#one of my semi-clichéd identities:

[oldshrewsburyian]

@butaneandthebeast​ replied to this post:

i know nothing about anglican marriage services and any elaboration on your part esp. re: anne and freddie would be much, *much* appreciated <3

@crabapple10​, adding incentive:

Yes, please elaborate on the implications of the Anglican marriage service!

Mine hour is come. A prolegomenon on the Book of Common Prayer: as a single text, it probably has the most decisive influence on the Anglophone literary imagination from the 16th century onward. Through the time of Austen’s writing, it’s part of most people’s daily lives (more than the King James Bible or Shakespeare, for instance.) I could digress on the theological and social debates that underlie its formation and revision, because I find them fascinating, but I will spare you. Point is: it’s influential, and it continues in use for centuries before substantial revision, so the language and some of the ideas would have been archaic by Jane Austen’s day, but... this is still the Marriage Service. The edition that would have been used for the Wentworths is that of 1662.

If you’ve seen the 1995 Pride and Prejudice -- a safe bet, probably? -- you’ve heard the opening of this liturgy, and I think its use is possibly the smartest choice of that very smart adaptation, simultaneously highlighting and undercutting the meaning of the text in a way that I hope Austen would have approved, showing the messy ways in which humans live our lives... and how we still aspire to human love that mirrors the divine, that makes us both better and happier.

Anyway! Despite the fact that the BCP contains Forms of Prayer to be Used at Sea, I rather think that Anne has a more easy familiarity with the liturgies of the church than her husband; that she is readier to view this as a homely as well as a solemn thing. But Frederick Wentworth is going to vow to love, comfort, honor, and keep this woman, in sickness and in health, keeping only unto her, and I think he’s going to do such a good job. He will vow to cherish her until parted from her by death. And the final vow of their joint sequence, before the priestly prayer confirming them as man and wife, is: “with this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.” I don’t know whether he would still be pale and grave, at this point, or just impossibly fond and pleased, but that... that is a vow. Made not only in the sight of God but also, I suspect, of the Harvilles holding hands, Sophy Croft borrowing her husband’s handkerchief, and Lady Russell looking fixedly at a stained glass window.

Anne, meanwhile, will be given from the hand of a man who has no affection for her into the hands of a man who adores her. And I think that quiet Anne Elliot makes her vows unhesitating. She will have this man and hold him, plighting her troth thereunto. “Neither time, nor health, nor life, to be called your own,” exclaims Anne, in conversation with Harville about the lot of naval men. She is acutely, painfully aware of this. But even if Frederick cannot call these things his own, she can, once they are married, call them hers. These things are owed to her, vowed to her, placed into her keeping after God’s. And if her Frederick were in serious danger, frankly, I think Anne would be prepared to argue the order of precedence with the Almighty.

#persuasion reread #now with big feelings about liturgy #anne elliot #frederick 'unconsciously nay unintentionally constant' wentworth everyone #one of my semi-clichéd identities: #queer anglo-catholic church lady #i ALSO have a lot of feelings about the fact that the minister would probably read the passage #about the man loving/cherishing his wife as himself #we know that #frederick wentworth #holds his life lightly and holds anne's comfort supremely dear #listen to the preacher fred

[chiseler]

VISAGE... VOICE... VITAPHONE

In Dimitri Kirsanoff's Menilmontant a destitute waif, betrayed and abandoned by the man who seduced her, sits on a park bench with her newborn infant. Beside her is an old man eating a sandwich. This wordless exchange is one of the greatest moments ever committed to film. Nadia Sibirskaia’s face reveals all of life’s cruel mysteries as she gazes upon a crust of bread.

The persistence of hope is the dark angel that underlies despair, and here it taunts her mercilessly. A whole series of fluctuations of expression and movement in reaction to anguish, physical pain involving hesitation, dignity, ravenous hunger, survival, self-contempt, modesty, boundless gratitude. All articulated with absolute clarity without hitting notes (without touching the keys). Chaplin could have played either the old man on the bench (his mustache is a sensory device!) or Nadia. And it would have been masterful and deeply affecting, but Nadia went beyond virtuosity and beyond naturalism.

She made it actual. And it was more than just a face. Sunlight travels across buildings at every second of the day; and the seasons change the incidence of light, too. Nothing stands still. Even déjà vu doesn’t attempt an exact rendition with the feel of a perfect replay.

***

Another face equates with pain—though a far more luxurious and decadent kind of pain, a visage summoning leftover ancient Roman excess or Florentine backstreets, the contortions of Art Nouveau with its flowers, prismatic walls and perennial themes of ripeness/rottenness, sadomasochism. While various directors have helped mold her naturally unsettling screen presence into nightmare visions, it’s Barbara Steele's vulnerability I tend to remember.

She is open and sensitive even as she materializes in the viewer’s mind as a kabuki demon one moment and a radioactive waxwork the next, a kind of alchemical transformation, an appeal to what Keats called negative capability—one’s ability to appreciate something without wholly understanding it; in fact, one’s ability to appreciate an object for its mystery.

“When did I ever deserve this dark mirror?” Barbara Steele asks me. “Clever you – I feel you’ve just twisted and wrung out an old bible to dry that’s been left somewhere outside lost in timeless years of…” She pauses. “…of rain.”

She made her Italian screen debut as a revenant.  And in so doing taught us all the eye is not a camera. It’s a projector.

Barbara Steele’s appearance in 1960’s Black Sunday is, even now, a shock of such febrile sexuality that it forces us to ask ourselves—why do we saddle her with diminishing monikers like “Scream Queen”? And, more fundamentally, why does her force of personality seem to trouble and vex every narrative she touches?

Of course, the answer is partly grounded in Steele’s unique physical equipment—and here I’ll risk repeating a clichéd word about those famous emerald eyes of hers: “Otherworldly.” As if sparked to life by silent-film magician Segundo de Chomón, the supreme master of hand-tinted illusionism. Peculiar even within the context of gothic tales on celluloid for the consumption of Mod audiences, flashing at us from well beyond their allotted time and place in history.

Barbara Steele is one of cinema’s true abominations—a light-repelling force that presents itself in an arrangement of shadows on the screen. No “luminary,”Steele is celluloid anti-matter; a slow burning black flame that devours every filament around it. Steele’s beauty is no accident of nature, even if she is, but in Black Sunday she gives a virtuoso performance by an artist in full command of her talent summoning and banishing it in equal measure in her dual role as mortal damsel in distress and undead predator released from her crypt. Filmmaking is the darkest and unholiest of arts (done right, that is), and for Mario Bava it becomes the invocation of beast and woman from the unconsecrated soil of nightmares. Steele remains the high priestess of the unlit and buried chambers of the imagination; the pure pleasure center of original sin and the murderous impulse buried just below the surface. She reminds us that existence itself is the highest form of betrayal and a continuing curse on us all.

Where Steele’s Italian films are concerned, we are watching silent movies of a sort. “The loss of voice for me has always been devastating…. It’s almost like some karmic debt…” Her sonic presence was eclipsed in a string of crudely, sadly dubbed horror vehicles, yes, including Black Sunday—no doubt aficionados of the great Mario Bava will object to my calling it a “vehicle.”  But whenever Steele appears, the storyline falls away. Anachronism rules. Not to mention the director’s exquisite sets, all keyed and subordinated to his ingénue’s stark loveliness (understood in black and white, molded by Italian cameramen into disquieting and sudden plasticity). Like a hot-blooded funerary sculpture made of alabaster, raven hair piled high, Steele’s already imposing height summons schizoid power, satanic sorcery—she’s Eros and Thanatos dynamically balanced. I’ve screened the film many times; and the famous opening sequence invariably leaves my otherwise jaded film students looking traumatized. (Just as a young Martin Scorsese was shattered by it once upon a time.) Barbara Steele’s defiant witch, spewing a final curse upon her mortal judges, pierces to the bone.

While Italian movies robbed Steele of her voice, they liberated her from what it had meant in Britain. Leading ladies in Brit films tended to be well brought-up young things, unless they were lusty and working-class like Diana Dors. Even at Hammer, where sexuality was unleashed regularly via bouts of vampirism, the erotically active roles usually went to continental lovelies (Polish immigrant Ingrid Pitt got her work permit based on Hammer’s claim that no native-born actress could exude such desire and desirability). Steele turns up all-too briefly in Basil Dearden’s Sapphire (1959) as an art school girl, the only kind of role that might allow for both intelligence and a certain liberated attitude. And Steele really was exactly that type. Her appearance is so arresting, you want the movie to simply abandon its plot and follow her into some fresh storyline: it wouldn’t really matter what.

In Italy, Steele suddenly became class-less and nation-less, devoid of associations beyond those conjured by the chiseled cheekbones and enormous eyes (convincingly replaced with poached eggs by Bava for a special effects shot). Her inescapable exoticism didn’t make sense in her native land, but that bone structure could suggest Latin, Slavic, or anything else. Omninational, omnisexual, but definitely carnivorous.

Generally remote with his actors, who were nothing more than compositional elements to him, Bava’s capricious move of selecting his female lead from a magazine photo-spread looks almost prescient in hindsight. Was it luck? Or, perhaps her now legendary eyes suggested a bizarre and beautiful leitmotif… to be destroyed, resurrected, and played endlessly on a register of emotions—extreme emotions, that is, tabooed delights.

Steele shares an anecdote about her director’s temperament and working methods on Black Sunday… “Everything was so meticulously planned that Bava rarely asked me for multiple takes. There was no sense of urgency or drama, which was rare for an Italian director…” I’m suddenly detecting deep ambivalence as she vacillates between little jabs at Bava (“He was a Jesuit priest on the set, somewhere far away”) and gratitude. “There was a tremendous feeling of respect, whereas in my earliest roles at Rank I always felt shoved around, practically negated by the pressure of production.

“Bava did go absolutely berserk once,” she goes on. “John Richardson, this gorgeous, sinewy creature, for some reason couldn’t carry me across the room. And I was like eleven pounds in those days. We had to do it over and over, twenty times or something, and whenever John stumbled or dropped me, the whole crew would be in hysterics. We were all howling with laughter, except for Bava – he went simply wild! Eventually, some poor grip had to get down on all fours, and I rode on his back in a chair with John pretending to carry me.”

If Black Sunday is a summation of spiritual and physical dread, it’s because Steele is everyone in this dream-bauble, everyone and everywhere, an all-consuming autumnal atmosphere. Which, of course, provides Mario Bava with something truly rare—a face and mien as unsettling as horror films always claim to be and almost never are. The devastation she leaves behind, her anarchic displacement, which has nothing to do with conventional notions of performance or “good acting,” is hard to describe. And here Bava earns his label of genius through compositional meaning—amid the groundswells of fog, lifeless trees and gloomy dungeons, Steele is an absence impossibly concretized in penumbras and voids. She is a force of nature never to be repeated.

Nightmare Castle (1965) starts off in Lady Chatterley mode as Steele cheats on her mad scientist husband (“At this rate you’ll wipe out every frog in the entire county,” is an opening line less pithy but more arresting than “Rosebud”) with the horny handyman. She’s soon murdered on an electrified bed, hubby preserving her heart for unexplained reasons while using her blood to rejuvenate his mistress. Then he marries her insipid blonde half sister (Steele again in a blonde wig) and tries to drive her mad. So we now have Gaslight merged with Poe and every revenge-from-the-grave story ever.

The identical twin half-sisters (?) bifurcate further: blonde Barbara goes schizoid, possessed it seems by her departed semi-sibling. Dark Barbara comes back as a very corporeal revenant, hair occluding one profile, like Phil Oakey of the Human League. Tossing the locks aside, she reveals… the horror!

Almost indescribable in terms of plot, character or dialogue, the film looks stunning, as chiaroscuro as Steele’s coal-black hair and snow-white skin. Apparently the product of monkey-typewriter improvisation, the story serves as a kind of post-modern dream-jumble of every Gothic narrative ever. You might get a story like this if you showed all of Steele’s horrors to a pissed-up grade-schooler and then asked them to describe the film they just saw. As a result, the movie really takes what Dario Argento likes to call the “non-Cartesian” qualities of Italian horror to the next dank, stone-buttressed level.

When I first met Barbara Steele about ten years ago, we somehow found ourselves sitting in front of a Brancusi sculpture here in New York City—I remember a filmmaker acquaintance joking afterwards: “Steele beats bronze!” Indeed, at 66 she was still stunningly beautiful, flirtatious, frighteningly aware of the power of her stare.

She was a painter in her youth, so it’s not surprising that, even as I visualize her in a voluptuous, cinematic world of castles and blighted landscapes, her own self-image is perennially absorbed by art—in the sense of André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls. She asks me to show her my paintings and when I dodge the subject out of shyness she offers:

A friend of mine just had a show of his art in a little cinema here – very small paintings, about 8 inches by 6 – and then they projected them onto one of their screens and they looked fantastic!  Size is everything!   Unless you were born in the Renaissance… then you were surrounded by silence and stone walls, shadows and glimmers of gold, and faces that are like spells they look so informed.

Steele speaks of her “old, suspicious Celtic soul,” her bitterness at having “flitted through movies par hazard,” and a newfound desire to make audio books (what colossal revenge!). It’s poetic really, this doppelganger, a ghost-like screen persona following her around. Whenever I think of the effect her movies have had on me, the following words by Charles Lamb leap to mind.

Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras – dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies – may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition – but they were there before. They are transcripts, types – the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to effect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body – or without the body, they would have been the same… That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual – that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy – are difficulties the solution of which may afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.

Even the wooliest metaphysics can be hard to separate from actual violence. Case in point: the night of September 22, 1796. Charles Lamb had his own brush with horror, when the future poet and author of children’s stories found himself removing a bloody knife from his sister’s hand. A spasm of matricidal rage that would land her in a mad house—and tending to prove, once again, the need for genres of terror and trepidation.  For a moment at least, Steele seems to agree, bowled over by the Lamb anecdote, literally screaming: “AND THAT NAME – LAMB – IT MAKES YOU THINK OF SUCH INNOCENT BRITISH LANDSCAPES!”  She’s a fairly solitary and introspective person on the one hand, capable of intense and unexpected eruptions of joy on the other, which may be why Italians have always embraced her—a shared gloomy zest for life, fatalism and pasta. There’s something intensely porous about her (as porous as film itself), which helps clarify her otherwise inscrutable tension with that shadow-self up on the screen, the one she so busily downgrades.

***

The thirties bustled with wise-cracking, fast-talking dames, probably not for any proto-feminist reason, but simply because the writers had a surplus of sassy talk to dispense onto the screen, and audiences liked looking at legs, so why not combine the two? Amid all the petite peroxide pretties, a few acerbic character actresses were allowed room, perhaps to make the cuties bloom all the more radiantly against them. Whatever the aesthetic logic, we can be grateful for it, since it gave us Ruth Donnelly and Winnie Lightner and Jean Dixon and a few other unforgettable shrews and wiseacres, adept as stage mothers, streetwise best pals of the leading lady, etc.

Aline MacMahon sort of fits into this category, but also destroys any category she sees with her laser vision. In Gold Diggers of 1933, she’s a Fanny Bryce type comedy showgirl, and in Heat Lightning (1934) she’s an ex-moll running a garage. In between, she played world-weary secretaries and put-upon mothers, taking any role and stealing the movie along with it. Rather than resist classification, she goes on the offensive, smashing down stereotypes and insisting on her own peculiar individuality.

Big and rangy in the body and hands, she had a strange, sculpted beauty, and was as luminous as Dietrich. Maybe more so: cameramen hit Marlene with brighter lights to make her shine out, whereas Aline was typically in the lead’s shadow. Her complexion is like the glass of milk in Suspicion in which Hitchcock planted a light bulb. That white. A sheet of paper passing before her face would appear as a dark eclipsing rectangle.

The law of photogenics insists that actresses hired to play the non-glamorous roles must be staggeringly lovely, but off-kilter and unconventional enough to fool the audience into thinking they’re seeing failed beauty. Aline’s unlikely photofit of attractive features resulted in a caricature of elegance and earthiness in precisely the wrong proportions, which makes her fascinating and alluring to watch.

The eyes are seriously big, saucers hooded by the heaviest lids since Karloff’s monster, resulting in long slits which strive to echo the even wider mouth, a perfectly straight line seemingly intent on decapitation. Like a horizon with lips. The chin cleft below catches the viewer by surprise. Were chin clefts on women more common then, or did studios screen in favor of them? The cheekbones have a graceful, yet powerful curve, so the face as a whole combines the qualities of an ice-cream baby and a crystal skull. All wrong, and alright with me.

Aline’s humor about her ill-assorted collection of perfect features was often played on in dialogue, so it’s pleasing when a role like the one in Heat Lightning admits that, for all her unlikeliness, she was indeed beautiful. More than a pretty face, too: her way with a snappy rejoinder distinguished her even in an era of exceptional wit and quicksilver delivery. And her essence, which radiated out whatever the role, was that of a philosophical, warm, smart, funny, sad woman: the essence of the age.

By Daniel Riccuito and David Cairns

[wickednerdery]

Title: War and Ruin Author: @wickednerdery Fandom: The Night Manager Pairing/character: Jonathan Pine/Female Assassin Rating: Mature Summary: “No one’s beyond help.” Notes: Like with Death, War and Ruin are not real names nor are they meant to be War and/or Ruin literally. The masterlist is here. This one’s mainly just got a murder…for that and consistency, “Read More”.

He knows CIA operative Joel Steadman lives in this quiet neighborhood outside Washington DC and, while friendly, mainly keeps to himself and his work. No family, no significant other, no one about to pop over the house unexpectedly. He knows there are cameras and an alarm system, yet these have been disabled for two days without being addressed. Perhaps the agent’s too tech-illiterate to realize there’s a problem or, perhaps, he’s merely too lazy to get them back online. It hardly matters.

What does matter is that Steadman’s home office, like so many in this field, is filled with the man’s work...files, notes, off-site research. All those classified documents taken home for examination that workdays filled with filings and meetings simply don’t allow. Ironic: all those efforts taken to protect asset identities and information only to carry it all off somewhere totally exposed.

Shadows give way in the lighting up of a neighbor’s lawn as its dog excitedly barks his knowledge to the winds. War’s come to town. The man slips back into the dark, waits to ensure the dog’s dismissed, brought in under scolds for barking at nothing, then carries on as the spotlight times out. No one suspects, no one thinks to worry, not even the federal agent.

“So...we all know about your dealings with international businesses, your philosophy on improving and maintaining not just a peoples’, but also company’s, wellbeing...”

Ruin smiles, near blushes, at the clichéd opener.

“...But apparently you’re concerned about wellbeing beyond that as well.” The newswoman finds his flushing face remarkably charming, even sweet. “You have a number of non-profit children’s homes both in your homeland of Australia and across Europe, but are hoping to expand into the States as well now, is that right?”

“Yeah.” His voice is gravely, but pleasant. “Yeah, I do. You know, the way I see it, children’s wellbeing is paramount. Whatever a child feels growing up, that’s what they carry into adulthood, carry on to their work, their families...the world.”

“And your organization works with a very specific set of children...”

It’s leading, so Ruin dives in. “RUIN - Refuge for the Underage, Indigent, and Neglected - tends to take in those who are, sorta, already on the wrong end of things.”

“The wrong end of things?”

“Those born below the poverty line, to places without a support structure already in place for them. Those born into addiction and violence and all manner of...” he thinks of the wording “deficits that may go beyond even what one might expect from a child taken in by social services.”

“Some would say there’s risk in that. How do you get others to back you in a project that, many may argue, is little more than throwing money at those beyond help?” It’s meant to be a challenge, but her smile remains.

“No one’s beyond help.”

War makes quick work of the backdoor lock, slips into the kitchen scanning everything around him. He knows the house, studied its layout long before tonight, but he checks and double checks. Everything is as it should be; nothing but a faint light coming from the office upstairs as another American works long past his workday.

He calculates: lure Steadman down and risk an armed agent or slip up and risk a witness via mobile or computer? He chooses the latter and climbs carefully, avoiding the parts he already knows will creak and give him away. Outside the door he listens, takes in the man’s deep voice and analyzes it for cadence and vocabulary...there’s no suggestion he’s speaking to anyone but himself, his work.

“Can you speak to that? Any success stories?”

Ruin smiles. “I don’t wanna name names, part of what we wanna do is give these kids a new start, a chance to distance themselves from where and what they came from, but...” the smile turns mischievous “I will say some of our early graduates have gone on to become doctors and lawyers, giants in the tech and business industries.”

“Graduates?”

“We don’t just house them, that’s...that’s what other places do, are for. At RUIN we educate them, prepare them for the next step after us. It’s not just aging out, it’s graduating.”

Deep breath, turn in, and two bullets fire into Steadman’s head before the man can even think to look up. Double-tap and two more for good measure. War’s breath hitches as he watches that proverbial light in the other go out, his lips lift at one corner in the pleasure of success.

He slips gun back in holster, pulls on gloves from pocket, and begins to rifle. He grabs files, notebooks, loose leafs. It’s all out in the open, not even the vaguest semblance of coding...not even on the agent’s phone. Shoving the man from his chair War gives it a spin, then another as he plops down to begin downloads. The computer is also an open book, spreading under the man’s fingertips as he types.

“God, I love the dumb ones....” War licks lips as he glances around the desk. Amongst the paperclips and Post-Its is a framed photo of Joel Steadman with a woman...Caucasian, same approximate age, significantly shorter in stature. “Hmmm...” he leans over, picks it up. “Who might you be....?” A closer look reveals dark, curly, hair and pleasant face with smart, searching, eyes.

“What principles, if any, do you carry over from your success in business to your philanthropic work?”

The man shifts, thinking over the answer. An answer that will ring true, that is true. “Give someone a purpose, have a purpose.”

“Purpose? Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Not passion or sense of community or -”

“Nah, see, those are good. They are important. But not as much as purpose. Passion without purpose can become chaos and a community inevitably falls apart if its people don’t have their own sense of purpose. Purpose...” he smiles “Give someone purpose and they’ve something to work, to live, for. They’ve a reason for existing.”

Tongue flicks out, runs across lips, as War scans his surroundings with vague interest. When the hotelier speaks he turns back. “Yes, thank you. Could you hold any calls I might get tonight or tomorrow? I’m afraid it was a very long celebration and I’d like not to be disturbed, please.”

“Yes, sir...Did you at least enjoy yourself, I hope?”

War chuckles. “Very much.”

The man smiles. “Glad to hear it. Have a good night, sir.”

“Thank you.” He heads up, locks and checks room, then texts from a secure mobile:

To: Ruin Ceremony was perfect. Got swag bag for you. Home tomorrow evening.

Pine gets the news over encrypted app message and he understands why. Security aside, Angela’s likely in no state to speak on it. Whatever she and Steadman had went beyond a business relationship and, he suspects, beyond a simple friendship as well.

He wonders what happened, how a CIA operative can be killed in his own home without there being any witnesses, any evidence. Pine wonders what information they might’ve taken and what they might plan to do with it. He wonders who it was.

Jonathan also wonders if, perhaps, Death might know something…

So, first and foremost, I’ll clarify any potential confusion: this piece goes back and forth between War (assassinating CIA agent Joel Steadman who worked the Roper case with Angela Burr & Pine) and Ruin (being interviewed on a UK talk show) with a bit of Pine finding out Steadman was murdered at the end. Thought it a good intro for the newbies - an arm’s dealing assassin and human trafficking semi-retired assassin - and you’ll learn more about them as we go...though next piece is most likely Pine and Death again, lol!

(Gifs found from Google, combined by me)

Tags: @sleepless-nights-with-your-king @chibiyanai, @my-world-of-imagines @lokilvrr @rizzo87 @tarithenurse @creedslove @wadeyouwitch @annievvv7 @cassadius @lady-crowned-with-stars @moonfaery @wintertink @holykryptonitekitten @musiclovertjeever @ultrarebelheart @lukeevansandjdmobession @merlinspantsandbeard @alexakeyloveloki @kimanne723 @mysacredstardust …If anyone wants on or off this list please just let me know! (Strike-throughs are those Tumblr wouldn’t allow proper tagging of.)

#jonathan pine #The Night Manager #joel steadman #angela burr #fanfiction #death #aka pine's lover #war and ruin #assassins #spies #my writing #not my gif #but kinda my gif #encounters with death

[fluent-in-lesbianism]

where to watch dimension 404, whats it about, how gay is it on a scale of like subtext to Hella Gay

LISTEN

First, I have no idea what Dimension 404’s about ~in general~. I only watched episode 1x05 “Bob” because I saw a post of Constance Wu kissing and hugging another woman while clutching a smiling child and it gave me wlw family feels so I tuned in. I’m easy like that.

Second, the “Bob” episode is very reminiscent of “San Junipero” in that the episode’s a standalone so you don’t have to watch the previous 4 to understand what’s going on and it features POSITIVE wlw representation! Also like “San Junipero”, the gay girls end up TOGETHER and HAPPY, but this time they have A CHILD together and are a FAMILY! *screams* It’s honestly the best, I cried.

Third, if you’ve always wanted to watch a gay character get treated exactly like a straight character with zero conflicts between characters when it comes to sexual orientation, then “Bob” is the episode for you. At no point does Jane get treated differently for being gay or for having a wife and child. The straight characters don’t pause before saying “your wife” or make that uncomfortable cringe-y face like, “am I allowed to say wife, or do I saw partner???” like in other shows. It’s just understood that Jane’s got a wife and child to go home to and that’s that. Jane is literally treated like your average, every day straight character like that. There’s also no “coming out” or identity crisis plot line. Jane and her wife are established from the get go and aren’t under threat of breaking up or dying. I’m shook.

Fourth, because Jane’s treated like straight characters are normally treated by writers, this means we actually get a “I’m trying desperately to get home for Christmas to see my family but the country’s in danger and I’m the only one that can save it” type story for gay girls!!! There’s fluff, there’s angst, there’s Drama, there’s action, there’s your clichéd hero gets to see her family after saving the world type ending, and along the way we fall in love with a supercomputer that really gives you flashbacks of POI.

Fifth (and final), there’s a surprise Megan Mullallly who plays the semi-antagonist and she’s amazing and also ends up giving you feels in the end and ugh, just please watch it. You’ll love it.

If you’ve read all that and are still interested, then you can watch it here.

#Anonymous #so on a scale of subtext to Hella Gay #it's super Hella Gay with a side of so gay it's cliché inducing #LOVE IT

[newssplashy]

Entertainment: Britain's musical soul, all aflutter

(Critic’s Notebook)

MANCHESTER, England — It was coming to the end of the first act of “Siegfried.” The hero was hammering out his sword.

The Hallé Orchestra was ratcheting its way through the cranking theme Wagner fashioned for the forging of the blade. The sound was deep, detailed, an actor in its own right.

On the podium, Mark Elder gave a satisfied smile.

In a pair of semi-staged performances this month at the Bridgewater Hall here, the Hallé, in radiant, commanding form, completed Wagner’s “Ring,” nine years after it began. A “Ring” is an achievement for any orchestra, but for the Hallé and its audience, it had a special meaning.

“Siegfried,” which the orchestra will encore at the Edinburgh Festival on Aug. 8, signified the Hallé's recovery: a slow, steady rebuilding in the two decades since it faced mortal financial peril. Long occupying a cherished place in its country’s musical psyche, with an unusually well-defined identity based in British music, it is the kind of orchestra everyone roots for.

It has become, once again, an ensemble with both a claim to international quality and a sense of national purpose — an orchestra vital to the north of England, which it considers its domain.

I can testify to that local mission. In Nottingham, where I grew up, the Hallé was the bright light in a barren musical landscape. It was the first orchestra I heard live as a child; the first to make me cry; the first to put me to sleep; the first to give me that shiver up my spine that I have chased ever since. The Hallé convinced me of the value of a musical life.

It convinced me of Wagner’s value, too, and this “Siegfried” confirmed it gives inspired performances of his work. When it eventually joins the live recordings of the other “Ring” operas on the Hallé's own label, “Siegfried” will crown a set marked by unruffled patience, a rare commitment to details, precision of color, delicacy and grandeur in the same notes.

The “Götterdämmerung” is electric; the “Die Walküre,” which I heard live in 2011, is bathed in tragedy, rather than fired by ardor; the “Das Rheingold,” released this month, is careful, darkly intense. The “Siegfried” will have the best playing and singing of the lot (except for a tentative, thin performance of the title role by Simon O’Neill).

It is all exalted music drama. Barring Daniel Barenboim’s accounts from the Bayreuth Festival, there is no “Ring” from the last 40 years that I would rather hear.

Why would a symphony orchestra, let alone one with a budget of only 10 million pounds ($13.5 million), take on a task that most opera houses fear? For some, a “Ring” is a vanity project. Here, though, Wagner has been integrated into a repertory consciously designed to develop the ensemble. Individual acts came first, then full operas, including a ravishing “Parsifal” at the BBC Proms in 2013.

“Opera in its very nature is basically valuable to all musicians for at least two reasons,” Elder, the music director, said in an interview after a rehearsal. “How music must breathe, because singers have to breathe; and how music can express the psychology of character. In the normal repertoire, most symphony orchestras never get to either of those things.”

“When you do Wagner’s major works, you’re landing yourself with yet another challenge, and that is what I call large-scale chamber music,” added Elder, an acclaimed music director of the English National Opera between 1979 and 1993 and a perpetual candidate to inherit the Royal Opera House. “If it sounds well, it’s because everybody is beginning to be aware of how their part relates to all the others.”

Despite the attraction of a new concert hall, which helped lead Manchester’s revitalization after an Irish Republican Army bombing destroyed parts of the town center in 1996, the Hallé was mired in financial uncertainty when Elder was appointed in 1999.

The board blamed the ambitions and conducting fees of his predecessor, Kent Nagano, who had increased the orchestra’s international reputation, leading it at the Salzburg Festival as the pit band for Messiaen’s immense “Saint François d’Assise.” But, having charged Nagano with that mission, the board tolerated mismanagement and could not curtail ruinous debts.

“The organization nearly didn’t exist,” Elder said. Consultants declared it practically bankrupt. Nearly a fifth of the orchestra, and a third of the staff, was laid off. Morale plummeted.

Deep crises, however, can produce stability if they force an orchestra to stop muddling along. John Summers, the orchestra’s chief executive, who joined the same time as Elder, used emergency state funding to stabilize the finances — though Britain’s austerity has since delivered savage cuts in public subsidy for the arts, so the orchestra still runs deficits.

About 60 percent of the orchestra has been hired since 2000, and it has created its own youth orchestra — conducted by Elder’s American assistant, Jonathon Heyward — and choirs. Most of the Hallé's players take part in its education program, which has unusually strong links with local school authorities, at a time when funding for music education is limited.

Often called the country’s oldest orchestra, the Hallé and its choir were established in 1858 by a German pianist and conductor, Charles Hallé. By 1899, the orchestra had become prominent enough to lure Hans Richter — the conductor of Bayreuth’s first “Ring” — from the Vienna Court Opera. After nearly collapsing during World War II, the ensemble was resurrected by John Barbirolli, who used it as an escape from an unhappy spell at the New York Philharmonic in 1943. An inspirational figure, Barbirolli led the Hallé until his death in 1970.

The Hallé became especially associated with British music, particularly through Barbirolli’s recordings of Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Delius. Elder has cemented its position as the guardian of British tradition, not through an unthinking celebration of the past, but a rethinking of its relevance.

“I’m trying to define our musical soul,” he said. That commitment that has only strengthened in a fraught political moment. Elder, who was knighted in 2008, said he has tried to make the Hallé “the best orchestra in the world for playing the music of our country.”

So it is. Unlike so many recordings of English works from earlier generations of conductor-knights, with their whiff of patrician amateurism, Elder’s are distinguished by their preparation and refinement. They are enough to banish any clichéd thought of what the modernist composer Elisabeth Lutyens memorably called “cowpat music.”

There is still a green thread of pastoralism, with Delius, Butterworth and Bax all represented, and Elder seems most comfortable in that idiom. A continuing cycle of Vaughan Williams symphonies, for example, is more effective in the lush Fifth and the elegiac “A Pastoral Symphony” than in the violence of the Fourth and Sixth.

Given that the Hallé gave the premiere of Elgar’s First Symphony in 1908, it is no surprise that his music dominates. His symphonies, recorded early in Elder’s tenure, would be improved on now, on the evidence of recent performances I have heard. But each of the three titanic oratorios — “The Dream of Gerontius,” “The Apostles” and especially “The Kingdom” — is the stuff of dreams.

Elder’s adoration is not blind. “I believe very strongly that I have to search out really carefully which of the pieces I really want to do, so that I can say why,” he said. “You can’t just do all British music. You have to give it personality. I talk to the orchestra a lot about what it is that makes Elgar and Vaughan Williams and Bax separate sound worlds, so they know what we’re trying to achieve.”

“It’s to do with the balance of the orchestra,” Elder said. Even without underlining Elgar’s Wagnerian ties to the Austro-Germanic tradition, one still needs “a great warmth in the strings, and the brass as in Wagner, supporting, very rarely overwhelming.”

More important is to “spend time in the shadows of the music,” he added, to find “the 50 shades of gray in between the black and the white. That’s the reason to do Elgar, because we all know the brio, the pomp and circumstance — call it what you like.”

Vaughan Williams, who studied with Ravel, poses different challenges. “Gone is the warm richness of the German bass counterpoint,” Elder said. “You need something leaner, something that is balanced acutely for the colors, and the spacing of the music.”

On the NMC label, the Hallé has contributed new additions to the British tradition, including music by Harrison Birtwistle, John Casken, Tarik O’Regan, Helen Grime, Simon Holt and Ryan Wigglesworth, who has served as the orchestra’s principal guest conductor.

“The creative energy in a country is part of defining what the country is,” said Elder, whose contract runs until 2020. (He will most likely stay beyond that, until a successor is in place). “A country without a rich, supported, appreciated, followed cultural energy is a very sad country.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

DAVID ALLEN © 2018 The New York Times

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/06/entertainment-britains-musical-soul-all.html

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[robertkstone]

2018 Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio First Test: Squeak, Rattle, and Roar

This is a two-ton luxury SUV. It has no business being this quick.

Yet there it is, on the unblinking screen of our testing computer: 3.3 seconds in the 0–60, 8.5 seconds from 0 to 100, and a quarter mile in 11.8 seconds.

The 505-hp Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio is nearly the quickest gasoline-fueled SUV we’ve ever tested—it ties the 707-hp Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk to 60 and is an eye blink slower to 100 and the quarter mile. And both those SUVs get pipped by the Tesla Model X P90D Ludicrous in launch mode. But when it comes to luxury SUVs—even ones with performance credentials—the Stelvio simply dusts them.

What’s more, even though it weighs about 500 pounds more than its identically powered Giulia Quadrifoglio sedan stablemate and has a higher coefficient of drag, the Stelvio is quicker to all these milestones.

Looking at their respective horsepower/weight values, this should not be possible. The lighter Giulia uses 7.5 horsepower to motivate each pound, the Stelvio 8.5 hp/pound. Race should go to the sedan, right? However, the Stelvio has all-wheel drive, while the Giulia has rear-wheel drive. In the critical 0–30-mph “launch” phase, the Giulia needs 1.5 seconds, but the Stelvio takes just 1.2 to get there, according to Chris Walton, Motor Trend’s road test editor.

That early momentum helps that 0.3-second gap stretch to 0.5 second by 60 mph—the Stelvio gets there in 3.3 seconds to the Giulia’s 3.8 seconds. Eventually, the Giulia begins to charge back with less frontal area (better aerodynamics) and less weight. By the end of the quarter mile, the Alfa SUV still wins the race in 11.8 seconds at 116.1 mph, and although the sedan is charging hard at a faster speed of 118.5 mph, it crosses the line in 12.2 seconds. Here’s hoping we eventually learn how quick the Giulia would be if they equipped it with the all-wheel drive from the Stelvio.

The Stelvio is more than just jamming 505 horses and 443 lb-ft under the hood of this $97,390 beast and letting it rip in Race mode. (Heck, what kind of SUV even has a Race mode?)

The tricky thing in building SUVs is that they are essentially boxes on wheels. It’s hard to give them personality. Alfa Romeo has no such troubles. Spin the Quadrifoglio’s drive-mode dial to Dynamic and give it full throttle, and you discover a stream of power on instant demand, gearshifts punctuated by a flatulent chortle from the exhaust. You barely need to roll into the accelerator to access this thrust. The engine always seems to be in the meat of the powerband, though it does reach redline too quickly.

But the Stelvio is more than just a straight-line rocket. This thing can scoot through switchbacks in a more composed fashion than many sporty cars. You’d think a two-box SUV would be plagued by body roll under hard cornering, but the Stelvio remains pancake flat. However, while dynamic suspension settings are fantastic for solo torching of back roads, you may sometimes have passengers who thrill to the engine note but who don’t wish to endure an overly rigid suspension—hence the appeal of the Stelvio’s soft-damper setting in dynamic mode. Or you can wimp out and put it in Natural mode.

“The sense of immediacy makes it feel a thousand pounds lighter than it is,” Walton said. “I love the seat, the steering wheel, the real metal shift paddles. It’s gorgeous, and like the Giulia, it offers a romantic alternative to the mainstream. It’s a freakin’ rocket.”

As for stopping, although the $8,000 Brembo ultra-high-performance carbon-ceramic brakes were impressive in their grip and precision at high speeds, they were brutal in everyday driving. You can forget about limousine stops or easing through parking lots. The Brembos are choppy and abrupt in routine traffic, with a disquieting rippling feedback to the brake pedal. When having to make a harder-than-expected stop after a stretch of city driving with light braking, the Brembos groan like an 18-wheeler rolling into a Flying J stall.

“They feel like first-gen carbon ceramics combined with the on/off switch of brake-by-wire,” Walton said. “There’s zero feel, they’re grabby, and when cold, they’re screechy and grindy. It has an extra-firm brake pedal with very short travel, immediate jump-in with zero feel through the pedal, and very little ABS buzz or flutter.”

However, there is no arguing with results. Our 60–0 brake tests netted 109, 103, 107, and 107 feet—impressive for a 4,282-pound SUV. “Every stop was dead straight,” Walton noted.

Keeping you in place under these severe forces are Sparco carbon-fiber-shelled sport seats. With a grip firmer than a straightjacket (size 42 or smaller, please), you’re not going anywhere. And because they are racing seats, they must be adjusted fore and aft manually (first world problems). The cool thing about the skinny Sparcos is that for back-seat passengers, the Stelvio easily passes the 6-foot passenger behind 6-foot driver test.

When testing the Quadrifoglio on the figure eight, Walton noted: “It oscillates between under- and oversteer, never really settling down or remaining neutral. Understeer on the skidpad and oversteer (a ton) on the exit. Steering is sublime and very quick.”

The Stelvio’s figure-eight time of 24.9 seconds at 0.79 g puts it in company of some crazy handling machines. In terms of g’s, it’s on par with the Honda Civic Type R and Nissan GT-R Premium. In terms of circuit time, it mirrors the 2016 Audi S6 4.0T and a Porsche Macan GTS on summer tires.

Speaking of the Macan, it was intriguing to drive the Stelvio Quadrifoglio directly after a Porsche Macan GTS. Although they are in separate universes in terms of power output, their relative prices (my Macan tester rang in at 85 large) put the two in the same consideration set. The Macan was bank-vault silent while cruising while the Alfa creaked. The Porsche engine purred while the Alfa growled. The Macan suspension was subtle and refined while the Stelvio was jouncy and immediate. But one day while in the Alfa, I pulled up alongside another Macan, and the Porsche looked plain by comparison. Then I parked adjacent to another Macan in a lot, and the Alfa’s front countenance simply oozed so much more personality, more fun, more excitement. So you get that benefit.

Now that we have the raving out of the way, we have to address the issue of the Alfa being an Alfa. To be clear: There was nary a mechanical hiccup or electrical gremlin during our loan period.

That said, the Stelvio Quadrifoglio was an aural assault of body panel squeaks and plastic-on-plastic buzzes and rattles. Some exterior panel gaps were more like panel fissures. There is an area of the Palos Verdes peninsula, called Portuguese Bend, that is in a perpetual slow-motion landslide. The undulations and upheavals in its cracked patchwork of asphalt are the equivalent of off-roading while on a paved road. It makes for a perfect test of manufacturing quality in terms of how every piece of plastic, aluminum, and steel fits together—or doesn’t.

In this test, the Stelvio fails catastrophically. The driver’s seat squeaks like a trapped mouse. The center console rattles mercilessly. Plastic mountings buzz. There were mysterious screeches from rearward body panels. I’ve been through this passage in Kia Rios that were quieter. Heck, my 5-year-old Volvo XC70 with 50K on the clock is quieter. If a Lexus factory assembled an SUV with this sort of build quality, the plant manager would be fired on the spot. But hey, (insert clichéd but colorful Italian saying here), it’s an Alfa Romeo, take a chance! No, seriously, take a chance, because it’s a great vehicle dynamically and artistically, squeaks and rattles aside. But perhaps take a chance on a lease, because these first-year builds can be a bit dicey off the factory floor.

For a vehicle so filled with personality, one wonders how it acclimates with semi-autonomous technology. A word about the Stelvio’s adaptive cruise control—it worked great. In following the car ahead, the Alfa carried a more intimate distance than most competing systems, and as such, no one dared cut m from PerformanceJunk WP Feed 3 https://ift.tt/2jVwMD2 via IFTTT

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