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oneweekoneband · 3 years

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Vacation

There’s a lot of clichés about artists burning out just as they come through with their brightest work, and in some people’s version of this story, that might be the frame for Vacation, BTMI!’s final album before breaking up. Personally, I’ve never bought into those monomyth-esque narratives about bands’ inherent career arcs, and so I’m not inclined to view the album this way. I will say that while I absolutely love it, I don’t think it’s necessarily the band’s best album. It’s also just not accurate to think that this was a point of “burning out” for BTMI!, since Jeff started writing for his solo career almost immediately following the band’s dissolution.

Still, Vacation does hew eerily close to a lot of these rock ‘n’ roll archetypes. It was a momentous album, it was probably the most publicized release the band had seen, it represented a new musical direction that seemed to present itself as the summary of Jeff’s experimentation with genre and songform over the rest of the band’s career, and the band very much did break up after its release (although, as with ASOB, it took a few years for that to become official).

About that publicization: while I’m somewhat sad that I missed out on most of BTMI!’s career (being, you know, too young to go to shows or even think much about punk for the first 5-ish years), I’m still glad I found them when I did, because the build-up to the release of Vacation was a really interesting time to be a fan. In 2010, almost a year before the release, the band began a roll-out of singles to get people excited about the new material, and it worked like a charm on me: the boisterous first single “Everybody That You Love” seemed like a sign of great things to come if its electrifying lead guitars and dizzying vocal hook were any indication. “Hurricane Waves” and “Can’t Complain” showed even more diversity to look forward to when the band released them in 2011 ahead of the album. In addition to that, Jeff launched a whole new label to sell Vacation (and much of the other stuff released through Quote Unquote) through, Really Records. Clearly, he was trying to communicate something about the step forward he wanted Vacation to represent.

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And fans like me, despite knowing that “Side Projects Are Never Successful” and that Jeff was never in it for the fame, had reason to believe not only that this might have been the band’s big shot, but that they might actually make it big – or at least to become big enough to continue to exist as a full-time touring band that played music for a living. The Vacation singles were getting media coverage like no other previous BTMI! release had, and they marked a direction for the band’s music that, while retaining the punk integrity and musical ambition of the earlier albums, also proved more melodic, cleanly-produced, and accessible to a broader audience. While previous albums got recognition in the punk scene, Vacation looked like it had “crossover potential.” And when it finally arrived, there were even more positive signs: within half a year of the release, “Can’t Complain” made an appearance in “The Office.”

Of course, for all this to work, the album had to be good, and thankfully it was better than that – despite what might have sounded like my talking it down, it definitely represents a new high for the band. It’s Jeff’s own favourite BTMI! album, and I can see why: its complexity is something to be proud of. He had always been influenced by artists falling outside of the punk spectrum, but here those influences are more pronounced than ever, and the band finally breaks free of its ska-punk chains with a sound wholly its own. Brian Wilson-esque harmony arrangements and multi-part songs abound, and in a similar fashion to To Leave Or Die In Long Island, a couple motifs from individual songs (“Campaign For A Better Next Weekend” and “Sick, Later”) turn up in multiple places on the album for thematic cohesion. If SMiLE was Wilson’s “teenage symphony to God,” Vacation might be Jeff’s “adult symphony to punk rock.”

Many of my favourite songs off Vacation stand completely alone in the BTMI! catalogue, with little stylistic precedent. “Why Oh, Why Oh, Why (Oh Oh Oh Oh)” is a brash, thunderous fusion of Elvis Costello’s melodic sense and Bruce Springsteen’s maximalism, with a wealth of memorable melodies and lyrics that are all Jeff’s own. “Can’t Complain” is that rare song that manage to “rock quietly” – it’s both hushed and urgent in its muted acoustic chords and slide guitar lines, panicking at the pace of everyday life while simultaneously realizing how much there is to be thankful. And of course there’s the glorious, dynamic opener that slowly builds from a nostalgic piano riff accompanied by subtle, emotionally-charged chord changes into an explosive hardcore-punk charge, with vocals ranging from Jeff’s cleanest, quietest-ever singing to his more characteristic shouting to a group chant at the end.

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But even when Vacation retreads familiar territory, it still feels like it’s moving forward. “The Shit That You Hate” stands in a long line of 3/4 5-6-minute slow-burn songs appearing on BTMI! albums, but it feels like a perfection of that particular type of song rather than a simple revisiting. Jeff’s weak, warbly falsetto note when he sings “Hold onto your hope” always gets me a little choked up. “Hurricane Waves” might recycle a melody from To Leave Or Die In Long Island during its bridge, but the rest of the song is all new, providing that melody with a fascinating recontextualization to great effect. The aforementioned “Sick, Later” has a zig-zagging riff in an unusual time signature combination that still manages to be incredibly hooky, as well as some of my favourite lyrics on the album:

The first time that I took you to the hospital,

I was tired and you wanted to die,

I drove off, and I couldn't understand at all

Fuck, I didn't even walk you inside,

I thought we all wanna die, we all wanna die,

And I thought that was fine, I thought that was fine.

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One of the album’s most instantaneous joys comes from “Vocal Coach,” the shortest true song on the album. Jeff’s vocals were probably the most consistently difficult factor in terms of getting listeners outside of punk to take BTMI! seriously; they’re somewhere in between the traditionally-expected “bad” vocals of classic punk and the cleaner, more melodic style of singing dominant in pop-punk. Either way, they definitely don’t play to mainstream ears (perhaps this is why “Campaign For A Better Next Weekend” starts the way it does, and for that reason, Vacation might be the best place for a listener that’s not well-versed in punk to jump into the band’s discography). On “Vocal Coach,” Jeff takes on this problem with a healthy dose of irony, penning an ode to the imperfections he loves in music, the “dirty covers, dusty grooves and deep scratches.” But with a melody reminiscent of Pinkerton-era Weezer, he also expresses his own frustration with his inability to transcend the ugliness of his own singing: “I get embarrassed when my voice pops out and it’s not like in my head, / If I got a new vocal coach and I could hit the notes, you’d fall in love again.”

I understand that frustration – I’ve sung in more than one band, but before I even started playing in a band, I never thought I could be a singer because I thought I wasn’t good enough. But over time, I slowly realized that the reason I thought that was because I was comparing myself to singers who were already considered to be superhumanly-gifted, and that not every singer needs to be that way; there are thresholds of “good-enough,” and realizing where you fall in that can be a very freeing experience. I learned to sing by imitation Johnny Rotten and Billy Corgan, singers with definitively “bad” voices that nevertheless managed to communicate pretty much exactly what they wanted to in their songs. And Jeff Rosenstock was another big inspiration to me in that respect: he was a “bad” singer who nevertheless sang his songs defiantly, against popular tastes, because who else was going to do it for him? (Not to mention that as a “rock ‘n’ role model,” Jeff seems like a much better guy than Johnny or Billy.) But like Jeff, I know that there are times when singers wish we could do more with our voices than what seems to be within our natural ability, and we start wondering if it’s just a matter of putting in the right amount of work to “perfect” that voice. “Vocal Coach” brilliantly captures the nuances of this feeling in under two and a half minutes in an unforgettably catchy tune.

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It couldn’t last, though. Even Jeff seemed to know it, as he sang on “Vocal Coach”: “ I'm aware that I'm kind of getting scared the love that I thought had no bounds is coming to an end.” Vacation proved that BTMI! could be made more accessible and reach a wider audience, but there were limits to that growth. Just what reasons lay behind those limits will always be a bit obscure, but after a while, it became clear that despite being their most successful album to date, Vacation wasn’t going to be a true “commercial breakthrough.” To be fair, I don’t even know if that’s what Jeff wanted. I haven’t been fully clear on why the band broke up, and strangely, Jeff even seemed a little vague on it in this interview, citing one member’s moving to Australia as part of it. It didn’t have much to do with a lack of commercial success (Jeff claims the band wasn’t even on as much of an upswing in popularity as fans had come to believe at the time), and I doubt he would have soldiered on with his solo career the way he did if it had. In fact, I suspect his solo career is probably more well-known by now than BTMI! was even at their peak.

In the end, I’m just happy the band go to do what they wanted to for as long as they did, and that BTMI! brought so much to my life and the lives of other fans like me. I’m also incredibly grateful I got to see them at least once, on their last tour before they broke up in what turned out to be my first real punk show. It was, in some ways, kind of a fluke: I was 16 and the band had planned some tour dates in Canada, including Ottawa, which was truly shocking, considering that almost no one big (outside of the Wu-Tang Clan – look that one up, it’s a strange story) comes to Ottawa. But it was even flukier than that, because it turned out that my parents had planned a road trip to Toronto for our family over the date BTMI! was playing! Of course, I checked the tour dates and sure enough, they were coming to Toronto too, so I got the tickets for that show instead and saw them for the first and last time at the loft above Sneaky Dee’s with my sister. It was an amazing experience, and I can’t think of a better way to have been introduced to live punk. I was caught off-guard by the mosh pit, but it was a friendly one, and I ended up spending most of the show in it. The band played almost every song I could have hoped for (“25”! “I Don’t Love You Anymore”! Every great song on Vacation!) and I ended the night a sweaty, dehydrated mess. As Jeff came down from the stage into the crowd after the show, I gave him a big hug and told him how awesome I thought it was. And while I hadn’t brought a blank t-shirt for the band to spray-paint their name on (a tradition from the early days they were still doing at that time), I bought one of their special “bilingual shirts” that I assume were made specially for the Canadian leg of the tour. I still have it:

#Bomb The Music Industry!#BTMI!#Punk #Punk rock #Vacation

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jkottke · 4 years

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The Best Self-Help Books of the 21st Century

I appreciated this list of 21 Books for a Better You in the 21st Century from Kelli María Korducki, filled with books that help the self without necessarily being quote-unquote self-help books. Here are a few selections I found interesting:

The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor. "Taylor argues that our personal bodily hang-ups -- and the beauty standards that inform them -- are manifestations of internalized inequality. By lending credence to unjust strictures, our self-hate inadvertently perpetuates oppression."

Quiet by Susan Cain. "In a culture that rewards 'being bold' and 'putting yourself out there,' Quiet proposes that the most effective leaders aren't necessarily the biggest personalities."

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. "Part love letter to the burnout generation, part anti-Capitalist manifesto, Odell proposes a mass reclamation of attention -- our most precious, and precarious, resource -- to soothe our existential overload."

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. "In an age of accumulation fueled by one-click consumerism, Kondo's 'konmari' offers a simple formula for relief from the burden of clutter -- literally and, perhaps, existentially."

I would like to put my vote in for an addition to the list: Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking (also, a self-help book for people skeptical of self-help books).

Looking both east and west, in bulletins from the past and from far afield, Oliver Burkeman introduces us to an unusual group of people who share a single, surprising way of thinking about life. Whether experimental psychologists, terrorism experts, Buddhists, hardheaded business consultants, Greek philosophers, or modern-day gurus, they argue that in our personal lives, and in society at large, it's our constant effort to be happy that is making us miserable. And that there is an alternative path to happiness and success that involves embracing failure, pessimism, insecurity, and uncertainty -- the very things we spend our lives trying to avoid. Thought-provoking, counterintuitive, and ultimately uplifting, The Antidote is the intelligent person's guide to understanding the much-misunderstood idea of happiness.

I've read The Antidote twice; I've learned a lot from it and it inspired me to delve deeper into some of the people and philosophies he features. I think reading it, in a significant and long-term way, actually has made me happier.

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danetobelieve · 4 years

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Who’s Fext? || Luce and Winston

As weird as it was being at a high school alumni event, Winston had to admit that at least Luce was there. She was cool. All the Vurals were. In their own way. If they had been forced to go through something like this alone then they weren’t sure that they would’ve come out of it entirely sane. They were dressed appropriately for the event. Just office wear really, a shirt and trousers, a jacket, sneakers, a hoodie, okay maybe they could’ve made more of an effort. But this was something that they were doing to keep their mother happy, rather then because they really wanted to. “Thank god,” Winston said as they headed out of the hall where the event had taken place, “I wasn’t sure that I could take another “have you ever shot a gun?” question if my life depended on it.”

Why the high school had wanted her here was beyond Luce. She didn’t think that “tattoo artist at a local shop” ranked all that highly on the list of things that would inspire kids to stay in school. But, she’d spent her day in the art classes, talking to kids about what she did and how her classes had helped prepare her for her career. Which was objectively a lie-- what she’d learned as an apprentice was what had made her successful. But, they didn’t need to know that. Plus, it was good to see Winston here. She’d spent the last five years living out in her cabin, very deliberately avoiding other people. But, it wasn’t bad seeing the neighbor kid again. “You could have just lied. Would have been fun to see the teacher just go wide-eyed and pull the plug on the whole thing.” Luce said with a grin. “I straight up just told the kids that I dropped out of college a semester in.” SHe said as they walked down the hall together.

Laughing Winston couldn’t help but imagine what the AV club kids -- or whatever the current Gen Z equivalent was -- would say if they tried to claim that they had dropped out of college. “I don’t know if it would work as well for me if I tried to lie about dropping out of college or anything like that, if anything I think that they would know that there is no way that I can actually make it anywhere meaningful in my career without college.” They shuffled their feet as they made their way through the corridors of their old high school. High school hadn’t been the best, and they didn’t exactly miss it. Winston hadn’t really found their feet till college and at that point it was nice that they could put high school well behind them. “Besides, I think I’m still too hard wired to be a good student to fuck with a teacher like that. They probably don’t want to be here either.”

“That’s a good point. Your whole deal requires a lot of studying and shit.” Luce said with a nod. Winston had always been good at that sort of thing-- they’d pretty much grown up together, their interests in tech stuff had gone a long way back. “I figured. But, this is why you’re the one with the internship with WCPD. You’re good and law abiding like that.” Stretching, the material of her flannel shirt rubbed against her forearms in an almost suffocating way. She’d figured it wouldn’t have been a great idea to roll up in her usual outfit-- leather jacket, tank, and jeans-- so she’d worn a flannel under her usual jacket. It didn’t hide the tattoos on her hands, but the art teacher had known who she was inviting when she’d extended the offer. As they walked down the empty hallways, Luce glanced down one of the corridors, a smirk growing on her face. “Hey. Do you remember Mr. Blume? Taught chemistry? Wanna pop by and see if he’s still teaching here?”

“I mean, it is all just practice, just a different way of practicing to the work that you do. Besides, my kind of practicing is a lot less permanent then yours, I don’t know if I would have the nerve to give someone a tattoo, I’d be terrified of fucking up.” Winston swallowed at the thought, imagining how angry they would be if someone gave them a bad tattoo. How did people work their way around something like that? They knew that they definitely didn’t have the spine for it. “Wow, am I that easy to read?” Winston asked with a shake of their head, they tugged at the rolled up sleeves of the shirt they had worn today, wishing that they had taken a leaf out of Luce’s book and dressed more casually. A t-shirt would’ve been more comfortable. AS they moved down the corridors and headed towards the classrooms which were called ‘labs’ they found themselves nodding. “Oh hell yeah, I loved Mr. Blume, he was like the best teacher that they had in this place, is he still around?” Winston made their way down the corridors, in some ways it was like nothing at all had changed. Things seemed to be mostly the same and yet they were different. “Think he’s got the same classroom?”

“That’s why there’s a three year apprenticeship. You practice on oranges for a long time, then pig skin, then yourself.” Luce said, rolling up her sleeves and showing them a faded and honestly kind of shitty crescent moon she had on the inside of her wrist. It was far from her best work, but she kept it as a reminder of how far she’d come in the last few years. “You just work until you’re too good to fuck up.” She said with an easy shrug. “And, you’re only easy to read cuz we grew up together, goofball.” Luce teased. As the two walked down the hall, she couldn’t help but smile a bit wistfully. High school hadn’t been too bad for her, honestly. She’d had to deal with being known as “Bea’s Little Sister” for a while, but by the time Nell and Winston got to high school, she’d carved out her own little niche in the art wing. “He might. I just remember blowing shit up when we learned about combustion reactions. That was fun.” She said with a smile.

“Three years of training so that I could potentially ruin someone’s skin permanently,” Winston chuckled and shrugged, “I don’t think after all of that I would trust myself to do a really good job. But then again I was never the artist that you were.” They glanced at the tattoo and raised an eyebrow. “Damn, you actually did tattoo yourself, that must have been a weird experience.” Luce really seemed to be in her element when it came to tattoos and Winston was kind of impressed. “True, I think when you’ve known a family as long as the Dane’s and Vural’s have known each other then you really get good at reading people, I know exactly what it means when your mom purses her lips. You know how she does.” Winston hadn’t loved high school, they’d not exactly been popular and they’d had friends but they’d also had … well not friends. “He once dropped a tiny bit of sodium straight into a puddle for the class, I don’t think that the janitor ever forgave him for it,” they strutted down the corridor and paused outside of his classroom, peering through the little square window of glass set into the door, Winston spotted him working at the desk at the front of the class. “Hey, he’s in there, you wanna say hi?”

“Eh. It’s all about practice. Some people might start with talent, but that doesn’t mean shit compared to consistent practice.” Luce said, a hint of humor in her tone. That statement could be applied to magic as well. Bea had always been the focus of their parent’s attention, the first born, the one with the flare their parents were looking for. But talent didn’t measure ability. At the mention of her mother, Luce full body shuddered, shaking her head at the mere thought. “You’re not wrong in the slightest.” She agreed. Yet another quote-unquote benefit of living with her sisters… their mothers increased ability to meddle in her life. She fucking hated it. At least when she was in the woods, she’d had some physical distance to keep her family out of her life. Laughing, she grinned at Winston. “That sounds just like him. He is? Shit, yeah, let’s go in there.” Pulling open the door, Luce grinned and waved a hand. “Hey there, Mr. Blume. Still kicking huh?”

“I guess it’s like a musical instrument, the more that you work on it the more confident you are, but also the more able to deal with unexpected shit you are able to be… though I hope with tattoos you don’t often have to deal with any surprises.” Winston laughed gently at the idea of a surprise arising during a tattooing session. That wouldn’t be ideal. Obviously. “It’s nice that you’re back around, I know you had to do your time in the woods and stuff, but it’s cool to actually see you and Nell and Bea more now, there were a couple of years when I was in college and Nell was travelling, kinda felt like you guys were on a different planet you know.” The Vural family had always been beyond good to Winston and they would never forget that goodness. They had given them a lot and they would do whatever they needed to feel as if they were on equal footing once more. Following Luce into the classroom, Winston waved as well. “Hey Mr. Blume, can’t believe you’re still stuck here right…” they fell silent as Mr. Blume’s eyes snapped up and locked with Winston’s leaving a chill to trickle down their spine as they realised something was wrong, “you okay Mr. Blume?”

“Yep, pretty much. Eh,” Luce paused, thinking about the strange walk-in tattoo that she’d just done the other day. “There are some surprises that can happen. Usually just people saying they’re ‘totally fine’ and then passing out on me. When you decide to get a tattoo, just be honest with your artist.” She advised. At their mention of the time when the family was spread all over the place, Luce’s joking expression wavered for a moment. If Winston thought they were on a different planet then, then call her a fucking astronaut. She’d rather be back in her cabin than living with Bea and Nell. She’d had an entire place to herself, now she had a room and a shed. A great shed, but still a shed. As soon as the two of them stepped closer, Luce’s eyes narrowed, the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. There was something off, something evil about Mr. Blume. Not in a typical science teacher way either. In straight up, that’s some bad shit kind of way. As Winston moved closer, Luce grabbed them by the shoulder. “Don’t--” Before she could finish that sentence, Mr. Blume vaulted over his desk and hurtled towards them with unnatural speed.

Winston frowned for a moment, “I definitely think that I would be the type to think that I was totally fine when in actuality I would be moments away from passing out, besides, I’m not exactly the best with blood and shock and stuff…” they sighed and shook their head gently before continuing. “Either way, if I do get a tattoo I will do everything that I can to be entirely honest with whoever is putting a permanent mark on my body. Seems like it is in my best interests really.” They noticed Luce’s expression and immediately realised that she hadn’t felt the same. But now didn’t exactly seem the time to ask her about it, so Winston decided that they would simply have to ask about it later. Or not at all. Depended on how they felt it would be received. They didn’t want to intrude after all. “Fuck, run,” Winston didn’t need to see the empty look in Mr. Blume’s eye, they didn’t need to see the way that they had cleared that desk with a single bound and they didn’t need to see the bee line that they were making towards them, “run run run.” They were pushing Luce out of the door and sprinting after them. “I don’t remember Mr. Blume doing that when we had chemistry together, even when I forgot my homework a few too many times.”

As soon as Mr. Blume yeeted himself over the desk, Luce had already turned on her heel and started sprinting away. Thank god she didn’t go running this morning, her legs were fresh and she needed the extra oomph, given she was hauling ass in heavy fucking boots. “Less quipping, more running!” Luce yelled over her shoulder as she booked it down the hallways. The school was empty, which worked out in their favor. But, as she looked behind her, Luce saw that Mr. Blume was hot in pursuit and gaining fast. There was something about his eyes, a dead look behind them, that just screamed ‘oh fuck no’ to her. “This way! Shortcut outta school!” Grabbing Winston’s arm, she pulled a hard right down one of the hallways towards one of the back entrances she’d used to cut class back in the day. Here’s hoping the door lock was still busted. As they neared the double doors, Luce kicked her foot out to push open the door and ran outside into the darkness.

It was all that Winston could do to stop themselves from screaming and swearing. Something that they weren’t about to do in front of someone who they had grown up in semi awe of. “Good idea, more running,” Winston said as they glanced over their shoulder and realised that Mr. Blume was easily keeping pace, in fact they might’ve even been gaining on them. Winston was sure that if Mr. Blume had seen them back in the day then they would’ve definitely told them off for running. Luce seemed to know exactly where they were going however, and as Winston saw that Mr. Blume was maybe seconds behind them they tried to pack on a final burst of speed as they exploded out of the school and into the perpetual night. “My car is in the car park, we should just get the fuck out of here and get someone more qualified to deal with this to help.” Things were going well, they were really making progress, they were getting further and further away and then of course, Winston Dane, the clumsiest person in the world had to have two left feet and trip over a curb.

Luce nodded at Winston’s plan-- it was as good an idea as any and whatever the fuck Mr. Blume was clearly wanted both of them dead. He looked human enough, so maybe if they lured it to the police station, the police would just riddle him with bullets and that would end that situation? Just make up some story about the guy going nuts and trying to murder them? But, as soon as they made it out into the parking lot, Winston tripped and fell over the edge of the curb. Pausing to help them up, Luce gritted her teeth together as she saw that Mr. Blume had not, in fact, been tricked by the sharp turn. “Fuck it.” She said, glancing over her shoulder to make sure she and Winston were the only ones around before holding her hands out and letting free a burst of magic. A ball of fire the size of a softball, concentrated and burning a bright white, soared from her hands towards Mr. Blume. “Get fucked, old man!” She yelled. But, instead of engulfing him in flames, something weird happened. The fire seemed to dissipate, recede, the colors growing dimmer and dimmer until there was nothing but smoke in front of him.

After learning the truth about the Vural family, Winston had suspected that Luce could also do magic too, but they weren’t about to admit that to them without letting them explain it first. But apparently when she had thrown a literal ball of bright white fire at Mr. Blume, that wasn’t something that they were going to need to do. “Yeah, get fucked…” Winston had made it to their feet just in time to see the fire expand around Mr. Blume, it should’ve burned them away and yet the magic just seemed to dissipate and vanish as if the oxygen around them had been snuffed out, “okay we should definitely run,” Winston said sprinting past Luce and grabbing her hand, pulling her towards their complete shit mobile. Their ankle twinged gently as they ran, the mostly healed wound that they’d received from the weird gremlin thing at UMWC not loving the amount of aerobic exercise that they were getting. Looking back, Winston tried to think of something that would buy them more time, do anything to get them more space, they had a plan, but it would take them a minute to enact it and they wanted to make sure they were in the car first.

The effort of throwing the ball of fire barely winded Luce, but it was the irritation of watching the man just continue to pursue them that really got to her. What the fuck? How did he just do that? There was no way that he would have been able to just… dissolve her magic like that. It was a fucking fireball. Letting out growl under her breath, she raised her hands again, intent on nuking this man into the ground. But, before she could conjure up another ball of flames, Winston had grabbed her hand and yanked her towards their car. “I can take him!” She protested, but when she saw the way that they were limping, she gritted her teeth. Even if she wanted to try and duke it out with Mr. Blume, there was no way that Winston would be able to manage. They shouldn’t be caught in the middle of this shit. “Ah screw it, the car it is.” She said, running ahead towards the familiar looking vehicle. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” She yelled, watching as Mr. Blume continued his relentless pursuit after them.

“You can absolutely take him I am completely and totally sure of it, but at the same time the guy just absorbed what looked like a white hot fireball, which by the way was very very cool, and I don’t really want to find out what the hell else they can do.” Winston reached into their pocket and dropped their keys immediately. Great. “Uh, if you could throw a few more fireballs at him whilst I get the keys then that would be great,” Winston was already pressed flat to the tarmac of the car park, they were wriggling under the very greasy and dirty underside of their car in an attempt to reach their keys, praying that they would be able to get them before whatever the hell Mr. Blume was got to them first. Somehow they didn’t think that when their old chemistry teacher got their hands on two of his former students that he was going to explain covalent bonds to them or quiz them on the periodic table.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Luce groaned, but stepped up to bat nonetheless. Rolling her sleeves up, she took a deep breath. Calm. Steady and calm. Disregard the neighbor kid behind her fumbling with their keys, completely ignore the murderous chemistry teacher on a warpath. Just straight up forget the fact he’d made her fireball completely vanish in a puff of smoke. None of that mattered, none of it. There was only the fire inside her. The burning, white hot energy. Flames she so carefully stoked and tended to, urging her onwards. And all she had to do was let them free. With a sharp exhale, Luce held out her hands and jets of red hot fire streamed out from her palms. Not fireballs, he’d already demonstrated he didn’t give a shit about those. No, she was going for volume this time. The parking lot lit up with the red hot glow of flames, shooting twenty feet in front of her from both of her hands. Aiming at the ground, she urged the magic on, fueling the fire to burn, even on the empty asphalt. Pulling back her hands, sweat dripped down the side of her face as she glared triumphantly at Mr. Blume, who had stopped for a moment on the other side of the flames.

As Winston’s fingers curled around the ring of their keys, they dragged them towards them and managed to bound up to their feet, slipping their keys in the lock of the car they pulled the door open and slipped the keys into the ignition. As they turned it and heard the car roll over a few times before sputtering into life, Winston thanked whoever had given them luck today because their car never ever started first time. Turning around, they were just in time to see Luce’s hands fire … well flames in great jets in front of them. A huge wall of fire erupted into life and Mr. Blume was hidden from view. Winston’s jaw fell slack and they were awe struck by the sheer display Luce had made. They’d managed small magic but nothing as big as what Luce had just done. For a moment, Winston was convinced that she’d saved them. Second time lucky right? And then, the most terrifying thing that Winston had ever seen happened. Mr. Blume appeared inbetween the flames that licked the open air, and then stepped through the magical inferno, causing the flames to shy away from their form as they made their way forwards. The heat seemed intense however, and Winston was convinced that they could see some of the skin on Mr. Blume’s face sizzle in the heat of the air, but they were through the wall of fire and making their way towards the car. “Luce, get in now!” they snapped, throwing the door open as they spun the car around and revved the engine, ready to speed away.

The second Mr. Blume vanished from sight, Luce had a fleeting moment of exhilaration. She’d done it, she’d made him back off. Maybe she’d even-- before she could get too happy, he appeared again, in the middle of the flames. Her magic was repelled away from him, skirting around his form as he took a slow step towards her. His eyes stared at her, unflinching, entirely focused on her. A chill ran down her spine and she recoiled. “What are you?” She asked, more to herself than to him. Before either of them could respond, Luce heard Winston’s car roar to life, heard them yell at her to get in. They didn’t need to tell her twice. Turning tail, she ran for the door and slid inside, slamming the door shut. Grabbing hold of the Oh Shit Handle, she stared through the window as Mr. Blume continued to come for them. “Let’s get the hell outta here!”

“You don’t need to tell me twice.” Mr. Blume was sprinting towards them, Winston could hear their footsteps and see them hurtling towards them in their rear view mirror. They shifted gear, slammed their foot on the accelerator and felt the wheels spin in place for a moment before the car shot off. Keeping their eyes bouncing back from their mirrors and the windscreen, Winston reached inside of themselves and harnessed the well of energy that they accessed in times of magical need. Taking a deep breath, they began chanting under their breath. Mr. Blume was moving with surprising speed and Winston could see them cutting across the car park as Winston was forced to weave between the cars that were still parked here, which wasn’t many. As they reached the exit to the school, Winston turned left and finished their incantation. As they turned left an identical copy of their car appeared to peel off towards the right. Winston slammed the speed on, heading towards the one place that they could think of which might have some information on what the hell this all was and what was going on here. “Fuck, that was really fucking close.”

As they zipped out of the parking lot as quickly as Winston’s car would allow, Luce slumped in the back seat, panting from the effort. Doing a mental check of her energy levels, she grimaced. She’d expended more of her energy on that than she’d originally thought she would. And it didn’t even phase him. What the fuck was Mr. Blume? As she stared out the window of the car, she was startled to see an illusion of their car appear in the middle of the road. What? That wasn’t her. Which meant… Leaning forward, Luce grabbed the back of Winston’s seat to stabilize herself. “Winnie. When were you gonna tell me you were a spellcaster, huh?” She asked, exhaustion letting her annoyance come through in her tone a bit more than she intended.

Perspiration beaded on Winston’s forehead as they slammed their foot down as hard as it would possibly go. They knew that they needed to eat, but they would have to do that later. But they’d found that for them, after using any amount of magic it was important to have a sudden and ferocious hit of calories as soon as possible to avoid too much of a deficit. “Sorry, I ….” they swallowed, “towards the beginning of this year I found out about all of this and I just haven’t been telling people about it because honestly I’m not very good and I also know that with Miriam Flemming out there it isn’t exactly safe to be broadcasting that information.” They took a left, then a right, then three more lefts, then two rights and another right, finally convinced that they were safe, they turned the wheel and headed for the old Scribe building. “But, we need to work out what that was and how we’re going to deal with it, because Mr. Blume is too dangerous to just leave to their own devices apparently, but I have a place we can go.”

#who's fext?#p: luce #wickedswriting #para #chatzy para

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ilovemygaydad · 5 years

Text

punk!patton is adopted by single parent logan part 1/?

short little backstory: this is something I planned up while going to sleep last night because I’d run out of fics to plan (because I haven’t actually wrote those things down... and need to not get too ahead....), but I actually got inspired to write it down and share it? also shout out to the fic miraculously their own because it made me think about adoption fics, and thus this idea

tl;dr: i made a fic about punk!patton being adopted. that’s it.

warnings: really awful people, bad parents, bullying, swearing, physical/verbal violence, homophobic slurs, homophobia, transphobia, sexual assault threat, patton’s honestly a bit of an asshole sometimes, fatalism, possibly something else?

pairings: eventual moxiety, maybe eventual logince

part two - part three - part four - part five - ao3 version - masterlist (includes asks)

patton is orphaned at three years old. he’s got fluffy brown curls, and these beautiful brown eyes, and a soft, round face, and so much soft pudge. he’s the cutest little thing. he seems like the kind of kid who would immediately be adopted

except he’s not

problem is, he’s just got so many emotions

and these prospective parents want the kids who are happy all the time, not the one who feels things so intensely

so he isn’t adopted

a few years later, he’s got these prospective parents who find him just precious. he’d been sitting in the corner of the playroom and reading winnie the pooh. the sweetest, quietest little boy.

and they set up a second time to come meet him

but when they arrive, he’s wrestling with the older kids and laughing and screaming and being a rambunctious child

those parents don’t come back after that...

fast forward to patton’s tenth birthday, and the older kids corner him after the celebration

“you know, once you hit double digits... it means you’re never going to be adopted.”

it just hits patton that no one wants a loud, excitable kid who’s over the age of ten, and he just kind of gives up

he loses himself in music and books and shuts himself off from the world

(the rest under the cut because this is obviously going to get long)

by sixteen, patton is dressing in all black and painting his nails and wearing dark eye makeup and lashing out at everyone

he’s the oldest at the orphanage by about four years

he also has his own room because he got in too many fights with the caretakers and other kids

he doesn’t mind. it gives him more privacy if anything

besides, it isn’t like he comes out of his room unless he’s forced

and when he’s forced, he absolutely fucking hates it

he sits in the corner of the playroom in a chair that isn’t comfortable for anyone over the age of five and stares at his phone, refusing to acknowledge anyone or anything

he’s so wrapped up in whatever’s on his phone that he doesn’t notice when someone comes up to him until they start talking

“hello. that chair seems rather uncomfortable.”

patton nearly falls right out of that damn chair at the sudden acknowledgement

he looks up and sees a man in his thirties sitting on an empty milk crate that previously had toys in it. the man looks like he stepped straight out of some stuffy office--tie and all

“yes, and?”

the man’s neutral expression doesn’t waver as he says “I’m Logan Summers. what’s your name?”

“nunya”

“nunya? that’s an interesti--”

“nunya business”

“oh...”

and they just kinda sit in awkward silence for a few seconds before logan speaks up again

“how much older are you than the other kids here?”

and patton just kinda stops because he thought that this dude would ditch when he gave him attitude, but he didn’t, and he doesn’t know what to do, so he just... answers honestly

“four,” he says

and logan gives him this knowing look and makes an offer that he can’t refuse:

“i’m sure that you’ve lost hope in being adopted, but i’d like to take you with me and at least give you some place to fall back on if you need it. i won’t try to be a martyr parent, but i’ll definitely try to make you feel accepted”

so he lets logan adopt him

summer passes, and it’s time for school to start up for the year

and it’s patton’s first school experience (he’d been homeschooled at the orphanage for his whole life), so logan gets really excited and takes him back to school shopping and buys him some new (all black) clothes and school supplies

logan even offers to drive him to school, even though the school that he teaches at is all the way across town

patton refuses and just takes public transport

he gets to school and absolutely hates how fucking busy it is, so he heads straight for his first class and sits in the back corner of the classroom and messes around on his phone until attendance is taken and his teacher starts talking

and the teacher is talking about the class, it’s american english, and they’re expected to try because they’re juniors, blah, blah, blah

but then

she tells them that they have to do a little ice breaker project with the person sitting next to them

so she explains it and tells everyone to go talk to their neighbor

patton being the edgy teenager that he is doesn’t move at all, letting his partner move their desk over to his

and they do

so patton looks over and finds this tiny boy in a soft lavender oversized jumper and translucent lavender glasses that take up half of his face. he has freckles dusting his rosy cheeks and nose, and he looks what patton imagined that he would’ve turned out like if he’d been adopted as a kid

“uh,” the boy says in a shy, sweet voice. “my name is virgil... you are...?”

patton really doesn’t want to have to deal with people, so he scowls and says “look, i’m not really here to make friends and exchange pleasantries, so let’s get this thing done and move on to never speaking again”

and the kid just deflates and nods, not speaking again for the rest of the class except to offer a few words here and there

patton’s fine with that

eventually, the class ends, and patton takes his sweet time getting to his second period class because--shocker--he still hates this damn school and the damn people

so the final bell has rung, and he’s walking in the empty hall

but, as per usual, there’s a catch

three jocks are trailing behind him, exchanging some quote-unquote witty banter

“ohhhhh, fresh meat! wonder what rock he crawled out from...” “who cares, have you seen him? he’s wearing all that makeup to pretend to be a girl!” “or he’s just gay! wouldn’t that just be hilarious” “wouldn’t he just love it if we took him to the locker rooms for some fun...”

patton ignores them in hopes that they’ll get bored and leave him alone

they don’t, and not a second later, he’s pinned against a locker by one of those jocks, and their wicked grins are almost enough to make him scared

luckily enough, he’s been in enough fights to know some self defense techniques

but he isn’t able to use them because he hears someone shout from a little down the hall

“hey! you leave him alone!”

and that voice is virgil’s for some godforsaken reason

and one of the jocks snarls and goes to take care of their interruption

a few moments later, patton sees virgil flung into the lockers by a punch to the face, followed by a few choice slurs, and something in him just fucking snaps

he sharply kicks up at the same time that he pushes forward, successfully dislodging the boy holding him to the lockers with a shout

one of the teachers finally comes out, but it just so happens that it’s at the same moment that patton breaks one of the jocks’ nose...

and they all get in so much trouble

logan scolds the hell out of patton when he arrives to pick him up because it’s only the first day of school, damn it!

but patton isn’t listening because he hears these adults--the parents of the jocks--screaming things like “how dare you do this to or baby boys!” and he sees them yelling these things at virgil and he does That Thing again

he storms up to them and just shouts at them

“listen here, you shit stains! virgil did absolutely nothing wrong! he was trying to protect me from those asshole sons of yours! they physically and verbally harassed me, and they threatened to sexually assault me! your ‘baby boys’ are nothing but menaces to society!”

and with that, he stomps out of the school, brushing past logan, who witnessed the whole rampage

to be continued....... IN PART TWO

@residentanchor, you wanted to hear this idea..... so!

#m speaks #m writes things #moxiety #patton sanders #virgil sanders #logan sanders #roman shows up i PROMISE #punk!patton au

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snowedinpodcast · 4 years

Audio

Long time no chat, friends. As usual, transcript is below the cut!

Let’s Walk: Life is (not?) a Strategy Game [Transcript]

“Wake up without you/flood in your [my] room, I see your headlights”

Wooooo we have a situation right now ... I would like to cross the road because there’s people coming down towards me on the sidewalk but there’s several cars that are making that tricky. Please allow me to cross the road, I beg of thee! Ok, great. That’ll do.

Hi. Let’s talk about ... romantic love! Everyone’s favorite, love to hate it. Ok. Ok, so, this comes to mind because I do kind of have a crush right now. I say kind of ‘cause it’s waning—thank goodness—but [laugh] it happened and I’m not ashamed of it. I am a little bit, let’s be real here: is anyone ever genuinely, wholeheartedly in love? I don’t think s—[laughs] I promise I’m not bitter, I’m just like this. This is just my personality, babe.

Yet again I find myself in a weird position on the road, ok, great. This is what i get for not being on the sidewalk ... but also, what am I supposed to do when there’s only one sidewalk and there’s other people coming towards me on it? Quarantine problems, guys. Every human’s a biohazard! We always have been, but, just now more so than ever.

The point I want to make here is ... Good question, what is the point I want to make here? I feel like I’ve had pretty good luck in terms of having crushes on people who wind up being interested in me back. I’ve only had ... mmm ... three solid dating experiences ... and those all taught me something, for which I’m grateful, but in all three cases ... Wow. Wow, I think that’s actually true. In all three cases, I was the first one to like them ... and that coming to light was what prompted them to either start liking me back or, like, y-you know what I mean? Like ... I didn’t necessarily make the first move in every instance but the fact that I was interested in them ... came to light before their interest in me surfaced, does that make sense?

So what I’m trying to say is, am I a siren? [Laugh] no, I’m sorry, I’m joking, I’m sorry. But no, I kind of have to wonder, right? I’ve heard that someone being interested in you and you realizing this, knowing it as a fact, can encourage reciprocation in you. Y’know, the idea that someone liking you is kinda hot and it’s fun to be wanted, right? So even if you didn’t initially notice them at all before, now that you know this, that might make that person just a little more attractive to you ... which may lead to a date which may lead to a relationship, you see what I mean. So in that way, I wonder how much agency I’ve had in terms of these romantic experiences. I wonder how many of them ... came to be because I kind of willed them into being?

[Distressed sound] I know that sounds a bit ... um ... cocky ... which I don’t want to be. I’m not trying to say that these people I’ve dated don’t have their own free will and thoughts because ... gosh, I hope they do. Otherwise, what’s the point of other humans if we all just merge into one another? Part of the joy of being human—one of the few joys—is that we’re all so different and interesting.

But yeah, crushes, the way that reality changes depending on what reality is? Ugh, that’s confusing, how do I say that better ... Yeah, it’s—it’s that idea of willing something into being ... like speech acts, kind of, y’know? You say it and the act of saying it is what makes it true. The act of liking another person in a romantic way can sometimes be a factor in making that romantic relationship between you and that person work out. And I don’t know what to call this. It feels weird to call it power because power implies it’s a tool that you can deploy at will. I can’t do that. I can’t—I’m not a siren, I can’t ... inspire sudden, unquenchable lust in other people. Wait, er—is that succubi? Sirens are the ones who sit on rocks and sing songs that sailors cannot resist, so, similar idea, I guess. Cool. Thanks, Odysseus. That’s not what I’m doing because it’s not guaranteed. Me liking someone does not guarantee that they will like me back but it does up the odds in an interesting way ... sometimes.

Which I guess goes to show, if you are interested in someone, the worst they can say is no—which can be kind of an emotional blow, so I get it. I get why you might still hesitate in terms of asking them out, but ... if they don’t know that you’re an option, then—then there’s no chance of this happening at all, y’know? So, so you might as well exercise your pseudo-siren powers and let the person you are interested in—or people—know and see if that may increase your odds. In an organic, non-creepy way! ‘Cause it’s worked out for me. I’m twenty-one, twenty-one divided by three is seven, so—is that how math—am I applying averages correctly? On an average of once every seven years I’ve had a successful romantic interaction. Maybe that doesn’t—mmm, maybe that doesn’t actually sound like such a, such a solid set of odds anymore. Maybe I don’t have the experience to be giving this advice but I just noticed this and I just think it’s interesting. That’s what this is for.

Here’s another thing I find interesting. I’m the kind of person who is an open book. Full stop. I am extremely expressive with my face and with my tone of voice, I—I talk with my hands, I talk to myself, I scowl, I clap, I make finger guns ... and, incidentally, I’ve noticed that I am more dramatic with my emotional cues than I usually am especially when I’m on a Zoom class call. And I think that’s ‘cause I’m adapting to being in quarantine and doing class remotely and wanting to still give my peers validation for their cool points and also allow myself to be read easily ... ‘cause I have to put more effort into emotional cues to be read over call versus in person when there’s just a lot more visual data available to you.

And that’s what I want to get at: the ability to be read easily. People tend to see that as a weakness and I have seen it that way before. In fact, there’s still moments where I’m like, god damn, if I could just keep my own feelings a secret, that would be extremely useful. Hey brain, can we do that? And my brain’s like “hmm ... no. No, sorry, your nature is just to be extremely readable.” But that doesn’t mean this doesn’t work for you in interesting ways.

So on the one side, right, people think “ah, if I keep my cards close to my chest then I am less easily read by opponents and I thereby have power over them in two ways. One, they don’t know what I’m up to and I have that knowledge, and two, I can read them more easily so I have a sense of what they’re going to do, I can predict them,” right?

Then look at my side of it. By making myself more easily read—or just by being that way in general, ‘cause a good fair amount of this is just how I am, and sometimes I amplify parts of it intentionally, but ... yeah. By making myself easily readable, I set up my opponents, quote unquote—or my peers, or my parents, or whomever I’m talking to—I set them up to read me accurately, which is actually extremely useful in getting a very quick, very accurate picture of how someone I don’t know that well treats other people.

Lemme give you an example: something somebody says to me upsets me a lot. It is extremely hard for me to hide the fact that this person has done something to upset me or said something to upset me. I will react vocally, I will react emotionally, my face will contort, that whole deal. Trust me, I’ve tried to not react to something that deeply upsets me ... I’m incapable of it! I would have to practice a lot to be capable of that. This means this person now has, very likely, a pretty clear idea of [thing that upsets me]. If they continue to repeat it with malicious intent, then it is very clear to me that you are an asshole who doesn’t extend their empathy towards other people and I probably don’t want to be friends with you. I probably don’t want to hang out with you because I’ve seen how you are, how you treat people. On the flipside, if that person notices the connection between the thing that upset me and my very visceral reaction and they either ask me about it like “oh hey did that bother you? Um, can I ask why? That’s interesting” or if they stop the behavior because they realize it freaked me out, then you’re probably chill. You probably have a sense of empathy and you could be a really cool friend. Yeah. We can hash out our differences in a meaningful way and continue to interact healthily and excitingly.

So, do you see what I mean? Because I am so readable, I prepare people to receive the message that I want them to have, which is how I genuinely feel. And that teaches me a lot about them. By giving information, I actually get back a pretty fair chunk of information. However in-power my opponent seems to think they are, they always give something away to me.

I realize that this language might make it sound like I view the world as a constant battle. And I do a little bit, trust issues will do that to you. Everyone is, on some level, an opponent who I must shield myself from somehow ... and you have to make use of the tools in your arsenal, right? So if you happen to be very readable, you need to be able to frame that in a way where it works to your benefit and this is the framing that has been useful for me. Because this part of my nature would be a lot harder to change than it would be to adapt to be useful.

But that said, I do like to think that in general, people are cooperative. That is how a lot of things have happened in history. That is how a lot of beautiful structures have been created. That is how a lot of core human ideals have been developed, challenged, changed ... and that is why, if you sat me down and made me pick between being able to hide my cards or constantly having to show a card or two—perhaps even my whole hand, god forbid—I would still pick being the type of person who can’t not emote. Because I think being willing to give information is not only useful in the way I laid out but it’s also ... more conducive to cooperation. I almost always appreciate it when someone gives me more information rather than if they hide it because that means I can help you better. It also means I could hurt you better [laugh], but that’s just kind of a risk I think is worth taking. Again, this is very generalized, like, don’t bear your soul to someone you barely know because that’s probably not going to end well, but ... incremental willingness to ... to share, I think, is just kind of ... good.

There’s some worldview ideas from a twenty-one year old. You’re welcome. Play life like a strategy game! No, I’m kidding, don’t, don’t do that ... [laugh] oh my gosh. Alright. Thanks for talking. I love you very much. [Click]. Catch you on the next one.

#snowed in podcast #sip #snowedinpodcast #i enjoyed this one a lot (:#this was recorded on 200905 #quoted song is Cry by Carly Rae Jepsen #life is (not?) a strategy game

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trentteti · 5 years

Text

A Look at the June 2019 LSAT

Two Fridays ago, LSAC released everyone’s scores for the June 2019 LSAT. Most people — the sane, well-adjusted people who take this test just as a means to go to law school — get the email, see their scores, react accordingly, and discard the other contents of the message. But other people — LSAT instructors, the decidedly less sane and well-adjusted — get really excited about those other contents. Because among those attachments are copies of the new LSAT. And LSAT instructors get really excited about new LSATs being released.

For one, even with the dramatic increase in the number of LSATs administered in each year, these score-and-LSAT-release days still fairly few and far between. The June score release going to be the last score release for a while; even though the July LSAT is next Monday, it’s going to take about two lunar cycles for the scores to finally come out. And, for our admittedly nerdy purposes, it’ll be even longer before the next LSAT is released. The next disclosed exam — the September 2019 test — won’t be released until mid-October. So these days feel ceremonious.

Two, the new exam gives us new material to work over, figure out, and prove we still have quote-unquote it. These opportunities to figure out games and passages and LR questions that test takers referenced with hushed and ominous tones post-exam are our continuous professional competency tests.

And three, these new exams give us an opportunity to monitor and assess ongoing trends the LSAT. Oh, were you not even aware that this test has trends that are in need of monitoring and assessment? That’s probably because you don’t nerd out over these exam releases like we do. Much like the griot of June 2019’s passage four, LSAT instructors are both the guardians of and mouthpieces to the history of this great test. We track changes to the test and sing songs write blogs about those change to hordes of future test takers.

So, excuse us as we nerd out over the June 2019 exam in this blog post. But we think this ensuing nerdgasm will be will be beneficial to you, too. You’ll see our thoughts, takeaways, and concerns about this test, and we’ll contextualize this exam within the recent history of the LSAT. And hopefully, this will give you a better idea of what to expect in future LSATs, whether you’re taking it July 15th, September 21st, or beyond.

So let’s breakdown each section.

Logical Reasoning

• Here’s how many of the different question types appeared across both LR sections:

• As you can see, it’s a fairly typical score distribution, with a few notable exceptions. One, after many tests where the LR sections de-emphasized questions that involved identifying formal aspects of the argument (Main Point and Role questions, namely), June test takers saw a sudden re-emphasis on those. We also a higher-than-normal of Disagree and Agree questions. In 2017, the LSAT went a little crazy with those questions, and then in 2018, they regressed to the mean. Is the relatively high number of those questions on this test an aberration, or a sign that LSAC will prominently feature Disagree questions every other testing year? Who knows, but the number of those questions vary significantly from test to test, so practice them a lot, just in case they show up in droves on your test.

• I predicted we would see a re-appearance of an old question format on this test, but that didn’t happen. In fact, there wasn’t anything terribly novel about these LR sections, other than the fact that both had twenty-six questions (which only happens occasionally).

If you were looking for novelty you had to settle for a question that had an unusual prompt. One question asked test takers to find the answer choice that “completes the explanation” begun in the stimulus. The stimulus started explaining why some people smoke way more nicotine products than others, and then it abruptly cut off, leaving the test taker with a blank line to fill in and complete the explanation. As far as I can remember, these “fill in the blank” questions have been exclusively Soft Must Be True, Strengthen, or Sufficient questions. This question, however, was clearly an Explain question.

It wasn’t terribly difficult, fortunately. Answering it just required you to realize the effect a rare form of the enzyme CYP2A6 had on nicotine cravings. One might say that rare form of CYP2A6 is the crown Juul of enzymes.

• On the whole, there weren’t a ton of truly difficult questions. There weren’t a ton of truly easy questions, either. Most questions fit somewhere in the middle. This comports with the eventual “curve” of this exam (more on this below). The curve was a little bit stingy for the high scores — you could miss fewer questions than usual to earn a high score. But the curve normalized for the middle-of-the-pack scores. This type of “curve” usually suggests that there were fewer difficult questions, and more medium question, than usual.

• In terms of the topics of these questions, we had some of the LSAT’s old favorites, like questions about predatory birds and their effect on insect populations, bicycle safety, mendacious politicians, and early human inhabitants of North America’s troubling habit of causing mass extinctions. So you could have crossed off all those on your LSAT bingo cards, kids. Shockingly, there were no questions about dinosaurs. There have been several recent questions about film critics and vampires, and we got more of those here. There was a question about how pilots on a diet might as well be two-drinks-in-the-bag-impaired, which I happened to read while on a plane captained by a very fit-looking pilot … so thanks for that burst of aerophobia, LSAT. And because the test writers seeming love to write “topical” questions — but since it takes a few years to write and test out questions — we got a question that was clearly inspired by “Fake News,” two years after that was a novel topic.

• Which was the hardest question here? There weren’t that many candidates. But one that springs to mind is a Strengthen question from the fifth section. That question went with a big theme common to many Great American novels and Real American Housewife music videos: that money can’t buy a great many things, including happiness. In fact, this question went a step further — taking a page from Diana Ross c/o Faith Evans, it claimed that money actually generates new wants that can’t be fulfilled, so money actually makes people less happy. There’s a pretty clear causal claim to strengthen — the idea that unfulfilled desires actually cause people to be less happy. The correct answer does that by showing that the fewer unfulfilled desires one has, the happier that person will be. That’s a dictionary-definition instance of “no cause, no effect.”

That was all fairly normal for a Strengthen question. There was one answer choice that was very difficult to eliminate, though. One answer preyed upon an aside in the argument, which said that wealth does fulfill some desires. This pesky answer choice said, “Oneʼs happiness tends not to increase each time a desire is satisfied.” Which would strengthen the argument if the argument actually claimed that money wouldn’t increase happiness. But remember, the argument said that money would decrease happiness. Satisfying new desires might fail to increase your happiness, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be less happy. The distinction between not increasing and decreasing, or between not decreasing and increasing is one that gets tested fairly often on the LSAT, so watch out for it.

• Looking ahead to future LR sections, what can be gleaned from these sections? For one, this section reaffirms that Strengthen questions are the most important question type in LR. The number of other common question types — Soft Must Be True questions, Flaw questions, Necessary questions — have actually gone down on recent tests. Strengthen questions have only increased their prominence. So get a ton of practice with those.

Diagramming conditional statements continues to be a fairly important skill — eight questions on this section were diagrammable. However, these diagrammable questions were not very complex, which has been par for the course on recent tests. So make sure you know which words indicate sufficiency and which indicate necessity, and make sure you know the basic deductions you can make with conditional statements. You probably won’t need more than that, though.

Reading Comprehension

• Everyone who took the June exam hated the Reading Comprehension section, and having read these passages, I get it. It was rough. That shouldn’t be surprising though — Reading Comp has regularly been the most the difficult section on recent LSATs. What was a little surprising to me, though, was why these set of passages were difficult.

Most tough passages are difficult because the passages themselves are hard to comprehend. Anyone studying for the LSAT knows the feeling — a passage is about some scientific phenomenon you either didn’t know occurred or assumed operated by luck or magic, and as a result you’re only dimly aware of what you’re reading.

These passage, however, weren’t too hard to understand (this is, of course, by the LSAT’s standards, where everything is fairly difficult to comprehend, including why you ever signed up to take this test). The questions were a nightmare though. These questions were rife with all kinds of trap answer choices. Many questions tested incredibly picayune details from the passages. Certain correct answers were, in my opinion, not well-supported by the passage. In short, this would have been a particularly frustrating RC section to take.

• The most annoying passage, I thought, was the passage on the use of “accomplice witnesses” (AKA snitches) in criminal trials. The fact that literally no one referred to this as the “snitches” passages post-exam confirms my belief that kids today are nerds who lack appreciation for the finer purveyors of early-aughts rap. Anyway, this passage had a straightforward enough thesis — that the use of “accomplice witnesses” poses problems for criminal trials, because jurors are either unaware of the incentives law enforcement offers such witness or unlikely to consider those incentives when assessing the witnesses’ testimony.

So I thought I understood the passage. Not only that, but this is a subject I studied and have first-hand experience with. Then I got to the main point question, and thought every answer choice was wrong. The correct answer choice made an assertion — that this testimony increases the likelihood that a defendant may be convicted by false testimony — that the passage simply never made, only sort of implied. I had major issues with that answer choice, and a few others on that passage. Good thing this passage wasn’t on the digital LSAT — it may have provoked many a test taker to hurl the tablet across the room.

• There was also an irksome passage about fish farms. That passage argued that fish farms can be the cause of and solution to the overfishing problem, much in the same way that alcohol is the cause of and solution to life’s problems. That passage had eight very detail-oriented questions, which would have taken an eternity to answer on the test. The fact that it was second passage — typically one of the easier passages — was also fairly, well, fishy.

• Rest assured, the annoying features of those two passages aren’t typical of recent LSATs. Most passages test big-picture ideas and details in about equal proportion — unlike the fish farm passage. And the right answers to pretty much every recent question are very well-supported by the passage, as long as you know where to look. Although I would anticipate any LSAT this year to have a difficult Reading Comp section, I don’t think any will be this annoyingly difficult.

Logic Games

• On the whole, the Logic Games section was relatively mild, as far as these things go. The second game, about scheduling commercials for fast food, pizza, sportswear, trucks, and, inexplicably, granola — Seriously, who invited granola? Who has ever seen a granola commercial, for that matter? — was particularly unchallenging. The third game, a tiered ordering game that involved arranging both oil and watercolor paintings, was also fairly straightforward. The third game was also, by my count, the fourth time the test writers returned to the concept of oil and watercolor paintings in a logic game. So that was at least familiar, as well.

• The thing that linked all these games was “scenarios.” I thought scenarios were helpful and time-saving on all four games on this section. This is nothing new or novel on recent LSATs. On the September and November 2018 exams, I also thought you should make scenarios on all four of the games. On June 2018, all but one. On December 2017, all.

This isn’t just some random hobby horse of mine (OK it’s not just a random hobby horse of mine), but reflects how newer games distinguish themselves from older games. On older games, when scenarios were useful less frequently, you’d typically get a laundry list of rules, which would severely constrain your players and lead to important deductions. To find these deductions, you really just had to pay attention to elements that showed up in more than one rule.

On almost all recent games, however, there are fewer rules and, with that, fewer elements that show up in more than one rule. Because there are fewer rules to follow, the games appear much more open-ended and unconstrained. To figure out how these games work and to get a little head start on the questions, it’s become increasingly important to figure out a way to divide the game into a few different “scenarios” — the few ways the game could actually shake out. Doing so usually involves constraining one or more part of your set-up, which leads to some important deductions in each scenario that would be exceedingly difficult to make without resorting to scenarios.

So if you’re taking the LSAT this year, it’s very important that practice figuring out when and how to make scenarios. If you’re not developing this skill, you’re preparing for a different set of logic games than the one you’re probably going to get.

• The last game was, unsurprisingly, the hardest. It involved finding people to volunteer for a charity booth on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, three volunteers per day. We had only five potential volunteers to draw from, which means that several of our volunteers would have to pull double-duty and work on more than one day. Thankfully, for the hypothetical work-life balance of these players, a rule prevented anyone from working on all three days.

This game was hard for a couple reasons. First, games that involve scheduling, especially ones that invoke the days of the week, are basically always ordering games. This game, which invoked days of the week, by all rights, should have been an ordering game. This issue comes up a lot when working games out with people studying for the test, and it has occasionally led me to make sweaty exhortations on this blog that games that “SCHEDULING IS ORDERING” (emphasis obviously mine, now and then). Except this particular wasn’t an ordering game. There weren’t any rules that involved any volunteer going the “day after” or the in the “days before” any other volunteer. This game was better classified as a grouping game, an exception to the rule that “days of the week = ordering.” However, you would have been fine even if you set up this game as an ordering game, so you can hold your educational malpractice suits for now.

The main reason this game was difficult was the deduction test takers were required to make. As far as difficult deductions go, I have to say I quite enjoyed this one (and with that statement, I’ll kindly see myself into this locker, good sir). Anyway, one rule claimed that if one volunteer, Morse, worked on a day, then another volunteer, Lentz, would also have to work on that day. The contrapositive of that rule meant that if Lentz didn’t work on a day, then Morse couldn’t work on the day either. But, since we only had five volunteers to fill three positions each day, that would mean the other three volunteers — Nuñez, Pang, and Quinn — would have to volunteer on any day Lentz didn’t. Plus, because Lentz couldn’t work all three days, there had to be at least one day they weren’t working, and at least one day the mighty Nuñez-Pang-Quinn triumvirate worked. Another rule made it so that the Nuñez-Pang-Quinn squad couldn’t work on Saturday, so that game divided into two nice scenarios — one where they worked Thursday, and another where they worked Friday.

So, basically this deduction came down to realizing that once two people couldn’t volunteer on a given day, the remaining three would have to volunteer on that day. These kinds of deduction, based on group sizes and the limited number of players to fill those groups, have been a theme of many recent games. The first game of the November 2018 LSAT, the fourth game on the June 2018 LSAT, the first game of the December 2017 LSAT, and the fourth game of the June 2017 LSAT all required similar deductions. It wouldn’t surprise me, then, if similar deductions were required on more LG sections this year. Make sure, then, you’re tracking which players can’t join certain groups by actually writing out that they can’t join that group in your set-up, and then check your list of players to verify who actually could join that group. Also pay attention to “can’t be together” or “hate” grouping relationships, which further restrict who can join groups.

The Curve

• Here’s the “curve” for this exam — as in, the number of questions you could miss and still earn a given score — compared to the curves of other recent tests:

• In previous posts, we’ve discussed why worrying about the curve before you take a test is mostly a waste of time and energy, but checking out the curve after the test is released can provide a somewhat objective measure of how “difficult” that exam is.

Essentially, if you can miss a lot of questions you miss and still earn a “high” score, that suggests a high percentage of the questions were “difficult” questions, or the difficult parts of the test were more difficult than usual. If you can miss more questions and still earn a “medium” score, that suggests a high percentage of the questions were “medium difficulty” questions, or the “medium difficulty” parts of the test were a little more difficult than usual.

• This curve definitely reflects my experience reviewing this exam. Nothing was incredibly difficult. And there weren’t more difficult parts of the exam than usual — one hard game and a couple difficult passages is pretty much the norm on recent exams. So it makes sense that we didn’t get a -11 or -12 curve for a 170, or a -20 curve for a 165. But there were a lot of medium-difficulty questions on this test, especially on Logical Reasoning. So it makes sense that the curve got a little more generous at 160, 155, and 150.

• You should also notice that, putting the very difficult December 2017 exam aside for the moment, the curves of all the recent exams have been virtually identical, give or take a question. More reason to not fret about the curve of any future exam! It will almost certainly look like one of these.

What to Expect Moving Forward

If you made it this point, congrats! These posts are always mammoth undertakings, because each exam provides a lot of material to discuss. But, for making it to the end, you get a reward. This is the point where we uncover our crystal ball and try to divine what future LSATs might look like, and tell you how to best prepare for them.

This exam was definitely representative of trends we’ve been seeing over the LSAT, and would make a fine practice exam to take in the weeks before any LSAT you may take this year. It followed many recent trends, like an increased prevalence of Strengthen questions, more straightforward “diagramming” questions, a very difficult Reading Comp section, and a lot of scenario-based logic games. If you want to be best prepared for any LSAT you’ll take this year, the June 2019 test, in addition to the last few years of published LSATs, provides ample evidence that you should focus on developing those skills.

A Look at the June 2019 LSAT was originally published on LSAT Blog

#June 2019 LSAT #LSAT #LSAT Trends #trent teti #lsat

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abarahman-richard-chignell · 5 years

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Nationalism...A Whole Lotta Nationalism!

Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatulahi wa barakatuh, The original title was going to be "A revert's thoughts on the rise in Nationalism drawing on the Quran and Sunnah", but "a whole lotta nationalism" is appropriate given the rise of it everywhere and the length, I',m afraid, of this podcast! I normally try to avoid politics but in this day and age, it's almost impossible (Brexit, Trump, Saudi, China, to name just a few that seem to be all that is in the Western news). As always I want to try and tackle this in a way that is helpful to reverts or those rediscovering their Islam as this can be a rather difficult area to navigate as it involves it seems one has to question identities, nationalities, allegiances, religion, etc. It is rather a lot easier to understand if you are of Pakistani or Bengali heritage in the UK or Latino in the US, you've sadly experienced navigating this complex mix of where you fit in one way or another on a daily basis. If you are a refugee, life has always been hard, you never left your home just for a giggle, contrary to what it seems many people think you are not an expat who is just from a quote-unquote 'undesirable' country. If you are from Palestine the struggle is in your blood. And of course this is just a snapshot of cases and far from fully inclusive. But of course, as a revert, you may be from none of the cultures under 'attack' you may even be from the culture or nation that is doing the attacking of your now new Brothers and Sisters. As a Brother from Britain or France, for example, you have the colonial legacy to deal with too. A Sister from the USA has the modern colonial warmongering of her own country to somehow come to terms with. As an Arab, you have the difficulty of leadership that never seem to represent the Islam that is everything to you, in a good light...I found and find this topic incredibly complicated and I hope that InshaAllah my thoughts and how I try to navigate this minefield may be of some value. Let me set the scene by giving some examples of rife nationalism and then tackle the Islamic view on this through some excerpts from the Qu'ran and hadith. Although a warning ahead of time: my efforts to deal with this through an Islamic lens are going to be in no way exhaustive. Alhamdullilah this is simply because there are so many references that I could choose. Allah is the most Kareem (Kind) and his Messenger pbuh the best of examples - it should not surprise you that like most things - we've got this covered! DOCUMENTARIES I cut the cord to the TV ten plus years ago but still sometimes go down a YouTube rabbit hole now and then with my wife! We basically stick to lectures or documentaries in some pseudo attempt perhaps to be educated or intellectual ha ha. I am more than aware that our recent 'watchlist' is thanks to Google and whatever clever algorithm they have deployed to nicely serve up things for us to watch on a plate. Thank you YouTube algo-developers you clever little things! The 'freedom of choice' that we have online and the 'echo chamber' effect is a whole other topic. I'm not going there today!! Anyway recently we watched a series of interesting documentaries, from what I can remember, on VICE channel, Journeyman Productions, Ross Kemp on Gangs, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc I said it was a binge so let me share the ones I can remember: Immigration - the harsh, fraught, struggle filled, emotional journeys of Syrians / Sub-Saharan Africans / Eritreans (the North Korea of Africa) / kind British people on the island of Lesbos / less kind Greek locals with a 'treat them mean and they won't continue to come' approach (as if that is going to do anything when they are willing to risk injury and death to leave where they are coming from) / unkind French and Italian police / kind local French people willing to go to court over providing refuge in their gardens to tens of refugees every day / the disgraceful French police behaviour at the Calais Jungle camp. Israel, although we normally don't watch things on the Israeli occupation as my heart breaks at the barbaric nature of this ongoing apartheid and the international communities unwillingness to act on behalf of the Palestinian victims, we did watch an interesting thing on how the Haredi Jews have refused to serve in the Israeli military for religious reasons and yet how the Zionist government are not letting them get away with it. Now persecuting their own people for their religious beliefs which they are meant to share. As I'm an Englishman and we have a bit of a dark humour, I must confess to being amused by how un-Jewish the Zionist government are, and how if you are actually a practising Jew you are also borderline, or maybe not even borderline, an 'enemy of the state'! Also, I had no idea what a large number of practising Jews were opposed to military service. A cursory bit of research highlighted that there are many other Jews like the Hasidic Jews who are against the occupation and service in the IDF. We watched on Guantanamo Bay and how it is still open and on a 'tour' were quite amazed by how little the US soldiers guarding knew about their 'enemy' that they were holding. This is rather damning of the educational level and natural intellectual inquisitiveness. Even the base commander with rather a lot of stars on his shoulder confessed to knowing next to nothing! Quite staggering. Of course, the former guard who reverted to Islam featured in the documentary, mashaAllah, so it is wrong to totally generalise - we come to Islam in some very unexpected ways! Allahu Akhbar! We also watched Hate Thy Neighbour on the Deep South of America and the horrid EDL in the UK which was simply staggering for the total demonstration of ignorance and racism that are on both sides of the 'pond'. As an Englishman watching the EDL I just felt horribly ashamed. It is quite hard for me to fathom how this country can produce such disgusting characters from its midst. A documentary on the most insane murder rate in Mexico border towns controlled by the cartels and how El Salvador is just so dangerous that those expelled from the US who have never really known El Salvador as home are willing to walk this 'caravan' that takes a minimum 30 days, and is truly treacherous, to try and get back into the US. Fully aware of the stakes involved if they are caught and that is if they beat the odds and even get anywhere near the border in the first place. We watched one on Afghanistan being, amongst a cornucopia of other natural resources, a gemstone capital. The one we watched focussed on emeralds and if you can afford them and want the greenest in the world then Afghanistan surely has them! This backed up what Afghan friends of mine had said about mineral resources in the country that I confess to never quite believing. It is amazing when you see for your own eyes that it rams home the point that you've been sold a dud by the media. It might even make one question the real motivations over the presence in a country that historically has been a graveyard for one army after another? Also, a debate hosted by intelligence squared and Chaired by Lyse Doucet (BBC's Chief International Correspondent) with the motion that "The West should cut ties with Saudi Arabia". For the motion were Mehdi Hassan (Journalist and Al Jazzera Broadcaster) and Madawi Al-Rasheed (LSE Professor and expert on Saudi Arabia). Against the motion Crispin Blunt (Conservative MP for Reigate - just up the road from me) and Mamoun Fandy (Egyptian born Middle East expert). It was a thoroughly good debate and well worth the watch. Before coming into the event 41% said they were for the motion, 22% against, 37% undecided. After the debate the positions had changed to 63% for the motion, only 5% were undecided, 32% were against. That was a swing of 6% towards the motion that "The West should cut ties with Saudi Arabia". An obvious trigger and feature of this debate was the alleged but clearly fairly solid 'off with his head' order by MBS on journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. We also watched an interesting Oxford University Hard Talk on "What is the human cost to China's economic miracle?" again with Mehdi Hasan who this time was challenging Charles Liu on China's economic and human rights record - particularly on the Uighur Muslim detention or extermination depending on who you choose to believe. Many are calling this ethnic cleansing and again it is happening pretty much undeterred. I forget where we watched it, but a just heartbreaking look at the humanitarian disaster that is Yemen, with a war that has been going on since 2015! The civil war was ongoing but everything got significantly worse and became the worlds worst humanitarian crisis upon the involvement of the Saudi-led coalition. As in every war, civilians are bearing the brunt and suffering. Normally Scandinavia is portrayed as the lands where everything works, people are the happiest in the world, etc. Yet another documentary on the rise of Far Right parties puts pay to that notion - at least in my mind. In the sidebar, there were similar documentaries on neighbouring and regional countries. Sweden was even interesting and frightening in that there is a vicious battle between these right wing hate filled groups and militant violent left groups that actively combat the fascist right. All of this centred around the topics of nationalism, immigration, race, etc. It is not just the algorithm served documentary binge fest where nationalist, separatist, racist, derogatoriness seems to be the global norm. The Christchurch terrorist act occurred and is obviously fresh in everyone's mind. As everyone knows this was nationalist, racist and hate inspired. I will not elaborate on that here. You may like to listen to my former podcast that covered the global Muslim reaction I experienced to this dreadful event, especially as it may not have been the reaction you may have expected (you can find it here). WHATSAPP Another example is from my own WhatsApp. I am a member of a number of Malaysian WhatsApp groups, after having lived there, and there is always a whole heap of Malay nationalism due to their concerns about the Chinese takeover of their country and the economic destruction that comes from not following Islamic economic principles at the state level. Post Christchurch I have received a troublesome number of links to mosques being vandalised in the north of England, we had Surrey Police talk in my local mosque and say that there had been a terrorist act against Muslims in normally sleepy Surrey. A 50-year-old man ranting about 'white supremacy' knifed a 16-year-old in a supermarket carpark..... and what is sad I am sure there are far more examples that someone with less aversion to media and social media could add to this already saddening list. The Today Show was shared with me where Muslim parents are upset about primary school sex and relationship education and Piers Morgan, taking on the mantle of a gay rights activist, decided to slander the Muslim journalist on his show, and Muslims in general, with an Islamaphobic and racist rant which was aired on an apparently well watched national TV channel. Although interesting the last 6 minutes or so were not featured online via the TV station where Piers steps a little too far over the line (the full version was sent to me). Piers, Piers, Piers, we are here to stay, when are you going to get that? Many of us are white like you mate. No, we're not going back to Islamabad, most of us never came from there, we're as British as you and have contributed more to building this society with real-world jobs than you. Wind your neck in mate. Accept that in a pluralistic society a favourite soundbite that you like to throw out, which is defined as: "A pluralistic society is a diverse one, where the people in it believe all kinds of different things and tolerate each other's beliefs even when they don't match their own.", you are going to have to accept that there are a whole bunch of us who face Mecca 5 times a day, wear different clothes, and rank God above all things. We accept you, time to actually be pluralistic and stop always targetting Muslims. That my friend is called Islamaphobia and you are only getting away with it because we don't seem quite as good as the Jews have been at getting it to be a term that people quake at being associated with, like anti-Semitism but.... we will get there soon inshaAllah, so watch out! NEWSPAPER Now I don't normally get a newspaper as I have a method that suffices my needs using my investment platforms excellent resources and I prefer books or periodicals for their deeper more thoughtful analysis. In general, I am not a fan of the 'news' per se. I know many successful people who seem to be just fine operating in a complete news blackout or reading headlines on the daily newspaper as they walk past a newsstand. However, after my family took my Dad out for lunch at the Shard last week I picked up an FT. I did it as a kind of walk down memory lane as I used to take the FT every day. As a finance chap, there really is no substitute. Now, this is not meant to be topical but rather an example of what is being pumped out and consumed. What I mean is that it is not specifically these stories that matter but rather the type of content I want to highlight. Scanning other newspapers in preparing a bit for this podcast, there is a commonality running through almost all UK publications - the examples I'm citing are indicative of the general state of affairs. I'm going to be referring to the Tuesday 19 March 2019 International Edition. Amidst the pages, on literally almost every page, what do you get but: Nationalism, Nationalism, Nationalism! Also, I quite like the FT as they don't mess about! The news section is a few condensed pages before they get full-on business. So let me walk you through this sample Tuesday from our look-for-the-nationalist or leaning-that-way articles and references:

- The front page headline has of course Brexit with "May's Brexit hits block as Bercow rules out third vote on same deal", naturally this sets the tone for a number of other articles where everyone guesses about the fiasco that has become the Brexit. The FT indicates what is coming in the rest of the paper on the front page. - Turning to page two, blissfully we get a pass. - Page three has four articles all of which are loaded with nationalistic, and because this is Britain schoolboy antics of our esteemed politicians. The main article is "Bercow adds to May's problems while delighting Europhiles and Brexiters". The photo below showing Union Jacks and European flags jostling for our attention. As its a Brexit piece it is safe to say that this is nationalistic, them and us stuff. Then we have "Leavers will back PM's deal 'if she agrees to go'. In short, this is where conservative party members seem more interested in their positions in parliament than the future of the country. Pretty standard fare for politicians. We also have "Article 50 Back to Brussels with extra baggage" which is of course more of the same about poor old Theresa May having to go back and forth to Brussels to try and find some way out of this pickle we as a nation have got ourselves in. Finally, we have more of the games in the Conservative party with "Johnson and Raab jockey for position" which is all about how to slip into the PM spot as Theresa May leaves. Oh yes, it's not about serving the public interests first but rather serving their own. Loyalty to none it seems. Of course, cherrypicking some terms we have plenty of "leading Eurosceptic contenders", "prominent Brexiters", "insisting they are acting in the national interests", "hardline Brexiters", "pro-Brexit hardcore", etc, etc, yawn, yawn. - Page four we have a detour from Brexit woes for a little foray into Europe-land. "Staff resist Czech tycoon in battle for Le Monde" is an article on a Czech billionaire looking to acquire control of the famous Le Monde newspaper. We have quotes like "I'm very suspicious of a foreign billionaire trying to get a foothold in the western establishment through the ownership of a media, especially through a newspaper such as Le Monde, which sets the tone and agenda of news in France and beyond". Yet we also have someone presumably talking on behalf of Kretinsky the billionaire saying "He is a Francophile and believes that France plays an important role in the fight of populism.". So here we have suspicion, foreign, western (making Czech back to the Eastern Bloc I presume), French nationalism in Le Monde as voice, Francophile, populism. Then it gets deeper as of course, we have "French interior minister in hot seat after yellow vest protest". This is more of the yellow vests protests that descended into violence with rioters setting fire to newsstands, a bank, restaurants and ransacking more than 90 shops. Sadly also for this chap they report on his playing around with waitresses rather than his wife. Who only knows what this movement is about anymore. It may not be so nationalistic but it is certainly popular and violent. And of course the French are often quick to say that everywhere immigrants come from are uncivilised and yet here we have France regularly looking like a war zone. - Page five, oh dear me, we have "Brazil's Trump pivots towards US in boost for White House", with subtitle "Rightwing Bolsonaro's Washington visit brings hope on both sides of closer ties". I can probably rest my case here but there are two disturbing quotes I will site to ram home the point: Firstly: "Day's before Jair Bolsonaro's meeting with Donald Trump this week, a select group of enthusiasts gathered at the Trump International Hotel in Washington to celebrate the ideas that helped bring the two rightwing populist leaders to power.Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of the Brazilian president who won a landslide election in October, was there. So too, as co-host of the event, was Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist who has set up a club for nationalist populist leaders called The Movement. "This is a very important movement and not just for Brazilian-US relations.... but the world," Mr Bannon told the gathering. "Ideas have consequences, and with the arrival of Bolsonaro [in Brazil], Trump [in the US], Orban [in Hungary], and Salvini [in Italy], it's a critically important time."We're at last doing what communists and socialists did a long time ago," added Eduardo Bolsonaro, who is also head of Brazil's congressional foreign relations committee. "We're organising ourselves internationally". All I will say personally is that I find this level of organisation globally of Nationalist leaders, the language used, and the titling of their club as The Movement, simply terrifying. - Page 6 and I promise we're done, inshaAllah, but there are a couple of things here which are both nationalistic and divisive. I have to make a little detour here. The first is "Erdogan angers Wellington by airing video" where we find out the Mr Erdogan screens footage of the mosque killings during his election rallies. It seems whilst everyone else is noting how well the NZ Primeminister has dealt with the whole affair Erdogan is trying to garner voters that he is struggling to hold onto. Now I am not sure who his advisors are but even my local Imam preached to the community not to share the videos due to the hurt it would cause the victims families, the disrespect to the martyrs, and the fact that it aids the intention of the killer himself. Oh no it seems Erdogan went and dove in with both feet the videos even being captioned "A terrorist who is the enemy of Islam and the Turks". In the rallies, Erdogan said 'the "real target" of the New Zealand killings was the Turkish people, the Turkish flag and the Turkish state.' Do we need to remind Mr Erdogan that whilst he might be struggling for votes that Islam, Muslim and Turk are not synonyms. But, without going too deep into this from the Islamic perspective, we have again(!) another example of rife nationalism. Next, we have "China talks up close ties with EU in riposte to 'systemic rival' label" and language like "concerns Beijing is trying to divide the bloc", China being an "economic competitor" and "systematic rival". China's representative making a big thing of "co-operation is a mainstay of European relations". The whole thing, of course, suggests discomfort from both sides with Europe marking their turf and China doing the same. I am going to finish with the headline "Beijing attempts to justify Uighur detention". As we all know by now Human Rights groups, international concern, yet not enough governments speaking out about the atrocious, ethnic cleansing, abuse, forced marriage, forced consumption of pork and alcohol, all in the name of education, oh and torture, murder, etc, treatment of the Uighur people in China. Here we have Erdogan reclaiming some class by being the "first leading Muslim-majority country to call on China to close its mass internment camps holding Uighurs." Of course, I don't have to work hard to convince you that this is nationalistic, ethnic, racist, behaviour at play. I do have to say one thing.... you know you have that one friend or family member who is prone to massive exaggeration. Well, it seems China's state council has a serious case of exageritis! Let me read you this quote "Xinjiang has destroyed 1,588 terrorist groups, arrested 12,995 terrorists" and it goes on. But really? Really? 1,588 terrorist groups. 1,588 terrorist groups inside Xinjiang province. I spat my tea out reading that! Come on China state council pull the other one! I think you need to double down on your editorial control to ensure that the 'stats' you produce have at least some basis in reality. WRAP UP THROUGH THE LENSE OF ISLAM Ok, ok, no I haven't turned this into a news review podcast but what I do hope I have done is demonstrated how everywhere you look there is the talk of nationalism or conditions that trigger nationalistic feelings. There are whole regions in flux and mobile populations at unprecedented scales. I want to say unprecedented but I'm not a good enough historian to know if that is totally true. What is for sure is that there is a significant amount of population movement and a significant amount of nationalism. What I'd like to do now is address nationalism through the eyes of Islam and my views as to how we as Muslims are meant to actually tackle this specific issue of nationalism. I'll start with making the point that Muslims living in non-Muslim majority countries can have issues that are kind of hard for them to deal with although I emphasise they have to rely on the religious teachings of our Deen (religion). Let's note the ease with which Muslims can feel awkward in Western countries with things that are nowhere near in line with our Religious views e.g. homosexuality, sex education at increasingly younger and younger ages, public debauchery, the promotion of gambling, sexualisation of almost everything, diminishing moral standards, etc, etc. Regrettably, the list is quite long. As this warrants a whole other podcast in its own right I am going to cover this in as short and sharp a practical manner as I can without giving any specific scriptural references, I'll save that for the full podcast inshaAllah. The key point: Muslims as long as able to practice their religion have to respect and uphold the laws of the land. After having travelled in many Muslim countries, you will find that many in those lands are jealous of the law and order in the West. There is no perfect Islamic environment in the world. We have to simply make do with what we have and in the West you are really rather blessed, whether you know that or not. Just wise up and be pragmatic. Thank God that you can freely worship, that you can listen to khutba's (sermons) that are not written by the state, that you can homeschool your children if you don't like the state education, that there is good state education at all, that there is access to medical care - which is often free, the rule of law is more balanced, bribery is not rife, etc. My suggestion is don't be a complainy-pants. Don't focus on the few things that are less pleasing and overlook much that is good. We should have shukr gratitude, for the blessings Allah swt has bestowed on us and sabr for those things he has also bestowed upon us that we find hard. As Muslims, remember we are people of shukr and sabr. So what do you do my brothers and sisters about things you are uncomfortable with, like homosexuality? Well how about this? Don't go to any gay bars!! What if you meet someone 'strange' or 'odd'? Be kind and well mannered. You never know if you may be an instrument of Allah swt and a trigger for them looking to Islam. There is no compulsion in religion and we are all the creation of Allah swt after all. A simple heuristic is to worry more about yourself, then your family, then your community, and work your way up. I am sure there are more than enough things for you to work on in those first three areas before being outraged by fringe groups. Even if they are rather vocal considering their meagre numbers. Back to Nationalism. Look I checked my logic on this whole topic of Nationalism and being a Muslim with one of my close Arabic Brothers who has memorised the Quran mashaAllah. I also asked him for verses that he thought were relevant. There are honestly so many on this topic and additionally many many Hadith. I messaged him the following: "I would like to write something on nationalism and its dangers. It will be along the line of what I believe is stated in the Quran and the Sunnah: that we are Muslim first and from a nation second. That cultural things from our national traditions are cool as long as they don't contradict explicitly something from the Qu'ran and the Sunnah. This is my logical understanding so far." My Brothers response was "I stand with you for this Brother, flags and colours should not take us away from each other, we are being called by Allah swt as "one Ummah" and the only differences between us are in Taqwa which no one can judge except He." Note the key points here. 1) we are an ummah before we are nations with flags, colours, etc, (2) our unity as brothers and sisters in Islam supersedes our allegiances to nation states, (3) in the eyes of Allah swt we are all the same except in our taqwa. Taqwa if you have not heard of it before is our God consiciousness or you can have it translated as fear of Allah swt. It is what makes us do acts in remembrance of Allah swt. This can only be judged by Him the Most Magnificent as He is the only one who can look into the hearts to see this taqwa. None of us mere mortals possibly can. Actually, there is another area I want to share in my communication with my Brother that I think is important to reflect on as Muslims. I laughed with my wife that it is so amazing that I can just ask him for references and he closes his eyes and can just pull relevant verses from the Quran database that is his brain. What an incredible blessing that is from Allah swt and for someone who didn't grow up with any knowledge that people have memorised God's word in its entirety with no errors I continue to be astounded when I see this. I told him we thought this and he laughed. He said "Alhamdullilah Brother, when someone says this to me I really would say as Prophet Suleiman (Solomon) said in the Quran 27:19 "... "My Lord, enable me to be grateful for Your favour which You have bestowed upon me and upon my parents and to do righteousness of which You approve. And admit me by Your mercy into [the ranks of] Your righteous servants" Alhamdullilah" Then he tells me "you should teach your kids Arabic Brother, they will be grateful to you afterwards, they will appreciate how much you really love them especially when they read the Quran and understand it the way it was revealed" Then he said: "Walahi Brother, Quran is the only guidance in my life, and without it, I am completely NOTHING. It is my soul's oxygen! and every Muslim's too (supposedly)!" I share this as I feel it imperative to ask anyone still listening or reading: is this how you feel about the Quran? Is this your relationship with it? Is it your oxygen? Are you nothing without it? It is meant to be! This is what creates our unity, creates our understanding, means that when there are issues like nationalism we know 100% where we stand as Muslims. We know that we're united with every single other Muslim on the Straight Path as we all go our understanding from Allah swt's direct words to us in the Holy Quran as well as the example and explanation of those words from the Prophet pbuh and what we have learnt from the Sahaba (may Allah be pleased with them), and the great scholars who have helped ensure in these modern times we understand as we were meant to the way to live. May Allah swt enable us as an Ummah to reconnect with Him through His Words and may we have the Qu'ran such a part of our life that it testifies on our behalf in the hereafter. Ameen. So here are a few quotes from the Qu'ran: 21:92-93 *"[Prophets], this is your community, one community, and I am your Lord, so serve Me. They have torn their unity apart, but they will all return to us."* 23:52-53 *"This is your community, one community - and I am your Lord: be mindful of Me - but they have split their community into sects, each rejoicing in their own." * In both of these the emphasis, the angle that is being stated if you like, is referring to us as a community which is understood as an Ummah-nation. A community united by shared beliefs. One where our religion is the unifier, that is what makes us a nation, we are not separate from any other Brother or Sister, we are united as an Ummah through our religion, through the Lord we worship, the Lord we fear, and the Prophet pbuh who's example we follow. Allah swt reminds us of the risks of division and how we will all ultimately return to Him. He swt also highlights at the end of the second verse how the Jews and the Christians split into sects "each rejoicing in their own". Here the Quran is warning Prophet Muhammad pbuh and us that we are meant to be united as an Ummah, as a community, and not divide up into groups, making the errors of the former peoples of the book. Do you see how this trumps all human constructs of nations or nation-states? How it runs so much deeper? *3:102-103 *"You who believe, be mindful of God, as is His due, and make sure you devote yourselves to Him, to your dying moment. Hold fast to God's rope all together; do not split into factions. Remember God's favour to you: you were enemies and then He brought your hearts together and you became brothers by His grace: you were about to fall into a pit of Fire and He saved you from it. In this way God makes his revelations clear to you so that you may be rightly guided." * This is massive! We were enemies, and He brought our hearts together, through the religion, and His favour and we became brothers. Allah swt tells us that this saves us from the pit of the Fire. He swt tells us that we must "hold fast to God's rope all together". So why are we fighting, killing, making enemies of other Muslims, fighting as nations against other nations, when that favour of Allah swt and brotherhood in religion that he has given us is what keeps us from the fire? *3:104 "Be a community that calls for what is good, urges what is right, and forbids what is wrong: those who do this are the successful ones."* As is the case throughout the Quran Allah swt tells us what makes us "the successful ones" and it as a community - a global ummah again - calling for what is good and forbidding what it is wrong. Calling to good is about as expansive as it gets. Are nationalistic motivations, the superiority of one type over the other, calling for good? Is this treating our brothers as we would hope to be treated? A community is stated here, not multiple nations. A community of believers where collectively, we focus on good. United we are successful as a single global community. I see this as knowing that deeper than the human constructs of nation-states there is a bond between me and my Moroccan brother, or between me and my Yemeni brother, or between me and my Colombian brother, or any other brother you can think of.... that transcends that nation-state man-made construct. *3:105 "Do not be like those who, after they have been given clear revelation, split into factions and fall into disputes: a terrible punishment awaits such people."* This should make us think, should it not? Are we going down the route of those in the past who became divided? Have we not been given clear revelation? Have we not witnessed the mess that has become of those who have split into so many factions they lost all unity and are clearly in confusion? Do we no longer fear the punishment of Allah? Allahu Akhbar! La illah ill Allah. We hear and we obey! Or at least we should be unified by that La illah ill Allah. There is a community or a nation but its the community or nation that unites across all languages, races, and types under the shahada: La illah ill Allah, Muhammad rassululah. THIS TOPIC REQUIRES MORE I actually got into this topic without thinking it through fully! I realise that I have only really scratched the surface of what needs to be said on this matter. For example, I need to address the race and racism part. How the inclusiveness of Islam is one of the biggest draws and how the Quran and indeed the Prophet pbuh's last sermon covered how we are all the same no matter our skin colour or where we happen to have been born. Maybe even more so than this is the importance of highlighting the importance of brotherhood and sisterhood as a broad concept in Islam and how this adds to the trumping of nationalism. However, this is already exceptionally long and so I guess I shall inshaAllah break this topic up and cover these in future podcasts. InshaAllah I also didn't lose everyone with the length of this one, in what seems to be, unintentionally, my first long-form podcast. CONCLUSION To wrap up I hope that I have made a clear case that as Muslims we must be very careful around nationalism and tribalism. We are Muslim first and of our countries second. Or maybe even deeper we are of the human community first and foremost, as all are created by Allah swt irrespective of belief. Then as Muslims, we believe in Allah swt and we happen to live in a particular nation, for what is ultimately a very short period. The purpose of this residence being to work so that we get where we so desperately hope to in the hereafter which is eternal. Furthermore, I hope that, although I didn't drum it home so much that, as long as we are able to practice our religion we are bound by the laws of the lands we reside in. This can raise emotions that can be difficult to deal with but we must be patient (have sabr) as well as being grateful (having shukr) for all those things we are blessed with. I've lived in different European countries most of my life and then in Muslim countries. I have good friends and business interests in many different countries and I can categorically tell you that even if things look 'idyllic' somewhere else - they aren't. Remember this is the dunya - you want idyllic? - work for it through your worship and remembrance of Allah swt. May Allah swt draw us together as Muslims, enable us to be the best of examples and the ones no one fears, may we not harm our brothers and sisters in any way and may our leaders lead with wisdom and mercy for all humankind. Ameen.

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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ROBERT SIKORYAK’S REMARKABLE SKILL often goes unappreciated because of its subtlety. His works are acts of cultural appropriation that deftly mine our comic book memories, filtering history and literature through our understanding of comic book history. His art enables our collective, illustrated past to mediate the present. What do we learn, for example, about the culture that produced iconic figures such as Mary Worth and Rex Morgan, M.D., when these two characters reappear as Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Lady Macbeth? If we, as a culture, haven’t yet come to terms with the extent of the sorrows expressed in Charles Schulz’s many decades of pathos-laden Peanuts strips, Sikoryak reassembles the ideological pieces for us, rendering Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in Schulz’s style and retitling it: “Good ol’ Gregor Brown.” Both of these strips, like all of Sikoryak’s work, demonstrate his keen eye and extraordinary finesse.

Sikoryak, born in 1964, generally signs his name “R. Sikoryak.” He has drawn cover art for The New Yorker, LA Weekly, and The Nation. His work has been featured in Wired magazine as well as in the groundbreaking publication Raw, where he worked together with Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly shortly after graduating from the Parsons School of Design in the late 1980s. In 2009 Sikoryak published his 64-page hardcover collection of literary works reimagined as classic comics Masterpiece Comics, and his Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel (2017) — an inspired take on the unreasonable language of user license agreements — was reviewed six months ago in LARB. He currently lives in New York and teaches illustration at Parsons.

I interviewed Sikoryak about Masterpiece Comics and about his recently published book, The Unquotable Trump. The Unquotable Trump is a collection of iconic comic book covers from many decades that have been remastered to show first Candidate Trump, and then President Trump, taking over the respective comic book’s worlds. Sikoryak’s Trump goes head-to-head with the comic world’s most iconic characters, including Neal Adams’s Superman, John Romita’s Spider-Man, and even Warren Kremer’s Richie Rich. For the book, Sikoryak relied only on direct quotes — as its cover boasts, it consists of “Trump in his very own ‘best words!’”

BRAD PRAGER: On several pages of The Unquotable Trump, Trump is seen speaking even when there is no speech in the originals. For example, the cover of your book is based on a cover of the 1975 Marvel Treasury Edition featuring the Incredible Hulk. On that cover, the Hulk is silent, but your “Hulk-Trump” is uttering a number of standard Trumpisms (“Tremendous!,” “Huge!”). A similar change is noticeable on your “Nice Nurse” cover as well, which is based on an issue of Night Nurse from 1973. In the original, the Night Nurse character is actually speaking, defending her patient by saying, “To kill him — you have to shoot me first!!” In your version, we only hear from Trump, while the comic’s heroine is speechless.

As I conceived the book, I felt it was important to only go by what Trump said. The book is obviously critical of him, but within that context, yes, he’s the only one who actually gets to speak. I conceived of the book right before the election. I had seen a series of mini-comics published by someone I don’t know, a series called “Tea Party Comix” consisting of old comics in which Obama had been inserted as the villain. I came upon them through Ethan Persoff’s site, where he posts a lot of obscure comics. My approach is quite different from those. I really wanted the whole world depicted in these covers to be infected by Trump. Even the titles of the books that he’s in have been tailored to fit his perspective. Sometimes the titles are more neutral, like “Subjective Comics,” based on Detective Comics, but on other ones, like the Wonder Woman cover in which she’s not Wonder Woman, but “Nasty Woman,” Trump’s language becomes part of the world that the characters inhabit. These characters do have a voice — they have personalities, and they have humanity — but as far as this book is concerned, everything is shaped by Trump’s perspective, and he drowns out everyone else.

The cover that is most striking for me, and which is most suffused with Trump’s perspective, is Pap Comics, featuring “Archy,” which is based on an issue of Pep Comics from 1952. If you look at the original cover, Archie is as happy as can be. His face is covered in lipstick from Veronica’s kisses. In your version, he is truly miserable. Even in the book’s marketing icon, in the upper right, poor “Archy” is suddenly suffering, wondering how all this has happened. The world has been invaded, much to the chagrin of the characters we know and with whom we identify. This is Pop’s soda shop, and Trump, as Pop, is running the show. Elsewhere, of course, you have him appear as Solomon Grundy or the Red Skull.

I was always trying to find a dynamic where, if Trump wasn’t a villain, he was at least a counterpoint to the main character. He takes the place of Tubby in Little Lulu, for example. Tubby is hardly a super villain but sometimes he’s a pretty bratty kid, so there the equation sort of works.

Several of these covers read differently from the others, including two that I would describe as feminist fantasy inversions: the pairing of the Catwoman cover alongside the one George Perez did of Black Widow from a 1983 Marvel Fanfare. Those covers depict worlds in which the women are in the dominant positions. Black Widow is really carrying the day in the your version of the cover, so the book varies its perspective in that regard, even if Trump comes out on top most of the time.

Those two covers just ended up next to each other. The book is for the most part ordered chronologically. There are one or two pages where I had to shift things around. I really didn’t want to start the book with his famous quote about Mexicans, so I put his quote about building the Wall first. The two were said within the same day, so that’s not such a big change. I tried to follow the campaign’s chronology, but that led to some of the covers echoing one another in odd ways. The two you mention evolved out of the debates.

Some of the covers you’ve chosen seemed as though they were pulled directly out of my own memory bank. I remember collecting some of the Neal Adams and George Perez covers at the time of their appearances, although I had stopped collecting comics by the time the issue of 300 you cite came out in 1998. Your work mines different areas of the adult, nostalgic unconscious. Was there a principle of selection? How did you go back through your conscious and your less conscious memories, deciding what to draw?

I’m sure a lot of the choices are directly attributable to what I was collecting and what I grew up with, but I really didn’t want the book to represent only my perspective. That’s true of Terms and Conditions as well. I was trying to run the gamut of styles and to put things in the book that people who didn’t grow up in the 1970s would also remember and relate to. Because of the movie, 300 was a major pop cultural moment. It made such an impression that I thought it was worth mentioning here. I didn’t want to suggest that the concerns raised in this book apply only to, say, white men who collected comics and who are now in their 50s, but rather to suggest that these concerns apply to most everybody. Although it was easy to choose superheroes, I tried to find other ways of integrating Trump.

The cover based on an issue of Adventure Time no. 5 really torments those Adventure Time characters. On the original cover, they’re not crying. In your version, it looks as though you’ve caught them on the most miserable day they’ve ever had.

It would have been harder to do these if I had really adhered to the rules that I had first thought of when I started. But changing their expressions seemed like a minor thing.

Some of the covers resonate more strongly than others. The defeat of Superman resonates in a particular way, and here I’m thinking about the 1971 Justice League cover, the one based on the original by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano. Turning Superman into “Supersad” was an inspired take, but there’s a way in which destroying Superman is part of the fantasy that our political rhetoric plays into. It’s a horrible thing to watch, when Superman goes limp like that. Another Superman cover later that struck me similarly was the one for “World’s Failest,” based on a cover for World’s Finest on which Superman looks distraught and helpless.

That is his original pose. I didn’t have to change that one. Trump speaks a lot about good and evil and about what’s right and what’s traditional, and about what represents “our country.” The terms wouldn’t be out of place in some of the older DC comic books. But then, you see him in opposition to these characters, and I think it’s evident that he’s coming from a different place. His perspective is not the same perspective that Batman or Superman had on those issues. The gamut is pretty wide here, but the more traditional superheroes tend to resonate a lot — they’re bigger than we are.

The mediation in this project works on a number of different levels. Our collective memories are being overrun, but this is exactly what a lot of political rhetoric aspires to. Comparisons with the Red Skull plug into our worst fantasies.

There was an early Fantastic Four villain called the “Hate-Monger,” who first appeared in 1963 and was driving people crazy by instilling hate in everyone, but the cover featuring him wasn’t iconic enough. It didn’t lend itself to a specific quote, but it seemed very on the nose. Some things are built into these characters.

And a lot of what was shocking during the campaign has become normalized.

Occasionally I get feedback from someone who doesn’t know why I’m being so mean about Trump, and there are some people who don’t see him as speaking out against anyone who doesn’t have it coming. But any good villain in a movie or a comic book has a very good reason for doing what they are doing. Even Doctor Doom thinks he’s doing the right thing, so it’s really hard to know how to unpack all of this.

It’s fascinating to me how your work has so many different historical layers, which distinguishes it from a lot of similar projects. I was thinking, for example, about Alan Moore’s Supreme, which I enjoy, but in those he is mediating comics through comics. He takes the history of the traditional superhero — whether it’s Superman or Captain Marvel — and filters it through a contemporary comic book lens. That’s an interesting exercise, but what you’re doing adds an additional dimension. The Unquotable Trump works from the collective memory of our youths, as does Masterpiece Comics, in which you are mediating literature, and really history itself, through comics. That produces a kind of triangulation: the Genesis story in the Bible as seen through the figures of Blondie and Dagwood, for example, and our reception of Blondie and Dagwood entering into it as a third element. I have to ask myself, when I read Blondie, why am I still looking at this fantasy from …

… the 1930s.

Right, it’s Chic Young’s idea about what domesticity is meant to be like. Filtering the Bible through that is a fascinating exercise. As you move through literary history and the comics, how do you pair these things?

The first book I adapted was Dante’s Inferno. I think I was playing more with form than with the characterization when I combined it with Bazooka Joe bubble gum comics. I was taking the loftiest, most seriously reverential epic poem and combining it with the most disposable comic there is. But then the next one I did was “Good ol’ Gregor Brown,” and that was where I thought that there seemed to be an analogy between the personalities of Charlie Brown and Gregor Samsa. When I started putting all of it together, the parallels really came into focus. I put Kafka’s dialogue into the mouth of the Charlie Brown bug, and I saw that there was no space between these characters. I didn’t have to fudge the dialogue to make it fit Charlie Brown, other than to add a “Good Grief!” Kafka was speaking for Schulz, or vice versa, and that was really exciting. Beyond that, I felt like I was paying more and more attention to how the characters related to the stories or even maybe how the genres related.

Making Wuthering Heights into a 1950s horror comic was hardly a stretch, and I don’t know if it was enough of a stretch to get the kind of jolt that I am usually looking for. But the way that novel is generally treated and thought of is much milder than the novel actually is, so I had to think of a really brutal comic to combine the novel with. I think about how things might connect and I make notes. Sometimes nothing comes of them, but sometimes something really seems like the right idea and I pursue it. What’s fun about doing these, and what has become important sometimes, is thinking about how the stories are told. I’m currently working on a sequel to Masterpiece Comics, and one of the new stories appeared in the Graphic Canon of Children’s Literature (2014). It’s a version of Tom Sawyer in the style of one of these Family Circus maps, and it actually tells the whole story as he moves through the neighborhood, to the island, to the courthouse and then to the cave. In that case I was playing with the wholesome kids of Family Circus set against Mark Twain’s more shaded views of youth. I had been asking myself, “How can I take this structure and use it to tell the story?” So, it happens in different ways. People have suggested ideas to me for other strips, and I could see how they would work. If they don’t resonate with me I won’t do them, but it all seems valid to me, and there are many ways to approach it.

It almost gets lost that you’re also offering a literary reading of a text, whether it’s of Marlowe or Brontë or any other author. It shouldn’t go unremarked that you’re a good close reader of literature. When it comes to “Inferno Joe,” I notice that you only picked Inferno. There’s no Purgatorio or Paradiso. There’s only “Inferno Joe.”

That strip was done for Raw Magazine in 1989. I only had one page, and at that point I’d only read Inferno. I thought about going back to finish the trilogy. I like closure and I considered it, but they don’t even make Bazooka Joe comics anymore. They changed the format, which is heartbreaking to me for a couple of reasons. I don’t know if that would resonate, but I considered following Joe through the other realms. It was more a question of space. Inferno is a satisfying read on its own, and many people don’t read the other two.

Raw’s aesthetics may also have helped determine that there would be only Inferno. But in any case the journey to Hell brings out something about the strange world that these figures inhabit: Bazooka Joe himself has an eye patch, which is a difficult fate for a teenager — however that might have happened — and his friend, Mort, has this oddly placed turtleneck, which turns him into Joe’s mouthless guide through Hell.

Looking at “Blond Eve,” your take on the Genesis story — your decision to turn Mr. Dithers into God was inspired. This meddling boss is walking around ruining everything for Blondie and Dagwood’s Adam and Eve. They seemed to have it good, and then their exile becomes the world of Chic Young’s comic. You’ve given us an origin story. This could be the very first Blondie. It tells us how they got into that house in the first place. They were exiled from Heaven, and now nothing remains but our cruel laughter over their fates.

Sometimes when I do these strips I end up killing the characters. Batman only goes to jail in “Dostoyevsky Comics.” But the Blondie one was striking. I was thinking it through, and I thought, “Oh, that’s were they would end up.” It’s not the end, but the beginning.

I noticed that you drew a sendup of The Lockhorns in which Mr. Lockhorn is explaining the stakes of the Vietnam War to Mrs. Lockhorn. His particular kind of sadistic masculinity is what anyone who enjoys The Lockhorns finds funny. He’s saying to her, “If Vietnam falls, all of Asia goes red, you stupid cow.” The Lockhorns first appeared in 1968, and repositioning him in this way, within that historical moment, is right on the money.

That was a drawing I did for The Daily Show. It was a commissioned illustration for them, and I think it was in response to the Muhammad cartoons in the Danish newspaper. It was written by The Daily Show’s staff, some of whom are big comics fans. They were excited that they could get a Lockhorns reference on the show.

You also made me aware of “Apocalypse Pooh.”

I came across that around 1990 when I was working at Raw. It was on VHS, and I’m not sure how it was edited, but it’s well done. It was great working at Raw, and a lot of good stuff just came over the transom. I was lucky to be there, for a number of reasons. It’s amazing to me that I had that opportunity.

Lately I’ve embraced digital comics, in part because I don’t have room for real comics anymore. It’s partially a question of space, and it’s partially about access. I did a Wonder Woman parody a couple of years ago — a retelling of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine as 1940s Wonder Woman covers, which was reprinted in Best American Comics 2015. In order to do this, I tried to look at all the 1940s Wonder Woman covers. Thankfully, those have been scanned, so you can track that stuff down. I don’t know if all of it has been reprinted. I like seeing the original colors, and a lot of the reprints take liberties. It’s really helpful in terms of research to be able to work that way, to work digitally.

Are there artists whose work you wouldn’t remediate? As I read Masterpiece Comics, I asked myself, “Where’s Hergé?” But then, of course, on your website I see that you indeed remediated Tintin in 2001. Would you ever say, “That’s something I wouldn’t tackle”? Where do you draw your lines?

That’s a complicated question. Part of the reason I did the Terms and Conditions book was to address comics I hadn’t gotten to in other ways. When I began the Masterpiece Comics project, I hadn’t thought about international comics, and part of the joke about Masterpiece Comics was that these were American comics steamrolling great works of world literature. I know Tintin pretty well, but I know American comics better. I just don’t know some great European or Asian comics in the same way. Part of it is being comfortable enough and confident enough with the source material to be able to do a good parody of it. The Tintin piece was written and drawn for Wired magazine. They came to me with the assignment to do a strip featuring Tintin going to Mars, and they gave me all the research about what might go wrong. The idea was that I was supposed to catalog it, which is kind of like what Hergé would have done. He would have tried to get the science right. I only had a page, so I didn’t have to work too hard, but I tried to be faithful to Hergé’s approach.

The Terms and Conditions book was a way to touch on cartoonists from different countries as a way of showing that I was paying attention. For Masterpiece Comics, it makes sense conceptually that it’s all American comics. I need some constraints, because otherwise I’d probably go insane. The Japanese manga artist Osamu Tezuka, by the way, did a version of Crime and Punishment with a little boy who looks sort of like Astro Boy, but it’s a fairly straightforward retelling of Crime and Punishment. Other countries’ approach to comics and literature is different from mine, or at least from what I grew up with, so it might make more sense for me to stick with American sources, because I’m responding to that heritage specifically.

That’s a level of mediation I hadn’t thought about. Masterpiece Comics is primarily European literature seen through a 20th-century American lens. In another interview you mentioned a Russian reader of Crime and Punishment who was irritated by your take on the story.

I was sort of amused by that. I don’t like it when people go away angry, but I am a trickster on some level, so I understand why I upset people. When I started the project I thought I was goofing on bad adaptations in comics and I also thought I was goofing on the high and low culture divide. But neither of those things exist the same way anymore. Many librarians have embraced comics wholeheartedly, and many teachers have said to me, “I show your comic to my high school students.” I wonder whether they really want to show them my Batman version before they actually read Crime and Punishment. It’s likely to color their reading of the novel, even though I do try to take the literary sources sincerely.

I’d be interested in your relationship to the word “adaptation.” There’s nothing more disappointing than when you open a graphic adaptation — a graphic novel based on a novel — and it’s really nothing more than an adaptation. Do you use that word to describe what you’re doing?

I like the word adaptation, but I sometimes call what I do “translation.” I’m being a little facetious with both of those terms. I try to remain faithful to the source text, and I try to remain faithful to the comic source, but the point is that they don’t really belong together. So the humor, or the disjunction, comes from that fact. Sometimes I get frustrated with adaptations that take too many liberties, but if they’re too faithful, they just die. It’s hard to find a balance, and I think I’ve tried to find a way around that by sticking to the plot. It may feature Little Lulu, as in my “Little Pearl,” or someone else that doesn’t belong there, but the plot remains that of the book being adapted. If you want to follow a plot line, my work might be more accurate than some of the Classics Illustrated, which I was also making fun of. Those present themselves as sturdy texts and wholesome for children, but they’re pretty boring.

There’s a lack of fun in those.

They might have been useful for writing a book report, and so many people have said that about them. I don’t think I would have taken the time with them as a kid, even if I had seen more of them. They were out of business by 1971, and I never paid much attention to them. They were really turgid, and they became more earnest as they went along. The earlier versions in the 1940s at least had some manic energy from the artists trying to finish in time for the deadline. By the later ones, they just seemed really stately and, yes, really square.

Brad Prager is professor of Film Studies and German Studies at the University of Missouri. He is the author of After the Fact: The Holocaust in Twenty-First Century Documentary Film and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of New German Critique.

The post Acts of Re-covery: Mining Our Comic Subconscious appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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platsy · 7 years

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Trolls

(Angry) This is something I’ve been meaning to write down for a very long time, but I couldn’t quite write everything down for some reason. But I believe I have it down now. There are very few movies that I hate. Honestly, the films that I’ve reviewed on this show don’t even make me that angry. I like to view each bad film as a learning experience for people who want to tell their own stories. Extract the things that work or could use a little touching up, explain where the film fails, and then thank the film for offering something to art. But then are movies like Trolls. At first glance, this film seems like another film that your kids will sing-along to for some months before you finally grab the belt and start wailing away at the children until the only thing that comes out of their mouths is sharp exhales whenever you open your mouth to say literally anything, because they’re so scarred and broken from the beating that anything that comes out of your diseased brain will likely make them jump in fright. Anyway, if you actually take the time to sit down and analyze the film, because when a film’s message is to find happiness perhaps that’s an invitation for people to look at it, you’ll find that the film’s quickly slapped on message is a little more flawed, and a little more dangerous. Kind of like you... you monster. So, Trolls is a film... unfortunately. And it’s one that comes to us from Dreamworks animation. The same guys who brought us How To Train Your Dragon 1&2 and Kung-Fu Panda 1&2. 3 is fine but it’s meh compared to the first two. These were the finest films that Dreamworks has created, and they’re some of my favorite movies of all time. Really, these movies are so good, that thinking about them inspires me. I love the characters, I love the emotional sincerity, I love the animation, I love every single last bit that these movies have to offer. Then I take a few steps back and look at Dreamworks as a whole. Dreamworks is a studio born of spite and anger towards Disney. As a result of that, we got such films such as Antz, made to deliberately screw over Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, and Shrek, a movie that tears apart Disney’s various tropes about its fairytale movies. And then Disney started doing that itself. Oh, no, don’t worry, it’s totally not distracting, you keep breaking your own immersion just to point out that this is not the typical Disney princess movie. What, no, it’s totally within these characters to point these things out, just shut up and get on with the film! And now, I feel either a coincidence or a reaction from Dreamworks about Pixar’s Inside Out. “Hey, their film about colorful small creatures that has themes of emotions and the importance of them did really well, I bet that we can do that too! I want it done in seven months.” Only, with Trolls, Dreamwork’s avaricious tendencies kicked in, and they thought it best to cast pop stars and have most of the film’s soundtrack be tired songs from recent memory that are boring and uninspired at best and insulting at worst. You’re going to notice a lot of comparisons to Inside Out here, because Inside Out and trolls are very similar. Tiny, colorful creatures going on an adventure to rescue something important, and learning a thing or two about emotions. I’m taking a stand against these kinds of movies. Those that decide to make a playlist of songs that were popular for a time and crafts an uninspired movie around it in order to make bank on the soundtrack. They’re selling you things that you already have and could easily make yourself. I do not need five covers of the same song. I don’t need to hear a song I had gotten tired of over and over again. Plot! Trolls escape giant creatures called Bergens. They live their lives in peace and banal harmony for some twenty years until the princess, Poppy voiced by Anna Kendrick of Pitch Perfect fame (because kids totally watched and understood the humor in that movie), throws a big party to celebrate escaping the bergens all those years ago, and then ironically and conveniently gets her closest friends taken to get eaten. And then I was half tempted to leave the theater and not know how the film ended, because I didn’t care about her friends because all I got was this out of them. *farting sprinkles* *dated lingo* *insufferable dialogue* *annoyance* Also as a side note, when Poppy says, “Will you go to Bergentown and help me save everyone?” There was only six trolls that were taken, and several hundred Trolls left, but then later on all the Trolls were taken to be eaten, so I think that while writing the early drafts of the story, the writers opted not to write another draft, they just went back over the previous draft and made slight edits here and there to save on time because when the main gimmick of your film is appealing to a crowd of screaming children by using dated lingo and beating dead horses until your arms give out from exhaustion, time is of the essence because you only have a very limited time to capitalize on the success of others instead of thinking about making your own songs, you’re not Disney and no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to beat Disney, you’re a joke! So, some dated, overrated songs later, we get to the climax of the film which involves the Trolls explaining that they can be happy without eating Trolls. And then they don't adequately explain how the Bergens can be happy or how they even know the neurological properties of a Bergen’s head. Instead, they sing a song that had already been drawn into the street and publically humiliated and then forgotten about. It’s obvious, but the main message is to be happy. Plain and simple, really. However, let’s talk about sadness. What’s the purpose of sadness? Well, despite what you might think and what society explicitly tells us, sadness isn’t just something that happens to us whenever something unpleasant happens to us. Twentieth century compulsory happiness is pretty much trying to drive sadness out of everybody’s heads. As Dr. Heidi Lepper explains in her article, “Sadness Serves a Purpose” quote, “Like all emotions, it is believed that sadness evolved because of its adaptive value, something about it served us well long ago, and we can use that knowledge now to help us cope with it in ourselves and within others.” Unquote. We use sadness in order to slow ourselves down and examine whatever is making us sad in order to deal with the problem. What Trolls tells us is that sadness hinders us. You might think that I’m a terrible villain who wants nothing but sadness and depressing art from films, however, I thoroughly believe that not every movie should be artful and inspired. I have plenty of films that I like despite the fact that they’re nothing movies. “Cloverfield” “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” “Pacific Rim”. And you can also use the age old argument that you throw at people who complain about children’s media, “It’s just a kids film, quit taking it so seriously.” Here’s the thing. When we talk about kids, the next generation of people, they deserve something better than a loud, colorful film that shouts at them constantly. Children deserve better media. They’re the ones who will run the world once we’re all dead and buried. You really want them to take these memories with them? *YouTube kids* *Teen Titans GO* We need quality content for kids. They deserve better. We can’t keep making this garbage for a profit. Our future will lie in the hands of these people. And I’m not saying that every single bit of children’s entertainment should be artful and inspiring. We do need some silly, goofy humor. There needs to be some breathers in between all the heavy stuff. We as human beings can’t handle that kind of stress all the time. But quite frankly, there needs to be more serious stuff for kids out there. Why can’t there be more mainstream kids movies out there that make the kid feel something other than happy? We have other emotions for specific purposes. Pushing them out in favor of happiness is dangerous. Trolls even accidentally contradicts itself. It shows unhappiness as a bad thing, but in the climax of the movie, when all the trolls lose their colors, Branch is inspired to help all of them. That was Branch using sadness in order to make them all willing to try and escape. Which was the message that Inside Out had. Of all the problems that the current generation has, compulsory happiness is certainly one of them. We push out anything that’s sad out of our heads, we purposely avoid negative art because that would make us be negative, and we even make sure that people who are sad are happy when they really need to be sad. They need that sadness in order to figure out where things are going wrong. Our negative emotions have purposes. Fear keeps us safe, anger makes us aware of the unfair things about the world, without lust then we wouldn’t be able to procreate and give children, suspiciousness makes us aware of shifty people, etc etc. The line that makes me the angriest is a line from the Russell Brand character. He says, “Some people just don’t want to be happy.” No no no no no no no no no, and f**k you. There are several factors that influence unhappiness, such as an unfair system, see happiness industry, mental problems that stop the flow of certain hormones, physical and mental abuse, I could go on but I need to make a point. There is not a single person on this planet that chooses to be unhappy. There are those who have a bad attitude, but that is never a choice they have a choice in. Something made them make those choices, they are not unhappy simply because they want to be. That line also implies that people who are unhappy have something wrong with them. There are some that really do have something wrong with them, but those who don’t suffer from anything serious, they believe that sadness is something to be avoided at all cost, not realizing the purpose of it, because they won’t let it do its job right. As I said, there are lot of factors that influence unhappiness, it’s not because people hate everything and choose to be unhappy. We all find happiness in different ways. Just because somebody doesn’t like what you like, it doesn’t make them unhappy. Also, what about that little kid who feels sad all the time. He doesn’t quite know why, but that’s something that he needs to deal with. Imagine him seeing this movie and being hurt and confused when the movie tells him to be something he can’t be. But the bottom line here is that life is hard. Life is really hard. Films like these aren’t going to help with that. They’re going to paint life as a happy skip and hop. There may be some adversity, but if you always keep a smile on and March through the hard times, then life will be just peachy. What about the times when being happy didn’t work for you? Nobody goes through life completely happy. Everybody has their trials. But kids wouldn’t know that, because they weren’t adequately prepared for that. A little sadness here and there is not inherently bad. It really isn’t. It’s how you handle it that might be the problem. I truly hate Trolls. It stands against everything I’ve stood for in the past three years, and it’s a garbage fire in all other respects. There hasn’t been any other film that has made me this angry. Die in a fire. I’m All of the Above, thanks for reading.

#trolls #happiness #filmcritic #film review #dreamworks #sadness

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