It’s Fine Press Friday!
Today we’re taking a closer look at some of Indianapolis-based artist Carl Pope’s (b. 1961 ) work—a portfolio of broadsides produced for the installation series The Bad Air Smelled of Roses. The edition in our collection consists of 71 letterpress prints of varying dimensions (all around 56 x 36 cm) produced with wood type at York Show Prints in York, Alabama (formerly run by Amos Paul Kennedy, whose works are also represented in our collection) and Tribune Showprint in Earl Park, Indiana (“the oldest continuously operating letterpress shop in the country”) on poster and chip board between 2004-2005, nearly all of which are signed by the artist.
Pope characterizes the work, which has grown since its original iteration to include 108 posters, as “an ongoing essay about the presence and function of Blackness in society” and an exploration of the "various psychological and emotional states like forgetfulness, insanity, alienation" associated with "the poetics of Blackness." He chose to present a selection of texts drawn from a variety of sources including “modern Black literature, René Descartes, jazz and rap music, Sigmund Freud, Malcolm X, Dolly Parton, movie dialogue from Casablanca and The Matrix...” in letterpress print form because of the medium’s historical associations with marketing and political activism.
When installed in the rarified context of an art gallery or museum, as this series has now been exhibited on numerous occasions, the commercial qualities of Pope’s posters incite a productive slippage in our assumptions around high and low culture. As he puts it in a 2018 interview with Hyperallergic, “I don’t see culture as the production of beautiful paintings and works of art, you know, although culture includes that. For me the production of progressive culture is the collaborative practice with myself and other people in the world of ideals, to create and to advance human evolution... I’m not interested in using art as a tool for cultural imperialism.”
View more Fine Press Friday posts.
View Amos Paul Kennedy posts.
View more letterpress posts.
View more wood type posts.
– Ana, Special Collections Graduate Fieldworker
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JASON VORHEES (friday the 13th 2009)
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“Pretty Pastels & Marajuana Leaves” (Jason Vorhees x Fem!Reader)
| Walking with Jason as he gathers up (and adds to) all the dead bodies from the last group of victims unlucky enough to encroach on Crystal Lake.
| SFW, depictions of killing and dead bodies, reader is being held captive, post-movie -callous!reader
| Pic Source: Friday The 13th 2009
| 2k+ words
The trees on the campgrounds always seemed oddly unbothered despite whatever blood had fertilized the soil the night prior. It was as if over all the years of bloodshed the nature around it had adapted to derive nutrients from carnage.
Most days it certainly felt like blood hit the ground more so than it rained.
Today the sun was blazing even at eight in the morning, gearing up to be just as cruel and scorching as the revenant that watched over Crystal Lake every second of every hour.
Weeks ago when you and your friends had first set up camp here, so sure the lake’s protector was nothing but a ghost story, you hadn’t known just how much your life would change.
Beside you Jason, nearly blocking out the light from your left, leads the way. He’d only just dragged you around while he did his usual disposal rounds and picked up all the bodies to burn all at once in a massive pit you’d watched him dig; the usual drill.
You hadn’t been with this group of unlucky visitors this time around but you’d met one of them. Clay, looking for the woman you knew Jason had below the cabin; the guy's sister.
You’d give the girl one thing, she’d been trouble and it’d been a miracle when during her escape attempt none of them had stumbled across where Jason usually kept you. A happenstance you still weren’t sure how to feel about.
Regardless, there was certainly no running away for you now. Not only had Jason kept one survivor this time, he’d kept two, and one of them he’s seemingly still hellbent on keeping. In some way at least. You don’t feel particularly positive about Whitney’s chances, and you know after witnessing the rage Jason was thrown into after coming to retrieve you sopping wet and with a fancy new hockey mask later in the day than usual that Clay was even more doomed.
You sigh. The flowers are a nice view at least. They bloomed in grand hues of pastels with a freedom you’d probably never have again amongst the vibrant green grass. The ground is dewy, you’re wearing some victims boots from months ago as you traverse beside your captor, however unconventional of one he was.
Your steps squelch as you come up on a sea of marijuana. Green and thinly clover shaped as they were, you recognized them instantly.
Fun. You think, almost hysterically. Someone must have died for weed.
You smile. Of all the things.
The tall grasses have collected water during the downpour, as Mother Nature did Jason the favor of washing away all his sins, and droplets lightly dampen your pants as the greenery slashes at your legs.
For at least the fifth time since you started your treck Jason bends over in the grass. Behind his bulk you can’t begin to see what he’s doing but so long as he doesn’t make any sudden movements towards you you’re not gonna worry about it.
You hated when he brought you outside more than anything. The sheer malice of the illusion of freedom hurt too much. For as sweetly as he handles you - about as sweetly as you imagine he can at all - none of it could make you forget how brutally he’d slashed his way through your friends. You had zero idea why he’d spared you specifically, whether for amusement or companionship or what but you did know that you were still alive, and that unlike the other woman he’d taken captive he carted you around with him everywhere so long as visitors weren’t around.
The two of you stop outside the boat shack and the lake air sticks as insistently in the back of your throat as the mint leaves Jason makes you chew.
Jason opens the door for you but not before one huge arm swings into your chest. His touch is relatively gentle, you only jolt from it at all because you’d already been walking forward.
It’s a small bouquet of wildflowers that meets your gaze when you look down. You inhale softly.
“U-uh,” you try, voice scratchy from disuse. You clear your throat, “Tha-nks?”
Shaky hands reach up to accept the gift and with the assortment safely clasped in your hold you try speaking again.
“Thank you, Jason.”
The way you speak is nearly a whisper but Jason clearly hears you anyway if the way he vaguely puffs up and nearly carries you into the shack himself is any indication.
After that the route you take to the dugout is familiar; you don’t have to pay much attention to where you’re going. Jason’s steps are sure and heavy bouncing off the walls of the dugout, your own steps not even registering as you follow closely behind him while using the light from his lantern to more closely examine the “bouquet” he’s given you.
Calling it a bouquet at all was incredibly generous but you wouldn’t deny that an attempt had been made to make it look more impressive. A silk ribbon tied into a crude bow holds all of the stems together and some of the flowers weren’t from the field you’d walked through earlier either and the pastel colors of every flower were a stark contrast to the grungy look of the dirt walls around you. For now you’d take the gesture for what it was, but no matter how much you acted like it you were in no way content here, just biding your time.
The closer y’all get to Jason’s other captives the louder the sounds of struggle and vague whimpers get. Something in you should feel bad for them, you know that, but they’d had their shot and squandered the fuck out of it for everyone else involved including you. From what Jason had done his best to convey to you yesterday and the context clues you’d picked up on by yourself Clay and Whitney had drowned and maybe tried to strangle Jason but had stayed around to reminisce or some shit like a bunch of idiots and now here you all were.
Immediately upon seeing Jason Clay starts up a barrage of yelling. None of which Jason truly reacts to. The killer’s irritated, you can tell as much with how jerky his movements have gotten, but that’s about it. Clay’s wasting his breath.
It takes both of them a while to catch sight of you, hidden behind Jason’s back as you are, until he moves to gather up a bunch of rope he’s collected off to the side. It opens you up to the siblings fully and they stare at you confused.
Clay is still huffing angrily from earlier and even as he turns furrowed brows your way it’s Whitney who finds her voice first.
“What, are you helping him?”
Her voice is tinged with disbelief and your hands clench over your flowers.
Despite everything bleak and unsettling about your current predicament you find yourself laughing. It’s short, a little mean even.
“Does he look like he needs my help?”
No immediate retort. Clay’s eyes narrow.
“Wait, I know you,” he says. He shifts, chains rattling, “You were in the woods. You said you were staying in a ‘neighboring cabin’. I asked you about Whitney and you said you’d never seen her.”
As he talks he gets more and more incensed, pulling against his restraints like a madman. Jason remains unbothered by the commotion though so you make a point to not back away from Clay and his thrashing.
“You’re a monster,” Clay finishes. You don’t bother doing anything more than raising an eyebrow. You weren’t any Mother Teresa, you knew that, but even Mother Teresa didn’t live up to the myth of her own virtue so you’d live. You were surviving, if that made you a monster then so be it.
Jason turns back around, sheathed machete pulling off the impossible and managing to glint under the murky lighting, and Whitney turns wet pleading eyes your way.
‘Help us,’ she mouths, and even accompanied with Clay’s smoldering gaze over her shoulder you’re not swayed.
Help them with what plan? Get yourself killed trying to fight a behemoth of a man so they could get away more likely.
You scoff. Please.
When Jason hands you one end of the bundle of rope you don’t hesitate to shift your little bundle of pastels to one hand to grab it with your now free one. He ties clay up easily, brushing off his thrashing like a mom would to a curious baby getting its diaper changed, and throws the man over his shoulder to haul to the surface.
When Whitney pleads aloud at you for a second time to do something while they’re gone you ask her straight up what her plan is and when she comes up mum you shrug plainly.
“Then no,” you murmur, and she spits in your face.
You sigh, wipe the saliva off from where it landed under your chin, delicately stuff the bouquet flower-side up into the front of your overall pocket, and move to grab the two cinder blocks Jason had indicated before leaving.
If Jason was willing to kill her after going out of his way to kidnap her after she’d tried to escape only once - someone who looked nearly the splitting image of his own mother - you weren’t willing to take any chances and get yourself murdered too. Plus, black as you were, you weren’t passing for this man’s mother worth a damn; appealing to his longing for a long dead maternal figure wasn’t an option for you.
Carrying the blocks make your arms ache and the concrete scratches unpleasantly at your skin but when Jason descends to haul Whitney topside after her brother you soldier on quietly.
When Jason situates brother and sister across from one another on the damp ground near the lake you stay just as silent.
When he ties the the blocks to Clay’s bound body and basically presents him to Whitney like a prized pony your lips stay locked, and when he sets him down in front of her - so close they’re breathing the same air - and poises his machete like an executioner’s sword you don’t let the scream rip from your throat no matter how much you want to match Whitney’s mournful pitch and Clay’s desperate incoherent yelling.
The blade slices clean through Whitney’s neck, cutting off her voice with a sick gurgle. Blood spurts like a fountain from her headless body onto Clay’s face and you don’t do anything but stand stiff like you always do, hell bent on not being next, as he sputters and chokes on the endless gush of her lifeblood.
Her blood hasn’t stopped gushing even as her dead body falls forward into her brother. Tied up as he is Clay can’t begin to catch her and he certainly can’t keep his tentative balance himself either and they both go toppling to the ground.
In contrast Whitney’s head has long since rolled closer to your frozen form and you blink rapidly down at the terrified open mouthed expression forever etched onto her face.
The next breath you take feels like breathing through a straw and that lake air sticks down the column of your throat like dew drops.
Clay’s still yelling, but the blood and wet muddy earth lodged up his throat makes them come out more like low grunts and squeals. A pig to be slaughtered.
The desperate sympathetic gasp you let in barely makes a sound and your hands begin to tremble as Jason stomps over with more rope.
You bite back a whimper as he ties brother and sister together, uncaring of Clay’s begging him not to, then drags them off to the lake.
After that Jason drops Clay in with little fanfare. When next he ambles closer to you, flayed head in hand and large sprays of blood and splashes of water soaking his front, and leans over to press a masked facsimile of a kiss to your forehead you don’t make a peep.
Ever silent, you wipe the tears that have soaked the planes of your face away and stumble only slightly as Jason drags you with him to start yet another large bonfire fueled by bones and decomposing flesh.
You didn’t know if in the foreseeable future you’d ever be free, if you’d ever bloom as wildly and as freely as all those pastel pink swamp azaleas in the field or so much marijuana under the shade, but what you did know was that you wouldn’t ever let yourself end up as just another head propped up on that damn mantle in Jason’s cabin.
No matter what.
NOTES: Hope you enjoyed!
Y’all I was supposed to get this out on Friday The 13th, but I fell asleep so now y’all get it on Saturday The 14th🫶🏾. The 2009 Remake is actually one of my favorite horror remakes and my favorite Friday film so it’s a little surprising that it took me this long to post a Jason fic, but whatever, I’m a slow writer anyway.
Also, mind any typos, I’ll get to them later.
btw: if you’d like to leave a comment I’d very much appreciate it! this is a sideblog tho so I won’t respond.
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