#(am I an 18th century boy off to fight the British or am I a merc off to fuck up a planet)

[sixcrowsbooks]

locus is so gender. no I will not elaborate.

[madrut16]

Premeditated Part 1 (AdrianxMC)

Author’s Note: This is by far the darkest thing I have written! And yes I know my preview had no hint of that, I didn’t want to give too much away. So, this is my warning that it gets really sad and horrifying. I was a little disturbed that I was actually writing this but, this theory has been nagging at me since Book 1 and I had to write it. 

Pairing: AdrianxMC 

Rating: R (A significant amount of violence and murder)

Summary: Isabel discovers first hand who was really responsible for the death of Adrian’s family.

Word Count: 2550

@endlesshero1122 @kinda-iconic @brightpinkpeppercorn @desiree-0816 @flyawayboo @tabithacarlisle @galaxyside-0  @sucker4aslowburn

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At first, everything is pitch black. That’s how all the visions start now, as an overture for the main feature. She first smells the fresh air mixed with gunsmoke and feels the cool breeze tickling her skin and already she can tell that this is somewhere familiar, somewhere she's been before. It slowly comes into focus and she lets out a strained gasp. 

The cabin... 

Immediately dread coils in her stomach, suspecting that whatever she would see wouldn’t be good. Yet, the scene before her isn’t sad or frightening at all, in fact, it’s purely domestic.

The full moon illuminates the cabin with a silvery light and that mixes with the soft, golden glow of a kerosene lamp. Her eyes first fixate on a younger woman, around the same age as her in 18th-century dress, humming to herself as she kneaded a loaf of bread. 

A movement soon catches her eye and Isabel looks to the woman’s right where a small boy was sitting on the floor a few feet away and her heart skips a beat as she recognizes the identity almost immediately.

“Ch--Charles...” 

Of course, no one could hear her, since she’s merely a fly on the wall. Even if they did, they would barely be able to understand her in her drugged-like state. Adrian was right about one thing, the kid was adorable. And he looked remarkably like his father too, even at that tender age. That means that the woman had to be Eleanor--his wife. 

She quickly realizes that it was just the two of them for now with Adrian gone somewhere. Every minute or so, a loud crack could vaguely be heard and faint screaming and shouting that was the unmistakable sound of war. 

“I hope your father is alright,” Eleanor said looking at her son as her forehead creased with concern. “He shall be late for supper again with the fighting going on this long.”

The toddler blinked at her in confusion before returning to the rocks in front of them which he was playing with gleefully. 

His mother let out an anxious sigh. “Tis good you are unaware Charlie. The British nearly have us surrounded now! I pray all will be right eventually. Your father doubts we have the blessing of the Lord. We must believe him. Hope is our greatest defense. That we shall focus on.”

A delicate smile appeared on her lips as she returned to her task. However, Isabel could see through the tension in her arms that she was still nervous. Eleanor finished up shaping the dough into a ball and left it on the counter, brushing her hands on the white apron. Then, she went over to Charles and crouched down beside the boy, who looked up at her with a cheeky grin. 

“Tis late my child, I ought to get you to sleep.”

His small forehead scrunched into a pout as she picked him up, a tiny frown gracing his tiny face. “No.”

She responded with a sympathetic look as she ignored his protests. Just as she went to take him to the single bedroom, the sound of a man's boots approaching stopped her. She turned toward the sound but there was no one to be seen. Shaking her head in bewilderment, she resumed placing the child in the small, hand-built crib and kissed his forehead.

"Sleep, my child. Father will see you when he is home," she whispered before slowly walking away as Charlie continued to fuss.

An abrupt knock cut through the silence just as Eleanor reentered the main living area. Her brows creased once more and she grabbed a broom as a precaution. She approached the front door just as the person outside pounded another more persistent knock. Finally, Eleanor opened it and her eyes widen seeing the man's uniform.

"No," Isabel murmurs in disbelief. "It can't...be."

But it was. Even though the hair was tucked underneath his hat, she feels like she’s known that face for ages. 

Gaius Augustine. 

"How do you do?" he said to Eleanor, his distinct voice as clear as day. However there was one difference: it sounded tired, hoarse. As if he were using a considerable amount of energy. It also sounded exaggerated, enough for Isabel to tell that it was fake. 

"Good evening to you sir. Can I help you?"

"May I come in? I am an acquaintance of your husband, Adrian Raines. From the fighting."

This caused Eleanor to gasp and immediately step to the side. "Of course! Has something happened?" she asked, her already pale face become sheet white. "Is he alright?"

Crossing the threshold, his boots creaked on the floorboards as he entered. Even though Isabel's mind is the only part of her in the room, she can still feel his presence. He consumed the space without even trying.

"Oh no, I did not mean to distress you," he told her shaking his head. A small, almost undetectable laugh partially escapes before his caught it and his serious demeanor returned. "He is fine. I, however, am not quite so," he reassured her before grimacing.

It’s then that Isabel noticed the dark stain that covered the white undershirt that peaked out of his uniform. 

"Oh no!" Eleanor exclaimed, observing the mark also. "That looks not good at all. Here, why don't you sit over there and I will fetch something to treat it."

Gaius did as he was told, letting no other cracks appear out of his armor. "You are too kind Mrs. Raines, thank you!"

"Of course, sir. Although, I beg you to be as quiet as possible. My son has gone to sleep for the night."

A trace of a smile briefly graced his lips. "My apologies."

"Tis alright sir, I will be back shortly."

She disappeared from view for a moment to get whatever medicinal supplies they had. As soon as he was left alone on the wooden bench next to the fireplace, a slow, evil smile spread across Gaius's face. He stripped off the soldier's uniform in several quick motions revealing the all-black attire Isabel has seen so many times. In his standard form, he stood and waited for the woman to come back, his eyes already flickering from their greyish blue to bright red.

"No. Not...him. Can't be...him," Isabel stammers, her subdued state from the vision barely allowing her to slur together a full sentence.

It was too early. Adrian said that he had made his move after his family was already dead. But, now it's clear that he was mistaken. Was Adrian misled about who did it? Or did he simply block the memory out and replace it himself? Both possibilities fill her heart with a pang of immense sadness and instantly she becomes nauseous. 

"Please...no. Don't...make...me..."

She desperately wills herself to snap out of the vision with no luck. Her mind is determined to make her an unwitting spectator to the killing she knew was inevitable.

After what seemed like an eternity, Eleanor returned carrying a metal bucket full of water and a cloth and seeing Gaius in his true form, she froze. Seconds later she dropped the bucket and as the water spilled out across the floor she let out a shrill scream. 

This seemed to enthuse him even more. “I like it when you scream, it makes your demise more entertaining.”

“Why? Why are you doing this?” the young woman cried.

“You have what I need...what I crave. Quite simply a means to an end. Although I will admit, this is more than a normal hunt for me. See, what I desire of your husband, the grand future I envision...it, unfortunately, requires that you meet your demise. Both of you.”

The meaning hit Eleanor the same time it reaches Isabel. The latter can only manage a few groans in protest, for the memory takes more of her energy as it grows in intensity.

As Gaius’s glowing red eyes bore into his victim, Eleanor’s gaze moved towards the bedroom and started moving near it protectively.

"I do not think that will help you," he told her menacingly.

"Please, I beg of you!" she sobbed, tears streaming down her face. "Do not harm my son!"

A sinister laugh echoed throughout the entire cabin. “No can do. Blood from the young has always been a particular...delicacy of mine. And more importantly, there is nothing you can do to stop me."

The hunger that he had been restraining came to the surface at once and baring his fangs, the vampire made his move. In a flash, Gaius traversed the gap between them and forcibly grabbed Eleanor, pinning her to the ground hard.

"Hhhhhh….," Isabel whimpered, the vision manifesting itself physically--a painful electric current of remembrance running through her.  

She wants to make it stop but it’s too strong for her to resist. And so she writhes in agony as the horrific scene plays out. 

Gaius began the slow and merciless assault, tearing into Eleanor's thigh causing her to scream in pain. Soon, her cries were mixed with the fearful wailing from Charles in the open bedroom behind her. He made his way up her body leaving a crimson red trail in his path. Eventually, Eleanor began to quiet as she hovered on the brink of consciousness, a purposeful tactic by Gaius to draw out the suffering before he went for the kill.

Eleanor's weakened gaze came to rest on the wooden ceiling above. There was no longer fear in her eyes, but an overwhelming sadness having resigned herself to her fate.

"A-Adrian I-I am sorry I...could not...protect him," she stammered, her breathing labored from the gaping wounds all over her torso and legs. "Please...know that I...love you...and will wait for you...to join me...once more...soon. Yet if you...somehow survive...do not...dwell on me...on us. Move on...live...tis quite alright with me."

Gaius appeared to be enjoying his victim's last dying words. Of course, he could have left her like that, with the amount of blood still coming out, she would certainly die from that alone. But that was not what he wanted, he wanted to decide exactly when she would take her last breath.  

Soon his impatience and insatiable thirst overtook his love of dramatics. He rose, his greedy eyes honing in on her exposed neck. The only part of her left untouched.

"At last...," he said softly, petting her hair with a blood-soaked hand as she sputtered and gasped beneath him. Then, he hissed and sank his sharp teeth right into her carotid, eliciting an ear-splitting scream from her as he continued to tear her apart.

Isabel cries out hysterically, her body continuing to spasm in blistering pain as Eleanor inevitably began to weaken until she fell limp in Gaius's arms, drained and mutilated. He stood up and left her there, lying in a giant pool of her own blood. He wiped his face which was stained red and moved methodically, coldly towards the open bedroom behind the mother who died trying to protect it. 

"No...please..."

Again, the Bloodkeeper's pleas are useless and the vision follows Gaius's bloodsoaked footsteps. She saw little Charles, still wailing profusely. And her heart shatters when she figures out why. From the crib, there was a decent view of Eleanor's body. Lifeless and drowning in red puddles and smears.

"Ch-charlie..." Her words barely intelligible, the shooting pain still running through her.

She saw Gaius approach the young boy and the look in his eyes was of pure thirst. He wasn't going to draw it out this time. He quickly grabbed the terrified toddler and immediately he sank into the child’s tiny neck. 

"NO!!!!!"

A guttural sob erupts as Isabel watches Charlie's shrieking violently stops. The intense burn that shoots through her is almost unbearable. 

"Isabel! Wake up! Isabel!"

Lily. 

The voice interjects through, calling to her. In a flash of bright white, she’s ripped out of the memory. Gasping, she finds herself still on the couch in her apartment where she was when the vision took hold, the blistering pain slowly turning into tiny electric tingles. As her eyes adjust she sees her best friend standing over her fretfully. 

“Iz! What happened? Are you okay?”

Isabel shakes her head, still sobbing profusely. 

“Please, let me forget!” she begs. A few weeks earlier, she had started to remember what her visions contained and this one joins the mental archive. It only takes seconds for this latest memory to implant itself for good. "No...it...it's real!" 

As soon as she speaks, an overwhelming wave of nausea hits her, the haunting images making her physically repulsed. She sprints to the bathroom just in time to reach the toilet. 

Vaguely she hears Lily come in after her. "Isabel?! You’re scaring me, what's going on?”

"He...he killed them! That lying, bastard," she exclaims her voice raspy as her face twists in anger before she turns and throws up once more. 

Before her friend can ask any more questions, a loud, persistent knock sounds and she springs up to go answer it. “Thank God you’re here, I didn’t know what else to do!”

“It’s alright, my last meeting just got out when you called. Where is she?” Kamilah demands, rushing into the small apartment. 

“In here!”

Her friend quickly leads the council member to the bathroom. Her eyes fall on Isabel and she freezes, frowning in concern. “Oh my. What happened?” 

“I-I don’t know!” Lily stammers. "When she came out of it, she was hysterical. I think she saw something. Something that obviously disturbed her.” 

“A memory?” Kamilah asks. 

Isabel opens her mouth to speak but, as soon as she does, her head starts to throb painfully and she nods with a wince. “Adrian’s family...I saw them. Oh god, where...where is he?”

“In Cambodia...he doesn’t get back until tonight remember?” Lily replies, her brows creasing. 

In her delirium, Isabel remembers chatting with him that morning. After a second her face pales impossibly more than it already has and another round of heaving starts, but nothing besides spit comes out. At this point, it’s all mental.

Groaning she leans against the cool porcelain, beginning to shake uncontrollably. “He--he doesn’t know! What really happened to them...o-or he...he can’t remember.”

“What do you mean?” Kamilah tilts her head slightly, brows creasing. 

Isabel’s face suddenly became flush with anger. “They weren’t killed by the British! Eleanor...she let him in...he was wearing a patriot uniform.”

Both vampires stare at her in shock. 

“Did you recognize who it was?”

She nods at them, her jaw clenched. She hesitates, not wanting to speak it into existence, knowing that it will be painful. 

“Isabel...tell me. Who was it?”

The assistant meets her equally intense stare. 

“Gaius.”

Lily’s mouth falls open. 

Meanwhile, Kamilah’s eyes widen, a mixture of sadness, fear, and anger all converging at once. “You’re sure?” she whispers. 

“Positive,” Isabel answers almost immediately. ”I've seen him in visions before, I know what he used to look like.” 

As soon as the words leave her mouth, Kamilah is up, fishing her phone out of her suit’s pocket. 

“Kamilah? What are you do--?” Lily wonders before being cut off.

She holds up a finger as the person on the other end picks up. “Brother, we have a problem. You need to come back now.”

...

[mariposalass]

To Rise Again

Summary: This wasn’t what Mari and her crazy bunch were expecting when they came to visit the Hamilton exhibit with a goal to temporarily bring life to the wax statues to have a talk with them; instead however, they just brought back one guy back from the dead. Let the madness begin.

Setting: The local Alexander Hamilton (more of the musical than the real life stuff) exhibit in a museum at Daly City, California, January 3, 2019

Notes: This is the story of how Mari and Philip met: permanently bringing him back from the dead thanks to Ahkmenrah’s magic tablet. Inspired by the Don’t Be Shocked When Your Hist’ry Book Mentions Me series in Archive of Our Own. It’s ‘future is shocking’ with a heavy dose of curiosity intrigues the cat. The cast used for this story and Mari’s world are the OG Broadway cast. I was listening to Evanescence’s Bring Me to Life (Synthesis version) while thinking of this story.

Tags: Mild language, future shock, fighting and arguments, the dead being revived to life again, life-bringing magic, mild revival angst, the future is shocking but interesting

“Is there any good reason why you had to smuggle in that tablet of yours for just an exhibit on one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, huh, Ahk?” Mari questioned the forever youthful pharaoh’s sanity as he pulled out his magic tablet from his messenger bag in their group (which composed of them, Harry, Issa, Kirby, Kairi, and Karina)’s presence during a visit at the Alexander Hamilton exhibit featuring the wax statues of the people around the First Secretary of Treasury based on the original Hamilton Broadway cast on display in a local Daly City museum.

“Mari, I understand that you’re quite peeved on the fact I had to lunge this thing around to the exhibit for seemingly no good reason, but I thought it would be interesting to talk with the figures for just one day,” Ahk tried to explain his reasoning behind the tablet tagging along.

“Errr… Would that be considered necromancy?” Karina asked him out of concern with fear in the tone of her voice.

“Maybe Ahk is up to something: crazy but still a genius idea,” Issa tried her best to sound hopeful that Ahk knew what he’s doing, “After all, Harry accidentally returned him back to life with that tablet of his when we visited the other local museum years back.”

Ahkmenrah, the former Fourth King of the Fourth King, didn’t pay too much attention to the bickering the girls were having, just making sure that his tablet, the only thing he has left in his connection to his previous life in Egypt’s past, wouldn’t go missing from his sight. Harry should’ve kept his mouth shut about this portion when he nonchalantly mentioned the tablet incident of Ahk’s revival during the exhibit visit planning and he (Ahk) was like ‘Well, why not try it on the wax figures for one day there, Harry?’. Holy shit, the Boy Who Lived was in trouble for sure.

The wax figures in front of them were rendered so life-like as if the artist behind them was able to capture the old Broadway cast frozen at one moment in time. Even the costumes they wear for the exhibit could easily be mistaken for the ones used in the original production in New York City and straight from the 18th Century to the 19th Century; it was quite surreal for Mari, Harry, Kairi, Issa, and Kirby to see them face to face as they have seen the play before in their most recent trip to the Big Apple for the New Year celebrations. Mari though was more morbidly curious than she wanted to admit as she spotted one figure looking like they’ve seen something bad in their line of sight.

That one wax figure in particular catching Mari’s eyes was a young slender man, handsome and quite tall for his age: a head of untamed manly brown black curls, soulful hazel eyes, light brown skin (? Wasn’t the real life man he was based supposed to be white? Oh never mind!), and freckles on the face. Mari felt as if she was drawn to the figure, like a curious moth drawn to the flame and like fate, only weirder that she has fallen hard for a wax statue.

“Hello, Earth to Mari!” Kairi was calling out to her adopted older sister, waving her arms frantically, to snap her out of her trance.

“Huh, what, what?” she shook her head after realizing her sister was right beside her, taking part of looking at the wax man with her.

“It seems that this guy has caught your attention, huh?”she giggled.

“Geez, Kairi,” Mari shrugged, “I mean, this fellow looks freaking cute. Too bad he’s… dead!”

“Gushing over a dead man like him, aren’t you, Mari?” Issa asked her.

Mari blushed in embarrassment, not knowing what to do with her strange feelings and her attraction to the stranger while Kairi and Issa were left dumb-folded on the matter without a single response.

“Poyo, poyo!” Kirby chatted with the wax man, tugging onto the left leg of his white stockings to try to get his attention.

“Kirby, that guy’s already dead for more than 2 centuries already,” Mari told him, which made the poor puffball sad to hear the news as she continued on, “Death by gun shot wound at only 19 years old.”

“Ouch! RIP Wax Guy in period clothing Mari just had a crush on,” Kairi prayed in concern.

Kirby understandably wept for the poor young man’s soul, salted tears running down on his spherical body. Issa went up to pick Kirby up in her arms, consoling him as she said to him it wasn’t the man’s fault that his life ended that way. On the other side of the story, Harry and Ahkmenrah were talking about the problems and concerns arising if they try to bring life to the wax figures for one day which went downhill from there.

“I can’t believe that I dragged everyone into this mess today,” Harry grumbled in his breath, “Seriously: What kind of a stupid plan did I just randomly blurted out loud? This is bloody stupid: bringing dead people to life for just one day!”

“Calm down, Harry,” Ahk tried to console his friend’s dilemma for suggesting a silly plan, “It is just temporary. Once we leave the exhibit, they’ll resume back to their original positions and return back to their still wax state. It’s not like we’re performing a necromancer’s ritual.”

“Ahk, you got to be kidding, mate!” the British wizard sternly yelled at him, “How are we going to explain to the exhibit staff & organizers and the people running the place if at least one of them goes missing? You said if a museum exhibit was left outside when the sun rises up, they’ll be reduced to dust!”

“True, but I did made sure that this one attempt was just a one-off, I swear to the Gods, Harry,” the ex pharaoh countered the argument, “Who knows: maybe the Doctor could get the chance to hear them speak if he’s here with us now.”

“Oh, you idiot!!!” “Harry, please! Just trust me on this...” “Shut up, okay!” “But it won’t hurt anyone in the end...”

Everyone in the group soon turned their eyes at Ahk and Harry playing a rough tug-of-war with the former’s tablet, fearing that it could break at any given moment. Mari was scared to see one of her great friends and her older brother arguing over something petty like temporarily giving life to a group of life-like wax figures. It was so bad she couldn’t hold her tears in great distress.

Unbeknownst to everyone involved, things would get weirder from there: while arguing inaudibly over the whole plan, Harry and Ahk unwittingly messed with the symbols on the tablet and aimed at the young wax man Mari took a great interest in. The girls and Kirby were horrified that the poor young wax figure was in the line of the tablet’s aim and, in a bold noble effort, tried to stop the two men from creating further fuel to the figurative fire: yelling “Guys, stop it! Don’t break that tablet beyond its limits AND kill each other at the same time!”, “Kuya Harry, don’t punch Ahk for this!”, “Harry, Ahk, no!!!”, “Can you guys just stop fighting and get a grip on yourselves before some serious shit happens?!?”, and “Poyo, poyo! Popoyo, poyo, yop, yoyopo, POYO!!!”

Sadly, it was all for nothing: the wizard and the pharaoh unwittingly sent a blast of golden light, hitting the wax man on the chest and knocking him back onto the floor with a great big THUD! It was that very moment that Harry and Ahk realized their grave mistake: the wax man was now lying down on the platform on his back with an extremely blank look in his face, as he was a wax statue after all. Everyone who didn’t took a part of the mess were now staring at the two of them being mad at them for being a bunch of idiots fighting over one tablet of all things.

There was deafening silence among the group and wax figures in that one room: not a single word or sound was made, everything in awkward silence. But the silence would not last for long…

While the group were staring at each other out of confusion and anger, the next thing they heard is a groaning voice as roars of life were emanating from the golden glow from Ahk’s tablet that hit one of the wax statutes earlier during Harry and Ahk’s arguing. They froze for a moment, blank stares everywhere, and turned around to see a sight they never expected to see. The wax young man, or rather the previously wax young man, was now struggling to get up on his own two feet, still lying on his back similar to that of a turtle upside down on its shell, and his limbs wailing around faster than a speeding Japanese bullet train.

“Umm… Hello, if you don’t mind, I could use some assistance over here,” the man cried out, “Where in the world I am in?”

“Mother of God...” Issa gasped in horror, “That man needs some help here! We better help him out.”

“But wasn’t that supposed to be the wax-” Kairi was about to counter the situation but it was vain when Harry regained some senses.

“There is no time to explain it to him right now, Kai!” he lectured her immediately, “We should help this guy out first, then we can break the… unpleasant news to him later.”

“Poyo...” Kirby nervously squeaked, shaking in fear of the man’s bizarre awakening.

“Then we should start helping him in getting up from the platform, shall we?” Ahk nodded back.

It took a while for the humans to get the newly revived man up with around 2 boys and 4 girls involved, but they were able to get him up at last. They were tired but relieved that the man was able to stand up again, though questions were being to stir in their minds and worries were forming that they may have done something really terrible that very day.

“Alright, sir. Are you okay now?” Mari was at a loss of breath, sitting down on the stage platform, as she asked him how he was feeling after finally regaining his grip.

“A damned sight better, Madam,” he remarked as a response while brushing off dust from his outfit before continuing on with what else he was going to say, “Now how I can repay you lot back… Wait a minute, this isn’t the dueling grounds or Aunt Angelica and Uncle John’s house...”

“Oh God, if it ain’t Philip Hamilton himself!” Karina’s eyes widened in shock as memories of reading about the life of his famous father with everyone else flashed back in her mind.

“We knew it!” Issa shouted.

“By Merlin’s beard!” Harry freaked out with his jaws dropping to the ground.

Ahkmenrah, having been through the same thing as this Philip Hamilton (as the man is called), couldn’t help but to feel bad for him with being sent back to life and reality once again but in a more modern era, decided to approach him with caution and spoke on behalf of the bewildered group, “Well, pardon me, sir. What was the last thing you saw before… you just came back?”

Philip, whose facial expression now went from bewilderment to mourning, meekly replied back to the pharaoh’s question, “I… I was at Uncle John and Aunt Angelica’s house across the (Hudson) river… The doctor was there checking on my dire situation then...” He then pointed to the group at the direction of his right hip, “Good Lord, I’ve been shot! That Eacker fellow is going to be in trouble once I can find him again-”

“Whoa, whoa, back up a minute!” Karina busted his moment of rage, “What did that guy did to you that has made you wanting to gang up on him?”

That was when the younger Hamilton came to realize to see the group’s more contemporary appearance, quite unusual for his time in their clothing; never mind the fact that Ahk was holding onto the same golden tablet that brought both of them back from the dead. Was he in some sort of a time displacement?

Mari sighed, knowing that they can’t keep away the fact that he’s in the wrong century now, and came “Mr. Hamilton, I know we just met within a few minutes of your reawakening, but I feel we need to properly introduce ourselves. I’m Mari Tan, assistant librarian at the Daly City Public Library. The people and puffball with me are my friends and adopted siblings: Karina Lyle, Ahkmenrah, Harry Potter, Isabelle Miravelez, Kairi, and Kirby. I hate to break this to you, but you’ve been asleep for far too long until now.”

Philip was left even more confused than when he got revived, asking her again, “For how long?”

“It’s January 2019, in Daly City, California. I don’t think we’re even in New York anymore,” Harry stepped in, adding more surprise to the 19 year old man, greeting the British wizard with a dropped jaw of shock, to which he replied, “I could tell that even California as a state is foreign to you: back when you’re still alive in your original timeline, it was under Spanish rule before the Mexicans took over, followed by a brief moment of independence when the Americans came into town.”

“Welcome to the Golden State, you’re going to be in a really rough pickle now that everyone you know then is, well…, dead,” Kairi dropped another major info bombshell with equal parts of concern and uncertainty.

“Uh… Kairi, I don’t think you should drop that information…,” Issa tried to reprimand her in a stern manner.

“Do we need to also tell him that he’s the only wax statue revived to life with the others being-” Karina bombarded her with another question of concern, only to be cut off when they turned to see Philip noticing that the wax replicas of the many people he knew in his old life, such as his parents, weren’t moving or even revived like him.

Mari, her siblings and friends watched in sadness and pity as the poor man was trying to get the still statues’ attention and failing miserably, eventually sulking as he sat down on the podium stage where they were standing and shedding bitter salt-laced tears. Many versions of ‘Poor guy’ were murmured among the group.

This was not his day, and yet, Mari couldn’t help to feel bad that she then sat down beside him and began to carefully explained of what happened after his first death, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but shortly after you died the first time, your entire family wasn’t the same: your sister became mentally wrecked, your mom gave birth to a little brother and named him after you, your dad died on the same grounds you died on 3 years later, and your mom would outlive nearly everyone else upon dying at age 97. Please don’t get mad at me and my friends and siblings for just bringing you back life and not everyone else, we didn’t mean to cause you any grief because of it.”

Tears began to slowly gave up when he heard her speak and, while the words did made him feeling guilty for causing so much grief onto his family, she delivered them in a gentle tone with no ill will to ruin his mood or even his sanity. Harry then quietly approached Philip and continued what Mari said, “Yeah, it’s actually nearly 218 years since your ‘passing’, and everything did changed a lot. Trust me, if we get out of here sooner or later, you’re going to be in a big shock for your life, mate.”

“We better be going then,” Ahk informed everyone in the area, “We all don’t want to be locked in for the night nor do we want to get into trouble with people in this museum over with what happened today.”

“Ahk has a point,” Karina couldn’t agree more, “It’s getting late right now as well.”

“Well, if you say so, then we can all go out now,” he remarked, “Besides, it is true that I haven’t seen the outside world for that long. Although if I was presumed dead for the last 2 centuries, I highly doubt that I have any monetary funds or a place to stay in.”

“We have a house at the Westlake neighborhood,” Mari suggested to Philip with a beaming smile in her face, “The place is more known for its Mid-Century houses, though plenty of the other houses do range in style lately, including ours. You can stay with us, even Ahk lives with us since he didn’t have anyone else to run to when he got revived back to life. Then we try to get you a job some time after that can fit with your education credentials.”

“Mari has a point, Philip, son of Alexander,” the pharaoh pointed it out to him in a wise manner, “Perhaps, I could be of some assistance as well. I have went through nearly similar situations like you do now a few years ago, so I’m more than happy to give you some advice and help along the journey.”

“Also, we’ll introduce you to everyone else. Just imagine the response they’ll get from knowing that you’ve just been awaken again and they can also help you out,” Karina continued what her two friends left off.

“The Doctor is going to be so happy to hear about this,” Harry sarcastically whispered to Issa on the side.

“Definitely,” she agreed.

“Poyo,” Kirby sighed.

“I would be in your debt, everyone,” Philip replied back, “And should be so for a long while, I’m afraid. Though I have another question: would I get some unwanted attention in these clothes?”

“Nah, nobody wouldn’t care too much right now, but we should need to get out of here just to be safe,” Kairi reminded him as they began to leave the exhibit.

Once they managed to get out of the museum, Philip’s eyes widened up: not merely out of shock (although Mari admits that could be the case), but mostly in awe and curiosity with cars and buses running along the asphalt roads, people going about their normal days in modern clothing, and an assortment of buildings in various styles scattered across the city. If someone smart enough would have taken a note,  they would’ve been shocked by one man’s old-fashioned outfit, but since it’s nearing time for the rush hour leaving for home, nobody paid them and Philip any unwanted attention.

“Those unusual conveniences...” Philip gasped upon seeing the changed landscape, a far cry from what he was used to seeing in early 19th Century New York, while pointing at the moving vehicles in front of them.

“Horseless carriages if you could call them that,” Ahkmenrah informed him, “A majority of them are actually called cars. Quite convenient and swift, though they can cause more problems in plenty of places. But they’re easier to use than with chariots on the sands of Egypt though.”

“I must say, at least the streets here are cleaner,” he mused on and Ahk honestly knew that it was true.

“Well, Philip, you might need to get used to the pros and cons of living in the modern day city: city living can be stressful if you’re not ready to brace for the madness around it,” Issa reminded him gently ahead of time.

Just then, Mari’s smartphone began to buzz, startling the revived man a bit from the noise it was emitting as she pulled out her phone to check on her message inbox. However, he was also at the same time morbidly curious at the strange device she and, he assumed, nearly everyone but Kirby has in their possession.

“A message from Belle,” she reported to the bunch and their new friend, “She is coming over to our house with food delivery and Adam is coming along with her as well.”

“So… How does this thing work?” Philip inquisitively questioned her about the smartphone.

“Well, it’s quite complicated to describe how a smartphone works without sounding like a tech nerd,” Mari shrugged a bit before she continued on her lesson, “But it’s quite a marvel in communications, if you ask plenty of people that. Anyone can pick it up, send a call or text to anybody, surf the internet, or even do things like playing app games or reading e-books… It’s like an encyclopedia, a very small encyclopedia that is a jack of all trades.”

“An encyclopedia, isn’t it?” he couldn’t help but to smile a bit, before he thought about the reading part, “Did you mentioned about these e-books, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I sure did. That’s the wonders of modern technology these days,” she replied back, “Maybe I can recommend you something from this period or something? We can do that once we get back to the house tonight.”

“Why, yes. I don’t mind at all,” his grin grew wider as she responded, “I happen to work as an assistant librarian in the city, I can show you the city’s public library someday.”

“I would happily take that offer, madam,” Philip noted the last sentence, “When we can arrange that day out trip?”

“Oh God, he’s speaking her language of books already,” Karina gasped in shock upon hearing those words.

“Wait till Hermione hears about Philip and his bizarre day today: she’ll be so happy to hear about another person to geek out about books with 24/7,” Harry shrugged back.

“Brace for it, world, because Philip Hamilton has finally returned from the grave,” Issa muttered to herself, wondering how the world and the US will react about one of the children of the one of the American Founding Fathers has come back home after nearly 218 years of being dead.

The End

[aion-rsa]

Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Many Influences of Indiana Jones

https://ift.tt/38Z54Pj

When Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in 1981, it was like a jolt of lightning from out of the past. As with George Lucas’ Star Wars before it, here was a throwback to many of the cinematic touchstones high and low that Baby Boomers grew up with: Saturday morning serials, prestige Oscar winners from yesteryear, and even boys’ pulp magazines were sifted through, borrowed from, and recontextualized into one of the most thrilling action-adventure movies anyone had ever seen. Somehow Lucas, who was a producer on the project, director Steven Spielberg, and the whole Indiana Jones team were able to craft a movie simultaneously retro and new.

Of course the younger generations who were swept up in Indy’s adventures may not have noticed any of this. They were here to see Indy outrun a boulder. And as the years have passed, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the whole Indiana Jones trilogy has become its own influential touchstone, passed from one era to the next. But for that very reason, it’s fun to revisit where this now seminal classic in its own right came from 40 years later, and how it’s kept Hollywood traditions alive well into the next century.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

The first of several Michael Curtiz movies that will appear on the list, The Adventures of Robin Hood offers subtle influence on Raiders of the Lost Ark. And you can see it clearly in the scenes set at Marion Ravenwood’s bar in Nepal. First Indy enters the establishment by casting a large, heroic shadow on the wall; the sequence then relies on yet more shadows as the Nazis follow suit, projecting a looming darkness across the room; finally the scene ends with Indiana Jones shooting one of those baddies, and audiences only see the Nazi’s shadow die.

This is all inspired by Curtiz’s famous use of shadowed silhouettes during the climactic sword fight between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in the best Robin Hood movie.

Busby Berkeley Musicals

The musical sequence that opens Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is centered around the song “Anything Goes,” which was written for Cole Porter’s 1934 stage musical of the same name. It was adapted into a 1936 Paramount Pictures spectacle starring Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman, however the way Spielberg stages the Temple of Doom sequence has more in keeping with 1930s musicals choreographed and/or directed by Busby Berkeley at Warner Bros.

As the filmmaker who pioneered the imagery of dozens of dancers and showgirls forming elaborate geometric patterns and kaleidoscopic shapes, Berkeley relied on complex overhead shots filmed from cranes. Eventually such elaborate staging fell out of favor in lieu of singular song and dance pairings like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers later in the decade, but in his time Berkeley was responsible for famed dance sequences in 42nd Street (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935), Footlight Parade (1933), and Stage Struck (1936). Spielberg obviously wanted to pay homage.

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard play with horses at the Encino ranch in 1939.

Carole Lombard

Less a direct cinematic influence than a source for characterization, Carole Lombard’s on and off-screen image as a tough-as-nails glamour girl was written into Marion Ravenwood. The character was of course eventually played with her own spark by Karen Allen, but Spielberg and company originally looked toward screwball comedy star Lombard for inspiration during the writing and casting stage. Spielberg even said about Allen that “Karen was the clear favorite because she had spunk and was a firebrand, and she reminded me of ‘30s women. She had that Irene Dunne and Carole Lombard [energy]. She seemed perfect for the part.”

Lombard is a particularly interesting comparison because the ‘30s and ‘40s actor got her start in Hollywood as a starlet who appeared in drawing room dramas, but then carved her path to stardom by playing fast-talking women in Ernst Lubitsch and Howard Hawks comedies, with the latter urging her to carry her own off-screen persona into her characters. Athletic, foul-mouthed, and able to keep up in terms of drink with the men in her life, she brought as much of that into her comedies as censors would allow. Also, perhaps coincidentally, her tragic death in a plane crash drove her husband Clark Gable into World War II with an alleged death wish, which somewhat mirrors a plot point in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Casablanca (1942)

As yet another Michael Curtiz film, the impact of Casablanca is all over the Indiana Jones movies. A sweeping love story and terrific World War II melodrama filmed during the actual war, Casablanca is generally considered the best movie produced under normal circumstances during Hollywood’s Golden Age. It’s thus an easy touchstone for Spielberg, who emulates many ideas from the picture.

Likely the most noticeable is how both movies communicate international travel while filming on a backlot. Casablanca is not the first movie to show a map onscreen and then draw a moving line across it, which is then juxtaposed alongside international stock footage, but it’s the most famous movie to do so. You can see Casablanca’s influence every time Indy got on a plane, boat, or submarine.

Additionally, much of the relationship between Indy and Marion feels partially inspired by the wounded romance in Casablanca. While, as indicated above, there is not necessarily a lot of Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa in Marion, Ilsa’s embittered bad blood with Rick (Humphrey Bogart) after a failed relationship is an obvious influence on Indy and Marion. Indeed, Allen’s first line to Ford in Raiders is “Indiana Jones, I always knew you’d come walking back through my door.” It seems a blatant riff on Rick saying, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

Gunga Din (1939)

The plot and much of the imagery in Temple of Doom is lifted nearly top to bottom from George Stevens’ Gunga Din, including many of the elements now cited as problematic in both pictures. In Gunga Din, audiences follow Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Victor McLaglen as a trio of British officers in 19th century British India. Over the course of the film, Grant’s Sgt. Cutter and his Indian sidekick Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe) discover a secret Thuggee cult, even though the religious order was thought to be extinct. Worse for the colonial powers, the Thuggee intend to expel British rule by following a fanatical, human sacrificing leader (Eduardo Ciannelli) to war.

Read more

Movies

Raiders of the Lost Ark Has the Greatest Exposition Scene in Movie History

By David Crow

Movies

How Marcia Lucas Saved Raiders of the Lost Ark’s Ending

By Kayti Burt

Almost all of the second Indy movie’s story about a hidden temple with an Indian cult leader who tortures white heroes comes from Gunga Din, as do several set-pieces and gags. Like Temple of Doom, Grant and Jaffee’s characters struggle with an elephant transporting them through the countryside, and much of the third act pivots around a rope bridge in which Thuggee followers are trapped as the ropes are broken, leaving the fanatics flal to their deaths.

It should be noted Thuggee gangs, which were said to practice ritualistic murder as a part of highway robberies, did probably exist in 17th and 18th century India, although they did not scheme for world domination, nor did they rip hearts from victims’ bodies. Some modern Indian scholars have argued their alleged religious practices were exaggerated or invented by the British authorities who used propaganda while stamping out 18th century gangs.

James Bond Movies

It’s no secret that 007 was a major influence on Indiana Jones. Spielberg originally wanted to make a James Bond movie in the 1970s. After Eon Productions turned him down—so as not to relinquish creative control to the new popular director of Jaws—Lucas pitched his buddy on the concept of what became Indiana Jones.

Elements of Bond still found their way into the Indy movies. Each film is a standalone adventure, and at least three out of four of them follow a rhythmic pattern where after an opening sequence shows the tail-end of Dr. Jones’ previous adventure, we return to his day-to-day life back home. Authority figures then arrive to assign his next quest. Also during all three of the original Indiana Jones movies, Indy had a new love interest from the start.

The influence is so blatant for Spielberg that he came up with the idea of introducing Indiana Jones’ father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade… and having him played by Spielberg’s favorite 007, Sean Connery.

King Solomon’s Mines (1950)

Indiana Jones is unquestionably influenced by Alan Quartermain. Whether intentional or not, most fedora-wearing adventurers and great white hunters of western fiction derive from this 1885 literary creation by author Henry Rider Haggard. So the question, then, is which version of Quartermain most directly influenced Spielberg and Lucas? While perhaps the 1937 movie adaptation produced by the Rank Organization (more on them below) was on Lucas’ mind given his nod to the company in Temple of Doom, the most famous iteration of Quartermain’s adventure in King Solomon’s Mines for Baby Boomers comes from a 1950 MGM movie released during Lucas and Spielberg’s youth.

That picture starred Stewart Granger as Quartermain, a white hunter living in what would become South Africa during the 19th century. There his services are requested by an English noble to retrieve his missing brother from the mysterious African interior and to find the legendary mines belonging to biblical figure King Solomon (sound familiar?). The 1950 film made plenty of changes, such as adding a female love interest for Quartermain and reducing the prominence of any black African characters in the already racist Victorian novel to even more primitive stereotypes. It also hasn’t aged particularly well. But it’s probably the closest to a “definitive” cinematic variation on the first adventure novel which created the concept of a “lost civilization” with connections to the Bible, a theme which Indiana Jones would return to time and again.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

As the beloved epic from most older Baby Boomers’ childhoods, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is a gargantuan spectacle unlike any other. Filmed in breathtaking 70mm and in the actual deserts traversed by T.E. Lawrence, its visuals are still astonishing 60 years later. Particularly since they really went to those places.

Spielberg attempts to homage that mythical quality repeatedly in the Indiana Jones movies. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy standing tall in the low light of a sunset as workers excavate the Well of Souls visibly emulates the majesty of Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence standing atop a train as men cheer his backlit silhouette. More directly, the final image of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a pure reversal of the most magnificent sunrise you’ve ever seen. In Lawrence of Arabia, Lean captures the sun slowly unfurling over Arabia’s dunes before Lawrence and a companion travel across the sand. In Last Crusade, Indy and multiple companions ride directly into a sunset, which recreates the famous Lawrence of Arabia shot.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Arguably the first film noir ever made, The Maltese Falcon made Bogie a star and John Huston an A-list director. It also is a smaller influence on Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Maltese Falcon begins as a murder mystery before giving way to a larger plot in which a sordid collection of gangsters and criminals fight over a MacGuffin called the Maltese Falcon. Alleged to be an ancient, bejeweled prize from antiquity hidden beneath a common-looking facade, men kill and die for it as it’s passed back and forth, a la the Ark of the Covenant.

At the end of the movie, it’s revealed the Maltese Falcon is actually a fake—a forgery made from graphite. While the MacGuffins are a lot more powerful in the Indiana Jones movies, the idea of a magnificent ancient prize driving men mad carries over from The Maltese Falcon, and both Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade riff on the reversal, with the Nazis initially finding only dust in the opened ark in Raiders, and the villain of Last Crusade being fooled into thinking the Holy Grail would be made of gold and covered in jewels.

Plus, Peter Lorre’s slimy and giggling depiction of the character Joel Cairo in this movie (as well as several others) appears to be an inspiration for the Nazi played by Ronald Lacey in Raiders.

The Man With No Name Trilogy

Sergio Leone’s seminal Spaghetti Western trilogy—which includes A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)—were a significant inspiration for Spielberg when he first imagined Indiana Jones’ personality. While there’s more than a hint of Humphrey Bogart to how Harrison Ford plays Indy, there’s also a darker menace, particularly in his first outing. During Spielberg, Lucas, and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan’s famed story conference for Raiders, the transcripts of which have been saved for posterity, Spielberg name drops a lot of influences for Indy’s personality, including Toshirô Mifune, who starred in multiple Japanese movies directed by Akira Kurosawa. He also mentions Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name.

Read more

Movies

How Raiders of the Lost Ark Continues to Influence Pop Culture

By Kayti Burt

Movies

Indiana Jones 5 Set Photos Reveal New Characters and Movie’s Setting

By John Saavedra

In truth, the Man with No Name is directly inspired by Mifune’s samurai in Yojimbo (1961), but we felt the final allusions in Raiders more overtly leaned toward Leone’s Westernized interpretation of the desperado. You can see it in the first scene when we’re introduced to Indiana Jones through a series of rapidly edited together close-ups of an enemy drawing a pistol, Indy’s whip (as opposed to his own revolver), and finally an extreme close-up of Indy’s eyes, shaded beneath a fedora, as he steps into frame while disarming a foe. It’s Spielberg’s version of countless Leone shootouts starring Eastwood. To further accentuate the influence, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is filmed in the same Spanish desert as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when Indy and his father travel to a fictional Middle Eastern country on their quest.

The Rank Organization Logo

A small nod occurs at the top of Temple of Doom when the Paramount Pictures logo turns into an engraving of a mountain on a Chinese gong that is soon rang in. This is an overt homage to the opening title card of movies produced by the British film studio the Rank Organization, which began with a man also hitting a gong. The studio produced early Hitchcock classics like The Lady Vanishes (1938) and seminal ballet ghost story, The Red Shoes (1948). We imagine Lucas and Spielberg were winking at some of Rank’s pulpier material though, like the first adaptation of King Solomon’s Mines (1937).

Republic During the 1930s-1950s

Admittedly, I’m no expert on the weekly serials that ran in movie houses each Saturday morning during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. However, George Lucas clearly is since they visibly informed Star Wars as much as Indy, what with interstellar adventures like Commander Cody. On the other side of the paradigm there were a cornucopia of mid-20th century Republic serials about adventurers and masked superheroes fighting Nazis that clearly made an impact. One that seems like a specifically heavy influence is Secret Service in Darkest Africa, a Republic serial from 1943 which despite its title is set in a largely lily-white Casablanca (original, ain’t it?).

Over the course of its week-to-week adventures, American secret agent Rex Bennett (Rod Cameron) infiltrates the Third Reich by posing as a Nazi officer in the SS. However, his cover is blown when he goes to Africa to beat the Nazis from discovering an ancient Muslim Tomb which is said to have a scroll that will tell “the Muslims” how to fight in World War II (yep). With incidents like Rex out-swimming German boats to impersonating German personnel, it all has an air of Indy.

Another serial with special consideration is Republic’s Zorro’s Fighting Legion (1939). One of the more popular serials from the FDR years, this classic more than any film I’ve seen likely inspired Lucas for emphasizing Indy’s bullwhip. As with the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Zorro uses his whip to disarm foes, swing out windows, and even escape an avalanche. But the stunt that most clearly inspired Indy is a scene where Zorro falls between the horses and under the wheels of a stagecoach, hanging by his trusty fingers. He then catches the back of the carriage and climbs on top to reach the driver’s seat. It’s spectacular, as seen in the above clip, and more or less taken whole cloth for the same stunt from Raiders.

Secret of the Incas (1954)

I’m not sure if Lucas ever publicly spoke about Secret of the Incas, but this Paramount Pictures pulp had a heavy, heavy influence on Raiders of the Lost Ark. Like the Indiana Jones movies, the filmmakers behind it were clearly big fans of The Treasure of Sierra Madre (more below). Also like Indy, they took it in a decidedly more Saturday morning direction. A young Charlton Heston stars in this movie as Harry Steele, a fedora-wearing, leather jacket sporting, adventurer who is after fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory. When Harry gets wind that some dastardly archeologists are on a dig down in Peru, having discovered a lost ancient kingdom, Harry gets the bright idea of sneaking onto their dig site and stealing a golden sunburst right out from under them.

Sounds familiar, eh? It’s nowhere near as exciting as Indy, but the basic framework about a gold-seeking cad in a fedora fighting rivals over a buried, priceless MacGuffin is all from here, complete with a love interest who is wooed by Harry’s rival.

Ursula Andress in She (1965), Hammer Studios’ campy adaptation.

She (1887)

This 1887 novel by H. Rider Haggard is considered one of the first and most influential adventure yarns ever written. It’s also an incredibly racist work authored by a Victorian Englishman who spent seven years living in South Africa, making it a prime example of what’s now dubbed “imperialist literature.” Nonetheless, it influenced many other authors, including Rudyard Kipling, J.R.R. Tolkien, Graham Greene, and others who’s work, in turn, influenced Indiana Jones.

She is worth separating from Haggard’s other most popular novel, King Solomon’s Mines, because unlike that story, there was never really a definitive film adaptation of this book. However, Merian C. Cooper of King Kong fame (also an adherent to Haggard’s adventure stories) attempted an Art Deco interpretation of the text in 1935.

In the original story, readers follow the adventures of Horace Holly, the ward of explorer Leo Vincey. Together they discover a lost city in the African interior in which primitive natives worship an immortal white woman whom they refer to as “She Who Must Be Obeyed.” In fact, she is so beautiful that any man becomes her slave after one look into her eyes. Curiously, the Indiana Jones movie which most emulates this is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which a lost “kingdom” hidden in the Amazonian jungle is protected by primitive natives who worship, if not a white woman goddess, then crystal skulls and the godlike alien beings they belong to. Also if you look into those crystal skulls’ eyes for too long…

The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948)

Reportedly Huston’s favorite collaboration with Bogie, The Treasure of Sierra Madre is the most influential work on Indiana Jones’ appearance and devil-may-care attitude. This post-war picture stars Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs, a fedora-wearing, hard-drinking, malcontent who becomes obsessed with finding buried treasure. Also prone to wearing a nice weathered leather jacket, Dobbs is a nastier piece of work than Indy. When we meet Dobbs, he’s a drunk with a violent temper. After he and business partners discover gold up on the Sierra Madre mountain, he becomes consumed by greed and ultimately attempts to murder his only friend. He also challenges bandits to a shootout to protect his prize, which eventually results in his death.

Indy never goes so far—which may be why he doesn’t end up getting macheted. But Ford’s visage, as well as the world weary grumpiness he reserves for Belloq or his father, is taken straight from life up on the Sierra Madre.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The post Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Many Influences of Indiana Jones appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2YARK1D

[litpoliticsinterview]

Interviews with Farrukh Dhondy

The following transcriptions are of two conversations I had with Farrukh Dhondy, writer, left wing activist and former commissioning editor of Channel 4. 

We spoke about the origins of the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, the fraught nature of the British Black Power movement in the late 1970′s and early 80′s.

These interviews were held on the 12th and 18th of November 2019. 

- Emily Blundell Owers

Tuesday 12th November 2019

 Farrukh Dhondy [FD]: (looking at printout of Voices of the Living and the Dead / VOTL&TD) I knew him in this phase, when he was formulating this. Well, you ask me the questions, I’ll tell you.

Emily [EB]: they’re not questions like ‘when did this happen’…I though that the first thing would be to tell you what the assignment is. ‘Take your text, and explain the relationship between what we have seen Raymond Williams call its social location and its aesthetic ideology. Each of these works is coming out of and speaking to a radical social movement at some moment in the twentieth century. I am asking you to research and reconstruct this context and to critically evaluate which elements of your work’s production and/or performance and/or publication/circulation history cast the best light on its actual or desired intervention in the world. Find out what you can about the decisions – personal, political – that inform the writing of your chosen work: its acts of aesthetic refusal and allegiance, its ways of thinking/doing community, uplift, justice, change. If appropriate, attend to any unintended effects or unconscious logics at play. Aim to address, in more or less equal measure, questions of literary form and of social world and to analyse both in relation to each other.’ Yes, it’s quite a long question.

FD: Good. Well it’s reassuring that you’re quoting Raymond Williams, who has gone out of fashion. But was very much in fashion when I was a student…before the postmodernists replaced him, who talk nonsense.

EB: So the first kind of questions that I was thinking were about the climate at the time…the 60s through to the 80s- this being first performed in 73 and published in 74. But my question is kind of…I get the impression that this was a time of social upheaval and what was it like in terms of one’s everyday experience?

FD: Let’s start there. I joined the Black Panther Movement (BPM/BP) in 1969. The reason was that I was a student from India and the entire movement consisted of immigrant workers, some immigrant students- Asians as well as West Indians- the movement was made of West Indian workers. And some people turned up in the youth branch of the BPM and they of course worked selling the newspaper, coming to meetings, coming to demonstrations that we organised, doing such things. Amongst them were the 6th formers of Tulse Hill school, one of which was Linton Kwesi Johnson. At the time he was not Kwesi, just LJ. But the BPM took its name through inspiration from the BPP of the United States. The BPP of the US departed from the civil rights movement of MLK, saying non-violence will NOT redeem the black population, or its social and political rights. We’ve got to take up arms, just as the American constitution guarantees that any citizen can carry arms and so on. And they were doing it as a piece of bravado- they weren’t actually going to shoot anybody- but they said we’ll carry guns and wear uniforms and this that and the other. But that was the inspiration, and the people who started the BPM here thought they’d take the name but it wasn’t the same struggle. We were immigrants from the ex-colonies, not descendants of slaves. Well yes, the West-Indians would come here, to work, who were- Indians weren’t. I was not- I came from a middle class family, on a scholarship to study at Cambridge, but I felt the same kind of tensions that Indian workers or west-Indian workers felt. Because there was a kind of race divide in Britain. So I joined that movement and the name of the movement was there to inspire black youngsters to join a movement which was dedicated to social and political rights in Britain. Get rid of racism. Get rid of police attacks on people. Get rid of pay differentials. Get rid of educational discrimination. Get rid of the fact that you couldn’t go into some places- a pub wouldn’t serve you, you couldn’t get housing- they’d say no blacks here. That had to be dealt with, it had to be dispensed with. One didn’t have to sit in different compartments, or at the back of the bus or some such, but there was a lot of discrimination going on in the 50s and 60s with the first wave of immigration, that’s the political background through which the BPM started, and which made people like Linton Johnson and others join up.

Now, there were radical teachers in Tulse Hill school. They were all white, but they were dedicated unionists, Trotskyists of sorts…they were the English department of THS. They were very active in the NUT, the national union of teachers, and of course they wanted an association with any other radical group. One got to know them. I was a teacher at the time.

EB: I heard that the Panthers spoke at the school, and that’s why Linton went along to the first meeting that he did…that it was through the school.

FD: Yes- they invited us to speak. I don’t know who spoke.

EB: I think it was Althea…

FD: Althea Jones. Yes. She was a postgraduate student in chemistry and biology, in London University. And she was very inspirational in as far as she was a good speaker. And these people invited her to speak there, and that’s how he got to know it and joined the BPM youth group, where we used to give history lessons in the Oval house, and we’d talk about ‘The Making of the English Working Classes’, Thompson, and other historical developments in America, in the West Indies, we wanted to know British history also. How it wasn’t exclusive- how the labour movement came about…it was all A.P Thompson’s book- it was very instrumental in those lessons. I had to give lectures on it, and young people were there. That was the political atmosphere in which that group began. And of course, in membership, you kind of devoted your life to it. Every day at some meeting, every weekend selling newspapers, during the week you were writing or having to publish it- Freedom News. And they’d call a movement (meeting?) on a Tuesday afternoon, and say ‘You’ve got to go somebody’s been arrested we are fighting for their release, outside the court or Brixton Police Station’. Constantly. So, we were doing all that. Agitational pamphleteering-

EB: Yes! Agit-prop.

FD: Exactly. And the group told itself that it aught to have its own educational internal systems. So, there were history groups, and some people wanted to start a literary movement. At that time, we had about 6 or 7 people who wanted to meet in a literature collective of the BPM, inside south London. And I was an aspirant writer myself- not aspirant, I was a published writer; I hadn’t written any books, but I’d written a lot of articles, lots of journalism and short stories- so they looked upon me as a kind of writer. And Linton wanted to be a kind of writer. And Linton turned up, we used to read things- if you sit in a collective of 8 or 10 people, in 33 Shakespeare road, in Brixton- you find out what other people are thinking, what they’re writing about. They’d bring their work and we’d criticise it, like a book club- a readers and writers association. At the time Linton was writing verse in imitation of what he had heard in 6th form English classes. He was writing not what he wrote later, but stuff that sounded to me like imitation T.S Eliot. Which he carried on into VOTL&TD. This book is not Jamaican patois.

EB: Yes. That’s a big thing, and its maybe more helpful to this question-

FD: Yes, this is (reads from text) ‘they came with fire blazing, death deep within our midst, desiring our destruction, we were water extinguishing their fire…’. Now this has a political bias. At the time, he was writing much more in the imitation of Eliot. Stuff he’d read and been inspired by his teachers to read. There was no notion in that literature group…that reggae was literature. There wasn’t. I think it was I who claimed that people are writing in the language that they grew up with- the language that they spoke at home, in the streets. And why…of course that was not something I invented. It was something I observed. There were poets in Jamaica and the West Indies who were trying to break out into dialect. There were other poets who wrote very purely in the English tradition. They were carrying on from Auden, Wordsworth, Keats, Eliot, Hughes. They were carrying on in that tradition even though they were black. But in the West Indies there was a movement to move towards the way that West Indians used English. Patois. Some call think that’s an insulting term.

EB: Yes, I’ve thought about this too- whether it’s creole or patois.

FD: Creole means ‘home language’.

EB: And then, coming off of that idea of the literary group, I’ve read Linton talking about reading in the Panthers, Fanon and Du Bois.

FD: Yes, in the history lessons…and CLR James of course. Whose biography I wrote. And he lived in our house, CLR James, when the kids were young. Yes, because his wife kicked him out. He stayed for a few months- he was supposed to stay 3 days! Anyway, so Johnson then went on with the inspiration of reggae and that debate which had been raging from the 30s in the west indies, over whether one should write in the British tradition, or apply bits of language and how people speak. And of course, he was influenced by that, and massively influenced by the reggae movement. And he began then- later on- VOTL&TD is kind of a construction in the British tradition, using the consciousness of hindsight. So, he has then put in the political content about tyranny, slavery…but the first branch out was when we told him, people told him, he became aware; ‘write in the language that your parents speak, how you speak on the streets, how Jamaicans speak’. And we got ‘Sonny’s Lettah’- I think that was probably the first branch out for him.

EB: I do find interesting, that 5NOB in this volume is also in DB&B. I was reading earlier, Brathwaite’s ‘History of the Voice’. And he analyses it, and writes it out in creole- in dialect. Because he’s analysing it from the EP, not how it was written down. And I thought that was interesting, because part of the question I’m asking myself is, because this is the reprint- rather than the original- why if this is in 83 that it was reprinted, so after DB&B has come out, after he started he publishing stuff in creole- I wonder why nothing was added to the volume that was this new type of poetry that he was writing.

FD: Braithwaite was at Pembroke college, Cambridge. Not at the same time as me, before. But I used to edit at Cambridge a magazine called Garconette (sp?), and I sought him out in London- said Mr Brathwaite, you were at my college. He probably thought ‘who’s this punk’- but I asked him to contribute a poem and he did. But it was not- he didn’t write- at the time in patois, he wrote in pure English.

EB: So, at the time he (Linton) was writing this (VOTL&TD), you don’t think he was experimenting with creole writing? Yet. Or maybe he was?

FD: Linton? I don’t know, but, as soon as Sonny’s Letter hit the decks, people though this was it, this is fantastic. And he never looked back. Except that when this was republished in 83- he went back to-he wasn’t ashamed of what he had written before. Did he revise it? Have you compared it?

EB: I can’t find 74 anywhere, but I’ve inferred from the introduction- which says ‘this volume’ was published in 74, and yes, I think it’s the same thing.

FD: You see, what would happen is that his teachers would have told him, and through Althea, write about the historical difficulties of what you think; Sonny’s Lettah is personal, he creates a character who is there. VOTL&TD is abstraction. He’s imagining that he’s the soul of black history, and that’s an abstraction. Putting himself in the place of the redemption of black history – ‘the tyrants came for us, they did this to us…’- they didn’t enslave him. He was walking around Brixton, having a drink. Smoking ganja. But he’s taking on the voice of the race.

EB: And calling for an uprising.

FD: Yes.

EB: I was going to ask about what Brixton was like in particular, and the relationships between minority youth, police-

FD: Brixton was very black- 100% black. There were no fashionable pubs, the Atlantic was a run down place, on the border of Coldharbour lane and Railton road- I lived at 74 Railton road. It was known as ‘the front line’.

EB: Yes, I’ve heard that Railton Road was a hotbed of different groups.

FD: What happened was, the BPM had a base in Shakespeare road- 38 SP road. That was given to us by somebody. Its first base was in Barnsbury, Islington. Very fashionable Islington. Because a rich white lady knew Althea and people, and said you can use my house to live in. You wouldn’t have known that it was the beginning of the BPM- it was in a very gentrified, even at that time- ‘Islingtonia’. And she handed over the house, so people would live in different rooms of the house. And the hall would be the meeting place for the Mangrove trials and so on. I would be up there every evening to write up what had gone on with the trial.

EB: I was reading about the Mangrove 9. And it was Franco Rosso, who did the film about the Mangrove 9…was it right that Race Today was based on Railton Road as well?

FD: What happened was, the Black Panthers then acquired property in Tollington Park. We had 3 branches in London. Shakespeare road, we used to call it the South London collective, then there was the West London collective, along the Mangrove- that gang, then there was the North London collective because they needed spaces across London, because there were members who used to come all the way South, as Althea said why don’t we base ourselves there. And as luck would have it, this writer, John Berger, gave us £2500, because he won the Booker Prize. And we, Darcus and I, with the BP, turned up- I was the only one with a fucking bank account. So we turned up to collect the money, with all these reporters trailing us and so on, and we took the money and put it into 37 Tollington Park, up near Finsbury park. And Althea and Eddie and everyone else moved in there. the entire story is told in a book I’ve written called ‘London Company’. Darcus was not a member of the central corps, because Althea didn’t like him.

EB: Of the Panthers? Why didn’t she like him?

FD: She said was a demagogue, a rabble rouser. And he was very attractive to the general membership. And he was a rival, so she kept him out of the central corps- saying he was a loose cannon, and he knew that. But one day they held a kangaroo trial…a chap called Brian, brought some white girl and the girls who lived there said we don’t want any white girls having sex in here. A household squabble. And they turned it into a kangaroo trial and called the central corps for an emergency meeting, saying ‘this man has disgraced the community’, and I said ‘What the fuck are you talking about? He’s a citizen he can fuck who he likes. It’s none of our business, we’re a political movement. He hasn’t broken any laws.’ And I said I’m not staying here for a kangaroo trial; I’m not doing this. And out of the 8 members of the central corps I walked out. And the first thing I did was phone Darcus, and said this is what’s happened. And he said ‘fuck, the whole place has deteriorated.’ So, we got a gang together, including Linton, and broke up the BPM, said fuck it. We want to do something else. So, we drifted for a while, didn’t go to the meetings, I signed over the house to Anthea and Eddie, her husband…but Linton came with us, he didn’t stay with the BPM, came with Darcus and me, and about 20 of us who quit the BPM started Race Today.

EB: That’s a really good story.

FD: So that’s how Race Today started and Linton joined it. And he continued his career as a poet, by this time of course he’d established himself by reading here and there. And the mood in Britain was towards celebrating Bob Marley, celebrating reggae, realising its rebellious- I wouldn’t say revolutionary- potential. And Linton tuned into that. It was very much attractive, to the establishment even. BBC 2 would do documentaries on him. That’s when Franco Rosso, everyone who thought they were on the radical left of the media, would join in to promote, celebrate, accentuate and bring to the public the ideas and voices they thought they were contributing to that rebellion or act of justice or revolution. All sorts of grades of ambition.

EB: So, at Race Today, were there specific roles?

FD: There weren’t specific roles. Darcus was certainly editor, he’d say what went into the magazine. The rest of us were writers, one of the first things I did for them was on the black explosion in British schools- a big article in the second edition.

EB: So, was Darcus Howe the editor from the start of the magazine?

FD: No, Darcus took over from a priest. Who used to run Race Today, when it was a magazine that belonged to the Institute of Race Relations in Kings Cross. And so, what happened was, Leila, who later on married Darcus, she and 2 or 3 others in the Race Today IRR said Alec was fine as editor, but we need a black editor. They were quite academic in their approach, the previous Race Today, just reporting this and that. They invited Darcus, who had just left the BPM, when we were floating about not belonging to anything, saying we’d make another movement and we’d have a black workers movement…they called him to be editor of Race Today, the collective of young black people who were working for IRR. And Darcus’ whole aim was, we’re not just going to be a magazine, we’re going to turn into an active collective.

EB: So the magazine was the start, and then it came out of that?

FD: Yes, and then he called me to write Black Explosion in British Schools, in February 73. The article is all about how the West Indian children of that generation that I was teaching are completely restless- by your generation they’d settled into the meritocracy, but in that generation they hadn’t.

EB: Are these second-generation kids, born here?

FD: Yes. Linton’s generation.

EB: This is something that I think is going to be the basis of my argument- the shift, the lack of complacency. So, I’m kind of wondering, for my own interest, your personal relationship with Linton. Because from what you’ve said it seems to be a kind of mentor relationship in the BPM.

FD: Hardly. He would never acknowledge anyone as his mentor. Of course, when he went his way and became a reggae poet, with groups giving him background to recordings and so on, there was no connection between me and him at all. We used to meet because we were part of the same collective, but otherwise there was no relationship with me whatsoever. I’ve never known whether he’s read my books- though I’ve followed his career.

EB: This was something I found interesting that I read today- in an interview he did with John La Rose, in I think around 97- he says, and I don’t think this will be a touchy subject from the conversation we’ve just had, but he said after he started touring the world with the successful albums, ‘I think there was a view within RT that I was too much of a high flier and my wings needed to be clipped’, in about 85. He said because of that he retired from music for 3 years, because he was needed for the Brixton organizational stuff.

FD: By 85 I had left Race Today, in the end of 83 I was appointed commissioning editor of channel 4, and I pulled in Darcus to do stuff. So, Linton was left with the collective and became one of its editors.

EB: I thought it was interesting.

FD: Yes, and maybe true. Its not that peoples wings…they probably said ‘what the hell are you doing? Do some political activity instead of cruising around!’

EB: I got the impression that it was more out of guilt than conscience, and I thought that was really interesting.

FD: You’re right I think, you’re right about that. And race today continued, Darcus left it because I gave him the money to fund Bandung files on Channel 4, where he started working full time. And Linton then began to run Race Today, and he must have felt responsible to do that. And if it was out of guilt rather than political conscience- well yeah, maybe. What he did do though, was bring in a lot of Jamaican poets- went to Jamaica, picked up Mikey Smith and others. And they all came and did a circuit of universities, and BBC2 came to the Race Today office and said they wanted to interview the poets.

 [recording cuts out here]

 Monday 18th November

 EB: So, I went through the things we’d spoken about before, to see what hadn’t been lost in the recording. I think the first question that cut off was regarding what it was like to be creative at a time when what was at stake was something more material…if the battles that you’re waging are more to do with police brutality and discrimination- threats which meant government at local and national level needed to be targeted, how can poetry get to that, or try to meet the requirements of an aim like that. I think we spoke about political consciousness raising?

FD: One can look at in several ways. A Caribbean population established itself here. It has its culture, its culture is religion, food- they may not be aware that all these things are known by the name of culture- what you wear, what you believe in, how you conduct the traditions within your life- all that becomes your culture. Now, art is a branch of culture. What you produce to be beautiful or instructive- not useful- a frying pan could be useful but that’s not art- but if you make a sculpture, a painting, if you write poetry or sing a song- those are creative things that come within culture, but they come within the subcategory of art. The workers who came here from the Caribbean had a culture for the Caribbean- the Trinidadians would sing calypso- there were black singers who had made it from the Caribbean- Harry Bellefonte. The people who came here didn’t quite discover what they were going to be writing about. They could do imitation calypso, they could imitate reggae and so forth, and some of them did try. But a particular culture began to evolve within British blacks, and Linton was certainly part of that. He knew that art went with particular forms, particular forms, particular moods and emotions. He had read English poetry, and American poetry, and knew that these were the things that poetry did. But, he had not discovered his subject, until he began to thing 2 things- 1) let me write in the language of the people that I live with, and am part of- actually youths. And the second thing was what should I write about. And it was always said, because we were in political turmoil, political action and struggle, combat and activation- it became clear to him that we always said write about what you are and what you do. It needn’t always be combative. It could be descriptive. When the philosopher C.L.R James said to us in a big meeting of the BPM ‘write about what you’re doing, and that will inspire other people rather than theories’. I was a schoolteacher at the time- I used to write 500 word articles for the paper about accusations of a black child stealing, or the 5th form disco, where fights went on, love rivalries- I wrote about that. James was telling us, write about what you know, about where you are. It will move other people to think in a similar way. Bus drivers wrote about how their union treated them, what happened at the garage, conductors about their interactions with the public- someone was racist to them, stuff like that. Linton would turn the experience that he saw around him into poetry, and that’s how he began writing Dread Beat & Blood, and then he took to writing actual propagandist poems- ‘Darcus Howe to Jail, Race Today cannot fail’, ‘free George Lindo’, stuff like that. So those were activist poems in support of a particular movement rather than descriptions of something that he had observed as an artist and poet. Those distinctions exist even within his work.

EB: Yeah, I think there’s even a further distinction in that this [VOTL&TD] comes before the absolute personal, there’s hints of it. He seems to be writing in the western tradition, of Eliot as you said. I found bits of ‘Voices’ very similar to ‘The Hollow Men’-

FD: Yes, that’s what he was doing.

EB: But he’s imparting upon that style-

FD: Yes- he discovered these two things. The language as his people speaks and the subject matter which he should now begin to represent. So, he did. And he was one of the first. Other people have followed, other writers. Now a whole spate of rap artists of your generation. Like Stormzy, someone who is a household name, who I know.

EB: Yes, my parents would know Stormzy, I doubt they’d know anyone else of that ilk. I suppose it’s similar to Linton, when we think about the documentaries- these people that want to be involved and push this figure.

FD: Sure, and of course what happens in our time is that art, even if it has propagandist and activist motive, becomes something to frame and look at. So even if you sing a song of love to woo a girl, it gets recorded and then its value doesn’t become the relationship, but how much the record will sell for. The function of art in our times has become that. Picasso paints ‘Guernica’, because he hates the Spanish civil war. What happens to the piece? Sells for millions. That’s the destiny of art in our times.

[break]

EB: Thinking about the performance of VOTL&TD at the Keskidee- I wish it were recorded somewhere but it’s not from what I can see. In some interviews he says there were dancers, in others dancers aren’t mentioned. And because obviously there’s different speaking voices- parts- I would really like to know if the audience were told before who each of them were, or if they were meant to infer it. Because if one voice is ‘the dead’ and one voice ‘the living’, I wonder how easy that is to recognise.

FD: Ask the George Padmore institute.

EB: Yes, I’ve looked at their archive website. But I’ll email. And I’ve got your book- I’m going to read the article on the black explosion in British schools, which from what I’ve glanced at is about the way black children were treated as inferior. Which I think is relevant, because I’ve read interviews with Linton that say in Jamaica he was top of the class, and when he came here they tried to put him in basically remedial lessons.

FD: That’s what happened in the first school I taught at. It’s not like that anymore- that’s gone. There’s still a lot of desperation amongst black boys though, gang crime.

EB: This question I think we spoke on, about the musicality of Linton’s work. About him being inspired by reggae artists- and I’ve also read him speaking about how he doesn’t consider himself to be a dub lyricist, because for him the words and the music were together as he wrote, rather than him needing a backing track for the poem to exist. Like reggae artists riffing on the track as it plays. I thought that was interesting because obviously 5NOB is the last in this collection, and I’ve seen it performed with music, but I thought it was interesting that it exists sans music, and I wonder if he wrote it for music, or if the music came after.

FD: What it is, when you look at his work- it’s extremely rhythmic. And it’s rhythmic in a drumbeat way. It has no complex rhythms which then come out, which some melodic songs do have- if you listen to Andrew Lloyd Webber, there’s different beats that progress within the songs. Linton’s poems don’t, they have the same – bum, pa dum, pa dum bu bu dum- and that actually accords well with the sort of instrumental music he did later. Because he recites, he doesn’t sing. Its not melodic, but it’s very rhythmic, and the rhythm is particular. And that’s just his style, the peculiarity of it. Lots of reggae songs, they use melodies found in popular music too- but his compositions as well are purely rhythmic too, the reggae beats.

EB: We spoke about Race Today, how the magazine was owned by IRR, and then when Darcus was appointed editor, he said he wanted it to be about activation, not just recording things. And I’d love for you to retell me that story about the post van-

FD: Yes. Darcus did a couple of months editing the magazine in the IRR at Kings Cross, and we determined in private talks that the magazine should not be – and so had they, those who worked there- had determined what they wanted to do. Because some of them were activists you see, in other groups like the Black Unity and Freedom party- who were doing things. They said to themselves, we don’t want the magazine to reflect the society, it’s not an academic magazine; we want to report the actions which we undertake, and we want it to stimulate the actions of people. If we wanted it to be like Lenin’s magazine in Russia, we needed to move it out of the academic atmosphere of the IRR. So one night a few of us, of course Darcus and I- with me driving my little old green post office van went to the IRR in Kings Cross, loaded up all the machines, the electric typewriters, pens, this that and the other – I don’t know if we took any desks, we may have done. The whole lot, we cleaned up the place. When they came in the next day they found everything gone.

EB: Was there bad blood?

FD: Yes. I think Darcus must’ve told Siavanandan, who thought he was the great leader of immigrants in Britain, who was a purely academic idiot. And not too academic- he didn’t know much. But he got himself into this position. He was a race peddler, not very bright- he’s dead now though, so its not libel. So we ran away, we established ourselves at 132 Railton Road, my second squat. 74 was my first squat, out of which I got burnt.

EB: How do you mean?

FD: I got burnt out. I was living on the second floor, 74 Railton Road, and at 4 o’clock in the morning someone through a bomb into the house. The house was ablaze, I woke up to the smoke. I thought someone was choking me, a pillow or something. I struggled, there was no pillow just burning smoke. I thought shit I’ve left the fire on, it’s caught fire. It wasn’t on.

EB: Was it people trying to get rid of the squatters or?

FD: No. It was the National Front. Because they hit 6 houses that night, all Asian and west-indian houses and shops. They fire-bombed. The fire engine police told me I was fire bombed. The police never caught them. It was on the 15th of march. 

EB: Beware the ides of march.

FD: Exactly. That’s when it happened. The 15th of March 1973. Burnt out of our house.

EB: It’s crazy to me that whenever I read about the New Cross house fire that it was never confirmed that it was the National Front. Who else would’ve done it?

FD: Electrical fault, somebody else, someone set fire to the basement because of a love rivalry. There’s all sorts of stories floating. Nobody knows I suppose.

EB: I can’t remember if I asked this last time- I wondered, not necessarily with this text as I don’t know how involved you were, but about the process of getting a text printed, getting somebody like Errol Lloyd to illustrate it. Do you think something like that would spring out of then already knowing each other, or-

FD: Well, the artistic world of blacks at that time was quite small, so they would have got to know each other, and they would have met at cultural occasions, where they were both speaking. And certainly the connection with Race Today could’ve helped- someone calling up and saying ‘I’m with Race Today, a poet, do you want to do my book?’

EB: I see, so it being a known thing people wanted to get involved. Also, not necessarily to do with Voices, but what do you think about capturing something in print which was made to be performed? Because on the first page of the poem, before it even starts, it says ‘with drums, bass guitar and flute’- and I suppose I’m asking for your opinion. Do you think illustrations in print are there in place of performance?

FD: No, they’re an additional form of art, apart from the performance. The performance is one thing, the illustrations their own form of art.

EB: Yes, this is why I’d love to see it. To see if there were costumes or-

FD: There wont have been costumes. I can tell you that. Youths of hope, for Darcus Howe…-

EB: Yes, that’s actually something I want to talk about, Darcus Howe. The fact it’s called ‘youths of hope’. I remember you saying to me before that Darcus was the driving force, was straight to the point.

FD: Yes, of Race Today. Yes.

EB: Everything I read about him, the mangrove 9, the black people’s day of action- every significant incident that is in the books I’ve read about any of this, Darcus is mentioned. So I guess the ‘youth of hope’ moniker is for him. It’s where I got a lot of my idea, my argument, about it being the younger generation who will be able to make a difference- rather than the complacency of the Windrush generation, it will be the younger people. I think 5NOB is my favourite one.

FD: It makes sense you see. Some of the others don’t- ‘terror tearing us up into pieces of smoke’- smoke doesn’t go have pieces!

EB: Well, I think YOH is helpful, when looking at VOTL&TD, to work out some things. Pinning down the tyrants, things like that. We spoke a little before on this- on whether at the time of writing this- because obviously all of this- even 5NOB which obviously made its way onto DB&B, is not written in the creole, the patois, any of the language that made him famous. Do you know if he was experimenting with it at that time- or do you think it was after? I remember you saying ‘sonny’s letter’ was the beginning, and after that he didn’t look back.

FD: I think so, I can’t be certain. 5NOB was refashioned- before he wasn’t doing anything in patois-

EB: Yes, it was actually really interesting to me that 5NOB, in his ‘History of the Voice’, Brathwaite analyses it, written out in patois- I think he did it from listening to the EP and writing it phonetically, because I’ve got DB&B, and it’s printed exactly the same as here. And that speaks to the fact that even though at this time Linton’s writing in standard English, if you were to hear him saying it, it becomes a completely different thing: his accent changes the whole thing. And it makes me think, how can a text that so needs to be heard in the voice of the person who made it- not what’s the point of printing it, because it’s obviously so more people can read it, but I find the tensions of that interesting.

FD: Yes. We all read Eliot for instance- and I’ve heard recordings of him reading Four Quartets, and it doesn’t give you a sense of a new dimension to the poem.

EB: So we don’t know for sure about the experimentations with creole, but I think I mentioned that this text we’ve been set is the republished, 2nd edition- so 9 years after the first in 1983. I wonder if you think there’s a particular reason for not expanding the volume, to include some of the work he was writing then. Because by then he’s published Sonny’s letter, and DB&B, released the albums which made him famous. He obviously wasn’t embarrassed of this stuff he’s done before.

FD: Well, even the publishers say ‘we don’t want collected works yet’, we’ll do them when you’re near to death.

EB: I’ve had to read a collected works of Linton!

FD: Well he’s getting old…

EB: My last question was- do you think Linton’s shift in writing style after this marked a shift in his intentions as poet. Maybe from politicisation to new means of expression for black creativity. VOTL&TD is riling up revolution of some kind and-

FD: Yeah, I think that the animus, the particularity of the activation has gone. There’s no Darcus in Jail or George Lindo- those were for particular publications of a monthly magazine- written for that. You couldn’t sell a poem in America or Jamaica, because nobody knows who that is, it’s a petty affair. Those poems were written for a particular audience, of a particular magazine, in a particular month. And they were just protest into rhyme. Of course he discovered that protest into rhyme works as journalism, but not as art. So I’m sure he’s shifted his focus to the attempt at permanence. The other thing, post-this, was that Linton befriended other poets from the Caribbean such as John La Rose. I don’t think La Rose is a good poet- or made an impact- but Linton befriended them, because Race Today deteriorated, got slower and went its way. Because frankly both Darcus and I left it.

EB: Do you think it was also kind of, not that the struggles had been won, but there was less-

FD: Times were changing certainly. And Linton then drifted off to the North to meet people like La Rose regularly, who of course he’d met in the Creation for Liberation times, World Book Fair and so forth.

EB: The way I’ve been thinking about it is like ’74, when this was written- there’s calls for uprising, calls for dying for what we believe in, even if that’s a lot of posturing. But I think even by the time this has been republished, there’s been the Brixton Riots, there’s been the battle of Lewisham. This stuff has happened.

FD: Yes.

EB: I think that you can attribute the change, that VOTL&TD is an attempt at politicisation, of whoever’s reading it, whoever’s watching; aimed at youth, the ‘youth’s of hope’, to stop ‘in-fighting’, start the righteous war- violence is justified if against police.

FD: Yes, he is saying that.

EB: And after this, it’s more like, ‘I’m speaking in my language…I’ve found my voice now’, like from the teaching in the BPM literary classes.

FD: Yes, adding the creole language to the literary tradition, maybe that’s what Linton will achieve.

EB: I think he knows that young people, 2nd generation children of immigrants, have got their own voice and that’s the protest and the riots and all this, is coming out of a lack of complacency. And the change, saying ‘I’m going to speak with this voice instead’, is a reflection of that.

FD: Yes.

[likegston-blog]

 shows  up  10  years  late w/  an  intro/info  post .     as  we  all  well  know  from  the  ooc  blog :  i’m  cosbo !     i  still  play  pokemon  go ,  i  create  things  you  never  asked  for  in  photoshop ,  i’ve  been  in  love  with  gaston  since  the  age  of  four ,  &  i  don’t  think  i’ve  ever  once  gotten  enough  sleep  in  my  life .     under  the  cut  i’ll  give  you  a  rundown  on  your  favorite  self  absorbed  french  asshole  &  how  i’m  playing  him  +  an  important  note  regarding  my  activity  in  the  upcoming  weeks !

MY  WHAT  A  GUY ,  THAT  GASTON !

 if  you’ve  heard  the  catchy  song  you  probably  know  that  no  one  does  literally  anything  quite  like  gaston .     &  true  enough  gaston  is  talented  plus  he’s  probably  one  of  the  most  handsome  people  you  will  ever  meet  but  the  downside  to  that  fact  is  he  is  fully  aware  of  it .     gaston  thinks  he  shits  gold  probably .     he  shows  up  to  birthday  parties  with  no  present  &  say  his  presence  alone  is  a  present .    he’s  the  king  of  entitled  white  boys .     &  unfortunately  he’s  not  quite  familiar  with  the  word  NO .     if  he  thinks  your  pretty ,  he  may  lay  some  moves  on  you  &  if  you  try  to  turn  him  down  honestly  he’ll  just  be  more  interested  just  ask  belle .     this  mainly  goes  for  just  girls  but  am  i  gonna  sit  here  &  say  he  can’t  appreciate  a  pretty  man ?     you  bet  your  sweet  ass  i’m  not .     no  one’s  bi  like  gaston !     however ,  he  does  come  from  a  time  where  any  form  of  non  heterosexuality  was  highly  frowned  upon  so  …  he’s  coming  to  terms  w/  that  one .     it’s  fine  he’ll  get  there .

 GASTON’S  PAST :     we  don’t  know  much  about  gaston’s  past  other  than  he  did  fight  in  a  war  ( given  the  timeline  of  beauty  &  the  beast  being  mid  18th  century  there’s  a  few  possibilities  in  which  war  he  fought  in  but  we’re  gonna  say  it  was  either  the  war  of  austrian  succession (1740 - 1748)  or  it  was  the  seven  years  war (1754 - 1763) )   &  he  became  a  war  hero  &  an  army  captain .     it  was  also  stated  by  luke  evans  in  an  interview  that  gaston’s  celebrity  status  in  the  little  village  of  villeneuve  comes  from  the  fact  he  protected  the  village  from  a  pack  of  portuguese  marauders  in  1740  when  he  was  just  16 .     in  the  book  it  also  states  that  this  war  he  fought  in  &  became  a  hero  in  was  12  years  prior  to  the  story .     what  baffles  me  the  most  abt  that  is  he  still  wears  his  uniform .   who  has  clothes  that  still  fit  &  look  pristine  for  12  years ????     anyway .     speaking  of  his  uniform  an  interesting  thing  to  note  is  that  gaston’s  war  uniform  is  bright  red .     in  the  18th  century  ...  the  french  army  wore  blue .     the  red  coats  were  the  british  so  ...  from  that  we  can  assume  gaston  fought  with  the  british  army  which  i’ll  have  more  on  that  deal  in  the  family  section  of  the  intro  post  but  what  i  wanna  talk  about  here  is  on  one  hand  we  can  believe  gaston  was  a  british  war  hero  who  had  ties  to  france  that  had  him  live  there .     on  the  other ,  &  i  think  this  better  fits  gaston’s  horrid  personality ,  gaston  could  be  a  deserter  from  the  british  army  who  stabbed  the  british  in  the  back ,  turning  on  them  &  becoming  a   war  hero  for  france .     he  is  fond  of  stabbing  backs  it  seems  like  him .   now !     moving  on !     gaston  does  have  ptsd  from  the  war  ,  even  luke  said  this  in  an  interview ,  though  he  keeps  it  under  wraps  by  feeding  off  the  praise  he  gets ,  making  himself  feel  useful  &  wanted  rather  than  focusing  on  how  empty  his  life’s  been  since  the  war ,  &  burying  it  under  his  inflated  ego .     underneath  that ,  however ?     yeah ,  he’s  pretty  broken ,  jaded ,  &  when  he  doesn’t  get  what  he  wants  his  anger  comes  forth  in  a  very  militaristic  fashion  that  seeks  to  destroy  anything  in  his  path  to  what  he  wants  due  to  the  fact  that  part  of  him  is  still  seeking  to  return  to  the  war .     not  even  tweleve  whole  years  have  shaken  the  battle  out  of  gaston  &  his  mind  since  it  just  hasn’t  been  able  to  settle  back .      some  part  of  him  has  wired  itself  to  live  on  the  adrenaline  &  action  of  the  war  &  his  frustration  with  his  inability  to  settle  back  into  a  peaceful  life  has  made  him  crave  the  war .     he  seeks  for  the  thrill ,  the  high ,  of  war  similiar  situations  &  while  most  once  shook  their  head  at  this  they  would  come  to  find  out  that  his  war  hungry  half  can  be  something  more  far  more  dangerous  when  his  anger  is  tested  along  with  it .     it’s  times  like  that  when  gaston  hardly  realizes  he’s  partly  acting  on  his  frustration  &  anger  with  mundane  life  &  subconscious  need  for  the  chaos  of  war .

 GASTON’S  FAMILY :     we  know  nothing  of  gaston’s  parents  …  but  one  can  assume  he’s  probably  from  a  well  off  family  &  he’s  most  definitely  an  only  child .     one  headcanon  i  do  have  is  that  while  gaston’s  mother  was  french ,  his  father ,  though  of  french  decent  hence  the  surname  legume ,  was  from  england .     in  the  2017  film ,  lefou  says  ‘je  ne  sais  quoi ?’   &  gaston  responds  that  he  doesn’t  know  what  that  means .     pretty  sad  for  a  french  guy ,  yeah ?     they  way  i  headcanon  it  is  that  gaston  was  born  in  england  &  his  family  moved  to  france  with  but  his  mother  soon  left  he  &  his  father  when  gaston  was  still  very  young .     so  gaston’s  british ,  technically .     he  &  his  father  simply  didn’t  move  after  his  mother  left ,  it  was  too  much  a  hassle ,  &  gaston’s  father  spoke  most  only  english  &  also  sought  gaston  out  an  english  tutor .     from  living  in  france ,  yes ,  gaston  has  indeed  picked  up  some  french  but  he’s  actually  not  fluent .     he  knows  a  good  amount  of  basic  conversation  &  could  hold  a  decent  one  &  then  he  also  knows  military  commands  but  that’s  about  it .     through  most  his  life ,  when  having  trouble  with  the  languge  be  that  trouble  speaking  it  or  listening  to  it ,  he  would  often  turn  to  lefou  to  translate .     anyhow ,  back  on  topic ,  much  of  gaston’s  personality  comes  from  his  extreme  need  for  attention  as  a  child  &  his  father’s  spoiling  of  him  in  addition  to  his  father’s  insanely  sexist  view  on  masculinity  which  he  inherited .

 GASTON  IN  THE  ENCHANTED  FOREST :     we  all  know  how  beauty  &  the  beast  ends  for  gaston .     he  does  a  cheep  shot  at  the  beast  from  behind  then ,  afterwards ,  the  structure  he  was  standing  on  crumbles  &  he  falls  to  his  death .     well ,  the  last  thing  gaston  remembers  is  falling .     that  is  the  point  of  beauty  &  the  beast  that  i’ve  taken  him  from .     that  being  said ,  this  mean’s  gaston’s  anger  &  deranged  violent  nature  is  at  critical  level .     tick  him  off ?     you’re  getting  hit .     he’s  extremely  angry  at  belle … yet  still  wants  to  marry  her  because  now  it’s  just  a  matter  of  pride  kinda  thing .     if  you  bring  up   the  beast  or  just  anything  about  his  story ,  probably ,  he  will  snap  a  bit .

 MISCELLANEOUS HEADCANONS :

 yes ,  gaston  can  read !    unlike  his  cartoon  counterpart  who  only  likes  picture  books .     now ,  he  doesn’t  read  any  of  the  books  they  have  in  the  village ,  of  course ,  as  they’re  all  in  french   ( save  for  romeo  &  juliet  as  it’s  by  an  english  playwright  but  gaston  would  not  subject  himself  to  reading  gooey  romance  shakespear  when  things  such  as  hamlet  &  macbeth  exist )   &  he’s  even  less  terrific  at  reading  french  than  he  is  at  speaking  it .     mostly  he  reads  only  from  his  father’s  small  collection  of  books  which  he  grew  up  with  &  has  now  inherited .     his  favorite  is  actually  macbeth ,  seeing  as  he  quotes  it  in  the  mob  song .

he  really  loves  breakfast  food  you  guys .     does  he  really  eat  5  dozen  eggs  a  day ?     may  have  been  an  exaggeration .     but !     he  does  eat  a  good  heap  of  eggs  every  morning  &  it’s  at  least  slightly  concerning .

 most  of  the  time  he  will  only  do  things  that  somehow  benefit  him .     this  is  how  he  is  &  if  he  doesn’t  see  gain  in  his  end  in  whatever  you’re  asking  him  to  do  he’ll  most  likely  turn  it  down .

 if  doing  something  will  get  him  adoring  fans  he’ll  do  it  &  he  won’t  let  anyone  else  help .     he  lives  for  praise .     oh  there’s  a  child  in  a  burning  building ?     you’re  going  to  save  it ?     not  anymore  he’ll  tie  you  to  a  tree  so  that  he  can  do  it  &  get  the  glory .     he’s  a  very  bad  team  player  for  sure .

 WANTED  CONNECTIONS :    i.  LEFOU .   connection  taken !    gaston  abanoned  lefou ,  who  only  spent  his  days  adoring  gaston  &  being  in  literal  love  w/  him ,  to  die  after  using  him  as  a  human  sheild  &  letting  him  crushed  by  candenza .    as  horrible  as  gaston  was  to  lefou  in  the  end  he  does  know  that  lefou  is  his  biggest  fan  &  before  his  jealousy  &  anger  took  him  over  he  was  genuinely  friends  with  lefou .     lefou  has  been  his  friend  since  he  was  young  &  fought  in  the  war  beside  him .     guaranteed  to  anyone  who  brings  me  a  lefou :  heartbreaking  plots ,  many  tears ,  my  constant  bothering  of  you ,  sad  headcanons ,  MY ETERNAL LOVE!!!!! ,  any  gif  icons  or  static  icons  of  lefou  you  may  need  i  will  make  them  for  you ,  &  more !     a  josh  gad  fc  would  be  preferred  but  ik  he  doesn’t  have  the  most  abundant  of  resources  so  if  you  have  someone  else  in  mind  that’s  fine  but  like  just  hmu  first  if  you’re  using  someone  else .     i  seriously  will  make  you  static  &  gif  icons  if  you  use  josh ,  though ,  like  i  will  make  resources  for  you .     LISTEN  I’D  JUST  LOVE  A  LEFOU  SO  MUCH ! 

+  COSBO’S  ACTIVITY  NOTE  6/3 !

 i’m  moving  in  two  weeks !     yeah ,  i  joined  a  rpg  at  not  the  best  time  but  it’s  fine .     see ,  you  may  notice  that  on  my  app  i  say  i’m  in  pacific  time !     well ,  i’m  actually  currently  in  central  standard  time  at  the  current  moment .     but  i’m  going  to  be  moving  literally  across  the  country  to  california !     i  put  pacific  time  on  my  app  though  because  i  thought  it  pointless  to  put  the  timezone  of  somewhere  i’m  not  even  gonna  be  for  much  longer .     this  means  i  will  be  packing ,  routing  my  trip ,  trying  to  get  a  new  job ,  working  at  my  two  current  jobs ,  &  spending  time  with  friends  before  i  leave  all  in  the  upcoming  two  weeks !     i’m  very  busy  but  i  will  try  to  get  on  here  as  much  as  i  possibly  can .     if  worse  comes  to  worse  then  i  will  request  a  semi  hiatus  until  i’m  successfully  across  the  country !

***UPDATE :   I’VE  MOVED  SO  NO  WORRIES  ABT  THIS  NOW  LMAO