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aftgficrec · 3 years

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@deathdorito said: For Raven Neil enjoyers i recomend Innominate by Major_816 - Neil starts off as a raven and from there he makes it to the foxes and alll that jazz

‘Innominate’ opens with Nathaniel Wesninski inhabiting his Alex persona, but not on the run like you might expect. He’s actually on the prowl. His eyes are butcher blue and his blond wig itches. The short while he’ll spend as Alex doesn’t justify a bleach job this time. He’s a friendly guy with photos of his hotel-industry family, unshakable documentation, known dietary preferences, and mannerisms practiced and polished down to a heartthrob smile that’s bigger on the left side.

Nathaniel’s hierarchy of loyalty puts Ichirou Moriyama and Jean Moreau at the top. Ichirou is favorite son and next in line to lead his family’s crime syndicate. Jean was sold to the Moriyamas as a child. Together they are family; brothers forged in blood. Only they and one other know him as Abram, his core identity that he’s fought to hold through a grizzly childhood as both carved and carver. Abram’s been terrorized and trained his whole life by his father, the Butcher of Baltimore, a bloody enforcer for the Moriyamas. The Family holds Abram’s second tier of loyalty with the noted exception being his machinations to disempower and kill their Butcher.

Abram is richly detailed, fractured and complex; plagued with debilitating nightmares and flashbacks, determined to hold on to his humanity but sometimes losing himself entirely to a persona more lethal than the Butcher who raised him. Now he’s been tasked to go deep undercover to shore up problems in the world of college exy where the Family has a vested interest. Jean has been undercover with Edgar Allan University’s team for 3 years. He reports on the Family’s weak link, lesser son Riko Moriyama. As Riko grows increasingly violent and unhinged, Jean gets quieter. Ichirou and Abram know something is wrong. To them Jean is a brother. To Riko he is property, a convenient target for abuse.

As Neil Josten, Abram’s mission is to infiltrate Palmetto State’s underdog exy team, to work out exactly what Riko is doing to Jean and extract him if need be, and to decide if Palmetto’s newly acquired star player Kevin Day is a loose end better off dead. As Day rebounds from a near career-ending secret attack by Riko, he remains a target for the lesser brother’s jealous rage that threatens to bring unwanted attention to the Family. Abram’s also determined to unravel what power beyond Riko tampered with goalie Andrew Minyard’s medical and psychiatric records and swayed a court to keep him medicated out of his mind. He needs to keep Andrew from looking too closely at the house of cards underpinning the identity of unknown exy prodigy Neil Josten, despite their eyes locking time and time again and the unshakeable feeling that they are somehow the same.

Ichirou is humanized and emotive; married with a baby on the way, protective of his chosen brothers, concerned for his father’s failing health, not quite ready to wear the crown. Jean fought back as a child and Abram suffered for it. What hurts is he hiding now? How will the brothers bring down the Butcher? Buckle up for the ride, y’all. I highly recommend investing in this story if you can handle the trauma and violence, it’s shaping up to be a stunner. Thanks very much for the rec! - A

Innominate by Major_816 [Rated E, 73397 words, Incomplete, Updated September 2021]

An AU where Mary never got Nathaniel out. Instead, he became too invaluable of an asset to be killed off or 'gifted' to Tetsuji. Instead, he's raised with Ichirou and Jean as a part of Ichirou's inner circle.

He'd always had a knack for languages and lying and all the 'messy stuff' came easily enough when your father is called the Butcher of Baltimore. So Nathaniel became the Wraith. He was untraceable, unknowable, infalliable; a criminal fairytale.

When Kevin Day leaves the Nest, there's no better person to send.

"Who the hell are you?" Andrew demanded.

He wasn't anyone, not really; not anymore. He hadn't really been anyone in years now. There'd been a time. Once. But there were entire lifetimes between who he could have been and what he'd become. He could taste it sometimes; blackberries and sand stinging his tongue like the iron branded on his shoulder.

It was easier to pretend he'd never been anyone at all.

"I'm nothing," he answered. the ghost of a smile pulled at his lips; sharp and cruel. "A wraith." The Wraith, he didn't say, but the shadows ran through Adnrew's eyes and he wondered if Andrew had heard it anyways.

tw: graphic depictions of violence, tw: graphic nightmares, tw: implied/referenced torture, tw: blood/gore, tw: referenced flaying, tw: graphic description of corpses, tw: murder, tw: canonical character death, tw: flashbacks, tw: victim blaming, tw: panic attacks, tw: child abuse, tw: abuse, tw: nonconsensual drug use, tw: implied/referenced rape/noncon, tw: kidnapping, tw: alcohol, tw: dissociation

NB: There are also bonus scenes for this fic!

adj. not named or classified by Major_816 [Not Rated, 11267 words, Incomplete, Updated September 2021]

Bonus Scenes and alternate POVs from Innominate; including previous missions of the Four Horsemen, Abram as a kid, lots of foreign countries, and a lot of chaos.

tw: drugs, tw: nonconsensual drug use, tw: kidnapping, tw: panic attacks, tw: violence, tw: murder, tw: torture, tw: child abuse, tw: child trafficking, tw: animal abuse & death, tw: implied/referenced rape/noncon, tw: gun violence, tw: knife violence, tw: blood

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thewickeddevil · 3 years

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A Study In Jean Moreau

(tw: mentions of Jean's past, violence, mental health and suicidal thoughts/intention to die. let me know if there's something else)

ok, so, i say all the time that Jean Moreau is my favorite and comfort character in All For The Game (i know. it literally hurts but also brings me joy sometimes) and i would literally kill for that man. so, that said, i think too much about him and, consequently, i have too many hcs about him. on request, i will now do what i'm gonna call A Study In Jean Moreau

(my beta reader and best friend helped me a lot with this. thanks @jostenrun)

i'll start with this quote from one of my kerejean fics (https://archiveofourown.org/works/26146540)

During Jean's first four months at USC and playing with the Trojans, he would always ignore Jeremy and put a frown on his face whenever he was in the same place as him. It obviously wasn't the best of strategies to put distance between himself and all the Jeremy glow, but it looked exactly bad enough to work.

Still, Jeremy was all pompous and charming looks at him, always smiling and being polite even though he received much less in return. It pissed the shit out of Jean.

He was used by the Ravens for many years, treated exactly like the exchange item he had been, just possession and obliged to follow lines and lines of rules too strict even for how he should breathe.

Riko was violent, the Ravens were cruel, the Moriyama family was wrong and he needed to repeat this to himself on a daily basis to be able to just keep going.

Back at the beginning of those days, many times he would fight back until he was taught that it was only worse. Many times he would beg until he realized that it encouraged Riko more than it prevented him. Many times he would cry until he was taught that it was wrong.

He would often bleed.

He would often wish to bleed until there was nothing left in his veins, no thoughts in his brain, no air in his lungs, no words on the tip of his tongue—

And he would often try to do just that on his own.

That was his daily life for a long time. Evermore was what he knew, the Moriyama family was who he belonged to and all of that was for what he served. That was it.

How was he supposed to know back then that suddenly overly nice twenty-eight other people would replace all of that with magnificence?

How was he supposed to know that they wouldn't look at him with disgust whenever he accidentally let a curse in French slip away?

How was he supposed to know that the Trojans had complete freedom within the team, instead of having to walk in pairs like the Ravens?

How was he supposed to know that Jeremy wasn't going to hit him whenever he made a mistake?

Or how would he know that Jeremy never considered anything that he made a mistake?

It was all a very big break from reality and so, so suddenly. Jean felt confused at first. Lost, wrong, out of place, stupid and scared.

And Jeremy was always determined to be the best he could be. Jeremy was safe.

Until Jean felt comfortable, confident, fine, and satisfied. He was someone instead of something and he really felt like that.

i think Jean would take years to relearn how to live instead of surviving. sometimes he would fail at that, but so many failures can only lead to success eventually.

he really didn't want to keep playing exy after everything, he doesn't think exy is good at all and trauma made him hate it, but he needs it because of the deal with Ichirou. fortunately, the Trojans are a team big enough to put him in the background for a while, to give him a little rest. but he knows he can't relax too much

he starts therapy. he needs it badly and it takes time for him to really be able to do it, but Jean was never anything but strong, and when he sees the chance to finally heal he knows that, despite how tired he is, despite how many times he wonders if it's worth it to keep going, he needs to grab that and at least try. just one more time. he never wanted to work for anything in his life because nothing was important before, but now he thinks that maybe things are changing

the Trojans get a dorm exclusively for him at first, because they don't want Jean to force himself to share space with someone he doesn't know and still doesn't trust. they want Jean to have his own space and feel safe before anything. he needs that solitude and he knows that it doesn't mean loneliness because his team will always be just a call away from him

he relapses sometimes. days without taking basic care of himself and without getting up from bed, and he no longer remembers whether he’s alive or not. sometimes he's able to call his therapist when that happens, but sometimes he isn't

this is how he gets into the habit of learning poetry. and eventually, writing poetry. he needs a coping mechanism and words seem to be safe enough to float around in his mind and make space in his core

(French poetry that Kevin always dissects for him and tells about the history behind the period in which those texts were written, or about the authors of each text)

the process is slow but it’s progress nonetheless

so, we know about therapy, about not being easy, about difficulties and things happening slowly during the healing process, now let's talk about the little details when things finally start to work out positively. when the best part of Jean's life finally begins

he finds out that his eyesight isn't bad only because of the beatings he took in the nest, and finds it ridiculous when Jeremy offers to help him buy glasses because, according to him, all the glasses Jean likes make him look like a middle-aged man that curses people for fun. Jean doesn't hate it though

Jean learns how to swim and likes it more than he thought he would. he likes the fluidity and movements of the liquid around his skin, how he cuts the water with his body when moving around and how it doesn't hurt him, and he just feels light

Jean likes nutella and chocolate with nuts, because Jeremy used to give it to him after nightmares or difficult days, and it became a comfort food for him (something he wasn’t even allowed to eat in the nest)

Jean's musical taste is a big mess of R&B, soul, pop art, folk, dark pop... he likes artists like Lorde, Aurora, Marina, Sigrid, Sleeping at last and the list goes on

Before he left France, Jean's family had a farm and he was responsible for harvesting fruits and vegetables there. this is one of the last memories he has about France, so he likes to harvest fruits and vegetables whenever he has the chance in the US

Jean loves to read fantasy books. he is a hufflepuff and part of cabin 6 in camp half-blood (children of Athena)

he likes geography. pedology, topography and weather are his favorites. he likes to look at the sky and know how to name climatic phenomena regardless of where in the world he is

(he also likes history and sociology, but only because he can hear Kevin and Jeremy — respectively — talking for hours and hours about those two subjects)

he hates biology

he absolutely hates croissants, tea and coffee. in the morning he always drinks juice or chocolate milk (the latter is Jeremy's fault)

the first time he willingly got wasted on alcohol, he, Sarah and Laila woke Jeremy up in the wee hours of the night while singing in Spanish (Jean barely knows Spanish). he passed out after that and woke up the next day in his room. his first thought was that he was fine even though he lost control of himself around other people, and he cried because of that. Jeremy was concerned because he thought he was crying from a headache or something related to a hangover

Jean can never find shoes his size in conventional stores because he's very big (fucking tall, muscular but not too much, with large shoulders and hips, and eventually a tummy) and, consequently, his feet are also big. he needs to have it personalized and he completely hates it

he loves dogs but is easily scared by them. he couldn't get out of the dorms for almost an entire day after Jeremy's mom's dog barked too loud and it scared Jean. he felt guilty and didn't want people to be mad at him for being so scared of a simple dog

he loves cats though, and after some time into therapy, he adopted a service cat. Kevin and Jeremy always joke about it looking like a replica of Jean himself

Jean doesn't understand the purpose of MMA competitions, because he doesn't like violence and thinks martial arts should be only for self-defense, so he doesn't really understand why people choose to compete over something so aggressive

he also doesn't like the violence in exy, but he forgives because, at least, violence is not the main goal of the sport, but to score points

he learns to draw and starts to open art commissions on the internet. this is his first job and he's proud of it because it was something he achieved by himself

Jean and Jeremy fell in love on the beach

Kevin and Jean take time to forgive each other, especially Jean. the broken heart Kevin left in Jean hurt more than being abandoned by his parents. he suffered from it for years but he didn't really want to blame Kevin. he also knew Riko, after all. he knew how capable of driving someone insane Riko was. it didn't make things easier or less painful though. Kevin and Jean took time, but they never loved each other less

Kevin and Jean fell in love for the second time (the time they could, the time they were allowed) after one of the matches in which their teams were rivals

Jean is very picky for food consistency, and he hates ketchup and mayonnaise for that. he insists all the time that if people knew how to season the food well, they wouldn't need those condiments

(he secretly loves Dijon Mustard though)

Jean was born on 08/31. he’s a virgo

plushies are the first resource that Jean uses when he feels alone but is unable to be around anyone at the moment, so he unconsciously starts making a collection of them. they're all small, except for two that Kevin and Jeremy gave him and are, respectively, a fox and a red and gold trojan. he eventually distributes his plushies to children in local orphanages but keeps those two to himself out of sheer emotional attachment

he doesn't stop suffering because of his trauma throughout his life, but he learns to deal with it. that's the point of everything. he never thinks he will magically forget or get over it, but now he is in a different place in his life and he can start working his way to be the best version of himself he can. he doesn't fool himself into thinking it will be easy and fast, he never thought it would be less difficult than it really was, but he takes things slowly and carefully and hopes it works

his entire healing process is too complex and extensive to explain everything here, but i did the best i could and now i really need to stop because i could stay here ranting for days. xx

#Jean Moreau #all for the game #aftg #the foxhole court #the raven king #the king's men #Jeremy Knox #Kevin Day #USC Trojans #Healing #i love him too much for my own good #this man deserves the whole world and i'll stand for that #Kerejean #Jerejean #Kevjean

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maybe-i-dreamt-u · 3 years

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Some Jean Moreau Headcanons that nobody asked for because I love him so so much and I miss him and his grumpy face

Buckle up cause this is a long one oh my god

He can draw, like, so incredibly well, he can sketch anything in a matter of minutes and it looks so good

Once Jeremy notices he leaves him a nice lil sketchbook on his desk with only an anonymous note ((because I can fucking BET that he’s as bad at receiving gifts as Neil))

Anyway. Once he gets that sketchbooks he starts carrying it everywhere and draws everything that catches his eye- it’s a nice distraction from his thoughts and memories + he wasn’t really allowed to do any of that with the Ravens, so he’s enjoying it as much as he can now

Jeremy’s heart swells whenever he sees him drawing, but nobody needs to know about that

within a month the sketchbook is full of drawings, mainly the trojans, stray cats he sees on the street and pretty places in California

also like half the drawings are of Jeremy

it’s not his fault, they live together, of course he’s gonna have a lot of drawings for Jeremy, sTOP JUDGING HIM

nobody really gets to see what’s in the sketchbook, he’s very good at keeping it closed, and nO NOT BECAUSE OF HIS DRAWINGS OF JEREMY AND HIS HANDS GOD DAMNIT

he still keeps all of them though.

yes, all of them, as soon as the first one is finished, he somehow finds a new one on his desk

hm I wonder how that happened

anyway

he also likes writing

not necessarily writing stories or anything he just

likes writing

by hand

he used to have really pretty handwriting

it was cursive and it looked amazing

he was so proud of it

but it’s kinda hard to have pretty handwriting after having broken 6 of your fingers

but he’s getting there again

slowly, but surely

he gets himself a journal and a fountain pen or some fancy shit

and he just decides that he wants to have pretty handwriting again

and so he starts writing about whatever’s on his mind

whether it’s some Exy strategy, the specific colour of Jeremy’s hair in the sunlight, or a new card game Laila and Alvarez taught him, he writes it down, as writing exercise

well, partly as writing exercise

in part he also wants to document the beginning of his new life and his newly found happiness

By the time he goes pro his handwriting is as beautiful as ever

everyone envies him for it

and don’t even get me started on his signature

also, I might have said this before but consider

Jean Moreau wearing rings. silver or black bands around his fingers

I fully believe that if aftg was from another era, Jean would wear those short, black gloves, you know the ones I mean. as it is though, he’ll settle for rings the colour of his eyes, that add a little bit of shine to his mostly black outfits

if he’s feeling particularly rebellious he might add a chain around his neck, but it’d take a while for him to get comfortable enough around the trojans to do that

while rooming with the trojans he gets to witness them play a bunch of video games

Laila and Alvarez do twitch streams and you cannot change my mind about that

and sometimes they invite him and Jeremy to their streams

Jeremy is happy to obliege, Jean not so much

but even if he doesn’t appear on camera or whatever, his commentary is almost always audible in the background

and everyone loves his wry jokes and plain rudeness towards the protags of the games

they’ve gotten him to play with them a couple of times

but one game that he hates with a passion

one game that he feels has personally offended him

is Minecraft

you will never see him play Minecraft and he will always degradingly stare at anyone who mentions playing or enjoying the game

he doesn’t have a reason, he simply hates it and that’s it

also, he hates american shows and movies

you’d say he’d have gotten used to it in what, 10 years? but no. if he ever watches tv, which he rarely does, but if it happens, it’s either european ((see: French)) movies, or anime

he likes anime because it allows him to practice his Japanese without thinking of Riko and the master, he can think of the language and not immediately think of pain and suffering

his favourite is Tokyo Ghoul

also, sometimes when Renee visits, they watch hxh together

speaking of Renee

they always go on picknicks together, and it’s always somewhere with a lot of flowers

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, Jean loves flowers

he loves looking at them, he loves smelling them, loves taking care of them, drawing them, journaling about them, everything

he loves how you can say a million words with a single flower

and also, how delicate and elegant they are

say what you want, but I feel like Jean is actually very delicate and gentle to his core

like yea, ever since he was sold to Moriyama and forced to become a raven, he had to be more violent

he had to be violent to be a raven and he had to be violent to play Exy and to be by Riko’s side

but I feel like if he could, he would do a totally different sport, like figure skating or something like that

as it is though, he has to deal with Exy and its violent nature

at least he’s a trojan now

he can relearn to be himself

be the person he wants to be, the person he feels he is at the bottom of his heart

because he’s finally with people that love him and he’s finally free

or well, as free as you can be, while still technically being the Moriyama’s

anyway that’s it for now

sorry, this got a lot longer than I intended it to be

uhh if you’ve come this far thanks? and I hope u enjoyed:))

#yea #sorry I just have so much love for him #it was bound to spill at some point #here u go #aftg #all for the game #jean moreau

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side-effect-of-the-meds · 4 years

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PLEASE write about Andrew & Jean being chaotic and bitter bffs on the same team the power they would have the intimidation level the fashionable goth energy,,, w ow also I want Andrew to learn French so badly which we all know he would if Jean started insulting him in French

IT WON’T BE UP ANY TIME SOON but I’m writing a fic about Andrew visiting Renee’s for winter break in his final year of college in which he’s forced to spend the week sharing a space with Jean.

Over the course of said week, they form a tentative alliance that’s essentially that We’re Not So Different You And I bit by John Mulaney

Anyway, that’s like mid-way through Andrew’s fourth year. They don’t speak again until a little before Andrew’s graduation. The Foxes have just won the Championships they made it to finals last year and lost the last game :’( and so they’re having a party. Andrew needed some air so he stepped outside and, a little while later, he hears footsteps on the porch behind him. Jean sits down, leaving some space between the two of them so as not to crowd Andrew, and just sort of slides a piece of paper over. Andrew keeps up his cool guy facade for a while, assuming Jean will break first. He does.

“Would you just look at it?” Jean snarled. Andrew flicked him a cool look before, picking up the paper painstakingly slowly. He held it up to his own face, not bothering to actually read it. “Illiterate too, I see.” Andrew could barely keep the scowl off his face. He squinted at the stack of papers he picked up.

“Why?” he asked.

“Our goalkeep is, how you say? A piece of shit.”

“You’re giving him more credit than he deserves,” Andrew cut in, his lips curling in a sneer.

“I’m getting tired of being the last line of defense. It’s hard not having anyone to watch your back,” Jean said, shooting a meaningful look at Andrew. He elected to ignore it in favor of taking another drag of his cigarette. Jean muttered something that sounded like a curse before standing up and disappearing back into Abby’s house.

A month later, Jean stepped out of his apartment wondering which horrid little monsters the Cardinals had signed now. Turning towards the stairs, he found his answer waiting for him.

“There’s no point in both of us driving down there. You make breakfast and I’ll drive,” the gremlin said. It wasn’t an offer or even a demand. He said it as though he were stating a fact.

“The arrogance of Americans never fails to amaze me,” Jean shot back.

“You’ve got dual citizenship, Frenchie. I’m sorry to say it, but that makes you one of us.” With that, the little monster turned on his heel and headed down the stairs. Jean muttered a steady stream of curses as he followed Andrew out to the Maserati

Having Andrew on his team is literally the worst. All he ever does is laze around. Sometimes, he’ll just lay down in the middle of the goal and stare at the ceiling. Jean gets a lot of shit for it bc he’s the one that recommended him for the line. It’s the day of their first game and tensions are high at practice when Jean loses his temper. He picks up an exy ball and hurls it at Andrew. Without even looking up, Andrew catches it with one hand. He stands slowly and throws it back so fast that Jean doesn’t have time to react. The ball wedges itself into the grate of his helmet, the force of it knocking him off his feet. Everyone assumes that Andrew isn’t going to play that night or will just be his asshole self but, when Jean finds himself struggling to hold the line, Andrew gets sent out and he’s an absolute monster in the goal. Every shot that comes his way gets deflected all the way down the court. The last goal of the night is made in the final seven seconds when Andrew slams a shot all the way down the court into the opposing goal. It lights up red and the crowd loses their shit. Exhausted, Jean collapses on the floor.

“It’s hard not having anyone to have your back,” Andrew said as he passed by. By the time Jean found his voice, Andrew was already gone. Catching a ride home with one of the strikers, Jean felt a tightness in his chest. Andrew was an annoyingly lazy little bastard but Jean should have trusted him.

Jean doesn’t know how to apologize. Words are wasted on the likes of Andrew so he says nothing. He wakes early to make breakfast the next morning and says a silent prayer. Andrew is never late to anything but, when 6:30 rolls around and he isn’t there Jean’s heart plummets. He leaves the plate out on the counter while he eats. The ticking of the clock is deafeningly loud. At 6:47 there’s a knock at the door and Jean nearly faceplants in his hurry to answer it.

“Your food’s gone cold,” Jean blurted out. Andrew turned a glare on him but said nothing as he shouldered his way into the apartment. Dark circles rimmed his eyes. His shoulders sagged, weighed down by exhaustion. There was no way he’d gotten a wink of sleep last night.

“Moreau,” a voice said from the door. Jean whipped around to see Matt Boyd standing at the door. How he’d missed such a tall person standing in his doorway, Jean didn’t know. “Mind if I come in?” Jean stepped aside and Matt moved in.

“Are you hungry?” Jean asked, haltingly. Boyd was the starting backliner for the Virginia Cavaliers, a whole state over. What the hell was he doing here?

“I could eat,” Matt said brightly. He grabbed hold of a chair and dragged it over to where Andrew sat.

“Not out of my plate,” Andrew snapped when Matt made to steal his eggs. Jean made his way to the kitchen to fix a third plate. From the dining room he could hear Andrew’s voice and Boyd’s laughter. Handing the plate over to him, Jean took his seat at the far end of the table. For the next quarter of an hour, Boyd rambled on about something or the other. If you asked Jean what he’d talked about, he wouldn’t have been able to say. He was far too absorbed in watching Andrew.

The usual tension that pervaded his form had fallen away. Despite the obvious lack of sleep, Andrew seemed far more relaxed than usual. Every now and again, Jean saw his lips twitch up into the barest hint of a smile. From what he’d heard, Andrew had never had a good relationship with any of his teammates save Josten. But that made sense. Neil was his lover. What was it about Boyd that softened him so much?

As soon as breakfast was finished and the plates cleaned, Jean disappeared back into his room to grab his phone. By the time he’d returned, both Andrew and Boyd were gone from the dining room. Jean found the pair blocking the open door. He stopped short when he heard Boyd’s voice.

“I’ve missed you so much, Andy.” His words shook Jean to his core.

“Yes or no?” Andrew asked quietly. Jean watched in stunned silence as Matt leaned down, mumbling yes a hair’s breadth away from Andrew’s lips. The second the word left his mouth, Andrew closed the distance between them. A soft moan slipped from Boyd’s lips and Jean watched in horror as he tangled his hands in Andrew’s hair. “Stop staring, Moreau,” Andrew said as he broke the kiss.

“I thought that you and Josten-”

“We are,” Andrew cut in dismissively. “Matt is too.”

“Oh,” was all Jean could think to say. Back at the Nest, there had been no exclusive relationships. While most relationships in the real world weren’t like that, Jean had heard there were still a few. Boyd said his goodbyes before heading down the hall to the back stairwell. Andrew started off in the other direction. Jean had to run after him once he’d locked the door. Neither of them spoke in the car. They never did but there was a weight to the silence now that Jean didn’t know what to do about. A thousand small talk topics flitted through his head but he knew Andrew wouldn’t appreciate any of it so he kept his mouth shut, contenting himself to stare out the window.

Jean is ready to run by the time that they pull up at the court but he doesn't. He needs to prove that he’s going to have Andrew’s back so he stays with him.

It’s kind of awkward for a while. Andrew doesn’t like having Jean towering over him from behind bc it makes him feel vulnerable so he’s always really tense.

The turning point in their relationship is when a striker from another team tries to start a twitter feud with Andrew. He gets asked about it in an interview and the interviewer pulls a Kathy Ferdinand and reveals that the striker is backstage. Jean is sitting with Andrew for the interview and when they try to start shit live on air, Jean snaps. He cuts the striker a new one, roasting them within an inch of their life and the interview is forced to end bc the striker throws a punch. Andrew steps in front of Jean, catching the punch with ease and judo flipping them.

Neither of them really acknowledge that it happened but, when Andrew comes to breakfast the following Monday, he brings a loaf of sweet bread that he baked over the weekend.

Things kind of settle after that. Sometimes Andrew leaves recipes for foods he wants and Jean starts filling their silences with something other than the news. He complains about Americans and moons over Jeremy and starts teaching Andrew French too.

Jean has his own tiktok and most of his vids are of himself cooking and have Andrew reacting at the end but there’s a few subsections tho. One of them is Andrew and Jean and their baking escapades. It’s always super messy. Another is their ‘date nights’. On the weekends, the two of them get a little extra dressed up and go out to sample new restaurants. They’re both massive foodies so they like to try new restaurants together. Andrew is a surprisingly picky eater and listening to him critic food is the most Jean has ever heard him speak. Platonic dates are actually incredibly nice n more ppl need to indulge in them.

The final subsection is fashion/makeup. Jean likes to do makeup bc… why not? Sometimes, he manages to convince Andrew to let him be his model and does some really interesting looks on Andrew. Those videos never see the light of day but it’s something they do and it’s very important to Andrew. There’s something very intimate about letting Jean touch his face for hours on end but it also kind of feels nice. Also he loves the way Neil and Matt fawn over him when he skypes them with his makeup done. The fashion videos, however, do go up. The two of them go to the mall p often and take turns styling each other. They do style challenges too where they’re both given the same horrible item (something like crocs or a really ugly sweater) and they have to make the other person look good in them.

They do little nice things for each other. When Neil has a game against Bluefield, Jean gets Andrew front row tickets for him and manages to convince Matt to come down too. Andrew learns how to make french pastries that he leaves on Jean’s counter pretty often bc it reminds him of home. He also gets Allison to help him pull some strings and arrange for Jean to spend Christmas break in France with Jeremy. Jean doesn’t cry but he does tear up a little bit.

Andrew is still a menace and you see that on his tiktok. He rigs ridiculous pranks like setting up a tripwire to dump glue and feather on him or wrapping all his stuff in plastic wrap.

#just a pipe dream #all for the game #the foxhole court #aftg #tfc #andrew minyard #all for the gay #andrew joseph minyard #neil josten #the foxes #matt boyd #mandreil #jean moreau #reveal to me your deepest desires

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impressivepress · 3 years

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The Matisse we never knew

Henri Matisse, unlike the other greatest modern painter, Pablo Picasso, with whom he sits on a seesaw of esteem, hardly exists as a person in most people’s minds.

One pictures a wary, bearded gent, owlish in glasses—perhaps with a touch of the pasha about him, from images of his last years in Vence, near Nice, in a house full of sumptuous fabrics, plants, freely flying birds, and comely young models. Many know that Matisse had something to do with the invention of Fauvism, and that he once declared, weirdly, that art should be like a good armchair. A few recall that, in 1908, he inspired the coinage of the term “cubism,” in disparagement of a movement that would eclipse his leading influence on the Parisian avant-garde, and that he relaxed by playing the violin. Beyond such bits and pieces, there is the art, whose glory was maintained and renewed in many phases until the artist’s death, in 1954: preternatural color, yielding line, boldness and subtlety, incessant surprise. Anyone who doesn’t love it must have a low opinion of joy. The short answer to the question of Matisse’s stubborn obscurity as a man is that he put everything interesting about himself into his work. The long answer, which is richly instructive, while ending in the same place, is given in Hilary Spurling’s zestful two-volume biography, “A Life of Henri Matisse.” The first volume, “The Unknown Matisse: The Early Years 1869-1908,” was published in 1998. The second, “Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954” (Knopf; $40), completes the job of giving us a living individual, as familiar as someone we have long known, who regularly touched the spiritual core of Western modernity with a paintbrush.

Spurling is a veteran English theatre and literary critic and a biographer of Ivy Compton-Burnett. The fact that she is an amateur in art matters proves to be an advantage, given that she is also unfailingly sensitive and thoroughly informed. Matisse’s greatness resides in capacities of the eye and the mind that almost anyone, with willingness, can discern, and no one, with whatever training, can really comprehend. I don’t think it is possible to be more intelligent in any pursuit, or more serious and original, and with such suddenness, than Matisse was when he represented a reaching arm in “Dance I” (1909), or the goldfish that he painted as slivers of redness in a series of still-lifes in 1912. How can intellectual potency be claimed for an artist whose specialty, by his own declared ambition, was easeful visual bliss? It’s a cinch, now that Spurling has cleared away a century’s worth of misapprehensions and canards. Take, for example, the popular notion that Matisse was hedonistic. Hedonists seek pleasure. Matisse served it, as a monk serves God. He was a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play. Matisse did not. His art reserved nothing for himself. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means.

“The Unknown Matisse” told of an awkward youth from a dismal region of northern France—he was born in the cottage of his maternal grandmother, in 1869, and was raised in Bohain, an industrial textile center. He was an unhappy law clerk when, in 1889, he began to study drawing and, while laid up with appendicitis, was given a set of paints by his mother. The effect was seismic. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” How much did he mean that? He meant it to the extent of warning his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he married in 1898, when he was twenty-eight, “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” Amélie assented. She “had spent much of her life searching for a cause in which she could put her faith,” Spurling writes. Her parents were ruined in a spectacular scandal, as the unsuspecting employees of a woman whose financial empire was based on fraud. Spurling attributes to Amélie’s memories of that public disgrace a cocooning “suspicion of the outside world” that would always mark the Matisse family. (If there is any reason to doubt aspects of this book, it’s the unprecedented coöperation that the author coaxed from the congenitally overprotective heirs.) Amélie and, later, Marguerite—a daughter Matisse had fathered with a shopgirl in 1894 and raised with Amélie—were strong-willed confederates of Matisse in his work, and severe critics when his concentration flagged, managing a virtual family firm of which the artist was both the fragile chairman and the slave-driven labor force. According to Spurling, “The family fitted their activities round his breaks and work sessions. Silence was essential.” Even during the years when Matisse lived mostly alone in Nice, an “annual ritual of unpacking, stretching, framing and hanging ended with the whole family settling down to respond to the paintings.” The conference might last several days. Then the dealers were admitted.

Matisse was not taught to paint; he just started doing it. His first two canvases, from 1890, are essentially consummate Old Master-ish still-lifes, the first one pretty good and the second, featuring opulent reds, a knockout. (Of the second painting, Spurling writes, “Digging this picture out of his father’s attic ten years later, Matisse said it came so close to containing everything he had done since then that it hardly seemed worth having gone on painting.” Twenty years later he had the same reaction to it, only stronger.) He had style before he had craft, which he picked up along the way by copying paintings in the Louvre and taking classes with, among others, the arch-academician Adolphe-William Bouguereau and the Symbolist Gustave Moreau. (His one art-schooled technical standby, almost a fetish, was the plumb line. No matter how odd the angles in any Matisse, the verticals are usually dead true.) Most of his early works employ a dark palette and tend to be gloomy, but each strives for an integral vision. Matisse was thirty-one years old when he began showing in Paris—in 1901, a year after Picasso, eleven years younger, arrived in town from Barcelona. (They met in April of 1906, at the salon of Gertrude and Leo Stein.) It was in 1905, in the Mediterranean town of Collioure, that Matisse, in close collaboration with André Derain, combined pointillist color and Cézanne’s way of structuring pictorial space stroke by stroke to develop Fauvism—a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s eyes.

“Matisse the Master” opens in 1909, with the Matisse family—which now included, in addition to Marguerite, two sons, Jean and Pierre—living in a former convent on the Boulevard des Invalides, in Paris, where the artist conducted a painting school. His immense notoriety, which had been confirmed in 1905-06 by “Le Bonheur de Vivre,” a fractured fantasia that seemed to trash every possible norm of pictorial order and painterly finesse, was regularly exciting near-riots of derision in the public. (“My Arcadia,” Matisse called the picture, which established his career’s dizzying keynote: calm intensity or, perhaps, intense calm.) His huge-hipped, sinuous “Blue Nude,” of 1907, discomfited even Picasso, who complained, “If he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, let him make a design. This is between the two.” As usual, Picasso (then creating “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” his own monumental riposte to “Le Bonheur de Vivre”) was onto something: pattern was a decisive element in Matisse’s kind of picture, which applied a passion for decorated fabrics that began in his childhood. But Picasso was loath to admit that the combined effects of ornamental rhythm and blooming flesh constituted a revolutionary correlative, and not a contradiction.

Picasso and Matisse are poles apart aesthetically. Matisse told his students, “One must always search for the desire of the line, where it wishes to enter, where to die away.” Picasso’s line has no desire; it is sheer will. Form builds in Picasso, flows in Matisse. Picasso uses color. Colors enter the world through Matisse like harmonies through Mozart. Young artists and intellectuals in Paris at that time overwhelmingly favored Picasso’s analytical rigor, to the extent of attacking Matisse in print and snubbing him in public. Gertrude Stein (unlike her sister-in-law Sarah Stein, Matisse’s first major collector) enjoyed ridiculing him, “reporting with satisfaction,” Spurling says, “that her French cook served M. Matisse fried eggs for dinner instead of an omelette because, as a Frenchman, he would understand that it showed less respect.” Matisse’s intimate friends among artists were mostly easygoing minor painters, such as Albert Marquet. His temperamental aloneness made him prey to vertiginous depressions. He later recalled a breakdown that he underwent in Spain, in 1910: “My bed shook, and from my throat came a little high-pitched cry that I could not stop.”

Matisse himself precipitated the most significant and indelible controversy of his career. In 1908, in a famous text, “Notes of a Painter,” he stated as his ideal an art “for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” At the end of “The Unknown Matisse,” Spurling writes that the metaphor “has done him more harm ever since than any other image he might have chosen.” Straining to defend it, she hazards that “this passage reflects its obverse—Matisse’s intimate acquaintance with violence and destruction, a sense of human misery sharpened by years of humiliation, rejection and exposure—which could be neutralised only by the serene power and stable weight of art.” This tack strikes me as unnecessary, on two counts. First, in general, the principle of Matisse’s armchair seems ever sounder in comparison to more stirring but ultimately vain programs of modern art. If “modernism” had any effective purpose beyond acclimating cultivated people to rapid worldly change, it was a bust. Second, in particular, the tired businessman whom Matisse most likely had in mind was no Babbitt but almost a co-producer of some of the artist’s greatest works, the Russian textile magnate and visionary collector Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, who wrote to him in 1910, “The public is against you, but the future is yours.” “Dance II” (1910) and “Music” (1910), heraldic mural-size slabs of resonating minor-key red, green, and blue, fulfilled commissions for Shchukin’s house in Moscow, which by 1914 contained thirty-seven Matisses—“He always picked the best,” the artist said—in history’s first dedicated museum of modern art. (Lenin expropriated the collection in person but allowed Shchukin to remain, in servants’ quarters, as caretaker and guide. He died in Paris, in 1936. The collection is now in the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums.)

Among Matisse’s students was Olga Meerson, a Russian Jew who had studied with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and, already possessed of an elegant style, sought to remake herself under Matisse’s tutelage. Her talent is as apparent as her emulation of him, in a charming 1911 portrait, that shows him reclining on a checkered bedspread, reading a book with amused eyes. Spurling writes, “She personified the pride, courage and resilience that he responded to all his life at the deepest instinctual level in his female models.” She also epitomized a period type of “self-reliant single girl,” an obsessive subject for Matisse in those years, which Spurling locates between the earlier heroines of Henry James and the later solitaries of Jean Rhys. Matisse’s 1911 portrait of Meerson shows a primly dressed and posed, tremblingly sensitive woman slashed with “two fierce black arcs—plunging from neck to thigh, and from armpit to buttock,” which resist any explanation aside from their sheerly formal éclat. Spurling loses me when she hesitates to concede a sexual relationship. The body language in two group photographs from 1911 testifies that Amélie scented the worst. (In one, nearly everyone faces the camera except Meerson, who stares at Amélie, and Amélie, who carefully gazes at nothing.) A combination of Amélie’s jealousy and Meerson’s peremptory neediness caused a severely rattled Matisse to end the connection, with a maximum of bad feeling all around. Meerson moved to Munich, where she married the musician Heinz Pringsheim, a brother-in-law of Thomas Mann. Never having fulfilled her promise as a painter, she committed suicide in Berlin, in 1929.

But the Matisses’ marriage ran afoul not of any romantic rival but of the artist’s growing will to stand, however precariously, on his own. A climax came in 1913, when Amélie sat more than a hundred times for the “Portrait of Madame Matisse,” a thunderous painting, in drenching blues and greens, of a chic and stony woman leaning forward in a chair, with a black-featured gray mask of a face. (“Saturday with Matisse,” a friend’s diary reported at the time. “Crazy! weeping! By night he recites the Lord’s Prayer! By day he quarrels with his wife!”) Spurling says that the portrait, which was the last work to enter Shchukin’s collection, caused Matisse “palpitations, high blood pressure and a constant drumming in his ears.” Such frenzy was not rare when Matisse had difficulty with a painting, but in this case it was compounded by something like exorcism. The portrait expresses no specific feeling but, rather, registers innumerable emotions, not excluding tenderness. The game tilt of Amélie’s small head, sporting a dainty ostrich-feather toque, could break your heart. He referred to the painting years later in a letter to her as “the one that made you cry, but in which you look so pretty.”

One well believes Spurling that life with Matisse could be “close to unendurable,” but enduring it had been Amélie’s vocation, through years of impoverished existence in studio-centered homes. What eroded her role was security, which Shchukin’s patronage provided, along with a big suburban house in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where the family moved in 1909, and from which Matisse was increasingly absent. (In 1930, his travels took him to the United States, where he was thrilled by New York, and to Tahiti, where his melancholic character drew comment from a new friend, the German filmmaker F. W. Murnau: “Shadows are rare here. There’s sunshine everywhere except on you.”) Matisse continued to depend on Amélie, just not enough. Sulkily, she ceded routine leadership of the family to Marguerite. The 1913 portrait was his last painting of her. The couple finally split in 1939, when Amélie tried to dismiss the coolly efficient young Lydia Delectorskaya, an orphan refugee from Siberia who, having been hired as Amélie’s companion, increasingly served the ailing master as model, assistant, and nurse. Delectorskaya reacted to being banished (among other sorrows, which included a thwarted ambition to study medicine) by shooting herself in the chest with a pistol, to remarkably slight effect. Soon the artist and his wife were legally separated and Delectorskaya was back. Phlegmatic in the face of the family’s icy resentment, the Russian said of Matisse, “He knew how to take possession of people and make them feel they were indispensable. That was how it was for me, and that was how it had been for Mme. Matisse.”

Spurling, in her preface to “Matisse the Master,” announces an intention to demolish “two standard assumptions, both false.” The first, which is, indeed, common, concerns “the supposedly exploitative relationship” that Matisse had with the women he painted. The second, which was bruited in 1992 by an American art historian, Michèle C. Cone, in a book on artists in Vichy France, is less often heard, and involves, according to Spurling, “baseless but damaging allegations about Matisse’s behavior in World War II.” In answer to the first charge, Spurling—backed by access to Matisse’s immense correspondence, among other previously withheld archives—contends that the artist, after his marriage, rarely, if ever, had sex with models, despite his keen feelings for many. In this, Spurling is up against a climate of cynical received opinion. I’m one of numerous critics on record as being certain, based on no evidence, that Matisse womanized during his decades in Nice, which started with seasonal sojourns in 1917, when he lived in hotel rooms painting naked or harem-garbed models who, Spurling writes, “were drawn from the tide of human flotsam washed up in Nice between the wars.” Matisse never disavowed, in principle, the libertarian anarchism of most of his avant-garde generation. Nor did he seem to share the wintry belief of Piet Mondrian, quoted by Spurling, that “a drop of sperm spilt is a masterpiece lost.” He would visit brothels, though apparently without enthusiasm. (“Not much fun,” he said.) But I discover ready support for Spurling’s arguments in my own experience of the Nice odalisques, who loll on chairs or chaises amid flowers, fruits, and sumptuous fabrics. Indubitably erotic, the pictures diffuse arousal. Their sensuality never fixates on a breast or a thigh but dilates to every square inch of canvas. Such is the character of Matisse’s formal radicalism, early and late: distributed energy, suspended gesture, deferred climax. Might the tension have been so precious to him, as the engine of what gave his life meaning, that its only end could be exhaustion? It may count that, according to Matisse, he never ate even the fresh food that he used for still-lifes—including oysters, from a restaurant in Nice, that were returned in time for the lunch crowd.

Spurling associates the Vichy charge with a “popular image of the painter indulging himself among the fleshpots of Nice in wartime,” which is absurd on its face. During the war, Matisse was isolated in Nice and Vence. He was old and ill with cardiovascular, renal, and abdominal disorders; he underwent a colostomy in 1941 and, a year later, almost died. Cone bases a speculation that Matisse “sided with the nationalism of the current Vichy regime” on a mild complaint by the artist, back in 1924, that people were mistaking, as French, the cosmopolitan art scene in Paris. (“French painters are not cosmopolites,” he told a Danish interviewer—an observation, largely accurate, about the Parisian avant-garde of the twenties.) Beyond that, Cone primarily cites wartime interviews, in which Matisse chatted amiably about his work, as evidence of irresponsible disengagement. It’s true that he shielded his art from politics under all circumstances—he created the reverberant domestic idyll “The Piano Lesson” (my favorite twentieth-century painting) in the summer of 1916, while death swaggered at Verdun. But there seems to be no gainsaying his at least passive solidarity with the Resistance, which swept up the two most important women in his life—Amélie, who was a typist for the Communist underground, and Marguerite, who served as a courier—as well as his son Jean, who was involved in sabotage operations. (Pierre had by that time become an art dealer in New York.) Amélie was jailed for six months; Marguerite was tortured by the Gestapo but escaped from a cattle car that was stalled on its way to a prison camp in Germany during the war’s chaotic waning months. The artist’s loyalty to the poet and leading Communist Louis Aragon, who, while on the run, spent time with Matisse and wrote passionately about him, also weighs in his favor.

Matisse was so consumed by aesthetic sensibility that his responses to life, when not baffled and distraught, were like unwitting prose poems. Asked to recommend a possible mate for Jean, he sized up one young woman as “tall, well made, limbs a bit long—sprawling movements like a young dog—intelligent, very gifted and very reserved.” His habits were incredibly regular. On a typical day in Nice, in 1917, Spurling tells us, he “rose early and worked all morning with a second work session after lunch, followed by violin practice, a simple supper (vegetable soup, two hard-boiled eggs, salad and a glass of wine) and an early bedtime.” Spurling knows her man so well that you readily tolerate her occasional reading of his mind: “By the seventeenth it was so hot he stayed indoors all day, drawing fruit, reading or dozing on the studio couch, feeling his feet swell and thinking about his ‘Still Life with Green Sideboard.’ ” (As anyone might: that quiet painting, from 1928, is one of the most uncannily ambiguous ever made; you cannot decide if you are looking at or into the surface of a cabinet door.) He had warm but awkward dealings with his sons, realizing late in life that he had burdened them with the sort of hectoring pressures to meet his standards that he had suffered from his own father. Pierre said of the boy in “The Piano Lesson,” “Yes, it was me, and you have no idea how much I detested those piano lessons.” The one person who could command Matisse’s attention was Marguerite. She had married a brilliant man of letters, Georges Duthuit, who was Matisse’s best critic in his lifetime; when Duthuit proved unfaithful to her, the artist forbade him to write about his work. Matisse is never so affecting as in his account of the two weeks that Marguerite spent with him after her escape in 1945: “I saw in reality, materially, the atrocious scenes she described and acted out for me. I couldn’t have said if I still belonged to myself.”

Matisse spoke with self-knowledge both sad and ruthless—on behalf of driven artists in general—when, in a 1941 letter to Pierre, he referred to a harrowing recent painting by his friend Georges Rouault: “A man who makes pictures like the one we were looking at is an unhappy creature, tormented day and night. He relieves himself of his passion in his pictures, but also in spite of himself on the people round him. That is what normal people never understand. They want to enjoy the artists’ products—as one might enjoy cows’ milk—but they can’t put up with the inconvenience, the mud and the flies.”

The last decade and a half of Matisse’s life, spent mostly as an invalid, was a bonus gift of time—“a second life,” he called it—in which, deciding that he had gone as far as he could with oil painting, he invented and developed a new kind of art. His compositions of paper cutouts included the 1947 book “Jazz,” and designs for Catholic vestments to go with his total design of a convent chapel in Vence—an improbable, gruelling commission, including seventeen stained-glass windows and several nearly abstract murals, that was arranged with help from a favorite former model, who had become a nun, and an idealistic young monk who came to remark, “I feel less and less Gothic, and more and more Matisse.” The project horrified not only much of the Catholic hierarchy but also a contemporary art world then largely in thrall to Communism. (Picasso is often said to have recommended that Matisse decorate a brothel instead. Actually, he proposed a fruit-and-vegetable market, to which Matisse “was proud of snapping back that his greens were greener and his oranges more orange than any actual fruit.”) But such was Matisse’s prestige, with the added advantage that the artist largely financed the project himself, that the chapel opened in 1951 in a ceremony led by the Archbishop of Nice. At first bewildered by the chapel, the sisters of the convent came to love its chaste serenity and effulgent color. “From now on,” Spurling writes, “indignant or derisive sightseers demanding to know the meaning of the stations of the cross received a firm response from the nun in charge: ‘It means modern.’ ”

Matisse’s cutouts realized a brilliant conjunction of drawing and color which had always been implicit in his art—often, as if his lines were not the container of his color but the edge produced by its expansion, like the contour of wetness left by a wave on a beach. Formed with scissors, color and shape become effectively one. In his house, luxuriant with simple amenities and living things, he “exercised dominion . . . from his bed,” Spurling writes. “Models and assistants were jealously guarded, cut off from outside contact and more or less confined to the premises.” Picasso, accompanied by his lover, Françoise Gilot, was a frequent and welcome visitor. While still fencing with each other like old duellists, they talked art. (Gilot remembered one occasion when Matisse, producing American catalogues of the work of Pollock and Robert Motherwell, asked Picasso, “What do you think they have incorporated from us? And in a generation or two, who among the painters will still carry a part of us in his heart, as we do Manet and Cézanne?”) Matisse died at the age of eighty-four, on November 3, 1954, with Marguerite and Delectorskaya at his side. Spurling reports that Delectorskaya “left immediately with the suitcase she had kept packed for fifteen years.”

If Spurling fails to make one important element sufficiently clear, it’s the connection between the peculiarities of Matisse’s life and his singularity, which is also his absolute modernity, as an artist. The key fact is his self-invention as a painter, entering art history from essentially nowhere, as if by parachute. Never having had traditional lessons to unlearn (unlike Picasso, with his incessant industry of demolishing and reconstructing the inherited language of painting), Matisse innovated on something like whim—a privilege, without guidelines or guarantees, for which he paid a steep toll in anxiety. There is even a touch of the naïf or the primitive about him, though it is hard to grasp, because his works quickly assumed the status of classics, models of the modern. You can track his inspirations, seeing, for example, that his discovery of Russian icons, during a visit to Shchukin in Moscow in 1911, informed a large confrontational painting of him and Amélie, “The Conversation” (1911). But how does this marital anecdote (the great man in pajamas!) manage to impress as an all-time symbol of creativity? Matisse couldn’t say, and no one else can, either. The circumstances of his life and time, as detailed in this appropriately capacious biography, continually distill into drops of wonder.

~ Peter Schjeldahl · August 22, 2005. Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. His latest book is “Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018.”

#matisse #artist biography #painting #the new yorker

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luobingmeis · 7 years

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hawk in the raven nest, chapter thirteen

A/N: hey guys what’s up, i’m jordyn, i turned eighteen today, and i never fucking learned how to properly treat fictional characters

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Nathaniel found himself swallowing guilt every time his eyes fell upon Jean Moreau. Nathaniel, for such a long time, only felt guilt towards his mother, the life she never got to have, and the apology she never got from him for fucking up her life. But now that guilt had reached out its claws and dragged Jean down with it, and Nathaniel was consumed by it. Despite the fact that nothing had happened, the twist in Nathaniel’s gut got worse and worse each time he saw his roommate to the point where he was choked by it. Even his self assurances that Jean was being watched by Andrew, Andrew made no promises but he was still keeping an eye on Jean, and that Riko would have to get through Nathaniel and Andrew before he got to Jean only sedated his nerves for a short span of time.

And while sitting on his own bed while Jean sat on his, the span of time was running out. Jean was sitting with his back against the wall and his knees bent. A book was propped open and Nathaniel was amazed with the calmness of his roommate. Nathaniel, who could probably count how many times he had truly been content on less than ten fingers (most of which involved a certain blond goalkeeper), had one knee pulled up to his chest with his chin resting upon it.

Apparently, while reading, Jean picked up on Nathaniel’s gradual decline of stability, because he said, “You… doing okay?”

“Fine,” Nathaniel said, definitely lying.

“Would you like for me to pretend that I believe you?”

Nathaniel turned his head to look at Jean and rested his cheek on his knee. “That would be greatly appreciated.”

Jean nodded. Nathaniel expected him to go back to his book, but instead Jean closed it and shifted his body to face Nathaniel. He said in French and with a quieter voice, “You never told me how Kevin was doing.”

Nathaniel paused; he hadn’t expected Kevin to come up. Kevin and Jean’s relationship was similar to Kevin and Nathaniel’s in the way that they were once friends, but time and circumstance and Riko Moriyama pulled them apart. While Riko and Kevin rose to stardom, Nathaniel and Jean stayed behind as punching bags and property. Nathaniel then nodded to the place on his bed in front of him, and Jean understood the cue and moved to sit in front of Nathaniel.

Nathaniel then thought about Kevin. How was he doing? How was adored Kevin Day reacting to being out of his element, surrounded by people leagues behind him, with a father that didn’t know he was a father? Nathaniel remembered Kevin’s clutched hands and white knuckles at their game against the Foxes. He remembered his drunk franticness when he found out Riko and the Ravens would be in the same district. Kevin had left the Ravens to get away from Riko, and Riko, ever the lurker, followed Kevin straight to his doorstep.

“He’s frustrated,” Nathaniel finally decided upon, also speaking in French. It was an understatement, but anything would be in describing what Kevin was going through. “His entire life did a complete one-eighty. He lived knowing that one day he would rule the world of Exy with Riko, but Riko ended up being the one to take that away from him. He went from being a star to an assistant coach for the Palmetto State Foxes.”

Jean nodded, his eyes staring ahead instead of at Nathaniel. “Do you really think the Foxes will win?”

Nathaniel looked down at his bedsheets and scrunched them up in his hands. He had faith in Kevin to get the Foxes to where they needed to be, but the cold, harsh reality that Nathaniel had always known still whispered worst case scenarios in the back of his mind.

Then he thought of their game against the Foxes, and how for the first time he felt the relief of finally trusting someone completely. He thought of the Foxes getting three goals past Andrew, the best goalie in the ERC against the currently lowest ranked team. He thought of Kevin helping govern that team, and he realized that perhaps he wasn’t so scared of the new player Kevin was bringing it. They would be debuted in a week, and Nathaniel found himself more curious than apprehensive. And, most of all, when Andrew told him that the Foxes would win, Nathaniel believed him.

So yes, he did have doubts speaking to him in the back of his mind. But between Kevin and Andrew’s voices, the doubts were quieter than usual.

“I think if everything goes as planned,” Nathaniel finally said. “They can win.”

Jean nodded again, turning his head towards Nathaniel. “And then, if that works out along with everything concerning… loose ends, we’ll be free from all of this?”

“If everything works out, we will at least have no more Riko and Tetsuji,” Nathaniel said. “We want to show the world what the Ravens truly are: fucked up. We live in an abusive, manipulative hivemind, and we’re trying to end it all. It’s risky, to say the least.” He sighed. “It requires a lot of careful planning and secrets and…” He trailed off, looking up at his ceiling. “And I think it might actually work. Andrew, Kevin, and I have the plan laid out in front of us. It’s just putting it all together.” He nodded. “So yes, if everything works, I believe we can be free after this is done.”

When Jean said nothing, Nathaniel looked back at him and was surprised to find him with a small smile on his face. “If we do get out of here,” Jean said, his voice soft. “I would like to see France again. Not where my parents are, as you probably understand why, but just to see it again.”

Nathaniel and Jean were both bought by the Moriyamas. However, even then, some of the circumstances behind their purchase were different. Nathaniel was bought because, otherwise, he would have been a loose end and would have been executed. Jean was bought because the Moreaus couldn’t afford the debt they owed the Moriyamas. Nathaniel didn’t have much of a move to make; Jean, on the other hand, came all the way from France. Nathaniel remembered him barely able to speak English, and then him being forced to not use French at all, since no one else could understand him, while simultaneously learning English and Japanese. Jean still taught Kevin and Nathaniel French in secret, though.

Nathaniel wondered what it felt like to have a home to go back to.

“It would be nice to be able to live in the outside world again,” Nathaniel murmured.

“It would be.” Jean then sighed. “Listen, I know you haven’t told me the entirety of your plan. You probably can’t, because from what it sounds like, you’re dealing with life and death. I still… it’s very frightening to hear about what you’re doing. No one has ever fought back before, and you three are going straight for the core of everything. Even you can’t say this plan is foolproof, can you?” Nathaniel hesitated before nodding. “Exactly. It seems like things are very particular. And when things are particular and need to be done a certain way or else they don’t work, it’s very easy for things to go wrong.” Jean paused. “If things do go right, and you manage to actually take all this down and reveal what has been going on, I hope you find a life outside of here.”

Nathaniel nodded again. I hope you find a life outside of here. For months, all Nathaniel had been thinking about was destroying the Ravens. He thought of taking down Riko and Tetsuji, and revealing the hivemind that has governed the team since Tetsuji started it. But this was the first time he found himself thinking of what happened after. If he was in one piece after all of this, or at least alive, and things had managed to fall into place, he had endless possibilities, it seemed.

The thought of a future was overwhelming. It took him three tries to manage out, “I hope you do, too.” He then coughed around the feeling in his throat in an attempt to revive his vocal cords. “Just, steer clear of all of this, okay? I know you said you can’t sit back and watch us do this, but please, Jean. Me and Andrew are currently the ones here involved in all of this. We are the buffer between you and Riko. He goes after whichever one of us he can get his hands on first, so don’t let that be you. Let us either live or die through this while you keep your head down. You shouldn’t be the one getting hurt because of us. You and I both know that I can’t make any promises, but just stay away from all this shit and let me and Andrew take it.” Jean looked as if he was about to disagree, so Nathaniel continued before he could say anything. “I think… I think you can get out of this okay. Or, well, as okay as a Raven can be.”

Jean didn’t say anything. Nathaniel received no cues from him as to whether or not Jean even believed him. But, finally, after staring at his hands in his lap, Jean gave a small nod, stood, and went back to his book.

#aftg #tfc #neil josten #kevin day #jean moreau #stuff i write #hawk in the raven nest

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kickfoxing · 7 years

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okay i’m still thinking about this post so just like... imagine:

jean gets to USC and he’s in pretty bad shape

(physically and emotionally)

and we all know jean is an absolute asshole, he’s a dick!

it’s just how he is

(we don’t love him any less just like we don’t love kevin any less)

jean’s dealing with both the terrible things that happened to him as well as the terrible things he did in the nest

neither are something that will go away easily

so he get’s to USC and is greeted by the absolute ray of sunshine that is jeremy knox

but you know what?

fuck jeremy knox!

all jeremy is to jean in that moment is a lifeline, a way out of the ravens

but jean’s problem with jeremy isn’t with jeremy

it’s with kevin

kevin who hung onto jeremy for so long as a beacon of hope

kevin, who’s excitement about jeremy is inherently linked in jean’s mind

so even captain sunshine can’t shine into jean’s dark soul

(at least at first)

becuase sunshine doesn’t go well with rain

only thunder and lightning do

and laila and alvarez no better than most the type of shit you can go through

they both understand what it’s like to have a hardened exterior that slowly makes it way inside of you

it’s laila that first cracks jean’s shell

while he’s busy being a grade A dick, she’s busy undermining everything he says

“the ravens aren’t the only champions around here, moreau”

“oh really, well what team has more court members?”

“this team is a family, not a machine”

each time, she cuts jean to his core without pushing him too far

jeremy (bless him) tried, he really did

but laila is the one who challenges first

she’s the one who battles him on the court but asks him to dinner of the court

she’s the one who will sit in silence in the library with him while they both get work done

she’s the one who talks him into getting help when his memories are too much

and eventually, jean will thank her for all she’s done

but in the moment, he doesn’t even realizes it’s happening

#jean moreau #laila dermott #idk why i did this #i have 2 projects due tomorrow #YIKES #tfchc #hc #aftghc #aftg

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aromanticgcallen · 7 years

Text

Hockeyverse Primer #1: “Meet The Team”

Alright folks if you’ve been around this blog for a hot minute you’ve probably heard me talking about this hockeyverse thing. Maybe you’re a friend who I’ve talked to about it enough that you’re begrudgingly curious. Maybe you’re humoring me. Maybe you’re just interested! Regardless of how you ended up here, at the first of my intro posts, welcome.

This is the barebones of our team, the Minneapolis Phoenixes hockey team. These are the twenty players, some of which you may be familiar with, some of which you might not have heard of. Just names, some core facts, and interesting details, so far. Want to know more about someone? Please don’t hesitate to ask! Hopefully this will bring you up to speed somewhat. More to follow soon.

Anatoly “Tolya” Sokolov. 29. Moscow, Russia. C/LW forward. 6’0”. Dirty blond, on the leaner side for a hockey player, wiry rather than Big. Hates the cold. Math prodigy. Perpetually eating cinnamon candy. #34

Blazej “B/Vlasi” Hostalek. 30. Ostrava, Czech Republic. C forward. 6’1”. Dark haired, unimposing until he stands up straight. Captain of the Phoenixes. Guilt complex a mile wide. Communicates more by meaningful arching of eyebrows than by words. #76

Derek “Monty” Montgomery. 26. Seattle, Washington, USA. LW forward. 6’3”. Warm-toned brown skin, broad-shouldered, generally relaxed posture just this side of a slouch. Makes a lot of motivational vines. Extremely good with knowing what to say when. Has a giant poofy dog named Snickerdoodle.

Eliot “iCloud” McLeod. 25. Portland, Oregon, USA. C/RW forward. 6’1”. Shaggy brown hair, rough hewn features. Mother and father from different sides of a family feud. Inherited his parents’ deep Texan accent. Almost frighteningly good with technology. #62

Iestyn “Tommo” Thomas. 32. Hope, Wales. Goaltender. 6’2”. Bearded, but not wildly so, light brown hair, dark blue eyes. Quiet enough to put people who don’t know better on edge. Hard on himself. Paradoxically encouraging and understanding to others, particularly Kai Makela. #60

Isaac Jensen. 21. Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. C forward. 5’11”. Curly dark brown hair, dark grey eyes, has dimples when he smiles genuinely. Heralded since Juniors as the “Miracle of Minneapolis”. People skills and temperament of a feral cat. Has lived in JP Delacroix’s attic since rookie year. #11

Jean-Luc “Moresie” Moreau. 33. Laval, Québéc, Canada. RW forward. 6’1”. Crow’s feet by his eyes and laughter lines by his mouth, light freckles not immediately visible. Number one instigator of prank wars. Perpetual silver lining artist. Common person to go to with your problems. #17

Jean-Pierre “JP” Delacroix. 36. Montréal, Québéc, Canada. LW forward. 6’6”. Short corkscrew curl hair, broad and strongly built as well as tall, wears reading glasses. Comes from a very large family (four sisters and a brother) with whom he has a good relationship. Tends toward ‘collecting’ people. Often starts conversations in the middle without giving the other person time to catch up. #26

Jesse Marvel. 19. Calgary, Alberta, Canada. RW forward. 6’2”. Flat, broad nose, expressive eyebrows, markedly square jawline. A morning person since he was a young child, gets up early and likes it that way. Hums to himself a lot, mostly radio songs stuck in his head. Happy go lucky. #28

Kai “Maks” Makela. 24. Lempaala, Finland. Goaltender. 6’5”. Combination of tall and gangly that makes him look like a baby giraffe, straw-blond hair. Instant friend to animals and children, especially cats. Competitive and headstrong. Brightens rooms with his presence, doggedly optimistic even when he has to fake it. #83

Leonid “Lyonya” Ilyushin. Saint Petersburg, Russia. 25. C/LW forward. 6’6”. Red hair, even brighter red beard, gestures with his hands a lot, very clear and numerous freckles. Has the entirety of Bohemian Rhapsody memorized despite not having mastered English to the extent of the other Russians on the team. Traded in mid-season a year ago. Party trick is that he can crack walnuts with his bare hands. #57

Marcus “Mark” Graham. 23. Washington, DC, USA. Defenseman. 6’3”. Unruly hair, scar on his lower lip where it was split twice, once in a bar fight and once in a hockey game. Younger Graham twin by two and a half minutes. Has trouble managing his emotions and impulses. Says what he thinks when he thinks it, even when it gets him in hot water. #36

Michael “Mike” Graham. 23. Washington, DC, USA. Defenseman. 6’2”. Hair even more uncontrollable than Marcus’s, habit of slouching makes him look shorter than he is. Older Graham twin by two and a half minutes, takes being the ‘big brother’ seriously. Internalizes things and compartmentalizes, taking the ‘deal with it later’ approach. Trying to maintain a strained relationship with his parents while Marcus has given up. #42

Paul “Johnno” Johnson. 27. Fargo, North Dakota, USA. Defenseman. 6’4”. Sandstone light brown hair, light grey eyes, strong jaw and nose. Doesn’t have a middle name. Unflappable to an almost concerning degree. Maintains an air of Midwest politness that seems like it must be fake until you get to know him, only to discover that no, that’s really just how he is. #14

Piotr “Petya” Afonin. 27. Chelyabinsk, Russia. RW forward. 5’11”. Blond, seems like he should be taller than he is given he carries himself tall and is otherwise broad and strong looking. Very protective and reactionary when he feels strongly about something, which is a lot of the time. Once did an interview for a high school newspaper in exchange for 3 pounds of banana bread. Makes a big deal out of birthdays. #94

Song “Bird” Chen. 20. Guangdong, Guangzhou, China. LW forward. 5’10”. Short hair that’s slowly growing out, prominent cheekbones, cool-toned dark brown eyes. Scrappy and kind of a smartass on the ice but fast enough to get away with it. Allergic to cats but has three with his roommate, Eliot. Autistic with a special interest in languages, speaks four and is currently learning two more. #23

Tony “Leo” Leonetti. 31. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Defenseman. 5’7”. A little scruffy looking, scar on his chin, brown eyes and brown hair. Taken Song under his wing given they’re both on the shorter side and have a similar playing style - fast, quick thinking, and obnoxious. Loud opinions. Has an ongoing feud with his defense partner Paul’s brother, Kyle, also in the league. #53

Tristan “Levs” Levesque. 24. Québéc City, Québéc, Canada. C foward. 5’11”. Stocky and has a short cropped, fade haircut with an angular pattern at the temples. Easygoing and friendly with just about everyone, but hard to get personal information out of. Likes to garden. Trying to teach his roommates, Kai and Uwe, to speak French, with very limited success, not that this is slowing him down. #31

Tyler “Coop” Cooper. 24. Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Defenseman. 6’0”. Lanky, looks more like a surfer than a hockey player, straight dark brown hair almost to his shoulders. Can’t swim and is afraid of the water. Trades places with his defense partner, Uwe, as number one in penalty minutes on the Phoenixes. Frank and honest, doesn’t beat around the bush or obfuscate what he means. #38

Uwe “Habs” Habicht. 21. Bielefeld, Germany. Defenseman. 6’3”. Imposing except for off the ice, where he looks uncomfortable with how big he is, has multiple tattoos, square chin. Pretends not to speak English when a reporter asks him a question he doesn’t want to answer. Cheats at cards, but is too good at it for anyone to prove anything. A good person, but not always a nice one (not mean, either, just not always soft). #6

#long post #hockeyverse blogging #holy shit y'all #i'll tag all the characters later #food ment #isaac doesn't have an 'official' nickname or a common one but #like half the team calls him 'kid'#wonder boy comes up a lot #jesse and song also both get 'rookie' on the regular #given they're the new kids #anyway #hockeyverse primers

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bienmoreau · 7 years

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Z? (if you need a prompt how about your love for jean moreau 🤗)

Z - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go! (Prompts optional but encouraged.)

Honestly just. Where do I even begin? He’s so good. He’s so strong and good and everything horrible in his life could have so easily broken him beyond healing. (Did in fact, all but once. Thank you Nora.)but he stayed alive. He survived. And more than that he still STILL has such a huge capacity for good. He’s been betrayed and abused by literally all of the people who should have looked out for him throughout his life. Over and over and has always borne the worst of it. He’s had unspeakable evils carried out against him. AND YET! He tried to help others and he doesn’t just give up. despite it all. And when he was presented face to face with the boy who so easily could have been stuck in the same life as him he didn’t try to drag that boy down into the darkness of his own situation. In fact! He helped that boy. Looked out for him like no one had for him and used the opportunity he presented as a means to enact the beginnings of his own saving. He’s so strong. He is just so amazingly, awe inspiringly, STRONG. He chose to keep going and keep fighting and keep surviving despite living through so so many completely valid reasons to just curl up in a ball and give up on life all together. HE CHOSE TO FOLLOW THE CHANCE TO LIVE. HE CHOSE TO TAKE ACTION IN HIS OWN HEALING. HE FOUGHT SO FUKIN HARD AND HE SUFFERED SO MUCH BUT HE MADE IT. He kept looking for the light in the what must have seemed like the most hopeless of situations. He fukin held is own in so many ways. He’s witty and inelegant and badass and #3 in the best team in the business FOR A GDAMN REASON! Like I feel that people forget that Jean is fuking GOOD at what he does! He’s is one of the absolute best there are! He can hate it. I hc that he probably does tbqh but he is DAMN FUKIN GOOD.

This sweet French boy is quite literally the light of my life. My shining star. He’s the brightest point in the darkest place and he absolutely freaking blazed. He is so so much more than anyone around him sees.

AND THEN HE GETS OUT. HE MAKES IT. HE SURVIVES. MORE THAN SURVIVES!

HE LIVES.

I love the whole series. You know I do. But honestly. The other stories are there. They’re told. (Either in the books or in the EC) they’re resolved. The story I want. The story that i am the most deeply invested in is this beautiful starlight boy and his journey forward. All the extraordinary things and marvellously quotidian happiness that he will finally have. The fact that in canon we leave him starting out this new life. This 2nd chance (that he watched everyone else (K, N, the foxes) get 5 fold). And he’s surrounded by people who want the best for him. He’s in a place that will support and enable his own healing process AT LAST. The fact that he can make connections with people. Not because they’re the only people he’s allowed to talk to. Not because they’re the only people who are going through the same abuse. Not because he belonged to them. He can make friends with people who make him smile. People who want to talk to him abt books and music and art and life. People who are a positive influence on him and ask for nothing from him in return except for him to try his best and stay in contact because they genuinely enjoy his company. Not as Edgar Allens star backliner. Not for the name or the fame or the bullshit in his past. But as Jean Moreau. Starting again. Trying again. Healing at last, slowly for sure but getting there. People who are with him for the future. For what he is, but also for what he can become. For how bright that future with him in it looks to them.

It’s going to be a fukin hard slog. It’s going to take time and feel useless and hurt, a lot, at times, but it’s going to be worth it. It’s going to be a long journey, it’s probably never going to end, but he’s not going to be alone and ‘just barely staying alive’ anymore. AND FUKING HELL! If anyone! ANYONE has the GDAMN strength and power of will, and clearly an innate core of hope, that’s going to be needed to make this journey it’s Jean freakin Moreau. I mean, just look at how far he’s stuck it out already.

And we already saw him take that first step.

#this is v long and rambling and they're will be typos. I'm on my phone sorry. also I'm crying #jean moreau #also I know this isn't really #but Ima tag it anyway #Jerejean #the foxhole court #talk to me #answered #everythingthatmatters #long post #mine #LINA

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codename-adler · 3 years

Text

...dance 'til you find someone to die for...

What if instead of Seth, Riko tried to get rid of Aaron?

Chapter 11 ♟️ [table of contents]

(CW: injuries, blood, medical inaccuracies, death threats, drugs, bullying, violence, swearing)

The Foxes had to be forcibly removed from the hospital room by the nurses and security staff. Even Wymack had to be escorted out. Needless to say, the accusation didn’t take well at all.

Aaron had much more to say, but none of his teammates were ready to hear it, and he was in no state to stay awake much longer. Everything hurt. Even his hair hurt. And he was all alone.

Sure, Andrew was guarding the door just outside, but, well…

Aaron didn’t get it. He was (mostly) out of danger for the time being, and he was stuck in kind of a secure place. Bad memories of bathroom floors and locked doors flooded Aaron’s mind. He should be going feral, he should be screaming, he should be trying to run away. He should be the one who’s afraid.

And he was.

But Andrew?

Andrew wasn’t afraid of anything. Mostly because he didn’t feel anything, didn’t give a fuck about anything, but also because he himself gave off an aura of danger. When you’re the threat, you don’t get scared; others do. So why was Andrew so avoidant? What was he so afraid of? Aaron couldn’t figure it out for the life of him. He did have more pressing matters to think about, though.

With Andrew blocking the door, Aaron was alone, yes, but he could use that time to think. He ruminated so much he didn’t even notice when he fell into a fitful slumber. He only realized when the door clicked shut, 12 hours later.

Renee.

She walked quietly to his side, but didn’t sit down on the chair or his bed. There was a glimpse of something in her eyes. There always was, Aaron knew that, knew that Renee was more than meets the eye, but this was something quieter, darker. Not alarming, per se. Aaron didn’t feel soothed, but he didn’t feel scared either.

“Sometimes I feel like He really does respond to my prayers in any way He can, because any other explanations for the things I witness do not make sense to me,” Renee spoke.

What? What’s her angle here?

“What did you… pray for?” Aaron managed to reply, wary.

Renee looked at him then, really looked at him, as if she was scanning his very core. Finally, she stared directly into his eyes, pondering for so long he’d thought she’d leave or reprimand him, but she simply answered with a question of her own.

“You think it’s me,” Renee remarked, her tone devoid of accusation.

It was Aaron’s turn to stare back, his mind easing at last.

“You are a very uneasy person to be around. You hide things. You lie. You pray. You make it very difficult not be suspicious of,” Aaron responded.

“I can’t pretend that I don’t,” she replied.

“But so does Andrew. And Andrew let you in here, somehow, after all. He trusts you, in his own way.”

Renee raised her eyebrow, realizing something else.

“And you trust Andrew?”

Aaron didn’t answer. He looked at her, his expression neutral. That was telling enough.

“You should tell him,” she said.

“You and I both know he doesn’t live off of truths like that,” Aaron replied.

“I didn’t say it would be for his benefit.”

That made Aaron freeze. He didn’t want to go there. He changed the subject.

“What’s so charming about Jean Moreau, then?”

“Charming…” Renee reflected.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do, and I don’t. Could he be charming, if given the time and space to grow? I believe so. Could he ever be charming to me? That I’m not convinced of,” Renee said.

“Right, because Andrew is such a better option…” Aaron scoffed.

“An option? There are things that are not mine to share, Aaron, but Jean and Andrew both have flaws that would make it very hard for me to consider them 'options’. The greatest one being that they are men.” Renee answered gracefully.

Huh.

Renee Walker was not one to hate on the basis of gender. That left only…

Oh.

Yeah, that made sense Aaron was surprised at the lack of disgust he felt. He was rather… relieved? For who or of what, Aaron didn’t want to think about.

“But I’m guessing your real question about Jean was less about my preferences and more about me fraternizing with the enemy,” Renee said.

Aaron could only nod.

“I can recognize a trapped soul when I see one. Can’t you?”

Yes.

He remembered the look in Jean Moreau’s eyes. The same one Aaron sported on his worst days. The same one Renee was looking at right this instant. Aaron didn’t feel any more at ease around her, but he felt satisfied.

“Now that this matter is settled, can I get you anything to eat or drink?” Renee inquired without missing a beat.

There she went again, pulling the rug from under Aaron’s feet, unsettling him after his mind had just finally eased. He would never understand that woman. But he was getting hungry.

“…Pudding. Thanks.”

She smiled her less fake and more soothing smile and went on her way, as if the tension in the room hadn’t been about to explode right in their faces.

As Renee got out of his room, his next visitor entered. Josten, the fucker, made so much more noise than Renee, or simply much more than Aaron could tolerate from him. He was also much less tactful, much less careful.

“Who’s the fucking mole, Aaron?” he asked pointblank.

Aaron stared at him, bored and unwilling to cooperate.

“Spit it out already so we can get them before they get us!” Neil impatiently pushed.

Aaron stared some more.

“Tell me… Neil. How many players does an Exy team need to continue playing for the NCAA?” Aaron asked, unfazed by the anger rising in Neil eyes.

“Nine, what the fuck are you playing at?” Neil spit out.

“Tsk tsk tsk… Bear with me, Neil… You seem familiar with… provoked injuries, let’s call them. Tell me, when will I play again? Hmm?” Aaron continued, cruel to his interlocutor and to himself.

“Fine! You want the truth? The doctors said at least 6 weeks for your ribs to settle back, and 10 more weeks for your liver wound to close up. Your concussion also complicates everything. You know what else they said? That you might not ever play again. That you might not heal at all. You could still bleed out to death, you could still lose your liver, or need an organ transplant. There are a hundred ways you could still fucking die. So why don’t you stop being the melodramatic bitch you seem to enjoy playing, and tell me who the fucking traitor is so we can move on and do something about it!” Neil whisper-yelled with fury.

Aaron shoved his fear deep down in his gut and hid his dread from his face

“Now, now, Josten. Is that any way to treat your injured teammate? Can’t you show any compassion? Don’t you have an ounce of sympathy for me? Do you not fear for my life?” Aaron tried to provoke Neil.

“What? Since when do you care about my–” Neil started, but stopped mid-sentence

Mouth hanging open, his eyes wide in realization, Neil stared at Aaron.

“Oh, fuck you Aaron.”

Aaron saw red.

“No, fuck YOU, Josten! Ever since you came to Palmetto, to this fucking team, you did nothing but feed us lies over lies over lies! You can’t keep your fucking mouth shut for two seconds to think about what it will do to this oh so precious team! It’s not brave, it’s not endearing. It’s reckless, and stupid, and fucking exhausting, is what it is! All the team has done is praise you and protect you from us big bad Monsters, but really, who’s the monster here? The guys who were handed shit their whole lives and turned bitter, or the guy who shows up, fucks everyone over and lies about it? Huh? Tell me, Josten! FUCKING TELL ME!” Aaron shouted.

“You think I’d go through all this trouble just to sabotage a pathetic team of troubled youth with mommy and daddy issues in the middle of bumfuck nowhere? For what, exactly? Don’t try to act smart, Aaron, it doesn’t suit you. You think you’ve got it all figured out, huh? You haven’t got shit. You’re a stupid hindrance to society and you can’t even comprehend games that are way above you,” Neil replied coldly.

Aaron was not intimidated one bit. The guy had a shitstorm coming.

“Then why are you here? If you’re not the mole, if you think I’m nothing, if you believe you had nothing to do with this, why are you here?”

Neil didn’t answer. He clenched his fists and waited.

“I’ll tell you why. You’re here because you want me to tell you that no matter who it is, we need them. You need them. I won’t come back 'til next season, and you need nine players. You need them. You’re here because you need to hear me say that Andrew won’t hate you if you tell the team exactly that. You’re here because you need your conscience eased. Because you can’t stop your lies, you can’t stop the Ravens from coming, but you also can’t stop playing. You want me to tell you that’s it’s okay to sacrifice me if it means you get to stay, to play, to live. You’re here to make me tell you that you don’t need to run. Kevin talked to me, you know? He told me everything about him, about his past. That’s already braver than you could ever dream to be. But here’s the thing. There are holes in his story. 'Says that those are stories that aren’t his to tell. But you… you fit right in these blanks. Like the fucking missing puzzle piece that you are. So I don’t know who you are to the Ravens, to the Moriyamas, to Riko… I don’t know what it is that you have to do with 'the Butcher’. Yeah, I heard that. I don’t know why you have beef with Jean Moreau either. But I do know you’re not the traitor. You’re not. I hate you, and I wish you were dead. And you hate me, and you wish I were dead. You might have proven yourself to Andrew, but not to me. And you’re still lying to him. If you don’t think he knows, then you’re as dumb as you look. But still. You’re not it. So listen to me very carefully. Somewhere in there, behind those big blue eyes, you can still feel guilt. I know you do. So I want you to consider this. Look at me. Look at me! This bed? This bed could easily have been anyone else’s. Could’ve been Matt’s, or Dan’s. Andrew’s. Even Wymack’s, even Kevin’s. You think because it’s me, that it matters less, that it doesn’t matter at all. But hear this, Neil Josten: you might not be the traitor we’re looking for, but you’ve already hurt all of us more than they have. That is something you should consider. And it should bother you. Now get out of my room.”

Neil was speechless.

Aaron was breathless.

Neil left without a word.

Aaron wanted to fall back into oblivion, wanted to cry rivers, wanted to run for his life. Aaron firmly believed in everything he had said. He knew these truths. That didn’t make them any less hurtful, any less real, any less terrifying. Alas, exhaustion was a perverse enemy. Aaron gave in and fell asleep with tears on his cheeks.

Hours passed, or maybe just minutes, and Aaron woke from a strange dream. The sight in front of him when he opened his eyes was even stranger. Once his eyes were fixed on the shadowy form in the corner of his room, it moved into the light.

Aaron felt his heart drop.

“Came here to finish the job?” he inquired, aiming for bravery and cockiness despite the fear gripping his guts.

No answer.

“Damn, you’re good. How did you get Andrew to go away?” Aaron went on.

Still no answer.

“So how you gonna do it? Unplug my IVs? Steal the transfusion blood? Rip my stitches? Wait, no. You’re gonna inject me with an air bubble, right?” Aaron still continued.

This time, a voice responded

“That’s what I was told to do, yes,” Seth Gordon answered.

Aaron had been right.

“Alright, then,” Aaron said, unsurprised.

Seth didn’t move.

“Come on, you won’t have much time before Andrew comes back. Just do it,” Aaron whispered.

“No, I don’t think I will.”

That did surprise Aaron.

“What, you’ve suddenly developed a conscience?” Aaron antagonized him.

“A conscience? A con– You think I wanted this?” Seth angrily replied.

“I heard you. In the bathrooms. You’ve made a deal with Riko to play for the Ravens. This is how you get in. This is how you prove your loyalty, how you annihilate the competition,” Aaron whispered, louder this time.

“Oh, stupid little druggie… Don’t you think I knew you were there?”

“Then why let me hear if not to kill me later?” Aaron asked

“Because I wanted you to get me out!” Seth cried out.

And that… that Aaron hadn’t seen coming

“ 'Out’… Seth, what does he have on you?” Aaron asked, softly.

“He– That night– It– It was supposed to be me. Not you. Me. I was drunk off my ass, Ally had just dropped me off after a fight. They were waiting for me, needles and pills in hand. They said if I made a single sound, they’d come for Ally too. So I begged. I begged, and they called Riko Moriyama. He spoke to me. Told me to tell him every dirt I had on your group. So I did,” Seth recounted.

Aaron started to understand more and more.

“And I’m sorry it put you through hell. But I’m not sorry I did it. Nobody on this fucking team has my back. Nobody cares. It’s not fair, what I did. But it isn’t fair either, what you all do.”

Seth started approaching the bed.

“The fact that it took so long for anyone to figure it out, when I was leaving all those obvious fucking clues for you to help me out, proves how much nobody gives a shit about Seth Gordon. Only I can protect me. Only I has my back. And you bunch of freaks–” Seth went on before he was interrupted.

“I don’t think you’re in any position to use that word, Gordon.”

Kevin.

Oh thank God.

Kevin grabbed Seth by the collar and pushed him hard against the wall, his other hand on his throat. It took everything in him not to strangle the other striker right there and then.

Two weeks ago, Kevin wouldn’t have given a shit about what Seth had done to Aaron. He would’ve only cared that he tried to ruin their team.

Now…

Oh, now it burned Kevin to his core. Yet he himself had come to the same conclusion Aaron had: they couldn’t afford to lose another player if they still wanted to compete.

“You will do as I say, otherwise Andrew will hear about this. This is the last time you come anywhere close to Aaron. You will get out of his room. You will not speak to him, you will not look at him. You will shut up about this until we figure out what to do with you. As far as the team is concerned, you came in here to apologize for being an asshole to Aaron. Understood?” Kevin roared in Seth’s ear.

If looks could kill, the great Kevin Day wouldn’t be anymore. Seth leaned his head back to spit in Kevin’s face, but the latter slammed it back against the wall with force.

“I said, understood?”

Seth clenched his jaw.

“…Yes.”

Then he walked out, shaking. Which left Aaron and Kevin alone for the first time since Kevin’s confession the day before.

“How long have you known?” Kevin asked.

“I had my suspicions since, I don’t know… Since Neil burned his car, maybe? But I only really knew at the banquet,” Aaron said.

“Why didn’t you say anything? Why did you do this alone? Why didn’t you tell anybody? Why didn’t you tell me?” Kevin asked again, confused and angry.

“I– I don’t know, to be honest…” Aaron answered.

“But– Aaron, for Christ’s sake! You–” Kevin tried to say.

Aaron cut him off.

“Kevin. Kevin. I– We’ll figure out something. Okay? But this isn’t what we should be talking about right now, and you know it,” Aaron said.

“What do you mean.”

“Kevin. My game.” Aaron said.

Kevin shut up. His mouth opened and closed a few times, no sound coming out. Then he put his walls up and his features hardened.

“What about your game.”

“Don’t play dumb. Not with me. You know very well that I can’t– I can’t give you my part of the deal anymore. My game is ruined” Aaron said.

It was like a punch to the gut. Kevin knew that, on some level, but he didn’t want to see it, to admit it. Even when the truth was lying in the bed right in front of him.

“Aaron… You don’t know that… The doctors said–”

“I know what the doctors said. Fucking Josten was kind enough to spell it out for me. I may be talking like everything’s fine, but it’s not. It hurts, Kevin. Inside. And outside. It hurts so much. I may not even see the end of the week. Anything could happen at any moment. So, I need to say this, in case– If anything happens, you have to hold on to Andrew, okay? He– He’ll need you, and you can’t–”

“Shut up. Shut the fuck up. This isn’t happening. It’s a matter of day by day. Minute by minute. So what if you can’t play this season? There’s always the next one. Or the one after that. And after that. So you, you do what you’ve always done. You fight. You fight, Aaron. I– We’ve got you. Leave the rest up to me. I’ll take care of everything. Just because you can’t play doesn’t mean– I won’t– I’ll be– I–” Kevin stammered.

“Kevin. What is it.”

“I– Christ. It’s just– Just because you can’t play, doesn’t mean I’ll give up on your game. I’ll be there. I won’t quit. I–” Kevin tried to say.

He took a deep breath. He sought out Aaron’s eyes.

“Aaron. I won’t let go.”

(read on Ao3 here !)

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mrmichaelchadler · 6 years

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RIP Cinema: On James Dean's Disappearance and French New Wave Legacy

This creative essay was inspired by a real philosophy podcast and an illogical dream. What if James Dean lived into the ‘60s and worked primarily with French New Wave directors?

Decades from now, international film critics will philosophize about James Dean’s “First Four.” And why not, given the directorial and cultural prestige of films like “East of Eden” (1955), “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955), “Giant” (1956) and certainly Dean’s influential portrayal of boxer Rocky Graziano in Robert Wise’s Oscar-winning black and white picture “Somebody Up There Likes Me” (1956), co-starring Dean’s Italian wife, Pier Angeli. Few other male actors have affected American movie culture during like Dean, but he’ll always be remembered not as an American Rebel, but as the unlikely French New Wave icon who bridged the gap between European cinephiles and American movie buffs; the architect of the international societal movement known as RIP Culture.

Inspired by Louis Malle’s 1957 New Wave classic “Let It Rip (Déchirure),” written by French film critic and noted script doctor Jean-Luc Godard, RIP Culture promotes professional proactivity, cultural diversity and personal creativity through casual meditation. Nowadays, even the most ignorant moviegoers understand the cultural connotations of “Let It Rip,” an improvised line, courtesy of Dean, that sparked genuine conversations about race, gender and art amongst moviegoers and powerful global influencers. Portraying Roger Seitz—an American in Paris—Dean’s now-famous speech to his jazz-happy pub crawl partners precedes one of cinema’s most revelatory and moving discussions about cultural divides.

And, of course, “Let It Rip” introduced the world to Dean’s inimitable co-stars—Miles Davis, Dorothy Dandridge, Jeanne Moreau and Claudia Cardinale—all of whom used their national prestige to further advance international RIP Culture, or “Strappa La Cultura” as Cardinale famously evoked at the 1958 Oscars. Once a promising Method actor from New York City via the American midwest, Dean evolved into a cinematic prophet who trumped the Aww-Shucks mentality that made U.S. teenagers so temperamental and unpredictable during the late ‘50s. “Let It Rip” offered come clarity and balance, thanks to Dean’s mainstream appeal and the New Wave’s rising European influence. From that point forward, Dean’s collaborations with French New Wave directors became known as FRIP productions.

While “Let It Rip” inspired a global movement, Claude Chabrol’s 1958 film "Handsome Serge” represents the connecting tissue for international audiences. Already a noted film critic and Alfred Hitchcock devotee, Chabrol brilliantly utilized his relationship with Dean, via Godard, to secure FRIP Culture funding for his debut feature, based on a self-funded short film produced on location in Sardent, France. Opposite French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, Dean further establishes himself as a New Wave hero, thus “paying it back,” as the Cahiers du Cinéma FRIP directors unquestionably appreciated American auteurs. With Dean portraying the savvy American cousin Eugene Tallerico, “Handsome Serge” paved the way for François Truffaut’s 1959 FRIP film “Breathless,” in which Dean’s “Rebel Without a Cause” co-star Natalie Wood stars opposite the “French James Dean,” Gerard Blain; a fusion of cultural philosophies that further strengthened international RIP Culture. While Dean only makes a cameo in “Breathless,” as his “Rebel Without a Cause” character Jim Stark, his mere presence strengthens the cultural connection, with Truffaut’s affinity for a-day-in-the-life conflict inspiring the American to fully maximize his screen time with careful improvisation. As for “Handsome Serge,” Chabrol managed to minimize Dean’s Method-inspired maniacal movements, resulting in a more natural and relatable character portrayal.

After Elvis Presley's tragic street mob death in 1960, Dean not only grabbed the torch as America’s leading pop culture voice, but also spread a universal message of creative camaraderie via Jacques Demy’s "The Soldiers of Cerbere” (1960)—a FRIP musical about love and war in the southwest corner of France. By this time, rumors had surfaced about Dean after a split from Angeli, and certainly after his reported romance with Cardinale during “Let It Rip”’s production. Given Godard’s reported admiration for the latter Italian actress, the media reports essentially killed a proposed FRIP trilogy, and the unspoken tension fully negated RIP Culture ideals.

Visually, “The Soldiers of Cerbere" highlights Dean’s chemistry with Danish actress Anna Karina (in her first feature role), but the film is anything but subtle with the character subtext between Dean and co-star Jean-Claude Brialy, both of whom portray masculine men in search of a familial bliss, but clearly interested in personal freedom. As Francis Franco, an opinionated wine connoisseur, Dean occasionally stumbles while attempting to sell “Pinot drunk,” but he does, in fact, appear charming and verbally succinct during the film’s street scenes, many of which were improvised by the male leads. While most European audiences were skeptical of Dean’s “too-giddy” song-and-dance numbers, Americans clamored at the box office and fully recovered from Elvis Fatigue.

While Dean’s FRIP productions weren’t a point of contention with La Nouvelle Vague as a whole, the growing professional bonds undoubtedly stung on a personal level for some. But then Dean return to America, and didn’t make another Parisian-set film for another six years.

That’s not to say that Dean entirely stopped working with New Wave directors. In 1962, Stanley Kubrick enlisted America’s artistic rebel for “The Idiot,” an existentialist adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel, written by FRIP director Jacques Rivette. As Pyotr Myshkin, a skeptical outcast living in New York City, Dean represents a sympathetic and cinematic version of The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, with the performance guiding American audiences into a more self-aware era. Less than seven years after starring in “Rebel Without a Cause,” Dean essentially landed a haymaker on the American psyche once again, this time punctuating the movement’s core aesthetic concepts with his staccato manner of speech and harrowing train monologues. To this day, the “It’s me, Pyotr, and I’m crying” scene is the go-to for many aspiring performers in American casting rooms. Back then, Dean’s RIP interpretation of The Idiot appealed to quasi-conservatives with its surface level religious concepts, all the while providing RIP intellectuals with a healthy dose of philosophical material to break down at dinner parties.

During the mid-‘60s, Dean’s “RIP for America” campaign with President John F. Kennedy had a polarizing effect on RIP loyalists. On one level, Agnès Varda’s complementary documentary showcases the ins and outs of Dean’s quest for artistic education and enlightenment, but it’s the rumored “lost footage” that partially damaged the RIPPER’s reputation at the time. While many RIP loyalists blamed the Hollywood elite, it’s been reported that the so-called “Savage Detectives” Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima—the leaders of the Visceral Realism movement—were the instigators via a word-of-mouth smear campaign. Some have even argued that Mexican-American icon Ritchie Valens and tour-mate Buddy Holly were corrupted during the southwest leg of the tour, shortly before recording the movement’s chart-topping theme song. And when Dean returned to Manhattan to teach RIP Culture Performance at the Actor’s Studio, rumors spread that Brando himself had played a role in the fiasco. Unsurprisingly, those on the fringe of RIP Culture questioned the core ideals and distanced themselves from Dean—“rebels with a cause,” as the Visceral Realists would later call them.

In 1964, Dean reunited with FRIP filmmakers Chabrol and Truffaut to write “Theory of Forms,” directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The RIPPERS’ fresh narrative take on the master’s suspense formula allowed the director himself to “break on through,” as poet Jim Morrison famously wrote in American RIPPER, but it also afforded Dean some extra comfort during the most challenging and intimate scenes with co-star Sophia Loren. Mainstream American audiences weren’t used to such blatant sensuality, and the characters’ borderline mean-spirited dialogue challenged the very essence of RIP Culture by almost going “too far,” as American film critic Peter Bogdanovich wrote in RIP Cinema upon the film’s release.

When Dean returned to Europe for Alain Resnais’ "The Bullfighter” (1965), he organically transformed into a self-assured artist. In the Madrid-based FRIP film, loosely inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Dean begins strong—like a Raging Bull—by communicating intensity, passion and ultimately heartbreak, as “El Destripador” recounts the life and death of his bride-to-be. By immediately shredding the character of all masculinity, Resnais allows Dean to channel the vulnerability of his early characters. Many critics perceived "The Bullfighter” to be some type of creative response to the Visceral Realists, when it actually seems to be a nostalgic reflection on Dean’s mid-‘50s naïveté.

Before production commenced for “The Bullfighter,” Dean invited filmmaker and FRIP comrade Varda to document the experience, resulting in one of cinema’s most poignant behind-the-scenes portraits of an icon coming into his own, “Spanish Caravan” (1966). By now, Dean had fully dismissed the Method technique—“egotistical and stiff,” as he called it—and embraced outline scripts that allowed him to, well, “RIP.” Once upon a time, Godard and Malle helped Dean innovate while connecting with various demographics. Then, in the early ‘60s, Demy and Dean expanded the international RIP Culture family. Finally, Chabrol inspired Dean to pay special attention to American affairs, thus “bringing it all back home,” as midwest folk singer Robert Zimmerman exclaimed. “The Bullfighter” features Dean at top form.

For “Let It Rip”’s unofficial 10-year anniversary, Dean teamed up with Jean-Pierre Melville for "Culture Vulture,” resulting in Dean’s most shocking performance of the decade. Set in Paris, and written by FRIP outlier Alain Robbe-Grillet, the subversive heist thriller shows Dean satirizing a new school of radical performers; an unapologetic culture attack on the Mexico-based Visceral Realists. As thief Johnny Golightly, Dean literally and figuratively rips off French culture, aided by Brando’s Ace McCracken. The unlikely pairing itself guaranteed box office success, and with the deliberately non-sexualized appearances of Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, “Culture Vulture” wildly succeeded by systemically picking apart the Savage Detectives’ questionable methods.

In a way, "Culture Vulture” established a sub-genre of film, along with hybrid approach for second wave of FRIP performers. Filled with fourth wall commentaries via reflected mirrors—later seen in Éric Rohmer’s instant RIP classic “The Prince” (1969) and especially in Jean-Luc Godard’s “American Ripper” (1969), Melville’s societal commentary bluntly addresses the rift between FRIP filmmakers and Visceral Realists.

Rohmer’s “The Prince” represents a “Culture Vulture” companion piece; a fitting conclusion to the FRIP director’s exploration of morals. The Florence-set Machiavellian tale of breakfast and ethics reunited Dean with “Let It Rip” co-star Cardinale and further cemented each as powerful multi-lingual orators in their native countries. Most importantly, "The Prince” clarified vague concepts from “Culture Vulture,” such as the melding of Method and Rip acting approaches.

If the Visceral Realists had gained momentum by late 1969, Dean and Godard calmed the storm by releasing the FRIP documentary “American RIPPER,” an insightful look at JFK’s final months in office, Martin Luther King’s European tour and the systematic deconstruction of the Che Guevara myth, after the Argentine-Cuban rebel was captured in Bolivia and questioned stateside about about the rising tensions between RIP radicals and rogue Visceral Realists.

With the impending release of Dean’s directorial debut “East of Fairmount,” along with Louis Malle’s road trip FRIP film “Easy Rebel,” one could argue that RIP Culture won’t soon fade away. But given Dean’s disappearance from the public eye, immediately after brashly criticizing the Visceral Realists’ political beliefs, one must wonder if the King of RIP is finally ready for a creative break. Or maybe, he’s simply preparing for Martin Scorsese’s loose interpretation of the mid-‘60s Kennedy-Guevara summit, in which he’s reportedly set to portray Chicago mobster Sam Giancana opposite Brando as President Robert F. Kennedy.

In RIP Cinema Vol. 1, Dean said “To RIP is to capitalize on the moment, and to RISE is to learn something valuable from the experience.” To paraphrase his famous call to action: RIP & RISE, James Dean. We’re waiting.

Vincent Quinn RIP Cinema Vol. 161, May 1971

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