#though on a typical foray into the living world this does not seem like something shinigami try very hard at to begin with
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THE LAND OF GODS AND DEVILS, a sequel.
—part i.
word count: 6k
rating: m for now, rating will change in later chapters as things develop, tags will be updated accordingly.
warnings: naughty language, massively canon-divergent, roman gets his own tag because he's a fucking nutso, canon-typical violence, established relationship that might not be the healthiest, age gap, domestic murder family. for this chapter in specific, roman likes to take things to the Extreme (i.e., "i'm going to fucking kms if you say this word one more time") but if you're here i imagine you know exactly what he's about.
notes: it's here! i know that most of my followers and friends on here are my friends through my far cry 5 content, but my return to the fic-writing world was inspired by my first longfic in a decade after watching birds of prey. you could say, perhaps, that i have a Type(TM), given that roman sionis lives rent free in my head forever and always. this is the sequel to my work carry your throne, though i like to think it's fairy user-friendly, especially once we really get into the thick of it.
special thank you goes to my beta and the loml, @starcrier; the first person to ever truly recognize varya for the wretched little beast that she is and love her anyway. thank you for being my beta and for loving my girl!
and, of course, another special thanks goes to @shallow-gravy, @vasiktomis, @faithchel, @tomexraider, and @belorage for being so supportive of my foray out of the far cry fandom and back into one that, in a way, brought me here in the first place!
summary: —by dread things, compelled.
roman sionis is the closest he has ever been to having everything that he wants; a perfect wife, a perfect family, a perfect international black-market arms dealing business signed over to him in its entirety. unfortunately for him, there are people in the world who would prefer to see him without, and that has never been a thing that roman has accepted for himself: being without.
(or: a fic wherein the devil spends his time rebuking sin.)
“If one more person says the word ‘chandelier’ in my presence,” Roman announced, drawing all eyes to him, “I'm going to blow my fucking brains out. Got it?”
There was a brief moment of silence that lapsed before the murmured acquiescence of the workers marked their return to their work. Blowing hot air from his mouth, Roman raked his fingers through his hair and turned back around to where Zsasz was watching him expectantly.
“What?” He demanded. “It’s my wife’s birthday.” Emphasis on the my, not the wife; it was not a favor Roman was doing for Varya, it was something he was doing for himself.
“V told them she wanted it.” Zsasz gestured to the offensive piece of lighting, which continued to haunt Roman’s waking and dreaming hours with its garish crystalline drippings and expensive bulbs. Ever since Varya had found out his fluctuating approval of the chandelier, it had been in and out of the Black Mask Club more times than he could count. Not that he needed to; he could very well put in or rip out a stupid fucking light fixture as many times as he wanted.
“Well.” Roman pulled a glass out from behind the bar, setting it on the top and dropping an ice cube into it. “She does so love to torture me.”
“It's just a—”
“Do you want my fucking guts on the floor, Zsasz? I mean it. Say the word and I’ll do it.”
The blonde regarded him drily. “No, boss.”
“Blood and guts everywhere.” Roman gestured widely with his free hand. “All over the floor. The bar top. You’ll have to clean it up. Maybe wipe down some of the bottles.”
“I won’t say it.”
“I don’t have to tell you how hard it is to get blood out of the carpet.”
Zsasz’s mouth quirked up in a smile. It said, without saying anything at all, no, you don’t. More agreeably, and with the flash of pearly whites and the capped tooth: “Sure.”
Roman poured well over what would have been considered the polite amount of expensive scotch into his glass, capping the bottle and setting it aside. It had been exactly twenty-four hours of making sure the club was perfectly polished and styled for Varya's birthday; though she was shrewd, she was so preoccupied with the twins and the lawyers and overseas business associates that she barely seemed to notice whatever was coming in and out of the Black Mask Club. He didn’t think she’d had a baby nor a phone out of her hands in over two days, and truthfully, it was starting to become tedious. Now that the twins were a little over a year old, they were supposed to be scheduling their honeymoon.
The delay of it hadn’t been a big deal, at the start. But everyday with you feels like my honeymoon, Varya had demurred months before the twins’ arrival, fluttering her lashes and gliding her fingers along the lapel of his jacket—and not even an hour after she’d curtly informed him that any more chatter, while she was nursing a headache, would be met with a swift and efficient extraction of his vocal cords by her own hands. Motherhood was supposed to have domesticated her, Roman thought, and had done the exact opposite; now, she was more assured of her status and power than ever.
So, yes; Varya had been busy, and he was almost certain she’d forgotten her own birthday. Never mind that everything had to be perfect. Never mind that it had to be immaculate. Never mind that Varya had deigned to order a brand new fucking chandelier from the same place they’d gotten one last time, knowing full well that he had made the executive decision to gut the fucking thing and get it out of his club.
“Tell you what, Zsasz,” Roman muttered, taking a swallow of the amber liquid in his glass, “don’t ever get fucking married. You want someone knowing all the shit that pushes your buttons all the time?”
“Maybe you just got a button pusher for a wife.”
Roman grimaced and took another swallow. It was true. “Fuck off.”
The blonde opened his mouth to say something else—and hadn’t he gotten confident in himself too, since Varya had become such a permanent fixture in their life, constantly goading and coercing him to voice his opinion on things, things that normally he would just defer to Roman on—when the doors to the stairwell and the elevator opened.
Eclipsing the doorway was Armazd, Varya’s hand-picked-from-the-batch-of-Russians-left-over-guard. Armazd had to be easily cresting six-foot-five, his dark beard neatly trimmed and peppered with silver, a scar breaking the color of his top lip. Roman had only ever seen the man swathed in dark clothes, like a fucking mourner on parade. His wife had been the one picked to be the twins' nanny, despite the fact that Roman felt like she barely did anything.
Also hand-picked. Thoroughly vetted. Interrogated for hours. No stone left unturned, when it came to Yuli and Ro.
“What are you doing down here?” Roman barked, coming around the side of the bar to make his way across the room. “You’re supposed to be going up and keeping—”
“She is coming down,” Armazd clarified. “In the elevator. Irina called to tell me.”
“Instead of stopping her?”
“She was—”
The elevator dinged in the hallway, and Roman quickly ducked around Armazd and closed the door into the club behind him. As soon as the doors slid open, he planted a smile on his face and closed the distance between himself and his wife.
Nobody would know, looking at Varya, that she not only barely utilized the nanny that they had furiously vetted and now paid handsomely, but that on top of juggling their twins she was actively in the process of getting a massive, international gun-running business signed over in his name. There was not a single hair out of place, not a single crease or rumple in the sapphire-blue silk of her blouse or skirt; the scent of her preferred jasmine perfume followed her like a cloud. She looked as put-together as the day he’d first seen her standing in his club.
And now, he desperately needed her to stay out of it.
“Kitten,” he greeted warmly, his hands—though gloved—immediately scratching the itch by reaching for her; they captured hers to carefully still her procession to the club’s main room. “What are you doing down here? I thought you’d be busy for hours.”
“Yuliana has been fussing nonstop,” Varya replied, her voice light despite what could only have been an expression of frustration quickly following, “all while I listen to grown men fussing nonstop at me on the phone.”
Roman feigned a sympathetic noise, bringing her hands up to his mouth to kiss them. “We have a nanny, V.”
“You know better than anyone else,” the brunette murmured, brushing her nose against his as their hands dropped, “that she is inconsolable without you.”
He tried not to look too pleased. “I’m sure that’s not true.”
“Don’t be modest, Romy.”
“Well, I’ll come up, of course.” He kissed the corner of her mouth. “And console our princess.” Another kiss, to the other corner. “So that you can continue letting grown men fuss at you.”
She beamed at him prettily, and finally they met in the middle for a real kiss—nothing coy, nothing demure, but lingering warm and just between the two of them.
“I love you,” she purred. “Go on, then.”
And then Varya pulled away, as though to go around him and into the club, and Roman blinked rapidly. He had only just caught her around the waist before she could walk in and pulled her in a full one-eighty until she was facing the elevator again.
“What are you doing?” she asked, a laugh bubbling out of her. “I was just going to make myself a drink.”
“Encouraging productivity,” Roman replied, hitting the button for the elevator doors to open again. “Ready for all this paperwork to be done, aren’t you? It’s been over a year.”
A year of wading through mafia-esque bureaucracy. A year of listening to Varya say, these things take time. A busy year, to be sure, jam-packed full of things—the biggest wedding in Gotham since its founding, the twins.
A funeral.
Roman tried more and more every day not to think about his (now) brother-in-law’s funeral, the double burial of the only man that might have stood a chance at being loved by Varya more than Roman himself and the only man who had ever been anything like a father figure to her. Family is tedious, he’d wanted to say, brothers and fathers and mothers, the whole lot of them, cut them loose why don’t you? Why should anyone matter to you outside of the twins and I?
Varya glanced at him over her shoulder. “These things take time.”
He rolled his eyes. “Mhm.”
“Not to mention, we were a little busy,” she added, eyes narrowing playfully as he nudged her into the elevator, “you know—having children.”
“And what beautiful children they are.” Roman hit the button without looking, the doors sliding shut behind him.
“Well, how am I supposed to suffer through those phone calls without a stiff drink?”
He quirked a brow upward. “I’ll make you a stiff drink, Mrs. Sionis.”
The brunette propped herself up against the back rail of the elevator as it whirred into motion. The corner of her mouth, painted ruby, curved and her head tilted inquisitively. “Oh?”
“Of course,” he demurred, sidling forward and boxing her in against the wall. “I’ll make you a stiff drink—”
He dropped his head to the slope of her jaw to plant a kiss there.
“—you’ll finish up with the lawyers, and put on the dress I bought you—”
Varya hummed and sighed sweetly.
“—we’ll go out to dinner for your birthday—”
He dropped his hands to her hips, planting a kiss on her temple so that he could rumble, “And we can get to work on baby number three, hm?”
A sweet laugh billowed out of her just as the elevator came to a stop and the doors slid open to bring to Roman the oh-so-sweet sounds of a caterwauling infant. Over the distressed crying was Irina’s voice, shushing and cooing dulcet words in Russian; he could see her swaying to and fro with a swathe of fabric bundled in her arms.
“I almost forgot about my birthday,” Varya said thoughtfully, completely unrattled by the sound of their daughter’s distress. She stepped out from between him and the elevator wall; Roman fell into step beside her easily, the sound of her heels clipping against the floor enough to draw Irina’s eyes to them.
Roman said, “I know you did,” and did not bother to hide his smugness as he held out his arms for the shrieking baby in Irina’s arms. The redhead regarded him with a sort of weary amusement before she acquiesced; with Yuliana safely in his arms, he watched Varya cross the room to turn the automatic rocker that held their son back on to a slow, lulling pace. The freckled infant babbled happily—ever the quieter of the twins—and as Varya said something to Irina in Russian that inspired the woman to depart to the kitchen, she absently picked up a baby blanket from the couch and wandered over to him.
“Yuli,” she murmured, waving her finger at the already-content infant, tucking the blanket around her “is that all you wanted, hm? Just for your papa to hold you?”
“What else could she want for?” he replied confidently. Soothing Yuliana’s fury had become old-hat for him at this point. And, certainly, it pleased him to know that sometimes, the only thing that would make his daughter stop screaming was being held by him. Not even Varya—who had taken to motherhood like a fish to water—bothered when she was in a fit.
Still, the brunette sighed dreamily, her finger captured by their daughter’s tiny hand before she said, “What a perfect little gem.”
Roman hummed his agreement. “Finishing that call with the lawyers?”
“Perhaps tomorrow,” Varya replied. “They’re in a mood today.”
“They’re in a mood every day.” Russians, he thought venomously.
“Yes.” She smiled, flashing pearly teeth at him. “But only today is my birthday.”
She had him there. Still, he was itching for the whole thing to be done—Ilarion had dragged his feet through the process of even drawing up the original contract, which had only been a spit in his face (“You are the only person who gets to fuck Varya Astakhova, that is as exclusive as it gets”) and by the time all of that nasty business had been wrapped up, Ilarion was dead.
Ilarion, and Nikita—leaving only a single living soul to be in charge of the Astakhov empire: Varya herself.
Which, she had expressed time and time again, she had no desire for; not in the public way that her father had done it, and Ilarion after them. She much preferred the clerical work of it all. Paperwork and public relations. Let the men do men’s work, she’d demurred one night, tangled up in their sheets, when he’d asked her what she was going to do with it. I don’t mind. They like me better as their madonna, anyway.
“You know,” she continued, breaking him out of his thoughts as she made her way to the bar cart, pouring herself a drink, “they will like you more if it’s you they’re talking to.”
“I don’t give a fuck if they like me or not,” Roman replied, lifting Yuliana with both of his hands so that he could look at her. “Isn’t that right, princess? Mommy gets to do all the paperwork so that your papa can spend all of his time with you, instead of listening to some dumbfucks bitch and moan on the phone.” He glanced at her. “Well, anyway, since it’s your birthday we can let it slide.”
“Very generous of you.”
“Get dressed, won’t you?” he prompted, depositing his now-content daughter in the mobile swing with her brother. “The table’s been ready for us since noon.”
Varya watched him, dark eyes glittering amusedly. “And why, my darling, did you make the reservation for noon? It’s nearly six now.”
“Because,” he replied, “I wanted to make sure they held it, regardless of how long it took us to get there.”
“Ah.” She lifted her chin a little, lashes fluttering with contentment when he reached up and brushed the hair from her face. “Or else?”
Roman flashed her a grin.
“Or else.”
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They held the table.
“Good for them,” Roman said as they followed the server out onto the balcony. The table had clearly been refreshed—a new candle, a new vase, a new bucket of ice and bottle of champagne. He’d heard the waitstaff whispering furiously among themselves as they idled in the lobby to be taken to their table; now, settled across from the birthday girl, Roman was content with the way they had squirmed.
“Quicker than the two-hour wait last time,” Varya noted by way of agreement, smoothing her hand along the edge of the tablecloth.
He scoffed. The only reason they had waited in the lobby for two hours was because Varya had asked him to stay for the table she wanted. If it had been his way, they would have left with a bloody warning and gone somewhere else. “I can’t believe I finally convinced you to leave the twins home for a night and we got stuck sitting in that fucking lobby because they gave our table away.”
“In my defense, they are good babies, Romy. Hardly ever cry. Certainly not too much trouble.”
“But there’s two of them,” he replied, “and toting two babies around is a lot of work. All I’m saying is, what’s the point of paying her that much fucking money if we’re just going to—”
The waiter came by the table, clearly a little stressed; the lines of concern on his face were clear as he cleared his throat and said, “Should I come back?”
Varya, perusing the menu: “No, my darling, you may stay. You were saying, Romy?”
“I just don’t know why we’re shoveling money into her bank account for her to be a glorified accent chair in our house rather than a nanny.” Roman gestured to the champagne bottle expectantly. “Open it.”
The waiter did as he asked, having been standing there uncomfortably for a moment during their exchange. As he worked to carefully open the champagne bottle, Roman turned his attention back to Varya; her eyes remained on the menu, absently twisting the engagement and wedding band on her finger back and forth.
There was no way, he thought, that she was putting off getting the business signed over to him on purpose. Surely, there was no way; even when Ilarion was alive, even when she had anticipated no further problems, it had always been, if you’re going to be my romantic partner, it seems only right you’d be my partner in business too, don’t you think? And yet—
And yet, Roman could not push down the strange, hazy doubt that occasionally flickered through his mind. He had always wanted Varya, had always found himself wanting and wanting and wanting more and more often, and Varya had always seemed content to indulge him. There was, it seemed, nothing she enjoyed more than indulging him. One more kiss, one more minute in bed, one more lingering glance across the room. She was the absolute pinacle of his hedonism, in every sense of the word, and had proven time and time again that she would give him anything that he wanted.
The business had always been for her and Ilarion. He wanted it, and told her he did, and she said, you can have it, if you like, but like in all things, there was a slyness about his wife—a cruelty—that he found endearing and dangerous. Dangerous, because it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d been on the other end of her cruel nature, playfully poking and unwinding and tugging the thread loose until she had pushed him to the limit.
Something echoed in his head, and he realized that the waiter was asking him what he wanted to eat. Varya had handed the menu over and steepled her fingers, watching him with dark, curious eyes and red painted lips, sooty lashes fluttering. A pretty, painted little snake.
“I’ll take whatever she’s having,” Roman said after a moment, setting his menu aside and returning his attention to the brunette across from him. “Something interesting, kitten?”
“Can I not just appreciate my husband?” Varya demurred. “You’re wearing the suit I like best, after all.”
“It is your birthday. What greater gift is there than me?”
She laughed, delighted by him—as she always was—and took a sip of her champagne. “You were away from me, for a moment.”
He watched her, gauging her carefully. Even I know not to drop my pants when a viper opens its mouth, Bianchi had said, just before Varya had unloaded six rounds into his face and chest less than two feet away from him.
“Just thinking,” is what Roman said finally.
“Hm. A dangerous past time.”
His expression flattened, deadpan. “It’s taken a significant chunk of time to secure your father’s business in my name.”
Something flickered across Varya’s expression. at the word father. “To secure my business,” Varya replied, her voice abrupt and cutting, her eyes narrowed, “in your name.” Absently, she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She looked to be composing herself, like she’d spoken on a knee-jerk reaction rather than with thinking.
Then, glossy and silken again: “You know your patience means the world to me, Romy.”
There was nothing that he loved more than watching her pull back her venom for him. Drumming his fingers against the top of the table, Roman bridled his own irritation to say, mildly, “I’d do anything for you. Even wait...” He made a thoughtful noise. “Over a year to finally take on the responsiblities you wanted handed over to me.”
“Of course.” Varya smiled prettily, absently straightening out her silverware. “And we will speak no more of my father on my birthday, or any day after this.”
He knew what that meant. She phrased it pretty, wrapped it up in silk and velvet and presented it to him as unassuming as a doe, but he knew what that meant. There is my button, she was saying, there is my trip wire. Don’t push it, Roman. The name Nikita had all but been banned in their household, even when funeral arrangements were being made; any time he’d heard one of the lawyers mention her father’s name, there had been a sharp rebuke. Not in my presence, she would tell him later, I do not want to hear that fucking name in my presence.
“At any rate, there is nothing that I want more than for this whole process to be done,” she continued lightly, reaching across the table to take his hand. “It was always what I wanted, you know. Ilya was better suited to be a functional piece of the business; he was the face because he had to be, not because he wanted to be, and I am better suited for the nitpicking and the details. Being the overseer is much more in your circle of talents, Romy.”
Her words assauged something unsettled and prickly in him, the sweep of the pad of her thumb across the back of his hand returning that doubtful monster in his mind back to its slumber. He sighed.
“You’re right,” he acquiesced after a moment, “it is more in my circle of talents.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“I always got the impression Ilarion wasn’t happy with it,” he added. “Though you two certainly enjoyed making work of me that first night, didn’t you?”
Varya smiled demurely. “It was never meant to make work of you, only to make a good impression.”
“Hm,” he replied, eyes narrowing playfully, “but you enjoy pushing me, V.”
She looked pleased. She always did, when he remarked on something that felt like he was really seeing her, beneath the glossy veneer. His girl did so love being seen.
“Only,” V demurred, “because you so enjoy reining me in.”
“Guilty as charged.”
Roman brought her hand to his mouth, kissing the back of it before relinquishing it and glancing around. He would just have to exercise patience, of which he had the most; patience, modesty, and humility, all excellent qualities that he could participate in at will, at any given time. Without any restraint.
“Did the men get the chandelier installed?” Varya idled, snapping his attention back to her. He narrowed his eyes.
“I told you I didn’t want a chandelier anymore.”
She looked at him across the table, dark doe eyes wide and innocent. “I thought you liked how polished they make the club.”
“No, you little viper,” Roman replied, clicking his tongue, “Paolo has a chandelier in his club, and there’s no fucking way I’m going to have people comparing it.”
“Ah,” she murmured, “the drama of the chandelier goes on.”
“And while we’re at it, might as well gut that one from the estate, too.”
“There’s more than one chandelier in there.”
“Then the men will be busy, won’t they?” He tsked his tongue. “I know you dream about watching me blow my top, V, but I’m making an executive decision on gaudy light fixtures.”
A smile flashed across her expression, pearly teeth and delighted eyes. She sighed, almost dreamily, like there was nothing more that she liked than to be doing this exact thing, and with him.
“Oh, Romy,” the brunette said sweetly, “you are the only thing I dream about.” And then, almost as an after thought: “Gaudy light fixture terrorism included.” She waved her hand to dismiss any protest or rebuttal he might have given her and said, “Now, since it’s my birthday, tell me all of the things you love the most about me.”
Roman sucked his teeth, eyeing her for a moment as he leaned back in the chair. Wicked little thing, waiting to preen and glow under his attention, a feline seeking him out. Her little bout of cruelty before was already forgiven. He said, “We’re going to be here for a while, if I do that.”
“They held the table for over six hours,” Varya demurred, “I’m sure they’ll hold it for as many more as you need.”
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By the time they got to the club, Varya was acting as though nothing had happened.
Truthfully, Roman preferred it that way. It just also left a lot of room to wonder—his wife was a talented actress, adept at smoothing his ruffled feathers out and not divulging her own feelings on the matter. And he wouldn’t ask, of course. If Varya wanted to express herself, she would, and had, quite openly in the past.
“I am so happy to be home,” she announced, gliding past the door to the club once Roman had opened it for her. “Do you think the babies are asleep, yet? I always miss putting them...”
Her voice trailed off, pausing a little as she seemed to realize that the club was cloaked in inky darkness, freezing just a few steps past the threshold. Roman let the door swing shut behind him, nudging her forward with a hand at the small of her back. He was met with some resistance; she steeled, stiffening against his insistence, before taking a few steps forward.
He said, barely keeping the delight out of his voice, “You’re holding up the line, V.”
“Roman,” Varya said, her voice pitched oddly soft and tight, “why—?”
The lights flashed on to a loud, unified cheer of Happy Birthday!; the club had been packed with vases of flowers, the tables donned with food and drink, and everyone worth their salt within a fifty-mile radius had made their way there. Not a single thing was out of place—everything exactly where he had instructed it be placed, and not a fucking chandelier in sight.
Roman came around in front of the brunette, grinning. “Happy—”
He stopped. Varya’s expression was not happy, or even surprised; it was something else, something that he couldn’t read, the pupils of her hot-whiskey eyes blown wide and the normally Renaissance-soft lines of her face sharpened and hardened into an expression that was more vicious.
“V?” he asked. Her eyes snapped to him, and for a second she looked the same way she had that night in the loft, her hands drenched in blood and the kitchen knife clutched in her fist with bodies at her feet: like she didn’t recognize him.
It took a heartbeat, but her expression smoothed out and she smiled, almost sheepish—like she’d been caught doing something naughty, instead of being caught being somewhere else. Someone else, more the wolf than the girl.
“The lights,” she explained, hands resting on his chest, “they startled me, is all.”
A frown creased his expression. He brought his hands up to hold her wrists, thumb pressed against her pulse point. It fluttered unsteadily. Unconvinced, Roman pressed, “The lights?”
“Just the lights,” Varya assured him. She tilted her head up and kissed him, one hand departing his jacket to go to the back of his neck—and when she kissed him, he could feel that strange little flicker of energy, like she’d been stamping something out before it could catch, but it still vibrated under her skin.
He opened his mouth to say something else, but she disentangled from him and swept around to the crowd of people waiting, beaming prettily and playing at bashfulness, as though she did not enjoy their eyes on her and did not soak their attention up like a flower did sunlight. Whatever had been plaguing her in that moment was now gone, and she was awash with attention and love, thanking people profusely and accepting each hug and cheek-kiss directed her way.
Roman brushed off the odd feeling that she wasn’t being as forthcoming with him as he would have preferred—no secrets anymore, isn’t that what they’d agreed on?—and instead waded into the crowd. Music kicked on overhead; chatter picked up to a warm humming around them; there was nothing else to think about except letting his girl enjoy her birthday celebration.
By the time Varya had made a suitable number of rounds (which tended to verge much higher than one, much to Roman’s chagrin—what tedious work, to share her with everyone else), she had barely sipped the glass of champagne someone had planted in her hand. She circled back to him eventually; like always, there was that pinprick tugging in the cavity of his chest, like they were bound by a single thread that kept them from parting too much and too quickly, and when she drew closer to him again it oozed relief, warm and vibrant, through his ribs.
“Sufficiently loved on?” he asked as she neared, hand reaching up to slide around her waist.
“By them? Certainly.” The brunette’s hand smoothed along his shoulder, the pad of her thumb gliding across the velvet of his jacket. “By you, though, not hardly. Not ever.”
“You are insatiable,” Roman agreed in a rumble. He splayed his fingers against the small of her back, tugging her in closer and brushing their noses together.
“Just for you,” Varya murmured, and the words brushed their lips together just a little—but everything with Varya, like this, felt like almost-kissing, enough to push him to some kind of edge where his stomach twisted and wrenched with want when she added, “And only for you.”
“You know I can’t resist you when you talk like that.”
She laughed, leaning in to set her glass to the side and curl her fingers into his shirt for a kiss; everything for a second felt normal, and good, and right again, the strange way she’d gone-away back in the doorway having disappeared, the dark cloud over her having cleared, her wretchedness from dinner dissipated.
And Roman kissed her, with the sound of the party chatter ringing in his ears, and kissed her with the faint taste of champagne flooding his senses when she parted her lips against his, and kissed her while his hand fisted the fabric of her dress and he managed out in a voice rough with want, “So you’re trying to rile me up.”
“I always,” Varya murmured against his mouth silkily, “want you riled, Romy.”
“Varya?”
A stranger’s voice filtered through the haze—the rose-colored one that usually accompanied Varya saying anything like she wanted him riled up—and Roman felt the irritation spike straight through it. He turned to look at the interruption at the same time that Varya did, only to find a young, handsome blonde standing just a foot away.
Varya said, sounding faint, “Maxim?”
“It has been a while,” the blonde said, and he sounded sheepish. “I called Armazd, asking after you—”
“Sorry,” Roman interjected briskly, fingers still curled—now possessively—into the fabric of Varya’s dress against the dip of her spine, “but who are you?”
His wife started to say, “Romy, this is—” at the same time that the man began, “I am sorry, my name—” and they both stopped at the same time, a strange little silence stretching between them.
“Maxim,” Varya said after a second, turning to look at Roman now. “This is Maxim. He is Artyem’s son.”
Roman stared at her, more to buy himself time than anything; she said the name like he was supposed to know who that was. Artyem, but it didn’t sound familiar. Almost any Russian name sounded like gibberish to him, and if Varya had said it to him, it had been in passing, an afterthought, nothing but a whisper of information passed between them before it was gone again.
Until it did. Until he remembered that the person Varya had thought was her father had actually been Artyem, that she’d poisoned him, let him bleed to death on the carpet while she had mentally checked out of the moment. That she had watched him die, but she had been somewhere else—someplace else, the way Ilarion had described it, very far away where she couldn’t even enjoy what she’d done fully.
And Maxim—golden, and polished, and clean-shaven—looked awfully pleasant for someone whose farther had choked to death on his own blood because of Varya.
“I see,” Roman said, even though he didn’t. His gaze turned to Maxim. “And you’ve—shown up without calling ahead?”
“I have been in Turkey,” Maxim explained, “finishing up some business, and I did not know how to get in touch—”
“Well, you spoke with Armazd, didn’t you?” Roman’s head tilted. “The man practically sleeps in our bed, I imagine he would have been happy to get you in contact with us.”
“Admittedly,” Maxim said, “I wanted it to be a surprise—”
No, Roman thought absently, venomously, that won’t do at all.
“—Varya’s birthday—”
“So you slunk in,” Roman elaborated tartly, “like a little street dog, hm?”
“Maxi,” Varya interjected, fingers absently tracing the stitching on Roman’s jacket, “why don’t you go get a drink and acquaint yourself with our friends? Armazd is just there—you see?”
Maxim’s eyes darted between her and Roman for a minute. He shifted on his feet, tilting and giving a little smile that might have liked abashed if Roman didn’t think he saw a little squirm of self-satisfaction in his gaze. Fucker.
“Of course,” the blonde replied after a moment. “C dnyom razhdyenyem, Varushka.” He took a step forward, pressing a kiss to her cheek.
Varya’s thumbnail dug into the lapel of Roman’s jacket. “Thank you, Maxi.”
Once the blonde had departed, linking up with Armazd in the crowd to get introduced, Roman straightened up from the bar. It was impossible not to stare at this newcomer—he glowed with an easy charisma, flashed bright smiles that were all teeth. Roman hated him already.
“Maxi?” he asked her, eyes narrowed, and Varya sighed. He waited for her to elaborate. Perhaps she’d say they had dated once, perhaps they were literally nothing. That would be ideal, after all. Ships passing in the night.
She said, “We grew up together.”
Even worse. Roman twisted a loose, dark curl of hers around his finger. “And you killed his father.”
“Well—” She paused, mouth pressing into a thin line. “He does not know.”
“He doesn’t—” The notion that she was keeping secrets, and not from him, coiled high and happy in his throat. He tried not to sound too delighted when he said, “V, surely he knows.”
“Surely he does not, that I did it. Only that it happened. And I will keep it that way,” she added firmly, picking up her champagne glass from the bar top. “Maxim was incredibly loyal to my father because Artyem was, but more than that—he was mine and Ilya’s friend. I’m sure he is missing Ilya almost as much as I am.”
“As we all are,” Roman agreed sagely, planting a kiss on her temple in spite of the dry look she gave him. It was hard to tell, to get a read on this Maxim. What was it he’d dragged himself out of the trenches for? Just to fly halfway across the world to wish Varya a happy birthday? Above all things, Roman understood that his wife was a desirable thing, and knowing that he kept her out of the reach of others was part of her appeal—but that much? Could someone who was just a friend want that much?
He continued, “So what is it that Maxim offers to the business, hm?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Varya demurred, which didn’t sound at all like the truth. “Artyem was the one who sent him out on jobs. My father kept things tight around the top, you know. If anyone would know what it was Maxim was up to in Turkey who wasn’t my father or Artyem, it would have been Ilarion.”
“I find it hard to believe you have no idea what your father was using someone for.”
The sound of delighted commentary drew both of their eyes away; Irina had come down, both dark-haired infants in her arms, and was walking them toward Varya and Roman. Murmured remarks on what could only be their cuteness passed throughout the crowd of party-goers.
“I am putting them down for bed,” Irina announced as she approached, “and I know you like to say goodnight.”
“Oh, you are an angel,” Varya murmured, glass set aside once again. She leaned in, pressing a kiss to baby Ro’s cheek. Yuliana babbled, and she sighed dreamily, “Have you ever seen more perfect babies, Roman?”
Perfect babies, a perfect wife; soon, he would even have the perfect grip on Gotham’s neck, throttling it until it was nothing but dust and ash. Soon, but not soon enough; he’d be content when it was just done and settled, when there was nothing else standing between him and everything that he wanted. Varya, and the guns—what an odd thing, to know that a year ago he’d set out for this and it was just falling into his lap.
“Romy?”
“Never,” Roman replied, smiling and glancing back at his wife, reaching and cradling the back of Yuli’s head. “I’ve never seen more perfect babies, V.”
Across the room, Maxim watched them. There was something about it that Roman didn’t like—the way his eyes flickered, the way he looked between the children and Varya, the way their eyes met and he didn’t deflect away. Like he didn’t mind getting caught. Where had he come from? What little shithole had he crawled out of, over a year after Nikita’s death and Ilarion’s death—longer, still, since his father’s death? Hadn’t he wondered what had happened to his father?
What are you doing here, he thought venomously, that you think you can just come in here like nothing? Like I won’t root you out like the little rat you are?
Maxim smiled. It was a polite smile, unassuming kind of smile.
Roman picked up his drink from the counter, taking a heavy swallow. Suddenly, the evening seemed to stretch out endlessly in front of him, no finish line in sight.
Nothing else standing between me and everything I want.
And he was going to keep it that way.
#birds of prey#birds of prey fic#roman sionis x original female character#ch: varya astakhova#ch: roman sionis#ch: victor zsasz#roman sionis/original female character#my writing#fic: the land of gods & devils#me sweating profusely posting this#i am really excited about this though and i want to really really thank everyone who has been supportive of me pursuing this!!!!#creeping up on varya's birthday and also the one year anniversary of CYT making me super emo#<3 <3 <3
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The Italian publisher, editor and collector Franco Maria Ricci has died at the age of 82.
In sumptuously produced art books, and as editor of the bi-monthly art magazine FMR, Ricci published writing by Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and many others over the course of his long and distinguished career. In 2019, Susan Moore visited his estate at Fontanellato, near Parma, where in recent years Ricci had constructed the largest labyrinth in the world out of bamboo; they discussed Ricci’s notable collection of largely 18th- and 19th-century sculpture and paintings, as well as his library of books published by the great typographer Giambattista Bodoni, whose works Ricci had reprinted in his first foray into publishing. The interview is published in full below.
Collecting may be read as a form of autobiography written with works of art rather than words. In the case of Franco Maria Ricci, his is a life composed of both words and pictures. He has not only published the most lavishly produced art magazine – FMR – and art books in the world, but also spent the last 50 years amassing a peerless collection of volumes produced by the great Italian typographer, compositor and publisher Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813) and a rich, eclectic collection of some 500 largely neoclassical and baroque paintings and sculptures. Both collections are at the heart of his most recent and extraordinary venture, the creation of the immense, star-shaped Labirinto della Masone, near Parma, the largest labyrinth in the world – and surely one of the few planted with bamboo.
There is something surreal, and slightly disturbing, about turning off the autostrada and suddenly encountering this majestic bamboo structure rising 10m or more above the plains of the Po valley. For all its elegant calligraphic stems and angular leaves, this is not the sparse specimen bamboo of Chinese ink-painting, but a forest. Here, more than 200,000 of these fast-growing bamboos arch upward in their quest for light. Once I turn into the drive of what was originally Ricci’s grandfather’s estate at Fontanellato, the brilliant azure June sky all but disappears. By the end of my two-day visit, it seems that the contrasts of light and dark are an apt metaphor for the book and art collections – and for the entire complex of maze, museum, archive and chapel, the latter built in the form of a pyramid. Ricci has always been part rationalist, part visionary.
Ricci’s story begins with the book. ‘I grew up surrounded by my father’s books. Reading Shakespeare, Homer, Joyce and Dante saved me from bad taste,’ he once said. ‘It made beauty simple, familiar and immediate in my eyes.’ It was a book, too, that transformed his life and launched a long and successful career: Bodoni’s Manuale tipografico, first published in 1818. Before his discovery of Bodoni’s works in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma in the 1960s, a career in publishing seemed unlikely. The stylish Ricci, a racing driver and a dandy with dark cherubic curls, was best known for patterning the snow in the piazza around Parma Cathedral with the wheels of his E-type Jaguar. Even Bernardo Bertolucci remembered that car.
As a young man, Ricci had wanted to study archaeology, but an uncle in the oil world persuaded him to sign up for geology instead. After three months in Turkey spent looking for oil that was not there, he realised the oil business was not for him. Yet his education proved critical in unlikely ways. He spent weekends exploring the mysterious, labyrinthine underground tunnels and caves that are a feature of the Romagna region of Italy. He also designed posters for Parma University’s theatre festival that caught the attention of an American curator preparing a show of Italian design in New York. He became, inadvertently, a graphic artist, and went on to create striking graphics for everything from Poste Italiane to Alitalia.
Ricci has long insisted that ‘Bodoni was not only a typographer. He achieved modernity and elegance through graphic art. He was, like Canova, a champion of neoclassicism but in two dimensions. I immediately fell in love with the proportions, the concept of beauty.’ Bodoni’s genius was not simply the freshness, rigour and precision of the typefaces, with their dramatic contrasts between thick and thin line, but also his sense of how to lay out a page. Texts are set with extravagantly wide margins and with little or no decoration.
Ricci decided to reproduce the master’s Manuale tipografico, although everyone told him he was mad to do it. He bought two early offset typography machines which, he noted, were ‘as expensive as a Ferrari, which I wanted to buy but never did’, and had the highest-quality paper made exclusively for the project by Fabriano. It took a year to publish the three volumes in 900 numbered copies (1964–65). ‘So I became a publisher. It became a bestseller.’
Much to his mother’s horror, Ricci decided to continue to publish very expensive books – art books printed in Bodonian style – and later, literary editions, several series of which were edited by Jorge Luis Borges, whose presence looms large in library and labyrinth. At a time when Arte Povera dominated the Italian avant-garde, Ricci chose opulent black silk covers embossed with gold, and printed on costly pale blue Fabriano paper with handmade plates. He wanted his books to be rare – printing small editions – but also surprising. He gave Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Borges free rein to write accompanying texts.
His wife Laura Casalis remembers having been struck by the originality of Ricci’s 1970 book on the then little-appreciated Erté – text by Barthes – before she met the publisher himself in 1975, and soon found herself working on a book on red paper-cut portraits of Mao, accompanied by 39 of the Chairman’s own poems printed in Chinese characters. ‘Little by little I slipped into publishing with him – Franco was a workaholic and I realised that was the only way I would see him. Those Mao paper-cuts were typical of the practically unknown subjects that he would seek out all his life, and we sometimes show them between loan exhibitions in the museum. Franco has l’occhio lungo – he can see beauty in something which may take others a long time to recognise.’
It is in the library I find Ricci and, indeed, where he is to be found most mornings and afternoons. It is part of a cluster of picturesque 19th-century stone buildings surrounded by lush and increasingly exotic gardens. He had begun renovating the dilapidated stables behind his grandfather’s long-abandoned villa as a summerhouse and library in the 1970s, and its enormous hayloft still serves as an idyllic open-air dining room and entertaining space, even though the couple have now moved into the main house. Inside this romantic half-ruined folly, Ricci created the unexpected: two neoclassical library rooms lined with bookshelves and marble busts, their domed and coffered ceilings reminiscent of those in the Biblioteca Palatina.
As soon as we arrive in the inner sanctum, the Bodoni library with its more than 1,200 volumes – missing a tantalising three or four tomes but otherwise complete – Ricci is immediately up on his feet and pulling down and opening cherished volumes, eyes blazing. Despite the heat, he wears an elegant embroidered linen waistcoat but not its jacket, which hangs nearby, bearing the synthetic red flower that became in effect his iconographical device. (Tai Missoni gave him a cardigan as a present: Ricci declined the gift – he does not wear cardigans – but declared that he would always wear the red flower from its packaging thereafter, which he did. Once, when he had forgotten the flower, an officer at the Alitalia desk at Milan airport said: ‘I see you are travelling incognito today Mr Ricci.’)
Now Ricci deftly presents Bodoni’s Essai de caractères russes… of 1782, and his 1789 edition of Torquato Tasso’s pastoral play Aminta, exquisitely illuminated for the Prince of Essling. These are dear friends and the joy as he handles these pages is self-evident. This is the only significant part of the collection not to have been moved down to the museum and archive complex, a short bamboo-lined drive away. It is clear that he could never bear to live apart from these books.
The impetus to create the long-imagined labyrinth, and a museum and library to house his collections and publishing archive, was a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. The couple sold the publishing house in 1982, and their house in Milan, and moved to Fontanellato. There is a fierce pride in Laura Casalis’s voice as she explains: ‘Franco wanted to do it, he imagined it, and he found the right team of people to help him realise it.’ We are sitting over coffee in the Labirinto courtyard surveying the sharp-edged geometries of its rose-pink brick buildings, a place that already has the air of a lost ancient city discovered in a jungle. Laura describes the evolution of the museum collections within, and recalls the words of the late Italian publisher Valentino Bompiani, who described Ricci as a man of courage and fantasy.
‘Whenever he fell for some subject or artist, Franco would try to buy.’ Laura continues. ‘He was never concerned with what was or was not fashionable, and never bought to decorate a house. He collected pieces that he liked that were strange or unconventional.’ He began with Art Deco, first buying inexpensive little bronze and chryselephantine dancers by the likes of Demétre Chiparus (1886–1947), as well as Guiraud-Rivière’s dramatic figure of Isadora Duncan with two bears, which dominates the central space of the 20th-century gallery in the museum.
Here, too, are three paintings by the outsider artist Antonio Ligabue (1899–1965), a tormented soul who had led a tragic life, painting and wandering around the Po valley when he was not confined to a psychiatric hospital. Ricci published the first monograph on the artist in 1967, two years after his death, a work that helped catapult the artist from provincial to national and then international fame. Two years later, he bought two of the artist’s bold, visceral close-up heads of roaring tigers, painted in the 1950s, including the key work that had been selected for the book cover. A no less bright and richly impasted self-portrait in the guise of Vincent Van Gogh followed a year later.
Ricci also championed – and collected – the work of the third dominant presence in this space, Adolfo Wildt (1868–1931), often described as the last Symbolist but one whose reputation was, as Laura puts it, ‘tarnished by Fascist association’. Ricci published a monograph in 1988, the same year that he acquired the strange masterpiece that is Vir temporis acti of 1913, a virtuoso marble bust of a Greek or Roman soldier reimagined through the combined lenses of Michelangelo and the Secessionists. The expressive anguish of this head may be seen as a symbol of the nobility and redemption of sacrifice, but it is the refined and gleaming silken surface that led to Brancusi.
Ricci has a penchant not only for sculpture but also portraits, and portrait busts in particular. ‘I have hunted portraits all my life. I never get tired of looking at them,’ he confesses, ‘and in turn, I feel observed by them.’ In the 1990s, he began following the art market and collecting in earnest. Ricci had an office, bookshop and apartment in Paris and there and in Monaco he was to acquire many of his largely French 18th-century terracottas, some of the most compelling by less familiar names. A superb example is the bust of an intense, low-browed individual, signed by one A. Riffard and given the Revolutionary date of ‘9. Fructidor an 3e’, from 1794–95.
Another naturalistic tour de force is one of very few known terracottas by Francesco Orso, also known as François Orsy, a Piedmontese sculptor also active in Paris. Orso is responsible for the rarest sculptures here: the disconcerting life-size polychrome wax portrait busts of Vittorio Amadeo III of Savoy and his wife Maria Antonia Ferdinanda di Borbone, complete with painted papier-mâché clothes. The revolution destroyed the sculptor’s courtly patronage in Paris, and he diversified into the more overtly commercial world of the waxwork with a show featuring an effigy of the aristocratic revolutionary leader the Comte de Mirabeau and popular tableaux on themes such as Marat’s assassination by Charlotte Corday.
Unsurprisingly, given Ricci’s passion for Bodoni, the neoclassical looms large. At the centre of the Napoleonic gallery, lined with marble busts – Italian, English and Danish – is a model of Canova’s ideal head of Dante’s muse Beatrice, first conceived as an idealised portrait of Mme Récamier. The display offers a witty face-off between Wellington and Napoleon on opposing pedestals, but the emperor prevails with a sequence of classicising family portraits. Above hangs the second version of Francesco Hayez’s The Penitent Magdalene (1825). Here the Romantic artist has transposed the chilly perfection of Canova’s marble surfaces into pigment.
An unusual and endearing mid 18th-century Italian group portrait presents the family of Antonio Ghidini, a cloth merchant to the Bourbon court in Parma, painted by his friend, the court artist Pietro Melchiorre Ferrari (1734/5–87). In this Zoffany-style conversation piece there is no doubting Ghidini’s business, as he points to documents mentioning his association with his trading partners in Manchester and his wife sits stiffly under her salmon-pink stomacher in sprigged and striped silk finery.
Yet it would be misleading to suggest that Ricci’s ever-curious eye never ranged beyond the 18th and 19th centuries. He owns a number of 17th-century marbles, including that of the all-powerful prelate Cardinal Paluzzo Paluzzi Altieri degli Albertoni, who effectively ran the papacy under Clement X – irresistible in profile. In the 2000s Ricci also added, for example, Ludovico Carracci’s handsome three-quarter length Portrait of Lucrezia Bentivoglio Leoni (1589), executed two years before the sitter’s death. Flanking the same door is Philippe de Champaigne’s Portrait of the Duchesse d’Aiguillon (c. 1650), and viewed beyond is an unusual sensual and erotically charged work by Luca Cambiaso (1527–85), Venus Blindfolding Cupid.
Yet Ricci has also always been attracted to what he describes as the art of visionary madness, by the surreal, and by what is prosaic and popular. The museum’s cabinet of curiosities includes a narwhal horn, once thought to have belonged to the unicorn. Its walls are lined with particularly gruesome vanitas paintings and sculptures. Centre stage among the skulls is a decomposing head by Jacopo Ligozzi (1547–1627), its flesh and rotten teeth seething with maggots and flies.
Only superficially more benign are the drawings of the Codex Seraphinianus, first published in two volumes in 1981 – Ricci’s most extraordinary publication. These meticulously detailed explications of the bizarre and the fantastical illustrate an encyclopaedia of an imaginary world conceived by the artist Luigi Serafini in the 1970s and written in a language still understood only by its creator. Certainly its pages are at home in the Labirinto della Masone complex – another visionary creation, in effect a Gesamtkunstwerk, an all-embracing art work expressing the life and taste of one man.
Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com
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Abandon Ideology
In Jordan Peterson’s second foray into self-help, he writes his VI’th rule for life: ‘Abandon Ideology.’ As an ardent follower of Jordan’s, on first reading of this, I took this rules’s implications at face value; that is, the implication that an ideology is something that is held by a group of people, but that the individual, striving for what is true and pure, should rid themselves of all ideology, in the interest of progressing new and helpful ideas to the culture at large. Recently, particularly after having watched this YouTube video by Philosophy Tube, a question which I wrestled with subtly after reading Jordan’s recent work has made its way to the forefront of my mind: Are we so sure that it is even possible to abandon ideology? and I don’t mean once you already ‘have one’, so to speak (though this is a valid question also, albeit requiring a few more prior assumptions), but rather, is it even possible for an individual to not have an ideology? (Paraphrased,) Philosophy Tube makes this point explicitly, comparing ideology to a**holes: everyone has them, they use them everyday, but nobody tends to take a good look at their own unless something has gone wrong. So who is right?
Interestingly, both philosophers consider ideology to be something that actually exists - which, to me, is by no means a foregone conclusion. Jordan assumes that it is a sort of group-think parasite that infests the mind, while Philosophy Tube believes that ideology is an inevitable function within the individual. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that the latter tends to be a more common belief among those with left political leaning, while Jordan’s point tends to be expressed by individuals who are more popular with those with right political leaning*. As we know that political leaning seems to be a result of a temperamental difference between individuals, it could be that this is just another form of what one could theorize as the fundamental question between the extremes of such differentiations, which is the question of whether the individual is fundamentally formed through nature or nurture. I have personally arrived at the conclusion, as have others, that the answer to this question is clearly both; however, the question of whether or not ideology is fundamentally group-oriented or individual-orientated doesn’t quite fit neatly into the dimensions of this theory. This is because, in no small part, that the roles of thought in regards to ideology in this case are antithetical to the typical hypothesis presented by the theory: in this case, the left leaning individuals are the one’s more likely to believe that ideology is an innate characteristic (nature), where as the right leaning individuals are more likely to believe that ideology is a product of culture (nurture). While it may not be a perfect comparison, this is the reverse of what an individual who agrees with this line of logic would likely guess. Is there a reason for this?
Perhaps it is the more fundamental tenant of conservatism, which tends to prize its own culture’s tradition, that demands from its right-wing thinker a bias in believing that their own way of interpreting the world is the ‘correct’ way to do so, based on the interpretation of the facts of ‘objective reality,’ which is free of ideology, because that is the way it is has always been; or perhaps it is liberalism’s inclination towards progression - its greatest strength and weakness simultaneously - that forces it to be open to all possibilities, and therefore implying that there is no single way of being, there is no objective reality, because reality could be anything based on the individual’s own subjective experience, based on their own ideology, which must therefore be present in all of us; or, perhaps, (and this is in no way to imply a comprehensively exclusive list) there is the consideration which I mentioned above, which questions the existence of ideology as an objective truth altogether.
[Aside: for sh*ts and giggles, let’s explore this last idea. So ‘ideology’, stems from the french word idéologie, where idéo- or ideo- is “idea”, and -logie or -logy is “the (scientific) study of the subject field represented by the stem.” (From Merriam-Webster.com). Also from Merriam-Webster: “Though ideology originated as a serious philosophical term, within a few decades it took on connotations of impracticality thanks to Napoleon, who used it in a derisive manner. Today, the word most often refers to ‘a systematic body of concepts,’especially those of a particular group or political party.” So according to this definition, ideology is more of a strictly philosophical or scientific term referring to the study of ideas. Well, everyone has ideas. But somehow this definition doesn’t quite seem to fit the bill. It seems as though both sides of the political spectrum seem to regard ideology as something deeper than the this definition gives it credit. It seems as though according to the political (to use a loose term to define the parameters of this debate) debate, believes that ideology is either a type of group-oriented idea that can inhabit a large swath of people, or it is the fundamental subjective framework that the individual uses to interpret the world. Of course, I doubt many serious thinkers on the right would deny that everyone needs a framework for which to use to interpret the world (Jordan Peterson certainly doesn’t). Instead, they would argue that framework is not the same as ideology, but simply a tenant of being human, as a combination of both an individual’s objective and subjective experience (and of course one could argue about whether objective experience actually exists also, but that’ll have to be another topic for another day; today we will assume that both objective and subjective experiences are real). But this also begs the question, why is it that some people can have an ideology while others can be free from it? This brings the argument illustrated nicely by Gad Saad into play; namely, that ideology is the equivalent of an idea pathogen, echoed by the complimentary position presented by Jordan’s work which contends with the idea that although not everyone need be infected by an idea parasite, everyone must have a narrative framework to operate in the world. This in and of itself, of course, asks us to contend with the question of whether or not there is even a difference between this “narrative framework” and ideology, to which we may get different answers based on the political leaning of the person whom we ask. As my inherent bias seems to lean to the right in most cases, my intuition tells me that there is a difference, that narrative framework is superordinate to ideology, but again, its difficult to assess whether or not that is my tendency towards conservatism and its respect of (let’s say the west’s) cultural background getting in the way of objectivity, sustaining that objectivity is real in the first place. But to play devil’s advocate to the side opposite to my intuition in a different way, I would say that it’s possible that the real problem is that we do not have our definitions straight: what is ideology to one may be narrative framework to another; and in this sense, I might also add that it is entirely possible that ideology itself does not exist past what may also be considered a narrative framework, since what one would call an ideology another may say they are only acting in according to their own narrative framework (or, “yes, I do have an ideology, but - of course - so do you). The obvious argument to refute this would likely refer to the nature in which an individual with an accused ideology would hold beliefs which mirror that of another individual with the same ideology, therefore rendering the ideas non-unique. And this is indeed a powerful argument. It’s also an argument which, hitherto, I never second guessed. But thinking now, of course it isn’t the case that two individuals narrative frameworks cannot be influenced by similar subjective experiences. This gets more complicated when you compound uncountable numbers of people who have “the same ideology,” and therefore expressing similar subjective experiences that derived their narrative frameworks; after all, could that many people really have had such identical experiences that they are brought to such similar beliefs independent from and “idea parasite” or ideology? Maybe not, but also, maybe the subjective experiences and narrative framework (or ideology), of the accuser has led them to a sort of confirmation bias, where one signal of similarity leads them to the expectation of uniformity; where the sight of a leaf of a certain type or color leads to certainty that that leaf must belong to a specific breed of tree, rather than perhaps a tree of only similar lineage. In this regard, with special consideration given to the possibility of miscommunication of words and their definitions, it is possible that the deeper form of “ideology” within the context of our current culture, does not even exist. It’s certainly a possibility which I will be keeping my eyes and ears on, anyways. End Aside.]
A conclusion about who is right certainly won’t be reached in a blog post by me today. What I can conclude from this thought experiment, however, is yet another example of why your intuition - based from your temperament and experience - can lead you astray when considering complex questions. Or even seemingly non-complex issues, for that matter. The perspective that Jordan Peterson provides may very well be the correct one. But the perspective that Philosophy Tube highlights as well feels as though it could be superior. Then there is the possibility that they are both wrong - or both right (it is such a strange world we live in, after all, where paradoxes are known to exist). One thing is for certain: both of these people are much smarter than I, so, as per usual, there is much left to consider and ponder. And to gather erratically.
One day I will start to write blog posts that focus more on my reader than my inner ramblings. But for now, I still need to sort myself out, and I hear writing can be incredibly useful for that. This is ErraticWoolGathering, after all.
Best,
- Alex
*An example of this that I can bring to mind is exemplified by Gad Saad, author of The Parasitic Mind, who similarly claims - as I understand it - that ideology is a matter of group-think, or in his words, that an ideology is no different than a type of “idea pathogen.” Now, whether Gad claims to be of right political leaning or not (as far as I know, he does not), his book and his ideas clearly seem to be more popular with the the right-wing of our culture than they are with our left-wing.
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"What sort of comedian can’t even make the lesbians laugh?” the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby asks in her new Netflix standup special, “Nanette.” “Every comedian ever,” she answers, grinning conspiratorially, her eyebrows darting behind horn-rim glasses. “The only people who don’t think it’s funny are us lezzes, but we’ve gotta laugh, because if we don’t—proves the point!” It’s a good joke, knowing and playful in the style that Gadsby, a star in her home country, has built her comedy career on. But it also contains a seed of discomfort: the image of the hypothetical gay woman in the audience, not quite comfortable with the joke, but being conscripted into laughing anyway, at her own expense.
This gesture is intentional. “Nanette,” Gadsby’s first foray into the American mainstream, begins as a traditional comedy show in the autobiographical, self-deprecating vein of the comedian’s older work. Gadsby is a native of Tasmania, Australia’s rural southern island state, where, when she was growing up, the majority of Tasmanians believed that homosexuality should be a criminal offense. She jokes about coming out to her mom and being mistaken for a man in public because of her butch appearance. One time, a cashier was mortified after calling her “sir.” Another time, a drunk guy at a bar threatened to beat her up when he saw her hitting on his girlfriend, only to apologize when he realized that she was a woman.
But in the course of the hour-long set, which was filmed at the Sydney Opera House (Gadsby has also been performing at the SoHo Playhouse, in New York), “Nanette” transforms into a commentary on comedy itself—on what it conceals, and on how it can force the marginalized to partake in their own humiliation. Gadsby, who once considered Bill Cosby her favorite comedian, now plans to quit comedy altogether, she says, because she can’t bring herself to participate in that humiliation anymore. Onstage, Gadsby typically speaks in a shy, almost surprised tone, playing jokes off of an unassuming, nebbishy demeanor. She clutches the mic with two fists and speaks softly, forcing audiences to listen closely to hear her. In "Nanette," she seems to slowly shed that persona, becoming increasingly assertive and, at times, deadly serious. Her set builds to include more and more disturbing accounts of her own experiences with homophobia and sexual assault, and broader themes of violence against women and male impunity. But for every moment of tension, Gadsby gives her crowd release in a punch line—until she doesn’t. When the jokes stop, the audience is forced to linger in its unease. “This tension? It’s yours,” she says at one particularly upsetting moment, toward the end of the show. “I am not helping you anymore.”
Gadsby’s moving anti-comedy in “Nanette” has been compared to Tig Notaro’s set, in 2012, about having breast cancer and her grief at the recent death of her mother, and how the two catastrophes had compounded each other in her life. Both shows challenge audiences to think about the comedian not just as a performer but as a person capable of pain. But where Notaro’s set felt intimate and immediate—it was delivered just days after her diagnosis—Gadsby’s material is almost two years in the making and seems to harness the broader fury of the #MeToo moment. Gadsby, like many women, is done hiding her anger, and in “Nanette” she bends the bounds of standup to accommodate it.
Gadsby holds an art-history degree, and at one point in her show she shifts to discussing the lives of famous artists. “I hate Picasso,” she says, “but you’re not allowed to.” In his forties, the painter—married, famous, and at the height of his artistic career—carried on an affair with a teen-age girl named Marie-Thérèse Walter. “Does it matter?” Gadsby asks. “Yeah, it does matter.” Picasso later said of his affair with Walter, “It was perfect. I was in my prime, she was in her prime.” Gadsby goes on to explain the obvious, that no girl is in her prime in her teen years; to Picasso, a woman’s prime was nothing more than the prime of her attractiveness to him. Picasso was the founder of Cubism, the artistic movement that allowed multiple perspectives to be simultaneously represented on a canvas. “Any of those perspectives a woman’s?” Gadsby asks. Art, she makes clear—from painting to comedy—does not liberate everyone equally. It can replicate the same privileges and exclusions as the culture in which it was made.
In the world of standup, this is, in part, a problem of form. In the show, Gadsby explains that a joke, at its core, has two components, a set-up and a punch line. Stories, meanwhile, have three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Gadsby thinks that there is harm in the joke’s tendency to truncate a story; the ending is the place where understandings can be expanded and lessons learned. “That’s where catharsis lives,” she said, in an interview with Emily Nussbaum on The New Yorker Radio Hour. “That’s where hindsight lives.” Telling a joke, by contrast, means leaving things out—cutting down on complexity, context, and moral stakes. For Gadsby, excising these for the sake of making people laugh has become too great a sacrifice.
One of comedy’s most effective tools is something known as a callback, wherein a story or a bit from earlier in a set is mentioned again later, and the repetition amplifies the joke’s effect. A callback helps to establish a rapport between the comedian and the audience; now they’re in on the joke together. In “Nanette,” Gadsby subverts this technique to devastating effect, returning to the story of the man who threatened her for flirting with his girlfriend outside a pub, only to back off when he realizes that she was a woman. When the story ends there, it’s funny—it’s a joke about the man’s ignorance. But the second time Gadsby recounts this, she tells us that the man in fact came back to her after he walked away, realizing his mistake. “I get it. You’re a lady faggot,” he told her. “I’m allowed to beat the shit out of you.” And he did. No one stopped the man from beating her, she says. She never reported the attack to the police, and, even though she was injured, she never took herself to the hospital. Recounting this, Gadsby’s eyes redden; her voice is loud and breaking. She points one hand emphatically outward, as if implicating the whole world in failing to protect her.
Watching Gadsby, it was impossible not to think of the many women who’ve come forward in recent months with stories of abuse that were years or even decades old. You could consider the #MeToo moment itself as a kind of callback, a collective return to stories that women have been telling one way—to others, to themselves—with a new, emboldened understanding that those past tellings had been inadequate. Like Gadsby, many women have excluded or elided the difficult parts of their stories for the sake of a punch line, the sake of not upsetting the status quo, or the sake of the comfort of their listeners. For many others, the #MeToo moment was not the first time they had spoken out; it was only the first time that they were listened to. Perhaps this is the most vital way in which “Nanette” reflects the events of the past year. In her interview with Nussbaum, Gadsby recounts that when she first began performing the show, she would be heckled by members of the audience—always by men, always at the point when she revealed that she had been sexually assaulted. It is hard to imagine that happening now. In her Netflix special, the crowd is rapt. People are paying attention.
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The Friendly Film Fan Mini Reviews (2018)
Due to time constraints and the nature of finals week being intensely busy, I’m not able to give my full time and attention to every movie I see in theaters in terms of writing up a full-length review (though I did just write up two for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Bumblebee, so go check those out). Occasionally as well, I get busy enough after seeing one that by the time I actually do have time to write a full-length review, the relevance of said review has passed with time. With this in mind, I do a set of mini-reviews each year that are more like short summaries of what I thought of each film, along with the usual score on a scale of 1 to 10. Not every movie I didn’t write a full review for this year will get one, but I’ll try to cover the ones I feel that I need to for this list. Here are The Friendly Film Fan’s mini reviews for the calendar year of 2018:
A Simple Favor:
A Simple Favor provides a decent showcase for Blake Lively’s acting abilities with style for days, but the mystery really isn’t anything special, playing off as a sort of discount version of Gone Girl that forgot why that movie worked so well, but Anna Kendrick is cute, and at least it has some good performances amidst lackluster dialogue. Really expected more from this one. 6.4/10.
Leave No Trace:
Please never let director Debra Granik leave us for this long again, even though the result of it is perhaps the best movie to come out about post-war veteran life in a really long time. Ben Foster puts on a great performance that’s par for the course for him at this point, but the standouts here are Thomasin McKenzie, a genuine talent that should get a lot more work after this, and a script that respects its audience just as well, if not better, than it respects its subject matter. 9.8/10.
A Prayer Before Dawn
A terrifically performed but occasionally difficult to watch, brutally hard-hitting movie with a career best turn from Joe Cole, A Prayer Before Dawn firmly establishes A24 as not just one of, if not the, best independent movie studio working today, but also the most ambitious. It tackles things like drug addiction and gang violence while also being a uniquely inspiring coming-of-age character piece. The film being set in a Taiwanese prison without subtitles (until Cole’s character learns to speak the language that is) truly lends to the sense of the world, and the result is really quite special. 9.4/10.
You Were Never Really Here
Lynne Ramsay’s meditation on humanity’s obsession with violence is a stunning watch, as the film actively chooses to refuse to let the audience partake in such brutal acts as depicted in a tour de force performance (perhaps a career best) from Joaquin Phoenix. The film is always focused on how badly people want to see the violence and then forces you to reflect on why you wanted to in the immediate aftermath of its happening. The editing, direction, and Phoenix’s performance all add up to a seriously impactful watch. 9.4/10.
The Clovehitch Killer
Many people were wondering if I was going to give this movie a full review, given that both my younger sisters are in it, but given how low it flies on the radar being a VOD release simultaneous with its limited theatrical run, a full review may not have gained a lot of traction. That being said, this is a really solid example of how to do a good film on a low budget; it’s noticeable, but it doesn’t detract from the overall narrative as much as it typically would in a movie like this. The first act takes a bit to pick up some steam, but once Charlie Plummer finds a box in a barn, it’s a pretty tense ride the rest of the way. 7.2/10.
The Kindergarten Teacher
Netflix has been picking up some pretty good stuff lately, and while I haven’t yet viewed 22 July or The Ballad of Buster Scruggs yet (still waiting for ROMA as well), this is a pretty good indicator as to how they’ll get into the awards circuit. It’s good, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is really good in it, but the protagonist is just too unlikable for me to want to keep watching. Gyllenhaal plays the part well, but it’s difficult to root for someone to kidnap a child (which is a thing that happens). 7/10.
Ralph Breaks the Internet
No, it’s not as good as the widely beloved first film, and that’s largely because what made the first one so special was its emphasis on classic arcade style video games as a means to tell a story but not the point of the story, a self-growth tale about Ralph learning to not be insecure about his place in the broader world he occupied, and also an arc that’s immediately forgotten as this one starts. The sequel aims to mostly just show off everything Disney owns in animated form since it takes place in the internet, but much like the internet, it seems much more concerned with selling you something rather than actually making a new point, though given Disney animation’s storytelling pedigree, you still have a good bit of fun along the way. 8.2/10.
Boy Erased
If there’s a singular film I’m more disappointed in than any other this year, it would be Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, an LGBT drama about the dangers of conversion therapy that doesn’t really seem to make any greater point other than “conversion therapy is bad.” Everyone in it does solid performance work, but it’s all just pretty good work where it could be great, there’s a whole rape scene that’s never really addressed by the movie except for briefly after it happens but not in context to the main character, and the whole thing is so drab and colorless right from the get-go that it feels like Edgerton doesn’t want you to feel any sense of joy even before the bad stuff happens. It’s not a bad movie, but it feels incredibly lackluster given the talent involved. 6.9/10.
Bohemian Rhapsody
And if there were any film this year people probably should be more disappointed by, it’s this paint-by-numbers recap of the highlights of classic rock legend Freddie Mercury, with his time in the band Queen serving as the main backdrop. Rami Malek’s physical performance is too devoted and genuinely astounding to not garner him some awards attention, and the use of a Mercury sound-a-like he lip syncs over shouldn’t be held against him in terms of that, but it does make a little bit of a difference since one can tell it’s definitely not Malek’s voice in the singing parts. The re-creation of the Live Aid concert is a true work of art, but getting there is such a plain ride, it’s honestly kind of boring. In fact, there’s whole edits in the film where one of Queen’s hit songs will start being written, and then it cuts away to a concert version of it but doesn’t bother to stay in any one spot for more than a few seconds at a time, and the moment either gains momentum too quickly or loses it entirely. This film needed to be great in order to justify being more than just another fairly average Brian Singer movie, and in my view at least, it didn’t accomplish that. 6.1/10.
Lean on Pete
Another foray into small film territory from A24, this coming-of-age tale starring Charlie Plummer in the role that will almost certainly propel him to stardom if he’s not there already is a terrific, moving portrait of grief, hope, loss, and love so subtly rendered by the script that by the time it rips your heartstrings out at the end, you barely realize the impact of the journey you just went on and the credits are already rolling. And hey, it’s always nice to see Steve Buscemi get work that unexpectedly fits him since he’s becoming such a recognizable chameleon of an actor; we may always recognize his face, but his performances just keep getting deeper. 9.4/10.
And those are all of my mini-reviews for the calendar year of 2018. Any you didn’t see on the list that you’d hoped to? Any verdicts you’re surprisingly elated or disappointed by? Let me know in the comments below! Thanks for reading, and keep an eye out for my next review, coming soon!
#Mini Reviews#2018#The Friendly Film Fan#Movie Review#Film Review#Movie Reviews#Film Reviews#A Simple Favor#Leave No Trace#A Prayer Before Dawn#You Were Never Really Here#The Clovehitch Killer#The Kindergarten Teacher#Ralph Breaks the Internet#Wreck-It Ralph 2#Boy Erased#Bohemian Rhapsody#Lean on Pete
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Dust, Volume 4, Number 8
Sad Baxter
For the latest installment in our often-monthly roundup of shorter reviews, we've got an elusively rare CDR, a brief discussion of "Mallcore," the merging of Arabic tones with a free jazz style of performance, and some lovely, understated Aussie songwriting. Contributors include Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw, Jennifer Kelly, and Justin Cober-Lake
Anne-James Chaton/Andy Moor —Tout Ce Que Je Sais (Unsounds)
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Tout Ce Que Je Sais (All That I Know) is the fourth cohesive recording project by
vocalist Anne-James Chaton and guitarist Andy Moor, and the second under their Heretics project. Sonically, it comes full circle to the strengths of their marvelous debut, Le Journaliste. Stripped back to what the two men can do live, certain strengths come to the fore. Moor’s guitar playing, an amalgam of chugging riffs, melodic permutations and those emotion-overloading near-explosions that have been his gift to the Ex for decades, is simply fantastic. You could just listen him do his stuff and the only thing you’d be missing is the way he shadows, underlines and propels the stark unfuckwithable authority of Chaton’s delivery. The Frenchman sounds undeniable reading the contents of his wallet, but the contents here — Francophone texts borrowed from or written about heretical figures that have endorsed the idea of undoing something — can’t help but add gravity to the music. Simultaneously freewheeling and unmovable, no matter what you’ve been listening to lately, this is one record that you really ought to know.
Bill Meyer
Neon Tiger—Accessorize (Bogus Collective)
Accessorize by Neon Tiger
Mallcore is a thing, it seems, so much so that multiple, competing subgenres lay claim to the label. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or weep. Neon Tiger’s recent EP sure doesn’t clarify anything. A few of the tracks scan as celebratory invocations of the climate-controlled corporate space of the late-twentieth century shopping mall, and the various consumer pleasures to be had therein. A few tunes feature weirdly distorted baritone vocals (including “Waiting in Line,” which turns out to be a couple sections of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” chopped up and slowed down a cycle or three; perversely, it’s compelling listening). The distortion misshapes the vocals discomfitingly enough to suggest a measure of critical distance from all the logos and fluorescent lighting and foodcourt linoleum. But it’s hard to say for sure what attitude Neon Tiger takes toward its subject matter. In that way, the EP is a perfect postmodern object—mystifying surfaces, ambivalent values, with only the commodity form as a legible presence.
Jonathan Shaw
Luke Stewart—Works for Upright Bass and Amplifier (Astral Spirits)
Works for Upright Bass and Amplifier by Luke Stewart
There was a time when you had an excuse to not know who Luke Stewart was if you were not hip to Washington, DC’s jazz scene. Given his membership in the fiery improvising-for-justice quintet Irreversible Entanglements, that time is coming to an end. But that’s only one rock on a veritable heap of live-performance and community-building work that dwarfs his still-slender discography (debut efforts by Heart of the Ghost, Heroes are Gang Leaders, Mean Crow, Trio OOO). To that you can add the 31-year-old bassist’s solo cassette. Rather typically, his voice on his instrument is strong, but it does not speak alone. First comes a burrowing feedback tone, which morphs and recurs throughout the nearly half-hour long first piece as if to say that even when you’re alone, you’re not alone. Sometimes Stewart uses that continuous presence as a springboard for knotted, bursting figures; others he lets the amplification add a red, ragged glow to sprinting pizzicato forays. Turns out that the upright bass and amplifier make good company when Stewart’s giving out the working orders.
Bill Meyer
Leo Mullins—Being Here Is Everything (Self-Released)
Being Here is Everything by Leo Mullins
Leo Mullins, an Australian songwriter also affiliated with the Small Knives, makes a low-key but excellent folk-tinged full-length here, with shimmering spiderwebs of acoustic picking and soft shadowy melodies. “Weight of the World,” with its quietly gorgeous harmonies, is maybe the pick of the litter; it is melancholic and uplifting at once, and the guitar cuts through shifting vocal textures with a clean, sure resonance. Mullins brings in Amy Galloway and Kirti Mills to add subtle, pretty embellishments to a couple of songs, the slyly percussive “This Paper Boat” cushioned and softened with dual vocals at the chorus (that’s Mills), the drone-y mysteries of “Linger On” enhanced with Galloway’s wavery unisons (she also sings on the very lovely “Weight of the World"). This latter cut is one of two to feature Mick Turner of the Dirty Three on guitar. He bows his instrument on “Linger On,” adding to the VU-ish mesh of tones and undertones that flicker through that cut. “Let the Light In” also bears his imprint, though unassumingly, in the glittering lattices of picked acoustic that are hemmed in with bells. The songs take shape slowly out of mists and aura and tone, shiver like rainbows for a little while and then subside into the air, all the prettier for their evanescence.
Jennifer Kelly
Finn Loxbo—Eter (Gikt)
Apparently Finn Loxbo is a restless sort. The Swedish musician has played punky electric bass in the jazz trio Doglife, navigated his electric guitar through the busy traffic of the Mats Gustafsson’s Fire Orchestra and recorded an album of pensive folk-rock for Kning. Now comes a solo CD, the first release by the Stockholm-based Gikt label, comprising solo improvisations on the steel-stringed acoustic guitar. Is this the real Finn? Probably not, anymore than any one good thing you do sums up the real you. But he’s pretty good at it, and it concentrates talents he’s likely developed in his other endeavors. Loxbo seems to have prepared his instruments strings and mic-ed them closely, yielding gamelan-like sonorities on one piece, Derek Bailey meets razor wire fence sound-spikes on another and soft abrasions on a third. Each of the album’s seven tracks proceeds with a lucidity that suggests his songwriter’s mind does not shut off when he puts away the vocal microphone. File this with the work of Bailey, David Stackenäs, and Norberto Lobo, but don’t just file it away.
Bill Meyer
Mutilation Rites—Chasm (Gilead Media)
Chasm by Mutilation Rites
This record completes Mutilation Rites’ transformation from a black metal band flirting with death metal, to a death metal band that sometimes plays black metal riffs. When Mutilation Rites began dallying with deathy rhythms and chunky chords on Harbinger (2014), it was worrying stuff: it suggested a band flailing for a sense of identity, and the resulting record was uneven, at best. Mutilation Rites’ more significant commitment to death metal on Chasm turns out to be an enlivening move (pun intended, hardy-fucking-har). This sort of music isn’t supposed to be fun, but on Chasm the band sounds loose and confident, like they’re enjoying themselves. Maybe that’s partially due to their decision to cut the tracks for the record at Brooklyn’s Saint Vitus, a venue the band plays regularly. In any case, Chasm is a good record, and folks who really loved Mutilation Rites’ first few EPs needn’t fret: “Putrid Decomposition,” the longest track on the album and ironically the one with the most death metal title, has the fleet, jagged riffing that captures the band at their blackest.
Jonathan Shaw
Shelton/Mofjell—Uncovered short run CDR (Singlespeed)
Uncovered by Shelton Mofjell
Ole Mofjell kicks off Uncovered with a blast of force. Unrelenting but texturally
varied, it makes this clear; you’re not in for an easy ride. In short order Aram Shelton joins him, blowing so hard and low that you might ask, “who’s the tenor player?” Ride the wave into the next track and the pitch territory moves upward, and then the question changes to, “how does he make an alto sound like that?” Time and experience have darkened and deepened Shelton’s instrumental voice, which has shed the diamond brightness that he wielded in various Chicago-based ensembles in the earliest years of the century. But his fluency has increased, and there’s no better place to hear it than in the company of a drummer like Mofjell. Each player shifts tone and tack in a second, using silence as well as motion to give the other room to take deep dives into the complexity of interactions with their instruments and each other. Caveat — the physical edition of this album is a pressing of 100 professionally duplicated discs that you might only be able to get by attending one of Shelton’s concerts or contacting him directly via his webpage or the Singlespeed site. But if you’re not into keeping the international postage
racket afloat, there’s always Bandcamp!
Bill Meyer
Sad Baxter—So Happy (Cold Lunch)
So Happy by Sad Baxter
Sad Baxter’s “Sick-Outt” does the mid-1990s ramp up from relatively quiet, melodic verse to screaming, crashing, unhinged chorus in a way that few bands even attempt these days, and if you’re thinking Hole, that’s because Deezy Violet’s a girl. The real reference is Nirvana, here and in the slow building guitar-and-cymbals firestorm that is “Wash,” a transformation from clamped down palm-muted tension to full on feedback fused noise. Violet’s partner in all this, Alex Mojaverian, builds a bristling, shivering dissonant wall of percussion and amp buzz around a voice that snakes around curvy melodies like the Muffs’ Kim Shattuck or, more recently, Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis. Sweetness and melody lurk in the intervals between bursts of splintering noise, hooking a finger to lure you in for the kill.
Jennifer Kelly
Manas—Live At (Null Zone)
Live At by MANAS
This cassette, which was recorded last summer at Fresh Produce Records in Macon GA, drives home a point that’s never exactly been a secret. These guys are punks. Guitarist Tashi Dorji may have been raised in Bhutan and he and drummer Thom Nguyen may operate within the realm of freely improvised music, but they're writing their own rule book. This half-hour performance rolls, slashes and rumbles in some pretty rocking ways; they play with an improvisers’ faith that their music will create its own form, but also with an abandon that suggests they really don’t care if someone doesn’t get it; they sound really loud; and out of all the places where they could have made a record, they picked a shop that (per photographic evidence sourced from a Yelp review) puts all four Kiss solo LPs on the wall. That’s plenty punk enough! Sobering up for a second, the music on this tape evinces more nuance and space than other Manas recordings, and sports their clearest recording quality to date. Rock on.
Bill Meyer
Gordon Grdina's The Marrow—Ejdeha (Songlines)
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Gordon Grdina's been merging his jazz-based guitar work and his oud studies for a decade and a half now, finding his way into Middle Eastern traditions while integrating his own voice. With his Marrow quartet, he's expanded the strangeness of what he does by opening space for bassist Mark Helias and cellist Hank Roberts, each of whom toy with the function and sound of their own instruments on new album Ejdeha. “Idiolect” lets each of the three musicians shine (percussionist Hamin Honari mostly stays steady here) while revealing Grdina's gift for composition. The track ebbs and flows, trading melodies and shifting intensity across its eight minutes before its surprising end. The piece relies on Arabic tones, but feels like a free jazz approach to performance, the sort of blend that Grdina can deliver in a way that's both comfortable and alien. “Ejdeha” pulses in a different way, its heavy beat thumping through as the quartet finds an unlikely groove. Grdina and his bandmates have figured out how to keep a grounding in various traditions while still sounding surprising.
Justin Cober-Lake
#dusted magazine#dust#anne-james chaton#andy moor#neon tiger#luke stewart#leo mullins#finn loxbo#mutilation rites#aram shelton#ole mofjell#manas#gordon grdina#bill meyer#jonathan shaw#jennifer kelly#justin cober-lake
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The balkanization of the novel
French author Mathias Énard
Through the fractured mind of a narrator in crisis, a new novel traces 2,000 tangled years of Mediterranean history and politics.
First, let us dispense with formal concerns. Zone is a 517-page novel that, with one notable exception, is written as one mammoth run-on sentence. It encompasses three continents, scores of wars, entire historical epochs, kings, fascists, freedom fighters, Guantanamo torturers and a number of literary greats. Representing the absorbing and frequently unhinged consciousness of one Francis Servain Mirkovic, it soon reveals that our narrator is on an overnight train from Florence to deliver a briefcase full of dirty secrets to the Vatican.
In the opening chapter Francis declares that he is headed “to the end of the world”. This seems an appropriately apocalyptic start for a book that seeks to sum up thousands of years of conflict across cultural, national, and religious lines. For the past decade Francis has worked as a spy for the French government, murdering, bribing, digging up evidence on some and destroying others throughout the Mediterranean basin – the titular Zone. But now he has decided to escape from this life that is slowly but surely driving him to the brink. In order to do this, he plans to end his life as Francis and assume the legal identity of a man locked away for the rest of his days in a mental ward – a former colleague and a casualty of the very work Francis now fears will lead him to his own ruin. This is an apt choice. Francis’s dark work for the Zone’s elites has pushed him to the edge of insanity, but he thinks he can buy his freedom with the Church’s “thirty pieces of silver” – the money he expects in exchange for his briefcase full of secrets. Already Francis is debating his future, be it a quick suicide with a gun, a slow one with alcohol, or a torpid counting of days in some unobtrusive corner of the world. All are equally likely.
Mathias Énard’s attempt to tell Francis’s life story in this particular way is certainly noteworthy, but Zone is not a groundbreaking book. One-sentence novels are not nearly so rare as they might seem: the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou’s mediocre Broken Glass, published in English by Soft Skull, pulls the same trick. So do the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age and dozens of others.
Moreover, Zone‘s language is far from experimental. Whereas, in Eden Eden Eden, the French novelist Pierre Guyotat used the one-sentence format to shape words in a manner that Michel Foucault claimed “no one has ever spoken [before],” Énard’s vocabulary tends toward the quotidian. Clean and clear, his thousands of narrative shards are easily consumed, marshalled by a phalanx of commas. Once a reader becomes accustomed to the flow of Francis’s thoughts, Énard’s prose becomes sharp and smooth as a knife’s edge. This headlong stream-of-consciousness style quickly picks up steam, obscuring the fact that Francis makes for rather an anaemic protagonist and making the extreme fragmentation of the story easier to bear.
Although Énard’s petit modernism should not be taken for experimentalism, Zone is nonetheless impressive. Its great success is in the author’s ability to use the novel’s structure to portray Francis’s scattered mind and to map out an extraordinarily broad historical terrain. He has taken Francis’s entire adult life, plus the 2,000-year history of the Mediterranean Zone and pulverised it into linguistic smithereens. These have then been painstakingly arranged it into something resembling Francis’s frenetic mind. Shot through with vivid characters, taut stories, bizarre flights of free association, and pages of historical erudition, Francis’s journey becomes a looping, digressive, spasmodic text – one that lashes together geographies and epochs.
This history of the Mediterranean à la Francis assaults contemporary visions of Europe as a community of fixed nation-states, turning the countries of the Mediterranean basin into plots of land that have for centuries been criss-crossed by various ethnicities, religions, cultures, languages, and political systems. The familiar demarcations of the world as told by western scholars give way to a new entity – the Zone as seen through Francis’s shadow-history. Zone’s lack of periods becomes a true asset. Confronted with a bewildering new geography, the reader is all but forced to crash along with Francis through the boundaries of character, time, geography, logic, and culture, just as Francis’s thoughts crash through syntactical barriers that would typically be forced by hard punctuation. One does not so much read this book as become absorbed in it. The cacophony of images is vast and and chaotic, yet this is a kind of bewilderment that engages, instilling a desire for repeat readings in order to gain a clearer view.
Zone’s expansive sweep makes it a tour de force of historical information, girded by the seduction of fascism (echoes of which seem to crop up like a plague wherever Francis travels), the long Mediterranean history of tension between the East and West, and fascination with the Other. Énard’s knowledge ranges from the major to the minute, the latter including the slipper collection of King Alfonso XIII of Spain (the last monarch before Franco), the Nazi Rudolf Hess, who absconded to Britain under mysterious circumstances just before Hitler opened the Eastern Front, and a young Cervantes who is conscripted onto a warship and almost dies before he writes Don Quixote. Reflecting Francis’s literary pretentions, the book is studded with writers who have passed through the Zone. William Burroughs, Malcolm Lowry, and Ezra Pound all steal scenes. There are also cameos by Jean Genet, Curzio Malaparte, Apollinaire, Maurice Bardéche (the infamous French collaborationist), Céline, Robert Walser, and Ibn Khafaja (the 11th-century Arabic poet who lived under Moorish rule in what would become Andalusia), to name a few.
But Zone is not all dislocation and discord. There are some fantastic stretches that, taken out of context, would make impressive short stories. Early on Énard spins us a tale from Francis’s time as a Balkan soldier in the 1990s, where he is initiated in the ways of war. It is a wonderful five-page anecdote of a foray into no man’s land made by Francis and his comrade Andrija as they hunt a pig that refuses to die:
“He went over to the animal took out his bayonet the sow tried to bite him and began squealing when the knife slashed her fat, I was seized with mad laughter too, despite the bombardment, despite the Chetniks who must have been thinking about preparing an attack I had in front of me a soldier black with wet mud dagger in hand in the process of running after a crazy animal in the roar of explosions, a machine gun began firing on the Serbian side, Andrija took advantage of it to shoot a bullet from his Kalashinikov into the animal 7.62 too small caliber to drop the pig he’d have to hit it in the head it went on squealing even louder as it limped…
The incident of the squealing sow comes through with palpable realness. The chaos that Francis finds in the Balkans is beautifully evoked by the image of two trained killing machines making a hash of slaughtering a pig, risking their lives for a pitiable meal.
As here, Énard continually shows his skill at efficiently building up palpable moments and memorable characters, but there is at least one notable misstep: the novella Francis reads on the train, which marks this book’s one break from one-sentence rule. It tells the story of a group of Palestinian soldiers resisting Israeli forces during 1982’s Siege of Beirut and functions as Énard’s attempt to let the East speak amid the clamour of Francis’s thoughts. This story about a rebel’s attempt to claim the body of her dead lover from Beirut’s war-torn streets is not bad, but Francis’s more authentic, more original thoughts so far outshine it that the East feels pale and diminished – an outcome that is clearly contrary to Énard’s intentions.
Zone’s formal conceit will undoubtedly scare some readers off. It shouldn’t, though. This book is far more immersive than intimidating. Moreover, its meaty historical trajectory means that its appeal reaches far beyond the strictly literary, encompassing both history and politics. Charlotte Mandell’s translation from the original French nimbly traces Francis’s shifts in register as he moves through guilt, pride, resignation, rage, and hope, while still maintaining his personal quirks and cadences. At length, Zone comes to feel like a book that has contained multitudes, one that can support a hundred theories and spark a hundred arguments. It is not quite the work of high art that some have claimed it to be, but it is a startling, stimulating read, a document that should stand out as a memorable part of the long history of its setting.
Scott Esposito
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“The Tech Guy’s Promise”
Welcome back to The Detective and the Tech Guy. As we dive back into the world of Sarah Walker, P.I. and her ultra-rich tech mogul boyfriend, remember that a lot has happened to get them here. If this is your first foray into DATG, I’ve put together an entire Master Post. You can catch up there! Or, if you’d rather, check out the fanfiction.net version HERE.
Enjoy, CHUCK fans. ;)
XOXOXOXOXOXO
Chuck made a face as he swiped at Sarah’s sweater with a wet cloth, trying his best to clean the mess without smearing.
“Sorry,” he heard Ellie chime in from over his shoulder. “Sometimes she misses the burping cloth.”
Sarah just giggled, shaking her head. “It’s okay. I said I didn’t mind holding her after she just ate so I sort of asked for it, didn’t I?” Chuck didn’t entirely feel like she did ask for it. It was like Clara had aimed for anything but the cloth. But he couldn’t blame her; she was so damn cute and had so much of her mom’s personality already. “Though I will say, I didn’t expect to be wiping baby barf off of my shirt today when I put it on this morning,” she added good-naturedly.
Ellie snorted, walking around them to grab a few paper towels from the nearby roll and handing them to Chuck. “That’s not something I can say.”
Sarah giggled again and took the towels from Chuck as he inexpertly continued trying to help her. “It’s okay, I got it.” She moved over to the sink and cleaned it herself, dabbing with wet towels until there was a wet splotch on her sweater and no trace of Clara’s spit-up.
“How are my ladies doin’?” Devon asked, walking around into the kitchen.
“Oh, we’re great, Devon, thanks,” Chuck drawled.
“Oh. Sorry, bro,” the surgeon chuckled, clapping him on the shoulder.
Chuck rolled his eyes teasingly as Ellie looked up from making faces at her squirming daughter. “Sarah took one for the team.”
“Aw man! Barf jet made its landing, huh? She likes bright colors.”
Ellie rolled her eyes. “Devon. Stop.”
“What? It’s a good theory!” he said defensively, holding his hands out. “She’s only ever barfed on us when we’re wearing bright colors. Never when we’re in darks and pastels. I think she hates pink the most.”
“Remind me not to wear pink, huh, Chuck?” Sarah said.
“Don’t play into my husband’s weird-ass theories, Sarah,” Chuck’s sister said, switching Clara’s weight to her other arm. “Wear whatever color you want to wear.”
“How does she feel about stripes?” Chuck asked, and Ellie rushed over to clamp her hand over Devon’s mouth as he made to answer.
She glared over her shoulder at her brother. “I hate you.”
Chuck laughed and shoved his hands in his pockets, leaning back against the counter in his kitchen. He watched as Devon pulled Ellie’s hand away from his mouth and beamed at her in that charming way of his. “Well, whether my little bumblebee nugget hates certain colors or not, she’s definitely tuckered out. Big time.”
They all looked and, indeed, Clara was out cold against her mom’s chest, her little fists curled up under her chin like little pink rosebuds. Everyone let out quiet little “awwww”s and stared for a bit.
Devon moved first. “Think it’s time to get her in her carseat. While she’s this far gone. Or she’ll fight us like a demon and it’ll take a half hour to get her in.”
“Plus insane screaming for an entire car ride,” Ellie whispered, rocking Clara a little to keep her asleep.
“I’ll get our things,” Devon chirped, rushing out of the kitchen to scrounge up their belongings. Chuck felt a little bereft at the thought of them leaving so soon, but with Clara here now, the two of them had much less time to visit. Their lives revolved around her eating and sleeping. It made sense. They needed to find some way to sleep themselves between all of that.
He just didn’t know how much longer Ellie and Devon would stay in Los Angeles before going back home to San Francisco. Ellie mentioned how rough it would be, driving with their newborn for seven hours straight. Was it even safe?
“I have to pee. Who gets the little bundle of joy?”
“ME!” both he and Sarah rushed out. Chuck reached out his arms first, though, and sent Sarah a pout he was relatively sure had some power with his girlfriend. She relented and crossed her arms with a bit of a glare. “In my defense, you’ve gotten to hold her all day, Sarah Walker, P.I. Let the tech guy have a turn with his niece, hm?”
“Fiiiiine,” she drawled, and he saw the mirth beneath her own pout.
He reached out with grabby hands as his sister handed him her daughter. “Yaaaay,” he whispered, pulling his niece in and cradling her close against his chest. She curled into more of a ball against him and drooled a bit on his nice button-up and he didn’t care even a bit.
As Ellie moved out of the kitchen to visit Chuck’s bathroom, Sarah sidled up to him and pressed her cheek into his shoulder. “I always thought people were such freaking liars when they talked about how cute babies are, but your niece is so cute it almost hurts.”
“I know. She makes me feel like my soul is made out of ice cream, sunshine, and fluffy clouds of happiness. I realize clouds and sunshine are contradictory, but it’s just how I feel.”
Sarah giggled and turned her face a little to nuzzle his shoulder over his shirt. “She almost looks like you. The little bit at the end of her nose that goes bwoop.”
“I have a little bit at the end of my nose that goes bwoop?”
She looked up at him and nodded.
“Huh. Didn’t realize that. Hey, I have a little mini-me, then. But, like, a girl version. This is quite a gig, you know? I get to cuddle, swaddle, and snuggle…with a few poopy diaper changes in the middle…but none of the really awful stuff like not sleeping, hearing all of the angry crying.”
“Not ready for all of the responsibility type things, then?” she teased.
“Uhhhhh, no.”
“So…then…you’re not going to do that shitty romcom trope where the guy goes around with someone else’s baby to attract chicks?” She was flirting hard. The way her eyes flashed as she peered up at him through her lashes, pursing her lips and twisting them to the side.
Chuck scoffed. “Okay. One? I don’t need no chick magnet. Case in point…” He dragged his gaze down Sarah’s body and back up again. She snorted and tilted her head, wordlessly granting him that one. “Two? That doesn’t even work in real life. Most women aren’t that easy. Nor are they idiots. And three? Ellie already banned Morgan from being alone with Clara for even suggesting he might do that, and he was joking. So…”
Sarah laughed quietly and stepped back as Ellie came back in the room.
“Dear God, please tell me she’s still asleep,” she said with a wince.
“Like a baby.” He opened his mouth and gave both of them a ta daaaa grin and didn’t get even a bit of the reaction he’d wanted. Instead they merely gave one another flat looks.
“Just for that, give me my daughter back.”
Sarah laughed as he pouted and handed Clara back to her mother.
Minutes later, the Woodcombs were gone, practically tiptoeing away to keep Clara from waking up before they got her to the car, and leaving Chuck and Sarah alone in his condo.
He let out a long breath and smiled to himself, going into the kitchen to start drying the dishes they’d left in the rack next to the sink. He hummed to himself, mopping at the plates with a towel. He’d half-expected Sarah to join him, the way she usually did…sidle up behind him, grab the towel out of his hand to tease him or grab another towel and help…
And after a few minutes, Chuck set everything down and wandered out of his kitchen, stepping into the living room. He found her on the couch, sitting upright, staring down at her laptop that was propped on her knees.
Her face was set in concentration, her eyes flicking back and forth on the screen. And then he saw a flicker of annoyance on her face, disappointment. And she cursed under her breath, slamming the laptop shut with an emphatic click.
She looked up then and saw he was watching. Immediately, a smile swept over her face but it was forced. Very forced. And it frustrated him that she even attempted it.
“Dishes all done?” she asked, setting her laptop on the coffee table in front of her and folding her hands in her lap.
“Nah, just gonna let them dry on their own. That’s what this rack thingy is for, right? Sarah, are you okay?” He wasn’t going to let her deflect this time.
“What do you mean? Do I not seem okay?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and wandered closer. “I mean, for the most part, yeah.” He shrugged. “But you’ve been a little… I don’t know…like something’s bothering you. Pretty much all day.”
When she came over in the afternoon to help him cook for Ellie and Devon, she’d been completely fine at first. But then he’d noticed she kept checking her phone for something. Or she’d pull out her laptop and look at it, then snap it shut like she’d just done again a minute ago, an annoyed look on her face. And then he’d caught her wringing her hands at least twice, though he hadn’t said anything about it. Then there was the fiddling of her fingers…like she did when she was worried.
Maybe she was worried…Or impatient? He closed the distance between them a bit more.
“Is it the agency? Everything okay over there?”
She snorted and gave him a flat look. “Same thing as always. Still trying to get clients. You know that.” With a shrug, she pushed herself to her feet and reached out to take his hand, pulling him the rest of the way so that she could drape her arms over his shoulders and look up at him.
He met her soft gaze and smiled with a short nod. Then he pulled his lips between his teeth and narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “You seem…I don’t know…almost worried. More than usual.”
She shook her head with a sigh. “Chuck, there’s nothing going on. Just typical adulting stuff. Seriously. I’m good.”
“There’s nothing going on you say. Then in the very next sentence: ‘Just typical adulting stuff.’ Sarah, I’m an adult. I have to deal with adulting as well. You wanna get it off your chest, I might be sympathetic.” He gave her a crooked smile and bumped her nose with his.
“I’m f—”
“Don’t you dare say you’re fine. You’re obsessed with Clara’s pudgy little legs and tonight I saw you were so distracted you didn’t pinch ‘em once and that seems like a big deal to me. More than just regular adult stuff. So out with it.”
Sarah rolled her eyes and tried to pull away but he held fast.
“Sarah—”
“I’m late.”
Chuck blinked, and he felt himself pale. The blood rushed in his ears. And all he could do was stare. “Y—You’re … wha—?”
Sarah furrowed her brow for a moment, and then she paled as well, her eyes widening. “No!” A nervous huff came out of her. “That’s not—No, I’m—Not that. No!”
“Oh!” A harsh breath came out of him and he shook his head, swallowing thickly. Relief swam through him. “I—I—Oh.” He swallowed again. “Oh.”
“How is that the first thing you jumped to?” she asked, just barely regaining some of her color.
“THERE WAS JUST A BABY HERE, SARAH.” He heard his voice getting a little high pitched, a little hysterical, but that had been a major shock to his system.
“Let’s go ahead and move away from that subject completely,” she interjected and he nodded.
“God, yes. Please.”
“My rent,” she amended. “I’m late paying my rent. And…And I guess I’m just nervous. Frustrated.” She looked to still be composing herself a little. Apparently he hadn’t been the only one to get a shock to his system. But why the hell had she phrased it like that?
And then what she said sunk in, and he did a bit of a double take. “Wait. Wait, wait. Your rent?” He stepped in closer, holding her by her elbows. “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier? Does your apartment still have electricity? Heat?”
“No! I mean yes. Yes, it does. But no, it isn’t my apartment, Chuck. It’s the agency. I’m late with the rent for my office space. I have to pay the apartment rent…I mean, it’s where I live. But the office…I can maybe let that one go for a little while without it being too much of an issue.”
He didn’t like the way she said that, how she shrugged—putting on a nonchalant act when he could see beneath the facade that this bothered her quite a bit.
“How long?” he asked, frowning.
“Um…” She gnawed on her bottom lip. “Tomorrow will be two weeks.”
“What?!”
“I just have to wait for—” She stopped, her eyes darted to the side, and she shut her mouth, her lips thinning. Then she continued again, this time sounding a bit more controlled, the way she sometimes had spoken to him back when she was the lead detective for B.E.C.’s case over a year and a half ago. “I’ve got some money I’m waiting on, something coming in. Then I can pay Jorge and I’ll be totally caught up.”
“You’ve got money you’re waiting on? From where? One of your clients not paying you?” He would send her to their doorstep with his company’s attorney in tow.
“No, not a client. Just, uh…Someone owes me money and they’re sending it to me. Soon.”
Chuck felt that she wanted this particular strain of discussion to end, but he didn’t want it to. He had so many questions. He wanted to know who owed her money. Who the hell was this person she was relying on to be able to pay her rent for her office space? Whomever it was, Chuck absolutely didn’t trust them. Not when having that space was so incredibly important. If she lost that, she’d be forced backwards in making her dream agency a reality, and he’d be damned if he’d let that happen.
For the moment, he decided to push his questions to the side, table them for later. Instead, he said, “Well, just let me give Jorge the money for now—”
“No.” She said it in a very emphatic voice, her tone almost a little hard, even.
“What d’you mean, no? I can—”
“No.”
He blinked. “Sarah—”
“No!” She grabbed his face in her hands, still gentle, imploring. “Chuck, you’re not paying my rent.”
Letting out a huff, the tech guy shrugged and set his hands on her hips, pulling her in closer. “Fine, then. I can give him the rent money, you can pay me back when the—whoever it is pays you back.”
It seemed incredibly simple to him. It was just like a placeholder. Jorge would have the rent and he’d get off of Sarah’s back. It was the perfect solution.
“No, Chuck, I’m not gonna have my boyfriend be my own personal loan agency. That isn’t how this is gonna work. No.”
“Sarah, I’m not a loan agency. I’m just the guy who loves you and wants you to keep your office.” Then he pulled a silly face and smoldered for her, the way he knew she liked. “I’ve got plenty of money, after all,” he teased.
But none of it did what he’d hoped, and she merely sighed and shut her eyes tiredly. “That’s just it, Chuck. I’ll be no better than…” she paused, “people think I am.”
He knew inherently that she was referring to his mom. His own mother was making the woman he loved doubt herself, her business, and worst of all, their relationship. And it hurt him that Sarah was so conscious of it, that it bothered her enough she brought it up this often.
Chuck nodded then, and held his hands up in surrender. “Alright. I give in.”
“You’re not gonna push me on this anymore?” she asked, tilting her head. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Do you promise to let me take care of this? I will take care of it. It’s important and I’m handling it as such. I’ve got it.”
He nodded.
“You promise?” she probed.
“Yes.” He paused and leaned in to kiss her warmly and her body melted into his, her arms sliding around his neck. As they pulled back a moment later, lips still brushing, he murmured an extra “I promise” and reveled in the feeling of her mouth smiling against his.
XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO
She’d seen it one thousand times before. And in many different forms.
How many promises had her father made to her that he hadn’t kept? At this point in her life, Sarah Walker estimated it was nearing a couple hundred. Maybe more than that even. Promises he hadn’t kept that she didn’t know about.
This was just another promise of his and she was unendingly angry with herself for falling into what was undoubtedly just another lie, another trap, another let down. That was how it ended, nine times out of ten. With her pissed and shattered, vowing to never talk to him again. …And then she’d accept his call again, open his email, read his text, and it’d be a vicious cycle. Like it always was. She always came out the worse for the wear.
Her life was different now, though. She had more riding on her decisions than just her own well-being. She had a path, a challenge ahead of her. Nothing was concrete like it had been with Pinkerton. She was secure there, knew what she was getting into every single day, even on the most dangerous cases. Now her future was up in the air, things were changing…but she had a path to follow. And in spite of it being her path, and hers alone, Chuck Bartowski was still there.
This wasn’t just about her anymore.
She had someone else to protect from all of this.
He’d made her a promise, too. Only, unlike her father, he would keep his. He always did. Unfailingly.
And maybe that was part of what drew her to him. Chuck was the most dependable person she’d ever had in her life, and she thought he was maybe the most dependable person anyone who knew him had in their lives.
It wasn’t about his money. Of course a man who had pockets as deep as his were wouldn’t have trouble being dependable. With all of that money at his disposal, he could afford to be that way.
It was just him, the way he was. Inherently. From the time she’d spent with Ellie in the last year or so, she’d discovered a lot about Chuck’s past, and who he was then. Even Morgan had been a good source. The stories of Chuck stepping in when Morgan needed a champion as a smaller kid on the playground being pushed around by bullies. Her boyfriend had gotten himself a black eye in seventh grade after refusing to leave his best friend alone in the hallway with a couple of asshole eighth graders.
Chuck had dependability already in him when he was born. It was a trait that set the tech genius far, far apart from her father, the only other man who’d been important in her life. He’d been a pillar in her life until…well, until he hadn’t been.
Sarah didn’t like the idea of that being why she’d fallen for Chuck so hard and so quickly—that he was the total opposite from her father. It felt almost dysfunctional, in a weird way. And she knew that wasn’t it, at least not completely. Because her attraction to him had been immediate, before she’d even known about him, before she’d gotten to know what he was like, what drove him. The moment he’d met her eyes, something had been there. Maybe not love—love at first sight was a sappy, paltry sentiment that only existed in movies. But it was a powerful attraction all the same.
Something had pulled at her, making her want to do more than just read the dossier on him. Her walls had come down so fast that she’d flirted with him, on the tape recorded, in her very first interview with him about the case. It was ridiculous and unprofessional and so unlike her.
And it was a testament to how singular this was, this relationship, them as a couple.
It had little to nothing to do with her problems with her father. And everything to do with the way they fit so well together. Her relationship with Chuck Bartowski was seamless. It wasn’t without its flaws, it certainly wasn’t perfect, but it was seamless.
So when Chuck made a promise, she believed him. In spite of how often others had broken their promises to her, in spite of how often those others had hurt her.
But that didn’t make her any less of an idiot for trusting her father again.
He said the money would be in the mail. And by that, she figured he meant a check. He owed it to her. He owed more than that to her…but that went so deep, she couldn’t even begin working all of it out, so instead she focused on the money.
His words had felt so meaningless at the time: “I’ll never be able to pay all of this back to you.”
And his “thank you, darlin’” meant even less. But she’d done it anyway.
And still…She was doing this…trusting him.
No, she wasn’t trusting him. She didn’t trust him. She never would again. But she was desperate enough now. She needed this. And she thought that if she’d never helped her dad in the first place, she wouldn’t be in the current predicament she was in, because she’d have more than enough to pay her rent, both her home and her agency.
So she would accept this blasted check, if it ever came like he’d promised her it would.
Before she’d hung up on him.
She would cash it. And she would pay everything off. And then she’d be back on track and Chuck wouldn’t have to worry about her anymore like she knew he was.
She knew how hard it was for him to understand and accept her choices. And she didn’t feel like she needed to explain everything for him to get why she was so adamant. It filled her with relief the other night when he’d promised her he would step back and let her handle all of this on her own. And he’d promised twice.
He was trustworthy.
She trusted him to keep his word.
Because he always had before.
XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO
He switched his gaze from the picture on the left to that on the right. Then back again. Chuck finally groaned and pushed his hands through his hair. “This sucks. I hate making decisions.”
Adisa huffed and set the plans he’d been holding up for his boss on the desk, one on top of the other. “Well, you have time with those. I think the issue that’s the most pressing is whether or not you can get both Neil and Bill on the same stage…at the same time. If you can promise that, people won’t care whether the rest of STEMCon is a complete failure.”
Chuck slid his droll gaze up to his assistant. “Thank you, Adisa.”
“Sorry.” He fixed his glasses and cleared his throat, folding his hands together in front of him. “My point, really, is that I think there are a few things that will really sell this convention if you get them right, whether everything else is perfect or not.”
Chuck let out a long sigh and nodded. “No, you’re right. You’re right. Definitely. And I think the Techosaurus Rex would probably be best for the main lobby, when pass holders are first walking in. Robotic dinosaur versus a giant brain? I mean, come on.”
“Always go with the dinosaur. I absolutely agree.”
“Great. Well…that’s one thing we’ve got settled. TAGBot’s got the job. Hopefully it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg…”
“Or a brain. That would be kind of ironic.”
“Ha!” Chuck pointed at his assistant. “I see what you did there. Get me TAGBot on the phone. Gah, what was the guy’s name I was talking to…? Get h—”
He was interrupted by his office door being opened.
His mother pushed right on in, stopping in the middle of the room. “Sorry, was I interrupting? Still planning that convention, sweetie?”
“Uh, yeah, still planning it. Hi, Mom. That was…uh, abrupt.”
“Well, I’m your mother. And technically my husband is your boss.” She sent him a teasing smile to let him know she wasn’t serious, but it still irked him a little.
“Uh, thanks Adisa. I’ll call ‘em later to let them know what we’ll need from them.”
“Of course, Ch—er, Mr. Bartowski.” He started to move out of the room, but Chuck grabbed the plans and held them up towards him. “Oh. Yes! I’ll take these out of your way.” As he hurried past Mary Bartowski, he grinned. “Mrs. Bartowski, very nice to see you again, ma’am.”
“Good to see you, too, Adisa. How’s your mom and your sister?”
“Oh, they’re great. Tambara is looking into grants for college, so she’s been busy.”
“Well, if she needs help with that, Chuck would be the perfect candidate. He had to apply for every grant in the book, and Tambara having been born in Nigeria will definitely open quite a few doors there. My advice: take advantage of every opportunity.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Bartowski. I will surely pass that on to my sister,” he said good-naturedly. Chuck tried to keep the wince off of his face. “Let me know if you need me for anything else,” were the young man’s parting words, and then he went out to his own desk, shutting the door behind him.
“Mom, can you maybe cool it telling my assistant that his sister somehow has a leg up in applying for college because his family had to flee from their home country when they were kids?”
“That is not what I said.”
“Keep telling yourself that, Mom.”
“The Obafemi’s are a good family and they deserve good things. I hope you’re offering your help to his sister, though. Seriously.”
“Adisa went to MIT, Mom. I think Tambara has a pretty good resource in her brother. But anyway, what’s going on? I thought you were with dad in Encino for that recruitment meeting.”
“Mmm yes, we just got back.”
There was a long pause then. “Oooookaaaay, annndd…? Like, I’m not trying to be rude, I’m never rude to you, Mom,” she gave him a dubious look at that, “but you just seem like there’s something on your mind.”
“There’s nothing on my mind. I just feel like I haven’t seen you at all since Clara was born and I thought I could have some one on one time with my son.” She held her hands out defensively. “What’s so wrong with that?”
He chuckled. “Nothing wrong with that, Mom. I actually need to stretch my legs a bit and give my brain a rest. It’s kind of cloudy and brisk out there, but would you want to take a quick walk to the park?”
Mary Bartowski’s warm smile was all the answer he needed.
They eventually made their way to the nearby park, a block north from B.E.C.’s headquarters, walking in comfortable silence. And it wasn’t until they actually made their way onto the path that Chuck felt something else start to enter the comfortable silence—something slightly less comfortable.
He’d fallen for her game again. And damn him, but he’d helped it along by suggesting they leave the office. At least in his office he could text Adisa and ask him to pretend an important patron was on the line for him or something.
“You know, your father told me you didn’t even leave the office the other night. He said you were there when he left and there when he got in the next morning, and wearing the same suit. He’s worried about you,” she finally said, wrapping a hand around his arm. “So am I if that’s what you’ve been doing. It isn’t even safe to be in the building all alone like that.”
“It’s perfectly safe, Mom.”
“Charles, don’t ‘it’s perfectly safe’ me. You do remember that a man was murdered almost two years ago. Right near here. And the man who did it thought he was murdering your father. And the bomb in your cell phone? Oh, and the drive by attempt on your life?”
“That last one was actually an attempt on Sarah’s life. I just happened to be—Sorry,” he rushed out when she glared at him. “I know, I know. But there’s a guard in the building.”
“Mhm. One guard. That’s not the point, anyway. You need to get proper sleep or you’ll be of no use to anyone.”
Chuck let out a soft huff in amusement, having just heard that same thing from someone else the other day.
His mom squeezed his arm. “What’s that smile for?”
“Huh?”
“You just smiled and laughed a little.”
“Oh. Nah, nothing.”
“What?”
“It’s just that Sarah said the exact same thing you did, word for word, the other day. About me needing to sleep or I’ll be of no use to anyone.” He paused. “I mean, she said it more teasingly than you did, but she said it all the same.”
He watched his mom out of the corner of his eye, and saw the way her features became pinched—in annoyance, perhaps, at the reminder that Sarah was still here, that his relationship with the private investigator who’d saved his life a handful of times a year and a half ago was still a thing.
It made his chest hurt and it made him angry all at once.
“How is Sarah?” Mary asked then, lifting her chin, her voice brittle in the cold air.
“Oh, she’s fine. She’s good,” he amended, not wanting his mom to read into anything. “Focusing on getting the agency off the ground, picking up clients…”
“Is that so? Your father told me the clients just don’t seem to be biting. Not in those words. He was assuming. Said he bumped into her on her way down from your office and she seemed quiet and fatigued—you know, emotionally. Must not be going so well…”
Chuck took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “She just needs to get her name out there. She gets a few good references, and they’ll practically be kicking her door down.” His smile was a little too bright, he knew, and his mother was a smart woman. People oftentimes underestimated just how smart she was.
“Is that so?”
“Yep.”
“Has she asked you for help yet?”
“What—?” He dropped the act and stopped walking, turning to face her. “No, she hasn’t asked me for help. Oh, do you mean how I’m paying for her lavish lifestyle?” he said sarcastically. “Funding her high society parties? Buying her a Maserati? Building her a chateau with stables up in the mountains? What do you think this is, Mom? Seriously.”
“I didn’t say any of those things. You did. I just asked if she asked for help yet. She obviously is hard for cash if she isn’t getting any clients. And her apartment is close enough to yours that I’m sure it costs her a small fortune, especially since she lives alone. Who’s paying for that?”
“She is,” he said, clenching his jaw. “No, you know what? I’m not answering any of your questions. Not anymore. Because my relationship with my girlfriend is none of your business.”
“What you do with the money your father’s company pays you is my business, Chuck. But most importantly, you’re my son. I love you. I don’t want to see you used and heartbroken.”
“She isn’t using me. And she has no intention of breaking anything of mine.”
“How do you even know that for sure?”
“Because we’re in love. Because I spend so much time with her that I know her, Mom. Because I trust her, the way you trust someone when you’re in a serious relationship. The way you trusted Dad when things were bleaker than they are now.” She looked away at that. “Money is nowhere in my relationship with Sarah. She goes out of her way to make sure I don’t help her. With anything. Even when I know she needs it. We’ve gotten into arguments about it. I try to help her all the time and she flat out refuses, contrary to what you might think of her. Trust me, I’ve tried to give her everything and she’s taken none of my offers. It’s almost infuriating. It is infuriating. It makes me feel crazy.” He huffed, annoyed he let his mom needle him enough to let that much out.
He pushed a hand through his hair, then smoothed down his tie. “Look, this family…” He licked his lips and shook his head, meeting her eyes. “This family has more money than we know what to do with. That’s just the truth. I’m so rich, I’m sure whatever money I die with will be enough for the next handful of generations that come after me to never work a day in their lives. What’s the point, though? What’s the point of having all of this if I can’t make the people I love comfortable? If I can’t help them to achieve their dreams?”
“Why can’t you just let her achieve her own dreams? Can she not get comfortable through her own hard work?”
“Don’t.” He shook his head, his jaw clenched. “Stop right there. If B.E.C. were my company back when Ellie was starting med school and shifting into neuroscience and surgery, would you have ranted and raved if I’d paid for Ellie’s education the way Dad did when the company was starting to pick up steam?”
She was silent for a few seconds. And then she looked up at him. “She’s your sister. It’s different.”
“It isn’t different.”
“Families help each other. Families stick together. Families help with things like that. Just like we did for your father. And look at how much we’ve all benefited. But family—”
“Sarah’s family.”
“She’s your girlfriend.”
“I love her, Mom. She’s the best thing to ever happen to me. She is family. When she needs help, when she needs a boost, it’s up to me to give it to her. I’m supposed to be supporting her.”
“Where’s her own family?”
He didn’t know. He didn’t know if she even had her own family. It didn’t matter, though. He was her family. And in spite of anything he might’ve told her before, it was his duty to protect her, to help her achieve her goals, and to make sure there were no roadblocks between her and her dreams.
Even if it was in spite of his mother.
“I mean, Charles, honestly…” She grabbed his arm and made him look at her. “I’m not saying this to hurt you. And I’m not saying this to give you doubts. I genuinely want to know what it is that is keeping her here. She can’t get that business off the ground. She’d probably have better luck in another city, like New York or something. Back to Chicago, maybe, where Pinkerton is. You know that’s in the back of her mind, always there in her head. She might be in love with you. In fact, she probably is. I don’t doubt that. I’m a woman and I know other women better than you could ever understand, and I’ve seen how she looks at you. But being with you has added benefits that have to come into play as she plans all of this. You’re rich, Charles. You are a pretty big safety net, in case that agency of hers falls apart. What happens if she never gets a client? You don’t think she’ll eventually let it all go, live off of your earnings? It’d be so easy. I wouldn’t even blame her for it. It’s a very tempting prospect, living without a care in the world, knowing you have someone to pay your bills, buy your food, house and clothe you…”
“No,” he said, knowing beyond all doubt that he was right. “She’ll never let it go. It’s her dream. It’s what she was born to do. And she’ll never be satisfied living off of my earnings. You don’t know her the way I do. She’d…” His voice drifted off. She’d leave first, had been what he was going to say. She’d build her agency somewhere else before she’d ever just give up and live off of him.
His mother had gotten deep under his skin without him even realizing it was happening.
So much so that even when they’d finished the walk and she’d excused herself with a kiss to his cheek as though the entire argument had never even happened in the first place, he’d found himself sitting at his desk, still thinking about the things she’d made him realize.
She was bitter and judgmental and overprotective and paranoid. The Bartowski’s success and fortune had done that to her.
There was no way in hell he’d ever think Sarah was with him for his money, no matter what his mom did or said. She could show him a picture of Sarah in a bath full of his money as proof and he’d laugh it off. … Or he’d think it was hot; that was also a possibility.
But all of her harping on the money issue had him wondering if things were worse than Sarah was leading on. She was struggling. He knew she was. And she would be kicked out of her office space, have no home for her agency, if she went much further along without paying the rent to the landlord. She’d be devastated, and he had no idea what she’d do about it. Would she try again? Find some other space in Los Angeles? Or would she see it as such a catastrophic failure that she’d decide she couldn’t make it in LA, and needed to build the business elsewhere, in some other city? Back in Chicago? Or New York? San Francisco? Somewhere far away from here, where he was rooted, stuck, trapped. He’d never be able to follow her, wherever she went. And the way their relationship had gotten so hard with the distance between them, could he do it again? Would she even want to? Or would all of this be over, after everything they meant to each other?
By the time he’d spiraled to the point where he wondered if he’d lose her altogether were she to get kicked out of the office space, he was already putting his jacket back on and grabbing his car keys. This wasn’t just about not wanting to lose her. It was about her dreams.
It was such a small thing in the grand scheme of her business. But it would help her so much.
And it was so easy for him to do it.
So he would.
Sarah wasn’t losing that office, even if it meant he had to do things his own way.
#The Detective and the Tech Guy#DATG#detective!Sarah#Tech Guy!Chuck#Chuck Bartowski#Sarah Walker#Ellie Woodcomb#Ellie Bartowski#Devon Woodcomb#Captain Awesome#Mary Bartowski#Bitchtowski#chuck AU#chuck fic#chuck fan fiction#charah fic#charah fan fiction#nbchuck#tv: chuck#NBC Chuck#CHUCK#AU fic#Thin Man#Thin Man Chuck#Thin Man Charah#Thin Man AU#crossover AU
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for the Exalted Secret Santa
@shiftingpath
The three choices would be:
1) Lyre of Sapphire, Serenities Sidereal, Golden Crane Socialite
2) Vitaliy Baran, Secrets Sidereal, Independent Ancient Mentor
3) Faithful Executioner’s Blade, Midnight Abyssal, Broken Ex-Martyr
1) Lyre: Native of An-Teng and member of one of it’s higher caste families, Lyre was well used to intrigue and backroom deals well before her Exaltation. Turns out the world of gods in Heaven isn’t all that different - the matter is both in scope and subtelty, and the methods used to leverage one’s influence, and all of those methods came easily to one inspired by Venus such as herself.
As almost 100 years old, Lyre isn’t the most experienced of the Five Score Fellowship, but she’s found her grounding and secured her position in both Heavenly politics and her Bureau. Her soft leverage is often enough to make even the most stubborn gods think twice before challenging the charming Serenities points of view, and as her service record is largely spotless, she’s hard to gain dirt on as well - very few gods had ever heard of her husband being a Full Moon Lunar, despite the fact that Venus herself blessed this union. Asked on how she’d managed to pull that stunt off, Lyre flashes her trademark grin and changes the subject.
Physically, Lyre has a fortunate mixture of exceptional beauty and access to the finest possible cosmetics and fabrics. She remains graceful and classy even in harsher enviroments, though during her missions to Creation she hides more extravagant fashion choices and, if needs be, can dress to mingle with the most social strata.
In Heaven, or in formal functions to most other places, however, she dresses in silks and velvets, in delicate veils and scarves, enhancing the look with many pieces of jewelry, some of which is in fact starmetal hosting the hearthstones of her many Manses. This is a calculated effort to hide the actually efficacious parts of her panoply - a large magical gemstone won’t be easily found amongst few mundane ones, especially if they’re of the similar color.
Lyre favours the colors of her Maiden - all shades of blue bring out the color of her eyes, and fit her rich, dark skintone and long black, curly hair well. She decorates her exposed skin with powdered sapphires to heighten the effect, the blue brocade in eyeshadow and lipstick is her most frequent makeup. Her jewelry is typically silver with blue and white gems, mixed liberally with pearls. She dresses to accentuate her full, bottom-heavy figure, although always tasteful.
Lyre’s anima is a brilliant halo of sapphire light with many bright blue stars playing on it’s surface. As with all Sidereals, it lacks any iconic appearance.
Ref (Warning, it’s ancient art so prepare your eyes T-T, use mostly as a color guide)
Typical clothing: (1) (2) (3) (4)
An example of an Artifact Lyre would wear as jewelry: (1)
(Note that Lyre’s dress color would be sapphire blue rather than light blue, she can mix it with pearlescent white or sometimes darker or lighter shades of blue, but rather won’t go for light or sky blue)
2) Vitaliy: Exalted only a few years before the Usurpation, Vitaliy had a taste of the decadence of the last gasp of the Deliberative, and the horror of the many castrophies that followed. Deciding that both factions were wrong, the Secrets’ joined Nazri in his independent political block... in secret. Officially, he’s Bronze, unofficially, he has Gold sympathies, and ultimately, he believes that the point is moot and that the Sidereal Exalts should be just focusing on their jobs and allying themselves with other defenders of Creation.
Now, though, after two millenia of trying his best to protect this world, the elder Sidereal wonders if Gold isn’t actually full of shit, especially since the young Solars display little to no issues their forebears had. Perhaps, they just need for the gentle Sidereal hand to guide them earlier in their Exalted life rather than later on?
Vitaliy comes from a North-Eastern stock, with a dash of features of a native to the Blessed Isle, giving him a rather generic look within these three geographical areas - for Easterners he looks like a second-generation Northerer, for Northeners he looks like someone from the Realm, and a Realmborn doesn’t think he’s somewhat out of place here. In fact, he was born in an ethnicity decimated by the Great Contagion, and people currently living around the place of his birth generally don’t look like Vitaliy anymore.
Like Lyre, the Sidereal has the access to the best tailors and fabrics in Creation, though as a Chosen of Jupiter, he prefers less flashy and spectacular choices of clothing, though they’re always stylish and fashionable, except when the mission demands otherwise.
His favourites are long robes, tied at the waist with silken sashes and flowing belts. Oftentimes, he’d wear kimonos, especially during his forays to Creation, where he needs to mingle more easily with the general population. Since his most typical disguise is as an Air Aspect sifu, he tends to wear light blues, pastels, and grays, embroided with typical Air imagery. In Yu-Shan, he dresses to show his Maiden’s clothing and the embroidery matches Jupiter’s heraldics - this also is a mean to subtly imply that his allegiance is to his Maiden and her alone, above all factions or divisions.
Vitaliy keeps his dark brown hair about shoulder-long. He always has a short full beard as well, unless he’s forced to shave it for the sake of a mission. His glasses are actually an Artifact, and he’s loath to part with them - his nearsightness isn’t bad enough for him to strictly need them. He is broad shouldered and heavy set, his face is slightly rounder due to this fact, but like all Sidereals, he’s proficient with martial arts and his build doesn’t impair him in any way.
Vitaliy’s anima is a whorl of emerald light emanating from his body and billowing into shimmering green sphere. As with all Sidereals, it lacks an iconic appearance.
Ref
Typical Creation clothes: (1) (2)
Typical Yu-Shan clothes: (1) (2)
(Note: Vitaliy generally doesn’t dress in reds or gold, vastly preferring colder colors. Favourites are dark and pastel greens, light gray, and off-white)
3) Blade: Chosen of the Mangled Corpse of Hope Once Bright, Blade is a fallen martyr, who tries to turn his bleak miracles for good - and does so by judging the evil and corrupt, destroying them as the Abyssal power seems to be only working in that way. He took the bargain with a Deathlord only because the alternative was the destruction of his noble cause and his very peoples at the hand of the power-mad tyrant - even though his resurrection made the Shadowland created by his nemesis’s influence fester and grow, freeing those suffering under the tyrant’s reign and exiling them from their own land as it was now belonging to death in one fell swoop.
The Midnight’s mission in life is the only thing preventing him from sliding in the spiral of depression and self-hatred. As long as he can convince himself he’s doing more good than harm, and that he can turn the horror of his condition into a weapon against worse evil, he will continue to live on his painful existance, even though each mirror and each terrified glare of a passerby reminds him just how far he had fallen from grace.
Blade comes from the North - before his Black Exaltation, he had a healthy blush of life to him and his hair was light blonde, though nowadays it is completely bleached and unkept, matted from being hidden under his hood for the most time.
The Abyssal denies himself most comforts - his Charms keep his flesh from being harmed by exposure, and so he wanders around with just his blood-soaked executioner hood and a long skirt that reaches his ankles. If he’d be compelled to wear something more presentable, he’d dress in red or black tunic. He’d never worn pants in his life - long skirts, kilts and robes were a typical masculine dresscode in his culture and anything resembling trousers on a male would cause him to wince sympathically - he’d consider those extremely uncomfortable-looking.
The alabaster-white flesh is covered in many scars - most coming from the public whipping he’s got before the execution, with the most prominent one being the massive red band around his head, a memory of his beheading. There are more scars on his back than on his front. His only decorations are soulsteel bracers and a blade forged from the souls who willingly chose to sacrifice their existances so they might be forged into blade against the tyrant that killed them. Blade took his name after this daiklaive, to honor their conviction, and it is what keeps him going still.
His anima banner starts as the vision of blood evaporating from his many scars, forming a rust-red flame emanating from his back, his red eyes glowing as the aura of carnage envelops him and reenacts the horrifying scenes of his failed martyrdom, culminating with an effigy of a beheaded man bursting into black flames during the iconic display.
Ref
Executioner Sword he uses (note: it would be in dull black soulsteel, this reference is for the shape mostly)
Tunic refs (1) (2) (if you’d want to have him look more presentable. He’d ditch the hood and try to at least comb his hair if that would be required)
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Vodafone Paredes de Coura 2019: the review
Sometimes it’s hard to be objective and unbiased when writing about a festival that is such a big part of your life. Except for two (very) unremarkable lineups that made me stay home, since I was old enough to go to college all my summers involved a trip to Paredes de Coura (and a painful trip back, too). When you’re a kid, they say you’ll eventually get older and boring, in a process they call “becoming an adult”. This usually comes with amazing perks such as ceasing to listen to any new music whatsoever, stopping seeing your (also ageing) friends, having great conversations about changing diapers with your remaining friends (yes, the other couple with kids you always go vacationing with to some shitty beach full of other couples with kids and the odd mother-in-law). Obviously, a multi-day, non-kid friendly, rural music festival such as Festival Paredes de Coura seems like one of those things that are amongst the first to drop from your newfound “adult life”. Except you don’t have to be that person; and is there anything better to remind you of that than going there and finding all your friends in the same place, same month, year after year, all over again? (Well, other than imagining the smell of those diapers.)
That does not mean the festival itself is perfect. The lineup itself is arguably the best amongst Portuguese generalist indie festivals, with a carefully picked mix of artists that appeal to a young, college-aged crowd that is the heart and soul of the festival - although we have missed some of those fast, hard pounding guitars that were always amongst the top moments of the festival - and more contemplative, “adult” artists that appeal to an ageing demographic who has chosen Paredes de Coura to be the soundtrack to their summers for the past ten to fifteen years. And this seems to be the main issue for the organization to tackle in the years to come: How can they better accommodate a fanbase that is growing older and craves a level of comfort that is a few degrees above the needs of a camping 18 years old kid?
For starters, the beautiful green amphitheatre we can find on Wednesday – the real headliner of the festival, every year – is rapidly gone as soon as you get used to it, at least in some areas of the festival grounds where there is more movement, and especially after two sold out days. A less than ideal scenario, unless you love the feeling of having your nostrils taken over by dust. More frequent extreme weather conditions in the future will likely worsen this problem. As elitist as this sounds, and although this has not been a source of extreme queues for food and drinks, a cap on the number of tickets sold per day would be appreciated by most, even if a ticket price hike is needed as a trade off. The lack of sufficient, suitable accommodation in town (and nearby villages) may also become a problem in a scenario where more and more 30- and 40-somethings refuse to trade the highlight of their summers for a painfully boring conventional lifestyle. On the bright side, it is refreshing to see that the food options in the festival keep improving, with the traditional junk food slowly being replaced by tastier and/or healthier alternatives, in line with the excellent food lineup NOS Primavera Sound boasts every June; the press area has a great ambience and provides an excellent view over the stage, with an added sidescreen; the staff, and especially the security team, is miles ahead of any other festival we usually attend in the country.
KOKOKO!. Photo: Hugo Lima
As for the music, the first night was saved by the superb polyrhythmics of the Congolese ensemble KOKOKO!, who certainly deserved better than a 2am slot in an after-hours stage that, unfortunately, cannot comfortably hold enough people that can properly listen to and enjoy a show like this. Julia Jacklin’s songs are perfect in any situation, but they felt slower than usual and I wouldn’t hold it against people that thought it wasn’t the most attention-grabbing set of all times. For a festival set, we could have used a bit less slows and a bit more energy. Boogarins sounded unlike everything we think a tropicalism-inspired Brazilian indie rock band should sound like and their set was a major letdown; local rockers Bed Legs are not the most interesting band in the world, but at least they sound like they give a shit (in fact, they played their hearts out, and fair play to them). In a prime time slot, Parcels seemed to entertain those who could see past the idea that they are were brought up in a lab, tailor made for indie music festivals and commercials. The National were up next.
The National. Photo: Hugo Lima
We do not want to sound like people who advocate alcoholism, but it was a bad omen to see Matt Berninger entering the stage with some Coca Cola instead of the wine bottles we were used to in the golden days around the release of Boxer and their shows in the Sudoeste and Alive festivals and their shows in Lisbon and Guimarães. Berninger might look healthier than his younger self, but the 2019 version of the National is tamer, more predictable (how many new songs with the same drum beat can they possibly write?), less interesting, and equally anthemic, but in a worse way. It’s not during “Mr. November”, the only song rescued from Alligator that night, that Berninger does his typical first row freak out; that song sounds quite graceless now. (Yes, this isn’t a good pun at all, he did that trick during “Graceless”). “About Today”, one of the greatest songs the National have ever written, also sounded a bit dull. Or was it because we knew that the cheesiest moment of the night, that a capella “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” chorus was about to come next, and we were already dreading it?
It wasn’t all bad, though. Despite the shameful absence of two handful of great songs off their pre-2011 life, their top songs released in this decade are amongst the best they’ve ever recorded. “Bloodbuzz Ohio”, “Day I Die”, new tracks “Rylan” and “Light Years”, and especially “Pink Rabbits” were the highlights of the show. The other songs off the new album are competent at best, and the musicianship is certainly there. Deep down, we know we might still see some spark in this band in the future, but not now. Berninger might have seen Nick Cave (who told him to fuck off) in this very stage fourteen years ago, but apparently he learned nothing from him. The National is a pretty decent band in a desperate need of a long break.
Stella Donnelly. Photo: Hugo Lima
Shamefully, we were working during one of our most anticipated sets of this year’s edition of the festival, but we heard only good things about Khruangbin’s show on Thursday. Of course they had to steal everyone’s hearts. How could they not? Same as last minute replacement Stella Donnelly, who ended up being one of the major highlights of the whole weekend. Donnelly and her five piece band had the best energy, played some of the songs with the quirkiest and poignant lyrics, did the best synchronized dances, and she deserves to be crowned the undisputed queen of Vodafone Paredes de Coura 2019. At least for the diminutive crowd that was there at 7pm - was everyone else working, too? Only time will tell if this is the next case of a singer-songwriter who will start playing two shows in Portugal per year until everyone’s tired of her but we sincerely hope the first part of the sentence is true. Later on, Car Seat Headrest made up for their lukewarm show two years ago and provoked the strongest bursts of energy in a crowd that seemed thirsty for some guitars, singing along to every single song, from the new "Can’t Cool Me Down” to the absolute anthems “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” – one of the greatest songs added to the indie rock canon in the past few years – and “Destroyed By Hippie Powers”, off Teens of Denial.
Car Seat Headrest. Photo: Hugo Lima
But the night belonged to a New Order rare apparition in Portuguese stages. You just have to check a couple of 80s and 90s New Order live shows on YouTube and do the same for contemporary gigs to know they're a totally different beast, and in a good way. They may still not be the best live band ever, and Sumner's vocals sound quite hilarious at times. But, at this point, they're a very oiled machine - and some of the best sounding songs were the ones off their most recent LP, such as "Tutti Frutti", "Plastic", or opener "Singularity". We would prefer, though, a few forgotten New Order classics ("Ceremony", "The Perfect Kiss", "Age of Consent"...) instead of that four song long tribute to Joy Division ("She's Lost Control" and "Transmission" in the beginning, and "Atmosphere" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" in the encore) that made them look as a band that would prefer to have never existed. The crowd didn't give a flying fuck about my eye-rolling reaction to that encore, as it provided the biggest sing along moment of the festival.
New Order. Photo: Hugo Lima
Our Friday opened with a laidback, seemingly endless (in a good way, they should have gotten a 2 hour long slot anyway) Jonathan Wilson show. Featuring ex-The Mars Volta drummer Deantoni Parks on drums (what an amazing extended solo at the end of “Dear Friend”) and Jeffertitti Moon on bass guitar, Wilson’s band smooth sailed through the early afternoon. Playing mostly Rare Birds material, taking us straight to LA along with album art-inspired visuals in the background, there was still time for a single foray into Fanfare (the abovementioned “Dear Friend”) and two picks off his “official” Dead Oceans debut, Gentle Spirit: the classic “Desert Raven” and traditionally set closer “Valley of the Silver Moon”. Jonathan Wilson will be back in Braga for a solo show next November but he’s apparently only going to play Frankie Ray tunes in my dreams.
Jonathan Wilson. Photo: Hugo Lima
One of the most expected shows of the festival was Black Midi, the most likely band in the lineup to make the kids go wild. And they did. The London boys might be young and a bit inexperienced, but they’re already masters of the whole tension and release thing, to the point that they’re comfortable with not releasing at all at the most obvious moments for that grandiose firework effect. Doesn’t matter: the kids still won’t be quiet, the kids are hungry for movement, the kids are loving it. This band is a blessing, and we hope they stay with us for years to come.
Black Midi. Photo: Hugo Lima
Deerhunter played possibly their most interesting set of their long history of boring me around 9pm in every single festival I go to, but the moment we were waiting for (and we waited for some 15min longer than supposed - thank you Jonathan and your extra long set, we love you) was for Spiritualized to take the stage. In a format of a six piece band complete with a three voice choir, Jason Pierce refuses to take center stage – as always – and sits on his chair by the far left of the stage as the band bursts into “Come Together” and proceeds into a more gospel-y phase with Lazer Guided Melodies’ “Shine a Light” and the miraculous, anthemic “Soul on Fire”. The straightforward rock and roll Amazing Grace cut “She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit)” gave way to an almost complete performance of their latest record “And Nothing Hurt”, with the song titles written in the big screen on morse code to keep with the album artwork. The combo “On the Sunshine” (complete with a long outro filled with strobe lights) and the post-rock-like crescendo of “Damaged” were amongst the highest points of one of the best shows Spiritualized have performed in the country in recent times, before closing off with an ecstatic “Oh! Happy Day” version where the choir shone even brighter than those strobes.
Spiritualized. Photo: Hugo Lima
It’s a very tough job to follow up a Spiritualized gig, but it’s simply impossible for Father John Misty and his band to play a bad show. With a heavy focus on latest record God’s Favorite Customer but especially 2015′s I Love You, Honeybear (the same record that fueled that marvelous show in this very stage four years ago), at this point, about five out of every five songs he plays live are above average, to the point that there’s really not much to say about it. I would like to use this opportunity to tell the kid that was singing all the words behind me during the whole set to frantically listen to Fear Fun, since those were the only moments (“Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”, “This Is Sally Hatchet”, “Nancy From Now On”) I could hear Tillman’s voice – the kid didn’t know the lyrics. Thanks man, you can learn them now. Unfortunately for Peaking Lights, there’s really nothing we could do to pay attention after Spiritualized and FJM, but a few of us really tried to fit Macarena’s lyrics into your beats.
Father John Misty. Photo: Hugo Lima
There’s always a dark cloud looming above us in the last day of the festival, and this time it was threefold: a certain sadness because we knew it was time to go, a cloud of dust in certain parts of the festival grounds due to too many people walking above holy ground, and a proper giant cloud threatening us with that classic Paredes de Coura rain we all know and hate. The Lisbon six-piece Ganso opened the main stage with their slow, pastoral brand of indie rock reminiscent of Capitão Fausto, who closed the main stage after the New Order show two nights before. Elsewhere, Alice Phoebe Lou was experiencing problems with her mic (and her sore throat), and the audience celebrated like a goal the moment her voice finally echoed through the Vodafone FM stage. A crystal clear voice that we cannot help but think it was cloned off Angel Olsen’s vocal chords. The up and coming singer-songwriter was presenting her new album, Paper Castles, from which she drew two of the highlights of her set: the marvelous ballad “Nostalgia”, “Galaxies”, and “Fynbos”, a song evocative of her homeland of South Africa. Looking forward to explore a record that, somehow, fell through the cracks and did not cross our radar in the first half of 2019.
Mitski. Photo: Hugo Lima
"I played three songs”. Those sharply pronounced four words, said while laying on top of a table, were the only words uttered by Mitski Miyawaki in between songs, sending away the photographers from the pit. On one of her last shows before an already announced hiatus, the Japanese-American songwriter brought us the unusual stage antics we were still looking for in the shape of unsettling dance moves that might have come straight from a 90s instructional fitness VHS. And tons of great songs covering all her albums, with a focus on latest Be the Cowboy and the brightest jewel in her discography, Bury Me at Makeout Creek.
Sensible Soccers. Photo: Hugo Lima
But the biggest moment of the night, and probably the festival, started taking place before Mitski even left the stage. We had already pointed out that Sensible Soccers was our top pick for the day and our favorite Portuguese act in the lineup, and they did not disappoint. On stage, the trio turned into a five piece that sounded tighter than most bands with extensive continental and overseas touring, despite their touring consisting of shows far and between, and almost always in their home turf. We like to believe the only reason for them not to be consistently touring and playing sold out shows all across Europe is simply because they have their own jobs and don’t want to. Aurora is an absolute beauty of a record that needs to be listened to right now (we told you that a few months ago), and too bad you cannot find them on a stage near you. Oftentimes contemplative, ecstatic when we needed it to be, this show was one for the ages - and we didn’t even need the bonus that is them closing the concert with the fantastic “Sofrendo por Você” - complete with their mythical dancer on stage as it should be. Later on, Freddie Gibbs and Madlib would prove hip hop is in Paredes de Coura to stay (although the fifteenth “fuck police” chant was starting to bore us) and Jayda G’s set was on point until 5 am, but our festival was largely complete. See you next year.
#vpc19#vodafone paredes de coura 2019#vodafone paredes de coura#paredes de coura#festival vodafone paredes de coura#sensible soccers#julia jacklin#the national#kokoko!#the parkinsons#stella donnelly#alvvays#new order#jonathan wilson#spiritualized#father john misty#mitski#freddie gibbs & madlib#alice phoebe lou#acid arab#ganso#capitão fausto#jayda g#live
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Modding a 10 Year Old Game - Grand Theft Auto IV
(extremely sentimental intro)
My first foray into game development (if you could even call it that) was modding. I’ve always been a sucker for immersion and realism in games, and as a fan of RPG’s, I love the feeling of belonging to a virtual world, and being able to engage in open, dynamic gameplay. This is what mods do best, taking an existing game-world, rules, and limits, and extending them to allow for many more hours of exploration and interactivity.
In Fallout: New Vegas, I loved pretending to be some kind of nomadic gun merchant, roaming the deserts of Nevada and living life rough. In Skyrim, I spent hours as a high society landlord, buying and renting every house in Whiterun, and hiring bodyguards to do my bidding. In both games, I had already played the story missions, and gone through all the available guilds and side-quests. However, I still enjoyed being part of such detailed game environments. Mods allow players like myself to run right past the storyline and do whatever weird, niche activity we want.
modding GTA IV
Another title with a fantastic modding community behind it is Grand Theft Auto IV. A lot of people don’t like this game compared to the brighter, goofier titles in the GTA series, but personally, it’s always been my favorite. Even though the graphics have begun to show their age, GTA IV’s rendition of Liberty City feels so authentic.
I’m still shocked at the amount of detail Rockstar managed to pack inside this game. Cab drivers pour coffee out of their driver’s side windows, pedestrians throw cigarette butts on the sidewalk, people get into arguments and conversations all without any input from the player. The city feels incredibly alive, and carries on regardless. Liberty City is filthy, covered in a layer of grime, garbage and haze. Walking around places like Hove Beach evokes all of my favorite films like Taxi Driver, Donnie Brasco, and Lord of War.
With such an intricate city to roam around in, I always wanted mods to make GTA IV more realistic. Thankfully, there are a lot of mods available aimed at doing this. Unfortunately, as the game and modding community are almost a decade old, many of the forums and sites dedicated to modding GTA IV are no longer available. Thankfully, some sites like GTAinside, and GTAforums are still kicking.
Modding GTA IV requires a couple things. First of all, if you have it on Steam, you’ll want to downgrade the game to Version 1.0.7 or 1.0.4. Next, you’ll need something called a ScriptHook, and an ASI loader. Basically, these make it possible to load custom scripts into the game. A guide on how to install these can be found here. Once installed, you’ll have a scripts folder inside your game directory. Most mods for GTA IV are scripts, but things like effects or textures that have to do with actual game data will have more complex installations. Typically, you’ll have to overwrite files in the common directory, so be sure to make a backup before you do.
Now that you’re ready to add some mods to your game, the only annoying part is making sure they’re all compatible with each other and don’t crash the game. Since I love realism mods, a lot of the ones I found where from this list. I really recommend ones like Arrest Warrant, Bank Account, Interactivity, and Bleed & Heal. I’ve found it makes the game a lot more challenging when you really have to be careful of how you approach combat, and when you also can’t magically carry an entire arsenal of weapons.
my mod for GTA IV
One thing I always wanted in Grand Theft Auto IV was a riot mode. I’m still amazed Rockstar never had a cheat for this in IV or V like it did in San Andreas or Vice City. Looking around online, I found a couple good mods that attempted to implement this, namely Ambient Wars by “IronHide” and Crossfire by user “my ammo crate”.
Ambient Wars is extremely detailed and provides a lot of features, but unfortunately seems to crash quite a bit. It’s also not compatible with version 1.0.7 of the game, which is problematic. That being said, it does a lot of neat things like spawn drive-by crews, gangsters and police all over the city, making it a lot of fun to try and survive amidst the mayhem.
Crossfire is a smaller, less-robust mayhem mod, but does work pretty well. The script basically spawns groups of police and criminals in a radius around the player and makes them fight each other, with the player in the middle. While the script does what it’s supposed to , it has a lot of potential for more features - so I decided to make my mod an updated, better version of Crossfire.
You can find the source code for Crossfire here on my GitHub.
getting started
My script for GTA IV was pretty simple, but it did need a few things to work with the scripthook. First of all, you’ll need an IDE that can spit out a class library, or .DLL file - I use Visual Studio 2017.
You’ll also need to reference two libraries - ScriptHookDotNet.dll. I wrote my mod in C# so I used the .NET Scripthook, which can be found here. You will also need a reference to System.Windows.Forms.dll.
Starting out, you’ll need the following include statements before you start writing your code :
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using GTA;
using GTA.Native;
Because we’re referencing the ScriptHook, we have access to the GTA library, which is really neat. Thankfully, RAGE is a great engine, and exposes a lot of handy functions that make modding pretty simple.
If you’re writing in C#, you’ll need to specify a namespace, and declare a class. Make sure your class extends Script. This is part of GTA’s library that allows our script to be run in the game:
namespace Mod
{
public class MyMod : Script
...
Scripts in GTA IV are run in-game in two ways. Firstly, they can specify a function to be run by a tick, which is specified in the script class’s constructor:
Interval = Settings.GetValueInteger("INTERVAL", "SETTINGS", 1000);
this.Tick += new EventHandler(Event_Tick);
Secondly, they can specify functions to be run on key presses.
BindKey(Settings.GetValueKey("Toggle Script", "SETTINGS", Keys.F10), new KeyPressDelegate(ScriptOn));
As you can see, in the first case, we’re setting our interval to one second (1000 ms). This means that the game will go into our script each second. The game also needs something to run, though. To satisfy this, we add an event handler to our interval tick, which is on the second line. Here, we are passing the function “Event_Tick” as the function the game will call every second.
In the second case, we are binding a key to a function. Using GTA’s BindKey function, we are assigning F10 to the function “ScriptOn”.
At this point, the mod is technically working. If you throw this empty script into the your scripts folder, the game will load it. Just press the ~ key at any time, and you’ll see a message in the console stating it’s been loaded. The console is really handy, as it will spew output if it encountered any errors.
writing the mod itself!
Now that we have the skeleton of the mod up and running, we can actually make it do stuff. For my mod, I wanted the functionality of Crossfire, but with more mayhem. I also noticed that Crossfire had a lot of trouble placing and spawning its NPC’s, which i’d like to fix.
Spawning a pedestrian in GTA IV is easy, and really just needs this function call:
Ped ped = World.CreatePed(Model model, Player.Character.GetOffsetPosition(new Vector3(float x, float y, 0.0f)).ToGround());
Basically, you have to specify what model you want to use for the pedestrian, and where you want it. Pedestrian is the class that GTA IV uses to describe any person in the game. Even the player class contains a Ped object, which has all kinds of handy information, like if the pedestrian is alive, driving a vehicle, speaking, etc.
Choosing a model for your pedestrian is easy - all you need is a string or hash to an existing model in game. Thankfully, there is a list of these online: https://gtamods.com/wiki/List_of_models_hashes. If you want to spawn a pedestrian who’s a fat cop, just put the string “M_M_FATCOP_01″ as your model.
As for the spawn location, you can spawn a pedestrian anywhere, but you’ll probably want them somewhere close to the player. Using the GetOffsetPosition function, you can specify a location relative to the player, and use the ToGround() function to ensure that the pedestrian wont spawn mid-air. This will attempt to place them on a surface nearby. CreatePed can still fail, though. If the game cant place a pedestrian, it will return a null pointer, so be sure to check that the Ped object you get isn’t null.
Another thing! Since this is a game engine, things like garbage collection are very important. RAGE probably uses a lot of smart pointers and weak pointers behind the scenes, so you can’t use the conventional check of == NULL to check if an object is available or not. Pedestrians are often deleted and removed from the memory heap, so if you want to check that a GTA game object still exists, use the .Exists() functions, rather than checking for a null pointer.
Once you have your pedestrian object, you can apply all kinds of things to it. Just be sure to call the function ped.BecomeMissionCharacter(), so the game doesn’t garbage collect your pedestrian. Keep in mind that when you die, all the pedestrians you made will be garbage collected. This is a good thing. If you spawn too many pedestrians, the game will crash, so keep that in mind too.
I’m still learning how the AI works in GTA IV, but you can define a lot of behavior with a few simple calls like this:
ped.RelationshipGroup = RelationshipGroup.Cop;
ped.ChangeRelationship(RelationshipGroup.Criminal, Relationship.Hate);
ped.ChangeRelationship(RelationshipGroup.Dealer, Relationship.Hate);
ped.ChangeRelationship(RelationshipGroup.Player, Relationship.Respect);
ped.MaxHealth = 100;
ped.Health = 100;
ped.Armor = 50;
In this code snippet, i’ve put the pedestrian in the Cop “relationship group”. This is GTA’s way of sorting NPC’s into criminals, civilians, and police. I’ve also told the pedestrian to hate any NPC who is in the Criminal or Dealer group, and to “respect” the player (because they kept shooting at me on sight).
I also gave the pedestrian a health threshold and some armor.
Now to give them more orders:
ped.Task.FightAgainstHatedTargets(200);
ped.Weapons.AssaultRifle_M4.Ammo = 999999;
Here, i’m telling the ped to fight against hated NPCs in a radius of 200 units. I also gave him an assault rifle with a ton of ammo. So there you have it, there’s a cop.
For the criminals, I added a couple other things to make things more interesting:
ped.RelationshipGroup = RelationshipGroup.Criminal;
ped.ChangeRelationship(RelationshipGroup.Cop, Relationship.Hate);
ped.ChangeRelationship(RelationshipGroup.Civillian_Male, Relationship.Hate);
ped.ChangeRelationship(RelationshipGroup.Civillian_Female, Relationship.Hate);
ped.ChangeRelationship(RelationshipGroup.Fireman, Relationship.Hate);
ped.ChangeRelationship(RelationshipGroup.Bum, Relationship.Hate);
ped.ChangeRelationship(RelationshipGroup.Medic, Relationship.Hate);
ped.ChangeRelationship(RelationshipGroup.Player, Relationship.Neutral);
ped.MaxHealth = 100;
ped.Health = 100;
ped.Armor = 0;
ped.WantedByPolice = true;
ped.StartKillingSpree(true);
Blip blip = ped.AttachBlip();
blips.Add(ped, blip);
As you can see, i’ve basically told the criminal pedestrian to hate literally everybody. This guy will open fire on anybody he sees. I also made him wanted by police, and to start a killing spree for maximum mayhem.
Now, police automatically have mini-map blips in the game, but criminals don’t. So, I attached a blip for the criminals. I also added the blip to a Dictionary that holds key-pairs of Pedestrians and Blips, so I can turn them off when the pedestrian dies. This way the map wont be flooded with the dots of fallen NPCs.
I also have a PedCollection for my pedestrians. This is a data structure provided by the GTA library meant for holding Pedestrian objects. I want to be able to keep track of every Pedestrian I spawn, and remove their blips when they die, etc.
what does the mod do?
The pedestrian spawning is really the meat and bones of the script. On top of that, I cap the total spawned and alive pedestrians at 64. Every tick, I do a “Cull”, where I go through and remove and dead pedestrians from the list, remove their blips, and allow for more space for new spawns. This way, the game never crashes and there’s always a steady flow of police and criminals running around.
I also implemented a wave system, so that three waves of criminals spawn, and then one wave of police. I did this because the criminals aren’t as well armed or armored, and get killed so quickly, while the police stay alive a lot longer.
One other feature I added is a weapon tier system. Each wave of goons is assigned a weapon tier (Melee, Pistols, Fully Armed). This way, one way has knives and baseball bats, while another has AK-47s, to mix things up.
When you start the mod using K+L, it spawns waves on a timer, and does cleanup in between. When you end the mod with L+K, or die, the script will do another cleanup, killing all spawned NPCs and removing any blips from the map. You can also use the mod without waves, by pressing F9 or F10 to spawn waves dynamically.
So that’s it! My mod used the Crossfire script as a starting point and turned it into more of a wave style format, with more weapon customization and better placement. I added a lot of randomization to the spawning, so that NPC’s aren’t spawning inside of each other, etc. I will be sure to post a video of gameplay soon.
If you want to try out my mod, you can download the script here!
happy modding!
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Ah, Fallout 76. Modern Fallout’s first foray into the online multiplayer territory and it went over…less than perfectly with its fans. When it was first announced that a new Fallout game was coming, people were pretty excited, except for the looming fear that Bethesda would take the glorious single player, choice valuing, multiple solutions Fallout and bastardize it to match today’s most toxic gaming trends. Would it be a battle royale, like every other game seemed to be? Would it be multiplayer? If it had multiplayer, could you still choose to play it as a single player?
Then when details starting coming out about exactly what Fallout 76 would look like, it seemed like everyone’s worst fear had been realized. People were freaking out, screaming into the aether, burning down villages, the usual internet outrage machine. But among the remains lay a small group of people who were at least willing to give this thing a shot. Some were even excited about it! While I had been expecting a typical Fallout game, I had also always wanted to be able to play alongside my fiancee and other friends in my favourite video game franchise. After tens of hours of playtime, here are my conclusions about Fallout 76.
Major Differences
Firstly, I think it makes sense to run down a list of the way this new entry into the franchise differs from other modern Fallout games. Obviously, there is multiplayer, it’s online, and the quests are more MMO directed than RPG. Another difference is that there are no NPCs in the sense that there are no other normal human beings in the world. There are enemies such as ghouls, Scorched, and other wildlife, but there are no raiders or human settlements. Anytime you see another human in Fallout 76 it means it’s another real player. There are also new things like timed events and PvP zones. Finally, there is no real end game, no ending conditions that could be considered winning or completing the plot.
Story and Environment
Personally, I’m no offended by the idea of there being no NPCs. Sure, in the past, raiders have been a key part of the universe, the omnipresent villain no matter where in the US you’re playing. But I was interested in seeing how they would make up for the lost characters. It was also reassuring to know that other players couldn’t hide in plain sight and attack me when I wasn’t expecting it. My problem with this new world is the reasons for it given in the plot. According to the game, there is a virus running rampant across Appalachia that is turning people (and anyone else for that matter) into the Scorched. The reason why there are no people is that they have all turned into Scorched or been killed by them. The only people living are the ones who have only just left the vault with you. But really, literally, everyone has been turned into Scorched? There isn’t one tiny faction somewhere that survived? Not even one weird hermit living in the mountains? It’s very hard to believe in a world where people have always managed to avoid other plagues such as FEV, Vault 22 virus, and the like.
Besides that annoyance, I find that the world is still very true to modern Fallout. The stories that can be found at every house and settlement, the giant monstrosities hiding around every corner, and the ever cynical take on large corporations and government programs. As far as the story goes, to make up for the lack of actual humans telling you their account, the terminal entries, voice clips, and notes seem to have at least doubled in size. This doesn’t work super well with a game that is now multiplayer. Many times I’ve told Nick to hang on for one second, I’m still reading that note I found minutes ago. If you can deal with that and suspend your belief to accept that everyone was keeping a diary on exactly what was happening to them at all times, this shouldn’t get in your way of enjoying the game.
Workshop Building
In the interest of full disclosure, I have always been a big fan of the workshops in Fallout 4. It’s the first time in Fallout that you can actually have an effect on the rebuilding the world around you. In previous games, you had to just work with what other people have rebuilt into settlements and that was it. I really loved building new settlements, getting people to work together, and trying to fix up the wastelands.
As for the workshops in Fallout 76, I still like it, despite missing a large part of what made them so satisfying in 4. In 76, you have your C.A.M.P (Construction and Assembly Mobile Platform) which you can use to build a personal settlement for all your crafting, cooking, and resting needs. It is still fun to put together a building and try to get creative with your architecture, but the best part about settlements in Fallout 4 to me what the rebuilding of society. Since there are no NPCs, there are no beginning villages to build up.
So far, all I’ve built is a fairly normal 2 story house with a turret balcony and every crafting table in the game. However, I look forward to crafting better and better settlements as my level grows and my settlement capacity grows too. The only choices made with this system that I flat out disagree with is the Stash (a personalized container that you can use but no one else can access) having a limit to how much you can store in it and the lack of ability to scrap other things that were in your settlement before you placed the C.A.M.P. Both of these things are supposed to be changing in upcoming patches though.
PvP
I absolutely hate PvP. I am a horrifically competitive person and while I’ve learned to not get too heated when I lose to computer people, losing to real people still rustles my jimmies. Especially since people online can be a touch rude when then win and when they lose. Luckily, Fallout has a system in place for people like me! Something called consent based PvP means that until your target fights back, you do little to no damage to them. That means you can’t just sneak up on an unexpecting level 5 player and snipe them into oblivion with your level 92-ness. It’s almost like every fight is a proper duel, with both parties aware and prepared for the fight before it begins properly.
Hanging out with all my friends
Queen of electric chairs
All hail the Mothman.
There are some flaws in this system though. For example, there is nothing stopping people from just following you around, jumping up and down in front of you, and waiting for you to accidentally hit them with a stray bullet. Once you hit them even once by accident, you are now fair game. While this has only happened to me once before, and I managed to avoid the jerk anyways, it kind of undoes the work to reduce griefing. Of course, you can block people, but all that does is mute their microphone to you, remove them from your map, and remove you from their map. They still exist in front of you though, so they can still do that annoying jumpy thing. I think blocking someone should remove them from your game in all ways. You shouldn’t be able to see them in the game or on the map and they shouldn’t be able to see you either.
There is also the bounty system. This means if you are repeatedly attacking someone who is pointedly not attacking back, you get a bounty on your head. This is to stop people from abusing the fact that even if the other person hasn’t fought back, the minor damage initial shots do can add up to a kill. If you have a bounty on you, you are fair game for PvP as well. However, this system is a little broken too. For example, the jumpy thing I mentioned earlier doesn’t net someone a bounty. It only goes into effect if the person is repeatedly attacking a bystander, not trying to troll that bystander into attacking them. There is also no way to forgive a bounty, so in the off time that Nick has accidentally shot my C.A.M.P or me (before we are in a team together), he just has to wait for someone to come and off him. I can’t just report that I, as the target, forgive him and it was an accident.
Multiplayer
Did I mention the occasional visual glitch?
My experience with having other players in my Fallout has by and large been very pleasant. Except for the single moment I mentioned in the PvP section, I’ve only met lovely people. There were the people who came by our C.A.M.P, waved at us, used our workbenches, and then paid us in steel for our trouble. There was the person who came to collect the bounty on Nick and after killing him, not stealing Nick’s loot and just leaving him some stimpacks for when he came back. We’ve had random people come to give us back up in fights, which is especially helpful when we were probably way too under-levelled for it. At one point I needed to kill a deathclaw, and when I ran up to the quest marked one, someone else was about to kill it. Instead of finishing the job before I could get a hit in, they stopped and waited, letting the deathclaw whale on them for a minute while I got my shot off.
Basically, Fallout 76 is full of cheerfully emoting, generously sharing folk and a couple of trolls in between. I think this comes from the fact that I don’t know if any hardcore Fallout fans really wanted a multiplayer game, so they are trying to make the best of it by being nice to the other players. It actually warms my heart quite a bit, especially if you’ve ever tried playing some of the other MMO games and heard what people are willing to call your mother if they lose.
Quests, Events, and Dailies
I am actually surprised at myself with how much I enjoy the dailies and events in Fallout 76. As someone who absolutely revelled in the normal Fallout quests with their alternate solutions and moral quandaries, I expected to find the quests in 76 to be weak and empty. Honestly, some of them are. But I have found that it doesn’t mean they aren’t fun too! I think the number one less I’ve learned from Fallout 76 is to stop taking Fallout so seriously. I know it might be hard to believe anyone can take a game about a post-apocalyptic sock-hop world full of zombies and smart-talking robot butlers too seriously, but here we are.
Favourite Things
The photo mode is actually ridiculously fun to mess around with
The Atom shop is full of great additions to the options for clothing, C.A.M.P building, emotes, and more! Plus the fact that you can earn the premium currency for free through achievements is a huge plus
Getting to play my absolute favourite game franchise ever with my fiancee, something I couldn’t do besides sitting next to him and watching him play
Honestly, just the fact that there is more Fallout in this world is great
Mothman. Just…Mothman.
Fighting the boss type creatures, such as Scorchbeasts is a great challenge
Weapon crafting, upgrading, and modifying has been tweaked a bit and I enjoy the mechanic
I appreciate the survival mechanics, especially since they are kind of on easy mode. Playing with those additional metrics is previous games would mean playing it on a higher difficulty than I prefer
The new perk system combines what I liked about previous Fallout levelling while adding some new dimensions, such as combining cards and sharing them with teammates
Changes I Want
Anti-griefing systems to take into account people who are griefing without technically damaging someone else
Larger limits on building size and an infinite limit on stash size
More Mothman
I WANT TO SELL EXCESS AMMO
Any automation in settlements (hire robots to tend to crops?)
A better, more robust blocking system
Higher bounties sooner to increase the incentive to not be a jerk
Ability to romance Mothman
Conclusion
I like this game. I really do. Sure I have some criticisms, but I have some criticism for any of the modern Fallout games. It’s pretty impossible to have a completely perfect video game. I haven’t gotten around to playing it in a couple weeks, but I definitely wouldn’t say that I’m giving up on it in any way. I know they’re still working on it and that my issues with the game will be addressed in one way or another. For now, I’m just trying to not get too caught up in fussing about lore or continuity and enjoy just being a wanderer.
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I tried to condense all my thoughts about Fallout 76 into this one review: enjoy! Get the game at Amazon.ca for PS4, Xbox One, or PC. These are…
#Appalachia#bethesda#country roads#Fallout#fallout 76#game#gamer#gamer girl#games#gaming#internet#new game#opinion#recommendations#Reviews#role-playing games#Video Games#west virginia
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Limbotale
A continuation of Undertale: Genocide route.
I’ve been thinking, I’ve seen so many continuations of the other routes, but none for the genocide route, understandably. But like normal death for us humans, maybe the monsters of Undertale do have somewhere to go when they’re slain. But Heaven or Hell are too typical and cliche, so what about some of the other afterlife realms, like Limbo. There’s so many AUs of Undertale, but only like, one or two of them are really continuations of the original handful of endings. Like I said, mostly the Pacifist and Neutral endings, and yes, I know that Genocide means everyone’s dead, but even that isn’t complete erasure.
What I was contemplating about this “Limbotale” is that every character who’s died still wanders about, still with their old personalities and quirks, albeit everything is more somber and melancholic and even slightly cynical, but generally the same as the lively Undertale timeline was. Although, every character has prominent scars racked across their bodies from when they were mercilessly cleaved by Chara’s blade. The scars no longer secrete blood, and don’t cause the monsters physical pain. Mental and emotional pain, yes, very much so, but they try to set aside the damage that they’ve suffered and go about their lives as they once had. Of course, some monsters may be better at this than others.
One of the main points of melancholy is that everyone remembers, so they’re very wary of humans. Somewhat mercifully, it’s not too severe since they are already dead, so they have the comfort of knowing that they can never die again, at least via normal means of death. The monsters holding the most suspicion of humans are the characters you’re able to befriend the most with during an Undertale playthrough. ie. Sans, Papyrus, Toriel, Asgore, Undyne, and Alphys. Some of the ex villains too, like Mettaton and even Asriel. Remember, Asriel wasn’t always a flower, and I figure that when he’s killed, his dust reverts back to its original body in Limbo.
Also, the point with Alphys, yeah it’s a contradictory thing because she’s never encountered in a genocide run. Maybe when Chara’s free, she finds her somewhere and kills her too eventually? *shrug* Same with the other monsters who’d evacuated from the Underground.
Anyway, just like in Undertale, you have the option to fight or spare everything you encounter. Now that everything’s dead, people mainly cheer themselves up by engaging in sparring matches for sport. Nothing can die, so sparing is technically considered forfeiting, but it’s still labeled as “spare”. For the sake of aesthetics, lol. And the battle system is all the same; monsters still use the same attacks as they had during life, so things can be pretty easy to go through.
So I’ve been going on about how life’s like now for the monsters of the Underground in Limbo, and mentioning the battle system seems like a good segway into the plot of the whole thing, no? Like I said, battles are now friendly competition amongst the monsters, but against humans it’s much the same as before. You see, there’s a barrier between two sections of this Limbo world; one being a residential zone for the dead monsters, and another for the souls of dead humans. Ooh, interesting, no? ewe Anywho, the two races live separated because of the monsters’ stigmatic view of humans, even though the humans are dead too. The monsters still want only to live in peace, and since being massacred by one evil human, this is where their skepticism originates from; the monsters essentially want nothing to do with the humans. But sometimes, members of either race seem to fancy risking interactions with each other. It doesn’t happen often at all, and thankfully the races never really squabble with each other over the rare mingling members, but the monsters do see that some humans are still good-hearted even after death. But of course they still prefer to play it safe and keep the barrier up to at least let them have a peaceful afterlife.
As the story goes of a new foray into Limbotale, one spectral human is interacting with Asriel through the barrier, simply talking as is all they can do. They talk about their lives in their respective residencies, what they tend to do for fun otherwise, how their other neighbors are going about, and so on and so forth. They proceed to converse about how they were killed, and how their lives were like before their deaths. It’s both joyful and solemn for the both of them, and when they come up to talking about random topics, they’re interrupted by their respective caretakers and separated once again. When they’re able to meet up again, Asriel starts coming up with an idea to bring the human into the monster zone, but he’d need to plan how to not have his friend monitored and outcasted by all the other monsters. His main plan involves the human befriending the main characters foremost, being as they’re the most looked up upon by all the other monsters. If they can trust at least one of the spectral humans this time, maybe the stigma will lessen at least for the human for now.
So, the story technically begins with the player going around Snowdin Town, of course accompanied by Asriel, and you can wander around freely as you wish, interacting with virtually anything. I should also mention that Limbotale does take place a few years after the events of the genocide ending, possibly in the wake of Chara reincarnating the world after you give your soul to them. That’s a plausible outcome, no? .3. Anyway, Asriel acts as your sidekick in this world, and he stays with you throughout the whole thing, if only to see to it that you’re not too uncomfortable in the midst of all the wariness and stigmatic fear.
As I said for the battle system, the random monsters who get into battles with you can be spared, and similarly to your hypothetical score in Undertale, every monster you spare slowly lessens your skeptical projection to the monsters, making you more viable to be trusted. Occasionally you encounter the main characters, funnily enough in the same orders, and their battles are more of a test of how determined and faithful you are to show them you’re not out to hurt anyone. This is about as committing as before, but this time there’s more room for error… The local monsters are simple enough to work around, but the main theme of this world is faithfulness, and that’s what the main bosses are testing. You have to be a lot more honest and careful with your choices to win their acceptance. This may seem cheap and cynically straightforward, but remember, all of these characters were brutally murdered by a demon and they won’t forget those scars… So as you go through the story, befriending the characters in general sequence, Papyrus, Undyne, Alphys, Toriel, Asgore, and finally Sans, you gradually gain the acceptance of the whole monster zone. The main bosses do pretty much grow accustomed to you as you go along anyway, but in sequence is as it’s confirmed if they’ve accepted you as a friend.
However, Sans is the one who your choices strictly matter; he’s very cautious of humans, still relatively laid back, but definitely very watchful, to the point where he’s as daunting to be around as he is relieving. Once Papyrus is befriended though, Sans is a little easier to persuade as long as you play your cards right with him. Partially by way of that is successfully befriending his other friends, the aforementioned characters, and when interacting with him himself. Of course, since he’s so analytical and psychological, you have to essentially match his mindset. That doesn’t mean just telling him what he wants to know on the spot. What I mean by that is, Sans is virtually the only one who critically listens to what you tell him, so if you say one thing, and then tell him something that doesn’t quite match up, he will call you out on it, and if his trust for you isn’t sufficient enough, he’ll initiate a very difficult battle with you. But seeing as you probably wouldn’t want to fight him, you need only talk to him three times and then spare him, granted he doesn’t beat you down first. Of course you can’t die in this world, but him beating you has pretty much the same effect as in Undertale, and his trust decreases. If you’re not honest, or even if your own words escape your knowledge as to what you once told Sans, you may find yourself in a lot of battles with him. Of course, he’s also as frustratingly difficult to fight as when he was alive; of course all of the bosses are, relatively.
So Sans is essentially the main monster you would benefit most from befriending, but his battles can range from relatively difficult to borderline unfairly hard depending on where you stand with his friends. Of course this is all easy if you go about the story with pacifist intentions. Curiously enough, his battle on a completely harmless Pacifist run is surprisingly forgiving. By the time you face him for the last time, he should be mostly accepting of you, but you must still be very careful. If you choose to attack him even once, or even by accident, his trust will drop back to below half and make the battle much harder than it should be. Interestingly, if that happens, he won’t be particularly happy about it. Almost disappointed, but indifferent at the same time. You’d think he’d actually be more expectant of it if anything. But if you get through it with no mistakes, the last battle is the point when Sans finally fully accepts you as a friend. If you do happen to blunder up, he’ll likely be the only one who still doesn’t fully trust you. It seems unfair, but understandable as well.
So all this explaining, and there hasn’t really been a point to all this, has there? Hmm, right then, what’s this world looking forward to, you wonder. I suppose there’s not much of a goal for them to anticipate, but maybe making friends with the humans again. I mean, before, they wanted to leave the Underground and live among the humans again, but now that they’re dead with a stigmatic view of them, living among them would be the last thing they’d want. Yeah, this time they’re simply hoping to befriend particular humans who do still approve of them, to come to terms with their death and eventually accept that friends can still be made in the humans.
What’s interesting about this world is that unlike Undertale where if you beat the game, then go through the world by the same route, nothing much differs, Limbotale actually remembers previous playthroughs, even if you’re going down the same route. Albeit, something interesting does pervade, such as of course the new character being unknown to the monsters, but the last human you played as is now an NPC in the world, and they can even be interacted with. They generally tell you things they’ve done and can give tips about things, like qualities on their main friends or comments on the world from a 3rd person perspective. But this only happens if you go through the whole story up till the point where the “reset” option in the main menu says “true reset”. Which doesn’t actually reset anything as it does in Undertale, what it technically means is it’s “resetting” the routine of life in the game, so you’re going through the same script on a different forward in-game point in time. So with each playthrough of the same Pacifist route, your previous humans will get to become permanent residents in the monster zone, sometimes interacting with various overworld monsters too. Also, the monsters remember as well, but beware of course, the stigma will pretty much always exist, hence with each playthrough, you will have to battle the boss characters every time.
However, this world is also very unforgiving if you decide to try and go through with murderous intentions. Well, I say murderous. I mean by getting into battles and choosing the fight option will quickly scare the monsters, and get the bosses on your case almost immediately. If caught, they’ll berate you and Asriel, and then throw you into stupidly difficult battles. Should you somehow survive all this, the monsters all accuse you of being Chara coming back to torture them again. The payoff is hardly even worth it, I’ll tell you now, seeing as it should be pretty obvious even thinking about it. The only thing that does happen for a tormenting run is raising the resentment of the monsters towards humans, dead or alive, and making the next playthroughs more difficult, until after quite a few at least. And besides, that’s supposed to be the whole idea of limbo, isn’t it? To go through and atone for your sins and mistakes?
I wonder if this might clash with the Aftertale AU in some way. >3>
#undertale#limbotale#au#sans#papyrus#undyne#alphys#toriel#asriel#dreemurr#humans#monsters#limbo#dead
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[SP] The Most David-ey David
You see David there? He's the one responsible for all this nonsense. He has it in his mind that he has to purify the earth. Shitty bargain buys from military resale shops are his instruments of choice. See, murder is such a David-ey thing to do. He couldn't even conjure up the creativity in his reasoning to do it. He's just another unattractive white male with a savior complex that expresses itself in a wrongful avenging angel manner. Honestly, I spent all my Sundays growing up in church, and he would rank as the shittiest archangel. Even Gabriel would be able to pull out more whup-ass than he can. Unfortunately, the most dangerous of the world's creatures are those armed with an American middle-class budget, pasty skin, a dick, and higher-class entitlement issues. They'll stop at nothing to get what they want, and all David wants is a "little fun."
At five feet ten inches and a hundred and sixty pounds, David isn't one to stand out from the average all American crew. Typically clad in polo or a button-up, he has the sort of softly lined looks that the fifth-choice friend tends to offer. If there were a group photo, he was either obscured by the one hyper-athletic tall guy in the group or found himself standing at the fringes of the picture. Parted Brown hair that belongs to the Brady Bunch and watery blue eyes, he didn't have much going on for him that would cause people to remark one way or another.
It's four-thirty pm on a Thursday afternoon. Honestly, the time doesn't matter to me, but the fact that David is very poorly tailing an innocent girl is. Stuck in his 2003 white Honda Civic, his features seem to blend into the car itself. It must be the reason why the girl three vehicles ahead hasn't noticed that he's been following her since she left from work. Finally, her car stops outside of a newer apartment complex, and she gets out. Her rail-thin limbs speak to the incessant need in Santa Barbara to cut more calories than you can eat. Frankly, it's a sad look to have when you might have to rely on physical strength to fend off a fucking David.
He sat there for over an hour, just watching from his white Honda to see if she was going to leave or not. The time passed in silence as he kept his eyes locked on the basement apartment that she stepped inside. Beads of sweat started to build on his upper lip as the windows in his car stayed up; there's a single-minded focus about David that leaps to murder understandable. Honestly, though, the fact that even the way he sweats is creepy is reason enough to lock him up in jail, let alone the purification scheme that's locked into his brain.
Well into the night, we've finally reached David's big moment. He's standing at the end of the bed of the rail-thin blonde girl. He was able to sneak inside courtesy of some off-brand lockpicks and a couple overly animated Youtube videos that aid burgeoning criminals in their pursuit of literal murder and mayhem. He's waiting for her to wake up as he silently rehearses his speech for her. The lip sweat is back in style as her eyes begin to flutter open- it's showtime.
"Oh my God!" the girl screams. David doesn't flinch.
"Don't scream, this is all a part of an important plan," he says with a calm smile.
"Plan?" she squeaks. Plan my ass.
"I'm here because you're going to help save the world." He takes a step closer to her.
"Save the world?" She asks, shrinking back. Oh, sweetie, neither of you are going to be doing that.
"Oh yes, the world won't be able to live much longer without it." He continues to creep forward.
"Without what?" Her teary eyes search his for an answer. Jesus, they do raise them dumber in the suburbs.
"This!" He pulls an old army issue K-bar Rambo knife from his belt and plunges it into her chest. Her scream cuts off with a gurgle as a jet of red smacks him square in the face. The stream pumps out in tune with her dying heart as he tries to shield himself from it. He's unsuccessful. He goes to step back, but the knife doesn't budge. It wedged between the ribs in her sternum. That's what you get for being overly enthusiastic, DAVID. God damn, he can't even stab someone without getting the knife stuck. Now I'm stuck watching him try to mount her corpse as he attempts to pull it out of her chest like Excalibur. The only problem is that he- wait no, couple problems here. First, he's no King Arthur, less roundtable, more of the pizza. Two, when you hit an artery as he did with her, you can get your hands covered in blood, which isn't very conducive for grip. Especially when you're in a hurry to get the hell out of somewhere. He's trying to grab the handle of the knife like it's a horny salmon that just wants to lay some eggs before it fucks off and dies.
Eventually, David was able to retrieve his Rambo knife before fleeing to his Honda. The next few days he spent glued to the television as he looked for stories about his first intentional foray into his purification scheme. When he finally saw the broadcast on the evening news about a grisly murder in Mission Canyon, he almost cried tears of joy. Instead, he just started humming "this little piggy went to the market."
Now, I didn't intend to play David's looming specter, but after that asshole stabbed me in the chest as well, I figured that I'd be damned if I didn't get to stick around and see this guy get creamed. I was six years into my career at the Santa Barbara junior college when David first came sniffing around one of the girls in my class. I typically led the night sessions for history and political science, but that term, I was conned into teaching an ethics class that was a requirement for most students. David must have taken a liking to Molly, a sweet redheaded girl, because before I knew it, he was staring at her during class and lingering around the campus. After a couple of sessions into the term, I decided that an intervention was necessary. I wasn't ready for him to be prepared for something more extreme than talking. I stayed after the session one night and made a point to see all of the students leave the room and campus since the parking lot was right next to the classroom.
"David? Can I speak with you?" I called him over to my desk.
"Yes, professor Lewis?" He asked with his shitty blue eyes feigning innocence.
"I've noticed that you've been making some of the other students in class uncomfortable with the attention you're showing them. I think it would be best if you went and talked to Carla over in health services; she's the counselor on campus." I said, using my morning yoga voice.
"Are you serious? You want me to go to a counselor? This is ridiculous! I haven't even done anything!" I should have known to back off at this point, but I only pushed him further.
"Yeah, I am serious. You can't invade the personal space of other students in the class and disrupt their learning." Bad move on my part.
"Oh, you think I'm invading personal space? I haven't done anything close to that yet." He said, leering.
"And I don't think any of us want to get to that point." I wasn't listening to my own words, still wrapped up in my arrogance.
"Well, maybe, I do." He said as he pulled that stupid Rambo knife from the backpack slung over his shoulder. It took me half a second to register the glistening metal when he thrust forward and caught me on the arm I jerked up to hide my face. Severed nerves screamed their goodbyes as I sprinted towards the doorway. I hit the hallway at top speed as I thanked the fates for those grueling weekend runs I suffered through. I felt like a Texas Road House steak cause an overeager white boy was trying to make me extra rare. I didn't struggle with all the other bullshit the world put me through to get skewered by some fucking kid named David. I made it to the end of the hallway a couple of seconds ahead of him when I ran into the locked door. My fellow night class professor must have prematurely closed the hall to the next wing, leaving me trapped like a third wheel on a dinner date.
The son of a bitch just smiled at me like I was a Christmas present, only he stabbed me in the guts when he caught up to me instead of unwrapping any bows. I tried to claw at his face as I felt my entrails play slip and slide with the ground, but I didn't have enough strength left to reach him. I decided in those last few moments that I'd be the annoying fruit fly of his life that hovers over the stale gingerbread cookies. When that bright light rushed down into that hallway as my blood rushed out, I said Hell No. I'm sticking around to see how this one plays out. If David or God thinks that I'm leaving this plane of existence before the final season of Game of Thrones, they're wrong. I'll break bread with Satan before I miss what that crazy dragon lady does next.
Unfortunately, David isn't one for television. Instead, the only screen in his studio is his desktop. The movies that play on that aren't from the traditional studios, though. It's just a daily onslaught of porn. Not even the well-scripted stuff either, no, his freaky ass just sits down in a cheap Office Max swivel chair in his dingy studio apartment and watches. He doesn't even rub one out. Not a single uncomfortable repositioning of the pants while various tanned figures feign attraction to one another. David's watery little eyes just track the screen as if he's trying to understand the reason behind what they're doing.
It wouldn't have been so horrible to have just been stabbed by some typical, angry, possibly road rage related asshole. I mean, the dream would have been not to be stabbed at all and married to Idris Elba, but beggars can't be choosers. But they can sure as hell be whiners. I didn't expect much when I started playing fly on the wall to this sack of shit, but I didn't think I was going to be watching such an intricate combination of evil and stupidity. Seriously, who sits in their bed and listens to some creepy white boy who tells you that you're a part of a plan? Apparently, that plan is for you to die and for him to challenge Ted Bundy on the serial killer leaderboards. Mainly, I'm just irked because I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm the kill that got him off base, now he's stealing them for fun, and before you know it, people will just be offering up their throats left and right.
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Do I really need to worry about cultural appropriation?
Social Media has brought me some really great things this year and I credit the devolution of my sense of humour to misspelled memes and terribly edited videos. It’s also been a major platform for people around the globe to discuss very specific issues faced in society. Basically, I’m subtly introducing ‘Social Justice Warriors’; people who deliberate the ramifications of the acts of certain individuals and companies. These vary from feminist issues, ableism, sexuality and gender, and race among others.
The discussion of race has never been a comfortable one for me, as a 22 year old black female living in the UK. As someone who does try to keep up with world news; however, the difference between being Black British and African American seems to be rather extreme. Having visited New York and seeing how Americans interact on the internet; it seems as though race is much more at the forefront of peoples mentalities. Race has become a very topical debate with people pushing the conversation through despite the prickly sensation we all feel; afraid to say the wrong things and quickly labelled with unappealing and ugly terms. However, the debate has become unavoidable and we’re all being asked to cast our opinions on the matter, otherwise we have the lone commenter now speaking out for an entire race. I don’t usually engage in the online foray of opinions; even less when the majority of comments begin with ‘Well, as a black/white/Asian/purple person, I think that…’ However, cultural appropriation has been one that has caught my eye as a problem I had never been as acutely aware of before encountering the wasteland photography of high-waisted jeans, messy buns and Starbucks that Instagram is.
So what is cultural appropriation? Type that into Google and you get: ‘cultural appropriation is the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of a different culture’. This is also followed by a picture of a minstrel show with the use of black face. Automatically, my brain is tuned to ‘bad’. Cultural appropriation is to be avoided at all costs. Yet, the explanation seems harmless enough. I like a thing from another culture, and I want to incorporate it into my life. What’s the harm in sharing? Isn’t that sort of devisive, schismatic attitude to people and culture perpetuating a harmful and ultimately less enjoyable way of life? After several discussions and a lot of research; I’ve figured cultural appropriation isn’t so much sharing a form of culture as much as it is poaching it.
The problem with cultural appropriation isn’t really about whether sharing cultures is good or bad but, in actuality, how heavily you value context. The ornately feathered headdress itself isn’t the problem Native Americans have with its adoption into music festival culture. It’s the fact that many Native Americans believe its history and ideology are inextricably linked to it; where as other cultures may see it only at face value. A pretty headdress that’s different and quirky which you couldn’t really wear to work or school or any other occasion. The problem is that if you know and appreciate the rich heritage of Native Americans, you wouldn’t want to wear them; it’s distasteful.
Most people have now conceded that yes, wearing a Native American headdress for fun is inconsiderate and inappropriate towards Native Americans. However, the context here is much more black and white than others. The most recent hotly debated topic has been ‘boxer braids’ as being an appropriation of African culture. The context associated with the braids isn’t as much historical as it is emotional. Braids themselves have been used by many different cultures and ethnicities. ‘Boxer braids’, however, have become hotly discussed because of their eerily close appearance to the much better established ‘cornrows’ known to the black community.
This evoked a flashback moment from me of being in primary school. The girls from my class would come back from their trips to the tropics with cornrows with beads very similar to my own. We would gently tug on each other’s hair and flick the hanging beads, loving that we had this thing in common. They must look back to those photos and absolutely hate them. Not because the braids were a form of cultural appropriation, but because they looked ridiculous and dated. They were aware that they were wearing a black hairstyle and simply thought it was fun and pretty. That’s okay! That’s not cultural appropriation. In fact, anyone could get that hairstyle; though I wouldn’t say it suits other ethnicities quite as much; if the hairstyle is embraced as being cornrows and a typically black hairstyle, it’s sharing. However, when the name of it is changed and then the style is put out as being trendy and cool, it becomes problematic. The fact is, people object to the hairstyle as being called cornrows, because of the negative connotations that it immediately implies. The hairstyle is often (and wrongly, in my opinion) considered to be quite ugly and most often used by low income families. Ghetto, thuggish and ratchet are some rude epithets that spring to mind. People didn’t want to wear cornrows when they went to work, or embrace the natural styles of black hair.
Well, now cornrows are considered acceptable, under the guise of boxer braids, surely this is a reason to celebrate another hairstyle acceptable for everyone? The unfortunate answer is no. Black people have a long and sad history of being uncredited and a literally stolen culture and peoples. The truth is, black people, in particular African Americans, are no longer going to stand being uncredited and overlooked for fear of the past. Which, in a sense, is fair with all things considered. Again, how you view context will affect your judgement on the situation. Some people may suggest that cornrows are off limits to white people entirely because of their treatment from white people in the past. I personally see this as even more problematic. It is important to share and enjoy the rich and beautiful intricacies in each other’s cultures. I used to wear Henna all the time as a kid; my close friend at the time was Indian and her mother would sometimes stop by the school and do it for any one that wanted it in the class. Reading some of the posts on Tumblr, for instance, I was grossly appropriating Asian culture. This, I believe, having looked in to the history of henna and mehndi, is simply untrue. Cultural appropriation would involve someone taking the henna and simply calling it ‘100 % natural tattoos ’ as I have seen on a couple of YouTube videos, and not acknowledging the fact that Mehndi is often used in celebrations in India and can be dated back several thousands of years.
In some ways, it’s really easy to introduce other cultures into your life. In my mind, it only really takes acknowledgement and understanding. Anyone with decent common sense should be able to see what is appropriate to incorporate into your own culture and what may be considered offensive. Alternatively, I can see why it could be pretty hard. It’s not possible to scrutinise and scour the internet about everything that you wear, eat, buy and even think. The post I mentioned above continued to say that some people should ‘understand that somethings aren’t meant for everyone’. Whilst I agree; we live in a pretty entitled culture and the idea that somethings are exclusive for some and not for others is abjectly sad but ultimately true. At the same time; we as people should try not to make things that are only for specific people. In the past; things weren’t intentionally made for specific cultures; cultures just weren’t able to interact with each other in the way they are now. People forget how recent globalisation really is, and sometimes it seems difficult to imagine a world which could be so closed off to each other, and we still haven’t even cracked North Korea. So whilst cultural appropriation might seem like a big problem right now; it’s really just working out the kinks of living in a new, open society. But again, that’s context.
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The Climate train, Saudi Arabia’s license to kill, and double Pitts
Local weather Change
Leonard Pitts on about simply what I mentioned he was going to speak about … and hey, what do you imply you stopped studying my screed midway via?
What if the top of the world got here and no one observed?
It’s not fairly an idle query.
You see, one thing exceptional occurred final week. The Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change, a bunch of scientists working beneath the aegis of the United Nations, issued a report on our planet’s well being. Seems it’s worse than we thought. Barring immediate — and politically unlikely — measures to drastically lower carbon output throughout the subsequent decade, they are saying we’ll start to see worsening droughts, wildfires, coral reef decimation, coastal flooding, meals shortages and poverty starting as quickly as 2040.
You may count on mass evacuations from essentially the most closely impacted areas. As one of many report’s authors, Aromar Revi, director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, informed The New York Occasions, “In some elements of the world, nationwide borders will change into irrelevant. You may arrange a wall to attempt to include 10,000 and 20,000 and 1 million individuals, however not 10 million.”
Learn. It.
David Lodge on the unbreakable hyperlink between local weather change and inequality.
Analysis has already related wealth inequality and the rising prices of pure disasters. We’ve seen how Houston’s Hurricane Harvey and New Orleans’s Hurricane Katrina struck the economically deprived more durable than anybody else. Now I’ve seen these results up shut.
The youngsters and grandchildren of North Carolina’s newly homeless usually tend to wrestle financially and have much less hope of reaching the American dream than that they had earlier than the storm. Simply ask all of the individuals nonetheless dwelling in momentary housing in Puerto Rico greater than a 12 months after Hurricane Maria.
My spouse and I had the possibility to fastidiously contemplate sea-level rise and different elements of local weather change whereas choosing our property. However lots of our neighbors didn’t have that luxurious. I’m extra conscious now than ever earlier than that I’m a “have.” And I can put faces on those that bore the brunt of the implications of coverage divorced from science.
Elizabeth Bruenig on dealing with that wall, and preventing again despair.
As Hurricane Michael leaves behind a wake of loss of life, harm and destruction within the Southeast, the very fact of local weather change feels notably tangible. Those that dwell close to the coasts can see their futures in each splintered palm and blasted shoreline, and within the blue tarps fastened over torn roofs by the Military Corps of Engineers. However even these dwelling safely inland and those that have the means to maneuver to greater floor as floodwaters rise gained’t be capable to escape the political turmoil that may come up as house and sources change into increasingly scarce.
Nonetheless, even though the US might play a serious position in making a sustainable future, many American politicians stay glibly detached to the specter of local weather change. In a really pragmatic sense, due to this fact, and in an ethical one, individuals appear to be the issue.
And ultimately, Bruening will get to a gut-twisting query.
Why have kids in any respect, when the long run appears so dire? Even when one assumes that having a baby gained’t contribute to the issue — that our progeny will take significantly the creeping disaster their mother and father didn’t — it nonetheless appears probably that right now’s youths can be confronted with a world vastly and unpredictably altered.
It isn’t too late. This prepare has brakes. However the time when they are often successfully used is getting quick.
Economic system
Dana Milbank on how Trump lives by the Dow, dies by the Dow
After the Dow Jones industrials plunged 832 factors on Wednesday, Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s chief financial adviser, walked up the White Home driveway and proclaimed that there was no trigger for concern. Not in regards to the inventory market, or turmoil in China’s economic system, or American casualties of Trump’s commerce fights, or the president’s try and bully the Federal Reserve into an easy-money stance.
“Our economic system and the individuals and the employees and entrepreneurs, they’re killing it. We’re the most well liked on this planet,” Kudlow proclaimed in entrance of the CNBC digital camera. “We’re crushing it proper now, and I feel that’s going to proceed no matter China.”
After which the Dow went down one other 546 factors. As a result of the inventory market has absolutely digested the large fats meal of tax lower sugar Trump supplied. Since these cuts went to a tiny fraction of the inhabitants they didn’t actually generate any extra demand, and now all Trump is doing is tying up commerce and tossing on tariffs in a system that’s been coasting down a cash hill.
However Trump certain desires some credit score for locating gravity.
On Saturday, he informed a crowd: “Your 401(ok)s, you all appear like a bunch of geniuses — thanks, Donald, very a lot.”
Jamal Khashoggi
For the reason that Saudi journalist was a columnist for the Washington Publish, it’s not shocking that lots of his colleagues had been compelled to write down in regards to the lacking Khashoggi.
David Ignatius on Khashoggi and the way he got here to be exile strolling right into a Saudi consulate.
Conversations with a few of Khashoggi’s shut mates, who shared texts they exchanged with him over time, reveal a person whose best ardour grew to become journalism itself — which he expressed in a fearless, unblinking dedication to the cleaning energy of the reality, whatever the private price.
Khashoggi questioned typically alongside this journey if he ought to again off, ease up and take fewer dangers. However he stored talking out, figuring out the hazard. His truth-telling bought him fired from distinguished modifying jobs, rehired after which fired once more. On the time of his disappearance, Arab journalism had change into a trigger he appeared keen to die for.
And sadly, with Saudi chief Mohammed bin Salman being signaled that killing journalists isn’t one thing that the US finds objectionable. that hazard was significantly elevated.
Kathleen Parker on … another person’s web page, as a result of after her help for Kavanaugh, she’s not on mine.
John Brennan on the person the US is now sadly supporting in Saudi Arabia, and the implications.
For the reason that passing of King Abdullah in 2015 and the ascension of Mohammed’s father, King Salman, to the throne, the crown prince has been on a relentless march to consolidate political energy. He has used his royal standing because the king’s favored son to outmaneuver, sideline and successfully neuter each royal and nonroyal obstacles in his path. Profiting from his father’s diminished psychological acuity, Mohammed gained the king’s acquiescence to push his uncle, Prince Muqrin bin Abdul Aziz, and his older and extra senior cousin, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, off the crown prince perch in brief succession, grabbing for himself the position of day-to-day decision-maker in Riyadh.
His political consolidation marketing campaign didn’t cease there. The well-publicized detention and shakedown of greater than 100 princes, senior technocrats and businessmen on the Ritz-Carlton lodge in Riyadh that started in November 2017, beneath the guise of an anti-corruption campaign, was akin to a single pot calling dozens of kettles black. The transfer was supposed to root out and intimidate potential opposition in addition to to fill Mohammed’s royal purse with greater than $100 billion in funds wanted to pursue his home ambitions and regional adventures, together with his disastrous navy foray into Yemen.
Simply earlier than that “anti-corruption” marketing campaign is when Jared Kushner supposedly equipped bin Salman with categorized info, naming these he wanted to spherical up for “cleansing.”
Fred Hiatt makes the query of supporting bin Salman slightly extra private.
“Why do you’re employed for a assassin?”
More and more, it appears that may be a query many People ought to be getting ready themselves to reply.
Every year, Saudi Arabia employs, via consultants or in any other case, a number of retired American generals, diplomats, intelligence consultants and others. Till now, they may guarantee themselves this was a win-win: profitable for them, to make certain, but in addition enhancing mutual understanding with an vital U.S. ally.
Now, as increasingly proof implicates Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, within the reported homicide of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Saudi diplomatic property in Istanbul, the equation has modified.
So how may, say, a retired Air Power colonel clarify his work when his daughter asks, “Daddy, why do you’re employed for a assassin?”
Probably the most superb factor that got here out of the investigation into Paul Manafort, was the record of issues that didn’t spur an investigation into Paul Manafort — like working repeatedly for murderous dictators and serving to them suppress democracy. It’s not simply that Manafort bought away with it, it’s that nobody appeared to suppose there was something unsuitable with it. Simply as they wave off any implication that working for bin Salman means supporting his homicide of anybody who opposes him. Although it completely does.
Colbert King on Donald Trump’s pucker issue when coping with the Saudis.
Probably the most shocking facet to the response to the doable abduction and killing of Saudi critic and Publish contributor Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey is the notion amongst some U.S. overseas coverage elites that Saudi Arabia, prizing its longtime alliance with Washington, would by no means contain itself in such an atrocity. Not via my eyes.
The Home of Saud, rulers of that desert kingdom, isn’t a authorities. It’s a gang that survives by bullying its neighbors and jerking round its so-called Western allies by weaponizing the huge oil reserves upon which it perches.
The household provides a face of non secular piety. However Saudi Arabia is among the many most bigoted, misogynistic human rights violators on the face of the Earth. Silencing critics is a Saudi artwork type.
What you’ll be able to count on from a Democratically-controlled Home
Adam Schiff offers a imaginative and prescient of a happier, extra simply, future.
Our democracy is damaged, and President Trump is just one purpose. Congress is the opposite. It has didn’t function an equal department of presidency, didn’t play its important position as a test and stability and, most obviously, fully abdicated its oversight duties.
It’s clear that we want a brand new majority that’s keen to carry this administration accountable.
In 1788, because the states thought-about ratification of the Structure, James Madison acknowledged in Federalist 51 that these drawn to public service weren’t all angels, creating an inherent problem in establishing a authorities administered by imperfect beings: “You should first allow the federal government to manage the ruled; and within the subsequent place oblige it to manage itself.”
For almost 2½ centuries, that’s the means it has labored, with Congress serving as a restraint upon the chief and vice versa, and the courts serving to constrain each. It’s actually true that Congresses sharing the identical occasion because the president have seldom been as diligent as these that don’t. However devotion to nation and the rule of legislation — if not the legislature’s personal prerogative — has all the time been sufficient to stiffen the backbone of Congress.
Go forward and skim the remainder of Schiff’s piece. Come again once you’re charged up and able to go. Checks and balances. Checks and balances.
House Stuff
And sure, I did my house column yesterday. However because of that little Neil Amstrong film (which I’m going to see this afternoon) I get bonus house.
Isaac Klausner on the necessity to dream large.
A lot of the staff behind the movie “First Man” was born after the moon touchdown. We had been born right into a world the place these had been, and all the time had been, irrefutable information. We had been born with the posh of taking the moon touchdown without any consideration.
What did it take to attain one thing of this magnitude? That is what our director, Damien Chazelle, and the remainder of us needed to discover. We needed to take audiences again to a time when success wasn’t a forgone conclusion and study how People embraced the concept of strapping a few of our boldest and brightest into tiny capsules on the highest of missiles and launching them into the unknown. What did it really feel like for the astronauts risking their lives, and for his or her households ready at house? What did it price them as people and us as a nation?
Why did we, regardless of beautiful success and advantages that might be measured on the patent workplace, change into so bored? Apollo exhibits that Trump could also be proper about one factor … People can get uninterested in profitable. Even after they’re profitable large.
The willingness to embrace threat and sacrifice on behalf of a nationwide dream is among the greatest methods our nation appears to have modified because the Apollo missions. Exterior of the navy, we not often see this in any respect. There is no such thing as a doubt that the moon missions had been pricey, each when it comes to cash and lives. However what we achieved basically modified historical past.
David von Drehle on a message from house, obtained on Earth.
Apollo eight is having a second. Fifty years after NASA launched essentially the most audacious gamble in its historical past, this overshadowed milestone of human exploration is the topic of books by Jeffrey Kluger and Robert Kurson and an award-winning quick documentary by filmmaker and musician Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.
Its timing couldn’t be extra good.
The story takes us again to 1968, a bitter and demoralizing nadir of the Vietnam Struggle, an ordeal of assassinations, riots, discredited leaders and damaged politics. Inside America’s house program, engineers had been apprehensive that President John F. Kennedy’s stirring promise to go to the moon earlier than 1970 can be unredeemed — or worse, that it might be fulfilled by the Soviet Union. The colossal Saturn V rocket remained unproven, whereas a lunar touchdown craft confronted an array of technological obstacles.
The published from Apollo eight gave me chills as a child, and it nonetheless works right now. I can nonetheless recall not simply the phrases that the three astronauts learn, however each pause and hitch and the inflection of their voices, as if that they had simply come via the speaker a second in the past.
However Von Drehle is leaping the gun. It’s one other two months till the anniversary of Apollo eight. This week was the anniversary of Apollo 7, a crucial mission that’s all too typically missed. Test it out.
Nikki Haley
Richard Wolffe on how Haley missed her alternative to be sincere.
Nikki Haley desires you to know that she’s not quitting her superior, once-in-a-lifetime job to spend extra time together with her household.
It is a uncommon factor amongst these completely rising stars within the Republican occasion who simply occur to announce their departures forward of the anticipated prepare wreck of the midterm elections subsequent month.
Paul Ryan, the outgoing Home speaker, is leaving his superior job as a result of he truthfully, actually desires to hang around along with his personal youngsters.
However Haley is completely different. “My household may be very supportive,” the departing US ambassador to the UN mentioned within the Oval Workplace on Tuesday. “So no, there’s no private causes. I feel that it’s simply essential for presidency officers to grasp when it’s time to step apart. And I’ve given every little thing I’ve bought these final eight years. And I do suppose that generally it’s good to rotate in different individuals who can put that very same vitality and energy into it.”
The crop rotation idea of presidency is an enchanting one, nevertheless it’s often cited by the individual doing the firing quite than the individual doing the quitting. On the Kavanaugh scale of unbelievably low-cost lies, Haley’s selfless self-sacrifice is true down there along with his declare that he vomited due to the spicy meals.
Progressives vs. Regressives
Leonard Pitts on getting it via American heads that almost all is progressive.
Some bonus Leonard Pitts. There is no such thing as a such factor as an excessive amount of.
Right here’s what will get me about progressives.
They by no means appear to appreciate that they’re the bulk. But on difficulty after difficulty, the polling constantly exhibits that they’re.
Abortion? Sixty-four p.c of People help Roe v. Wade.
Weapons? Sixty-seven p.c need stricter legal guidelines.
Taxes? Sixty-one p.c say the wealthy must pay extra.
Healthcare? Fifty-six p.c need authorities to make sure protection to all People.
However it’s not simply opinion polls. It’s additionally presidential polls. Republicans have gained the favored vote solely as soon as since 1992.
So liberals might have the world they are saying they need — with wise gun legal guidelines, immigration reform, common healthcare, reproductive rights, therapeutic of the planet — in the event that they solely had the wit, the need and the braveness of their convictions.
As an alternative, we now have a world of weekly mass shootings, kids in cages, the Inexpensive Care Act barely escaping repeal, Roe v. Wade endangered and a dire new United Nations report forecasting planetary disaster. Additionally: Brett Kavanaugh was simply confirmed to the Supreme Court docket.
What to do about that? Effectively, very first thing you do is … learn the remainder of Leonard Pitts.
The post The Climate train, Saudi Arabia’s license to kill, and double Pitts appeared first on Breakig News.
source https://www.20minute.info/the-climate-train-saudi-arabias-license-to-kill-and-double-pitts/
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