What Duck?

Wring…

I’d like to wring

Those Wright brothers necks

For building the wings

that bring her back west

Parallel lines upon the evening sky

laughing and mocking me,

to tired to fly

She tells me of kingdoms

cut from ivory and white

Flooded in gold

then covered up by the night

What a show,

what a real delightful sight.

But way down here, the quiet grows

and I curse the minds and hearts of those who sought the stars until they rose

In iron wings

They must not have known love

Or certainly not such love

as urgent as mine

For if they had

They’d of never risen their eyes

In hopes of the heavens

and gifts of the birds

It’s clearer than day

they knew no one like her

Yes her,

The one now lifted towards the sun

In the morning glare

she was here I swear

Now just past noon

she’ll be arriving soon,

ten thousand miles away from me,

I’d like to do the same as she

Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski (1849–1915)

female bodybuilders across india

In the scene where Smoke teaches the young girl how to negotiate, they're standing in front of of a cafe. The shot of them negotiating is framed so that you see a sign in the cafe window advertising a Ham and Eggs breakfast - in other words, a full meal - for 25 cents. The editing makes sure to put that sign back into frame whenever the question of the value of money arises in their discussion.

Smoke offers her 10 cents a minute and asks if that works for her. She says yes. He says no, it does not and tells her to negotiate higher. The 25 cent sign is framed in the shot when he tells her no, reminding us *why* it's not a good value.

She comes back with 50 cents - which the sign has informed us is the cost of *two* meals. Smoke tells her that's too much and counters with 20, which is just under a full meal but we now know that's a fairly respectable price because we just got the high/low contrast of 10 being too little and 50 being too much.

The negotiation ends with her getting 20 cents per minute and we now know 1) 25 cents is the cost of a filling meal in this environment 2) This girl only needs to do five minutes of work to be able to feed herself for a over day (20 cents per minute times five is a dollar, which is four meals) 3) Smoke has the kind of money to throw around that over a day's worth of food for someone can be to him - as it is to our modern eyes - mere pocket change and 4) Smoke's the kind of person who can both be a violent gangster but also care about teaching this girl how to look out for herself so that one day maybe she too can throw over a day's worth of food around like pocket change.

Combined with 5) you can now use that 25 cents = a meal to do the math every other time money gets mentioned in the movie to understand just how much cash the Smoke Stack boys are dealing with.

This sort of problem runs deep and i see it fucking everywhere.