Timeheart

Your slow-motion montage backed by a Gregorian choir can be done with a few technques that all involve repetition.

First is epizeuxis, the repeating of a word for emphasis.

Example:

Falling. Falling. Falling. There was nothing to keep Marie from plunging into the rolling river below. She could only hope for a miracle now, that she would come out alive somehow despite a twenty-foot drop into five-foot-deep water.

Then there’s anaphora, where you write a number of phrases with the same words at the beginning.

There were still mages out there living in terror of shining steel armor emblazoned with the Sword of Mercy.

There were still mages out there being forced by desperation into the clutches of demons.

There were mages out there being threatened with Tranquility as punishment for their disobedience, and the threats were being made good upon.

Mages who had attempted to flee, but knew nothing of the outside world and were forced to return to their prison out of need for sustenance and shelter.

Mages who only desired to find the families they were torn from.

Mages who only wanted to see the sun.

i picked up the saxophone when i was 11 and played until i was about 17. by the end of it i was first chair in our highest ensemble, a district honor band player, etc. but at the beginning – and this is important – i was bad. for the first year or so, i had no rhythm, i couldn’t make my tongue line up with my fingers, i was consistently sharp, etc. etc. other kids actually made fun of me for my lack of skill.

but 11 year old me didn’t care. 11 year old me practiced, but she also thought that being able to play the pink panther made her incredible (i shudder in retrospect). i mean, i was aware i wasn’t a master, but my skill level didn’t deter me from wailing out those notes in a way that i’m sure had my band director questioning his career decisions.

right now, i’m trying to pick up the guitar. it’s a very different instrument from the saxophone, and i struggle a lot with things like strumming patterns and barre chords. and sometimes i don’t want to play, because i know i’m bad at guitar. and sometimes i beat myself up when stumbling through a poor acoustic rendition of Everybody Wants to Rule the World because it’s not how i want it to sound. and it’s made even more frustrating because i can navigate the saxophone so smoothly.

when they’re cleaning their feets and spread all their little toes out

when they smelled something weird and make a stinky face

when they walk up to you making little chirpy purrs of inquiry

when they get distracted by a noise mid-lick and a tongue blep occurs

when they see a bird and do that ekekekk thing

“ In August, 1968, the country was still reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King four months earlier, and the race riots that followed on its heels. Nightly news showed burning cities, white flight, radicals and reactionaries snarling at each other across the cultural divide.

“A brand new children’s show out of Pittsburgh, which had gone national the previous year, took a different approach. Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood introduced Officer Clemmons, a black police officer who was a kindly, responsible authority figure, kept his neighborhood safe, and was Mr. Roger’s equal, colleague and neighbor.

“Around the first anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death, Mr. Rogers invited Officer Clemmons to join him in soaking their tired feet in a plastic wading pool. And there they were, brown feet and pasty white feet, side by side in the water. Silently, contemplatively, without comment.

“25 years later, when the actor playing Officer Clemmons retired, his last scene on the show revisited that same wading pool, this time reminiscing. Officer Clemmons asked Mr. Rogers what he’d been thinking during their silent interlude a quarter century before. Fred Rogers’ answer was that he’d been thinking of the many ways people say “I love you.”

It’s not a fuck-you.  Mr. Rogers didn’t do fuck-yous.  But it was a clear, decisive, pointed statement.  It was more than just showing inclusion; it was a deliberate response to what was going on in the world.  This was him saying “you can do better.  We can all do better.  What you are doing is wrong.”  This was a sweet, simple, and relatable thing to show little kids, to give them a view of a black man as kind and professional and a trusted adult – but also a lovely and strong statement to their parents and to the world.

It could have lost him his show, or at least his national distribution.  It could have gotten him attacked both in the news and personally in person, but he did it anyway.  I wish I knew if he ever talked about this, and how aware he and the show producers were of the statement this made.

for those unfamiliar, Max Weber was an early sociologist who posited that modern capitalism grew out of the psycho-social conditions created in western Europe by the destruction of the pervasive institutions of the Catholic church. his thesis was that prior to the Reformation, people were comfortable in the assurance of their salvation as long as they received the sacraments of the church and acted (more or less) under its authority. but with the security of the Catholic hierarchy and claim to One True Churchness gone, most people did not have a sufficiently developed personal spirituality to feel assured of salvation anymore. this was particularly acute amongst Calvinists because of the belief that God had already predestined who was going to Heaven and who was going to Hell- but there was no formal institution to tell you that you were deffo predestined for Heaven, no worries buddy, so you had to find ways to constantly reassure yourself.

and of course if you were one of God’s Chosen Elect, your life would surely be pretty great, and you’d be rich- or at least better off than those bad awful sinners who were born going to Hell. so you worked hard and made your work a spiritual calling, and you weren’t profligate with your money because you needed it to prove you were living the blessed life of the elect. and eventually accumulating money became an ethical end in itself, intertwined with other aspects of virtue- this was a big thing for Benjamin Franklin, amongst other major figures in the founding history of the USA. this also went hand-in-hand with disdain for the kinds of charitable practices that are central to Catholicism- if a person was poor, it was a sign of their non-electness, and they deserved to stay that way. the whole system requires that some peoples’ lives are shit, because then otherwise how can you be sure who’s going to Heaven?

and the same principles apply to white supremacy. it was easy to be confident and comfortable in your belief in the inherent superiority of white people when you had vast social institutions backing you up. in the Jim Crow south, you could be a poor as shit white person, but at least you got to drink from the ‘whites only’ fountain. but now those institutions are gone or going, and despite every effort against them people of colour are clawing their way to economic and social equality. 

there’s nothing left to reassure the white supremacist. they can’t look at the corridors of political power and feel a bit better, because the head of state is a highly-educated black guy. they can’t even go the Calvinist route and pile up a big soothing stack of money, because you can’t tell by looking who’s God’s Deserving Elect, but you sure as hell notice when a black family moves into your suburb and are driving a nicer car than you do.

but if you can fuck yourself over in a way that you can be dead certain is going to fuck over people of colour worse, well, that just proves you were right all along, huh? now you’ve got more money than that black family, even if all of you are worse off.

tl;dr: requiring there to be people worse off than you as proof of your innate superiority is one of the founding socio-ethical principles of the USA and Protestant societies in general, which maps neatly onto the white supremacist need for people innately inferior to you to be worse off.

Lee is described by The American Lawyer as “one of the country’s top intellectual property litigators.”…