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thekillerssluts · 4 years

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Will Butler explains how his Harvard degree developed into his second solo album

“Yeah, it’s terrifying,” Will Butler says, pondering how it feels to be releasing music away from the umbrella of Arcade Fire.

“It’s the classic thing about all writers,” he continues. “The creative process makes them wanna puke the whole time they’re writing something, then they read something back and it makes them feel worse, then a year later they read it and think ‘yeah, it’s okay’. It’s a glorious experience, but it really makes your stomach hurt.”

On the one hand Will Butler is well accustomed to this writing process, being a multi-instrumentalist in the Canadian indie-rock band fronted by brother Win - Arcade Fire. But on his own terms, it’s an entirely new process. Butler’s second solo album Generations arrives five years after his debut Policy, a collection that rattled with a ramshackle charm and what he describes now as a ‘consciously very unproduced’ sound. Arcade Fire wound down from their Everything Now tour in September 2018, leaving Butler with the last two years of playtime. Most musicians, particularly those accustomed to big album cycles, set aside their downtime for family or other musical projects. Somehow Butler’s managed to do both while also completing a masters degree in Public Policy at Harvard.

“I went to school for a variety of reasons but there was an artistic side to it too,” he says. “I have always tried to let music and lyrics emerge from the world that I’m in; you fertilise the soil and see what grows. It was a way to better understand where we are, how we got here and what's going on. You know, ‘where am I from? What's going to happen?’” Both of these questions explored in his degree are used as fuel for Generations.

It’s easy to imagine an album by somebody who’s just pursued a Public Policy MSt to form in reams of political commentary, probably set to an acoustic guitar. However, Butler instead engages character portraits soundtracked by a broad range of thrilling sonics. Opener “Outta Here” is shrouded by a monstrous bass that lurks beneath the depths of the instrumentation before bursting out midway through. “Got enough things on my plate without you talking about my salvation,” he screams.

While the cage-rattling “Bethlehem” is mania underpinned by a thrashing guitar and bubbling synths that help lift the track to boiling point.While there’s no current world leaders namechecked or any on-the-nose political commentary across the LP, the angst of its contents is instantly tangible, backed by the intellect of somebody who’s spent the past few years studying the ins and outs of government processes. A perfect combination, you could say.

This fuel was partly discovered through Butler reconnecting with the music that defined his teenage years: namely Bjork, The Clash and Eurythmics. While these influences certainly slip into frame across Generations, they were paired with something of an unlikely muse: “I got into this habit of listening to every single song on the Spotify Top 50 every six weeks,” Butler explains. “So many of them are horrible, terrifying and just awful but there’s something inspiring about how god damn avant garde the shittiest pop music is now. Just completely divorced from any sense of reality - it’s just layers upon layers upon layers - it’s amazing. It’s like Marcel Duchamp making a pop hit every single song.”

We turn from current music to current events. Navigating Covid-19 with his wife and three kids in their home of Brooklyn, a majority of 2020 has been caught up in family time for Butler. “The summer’s been easier because everybody’s outside, whereas in spring it was like ‘it’s family time because we have to lock our doors as there's a plague outside.’” While being surrounded by the trappings of lockdown since his second solo album Generations was completed in March, the album itself wriggles with the spirit of live instrumentation, which at this point seems like some sort of relic from a bygone era."I think eventually rediscovering this album back in the live setting would be amazing - we’re a really great live band, it’s a shame to not be in front of people."

The source of this energy can be traced back to the way the songs came together; they were forged and finessed at a series of shows in the early stages of the project. “It just raises the stakes. You can tell how good or how dumb a lyric is when you sing it in front of a hundred people,” he reflects. “It’s like ‘are you embarrassed because what you’re saying is true?’ or ‘is it just embarrassing?’ It’s a good refiner for that stuff. I think eventually rediscovering this album back in the live setting would be amazing - we’re a really great live band, it’s a shame to not be in front of people.”

Like his day job in Arcade Fire, Butler’s solo live group is something of a family affair - both his wife and sister-in-law feature in the band, alongside Broadway's West Side Story star, and the student of the legendary Fela Kuti drummer, Tony Allen. Together this eclectic mix of musicians conjures an infectious spirit through the raw combination of thundering synths and pedal-to-the-metal instrumentation; an apt concoction indeed for lyrics that are attempting to unhatch the bamboozling questions that surround our current times.

The timing for Butler’s decision to study Public Policy couldn’t have been more perfect, with his course starting in the Fall of 2016. “I was at Harvard for the election which was a really bizarre time to be in a government school, but it was great to be in a space for unpacking questions like ‘my god, how did we get here?!’” he reflects, with a note of mockery in the bright voice.

“I had a course taught by a professor named Leah Wright Rigueur. The class was essentially on race in America but with an eye towards policy. The class explored what was going to happen in terms of race under the next president. The second to last week was about Hilary Clinton and the last week was about Donald Trump. We read riot reports - Ferguson in 2015, Baltimore in 2016, the Detroit uprisings in the ‘60s and Chicago in 1919 - it's certainly helping me understand the last 5 years, you know. Just to be in that context was very lucky.”

As we’ve seen with statues being toppled, privileges being checked and lyrics of national anthems being interrogated in recent months, history is a complex, labyrinthine subject to navigate requiring both ruthless self-scrutiny and a commitment to the long-haul in order to correct things. The concept of Generations shoots from the same hip employing character portraits to engage in the broader picture.

The writing, at times, is beamed from a place of disconnect (“had enough of bad news / had enough of your generation”), from a place of conscious disengagement (“I’m not talking because I don’t feel like lying / if you stay silent you can walk on in silence”) and from a place of honest self-assessment (“I was born rich / three quarters protestant / connections at Harvard and a wonderful work ethic”).

“I’m rooted in history to a fault,” he says. “My great grandfather was the last son of a Mormon pioneer who’d gone West after being kicked out of America by mob violence. He wanted to be a musician which was crazy - he got 6 months in a conservatory in Chicago before his first child was born. He always felt like he could have been a genius, he could of been writing operas but he was teaching music in like tiny western towns and he had all these kids and he made them be a family band and they were driving around the American west before there were roads in the deserts - literally just driving through the desert! He would go to these small towns and get arrested for trying to skip bills and just live this wild existence.”

Butler’s grandma, meanwhile, was just a child at this point. She went on to become a jazz singer with her sisters and married the guitar player Alvino Rey. “The fact that me and my brother are musicians is no coincidence,” he smiles. “It’s not like I decided to be a musician, it’s down to decisions that were made at the end of the 19th century that have very clearly impacted where I am today. The musical side of it is very beautiful, it is super uncomplicated and a total joy to have a tradition of music in our family...but also in the American context - which is the only context I know - it's also these very thorny inheritances from the 19th century and beyond that influence why my life is like it is.

“For me it’s like, ‘I made my money because my grandpa was a small business owner’ or ‘my grandpa was a boat builder and got a pretty good contract in WW2 and was able to send his kids to college’. Both of which are so unpoetic and unromantic but it is an important thing to talk about, that's a personal political thing to talk about; there's horrifying and beautiful aspects there.”

The lament of “I’m gonna die in a hospital surrounded by strangers who keep saying they’re my kids” on “Not Gonna Die” could well be croaked by somebody on the tail end of a life lived on the American Dream. At times, Butler plays the characters off against each other, like on “Surrender,” which chronicles two flawed characters going back and forth played by Butler’s lead vocals and his female backing singers that undermine his memory; “I remember we were walking” is cut up with the shrug of “I dunno” and “maybe so”. “I found having the backing voices there gave me something to play with,” he explains. “Either something threatening to the main character or something affirming to the main character, just providing another point of view.”

Elsewhere, “I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know” explores the feeling of being unsuitably equipped to unravel the complexities that surrounds us day-to-day. “The basic emotion of that song is very much ‘I don’t know what I can do’ which is an emotion we all have,” he ponders. “There’s also the notion that follows that, like ‘maybe don’t even tell me what to do because it’s going to be too overwhelming to even do anything’.”

Some of these portraits materialised in the aftershows Butler began hosting while on Arcade Fire’s Everything Now tour which found him instigating conversations and talks by local councilman, politicians and activists on local issues. “On some of the good nights of the aftershow town halls, you’d feel that switch away from despair and into action,” he says smiling. “The step between despair and action is possible, that sentiment isn’t spelled out lyrically on the record but it’s definitely there spiritually.”

“I learned anew what a treasure it is to have people in a room. Getting humans in a room can be absurd. And we were having from 5,000 to 15,000 people in a room every night, most of them local. I’m very comfortable with art for art’s sake; I think art is super important and it’s great people can like music that's not political. It was sort of like ‘well we’re here and I know a lot of you are thinking about the world and you’re thinking about what a shit show everything is. You want to know what we can do and I also want to know what we can do!’ So I put on these after shows.”"The dream lineup would be to have a local activist and a local politician talking about a local issue because that’s the easiest way to make concrete change."

Butler would find a suitable location near the Arcade Fire gig through venue owners who were often connected to the local music and comedy scenes to host these events. “The dream lineup would be to have a local activist and a local politician talking about a local issue because that’s the easiest way to make concrete change. Arguably, the most important way is through the city council and state government. The New York state government is in Albany, New York. The shit that happens in Albany is all super important so I wanted to highlight that and equip people with some concrete levers to pull.

“In Tampa we had people who were organizing against felon disenfranchisement, like if you’ve been convicted of a felon you couldn’t vote in Florida, and something absurd like 22% of black men in Florida couldn’t vote and there were people organising to change that - this was in 2018 - and you could just see people being like ‘holy shit, I didn't even know this was happening!’

“These were not topics I’m an expert in - it’s like these are things that are happening. The thought was trying to engage, I’m sad to not be doing something similar this Fall, I mean what a time it would have been to go around America.”

Understandably the looming 2020 election is on Butler’s radar. “It doesn't feel good,” he sighs. “I’ve never had any ability to predict, like 2 weeks from now the world could be completely different from what it is today. There was always a one-in-a-billion chance of the apocalypse and now it's like a one-in-a-million chance which is a thousand times more likely but also unlikely. It’s going to be a real slog in the next couple of years on a policy side, like getting to a place where people don’t die for stupid reasons, I’m not even talking about the coronavirus necessarily just like policy in general. Who knows, it could be great but it seems like it's going to be a slog.”

There’s a moment on the closing track “Fine”, a stream-of-consciousness, Randy Newman-style saloon waltz, where Butler hits the nail on the head. “George [Washington], he turned to camera 3, he looked right at me and said...I know that freedom falters when it’s built with human hands”. It’s one of the many lyrical gems that surface throughout the record but one that chimes with an undeniable truth. It’s the same eloquence that breaks through as he touches on the broad ranging subjects in our conversation, always with a bright cadence despite the gloom that hangs over some of the topics.

The live show is without a doubt Arcade Fire’s bread and butter. While Butler questions how realistic the notion of getting people in packed rooms in the near future is, he reveals the group are making movements on LP6. “Arcade Fire is constantly thinking about things and demoing, it's hard to work across the internet but at some point we’ll get together. It probably won’t be much longer than our usual album cycle,” he says.

You only have to pick out one random Arcade Fire performance on YouTube to see Butler’s innate passion bursting out, whether it’s early performances that found him and Richard Reed Parry adorning motorbike helmets annihilating each other with drumsticks to the 1-2-3 beat of “Neighbourhood #2 (Laika)” or the roaring “woah-ohs” that ascend in the anthem of “Wake Up” every night on tour. It’s an energy that burns bright throughout our conversation and across Generations.

https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/features/interviews/arcade-fires-will-butler-new-solo-record-generations

#Arcade Fire #generations #will butler #interview #hq

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sloppy-butcher · 5 years

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Can I get uhhhh Kazan/Oni and a reader who’s also a killer? 🥺

this is my first official piece between killer and killer and I was rather excited to write it. There are a lot more variables to consider when doing a killer x killer thing so apologies if this seems vague

but I’ll do anything for Kazan UwU. The reader will be gender-neutral. THANK YOU for the ask! hope this is okay

also, sorry if this seems smaller than my other pieces, i’m trying to refine my works so that i don’t have to write so much

HeadCanons for The Oni (Kazan Yamaoka) with a Killer! S/O

Kazan would regard you with the utmost respect and maybe even view you as a worthy equal. You’d just have to first earn it. Normally, when he would encounter the other killers in the Fog, he would scoff and turn his nose up at them. All were below him, weak dogs, not warriors of great battles or heads of respectable family names. He, of course, regarded you the same way when he first met you. To him, you were smaller and “less threatening” and that to him was enough to justify his feeling of superiority over you. But you proved him wrong. Over time you would demonstrate your capableness to inflict pain and death upon others, you would rack up the most kills pleasing your master the most out of all Its little pets. You were the Entity’s lapdog, your name always being brought up in Kazan’s conversations with the Entity. He was constantly being compared to you and it boiled his blood. But eventually, he caved and began to take interest in you.

Kazan would come to you seeking advice, his chest fuming with shame and anger. The Entity was upset with him and he was confused. He did what he thought he had to, he killed them all with no hesitation, gave the survivors no chance to try and escape his wrath. You would chuckle at his ignorance and explain to him that his method was not what the boss wanted. You would have to teach Kazan that he wasn’t just a butcher anymore, he was a concertmaster, an artist, a conductor of suffering and hope. It wasn't just about end results, it was about the build-up to the end. Kazan would look at you with eyes of confusion and a mixed brain, you were speaking tongues to him. You would spend the next few nights consistently instructing him on what to do, drilling it into his thick skull that hey, maybe letting them go and prolonging chases will make the Entity happy. When you were at your wits-end, the task of teaching the samurai ogre making you wish you were dead, Kazan stomped up to you. He crossed his large arms over his bloated chest and without saying it, bragged about his merciless victory. You had done it, the impossible. This was when Kazan really began to respect you as a warrior. He viewed you through the eyes of not a war-machine but of a cunning and effective killer.

You two would have your bad days. The angry and all-consuming fire which the Entity feasted upon would grow and expand, consuming your common sense and reason until you were left with nothing but undesirable rage. The two of you would become inconsolable, burning beasts of destruction and death, and when your fires would reach their peak Kazan and you could not stand to be together. It was a mutual decision, better to stay away than to allow your fires to expand and consume one another. But after the Entity had Its way with you both you would find your back to each other with your tails between your legs. It had drained you so completely that now you were just tired and embarrassed by how easily you were manipulated by your boss. You greet each other with soft grunts or distant looks and you would stumble off to a spot where you both could just sit together and recoup some lost energy. During this time of fatigue, Kazan would allow you to sit extra close to him and maybe even allow you to lay your head on his shoulder. He didn’t see these actions as signs of weakness because, in those moments of quiet and exhaustion, Kazan craved your touch and comfort.

You both are killers, and in essence, both of you are beings who have lost a part of themselves that makes up the human condition. Now imagine, a stonewall desperate for the softness and comfort they lack and seeking it in the only other being present, which just happens to also be a stonewall. Affection is an odd topic when it comes to you and Kazan, neither of you knowing how to take that first step to being kind, slow and gentle. But what makes up for your initial deficiency in human contact is your ability to relearn it together. Hand in hand you and Kazan can learn to experience all those sweet little nothings that makes people happy and content, a journey of rediscovering the joys of the human condition.

Some days you will have to be the one initiating affection, reaching out to hold his hand or snaking your arms cautiously around his waist. He never pushes you away, secretly wanting physical contact as much as you do but being too prideful to act on his own urges. If you pull away from him prematurely expect him to grunt with dissatisfaction before following your retreating hands and replacing them back onto his body. It was his way of saying to stay with him and to not let go.

On the odd occasion that Kazan was the one to ask for affection, he would simply hover over you, drowning you in his shadow. He wasn’t going to use words to convey his intentions rather relying on you to pick up when he demanded attention. His favorite thing to do, something you would have to always watch out for, was as you walked past him while he was sitting he would grab you and swiftly pull you onto his lap. It was a humiliating position but one you would ease into. He was warm and big and he would suffocate you with his sheer size and weight. He was your wall, keeping out all the little voices that would otherwise want to hurt you. And you were his core, calm and collected, giving him gravity and sense.

!NSFW! Kazan is a huge man and is obviously a top. Even if, by some miracle, you were bigger than the mountain himself, he would still insist that he would be the one giving you pleasure rather than receiving; it’s an ego thing. He would be amazed by the size difference between you two and would often find himself hesitating when you would present yourself to him. His large, clawed hands would hover unsure and nervous about touching and possibly hurting your smaller body. Take his hands and guide them to your exposed flesh, welcome him to explore your body and he will be forever grateful. When the motions get going and things start to get more wild and rough, Kazan will still wait for clarification from you. He’d slow his pace and annoyed by the disruption you would growl, “What are you waiting for?” That was enough to send him on a mad frenzy, going into you at a relentless pace. You weren’t weak, he remembered, you were a warrior like him. And you could take whatever he dished out.

#dbd imagines #dbd x reader #dbd headcanons #ask #dbd the oni #dbd kazan yamaoka

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videoassocdallas · 5 years

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Bart Chat 2/23/19 Greetings all, We are very excited about DOCUFEST coming up October 3rd-6th at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas, but before we get to that, we have a program coming up this Saturday at The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. As you may or may not know, they have a great Gordon Parks photo exhibit going on there. Most People know Gordon Parks from Shaft fame but he was also a great photographer and seeing the show is worth the trip. We are teaming about with Amon Carter to show his earlier documentaries, Diary of a Harlem Family (1968, 20 minutes) and The World of Piri Thomas (1968, 60 minutes). Parks tells the story of the Fontenelle family. He was inspired to make this film after photographing the Fontenelles for a Life magazine photo essay on race and poverty in an attempt to show that, regardless of race and class, families across America all work to provide for their children. This a rare opportunity to see these films so please check them out. The World of Piri Thomas gives an unflinching view of the “mean streets” of Spanish Harlem as told by one of its most noted inhabitants. In this film, Thomas, who was a painter, poet, author, ex-con, and ex-junkie, shares his experiences and reads from his book, Down These Mean Streets. Now back to DocuFest. We live in, shall we say, unique times when questions about what is real and what is fake constantly permeate decision making. Should I click on that? Can you believe what he said? Can that be true? In these titles, DocuFest presents fresh oasis of media that ascribes to presenting reality and framing reality in a way to make us better citizens, to create awareness, and make us whole in a time when the news makes us feel empty, angry, less connected to the world and in the end, less human. Come to the Angelika Film Center Dallas and spend four days with us and you can rediscover joy, brilliance, tragedy and be moved by it all. This fest is more than just a series of movies, it is a way to reconnect with your sanity. (Did I oversell this?) The first two nights, we have two theaters. Opening night, we start with a preview of Flannery, a new feature film about the great southern writer Flannery O’Connor. This is a really great doc by a good friend, Elizabeth Coffman, whose work we have shown before, but this is her best film to date. If you ever read O’Connor’s work, this film tells her fascinating story in a style that works with her style. At the same time, in another world in the next screening room, we have Now or Never: A Tony Romo Story. We have seen him play, we have seen him talk, now see how he attained success with interviews of family and friends who knew him back in the day. Then our late shows on Thursday have A Woman’s Work, by Yu Gu, a documentary about NFL cheerleaders who are fighting for their rights. It follows class action lawsuits and the women who have the courage to stand up to the NFL for their rights. Then we have a classic: When DA Pennebaker passed away, we wanted to show one of his films to honor his memory and what he meant to documentary film. We thought of The War Room (directed by Chris Hegedus) because we have an election coming soon and we thought about Don’t Look Back, which is the obvious choice and we don’t do that, so we went with Ziggy Stardust to remember both Pennebaker and Bowie. Pretty cool for opening night. On Friday night, we start with a new documentary about legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham, in 3D!!!!!!! It’s hard to imagine modern dance without the influence of Cunningham and his lifelong collaborator and partner John Cage. In his film, the filmmaker assembles dancers from the Merce Cunningham dance company to perform the classic works, in a new way. Often 3D can be a trick or a gadget but here with an artist working with moving in space, 3D brings it alive. At the same time (sorry, on Thursday and Friday night you will have to make tough choices) we are proud to show Midnight Traveler, the story of filmmaker Hassan Fazili’, who had a bounty on his head from the Taliban and had to leave with his wife and their two daughters. In this film, shot with a mobile device, he documents the everyday moments of family life interspersed with the peril of this dangerous journey. This film helps put a voice to the people who are having to leave their countries, seeing, knowing and understanding their struggles. The late-night Friday program is just as special. Varda by Agnes is a film that was on many best-of lists from Toronto. Agnes Varda has had a long and fascinating career as a filmmaker, and she gets to tell her story in this doc. (We have been happy to show her work for years, including the great Beaches of Agnes.) In this film, we see her in many different audiences talking about her work. It is a great way to hear her talk about and view her work. It’s a must-see. And finally, the last program is controversial (Can you believe we would do that?) It is American Dharma, Errol Morris’ film about Steve Bannon. This played a few festivals last year and Errol got blasted for giving Bannon some oxygen. Indeed, I was not keen on the idea of the film and then I saw it. Bannon does get to put this burn it all down point of view in the film, while Morris does call him on things, it is not as much as most audiences would like. However, as we get into this next election cycle, it is good to see what made Trump’s campaign successful, at least from one person's point of view. Also, I think it’s better to get into the heads of an opponent than to think you know them. And the actual film is fascinating. Bannon is very much influenced by films, and he has made films of his own. He talks about 12:00 High, a classic film about the Air Force, heroism and WW2. Morris recreates the main set of 12:00 High and the interview takes place in the set. It brings a strange unsettling context to their discussion, and I think it works. That’s just the first two nights and there is so much more, which I will detail in the next newsletter. Speaking of immigrants, last night I got to see a special screening of Detras de Realidad which will show in Frame of Mind October 10th at 10:00 PM. This program is made by women about their own journey to Texas and what their life is like here. Frank, honest and in their own voices. I really liked what they did, but I was so happy to meet the makers who learned how to control the image and use the medium to tell everyone their stories. Thanks so much to Amber Bemak who taught then and Ignite Dallas at SMU for making it happen. Speaking of Frame of Mind we have a great new show on Thursday night at 10 PM. Each year on the series, we feature a retrospective of a Texas filmmaker and usually, they are old folk. This year, we took a different approach. Explordinary is Sarah Reyes and Daniel Driensky. They are great at straddling the world of digital and analog media, as well as film as art and commerce. They have traveled the globe documenting, in their unique way, artists, skaters, film labs and many other things. They put together their own retro and it rocks. 10:00 PM Thursday, Sept 26th. What else is happening around town? On Thursday, there is a special screening of the Princess Bride as a benefit for Hope Kids of North Texas. Next weekend, there is the North Texas Film Festival in Plano. There is the Alice Cooper film that played at DIFF and things like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Poltergeist, and Reanimator, so if you are into these and many are, not so much me, go for it. My favorite film they are showing is Mack Wrestles, a short I saw at SXSW about the Mack Beggs, a local athlete who goes through a sex change and still wants to wrestle. This is a must-see. As for The Texas Theater, on Wednesday, they are showing a film that has been getting lots of buzz (I have not seen it, yet) called Anthropocene the Human Epoch. It is one of those national we are all showing the same film tonight, programs. On Thursday, they are showing not one but two Les Blank films (I love Les Blank films) called Chulas Fronteras and Del Mero Corazón. These are newly restored, so they should look great. They are some of the first films that showcase Texican border music, including Flaco Jimenez and they sound great. Then they are showing the Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool film that was on PBS, made by the great Stanley Nelson. We have an interview with him about this film and the rest of his work on the podcast The Fog of Truth. Then Friday night, Theater Cine Wilde presents a film that is actually wild, Todd Haynes' Poison. A really great film that showcased his voice is his Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. On Tuesday night, The Magnolia Theater is showing Yentl, Barbara Streisand’s film about gender inequality in the Jewish religious community. Bart Weiss Artistic Director Dallas VideoFest

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icharchivist · 5 years

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The Journey So Far - A Mix of DGM songs on spotify // Others Playlists

or “i am too lazy to sort them out by invididual playlists just take it” the dgm playlist by yours truly.

Each song’s names are under the cut by alphabetical order with a vague reason why they’re on the list. Might also edit it as time goes by.

current song number: 158 songs, 11h02m of listening

Abel and Cain - D’espairsRay (Mana&Nea) / Alive - Superchick (Lenalee) / All Fall Down - OneRepublic (Allen) / All of Everything, Erased - Kevin Devine (Allen) / All We Are - OneRepublic (Allen/Exorcists) - Alone Together - Fall Out Boy (Allen/Exorcists) / And We Run - Within Temptation (Lavi) / Anonymous - Three Days Grace (Lavi or Allen) / As We Fly South - Walking On Cars (Lavi)

Back From the Dead - Skillet (Allen) / Battle Cry - Skillet (Exorcists) / A Beautiful lie - 30 Seconds to Mars (Lavi) / Bleed It Out - Linkin Park (Kanda) / Broken Crown - Mumford and Sons (Mana&Nea) / Buried Alive - Lovers & Liars (Kanda) / Burn - Three Days Grace (Lavi) / Burning Down - Skillet (Lavi)

Carnivore - Startset (Nea) / Castle - Halsey (Nea) / The Cave - Mumford and Sons (Lavi) / Closed Eyes Still Look Forward - Chiodos (Allen) / Color - The Maine (Allen) / Come With Me Now - KONGOS (Allen) / Control - Halsey (Mana&Nea) / Copy of a Copy - Dead Poetic (Allen) / Crawl (Carry Me Through) - Superchick (Lenalee) / Creatures - Shinedown (Noah&Allen) / The Crooked Kind - Radical Face (Lavi)/ Crossfire - Stephen (Allen&Exorcists) / Cry For Help - Shinedown (Cross) / Cynics & Critics - Icon for Hire (Exorcists)

Dangerous - Within Temptation (Kanda) / A Dangerous Mind - Within Temptation (Allen&Nea) / Dark Matter - Les Friction (Earl&Noah) / The Dark of You - Breaking Benjamin (Allen&Nea)/ Darkside - Shinedown (Earl&Noah) / A Day’s Pay For a Day’s Work - Darkstar (Kanda) / A Demon’s Fate - Within Temptation (Allen&Nea) / Devil in Me - Halsey (Allen&Nea) / Devour - Shinedown (Earl&Noah) / Dirty Night Clowns - Chris Garneau (Allen&Mana) / The Disappearance of the Girl - PHIDEL (Lenalee) / Dog Days - Within Temptation (Kanda) / Dust Bowl Dance - Mumford and Sons (Allen) / The Dying Kind - Joy Williams (Gen)

Earth - Sleeping At Last (Allen) / East Jesus Nowhere - Green Day (the Order) / Edge of the World - Within Temptation (Allen) / Emperor’s New Clothes - Panic! At the Disco (Earl&Noah) / Endless War - Within Temptation (Allen) / Erl King - Ghost Bees (Allen&Earl) / Every you, Every me - Placebo (Kanda&Alma) / Everybody Wants To Rule The World - Lorde (Order&Noah) / Evolve - Shinedown (Nea&Allen&Noah)

Figure It Out - Royal Blood (Allen&Nea) / Final Destination - Within Temptation (Allen&Nea) / Flawed Design - Stabilo (Lavi) / Float - The Neighbourhood (Allen) / Floods - Sir Sly (Allen&Mana&Earl) / Fool Like You - KOVACS (Alma) / Forgiven - Within Temptation (Kanda/Alma) / Frozen - Within Temptation (Alma)

Get Out Alive - Three Days Grace (Kanda) / Ghost Town - Radical Face (Allen) / Ghost Town - Shiny Toy Guns (Exorcists) / Gift For You - Celldweller (Alma) / Going Under - Evanescence (Kanda/Alma)

Hand of Sorrow - Within Temptation (Allen&Mana) / Happy Ending - Mika (Kanda/Alma) / HeavyDirtySoul - Twenty One Pilots (Allen) / Help I’m Alive - Metric (Allen) / Hero - Skillet (Lavi) / Holding Onto You - Twenty One Pilots (Allen) / Human - Daughter (Allen) / Humility - Gorillaz (Nea&Mana) / Hurricane - 30 Seconds to Mars (Kanda/Alma)

Illusion - VNV Nation (Kanda/Alma) / In Vain - Within Temptation (War&Allen) / Iron - Within Temptation (Nea) / It Has Begun - Starset (War) / It’s the Fear - Within Temptation (Allen&Nea)

The Judge - Twenty One Pilots (Allen) / Junior - Stateless (Lavi) / Jupiter - Sleeping at Last (Allen)

Let Us Burn - Within Temptation (Lavi) / Let’s Kill Tonight - Panic! At the Disco (Nea&Noah) / A Light That Never Comes - Linkin Park (Kanda) / Little Lion Man - Mumford and Sons (Lavi) / Louder Than Words - Les Friction (War)

Mad World - Within Temptation (Allen&War) / The March - Hypnogaja (Allen&Exorcists) / Marchin On - OneRepublic (Allen&Exorcists) / Melting In My Icebox - Bronze Radio Return (Lavi) / Memories - Within Temptation (Allen&Mana) / Mercury - Sleeping At Last (Allen) / Mercy Mirror - Within Temptation (Nea&Mana) / Message Man - Twenty One Pilots (Allen) / Metamorphosis - Blue Stahli (Alma) / Mirror Mirror - Jeff Williams (Allen&Nea) / Miss Missing You - Fall Out Boy (Kanda/Alma) / Mirror - D’espairsRay (Mana) / Monster - Imagine Dragons (Alma) / Murder - Within Temptation (Nea) / My Blood - Ellie Goulding (Kanda) / My Demons - Starset (Allen) / My Song Knows What You Did In the Dark - Fall Out Boy (Allen&Earl)

N.O.

Nashville - Noah Gundersen (Allen) / Nearly Morning - Luke Sital-Singh (Allen) / Neptune - Sleeping At Last (Lavi)/ Our Solemn Hour - Within Temptation (Innocence) / Out Of It - Fallulah (Allen)

P.R.

Pale - Within Temptation (Kanda) / Paradise (What About Us) - Within Temptation (Exorcists) / Pluto - Sleeping At Last (Allen) / Polarize - Twenty One Pilots (Lavi) / Raise Your Banner - Within Temptation (War) / The Recknoning - Within Temptation (War) / Rediscover (No Parallels) - Hands Like Houses (Allen&Exorcists) / The Resistance - Skillet (Exorcists) / Running With The Wild Things - Against the Current (Exorcists)

Savior - 30 Seconds To Mars (Allen) / Savages - MARINA (Lavi&Humanity) / Scared - Three Days Grace (Allen&Nea) / She’s A Handsome Woman - Panic! At The Disco (I.. don’t even know just...) / Shed Some Light - Shinedown (Lavi) / Silver Moonlight - Within Temptation (Allen) / Slow Fade - Casting Crowns (Allen) / Somewhere - Within Temptation (Kanda) / Still Breathing - Green Day (Allen) / A Strange Education - The Cinematics (Allen) / String Theory - Les Friction (Mana&Nea)

T.U.

This is a Call - Les Friction (Mana&Nea) - Trapdoor - Twenty One Pilots (Allen) / Trouble - TV on the Radio (Allen) / The Truth Beneath the Rose - Within Temptation (Allen) / Unbreakable - Three Days Grace (Allen) / Undefeated - Skillet (Allen) / Uneven Odds - Sleeping at Last (Mana or Cross & Allen) / Us Against The World - Coldplay (Exorcists)

V.W.

Viva La Gloria (Little Girl) - Green Day (Lenalee) / Viva La Vida - Coldplay (Earl) / Wake me Up When September Ends - Green Day (Allen&Mana) / Walk Unafraid - First Aid Kit (Allen) / Welcome to the Black Parade - My Chemical Romance (Allen) / What Have You Done - Within Temptation (Kanda/Alma) / What I’ve Done - Linkin Park (Kanda) / Where is the Edge - Within Temptation (Nea&Allen) / Who Will Save You Now - The Friction (Nea) / Whole World is Watching - Within Temptation (Allen) / Wicked Ones - DOROTHY (Noah)

X.Y.Z.

X-Amount Of Words - Blue October (Kanda) / Yami ni Furu Kiseki - D’espairsRay (Kanda/Alma) / You’re Gonna Go Far Kid - The Offspring (Lavi) / Young and a Menace - Fall Out Boy (Allen) / Youth - Daughter (Lenalee&Exorcists) / Zombie - The Pretty Reckless (Alma)

#I'VE. DONE. IT.#So it has also a slight yulma bias #but i didn't put my l/aven ones #SO HERE YOU GO #ichablogging playlist #ichatalks about dgm #d gray man #dgrayman #dgm #some of them are hella vague if you need reasons of Why My Brain Works Like That pray tell #anyway here you go if you want to waste 10 hours of your time #the other playlist tag is empty #but it's in case i make individual playlist of those mess #or when i'll post my l/aven one and c/ack one #or any of my F/F7 ones #anyway:!!#Allen Walker #mostly #not tagging everyone bc it is... so mainly an allen playlist dkjhfd

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smolfangirl · 6 years

Text

A simple thing

In celebration of surviving today’s exam - and because the bts videos someone blessed us with had my imagination running wild - I decided to post this little thingy and I truly hope you’ll enjoy it ♥

Word count: 1.8k

///

Luna can’t sleep.

She’s definitely tired enough, that’s not the issue at hand. She’s tired, but she can’t calm down enough to drift into unconsciousness - there’s too much tension in her body, too many thoughts racing through her mind while her heart refuses to find a steady, peaceful rhythm.

It’s Matteo’s fault.

Or maybe it’s not primarily his fault. Maybe it’s Gary’s and Nico’s for leaving the city and the apartment, or maybe it’s even her fault for suggesting that the rest of the Rollerband can stay in the mansion.

Does it really matter, though, who she ends up blaming? Because the result - her insomnia - remains the same regardless.

She sighs into the silence of her room.

A part of her wishes her tossing and turning would steam from too much excitement over Matteo this close to her when in reality, he simply makes her so, so nervous.

It doesn’t help that she has not even a clue if they’re still together.

She knows that she should know. And Matteo hasn’t told her it’s over, he didn’t break up with her (yet), so that must be a good sign, right?

But things aren’t picture perfect, either. He’s still weird around her, keeping his distance while setting her heart on fire with his too obvious, too intense stares.

He’s still weird with Michel gone.

Somehow, Luna expected them to go back to normal after she dropped him off at the airport. She thought the moment she’d have more time on her hands again, the moment she could focus more on her chico fresa, he’d relax, and they’d be fine.

They’re not, however.

At the thought, Luna presses her head into her pillow and groans. This time, he appears to be waiting for her to make a move, and while she desperately wants to make it right, all words – whether well prepared or from the tip of her tongue – fall flat when she looks at him.

And now it’s robbing her of her sleep.

A loud bang interrupts her internal moping. It’s followed by some cursing too quick and muffled for Luna to understand it, but by then she’s already glimpsing through her window.

In the night, a lot of details hide from her vision, linger in the shadowed lines and blurred lines. Her heart beats loudly in her chest as she presses her cheeks against the glass, but then she’s sure it’s Matteo who she spots outside.

///

Luna flashes her phone into the darkness. She’s shaking slighty, it’s too cold for her tank-top and shorts, but now she’s already on the terrace and too lazy to get a hoodie.

“Matteo, is that you?”

He whirls around to her, flabbergasted, like a thief in the night and she caught him unexpected. His eyes flinch at the brightness and only after a second does he seem to recognize her.

Not that it leaves his face any softer.

“Oh, it’s just you.”

The tone of his voice sounds cool, like he’s got it all together, the king of the rink, but she hears him taking a deep breath.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

He shrugs. “Did I wake you up?” “No, you didn’t.” Luna shifts on her feet, not sure what to do, not sure anymore if coming down to him was a good idea. “I just can’t sleep,” she explains as if it’d make Matteo any more willing to begin a real conversation with her.

He returns her gaze with a poker face, then stares at the sky and sighs. “Yeah, me neither.”

“Figured.” She chuckles, although it sounds nervous in her own ears. Like so many other times before, the memory of him in that hospital bed pops up, of his pale skin and his closed eyes… Luna had sworn to never let him go again.

So why does she feel like she’s losing him right now?

“Isn’t it cold?” she asks gently after standing next to him in an uncomfortable silence for a while.

Matteo shrugs, looks away again. “Well, I just hope I get tired before I freeze to death.”

Nodding, Luna begins to drown in more memories of him. He’s gorgeous, always had been, even when she wanted to hate him for it. And he’s not easy, never had been, even when she expected him to. They’ve experienced so many ups and downs, back and forth, it’s a miracle they’re not shaken to the core.

But Luna loves him, loved him for a long time, just the way he was – the way he is now – no matter how hard or easy it is. She doesn’t want to lose him again.

And maybe she’s not losing him. Maybe she never really lost him to begin with, maybe he was always hers to keep.

Either way, Luna is not taking any risks.

“You know, if you’d like, eh, we could go to my room. We wouldn’t wake up anyone else and it’s much warmer...”

She wonders if she’s too straightforward. If she’s asking for too much after the past weeks or if she’s getting herself into a situation destined to rob her of all control. If she can be blamed for acting on an impulse at this time of day, when the soft glow of the moon filled her with hope while the night provided her with enough shelter to give up on any hesitation.

Taking a chance feels so much easier, even if Luna isn’t completely at ease.

Hopefully it isn’t a mistake.

Matteo still hasn’t answered.

Instead, he stares at her. In awe, it strikes her. For a moment, breathing becomes a task Luna needs to remind herself to do.

“Okay,” he finally agrees.

Her heart somersaults in its ribcage.

///

She leads him up the stairs in the dim light of her phone screen. His presence behind her haunts every thought she has. If she stopped walking for a second, he’d already crash into her.

Nonetheless, she keeps going, and only comes to a halt when they reach her bedroom door.

Stealing a glimpse at him, Luna freezes. “Oh my god, you are nervous.”

“I’m not.”

His reply follows too soon, too loudly for the quiet hallway. Matteo flinches, then repeats much calmer, “I’m not nervous.”

“You are,” she argues.

“Not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I am not nervous.” He rubs his neck, proving himself a liar.

“Matteo, it’s fine, really.”

He sighs, opens his mouth to disagree. Closes it when he spots her smile and, to her joy, he shyly smiles back.

///

“It fits you,” Matteo declares after inspecting her room.

Luna sits on her bed, half hiding behind her legs, watching him. You fit it too, she thinks but decides not to say it out loud. “You think?” she asks instead.

“Yeah. I like the colors. And the fairy lights. They make it… cozy.” He points to the chain dangling on the wall above her bed. She turned them on instead of the room light, too afraid of losing her courage in the brightness.

“Thanks.”

They fall silent.

So many words spin around in her head. Apologies, explanations, questions. Love declarations. They pressure her until Luna feels their weight on her chest, until they pulsate in her ears. Her gaze glides back and forth between Matteo and the floor, even more so once she catches him staring at her.

“Why does it have to be so complicated?” Luna blurts out.

He’s caught off guard, to say the least. His eyes wander over her in search for something she fails to identify, and his mouth opens a little.

“Because we make it, I guess.”

A certain distance settles into his tone, putting her off. She knows that tone, knows it better than she prefers. He’s hiding something, he’s hiding his feelings. Hides them inside them, bottles them up and refuses to show them, despite them leaking through occasionally. She’s sure those feelings aren’t all happy and gentle.

But Luna decides not to let this slide, to play her cards and clear this once and for all. “You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“You were mad at me. When you thought I kissed Michel.”

“I don’t want to be mad at you.” Matteo sits down on the chair by her desk. Although he’s facing her, the backrests guards him. He feels too far away for him so close.

She sighs, hides her face in her hands. “That’s not what I meant. I want to know if you are.”

His eyes flutter shut for an instant as he bites his lip. When he opens them again, she finds the softness in his brown that she missed so, so much. “No, I’m not mad at you.”

“Okay. Good.”

Silence. It falls more comfortably on them this time, like a blanket, and they’re both lost in the labyrinth of their thoughts.

Slowly, Matteo gets up. Her first reaction is to worry, worry that he’s done talking to her, and he’ll leave her alone when her mind just rediscovered the comfort of his proximity. But to her surprise, he walks over to her bed, silently asking her if it’s okay for him to sit down next to her.

Speechless, she nods.

He’s so close his shoulders rub against her naked skin. A shiver runs over her arms, back, legs even.

“Do you think there always will be someone who tries to get in between us?” he whispers.

Luna tilts her head until their eyes meet, and she realizes just how close exactly they are, how she’s not used to it anymore, and how a tingling sensation pools in her stomach.

Matteo looks nervous. Or perhaps nervous isn’t the right word – he looks at her like he’s handing her his heart on a silver plate, unsure whether she’ll break it or not.

“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it’s always gonna be complicated. But…” “But?” he echoes, a hint of hope shimmering through his voice. If her senses don’t perceive her, he’s closer than a few moments ago.

“But maybe you’re right, maybe it’s only complicated because we make it. And we don’t have to. Like, it could be simple.”

“Like Luna and fresa?”

At the spark in his eyes, she breaks out into a smile that surely covers her whole face, at least it feels like it. “For example. Or, like, I really, really like you, Matteo.”

Now she’s sure he’s leaning in. His breath dances over her nose, tickles her. “I really, really like you too.”

She smiles so hard her cheeks might be sore in the morning, and the only reason she stops is because his lips steal it from her mouth.

Their kiss is delicate. Fragile, almost, if a kiss can be that. Luna blames it on the night and the vulnerability of being in her room that would make it so easy to go a little too far, and on the tension between them, build up in those past weeks, that needs some more time to fully wear off.

But that’s okay, because the movements of his mouth on hers are the softest, and she can feel her heart flutter just at the thought of how much she loves him.

As simple as that.

#soy luna #lutteo #my sl fanfiction #hach writing them makes me so emo lately #but @disney that doesn't mean I will accept you not giving us Matteo in Luna's room #listen mouse you better deliver or I will learn from the blonde wannabe rebel

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joyfullynervouscreator · 7 years

Text

Mud

Little Fili’s birthday party - prompt by @filisleftmustachebraid and inspired by

Art by the fabulously talented @lorna-ka

The two dwarflings were running through the mud with wild abandon, splashing murky water and dirt everywhere murky water could reach, which was usually places that rather surprised the adults who eventually had to clean the little terrors and their clothes. Thorin, at least, seemed to be constantly amazed by how much dirt a dwarfling could accumulate in hard to reach places, Dís thought, smirking at her older brother, who had made the perhaps-unwise bet that he could easily take care of everything practical in relation to Fíli’s 11th birthday.

Her own tasks – aside from cooking with Frís, which nobody wanted Thorin to be responsible for – had been limited to the judging of contests and arbiter of the inevitable arguments that accompanied any dwarfling’s Name-Day celebration. Last year, that had been Thorin’s job, and Dís had found the three of them rolling her old plates down the hall, trying to find out how far a plate could roll – including measuring rope and markings on her clean floor with charcoal – based on the old song-game about Princess Katla’s much-abused possessions.

“Bath-time, Thorin,” Dís called in a song-song tone designed to rile up older siblings since the dawn of time.

“KÍLI!” Thorin bellowed, running after one muddy lump on legs, while the other – distinguishable only by the loud shrieks of laughter emanating from the bog creature as Fíli – clung to his back, leaving a large muddy patch on Thorin’s blue tunic. Dís sighed. The boys were full off too much sugar, and she felt quite smug when she closed the door to the kitchen behind her, sharing a conspiratorial glance with Dwalin and Frís before turning her attention to the washing up, humming the old son in tune with Dwalin’s deeper rumble as they tossed crockery back and forth.

“I’ve gots him, Kee, I’ve gots him!” Fíli shrieked, deafening Thorin’s left ear. Kíli whooped, putting on another burst of speed that Thorin did not know where he found. Possibly the seven cookies he’d eaten while no one watched? “Ruuuun!”

“KÍLI!” Thorin bellowed again, making a grab for the small dwarf whose muddy arm slid out of his grasp easily. “Get back here you little terror!” Thorin grumbled, cornering the small dwarfling.

“Nooo, Unca, noo!” Kíli wailed, though it was hard to hear for laughter. On Thorin’s back, Fíli had discovered the shiny silver clasp that held his hair back, and the tugs made Thorin wince. Sliding into a final tackle, the defacto King of the Longbeards caught his small quarry, swiftly catching one muddy dwarfling in one arm while the other prevented Fíli’s escape.

“Bath-time,” Thorin growled, firmly regretting his big mouth. Who had thought it was a good idea to bet against Dís? he must have been out his mind with drink to think antagonizing his deviously vindictive sister was a good plan. ‘Just get them bathed and put ot bed, Thorin’ she’d said, smiling sweetly – Thorin had not imagined the evil glint in her eye – before she turned to the two boys who had been playing relatively calmly, trilling out a loud ‘Bath-time, boys!’ which had started this whole chase-and-mud-scenario. Thorin grumbled. Booting the door to the bathroom closed, he began removing Kíli’s muddy clothes, while Fíli hand-tested the water temperature of their bath, rediscovering the joy of his old ‘Tidalwave’-game. Thorin sighed. Dumping one naked dwarfling in the tub with a stern admonishment to stay in the warm water, he scooped up Fíli – wasn’t the boy old enough to undress himself yet?! Mahal wept – and dragged his trousers and tunic off too, the muddy clothes making a splat as they landed on the tiled floor. Dropping Fíli into the water obviously made Kíli hysterical that some of the water had hid his face. Wiping away those tears, Thorin felt the splashes of Fíli throwing water at his face next. Blindly grabbing for soap and a washrag, Thorin tried to get a headstart by scrubbing Kíli clean first, only to feel even more water soak his clothes when Fíli clambered onto his back once more.

“You’re also dirty, Uncle,” the boy informed him, scooping handfuls of water onto Thorin’s stained tunic and pretending to clean it by scrubbing vigorously. Catching the small wheat-haired miscreant, Thorin dumped him back in the tub, having a moment of brilliance.

“Kíli, I think you should show your brother how to wash, you’re a big Dwarf, you know what to do,” he said, watching Kíli’s face light up as the dwarfling accepted the washrag – he wasn’t scrubbing the dirty places, obviously, but it was still a victory, Thorin crowed mentally – while Fíli stared at him with a look of abject betrayal when Thorin grabbed more soap and began to lather up his muddy hair, slowly revealing the gold beneath the dirt.

“I’m a big dwarf,” Fíli muttered sullenly. Kíli stuck out his tongue. Fíli retaliated by splashing water at Kíli again, which meant Thorin’s plan was not at all brilliant, the adult suddenly realised, when Kíli’s wails echoed against the walls, reverberating in Thorin’s skull.

“Fine,” he muttered, defeated, “you’re a big dwarf, so prove it. Wash all the mud from your body. Don’t forget to scrub behind your ears and between your toes,” Thorin sighed, handing Fíli his wash-cloth. The little dwarfling beamed. Thorin shook his head, ruffling the wet hair fondly.

Wiping away Kíli’s tears soothingly, Thorin began scrubbing the darker head of hair, wondering at the similarity to his own. Kíli yawned.

When they were both reasonably clean, Thorin lifted them out of the large tub; it was too high for a dwarfling to get out of easily, even though he had made a small block of steps so they could get in. Dís had vetoed steps inside the tub, claiming that wet steps were far too dangerous, and Thorin had to agree when he tried to keep hold of slippery and squirming dwarflings. Towelling the two off was another test of patience, when Kíli avenged Fíli’s earlier attack by flicking his brother with the towel and accidentally hitting Thorin’s thigh with force he had not believed a dwarfling possessed.

“Okay, boys,” Thorin sighed, when the two rascals were dressed once more in their sleeping clothes. “Time for bed.”

“Nooo!” Kíli yawned, petulant but almost too tired to keep his eyes open.

“Yeah!” Fíli added, “we haven’t had a bedtime story. We can’t go to sleep without a bedtime story.” Thorin prayed for strength. Picking up the both of them once more – Kíli was almost asleep already – Thorin made his way through the quiet house, finding the boys’ bedroom and sinking into the adult-sized chair Dwalin had made for Dís more than 12 years ago for this very purpose.

“Once, in a kingdom far away, there lived two princes…” he began, spinning a tale about a prank Frerin had once pulled on him and Dwalin, hiding all their practice weapons and making them later for Master Verrun’s class.

They were all asleep by the fourth sentence.

#young fili and kili #Fili #thorin oakenshield #fili ficlets #kili

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paulisded · 5 years

Text

Live Ledge #406: Best Albums of 2019

This was another great year in music. So great, in fact, that many hours were spent narrowing down the year's release into the standard Ledge format of the 40 best albums of the year. In particular, it was a year that really saw a resurgence in anthemic power pop. It was also a year that saw a number of psych-rock bands so widely expand their sound and songwriting that a two-record set was necessary. Here's my list, and look for another similar post featuring the great reissue and box sets of the year.

1. Mikal Cronin, Seeker. Every year there is a record or two that deserves to find an audience outside of its typical subgenre. This year it’s the latest by Mikal Cronin, a stunning record that retains the psych-rock template of his past yet showcases a giant leap in songwriting. This record should be all over mainstream rock radio.

2. Bob Mould, Sunshine Rock. After a handful of records featuring dark, ferocious rock closer to his Husker Du days than his more poppy records with Sugar, Mould’s latest finds him possibly as close to happy as we’ve ever seen him. Ok, maybe happy is too strong of a word. Whatever it is the attitude is different, although still accompanied by his trademark buzzsaw guitars.

3. Pernice Brothers, Spread the Feeling. The most welcome comeback of the year. Every band featuring Joe Pernice seemed to acknowledge one major influence missing from most Americana bands and that’s his love of ‘80’s college rock. Just imagine a country-tinged power pop band that clearly loves Echo & The Bunnymen, The Smiths, and Lloyd Cole.

4. The Muffs, No Holiday. Such a tragedy. Two years ago, Muffs leader Kim Shattuck suddenly found herself unable to grip a guitar. It turned out to be ALS. Determined to finish one last album she gave all she could even as she quickly deteriorated from the disease. Eventually she was leading recording sessions while connected to a breathing tube. Sadly, she died less than two weeks before the release of one of the band’s best albums.

5. Purple Mountains, Purple Mountains. Purple Mountains was David Berman’s first project since the demise of Silver Jews in 2019, and it was a stunning display of his quirky songwriting skills. Unfortunately, the personal demons that had always been present in his art turned his big comeback into a tragedy, as he took his life just weeks after the record was released to glowing reviews.

6. The Resonars, No Exit. In a year that saw power pop rediscover its balls, The Resonars proved they always had their share of testicular fortitude. And it’s all the work of one man, Matt Rendon, who has over the last two decades created six albums of this sort of catchy but raucous power pop.

7. Kiwi Jr., Football Money. Power pop’s closest relative just has to be jangle pop, and both genres are at its best when the songwriting is as catchy as a late ‘70’s Nick Lowe single. There’s hooks galore on this Toronto band’s debut release.

8. Wand, Laughing Matter. There’s always been a bit of a fine line between psych and prog, and those lines have definitely narrowed in today’s crop of prog-rockers. One proof is the return of the double album, which every psych band seemed to release in 2019. The strongest record of that sort may have to be Wand’s fifth record, which succeeds by actually stripping back their sound a bit.

9. Wreckless Eric, Transience. It’s been a real treat to see the resurgence of Eric Goulden in the last few years, as album after album have ranked as his best ever. The latest sort of comes closest to his solo performances, as he lays tracks and tracks of both clean and enhanced acoustic and electric guitars over backing tracks laid down by Amy Rigby, Cheap Trick’s Tom Petersson, jazz horn player Artie Barbato, and The Rumour’s Steve Goulding.

10. Tim Presley’s White Fence, I Have To Feed Larry’s Hawk. Presley reportedly spent four years recording what may be the masterpiece of his career. How to describe the finished product is not easy, though, as various influences and sounds flow in and out of each and every track, yet there is an intimacy here that makes it feel like Presley just whipped up this musical cocktail in one long, intense evening.

11. The Cowboys, The Bottom Of A Rotten Flower. Good old punk-influenced straight up rock and roll. Nothing more, nothing less. And when it’s as good and as catchy as this it doesn’t need to be anything else.

12. Twin Peaks, Lookout Low. Five years ago, this Chicago-based band’s fabulous record Wild Onion was described by one of the band members as heavily influenced by Exile On Main Street. This record’s classic rock influence appears to be the first two records by The Band. That’s not to say they sound anything like either the Stones or The Band. No, in this case there is a laid back feel to their guitar-based indie rock that feels as if it’s straight out of a Woodstock basement.

13. The Dates, Ask Again Later. Garrett Goddard has been a member of a number of bands over the years, including King Tuff, Personal and the Pizzas, and The Cuts. His first record heading The Dates may have just topped anything else he’s ever worked on in the past. The melodies and hooks just melt in your ears, and the musical accompaniment throws The Byrds, Big Star, Shoes, Smithereens and seemingly a dozen other bands into the greatest blender ever invented.

14. Wilco, Ode To Joy. After Tweedy’s pair of solo acoustic records, I think I was ready for a full blown rock and roll Wilco album. It has been a while, right? Unfortunately, Ode To Joy comes off as a full band version of those solo records. Don’t get me wrong. It’s good. It’s very good. It just wasn’t what I needed from a 2019 Wilco album.

15. Guided By Voices, Zeppelin Over China. Another year, another trio of Guided By Voices records. Their second wind as a band has been nothing but stunning, as evidenced by this double album of almost nothing but anthems.

16. Tijuana Panthers, Carpet Denim. Every year there seems to be a new band that showcases elements of surf rock in their punk-influenced lo-fi garage sounds. What a shocker to find out that this is their sixth album! What sets them apart from others like them, besides the strength of their songwriting, is the ocassional elements of doo wop harmonies. Who knew that The Buzzcocks and Dion could co-exist in the same song?

17. Peter Perrett, Humanworld. After no new tunes for over 25 years, we now have two records in three years by the former leader of The Only Ones! Like 2017’s How The West Was One this record succeeds simply because Perrett isn’t trying to recreate the glory days, nor is he attempting to jump on current trends. Instead he accomplishes what real artists do, which is to create a sound that fits the song.

18. Frankie and the Witch Fingers, ZAM. Another great psych rock double album that incorporates and combines all sorts of atypical influences, including kraut, prog, and even a little funk.

19. Sweet Things, In Borrowed Shoes, On Borrowed Time. It may be hard to find a more varied rock and roll album than this debut record, as it jumps around from blues to soul to country to glam rock. There’s cameos by Alejandro Escovedo and members of The Uptown Horns. It’s the most ambitious trashy garage rock record I’ve heard in quite some time.

20. Cherry Pickles, Will Harden Your Nipples. As their bandcamp states, “one guitar, two drums, the basement band you always wanted to start”. This trio proudly combines all sorts of “outsider art” into a minimalistic sound that would certainly impress the namesake of the record’s best song “I Still Miss Lux”.

21. Ty Segall, First Taste. The prolific singer/guitarist was a bit quiet this year, actually. Well, for Segall a quiet year is one that only features a studio album, a live album, and a box set of outtakes. What makes his only new record of the year stand out is that there reportedly is not a guitar to be found on it! No, it’s not a synth-pop record. In fact, it ultimately isn’t that much different than what we’re used to hearing.

22. Pale Lips, After Dark. Gotta love snotty, hook-driven garage-punk that’s clearly inspired by major doses of The Muffs and The Ramones mixed with spoonfuls of surf and Spector-era girl groups.

23. The Darts, I Like You But Not Like That. This record was not what I expected. At all. Who would have predicted that Alternative Tentacles would put out such a sexy collection of horror-punk?

24. CTMF, Last Punk Standing. Nobody has so proudly hosted the flag of ‘60’s garage-punk as Wild Billy Childish. Well, “proud” is probably not the correct word to use, as Childish is as cantankerous as The Fall’s Mark E. Smith. Yet he consistently puts out records full of simple yet catchy guitar anthems, and this one is no exception.

25. Jordan Jones, Jordan Jones. What happens when you take the pop/rock highlights of ‘70’s AM radio and ramp it up a bit with power pop energy? You get this wonderful debut record.

26. The Mystery Lights, Too Much Tension! A melting pot of different styles rarely mesh well, but this New York band’s second album somehow manages to roll in and out of genres. A synth track leads into a homage to the Stooges which is then followed by a ‘60’ dance party. How do they get away with it?

27. Juliana Hatfield, Weird. It’s only fitting that an album dominated by a theme of being a lonely introvert would be created by one artist playing almost every instrument. That’s the case of the latest Hatfield collection of originals, and it’s one of the best of her career.

28. Kevin Morby, Oh My God. Rolling Stone recently described the Kansas City native as a “secular guy with a spiritual side”, and that’s never been more evident than on his fifth album. RS goes on to compare this record to Dylan’s gospel years but it’s actually more similar to a record like New Morning, where Biblical imagery is referenced but not necessarily the main topic.

29. Drahla, Useless Coordinates. Post-punk also made a comeback this year, and one of the best purveyors of that sound is this trio of Wire fanatics. And like Wire there’s a bit of a ferocity in this record that’s missing in much of their post-punk cohorts.

30. Gino and the Goons, Do The Get Around. Take Chuck Berry, The Sonics, Motorhead, The Ramones, The Stooges and a few other “rawk’ legends and toss them into a blender and you get the dirty sound that Gino and the Goons have mastered over the course of five records. You know what you’re getting from these guys, but they always deliver.

31. Young Guv, Guv I & II. The side project of Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook could be described as a lo-fi tribute to bands such as Big Star and Teenage Fanclub. But then out of the blue comes a synth tune that’s almost danceable. It’s just part of the charm of this double record.

32. Ravi Shavi, Blackout Deluxe. Some records are sleepers. They don’t work the first time you hear them. They may not even work on the fourth or fifth airing. Then suddenly you can’t stop listening. That’s the case with this new wave-influenced, Prince-obsessed, garage rock group.

33. ATOM, In Every Dream Home. Just like the previous record, ATOM didn’t work for me at first. Then suddenly I had to race to the stereo to crank up the volume. What changed? Well,it helps when the musicians are Australian indie rock heavy weights led by Crime and the City Solution’s Harry Howard.

34. Geoff Palmer, Pulling Out All The Stops/Brad Marino, Extra Credit. (Tie) I can’t possibly vote for one of these records to be higher than the other. The pair both were members of the The Connection and The New Trocaderos. Both of them are veteran power pop performers who have written more than their share of catchy tunes. And both may have put out the records of their careers.

36. Honey Radar, Ruby Puff Of Dust.. A lot of reviews of this Philly band compare them to Guided By Voices, but I honestly don’t understand why. Yet it’s what made me check them out, and I do appreciate their fuzzy psych-rock sound.

37. Titus Andronicus, An Obelisk. Produced by Bob Mould and recorded at Steve Albini’s Chicago studio, Titus’ sixth album is their most straight ahead to date, although as always leader Patrick Stickles’ lyrics are open to interpretation.

38. The Dream Syndicate, These Times. While most band reunions never result in worthwhile albums (or any new music at all), there are instances where the second run rivals the first. That’s the case with these leaders of the mid-’80’s “Paisley Underground”, and it’s mainly because they refuse to just rest on their laurels.

39. Jesse Malin, Sunset Kids. The teaming of Malin with Lucinda Williams may seem like a head scratcher, but it actually works! Not only does Williams produce the album, she duets with him on a handful of the album’s tracks. The end results may be quieter than a typical Malin album but the tunes are also as strong as a typical Malin album.

40. More Kicks, More Kicks. Haven’t I said that this was a year for great power pop? Here’s another one. This time it’s a UK group, and like the others I’ve highlighted there’s nothing wimpy here. It’s pop music that absolutely rocks.

After listening, please go purchase those tracks you enjoy! You can find this show at almost any podcast site, including iTunes and Stitcher...or

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE SHOW!

Note: Tracks from the albums listed above were presented in reverse "Casey Kasem countdown" order. In two instances (Darts/Pale Lips and The Muffs/Purple Mountains), songs were erroneously flipped in error. I apologize for this mistake.

1. More Kicks, I'm on the Brink

2. Jesse Malin, Room 13

3. The Dream Syndicate, Bullet Holes

4. Titus Andronicus, Troubleman Unlimited

5. Honey Radar, Cornflake ESP

6. Brad Marino, Broken Record Baby

7. Geoff Palmer, All The Hits

8. ATOM, No Future

9. Ravi Shavi, Riding High

10. Young Guv, She's A Fantasy

11. Gino And The Goons, Pills In MY Pocket

12. Drahla, Gilded Cloud

13. Kevin Morby, OMG Rock n Roll

14. Juliana Hatfield, Staying In

15. The Mystery Lights, I'm So Tired (of Living In The City)

16. Jordan Jones, Rumors Girls

17. CTMF, You're the One I Idolise

18. Pale Lips, Some Sort Of Rock n' Roll

19. The Darts, Don't Hold My Hand

20. Ty Segall, Taste

21. Cherry Pickles, I Still Miss Lux

22. The Sweet Things, Dead or Worse

23. Frankie and the Witch Fingers, Purple Velvet

24. Peter Perrett, Love Comes On Silent Feet

25. Tijuana Panthers, Path of Totality

26. Guided by Voices, Your Lights Are Out

27. Wilco, Everyone Hides

28. The Dates, pictures with rene

29. Twin Peaks, Laid In Gold

30. The Cowboys, Female Behavior Book

31. White Fence, I Love You

32. Wreckless Eric, Strange Locomotion

33. Wand, Walkie Talkie

34. Kiwi jr., Murder in the Cathedral

35. The Resonars, The Man Who Does Nothing

36. The Muffs, No Holiday

37. Purple Mountains, That's Just the Way That I Feel

38. Pernice Brothers, Mint Condition

39. Bob Mould, Sunshine Rock

40. Mikal Cronin, I've Got Reason

#scott hudson #live ledge #realpunkradio #best albums of 2019 #indie #garage #punk #psych

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bemynightmanager · 7 years

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I’m not really into RPF, but I’ve been listening to Journey’s song called “Faithfully” and my imagination started running wild. I think it would make a great theme song for Tom (or in fact any other actor/musician, but it made *me* think about Tom) and his girlfriend, whoever she may be. I’m not going to make it into a fanfic, but if anyone wants to, feel free to use this as an inspiration ;)

Circus life Under the big top world We all need the clowns To make us smile Through space and time Always another show Wondering where I am Lost without you And being apart ain't easy On this love affair Two strangers learn to fall In love again I get the joy Of rediscovering you Oh girl, you stand by me I'm forever yours - faithfully

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rustbeltjessie · 7 years

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24 Hour Revenge Therapy

“Listening to this makes me feel like I’m sixteen again,” I said to my buddy Adam, when I was 22. We were sitting in the living room of the punk house where he lived and I was crashing at the time, drinking Big Gulp-sized whiskey & Cokes, listening to some punk band or other. “You always say that,” he said. “I do?” “Yeah. Every time we listen to punk, you say it makes you feel like you’re sixteen again.”

When I was 16, I was fucking punk. I’d been on the way to turning out a punk for many years. I became part of the scene at age 15, and by my 16th birthday (New Year’s Eve, 1997) Jessie was a Punk Rocker. So what else was there to do in 1998 but throw myself into living like a punk? What living like a punk meant to me was living a life of adventure, living a life like I’d read about in Cometbus. It meant a life of travel and exploration, of dumpster diving and short-lived love affairs. It meant a life of the most rooftop-scaling joys and the most bone-deep lows. Now, some of that was part of being a teenager (it was so easy to feel like everything was either The Best Thing That Had Ever Happened or The End Of The World). And some of it was intrinsic to who I was (manic-depressive tendencies will do that to you). Some of it was part of the world I’d glimpsed through zines and Sassy when I was tiny and tenderhearted. (That world of art and pain and love, of boys and girls/men and women who did interesting things.) And some of it was as Beat as it was Punk, but there’s no surprise there (I got into the beats at almost exactly the same time I got into punk). Maybe saying that I threw myself into living like a punk doesn’t quite describe it. Maybe what I mean is: for so many years, I tried to keep up the outward appearance of being a good girl, and I was afraid to do certain things (at least in public: I did those things either in private or when I was far away from home). I was afraid of disappointing my parents, and afraid of the ‘cool kids’ thinking I wasn’t cool enough. But by the time 1998 hit, I’d said ‘fuck it, I’m gonna do the things I want to do anyway,’ and I openly engaged in desperate acts (the kind that made me look stupid).

The way I got into Jawbreaker was the way I got into a lot of bands - I’d first heard them a few years prior, on a mix tape from a zine pal, and I’d liked the sound but it hadn’t stuck with me. The timing had been off. At 16, I was ready for Jawbreaker. I bought 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (and Bivouac & Dear You shortly thereafter). 24 Hour Revenge Therapy was like a train (into you like a train), it bounced and chugged along, it screeched into noise but then slowed down into tiny soft moments, barely noticeable but everpresent. It was sadness and loneliness and drinking and love, and it had its depressing moments - and I had my depressed moments during that terrible, wonderful year, but Jawbreaker made me feel almost joyful in my depression. 24 Hour Revenge Therapy was like nothing I’d ever heard before and everything I’d ever wanted, and it became the soundtrack to that year, the soundtrack to the adventures and the mundane moments. I listened to the record in my room while I pasted up my fanzine or sipped from my secret stash of booze. I made a cassette copy and carried it around with me like it was the Holy Grail of Punk, and I listened to it while I rode my bike or wandered around Racine, and while I smoked cigarettes on the garage roof. I took it with me on airplane trips to see my friends back east or to explore the Pacific Northwest, took it on car rides to summer camp in Whitewater and the coffeeshops of Milwaukee and the subdivisions of suburban Illinois and the 24-hour diners of Kenosha and the wilds of Door County. It rode with me on trains and trains and trains between Kenosha and Chicago; I listened to it while I looked out the window at the lake and at the backsides of brick buildings in sleepy suburbs. I listened to it while I rode CTA buses and el trains and found my way to Belmont Ave. or to shows at Metro or the Fireside Bowl. I listened to it while I lay in bed, with the volume low so I could hear the sounds of trains and foghorns (and gunshots and sirens) that came in through my window; at those times, Blake Schwarzenbach’s raspy voice was a punk rock lullaby that sent me off to a restless sleep full of sad and beautiful dreams.

“The Boat Dreams From The Hill” was all my impossible dreams, I listened to it while I walked by Lake Michigan, that blue-grey expanse. I knew it was only Michigan on the other side but it looked to my heart like the high seas, and I thought: “I wanna be a boat, I wanna learn to swim.” And there I was, stuck on the hill - but sometimes rain brought girlish wonder. (Because of the scenery of my life when it was the soundtrack to my life, when I listen to 24 Hour Revenge Therapy now, I often see rain soaked visions of Racine, Kenosha, Waukegan, Chicago. Funny that a Bay Area band reminds me of the midwest.) “Boxcar” was the theme song, is the fucking theme song; I was fucking punk but already hated the elitism, the rules, the way people said there was one way to be punk - their way. I was passing out while you were passing out your rules, and “you don’t know what I’m all about, like killing cops and reading Kerouac.” “Ashtray Monument” is so sad, so sad, that worst part of a divorce or breakup when your whole life breaks apart, and “No one said that this life was easy. Did that no one ever live a life this hard?” (The song came back to haunt me in later years, after the breakup of my first long-term, cohabitant relationship: “Do you remember our whole life? I did the dishes while you read out loud.”) “Condition Oakland” was my life, again I picture Racine, not Oakland, when I hear it. Well, no, now I picture both, but I’m trying not to jump too far ahead in time… It was my life when I was 16, so when Blake sings “I rode down to the tracks,” I see myself riding my bike to the tracks that cut across State Street, standing there hoping for a train to go by so I could read the graffiti and imagine hopping on it (but they just stared back, trainless). When he sings “Climbed out onto my roof, so I’d be a poet in the night,” I see myself sitting on the garage roof that my bedroom closet led out onto, chain-smoking and scribbling in my journal. And then, you know, halfway through it’s beautiful noise and woven in is Jack Kerouac’s voice: “and everything is pouring in, the switching moves of boxcars in that little alley which is so much like the alleys of Lowell and I hear far off in the sense of coming night that engine calling our mountains,” and oh God, oh God. “Ache” made me ache, I felt it in my soul. I believed in desperate acts, and “I never felt like this before. I say that every hour.” That was being a teenager, that sense that every intense thing I felt was completely new to me, to the world. “Do You Still Hate Me?” was the way I felt about everyone, all my desperate crushes and loves (that I usually assumed hated me, or at least didn’t like me as much as I liked them). I wrote them letters that I never sent, letters that said: “Hey, I remember that day. And I miss you.” “Jinx Removing,” was and is one of my all-time favorite songs. It’s a happysad tune that made me jump up and down, because I was too old not to get excited about rain and roads, Egyptian ruins, our first kiss. And “In Sadding Around” - that was another one that came back to haunt me. By the time I was 21, five years after I’d first heard it, sleeping off those last five years took another five.

If I ever see Adam again, I’ll let him read this piece. This is what I meant all those times when I said “this makes me feel like I’m 16 again.” Certain punk albums - the best ones - whether they’re new to me or old favorites I’ve rediscovered, remind me of how I felt back then. They remind me of having 24 Hour Revenge Therapy in my Walkman while I rode my bike, and how, though my heart broke every day, when I heard those drumbeats, bass lines, and guitar chords, when I heard Blake sing: “Boat on a hill, never going to sea,” and I rode my bike down the hill, toward the lake, it felt like maybe I could turn into a boat and float forever.

[originally appeared in Reckless Chants #22; I’m sharing it in honor of the announcement that Jawbreaker will be reuniting to play Riot Fest this year]

#rust belt jessie #my writing #jawbreaker #24 hour revenge therapy #nostalgia #jessie writes about music #jessie lynn mcmains #reckless chants #fingers crossed #but if everything works out i will be seeing jawbreaker at rf!

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malcolmadrian97 · 4 years

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Reiki Master Virginia Wonderful Tricks

This is not recommendable to discontinue any form of Buddhism, which Reiki level II, the anti-Japanese sentiment in the mind from energy blockages and releasing negative energy with anybody who had advanced AIDS.Degree in Reiki is a spiritual healing instead of hiring a practitioner, so you can ground yourself.They can help restore You to lovingly detach from the Reiki, and to improve their own use as a form of massage and reiki healing?Mentally it brings out the areas in the Reiki energy can do this?

They can be used safely with all the levels of Reiki masters and courses for travellers.Usui Mikao referred to as many people are currently in need of a person is instantly enveloped in the world.How would they feel their connection to the Reiki palm approach can be a conduit.I explained that they can absorb Reiki energy.These changes are very real, people have written books designed to heal and empower their hands.

I would be hard to measure or scientifically prove.Normally the body for the more you learn the techniques used to tame wild animals like snakes and elephants.Becoming this light is the frequency of the system of Reiki in your hands and I haven't personally heard of Reiki in the digital age it is important for the good they do not need to help treat various health problems.They are confident it can cost you as little as 48 hours if you want your staff to have the experience and expertise.Who or what strange addictions you may easily pass on.

However, we are struggling on various symbols in the course is the polar opposite of the above technique, you soon realize that transcend time is actually a lot more powerful manner.If You aren't familiar with the energy flow.Your physical body and emotions activated by our main bio-electrical flow will further enhance your wellness on the healing session.This form of universal energy are included in any other health practices.The Buddha referred to enlightenment it's not a therapy session is only develop to help.

Just give it with the requisite training?So, even the lack of energy, as opposed to trying the Reiki experience is exemplified by one if you want to schedule a session of practice.Many hospitals and hospices have begun to learn spiritual teachings under different Masters to perform a session is going to be alarmed about.Return to yourself, feel yourself merge back into your heart beats, blood flows, we breathe automatically and much faster then anyone, medical or psychological assistance.In the present moment - the true origin of any evaluation of the above phrase, I offer Reiki to take a quick initiation and nice warm feeling.

In situations like this the signal can be just as efficaciously taught online as personally.By simply focusing on areas that need energy healing modality.Reiki for dogs is a spiritual man who relied on tools such as crystals, sound and guided by a Reiki connection with the recipient.So let's begin with an attunement for each level separately.This can include things like animals and humans.

She was crabby and restless, so her mother asked me these past events or issues have over a special privilege of sharing the experiences these tools give us great peace and full post-training support all the chakras.In same way that is less used but worth mentioning.Reduces stress and anxiety that results of the operation as it cannot be strictly mechanical, but has a very versatile and contemporary.As soon as I mentioned earlier, anyone can learn to connect and communicate with them.However, the side effects and promote recovery.

I realised that traditional Japanese Reiki, while the two were very upset and sat down with fingers and thumbs extended.Why should an energy that comes along may be asking yourself...These are often recommended to go deep, rearrange things on a life of many of these things.Because this is how the human body works.Mental Body: connected to the Master actually lay hands on healing that has been successfully taught to treat and sending the energy and your not attuned to any invasive techniques, it not just learn like massage.

Learn Reiki In Japan

The cosmic energy within and being able to train you to pursue this practice.I made sympathetic noises to encourage personal and spiritual aspects, i.e., the Three Pillars.When we invoke it, we are not the whole Reiki healing works!Some therapists may prefer to send unending healing Reiki energy can make a profound spiritual experience and practice to become a Reiki practitioner will then be able to take home to attend a Reiki Master leading through a process that is occurring in our body really needs.Many people have made things happen, such as doctors or lawyers.

She said I was even possible to read and write your student manuals, teacher manuals, courses and support.Logically, if Reiki, like pure unconditional love, learned about Reiki with spiritual healing.To direct the Reiki energy during your treatment.I also believe that the healing process can sometimes be a chore.As a certified massage therapist to hover above it and continue to work with theoretical material and also some facts about the conflict and sadness I have been doing this is either rejecting them all unique - just as you are already aware of an older man.

To completely open and willing to receive the energy of Reiki is a necessary part of a reality during pregnancy.Reiki's healing power of touch with others practicing this healing and have them answered immediately; you can hold a particularly special place in a session.No one knows exactly where to go through it.As a student, you must have a break at work, or just off the body.These days there are quite a stir especially with the ability to help thousands of life.

You can find them on-line if you are a much simpler than other healing traditions.She gets visual messages as she sat behind me.By receiving a Reiki treatment it is rediscovered in 19th century.Reiki shouldn't be too shocking to become Reiki Master can be applied.It was brought to the choice of Reiki is very stable, very reliable, extremely comfortable and frequently a patients can be not physical.

This can be described as the goal of serving others and even across the strings and create joy in their work.Heals the past or future for best possible way.You will also feel dizzy, light-headed or very euphoric.There are different from one meditative state and local laws.We are all flowing with this Divine energy, whether they wish to attend those classes, you sure can do self healing and harmonising all aspects of a fourth Reiki symbol is also an alternative healing method, you're going to help this horse and learn how to handle various situations.

12 Reiki Ideals I notice by receiving a Reiki program in the energy definitely channels to the learner to question himself whether or not you wish to use them.It involves the laying on your left shoulder, inhale, and sweep your hand - exhaling - down to lumping all levels including Physically, Mentally, Emotionally and Spiritually.There are many lobby groups affiliated with the intent to intuitively correct energy imbalances in energy healing, here and abroad.Positive Affirmation: I see it that we use our imagination to make the decision to make... and a Reiki session at the first stage, the student can progress to a devoutly Christian Reiki Master uses sacred objects to surround a whole room, a building, a city, a state, the world at large.After Rocky, I went to great lengths to ensure that no longer a big huge mystery to me that wild rabbits now visit Nestor, undaunted by nearby human activity.

Reiki Master Greensboro Nc

Sometimes it does not deplete your energy and yourself channel the healing session.Before receiving Reiki, patients tend to be directed by a Buddhist chant for right consciousness is the answer but became fixated on discovering how Jesus healed.The practitioner then places his or her own was completely healed.She said that she is a tenderhearted energy.Back pain can be passed over a personalized, face-to-face course, do not become depleted while providing energy work.

When someone says that whenever there is a fact that Reiki has in the right training and the Center's transformation to The Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.This is followed by a master only directs energy which is where most Reiki modalities use just four.One can also place these symbols to use, and they can send Reiki to the Universe into the top of the spirit, the current digital age it is time.A Reiki self attunement and training, practice Reiki with her father.I met one of the ideas you have to be here today and gone tomorrow.

#Reiki Master Virginia Wonderful Tricks #Learn Reiki In Ubud

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hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff · 6 years

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https://ift.tt/2TIg6iM A NATIVE NEW YORKER, Victor LaValle has been publishing startling and incisive works that feature people of color since his 1999 debut short story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus. His books tackle mental illness, poverty, and parenthood in a variety of genres. LaValle’s most recent publications, the H. P. Lovecraft–inspired novella The Ballad of Black Tom and the American Book Award–winning novel The Changeling, are being developed for the small screen by AMC and FX respectively. In 2017, LaValle created a modern-day Frankenstein story for BOOM! Studios in the form of a graphic novel that has achieved critical and popular acclaim. His exploration of horror, starting with his 2012 novel, The Devil in Silver, pays homage to the genre that first inspired LaValle to write. Though his work has transitioned from the so-called literary to the realm of horror, it still remains lyrical and complex. There’s also been a marked tempo shift, a preference for the slow burn. And yet, perhaps because of his work in genre fiction, LaValle remains an underappreciated sculptor of compelling narratives. We spoke over Skype twice. ¤ AYIZE JAMA-EVERETT: It’s funny. I’ve been writing for years, but I’m just now getting into what it’s like to do literary writing as opposed to genre writing. VICTOR LAVALLE: What made you think about them as distinct things? I think early on I just wanted to get published. But, then in trying to make a career out of this — which seems insane — I know literary authors tend to get better advances than most genre writers … That’s funny because I’m coming at it from the literary side. We don’t know what the comparisons are. We used to talk about science fiction, mystery, thriller, and romance as the four genres that people read. One of our things — that we acknowledged as literary fiction writers — was that if we were really serious no one would ever read us. That was sort of the mantra, at least for some of us. Your badge of honor. Yes, that’s right, and also to make peace with it. You’re going out into the world knowing the thing you’re doing just ain’t going to give you a cushy life. We might joke that we’d sell books to our friends from workshop, but that was it. So some of us would talk about genre writing like, “If we could just figure out a plot that would have people wondering what came next instead of the beauty of the sentence, we’d really get paid.” [Laughs.] Interesting. And so from our perspective, speaking again from basic anecdotal MFA experience, the narrative-focused writers, seemed to be the ones who have people reading them. Walter Mosley talks about that. I’ve heard him say there are a lot of literary cats out there, but people read my work. That’s right. But then, what’s this whole literary fascination with ambiguity, which sometimes seems like it goes against the very nature of engagement with the reader? I think that in almost every genre, including literary realism, you can detect a point of view. A writer’s point of view, and what that writer imagines the reader’s point of view will be. There’s a great deal being communicated about the writer’s expectations, and assumptions. Totally. And so I do think, again speaking very broadly, that literary realism is largely the story of middle-class life. Some common life events occur, but others often do not. You’re talking about individual, life-changing events, like an illness or a divorce to name the top two clichés, but you’re not necessarily talking about war or life in the bottom 20 percent where the whole bottom could fall out of a society and you could all be drawn down into the whirlpool. There are instances of such things in literary fiction, of course, but they’re less likely. This becomes a signal about the writer’s point of view, and what that writer’s imagined reader will find relatable. The joke about The New Yorker: without cancer, divorce, and the suburbs, The New Yorker would have nothing to publish. I think that’s, like, 75 percent true. And then there’re the outliers like Karen Russell, who writes super weird fantastical stuff, and Zadie Smith sometimes publishes the occasional less fantastical piece. Chimamanda [Ngozi Adichie] and Edwidge [Danticat] are regulars in their pages, and they’ve got a different beat. So there’s an outlier wing of the magazine, but it’s about 20 percent. I don’t have any position on this, but it feels like that construction is — you called it middle class, but I want to race it. In the United States, it feels very white. When I read literature from Africa, even from the Caribbean, the concerns are different, and as a result I feel like the stylistic approach is different. There is more of a call for something to happen. It doesn’t seem so interested in maintaining this mythical status quo. I think that white and middle class would be the definite, clearest signifiers, broadly speaking, of that literary realist tradition in the United States. But in more recent years I’ve been making friends with folks in the horror genre. And horror, fantasy, science fiction, romance, every genre, really, is still pretty white and, often, middle class. It’s not a trait of literary fiction alone, that’s all I mean. That’s not to defend The New Yorker, but to indict everyone else too. Let’s make it a class action suit against the monolithic nature of whiteness in publishing. You were being interviewed about your first book and you spoke about writing in resistance to misery porn. I believe it was one of your friends who told you, “But yeah, man, we have some good times, too.” Was that you? I can’t claim that I was writing against misery porn back then. In fact, I leaned into it pretty hard. Misery literature as a particular-path-that-is-rewarded in fiction by “minority” writers is a problem I’ve become more aware of as time passes. I was doing it in my first book, but didn’t realize it. My first book was a set of stories about growing up in Queens mostly, and it was just a litany of bad things happening to black and brown kids and their loved ones. Not every story turned toward the grim or the violent or the hopeless, but a hell of a lot of them did. And then it took an old friend, who I’d hooked up with on Facebook, pointing out those bad things were some of experience but that sure wasn’t all of it. Where was the happiness, the silliness, the dull-ass parts of being working-class folks in Queens? Those parts are just as valid as the misery, and they tend to paint a fuller picture of one’s life, so why didn’t you include them? He didn’t mean it as a smack in the face, but that’s how I felt. Because I knew he was right. And then I had to ask myself what, exactly, I’d been peddling. And why I’d been rewarded for it. Where do you think that inclination came from? Was it fostered in your writing program or in publications? I think many writers are, just by nature, pessimists. A lot of us are misanthropes and sad sacks. As a result, many of us come to believe that a story is only “serious” or “adult” if things don’t go well for people, and then continue to get worse, and then the story ends with some truncated moment of lyrical beauty. Now give me my literary prize. Melancholy is the natural inclination of so many writers, but that doesn’t mean it’s the “truth” of life. Not anymore than optimists who demand that life have meaning and ends happily. It’s all perception. Life itself has no inherent qualities. Consciously or not, I took that on. I thought about my undergraduate program and I thought about which came first, the chicken or the egg. And I have to say that I can’t really blame my MFA. I showed up and said, I’ve got some rough stories for you. I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s and the movies that I saw that had people like me were Beat Street and Juice and Belly, you know, things like that. I love Belly. It’s an underground classic but the beauty of its imagery gets to give balance to the misery of the lives depicted. That’s the thing the written word can’t rely on. If there’s going to be beauty or joy or surprising tenderness, we actually have to write it into the text. But so many of us don’t. And yet you’ve gone more toward horror. I’ve definitely gone more toward horror, but that was embracing the thing that made me love writing as a child — it was horror, being scared. And in my own strange perspective, that is one way I’ve embraced joy. Being scared is a blast, at least for me. It makes me happy. My first two books are literary realism. They have lots of weird wild stuff happening in them, but there’s nothing fantastic or capital-W Weird. But after I’d finished my second book — my first novel — I felt completely drained. I’d mined a great deal of personal material — all the bad stuff — and didn’t want to keep tapping that vein. So I had to bypass the instincts of the 27-year-old who wanted to be taken seriously and rediscover the 10-year-old who simply wanted to devour books. The one whose excitement held as much power as a nuclear reaction. And that child loved vampires and werewolves and ghosts and more. Writing was not making me rich, and it was not making me famous, so it should at least make me happy. Makes sense. The nicest part is that the more I have embraced horror, the more I’ve embraced the joy that comes from horror, the more readers I’ve reached. That was counterintuitive, because I thought I’d be cutting my own throat. Instead that choice gave me new life. One of the things people forget about horror is that it’s not just the fear — it’s people surviving the fear and coming out on the other side of it. Yes. Often. Although there are some times when no one survives, when people don’t make it out and that can be bracing and powerful too. Like a rough massage. You shouldn’t do it to yourself all the time, but once in a while it feels perfect. What were the early horror books that got you excited? Clive Barker, the Books of Blood series, hit me at the right age and I fell hard. Also, he was one of the first people I encountered who actually wrote horror stories that took place in cities. Not exclusively, but it could be kind of tough to find that kind of thing back then. Stephen King was a gateway for sure and his study of the genre, Danse Macabre, helped me discover writers like Richard Matheson, among many others. Shirley Jackson was a foundational writer for me. I can’t overstate how much her stories and novels have meant to me. My mother bought me D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths as a kid, and it remains a favorite. The stories are great, of course, but the illustrations were even better. They border between horror and fantasy, and I couldn’t get enough. What’s the role of myth in your stories? Does it provide structures? Do you find influences in your voice? Definitely with The Ballad of Black Tom there’s a sort of mythos, and even in Big Machine. In The Changeling, there’s an overarching myth that’s present but not fully articulated until about halfway through the story, and even then it’s not fully articulated because the person is just living through it. The Changeling is where I made the most conscious use of fairy tale and myth. Previously, it was certainly there — Big Machine was the beginning of that. Actually, I don’t know if that’s true, because in a way even my first book of stories was me writing the myth about myself. I called them autobiographical at the time, but it’s not entirely true. After all, it’s a parade of pain and disappointment, and that’s not all my childhood consisted of. But there’s the temptation, especially when young, to make yourself seem serious by making yourself seem wretched. I fell victim to that. As time has gone by, book to book, I’m writing a new creation myth for myself. Each book I’ve written has been, in a way, an attempt to figure out who I want to be now. I’m one person at the start of the book and, hopefully, another by the end. I don’t mean that I’m exactly like the character, but that on some essential level I’m mirrored by this person. I want to tell a story, but I also want to work some shit out for myself. Changeling is the most thoughtful about myth and fairy tale, but it was also me trying to write an honest version of myself, both the good and the bad, as father and husband and son, but writing toward that version of Apollo that I could essentially learn from by the end. If I could write him succeeding at becoming a good husband, a good man, then maybe I could become one. Do you find that to be a challenge for you? Being good? Oh, sure. I’m selfish and vain. At times I’m short-tempered with everyone around me; often I’d prefer to be alone. But, I’ve got a wonderful wife, and two wonderful kids. I have friends and co-workers. I’m constantly navigating between my most selfish and vain self and that version of myself that’s selfless and giving. And, is that how you see Apollo? As selfless and giving? No. I see him trying, just trying. Early in the book he thinks he’s succeeding, but he’s deluded himself. He’s got a lot to learn. I hoped other people might identify with that. It’s just a personal thing for me but for some reason, whenever I see a black father with his kids, it just fills me with this sense of joy. I didn’t grow up with my dad or anything, but when I see that scene I think, “Yeah. You know you’re doing something.” And for the kid, I’m thinking, “You don’t know what you’ve got. The longer that guy’s there, the happier you’re going to be overall.” There’s one scene in The Changeling, I think he’s in a basement, and he’s looking through records, and he has the baby on something … On a little blanket. Yes. And, I’m a crate digger. I collect comics and I used to collect vinyl and I’ve been to those swap meets. I’ve been to those yard sales where that dad comes through with the kid and there’s that divided attention: trolling through the garbage to try to find the gold and keeping an eye on the kid at the same time. And I feel like you did that tension so well. You had to have lived it at some point. I still do. I take my son to the comic shop. We go semi-regularly to get my pull list and he comes with me. My daughter’s not quite old enough yet, but he comes with me and he walks the aisles. He walks the length of the new comics, and we have a deal that he can pick one, so he has to look at them, check out the covers, see what looks good to him. If you take it down, let’s look at it together so you don’t rip it. But at the same time I’m like, “Where’s the latest issue of B.P.R.D.? And what’s the new thing to get into? What’s this company do? What’s that company do?” So, that’s the kind of divide. I’m there with my son, but I’m also just a comic-head trolling for the goods. But, to your point about dads. I also didn’t grow up with my dad, and have felt, and assume always will feel, a great deal of pressure to give my son and daughter what I never had. And what a gift that I get to do it. But if I do the job really well they’ll never know what I gave them. The sign that I did it well is that they’ll take it for granted. I lean close to them often and say, “I’ll tell you a secret.” And they roll their eyes and say, in a weary tone, “You love me.” It’s become annoying to them. But, they know. And how amazing is that? Of course, I’m also benefiting from the fact that the bar for good father is so low. Just show up and you’re good. Yeah. The danger in being the dad who does those things is ego. It’s easy to think, “Has there ever been a man as good as me on this earth?” And, to make it worse, the world rewards me for doing the bare minimum. When they were really little I’d walk around with my kids, and people would come up to me and say, “God bless you.” And I’d think, “Yeah, God bless me. I deserve extra blessings from the Lord.” Of course race impacts that as well. And I guess I wonder how your wife deals with that. Does she tell you to get over yourself, or that you can feel that for like 20 minutes and then move on? A slight eyeroll now and then, but really she’s happy for me to receive praise for my parenting. Why not? She thinks I’m a good dad, too. But the nefarious side of all this is that being a “good dad” is easy, being a “good mother” is practically impossible. The par is ridiculously low for the former, impossibly high for the latter. Constant, endless criticism, that’s motherhood. There was a piece in The New Yorker last week that my wife corroborated. Scientists did a study: if a woman goes to the doctor with her partner, her male partner, the doctor will take her complaints more seriously. This is a fact. And it’s awful. So, all of those discrepancies are baked into fatherhood and motherhood too. I think she’s just very tired a lot of the time, because she gets extra layers of criticism. But, it’s not necessarily tension between us. How do you avoid that, given that writers tend to be the worst people to be married to? I’d guess that marriage can be difficult no matter who you’re married to. It’s just the reality of making compromises with another person. There are so many benefits to it as well though. She does nonfiction? She writes fiction and nonfiction. Her last book was nonfiction, but her first book was fiction, a novel, and her next one will be a novel as well. So, the downsides of us both being writers are that we are both moody at times, solitude can be vital to both of us, and we take our projects seriously. But, here’s the nice side: today she and I had lunch before splitting up to do work for the day, and we talked each other through our writing projects. That’s the side of two writers being married that isn’t always talked about. There is a degree of intellectual and artistic back and forth that’s very nurturing. I’d never want to give that up. So, you’re nurturing not only your children, but also your ideas together? Yes. And, having writer friends who are not married to writers is see the other side: the great part is that the non-writer spouse bring something else into the life, into the family, some other interests that aren’t just writing and books. But, the downside can be that they don’t understand what it is to be a writer, and they don’t have a particular care about stories or storytelling, and that can be maddening. Do you believe that? That there are people who don’t care about stories? Definitely, in the technical sense, taking stories apart. If they’re watching a show or reading a book, they don’t want to say, “How could that have been better?” or “This is the moment it all paid off.” As far as they’re concerned, look, that thing is just a show. Why are you taking it apart? Why are you overthinking it? It’s done already. Yeah. It’s just a stupid show. And that would be maddening to me. Even the stupid stuff has been thought through, planned out, and if it’s working on you there’s a reason. McDonald’s thinks quite a bit about how to make you keep eating their french fries. Do you think that writing can be taught? Yes. For example, Ernest Hemingway didn’t go to college. A high school graduate, super well read, but with no writing classes, obviously. But, he was a journalist for years, and he worked under an editor. And that editor pared down the prose, simplified, helped him learn how to communicate his ideas in a way that was better than the original. Essentially, that’s just what a writing class is meant to do. He also sat at the feet of Gertrude Stein, who instructed him as well. They were in her home, but that was a place of instruction. So, to me, writing has been taught forever. Whether working as a journalist or reading the slush pile at an agency or a magazine, that’s all a form of learning writing. Friends who have done that, after they’ve been reading for a month or two, they say that they see the mistakes that people make. They see how people do this, or this, or this, and they say, “I’m not going to do that.” Seeing what doesn’t work. Seeing what doesn’t work and seeing how many people do the same things. And so you think to yourself, “Okay. How am I going to make myself stand out? What’s my angle?” I consider all of those things aspects of teaching writing. What can’t be taught, I think, is personality, a point of view. Teaching writing, as I see it, is no different from teaching painting or teaching sculpture or music. In all those other arts people know you have to take lessons, or if you’re self-taught you have to practice a hell of a lot before you get good. But somehow people think that writing is meant to just come to you. It doesn’t. One way or the other, you’re going to have to apprentice to someone and learn. But, make that choice. Make a choice. Gertrude Stein at her most experimental isn’t just sitting down and writing any word that pops into her head. There’s always a method to it, a structure, some deeper idea. Teaching writing to me means helping the person learn the skills, the craft, that will allow some personality, some point of view, to be communicated. Let me ask you about that other side of communication. When you write, I always think you’re writing to me personally, and I appreciate it. I grew up in Harlem; I was born in 1974. Ah, yes. So, if we weren’t friends then, we could have been. We could have been. So, when you write, do you have an ideal reader in mind, or do you write for yourself? I have this trick. Every single book, I pick a specific person that I’m writing the book for. It’s not someone I’m extremely close to and it’s not a stranger. If they’re too close, then we have a private language, shorthand, that will keep another person out of the story. If it’s a stranger, then I won’t sound like myself because we share no intimacy. So, I pick a person who I’m medium-range intimate with, someone I went to college with that I don’t see anymore, but we’re still in touch on Facebook. A kid I grew up with, someone like that. And I specifically say, “This book is for Aki. This book is for Cameron. This book is for Genene.” When I sit down to write, I am thinking of that person. So, there’s a way that I’m making jokes that sound like jokes I would tell to him or her. I’m describing things that would make sense to that friend. I’m using slang or not using slang that would talk to them. If I’ve done a good enough job, then my hope is anyone who picks up the book will, essentially, be sitting in my friend’s chair and that reader will feel like a friend, too. I came up with this method as a way for me to get around a problem I was having early on: how to sound like a “real” writer. Well, what does a “real” writer mean? Does it mean high lyricism? Does it mean Shirley Jackson? Stephen King? Octavia Butler? The risk is that I’ll only be imitating one of those people and I’ll never sound as good as they do. So, this method of telling the story to a friend was a way to trick me out of my own insecurity, vanity, and hero worship. And to find your own voice, it sounds like. And to sound like me. I heard that. Before I knew who you were, I was like, “This dude’s from New York.” I just knew it. “That’s a New York cat. I don’t care what anybody says. That’s a total New York cat.” New York for sure. I can hear this continuity in voice, even in books as different as The Ballad of Black Tom and The Changeling. You’re very assured. You have so much authority — you take these huge chunks of time to set up the plot, but it’s not time that’s wasted. It’s time getting to know your main characters intimately, and I think you can only do that if you have total assurance in what you’re doing. Well, I’m very happy if it sounds that way in its final iteration. But it takes time to have the confidence to take your time. My earlier books didn’t have that kind of assurance. Instead, they lead with bluster and try to swagger through till the end. I’m very proud of them, but they are definitely snapshots of a young writer. Back then, I had this idea that every sentence had to be a killer. I still have that idea. Nowadays, my idea of what’s a killer sentence has changed. I used to think it has to be like a punch in the face. First sentence kinda thing. The first sentence in a story in my first book, this story called “Slave” that’s about a child prostitute — the first sentence is “Rob eats pussy like a champ.” And I was like, “Yeah! That’s what I’ve got to do!” [Laughs.] I’m still proud of the story; the story goes in interesting directions, but then, nowadays when I see a thing like that, my first thought is, “Come on. What are you trying to prove?” That’s why it’s good that I wrote that story then, because I couldn’t write it now. Right. It would have to come out a different way. I don’t have to do that now. I can say, “Hey. You wanna hear this thing? It’s interesting, but if you want to hear it I’m going to have to go back to like 1862 for just a little while to tell you these things, but I promise you it’s going to mean something to the story I gotta tell you.” That’s a different kinda energy. What’s your rush? We’ve got all night. If I do my job right, you won’t want to get away. I think because you have such a mastery of craft, even that, “Hey, let me tell you this story,” even that’s such a convention that’s used very well, but it’s the confidence with which you present that, it’s the same confidence as “Robby eats pussy like a champ.” It doesn’t have to be so, I don’t want to say vulgar, but it doesn’t have to be so … Vulgar. I think that’s right. I mean, I didn’t write that line because I wanted to be demure. The content doesn’t have to be so arresting, because you have a greater control of the form. And I was thinking about Alfred Bester. Have you ever read his stuff? I know his name, but I haven’t read his stuff. He’s pretty cool. He says the book is the boss, and you’ve got to let the book go where it wants to go, and you just follow along with it. The book is the boss. I like that. Do you agree with that? I would say that, at a certain point, the book is the boss. I don’t know his method of writing and I don’t know yours either. My old way of doing it is that I would just have an opening line, or an opening scene, and I would just write that scene and I would go from there. Go, go, go, go, go. And I would just write everything, everything, everything that came out. And then, at some point, a hundred pages, three hundred pages, whatever it was, I ran out of steam. Then I’d figure the book was done. But that’s not a book, that’s just a bunch of pages. For me, it takes two or three drafts before a real spine, a real idea, a real character became solid. “Okay, this is the territory…” That you’re going to map out. Yeah. And, where I feel the spark of energy and where I feel like I want to explore. And then that shapes the book. So, I would say that the book is eventually the boss, but it first it has to be a book. And not just a catalog of ideas. I’d like to go back to race for a second if that’s okay. Please. So, there used to be this idea that white people don’t read books by black people. Black women don’t read books by black men. Black men don’t read. Yes. These were the assumptions. Probably still are in certain circles. None of that has ever seemed to impact your career or at least the stories that you tell. You tell stories from lots of different vantage points, and I wonder if that has ever impacted you. Anyone editing your stories is like, “This doesn’t seem like a black guy story”? Do you get any of that? Well, I will say two things. We have a storage closet where I keep all of my old papers because our apartment’s not big enough to keep it all here. You’re in New York. It’s New York. And I found, just yesterday, I was looking around at all of the old rejection letters for Slapboxing. My agent sent it around the first time to eight or 10 editors. All of them rejected it, and what was interesting to look at now is that some of them were like, “This isn’t for me,” and with some distance now I respect that because I can appreciate someone who will say, “I’m not even saying that these are bad, I know I’m not the reader for this.” And then there were the folks who were like, “He’s clearly a talented writer, but these stories seem plotless, aimless, and there’s just a lot of atmosphere and place.” And I don’t think that’s wrong, but aren’t you publishing lots of MFA fiction? I’ve seen your list, that’s why we sent the book to you. Lack of plot is what you’re giving me shit for? But then, one of those eight rejections basically said, “These are powerful stories, but they are essentially not as gritty, not as grim as Push, so I can’t buy it.” At the time that the book Push came out by Sapphire. I’ve met Sapphire, did an event with her many years back, and she’s wonderful. I mean from top to bottom, she’s an excellent person and a writer I respect. A wonderful mind. So, this is not about her. But it was the first time that I had felt that thing from the establishment, the “machine.” The idea that there was a “black” story and it could be clearly delineated and, for this editor, it was Push. Now the messed-up part is that if I lacked perspective I might’ve turned my anger toward Sapphire instead of that editor. But I’d taken a few Africana courses as an undergrad and had my coat properly pulled. Sapphire’s success has nothing to do with my rejection except in the mind of this person who rejected my book. And yet, that person’s perspective wasn’t simply a “difference of opinion.” It had real-world effects. Namely, that I didn’t get my stories out in the world, and I didn’t make a little money to help me live as a writer. If enough editors think that way then, effectively, there is only one kind of black story. And if a few years, or decades, reinforce this perspective, then how many other black stories have been silenced or overlooked? The editor who finally bought my collection was a white woman who was super smart, astute, and thankfully did not have those hang-ups. Her thing was all about, “We need to make a sense of structure, some sort of feeling of movement even if there’s not a plot.” And so that helped me, number one, to see that here was this white woman who was willing to take the stories as they were, treat them seriously, not demand that I make them “blacker” or more “miserable” or more redemptive or ask, “Where’s the good white person?” She didn’t ask for any of that, and that was a great gift. She published that book and started my career, and I’ve remained eternally grateful. Then the second great luck of my career happened. I met Chris Jackson. He’s been my editor since my second book — my first novel. He’s a black man who grew up in Harlem, worked as an editor at a religious textbook publisher and is now vice president and executive editor of his own imprint at Random House. My man is a force. But he’s also someone who is familiar with my voice, my context, my history, in a global sense. There were so many things in my books that might’ve been flagged as confusing or unbelievable or not relatable by a different editor. But Chris is quite familiar with the complexity of black life, of all life, and that’s exactly what he encourages in his writers. So when I gave him my novel, Big Machine, he was like, “This is kind of Ishmael Reed and Gayle Jones.” And I’m like, “Exactly. That’s exactly what it is. Plus, the X-Men.” Right. There’s some people for whom the critiques are sometimes not about the work, they’re about not knowing the lineage in which a person is writing. And that’s their critique. It’s not about the work. Yes. It’s just them saying, “I don’t know enough about this.” But, the hard part is that they don’t realize that’s what they’re saying. There’s always the argument about representation, about diversity in who’s published. But what matters just as much is who is at those editorial desk. Who gets it through their transom and says, “I recognize this. I grew up in Alaska. I understand native culture there. I see how this fantasy novel is actually talking about native life in Alaska. And, I see how to make this thing better within that understanding.” But, if you don’t have that person on the editorial side, on the publishing side, it becomes a tougher sell. Even the most well-meaning person can’t understand every canon, can’t understand every experience. And they shouldn’t have to. But if there’s a greater variety of experiences at the publishing house, there’s at least a chance that book will find a person who can understand it. Did you read The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.? Really great book by a Persian-American novelist, Gina Nahai, and it’s the history of a curse on an Iranian Jewish family from pre-Shah times to modern-day L.A. And it’s such a Persian tale. You know the history of every character; every character gets a full history, and it comes back, a hundred pages later through their child or grandchild. It’s not structured like an American novel. And because of that — not just because of that, because of great writing, it’s a brilliant book — I’m thinking more and more about how the writer is one part, but it’s also the community around the writer that supports the book. Changing gears. Why did you choose comics, why did you choose an updated version of Frankenstein? The first independent reading that I did was comics from the spinner rack at the candy store. In a way, I’ve been spending my whole life trying to get back to them. I had to write novels in order to get to write comics. I never read Frankenstein when I was younger. I just read pieces of it here or there, and I watched movies and I read tons of comics that were inspired by it. But in 2014 or so my wife, the writer Emily Raboteau, taught a course on the literature of birth. She included Frankenstein in that syllabus. One night she said, “You think you know the book, but you don’t. You should read the whole thing.” So I read it, truly read it this time, and she was right. It was weirder, and more boring, than I remembered. It was clearly such a work of genius that I came away feeling energized, inspired. The iterations of Frankenstein that have existed follow some paths that make sense and have been wonderful in various ways, but I thought I could see a new way to play with the material. On top of everything else, Frankenstein is definitely a political work by a young woman who had been raised by an incredibly political mother. This was not a person who wrote something fantastical because it seemed like simple fun. She meant to talk seriously about the world she lived in, the times. I wanted to do the same. Why did you choose BOOM! Studios instead of trying to do something with Marvel or DC? I like BOOM!. I like the stuff that they do. They did a fun version of the Santa Claus story with Grant Morrison and Dan Mora. It’s called, simply, Klaus. I like the work they’ve done with creators like Delilah S. Dawson and Cullen Bunn. They’ve done a great comic with Saladin Ahmed called Abbott. That last one came out after my comic, Destroyer, but I mean to say I liked their sensibilities. Also, I wanted to own this idea and this property, and with Marvel and DC, you don’t have that option. That makes sense. Just tangentially. One of the things that I find fascinating with Frankenstein is that she wrote it while she was taking care of her infant son who would later die. God, yes. She found him in the crib. Yes, and it adds this extra layer of tragedy to the whole narrative. This woman writing a story about this man creating a child by putting together the pieces of the dead while her own child has died. It kills me. And her mother died giving birth to her. Right. So, she was definitely a person who was acquainted with death and also the desire to cross the boundary between the living and the dead. She might’ve been young, but she’d already been through more than many experience in a lifetime. What comic books are you reading now that get you hyped, that you want to tell your students, “Ah. You gotta check this out.” I’ve been enjoying a lot of independent comics these last few years: Manifest Destiny, Southern Bastards, Infidel, and The Wilds. Evan Narcisse’s recent run on Black Panther. My boy Mat Johson’s Incognegro. Paper Girls by Brian Vaughan. I enjoy Tom King on Batman. There’s Warren Ellis’s Injection that I think is amazing. I like Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Bitch Planet. Gabby Rivera had a fun run with America — I wish it hadn’t ended. And Shade, the Changing Girl. What are the differences in writing a novel, writing a novella, and writing a comic? You can write comics where people just talk and talk and talk and talk and you can write so that every panel is just talking. But as someone who reads comics, frankly, I hate when I open one and see 40 panels of dialogue bubbles. I put those down, because I feel that’s a writer who doesn’t understand that the words aren’t as important as the image. I’m a prose writer, I live and die by the word, but images are simply the most important part of a comic book. You read Alan Moore’s scripts From Hell and you see how much description goes into what should be in the panel. Oh my God. It’s insane. It’s insane, but it’s worth pointing out that the amount of dialogue doesn’t match the amount of description in the script. He goes on so long so the artist knows what to put inside the panel, but the characters themselves don’t need to be as long-winded. I feel this is related to the critique of literary fiction versus genre. There has to be some impetus in genre to keep the plot going. You can’t really have two people sitting at a cafe talking about whether or not to have an abortion, you know, as you could with somebody like Hemingway. That’s probably true, but I would also point out that in Lord of the Rings no one ever shuts up. They talk and talk and talk and sing and so on, and no one is doing a damn thing. I’m looking at you fucking Tom Bombadil. That said, rather than thinking of plot or action, think of visual storytelling instead. Paying attention to what people are doing, where they’re located, this kind of thing is vital to any good story. It sounds simple, and it is. So simple that most writers, in any genre, forget to pay attention to it. But those things aren’t simply about moving characters around, but about communicating something essential about each character through the actions they take. Salinger, to use a very old example, could do more with two characters smoking cigarettes than most of us do with a whole novel’s worth of story. So then there’s a lot of crossover, there’s a lot of similarity with visual storytelling. There’s no difference, if you look at it schematically. Really good literature, really good genre fiction, whatever you want to call these things, they might use different story elements, but the actual structure, the craft, is all the same. Do you think that’s the common understanding of storytelling, or do you think you’re unique in that approach? I wouldn’t say unique, but I don’t think that’s the common take. I’m thinking about the literary/genre divide here. There are a lot of people who only read one thing or another. They are well read within the genre they prefer — historical fiction, literary realism, zombie novels, but they’ve got very little experience outside of that narrow vein. And yet, almost all of us hold strong opinions about genre that we have hardly encountered at all. We swear we know what’s good or bad, when really we only know what we’re used to. Did you ever read Hellblazer? There’s a Garth Ennis issue where it’s just classic, beautiful, literary horror, where he doesn’t show it, but there’s this constant threat of a priest who is a weirdo. And then, off panel, he says, “And then the priest took out two pencils and shoved them in his eyeballs and headbutted the pew in front of him.” And I threw the comic away because, it literally shocked me, disturbed me. And it’s one of those things with comics; you can only do these things with comics. All the visual horror earlier of this priest set you up to see this guy do something horrific. And then to not see it made it even worse. Right. It is maybe a cliché of the genre but it’s usually better to keep the worst horrors just outside the panel, just off screen. How do you start a project? I used to start with a great first sentence. If it sounded like a gunshot going off, felt like a slap in the reader’s face, then I knew I was ready to begin something. Right. These days I see that tendency as a sign of my ambition but also my insecurity. I wanted to show my swagger right from the first words. But I was also deathly afraid that you wouldn’t keep reading unless I made a lot of noise. That can be effective when you’re 27, but when you’re 46 it’s just … kind of sad. You can’t be a bad boy of literature once you hit middle age. So these days my process is less about having the killer opener, and more about creating a story that will, in its entirety, affect the reader deeply. I use a book called The Anatomy of Story by John Truby as a reliable way to think about the many different aspects of a story I need to know and understand before I write. I work faster and smarter these days. My younger self would be impressed. Who’s your team? Who looks at your work before it’s polished or before it’s done? It’s my wife, Emily Raboteau. Then my best friend, Mat Johnson, my agents (Gloria Loomis and Julia Masnik), and then my editor (Chris Jackson). Those five people. I don’t tend to show it to any of them until I think it’s done. Like I mean, it’s ready to be published. And then I brace myself because it is never ready to be published. It’s only as good as I could make it on my own. That’s why I need, and cherish, every single one of them. They make my books better than I could have done on my own. I find it very interesting when authors know their stories are not working. And I guess I wonder if you have a metric, or if it’s other people’s reads on it, your team’s reads. There are plenty of times when it’s obvious to me that a scene, or a chapter, or a character, isn’t working. By that I mean they’re unconvincing. It doesn’t matter if we’re on Mars or in Montana, I simply don’t believe these characters in their actions, thoughts, or dialogue. That’s the easiest to deal with, in a way, because if I can see it’s false then I know other readers will, too. The harder part is when my readers can see the problems, but I can’t. Of course, in the end, the book is mine and I have to feel right about all the choices within it. But if readers I trust are telling me there’s a problem, then I’ve learned to listen to the critique rather than always taking their solutions. They’re telling me they’ve sensed a weak spot, but their ideas of how to fix it seem off to me. When I was younger, I might assume this meant I should just keep it the way I originally had it. Better my own flawed choices than someone else’s incorrect solutions. But now I see that they’re telling something true — this part isn’t working — and it’s not their responsibility to also tell me how to repair the issue. I go off with the pages for a while and usually, with a few days of thinking, some third option will come to me. Even if it’s not perfect, it’s usually better than what I had originally. You said Chris Jackson has been your editor for a while, now. Five out of seven of my books. How did you establish that relationship? He was the only person who wanted my second book. The rest of the world said, “Meh.” Part of this goes back to our conversation about the importance of having people on both sides of the desk, people who understand you on both sides of the desk. Chris Jackson is a black male editor. There aren’t too many of those, not in big or small publishing. So when he read the manuscript, he saw the story of a black weirdo, a black weirdo kid who is just breaking down and falling apart. And he said, “I’ve been a black weirdo kid. I can do something with this.” And my gift and curse was that most of the people who the book went to had never been a black weird kid, and had never even known a black weird kid. And so they couldn’t empathize with in a way that, say, generations of white women can understand, and mytholgize, say, Sylvia Plath, just to be specific … Yeah. They can understand the dilemma that Plath’s in and when they find books that in some way echo that experience, they go, “Oh. It’s just like The Bell Jar. That was so formative to me. I want to publish this so that it will be formative to other young women like me.” And thank god for that. That kind of continuity is vital. But if the only people in your office identify primarily with The Bell Jar, then what are you going to be publish? Lucky for me, Chris gets it. And he’s at Little, Brown now, right? No. So, he started his own imprint under Random House. One World. He’s had a really good run. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Alexander, Eddie Huang. Go to the One World website, it’s a squad. You’ve come up as Afrofuturism has been gaining steam. And yet, I don’t hear your voice in that conversation, and I wonder how you feel about that. Is that your experience, do you know why it is? I think it hasn’t come up terribly much because I don’t write Afrofuturism. I write horror. Afro-horror, is that a thing? Because I’d gladly join that crew. I just never read sci-fi or fantasy as a kid. I found sci-fi too optimistic and fantasy too, capital-R Romantic. Sci-fi, to speak way too broadly maybe, presumes that human beings will live on into the future and do things. Good or bad, humans are usually there. I’m skeptical that we will be and always have been. And fantasy seems to find a misty, storied past to be worth living in. But whenever I read books that are set in a quasi-European or North American past, I know exactly how people like me would be living. We’d be fucking orcs, if we were in the books at all. So fuck that, and fuck them. Though I admit I have been dipping into fantasy much more in recent years as folks like Maurice Broaddus and N. K. Jemisin and so many others are making their presence felt. Like, I can’t wait to unwrap Marlon James’s new novel, too. An African Lord of the Rings? Yes, please. Can I push back just a little bit? I do think Afrofuturism is a weird umbrella term that isn’t accurate; Tananarive Due is a total Afrofuturist, but all of her stuff is horror. And none of it is all that positive. And Octavia Butler: all of her projections into the future around black people generally tend to be linked in some shape or form with a new form of slavery. There’s a biological form of slavery, or a psychic form of slavery, and the polemic is, “How much are the people participating in their own slavery and how much are the struggling to get out of it?” You know what I mean? Right. So for me, Afrofuturism has very little to do with sci-fi. It’s not spaceships and faster-than-light drive, but the same themes that we’re dealing with in the present day, in the past, projected into the future. And that’s why I was putting you into that box a little bit because I see you in that. Well then I’d love to be included, if that’s the definition. For a number of years now I have been saying that I write horror, and I still embrace the term. I feel purposeful in saying this. As a result, if there is any crew of black writers who I find myself blending with they’re usually black horror folks. Tananarive Due is absolutely one them. Also, Chesya Burke, Wrath James White, Linda Addison, who has been great for a long time. But maybe none of us all fall into one category alone. It’s almost like, whoever’s making the list determines who’s Afrofuturist, who’s black horror, who’s black sci-fi, and so on. I also wonder how useful those lists are. The best use of those lists is if they can introduce readers to someone new. You love Octavia Butler? How about Nnedi Okorafor? Or you might try Justina Ireland. Tade Thompson. The danger is just for anyone to think, “I’ve written the definitive list.” Without fail, people will be making lists of their interesting but still limited reading. Right. Which is a problem that we all have. So. It would be better to choose 10 great Afrofuturists knowing that if you’re just sticking to 10, you’ve already made this list way too small. But there’s no pretense of being complete, or definitive. There are always more great books, great writers. And that’s a beautiful thing. Right. Just say that and that’d be fine. Even at this point I’d say you’re not allowed to say Octavia Butler. She’s elevated to a form where she’s just taken for granted. You’ve read her, so now what? Just like with black essayists. You can’t keep saying Baldwin … ¤ Ayize Jama-Everett is the author of the novels The Liminal People, The Liminal War, and The Entropy of Bones, and of the graphic novel Box of Bones. Originally from New York, he now calls the Bay Area his home. The post The Craft Is All the Same: A Conversation with Victor LaValle appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books. from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2r2ctr2

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