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hashtagartistlife · 3 years

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IR hunger games AU

pt 4/???

pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4

bonus comics under the cut + some more exposition

bonus cut 1:

bonus cut 2:

Recap of the story so far: yuzu gets picked as tribute for the hunger games. Ichigo manages to volunteer in her place. Rukia gets drawn to replace yuzu, and ichiruki end up being the tributes for district 12.

Ichiruki then meet urahara, their mentor, on the train to the capitol. On this train they may or may not have a conversation regarding the fact that Rukia saved Ichigo’s life as kids, and that they have consequently been dancing around each other for years now. I reserve the right to add more to this section later. Either way, they are awkward at best and frosty at worst as they enter the capitol.

At the capitol, they meet their stylists, uryuu and orihime. They are new stylists, who only graduated last year. This is their first official stylist job. This in itself is not that surprising, as district 12 was unpopular and often stuck with the inexperienced or not-quite-so-talented stylists. However, though uryuu and orihime are inexperienced, they are the furthest thing from untalented or unpopular - since they had been students, they have been somewhat of a rising star in the styling community. So, everyone is surprised when they both (separately) apply for the district 12 styling job, because they really could have had their pick.

Ishihime were both born and raised in the capitol, but their childhoods were far from the lavish, glamorous lifestyle commonly associated with capitol citizens. If the capitol had a caste system (which they do — it’s just unspoken, is all), they would be on the bottom rung — orihime grew up under her brother in as close to poverty as what you can get in the capitol, dreaming of the glitz and glamour of the upper crust life. Ryuuken, meanwhile, is very rich, but for whatever reasons uryuu ran away from home young and has been surviving on his own since. The fact that they both clawed their way up the ranks to become hunger game stylists out of pure talent and tenacity was a novelty for everyone, and contributed to their rising stardom.

Ishihime hadn’t met prior to their appointment as district 12 stylists, but they HAD heard of the other— it was a pleasant surprise to both of them that the other had also applied for the job. Though they only meet on the job, they click instantly and develop an easy working partnership to create a sensation with ichigo and rukia’s opening ceremony outfits. The outfits had a fire + ice theme, based on the fact that district 12 was a mining district (coal > fire, diamonds > ice).

Orihime applied to the district 12 job because of Ichigo— she saw him volunteering for his sister on TV and maybe fell a little bit in love with him, with the idea of him— how romantic, how heroic of him, how noble to be able to volunteer for his sister like that— the same age as her, and so handsome, too, she wants to be by his side, she wants to help him, she wants to make sure he looks his best at the games so that he can maximise his chances of returning to his sister… as stated previously Orihime grew up entrenched in the capitol mindset so she is not yet aware of how fucked up the whole system is. Uryuu, meanwhile, nobody is particularly sure why he applied for the job… he said something trite about wanting to use his skills where it’s most needed, how he likes a challenge, but orihime wonders if that’s really all there is to it— outwardly, he’s the picture perfect new graduate, enthusiastic, happy, proud of his job— but there are moments when they are being applauded for their latest creations when she thinks his expression goes a little sour… it’s always fleeting and gone so fast that she can never be sure however

Ichiruki, meanwhile, are the talk of the town. What with their stunning entrance at the opening ceremony and rukia’s public confession, all they have to do now is ride this wave of popularity all the way through the games for an easy win— unfortunately, they are both terribly bad at knowing how to manipulate this situation to their advantage. They both understand the gist of urahara’s plan — act like they’re falling in love— but neither of them understand WHY or HOW this will work. Why would the audience be invested in their falling in love? What exactly do they want to see? HOW do they act like they’re falling in love? (and, in Rukia’s case— how much of it should be pretend, how much of it is real?)

Enter Rangiku, the previous district 12 stylist. She and gin grew up in one of the districts, both hating the games and the capitol, until one day at 14 yrs old, gin said to her ‘i’m gonna make it so that you don’t have to be afraid of your name being called at the reapings no more’, volunteered as tribute, won the games, and promptly disappeared from her life.

Years later, rangiku sees gin on tv as the new host of the hunger games. She’s stunned and infuriated— she thought they both hates the capitol for what they did to the districts and now he’s WORKING for them? What the hell is he thinking? So rangiku packs up and moves to the capitol— her plan is to try to see him, to talk things out, surely there must be some kind of misunderstanding— but gin is all rich and famous now, and very heavily guarded, and she’s a nobody. There’s no way anyone will let her within ten feet of gin at all— so, rangiku decides she’s going to have to join the circus to talk to its head clown, and becomes a stylist.

Unfortunately, even as a stylist, she can’t get a word to him edgewise— and she’s starting to suspect that maybe it’s not that she can’t get to him, but that gin is actively avoiding her. She COULD climb the ranks until he can no longer avoid her— she is very good at this stylist gig, much to her surprise— but she doesn’t have the heart to do the backstabbing and bribing necessary for that. She is constantly warring between ‘I cannot pour my talent into something this morally bankrupt’ and ‘but maybe if I do my best, I’ll give my district’s kids a fighting chance’.

Eventually, by the time ichiruki step up, rangiku is so sick of having to dress kids up nicely for slaughter that she hands in her resignation, gives up on gin, and is getting ready to move back home to her district. That is, until she sees what an absolute record-breaker ichiruki are becoming, and start to hope again— that maybe, this year things will be different. That maybe, they will be different. That maybe, at least one of ‘her kids’ won’t go home in a coffin this year, will instead require outfits for a victory tour instead— a victory tour that is accompanied by their stylists… and the host.

So, rangiku comes back in an unofficial capacity to help ichiruki refine their act a bit more. But with less than one month left till the games commence, will what they come up with be enough to carry them through the entire games? And, even if it does— what will happen if at the end of it all, the two people who remain are ichigo and rukia— when only one person gets to return home alive?

Very unrelated point, but: ichigo apologised to rukia for grabbing her wrist post-tribute interview. Just wanted to clarify it is NOT alright to grab at people under any circumstances— ichigo did it in the heat of the moment, but when everything was cleared up he apologised for it. Had to mention this somewhere because it bothered me so much while drawing this installment— Ichigo you have NO room to be scolding the reporter for grabbing rukia, you did it not too long ago yourself! Having said that, that’s probably why he’s being very touchy about this— it was something that had been a sore point for him too very recently.

To be continued!

#bleach #ichiruki #bleach fanart #artist life #bleach art life #kurosaki ichigo #kuchiki rukia #hunger games au

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be11atrixthestrange · 3 years

Text

Waking Up In Vegas Chapter 14

After a night of debauchery, Ron and Hermione wake up in Vegas... married.

Muggle!AU. Romcom!Romione. Slow burning, smutty, angst-fest.

Rated M for reasons.

Ao3 | FFN

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SMUT WARNING

[Hermione]

"Is this the moment?"

Hermione vaguely registers Harry's voice, but she's too lost in kissing Ron to care. Instead, she wraps her arms more securely around his neck and smiles through the kiss when his fingers dig into her back.

"Oi! There's a hen party going on here!" Harry's voice is louder now, and he slurs his words, suggesting that his current state of mind is a bit more courageous than usual. No wonder he's so willing to interrupt their kiss.

On their own time, Ron and Hermione eventually surface. They hesitate to break eye contact, which would officially end the moment, but they're forced to look around as soon as they hear a round of applause. They glance around to see that the entirety of the wedding party is staring at them, cheering and beaming.

"Cough it up, Ginny," says Dean, jokingly shoving her shoulder.

"No! You bet they would kiss for the first time tonight," she argues. "That might not be their first kiss."

"Ask them!" says Neville..

"What if they lie?" asks Seamus. "They've been lying to us about this so far. Who's to say they won't keep it up?"

Hermione and Ron share a shocked expression and then burst into laughter.

"Did you all bet on us?" asks Ron incredulously.

"Why yes, we did," says Neville. "You two have been acting quite shifty for the last few days. How long has this been going on?"

Ron and Hermione meet each other's gaze for a silent conversation. Do they tell the truth? She tries to ask with her eyes.

Ron shrugs. "Last night," says Hermione, a blush forming on her cheeks. It's not a complete lie; it feels like the proper start of their relationship. A look at Ron nodding confirms he agrees.

"Did she say last night? Hand it over, everyone!" beams Lavender, shouldering her way into the crowd.

Ginny groans, and Lavender smiles as everyone else rummages into their pockets for cash.

"Hold on," says Ginny, holding her money just out of Lavender's reach. "You said Hermione spent the night in your room last night!"

Lavender shrugs coyly.

"Did you cover for her?"

"Maybe," she shrugs.

"So you knew?"

"I had a feeling."

"That's not fair!" says Ginny. "You had an advantage!"

"All's fair in love and war." Lavender snatches the money from Ginny's hand and saunters off, Demelza and Luna following behind her.

Ginny huffs. "I can't believe she didn't tell me." She looks at Hermione and narrows her eyes. "I can't believe you didn't tell me!"

"You're not upset about this?" asks Hermione, gesturing between herself and Ron.

"No, I'm thrilled!" she says, launching toward Hermione and throwing her arms around her neck. "Maybe you'll be my sister-in-law one day."

Ron laughs, and Hermione's cheeks turn pink.

I already am.

"Gin, you're freaking them out. They've been together for a day."

"Right, sorry."

"Alright, the show's over, kids," says Ron. "How about we go home and hope that you're all too drunk to remember this tomorrow?"

There's a chorus of groans, but not much protesting, as everyone is already leaning on one another for support and probably dreaming of being in bed. Luna, Demelza, and Lavender are already by the exit.

"I'll go walk with them," says Hermione.

"Sounds good," says Ron. "I'll keep an eye on the boys. And Gin."

"See you at the hotel," she says before trotting off to catch up with the rest of the girls.

The walk back feels much longer than it is, especially with three drunk and distractible girls. To Hermione's relief, the topic of her and Ron passes quickly, and Hermione wonders if they really are too far gone to remember this later.

As soon as they arrive back at the hotel, they split off and stumble back toward their rooms. Ron and the boys aren't too far behind her, and Hermione watches in amusement as he corrals them toward the stairs to the suites. Still sober, Ron and Hermione breathe a sigh of relief once everyone is safely up the stairs.

"Finally," says Ron. He loops his fingers through hers and waggles his eyebrows. "Now that the kids are in bed…" he says, trailing off mid-sentence.

"What do you have in mind?" she asks.

"Fancy a swim?"

Hermione looks toward the pool. Even though the hotel lobby doesn't offer a complete view, she can tell that it's relatively empty and looks a lot calmer and more relaxing than it does during the day. "Sure. Let's stop by our rooms to grab our suits?"

"Or," he croons, tugging her arm to pull her into an embrace. He continues in a whisper, "It's three AM, and we're in Vegas. Knickers will be fine, don't you think?"

Hermione bites her lip. "What if we get in trouble?"

"Live a little?"

Hermione considers skinny-dipping in a public pool living a lot, but as it turns out, adopting a 'what happens in Vegas' mindset has served her quite well this week. "Okay. But if we get caught, I'll be quite angry with you."

Ron's eyes flash with something unexpected — he almost appears excited at the thought of her being angry. "Win, win," he says.

She recalls their first day married and how they argued in his suite and then again at Erised Elopements — she saw the same flash in his eyes back then, and it clicks for her. Ron loves to argue. Hermione can't help but laugh. If he's into a hot temper, he picked the right girl.

He might like London-Hermione, after all.

The back of the pool deck is spotted with miniature hot tubs, capacity of two, as if the resort was built for honeymooners. It's perfect — there'd be nothing worse than a third oblivious guest plunking down next to them. They approach an empty one obscured by a few fake palm trees and set their belongings on the edge.

Ron pulls off his shirt and shorts and offers her a sheepish smile and a shrug, and his neck turns red, almost as if he's nervous. It makes Hermione want to shout at him and remind him how beautiful he is.

He doesn't waste any time stepping into the hot water, and as soon as he does, Hermione laments the lack of view.

"Your turn," he says with a smile. He leans against the back of the hot tub with his arms on the edge.

His gaze feels like a spotlight on her, but she doesn't mind it. With one last glance around to make sure no one else is watching, she basks in Ron's salacious stare as she strips off her dress to expose her matching bra and knicker set. Ron beams as she steps into the water.

"You're so goddamn beautiful." His voice, paired with the look of awe on his face, make his words somewhat convincing. Then his voice lowers, and in a surprisingly commanding tone, he continues, "Get over here."

Heat pools in her lower belly, and it has nothing to do with the temperature of the water. When she's close enough, his arms envelop her and pull her close. Her legs find a home on either side of his thighs, and their lips connect like magnets.

Hermione can feel Ron's immediate attraction to her press against her, so she presses back. He groans through their kiss, and his fingers travel up the back of her thighs and cup her bum.

He runs his tongue along her lips, asking for an invitation, and she lets him in without resistance. Their kiss deepens, and they take their time exploring it. One of Ron's hands slides from her bum to her stomach — she typically doesn't like it when men touch her there, but it feels nice when Ron does it, like an act of appreciation rather than judgment. His hand travels upward and lands at her breast, and he runs his thumb over the lace.

He breaks the kiss, but only to trail kisses down her cheek and neck until landing at the soft flesh below her ear. His teeth make contact with her skin, but only for a second before he pulls away to ask, "is it okay if I leave a mark?"

"Yes." The sound of her voice surprises her, but not as much as how good it feels when he starts to suck at her neck. Without a thought, her hand tangles into his hair, and she presses on his head, encouraging him to bite harder.

It all feels so good, so perfect, and she almost doesn't mind that they're in public. She wants to rip off his pants and have him in the hot tub. Almost.

As Ron gets lost in kissing and sucking on her neck, she tousles his hair, and her mind starts to wander. They'll be back in London in a few days, and Hermione usually wears her hair up at work. She hadn't thought about that when she told Ron to bite harder.

The single thought about hiding a hickey at the office breaks a dam, and more start rushing in. Before Las Vegas, she'd never snogged anyone in public, let alone half-naked in a hot tub. A month ago, she'd have never told a man she was falling in love with him after a few days or slept with him so soon. What happened?

For a moment, it feels as though she's that third, unwelcome guest in the hot tub just watching the pair snog each other senseless. The girl on Ron's lap letting him have his way with her is nothing but an experiment, an example of what would happen if Hermione wore her heart on her sleeve.

Her stomach clenches for the same reason it does when she sees Seamus throwing back one too many drinks, or Lavender basking in male attention, or Luna dancing wildly under neon lights at the club. Before Las Vegas, she would have named it superiority — she's too good for all of that. But she knows better now. It's just envy.

Unfortunately, she built her life in London under the assumption that she was too good for wild nights. Too responsible to just say yes to things. Too uptight to let her hair down, especially to hide a hickey.

How is all of this going to fit into her life in London? She stops playing with Ron's hair.

As soon as she stops, Ron pulls away from her neck. "Are you okay? Was that too much?"

Hermione looks into his bright blue eyes, wide with concern. She doesn't want to ruin the moment for him, but it's already ruined for her. "What happens when we go back to London?"

Ron's hand drops from its place on her chest and meets the other at her lower back. His embrace loosens so she can lean back and see his whole face. "What do you want to happen?"

She hesitates. The thought of going back to her life in London without Ron doesn't exactly appeal to her, so she tells him the truth. "I want to be with you."

"Same." He brushes a hair behind her ear and smiles at her.

"So, where do we start?"

"Married." He makes it sound so simple.

"How married?"

Ron laughs. "Are there different levels of marriage? And is this a conversation you want to have right now?"

"Considering we'll be back in London in two days… yes."

Ron nods. "Okay. Then let's talk about it."

Her arms drape loosely around his neck. "Are we really going to make a go of this?"

"I want to," he says, his voice sincere. "I don't think it's that complicated."

But it is complicated. Do they live together? Share money? Does Ron want children? They've never even talked about their future; they just got married. "There are a lot of logistics to consider."

"I say we play it by ear."

Hermione sighs, and Ron holds her more tightly.

"Look. We'll go back to London and dive into our lives. From there, we'll figure out how to blend our lives together. There's not much we can do from this hot tub."

"We have six months to figure it out."

"At least six months, but I'd like to think we don't have a deadline at all. It's not like some judge will stop in at the six-month mark and declare us divorced because we don't have every loose end tied up. Heck, my parents have been married for forty years, and they still have shit to figure out. They just love each other, so they tend to put the shit on the backburner."

Hermione hadn't thought of it that way — for some reason, six months felt like a strong, hard deadline. Maybe she was just afraid that Ron would be itching to leave, and she'd only have six months to prove she was worth staying married to. She smiles — she'd never have expected the words 'put the shit on the backburner' to give her butterflies, and yet, it does.

"What is your hesitation?" he asks.

"The truth?" She doesn't want to overwhelm him with her insecurities — that's London-Hermione, and she's still not sure he'll like her.

"Of course I want the truth. Can't start our marriage off with lies."

Hermione takes a deep breath before answering. "I'm worried you won't like me."

Ron narrows her eyes at her. "Why wouldn't I like you?"

"You didn't when we first met."

"But I like you now."

"But this isn't really me," she says. "This is Vegas Hermione. Not London Hermione."

"Do you think they're that different?" he says, his head cocking to the side. He lifts one eyebrow as if trying to call her bluff.

"Yes. I do."

"Cool. I can't wait to get to know London Hermione." His tone is so calm, so casual.

"I'm serious, Ron," she says, pulling away so his hands loosen around her waist. "I don't want you to be disappointed."

He responds by gently tugging her back so he can place a well-aimed kiss on her nose. "How about you give me a chance, then let me decide if I'm disappointed? Don't you think I have the same fear?"

"You're afraid I won't like you?" she says, leaning her forehead against his.

He nods as he repeats her words back to her, "You didn't when we first met."

Hermione smiles at the memory of their first disastrous encounter in London. "That's true. You ordered a straw like a psychopath."

Ron laughs. "But you like me now."

"Also true. Now you don't order straws—"

Ron cuts her off by pressing a kiss to her lips. "Oh, it's more than that, and you know it. I think your exact words were that you're 'falling in love' with me."

She lightly kisses him again. "We both said that."

"We did," he says, running his thumb along her cheek. "I meant it, too."

Their lips meet again. It's less hungry than before but more caring and slow-paced, like two lovers that don't have a deadline. His arms tighten against her back, shifting her hips against his body.

"Do you normally say it so soon?" she asks when they surface.

"What, thirty-six hours?" laughs Ron. "Never. You?"

"No," she says, shaking her head. "That was most definitely Vegas Hermione."

"Same. Maybe I'll keep that part of Vegas Ron."

He tries to kiss her again, but she hesitates, lost in thought. Such a simple statement sends her mind reeling. She's still worried that Ron won't like her London-self as much, but that's under the assumption that she's going to revert to that person upon landing at Heathrow. She'd imagined London-Ron as the same happy-go-lucky person that she's gotten to know. He's probably different, too.

"You're usually quite guarded, aren't you?" he asks as he watches her expression change.

"Yeah, I'd say I am," she nods. "Aren't you?"

"Yeah. Figured it was the best way to avoid getting hurt."

Hermione chuckles. She uses the same logic as Ron. "How's that working out for you?"

"It's a good way to stay single. A bad way to fall in love."

What they're doing might be short-sighted and naive, but Ron makes a good point. If love is at the bottom of the deep-end, she'll never find it by dipping her toes in the water. Maybe getting married in Vegas was the equivalent of getting pushed into the pool.

"Maybe Vegas will have changed us." Her fingers find Ron's hair again, and she can't help but play with it.

"Or at the very least, woken us up a bit."

His lips find hers again, and this time his hand starts to wander from her lower back down toward her knickers. He slips his hands underneath the lace to grip her bare skin and groans as his hips grind against hers.

She chuckles at his reaction and dips her fingers inside of his waistband, where they brush against his erection. "What, do you want me or something?"

"Cheeky," he laughs. "And absolutely. But as much as I want to have you right here, I'd like a little privacy."

"Back to my room?" she whispers in his ear.

"Yes, please."

After pulling their clothing over wet underwear, Hermione leads the way back up to her suite, hand in hand with Ron as he follows closely behind. Her dress is uncomfortably heavy as it soaks up the water from her bra and knickers, but she doesn't mind — she knows she won't be wearing it for much longer.

Ron seems to have the same thought because the moment the door closes behind them, he spins her around to face him, pulls her close, and runs his hand down her back. She shivers at the contact.

"Let's say we get you back out of this dress," he whispers in her ear. She doesn't protest as his fingers dip under the hemline to tug it up and over her head, once again leaving her standing before him in nothing but her lingerie.

Ron then pulls off his shirt while she unbuttons his shorts until he matches her, almost naked. His hands grip the bottom of her thighs, and with the help of a small hop, he pops her up to waist height. She wraps her legs around him to lock herself in place and captures his lips with hers.

Instead of hauling her to the bed, he makes his way to the bathroom, shoulders the door open, and sets her onto the bathroom vanity. Without removing his lips, Ron reaches around her back to unclasp her bra, letting it drop to the tile below.

His pants join her bra on the floor, followed by her knickers. Hermione arches her back as Ron's mouth travels down her body, kissing every square inch of skin it can find until it lands at her breasts. Hermione can hardly believe they're under the same fluorescent lighting where she picked apart her appearance a few mornings ago because right now, she's never felt sexier.

Ron echoes her thoughts by trailing kisses from her breasts, across her stomach, and to her thighs, which open for him without protest. He dives his tongue between her legs and groans as if she's the most delicious thing he's ever tasted. Her eyes flutter shut as he steadies her lower back with one hand and slips a finger inside her.

"Oh my god, Ron," she mumbles, tangling her fingers in his hair to hold his head in place. "Keep doing that."

Pressure starts to build at her center, and she leans her back into the mirror to give him a better angle. One leg drapes lazily over his shoulder, and his free hand moves from her lower back to her thigh to hold it in place. She continues to press his head into her as his tongue circles her clit.

"Ron, I'm gonna come—"

As soon as she says it, the movements of his tongue slow down, his fingers pause inside her, and the pressure comes to a frustrating plateau. She groans and wraps her other leg around his head to lock him in place. She can feel the vibration of his chuckle against her.

"I'm so close!" she whines, and he removes his mouth from her to gaze up.

"Oh, I know."

What a tease. "Fuck you," she adds, aiming for a playful tone.

"Gladly." As Hermione rolls her eyes, Ron beams, "Marriage with you is going to be so goddamn fun."

He rises to his feet to turn on the shower and steps inside, motioning for Hermione to join him. Pouting, she hops off the vanity and meets him under the warm running water. "You owe me an orgasm."

"Oh, calm down," he says as he guides her back to the wall. "I'm going to finish you off right now."

She bites her lip and spreads her legs as Ron lowers to a knee and runs his nose along her center. He then takes his time kissing and nipping at her inner thigh until Hermione clears her throat and raises an eyebrow at him.

"Jesus, woman," he laughs. "So needy."

But it works — he attaches his mouth and lets his fingers travel inside her to work their magic, and it doesn't take long to get back to where he had her before. The hot water dripping down her body only intensifies the sensation of his lips on her, and this time it's her breath that gives away how close she is to release. Ron keeps his contact this time, his tongue moving slow, rhythmic circles around her center until she reaches a peak. He holds her up as she collapses against his face, grips, and tugs at his wet hair, and his name involuntarily escapes her lips as a high-pitched, breathy moan.

Ron holds his tongue on her until she comes down, cycling through a few waves of pleasure before her legs can hold her up again. Then, he kisses his way back up her body until his lips find hers.

"Worth it," she says when he breaks away. He starts kissing her cheek and neck, and she whispers in his ear, "now what?"

"I want to fuck you."

"I bet you do," she says as she slithers out of his embrace and reaches for her shampoo bottle. "You'll get your chance."

Ron smirks at her as she starts lathering up her hair. "Tease."

"It takes one to know one." Hermione smiles at him as she plops some shampoo onto his head before rinsing her own.

She takes her time cleaning herself, and Ron follows suit, but they both know exactly what they're doing with every 'accidental' brush of his cock against her hip or breasts against his back. It doesn't take long before his hands are on her again, rubbing soap over her body under the guise of helping her get clean. He runs soapy fingers over her chest, her neck, and down her legs, then flips her around so her breasts press against the hard, cold tile. She shivers as his hands run up and down her back, and then his body melts against hers, his erection nestled between her legs.

"Please?" he croons into her ear.

Teasing him is deliciously fun, but there's only so much she can take before she absolutely needs him. "Yes."

She widens her stance and feels his knees bend behind her as he positions his erection at her entrance. To allow him access, she arches her back, tilting her hips up toward him, and he slides in, groaning with pleasure as he fills her from behind.

He moves slowly at first, exploring the limits of this position before picking up his pace. His hand plants to the wall beside her head, and she watches his knuckles turn white as he grips the tile, moaning along with him as each buck of his hips presses her against the wall.

The pressure rises again, and she can sense they're both close to release. To her surprise, he slows down and settles his face next to hers.

"Hermione," he breathes into her ear, "You're the sexiest thing I've ever seen, you know that, right?"

She hopes to god the question is rhetorical because she doesn't answer, instead turning around to face him. His lips crash into hers as one leg at a time swings around his hips until he's holding her against the wall. Their position is perfect for his cock to slip right back in, and he resumes his thrusts, each one harder and deeper than the last, until they both lose themselves in pleasure.

Her legs drop to the shower tile. Panting, he leans against her, embracing her. "Let's do that again sometime."

Hermione laughs and places a kiss on his cheek. "Whatever you say, hubby."

Still covered in soap, they step under the water stream, kissing until every bubble washes off. Ron reluctantly turns off the shower and steps out to grab them each a towel.

"How did I get so damn lucky?" Ron mutters as he towels off. His voice is low and quiet, as if he's wondering to himself.

"I could ask myself the same question," she says before placing another kiss on his lips. The kiss lingers as they breathe each other in.

Hermione can't wait for more showers like this.

Once dry, Ron settles underneath the covers. Not bothering to put any clothes on herself, Hermione dives in beside him.

They settle underneath the blankets together as if it's something they've done one hundred times before. Only when Ron wraps his long arm around her waist like a protective seat belt does Hermione realize that it's the first time they've knowingly shared a bed. His embrace feels safe and secure, just like the harness on the Deathstick, and she'd almost be willing to drop through the sky again if his arms were around her. Almost.

Even though he's quite a bit taller than her, his knees fit perfectly behind hers. Just like they did in the shower. Hermione closes her eyes and listens to his breath as he buries his head in her bushy hair, now frizzing as it dries. Her own breathing settles into a rhythm, and she's about to drift into sleep when Ron speaks.

"My lease is almost up." His voice is low, almost a whisper, but even so, there's a tremble to it.

Hermione feels a smile forming on her lips. "Are you renewing?"

"I was planning on it," he says. "Before."

Before. Her smile grows bigger. "Before you accidentally got married?"

"Yeah."

It should be a big decision for any couple, but it doesn't feel that way. Not at all.

"Move in with me?"

"Really?"

"Head-first, right?" She can almost feel his eyes widening. "I have a huge shower. You'll love it."

Ron lets out a long breath and chuckles into her hair. "I hope you don't mind that my favorite color is orange," he says as he tightens his embrace.

"Oh god. I hate orange."

Ron uses his nose to move aside some of Hermione's hair and presses a kiss to her neck. "Well, marriage is about compromise, love."

Hermione imagines her flat adorned with orange curtains and art, Ron's clothing scattered around her room, and his dirty dishes in the sink. "We're gonna drive each other barmy once this honeymoon phase is over, aren't we?"

Even though he can't see her, Ron must sense her smiling too and know better than to take her complaint seriously. "Can't fucking wait."

Hermione snuggles up closer against Ron, her head in the crook of his neck. It's a good thing he doesn't take her too seriously because the reality is, she can't fucking wait either.

#ROMIONE #romione fanfic #romione fanfiction #hp fanfiction #hp fanfic #hpromione #muggle AU #be11a_vegas #Ron Weasley #ronweasley #Hermione Granger #hermionegranger #Ron and Hermione #ron x hermione #slow burn #romione smut

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mrs-theirin · 3 years

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Since Varric (sadly) isn’t romanceable in-game, does Eden romance anyone who is? If so is that simply not canon and Eden has always been with Varric or does she break up with whoever else before getting with Varric? I guess what I’m asking is, what’s the timeline of Eden and Varric’s relationship? Does it all happen post-Kirkwall or during the events of the game and if so how does any other romance fit into that?

oh thank you so much for asking!!! a long, long time ago, i had eden romance fenris and then stay broken up with him when he breaks up with her, but i eventually realized that while they were close friends, they didn’t really work as a relationship? so i scrapped that

so! the timeline of their relationship is like:

act 1: varric begins to develop feelings for eden. eden kinda has a crush on varric but love scares her so she tries to forget about it. varric ALSO tries to forget about it and fails. after the deep roads expedition they are much closer to each other and begin to spend more time together

between act 1 and act 2: this is when they get the closest! we all know hawke moves into the estate and has all these riches blah blah blah but eden and leandra are. not kind to each other. so eden stays away from the estate for the most part, spending most of her time at the hanged man with her companions! this is where eden and varric really start to get to know each other. varric’s feelings grow here, and eden allows herself to begin to have feelings for him. she doesn’t think much of it though

act 2: here their relationship gets pushed aside for a bit because there’s just so much shit going on in act 2 that they don’t really have time to focus on each other? they still spend time together and such (a lot of time!) but it’s not the same as before. this is around the time that varric starts to think about how serious he is about her. i mean, technically he’s still got A Thing with bianca, and he still has feelings for bianca, but he starts to realize that bianca has never made him feel the way eden does. things really change after leandra dies and the arishok fight. eden falls into a pretty bad depression because she blames herself for pretty much everything, and varric is there to help her out when things get tough

between act 2 and act 3: this is when it happens :)) a little after the last events of act 2, varric throws a party for eden to celebrate her, hoping to make her feel better. it works, half of kirkwall shows up in the hanged man to support her, and they have a full night of singing and dancing and drinking. this is when eden realizes that she loves him. at the end of the night, they kiss and confess that they love each other, and they wake up in bed together and go about their business (you can read that here, yes i am plugging my own work please don’t make fun of me). a few weeks after, however, eden has a sort of breakdown and chops all her hair off and gets in a really bad state. during this time, varric comes over to the estate and takes care of her (it takes about a month for her to recover). they express confusion over what they “really are” and then they become an “official” couple (though they plan to keep it a secret. everyone who knows them can honestly guess that they’re a couple but they’re never romantically affectionate in public and they never confirm their relationship). eden ends up relinquishing her estate to house apostates and lives with varric at the hanged man instead

act 3: we all know things get crazy in act 3 so let’s just say they stay together lmao. during this time they actually get “married” (varric just gives her his signet ring, they don’t make it official in any capacity, but it’s enough for them) eden gets wrapped up in helping anders (the situation surrounding “the last straw” are quite different in my canon to make myself more comfortable with anders’s actions but we don’t have to get into that here). at the end of it all, varric fights by her side as they defeat meredith. a few weeks after, eden has to flee kirkwall. they say their goodbyes and part their separate ways

inquisition: not much to say here except they get officially married a couple weeks after here lies the abyss in the herald’s rest edit: OH AND THEY ADOPT A KID TOGETHER AND NAME HIM MALCOLM ANDERS I CAN’T BELIEVE I FORGOT THAT PART (post-inquisition)

i cannot thank you enough for asking these questions it really warms my heart that you want to know :’)) if you don’t mind reading my work (lmao) you can learn more about the intricacies of their relationship here and here! thank you again!!! <3

#anon: tell me about eden and varric!#me: [patrick glowing eyes meme]#sorry i went on for so long adslgkhag i'm just passionate about them #thank you sm for asking #quill's oc asks #eden hawke

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madamhatter · 4 years

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Headcanon: The ‘Actress’ Motif and Sophie Hatter. Companion piece to Self-Perception, Self-Restraint, and Conflict in Sophie Hatter.

A theme that has been going throughout this blog’s writing (and in my interpretation of Sophie) has always been themes surrounding theater and performance. It ranges from addressing the young Hatter to work through ‘masks’ that best work per situation (this’ll date to pre-curse in canon and standard in others) to the stage that everyone works on to this thing we know as life.

She refers to herself as a cognizant actress to take on many shapes and forms, easily transitioning and adapting physically and emotionally (feelings, as opposed to long-term sentiments) whenever possible. Her adaptability isn’t as flexible when it comes to her own mentality, and emotions, which itself is jeopardized and rigid most of the time. However, what matters to her is how she is perceived and keeping all in order and in check as she is, after all, responsible for providing to others.

Emotional intimacy, in which she opens herself up to others, is among the hardest things for her to express. She has placed too many boundaries and walls around to find herself comfortable to do this in any normal circumstance. And this is a result of her own deliberate management and compartmentalization of her own person. Which is basically saying ‘her behaviors and thought process has harmed her normal processes and her own perception of herself. It is a removal from understanding herself entirely and placed it in the back of her mind. That is itself an entirely different topic, but it does relay back into this current headcanon. More details on that may be found here: Is your muse very emotionally intimate?

Performativity is an important asset to how Sophie functions. She has already withdrawn her own interests and future intentions at a relatively young age (book canon wise) in order to pursue raising and aiding her youngest sister to seek our her fortune. This also includes her other sister, the second-born, by keeping her in line and helping her navigate through her wants. Being perfectly honest, Sophie did raise both of her sisters and Fanny, her mother, gave her her rightfully deserved acknowledgement and credit for that after being missing for quite some time. Back on topic, this is the first instance to where Sophie begins her ‘performance’and reworking herself to better meet the needs of others. The first mask for her to where was the one meant for the most important people in her life: her sisters.

As for imagery, the most consistent would be masks, the stage, dancing (specific performance), marionettes (and being controlled by strings), the ‘audience’ being connected to overwhelming (and public) eyes always watching her and recitals. All of it revolves around how she sees herself in the real world interacting with everyone else, making her distinctively separated from the others around her. And boy, Sophie’s views on what she deserves and what others deserve is a topic.

The quote below is an excerpt that goes thoroughly into the mentioned imagery. It is specifically a dream sequence Sophie has that encapsulates her own experience and fears that ties all this together.

( White, red, and gray dance in the mind of the dancer; dissonance spinning her around by the wooden controller that fate held onto. Entangled by responsibilities, her feet drag, and the wires dig into her light skin along her neck, arms, legs, and across her exposed body. The same sequence, dance, and song – the marionette towed onto the stage takes her place – first position, heels touching, and feet outward with shoulders flat and body motionless.

A jerk to the left from the strings, one arm now up, and her feet are drawn to the fifth position. Assemblé, the left foot behind her right, gives a small kick forward, and once that rests, the right foot and arm continue the pattern. Within the same step, arabesque. Both arms out on her sides slightly angled forward to the house, left leg extending behind her body with her right leg firmly straightened. Before long, she turns to position.

Rond de jambe to create grace, tendu to keep simple, sissonne to change the pace, and passé to change her feet position a little. Each rigorous moment had a particular formation to follow, an order that must be obeyed. Performing for the faceless and unseeable, they still demand entertainment, and she must appease.

Echappé to the stars and emboité for impressions, each step now was exigent and the breath in her throat she held. Jumps, bends, snaps, it must be according to the motions of wires that compose and direct her required movements. Glistening her throat was sweat, trailing down a major muscle tensing, yet now she held the house in her palm.

One arm pulled back over her shoulder, back bent backward, her head craning back to greet the audience with her eyes, and her left up, pointing forward to the direction of the stage. A waltz dip for only one, a dance for two yet she must perform in solitude. Her greatest feat, making illusions of balance when impossible.

Rrrrriiiiippppp. All she could feel was cotton. Just like a well-loved and well-traveled toy, sometimes they tear after a while. White cotton plush tumbling out of the split down her abdomen, the chaotic tune in her ears now white noise, a stillness hangs over the theater. But why was it so hot? Why were her appendages twitching, and why now of all places? Could she not continue? She must–…

Her legs failed her – no, no, she failed them. The conductor to the show, the audience, the faces she knew and loved. Perfect form collapsing to the ground, her body descending to the wooden floor with her arms splayed and legs luxate stiffly.

How odd, this dream never ends like this. But, it’s a kinder dream then if it does. )

DRABBLE RESPONSE TO @/diverse-hearts’ ASK.

Now, onto another business revolving around this motif: the mental state of Sophie’s mind because the imagery, references, and comparisons whenever I write are connected to each character by third person narrative. Basically, any time I do write for a character, their unique particulars bleed through into the writing which makes it their own and provides the capacity available to experience what they’re thinking, going through, rationalizing/understanding something, etc.

Having this constant duality between the perceived world and the real world since young, Sophie’s mind oft bleeds into relying and using her active imagination, which was of the many things that were kept ‘in line’ as a child. It is something that is persistently with her as she has a tendency of vicariously living out different lives and imagining herself as a completely different person or face (thank you HMC musical for validating this HC). But, she would most often take on imagining what other people life and what kind of fun and excitement and fortune was in their lives. Case and point: the entirety of chapter 1 where Sophie spends her time coping from her isolation by talking to her hats.

Her mental stage is working around the loss of herself and the opportunities, time, and chances for herself. In some cases, thinking of life in a certain way can help minimize the suffering and pain that one endures if they don’t want to come to terms. However, there comes the fact that it is more damaging to the person the longer they continue with their ways. Sophie falls underneath this umbrella since her own coping is essentially one fitted to how she was originally responding to traumas as a child. She has become a reclusive, nervous wreck of a person (book canon) that refuses to leave home and works through executive dysfunction whenever she prompts herself to leave the house or do something outside of her schedule (house-work-sleep). This only happens once she is officially hired as an apprentice under Fanny and her sisters both leave for their apprenticeships. But, judging from what Martha tells her, Sophie’s tendency to wallow and hide didn’t suddenly appear. It’s been here and there that both sisters comment on it. Even when she tells herself that she should go, it’s up to her and she knows, it is then where she falls back to excuse certain things and continue only for the sake of someone needs to work.

And that itself is relatively childish. There are numerous gaps in her to understand herself and assess her own self that she tends to fall back into this box of where she’s been already used. To her, it’s easier to play upon the part assigned to her as opposed to seeking herself out and shedding off this role. It’s only until she is cursed beyond recognition that she, finally, goes out for her own and is remarkably accepting of the situation. (Which, really, speaks enough about Sophie’s mental health).

With all the emotional maturity and responsibility to help and guide others, however, there is freshness and uncomfortable feeling she carries when it comes to acknowledging her divided self. It is an untreated wound and unacknowledged creation made by her household. it is the ‘elephant in the room’ that even her sisters repeatedly tell her about (about her being exploited and being taken advantage of).

It could be simply said that Sophie, overall, confronts herself with over-simplifications of her own feelings and thoughts, despite showing intense and deep questioning and dislike. The actual her that wishes to speak cannot when the role she plays does not find need for it. With this in mind, this perpetuates frustrations and even more inclination to make skewed, if not worrisome, conclusions. If she could, she would rather split herself to play different roles just like what she does and ignore what is brewing inside her mind. Which is why, for verses including Sophie crossdressing (Simeon), or in disguise (ie: Myrtle in TW), this side of her is explored much more as for the fact she’s as willing and open to doing it

One of the best examples to elaborate on this Sophie’s confrontation of death and what she views it as. Taking into account from the previous HC post, there are two variations to how Sophie may view a particular topic (but end with the same results, which is her belief). The two accounts below carries the romanticize versus poison parts of herself.

To truly embrace of total removal of control, that was the final evidence needed to show that one was willing to submit their mortality in the hands of someone else.

A cold someone else, whose of the remains of all mankind, placid bones that caress against still-warm skin, cradling mortal’s falling form. Garments of black hug their rib cage, hollowed eyes gazing tenderly, they hold humanity and allow for the mortal to lay all weight and burdens into their hold. Bowing now from the dance of life, death takes the final lead in the danse macabre.

Sophie hopes at the time death greets her, when she submits herself unwillingly or willingly to the final number in their performance, that they were beautiful.

But, it was yet the step for that – as she never knew when it’d be and countless times, she could’ve. To when she would’ve been enveloped in unconditional acceptance, for the first time in her life, it was not yet time. For now, it was a long waltz with the grim reaper who waited for her.

Yet, the actress returns to form, facing the mirror once more as the curtains drew back on her neck.

ACT. ???? - SILVER STIGMATA.

Context: Sophie Hatter, after doing a night’s work as Simeon, is standing before her bathroom mirror, in a state of undress. Her mind right now is blurred between the current act of Simeon and the act of Sophie. She is looking over the parts of herself that she keeps hidden (her scars) and her own bareness has her examining herself. While lost in this space, she slowly succumbs to revisiting her true self, locked away in mind.

Part of her wants to laugh. How dare he have the audacity he had to think she’d be bothered by death? [...] Death was the only guarantee she had in her life besides her future as a failure.

DRABBLE RESPONSE TO @/diverse-hearts’ ASK.

Context: Sophie made a reckless decision during one of the Port Mafia’s events to take on an incoming threat that almost cost her life. Chuuya is reprimanding her while she’s laying out in a hospital, a place that is uncomfortable for her and reveals her usually hidden hostility and anger.

While elaborate in description and playing along with Sophie’s imagination (and thoughts), the ending results are still the same: death is the only other variable in her life promised to her. She may look at it lovingly and dream it or scoff and bitterly remark it as if ‘that’s how life is.’ Both still embrace it, which is reducing the actual gravity and weight of the situation of her almost dying and the thought of herself dying.

(For those curious: Sophie’s views on death for others is entirely different and she’s fearful of it for others. Relates back to both of her parents’ early death and her witnessing her father succumb to ailment while she spent most of her time caring for him.)

Anyways, that’s a lot for this one post ---!

#( in which we learn about the eldest ; headcanons )#death idealization tw #[ GOD DAMN FINALLY TUMBLR WORKS WITH ME ]#[ anyways. welcome 2 my shitshow of a post. ]

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patricianandclerk · 5 years

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Will that be all?

My Ask | My Ko-Fi | On Ao3 | Requests always welcome!

VetVimes.

At the behest of Lady Winesta Sexton, there is a great ball, and Samuel Vimes hates it. There is a peculiarity to the Ankh-Morpork ball that makes it even more unbearable than anything Vimes could imagine in his wildest dreams. It’s a mix of a few factors, really. The tinkling nature of the music on the air, which contains no personality at all and somehow manages to echo off the ceilings and walls, ringing around the room and insinuating itself inside one’s skull. Even when Vimes finally leaves, he knows the waltzes and little ditties are going to be stuck in his head for the next few weeks, and he wouldn’t mind, if they were only any good.

Which they are not.

The average composition of the Ankh-Morpork musician comes somewhere between “brain-numbingly bland” and “desperately commercial,” meaning that it clings long after you’ve hoped to have forgotten it.

And what’s worse is that the Lady Sybil Vimes, née Ramkin, has fallen ill. Vimes does not doubt that she is ill, either – Sybil is not the sort to let Vimes wander into some awful soirée and not be there to make it bearable. Unfortunately, by the time the message of Sybil’s abrupt flu and confinement to bed with one of the ridiculous (and yet specially designed) bowls that is made especially for the purpose of vomiting in it (the rich and powerful of Ankh-Morpork believing in specialised crockery for every purpose imaginable in two to three colours, so that they have something to put in the dozens of storage closets that make a manor a home), Vimes had already arrived, and been announced.

Vimes isn’t one for rules, or for social etiquette, or appearing in public except for in his official capacity as a watchman (albeit, Vimes thinks with a sense of vague disgust, a Commander), but once you’re announced, you need to stay for at least an hour, unless you are called urgently away.

Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, no one seems willing to call him urgently away on anything.

Captain Carrot had assured him, in his brightest tone, that he would handle absolutely everything, and unfortunately, Captain Carrot is a man of his word. Unfortunately…

Noting a curious gap in the waves of ridiculously dressed lords and ladies milling around the ballroom, the majority of them absently swaying from side to side or fluttering fans or swinging canes, Vimes arches one eyebrow. A natural parting occurs in the crowd, and Vimes beholds the slow moving figure of the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. His ebony cane held neatly at his side, he moves delicately through the crowd, seemingly incognizant of the way that everybody naturally gives him a gap of around six feet on each side.

“Good evening,” Vetinari says mildly, and Vimes gives him a dutiful salute as he comes closer. Unlike the average member of the aristocracy, Vimes does not especially fear Vetinari: to do that would amount to about the same lot of good as being afraid of the moon, or the sun. You can be frightened of it if you like, but it isn’t going to go anywhere, and if it wants to harm anyone, it probably won’t go to the bother of harming you specifically.

And if it does?

Well. It’s not as if you can do anything about it. What’s the point in being frightened?

“Is it?” Vimes asks, unenthusiastically.

“I notice the Lady Sybil is absent,” Vetinari says, with a sort of wooden sympathy. His expression is entirely neutral, displaying its usual blank-eyed stare that would make most people flinch, fluster, or perhaps break out in a flopsweat. There are some on the Disc that might retort to this stare with a cheery grin that might annoy Vetinari; others might respond with blank incomprehension; Vimes’ riposte – well-practised after all his years of service – is something rather different.

Vimes’ method is to retain an expression of dutiful service, the lips pursed, the eyes staring forward and not crossing the gaze of the Patrician’s own, his fingernails still touching against his forehead in silent salute.

“Yessir,” Vimes says.

“Put your hand down, Vimes,” Vetinari says, in a tone of some boredom.

“Yessir,” Vimes assents, and he does, his hands settling behind his back. He’s still wearing his Commander’s uniform, although he had been convinced to exchange his cardboard boots for some “handsome” ones. “She’s caught ill.”

“What a shame.” With the familiar stiffness to one side, Vetinari moves to stand beside Vimes, so that the two of them are shoulder to shoulder. Vetinari stands slightly closer to Vimes than is strictly necessary, and Vimes can feel the dusty, stiff fabric of his sleeve against the bare patch of arm where his breastplate gives way before his gauntlet begins. It’s summer in Ankh-Morpork, a dreadful, sticky heat lingering on every street, and causing the river to concentrate its smell on the air at large instead of just the air beside the river. This means that Vimes is even less inclined to wear the full livery of his poshed up uniform than usual, as it’s simply too hot to bear.

Vimes is aware of the looks being sent their way.

Ordinarily, Vimes is the subject of a great many looks – these looks ordinarily happen along the lines of, “he doesn’t belong here, the jumped-up little oik,” and such sentiments as that – these are sentiments, in fact, that Vimes would agree with. He does not belong here. He is of the opinion that nobody belongs here. This is nonsense.

But the fact of the Patrician standing beside him means that many of these looks stop in their tracks, and are abruptly softened (or, more accurately, strangled) on the faces of those delivering them. It’s one thing to send a withering look to Sir Samuel Vimes, who should not be here anyway, and who couldn’t give a toss who looks at him, withering or no, but—

Lord Vetinari?

Well.

That’s a very different matter.

“You don’t sway to the music,” Vetinari says mildly.

“This ain’t music,” Vimes scoffs.

“Isn’t it?” Vetinari asks, “Curious that you should say so, Vimes. It meets many of the descriptors of music. Instruments, a rhythm, chords—”

“It’s like,” Vimes starts, wrinkling his nose and crossing his arms tightly over his chest, “clay. It’s cheap, easy to reproduce, and it doesn’t matter that it looks nice for five minutes, because it’s sticky and it clings to your boots.” Vimes glances at Vetinari, and he sees Vetinari’s thin lips twitch slightly into a smirk.

“I see,” Vetinari says. “You dislike popular music.”

“Don’t see the point to it.”

“There is no point to it, Vimes. One hears it, one listens to it while it is playing, perhaps one dances, and then one goes home.”

“What time is it?” Vimes asks.

“Bingly-bingly-bong!” comes the resulting chime from his pocket, and Vimes feels his mouth twist into a scowl. “It is precisely about half seven!”

“Can I have an actually precise figure, if you please?” Vimes demands. There is a sort of stiff growl in his voice that rings on the air, and the demon in the Dis-organiser hesitates for a second or two as it evaluates the potential of this growl being a threat.

“It’s thirty-six past the hour.”

“Right,” Vimes says. He has been here, then, for thirty-two minutes, meaning he has to pass another twenty-eight before he can leave without Sybil calling him impolite. It isn’t that Sybil will mind, exactly. Sybil doesn’t like any of these people any more than he does, really, and she doesn’t want him to have to withstand it either, but—

She’ll be pleased, if he sticks it out. She won’t say so, outright. But as much as Sybil will playfully call him impolite, if he goes home early, she’ll also be delighted, if he is polite, for once. It’ll make her smile.

He likes those absent smiles of hers, when she is focusing on other things, and when it’s something Sam’s done. She does it like she doesn’t know she’s smiling, her expression faraway and focused on other things, and it’s—

It’s lovely, is what it is. She’s lovely.

“You like it when I piss ‘em off, don’t you?” Vimes asks. His voice is quiet, meant for Vetinari’s ears – the benefit of a room like this, with this tinkling music and the chatter of all these toffs, is that you can be in full view of everybody, and still say what you like.

“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean,” Vetinari replies, his tones smooth and oily. “Nothing you do, Vimes, gives me pleasure one way or the other.”

Vimes feels his lips shift into a slight smile.

“As intended then, sir,” he says cheerfully. A little while ago, he’d been looking back on the times where he’d been a little bit more reliant on the bottle, and missing it – he’d wanted for a drink, and had been glancing at the trays of champagne as they’d passed him by, but Vetinari…

In a completely different way to Vimes, Vetinari is seemingly incapable of getting drunk.

“What’s this music for then, my lord?” Vimes asks.

“I believe I told you, Vimes.”

“Oh, I see,” Vimes says. “Dancing.”

“Quite.”

“You ain’t dancing, lord.”

“I am not.”

“You ain’t even swaying.”

“No.”

“’Cause you’re too tall, is it?” Vetinari’s blank expression—

It would be unfair to call it a falter. If we are to use the terms of the music Lord Vetinari is so fond of, we might say that a falter lasts too long: it would need to last at least a beat. The shift in Lord Vetinari’s expression is so marginal that it does not even amount to a quarter of a beat, so we can’t call it a falter.

Vetinari’s blank expression, instead, flickers.

A light seems to shift in his icy blue eyes, so small a change as to scarcely be noticed, and then he gives Vimes a sideways glance that Vimes has seen before. This glance communicates a great deal of information in one easy shift of the heavy eyelids and the dark eyebrows, in the glacier-cold colour of the eyes: it says, Explain. Explain now. Explain with expedience. And maybe, all will go well for you.

“Well,” Vimes says, conversationally. “It’d look silly, if you were to sway, wouldn’t it? You could tap your foot, maybe, or flick your nail against your cane, but if you were to sway, well. You’re just too tall, and too thin. You’d look like some Uberwaldian tree in a low wind.”

A pause spans between them.

The rest of the ball continues around them, the music irritatingly pleasant (Vimes can just feel it needling its way into his ears, to worm about as much as it pleases over the coming weeks and rot his concentration), the people dancing. Ugly men dance with ridiculous women; ugly women dance with ridiculous men. One couple that is equally ugly and equally ridiculous are better at dancing than everybody else, and Vimes decides he likes them, based on the fact that Lord Rust is giving them both a disgusted stare, meaning there must be something about them worth liking.

“Am I to understand, Vimes,” Vetinari says in a poisonous whisper, the best the Assassins’ Guild knows how to train into a man, “that you are teasing me?”

“Don’t reckon it’s up to me to decide what you understand or don’t understand, lord.”

A beat passes (not a falter, you understand), and Vetinari laughs, and for a second, the entire room freezes.

The music stutters, and stops: dancers stop dancing with one another, and people turn to look at their Patrician as he chuckles quietly, his teeth showing, his head leaning forward slightly. “Very droll, Vimes,” he finally rumbles out, and at a sudden glare, the music starts back up with a hurried stumbling over notes and scrambling for instruments. “Do you know how to dance?”

“’Course, sir. Sybil insisted.”

“I see.” There’s a measure of doubt in Vetinari’s voice, and Vimes frowns at him, looking slightly up at Vetinari’s expression, which reveals nothing at all, but… Well, Vimes can dance. He’s got a sense of rhythm, and he knows how to hold himself at least as well as any of these toffs.

The thing is, sometimes, Vimes does things just to cause a spectacle. It’s because, at heart, he’s an angry man, and the fact of the matter is that anger can only get you so far with truly upsetting some people – you can yell until you’re blue in the face at one of these nasty, gold-plated bastards, and they’ll just laugh. But a spectacle? Well, that sort of thing needles right into the heart of these ugly people and rubs sparks together, makes them pop and shudder and make indignant noises. Indignation is the weakness of any lord or lady – when you’re indignant (and that’s trulyindignant, not just putting on a show of indignation for the sake of it), it’s hard to remain superior. It rips the rug out from under you, in that respect.

“Can you dance, lord?”

“Yes,” Vetinari says, in the mild tone of someone making small talk, but not exactly clear on the path it’s taking him on.

“Nah. Bet you a penny you can’t.” Vetinari glances at him again.

“I beg your pardon, Vimes?”

“Bet you a penny, sir. Legs’re too long: bet you can’t dance a beat.”

Vetinari stares at Vimes, uncomprehendingly, and then his icy-cold gaze flickers downward, to Vimes’ hand, which is outstretched, palm up. The golden shine of his gauntlets catches the ridiculous candlelight. Vetinari blinks.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Vimes,” he snaps out scoldingly, and Vimes holds his position for just a second longer than another man might. “Take those gauntlets off. Drumknott.” The last is added in a sort of automatic way, and Drumknott materialises out of the air beside Vimes with astonishing alacrity.

“Were you there this whole time?” Vimes asks, and Drumknott arches his eyebrows at him, his hands out. Vimes sets each of his gauntlets down on Drumknott’s soft palms with one quiet clank and then a second, and he looks to Vetinari, raising his eyebrows in expectation.

Vetinari’s hand is inhumanly cold in Vimes’, but his grip is firm, and Vimes moves faster than Vetinari does: his other hand settles on the firm, flat rivet of Vetinari’s hip, gripping loosely at the black cloth. Something shifts in Vetinari’s expression, a kind of brightening, and Vimes thinks – or he imagines, more accurately, because he can’t possibly actually be seeing this – Vetinari’s breath stutters just slightly as his hand settles on Vimes’ shoulder.

Sybil would love this, and Vimes wishes she was here to see it. Gods, Sybil will be delighted, just hearing about it.

“I’ll lead, shall I?” Vimes asks.

“For once,” Vetinari replies, and Vimes takes the first step.

Dancing with the Patrician is not like dancing with Sybil. For one, Sybil is a good deal bigger than Vetinari – they’re about the same height (taller than Vimes), true enough, but Sybil is a stout woman with a prominent chest, and when she and Vimes dance chest-to-chest, they dance chest-to-chest. You could fit Vetinari’s biography, sideways, between his and Vetinari’s chests right now. For two, Vetinari’s movements are—

Look.

The moves are correct. Vimes couldn’t argue with that. The bastard has perfect rhythm (and probably perfect pitch and all), and his movements are completely in time with the music, but there’s a sort of clockwork element to them, a little too perfect. His body is held stiffly, his steps quiet against the ballroom floor, and unlike Sybil’s body, which moves with the music, her bosom shifting, her hips swaying, her frame seeming to sing, Vetinari just moves.

It still works. Vimes can’t deny that it still works, and that there’s something hypnotising about the ramrod straightness of Vetinari’s spine as they take themselves through the one-two-three, about the smirk on his face, about his bone-dry hands under Vimes’, but—

It’s not Sybil.

Then again, if Vetinari did manage to move like Sybil, somehow, Vimes supposes that’d be more unsettling.

They don’t speak, as they dance. He and Sybil usually do, her chattering away about what the dragons need this week, or him saying which lords and ladies in the room he dislikes the most, and Sybil patiently agreeing or disagreeing, depending on which of them likes dragons. He and Vetinari don’t speak: instead, they retain a perfect rhythm, dancing one way and then dancing the other, Vetinari seemingly content not to lead, and it’s—

It’s almost fun.

The music suddenly doesn’t seem quite so grating.

People are staring, but that doesn’t matter – Vimes expected them to stare, and to be indignant, and the best thing about the indignation is that it’ll be like these people’s withering looks. In the face of the Patrician, they have nowhere to go. No one is going to tell Lord Vetinari that he can’t dance with the Watch Commander, if he wants to, no matter that the Watch Commander isn’t a real gentleman, or that the Watch Commander is a man, or that the Watch Commander is—

Well.

Sam Vimes.

“Think anyone’s gonna cut in?” Vimes asks when he feels his feet getting a bit tired in his disgustingly expensive boots. Vetinari, almost unsettlingly, has had a slight smile on his face the entire ten or fifteen minutes, and now, it only deepens.

“I don’t think they’d dare,” he says, with no small amount of fascination, and he neatly releases Vimes’ hand, letting him step away. They bow to one another, Vimes a bit deeper than Vetinari, and then Vimes glances at the big clock on the wall.

It’s a quarter past eight.

“You will be taking your leave, then, Commander Vimes?”

“Yessir,” Vimes says brightly, with an easy salute. “Good evening, sir!”

“Is it?” Vetinari replies smoothly, and Vimes brings a cigar to his mouth as he filters through the crowd, to make his way home.

It doesn’t matter that Sybil’s taken ill – he’ll sit up with her anyway, rub her back, brush her hair before bed… It’s a rare morning off tomorrow, as he’d expected for them to be up late, and Sybil will be glad to hear all about Vetinari, and about Vimes pissing off the toffs. Hopefully, she’ll feel better soon.

This’ll distract her, anyway. This’ll make her smile.

Gods, he loves that smile.

♕ ♕ ♕

Standing in an anteroom, Vetinari allows his thumb to stray over the delicate skin at his wrist, pressing tightly to the pulse point. Ordinarily, his heart beats in a slow and orderly manner, even in times of great crisis, but now, it has taken up the slightest speed, a disruption to its regular beat.

Vetinari’s mouth is slightly dry, and he feels the warmth in the smile he does not bother to force from his mouth in the privacy of the little room.

“Another glass of water, my lord?” Drumknott asks, sounding faraway.

“Please,” Vetinari says, and he hears the door open and click shut behind him.

Vimes is married, of course – it wouldn’t surprise Vetinari if Vimes had never even spared a thought to the idea of any man wanting another man, let alone the idea of a man wanting him, or wanting a man himself, but that isn’t the point, is it? Vetinari is a man of singular focus – he lacks the time for dalliances with young men, or even men his own age, nor the real inclination to want time to pursue such things, but that isn’t the point either.

The point is the ridiculous smile tugging at Vetinari’s lips, and the speed of his pulse that even now is evening out, smoothing to a fine, even pace.

“Up the budget for the Watch this year,” he says cleanly, when Drumknott returns with his water.

“An extra fifty dollars, my lord?” Drumknott asks.

“That should do it,” Vetinari says, inclining his head before taking a sip of his water.

“A very bold man, that Sir Vimes,” Drumknott says. Vetinari does not believe he imagines the slightly dreamy tone to his voice. “But now, that Captain Carrot…” Drumknott trails off, his eyebrows raised in inward, appraising thought, and then he coughs delicately against his hand, seeming to remember himself. “Will that be all, my lord?”

“Yes,” Vetinari says, drawing his thumb away from his wrist, and putting his sleeve back. “That will be all.”

#as defined by dictionary #discworld #vetvimes #havelock vetinari #sam vimes #fanfic

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gordonwilliamsweb · 4 years

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Packed Bars Serve Up New Rounds Of COVID Contagion

As states ease their lockdowns, bars are emerging as fertile breeding grounds for the coronavirus. They create a risky cocktail of tight quarters, young adults unbowed by the fear of illness and, in some instances, proprietors who don’t enforce crowd limits and social distancing rules.

Public health authorities have identified bars as the locus of outbreaks in Louisiana, Florida, Wyoming and Idaho. Last weekend, the Texas alcohol licensing board suspended the liquor licenses of 17 bars after undercover agents observed crowds flouting emergency rules that required patrons to keep a safe distance from one another and limit tavern occupancy.

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Adriana Megas found HandleBar Houston so crowded when she went one night two weekends ago that she left. “They weren’t counting who came in and came out,” said Megas, 38, a nursing student. “Nobody was wearing any masks. You would never think COVID happened.”

The owners of HandleBar Houston, one of the bars whose licenses were suspended, did not respond to requests for comment. Megas said she and her friends drove by five other jammed bars on their way home. “The street was insanely busy,” she said. “Every single bar was filled.”

Photo at Handlebar in Houston ⬇️ 2/3 pic.twitter.com/kOiJTBqm9p

— Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (@TexasABC) June 21, 2020

In Boise, Idaho, at least 152 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in cases that health authorities linked to people who, unaware they were infectious, visited bars and nightclubs, officials said. On Monday, the Central Health District, which oversees four counties, rolled back its reopening rules to shutter bars and nightclubs in Boise’s Ada County.

Bars are tailor-made for the spread of the virus, with loud music and a cacophony of conversations that require raised voices. The alcohol can impede judgment about diligently following rules meant to prevent contagion.

“People almost don’t want to social-distance if they go to the bar,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security in Baltimore. “They’re going to be drinking alcohol, which is a social lubricant. People will often be loud, and if they have forceful speech, that’s going to create more droplets.”

On top of that, the very act of drinking is incompatible with wearing a mask, a primary way of limiting the spread of infection. Public health experts say many patrons are young adults who may think they are impervious to the coronavirus.

It’s certainly less lethal for them: Fewer than 4% of adults in their 20s with COVID-19 have been hospitalized, compared with 22% of those in their 60s, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only 1 in 1,000 COVID-19 patients in their 20s die from the virus.

Nonetheless, as bars and other public places reopen, rates of infection in younger adults are rising, and bars are a particularly dangerous vector. Several outbreaks have been traced to bars that cater to college students. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, health authorities have received reports of more than 100 instances of positive COVID-19 tests tied to bar visits and bar employees in Tigerland, a neighborhood frequented by Louisiana State University students.

Reggie Chatman, a 23-year-old LSU graduate and sports reporter at a Baton Rouge television station, said he was surprised at how crowded the Tigerland bars were when he drove past them last weekend.

“It looked like a football weekend. It was unbelievable, just seeing that many people walking around,” he said. “Each bar had a line in front of it. It didn’t look like they were really stopping anybody from going inside. I didn’t see one mask out there at all.”

Jason Nay, the general manager of Fred’s, one of the bars there, said the bar closed two days last week to test all employees after three workers were COVID-positive. The business reopened Friday night but had only five customers.

“This goes to show you how many people know what’s going on,” he said. “Not even the students who thought they were invincible felt comfortable coming out.” He said that Fred’s will check patrons’ temperatures and hand out disposable face masks this weekend.

Nay, 37, said he believed most students had been actively socializing for months by having friends over to their homes. “Don’t think they changed anything until recently, and I think the main reason why they changed is because their parents really tore into them because they could have brought that home for Father’s Day,” he said.

There are about 43,000 bars in the country. As many states permit them to reopen, authorities have enacted various measures to mitigate the chances of infection. Earlier this month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis allowed bars to open at half capacity with social distancing. This week he warned that violators risk losing their liquor licenses if “it’s just like mayhem and like ‘Dance Party USA’ and it’s packed to the rafters.”

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott decreed that bars must limit indoor service to half their legal occupancy, keep tables to 10 people or fewer and enforce 6 feet of distancing between groups. “There are certain counties where a majority of the people who are tested positive in that county are under the age of 30, and this typically results from people going to bars,” Abbott said at a press conference earlier this month.

Last weekend, undercover inspectors with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission visited nearly 600 bars and restaurants in Texas’ major urban areas. The commission posted on Twitter videotapes of two bar scenes and a photograph of a third bar, all showing patrons standing shoulder to shoulder and chatting face-to-face. Those bars and 14 others had their liquor permits suspended for 30 days, with the threat of a 60-day suspension for a repeat violation.

On its Facebook page, one of the bars sanctioned by the commission, BARge 295 in Seabrook, near Houston, said its license was suspended “for allowing some customers to stand and gather at the bar [S]aturday night (no six foot rule).” The bar, which has been promoting its live music, whole pig roasts and a bikini contest, said it would appeal the action.

“Everyone in the country is aware of the situation and has the ability to think for themselves and decide when and where they want to interact socially,” the bar said in a series of posts. “This BS needs to end now. Come out and support local businesses.”

Other bar owners have found the mandates manageable. Greg Barrineau, who owns a number of bars in the San Antonio area, said he rearranged tables and stools to meet the state’s requirements. “The guidelines are not that hard to follow,” he said. While the state does not require masks, he said the county’s administrative officer and the mayor decided to fine businesses if customers did not wear masks, and most patrons have complied.

“You walk in the door, and you sit down and take your mask off,” Barrineau said, adding he was not sure how big a difference it makes. “If they were waiting in the line outside and the restroom, then they would wear them.”

J.C. Diaz, president of the American Nightlife Association, which represents bars and clubs, said it has been harder for bars to enforce mask-wearing because it has been so politicized. “The problem now is people are not adhering to the mitigation measures,” he said. “We’re doing what we can do to prevent the spread of COVID, but if you are a reckless guest who doesn’t care about the health of others, you shouldn’t be out.”

Masks alone cannot solve the problem, said Dr. Ray Niaura, interim chair of the epidemiology department at New York University’s School of Global Public Health. The risk of contagion is impossible to eliminate at bars, especially since many infected people are asymptomatic. “Even if you distance tables, you’re still going to have groups of people together,” he said.

Megas, the nursing student, said crowds have not deterred her from planning to return to Houston bars despite the continued spread of the coronavirus. “I’ve studied it enough and I think it’s been going on long enough that I’m really comfortable around it,” she said. “There’s a small part of me that is just like ‘I would like to get it now, while I’m not in school.’”

Packed Bars Serve Up New Rounds Of COVID Contagion published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

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dinafbrownil · 4 years

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Packed Bars Serve Up New Rounds Of COVID Contagion

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Photo at Handlebar in Houston ⬇️ 2/3 pic.twitter.com/kOiJTBqm9p

— Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (@TexasABC) June 21, 2020

Reggie Chatman, a 23-year-old LSU graduate and sports reporter at a Baton Rouge television station, said he was surprised at how crowded the Tigerland bars were when he drove past them last weekend.

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/packed-bars-serve-up-new-rounds-of-covid-contagion/

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stephenmccull · 4 years

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Packed Bars Serve Up New Rounds Of COVID Contagion

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Photo at Handlebar in Houston ⬇️ 2/3 pic.twitter.com/kOiJTBqm9p

— Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (@TexasABC) June 21, 2020

Reggie Chatman, a 23-year-old LSU graduate and sports reporter at a Baton Rouge television station, said he was surprised at how crowded the Tigerland bars were when he drove past them last weekend.

Packed Bars Serve Up New Rounds Of COVID Contagion published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

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zeebirdskingdom · 5 years

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Bachelorette' finale: The devastating ending to Hannah's journey for love "The Bachelorette" Hannah Brown made a shocking final decision. USA TODAY It seems like that drink invite heard 'round the world didn't pan out the way "Bachelorette" fans had hoped. After dumping fiance Jed Wyatt in the season finale of "The Bachelorette," Hannah Brown asked runner-up Tyler Cameron on live TV if he would be interested in getting a drink. Cameron said yes, but following rumors he's been seeing model Gigi Hadid, it appears as though the Bachelor Nation couple is no more. Brown, 24, opened up about post-reality TV life in an interview with Extra TV. When asked if she had heard from Cameron, 26, since the two were photographed on an overnight date, the former Miss Alabama gave a diplomatic answer. "Honestly, I think he's been so busy and I've been so busy," she said. "I'm focusing on what's next for me and trying to get bearings around this new city that I'm living in. I wish him well and I know that he does the same for me." Brown previously hinted at Cameron's exploits with 24-year-old Hadid on the official "Bachelor Happy Hour" podcast. "(Tyler and I) are not dating-dating, at all, we hung out, but we also had conversations of both, like, knowing that there’s still something there," Brown said. "He has every right to do what he wants to, because we're, you know, just hanging out, seeing where it goes. And I am completely fine with that … I am not tied to any man or tied to Tyler, and I'm not going to be." She continued: "When you are in the public eye, you do have to just be respectful of each other. And yeah, I wish I would’ve got a little bit more than two days," she added, seemingly referring to Cameron being photographed with another (famous) woman two days after he was seen leaving her home. "But, you know, it is OK.” What's next for the new Los Angeles resident? Brown declined to confirm or deny rumors she'd be featured on the upcoming season of "Dancing With the Stars" – but did tell Extra she grew up dancing and "loves sparkles." Life is so different," she captioned an Instagram photo of herself last week. "Since last August, I’ve been a pageant queen, a bachelor contestant, and the Bachelorette. I’ve been in love with multiple people, I got engaged, I broke off an engagement, and I shared it all with millions of people." Now living on her own "for the first time," Brown said she's trying to figure out how to navigate her newfound media attention and what future opportunities in the spotlight might mean for her personal relationships. "I miss my friends and family that have watched my life explode," she added. "I feel guilty because I don’t have the time or emotional capacity to fill each of them in on my life right now. I can’t keep up with the people that matter most, because I can barely keep up with my own life right now."

#IFTTT #YouTube

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babettepress · 6 years

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What’s Lutz got to do with it? On Lutz Bacher & Tina Turner

What’s Love Got to Do With It is the title of Lutz Bacher’s new exhibition at K21 in Düsseldorf. It’s the second exhibition of note this year to borrow a title from Tina Turner: the 10th Berlin Biennale was titled We Don’t Need Another Hero, a Turner hit of a similar vintage, and it's hard to say whether Lutz is playing artworld ping-pong, slamming a slice serve back at that other German art institution, or whether Tina Turner, a black woman and one-time battered wife, who in 2013 rescinded her US citizenship to become a citizen of Switzerland, has become an unlikely antidote to our Trumpian age. Lutz’s exhibition reopens the programme at K21 with three rooms of cryptic objects, surveillance mirrors and fragments of texts, a web of criss-crossing ideas and bleak ideologies, discarded artefacts from her native United States of America.

The work is more on-the-nose political than I had expected from Bacher, who has a reputation for being evasive. A long, paper artwork runs like a ribbon throughout the rooms: white banner with wavering black scribble, like a seismograph. I have seen images of this work before, installed in a space in San Francisco, where it was presented in 2017 without a text or a title. I did not know, when I first saw it, that this jagged black line (like “barbed wire”, says Frieze[1]) was the signature of the current President of the United States of America, spliced, repeated, amplified. And yet, I think, I innately understood. The violence of that juddering black mark was enough.

Lutz Bacher, installation view, 3320 18th St., San Francisco, 2017. Source.

Lutz Bacher is not the artist's real name. No one knows her real name, except, I’m sure, some close friends, her bank clerk, her dealer. Since the 1970s she has been making work under the masculine, Germanic pseudonym Lutz Bacher, so appropriate for a conceptual artist making a show in Düsseldorf. Lutz Bacher does not really give interviews and is never photographed, at least in any official capacity. Lutz Bacher’s exhibition reviews describe her, invariably, as “elusive”, “slippery”, “mysterious”.

When I search #lutzbacher on Instagram, the current ‘top image’ shows a woman that I presume to be the artist, stood alone, a black silhouette against the Donald Trump signature work. Head downturned, frozen in a sort of half-smile. Slight. Self-contained. Pin-striped blazer and what looks to be a scarf around her neck. Appropriately for an artist who has used low-fi photographic and video imagery throughout her career, the image is pixellated, low-grade, and I imagine it was taken covertly at the opening reception of What’s Love Got to Do With It. I imagine that the photographer got a kind of smug self-satisfaction when she captured it, pinching her fingers on the screen to zoom in and isolate the figure, uploaded it, hashtagged it. “I got her.”

#lutzbacher on Instagram. Source.

Tina Turner is not the singer's real name, either. Born Anna Mae Bullock, or perhaps Martha Nell Bullock, her first recordings were under the name “Little Ann”. It was Ike Turner that named her Tina. He was reportedly inspired by Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and trademarked the name so that if Little Ann left him he could hire another singer and she could also perform under the made-up name. He thought Tina Turner was replaceable.

Lutz Bacher, James Dean, 1986, video slideshow, 16 paired slides shown on two monitors, dimensions variable. Exhibited at Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, 2014. Source.

Lutz Bacher is fairly anomalous among feminist artists of her generation in that her work prods at masculinity more than it does femininity or feminine constructs. While her contemporaries made didactic works that sought to dismantle female-assigned gender roles, or focused primarily on the female body as a site of exchange and exploitation, Lutz Bacher, with her draggy name, fixes her gaze on maleness. Hundreds of beaten-in baseballs slumped onto the floor of the Whitney; a diptych of James Dean publicity shots, doomed heartthrob looking two different directions; a hoard of photographs taken by a US soldier stationed at Bien Hoa Air Base in Vietnam, found by the artist in a Berkeley salvage store; a Twilight publicity poster framed behind tinted glass, Robert Pattison’s brooding share receding into darkness; Playboy bunnies stencilled on the steel shells of military planes; cut-outs of Elvis Presley and T-Rexes on a chessboard; a conga-line of frat boy-ish trucker hats snaking across the gallery floor.

Martin Herbert points out that her work is in an “ongoing conversation” with an ecosystem of male artists and writers – Duchamp, Flavin, Johns, Warhol – and that her work has a preoccupation with “masculinity, domination, selfdefence”. He argues her work “suggests that the fixity of gender roles is the problem, and the best thing to do, via a rewiring of the gaze, is to explode it”.[2]

Tina & Ike Turner perform Proud Mary live on Italian TV station RAI, 1971. Watch.

An ex-boyfriend once told me that Mick Jagger stole his whole routine from Tina Turner. This boyfriend was notorious for invented truths, but watching a YouTube video of Tina and Ike perform Proud Mary in 1971, I’m inclined to believe this one. She inhabits the song so fully, so vigorously, it comes alive in her. Face muscles contorting into wild postures, lips wrestling with words. Shrieking, stuttering and stomping, a ticking bomb.

Lutz Bacher, Huge Uterus, 1990. Source.

Lutz Bacher’s rebuff to feminist artists who made work exclusively fixated on the female body was her 1990 work Huge Uterus, a video documenting the six-hour long surgery the artist underwent to remove fibroids from her real-life uterus. Lia Gangitano, the gallerist/curator who showed this work at Thread Waxing Space, has indicated that critics’ persistent focus on Lutz’s obfuscation of authorship, their reading of her work as elusive, is partially misplaced. “My experience of Lutz’s work and her practice is really about intimate collaborations,” she argues in an online talk by ICA London, “and incredibly personally revealing work.”[3] She cites Huge Uterus as an example – what could be more personally revealing than a video from inside one’s uterus? But I think Gangitano’s point holds even for those works that do not reveal the artist’s internal organs. The artifice of Bacher’s identity does not prevent her from revealing herself. To paraphrase Wilde, give a woman a pseudonym and she will tell you the truth.

Cher & Tina Turner sing Shame, Shame, Shame, The Cher Show, 1975. Watch.

I never thought of myself as a Tina Turner fan until the summer of 2015. I was at a party. A housewarming in a glass-fronted penthouse with views of the canal, one of those endless celebrations that continues to unfold for hours on end. By now, we were deep into the second day and most people had dropped off, leaving only a core group of revellers with electric chat. When the sun streamed in through the windows, we stocked up on ingredients for Bloody Marys.

“This song was released just as both of their marriages broke down,” said a friend as he typed the words “cher tina turner shame” into YouTube. “It’s just the two women, striking out without their husbands. They nail it.” Tina sashays onto the stage in a long blue gown like a beaded curtain. It catches the light as she moves her legs, jellyfish dancing in a sea of diamonds. She sings the opening bars of the song alone – “Shame, shame, shame, shaaaa-ame!” – before Cher is announced with a scream, whoops and applause – “Awwwwwwww!!!! Shame on YOU!”. Cher is wearing the same dress but in pink and they sing the rest of the song as a duet. They have sass, conviction, and genuine rapport, looking into each others’ eyes as they sing. My friend was right – they nail it.

Lutz Bacher, Accidental Tourist, Greene Naftali Garage, Brooklyn, 2016. Source.

Do you love me? This is the question Lutz Bacher asked her friends, colleagues and collaborators again and again for a number of years. Their answers to this loaded questions are published – unedited – in an artist book of the same name (Do You Love Me?, Primary Information, New York, 2012). In a blurb for Mousse, Stefano Cernuschi says that reading the book "feels like being in the backseat of a car driving fast, and you can’t hear every word that is spoken between the front seats, and mostly you can’t see the faces, but it’s kind of thrilling and also rewarding to be close enough to grasp what they say.”[4] What you realise from reading the answers is that, in answering an intimate question about Lutz, people always reveal more about themselves than they do about her. Sometimes the most personal insights come from talking about something outside of us.

Just as Lutz Bacher’s anonymity does not make her work any less personal, her use of hyperbole and humour does not make it any less serious. A seemingly throwaway gesture, like covering the floor with glitter, reveals prisms of light breaking across the ground. Glitter, that synthetic, silly substance associated with frivolousness and nightlife, becomes the medium to reveal the transmutability of the cosmos; something so natural, so contemplative, it could be seen as Romanticist, in the same way that a William McKeown painting can be, with its glimpse through an open window into the two-tone fade of the sky.

Elsewhere in her work, plastic vinyl screens are printed with hot, hovering suns, or cool mountains, synthetic vistas that seem palpably real. A spinning milky way is painted on the side of an elongated school bus. I suspect Bacher would reject my literal reading of this work, but this work, The Bus, struck me as apt, because when you’re young enough to ride a school bus, your universe really is that small.

Tina Turner, What’s Love Got to Do With It?, 1984

Tina Turner was in her 40s by the time she released What’s Love Got To Do With It in 1984. Her big comeback hit after her divorce from Ike Turner, the video sees her strut around New York with lion’s mane hair and a leather skirt, playfully rebuffing sexual advances. Her relatively mature age (by popstar standards) works in the track’s favour. She’s tough but jaded. Given up on love. She carries the pain of her abusive, broken down marriage into the song's guttural vocals, and we believe her when she looks into the camera and sings with conviction: Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?

It’s like the song was made for her, but really it wasn’t. It was written by two white British guys who first offered it to Cliff Richard, Donna Summer, Phyllis Hyman and even Bucks Fizz, who recorded the song first and planned to include it on their album. They dropped it upon hearing Tina’s version.

I’ve since fallen out of touch with most of the people at that party I told you about. Thinking back on it now, it seems like a distant flicker from another time, like when Joan Didion writes that she has “lost touch with several of the people she used to be”.

I have, however, been a Tina Turner fan ever since.

Lutz Bacher, Bus, 2011. Digital photograph, dimensions variable. Image courtesy the artist, Ratio 3, San Francisco, Alex Zachary, New York, and Cabinet, London. Photograph by Vincent Fecteau. Source.

Like Tina’s, Lutz Bacher’s success and recognition has accumulated with age. I guess it’s what happens when you refuse to play the PR game, to avoid all the trappings and limelight and sycophancy that comes with artworld ascendancy, but despite her being consistently active since the 1970s, Bacher’s work went largely unacknowledged by the mainstream until about six years ago, when she was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and then subsequently snapped up for a spate of solo shows in Europe. I wonder if she is relieved, bemused, or exasperated at her boom in recognition and success.

I remember hearing at a lecture once that Carol Rama, having been marginalised by the artworld establishment for almost her entire life, and then suddenly awarded the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion award at the age of 85, was nonplussed about her late recognition. “I’m not interested in stupid people,” she told The Walrus in 2005. “When I think of the attention I’ve been getting these last few years … so late in my career, I feel sadness. It leaves me somewhat stunned: all of this now?!”.[5]

Does Lutz feel the same way? “All of this now?!” My instinct is no. My instinct is that she is three steps ahead of us, turning back to shoot a sidelong glance every once in a while to see if we’re following yet. Perhaps her pseudonym, her “there-but-not-there”-ness, protects her from our slow-to-catch-up gaze.

In an interview last year, Tina Turner told The Daily Mail that “when the lights go out, I go back to being Anna Mae Bullock.”[6] Perhaps Lutz Bacher, too, goes back to being whoever the fuck Lutz Bacher wants to be. My instinct is that, like Rama, neither of them are interested in stupid people.

Babette

[1] Moritz Scheper, ‘Critic’s Pick: Lutz Bacher’, Frieze, September 2018. URL: https://frieze.com/event/lutz-bacher-3

[2] Martin Herbert, ‘Lutz Bacher’, ArtReview, Summer 2015. URL: https://artreview.com/features/summer_2015_lutz_bacher/

[3] Lia Gangitano in ‘Online Talk: Lutz Bacher’, ICA London, streamed live on 7 November 2013. URL: https://archive.ica.art/bulletin/video/online-talk-lutz-bacher

[4] Stefano Cernuschi, ‘BOOKS. Lutz Bacher: Do You Love Me?’, Mousse. URL: http://moussemagazine.it/lutz-bacher-do-you-love-me/

[5] Carol Rama, quoted in The Walrus, March 2005. URL: https://thewalrus.ca/2005-03-detail/

[6] Tina Turner, quoted in The Daily Mail, 14 September 2017. URL: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-4886020/I-taught-Mick-Jagger-dance-says-Tina-Turner.html

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#lutz bacher #tina turner #what's love got to do with it #contemporary art #pop music #obfuscation of authorship #pseudonym #identity

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samosoapsoup · 6 years

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The Most Relevant Art Today Is Taking Place Outside the Art World

By Isaac Kaplan

Dec 20, 2015

There’s a scene in The Simpsons where a middle-aged Abe Simpson—lecturing a teenage Homer about losing touch as one grows old—says, “I used to be with it. Then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me.” Replace ‘it’ with ‘art’ and you have something fairly close to Michael J. Lewis’s essay on the the demise of art-as-culture, published this July in Commentary magazine (not something that’s usually on my digital bookshelf, but I digress).

Titled “How Art Became Irrelevant: A chronological survey of the demise of art,” the essay’s central claim is that “while the fine arts can survive a hostile or ignorant public, or even a fanatically prudish one, they cannot long survive an indifferent one. And that is the nature of the present Western response to art, visual and otherwise: indifference.” There are lots of flaws with this argument, as well as its supporting evidence. But besides greatly overstating art’s demise, the conclusion rests heavily on artists who are primarily white men. While Lewis does get some fair shots in about vapid works of spectacle, no matter how you feel about contemporary art, to call an entire swath of culture irrelevant based primarily on those who have been privileged enough to occupy galleries and other institutions (and thus the canon of art history) ignores both the artists who have been historically marginalized from such spaces and the artists who are taking their practices outside of them.

In September of 2014, artist and student Emma Sulkowicz began her senior thesis, Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) (2014-15), a startling piece and ambitious work of endurance that famously involved Sulkowicz carrying a standard Columbia University mattress around campus with her at all times. The burden would quite literally be lifted only after one of two things happened: when the student who Sulkowicz (and subsequently others) accused of raping or sexually assaulting them left or was expelled from the school, or with her own graduation. And so it was that during Columbia University’s graduation ceremony in May, President Lee C. Bollinger turned away as Sulkowicz and four friends carried the mattress across the stage after more than eight long months.

The reaction to the work was far from indifferent. Most visibly, it was heralded by art critics and vitriolically maligned by self-described “men’s rights activists” (this is an actual thing, somehow). Yet one crucial aspect of the piece occurred quietly and without fanfare: the repeated instances when someone on the street grabbed hold of the 50-pound mattress and lent Emma a hand. Her endurance piece compelled many to act in a transformative way—one that spoke both to and beyond her specific case.

This participation, Sulkowicz reminded me in a recent conversation, was not explicitly invited by the artist or the work. “I never envisioned people helping me carry it,” she said. She certainly never envisioned that an entire group, “Carrying the Weight Together,” would be set up to coordinate support. In fact, one of the performance’s intrinsic rules—to accept but never ask for help—was partly born out of the expectation of some level of apathy and confusion from the public. “I really thought no one would care,” she said, adding, “but it turned out not to work that way. That rule turned into a call to action.”

Is a call to action displayed in a museum the same as one hauled through the streets? The ability of Carry That Weight to turn viewers into participants is the result of a raw act. The work, as Jerry Saltz put it, is “pure radical vulnerability,” one that would lose something if given the distance of museum’s explanatory wall text. Indeed, Sulkowicz’s work is relevant not only as a thoughtfully conceived piece of performance art, but also as a very public intervention against sexual assault. Though she shies away from being called an activist (“it depletes my agency”), affecting change is an integral part of her practice.

“Rape isn’t going to stop until rapists just stop raping. It’s about really changing the culture,” she told me. “I think that art changes culture. So, in some ways, I think the most direct way to fix the problem is to make art.” And if we ask art to engage the public, especially when it comes to an issue as prevalent as sexual assault, it’s crucial to think about art that’s accessible enough to reach not only those who would choose to walk into a gallery, but a broader public. Still, besides some angry and frankly misogynistic men’s rights activists, many consider Carry That Weight a work of art, albeit one that engaged with activism. It may well appear in a museum show one day.

There are, of course, other acts of creativity that do not meet traditional definitions of “fine art” but are no less valuable. If you walk east from Columbia’s Butler Library, down the rocky hills of Morningside Park, and cross a few avenues, you will find a relatively nondescript laundromat, one of some 3,000 in New York. It’s not a gallery, nor a pop-up space, nor the work of an artist who turned an abandoned building into a functioning laundromat. No, it’s a laundromat, but nonetheless one bursting with creativity.

To wit: During the summer months, it hosts workshops by The Laundromat Project, a nonprofit officially started in 2005 that seeks to “amplify the creativity that already exists within communities” through residencies, development programs, and a host of other events, as its executive director Kemi Ilesanmi explained to me. The benefit of hosting public events in laundromats is engaging a diverse group of people. In New York, at least, they are “multi-generational, multi-race, and multi-class spaces,” says Ilesanmi. The type of community engagement fostered by the project isn’t about painting a mural and walking away, but rather commissioning artists who think long and hard about how to engage the communities where the project operates: Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant, and Hunts Point / Longwood, three neighborhoods primarily made up of people of color with modest incomes and rich histories. Elvira Clayton’s “Dioko,” a “sculptural oral history project,” for example, took place in the much-trafficked hub of African Square on 125th Street and explored Senegalese and African-American communities in West Harlem.

The Laundromat Project attracts people of all ages, many of whom haven’t produced art in years and who might not opt in for a museum experience. “One of the things that makes us stand out is that we meet people where they are,” said Ilesanmi. “It’s not that museums can’t or have never done that. But we actually do it all the time. It’s not a special project.” Ilesanmi notes that the rules governing museums, long conceptualized as something akin to temples, is an alienating experience for many people. “In our opinion everyone is creative, and we remind them of that even when they don’t think that about themselves,” said Ilesanmi, adding, “creative expression is just a part of being human beings.” As we spoke, she talked through the imagined voice of any given person: “I dance, I love music, I love fill in the blank, as a human being in the world. However, I don’t need that validated by, nor do I feel like I have to go into, a formal setting.” Likely because of this inclusive approach, the Laundromat Project has been met with success. The organization was featured at the Creative Time summit and successfully raised $35,000 in 10 days this year. It’s now thinking about how it will adapt and change its program in the future.

From that Harlem laundromat, if you head southwest about 20 blocks, you’ll arrive at the Frederick Douglass Houses, a 17-building complex home to over 4,500 people. In June of 2012, it was was there that the nonprofit Project EATS helped create a community garden and farm (one of many fostered by the group) out of an unused tennis court just adjacent to a high school, where one can still find it. Broadly, Project EATS works in “partnership with community residents, public schools, and service providers to develop neighborhood resources, skills, and capacity needed for people to have good health and achieve individual and collective goals.” One aspect of that is reclaiming vacant lots, then providing students with the skills necessary to maintain those gardens. As with The Laundromat Project, there’s an emphasis on listening and communicating.

But, Isaac, you may be thinking to yourself if you’ve read this far (thank you!), why are you talking about a sustainable food project? How is that art? Isn’t that social activism? Well: “I don’t distinguish between art and activism in the work I do,” says founder and artist Linda Goode Bryant. “In its essence, I believe art—for the maker and the observer/participant—helps humans grapple with the things we grapple with. Project EATS helps me grapple with creating forms of art that have the capacity to tangibly change the norms and conditions that exist where it occurs.”

This expansive understanding of art is one that is fundamentally situated within the structures and relationships of the world at large. Indeed, it’s both analytical (thinking about the socioeconomic conditions of how food is made and distributed) and experiential (engaging communities in the ecosystem and inviting them to alter the conditions of the world). So while there is conventional art in Project EATS, as Bryant explains, “each component—from each farm to the exchange and acquisition of food at farm markets, to a video installed within a squirrel hole in a tree growing out of concrete on a subway platform—are part of the overall work of Project EATS’ art.”

Bryant draws on her history as the founder of Just Above Manhattan (JAM), a space she created in 1974. One of the first galleries in the the prestigious East Side gallery district to exhibit black artists—David Hammons, Fred Wilson, and Maren Hassinger among them—JAM was partly an attempt to establish much-needed market parity with white artists. Yet like with Project EATS, Bryant considered the entire enterprise a work of art, not just what occupied the space. “JAM had multiple parts going on at the same time that addressed different aspects of how making and experiencing art is heavily mediated by standards and conventions in how it is presented, who presents it, how it is sold or otherwise acquired,” she wrote me, which in turn impact how “roles—as artists and witnesses—get defined and performed.”

This is a crucial insight: The structures by which art is typically presented are not a predetermined, natural way to look at art. They are constructs (gasp), carrying all the baggage of our society and benefiting those who are usually benefited. So while institutional spaces can be welcome sites for meditation and aren’t antithetical to broader social engagement (Bryant herself will participate in a forthcoming exhibition at Brooklyn Museum to coincide with the Sackler Center’s 10th anniversary), just think: the Guggenheim’s Carrie Mae Weems retrospective was its first dedicated to an African-American woman in its 76-year history—and it happened last year. (Let that sink in—then go read Ashton Cooper’s excellent piece in Hyperallergic about the flawed language we use around such shows when they do occur). When artists operate outside the gallery space, whether because their work functions best there, or because they are forced to, they are both creating valuable art and making the limitations of traditional art institutions visible—physically, historically, and conceptually. Perhaps such work can even change those institutions, those structures of looking. Perhaps it can change society at large. And that’s unceasingly relevant.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-the-most-relevant-art-today-is-taking-place-outside-the-art-world?utm_medium=email&utm_source=11386320-newsletter-editorial-daily-11-27-17&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=st-V

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wbwest · 7 years

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New Post has been published on WilliamBruceWest.com

New Post has been published on http://www.williambrucewest.com/2017/06/23/west-week-ever-pop-culture-review-62317/

West Week Ever: Pop Culture In Review - 6/23/17

It’s gonna be a quick one this week, as I’ve got too much real life stuff going on. Plus, there was a lot of little news, but no big whammy.

Last Saturday I took in Awesome Con which, in its fifth year, was being held at the Washington Convention Center. Normally I’m all about con reports. You’ll see my cosplay pics, and hear about all the stuff I bought. Not so much this time around. I don’t know what it was, but it didn’t feel very Awesome this year. I hate cons that are filled to capacity (like NYCC), but I felt like this one could’ve been better attended. Sure, there were a lot of folks there, but I still bet they fell short of the numbers that had been expected. No cosplay really caught my eye. There were only, like, 7 comic vendors. The show really doesn’t seem to know if it’s a pop culture con, like a Wizard World show, or if it’s a comic-con for the DC area, rivaling Baltimore’s.

It wasn’t all bad, though. I got to hang out with my buds @KeithDavidsen and @ClassickMateria, plus I had a great conversation with 2/3 of the 3 Black Geeks Podcast. Oh, and I totally gushed over Christopher Hastings, who currently writes I Am Groot and The Unbelievable Gwenpool for Marvel. I’ve been a fan of his since his indie series, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, and I’m a huge Gwenpool fan. I pretty much went just to meet him, and he was totally gracious and nice. Meanwhile, I was gonna confront Scott Snyder and get him to sign my Dark Days: The Forge book. And then ask him why he blocked me on Twitter. But the stars were not aligned, as his line was capped before I got there. I suppose it was for the best. So, while lacking in awesome, there’s still room for improvement, and I’m sure I’ll be right back there next year.

While a lot of folks are getting excited about it, I have some problems with the way Netflix’s The Defenders series is being marketed. Something seems off with the tone of everything. See that poster above? As I remarked on Twitter, it looks like a TV Guide ad for a show Fox canceled in 1994. I can hear the promo now: “The Defenders, followed by an all-new New York Undercover. Thursday, at 8/7 Central.” There’s nothing about it that *pops*, and it just looks so pedestrian. Are they a rag tag group of NYC street-level heroes, or is it a coming of age drama about 3 guys and a girl trying to make it in New York City? I still have 3 more seasons of Marvel Netflix shows to catch up on before I can even watch this, so maybe I’m not the target audience. It’s just all so formulaic now, though. “Hey, look – a hallway fight!”

We finally got a premiere date for the long-delayed Star Trek: Discovery, bowing September 24th at 8:30 on both CBS and CBS All Access. What’s with the 8:30 start time, though? I guess we’ll get some kind of half-assed, 30-minute Trek retrospective before the show. And, taking a page from cable shows, the season will be split in two, with the first 8 episodes airing in the fall, while the remaining 7 will air starting in January. I couldn’t be less excited for this show. So many damn hoops to jump through, so many broken promises regarding its premiere date. At this point, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they requested a blood sample before allowing you to watch it. That’s how crazy this has become. What was once thought to become the most pirated series of all time, I’m now starting to think most of us aren’t even gonna bother.

I had no clue that Phil Lord and Chris Miller were the directors on the Han Solo film (how’d I miss that?), and I would’ve told anyone who’d listen that they were a terrible choice – which is why I’m not surprised that they were fired this week, citing “creative differences”. Sure, The Lego Movie was great. The Jump Street franchise was great. But I don’t see them fitting into the “Star Wars vision” that Kathleen Kennedy clearly has. They would’ve given us something great and entertaining, but I don’t know if it would’ve been a “Star Wars movie”. Then again, I’m not the biggest Star Wars fan, so what do I know. I’d like to think there’s room to do a lot of stuff in that franchise, but I just don’t see their style fitting into what’s already been established. And then Ron Howard was announced as their replacement. I really don’t know how I feel about this. I mean, gifted director, but this seems sort of out of his wheelhouse. Any of y’all have strong thoughts either way?

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Meanwhile, somebody needs to make up their mind about whether these Spider-Man spinoffs are gonna be set in the MCU or not. We were basically told that only Spider-Man was crossing over, and even that’s been threatened as a possible one-time deal. But then Amy Pascal did a press junket earlier this week, where she danced around the matter, saying that the Spider-Man spinoffs would build upon the world that is being carefully crafted, leading some to believe they might actually be set in the MCU. That’s how some folks saw it. I just saw it as Pascal trying to keep her job. I guess time will tell. Meanwhile, Spider-Man Homecoming 2 is already being discussed (which I hope is called Spider-Man: Sadie Hawkins Dance), and there will reportedly be a cameo by another MCU character who’s not Iron Man. Keep it in your pants, boys. Let’s see how this one does first, OK?

Song of the Week

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Yup, it’s a Taylor Swift song, but it’s NOT sung by Taylor. She gave this song to Little Big Town, who have ridden it to #1. It’s got her trademark juvenile lyrics, but I still think it’s beautiful. I kinda wish I didn’t know she wrote it, but I think that was part of the push that got it to #1. Anyway, here’s “Better Man”.

Things You Might Have Missed This Week

Shonda Rhimes had to fail eventually, which is why her summer Shakespeare series, Still Star-Crossed, has been moved to Saturday after 3 low-rated episodes. Stick a fork in that turkey!

Speaking of dead shows, CMT couldn’t make the numbers work to revive Last Man Standing, so the sitcom is officially dead

Dule Hill’s real-life fiancee, Ballers actress Jazmyn Simon, will play Gus’ love interest in the Psych reunion movie

Apparently Nickelodeon is prepping a one-hour reunion, called Rocko’s Modern Life: Static Cling. I didn’t have cable growing up, but I know this means something to some of you.

Virginia Madsen won’t be back for season 2 of Designated Survivor. I was kinda hoping she and Kiefer would bang, so now I have the sads…

Six cast members are out at Taken, amid a major shake-up prior to season 2. I guess you could say they didn’t have the right set of skills.

They’re teasing a Downton Abbey movie for 2018. I hope it’s called Downton Abbey: Matthew’s Revenge!

There are rumors that Damon Lindelof is in talks to do a Watchmen TV series for HBO. That network is really into dongs lately, so I guess this is a perfect fit.

Daniel Henney is shifting his Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders character over the main Criminal Minds series, following the former’s cancellation. Remember that when your CBS-watching grandpa asks you where he’s seen that “Oriental fella” before…

The CW is interested in a Supernatural spinoff called Wayward Sisters, which would star recurring guest star Kim Rhodes. I don’t watch Supernatural, but she was Zack & Cody’s hot mom, so I’m a supporter of giving her more work!

After a thorough investigation, Warner Bros found no evidence of misconduct on the set of Bachelor In Paradise, and production has resumed on the season. Now it’ll probably be the most-watched season of the show, but there’s no way they saw that coming, right? Right?

As a reward for being the #1 daytime drama for the past 28 (!) consecutive years, CBS has renewed The Young and the Restless for another three seasons

NBC is scrambling to do some damage control, as Megyn Kelly’s highly publicized interview with Sandy Hook truther Alex Jones was beaten by a rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos. That’s right, it was beaten by a show that’s been rendered virtually obsolete since the proliferation of the Internet

Heroes is coming to Crackle on July 13th. You know, that free streaming network that nobody watches? So, if you’re still itching to save the cheerleader, there ya go.

The sequel to Jurassic World will be called Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Meh. That shit ought to be called Jurassic Galaxy. Take those dinos into space already!

Daniel Day-Lewis has quit acting, meaning we’ll never get to see him in the Fast and the Furious franchise like we’d always dreamed!

Fresh off his mistrial, Bill Cosby plans to give speaking engagements where he will instruct folks how to dodge sexual assault charges. I couldn’t make this shit up! “If you put the pudding pop in the Jello, make sure you’re not caught on any Kodak film!”

Transformers 5: Bad Touch had the lowest opening day box office for the franchise, with $15.7 million.

In the ultimate Fuck yo’ Father’s Day move, Beyonce’s dad announced to the world, via tweet, that her twins had arrived. I hear he was dragged away by wraiths soon afterward.

Adam West’s unaired episode of Powerless can now be seen on DC All Access, as well as Hulu.

No one had the West Week Ever this week. As Nina Simone sang, “It be’s that way sometimes”. I do have a correction from last week, though. Like I said up top, I’ve got some real world stuff going on and I wasn’t really thinking clearly. I inducted Adam West into the West Week Ever Hall of Fame, when my pal @zacshipley pointed out that a better honor was staring me right in the face: that honor should be called the West Life Ever. So, the post has since been corrected and, going forward, that is what will be bestowed upon those greats that we’ve lost along the way. Adam West had the West Life Ever.

#Batman #Comics #Country #DC #Marvel #Movies #Music #Politics #Pop #Race #Social Media #Star Trek #Star Wars #Television #West Week Ever

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