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Sep. 7th, 2015 12:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* "Parents Rage As GOP Rep Rants About Suicide Bombers To Little Kids :" http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/08/31/parents-rage-as-gop-rep-rants-about-suicide-bombers-to-little-kids-video/
* "Federal Judge Hands Down The Wackiest Anti-Birth Control Court Decision To Date:" http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/08/31/3697119/federal-judge-hands-down-the-wackiest-anti-birth-control-court-decision-to-date/
* "The curious grammar of police shootings:" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/the-curious-grammar-of-police-shootings/
* I am hearing lots of police and people on the right generally insist that the shooting of a single police officer is proof that the Black Lives Matter is illegitimate and a hate group and ought to be dismantled immediately, but I do not seem those same, police, politicians and pundits calling for the police to be dismantled immediately on the grounds that they are illegitimate and a hate group despite them having murdered more than four hundred people so far this year including in many cases where there is ample evidence that people were unarmed and innocent of any crime. you can't have it both ways. If one police shooting is enough to require a large group of people to lose their first amendment rights to protest police murders, regardless of any guilt or condoning of that shooting, shouldn't the murder a single unarmed innocent person by the police demand the exact same action to occur to every police officer, murderer or not? here's a radical idea, instead of a sweeping loss of civil rights for innocent civilians, why not just start arresting ALL the known murders and aggressively prosecuting them instead of the current system of letting the ones in blue get a free pass and stop arbitrarily stealing the basic right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from millions of people based on racial animus.
* "The Kim Davis Case Is About Disobeying The Rule Of Law, Not About Religious Liberty:" http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/canyonwlkr/the_davis_case_is_about_breaking_the_law_not_about_religious_liberty
* "Prehistoric stone age petroglyphs discovered deep inside the Arctic Circle:" http://www.sott.net/article/300778-Prehistoric-stone-age-petroglyphs-discovered-deep-inside-the-Arctic-Circle
* Response to a Jonquility email, mostly about Black Sails XII-XIII, with some little bits changed for clarity:
"Put a man on an island, give him power over other men, and it won’t be long before he realizes that the limit of that power are nowhere to be seen. And no man, given that kind of influence will remain honest for very long."
— Lt. James McGraw to Lord Thomas Hamilton
I think you are right. It's an Éowyn situation. They could find no MAN to do it right, but Eleanor bids fair to do it. Well spotted. She may not be perfect, but she's as close as they are likely to get.
I honestly think there is deliberate ambiguity about what the deal is with James and Miranda. I can only hope we get some season three flashbacks to disambiguate it. I do think there is more to say about the Ashes as well. I am not holding my breath, but I do hold out a thread of hope.
I went back and watched the carriage scene a few more times since I wrote it up. I'm leaning towards him flirting with her and welcoming her kiss as camouflage. We know he's just bi enough to function in bed and we know how well he can act. As she points out in XII, they hang men for it. So yes, I wouldn't put it past Flint the clever planner to welcome her advances as part of his whole getting what he wants without anyone realizing how he did it ethos. I do think his affection for her was real, though by the end on that island they are tied together as much by anger and shame as some form of love. I think it's performative on both their parts. He is saying, Look how not gay I am, kissing a woman! She is saying to anyone outside the open carriage window, Look at how I am having an affair with this man and my husband totally isn't in love with him because I am! The semi-discreet staging is useful for both of them because it looks like ineffective cover up in the heat of passion rather than display to the onlookers. That's my current theory anyway.
I believe Miranda when she repeatedly says she loves her husband. I do think she loves James. Love is such a complicated word, with so many shades of meaning. I think the love for both is and was real. I think her fury and grief are as great as Flint's, though they often express them differently and make different decisions based on them.
I have been of the opinion since early in season one, that she likely shared men with Thomas and/or fabricated affairs to cover for Thomas. I do think that Miranda has a healthy love of sex herself, and I wouldn't be surprised if she has a history of lovers on her own account. I still think the taunt in the flashback fight scene about how if Lord Hamilton likes you enough he''l let you sleep with his wife is a reference to this pattern of her sleeping with or appearing to sleep with Thomas Hamilton's lovers.
I think Flint thinks he's telling the truth about wanting, like Odysseus, to carry his oar so far inland they think it's a shovel. I think Flint is lying to himself. I think if he were to fulfill Thomas' dream he'd need to find a new cause and die fighting for it, or else shrivel up and die, likely of drink. I think his grief and fury are so profound that there is very little left of him beyond his goal and the stratagems necessary to achieve it. Anne Bonny may look like the most shut down character in the show, but she's not even close. It's Flint. Flint is a dead man walking. We see him relax a little with Mr.Gates when they drank together that time, but you compare that with the flashback at the end of 13, his face with Thomas reading to him, with the vital, passionate, Lt. McGraw... yeah. He is so hard, he can do all these terrible things, including murdering his best friend, because he hates himself so much for not rescuing Thomas, that no other sin can hold a candle to it. Take the motivating goal that drives him away, and that grief and fury have nowhere to go but inward. Flint is the kind of fearless he is because his own life only has value insofar as he is working towards his goal.
As far as I can tell, Billy Bones is the only one who sees through Silver. He says so in different words, but so very clearly in XIII. It's in the fragment when he says that Silver wouldn't have come into such power if he'd been there to stop it.
* Black Sails Rewatch XIII:
1. The more I think of it, the more I believe Max set up the argument over the articles as part of her plan to seperate Anne and Jack. Think about it. Who negotiated Mr. Featherstone's offer of a ship and crew? How hard to manipulate would that be, exactly. Especially after the face she showed Jack in XII? She wouldn't even have to do it directly. How many of the crew were in her brothel that night and how many of them had clever women whispering about Anne the c rew killer, Anne who had Jack completely in her sway? Given prevailing misogyny anne is vulnerable the same way Eleanor is. They are women competing in a man's world on men's terms, and just like today, women must be twice as good or more than the best man to be seen as half as good by an incredibly sexist society. Anne can't just be _A_ pirate, she pretty much needs to be _the Best_ pirate, or very close to it. And pirates crews are pretty close to pure democracies. Their leaders are elected and can be deposed by a vote or violence pretty quickly.
So say Max set Jack up, by giving him what he thinks he wants, then subtly undermining him, knowing he is likely to be a weak captain, and simultaneously uses that to weaken his relationship with Anne. I think Max is every bit as intelligent as Flint, Charles, and Eleanor. She's less experienced, but she has a knack for politics, a strong hold on her power base, and looks to be an incredibly fast learner, never having to learn the same lesson twice. I think she could do it.
What is the very first thing we see this episode? She very deliberately takes action during the threesome to make Anne jealous of her and Jack. I'd bet money she's sewing the seed knowing the article negotiation is coming in a few hours and Jack is good enough at crew politics that he will have to pick Max over Anne for all the reasons he gives Anne. And jack, the idiot, doesn't think that Anne literally asked him to watch her back last night in their dealings with Max, and less than a day later, he's picking Max. It's a brilliant trap, really, and Max has seen that Jack is limited in that particular way: that he is blinded by the immediate prize to long term implications, and that he can be utterly thoughtless about the ways Anne is vulnerable. I think part of that is that he doesn't think of her sex at all outside of the actual fucking, in a very male privilege sort of way. I also think a big part of it is that she is so tough and dangerous, way more tough and dangerous than he is. Even if long ago he rescued her, for most of their time together, she has been physically protecting him, just as he does social for her. Despite the scars on her back and her history, all he sees his her strength. I think he has trouble remembering she can be hurt or imagining how what is logic to him is an incredibly deep betrayal to her.
2. In this episode we see Miranda Hamilton being absolutely right in the London flashback. (It is time to stop now before tragedy strikes), and the way that informs Miranda Barlow's calculation about Peter Ashe. You can see why she is so utterly convinced she is right and Flint is wrong. After all, James was wrong last time and Peter Ashe made all those pretty offers of help. And so another Hamilton tragedy is set up starring Ashe the betrayer in a pivotal roll.
3. In the first shot of the first flashback scene, the first glimpse of Miranda this episode, she is holding that infamous copy of Marcus Aurelius. Moment before she goes to tell Thomas that James is back. Right before she warns her husband about people digging deeper. Ouch. So much ouch.
4 Jack's line: "We all have the same swords out there, we all have the same guns, but great art has felled empires," sounds frivolous and pretentious, much as Jack Rackham often looks, but there is a point here. So much of Season two has been thematically about the power of reputation for good or ill. Think about it. It's threaded all through. The merchant captain surrendering to Flint banner, then attacking Dufresne because he clearly isn't Flint. All the business about Anne and Jack's reputation as crew killers. Hornigold, Charles Vane, Eleanor Guthrie, Ned Low, and James Flint all contending for face against each other. Oh so fatally for McGraw and the Hamiltons in the London flashbacks. jack's obsession with his banner design is played as another example of what the other pirates see as a sort of effeminacy in Jack, which they tend to read as weakness due to societal patriarchal programming. The more I think about it, I think it is displaced anxiety about his reputation and what that means for his first captaincy. the banner has to be right, because he's not convinced HE is right, that he can really pull it off. The banner is his symbol, his public persona, his reputation made visible. I think he wants the scariest banner ever because he can't conceive of merchant captains in terror of his person, something he absolutely can't admit or show. That flag is him trying to fake it until he makes it. But it's just a theory. The flag passages are so odd they stand out like red flags, if you'll pardon the cliche.
5. "Thomas, he sees only the principle the right. It’s inspiring. It can be intoxicating. It’s why I love him. But you, you see the world as it is. You see it’s truths and how to navigate them, how to bend them to your will. It’s why I love you. Men like Thomas need men like you to protect them from the world."
— Lady Miranda Hamilton to Lt. James McGraw in Black Sails
I think something really important just happened there, thematically.
6. We get Richard Guthrie's belated pride in his daughter and their resulting reconciliation about ten minutes after we get James McGraw's utter rejection by his father figure over who he loves, and Thomas' fall at his own father's hands. The past and present Daddy issues passages in this episode are all in opposition, a structural warning about plans made this episode, I think.
7. It is pleasing to me that Randall is a Power too. A minor power, to be sure, but he is so often pivotal and it is so often overlooked. Silver routinely uses Randall in this way without really thinking about the implication. It is interesting that Billy knows it and acknowledges it openly. I love that Randall, like all the major cast, has his principles, motives, and goals he works towards. People often treat him as less than because of his intellectual challenges, but he absolutely stands up for himself and what he wants and he helps the ones who treat him decently, which has a lot more effect than I think anyone gives him credit for. It is interesting that Billy's warning about "what took me out" goes right over Silver's head. Silver is still working on the tactical. like Max, Billy is moving into the Realm of the strategic, setting up what was for me, the biggest plot twist of the season. (as I said, the Thomas/Flint reveal was telegraphed from 1.IV. For me, Billy was by far the biggest surprise.
8. Is is weird that I love all these characters so intensely for their flaws?
9. I keep thinking about the way the biggest pivots in this episode are the fall of the Miranda/Thomas/Flint triumvirate in the flashbacks, and the weakening of the Max/Anne/Jack triumvirate in the present, one through betrayal from without (I am judging you so hard, Peter Ashe) and the other through betrayal from within.
10. It's not just Peter Ashe Miranda fundamentally misjudges, it is James.
11. That subtle hesitation before surrendering to the kiss, that delicate caress of thumb to cheek break my heart a little every damned time.
12. The final few moments are fascinating, juxtaposing one intense sort of loving intimacy (Thomas/James) with the infinitely more violent one of assassin and intended prey (Charles/James).
13. This show's structure is the cleverest and tightest of any I can think of, every piece fitted together like a puzzle box.
* Ebay, One More time:
Lindworm 2012 (LE, DragonCon, Event Exclusive): (Company says: Smoky green leather smeared with crushed grasses and wild herbs). 3/4 Full. http://www.ebay.com/itm/301718133830?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
* A list of LGBTQA Charities to donate money to instead of seeing the racist Stonewall Movie that decided to portray a black trans woman activist as a cis white man. http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com
* "Federal Judge Hands Down The Wackiest Anti-Birth Control Court Decision To Date:" http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/08/31/3697119/federal-judge-hands-down-the-wackiest-anti-birth-control-court-decision-to-date/
* "The curious grammar of police shootings:" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/the-curious-grammar-of-police-shootings/
* I am hearing lots of police and people on the right generally insist that the shooting of a single police officer is proof that the Black Lives Matter is illegitimate and a hate group and ought to be dismantled immediately, but I do not seem those same, police, politicians and pundits calling for the police to be dismantled immediately on the grounds that they are illegitimate and a hate group despite them having murdered more than four hundred people so far this year including in many cases where there is ample evidence that people were unarmed and innocent of any crime. you can't have it both ways. If one police shooting is enough to require a large group of people to lose their first amendment rights to protest police murders, regardless of any guilt or condoning of that shooting, shouldn't the murder a single unarmed innocent person by the police demand the exact same action to occur to every police officer, murderer or not? here's a radical idea, instead of a sweeping loss of civil rights for innocent civilians, why not just start arresting ALL the known murders and aggressively prosecuting them instead of the current system of letting the ones in blue get a free pass and stop arbitrarily stealing the basic right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from millions of people based on racial animus.
* "The Kim Davis Case Is About Disobeying The Rule Of Law, Not About Religious Liberty:" http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/canyonwlkr/the_davis_case_is_about_breaking_the_law_not_about_religious_liberty
* "Prehistoric stone age petroglyphs discovered deep inside the Arctic Circle:" http://www.sott.net/article/300778-Prehistoric-stone-age-petroglyphs-discovered-deep-inside-the-Arctic-Circle
* Response to a Jonquility email, mostly about Black Sails XII-XIII, with some little bits changed for clarity:
"Put a man on an island, give him power over other men, and it won’t be long before he realizes that the limit of that power are nowhere to be seen. And no man, given that kind of influence will remain honest for very long."
— Lt. James McGraw to Lord Thomas Hamilton
I think you are right. It's an Éowyn situation. They could find no MAN to do it right, but Eleanor bids fair to do it. Well spotted. She may not be perfect, but she's as close as they are likely to get.
I honestly think there is deliberate ambiguity about what the deal is with James and Miranda. I can only hope we get some season three flashbacks to disambiguate it. I do think there is more to say about the Ashes as well. I am not holding my breath, but I do hold out a thread of hope.
I went back and watched the carriage scene a few more times since I wrote it up. I'm leaning towards him flirting with her and welcoming her kiss as camouflage. We know he's just bi enough to function in bed and we know how well he can act. As she points out in XII, they hang men for it. So yes, I wouldn't put it past Flint the clever planner to welcome her advances as part of his whole getting what he wants without anyone realizing how he did it ethos. I do think his affection for her was real, though by the end on that island they are tied together as much by anger and shame as some form of love. I think it's performative on both their parts. He is saying, Look how not gay I am, kissing a woman! She is saying to anyone outside the open carriage window, Look at how I am having an affair with this man and my husband totally isn't in love with him because I am! The semi-discreet staging is useful for both of them because it looks like ineffective cover up in the heat of passion rather than display to the onlookers. That's my current theory anyway.
I believe Miranda when she repeatedly says she loves her husband. I do think she loves James. Love is such a complicated word, with so many shades of meaning. I think the love for both is and was real. I think her fury and grief are as great as Flint's, though they often express them differently and make different decisions based on them.
I have been of the opinion since early in season one, that she likely shared men with Thomas and/or fabricated affairs to cover for Thomas. I do think that Miranda has a healthy love of sex herself, and I wouldn't be surprised if she has a history of lovers on her own account. I still think the taunt in the flashback fight scene about how if Lord Hamilton likes you enough he''l let you sleep with his wife is a reference to this pattern of her sleeping with or appearing to sleep with Thomas Hamilton's lovers.
I think Flint thinks he's telling the truth about wanting, like Odysseus, to carry his oar so far inland they think it's a shovel. I think Flint is lying to himself. I think if he were to fulfill Thomas' dream he'd need to find a new cause and die fighting for it, or else shrivel up and die, likely of drink. I think his grief and fury are so profound that there is very little left of him beyond his goal and the stratagems necessary to achieve it. Anne Bonny may look like the most shut down character in the show, but she's not even close. It's Flint. Flint is a dead man walking. We see him relax a little with Mr.Gates when they drank together that time, but you compare that with the flashback at the end of 13, his face with Thomas reading to him, with the vital, passionate, Lt. McGraw... yeah. He is so hard, he can do all these terrible things, including murdering his best friend, because he hates himself so much for not rescuing Thomas, that no other sin can hold a candle to it. Take the motivating goal that drives him away, and that grief and fury have nowhere to go but inward. Flint is the kind of fearless he is because his own life only has value insofar as he is working towards his goal.
As far as I can tell, Billy Bones is the only one who sees through Silver. He says so in different words, but so very clearly in XIII. It's in the fragment when he says that Silver wouldn't have come into such power if he'd been there to stop it.
* Black Sails Rewatch XIII:
1. The more I think of it, the more I believe Max set up the argument over the articles as part of her plan to seperate Anne and Jack. Think about it. Who negotiated Mr. Featherstone's offer of a ship and crew? How hard to manipulate would that be, exactly. Especially after the face she showed Jack in XII? She wouldn't even have to do it directly. How many of the crew were in her brothel that night and how many of them had clever women whispering about Anne the c rew killer, Anne who had Jack completely in her sway? Given prevailing misogyny anne is vulnerable the same way Eleanor is. They are women competing in a man's world on men's terms, and just like today, women must be twice as good or more than the best man to be seen as half as good by an incredibly sexist society. Anne can't just be _A_ pirate, she pretty much needs to be _the Best_ pirate, or very close to it. And pirates crews are pretty close to pure democracies. Their leaders are elected and can be deposed by a vote or violence pretty quickly.
So say Max set Jack up, by giving him what he thinks he wants, then subtly undermining him, knowing he is likely to be a weak captain, and simultaneously uses that to weaken his relationship with Anne. I think Max is every bit as intelligent as Flint, Charles, and Eleanor. She's less experienced, but she has a knack for politics, a strong hold on her power base, and looks to be an incredibly fast learner, never having to learn the same lesson twice. I think she could do it.
What is the very first thing we see this episode? She very deliberately takes action during the threesome to make Anne jealous of her and Jack. I'd bet money she's sewing the seed knowing the article negotiation is coming in a few hours and Jack is good enough at crew politics that he will have to pick Max over Anne for all the reasons he gives Anne. And jack, the idiot, doesn't think that Anne literally asked him to watch her back last night in their dealings with Max, and less than a day later, he's picking Max. It's a brilliant trap, really, and Max has seen that Jack is limited in that particular way: that he is blinded by the immediate prize to long term implications, and that he can be utterly thoughtless about the ways Anne is vulnerable. I think part of that is that he doesn't think of her sex at all outside of the actual fucking, in a very male privilege sort of way. I also think a big part of it is that she is so tough and dangerous, way more tough and dangerous than he is. Even if long ago he rescued her, for most of their time together, she has been physically protecting him, just as he does social for her. Despite the scars on her back and her history, all he sees his her strength. I think he has trouble remembering she can be hurt or imagining how what is logic to him is an incredibly deep betrayal to her.
2. In this episode we see Miranda Hamilton being absolutely right in the London flashback. (It is time to stop now before tragedy strikes), and the way that informs Miranda Barlow's calculation about Peter Ashe. You can see why she is so utterly convinced she is right and Flint is wrong. After all, James was wrong last time and Peter Ashe made all those pretty offers of help. And so another Hamilton tragedy is set up starring Ashe the betrayer in a pivotal roll.
3. In the first shot of the first flashback scene, the first glimpse of Miranda this episode, she is holding that infamous copy of Marcus Aurelius. Moment before she goes to tell Thomas that James is back. Right before she warns her husband about people digging deeper. Ouch. So much ouch.
4 Jack's line: "We all have the same swords out there, we all have the same guns, but great art has felled empires," sounds frivolous and pretentious, much as Jack Rackham often looks, but there is a point here. So much of Season two has been thematically about the power of reputation for good or ill. Think about it. It's threaded all through. The merchant captain surrendering to Flint banner, then attacking Dufresne because he clearly isn't Flint. All the business about Anne and Jack's reputation as crew killers. Hornigold, Charles Vane, Eleanor Guthrie, Ned Low, and James Flint all contending for face against each other. Oh so fatally for McGraw and the Hamiltons in the London flashbacks. jack's obsession with his banner design is played as another example of what the other pirates see as a sort of effeminacy in Jack, which they tend to read as weakness due to societal patriarchal programming. The more I think about it, I think it is displaced anxiety about his reputation and what that means for his first captaincy. the banner has to be right, because he's not convinced HE is right, that he can really pull it off. The banner is his symbol, his public persona, his reputation made visible. I think he wants the scariest banner ever because he can't conceive of merchant captains in terror of his person, something he absolutely can't admit or show. That flag is him trying to fake it until he makes it. But it's just a theory. The flag passages are so odd they stand out like red flags, if you'll pardon the cliche.
5. "Thomas, he sees only the principle the right. It’s inspiring. It can be intoxicating. It’s why I love him. But you, you see the world as it is. You see it’s truths and how to navigate them, how to bend them to your will. It’s why I love you. Men like Thomas need men like you to protect them from the world."
— Lady Miranda Hamilton to Lt. James McGraw in Black Sails
I think something really important just happened there, thematically.
6. We get Richard Guthrie's belated pride in his daughter and their resulting reconciliation about ten minutes after we get James McGraw's utter rejection by his father figure over who he loves, and Thomas' fall at his own father's hands. The past and present Daddy issues passages in this episode are all in opposition, a structural warning about plans made this episode, I think.
7. It is pleasing to me that Randall is a Power too. A minor power, to be sure, but he is so often pivotal and it is so often overlooked. Silver routinely uses Randall in this way without really thinking about the implication. It is interesting that Billy knows it and acknowledges it openly. I love that Randall, like all the major cast, has his principles, motives, and goals he works towards. People often treat him as less than because of his intellectual challenges, but he absolutely stands up for himself and what he wants and he helps the ones who treat him decently, which has a lot more effect than I think anyone gives him credit for. It is interesting that Billy's warning about "what took me out" goes right over Silver's head. Silver is still working on the tactical. like Max, Billy is moving into the Realm of the strategic, setting up what was for me, the biggest plot twist of the season. (as I said, the Thomas/Flint reveal was telegraphed from 1.IV. For me, Billy was by far the biggest surprise.
8. Is is weird that I love all these characters so intensely for their flaws?
9. I keep thinking about the way the biggest pivots in this episode are the fall of the Miranda/Thomas/Flint triumvirate in the flashbacks, and the weakening of the Max/Anne/Jack triumvirate in the present, one through betrayal from without (I am judging you so hard, Peter Ashe) and the other through betrayal from within.
10. It's not just Peter Ashe Miranda fundamentally misjudges, it is James.
11. That subtle hesitation before surrendering to the kiss, that delicate caress of thumb to cheek break my heart a little every damned time.
12. The final few moments are fascinating, juxtaposing one intense sort of loving intimacy (Thomas/James) with the infinitely more violent one of assassin and intended prey (Charles/James).
13. This show's structure is the cleverest and tightest of any I can think of, every piece fitted together like a puzzle box.
* Ebay, One More time:
Lindworm 2012 (LE, DragonCon, Event Exclusive): (Company says: Smoky green leather smeared with crushed grasses and wild herbs). 3/4 Full. http://www.ebay.com/itm/301718133830?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
* A list of LGBTQA Charities to donate money to instead of seeing the racist Stonewall Movie that decided to portray a black trans woman activist as a cis white man. http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-07 03:35 pm (UTC)