not enough music thats wet with blood
a few of you asked me to share the blood playlist so here you go ENJOY:
you think they are singing WRONG. they are taking a little sippy of their microphone
You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.
By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.
I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?
it's probably from assholes making asks a minefield of trolling/harassment for years with no real blocking ability, which turned people off from allowing asks on their blogs so as a whole the site moved away from it
but now that we do have better blocking, we should try to revive it.
Reblog if your ask box is open.
via @123i321 you can't just leave that in the tags
[Image descriptions in order: two tweets by Joseph Mullins @josephmulli... The first says "Today, nobody showed up to my 8.15am class.
0 students of about 40. Sitting in the empty room, I email them, trying to disguise my hurt feelings.
2 mins later, I get a reply: "Professor, we think you might be in the wrong room." So anyway off I go to live in a hole forever.
The second says "My wife really wants me to mention that I was sleep deprived because I got up at 4am to play Dungeons and Dragons with my friends in Australia."]
[Tags that say #Sad professor in a room alone #Students no love me? Why students no love me 😭 #All 40 in the other room #Where our beloved professor? Why he not here? He ok?!]
All I can think about is the ENERGY in the room with the students when the first one looked at their email... absolutely incredible.
something about the wave of Alfred Molina thirst makes me think of that "Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny" essay. shan't elaborate right now but give me a moment.
I'm sorry, the what essay?
so glad you asked
it was this article, "We All Simp for Alfred Molina" by Chingy Nea, that made me think of it, particularly this paragraph that one assumes the Nea must have composed whilst drooling like a cartoon wolf:
But gravity isn’t all Molina brings to the role [of Doc Ock]; he carries with him a stunning degree of raw sexual magnetism. As a larger man, Molina really carries his massive appendages, moves deliberately with a menacing cool and delivers one-liners in a sultry arch tone. The physicality of the role also plays into it with Octavius in an open trench coat with his titties out and with a bit of his paunch hanging over the metal tentacle corset around his waist, letting us really take in the beauty of his body.
it's Nea's appreciation for Molina's physicality, specifically the fond attention drawn to his visible paunch, that made me think of R.S. Benedict's essay "Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny." it's a good read but also a long one, so I'll summarize: Benedict posits that current standards of American attractiveness stem from post-9/11 anxiety - "When a nation feels threatened, it gets swole," she writes - and has created a national mentality of bodies as commodities to be honed to perfection without indulging in any of the pleasure a body can bring, a vessel disjointed from any sense of self and meant only to be looked at with awe.
she opens particularly by noting the very particular brand of sexless-ness that pervades mainstream media, leading to action heroes whose beautiful faces and implausibly sculpted muscles are attractive in theory but also seem to exist in a world apart from anything like genuine sensuality. their bodies are inhuman in their perfection, and this comes at the cost of doing anything as human as fucking. to quote:
In the films of the Eighties and Nineties, leading actors were good looking, yes, but still human. Kurt Russel’s Snake Plissken was a hunk, but in shirtless scenes his abs have no definition. Bruce Willis was handsome, but he’s more muscular now than he was in the Nineties, when he was routinely branded a bona fide sex symbol. And when Isabella Rosselini strips in Blue Velvet, her skin is pale and her body is soft. She looks vulnerable and real.
Benedict mostly speculates about the neutered nature of DC and Marvel's movie characters, but they're hardly the only blockbusters falling into this trend. Alison Wilmore's "Why Doesn't The Rock Get to Make Out More Onscreen?" calls attention to this with a particular focus on Disney's new Jungle Cruise movie, describing Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt's roles as "characters who are to Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen as Funko Pops are to people," with their inevitable kiss playing out "as though they’re dolls whose heads are being smashed together by a child enacting a rudimentary idea of passion."
similarly to Benedict's point, Wilmore notes that "There’s a striking divide between the body that Johnson is so famous for and the characters who are supposed to inhabit it... his characters rarely if ever seem to take pleasure in this physicality beyond its capacity to intimidate and serve as a spectacle."
and by now you're probably saying okay Makenzie that's swell, but what the fuck does this have to do with people thirsting over Alfred Molina? well, look at him.
take in the tits and paunch Nea loves so much, and compare Molina's body with the kind that have dominated the biggest movies of the last decade or so, since the MCU set the tone for the future of the superhero genre. Quoth Benedict again:
Actors are more physically perfect than ever: impossibly lean, shockingly muscular, with magnificently coiffed hair, high cheekbones, impeccable surgical enhancements, and flawless skin, all displayed in form-fitting superhero costumes with the obligatory shirtless scene thrown in to show off shredded abs and rippling pecs. And this isn’t just the lead and the love interest: supporting characters look this way too, and even villains (frequently clad in monstrous makeup) are still played by conventionally attractive performers. Even background extras are good-looking, or at least inoffensively bland.
Molina's Doc Ock isn't bland; he has character in the form of features that are, increasingly, written off as too ugly or undesirable for film. I think the reason people may be reacting so strongly to him nearly two decades after the movie's release is that a pretty-normal looking body has now become a spectacle unto itself, by virtue of being so normal.
the current crop of superhero stars are exercised, waxed, dieted, dehydrated, and quite probably steroided into something the average person could never achieve on their own, a body that's fun to look at but is ultimately alien to anything most people will ever experience. whereas what we're looking at with Alfred Molina's Doc Ock is something like a body that many people actually have, a body that many people have known and loved, a body that, frankly, many people have had sex with - certainly more than have ever had sex with, say, Chris Evans' Steve Rogers all hairless and shiny fresh out of getting shot up with super soldier serum.
it's a sexy body because it's a palpably human body, in a genre that increasingly shuns exactly that.
plus, you know, those are just some nice tits.
Both of these articles are worth a read, but this post sums them both up pretty nicely.
got my first positive review lads :)
Ok I now have one (1) thought to add to this sorry for any typos I'm wearing two (2) wrist braces.
So, another thing about Molina's physicality is that he is a stage actor. I've noticed that stage actors, because of the fact that stage is about the 'single take' and there are no cuts, no post-processing, no close-ups, coupled with backstage being communal and stage acting generally having this higher requirement for the present and the reality of inhabiting a human body in a physical space, means that stage actors are a presence on screen that is more magnetic and more sensual, not even sexually just inhabiting the senses.
And not only that, but when you're backstage you have to get comfortable with your nudity and everyone else seeing it real damn quick, because unless you're in a really modern theatre building (not very often, most theatres are pretty old and labyrinthine), the space backstage is limited, and there are sometimes super-fast costume changes required. Theatre, also, has always been far more rauncy, liberal, and risque than cinema. There was never a Hays Code for theatre, and the MPAA has no power there.
So I would be surprised if a significant part of how Molina carries himself isn't to do with the fact that he's a stage actor, and has had vastly different training and experience with that intense 'you inhabit every inch of a body' self-awareness without the societally-normalised shame or intense discomfort with one's own body--a lack of anxiety that the viewer twigs as intensely attractive (after all, confidence is the core of 'sexy' as a concept).
this is an excellent and insightful addition, thank you for typing through the pain!
hey, you guys. life gets so much more fun when you let yourself enjoy the small pleasures of life, love your friends loudly and wholeheartedly, and let yourself be loved.
