Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)

dream job

Pride and Prejudice AU in which Elizabeth Bennet moves to Argentina and makes BANK.

from [Coll:set] 2005

still thinking about wolf 21

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Twenty-one was “remarkably gentle” with the members of his pack, says Rick. Immediately after making a kill, he would often walk away to urinate or lie down and nap, allowing family members who’d had nothing to do with the hunt to eat their fill. 

One of Twenty-one’s favorite things was to wrestle with little pups. “And what he really loved to do,” Rick adds, “was to pretend to lose. He just got a huge kick out of it.” Here was this great big male wolf. And he’d let some little wolf jump on him and bite his fur. “He’d just fall on his back with his paws in the air,” Rick half-mimes. “And the triumphant-looking little one would be standing over him with his tail wagging.”

“The ability to pretend,” Rick adds, “shows that you understand how your actions are perceived by others. It indicates high intelligence. I’m sure the pups knew what was going on, but it was a way for them to learn how it feels to conquer something much bigger than you. And that kind of confidence is what wolves need every day of their hunting lives.”

In Twenty-one’s life, there was a particular male, a sort of roving Casanova, a continual annoyance. He was strikingly good-looking, had a big personality, and was always doing something interesting. “The single best word is ‘charisma,’” says Rick. “Female wolves were happy to mate with him. People loved him. His irresponsibility and infidelity – it didn’t matter.”

One day, Twenty-one discovered this Casanova among his daughters. Twenty-one ran in, caught him, and began biting and pinning him to the ground. Various pack members piled in, beating Casanova up.

“Casanova was also big,” Rick says, “but he was a bad fighter. Now he was totally overwhelmed and the pack was finally killing him. Suddenly Twenty-one steps back. Everything stops. The pack members are looking at Twenty-one as if saying, ‘Why has Dad stopped?’” The Casanova wolf jumped up and — as always in such situations — ran away. 

But Casanova kept causing problems for Twenty-one. Why didn’t Twenty-one just kill him so he wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore? It didn’t make sense — until years later.

Fast-forward to after Twenty-one’s death. Casanova briefly became the Druid pack’s alpha male. But he wasn’t effective, Rick recalls. He didn’t know what to do, “just not a leader personality.” and although it’s very rare for a younger brother to depose an older one, that’s what happened to him. Casanova didn’t mind; it meant he was free to wander and meet other females.

Eventually Casanova, along with several Druid males, met some females, and they all formed another pack. “With them,” Rick remembers, “he finally became the model of a responsible alpha male and a great father.” Meanwhile, the mighty Druids were ravaged and weakened by mange and diminished by interpack fighting; the last Druid was shot near Butte, Montana, in 2010. Casanova, though he’d been averse to fighting, died in a fight with a rival pack. But everyone in his pack remained uninjured — including grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Twenty-one.

Wolves can’t foresee such plot twists any more than people can. But evolution does. I’s calculus integrates long averages. By sparing the Casanova wolf, Twenty-one actually helped assure himself more surviving descendants. And in evolution, surviving descendants are the only currency that matters.

So in strictly survivalist terms, “should” a wolf let his rival go free? Is restraint an effective strategy for accumulating benefits? I think the answer is yes, if you can afford it, because sometimes your enemy today becomes, tomorrow, a vehicle for your legacy. What Rick saw play out over those years might be just the kinds of events that are the basis for magnanimity in wolves, and at the heart of mercy in men.

Early on, when Twenty-one was young and still living with his mother and adoptive father, one of their new pups was not acting normal. The other pups were a bit afraid of him and wouldn’t play with him. One day, Twenty-one brought back some food for the small pups, and after feeding them, he just stood there, looking around for something. Soon he started wagging his tail. “He’d been looking for the sickly little pup,” Rick says, “and finding him, he just went over to hang out with him for a while.”

Rick suddenly seems to be searching inside himself for something deeper he wants to express. Then he looks at me, saying simply, “Of all the stories I have about Twenty-one, that’s my favorite.” Strength impresses us. But what we remember is kindness.

The majority of wolves die violently. Despite a violent, eventful life even by wolf standards, Twenty-one distinguished himself to the very end: He was a black wolf who grayed with the years and became one of the few Yellowstone wolves to die of old age.

One June day when Twenty-one was 9 years old, his family was lying bedded down when an elk came by. Everyone jumped up to give chase. He jumped up, too, but just stood watching the action and then lay down again. Later, when the pack headed up toward the den site, Twenty-one crossed the valley in the opposite direction, traveling purposefully somewhere, alone.

Sometime later, a visitor who’d been way up high in the backcountry reported having seen something very unusual: a dead wolf. Rick got a horse and rode up to investigate.

The last day, it seems, Twenty-one knew his time had come. He used the last of his energy to go up to the top of a high mountain. In a favorite family rendezvous site, where he’d been with his pups year after year, amid high summer grass and mountain wildflowers, Twenty-one curled up in the shade of a big tree. And on his own terms, he went to sleep for the last time.

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the story above was taken from this article, and the whole thing is really worth a read.

https://theweek.com/articles/577618/what-animals-think

“He was born the night the Titanic went down.” That seems a nice enough line, and I even recall who said it, but I’d it not really a better line in life than it could ever be in fiction ? But of course that is exactly it: not that I should ever use the line, but that I should remember the woman who said it and the afternoon I heard it. We were on her terrace by the sea, and we were finishing the wine left from lunch, trying to get what sun there was, a California winter sun. The woman who’s husband was born the night the Titanic went down wanted to rent her house, wanted to go back to her children in Paris. I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $1,000 a month. “Someday you will,” she said lazily. “Someday it all comes.” There in the sun on her terrace it seemed easy to believe in someday, but later I had a low-grade afternoon hangover and ran over a black snake on the way to the supermarket and was flooded with inexplicable fear when I heard the checkout clerk explaining to the man ahead of me why she was finally divorcing her husband. “He left me no choice,” she said over and over as she punched the register. “He has a little seven-month-old baby by her, he left me no choice.” I would like to believe that my dread then was for the human condition, but of course it was for me, because I wanted to own the house that cost $1,000 a month to rent and because I had a hangover. It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value on having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forgot too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loved and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing “How High the Moon” on the car radio.”

- Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, On Keeping A Notebook

No song nor poetry can convey tragedy like a cat who wants through a door

happy medjed monday

The museum sign for this inscription simply said 'funerary monument to Pieris'. What it didn't say is that she was karissima. Rarissima. Incomparabilis. It forgot to mention that someone loved her very much and wanted everyone to know it.

Plato makes up Atlantis as an allegory and over 2,000 years later people are still looking for it. You might as well be looking for Narnia.

Plato: Luxury and unlimited power are forces that corrupt human beings and lead them to being colonialist and stupid. The gods will punish Athens if we continue to exploit others for our own gain. I have invented this society as a parable to illustrate my point because I tend to use metaphor for a lot of things.

Everyone: But where are you hiding it though

Plato: I’ve purposefully included details like a mud shoal west of Iberia that doesn’t exist and references to a volcanic eruption that we all have cultural memory of as an obvious indication that I made this up. Are you paying attention? It’s a metaphor. I’m using literary references. You can go west of Iberia yourself. It’s not there. I explained where it is and it’s not there. You all know it’s not there. Please stop it with the luxury and exploitation. That’s my main point here.

Everyone: Yeah but where is it though

Plato: Orichalcum is just a fancy looking metal. It’s kinda like fancy copper. I made it up for this fake parable city.

Everyone: So it’s magic, then.

Plato: I want Athens to be a bit more like Sparta.

Everyone: Where’s the magic metal

Plato: I just think that greed is bad, generally. We should stop doing that.

Everyone: Where are you hiding the magic metal???

LA Cares AIDS campaign (c.1984) starring Zelda Rubinstein Zelda Rubinstein was a little person (the term she preferred) who began acting in her 40's. Her big break came in 1982 with her role as Tangina Barrons in the film Poltergeist.

In 1984, she was the the central figure in a series of advertisements, directed towards gay men specifically, promoting safer sex and AIDS awareness. Rubinstein did so at risk to her own career, especially so shortly after her rise to fame, and admitted later that she did "pay a price, career-wise." "I lost a friend to AIDS, one of the first public figures that died of AIDS," the actress said in an interview with The Advocate. "I knew it was not the kind of disease that would stay in anybody's backyard. It would climb the fences, get over the fences into all of our homes. It was not limited to one group of people." She attended the first AIDS Project Los Angeles AIDS Walk. (Source:Wikipedia)

Rene Gruau Illustration