I made a ko-fi!
Currently, my one-act play Breaking Mediums is up for all supporters. If you want to read a dark comedy about a mother and daughter arguing as they bury a body in the woods, check it out! If you don’t want to read my play but just want to support my Shakespeare and absurdist theatre posting, please send me a tip! Many thanks, love you all 💗
“Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view. And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone. When you look up the stage directions, it says, ‘Exit Ariel.’”
— Tom Stoppard, University of Pennsylvania, 1996 (via flameintobeing)
it is finally my season i am so so excited. warmth and long days and all my friends back in town and concerts and festivals and beach trips and pride and berry picking and skimpy outfits and ice cream and farmers markets and summerstock theatre!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
someone hire me on as an article writer bc amazon released an "audiobook" of 1984 that's actually a completely rewritten audiodrama script insidiously marketing itself as an audiobook with a star studded cast & it has notably completely removed elements of the novel including the violent misogyny. and there's just SO much going on there and an article on it would make a killing and go viral i'm convinced but i have nowhere to publish to </3
so i had my first full read through of my capstone play with actors last night (it went very well!) and I was giving a note to an actor who is also a close friend of mine about how her lines are meant to be delivered with a poetic and haunting quality, but she needs to find a cadence for the "normal conversation" sections that strikes a balance between ghostly and human because she's a ghost masquerading as a camp counselor right. and I said "If it helps you at all, I wrote this character as the one I would play were I ever to perform in this" (referring to how as an actor I have an intense and commanding presence & I'm often cast as characters who hold a certain grandiosity/status) and she goes. "ohh that makes sense. because you also seem normal but there's sometimes kind of strange and off and dark about you that's hard to pin down" and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it bc what does that MEAN 😭
Updated commission page!
Commission me through ko-fi: http://ko-fi.com/viridializard/commissions
or
Email me at viridializard@gmail.com with an enquiry
actually no one more thing. i think its fascinating how fandoms are ostensibly centered around their love of a piece of fiction or celebrity or whatever and somehow such critically and intellectually stagnant spaces. like all u do is talk and its never about anything serious. except when it benefits you ofc
BORING! BANAL! PREDICTABLE! CLICHÉ! AND WORST OF ALL… PROFOUNDLY UNCHIC!
my brutalist son just killed my rococo son with his gray concrete alphabet blocks
can’t stop thinking about this section from the caucasian chalk circle I feel sick.
im not sure you know what ancient rome is
again shows the common practice of taking certain aesthetics at face value and reverse engineering whole cultures, ideas and ideals from them, and ignoring that historically, it usually worked the other way around. what do you MEAN ancient rome w/o slavery, child exploitation and misogyny. whats next. roman empire 2 - no imperialism?
like whats the roman empire without imperialism, slavery, child exploitation and misogyny. aesthetics? what aesthetics? architecture? sculptures? clothing? whos gonna build all these buildings? whos gonna maintain them? whos going to mix the cement? mine for marble? iron? gems? whos going to process fibers? weave fabrics? sew them? who do you think behind all these aesthetics?
guys I hate to say it but I think it might be time to put the phrases “trapped by the narrative” and “time loop” in reference to media with 0 connection to those concepts back on the shelf
“When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.”
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
Greek myth inspired media is so tired and overdone & i know this but man. echo & narcissus and Eros & psyche you will always be famous to me
interviewer: can you explain this gap in your resume?
me: mhm so that’s called a lacuna. it refers to when manuscripts have missing parts, lost to time. for example, the epic of gilgamesh has
George Bernard Shaw’s essays are so endlessly frustrating because like you have this nugget of really beautiful insight into one of the fundamental errors & contradictions of the Christian afterlife but it’s surrounded by a separate message seemingly completely at odds with the first one that’s likely informed by both eugenics and, bizarrely, the evolutionary reincarnation popular in occult theology of the time. So you have a eugenicist making a case against the idealization of a “perfect” human as well as a man who famously ridiculed occultists directly referencing occult cosmology. Which is all a bit odd isn’t it. & this is why I would kill to speak with a Shaw scholar for a few hours because literally what was going on in there.
