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keanuquotes · 3 years

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i-D Magazine, "The Sound Issue" (UK), April 1993

KEANU ACHIEVES NIRVANA

Interview and Photography by Stephen Hamel. Additional Research by Matthew Collin, David Eimer and Stephanie Dosunmu

Hollywood Sex Symbol, Righteous Dude, Air Guitar Expert, Buddhist? While Preparing for the Forthcoming Film The Little Buddha Keanu Reeves Fell In Love With Buddhist Philosophy. Here He Talks About That "Audacious" Experience...

Keanu Reeves: without doubt, the sexiest young male actor on screen today. However, from the air-guitar-wielding dude in the two Bill and Ted films to the FBI man undercover as a surfer in Point Break, the impressionable young nobleman in Dangerous Liaisons, and, most recently, the unfortunate Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Keanu has asked as many questions as he's answered.

First off, why do people (yes, that's girls and boys) find him so irresistible? He's not a Swayze hunk or a clean-cut Cruise or a Jason Priestley dreamboy. Instead, he has this unaffected gawky charm, a loose-limbed posture, a certain wayward innocence; there's something completely uncalculating about his personality that attracts people to him. He'd have been perfect as a leading man in the Hollywood of the '30s with the goofy glamour of a fantasy boy-next-door.

Secondly, can he act, or is he just the Bill and Ted dude surf-speaking his way through parts that are way too weighty for his flimsy talent? Opinions here differ. He was impressive as the wayward son of a businessman potentate in Gus Van Sant's tale of street misfits in Portland, Oregon, My Own Private Idaho, an update of Shakespeare's Henry IV in which he played the middle class kid alongside River Phoenix's narcoleptic drifter, slumming it with the rent boys and drugheads, all the while anticipating the time when he has to embrace the straight world, reject his lowlife friends, put on a suit and take over his dad's role.

Reactions to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula were less positive. Reeves struggles with an English accent, not to mention a wooden role, causing titters in British cinemas with his unintentionally comic renditions of expletives like "blooming" and "bloody."

Born in Beirut in 1964 and brought up in New York and Toronto, he started acting at 15 and had his first role in the forgettable Rob Lowe ice hockey romance flick Youngblood in 1986. Punk aficionado and bass player in the thrashy mutant rock band Dog Star, Reeves' career has, to some extent, been defined by his face.

However, he seems to have escaped the fate of the 'brat pack' of the early '80s -- Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez -- who had bright starts but ended up in dodgy films and straight-to-video no-hopers. Reeves has already gone further: actors say that the three most desirable directors to work with are Bertolucci, Scorsese and Coppola; Reeves has already done two of them. His career could be seen as evidence of the increasing power that young, hip actors have in Hollywood these days. None of the above directors (nor Gus Van Sant, for that matter) have any real box office pull: their films don't make any real money (although Dracula did alright) and they need people like Keanu even if they don't have the same intense talent as Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel or Christopher Walken.

You could draw a comparison between Reeves and Mel Gibson, who started out strictly as beefcake but escaped the stereotype by taking on risky roles (appearing in Kenneth Branagh's interpretation of Much Ado About Nothing is a step in the right direction for Reeves, rather like Gibson's Hamlet). He's past the stage of taking on roles just because they're there and will probably end up forming his own production company and picking projects more judiciously.

Historically, those actors who the camera and the public love do alright. And although the jury is still out on Reeves' long-term worth as an actor, he's more than bankable and the parts keep coming. This year he'll be starring in Much Ado About Nothing, but the most exciting project on the horizon (it'll probably come out next year) is his role as Siddhartha in Bernardo Bertolucci's Buddhist epic The Little Buddha. Currently blanketed in secrecy, The Little Buddha is a fairy tale set within a contemporary framework. The story of the search for the reincarnation of a dead lama, it contains within it the ancient myth of Siddhartha, the central tale of Buddhism. Siddhartha, born a prince, was cosseted in luxury by his father, before rejecting his privileged enclave to seek spiritual fulfillment. This eventually came after years of fasting and deprivation, while sitting in meditation under a tree, where, finally enlightened, he reached nirvana....

The film, reportedly, will look spectacular. Filmed in Kathmandu and Seattle, it's being made by the same team that produced Bertolucci's visually amazing Chinese dynasty fable The Last Emperor. This is Buddhism for the mass market. But for Reeves, Siddhartha has been more than just another role. "He was a great spiritual, intellectual, social redeemer, a radical," he says with the respectful awe of a novice. "He became a liberator within his lifetime. People took up his practices, his ways." Soaking up Buddhist teachings through books and then, in Nepal, through direct contact with Buddhist lamas, there's a sense that the experience has struck a chord deep within him. "You're just invigorated by them," he says of the lamas. "Even now when I read books I find myself getting energy from them. I feel it going up my spine, up my back. All of a sudden I'll be bolt upright as I'm reading. I'll stay awake longer, I'll be more active. It's very, very cool!"

Reeves was interviewed in Nepal by film-maker and photographer Stephen Hamel, a friend of eight years' standing, just after completing the filming of his part. The conversation shows a more thoughtful, introspective Keanu Reeves than we're accustomed to. "This was a huge thing for him," says Hamel. "He was overwhelmed by this whirlwind of experience that affected him a great deal, made him start questioning himself."

Reeves certainly seems serious about it. You couldn't imagine the Keanu of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure talking about dharma -- but that was five years ago. From dude to Buddhist? Perhaps it's still too early to pin Keanu Reeves down.

i-D: How did you get involved with Bernardo Bertolucci and The Little Buddha?

Keanu Reeves: Bernardo had seen My Own Private Idaho and he saw me. I didn't know anything about Buddhism. When I was a kid my mother had Chinese artifacts, so to me Buddha was this big fat smiling guy. I come from a background that is not Christian. My mother is English and has no interest in the church, no Western religiosity. In my life I have searched for and asked about God. I joined a Bible group for a bit when I was 11 but it was boring. We met in New York City in a hotel and Bernardo told me the story of the script. He spoke about the lamas he had met and how he had come from a non-religious background, a disbelieving aspect, and he felt he had met religious men and they infected him, you know? And as he told the story, I was crying, I was very excited to be there. When I said I was crying, I didn't, like, drench my jeans, but I was fucking moist on it because it was very sweet and moving and I was affected by seeing this man affected. I was thinking, my God, this is audacious!

While you were filming Much Ado About Nothing in Italy, you met the actor Brian Blessed, and he helped you out with preparing for The Little Buddha.

There was something about Brian Blessed which made me think that he meditated. He's an actor, he climbed Everest, and there was just something about him that made me want to ask him about the dharma (truth). So I asked him if he would spend some time with me, teach me about meditation. I had to prove to him that I wanted to learn. He taught me a basic, very simple meditation. It was my first introduction to many other experiences, to a magnetism that draws you. Throughout the three months that I've been involved I've had many examples of running into Buddhists out of thin air. Driving to Florence to meet my sister and picking up a hitch-hiker and me just asking out of the blue 'are you Buddhist?' And yes, he was. It's occurred many times. Sometimes I've had moments when it's been a little maddening -- like, leave me alone! Man, these fucking guys! There's a power about them, things get taken care of for them without them asking for it. Higher energies, I guess.

When did you start to get totally immersed in Buddhism, on your first visit to Nepal?

I started to have books shipped out to me whilst I was doing Much Ado About Nothing, and began reading, practicing posture and sitting. The first things I learnt were the four noble truths: suffering, the cause of suffering, the path that leads to suffering, and the sensation of suffering. The Buddhists believe in no 'self.' The 'I' -- what we call the 'ego' in the West -- does not exist.

When I was in Nepal to do the costume fittings I met a 'master', a Rimpoche (Buddhist adept), who was working with Bernardo. I had some sessions with him doing personal training, he gave me a couple of meditations and he spoke to me about basically working on the notion of 'self'; you have to come to terms with that, then move onto subtler, greater aspects, and basically come to compassion and wisdom and happiness.

When I began working with the Rimpoche and dealing with the sense of self and the practices that he taught me. It's terrifying, it's so painful it's terrifying to give up that idea and the whole notion of the 'I' itself. The Rimpoche said to me do not take what I say on faith! Taste it, bite it, test it like gold. That is Buddhism's strength. It's not proselytising. A Buddhist will not make you fucking say 14 Hail Marys before they give you food. It's not about that the principle that has kept me interested in this is that Buddhists are interested in truth. The bottom line is love and compassion and kindness and happiness.

You were obviously very influenced by the Buddhist teachings. Did you want to become a monk?

No, but there was something inside of me that wanted to. There was a part of me that was searching for a vow to take, you know? There is something in you that can put you over the edge and basically it is only now that I am considering Buddhism. I am going to continue to study it.

How did the influence of Buddhism affect you as an actor?

I've trained as an actor for the past ten years: watching myself, asking why do I feel this, what do I feel now, physically learning expressions, trying to delve into the emotional and intellectual aspects of relationships. And this helped me. It's been therapeutic in a sense -- I've been training my mind.

The first shot you did for the film was the scene of Siddhartha's enlightenment. How did you prepare for that?

I just tried to invoke in myself a calm and a vastness. Bernardo had a picture from a book of the facial expression that he was interested in seeing. I would just try and relate to that and conjure it up.

What about the restricted diet you had to eat while you were doing the scene where Siddhartha is naked and starving himself in the forest?

You and I know, I fucking love feasting! Feasting is one of the great joys of life! But in the past couple of weeks we've been doing the mortification scene, so l fasted; I had an orange and ten litres of water a day, it's crazy, things are revealed to you, that's one of the kicks! Siddhartha was this man who was seeking release from old age, suffering and death. He was conquering his body, he was conquering his desires, his cravings, he was testing himself. He thought, 'if I can conquer my desires, I will be liberated'. You should read some Dalai Lama books, he's very eloquent. There's this one book I've been reading recently called Kindness, Clarity And Insight; if anyone wants to have a little taste of any of these things, they should try to read it.

What's the overall tone of the film?

We're doing a fable-istic, emotive and compassionate representation of Siddhartha. That's my view of it. It's trying to push out and magnify the pain that this man felt.

How are Buddhists going to react to this film?

I don't know. I haven't seen the film yet.

Originally the Indian director Satyajit Ray was against the idea of a film about the story of Buddha. There must be other people who think that too.

The film isn't about the story of Buddha. It's a representation of Siddhartha and his life. Bernardo has been very careful about his responsibility. Tradition, ritual and practice is reflected in the film very accurately, and the teaching of the dharma is subtle, rich and deep, and hopefully that will help.

How do you feel about going back to Los Angeles after the filming?

I've come to believe that there is so much ludicrous about America, I can't even believe it! (laughs raucously) Being here (in Nepal) I realise the sewage is so good in America, how we take care of our shit -- the technology is so great, the industry of America is so beautiful. You can see its wonderful, incredible promise -- the potential of a land to really, really help everyone with its ideas and machines, to really fucking help everyone.

When I arrived in Nepal, I'd never ever seen anything like it before in my life. It was amazing. The shock of seeing the culture, the cows everywhere, people brushing their teeth in the street, the bare feet. How did you deal with that?

I had the really bizarre feeling of being very comfortable and not thinking that it was strange at all. It seemed to make sense. I like cows! One of the most amazing things was an evening I spent at a sacred burial ground where they burn the dead. The sun was going down. On one side was a Hindu temple, some monkeys and dogs; on the other side were people praying and the preparations for a cremation. There were children playing around and selling food and the monkeys were playing with the dogs, the river kept flowing and the sun was going down and the whole of life was there. I didn't grow up on a farm, I grew up in the city. As a bourgeois white boy, sometimes you don't get to see the whole thing -- the morning, the joys, the children, the beginning and the end, the respect and the holiness. The feelings that coursed through me were awe, respect and just being a part of it and looking at all these different people. That was, to me, the most affecting time I spent there.

So you're going back to LA in two days.

Whoo hoo! It's hilarious, man, I've had, like, visions in my bathtub, of going home, lying on my lawn and pouring red wine over my head, soaking myself, going 'forget it, I'm just going to be an ordinary guy, just eat and shit and love and do whatever, man!' I'm looking forward to seeing my friends and family and riding my bike, hanging out and reading, eating some crab and relaxing. I shipped all my books home -- I'm very interested in learning more about the doctrines, maybe becoming Buddhist. In the world that I'm in, you just want to talk to your friends, hang out, kick back; it's hard sometimes to see deeper things. All we want to do is be happy, have a sense of ease, comfort and joy. Most of us aren't looking for anything beyond that. We all want pray to something, we all feel that something more is 'out there' sometimes. I know I do. And all this has helped me come into contact with that -- an actual experience of it. And that is cool!

http://www.whoaisnotme.net/articles/1993_04xx_kea.htm

#keanu reeves #Stephen Hamel #article #WINM

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scrivenerofmossflower · 4 years

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I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghost

Word Count: ~2.8k Summary: Four new friends decide to celebrate their recent meeting by doing some light breaking-and-entering at the local cemetery. They're looking for a ghost. They accidentally come out with the seeds for a YouTube channel. In which Gonff has done research, Rose brought the video camera, Martin's a little too comfortable with this, and Columbine wonders how a pre-med like her wound up stuck with two theater geeks and an enigma. read on ao3 Notes: Human AU, College AU. Un-beta’ed, all mistakes are my own. I’ve been sitting on this for like, over two years and the fact that the ‘verse is still bothering me and I still remember all the details to the set up means that I’m just going to have to exorcise it. Have a Halloween fic the day after Halloween.

The cemetery was on the western edge of town and looked not as a cemetery usually does, with neatly kept graves and graveled paths and mown lawns, but as a cemetery should. With the sun just below the horizon and night falling quickly, the overgrown graveyard with it’s off-kilter, lichen covered headstones and crumbling mausoleums looked like something right out of a horror movie.

“Hollywood called, they want their set back,” Rose said. All four friends were leaning against the iron gates at the entrance, nerving themselves up to go in.

“Oh, come on, this is B-list horror fodder at best,” Gonff countered. “More like Haunted Mansion or Hocus Pocus than—are you recording this?”

“Yep,” Rose said. She turned her phone towards him, zoomed in and out on his face, and stuck out her tongue. “You know how big a wimp my brother is about the spooky stuff, so I was going to send it to him. Congratulations, he just found out you’re a massive Disney geek.”

“Everyone likes Hocus Pocus—”

“Are you seriously going to do this?” Columbine interrupted, and rolled her eyes when Rose turned the camera on her.

“Scared?”

She sighed. “Of getting arrested for trespassing? Yes.” She reached out and made a swipe for the camera, but Rose avoided the grab. “Especially if you’re going to be recording us breaking the law—Martin!”

While they’d been talking, Martin had swung himself onto the top of the chest-high wall and sat straddling it with one leg to either side. “What?” he asked. “It’s not that high.”

“That’s not really her point, mate,” Gonff said. What was chest high on Martin was shoulder high on Gonff, and between that and a bit of extra pudge, it was a bit more of an undignified scramble up. Martin snagged the back of his shirt and heaved when it looked like he wouldn’t quite make it. “Thanks. C’mon, Columbine, you’re up next.”

She sighed again, but took both their hands and let them haul her up between them, with a neat little twist that left her sitting on the wall, feet on the outside.

“Here, catch,” Rose said. She tossed her phone up to Martin and waved off their assistance, bracing her hands on the top of the wall and hopping up, accepting her phone back with a grin. The group paused again on the top of the wall. “So,” Rose said, dragging out the vowel and turning the camera on each of them. “What do you think we’re going to find?”

“I was poking around in the library this afternoon,” Gonff volunteered, drumming his heels against the wall, “and turned up a couple of specifics. Apparently there was this chemist—and I use the term loosely, he wasn’t trained and it was the 1700s, I think—but when he died he said he’d be back.”

“And was he?”

“Well, he was exhumed at some point, and the body was unsettlingly preserved. Though I suppose saying the tomb was broken into would be more accurate; a curious medical student tried to cut off his head.”

“And you say it’s the theater geeks who’re weird,” Rose said. “When has a theater geek ever tried to cut off someone’s head in the name of science?”

Columbine just raised both eyebrows in Rose’s direction. “Really? We’re really going there?”

“Okay, but when has a medical student willed their skull to a theater so it can be used in a production of Hamlet?” Martin asked, and ignored how all three just looked at him in bewilderment. “Go on, Gonff. The body was unusually preserved, the student tried to take its head.”

“Which I contest, honestly,” Columbine interrupted. “You could get as good a sample without desecrating the corpse like that.”

“Anyway,” Gonff said. “As he was putting the head in the sack he’d brought with him, he heard whispers coming from the corners of the tomb.” He gestured, describing the scene with relish. “Whispers at the edges of reality, seeping through the cracks. When he turned around, there were shadows writhing and twining in the corners, reaching out as if they would pull him into the void itself.”

There was a beat of silence.

“And this tomb is in this graveyard?” Rose said, scanning the layout of the ground below them.

“Yep. The student ran, of course, and left the head behind. It’s probably still there, kicked into a corner by a panicked foot.”

Martin and Columbine exchanged skeptical looks. “Guilty conscience, obviously, and probably wind through the leaves,” Columbine said. “Look, there’s trees all along the wall, and there’s grass and stuff, too. When was this?”

Gonff blew out an exasperated breath. “I don’t really remember, a few years after the guy died?”

“So call it the 1810s at the latest,” Columbine said, crossing her arms. “Way before electricity was harnessed for things like flashlights. If he had a lantern or an oil lamp, those shadows were probably caused by the unsteady light source, and obviously an overactive imagination.”

“Speaking of which, anyone else have a flashlight?” Martin asked. “First quarter moon won’t be up for another few hours.”

There was another, longer silence.

“We are really bad at this,” Gonff said finally. “Martin’s the only person who brought a flashlight? Seriously?”

“I was just going to use my phone,” Rose said. “But that’s going to eat my battery, especially if I’m recording at the same time.”

“Lesson learned. When poking around old graveyards after dark, everyone in the crew brings a flashlight,” Columbine said, shaking her head.

“We’ll keep it mind for next time,” Rose decided, and hopped down into the graveyard without further commentary. “Come on, let’s go find this tomb. You remember which one it was, right, Gonff?”

“Yeah, it’s in the north corner. I’ll lead the way.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Martin said as he helped Columbine down off the wall, “I swung by earlier today to talk to the groundskeeper. Ghost hunters aren’t new to him, and we’ve got permission. As long as we don’t break anything, leave trash around, make too much noise, etcetera, he’s fine with it, if a little resigned.”

“I’m beginning to think you’ve done this before,” Columbine said, half joking, half accusing.

Martin shook his head. “No, I just don’t see any reason to take unnecessary risks.”

Gonff laughed from in front of them, and turned around to walk backwards and still face them. “Matey, I’ve known you for a week and I can already say with full confidence that that’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told.”

“I did say unnecessary risks,” Martin said with complete calm. “Besides, I haven’t been that reckless around any of you.”

“Yes, because jumping two flights of concrete steps is perfectly reasonable,” Rose said, giving him a very disappointed look.

“I was running late and took the landing on my shoulder like you’re supposed to.”

The deeper the four friends passed into the graveyard, the older the headstones became. What names and dates had survived the years were obscured by green-gray or orange lichen. At the very back were a row of small marble buildings, some with long fractures in their walls, some with craggy domes, some in eerily perfect repair but with the iron grate hanging askew. The casual back and forth banter grew quieter as they approached, until at last the muffled sound of shoes upon gravel swallowed it up entirely.

“That’s it,” Gonff whispered, nodding towards a mausoleum built into a low hill, the dark space where its door should have been framed by ivy and brambles.

Rose took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Break my phone and I’ll curse you,” she said, and thrust it into Gonff’s hands.

“Wait, what are you doing?”He fumbled it, checking the camera and keeping it trained on Rose. The image was becoming grainier as the light faded, but it was still enough to film, for now.

“I’m going inside,” Rose said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“Oh, no, not without me you’re not,” Gonff said, shoving the phone at Martin. “Here, you hold this.”

“I’m pretty sure this violates the 'don’t break anything' request we got from the groundskeeper,” Columbine said, rubbing at her forehead.

“Do you want to go in to explain every ‘experience’ they have, or shall I?” Martin asked. The video wouldn’t show the fond grin he wore, but it was clear enough in his voice as he trained the camera on Columbine, equally fond for all her exasperation.

“You’ve got the flashlight,” Columbine pointed out, waving him on. “I’ll stand guard on the off chance someone comes to run us out.”

“We can jump the wall and make for downtown if that happens,” Martin said. “Always have an exit strategy.”

“You’ve definitely done this before.”

“No, that’s just general life advice.”

They were interrupted by a low call from Gonff from inside the mausoleum. “Martin! Flashlight?!”

Martin fished the penlight out of one pocket with one hand, keeping the camera steady on the door as he approached. He knocked on the jamb with it. “Hello? Sorry for the disturbance, but we were just hoping to look around for a little bit, if you don’t mind the company. We’ll leave you in peace again soon.”

He flicked the light on, and startled back when it illuminated Rose, who was far closer than he’d expected. She also backed off with a pained protest. “Warn a girl before you do that, will you?”

“Sorry, sorry,” Martin said, angling the light a bit lower.

She rubbed at her eyes. “Were you talking to the ghost just now?”

“Look, if there is someone in here, just because he’s dead doesn’t mean we have to be rude,” Martin pointed out, following Rose into the crypt. “How’d you feel if someone came poking around your room without even apologizing for it?”

“You don’t even believe in ghosts,” Gonff pointed out, squinting around. The three of them drew closer together—ghost or no, they were in a small space with a dead body after dark, circumstances creepy enough to raise the hair on the back of anyone’s neck.

“I prefer to hedge my bets,” Martin said, sweeping the penlight slowly around. It was mostly empty, but for a few dead leaves in the corner and a low, rectangular construction in the middle of the room—the tomb itself. “I don’t see anything in here. Should we go a bit deeper?” They were huddled near the door, the blue-bright LED penlight aided by the distant starlight and the sickly yellow glow of a nearby streetlight.

“Yeah, why not,” Gonff said. His voice was a bit higher than normal, but he slid one foot forward, then another. Rose trailed behind him, looking closely around the room.

“Are you sure I shouldn’t go in front?” Martin asked.

“You’ve got the camera,” Rose said.

“Right,” Martin muttered, not sounding too pleased with that. “Of course.”

“I’ll curse you, too, if you break my phone—” Rose started, only to cut herself off with a gasp. “Did you hear that?”

“No?”

Another long moment of tense silence, before all three heard a rustling sound from beyond the tomb.

“I heard that,” Gonff said, this time with an almost manic sounding giggle. “It sounds like he doesn’t like curses. Maybe don’t talk about that right now?”

“Right,” Rose said. She swallowed. “Sorry.”

“There’re a lot of dead leaves in here,” Martin said, directing the penlight towards the corners. “It was probably the wind, or an animal. Something like—huh.”

The light illuminated a misshapen lump closer to the entrance, a bundle of something that looked like it might be cloth. The trio stared at it for a moment.

“Do you think that’s the head?” Rose whispered.

“It’s definitely something,” Gonff said. All three drew closer together until their shoulders were touching.

“You know, I sort of thought the head would’ve been moved, or missing, or eaten by now,” Martin said.

Gonff blanched. “Eaten?”

“Well, yeah. Animals, scavengers, that sort of thing. What, did you think I meant cannibalism?”

“No…”

“Well, only one way to find out,” Rose said. She squared her shoulders. Each step forward echoed hollowly in the empty mausoleum, and when she spoke, both Gonff and Martin couldn’t quite suppress a jump. “Martin, will you stop moving the light around? I’m nervous enough as it is.”

“I’m not moving the light, Rose. And my hands are steady, before you ask,” Martin protested, eyes on the video to make sure this was the case.

Rose halted without turning around. When she spoke, her voice was forcibly calm. “If it’s not the light, what’s making the shadows move?”

“Martin, are you getting that?”

“I’m recording the shadows acting like shadows, yes,” Martin said patiently. “They’re moving because you’re moving, Rose, and you’re between the light and the—oh,” he said, as the shadows trembled again and moved up the wall.

There was a crash of stone on stone from behind them, loud in the sudden stillness. All three screamed, Gonff and Rose both latching onto Martin’s arms. Martin had dropped the penlight to free one hand, and the light swung wildly about the mausoleum, chasing spiky shadows and weird shapes up the walls.

“I think we should get out of here,” Gonff said, already backing out and dragging Martin along with him.

“Good idea,” Rose agreed, matching Gonff pace for pace. “Great time and all, really interesting, but we ought to, you know, go analyze the footage, see if we got an EVP—”

“Not find out what that was?”

“A ghost angry about a joke about curses.”

“Don’t joke about curses, I was cursed once and it offends me,” Gonff agreed with another high pitched giggle.

“This is just for practice anyway, next time we’ll go investigate,” Rose said.

There was another rustling, and the penlight caught the reflective gleam of eyes at the other end of the room.

They broke and ran, bursting out of the mausoleum and almost bowling over Columbine.

“What, what did you—”

“Eyes, dark, something—”

“Just run!” Rose said, pushing the both of them ahead of her.

“Over the wall?” Martin asked the group.

“Yes, fine, just away!”

This wall was conquered far more easily than the first, the fear adding extra speed to all four friends’s flight.

“You really saw a ghost?” Columbine panted.

“No,” Martin said, at the same time Gonff said “Yes!”

“There were eyes, mate, actual, glowing eyes!” Gonff continued. “And the shadows, you saw the shadows!”

“I saw shadows move that weren’t caused by Rose,” Martin said.

“And the crash? And the rustling?”

“Coincidence. Dead leaves. There wasn’t a ghost in there.”

They stopped a dozen blocks away, Rose clutching a stitch in her side, Gonff with his hands braced on his knees, gasping for breath.

“Then what was it?” Rose asked, leaning her head against the wall of the closed coffee shop.

“I don’t know,” Martin said. He was breathing deeply, deliberately slowing his breathing back to normal. “But it wasn’t a ghost.”

“That’s… because… it was a fox,” Columbine said, also bent double and panting for breath. She waved her phone, which the other three only just noticed in her hand. “I saw it come out about two seconds before you did,” she said, straightening as her breath came back. “Snapped a few pictures. He’s a cutie, you probably scared him.”

“We scared him?” Rose repeated, scandalized.

“Oh, let me see,” Gonff said, leaning over her shoulder as she swiped through the handful of pictures.

“Wait, let me get a shot of this,” Martin said, a grin beginning to steal over his face. He raised Rose’s phone again, getting a good angle on Columbine’s. “Aw, he is cute.”

“What about the eyes—?”

“Probably a family,” Columbine said. “I mean, that’d be a great place for a den, wouldn’t it? Sensible people don’t go in.”

“Did I ever claim I was sensible?” Gonff asked her, turning to look at her indignantly with his chin still propped on her shoulder. “Did Rose? Did Martin?”

Rose shook her head, beginning to laugh. “So our first ghost… was actually a family of foxes,” she said.

“Apparently,” Gonff said.

“Stepping through leaves, knocking something over, moving around so that there were shadows,” Martin listed. “And our imaginations did the rest.”

Columbine shot them all a grin. “Good thing I didn’t come in with you guys, then, or I wouldn’t have evidence,” she said, waving her phone in Gonff’s face.

“Well, you’ll have to figure out a way to get evidence from the inside next time,” Rose decided. She put out a hand and wiggled her fingers. Martin passed her the phone.

“Next time?” Columbine repeated.

“Absolutely,” Rose said, and panned the camera around the group. “After tonight, we’ve got to find a real ghost. This is too embarrassing a note to leave on, don’t you think?”

#my fic #redwall #Late LateRose Channel AU #one-shot #Martin the Warrior #Gonff #Columbine #Rose #look I don't remember where this came from #but I love it #please love it too

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fahrenheit45done · 5 years

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Younger me went off hardcore

Right so I was looking through old files today and I just found this pretty much essay young me wrote on the faults of studying literature in the education system and like, she went hard.

We say that poetry, that literature, is a noble art- but how is it noble if it does nothing in the face of tragedy?

Right, so this is coming from a person who was completely enamoured by the idea of studying English literature as little as maybe five months ago. I was planning on applying to Durham University (actually rated as the best UK University to study English Lit), I did a summer course at 16, I read and still read most of the highbrow classics but the education system is so good at suppressing this love. I’m not saying they make you read bad texts as most people do- I genuinely have never studied something I didn’t like the first time reading (the second go at the sign of the four, however....). My problem is with how you’re not allowed to give an interpretation that either goes too far or is too simplistic.

My most likely outcome at GCSE was a 9 (the top 5% like hardcore nerd category), I got an 8. Okay so my radical theory on Lord of the Flies (starring Jack as Hitler, Simon as the Jews, and Piggy quite bizarrely as Winston Churchill) worked out, only dropping three marks on the 96 mark paper (and this is three essays and a comparative answer on two poems), but sign of the four and Macbeth. EEK! I won’t go into Macbeth - I had this weird point linking it to Hamlet through the last words of the titular character and Lady Macbeth’s diminishing power of speech- but Sign of the Four, I still would defend my viewpoint even with its shitty grade. I argued, quite simply, that Sherlocks Holmes was a hero written for a dark time, and that’s not good enough for examiners. They don’t want to hear about how Sherlock Holmes is literally the crime novels of the nineteenth century- that they’re for fun.

I’m okay with my 8. I’ve gotten over it.

But A-levels... How is it that I can apparently ‘try too hard’ in an essay that I’d spent forty-five minutes on the night before with, what I thought was, a valid viewpoint. Okay, so Shakespeare was probably not a feminist and probably wouldn’t really be using the Winter’s Tale as a way to portray the tragicomedy which is women’s experience at the time. But wouldn’t it be interesting if it was? And the evidence is there- Hermione and Paulina may extrinsically be typical conventions of a comedically outspoken female character, but intrinsically? They’re so badass at speech that all the men fall apart next to them. I used quotes, I related to the time, I just don’t understand how that’s trying too hard. I think it’s exploring viewpoints.

And then you get the more recent view I’ve picked up on- the what’s the point of studying literature anyway? There are many books that celebrate literacy, but there are also many books that highlight the flaws of society. So why is it we study literature, arguing like pretentious snobs with nothing better to do, whilst all those problems still reign supreme in our world? What does studying literature even do? Nothing. It’s so pointless and I don’t know what to do with that. I love books, adore them. I’ve written and read them all my life and still, it seems selfish to study something and work towards something that’s not for the betterment of society. So I want to write, so I want to highlight the world’s problems- as so many have done before me- and yet what has it done? We write the flaws, literary critics highlight the flaws and then nothing’s done. Isn’t anyone else tired of it? Yes, I love literature, I love learning, but how can I go and study accumulating debt when there are children out there, girls especially, who never even learn to read? How can I go to Uni and have the Uni experience, learning to cook, to live on my own, when I know that thousands don’t even have the food that I’ll stupidly burn, that some will be alone in their house with the dead bodies of their family all that joins them?

I just, we say that poetry, that literature, is a noble art- but how is it noble if it does nothing in the face of tragedy? Tragedy is treated as a genre, caused by a fatal flaw, a hubris- we use big words to comprehend feelings we don’t understand as anything more than themes to teach us lessons. The human experience, human tragedy is not a lesson, it is something that shouldn’t happen. It just shouldn’t. And maybe if we focus on first elevating everyone to a decent education, we could live in a world where studying literature can be a worthy endeavour.

#english literature #younger me #I don't know if I still agree with all her sentiments but damn she made her point #A levels #GCSEs #education

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bellejanewednesday · 5 years

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Just the Beginning

Here’s the thing: I was recently diagnosed as Autistic. I’m happy about this. I’ve found my people. The aliens and faeries that I dreamed would come greet me as one of their own finally showed up. This is awesome. Except… except… wait a minute. My family is being weird, as usual. Nobody wants to believe I’m autistic. I keep getting eye rolls and reading their looks that say: omg,she Is such a drama queen. She’s not autistic, she talks!

Except for the many years that I stopped talking. I was highly verbal until I was about three, when I started noticing things that were… off… about my family dynamics. I started saying awkward things at the bi-weekly large family gatherings at my grandmother’s house. “Mama, the chicken is raw in the middle.” (I was told to eat the cooked bits on the outside.) “But mama, it’s black and bitter on the outside.” My comments were not restrained to the cuisine, although I was horrified by the “Rainbows in the green beans.” (It was bacon drippings) it started taking on hamlet-like proportions, if hamlet were three. “Mama, why does gran flirt with uncle E. And Uncle V.?” “Sissy, is gran flirting with daddy?” And finally: “Gran, why do you come over to our house all the time and make momma cry?”

If I heard “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” once, I heard it a thousand times. And then there was: “Just ignore them and they’ll stop picking on you, they’re just doing it to make you cry.” This was in reference to my myriad of much older cousins, one of which bullied me into kissing his literally shitty shoes.

So it’s no wonder I ceased to speak at family functions. I was polite, I would say “Yes ma’am” and “No sir.” Or, more and more commonly, as my Dysautonomia progressed, “I don’t feel very good.” (Sidenote: I was never afraid of “the thing beneath the bed.” Why? Because I WAS the thing underneath the bed, accompanied by a doll, usually)

It’s not what caused me to cease speaking from 3 til 9 that bothers me, it’s that NOBODY NOTICED. I had no idea it was unusual for families not to notice when a toddler stops speaking. I guess it was convenient so they didn’t question a good thing. I started speaking again, briefly, from 10 to 14, but I gradually stopped as my grandmother increasingly pointed out how sexy I was to anyone who would listen. She was obsessed with my not so itty bitty baby boobs. At 12. I officially stopped speaking at 14 when she pointed this out to a room full of family and friends, including the town pervert. Everybody knew this about him. Nobody left children alone with this guy, including his own daughter. There was shocked stunned silence from at least ten people. So, I stopped speaking until my 20s, but that’s another kettle of fish. The thing I’m pissed about today is being forgotten. Once at a big family reunion one of my first cousins, that I actually considered NICE, made a score of scrapbooks and poster sized collages of family pictures. I must’ve looked for two hours. There were no pictures of me. Not one. Not even a baby picture. At this point I had this almost out of body experience. I started to doubt my own existence. I thought maybe i’d already died of my physical illness and didn’t know it. I looked, stunned, at my surrounding family members and wondered if they actually could not see me. I was so terrified that I COULDNT speak, for fear that no one would hear me, either. I must’ve registered something on my face, because eventually somebody asked me if I was ok. I responded in such a quiet voice that, to my horror, I actually couldn’t be heard. I finally managed to ask said relative if they had noticed any photographs of me. I told them maybe I just missed it among the sheer volume. Gradually her face turned from confusion and disbelief to absolute horror as she flipped through book after book, scrutinized poster after poster. I just stood there feeling pale, not really registering any emotion except suddenly very, very tired. I gradually excused myself to go lie down, which is not unusual behavior for me. I took the short walk home and, pathetically, found a recent photo that I liked. I walked back and quietly tucked it in a corner of a poster, careful not to obscure anyone. When word spread (I didn’t tell anyone) people were horrified and apologized profusely for the cousin who made the scrapbooks, telling me that “she didn’t mean it.” But that’s the thing, isn’t it? I would rather have been hated and deliberately excluded than just… forgotten. I’m not sure how many times I’ve been forgotten by them now. Once one of them had the balls to say: “well you never show up anyway.” After they forgot to include me. So… I started deliberately not attending family functions. I’m not stupid, I know I’m not wanted, even if they don’t.

So I’m spending this Christmas with my cat and my dolls, and my found family that avoids Christmas like literal hell anyway. We’ll check in on each other via text, (You ok?

Yup. You?

Sorta.

I overstand. Ttyl.

Thanks, love you.

Love you too)

And then we can start looking forward to Halloween again.

#disability #disabled #actually autistic #natalunasans

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uomo-accattivante · 6 years

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On 21 August 2017, the Great American Eclipse caused a diagonal swathe of darkness to fall across the United States from Charleston, South Carolina on the East Coast to Lincoln City, Oregon on the West. In Manhattan, which was several hundred miles outside the path of totality, a gentle gloom fell over the city. Yet still office workers emptied out onto the pavements, wearing special paper glasses if they had been organised; holding up their phones and blinking nervously if they hadn’t. Despite promises that it was to be lit up for the occasion, there was no discernible twinkle from the Empire State Building; on Fifth Avenue, the darkened glass façade of Trump Tower grew a little dimmer. In Central Park Zoo, where children and tourists brandished pinhole cameras made from cereal boxes, Betty, a grizzly bear, seized the opportunity to take an unscrutinised dip.

Across the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Oscar Isaac, a 38-year-old Guatemalan-American actor and one of the profession’s most talented, dynamic and versatile recent prospects, was, like Betty, feeling too much in the sun. It was his day off from playing Hamlet in an acclaimed production at the Public Theater in Manhattan and he was at home on vocal rest. He kept a vague eye on the sky from the balcony of the one-bedroom apartment he shares — until their imminent move to a leafier part of Brooklyn — with his wife, the Danish documentary film-maker Elvira Lind, their Boston Terrier French Bulldog-cross Moby (also called a “Frenchton”, though not by him), and more recently, and to Moby’s initial consternation, their four-month-old son, Eugene.

Plus, he’s seen this kind of thing before. “I was in Guatemala in 1992 when there was a full solar eclipse,” he says the next day, sitting at a table in the restaurant of a fashionably austere hotel near his Williamsburg apartment, dressed in dark T-shirt and jeans and looking — amazingly, given his current theatrical and parental commitments — decidedly fresh. “The animals went crazy; across the whole city you could hear the dogs howling.” Isaac happened to be in Central America, he’ll mention later, because Hurricane Andrew had ripped the roof off the family home in Miami, Florida, while he and his mother, uncle, siblings and cousins huddled inside under couches and cushions. So yes, within the spectrum of Oscar Isaac’s experiences, the Great American Eclipse is no biggie.

Yet there is another upcoming celestial event that will have a reasonably significant impact on Isaac’s life. On 15 December, Star Wars: The Last Jedi will be released in cinemas, which, if you bought a ticket to Star Wars: The Force Awakens — and helped it gross more than $2bn worldwide — you’ll know is a pretty big deal. You’ll also know that Isaac plays Poe Dameron, a hunky, wise-cracking X-wing fighter pilot for the Resistance who became one of the most popular characters of writer-director JJ Abram’s reboot of the franchise thanks to Isaac’s charismatic performance and deadpan delivery (see his “Who talks first?” exchange with Vader-lite baddie Kylo Ren: one of the film’s only comedic beats).

And if you did see Star Wars: The Force Awakens you’ll know that, due to some major father-son conflict, there’s now an opening for a loveable, rogueish, leather-jacket-wearing hero… “Heeeeeh!” says Isaac, Fonzie-style, when I say as much. “Well, there could be, but I think what [The Last Jedi director] Rian [Johnson] did was make it less about filling a slot and more about what the story needs. The fact is now that the Resistance has been whittled to just a handful of people, they’re running for their lives, and Leia is grooming me — him — to be a leader of the Resistance, as opposed to a dashing, rogue hero.”

While he says he has “not that much more, but a little more to do” in this film, he can at least be assured he survives it; he starts filming Episode IX early next year.

If Poe seems like one of the new Star Wars firmament now — alongside John Boyega’s Finn, Daisy Ridley’s Rey and Poe’s spherical robot sidekick BB-8 — it’s only because Isaac willed it. Abrams had originally planned to kill Poe off, but when he met Isaac to discuss him taking the part, Isaac expressed some reservations. “I said that I wasn’t sure because I had already done that role in other movies where you kind of set it up for the main people and then you die spectacularly,” he remembers. “What’s funny is that [producer] Kathleen Kennedy was in the room and she was like, ‘Yeah, you did that for us in Bourne!’” (Sure enough, in 2012’s Bourne Legacy, Jeremy Renner’s character, Aaron Cross, steps out of an Alaskan log cabin while Isaac’s character, Outcome Agent 3, stays inside; a few seconds later the cabin is obliterated by a missile fired from a passing drone.)

This ability to back himself — judiciously and, one can imagine after meeting him, with no small amount of steely charm — seems to have served Isaac well so far. It’s what also saw him through the casting process for his breakthrough role in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2014 film Inside Llewyn Davis, about a struggling folk singer in Sixties New York, partly based on the memoir of nearly-was musician Dave Van Ronk. Isaac, an accomplished musician himself, got wind that the Coens were casting and pestered his agent and manager to send over a tape, eventually landing himself an audition.

“I knew it was based on Dave Van Ronk and I looked nothing like him,” says Isaac. “He was a 6ft 5in, 300lb Swede and I was coming in there like… ‘Oh man.’” But then he noticed that the casting execs had with them a picture of the singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne. “Suddenly, I got some confidence because he’s small and dark so I said to the casting director, ‘Oh cool, is that a reference?’ And they were like, 'No, he just came in here and he killed it.’” Isaac throws his head back and laughs. “They literally said, 'He killed it.’ It was so good!”

In the end it was Isaac who killed it in Inside Llewyn Davis, with a performance that was funny, sad, cantankerous and moving. The film was nominated for two Oscars and three Golden Globes, one of them for Isaac in the category of: “Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture — comedy or musical” (he lost to Leonardo DiCaprio for The Wolf of Wall Street). No cigar that time, but in 2016 he won a Golden Globe for his turn as a doomed mayor in David Simon’s HBO drama, Show Me a Hero. This year, and with peculiar hillbilly affectation, Vanity Fair proclaimed Isaac “the best dang actor of his generation”. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that, some day very soon, Isaac may become the first Oscar since Hammerstein to win the award whose name he shares. Certainly, the stars seem ready to align.

Of course, life stories do not run as neatly as all that and Isaac’s could have gone quite differently. He was born Óscar Isaac Hernández Estrada in Guatemala City, to which his father, Óscar, now a pulmonologist, had moved from Washington DC in order to attend medical school (having escaped to the States from Cuba just before the revolution) and where he met Isaac’s mother, Eugenia. Five months after Isaac was born, the family — also including an older sister, Nicole, and later joined by a younger brother, Michael — moved to America in order for Óscar Senior to complete his residencies: first to Baltimore, then New Orleans, eventually settling in Miami when Isaac was six.

Miami didn’t sit entirely right with him. “The Latin culture is so strong which was really nice,” he says, “but you had to drive everywhere, and it’s also strangely quite conservative. Money is valued, and nice cars and clothes, and what you look like, and that can get sort of tedious.” Still it was there, aged 11, that he took to the stage for the first time. The Christian middle school he attended put on performances in which the kids would mime to songs telling loosely biblical stories, including one in which Jesus and the Devil take part in a boxing match in heaven (note the word “loosely”). For that one, Isaac played the Devil. In another, he played Jesus calling Lazarus from the grave. “So yeah,” he laughs, “I’ve got the full range!’

He enjoyed the mixture of the attention and the “extreme nature of putting yourself out there in front of a bunch of people”, plus it gave him some release from stresses at home: his parents were separating and his mother became ill. His school failed to see these as sufficiently mitigating factors for Isaac’s subsequent wayward behaviour and, following an incident with a fire extinguisher, he was expelled. “It wasn’t that bad. They wanted me out of there. I was very happy to go.”

Following his parents’ divorce, he moved with his mother to Palm Beach, Florida, where he enrolled at a public high school. “It was glorious, I loved it,” says Isaac. “I loved it so much. I could walk to the beach every day, and go to this wild school where I became friends with so many different kinds of people. I met these guys who lived in the trailer parks in Boynton Beach and started a band, and my mom and my little brother would come and spy on me to see if I was doing drugs or anything, and I never was.”

Never?

“No, because I didn’t drink till I was, like, 24. Even though I stopped being religious, I liked the individuality of being the guy who didn’t do that stuff. Maybe it was the observer part of me… I liked being a little bit detached, and I wasn’t interested in doing something that was going to make me lose control.”

When he was 14, Isaac and his band-mates played at a talent show. They chose to perform 'Rape Me’ by Nirvana. “I remember singing to the parents, 'Rape meeee!’” Isaac laughs so hard he gives a little snort. “Yeah,” he says, composing himself again, “we didn’t win.” But something stuck and Isaac ended up being in a series of ska-punk outfits, first Paperface, then The Worms and later The Blinking Underdogs who, legend has it, would go on to support Green Day. “Supported… Ha! It was a festival…” says Isaac. “But hey, we played the same day, at the same festival, within a few hours of each other.” (On YouTube you can find a clip from 2001 of The Blinking Underdogs performing in a battle of the bands contest at somewhere called Spanky’s. Isaac is wearing a 'New York City’ T-shirt and brandishing a wine-coloured Flying V electric guitar.)

Still, Isaac’s path was uncertain. At one point he thought about joining the Marines. “The sax player in my band had grown up in a military family so we were like, 'Hey, let’s work out and get all ripped and be badasses!’” he says. “I was like, 'Yeah, I’ll do combat photography!’ My dad was really against it. He said, 'Clinton’s just going to make up a war for you guys to go to,’ so I had to have the recruiters come all the way down to Miami where my dad was living and they convinced him to let me join. I did the exam, I took the oath, but then we had gotten the money together to record an album with The Worms. I decided I’d join the Reserves instead. I said I wanted to do combat photography. They said, 'We don’t do that in the Reserves, but we can give you anti-tank?’ Ha! I was like, 'it’s a liiiiiittle different to what I was thinking…’”

Even when he started doing a few professional theatre gigs in Miami he was still toying with the idea of a music career, until one day, while in New York playing a young Fidel Castro in an off-Broadway production of Rogelio Martinez’s play, When it’s Cocktail Time in Cuba, he happened to pass by renowned performing arts school Juilliard. On a whim, he asked for an audition. He was told the deadline had passed. He insisted. They gave him a form. He filled it in and brought it back the next day. They post-dated it. He got in. And the rest is history. Only it wasn’t.

“In the second year they would do cuts,” Isaac says. “If you don’t do better they kick you out. All the acting teachers wanted me on probation, because they didn’t think I was trying hard enough.” Not for the first or last time, he held his ground. “It was just to spur me to do better I think, but I definitely argued.”

He stayed for the full course at Juilliard, though it was a challenge, not only because he’d relaxed his own non-drinking rule but also because he was maintaining a long-distance relationship with a girlfriend back in Florida. “For me, the twenties were the more difficult part of life. Four years is just… masochistic. We were a particularly close group but still, it’s really intense.” (Among his fellow students at the time were the actress Jessica Chastain, with whom he starred in the 2014 mob drama A Most Violent Year, and Sam Gold, his director in Hamlet.) He says he broadly kept it together: “I was never a mess, I just had a lot of confusion.” He got himself an agent in the graduation scrum, and soon started picking up work: a Law & Order here, a Shakespeare in the Park there; even, in 2006, a biblical story to rival his early efforts, playing Joseph in The Nativity Story (the first film to hold its premiere at the Vatican, no less).

By the time he enrolled at Juilliard he had already dropped “Hernández” and started going by Oscar Isaac, his two first given names. And for good reason. “When I was in Miami, there were a couple of other Oscar Hernándezes I would see at auditions. All [casting directors] would see me for was 'the gangster’ or whatever, so I was like, 'Well, let me see if this helps.’ I remember there was a casting director down there because [Men in Black director] Barry Sonnenfeld was doing a movie; she said, 'Let’s bring in this Oscar Isaac,’ and he was like, 'No no no! I just want Cubans!’ I saw Barry Sonnenfeld a couple of years ago and I told him that story — 'I don’t want a Jew, I want a Cuban!’”

Perhaps it’s a sad indictment of the entertainment industry that a Latino actor can’t expect a fair run at parts without erasing some of the ethnic signifiers in his own name, but on a personal basis at least, Isaac’s diverse role roster speaks to the canniness of his decision. He has played an English king in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood(2010), a Russian security guard in Madonna’s Edward-and-Mrs-Simpson drama W.E. (2011), an Armenian medical student in Terry George’s The Promise (2017) and — yes, Barry — a small, dark American Jew channelling a large blond Swede.

But then, of course, there are roles he’s played where ethnicity was all but irrelevant and talent was everything. Carey Mulligan’s ex-con husband Standard in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive in 2011 (another contender for his “spectacular deaths” series); mysterious technocrat Nathan Bateman in the beautifully poised sci-fi Ex Machina (2014) written and directed by Alex Garland (with whom he has also shot Annihilation — dashing between different sound stages at Pinewood while shooting The Last Jedi — which is due out next year). Or this month’s Suburbicon, a neat black comedy directed by George Clooney from an ancient Coen brothers script, in which Isaac cameos as a claims investigator looking into some dodgy paperwork filed by Julianne Moore and Matt Damon, and lights up every one of his brief scenes.

Isaac is a very modern kind of actor: one who shows range and versatility without being bland; who is handsome with his dark, intense eyes, heavy brows and thick curls, but not so freakishly handsome that it is distracting; who shows a casual disregard for the significance of celebrity and keeps his family, including his father, who remarried and had another son and daughter, close. It’s a testament to his skill that when he takes on a character, be it English royal or Greenwich Village pauper, it feels like — with the possible exception of Ray LaMontagne — it could never have been anyone else.

Today, though, he’s a Danish prince. To say that Isaac’s turn in Hamlet has caused a frenzy in New York would be something of an understatement. Certainly, it’s a sell-out. The Sunday before we meet, Al Pacino had been in. So scarce are tickets that Isaac’s own publicist says she’s unlikely to be able to get me one, and as soon as our interview is over I hightail it to the Public Theater to queue up to be put on the waiting list for returns for tonight’s performance. (I am seventh in line, and in my shameless desperation I tell the woman in front of me that I’ve flown over from London just to interview Isaac in the hope that she might let me jump the queue. She ponders it for a nanosecond, before another woman behind me starts talking about how her day job involves painting pictures of chimpanzees, and I lose the crowd.)

Clearly, Hamlet is occupying a great deal of Isaac’s available brain space right now, and not just the fact that he’s had to memorise approximately 1,500 lines. “Even tonight it’s different, what the play means to me,” he says. “It’s almost like a religious text, because it has the ambiguity of the Bible where you can look at one line and it can mean so many different things depending on how you meditate on it. Even when I have a night where I feel not particularly connected emotionally, it can still teach me. I’ll say a line and I’ll say, 'Ah, that’s good advice, Shakespeare, thank you.’”

Hamlet resonates with Isaac for reasons that he would never have foreseen or have wished for. While playing a young man mourning the untimely death of his father, Isaac was himself a young man mourning the untimely death of his mother, who died in February after an illness. Doing the play became a way to process his loss.

“It’s almost like this is the only framework where you can give expression to such intense emotions. Otherwise anywhere else is pretty inappropriate, unless you’re just in a room screaming to yourself,” he says. “This play is a beautiful morality tale about how to get through grief; to experience it every night for the last four months has definitely been cathartic but also educational; it has given structure to something that felt so overwhelming.”

In March, a month after Eugenia died, Isaac and Lind married, and then in April Eugene, named in remembrance of his late grandmother, was born. I ask Isaac about the shift in perspective that happens when you become a parent; whether he felt his own focus switch from being a son to being a father.

“It happened in a very dramatic way,” he says. “In a matter of three months my mother passed and my son was born, so that transition was very alive, to the point where I was telling my mom, 'I think you’re going to see him on the way out, tell him to listen to me as much as he can…’” He gives another laugh, but flat this time. “It was really tough because for me she was the only true example of unconditional love. It’s painful to know that that won’t exist for me anymore, other than me giving it to him. So now this isn’t happening” — he raises his arms towards the ceiling, gesturing a flow coming down towards him — “but now it goes this way” — he brings his arms down, making the same gesture, but flowing from him to the floor.

Does performing Hamlet, however pertinent its themes, ever feel like a way of refracting his own experiences, rather than feeling them in their rawest form?

“Yeah it is,” he says, “I’m sure when it’s over I don’t know how those things will live.” He pauses. “I’m a little bit… I don’t know if 'concerned’ is the right word, but as there’s only two weeks left of doing it, I’m curious to see what’s on the other end, when there’s no place to put it all.”

It’s a thoughtful, honest answer; one that doesn’t shy away from the emotional complexities of what he’s experiencing and is still to face, but admits to his own ignorance of what comes next. Because, although Isaac is clearly dedicated to his current lot, he has also suffered enough slings and arrows to know where self-determination has its limits.

What he does know is happening on the other end of Hamlet is “disconnection”, also known as a holiday, and he plans to travel with Lind to Maine where her documentary, Bobbi Jene, is screening at a film festival. Then he will fly to Buenos Aires for a couple of months filming Operation Finale, a drama about the 1960 Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann which Isaac is producing and in which he also stars as Mossad agent Peter Malkin, with Eichmann played by Sir Ben Kingsley. At some point after that he will get sucked into the vortex of promotion for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, of which today’s interview is an early glimmer.

But before that, he will unlock the immaculate black bicycle that he had chained up outside the hotel and disappear back into Brooklyn. Later, he will take the subway to Manhattan an hour-and-a-half or so before curtain. To get himself ready, and if the mood takes him, he will listen to Venezuelan musician Arca’s self-titled album or Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie and Lowell, light a candle, and look at a picture of his mother that he keeps in his dressing room.

Then, just before seven o'clock, he will make his way to the stage where, for the next four hours, he will make the packed house believe he is thinking Hamlet’s thoughts for the very first time, and strut around in his underpants feigning madness, and — for reasons that make a lot more sense if you’re there which, thanks to a last-minute phone-call from the office of someone whose name I never did catch, I was — stab a lasagna. And then at the end of Act V, when Hamlet lies dead, and as lightning staggers across the night sky outside the theatre, finally bringing the promised drama to the Manhattan skyline, the audience, as one, will rise.

Fashion by Allan Kennedy. Star Wars: The Last Jedi is out on 15 December. The December issue of Esquire is out now.

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#oscar isaac #esquire uk #star wars #the last jedi #interview #david slijper #article

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queencamellia · 7 years

Text

“His” Fiance, Choosing (Ch.3)

Summary: [TCT, spoilers for recent chapters] Confronted with the truth, she chooses. (or: Lizzy is faced with a decision to accept her past or move forward, and looking at her two Ciels in the eye has never been harder)

Chapter 1 Link

Chapter 2 Link

I’ve been late with this because I’ve fallen in love with Charles Grey/Lizzy and am unabashedly writing a much longer, more well-written story about the two of them at the moment. ^^ Sorry.

Lizzy woke up to the sound of birds chirping. Immediately, she sat up and scanned the room warily, and to her relief, it was empty. Light streamed in the bedroom through a single window, and to her side laid a single stuffed animal. It was a rabbit (rabbits had always been one of her favorite animals), and its resemblance to Ciel almost made bile rise to her throat.

She couldn’t do this.

Lizzy couldn’t face him: not now, not after meeting the other Ciel.

“The other Ciel”, hah. Wasn’t that a funny thought? After all, “the other Ciel” had always just been “Ciel” in the past. She was hit by a sudden turbulent wave of emotions: anger, fear, guilt, sadness, hope, and confusion. It seemed as if the entire emotional spectrum had somehow managed to overwhelm her senses.

She had no doubt that Sebastian was somewhere nearby. In fact, she could faintly hear voices from downstairs. One of the voices sounded suspiciously like her brother.

Edward.

God, she couldn’t do this. Not yet.

Lizzy had to leave. And if she wanted to leave without getting caught, she’d have to do so quickly before Sebastian came upstairs to check on her. Silently mustering all the agility she could, Lizzy pulled off several of the bedsheets and began to work. Hands nimbly weaving the fabric together, each satisfying knot distracted her from further thought and emotion. All that existed in her tiny world was her and the bedsheets: twist, tie, secure. Twist, tie, secure.

“Okay,” she whispered quietly, her voice sounding hoarse and nearly inaudible in the bedroom. Lizzy, you can do this. She scooted over to the side of the bed, securing her makeshift rope around the bedpost. Gingerly, her feet stepped onto the bedroom floor. Ensuring that the wood would not creak, Lizzy made her way to the window and slid it open.

Throwing the rope out of the window, Lizzy hesitated for a split second and glanced back.

Ciel will be furious.

“Maybe next time,” she murmured, nimbly scaling down the wall nearly effortlessly.

And so she ran away.

She didn’t want to face either of them. Not now, at least.

Lizzy trudged through the streets of London with a purpose.

“Nina,” she greeted, exuding as much authority as she could. Lizzy tried to emulate the intimidating aura that Ciel and her mother often used whenever they meant serious business. “A pleasure to see you, again.”

The dressmaker, who had been in the middle of pinning a cloth to a mannequin, froze and promptly dropped her sewing needle. “Oh my, Lady Midford. Please...why don’t you take a seat?”

Within three hours, Lizzy was well-fed, properly dressed, and warmed to the core. At the moment, she sat on a fashionable Oriental chair in Nina’s backroom, sipping some tea and ignoring Nina’s pressing stares. To her relief, the dressmaker hadn’t questioned her sudden reappearance or state of unkemptness, instead fussing over her and remarking about how “cute girls like her needed to take better care of their complexion and clothes”.

Feeling as though the woman needed some semblance of repayment, Lizzy cleared her throat. “I’ve been avoiding Ciel.”

“Ah, I’m well aware,” Nina replied cheerily. “After all, he kept sending men to ask me if you ever came by. Not to mention the Sphere Music Hall nonsense.”

Lizzy flinched at the invocation of the place. Just thinking of the atrocities that...that occurred there made her want to vomit. Vomiting, as her mother once told her, definitely was not ladylike (much less the proper thing to do when being received by somebody in their own workspace).

“I see,” Lizzy said simply, taking another sip of tea. Carefully, she asked, “What did Ciel tell you about me?”

“If you mean to ask how much did he tell about me, young Lady Midford, you shan’t worry,” Nina assured her. “The young Lord Phantomhive doesn’t like discussing such matters with somebody like me, the little brat. But don’t worry, I won’t inform the young Lord of your presence. I can basically gather what’s going on, anyways.”

Trying not to flinch or show any signs of panic, Lizzy gave a somewhat noncommittal hum of acknowledgment. “And your conclusions?”

“A lover’s quarrel, of course!” Nina declared confidently, causing Lizzy to spit out some of the tea she was drinking.

“L-lovers’ quarrel?” She sputtered, blinking rapidly. “What even...why would you ever think such a thing?”

“The young Lord Phantomhive, as adorable as he might be, is not the most tactful of lovers, m’lady,” Nina sighed dramatically, and if it were any other situation, Lizzy might have burst into laughter and probably would’ve agreed. Instead, she bit her lip.

“If…” Lizzy started. “Just...suppose, Nina, that there is a woman who loves a man. She loves him with all her heart, but then she learns that he isn’t the man who she thought he was. What should she do? P-purely hypothetical, of course.” The last fragment was added as a nervous sidenote.

“Purely hypothetically, you say?” Nina pondered. “Well, whoever you love, you love. Love is a fickle thing, m’lady. It’s the man’s actions that matter, not his name nor words. What was that quote I liked again? From that play by William Shakespeare.”

“Hamlet?” Lizzy offered, recalling Edward’s near fanatic reverence of the play.

“No, no. The one with the lovesick teenagers.”

Lizzy blinked for a moment, searching through her memory for several seconds before finally remembering the title. “Ah, Romeo and Juliet.” Something about her expression seemed to darken, which Nina caught.

“Is it not to your taste, m’lady?” Nina questioned curiously. “I would’ve pinned you as the type to swoon at such romance.”

“The play ended as a tragedy,” Lizzy explained shortly, biting her lip. “I don’t like tragedy.”

Ah, the amount of irony that went into that statement was astounding. Sometimes Lizzy felt as if she were one of the characters in a tragedy of her own.

“There was a quote that I took a liking to in that play,” Nina hummed, procuring a plate of biscuits and offering one to Lizzy. She shook her head politely, content with her tea. “It was about roses.”

“Perhaps you are referring to the balcony scene?” Lizzy suggested. Juliet’s speech had resounded with her many years ago when Lizzy first viewed the play. She quoted quietly, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

“Ah, yes. That was what I was thinking of!” Nina confirmed, bobbing her head excitedly. “Even if we called a rose something else, it still retains the same qualities. I would think that the same applies to this lover of yours, Lady Midford.”

“Hypothetical situation, Nina,” Lizzy insisted, but the dressmaker looked unconvinced.

It was slightly interesting to see the dressmaker act so normal. Usually, the eccentric woman always portrayed herself as a rather exuberant and over excited fool, if she were to quote Ciel. Then again, considering the time period, Lizzy supposed there must have been a well-educated and rational side to the woman. Not anybody could own a dress-shop, not in this society where women were supposed to take care of the household and educate their children.

Mother had drilled it into Lizzy’s head since as long as she could remember: if you’re a woman and want to survive in this “man’s world”, you must be strong.

“Well, Lady Midford...if you need a place to stay for the moment, you may stay with me,” Nina said kindly, reaching over and petting Lizzy’s hands gently. “I don’t know exactly why you and Lord Phantomhive are fighting, but I understand that a girl has to have some space every once in awhile. You’ll be alright, dear.”

The amount of warmth leaking into the woman’s voice was almost enough to make Lizzy’s expression crumble completely. Instead, throat constricted and voice somewhat raspy, she mumbled, “...Lizzy.”

“Pardon me?”

“Please just call me Lizzy,” she said in a louder voice, offering the woman a small smile. “And...um, if you need any help with your shop, I’ve learned a bit of sewing here and there from my etiquette lessons.”

Nina returned her look with a grin of her own. “As you wish, Lizzy. Now, why don’t I show you one of my new designs I’ve been working on for a client? Actually, your figure is about the same as the girl I’m designing it for. Would you mind being my model?”

Over the next week, Lizzy learned the ins and outs of sewing and had reached the point where Nina would actually entrust some minor details to her. (She had spent the first few days practicing on scrap fabric and acting as a mannequin: Nina had high standards for her clothing, and Lizzy’s mediocre sewing skills were not enough to impress her.)

Now, Lizzy was sitting on a bed that Nina graciously granted her. Emerald eyes glancing out of the window and towards the dreary gray sky, Lizzy pondered. She thought and pondered and ruminated over the same thing over and over and over:

What should she do?

Ciel (the one with the eyepatch, the one who had gone through so many experiences with her) wasn’t really “Ciel Phantomhive”. And, on the flip side, her old Ciel wasn’t the same Ciel anymore, either. Not-Ciel (because she refused to call her former childhood playmate “Ciel” when all he did was smirk evilly and look remarkably like Uncle Vincent all day) was planning something, like always.

Not only that: he was associating with shady groups that Aunt Rachel would’ve been horrified to even hear about, much less speak to. She could understand not-Ciel’s anger: his name, title, fiance, future stolen by the person he trusted most.

Then again, he was dead. Or he had been dead. Not-Ciel hadn’t offered much of an explanation to her, but Lizzy knew that when Ciel had returned from whatever hellhole he found Sebastian, not-Ciel had been dead. When Ciel returned to her, he had looked tired. Lost, broken...as if he had lost his twin.

Not-Ciel had returned from the dead.

Was there any laws barring the dead from reclaiming their titles? Lizzy wasn’t even sure: legal matters never interested her in the past. Maybe that was something she should look into. On the other hand, were there any laws against Ciel remaining the heir to the Phantomhive family? It wasn’t as if reanimated corpses were something Queen Victoria worried about on a daily basis. (Then again, maybe she did worry about them: after all, she had heard the whispers about Ciel, the “Queen’s Watchdog”. She had no doubt that the Queen was informed of the Campania incident.)

And moving on to her next problem: rather than what should she do...what did she want?

Did she want not-Ciel to reclaim his title? Did she want Ciel to remain “Ciel Phantomhive”, even though that was a lie?

Who should she side with? Who would she side with?

Lizzy swallowed, feeling a lump rise in her throat. Not-Ciel had been her childhood playmate. He had been her first love, her best friend, the ray of sunshine that penetrated through her worries. Not-Ciel had loved her back, and had been unafraid to show it. Even now, he still cared about her.

She could tell: from the way his gaze would follow her across the room to the scent of strawberries in the room he arranged from her. (He had always done those kind of little actions. She noticed. Not-Ciel always kept her likes and dislikes in mind when doing anything. He was thoughtful like that.)

(He had been thoughtful towards Ciel, back in the day, too. Lizzy remembered Aunt Rachel talking about how not-Ciel would often stay inside for his sickly brother.)

(Lizzy once again kicked herself for not realizing sooner. Stupid Ciel, hiding his asthma like he was some cool protagonist of a novel.)

Ciel, on the other hand, was the kind of person to cause anxiety and worry. He was rough and callous with his words. He lied to her, pushed her away, and refused to listen to her.

But...she knew that somewhere deep inside, Ciel cared.

Ciel had been the person to accept her strong side. Ciel tried to protect her from harm, Ciel was the one who comforted her. Ciel had been the person who obliged to her selfish requests, from dancing to the Campania (the latter ending in disaster).

Did she love him?

Ciel had been the person who she wore her low-heeled shoes for. Ciel had been the person who she fought for. Ciel had been the person who she accepted all sides of, just like how he accepted every part of her.

But did she love him?

Even though she could describe Ciel with so many derogatory terms — callous, rude, tactless, and socially inept to name a few — he still was Ciel. Beneath his prickly exterior was Ciel: caring but shy, kind but awkward, weak yet strong. And even though he was such a dork whenever he tried to do anything remotely kind, Lizzy knew that he cared.

And sometimes, that was enough.

Not-Ciel had confided in her about his plans. Not everything — oh, no, not-Ciel would never tell his dainty cousin all of his plans — but enough for her to figure out her next plan of action.

Lizzy was going to put a stop to this act.

#elizabeth midford #lizzy midford #kuroshitsuji #tct #ciel phantomhive #cielizzy #his fiance: choosing #sebastian michaelis #chapter 3 #phantomhive #charles grey is bae im sorry

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donalsgirl · 7 years

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Oscar Isaac’s Mom Died. Now He’s Working Out His Grief in ‘Hamlet.’

Oscar Isaac spent most of the fall and winter at a hospital in Florida, caring for his dying mother, Eugenia. As her condition deteriorated, he found himself reading aloud to her from “Hamlet.”

“I would just read the play all the time, do bits for her,” Mr. Isaac said.

An Elizabethan revenge tragedy with a substantial body count and heavy existential dread isn’t obvious bedside comfort. But Mr. Isaac, his mother and his sister were all Shakespeare obsessives. When he was growing up, they watched Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” over and over. “Me doing Shakespeare was her favorite thing,” Mr. Isaac said.

So reciting “Hamlet” to her at the hospital felt like the right thing. Sometimes it felt like the only thing. “I didn’t know how to process any of this, but this I knew how to do,” he said.

As her health declined, Shakespearean questions that had seemed abstract — What drives the dissolution of a family? How do you overcome crippling loss? — felt immediate and real, he said.

Continue reading the main story

“I know it happens to everybody, but it’d never happened to me,” he said. “I know people’s mothers have died, but this was mine.”

Mr. Isaac’s mother died in February, but “Hamlet” is still with him. For most of this heat-struck summer, he is performing as the tortured prince grieving the death of his father, six times a week for nearly four hours a throw at the Public Theater.

Mr. Isaac certainly has other ways to spend his days. For one, his first child, a son, was born in April. And his film career is booming. In a few short years, he’s graduated from indie artisan, with films like “Inside Llewyn Davis,” to bona fide star with roles in “X-Men: Apocalypse” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” He can probably take whatever theater job he wants to or not take any theater job at all.

That said, “Hamlet” is a play that exerts a strange pull on a lot of movie and television stars (Benedict Cumberbatch, David Tennant, Jude Law, Ethan Hawke), and it’s a role just about any classically trained actor and plenty of actresses have dreamed of playing.

But it’s also a tragedy that asks Mr. Isaac to relive the anguished death of a parent at every performance. In Sam Gold’s rowdy, deconstructionist staging, every time Mr. Isaac mud-wrestles, or lofts a prop skull or performs a mad scene in just a T-shirt and briefs, he seems to be working through his own loss, transforming raw private grief into riveting public performance.

“It’s for my mom that I’m doing it,” he said. “It’s to honor her life, but also her death, which was so awful.”

ON A RECENT WEEKDAY, an hour before rehearsal, Mr. Isaac hunched in a booth at the back of the Library, the Public’s restaurant. Looking slighter in person than onscreen, he was sitting underneath a skull-bedizened poster for an earlier production of “Hamlet.” His black warm-up jacket was a modish update of Hamlet’s “inky cloak.” It wouldn’t have been a huge surprise if he had drawn a sword from underneath the table or spotted a ghost over by the bar.

This symbolic brazenness seemed like a joke; Mr. Isaac was probably in on it. He has a roguish sense of mischief that underlies even his more serious roles (“Ex Machina,” “A Most Violent Year”). And he’s one of the few actors of his generation who can combine the unrestrained volatility of a Method actor with pedigreed classical chops.

His Hamlet is antic, mercurial, unpredictable, but each line of verse comes across clearly, almost conversationally. As Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater — who helped cast a Juilliard-fresh Mr. Isaac in “Two Gentlemen of Verona” in 2005 and “Romeo and Juliet” two years later — said, “That combination, particularly in such a handsome man, it’s amazing.”

It’s that charisma that helped the “Star Wars” director J. J. Abrams decide not to kill off his character, Poe Dameron, who will reappear in the coming “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” “The idea of Oscar Isaac as Poe coming back into the movie and being an ally to the cause got my blood pumping,” Mr. Abrams wrote in an email.

MR. ISAAC LOVED THEATER early. Born in Guatemala and raised by evangelical Christian parents in Miami, he had his first roles in religious plays. Even then, he played antiheroes. His first lead? The Devil. He devised an entrance from underneath the bleachers, scaring an adored teacher and exciting the interest of the popular girl he had a crush on.

“For that little moment, I thought, this is what I want to do,” he said.

Eventually he fell away from the church, and though his parents supported his acting ambitions, for a while he stopped that, too. He turned to music, migrating from soft rock to grunge rock to heavy metal, before landing in third-wave ska groups like the Worms and Blinking Underdogs, which attracted a local following.

Still, he never really shook theater. He studied it at community college and apprenticed at Area Stage Company in Miami. The artistic director got him reading Shakespeare again. “I didn’t really understand it,” Mr. Isaac said, “but I liked it a lot.”

He even developed an infatuation with the film soundtrack to the Zeffirelli “Hamlet.” On an impulse, he auditioned for Juilliard, using a monologue from Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” and arguing about its interpretation with the head of the drama division in the middle of his callback.

Richard Feldman, one of Mr. Isaac’s Juilliard teachers, remembered sensing in him “the best kind of artistic ambition,” adding: “I’m not talking about fame, I’m not talking about fortune. I’m talking about the hunger to be really good.”

At Juilliard, he met Mr. Gold, at the time a directing student. Mr. Gold was immediately struck by Mr. Isaac’s “easy energy and an easy relationship to his talent and having an incredible amount of talent” and a shared belief that “acting shouldn’t look hard,” Mr. Gold said.

The two of them fooled around with some comic scenes from “Hamlet,” making a pact to work together one day on the whole play. They both got “bit by it and obsessed by it,” Mr. Gold said, speaking by phone. Those talks continued, and two years ago, Mr. Isaac signed on, saying he felt he had to do it “before the knees give out.”

“You can only be so old and be upset that your mom remarried,” he said.

Once he’d agreed, Mr. Isaac began reading academic books, watching famous past performances, playing a recording of John Gielgud’s Hamlet “and just listening to the beauty of that man’s voice,” he said. After creative tensions with the production’s original home, Theater for a New Audience, “Hamlet” shifted to the Public Theater, where Mr. Isaac had made his post-Juilliard debut, and dates were set.

But then his mother got sick and his partner, the documentary filmmaker Elvira Lind, got pregnant, and suddenly “there were a lot of things that really connected on a very personal level,” he said. As Mr. Isaac explained, performing has always helped him come to terms with his emotions. “This is how I’m able to function,” he said. “The only way that I’m really able to process stuff is through reflecting it.”

Some of the visual language that he and Mr. Gold settled on — the syringes, the IVs, the PICC lines — make his memories and associations even more visceral. His Hamlet wears rumpled clothes and has a 5 o’clock shadow (if you’ve seen Mr. Isaac’s movies, you know his facial hair is a key to character) to approximate “the look and feel of spending long hours visiting a loved one at the hospital,” he said.

In the first days of rehearsal, Mr. Gold worried “that there would be things in this play that would be such deep triggers that he wouldn’t be able to make it through the show,” he said. But he watched Mr. Isaac use the play’s words “to contextualize what he was going through,” he said.

Mr. Isaac didn’t worry about making a timeworn speech like “To be or not to be” sound new. As soon as he says the words, he is instantly reminded of his personal loss and “the feeling that grief can just make you want to stop,” he said.

At the same time, he never really discussed that personal life in the rehearsal room. “It was always a very subtle thing hovering in the air, ” Mr. Gold said. Instead, he threw himself into experimenting with the role — physically, vocally — and worked on making his colleagues laugh.

Keegan-Michael Key, who plays Hamlet’s pal Horatio, noted that Mr. Isaac, who bought a Ping-Pong table for the rehearsal room, “likes to have fun.” Onstage he’ll often monkey with a pronunciation or arch an eyebrow just to get a rise out of a cast mate.

“He’ll do it on purpose just to keep everyone on their toes,” Mr. Key said. “The more alive it is, the more uncertain it is, the more dynamic it is.”

Mr. Isaac said that performing the play hasn’t felt especially dour. When he comes offstage after four hours he feels energized, he said.

That’s in part because the play isn’t only for his mother. When he acts, he’s also thinking of his 2-month-old son, Eugene, named after her. The baby has Eugenia’s lips, he said, and her hands.

He brought Eugene to the first run-through (“I think some of the more philosophical and theological aspects of the play were above his head,” Mr. Gold joked), and it’s Eugene he thinks of when reciting the “to be” part of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy.

As Mr. Isaac explains, the speech is about dying — that’s the “not to be” part — but it’s also about choosing to go on living. And Mr. Isaac has better reasons to go on than Hamlet does.

“You have a child,” he said, “and you must — you must for their sake — you must say yes to life.”

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#oscar isaac #hamlet #the public theater

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allthingsberena · 7 years

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An interview with the Independent 2013

The last time Jemma Redgrave gave a proper, full-on newspaper interview was in July 2010, just a couple of months after the deaths of her aunt Lynn Redgrave and her father Corin Redgrave and just over a year after the skiing accident that killed her cousin, Natasha Richardson – an awful succession of loss that the interviewer described as giving her face "the look that grief gives, as if a layer has been washed away". Three years later, and Redgrave appears outwardly restored – friendly, warm and unpretentious, with an unexpectedly hearty laugh that wouldn't disgrace Basil Brush. If she remains huddled under her coat in the well-heated bowels of the Soho Hotel in London, then it's because today she is sniffing her way through a cold. "It was a couple of months after he [Corin] died, so I was quite raw," she says of that 2010 interview. "I still feel the same now, just not with the same intensity." We talk more about her father and other relatives later, and not altogether mellifluously when I reveal that some of my research came by way of a biography of the Redgraves despised by her family. First and more happily, however, we discuss her work. Since leaving drama school, Redgrave has been a regular on television, most prominently as the titular Victorian doctor in ITV's Bramwell. Thanks to its huge global fanbase, however, her role in Doctor Who, in which she debuted last year as Kate Stewart (the daughter of the much-loved Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, played by the late Nicholas Courtney from 1968 to 1989) is set to eclipse all that has gone before, when she returns in the 50th- anniversary episode "The Day of the Doctor". So far we know that this "love letter to the fans" has been filmed in both 2D and 3D, and will see the return of David Tennant and Billie Piper alongside Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman, as well as John Hurt as a previously unknown incarnation of the Doctor, plus Daleks, Zygons and a visit to Elizabethan England. Otherwise, a strict omerta prevails around the 75-minute episode that will be shown simultaneously around the world as well as in cinemas. That's next Saturday – quite the event. "What can I tell you about the 50th anniversary? Practically nothing," she says, giving me a first taste of her pleasingly full-throttle laugh. "When the job offer came in my agent said, 'You mustn't tell anybody about this,' and I thought, 'What am I going to tell the kids?' It's like joining M15." The cat finally exited the bag when scenes were filmed in Trafalgar Square. "The news hit the Twittersphere and within half-an-hour of our being there, there were people with Tom Baker scarves on… people with Tardis safety covers on their iPhones," she says. "It was a huge relief to be able to tell people." Redgrave's peak Doctor Who-viewing years were the early 1970s, when, classically, she'd watch from behind the sofa. "I would then have terrible nightmares," she says. "My dad said he would take me to the BBC studios so I could see the Daleks – and that frightened me even more." Does she meet one in the anniversary special? "Can I tell?" she asks the publicist sitting in on the interview, who signals her assent. "In that case, yes, I come across a Dalek. There was no acting required. It was a scarifying moment." Anything else she can tell? "I work with more than one Doctor… oh, and I worked with more than one Tardis as well." Intriguing, or at least it will be to Whovians. "The community of Who fans have been very kind to me," she says. "Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart was such a loved character and I think people were very open to his daughter making an appearance and, hopefully, touch wood, making more appearances in the future." So, she'll be back? "I think Peter Capaldi is a very exciting prospect as the new Doctor, so that would be wonderful." Born in January 1965, Redgrave is five days younger than her cousin Joely Richardson, whose parents are Vanessa Redgrave and the film and play director Tony Richardson; Joely's sister, Natasha Richardson, was born two years earlier. In the flesh, she bears a far more striking resemblance to her late cousin than she does when photographed – or, at least, I'd never noticed such similarity before. Her paternal grandparents were the actors Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, an acting dynasty, if you like… although Aunt Vanessa doesn't like, insisting that "dynasty implies power – we're a family of professional actors. It's like coming from a family of carpenters or plumbers." "I think that's about right," agrees Jemma (née Jemima). "I associate dynasties with huge corporations… the Murdochs… it feels like a family and quite a few of us are actors." When did she first become aware that she belonged to this extraordinary clan? "I remember one of my teachers at primary school used to call me Vanessa by mistake, and I couldn't understand why and then, of course, later it became clear," she says. "It just seemed very normal to me – like everybody's family seems normal until you realise no one else's family is like that." Was it inevitable that she would follow in the family profession? "No, not at all. None of my brothers are actors – I've got three brothers – Luke is a cameraman, Harvey is a civil servant and Arden is training to be a primary-school teacher. A mixed bag. "I remember once on my grandmother's birthday, my dad was filming In the Name of the Father (the 1993 Daniel Day-Lewis film about the Guildford Four) in Ireland and my aunt and my brothers… a big lot of family… were driving round from here to there in a minibus, having a lovely time and breaking into songs, and my brother Luke heard Harvey mutter to himself, 'I was born into the wrong family.'" Her own sons with barrister husband Tim Owen, Gabriel and Alfie, are aged 19 and 13; Gabriel has just started an English degree at Sussex University. Are there any signs of a new generation of thespians? "There are going to be one or two more… possibly… but I think it's important that they speak for themselves," she says – a statement in stark contrast to Laurence's Olivier's very public announcement of the birth of Vanessa Redgrave, after a performance of Hamlet at the Old Vic, that "Laertes [played by Michael Redgrave] has a daughter." Vanessa could hardly grow up to be an accountant after that. It was Jemma Redgrave's grandmother, Rachel Kempson, who took her – aged five – to her first play, Peter Brook's RSC production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, followed by more Shakespeare, watching her father in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. "Complicated theatre really… not Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which I took my children to see." Her parents, Corin and former fashion model Deidre Hamilton-Hill, divorced when Redgrave was nine, by which time her father, like her aunt Vanessa, was deeply involved in far-left politics in the shape of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). "We'd been taken to demonstrations when I was very young," she recalls. "This was the late 1960s, early 1970s, and everybody was demonstrating about something. "It's difficult to explain it now… you know the whole Ed Miliband thing with the Daily Mail and 'it's very important to know where he comes from… very, very left-wing views were expressed round his breakfast table'… well, they were discussed round the breakfast tables of a lot of people who grew up at that time. The children of those people weren't brainwashed." Certainly this child isn't without her own political causes: Redgrave was a prominent member of the Stop the War movement protesting at Blair and Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq. ("There's no joy in being proved right.") She also helps at a Red Cross refugee centre in Islington, north London. What she can't stand is that any political movement would espouse a cause to the detriment of family life. "I resented the WRP, because my dad was unavailable to me and to my brother because there were such extreme demands made on everybody who became a member of that party," she says. In her book, To Be a Redgrave, her mother recalls Jemma and her cousins Natasha and Joely sitting round the kitchen table discussing how much they hated the WRP. "Vanessa was involved in the WRP for a while so we did have a similar experience, yeah," she says. I add that I'm surprised that she has stated that she has never read her mother's autobiography. "My mum was very angry with my dad for a very long time and I didn't really want to divide my loyalty," she explains. "The least complicated path through that particular difficulty was not to read it." Another contentious book is one that I had blithely borrowed from my local library, The House of Redgrave by Tim Adler, unaware that it had been lambasted by the family for an outrageous false claim that Vanessa Redgrave had once come home to find her husband, Tony Richardson (director of the original Royal Court production of Look Back in Anger and Oscar-winning British New Wave film-maker), in bed with her father, Sir Michael Redgrave. "You can't libel the dead so [Adler] can make up what he likes… I don't even want to comment on it," she says, before adding: "That book was written by a man who got in touch with my cousin Tasha and said that he wanted to write a book about her dad and that he was a huge fan. She did a bit of investigating and she said that she wasn't going to help him. He wasn't a huge fan of Tony's. This is a man whose work was groundbreaking and changed the landscape of theatrical and cinematic culture in this country. And to reduce him to his sexuality… it's… yeah." A long silence follows and we talk about other things to get the conversation flowing again – of her recent house move across north London, her cottage in Wales and her pet Labrador. And then our time is up and she is whisked off for a photo-session with the marvellous Dan, who soon has her booming with laughter again. After the shoot, I tell her that I will return the despised book to the library forthwith. "Or burn it," she says. "No we can't start burning books. Oh, all right – perhaps just this once."

#berena #serena x bernie #bernie wolfe #jemma redgrave #bmam #keep the faith #wolfe warriors

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martechadvisor-blog · 7 years

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How we Used PPC Ad Data to Design Successful Organic Search Snippet Experiments

Hamlet Batista, the CEO of RankSense, outlines that many organic search snippets are straightforward descriptions of the page content. Can organic CTRs be improved by taking a page out of your Adwords playbook? His research says yes

In a recent study released on Searchengineland.com, Brian Wood from homewares ecommerce platform Wayfair.com argues that paid search ads don’t help inform title experiments, basing the main part of his argument on claims that different types of users click on paid search ads than on organic listings.

I was surprised by these conclusions, as they are contrary to findings in my own company’s research. My team has been conducting similar experiments, and using paid search ads to guide our search snippets with considerable success.

Here is one example of a successful meta description experiment from one of our B2B e-commerce clients.

Let me explain some important differences between our methodologies, which should hopefully clear up this contentious issue:

Title vs meta description experiments

Title tag changes don’t just affect click through rates, they also cause ranking shifts. If we only want to learn which message will increase click through rate with the same rankings, we need to use meta descriptions because they won’t cause re-rankings.

It is possible the Wayfair title experiments caused pages to lose important rankings. Any page can rank for hundreds of keywords, not just a few. Losing a good number of them would reduce the SEO traffic a page receives.

It’s important to note that, like Wayfair, our study didn’t test individual titles or meta descriptions. Instead, we used title or meta description templates, which allowed us to test groups of pages as one. For example:

Order <product name> and get free shipping, not Order blue widget and get free shipping

We used this approach because traffic to a single page can vary widely, but when you measure traffic to a group of similar pages, the traffic behaves more predictably.

Artificial users vs real users

A key difference between our methodologies is the Wayfair team’s assumption that artificial and incentivized Mechanical Turk users’ behavior would mirror real potential customers.

Most direct response marketers know that ads are designed to be compelling only to their specific target audience. For example, a business that sells luxury goods rarely uses discounts in their messaging because it would not resonate with their target audience. They would highlight exclusivity and first-class experience. As such, Mechanical Turk users may not resonate to Wayfair ads in the same way as their usual target customers who are interested in buying furniture.

Instead of using three approaches to test our messaging, we used only one: the SEO experiment. We didn’t see the need to create new PPC experiments, instead we looked at the Adwords ads of a B2B e-commerce client. We pulled the existing ads with the best CTRs that had at least ten clicks and transactions and we used those ads to find ideas that seemed to resonate with potential buyers, and selected two to test as templates.

Importance of the buyer’s journey

Different kinds of pages appeal to different types of potential customers depending on which stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in.

People who are in the awareness stage tend to know the need or problem that they have, but not the best solution. Their searches tend to lead them to informational pages such as blog posts, infographics, and FAQ pages.

In the consideration stage, potential customers are evaluating different solutions, so they may be deciding what type of product they need or which business to utilize. For example, take someone has recently become motivated to adopt a healthier lifestyle. At first, they don't know exactly what changes they want to make, and will probably search for fairly generic terms like "exercise routines" or "healthy diet."

As they move into the decision stage, potential customers begin to account for a variety of new factors such as price, quality, and guarantees - factors typically addressed in promotional advertising. Continuing the previous example, the new health enthusiast has decided they want to try yoga. In the consideration stage, they begin searching for yoga gear, DVDs, or classes.

When a potential customer lands on product pages from organic searches, they are likely near the end of the buyer’s journey. Promotional meta descriptions offering a good deal, a guarantee, or an assurance of quality are more likely to resonate with customers in this stage.

We don’t subscribe to the notion that there is a group of potential buyers that clicks on ads, and another that clicks on organic snippets. We believe there are potential customers that respond to benefits that resonate with them, whether that is in paid search snippets or organic search snippets. Put simply, if the message speaks to the potential customers’ needs and wishes, they respond by clicking. Our results support the notion that more promotional language will appeal to decision-stage customers.

Statistical analysis

Conducting accurate experiments to validate winning combinations is more challenging in e-commerce sites where there are many factors at play, including seasonal fluctuations in sales. Fortunately, Etsy recently shared a very robust scientific framework in this post which offers insights into this issue.

In short, the Etsy methodology is as follows:

Pull all pages from Google Analytics to get the organic search traffic

Normalize the list to include only canonical pages

Exclude pages tagged as no index and short-lived pages

Select pages of the same type (i.e. only products)

Order the pages by search traffic and assign them to ntile groups

Use stratified sampling to randomly assign each page to a test group

Run t-tests and visualize the data in covariance plots to ensure that the differences between the groups are not statistically significant

Assign a treatment to each test group

Once the changes are in place, pull SEO traffic data from Google Analytics for all the groups, and use Causal Impact to figure out the winning treatment (more about this below)

Use A-A testing to ensure any differences between the control groups are not statistically significant

Rollout the winning treatment to the other samples to ensure an increase in search traffic and a decrease in variance between groups

In the case of the client from our first sample on page one, we created 5 statistically similar sample groups covering around 30% of the product pages and also created 5 statistically similar groups for around 30% of the category pages.

Experiments of this type have been reported for product pages but not category pages. We realize that categories tend to define a broader subject and may not provide results as interesting as products. We applied the Etsy methodology to the 5 product groups and the 5 category groups.

This is a covariance plot of the product sample groups (step 7 above). They’re statistically similar enough to use for SEO tests.

As recommended by Bill Ulammandakh in the Etsy post, we used more than one control group.

The recommendation was to use two control groups, however we decided to use three instead.

The remaining two groups were used to test the meta description ideas. One advantage we see in this approach over a traditional A/B test on half the population, is that when the experiments perform worse, negative impact is minimized. By adding an additional control group, we further minimize this negative impact. For example, it is possible that the three test groups will perform much worse than two control groups which could cause a site to lose a lot of search traffic during the testing period. It also helps to ensure that your results are due to treatment effects and not the fluctuation of views for your control groups.

Accelerating the results

In about three weeks, we were able to assess which of our experiments had been the most successful.

In the case of the product pages, both promotional messages performed better than the meta description copies carefully written by the copywriting team, by a considerable amount. Our changes outperformed all control groups. As the plot above shows, one of the promotional messages had a cumulative increase in traffic of 51.7% over the control.

Adding promotional messaging to the categories didn’t provide measurable lift. As we explained above, category page visitors are in the consideration stage, and messaging about the quality of the products or a good selection may resonate better. We aim to run category page experiments with those ideas next. It is important to consider that e-commerce sites have fewer category pages than product pages, so it’s difficult to generate a large sample size.

In order to get results fast, we used Fetch as a Googlebot and submitted all the pages manually to the index. It helped that we could reach statistical significance with only a few hundred pages using the framework we learned from Etsy.

One of the motivations behind the Wayfair study was to find a faster method to perform SEO experiments. Their SEO experiments took 60 days to get results, so our project only taking three weeks was a substantial improvement.

Measuring Success

Figuring out whether an SEO experiment is successful is challenging because of any factor outside our control can affect the search traffic. As recommended in the Etsy blog, we use Google’s Causal Impact package. You can learn more about it and its effectiveness here.

In a nutshell, it is a sophisticated statistical approach which allows users to compare the actual traffic (orange line in our plot) against a “virtual control” (dotted blue line), which is forecasted based on any kind of controlled behavior. In our case, we created our control and test groups from similar data. They offer a very easy-to-use R package if you are familiar with the programming language.

Users can also find a detailed technical explanation on how the Causal Impact methodology compares with more traditional ones like difference-in-differences here.

To summarize our findings, paid search ads are very useful when you want insights and ideas about which organic search snippet experiments to perform. If you want to test click through rate increases, you need to start with meta description experiments as those won’t cause rerankings.

Strong benefit-driven marketing copy in search snippets generally performs better than plain descriptive copy because it speaks to the needs of potential customers.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

#martech #marketing #technology #business #cmo

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vileart · 7 years

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Hyperion Dramaturgy: George Siena @ Edfringe 2017

esprit de corps presents the world premiere of:

Hyperion

Greenside

4-26 August I 60 minutes

In a bunker on a Greek island, a conscript keeps watch. Alone. His mission: to guard the border for 72 hours. Three days later, no one shows up: no replacement, no pick-up, no one. What to do? Hyperion is a performance inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin's early romantic novel, Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece (1797). Written in an age of revolutions and seismic changes in Europe, the novel traced the journey of a young Greek dreaming of national independence and freedom from foreign rule.

What was the inspiration for the performance? Hyperion has two main sources of inspiration. First, there’s the epistolary novel written by Friedrich Hölderlin, published in 1797: a young Greek, Hyperion, returns to his homeland after years abroad and deplores its state of devastation and the abuses of the Ottoman regime. He joins a secret revolutionary group aiming at emancipating the country from foreign rule. In the process, the rebel leaders will betray their initial cause preferring to pursue their personal ambitions, leaving the country divided and subjugated as ever. Hyperion is once more pushed to self-exile. There’s nothing new under the Greek sun. Hölderlin writes in an age of revolutions and seismic changes in Europe, both political and social. His oeuvre is still very much influenced by the Enlightenment with a very personal prophetic instinct about the limits of the realm of Reason and the dangers humanity faces in alienating itself from Nature and the sense of Being-in-the-world. His whole work has been a source of inspiration: his poetry, his philosophical essays and his personal letters. They are all one. The second source of inspiration is our current political environment, European but also more broadly Western. The Greek debt crisis, soon reaching its tenth birthday without foreseeable prospects of recovery, is undeniably both a bitter source of inspiration and the backdrop that forms and informs the performance. It’s the element that gives it that sense of entrapment. Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas? That’s such a crucial question. I don’t think there is anything as potent as live performance to touch in depth those involved in it, all those present in the room. So then the question is: who is in the room? Who are we discussing with? There is a real challenge in terms of reaching audiences beyond our kind. I find it difficult when artists end up doing work that only other artists see, forming a little arty bubble that doesn’t reach out. Performance equally loses its raison d’être when treated like a product with a specific market to target. ‘Who’s your audience?’: every serious theatre maker is supposed to do some marketing in order to viably preach to the converted. Is our audience in this case that other, larger bubble of relatively well-off liberal-thinking theatre-goers? Are we just another recycled expression of what is already discussed on tv and in newspapers? It’s a bit like our social media networks that end up being echo chambers: a recipe for stillness not growth. There is a cultural dimension to it: in Greece, going to the theatre is part of popular culture, not just a middle-class pastime. The audience at Epidaurus is a microcosm of Greek society in its entirety. Equally, a bit further East, I was amazed by the Moscow theatres where I’ve seen the best shows so far in my experience as an audience, but most importantly, where all social classes seemed to be present. There are tickets for a pound in the best Moscow venues. Then yes, that can become a good space for the discussion of ideas. How did you become interested in making performance? I have a classical acting background which was my first contact with stage work. I started making my own work at the London International School of Performing Arts (still called LISPA though they’ve moved to Berlin!) The training is inspired by the teachings of Jacques Lecoq and takes its students on a most incredible journey of creativity. If you meet Lispa graduates they will all agree their training there was a life changing experience. It was eye-opening, a bit like an initiation. I hope I don’t make it sound too much like a cult! More broadly, making one’s own work feels like being part of a wider trend. There is an ever growing number of actors, dancers, performers who find themselves much more in creating their own material or devising with others. There is such an empowering element to it. Making performance or the co-authorship of performance is also relative to emerging methods of work, and that goes beyond the arts: they are less vertical than traditional ones, more collaborative. Is there any particular approach to the making of the show? The approach is: throw everything in the space, make a big mess, a too-much of materials. For example: the novel Hyperion was published in 1797: what was going on then, what can help me understand the world I’m visiting? I find historical research fascinating and I’ll bring in anything I might consider even remotely relevant to the piece, or something surprising or unexpected I’ve come across. There was of course so much material regarding Hölderlin: his poems in particular, his essays, his letters; then there was the presence there of what inspired him, like the Greeks, especially the Pre-Socratics… then his native Swabia that I had the chance to visit: some filmic material from that trip is used in the performance… So the challenge is always: where or when to stop? T here will always be more stuff out there so one needs to set a limit at some point. On the other hand, even if less than 1% of all this material gathered finally makes it in the show, it still felt necessary for my own writing process and the creation and ‘ownership’ of something at the same time ‘original’ and genuinely ‘inspired by’. Then there’s a whole range of apparently ‘unjustified’ materials that come along in the mix, more instinctive and less ‘intellectual’ I guess. Stuff one wants to play with - an image, an object, a medium, anything, even when one is not sure where the idea comes from. It might find its way later. To the bin probably. Although it’s increasingly difficult along the process, this necessary elimination defines and refines what the performance wants to do. Then the game is to create some order, find some rules, or some kind of structure and carve out the show from that initial messiness. And finally question the limits of that order too. Does the show fit with your usual productions? I guess it does with the productions that are consciously seeking to find their form - and accept that quest as part of the performance. Hyperion is somehow cross-genre and that is because the experience of exile and the search for one’s language is at its core. What do you hope the audience will experience? Fun, emotion and thought! Isn’t that the grail of every performer and theatre-maker? I hope they will experience a genuine sharing. There are aspects of the performance that defy narrative patterns and narration altogether: I hope they will accept the invitation whenever the onstage events go against their expectations. Last, there is a political aspect to this piece which is by no means restricted to the Greek crisis, but tries to look at the questions that lie beneath and currently touch all western societies. I hope the audience will be interested in responding to that. What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience? What felt essential was to keep a sense of playfulness that would be shared with the audience when leaping from one character to another, one world to the next, or between ‘genres’. It might not be a ‘play’, but play we must! Interweaving historical events and experience of contemporary Athens, this performance re-visits Hölderlin’s work by blending text, physical theatre, original music and film. Created and performed by George Siena, Hyperion questions our sense of belonging and heritage in a changing world and explores themes of identity and exile, individual responsibility and collective action. A major German poet, Hölderlin was also an important thinker in the development of idealism and dialectics. Inspired by Greek philosophy and poetry, his thought pursues the overcoming of conflict and opposition in an englobing unifying principle. Greenside @ Royal Terrace (venue 231) 1b Royal Terrace, EH7 5AB 60 minutes 4-26 August 4-5 August: 11.25am previews £5 7-12 August: 11.25am £7 (£6) 14-19 August: 10.15am £7 (£6) 21-26 August: 12.35pm £7 (£6) George Siena, creation and performance A National Theatre of Greece graduate, Siena obtained the 2005 Academic performance Award, and worked in productions of the Greek National Theatre and the Athens Festival. A multi-lingual performer, he has had the chance to work across Europe, performing in Greek, French and English. Based in London for the last ten years, he has performed in a wide variety of genres including devised theatre, movement-based shows, ancient drama, new writing, immersive theatre, opera and dance, making work at the NT Studio, Young Vic, Riverside Studios and ENO where he had the chance to collaborate with directors Yoshi Oida and Terry Gilliam. As a deviser, he worked with Clod Ensemble, Slip of Steel and co-founded Off-balance and Move to Stand. Further training in Theatre Directing lead him to Moscow for seminars at the GITIS Academy and to assisting Simon Usher in Peer Gynt and Jemma Gross in The Winter’s Tale. Recent directing work includes Gilgamesh by Denise Stephenson, currently in development, and assisting Kelly Hunter on the European tour of Flute Theatre’s Hamlet. Byron Katritsis, composer A composer, writer and performer based in Athens, Katritsis explores ancient stories and archetypal themes with contemporary sound. For over ten years, he has been composing for theatre and film in Greece. Neon's composition for the poems of Kariotakis met extensive critical acclaim. His most recent work for the stage includes Athens Festival productions of Medea and Flux, Hamlet Machine at the Athens Contemporary Theatre and Foinisses at the Delphi Festival 2017. Mayou Trikerioti, costume design Mayou Trikerioti trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Mayou is one of Greece's most established theatre designers, working at venues including the National Theatre in Athens and the Ancient theatre of Epidavros. She now lives in London where she has recently designed at the Young Vic and Riverside Studios. Since 2007 Mayou has designed feature and short films that have traveled across the globe and screened at international film festivals, including Venice Film Festival, Berlin and Toronto IFF. Most recently she designed costumes for True Crimes, dressing amongst others Jim Carrey, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Agata Kulesza. Melly Still, mentor Melly Still is a theatre and opera director and began her career as a choreographer and designer. She has worked for many companies including the National Theatre, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Bristol Old Vic, Hampstead Theatre, The Manchester Royal Exchange, Liverpool Playhouse and the Young Vic. She has been nominated for Olivier and Tony awards (best director and best design). Her work has travelled throughout the UK, Europe, Scandinavia, the Far East, US and Broadway. Li-Tien Chueh, dramaturgy Li-Tien has worked as a director with Cheng-Chi and Tam-Kang Theatre in Taiwan, in productions such as Hedda Gabler, Death of a Salesman, and several site specific performances. In London, she completed an MFA in Theatre Directing and assisted Tony Graham in Three Birds Alighting On A Field, at the Tristan Bates Theatre. A steady ‘outside eye’ and dramaturg for Hyperion, she wrote to George in August '15 before leaving for Greece on a night bus: ‘’I want to see where Hyperion comes from. The land, the people, the air, the water’’. She is currently based in Paris where she works as a director and continues exploring methods of devised theatre.

from the vileblog http://ift.tt/2sn0K5M

#Theatre #Blogger #visual art #Edinburgh Fringe #Experimental Critique

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extraquarterblog · 7 years

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Discovering all the Rage about Darkest Dungeon

Darkest Dungeon claim to fame is an unforgiving, turn-based, explorative game that the best way to describe is Oregon Trail meets Dark Souls with a dash of Rogue Legacy. Made by the company Red Hook Studios, using a successful Kickstart campaign to develop the game in full, released early 2016.

I've always stood on the sidelines watching this title. I heard of high praise but also hearing how it's a title not for everyone. Patience and grinding are the two biggest keys to this game. What convinced me to finally jump on was the recent sale on Steam and the new updated radiant mode. A mode designed to be slightly more forgiving and requiring less grinding to get ahead.

Now don't get me wrong, I love a good challenge. Just stopping every min to make sure Jimmy has eaten his sandwich, Sam has bandages to fix his bleeding, and Nick drinks his holy water to stop his madness, doesn't really invite me into the experience. I want to slay demons, not constantly throw my team into the medic ward till they regain their sanity. It's one of the games where you spend time managing your surplus of supplies, making sure your characters have food, bandages, and torches to keep the darkness at bay. Hence the Oregon Trail part, cause I learned the hard way what happens when your knee deep in a dungeon and suddenly everyone needs to eat, and you don't have a scrap of food.

So now seemed to be the time. I pull the trigger on the Steam sale, fired up the Radiant mode and jumped right in.

Yup, it was everything I was expecting.

Entering this world for the first time seems a lot to take at first. The town Hamlet, the mainstay of the game, is filled with a plethora of shops, like a Blacksmith, Guild, Church etc. All with their own options, leveling up, abilities to unlock. A top of all that, you can level up each of those places as well. While I loved the charm, I also found myself frustrated trying to discover where the hell some items are located, how to equip a trinket, where the hell is the map to continue? We're just a few examples of the confusing layout at first glance.

The atmosphere is dead on. I absolutely love the visuals, the character animations, and music. Also, the narrative really adds to the experience. Hearing the narrator, voiced by Wayne June is absolutely fantastic and really draws you into the experience. Good or bad events could happen to you but hearing the narrative speak makes it so damn cool. You slay a random skeleton, the narrator kicks on, making you feel 10x more bad-ass about it.

"Great is the weapon that cuts on its own! "

At first, being on radiant mode didn't seem so bad. I got through my first dungeon run, feeling more confident I decided to go in for another try.

That's when everything went sour.

I was only two rooms deep, a battle appears against a few spiders and my team suddenly leaped into madness. My tank became fearful and started to pass up on turns. My healer in the back became paranoid and fell to a heart attack. My two attackers both became depressed. Within what seemed only 1 min, my team was down to just 1 person left. My opponents, the two spiders, had hardly done anything. It was my team losing faith, humanity, hope, that quickly fell to their own demise.

Just like that, I lost my first 4 players to a permanent death.

That's when I realized, they're not kidding. If you expect to go wade deep into the darkest pits of a dungeon, you're going to need supplies for everything, from shovels to torches. Oh, heaven forbid you forget food. Never, ever, under any circumstance go without food. The second your teams become hungry and you can't feed them. It's like giving them all a death sentence.

There's an element of luck to this game. Sometimes your characters gracefully dodges, overcome their challenges, keep their motivation up. Other times they run to the back, petrified in fear to do anything. It's one of those games, where keeping a constant check on your character's sanity, plays a bigger part than their health bar.

With each attempt, I gained more money, more emblems, more items. Slowly my team began to grow, I became wiser, better at the game. Giving the game a few hours is when it really started to grow on me. Understand the mechanics, the roll of luck, and a better idea of their sanity is when this game really start to shine for me.

Yes, of course, I enjoy the game. It's fresh and can be both incredibly fun or frustrating. Even at your best, things could still turn sour unexpectedly. Though, the more experience characters you have, the better you overcome trivial matters. The game has a lot to offer with new dungeons to explore, foes to slay and yes, there's lots of grinding. You could easily put +50hrs into this game.

Darkest Dungeon, at its core, is an excellent game, for what it aims to be. Could I recommend this game to my friends? To answer that, I had a good friend of mine give it a go. He's more of a casual gamer but always open to exploring new genres or niche games. I let him give the game ago.

He didn't last 2hrs.

Within those first 2hrs, he had graveyard filled with his fallen heroes. Unable to grasp the game mechanics. After I sat down with him, giving the lay of the land, how to properly play this game. He just looked at me and said: "Why?".

That's the best way for me to sum up Darkest Dungeon. It's a game that requires preparation, foresight, planning. It offers a great sense of gambling, risking for reward. With death being permanent, its always keeping you on your toes. Depending on the type of player you are, you will either love it or hate it.

For me, its a love hate relationship. That I keep returning too.

#Darkest Dungeon #PC

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kaitlynalingefelt · 7 years

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What New Media Means To Us

New media consists of all of the technologies and innovations that enhance our modern world and make it smarter. However, there are many dimensions in the area of new media that I have extensively analyzed in past posts. An important thing to note is that new media isn’t necessarily new. It’s been ‘new’ for a long time.

The Beginnings

The idea of automated machines was particularly interesting to early pioneers in the last half of the twentieth century. Vannevar Bush, in his essay “As We May Think”, envisioned a world in which machines helped humans be more productive and get more things done.

J.C.R. Licklider had this vision as well in his essay “Man-Computer Symbiosis”. The Memex (by Bush) and other thought processes came out of the idea that machines could change everything.

New Media and Perfection

If machines can change everything, can they also create perfection? Perfection is something many of us strive for, and if technology gave it to us, we would be infinitely happier.

We know that music can be made to sound perfect through auto tune technology. Music is not life, however. It can be dangerous because it does not represent real life. It can be fun to enjoy it in forms such as alternate realities, but not permanently.

Enhancing Democracy

New media also helps us be more easily heard. Before the age of new media began, there were only newspapers and broadcast television programs. Readers and viewers couldn’t express what they liked and disliked about what they read and saw.

In “Being Digital��, Nicholas Negroponte elaborates on four principles of digital technologies that allow us to express our opinions to the world: decentralization, globalization, harmonization, and empowerment. All of these elements work together in order to give us the power to enact change in our lives.

Social media is a key platform that allows us to share what we really think. With social media, what we say can be spread around the world and cause policymakers to listen. A pertinent example of the power of social media was the Arab Spring.

New Forms of Writing

New media also ushered in a new form of writing: hypertext fiction. In Robert Coover’s “The End of Books”, hypertext fiction is described as a work of writing that contains hyperlinks that the reader can click on to either create their own story or add new details to the story at hand.

Michael Joyce’s “Afternoon” was the first hypertext fiction, written in 1987. Many other fictions were written, but the idea of using them to replace books never really took off. Coover acknowledged that they were groundbreaking digital pieces of work that would change the world of physical books forever, but that time has not yet come. As new media advances, however, digital novels may take off with it.

Open Sourcing

With computers came the revolution of open source software. The Open Source Definition says that this software has to be able to be distributed freely and without any limitations, the most important among the many other qualities. This software is the opposite of proprietary software, which cannot be freely copied and shared.

The good thing about open source software is that it allows computer programmers to share their work freely and create better programs. Linux, created by Linus Torvalds, is a perfect example of an extremely successful open source operating system. It and the other pioneers of open source are documented in “Revolution OS”.

Open source may or may not take over the world of proprietary software giants like Microsoft, but it has changed the digital world nonetheless.

Faking Reality

Technology has also brought about the creation of highly realistic and immersive digital worlds. These can be computer games or just highly detailed digital environments that we can explore freely.

We don’t just play in these worlds, however. Sherry Turkle has studied how we escape from real life in digital worlds and work through our problems and fears. We are also affected by how we look and act in these worlds.

One of the controversies here is that these worlds don’t have rules. Anything can and will happen, as was the case in the MUD (multi-user dungeon) game LambaMOO. We crave freedom, but we also don’t want the government to control our online interactions. John Perry Barlow makes this crystal clear in his “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”.

We like to be free and do whatever we like, but we also want to be protected from harm. A balance still has yet to be found.

Remixing

No idea is every truly original. This is made even more true by the concept of remixing, or the creation of new content using old content. Lawrence Lessig is a huge supporter of remix culture, as evidenced in his book “Remix”.

He says that remixing creates meaningful content, communities, and opportunities to learn. Remixing is important for the development of our culture and for the enhancement of young minds.

However, the legality of remixing is still unclear. The ideas that are used are copyrighted and many people don’t ask for permission to use them. The laws are obscure and as of yet, they haven’t been changed to reflect this new revolution. Lessig wishes that the law wouldn’t condone young people for what they like to do, because it ultimately stifles their creativity.

New Forms of Storytelling and Ludology

We love to hear and tell stories. It’s merely our human nature. With digital technology, stories can now be even better. They can be interactive and allow us to participate and make them how we want them to be.

In “Hamlet on the Holodeck”, Janet Murray delves into the world of digital storytelling possibilities, most particularly in the world of games. Once the digital environment has fully immersed us, Murray says we feel the ‘agency’, or satisfaction, of having made the choice that furthers the game in a better direction. Though we are not the authors (not all of us are capable of writing the code) we feel like we have made the story our own.

We don’t necessarily think of games when we think of stories, but as digital technology becomes more advanced, they become more similar to each other. Ludology describes the study of games, and more recently storytelling has been thrown into the mix of game elements.

Henry Jenkins further analyzes the existence of stories within games in “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”. Games can feature clips of information in video form (cut scenes) or pieces of information hidden within the game to make it more fun (embedded narratives). The most important storytelling aspect in games is environmental space. When games have a world to be imagined, we can more easily create a story out of it.

Stories are ultimately more real when we experience them through a digital environment. They give us more control and may even teach us a thing or two. We still get just as much (if not more) satisfaction than if we were reading a story on a page.

We are Cyborgs

According to Donna Haraway, we are in fact cyborgs, the creatures of the future. In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, she says that all of our social realities are just myths we make up to create concrete identification. We are not colored, we are not rich or poor, we are not male or female. We merely create these identities so we feel unique and not like everyone else.

As technology advances, we may find out who we really are. Computers are priming us to be more and more like them, according to Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. Instead of being content with reading long passages to learn from, we relish skimming through and skipping between web pages to find only the information we desire. As we focus on this, we may forget who we’ve made ourselves out to be and become the cyborgs Donna Haraway says we are.

Then again, technology is advancing much faster than we may think. Ray Kurzweil, in “The Singularity Is Near”, predicts the future of humans: we will lose our biological aspects and become all machine. Thus, the reality of the cyborg rings even more true.

A Complex Definition

New media does not have a simple, straightforward definition. Yes, we could say that it encompasses the new technologies that we use and are affected by, but it would be a broad definition that doesn’t account for what those areas are.

I have shown that new media is made up of a lot of different elements, from basic communication technologies to the complicated concept of cyborgs. As the years go on, new media will continue to evolve and its definition will continue to grow more and more complex. The world of new media is an ever-changing world that we will continue to find hard to keep up with. Nevertheless, we benefit from it and appreciate its existence, because it truly makes our lives better and more exciting.

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oldguardaudio · 7 years

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Learn a bit about our next Supreme Court Judge - Tenth Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch -

Learn a bit about our next Supreme Court Justice - Tenth Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch -

President Donald Trump nominates Tenth Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of The United States of America

On September 11, 2001, at the age of 45 and at the height of her professional and personal life, Barbara K. Olson was murdered in the terrorist attacks against the United States as a passenger on the hijacked American Airlines flight that was flown into the Pentagon.

The Federalist Society established this annual lecture in Barbara's memory because of her enormous contributions as an active member, supporter, and volunteer leader. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson delivered the first lecture in November 2001. The lecture series continued in following years with other notable individuals.

In 2013, the Honorable Neil M. Gorsuch of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit delivered the lecture. He was introduced by Mr. Eugene B. Meyer, President of the Federalist Society.