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liminality-secular-witch · 1 year

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I have murdered a god, and so can you.

A short stream-of-consciousness on the power and pain of deicide.

Before Selena Gomez's song broke Google's search engine, the term "rock god" could pull up anything from Elvis to Freddie Mercury to Kurt Cobain. The Urban Dictionary gives the following definition first:

A rock god is an artist that is so talented and amazing that (s)he is worshipped as a god by his fans. A rock god has usually touched the masses beyond just music. An artist that people can associate with an idea/style/time.

"God" here is assumed to be a bit of a euphemism for "beloved target of fandom," but the behavior of some fans would certainly rival—if not surpass—the passion displayed by the most ardent religious observer of a given faith.

I admit, I am one such fan. But, even among that group, I might be a bit unusual.

I'm among a growing number of modern day witches who fall under the umbrella of "SASS," an acronym whose reading is, or is along the lines of, "skeptical, agnostic (or atheist) and science-seeking." Whether or not we will say we believe in magick—used with a "k" to distinguish it from purely stage-show entertainers—varies by witch and by the definition you choose to use for "magick," though, generally, no, we do not think that doing X spell makes Y happen in the most literal sense. To varying degrees, we "believe" in the placebo effect (where one is able to exist and have effect), the power of ritual to focus the mind, the benefits of meditation and journaling, the power of introspection and the power of belief as it affects the believer.

You could say it's imaginary play for grown ups. Frankly, it's a blast.

There are greater bits of media out there by witches who came before me on the general topic of who we are and what we practice, so I'll leave the volumes of modern witchcraft to them. But there is one more thing about my own personal practice I should inform you of.

I practice pop culture magick.

If you do a web search for the topic, you'll likely come across references to fictional magick systems that others have incorporated in to their own. A favorite for those working with elements (in the western system of earth, fire, water, and air) is that of Avatar: The Last Airbender. There's an even more popular one from a series of books whose author I'll speak of shortly…

In my case, I found more connection with Emily Carlin, a witchy blogger whose source of magick is often quoted in articles on the subject of pop culture practice. The story goes that, while struggling to understand and incorporate the four elements into her practice, she was inspired by the presence of her Master of Puppets CD to use the members of the band, Metallica, one for each element. It worked, giving her something concrete to attach an otherwise abstract concept to. What's more, such an approach is highly personal, a favorite aspect of SASS witchery.

I have yet to be able to incorporate the elements into my own practice, whether I attempt to use the four western elements or any of the sets of five eastern elements. Though I hoped that the one band I work most with in my practice could represent an eastern five, they ended up fitting better with a selection of tarot cards. But that's a story for another day.

They are, however, gods to me.

Do not misunderstand me. I do not deify the five men who write and rehearse regularly, put on costume and make-up for a whirlwind tour of the country each year, and then return home to their spouses and children and pets. In my mind, there are two beings in one form: The image that has been created and curated for the art and for the fans, and the artist behind that great work who also shares its visage. Two, but also One.

If you grew up in Christian circles as I did, it's less of a struggle to comprehend the paradox of it. Though I definitely feel the irresolution most at concerts and live meetings where my image of the "rock god" and the mere human performer collapse in front of my eyes like the leveling of a spiritual city by an earthquake, a fissure rupturing between planes of existence.

I've come to appreciate these moments as one would a difficult work of art that forces one to withdraw and reconsider, and that sticks in the mind like melted rubber on concrete on the disturbingly-ever-more hot summer days.

Those gods I worship now, whose challenging humanity I welcome and adore, I have loved off and on for most of my life. I feel quite blessed that, in all the many interviews they have given over the years, they have said few controversial things and that in their youth. By all accounts, their care and focus seem to have grown with their age. At best, they have actively educated themselves in both their craft and their understanding of the world at large. At worst, they are not vile.

I once worshiped a god who did become vile. But I killed him. I have that power.

I suppose I have to take a moment to tell bad-faith or otherwise oblivious readers that, no, I did not literally kill anyone. No human being is dead on my account, to the best of my knowledge, and few humans have ever even evoked such a horrid wish out of my heart. I am speaking of a metaphorical murder here, just as I speak of metaphorical gods.

When I was very, very young, I adored a particular pop star, my first rock god. He fit the definition from earlier, effecting the world beyond just the sounds of his music. He was influential in dance and social awareness, able to command the praise and participation of giants who came before and alongside him. Everyone knew his name, his style, his sound, and he influenced innumerable artists who followed him.

I had all his albums—on cassette, at that time—and several of the films and documentaries of which he was the subject. I knew every lyric to every song by heart. I named my pet hamster after him. To say he was a formative force in my life is an understatement.

There were rumors throughout his life, but I never wanted to hear them. I could not believe them. When he said, or when others parroted, that the rumors were wrought of jealously and were, in fact, completely unfounded, I took those words and looked no further. It was enough for me to believe him.

After his death, and after some time, the rumors were still swirling. And then there was a documentary of some of his victims. I watched it, skeptical.

But now, I believe his victims. And I'm sorry I didn't want to listen before.

At his death, I had mourned. I never missed an opportunity to soak my ears in his sound when I caught one of his songs in the air. Now I found myself struggling. This song… THIS SONG. It's such a mark on the culture… It plays every year! How can I not listen to it?! But I made myself turn away. Other people were enjoying the music, and I couldn't. I loved that song, I LOVED IT, but I couldn't enjoy it anymore. Not like before.

And never again.

The death of a god is slow and grating. They do not go down gently. Their worshipers uphold them, and the trick to surviving the ordeal yourself is to avoid the sycophants at all costs. And so, the death of a god is also lonely work. The death of a god is personal.

With time and practice, and time and practice, it became easier to turn away from the music when I heard it, to say, with the stoicism of a Zen monk, "It's just not my thing," in ever more rarer cases that someone should ask if you're into that artist.

The adoration you once held calcifies and passes. Maybe there's a scar. You are at once sadder and lighter.

He ruled the alignment of my stars for the first two decades of my life. His afterimage lingered, untouchable in my third. In my fourth decade, over the course of a year, his color changed, he fell and faded, and finally died.

I will never deny the impact his music and style had on the world or on me personally. But I have the power to turn away from his work. There are other artists who better deserve our attention. Other rock gods whose human creators are doing their best, not merely as artists, but as people. I will give my love (and, as a fan, my patronage) to them.

And if they turn vile, I will kill them too. I have done it once, and I can do it again.

I am no proponent of "cancel culture" as it specifically occurs on a certain accursed social media platform. No one is perfect nor should they be expected to be. But there is a wisdom to not engaging on such sites. And there is a level of basic decency we should all show our fellow humans, a behavior for which celebrities are even more scrutinized.

At the same time, there is, if not a clear line, a zone into which one may cross. Certain people have hurled themselves into the darkest reaches of those places. The god I killed was there.

Another one of a different ilk but the same degree is also there. She is not my god, but she may well be yours. She constructed the universe that ruled the stars of your formative childhood. She wove stories of a kind of magic(k) that made your heart manifest its own.

You can kill such a god. You have that power.

It is painful and lonely work. I know. I know so, so well. But it can be done. A god can fall from your heavens by your hands. The storms of guilt and excuses clear. There is a scar. You are sadder. You are lighter.

And then you remember, or perhaps you realize for the first time: There are other artists. There are other worlds.

Do it.

Kill your god.

#no terfs #no pedes #in the media I consume #witchblr

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wanjikusblog · 1 year

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Restoring Regina Twala to her rightful place in history.

Regina Twala is one of those towering intellectuals that you never hear about. But now, thanks to the efforts of Stanford historian Joel Cabrita, the story of Regina Twala is finally hitting the newsstands.

In her book, Written Out: the silencing of Regina Twala, Joel Cabrita examines how both systemic racism and systemic sexism and their gatekeepers, conspired to disappear from public consciousness one of the 20th century's most important thinkers.

In many ways, Regina broke the mould of what an African woman is supposed to be. She was the second black woman to graduate from the University of Witwatersrand, and the first to graduate in social science in South Africa. She was also a popular newspaper columnist, a role in which she examined the misogyny as well as social and racial disparities of her society.

Regina's active politicization began in 1948 following an election that ousted the more intellectually minded Jan Smuts, and changed the course of South African history by ushering in D. F. Malan and his nationalists who'd install 40 years of racist apartheid government in South Africa.

As an IDP from rural Natal courtesy the Native Lands Act of 1913, Regina's new life in Johannesburg allowed her to rub shoulders with the city's intelligentsia. Regina became intimately acquainted with the likes of Nelson Mandela, she travelled the continent as well and met with Pan-Africanists such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah.

With South Africa's political space shrinking every day, the country's black elite massed to the African National Congress (ANC) where they took to protesting against apartheid. In 1952, Regina was herself arrested for participation in the non-violent resistance movement. Shortly thereafter, Regina left South Africa for neighbouring Eswatini where she remained until her death from cancer in 1968.

But Regina wasn't just a political activist, she was also a talented researcher and academic. As the recipient of a Nuffield grant, Regina pursued anthropological research into Swati women, their response to cultural evolution, and the weaponization of African culture with a view to keeping women in their place.

And like all true revolutionaries, Regina had her crosses to bear. She was constantly buffeted by two forces; the ignorance and chauvinism of her fellow Africans, and the envy of so called liberal white academics and mentors. The latter either resented that she'd outgrown their patronage, or stole her work. Athropologist Hilda Kuper for instance, effectively quashed the publication of Regina's final work titled "A study of Swati women." Swedish historian Bengt Sundkler on the other hand, plagiarized Regina's research on indigenous Zionist churches and published it as his own.

But whatever she endured in life, Regina remained true to her ideals. Even whilst in exile she was still working to bring about social change. In Eswatini, Regina became one of the founders of that country's party politics, she confronted royalists and criticized the excesses of the powerful, but she also quickly realized that Sobhuza (the paramount chief of Eswatini who'd become the world's longest reigning monarch) had no intention of expanding democratic space for ordinary Swazis.

#historical figures #political history #biographies #pioneers

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thomcantsleep · 5 months

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Benjamin Zephaniah

I woke up especially late today and discovered that Professor Benjamin Zephaniah had died following an ongoing battle with a brain tumour and it wasn't sadness I felt, it was shame. And it hasn't been the first time.

Benjamin Zephaniah has a strange, almost subliminal effect on my mind and possibly the collective consciousness. I don't think about his impact on my life and my creative upbringing and how he was integral to both until he finds his way back into my conscious through kismet. Then I realize what he has done for me in that moment and only that moment.

One time semi-recently, I was rooting through old, wrinkled books in my parents' room to decide what to keep and what to give away. Whatever exact books you are envisioning in your mind right now - let me tell you they were all there. Rankin, Patterson, Gerritsen but not just Sunday Times Bestsellers; C.S Lewis and Roald Dahl featured heavily from my parents' distant past as well.

There was another book that I don't remember owning but was apparently mine. I remember reading it in Year 8 English Lit but never buying it. It was a play called Face by Benjamin Zephaniah, a cautionary tale of how the reputation of a popular boy in school declines due to an accident that disfigures his face despite being essentially the same person.

It is disappointing to report to you, the reader, that my class did not like this play and it not being officially on the curriculum, it was sacked off. What I did as a 12 year old boy was knock one of the class copies of the book to read it in my own time. It was deeply interesting to me on a subconscious level because I grew up with people not liking me and not understanding exactly why.

I had forgotten all about this though and it's only sitting here now and remembering the several instances where my paths had crossed with Benjamin Zephaniah's work. Year 8 (8th Grade) was a tumultuous and impressionable time for me as I was at a crossroads between falling in with a bad crowd or concentrating on my love of books and writing and it's bizarre that that is the trade-off but societally, it is in school. If I hadn't read that play of my own volition, fuck knows what might have happened to me.

I'll share one more story.

Courtesy of De Montfort University

At my university, we had a surprise visit from the man himself where we were all made aware just a week in advance and excitement and tension shot through my veins. The only feeling I think I can compare it to is the combination of giddiness and dread thst cultivates in your stomach before you have your first kiss. It was a 10am lecture which I frequently struggled to get out of bed in the morning for. I was having difficult times in my social life and was suffering with anxious and depressive feelings a lot of the time. Knots and dread every morning. On that day, I was on campus two hours in advance.

I remember waiting in the lobby outside the theater for what felt like a lifetime and getting cold feet. I wanted to head back just because something in my head told me I was undeserving of being there. I don't know why those feelings existed in me but it's probably because I didn't have any questions for him, any books for him to sign and I was too scared to ask for a photo. I regretfully ended up having no interaction with him whatsoever.

As for his talk, he was as great as you'd expect him to be. He talked wondrously about his life story, the background of some of his most iconic poems as well as some perhaps lesser known tidbits but my main takeaway was how humble he was; putting himself below everyone in the room because he has zero academic achievement in his field. If nothing else, its indictive of the false credibility of the mechanics of academia. Especially after he had told us all of world experiences that would make your teeth itch.

From the official social media of Benjamin Zephaniah

And today, like every other time Benjamin Zephaniah has entered my conscious, it has been at a crossroads in my life where I struggle to sleep and wake up for my night job. It has been at a time when there have been doubts on my mind about my creative ability, where I'm going in my writing career and even if I will have one. I woke up to discover Benjamin Zephaniah had passed away and before I knew it, I was reading and watching everything that he had ever done.

And once again, I remember why I do this. Why I love this and why I want to achieve big things through prose and poetry. My will to not leave behind my dreams and accept consumption by the zeitgeist. Especially, in attitudes to how art is commercialized and capitalized in our modern world. Zephaniah preached absolute creative freedom. Anarchy in writing. He never shut up for anyone. He told the absolute truth and told it beautifully, no matter how stark the reality is.

Thanks to him, I will not throw this away.

This wasn't really a tribute so if you want to read one, I'd recommend reading this from my former lecturer, Prof. Simon Perril of De Montfort University.

#benjamin zephaniah #writing #poetry #rest in peace #rip #zephaniah #tribute #creative writing #prose

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meraki-yao · 6 months

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Heads up this is a little different from what I usually post and it's not RWRB related, i completely wrote this for fun

There's a rom-com danmei web novel (danmei, a genre of queer/mlm literature popular in China) that I wished more people here knew about because it's hilarious, sweet, unhinged, and honestly a really good template for fanfics, in fact over here most of the popular gay ships have a fanfic/ fan edits of it

It's called Mister Dior (it has nothing to do with the luxury brand) and it's set in a world pretty much like ours, with the exception that everyone has a thing called a smartbrain, which is essentially a smartphone directly implanted into a human brain (don't think too much about it)

The main characters of the story I'll simplify to Zhang (top, yes these things are fairly fixed in this genre and contribute to their personality) and Jiao (bottom) who have been married for seven years. They're both CEOs of big companies, but while Jiao has rich parents, Zhang built up his company by himself. At the beginning of the story, their relationship isn't bad per se, but they are having communication issues and drifting apart slightly.

One day Zhang gets into a mild car accident causing a concussion, but also a side effect which is the point of the story: before the collision, he was browsing trashy, tropey romance novels using his smart brain, and the collision hit his head so hard that the novels and his own consciousness got mixed up

The consequence is for a variable period of time, he will think he is the main character of a certain novel, Jiao is his love interest, and everyone around assimilates into some role from the story

Each novel is called a "script" and it's all hilariously tropey, you have ABO, Mafia, Vampire etc, all together 9 AUs, plus he's still in the real world, so it's like 10 stories in one web novel, all of which turn into comedy because the real world is still the real world and Jiao is trying really hard to deal with each script without setting off anyone else's alarms

And at the same time, because he has no filter when in character, Zhang ends up revealing certain things about their relationship that help them learn more about each other, understand each other better and improve their relationship, they come out stronger than ever

So TL DR: you have one half of the couple jumping through 9 AUs and the other half desperately trying to play along while still living their daily lives of prominent CEOs and semi public figures, all while learning more about and improving their relationships

It's sweet, it's kinky, it's fun and it's fucking hilarious.

And more than the novel, there's a completed radio drama and an ongoing comic of the novel. The radio drama, although in Mandarin, is an amazing production, one of the most popular on the radio drama platform, passing one hundred million plays earlier this year. It's how I learned about this novel as well. Me re-listening to the radio drama these days is what prompted me to write this lol

And the thing is because of the structure of the story, it's really easy to change the "script" and put in other ships, I wish more people explored this

Yeah anyway I wish more people knew about this it's just amusing

Plus nearly everyone's name is a pun lmao

#danmei #迪奧先生 #mlm #gay #web novel #romcom #I honestly don't know how to tag this one lmao #Idk it's just I started relistening to the radio drama after like a year #and someone on the firstprince weibo tag wrote an idea for a firstprince this novel au #and then I thought a thought #and this is the thought

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donman2112 · 10 months

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Dark to Light

Q, Anons and the End of the Beginning

BURNING BRIGHT

JUL 14, 2023

185

(Author’s Note: This piece represents a thematic follow-up to two of the most popular features yet at Burning Bright, ‘We Are Q,’ and ‘The Darkest Path,’ and while it stands alone in the current context of the Info War, it may be best read in conjunction with that deeper dive on the Op that started it all for many of us. Additionally, I’d like to point readers new and old to a series written by friend and peer Chris Paul entitled, ‘A Story About Reality,’ which explores the same Op in the way only our favorite moderator can.)

The Great Awakening is a framed narrative.

We knew the end of the story from the outset, even if challenges of faith and seven years of psychological warfare by a deeply-entrenched, increasingly desperate satanic cabal has put that framing into question for each of us at times.

And yes, in case you couldn’t tell, this feature is going to be a bit more direct than some of my others—at least, as direct as a stream of consciousness writing can be—because the subject matter demands it, and because, as argued in many recent features, posts and appearances, we must always strive to argue from a position of strength, both of belief and of logic, and reject enemy framing wherever possible, especially where it concerns the core of their subversive empire, and the pillar that must be chipped, cracked and eventually—perhaps soon—shattered en route to bringing the whole corrupt, diseased temple down upon their heads.

Despite attempts to obfuscate and increasingly-clownish arguments to the contrary, and despite the fact that none of us are omniscient or omnipresent, and cannot know the future with certainty, faith, logic and discerning minds prone to advanced pattern recognition have a way of bringing one back to the first drops by the Anon known as ‘Q.’

We knew the end from the beginning, with the ongoing journey there representing an alternatively enlightening and devastating series of revelations as to the true nature of the world around us, the powers that would lord over us and the dark sins at the heart of the eternal mausoleum they’d foment over our heads, and the bones of our children, born and unborn alike.

In many ways, we’ve known this all along.

And yet, the farther we’ve got in the Information War, the Mind War and the Shadow War—disparate names that form a fractal that more closely approximates the truth of it all—that makes up that spiritual, cognitive and sometimes-actual journey, the more frequent the reminders come that the dark truths that nest within the System of Systems also represent the shimmering gemstones of awakening that heralded the advent of the Second American Revolution … that heralded the coming of each and all of us.

And make no mistake, that is what we find ourselves in the midst of in this time and place.

Whether you’re examining the Net Effects of the latest Mass Psychological Deployment by one side or the other on the Game Theory Game Board, delving into the latest scandal to emerge from the unmasked ‘elite’ as patriots render them stark and exposed in the public eye through a combination of Narrative and Legal Exposure and Disclosure, or ruminating on the moral questions inherent in the recognition of evil and its continued existence amidst the sleeping spell our fellows remain caught firm within, this Revolution may be peaceful, and—contrary to the popular saying—it may in fact be televised … but it will also be lasting.

So long as we embrace the periodic reminders served up by ghosts in the media machine along with glowing nodes in a vast, interconnected network of sovereign minds, as well as the divine brilliance of serendipity as to what it’s all about. What it’s always been about.

And if my own journey into this awakening mirrors that of many of the minds reading these words today, then I’m not the only one out there who’s been catching signs others might see as fireflies in the yard more as comets streaking across a world-ending sky; not our world, but [theirs,] as the crumbling edifices of their criminal empire mark the precursor to a new dawn whose light we have not so much come upon through an arduous trek, but rather beckoned along so that it might pierce the heavy, laden lids of those not blessed or cursed with the same drive and insight that infects, afflicts and adorns the mind of the anti-collectivist collective known as Anons.

Anons.

Glowing nodes within a once-suffocating darkness, which now resembles a glittering web of awakening. Nodes whose initial flame was either sparked or else stoked by a shooting star of hope that heralded the beginnings of a storm whose waves reached shore long before its howling winds, lashing rains and the restorative reckoning we once trembled in anticipation of with anxiety, and now do so with excitement.

A sun around whose illuminating light the beginnings of the awakening orbited before spinning out, sparking the birth of galaxies of awareness all their own. The center point of a movement with as many names as persuasions, origins as missions, hearts as minds.

A node. A star. A sun.

A hope named Q.

And before that hope can be fully recognized and embraced, so its antithesis must be known, accounted for and summarily, soundly rejected, and routed from the shores of the collective human experience we once wandered, and now patrol. Woe be unto those who would seek to hide from the light we’ve been entrusted to shine. That we’ve taken, not to covet, but to shepherd and to share.

This rejection of the System of Lies and unTruths is a process each of us have or are going through even now, as we attempt to catch fresh tinder within the Collective Mind we yearn to wake, even as we seek to shield it from the trauma of having done so.

I was ‘awake’ before 2017 and the advent of Q, in a manner of speaking.

Awake enough to recognize the liar’s sleep that most of us—all of us—are born into. Aware enough to understand the sins I bore through the ignorance I felt as a heavy shroud and yet, whose yoke I couldn’t quite shake out of the malaise of illusion the powers that would be had spread like pestilence over the waking world of their dominion.

I remember the sensation, not always apparent, but ever-present which recalled the existential paralysis that would overtake me as a youth, when I would pass through the veil of sleep and re-enter the waking world trailing images—more so—suffocating feelings of dread anxiety into the reforming real—an affliction I no longer bear, but remember well.

And how many of us have been jarred or shaken roughly into waking before falling back, perhaps willingly into the grips of sweet ignorance, only to recognize that the sparked mind, much like the struck match can never strip its scorchmarks and ashen skin? How many of us pretended to prefer to dream along with the others, squeezed our eyelids shut tightly so that the monsters beneath the bed—now made real—might let us be a while longer, so they might continue to torment the innocent we pretended not to hear?

How many of us mistook knowledge for wisdom before the arrival of Q? How many mistook cynicism for clarity? Curiosity for bravery?

How many of us adopted the Doomer’s Refrain quite by accident, and converted the recognition of lies into the diffusion of sin onto the hated sleepers … onto everyone else, but never ourselves, because we knew better?

The reason I rail against Doomers in our midst—the worst of the Wolves because they betray not for wealth or fame, but due to the earnest failings of their own hearts—is because I used to be one.

I used to recognize the lies of the enemy matrix, at least in the Macro. I saw the sins of [their] empire laid bare. I knew enough to know that I knew very little, and I felt powerless because I did nothing to become powerful. I grew bitter to combat bitterness, and angry to combat hatred. I scorned in defense of being scorned, and I retreated in disgust at the cowardice I recognized in the world around me—in the people—without taking responsibility for its presence in myself.

I could tell you ‘What’ changed to put me on a path toward the logic-based positivity I created this publication—this name, and whatever goes along with it—to attempt to spread, and that ‘What’ was largely spawned by Q, but I’ve always found the ‘Why’ to be the more compelling story, and we are, after all, in a War of Stories.

If those reading these words know the ‘What’ of Q, then, what is the Why of Q?

As I often say around these parts, sometimes the answer lies within the question itself, and Q was—is—nothing if not a central question, one that recalls the great, mythic mysteries of the modern age, from Neo’s awakening in The Matrix to Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole.

What is the nature of our world?

And perhaps more importantly.

Why?

That said, it wasn’t solely the questions themselves that were responsible for the viral, exponential and somewhat ethereal spread of the Q Op. After all, while the right questions have the power to spark minds for the first time while reigniting cooled, dormant blazes within others, fires burn out without the fuel to sustain them, especially within those whose wicks had already run—within those the Q Op was designed to strike first, and strike hardest and hottest, that being the heterodox, beautiful paradox of the Anons.

No. It wasn’t the questions that sustained and transformed a curiosity into a philosophy, a mystery into a mission; it was the hope underlying them. The outlook. The end, communicated to us at the beginning, and whose broad outline comes clearer with each passing day, like the prow of a ghostly ship breaking the thick of fog, its sails still obscured with billows of cotton, canvas and mist. Lies covering truth, but whose shape is unmistakable if you know it’s coming.

Throughout the vastness of mapping the System of Systems that is the Globalist, Satanic Deep State Cabal, the complexities of starting on a path to learning Fifth-Generation Warfare so that we might do more than read the memories of the great battle on the ocean of our consciousness as its reflections reach the shore through shimmering ripples, and the spiritual intricacies of the unseen realm rendered just a bit more real with each passing day in this era, the same hope that made up the core of Donald Trump’s inexplicable and yet, inevitable appeal to the American heart is the same bright destiny that gripped the zeal of the overactive and underused Anon hivemind.

That is and was the brilliance of the Q Op, even if it was just the beginning of its central purpose.

As a very public figure said last week, there is no ‘QAnon;’ there is Q, and there are Anons. There are questions, and so, there must be answers, as the latter cannot be arrived at without the directed, discerning wings of the former to bear them hence.

As my good friend and peer

Chris Paul

is fond of saying, there are few feelings that rival “the joy of having been wrong.”

And after the darkness of despair many of us experienced upon those early revelations of the Q drops—revelations the sleepers are only just beginning to be confronted with the ghostly outlines of—and the anger it called up, we have had the honor, the privilege and the great responsibility to experience the joy of having been wrong with frequency, and with a fortitude that will help us prepare the way for those who follow.

More so than an observation, that epiphany isn’t just representative of the truth the Great Awakening process imprints onto those it touches, but rather marks a philosophical shift in framing the very questions that sparked said awakening in the first place.

After all, how is one to recognize the light without the darkness that makes up its edges, frames it and thus, gives it meaning?

What is light in a canvas made of itself?

A blanket of bright, like a blinding sun with no horizon to carve from the edges of the world, or a canvas upon which to paint the colors it would birth in order to define itself.

It has been said that, when one stares into the abyss, one must take care, lest the abyss stare back. And that truth hits hard to those who’ve wandered the darkest paths of the Info War for years, as the Darkest Path is also the first one many of us took back then, which was simultaneously the most difficult course, and the one we were least prepared to take.

And yet, with the benefit of the hindsight we mistook for foresight at the time, and with all the many joys we’ve experienced cataloguing and exorcising the many wrongs we once held in our awakening psyches, I now believe that jarring, traumatic trek into the wandering ways of the void was quite the point—a feature of both the Q Op and the Great Awakening it helped to usher in, and not a bug.

After all, while many of us stumbled upon those prescient, fateful questions by mistake—or were guided by unseen hands—the choice to follow them to their logical, paradigm-shattering endpoints was entirely each and all of ours.

The Darkest Path was a path we chose to walk, partly out of the inherent curiosity that makes up those predisposed to the life of the Anon, partly out of heterodox rebellion against the status quo and yet, I would posit and confidently guess, more so because we felt a pull to the questions in the first place, and a responsibility in light of the answers.

But then, I suppose there are still some toiling among us who believe in coincidence, and accident, despite the revealed designs of our collectivist enemy and their undoing.

Which brings us to the point of this piece.

In recent pieces, such as ‘Crisis Cascade’ and ‘Crisis Convergence,’ I have laid out a general—and far from exhaustive—framework that defines the System of Systems to me. This framework, breaking the Deep State into pillars ranging from the Financial and Political to the Cultural and Clandestine is a veneer of complexity that obscures a rather simple truth, and that is that what binds the System together is shared sin, and the leverage that implies—first over one another, and through that bound and trapped immorality, and the temporary power it affords—dominion over us, the would-be sovereigns of the world.

That said, there are signs every hour of each day that the System of Systems has grown ragged and weary. From the ongoing failure of woke corporations and the continued backlash against subversive ideology of every sick, twisted persuasion, to the sheer idiocy on display on the political world stage—a puppet show whose Net Effects are serving the Great Awakening, for a change—the Deep State has never been so revealed to a greater plurality of the American people than in this time.

And the true Crisis Cascade that will ultimately take the Deep State down in the Actual realm and not simply the Potential one—that involving everything from what many Anons believe will be the largest criminal conspiracy (RICO) case ever brought to court, international committees, New Nurembergs and the ramifications for the Biblical flood of Disclosure to emerge from the Media, Military and Medical industrial complexes, as well as the exposure of the true Deep State, the subversive rot in the heart of the U.S. and international Administrative State itself—comes back around to the original secret their false world was built in order to keep, and that we exist in order to expose.

Sound of Freedom is currently clogging the cognitive airwaves of the Info War in all the best ways, but it’s simply the latest in an accelerating and intensifying series of Narrative Whiplashes regarding the very ‘Crimes Against Children’ truth this formerly-disparate, uncooperative community of Truthers, Anons and Citizen Journalists coalesced and unified in order to expose.

The fact that the independent film, which explores the Child Sex Trafficking epidemic in a fashion most Americans are completely unexposed to on the back of its continued embarrassment of Disney’s cascade of box office and fiscal failures, and in spite of the entertainment conglomerate’s attempts to shelve the film indefinitely when they held the distribution rights to it, is so utterly, righteously perfect, the sheer magnitude and impossibility of the congruent success of the one and failure of the other beggars belief, and renders attempts to dismiss the connection inane and expository on their own misplaced merits.

As I said on Truth Social:

I refer to this resurfacing of the Darkest Path—and other ongoing truths and theories ubiquitous with the Truth Community and the Q Op—as the ‘Shark Fin Template,’ which posits that the most important revelations to emerge as part and parcel to the Great Awakening continue to break the surface of the roiling waters of the Info War with increasing frequency, until such a time as Justice is actualized for the imprinted, solidified wrongs against humankind.

These Crises [to them,] represented by parallel Narrative & Actual, Legal Deployments regarding Allison Mack, Keith Reniere and NXIVM, sex crimes at CNN and the BBC, Larry Nassar’s current plight in a Florida prison, Jeffrey Epstein’s ubiquity within every elite walk of shadowed life, from the central bankers to Big Tech and even the slow re-emergence of the Podestas, Clintons and Haiti back in the Story the Collective Mind is absorbing absent its conscious will, provide near-constant reminders of the inevitability of Justice, which is never early, nor late, but rather arrives precisely when it means to.

And I believe the resurfacing of these Stories—particularly, of these characters—is our most apparent signal that there are indeed ghosts within the media machine, and that these ghosts work for the side of the light.

More so than the re-emergence of these Narratives, however, the Media Industrial Complex’s denials and employment of what I refer to as ‘Overton’s Goalpost’ regarding their veracity is perhaps the most damaging development for the anonymity these ‘protectors’ and enablers of the Deep State’s predilections once enjoyed.

The Narrative-setters in the Deep State’s direct employ, as well as those orbiting their system of immorality and debauchery are now bound in the Ouroboros pattern that can only result in their exposure to the waking collective of humanity, and the wrath that will come along with it.

So, when you see the Media Industrial Complex going out of its way to cast child trafficking itself as the conspiracy theory and those who lead its exposure cultists and miscreants, remember that ‘Guardians of the Pedophiles’ isn’t some conspiracy-addled fever dream.

They’ve been in the shadows, and now they’re being forced—they’re forcing themselves—into the light of our directed minds, and for things born of and in the dark, that isn’t an especially good place to be.

We in this community don’t exist to spread the truth. Not any longer. That part of the tale is done, and the enemy has picked up the baton from us in their seething, spitting desperation. They will germinate the seeds of awakening we planted some time ago with their immolative attempts to obscure them, and we will be here to be the frame and support upon which those fresh green chutes and curling, fragile, eager creepers of curiosity climb, and whose buds and blossoms will begin to move through the colors of awakening each of us went through in a different time, and through harder earth.

Mapping began long ago. Perhaps far longer than we’ll ever truly know.

Amidst the financial, political, cultural and clandestine, the Darkest Path is the foundation of the dark world they would have us inherit. It is what the System of Systems was erected to protect, and it is what the Sovereign Alliance—and what each of us and those who join us in the brightening sun—was called to tear down.

The sheer magnitude of the current Crisis Cascade afflicting the one secret they wish we’d leave alone, and the one they can least afford being dragged into the light is a breakthrough of encouragement that, where it concerns the Info War, the Mind War and the Great Awakening, things can turn very slowly, and then all at once.

Just as Epstein and Maxwell were two key nodes in a larger network of evil masquerading as unelected lordship, each revealed piece of filth carries with it its own story, which will water the well of awakening within its own mind in the loosening bedrock around us. After all, it is only through confronting the greatest sins that we might hope to reconcile the past they poisoned with the future we hope to build.

Revelation, much like epiphany is not a gradual process, but immediate, even if the path there is choked with trials, trails and tribulations, forded rivers, gnarled roots and earthen slides that slowed the climb to the summit. This climb, for all its hellish, callused intricacies is quickly forgotten, and melts away when the last staggered steps onto the plateau become the first in a new world, and when the whole comes into view, vast and stunning and present.

What are we here for, then?

In the end, it’s up to each of us to answer that question. That said, sometimes we get a helping hand. Sometimes the simulation winks at us. Sometimes God breaks through.

Sometimes the truth heralds itself.

Our beginning will mark their ending. It already has. It already did.

The reckoning is long overdue, and the storm is coming.

Because it was always about the children.

We’re all of us in a Mind War. We were born into it. Molded in it. The difference is, you and I know it. Which gives us a responsibility. There’s no putting the genie of awakening back in the bottle. But that truth goes both ways. That burden of knowledge whose weight we share is the millstone around [their] collective necks.

And if the more subtle Tolkien nods throughout this piece weren’t quite enough, I’ll end with one I’ve only slightly modified, intoned by King Theoden of Rohan unto the breaking of the world, and the last ride of the Rohirrim:

“Now for wrath. Now for ruin. And [their] world’s ending.”

Until next time, stay Positive, stay Based and most importantly … stay Bright.

(Note to Readers: Below, I humbly ask for the support of those willing and able to spare it as I continue to try to carve out a path for myself and my family that will allow me to focus on the life of the Truthful Tiger more completely. That said, recently, the Buy Me A Coffee company caved to a coordinated ‘Cancel Campaign’ launched by Media Matters, resulting in the deplatforming of several of my friends and peers. While Burning Bright has seemingly escaped their notice—should I be insulted?—for the time being, it is possible that my page will be taken down soon as well. Either way, I wanted to clearly communicate that to you folks, in case it changes your desire to use their platform to support my work.

As always, the best and most consistent way to support my writing and research is to upgrade to a paid membership on this Substack platform for $7 per month or less. So far, Substack has rebuffed ‘Cancel’ and ‘Pressure’ Campaigns launched against citizen journalists.)

#substack #burning bright

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bao3bei4 · 3 years

Text

fan language: the victorian imaginary and cnovel fandom

there’s this pinterest image i’ve seen circulating a lot in the past year i’ve been on fandom social media. it’s a drawn infographic of a, i guess, asian-looking woman holding a fan in different places relative to her face to show what the graphic helpfully calls “the language of the fan.”

people like sharing it. they like thinking about what nefarious ancient chinese hanky code shenanigans their favorite fan-toting character might get up to⁠—accidentally or on purpose. and what’s the problem with that?

the problem is that fan language isn’t chinese. it’s victorian. and even then, it’s not really quite victorian at all.

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fans served a primarily utilitarian purpose throughout chinese history. of course, most of the surviving fans we see⁠—and the types of fans we tend to care about⁠—are closer to art pieces. but realistically speaking, the majority of fans were made of cheaper material for more mundane purposes. in china, just like all around the world, people fanned themselves. it got hot!

so here’s a big tipoff. it would be very difficult to use a fan if you had an elaborate language centered around fanning yourself.

you might argue that fine, everyday working people didn’t have a fan language. but wealthy people might have had one. the problem we encounter here is that fans weren’t really gendered. (caveat here that certain types of fans were more popular with women. however, those tended to be the round silk fans, ones that bear no resemblance to the folding fans in the graphic). no disrespect to the gnc old man fuckers in the crowd, but this language isn’t quite masc enough for a tool that someone’s dad might regularly use.

folding fans, we know, reached europe in the 17th century and gained immense popularity in the 18th. it was there that fans began to take on a gendered quality. ariel beaujot describes in their 2012 victorian fashion accessories how middle class women, in the midst of a top shortage, found themselves clutching fans in hopes of securing a husband.

she quotes an article from the illustrated london news, suggesting “women ‘not only’ used fans to ‘move the air and cool themselves but also to express their sentiments.’” general wisdom was that the movement of the fan was sufficiently expressive that it augmented a woman’s displays of emotion. and of course, the more english audiences became aware that it might do so, the more they might use their fans purposefully in that way.

notice, however, that this is no more codified than body language in general is. it turns out that “the language of the fan” was actually created by fan manufacturers at the turn of the 20th century⁠—hundreds of years after their arrival⁠ in europe—to sell more fans. i’m not even kidding right now. the story goes that it was louis duvelleroy of the maison duvelleroy who decided to include pamphlets on the language with each fan sold.

interestingly enough, beaujot suggests that it didn’t really matter what each particular fan sign meant. gentlemen could tell when they were being flirted with. as it happens, meaningful eye contact and a light flutter near the face may be a lingua franca.

so it seems then, the language of the fan is merely part of this victorian imaginary we collectively have today, which in turn itself was itself captivated by china.

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victorian references come up perhaps unexpectedly often in cnovel fandom, most often with regards to modesty.

it’s a bit of an awkward reference considering that chinese traditional fashion⁠—and the ambiguous time periods in which these novels are set⁠—far predate victorian england. it is even more awkward considering that victoria and her covered ankles did um. imperialize china.

but nonetheless, it is common. and to make a point about how ubiquitous it is, here is a link to the twitter search for “sqq victorian.” sqq is the fandom abbreviation for shen qingqiu, the main character of the scum villain’s self-saving system, by the way.

this is an awful lot of results for a search involving a chinese man who spends the entire novel in either real modern-day china or fantasy ancient china. that’s all i’m going to say on the matter, without referencing any specific tweet.

i think people are aware of the anachronism. and i think they don’t mind. even the most cursory research reveals that fan language is european and a revisionist fantasy. wikipedia can tell us this⁠—i checked!

but it doesn’t matter to me whether people are trying to make an internally consistent canon compliant claim, or whether they’re just free associating between fan facts they know. it is, instead, more interesting to me that people consistently refer to this particular bit of history. and that’s what i want to talk about today⁠—the relationship of fandom today to this two hundred odd year span of time in england (roughly stuart to victorian times) and england in that time period to its contemporaneous china.

things will slip a little here. victorian has expanded in timeframe, if only because random guys posting online do not care overly much for respect for the intricacies of british history. china has expanded in geographic location, if only because the english of the time themselves conflated china with all of asia.

in addition, note that i am critiquing a certain perspective on the topic. this is why i write about fan as white here⁠—not because all fans are white⁠—but because the tendencies i’m examining have a clear historical antecedent in whiteness that shapes how white fans encounter these novels.

i’m sure some fans of color participate in these practices. however i don’t really care about that. they are not its main perpetrators nor its main beneficiaries. so personally i am minding my own business on that front.

it’s instead important to me to illuminate the linkage between white as subject and chinese as object in history and in the present that i do argue that fannish products today are built upon.

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it’s not radical, or even new at all, for white audiences to consume⁠—or create their own versions of⁠—chinese art en masse. in many ways the white creators who appear to owe their whole style and aesthetic to their asian peers in turn are just the new chinoiserie.

this is not to say that white people can’t create asian-inspired art. but rather, i am asking you to sit with the discomfort that you may not like the artistic company you keep in the broader view of history, and to consider together what is to be done about that.

now, when i say the new chinoiserie, i first want to establish what the original one is. chinoiserie was a european artistic movement that appeared coincident with the rise in popularity of folding fans that i described above. this is not by coincidence; the european demand for asian imports and the eventual production of lookalikes is the movement itself. so: when we talk about fans, when we talk about china (porcelain), when we talk about tea in england⁠—we are talking about the legacy of chinoiserie.

there are a couple things i want to note here. while english people as a whole had a very tenuous knowledge of what china might be, their appetites for chinoiserie were roughly coincident with national relations with china. as the relationship between england and china moved from trade to out-and-out wars, chinoiserie declined in popularity until china had been safely subjugated once more by the end of the 19th century.

the second thing i want to note on the subject that contrary to what one might think at first, the appeal of chinoiserie was not that it was foreign. eugenia zuroski’s 2013 taste for china examines 18th century english literature and its descriptions of the according material culture with the lens that chinese imports might be formative to english identity, rather than antithetical to it.

beyond that bare thesis, i think it’s also worthwhile to extend her insight that material objects become animated by the literary viewpoints on them. this is true, both in a limited general sense as well as in the sense that english thinkers of the time self-consciously articulated this viewpoint. consider the quote from the illustrated london news above⁠—your fan, that object, says something about you. and not only that, but the objects you surround yourself with ought to.

it’s a bit circular, the idea that written material says that you should allow written material to shape your understanding of physical objects. but it’s both 1) what happened, and 2) integral, i think, to integrating a fannish perspective into the topic.

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japanning is the name for the popular imitative lacquering that english craftspeople developed in domestic response to the demand for lacquerware imports. in the eighteenth century, japanning became an artform especially suited for young women. manuals were published on the subject, urging young women to learn how to paint furniture and other surfaces, encouraging them to rework the designs provided in the text.

it was considered a beneficial activity for them; zuroski describes how it was “associated with commerce and connoisseurship, practical skill and aesthetic judgment.” a skillful japanner, rather than simply obscuring what lay underneath the lacquer, displayed their superior judgment in how they chose to arrange these new canonical figures and effects in a tasteful way to bring out the best qualities of them.

zuroski quotes the first english-language manual on the subject, written in 1688, which explains how japanning allows one to:

alter and correct, take out a piece from one, add a fragment to the next, and make an entire garment compleat in all its parts, though tis wrought out of never so many disagreeing patterns.

this language evokes a very different, very modern practice. it is this english reworking of an asian artform that i think the parallels are most obvious.

white people, through their artistic investment in chinese material objects and aesthetics, integrated them into their own subjectivity. these practices came to say something about the people who participated in them, in a way that had little to do with the country itself. their relationship changed from being a “consumer” of chinese objects to becoming the proprietor of these new aesthetic signifiers.

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i want to talk about this through a few pairs of tensions on the subject that i think characterize common attitudes then and now.

first, consider the relationship between the self and the other: the chinese object as something that is very familiar to you, speaking to something about your own self vs. the chinese object as something that is fundamentally different from you and unknowable to you.

consider: [insert character name] is just like me. he would no doubt like the same things i like, consume the same cultural products. we are the same in some meaningful way vs. the fast standard fic disclaimer that “i tried my best when writing this fic, but i’m a english-speaking westerner, and i’m just writing this for fun so...... [excuses and alterations the person has chosen to make in this light],” going hand-in-hand with a preoccupation with authenticity or even overreliance on the unpaid labor of chinese friends and acquaintances.

consider: hugh honour when he quotes a man from the 1640s claiming “chinoiserie of this even more hybrid kind had become so far removed from genuine Chinese tradition that it was exported from India to China as a novelty to the Chinese themselves”

these tensions coexist, and look how they have been resolved.

second, consider what we vest in objects themselves: beaujot explains how the fan became a sexualized, coquettish object in the hands of a british woman, but was used to great effect in gilbert and sullivan’s 1885 mikado to demonstrate the docility of asian women.

consider: these characters became expressions of your sexual desires and fetishes, even as their 5’10 actors themselves are emasculated.

what is liberating for one necessitates the subjugation and fetishization of the other.

third, consider reactions to the practice: enjoyment of chinese objects as a sign of your cosmopolitan palate vs “so what’s the hype about those ancient chinese gays” pop culture explainers that addressed the unconvinced mainstream.

consider: zuroski describes how both english consumers purchased china in droves, and contemporary publications reported on them. how:

It was in the pages of these papers that the growing popularity of Chinese things in the early eighteenth century acquired the reputation of a “craze”; they portrayed china fanatics as flawed, fragile, and unreliable characters, and frequently cast chinoiserie itself in the same light.

referenda on fannish behavior serve as referenda on the objects of their devotion, and vice versa. as the difference between identity and fetish collapses, they come to be treated as one and the same by not just participants but their observers.

at what point does mxtx fic cease to be chinese?

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finally, it seems readily apparent that attitudes towards chinese objects may in fact have something to do with attitudes about china as a country. i do not want to suggest that these literary concerns are primarily motivated and begot by forces entirely divorced from the real mechanics of power.

here, i want to bring in edward said, and his 1993 culture and imperialism. there, he explains how power and legitimacy go hand in hand. one is direct, and one is purely cultural. he originally wrote this in response to the outsize impact that british novelists have had in the maintenance of empire and throughout decolonization. literature, he argues, gives rise to powerful narratives that constrain our ability to think outside of them.

there’s a little bit of an inversion at play here. these are chinese novels, actually. but they’re being transformed by white narratives and artists. and just as i think the form of the novel is important to said’s critique, i think there’s something to be said about the form that fic takes and how it legitimates itself.

bound up in fandom is the idea that you have a right to create and transform as you please. it is a nice idea, but it is one that is directed towards a certain kind of asymmetry. that is, one where the author has all the power. this is the narrative we hear a lot in the history of fandom⁠—litigious authors and plucky fans, fanspaces always under attack from corporate sanitization.

meanwhile, said builds upon raymond schwab’s narrative of cultural exchange between european writers and cultural products outside the imperial core. said explains that fundamental to these two great borrowings (from greek classics and, in the so-called “oriental renaissance” of the late 18th, early 19th centuries from “india, china, japan, persia, and islam”) is asymmetry.

he had argued prior, in orientalism, that any “cultural exchange” between “partners conscious of inequality” always results in the suffering of the people. and here, he describes how “texts by dead people were read, appreciated, and appropriated” without the presence of any actual living people in that tradition.

i will not understate that there is a certain economic dynamic complicating this particular fannish asymmetry. mxtx has profited materially from the success of her works, most fans will not. also secondly, mxtx is um. not dead. LMAO.

but first, the international dynamic of extraction that said described is still present. i do not want to get overly into white attitudes towards china in this post, because i am already thoroughly derailed, but i do believe that they structure how white cnovel fandom encounters this texts.

at any rate, any profit she receives is overwhelmingly due to her domestic popularity, not her international popularity. (i say this because many of her international fans have never given her a cent. in fact, most of them have no real way to.) and moreover, as we talk about the structure of english-language fandom, what does it mean to create chinese cultural products without chinese people?

as white people take ownership over their versions of stories, do we lose something? what narratives about engagement with cnovels might exist outside of the form of classic fandom?

i think a lot of people get the relationship between ideas (the superstructure) and production (the base) confused. oftentimes they will lob in response to criticism, that look! this fic, this fandom, these people are so niche, and so underrepresented in mainstream culture, that their effects are marginal. i am not arguing that anyone’s cql fic causes imperialism. (unless you’re really annoying. then it’s anyone’s game)

i’m instead arguing something a little bit different. i think, given similar inputs, you tend to get similar outputs. i think we live in the world that imperialism built, and we have clear historical predecessors in terms of white appetites for creating, consuming, and transforming chinese objects.

we have already seen, in the case of the fan language meme that began this post, that sometimes we even prefer this white chinoiserie. after all, isn’t it beautiful, too?

i want to bring discomfort to this topic. i want to reject the paradigm of white subject and chinese object; in fact, here in this essay, i have tried to reverse it.

if you are taken aback by the comparisons i make here, how can you make meaningful changes to your fannish practice to address it?

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some concluding thoughts on the matter, because i don’t like being misunderstood!

i am not claiming white fans cannot create fanworks of cnovels or be inspired by asian art or artists. this essay is meant to elaborate on the historical connection between victorian england and cnovel characters and fandom that others have already popularized.

i don’t think people who make victorian jokes are inherently bad or racist. i am encouraging people to think about why we might make them and/or share them

the connections here are meant to be more provocative than strictly literal. (e.g. i don’t literally think writing fanfic is a 1-1 descendant of japanning). these connections are instead meant to 1) make visible the baggage that fans of color often approach fandom with and 2) recontextualize and defamiliarize fannish practice for the purposes of honest critique

please don’t turn this post into being about other different kinds of discourse, or into something that only one “kind” of fan does. please take my words at face value and consider them in good faith. i would really appreciate that.

please feel free to ask me to clarify any statements or supply more in-depth sources :)

#x #-__- another fandom essay sorry

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felassan · 3 years

Link

Article: ‘Mass Effect 3 Could Have Had A Completely Different Ending’

The Mass Effect 3 ending has been a controversial subject for nine years. As it turns out, it could have been completely different.

This article is part of TheGamer’s Mass Effect week.

Highlights:

This [the RGB endings] wasn’t always the case. According to Mass Effect 3 writer Chris Hepler, the end of Shepard’s story could have been radically different.

Hepler started working on Mass Effect right at the beginning. Although he wasn’t formally part of the team yet, he did additional design, chipped in for playtesting, and offered a fair amount of writing feedback during development of the first game. He had a much more active role on Mass Effect 2, writing the Codex entries, the Galaxy Map, and spearheading the Cerberus Daily News initiative. By the time Mass Effect 3 rolled around, Hepler was writing EDI, Thane, Citadel missions, and was generally considered to be the project’s “loremaster.”

“The ending relies on space magic, and the lead writer, lead gameplay designer, and executive producer all just embraced that and owned it from the get-go,” Hepler tells me. “‘Any sufficiently advanced technology’ and all that. They wanted and got a really big decision that affects the whole galaxy. If you give it a moment's thought, none of the three options are perfectly moral or the ‘right’ answer for everyone. Destroy may not solve the problem of AI and organics; Control rewards the Reapers; even Synthesis, which is harder to get than the other two and sounds like it'd be permanent peace, basically violates the entire galaxy's bodily autonomy without consent. So that part, I think, works.

“Did it satisfy the fans? Hell, no, not at first, and I found a lot of the criticism to be legitimate. The Extended Cut gave us a second chance to make an ending that acknowledged many more of the players' choices, and was about as good as we could reasonably make given the decisions we'd already made. I felt a lot better about myself and us as a team after the EC came out.”

Hepler explains that fans had observed several hints throughout the trilogy that pointed in completely different directions. For example, there are aspects of the lore that actually lean towards the Citadel species allying with the Reapers in order to collectively tackle a dark energy anomaly, as opposed to the Reapers remaining as the Big Bad right up until credits roll. Hepler confirms that there are explicit lore details that lean into this idea, but that he never personally heard about capitalizing on them. Remember, this is coming from the Mass Effect loremaster - if he says there is lore to back up a dark energy anomaly that only the Reapers can save us from, it certainly exists.

“Now, what would I have done?” Hepler asks. “I wouldn't have done space magic at all. I planned to write three Codex entries on the Crucible rather than one, reflecting on what scientists think it is at first, what it appears to be once construction has really made progress, and a third detailing how it will kill the Reapers, readable right before you return to Earth.”

Hepler explains that he wanted to take inspiration from Nancy Kress’ novel, Probability Moon, in order to have the Crucible use a strong nuclear force as a weapon. Kress’ superweapon is designed to create a massive burst of energy that is completely harmless for objects that have a low atomic weight, like organic flesh made of carbon chains. This means that the vast majority of Citadel species would be virtually unaffected by a blast from this weapon.

Objects with a much higher atomic number, however, would be annihilated by the beam. This weapon is constructed in such a way that it emits life-killing radiation for anything made up of heavy metals. “So cybernetic creatures like the Reapers and husks would have their organic parts fried because they're right next to the heavy metals, but the organic creatures a safe distance away, like a civilian population, would be just fine,” Hepler says.

“The rebuilt Shepard, who had a fair bit of cybernetics, would die heroically, but that was always likely to be on the cards. In talking with Ann Lemay, another writer on the project, we theorized that the metal most likely to be the atomic weight cut-off-point was niobium, which today is used in piercings and surgical implants because it doesn't rust and you can embed it in flesh without ill effects. It's even blue when exposed to oxygen, like the glowing blue husks we've been fighting since [the first] Mass Effect. So it would make sense as a building block for the Reapers and their ultimate weakness.”

So, what happened? Unfortunately, Hepler never got to pitch his ending. The design leads moved lightning quick with their Destroy/Control/Synthesis trifecta, to the point that the whole premise had been approved before Hepler even got around to finishing his second Codex entry. As a result, he hadn’t got a full description of how this pertained to the entire galaxy yet - although looking at it now, it could have borrowed from the best bits of each ending. The Reapers would be neutralized, but the tech would be there. Given that Mass Effect is largely about the coexistence of humans and cybernetic creatures, it would also have had an impact on other aspects of the universe - what would happen to EDI?

“I [also] had some concern that Nancy Kress might notice and sue us if I didn't do my homework,” Hepler says. “And there was no time to do that homework, which would be me telling all the leads to hold off for a week while I exchanged a crap-ton of emails with my subject matter experts. ‘Sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic’ was far easier and had much more project momentum. “I recycled some of the strong-force-as-a-weapon tech into the Reaper infantry weapon, the Blackstar. In retrospect, I wish I'd spoken up more, or thought it all out faster, but them's the breaks.”

As well as Hepler’s own ending - which obviously never made it into the final game, despite sounding as if it had a lot more hard science behind it - Hepler is a big fan of the popular Indoctrination Theory. However, he was pretty open about the fact that this wasn’t something BioWare consciously designed.

“The Indoctrination Theory is a really interesting theory, but it's entirely created by the fans,” Hepler says. “While we made some of the ending a little trippy because Shepard is a breath away from dying and it's entirely possible there's some subconscious power to the kid's words, we never had the sort of meetings you'd need to have to properly seed it through the game.

“We weren't that smart. By all means, make mods and write fanfic about it, and enjoy whatever floats your boat, because it's a cool way to interpret the game. But it wasn't our intention. We didn't write that.”

[source]

#bioware #mass effect #video games #long post #longpost

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broke-on-books · 3 years

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Thinking about the effect that the Scooby Doo legacy and stereotypes associated with it have had on the friendships of individual gang members other than just Shaggy and Scooby.

(Some negativity and a lot of personal opinion below, also running on 3hrs sleep so do what you will)

Like this post was actually written after my rant in the tags but in newer Scooby media (with newer counting as everything after the change in art styles and entrance to the 21st century in my mind) it always has to be a spectacle when they do something against the "Laws of Scooby" like they decide to switch up the clue finding pairings for an episode? Suddenly it's the focus of the whole thing, and people are clashing, and blah blah clap the writers on the back for being so self aware!

It's like: listen. Take that one what's new episode for example, in the mall where the toys come to life. They decide to split up the pairings, putting Fred and Shaggy together, and leaving Scooby with the girls. And instead of it being a fun and interesting change, it's just... awkward. Like suddenly Fred and Shaggy can't even have a conversation together? Like they can't even find a common interest to relate over for small talk and I'm supposed to believe that they're friends? And they ARE FRIENDS! First and foremost, friendship is the strongest binding factor in Scooby Doo! These teenagers basically live together and drive around solving dangerous mysteries together. Like for Pete's sake! There's your common intrest right there! It just rubs me the wrong way honestly

This same thing was done (I think I remember) in a few be cool, scooby doo episodes although like a lot of stuff in be cool, they handled it much better, and normally presented a resolution of the gang's friendships at the end of the episode, and would occasionally break the status quo with other team ups.

But still, compared to older, hanna-barbera era (hey, that rhymes!) it felt almost performative, like they were telling us that We, as an Audience had to acknowledge that they were being Different (TM).

Just when you compare it to older cartoons, specifically those where many of the iconic hallmark gags and catchphrases of scooby doo weren't fully cemented, it's a much more chill and relaxed affair. Like Velma can go look for clues with Shaggy and Scooby in WAY, no problem! But if it happens now, there has to be some sort of reason or conflict behind it other than them just being friends, and wanting to hang out!

It's just very interesting, and while an occasional trend, It's one I can find appearing more in Scooby properties I don't like as much, and less in those I do. Like some of the more recent straight to DVD movies! (Can they still be called that tbh?) I love those, and most of them, I've noticed, puts greater emphasis and care on the friendships of the gang than other properties do.

I've especially seen this with the more "popular" or mainstream Scooby media. Like the ones like Mystery Incorporated, the Gunn Movies, etc. try and do something different with the plot (most of the time to great acclaim) but do so at the expense of the characters and their friendship with each other

Like I appreciate what they're trying to do! I do! I like branching out, I loooove changing it up plot wise! But when you don't preserve the heart of the franchise (the scooby gang) it just feels uncomfortable, or flat to me as a Scooby fan.

Like to a more casual fan I can totally see how they can LOVE Mystery inc, or the Gunn Movies, but as someone who watches old episodes and owns and loves DVD releases, it doesn't always feel like the same characters or same story. Like I adore SDMI and what it tried to do with it's plot, but I can have a hard time having fun with it when the gang are arguing and neglecting their real friendships over bullshit relationship drama for the 15th episode in a row. It just makes me a little sad and it's hard to watch as someone who cared about them. It just... I'm a fan who would take a repetitive, carbon copy scooby story with solid and considerate versions of the characters over a story with an amazing plot, but horrible characterization (to the point that you could not PAY me to believe these people are friends) any day

Anyways this got much too long plus my rants in the tags, and I STILL haven't nailed down my point here and I don't think I will so I'll just wrap it up with the fact that Scooby Doo is character driven, and it has survived off those characters for over 50 years. And sometimes it seems that executives have a hard time remembering that when the adaptations most ingrained in the public consciousness seem to show the opposite of this. But I don't know, characterization and character dynamics are something that has changed and evolved a lot over the course of the Scooby Doo franchise's lifetime, and appears in many different forms at different times, making each show and movie (nay, each episode) almost hit or miss in the mind of each fan and their own version of the characters. And I think you can get your best glimpse at what other people see in Scooby through their version of the friendships it involves and how it stands as a central theme

#just mmm YES #the old series when a lot of the tropes and in gags and stereotypes werent set so they really had freedom to explore other dynamics n ideas!#like SO GOOD #like they DONT always split uo the same way shaggy and scooby doo want to solve the mystery and help its just... so good #there arent certain points they always hit each episode its so nice #like i was watching something and i actually think it was way later than WAY bc it was scrappy era but still original art style but ANYWAYS #they had a flashback to a fred and scooby team up! JUST fred and scooby! catching a bad guy together! do you know how awesome it is!#i swear nowadays anytime they switch up the teams at all its always a huge thing the episode has to point at like SEE SEE WE'RE ORIGINAL #and theres some bs plotline abt it being hard for people to get along in the new team ups #like the wnsd episode where its shaggy and fred and they cant find shit to talk about or like the bcsd episode where scooby and velma team #up (this one was better than the wnsd ep at least) and its like NO NO NO WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT THEY ARE FRIENDS #it shouldnt be awkward or played off for the studio to get brownie points for doing something different with scooby doo like no! nonononono!#just ugh the older episodes had their own little things but im just thinking about the weight that the tradition of what constitutes scooby #puts on the episodes #also this isnt a blanket statement because non classic era scooby can do gang dynamics really well at times!!! like holy shit! but i find #that it being done badly can turn good episodes into uncomfortable ones and okay episodes into boring ones #like sdmi!! the plot in sdmi can be the best thing ever but it sacrifices gang dynamics to do that and adds in artificial drama so #i have the most complicated feelings on it as a series and how it portrays the gang #same with the gunn movies! like i hate them because of the scrappy slander and shit but no matter how good they can be plot and comedy wise #i just cant believe the gang are actually friends in it and it takes a lot of that joy out of it and makes ut suffer in my eyes #SO TO SUM UP bc these tags got long as fuck for a one sentence post: the thing that turns good scooby into great scooby is defined in the #relationships of the main characters and their friendship above all else #tdlr: if they dont love each other youre doing scooby doo wrong #anyways wb hire me i would love to create character driven scooby shows and movies for you : )))#scooby doo #this is gibberish #you can tell im sleep deorived but whatever #anyways i didnt mention the 90s quartet when talking about mainstream interpretations and that was on purpose bc its Complicated.#and honestly deserves a full rewatch and another post before going into my opinions on them #hhhhhggggggg brain mush now okey bye

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tlbodine · 3 years

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The Horror Genius of Five Nights At Freddy’s

I’ve been playing FNAF: Help Wanted VR on my Oculus Quest lately (a birthday present to myself -- I know I’m late to that party!) and it’s reignited in me my old love of this series. I know Scott Cawthon’s politics aren’t great, but I don’t think there’s any malice in his heart beyond usual Christian conservative nonsense -- and I think he stepped down as graciously and magnanimously as possible when confronted about it. Time will judge Scott Cawthon’s politics, and that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I want to talk about what makes these games so damn special, from a horror, design, and marketing perspective. I think there’s really SO MUCH to be learned from studying these games and the wider influence they’ve had as intellectual property.

What Is FNAF?

In case you’ve somehow been living under a rock for the last seven years, Five Nights At Freddy’s (hereafter, FNAF) is a horror franchise spanning 17 games (10 main games + some spinoffs and troll games, we’ll get to that), 27 books, a movie deal, and a couple live-action attractions.

But before it exploded into that kind of tremendous IP, it started out as a single indie pont-and-click game created entirely by one dude, Scott Cawthon. Cawthon had developed other games in the past without much fame or success, including some Christian children’s entertainment. He was working as a cashier at Dollar General and making games in his spare time -- and most of those games got panned.

So he tried making something different.

After being criticized that the characters in one of his children’s games looked like soulless, creepy animatronics, Cawthon had his lightbulb moment and created a horror game centered on....creepy animatronics!

The rest, as they say, is history.

The Genius of FNAF’s Horror Elements

In the first FNAF game, you play as a night security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a sort of ersatz Chuck-E-Cheese establishment. The animatronics are on free-roaming mode at night, but you don’t want to let them find you in your security room so you have to watch them move through the building on security camera monitors. If they get too close, you can slam your security room doors closed. But be careful, because this restaurant operates on a shoestring budget, and the power will go off if you keep the doors closed too long or flicker the lights too often. And once the lights go out, you’re helpless against the animatronics in the dark.

Guiding you through your gameplay is a fellow employee, Phone Guy, who calls you each night with some helpful advice. Phone Guy is voiced by Cawthon himself, and listening to his tapes gives you some hints of the game’s underlying story as well as telling you how to play. A few newspaper clippings and other bits of scrap material help to fill in more details of the story.

Over the next set of games, the story would be further developed, with each new game introducing new mechanics and variations on the theme -- in one, you don a mask to slip past the notice of animatronics; in another, you have to play sound cues to lure an animatronic away from you. By the fourth game, the setup was changed completely, now featuring a child with a flashlight hiding from the monsters outside his door -- nightmarish versions of the beloved child-friendly mascots. The mechanics change just enough between variations to keep things fresh while maintaining a consistent brand.

There are so many things these games do well from a storytelling and horror perspective:

Jump Scares: It’s easy to shrug these games off for relying heavily on jump scares, and they absolutely do have a lot of them. But they’re used strategically. In most games, the jump scares are a punishment (a controlled shock, if you will) -- if you play the game perfectly, you’ll never be jump-scared. This is an important design choice that a lot of other horror games don’t follow.

Atmospheric Dread: These games absolutely deliver horror and tension through every element of design -- some more than others, admittedly. But a combination of sound cues, the overall texture and aesthetic of the world, the “things move when you’re not looking at them” mechanic, all of it works together to create a feeling of unease and paranoia.

Paranoia: As in most survival horror games, you’re at a disadvantage. You can’t move or defend yourself, really -- all you can do is watch. And so watch you do. Except it’s a false sense of security, because flicking lights and checking cameras uses up precious resources, putting you at greater risk. So you have to balance your compulsive need to check, double-check, and make sure...with methodical resource conservation. The best way to survive these games is to remain calm and focused. It’s a brilliant design choice.

Visceral Horror: The monster design of the animatronics is absolutely delightful, and there’s a whole range of them to choose from. The sheer size and weight of the creatures, the way they move and position themselves, their grunginess, the deadness of their eyes, the quantity and prominence of their teeth. They are simultaneously adorable and horrifying.

Implicit Horror: One of the greatest strengths to FNAF as a franchise is that it never wears its story on its sleeve. Instead of outright telling you what’s going on, the story is delivered in bits and pieces that you have to put together yourself -- creating a puzzle for an engaged player to think about and theorize over and consider long after the game is done. But more than that, the nature of the horror itself is such that it becomes increasingly upsetting the more you think on it. The implications of what’s going on in the game world -- that there are decaying bodies tucked away inside mascots that continue to perform for children, that a man dressed in a costume is luring kids away into a private room to kill them, and so forth -- are the epitome of fridge horror.

The FNAF lore does admittedly start to become fairly ridiculous and convoluted as the franchise wears on. But even ret-conned material manages to be pretty interesting in its own right (and there is nothing in the world keeping you from playing the first four games, or even the first six, and pretending none of the rest exist).

Another thing I really appreciate about the FNAF franchise is that it’s quite funny, in a way that complements and underscores the horror rather than detracting from it. It’s something a lot of other properties utterly fail to do.

The Genius of Scott Cawthon’s Marketing

OK, so FNAF utilizes a multi-prong attack for creating horror and implements it well -- big deal. Why did it explode into a massive IP sensation when other indie horror games that are just as well-made barely made a blip on the radar?

Well! That’s where the real genius comes in. This game was built and marketed in a way to maximize its franchisability.

First, the story utilizes instantly identifiable, simple but effective character designs, and then generates more and more instantly identifiable unique characters with each iteration. Having a wealth of characters and clever, unique designs basically paves the way for merchandise and fan-works. (That they’re anthropomorphic animal designs also probably helped -- because that taps into the furry fandom as well without completely alienating non-furries).

Speaking of fan-work, Scott Cawthon has always been very supportive of fandom, only taking action when people would try to profit off knock-off games and that sort of thing -- basically bad-faith copies. But as far as I know he’s always been super chill with fan-created content, even going so far as to engage directly with the fandom. Which brings me to....

These games were practically designed for streaming, and he took care to deliver them into the hands of influential streamers. Because the games are heavy on jump-scares and scale in difficulty (even including extra-challenging modes after the core game is beaten) they are extremely fun to watch people play. They’re short enough to be easily finished over the duration of a long stream, and they’re episodic -- lending themselves perfectly to a YouTube Lets Play format. One Night = One Video, and now the streamer has weeks of content from your game (but viewers can jump in at any time without really missing much).

The games are kid-friendly but also genuinely frightening. Because the most disturbing parts of the game’s lore are hinted at rather than made explicit, younger players can easily engage with the game on a more basic surface level, and others can go as deep into the lore as they feel comfortable. There is no blood and gore and violence or even any explicitly stated death in the main game; all of the murder and death is portrayed obliquely by way of 8-bit mini games and tangential references. Making this game terrifying but accessible to youngsters, and then marketing it directly to younger viewers through popular streamers (and later, merchandising deals) is genius -- because it creates a very broad potential audience, and kids tend to spend 100% of their money (birthdays, allowances, etc.) and are most likely to tell their friends about this super scary game, etc. etc.

By creating a puzzle box of lore, and then interacting directly with the fandom -- dropping hints, trolling, essentially creating an ARG of his own lore through his website, in-game easter eggs, and tie-in materials -- Cawthon created a mystery for fandom to solve. And fans LOVE endlessly speculating over convoluted theories.

Cawthon released these games FAST. He dropped FNAF 2 within months of the first game’s release, and kept up a pace of 1-2 games a year ever since. This steady output ensured the games never dropped out of public consciousness -- and introducing new puzzle pieces for the lore-hungry fans to pore over helped keep the discussion going.

I think MatPat and The Game Theorists owe a tremendous amount of their own huge success to this game. I think Markiplier does, too, and other big streamers and YouTubers. It’s been fascinating watching the symbiotic relationship between these games and the people who make content about these games. Obviously that’s true for a lot of fandom -- but FNAF feels so special because it really did start so small. It’s a true rags-to-riches sleeper hit and luck absolutely played a role in its growth, but skill is a big part too.

Take-Aways For Creatives

I want to be very clear here: I do not think that every piece of media needs to be “IP,” franchisable, an extended universe, or a multimedia sensation. I think there is plenty to be said for creating art of all types, and sometimes that means a standalone story with a small audience.

But if you do want a chance at real break-out, run-away success and forging a media empire of your own, I think there are some take-aways to be learned from the success of FNAF:

Persistence. Scott Cawthon studied animation and game-design in the 1990s and released his first game in 2002. He released a bunch of stuff afterward. None of it stuck. It took 12 years to hit on the winning formula, and then another several years of incredibly hard work to push out more titles and stoke the fires before it really became a sensation. Wherever you’re at on your creative journey, don’t give up. You never know when your next thing will be The Thing that breaks you out.

If you want to sell a lot of something, you have to make it widely appealing to a bunch of people. This means keeping your concept simple to understand (”security guard wards off creepy killer animatronics at a pizza parlor”) and appealing to as wide a segment of the market as you can (ie, a horror story that appeals to both kids and adults). The more hyper-specific your audience, the harder it’s gonna be to find them and the fewer copies of your thing you’ll be selling.

Know your shit and put your best work out there. I think there’s an impulse to feel like “well, nobody reads this anyway, so why does it matter if it’s no good” (I certainly have fallen into that on multiple occasions) but that’s the wrong way to think about it. You never know when and where your break will come. Put your best work out there and keep on polishing your craft with better and better stuff because eventually one of those things you chuck out there is going to be The Thing.

Figure out where your target audience hangs out, and who influences them, and then get your thing in the hands of those influencers. Streaming and YouTube were the secret to FNAF’s success. Maybe yours will be BookTube, or Instagram, or a secret cabal of free librarians. I don’t know. But you should try your best to figure out who would like the thing that you’re making, and then figure out how to reach those people, and put all of your energy into that instead of shotgun-blasting your marketing all willy nilly.

You don’t have to put the whole story on the page. Audiences love puzzles. Fans love mysteries. You can actually leave a lot more unanswered than you think. There’s some value in keeping secrets and leaving things for others to fill in. Remember -- your art is only partly yours. The sandbox belongs to others to play in, too, and you have to let them do that.

If in doubt, appealing to furries never hurts.

Do I take all of this advice myself? Not by a long shot. But it’s definitely a lot to think about.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go beat The Curse of Dreadbear.

#horror analysis #writing advice #fnaf

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letterboxd · 3 years

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A Cinematic Outcoming.

From Istanbul to Chicago, and C.R.A.Z.Y. to Spirited Away, Letterboxd member, writer and film programmer Emre Eminoğlu explores the films that drove his gay awakening.

“I see it as my duty to never shut up about how representation matters.” —Emre Eminoğlu

I was one of the luckiest ones, yet I had no idea how lucky I was. Growing up in Istanbul, Turkey, a predominantly patriarchal, conservative and homophobic society, my luck was being born into an open-minded, secular and loving family.

In this bubble, I was isolated from the struggles of the majority of my people. I was not bullied at school by my peers, I was not forced into being someone else by my family. Yet I still had that voice in my head. As soon as I realized something could be different with me, I became my own bully and forcefully adopted a fictional persona: ‘exceptionally normal’.

Coming out was hard, but coming out to myself was harder. Although I was perfectly aware of my sexual identity, I could not come to terms with the possibility of being ‘abnormal’. Cue cinema. Watching films was a way of escape for high-school Emre—it still is—and it was inevitable that I would come across some LGBTQ+ films. I was not consciously in search of a ‘truth’ about myself but I started seeing my reflection in them, as they slowly disarmed the bully I involuntarily created.

Twenty years later, now, as a 34-year-old gay man professionally writing on cinema and television, I see it as my duty to never shut up about how representation matters. Streaming LGBTQ+ shows on various platforms, seeing widely released, mainstream LGBTQ+ films, listening to the music of openly LGBTQ+ stars, and hearing words of wisdom like “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”, I am confident that the personal, inner bully that I created twenty years ago would not survive a week in today’s world.

‘C.R.A.Z.Y.’ (2005)

Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) was definitely not the first LGBTQ+ film I ever watched, but it was an invaluable juncture in my life. It was a hot summer in Istanbul, freshman year of college was over. One of my best friends, who had been accompanying me through most of my cinematic discoveries, told me about a French-Canadian film with this guy on the film poster with David Bowie makeup on his face. We headed to an independent theater in Kadıköy to see it.

Zachary Beaulieu was different. As the lone gay son in a family of five boys, he too was forcefully adopting a fictional persona, and his way of escape was music. He was constantly worried about how to be worthy of his parents’ love, how to realize their ideals of him, and how his difference and truth contradicted all of that. Zac’s 1960s basically mirrored my story in the 2000s. I perfectly muted the life-changing enlightenment I was going through and did not vocalize my inner screams.

In two hours, C.R.A.Z.Y. helped me realize my true self and admit my sexual identity after all those years. It was a personal threshold I had been longing to cross… but there was still a lot to go through.

‘Les Amours Imaginaires’ (Heartbeats, 2010)

Liking someone, falling for someone, being loved, dating someone, sex, refusals, misinterpretations, heartbreaks, break-ups, bad sex. On the other side of the closet, I was being introduced to new, sometimes euphoric, sometimes gut-wrenching experiences. But coming out to my friends was still a challenge. I was feeling so lonely keeping all these wonderful and horrible experiences in my chest.

But I was not alone: LGBTQ+ films were my life’s understudy. The same heartbreaks, worries, and disappointments I was going through were right there on the silver screen. I took note as two best friends, Francis and Marie, fall for the same guy and navigate their friendship in Xavier Dolan’s Les Amours Imaginaires (Heartbeats, 2010). I studied how a popular student, Jarle, falls for the new guy in school, but cannot risk his reputation to be with him in Stian Kristiansen’s Mannen som Elsket Yngve (The Man Who Loved Yngve, 2008) and I watched as close friends Tobi and Achim become lovers, until one’s need to keep everything secret threatens to destroy the relationship in Marco Kreuzpaintner’s Sommersturm (Summer Storm, 2004).

Things were not always accessible via online platforms and the internet, so film festivals were often the only chance to see the latest independent and queer films. Two of the biggest film festivals in Istanbul, thankfully, had LGBTQ+-focused sections; !f’s Gökkuşağı (Rainbow) and Istanbul Film Festival’s Nerdesin aşkım? (Where are you, my love?) felt like home.

‘Tomboy’ (2011)

Being the lone avid cinephile among my friends, I was used to seeing half of my festival picks alone. Even before coming out to myself, my hopes for a romantic relationship included, among other things, having a festival partner. When I, fortunately, found the one, I was delighted to have also found the perfect festival partner. Shortly after our first month together, the first film we saw at a film festival was Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy (2011).

Although I was a 24 year old cis man, I was more than able to empathize with the title character, a ten-year-old trans boy. With his family unaware of his true identity, Mickaël experiences the liberation of a fresh start when ‘mistaken’ for a boy after they move to a new neighborhood—finally able to introduce himself as Mickaël, not Laure.

Changing my career path, a new job in the creative industry, and a stable relationship had similar effects on me. I was still not completely out to my parents, or some of my friends, schoolmates, and acquaintances from my past, but I was freed of the obligation to explain anything to my new friends or colleagues. I would proudly introduce them to my boyfriend, or simply correct people by saying I was attracted to men during a conversation. The perfect festival partner turned out to be a perfect partner as well—over the past ten years, he has helped me grow and be proud of myself.

‘Weekend’ (2011)

We moved in together in the fifth year of our relationship. Right above our bed hangs a poster of Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011). At the time we saw it, it was just another film that we watched together and liked—no significance, no symbolism. It is the story of two young men, Russell and Glen, who are fascinated by the connection they find between each other, and are surprised how their one-night-stand evolved into the perfect weekend. When Glen reveals that he will be leaving for another country the very next day, it only makes their connection stronger, and their time together more precious. Being a timid and socially anxious person, none of my romantic relationships or my friendships had formed this organically. Even my first date with my partner was a disaster. We built what we have now over time, slowly and patiently. I did not believe in ‘weekends’.

And yet, one summer night, we met a guy on Grindr, as we occasionally did. What we thought was just another one night stand was in fact a transformative experience for us both. Intense conversation, a triple connection, the drinks we enjoyed instead of hurrying to bed, and the passionate sex turned that casual one-night-stand into a magical reality for us. We realized that we still had feelings and instincts to discover in ourselves and in each other. Over a week-long, unexpected, unpredictable polyamorous fling, we learned to act as one instead of two—only to find out that he was leaving for another country the very next week. This was our ‘weekend’.

‘Hamam’ (Steam: The Turkish Bath, 1997)

Thinking how LGBTQ+ films of other cultures and languages had played a significant role in some precious, threshold-crossing moments of my life, it was alienating not being able to feel embraced and represented openly in Turkish cinema. There were certainly multiple Turkish LGBTQ+ films or characters, but they were in films addressing more urgent issues—right to live, violence against LGBTQ+ individuals, honor murders, trans murders—rather than the nuanced experience of queer love.

Although I discovered it years after it was released, Italian-Turkish director Ferzan Özpetek’s Hamam (Steam: The Turkish Bath, 1997) was a mind-blowing experience for me. The relationship, and the sexual tension, between Francesco, the Italian heir to a building with a Turkish bath in it, and Mehmet, the young son of the family managing the compound, felt much closer to my story and my cultural, familial identity.

Aşk, Büyü vs. (Love, Spells and All That, 2019)

Today, I am glad to see more and more filmmakers finding the courage to maintain the LGBTQ+ narrative in Turkish cinema, despite the oppressive, intolerant and exclusionary policies. Some are telling the youthful, urban stories I was longing for at the time: In Leyla Yılmaz’s Bilmemek (Not Knowing, 2019), Umut, a high-school athlete from a middle-class family in Istanbul, is bullied by his so-called modern and open-minded teammates after not replying to a query about whether he is gay or not. In Ümit Ünal’s Aşk, Büyü vs. (Love, Spells and All That, 2019), Eren and Reyhan, two adult women reunite in the magical atmosphere of The Princes’ Islands on the Istanbul coast, decades after they were forcefully separated by their parents.

The story of me coming out to myself all started with an urge to escape reality through cinema, and on the way, I found films that gave meaning to my muddled existence. When I saw Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced (2019), I smiled as I noticed the Spirited Away poster in Merab’s room; this minor detail another reminder that I was not alone. Merab, a gay dancer who is part of a very traditional and conservative Georgian dance company, was dealing with similar challenges in his life. He was trying to discover his true identity in a society that does not celebrate being different. He was too, finding an escape in cinema.

Coming out was hard. It still is. A recent Instagram post by the 27-year-old actor Connor Jessup, who came out as gay two years ago, reminded me coming out is not a single moment, but a never-ending process, a ‘becoming’. He writes, “When I first came out, a friend wrote to me and said, ‘Now you can really start coming out.’ Start? I thought. I just did it. But he was right. […] I’m going to keep trying. I’m going to keep looking.”

I keep trying, and looking. Learning about myself, my identity, my relationship. And LGBTQ+ films keep helping and inspiring me, just as they did in my journey to accept myself and become the person I am today. This is the power of cinema; unconsciously, you see your past, actuality and possibilities through the stories filmmakers tell. And I am so grateful to these filmmakers.

Related content

The Ten Greatest Turkish Films of All Time, according to the Turkish Film Critics’ Association

Emre’s Favorite LGBTQ+ Films: a personal top 50

Queer Films in Turkish Cinema—a list by Atakan

The Top 100 Turkish Movies of the 21st Century: Emre’s personal favorites

#letterboxd #pride #pride 2021 #lgbtqia cinema #lgbt film #turkish cinema #turkish film #queer cinema #coming out #jean marc vallée

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ericleo108 · 3 years

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Blog Navigation 2021

List #3

“Let go of the past and go for the future.” - Henry David Thoreau

Blog Navigation List: 2020, 2019

Last Updated 05/04/21

Media and Treatise List:

Philosophy:

🌍108 The Story Of Discovering Earth’s Consciousness (post) - I am now an author and this is my first book. The book is nonfiction and autobiographical and about celestial consciousness, my personal story of struggling with schizoaffective disorder, atmospheric consciousness, sustainability, and eugenics, and finishes with what the number 108 means for the origins of life on Earth.

💿🌍Read “108” (album) - As I am a hip-hop artist, I also wrote an album to compliment, popularize, and promote my book “108” as a tool. It’s much quicker to understand what “108” is about by listening to the “Read 108” track. The album stands alone and is more focused on saying some in hip-hop, being relevant, and keeping with the Emma Watson romantic narrative.

🚸🚜 Knhoeing 2020 - The information is broken down into celestial consciousness, atmospheric consciousness, sustainability, and eugenics. Knhoeing states the planets, stars, and atmosphere are alive, and how humans can understand that through sustainability and eugenics. Knhoeing has to do with understanding your position in the universe and expresses and addresses human purpose through a eugenics goal. In order to survive & thrive as a species, we must support ourselves through healthy sustainability and breed to understand higher dimensions.

🙏Sentientism 2021 - This post contains insights into my mind and the voice in my head, Gaia. I explain how sentientism is the religion of Gaia where you worship through action and create dogma through science and philosophy. If the planet earth is conscious how would she try to communicate considering she has no mouth or ligaments? How would Gaia try to communicate? I postulate and explain how Gaia could be communicating through a kind of telepathic randonauting.

📐 Expanding on Plato’s Philosophy: Forms and the Tripartite Soul (2020) - In this treatise, I explain how Plato’s forms are stored and strived for by Gaia and how Plato’s theory about the tripartite soul is similar to my theory about the will.

♟️ Logic - This post is a short introduction to logic. I use quotes and pictures of pages from the book “How Philosophy Works.” The content includes deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning, fallacies, and formal logic. I have also embedded a couple CrashCourse videos.

Sociology:

🏳️‍🌈 Gender Equality 2021 - In this essay, I break down gender equality into six categories: LGBTQ, Phobic, Sexual, Mental, Feminist, and Economic. To properly show the subject of gender equality I reference the 6 Netflix documentaries and linked and discuss related videos from Ellen, HeForShe, TED, Jordan Peterson, The World Bank, and the UN.

🏁 Dark Racism 2021 - In this treatise I explain the science of racism, how it’s an arbitrary distinction that is socially constructed. Black people do have it worse due to institutionalized racism and white privilege. However, I talk about how black people create their own in-group morality around the word “nigga,” and my presented solution.

🌎👣 Earth: Sustainability, How To Save Our Planet - If you want to know how to save our planet this post is the summation. Taking from the featured WWF video, I focus on a carbon tax and the three ways to save the planet. Along the way I discuss how it relates to The Psycho Consumption Cage.

🍱 The Psycho Consumption Cage 2021 - In this treatise I talk about how it’s hard to see environmental degradation that is not added in our economics, how you should be using your buying power strategically, how apex species need economic and congressional representation, some solutions, and examples of psycho tendencies from Christmas and hip-hop.

🌲Marijuana Treatise 2021 - Published on April 20th and introduced with a discussion of my personal use, in this essay, I wrote about the versatility of hemp, the immorality and failure of the war on drugs, and the medical benefits of cannabis.

Politics:

🍊Trump’s Effect on America - In this post I explore how Trump made the country more xenophobic, racist, and ignorant. I use some psychological terms like cognitive dissonance or the Dunning-Krueger effect.

🐘🔫Republicans are Dangerous - In this post I focus on a chart that shows the most acts of terror come from conservative extremists.

🍊🦠Trump’s Covid Response - In this post I show how Trump is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths due to his response to covid.

Personal:

👨‍💻 My Reckoning - This post is part two from my book “108: The Story of Earth’s Consciousness.” Part one explains the first part of Knhoeing, celestial consciousness. Part two is my personal story from the time I graduated from college in 2010 until 2019 and explains why I think there is celestial consciousness. Knhoeing 2020 is a necessary prerequisite to understanding this story.

✨💕Cosmic Love 2021 - In this post I explain how Selena Gomez is reflecting me and why she is my cosmic love. Coming in phases, I reference Emma Watson who also reflects me and I talk about in my book “108” and in (the previous year’s) Emma Watson Cosmic Love post.

🍷The Chalice Mixtape - This is a mixtape I did from jacked industry beats back in 2017. It was a response to the cosmic love I’d been seeing and I talk about in the blog and “108” book. I love Emma Watson and I want her to think about me so I came up with a fantasy and rapped about it. I took Emma Watson and Taylor Swift’s middle name, Charlotte and Alyson (who I changed to Alice), and made songs talking to them with the subject of gender equality and the theme of Charlotte's Web and Alice In Wonderland.

Journal list:

Journal 01/27/21: Looking Forward - In this journal, I talk about having a healthy relationship with food, Ancient Aliens and Bob Lazar, Marcus Lemonis, David Dobrick, being in remission, keto business plans, and looking forward to Joe Biden improving social security.

Journal 12/04/20: Refocused - This is my first journal in 6 months and does not contain a video. I talk about my plans and the pandemic, my book and music, growing my hair, stagnant weight loss, looking for housing, the importance of food, and going into business.

Video Journal 06/01/20 - Moving On - In this journal I talk about how I have plans to move to Lansing and attend graduate school at MSU. Along the way, I talk about the “108” book promotion and how the diet is coming along. I update the reader on topics from my previous VJ.

Video Journal 02/13/20 - Published 108 - In this journal I talk about publishing my book “108,” getting work-out equipment, exercising, losing weight on a ketogenic diet, how I want stem cell therapy for my knee, affording things on disability, my credit score, who I plan on voting for, that congress should have term limits and future career plans.

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bloodybells1 · 2 years

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Gemütlichkeit and Adult Contemporary: my Journey into the New Age

Harold Budd, the late mood music composer whose oeuvre was largely defined by dark and introspective solo piano pieces, once summed up the power of the New Age taboo in an infamous quote during which he claimed that, whenever he heard those dreaded words in the same sentence as his music, he’d need to reach for his “revolver.”

Setting aside the relatively pressing question as to why on earth a composer of peaceful ambient music would have such ready access to a firearm, it didn’t surprise me nonetheless to read about this type of reaction at being called a New Age artist. Over the years, Budd had supplied a certain sector of engaged listenership with a breed of instrumental music—intelligent, tasteful, somewhat minimalist—uniquely vulnerable to appropriation by what was, at the time of the quote, a truly hegemonic force. It’s easy to forget these days just how popular New Age music was in the 80s and 90s, how hungry was its fanbase of spiritual aspirants and how zealous was its cadre of intrepid composers, your Ayurvedic yogis and amateur ethnomusicologists, for example, who were determined to reify a connection between soul-seeking and music. These New Age composers and fans and marketers had much sway in framing the prevailing narrative of mood music, such that it was easy for the casual listener not to really get what divided a composer like Harold Budd from, say, a composer like Iasos, an adventurous and jazzy New Age composer positively dripping with Marin Valley post-hippie goo. You might say Budd had been born in the wrong era, having composed his best work during the exact time of New Age’s hegemony, back when listeners were much more credulous about it than today.

The ardor of these New Age composers, supported mostly by bourgeois consumers with discretionary budgets, would end up faltering: it was an ignominious turn to a once hopeful story, a turn that would plant in the minds of listeners the opprobrium, now taken as canon, surrounding a genre of feel-good, vibratory-centered music that apparently had no business seeking spiritual unity and world peace, its nominal goals, but was really instead synonymous with cloying vagueness and only so much woo. I guess Harold Budd was prescient, because there’s still a lot of reaching for revolvers these days when it comes to those words being uttered, indicating the victory of the smear campaign against New Age that was conducted amongst certain cognoscenti proceeding out of the more idealistic 90s, which has amounted to the now pervasive aversion to a genre most reasonably engaged listeners in the 21st Century regard with eye-rolls and snickers. Budd might have been a persnickety naysayer back then, but today he looks the picture of valor, fighting the good fight against a pseudo-genre which many now believe more accurately constitutes a hyper-capitalistic marketing trend than a legitimate style of music.

I don’t begrudge Harold Budd his dyspepsia, this even despite my own newfound zeal for New Age music. As an artist I know how frustrating it can feel when your work is misunderstood—though I suspect Budd’s gripe was aggravated further by the radioactive connotations of the genre with which he was being associated. So, rather than the simple case of an aggrieved artist’s fist-shaking at media misunderstanding, I see Budd as embodying the fullest sense of the New Age taboo. It’s interesting to note his reaction in the light of modern developments given how thoroughly discredited New Age appears to the average listener today. I was reminded of this just the other day when I visited the observatory on top of the Freedom Tower and noted how the conventions of New Age music—nature sounds and synthetic, quasi-orchestral string arrangements—had so completely infiltrated public consciousness as the exhibit unfurled a bombastic introduction to the New York City skyline. And this cultural prevalence has had downstream effects. Try finding a modern music blog diving into anything remotely like the New Age genre that does not include de rigueur disclaimers about the value of a piece of music despite its possible association with New Age and you will quickly come up to date with the genre’s conspicuously problematic state-of-play in the minds of engaged music listeners. You’ll find all sorts of handwringing and pretzel-twisting in these blogs trying to get at the heart of the featured music, be it an album, artist or song, without uttering the dreaded words, as though one had to find the most politic manner of telling a host whose apartment you just visited that their toilet was clogged.

But as I see it, this debate is full of confusion, and Budd’s revolver only adds to it. Back then, most lay listeners were much less savvy and didn’t really see the differences between, say, a certain type of ambient and the New Age genre as a whole, hence the anxiety of the “Not New Age” commentariat in the Amazon user reviews of many ambient albums. There’s an enduring perception that ambient music must continue to be walled off from an ever encroaching New Age stain, even though the zeitgeist has progressed well past any such danger. The problem is compounded by the unwillingness of this cognoscenti to admit that in fact there is a similarity between intelligent ambient music, let’s call it “indie-ambient,” and New Age music, even if that similarity is a result of ignorance on the part of the casual listener. If you ask most lay listeners the basis of their criticism of this music you’d hear that the music, apparently, isn’t “doing” anything. The absence of “events” is one of the first things that is noticed in, not just New Age, but of the type of music Harold Budd himself was making. (Other subgenres which often receive this criticism are ambient electronica and some forms of modern classical). And while the prevalence of eventlessness would be harder to pin on many putatively New Age artists such as Yanni and Enya, it still has meaning there for a certain type of listener, one that believes that music should offer the listener some form of contact with recognizably (read: pop) substantive musical ideas, such as lyrical poetry or some form of vaguely defined “movement” that’s usually code for verse-chorus-verse-chorus. In the case of more rarefied musics like indie rock this critique comes in the form of wanting the music to grant the listener a certain degree of kudos for having “taste” or some other such misty skillset when it comes to appreciating music. On the other side of the spectrum, someone might say that the music of Celine Dion, an artist whom one might criticize for a certain vapidity, essentially “does nothing,” despite her recognizable pop song structures, and this is excused in the minds of most listeners because, hey, it’s pop music, and so its broad appeal inoculates it from accusations of a certain type of eventlessness. In any case, the critique often holds whether the eventlessness is in the music itself or in some incapacity to fully position the listener in a clearly defined, or, better put, clearly validated, context. That New Age so clearly abjures these standards—whether it does so intentionally or not is a whole other matter—and fails this litmus test of so-called authenticity partly explains why it has garnered a high degree of cultural ignominy.

I find that the truly problematic element in the history of New Age and its development among music listeners inheres not so much in its failure to measure up to standards defined by other genres as in its long and sordid allegiance with capital. I can’t think of a more distasteful signal of late capitalistic degradation than the ideal of “choice,” of an autonomous consumer as the germ of economic activity, and this individualist ontology is something which New Age music marketing, with its homeopathic appeals to functionality and pantheistic inclusion, was only too eager to exploit. It gets worse, though, when you consider much of New Age music’s problematic neocolonialist cant, with its invocations of journeys to exotic lands, either to Asia in the East or to the Puebloans in the West. There’s a long history here to this type of ugly Orientalism, not just in the music but in the New Age movement as a whole; I think it even dates all the way back to the birth of Western tourism after the Dutch East India Company’s push to commodify the lands it had just begun to colonize. Dave and Steve Gordon come to mind as perhaps one of the guiltiest parties in this heist: a look at their catalog from the 90s is a gaze into some fairly cringe-inducing fare, with lots of “Native-wave” iconography, like dreamcatchers and frame drums, all in dated illustrations and complete with Indiana Jones font. I think they ended up taking a hint from the shifting zeitgeist in the new millennium because, around the 00s, the catalog starts to shift towards the coldly scientific with lots of titles about theta-waves and their soporific benefits. Though the music’s preoccupation with functionality still holds, they seem to have retreated from the breathless naïveté of earlier New Age’s neocolonialism, its conspicuous Othering of indigenous and Eastern cultures and its primitivist belief that so-called native peoples embody some sort of prehistorical archetype full of spiritual resources of which Western post-industrialized humans, the “stressed subjects” comprising the main target of New Age marketing, can and should avail themselves.

I want to be a little clearer here, though, because it’s important to separate the artists from the marketers. Dave and Steve Gordon are perhaps outliers in this respect as they have long been both a musical duo and a record label called Sequoia Records. But a perusal of their library nonetheless reveals the dichotomy: as far as New Age is concerned, though the imagery is quaint, their music, on the other hand, is actually of a fairly high quality. What this tells me is that, with respect to this problematic genre as a whole, it wasn’t just foreign cultures that were becoming appropriated, but the artists themselves. That is to say that the artists’ reputations, irrespective of the quality of their various works, were unfortunately lumped in with the reputation of the genre. When the genre suffered, so did they. This echoes what happened with disco by the late 70s: the scarlet letter of that genre’s cultural fallout followed its artists for a long time. For proof, ask Nile Rodgers who co-founded disco pioneers Chic but had to hide in studios as a producer all throughout the 80s. This is clearly an outgrowth of the uniquely depersonalized affect of New Age music (which again echoes disco, odd as the connection may seem). With its turn away from the autonomy of the artist towards the autonomy of the listener, New Age, like disco with its nightclub goers, dispenses with any cults of performers and centers all of those stressed-out people sitting on yoga mats. It’s important to note that “The Golden Era of New Age,” roughly the mid 80s through the 90s, was really more like “The Golden Era of New Age Record Labels.” It has long been rather easy to dismiss the genre as only so much marketing pablum, and this has been permitted by the relative anonymity of the New Age composers themselves who, because of their lack of visibility, never seemed quite capable of defying whichever ascriptions to the genre ended up gaining traction. Once upon a time, the primal consumerist act in pop music was of a listener choosing to listen to an artist and, depending on the genre, signing up for whichever identification stratum such choice thrusted at the listener. If I bought, say, an Ozzy Osbourne CD, this meant that effectively I was choosing to support bat-head mastication, along with all of the subversive prescriptions such a stance entailed. But such “allegiances” with artists and their various ethics was complicated with New Age music, since its consumption resembled something more akin to a shopping experience, hence the primacy of the record label, as opposed to the artist, as the arbiter of taste and identification. For a long time it made perfect sense to say that one had purchased a New Age CD at the health food store, and perhaps picked up a tiny gong and some imported incense along the way.

Why then, Carlos, you may ask, why in God’s name, would you take the time, not only to write a whole blog post in defense of this seeming dumpster fire, but actually seek to explore this music in your own work?

The simple, less accurate, more disingenuous answer is that I can’t predict where my heatseeking artistic inclinations are going to take me. It just so happens that they’ve taken me here.

But the more substantive, and therefore truer, response is—not too surprisingly, I think—a lot more complicated and involved.

If you know at least part of my history, that I was a successful rock musician in the post-punk vein, then it basically says just about nothing about my pedigree that I consider Brian Eno to be a huge source of inspiration. The reason why it says so little is because he is that way for many artists with similar provenances as mine. Another way of putting it is that he is very much the patron saint of the wider “tastemaking” sector, in which my community was, and to a certain extent continues to be, located. What’s more is that Eno has parlayed that notoriety successfully into wider circles, notably as a producer of records for the likes of U2 and Coldplay. He’s acquired a level of prestige as some sort of celebrity whisperer. He’s a kind of guru for the NPR/New Yorker portion of the upwardly mobile, though—crucially—culturally literate, managerial class, aspiring or otherwise. And this is no accident. In his infamous liner notes to Music for Airports, an album that most critics and listeners regard as the inception point for ambient electronica, he was pretty clear about how this music should be digested and, more importantly, who should be doing so. He stated that ambient music could and should be both ignorable and interesting. That last descriptor is critical because interesting is often the sine qua non of valid listenership among this tastemaker community. Elsewhere in the liner notes he went to great pains in making clear what he thought of Muzak and elevator music (which today seems clearly a dig at New Age), that it was culturally ignominious and chiefly so because it was merely ignorable. Crucially, it lacked the interesting part.

What ensued over the course of Eno’s storied career, a prodigious string of albums that seemed intent on supplying this tastemaker set with the modern equivalent of something like Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement (“Music for Moving Furniture”), that is to say, an intelligent version of a music to “do things” by, was what many among this community have regarded as something of a rescue effort. The grand proliferation of a now famous genre of highly reflective mood music commonly known as “ambient” has only doubled down further on the sense of this type of “rescue operation.” Ambient music, that is, more specifically, legitimate ambient music, was, according to Eno, here to save the day. What Eno was saying in the liner notes essentially was that certain people didn’t deserve mood music, namely, the culturally illiterate ones, the naive and confused Rajneeshees, or the “stressed subjects” and mainstream petit-bourgeois who were New Age’s specific target audience, from whose clutches ambient music was now to be salvaged. The perception of these Baby Boomer, post-counterculturalists as mainstream dupes to the latest snake-oil sales-guru, your Oshos and your Hubbards of the world, gave credence to the belief that a harsh separation was needed. In the use of the word “interesting,” he was clearly bequeathing the ambient genre to its supposedly rightful heirs, the college-educated, liberal-minded cultural intelligentsia who “know what they’re talking about.” You can see the legacy of this rescue effort in the clear line drawn between the “spiritual” ambient composers “over there”—your Steve Roaches and Robert Riches of the world—and the much more “tasteful” indie ambient composers “over here”—e.g. Stars of the Lid and Marconi Union. The spiritual valence is key: there is no talk of ghosts and candles and forest nymphs on the indie side, only the abstract, cold and pallid atmospheres of psychologized “rooms” and “spaces.” Indie ambient, in offering an agnostic, woo-free climate of consumption to NPR listeners and other forms of secularized “Brahmin Left” elites, clearly aligns itself with the tastemaker project of the greater independent music movement which began with college rock radio. By contrast, “spiritual” ambient composers, with their closer ties to the counterculture and progressive rock of the 70s, have been deemed as more closely aligned with the New Age movement, with all of the stench the association has entailed.

In many ways, this is all Eno’s work. And when Harold Budd, himself a one-time collaborator with Eno, reaches for his revolver at the mere mention of the words “New Age,” it is easy to hear in his distress the polemic ring of the liner notes from Music for Airports, with its calls for “interesting” music.

But since when does music have to be interesting? Or better put: what really counts as interesting? How is that determined? What are the metrics? And who is setting them?

I take a couple of examples from the art music world to illustrate the problem, namely La Monte Young’s consort, Theatre of Eternal Music, wherein performances often lasted for days, and John Cage’s As Slow as Possible, an organ work going on right this very second in a church in Germany, performed by attendants placing specifically timed weights onto keys: the performance of this work began in 2001 and is set to be completed in 2640. It’s an understatement to say that the “interest” in these examples certainly defies category. It’s also important to note just who are the people who are validating this kind of music as “interesting.” Of course, this isn’t at all to say that Music for Airports, likely a much more consonant experience for the average listener than the aforementioned art music, fails Eno’s own test. In fact, it is so very interesting that it had to be taken off the air once, after it had been looped in a Pittsburgh airport to see what would happen: airport patrons complained about the disruption and eventually they had to remove it and put back whatever conventional pop or token Bach was likely playing before it started. You could say this was an incredible victory for Eno to have made such a relaxing record be so interesting that it disrupted air traffic. Ironically enough, and, I suspect, very much in keeping with Eno’s original attempt, Music for Airports failed the letter of the album title’s goal, though not the spirit. Eno was likely well aware of the “Music for” tradition that dated back all the way to the hybrid jazz and classical LPS of the 50s and the 60s that served as the original template for functional music (“Music for Lovers,” and so forth). And if Eno wished to demonstrate that ambient music could and should be provocative, well then he succeeded. But provocation and interest are not joined at the hip. Nor is it always necessary to hold a genre accountable to a certain vision of what makes music interesting, a vision which, itself going all the way to Eno’s alma mater in Roxy Music, the very first college-educated art rock group, seems to ally itself with a certain elitist understanding of what “interesting” music should sound like.

In many ways he’s right. Purely functional music, either of the overtly “Music for” variety or simply of the larger New Age variety, is indeed not very interesting. And that is by design. In keeping with its goals, it is highly ignorable, something that, as of late, has for me been the much more important parameter. And when I say ignorable, I’m not talking about boring or dispensable. Ignorable can be just as emotive as the not so ignorable. To me, “ignorable” means rejecting the need for a certain type of close-listening scrutiny that is a convention of a different genre and community and class structure than the one which New Age music concerns itself with. The need for a music to recede and to blend in, something which Eno did emphasize in his liner notes, does not need to also be interesting in order for it to be valid. I see nothing more wrong with the consumptive model of the average New Age CD of yore, an item that sat as comfortably inside a shopping bag alongside books and tchotchkes as it did in a CD tower at home, than I do with the attentive, sacral hush that accompanies the informed and engaged listening of a classical symphony. The notion that a music must somehow rise above the level of a mere commodity is, depending on who is making that criticism, either classist bigotry or a bias coming from pop music hegemony. Modern copyright law reflects this sense of intellectual property ownership straining from the Western conception of this type of artistic genius. We only need to look outside of the Western gaze to see very different modalities in the consumption of intellectual property such as music. So-called merely ignorable Muzak or New Age has every right to claim legitimacy alongside its more interesting variants of the mood music scene.

Interestingly, the more you dive into these demarcations the more you see that the battle between these two visions of mood music is actually a battle between two different types of elite structures (and therefore not exactly the kind of fight one wants to bother with). On one hand you have the “initiated” ones, musicians and composers who graduate from art schools, as opposed to music schools, and rise to the favor of professional classes and critical gazes and whose efforts are subsequently deemed “valid” by a community that, for better or for worse, has become trusted by “serious” music consumers. This is the tastemaker sector which also has strong ties to the college rock movement. On the other, you have the “naive” ones, the more mainstream musicians and composers with training in more institutionalized forms of music, such as classical or jazz, and whose migration towards ambient and instrumental music is articulated along contours of spiritual searches. And, because of all of the whiffs of incense and pot smoke, many of these composers take on the mantle of providing soothing and relaxing and otherwise homeopathic modalities within their consumption models, with all of the elitist connotations implied in the price tags of all of those visits to the spa. For better or worse, there are many strictly ambient composers who’d likely prefer not to be too closely associated with this overtly New Age camp but, because of their less abstracted, more visceral takes on the ambient genre, are often lumped in with New Agers by the aforementioned tastemaker set (these are those “spiritual” ambient composers). In any case, no matter how you slice it, we’re dealing here with two highly constructed variants of mood music intended for two disparate though nonetheless equally privileged communities of elites. It’s important to realize that, in the case of the tastemakers, no matter how much they attempt to ground their vilification of the New Agers in some sort of doctrine of legitimacy, they will inevitably come off sounding like snobs, and rightly so; something different, though still apposite, happens in the case of the New Agers; no matter how much they claim to be simply spreading good vibes throughout the world, they’re really only talking to people who can afford membership plans at yoga studios and time off to go to Costa Rica on a meditation retreat. At the end of the day, they’re just two warring camps of elites. We should not be too concerned with whoever “wins.”

The “good vibes” claim, something which you can hear extolled in Stephen Halpern’s introduction to the legendary International Guide to New Age Music (whose last edition, tellingly, is from 1998), is instructive here because it’s where I’ve decided to insert myself into this wide-ranging spectrum of mood music. If the debacle at the Pittsburgh airport reveals only one important thing to me it’s that Brian Eno may claim that his ambient music is both ignorable and interesting, but maybe it’s really only the latter. The problem with this kind of mood music, as I see it, is that the relentless search for an artistic safe space from discredited music, the Muzak of his liner notes, usually means erring on the side of interesting. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with interesting music, any more than there is anything wrong with any music. But every time you slap a condition on an aesthetic you can expect to reap an imbalance somewhere down the line. That condition may seem pretty straightforward in your manifesto, but real-world factors weigh in in actual practice.

Rather than interesting, I’ve noticed that, when it comes to mood music, my essential preoccupation has been with magic and the metaphysical. This concern is of a piece with my general philosophy, which is much more theological than your average secularized liberal. I’ve noticed throughout all of my exploration of mood music that the essential ingredient that attracts me is a willing fraternization with elements surrounding nameless essences which have been approached in various incomplete ways by the wellness industry and other outgrowths of the post-countercultural diaspora. I know that many of my confreres react to this incompleteness with a visceral distaste. But I see in that reaction an echo of the distaste I encounter when I mention, for example, that I believe in God. (And that whole debate is better served in another essay). Of course, then, it should come as no surprise that my attraction to New Age has none too little to do with my own undertaking of the secularized pilgrimage of spiritual rejuvenation, commonly found in the self-help movement, with its concomitant zealous consumption of wellness industry products. So: guilty as charged. Fetishizations of nature, sound baths, vague stabs at theosophy, commercialized Buddhistic constructs, and, yes, an interest in folk musics from around the world, they all sound rather cringe-inducing, but the common denominator that I have found is that, in their sincere application of imagined therapies and systematized evocation of mystical experiences lies a tendency to produce a certain kind of music every bit as wonderful as Eno’s Music for Airports—along with subsequent examples of the genre it launched. It’s just what I’ve found that ends up sticking the most. Maybe its my own dogged, though nonetheless vague, spiritualism that attracts me to this type of music, my clear indebtedness to yogic evangelism which I know turns off many others; this would also explain my lack of interest in the indie ambient variety which strikes me as overly allied with a kind of godless scientism that leaves me dry. [It’s been noted elsewhere that the perception of disgrace is a key factor in the construction of magic within a given sphere of influence. As a disgraced form, so this scholar would have it, New Age is rife with magic. This is an interesting hypothesis and one which I’ll assume for the time being as I continue to piece together this tangled web of incipient musical exploration].

To me this music is most accurately deemed gemütlich: not just providing comfort but something a little higher. That would certainly be a start towards an understanding of what’s driving me. Indeed, when I think of the 47-year-old man that I am today, I can’t help but to have sympathy for progenitors of another maligned “gemütlich” genre, Adult Contemporary. This genre, itself a grab-bag like New Age, may include anything from the music of Celine Dion, who somewhat defines the genre, to the latter day efforts of Ian McCulloch of Echo & the Bunnymen fame. Previously known as Easy Listening or Soft Rock, the genre concerns itself, spoiler alert, with aging, at least insofar as its target audience is older. The virtue of Adult Contemporary is precisely this earnest entreaty to the end of youthful glory days. I have always felt that the rock scene that spawned me into public consciousness was a young man’s game and have always bristled at this arena’s conspicuous absence of off-ramps for its aging members. Adult Contemporary is one such off-ramp from the insanity of the rock’n’roll lifestyle, for artist and listener alike. It is a soundtrack for greying hairs and encroaching crow’s feet and its chief virtue as such is its honesty and complete unwillingness to engage in controversy, drama and other types of youthful shenanigans, even at the cost of a certain absence of heft and so-called “legitimacy.” It is a music which easily slips into the back pocket of your aging dads and your soccer moms, instead of needing to be broadcast on a T-shirt. To me there is no more tragic figure than that of the “rocker who’ll never die,” the Mick Jagger wannabe sporting skull necklaces and bleached hair amidst a bramble of liver spots and wrinkling skin. Adult Contemporary offers you a deal: escape the embarrassing obsolescence of aging rockerdom by embracing the quieter pleasures of aging; the only sacrifice you’ll need to make is forgetting about ever being cool again. It strikes me as a very reasonable offer.

I will admit that there’s also a hint of doomerism in my full-throated appeal to New Agers, specifically a conspicuous eagerness to disavow the strictures of the indie-rock community. It’s complicated, obviously, because this community gave me a meaningful career over a decade ago and continues to provide me with meaningful capital today, both financial and cultural. But I also have to admit that I was never all that comfortable with the indie-rock community. I remember how thrilled I was when, in 2002, Interpol learned that Matador Records, the indie-rock record label par excellence, wanted to sign a deal. Nonetheless, I was concerned that the exposure this particular label would give the band would always be framed through the college rock radio lens and I was uncomfortable that this band I’d co-founded would become appropriated by a community I’d never seen myself as a willing member of. I was Goth back then, and before that I was various things, though always they were much more theatrical than anything the more sullen indie-rock genre liked to tolerate. Thankfully, my fear proved unfounded: for a variety of historical reasons, not least of which was the explosion of The Strokes with its much more “fun” centered affects, something which up to that time indie rock had shunned, Interpol was able to accomplish the reverse, that is, frame Matador’s legacy within the context of a more mood-oriented approach. It’s instructive to recall that The Strokes’ “fun-lovingness” was retroactively defined as the kind espoused by late-Seventies punk and barroom rock like The Modern Lovers and Richard Hell. A similar cast surrounded Interpol, but of a decidedly more Mancunian nature. This is all to say that, while indie rock was beginning an evolution towards its present incarnation as a panoply of musician scholars obsessed with lost musics of the past, a tradition that very much defines my own career, I was still eager to defy the expectations of this tastemaker set for what I suspected were those university-driven classist aspects which I think are now much more wide open than they were back then.

The irony here, then, is that there may be no more indie rock of a thing you can do today than to do what I’ve been doing, study the detritus of dustbin musics in search of previously discarded ore, those forsaken ingredients of a long lost genre, hoping to reverse-engineer the original prototype, only this time under the indie-rocker/scholar’s more culturally informed microscope. The ghost of Eno’s liner notes lives on! You can see that New Age is now getting the retro treatment in the burgeoning popularity of YouTube channels like Sounds of the Dawn. If Spotify and YouTube have enabled the construction of just so many Frankenstein’s monsters pieced together from the limbs of the past, then I guess I can say no other thing than, once again, “guilty as charged.” But this disappoints me; and that’s the irony. Because, actually, I wish it were otherwise. In many ways, I’m disappointed in the inescapability of my provenance, this lot into which I’ve placed myself, the perennially abstracted musician-connoisseur, able to reassemble the past through intelligence and savvy, the skillset that has always been essential to the full vista of indie rock excellence, a legacy that began with Roxy Music and The Velvet Underground. Whether it’s because of its clear indebtedness to university education or perhaps its conspicuous whiteness, I can’t help feeling like there’s something denuded about this purview. On a larger canvas, it bespeaks of the impoverishment of our decadent age, an era in which not even our politicians seem capable of escaping the public’s rabid preoccupation with nostalgia.

But I’ll also take the upside of this scenario. There’s something to be celebrated here. For the streaming platforms have once and for all decoupled the New Age CD, previously sequestered to spas and realization centers, from its community of spiritual aspirants. More accurately, these platforms, in their democratized access to universal taste, have removed the main hindrances which New Age has always encountered, owing first to its capture by the erstwhile Yuppies of the 80s and the 90s, and subsequently to its fall from grace in the light of changing mores and consumption habits. Spotify and YouTube have insured one no longer needs to engage with subcultures in order to partake of their aural wares. New Age, like all music, really, has now been installed within the cold Library of Congress-style enumeration of the various platforms’ algorithms, playlists and Pandora-style channels, divorced from the old and problematic consumption model of the wellness industry. And when you dive deep into the actual music of New Age, something which modern streaming facilitates to a hitherto unimaginable degree, what’s revealed is a rather uncomfortable truth: as it turns out, New Age music is actually not so very different after all from most other musics, at least when in comes to its proportion of good to bad. To assail the genre as hokum evinces either ignorance of the genre or willful blindness to the realities of more culturally acceptable fare. Trudging through Spotify playlists, “Fans Also Like” panels and good old fashioned artist catalogs, not only reveals that Spotify teems with mediocrity, but also unveils priceless gems to the tenacious explorer. This happens with any genre and New Age is no exception.

After the Teens and now in the Twenties, algorithms and subscriptions have decoupled the listener from their various and previously determined lifestyles and value sets. Marketing has necessarily shifted away from its emphasis on identity and morals and towards amorphous malleability: now the listener is centered and is free to shape-shift their listening habits according to taste, no matter how fickle or transient. We live in the age of the rabbit hole, and, no more so than in the realm of music consumption do we more clearly resemble a horde of librarians referencing a database of eternally codified entries which once, at some hopelessly quaint time, came in the form of physical units, accessible to touch and smell, and which, in their corporeality, seemed to offer the listener a private audience with some such genius or other.

No longer. If anything, this literally is the New Age. In many ways, because Silicon Valley has decreed it, the listener truly is king. It’s no longer a New Age thing. It’s across the board. The longstanding critique of New Age, which seemed entirely bolstered by the perception of its cynical catering to the cult of the individual, has been made moot via Big Tech’s transformation of the basic machinery of listening. Now, regardless of what floats our boat, we are all a sea of individuals.

It’s all just music now.

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