I’ll Follow You to the Unknown @iris-in-strangeland - Tumblr Blog

river phoenix and keanu reeves talking about each other

"I've always loved you, River. River is my best friend and I don't have many of them." - Keanu "That's really sweet, Keany." - River

"Every evening that we don't spend together we're on the phone." - Keanu

"He's beautiful, inventive, funny and creative, too." - Keanu

"I really would like to do Shakespeare with River. I think we’d have a hoot. We could do A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Romeo and Juliet." - Keanu "I’ll be Juliet." - River

"Meeting River was a revelation." - Keanu

"There was a lot of deep love." - River (about "Private Idaho")

"We brought good out in each other." - Keanu

"River's the best, he's a god, he's the king. I pray to the church of River Phoenix!" - Keanu

"(After a long silence) River was an exceptional person, incredible. Where is my Juliet? Bullshit. Fuck! (After another long silence) He was a really good guy." - Keanu

"I don't have any friends in the business. Just River. Oh where, oh where has my Juliet gone?" - Keanu

"I don't know what I'm going to do when I get older, do you, Keany?" - River "I'd like to maybe get a boat someday and sail around. Maybe I'll settle down and I'll raise a family. I've always wanted kids." - Keanu "I didn't know that --" - River "You never asked, dude." - Keanu "I really want kids too." - River

"It’s weird speaking about him in the past. I hate speaking about him in the past. So I almost always gotta keep it present." - Keanu

"I liked the guy and wanted to work with him." - River

"Keany, he's a sweetheart. People don't understand him." - River

BONUS: "Keanu and River were kind of soulmates, they had known each other for a few years… but they were." - Gus Van Sant

BONUS: "Suddenly he and Reeves are off, excitedly exploring the possibility of doing Shakespeare together. They stand nose to nose- Phoenix newly bleached blond as part of his bid to play the young Andy Warhol in a future Van Sant biopic, Reeves dark-haired and tanned- like positive and negative images of each other. They sustain their banter throughout the meal, as one interrupts the other, but only to complete his thought." - Interview Magazine

BONUS: "I watched how Keanu grieved. And oh, did he grieve for his friend. He’s very private, but he couldn’t hide that. And just to see that a man like that was able to grieve. And I remember thinking, God, if that’s the tip of the iceberg of his depth, and his level of love and care for a friend—that just draws you in." - Sandra Bullock

BONUS: "Talking about Phoenix, Reeves has one of what he calls his “excellent panic attacks”, and his china-doll complexion becomes whiter than white; his brown eyes turn black. Time to change the subject." - SKY Magazine

riverpheonixs

Things River Phoenix did before it was cool

1. Became a vegan

2. Played a gay character

3. Supported animals rights and organizations such as PETA

4. Supported charity works

5. Talked to young fans and press about environment and ways to help the planet

6. Complained about how much the film industry needs more diversified actors and more good roles for women

sflow-er

What Alice Oseman has said about the Ferris wheel scene

Cut for Heartstopper season 3 spoilers!

thegayestpossum

I desperately need everyone to understand that the reason Tori’s coming out scene was removed is because Alice wanted to save it for season 4 so it could have more time to be explored!!! Tori’s sexuality isn’t erased, and if we get a season 4 then we will absolutely be getting asexual Tori

neil-gaiman

I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.”

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.

You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening.

I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”

Happy Valentine’s Day.

neil-gaiman

Eleven years old. Still true.

anderswasrightt

don't use "ftm" it's outdated and offensive. it implies that the trans person was their agab, which we never were. i was always a boy, never a girl who became a boy.

i'm 35 years old. i've been IDing as trans or something similar to trans for nearly 20 years. i was probably calling myself FTM while you were playing tag during recess, anon.

i WAS a girl. i IDed as a girl early in my life. i recognized myself as a girl, called myself a girl, lived as a girl, and was a girl. who then IDed as a man. hence, F t M.

spend more time worrying about yourself instead of strangers on the internet, anon.

sorry not sorry if this comes off as needlessly hostile, but i've been getting a lot of shit from a lot of teenage trans kids about the language i use to describe my own goddamn experience, and i'm growing real fuckin weary of it.

i have elder trans friends who call themselves transsexuals and transvestites and trannies. are you going to seriously go to a 60-year-old trans person who survived the reagan years and tell her she's not allowed to use certain language to describe herself because it might offend the delicate sensibilities of some teenager on the internet?

do yourself a favor and log off, find some real-life trans people who are over the age of 20 or 25, and spend time talking to them instead of getting all holier-than-thou at random strangers on tumblr.

femmefurina-deactivated20240814

It may be weird to encounter because it's not the trans narrative that the media sells to us as 'the only valid way to be trans', but the 'I always knew I was x' is not all-encompassing.

Anon there are more people than you think who were girls who grew up into men, or boys who grew up into women, or girls or boys who grew up to be nonbinary. There is a rather obscure theory that girl and boy are distinct genders from man and woman and while the most common trajectory is that boys grow into men and girls grow into women it's not the rule.

Let people define themselves.

phoenixtawnyflower

also if you think genderfluid people are real and you're not just humoring us, you by definition have to allow that gender can change over time. I was a girl once. I am not a girl now.

theleakypen

Chiming in with solidarity to OP.

I feel very protective of my former identity BECAUSE there's so little room in the Mainstream Trans Narrative ™️ for allowing gender to change.

I was a girl. Now I'm genderqueer. Maybe later I will find different words for myself.

There has to be room for all of us in the trans community or there's no point to any of this.

mirrepp

Ive been here long enough to see words like ftm/mtf, afab/amab, transmale/female, trans man/woman all go through the cycle of ppl telling you to “Dont use X word its out dated. Now use this Y word”. Only for a year or two pass and suddenly “Y word is outdated. Now use Z word” like yall this is exhausting. Just because a word is old doesn’t automatically make it a slur or offensive.

derinthescarletpescatarian

They're pulling high school clique bullshit out and just replacing 'uncool' with 'problematic' and pretending it's activism somehow. We're trying to get work done here not everybody is going to keep up with the ever-rotating lexicon of words.

hedwig-dordt

I used to be a member of the commentariat where I learned the phrase

THERE IS NO QUEER REVIEW BOARD

Which has kinda helped me be a bit better at being decent

neil-gaiman

Some of your books make it seems like you believe in actual literal magic, do you? ()

I can write down a few words and make people thousands of miles away, whom I have never met and will never meet, laugh tears of joy and cry tears of true sorrow for people who do not exist and have never existed and never will exist. If that isn't actual literal magic I don't know what is.

rylandsgrace

There's nothing wrong with you.

Tobie Donovan as Isaac Henderson in Heartstopper season 2

imspaceingout

Saw this on r/LGBT and figured my aspec followers would enjoy.

chrisriddellblog

Credo by Neil Gaiman.

fuckyeahgoodomens

neil-gaiman

Happy Pride Month, Neil!

Thank you! And (as was pointed out to me on Twitter) you can't spell Pride Month without a demon.

neil-gaiman

On Casting the Doctor: Rebloggable by request

torchyvalentine asked: What would you say to Sir Ian Mckellen taking the reigns as the 12th Doctor? For that matter, who do you think would be a good actor for the character?

I think that if you’d asked me who should be the 11th Doctor 5 years ago I wouldn’t have listed Matt Smith, because I didn’t know who he was or what he was capable of, and if you’d asked me who should play Sherlock Holmes in a modern day revival around the same time I wouldn’t have said Benedict Cumberbatch, because I didn’t know who he was either.

I actually like it when The Doctor is a relatively unknown actor, or one without one huge role that made them famous. A star, like Sir Ian, brings all the other roles they’ve ever played to the table when they act. Seeing John Hurt as the (Spoiler) at the end of the Name of the Doctor, meant that this was a certain type of part with a certain amount of gravitas, and you understood that John Hurt was bringing everything with it (including being John Hurt), just as Derek Jacobi did as the Master.

But I like to see The Doctor as The Doctor, and an actor who doesn’t bring baggage is a grand sort of thing. A star waiting to happen. So I don’t want to see Helen Mirren or Sir Ian McKellen or Chiwetel Ejiofor, or any of the famous names people are suggesting.

I want to see The Doctor. I want to be taken by surprise. I want to squint at a photo of the person online and go “but how can that be The Doctor?”. Then I want to be amazingly, delightedly, completely proven wrong, and, six episodes in, I want to wonder how I could have been so blind. Because this is the Doctor. Of course it is.

neil-gaiman

Still true. Will be true for ever and always. Welcome Ncuti Gatwa!

fatoujallovv

the transformative power of QUEER JOY

neil-gaiman

I have a copy of American Gods (the cover with a road and lightning that seems to be very common), and on the back cover there is a large photo of you (looking very dashing!). When reading it as a teen, I thought it was a photo of Shadow. The thing is, I've had two other people tell me the exact same thing happened to them! Is a common thing? What is the story behind the author's photo on the back cover? BTW thank you to the show for getting Neil-as-shadow visual out of my mind finally.

The publisher decided it was time for me to get an Author Photo and the next time I was in New York I went to the photographer they had decided to send me to and A Photo Was Taken.

And, as I wrote at the time on my journal at neil gaiman.com:

The photographer was a very nice lady named Sigrid Estrada.

(Kelly Notaras, my editor Jennifer Hershey’s right-hand woman took me down there. Jennifer herself, and my literary agent Merrilee Heifetz wandered along during the course of the afternoon.)

Sigrid took one look at me and said “I thought you were going to have longer hair.”

She looked very disappointed.

“No,” I said, apologetically. “I don’t.”

She sighed. She shook her head. I never quite found out why this messed things up as much as it obviously had.

Sigrid had a plan for a photo. The plan involved a lot of smoke. Her assistant held the smoke machine. Kelly Notaras was drafted in to hold a piece of cardboard to waft the smoke. And I stood there while Sigrid shouted “Smoke!” at the assistant holding the smoke machine, and the machine would belch huge gusts of white fog at me, and then she’d call “Waft!” at Kelly and Kelly would wave the paper and try to get the smoke off my face.

And that’s what we did for the next four or five hours. We did it with my leather jacket on. We did it with my leather jacket off. We did it with me standing up. We did it with me sitting down. We did it with me peering coyly from around the side of a huge sheet of paper. And all through this, the smoke was belched, and then the smoke was wafted. (Jennifer did some fine smoke wafting, too.)

Merrilee exerted an agent’s traditional prerogative and ran up between smoke belches and tried to tame the hair on my forehead. It didn’t tame, but she did her best.

And I began to understand what a kipper must feel like, at the precise moment it stops just being a herring, and realises that it has been smoked. For me that moment occurred at the point where Sigrid decided that it might be more... more whatever she was going for... if the smoke was splurted directly at my head, rather than just generally belched out around waist level.

I’d hold my breath and smile and be told that I shouldn’t smile, not for the kind of photo that Sigrid had in mind. So I’d stop smiling, and the smoke would splurt and Kelly or Jennifer would waft it and Sigrid would click away.

Days would pass before the taste of the smoke machine finally left the back of my throat. Still, it could have been much worse. There was no builder’s sand involved, nor was I being warned not to get too close to the candles or my wings would go up like tinder and burn my bare skin.

So a few weeks passed, and one day the contact sheets arrived. Lots and lots of photos of me. And smoke.

My son took one look at the contact sheet and said “Was your head on fire?”

“No,” I said.

“It just looked like it was, that was all.”

And he was right. All the smoke being let off at head level had managed to create a set of photos in which it was perfectly obvious that my head was indeed on fire.

Claudia Gonson (of the Magnetic Fields) was staying with us over Christmas. I showed her the contact sheet.

“They make you look like your head’s on fire,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “It’s a special effect.”

“And all the ones of you not wearing the leather jacket make you look like David Copperfield.”

“Yes. That’s a special effect too.”

“You don’t want to look like David Copperfield, do you?”

“No, thank you. Let’s stick with the ones with me with a jacket on.”

We picked one black and white photo, and one colour picture. The best thing about the black and white photo was the smoke in the background, which, far from looking like my head (or indeed any part of me) was on fire, looked instead like a mysterious sort of background, which might be clouds or mountains or, well, anything really.

I think they’re pretty good photos. I still feel vaguely guilty about getting the haircut, though. I just wonder what Ingrid could have done, if my hair had been longer. And whether whatever it was would have required quite so much smoke.

mercurymusing

For reference, I believe this is the image being discussed:

With original blog post here

neil-gaiman

It is.

seasurfacefullofclouds1

Keanu Reeves on working with River Phoenix : Esquire (winter 2021).

That’s how Keanu Reeves met River Phoenix. River lived in Gainesville, Florida, at the time, less than two hours from Universal Studios in Orlando, where Parenthood was filming. Between his girlfriend and his little brother, River was on the set all the time. Plimpton and Keanu liked each other from the start, she introduced him to River, and then the three older kids—and sometimes Leaf, who was only about thirteen—started hanging out.

Onscreen, Keanu and Plimpton clicked as an earnest, tortured, heartsick young couple in ways that don’t always result from the simple accident of casting.

“We just liked each other,” Plimpton says, by way of explaining why Tod and Julie became one of the more memorable teen couples of the late eighties, which is saying something. “We were friends. We had a good time together. We went to Disney World. We took road trips. We danced to Michael Jackson’s album Off the Wall in our trailer together. We liked each other.”

Bill & Ted came out while they were there, and Keanu, Plimpton, and River all went to a theater to see it. They all took a motorcycle trip to—where was it, Key West? No one’s sure—to see the indie-rock band the Feelies. Plimpton was just eighteen, but afterward at the bar she was drinking a beer. “We were playing pool, and Keanu went to go to the bathroom or something, and all the sudden the lights came on and I looked up and there was a cop,” she says. “And the cop said, ‘Can I see your ID, please?’ And I was like, Ohhh, shit, man. And just then Keanu comes around the corner and goes, ‘What did you do? Did you take a sip of my beer?’ He tried to get me out of it.”

Bad things happen in life, inexplicable things. Keanu has seen people disappear: his father, who wasn’t around; later, an unborn child, lost in the cruel randomness of prenatal mortality; a life partner, lost in a car accident. And his friend River, to a drug overdose, when River was twenty-three and Keanu was twenty-eight. In our Zoom call, I ask about him.

“He’s a—”

Keanu cuts himself off and smiles downward. Head tilt. What tripped him up was the word he’s. He is. Present tense.

“It’s weird speaking about him in the past,” Keanu says, almost thirty years after River’s death. “I hate speaking about him in the past. So I almost always gotta keep it present. He was a really special person, so original, unique, smart, talented, fiercely creative. Thoughtful. Brave. And funny. And dark. And light. It was great to have known him. To—yeah. Inspirational. Miss him.”

neil-gaiman

I recorded this quite certain we wouldn’t win the Hugo Award for the Good Omens tv series. I was wrong. Last night, we won the Hugo. This one is for Terry.

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/2020-hugo-lodestar-and-astounding-awards-winners/

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