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precious-little-scoundrel · 3 months

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Dear John | Unsayable Things

Masters of the Air Fanfiction

I banged this out in an hour or two, past midnight, deep in my feels, half chatting with my baby @stylespresleyhearted who put in the initial request for this series and who is now owed a few choice lines herein. If you wanna stew in the pain of Friday’s episode- this is the angst fest for you. With a tiny bit of hope at the end. Tiny. But it’s there.

Summary: months after one drunken letter of horny (and gentlemanly) admiration was sent off by one John Egan to Miss Lana Tierney of Hollywood fame, a written rapport has formed between them, based on a refreshing freedom to be perfectly frank and even trivial in their letters -a tone set by his inarguably appaling initial correspondence. But until today, he’s never dared make use of the number she gave him to dial when he needs to say unspeakable things.

Warnings: angsty as hell? morose and possibly suicidal thought processes? it’s Egan after THAT phone call so, I imagine you can envision that it’s not exactly a stable mentality portrayed here-in.

Masterlist

Date: October 1943

The hotel lobby is as chilled as an ice box with those front doors constantly revolving, letting in gusts of autumn air that’s suddenly turned harsher than he recalled when he stepped out into the daylight this morning. His ride back to East Anglia won’t be here for another two hours and no amount of charm or haggling can get him the petrol to make the journey on his own. It’s a carpool sort of life now, every man, woman and child in Britain knows that but every minute he stays in the great metropolis feels like a betrayal to those boys who just got-

-he will get back in time.

He vowed it, he arranged it, now all there’s left to do is wait until it can be enacted. John was never good at waiting but now all the activities and pastimes he’d once relied upon to fill a slow hour seem intolerable. Imbibe any more booz and he’ll be unfit to fly, seeing the sites could get him more sights than he’d like, polite conversation makes him want to scream in the face of the next passer by that he’s lost something precious today -don’t they know? -and it would be just his luck today of all days to get answered by someone who did know, some parent with a dead child, pulverized to bits while he fucked his demons out.

So John keeps his mouth shut in a stern line and stares venomously ahead at the charming little Renoir hung in the lounge. No one has troubled him yet and by the spooked face of the desk clerk who offered him a menu, he dares to think he won’t be in future.

He is sick to death of it all, of the death itself and the brave faces and the lack of bravery he suddenly feels now and the necessity of it all. He hardly recognizes the hollowed out sinner he’s become with a head full of too many griefs to even formulate a prayer.

He was close to catatonic, eyeball deep in his self abhorrence, when he realized he was spinning round the little lacquered card she had enclosed three letters ago.

“If you ever need to say those unsayables, here’s a private line. Don’t call it if you don’t want me to answer, only you, my mama and my hair stylist have it. Xoxo, Jeanie.” 💋

The unsayable would be to call one of the most successful, desirable and busy women in the world only to admit John Egan has run outta words. But with the mounting desire to do something stupidly productive, and without the kind fist of a friend to dissuade him -he knew walking in front of busses wouldn’t get him any closer to Thorpe Abbots- a starlet’s withering rejection just might do the trick. Just might hurt enough to slice through the fog. His fingers were sweating as he spun the rotary, thumbnail tracing the underside of her extension.

God knows it would be unlikely to get through even the first connection, much less get overseas, much less find her at her home. What time of day was it back there anyway? And this entire conversation would get bugged to hell, he’d have to be careful and this was a terrible idea to start with and-

“Hello you,” the airiest voice he’s ever heard warbles over the static, teasing and warm, “I’ll admit it, that lilac did nothing for my color last night. You win, I’ve got the front page of the Whisper to confirm, please, don’t rub it in.”

John stares out of his little alcove in the lounge with watery eyes, mouthing a silent -what the fuck- to himself before recalling the obvious: only her mother, her hairstylist and him. With this line, Jeanie -or should he call her Lana on the phone?- didn’t expect a stranger. This was an anticipated call and he about hangs up in mortification at not being what she expected.

But then, the hollow idea of one and a half hours of waiting for the ride catches up and John recalls that he had in fact phoned in order to be humiliated and he was a rare sort of chump to take so poorly to a plan gone off to so dazzling a start.

“Can’t imagine a shade that wouldn’t suit you.” he finds himself saying smoothly, the flirtation on autopilot.

He can hear an audible gasp on the other end of the line and a breathy sputter and what might be sheets rustling, or perhaps it’s a dress or paper or-

“JOHNNY?” she all but squeals and he winces at the blare of the receiver in his ear, the flinching crinkle of his blue eyes not without some pleased merriment at her unabashed excitement. “This you? Finally you used it, you silly old thing! Oh gosh, oh gosh say something again, your voice is divine! Oh, I can’t believe I’m finally talking to you. I thought you were my mother! Oh say something! You’re there, aren’t you? Johnny?”

She sounds so pleased he finds his eyes smarting and suddenly this feels like the worst idea in the world. He needed her to be harsh, to fit with every other disillusionment that’s rained down on him this past month, instead he’s met with -care. His stomach roils and not even the mean suspicion that she’s putting on an act can make it calm. “Well, I’m finally somewhere I don’t have to share a line with the whole group.”

“Where’s that, Johnny?” She sounds as eager as if he’s got a lot of options.

“London.”

“Oh!” There’s a waiver to her voice, he’s not sure why, but either way she sounds unsure if she should be merry or sober. “Business or pleasure?” she inquires levelly and it’s got all the sultry teasing he’s read into her scrawled writing hundreds of times, John finds himself flushing despite the morose sentiment that comes up right behind it.

“That, well, uh, that uh“ he picks at the sleek paint on the phone base and questions whether he’s going to use precious time on the phone with the hottest dame on planet earth to throw a pity party, “-I think the intention was a rehabilitation for the nerves. Ironically the guy who suggested it is now toast.”

“Oh John.” she sounds wounded and he bites his lip in savage pleasure at hearing what he wishes he could feel. “Was it -was it someone close?”

“A couple hundred, more like.” he sulks, his jaw ticking so hard he might break a molar if he keeps on. “But yeah. Yeah today was-“ he tries to think of the censors and that makes him laugh at the thought of all their previous filthy correspondence making it through but some slip of the tongue about a dead friend could land them in the hot spot, his following laugh is snotty and he could gag at himself for it.

“Johnny, darling man, are you-“ she shifts course and he holds his breath, depending on her for something, he doesn’t even what, “-does this happen to have something to do with our duet’s harshest critic?”

He smiles at her cleverness, she’s not a complete airhead then. And she recalls Buck. Of course she does, she hasn’t stopped sending him kisses via Egan’s letters even though she didn’t recall meeting either, not even when John had sent back photographs of the both of them to jog it. The flow of correspondence hadn't stalled despite this strike out and neither had the morale boosting glamor shots of certain of her assets which John kept locked in the false bottom of his footlocker and one small one folded in in the hollowed heel of his boot.

_“keeping it handy for the emergency tug off?” Gale had scorned him but Egan liked having her with him._

“Yeah, Shirley Temple- he’s been uh, he’s been traded, ya see.” Egan manages the metaphor once more and winces at the truth it hides.

He hears Je-Lana?-Jeanie?- suck in a breath on the other end. “Gosh. John. Any sign of, of-“ she begins to stammer, “of chut-“

-chutes, she’s going to say. John coughs loudly into the reviver and her voice trails off in recognition of his warning. “This was a mistake.” he decides, “I just -you can see why- I just thought I’d like to hear a-a-a voice, a-“

“A friend!” she replies eagerly, “I’m here, I’m here don’t go, not yet, not unless you have to, Major. Are you waiting? You’ll be wanting to get back, no? Or will you be staying on? In London?”

“I’m not staying.”

“Of course.” she whispers, “I’m so terribly, terribly sorry.”

His grip on the receiver has turned white. “No,” he decides, “I’m the one who’s sorry. Bringing this up, never even talked to you before and I go and make it this the call. Pretty girl like you doesn’t need this.”

“I told you to call.” she reminds him gently, “And Johnny, I’m ever so happy to hear your voice, I’ve imagined it a million times rereading your letters and looking at your photographs. I can concede that my imagination failed.”

“You reread them?” he is amused.

“Yes. Don’t you reread mine?”

“Mhmm you bet.”

“Gosh your voice gives me shivers.” she whispers into the phone and he feels an odd rising of the hair on the back of his neck. “Are you having to beat the London women off with a baseball bat?”

“I just let ‘em swarm.” he admits and she makes a noise of intrigue, “I was with a widow last night.” He blurts. “Polish. We watched the bombs from my hotel room.”

“How relaxing.” Without missing a beat Jeanie’s soft tease comes through, “Did the one balance the other for the nerves?”

“I’m dehydrated and hungover.”

“And grieving.” she adds.

That’s an unsayable. “I just needed to talk to someone.” he decides.

“Did she not speak English?”

He’s gone this far, he might as well be honest. “She didn’t know Buck.”

“Mm.” She makes a mournful noise of assent.

“I-I’m tryin’ not to do something stupid Jeanie,” he hates how his voice shakes but to her, it sounds more like rage than fear, “and I thought if I could hear your voice I’d -id get some peace. And wait for my ride without bustin’ up the Carleton.”

“Yes, I forbid you to bust up the Carleton without me, Major.” she warns and his pulse leaps at the simple direction, it’s a joke of course but it lodges heavy and wanted in his chest. “Promise me, Johnny, one day we’ll cause a great scandal there, you and I?”

“Miss Tierney,” he bites at his lip, “it’s a kindness for me not to make promises. To girls -to anybody.” She’s got to know that, she’s just being nice. “Especially not to special little ladies with nice long futures ahead of them.”

“It’s Turner, actually, Miss Turner if you’re going to be so formal.” She corrects, not a single part of her name Hollywood hasn’t meddled with. “But you must know, it’s far too late for that John. I miss you like mad.”

“We haven’t even met.” he reasons.

“What, and you don’t miss me?”

He curses under his breath fondly and shrugs. “I adore you.”

There’s a beat of silence in which he thinks he may have blown it by being so gushing but in fact, Jeanie finds herself milking her throat to dislodge the lump of painful glee settling there.

“Then you do whatever you have to, Bucky Egan,” she commands him, imperious but fervent, “you punch and get punched and drink as much as you need and bed as many girls as it takes and go after Buck-“

“-hold up, how’d you kn-“

“-but you come home. It’s much too late to tell me not to get my hopes up. You’re all I dream about anymore. There’s got to be some future for us, there’s got to be, Johnny, I’m not asking you to promise I’m asking you to try. Do what you’re good at.”

The pause is long and heavy and Bucky thinks he hears her sniffling on the other end. Unmoored by the unprecedented honesty he’s receiving and the juxtaposition of being someone’s risky bet for happiness when just this morning he’d come to resign himself to letting go what could only ever be a passing night's comfort- “Hell of a business.” he finds himself repeating.

“But you’re the best at it.” she retorts, “So stay the best.”

Everything certain, everything he thought was a given got blown to hell with Gale’s plane today. “Used to tell him if everybody else went down it’d be just him and me. I believed that.” He mumbles into the phone, turning to tuck his neck into the device like it’s the soft crook of her neck, “Now to be the best- that’s just me, and charred Europe under me and no one else in sight. That’s what you’re asking? ‘Cause that’s how this ends.”

The sun is shining bright and brutal in California, a cheery morning to mock her cocktail hangover and now she thinks it’s to hurt him as well, everything is so far removed an ocean away. Such bleakness is hard to even fathom for her, but the man she’s come to know, to love even, on paper is hoarsely spilling his guts to her over the phone and she’s not sure what one says to such a prediction. Her agent hovers in the doorway, the angry swats of her hand not sufficient to deter him from fretting with the press conference approaching. “So what, this is a suicide note?” she winces as soon as she says it but honesty has always been their currency.

“No.” he replies at long last and her shoulders sag. “I thought- i just wanted to hear your voice once before I go up again, Jeanie.”

“And I’m glad you called.” she swears, “And now I’ll have a voice to go with all the wicked things you do in my dreams.”

“Oh fu- Jeanie that’s unfair.” He balks and she grins at the little victory.

“Alls fair in love and war, Major.” She reminds, “Now tell me, do you want to tell me about him? Buck-“

“No, fuck no!” he hisses, angry at himself, “I wanted to talk to you to forget. I wanted to hear your voice.” He repeats it like an idiot.

“Then tell me,” she soothes, unphased by his outburst, “what would you like to hear in my voice, Major? The latest score? Perhaps the front page of the Times? They brought it in with my toast. Or some dirty line from one of your letters? I’ve got them here under one of Salinger’s books. They’re safe from the fiancé there, he’s a complete ignoramus with a phobia for learning.”

Bucky chuckles at her unabashed derision for her hotel scion intended and grins at the idea of her sleeping so near to his scrawled professions of lo- obsession at the very least.

Love is another unsayable.

“Just -tell me about your day, sweetheart?“ he begs, hoarse with the need to teleport elsewhere for the remaining forty minutes of his wait.

“If you’re sure.” she sounds only mildly skeptical, “It’s been very loungey, rather frilly.”

“Perfect.” he sighs, closing his eyes.

“Well, it’s actually morning here so I haven’t been up to much,” she begins and he feels guilty for just dialing away, damn the timezones, “I’ve not even dressed.”

“What color are you wearing?” he begs before he even realizes it.

“White.”

Hey sucks his teeth and nods approvingly. “White what?”

“A silk top and- no! Go away Herbert, for the last time!” Some interruption seems to occur on her end as a man’s voice comes through in snatches and Jeanie’s raised one drifts through the hand she’s cupped over the receiver, “Herbert, for the love of God, I am talking to one of the men protecting our country, the reporters can wait!”

Jeanie’s snappy loyalty soothes some raw edge he’s felt since watching *her* leave this morning without more than a kiss. “Reporters, huh?” he sympathizes, fully ready to give her an out.

“You’d think they’d have enough to report, there’s a war on.” she seethes and he has to smile again, “Anway, where were we? Oh, my pajama shorts.”

“White.”

“Yes Johnny, white.”

“Send me a picture?”

“Awfully demanding for a man who hasn’t even promised me he’ll try to live and see them in person.”

John puffs out a laugh at being snared so easily. “Alright, I’ll try.”

“Promise?” Her voice sounds so small.

“I promise.” He’s dazed by the shift, how did he end up being the one begged by Miss Hollywood herself? Perhaps he’s still drunker than he thought.

“It’s all any of us can do, Johnny,” she says, “but we’ve gotta try. You got your pinky up?”

“What?”

“For your oath- pinky swear.”

“You're not even here.” he laughs.

“I’ve got mine crooked, come on Major, meet me halfway.”

And so John Egan finds himself sporting a watery, helpless grin as he lifts his finger into thin air and crooks it around her imaginary little digit. Her sigh sounds as if she can feel it a ocean away. Perhaps he’s gone fully looney in the way he thinks he can, too.

He doubts she’ll appreciate his choices in the next few weeks, maybe even doubt his intention to keep his oath, but what matters is he’s going to try. Even if it’s an angry, furious, blind sort of determination, it keeps him firmly out of the London bus lane until Hobbs and his transport arrive and then it’s goodbye Jean Turner, hello again Thorpe Abbots.

Taglist: (I’m sorry for tagging y’all twice in a single day, oops)

@stylespresleyhearted

@ab4eva

@earth-to-lottie

@suraemoon

@blurredcolour

@steph-speaks

@crazymadpassionatelove

@rubyfruitjungle

@taestrwbrry

#mota fic #mota fanfic #masters of the air fanfiction #john egan #archive #mine #Dear John

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odinsblog · 1 month

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We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.

“It’s not the first time Ukraine has been the object of fascist war. The conquest of the country was Hitler’s main war aim in 1941. Hitler thought that the Soviet Union, which then ruled Ukraine, was a Jewish state: He planned to replace Soviet rule with his own and claim Ukraine’s fertile agricultural soil. The Soviet Union would be starved, and Germany would become an empire. He imagined that this would be easy because the Soviet Union, to his mind, was an artificial creation and the Ukrainians a colonial people.

The similarities to Mr. Putin’s war are striking. The Kremlin defines Ukraine as an artificial state, whose Jewish president proves it cannot be real. After the elimination of a small elite, the thinking goes, the inchoate masses would happily accept Russian dominion. Today it is Russia that is denying Ukrainian food to the world, threatening famine in the global south.”

“… In 1939, the Soviet Union joined Nazi Germany as a de facto ally, and the two powers invaded Poland together. Nazi speeches were reprinted in the Soviet press and Nazi officers admired Soviet efficiency in mass deportations.

But Russians today do not speak of this fact, since memory laws make it a crime to do so. World War II is an element of Mr. Putin’s ahistorical myth of Russian innocence and lost greatness — Russia must enjoy a monopoly on victimhood and on victory. The basic fact that Stalin enabled World War II by allying with Hitler must be unsayable and unthinkable.”

(continue reading)

#politics #ukraine #russia #russian invasion of ukraine #russia is a terrorist state #authoritarian dictatorships #russian colonialism #russian imperialism #neo fascism #russian fascism ☭#vladimir putin is a war criminal

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mariacallous · 4 months

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‘I don’t like it when a comedian just spouts his own political views and relies on the audience agreeing with him to get a round of applause,’ announces Ricky Gervais in his new Netflix Special Armageddon. For 60-minutes Gervais, clad in his usual black t-shirt and jeans get-up, tells jokes about dwarfs, gay people, ‘disabled creatures’, African babies with AIDs, Chinese people eating dogs, people pretending to be asylum seekers, people pretending to have ADHD, students taking micky mouse degrees, Greta Thunberg, homeless people (‘fucking horrible’) and the fragile and narcissistic ‘woke’ youth. Which is to say that Gervais just spouts his own political views and relies on the audience agreeing with him to get a round of applause.

Gervais’s portrayal of David Brent in mockumentary The Office (2002) was a work of comic genius. Brent, a hapless white-collar middle manager who desperately wants to be popular, cuts a pathetic but ultimately sympathetic figure. The viewer didn’t so much hate Brent as feel sorry for him; he was an uncalibrated fool but a well meaning one, hence the happy ending written for him in the Christmas Specials that brought the curtain down on the story in 2003. Gervais foolishly resurrected Brent in 2016 for a feature length spin-off, Life on the Road (2016), this time without the grounding influence of his original co-writer on The Office Stephen Merchant. All of a sudden the charm had gone out of the franchise and Brent had morphed into something genuinely tragic and repulsive, trucking in boring jokes about gays and fat people.

Expressing any form of reservation or note of disapproval about anti-woke comedy nowadays is to get oneself marked down as an invertebrate. For those of us who possess a strong enough constitution to sit through jokes that poke fun at the shibboleths of political correctness - provided they are actually funny - retorts like this don’t hold much water. But I’ve come to realise that such humour is increasingly sustained by a section of the audience being reliably ‘offended’ by it and kicking off. How else to keep the lucrative conceit going which says that rich middle aged white men telling rollicking jokes about asylum seekers are heroic truth-tellers saying the unsayable? These days Gervais’s adoring fanbase seem more enthusiastic at the prospect of upsetting their political opponents than about the material itself. And who could blame them: most of the jokes in Armageddon are hackneyed and stale - ‘Doctor, Doctor, I keep thinking I’m a pair of curtains’; ‘You are then’. Heady stuff that is indeed guaranteed to ‘annoy all the right people’.

Netflix describes Armageddon as ‘controversial takes on political correctness and oversensitivity in a taboo-busting comedy special about the end of humanity’. Yet those on the receiving end of Gervais’s barbs are hardly considered off limits by the wider culture: illegal immigrants, the homeless and transgender people are all regularly subjected to invective from government politicians and Britain’s overwhelmingly right-wing media. By all means make an off-colour joke about those groups if you wish: I’m a big boy and I know how to use the remote control. But you won’t convince me that publicly flogging these tabloid bête noires makes one a gutsy truth teller. It’s true that a disability charity condemned Armageddon before it was released on Christmas Day for a joke Gervais makes about terminally ill children. But it’s also true that Gervais is still on Netflix telling the joke, which perhaps gives a good indication of just how risqué this style of humour really is.

One of the biggest cheers from the audience during Gervais’s performance in Armageddon erupts in response to a fatuous joke about mobs pulling down statues originally put up to honour slave traders - another example of woke hypocrisy apparently. ‘He was a slave trader, pull down the fucking statue.’ ‘He built the hospital, should we pull that down too?’ ‘No, leave the hospital’. It’s certainly true that wealthy people have historically (and not just historically) tried to launder their reputations through philanthropy (and on this note Gervais enjoys boasting about how wealthy he is and how much money he donates to animals, who he prefers to humans). But you needn’t take a course in critical race theory to recognise that those who became uncontrollably rich from the slave trade might have set aside some of their tainted money for similar ends. ‘Pride and vanity have built more hospitals than all the virtues together,’ wrote the Dutch physician Bernard de Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees, his eighteenth century polemic against philanthropic hypocrisy.

It isn’t for me to tell a comedian who the ‘correct’ target of his humour ought to be - comedy is subjective after all. But then Gervais’s current shtick is of a piece with right-wing populism more generally, characterised as it is by a servility to the very power it ostensibly rails against. I’m no more required to accept Gervais’s assessment of himself as a brave heretic saying the unsayable than I am obliged to join in with the hysterical blue pencil-wielding critics who really do want to see him cancelled. As to who is currently coming out on top, Armageddon is apparently the highest grossing single stand-up performance ever, bringing in £1,410,000 for a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. Cancel culture indeed.

At one time conservatives and reactionaries would doggedly stand athwart history yelling Stop. Nowadays they need constant reassurance that they are still the plucky countercultural underdogs they imagined themselves to be in the halcyon days of their youth. Which is understandable I suppose. Nobody wants to be the angry young man whose waistband has inexorably expanded along with his list of blimpish grievances. ‘I think I am woke, but I think that word has changed,’ says Gervais. In other words it’s not him, it’s us. ‘No-one likes a white middle aged man anymore,’ laments Gervais at another point in the show. I’ve heard that one before too.

I used to enjoy Ricky Gervais but when I think of him today I always imagine some braying face demanding to know how ‘triggered’ I am by something puerile he’s said. This ‘type’ is seemingly ubiquitous at the moment: everything is geared toward getting a rise out of the libs and sticking it to the man in a way that doesn’t threaten one’s status as a servant of power (am I still allowed to say “man”? hehe - you get the gist).

The role of humour according to Gervais is ‘to laugh at bad shit to get us through it’. Which isn’t a terrible definition, though I suppose it depends on what one considers the ‘bad shit’ to be. I found much of the material in Armageddon indistinguishable from the endless bleating we hear in some quarters about the country going to the dawgs because of foreigners and queers and the young with their trendy ailments and political correctness et cetera. I can’t say I feel hysterical or offended by jokes about that stuff - soporific is more the word that springs to mind. Perhaps I should just be grateful that Gervais didn’t make an ‘Orange man bad’ joke. Maybe he’s saving those gags for his next Netflix Special when Donald Trump is President of the United States again. Important to laugh at the truly bad shit first though right.

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justforbooks · 2 months

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Phil Baines, who has died aged 65 of multiple system atrophy, was one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British graphic design. His work included books, posters, art catalogues and lettering for three important London monuments – the memorial to the Indian Ocean tsunami in the grounds of the Natural History Museum and the 7 July memorials in Hyde Park and Tavistock Square, commemorating the victims of the 2005 London bombings. These projects point to Baines’s defining attributes: a scholarly appreciation of letterforms, a deep-rooted respect for materials and a love of collaboration.

Such attributes can also be seen in Baines’s cover designs for the Penguin Great Ideas series (2004-20), works by “great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries” that gave him a canvas on which to display his typographic philosophy. The Saint Augustine – Confessions of a Sinner cover, for instance, uses ancient ecclesiastical letterforms and yet looks superbly modern. For Chuang Tzu — The Tao of Nature, Baines arranged letters to suggest a butterfly in flight. David Pearson, one of two art directors for the series, described how his “often-oblique approach gave the series a crucial added dimension”.

Born in Kendal, Cumbria, Phil was one of the three children of Martin Baines, a construction contract manager, and Joan (nee Quarmby), a horticulturalist. Growing up in a Roman Catholic household, he began studies for the priesthood at Ushaw College, County Durham. During the holidays from Ushaw he worked at the Guild of Lakeland Craftsmen, Windermere, and from there his interest and confidence in art grew.

At the start of his fourth year, he quit Ushaw, and in 1980 began a year’s study on the foundation course at Cumbria College of Art and Design. In 1982 he moved to London and enrolled on the graphic design course at St Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins), where he met Jackie Warner, whom he married in 1989, and where he was among a talented cohort, many of whom went on to study, as he did, at the Royal College of Art.

Richard Doust, then leader of the first-year course at St Martins, recalled the portfolio Baines submitted for admission: “I was so excited … I was sure he was going to be someone very special. He quickly established his individuality. He made typography and particularly letterpress his own territory.”

Baines was fiercely individual – he did not join schools of thought or align himself with fashionable camps. Instead, he built a creative practice based on his belief in the “humanist” qualities of the English typographic tradition.

His contemporaries were using the computer to bring a new complexity to graphic communication. Smart software allowed for the overlapping and interweaving of text in ways that echoed the ecclesiastical manuscripts that Baines admired so much. He was no Luddite, and used the computer himself, yet his work invariably retained an element of the handmade.

Paradoxically, his work was greatly admired by the new generation of digital designers. Neville Brody, for instance, included Baines’s work in his experimental typography publication FUSE, produced to demonstrate the malleability of the new digital typography. Baines’s work does not look out of place among the other contributors, many of them American typography radicals whose multi-layered layouts were driven by modish theories of deconstruction and poststructuralism.

In 1988 he returned to Central Saint Martins (CSM), as part of the faculty. In staff meetings his willingness to say the unsayable was a frequent cause for consternation among colleagues. To his students he preached a doctrine of “object-based learning”, a typically contrarian notion in the age of screen-based and virtual graphic design. He was appointed a professor in 2006 and retired in 2020 as emeritus professor.

Despite his commitment to teaching, Baines did not give up his work for clients. As well as designing books for leading publishers, he worked for the Crafts Council and the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, and designed the signage for CSM’s King’s Cross campus. He designed exhibition catalogues for Matt’s Gallery, south-west London, relishing the creative three-way collaboration that existed between the gallery’s director, Robin Klassnik, exhibiting artists and himself.

He wrote books that contributed to the understanding of visual communication: Type & Typography (with Andrew Haslam, 2002), Signs: Lettering in the Environment (with Catherine Dixon, 2003) and Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 (2005), the last of which helped establish Penguin cover art as one of the most important bodies of graphic art in British design history.

With Dixon, he co-curated the Central Lettering Record, an archive of typographic history housed at CSM, and in November 2023 his work was celebrated in an exhibition, Extol: Phil Baines Celebrating Letters, at the Lethaby gallery, CSM. He was appointed as the Royal Mint advisory committee’s lettering expert in 2016, and reappointed in 2021 to advise on the integration of lettering on new coins and medals, with consideration given to special issues and the accession of King Charles to the throne. For this work, in 2023 he was awarded the Coronation medal.

Baines was an enthusiastic runner and cyclist, and loved music, especially the Manchester post-punk band the Fall. He was a collector of signs, lettering, and railwayana, and built his own studios at his home in Willesden Green, north-west London. A few years before his retirement he moved to Great Paxton, Cambridgeshire, where he took up bellringing.

He is survived by Jackie and their two daughters, Beth and Felicity, and by his father.

🔔 Philip Andrew Baines, graphic designer, born 8 December 1958; died 19 December 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #Phil Baines #in memoriam

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maybuds · 1 year

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Sorry to ask but why do people hate rupi and other insta poets? Not hating just very confused. Is it bad writing?

hi! i don’t hate rupi kaur either, mostly i just don’t really care about her lol, but yes, it is bad writing. i think this post articulates it better than i can. most instagram poets write the same way.

poetry is supposed to be an experience through language that is worked/bent/reconfigured to break from the default comprehension of something, and trying to get across the unsayable as close as possible so that as you read the poem, your mind—much like if you were experiencing something physically, whether it’s as ordinary as walking through an alley on the way home, or as whack as fighting with someone—goes through something that can’t be explained if the language used wasn’t worked/bent/reconfigured like that. and that’s where subjectivity lies—in how you experienced the poem. it’s kind of like when you’re in a dream, and you wake up and think nothing was rational in that dream, but subconsciously it made so much sense, and it left something deeper than you can explain—but it only makes sense to you because of how personal it was.

i’m sure others will say it’s not the same for everyone, but poetry is definitely not ‘if i enter-enter this content and put it on white background, voila, i made a poem.’ with rupi kaur and ig poetry, you could post them on the subway walls and it would still feel like an advertisement to something. it’s banal and so stuck on the need to be relatable, consumable. it’s adspeak.

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poems-from-around-the-world · 11 months

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Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness - Franny Choi - USA

Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. I want an excuse to change my life.

The day A. died, the sun was brighter than any sun. I answered the phone, and a channel opened between my stupid head and heaven, or what was left of it. The blankness stared back; and I made sound after sound with my blood-wet gullet. O unsayable—O tender and divine unsayable, I knew you then: you line straight to the planet’s calamitous core; you moment moment moment; you intimate abyss I called sister for a good reason.

When the Bad Thing happened, I saw every blade. And every year I find out what they’ve done to us, I shed another skin. I get closer to open air; true north.

Lord, if I say Bless the cold water you throw on my face, does that make me a costume party. Am I greedy for comfort if I ask you not to kill my friends; if I beg you to press your heel against my throat—not enough to ruin me, but just so—just so I can almost see your face—

#catastrophe is next to godliness #franny choi #usa #united states of america #poem #poetry #poems from around the world

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just-wublrful · 1 year

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predestination

Ferris Wheel at the World's Fair, Gregory Orr | A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on its Way to the Neck, Ilya Kaminsky | Certain Magical Acts, Alice Notley | Falling Up, Will Wood | Catastrophe is Next to Godliness, Franny Choi | La mano destra che sa cosa fa la sinistra (2011), Giovanni Gasparo | Moby Dick, Herman Melville | Catastrophe is Next to Godliness, Franny Choi | No Evil Stars, Lynn Crosbie | & O, bright star of disaster, I have been lit, Franny Choi | Half-Hanged Mary, Margaret Atwood | Bluets, Maggie Nelson | Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect, The Decemberists

[ID under the read more!]

[ID: An assortment of quotes and images from various sources.

1. Fortune has a zero for a heart - defend / Against Her, whose wheel is noose and snare.

2. At the trial of God we will ask: why did you allow all this? /And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?

3. I’m so sticky with Fate that I can hardly move for fear of it. / Maybe the point is that you can always see or feel it coming. / The beginning and the unraveling at the same time.

4. Cut ties, shed the dead weight / I ain’t saying it’s fate, but there are no mistakes and

5. When the Bad Thing happened, I saw every blade. /And every year I find out what they’ve done to us, I shed another skin. / I get closer to open air; true north.

6. A painting of eight hands splayed in various poses against a black background, tangled together in string as if controlling a puppet.

7. tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

8. O unsayable—O tender and divine unsayable, I knew you then: / you line straight to the planet’s calamitous core; you moment moment moment; / you intimate abyss I called sister for a good reason.

9. “I sleep more and more and in my dreams God says, ‘You’re done for’ and ‘It only gets worse’.”

10. fleshy marionette in the window, dancing / her awful, crooked dance. & isn’t that // what you paid for? isn’t that what you came / to see? a god, on loop, failing?

11. Well God, now that I’m up here / with maybe some time to kill / away from the daily / fingerwork, legwork, work / at the hen level, / we can continue our quarrel, / the one about free will. // Is it my choice that I’m dangling / like a turkey’s wattles from this / more than indifferent tree? / If Nature is Your alphabet, / what letter is this rope?

12. 220. Imagine someone saying, “Our fundamental situation is joyful.” Now imagine believing it. / 221. Or forget belief: imagine feeling, even if for a moment, that it were true.

13. And try one, and try two / I guess it always comes down to / Alright, it's okay / Guess it's better to turn this way. End ID.]

#paranoia inducing #tw religion #religion #woe be upon ye #long post #webweaving #web weave #please ask if you need anything tagged!! this is a very intense one and i dont mean to upset anybody #wubweaving

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theprissythumbelina · 3 months

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Creating art for other people is so different from creating art for me. My student is graduating soon so I'm painting her a tiny ornament to look like her horse, and I painted my dad a picture of our old lab mix, and for both of these these is something special happening as I work on them. Normally, I don't really care about my art when I finish it. The important part to me was the act of creating. But these two already don't belong to me, and that makes me care more. Its like I am trying to put everything unsayable into them. Like I can give them a piece of art that says "This is everything. This is what you mean to me. No one else would ever have this."

#very strange experience #and this is why I can never do commissions #I couldn't sell my babies off to someone I never met #I'll sell this canvas I smacked some paint around on sure #not writing #but art related

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hannibal-confessions-nbc · 7 months

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Saying Hannibal didn't care about Abigail is not an unpopular opinion it's MASSIVELY popular and when people act like they're saying an unsayable truth or something it really grinds my gears. Like Hannibal didn't kill Abigail even though she re-opened the investigation into the Copy Cat by digging up Nicholas Boyle - compare that to him trying to kill Bedelia immediately after she terminated their psychiatrist patient relationship. He said she reminded him of Mischa. And he thinks about her in prison. I remember Mads said Hannibal likes everyone he appears to like so I think he did care

Fair. But the difference between Abigail and Bedelia is their connection to Will, or rather Will's connection to them. Makes sense though anon 💯

#hannibal confessions #will graham #bedelia du maurier #abigail hobbs #hannibal #hannibal nbc #nbc hannibal #trying to see it from both sides. not dissing you anon. you're quite reasonable.

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lisztcmania · 11 months

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My heart is waking up and for the first time in a long time I feel alive. A week ago my bestfriend for 2 years became my girlfriend. She is as radiant and lovely as she always was and more, and I am fumbling and tripping over every puddle I find myself in (the contrast, in my head, is quite funny). I’d be lying if I said the prospect of change doesn’t continue to scare me everyday. Even though I laid out all my cards to her and pulled out every disclaimer I could think of about how I’m absolutely going to be very much the same genre of person (this is because I am ace, continuously figuring things out about myself, and awkward), I am beginning to think there’s so much more to me and so much more to us than I’ve ever thought. I’m less scared of the change in our dynamic, more scared of the change in me. I find the need to channel every bit of limited, fair weather, literary power I have to accurately display every shapeless, complicated, complex, feeling I have about the urge to shout to everyone I have a girlfriend and she is amazing despite me being the most rigid, simple and lame person known to man. Hence, making this post.

I am actively dealing with change by fully embodying the change. What that means for me is choosing the mortifyingly vulnerable path to resemble being alive. I’ve learned that running from it has caused me to be dissociative, so, I won’t shield myself from all of that anymore in the hopes I get to at least be in my body when I’m experiencing devastating, wonderful things. My girlfriend is open, cheesy, affectionate in all the ways I lack and severely want. So I’ll try to one-up her by being embarrassing, honest, and openly affectionate in the only way I know how --through writing.

Where the faulted normalcy of my outer shell fails, the commended silliness of my literary inner being succeeds at. All of that is proven in every lyric and poem I’ve written and lied to her about and said they were about general concepts when really they were all about her. In every song I sent spewing blabbery analyses and media parallelism when in reality they only reminded me of her. In every info dump I do when we talk about media that made me vulnerable, that really just meant I trusted her with every bit of me, hear me, see me, I adore you. In every time she’d lay her head on my shoulder and her breathing sounded like waves crashing to the shore, back and forth. In every time I allowed myself to feel so much for her and my words fail to give something unsayable, I compare the feeling to a cliff dive to the sea --and how I wish I could tell my hesitant self that you did it, it’s fine, the water is radiant and warm and it glows when you’re around.

You’re alive but you’re terrified, for how can someone who used to be so desperate to pushing down the heart ever feel like there’s something beating at all? There is no reference point. The beating feels alien and it doesn’t feel normal...until ultimately, with patience, it does. Until it feels familiar. Until it feels welcoming and captivating and all I want is to chase it even if it means embarrassing myself in front of my girlfriend and whoever is reading this. This is my gift to her, this is my gift to the version of me who has it a bit more figured out than I do now.

May you be as silly, as serious, as passionate, as cheesy, as bold and as silent in power.

And to her, I love you very much and you know this already because I tell you every time you tell me. This is the least I could say as the unsayable amalgamation of what I feel. I want to give you the world. This is the new, innate thing that has awakened along with my heart. It’s all for you and me to share.

#personal

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huayno · 1 year

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i get that if you take all the magic literally there's not much to "solve" so beatrice must be using metaphor but i hate doubting beatrice and i hate doubting maria. look at how they're hurt when you don't believe them!

then again i suppose the purpose of those metaphors is also to say the unsayable. that's why the choice is between accepting the witch and accepting the violence of the ushiromiya household. battler claims to want the truth but he will refuse it because it causes him pain. that's why the witch exists.

is accepting the metaphor really a sign of respect? is it fairer to maria to say her mother gets taken over by an evil witch, then to say rosa is abusing her? is it fairer to beatrice to say that kinzo repeatedly traps her in human flesh, rather than accept the fact of the rape and incest that battler stops short of naming?

the repeated games where everyone dies under different circumstances and in a different order also shows how unimportant the particular culprits are in any iteration. it could be any one of them. because it's a brutal family that literally "begets" violence, everyone hurting and trying to console themselves by hurting someone weaker.

so of course beatrice is one of the family, in multiple senses.

#umineko spoilers

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revddan · 6 months

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Parihaka Day

At this week's service, we commemorate Parihaka Day. At Parihaka, Tohu Kākahi & Te Whiti o Rongomai built a model community and fostered a nonviolent resistance movement against the unjust confiscation (stealing) of Māori land. Their mahi (work) led to conflict with the colonial government. On November 5th, 1881, armed constabulary invaded Parihaka, decimated the community, arrested Tohu and Te Whiti, and imprisoned them (along with many other ploughmen) without trial. Look at this short video about Tohu and Te Whiti and the invasion of Parihaka on November 5th, 1881: The invasion of Parihaka and why it needs to be remembered.

As we remember Parihaka, we might ask ourselves why. Why do we recall and lament the brutal attack on Parihaka? Lament is an oft-ignored practice in the church. We live in a culture that wants to avoid pain at all costs, to not engage in what's difficult, to push it to the side. The comment, "oh, that happened in the past, we just need to get over it," seems (at least to me) an act of avoidance and, more precisely, a way to dodge doing the hard work of engaging with our preconceived ideas, personal biases, and unwillingness to change. Lament can be a vital way to pry the door open, confront ourselves and injustice, and start a journey toward healing, wholeness, and life.

Lament is an opportunity to bring before God all that is not right with the world, where we have failed, and where we need God to enter and bring justice, reconciliation, and peace within ourselves, with our neighbours and on the land.

Lament is a profoundly biblical practice. The cries of the ancient Hebrew people living under the tyranny of Egypt (Exodus), Psalms, Lamentations, and Jesus' prayer in the garden of Gethsemane are all examples of lament. They are honest, raw, heartfelt cries to God for deliverance and justice. I love what Barbra A. Holmes says about lament (she is particularly talking about communal lament):

Lament is risky speech. It's risky because it challenges power structures, calls for justice, and makes demands on our relationships with "the powers that be," one another, and God. Lament allows the pain to escape and stitches us to our neighbours. God calls us to weep with those who weep. Lament gives us back our voice; it helps us say the unsayable. Lament is a collective response to tyranny and injustice. Lament is work that prepares us for action and resistance. It's art that heals our weary souls (Crisis Contemplation, pg. 96-96). Lament is a gateway to newness.

So, why do we remember? We remember, and we lament because in doing so, we challenge the arrangements of the world, give voice to our pain, call God into the situation(s), and make room for God to enter and, maybe just maybe, for God to act in ways that bring healing and wholeness to us and for us, individually and collective.

As we remember Parihaka and lament our church's complicity in the carnage there, may God challenge us and inspire us in our work of justice and peace. May the past events not define us but instead catalyse us into people who, without fear and guilt, confront the biases and prejudices in ourselves (I have heaps), church, and community and work to build a better future for our kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids in the years to come.

Peace.

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God of peace and justice, you called Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi to lead their people to struggle for justice by peaceful means; may we defend the rights of the powerless and build our communities based on mutual care and love; through Jesus Christ, the prince of peace. Amen (For All the Saint, Vol. 2, pg. 787).

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