if you’ve read The City and The City…come talk to me. I’m obsessed.

@sodasodabanana At last, someone who wants to talk about this!

I love the damn thing so much, don’t know why so few people seem to have heard of it. I was glad it got adapted, apart from the casting: for me, Borlu is either William Hurt (unavailable) or Humphry Bogart (dead.) The wife sub-plot annoyed me (I have a problem with Lara Pulver), but you can’t have everything, and Corwi was wonderful in this version.

One of interesting things for me is the strange reversal of expectations over Breach. Sinister intelligence agency, brutal, insidious…and ultimately working for the greater good, with limited resources. I find a lot of humour in that gap between how they present themselves and what they really are, though that could just be me. 

Breach:

I JUST FINISHED THE BOOK and I really loved that too? like breach are built up to be like men in black almost and then you finally meet them and they’re not that at all omg. I’m especially peeved by the dead wife subplot because it feels so cliche and it erases the fact that Borlu is polyamorous in the novel which would’ve been something actually new and interesting to see on a cop show. but like....man....the ending?? how Bowden gets out at the end just blew my mind. I cannot wait to see how they handle that in the show.

I’m gonna finally get to watch it come June because I’ll be in the UK and I’ll actually be able to use the damn BBC streaming site!! also I might get the DVD. I heard there was a DVD.

why is no one hyping the city and the city? it’s based on a book by china mieville, is very dystopian with a really cool setting, is layered and political as fuck so tumblr should be eating it up, and apart from the main character literally EVERY OTHER important character is a woman! out of the two main women, one is poc and one is a lesbian! go read it! or watch the BBC adaptation because it’s all available on iplayer. don’t sleep on this! trust in breach!

Breach will come and get you if you don’t reblog this.

when in beszel, reblog beszel

The most important writing lesson I ever learned was not in a screenwriting class, but a fiction class.

This was senior year of college.  Most of us had already been accepted into grad school of some sort. We felt powerful, we felt talented, and most of all, we felt artistic.

It was the advanced fiction workshop, and we did an entire round of workshops with everyone’s best stories, their most advanced work, their most polished pieces. It was very technical and, most of all, very artistic.

IE: They were boring pieces of pretentious crap.

Now the teacher was either a genius OR was tired of our shit, and decided to give us a challenge.  Flash fiction, he said. Write something as quickly as possible.  Make it stupid.  Make it not mean a thing, just be a quick little blast of words. 

And, of course, we all got stupid.  Little one and two pages of prose without the barriers that it must be good. Little flashes of characters, little bits of scenarios.

And they were electric.  All of them. So interesting, so vivid, not held back by the need to write important things or artistic things. 

One sticks in my mind even today.  The guys original piece was a thinky, thoughtful piece relating the breaking up of threesomes to volcanoes and uncontrolled eruptions that was just annoying to read. But his flash fiction was this three page bit about a homeless man who stole a truck full of coca cola and had to bribe people to drink the soda so he could return the cans to recycling so he could afford one night with the prostitute he loved.

It was funny, it was heartfelt, and it was so, so, so well written.

And just that one little bit of advice, the write something short and stupid, changed a ton of people’s writing styles for the better.

It was amazing. So go.  Go write something small.  Go write something that’s not artistic.  Go write something stupid. Go have fun.

Seeing & Unseeing: Starbucks & BLM

The premise behind “The City and The City” by British writer China Mieville is that there are two cities (Beszel and Ul Qoma) that have different cultures and languages—but they exist in the same space and time. Inhabitants of each city are taught from birth to “unsee” the people and buildings of the other one, a mental shift that requires constant vigilance with dire consequences threatened for failure.

Reading “The City and The City” is exhausting, because moving through the story with the main character’s eyes, the reader has to keep “unseeing” things that we know are there. And that is something like how some social segments are taught to “unsee” others who are different from them. So, an example would be situations like what happened at Starbucks, but where no one speaks up or videotapes or objects in any way, because they are “unseeing” what is really going on.

One of the great accomplishments of Black Lives Matter has been to help people learn to SEE what they’ve been taught to “unsee” and it seems to be growing and accelerating. As Johnny Nash wrote: “Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind…” (from I Can See Clearly Now)

why is no one hyping the city and the city? it’s based on a book by china mieville, is very dystopian with a really cool setting, is layered and political as fuck so tumblr should be eating it up, and apart from the main character literally EVERY OTHER important character is a woman! out of the two main women, one is poc and one is a lesbian! go read it! or watch the BBC adaptation because it’s all available on iplayer. don’t sleep on this! trust in breach!

An action being “punishable by a fine” basically means “legal for rich people”.

Oh wow. That’s…

This is why all fines should be income based. They should carry the EXACT same weight of punishment to anyone who commits the act. That way poor folk aren’t bankrupted into desperation or jail by a minor offense and rich people can’t get away with shit.

Promo shots of David from The City and The City.

The City and the City/The Onion headlines

@misscrawfords

Left: Edvard Munch’s “The Vampire,” 1893 (image source)

Right: Being Human, “The Longest Day,” episode 3.5 (screenshot by jayneedsurl) 

I don’t know if the shot on the right (possibly one of Being Human’s most iconic moments, visually) is a direct homage to Munch’s famous painting on the left, but I suspect it is.

What I like most about the parallels between “The Vampire” and this moment in “The Longest Day” is not that the show cleverly references a 19th Century painting of a vampire — after all, it’s not really a painting of a vampire. It’s that the scene in Being Human actually represents something closer to what Munch was going for, while subverting the questionable vampire interpretation.

Munch didn’t title his painting (actually a series of almost identical paintings) “The Vampire.” He called it “Love and Pain.” He never identified the man and woman in the painting or gave them a story, but it’s believed that, like many of his other paintings (most famously “The Scream”), it is deeply personal. Munch struggled with mental illness, addiction, and relationships. In the painting, both love and pain are clearly depicted. The man clutches the woman desperately, she embraces and consoles him. Maybe he’s begging forgiveness, maybe he’s facing the fact that he will lose her, maybe he just needs to be held. It’s a very raw, very human picture.

The Vampire interpretation — a much more superficial and in my opinion misogynistic reading — identifies the woman as a predator feeding from the man. She is a temptress, the moment darkly sexual (women depicted in modern art to this day are very commonly seen as sinister temptresses, regardless of the creator’s intention). This became the accepted reading, despite the fact that Munch never agreed with it (he relented to changing the title later in life when it became clear that it was more valuable as a vampire painting).

“The Longest Day” scene is, intentional or not, more in line with Munch’s intentions than the erroneous assessment that led to the painting being retitled “The Vampire.”

I don’t know, I think that’s pretty cool.

As we approach June and the anniversary of Stonewall, I just want to remind everyone that twerfs/terfs have no connection to the spirit of Pride or Stonewall. Those were founded by the very people they want to dehumanize, and twerf ideology aligns with the anti-lgbt.

Trans women were the founders of LGBT liberation and too many people are trying to deny that (these people are transphobes)

Some ppl say comedy is dead cause of “political correctness” but like john mulaney did an entire bit on captchas and bo burnham did an entire bit on not being able to fit ur hand inside a pringles can so really anything is possible as long as ur actually funny

Is this person for fucking real lol

“I want the free speech to say something rude but I don’t want anyone else to have the free speech to tell me I’m an asshole for it”

iconique™ batman outfits by iconique™ artists