#michael ralph

Ahhhhhh the new SFX interview is so much fun to read!! I'll include the full article at the end of this post (with thanks to @lookingatacupoftea for the screenshots).

Here are my favorite parts:

Michael Sheen described the finale in five words: "Emotional. Nosy. Crossword. World-ending. Ineffable."

(Does "crossword" imply "puzzle" or is there an actual crossword involved?!)

(No spoilers for season two in here, promise) One of the most interesting parts of getting to visit the Good Omens set was talking with set designer Michael Ralph. Mostly it was about the bookshop, but he also talked about back before season 1 was done and he was first envisioning and drawing the concept art for everything. His image of the Garden of Eden was that it would be behind walls, obviously, and that outside those walls would be a vast desert.

And that in that desert were the remains of the first attempts of building other Edens. Failed prototypes now left to turn to ruins.

Look what I found lurking in a corner.....

Yes, it's a bronze of THAT statue...

CROWLEY’S FLAT/AZIRAPHALE’s BOOKSHOP vs. HELL/HEAVEN

Alright, so I’ve seen a couple posts about how Crowley and Aziraphale’s living spaces are contrasts of their respective head offices of Hell and Heaven. I also found this contrast to be extremely interesting and it didn’t occur to me at first until I saw Crowley’s flat.

So let’s start with Crowley’s flat. It’s sparse and open. Hell is crowded and cramped. The very fact that he has a flat designed this way, his own space, speaks to his uncomfort with the confinement and claustrophobic nature of Hell’s environment. His flat is minimalistic, but it’s methodical. The climate of Hell is connected to the space it occupies, so for Crowley the way to separate himself from that is to use the power he has being on earth to design himself a space diametrically opposed to Hell. It’s a safe space, breathing room (well, until Hastur and Ligur try to disrupt that). It’s freeing and freedom is something Crowley craves constantly (his insistence on running away). It’s not that he likes the empty privacy of his flat because he clearly doesn’t like to be alone. It’s the sheer fact that his flat creates a physical and psychological separation from Hell.

And many of the same things can be said about Aziraphale’s bookshop. It’s very intimate and filled to the brim with books. Heaven, on the other hand, is empty and vast. There is a cold and clinical feel to Heaven that leaves Aziraphale feeling uncared about. He is an entity of love, after all. He has a genuine warm and friendly personality that has been dilated and warped by the need to maintain the Heaven facade in front of his superiors. His bookshop is an extension of the love he feels - for books, for knowledge, for humanity, etc - and it helps him to retain that warmth that is lacking in Heaven. His space is designed to shelter himself, relieving the anxiety that the environment and structure of Heaven consistently causes him. The empty space leaves Aziraphale feeling exposed and under observation where expectations can never be met.

Both Crowley and Aziraphale’s living spaces are important to the overall story because they represent the rejection of the environments that they have been forced into, and they reflect the emotional and psychological need for a safe space/escape. Another potent piece of this is choice. Their earthly spaces are designed according to how they want them to be, while they have no control over the spaces of their head offices.

Left of Black S9:E11: Michael Ralph on the Forensics of Capital 

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined in the studio by professor, Michael Ralph, author of Forensics of Capital (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which Mamadou Diouf describes as a book that, “draws from various sources and resources to identify critical moments, events, and key social actors; investigates issues of risk, liability, citizenship, sovereignty, leadership, historical injustices, violence, (un)employment, and displacement; and proposes an original cartography of the formation of modern Senegal. This bold, concise, and innovative book presents a compelling profile of the ‘Senegal exception / success story’ narrative based on a scrupulous and captivating probing of forensic anthropology in an African context by one of the most astute and versatile theorists.”