#they have to have some sort of violent undercurrent before they can really connect and even when they do that violence persists

[soundsof71]

So, considering you are a passionate fan of music released in 1971, I feel justifiably obligated to ask you what you think of Buffy Sainte-Marie's 'She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina' album. 😂 (Also, it would make me beyond happy if you could post more about Buffy, my friend! Thank you! ❣)

Buffy Sainte-Marie + Crazy Horse - what’s not to love? LOL I confess that it was the Crazy Horse connection that caught my attention first. I had a general idea who Buffy was, had seen her on TV a few times, but I was a big Crazy Horse fan. News that they were her backing band for this album was easily enough for me to scoop it up.

They weren’t doing anything much with Neil Young in 1971 (other than this album, on which Neil also appeared!), but they had released a tasty solo album in February 71, produced by Jack Nitzsche (who also produced this, and would later marry Buffy), and featuring Ry Cooder (also featured here, although did not marry Buffy). 

(btw, the first place that Buffy, Ry, and Jack worked together was on the Nic Roeg film Performance, starring Mick Jagger. People obviously remember Mick in that, but musically, Buffy was the best part!) 

She Used To Wanna... also features Jesse Ed Davis, a Native American guitarist and singer who was a frequent “usual suspect” at these sort of “sure, invite everyone!” jam albums of the era, and played a prominent role at 1971′s biggest concert (at least in the US), The Concert for Bangladesh on August 1.

(I know you know  RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked The World, the documentary about indigenous music’s influence on rock and roll, which has chapters on both Buffy and Jesse Ed. I just watched it again recently, and love it! A reminder of Buffy’s pivotal role in classic rock history. Not mentioned in the film: she relentlessly championed the work of her fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, helping them get their first record deals.)

I haven’t listened to She Used To Wanna Be A Ballerina for a while, so I definitely need to do that, along with posting more pictures of Buffy.  (I can’t believe I’ve only posted two!) 

But I’ll tell you what still stands out to me about that record years later. “Smack Water Jack” is an underrated track from Carole King’s Tapestry that got a ton of airplay at the time. Quincy Jones did an instrumental cover as the title track for his terrific 1971 album, too, but it has somehow faded to obscurity since then. Buffy takes a playful trifle, and turns it into a powerful fable of men of color who explode into violence in response to the violence visited upon them, and self-satisfaction of whites in authority who answer their demands for better living conditions by killing them on the spot. 

No need for a trial when you can murder them in the streets, right? “You can't talk to a man when he don't wanna understand / And he don't wanna understand” hits different when Buffy sings it, and in 2020 for that matter. 

It’s also just a terrific performance whose combination of soul and rock and roll and driving piano in a sort of Old West-sounding context would have made this sound right at home on a record like Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection  or something by The Band. I’m limited to five video embeds per post so I can’t embed it here, so I'm linking instead: anyone who hasn’t heard this definitely needs to.

Her cover of Neil’s CSNY track “Helpless” has things I like even better than Neil’s original, including Merry Clayton standing in for CSN. Buffy’s version is more muscular (thanks again to Crazy Horse), and taps even more deeply into the isolation of the song that the star power of CSNY somewhat obscured. 

Buffy’s version also made a brief but memorable appearance in the 2018 film Hotel Artemis, starring Jodie Foster. A weird little movie that I loved maybe more than it deserved LOL but I recommend nonetheless:

I know that this album gets attention because of the unusual number of covers, including one by Leonard Cohen, and a cover of a cover that Leonard had made famous on top of that, called "Song of the French Partisan” (hers is the far superior version imo, a song of French resistance to Nazi occupation from the perspective of a woman hiding a resister), but there are a couple of standout originals too. 

I love the title of this record, and the title track is a delightful little stomper that playfully cautions against equating the intentions of grown women with the childhood fantasies they’ve grown out of. More Merry Clayton goodness here on backing vocals too. 

“Soldier Blue” is a powerful song first written for the 1970 film of the same name, billed at the time as “The most savage film in history” -- and maybe it was. It used the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre as a metaphor for Vietnam, and it's still shockingly brutal. It was the third-highest grossing movie in the UK in 1971, though, and the single became a top-10 hit for Buffy there. 

It didn’t do as well here, either the song or the movie. Perhaps not shockingly in retrospect, Soldier Blue was pulled from American theaters after a few days, the Vietnam metaphor not at all lost on the Nixon administration. 

As horrifying as it was, this is about when I was reading Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (first published in 1970), and Soldier Blue resonated with me in a whole lot of ways. Here’s the song in the opening credits of the movie.

I was also really struck by “Moratorium”, which is the story of “Universal Soldier” (from her 1963 debut, but a bigger hit for Donovan in 1965), coming from the opposite direction. In the earlier song, she blamed war on the soldiers who think that fighting is honorable, but here, she has empathizes with the young men, boys really in many cases, who’ve been lied to by their countries, their parents, and even their friends. They’re not vainglorious. They’ve been duped by people they trusted. 

(I don't think she takes enough into account how many men sign up to fight because they want to embrace and celebrate their worst, most violent impulses, which was of course an undercurrent of “Universal Soldier”, but I appreciate her empathy here. More than one thing is true at a time.)

Buffy goes even farther, though, calling on soldiers to support and validate demands for peace as explicitly supporting them, summed up in the unforgettable cry, "Fuck the war and bring our brothers home!" 

1971 was the peak of antiwar demonstrations in the US, with the biggest crowds ever seen in this country until the 2017 Women’s March. The May 1971 demonstrations pretty much shut down Washington, culminating with Vietnam Veterans Against The War throwing back their medals on the steps of the US Capitol, incredibly powerful stuff to see on TV in my formative years, and Buffy was right there in it. Anti-war songs were a cottage industry for sure, but nobody was writing with the nuance and empathy that Buffy was.

Here’s a 1972 performance of “Moratorium”, Buffy and a piano, and more emotionally bare than that:

There’s obviously lots more to say about Buffy, far outside the realm of protest music that was actually just a small part of her musical palette -- her pioneering experiments with electronic music, her educational philanthropy starting in her 20s, Sesame Street, you name it. Her commercial peak was still in front of her, and while I can’t say that this is my favorite of her records, it does have some of my favorite songs of hers, and 1971 and She Used to Wanna Be A Ballerina is definitely where I went from knowing who Buffy Sainte-Marie was to being a fan. 

I'll also note as I do now and again that while this blog started as an offshoot of a book on 1971 that I’d started but abandoned, I mostly listen to music released now. That’s always been my policy, including in 1971. When 1972 rolled up, I was mostly listening to music from 1972, music from ‘80 in ‘80, ‘91 in ‘91, 2018 in 2018, etc., to name just a few other favorites. (Plus The Beatles, okay? LOL I still listen to The Beatles every day. No apologies.) Honestly? It took me until 2011, in my fifties, when a whole bunch of 40th anniversary editions of 1971 albums got released all at once that made me think, “Wait a minute, this was maybe THE pivotal year in classic rock history!” 

So yeah, the historian in me dug into 1971, but even though I happened to be alive and enthralled by music in that year, what I’m doing here has nothing to do with nostalgia, or any idea that that was the *best* year in music, even if for the narrow slice of music that is classic rock, yeah, it absolutely is. For soul/R&B too, and for the explosion of women artists outside the even narrower confines of pop as well. This is not subject to debate. No year like it, before or since. It's just that classic rock is a such a narrow slice, and I like my slices wide. LOL Which is also why my blog has less and less 1971 content as I go along. 

While my general policy is that my favorite year for music is THIS year, this particular year hasn’t left me as much energy as usual for listening to music. Some of it is These Trying Times™, some of it is my bipolarity and schizophrenia getting the better of me in waves, as is the way with these, uhm, things. (Keep taking those meds, kids!) I listen to music and post about the people making it as a creative act, not a passive or reflexive one, and I just haven’t felt as creative as usual.

(This is also has everything to do with why so many Asks have been piling up unanswered. I apologize if you’re one of the many kind and indulgent souls who’s gotten in touch, but I swear I’m gonna get to ‘em all!)

To get an idea of what I’m ACTUALLY passionate about right now, my “to be edited later” running list of 2020 favorites randomly added to a playlist as I encounter them, to be properly curated later, is at Spotify, cleverly entitled “2020″ -- 94% women, which is about right. LOL 

But since I do in fact listen to old stuff (by which I mean 2019 LOL), I made a list of mostly 2020 bangers from women rockers with some tasty treats from 2019 that I haven’t been able to let go of just yet, inspired by a post I saw at tumblr saying that punk music by women is just plain better (also beyond debate), called “Women Bangers: A Tumblr New Classics Jam”. I’ll be posting an essay with a YouTube playlist soon, because god forbid that I only talk briefly about anything LOL and most of these women need to be heard AND seen.

Like Buffy Sainte-Marie, whom you'll both see and hear more often on my blog soon. Thanks for the reminder! Always a pleasure to hear from you and be challenged by you. :-)

Peace, Tim 

#ask #musicrunsthroughmysoul #buffy saint marie #women in rock #1971 #she used to wanna be a ballerina #1971 album #youtube #1971 single #crazy horse #essay #me

[fantastic-bby]

Books & Poems I love

Hello, I am just dumping my favourite books and poems here because I like them and I want people to read them too bcs they're cool. Disclaimer: I haven't read some of these books in a REALLY long time, so the explanations might be a bit off since this is mostly what I remember from when I had read them. All will be under the cut and I hope someone out there finds these as enjoyable as I do!

Books

1. Huntress by Malinda Lo

Nature is out of balance in the human world. The sun hasn’t shone in years, and crops are failing. Worse yet, strange and hostile creatures have begun to appear. The people’s survival hangs in the balance.

To solve the crisis, the oracle stones are cast, and Kaede and Taisin, two seventeen-year-old girls, are picked to go on a dangerous and unheard-of journey to Tanlili, the city of the Fairy Queen. Taisin is a sage, thrumming with magic, and Kaede is of the earth, without a speck of the otherworldly. And yet the two girls’ destinies are drawn together during the mission. As members of their party succumb to unearthly attacks and fairy tricks, the two come to rely on each other and even begin to fall in love. But the Kingdom needs only one huntress to save it, and what it takes could tear Kaede and Taisin apart forever.

I cannot express how much I adore this book. It's so well-written and the entire book feels like such an adventure to read. I have to warn everyone who will read this that it is quite violent. I also love the WLW inclusion which is carried throughout the story. It's also mentioned in the beginning that Kaede does not want to marry a prince because she could never marry a man. It's filled with lots of romance and it's fantasy because I'm a sucker for fantasy reads.

My sister had bought this book for me after I had lost my first copy and my cat peed on my second copy. The first time, I had bought it from a Big Bad Wolf sale in about 2014. The second, I ordered it through Kinokuniya, but I'm pretty sure you can get it off of Amazon as well.

2. Teardrop by Lauren Kate

Never, ever cry . . .

Seventeen-year-old Eureka won't let anyone close enough to feel her pain. After her mother was killed in a freak accident, the things she used to love hold no meaning. She wants to escape, but one thing holds her back: Ander, the boy who is everywhere she goes, whose turquoise eyes are like the ocean.

And then Eureka uncovers an ancient tale of romance and heartbreak, about a girl who cried an entire continent into the sea. Suddenly her mother's death and Ander's appearance seem connected, and her life takes on dark undercurrents that don't make sense.

Can everything you love be washed away?

This is also a book that I've read multiple times. I've even read the sequel, Waterfall, but I don't think I actually got around to finishing it since I bought it right before my exams. Another love and fantasy novel, it covers a lot of grieving and pain that Eureka goes through after losing her mother and at one point, she actually wishes it was her that had died during the accident.

Her relationship with Ander is quite sudden since he just shows up out of nowhere and just happens to know practically everything about her. I, personally, enjoy this book out of the amount of angst that it's filled with. It's very well-written and I still have the first copy that I bought at the same Big Bad Wolf sale that I had gotten Huntress. I think I had gotten the sequal at Kinokuniya as well (?), but I'm not entirely sure because it's been a really long time.

3. Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

No one knows why Juliette's touch is fatal, but The Reestablishment has plans for her. Plans to use her as a weapon. But Juliette has plans of her own. After a lifetime without freedom, she's finally discovering a strength to fight back for the very first time--and to find a future with the one boy she thought she's lost forever.

Another very angsty book. It centres around Juliette, a girl who, for some reason, kills everyone she touches. It's also written in First POV and in the format of a journal. It feels more personal because some of the lines are striked through to show a thought that Juliette had in the moment of writing that she decided to replace with a different approach instead.

The beginning is basically Juliette being locked away in some sort of a prison because of her 'gift' and she writes to keep herself from going crazy, but then one day some guy is put into the same cell as her. It's another romance novel and also a kind of superhero novel It also gets pretty... ahem... seggsy... at one point, but it's a good read.

I've read the entire series aside from Restore Me. I have it, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Shatter Me is also from the same Big Bad Wolf sale as the other two lol. Juliette is also trapped in a love triangle at one point, but I won't get into it. It also gets a bit violent, but slightly less graphic than Huntress is and is also another 'self-discover' kinda book. (can you see a theme here that I read lol)

4. Winter's End by Jean-Claude Mourlevat

Four teenagers escape from their prison-like boarding schools to take up the fight against the tyrannical government that murdered their parents fifteen years earlier. But only three of the friends make it safely to Jahn's restaurant, the headquarters of a secret resistance movement, where they discover the astonishing power that one voice can have in the fight for freedom.

As the battle rages, the three friends are in a race against time to save their companion, who has been forced to participate in a deadly, ancient game for the amusement of his captors. Will this new generation prevail, or are they destined to meet the same grisly fate as their parents?

This is also extremely angsty. It's also pretty violent as well, so that's a warning for whoever will read this. Once again, well-written, nice flow to the story and I just really like this book. There's a lot of uncovering in the book that makes you go HUH because the four students end up uncovering a lot about their government and the secrets that involve the four of them.

It has a very heavy dark tone to it, which I really enjoy. It's a bit different from the other three which is less fantasy and more of a dystopian book. It's a very heroic, determination feeling that follows the students as they journey throughout the book. Also something that follows the students are a group of dog-men... things... that I'm pretty sure I actually had small nightmares imagining when I had read this in around 2013 or 2014.

Poems

Disclaimer: Half of these were poems I did essays on in high school aside from L. These are my illustrations of it and they're the ones that stood out to me when I had first read them.

1. Daffodils by William Wordsworth

I read this in high school when I was taking English Literature. It's a poem that Wordsworth wrote after his wife had passed away. I love the way it's written and William Wordsworth is one of my favourite poets. It's filled with the feeling of being lost and rediscovering the joys of the small things in life. There's a lot of imagery that refers to the flower, daffodil, and overall, it's just a a very soft themed poem.

I think the reason this poem stood out to me was because I was feeling a bit lost at the time I read it (the end of highschool) and I was desperately trying to find something I could relate to in some way.

2. Winter by Andrew Young

Another one that contains a lot of imagery. It's a poem about the beauty of Winter and how, while it's seen as a dark and gloomy season, it has hidden beauties that you can see if you're able to look past the initial image of it.

This poem in particular, I'm pretty sure I have a soft spot for in my heart mainly because of the soft spot I have for Winter in general.

3. London by William Blake

This is a more dark toned poem. It covers what old London used to be like with the raging poverty at the time. A lot of child labour and sex workers that would struggle with making money when they would accidentally get pregnant.

It's quite a depressing poem that I like because of the dark undertone and I, personally, really enjoy William Blake's works.

4. L by Bernice Chauly

L is a poem about how her daughter had cut her hair right after going to the hairdressers. While Chauly's daughter is crying when she yells at her, Chauly is reminded of when she had done something similar when she had just turned five years old. She thinks back to it and remembers that, at the time, all she wanted was to see her late father.

This is also more heavy set and it makes me think of the way children must feel when they lose their parents at such young ages.

#books #poems #literature #reading material

[racefortheironthrone]

Thoughts on House of X#2

I fell way behind on writing these even as I devoured each issue, so I thought I might as well knock these off as the HoX/PoX miniseries come to an end and the “Dawn of X” looms over the horizon. (Also I did a re-read recently and it got my mind buzzing.) 

So let’s get into it!

Moira’s Ten Lives:

It turns out that, like everyone else, I was sort of right/wrong about time travel shenanigans. It’s technically a semi-stable time loop, but I’m not about to quibble. (Incidentally, on a re-read one of the things that’s been really impressive to see with the benefit of hindsight is the way in which Hickman et al. top each issue with the newest high concept or reveal, like some mad plate-spinning act.)

Here’s how the individual lives break down:

Life 1: 

Because everything in this life takes place prior to the activation of her mutant gene (which, talk about a hell of an additive retcon), Moira’s first life is a romanticized, bucolic portrait of innocence not corrupted by worldly knowledge. The emphasis is strongly on family and nature (note the tree motif, which isn’t as prominent as the tower motif but still) as opposed to scientific pursuits.

On the other hand, you definitely get the sense that the perfect nature of this life is a distortion caused by nostalgia, as we’ll see in the next life.

Life 2:

Moira reincarnates for the first time with full knowledge of her previous life, which for all that HoX/PoX has been analyzed through the lens of both Christian and Jewish theology, can’t help but draw from Hindu and Buddhist thought.

One key aspect of her power is that Moira is given an enormous developmental leg up, being born with all of the skills of a grown adult. Suprisingly, we don’t actually get to see Moira make much use of some of the broader implications of her mutant power.

As a good scientist, Moira uses observation and experimentation to prove to herself that her memories are real and that she can change the future through her actions, two critical pieces of information.

Speaking of Buddhism, Moira’s “curse” concept is tied to the Second Noble Truth, that suffering comes from attachment. In this case, Moira’s problem is an attachment to her memories of her idealized first life: when she meets Kenneth Cowan for the second time, the emotional connection isn’t there because her foreknowledge of her first life changes her perceptions.  

At the same time, I wonder how much of her reaction to this upheaval is due to her realizing that her first life wasn’t as perfect as she thought it was (the flaws she focuses on), or that she herself has changed and isn’t content to live and die as a rural schoolteacher.

In this timeline, Charles decides to come out of the closet as a mutant on national television, which is a different tack to how he’s approached pro-mutant activism in the past, although there is a common theme of putting his faith in public debate. Sadly a faith that will be broken. 

Despite her misgivings about her own mutant gifts, Moira decides to fly to America to meet Charles...and dies in a plane crash. I wonder how much of her heel turn in life 3 is due to the Kenneth Cowan issue and how much of it comes from her experiencing violent death for the first time?

Life 3:

In Moira’s third life, she turns sharply away from Charles (nicely symbolized by her turning away on a pub stool) to try to cure the mutant gene, which brings her face-to-mask with Destiny, who is the closest thing that this issue has to an antagonist (at least in the sense an outside force acting on Moira and changing her behavior).

The conversation between them is split in two: in the first, Destiny does a good job of laying out why narrative of individual choice/consumerism don’t really work with regard to mutant cures, because of pre-existing structures of power and inequality that will turn an option into a mandate. Something that Whedon’s “Gifted” arc and X3 should have maybe mentioned. 

(Incidentally, even before we got the later infographic from Powers of X #4 about mutant genocides, I thought this didn’t bode well for Wanda Maximoff.)

After setting up a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation - if you don’t change your behavior, this scenario will keep recurring - Destiny then gives us the next big reveal of the issue. Moira’s powers of resurrection only give her ten or eleven lives, that there is a way out of the cycle of endless rebirth if she makes the “right choice.” (Word is still out on the other aspects of the Eightfold Path.) I don’t know what the eleventh signifies - after House of X #5, I saw a lot of people suggesting pod-rebirth as her eleventh life, but I dunno. 

However, I did spot something this time: Destiny “see[s] ten lives...eleven if you make the right choice at the end.” This may be me reaching, but it suggests that Destiny knows already that Moira isn’t going to get it right in lives four through nine, but isn’t telling her. Which, given the immense potential involved in combining their powers, suggests that it’s not just about Rube Goldberging her way to the Good Ending but rather that Moira has to experience her defeats personally in order to grow into the person who would make the right choice. 

Life 4:

Having received a fiery “swift spiritual kick to the head,” Moira makes two changes in her life. First, she begins to approach the question of mutancy from a systems perspective - although I have some significant issues with Hickman’s evolutionary biology. Second, she looks deeper past Charles Xavier’s “confidence...arrogance,” to see the real Charles beneath, and the two fall in love (which makes the second time in her lives).

The result seems to be the 616, breaking down into the Gifted Years (the Kirby/Lee years), the Time of Hate and Fear (the All-New X-Men given to us by Claremont et al.), and “the lost decade,” which given the associated panel is a pretty clear slam on the last ten years of X-Men storytelling, most pointedly Avengers vs. X-Men. 

This page (p. 17) has made me somewhat out of step with a lot of folks who’ve been arguing online that Moira’s sixth life must be the 616 - a trend we’re going to see repeating.

Regardless, this timeline is the first to end with Sentinel genocide, resulting in Moira for the first time seeing the dystopian dilemma. Much of what follows is a series of unsuccessful iterative attempts to solve this dilemma.

Life 5:

In her first go, Moira decides to see if accelerating the process will work, showing Charles what happened to his dream in her past lives. Hickman’s use of the term “radicalized” is key here to understanding what’s going on with Krakoa in X^1, because as Moira learns (and Charles will learn), separatism alone will not do the trick. Mutants got an 11-year head start to build up their defenses, and the Sentinels came anyway.

Life 6:

Because this life remains completely redacted, the fandom has gone absolutely nuts in speculation. One common speculation I’ve seen is that the X^3 timeline is Life 6, which I find quite puzzling. The reveal in Powers of X #1 that Cylobel is stuck in Nimrod’s femtofluid database is strongly suggestive that X^3 is Life 9, unless we’re going to say that in alternate timelines in which so many variables change, there’s always going to be a black brain hound mutant who looks identical to Cylobel and who dies in the exact same way. Which strikes me as falling afoul of Occam’s Razor.

Life 7:

Here’s where we really start zeroing in on the dystopic dliemma, as Moira tries to forestall the inevitable by eliminating the Trask bloodline. It doesn’t work because of the whole idea that AI is a discovery not an invention, and as a result Sentinels will always come about and the only thing that can be changed is the name of the person who’ll discover them.

Here is where Hickman’s obsession with mechanical vs. biological transhumanism (and/or singularities) really come into play. If you’ve read his book Transhuman (which I don’t necessarily recommend, as it comes with some rather nasty sophomoric undercurrents that have aged very badly in the last ten years), you’ll know that Hickman considers biological transhumanism to be superior to the alternative. Something to keep in mind when thinking about mutants vs. the man-machine supremacy, mutants vs. the technarchy, etc. 

Interestingly, we never learn what happened to Xavier or the X-Men in this life.

Once again, Moira is “radicalized” by the seeming inevitability of robotic genocide, although it’s noticeable that her focus is shifting from humans to their creations.

Life 8:

Her solution is to go to Octopusheim and ally with Magneto, presumably because the Master of Magnetism is her first bet to go up against the mutants.

Magneto reacts to “the good news” with thermonuclear war, and gets curb-stomped by a combination of the Avengers, Fantastic Four, and X-Men.

Important note that by this point, Moira dismisses the idea of any great good beyond that only of mutants, and we go for another round of radicalization.

Life 9:

At this point, Moira decides to ally with Apocalypse out of desperation, presumably because Apocalypse is a revolutionary who can’t be killed as easily as Magneto can. 

Although we didn’t know it at the time, this is X^2 (and I think X^3) as well, and while Apocalypse’s power levels allow him to prosecute a war “without end,” it doesn’t solve the strategic stalemate.

Life 10:

I don’t know what the two black panels suggest; it’s quite possible that they’re just pauses for emphasis. 

In her tenth life, Moira takes a step back and focuses instead on “all the old ways of thinking.” Here, I think we see a preview of the Krakoan solution: mutant unity will unlock synergies of cooperation that were not possible while working with limited mindsets and only a part of mutankind. 

Notably, we don’t know when Moira or anyone else found out about the possibilities of Krakoa and mutant biotechnology - we know some of it existed in Life 9 because we see Krakoan flowers being used, but we don’t know if Moira encountered it earlier or whether the higher order stuff was in use. I somehow doubt the resurrection system was intact, because it would seem to make Mister Sinister’s breeding program largely irrelevant.  

Once more, we return to Powers of X #1, as we now know what Xavier learned from Moira’s mind.

Infographics:

The whole circle wrap-around thing is very evocative of other signs we’ve seen (on Cerebro when Xavier uses it for various higher-order stuff, on the Librarian’s face, etc.), but it actively makes the map harder to read, which I think is the point. 

(Also, while I’m complaining: Comixology is not well set up for these large-scale infographics, because it keeps crashing on me when I try to zoom in. Very annoying.)

Note: earlier lives are more leisurely, things more spaced out, and then the pace accelerates as things get more intense.

One interesting difference between Life 4 and 616 canon: Moira and Xavier marry when she’s 23 and establish the Xavier School 12 years later. 

Life 5 is interesting, because we’re seeing repeated themes of Moira in comas, even when it might not be necessary. For example, what’s the dramatic purpose of having the two Sentinel attacks?

In Life 7, I noticed that Larry Trask isn’t killed with the rest of his family. Is it because he turned out to be a mutant?

Life 8 is the first instance where I think the initial panelling let us down. The original one-two punch heavily implied that Magneto was defeated on his first attack on Washington D.C, but here we learn that he ruled America for eight years before being defeated and killed. (Incidentally, this suggests that the visions he’ll have of his failures don’t include this life).

As other people have noted about Life 9, Xavier and Magneto are killed in Years 19 and 21 respectively, which makes it easy to rule out their appearances as happening in Life 9. Also, it’s significant that the first horsemen aren’t on earth (almost certainly on Arakko/No-Place).

Life 10 including Moira’s marriage to Joseph McTaggert despite presumably knowing from earlier lives that he would be abusive suggests that Moira may well have gone into the marriage because she needed Proteus to form the Five. Not sure how I feel about that. Finally, I’m a bit puzzled about what the schism was and whether it was genuine vs. feigned (after all, Moira is faking her death, so there’s plenty of skullduggery going on). 

#xmen #xmen meta #house of x #hoxpox

[scriveyner]

symbols in the sand p1

“What’s there, at Oriande?” “A lot of sand, and a lot of death.”

There were worse things than waking up in a crowded, dirty prison cell. Shiro could name at least five, out of hand; although the thought didn’t make him feel any better as the elbow of another prisoner jabbed into the vicinity of his kidney. He managed to roll over, off his stomach, and kick a leg out at his attacker, warding the other man off. Shiro stared at him, dirty and rancid, as he scuttled back amidst the crush of prisoners and felt more than slightly out of sorts. The entire population of the cell was human - at least as far as he could tell, and for reasons he was entirely unsure that knowledge sat strange with him. As he stared about the glut of humanity another prisoner took the opportunity to relieve himself entirely too close to Shiro’s head, and he scrambled out of the way before climbing unsteadily to his feet.

That was when the hangover hit, and the cell spun around him.

Shiro staggered toward a wall that prisoners were crowded against and looked like they had no interest in moving any time soon. That was okay, when he vomited they moved quickly, scrambling to get out of the way as bile and the remnants of what felt like a week’s worth of drink made themselves known again. Shiro panted loudly, retching slightly still as he leaned, one arm against the wall and the other cover his mouth. His head was pounding like there was a bull elephant trapped in his skull and trying to break free, and there was a significant chance that he was going to vomit again, especially as the piquant bouquet of the cell’s inhabitants was beginning to make itself known.

As he recovered, still panting, a commotion near the front of the cell drew his attention. From the left two armed guards entered the cell, and Shiro watched them distractedly, more focused on keeping the contents of his stomach in place when he realized that they were making a beeline for him and holding shackles. The two men spoke in a foreign language that felt familiar, like he should understand them but he didn’t, and then one grabbed him firmly by the arm and yanked and Shiro’s first reaction was to immediately punch the man in return.

Hungover and dehydrated, that was perhaps a poor choice. When Shiro’s face was slammed against the bars of the cell hard enough to rattle him further he recognized that maybe leading with his fists hadn’t been the best course of action, but at least he hadn’t made it easy on the guards shackling him.

“And here is your friend now,” spoke someone unfamiliar, his tone thickly accented and just out of Shiro’s line of sight. He squinted through the bars, his vision temporarily doubled, and he saw a lot of white. His eyes traveled up the cream-colored skirts and finally rested on darker skin, a familiar face pulled into an unfamiliar expression underneath a wide-brimmed sun hat.

“Princess Allura?” Shiro slurred, before he got his shackled hands around the bars and was able to push himself up. He sent a glare over his shoulder at the guard who prodded him with the butt of his bayonet, but his attention was drawn back out to the other side of the cell at a familiar burst of laughter.

“Princess? Oh please, don’t give her any ideas,” an equally-familiar older man in an ill-fitting cream-colored jacket said, and Shiro’s brain must really be rattled because he knew this person too, although he was certain he’d never set eyes on either of them before in his life. “I wasn’t aware you were acquainted with my sister, Mr. Shirogane.”

Everything about the way this person spoke and held himself was wrong, sat wrong, and Shiro had the strangest memory of this person in a smoky dive bar that didn’t feel like his memory. His memory contained a lot of … teal. Shiro squinted again and fought with dueling memories to try to identify him. “You look familiar,” he said, as the woman - Allura? Was that actually her name? - turned to the third member of their party, a rather portly and greasy-looking man in creased linen.

“May we have a few minutes with our friend?” she asked, her voice tight but pleasant.

The warden looked at the man in the cream coat suspiciously, but finally nodded at the lady in the sun hat. “You have five minutes,” he said, and left them.

“I know you,” Shiro said, address the man with the ginger mustache, but the woman stepped forward, discretely producing a small, weathered, golden box from her handbag.

“What can you tell us about this?” she asked, and Shiro stared at the box that she kept slightly concealed in her hands. Baffled, Shiro didn’t recognize the box - but he did , and it produced a violent retch in his gut that he somehow managed to keep contained. The box was connected to sand and blood and death, and it looked so damn foreboding held cupped in the warm skin of the woman’s hands.

“Look, lady,” he said, and she stiffened slightly.

“That’s Miss Carnahan to you.”

He plowed on without being stopped, “I don’t know anything about that stupid thing.”

She turned toward her brother, tucking the trinket away. “Coran, you said this is the man you-” aware that her voice had raised she dropped it somewhat, “ stole it from.”

Coran. The name was familiar to Shiro and he wasn’t sure why. The same way that Allura’s name had resonated, but he was most certain now that he didn’t know either of them. “My dear sister,” Coran said, looking mildly panicked, and Shiro reckoned it was because pick-pocketing was intensely frowned upon in Cairo. “My friend here allowed me to borrow it, clearly recognizing the immense amount of trouble he was about to find himself in.”

“Immense amount of trouble,” Allura repeated, clearly not believing a word of it for a second. “I’ll wager you started that bar fight to get away with the map.” She turned back to Shiro and leaned in close to the bars, close enough that he realized the wisps of hair framing her face weren’t blonde but a white so fair it looked like it was spun from the clouds themselves. “There is a map in this trinket you … loaned my brother, Mr. Shirogane, and I am quite curious how you came across such an interesting piece.”

It didn’t feel like him speaking, when the words escaped this time. “You’re talking about Oriande,” he said, and Coran sprung forward, hissing quiet. There was a guard still in the cell with Shiro, and while he might not speak the language they were using, that name would perk up any ears.

“And why would you feel I was speaking about a fabled lost city?” Allura said, and there was an undercurrent of smugness to her tone, like she had tricked something out of Shiro that he wasn’t going to willingly give.

“Maybe that’s where I was when I picked up that ‘trinket’,” Shiro said, and felt the memory of blood and sand surge. “That’s what you’re after, isn’t it?”

“You’ve been there?” Coran sounded incredulous. “He’s pulling our leg, Allura. He probably won that thing in a card game, or stole it, more likely.”

“What’s there, at Oriande?” Allura asked, and Shiro shook his head.

“A lot of sand, and a lot of death,” he said, certain that this was true. “They aren’t kidding when they say that place is cursed. You need to steer clear.” There was a familiar look of determination on Allura’s face, and he knew that steering clear was in fact the exact opposite of her plans. “But … if you need to find it, I might know a guy,” he said.

“Really?” She leaned forward again.

“Yeah. Me. ” The guard behind him had clearly grown tired of their conversation, whatever the contents, and grabbed Shiro by the back of his roughspun tunic, but Shiro had a good grip on the bars of the cell. “Get me the hell out of here, and I’ll take you there!”

A second guard joined the first, and this one encouraged Shiro to release the bars of the cell by liberal application of the butt of his rifle to Shiro’s ribcage. He grunted in pain as the guards dragged him off, leaving the matched pair of siblings standing in front of the cell and exchanging a glance.

##

The guards did not return Shiro to the crowded holding cell where he had awoken. Shiro was half-dragged past jeering inmates and around through an arched doorway, into the blinding brilliance of the desert sun shining harshly down from a cloudless sky. He squinted, dazzled, as the noise level of the screaming prisoners rose slightly, and he realized that the guards had stopped a moment, giving him time to get his bearings. He was faced with a courtyard, squared off, and he could see the prisoners in this jail pressing their faces to the bars of various cells, trying to get a better look at the proceedings.

The thing that drew most of his attention, though, was the rickety gallows that sat centered in the courtyard.

This produced a visceral reaction as soon as he saw it. Shiro dug his heels into the dirt but the guards had him in too tight a grip to get free. The prisoners continued to heckle and jeer as he struggled, and then he heard Allura’s voice rise slightly about the crowd. “One hundred pounds!”

He looked involuntarily toward her voice and saw her seated on a balcony that overlooked the courtyard, beside the greasy form of the warden. She was turned toward the warden and not looking at him; but her brother stood slightly behind her and was staring at Shiro with some fragment of familiarity. Shiro couldn’t focus on that, though, as the guard shoved him toward the wooden stairs that would take him to his fate.

His hands and feet were both shackled and it was suicide, but so was mounting that set of stairs. So, Shiro did the first thing that came to mind when the guard brought the heel of his rifle to bear on Shiro again; he twisted, bringing the manacles up and catching the butt of the guard’s rifle in his chains and twisting them around it. This caught the man completely by surprise as Shiro yanked, pulling the weapon from the man’s grip and flinging it away.

The noise level of the prison rose immensely as the two guards rushed him, and several other guards started fighting their way through the crowd to get to the courtyard and help their brethren. Two at once Shiro could handle; or at least he felt he could, ducking under the first guard’s haymaker and surging into the second guard, shoulder-first, before the bayonet at the end of his rifle could be brought to bear. He didn’t get far as the second guard staggered back because the hangman joined the fracas, yanking Shiro by the back of his tunic hard enough to bring him down backward. He was off-balance enough that the hangman’s fist only glanced his head but he landed on his back against the stairs, the wind driven from him by their angle.

He thought he heard Allura’s voice again, five hundred pounds! , but he couldn’t be certain what he was hearing over the ringing in his ears as the second guard slammed his rifle into Shiro’s solar plexus - before he could even catch his breath, he was wheezing for air a second time. The first guard drew a dagger from his belt, holding out his hand toward the second guard, and Shiro rolled… or at least, tried to, but the hangman’s boot was on his shoulder.

The warden’s voice rang out, authoritative and sharp, in that same foreign language that most of the prison used. The first guard hesitated, his dagger still in hand as he argued back. The warden barked out something else and the guard snarled but tucked his weapon away, and Shiro tried again to get up but this time, the heel of the hangman’s boot found his face and that was the last thing he saw.

read on AO3 | buy me a ko-fi

#voltron legendary defender #crossover #multipart #unfinished #also on ao3

[ramonsouzagarcia-blog]

La Grande Belleza

  La Grande Belleza (An Interpretation)

I first saw La Grande Belleza in the wee hours of the morning. It ended just as a hazy dawn began to illuminate the sky outside my bedroom window. I lay in a numb silence, the closing lines of the film echoing in my head. I felt...strange. The feeling was surreal....

This is how it always ends…in death.

But first, there was a life hidden beneath all the bla bla bla….

Everything is covered beneath the frivolity and the noise,

the silence and the sorrow,

the emotion and the fear…

the gaunt, inconstant flashes of beauty,

the decay,

the misfortune,

and wretched humanity...

all buried under the blanket of the embarrassment of being in the world bla bla bla…

It had been a long time since a film had moved me in this way. I pulled the curtains closed to keep the room dark. I didn’t want the sun up just yet. The film was pregnant with a metaphysics waiting to be solved and translated.

There are stories that are simple, where the plot is the whole story. Then there are stories that run deep, and play on multiple themes and manifold layers of truth. Films like these are not so neatly comprehended in a “once and for all, I know what it’s trying to say” sort of way. Here was a film that compelled repeated viewing.

La Grande Belleza is an experience of enormous proportions—not only in terms of thematic breadth but, more importantly, in terms of a profound depth. The film is a whirlpool that catches you on the surface and then drags you violently down to a subterranean netherworld…

 “Everything is covered beneath the frivolity and the noise….”

 A perceptive viewer, seeing the film for the first time, will be cued, early in the film, to switch on multiple lenses, to pay attention, to open one’s mind and one’s…intuition, to open wide because more than just a plot is playing out.

If there is anything to be said that is emblematic of director Paolo Sorrentino, it is his visual style. Camera movement will be the first thing a Sorrentino neophyte will notice. The camera opens and pans through scenes with artful elegance. The composition of each shot is painstakingly art-directed and planned. The frames that unfold are cinematic art-scapes of wide vistas and frescoes... and intense, intimate portraits.

But that is just the first, most discernible, aspect of the film. Sorrentino is a master of sound design. He is able to convey mood and message through a careful selection of musical scores from various artists. In La Grande Belleza, he uses music to mark and bucket different themes together, such that it becomes possible to divine the director’s intent, even as these scenes are spread out through the film.

And then, there is the writing. It is excellent. I am unfortunately not able to speak Italian, and it is likely that the original version is much more beautifully written. The Spanish translation, however, is superior to the English version. There is a poetic rhythm that is not captured in English. But I digress….

The surface story is about a man, Jep Gambardella, who has just turned 65. From a quiet, less than cosmopolitan background, he is now a prince of the social scene. He knows all the important people, and they know him…. Indeed even the Cardinal, and most likely successor to the Chair of St. Peter, is honored to be a dinner guest at Jep’s home.

“When I came to Rome, at the age of 26,” he says, “I fell quite swiftly, without even realizing it, into what might be defined as the whirlpool of the high life. But I didn’t just want to live on the fast lane; I wanted to be the King of the high life. And of course, I succeeded. I didn’t just want to attend all the parties, I wanted to have the power to make them fail!”

"Cuando llegé a Roma a los veinte-seis años, me precipité demasiado rápido, apenas sin darme cuenta, a aquello que se puede definir como el remolino de la mundanidad. Pero yo no quería ser simplemente un hombre mundano. Quería ser el rey de la mundanidad. Y desde luego, lo conseguí. No sólo quería participar en todas las fiestas, quería tener el poder de hacerlas fracasar!”

Indeed, Jep is presented to the audience, for the first time, at the party of parties! It is after all the king’s birthday, Jep’s 65th. All of the beautiful people are in attendance. And Jep appears quite at ease in his court, waving to well-wishers and dancing the Colita. But it is also here, at the pinnacle of this epic party, that Jep steps out of the cola, and, in one sweeping, surreal moment, he stands before us… unmasked.    

“To this question, as kids, my friends always gave the same answer: ‘Pussy’. Whereas I answered "The smell of old people's houses". The question was "What do you really like the most in life?" I was destined for sensibility. I was destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella.”  

“De pequeños, a esta pregunta mis amigos daban siempre la misma respuesta… ‘El coño’. Pero yo respondía: “El olor de las casas de viejos”. La pregunta era: ¿Qué es lo que realmente te gusta más en la vida? Estaba destinado a la sensibilidad. Estaba destinado a convertirme en escritor. Estaba destinado a convertirme en Jep Gambardella.”

So soon in the film, it appears as if the cat is out of the bag… the inner tension of the story lying exposed.  Is this a mere story about a man who’s sold himself out? A man destined for deep sensibility, a magnificent writer whose first book was a national treasure, suddenly reduced to a pop art critic…a king of noise and mindless chatter… the king of the pointless bla bla bla of the mediocre…  

And yet, almost as one begins to lose interest, one begins to detect a thematic undercurrent running in parallel. There is a scene that cuts into the film, disjointed and with no relation to its trajectory. Almost as if in a dream, a mother is looking for her child. “Have you seen my daughter”, she asks Jep. We see this from Jep’s point of view. The mother steps away from the camera and reveals a crypt behind her. The music cues surrealism. The camera moves slowly towards the crypt, enters it, and switches to the third person perspective.

We see Jep inside… and we hear a child’s voice, “Who are you”, the child asks Jep… the voice emanating from a pit in the center of the crypt. The child is apparently standing underneath, looking up from the dakness at Jep. “Who am I,” Jep replies…. “I am…” he stammers. The child’s voice interrupts him and says, “No! You are no one.”  

The film begins to feel, from this point onwards, like a labyrinth of images. Sorrentino opens a door for us, and we are invited to start seeing from a very different perspective. We begin stitching and connecting images and scenes. We are now creating meaning. The film is a looking glass, and one will bring to it, and derive from it, one’s own interpretation and insight....  

On the days following his 65th birthday, Jep begins to experience a sense of estrangement, a feeling of being disjointed, and somehow suddenly disconnected from his milieu--from his socialite friends, from his work, from the frenzy of his parties. Some hidden turmoil comes bubbling up from deep within his spirit.

As he walks home from his big birthday party celebration, we see, for the first time, an image of nuns- one young novice, in particular, is staring at Jep. A carved stone head of a fountain inter-cuts the scene momentarily, its eyes penetrating, as water from some underground aqueduct gushes out of its mouth.

The images of nuns are replete throughout the film, and I believe that this image is a vital clue to understanding the film....

Jep is lying in a hammock on his porch across the coliseum, a glass of scotch in hand, when he hears children laughing and giggling in the distance. He stands and gazes down at the courtyard of a nearby convent, where he sees nuns playing with the little children. Jep is visibly moved. This is the first time Robert Burns’ song plays... (and it will play again, marking scenes that seek to convey Jep’s uprooted nature-- his enigmatic longing for some distant time, for some special place buried within his soul.)

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here,

My heart's in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer....

When Jep hears the news of the death of his first love, broken to him by the shallow simpleton who married her, we glimpse nuns walking in the rain, as they pass both men by  in their moment of mutual consolation. This entire sequence of morbid discovery and desolation is abruptly interrupted by a nun laughing like an idiot, as though some darkly intended ridicule is hurled up at Jep through some crack in the veil of Maya (in the Vedic sense). For a moment, Jep’s self-composed world of illusion is shattered by the stark, sharp indifference of nature.

Indeed, as the film approaches its resolution, Jep has a poignant encounter with a saintly nun, who only eats roots. In a bizarre moment, amidst a flock of flamingos who have come to settle on Jep's porch, the nun tells him her secret: “Do you know why I only eat roots?” she asks Jep, “Because roots are important,” she tells him. The nuns are poignantly revealed in this unearthly scene as the absurd symbol (in the Camusian sense) of what lies “underneath”. They are the mantle, safeguarding some sacred knowledge.

Two passages open and close the film. The first is a quote from a novel by Louis Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night. The concluding passage is Jep’s epiphany. The movie must be seen in the context of this prologue and epilogue.

Louis Ferdinand Céline:

Travel is very useful.

It exercises the imagination.  

All the rest is disappointment and fatigue.

The journey is entirely imaginary.

Therein lies its strength.

It goes from life to death.

People, animals, cities, things-- it's all invention.

It's a novel, nothing more than simple fiction.

Littrè says so, and he's never wrong.

And besides, anyone can do the same.

You just have to close your eyes,

and you're on the other side of the world.

In the end, our daily lives of parties and noise, work and labor, architecture, literature, and even art are illusory. Reality, death, and the nature of things and the world are indifferent to us. The big questions have no answers, and everything is ultimately irrelevant.

At the end of the film, Jep makes his final statement…

In the end, it's just a trick. Yes. It's just a trick.

Before Jep makes his conclusion, that it’s all a trick, he says, “In other places, there are other things. But I don't care about those other places. Therefore... let the novel begin!”

Only one’s own choices, of how one chooses to view the world, are what give meaning to life. There are no absolute truths, just as there are no answers beyond what we see. Jep has found the ability, motivation, and desire to write his second novel, after years of procrastination and excuses.

“Why didn’t you write another novel,” the saintly nun asks Jep. “Because I was searching for the great beauty. But I never found it,” he replies. In the end, art saves Jep. One must create one’s own trick to give meaning to life. And thus, Jep finds the will to begin to write in earnest again. Jep couldn’t find the great beauty because it isn’t something you find. It’s something you have to create for yourself.

Before the final act of the film, Jep visits a photo exhibit of a man who has covered an entire stadium with mug shots of himself, taken every day since he was a child. While this scene initially sets itself up as yet another of those kitsch art shows that Jep attends in his mundane job as an art critic, the music that plays is, instead, the musical cue for moments of profound self discovery for Jep.

Art is presented as a transformative force. It redeems us from the abyss of the indifference and coldness of nature, from the senseless noise and frivolity, from all the bla bla bla…

Each one makes of himself, and of his life, a work of art. This is the great beauty. Self-creation is the redeeming principle of human life.

“In the end, its just a trick. Yes, it’s just a trick.”

Jep finally sees the human experience, and its reality, for what it is. There is no redemption in anything that is outside one’s self. Human life is merely, and inescapably, a point of view. Human perception is a trick of mirrors. It is illusory, imaginary. But because it is, one has a choice... one is able to defy nature by becoming the maker of one’s own values. One has godlike power to create the great beauty. This is the sacred knowledge the nuns are hiding. This is the secret behind the disappearing giraffe trick. Céline says so too, anyone can do it, he says, you just have to close your eyes, and you're on the other side of the world.

Epílogo:

Siempre se termina así: con la muerte.

Pero primero ha habido una vida escondida bajo el bla bla bla…

Todo está resguardado bajo la frivolidad y el ruido,

el silencio y el sentimiento,

la emoción y el miedo…

los demacrados inconstantes destellos de belleza,

la decadencia,

la desgracia

y el hombre miserable.

Todo sepultado bajo la cubierta de la vergüenza de estar en el mundo bla bla bla.

En otros lugares hay otras cosas.

A mi no me importan los otros lugares.

Así pues, que empiece la novela.

En el fondo, es sólo un truco.

Sí. Sólo es un truco.

#la grande bellezza #la gran belleza #the great beauty #paolo sorrentino #the young pope #cannes #film #movies #movie review