Looking Around Online, I Found A LOT Of People Were Left Stumped By The Ending Of The Film Personal Shopper.

My first video essay. I talk about the film “A Ghost Story” and how it uses things like aspect ratio and literal temporal editing to get across tone. 

Would really appreciate any likes/comments/subscriptions at this point. Let me know what you all think!

I, a lesbian, find you very attractive

This is a strangely consistent demographic for a skeleton to have. 

Yo at this point I think I’ve seen enough desolate Russian landscapes in cinema to reconstruct the whole country from memory

Hello everyone! In this video (which is probably the single one I’m most proud of to date), I examine one of the most famous shots in all of cinema and try to figure out what makes it so special.

Soy Cuba is a strange movie; a Cuban film funded by the USSR, meant as a piece of Propoganda but abandoned for not being radical enough. Check out my video and let me know what you think, and if you have any other suggestions for films I should take a look at, speak up!

4000!

A huge thank you to my 4,022 subscribers. That number really snuck up on me. If you’re an artist please hit me up! I’m sitting on a episode of Castles in the Air until I have some cool art to go alongside it, and I’ll start uploading them to Youtube as well. 

Working on the new season of Castles in the Air. Need a voice actor who sounds older, meant to be playing a character in their 50s/60s, if anyone know anyone please lemme know!

You will be okay.

I see a lot of people talking about the Mad Men finale in a cynical sense. They see it as the punch-line culminating from seven years of build-up; one of the longest, cruelest shaggy dog jokes ever told. Without sounding too stand-offish, I think this is absolutely the wrong way to view the finale and that is does a great disservice not so much to the writers or the show itself, but to Don.

The ending is one that is immediately a little polarising, but once given time to digest most people agree that it really does just click. The reading I’m so opposed to is the idea that “after all that Don just made an ad! Haha! People never change” in regards to the series ending with the iconic Hilltop Coke ad, after Don has a huge emotional breakthrough.

The thing is, to take this view (like many people have, from random tumblr users to Wired), you have to completely ignore the kind of man Don is. The question of Don’s character has been at the centre of the show since it’s very first season, and has been examined in so many ways that it makes the conversation hard to ever really finish, and harder still to begin. However, there is one thing about Don that I will always believe, that has been supported by the show since the very beginning;

Don is a man who believes in a pure ideology. He wants to connect with people and he wants the best for them.

Now, does this mean Don is morally sound? No, he’s actually anything but. He cheats on his spouses, he’s not really a great Dad and he is prone to being unreliable. Despite all that, Don beliefs have always been idealistic, lofty and sincere. That is what makes the character so wonderful to talk about, and at the same time makes him so incredibly tragic: he is a man whose weaknesses constantly betray his own morality.

Don may be cynical, but he really, really doesn’t want to be. Rachel calls him on this way, way back in season one, when he gives his “born alone, die alone” speech. She see’s through it immediately, and it catches him off guard. One of the things I’ve always adored about the show is its incredible level of humanity, and even seemingly casual interactions can be incredibly powerful character moments when this is properly utilised.

This lack of cynicism goes doubly for advertising. Think about it; how many times has he brow-beaten Peggy (and everyone else who works under him) for being phony in her work? For not being sincere?

Don doesn’t want to sell you a product; he wants to sell you a feeling that he associates with a product. Why is Don so passionate about this? Why is this what Don wants to sell? Simply put, it’s because it’s a way to connect. Connection has always been what Don has ached for.

Why did Don leave his new place of employment? Well, because he didn’t belong there. That was a place where Ivy League ad gurus sat around a table and talked about the demographic they were after while taking notes like they were studying for an exam. It was a place where the product they were selling was their ability to sell a product.

This not the place for Don. Don, who used his own life and pain to demonstrate the value of the carousel. This is the man whose first experience with love was being given a Hershey bar, which he would eat alone in his room and pretend to be normal. Maybe this is sad to you, but to Don it’s real.

With this in mind; think about what the Coke ad Don apparently creates is about; a collection of people, of all genders, races and ages, united together by a common product. This is the image Don envisions for a product that, hand to God, used to have vending machines that said “White Customers Only” (that’s right, Coke had honour-based racist vending machines). A product that isn’t even mentioned until 20 seconds into the commercial. What Don wants to sell you is the feeling that when you sit down and drink a Coke, you’re drinking it with a million other people all over the world. There’s a reason it’s the most successful commercial of all time. It may look schmaltzy, cheap or silly today, but at the time it was something people genuinely wanted to hear. Don doesn’t want you to know how great this sugar water tastes, he doesn’t want you to know that it’s better than a competing brand, or even cheaper; he wants you to feel what he feels.

And what did he feel? Well, his epiphany in that episode came when Leonard, seemingly the opposite of Don, gave a speech that rocked Don to his core. He told a story of loneliness, or worthlessness and of the desire to be loved. And Don understood. So much so that he hugged this man, who he had never met, and wept. He knew the answer to the question he repeatedly asked Peggy only a few episodes ago. Don wants to sit down with the world and buy it a Coke. It’s really what he’s always wanted.

Mad Men was always a show about introspection. To think that the show’s final moments wouldn’t reflect this is an incredible oversight, and to think that Don changes for the worse in the very last moments of the show is doing him a huge disservice.

The Hilltop ad is about empathy. It is Don, realising that not only is he not special, but neither are his worries. The way Jon Hamm played the scene supports this; he realises who he is. He is an ad man, he is a human being, who wants to connect to other human beings, and that want is ubiquitous. Don does not just “come up with a great ad”, because ads were never that cheap to him. He finds a way to communicate the feeling of profound empathy he felt the previous day, when he and Leonard were both people, together, in the only way he knows how; an ad.

Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you're doing is Okay. You are Okay.

Goodbye to one of the greatest shows of all time, and thank you for the beautiful send-off. You are not alone. You will be okay.

Mountains Crack the Clouds

If i were able, I would tell you; “be careful what it is you want to know.”

Impossible as it may be to implement, i can think of no greater advice to give.

Our own secret pessimism is betrayed by our eagerness to look to leave the Earth. How terrifying the concept of being alone is. How horrific, the notion that all there is to discover is in each other.

I don't say this sarcastically or mockingly – it's true. Since I first began my cosmological research I found the notion that this planet (and by association, this culture) is an outlier utterly repellant. Individuality is the worst thing that could happen to us as a race. To find that we are the only thinkers in a stagnant universe. To be completely alone except for the company of other men. God, how we fear being alone - how we flee the thought of isolation... but for me, personally? For the individual? That's something entirely different. There are no lonely echoes in this ship. I don't float down the halls longing for another to share the burden. That's why I'm here.

Being away from people is a blessing.

I mean, logically speaking, it's impossible we're alone, isn't it? Science does not like the idea of there being outliers, or one-off's. The universe is just too big - it just doesn't make sense that there would only be one species in the entire infinite goddamn universe that can make it into space, let alone exist. There must be – the math wouldn't fail me. I can't just have home to go back to. I'm a pioneer. I'm going to discover amazing things. That's why I'm out here – to make contact.

I won't lie and say that I don't find myself overtaken by boredom from time to time. The universe is big, but my comprehension of it is small, as is my capacity for wonder. Maybe it was a mistake to make me an astronaut – I get used to everything. To space, to cities, to people... My God, I am used to people. There has to be something more interesting out here – there just has to be.

I wasn't always interested in the idea of intelligence foreign to Earth. Back home, I studied the sun, of all things. I remembered reading how, long ago, they thought that there was life on there. That the sunspots where mountains, poking through the clouds... Given what we know now, that's an even more beautiful thought, I think. Standing atop a dark mountain, looking over a sheet of nimbus clouds with the firey intensity of a septillion atom bombs.

Sunspots are interesting things. They're around two thousand degrees kelvin cooler than the rest of the sun, and though they look almost black, that's only in comparison to the brilliant intensity of the rest of the photosphere. Also interesting is that no one really understood that much about them until recently – we knew that they could release powerful solar flares if given time. We also knew they were caused by disturbances in the sun's magnetic field – but still, we didn't know why.

I put forward a theory; that the Sun's magnetic poles, much like our Earth's, were about to flip. The sunspots we see are not actually all too common in young stars that still have a while before their poles switch places. As the magnetic flip draws closer, we begin to see more and more sunspots.

Of course, that was all just theory. Preamble to my real cause of looking for alien life. I've sat up here for almost three years, now. Just... listening for radiowaves. Letting these machines look for... Anything. I haven't found anything yet, of course, but there's hope. We can shoot out data at lightspeed now, surely we are not the only ones doing that? Surely, in this infinite universe, there must be those more advanced than even us? Of course there are, it only makes sense. In an infinite universe, this simply has to be the case. There have to be people who have been around longer than we have,

Many consider this position a punishment, and in a way I suppose it was meant as one. They couldn't fire me for what I did – they couldn't even keep me out of space. Apparently I'm too valuable to keep grounded for the rest of my life but expendable enough I can be sent on what they perceive as a dead-end mission. It doesn't matter; I'm up here, and I'm going to make history for a planet I never want to go back to.

People think their differences are precious. They think that what separates them is important or – even more ridiculously – demands respect. I'm from here, I believe this, I’m owed this.

Events come and go, and people happen to each other. Differences aren't things to be deified– people are difficult enough already. No man has the right to be surprised when others seek to rectify their problems.

God, don't send me back to Earth. Someone, please. Take me somewhere else.

I said that, time and time and time again, until I heard the good news. I was told that my theory had just been proven – that the sun's poles where about to switch, and that the increase in sunspots over the last thousand years was indeed build-up. It was going to happen, eventually. Not for another few thousand years.

The thing is, I realised what that meant. I saw the terrible implication of it.

If sunspots are caused by magnetic disturbances, and the sun's entire magnetic system was about to get flipped upside down, that would mean... Well, an enormous increase in sunspots, the likes of which we had never seen before. Perhaps even enough to cover the entire body.

What I'm curious to is if the Earth could handle the sun's overall temperature (or even just enough of it) decreasing by 2000 degrees kelvin. If by some miracle it could, there is no chance it would survive the gargantuan solar flares that would follow. Our planet’s life expectancy had just been cut drastically short.

This didn't bother me. What bothered me was my understanding of space, and life. Every planet that can support life needs to orbit a star – to have a sun of their own.

And if every civilisation needs a sun, and every sun goes through this magnetic switch, it means that

every single sun is a time bomb, waiting to kill the planets that orbit them.

The assumption we had been working under was that we would have to make contact with a more advanced species, but,

no sun will allow a civilisation to get that far.

Universe-over, they are snuffed out right before they can.

we are not alone in the universe – we can't be, but

we may as well be,

and all I have is Earth.

Howdy everyone. Please take a moment and watch this quick video I made about the best film of last year; Sorry to Bother You. If you enjoy it, feel free to give me a sub/like/share/the good stuff! If you don’t like it, pretend you didn’t see it!

friends, i have been quiet because i have been funnelling all my creative energy into music right now and idk how to move from poems to that on here. I do still make more visually inclined things but right now this is what’s taking over my life. I’m not really calling anything as formal as a hiatus - just that’s why I’m here a bit less right now, though I’ve no doubt I’ll be around again for poems and art.

if you would like to maybe keep up with this music stuff, you can, and I would love it if you did.

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I am also working on solo music stuff a fair amount. none of it is being released yet because recording is either difficult or expensive, but old things are on ishanijasmin.bandcamp.com and new things will be too.