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count-lero · 3 years

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So thanks to @microcosme11 who showed a lot of interest in the incredible painting “Battle of Leipzig” by Johann Peter Kraft I’ve decided to consecrate a series of posts to the main participants of the event depicted on the canvas!

It’s simply going to be a bunch of my guesses about who is who over there. 👀

Unfortunately I’m going to illustrate my ideas with such an amount of pictures that it’s simply a necessity to divide this post into several parts…

Well, as an old Russian saying goes, “Don’t feed me bread, just let my speak a lot about 19-century men in fancy uniforms”!

Ahem.

So here comes part 1!

First of all, let’s start with the most important participants - three allied monarchs themselves. Here they are: Alexander I of Russia, Franz II of Austria and Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia. 👑

…Aaaaand I was lucky enough to find some old photos I took in the State Hermitage Museum during my last trip to Saint-Petersburg!

I guess Saint-Petersburg is at some point the second home for each and every lover of the Russian Empire. Even nowadays the city itself represents the living remains of that illustrious period in Russian history. :)

As for the paintings those epic depictions of allied monarchs are located in the Military Gallery of the Winter palace. The portrait of Franz II is also one of Kraft’s works which was presented by Kaiser himself to Alexander I when the latter decided to organise the Military Gallery (which is also dedicated to the victory of Leipzig, what a coincidence) in the 1820s while the portraits of Alexander and Friedrich were made by the German painter Franz Krüger who had been working for the Russian Imperial court for a long period of time.

All three of them look truly magnificent but it’s a little bit hard to find the right angle for a photo because they hang pretty high and are gigantic. 😅

Okay, back to the “Battle of Leipzig”~

Since monarchs were usually followed by an escort of their loyal courtiers, the exact same thing goes for the Kraft’s painting. This time for the major part it consists of different military men. I believe most of them come from the general headquarters.

There are three major figures accordingly behind Alexander, Franz and Friedrich - three chiefs-of-staff of the allied forces.

The first man in the crowd is (I’m still not entirely sure about him but it would be still logical to some extent) August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, quartermaster-general of the Silesian army and Blücher’s right-hand man.

The second one is probably (like I don’t know where his aiguillettes are but the resemblance is quite obvious) Pyotr Mikhailovich Volkonsky, chief-of-staff in the Russian army.

He became one of the Alexander’s closest friends since he was introduced to him by his father Pavel I, the emperor of Russia, when Alexander was still a grand-duke (or how we call him in Russian - цесаревич / tsesarevich ✨).

By the way, Volkonsky and his colleague Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov, a general who also went through all Napoleonic wars, were the only commanders in the Russian army who received the Grand Cross of the British Order of the Bath after all the struggles.

And here is Vorontsov as a small postcriptum. :)

Mikhail was the eldest son of Semyon Romanovich Vorontsov, a Russian diplomat who served as an ambassador in the United Kingdom for almost thirty years! That was the main reason why he knew English language as well as his mother tongue, Russian.

In the nearest troublesome future he and Wellington actually became very good friends as well! 🇷🇺🇬🇧

To be continued 🔜

#napoleonic era #napoleonic wars #battle of leipzig #völkerschlacht bei leipzig #battle of the nations #alexander i of russia #franz II of austria #friedrich wilhelm III of prussia #august von gneisenau #pyotr mikhailovich volkonsky #mikhail semyonovich vorontsov #19th century

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the-other-art-blog · 3 years

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Jo’s Boys: Chapter 2 Parnassus (Part 3)

Did I tell you that my first two posts about this chapter only covered 4 pages of the chapter... 4 pages!!!

The shrine 🥺

Probably one of my favorite things in this book. It's such a thoughtful thing to have for such a powerful legacy. And it definitely echoes May’s shrine to her mother in her home with Ernest.

So there are a couple of busts of John and Beth. Both were made by Amy and she chose marble. The material is very important. It goes after the saying:

'Clay represents life; plaster, death; marble, immortality'.

It just made think me of the idea of an afterlife that was very important to Louisa. Marble also is a luxury and art teachers only let the best students try the material. So it's really significant that Amy chose this material (and it also speaks of how good she is as an artist).

For the old generation, there are three portraits. On the right, there is Mr. Laurence's painting and is called the “founder of the house”, which makes me think that he got to live there at least for a few moments. And it's also the same portrait that Jo saw in LW part 1. There are so many Easter eggs in this book.

There's also Aunt March. I really like that it's said to be "a legacy to Amy". I don't know if Aunt March married a wealthy man for love or if it was an arranged marriage gone right. But if it was the former, then Amy kind of repeated the pattern: the girl from a working-class who falls for a wealthy man and thanks to that she rises up in society.

Also, Aunt March was also the most and least supportive person to Amy's artistic dreams. On the one hand, she paid for her artistic education in exchange for becoming her companion. On the other, I highly doubt Aunt March expected and wanted Amy to work as an artist. Or maybe she just left the portrait to Amy and I’m over-analyzing. Who cares, I love this relationship.

At last, it's Marmee's portrait. It was made by a friend of hers, when they were still poor and I just think it shows how kind and free of prejudices Marmee was. I like to think Marmee gave him his first gig! And maybe Amy and Laurie helped him later on. I really have to make a list of all my headcanons.

Fritz x Jo

This is also a great chapter for JoxFritz fans. They had a make out scene and they’re so in love. It’s a thing of beauty. Jo is so excited for Franz’s engagement. These boys are truly part of the family and I love it. 🥰

Nat Blake

So, Nat is all grown up and about to go to Europe. Laurie is financing his trip and Fritz will help him with some friends in Germany. Jo... well, she doesn’t have much hopes. In Little Men, both Jo and Fritz described him as a “daughter” and even though he has grown up, in Jo’s eyes, he needs to get stronger and independent. Look, this might seem politically incorrect today, but please, this is 1880s, give them a break.

But hey, we have a forbidden love! I’m writing a post solely on this subject, but just know it mirrors Amy and Laurie. 🥰

Feminism

Jo’s Boys also makes some of the clearest feminist remarks in the entire saga. After a discussion with Ted, Josie goes to Mr. March and Bess and asks,

'Grandpa, must women always obey men and say they are the wisest, just because they are the strongest?'

'Well, my dear, that is the old-fashioned belief, and it will take some time to change it. But I think the woman's hour has struck; and it looks to me as if the boys must do their best, for the girls are abreast now, and may reach the goal first,' answered Mr March, surveying with paternal satisfaction the bright faces of the young women, who were among the best students in the college.

I really enjoyed all the Ancient Greece references. It’s a really long and interesting discussion. And Laurie is there too. But it’s great to see women questioning the status quo and men encouraging them and having faith in them.

Emil arrival

So Emil comes back and bring gifts to everyone. It’s all really nice and I love his gift to Amy:

'I couldn't find anything swell enough for Aunt Amy, because she has everything she wants, so I brought a little picture that always makes me think of her when Bess was a baby'

But the best one is the one for Nat: a pair of lava earrings shaped like little skulls. To which Bess is horrified! 😂 Why do I feel that’s something my sister would like. She was all excited dissecting rats in a lab and she sent me pictures of the brains as if that was something I enjoyed watching. That’s Nat. In modern times, Nat would be like, look this surgery tape, it’s awesome! Poor Bess and Josie.

#little women #jo's boys #amy march #jo x fritz #march family #josie brooke #bess laurence #mr. march #Laurie Laurence #nat blake #daisy x nat #jo march #may alcott nieriker #louisa may alcott #yes #i'm still writing this

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themusicaldesk · 2 years

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Legend has it that the ‘Immortal Piano of Siena’ was made of the same wood used in the first Holy Temple. Somehow, it ended up in modern Israel. How did this rare instrument come to be up for auction recently in Jerusalem — a mere five kilometers (three miles) from the Temple Mount?

Italian harpsichord maker Sebastian Marchisio started building it in 1799 in Turin. The wood was claimed to be sourced from descendants of the Lebanon cedars that King Solomon used to build the first Temple in Jerusalem around 1000 BCE.

Marchisio managed to complete only the resonance box before his death, so his son and grandsons finished the project around 1825. The instrument was described as having a sound at once delicate like a harpsichord and powerful like a piano.

Rebecca, Sebastian’s granddaughter in Siena, received the piano as a wedding present. According to the auction house, “The piano became very famous there, as it was frequently featured at festive events in the city. Toward the 1860s, the marquis of Siena ordered a more magnificent appearance to be given to the piano.”

Rebecca’s son, sculptor Nicodemo Ferri, and his cousin, architect and painter Carlo Bartolozzi, were commissioned to produce the piano’s magnificent frame and cover.

Their design includes portraits of Mozart, Handel and other composers. At the center, they carved images of David’s harp, lions and cherubs. They also added a staticofone, an iron-reinforced frame, to enhance the sound.

In 1867, the refurbished piano was exhibited in the Italian Pavilion of the World’s Fair in Paris. A year later, the city of Siena gifted it to Prince Umberto I on his marriage to Margherita, Princess of Savoy.

Famed pianist Franz Liszt played it at the wedding ceremony.

After Umberto was crowned king of Italy in 1878, the instrument occupied a place of honor at the Quirinale Palace in Rome for approximately the next 70 years.

During the late 1880s, King Umberto invited pianist Mattis Yanowski, a Jewish refugee from Czarist Russia, to tickle the ivories of the piano Umberto had nicknamed “David’s Harp.” However, Umberto was assassinated in 1900, before Yanowski had a chance to do so.

“On his deathbed, Yanowski extracted a promise from his grandson Avner Carmi, one of the first piano makers and tuners in the Land of Israel, to go see the legendary piano in Rome,” according to the auction house.

Carmi tried several times to get into the palace to see the piano but never succeeded. Once, he was even arrested by the guards.

Sometime during World War II, a senior Nazi officer apparently looted the instrument. But Carmi didn’t know that. “Carmi was drafted to the British army during WWII, and he served in Egypt. One day [in 1942], soldiers from his unit who were searching for mines using metal detectors, discovered a plaster-covered piano buried in the sand, and brought it with them,” goes the narrative.

The unit’s officers wanted to discard the piano, but Carmi – who still didn’t realize that this was the piano he had been searching out for so many years – convinced them to hold onto it as a means to entertain the soldiers.

After the war, a Tel Aviv dealer bought the piano at an auction in Gaza City. Carmi purchased it from the dealer for next to nothing and began refurbishing it.

Only when the carved cherubs began reappearing from under the plaster did he realize that this was the legendary piano he had been searching for.

Carmi painstakingly restored the instrument’s exterior over the next three years. He then took it to the United States to have its original special sound restored.

The embellished piano was displayed in New York’s Steinway Hall, where noted pianists including Arthur Rubinstein and Penina Saltzman had an opportunity to play it. It was used for recordings in the 1950s and 1960s.

Carmi and his wife wrote a book about the instrument called The Immortal Piano.

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mellomedia · 3 years

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Youth Culture

For Media & Society’s first blog post, our class watched Euphoria, Mid90s, Mean Girls, Kids, and The Breakfast Club. If you haven’t figured out the theme yet, it’s youth culture. Most of these films were set in the 80s and 90s before this current generation. This is the first generation where our lives are saturated by mobile technology and social media (Divecha, 2017). But no matter what generation, youth culture has many common behaviors, or misbehaviors.

Often when I watch a film or read a comic book, I wonder if I relate to the story or anyone in it. I looked for anything in common I might have with one of the characters in the five films we watched. I can identify with Ray from Mid90s the most. I’m not a die-hard skateboarder like Ray. In fact I can’t skateboard at all, but I dedicate all my time and energy into art and animation. While we have different interests, I can relate to Ray’s passion for something he enjoys and the energy he puts into it. Ray is the top skateboarder in his group and practiced every day. All my spare time is spent drawing and taking online animation courses. My goal is to always do better than what I did yesterday. Words to describe Ray would be the same way I describe myself: down to earth, not concerned with fitting in, my own person, caring, always willing to help, and a very loyal friend. When Stevie joins the skateboard crew in the film Mid90s, he finally digs up some money to buy Ruben’s old, used skateboard. Stevie gets injured while attempting an insane jump over a hole in a roof and breaks his skateboard. Ray sees how much Stevie is trying to fit in, no matter how many falls he takes, he gets back up. Ray has a big heart and builds Stevie a new skateboard. As I mentioned, I’m not a skateboarder, but I enjoy trying to make people smile with my art. I enjoy drawing a cartoon of a friend to help them to get out of a funk or just listen to whatever it is they are going through.

These films all share a few common themes. One theme is belonging. I admit I looked up the term “fitting in” and it was compared to belonging. Fitting in is defined as to be like other people in a group – what they wear, how they act, how they look. (Pace, 2018) Belonging is a basic human need – it is about acceptance – being where you want to be and being where you are wanted (Pace, 2018). A few examples are Stevie (Mid90s) wants to be accepted into the skateboard crew; Brian (The Breakfast Club) brings a flare gun to school as a suicide attempt because he didn't feel he was good enough; and Cady (Mean Girls) is the new girl trying to get accepted by The Plastics.

My freshman year in high school definitely falls into the theme of belonging. I struggled with speech and have a learning disorder. And at the time I had zero confidence in socializing. I’d walk over to a group of kids in the cafeteria just to try to get involved in the conversation, but I couldn’t form sentences quick enough to jump in. I would be the weird kid just standing there. One day my speech therapist asked me what I wanted to improve and I told her I wanted to gain confidence in socializing. She told me the best way to do this would be to just try to talk to more people. Well in high school that worked with some kids, but not all. I’ll never forget one day in the cafeteria I was trying to find a place to sit and eat lunch. I saw an empty chair at a table where a ‘friend’ was sitting. The group was taking turns roasting one another. At one point another kid challenged me. I was doing fine until he said, “You know people are only nice to you because they don’t want to hurt your feelings.” That hurt like hell. He was referring to my speech impairment. I got up from the table and walked away. And that ‘friend’ at the table didn’t defend me at all. One girl came running over to make sure I was alright. I was pissed and hurt. I was not alright. Just so you don’t think I went off the deep end and had a miserable high school experience, I actually gained a great friend in high school that day. Alex, who was a senior, saw me leave track practice early. My head just wasn’t into track, so I went to sit in the empty cafeteria hoping to clear my head. He asked how things were going and I told him what happened that day. He told me, “It’s not easy finding out who your real friends are. But don’t change for anyone and don’t try to be like anyone else. Just be you.” I’ll never forget how he took the time to talk to me. After his advice, I could care less about belonging.

Another common theme between all five films is rebellion. When they aren’t skateboarding, most of the characters in Mid90s spend their time partying, drinking, and doing drugs. In The Breakfast Club, each character is in detention because they rebelled in some way. Why else would they be in detention? Every character in Kids was a rebel, actually more like a criminal. I bet the writer of the film was too.

A third theme is “bro” culture. “Bro” culture is defined as people who are bullies but at the end of the day they have your back, like a brother (Sloothunter42, 2018). Two great examples of “bros” are John (The Breakfast Club) and Ian (Mid90s). Throughout The Breakfast Club, John constantly insults the other kids in detention. He even insults the principal. The group escapes detention to wander the hallways. When the principal sees them, John saves the group by telling them to go back to the library while he distracts the principal. This link shows you the scene I’m explaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Iq7MRlHg5I (Hughes, 1985). Not something you would have expected from a bully, but you would from a “bro.” In Mid90s, Stevie’s brother, Ian, beats the crap out of him every chance he gets. But when Stevie is laying in a hospital bed after a car accident, his brother is there by his side. He even shares his precious orange juice.

Now onto one of my favorite things in life, music! I put together a playlist that relates to my adolescent experience. In no particular order, here are 10 songs and what each means to me. But let me point out that some song lyrics mean something to me, while with other songs it was the energy it gives off. I’m all about positive energy. First song is “Mr. Blue Sky” by Electric Light Orchestra. I first heard this song during the movie Guardians of the Galaxy. This song kept me motivated and positive during high school. If I was having a bad day, this was my ‘go to’ song. I also listened to it every day on my way to school. Next is “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley, a.k.a. CeeLo Green. This song reminds me of my mind, imagination, and the stuff I think about. I always have a trillion things going on in my head. I guess that explains my poor focus skills and super procrastination. “Inner Ninja” by Classified is another upbeat song. A few lines that always stuck in my head are, “I find my inner strength and I re-up; Here we go, I know I've never been the smartest or wisest; But I realize what it takes; Never dwell in the dark cause the sun always rises.” My junior year of high school I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. It has and still is life-changing and as much as I don’t let it change who I am, I’m human. But as the song says, don’t dwell on the negative, look for the positive. I always remind myself of the positive. “Through the Fire and Flames” by DragonForce always fueled my brain when I was tired of doing homework or studying. To me the lyrics mean to keep moving forward no matter how difficult. Just look at what your goal is and don’t give up. Plus this song has one hell of a guitar solo that is very motivating. Michael Jackson is one of my favorite artists and “Man in the Mirror” reminds me how important it is to try to do good in the world and make a positive change. Regardless of culture, color, religion, and disability, we are all capable of making good changes in the world. I tried this on a much smaller scale in high school by volunteering at the food pantry and community events. “Clint Eastwood” by Gorillaz is one of many songs by this group that I like. It’s not so much the words I relate to, but I love the animation in their music videos. I remember the first time I saw one of their videos I thought how cool and mysterious it was that we only see the singers as cartoons. We are never shown who they really are. I like the fact that it’s different. Different is good in my world. “Intergalactic” by Beastie Boys reminds me of breakdancing and dancing in general. I love to dance and looked forward to every prom and homecoming dance at high school. “Without Me” by Eminem reminds me that no matter how much people criticize you, you can be very successful at what you enjoy doing. The last song on my list is “Take Me Out” by Franz Ferdinand. To be honest, I just like the beat of the song and it’s one of those songs I listened to over and over in high school.

So that wraps up my Youth Culture blog. I hope it gave you a better understanding of how I relate to the assigned films. But let me make one thing clear, I do not relate to anything in the film Kids. Not one thing.

Below is my self portrait of what goes through my mind.

Artwork by: Marcello Laudato

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istoleludwigsbaumkuchen · 4 years

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Okay, I don’t see enough content of Austria & Kugelmugel’s relationship with one another, so I’ll make it. Heads up, this is not shippy! If anyone tags it as such, I will be rather peeved. Also, Kugelmugel is Franz, and while I don’t have any firm gender headcanons for them, I’ll use they/them for those who see them as nonbinary as that seems to be the majority.

- Roderich isn’t quite sure how to handle Franz at first, seeing as he’s somewhat scarred from what happened to Holy Roman Empire, even if his body still exists as Ludwig today. They probably have a rather strained relationship at first, Roderich just letting Franz do their own thing as long as they’re not bugging him.

- Franz doesn’t really care at first, they’re just glad that they are allowed to create whatever they want. Over time though, they get really bored and lonely, only having the other micronations to talk to, and so they try to interact more. First they just try to paint and draw in the same room as Roderich, which doesn’t do too much aside from being a tad annoying for a brief period of time until it becomes normal. Then they try calling him “vati”, which is a little startling at first, and prompts a bit of fear from Roderich, not wanting to be seen as a parental figure again. This goes on and on until eventually the two of them start to warm up to one another.

- Something tells me that Roderich lets them do whatever they want with their room, although Franz is not aloud to use thumbtacks, because the holes in the wall bug him.

- I think that Franz might have sound-color synesthesia, and likes to sit next to Roderich while he’s playing piano and paint the songs. Roderich is rather confused at first, but grows to enjoy seeing his music come to life in the physical form.

- Baking! Lots of it! I like the idea of Roderich having no clue what to do with Franz, and baking being the only thing that he can think of to do together. Franz gets to express themself and Roderich gets to do one of his favorite things. It’s a win-win situation.

- I feel like Roderich might have a bit of a hard time understanding Franz’s relationship with gender at first, but comes to accept it as normal life. They tend to view their gender as art, and when they explain it as such, it helps Roderich understand a bit better. He never isn’t accepting, just took a little longer to try and understand.

- (since I do like to think that Kugel has a crush on Ladonia {Erland}, here you go) Franz definitely is confused at first, and thus confuses Roderich by the constant describing of Erland as art. He starts creating portraits of him, leading to Roderich questioning the sudden explosion of Erland’s face everywhere. Franz is just like, “He’s just art, okay?!” and Roderich eventually facepalms and helps them understand what a crush is, and goes to Erzsébet for help.

#hetalia #hetalia world stars #hws kugelmugel #hws austria #hws ladonia #acetalkshetalia #hws

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manuscripts-dontburn · 4 years

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The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era

Author: Gareth Russel

First published: 2019

Pages: 423

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 4 days

This is a beautifully written account of the Titanic which concentrates on a handful of selected passengers and delves into their pasts, feelings and how they lived after the tragedy. It has enough new information to engage those who already have read on the subject (like me), and it takes time to dispel some of the popular myths and contested theories. The only thing which I slightly minded was the fact that from time to time the attempts of painting the picture of an era the reader is actually taken away from the Titanic for far too long and so the narrative is disrupted. But this happens mostly in the first part of the book. The story of the sinking and its immediate aftermath are done a very respectful and moving manner.

My Dark Vanessa

Author: Kate Elizabeth Russell

First published: 2020

Pages: 384

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 7 days

This was a really difficult book to go through. So much about it is so messed up, so disgusting. And through it all, though Vanessa herself never admits it, it is a cry for help which so many girls and women have sent into the unfeeling world, which still does not care.

Seduction: A History From the Enlightenment to the Present

Author: Clement Knox

First published: 2020

Pages: 516

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 8 days

First of all: this book does not cover the entirety of human civilization, in fact, it only starts with the era of enlightenment. And if you are only after the discourse on seduction and sexuality, you might as well only read the last portion of this book. However, if you like engagingly-written accounts of interesting people (in this case chosen as representatives of ever-changing stances on the question of seduction), you might enjoy it as much as I did. True, the author sometimes goes into such details that have very little to do with the original topic, and I was also surprised that the focus was pretty much only heterosexual, but overall I found this interesting, well-written and food for thought.

Little Lord Fauntleroy

Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

First published: 1886

Pages: 320

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

How long did it take: 1 day

Soooooo The Secret Garden is one of my absolute favourite books and I also loved The Little Princess, but this book.... is really boring and ridiculous simply because the kid in the centre could never exist. Also, poor people are to be PITIED, but also HATED when they want something. Or was that not the message?

Brontë's Mistress

Author: Finola Austin

First published: 2020

Pages: 320

Rating: ★★★☆☆

How long did it take: 3 days

This was.... fine. It is well researched and read very easily.... it does make Lydia Robinson into a real, flawed human being (still unlikeable though).... but on the whole it did not excite me in any particular way. I did not understand Lydia´s fascination with Charlotte at all, in fact all of the references to the Brontë sisters, besides Anne being the governess, felt rather forced.

The Hobbit

Author: J. R. R. Tolkien

First published: 1937

Pages: 374

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 17 days

This was a re-read. I loved it of course. Utterly charming.

The Pull of the Stars

Author: Emma Donoghue

First published: 2020

Pages: 304

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 2 days

Three days on a small maternity ward for pregnant women afflicted by the Spanish flu. On one hand, it does move very slowly and goes into great detail. But for all the relative "shortness", this story is full of intense emotions. Meticulously researched, it also offers a grim, but fascinating view into the reality of an ordinary Irish woman at the end of the WWI. After I have finished, I needed a long, deep breath to calm down everything I was feeling. What else can I say?

Sea Prayer

Author: Khaled Hosseini, Dan Williams

First published: 2018

Pages: 48

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 10 minutes

A cry for help made of painful words and stunning pictures. A cry for humanity. A silent cry. No less heartbreaking for its quiet tone.

The Other Bennet Sister

Author: Janice Hadlow

First published: 2020

Pages: 655

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 13 days

What a wholesome, comforting book! It is very respectful to the original Jane Austen novel, draws and builds upon it and always managed to stay true to the atmosphere and nature of it. It is not plot-heavy and is more of a character development story, but that character development is truly wonderfully done. Janice Hadlow lets Mary Bennet bloom!

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

Author: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

First published: 2019

Pages: 320

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 3 days

Though some of the points are repeated over and over again, this is an excellent book both as a source of learning and engaging reading material. It is also painful. And necessary.

High Society: The Portraits of Franz Xaver Winterhalter

Author: various

First published: 2016

Pages: 256

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 2 days

This book is made stunning simply by featuring a vast number of Wilterhalter´s paintings. It is hardly a detailed exploration of his life or development as an artist, but it gives a casual admirer of art enough information to create an image of him as he was and as he worked. I especially appreciated that the descriptions of every painting included a life story of the sitter. All in all this book is a tribute to Winterhalter, a beautiful gallery of portraits and an introduction to some of the most prominent members of the high European society of the 19th century.

Sin Eater

Author: Megan Campisi

First published: 2020

Pages: 304

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 2 days

This book has the most intriguing premise, presents a little known but fascinating institution of sin-eaters, is heavy on atmosphere and above all is compulsively readable. The constant theme of death and dying is handled with great respect but could be too much for more sensitive readers. What the book needed though was some more editing. Certain thoughts and sentences appear way too often and lose their meaning, becoming more annoying than powerful. And I swear that the word "mayhap" constituted like 20% of all of the vocabulary used.

Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag

Author: Orlando Figes

First published: 2012

Pages: 352

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

How long did it take: 20 days

I feel kinda bad giving this book mere 2 stars, but I would like to point out that it is not the story, but the overall presentation of it that made this book an unpleasant chore. The whole time I was reading I kept having the same thought: This book should have been an edition of selected letters with explanatory footnotes, not a "proper book". Considering the 75% of the text ARE the letters anyway, the writing by Orlando Figes usually just jerked me out of the story and frankly seemed redundant. Interesting subject and admirable main characters, whose love and devotion is inspirational, but somehow still not a good book.

All My Friends Are Dead

Author: Avery Monsen

First published: 2010

Pages: 96

Rating: ★★★☆☆

How long did it take: 5 minutes

Gave me a few chuckles and was cute. Nothing deep about it though.

#booklr #wrap up #September 2020

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loveautomatics · 4 years

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‘An Easy Girl’ Review: There’s More Than Skin and Sun to This Sexy French Netflix Offering

An intellectually stimulating art-house treasure all too easily overlooked amid the near-constant flood of Netflix content, “An Easy Girl” depicts a transformative summer in the life of a 16-year-old girl, but not the one described in the film’s title. That label — which writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski employs ironically, calling into question the patriarchal idea that a woman’s worth is tied up in how “hard to get” she plays it — refers to the protagonist’s 22-year-old cousin, no girl at all, but a comely temptress who breezes into the coastal French city of Cannes like a seductive tropical storm, turning heads and jostling perceptions wherever she goes.

Shifting gears from her widely panned “Planetarium” (also on Netflix, largely ignored despite Natalie Portman’s involvement), Zlotowski delivers a relatively modest but far more thought-provoking project — a Rohmerian moral tale, à “La Collectionneuse,” with a shrewd feminist twist. It’s at once a striking auteur statement (launched during Director’s Fortnight at Cannes last year) and a tawdry tease for those subscribers looking for some virtual excitement to get them through their long nights of isolation.

Yes, this sun-kissed portrait boasts ample skin and explicit sex, but unlike such tacky streaming hits as “365 Days” and “Milf,” which proved that people will endure subtitles when the reward is steamy enough, this is quite an intelligent and insightful film. With any luck, unsuspecting audiences might come away with their prejudices slyly challenged, starting with their notions of what constitutes a suitable leading lady.

For the role of Sofia, Zlotowski approached D-list celebrity Zahia Dehar, a former escort who was thrust into the public eye amid a tabloid scandal whereby several members of the French soccer team were caught up in a messy prostitution bust. Dehar, who was underage at the time, managed to turn the infamy to her advantage, using the attention to launch a modeling and lingerie career. Whereas that casting decision might seem like a bad-taste stunt to some — the way John Waters takes delight in tapping nonactors like Traci Lords and Patty Hearst — it turns out to be an inspired notion, here played for pathos rather than camp.

With her exaggerated plastic surgery — which bypasses “bee-stung” and goes straight for a swollen, “attacked by murder hornets” look — and ambivalent attitude about on-screen nudity, the French Algerian personality comes across both alluring and aloof, seemingly indifferent to our scrutiny. That’s precisely the point. Popular culture can be vicious toward women like Sofia, who flaunt their re-sculpted assets in thongs and see-through skirts, while missing what her cousin Naïma (Mina Farid) sees: an empowered, self-confident woman who’s proud of her sex appeal and fully in control of her influence over men.

The idealized memories that comprise “An Easy Girl” are presented from Naïma’s perspective, which explains her still-childish naiveté and the unconditional admiration she feels for Sofia. Whereas the local guys lob insults when Sofia doesn’t give in to their weak pickup tactics, the movie withholds judgment. Naïma can’t help feeling impressed. She views her older cousin as a role model, rethinking her own plans — an aspiring chef, Naïma skips out on an important apprenticeship — to tag along for an enchanted fortnight of yacht rides and expensive dates. One such dinner affords Naïma the chance to eat at the upscale hotel where her mother works as a maid, stirring up conflicted feelings of pride and shame, which Zlotowski evokes with minimal narration.

Compared with the somber, heavy TV series, “Savages,” the director shot just after this film, “An Easy Girl” feels buoyant and carefree, as DP Georges Lechaptois’ bright, flattering cinematography is whisked along by jazz (John Coltrane) and classical (Franz Schubert) pieces on a soundtrack that invites us to participate in the film’s “Pretty Woman” fantasy. But Sofia is no working girl. She’s merely living up to the “Carpe Diem” tattoo on her lower back, rejecting love (“What did your last relationship bring you?”) in favor of sensation and adventure.

She catches the eye of a handsome, wealthy stranger (Nuno Lopez) and invites herself aboard his boat, bringing Naïma and her gay best friend Dodo (“Riley” Lakdhar Dridi) along for the experience. Dodo disapproves, but Naïma doesn’t let that rupture her fascination with Sofia’s behavior. At night, she spies on her cousin, witnessing porny sexual acts that might have been shocking had director Abdellatif Kechiche not gone much further in “Blue Is the Warmest Color” the same year Zlotowksi’s “Grand Central” (the superior Léa Seydoux movie) premiered at Cannes. With its emphasis on the dynamics of flirtation and coupling among voluptuous French Algerian youth, “An Easy Girl” has more in common with Kechiche’s controversial “Mektoub, My Love” movies. But Zlotowski doesn’t objectify her characters nearly to that degree — this despite numerous scenes in which Dehar knowingly bares her body.

The movie presents Sofia as more sophisticated than she lets on. She knows better than to shatter others’ idea of her by opening her mouth. That would break the spell. However, when invited to a private luncheon across the border in Italy with the elegant Calypso (played by actor and princess Clotilde Courau), the geisha-like young lady coyly holds her own against the impertinent host in a scene that suggests what Zlotowski intuited about Dehar: that she could be deeper than people give her credit for. It’s not easy being easy, the movie concludes, before tying things up a bit too conservatively. Ultimately, “An Easy Girl” challenges what society thinks of those who leverage their desirability as Sofia does, leaving intriguing questions about one’s values — and value — in her wake.

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dillydedalus · 5 years

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october reading

books. i read ‘em.

the bird king, g. willow wilson ugh i’m disappointed with this - i expected it to be more about the fall of granada, rather than just taking that as a jumping-off point for a very slow story of how fatima (concubine to the last andalusian sultan) and her bff hassan (magical mapmaker) escape from lady inquisitor luz to a magical/legendary island. that’s more of an expectation mismatch, but i also found this just a bit boring and confused, didn’t like the characters or the emotional moments. 2.5/5

lanark: a life in four books, alasdair gray y’all... this is a weirdo pomo mess which gray himself describes as ‘a portrait of the artist as a frustrated young glaswegian’ (instant love), it’s about duncan thaw growing up in post-war glasgow (not a good place) and lanark, sans memories, finding himself in the city of unthank (probably The Bad Place), where the sun hardly ever shines and people grow dragonskin, but really it’s about art & cities & politics & scotland & hell. it’s completely nuts & has a chapter where the protagonist meets the author in the process of writing and there’s a chapter-long sidebar detailing all instances of plagiarism in the book (incl. the lack of influence from robert burns, more sinister than all plagiarism). it’s a bit flabby in places & could stand to be a 100-200 pages shorter, but damn. 4/5

the memory police, yoko ogawa (tr. from japanese by stephen snyder) very atmospheric, quietly disturbing magical realist(ish) book about an island on which sometimes certain things (birds, roses, ribbons, fruit) just disappear, with the inhabitants losing their memories and emotional connection to the thing. the disappearances seem to occur randomly and on their own, but the memory police makes sure that no disappeared items remain and that those who can still remember also... disappear. really liked the quiet slow dread building here, the mysterious workings of the disappearances, and the interplay between the main story and the novel the narrator is writing while worrying whether words too will soon disappear. 4/5

trick mirror: reflections on self-delusion, jia tolentino collection of nine essays about roughly, life & self-image & politics in the social media age (and its predecessor, the reality tv age), gender politics and uh scams and self-delusions. many of these essays felt vaguely like things i’d read before online (& i might have) & didn’t offer anything completely new but i liked the examinations of big wedding culture, and her take on the ‘difficult woman’ archetype of millenial feminism. tolentino in general is an engaging, sharp writer, and even when she’s writing about familiar topics, she often puts an interesting spin on things. 3.5/5

here in berlin, cristina garcía and the anglophone-berlin-books saga continues. a cuban-american woman with a mild personal crisis goes to berlin (as people w/ personal crises so often do) and there collects a variety of snapshot stories from berliners (by birth or choice or accident), mostly about world war 2 and the latin american diaspora in berlin. some of the snapshots are p interesting or bizarrely funny but mostly they retread the same ground (history, trauma, collective & personal responsibility, commemoration etc) without really saying anything new (except the connection garcía makes between the nazis and south american dictatorships). there’s also a pretty annoying attempt to create authenticity by peppering in german words and phrases which sometimes aren’t even appropriate or spelled correctly* (get a german proofreader you cowards i’ll do it for free... like wtf is ‘volkenbrot’). 2/5 *i ordered it used and got an ARC, so maybe some of these issues were fixed for the final version but lmao. volkenbrot.

wilder girls, rory power this is annihilation as YA, set on an island called raxter where a mysterious illness called the tox has taken over, transforming the wilderness, the animals (deers grow canines y’all), and most of all the girls at raxter boarding school. the narrator’s eye has fused shut & something is growing under it, her friend has grown an extra spine, other girls have gills or claws. less fortunate girls (and most of the teachers) just die. there was a lot i liked about this, especially the tox and the ambivalent relationships the girls have to their changed bodies, but the last third just... eh. also, like, i like tumblr monster-girl poetics as much as the next person, but this is really overdoing it. 2.5/5

nach mitternacht (after midnight), irmgard keun KEUN HYPE TRAIN!!! this one’s super interesting because it’s the first novel keun wrote in exile, published 1937 and set at around the same time. the protagonist, sanne, is a naive and politically uneducated 19-year-old who is repeatedly & very dramatically confronted with the political reality she lives in, first when her aunt denounces her to the gestapo and later when her boyfriend franz is arrested. for most of the (very short) novel, sanne is observing and not quite understanding the increasing legal discrimination against jews, culture of paranoia and denouncement, and glorification of fascist ideology, which makes for a very disturbing reading experience, especially with the reader’s retrospective knowledge, but the climax is truly nightmarish & devastating. 4/5

children of god, mary doria russell the sequel to the sparrow, which i read & loved earlier this year. in this one, emilio sandoz, still in recovery from the trauma of his first trip to the planet rakhat, is forced to return there (bc the pope thinks it’s god’s will lol) and finds the planet changed after decades (space travel makes time weird) of revolution and civil war. i liked this but it’s not as good as the sparrow, the characters (except my man emilio) aren’t as interesting & well-developed and the dual timeline structure isn’t as well-executed but hey. there’s some closure for emilio & that made me hella emosh. 3.5/5

the wilful princess & the piebald prince, robin hobb a novella telling the true (?) story of charger farseer, the piebald prince, a historical figure that has great influence on the six duchies of fitz’s time, especially regarding the treatment of the witted (people who can magically bond with aninmals) and how fitz is framed & reviled as the ‘witted bastard’. this was cool & i enjoyed how it twists the story, but it’s not worth reading if you haven’t read the main series. 3/5

the inheritance, robin hobb/megan lindholm collection of short stories by hobb under her two pseudonyms - i mostly skipped the lindholm ones (sorry), but the three hobb ones were really really good. the first is about the first expeditions into the rain wilds (i love the cursed shores so much & wish there was a full trilogy about the first settlers there), the second is about bingtown & wizardwood, the third is about how sometimes you gotta kill your abusive ex & if you’re lucky, your cat will help you do it. it’s great & the cat is called marmelade. 4/5 for the hobb stories only

unholy land, lavie tidhar alternate history + multiple realities + high-concept pulp - lior tirosh, a pulp author (it’s meta) returns to his homeland, the jewish state palestina, established in east africa in the early 20th century, and there becomes involved in... rival plots to destroy/stabilise the borders between the worlds, not only between this alternate one and our real one, which tirosh seems to occasionally slip into, but all the million others, including one where the moon broke. love the concept, but this is so vague & confusing on so many points and the ending so abrupt that i was left kinda frustrated & unsatisfied (also bc we never find out much more about the world where the moon broke). 3.5/5

tigermilch (tiger milk), stefanie de velasco german ya book about two teen girls growing up in a poor neighbourhood in berlin. nini’s father is absent, her mother depressed, while jameelah’s father died in iraq and her mother is worried that they might be deported, and their bosnian friend amir’s sister is dating a serb. it’s some pretty harrowing stuff & it’s good to see Issues (TM) addressed in german ya in a way that doesn’t feel super didactic & preachy, but ultimately i’m really not the target audience here. 3/5

sea monsters, chloe aridjis

weirdo brainy dreamy novella about a girl in 80s mexico running away from mexico city to the beach because she’s looking for ukrainian circus dwarfs (???). i liked a lot about this (atmosphere, poetic & mythical allusions, a lot of the writing, the depictions of mexico city and the weird beach culture are both really cool) but a lot of the time this was so dreamy that i just kinda zoned out. 3/5

i am currently reading emma by jane austen bc i forgot about my monthly austen project until the last few days of the month lol & one of the hugo long list anthologies. the one with the cool fox on it.

#the books i read #long post

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sylleboi · 4 years

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𝕰𝖓𝖈𝖔𝖚𝖓𝖙𝖊𝖗

Unit 8: Developing an art and design project.

For our FMP (Final Major Project), we are required to do some research activities. This includes the following;

Select an image or and object that inspires you. This could be something in your home/garden/room/journal. Take a photo of it and explain why you selected it.

Select an image of an artwork or design in a museum collection that you like.

Select a quote or textual reference that interests you. This could be a passage from a book you have read, a headline from a newspaper or magazine, text from a comic book or graphic novel, something inspirational someone has said or written, a song lyric, etc.

Afterward, we are told to ask someone that we know to do the same and to make sure to document their responses. Ask them to tell you about their choices and make a note of what they say.

Create drawings/sketches/doodles based on the research you have collected. These will be necessary for the next part.

Using all of the material you have collected, create a collage/mixed media piece/image that visualises your ‘encounter’ with the person you spoke to.

By the end, we are expected to be able to present all of the above in the first week of our FMP, making sure that it can be presented in an appropriate format such as a sketchbook, blog, production file or portfolio.

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01: Select an image or and object that inspires you. This could be something in your home/garden/room/journal. Take a photo of it and explain why you selected it.

For the selection of the image/object that personally inspires me, I chose plants as a general. I have always grown up around greenery, helping my parents in the garden since I was a kid. It was an unavoidable thing to encounter in the Danish countryside where I grew up. I have always found that the cycle of growth, death and surviving is inspirational to me. I have gone through many things in my life already, most of them not coming from a healthy place, but having plants decorating every possible wall and surface in my room was helped me more than I initially would have thought that it could. I felt less alone; like I had a reason to live, although it might seem little to some, I couldn’t end things for good, knowing I would completely abandon all those plants; living organisms; sending them to deteriorate with me. Although I am doing better, I cant seem to fully feel and be me without the presence of the green leaves and spiky cacti all around.

Below is a picture of all the plants I currently own:

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02: Select an image of an artwork or design in a museum collection that you like.

This step took me some thinking to do- I have many favorites that come to mind when thinking of artworks that I feel some sort of connection to, but I found myself coming back to one specifically, multiple times; Lucifer by Franz Von Stuck. My first encounter with this painting was in a museum in Germany. I was touring with my music school and our choir, (Ollerup Efterskole kor 16/17), in which we were allowed time off to just wander around the different cities we went to, exploring all the different corners of each destination. With some friends, we found a museum in Erfurt.

I don’t remember the name of it, but I recall it to be quite small. I picked up a magazine in there, showing different old paintings and artists, all German. That was where I found a small picture showing the work of Franz Von Stuck and the piece Lucifer.

Below is a picture of this painting:

Lucifer, Franz Von Stuck, c. 1890

I feel as if there are many different reasons as to why I was so immediately drawn into this. At the point that I was in my life when I saw this painting, I was going through some tough times. Within the magazine, around all of the colourful landscape paintings and portraits, this stood out immensely. There’s little colour and light, making for less clear information for your eyes to read, causing you to fill in the gaps yourself.

This is something I myself have adapted into my own artwork, for the main reason being how I find it intriguing and fun to twist people's minds to think and see something different every time they lay eyes on a piece of artwork.

One thing that I have found myself to have adapted since discovering this piece of artwork is the eyes; the way I draw them has changed over the years after seeing Franz’s art. Below are various examples of this:

I have found inspiration in his artwork, the darkness of it, the lighter aspects and everything in between, but it is not only his use of colour and shade that I admire but the way that he has managed to convey emotion. I personally find myself to aspire to be able to convey it as successfully as he has here; the rawness of it makes it all the better.

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03: Select a quote or textual reference that interests you. This could be a passage from a book you have read, a headline from a newspaper or magazine, text from a comic book or graphic novel, something inspirational someone has said or written, a song lyric, etc.

For the quote, I knew right away what I wanted to pick; a lyric from a boy band called Brockhampton, more specifically from their song J’ouvert.

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One of my favorites in this group is a guy called Russell Boring, but is better known as JOBA.

In J’ouvert, his verse goes as such:

'Til the casket drops, I will play God Fuck the world, let's start a riot Got too much, too quick God damn, I'm feelin' sick, bitch, call the doctor Don't act like I ain't been dead to ya Don't act like I ain't deserve this shit Couldn't last a day inside my head That's why I did the drugs I did Got issues with these motherfuckers Looking down from they pedestals From that petty view, on that petty shit Pray for peace with a knife in my hand Speak my piece like a gun to my head Come equipped just to blast this shit Misunderstood since birth Fuck what you think, and fuck what you heard I feel betrayed, you can keep the praise And all of the fuck shit need to get away Still ain't got the fright to the fickle-minded people I thought I knew better, wish I knew better Should have known better, wish that I was better At dealing with the fame and you fake motherfuckers Guess I'm too real

But the part that really hits deep with me is near the end of the verse, which is the highlighted part; (I thought I knew better, wish I knew better, Should have known better, wish that I was better).

This quote hits deep for several different reasons, but mostly it’s on the background of how I’ve been raised; how I’ve been taught to see and view the world, as well as myself. My parents have always been there to push me further; which I don’t see much wrong in, but well...

If I came home with a B, all that I’d get back would be odd looks of disappointment and “Huh... a B? Why not an A? or an A+?”.

Still, this ideology is stuck with me. I always feel as if I should know better, should do better and be better. - I don’t think I’ll be able to let go of this for some time, although I’ve tried countless times. I believe it’s built on the fear that If I don’t live to impress my family, they will completely cut me out of their lives; as they have done on all social media already. It used to be a go-to threat that would echo through the house a year ago. ; “Do this, and this will happen”. - Come out to your friends as trans? Well, then we’ll force you to wear a dress while touring Denmark and Germany with the choir in your boarding school:

Ever since I physically removed myself from that place, it’s been a process of healing. In Joba’s verse in J’ouvert there is another part that applies seamlessly to what I used to feel and probably still feel quite a lot today, marked in bold:

I’ve been through so much at this point, that things such as people talking behind my back, calling me names, or doubting me seems so little and worthless. I simply don’t care anymore; Don’t care what people I barely known thinks of me, don’t care what they’ve heard about me. I am who I am and no one can take that away from me, at least not anymore.

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04: Afterward, we are told to ask someone that we know to do the same and to make sure to document their responses. Ask them to tell you about their choices and make a note of what they say.

I chose a good friend of mine to fill in the other side of the coin for this task. I let them explain everything since I feel that it’s personal to them, and they will know how to word it the best; I simply just asked them questions.

01.2: “Why have you chosen this object, and what is it?”

“I chose this to be the object because it has great sentimental value to me, but from first glance to those who don’t know what it is - it seems ordinary. The picture is an illusion piece, by tricking your eyes to look at the pattern a certain way, the background appears to completely drop back - as if there is depth to it - and from the background, an Eagle of the same colours emerges. What is interesting about this object, is not only that it first belonged to my late grandmother who gave it to my father (her son), and then my mother but also that it appears only me and my family are able to see it. As far as I know, the illusion hasn’t been worked out by anyone else who we’ve showed it to; it’s almost like our own personal piece of art.”

02.2: “What painting did you choose, and why?”

Artwork: NIGHTMARE FUEL by Oleg Vdovenko

“This piece of art has been the center of a great deal of curiosity and confusion for many years, for me at least. I’ve always wanted to understand it, and if ever came the opportunity I would love to ask Oleg Vdovenko what exactly is happening within the piece, the story behind this strange and somehow almost religious scene. The piece is so compelling, and as a writer, it has always made me want to understand the events leading up to the scene in this painting.”

03.2: “Which quote have you chosen, and why this in particular?”

Quote 15, by Plato.

“This quote speaks to me primarily because I am someone who as a child was fascinated by sleep. I have always been interested in sleep, what happens and where exactly we go. Training myself to achieve lucid sleep was something I used to do often as a child, as well as practicing the art of being able to remember dreams. Even now in my young adult years, I still continue to write down my dreams and remember each of them very clearly due to the practice that I did as a child. Sometimes, as someone who has experienced the less desirable aspects of sleep as well (i.e. sleep paralysis and insomnia) the line between asleep and awake can become blurred. This quote really spoke to me, and made me recognizer the existential idea that we may never know if we are truly all just asleep, or awake.”

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05: Create drawings/sketches/doodles based on the research you have collected. These will be necessary for the next part.

Below are some scans of some doodles and sketches that I did while just letting go and try not to think too much whilst drawing;

06: Using all of the material you have collected, create a collage/mixed media piece/image that visualizes your ‘encounter’ with the person you spoke to.

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acaseforpencils · 5 years

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The Ink Well Foundation.

The Ink Well Foundation is a non-profit that helps bring smiles to the faces of children facing adversity such as illness, neglect, and abuse. I cannot begin to express how big of an honor it is to have Elizabeth Winter on Case—this interview brought me to tears, and it means a lot to share her message on here, so that you all can help more children in need to be able to connect with this incredible foundation.

Bio: I am the Founder and Executive Director of the Ink Well Foundation. Growing up, I had cancer my entire childhood—it was a rare cancer that kept getting misdiagnosed, which meant a fair amount of biopsies and days in the hospital, and finally major surgery where I was told I might wake up without a leg. I am very fortunate in that the doctors were able to remove all the cancer without amputating, and I have been cancer-free since I was about 20 years old.

That experience gave me a lot of empathy and compassion for kids facing long, isolating hospital stays. There were also other issues during my childhood: I experienced a lot of abandonment with a mother who just could not play the role of mother, and who eventually died when I was fifteen. In general, I just had a pretty severe lack of affection and emotional support growing up. All that made me very tough, in some ways too tough and it wound up creating only further isolation and pain.

As an adult, I saw that pain mirrored in other children's eyes and I began to seek out a way to connect with them, to help them and myself learn to nurture and heal together. I strongly feel that genuine human bonding can fuel both physical and emotional healing. I also think getting out into nature and carrying that same respect to all wildlife helps us to become humble and connected in a very powerful way, so we stress those ideas in our work often.

In 2005, I was working in animation in New York City, and I stood up in a meeting at work one day, and asked if any of the other artists would like to come along with me to draw with kids facing illness and hardship. A couple people raised their hands, and we went together to Gilda's Club out in Brooklyn (that club house has since closed, but we still go to the one in Manhattan). The artists who came along in those early years, like Rami Efal and Ray Alma, Pedro Delgado and Sergei Aniskov—those people are all still volunteers today! That says so much to me about the kind of people this work attracts. We've all become like family over the years and I love those guys so much.

It all began at Gilda's Club, but then I reached out to places like the Ronald McDonald House, St. Mary's Hospital and Bellevue Hospitals, and we slowly but surely became accepted and welcomed at healthcare and at-risk support centers all across New York, because the kids loved what we did, and at then end of every event they were begging us to come back. So we always did! That is the true mark of success for me every time, when the kids are yelling at us to get back there as soon as we can.

A few years ago, I learned about the great organization on the Upper East Side, The Society of Illustrators. Their Executive Director, Anelle Miller, connected me with all these other great artists like Stefano Imbert, Bil Donovan, Abby Merrill, and Elana Amity (who is now our Event Director at Mount Sinai Hospital, where she hosts a monthly live drawing call-in show that beams to all the kids' hospital rooms at once). They draw along with us and call or text in with questions and comments. It's hilarious and adorable. We also connected with the great people of the National Cartoonists Society, and wonderful artists like Ed Steckley, Adrian Sinnott, Howard Beckerman, Tim Savage, Marty Macaluso, Joe Vissichelli and so many more.

After MTV Animation New York shut down, pretty much all my colleagues and I from great shows like Beavis and Butthead, Daria, The Head, and Celebrity Death Match all moved out west. So I had this great group of talented friends still living there, and based on the Ink Well's popularity in NYC, I thought, let's give it a shot there too! I reached out to my former colleague from Rugrats and Wild Thornberrys, Joseph Scott, and asked if he'd be interested in running things there. He is now heading up all our operations in L.A. and he is just the most phenomenally kind and talented person on earth. With his art skills he could do whatever he wanted but he devotes a huge amount of time to the kids we work with and I'm so moved by his giving spirit and boundless good energy. And Michael Daedalus Kenny is also stepping up in a leadership role as our newest Event Director, we've got amazing artists like Marla Frazee of Boss Baby genius, Monica Tomova from SpongeBob, Jeanette Moreno, king of The Simpsons, Chris Harmon from Futurama, Ashley Simpson from Phineas and Ferb, Christian Lignan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, graphic novelist, Jeremy Arambulo and so many others so we're in great hands there. I just wish the traffic weren't such a problem! It really is tough to get around that city, unlike NYC where there's a decently functioning subway that goes to all our locations, so getting around is no real trouble comparatively.

Tools of choice: Our events are usually very handmade by design so that the kids can feel like they could do all of this easily by themselves. So we come up with themes like, “Who is your Superhero?,” and we ask the kids to focus on their strengths and what superpowers they wish they would have, and we draw their portraits as such. We are not art therapists, but we feel these event themes help to make the kids focus on positivity and their potential, and therefore help them to bond and heal.

We do sometimes get more elaborate, like when we teach stop motion, claymation, and we once even taught them how to build homemade rockets on the roof of Bellevue Hospital! One of our Event Directors at the time, Nathan Schreiber, used to come up with the most fantastic science-focused events. He now runs a company called Science Ninjas, that helps kids learn about science with fun card games. But usually it's simple by design.

We are extremely fortunate to have Blick Arts as a sponsor. Their support enables us to provide each child with their own art kit after each event so that they can keep creating on their own after they learn new skills with us so thanks to them we have a lot of the arts tools we need.

Tool I wish existed: I think we do great working with anything we've got lying around- we emphasize the potential of just about anything to become art: we often create characters out of inanimate objects, make flip books, sculptures and puppets— using everything from card stock to socks to toothpicks and gum drops. We keep it accessible and inventive.

How can we support The Ink Well Foundation? Because our volunteers are by definition "the artists behind the kids' favorite books, films, comics, and TV shows," we don't solicit volunteers from the general public. We do have an online application on our site, so other professionals that meet our criteria in the illustration, animation, and cartooning industries are welcome to apply there.

What the general public can do is to help us spread the word so that more children can see that others are going through what they're going through, and also so that they see examples of adults believing in them and encouraging them. We try to promote the idea of art as self-expression and a way to get through trying times, ideally together. Connectivity and encouragement are critical to healing, and honestly, to just building a better world. So we talk about that a lot on our social media and at the events themselves. We also honor the kids' intelligence by talking about art in general there— we highlight classic and new artists and ideas and encourage them to learn from those masters as they develop their own skills.

Because we are a very small 100% volunteer-run organization, we focus on giving the kids the greatest events possible, and sometimes that means we don't have a lot of time for social media, self-promotion, and fund-raising. So spreading the word is huge and we are always extremely grateful for, and in need of, any financial donations.

Where are Ink Well Foundation events held? We operate in New York City and Los Angeles because that's where the top artists in our fields are concentrated. We go to hospitals and at-risk support centers like Ronald McDonald House, Gilda's Club, Bellevue, St. Mary's, Mount Sinai, Childhelp, Covenant House and more. You can see the full list here.

How can children who don't live near Ink Well Foundation events benefit from your Pen Pals Program? This is another reason we want people to spread the word. Loved ones of a child experiencing serious illness or hardship, who is physically or geographically unable to attend our events, can apply to have a special artwork sent straight to them. We ask the kids what their favorite animated films, TV shows, or illustrated books are, and then we have an artist who actually worked on that production make something tailored to that child. We then frame it up, and send it off to them by mail.

We've done this with artists from SpongeBob, Captain Underpants, and just a week ago, we delivered a beautiful drawing of Curious George that our Event Directors, Franz Palomares and Lisa LaBracio (both of whom worked on Curious George) lovingly made. This was for a girl named, Maryanne who lives in Florida. She suffers from a rare disease called, vein of galen malformation that has led to brain damage and vision loss. She is unable to talk or walk or eat through her mouth and she suffers seizures but she understands everything around her, and she can feel texture. So Franz and Lisa made her Curious George playing in a sand box, and they glued real sand into the picture, so that Maryanne could feel that, and enjoy the art on multiple levels. Maryanne's mother, Sandra, said that she was thrilled, and that she loves to hold it.

Our hearts are full being able to share these works with kids who need that moment of light, and that knowledge that an adult they admire, someone who doesn't even know them well, can care enough about them to take the time to create careful, tailor-made artworks just for them. We hope that helps to bring a smile in the moment, and build self-worth long term.

Misc. I'd like to mention that everything we do is 100% free of charge. No one gets paid, no money ever changes hands for the art. We have brilliant artists like Peter de Séve who is on our board and attends many events, while also creating characters for Ice Age, The Little Prince, and all his New Yorker covers. He could get a mint for his works, but he comes down and does this for free, and that's a testament to the power of that loving connection we all feel when we are just selflessly helping one another.

I feel this most acutely when I'm working with youth who have suffered abuse and neglect. We have an Event Director, Jane Archer, who leads our work at Bellevue Hospital. Many of those kids are there because they have been through unendurable trauma, and Jane connects with them beautifully. She begins with a meditation where we all envision our strengths together, we talk about our talents, and hopes for a brighter day, we imagine embodying those gifts and then we gently, patiently, ask the kids to help us draw characters step by step. Many kids start out very suspicious and resistant, even angry. But by the end of the events they are almost always laughing and teasing us, and they don't want to stop creating. It is my greatest joy to experience that transition and I hope we may continue to spread this support and faith in one another for many years to come.

Website, Etc:

We are @inkwellkids on every platform:

Website

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

Find more posts about art supplies on Case’s Instagram! There is a Twitter as well. If you enjoy this blog, and would like to contribute to labor and maintenance costs, there is also a Patreon!

#ink well foundation #elizabeth winter #ink well foundation kids

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innuendostudios · 6 years

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Thoughts on... a few games

[discussion of A Case of Distrust, Gray Skies Dark Waters, and The Lion’s Song below the cut. there won’t be any major spoilers, but I will be at least alluding to some things that you might be better off not having heard allusions to if you want to play the games.]

Thoughts on A Case of Distrust

I heard rumblings about A Case of Distrust on Games Twitter, and, while the pitch sounded enticing, there wasn’t any demo and I didn’t want to buy a game I knew next to nothing about. I put hands on it for a few minutes at PAX East this weekend and immediately bought it from the developer. (I confess the discounted PAX price helped.)

The enticing pitch is as follows: You play PC Malone, the only female private detective in 1924 San Francisco. PC mostly gets adultery gigs - snoop jobs for suspicious wives - but snags her first proper case from a shady rum runner investigating some death threats he’s received. Things get dicier when her client shows up dead the following morning. The art and presentation are killer, the downtempo jazz soundtrack is choice, and I appreciate the way the game leans in to having a female protagonist in a classically male role.

This isn’t some alternate-history 1924, where women are treated with equal respect to men. PC quit the police force after the death of her biggest advocate, her uncle Lewis, knowing that none of the other policemen would let her work real cases. So she struck out as a private dick, and is constantly underestimated by the suspects she interrogates. (Though it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in my playthrough, it’s a safe bet she goes by PC instead of Phyllis so that potential clients won’t know she’s a woman until they meet her in person.) (Also PC is interactive fiction speak for Player Character.)

The whole of the interface is a fairly robust notetaking system, where you can interrogate any suspect about any statement made by any other suspect or any evidence you’ve seen. Getting new bits of information and using them to contradict a suspect’s story is the whole game. It has one thing to do and it does it well: letting you construct a theory of what happened in your head and test every piece before making an accusation. It’s something a lot of mystery games imply while actually doing the hard parts for you, and, while I wouldn’t say A Case of Distrust completely forsakes handholding, it knows what the fun bits are and lets you do them yourself.

What the game is missing is... a plot. A Case of Distrust has a complete first act: it has an inciting incident with the rum runner hiring PC, it sets up its themes about PC’s feelings of failure as she tries to live up to her uncle’s example, it introduces its central characters and hints at its world of seedy speakeasies and businesses that serve as criminal fronts, it has an unexpected (and very artfully directed) dream sequence, and the first act ends with the rum runner’s death.

It also has an ending.

Between them, there’s no real plot. There’s a mystery, for sure, and what hardboiled detective story would work without one? And it opens with an excellent nod to the scene in The Long Goodbye where Philip Marlowe fails to feed his cat. But it doesn’t have the scene where Sam Spade meets with Gutman and then passes out from a spiked drink, or where Jake Gittes sleeps with Evelyn and then tails her car through Los Angeles, or where Brendan Frye gets thrown in Tug’s trunk and driven to meet with The Pin. There’s no rising or falling action, no setups or payoffs, no setbacks or reversals. There’s just the mystery. Every suspect stays right where you left them - one guy sits in a chair waiting for his barber to get back for the entire game - and the only thing that happens between you and any of them is conversation. There’s not even much in the way of red herrings; you can have a bad theory, but there’s never anything that sends you down the wrong path to eventually turn up nothing.

Even the threads about PC trying to be a proper detective in a world that doesn’t take her seriously, though not exactly dropped, are unsatisfactorily resolved. (Frankly, the defiance of gender politics would go down easier if the female suspects weren’t the same old noir tropes, jealous gangster molls with no real agency.) The whole affair ends pretty abruptly, save for an obligatory sequel tease.

The game is worth playing, certainly - more mysteries should have that notetaking system - but I hope the next one recognizes that the mystery itself is the least important part of a noir. It’s what happens around the mystery that makes or breaks it.

Thoughts on Gray Skies, Dark Waters

Another mystery of sorts, though, in this one, the female detective is simply a daughter trying to find out why her mother vanished the year before. There aren’t any interrogations or recovered murder weapons, just a girl wandering her home town and asking her friends and family what they know.

It’s hard to discuss Gray Skies, Dark Waters without addressing its production values. I’ve played a number of microbudget indie games in my day, but even small-scope adventure games have a hard time looking polished without a decent amount of money. Gray Skies, Dark Waters is maybe the roughest-hewn game I’ve ever bought off of Steam. There’s no character animation to speak of: main character Lina has a walk cycle and that’s it. Everyone else has a talk animation and a standing/sitting-in-place idle animation. (This is another game where everyone stays in the same place waiting for you to come talk to them for the entire game; only one character shows up in a second place.) No one’s lips move when they talk. No one moves their hands when ostensibly handing inventory objects to each other. Voice actors are very clearly recorded using different mics, because the audio quality differs wildly from character to character, sometimes from line to line spoken by the same person.

I want to say this up front because I want to get it over with. I came up on TIGSource, I’m used to rough edges. None of this matters if the story is good.

I’m not sure the story is good.

It’s definitely not bad, though it’s hard to talk about without spoiling anything because the game is very short. Lina and her family have been living alone with her dad for the last year, ever since their mom disappeared. Much of the game’s appeal is in the details: Looking for clues means hearing Lina’s musings on her house, and, by extension, her life before and after her mother’s disappearance. Talking to her siblings is one part investigation and several parts painting a picture of different ways children deal with grief. And, frankly, the dialogue and characterizations are quite good. Some of Lina’s poetic commentary is overwrought, and the siblings can be a bit one-note, but foibles of a talented writer who hits the mark more often than she misses.

The game’s biggest setback is that there’s just not much mystery to the mystery. The explanation is not the kind of thing you’d assume from the outset, but you’re going to have it figured out by the midpoint. This makes the gameplay feel less like uncovering a narrative and more going through the motions. It can almost feel like a third-person walking sim, where you’re just moving through the narrative, not really directing yourself through it.

But I like walking sims, so that’s not really a complaint either.

On the whole, I think there’s a lot of value to playing a game like this. I’m not sure I’ve experienced an adventure game that was this comfortable with sadness. Plenty of games have broken my heart before, but not many are about the laborious process of mending one. If it has a failing, it’s that it’s insubstantial. This isn’t a portrait of grief or of family life, it’s a sketch. It has barely enough time or budget to glimpse the big picture before its over. But it’s a big picture worth glimpsing, I suppose, of a subject rarely addressed in games.

I’d call it a worthwhile experience. That’s not quite a recommendation, but it’s not not a recommendation, either.

Thoughts on The Lion’s Song

Of these three games, The Lion’s Song is the most ambitious. It’s a pastiche of pre-war Austria’s art and science culture, viewed through three vignettes and a coda. Each character is devoted to a particular passion and is trying to create their first real masterpiece: Wilma is trying to compose a symphony (the titular Lion’s Song), Franz is trying to break through a person block with his painting, and Em is trying to write a mathematical proof but has to disguise herself as a man to work with other mathematicians.

The gameplay is largely about how each character manages the personal issues that both impede and inform their work. The player helps Wilma tune out the parts of her environment that distract her and focus on things that give her inspiration; helps Franz pick and converse with his portrait subjects to try and locate their essence; and helps Em extrapolate a proof about objects in conflicting states from her own dual existence as both man and woman. This is all done very artfully, with a number of visualization tricks and some gorgeous sepia pixel art.

The writing is also quite lovely across the board.

The weakest link is the final chapter. I’m not the first to say so. Each episode has cameos of the characters from the other chapters, and the episodes are even more tightly related thematically. But I’m not the first to say that the ending, which aims to tie them all together narratively shoots for the moon and lands somewhere short of the stars. What it’s going for is a sobering reality check on what happened to the mini-Renaissance in Europe at the dawning of Modernist thought, and it’s very poignant on paper, but in practice it just comes out of nowhere, to the point where it feels like a cheat. In an episodic story where you rely on the ending to tell you what it was all about, not sticking the landing casts a shadow backwards on the whole series.

The other elephant in the room is the problem with telling stories about genius artists: You have to be a genius to pull it off.

The devs can’t really sell Wilma as a genius composer if we’re going to hear snatches of her symphony, or Franz as a genius painter if they’re going to show us his paintings, or Em as a mathematical prodigy if they’re going to show us her proof, if any of these things are not made by actual geniuses. The music is lovely, but it’s being sold as holding its own with Stravinsky; the art is pretty, but it’s sold as holding its own with early Duchamp; Em’s proof is either based on real math but simplified until it’s unrecognizable, or it’s gobbledygook that’s meant to sound sort of like math.

I never want to be the guy who asks “why is this a game,” but one might pull this off better in a non-audio/visual medium. (Then again, Marc Estrin tried to pull this thing where he’d make up “genius” symphonies and ballets that took pages and pages to describe in Insect Dreams, and that book was insufferable.)

As an analysis of how artists and scientists push through creative blocks, it’s a bit over-simple. But as a kaleidoscope of the artistic culture and the social and political pressures of Vienna at the turn of the century, it’s kind of wonderful. (Or, at least, 3/4 of it is.) The first episode is free and the whole endeavor is worth checking out.

#capsule review #Adventure Games #writings

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parsippanylibrarykids · 6 years

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Art Picture Book List (Books used during Itty Bitty Artists & Preschool Painters Storytime Programs)

Beaumont, Karen. I Ain’t Gonna Paint No More. 2005. Ages 4-7. In the rhythm of a familiar folk song, a child cannot resist adding one more dab of paint in surprising places.

Campoy, Isabel F. Maybe Something Beautiful. 2016. Ages 4-7. Mira lives in a gray and hopeless urban community until a muralist arrives and, along with his paints and brushes, brings color, joy, and togetherness to Mira and her neighbors.

Carle, Eric. The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse. 2011. Ages 3-5. Rather than use the same old colors, a child paints animals and objects in avariety of different hues. Includes biographical information about the German painter Franz Marc, who created unconventional animal paintings in the early 1900s.

Lodding, Linda Ravin. Painting Pepette. 2016. Ages 4-8. In 1920s Paris, after Josette and her stuffed-animal rabbit Pepette encounter famous artists who try and paint Pepette's portrait, Josette realizes she is the perfect person to do the painting.

McDonnell, Patrick. Art. 2006. Ages 5-6. A rhyming tribute to a budding young artist.

Otoshi, Kathryn. Beautiful Hands. 2015. Ages 2-8. Little hands can do so many wonderful things: plant ideas; lift spirits; stretch imaginations. This colorful concept book rouses children's to use their handsfor the good and reach for their dreams.

Schwartz, Amy. Begin at the Beginning. 1983. Ages 4-7. Sara gets stuck when she must paint a picture for the second grade art show, until she discovers the best place to begin.

Tullet, Herve. Mix It Up. 2014. Ages 5-6. Using no special effects other than the reader's imagination, simple directions lead the reader to experiment with mixing and changing colors on the printed page.

Ziefert, Harriet. My Dog Thinks I’m a Genius. 2011. Ages 4-8. A budding artist goes to school after painting a picture with input from his dog Louie, and returns home to find that the dog has some talent, as well.

#books #pre k #elementary #picture books #book recs #book recommendations #art #itty bitty artists #preschool painters #storytime

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notasapleasure · 6 years

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Music shuffle meme!

I was tagged by @ladytharen — thank you! My phone on shuffle threw up some real favourites here! It took me a while to post though because I'm mostly on mobile these days and cutting and pasting and formatting in mobile is an arse...

I tag @jimtheviking @dolorosa @mardymaid and @donnaimmaculata if any of them would like to do this :) and indeed anyone else who wants to!

1) Sam Lee — On Yonder Hill

And now she's turned and turned again / Hi Ho Hi Ho Merrily as she trips over the plain / And may she live to run again / Singing ho, brave boys, Hi-Ho / And may she live to run again / Singing ho, brave boys, hi-ho

2) Bella Hardy — You Don't Have to Change (But You Have to Choose)

And through the telescope of time / where every strange look is a sign / doesn't mean they'll judge you either way. / He might still be the one you choose / And you don't have to cut your hair / And you don't have to change the clothes you wear / And you don't have to change...

3) Tori Amos — Virginia

In the lush Virginia hills / they kept her as long as they could / Cause they knew when the white brother found / White shell Beads wrapped around her / Skin - a life giving river - Her body open / As will his hand / With a "goodbye" there she goes / she may betray all that she loves / and even wait for their savior to come / and in some things, maybe he'll be right / but as always the thing that he loves / he will change from her sunrise to clockwise to soul trading / still she'll lay down her body / covering him all the same

4) Patrick Wolf — London

But see, I will be gone by morning / My dear friend, I lost a fight / Forget me, I wash my hands / In your grey slowing night / Coming down from darkened heights / I taste the Thames with my cycle lights / By saint Paul's, by Big Ben / By God's name I repent

5) Franz Ferdiand - You're the Reason I'm Leaving

As we ride along under an optimistic sun/ The radio sings that Everybody song by rem / And Here I Am Fighting Fighting / Yes I'm Fighting not to cry / And that's another reason / Why I oughtta hate you like I do / Like I do

6) Maximo Park — Until the Earth Would Open

I won't survive / But I intend to have a good time / I will proceed / But I won't fulfill my every need / I won't survive / But whoever does? / We could drive until the earth would open / Please take me to the verge of England's ocean / Tonight suggests so much

7) Ciccone — Look at you Now

Friday night and she takes him out dancing / It's a kind of tradition but it feels more like a habit / He cries hurry up as he drags her make-up half-done through the door up the stairs into the waiting outside / She's off dressed to impress / It smacks of desperation / There's a load on her mind coz her dreams are heavy / And he talks when he drinks and he thinks when he does

8) Les Cox (sportifs) — John E Millais

Well the other one is also a portrait of the sage of Chelsea, Thomas Carlyle / They say it was done over a three day sit, all the while he never cracked a smile / Well I heard a story from the summer of 1914, one that I couldn't believe / A suffragette went to the National with a meat cleaver up her sleeve / It was Annie Hunt swung it three times at the canvas and the glass / Poor Thomas he was blinded with his brow and cheek slashed / Covered in a hood she was accosted / But she didn't seem too distressed / It's true what they say about ladies / They look their best when they're under arrest

9) Kate Bush — Top of the City

See how that building there is nearly built / There's a big fire over on the north of the city / I see you walking down the street with her / I see your lights going on and off / She's no good for you baby / She's no good for you now / Look I'm here with the ladder / I don't know if you love me or not / But I don't think we should ever suffer / There's just one thing we can do about this / Take me up to the top of the city

10) Stan Rogers — The Flowers of Bermuda

Oh, there be flowers in Bermuda / Beauty lies on every hand / And there be laughter, ease and drink for every man / But there is no joy for me. / For when we reached the wretched Nightingale / What an awful sight was plain! / The Captain, drowned, was tangled in the mizzen-chains / Smiling bravely beneath the sea.

#meme #shuffle meme #music #lyrics

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overlord-off-record · 6 years

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I could have done anything else other than writing this. I did not.

---

Tarvek jolted awake out of vivid and restless dreams. His heart raced, a sweat chilled his skin, and he struggled to swallow a dryness in his mouth. Beyond the windows, a false dawn had traced the edges of clouds in milky hues. Beside him, Gil snored. Loudly. How Agatha slept through that noise mystified him, and yet, he didn't think the snoring had awakened him.

Tarvek counted his own breaths until his heart rate slowed. His fingertips trailed over skin in a mindless, automatic caress. Gil's stomach, Agatha's hand, Gil's stomach again. The familiarity of the touch soothed him as much as the counting did. He had a place here, with these two remarkable people. They wanted him in their lives, in their arms, in their bed. No reservations, no regrets. His heart rate spiked upward again.

I'm sorry. The words came to his mind, almost to his lips, before he had quite noticed them. Why should he apologize for anything? Wasn't Gil the one who managed to sprawl out and take up half a bed meant for more than three people?

But he knew. The taste of memories lingered from his dreams, thick like smoke, metallic like blood, and he knew. The past called to him. More than anything, he wanted to close his eyes, to clap his hands over his ears, to shut it out. He would do no such thing.

Reluctantly, Tarvek eased himself out of the safe warmth of Gil's embrace. He leaned over to brush his lips across the back of Agatha's hand, and then, careful not to wake either of them, he stood. Faint light filtered in through the windows. It was far too early for this nonsense.

It was the perfect time for this nonsense.

He dressed himself, and he stole out of the master suite without disturbing his sleeping lovers. A small victory, but important. His hands in his pockets, he hurried down to his own room. The Castle kept silent while he retrieved what he needed, so it hardly surprised him when he descended a staircase only to find an entire landing occupied. Two of the cultists scrambled about, cleaning that big bust of Franz Scorchmaw that the Castle liked to move about just to startle people.

The cultists stopped their work when they saw him. He bade them good morning. Alina gave him a crisp nod and returned to her work. Olga stared. Following the direction of her gaze, Tarvek flicked his tongue across the fresh bruise on his lip. The cultists considered the damage a sign of the Heterodyne's favor, and he wouldn't tell them if it had been Gil's teeth that had carelessly raked his flesh. If he even remembered.

"Any word about the sinister bread?" he asked Alina. Still silent, she shook her head. "I'll ask Hadrian if his people can look into it."

Alina's cheeks flushed a bit. Filing that information for later, Tarvek continued on his way.

Mechanicsburg lay sleepy in the early morning. A few people bustled about, mostly preparing to open various businesses for the day. The handful of Jägers loafing on street corners no doubt had not yet been to sleep. Tarvek smiled, but he avoided them, clinging to the shadows as silvery hues seeped through the sky. He walked for a while without knowing his destination, feeling the familiar weight in his pocket, trusting his feet to lead the way, but when he arrived, he knew nowhere but the catacombs would suit.

He wandered the Crypt of the Heterodynes for a while, taking time to read each inscription, even those belonging to the devils of his childhood stories. Eventually, he settled himself in the only possible place, at the grave of Klaus Barry Heterodyne.

"I'm expecting the two of you to get along," he said in a tone of mock warning as he took the tiny portrait from his pocket. He set it at the corner of the stone, and he placed a candle close beside it, at that particular angle that caused the play of light and shadows to make it look as though Anevka smiled at him.

Tarvek thought of his troubled dreams, still distracting him in fragments of memory. He drew a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then he said, "Anevka, I'm getting married."

Yes, that's what had been bothering him, gnawing at the edges of his thoughts a little more with each passing day. He wanted to get married, wanted it more than anything, but he wanted his sister to see it. All he had was a portrait.

His voice hushed, scarcely more than a whisper, he told her about it. He told her everything. How he had found a home in Mechanicsburg—Mechanicsburg, of all places! How Gil—remember Gil?—really did love him, and so did Agatha, and nothing could be more wonderful than that. He told her about Vanamonde and Hadrian, about the Jägers and the Castle. He told her how one of the bakers in town had started making pain au chocolat just because he liked it. He talked until his voice went dry and his eyes burned.

Exhausted at last, he knelt over the portrait as he always did, longing for absolution. I should have protected you. Not that he hadn't tried, but of course he could have done better. He'd been young and foolish then, and nothing could take that back.

Tarvek emerged from the catacombs to find daylight gilding the rooftops. The town stumbled blearily to life around him, and an old man gave him a friendly nod.

"This is a strange place for you to be," said Carson von Mekkhan.

"Is it?" Tarvek let the portrait fall back into his pocket. He looked around, and he frowned. "Were you waiting for me?"

Carson chuckled. "Young man, nothing goes in or out of these crypts without my knowing about it." He took Tarvek's elbow in a surprisingly strong grip and steered him back toward the Castle. "Anyway, there's nothing wrong with a little ancestor worship."

"No, that's not—not scientific," Tarvek blurted, just stopping himself from saying why he had been down amongst the dead. Carson grinned at him.

"Of course not. We do it anyway."

"We?" Tarvek repeated, beginning to feel baffled. This man was Vanamonde's grandfather, and that explained so much.

Carson von Mekkhan gestured vaguely at the entire city. "People. We venerate the dead in so many ways, and most of us hardly notice we're doing it." He gave a wry chuckle. "At my age, that's a bit comforting." His eyes narrowed, and his laugh faded. "Which grave did you visit?"

All of them. None of them. "Klaus Barry's," Tarvek said, managing a lie and the truth at the same time.

Carson nodded. "That's good," he said, as though everything made perfect sense. Before Tarvek could ask what he meant by that, the old man changed the subject, launching with surprising vigor into a discussion of the upcoming wedding. Tarvek found himself smiling.

Carson von Mekkhan walked with Tarvek all the way back to the Castle, turning away at the doorstep. Tarvek felt a little lighter with every step, and when they parted ways, he almost envied Vanamonde. Probably not the best idea, he decided, and he headed inside.

Castle Heterodyne delivered him to Agatha immediately. In the middle of both breakfast and a lively debate with Violetta, she stopped to look at him as though he may be on the menu. Perfectly aware of his own idiotic grin, Tarvek meandered over to help himself to a cup of coffee.

Agatha and Violetta resumed their conversation. Tarvek lingered nearby, sipping his coffee and lightly touching his thumb to the underside of his finger. Soon he would have a ring there, a ring of Agatha's choosing, an outward sign that he belonged to her. Everything as it should be.

Violetta caught him in his reverie, and she mouthed a single word at him: Gross. Tarvek grinned across his coffee at her. As much as Violetta supported his impending marriage, she did like to tease him about it, and he gave as good as he got. He sidled closer to Agatha.

"Is Gil still taking up the entire bed?" Tarvek flirted shamelessly, his eyes half-lidded, his fingertips dancing up Agatha's arm. Behind her lady's shoulder, Violetta made a gagging motion.

"I have no idea how he does it."

"Hmm. Perhaps we should make a study of it. Scientific." Tarvek swirled the coffee in his cup. "'Unconscious Expansion: the Tendency of a Sleeping Wulfenbach to Fill Any Given Space.'"

Agatha's eyes gleamed with mischief. "I dare you to publish that."

"'Sturmvoraus, et al'?" Tarvek grinned at her. "I certainly can't name the Castle as a research assistant."

"Sturmvoraus-Wulfenbach?" Knowing perfectly well the effect her words would have, Agatha gave him a wicked little smirk. Tarvek struggled for breath, struggled to calm the wild pounding of his heart, and failed at not flushing as crimson as his hair. Violetta mimed being violently ill.

"Well," he managed at last. "We shall see." While Agatha and Violetta resumed their conversation, Tarvek busied himself piling a plate high with pastries, chilled roast, and an unreasonable amount of cheese. He had nearly escaped with the small mountain of food when Agatha turned toward him again.

"He takes up space enough for four people, and you're going to reward him?"

Catching the humor in her voice, Tarvek agreed. "He hasn't earned it, but he does need fuel." He glanced toward Violetta, and he reconsidered. Perhaps he should insist that Gil had earned a reward, and he had the bruises to prove it. "How am I going to experiment on him if I don't keep him fed?" he said instead.

Agatha pursed her lips. "We should plan the experiment." She had no intention of doing actual science.

Violetta made good use of her Smoke Knight training and vanished, taking half of the coffee tray with her.

Agatha captured the remaining coffee for Gil. Grinning, she grabbed Tarvek's hand, and together they raced back to the master suite, laughing most of the way. They threw open the door and rushed inside.

The bed was empty.

Tarvek set the plate down on a side table and glanced around the room. Sheets on the floor, shoes under the bed, the bathroom door slightly ajar. He met Agatha's gaze and nodded toward the bathroom just as the door swung open. Gil emerged, one towel slung around his hips, another in his hand. He stopped scrubbing at his hair when he saw them.

Tarvek pretended to swoon. "I'm powerless against a damp Gilgamesh!"

"My bathroom," Agatha said, stepping between the two of them. "My damp Gilgamesh. Coffee?"

Gil hesitated. He glanced between the two of them, trying to work out what new game this was. He took the coffee. "Isn't there enough of me to share?"

Agatha ran her hand up Gil's chest. "That's what I like to hear." They kissed, and Tarvek found himself leaning forward, craving a touch, a taste. He stayed where he stood, watching, listening to the blood rushing in his ears.

When Agatha let Gil breathe again, Tarvek saw something that made his knees buckle. He fumbled for the edge of the bed, and he sat.

Agatha stood with her hand still resting on Gil's chest, giving him an amused smile as he gulped the entire cup of coffee. She might as well have held the morning sun in that smile. Gil stood completely at ease, damp and magnificent and barely covered by that one towel. His free hand relaxed at his side, except…

Except for the way his thumb played across his ring finger.

Tarvek found the strength to beckon to his lovers. Agatha tugged Gil along with her, and in a moment they stood over him. The gentlest touch from Agatha tilted Tarvek's face upward, and she kissed him, driving the last of the cobwebs and shadows from his thoughts.

Let the past lie. Let the future come when it would. The present was pretty damn great.

#Girl Genius #fanfic #kind of rambly

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eth-an · 3 years

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Modern Love and Broken Promises: Romance in Edward Yang’s Cinema

Around halfway through the runtime of Edward Yang’s 2000 film Yi Yi, the audience is given a portrait of a pitiful man reaching one of his lowest points. A-Di, brother-in-law to the film’s protagonist NJ, is shown lying half-naked on a mattress in his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, portly and slothful, engrossed in a porno playing on the television at the foot of the bed. As Yun-Yun turns off the bedside lamp and the space goes dark, the scene recedes with nothing but the reflection of the TV’s glare on A-Di’s glasses and the moaning of porn stars reverberating around the room. A-Di attempts to ask his ex- for help with his money troubles; she ignores him, leaving him talking to himself. In Edward Yang’s oeuvre, characters are often left conversing with themselves, hearing the echoes of their own voices, constantly talking past the ghost of their partner rather than meeting them on an intimate common ground. As Franz Kafka wrote in a correspondence to his lover at the turn of the twentieth century: “writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts” (230). Edward Yang, a key player in Taiwan’s New Cinema at the end of the century, then could be said to extend Kafka’s formulation to match the new material technologies present in a globalizing city. While Kafka remarks on the letter and its inability to consummate a human connection, Yang replaces ink and notepads with more timely motifs: the TV screen, the fax machine, the tape recorder, the film studio, the business card. As A-Di lies with his limbs sprawled out, made agog by the material on the cassette tape, the television screen erodes the boundary between private intimacy and public spectacle. Critic James Tweedie has commented, “the television exists at the threshold between those two social spheres” (14), making the divide between the personal and public more porous than ever before. While giving the illusion of connecting A-Di to a richer outside world, we can see how the television only serves to further alienate him from Yun-Yun; from an active, embodied experience of his own sexuality; and from the conversation he halfheartedly prolongs. Yang’s films then are instructional in understanding how modern media technologies have turned the traditional triumphant romance narrative into an “intercourse with ghosts”—perpetually frustrated, mired with failure, and unconsummated. While this may seem like a cynical indictment of modern love, I hope to show through an analysis of Yang’s films Yi Yi and A Brighter Summer Day that Yang’s characteristic melancholia opens up new potentials for making meaning out of romance in an era of increasing fragmentation. As Fatty deftly comments before his murderous rampage at the end of Yi Yi, “we live three times as long since man invented movies” (1:51:18). Yang’s films live up to this charge, offering their audience three times the intricacy through their characters’ ultra-mediated relationships.

One of the most compelling romantic arcs in these two films is the rekindling of the long-lost flame between NJ and his first love, Sherry. Although NJ and Sherry are both married when they come across each other unexpectedly in the gaudy lobby of some Taipei hotel, circumstances give them a chance to temporarily forget their spouses and reconnect. However, their new intimacy is spurious. Rather than offering either of them closure from the thirty years since their last meeting, their connection is mediated through shadows and fleeting impressions. At first, their reconnection is facilitated by nothing more than the exchange of flimsy business cards. Sherry hands off one of her cards—a symbol of the professional success she has found since moving to America—to NJ, who does not reciprocate the gesture. This scene marks their relationship at its most obviously superficial, but as the story progresses and their interactions become more and more frequent, their reliance on flimsy forms of mediation persists. NJ misses several calls of Sherry’s, only to dial her number and pour his heart out on her answering machine. Technology, rather than making the world a globalized paradise, then offers NJ and Sherry little more than the ability to talk to strangers they used to know. Yang then problematizes the supposed forward march of global communication, showing how it causes NJ and Sherry to miss each other’s messages just as often as it lands on the mark. The context and location of their phone calls also plays a crucial role here. Walter Benjamin has commented on the “sanctuary” (171) of private living spaces in opposition to its “complement” (154) of the office workspace, but in Yang’s film this dichotomy is collapsed as well: Sherry and NJ are only afforded the opportunity to speak to each other in the context of a business trip, NJ always reaches out to Sherry through his office’s phones, and the details about meeting up with Sherry at a Japanese hotel are routed through NJ’s secretary. The office phone, just like the television screen, then refigures private intimacy as one more piece of a larger global loneliness.

Even once NJ and Sherry end up meeting each other in person, the damage has been done so that they are seemingly doomed to speak past each other. NJ meets Sherry along with Ota in the lobby of yet another hotel, and they briefly converse in English, a language which none of them grew up speaking. No matter how technically proficient they are in speaking this foreign language to each other, this adds yet another level of mediation to their conversation. Throughout the trip, NJ and Sherry go on walks together, each monologuing their discontents from their long-gone relationship to the air around them, as if the other was not even present to comment. “I wouldn’t know how to live on!” Sherry yells, to no reply (1:53:03). She later breaks into tears and screams at NJ in his hotel room, only to realize that she has missed the mark and that her yelling was out of turn, directed at a vision of their relationship that no longer exists, or perhaps never existed in the first place. In these scenes, Yang represents their lost young love not as a monument worth rebuilding, as might be the case in a more traditional romance film, but the crosshatching of faulty memories and miscommunications underwritten by modern technologies. In a 2000 interview conducted between Edward Yang and the magazine Cineaste, Yang comments that his stories try to deal with “the universality of being human” (Sklar 6). While it is difficult to pin down a specific meaning from such a broad and totalizing claim, surely the increasing “connectedness” of the world under globalization is one such universal feature of being human at the turn of the millennia. While many take this connectedness as an a priori feature of modern life, Yang remains critical of those media and communication practices that ambiguate meaning in our relationships. In a concrete way, the trains and planes that connect Taiwan, the U.S. and Japan—the modern transportation that brings Sherry and NJ physically closer together—only serves to ultimately push them further apart. Focusing again on the boundary between the personal and the outside world, Yang shows a shot of Sherry’s reflection in a train’s window: her face is contemptuous as NJ sleeps, unaware next to her.

In addition to those features of globalization like mass-communication and transportation, Yang builds in a reflexive critique of the proliferation of video as well. The porno that A-Di watches is likely a specific reference to the increasing production of Taiwanese porn films at the end of the 1980s, which made up over half the country’s video output at that time (Zhang 242). Likewise, Taiwanese news media makes up an important expository narrative device at the end of Yi Yi, when Ting-Ting learns of Fatty’s unfortunate demise by watching the television hanging in the police station. The seriousness of the situation is brought down into an almost humorous register by the TV program, which illustrates exaggerated CGI visuals of the way the crime may have occurred. While the viewer is able to experience some much-needed comic relief from this scene, a certain darkness underlies its motivation. Ting-Ting, who is as personally acquainted with the situation as anyone could be, learns of the attack the same way as the rest of the public. The boundary between personal and public is collapsed, and her formerly innocent crush on Fatty is plagued with the same failure the other relationships in the film suffer. If critic James Tweedie is to be taken literally in his claim that CGI animation is “staging in its purest and least encumbered form, without the limitations imposed by photography” (15-16), then the news media’s recreation of an animated murder is nothing less than pure spectacle, absent of substance. In terms of Ting-Ting’s own romantic arc, this form of media represents an emptying out of meaning from an incredibly impactful event: though her former lover is going to jail for life, she can (almost) safely feel that it is some distant event happening to another person, in another time. Fatty becomes just as much of a ghost by the end of the film as the lost romance between NJ and Sherry, and no trace of him remains save the hand-shaped blood stains on the front of their apartment complex.

While this emptying out of meaning is the most common effect of modern media technologies in Yang’s films, this does not necessarily make Yang a pessimist in the face of globalizing technology. Yang himself, who attended “the newest and hottest program” for engineering at the University of Florida in the 70s, could hardly be accused of rejecting the adoption of modern technology (Sklar 8). Instead, his films try to explore these technologies’ effects on human life and romantic relationships, rather than tackling their broader structural, societal causes. Yang himself claims that he attempts to portray the events of his films as “neutrally as possible” so that his audience can make any moral judgements for themselves (Sklar 6). This neutral exploration is perhaps best exhibited in his 1991 epic work A Brighter Summer Day, which masterfully portrays the young love and hate between two Taiwanese teens, named Xiao Si’r and Ming, in the dangerous Taipei streets of the early 1960s. Si’r and Ming’s initial introduction is made wholly possible by a chance encounter at a film studio, without which they would not have forged a bond of friendship. One day, as Ming and Si’r are wandering outside their school grounds to spy on the production of a film in the cavernous building next door, they are caught trespassing by the film director. The director, so taken with Ming’s beauty and fitness for the lead role, asks her to come by the next day for a camera test, so that she might take over the position from the previous actress. In many ways, this occurrence is the genesis of Si’r and Ming’s romantic relationship, which grows more fruitful as they pass each other in the halls of the night school.

In one of the film’s most beautiful scenes, the camera cuts to Ming’s face, covered in tears. Yang does not give this scene any prior context. The preceding scene features Ming in a hospital overhearing her caretaker haggle with the doctor about her mother’s medical expenses. As the camera cuts to Ming’s crying face, the viewer expects that she might be crying about her mother’s asthma attacks, or possibly about her boyfriend’s disappearance. Then, a disembodied voice simply asks: “Are you thinking about something sad? Can you tell me about it? Maybe you don’t know where to start” (1:07:58). Soon after these questions are posed to Ming, the camera broadens out, and Yang’s audience sees that Ming was crying during her camera test in the film studio. On the one hand, Ming’s performance could be cynically read as yet another of Yang’s demonstrations of the falsity of meaning in cinema. Although Yang’s audience is initially led to believe that Ming is crying due to some tragedy in her life, it soon becomes clear that she is simply acting. Like so many other instances in Yi Yi, the personal affective labor of Ming is then appropriated by a objectifying public medium, in this case the film camera. However, a more reparative reading of this scene offers a new understanding of how the boundary between personal and public can be recast in spite of modern media. Although the director’s assistant asks Ming to reveal her personal thoughts that cause her tears, she refrains from giving the audience insight into her most intimate thoughts and feelings. Ming’s obstinacy shows that there is still a final frontier of the personal that cannot be captured in written letters, animation, 35mm film, or phone calls. This boundary is preserved in this scene, and Ming refuses to become another ghost for the audience to empty out and recreate to their own liking.

This also becomes evident in Ming’s romantic relationship with Xiao Si’r. The sound stage of the film studio is also the literal stage for the beginning of their romance, and Yang shows how the stage can possess both of these meanings without compromising these characters’ intimacy. When the studio’s cameras are off and the lights are dimmed, Ming and Si’r share their fears and hopes. Ming calls Si’r “honorable” and says that it will get him in trouble (1:00:59). Ming does not leave Si’r with an overly picturesque view of herself, and willfully tells him about other men who flirt with her. In a world that could easily subsume Ming into empty spectacle, she remains an strong example of how intimate and open communication can continue to exist. Ming discovers a modern love that is able to work within both the public and the private without letting one destroy the other through their collapse. She is flexible in finding love not necessarily in a single monogamous heterosexual relationship, but variously works with and against the contingencies of her life in Taipei to maintain and consummate connection with others. When her lover Honey is tragically murdered, she finds generative dialogues with Si’r reconstituting to her self, and this allows her to find a stability in modern love where other characters fail.

Ming does not give herself over as a passive subject to modern love, chasing after Honey’s ghost (in this case, his ghost would be literal), but instead finds a way to move forward and make new meanings in life. In A Brighter Summer Day, Yang offers several other notable features of modern romance that employ a similar ethos, each making meaning in spite of the collapse between public and personal brought about by new media and globalization. The popularity of Elvis’s music among the Taipei gangsters in the film is one such example. Although the gangsters do not speak fluent English, and can only sing Elvis’s songs through phonetic transliterations, they still find deep personal meaning in this global phenom. Although it may seem campy to a contemporary viewer when a Taiwanese child with greased back hair and a white tee starts singing songs by the “King of Rock,” the teens in the movie take this mass-media sensation and make it re-signify in their own community. Even though the film’s title, “a brighter summer day” is a misheard lyric meant to be “a brighter sunny day,” this hardly seems to matter as it makes meaning for these characters personally. The divide between a public, globally recognized rock star, and the individual, personal (mis-)interpretation of that music is then shown to be a generative process that nevertheless allows for new bonds to be made and new relationships to be formed. In Yi Yi, while Ota and NJ sit together in a parked car, they commiserate with each other and agree that music has a unique ability to bond people across time and place. In A Brighter Summer Day, music is another valuable site for modern love to make meaning, as teen lovers lean against each other’s shoulders on the dance floor.

In both A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi, romance seems to be perpetually, invariably in the throes of failure. NJ and Sherry, Ming and Si’r, Ting-Ting and Fatty, even A-Di and Yun-Yun: these films offer no shortage of romances ending in spectacular violence or dissipating in dispassionate indifference. As such, it is hard to see how Edward Yang could ever be seen as a romantic filmmaker in the conventional generic sense, or an optimist when it comes to new, modern modes of connection. However, I argue that this unashamed willingness to deal with failure on its own terms is just one of Yang’s many virtues. As critic Jack Halberstam has said, “failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd” (187). In addition, “failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior” in modern society (3). Under the strictures of NJ’s soul-sucking office job, or the angry disciplinarians at Si’r’s night school, or even the covertly violent interrogation practices of the Taiwanese nationalist government, perhaps failure is a viable alternative that ought to be explored. Yang’s romances do not usually offer a happy ending, but their exploration of love does offer something else: an alternative to the rigid and confining norms of modern life that threaten to empty us out and turn us into ghosts.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing. Schocken Books, 1986.

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.

Kafka, Franz. Letters to Milena. Schocken Books, 2015.

Sklar, Robert, and Edward Yang. “The Engineer of Modern Perplexity: An Interview with Edward Yang.” Cinéaste, vol. 26, no. 1, 2000, pp. 6–8. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41689311.

Tweedie, James. “Edward Yang and Taiwan’s Age of Auteurs.” Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199765607.013.0023.

Yang, Edward, director. A Brighter Summer Day. The Criterion Collection, 2016.

Yang, Edward, director. Yi Yi. The Criterion Collection, 1999.

Zhang, Yingjin. Chinese National Cinema. Routledge, 2010.

#yang gang #fuck andrew yang though

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