#his most autobiographical work apparently.....

[bluewinnerangel]

About Louis about Chicago

I can't help but feel the things Louis says about Chicago have a layered meaning to them (as I feel with most things he says - but among everything he's been saying about the songs on FITF, Chicago feels like an outlier to me. As if there's some need to elaborate in this way while for most other songs it's just idk that pressure isn't there if that makes sense), there's just something between the lines there, and I don't mean this is for us to "figure out", its his alone, I'm just loving him potentially finding ways to say things coming from a deeper place without giving too much (or anything) away. This post got little to do with the meaning of Chicago, its just hey did you notice this too lol that's it. So in bold his quotes about Chicago:

"It is a special song to me and almost not by choice it just is" - it was a necessity to get this out? it's... not by choice it just is. I feel like this quote is bigger than whatever I can think of. (Track-By-Track)

(about Dave Gibson the only co-writer on Chicago getting him: "Sometimes what I find challenging, is I can see the picture or I can hear the song or I can see the concerts in my head and sometimes it’s quite hard to articulate that cause you’ve got such a clear vision in your head and you just want someone else to be able to read your mind, go ‘Yeah that’s what Im talking about!’" - Again (so far) this is the only song on this album where he's making it known as far as i know he had trouble putting what he had in his head into words. This quote is also about Dave understanding him well in general, but talking about Chicago is what prompted him to say this. (Track-By-Track)

Dave Gibson said "I honestly love everything we wrote - but I think Chicago is a really really special record" - again emphasizing this one's more. (Dave Gibson on Twitter)

[when asked about the meaning:] "Yeah, I’m gonna leave that one close to me chest that one. Pretty kind of raw lyric that, that lyric kind of hits you in the heart but nah, I’m not telling you." - the essence here. (Z100 NY)

"even from that first lyric you know I saw you had a baby did you use any names that we liked like that it kind of hits you straight away [compares it to the brashness as he's calling it of Face The Music] but its important obviously to have shade to the line" (it's gotta be "line" but I really hear him say "lie") - this can mean so many things? (Track-By-Track)

"one of those songs [...] I'm referencing my lyrical maturity and its not some i think i could have written on the last record because i think its a concept that i havent necessarily heard before" - again this can mean many things. (Track-By-Track)

but again this "I've personally not heard the concept [of chicago] before" ???? WHAT? Whu- the concept like the casual listen concept is like.. yo we didn't work out. So what is he thinking here. Within his own discography? Is he trying to put emphasis on his song being like super specific and that's what he hasn't heard before? How is he viewing this song that makes him say this. (Track-By-Track)

"It's a very honest [and then immediately:] I will say maybe half of it you know is is imaginative half it based on personal experience [and then immediately:] probably like most songs in reality" - He's really putting it out there that it's "half real autobiographical half imagination" (Track-By-Track)

"But, but I will say, I do have a special relationship with Chicago, like it is, it is I mean yeah its a cool place. I mean I do feel this kind of affiliation to, to Chicago, but mostly it’s half theoretical, imaginative, and half based on real events" - adding mainly because he did put into words there is some affiliation to Chicago, and that the half-theoretical, half real events gets repeated like its apparently important its out there lol. (102.7 KIIS FM)

he keeps calling the song "emotional" - obviously it's deeply emotional but... he's saying this the most about this song by far and then just not elaborating at all. not that i need him too, just stands out to me.

Then there's him agreeing on it being the most pop song on the album, while at many points in this promo run he's been clear on wanting to step away from that, but then here's him wholeheartedly agreeing "DEFINITELY" and absolutely not in a negative way, and ready to elaborate, but unfortunately the interviewer wasn't done and clarifies "it's a nice sort of way to transition from walls into this new album" and he goes "exactly yeah that's kind of how I see it [...] it's not trying to be anything that it's not" which I think is so fascinating? Maybe the most of all in this list? It's making me think he purposefully went poppy on this one because it fits the concept of Chicago? Like he's traveling back in time sonically on purpose? Maybe? (Track-By-Track)

#imma schedule this for later #i dont really like that its got no point really but also its been on my mind and just in them drafts and if i dont post then its there #forever so. for the 2.8 interested individuals this

[hornyforpoetry]

Classic 20th Century Japanese Writers I Recommend

Over the past three years, little by little, I have begun to explore the beauty of Japanese literature. I had some reluctance at first due to the fact that the first Japanese I read was Haruki Murakami (no offense to his fans, but his writing style doesn't appeal to me). Even if you try not to be prejudiced, sometimes the brain works against you. I've taken a much further step back since then and decided to get my hands on some classics. I always liked the classics better. An apparently wise decision on my part, as I found some exceptional literary gems. I'm still at the beginning of exploration and it's a slow process (quality translations are few and far between in my country; luckily more and more classical Japanese authors are coming in lately, which brings me nothing but joy), but this is a short list of 20th century Japanese literature that I recommend.

1. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892 - 1927) // Hell Screen (1918) // Spinning Gears (1927)

One of the greatest Japanese authors in history, Akutagawa is known as the "father of Japanese short stories". In my opinion, he fully deserves his title. His short stories are something unique in world literature, developing a wide variety of themes. He explores in his writings both old and new Japan, but maintaining a precious, enchanted air. Its style is easy to understand, but retains a certain poetry. Akutagawa instills in his characters an air of mystery and, in a certain way, grotesque, as if he could sense the dark side of man.

  "Hell Screen" is inspired by a 13th-century volume of stories about the painter Yoshihide, commissioned to paint a screen depicting the Buddhist Hell scene. The theme of the artist's obsession with creation is a recurring theme in world literature, and Akutagawa brings it back in a new light. ”Spinning Gears” on the other hand takes place in the modern era and has a certain autobiographical feel to it. The protagonist narrates a series of events that he goes through, but these are often interrupted by his own thoughts and even hallucinations. The line between reality and fiction is finely demarcated, and the fall from one side to the other is sometimes imperceptible.

2. Yasunari Kawabata (1899 – 1972) // Thousand Cranes (1952) // Beauty and Sadness (1964)

  The first Japanese to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kawabata is an important writer both nationally and internationally. Many of his writings have spread throughout the world. His protagonists are usually respected men, but tormented by a hidden, obsessive side that they try to curb. His style is delicate but concise, being generally devoid of unnecessary literary flourishes. Kawabata's construction is subtle and carefully contoured, knowing when to alternate shots.

  "Thousand Cranes" is a short novel about a young unmarried man who has an affair with a woman older than him. Despite the age difference, the young man begins to develop an obsession with the woman, an erotic and even scary fascination in places. It is a story about passion that transforms reason, that brings horrible chimeras out of the human soul. "Beauty and Sadness" revolves around a former affair between a respected writer and a painter. The nostalgic notes of the past merge with the monotony of the present. While the central female figure is resigned and accepts her fate with simple coldness, the male figure seems to degrade at the first push and to live in a slight reverie, throwing himself into the nets of a past that only he idealizes.

3. Osamu Dazai (1909 – 1948) // The Setting Sun (1947) // No Longer Human (1948)

  A tragic genius par excellence, Osamu Dazai was obsessed his whole life with the idea of non-being. He had a latent fear of the idea of living among humans. His style is the most similar to that of Western writers among the Japanese authors I have come across so far. Like French decadents, he led a miserable life marked by alcohol, sex and suicidal tendencies. What makes him unique in literature is the way he manages to capitalize on the anguish, anxiety, fear of the human being that he suffers from and expose it in a poetic way in his writings.

  "The Setting Sun" centers on a woman in her early 30s who lives with her opium-addicted brother and her widowed and ailing mother. The snake appears as an obsessive idea, a protector and a harbinger of death at the same time. The woman seems to have a corrupted soul since childhood, a tendency towards alienation, towards misfortune, towards darkness. The fear of loneliness is combined here with the fear of closeness. "No Longer Human" is a prose memoir with many autobiographical elements. The protagonist is presented through all three stages of his life, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. The young cartoonist is terrified of the darkness within him, which turns him into an inhuman being. Despite his desperate attempts, he finds it impossible to be honest and connect with people. His life is haunted by the tragedy of a lonely soul, scared of his own self, terrified that the world will find out about the monster that lies within him.

4. Yukio Mishima (1925 – 1970) // Confessions of a Mask (1949) // After the Banquet (1960)

Every country has that historical character that seems to be taken out of legends, but which was as true as it can be. Yukio Mishima is that character of Japan who is not talked about enough outside the borders. He had a tumultuous life, involved in art and politics alike. He wrote literature, essays, plays. His vocabulary is rich, lyrical, powerful. The images he conjures are terrifying, but clothed in poetry. He was not afraid to express the ideas he believed in, his political views, his observations on society, but he never forgot to express his art in a unique and sublime way. His voice is a universal voice, the meditations are of the whole world, and the freshness of the spirit is eternal. Mishima had a hidden talent for entering the darkness of the human soul and bringing out from there everything that could be both terrible and beautiful.

  "Confessions of a Mask" is one of his most famous works. The young protagonist recalls his childhood and adolescence, exploring his homoerotic inclinations and the passion he develops for characters in agony. The images suggested in this prose are jarring, dramatic and aesthetic. Everything from the construction to the wording to the image is beautiful. "After the Banquet" has as its central character a woman in early old age. This is a charismatic character, slightly rude, but charming. Mishima balances the woman's free spirit with her fear of dying and disappearing without anyone to honor her memory, while a political battle rages in the background.

#dark academia #classic academia #dark academia aesthetic #art academia #light academia #art academia aesthetic #academia #chaotic academia #darkest academia #darkest academics #japanese author #japanese #japanese literature #classic literature #literature #akutagawa ryunosuke #yasunari kawabata #osamu dazai #yukio mishima #hell screen #thousand cranes #beauty and sadness #the setting sun #no longer human #after the banquet #confessions of a mask #booklr #bookblr #booklover

[holden-norgorov]

An Apologia to BEFORE MIDNIGHT (2013)

I've just finished rewatching for the umpteenth time the spectacular work of art that is The Before Trilogy, and since I've discovered it I have always refrained myself from writing about it because of my inability to put into words the beauty and the depth behind the meaning that these three films have progressively acquired for me.

But this time I'm going to try to say something for the sake of those who believe the screenplay to have failed in portraying Jesse and Celine’s personalities and gone out of character in this third installment – which I feel particularly compelled to defend as it's, in my opinion, not only the best entry in the trilogy, but also one of the best movies ever made, significantly thanks to the way the couple's characterization brilliantly builds up on two-decades of long cinematic work and collaborative effort and climaxes with an egregious payoff. I hope that reading about how I interpret the way Before Midnight blends in perfect harmony with Before Sunrise and Before Sunset may at least partially redeem the film for those of you who were left dissatisfied or disappointed by the decrease in naive idealism and dream-like romance.

WARNING: Detailed spoilers of all three movies under the cut.

Even though I think it’s quite easy at first to find a bit jarring the evident, apparently sudden change in Jesse and Celine's dynamic – reacting with a kind of discomfort that is clearly something the screenplay wants to induce in the audience, which is not accostumed to revisit Jesse and Celine after they have spent almost a decade together and studying each other inside out – I also think it quickly becomes clear that what Before Midnight aims to do, with regards to characterization, is to take all the most irritating and unpleasant shades Jesse and Celine had always had within themselves, whose seeds were planted and indeed palpable, albeit romanticized, in Sunrise (despite both characters trying their best to keep them hidden beneath a deeply self-conscious need to foster the spark of their newfound connection and perform the attraction/seduction role-play) and aptly watered in Sunset, and throw them full-force to the viewers’ face, challenging their ability to still feel invested in the couple by appealing to the idea that even our favorite, most beloved people in the world can intimately be ugly, paradoxical, occasionally toxic as well as endearing at the same time, because that’s a hard truth about human nature and “this is real life, it’s not perfect but it’s real”.

To demonstrate that their characterization is actually coherent with everything that came before, I challenge you to think about Jesse and Celine in these terms: Sunrise makes it clear that they are both smart college graduates, fundamentally contemplative and opinionated intellectuals (or at least, proto-intellectuals) who share a hardwired desire to shape the world around them with their thoughts and ideas and an idealist outlook on the universe, time and the human condition. The trilogy explores, among other things, the way they react to the realization that the universe, time and the human condition can’t conform to their idealistic vision, but that they themselves have to find out how to conform to the universe, time and the human condition. What deeply sets Jesse and Celine apart, then, is the direction they decide to channel the resentment and deep-seated unfulfilling dread steaming from this bitter realization towards.

Jesse directs it towards himself, which turns him into a depressed writer who is never going to be satisfied no matter what happens into his life. In Sunset, the movie starts with Jesse talking about how everything is autobiographical and proceeding to announce the concept of his next book, which happens to feature a totally depressed guy whose dream is riding motorcycles trough South America, being a lover and adventurer who finds happiness “in the doing, not getting what he wants”, but who is instead “sitting at a marble table, eating lobsters with a beautiful wife and everything that he needs”. Later on, at the Parisian café, Jesse rants about being unable to be “in the moment”, about not enjoying any minute of his best-selling book tour and about how Buddhists may have a point when they talk about freeing themselves from desire – which Celine aptly identifies as a symptom of depression. And while Sunset seems to want to make you think that Jesse’s depression may stem from his unsatisfying family life, even hinting at the idea that Celine may be the cure to his condition, Midnight slaps you hard in the face and awakens you to the reality that even though Jesse did get what he wanted, he’s still more depressed than ever – in fact, it clarifies that Jesse’s depression is existential. Celine herself outwardly calls him out on it after he relates an anecdote about the twins fighting over a trampoline, when he refers to pettiness, jealousy and selfishness as “the natural human state”. He seems to quickly scrape her comment off in the moment as one of her exaggerations, but later on admits to his accuracy when he tells her, in the last scene of the movie, that he has struggled all his life connecting and being present with those he loves the most. Which brings us back to Sunrise and his confession about being an unwanted, neglected child who eventually kind of adjusted and took pride in viewing the world as “this place where I wasn’t meant to be”, or to the acknowledgement that he is sick of experiencing his life from his own point of view (“see, I’ve heard all these stories, so of course I’m sick of myself”). I truly believe, during the car ride at the beginning of Midnight, that Jesse is thinking about the same words of his father’s that he was confessing to Celine in Sunrise, when he says, talking about his own absence from his son’s life, “This is the one thing I promised myself I was never going to do, and now I look up and I’m doing it”. I really think it often goes underappreciated how tragic Jesse’s character actually is. The point of his character is that his own childhood abandonment trauma colored his conception and experience of the world, and about how that adds up to his intellectual inability to find peace and contentment in the moment, and about how both aspects flow into apparently inescapable patterns of self-repeated misery. He’s not just depressed: he’s doomed to depression. And the truth the movie points to is that, ultimately, Celine can’t change this foundational aspect of Jesse’s nature. She has, to an extent, to learn to live with it and accept it.

On the other hand, the same intellectual resentment and unfulfilling dread that Jesse directs within himself, Celine aggressively projects to the outside world. If Jesse is fundamentally depressed, Celine is fundamentally angry. Sunrise does a masterful job at carefully planting the seeds that testify how Celine is, at her core, defined by her anger, while simultaneously never allowing for that anger to truly come to the surface and take the audience out of the otherworldly romantic idealism of their night in Vienna. She talks about the unfairness of being unable to complain to nice and supporting parents; she says that everything pisses her off and proceeds to list several examples; she thinks it’s a healthy process to rebel against everything in her life right after admitting that she has been raised happily, loved and wealthy and doesn’t even know “who or what the enemy is”; quite revealingly, she tells an anecdote about a professional shrink experiencing her anger to the effect that, after a single session with her, she had to call the police in fear that Celine might actually carry out the story about killing her ex-boyfriend that she had written as a consequence of her morbid obsession with him. And maybe most importantly, the palm reader makes explicit to the audience what ends up being the central theme of Celine’s character in the trilogy: “you need to resign yourself to the awkwardness of life; only if you find peace within yourself, you’ll find true connection with others”. Sunset dares to shed quite a bit of the romantic aura that Celine was wrapped in during Sunrise where, despite all of this, she still managed to resemble a Botticelli angel, and lets her anger manifest more vividly in several moments. “The world is a mess right now!” she shouts right before a bitter political rant. She’s also deeply resentful towards Jesse who, despite her statement in Sunrise about not wanting to be “a great story” or a male fantasy, has basically decided to spectacularize their night together and sell Celine’s most intimate side to the masses. This is why Celine proceeds to lie about not remembering them having sex – she feels like Jesse has stripped her of agency and control over herself and officialized to the world a one-sided interpretation of their encounter – so she wants to reclaim ownership and hurt him at the same time (“knowing his weak points, what would hurt him, seduce him” she told him in Sunrise while talking about her habit of studying her boyfriends in order to grasp how to manipulate them). The existence of this fictionalized version of herself out in the world that she didn’t consent to, along with the death of her romantic outlook on life that prompts her notorious rant in the taxi, only makes it easier for her to allow her deep-seated anger to bubble up and start defining her. Which brings us to Midnight, where that anger is so consuming that it ends up being directed also at herself (she resents herself for failing to live up to her own expectations of both motherhood and feminism, and for letting herself be consumed by anger). She engages in a lot of borderline toxic behaviors – parental alienation (she sabotages Jesse’s ability to talk to Hank twice), false accusation and public shame (she mischaracterizes their conversation in the car at the dinner table and exposes Jesse’s private fantasy) and generic hurtful insults. Her problem with Jesse’s monopoly on how the world perceives her is as alive as ever, and she makes it a matter of relative status in the relationship. And last but not least, she also resents the world – and men – for women’s unjust impossibility to avoid having to make compromises that motherhood (or largely, the female condition) imposes on them, leading them to sacrifice leisure time or renounce to opportunities that our modern, fully technological world increasingly abounds with. In the same scene, in the hotel room, where Celine calls Jesse out for being depressed, he accuses her of seeing anger as a positive means to deal with life, and despite her refusal to concede the point in the moment, she ultimately admits to it in the last scene of the movie (“I’m an angry person and I hurt my kids, my work and everyone that I love”).

In a nutshell, we could sum up their characters as follows:

JESSE: idealized, intellectual approach to the world --> finds out about world’s imperfection --> blames himself --> existential depression.

CELINE: idealized, intellectual approach to the world --> finds out about world’s imperfection --> blames the world --> existential anger.

Particularly interesting, in this regard, is the role each of them plays in establishing the kind of path the other ends up taking. Jesse ultimately allows his depression to take over him as a consequence of Celine's decision to miss their agreed-upon second encounter six months after Sunrise, whereas Celine ultimately allows her anger to take over her as a consequence of Jesse's decision to circumvent her previously expressed wish and publish a book about the night they spent together in Vienna. In a way, they both sealed each other's existential fate in their quest for the connection they had once shared.

So, once you peel away all the layers in their characterization and identify the root core of their motivation, choices and actions, I don’t really think it’s possible to argue that they are out of character in Before Midnight. In fact, it feels like a perfect follow-up to its predecessors, designed to force the characters to confront the origin of their unhappiness and realize that they are not meant to be each other’s salvation. Just as Celine is going to have to accept Jesse’s depression as something he’s never going to be able to fully part with, Jesse is going to have to learn to deal with Celine’s unhealthy relationship with her own anger (“I’m not asking you to change, it’s called accepting you for being you”). This is where Ariadni’s words come to mind as the testament of the film – “this is what fucks us up, right? The idea of a soulmate coming to save us from taking care of ourselves”. The point of the movie is that Jesse can’t save Celine from herself, and Celine can’t save Jesse from himself – that real love, which is to say real life, is not about that.

Another quite common form of criticism that I don't get is the annoyance at the movie being willing to occasionally be critical of feminism, or explore perspectives outside of the feminist lens – particularly with Jesse's character, whose detachment from and derision of Celine's overstated feminist apologia apparently strikes to many people as a betrayal to his characterization in the previous installments. But first of all, I don’t think there's any evidence that Jesse was ever portrayed as a feminist in the previous movies – and even if he had been, how can a change in one’s own ideology or outlook on life through an eighteen-years-long experience result in an “out of character” portrayal? People change. Ideologically and politically, I’m almost a completely different person than I was three years ago. Does that make me out of character? I don't think so. But that said, many seem to move from the assumption that Sunrise and Sunset were feminist movies in the first place, which I also disagree with. In Sunrise itself, when the topic of gender comes up for the first time between the two, Jesse points out the paradoxical nature of some common female behaviors and raises a biologically-rooted counterpoint to Celine’s obviously University-derived socially constructivist outlook. Nothing about that screams “feminist” to me.

On a sidenote, though, I find incredibly illuminating Jesse’s response to Celine’s rant about female sacrifice in the hotel room scene. He sharply brings up her privileged upbringing (she actually spent her whole childhood “travelling around the world while her father built buildings” and was raised “with all the freedoms he had fought for”, as she herself said to him in Sunrise), which starkly contrasts both with his own childhood of neglect and psychological abuse and therefore with her feminist axiomatic ideas of male privilege and female oppression, and then he mentions a specific historical male-only obligation (the military draft) to swiftly rebuff her claims. She calls him an asshole, but has no real counterargument to throw back at him other than some mockery. This writing choice was actually so clever that I had to pause the movie a moment and think back about Jesse’s character. Then it occurred to me: Jesse’s been divorced and likely lost custody of his son after a strenuous legal battle with his ex-wife that both he and Celine refer to multiple times during the film. He had to spend years travelling back and forth trying to escape the dreadful destiny of turning into his own father and dealing with a progressively litigious ex-wife who apparently exploited Celine’s pregnancy and the notoriously skewed U.S. legal system to make Jesse’s attempt at remaining present in his son’s life extremely difficult – all of this while still managing to maintain some kind of sympathy from the viewers, who know she’s been wronged and cheated on by her ex-husband. The screenplay of this movie is excellent to the point of being able to condense into a single line a character’s entire lived experience and approach to things. That amazing line from Jesse about the “trenches of the Sorbonne” not only reminds the audience that he’s not a feminist; it also reveals that he’s quite versed in (and therefore accostumed to) anti-feminist talking points. Which is incredibly accurate and realistic for an American man who has found himself having to deal with custody issues – as Celine rightly points out, “I guess judges assume that women have the mother instinct”.

The fact that Jesse’s lived experience makes him critical of feminism doesn’t mean that Celine’s own lived experience is invalid, though – nor does it mean that the movie itself is anti-feminist. And there lies the brilliance of the film. Celine’s deeply-held feminist views are still entertained and tested in their validity. She is allowed to be a feminist through and through and voice her ideas, often with incredibly powerful weight and resonance – in fact, two of Celine’s best and most poignant lines in the whole movie are "The world is fucked by unemotional, rational men deciding shit" and “You know what I love about men? They still believe in magic”. Most of the film's detractors just seem upset that those ideas are not presented by the movie as golden nuggets of truth that shouldn’t be subjected to scrutiny or falsification, or treated by the screenplay as axioms that should automatically be taken for granted by everyone. I also think having Jesse laugh at Celine exposing her worries about rape to be, once again, incredibly realistic – it highlights how there will always be some level of incomprehension between the sexes, and how men will never be fully able to put themselves in women’s shoes when it comes to truly understand and empathize with that kind of fear and vulnerability. It basically testifies men’s impossibility to live the female experience.

Moreover, the same detractors that lament their disappointment at the “lack of feminism” in the movie also seem to take umbrage at Celine being portrayed as profoundly human in her complexities, which strikes me as quite the paradox. Women can be as toxic and problematic as men, albeit often in different ways. It’s Celine’s own imperfection that truly makes her a great female character. The argument underneath this criticism seems to be that a female character who engages in problematic behaviors drawing from the ugliest side of human nature does a disservice to feminism – which I guess you might think, if your feminist belief assumes that only men can really be toxic and problematic with the other sex purely out of selfish reasons. It’s quite clear to me that a socially constructivist perspective on life and the world is informing these people's judgment on the movie and the characters, whose raw realism and unfiltered humanity they seem to find ideologically inconvenient.

I have to say I’m also baffled by some people's characterization of the argument scene in the hotel room as “boring”, or an example of “classic middle-aged couple problems" film. It’s anything but, in my opinion. I find it some of the best cinema I have ever seen, with directorial choices, a screenplay and acting performances so high-ranking and engrossing that I was left mouth wide open, with so many shades and aspects that I’d never seen any other “marriage movie” seriously bring up, let alone face. I could never give justice to the excellence of that scene with words. Similarly, I’m stunned by the recurring claim that the dialogue in this movie feels forced and pretentious, given the fact that this is uncontestably the less philosophical, more grounded script of the three. Even though I also don’t agree with those who claim that Jesse and Celine were ever pretentious, I can see how Sunrise could definitely give that impression at specific moments – though the actors’ chemistry and talent were always able to hide any artificiality as much as possible. But Sunset and Midnight particularly flow with such a spontaneous and natural rhythm, as well as flawless acting expertise, that it almost seems a criminal act to press pause during the film. This specific claim seems particularly paradoxical given the fact that the same people who complain about this simultaneously express dissatisfaction with the absence of the kind of idealistic, philosophical talk that the characters had with each other when they met for the first time – which could have easily sounded pretentious if it had been delivered by lower-skilled actors. As if, by the way, the lack of that kind of magic between the two wasn’t completely intentional and exactly the point Midnight is making, particularly when it comes to what Celine laments as her own forced sacrifice of existential discussions in favor of seemingly unending, practical maternal tasks. This is a movie where Jesse says that he misses hearing Celine think, and Celine replies that her thoughts now smell like shit. Not only is the Leopardi-esque “Death of the Illusions” one of the main themes of the film, it’s also an inevitability in the relationship between two formerly idealistic intellectuals who now have to deal with their own existential dread while at the same time raising a family together and being deprived of the luxury they used to have of closing the world outside of their time-constrained connection.

About the ending scene of the movie, I admit that it had to grow on me. On my first watch I didn’t really know what to think about it, mainly because I was still recovering from the brutality of their fight in the hotel room. But the more I rewatched the movie, the more it made sense, and now I find it not only extremely fitting but also kind of brilliant. The couple’s destiny is also once again left up to interpretation and not at all cemented in a definite trajectory like I've often seen being implied. At the same time, the trilogy comes full circle by having Jesse impersonate the time-travelling role-play that won Celine over during Sunrise, and consequently by evoking in the audience a comparison between the state of Jesse and Celine’s relationship now to that of the German couple who, likewise apparently in their 40s, had prompted Celine’s decision to change seat in the train and sit opposite Jesse, reinforcing that very idea of “awkwardness of life” that the palm reader advised Celine to resign herself to in order to find true happiness. As such, the ending solidifies the idea that genuine relationships take work to function, and that true happiness has to be found in carrying that work out ("in doing, not getting what you want"). Jesse realizes this and demonstrates that he’s willing to do the work to rekindle a kind of spark and magic that can exist outside of the transformative influence of time. Celine also eventually acknowledges this, and closes the film showing her own willingness to put in her own share of the work. "It’s not perfect, but it’s real."

Overall, this movie is a masterpiece, a milestone in romance and independent cinema and, as far as I'm concerned, the bar that any film intimately interested in the exploration of the human experience and the creation of solid characterization has to outdo.

This trilogy is History, and as such I will forever treasure it and pass it on. Thank you Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy for such a gift. Ad maiora.

#richard linklater #ethan hawke #julie delpy #before trilogy #before sunrise #before sunset #before midnight #jesse wallace #celine #jesse x celine #review #analysis #meta #mine

[popentertainment-moviereviews]

SALTBURN (2023)

Starring Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe, Carey Mulligan, Paul Rhys, Ewan Mitchell, Lolly Adefope, Sadie Soverall, Millie Kent, Reece Shearsmith, Richie Cotterell, Millie Kent, Will Gibson, Tasha Lim, Aleah Aberdeen, Matthew Carver, Gabriel Bisset-Smith, Saga Spjuth-Säll, Glyn Grimstead and Paul Rhys.

Screenplay by Emerald Fennell.

Directed by Emerald Fennell.

Distributed by Metro Goldwyn Mayer. 131 minutes. Rated R.

Screened at the 2023 Philadelphia Film Festival.

Saltburn: PFF Closes With a Gem

For three consecutive years, the Philadelphia Film Festival has allocated some of its most coveted slots to vehicles that showcased Irish talent. In 2021, the festival’s opening night film was Belfast, the loosely autobiographical work, penned and directed by Kenneth Branagh. It recounted his childhood in Northern Ireland’s capital city. In 2022, the festival kicked off with The Banshees of Inisherin. The tale was set on a fictitious island in Galway Bay, off the western coast of Ireland. It starred the estimable duo of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as life-long friends, whose relationship becomes abruptly truncated. This year, in its 32nd edition, the festival’s closing night film was Saltburn. Dublin native, Barry Keoghan, is cast as the film’s protagonist.

Set in 2006, Saltburn is at once a jocular, albeit scathing, satire of the British ruling class and a psychological thriller. It centers on Oliver Quick (Keoghan), an incoming freshman at prestigious Oxford University. Unlike his posh classmates, Oliver hails from a modest background and is a socially maladroit dweeb. His parents are apparently addled with alcoholism and drug addiction. He has no siblings or other familial support to speak of. Oliver is an obvious candidate for ostracism by his more privileged peers.

In the film’s prologue, Oliver speaks retroactively of the ambivalent, tortured, and unrequited feelings that he had harbored for Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). Felix is a strikingly handsome alpha male, whose family boasts a centuries-old aristocratic pedigree. Felix is accustomed to people fawning over him. In particular, wherever he goes, he is avidly pursued by a bevy of pulchritudinous coeds. Meanwhile, Felix remains totally oblivious to Oliver’s homoerotic longings for him.

The two lads meet serendipitously, when Jacob experiences a flat tire on his bicycle. He is distressed by the prospect of being tardy for a meeting with his new faculty advisor. As Oliver rides past, he notices Felix’s predicament. Oliver veers from the pathway and graciously offers to lend his own bicycle to help the immobilized stranger. Felix expresses his deep-seated gratitude.

Felix defies audience expectations, when he actually takes pains to incorporate Oliver into his elite social clique. As summer break beckons, Felix magnanimously invites Oliver to sojourn at his family home, the eponymous Saltburn. It turns out that the family residence is a sprawling Medieval castle from a bygone era. Drayton House, an edifice situated in Northamptonshire, afforded an ideal site for location shooting. Construction of the spectacularly opulent estate began around 1300 and was repeatedly revised thereafter. Shortly after the house was erected, the original owner of the magnificent structure was issued a license to build ramparts and crenellations as part of a protective wall around the residence.

When Felix gives a tour of the estate to Oliver, he parenthetically references family lore. As a vestige of a tryst that the notoriously licentious Henry VII once had while visiting the estate, the monarch’s desiccated seminiferous fluids are reputed to remain embedded in the mattress in one of the guest rooms. Imagine living in a home with such a juicy historical tidbit attached to it.

Oliver soon meets the residents of Saltburn, a menagerie of well-drawn and altogether eccentric characters. Felix’s immediate family consists of his mother, Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike); his father, Sir James (Richard E. Grant); and his sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver). They are augmented by Felix’s snide biracial cousin, Farleigh Start (Archie Madekwe), who also matriculates at Oxford, and a non-family hanger-on, literally known as "Poor Dear" Pamela (Carey Mulligan). All of the thespians convincingly embody the solipsistic sense of entitlement that is routinely exhibited by upper-class British twits.

However, ultimately it is Keoghan, who delivers a particularly delicious performance that anchors the film. He adroitly captures the evolution of his screen character over the course of the film’s protracted narrative trajectory. Last year, Keoghan as well as his cast-mate, Brendan Gleeson, each scored a supporting Oscar nomination for their respective roles in the aforementioned The Banshees of Inisherin. Keoghan portrayed a cognitively impaired villager in the film. Here, Keoghan demonstrates his versatility, while enlivening a far different role. He establishes that he is capable of carrying a feature film as its lead.

Saltburn is the sophomore venture of Emerald Fennell. In 2020, she made a successful transition from actor/showrunner to screenwriter/director/co-producer with her debut feature, Promising Young Woman. The film generated an Oscar for Fennell’s Best Original Screenplay along with nominations culled for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Carey Mulligan, who as noted plays a juicy supporting role in Saltburn), and Best Editing. Here, Fennell shows impressive growth as a filmmaker. Her screenplay is chocked full of plot twists and apt metaphorical constructs. Fennell makes efficacious use of dramatic foreshadowing and misdirection. Following a faux denouement, Fennell uses a double epilogue to mount a startling montage of events, juxtaposed with a memorable true finale. In her role as director, Fennell evokes strong performances from her entire ensemble cast and handles the film’s frequent tonal shifts with dexterity.

The production values of Saltburn are superb. Cinematographer, Linus Sandgren (La La Land), makes adroit use of light, mirrors, and reflections to fashion a litany of mindboggling images. His use of a 1:33:1 aspect ratio creates the sensation that the viewer is a voyeur, who is surreptitiously spying on the most intimate machinations of the film’s onscreen characters. The editing by Victoria Boydell keeps the pacing taut and the audience guessing what will transpire next. The evocative score by Anthony Willis (M3gan) provides an excellent complement to the visual text of the film. The choice of period pop hits buttresses the film’s sense of time and place.

For all my enthusiasm for Saltburn, I would be remiss if I did not provide a caveat to prospective viewers. The film includes explicit dialogue as well as repeated depictions of drug use and decidedly twisted psychosexual expression. One vignette involves a libertine, who is ruefully disparaged as “sexually incontinent,” and her liaison with an accommodating paramour. Another scene depicts more “mundane” intercourse. These carnal interludes are not gratuitously ribald. Instead, they capture the sublimated urges of various screen characters as well as the intolerant deprecations of their more priggish detractors.

After appearing at the Philadelphia Film Festival, both Belfast and The Banshees of Inisherin each went on to accrue a plethora of Academy Award nominations as well as other accolades. Although Saltburn is a far more polarizing film, it is richly deserving of similar recognition.

Nathan Lerner was a syndicated Film Critic for the Montgomery Newspapers Chain and its corporate successors for twenty years. He welcomes feedback at [email protected].

Nathan Lerner

Copyright ©2023 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: November 17, 2023.

#Saltburn #2023 #Movie Review #Barry Keoghan #Jacob Elordi #Nathan Lerner #Philadelphia Film Festival #PFF32 #Youtube

[cantsayidont]

Haterating and hollerating through the '90s:

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE (1990): Carrie Fisher scripted this witty adaptation of her novel about coked-up, pill-popping actress Suzanne Yale (Meryl Streep), who overdoses in the bed of a strange man (Dennis Quaid), ends up in rehab, and learns that the only way the production insurance company will let her keep working is if she stays with her mother, an aging singer-actress-diva (Shirley MacLaine) whose love for her daughter is equaled only by her tireless determination to upstage her. (No, it's not autobiographical at all, why do you ask?) Fisher's deftly paced, funny script weaves in various serious mother-daughter moments without ever becoming mawkish, and offers a fabulous part for MacLaine, who has a ball poking fun at herself as well as Debbie Reynolds, Fisher's real-life mother and the obvious basis for the film's lightly fictionalized "Doris Mann." Curiously, the weakest link is Streep, who never quite sheds her customary air of prim affectation and always seems ill at ease with Fisher's layers of self-deprecating, sarcastic humor. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Apparently not, although I had questions about Suzanne's rehab friend Aretha (Robin Barlett). VERDICT: MacLaine's finest hour, but Streep's primness keeps it "good" rather than "great."

TERESA'S TATTOO (1993): Painfully unfunny crime comedy, directed by Melissa Etheridge's then-GF Julie Cypher and costarring Cypher's ex, Lou Diamond Phillips, along with an array of incongruously high-profile actors like Joe Pantoliano, Tippi Hedren, Mare Winningham, Diedrich Bader, k.d. lang (!), Sean Astin, Emilio Estevez, and Kiefer Sutherland, most in bit parts (some of them unbilled). The headache-inducing plot concerns a couple of brain-dead thugs whose elaborate hostage scheme hits a snag when their hostage (Adrienne Shelly) accidentally dies. Their solution is to kidnap lookalike Teresa (also Adrienne Shelly), a brainy Ph.D. candidate, and disguise her to look like the dead girl — including giving her a matching tattoo on her chest — in the hopes that the dead girl's idiot brother (C. Thomas Howell) won't notice the switch until it's too late. This truly bad grade-Z effort, barely released theatrically, feels like either a vanity project or a practical joke that got out of hand, and is interesting mostly as a curiosity for Melissa Etheridge fans: The soundtrack is M.E.-heavy, and Etheridge herself has a brief nonspeaking role. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Technically? (Etheridge has no lines and lang plays a Jesus freak.) VERDICT: May erode your affection for M.E.

BLUE JUICE (1995): Tiresome comedy-drama about an aging surfer (a terribly miscast, painfully uncomfortable-looking Sean Pertwee) who's still determined to continue living like a 20-year-old surf bum with his obnoxious mates, even though his back is giving out and he's perilously close to driving away his girlfriend (a disconcertingly hot 25-year-old Catherine Zeta Jones), who is keen for him to finally cut the shit. Meanwhile, the scummiest of his mates (Ewan McGregor) doses their pal Terry (Peter Gunn) and gets him to chase after an actress from his childhood favorite TV show (Jenny Agutter) in hopes of dissuading from marrying his actual girlfriend (Michelle Chadwick), and their mate Josh (Steven Mackintosh), a successful techno producer, flirts with an attractive DJ (Colette Brown) who's actually furious at him for building a vapid techno hit around a sample of her soul singer dad's biggest hit. The latter storyline probably had the most potential (although a weird scene where Josh is castigated by a group of outraged soul fans seems like a lesser TWILIGHT ZONE plot), but none of the script's various threads ever amounts to much. CONTAINS LESBIANS? It doesn't even pass the Bechdel test. VERDICT: If you happen upon it, you may be tempted just for Zeta Jones (and/or Brown), but the rest wears out its welcome with alacrity.

HIGHER LEARNING (1995): Potent story of simmering racial tensions on the campus of a university that definitely isn't USC (writer-director John Singleton's alma mater, and where most of the film was obviously shot), let down by incredibly heavy-handed execution. (The film's final shot is of the word "UNLEARN" superimposed over a giant American flag!) A capable cast (including Omar Epps, Kristy Swanson, Michael Rapaport, Jennifer Connelly, Ice Cube, Tyra Banks, Cole Hauser, Laurence Fishburne, and Regina King) tries to maintain a sense of emotional reality through Singleton's frequent excursions into overpowering melodrama, but there are so many competing plot threads that few characters have any depth; curiously, the script's most complex characterization is in the scenes between budding white supremacist Remy (Rapaport) and Aryan Brotherhood organizer Scott (Hauser). Singleton made this film when he was 25, and there's no shame in its sense of breathless ambition (even if it inevitably bites off more than it can chew), but the overwrought stridency undercuts its intended impact. For a more effective treatment of similar themes in roughly the same period, try Gilbert Hernandez's graphic novel X, originally serialized in LOVE & ROCKETS #31–39 and first collected in 1993. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Jennifer Connelly gives Kristy Swanson a bisexual awakening. VERDICT: The '90s through a bullhorn.

CRASH (1996): Divisive David Cronenberg adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel, about a movie producer called James Ballard (James Spader) and his desperately horny wife (Deborah Kara Unger), drawn into a loose-knit group of car-crash fetishists organized around a man called Vaughan (Elias Koteas at his creepiest), who stages recreations of famous celebrity crashes like the 1955 accident that killed James Dean. Despite some pretentious dialogue about "the reshaping of the human body by modern technology," the controlling idea might be better summarized as "anything can be a paraphilia if you get weird enough about it." Part of what offends people about the film is that Cronenberg deliberately treats the entire story with the same frosty clinical detachment, rendering the "normal" sex scenes just as remote and perverse as the characters' fixation on the grisly aftermath of car wrecks; the point is that there is no line, just different facets of the same erotic longing, which each of the (admittedly unsympathetic) principal characters embodies in different ways. Spader, Kara Unger, and Koteas are very good, as is Holly Hunter, in perhaps the bravest role of her career, but Rosanna Arquette is underutilized. A worthwhile companion piece would be Steven Soderbergh's 1989 SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE, also with Spader, which is much more highly regarded (though almost as contrived and scarcely less perverse), perhaps because it seeks to titillate where Cronenberg does not. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Briefly. (See previous note in re: underutilization of Rosanna Arquette.) VERDICT: Icy but interesting.

#movies #hateration holleration #postcards from the edge #carrie fisher #meryl streep #shirley maclaine #debbie reynolds #teresa's tattoo #julie cypher #melissa etheridge #adrienne shelly #kd lang #blue juice #sean pertwee #catherine zeta jones #ewan mcgregor #crash 1996 #david cronenberg #j.g. ballard #james spader #deborah kara unger #crash #holly hunter #sex lies and videotape #john singleton #higher learning #higher learning 1995 #omar epps

[kaurwreck]

What characters/references do you hope to see in a possible Order of the clock tower arc of what do you think Agatha will be like? Based on the few appearances she has I think she’ll be a MoriDazaiFyodirSasaki type but you know.

Kafka Asagiri, by his own admission, draws inspiration for his characters from their namesakes' works and lives:

I draw inspiration not only from the author themselves, but also from their works. I like to look at particular scenes from those works of literature to then come up with the character [for my story]. For example, if we take Fyodor and look at this character, he is completely different [than the real-life author]. He has absolutely no similarities to Dostoevsky. I took inspiration from Dostoevsky's book, The Brothers Karamazov, in which there is a scene where Ivan has a conversation with the devil. I based Fyodor off of this.

I've noticed that his Western characters tend to resemble more closely their namesakes' works than their namesakes' lives. Which isn't to say the Japanese characters do not also borrow from the namesakes' works (they do, prolifically; I can cite the source material for much of Dazai's more iconic dialogue).

But in addition to Fyodor, who Asagiri acknowledged above more closely resembles a character than the author himself, Francis resembles Jay Gatsby; Louisa resembles Jo March; Steinbeck resembles Tom Joad; HP Lovecraft resembles Cthulu; Bram Stoker resembles Dracula— etc.

To some degree, the distinction isn't especially meaningful. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, clearly drew from himself and Zelda for Jay and Daisy, even using quotes from Zelda for some of Daisy's dialogue. Further, I'm sure my impression that the Japanese characters more closely resemble their authors might be related to the popularity of autobiographical fiction in modern Japan. And there are, of course, exceptions (such as Ranpo).

All of the above to say: I'm almost certain that most of Agatha Christie's personality is drawn from Judge Wargrave from And Then There Were None rather than the author herself, who preferred to project a more understated, self effacing presence. (Although, bsd!Agatha's title is a reference to Dame Agatha Christie's, and her reclusiveness could be modeled after irl!Agatha too.)

I'm not sure how familiar the fandom is with Wargrave; I studied And Then There Were None in middle school, but I don't know if it's still commonly taught or not. He's decisive, commanding, cold, calculating, and deeply sadistic. He acts as the narrative's detective, judge, jury, and executioner but only as a pretense for satisfying his own self-admitted lust to kill. He claims he only desires to murder the guilty, but he also appoints himself the moral arbiter of guilt and meters out suffering relative to the degree to which he's decided the others are guilty.

It's nakedly apparent that he is not interested in justice but in pageantry. He curates the setting and plays with the others like they're dolls, or more aptly, like he's a well-fed outdoor cat and they're the local bird population. In that sense, he isn't like any of the characters you mention above. He's a mastermind like them, sure, but he lacks Mori and Dazai's self awareness and insight, and Fyodor and Sasaki's ideological passion. There is nothing he seeks to protect, like Mori and Dazai, nor any institutions he seeks to destroy, like Fyodor. While he wants you to think he's avenging unpunished crimes like Sasaki, the justice he delivers is more arbitrary.

He just wants blood and artistry, but he also wants moral authority over those he deems beneath him even though he knows he isn't innocent. I think we've already seen that in bsd!Agatha. In Dead Apple, she sits in her ornate throne and, with serenity and pleasure, informs Ango that she will destroy Yokohama at dawn. She has her perfunctory justification (to stop the spread of Shibusawa's fog), but her eagerness, projected authority (over a foreign government, no less), imprecision (bombing the entire city rather than seeking to subdue or execute the perpetrating skill user), and method of execution (launching a convicted skill user to suicide bomb the city) speak to her bloodlust and sadism. When Shibusawa is killed and her attack is recalled, she openly pouts because she was looking forward to the destruction.

Quite frankly, I'm not convinced Agatha would make a compelling primary antagonist. She doesn't have any interest in Yokohama absent the opportunity to enact mass murder from a distance, and only if there's some national security justification, however superficial. She's modeled after a mastermind, but her position is too high, and her sights too macro to make use of Judge Wargrave's detailed pageantry.

The One Order may be enough to coax her attention, but again, her attention is too impersonal, and her sadism is too broad for the relationship-based conflicts on which bsd is built. She will not engage directly if she does engage, but by proxy. It's interesting to watch Fyodor and Dazai play their hybrid 4D chess-Go game because of their chemistry and understanding of themselves through the other. Agatha will not descend from her literal and figurative tower to meet them on any meaningful interpersonal level; Judge Wargrave certainly doesn't. Instead, she works best as a specter over Yokohama; an existential threat from a more powerful foreign power.

There are more than a few reasons to involve her more in the plot, but not on her own; there would need to be another, more intimate antagonist for bsd's structure to work. That said, I would love a secondary conflict based on foreign policy and statecraft; I thrive there, and I've been so hungry for more information about the bsd universe's distribution of powers and interests. Maybe a foreign conflict will erupt and new characters who can match Agatha's level of state power will be introduced because of the One Order; or Ango's treason; or the sudden global spread of vampirism that crippled several national governments; or the leggy calamity that was just extrajudicially released from imprisonment by a 10 y/o to whom he's now loyal; or the internationally notorious political assassin Mori is hiding in his basement; or the prior collapse of Standard Island; or Chuuya's mass murder of MANY foreign military guards in Meursault ft. his feral poses for the camera; or the destruction of what seems to be the most prominent if not only prison equipped to contain skill users given they transported Russian and Japanese nationals to its location off the coast of France; or the assassination of the general of the one world army the United Nations just formed and now can't dissolve; or that said general was assassinated within, like, a day of his appointment by someone who should not be under public scrutiny given he previously assassinated multiple Japanese leaders; or any number of recent canon events.

So, there's certainly fertile ground for a higher level conflict, and Agatha might work if set against other, similarly positioned state actors, but I'm not sure how interested in or equipped Asagiri is to write political intrigue. Or where the international community and Mushitaro should even begin re: addressing what just happened.

Notwithstanding any of the above, I do hope bsd!Agatha has a much younger trophy husband just like her namesake.

#bsd #bungo stray dogs #bsd agatha

[alarawriting]

52 Project #51: Dex

This story is highly autobiographical in a way that's actually kind of painful and embarrassing, and you'll all know why after you read it. And you'll also know why it has taken me two and a half years to write one year's worth of stories and I'm still not done.

BTW I hope like fuck none of the Reddit handles in here are real, but I didn't have a chance to check them all.

***

Jason had promised his boss he’d have a debugged version of the code checked in by morning.

He’d been tracking down a bug when he’d gotten sidetracked reading Stack Overflow. Dammit. He’d just lost an hour, and he still had no idea why his code wasn’t working the way it was supposed to, and it was 10 pm. Teresa was expecting a new version to be checked in by 9 am and she was expecting that it would run.

This was a job for more Coca-Cola. Jason got up, went downstairs and got himself a slice of pizza and a cold Coke.

His mom, also burning the late night oil at the kitchen table, hunched over her laptop, said, “How is it going? You think you’ll have what your boss is expecting by tomorrow?”

No. “Yes,” Jason said. “I just need a few more hours to track this down.”

“Well, you’re running out of them. You’d be better off getting a good night’s sleep, then waking up fresh in the morning early enough to work on it then.”

Mom was 57 and had apparently forgotten everything she had ever known about how night owls worked, despite having spent her younger years routinely staying up until 2 am. “Is that what you’re doing?” Jason couldn’t help saying.

“I’ve got a house showing tomorrow, I just have to make sure that I have my talking points memorized.”

“Why? Does the house really suck?”

“It doesn’t really suck. It’s a good house, really. Great bones, a nice big yard. But I’m gonna have to redirect the prospective owner’s attention away from how ugly the carpet is and things like that, because the seller? Whoo-ee. There’s people who have no taste, and there’s people who never fix anything, and there’s people who own dogs, and then there’s my seller, who is all three.” She sighed. “I tried to get them to rip the carpet out and install hardwood flooring before putting the house on the market, but the market is hot right now; I don’t blame them for wanting to charge forward. I just think they’d get more if their house didn’t smell like dog and look like water damage had a horrible transporter accident with the 1970’s.”

“That bad, huh?” He leaned up against the fridge, sipping his Coke. “You wanna go over your spiel with me, Mom? Some late night practice before you go to bed?”

“Yeah, actually, that sounds good.”

So Mom talked enthusiastically, if hoarsely, about the four bedrooms and the two and a half bathrooms and the recently modernized kitchen and how great the neighborhood was, and Jason listened, because he wasn’t contributing nearly as much to the mortgage as his mom was and she was also paying most of the utilities, so her career was important, not to mention what stress did to her heart.

When he got back to his computer it was 11:30 and he’d finished his Coke and pizza. He thought about getting ice cream, but best not to do that until Mom went to bed, if he didn’t want to get sucked into another conversation. Not that conversations with Mom were bad; they were much more entertaining than debugging code, which was the problem.

He opened up his coding window, stared at it for thirty seconds while doing nothing, and then convinced himself that maybe Reddit would have an answer to his question.

It didn’t. It did have answers to how to solve a particularly difficult problem in his current favorite game, a number of people who wanted to know if they were the asshole, some great reviews of movies on streaming that he hadn’t had a chance to watch yet, political rants, and some really entertainingly stupid coding mistakes that people had posted.

It was 12:30 am. Teresa was expecting this at 9 and she was expecting it to work.

His eyes glazed. The act of reviewing the code for the tenth time, looking for the bug he hadn’t yet been able to find despite knowing the general area it had to be in, was almost physically painful. He checked his brackets, again. The error didn’t look like a missing close bracket, but that didn’t mean anything. If he had a dollar for every time the error didn’t look like a missing close bracket but turned out to be one, he’d have maybe twenty dollars, which wasn’t a lot in terms of actual money but was a lot of times for the same stupid thing to happen in his code.

The software was supposed to warn him when there was an unclosed bracket, but half the time, if the code was particularly complex, it didn’t. It just re-interpreted the bracket locations and then his code broke.

One more time. Stepping through. Why the fuck was it stopping there? There was nothing there that could account for the error.

Time to go get ice cream. Maybe some sugar would help him stay awake and focused enough to get this done. Another Coke, possibly, too.

When he sat back down, he had Discord messages, so he needed to check them. And messages on Slack, which he could be checking in the morning, and probably should be, but maybe one of his co-workers had found an answer to his problem. They hadn’t, but Priyal had a different question and that one, he thought he could quickly get an answer to, so he fired up Google, dug in, and got her answer for her, which he sent. She’d have it in the morning. Unlike Teresa, who probably would not have what she was expecting.

It was 2 am. Stupid of him to get sidetracked with Priyal’s problem when he was having such difficulty with his own. He flicked over to Reddit again because this was unbearably boring and if he didn’t give himself a break from it, he’d fall asleep.

But he had to go back to debugging the code. Or to sleep. He could handle Teresa being pissed off in the morning a lot better if he got some sleep.

Third page of the subreddit he was on. Four. Man, he needed to keep up with this stuff, there was so much here he hadn’t read yet.

Fifth page of the subreddit. He really, really needed to get back to work. It was 2:30.

A screenshot of something really stupid from Cicada. Damn, someone actually posted something that stupid? Over to Cicada to see if there was context that explained it. There wasn’t, but there was a lengthy thread of people absolutely shredding the OP. Including someone he followed, and he should probably catch up with that.

No, he should get off Cicada and go back to coding. Or bed. His eyes were burning. Bed was probably a better idea. Give up on finishing the debug, tell Teresa he hadn’t found it yet and would need another day.

That was an interesting news article, though. He had to check that out.

No, he didn’t. He needed to go to bed.

Jason’s mouse clicked the link to the article. His eyes read the page, despite burning with exhaustion. Some frantic voice in his head was yelling, screaming, get up, put the computer down, you need to be awake to deal with Teresa in the morning, it’s late, you’re doing nothing useful, get up.

Back to Reddit.

Stop this. Get up. Go to bed. You need to go to bed.

3:30 am. He could barely keep his eyes open, but they were still riveted to the computer, his butt still glued to his chair.

Get up get up get up and go to bed, go to bed, turn the monitor off, you need to go to sleep so you can deal with Teresa tomorrow, get up, go to bed, go to bed

4 am. Look, there was his Firefox home tab, with articles from Pocket. A few of those looked interesting.

Don’t read them, you need to sleep, you need to sleep

Right, right, he didn’t have time to read them right now. He just needed to open them all so they would be there for him tomorrow. If he didn’t do that, Pocket would refresh and he’d lose all of them.

Wow, did they really find carbon deposits on the moon? He had to check that out.

Stop it, stop it, you have to stop it, you need to sleep, stop it

5 am. There was no way he’d be up at 9 to deal with Teresa.

Email. “Hey, I’ve been up all night bashing my head against this thing and I’ve made progress—” This was a lie. “—but it’s still not running. I’m gonna have to look at it with fresh eyes tomorrow. I’ll be logging in around 11 am.” This was also a lie, it would probably be closer to noon. But since he worked from home, all he needed to do was drag ass out of bed around 10:30 to send everyone a status update, tell them he was diving into the code and probably wouldn’t see incoming notifications until he came up for air, and then dive back into his bed instead.

Set an alarm for 9:30 am. Set an alarm for 10 am. He’d blow through them both, of course, but they’d wake him up enough to actually wake up when the 10:30 alarm went off, and then he’d convince himself to get up and send the status message by promising himself he’d return to bed.

Check out that article about a different way to manage your ADHD?

No. Go to sleep. Off the computer. Sleep.

Right, but obviously, he needed to put on his Spotify for music to fall asleep to, and adjust the volume because he couldn’t let it be too loud or it would wake Mom up, calm and peaceful or not.

Pop over to Reddit one last time.

5:30 am. Sleep!

The panic finally overwhelmed the inertia and he managed to drag himself off his chair, turn the monitor off, and stumble to bed. Now to get some sleep.

Oh, except now, he couldn’t sleep because he was overwhelmed by his anxiety and fear about not getting enough sleep to deal with Teresa even if he slept until noon because she was going to be seriously pissed off with him because this was the third time he’d blown the deadline.

It was another hour before exhaustion finally claimed him, and he knew that because the sun had risen.

***

He’d never set the 10:30 alarm.

He’d never set the 10:30 alarm, he’d blown through 9:30 and 10 just like he’d planned, but he’d never turned on the 10:30 alarm, so it was half past noon and he’d never sent that status message, so everyone would know he overslept way past the point Teresa would be okay with after an all nighter, and there was a meeting at 1 pm and he had to shower and shave because it was going to be a meeting with video so he couldn’t look like he’d just dragged himself out of bed.

Or maybe he could. He sent Teresa a message on Slack. I think I’m sick. My throat’s sore, and I’ve got a migraine. And I don’t have the program working anyway, so there’s really nothing to show anyone. Can we postpone until tomorrow?

The response was almost immediate. You need to figure out how to manage your time better. You’re sick because you stayed up all night.

Yeah, but I was trying to solve the bug.

If you can’t get something fixed by 11 pm, it’s not going to get fixed. You should have gone to bed.

I know, but I wanted to try. I was getting close. This was a lie. I thought I could get it done before morning.

Yes, and instead you made yourself sick and the program still doesn’t work. ☹  I’ll postpone the meeting this time, Jason, but we need results before tomorrow. Sorry that you’re sick but you know as well as I do it’s because you didn’t get any sleep.

Yeah, I know. I’ll pull myself together, have some coffee, and get back to work. I’ll try to have it done before 5. This was a lie. He knew perfectly well he wasn’t going to get it done by 5, not when he was this tired.

Do you want me to have Jorge review it? Maybe he can see something you missed?

No, that would be the worst possible thing, because then Jorge would know that he’d made basically no progress last night. I don’t want to add to his workload, but if I’m running into trouble later today I’ll pass it over to him, see if adding some eyeballs might help.

All right, I’ll let him know.

And now Jason was awake, the imminent terror of Jorge finding out that he had done basically nothing last night flooding him with enough adrenaline that he could focus enough to turn on his monitor and get back to work.

***

He had to stop living like this.

Sooner or later he was going to get caught, and he was going to get fired. He couldn’t stay focused on his work when it was boring, which debugging generally was; he enjoyed the act of creating code, making things happen, but when it wouldn’t work, it was an exercise in frustration and soul-crushing despair. He couldn’t keep up with his own documentation, he missed emails and chat messages because he was obsessed with something else when they came through, and he wasn’t even spending his time doing things that were fun; endlessly surfing Reddit and checking the news and articles wasn’t something he did because it was incredibly fun. It was just more bearable than focusing on work, sometimes.

It wasn’t like there would ever be a programming job where you never needed to debug, or never needed to polish off the last few functions that you’d kept skipping because of how tedious they were. He knew that. He’d gone into the profession knowing that. But when he was younger, his meds had worked better. Or maybe he’d just been better at being able to go without sleep. Or not as acclimated to the panic. It was the panic that got him moving, that made it so he could do the boring jobs. He had to be terrified of the consequences of failure before the fear and anxiety could override the whatever-it-was that kept him sitting in his chair, playing video games or surfing the Internet, rather than doing the boring parts of his job.

It had gotten worse since he started working from home. In the past, he’d had the fear that his boss might come by and see him goofing off. So he’d still goofed off, but carefully, always prepared to jump back into his work at a moment’s notice. Sometimes he’d pushed himself, polished off what was normally three or four days’ work in one afternoon, and then goofed off for the next three days. Because he could. Because when he was on, he was magic. The insights were lightning, his speed was legendary, his accuracy was amazing. When he was on.

He was off most of the time. And more and more often, nowadays.

Medication didn’t work anymore. It just made him jittery and irritable, so he’d stopped taking it. Overdosing on caffeine did the same but somehow felt more palatable, and he’d grown to associate the feeling of being competent with the tastes of coffee and Coke, so he used those instead. Then he couldn’t get to sleep. On the nights when he actually managed to get a satisfying amount of work done, he might have a beer or two to unwind and let himself relax and sleep, but that was impossible to do when it was late and he wasn’t done. Which was most nights, nowadays.

He couldn’t keep living like this. He couldn’t depend on a state of fear to enable him to work. Sooner or later he’d slip up, he’d be caught, and he’d get fired. And then he’d have to admit to his mother that he got fired. That terrified him far more than the thought of having to get another job. Jobs weren’t that hard to come by, but his mother’s disappointment and sorrow was utterly horrible.

Jason had spent his childhood alternately disappointing her and making her proud. She thought he was stable now, that the problems that had plagued his childhood – the inability to do homework, the losing it when he had done it, the dishes he didn’t wash, the laundry he didn’t do, the leaves he didn’t rake – were gone. And it was true, nowadays he could get the laundry done, because he’d figured out how. Pile it up in front of his door, and as soon as it got too irritating to open his bedroom door, he could gather up the laundry in his arms and dump it in the wash. It helped that he’d finally figured out that he didn’t need to sort anything if he washed everything in cold water and never bought anything that was white.

He didn’t know any way to pile up a debugging project in front of a web browser. He’d tried using software that blocked him from doing anything that wasn’t work related, but the trouble was, Reddit was a legitimate source of information on how to fix issues he’d never encountered before, and Stack Overflow and other sites and forums dedicated to development problem solving were enticing time sinks of entertaining information. There was no way to solve this programmatically, because no AI was capable of telling the difference between “this is useful stuff you need to solve this problem right now” and “you’re just reading about all these other problems other people have had so you don’t have to work on your own problem.”

And even if there was…

Jason was one of the best programmers at the company. He was only 29, but he’d been doing this since he was 12. So people came to him with their problems, and he was usually able to solve those. Most problems people had were something he’d encountered so often he could fix them when asleep, which had actually sort of happened a couple of times – he had once or twice found that he’d sent an email at 3 am that he had no memory of sending, when he’d been pulling an all-nighter, that elegantly and correctly solved a co-worker’s problem.

Their problems were easy, and the feedback was immediate and gratifying. People thanked him profusely, told him he was a genius, sometimes gave him homemade cookies or delicious ethnic lunches (this was the thing he missed most about working in the office, but too many of his coworkers were also working from home; he’d gone in once or twice after lockdown was over, but it had never been the same again.) Everyone had nothing but great things to say about Jason’s willingness to help a coworker out and ability to solve their issues. His own problems, not so much. But he got a lot of leeway for being the genius who could fix everyone else’s issue.

When he was stuck, it was rare that anyone else could help him with it. And it was rarer that he was willing to let them. The humiliation of needing help, of what if it was a simple, stupid thing and it destroyed his wunderkind reputation that he’d missed it, made it so he never wanted help, not with the big problems he couldn’t solve himself. If your whole life was based on your skill at swimming, how close did you have to be to drowning before you were willing to call for help?

Jason managed to get the code working a little before 3 pm, after ignoring three messages from Teresa that maybe now it was time to bring Jorge in, and one from Jorge asking if there was anything he could do to help out. He then gratefully handed it over to Jorge. It’s working, but I could use some more thorough testing than I’ve been able to do. (I have done minimal testing because testing is so boring it makes me want to spork my eyeballs out, but I’ve made sure that it runs start to finish in the most basic scenarios and that the more complex functions kick in when given at least one example of data that should make them kick in.) The QA department would beat the crap out of it later, but the programmers didn’t hand over code to them until it at least ran, most of the time. Well, some of the time. Well, at least the one time they tried it.

He needed a nap, badly, but he was too wired to get one, and it wasn’t a good idea. If Jorge did find something in testing, he needed to at least look responsive. So he started reading the article tabs he’d opened last night, when he’d promised himself he’d just open them so they’d be available for him today.

Oh, and there was the article about a new treatment for ADHD. That was timely.

***

“The newest ADHD treatment on the market isn’t a pill, and it isn’t an app. Dex™ is an implant, that promises to revolutionize treatments for the long-forgotten invisible victims of ADHD… the ones who grew up.”

Oh, that was definitely promising. It had long been a source of deep irritation to Jason, and pretty much everyone else he knew with similar issues, that ADHD was treated as a disorder of childhood. Once you were grown up and out of the educational system, you were an adult and you could adult like an adult, because you were an adult! Right? It was a blind spot in the entire system. The go-to medications for kids could have long-term effects that got more and more unpleasant as you got older… such as developing high blood pressure. Or desensitizing to it, as Jason had. (His doctor had claimed that was not possible, but tolerance was a thing for pretty much every other drug, including allergy pills, so Jason thought that was bullshit. He was planning on changing doctors. As soon as he got around to picking a new one.)

But… implant?

“By utilizing dopamine, the natural chemical made by the body that promotes motivation, Dex™ enables adults with ADHD to stay focused on the important things in life. Their work. Their family. Their loved ones.”

Aaand it was off and running into marketing bullshit. Jason scrolled through the article, but it was pretty obviously pay-for-play.

Another article was more promising. “The idea behind Dex sounds frankly somewhat terrifying. A brain implant that uses AI learning algorithms to dose you with chemicals that make you want to do things? It sounds straight out of a science fiction dystopia. But in fact, the science behind Dex is rigorous.

“One of the biggest problems people with ADHD face is that they can’t motivate themselves to do what they know they need to do. This has long led to sufferers of the disorder being told they are ‘lazy’ and ‘unmotivated’, or worse things. But it turns out that this is a genuine medical condition. Science has identified the neurotransmitter in the brain that gives us motivation. It’s called dopamine, and people with ADHD don’t produce enough of it.

“By jolting the brain with a dose of dopamine every time the Dex user is doing something they need to do, it helps them stay focused and on task, even with the boring tasks that most ADHDers are famous for being unable to do. Wash the dishes. Remember to take out the trash. Finish that essay.

“Some have concerns because Dex is manufactured by Ulysses… the newest medical/pharmaceutical company to place its wares on the market. Ulysses’ focus has been on combining artificial intelligence with low-dose, just-in-time medication, such as the anti-anaphylactic implant Destiel or the—”

Wait. Wait. Did this company seriously name a medication Destiel? Who was that for, people who had never been in their teens on the Internet while a certain TV show had been airing?

“—or the virus-fighting Ajaxon, but—”

Too late, Jason couldn’t take a company seriously that named their product something like that. He flipped away to read about a nonprofit who would paint your roof with super-reflective white paint for free, to help fight climate change.

***

Jorge didn’t find any critical bugs, and Jason managed to take a nap after hours, which was good, because anxiety about the meeting that had been postponed started to creep in around 10 pm, and despite the fact that he knew he needed to be well-rested for the meeting, which had been moved to 1 tomorrow, he had to get online and play a video game to relax.

It was 3 am before the need to go to the bathroom forced him to get off the computer. He gratefully accepted the out his bladder had given him, and as soon as he was out, he went straight to bed. The light from the monitor was irritating, but if he got up and went over to the computer to turn off the monitor, he might succumb to the temptation of just checking one thing, and then who knew when he’d get to bed? It would go to sleep eventually, and in the meantime, he could use a sleep mask.

He hadn’t forgotten the alarms, this time. 9:30 am was probably too early to wake up when he’d hit bed at 3 am, but after yesterday, he knew he had to be online and responsive from early on to make up for his fuckup. Didn’t mean he had to actually work. As three cups of coffee made their way down his throat, he browsed online comics, read email, skimmed articles, answered Slack messages, pretended to be contributing to the discussion about the strategy for the meeting, and finally ended up at r/AMA, because when he googled Dex, he found that one of the people who’d developed it had done an AMA on it.

“I’m one of the lead scientists on the development of the new ADHD treatment, Dex. AMA”

He read over her initial post. Her name was Suzanne Burke and she worked for Ulysses, which was a subsidiary of the online retail-and-cloud-computing giant Jupiter.com. This was troubling. Jupiter was known for its forays into AI, having gotten its start with neural networks that recommended books to people, and was now well known for its near-ubiquitous AI household assistant, Ray-Ray. Mom had gotten one of those for Christmas last year, but Jason hadn’t let her hook it up. His specialty wasn’t cloud security, but he’d been working in IT long enough that he had no trust whatsoever in an appliance made by a giant corporation that could turn your furnace off and on and was probably sending all your data back to the mothership. On the other hand, he was guessing that Ulysses had been bought out by Jupiter, because naming a medical device after a fan fantasy of a gay relationship between a monster hunter and an angel from a TV show that had ended a few years ago did not seem like the kind of stupid mistake Jupiter would make.

[u/ineedcheese: How does it work?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Diving in the deep end I see! OK, for any of this to make sense, I have to give you guys a simplified run-down of how ADHD itself works, because it isn’t “ooh! Shiny!” It’s a serious medical condition.

[Firstly, ADHD is described as Attention Deficit Disorder because from the outside looking in, that’s what it looks like. A person with ADHD can’t pay attention. Unless they’re really interested, and then they can’t stop paying attention. But that’s really more of a symptom. What it should be called is Executive Function Deficit Disorder or maybe Executive Dysfunction Disorder.

[You can think of a brain as having multiple multi-threaded tasks, like a computer. One of those tasks is consciousness, of course, but the rest of them run in the background and you are rarely aware of them. Until they break. Executive function is the manager, the dispatcher that takes commands from consciousness – or other parts of the brain, I’ll get to that – and, generally, informs consciousness of what it should be doing. It handles the passage of time, so you have some idea how long an hour is. It remembers where you put your keys. It allocates your attention to speech, to reading, to tasks.

[A lot of this is performed by stimulating the brain to release dopamine. Now, if you’ve ever sought out help for depression, you’ve probably heard of neurotransmitters. There’s tons of them, but the ones you hear about most are serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. Very very roughly, and with the caveat that some recent evidence calls some of this into question, we can describe serotonin as the happiness chemical, dopamine as the motivation chemical, and norepinephrine as the excitement, fight-or-flight chemical. Very roughly.

[Basically everything a person does, is done because it feels good to do it – in some way – or, being smart animals, we know that not doing it has a bad result. If we don’t wash the dishes we get roaches – brr! If we don’t do our homework, we get a bad grade and Mom and Dad yell at us. In a normal brain, small amounts of motivational dopamine are released when we set ourselves to a task that will prevent a bad thing, but that we don’t inherently like. Or, sometimes, to a task that we enjoy, but maybe it’s hard and we’re not always feeling it. Wash the dishes, get a tiny amount of dopamine because yay, you have successfully fought off the roach apocalypse for another day.

[People with ADHD don’t get that. The small amounts of encouragement dopamine aren’t there. We don’t wash the dishes because we enjoy it, and it turns out, we don’t do it because we are afraid of the roaches. We do it because our executive function has decided that roaches are bad, and it will reward us with some dopamine for doing things to keep the roaches away. Everything we voluntarily do, we do because it gives us at least a little dopamine.

[I want you to think about the mythical Sisyphus, endlessly pushing a rock up a hill, because he’s been told he can be free of Hades if he gets it to the top – a thing he wants, a lot. What if someone tells him, the deal’s off? You’re never getting out of Hades, no matter what you do? Well, he probably wouldn’t keep pushing the rock, because what’s his motivation?

[That’s what washing the dishes is like if you have ADHD. It takes time, it’s not pleasant, and it doesn’t reward you with that little bitty bit of dopamine. So what’s your motivation to push the rock up the hill? You can intellectually know that washing the dishes is a good idea and that not doing it exposes you to disease, yucky tastes, and maybe roaches, but you don’t do the smart thing because it’s the smart thing. Or at least, most of us do not. We do the smart thing because executive function rewards us for doing it. And people with ADHD do not get that reward.”]

[u/beepityboopbop: “It handles the passage of time, so you have some idea how long an hour is.” Unless your name is Karen and you’ve called for technical support, in which case five minutes is an hour]

[u/paleshadowofawoman: Suzanne Burke you seem to have a serious fixation with roaches]

[u/semicolonbang: Yeah did the roaches eat your baby?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: They ate my last relationship. My girlfriend and I broke up because of roaches.]

[u/semicolonbang: that sounds like an interesting story]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: it is but it’s got nothing to do with Dex so maybe I’ll answer it in a few days if I feel like it]

[u/ineedcheese: that’s a lot of stuff about how ADHD works but how does Dex work?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Getting to that. People with ADHD gravitate toward things that overstimulate the dopamine reward system, because it’s the only way they get any. Playing video games generally gives you lots and lots of small rewards along the way. Endlessly bingeing Netflix feels good while you’re doing it because television is created to entertain and reward you.

[Now, being smart animals like the rest of humanity, ADHDers really do not want to spend their entire lives playing video games and bingeing Netflix. They want the same things anyone does – to do work that’s rewarding, to have satisfying relationships, to get along with family and make friends. But to accomplish those broad tasks, usually you have to do a lot of small tasks that aren’t inherently rewarding themselves. It’s hard to have a satisfying relationship if your girlfriend blames you for having roaches because you didn’t wash the dishes.

[So stimulants enter the picture. Adderal, Ritalin, and the most powerful and oldest stimulant of all: norepinephrine. Excitement, fear, anger, sexual desire, they all release norepinephrine, which tells the body to rev up. Charge up with energy. It’s time to run away from that tiger! Or beat the crap out of the guy macking on your girl! Or ride your horse, which is terrifying and exciting because you’re moving faster than a human can, on top of an animal who is perfectly capable of doing whatever it wants instead of what you want.

[People with ADHD procrastinate, because the fear of the consequences of not doing the task eventually becomes high enough that that provides the motivation. If you can’t have dopamine, you can at least have some norepi. I don’t want to write that paper, so I pretend it’s not happening… and my executive function is so bad at keeping track of time, it’s easy for me to pretend, until the night before I have to turn it in, and my professor has reminded all of us to do it. Now I’m terrified. I’ve done exactly nothing on this paper, I’m gonna fail my class, my mom and dad will be disappointed, my asshole ex will laugh at me, I’ll suffer shame and disgrace for generations to come. Now I’m scared enough, flooded with enough norepinephrine, that I can do the thing. And maybe I will even get a dopamine reward when I’m done, because “congrats on getting us away from that tiger, buddy!” is a thing that even most ADHDers get.]

[u/semicolonbang: “It’s hard to have a satisfying relationship if your girlfriend blames you for having roaches because you didn’t wash the dishes.” Personal experience much?]

[u/estesrocketsarenottoys: “Or beat the crap out of the guy macking on your girl!” not exactly feminist]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: “not exactly feminist” maybe not, but try being a lesbian with a beautiful girlfriend who all the guys are hitting on and she is really weirded out and upset by it and she just wants to be left alone, are you going to tell me you would not want to punch them in their sexist faces?]

[u/semicolonbang: your life story seems very interesting Suzanne Burke]

[u/ineedcheese: I still don’t know how Dex works]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Dex works by releasing small amounts of dopamine when you do a task you know you have to do, even if you don’t want to.

[We’ve used sophisticated AI to analyze the brain states of thousands of volunteers who recorded a moment by moment diary of what they were doing for a week and how they felt about it, and from that we’ve figured out how to distinguish the brain state of “I really, really hate doing this and there is no good reason to” – Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill after Hades has told him, the deal’s off buddy – and “I hate doing this, but it’s a step toward getting what I want.” When you make yourself do the thing you don’t want to do, but you know it will be good for you to do it, Dex rewards you with a little dopamine. Just like your own executive function would have, if you had one that worked.

[Dex can also tell when you’re caught in that paralysis loop – “I really should be working on my paper, but instead I am reading Reddit” – how many of you are in that place right now?]

Jason blinked. Wow, that was a little on the nose. This was posted a week ago, though, so she wasn’t talking about him. Specifically.

[If you’re doing a thing, but you feel guilty about doing the thing because there’s something you should be doing instead… Dex can uptake your existing dopamine. Basically, Reddit bores you! So you go looking for some other source of entertainment. Well, if you take that moment and use it to write your paper, or wash the dishes, Dex will make you feel good about doing it.]

[u/thisuserdoesnotexist: How good?]

[u/peterporkerthesuperbspiderham: Yeah, doesn’t like heroin or morphine also give you dopamine?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Not that good, and not exactly, but we’re not going to get into that. Dex isn’t addictive. Video games are a lot more addictive than Dex. Not that I ever blew a few hundred dollars on DLC, or anything.]

[u/thisuserdoesnotexist: How do you know?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Because we’ve tested it. There have been years of clinical trials at this point. There are a lot of people who were very, very upset at the thought of ever losing Dex… but we drilled down on that, and they were more like, wheelchair users upset at the thought of losing their wheelchair than addicts upset at losing their fix. They described how Dex made it possible for them to focus, to get things done that they’d always wanted to be able to do. Not that it made them feel good. Because it doesn’t. Tiny jolts of dopamine for washing the dishes doesn’t feel good. It just feels like it makes washing the dishes tolerable.]

[u/chaosisawonderfulthing: Should we be concerned about Jupiter’s involvement in this project?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Jupiter didn’t buy Ulysses until we were already in clinical trials, so no. They’ve been very hands off, actually.]

[u/ineedcheese: how does this fix me forgetting my appointments?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: it doesn’t. But if you’re like most ADHDers you’ve been told, “Oh, just program a reminder on your phone!” And then the reminder to take out the garbage comes through, but you don’t feel like taking out the garbage, so you ignore it. Or you forget to add the reminder about the doctor’s appointment because that just seemed like a lot of work and you didn’t feel like it. What Dex will do is allow you to use those tools to manage the parts of ADHD that it doesn’t directly fix. You won’t remember the doctor’s appointment, but you will feel like putting a reminder into your phone about it was a worthwhile thing to do, when you made the appointment, and you will feel like getting up and going to that appointment is more worthwhile than checking Facebook, again.]

[u/stephaniestick: no one uses Facebook anymore]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Or Cicada, or Instagram, or Tumblr, or whatever.]

[u/ineedcheese: so it’s not as good as medication.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: In what way?]

[u/ineedcheese: medication helped me remember things I was supposed to do.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: If medication works best for you, that’s a fine thing, and we’d advise you to stick with it. But a lot of adults can’t take the medication, or it doesn’t work for them.]

[u/mushroommushroom: Or they won’t prescribe it for you. I was diagnosed as an adult and my doctor told me, basically, no one will prescribe amphetamines for someone my age.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: also true.]

[u/paleshadowofawoman: you said it makes things unrewarding to do if you feel guilty about doing them. What if you feel guilty about everything?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: you absolutely should not use Dex if you have a scrupulosity complex, or in any other regard feel a lot of guilt over things you really shouldn’t feel guilty about.]

[u/beepityboopbop: so no Catholics, got it]

[u/mushroommushroom: A lot of people feel guilt over having sex, even if it’s healthy consensual sex.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Yeah, so it turns out that the human sex drive is so powerful, Dex can’t do anything with it. We tried. We recruited a few volunteers who wanted Dex to reduce their interest in sex, because they were trying to not cheat on their spouses, or they wanted to get more done… or whatever. We didn’t probe very deeply. It didn’t work for any of them. It can help with more traditional addictions, alcohol or smoking, but it does not actually seem to reduce sex drive even in people who feel guilty about having sex and want to have less of it.]

[u/supermansshorts: But you can use it to stop smoking?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: If you feel bad about smoking, yes. If you know you shouldn’t smoke, and you would like to quit, but you are compelled to smoke anyway, having Dex will make smoking feel a lot less fun, which will help you quit. But you still have to do the hard work.

[Dex doesn’t magically solve all your problems. I’m pretty sure there is no implant that could do that. What it does is it gives you the tools you need to solve your own. When you have work to do, and you don’t want to do it, but you want to want to do it because you need to do it… Dex isn’t smart enough to know to reward you for that the first time you make yourself do it. It has to read your brain state while you’re doing it to know that this is a thing you should be doing that you don’t want to. You have to summon the willpower to do it the first time, yourself.]

[u/chaosisawonderfulthing: Because willpower and ADHD are so well known to be found together.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: I actually think people with ADHD have enormous willpower, because they don’t get rewards for doing the useful things they have to do to stay alive and healthy. Other people aren’t really using willpower alone, they’re using the fact that it feels good to do a thing you need to do. People with ADHD have literally no emotional motivation at all, no brain chemical telling them to do the thing, but often they manage to force themselves to do it occasionally anyway. I think that takes a lot more willpower than doing a thing that rewards you with a little dopamine.]

[u/mushroommushroom: How do you get it?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Currently, only a psychiatrist can prescribe Dex.]

[u/mushroommushroom: Not a regular doctor?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: No, and actually, we recommend that you be in therapy while working with Dex. Among other things, there’s a phenomenon called spin doctoring that you might need a therapist to help you recognize and work through.]

[u/chaosisawonderfulthing: You obviously want us to ask what spin doctoring is.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Haha, yes! OK, so you’re all familiar, I hope, with the fact that the brain has two lobes. They have a lot of overlap in function, though in a lot of people only the left side controls speech. But you are not two people, because there’s an entire wall of connecting neurons, the corpus callosum, between the two.

[Well, back in the old days, one treatment for really severe, life-threatening epilepsy was to sever the corpus callosum. So in a sense, patients became two people, but only one of them could talk. They did an experiment with those people. Sat them in front of a viewer where each eye could be shown a different image, and while they were doing tests, they sent a message to the right eye, go get a Coke. The right eye connects to the right lobe, which doesn’t usually have the ability to talk.]

[u/thisuserdoesnotexist: Doesn’t the right brain control the left side and so on?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Yep, but the crossover happens below the head. So the eyes, being in the head, are still connected to the lobe on the same side. Anyway, so they’d tell the right brain, go get a Coke. So the right brain would get the body up and head for the Coke machine. Now, keep in mind, the left brain has not seen this message, and without the corpus callosum, and given that the right brain can’t talk, the left brain has no way of knowing why the body is heading for the Coke machine.

[You would think this would be terrifying. Your body is doing something and you never told it to! Aaahh! Horror movie! But when they asked people, what are you doing? They got answers like, “I was thirsty”, or “I wanted to stretch my legs a bit.” None of them expressed any fear or uncertainty about why they were doing this, and also, none of them knew they’d been told to go get a Coke.

[So the theory goes, consciousness is not actually where all of your decisions come from! Maybe not even most of them! A lot of stuff is being done by deep processes in the brain that are black boxes, that consciousness has no insight into. But when those processes decide that the entire collection of stuff that is you needs to do something, consciousness often smoothly and easily rationalizes why you are doing the thing, without any recognition that that’s what you’re doing. It feels to you like you got up to stretch your legs, and while you’re at it, why not get a Coke? When the real reason is, the right side of your brain, which your left side can no longer hear, was told to do it.]

[u/supermansshorts: Is the right side of the brain, like, vulnerable to mind control?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Oh, no, no. These were volunteers who’d agreed to do the experiment and follow the instructions. It’s not like the right side of your brain is a completely different person from the left side. Even if you sever the corpus callosum, both sides are still you, near-identical copies who think and feel much the same way about everything. So if the left side signed the papers and spoke the agreement, it’s likely that the right side also agreed, for the same reasons. The right side wouldn’t have done something like “jump out a window”, it’s just as capable of making rational decisions as the left side is. But it agreed to follow instructions the same as the left side did, because if the left side was the kind of person who’d volunteer to follow the experimenters’ instructions, then so was the right side.

[Anyway, so spin doctoring. Consciousness is so good at coming up with rationalizations for why you are doing a thing that some deeper process said to do, it doesn’t even know it’s doing it. So a lot of the time, we make decisions based not on anything rational, or even an emotion we understand and recognize, but something deep down that we’re not even aware of.]

[u/mushroommushroom: Like Freud’s ego and id.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Similar, yeah, but it’s more like, there’s all these different processes happening, and consciousness isn’t actually aware of any of them, just their outputs. And when the body as a whole acts on one of those outputs without going through consciousness first, consciousness comes up with a reason why they wanted to do that.]

[u/ineedcheese: But I do things all the time that I literally have no idea why I did it, like one time I poked a cake my mom had just iced and when she asked me why I did that, I didn’t even know.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Yeah, spin doctoring doesn’t always work, particularly since the ADHD brain is particularly vulnerable to processes just totally bypassing consciousness and doing a thing. That’s called “poor impulse control.”

[But the point is, we do things for reasons we don’t even know, and then our consciousness comes up with a reason why we did that thing, and then it enters our database of “reasons to do or not do things.” Like… if I found it very hard to do a thing, I might, for the sake of my pride, come up with “I really hate doing that thing” or “I think it’s stupid” or “That thing is completely unnecessary.” But maybe the only reason it was hard was I wasn’t getting any dopamine from it, and maybe Dex could fix that for me… if I was willing to try to do it, but the spin doctor might have already convinced me, doing that thing is dumb and why should I?

[One of the roles a therapist or psychiatrist can play with a patient trying Dex is to work through the spin doctor’s bullshit. Help you try out things you have already written off, or break patterns you think are just the best way to do things when maybe they’re not.]

[u/ineedcheese: Like what kind of thing?]

[u/snowflakespecialaisle10: Writing documentation if you’re a programmer.]

Ouch. That one especially hit home.

[u/semicolonbang: How is the implant done? Like do they drill through your skull?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: It’s a laparoscopic surgery done up through the nose. Outpatient surgery, you go home the same day.]

[u/supermansshorts: And that doesn’t fuck up your nose?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Oh, your nose hurts like a bitch for about a week. When I did it, it drove me a little nuts because I have allergies, but blowing my nose would cause giant nosebleeds. Now, we give people a cocktail of antihistamine, numbing solution, and decongestant in a nasal spray, and apparently that works a lot better.]

[u/semicolonbang: You did it yourself?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: I told you that I lost my girlfriend because I never washed dishes and then we got a roach infestation and she blamed me, and you think I wouldn’t be signing up for the clinical trial the moment we opened it to human trials?]

[u/mushroommushroom: To be fair, the roaches probably came in on your groceries or from the next door neighbor or something. Not washing the dishes just gave them a source of food and water to breed from.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: I mentioned that. Turned out that was not a helpful argument.]

At this point, a Slack message popped up, and Jason had to turn his attention to that. It was from Teresa.

Jason, I haven’t heard from you in a couple of hours. Are you going to be ready for this meeting?

Ready, eager and waiting, he typed back. Shit, the meeting was in ten minutes. And look, there was the Outlook reminder he had reflexively shut off the moment it popped up, popping up again. Good thing Teresa had decided to poke him.

***

The meeting went well. Great, in fact. Jason was able to demo his code, and nothing went wrong. There were a couple of features he hadn’t implemented that the upper-level managers were concerned about, but Teresa backed him up, because he’d told her a month ago that those features would have to come in a later version. She politely reminded the upper-level managers that she’d informed them in email a month ago that those features wouldn’t be in this version. “Controlling scope is a very important part of controlling costs,” she said, and they couldn’t disagree.

Afterward there was a second, internal meeting of the team, which didn’t go quite as well because Teresa was banging the documentation drum. “If you got hit by a bus tomorrow, no one here would know how to support your code,” she said.

“Good thing I never go anywhere. No bus injuries in my future,” he said, and everyone laughed.

“But you know, they say that most accidents happen close to home,” Adrian said. “Seriously, Jason, I know doc’ing sucks, but you gotta get it done.”

Adrian extensively documented his own code, and got it done approximately 20% as quickly as Jason when he was on. And probably only 75% as quickly when you factored in how much time Jason wasted. “I know,” Jason said.

Stacy, the business analyst charged with writing user manuals, said, “It makes my job a lot easier when there are docs.”

“I’ll take a few days and go back through and do that.”

Then they talked about next steps, and the QA team revving up to test. Duane tried to get Jason’s help with a different problem he was working on, but Teresa deflected it, unfortunately. “Jason’s focus has to be on fixing his documentation,” she said. “Jorge, maybe you could team with Duane, see if the two of you could get any traction on this?”

“Sure,” Jorge said, dashing what small hopes Jason had of being able to find an acceptable task to work on that was not documentation.

When the meeting was over, he opened up his code, stared at it for three minutes trying to figure out where to even begin documenting. Due to the lack of documentation, he wasn’t even 100% sure he knew what all these functions did.

Fuck it.

He jumped over to Reddit, where he still had the Dex AMA open, which reminded him that he’d wanted to google Suzanne Burke’s claims and generally the whole thing, because the idea of a brain implant that could help you control your own behavior wasn’t real far off from conspiracy theorists’ paranoid fantasies of the CIA putting mind control devices in your brain.

Three hours later he’d learned some things:

All the bad reviews of Dex came from people who had obviously never used it or didn’t even really know what it was, people who were complaining about absurd things (“I wanted it to help me stop eating snack chips so I filled my room with snack chips to test it and it didn’t work, I still ate snack chips”) or things no one had never claimed it could fix (“I still keep losing my keys”), or people who had gotten one of the earlier versions at the start of clinical trials. Most of the most recent reviews either raved about it or said something like, “It’s a lot of hard work to re-engineer your whole life even with Dex, but with Dex I can actually do that work without getting in my own way”, or “It’s an adjustment and you’ll find there are things you are used to wanting to do that you don’t even really want to anymore, and that can be bothersome, but they’re usually things you wanted to stop wanting to do”. Most of the complaints that remained after the positive reviews and factoring out the old and/or stupid ones were about the surgery – “They said my nose would hurt for about three weeks but it’s been six weeks and it still hurts when I blow it”. One person had a bad allergic reaction and they had to take it out.

There were many complaints from friends and family members of someone using Dex. “He never has time to hang out anymore”, “We used to spend hours chatting on Discord and now she blows me off after like half an hour”, “He’s like some kind of zombie drone where it’s all about work, work, work” (this was troubling, but when Jason drilled into that, it turned out to be a boyfriend who was annoyed that his paramour didn’t want to spend hours a day canoodling, because he had work to do.)

There were a lot of conspiracy theories about how Jupiter was using Dex to mind control people on behalf of the government, the New World Order, the Jews, the reptilians, the liberal left, fascism, or corporations. These were all presented with tremendous hysteria and very little actual evidence. One persistent theory was that the founder and CEO of Jupiter, who’d expressed an interest in space colonization, was going to use Dex to mind-control a sizable workforce into going into space to build his space colonies. Another one seemed to think that Dex had been created by the infamous tech billionaire who’d managed to destroy Twitter, as if all tech billionaires were the same guy, or had some kind of hive mind agenda.

One credible theory claimed that the device had a wireless component to receive updates, and that therefore it could be used in the future to send ads to people, somehow. The wireless component turned out to actually exist, and it really was sending brain scans back to Ulysses for analysis, and Ulysses really was sending out software updates. Ulysses claimed this was fully anonymized, that the analysis was necessary in order to improve the software that ran Dex, and that the software itself was so unusual and proprietary that it would be literally impossible to infect it with malware. Jason was suspicious. All of that sounded very plausible and also something a corporation could decide to throw out and do something evil with the moment the board of directors decided they could get away with it. He couldn’t figure out exactly how it could possibly send ads, but he was sure it could be nefariously used for something.

In the end, there were two factors that decided him on not bothering to look any further into Dex. The existence of the wireless connection to Ulysses’ servers, and the fact that he’d have to find a psychiatrist if he wanted to be prescribed it. Finding a psychiatrist sounded easy enough, but given that Jason had had “change doctors” on his to-do list for two and a half years, and hadn’t been to a dentist in longer than that because he just never got around to making an appointment, he had no illusions.

But without researching Dex as an excuse to himself, he had no good reason not to work on his documentation. Just the usual reasons. It was boring, he didn’t want to, and he couldn’t make himself do it without a stunning amount of caffeine in his system.

Well. Time for early evening Coca Cola, then.

Jason had a system. Complex carbs, he thought, slowed him down and made him sleepy. Simple carbs, sugar, were a quick shot in the arm of energy, but there’d be a crash afterward. Greasy protein was even worse than the complex carbs, so pizza was absolutely terrible for focus. (This did not stop him from eating it when it was available.) The secret was lean protein, cold vegetables (because warmth made him sleepy), and sugar. So grilled chicken or salmon on a salad, and Coke. It was a pain in the ass to make this for himself; salad, in particular, was annoying because you had to wash it and then somehow you had to dry it, or wait hours for it to dry on its own, or your croutons would get soggy. He put in an online order at a local place, and then turned to video games.

The good thing about ordering food online was that, when it showed up, it would automatically disrupt whatever he was doing, so it was a great way to break free from something he probably shouldn’t be doing to switch to something he should. The bad thing about ordering food online was that it resulted in multiple interruptions while he was trying to relax with the game, because they called to confirm the order, and then they called to find his house, and then they called to tell him they were on the porch downstairs. And then Mom called up to tell him his food was here, and why hadn’t he asked her if she wanted anything?

But now he had his food, and his Coke, so it was time to focus on this thing.

This boring thing.

This thing he would rather do almost anything than be doing.

He slogged through it, incredibly slowly. He’d add a comment, scroll down, pop over to Reddit or a newsfeed or Youtube or literally anything other than this documentation, do that for several minutes – he had no idea how many – and then abruptly remember he was supposed to be doing his documentation and go back to it. As the night wore on, he became less and less efficient, more time spent not documenting, less time unraveling his own code to figure out what he did and write it down. But he couldn’t just go to bed; he had to make enough progress that he looked like he was making progress. But he couldn’t stay up all night, because then he would oversleep tomorrow and he would look bad.

The two balanced each other at 3 am, and he was finally able to go to bed, the documentation close to sort of done. Not to sleep, though, because he’d had way too much Coke and he was much too worried about what Teresa would think. Was this enough to show due diligence, or would she be angry that it wasn’t complete?

***

It took four days.

Four days of Teresa pestering him about whether the documentation was finished, four days of having nothing required of him that he actually wanted to work on. Four days of dodging the documentation as much as he could by helping everyone else out. Including helping with their documentation, because as annoying as documentation in general was, it was much better when he was getting the warm fuzzies for helping someone else, directly.

There was a weekend in the middle of those four days. Jason promised himself he’d work on the docs over the weekend and then didn’t even open the file. Then he promised himself he’d get up early on Monday to do some work on it, and instead woke up at 10, having missed a 9:30 scrum.

At 2 pm on Tuesday, he was finally able to report being finished with documenting his code. He checked the final version in, breathed a sigh of relief, and got himself a beer. He’d finished the slog. Time to unwind. He didn’t officially clock out, because frankly he’d been working so ridiculously late each night that if he weren’t salaried, they’d owe him a whole extra paycheck, so it was only fair. While he didn’t log off Slack or close his email, he did dive into a video game that occupied the full screen and wouldn’t let him see if messages came through. He told himself he’d pop out periodically and check.

Six hours later, when he finally checked, he had a Slack message from Teresa to come into the office tomorrow. It was much too late by now to ask her why.

***

“You’re letting me go?”

He stared at Teresa, a feeling of cold and heat at once sweeping through his veins. “You know I’m the best programmer in the department, right?”

“No one disputes that,” Teresa said, conciliatory. “But it takes you too long to get your work done, because you’re always in late, or leaving early.”

“I’ve been working until 3 am for a week now! And I only left early yesterday because I’d finished my documentation, and I needed a break.”

“Right. Jason, other programmers do not take four days to finish documenting their code. They document it as they write it. If you’d been hit by a bus over the weekend, we wouldn’t have had any idea how the code works, and I’d have to put someone on tracing it back and figuring it all out.”

He realized, then, that she’d just been waiting for him to finish it before she fired him. “I’m always helping out everyone else in the department, that’s why I’m slow sometimes.”

“You’re a great help, and you’ll be missed, but we need programmers who can work standard hours and hit their deadlines. I’m sorry, Jason, but it’s out of my hands. Upper management looked at your metrics and told me you’ve gotta go.” She shook her head. “I know you have personal effects here at the office, so you can go get those. Charlie here will escort you.”

Charlie wasn’t dressed any differently than anyone else at the company, but he was probably security. Certainly Jason didn’t recognize him, so he wasn’t in IT. “Fine,” he snapped.

“We’ll need the work laptop back,” she reminded him. The one he had never taken out of the box, because the box had the specs on it and he’d realized that it wasn’t nearly powerful enough for his needs, so he’d been doing all his work on his personal desktop.

“I’ll drop it off.”

He knew that by now he’d already been locked out of all the computer systems, so he wouldn’t have a copy of any of his Slack messages, or the code he’d just finished. If he wanted his email he’d have to find a way to convert his Outlook OST to an archive without actually opening it, because if he opened it, it would probably ask for a password and then just endlessly prompt him for a login until he closed it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to keep his email that badly.

What a dick thing, to make him come into the office just to fire him. But then, it would also have been a dick thing to fire him by Slack message or voice call or email, and then he wouldn’t have had a chance to get his very minimal amount of stuff, which included a few cartoons he’d pinned to his cubicle wall and a family picture he’d photoshopped to completely remove Dad, so it just had him and Mom. Not that he couldn’t print out another copy of that, but the frame had come from a college friend he wasn’t in touch with much anymore, and he had sentimental attachment to it.

***

Mom was home, in the kitchen, on her laptop, as he came in, because of course she was. “Honey? You okay?”

For a moment he contemplated saying “Fine,” and stomping off to his room like he was still 17, but Mom would get it out of him sooner or later. Better bite the bullet now. “I got fired.”

“Oh. Oh, Jason, I’m so sorry. Anything I can do to help?”

Not tell me about how it’s my fault, I hope. “Not really, but thanks for the offer.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve got savings and I’ve got health insurance until the end of the month, and more if I take COBRA. I want to see a psychiatrist about these problems I’ve been having.”

Mom nodded. “That might be a good idea. Maybe there’s a new medication you could try.”

“There’s this thing I was looking into, called Dex. It’s like an implant that helps you train your brain to focus? I’m thinking maybe I need to take it more seriously.”

“That might be a good idea. Do you need help with finding a psychiatrist?”

He was about to say no, it’s fine, I’ve got it handled Mom… and then thought better of it, because that kind of thing was the strategy that just got him fired. “Yeah. I need you to keep reminding me I need to do it. Even if I get bitchy about it.”

“Oh, I can do that,” Mom said, amused. “Also, I don’t know how quickly they’ll get your COBRA paperwork to you, but you need to get on that immediately. Check the mail every day—”

“I’d think they’d email it.”

“They might, but probably they’ve turned off your email? Do they have a personal email address for you?”

A good question. “I think they have my Gmail…”

“Check that every day. Including the spam boxes. And check the regular mail every day. There’s some time limit they’re under for how quickly they have to provide you that, but I don’t remember what it is. And it’s to their advantage if they wait a few days so maybe you’ll forget. You need to be on that. You could try to go through the marketplace, since losing your job is a qualifying event, but that’s likely to be much more disruptive, and COBRA is probably cheaper than that.”

Jason nodded. “Keep me honest?”

“I sure will.”

“Gonna hit up Dice and Linkedin, maybe Monster, see how quick I can land a new job.”

“Good luck.”

***

But he had savings, and it seemed like a dumb idea to take a new job and then get brain surgery. Sure, the AMA had said it was outpatient surgery, but what if there were complications and he had to take time off? It might be a better idea to find out if he was getting Dex or not before he got a job.

He found a psychiatrist who didn’t take his, or anyone’s, insurance, which was expensive, but living with your mom for several years and paying only a third of the mortgage and half the utilities, while holding a good job, had enabled him to save up a fairly large nest egg. She was the kind of psychiatrist who never actually told you what she thought, but spent all her time asking you what you thought about things. She presented options and made suggestions and offered to help by writing prescriptions for whatever she had suggested that you had decided to go ahead with.

The company had given him one boon; they hadn’t told the state they’d fired him for cause, even though doing so would have saved on their unemployment insurance. Unemployment was less than a third of what he’d been making, but on the other hand, he didn’t have to order food out nearly so much when he wasn’t breaking his neck for the company that had just fired him. He could actually cook. He could help his mom when she cooked, and learn how to make some shit he didn’t already know.

Jason tried three non-stimulant medications over the course of eight weeks. One of them made him horny as hell, which was unfortunate as he didn’t have a significant other, and he felt like jerking off three times a day was a waste of his time. One did nothing. One made him overwhelmingly sleepy. He tried stimulant medication, again, a slightly different formulation, but still felt like it made him jittery and his heart raced and he got headaches and was irritable. A lower dose of stimulant medication gave him the same symptoms, just a little less of them, and lower than that didn’t actually work at all to help him focus.

This wasn’t the first job he’d been fired from for not being able to keep to a schedule or make deadlines, and if he didn’t do something, it wouldn’t be the last.

In the end, he talked himself into asking his doctor about Dex, just like the commercial said.

***

Outpatient surgery, it turned out, was still surgery… it just didn’t involve a lengthy stay in the hospital. When his mother came to pick him up, because he wasn’t allowed to drive after surgery, his nose was starting to hurt like a motherfucker. They’d given him a nasal spray that would keep the area sterile, promote clotting, and relieve pain, and they’d given him decongestants because it was EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, according to the aftercare nurse and the directions he was given on paper, that he not sneeze or blow his nose. If his nose started to run, they’d given him a second nasal spray that was a direct decongestant and antihistamine, and he was supposed to use that instead. If he had a nosebleed, he was to use his spray and lay down immediately until the bleed went away. Yes, his nose would clog up, because there was a healing wound and the spray was promoting clotting; he would just have to breathe through the other nostril. And this was supposed to go on for up to two weeks.

Joy.

They also gave him regular painkillers, which he quit taking about four days later because seriously, how do people get addicted to the sensation of having a fuzzy head? He had enough issues with being half-brained from exhaustion, he didn’t really want to add opioids to the mix. Tylenol and the nasal spray would do.

It was at that point that he decided to engage in the difficult task of trying to get a new job. He’d already updated his resume, but he hadn’t uploaded it; he’d already done some initial keyword searches for jobs, but hadn’t actually applied to anything.

He opened the job search site, logged into his profile, and began the laborious task of adding his newer skills from the job he was just fired from, and updating the length of experience he had with the other ones. It was nightmarishly boring, just like it had been every other time, so he popped over to Reddit. Just for a little while, just to do something more entertaining for a few minutes.

Except Reddit wasn’t entertaining.

He browsed around for a while, looking for something to catch his attention, but frankly nothing was as compelling as the idea of getting the goddamn resume done and out there, so he could get a job, get health insurance he didn’t have to pay an arm and a leg for, and stop making his mom anxious. So he went back to the job search site, and this time, managed to get the entire task done without interrupting himself. It wasn’t fun, but it was something he wanted out of the way, and he was able to power through it, and then finish doing the same thing with two other job search sites.

It wasn’t until after he was finished that he realized.

Holy shit. This thing works!

***

After that, Jason went a little nuts, self-admittedly, with his new superpowers of actually being able to focus and get shit done.

The AMA had been correct. He wasn’t any better able to remember where he put his keys than he had ever been. But he was able to order a bunch of devices that could be hung on key rings or slipped into wallets, that he would be able to use an app to find, and then get them set up and put them on the devices they needed to be attached to. He got “Find my Droid” configured for all the times he lost his phone, and a bunch of chargers he could plug in all over the house, including QI chargers, that he could leave the phone attached to whenever he didn’t want to deal with carrying it around, so now it wouldn’t die out of his custody.

He wasn’t any better at remembering that he had appointments. But he was able to focus enough to put in sufficient reminders, that would catch him at enough points in time, that he wouldn’t be blindsided… and enough to actually check the reminders when they showed up, rather than just absent-mindedly dismissing them. After he next saw his psychiatrist, he actually put his upcoming appointment on his calendar, so he didn’t have to run around like crazy trying to find the little appointment card when he finally remembered that there was an appointment.

He remembered to wash his clothes three days before a job interview, so he had options. (It was virtual anyway, but it did require his camera, so he wanted to look good.) He showered and shaved that morning, rather than forgetting and then racing to try to get it done before the interview. He actually ate breakfast, not just coffee, because he paid attention when his alarm went off, didn’t just snooze it, and managed to drag himself out of bed early enough that his mom was still home and making herself eggs and bacon, which she shared with him. He used Linkedin and Google to read up on the companies he was being interviewed for before the interview, so he actually knew who some of the people were and had some familiarity with what they did.

And in the meanwhile, he kept the dishes clean, the trash taken out, the kitchen floor swept, the toilet paper on the roll and the empty rolls in the trash can, the soda cans in the recycling bin, and he even got around to fixing the bathroom shelf above the toilet and taking his mom’s car to the mechanic for her, because a 30-year-old guy was a lot less likely to get scammed by a mechanic than a nearly 60-year-old woman.

This was fucking awesome.

He wrote a few of the personal programs he’d always wanted to get around to, like the one that helped him use his phone to take an inventory of his and his mom’s shit, so if there was ever a fire, they could back up their claims of what was lost… and then he actually went around taking the photographs, labeling them, and using the program to push them into the database he’d set up. He remembered, finally, after about twelve increasingly upset emails from Teresa, to bring in that work laptop and drop it off. He returned his library books, paid his fines, and checked some more out, and then returned them on time. He set up a blog and started writing about programming challenges he’d encountered in his career. He put a Pi Hole on his mom’s wifi network to block ads at the router so none of the computers had to work at that. He bought a cheap laptop and set it up with Linux like he’d always planned, and actually did the experimenting he’d always wanted to do.

His time on Reddit plummeted, and was mostly confined to subreddits about the games he was into, where he knew people and had stuff to say that he cared about, rather than endlessly surfing sites like r/AmITheAsshole and r/TodayIFuckedUp. He still gamed, in the evenings, for a reasonable amount of time that didn’t interfere with his sleep schedule, and felt no guilt about it because he was getting his important shit done, so he had every right to relax as hard as he worked. When he wasn’t doing job interviews or searching for jobs, during the day in what would be working hours, he was reading up on new technologies and actively teaching himself new skills.

Jason’s mom cried when she told him how proud she was of him for taking this step and getting his life turned around. He himself wanted to cry, sometimes, when he realized that he’d wasted 30 years of his life without this, and that ordinary people, people without ADHD, just lived like this. Out of the box. Without having to have a foreign object shoved up their nose and into their craniums.

The day he got the new job, he happily updated his LinkedIn, after making connections with old co-workers so they could see he’d landed on his feet and he wasn’t a total fuckup. A couple of them contacted him, asking if he could help out with some problems they were having. He asked them to go back to Teresa and get authorization to pay him as a contractor. They didn’t ask again after that.

He even went and updated his profile on some dating sites. Now that he had a job again, and now that he no longer felt constant guilt over what he wasn’t getting done at his job, it was time to try to get back into that game. He hadn’t had a partner since shortly before the first lockdown… that was a long time to go without.

And then his first paycheck arrived, and he grinned to himself. He’d been good… at least since getting the Dex implant. He hadn’t bought anything unless he needed it or it would help him improve skills and be more marketable. No new games, no new DVDs, no books, no new phone, no new speakers for his PC, no replacement pump and filter for the fish tank that had no fish in it and was at this point just an algae-growing experiment, no cast iron skillet because Mom had sold hers at a yard sale due to her hands being too arthritic to hold something so heavy while cooking, nothing.

It was spending spree time! He’d been promising himself this since he got Dex. Save his money while he didn’t have a job, keep spending as tight as he could, and he’d go on a spree as soon as he got a paycheck.

He went to Jupiter.com first, because that was where he could get most of everything he wanted, maybe even everything he wanted. Two new games he’d been jonesing for. Several graphic novels, a science fiction novel, and a memoir. A box set for a TV show he loved, because relying on streaming had gotten more and more erratic as fights over licensing continued. PC speakers with surround sound that were two generations better than what he had, and an upgraded graphics card. Fish tank supplies – maybe he was finally going to be responsible enough to keep fish alive. A hat, because it looked cool, even though he couldn’t imagine a circumstance where he’d actually wear it.

For clothes, though, and the cast iron frying pan, it was better to shop local, where he didn’t have to pay shipping, and he could immediately return anything that had an unpleasant texture. So he went over to Target’s web site, and was immediately bored out of his mind.

He tried to convince himself that the search tools for clothes were more specialized here, and he was more likely to be able to find one thing that fit and then six other things like it in slightly different cuts or colors. No go. It was like looking at the red color scheme and the font was draining the life out of him.

Which was ridiculous. He forced himself to look for the cast iron frying pan. That should be simple and easy.

But they had multiple options, and it seemed like just such an enormous amount of work to sort through them.

He went back to Jupiter.com. The fonts seemed cleaner, the pictures more inviting. The cost of shipping was challenging, though. But he could fix that. Just click the button for only free shipping, and look at that! He could even get three of different sizes. He added it to his cart without thinking about it much.

Clothes continued to be a challenge. It was kind of fun to go hunting, but his frustration was building, because there were so many items coming up in his searches that weren’t what he searched for at all. And no way to tell the texture of anything just from pictures, whereas with a local store he could go there and check things out.

So he tried going over to Walmart, which was disgusting, and JC Penney’s, which was overwhelming, and some of the sites for fancy mall stores, which just seemed to not have any kind of selection. He was used to buying from Target. They had good search filters for men’s clothes, that rarely pulled back complete bullshit. He should go there.

Except when he went there, everything looked overwhelmingly hard and chaotic and he just didn’t want to. All the fun of clothes shopping drained away.

And then he went cold.

Jason tried going to Barnes and Noble’s web site for a specific book. It was too hard to use the site. He’d used it before, but somehow it seemed really inferior now. He tried going to a PC online retailer to look for the video card he had already bought from Jupiter. The filters were too unresponsive. He went to Swappa to find a used phone to replace the one he had, and almost immediately gave up because none of the products looked good and he was feeling a general sense of unease about the idea of buying a used phone from a shady online store… even though he’d gotten his last three phones there and had been satisfied.

Shit. Shit.

He had to post about this. If this was happening to him… he couldn’t be the only one. He opened up Reddit and found the thread about Dex, clicked the new post button…

…and lost all enthusiasm for the task. Jesus, did he really have to write a post about this bullshit? Who cared? Probably everyone would jump his shit. It wasn’t like he had any scientific proof. And the idea of having to explain, in detail, what was happening? Humiliating.

No. No. That was more of it. He had to write this post. He started typing, grimly, using the same fortitude he’d used when he’d spent four days documenting his code so his boss could fire him.

“I really loved Dex at first, but”

“but some disturb”

“but I found”

“but there’s one thing”

Nothing looked right. The documentation, at least, had been right when he’d written it. Everything he was writing now just looked terrible and whiny and like there was no point to saying anything.

But he had to do this. He had to write this post. The thing in his head had to be making him not want to do this, not want to say this, but he’d gone for 30 years forcing himself to do things he really, really didn’t want to do.

“I really loved Dex at first, but its changing what I want, its bad, you shouldn’t”

No. Fuck. What was that? That was utter shit. Couldn’t he even be bothered to capitalize and use punctuation?

“I really loved Dex at first, but it won’t let me write this post about what it’s doing to me”

Fuck this, go read r/AITA.

Go read his video game subreddits.

Check Microsoft Teams, which his new company used instead of Slack. Maybe someone had a late-night request for help? Or something he was supposed to do tomorrow that he could get started on tonight instead?

No!

“I really loved Dex at first, but it makes me”

An hour of reading the news.

“makes me feel bored with shopping”

Just one round of his video game. Just one.

Six rounds later.

“shopping anywhere but Jupi”

This dog growled at the baby sitter, you’ll be shocked when you find out why!

25 screens later of a story he had predicted the end of when he’d started reading it.

“Jupiter. I go to tar”

Had anyone online ever posted that stupid ditty where they sang “shop at tar-jay” like the word Target was French? Go check.

“target or any other site”

Wow, it was late, shouldn’t he go to bed? Bed sounded really great. He really shouldn’t disrupt his sleep schedule for this now that he’d gotten a new job and finally established a good sleep schedule, right?

Focus.

“site and it makes me feel like it’s boring, or too complicated, or just bad”

How about his favorite TV show? Was there going to be another season of that?

“just bad, until I go to Jupiter, and then shopping feels fun”

Yeah. That was it. That was the message. He didn’t need to keep doing this. He could stop and post it here. Actually he should spell check first, right? And it was late, maybe he wanted to hold off on posting until tomorrow, when he could look at it with fresh eyes.

“feels fun. And it wont let me”

1 am. This was ridiculous. He had work in the morning. He couldn’t lose this job just because of something stupid like this.

Another half hour of reading the news.

“let me write this to warn you.”

Right! Wrap it up, turn off the monitor, go to bed! He’d done his part. The message was out there!

Jason absent-mindedly turned his computer off, and only then, wondered if he had ever actually hit post.

Well. He could check on it in the morning.

After work. And his chores. And he was supposed to game with his friends tomorrow, so after that, too.

Oh, fuck this. He'd spent his life struggling against things his brain didn't want him to do, and it was awful and it had traumatized him and he never wanted to go through that bullshit again. If he'd forgotten to hit post, oh well. Let someone else do it. Jason was done beating his head against the wall of things he really didn't want to do, that he thought he should do, forever.

#52 project #science fiction #adhd #near future #i made up jupiter so amazon wouldn't sue me #just so you know

[struggle-but-its-all-ocean-floor]

I’m probably projecting but I find Jungkook’s enthusiasm regarding his solo album pretty tamed. I too have been quite disappointed in most of his performances, not that they were bad but I couldn’t find the energy he usually has? I can’t exactly pinpoint what doesn’t work for me. I feel like it’s a toned down version of Jungkook we’re seeing now for some reason. On one hand he seems happy to have had the opportunity to work on a variety of songs of various genre, it was a challenge and I can see he’s satisfied with the result and tbh he should but at the same time I’m having a hard time connecting to the songs themselves because he himself seems quite disconnected to them. He seems a bit more enthusiastic about SNTY so it’s nice to see but otherwise I don’t see him overly excited. Even though he didn’t write anything he still participated in choosing the songs so I was expecting to learn a bit more about how and why he choose them, why he connected to them on a certain level but he barely said anything. The fact that he repeated multiple times it was just stories, it wasn’t autobiographical, like okay but still, those songs make you feel something, right? When he answered on those interviews Hate You is a good winter song or whatever I was a bit dumbfounded cause, huh, okay cool but don’t you have a little bit to say about it? It’s almost like he doesn’t think too much about the meaning of the songs. Or maybe it’s because it’s about love and he can’t really touch on this topic with us? He could still stay as vague as he wants, and be generally speaking about how he relates to this or what he likes about that song yada yada. I don’t know, maybe I was expecting too much. And I know he thinks he’s not good with words so maybe he just have a hard time expressing his feelings. At the same time we still have his documentary on the way so we might know more of the process then. I forced myself to wait for some time after the release to really make my mind about it but I still have mixed feelings. I like the album but I don’t love it. I’ve liked some performances but I can’t say I’ve been particularly impressed. It’s not groundbreaking. I don’t see a particularly energetic and powerful Jungkook like I used to. I feel like I’m being unfair and that I probably sabotaged my own enjoyment by having too high expectations maybe. It sucks lol. I’ve been following your and reading your posts and it feels like you’re one Jungkook biased fan who could relate.

Hey!

You brought up something I'd never though about before, which is Jungkook not being excited about Golden. I don't know how excited he is, but he doesn't seem unexcited? Jungkook was apparently on the fence about releasing an album, and I think the album itself doesn't hold as much meaning to him as the challenge it posed and the fact that he was able to achieve good results and make the fans happy. Golden seems more like a means to an end - an opportunity he took advantage of - than an album that is very dear to him simply because he wanted to release one. Of course Golden is dear to him - he chose the tracks and was especially involved in the performance aspect of Seven, 3D, and SNTY - but his attachment to Golden can't compare to Suga's attachment to D-Day, Jimin's attachment to Face, RM's attachment to Indigo, or Hobi's attachment to JITB, because they also wrote the songs, and put themselves in a more vulnerable position of sharing their thoughts and feelings with fans and taking responsibility for the album's success. Golden, in many ways, is just like another BTS album to Jungkook. Jungkook likes BTS's albums, but he may not personally relate to most tracks. To him, BTS albums are a chance for them to perform and make Army happy, to become more successful, to try different genres and grow as a performer, and also what he's meant to do as an artist. BTS albums are very special to Jungkook, and Golden may be even more special, but surely there is a difference when the album is self-produced. We saw how difficult the album making process was for Jimin and Jungkook was "spared" some that, even if recording songs, shooting MVs, flying, practicing choreos, etc. in such a short period of time was really challenging for him. But it's just different from having a producer role as well. Golden is still Jungkook's debut album though, and he is solely responsible for how it performs - even the album's name is special to him.

So I'd say Jungkook is excited and proud of Golden. But you're right that we'd be having a different conversation had Jungkook written it. He'd be asked different questions and share different stories with us.

As for the performances, I'm not sure if it's the energy, exactly, but there seems to be a deliberate intent to simplify his performances? His emphasis on "cool" performances aren't the type of "cool" we're used to in BTS. We're used to Jungkook hitting every note and adlib (the first time he missed was YTC in Busan...), but, tbf, he usually doesn't have an entire song to sing.

What I realized in his second GMA performance is that Jungkook isn't trying to impress people. Maybe in the past impressing Army and delivering very consistent performances was the biggest priority. But, now, although delivering good performances consistently is still a top priority, enjoying the process may be equally important? When Jungkook performs, he allows himself a lot more moments to look at the audience and enjoy their energy now. When he chooses not to sing some verses (many verses, even), is it because he's tired, or can't be bothered (doesn't have the motivation? doesn't seem likely), or wants to spare his vocals, or enjoy the fans? Is it because it's not the singing that's fun but rather the fans?

I really wish I knew what Jungkook thought during his two Euphoria performances, which, to me, were frankly so below his standards it was shameful. Has his idea of being a performer has changed? Like Jungkook of BTS is a high-achiever who never stops moving and singing (though he has way less lines), but soloist Jungkook is a high-achiever who also just wants to vibe? I've been disappointed too - not really with SNTY, but with a lot of Seven performances, as well as his Euphoria ones, and Global Citizen in general which was so bad by his standards, but I don't know either. I know he's a perfectionist, I know he loves being on stage, I know he loves his fans. So are Jungkook's recent performances because he's getting older and has to adjust his performances? Is he struggling with motivation? Is he struggling with his voice? Euphoria is a really hard song and he's had two bad colds since Seven and mentioned losing his voice once. Is he trying a more Western and less kpop style of performing? I wish I knew the answer.

I think you and I are a bit to blame, because we place really high expectations on Jungkook and are used to him always living up to them. But his performances have been different lately, and I think it's okay to be disappointed and confused, I think.

Thanks for the ask!

#ask #bts #jungkook #golden #text #thanks for the ask!

[nysocboy]

Cousin George: "Only fools wear pajamas"

I'm starting a new series of autobiographical stories with a Gemstone connection, mostly South Carolina or megachurch-related. First up: Cousin George:

He was the son of my father's older brother, just my age, tall and blond, with a hard chest, a thin belly, and a Southern drawl. He lived in Walterboro, South Carolina, about 50 miles from Charleston but a thousand miles from Rock Island, so we visited only a few times during my chiildhood. Usually my Grandma Davis took me down on the train. What I remember most about my visits: the sizzling heat, the humidity, and the beefcake. No one in South Carolina owned a shirt. I had never seen so many muscular bodies.

And the racial diversity: Cousin George had friends who were Native American and Chinese, and even black (I never saw anyone black in heavily-segregated Rock Island).

We went fishing and crabbing, and Cousin George warned me to avoid the "dead man's fingers" inside the crab shells that would turn you into "a goon."

We went swimming in the warm salty Atlantic Ocean.

At night Cousin George and I took our baths together together in scalding-hot water, and then slept naked together under thin sheets -- "only fools wear pajamas," he insisted.

When I was 13, Grandma Davis got sick, and the train-visits stopped. We didn't stay in contact. Occasionally my father would tell me something about his three older sisters, but he never mentioned Cousin George. Apparently my uncle never mentioned him. Was he dead, or disinherited, or a disappointment?

Years later, when I was a visiting assistant professor in Florida, I got a job interview at a college in South Carolina, and afterwards I thought I'd look up my relatives. I visited my uncle and aunt, and Cousin Suzie, and then I asked about Cousin George.

They all exchanged glances. "Oh…um…we don't talk to him much," Cousin Suzie said. "He lives in Charleston." She said it with palpable disgust, like it was a cesspool of immorality.

"That's only an hour away," I pointed out. "And it's on my way home."

"Oh…um…he's busy with his own affairs, is all."

What would cause such obvious discomfort? I wondered. Only three things:

My South Carolina relatives were all strict Nazarenes. Maybe George was a backslider.

They were somewhat racist. Maybe George was in an interracial relationship.

Maybe he was gay.

Turns out: all three!

They gave me the address in Charleston -- they didn't have a phone number -- and I drove down. A massive African-American bodybuilder-type answered the door. Rod, the boyfriend!

Cousin George came home from work about an hour later, a massive blond bodybuilder-type (this isn't him, either).

We went out to dinner at the Boar's Head, a gay-friendly restaurant, and talked about bodybuilding and our jobs and romances, and the difficulty of dealing with fundamentalist relatives.

"You should have known about me back when we were kids," Cousin George said. "Why do you think I wanted to take baths together?"

"And sleep naked," Rod added. "'Only fools wear pajamas.'" They exchanged a glance and laughed.

Apparently he had heard a lot about my visits.

No, I didn't hook up with my cousin. But I did discover that both Rod and George still slept without pajamas.

The story with illustrations (no nudity) is on RIghteous Gemstones Beefcake and Boyfriends

#the righteous gemstones #Gemstone Connection #South Carolina #autobiography #Cousin George #bodybuilder #gay couple #evangelical homophobia

[tygerbug]

The Fabelmans: Steven Spielberg gets autobiographical with a story of a troubled teenager who wants to be a filmmaker, and who is starting to see his parents as people- complicated, messy, deeply broken people. Weirder, more complex and less sentimental than you'd expect ... and too specific to not be true. Michelle Williams stands out with a layered performance.

Steven Spielberg, our most popular filmmaker, gets a little experimental, and personal, with this moody semi-autobiographical drama about young Sammy Fabelman, who wants to be a filmmaker, after a traumatic moment seeing an onscreen train crash as a child. Back in 2001, Spielberg directed A.I. / Artificial Intelligence, based on an unmade Stanley Kubrick project, which was apparently intended to be shot in Spielberg's style. The Fabelmans, although it's pure Spielberg, feels a little like a response to David Lynch, and perhaps to Mad Men. It's a little bit cartoony - I think Spielberg can't help that - but it peels back a few layers of 1960s suburbia to show something a little darker and weirder lurking inside. It's not his most accessible film, but it is interesting, and populated with complex performances. It will also probably ring true for anyone who has ever picked up a camera and made their own films.

Michelle Williams turns in perhaps the most memorable performance this year, as the troubled Mitzi Fabelman, a fragile soul who seems like she might float away at any moment. Paul Dano is careful to soften the character of Burt Fabelman, the father who is nerdy, distant and out of his depth in all matters of the heart. Gabriel LaBelle plays young Sammy Fabelman without apparently feeling the need to be likeable at all times, having inherited some of the quirks of his parents, and letting his emotions get the better of him. Judd Hirsch has a ball in a brief role as Uncle Boris, who accurately diagnoses Sammy's future and curses him with it. It's not the most exciting film, and a long watch at two and a half hours, although the characters are eccentric enough to fill the time. Seth Rogen plays Bennie, the family friend who causes a rift in the family. It's a light, likeable performance, as if Sammy had more empathy for the man in retrospect than he did at the time. Sam Rechner plays an alt-right sports star who bullies Sam for being Jewish, before ending up in the crosshairs of his camera. Greg Grunberg and young Julie Butters also appear.

There's something about the style of the filmmaking that rings a little false, but pretty much every detail of the film feels alarmingly specific and true. It is easy to believe that the events of this film occurred to Steven Spielberg, and these events are depicted with a welcome complexity and empathy for almost everyone involved. It's a little weirder than you'd expect, and not overly sentimental, except in the fact that Spielberg has more understanding for these people than Sammy Fabelman does. Sam is going through his rebellious teenage years, and is really struggling as he starts to see his parents are flawed people rather than just family. In real life, Steven Spielberg was not close to his father for about fifteen years, and you feel that here, but from a later, retrospective point of view that comes without judgement. Paul Dano's Burt Fabelman is basically a good man who can't make this work, and who tries to support his wife and son without understanding them. The Fabelman daughters get less character development. Gabriel Labelle's performance as Sammy does not drip with likeability, but he really seems to feel Sammy's darker moments that distance him from his family and isolate him, all of which feel like a prelude to the rest of his life as a filmmaker, as the film ends with a joyous moment, from the point of view of a camera. It resembles The Muppet Movie, but I'd bet good money that it happened exactly as depicted.

I won't recommend this film to everyone, but if you've ever been a young filmmaker you'll find a lot you recognize here, and it's interesting and laudable to see Steve Spielberg dig deep into his own past, with all the messy complexity that suggests. It's thought-provoking, and avoids easy answers, and you'll feel like you understand Steven Spielberg better at the end of it.

[alarajrogers]

upcoming WIP

This is the first part of the next 52 Story and I wanted to share it with you guys because I cannot think of another place where this would be as profoundly relatable.

This isn't autobiographical at all. I don't even use Slack. :-)

The following is a description of ADHD hell (not literally hell, this guy is supposed to be alive) and may be triggering to, well, probably all of us.

***

Jason had promised his boss he’d have a debugged version of the code checked in by morning.

He’d been tracking down a bug when he’d gotten sidetracked reading Stack Overflow. Dammit. He’d just lost an hour, and he still had no idea why his code wasn’t working the way it was supposed to, and it was 10 pm. Teresa was expecting a new version to be checked in by 9 am and she was expecting that it would run.

This was a job for more Coca-Cola. Jason got up, went downstairs and got himself a slice of pizza and a cold Coke.

His mom, also burning the late night oil at the kitchen table, hunched over her laptop, said, “How is it going? You think you’ll have what your boss is expecting by tomorrow?”

No. “Yes,” Jason said. “I just need a few more hours to track this down.”

“Well, you’re running out of them. You’d be better off getting a good night’s sleep, then waking up fresh in the morning early enough to work on it then.”

Mom was 57 and had apparently forgotten everything she had ever known about how night owls worked, despite having spent her younger years routinely staying up until 2 am. “Is that what you’re doing?” Jason couldn’t help saying.

“I’ve got a house showing tomorrow, I just have to make sure that I have my talking points memorized.”

“Why? Does the house really suck?”

“It doesn’t really suck. It’s a good house, really. Great bones, a nice big yard. But I’m gonna have to redirect the prospective owner’s attention away from how ugly the carpet is and things like that, because the seller? Whoo-ee. There’s people who have no taste, and there’s people who never fix anything, and there’s people who own dogs, and then there’s my seller, who is all three.” She sighed. “I tried to get them to rip the carpet out and install hardwood flooring before putting the house on the market, but the market is hot right now; I don’t blame them for wanting to charge forward. I just think they’d get more if their house didn’t smell like dog and look like water damage had a horrible transporter accident with the 1970’s.”

“That bad, huh?” He leaned up against the fridge, sipping his Coke. “You wanna go over your spiel with me, Mom? Some late night practice before you go to bed?”

“Yeah, actually, that sounds good.”

So Mom talked enthusiastically, if hoarsely, about the four bedrooms and the two and a half bathrooms and the recently modernized kitchen and how great the neighborhood was, and Jason listened, because he wasn’t contributing nearly as much to the mortgage as his mom was and she was also paying most of the utilities, so her career was important, not to mention what stress did to her heart.

When he got back to his computer it was 11:30 and he’d finished his Coke and pizza. He thought about getting ice cream, but best not to do that until Mom went to bed, if he didn’t want to get sucked into another conversation. Not that conversations with Mom were bad; they were much more entertaining than debugging code, which was the problem.

He opened up his coding window, stared at it for thirty seconds while doing nothing, and then convinced himself that maybe Reddit would have an answer to his question.

It didn’t. It did have answers to how to solve a particularly difficult problem in his current favorite game, a number of people who wanted to know if they were the asshole, some great reviews of movies on streaming that he hadn’t had a chance to watch yet, political rants, and some really entertainingly stupid coding mistakes that people had posted.

It was 12:30 am. Teresa was expecting this at 9 and she was expecting it to work.

His eyes glazed. The act of reviewing the code for the tenth time, looking for the bug he hadn’t yet been able to find despite knowing the general area it had to be in, was almost physically painful. He checked his brackets, again. The error didn’t look like a missing close bracket, but that didn’t mean anything. If he had a dollar for every time the error didn’t look like a missing close bracket but turned out to be one, he’d have maybe twenty dollars, which wasn’t a lot in terms of actual money but was a lot of times for the same stupid thing to happen in his code.

The software was supposed to warn him when there was an unclosed bracket, but half the time, if the code was particularly complex, it didn’t. It just re-interpreted the bracket locations and then his code broke.

One more time. Stepping through. Why the fuck was it stopping there? There was nothing there that could account for the error.

Time to go get ice cream. Maybe some sugar would help him stay awake and focused enough to get this done. Another Coke, possibly, too.

When he sat back down, he had Discord messages, so he needed to check them. And messages on Slack, which he could be checking in the morning, and probably should be, but maybe one of his co-workers had found an answer to his problem. They hadn’t, but Priyal had a different question and that one, he thought he could quickly get an answer to, so he fired up Google, dug in, and got her answer for her, which he sent. She’d have it in the morning. Unlike Teresa, who probably would not have what she was expecting.

It was 2 am. Stupid of him to get sidetracked with Priyal’s problem when he was having such difficulty with his own. He flicked over to Reddit again because this was unbearably boring and if he didn’t give himself a break from it, he’d fall asleep.

But he had to go back to debugging the code. Or to sleep. He could handle Teresa being pissed off in the morning a lot better if he got some sleep.

Third page of the subreddit he was on. Four. Man, he needed to keep up with this stuff, there was so much here he hadn’t read yet.

Fifth page of the subreddit. He really, really needed to get back to work. It was 2:30.

A screenshot of something really stupid from Cicada. Damn, someone actually posted something that stupid? Over to Cicada to see if there was context that explained it. There wasn’t, but there was a lengthy thread of people absolutely shredding the OP. Including someone he followed, and he should probably catch up with that.

No, he should get off Cicada and go back to coding. Or bed. His eyes were burning. Bed was probably a better idea. Give up on finishing the debug, tell Teresa he hadn’t found it yet and would need another day.

That was an interesting news article, though. He had to check that out.

No, he didn’t. He needed to go to bed.

Jason’s mouse clicked the link to the article. His eyes read the page, despite burning with exhaustion. Some frantic voice in his head was yelling, screaming, get up, put the computer down, you need to be awake to deal with Teresa in the morning, it’s late, you’re doing nothing useful, get up.

Back to Reddit.

Stop this. Get up. Go to bed. You need to go to bed.

3:30 am. He could barely keep his eyes open, but they were still riveted to the computer, his butt still glued to his chair.

Get up get up get up and go to bed, go to bed, turn the monitor off, you need to go to sleep so you can deal with Teresa tomorrow, get up, go to bed, go to bed

4 am. Look, there was his Firefox home tab, with articles from Pocket. A few of those looked interesting.

Don’t read them, you need to sleep, you need to sleep

Right, right, he didn’t have time to read them right now. He just needed to open them all so they would be there for him tomorrow. If he didn’t do that, Pocket would refresh and he’d lose all of them.

Wow, did they really find carbon deposits on the moon? He had to check that out.

Stop it, stop it, you have to stop it, you need to sleep, stop it

5 am. There was no way he’d be up at 9 to deal with Teresa.

Email. “Hey, I’ve been up all night bashing my head against this thing and I’ve made progress—” This was a lie. “—but it’s still not running. I’m gonna have to look at it with fresh eyes tomorrow. I’ll be logging in around 11 am.” This was also a lie, it would probably be closer to noon. But since he worked from home, all he needed to do was drag ass out of bed around 10:30 to send everyone a status update, tell them he was diving into the code and probably wouldn’t see incoming notifications until he came up for air, and then dive back into his bed instead.

Set an alarm for 9:30 am. Set an alarm for 10 am. He’d blow through them both, of course, but they’d wake him up enough to actually wake up when the 10:30 alarm went off, and then he’d convince himself to get up and send the status message by promising himself he’d return to bed.

Check out that article about a different way to manage your ADHD?

No. Go to sleep. Off the computer. Sleep.

Right, but obviously, he needed to put on his Spotify for music to fall asleep to, and adjust the volume because he couldn’t let it be too loud or it would wake Mom up, calm and peaceful or not.

Pop over to Reddit one last time.

5:30 am. Sleep!

The panic finally overwhelmed the inertia and he managed to drag himself off his chair, turn the monitor off, and stumble to bed. Now to get some sleep.

Oh, except now, he couldn’t sleep because he was overwhelmed by his anxiety and fear about not getting enough sleep to deal with Teresa even if he slept until noon because she was going to be seriously pissed off with him because this was the third time he’d blown the deadline.

It was another hour before exhaustion finally claimed him, and he knew that because the sun had risen.

***

He’d never set the 10:30 alarm.

He’d never set the 10:30 alarm, he’d blown through 9:30 and 10 just like he’d planned, but he’d never turned on the 10:30 alarm, so it was half past noon and he’d never sent that status message, so everyone would know he overslept way past the point Teresa would be okay with after an all nighter, and there was a meeting at 1 pm and he had to shower and shave because it was going to be a meeting with video so he couldn’t look like he’d just dragged himself out of bed.

Or maybe he could. He sent Teresa a message on Slack. I think I’m sick. My throat’s sore, and I’ve got a migraine. And I don’t have the program working anyway, so there’s really nothing to show anyone. Can we postpone until tomorrow?

The response was almost immediate. You need to figure out how to manage your time better. You’re sick because you stayed up all night.

Yeah, but I was trying to solve the bug.

If you can’t get something fixed by 11 pm, it’s not going to get fixed. You should have gone to bed.

I know, but I wanted to try. I was getting close. This was a lie. I thought I could get it done before morning.

Yes, and instead you made yourself sick and the program still doesn’t work. ☹ I’ll postpone the meeting this time, Jason, but we need results before tomorrow. Sorry that you’re sick but you know as well as I do it’s because you didn’t get any sleep.

Yeah, I know. I’ll pull myself together, have some coffee, and get back to work. I’ll try to have it done before 5. This was a lie. He knew perfectly well he wasn’t going to get it done by 5, not when he was this tired.

Do you want me to have Jorge review it? Maybe he can see something you missed?

No, that would be the worst possible thing, because then Jorge would know that he’d made basically no progress last night. I don’t want to add to his workload, but if I’m running into trouble later today I’ll pass it over to him, see if adding some eyeballs might help.

All right, I’ll let him know.

And now Jason was awake, the imminent terror of Jorge finding out that he had done basically nothing last night flooding him with enough adrenaline that he could focus enough to turn on his monitor and get back to work.

#wip #adhd hell

[aangussca]

Gallery visit: MCA Tacita Dean exhibition PART 3 (13.12.23)

Context: Tacita Dean is an artist who reflects on nuances and transformations that exist in memory, impermanence/mortality, time, and the natural environment. She articulates these themes through her approaches to celluloid film, photography, drawing, printmaking and installation.

My Reflection: I was intrigued by the approaches Dean took in the production of her works, particularly of her films and drawings (composition, colour/light, tactility/texture, sound, etc.). I noticed an overarching theme of 'the archive', alongside the other themes (mortality, nature, memory, spirituality, etc.).

In the presentation of her works, elements of theatricality and transformation respond to and connect these themes together. However, they are grounded by personal narratives within the work (which can either be read by audience as Dean's (the artist) experiences or as their own).

The Story of the Lemon that grew Hair (1991-2004, Cibachrome prints - first row) and a couple of works from 24 frames of Ephemera (1988–1991, sketches and found images- second row)

Description: "The ephemera assembled in this room date from 1988 to 1991 when Tacita Dean was still at art school. It reveals Dean’s early relationship to drawing, postcards and found images and motifs that also feature in the artist’s monumental film installation Geography Biography (2023). Located in the adjacent gallery, which is her most personal and autobiographical work to date. Dean’s notations in text, a strategy she employs in her large-scale chalk-on-blackboard drawings, is also apparent in many of the drawings on display. They resemble storyboards, a preproduction tool commonly used in filmmaking. Dean’s technique of layering, masking and collaging found images within these early works also echoes her material experimentation in Geography Biography.

The Cibachrome photographs of The Story of the Lemon that grew Hair (1991/2014), which originated from an early film work, were later printed in Switzerland using the last chemicals and paper in the world."

Chalk Fall (2018, chalk on blackboard)

The Wreck of Hope (2022, chalk on blackboard)

Sakura (Jindai II) (2023, coloured pencil on photograph)

Description: "Drawing has been a defining aspect of Tacita Dean’s art since the beginning of her career. The works in this room represent various strands of her drawing practice from monumental blackboard works that evoke the grand tradition of history painting, to meticulously over-drawn photographs and finely detailed cloudscapes rendered in spray chalk on slate. Like her 16mm and 35mm films, which are similarly the result of labour-intensive manual processes, Dean’s drawings can be understood as markers of time. The frequent appearance of text imbues many of her drawings with a diaristic quality that imparts a sense of time’s passage. Time is also embodied in the material composition of Dean’s preferred medium of chalk, a type of limestone formed in layers of sedimentation over millennia.

The majestic cliff in Chalk Fall (2018) recalls England’s iconic White Cliffs of Dover, a landscape steeped in wartime notions of nationhood and the home front. Dean’s cliffs, created during the turbulence of Brexit, evoke geopolitical and environmental breakdown instead. Opposite, in The Wreck of Hope (2022), a colossal glacier recedes before us. This work takes its title from a famous painting of the same name by Caspar David Friedrich (born 1774 – died 1840), known for his emotional, often ominous depictions of nature at its most sublime. Dean’s use of chalk – an unfixed medium – mirrors the fragility of the landscapes she portrays, which are increasingly threatened by our climate emergency. The surface of each work is built up with handwritten notes referencing the time of its creation, adding a personal dimension to the sense of loss and change. A seasonal shift unfolds in Sakura (Jindai II) (2023), a large-scale photograph of the Jindai-Zakura, a rare cherry blossom tree in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. With an estimated age of 2000 years, this tree is thought to be the oldest of its kind. Its branches are supported by wooden crutches, a practice intended to extend its life. Dean’s meticulous embellishment of the tree’s branches with colour pencil gives it an otherworldly quality and accentuates the inherent duality of nature as a powerful yet vulnerable entity."

Geography Biography (2023, anamorphic film diptych installation (35mm portrait, 18 mins 30 secs) - screencaps and video excerpt below)

CONTENT WARNING FOR FLASHING LIGHTS IN ACCOMPANYING VIDEO SHOWCASING THE FILM PROJECTORS

Description: "Geography Biography (2023) is a new 35mm film installation presented as two 4-metre- high vertically oriented projections. Comprised of outtakes from Tacita Dean’s 16mm, as well as her Super and standard 8mm films, this film diptych is a work that she has described as an ‘accidental self-portrait’. Geography Biography exemplifies the artist’s poetic and experimental approach to the processes and material properties of photochemical film. Her use of the medium, itself at risk of becoming obsolete, reinforces the transitory and fleeting qualities conveyed by the imagery.

Dean has embedded sequences from her past films within postcards from her collection, using an experimental aperture gate-masking technique which allows her to combine still images and different gauge films together in one frame of a 35mm negative using stencils and multiple exposures. The result is a luminous, lyrical and intensely personal filmic collage that reflects the artist’s relationship to the world through her cutting room floor."

#art gallery #thingstonoteforfutureprojects

[readingbooksinisrael]

December 2022 Read This Month

Rereads

East/Edith Pattou (East #1) (ya fantasy fairy tale retelling)-Rose has always been more wild than her mother would like, but no one expects a polar bear to demand her in exchange for riches and her sister healing from her illness. Rose, despite her family’s protests, agrees, but when she makes a terrible mistake she has to make a journey east of the sun and west of the moon.

Heartstopper, vol. 1/Alice Oseman (Heartstopper #1) (ya romance slice-of-life graphic novel)-Charlie, a highly-strung, openly gay over-thinker, and Nick, a cheerful, soft-hearted rugby player, meet at a British all-boys grammar school. Friendship blooms quickly, but could there be something more...?

Heartstopper, vol. 2/Alice Oseman (Heartstopper #2) (ya romance slice-of-life graphic novel)-Charlie, a highly-strung, openly gay over-thinker, and Nick, a cheerful, soft-hearted rugby player, meet at a British all-boys grammar school. Friendship blooms quickly, but could there be something more...?

Ragged Dick/Horatio Alger, Jr. (Ragged Dick #1) (mg rags to riches)-Ragged Dick is a bootblack and has been on the streets since he was six (he’s now fourteen), but an unexpected encounter with another boy makes him determined to move up in the world.

The Wind in the Willows/Kenneth Grahame, illustrated by Paul Bransom (mg animal cozy fantasy)-Mole and Rat, Toad and Badger all live cozily near the River. Well, all except Toad. He has an obsession with motor cars that leads him into trouble that his friends have to help him with, in between boating in the summer and writing poetry in the winter.

רק שלא יגיד את המילה הזאת\יעל נאמן ברק, מאוייר ע”י אבי כץ (mg realistic fiction)- עוד פחות משנה יהיה לאחיה של תמר, ילד עם פיגור שכלי, בר מצווה וקרוביה עדיין מתעלמים ממנו באירועים. בינתיים היא צריכה להתמודד עם הצקות מילדים בשכונה, חיבתה לילד בכיתתה וחוג חדש.

5 Stars

Almost American Girl/Robin Ha (ya graphic novel memoir)-When Robin’s mother unexpectedly moves them from Seoul to the western US her world drops out from beneath her.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich/Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (adult semi-autobiographical fiction)-The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps.

The Real Hole/Beverly Cleary, illustrated by DyAnne DiSalvio-Ryan (picture book realistic fiction)-Jack is digging a hole. But what will they do with it when it is done?

4.5 Stars

The Long Distance Dispatch Between Lydia Goldblatt and Julie Graham-Chang/Amy Ignatow (The Popularity Papers #2) (mg illustrated novel realistic fiction)-After all their preparation for 6th grade, Lydia is moving to London for six months. But it’s okay because Julie will get popular in the US, Lydia will do the same in England and so they’ll both be ready for Lydia when she gets back.

מסיפורי המושבה רחובות\ד”ר יהודה דניאלי, מאוייר ע”י יעקב גוטרמן (ya memoir)- מסיפורי המושבה רחובות מתאר תקופה שעברה ולא תשוב יותר. סיפורי ראשית המושבה, על החקלאות בראשיתה, על כרמי ענבים, מטעי הזיתים והפרדסים. סיפורי שמירה והווי שומרים. סיפורים על הילדים והנוער של המושבה. אירועים שאירעו לפני קום המדינה ומעט מראשיתה.

4 Stars

Aru Shah and the City of Gold (Pandavas #4) (mg fantasy)-Aru has to get out of the trap she’s been caught in and beat the Sleeper to the most powerful weapon in the world. Plus, her mother’s disappeared and apparently she has a half-sister she never heard of. 

Dan and Phil Go Outside/Daniel Howell and Phil Lester (living room book)-Follows The Amazing Tour Is Not On Fire through photos and comments from Dan and Phil.

3 Stars

Camp Time in California Mary Pope Osborne, illustrated by AJ Ford (Magic Tree House #35) (children’s fantasy time travel)-Annie and Jack are told they need to save nature, but everything in the forest they travel to seems perfect. Then their old friend, Teddy Roosevelt, appears. What is he doing there and how is it connected to saving nature?

I’m Not Dying With You Tonight/Gilly Segal and Kimberley Jones (ya realistic fiction)-Two girls, Campbell and Lena, get caught in a riot at a school football (American) game and have to survive the night together.

2.5 Stars

The Inexplicable Logic of My Life/Benjamin Alire Sáenz (ya realistic fiction)-Sal has been good up to now but suddenly, in his last year of high school, he’s throwing fists. Is this the legacy of his birth father who he’s never met?

Invisible Emmie/Terri Libenson (mg illustrated novel realistic fiction)-Emmie feels invisible. Katie is outgoing. This is the story of the day their lives intersect.

1.5 Stars

Late Lunch with Llamas/Mary Pope Osborne, illustrated by AJ Ford (Magic Tree House #34) (children’s fantasy time travel)-Jack and Annie come to ancient Peru just in time to see a llama being stolen. They have to save her!

Sunlight on the Snow Leopard/Mary Pope Osborne, illustrated by AJ Ford (Magic Tree House #36) (children’s fantasy time travel)-Jack and Annie travel to Nepal and meet two girls, a grieving old man and a ghost.

#wrap-up #read this month #rtm #december 2022 #2022 #december

[sister2of5]

Saga of the Aesthetic Book Stack, Parts 1 and 2

Well, it’s certainly been a long time since I’ve blogged on this account...

For Christmas last year, my mother purchased an aesthetic book stack in blue-green for me. I plan to read that foot of books with similarly colored bindings. I’m going to babble about it too.

Definitely spoilers ahead.

These will probably get quite long, so...

I have a bad habit of reading more than one book at a time and flipping back and forth between them in little chunks. It’s partly a focus issue and partly because digesting things a snippet at a time works well for me.

I’m already partway through the first two books, but my goal going forward is to write a little a bit about my impressions once a week as I go.

Once I have finished any of the books, I will give an overall assessment of whether I would recommend them, and to whom.

The first two books are “A Pirate Looks at Fifty” and “Where is Joe Merchant?” both by Jimmy Buffet. These two books actually work very well in conjunction with each other, even though one is a novel and the other is not. Thanks to Jimmy’s publishers for liking blue-green binding, I guess?

“Pirate” was written after “Joe Merchant”, but Jimmy references the novel multiple times in the non-fiction piece. For a work of fiction, there’s a lot of autobiographical Jimmy Buffet tidbits and Easter eggs in it that I probably wouldn’t notice if I weren’t reading both books together.

For grins, we’ll start with the first chronologically.

“Where is Joe Merchant?” is about a sea plane charter pilot named Frank Bama who is a bit down on his luck in the business department. To keep his plane from being repossessed by the bank, he plans to run away to Alaska, but circumstances keep making that unlikely.

I have spent very little time in either Florida or the Caribbean, the main locations in the story thus far. I am also not very into either aviation or fishing, the main loves of the main character.

Frank’s a bit of a disaster, which I guess is more interesting to read that someone who has their act together, but most of the time I’m shaking my head going, “Why, though?” Ah well. I’m just boring like that.

Mr. Buffet likes to info dump a lot of airplane facts and figures, which would absolutely be more interesting to me if I cared. There’s a whole a paragraph of a character straight up listing plane parts and parameters in dialogue. Granted, the character is trying to weasel his way into the marginally better graces of the main character by showing how much he knows about his plane, and it’s not supposed to work, but it’s a bit of a slog for a non plane person.

Who is Joe Merchant? A rock star who disappeared off the back of a cruise ship and is presumed dead. His younger? I think? sister sort of dated Frank Bama for a while, though apparently nothing was official. She pops up again because she thinks her brother might still be alive and wants Frank to help her go looking for him. She’s even willing to fund the Alaska escape plan in exchange.

Given that there’s a little heart with wings all over the book, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess their romance will rekindle. We’ll see, I guess.

On to “A Pirate Looks at Fifty”. This one is basically a stream of consciousness journal of sorts that is kind of about a trip Jimmy Buffet took for his 50th birthday but also kind of...not. It’s a solid 1/4 of the way into the book before they even leave on the trip.

Anyone want to guess three things Jimmy Buffet really likes? Planes, fishing, and the Caribbean. If you are curious about the inner workings of the mind of Jimmy Buffet and want to hear about his thoughts and recollections of a wide variety of topics, you’ll definitely enjoy this. It will also help if you are very comfortable with a non-linear narrative.

This is a good book for taking in small chunks, though, because that’s how it’s written. I am hopeful there will be a bit more about the traveling as it continues. Anecdotes are fun and all, Jimmy, but you can’t call it a trip journal without actually writing about the trip.

Until next week...

#as i read #A Pirate Looks at Fifty #Where Is Joe Merchant #Jimmy Buffet #currently reading

[bellamysgriffin]

A QUOTE FROM EVERY BOOK I READ IN 2021: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

#themetamorphosisedit #the metamorphosis #franz kafka #classiclitedit #litedit #typoedit #typographyedit #* #2021books #books #his most autobiographical work apparently..... #franz my man. you good?

[thephantomessoftheopera]

The origins of „Don Juan Triumphant“

In Gaston Leroux‘s novel, Erik has worked for 20 years on a piece called „Don Juan Triumphant“ (probably an opera or a symphony). In the ALW musical, „Don Juan Triumphant“ is even performed on stage. But the origins of „Don Juan“ are much older than that.

“Don Juan“ is a spanish legend, first dramatized by Tirso de Molina as „El burlador de Sevilla“ in the early 17th century, but the originis of the story arguably date back even further. Throughout the centuries, the material has been adapted many times. The character of the peasant girl „Aminta“ which is used in the ALW musical seems to have been taken from Tirso de Molina‘s version (read the synopsis here).

The „Don Juan“ legend is sometimes viewed as the southern European complement to the northern European „Faust“ legend. Both works are exemplary tales of protagonists who exceed moral limitations because they „want too much“ and are ultimately punished for their wrongdoings. Both works are strongly referenced in „The Phantom of the Opera“, linking Leroux’s protagonist to those earlier archetypes.

Probably the most famous operatic adaptation is probably Mozart‘s „Don Giovanni“, which is also titled „Don Juan“ in French. One trait that „Don Giovanni“ shares with „Phantom“ is the importance of the mask which is used by Don Giovanni to conceal his identity. The „Point of no return“ scene in the musical has apparently been modeled after two scenes in Mozart‘s opera:

in Act 2, Leporello („Passarino“) and Don Juan exchange their clothes so that Don Juan can seduce Donna Elvira‘s maid

in Act 1, a masked Don Juan is trying to seduce Donna Anna, but she unmasks him and he has to flee, killing her father in his escape.

During the Romantic period in the 19th century, the Don Juan story was adapted by Lord Byron, who turned it into a satire in the form of an epic poem. Byron‘s version of Don Juan doesn‘t portray him as a lewd womanizer, but sends him on an odyssey all over Europe and Asia and has him fall in love repeatedly with several women. At one point, Byron’s Don Juan is sold as a slave to the sultana of Constantinople, which is reminiscent of how Leroux‘s Erik worked to entertain the sultana of Mazenderan, and later for the sultan of Constantinople. Byron‘s poem is sadly unfinished, but it is quite clear that Byron does not adhere to the conventional morality of the story by portraying Don Juan as a selfish villain.

While both Faust and Don Juan were dragged down into hell by the end, Erik remarks that his „Don Juan“ „burns, and yet he‘s not struck down by the fire of heaven“. This points to potentially more similarities with Byron than the original source material. In any case, it indicates that whatever the plot is, Don Juan is not a villain who meets his righteous punishment here.

So, what is Erik‘s “Don Juan Triumphant“ really about? Christine gives a few details about it in „Apollo‘s Lyre“, which point to a strong autobiographical influence:

“It took me into all the details of martyrdom and into every part of the abyss inhabited by the ugly man; it showed me Erik banging his poor, hideous head against the grim walls of that hell, and avoiding being seen by people, so as not to frighten them. […] I heard such a triumphal symphony, seemingly setting the world ablaze, that I realized the work was ending and that ugliness, lifted on the wings of love, had dared to look beauty in the face.“

Especially the last part makes me believe that „Don Juan Triumphant“ is probably quite similar to what we are reading - „The Phantom of the Opera“. Erik seems to have poured the entire sorrow and suffering of his life into his work, and it reveals the true extent of his pained soul to Christine.

Considering that Erik, due to his face, is quite the opposite of a womanizer, his choice of title is probably in equal parts irony (or cynicism) and wishful thinking. The „ugly“ Don Juan finally dares to confess his love, and the „triumphant“ makes me think that Erik wrote his character a happy ending here. So „Don Juan Triumphant“ is quite probably the expression of Erik‘s deepest wish of finally being loved - and being allowed to return that love.

#phantom of the opera #leroux phantom #alw phantom #point of no return #the phantom of the opera #don juan triumphant #gaston leroux #erik the phantom #erik x christine #le fantôme de l'opéra #poto