Taming of the Shrew but as one of those Hallmark "country boy meets city girl and teaches her simple living" movies. Leans heavily into the "psychological horror disguised as a romcom" aspect of the play that's often performed by having things just be ever so slightly...off about the small town in, like, New England she's moved to.
This is what I had in mind for the plot:
Kate is a no-nonsense, hardworking office worker at a financial company in Manhattan. She has a comfy apartment, but that somehow isn't enough for her. Not to mention that she's in a rocky relationship with her city boyfriend Derek. Then her family, who lives in a quaint town in the Berkshires (or maybe the Quiet Corner of Connecticut) invite her over for a visit. If it's on Christmas, it's the annual lighting of the Christmas tree and the Christmas pageant. If it's going to be anything else, it's the harvest festival. Soon she packs her bags and travels to the quaint New England town of Seven Pines, a charming, rustic little town with a little secret (imagine Bedford Falls meets Summerisle). There, while trying to settle into life in a small town, she has a little meet-cute with Peter (our Petruchio), seemingly a kind, gentle man who teaches her the way of life around here, sharing folksy aphorisms from his family, and teaching her how to whittle wooden sculptures. But, over time, he starts to control her in many subtle, insidious ways. There's always some kind of delay or obstacle when she wants to get back to her apartment: bad weather, staying a bit too long for lunch, even her car breaks down but the local mechanic isn't there to help. Outside help is limited, since cell service is spotty around here, and Peter's one of those "live in the moment" guys. Peter starts gaslighting Kate, whittling her into the perfect woman-shaped trophy for him to have. Soon, the big event happens, the mayor gives a little speech about the spirit of the town or whatever holiday it celebrates, everyone celebrates with a big dance at the pavilion.
Eventually, of course, Kate agrees to settle with Peter, she breaks it off with Derek, and they get married. At their wedding party, Kate gives a speech about a wife's submission to her husband, and how the simpler ways of living are best, calling for a return to the olden days.
All of this, in keeping with the original spirit of the Shakespeare play, turns out to be a movie a young present-day couple decides to watch out of boredom in a hotel room, after a long day of unpacking luggage, much like Christopher Sly's play which turns out to be Taming of the Shrew. Once the movie-within-the-movie ends, the couple are just as baffled and deflated as we are after seeing our female protagonist get gaslit into submission to her quite obviously sleazy country lover. I imagine the man of the couple just goes "What the hell was that?"
It's all shot like an ordinary romcom with warm tones, expansive scenes of the town and nature, we linger on Kate and Peter a little too long for comfort, but there's something ever so slightly off about it. Think, for example, a French movie from 1989 called Baxter, which uses all these warm tones and pleasant scenery, but it's very curated, very sterile.
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Zennyo RyÅ«Å by Hasegawa TÅhaku (1539 ā March 19, 1610).
Ishikawa Nanao Art Museum.
Zennyo RyÅ«ÅĀ (āDragon Queen Zennyoā) is a rain-bringing dragon deity in Japanese Buddhism, also known as the eight-year-old dragon girl and SeiryÅ« Gongen. She is described as the wise, compassionate daughter of the dragon king Shagara, enlightened from a young age through her devotion to the Lotus Sutra. In the sutraās famous episode, she proves that even a young girl can attain buddhahood instantlyādefying beliefs that women could not achieve enlightenmentāby transforming, perfecting the path, and becoming a buddha before all present.
In Japan, she is closely associated with the monkĀ KÅ«kaiĀ and is worshiped at temples such asĀ ShinsenenĀ andĀ KongÅbu-ji, as well as at DaigÅji in KyÅto under the name SeiryÅ« Gongen.
Her most famous legend dates to 824, during a severe drought under Emperor Junna. After rival prayers failed to bring rain, KÅ«kai invoked Zennyo. She appeared as a great serpent crowned with a golden snake and entered a pond at Shinsenen. The skies darkened, and rain fell across Japan for three days, ending the drought and affirming her power as a dragon bodhisattva and protector.
FAIRY TALE ART SERIES | L. Frank Baum's 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' | PART 1
"Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmerās wife."
I'm really excited to start sharing the follow-up to my previous fairy tale designs with Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid. I went back and read through the entirety of L Frank Baum's novel, and followed pretty closely to physical descriptions he described, but still left a lot to my own imagination and personal tastes.
To start off the series of designs, here is my own interpretation of Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. I stuck to Baum's visual description of the pair - their colors sapped by Kansas living, in contrast to Dorothy. I originally kept her out of this image, but decided to include her to show the visual difference between them and her.
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When I was a child, not more than seven or so, I woke to the sound of something crawling down the alley behind our house.
We didnāt have a garden, just a small yard attached to out back āpart of a row of identical, old coal-houses.
The buildings are all attached together, and our yard led into a small street, and on the other side of that were another series of yards and equally identical, attached houses. Thereās a lot of buildings like that around here, built as one-on-one-down housing for mine workers back in the late 1800s. Theyāve been modernised and divided up in the decades since, but from the outside they still look the same. Right down to the stains on the lower brick walls, from the time when all the world was made of coke and coaldust. That stuff is engrained.
Iād gone to bed early, without dinner. Not sure why now, but I think I was probably being a spiteful little brat for some reason and ran upstairs to hide. When I woke, still fully clothed right down to my training shoes, curled up in my blankets and clutching my pillow, it had long gone dark and my stomach was roiling.
Not from hunger. From something else.
I remember focussing on my gut for a second. Dad always said to trust it, but I never knew what he meant by that until then. It felt like a jar of marbles was jammed between my ribs, occasionally turning over and over in a rhythm that even my sleepy brain could figure out.
It was footsteps. Or something like them. The sort of footsteps youād expect if an entire stampede of creatures were somehow walking in synch.
There were footsteps in the alleyway outside.
Dead silent footsteps, sure. But they were there.
My bed was below the window, directly looking out into the alley. I heard the clatter of a plastic wastebin, but otherwise it was silent.
I wasnāt exactly the brightest child. Or adult, for that matter, but when I was a kid, I didnāt have the good sense god gave a rat. If it werenāt for the feeling of rattling marbles in my gut, maybe I wouldnāt have known to look out of the window.
Fuck those marbles, to be honest. Fuck them for making me crawl up, past the pillows and the glass of orange juice mam had left on my bedside table. Through the curtains, to gaze out into the street.
You didnāt get a lot of light in my room, which looked right out into the alleyway, no streetlights. One curtain was already open for me to peer through. I remember that I looked out into a pitch-black sky with nothing beyond. Nothing in sight, not a sound except for the rhythmic marble-rumble in my chest. The world was empty for the several long moments it took my eyes to adjust and realise what was making the silent footsteps.
All of them.
All of their hundreds and hundreds of bodies.
They moved the way I always imagined ghosts would.Ā Or maybe I imagine ghosts that way now because of them. There mightāve been a rough shape of a humanoid somewhere in the middle of all that darkness, and you could see that shape, if you focussed on one of them for long enough. Everything else about them was justā¦ branches.
Even now I donāt have the words for it. Branches isnāt right really, nor is filaments or cords or spidersā webs. But they were many, and they were slow and careful, crawling their way across the walls and fences that made up peopleās backyards, like Wellās Red-Weed in the colour of ink. A crowd of not-quite-people filling the alleyway like a slow, dark tide of molasses.
Every now and then they found a rubbish bin and rummaged around inside of it with their countless thready fingers. Then theyād leave. They crawled across the walls and cobbled slabs, absorbing the tattered rubbish people poured into the streets. It was still silent, except for the way in which it wasnāt. I felt, rather than heard, something almost like faint laughter and muffled words, the sort of banter Iād hear coming from people returning from the pub late at night.
Like the ghost-creatures were speaking to one another in words I wasnāt supposed to know.
They were passing my house, a silent procession of movement and endless hands, the rattling marble sensation in my chest ever constant, when I saw what was behind them.
The lumpy shape that followed seemed to suck the light from the world. Imagine tar and dirt given form, a golem-like construct of endless, rolling earth, subsumed in smoke. Colossally huge, filling the whole alley and seeping over into peopleās yards, knocking over plant pots. A cat yowled somewhere and was cut off, like someone had plunged it into water. I gelt me breath until I heard it hissing, escaping into the night.
And somehow, that comforted me. The neighbours wouldnāt be looking for their cat tomorrow.
The hugest form had no faceā¦ no body, really. No form of propulsion but the spindly threads underneath, like those coming from its followers, seeming to drag it silently forward. It was the source of the marble-rattling, I know, but I couldnāt see feet. I could barely make out anything but the blackness, like my eyes didnāt want to see what it might be beneath the dark.
You know, looking back, it reminds me, weirdly, of the rubbish collectors? I know that sounds laughable. It does to me, too. But thatās what it reminded me of: the deep disruption of the people who would drive their huge vehicles down that very alleyway at ungodly hours. Right down to the sound it finally did make, the loud, gut piercing shriek that turned the gut-marbles into fine dust inside of me. Like a sound designed specifically to break bone. Or to wake up people that needed to be awoken.
Nobody did. So far as Iām aware I was the only person who looked out my window that night.
The followers reacted to the sound the way the dustbin men would, too, scattering forward into the alley, bodies crawling across fences and signposts, dipping into drains, like insects trying to escape a downpour.
I got a clue to what they were doing when they reached the older parts of the street.
Some of the houses, you see, still had the old walls. Most of them had been replaced with newer painted brick of wooden slats, but some people still had the bones of the world before: The walls from a century back which had small, wooden slatted doors in them. Coal hatches. From back when we actually used our chimneys. The source of the stains around the bottom of every wall in the street, even now, fifty years later. I remember my dad telling me about helping his grandmother shovel coal that the company left on the ground into the hatch. These were the same hatches some of theā¦ creatures crawled into and never came out. Like birds finding their nests.
The windows were closed, but I could still smell something. Like the burning coke in my nannaās old fireplace. And even though their not-faces turned towards me frequently, I donāt think they saw me.
And then it was gone.
I woke up to daylight, with a glass of orange juice soaked into my carpet, and the feeling of a long-gone history aching in my bones.
For a week, the collection will stay with the authors' names anonymous to allow guessing games.
If your work is part of the collection, don't forget to change the published date to today's date so it shows up at the top of the list of Baldur's Gate works.
I think I just wanted an excuse to draw McNamara šš,,, sorry for the weird formatting I wanted to do more like shading but I'm too lazy,,,! ugghh!
Art Nouveau Multi-Gem and Enamel āGlycinesā Tour-de-Cou (Collar) by Philippe Wolfers, 1900.
Designed as five alternating carved watermelon tourmaline and opal wisterias, between purple and green plique-Ć -jour enamel scrolling leaf clusters, enhanced by scrolling garnet-set accents and ruby details, 34.0 cm, mounted in gold
With makerās mark for Philippe Wolfers, signed Ex-Unique for āExemplaire uniqueā.
History geek note: Now Iām imagining an editorial cartoon from 1615 comparing āYe Moderne Bible Reading Womanā with the good, old-fashioned women from 1315 who didnāt insist on learning to read the bible for themselves but were content to have a learned Man of the Church interpret it for them. Iād try drawing it myself if I could draw anything other then stick figures.
The editorial cartoon from 1615 you imagine actually exists! Or at least, something a lot like it.
This is an illustration from the 1600s. First picture shows the good old days, when people carried around lances to stab people with and we actually read literature and wore spurred boots. The second picture is THE DEGENERATE PRESENT, where all these 1600s millennials wear RIBBONS and play DICE and SMOKE and DRINK STUFF FROM SNAKE FLAGONS. Damn 1600s hipsters. It was better when I was your age.Ā
Look! Silvermarmoset posted an editorial cartoon from the 1600s, providing more proof that no matter what century you were born into you always just missed the good old days.
Early 20th century British conservative cartoonist WK Haselden ran a whole series like this in 1920, whereĀ āMaud of the Eightiesā (1880s, that is; sturdy, Victorian times) was faced with modern mores generally orĀ āGladys of Todayā specifically:
Iām sure this was a hilarious, cutting insight at the time:
By the way, Haselden himself was all of eight years old in 1880.Ā āBorn in the wrong time,ā I suppose they say.
Itās hard to say how much outright disapproval Haselden was expressing when you read, for example, the below ā but as I have pointed out before, things like this that read to us today as awesome were usually intended to be read as unseemly and absurd at the time.
This is a more overt example of the same sentiment:
And before giving him too much credit, I hasten to add he was a staunch anti-suffragist:
Haselden did at least seem to recognize the ironies implicit in āgood olā daysā talk:
Whatever his level of self-awareness, he seems to have reached the conclusion that the chattering class will always be thus:
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For a week, the collection will stay with the authors' names anonymous to allow guessing games.
If your work is part of the collection, don't forget to change the published date to today's date so it shows up at the top of the list of Baldur's Gate works.
