the reason for stars

sarah. expresses self via the tag novel.

[notbecauseofvictories]

I spent a lot of today thinking about the personifications of cities. Back in the day, I conceived of the the anthropomorphic personification of the USA as a very ordinary woman, who just happened to be nearby when the Declaration was signed. (She vaguely resembled the Continental Congress’ idea of the sort of girl who should wear Grecian drape; no one ever asked her if she wanted the be the immortal personification of a nation.)

However, I actually think that personifications of American cities is much more interesting, especially if you combine it with some of the other ideas I've had where founding a town requires a blood-soaked pact with forces beyond your ken. I love the idea that Chicago might have existed, but wasn't a city until 1893 when they finally forced found a woman willing to wear a burning crown. Or that in 1846, Solomon Juneau carefully negotiated the sacrifice of the Juneautown, Kilbourntown, and Walker's Point goddesses, and by spilling their blood on the Milwaukee bridge he created a Milwaukee goddess---though she woke up the next morning and went to work at a bottling plant, same as always. New York already had its Knickerbocker (not Herman Knickerbocker, but one of his sons) and Pennsylvania had William Penn (not related to Penn at all, just a member of the congregation who looked right) but after a few decades of not aging, not growing, the personifications might tentatively reach out to one another, ask, are you a thing like me? Did you know? Have you guessed?

In this sideways world, there are plenty of towns that have never contemplated sacrifice, and would never. I mean, sure, Cincinnati has had a goddess for a couple hundred years (she worked in a pork processing plant, now she's a VP for Procter & Gamble) but it's a waste of resources to sacrifice someone for Kenton County, Kentucky. How far does your ritual sacrifice extend? If you slaughter someone in Minneapolis, can you grandfather in St. Paul? And how do you replace him or her, when your city has moved beyond that---Birmingham, Alabama, has moved beyond steel, such that their Vulcan should be wearing a suit; even Chicago is a little bit embarrassed by the stocky HR manager who represents us; other Midwestern cities have fumed since the start, etc.

The idea that the United States is just a patchwork of communities with weird hyperlocal religious practices is more accurate and correct than the alternative.

[notbecauseofvictories]

also I realize that this is not the point of Us (2019) but I do think that Red is correct for revenging herself on the non-tethered. It's justifiable that a normal little girl, finding herself stranded in a bizarre mirror world where no one speaks, no one does much of anything really, but each and every one of them is nevertheless forced to inexplicably change---partner, have children, die, mirrored to people they do not see or know---would decide to revenge herself on the whole system and agitate for her people to kill their oppressors. That's just sensible.

[cinematicnomad]

HOW TO MAKE A KILLING (2026) dir. john patton ford

[julian-fawcett-mp]

John Singer Sargent, ‘Gassed’ and ‘Six Studies for Gassed’ (1918)

[robertwire]

In Gassed there is little suffering. Or rather, what suffering there is is outweighed by the painting’s compassion. In spite of the vomiting figure the scene has almost nothing in common with Owen’s vision of the gas victim whose blood comes ‘gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’. What Sargent has depicted, instead, is the solace of the blind: the comfort of putting your trust in someone, of being safely led.

— geoff dyer, the missing of the somme

[notbecauseofvictories]

So in the run up to the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition, one of the Chicago newspapers put out a call for drawings and sketches, all with the same brief---capture the spirit of the newly rebuilt Chicago, just as Columbia or Uncle Sam stood for the USA generally.

(One Birmingham, AL newspaper reporting on the contest said that, "New York has her Father Knickerbocker, Philadelphia her William Penn" and suggested that Chicago have a woman with windblown hair and webbed feet. However, they also wrote that "[Birmingham should have] a handsome young woman with a constitution of iron, hair of the blackest of coal, and eyes with the fiery glow of the furnaces," so I think the takeaway here is that throughout all of history, people without Hetalia will invent it.)

Anyway, the newspaper received hundreds of entries, and they chose as their winner a woman standing with feet apart and one hand on her hip, a mason’s square in the other hand, crowned with a phoenix rising from the ashes to reference the Great Chicago Fire. Most importantly, she had "I WILL" emblazoned on her cuirass.

The New York Times called this "a badly proportioned design and a swaggering pose" but Chicago didn't care (and maybe liked the swagger, thanks very much). The Columbian Exhibition moved ahead, and a lady crowned with a bird and flames, "I WILL" somewhere on her person, became as close to an official symbol for the fair as you could get---so much so that they brought her back for the 1933 Fair too.

(that 'Y' you see on either side of her was also the result of a newspaper competition around the same time, and is still found throughout the city.)

I don't really have a point here, I just like her. I've never seen the anthropomorphic personification of a place and thought "actually? that seems about right."

[rozieramati]

Fra Angelico & Mark Rothko

[notbecauseofvictories]

I am personally, emotionally, and ideologically opposed to the suburbs, we all know this. That said, I do think that I need to have a conversation with the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, because I'm not sure we should allow suburbanites to hop in their cars, drive for 10 minutes, and order a tikka masala burrito or a pav bhaji pizza. Not without a solid counterargument.

[johnwatersbongwater]

This place freaks me out. Okay, good luck!

WIDOW'S BAY (2026)

[notbecauseofvictories]

anathema “i would kill for you” carpenter and high prophet “i would also kill for me” faulkner

[notbecauseofvictories]

Q: What's that group called again, the one for retired pirates?

A: Aaaaarp

[delinquentbookworm]

one time I went over to a friend's house and their housemate was making paper in the living room, and we saw this big tub full of water they were using to dissolve old scrap paper into a slurry, and everyone was immediately like "oh, you need scrap paper?" and started turning out their jacket pockets and producing expired coupons and bus tickets and crumpled receipts and old shopping lists and whatever else they'd been carrying round with them for no good reason, and passing it all to the paper-making housemate to make sure it was suitable before it got torn up and dropped into the tub, while people took turns stirring the slurry with a big wooden stick. it was strangely ritualistic, like presenting an offering to some kind of temple elder for inspection before placing it in a watery shrine to be devoured and reformed. pulp for the pulp god.

[ouiouhie]

intruder 👁️

[notbecauseofvictories]

As if to prove the point of my last post....guess who scored tickets to a proshot version of Iceboy!, a production currently being performed live in my city by the exact same actors I'm about to watch on screen. It is a Monday. The viewing sold out within hours.

[notbecauseofvictories]

Iceboy! has all the structural integrity and good sense of a chocolate souffle. Unfortunately, I was charmed by it nonetheless---it's got a comic sensibility that might be fondly described as "Mel Brooks meets Dicks: The Musical, but it's been through the washing machine a few times with strong bleach." It's not the next great piece of American theater, but it's also not trying to be! Instead, have a couple clever lines in a song, some delightful stagecraft, and admire the fact that Megan Mullally is the best comic onstage.

It's interesting, because the last Broadway in Chicago musical I saw was Suffs, which I have complicated feelings about. On one hand, it genuinely was affective---I thought the ongoing clashes between the old and new guard were wonderful, and I could have watched so many more scenes of Alice Paul and Mary Chapman Catt, Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, all arguing with/about/around each other. (The scene where Alice Paul is confronted by the new new guard---an ERA activist who sings the same song Alice opened the musical with, who pushes Alice to sing the lines Mary Chapman Catt sang about her back in the day---was similarly wonderful.) On the other hand....unlike Iceboy! it tries to say something, and I am immediately wary of such measures these days. I did my time in the Hamilton mines.

...........that said, I hope there's a whole generation of theater girls going really really insane about a musical they can perform all by themselves, with the fig leaf of "being about history." No one should ever again have to pressure Jeremy to drop wrestling this semester, because you need him for the lead.

[notbecauseofvictories]

As if to prove the point of my last post....guess who scored tickets to a proshot version of Iceboy!, a production currently being performed live in my city by the exact same actors I'm about to watch on screen. It is a Monday. The viewing sold out within hours.

[spiders-hth-is-an-outlier]

There's this notion that being able to stream professional theater shows will hurt the industry, because people won't go to the effort to support live theater anymore, and this is based on the anxieties of the film industry, but live theater isn't a film. The better analogy is sports.

Look me dead in the eye and tell me that people being able to sit at home and watch The Game -- the fandom that encourages, the ongoing investment over the years, the memories and traditions of Watching the Game with family and friends -- harms the ticket sales of real live go-to-the-stadium sports. Of course it doesn't. Of course all that *is the reason* that people care so much about sports they'll invest a small fortune on not only tickets but often travel costs to be part of it all in person. And the people who aren't doing that *can't* do that and weren't going to regardless, but their at-home participation and investment still boosts the profile of pro and NCAA sports as cultural institutions.

Maybe it's possible to fall in love with film and be immune to the romance of Going to the Cinema such that you'll just freely choose the same film in the comfort of your living room. It's not possible to fall in love with something that happens live and not want to be there to experience it. The consequences of procasts, for theater just like for sports, can only be A) more people motivated to make live theater part of their worlds, aka more money, when theaters everywhere could desperately use more money, or B) more love. Which is worth arguing for because reasons I assume I don't have to defend.

[notbecauseofvictories]

two additional thoughts on yesterday's nonsense, and then I swear I will talk about something else.

one of the other reasons I like job/corporate horror is because it makes firing someone an act of mercy. In real life, being fired is rarely fun, mostly unfair and destabilizing and infuriating and depressing and twelve other emotions all at once. But if you're employed by Evil Inc., their firing you is actually kind. They have saved you from the slaughterhouse! You are safe now. Safe to go back to your family, to stay with them, be with them; safe to worry about your dwindling bank account and lack of health insurance, safe send out application after application to other companies and hear nothing back. There might even be better companies, out there in the world! (There's not, but they could be, one of those nice places where the 'keep hanging in there!' poster doesn't feature a kitten dangling above a gaping maw.) Shouldn't you be grateful? Shouldn't you thank Evil Inc. for your newfound ability to be so very, very safe?

(and then, the quiet afterthought---what kind of person wants to go back to the slaughterhouse? what kind of person thinks, I don't even know who I am anymore, outside the slaughterhouse...)

my other point is that sometimes a haunted house is not actually about the house, it is about the people in that house with you---a spouse, parent, children, or family more generally. Relational horror is not place horror is not job horror. You can combine them in fun ways! But they are distinct.

[notbecauseofvictories]

I can't quite decide how I feel about Thomas Olde Heuvelt, but that was one of the things I liked about Hex---everyone in town is aware of the horror, has carefully shifted their lives in idiosyncratic ways to ignore and accommodate it, but the next generation is unwilling to play by the same rules. Place horror can go in many different directions, and I find "unfortunately, the youths were not perfectly molded in our image and did not take our words as gospel, who could have predicted this" a compelling thread to pull.