There Is A Hart In Forest And He Holds The World In His Crown

somehow, amazingly, i have hacked the impulse that makes me mindlessly scroll on my phone. it's not gone but i've paired it with a conscious thought process that goes like, "what's my goal here? i'm looking for entertainment, for information, for something that makes me feel more optimistic and interested in the world i live in..."

and because that kicks in between apps, too, i'm not doomscrolling as much. i'm intentionally seeking out posts or videos or whatever that actually mean something to me. when i'm not satisfied i walk away or pick up a book instead. most subtle yet impactful change i've gone through in years

i did not intentionally set out to change this. i've just been working on my mindset in general. hey, turns out having a good therapist again helps

i’m gonna be free and i’m gonna be fine……..but maybe not tonight

from @romania on ig . “What is it about a winter storm that stirs something ancient in the soul? The Vaser Valley, cloaked in its alabaster raiment, offers a tableau of unearthly splendor. Here, amidst the Maramureș wilds, the venerable Mocănița train, a relic of steam and iron, threads its way through the vortex of snow. Each whistle is a hymn to forgotten epochs, each puff of smoke a specter lost in the whorls of a celestial blizzard. It doesn’t merely move through the storm—it communes with it, drawing the heavens to earth in a cosmic embrace.[…]”

beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way

Is the music from Kendall’s point of view?

So I’ve had a thought. Throughout the show, I noticed that whenever it’s talked about that Kendall would inherit, these moments are underscored with music that is often absent during the equivalent scenes with the other siblings. The most obvious example of this is in Dundee, when Rhea is trying to court each of them individually by telling them they ‘have what it takes’––with Shiv and Roman this kinda falls flat, but when she says to Kendall that “it’s you, it’s always been you”, there are these dreamy piano chords which inherently lend more weight to the idea. Initially, this seems to be a foreshadowing device meant to signal that Kendall WILL one day be the successor. Similarly, more dramatic chords are played when kendall talks to Frank about his name being on the piece of paper in Logan’s office. And later in Season 4 the new composition Allegro Bellicoso––which is initially played during Logan’s terrifying ATN speech––becomes paired with Kendall during scenes when he starts to behave more like his father (blackmailing Hugo, assembling cronies after the funeral). This again feels like the show is trying to foreshadow the whole tragic ‘kendall winning but only after he becomes the thing that he hates’ ending which we are meant to expect. 

HOWEVER, knowing how the show ends, and the cruelty of the fact that kendall becomes the thing he hates (and loses all of his loved ones + what was left of his soul) but STILL doesn’t inherit.. these musical motifs start to take on a different meaning. Rather than being a meta-narrative device which we look back on and say Ah! they told us the ending all along!, these moments seem more like a reflection of Kendall’s interiority––his belief that he IS the chosen one, that he CAN become his father––than a confirmation that such things could ever be true in reality. Then I started thinking about how many of the score’s most pronounced appearances in the show come when kendall is experiencing some emotionally significant event: the press conference, the near suicide in the pool, the final walk with Colin...and I realized, is Nicholas Britell’s music basically just from Kendall’s point of view?

‘course I’ll admit I might be generalizing a bit here, because there are strong compositions with other characters (particularly Shiv). But at the very least, this has made me very curious about how they went about scoring the show, and the discussions they must have had about perspective; and who’s emotions they chose to reflect in the music. 

did this last night

As it apparently needs to be restated - race, ethnicity, and nationality are not themselves the basic drivers of history. Political-economic class is.

The European practice of placing African people into chattel slavery was not carried out on the basis of any innate characteristics of 'blackness' or 'whiteness' - those categories did not exist before the slave trade, they were created in support of it. Europe at the time found it would be beneficial to have a class of slave workers for its colonial projects, and it had the military, political, and economic might to subjugate Africa and African people to that end. Had you asked a Prussian and a Scotsman prior to the institution of African slavery if they were both members of a common 'race', they would have found the idea ridiculous - and yet, transport those two ahead in time, and perhaps to settlements in the Americas, and suddenly they were both Whites. Whiteness (and its necessary counterpart, blackness), then, is not some intrinsic quality based on the tone of someone's skin, but a political and economic category constructed to differentiate between those people that could be oppressed and made chattel by the slave trade, and those that could not.

This is true for all these systems of oppression - though they may be divided on supposed lines of biology or locality, they are not inherently based on biological factors, those are functionally coincidental, and are constructed as justifications for a system necessitated by purely political and economic reasons. Nazi oppression of Jewish, and Roma, and Slavic [and etc.] people was not fundamentally based on any inherent quality of e.g. Judaism, but on the economic needs of German capital under the burden of postwar reconstruction and 'war reparations' paid to the victorious powers. It was not blind hatred, but the inevitable result of a society built in pursuit of profit - one whose ruling class held a cold, calculated need to expropriate wealth, weaken worker organisation, and seize and depopulate land to strengthen the composition of capital. It was still necessary for this system to split the population into one group of 'legitimate targets' for victimisation, and one of reassured, protected accomplices, though there were no obvious physical, 'biological' features to base these on - so they were constructed, both through propaganda that exaggerated physiology, and through the appending of obvious badges and marks onto those targeted. Again, these were sets of features, and categories, created to support a system of oppression and exploitation, not the reasons it came into being in the first place.

Again, these are fundamentally political and economic categories, and can only be properly understood as such. If not properly understood as being based, first and foremost, on material interests of classes, then any analysis of them is unstable. For example: appeals to the supposed ancestral claim of zionists to the land of Palestine, and thereby to indigineity, can only be refuted with an understanding that indigeneity is a political and economic characteristic, of relation towards the oppression of a settler state, and not some characteristic of where one's ancestors were born. None of this is to say that race, nationality, etc don't function as axes of oppression - but that they must be understood as manifestations of the existing political and economic material interests of classes that drive the development of history, if they are to be fought against.

connection

I read this too often