ARBT

Here’s my one week film for film workshop class B^)

Hey y'all. I haven't been doing a ton of writing in the past year and change so no updates really. But my writing group is meeting again (monthly, not weekly though) so things and word counts are slowly spinning up.

Also I'm in the process of slowly taking stuff down from my website, revising it, and reposting on Ao3, starting with Twelve Sundays. Posting it according to the story, every Sunday and every other wednesday. We're up to Sunday Three at the moment. Eventually the other stuff is gonna go over as well., probably in June.

As snow falls on New York City, we’re looking back to 1946, when artist Belmore Browne put the finishing touches on the background painting of the Museum’s snowswept Mountain Goat Diorama. 

Did you know that each of the Museum’s dioramas depicts a real location at a particular time of day? The views are painstakingly recreated from paintings, photographs, data, and specimens collected in the field. This diorama shows a herd of mountain goats in Tongass National Forest, Alaska. Standing where these goats are, you would hear more than see this glacier moving—a creaking as the ice strains down the valleys, and a booming crack when the leading edge breaks off into the fjord. 

Today, Alaska’s glaciers are noisier than ever, disintegrating faster than they were when this background was painted in 1946. Climate change is causing severe melting at Alaska’s steep southern coast and other icy landscapes worldwide. If this scene were painted today, the glacier’s edge would be much more distant.

The monkeys hate having to operate in civil society. In order to get back on their good side, you need to engage in more natural primate activities. Get a pile of nuts and crack them open one by one. Grab a stick and wringle it around until there's nothing left but the flexible inner fibres and weave rope out of it. Go find one of your buddies and whack them with the fibre rope. Eat a fruit, jack off, take a nap. Go bother some other small mammal.

Delia, having processed the haunting, clearly turns it into the first real bones of an art career that quickly excels (see Art in America behind her).

I frequently wonder what happened to Lydia's photography career, post-Beetlejuice, post-reconciliation with her step mother, post-her father recovering from a nervous breakdown.

Delia is frequently cast a villain, prior to the haunting. Her husband is suffering from a shattered mind -- we can debate the morality of his job in parallel -- the core of the story is "Delia's husband is having a breakdown. His old boss/client is coming. This needs to be fixed."

I have frequently seen folks tag Morticia as a role model for motherhood, better than Delia.

This is Margaret Alford with Cousin Itt.

In The Addams Family (1991), Margaret is married to Tully Alford.

Tully, the Addams Family lawyer, is seeking to rob them of their fortune. Betrays them wretchedly. It would have been fine but he also tried to break up the family (dirty pool, old man).

Margaret, who didn't want to go to the party, the party where her husband was actively going to betray the Addams, meets Itt.

And is charmed by him.

Immediately.

And when she finds herself a widow, pursues this relationship with him.

It is fair to say they are very happy.

This post uses Margaret Alford as a lens to view the post-Beetlejuice life of Delia, because few precious minutes are shown after The Sandworm Incident.

I hold in my heart, though, the Deetz family would have reconciled.

Delia would have used the newfound calmness and stability within herself and her house, her emerging success, to help Lydia's photography career, pairing with the Maitlands, pushing the boundaries of spectral photography, art, and the joy of a haunted house.

I hold in my heart Delia Deetz would meet Margaret Alford at an art exhibition -- her own, of Lydia's, or of a joint show.

If Morticia were not there, Margaret absolutely would introduce them and they all would have tea, discussing their children, discussing ghosts and Halloween decorations and gardening and so many things.

...and a lot more...

are coming to the site in the next few months.

I have -- (Lurch groans and stuffs me into a sack again)

(muffled) --figured out to answers to the questions that have been plaguing me since the launch of this project.

The essay is late but I want to say

I hope you are comfortable, I hope you knew how bright your light shone

Your work brought me so much joy, comfort, and safety, starting as a young creature and echoing through my entire life

“Can I ask you something?” Yuna said lightly, causing dread and terror to flood Ilya’s chest.

They were sitting at the dinner table at Yuna and David’s place, having just polished off a meal Ilya could only describe as ‘delicious.’ David had gotten up to do the dishes, insisting Ilya sit and digest after having helped Yuna with the bulk of the cooking, leaving Ilya alone with his almost-mother-in-law. Being alone with Yuna and David still scared Ilya, but it was getting easier, most of the time.

Until Yuna said things like that. Because who was to say she wasn’t about to ask Ilya something like ‘What makes you think you deserve my son?’ or ‘Don’t you think you’re too fucked up for someone as perfect as Shane?’ 

So Ilya sat, tense, waiting for the verbal blow. Because really, he’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop for months, now, trying not to bask too much in the light of being Shane Hollander’s boyfriend when he knew he belonged in the dark of being alone.

So he was very shocked when Yuna instead asked, “Why do you call Shane a tomato?”

“I–what?” he muttered, sure he’d heard wrong.

Yuna, though, took his absolute confusion in stride, meeting his gaze head-on. “You speak to him in Russian sometimes. And he’s learning, too, I noticed. You call him names. At first, I thought…but they’re random things.” She pulled out her phone and, to Ilya’s utter horror and delight, seemed to swipe to a list. “Tomato. Lawnmower. Apple. Pencil. Shiny coin. Are these inside jokes? Sorry, I don’t mean to pry, I’m just curious…”

“You translate my Russian?” Ilya asked before he could stop himself.

Now Yuna was blushing. “It…seemed sweet. Like you were calling him pet names. I was probably being nosy, but I wanted to know…”

He could feel himself relaxing, though he made a mental note to himself that he could not get away with uttering dirty phrases in Russian to his boyfriend in front of others any longer, at least around Shane’s parents. “I do, sometimes,” he conceded, allowing his shoulders to slump a little. “There are many names I call him that are too mushy for English, I think. Milyy is…’darling,’” he translated, casting his mind around for the best words. “Malysh is…similar to ‘baby.’ Moya lyubov is like ‘my love’ and dorogoy is ‘sweetheart.’” He decided to leave out kotenok as he didn’t want to explain to Shane’s mother that he frequently called his boyfriend ‘kitten.’ “But…is game we play, I guess? I call him different Russian word, he guesses what it means. He practices my language, and I tell him I love him in fun way,” he shrugged. “Is our…thing.” But now he was smiling. Not so long ago, the only ‘thing’ they had was sneaking around. Now, they had other ‘things.’ ‘Things’ that held emotional weight and made Ilya smile to himself as he explained them to Shane’s mom, whom he had dinner with on a random Tuesday night, without Shane even there.

Yuna, of course, was smiling, too. “That’s sweet,” she said softly, racing over to pat his hand. 

“Thank you, I–”

“I am wondering, though. I couldn’t seem to get a good translation for this one, maybe I wrote it down wrong: ‘ho-roo-sha ska-lew-hi.’ What does it mean?” she asked, reading the phrase off of her phone, eyes wide with curiosity.

And it was so kind. So sweet of her to want to understand his language, his relationship with Shane, that it almost stopped Ilya from choking on his own spit as he realized what she was trying to say. “I…um…that…” he stammered, trying to come up with a lie that sounded suitable in his head. “It means….’honey bear.’ Is just weird translation. Not…uh…what is word? Direct,” he stammered. 

Yuna smiled and nodded. “How sweet,” she said, patting his hand.

It was a week later when he got the text:

Jane:  Ilya, what the fuck? Why is my mother calling me a 'good slut' in Russian? And WHY does she seem to think it’s a good thing?