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if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in the midwest, this is it. 

#Semple is a dude #and Kapoor is a prat #and tjis post is gold

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Josephine Baker and her pet cheetah “Chiquita”, 1925. Josephine would bring Chiquita (wearing a diamond collar) onstage with her during her shows at the Folies Bergère in Paris during this period, and the cheetah would sometimes jump into the orchestra pit during Baker’s act, scaring the musicians and giving the audience a thrill.

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Black Cat   -    Hiroto Norikane 

Japanese, b, 1949-

Colour print

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assert your dominance and take up every inch of the command chair

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Kathryn Janeway is to time travel as Benjamin Sisko is to the mirror universe

#star trekking across the universe

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men really be like “well this woman has studied this subject her whole life, and i am a man, so we have equal knowledge on this”

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Jellyfish under the sun (by Mimmo Leonardo)

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« There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum-trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone. »

— Sara Teasdale, “There will come soft rains” in Flame and Shadow (1920)

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Something that’s been very interesting to me, in this new wave of post-miniseries Good Omens fandom, is the apparent fannish consensus that Crowley is, in fact, bad at his job.  That he’s actually quite nice.  That he’s been skating by hiding his general goodness from hell by taking credit for human evil and doling out a smattering of tiny benign inconveniences that he calls bad.

I get the urge towards that headcanon, and I do think the Crowley in the miniseries comes off as nicer than the one in the book.  (I think miniseries Crowley and Aziraphale are both a little nicer, a little more toothless, than the versions of themselves in the book.)  But maybe it’s because I was a book fan first, or maybe it’s because I just find him infinitely more interesting this way–I think Crowley, even show!Crowley, has the capacity to be very good at his job of sowing evil.  And I think that matters to the story as a whole.

A demon’s job on Earth, and specifically Crowley’s job on Earth, isn’t to make people suffer.  It’s to make people sin.  And the handful of ‘evil’ things we see Crowley do over the course of the series are effective at that, even if the show itself doesn’t explore them a lot.

Take the cell phone network thing, for instance.  This gets a paragraph in the book that’s largely brushed off in the conversation with Hastur and Ligur, and I think it’s really telling: 

What could he tell them?  That twenty thousand people got bloody furious?  That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city?  And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people?  In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves.  For the rest of the day.  The pass-along effects were incalculable.  Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.

In essence, without any great expenditure of effort (look, I’d never say Crowley isn’t slothful, but that just makes him efficient), he’s managed to put half of London in a mental and emotional state that Crowley knows will make them more inclined to sin.  He’s given twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or half a million people a Bad Day.  Which, okay, it’s just a bad day–but bad days are exhausting.  Bad days make you snap, make you fail at things, make you feel guiltier and more stressed out in the aftermath when you wake up the next day, makes everything a little worse.  Bad days matter.

Maybe it’s because I’m a believer in the ripple effect of small kindnesses, and that means I have to believe in its opposite.  Maybe it’s just that I, personally, have had enough days that were bad enough that a downed cell network (or an angry coworker because of a downed cell network) would honestly have mattered.  But somebody who deliberately moves through the world doing their best to make everyone’s lives harder, with the aim of encouraging everybody around them to be just a little crueler, just a little angrier, just a little less empathetic–you know what, yes.  I do call that successful evil.

It’s subtle, is the thing.  That’s why Hastur and Ligur don’t get it, don’t approve of it.  Not because Crowley isn’t good at his job, but because we’ve seen from the beginning that Hastur and Ligur are extremely out of touch with humanity and the modern world and just plain aren’t smart enough to get it.  It’s a strategy that relies on understanding how humans work, what our buttons are and how to press them.  It’s also a strategy that’s remarkably advanced in terms of free will.  Hastur and Ligur deliberately tempt and coerce and entrap individuals into sinning, but Crowley never even gets close.  We never see him say to a single person, ‘hey, I’ve got an idea for you, why don’t you go do this bad thing?’  He sets up conditions to encourage humans to actually do the bad things they’re already thinking of themselves.  He creates a situation and opens it up to the results of free choice.  Every single thing a person does after Crowley’s messed with them is their own decision, without any demonic coercion to blame for any of it.

You see it again in the paintball match.  “They wanted real guns, I gave them what they wanted.”  In this case, Crowley didn’t need to irritate anybody into wanting to do evil–the desire to shoot and hurt and maybe even kill their own coworkers was already present in every combatant on that paintball field.  Crowley just so happened to be there at exactly the right time to give them the opportunity to turn that fleeting, kind-of-bad-but-never-acted-upon desire into real, concrete, attempted murder.  Sure, nobody died–where would be the fun in a pile of corpses?  But now forty-odd people who may never have committed a real act of violence in their entire lives, caught in a moment of weakness with real live weapons in their hands, will get to spend the rest of their lives knowing that given the opportunity and the tiniest smidgen of plausible deniability, they are absolutely the sort of people who could and would kill another human being they see every single day over a string of petty annoyances.

Crowley understands the path between bad thought and evil action.  He knows it gets shorter when somebody is upset or irritated, and that it gets shorter when people practice turning one into the other.  He understands that sometimes, removing a couple of practical obstacles is the only nudge a person needs–no demonic pressure or circumvention of free will required.

I love this interpretation, because I love the idea that Crowley, who’s been living on Earth for six thousand years, actually gets people in a way no other demon can.  I love the idea that Crowley, the very first tempter, who was there when free will was invented, understands how it works and how to use it better than maybe anyone else.  And I really love the idea that Crowley our hero, who loves Aziraphale and saves the world, isn’t necessarily a good guy.

There’s a narrative fandom’s been telling that, at its core, is centered around the idea that Crowley is good, and loves and cares and is nice, and always has been.  Heaven and its rigid ideas of Right and Wrong is itself the bad thing.  Crowley is too good for Heaven, and was punished for it, but under all the angst and pain and feelings of hurt and betrayal, he’s the best of all of them after all.

That’s a compelling story.  There’s a reason we keep telling it.  The conflict between kindness and Moral Authority, the idea that maybe the people in charge are the ones who’re wrong and the people they’ve rejected are both victim and hero all at once–yeah.  There’s a lot there to connect with, and I wouldn’t want to take it away from anyone.  But the compelling story I want, for me, is different.

I look at Crowley and I want a story about someone who absolutely has the capacity for cruelty and disseminating evil into the world.  Somebody who’s actually really skilled at it, even if all he does is create opportunities, and humans themselves just keep living down to and even surpassing his expectations.  Somebody who enjoys it, even.  Maybe he was unfairly labeled and tossed out of heaven to begin with, but he’s embraced what he was given.  He’s thrived.  He is, legitimately, a bad person.

And he tries to save the world anyway.

He loves Aziraphale.  He helps save the entire world.  Scared and desperate and determined and devoted, he drives through a wall of fire for the sake of something other than himself.  He likes humans, their cleverness, their complexities, the talent they have for doing the same sort of evil he does himself, the talent they have for doing the exact opposite.  He cares.

It’s not a story about someone who was always secretly good even though they tried to convince the whole world and themself that they weren’t.  It’s a story about someone who, despite being legitimately bad in so many ways, still has the capacity to be good anyway.  It’s not about redemption, or about what Heaven thinks or judges or wants.  It’s about free will.  However terrible you are or were or have the ability to be, you can still choose to do a good thing.  You can still love.  You can still be loved in return.

And I think that matters.

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More people need to see and understand this!

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Okay, buckle up buckaroos, because today I met an honest-to-goodness cryptid.

I was out running errands and I made a stop at Intimate Books (…for a friend), and on my way out I realized that the bookshop next door was open.

This bookshop has existed for more than a hundred years, and in all my life it has NEVER BEEN OPEN. I mean, I assume it has to be open sometimes, but never at any normal, reasonable hour. Everyone says it’s a front for the mob or something.

So what do you do when the weird mafia bookshop is open? You go the fuck inside.

The first thing I noticed was the smell. You know that smell when you accidentally leave your towel on the bathroom floor all day and you come back to that mildew funk? The shop smelled like that times a thousand. I expected to see stuff growing on the walls, but the books were pristine. We’re talking first editions, rare editions, weird Bibles and books inscribed to really famous dead people. Librarians would weep for the chance to accession this place. In the first two minutes I found a signed copy of The Crucible and what I think was a first edition of Blake’s Book of Thel.

Then a clerk showed up out of nowhere—honestly nowhere. He looked EXACTLY like a bookseller should look, kind of fluffy and bewildered and really, really gay.

“Are you lost?” was the first thing he said to me.

“Nope. Just browsing, thanks.”

“Browsing, I see. Erm. How do you feel about snakes?” he asked. And without waiting for me to answer, he just walked away and vanished around a shelf.

I figured it was a metaphor, or a code phrase for the mafia. Until I turned a corner like ten minutes later and found a little reading nook. It was really pretty, although I feel like that particular window should have been on an interior wall? Anyway, curled up in an armchair in a patch of sunlight was the biggest fuck-off black snake I have ever seen.

Like, I don’t mind snakes in general. But in their normal context, right? Outside. On the ground. Not six feet long and sitting on a threadbare velvet armchair like it owns the place.

I was about to turn around and leave, but I saw a gorgeous first-edition copy of Leaves of Grass on a shelf, a little too close to the snake for comfort. But I had never needed anything so badly in my life.

So I went back to the counter to buy it, but the clerk was nowhere to be found.

While I was waiting, I noticed a collection of pictures hanging on the wall behind the counter, dating back to the very dawn of photography. A couple were of this rock-star looking guy from the 70s that I should probably have recognized, but there were authors and landscapes and stuff, too. There was even an old tintype portrait of Oscar freaking Wilde, sitting in this very shop with a guy that I would ACTUALLY SWEAR was the clerk from before. Like, I know my family all has the same nose, but this guy had the same everything.

After approximately one year of waiting, the clerk came back out to the desk. By now I’ve realized that he’s too bad at his job to be anything but the owner of the shop.

“I saw your snake,” I told him.

“Did you? Was he behaving himself?”

“He was sleeping.”

“Yes, he enjoys that.”

“Does he just stay out in the open like that? What if he gets out?”

He shrugged and smiled. “He always comes home again, the dear boy.”

Right, a homing snake. That’s totally normal.

Then he cleared his throat and asked, in a weirdly reluctant voice, if I was going to buy the Whitman.

“Yes, please,” I told him. “I saw it on a shelf by the snake, and it was just too tempting.”

He sighed. “Oh, yes, I expect it was.”

When I started to hand him my card, he went all fluttery and said that they didn’t take cards.

All right, fine. I had some cash on me, but I told him that he’d sell a lot more books if he got a Square or something.

He got this scandalized look on his face and went, “Why would I want to do that?”

Oookay. I handed over the cash and he popped open the ancient till and started making change.

In shillings. Shillings! I swear to god I saw Queen Anne’s face on one of them. The silver value of the coins was probably as much as I paid for the book.

But I had to have proof that this happened—at that point, all I had was a book in a plain brown wrapper, not appreciably different from what I bought next door. So I asked him for a receipt.

He looked delighted and wrote one up for me.

By hand.

With a fountain pen.

And that’s the story of how I met a bookseller cryptid and his pet snake.

#😆😆😆😆😆😆

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Kira & Janeway: Undershirt Appreciation

#star trekking across the universe

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It’s just the two of us, darling.

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Find your REAL Angel name

• First two letters of your last name • First vowel of your first name • Third letter of your middle name (or parent’s first name if you don’t have a middle name • Last consonant of your last name • Add IEL or EL to the end!

#Erathiel