brain universe exploding image as I troll the depths of my indie cancon millennial lived experience to make a musicologically contemporaneous CRTC-approved Heated Rivalry mixtape
like
Resurrection, Lofticries, Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk obvsly but consider:
"#french and russian tunes admittedly more difficult as I try to venture beyond Malajube and stunt post soviet one-offs"
The band's concept is based around an alternate history in which the Patriotes won the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1838 and established a state based on the Declaration of Independence of Lower Canada. In the band's Bas-Canada (Lower Canada) mythology, the nation suffers none of the linguistic tensions between Anglophones and Francophones that exist in contemporary Quebec and Canadian society, and the band performs lyrics in both languages.
I am having a rly great time w this project
The group's 2013 album Les maigres blancs d'Amérique du Noir, whose title is a satirical pun on Pierre Vallières' Quebec revolutionary manifesto Les nègres blancs d'Amérique, was released on Google Records and was a long-listed nominee for the 2013 Polaris Music Prize.
Hudson Williams fakest cinephile of all time bc wdym he was two seats down from Luca Marinelli but in all the pictures and videos he's just hanging out w Ricky Martin and Tom Blythe or whoever?!?!!!!
my dream for the heated rivalry boys and 40 yo man is a life ruining career altering threesome c. s2 filming that we have to piece together through shady instagram stories
brain universe exploding image as I troll the depths of my indie cancon millennial lived experience to make a musicologically contemporaneous CRTC-approved Heated Rivalry mixtape
like
Resurrection, Lofticries, Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk obvsly but consider:
and I have to break my silence bc I haven't even seen anyone mention it much less a parallel gifset (pls pls pls) but my FAVOURITE Connor Storrie as Ilya acting moment is when he clumsily (for Ilya) rattles his empty beer bottle a little bit in ep 5 as he's pushing it away to make space for the new one the bartender sets in front of him
NORMAL SMOOTH SUAVE Ilya WOULD NEVER
NERVOUS GATHERING UP HIS COURAGE TO ASK SHANE IF HE'S BROUGHT ANYONE TO ALL-STAR WEEKEND ILYA CAN'T EVEN PROPERLY SLIDE HIS BEER BOTTLE OUT OF THE WAY
one of my twitter mutuals wrote a really interesting thread a few months ago about the dominance of hyperrealist naturalism as an acting style (reproduced in its entirety below the cut) — namely,
it really doesn't seem like actors today learn to pretend how to be someone else. instead, what they learn (& get very good at), is how to display unspoken thoughts on their face (which is not how real people actually behave)
actors who come up through moving images seem to be especially bad at pretending to be someone else; that is a skill you learn through acting IRL—theater, sketches, what have you, just being a funny person with your friends
but the common sense association of acting with becoming a distinctly & visibly different person, a character, isn't at all what moving images necessarily need, & it seems to lead to a lot of very bad casting; everyone assumes it's just in every actor's toolkit, but it's not.
[...]
and I think it's one aspect of the lighting-in-the-bottle making Heated Rivalry esp compelling.
HudCon were cast in a way that is sharply against these trends of actors playing a plausible version of themselves and/or a sort of reverent over-identification with their characters. And in doing so, both must maintain a level of detachment from the people they are pretending to be, requiring a more explicit commitment to the bit as a bit, which is then always a Performance.
This is p obvious w Ilya/Connor, but I think the kind of ironic distance alluded to in the original thread is equally relevant w Shane/Hudson given how he often relates to the character in interviews etc as a persona to insult (lovingly) and slap around.
The argument of Heated Rivalry being somehow 'exceptional' following that thread's particular analysis kind of goes off the rails in terms of "hypertransparency" and naturalism given the usual reliance on micro-expressions as a way to indicate prestige/good acting and in fact is a perfect example of the just-in-time conditions of production described at the end of the thread; HudCon were chosen precisely because of their uncanny and instantaneous rapport that thus did not require the time/preparation/resources that were completely inaccessible by dint of the budget and production process.
But I think there is something to Heated Rivalry being an adaptation and its specific nature (genre m/m romance written by a woman for mostly female audiences -> gay male director/showrunner/writer coming from a completely different artistic background/tradition/subculture + HudCon) that points the production towards an extremely successful navigation of that tightrope between overly hammy camp and dour method acting. And a condition of respect but not reverence and engagement with the work as a text to be played with and get interesting results out of.
+ HudCon's backgrounds!!! A literal clown! both sides of the camera! endless indie productions!
anyway, the whole phenomenon is neat neat neat and I'm v happy to experience it even as I don't vibe w the original source and have so far been unsuccessful getting into the pairing in my usual obsessive otp way. (whole separate thing about fandom generations, approaches to bdsm, top/bottom discourse, 'fetish' etc etc)
twitter user pHiycrtyl / audio book narrator Patrick Harrison:
"it really doesn't seem like actors today learn to pretend how to be someone else. instead, what they learn (& get very good at), is how to display unspoken thoughts on their face (which is not how real people actually behave)
actors who come up through moving images seem to be especially bad at pretending to be someone else; that is a skill you learn through acting IRL—theater, sketches, what have you, just being a funny person with your friends
but the common sense association of acting with becoming a distinctly & visibly different person, a character, isn't at all what moving images necessarily need, & it seems to lead to a lot of very bad casting; everyone assumes it's just in every actor's toolkit, but it's not.
it just seems to me, as a hyper consumer of moving images, this mistake is becoming alarmingly prevalent. to take a very banal example, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. the whole premise of this show is a partial return to the campy roots of Trek, but the cast is terrible at it.
everyone in this cast has an acting style redolent of MFA programs, which makes them very fine indeed at giving naturalistic* performances of characters not too distant from themselves, but the cast falls flat on its face in its holodeck or magical episodes
i can only assume that Ethan Peck, the only person who's good at it & the best Spock since Nimoy, just has a natural talent, cultivated since childhood (he is the grandson of Gregory Peck) at pretending to be another person
contemporary aesthetic norms encourage actors to over-identify w/ their characters & discourage an ironic comportment towards texts. this has good intentions—if you play a joke just as a joke, as false, it will not be funny—but can also go too far.
i work w/ a director speaks of almost everything as "gags." this is a helpful way of thinking about things. whereas actors are encouraged to be hyper-functional, never to fail—to accompany every line w/ paragraphs of unspoken propositional sentences written on their face—this…
…this is not true to life. people are usually dysfunctional, inadequate to themselves & their situation, involuntarily so. situations are dysfunctions; we are only paying attention to them, only dramatizing them in the first place, bc they are not functioning successfully.
an actor must preserve a capacity for ironic distance as a reading intellect, be able, initially or in the process, to take a step back from overidentification w/ the character & identify the gags that need to be given space to transpire & be appreciated by the audience
the gag is like the tightrope the actor must walk (tightrope performance itself is all about gags) to carry the audience away. if the peril on one side is hammy falsity & the other is humorless overcommittment, below is the same abyss, an unmoved audience.
naturalistic* performances have become identified w/ actors accompanying every line w/ a litany of unspoken thoughts expressed on their faces. one day we will be re-sensitized to just how artificial this is; this hyper-transparency will seem bizarre & silly.
the issue here is not JUST that the expression of unspoken thoughts is done too much as compared w/ real life. yes, our faces color our words & even betray us in real life, if not w/ that degree of frequency, intensity, and (what is least true to life) redundancy.
the issue as always is the myopic & ideological insistence on realism. yes, cinema has a special power to convey an illusion of realism, but in mainstream cinema that illusory reality is typically only conjured in the service of a higher illusion, namely, that the story matters
now, maybe the story does matter, or maybe it's just ideological horseshit. but realism or naturalism isn't the only way to make stories matter, bc the camera makes, or can make, everything & everyone matter. that is the proven magic & promise of cinema.
what appears on screen is a mask or an idol, made of light & shadow: a star. there are as many ways to fashion these artificial beings as there are of fashioning gods. i mean this literally.
this is why you can use professional actors or non-professional actors or hand-drawn or computer-generated images or puppets or create a new being out of what purports to be merely recorded, documentary footage. it all works on us.
i would just like to see more variety out there. moving images give us more even powers for creating characters than live performance, but they are used as if they gave us fewer.
the style of acting that's been analyzed here is probably above all an adaptation to economic exigencies. we have a moving image economy that traffics in banal realism & limited imagination. actors are expected to show up & do their jobs w/o rehearsal.
i don't think most people realize this: in the real economy of screen production, there is almost no rehearsal & little artistically meaningful direction. actors show up having done a ton of individual preparation on their part & shoot.
actors are generally cast bc they "look" appropriate to the part & have a resume demonstrating reliability. most directors don't know anything about acting, don't need to; they are racing against the clock to get set ups done. actors are the last thing they have time for.
what actors bring to set is their individual preparation & cultivated ability to interact credibly & spontaneously w/ scene partners. they don't really get to practice; they just have to show up and do it right. like, it's crazy that it works at all, ever.
you can see how the exigencies of casting militate against actors showing up & behaving like a visibly different person. likewise, the individualization of the work & the time pressure encourages hypertransparency.
what every actor longs for today is to become a series regular bc it's the closest you can get to actually getting paid to do real acting, acting that approximates the conditions of theater, the foundation of many's training
the working actor is more like the session musician than most people realize. they cultivate a very strange skill over years & must be able to use it, at once, for someone else's ends. hypertransparency is, perhaps, the aesthetics of just-in-time (moving image) production."
"Connor Storrie's hairstylist, Candice Birns, took inspiration from Kurt Cobain's 1986 mugshot for the Heated Rivalry star's “mod mullet” at the 2026 Golden Globes."
ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok okaaaaaaaaay
Brushed forward to achieve a fringe and slicked in the back for an on-trend mullet, the hairstyle comes courtesy of celebrity hairstylist Candice Birns, whose inspiration struck during a flight when Kurt Cobain’s mugshot from 1986 came across her feed.
“I started looking for Patrick Swayze in Point Break, and then I pulled up an old photo of the Beatles, like circa ’67 arrow, and I was like, ‘OK, if the three of these had a baby, this could be your hair,’” Birns tells GQ.
[...]
She describes Storrie’s hairstyle as a “mod mullet,” combining the look of ’60s mod with a bit of ’90s grunge. Styling the look started with wetting the hair and adding a curl cream, a hair oil, and mouse pomade to “give the hair a bit of grit and grease to it.” The idea was for the hair to have a bit of an edge and remove any of the usual fluffiness. To tame the natural waviness of the hair, Birns went in with a tight nozzle attachment on her blow dryer, smoothening and straightening the locks with her fingers, essentially pulling out the curls. Birns’s final touch for the mod mullet involved taking a flat iron to create the “flips” at the ends of the hair at both the front and back of the style. An all-over spray completed the style, giving the hair a wet appearance and also highlighting the dimension and texture of the hair, which Birns says was important for the red carpet 360-degree lighting.
haven't seen a single Heated Rivalry edit w Metric or BSS or Wolf Parade or Godspeed! or Tegan and Sara or Stars, what is even the point (in being decrepitly millennial so basically the same canon age as Ilya and Shane)
like, even if it's not Canadian, this is at least the right era. plus I think part of the ep takes place in Brooklyn so it fits. but come onnnnn WHERE IS MY RUFUS WAINWRIGHT VID
there would have been at least two competing 2000 - 6000 word thinkpieces on Heated Rivalry 5 yrs ago and now I can't even find tumblr text posts. the age of mass internet literacy is over
Writers Against the War in Gaza twitter thread about the anti-genocide action at the NYT headquarters
"🧯BREAKING: Early this morning, actionists targeted the @nytimes headquarters in midtown Manhattan with paint-filled fire extinguishers. In an anonymous statement sent to our inbox, the actionists accused the NYT of being “an active accomplice to the genocide in Gaza.”
[text of communiqué follows]
Good morning comrades,
Early this morning, an action occurred at the Times building involving red paint and flyers. We thought this might be of interest of WAWOG because of your campaign against this genocidal rag.
Photos here [url removed] if you want to post. Text of the flyer below:
THE NEW YORK TIMES IS STARVING GAZA.
In the past week, more than 100 Palestinians in Gaza have died of starvation. Six hundred and fifty thousand children have reached the fifth stage of malnutrition, which means those who do not die will likely suffer permanent organ damage. Since May, over 1,000 aid seekers queuing in cages set up by the so-called "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation" — a U.S.-Israeli front for the continuation of the genocide — have been murdered in broad daylight while waiting for food.
Who is responsible? You'd never know from reading the so-called "paper of record." On Saturday, July 26, The New York Times finally published a front-page story about the famine, only to give it the headline "Israel to Allow Aid Drops Amid Starvation." But "Israel" engineered the starvation, a fact the NYT persistently elides. On Sunday, the Times reported Israeli officials finally admitting what we've always known: There is no proof Hamas stole aid. What the NYT left out of the story was their own complicity in being the first mainstream outlet to promote the lie of aid theft, a genocidal lie used to justify months of brutal siege and forced starvation.
According to research recently published by Writers Against the War on Gaza, both the NYT's Jerusalem bureau and its newsroom here in NYC are filled with reporters and editors who have direct, material ties to "Israel." One of these reporters is Johnatan Reiss, who wrote in the NYT this past week that the murders at aid sites are "a crude form of crowd control." It is no longer enough to say that the NYT is merely covering up Israel's crimes.
THE NYT IS AN ACTIVE ACCOMPLICE IN THE ONGOING GENOCIDE.
The actionists also dropped hundreds of flyers, which, along with their statement, included an illustration depicting pigs with pens writing “LIES” and “MORE LIES” in blood. Soon, other pigs arrived on the scene.
This action comes a day after the NYT appended an ed. note to a story on a child in Gaza diagnosed w/ severe malnutrition, saying he had “pre-existing health problems.” Echoing Nazi defenses from the Nuremberg trials, the “correction” was issued at the behest of @HonestReporting.
Yesterday’s scandal is far from an anomaly: As our newly released dossier reveals in detail, NYT staffers are both individually and institutionally motivated to uphold Zionism in their biased coverage. Many have ties to Israel lobby groups &/or the IOF.
Over the past 21 months, it has become more than clear that NYT newsroom employees are not the colleagues of Palestinian journalists, but their enemies. We salute this bold action in defense of Palestinian life."
-- Writers Against the War on Gaza twitter thread, July 30, 2025
ZIONISM* IS THE LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE, through both direct, state-sanctioned violence and indirect, consequential violence, which trickles down through suffocating bureaucracies, inescapable psychological onslaughts, and impetuous intercommunal conflicts. Yet this man-made quietus is treated like any other leading cause of death—heart disease in the US, dementia in England—and is scarcely cause for concern, let alone condemnation. On the contrary, our death is sustenance for the world we live in, necessary to maintain things as they are. Our blood is the price of the colony’s sense of “security.” The empire cuts the lives of our loved ones short to prolong its reign. And our grief is negligible, our rage unwarranted. The more our loved ones are killed by Zionist colonialism, the less space we are offered to grieve them. We cannot narrate this colossal theft of life, let alone avenge it.
For our martyrs to matter, they need to have lived as spectacular people or endured a spectacularly violent death. And when I say “a spectacularly violent death,” I think of the killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a sixteen-year-old boy who was kidnapped by Jewish settlers from his neighborhood in occupied Jerusalem, brutally beaten, forced to drink gasoline, then burned alive. I think of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was found murdered by Israeli soldiers alongside the paramedics sent to rescue her twelve days after she called emergency dispatchers from a bullet-riddled car, surrounded by her family’s dead bodies, pleading on the phone for three hours, “Come take me. You will come and take me?” I think of the ghoulish and perverse. Otherwise, as in most cases, after the news breaks in silence, our martyrs’ loved ones join a long line of families who lament away from cameras and only know to ask God for justice. Otherwise, as in most cases, the slain are condemned to become another forgotten statistic, or even deserving of death.
ZIONISM* IS THE LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE, through both direct, state-sanctioned violence and indirect, consequential violence, which trickles down through suffocating bureaucracies, inescapable psychological onslaughts, and impetuous intercommunal conflicts. Yet this man-made quietus is treated like any other leading cause of death—heart disease in the US, dementia in England—and is scarcely cause for concern, let alone condemnation. On the contrary, our death is sustenance for the world we live in, necessary to maintain things as they are. Our blood is the price of the colony’s sense of “security.” The empire cuts the lives of our loved ones short to prolong its reign. And our grief is negligible, our rage unwarranted. The more our loved ones are killed by Zionist colonialism, the less space we are offered to grieve them. We cannot narrate this colossal theft of life, let alone avenge it.
For our martyrs to matter, they need to have lived as spectacular people or endured a spectacularly violent death. And when I say “a spectacularly violent death,” I think of the killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a sixteen-year-old boy who was kidnapped by Jewish settlers from his neighborhood in occupied Jerusalem, brutally beaten, forced to drink gasoline, then burned alive. I think of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was found murdered by Israeli soldiers alongside the paramedics sent to rescue her twelve days after she called emergency dispatchers from a bullet-riddled car, surrounded by her family’s dead bodies, pleading on the phone for three hours, “Come take me. You will come and take me?” I think of the ghoulish and perverse. Otherwise, as in most cases, after the news breaks in silence, our martyrs’ loved ones join a long line of families who lament away from cameras and only know to ask God for justice. Otherwise, as in most cases, the slain are condemned to become another forgotten statistic, or even deserving of death.
In a CNN interview, Christiane Amanpour, who made a name for herself covering the Bosnian genocide, probes a prominent Israeli author: “Can I ask you, because you are a really thoughtful person ... Is there a moral maze? Is there an ability to hold two thoughts at one time?” The author shakes his head in either disbelief or amusement, then he interrupts her question with a scoff. Amanpour continues, “That that slaughter [on October 7] is the worst thing that could have happened, and that everybody has the right to live with rights and dignity, including the Palestinian people?” She quickly clarifies, perhaps correcting herself: “And I am not talking about Hamas.”
Through her resounding exclusion of Hamas from the category of those entitled “to live with rights and dignity,” Amanpour effectively suggests that the supposedly universal Declaration of Human Rights can be conditioned upon one’s political affiliations. Similar suggestions would spark outrage if uttered in relation to any other contemporary political party or any group.
[...]
Examining the conversation between a liberal television anchor and a liberal author unveils the implicit underpinnings of their discourse: Palestinians must denounce certain affiliations, determined by the West, to be considered worthy of living. Or, I should correct myself, worthy of condolences, as we are doomed regardless. Bombs do not discriminate on the basis of political ideology: they take the liberal and the radical, the Salafist and the secular, the communist and the capitalist, sometimes from under the same roof. When the sniper finds your bedroom in the scope of his rifle, he (or she) does not care whether the photograph beside your bed is of Nasrallah, Gandhi, or Haifa Wehbe. The photograph is only useful when your character is on trial.
This is the tension in which we exist: in response to “the bad guys” saying that there are no innocents among us, “the good guys” will retort that indeed there are innocents if you look hard enough. You hear it everywhere, in White House press briefings, in the halls of the European Union, even in the paragraphs of an ally’s impassioned op-ed: Not all Palestinians are Hamas. And it is true that not all Palestinians support Hamas. But what is the implication of that argument? By distinguishing Palestinians from Hamas (or differentiating the supporters of the organization from its opponents, the members from the nonmembers), Amanpour, if I were to give her the benefit of the doubt, wanted to convince her Israeli guest of Palestinian humanity. But in her attempt to do so, it could be inferred that she implicitly condemned Hamas members and supporters to die. For when she insisted that she is “not talking about Hamas,” she pledged allegiance to the belief that underpins both Israeli and American societies, across the political spectrum: unless Palestinians perform a preapproved sociopolitical disposition, one remains without an obligation to even pretend they are human.
One week after his interview with Amanpour, the “really thoughtful” liberal author went on a Japanese TV channel and asserted that the settler state “could defend itself with all the weapons it has, including nuclear capabilities.”
If we are assessing a certain ideological project (say, capitalism, Zionism, so on), why not judge it based on how it materially manifests rather than on the perceived attributes of its subjects? Zionism is best defined by its material manifestations—Zionism is what Zionism does. When Zionism’s most recent manifestation is genocide, what difference does it make whether the encampments protesting this genocide are utopias of coexistence? What difference does it make how the grieving grieve? Curating the native as “respectable” is a misplaced priority because it redirects critical scrutiny away from the colonizer, which in turn neglects the innate injustice of the colonial project. This misplaced focus insinuates that the oppressed must earn what they are already entitled to: liberty, dignity, and basic rights. Otherwise, if the native is not “respectable,” slavery and subjugation would be necessarily applicable, rather than morally reprehensible. Nothing reveals more about the colonizer’s psyche than these arrogant expectations.
Let us consider again the violence visited upon Ahmed, the insurmountable, suffocating sorrow one is bound to feel after a loss of such devastating proportion: twenty-one of your kin, slain at once. What becomes of you when words no longer suffice, when “sorrow” loses its potency and when “suffocation” loosens its grip? What becomes of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, whose calendars are marked by routine bombardments? What are the mental and muscular consequences of being forced to transform a taxi into a hearse? What becomes of the nurse whose shift is interrupted by the arrival of her husband’s corpse on a stretcher? What about the father wandering with what remains of his son in two plastic bags? What happens to him after all of this death, once he is alone and away from the cameras? What kind of man will the boy carrying his brother’s limbs in a bag grow up to be? Does it matter whether he emerges as Abd el-Hadi or as Abu Obaida? Does it make Zionism any less indefensible?
So I ask again: What if our perfect victims do in fact despise those who have killed their families? Then what? Let me ask the most exaggerated, extreme version of this question: What if, after a Star-of-David-clad soldier of the self-proclaimed “Jewish state” killed your loved ones in cold blood, you began to obsessively, irrationally hate Jews, all Jews, wherever they may be? Then what? Does your venomous sentiment undermine your status as a victim? Does it rewrite history to absolve the soldier of his sins? Does it justify the crime?
