Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this
One SEVERELY underrated moment in the Fellowship of the Ring, one of my favorite subtle moments in the film, is Aragorn’s reaction to Weathertop.
First the Hobbits/Aragorn travel out of Bree and into a barren wilderness. After struggling for days through barren plains and disgusting marshes full of so much nothing, they arrive here:
A bare, melancholy landscape in the middle of nowhere. The music is bleak and lonely.
There is nothing around except a pile of broken ruins on a far hill.
Aragorn’s reaction is to say, basically to himself: “this was once the great watch tower of Amon Sûl .”
And you realize that the lifeless landscapes these characters have been journeying through for the past few days used to be part of a beautiful, vibrant kingdom that no longer exists.
And that Aragorn understands that, and feels that loss, but the hobbits don’t.
Then they set up camp on Weathertop. The hobbits all put their things down and start to relax….but Aragorn stands up, and walks away.
Then he stands on the edge of Weathertop, and looks out over he landscape:
It actually took me a while to notice that you can see his silhouette under the overhang, against the clouds:
And while this moment is tiny, it reminds me of a moment in the book. When Aragorn and co. arrive at Weathertop in the book…..Aragorn suggests they all look out over the top, so that they can see the same view the ancient kings saw when they used Weathertop as a watch tower.
And that’s what I feel like Aragorn is doing in this little moment– surveying the horizon the way the ancient kings used to do before everything fell apart.
And I love that because…. there’s a recurring thing in the films where Aragorn comes across symbols of his kingdom, but the symbols are always decayed or broken. The most obvious example of this is Narsil, the Sword that Was Broken. (And Aragorn’s character arc in the films is about learning that his kingdom, though it seems hopelessly broken, is not beyond repair.)
And I think Weathertop is another, more subtle, example of that.
also, if you don’t know the books, like… this is foreshadowing that HE is a king… literally watching over the kingdom from atop the ancient Weathertop.
YES and it’s also like:
Aragorn is a king in exile.
The Nazgul were once “great kings of men.”
Weathertop was once a watchtower that belonged to a fallen ancient kingdom–a kingdom that a man like any of them might’ve ruled.
Aragorn the King of Gondor goes to Weathertop as “Strider.” And nine great kings of men go to Weathertop as Ringwraiths.
So Aragorn, a king who has wandered for so long in disguise that he’s beginning to lose his sense of identity….and the Ringwraiths, kings who have already utterly lost their identity…….battle in an ancient watchtower of the King, a watchtower that has become ruins/is also losing its identity.
It’s like the line from the books: “all that is gold does not glitter.”
On the surface, the battle at Weathertop is a Ranger defending the hobbits from a group of monsters in the abandoned ruins of an old hill.
But underneath the surface, it’s a battle of kings–the destined King of Gondor battling these ancient corrupted kings in the ruins of their fallen kingdom.
The Kings have finally returned to Weathertop, but they’re all as faded as Weathertop itself.
“but if you’re pro-union, why are you anti-cop-union?” because cops are not laborers. what cops do is not labor. they are enforcers of the laws that oppress laborers and exist solely to protect capital. don’t bother me with stupid questions.
“If you want to start a revolution, tell your workers you’d rather see them lose their homes than offer them fair wages. Then lecture them about how their “unrealistic” demands are “disruptive” to the industry, not to mention disturbing your revels at Versailles, er, Sun Valley.
Honestly, watching the studios turn one strike into two makes you wonder whether any of their executives have ever seen a movie or watched a television show. Scenes of rich overlords sipping Champagne and acting irritated while the crowd howls for bread rarely end well for the Champagne sippers.
This spring, it sometimes seemed like the Hollywood studios represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers were actively itching for a writers’ strike. Speculations about why, exactly, ran the gamut: Perhaps it would save a little money in the short run and show the Writers Guild of America (perceived as cocky after its recent ability to force agents out of the packaging business) who’s boss.
More obviously, it might secure the least costly compromise on issues like residuals payments and transparency about viewership.
But the 20,000 members of the WGA are not the only people who, having had their lives and livelihoods upended by the streaming model, want fair pay and assurances about the use of artificial intelligence, among other sticking points. The 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists share many of the writers’ concerns. And recent unforced errors by studio executives, named and anonymous, have suddenly transformed a fight the studios were spoiling for into a public relations war they cannot win.
Even as SAG-AFTRA representatives were seeing a majority of their demands rejected despite a nearly unanimous strike vote, a Deadline story quoted unnamed executives detailing a strategy to bleed striking writers until they come crawling back.
Days later, when an actors’ strike seemed imminent, Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger took time away from the Sun Valley Conference in Idaho not to offer compromise but to lecture. He told CNBC’s David Faber that the unions’ refusal to help out the studios by taking a lesser deal is “very disturbing to me.”
“There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic,” Iger said. “And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.”
If Iger thought his attempt to exec-splain the situation would make actors think twice about walking out, he was very much mistaken. Instead, he handed SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher the perfect opportunity for the kind of speech usually shouted atop the barricades.
“We are the victims here,” she said Thursday, marking the start of the actors’ strike. “We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us. I cannot believe it, quite frankly: How far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right, when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history at this very moment.”
Cue the cascading strings of “Les Mis,” bolstered by images of the most famous people on the planet walking out in solidarity: the cast of “Oppenheimer” leaving the film’s London premiere; the writers and cast of “The X-Files” reuniting on the picket line.
A few days later, Barry Diller, chairman and senior executive of IAC and Expedia Group and a former Hollywood studio chief, suggested that studio executives and top-earning actors take a 25% pay cut to bring a quick end to the strikes and help prevent “the collapse of the entire industry.”
When Diller is telling executives to take a pay cut to avoid destroying their industry, it is no longer a strike, or even two strikes. It is a last-ditch attempt to prevent le déluge.
Yes, during the 2007-08 writers’ strike, picketers yelled noncomplimentary things at executives as they entered their respective lots. (“What you earnin’, Chernin?” was popular at Fox, where Peter Chernin was chairman and chief executive.) But that was before social media made everything more immediate, incendiary and personal. (Even if they have never seen a movie or TV show, one would think that people heading up media companies would understand how media actually work.)
Even at the most heated moments of the last writers’ strike, executives like Chernin and Iger were seen as people who could be reasoned with — in part because most of the executives were running studios, not conglomerations, but mostly because the pay gap between executives and workers, in Hollywood and across the country, had not yet widened to the reprehensible chasm it has since.
Now, the massive eight- and nine-figure salaries of studio heads alongside photos of pitiably small residual checks are paraded across legacy and social media like historical illustrations of monarchs growing fat as their people starve. Proof that, no matter how loudly the studios claim otherwise, there is plenty of money to go around.
Topping that list is Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive Davd Zaslav. Having re-named HBO Max just Max and made cuts to the beloved Turner Classic Movies, among other unpopular moves, Zaslav has become a symbol of the cold-hearted, highly compensated executive that the writers and actors are railing against.
The ferocious criticism of individual executives’ salaries has placed Hollywood’s labor conflict at the center of the conversation about growing wealth disparities in the U.S., which stokes, if not causes, much of this country’s political divisions. It also strengthens the solidarity among the WGA and SAG-AFTRA and with other groups, from hotel workers to UPS employees, in the midst of disputes during what’s been called a “hot labor summer.”
Unfortunately, the heightened antagonism between studio executives and union members also appears to leave little room for the kind of one-on-one negotiation that helped end the 2007-08 writers’ strike. Iger’s provocative statement, and the backlash it provoked, would seem to eliminate him as a potential elder statesman who could work with both sides to help broker a deal.
Absent Diller and his “cut your damn salaries” plan, there are few Hollywood figures with the kind of experience, reputation and relationships to fill the vacuum.
At this point, the only real solution has been offered by actor Mark Ruffalo, who recently suggested that workers seize the means of production by getting back into the indie business, which is difficult to imagine and not much help for those working in television.
It’s the AMPTP that needs to heed Iger’s admonishment. At a time when the entertainment industry is going through so much disruption, two strikes is the last thing anyone needs, especially when the solution is so simple. If the studios don’t want a full-blown revolution on their hands, they’d be smart to give members of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA contracts they can live with.”
My friend’s kid gave me pinkeye and I have been on a particularly fuckt up sleep schedule about it and dreamed an entire Italian Opera on the themes of heaven and hell and the power of love and recognition of the self in other and the tragedy of loving the idea of something rather than the thing itself and the dream ended with the phrase “-And then it was banned EVERYWHERE.”
The plot starts off with a hybrid of Cinderella and the Taming Of The Shrew where a woman with her own daughter marries a Duke who has an older daughter, and then the Duke dies under “Mysterious circumstances”.
But he leaves in his will that his fortune won’t be disbursed until his daughter (the elder one) marries.
The elder daughter (like, 20ish?) is refusing to get married because her step-mother is trying to set her step-sister (age 12) with IDK A Medieval Italian supreme court judge?? (Age 65) , but the marriage can’t go through until the Duke’s fortune disburses and the mother can pay the dowry.
Other thing about the Eldest Daughter: She Always Speaks The Truth. Not only does she refuse to lie, but kind of like a retroactive Cassandra, everything she says is True. As you can imagine, this is not terribly popular In Fantasy Medieval Italian High Society.
The mother, big mad about being stuck with this stubborn, awkward girl, gets a Lawyer and a Bishop and a bunch of other authority figures to modify the will so that “Should the plague take my eldest, we will not be bereft *wink*” AKA if the eldest just dies or disappears without getting married, the mother will get the money anyway. (They all know she’s going to kill the girl, but they’re getting a cut.) The Step-Mother then, in true operatic fashion of Going Way Too Hard tortures the Elder daughter, and locks her in the basement to bleed out and die.
There, in the darkness, abandoned by God and the Law and Family etc. the daughter turns to the last thing she has left.
BLACK MAGIC
(Come on, it’s Opera. Everybody knows Black Magic)
Morning reblog with some production notes now that I actually slept a bit:
Elder Daughter’s name is Franchezza, the Demon’s name is Radrizzare.
EVERYONE is getting the most Blunt-Force Names possible. it’s funny. God The Caterer is named Dio, and his big reveal is literally “You thought I was a simple baker, but in reality, T'WAS I, DIO!!”
It’s a tragicomedy of contrasts. Memes one second, the kind of ridiculous violence that would make a Tarantino film look like a saturday morning cartoon the next.
Franchezza should be played by the deepest, roughest female voice you can find. If she sounds like the ungreased hinges to the gates of hell, that’s your girl.
Radrizarre’s Costume: -the wings should be dark and ratty but always feathered, Not bat or insect wings. Ideally, he should look like a crow that fell out of a chimney fire. -His horns should curve together and ALMOST but not quite make a complete circle, to evoke his Halo. -The rest of him is magnificently monstrous- big teeth, lots of eyes, on fire, tail, hooves, the works. -When he is in “disguise” as a pageboy on earth, he should look EXACTLY like his demonic self- tall, dark and eldritch- but wearing the medieval version of a Shitty retail uniform. Nobody Except the younger sister notices.
When Radrizzare goes to earth to see what the hell is wrong with all these humans, he finds the Stepmother deep in grief and he asks her whose grave she weeps over. They have a duet where she sings about how much she misses her stepdaughter, and the life they could have shared, while Radrizzare sings about “Yeah that doesn’t sound like Frankie at all/Oh I see you only loved the version of her you made up in your head, no wonder you killed the real one.
Franchezza may or may not actually be dead, that isn’t really all that important.
Make that Wedding cake as ridiculous as possible
B-plot with the Younger Sister being in love/good friends with the creepy Judge’s grandson, who is about her age. They serve a few functions in the play: 1. The stepmother is deliberately misleading her daughter about WHICH member of the Judge’s family she’s arranging the marriage with. 2. the younger daughter and the grandson serve as scene-change clowns, in which they come out and have absolutely absurd conversations as a pair of clueless teens to make the audience laugh while the set pieces are moved around. 3. The Grandson is going to grow up to be himbo supreme, but in the meantime he manages to get lost and ends up in hell, so he helps Franchezza out. The younger daughter is onto Radrizzare’s shit immediately and helps him out as well.
Lawyer is actually a medieval hedge fund manager, or some other bean-counting money-obsessed twit that puts profit over ethics.
Plot exposition is done by the Art Historian in a sort of Princess-Bride-Novel-Style commentary from the wings, and is played by the same actor as God.
I’m calling it ”The Truth Gets Out“ unless I think of a better title.
Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?
They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.
Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?
So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.
And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn’t compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn’t sell.
And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at… putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.
If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn’t have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that’s what they did.
I don’t know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.
