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Mar. 14th, 2016 01:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* It's like praising W for his "low key" response to Katrina. "Hillary Clinton Lauds Reagans on AIDS. A Backlash Erupts.:" http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/03/11/hillary-clinton-lauds-reagans-on-aids-a-backlash-erupts/?_r=0
* "Being A Girl: A Brief Personal History of Violence:" http://bellejar.ca/2015/12/03/being-a-girl-a-brief-personal-history-of-violence/
* "Second Wachowski filmmaker sibling comes out as trans:" http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Second-Wachowski-filmmaker-sibling-comes-out-as-trans-/54509.html
* Thanks to a last minute bidding flurry, I made insurance + postage/packaging, but not ebay fees and this week's meds money. *facepalm* I'm still recovering from Dolphin Festival and have achieved fuck all on getting the house ready for guests. LM is stressed out still from hector going, squirrel's computer is down and I'm struggling with basics, like remembering how to walk when I get out of bed and bare minimum maintenance. Ugh.
* "DRUM TAO:"
* Black Sails XXVI
* We start the episode with Charles Vane and Flint debating freedom vs, security with Charles on the freedom side. We end with Charles in a cell. Beautiful. All of it surrounded with Miranda's things and thus the ghost of her own tension between those things. The lingering camera shots of her belongings made me think of tombs and grave goods, for all her body doesn't lie here. It's not just haunted by Miranda, but what this place represented for Flint, the last of James McGraw and the dream he shared with the Hamiltons, the Hamiltons and the dream all killed for him one way or another by Peter Ashe. He's now rejected that vision, realized he can never go back, but he can't quite let go the longing for a domesticity he only ever played at here, but fought for so hard between his exile and her death. Two Deaths, Two ghost captains, a psychopomp/Charon, the river Styx, and now a tomb. Death is everywhere this season.
* "All these things– porcelain, books… all so goddamn fragile. The energy it must take to maintain it all." Yes, Charles, so much energy, both in the amount it cost them to keep this facade up in the small scale, but also in the large sense of soviety and empire. So fragile, as Flint has seen over and over. Reputations, even lives, so very, very fragile. Flint's remaining veneer of civilization, much the same. We'll see how it works out for Nassau in a bit.
* I love how naturally they laid the exposition in the first scene, layered into Anne's character appropriate frustration with waiting.
* Jack's gallows sense of humor is very much my own. Him advising the pirate rodent is so perfect, self mocking and sincere all at once. his advise is a fundamental statement of operating principles, I think. It's his story in a nutshell, why he became a pirate, how he lives, "That’s for you. Consider that your share. For the company. I suspect I’ll be leaving shortly. Don’t despair. Some other poor bastard’ll take my place soon enough. I wish I could assure you that he would be as generous as I with his scraps. Either way, you mustn’t settle for whatever refuse finds its way into this cell. There’s a whole world out there that every so often rewards ambition. Mark my words. Today the crumbs, tomorrow the loaf. Perhaps someday the whole damn boulangerie. You’re welcome."
* Jack's faith in Anne is in every Jack scene since his capture, really. As soon as he knows what Woodes has done, he knows she is coming for him, one way or another. he can't know what her resources are, but he knows she will come.
* I kind of love that the universal reaction amoung those who know Anne to learning that Woodes has robbed her and betrayed her by keeping Jack is incredulity followed immediately by the assumption that some sort of horrifying bloody vengeance is about to descend. The only surpise is how long she was willing to wait, which really only happened because Vane and later Flint were there to get her to do it a tad more twisty.
* More nicely natural exposition, this time Silver explaining to Madi, done in a very Silver way. it's also a useful reminder that silver, for all his political skill and ability to see implications of bits of information, is barely a sailor and not at all a navigator, or anything like skilled at the ship tactical part of Captaining. He's relying on his confident demeanor and the skills of people like DeGroot and the actual sailors to pot the ship where it needs to be. I suspect that will soon rather bite them in the ass, but that's entirely speculation. it just felt like foreshadowing to me, likely for the upcoming contest with that wily old alligator, Hornigold.
* Madi brings talk around to the Dufresne incident and the decent into darkness. I think he is on a path "to a place you would not be able to return from." I think he's definately on the way to it.
* Max is not going to fall for Georgia.
* Like Jack, Max figures it out as soon as she knows exactly what Woodes has done and how Anne responded. Eleanor has the sense to believe her.
* "It is fascinating to me how stubbornly you people expect the unlikeliest of outcomes because you prefer them. You expect the world to become what you want it to be despite all available evidence and experience to the contrary." — Woodes Rogers to Jack Rackham, exhibiting a stunning lack of self awareness.
* Period appropriate sexism on display in the Red Coats' dismissal of Eleanor and Max nearly kills Woodes Rogers. Hornigold, sensibly listens, because he is way to clever not to take Eleanor seriously. The way the alliances plausibly shift never ceases to amuse me.
* I like the way the missing piece of how Featherstone knew is tucked into the Red coat/Eleanor/Max conversation without anyone in the scene knowing what just happened.
* Silver's action was the only one he could take that had any chance of working that I could see. Madi's rebuke to Silver is so deserved: "When I speak, my men listen, and they do as I say."
* Jack's backstory bookends with the mouse advice. It also has echoes with flint. he too has been robbed of his old life by rich men in power. In his case the Empire ate his father and the family business instead of a lover and friend and a naval career, but it resonates, especially since we started the episode in Miranda's abandoned house, surrounded by her things and cut to Jack's mouse scene. Jack lost everything once and this is the life he made in response. This is the man he became in response. The contrast is alarming when you put him next to Flint. Loss made them both pirates, but very different pirates and even more different men. I love his panache here, "'You people, incapable of accepting the world as it is,' says the man to whom the world handed everything. If no Anne, if no rescue, if this is defeat for me, then know this. You and I were neck and neck in this race right till the end. But, Jesus, did I make up a lot of ground to catch you."
* Woodes Roger's reply is the rattle of a snakes tail and hints at things I've suspected about him since at least 3.2. "But there are things you leave out of the book. Things you leave out because if it got around polite society what you're capable of when pushed, they might stop inviting you to their dinner parties. All you know about me is what I want you to know." He's warned Jack before in that conversation about taking control of one's own story by writing it.
* How gloriously swashbuckling the carriage chase fight was, and how startlingly realistically destructive. We are so used to sanitized violence in scenes like this. I don't just mean the bullets doing serious damage (like blowing of the top of a man's head), but also the carriage. We're so used to the cinematic language of old school Zorros or Errol Flynn type pictures, that seeing everything come apart like that is somehow shocking. We're so far removed from that world, it's easy to forget that carriage accidents were really scary and people died.
* In scenes like these I always wonder what happens to the horses. Did they run home? Is someone about to make money selling pretty horses to the farmers of the interior? I know, I know, a thing of no matter, but horses are very expensive and that was a well matched team that look very expensive indeed, plus all the riding horses running loose after their riders went down. I'm like this about all sorts of things. I hate scenes where they break irreplaceable art treasures in action films too. I know they are props, but....
* Charles Fucking Vane sacrificing himself again, for Jack and Anne this time.
* Back on the ship, I can't let go the idea that once again the black characters are being asked to sacrifice, to be the bigger people in the face of violent white behavior. "So I will fight this thing rising up in me eager to see more blood spilled today, and I will serve them by minding their future and doing the hard thing that will lead to the outcome desired by all of us." - Madi
* I wish I could better see who is in the blanket party specifically besides the obvious ones.
* Max and Eleanor have a discussion about what's happening next, given the fever, the suspected attack on the caravan, and the situation with the Spanish. Max correctly works out there is a spy. I just love watching them be the adults in the room together, two Powers. Max is every bit a Captain now.
* Apropos of nothing, I continue to love Max's ward robe.
* Flint's instinct is to do for Charles what Charles did for him, for the identical stated reason: "Charles Vane swinging over Nassau is a statement we cannot afford to be made." That's essentially Charles argument for rescuing Flint from charlestown at the end of season two. Billy pops up again with a perfectly valid argument for that being a terrible idea, "We're about to get the war you wanted and perhaps a credible path towards something resembling victory, but the war is going to follow that chest and you're the only one of us who can marshal it," which Jack backs up with a pretty accurate, "He's right. If Charles knew we were even contemplating jeopardizing the grander effort to save him, he'd kill us all." Perfectly rational, and yet Billy's expression sure looks like love and the counter proposal he makes puts his own life at risk instead of Flint's, just like his counter proposal in XXV. Just saying. Billy's plan is rather Silverish, the bright to Silver's shadow. Like Flint and Silver and Woodes Rogers, he grasps the power of Story. He plans to tell Vane's story. I love how it echoes the Anne/Jack conversation about Vane's reputation early on in the season and what people would do to have him call them a real pirate. I love the way it plays on all the conversations about reputation and legendary pirates threaded all through the season.
* Judging by Flint's face at the end, he Saw Billy.
* Woodes Rogers acknowledges that Eleanor saved him. Now he's trying to suss out where she is when it comes to her ex. (The fact the big one on one fight this episode was her current vs. her ex wasn't lost on me). Eleanor is honest about knowing how she'll react. I know exactly how messy that sort of tangle of love and hind brain desire and endless harm and betrayal can be, so I'm not placing bets either way.
* Woodes Rogers has it, doesn't he? And we had a strong reminder today that his men won't listen to her, and that she and Max and Hornigold are the only ones with the kind of minds and local knowledge to fight for Woodes' vision effectively.
* EBAYs, Relist:
I AM TIRED OF TEARS AND LAUGHTER 2013 (LE): (Company Says: White lavender, oudh, and Siamese benzoin.) Just below label Top. http://www.ebay.com/itm/301897374753?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
FOREVER IS MERCY BUILT 2013 (LE, Gifts with Donation or Purchase): (Company Says: Tamarind, tonka bean, patchouli, golden amber, and white fig.) Just below label Top. http://www.ebay.com/itm/301897382130?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
DIVERSIONS IN THE CHASHITSU 2014 (LE, Lupercalia, Shungas): (Company Says: Green tea, yellow sandalwood, apple blossom, and white bamboo.) just Below Label Top. http://www.ebay.com/itm/301897384860?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
BUT MEN LOVED DARKNESS RATHER THAN LIGHT 2009 (LE, Yules): (Company Says: The world will love its darkness: cistus labdanum, ginger, East Indian patchouli, pimento berry, oakmoss, saffron, smoky vanilla, sage, myrrh, and bitter clove.) 2/3 Full. http://www.ebay.com/itm/301897386710?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
* Help pay for gas to get a rescue kitty safe to his new forever home. paypal@ninjakitten.com
* Want to help the people of Fiji in the wake of Cyclone Winston?: http://www.redcross.com.fj/
* Zimbabwe has joined Ethiopia in disaster level drought People and animals are dying. Want to help? https://www.wfp.org/help
* Help the poisoned children of Flint Michigan. "Water Crisis:&"; https://www.cfgf.org/cfgf/GoodWork/FlintArea/WaterCrisis/tabid/855/Default.aspx
* "How to help Flint, Michigan:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/how-help-flint-michigan
* Want to help finance my meds/medical co pays? Paypal Lethran@gmail.com
* Donate to help refugees "UN Refugee Agency:" http://donate.unhcr.org/international/general
* Organizations helping with the refugee crisis: http://captainofalltheships.tumblr.com/post/128790538169/an-updated-list-of-organizations-to-donate-to-help
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com
* "Being A Girl: A Brief Personal History of Violence:" http://bellejar.ca/2015/12/03/being-a-girl-a-brief-personal-history-of-violence/
* "Second Wachowski filmmaker sibling comes out as trans:" http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Second-Wachowski-filmmaker-sibling-comes-out-as-trans-/54509.html
* Thanks to a last minute bidding flurry, I made insurance + postage/packaging, but not ebay fees and this week's meds money. *facepalm* I'm still recovering from Dolphin Festival and have achieved fuck all on getting the house ready for guests. LM is stressed out still from hector going, squirrel's computer is down and I'm struggling with basics, like remembering how to walk when I get out of bed and bare minimum maintenance. Ugh.
* "DRUM TAO:"
* Black Sails XXVI
* We start the episode with Charles Vane and Flint debating freedom vs, security with Charles on the freedom side. We end with Charles in a cell. Beautiful. All of it surrounded with Miranda's things and thus the ghost of her own tension between those things. The lingering camera shots of her belongings made me think of tombs and grave goods, for all her body doesn't lie here. It's not just haunted by Miranda, but what this place represented for Flint, the last of James McGraw and the dream he shared with the Hamiltons, the Hamiltons and the dream all killed for him one way or another by Peter Ashe. He's now rejected that vision, realized he can never go back, but he can't quite let go the longing for a domesticity he only ever played at here, but fought for so hard between his exile and her death. Two Deaths, Two ghost captains, a psychopomp/Charon, the river Styx, and now a tomb. Death is everywhere this season.
* "All these things– porcelain, books… all so goddamn fragile. The energy it must take to maintain it all." Yes, Charles, so much energy, both in the amount it cost them to keep this facade up in the small scale, but also in the large sense of soviety and empire. So fragile, as Flint has seen over and over. Reputations, even lives, so very, very fragile. Flint's remaining veneer of civilization, much the same. We'll see how it works out for Nassau in a bit.
* I love how naturally they laid the exposition in the first scene, layered into Anne's character appropriate frustration with waiting.
* Jack's gallows sense of humor is very much my own. Him advising the pirate rodent is so perfect, self mocking and sincere all at once. his advise is a fundamental statement of operating principles, I think. It's his story in a nutshell, why he became a pirate, how he lives, "That’s for you. Consider that your share. For the company. I suspect I’ll be leaving shortly. Don’t despair. Some other poor bastard’ll take my place soon enough. I wish I could assure you that he would be as generous as I with his scraps. Either way, you mustn’t settle for whatever refuse finds its way into this cell. There’s a whole world out there that every so often rewards ambition. Mark my words. Today the crumbs, tomorrow the loaf. Perhaps someday the whole damn boulangerie. You’re welcome."
* Jack's faith in Anne is in every Jack scene since his capture, really. As soon as he knows what Woodes has done, he knows she is coming for him, one way or another. he can't know what her resources are, but he knows she will come.
* I kind of love that the universal reaction amoung those who know Anne to learning that Woodes has robbed her and betrayed her by keeping Jack is incredulity followed immediately by the assumption that some sort of horrifying bloody vengeance is about to descend. The only surpise is how long she was willing to wait, which really only happened because Vane and later Flint were there to get her to do it a tad more twisty.
* More nicely natural exposition, this time Silver explaining to Madi, done in a very Silver way. it's also a useful reminder that silver, for all his political skill and ability to see implications of bits of information, is barely a sailor and not at all a navigator, or anything like skilled at the ship tactical part of Captaining. He's relying on his confident demeanor and the skills of people like DeGroot and the actual sailors to pot the ship where it needs to be. I suspect that will soon rather bite them in the ass, but that's entirely speculation. it just felt like foreshadowing to me, likely for the upcoming contest with that wily old alligator, Hornigold.
* Madi brings talk around to the Dufresne incident and the decent into darkness. I think he is on a path "to a place you would not be able to return from." I think he's definately on the way to it.
* Max is not going to fall for Georgia.
* Like Jack, Max figures it out as soon as she knows exactly what Woodes has done and how Anne responded. Eleanor has the sense to believe her.
* "It is fascinating to me how stubbornly you people expect the unlikeliest of outcomes because you prefer them. You expect the world to become what you want it to be despite all available evidence and experience to the contrary." — Woodes Rogers to Jack Rackham, exhibiting a stunning lack of self awareness.
* Period appropriate sexism on display in the Red Coats' dismissal of Eleanor and Max nearly kills Woodes Rogers. Hornigold, sensibly listens, because he is way to clever not to take Eleanor seriously. The way the alliances plausibly shift never ceases to amuse me.
* I like the way the missing piece of how Featherstone knew is tucked into the Red coat/Eleanor/Max conversation without anyone in the scene knowing what just happened.
* Silver's action was the only one he could take that had any chance of working that I could see. Madi's rebuke to Silver is so deserved: "When I speak, my men listen, and they do as I say."
* Jack's backstory bookends with the mouse advice. It also has echoes with flint. he too has been robbed of his old life by rich men in power. In his case the Empire ate his father and the family business instead of a lover and friend and a naval career, but it resonates, especially since we started the episode in Miranda's abandoned house, surrounded by her things and cut to Jack's mouse scene. Jack lost everything once and this is the life he made in response. This is the man he became in response. The contrast is alarming when you put him next to Flint. Loss made them both pirates, but very different pirates and even more different men. I love his panache here, "'You people, incapable of accepting the world as it is,' says the man to whom the world handed everything. If no Anne, if no rescue, if this is defeat for me, then know this. You and I were neck and neck in this race right till the end. But, Jesus, did I make up a lot of ground to catch you."
* Woodes Roger's reply is the rattle of a snakes tail and hints at things I've suspected about him since at least 3.2. "But there are things you leave out of the book. Things you leave out because if it got around polite society what you're capable of when pushed, they might stop inviting you to their dinner parties. All you know about me is what I want you to know." He's warned Jack before in that conversation about taking control of one's own story by writing it.
* How gloriously swashbuckling the carriage chase fight was, and how startlingly realistically destructive. We are so used to sanitized violence in scenes like this. I don't just mean the bullets doing serious damage (like blowing of the top of a man's head), but also the carriage. We're so used to the cinematic language of old school Zorros or Errol Flynn type pictures, that seeing everything come apart like that is somehow shocking. We're so far removed from that world, it's easy to forget that carriage accidents were really scary and people died.
* In scenes like these I always wonder what happens to the horses. Did they run home? Is someone about to make money selling pretty horses to the farmers of the interior? I know, I know, a thing of no matter, but horses are very expensive and that was a well matched team that look very expensive indeed, plus all the riding horses running loose after their riders went down. I'm like this about all sorts of things. I hate scenes where they break irreplaceable art treasures in action films too. I know they are props, but....
* Charles Fucking Vane sacrificing himself again, for Jack and Anne this time.
* Back on the ship, I can't let go the idea that once again the black characters are being asked to sacrifice, to be the bigger people in the face of violent white behavior. "So I will fight this thing rising up in me eager to see more blood spilled today, and I will serve them by minding their future and doing the hard thing that will lead to the outcome desired by all of us." - Madi
* I wish I could better see who is in the blanket party specifically besides the obvious ones.
* Max and Eleanor have a discussion about what's happening next, given the fever, the suspected attack on the caravan, and the situation with the Spanish. Max correctly works out there is a spy. I just love watching them be the adults in the room together, two Powers. Max is every bit a Captain now.
* Apropos of nothing, I continue to love Max's ward robe.
* Flint's instinct is to do for Charles what Charles did for him, for the identical stated reason: "Charles Vane swinging over Nassau is a statement we cannot afford to be made." That's essentially Charles argument for rescuing Flint from charlestown at the end of season two. Billy pops up again with a perfectly valid argument for that being a terrible idea, "We're about to get the war you wanted and perhaps a credible path towards something resembling victory, but the war is going to follow that chest and you're the only one of us who can marshal it," which Jack backs up with a pretty accurate, "He's right. If Charles knew we were even contemplating jeopardizing the grander effort to save him, he'd kill us all." Perfectly rational, and yet Billy's expression sure looks like love and the counter proposal he makes puts his own life at risk instead of Flint's, just like his counter proposal in XXV. Just saying. Billy's plan is rather Silverish, the bright to Silver's shadow. Like Flint and Silver and Woodes Rogers, he grasps the power of Story. He plans to tell Vane's story. I love how it echoes the Anne/Jack conversation about Vane's reputation early on in the season and what people would do to have him call them a real pirate. I love the way it plays on all the conversations about reputation and legendary pirates threaded all through the season.
* Judging by Flint's face at the end, he Saw Billy.
* Woodes Rogers acknowledges that Eleanor saved him. Now he's trying to suss out where she is when it comes to her ex. (The fact the big one on one fight this episode was her current vs. her ex wasn't lost on me). Eleanor is honest about knowing how she'll react. I know exactly how messy that sort of tangle of love and hind brain desire and endless harm and betrayal can be, so I'm not placing bets either way.
* Woodes Rogers has it, doesn't he? And we had a strong reminder today that his men won't listen to her, and that she and Max and Hornigold are the only ones with the kind of minds and local knowledge to fight for Woodes' vision effectively.
* EBAYs, Relist:
I AM TIRED OF TEARS AND LAUGHTER 2013 (LE): (Company Says: White lavender, oudh, and Siamese benzoin.) Just below label Top. http://www.ebay.com/itm/301897374753?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
FOREVER IS MERCY BUILT 2013 (LE, Gifts with Donation or Purchase): (Company Says: Tamarind, tonka bean, patchouli, golden amber, and white fig.) Just below label Top. http://www.ebay.com/itm/301897382130?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
DIVERSIONS IN THE CHASHITSU 2014 (LE, Lupercalia, Shungas): (Company Says: Green tea, yellow sandalwood, apple blossom, and white bamboo.) just Below Label Top. http://www.ebay.com/itm/301897384860?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
BUT MEN LOVED DARKNESS RATHER THAN LIGHT 2009 (LE, Yules): (Company Says: The world will love its darkness: cistus labdanum, ginger, East Indian patchouli, pimento berry, oakmoss, saffron, smoky vanilla, sage, myrrh, and bitter clove.) 2/3 Full. http://www.ebay.com/itm/301897386710?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
* Help pay for gas to get a rescue kitty safe to his new forever home. paypal@ninjakitten.com
* Want to help the people of Fiji in the wake of Cyclone Winston?: http://www.redcross.com.fj/
* Zimbabwe has joined Ethiopia in disaster level drought People and animals are dying. Want to help? https://www.wfp.org/help
* Help the poisoned children of Flint Michigan. "Water Crisis:&"; https://www.cfgf.org/cfgf/GoodWork/FlintArea/WaterCrisis/tabid/855/Default.aspx
* "How to help Flint, Michigan:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/how-help-flint-michigan
* Want to help finance my meds/medical co pays? Paypal Lethran@gmail.com
* Donate to help refugees "UN Refugee Agency:" http://donate.unhcr.org/international/general
* Organizations helping with the refugee crisis: http://captainofalltheships.tumblr.com/post/128790538169/an-updated-list-of-organizations-to-donate-to-help
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com