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arecomicsevengood · 4 years

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More Quarantine Movies

Going to put up this log of what I’ve seen now, as some of the stuff I liked the most is leaving The Criterion Channel at the end of the month. I really don’t know if anyone gets anything out of these posts, these are mostly synopses and they’re maybe spoiler-heavy. Let me give you the gist of it now: Otto Preminger’s a really good filmmaker whose movies are really interesting, Jean Arthur’s a great actress who enlivens everything and is also in a bunch of good-to-great movies. Also, I didn’t write about it but I rewatched Death Race 2000, that movie rules, feels relevant to today’s politics, and is leaving Criterion Channel at the end of the month.

The Pawnbroker (1964) dir. Sidney Lumet

Based on novel by Edward Lewis Wallant, whose The Tenants Of Moonbloom was reprinted by NYRB Classics with a Dave Eggers intro. Also some of the earliest nudity in a mainstream American film. About the misanthropy of a holocaust survivor, living in New York City, and interacting with black people who vaguely feel like racist caricatures, in part because it’s a movie about a misanthrope told from his perspective. A ton of movies about race from this era feel dated, this feels legitimately edgy, which is a term that gets thrown around somewhat ironically now or viewed as a pejorative, like something trying to offend, this does feel like a genuine attempt to be honest and push things forward (I really was not expecting that nudity) but also doesn’t feel totally successful, definitely not particularly enjoyable.

Shockproof (1949) dir. Douglas Sirk

I haven’t seen Sirk’s later melodramas, this one intrigued me in part because the screenplay was written by Samuel Fuller, and it’s sort of a pulpy noir thing. A woman, fresh out of jail, ends up living with her parole officer who is trying to keep her on the straight and narrow and away from her criminal ex, but they end up falling in love. There’s a thing where the male lead’s younger brother talks about how the lady is beautiful that I sort of wish wasn’t in there, feels creepy to me. There’s a bit of a shift in the narrative with the third act, where the lovers end up on the run, the once-upstanding man now a criminal on account of love, but they are having the endurance of their love tested by circumstance, is one of those things where a story which felt somewhat unique over the course of its telling shifts into something more recognizable.

…And The Pursuit Of Happiness (1986) dir Louis Malle

I have watched most of Louis Malle’s feature films at this point, I believe, and had a vague curiosity about what his documentaries were like. This one, made shortly after he’d moved to the U.S. and married Candice Bergen (something that comes up in Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens, in that some prostitutes read aloud from a fashion magazine that discusses it) he made a film talking to various recent immigrants. He covers a lot of ground, covering people working as doctors, large communities living in housing projects and causing racial tension with black neighbors (who both resent the smell of the food they cook but also suspect they don’t know their rights as the property developers plan to evict everyone and have the projects demolished). By and large everyone spoke to believes in the notion of the American dream of working hard to get ahead. Malle also speaks to anti-immigration think tank people and border patrols. Nothing too surprising but a lot of ground gets covered in a short amount of time. If I didn’t learn anything I at least admired that it felt non-didactic. Anything with more of a point of view or an argument would probably be disingenuous were it to present itself as enlightening.

The Baron Of Arizona (1950) dir. Samuel Fuller

Based on a true story, although with fictionalized elements, about a dude (played by Vincent Price) who becomes a master forger to falsify land grants and claim the entire state of Arizona as his own. Not a great movie, though that’s an interesting story. I bet I could guess what elements were made up for the sake of making a movie out of it, it has this tension of being interesting and unbelievable (although unbelievable by way of rote moviemaking formula), but also the story takes place over an extended period of time and so has some of the structureless feeling of a biopic.

House On Haunted Hill (1959) dir. William Castle

I’m going to confuse this with The Haunting Of Hill House for my entire life, that’s just the way it is. This stars Vincent Price, who’s always great, doing the famous premise where a group of people meet up to spend the night at a haunted house to win money. Vincent Price has a contentious relationship with his wife, who’s openly contemptuous of him and wants his money. There’s a moment where everyone at the house party is given a gun, each in a coffin. There’s a few “twists” all sort of being of the “there was a rational, non-ghost reason for everything” although any of them individually sort of strain the limits of credulity as something that works as a hoax. Vincent Price is basically not the villain, so much as his wife is, although he’s such a ham that loves being creepy that this again strains credibility in that the conclusion of the movie plays against the style with which the previous action has been presented. An enjoyable viewing experience.

My Name Is Julia Ross (1945) dir. Joseph Lewis

This one’s about a woman, looking for work, who falls into a scheme that kidnaps her and puts her up in a mansion, where she’s kept drugged and basically is told to assume the identity of a woman who was killed. I found this one pretty nerve-wracking, as it’s pretty nightmarish, basically about psychological torture. I found this one under Criterion Channel’s Columbia Noir collection, but before these films were considered noir, they were thought of as melodramas, but it’s also sort of a horror film about being gaslighted. There’s a part where they remove a stairwell and try to trick her into falling down? What’s funny is that one of the things that sort of separates this from horror is how quickly it resolves, whereas later work would I think give the audience the satisfaction of seeing the villain be punished in some way, the ending that just goes “then everything worked out alright” ends up making the structure feel more like the whole movie’s reason for being is just to see the protagonist suffer.

God Told Me To (1976) dir. Larry Cohen

Did I write about this already? I watched that a few months ago. Pretty wild basis in seventies grit about people going crazy, committing murders, then goes to a weird/confusing place involving some sort of holy entity in human form, the police procedural aspect butting up against this strangeness which doesn’t feel entirely thought through, and is in fact sort of incoherent, makes for a movie that is, in fact, still pretty good and worth watching although a bit tedious by the end.

Zombi Child (2019) dir. Bertrand Bonello

This I guess just came out in America this year, to the extent that anything came out this year, in theaters, it coming to streaming is basically its release. The zombies in this are of the old-school voodoo sense, taken seriously as a system of belief juxtaposed against French colonialism, as a Haitian teen feels at odds with her circle of friends, flashbacks to Haiti occur. When you watch a bunch of older movies new movies just seem to be not as good. Bonello’s not a bad filmmaker though, he’s able to capture a sort of sensual aspect of particular moments and moods, just not in a way where they then coalesce into a narrative of shifting emotion.

Anatomy Of A Murder (1959) dir. Otto Preminger

This movie is close to three hours long. It has a Law And Order procedural quality, taking up much of its second half with a courtroom drama, where Jimmy Stewart does a proto-Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer routine. He’s protecting a man accused of murdering the woman who raped his wife. The subject was surely shocking for its time. It becomes pretty clear, extremely quickly that the husband is an abusive piece of shit, but the main thrust of the narrative is still tasked with following the lawyer trying to get him off. Lee Remick, from Experiment In Terror plays the beautiful and doomed wife, who flirts with Jimmy Stewart. Some of these interactions feel weird from a modern perspective, because Stewart’s reaction is like “Yes, you’re a beautiful woman and any red-blooded American male would enjoy looking at you, but it is my duty as a lawyer to paternalistically insist you cover up!” Preminger is sort of known for pushing the envelope, and this one has a lot more talking about sperm and Lee Remick’s vagina than you’d expect. One of the things that’s meant to be a “quirky character detail” is that Jimmy Stewart is into jazz- The score, by Duke Ellington, is great, but there’s also a pretty corny cameo by Duke Ellington where Jimmy Stewart sits in with him, a second pair of hands on the piano. Still, I guess it’s better that he physically appears in the movie than there just being a scene where it implies Duke’s music is played by Jimmy Stewart, as the music is way too good to just be a lawyer’s quirky hobby. George C Scott, from Hardcore, plays the legal expert on the other side. After being pretty long, there is this sort of abrupt, (although well-foreshadowed) downbeat ending, where the jealous and abusive husband flees town to avoid paying his lawyer and to go somewhere quiet he can beat his wife to death, but said ending is played for this “you can’t win them all I guess, shame about the lower classes” quality from Stewart, who is dead broke all movie but seems like he just enjoyed being able to do work for once, even if it’s for a total shitbag. Good movie! Feels thorny and interesting.

Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) dir. Otto Preminger

This is even better. Great Saul Bass credits sequence too. A psychological thriller where the disappearance of a child gives way to the police not being able to confirm the child is real, and doubting the mother’s sanity, becoming pretty nightmarish, dreamy, and exhilarating by turns. Gets to a place of “huh, I wonder what is going on” and then when that finally resolves there’s a pretty extended sequence of silent escaping/hiding, which is, one of those things that films do really well and is super-satisfying. It plays out amidst this background filled with interesting supporting characters, who all, for the first half of the movie, feel like moving parts in this somewhat inscrutable narrative machine.

The Man With The Golden Arm (1955) dir. Otto Preminger

This one I don’t like. Stars Frank Sinatra, who I find annoying, as a recovering heroin addict who relapses again. While I normally like the sort of scenery-chewing supporting cast that shows up in Preminger things, I really didn’t Sinatra’s nerdy best friend, or his wife with Munchausen’s syndrome. While with the other Preminger movies there’s this feeling of a slow reveal of what the plot is with this one I feel like as soon as you know that Sinatra is out of rehab (which you learn pretty quickly) you can guess the movie will be about how he relapses and then tries to get sober for real.

The Human Factor (1979) dir. Otto Preminger

Preminger’s final movie, based on a Graham Greene novel, featuring Iman making her film debut. Movie is mostly about intelligence agencies seeking out the mole in their mist, with intentions to kill whoever it is once they’re certain. It stars Richard Attenborough, as the source of the leaks. Halfway through the story becomes interspersed with flashbacks about Attenborough and Iman’s romance upon meeting in Africa. Continues the habit of ending on a moment that maybe feels like it should be expanded upon or made more resonant.

Bonjour Tristesse (1958) dir. Otto Preminger

This stars Jean Seberg as a teenager being raised by a single father, David Niven, who’s kind of a cad/ladies man who’s very permissive with his daughter, who seems likely to grow up rich and spoiled and find another rich man to take care of her. Deborah Kerr plays the woman who Niven ends up falling in love for real with, and the conflict is then between this woman taking on a maternal role and a daughter who is resentful of this. Deborah Kerr is in Black Narcissus, a movie I love, and here she comes off as smart, the voice of reason. Seberg destroys her father’s relationship by taking advantage of his sort of innate desire to flirt and be liked by women, driving Kerr to commit suicide, and the whole film is then told in flashback by Jean Seberg a year later, as she flirts with boys but has a great sadness and emotional distance about her, which is both inherited and self-inflicted. I’m partly just writing these plot summaries as my way of remembering what these movies are about, but this one is nice because I get to account for complicated characters who are both pretty eminently understandable. I keep getting hung up on the fact that movies today now have a much dumber idea of what a female character is. Maybe it’s something as basic as the fact that, as people read less, it’s rarer for literary novels to be adapted? As I talk in terms of “less good roles for women nowadays,” which is a cliche, it’s obvious enough that bad roles for men follow, as everyone is only as good or interesting as who they’re playing off of.

It’s also funny to think, in this era of “comic book movies,” that very few artists can make a character come to life with body language and facial expression the way an actor can. “Literary” cartoonists like Dan Clowes or Tomine play into the mask quality drawing creates, generating inscrutability as part of their effect. Many of the biggest names in “noir” comics are removed from the melodrama elements of actor’s performance in favor of an aesthetic based on paperback covers, which makes for something far less lively. Meanwhile, Blutch is an amazing artist who would probably do a great job telling lively character studies in a genre form, but he’s way more preoccupied with these Godard-style interrogations of film’s cultural meaning.

Separate Tables (1958) dir. Delbert Mann

From the same year as Bonjour Tristesse, and also featuring David Niven and Deborah Kerr. Deborah Kerr’s good in this- while she is sort of uptight in a maternal way in Bonjour Tristesse, here she’s sort of crippled by repression her mother imposes on her. It’s a totally different character, but she remains defined by various manifestations of repressed energy; I would say she’s most known for playing a nun in Black Narcissus. She’s again opposite Niven in a sort of romantic context, though Niven’s character is meant to be a neurotic freak and he’s not really convincing in that capacity. I couldn’t really work out what the deal is with Niven’s character, he gets arrested in a theater, seemingly because he takes his dick out to show women? Or that’s how I interpreted what was being discussed, but he’s mostly defended by everyone except this lady you’re supposed to hate for how domineering and judgmental she is so maybe it’s something less bad. I honestly couldn’t figure it out because it seemed like the thing I was guessing they couldn’t talk about. This movie also features Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth as a couple that broke up once before and are reuniting now. This movie is pretty dull in a way I didn’t know whether to attribute to it being British or it being based on a play, as it feels extremely both.

Seance On A Wet Afternoon (1964) dir. Bryan Forbes

This one’s British too, and features the quality I recognize from British television, where the stars are not attractive, which always feels surprising. This one’s got a pretty great title, and a great premise. This woman, a professional psychic, convinces her husband to kidnap a child so she can comfort the parents and get publicity. The cinematography’s great. I got pretty nervous watching this, I think I am feeling more sensitive to movies as of late, way more willing to find things upsetting and nerve-wracking than usual. I can partly attribute this to the feeling of taking something in from a different cultural context, that leaves me unsure what to expect, but it’s also true that nowadays I sort of constantly have this feeling of “I don’t know how bad things are going to get” about the world in general, and it makes sense that I would apply that to films.

Only Angels Have Wings (1939) dir. Howard Hawks

Jean Arthur’s amazing in this - saw her the first time in The Devil And Miss Jones and then there’s this whole Criterion Channel featurette video running through what her whole deal is: This vulnerability/innocence crossed with an attempted toughness that really is very charming. Here she plays an entertainer just stopping briefly in town who gets hit on by some pilots, and develops feelings of impossible love for a man (played by Cary Grant) whose insistent toughness and refusal to show fear (despite having a dangerous job, of a pilot, that makes everyone who cares about him fall to pieces with nervousness). It’s this very universal type of entertainment, where there’s all these special effects shots of planes flying and a drama of men being men that’s nonetheless anchored by this love story, carried by the fact that Jean Arthur is very real and complex. She’s also a legit comedic actress, which I think makes her feel richer and more watchable than someone without a sense of humor would be. Rita Hayworth plays Grant’s ex, a woman who couldn’t take his daredevil ways but is now married to another pilot who has to do dangerous flights essentially to make up for an act of cowardice that got someone else killed. She’s got her own charisma obviously (and Cary Grant’s equally solid, in this sort of old-Hollywood glamor way) but Jean Arthur feels very alive in a way that carries the movie.

The Talk Of The Town (1942) dir. George Stevens

This one also stars Jean Arthur opposite Cary Grant, but it’s less interesting, partly because of a domestic setting and some stale-seeming comedy. Cary Grant plays Lionel Dilg, (great name!) who breaks out of prison and hides out in Jean Arthur’s attic, with a hobbled ankle, while a preeminent legal scholar moves in. There’s a love triangle between the three of them, and a friendship between the escapee and the scholar. Grant’s been unfairly framed for arson for political reasons by his boss for pointing out the factory where he works is a death trap. The people of the town are easily turned against this sort of leftist agitator by a last and biased judge. Insanely enough, there’s a movie called “The Whole Town’s Talking” also starring Jean Arthur but it has no relation to this one.

The Ex-Mrs. Bradford (1936) dir. Stephen Roberts

Upon realizing that many of these Jean Arthur movies were leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month, I started taking more in. This is a murder mystery, with screwball comedy accents, and again I’d say it’s really good, although the “comedy” premise wherein a woman sort of plows through the life of a man with no real respect for personal boundaries is the sort of thing that works in a movie even though it seems totally nightmarish when looked at from a certain angle. She writes mysteries, he’s a doctor, people are getting murdered. He is played by William Powell, from The Thin Man movies, which maybe these resemble. I guess the bickering couple that solves mysteries is a trope but it’s one that I don’t think has had any currency in popular culture since Moonlighting, which was in my lifetime but before I would have had any awareness of it. (I would probably enjoy it up until the point where I got bored of the formula.) I thought this was great and would make a good double feature with L’Assassin Habite au 21.

History Is Made At Night, 1937, dir. Frank Borzage

This has Jean Arthur in it too, but the reason I became aware of it was Matt Zoller Seitz tweeting about it. Partly this is because the description on the Criterion site is so bare-bones it barely seems like anything, but it turns out this is because the plot is completely insane and has a ton of twists and to talk about them very quickly veers into spoiler territory. It is, in brief, a love story. The first totally insane in it is the handsome male lead does the “drawing a ventriloquist puppet on his hand” thing and the woman’s totally on board. An element that doesn’t spoil the plot, but does seem somewhat incongruent with the tone, is there’s a French chef character for a comic relief. It’s really good. I’m pointing out the lightest element but the story’s villain is believably sociopathic.

Secrets (1933) dir Frank Borzage

Not nearly as cool or good. While History Is Made At Night feels like a cohesive story that’s just pretty crazy, this one feels divided into acts that have nothing in common with each other. First act is romance, between a rich man’s daughter and his banker. They run away together. I’m basically unsure of when this movie takes place timewise, the rich lady is wearing massive layered gowns I know would’ve been out of fashion by 1933. The second act is a western where they make a home together and have to fight off bandits! But the action is shot in a a pretty disinterested manner. Third act, I’m pretty on edge and bored, but the banker is now the governor of California and is having an affair with another woman, and they’re at a party together, and then the ending feels epilogue style as they’re both old as hell and they have fully-grown children and they’re talking about how they’re taking their leave of the kids to discuss their secrets. Female lead is Mary Pickford in her final film role. I guess this is a remake of a silent film, which was itself based on a play. Yeah this movie sucks basically.

Bitter Moon (1992) dir. Roman Polanski

Sure, I’ll watch a sex criminal’s erotic thriller that’s way too long. Hugh Grant is a married guy on a boat who has a French dude talk about all the sex he and his wife have because he knows Hugh Grant wants to fuck his hot wife. Said wife is played by Emmanuelle Seigner, Roman Polanski’s actual wife since 1989. This is a bad movie by pretty much any metric. It kinda feels like the social function of erotic thrillers is not to be a more socially-acceptable form of pornography, but rather to be pervy enough to remind the audience why you shouldn’t talk about sex publicly and have that be your whole thing. The French, of course, misunderstand this.

The Burglar (1957) dir. Paul Wendkos

Another noir, written by David Goodis. This one is a little formulaic, in terms of what you think of crime movies as being “about.” A burglar, who learned the trade from his adopted father, works with that man’s daughter to commit heists. His gang doesn’t like her. Once the two of them are separated, a corrupt cop seeking to steal a burgled necklace for himself tries to pursue a relationship with her as a means to an end, while a woman allied with him works on the burglar. A drive to New Jersey gets stopped by cops, violence quickly escalates to make the situation more dire. Members of the gang die. Not a bad movie but by no means essential.

My Brother’s Wedding (1983) dir. Charles Burnett

Criterion Channel removed the paywall for a bunch of Black-made independent films, this is one of them, Burnett’s follow-up to Killer Of Sheep. Seemingly starring non-professional actors, it’s about the conflict a guy feels as his brother is planning to get married to a rich woman he resents, and the loyalty he feels to a guy who just got out of prison who everybody hates. The main character is a good dude who wants to help out this pretty dangerous friend the best he can. The film captures his pride and resentment.

Dial M For Murder (1954) dir. Alfred Hitchcock

A few iconic-seeming shots of Grace Kelly in the role of a Hitchcock blonde, i.e. her standing at a phone while someone looms behind her about to choke her, and later standing traumatized. Suffers a bit from clearly being based on a play, with a ton of dialogue, particularly in the second act. The first act is able to provide this very particular type of satisfaction, where someone outlines a “perfect crime” in dialogue and then we see it play out and it falls apart and happens completely differently. It’s funny the criminal gives themselves away due to mistaking one key for another, because this sort of structure really does feel like a key fitting into a lock, things perfectly designed for one another, parceled out at the right time.

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everyday-effing-therapy · 5 years

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12/09/19

Oh my, oh my,

Did you even expect me to come back? I mean, I know the last post wasn’t that long ago, but it was still not that recently either.

The school started and it’s one of the things why I completely don’t have the time for anything. It’s like they want us to do so much work outside school that it does get hectic sometimes.

I have to do a lot since it’s the year of the exams, which are supposed to open the entire path of education that follows.

I think I will be sitting advanced exams from maths, biology, chemistry and English and every single one of us has to take basic literature, maths and English. It’s going to be a long road and a very lengthy exam season, as all of those exams are day after day, they take up over a week in total.

I wasn’t sure about maths, I still am not, but I think that might be one of the most necessary exams and I have already signed up for a preparation course that is bound to start in October.

From other news, I came home from the Maldives and I already went to school the next day. Nobody saw that coming, but since I came back at early enough night hour, I decided not to miss out on anything.

I also horribly missed Black, but we’re not talking about it.

So, school started out nicely. Upon seeing Black I somehow wondered whether that would clear my mind and let me know, whether I have a crush on him. I obviously do and from the moment I saw him, I knew I was fucked.

He wears braces now and I didn’t think that braces could be so fricking hot. I didn’t know that long hair could be that hot and I certainly didn’t know that shirts with dark prints could make me swoon so much. And the sweatshirts, the fricking sweatshirts.

Fall is approaching, which means more sweatshirts (which are my favourite part of male’s wardrobes) and also, fall means rain.

I hope that you all understand how much you can smell everything after it rains and certainly, you can definitely feel the smell of other people so much more intensely.

That’s why I love boys in the rain.

Well, apart from that, school is really hectic. We get lots of homework, but so far I kinda managed to wrap my head around it, or at least so I hope. For now, it is manageable, but I don’t have as many extracurriculars either, as not all of them have started yet.

The yoga plan is also not ready to be implemented and that makes me sad, cause I really, really wanted to take yoga classes.

Last Saturday, I organised my birthday party. My cousin arrived on Friday, after I went out with Black and Silver, took my driving classes, ate supper and had my nails done. We talked a lot, laughed and eventually fell asllep, cause I was so ungodly tired.

The entire Saturday was spent doing shopping, some preparations, decorating the place and overall, me being super stressed.

I think I looked absolutely stunning, but at that time, I didn’t know how to react. Fewer people than I expected came, but the place didn’t look empty and I was glad everything turned out alright. People ate, danced, I managed to have a dance with Opal, Silver, even Gold, my dear friends and so many other people. I felt amazing, stressed but surely amazing. So many people congratulated me on choosing that place, gave me the most amazing birthday wishes and the gifts were truly ideally picked. However, even now when I think about it, I feel the stress. I don’t know what made me so uneasy. Maybe I was afraid that people wouldn’t come, or they wouldn’t get along or maybe they wouldn’t like the music. Everything turned out fine, everything, apart from one thing.

Do you remember the situation that occured on a birthday party of my best friend? It was in June, in a week that had a horrid series of birthday parties. A few days after I actually talked with Black and danced with him for the first time. It was before I started crushing on him, when everything was calm and collected.

Basically, on that party, Silver told me that there was going to be a song played for us, but while the song was playing, he was gone and I felt really bad. After that, Black came and got us the song, the same song that we danced to on the previous birthday party and I guess, that’s how it started being “our” song. During the holidays we’ve had the situation with this song twice and we also talked about it. He looked stressed in that scenario and that led me to thinking that maybe that song meant something to him also before me, which woke up hurtful memories. We talked about not having that song on my birthday party once, but I told him I will still have that.

Now, on my party, I wanted to dance with him and he did dance with me, promising me a dance also to “our” song. Unfortunately, while the song was playing, he was gone and it was Silver who danced with me to that. The situation turned out to be the direct opposite of what went down in June.

It’s funny, cause when I dance with Silver he is very brave and flirty, and I truly love dancing with him, but to that song, I think I didn’t even smile. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I think everybody knew what happened, cause when the song started playing, they started screaming Black’s name and searching for him. He didn’t come.

Before midnight I collected myself and in that moment, Black came up to me. I confronted him on his absence during our song, he apologised and asked me multiple times whether we could have the song again. On midnight, I got as many belt spanks as my age, which is a sort of tradition. Obviously, it’s one spank for every more important person. We started out with my cousin, then it was Black, then my close friend, some girl friends of mine, Black again, Silver, Opal, Black again, Opal again and my besties for the end. After that everyody sang happy birthday, I made a wish, blew out candles (and pretty much missed one, oop), we ate cake and then I danced with Black. It was marvelous, truly, he hugged me and was so close, I felt his hair tickling my face and I was so, so happy.

Not for a long time.

Half an hour later he drank shots with one girl (the one with whom he cheated on his girlfriend at that time) and I found them ferociously making out outside. They hid behind a wall, but I just felt that if I make those two more steps, I’ll see them. I came up to my friend who stood there and he tried to crack a joke about the situation, but when I looked into his eyes with my almost teary ones, he was completely serious and so was I.

He told me that maybe it was for the better, he saw us dancing, watched us dance and told me that maybe it’s better that I knew then, rather than in the future when I would be completely head over heels for him. He also asked me whether I needed any help and that they are going to be there for me, him and his brother and all of the people in our friend group. I am very grateful, cause without that, I probably would have burst into tears.

I came back inside, talked to my cousin about it and to my besties. V was the one who got the most into the situation and she talked with Opal. Suddenly everybody talked and I just danced, danced it off, cause I didn’t want to drink, I’d already felt sick. I ended up being taken by V by the hand and we went to see one of my guests off, while walking directly next to Black and that girl snuggling. V was blunt enough to come up to them, ask them about the direction and then we went on. I looked Black in the eye and he looked at me. I felt my heart break, turned around, held V’s hand and ran for my life.

Directly after we came back, V took Black by the hand and they went away “to talk”, so I got a mini panic attack. My cousin got me going, but V was gone for good 20 minutes and then they came back and drank shots. As it turned out, V told him to leave the party, then they talked about morality and my being hurt and in the end she told him to stay. In the meantime that girl came up to me, apologised with saying that she heard I like Black, that she doen’t feel anything towards him, she just wants to have fun in life and that she’s sorry, cause she didn’t want to ruin the party.

After that I danced and danced, Black didn’t speak to me and at about 3am, we all went home.

The next day I looked at the gifts, finished my homework, saw off my cousin to the train station and came back home, slept everything off.

So far, V has made up with Black and I think I did too, cause we talk now. We maturely ignored the topic which made me feel bad, cause I still have a crush on him, I see that he’s probably not that good of a person, my cousin heavily dislikes him and he hurt me and might just know that I’m crushing on him and yet, I still can’t let go. I just want to stay.

There’s this song Be Alright by Dean Lewis and the second part talks exactly about what happened on that god forsaken night.

“So I still look back at all the messages you'd sent And I know it wasn't right, but it was fucking with my head And everything deleted like the past, it was gone And when I touched your face, I could tell you're moving on But it's not the fact that you kissed her yesterday It's the feeling of betrayal, that I just can't seem to shake And everything I know tells me that I should walk away But I just want to stay”

It’s like, I touched his face last Friday and we stared into each other’s eyes and this Monday, we didn’t look at all.

It’s all weird.

I still feel his presence in the room and I can’t stop staring when he wears his hair down and I just want to kiss him or talk to him constantly.

It’s so bad.

Today, I didn’t go to school, cause I had to go get my vaccination at the doctor’s. The problem was, everything turned out to be way more complicated and I had to come back there an hour later. I spent an ungodly amount of time there, but I’m glad at least this is done and I hope I won’t be sick.

I don’t know whether I have any plans for tomorrow after school, but if any of my friends would be willing to go out, I will go with them. If not, maybe I’ll get my ear pierced, who knows.

Today’s light I am sending to my cousin and V. They are both amazing, truly sassy queens, that are standing by my side and protecting me when I need it the most. They made that night truly valuable.

Every single one of us has some problems to work out.

Take care of yourselves and each other.

Love,

#12/09 #22:36 #finally a long post #finally a new post #diary #journal #journal entry #it's more of a diary now i guess #love #friends #birthdays #parties #boys boys boys #c posts #c is feeling so bad #c is so frickin' lost #night post

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papercutsunset · 2 years

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TMS 4/1/22

Everything is going weird, but, then, when is it not? Everything has been weird for a really long time, I suppose. I wouldn’t have it any other way!

I can't believe it’s been almost a month since Betty and Drake left. God… I miss her. I miss her a lot. Drake, too-- but it wasn't like Drake and I ever had a time when we were constantly talking, right? It’s not like Drake was ever my best friend. But Betty… Well, losing her for three months with no explanation, then getting her back for technically-two-weeks-but-really-just-one, and then not knowing how to communicate with her after we finally talked things over… I don’t know how to admit that it’s devastating.

But life marches on, I suppose. I have to get ready for graduation, I spent a bit catching up on homework I missed when we were gone… Life goes on, just as meaningless as before.

I wonder, sometimes, if Eliza was right and I was wrong. Maybe there really is no deeper meaning to all of the bullshit that has happened, right? I mean… I wouldn’t have taken up Oneiron on his offer but, with a year of hindsight and intensified emotion about everything, I know where she was coming from.

But, hey, that doesn’t matter. None of it matters, because it’s getting better, and life marches on, and I refuse to submit to it.

That’s enough nightmare-fueled feelings talk, I suppose. It’s time to talk about how things have changed since the end of February. I know more now!

And I know the truth of everything.

Well, maybe not the whole truth, but a lot of it. You see, I've had a real breakthrough in my longest-term investigation to date: my continued search into Bigfoot.

I say Bigfoot, but I know now that the proper, more P.C. term is Woodland Crafters. I know that now because, after I first heard the term from Aconita’s mouth, and after everything happened, Betty and I had a bit of a talk about it. I don’t know how I was so oblivious to it; in retrospect, it should have been a little obvious that Mrs. Lewis is a Woodland Crafter. In retrospect, a lot of things make a lot of sense. While Betty and I were swapping notes before she left, I put some things together-- because I’m not stupid, remember? And Mrs. Lewis’s hands made a lot more sense. And so did that photo Claudia Nielsen posted. That was her, right? That was her and (I would assume) Betty over her shoulder, which seems to bolster my suspicions that something odd and supernatural happened back in November. I just don’t know what it is, yet.

Either way, my suspicions about the existence of at least one large group of Woodland Crafters living in the area have been entirely confirmed, but my other questions and wondering, wandering thoughts remain unanswered.

That links to today’s main ticket item. Aside from two exams and an essay for the classes that actually matter (my dual-enrollment ones), there is something happening today! That new Melvin J. Berrycloth comic is coming out. My interest in him is more recent, of course-- after all, Ruth and Herman didn’t let me read comics, and I didn’t really have reason to before I was a fan of sneaking my lunch into the library and stumbled across a pile of them-- but, now that I get it…

He seems to know a thing or two about Bigfoots/WCs. I’m wondering if that’s informed by the cultural construction thereof, or if he has seen something like what I have seen.

I didn’t get the obsession with the disappearance, but I do now. The note Berrycloth left mentioned something about Rivendell…

Well, I know the folks at The Arcane Lab seem to think he won’t be there, but I’m going to drop in just in case. I don’t really want the new comic, but maybe I’ll pick one up for Drew. He likes comics, right? And I do want to look for Catan…

I have questions for this Berrycloth fellow.

I’m done writing now. I want to think more about interdimensional communication before school.

#tiff sheridan #lake wonder #i posted this and then chickened out but you know what. posting it again. bitch.#writing

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georgepavlidis · 3 years

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Blog Post #2 - Gilbert Lowell

Host: Up next, get ready guys this next guy is great, I mean wow, I’m so thrilled to finally have this guy on the show, leader of the geek revolution of 1984 at Adams University but more recently, founder of his very own church, we’ve got a doozy for ya here today, everyone, please welcome to the show Gilbert Lowell!

Gilbert, welcome to the show/

Gilbert: It’s great to be here, I’ve been listening to your show on the radio for years, thought this would be the best place to come back to!

Host: That’s amazing, now let’s talk about the church because I feel like, it took a lot to get from where you were, this guy to unite a huge swarm of students of different backgrounds and different social “statuses” if you like, in the college you attended, Adams. (Gilbert nods). What made you think, “you know what, let me go ahead and start my own… (laughs a bit) religious… organization?”

Gilbert: (smiling) Uhhhh..

Host: And what do you promote there at your church? If you don’t mind.

Gilbert: Well it’s interesting, cause you’re right, it is a bit of a weird path to take, but you know one of the things that not a lot of people know about me is that I am very religious, in fact, one of my girlfriends, who I was very serious with in college, Judy, actually dumped me for my christian beliefs, which was hard, and from then on, I was always questioning things at my own church as to why things were done a certain way, until I met my wife of 17 years, Julissa, and we felt the same about religion and with the lord on our side, we were able to open our own church, so I think my experiences from college really stuck with me, and I feel blessed that I am able to run this church with my wonderful wife. And so basically what we do is um, hold daily services, we have a wonderful pastor and most of the people are local, so we like to have separate services for the kids for them to really get them to understand why worship is so important, and a big thing for us is sexual education.

Host: Sexual Education?

Gilbert: Yes, Sexual Education, because, where were located, a lot of these families, don’t have a lot, and so what we do is we promote abstinence to kids, and teach them to focus on bettering their lives and saving their hormones till after marriage so that when they are financially stable, they can then move on to the next stage of their lives, knowing they never made a mistake.

Host: That is an interesting thing you do there, uh, Gilbert! But, I noticed how you said a lot of what you did in college set you up for what ended up becoming your future, so tell me Gilbert, did you have a lot of sex in college?

Gilbert: HAHA well, you know, I did have a decent amount, but like I said, I was different at the time than I am now, so I don’t really see how that’s relevant, in fact, let me explain it a bit more because I feel like you’re not understanding. We’re trying to keep these kids from getting pregnant so that they live happy lives! A lot of parents actually choose us for that reason. They don’t want their kids to make the same mistakes they did and throw their lives away.

Host: So are you worried that these kids will grow up to be sex addicts? Rapists? Because that’s what it sounds like.

Gilbert: No! No of course not! Come on! We just want to be a positive influence in people’s lives and in these children’s lives, and I think we are doing that!

Host: See here’s what I think, Gilbert, I just can’t shake this feeling that you couldn’t care less about people, and you are extorting people for their money in exchange for bullshit teachings of abstinence, when really, you are the LAST person they should be taking this advice from! Do you remember your old pal from high school? Lewis Skolnick?

Gilbert: Lewis! Oh Yeah! Were still very close.

Host: Did you know that he sexually assaulted a girl from your college? Betty Childs? He Raped her.

Gilbert: Well, I would hardly call it rape, they hooked up once and then they dated for a while. A typical college relationship I would say.

Host: Except it shouldn’t be. Are you aware he did not have consent from Betty to perform those acts on her?

Gilbert: How do you have this information?

Host: Lewis Skolnick was arrested four hours ago for sexual assault. Did you know he was a rapist? And why did you condone this behavior in college?

Gilbert: (shocked) Well, in college, Lewis was always very enthusiastic about girls. He was crazy about this one particular girl, Betty. And when they hooked up, all he told me was, they hooked up, and she was in that cheerleader outfit, which was a short skirt and a tanktop that was very popular, and it encouraged him, and she liked it. And he was so happy that she liked it, and she made him so very happy. Now I was happy for my friend, and I love my friend, despite these accusations. I think that for her to now turn around and accuse him of sexual assault almost 40 years later is a bit extreme. After all, she liked it! And they liked each other, so I don’t see what the problem is. That is actually one of the reasons we like to keep our women at the church from dressing too nice, we prefer long dresses and to have shoulders and arms covered. So that they become less appealing to men their age, which can really help in our abstinence mission.

Host: Wow, I actually can’t believe what I’m hearing, so you would not only fail to condone the actions of your rapist friend, and furthermore, you would limit what the girls wear to church in order to keep them from being taken advantage of by men?

Gilbert: That is correct. I firmly believe that…

Host: Here’s an idea, take all your boys into a room and teach them the importance of SELF CONTROL! Gilbert, ever since you arrived here, you have said nothing but terrible things about our youth, about the morality of rape, and women! And here you are, trying to promote that GOD loves us? That GOD will forgive our sins? You have to admit to yourself that you have sins before you can ever be forgiven for them! So here’s what I think, Gilbert, I have a list of frankly, FUCKED UP things you did at Adam’s College, and I for one, can’t WAIT to read them to you!

You installed video cameras in the ladies sorority house after they failed to show up for your party and betrayed you. From then on, you continued to SPY on them changing and taking provocative photos of them throughout the rest of the term. That sounds like sexual assault to me, my friend.

Gilbert: That was just simple fun! We didn’t mean any harm by it.

Host: But you did harm! You harmed these girls in a way that you will never be able to undo! You violated their privacy! And you exploited them, used them as your own personal porno whenever you felt like it. Doesn’t that make you sick!

Gilbert: I assure you, we did not save or take pictures of ANY of that footage!

Host: Oh yeah? Then how do you explain the plates you used to win the vendor contest at the Frat Games? Where you put a topless photo of Betty Childs on the plate so that more people would buy from you??

Gilbert: That was just a good tactical decision from our fraternity, we never intended to insult Betty and she never had a problem with it afterwards!

Host: Did you ever ask her how she felt about it?

Gilbert: No, but…

Host: Then how do you know that she was fine with it? (pause) Tell me Gilbert, do you teach mental health in your, prestigious, place of worship?

Gilbert: You know what, I don’t need this. I don’t need to sit here, and be ridiculed by you! Who never understood me or my friends intentions. And who is looking to pursue a negative perspective as opposed to a positive one! That is not the way the lord works!

Host: Sometimes, Gilbert, we need to look at the negatives in our society in order to understand how to be positive moving forward, maybe you should take a good long hard, look at yourself and your values, and see where it takes you, because I sure as hell am not promoting a religious institution run by someone who fails to condone rapists and celebrates lack of accountability!

(Gilbert gets up and leaves)

Host: Well, that’s it for the show folks, you can put the popcorn way now, we’re done. I hope you all learned a lesson today. These people, people like Gilbert Lowell, they don't like to give away their power over people, they like to expound it. If you’re not careful, people like this could enter your homes, and teach you things that just aren’t right. It is no longer a question of whether something is “politically correct” it is a question of what is right, and what is wrong, and ladies and gentlemen, I hope you all are able to realize tonight, that a lot of people are wrong, and they don’t even know it.

ONE MONTH LATER

Host: Hello everyone welcome to the show, our top story today is regarding our old friend Gilbert Lowe! Who today has closed his church, the former prodigee turned failed televangelist has said that he quote “Rushed into things without thinking first” Way to go, Gilbert, now you’re only HALF the asshole! But hey, maybe the old man did learn a lesson, at least I hope he did, we can’t forget guys, we always want people to learn from their mistakes, and become the best versions of themselves. So Gilbert, if you’re listening, I hope you’re doing that bud.

In other news, Lewis Skolnick was sentenced to 15 to life on for the multiple counts of sexual assault he has been accused of this past month...

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carmillatranscripts · 7 years

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The Carmilla Movie

Air date: October 25, 2017

Length: 1:34:27

We open with static, which disappears to be replaced by Laura against a plain white background.

Laura: Okay! Don’t know how many of you are new, and how many of you have been with us from the start, but I am Laura Hollis. Yes, the Laura Hollis, who recently got famous, or “internet famous”, because my university pals and I vlogged ourselves saving the world.

Brief footage from 3x33, of Dean!Perry opening the Gates of Hell

Laura: See, back in my freshman year, we discovered that our Austrian university was actually being run by an evil dean and her vampire cult. Naturally. They’d been sacrificing girls to this monstrous creature under the campus, and I was next. Really should’ve gone to that safety school. Anyway, the Dean sent ... Carmilla,

Footage from 1x2

Carmilla: I’m your new roommate, sweetheart.

Back to Laura

Laura: A 300-year-old vampire with a checkered past and centuries worth of victims to kidnap me.

We see Laura and Carmilla kissing from season 3

Laura: There was just one small snag with that plan. (back to Laura) Carm and I fell in love. Carm turned her back on the evil dean, and with a little help from our friends: LaF, Perry, Kirsch, Mel, and Danny, we saved the school! And the world. For stopping the apocalypse, Carm earned herself a magical human life. A vampire no more.

Footage of Laura discovering Carmilla’s heartbeat at the end of 3x36

Laura: A chance to start again, and leave the crimes of her past behind. And for us to figure out ... whatever happens next.

New scene. Exterior: An old manor, on a stormy day.

We see Laura, waking up inside the manor, dressed in 19th century clothes, lying on a couch. She gets up.

Laura: Okay ... weird. (looks at her clothing) Old-timey and weird.

Laura notices a mirror and looks into it. She does not see her own reflection, instead, she sees another woman, dressed as she is, copying her moves. A door creaks open, and Laura turns towards it

Laura: Hello? Ghost-lady?

Suddenly, a woman dressed all in black, with a veil over her face, appears behind Laura, and taps her shoulder. Laura runs in fear out the room and down some stairs, looking behind her. At the foot of the stairs, she runs into the same mysterious woman. The woman lifts her veil, reveiling herself to be Carmilla.

Carmilla: You’re wearing my broach.

Laura: Carm!

Carmilla: Did I scare you, my pet?

Laura: You think? Sneaking around, dressed like Lizzie Borden? Wait, why are you dressed like Lizzie Borden?

Carmilla: You mustn’t be afraid

Laura: Why would I be afraid?

Carmilla: We shall die, as lovers may ... (Carmilla kisses Laura) Die together, so that we may live together.

Carmilla’s fangs appear, and she bites Laura, drinking from her, Laura looking terrified

Suddenly the scene changes, and we see Laura waking up from a nightmare, her head on Carmilla’s lap.

Carmilla: Welcome back, creampuff.

Laura (moving up from Carmilla’s lap to lay her head on Carmilla’s hsoulder, we hear screams and chainsaw sounds from a TV offscreen) I think your horror movies are giving me nightmares

Carmilla: Oh, well, life’s rough like that sometimes.

The camera zooms out, giving us a broader view of the living room

Carmilla: Come on! How long does it take to kill one limping teenager? Is this guy on a coffee break? (to Laura) So, what happened? Did you get scooped up by that talking goat again?

Laura: No, I dreamed you were a vampire. (Sitting up) It was very ... blast-from-your-gothic-horror-past. There was this old house, and then you ... well, you were actually kinda scary

Carmilla (concerned): Did I hurt you?

Laura: In a dream. Come on, it was probably a ... subconscious fascination with Victorian murders. Or, uh ... corests.

Carmilla: Mmm! Well, no need to go digging around in the past. We have it much better now.

Laura: No arguments here. (looks at TV) So long, hammer horror! (to Carmilla) Hello, rom-com

They start to kiss, when suddenly a loud scream and chainsaw sounds come from the TV. Carmilla turns off the TV, and they begin kissing, and we fade out to the opening credits

New scene: Another dream sequence, Laura’s running in fear through the same mansion as before. She opens a door and sees Carmilla being placed in the coffin of blood, she closes it and keeps running, opening another door where we see Carmilla covered in blood

Laura wakes up, breathing hard. She’s in bed next to Carm. She kisses Carm’s forehead and gets up. We see her making coffee and pouring it into her Tardis mug. She snaps her fingers to wake herself up and sits down in front of her laptop.

Laura (with exaggerated enunciation): How now, brown cow? How now, brown cow?

She turns on the laptop, and we see her from the POV of her laptop, with a “Laura Hollis” logo in the lower left corner.

Laura: Happy anniversary, faithful viewers! I know! Iknowiknowiknow I’m behind in my posts, but, I would never miss this! Because 5 years ago, today, (copy of the Voice of Silas on screen with headlines “Students Save Austria From Apocalypse” and “Girls Sacrificed to Giant Anglerfish!”) a ragtag bunch of undergraduates stopped the dean of their evil university from unleashing Hell on Earth! Or, mostly stopped. You can’t really blame us for Antarctica. And where are they now, you might ask? Well, let’s check in with a very special 5-year retrospective.

Laura looks off to the side with a dramatic gesture. And then her face turns neutral

Laura (mumbling): And then we will cut to ...

Super cheesy graphics with phrases like “tiny, gay and mighty” and “Hollis Five Year Retrospective”

Back to Laura narrating

Laura: First up is LaFontaine and Perry who, as you’ll recall, transferred to Occult Studies at Berkley and then started LaFerry Industries, where they’ve been revolutionizing life for the supernatural with products such as their Hemo-Soy vegan vampire sumplements ever since. They’ve got this huge meeting with a megacoporation that wants to buy their start-up. I’m so proud! Speaking of super-successful people, you guys remember Danny? My Lit TA, turned stalwart ally, turned repentant vampire? Has turned into ... a vampire rights advocate. And, what retrospective would be complete without a look at how Mel and Kirsch and I leveraged our coverage of the almost-apocalypse into a career in local news? And, if you’re morbidly curious, here are some clilps!

Clip 1, Laura in front of a flower shop, with “Luane Horlis Reporting Live” at the bottom fo the screen

Laura: Today, we explore the fast-paced world of floral arrangements.

Clip 2, Laura on another street, in front of a bakery, with the name “Lauren Horley”

Laura: Cranberry bannock

Clip 3, another street, name displayed as “Laura “The Puff” Hollis”

Laura: Ceramic cephalopod

Back to Laura’s narration

Laura: So, yeah. Not quite achieved Lois Lane-dom. But never fear!

Laura runs off screen, and comes back with a big board with various goals on it

Laura: It is all part of my 5-year plan!

Some of the goals are marked with stars, and others with X’s. Some are sensible goals like “Meet Christiane Amanpour” or “200 hours volunteering in the library”, while others are nerdy, like “Buffy marathon with Carmilla”. Laura looks wistfully at he board for a moment and then pulls herself away

Laura: Yeah, um, after Carm and I took our glorious gap year, it was time to start real life. We moved town to TO, I finished my degree, stuck my foot in the door, now I’m just waiting for my big break! Busting open some huge Woodward-and-Bernstein-style scandal and being moved up to the city desk. Admittedly, I have been waiting a while for that one. But, uh, you know ,that’s what you do in life. You pay your dues. Unless you’re a former vampire with 300 years of sunshine and culinary history to catch up on. So, what has our Carm been up to as a living, breathing, human?

[Scene of Carmilla walking around in broad daylight]

Laura: She’s definitely taking advantage of ye old vampire trust fund.

[Carmilla walking out of a bakery with a pastry]

Laura: Bakery-based gluttony, check.

[Carmilla lying out in a bikini on a patio in the sun]

Laura: Sun-tanning sloth, check.

[Laura in front of a computer, eating a strawberry, Carmilla comes by and takes a bit of the strawberry with a seductive look at Laura]

Laura: I-have-a-pulse-now lust ... well ... actually I can’t complain about that last one [Laura and Carmilla exit scene]

Back to Laura narrating

Laura: Yeah. Unless you count starring in my spooky dreams, it’s been a bit more pastry than purpose lately. But! Today’s retrospective is all about perspective. We are going to get our heroine back on track. But, where to start such a conversation? Where else? [Laura pulls a cake into camera view] With desert!

Carmilla walks in

Carmilla: Mmm ... have you been baking?

Laura: Happy rebirthday! [kisses carmilla several times] It’s, um ... like a ... like a birthday, but for your rebirth. Because, five years ago, you got a life. Not like 90s ‘get a life’, but you know, um, literally.

Carmilla: Hmm, how very Lewis Carol.

[Carmilla turns the webacm off and closes the laptop]

Laura: So ... speaking of five years, I was thinking that we could talk about five years in the other direction. [Carmilla looks faintly exasperated] Cause you’ve been through a lot. Not just Silas, but death. And the French Revolution. So, it’s completely understandable that you’re feeling a little lost

Carmilla: Lost?

Laura: Okay, maybe not lost, but maybe a little ... aimless?

Carmilla: Laura, are you staging an intervention because you think I’m wasting my life?

Laura: No! [Carmilla gives her a look like “really?”] Maybe. It’s just ... you aren’t immortal anymore. And I know that you want to make the most of our lives together, but -

Carmilla: Is there something wrong with those lives being fun?

Laura: No! But I think it’s possible to have fun and ...

Carmilla: And did I go to that supernatural therapist?

Laura: One time. You siad you couldn’t take advice from someone born after the moon landing.

Carmilla: Mm-hmm, and do I pester you because you’d rather spend your days in a news cubicle instead of on a beach in the South of France?

Laura: No, you don’t. It’s just ...

Carmilla: It’s just, you like making plans. And I love that about you. But, I don’t know, it’s my rebirthday, so ... I want to spend it enjoying our lives. Preferably [wipes a bit of chocolate icing on Laura’s lip] somewhere with a patio and an extensive wine selection? [they kiss] And chocolates

They wander off-screen together, tightly embracing, the camera zooms in on the cake; Carmilla runs back on camera to blow out the candles, and then they both leave the scene again.

Several city scenes, a sunset, night time, then back to their home. Carmilla’s in bed already, and Laura puts some moisturizer on her hands. They snuggle together on the bed. Laura falls asleep, and it’s another dream sequence. She’s in bed, and she sees Carmilla crouched at the foot of the bed. In the background is a painting of Carmilla.

Laura: Carm?

Carmilla: Shhh. You’re dreaming.

Laura turns on a lamp, and Carmilla winces, covering her eyes

Laura: Oh. Right.

Carmilla crawls onto the bed towards Laura, in a scene shot to resemble a famous illustration from the original publication of Carmilla

Carmilla: You are mine. You shall be mine. You and I are one, forever.

Laura: Something tells me I’m gonna like this dream.

Carmilla strokes Laura’s face, and then her fangs appear, and she bites Laura. Laura’s eyes snap wide open. She’s back in the real world now, and the real Carmilla is biting her neck.

Laura: Carm! What are you doing?! [pushes Carmilla off her, Carmilla hisses, her fangs exposed] Carm! Hey! Hey! It’s me! It’s me! [snaps her fingers]

Carmilla comes to, and looks horrified

Carmilla: Laura, your neck! Oh, God! [she moves towards Laura, and Laura backs up, still afraid; Carmilla pulls back, looking completely horrified]

Laura: What is going on?

New scene: Back in the living room. Carmilla’s sitting in a chair with some kind of electrodes on her forhead. LaF and Perry are there. LaF is holding some kind of electronic tablet, while Perry has some notes in front of her. Laura is standing watching, with bandaids on Carmilla’s bite mark

Perry: Have you been in close proximity to any vampires or vampire by-products in the past two or three months?

Carmilla: Oh, you mean when a Sumerian goddess turned me again last week? Must’ve slipped my mind.

Perry: I see that sarcasm hasn’t suffered.

Laura: Thanks for taking some time out of your meeting prep to help us.

LaF: For you guys? Anything.

Perry: Of course! We’re probably over-prepared.

LaF: Something’s definitely off with Carm.

LaF’s scanning her with their robot eye, we see various graphs and the like, a light glowing above Carmilla’s chest, and the words “lifeforce: flickering”, among others

Laura: For those of us without a fancy cyborg eye?

LaF: Right. Um, this is Carm [LaF turns their pad around for Laura and Perry to see; it shows an abstract form of a female body, with a glow in the chest] And she’s, well, dead, except ...

Perry: Except, the resurrection spell is still running inside her, making her a living human

LaF: It makes her heart beat, hair grow, and all the other things a regular human body does

Laura: Yeah, like a magic battery

Carmilla: I thought we agreed we wouldn’t call it that.

LaF: My vote’s still with life-force

Carmilla: No, that’s even worse!

Perry: Oh! What about her, um, what about your spark?

LaF: Hmm, it does work pretty much like an ignition

Perry: Spark it is! Spark, spark, spark!

Carmilla: I hope you’re enjoying yourselves.

LaF: Uh ... Carmilla’s spark is ... going out.

Laura: What’s wrong with it?

LaF: It’s producing a sort of electrical discharge that’s making it flicker, and, since it’s what’s keeping her human, when it flickers, she ...

Laura: Vamps out.

Laura sighs and sits down

Carmilla: Okay, so ... how do we get my .... spark to stop flickering?

LaF: We’ll have to run some more tests.

Laura: And in the meantime, Carm just keeps randomly vamping out? What are we supposed to do about that?

Perry pulls out a bunch of garlic. Carmilla sighs.

Montage of scenes, mimicking the ones earlier where Laura was talking about Carmilla’s “aimlessness”, but twisted. First we see Carmilla lying out on the patio, but instead of enjoying the sun, she’s trying to cover up, with a bottle of hemo-soy beside her, then we see her biting a strawberry that Laura was eating, but accidentally biting her hand, then we see her drinking a squirrel’s blood at the same place we saw her getting a pastry before

Then we see their bedroom again. Cloves of garlic in the foreground. Carmilla’s lying on the bed, looking sad.

Laura (applying moisturizer): [Unclear dialogue, something about Mel?] ... Kirsch, of course, is jazzed, like ‘Oh, there’ll be blueberry pie, right? I’m into the bluebs”, and then to top it all off, I get to the fridge, and it’s just ... Carm? You okay?

Carmilla: Sure. Just grappling with an aversion to daylight and cravings for blood.

Laura: Hey, LaF is going to figure something out.

Carmilla: I know. It’s just ... this was supposed to be done. You know? The bloodlust, the self-loathing. The sleeping tied to a chair in my own bedroom.

Laura: That one might be overkill. You’ve never had a problem controlling yourself before. [Carmilla nods] Unless you count dream-Carm chasing me through discount Transylvania all “you are mine, you shall be mine”

Carmilla: Wait ... what did you just say?

Laura: “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever”

Carmilla gets up and runs into the living room, searching through the bookshelves

Laura: Carm, what is going on? It was just some silly Dracu-poetry my brain coughed up for atmosphere [Carmilla opens up a chest] What are you looking for? [Carmilla takes out a book from the chest, looking through it, and finding a photograph, which she shows Laura. It’s the mansion from her dreams] That house!

Carmilla: This is where Elle and I lived. Is this the manor in your dreams?

New scene; Laura, Carmilla, Mel, Kirsch, LaF, and Perry are all in a park

Perry: So, this place Laura’s been dreaming about, the manor, it’s real?

Carmilla: Not just the manor.

Laura: Carm thinks that, from what I’m describing, the house, the clothes, what she says, that I’m dreaming things that really happened. [Perry and LaF look thoughtful] .... A hundred and fifty years ago [Mel and Kirsch look thoughtful] ... to Elle.

Perry, LaF, and Mel all look at Laura shocked; Kirsch has no reaction, he notices everyone else’s reaction

Kirsch: Am I supposed to know who Elle is?

LaF: Elle? The girl Carm turned on her mother and stopped being evil for?

Kirsch: That wasn’t Laura?

Perry: Carmilla’s epic first love?

Kirsch: Also not Laura?

Laura: Remember first year at Silas, those weird dreams I was having?

Kirsch: Only those weren’t dreams! They were warnings from Carm’s ... [look of realization]

Mel: So, you think the dreams are from Elle? Didn’t she, like, sparkle off into floaty white nothingness after Carmilla killed the giant anglerfish god? ... How is that a sentence I ended up saying?

Laura: Only one way to find out. We go back to the scene of the crime.

LaF: If it’s ghosts, we can test out the new spectrometer.

The conversation fades out, as Carmilla starts staring at Laura’s neck, the sound of pumping blood; Laura turns to Carmilla

Laura: Carm?

Carmilla shakes her attention off Laura’s neck.

Carmilla: Yeah ... I’m gonna go crack another bottle of hemo-soy

Carmilla gets up. Laura, Mel, and Kirsch look at each other. Laura gets up and follows Carmilla

Laura: Hey. Sorry about the whole “scene of the crime” thing. I know what happened between you and Elle was complicated, and I shouldn’t’ve said that.

Carmilla: No. Scene of the crime is exactly what it is. You saw those dreams. You know I ... hurt her. Hurt you.

Laura: You didn’t mean to. Maybe there’s a silver lining in all this. If this is Elle trying to warn us about something, maybe you can ... help her?

Carmilla: I’m done being a vampire. I’m done dredging up the past. I’m done with ... well-meaning therapists saying “close your eyes and think of those you’ve wronged, while I light up this funky incense”, and ...

Laura: That’s right. We have plans. And goals. And a color-coated chart [Carmilla smiles, laughing softly] None of which features some mystery from your past stealing the life that you earned. So, we are going to figure out who or what is doing this, and then we are going to -

Carmilla (looking way too cheerful): Gruesomely murder them?

Laura: Stop them. (Carm rolls her eyes) We’re going back to Styria!

Transition scene; cheesy image of a world map, showing their flight, with voiceovers

Kirsch: Where are we going?!

Laura: Styria!

Kirsch: Why are we going?

Laura: To stop Carm from re-vamping!

Kirsch: Okay, but really, why go back to the bad place with the monsters?

Laura: Because of Elle’s manor? It’s in my dream, it’s all connected? And it’s our only lead!

Montage of various foods

Kirsch: Oooh, schnitzel ...

New scene; all six walking dramatically along a path, looking determined, then the music stops, and they’re all looking exhausted

Kirsch: How much further till we get to this place?

Carmilla: It’s just ...

Laura (dropping her bag): Right around the corner

Laura and Carmilla walk towards the manor, ahead of the rest

Kirsch: Oh, yeah, it’s cool, Laura! I got your bag! Yeah.

Laura: You don’t have to do this if you don’t want. You can just stay here if it’s too much.

Carmilla: Hmm. And leave you alone to explore the mystery mansion? Hard pass.

Laura and Carmilla walk up to the entrance. We see a brief glimpse of someone in an upstairs window

Laura and Carmilla enter the manor; we see them entering from inside the building; on the wall in the foreground is a portrait of the same woman Laura saw in the mirror in her dream

Laura (entering the manor with Carmilla): Hello?

They look at each other, and continue in. Carmilla’s attention is drawn to the portrait for a long moment.

Kirsch: Hello? Knock-knock? Elle’s manor’s pretty cool!

Mel: I guess. If you dig the Harenhal vibe. Hello? Anybody?

LaF: I’m calling it. This place is totally haunted.

Perry: You don’t know that. Maybe it’s just ... creaky. It’s a lovely example of a 19th century schloss.

Kirsch: Heh, schloss.

Laura: This is exactly like my dream. Beautiful. I mean, abandoned and dusty, but beautiful.

Perry (putting rubber gloves on): Well, we can deal with the dust.

Mel: Tell me you did not bring an entire bag of cleaning supplies?

Perry: Of course I did! Do you know what dust does to expensive equipment?

LaF: We have EMF detectors, geiger counters, various spectrometers

Mel: You didn’t think maybe we’d need some actual weapons?

LaF: Well, knowledge is really the best -

Mel (pulling out a crossbow): I’m pretty sure weapons are the best weapon. Look at this princess. Carbon-fiber lens, 80-pound drawweight, capable of shooting 160 feet per second. I call her, Gertrude.

Perry: How excessive

Mel: Excessive? Do you remember senior year? You were possessed by Carmilla’s mom, the evil god who forced the entire student body, including me, to dig a pit to the literal gates of hell, or how about that time LaFontaine got brain-sucked by the giant anglerfish monster? Or how about that time that the evil baron tried to execute Carmilla? Or that time that Laura sorta, kinda, I don’t know, died?

Kirsch: We do have a lot of back-story.

Sounds of thunder and strange crashing noises, spooking everyone

Perry: Fine, fine, haunted.

Mel (to Laura and Carmilla): Tell me at least you two packed some heat?

Carmilla heads over to look at the portrait in the hall

Laura: Uh, I know krav maga. I am a weapon. I brought walkie-talkies and flashlights for everyone. There’s no cell service out here, they’re gonna come in handy!

Carmilla’s approaching the portrait slowly

Mel (off screen): How ‘bout you, Jughead? [sound of a beer can opening] Oh, Vincent van Bro brought beer.

Mel looks over at Carmilla and turns to Laura

Mel: Is that her?

Laura: Yeah. [long pause] Let’s search this place!

Mel: For a ... girl who died 150 years ago?

LaF: Better not keep her waiting.

We see a sequence of search scenes, first Mel and Kirsch looking in a room with flashlights, then Perry and LaF with flashlights and EMF detectors, then we see Laura and Carmilla entering a room. Laura sees the portrait of Carmilla that was in the background of one of her dreams. The portrait is lying on the floor, slashed. Laura picks it up.

Laura: Is that you?

Carmilla: It was.

We switch to LaF and Perry

Perry: We should be safe to push the meeting to next week, don’t you think?

LaF: Do we have to talk about this right now?

Perry: Single most important meeting of our professional careers?

LaF: Perr, we are searching a haunted castle for ghosts. This is literally the reason we started the company.

Perry: But if we had more resources, then -

LaF: Hold on, I think I’ve got a hit! Nah, it’s gone now.

Perry: Well, now, see, as part of Intrigue, we’d have all the equipment, we could scan the house in like two seconds.

LaF: Yeah, I get it. But we’re not selling out right this second, so can we focus on the task at hand? Let’s check out the next room.

They leave the room. The door closes, revealing a ghost in 19th century clothing.

We’re back to Laura and Carmilla

Laura: Looking forward to seeing her? Elle, I mean? Wouldn’t blame you if you were

Carmilla: Honestly, I’d rather not. I mean, what am I supposed to say? “Sorry I lied to you and sacrificed you to a giant fish-monster”? I doubt there’s a hallmark card.

Laura (walks over to Carm, and strokes her hair): It wasn’t all your fault.

We switch back to Mel and Kirsch. Something moves in the foreground, and Kirsch spins around to look at it, but it’s gone before a clear sight can be made. Mel raises her crossbow as they both back up. Kirsch backs up into another ghost, and starts screaming.

We get back to Laura and Carmilla. Laura’s walkie-talkie beeps.

Laura: Told her these were gonna come in handy

Kirsch (over walkie-talkie): Ghosts! The schloss is full of ghosts!

Laura and Carmilla look at each other. And suddenly another ghost shows up. They start running.

Laura: Ghosts! Ghosts! Everyone, come on!

LaF: Haunted house! Totally called it!

Perry: Run, weirdo!

Everyone’s running towards the front door. Laura and Carmilla reach it first, but the door won’t open. It’s completely stuck.

Laura: It’s stuck!

The ghosts continue to approach them. They run to another room, running into another locked door, the ghosts surrounding them. They turn to face the ghosts, who’ve stopped right in front of them.

Laura: Um ... hi. I’m Laura. These are my friends. And we’d be thrilled if you’d abandon your plans to gruesomely murder us.

One of the ghosts, Emily, speaks

Emily: Hello, Miss Karnstein.

Carmilla (confused): Hello? Wait ... I know you. How do I know you?

Emily (turning to another ghost, Charlotte): Oh, dear. Well, this is awkward. We imagined you’d recall ...

Charlotte: Killing us. I’m Charlotte. This is my sister Emily.

Laura: Carmilla killed you?

Emily: Oh, no, not quite, exactly. Her mother did the actual deed.

Laura: You’re the girls who were sacrificed to the Deep One.

Lightning. We pan over the various ghosts.

Charlotte; Yes. We are the victims of Carmilla Karnstein.

Emily: And we’d like to invite you to a dinner.

New scene. Dinner table, a roast pig in the center of the table. Emily and Charlotte are at the ends of the table. One side are Carmilla, Laura, and Kirsch, with Perry, LaF, and Mel on the other. Kirsch is eagerly digging in, while the others seem more suspicious

Emily: It’s wonderful that you’ve all been able to join us. And, naturally, we’re so glad you’ve arrived in time.

Charlotte: We’ve been waiting for weeks.

Laura: For us?

Emily: For Miss Karnstein. We hoped once she realized what had happened she’d return

Mel: Hold up. Did you just confess to flipping the vampire switch on our girl Carm here?

Emily: Oh! Goodness, no, we couldn’t have. What little research we have been able to perform suggests it was Miss Karnstein’s life-force that pulled us into the physical world. Until a few weeks ago, we were trapped in a nightmare land, doomed to endlessly repeat our greatest regrets.

LaF: This nightmare afterlife, is it more of a Jungian unconscious, or a “Through the Looking Glass” style situation?

Perry: Stop that! It’s not polite to pry into other people’s unspeakable suffering.

Laura: Why would you be connected to Carmilla’s human life?

Emily: Ah, w-we think it ... might be ... because ... it was Miss Karnstein who ...

Charlotte: She’s the reason we died

Carmilla looks uncomfortable.

Emily: Yes. The family here offered my sister and I a place to lodge

Charlotte: They neglected to mention the vampire cult

Mel: Same thing happened with my college acceptance letter

Laura: Y-you said you knew the family. Does that mean you knew Elle?

Both Emily and Charlotte look confused

Carmilla: Miss Sheridan.

Emily: Ah, yes. We knew her.

Laura: But she isn’t here with you?

Charlotte: No. She isn’t with us.

Emily: But, we’re thrilled that you are!

Carmilla (sighs and puts down her wine glass): Okay, that’s it. What’s with the Stepford act? I got you and your sister killed

Emily: Yes, but you’re here now. And according to this spell book, we need you, Carmilla, here to perform the ritual that will let us move on.

Perry: I don’t ... suppose I could take a crack at deciphering the book?

Emily: Oh, please, do. I’ve deciphered what I can, but I’m hardly an adept. Ah, from what I can tell, if we move on, your vampire symptoms will go away. I assume that’s why you’ve come? Haven’t you? Because otherwise you’d be trapped here with us forever?

New scene: The gang is in a bedroom, talking and getting ready for bed.

Mel: So ... they’re obviously evil.

Kirsch: Nah, I though they were kinda nice

Carmilla: More importantly, is this ritual of theirs even gonna fix me?

Perry (reading the spellbook): Well, it looks promising.

Carmilla: Promising? Are you telling me you were possessed by an evil goddess for, like, six months -

Perry: Eight. It was eight months.

Carmilla: And you can’t get more specific than that?

Perry: The whole book is written in code. But, if the family’s notes are correct, it seems as though it’s two birds, one stone. The ghosts move on, Carmilla stays human.

LaFontaine: That makes sense. When I scanned them, the energy from your spark was flowing straight to them.

Mel: Look, for all we know, they lured us in and trapped us here. Are we seriously gonna trust them?

Laura: What happened to them wasn’t their fault. They were girls just like you or me with their whole lives ahead of them. If this ritual helps them and keeps Carm human, we have to try it.

Later that night. Laura and Carmilla are lying in bed. Perry’s working on a laptop, sitting on the floor by the couch LaF is scanning the room with an EMF detector

Kirsch: Sweet! Is that a Gameboy?

LaF: Even better. It’s an EMF alarm. It might be nice to get a heads-up if any ghosts come calling.

LaF puts the EMF detector up on a mantle and sits down on the couch.

LaF: Psst, Perr, about before ...

Perry: Oh, I’m glad we postponed the meeting.

LaF: You are?

Perry: With all the data we’ve collected here? We’re in a much stronger bargaining position.

LaF: Really, Perr? I know this is the big leagues, but why are you so pumped to sell our company?

Perry: Do you even know what I do all day, while you’re off playing in your little lab? [LaF looks upset] I balance our budgets. Get our products approved. Handle the reckless endangerment lawsuits. I mean, at Intrigue there’d be a legal ... [Carmilla clears her throat, Perry reduces her volume] ... there’d be a legal department, LaF

LaF: I see. And, uh, by “playing” you mean the research that makes our company possible?

Perry: Oh, that is not fair, you -

LaF: You know what? I am too tired to deal with this right now. [LaF lies down on the couch, pulling a blanket overthemself. Perry goes back to her computer]

New scene. Kirsch is making a sandwich, and Mel approaches him, startling him, causing him to drop his sandwich.

Kirsch: On, man, we killed my sandwich. [Kirsch picks up the sandwich] Tutti abal tutti. [to Mel] Five-second rule. [bites into sandwich]

Mel: Have we, or have we not, had multiple conversations about not wandering away in the haunted house?

Kirsch: I know. It’s just the ghost ladies are so nice. And you know how I feel about leftovers.

Mel: Kirsch, if your stomach gets me dragged into some kind of black girl dies first bullshit, I am gonna come back from the dead and haunt your bar fridge.

They hear a noise coming from another room, and go to check it out

Charlotte: They aren’t going to go along with it.

Emily: They’ll get caught up in the surprise. You’ll see. It will all come out exactly as we planned.

Charlotte: Why aren’t we just telling them?

Kirsch’s stomach growls, alerting Emily and Charlotte to their presence. Kirsch and Mel hurry off to hide, while Emily and Charlotte leave the room, locking it behind them.

Back to the bedroom, Laura and Carmilla are asleep. Laura has another dream. Laura notices the nightgown from before

Laura: Ugh, this again? Really?

She hears Mattie from another room

Mattie: You would do well, little sister, to finish your task here. We live for the eternal moment, chérie. We are power.

There’s further talking but it’s indistinct, Laura notices some creepy paintings as she walks through a hall

Mattie: Faîtes attention, chérie. You would do well, little sister, to finish your task here without further delay.

Laura peeks into a room and sees Carmilla dressed in all black, holding a book.

Laura: Did you ever think that our part in this, that what we do might be ... unforgivable?

Mattie: You must stop reading the romantics! [takes book away from her] We live for the eternal moment, chérie! We are power, pleasure [Carmilla walks away from Laura’s sight, while Mattie walks into her sight] and are only accountable for our desires. And maman, who is growing impatient. Faîtes attention, chérie. Votre mère vous met en garde contre l’assassin.

Mattie walks towards the door. Laura runs off. Carmilla and Mattie leave the room.

Laura enters the room Mattie and Carmilla just left. She sees a broach on a plain table.

Carmilla (faint voiceover): You’re wearing the broach

There’s a sound of girls laughing, and then a thunderclap, and a ring of paper dolls appears, surrounding the broach. Laura looks at the paper dolls. Suddenly the laughing changes to screams

Woman: No! I don’t want to go back!

The dolls start to burn and are replaced by a ring of ash in seconds. Carmilla’s gloved hand touches Laura, and suddenly she wakes up in the real world.

Carmilla: Hey, you all right?

Laura: Another nightmare. You and Mattie were talking and she said something about an assassin, and then these paper dolls disintegrated, and I don’t know. It seemed more coherent when it was happening.

Carmilla: You’re still havin the dreams? But we’re here, I mean, why would you still be having them, unless ...

Mel walks in

Mel: Something else is going on.

Carmilla: Knocking, still not a thing.

Mel: The Hunger wanted a midnight snack and while he was getting it, we caught our ghostesses talking about some kind of surprise we aren’t gonna like and sneaking into a locked room. So they’re hiding something. Or someone.

Daytime. Laura, Carmilla, Mel, and Kirsch confronting Emily and Charlotte.

Emily: Hiding something? How could we possibly -

Mel: What’s behind the door?

Charlotte: Why should that concern you?

Mel: Maybe I don’t like surprises.

Charlotte: You look like a woman who can cope. [Mel and Charlotte share a long stare]

Laura: This could all be easily resolved by just showing us what’s behind door number one.

Emily: Of course. If you insist, but ... you’ll ruin the surprise.

Carmilla: We’ll risk it. [Emily turns to unlock and open the door] We’d kind of like to know if you’re planning to ... [They walk into the room and see all kinds of party preparation] ... to throw a party?

Laura’s looking around excited, while Carmilla looks confused

Emily: To thank you for helping us.

Carmilla: You’re throwing a party?

Charlotte: The ritual can’t be performed until the Ash Moon, and Emily always loved to dress up.

Mel (to Charlotte): I can’t imagine you’re a slouch in that department.

Carmilla: You can’t be serious

Laura (looking at a bottle of champagne): I think it’s sweet. It’s like a pre-ritual going-away party, before they go away. Permanently.

Emily: Exactly! And, we would be honored if you would attend.

Laura: Yeah, of course! [she notices a closet with ball gowns] Oh, my gosh! [she takes out a gown] Ball gowns? Are we gonna get our strictly ballroom on? Aaa! Best haunting ever! [she gives Carmilla a quick peck on the cheek and runs out excitedly]

Exterior of mansion

Carmilla (off camera): How’s it going in there?

Interior. Carmilla’s sitting on a couch already in a dress while Laura’s struggling to get her dress on behind a dressing screen.

Laura: BBC period dramas do not spend enough time on how complicated these clothes are. I swear, I’ve been in here for 40 minutes. Hey, thanks for going along with this, by the way.

Carmilla: Well, what’s to go along with? I like a canape as much as the next girl.

Laura: Still, it can’t be fun hanging out with you ....

Carmilla: Former victims?

Laura: No matter how nice they are.

Carmilla: Hmm, yeah, well, I’d appreciate it if they took it down a notch.

Laura: You’d prefer a roaring rampage of revenge?

Carmilla: Well, all this forgiveness is making me twitchy.

Laura (putting a choker on around her neck) You think maybe that’s cause deep down you still don’t think you can be forgiven?

Carmilla: I see we’ve reached the amateur psychoanalysis round. See, this is why I blew off that therapist. You know, some things are just too much to talk about in an office full of crystal dolphins.

Laura: I think maybe that’s the point of the talking

Carmilla: Yeah, except it wasn’t just talking, there was this manifes-

Laura steps out from behind the dressing screen. Carmilla is completely dumbfounded by how Laura looks.

Laura: You aren’t saying anything. Did I put it on wrong? I look ridiculous. I do. I look ridiculous, I -

Carmilla gets up from the couch and approaches Laura. They kiss. They separate and Carmilla takes a long look at Laura.

Carmilla: Forty minutes to get you into that, hunh? Bet I could get you out of it faster.

They kiss again. Carmilla turns Laura around, her hand around her waist, kissing her collar

Laura: We’re already gonna be late for the ball

Carmilla: So let us be late.

Carmilla unzips Lauras dress, removing it, exposing her corset, Laura turns back around to face Carmilla, as they kiss. Carmilla turns around and Laura removed her dress.

Laura drops to her knees, kissing Carmilla as she does. She kisses the inside of Carmilla’s thigh, as Carmilla gently plays with her hair. Laura stands up, briefly kissing Carmilla, and then breaking away to lie down on the bed, Carmilla joins her on the bed, she kisses Laura, and then moves down her body, kissing her left breast. Carmilla lifts up Laura’s skirt, and dives under it. The camera focus on Laura’s face as she gasps in pleasure

Carmilla wipes her mouth as she goes in to kiss Laura. Laura flips them over so that she’s on top. Carmilla removes Laura’s corset leaving her topless (seen from behind), Laura drops back down to kiss Carmilla as Carmilal’s hands run along Laura’s back, scratching it, as Laura’s hand moves off screen, Carmilla moaning

We see Laura and Carmilla dressed fully again, with masquerade masks running down the stairs, Laura in the lead

Carmilla: I’m coming.

They reach the ballroom. An unnamed ghost greets them. There are several pairs of ghosts dancing, as well as LaF and Perry. Mel is standing in the background watching, next to Charlotte.

LaF: Looking good, frosh!

Carmilla looks at Laura

Laura (laughing): What?

Carmilla: May I have this dance?

They go out on the dance floor, giggling, and start dancing

Perry: I’m sorry about the way I handled things last night.

LaF: It’s alright, I know you didn’t mean any of it.

Perry: I may have been a little harsh, but that doesn’t mean I was wrong.

LaF: Let’s not fight in front of the ghosts, honey.

Charlotte looks bored.

Mel: It’s not your thing either, hunh?

Charlotte: Emily has always wanted to belong to society. I understood life differently. [Mel looks at her] If you have to conform, you never belonged.

Mel (smiling): Okay, how did you fall for Vampirella’s schtick?

Charlotte: I didn’t. My sister vanished. I went looking of her. She’s never forgiven herself.

Mel: What about you?

Charlotte: I didn’t leave her then, how could I now?

Mel: You wanna try this stupid dance?

Charlotte: Obviously.

Mel and Charlotte dance.

We see several dancing couples, including Kirsch with another unnamed ghost-lady

Laura (slow-dancing very close with Carmilla): This is nice. Kinda like that grad ball we never got ‘cause our school was a supernatural death trap. [Carmilla chuckles] I missed this. I mean, not the pulse-pounding terror, but ... the parts where we help people. Though, I do wish we’d figure out why the ghosts were here in the first place.

Carmilla: Hey, Laura ...

Laura: I know, no need to keep prying. The ghosts will move on. You will get your life back and ... we can go back home.

Carmilla: No. I, um ... I think at that therapist’s appointment, I may have, um ...

Laura notices the table from her dream, and has a brief flashback to the dolls disintegrating and other scenes

Carmilla: Laura?

Laura: Sorry. Weird déjà vu.

Suddenly she sees dream!Carmilla for a brief second. She backs away from Carmilla

Carmilla: Hey, what’s going on?

Laura: I though ... I thought I saw ... the woman in black, the ... you! The you from my dreams, but that’s impossible, right?

Carmilla: Come on, let’s sit down.

Laura sits down on a chair

Laura: I’ll get you a drink, okay?

Laura has a dream-vision. Carmilla, all in black, with a woman dressed in white with purple fringes.

Carmilla: Come with me, loving me, to death, or else hate me and still come with me, hating me through death and after

Laura snaps back to reality, LaF is next to her.

LaF: Are you okay?

Carmilla arrives with two glasses of champaign. Laura notices a woman dressed in black, with a mask. Laura gets up, rushing to where she saw the woman, but the woman is gone.

Laura: Where is she?

Carmilla: Hey ...

Laura: She was right here!

Mel: What’s going on, Hollis?

Laura: The woman in black, the one wearing a mask

Mel: Everybody’s wearing a mask. [to Charlotte] Do you know who she’s talking about?

Charlotte (to Laura): Maybe if you’re not feeling well, you should sit down.

Laura: I’m dreaming things while I’m awake now. What’s next?

A light glow fills the room.

Emily: It’s almost time! The Ash Moon has begun. Gather round for the ritual.

Skip to all the ghosts plus Carmilla in a circle around a black table (the same one from Laura’s dream), Laura and the others are standing outside of the circle.

Emily: Before we begin, I want to say how grateful we are. Whatever you’ve done in the past, you’ve come to help us now, and I think that shows a strength of character that is quite remarkable.

Carmilla: Yeah, sure.

Charlotte: It’s time, Emily.

Perry: It’s your last night on Earth. Are you sure you don’t want another drink before you go?

Charlotte: The ritual must be performed before the Ash Moon ends at sunrise. Otherwise, we’re trapped here forever. So, no.

Emily begins reciting some foreign language and places a broach in the center of the table, the one from Laura’s dream

Carmilla: Wait, that’s the broach that I ...

Emily and Charlotte place her hands on the broach, and she gasps, frozen. The ghosts join hands.

Laura: Carm?

A glowing light appears from Carmilla’s chest, moving into the broach.

LaF: That’s Carmilla’s spark! It’s leaving her! Wh-why is it going in to the broach?

The ghosts start shaking and seizing

Kirsch: Uh ... guys?

LaF (looking worried) Did that spell say anything about spirit entanglement?

Emily: It’s not supposed to happen like this!

Laura: Something’s wrong!

She starts to approach the circle, but is stopped by Perry

Perry: Laura, stay back, it’s dangerous!

Laura: We have to stop the ritual!

Emily: I can’t! It’s out of control!

Suddenly Emily disappears, in a brief flame, which spread through the circle

Unnamed ghost: We’ve been tricked!

Charlotte: I don’t want to go back!

LaF: We need to disrupt the circle!

LaF rushes towards the circle to try to break it. They free Charlotte from the circle, but get caught themself, pushing Charlotte back into Laura before they disappear.

Perry: LaF!

Laura rushes twoards Carmilla

Perry: Don’t touch Carmilla, it will take you too!

A masked woman appears, the same woman we saw earlier, humming.

Woman (to Carmilla): Did you think you’d get away with it? Summon us up to ease your mind and then just waltz away? Did you really think there’d be no consequences?

Laura: It’s you.

The woman removes her mask, revealing herself to be Elle.

Elle: Surprise! Not the brightest little ingénue, are we?

She grabs the broach. There’s a bright light and a high-pitched ring as everyone falls back. When the light fades, everyone’s on the floor, geting up. Except Carmilla, who’s not getting up. Elle takes something from the table and leaves.

Kirsch notices a pile of dust where LaF had been

Kirsch: Is that pile of dust LaFontaine?

Perry: They’re j-... they’re just ... they’re just gone

Mel (to Charlotte): Are you okay?

Laura (off screen): Carm?

Charlotte: I need to hide

Charlotte runs off

The camera shifts to Laura and Carmilla, Carmilla’s on the floor, not moving

Laura: Carm? Carm? [Checks Carmilla’s pulse] Carm! [Laura starts shaking her] Carm! Hey! Hey! C’mon, hey! [slaps Carmilla’s cheeks trying to wake her up] Carm! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

Carmilla opens her eyes

Carmilla: Hey ...

Laura pulls her up and they embrace. Laura’s eyes widen in shock

Laura: Your heart. It’s not beating. You’re a vampire.

The camera shifts to Elle at the front door, trying to get out, but the door is still stuck.

Elle: Nooo!!!! Why won’t it work? I’ve sent all the ghosts away! [takes out broach and starts chanting in foreign language again; she tries again with no success] Did one of them escape me?

Back in the bedroom, Kirsch is changing, while Perry reads the book.

Kirsch: So, did I miss something, or did that go radically not as planned?

Laura: It was Elle. She was at the masquerade. She knew about the ritual, she knew exactly what was going to happen.

Kirsch: How could she have known?

Carmilla: Because Emily and Charlotte lied to us. They had to have known she was here

Laura: You think vacuumed, screaming back to a hellish nightmarescape was part of their plan? [Perry and Carmilla look at her] Sorry. We will figure this out. We will find LaF. Why would Elle do this?

Carmilla (holding a bottle of hemo-soy): You heard her, to punish me for what I did by stealing my life. [drinks from the bottle]

Laura: But she can’t steal anything, she’s trapped here just like us unless all the ghosts move on.

Perry: But the ghosts are gone. All of them except Elle and Charlotte. Elle can’t leave until Charlotte is also sent back to the nightmare land, like all the other ghosts. LaF thwarted her plan

Carmilla: And now that my spark’s in the broach and Elle has the broach, if she gets rid of Charlotte, she could become human and leave.

Laura: We have to find her. Now.

Mel (entering the room): That’s easier said then done. Miss Sheridan is gone, girl.

Carmilla: Not to mention we don’t exactly know how to extract a life force from a magical broach.

Carmilla sets down the now-empty bottle of hemo-soy, and picks up another one

Mel: You may want to go easy on those, that's the only case

Carmilla: Terrific.

Laura: But, Elle must have the spell already. I mean, that’s her escape plan, right? So we have to find Elle before she gets to Charlotte, then Perry can find the spell to put your spark back -

Perry: Laura, what are you talking about? We have to find LaF first.

Laura: Of course, of course, we have to find both of them, but if we lose Elle now, then all of use are trapped -

Perry: We have to find Elle later, LaF comes first!

Laura: We can’t just let her take Carmilla’s life!

Awkward silence as everyone looks at each other

Kirsch: We could start in the study

Mel: I can’t believe I’m saying this, but beefcheeks is right. We don’t have much time.

Mel, Kirsch, and Perry leave the room. Carmilla approaches Laura, touching her arm. Laura pulls away

Laura: I need to get out of this dress

Carmilla: It will be easier if you let someone help

Carmilla reaches for Laura, Laura spins around facing her angrily

Laura: Did you summon up the ghosts? Because that’s what she said, Elle, that you summoned her up.

Carmilla: I think it’s ... possible.

Laura: Possible? How do you not know whether you summoned up the ghosts of your former victims who maybe want some light, refreshing revenge?

Carmilla: Because, it was just something stupid that happened at the therapist’s appointment!

Laura: What?

Carmilla: She ... said I could never move forward unless I dealt with my past, so ... she had me think about Elle and the others, and, you know, there was the usual “manifest your issues” crap, but ... I had completely forgotten about it until my issues actually ... manifested

Laura: And when were you going to share this little piece of information with me?

Carmilla: I was waiting for the right moment.

Laura: You know what would’ve been a good moment? Any time before the ghost of your former lover killed you! (starting to cry) She killed you. I thought she killed you.

Carmilla: Hey [opens arms] come here [Laura embraces her, sobbing against her] I’m still here. OK? I’m still here. We’re gonna get my life back, okay? And all those things we want, every single point on your five-year plan, we’re gonna do them, okay? Okay, let’s get you out of this thing.

We switch to Mel, Perry, and Kirsch in the study

Perry: Either Emily decoded the spell wrong, or Elle tricked her. The spell she did cast used Carmilla’s spark to force the ghosts off to the nightmare land that Emily described.

Mel: You think that’s where the braniac ended up? [Perry nods] You think you can get them back?

Perry: I think the real moving-on spell might do it. But, that means we only have till sunrise to find the code key. [Mel looks out the window at the moon] And I’ll need Carmilla’s spark.

Mel: Well, that makes getting the broach back priority number one. Hollis’ll be chuffed. [looking at Perry] Perry, LaFontaine knows you’re looking for them. They know. It’s what we do.

Mel slaps Perry’s leg in comfort. Perry returns the gesture

Back in the bedroom, Laura’s in her regular clothes, and Carmilla’s putting on a shirt. A humming sound is heard, and Laura flashes to another dream sequence.

Carmilla enters a room, looking very happy, dressed in white

Carmilla: It’s done! We leave tonight. In three days, we’ll be on an ocean liner headed for New York.

Elle looks less than thrilled. She stands up from where she was sitting

Carmilla: You’re gonna love New York! It’s full of ... concerts, and theater, and ... life. Your life life is gonna be so much bigger than you ever imagined!

Elle has now been replaced by Laura. Laura!Ell turns aroung to face Carmilla.

Carmilla: Wh-what are you doing?

The humming returns. Elle appears creepily sliding up Laura, she takes Laura’s right hand, a knife now in it, and slices her left palm open.

We suddenly return to the real world, Laura’s completing the slicing motion

Carmilla: Laura! Hey! Are you alright?

She looks down and sees Laura’s palm sliced open.

Laura: What in Stoker’s name is going on?

Time-skip. Perry and Mel are now present. Perry is getting gauze out of a first aid kit while Mel supports Laura’s hand.

Mel: So Elle can dream-kabob you in real life? Is that a normal ghost thing? Are we supposed to know they could do that?

Laura: She’s sent me dreams before. This is the first time she’s reached out and slashed me.

The camera focuses on Carmilla, looking broodily out the window

Perry: Oh, dear

Laura: No, no, no, no, no. Not “oh dear”, we do not need an “oh dear” right now.

The conversation becomes slightly muted, as we hear the sound of beating hearts

Perry: Well, I mean, I’m still deciphering, but there’s several spells in this book which might make ghosts much more powerful, especially in the dream world.

The camera shifts back to Laura, Mel, and Perry

Laura: Right, so Elle’s faster, better, stronger. Can we undo that? Use the book to soup ourselves up?

Perry (reading): “Side effects may include ... anxiety, insomnia, dream contagion, and ... death”

Laura: So ... no. Wait ... dream contagion? Is that like ... sometimes in the dreams it’s like she can’t completely control them, like I’m seeing things that she wouldn’t want me to see. Like just now, I saw you getting ready to leave for New York.

Carmilla: No one’s going anywhere until we find Charlotte. The Craft here will keep researching. You, Mel, and frat-boy can ... [notices that Kirsch isn’t around] Where’s the frat boy?

Mel: That burrito-chomping, protein-powder-snorting, gullible, mush-brained ...

We see a pile of ash with a sandwich on it

Mel: ... dope.

We pan up to see Carmilla, Perry, Laura, and Mel looking at what used to be Kirsch.

Mel: I told him

Perry: It’s the same as LaF.

Laura: Okay, we have to find Charlotte and get that broach back before Elle finishes this little re-enactment of And Then There Were None.

External view: The moon in the sky

Laura (voiceover): Search every nook and cranny, Charlotte has to be somewhere

Carmilla: Be careful. Elle knows this place better than we ever will.

We see Laura and Carmilla searching. They enter a room, and Carmilla looks at the books on a mantle. She pulls one out as Laura watches.

Another flasback-dream. Laura (as Elle) lying on Carmilla’s lap as Carmilla reads from a book labelled Le Fanu Poems

Carmilla: “Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes. But in the meantime, there are grubs and larvae, so says Monsieur Buffon”

There’s a thunderclap, and then we see Elle standing behind the couch

Elle: To think of the trouble I went to, [Laura gets up, running for the door] warning you, [Elle blocks her escape thinking you’d learn from my mistake.

Laura: Yeah, cause Carm’s the villain here. Aren’t you the one zapping innocent people for no reason?

Carmilla: I’m doing it to keep what’s mine.

Laura: That life isn’t yours.

Elle: It’s what I’m owed. And I wouldn’t waste it on some banal five-year plan.

Laura notices LaF drawing some kind of symbol on a mirror.

Laura: LaF?

The dream sequence ends abruptly, Carmilla’s still in the middle of taking the book out

Laura: LaF! I saw LaF!

We skip ahead, Laura sitting on a couch with a pad of paper, Perry and Mel on either side, and Carmilla behind them

Laura: Drawing some sort of symbol, looked like this ... or maybe like this. [Laura’s drawing two versions of the symbol she saw in her dream]

Mel: How did you get past second grade?

Laura: I saw it for half a second in a ghost-induced nightmare, give me a break.

Carmilla: Any idea what it means?

Perry: No, but if LaF thinks it’s important enough to send from beyond the vale ... if I could just identify it, maybe it could hep decipher the moving-on spell. I’ll try to figure this out, while you guys go get a life.

Laura gets up and moves toward the door

Carmilla (to Mel): Go with her, keep her safe.

Mel: What are you going to do?

Carmilla: Well, young lady stole my life and turned me back into a vampire? So, I’m gonna remind her what that means.

Mel (to Perry): How about you?

Perry: Oh, I’ve got the EMF. If it so much as chirps, I’ll shriek.

Mel gets up to follow Laura. We see Mel and Laura heading down some stairs, as Perry studies the spell book, and the EMF detector produces static noise, and then starts beeping, Perry looks up.

We switch scenes to Carmilla entering a room, where Elle waits, facing away from the door.

Elle: I used to think you and I would spend our lives reading to each other. If only I’d known how brief one of those lives was going to be.

Carmilla: Hello, Elle.

Elle: Is that all you have to say to me? After what you did?

Carmilla: I never meant to hurt you.

Elle: Oh, don’t apologize. [Elle turns around to face Carmilla] It costs you nothing.

Carmilla: So, what? This is about me paying for my sins?

Elle: You never even stopped to think if you deserved this life. I’ve watched you. All these years. You've never thought of anyone but yourself.

Carmilla: Well, that’s some big talk coming from the girl who sent her friends to a nightmare land.

Elle: Me? Oh, no, I’m just thinking about myself. Oh, wait, I wonder who taught me that?

Carmilla rushes at Elle to hit her, but Elle vanishes and reappears by the door.

Elle: Oooh [chuckles] Not very ladylike, Miss Karnstein.

From off screen, Laura’s scream can be heard

Carmilla: Laura!

Elle: Better run, Carmilla. These old house are so dangerous, after all.

We see Carmilla running with her supser-speed to the study, where Laura and Mel are already present

Laura: Damn it! [camera pans to the pile of ash that used to be Perry, there are various notes around her, the only one that can be seen clearly says “... is a giant trap??”] Perry. You never should’ve left her alone

Mel: No sign of the spell book, either. [to Carmilla] I take it your little chat with the ghost of girlfriends past was a bust?

Carmilla: Yeah, I’m getting pretty sick of this haunting crap.

Charlotte: Imagine how we feel. [All three turn around to see Charlotte in the room with them] I’m wondering if we might be of assistance to each other.

Charlotte’s sitting on a couch with the others around her

Charlotte: Miss Sheridan said you would never go along with the spell if you knew she was with us. I should’ve known that she only wanted your life for herself. It was all she ever talked about. The wide world that she’d been denied. As if the same thing hadn’t happened to us all. (to Mel) I’m sorry about your friend. I didn’t know what would happen when they pulled me back.

Laura: Can you help us get them back?

Charlotte: I don’t know. But we have to stop Miss Sheridan.

Mel: You got any thoughts on the stopping front?

Charlotte: It’s me she wants, so perhaps ...

Another dream sequence. Laura and Elle are alone in a room. Laura’s sitting in a chair while Elle approaches her, pulling out a knife.

Laura: Do we really have to do this Nightmare on Elm Street crap?

Elle: Fine [turns around, then turns back, now holding a tray with a tea pot and tea cups, the room gets brighter] Let’s speak as reasonable women. Elle sits down in the chair net to Laura’s, setting down the tea tray. So. Your friends are trapped beyond the veil. You, Carmilla, and your ... trigger-happy accomplice are next. Sugar?

Laura: ... sure

Elle: But, if you hand over Charlotte, and let me keep this life -

Laura: It isn’t yours to keep

Elle: That’s beside the point! Let me keep it ... and I’ll bring your friends back. You can all ... leave this place.

Elle hands Laura a tea cup, she accepts it warily

Laura: What happens to Charlotte?

Elle: Well, I’m afraid poor Charlotte will have to ... follow her sister. But, you know that was always going to happen, so.

Laura: She’s just like you. They all are. Don’t they deserve a chance to move on?

Elle: Oh! [laughs] Oh, you haven’t figured it out yet. The only way that Charlotte and Emily can reach their ... everlasting rest, is if Carmilla sacrifices her human life. [Laura looks shocked] So, let’s not pretend that you’d sacrifice Carmilla’s life for a few wayward spirits, any more than I would.

Laura: You can’t just leave them trapped in a nightmare!

Elle: You’d let your friends die in here to ... help them?

Laura: There has to be another way!

Elle: Ugh! You’ve had your chance. [the room darkens again, thunder cracks] Whatever happens now is your fault.

Laura’s back in the real world, gasping back to consciousness

Carmilla: Elle? Are you alright? Did she do anything to yo uin the dreamscape?

Laura: No. I just wanna get her out of my head. I wanna get your life back.

Carmilla: Well, we think we can lure her out into the open by using Charlotte as bait.

Laura: You’d do that for us?

Charlotte: There’s only a few hours left of the Ash Moon. If Emily and I want to move on, it’s our only chance.

External shot of mansion, shots of various rooms. We see Charlotte coming down the stairs

Elle: There you are! You know, it’s impolite to cause your host so much trouble.

Charlotte: I’m sure I’ll find a way to repay you.

Elle grabs Charlotte’s neck, pushing her up against a wall.

Laura appears, followed by Carmilla, and then Mel with her crossbow, surrounding her

Elle: A trap? You aren’t serious.

Carmilla: Vampire, warrior, journalist. I like our chances. Let’s have a little chat about taking things that don’t belong to us.

Elle: You first

Elle zooms over to Mel, vanishing her into Ash

Charlotte: Mel!

Elle: Best get the broom out. [kicks the pile of ashes, then zooms over to do the same to Charlotte] Look at that. Then there were three. [to Laura] You should’ve taken up my offer, sweetheart.

Carmilla: Offer?

Elle: Your life for you friends. Don’t worry, Laura declined when she discovered that Emily and Charlotte can’t move on without destroying your precious spark.

Carmilla: You’ll never be able to enjoy it. You’ll spend the rest of your days looking over your shoulder [Rushes to grab Elle’s arm] Wondering if it’s my step you hear at the door.

Elle attempts to slice Carmilla with her knife, but Carmilla dodges too quickly.

Elle: I’ll take my chances. I’ve got the broach. There’s nothing you can do to stop me.

Carmilla: Maybe not. But she knows krav maga.

Elle: What?

Laura grabs Elle’s arm, wrestling the knife out of it, they fight

Laura: Why do people always forget that?

Elle, Laura, and Carmilla fight for the broach. A bright glow appears from teh light, and they all disappear.

Laura appears in a blank white space

Laura: Hello? Carm? Carm! [creepy whispers and howling wind are all we can hear] Pull yourself together, Hollis.

Laura finds herself back in a dream version of the mansion. She sees Carmilla’s rebirthday cake on the same table that they’d performed the ritual at before. The cake then turns into the broach. Laura picks it up. She hears herself, speaking in a sad, almost-monotone, fashion

Dream!Laura: Oh, crap, we’re live? [Laura turns and sees a version of herself dressed in grey, with a microphone for news 9 (the same as in the “local news” clips from the beginning). Behind her is a twisted version of her 5-year plan, with all the goals turned into failures] Today, on Toronto News 9, it’s harsh reality. Abandon your childhood dreams for the dubious security of a subpar paycheck. Spend your days glorifying clickbait and your nights letting fear and misery drive away friends and loved ones. Accept that life is an unbroken chain of mediocrity stretching on and on and on. This is Laura Hollis reporting live from a failed career.

Laura notices Elle approaching and runs down the stairs away from her

Elle: I want my life, you little thief! I want my life!

Laura opens a door, and appears in a brightly-lit room with dream!Carmilla and dream!Elle

Laura: Doors are arbitrary. Wonderful

Dream!Carmilla: Oh, you’re gonna love New York. There’s theaters and conerts and ... life.

Laura: Wait, I know this. I dreamed this.

Dream!Carmilla: Your life is going to be so much bigger than you’ve ever imagined. What are you doing?

We see Dream!Elle taking out a knife. The real Elle appears, grabbing Laura and dragging her out by the ears

Elle: You don’t belong here!

Laura runs off, with Elle continuing to follow her.

She appears in another room, with a weeping Emily being held by Charlotte

Dream!Emily: She laughed. Miss Sheridan, she laughed at the very idea of ... Why did I trust her? Why did I not ... I was supposed to keep you safe.

Laura: Oh, God. Poor Emily. Poor Charlotte.

Elle appears in the doorway.

Elle: Do you know what will happen if you die here?

Laura: Let me guess. I die in the real world too

Elle: Worse. You’ll be trapped, in this hell made of dead minds. I wonder if you’ll feel so sympathetic then?

Laura: Is that what happened to you?

Elle: I don’t want your pity. I want my life! [Elle grabs Laura] I can take it from you living, or I can take it from you dead.

Laura: You’ve seen my dreams. [she kicks Elle in the stomach] Have I ever gone down without a fight?

Laura runs off. She runs into another room, which is the same one from before

Laura: Stuck in an endless loop of someone else’s damage. Classic me.

Dream!Carmilla: Oh, you’re gonna love New York. There’s theaters and concerts and ... life.

Laura notices the real Carmilla behind a couch, watching

Laura: Oh, Carm! Carm! [she runs over to real Carmilla]

Dream!Carmilla (partly overlapping with Laura): Your life’s gonna be so much bigger than you ever imagined! What are you doing?

Dream!Elle slices her left palm. Dream!Carmilla looks away

Dream!Elle: I met a woman in the village today. She said strange things about you. [Dream!Elle raises her palm, lifting it towards dream!Carmilla] What’s wrong? Why won’t you look at me, Carmilla? LOOK AT ME!

Dream!Carmilla looks up, for a brief second, her fangs appear, she hisses and moves towards Elle, before she stops herself. But it’s too late.

Dream!Elle: She was right. You’re a monster.

Dream!Carmilla: I can explain ...

Dream!Elle: Oh, I’ve heard enough of your lies. All your promises. All your talk of a new life.

Dream!Carmilla: No, not lies, in the colonies, things’ll be different! No one will know us! You’ll see that!

Dream!Elle: As if I would go anywhere with you now. No. My new friend is waiting in a carriage below. She is going to take me travelling She’ll show me the wonders of the world.

Dream!Carmilla is horrified, shaking her head

Dream!Carmilla: No, you can’t go with her. Elle, I know, I know I lied, but the horror she has planned for you is much worse than -

Dream!Elle: Worse?! Worse than saying that she loved me ... [whispered] while she drank my blood? [loud] WHILE SHE DRANK MY BLOOD?

Dream!Carmilla (on the verge of tears): Please ...

Dream!Elle: Don’t worry. I’ve told her where you are. She’ll send someone to deal with you.

Dream!Elle leaves the room, as dream!Carmilla falls to her knees sobbing

The camera then pans to Dream!Elle in the room as at the start

Laura: What, is this on repeat? How many times have you watche this?

Dream!Carmilla (entering the room): It’s done. We leave tonight. In three days, we’ll be on an ocean liner headed for New York.

The real Elle appears, Laura and Carmilla hide. Elle leaves

Dream!Carmilla: You’re gonna love New York There’s theaters and concerts and ... life! Oh, your life’s gonna be so much bigger than you ever imagined!

Laura leads the real Carmilla out of the room. They’re now in a staircase.

Laura: Hey! Hey. It’s okay. Hey, you are not there anymore. You are here, with me, right now. And I have the broach. [she places the broach in Carmilla’s hand] If you can just ... absorb it. [Nothing happens]

Carmilla: Nothing.

Laura: Of course not. Of course we still need some stupid spell!

Carmilla: Maybe I should give her my life.

Laura: What? Carm, you can’t! She’s unhinged!

Carmilla: Not to her ... to them. Laura, everything you saw in there ... it’s everything I’ve been avoiding for years. Pretending like being human meant I didn’t do all of those awful things. How is it fair that I get this life while they’re just trapped here? After everything I’ve done?

Laura: Okay. [sniffles] Okay, [sniffles] A, let’s acknowledge that Ell and your mother share some of this blame, and B, we will figure out another way, a way that doesn’t involve you giving up your life.

Carmilla: You mean find a way to avoid responsibility? Mmm-mm [shakes head] You heard Elle, there’s no other way. It’s my life for their freedom.

Laura: What about our life together? Our future? You’re just gonna give up on that?

Carmilla: Laura, I’m not giving up on that -

Laura: Cause, we’re supposed to have arguments over who does dishes, and cupcakes to celebrate big days at work, and grandkids. What is that gonna look like if you can live like you’re 25 forever?

Carmilla: You think I don’t want those things, too?

Laura: Please don’t give up on our life.

Carmilla: I’m not giving up. But I can’t keep running away. Not after what I’ve done.

Laura: Okay [they kiss, then in barely a whisper:] Thank you. [normal volume] Let’s go save some ghosts

We see Elle, pissed off by the front door.

Laura and Carmilla walk through a passageway. A hooded figure in black passes them by, the same ifgure from the dream where Laura saw Carmilla being lowered into the blood-coffin

Laura: Seriously? People can’t just dream about being audited?

They see LaF standing the hallway.

Laura: LaF! [runs to LaF, huggin them] How did you --- ?

LaF: Escape my personal hell? I’ve been through, like, three apocalypses, I can tell the difference.

Laura: Have you found any of the others?

LaF: Funny you should mention that. [LaF opens a door] I’ve been trying to wake her, but she keeps confusing me for ... me.

Perry is watching herself doing paperwork, with Dream!LaF beside her

Dream!Perry: That’s form 83-B done. [a pile of papers appears beside Dream!Perry] Just filing a hundred of these daily ...

Dream!LaF: You don’t mind taking care of these right? There’ll be just, like, 5 or 6 million pages. You can do this alone; you don’t need me. See you in six years.

Laura wakes the real Perry

Perry: Laura? What are you doing in my ... strangely bureaucratic nightmare?

Laura: Elle zapped us into nightmare land. We have to do the spell before sunrise which is coming up fast.

Perry: Well, I had to read the pages before Elle zapped me, but without the code key to decipher the spell -

LaF (clearing their throat): I've got the code key.

Perry: Oh! Yes, the symbol! Do you have the full thing?

LaF: Uh, yeah, I’ve literally got a photographic memory [LaF points at their cybor ete]

Perry: Oh, I could just kiss you on your robot eye!

Sadly, there is no kiss.

The four walk down a hallway, rescuing others from their dreams

Laura (to Mel): You’re safe

Kirsch: Why are people always hunting me for sport?

Perry (leading the others to the room where the ritual is to be performed): Okay, circle up. We don’t need to hold hands or anything, the spell is much more powerful. But, it might be more cozy that way.

Mel: So, what happens to us after the ghosts move on?

Perry: Oh, um, well, we’ll either find ourselves back at the schloss, or cease to exist entirely.

Mel: It’s better than our usual odds

Emily: I’m sorry, not to criticize any plan that would clearly be so much to our benefit, but ...

Charlotte: Doesn’t that mean you have to give up your human life?

Carmilla: Yeah. Well, I’m responsible for what happened to you, so ... this is how I can help.

Carmilla sets the broach down. It turns into Carmilla’s rebirthday cake.

Kirsch: Woah, what happened to the, uh ...

Laura: It’s a cake now. Don’t ask.

Kirsch: Okay.

Carmilla: Alright, uh, let’s get this ritual started before I change my mind.

Perry pulls out a piece of paper and starts chanting in an foreign language. Carm leans over, to blow out the candles on the cake, when Elle suddenly grabs her from behind with a knife

Laura: Carm!

Elle: You think I’m gonna let you do this? Steal everything from me again?!

Laura: But Carm really isn’t the one who you blame for that, is she? I’ve seen that moment between you two over and over again. You had everything that you ever wanted and you gave it up because you were afraid.

Elle: They lied to me. Carmilla, her mother, they betrayed and murdered me!

Laura: You’re right, it isn’t fair what happened to you, but that’s not an excuse. Everything that you’re doing right now, hurting everyone else, hurting yourself, it’s just because you’re afraid of what comes next, but you don’t have to be. We can help you, we can help you find the peace you’ve always been looking for!

Elle: No! No, I don’t want your platitudes! I want my -

Elle is suddenly stopped by an arrow shot by Mel

Mel: Your life. You want your life. Yeah, we know. But it’s not all about you. And you’re a part of this. So, stay put.

Elle slides to the ground, injured, the arrow in her shoulder

Carmilla: Nice shot!

Mel: I’ve been waiting to do that since we got here

Laura and Carmilla embrace. The circle is reformed, as Elle sits quietly in the background

LaF: So, you’re kinda rocking the fieldwork these days, hunh? Think if we got more admin help, you’d be able to come out more?

Perry: I think I could ... find some time to play.

Charlotte (to Emily): We’re almost free of all this

Emily: You shouldn’t have been drawn into it to begin with.

Charlotte: It was 1872. If we hadn’t been killed by vampires, it would’ve been, I don’t know, tuberculosis?

Laura: Oddly specific

Charlotte: Each day was made better because you tried to make it such. I don’t regret a thing. [to Mel] Thank you for the dance. I wish there could be another, but ...

Mel: I get it. You gotta leave with the one that brung you.

Charlotte: Would you like to ... ?

Mel: Obviously.

Charlotte and Mel kiss. Everyone looks happy for them, except Elle who just looks annoyed by the delay

Elle: Ugh, can we please just move on already?

Perry resumes the spell. Carmilla blows out the candles, all but one.

Someone: Ah, it’s working!

Charlotte and Emily vanish in glowing sparkles, followed by Elle. Then Mel and Kirsch vanish, followed by LaF and Perry, leaving just Laura and Carmilla.

Carmilla: What the hell now?

Laura: I guess with all the ghosts gone, there’s no reason for this place to exist anymore. So ... it worked. Hooray. [looking at Carmilla] Sorry about before. I think I’ve been so focused on chasing after your life cause it seemed a lot easier than trying fixing my own.

Carmilla: Hey, you’re Laura Hollis. [chuckles] And I’ve watched you fight vampires ... and gods and even that lady who tried to butt us in line at the craft fair. [they bloth laugh] So, you’re gonna figure it out. Whatever happens next, we’re gonna do it together.

Carmilla prepares to blow out the remaining candle

Laura: If this goes Romeo and Juliet on us, I’m totally gonna haunt your ass.

Carmilla: Of course you are.

They kiss, and then Carmilla blows out the remaining candle.

They find themselves lying on the floor, sunlight coming, holding hands.

Laura: Well, that was a kick.

Laura’s walkie-talkie beeps

Perry (on walkie talkie): Where are you guys?

LaF (on walkie talkie): Is everyone okay, over?

Laura: Affirmative. Laura and Carm A-OK. Over.

Laura and Carmilla get up

LaF: Front door’s unlocked

Perry: Oh! Meet you outside

LaF: You’re supposed to say over

Perry: Over.

Carmilla: Let’s get the hell out of Styria.

Laura and Carmilla walk out of the schloss, joining the rest. Kirsch hands them their bags.

Kirsch: I call dibs on window!

Montage: Walking down the path, then taking a train, then a plane landing, then back to Toronto. The group is having a picnic, and we see Danny in the background talking to Kirsch. Laura and Carmilla are sharing a bottle of champagne

Carmilla (holding champagne bottle as if microphone): And, how does it feel, Ms. Hollis, to officially be a freelance journalist at large?

Laura: I made a huge mistake! What have I done? I quit my job! I gave up my cubicle! I don’t have a plan! What’m I supposed to do without a plan? [Laura starts laughing, joined by Carmilla] Only about half of that was actual panic, so pretty good, right?

Carmilla: Yeah. I’m just gonna go get some blood, babe.

They kiss. The camera pans over to LaF and Perry, looking at some kidn of electronic device.

LaF: So ... this is a blueprint?

Perry: Yep, these are the blueprints they sent over. And, oh, check this out. They have an industrial-sized cleaning closet, and I was thining we could put your reactor over here in this corner.

LaF: That is a beautiful thing.

Carmilla: Selling out going smoothly?

LaF: Uh, we’re retaining executive control over LaFerry at Intrigue. And they’re giving us a thorium reactor. A thorium reactor!

The camera pans over to Kirsch and Danny

Kirsch: It was really scary.

Danny: It sounds a little cushy.

Kirsch: But it was a totally legit adventure. You know, there were ghosts and this haunted mansion and then, you know, this weird netherworld

Danny: And comfy beds and midnight snacks, and a masquerade ball

Kirsch: Look, I even have that mark where I was ghost-zapped. Look. No, seriously look!

Danny: No, I see it

Kirsch: It’s there, look!

Danny: Okay, I see it, you can put it away now.

The camera pans over to Mel. Laura’s standing by her, with a sympathetic look

Mel: Okay, don’t give me pity eyes, Hollis. Like you never had a crush on a dead girl.

Laura: That does sound familiar.

They touch foreheads

Mel: Thanks

Laura walks over to Carmilla

Laura: So, Carmilla Karnstein, a vampire again. What’s next?

Carmilla: I’m thinking ... maybe my PhD in Philosophy. Hey, attend university for 70-odd years, and you rack up a few credits.

Laura: I’m so proud of you.

Carmilla: You’re not worried about how we’ll spend our lives together?

Laura: I figure any two people in a relationship, their lives move at different speeds. That isn’t the part that matters. This, here, right now. This is what matters. And I love you.

Carmilla: I love you too.

They kiss, and then look at the cityscape together as the credits begin

Credits scenes

Montage of various scenes of Laura reporting from various locations

Laura: I’m Laura Hollis and this is a web exclusive for Creampuffington Post. We’re talking today with veteran dragonslayer Elizabeth Spielsdorf about the great apocalypse of 2015

Laura: Hi, I’m Laura Hollis on assignment in Graz where we’re just in time for the ribbon cutting ceremony on the JP Armitage Memorial Library

Laura: I’m Laura Hollis reporting live from the Geneva Summit on the Rights of Were-People

Laura: I’m Laura Hollis reporting to you live from Iceland where scientists have made a breakgthrough discovery of the first drinkable Fountain of Youth

Laura: A scandal brewing tonight on the steps of the capital as the President, who last month was revealed to be an as-yet unidentified species of lizard creature with very small hands, refuses to produce his long-form hatching certificate. This is senior correspondent Laura Hollis for MSSSN-BCD

Credits roll. Pictures of Laura and Carmilla with a baby

Post-Credits scene

Laura and Carmilla asleep in bed. Carmilla wakes up. She yawns, and gets up, walking to the kitchen. She opens the fridge and pulls out a bottle of hemo-soy. Mattie shows up

Carmilla: Hey, Mattie.

Mattie: Hey, sis.

Carmilla: Why are you ...

Mattie: Back from the underworld and lounging in your charmingly Bohemian pied-a-terre?

Carmilla: For starters.

Mattie: You and I and the little ingénue that could are going on a road trip. Turns out the anglerfish was female. Before it died, it laid eggs. Just an alarming number of eggs.

Carmilla takes a sip of hemo-soy

Carmilla: Alright, let’s get going.

Title card reading “To be continued ...?

#carmilla #carmila movie #this took forever

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pleiadesounds · 4 years

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Where To Start With, Pt 1

This week, Harry Fanshawe from UK noiseniks Modern Rituals acquaints Kai with the inimitable Silver Jews, while Kai in turn shows him the finer points of British post-punk stalwarts Wire.

Kai Woolen-Lewis Wire are, for me, one of the great bands in the history of punk music. Whereas a lot of other bands you’d describe as such would subsist largely on folklore and be a calamity if judged on their incarnation in the present moment, Wire however seem to be one of the rare bands who have managed to be both very influential (if you need punk credentials, they were covered by Minor Threat and if you need trendy floppy haircut credentials, they were covered by My Bloody Valentine) and forever forward-thinking - bridging the gap between the pompousness of progressive music and the snarl and brevity of punk, a bridge between what were two ultra-partisan camps. Though they’re contemporaries of elder statesmen of British punk like the Sex Pistols and The Buzzcocks, there’s far more of an art-school vibe to Wire - one gets the impression that they must’ve stood in stark contrast to the image and the attitude of their peers, with cerebral and challenging songs that refused to succumb to the immediate hedonism of the punk music of the time. One gets the impression that they have far more in common with genre outliers like Patti Smith, Pere Ubu and Kraftwerk than with any of their counterparts in the British punk scene.

When I first saw them, at the Lexington in London 4 or 5 years ago, they played almost entirely new songs, with only a few songs from their “seminal” LP’s included in the set. Now that the horror of not knowing many of the songs has worn off, it’s a clear sign of their continuously forward-looking approach. With seventeen studio albums and god knows what else in the way of releases, here’s where to start with Wire - despite their huge legacy, absolutely not a legacy act…

Playing Harp For The Fishes

KWL Even after decades of churning out consistently stark, highly original songs, Wire still absolutely excel - although lots of their current and recent material is a lot more digestible than in their early years - this, from 2017’s Silver/ Lead is big slow-grooving song which gives an excellent idea of the kind of discomforting experimental noise Wire have always dealt in. A steady rhythm section struggles against all matter of ethereal out of key guitar, weird oscillating noises and throbbing synth lines. Musically and lyrically challenging and abstract without ever feeling overwrought. Sardonic without any hint of bitterness. Dense without even a smidgen of unpalatability. Is it always so? Aye.

Harry Fanshawe Wire for me have always been a band on the periphery of punk history. Not to say that is rightly so, but they're a band that I've seen has being earmarked as integral by the nerdier music fans (I mean that with fondness). Take Joy Division, they formed because they saw the Sex Pistols, but they made something much deeper and more meaningful. My mental placement for Wire has had them alongside the likes of Killing Joke in that history (weirder and less easy to associate with the common idea of 'punk'), and I feel like their evolution has been similar. Like you say this track favours simplicity with the steady beat, allowing a nicely sized canvas to throw as many different colours at, which they do with the layers they chuck on top. That is an approach that I see as being more contemporary of today than the 70s (favouring simplicity and excelling in it has really come back in the last few years). It shows how adaptable this band has been over the decades.

Lowdown

KWL Wire’s first album Pink Flag has gone down in music history as one of the seminal British records of the early punk movement, largely down to it’s combination of abrasiveness, melody and brevity. 21 songs in 36 minutes, often fleetingly abrupt, played at breakneck pace and infused with an abstract sense of humour and an art-school sensibility that set them miles apart from their contemporaries. This one, Lowdown, sounds like a soul single on 33rpm; a fascinating disco dirge and highlight of a pretty highlight-heavy first LP.

HF Right back to the 70s and for me that Crazy Horse vibe is straight in there. This is the THE Wire album. Fight me. Musically, it's a whole different sound to the last song, it's got vibe and groove and all the amazing characteristics of the best 70s bands. Vocally I find it more alike the stuff of the 2010s, though I reckon that's probably debatable! It's obviously got that old school, British punk oi! to it and today they're much calmer. But you can hear it. For anyone who knows Kai and his musical projects of the last few years, this riff is SO Kai.

Marooned

KWL Here’s an older one - from 1978’s Chairs Missing. The jump between Pink Flag and this in the space of a couple of years is absolutely insane, and the jump from this to the next year’s 154 is also pretty nuts. A highlight on a rich, chilling and unique record of challenging post-punk, Marooned is slow, meandering and awash with oceanic wetness, big synths and sheet glass guitars, with Newman singing about hanging out on a sinking iceberg - both sonically and in terms of sheer epic-ness of scope, it’s closer to Pink Floyd than to any of their genre contemporaries. I put this on at a house party once and the atmosphere nose dived and the whole room just totally explicably got really fucking awkward. Take what you want from that, I guess.

HF Forward a couple of years and the Pink Floyd sounds are in there, the experimentation is kicking off and yeah we're sat on a soft synth cloud here. It is a massive jump and I love that, I fully dig that 'fuck it who cares what anyone thinks I wanna try that'. I reckon that idea is nicely reflected in your house party play of it. I know that feeling, I did it with Primitive Man myself around a bunch of posh hipsters listening to surf rock in Cornwall. Lasted like less than 2 seconds. Proper wankers. Anyway, point is Kai, it's their loss. The tune slaps.

Map Ref

KWL By 1980’s 154 - so called because at the point they recorded it, they had played live 154 times - Wire had cemented their place as both stalwarts and genre outliers by following up the seminal Pink Flag with the enormous impenetrable curveball-shaped Chairs Missing. 154 is full of big bangers and awkward, atmospheric synthesiser-led songs - this by the way is one of the big bangers. Lyrically it seems to be a geography nerd gushing about the enormous epic expanses of landscape that make up the American midwest. Before you go look it up, the Map reference is somewhere called Centerville in Iowa or Ohio or something. Map Ref has a chorus I frequently cite alongside “That’s When I Reach for my Revolver” or “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” as a contender among underground punk rock’s biggest fist-in-the-air choruses.

HF Again, 70s vibes are rife, the energy of the rhythm section just holds it all up so strong. Weirdly, I find his voice sounds loads like Blake Schwarzenbach [Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil]? Any influence on him there? Who knows. Way more in the way of vocal melody here and the vibe is moving more along the way bands like Talking Heads were at the time. Definitely a banger. Love the lil satirical 'chorus' drop in there. As for landscapes inspiring songs, fuck yeah why should it always be about people? I mean animal rights punk is usually dreadful and dull, let's talk about something inanimate for once.

Blogging

KWL Brazen, streamlined and groovy, with a chugging downtuned riff and a glorious uplighting chorus - Blogging showcases Wire’s admirable ability to follow their own pretty standard formula and keep churning out highly original and interesting songs. The lyrics deserve a mention - it’s a hard enough endeavour sometimes for those of us born in the 90s, but if you were in a band that existed in 1976, the current musical landscape must be a pretty soul-destroying place to exist. Actually scrap that. If you were alive at a time when art seemingly meant something or was worth anything, now must be a horrible place to live. “I’m blogging like Jesus/ I tweet like a pope/site traffic heavy/ I’m YouTubing hope”

HF Totally agree Kai. Today is a fucking terrible time to be alive if you're interested in anything related to the notion of 'art'. It's all been rehashed and overdone. It's everywhere to be seen and no longer has a sacred place. It's been abused and overused for petulant causes. Everyone's a fucking artist and that's killed the concept. Can't believe how much this reminds me of Jets to Brazil, why!? I suppose we can forget about the present if we stick to Wire's back catalogue.

Circumspect

KWL A product of extensive periods of down-time on their part, which saw the members working on other projects - Colin Newman’s Githead in particular is worth a mention - 2008’s Object 47, so called because it’s the 47th Object in their back catalogue - is a really great record and a hidden gem in Wire’s back catalogue for me. Dispensing with the distortion and the abrasion, Wire made a record of sparse, infectious guitar-based songs that you can really lose yourself in, and this is one of the songs in which I have most frequently lost myself. A slow circular guitar arpeggio, laid-back drums and lush vocals result in an almost Manchester-esque slow disco pills-thrills-and-bellyache vibe - this is Wire at their most hypnotic and enjoyable.

HF Slowcore Wire! Yeah this is one of my favourites from this list. Having time away from something can let you come back to it without as much creative control or care, and refreshing your image of what the thing is in the first place. Step away, come back more naturally. This is softer, but it's still as weird as anything else they made in the last 20 years. Pretty banging video too, mind. It feels like you're in one of those dreams where you try and run but you got sandbags on your feet. But in this one, it's Drew Barrymore from Donny Darko and she's apathetic as fuck.

Bad Worn Thing

KWL Their first album properly “back” after a period of sporadic activity through the 2000s, Red Barked Tree is the sound of a band of fifty-somethings consistently at peace with the idea of re-defining what their band IS, without at any point ever stepping on the toes of their older selves. Another album highlight (with acoustic guitars) Adapt, sums it up pretty nicely. "Go east / Go north / Go south / Go west / Leave mouths open / With your best / Adapt to change / Stay unimpressed”. Bad Worn Thing finds the band both tapping into 2000s alternative music and subjecting it totally to their musical and lyrical interpretations. An upbeat, undeniably British-feeling slice of sauntering pop, one that makes me feel like I’m taking an afternoon walk through a British urban landscape to the shop on the first sunny day in weeks - all while giving a pretty caustic account of Britain’s ongoing relationship with its past and by implication, it’s future. “Follow me, no explanation/ the future sold the chancellor paces/ the growing pains associated with a past that no-one faces.”

HF This feels so much more British than much of what we've had from them on this list so far. This is Britpop Wire. Dam right they sound like they're back, they have something new to say, they're older and more jaded, but they still have something to say. I love the 'overcrowded nature of things' repetition. Like they've come back to this messy DIY music thing and it's a fucking full house. So you gotta build your own. Mind you, I'd say Wire have always lived in the garage.

Used To

KWL Another huge cut from Chairs Missing - and a perfect example of what critic Simon Reynolds called Wire’s “strange clockwork geometry” - a blissful piece of post-punk psychedelia and definitely one of the climaxes of a record that enjoys an embarrassment of rich, blissed out moments. I would definitely cite Wire’s work in this period as proof of the utter compatibility of the experimental, expansive, forward thinking music of the 60s and 70s and the abrasiveness and brevity of punk. Indeed, it sounds like bullshit now, but the same A+R man who signed Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols was responsible for EMI’s acquisition of the band while they were still in their infancy. For me, basically everything that made the years 1976-1979 so exciting and vital in the history of unpopular music is represented in this album, whether it be this, the Beatles-on-glue vibes of ‘I am the Fly’ or the aggressive minimalism of ‘Being Sucked in Again’, the album just gives and gives and gives. An absolute classic.

HF Very pleased we went back to this to close. Absolutely loving the post-punk psychedelia tag on this baby. Again, everything you say above that I hear in this record is their observant nature as a band to look back at the twenty years before them and incorporate what's important, what's wrong, what's right and the relationship of all that against their own stronghold. It reinforces their importance and their place in all of this. Not everyone, hardly anyone, has the ability to be the originator of something whilst being so observant (the latter being one of the most troubling things for humankind) at the same time. A perfect place to end with Wire: it repeats, it talks, it stays with you for a moment and then it's gone. Thanks Kai.

Silver Jews

Harry Fanshawe Like many of us, my summer last year was consumed by the release of David Berman's new album under the 'Purple Mountains' moniker and then his sudden death. I'm sure many of us also went back through his entire catalogue once we'd exhausted our ears of his latest and last offering. Silver Jews have always been a standout band for me, usually sitting with things like Leonard Cohen or the Velvet Underground in my poor attempts at genre categorising.

What's always stood out to me in this way, making it something I've struggled to place with more contemporary artists, is the looseness in the music and the corresponding looseness in its lines between music and prose. Like Leonard or Lou, SJ have a truly unique way of delivering and intertwining music and meaning. Where the new Purple Mountains record is much more polished in its production, my fondness for the old Silver Jews records has always been like that of an old, familiar room; their rusty structures and broken floorboards bring with them more character and heart than any solid new build could and, given last summer’s events, it now holds a very special place in my heart.

KWL I remembered having heard about David Berman’s suicide because many of my most misanthropic and refined friends had been especially despondent about it - it seems I missed the boat on that particular opportunity to be saddened by the loss of a great artist, so having this opportunity to go back and be able posthumously introduced to him has been a strange experience - cool that Harry and I have these different perspectives on his work and death…like reading a sentence with a full stop at the end, or something.

Albermarle Station

HF A tender country offering inhabited by old ghosts, broken bridges and ivy covered screens. This song always reminded me of travel, of the lingering memories from recent events in recent places bouncing around the mind after an experience somewhere with people. All whilst anticipating the next destination. There's a train station near my parents’ house and as a teenager I used to travel from it a lot to see friends. That place hasn't changed at all in the 15 years since, and the rare occasions I go there now just bring back all of it; all the old ghosts while I sit and wait near the ivy covered screens and the rickety old bridge.Travel is a time that allows for rumination and retreat, and that can be savoured in all of its broken glory.

KWL A surprising first listen - I’m not sure exactly what I expected, maybe something a bit glossier and more upbeat, but this is great - ramshackle, melodic and with lyrics that will take a million listens. It sort of reminds me of Red House Painters but with wit, self-deprecation and genuine insight in place of abrasiveness and machismo. Berman is a prepossessing and fascinating figure in light of his suicide, I should imagine before just as much and also considering the esteem in which a lot of people held and hold him. Maybe you led me there but this song definitely feels like they have a foot in the past, in those old, deserted spaces you pass through on the way somewhere.

New Orleans

HF From that slightly out of tune guitar at the start to the doubled up lazy groans about the trouble in the stairs; to me this song is the dusty corner of an old house, the gold in the cellar, and it's not the house you think it is. Keeping up with a nostalgic line of thinking, this track captures the 'otherness' of the past, the distance it eventually takes, even when it can be so well set in stone by old artefacts and rooms. It beholds the length of reflective nights and the depth of their texture. Trapped inside the song where the night's are so long, we count sheep to find soothing sleep. An early banger from Berman.

KWL This is also great - there’s something hugely admirable about a song being able to be this rickety and cobbled-together-sounding while still being so evocative. It’s like, they could probably have recorded it without the out of key guitar lines or the drums losing the beat, but they didn’t - and there’s beauty in the imperfection. The song has that ‘On The Beach’ feeling of the end of a long, drunken night, when the ash-tray is full and the kitchen needs tidying before bed. But you’ll do it in the morning.

Tennessee

HF Clearly a trend is setting in here: the slowest country SJ numbers titled by places. Aside from the obviously amazing play on the title word in the chorus, this love song has some of the best one-liners as far as I'm concerned. Here's one: 'Punk rock died when the first kid said "Punk's not dead, punk's not dead”'. Here's my favourite: 'We're off to the land of hot middle-aged women'. Is this an optimistic look to a future with a spouse? As far as I care to know, the whole song is. Punk may be dead but love isn’t.

KWL I always knew you had a type, Harry. Another piece of rickety out of tune folk-country storytelling that somehow plays with superficiality and reaches into the darkest depths at the same time. A bit of cutesy word-play and a really lovely key change in the middle of the song - this is actually going really well, isn’t it. I’m guessing the lady singing is Berman’s wife, just because the whole atmosphere just feels very close and personable - listening to these songs of Berman being in love and happy and stuff is startling in this current context. A great song.

Sleeping is the Only Love

HF What's that? Another love song? Maybe! As blurred as it seems deliberately to be about loving someone and how incredible a good night's sleep is. As someone who troubles with sleep, I can agree that there are times when I would crawl over broken glass and hot coals to make it to sleep. I also love the reflection from that onto the peace had with a good functioning relationship with someone you love. Sleep and love intertwined.

KWL All these love songs have taken on a very strange overtone, now. This one has somewhere in it a snapshot of Berman and his wife settling down to the quiet life in Nashville - it’s all pretty beautiful, and it’s very impressive to go about making so intricate a love song about something as banal as sleep. I think there’s a snapshot here of the kind of intimacy that goes beyond the sexual - where somehow sleeping next to someone is the most intimate thing of all - the rolling over, the arms going to sleep, the waking up, the bad breath. The real deal.

Punks in the Beerlight

HF A song for the addicts! After a hot summers day, what better than the transcendence found in the cooling of a beautiful summers night? How could you make that even better? I guess you could smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch? This song is for a long summer night where you can go and run away into the night with a friend, find the nicest, deadest park around and watch that sun go down. And what comes after we exhaust our routes for escape? Let's not kid ourselves. It gets really really bad. Gotta love that 80s glam section after the first chorus too.

KWL Ok, so I feel I need to state here that Harry’s article has sent me down a deep rabbit hole of SJ/David Berman appreciation. It’s strange to find him here, at this point and I just wonder what it would have been like to have been like “I hope David Berman’s doing okay” at random intervals in life. This is easily the most conventionally beautiful song on the list so far and somehow it examines some of the darkest corners of the human experience. It reminds me of the beauty of being in love - all other markers fade into unimportance, rendering the rich paupers and the poor rich beyond dreams, together; a beautiful juxtaposition, part love song, part junkie memoir.

Advice to the Graduate

HF 'Your third drink will lead you astray.' Let's follow on from the last theme. 'So you've got no friends and you wander through the night. And now you watch the sunrise through a rifle-sight'. This song speaks for itself.

KWL This song seems to be quite strongly advocating the “school of life” diploma - that when you finish all the arbitrary self-building, that there’s a big wide world to step out into that’s all misery and addiction and what’s your deep critical analysis of Edgar Rice Burroughs going to do for you then? It sounds so slack, a borderline The Shaggs influence - Berman said that all of his favourite singers couldn’t sing, and it doesn’t sound like he or his backing band was much better. A genuine advert for keeping the musicians out of music…

K-Hole

HF I've never understood the appeal of a K-Hole, I suppose that DB doesn't either, since he compares it to the feeling of being left alone. Though he does still reserve his fondness for booze as a trustworthy fallback during tough times. Perhaps that's it; it can go too far. I love the string arrangements in this song, it feels outback and rural, the lyrics appeal to that sense of dusty distance too.

KWL I have a real soft spot in my heart for when the music of a song seems to run in tandem with its lyrical content, and I must say lots of the instrumental here feels like an out of body hallucination of a country song - large swathes of the song feel like Alice in Wonderland or that first Pink Floyd record that sounds like a Kaleidoscopic Circus.

Dallas

HF You know the way a city can change completely in character when night hits. When all the blazing sunlight lifts and leaves you with the purity of a place. It's like a deep breath of fresh air after a heavy day, you can feel your spirits lift as the weight peels away. This is a great, simple example of DB, highlighted best in the last lines: 'Poor as a mouse every morning, rich as a cat every night, Some kind of strange magic happens, when the city turns on her lights’.

KWL The lyrics to this really grabbed me too - but not so much in respect of the city at night, but the string of non-sequiturs that pepper the song, something that DB is obviously really great at - painting those little pictures. There’s the bit about his shrink’s former NFL career, the eroticism of CPR, “our record just went aluminium” - all absolutely amazing. I’ve heard hundreds of songs about hundreds of places, but they never came as unique or as vivid as this.

I Remember Me

HF Another example of being a sucker for the whimsical. 'I remember you and I remember me': through the years you can lose the old parts of yourself. When you're in a relationship these losses double, and when you look back in your 'now' state to the person you were right back at the beginning, and the person they were, it makes you appreciate the whimsical and the romantic because they are so short-lived and random. Even though you change through those years, that change enables each quirk and trait that you might look back on and miss. So soak it up while it's there lest you regret its disappearance. In this story, the characters end up apart, but whether or not you do, know that even if you are still together, parts of you can always remain apart.

KWL This is the best song on the list, for me - absolutely gorgeous and very very moving indeed. Somehow, Berman manages to sum up in his songs and in his writing that life is a huge collection of these tiny tiny moments, and maybe if we looked more closely at the tiny moments, the enormousness of life might not seem so terrifying. A sort of temporal looking after the pennies, so to speak. This one screams “don’t wait for the perfect moment, it’s now”.

How to Rent a Room

HF A great ender for this list. 'I want to wander through the night as a figure in the distance even to my own eye'. 'No I don't really want to die. I only want to die in your eyes'. If only…

KWL Further research into the life of DB has directed me towards the fact that his father represents the worst of the worst of the American Republican corporate lobbying parasite - against environmental protections, the minimum wage, health warnings on tobacco, labour rights and trade regulations, to name just a few, and whose son Berman seemed ashamed to be. I just looked through the lyrics to this and they genuinely seem to be a letter to his dad, who he called “a despicable man … [a] human molestor … an exploiter … a scoundrel” saying “I’d rather be dead than your son.”

Thanks for this Harry, it’s been a real pleasure and a great introduction to a fascinating man and his band. May he rest in peace.

For the full playlist, click here

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disappearingground · 5 years

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Interview: Jenny Lewis on 'The Voyager', True Love, and her Musical Sisterhood.

Coup de Main October 6, 2015

INTERVIEW: JENNY LEWIS ON 'THE VOYAGER', TRUE LOVE, AND HER MUSICAL SISTERHOOD.

By Shahlin Graves

There’s a red panda toy on-stage tonight - undoubtedly a first for Sydney’s Metro Theatre (after the show, bemused Australian venue staff take photos of it on their phones). The 'lil panda sits proudly, surveying its surroundings - star-spangled rainbows and bouquets of fresh flowers - looking on as JENNY LEWIS and her five-piece band impress the heck out of an adoring audience.

Jenny Jr., The Panda, (as named during our interview at soundcheck / photos here) looks how I feel - equal parts ecstatic and reverential. When the last decade of your life has been soundtracked by all of Jenny Lewis’ albums, this kind of silent shout-out is like the bucket-list item I’ve always wanted to become reality, but just didn’t know.

Hours earlier, while writing a postcard addressed to New Zealand, Jenny tells us an anecdote about her time on Mumford & Sons’ stopover tour: "I just did this Gentlemen Of The Road festival show, and they have postcards pre-stamped backstage for the artists, so that you can send a postcard to someone - but I just sent postcards to myself, and I sat there for hours writing poems on these postcards about the Jersey Shore. I don’t know if that was their intention, putting them there."

Jenny Lewis is my spirit animal - she’s unashamedly unapologetic, the epitome of big sis wisdom, and a good human; like the very best kind that exists. Whoever said that you shouldn’t meet your heroes, has obviously never met Jenny.

"Can we embrace? I feel like I need to hug you after that," says Jenny post-interview, and the feeling is wholeheartedly mutual.

"...for me, it’s all on the table. My work, it comes from my soul, I’m never writing for someone else. I write from that feeling; so there are no rules."

COUP DE MAIN: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today! I grew up listening to Rilo Kiley, so this is such an honour! And in celebration of your existence, as tribute, we’ve bought you a lolly-lei made out of snacks. JENNY LEWIS: Oh my gosh, you guys! Are you serious? Thank you! What are these snacks? Milk bottles?! Thank you, I’ll need these later.

CDM: Selfishly, I’m so happy that you’ve got some Rilo Kiley songs on your current set-list - I don’t think Rilo Kiley ever came to New Zealand, so this is like the end of a long wait for me. JENNY: No, and we didn’t make it to Australia. Blake [Sennett] has a fear - or had a fear - of flying, so I think that was one of the reasons why we didn’t make it in the end. It’s a long flight, it’s quite a commitment - but that’s what drugs are for. <laughs>

CDM: Well, so that you have a super good reason to come visit NZ next time you’re in this part of the world, we’ve adopted you a Red Panda from the Auckland Zoo back in New Zealand. JENNY: WHAT?! This is the best interview I’ve ever done. This is the cutest little guy ever! This is Jenny Jr.? Because I have a purse - it’s like a little mouse-purse, and I call him Gary - and I wonder if Jenny Jr. will fit inside of Gary?

CDM: Jenny Jr. and Gary can be friends! JENNY: Yes! Perfect.

CDM: After working with Ryan Adams on your latest album and then touring together, it’s rad that it just so happened that you’re on the road together again here in Australia. Is tour-Ryan any different to studio-Ryan? JENNY: Ryan is pretty consistently himself, but the coolest part about travelling with Ryan is that he travels with a pinball machine in a road-case. So backstage, there’s always pins to be played. I was never a pinball fan until I started making 'The Voyager' with Ryan, and now I’m a pretty... I can’t say that I’m very good at it, but I really enjoy blowing off steam.

CDM: Can you beat Ryan? JENNY: I can’t beat him at anything. Maybe I could beat him at making a better Grass-Fed burger or something, but that’s about it.

CDM: Girls can do anything, Jenny. Keep practicing. JENNY: Yes! But he’s a pinball fanatic. I’d have to put in a couple years - I don’t have the time to play that much pinball.

CDM: While in NZ last week, Ryan made national news after he helped rescue an abandoned kitten that he found in a cemetery. Is that a normal kind of life-event for Ryan? JENNY: Really?! Did he really?

CDM: Ryan was the #1 Trending Topic on NZ Twitter with #CemeteryCat. He was roaming a cemetery one night, happened upon this abandoned kitten, then rallied our entire nation to try and help save/adopt it. JENNY: Did he just happen upon the cat?

CDM: I assume he was staying at the hotel opposite the cemetery. JENNY: Amazing! We’ve unfollowed each other on social media, so I don’t know anything about #CemeteryCat. <laughs>

CDM: 'The Voyager' album opens with 'Head Underwater', in which you sing, "Looking out on my life / As if there was no there." A year on from the album’s release, do you still feel that disconnect with your past selves? JENNY: No, and I think that line is about the past even in the song. Like, this is what happened to me and I’ve come through it. By the end of the song, that is no longer the case.

CDM: When you look back on your life, do you visualise your past selves as Matryoshka Russian nesting dolls? Or more like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle that fit together? JENNY: That’s a good question. I think more of the Russian dolls, because that little you - that little innocent girl - is always in there somewhere.

CDM: The line, "If for just one second it helps us to remember that we like each other the most" in 'Slippery Slopes', is one of my favourite lyrics on the album. It’s so unashamedly unapologetic, which isn’t a typical narrative for female musicians in this day and age. Why do you think pop-culture stereotypes tropes of female fidelity and infidelity, pitting 'good girls' against 'bad girls'? JENNY: That’s a big question and I think that everyone’s sexuality is their own - you’re on your own path and there’s no right or wrong way to do things. I’ve been in a committed long-term relationship, and that has ebbs and flows, as any long-term relationship does. But it’s funny, 'She’s Not Me' from 'The Voyager' [album], some people have assumed that I’m saying, "She’s not me, she’s easy," as if she’s promiscuous - and that’s not the point of the song at all because I would never say that about another woman and I don’t judge women by how they choose to carry themselves in that regard. But really, it’s just about someone who’s a little easier to live with than me. <laughs> She’s easy; I’m a little more complicated, it’s a little more difficult with me.

CDM: Another of the album’s important takeaway lines, is of course, "There's only one difference between you and me / When I look at myself, all I can see: I'm just another lady without a baby," in 'Just One Of The Guys'. Do you feel frustrated with society’s gender constructs? JENNY: I do, but that line in that song is-- well, it changes from night to night, but on most nights, it’s light. It’s not entirely heavy, and I think that it’s okay to talk about those things in your work. I think there are pressures... like, you have to choose between your career and having a family - you can do both, or you can choose neither, or it’s okay to define yourself through your work rather than other humans that you’re creating.

CDM: I don’t really read album reviews unless it’s research-related, so I only read The Telegraph’s review of 'The Voyager' this week. They said, "Given Lewis’s age and retro-musical instincts, major stardom may now be beyond her grasp, but if you like your pop music grown up, she’s up there with the big boys." Every word of that sentence makes me livid, from them putting an expiry date on your career to the 'big boys' idiom. Do you think that music journalists would be judging these songs in the same way if they were Rilo Kiley songs? JENNY: I don’t know... because if they were Rilo Kiley songs, if my band were still together, I’d still be a 39-year-old woman writing pop songs. I didn’t actually read that review when it came out. <laughs> I was reading an interview recently with Meryl Streep and she said something really interesting. She said that when she turned 40, the only parts that she was offered were parts to play witches in movies. <laughs> So if someone like Meryl Streep feels it, I certainly feel it. But what she’s done, and she’s continued to do amazing work, is she’s also created a writer’s workshop for women over 40 - and it’s specifically for women over 40. So I think that kind of journalism... it will always exist, but I don’t let it affect my work.

CDM: In Kim Gordon’s book, 'Girl In A Band', she says: "For high-end music labels, the music matters, but a lot comes down to how the girl looks. The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and, depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience. Since our music can be weird and dissonant, having me center stage also makes it that much easier to sell the band. 'Look, it’s a girl, she’s wearing a dress, and she’s with those guys, so things must be okay.'" Do you agree or disagree with those thoughts? JENNY: Well, I think that’s why we play indie-rock. Because we don’t necessarily have to subscribe to that. I can only talk about my own experience, and in the way that I’ve presented myself as a female up on a stage with my band or with Rilo Kiley... and I grew up and I was extremely shy - I was a tomboy until I was in my mid-twenties - and when I started feeling more comfortable-- like if you look at early Rilo Kiley photos, I was in jeans and t-shirts, and then I started becoming more confident and just feeling more attractive. And so I started wearing dresses and I started wearing hotpants, and it infuriated some of the people in the audience - some of our hardcore fans - as if I had sold out. But really what was happening, was I was growing up and coming into my own and feeling more comfortable in my own body.

CDM: Because what you’re wearing totally affects the quality of your music. JENNY: Right! But it’s so funny how no-one ever said anything about what Blake was wearing - if he had a moustache or not, or long hair or short hair, or shorts or Tevas, hat or no hat. But suddenly somehow the quality of the music declined because the length of my pants got shorter. So it’s absurd. But again, you embody your own femininity and sexuality in your own time.

CDM: 'Love U Forever' ironically voyages from the bliss of young love, to "the feeling of hell in a hallway" when a relationship is no longer shiny and new. Do you believe in true love? What does true love mean to you? JENNY: I do. I think you have to believe in true love. I think practical love is also a part of the equation, and it takes work to be in love, and I think standing in love is something different than falling in love - and I think that’s the ultimate goal. You meet a lot of people that fall in love very quickly and obsess and then it sort of ends, but just the idea of standing in it is different.

CDM: Through Rilo Kiley, Jenny and Johnny, and now 'The Voyager' album, you’ve documented your relationships in a public way over a series of albums. It would be easy to dwell on the negative aspects of that sharing, but what have been the upsides for you personally? JENNY: I learn about myself through my songs. And sometimes I write things that I don’t understand in the moment - I write songs because I have a hard time expressing myself in my own relationships, so a lot of times I’ll write something and then three years later I’ll truly understand how I felt at that time. So for me, it’s all on the table. My work, it comes from my soul, I’m never writing for someone else. I write from that feeling; so there are no rules. I never tell myself what I’m not supposed to write about. But talking about my relationship, that’s different - if I’m giving an interview, I think you want to keep some things for yourself. But once you start making rules about what you can and cannot speak to, then you could find yourself in trouble.

CDM: Do you think it’s more important to move forward or move on? JENNY: Move forward. Because, do you ever really move on? I don’t think so.

CDM: In the Rilo Kiley song, 'Love and War (11/11/46)', you asked: "Can vanity and happiness coexist?" Over a decade later, have you found an answer for that question yet? JENNY: HA! I love that line. That line is so funny, I really thought about it for so long. I think that I probably wouldn’t write that line today, because the hope is that you become more comfortable in your own skin as you get a little bit older. But if I could tell my younger self anything, it would be like, 'Don’t worry about it.' Like a 22-year-old Jenny Lewis, 'Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. You look great. Don’t worry about it.'

CDM: You worked with Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij on 'Completely Not Me' last year, for the 'Girls' soundtrack. He’s such an extreme perfectionist, that seems like it would have been the opposite studio experience of working with Ryan Adams who is so primal and instinctual? JENNY: It’s a completely different style of working. Ryan is all analogue - yeah it’s all instinctual, but he is also a perfectionist if he has an idea about the song itself. He doesn’t let the musicians dwell on the process, but he’s very specific about what he wants to hear. Rostam is in a digital world, so things change when you’re not even in the room. But working with both of those guys I learned so much, and I actually am working on a song with Rostam right now - we just started writing something together and I always love working with him.

CDM: You’re so super all about the sisterhood. From having Z Berg perform with you on Jimmy Kimmel Live, to playing at Haim’s Sam Jam benefit show and also having the Haim sisters appear on-stage with you at Coachella this year. As sort of the Patron Saint of Valley Girl musicians, do you feel like a proud Mom watching Haim take over the world? JENNY: How do you know all this stuff?! This is great! <laughs> I am so, so proud of them. I’ve had so many amazing musicians in my band over the years, Este and Danielle Haim, Blake Mills who’s amazing, Natalie Prass was in my band last year... so I’ve seen so many people go on to do really amazing things after spending a little time in my band. I’m so lucky to have people for a short amount of time. And I’ve learned so much from the Haim girls; I’m so incredibly proud of them, and I’m always there if they need me. They were actually over at my house a couple of weeks ago and were talking about songs and writing. I’m always a resource - if you’ve done time in my band, I’m always here for you.

#publication: coup de main #album: the voyager #year: 2015 #mention: songwriting #person: ryan adams #song: head underwater #song: she's not me #song: just one of the guys #mention: meryl streep #mention: love #song: love and war #person: haim

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gadgetsrevv · 5 years

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The Fiver | Sprinting in slo-mo and frolicking in the surf with Apollo Creed | Football

HANGING TOUGH, STAYING HUNGRY

After seeing his stand-in goalkeeper make the crucial penalty save to win a Super Pot on his first start for Liverpool, Jürgen Klopp couldn’t help but channel his inner Sly Stallone. “ADRIAN!” he roared down the camera in his post-match interview, mimicking Rocky Balboa’s emotional address to his wife after beating Apollo Creed to become heavyweight champion of the world. What Liverpool’s manager would do well to remember is that in a sequel to that particular success, the Italian Stallion got a little bit too fat and lazy and was subjected to the daddy of all beat-downs from Clubber Lang.

With a trip to Southampton looming in barely the time it takes to cobble together a decent training montage, his side cannot afford such complacency. “We have to find a way to be ready to win that game,” said Klopp, as his players warmed down by donning muscle vests and extra tight shorts, sprinting in slow-motion and frolicking in the surf with Apollo Creed. “Only one team celebrated more than us tonight and that’s probably Southampton when they saw 90 minutes, no decision!” Having bounced back from emphatic defeat at the hands of Manchester United with a far less emphatic defeat at the hands of Liverpool, Chelsea will host Leicester on Sunday.

With one paw already in a play-off against Torino to make the group stages of Euro Vase, Wolves entertain Pyunik of Armenia at Molineux tonight. With his team leading 4-0 from the first leg, Nuno Espírito Santo has stopped short of forcing his players to chop logs or chase chickens, but has warned against complacency. “It’s not over,” he said, even though it kind of is. “It’s going to be over at 10 o’clock. It’s not over. That would be a mistake.” Elsewhere in Euro Vase, the Pope’s O’Rangers will have seen, laughed at and hopefully learned from the Queen’s Celtic’s exit from Big Cup at the hands of Cluj on Tuesday and will try not to make the same mistakes in their match against Danish side Midtjylland. “My players need to take note of last night and make sure we deal with our second leg much better,” said $tevie Mbe, whose side lead 4-2, in the wake of a Queen’s Celtic’s exit that will have put a spring in the step of all O’Rangers supporters.

In other Euro Vase news, Aberdeen are 2-0 down and facing an uphill task if they are to avoid being eliminated the competition by Rijeka, from – Fiver consults Wikipedia – the Croatian port city of the same name on Kvarner Bay in the northern Adriatic Sea. And finally, in Wales, they’ll once again be dancing on the streets of Total Network Solutions, if The New Saints of Oswestry Town & Llansantffraid Football Club can somehow manage to overturn a 5-0 deficit against Ludogorets.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Barcelona don’t need Neymar. Where is he going to play? He would be a bomb inside the locker room. The Barça fans were hurt by how he left. They will not forgive him” – no, Hristo Stoichkov, tell us how you really feel about Neymar’s potential return to Barcelona.

Hristo Stoichkov: straight shooter. Photograph: Clive Brunskill/Allsport

QUOTE OF THE DAY II

“He’s like an empty crisp packet in the park, flying around all over the place” – Chelsea and Republic O’Ireland legend Tony O’Cascarino offers N’Golo Kanté some poetic praise.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

Head this way for Football Weekly Extraaaaaa, where Max and Barry are joined by Jacob Steinberg, plus former Jamaican international and prominent podder Marcus Bean. Get it in your ears!

FIVER LETTERS

“While I’m as pleased for Adrián as any Liverpool fan, I can’t help thinking that his widespread description as a ‘penalty hero’ is a bit excessive, given he only stopped one in six (and sort-of gave one away). Still, this new 16.67% benchmark for heroic achievement is going to come in very handy during my next work appraisal” – Tim Woods.

“Noble Francis’ letter about The Queen’s Celtic (not to be confused with any of his other letters) actually did make me smile, which is quite something as I’m a Queen’s Celtic fan, so let me explain. His mention of the 2010 defeat to Portugal’s Sporting Braga created quite a bit of mirth from the Spaniards in the office. You see, braga means pants in Spanish. Rather ironic, considering it was Celtic who were pants” – Paul Dixon.

“Frank Lampard’s Chelsea’s Frank Lampard can be well pleased with his youngsters despite losing on penalties in Istanbul. But surely it was Frank Lampard’s Chelsea pensioners who stole the show. Old, creaky N’Golo Kanté and ageing wrinkly Jorginho were the stars of Big Pot. Might I suggest a comeback for Frank Lampard’s Chelsea’s Frank Lampard?” – Mark McFadden.

“The Queen’s Celtic must have thought their Big Cup fixture was a repeat of the old radio standby, ‘I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Cluj’” – Nick Adams.

Today’s winner of our letter o’the day prize is … Paul Dixon, who wins a copy of 50 Years of Shoot! We have more to give away, so get scribbling.

NEWS, BITS AND BOBS

Sol Campbell and Macclesfield have mutually agreed that the former England defender be assisted through the door marked Do One. In other news, the League Two club are skint and facing a winding-up petition.

Sol Campbell: ready to try on a new scarf? Photograph: Matt West/BPI/Rex/Shutterstock

USA! USA!! USA!!! superstar Megan Rapinoe has hit back after equal pay talks stalled. “We show up for a game, if we win or lose we want to be paid equally, period,” Rapinoe told Good Morning America.

Things that probably won’t happen dept: Bury South MP Ivan Lewis has called on Manchester United and City to “step up to the plate” and help the crisis-hit club, who have had another League One game suspended by the EFL.

QPR are demanding strong action from Uefa after their U18s were subjected to racist abuse during a friendly in Spain. The Andalusían football federation have opened an investigation.

Meanwhile, Kick It Out has urged social media companies to clamp down after Chelsea’s Tammy Abraham was subjected to racial abuse on Twitter.

Conor Coady might have a touch of carpal tunnel after writing to all 48 Wolves fans who travelled to Armenia last week to watch their side romp to Euro Vase victory.

Flamin’ Newcastle Jets winger Joe Champness is taking a break from bothering A-League touchlines to focus on his hip-hop career. “He’s made inroads in the business and the opportunity to chase those dreams is one that’s too big for him to pass up,” smirked a Newcastle suit.

And Mesut Özil and Sead Kolasinac are reportedly back in Arsenal training after their recent security scares.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Colombian tyro Anderson Díaz bobs and weaves like a Tin-addled Weird Uncle Fiver, before adding the playground finish. Get it in your retinas.

Player dribbles past seven opponents to score stunning solo goal in Colombia – video

STILL WANT MORE?

Floating football brain in a jar Jonathan Wilson has done a book. About Hungary’s golden age. And here’s an extract on the roots of their Olympic success in 1952.

Turkish Super Lig previews: we got ‘em. And Emre Sarigul reckons the title race will go to the wire again.

Premier League footballers are more woke than ever before, writes Big Paper’s Toby Moses.

Christian Pulisic and N’Golo Kanté gave Frank Lampard’s Chelsea reason to chin up after their narrow Super Pot loss, writes Andy Hunter.

USA! USA!! USA!!!’s Alex Morgan thinks the country’s development model is broken, though MLS suits disagree. Who’s right? Steve Brenner discusses.

Oh, and if it’s your thing … you can follow Big Website on Big Social FaceSpace. And INSTACHAT, TOO!

THE FIVER FAILED ITS A-LEVELS, AND LOOK AT US NOW … OH

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#Uncategorized #Football #sport The Fiver | Sprinting in slo-mo and frolicking in the surf with Apoll

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deadcactuswalking · 6 years

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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 16th September 2018

Pretty uninteresting week on the charts today so maybe this episode might be short. I hope not but on the weekend you’ll be getting BLAST TO THE PAST so maybe Snoop Dogg will be a bit more interesting and provide me with some more material. Anyway, top 10.

Top 10

“Promises” by Calvin Harris and Sam Smith stays still at the number-one spot, and if that’s not a pretty apt depiction of the charts this week, I don’t know what is; that song feels like it lasts 10 times the actual length.

Also not moving is “Eastside” by benny blanco, Khalid and Halsey, at the runner-up spot, an equally worthless song.

We have a debut at number-three today, fuelled by the YouTube streams (it’s probably only here because they have recently started to count on the UK Singles Chart) and YouTube memes. That song would be “I Love It” by Lil Pump and Kanye West featuring additional vocals from Adele Givens. I’ll talk about this song more when we get to the new arrivals.

At number-four, we have a one-space increase for “Body” by Loud Luxury and brando, and I’m not exactly bothered by that, although a closer look at the lyrics reveal them as pretty... dodgy.

Talking about dodgy men, we have “Taste” by Tyga and Offset moving up three spots to number-five.

“Happier” by Marshmello and Bastille has gone up nine spaces to enter the top 10 at number-six, for some reason.

“Girls Like You” by Maroon 5 featuring Cardi B is also up three spots to number-seven.

Oh, remember the three Eminem songs we had in the top 10 last week? Well, they’re still there, and now they’re consecutive. “Fall” featuring Justin Vernon is up a spot to number-eight... why?!

“Lucky You” featuring Joyner Lucas is down three spots to number- nine.

Finally, “The Ringer” is a whopping six spaces down to number-ten. Oof.

Climbers

There is only a single climber here. Yeah, yikes, it was quite boring here. Other than the top 10 and a couple small climbers for songs by Freya Ridings, Jess Glynne and a couple others, that aren’t worth mentioning, we have “Be Alright” by Dean Lewis moving up eight positions to #27. Nice song.

Fallers

We don’t even have much of these... there are quite a lot of fallers at about one space or two down but otherwise, yeah, there are just a few worthwhile decreases here. “Shotgun” gets its streaming cut in half as part of a chart rule, forcing it down 14 spaces to #17, “In My Feelings” by Drake featuring City Girls is collapsing down the charts, with a whopping 14-spot decrease right to #21, whilst “Rise” by Jonas Blue and Jack & Jack is down eight positions to #32, as is “Solo” by Clean Bandit and Demi Lovato down to #36. There are also two five-spot falls for “Youngblood” by 5 Seconds of Summer and “Jackie Chan” by Tiesto and Dzeko featuring Preme and Post Malone, down to #30 and #38 respectively.

Dropouts & Returning Entries

We don’t have all too many big dropouts this week, but there are a lot of smaller ones that were pretty expected like “If You’re Over Me” by Years & Years out from #34, “Ring Ring” by Jax Jones featuring Mabel and Rich the Kid from #37, “LO(V/S)ER” by AJ Tracey off the debut from #38, “Only You” by Cheat Codes and Little Mix from #39 and “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME” by the 1975 from #40 (please, stay out!).

As for returning entries, we have “This is Me” by Keala Settle and the Greatest Showman Ensemble because it can’t leave the freaking charts apparently to #40, as well as that confusingly-credited “Ay Caramba” song by Fredo, Young T & Bugsey and their weirdly-titled record label Stay Free Get Lizzy back to #39.

IN MEMORIAM

“What’s the Use?” – Mac Miller featuring Snoop Dogg, Thundercat, Dam-Funk and Syd

I’m sure you all know of Mac Miller’s tragic death on September 7th due to what I believe is a drug overdose. I was never a massive fan of his music, his lazy flow never appealed to me and personally his production could be hit-and-miss. At 26 though, a clearly great talent with a lot of musical growth and potential, who touched a lot of peoples’ hearts with his songwriting, being lost, is awfully sad, and one of the recent musical deaths I’ve actually taken to heart and cared a great deal for, enough to check out more of his stuff at least. I’m not covering the song that charted on the UK Singles Chart – it didn’t get into the top 40, and I’m rather indifferent on it – so, instead, I figured I’d talk just a little bit about one of my favourites off of Swimming, “What’s the Use?” featuring uncredited vocals from Snoop Dogg, Thundercat, Dam-Funk and Syd. The track, produced by Pomo, also the man behind Anderson .Paak’s “Am I Wrong” (one of my favourite songs of the decade), has some of the essential elements of synth-funk, with a smooth falsetto vocal from Mac Miller in the hook, a freaking great bassline, and really pretty synths serving as the base for the handclaps that perfectly encapsulate Mac’s lyrics and performance – they’re not energetic, in fact, they’re just kind of there... with very little effort or charisma, like Mac’s vocals, where he’s clearly hopeless and careless about what he’s singing about, which is, shocker of the century, drug addiction, which he has since grown numb to, and it’s just become part of the routine. Oh, and I love how is flow is ever slightly off throughout, it adds a more natural touch. Thundercat’s bridge is pretty heavenly too, and the ever-so-subtle Snoop Dogg vocals are quirky and do their job well; if you add Snoop Dogg to a track, you will most likely never fail, he just has too much charisma to ever ruin a song, I love him for that. Great track, check it out. Rest easy, Mac.

NEW ARRIVALS

#31 – “RAP DEVIL” – Machine Gun Kelly

Okay, so, I’ve heard “KILLSHOT”. Eminem, basically on auto-pilot, still destroyed Kelly, and that’s because Kelly doesn’t seem to be able to stir up the anger that is clearly being felt from how Em’s disappointed him as a fan (trust me, I’ve been there) in any way that seems visceral or even interesting compared to Eminem’s thirsty verse in “KILLSHOT” that even Em sounded bored recording. The beat is actually pretty good, with the simple guitar strumming being covered by a lot of distortion and some skittering trap percussion, as with Ronny J’s typical style, but it’s pretty effective, especially when the distortion and drums cuts out in the intro and bridge. Meanwhile, Kelly has an autotuned hook where he rhymed “let’s talk about it” with itself, petty and moronic references to how Eminem’s beard is weird and how he’s named after confectionary (really, Kelly? That’s the best you could come up with?), an admittedly nice delivery at some points (especially during the “f**k the Rap God, I’m the Rap Devil” passage, where he flows pretty nicely and the lines are actually pretty hard; not hard-hitting but work very well with Kelly’s aggressive and faster style), backing vocals desperately trying to prove anything Kelly says is worth listening to by repeating “facts!”, and finally, how the real Slim Shady can’t stand up. Yeah, that’s a hilariously pathetic line, not in concept but how the beat cuts out for such an uninteresting line, and that’s how he ends the second verse. It’s pretty funny, but the song itself? Not exactly worth it. Sorry.

#15 – “Electricity” – Silk City and Dua Lipa

So, this is a song featuring vocals from Dua Lipa, and partly written by Mark Ronson, Florence Welch and Diplo. Recipe for success, right? Well, not exactly, but it’s awful at all, in fact I’d argue it’s pretty damn good for what it is. Yes, it’s a tad underwritten, but do these dancefloor-filler house tracks need much of that to be fun, energetic bops? No, of course, they don’t, and this song succeeds in being just that, with some beautiful vocals from Dua Lipa, who proves to be a perfect base for the deeper pitch-shifted vocals in the drop, and a pretty nice piano melody, with a great bassline to boot, as well as some pretty interesting vocal samples in the bridge that appear alongside some cloudy synths. Much like the last song I reviewed by EDM producers that featured Dua Lipa, “One Kiss”, it’s a good song, but it’s not anything I’m able to really talk much about. It’s not void of any discussion, and I expect this to stick around on the charts for a while (at least in the UK), but it doesn’t exactly give me much material. Oh, and the outro with the “woo-hoo!” ad-lib and the funky guitar strumming is such a great ending, albeit slightly unfitting. It’s alright and I’d definitely recommend it for someone looking for these types of tracks, but that’s as much as I can say about it.

#3 – “I Love It” – Lil Pump and Kanye West featuring Adele Givens

This is “I Love It”, a song presumably taken from both Pump and Kanye’s upcoming albums, featuring a sample (and a video cameo) from comedian Adele Givens, and a video featuring Kanye and Pump being trapped in blocky ROBLOX suits and overly-large shoes while following Givens, dressed somewhat like an angel, in a grey hallway, that premiered at the Pornhub Awards, which Kanye creatively directed. Can’t make this up, folks.

The song that was pretty blatantly rushed last minute so that the video would serve any purpose, and in an attempt for Kanye to get some more chart success after how ye performed, is also pretty humorous, actually, and it’s not like it’s all that terrible, either. It’s got a nice enough bassline – possibly stolen from T-Pain but that’s besides the point - but that’s all it has, and I’m not over exaggerating all that much here; other than the percussion and the vocals, starting off with a decent enough introduction from Adele Givens, sampled from a Def Jam comedy special, that is actually kind of funny to be fair to Givens here, but then it continues down the road to an awful feature from Lil Pump, where he ditches his yelling for a more melodic, autotuned style as he croons about how his girl is such a hoe and he loves it. That’s completely fine, until he talks about telling her cousin that he’s with her, and then banging that cousin, or her sister as he’s apparently oblivious because he does so much Xans or whatever, and then, in shock and pure disgust, he exclaims what I’m pretty sure is the ROBLOX death sound and the beat cuts out to show his genuine anger at how “she take lines”. I thought you loved her (or her cousin, or her sister) because she was a freak, what’s wrong with her taking cocaine? Man, I didn’t think I’d be able to find plot holes in a Lil Pump song this easily considering the lack of even trying for any substance in the subject matter but anyway, after Pump makes up some words, shouts out both London and Smokepurrp and repeats the chorus again, we get a skit from Kanye which is just there to fill out the runtime... as is the mind-numbing repetition of “I’m a sick f**k, I like a quick f**k, whoop!” After about four or five takes at the line, he starts rapping about how if you perform oral sex with him, he’ll buy you a sick truck... and he delivers on his promise, Kim got a green Mercedes-Benz back in August. To be fair to Ye here, he puts more effort in comedic delivery than Pump, so some of his lines can actually pass off as at least partly humorous, like “How you start a family? The condom slipped up”. And after a few filler lines that rhyme “hoe s**t” and “more s**t” with itself two or three times, Kanye’s done and basically the song’s done. It’s really not worth your time unless you’re watching the video. The official clean version on Spotify is somehow even more incompetent than the song though, it’s bloody hilarious.

Conclusion

Best of the Week goes to Silk City and Dua Lipa for “Electricity”, because at least they tried, and Worst of the Week goes to Kanye West, Lil Pump and Adele Givens for “I Love It”. I like all three of these guys, I just wish they were able to come out with something more worth my time combining all their strengths. See ya next time!

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senaidaarz75-blog · 7 years

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eurolinguiste · 8 years

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The following post is a guest post from fellow language learner and musician Fiel Sahir. He came to me with this excellent idea on how to apply music study techniques to language learning and I just love what he came up with.

So take it away, Fiel!

This is it.

Lots of crazy things going on in the world, so it’s time to bring in some positive energy. Let’s make 2017 something worth looking back on.

Losing weight is good, hiking up Everest is always prospect, as is finally getting to those cooking classes. There are always more ideas floating around than we realistically have time for. It’s hard to know what to choose.

Already, it’s February. There’s a pretty good chance that so far, you’re not quite where you want to be with your goals for the new year. Kinda frustrating, isn’t it?

Maybe trying to tackle Mandarin from scratch was too difficult, and now it’s crunch time at work. All those characters! UGH! If only the boss was more lenient so that you’d have a bit more free time. Or maybe you were still just wishing you had a better plan or strategy.

As humans we often tend to think too big. We love to dream about end results as if they were as easy as picking an apple off a tree. It’s easy to forget that there’s work that needs to go on behind the scenes to make those end results a reality.

I’m not saying goals and resolutions are bad. Not at all. It’s a sign that you are a responsible individual and that you want to take charge of your life! The world needs people like you.

The problem is that these goals are often too big.

As the days roll by, life happens. You’ve find your progress up that mountain has halted and you’re frustrated about why you aren’t at the peak yet. You start to wonder if you’ll ever arrive.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy way to learn languages?

What makes ordinary people do great things is not because they themselves were great. Rather, it’s all about how normal people tackle great adversity.

If you’re short on time, and want to get to the specifics there’s a detailed video explaining how things work in this post.

What in the world is chunking?

I’ll let you in on a secret: Just doing something repetitively won’t solve your problems.

Instead, you need to be more mindful of how you spend your study time and develop a series of tactics that work for you. Chunking is a technique that musicians use and I’ve also found it useful in language learning and it may be the right choice for you.

For those of you unfamiliar with chunking, it is the practice of breaking things down into bitesize pieces. Whether you like it or not, your brain can only process a limited amount of information. You cannot absorb everything at once. But if you give it breathing room, the brain can absorb more effectively.

Let’s say you want to go to the US for college. It’s tempting to throw up your hands in desperation exclaiming, “OH MY GOD. I HAVE TO LEARN ENGLISH!!” While that may be your current mountain, take a breath. Do what Benny Lewis the Irish Polyglot does instead:

“Today I need to learn how to introduce myself. Tomorrow I’d like to order a coffee. Hmm… maybe I’d like to talk with a waitress at a café today.”

See how much less pressure that carries? You can even go further still!

You might find something similar to the following dialogue in your course book: Jack: Hey! My name’s Jack. Where are you from? Ann: Oh, hi! I’m Ann. Nice to meet you! I’m from Seattle. Jack: Nice… I’m from Nebraska. It’s a pretty cold place. I hear Seattle gets TONS of rain!

Let’s say this is your first ever English dialogue. What the heck is Nebraska? After looking it up, you breathe a sigh of relief. It’s just a place name.

You naturally read it over and over again from beginning to end and soon find the rhythm in your voice. After having done that multiple times, you realize it’s not sinking in as well as you hoped. You look at it and shake your head thinking, “How can I learn this in the most efficient way possible?”

Spending a lot of time on something doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get anything done…. Click To Tweet

Simple Repetition isn’t the Answer

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Unknown but falsely attributed to Einstein

I recently sat down with a polyglot friend over Skype who wanted some guitar advice before he recorded a video for YouTube.

One of his enduring questions was, “Do you ever get stuck in a song and then have to play from the beginning all over again? I never seem able to just pick up where I messed up!“

I then asked him how he was practicing, and therein lay the answer.

For anyone who’s studied music (particularly classical), this is a problematic reality. Many people look at sheet music and “practice” by playing from beginning to end.

While a Freshman at the New England Conservatory, that was my routine. I thought, as long as I spent two hours on this piece everyday, it would get better. Two hours of putting something on repeat and stopping to fix mistakes only once as you plow through doesn’t do much. Why? Because you’ll only make them again. You’re not giving your brain enough time to process and reprogram what you’ve learned.

Just as you can learn to play the right notes, you can also program yourself to play mistakes. And…

Mistakes don’t fix themselves. If they do, it’s never at the speed you need or want. This problem plagues everyone from the amateur to the seasoned professional. Music is enjoyable and it’s easy to get lost in it.

“Playing is simply intoxicating!” – Adam Holzman, Classical Guitarist and Pedagogue

One of the problems many musicians face is relying too much on muscle memory. On the other hand, language learners focus too much on the script in front of them. After spending a good amount of time with the music or text you begin to feel pretty great.

The reason is, no one is there to judge but ourselves.

Then comes the moment when you have to practice in front of our language partner or tutor. Half a sentence leaves our lips, and then our nerves kick in and you forget the rest. This happens multiple times within one session. It’s pretty embarrassing!

Everyone has problems and challenges. Nothing new. How you address them, especially through chunking will change everything.

Building better “practice” habits.

“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” – Doug Yeo former BSO Bass Trombonist

Being a Classical Guitarist by trade, these are techniques I’ve learned over the years that push me in the right direction. I’m in the business of having to learn music for concerts and competitions. Without these ideas, I’d end up just playing my pieces over and over again.

What I’m about to describe is invaluable information. It’s the behind-the-scenes work of professional musicians and actors. It’s how they perfect their craft. I’m sure Shannon can attest to having used these techniques herself.

1. Take it slow, phrase by phrase.

Ignore the temptation is to take it in all at once. Don’t forget the brain can only process a certain amount of information.

As you look at a dialogue, feel the words in your mouth, and the weird shapes and sounds of this new language. Give your body time to adjust. It’s like stretching into a new yoga pose.

Maybe your accent is really bothering you and you’re not sure how to fix it. There is hope!

I highly recommend Idahosa Ness’ MimicMethod or Gabriel Wyner’s Pronunciation-Trainers. What makes them work is the musical philosophy behind their methods.

“If you can’t hear it you can’t imitate (pronounce) it.”

2. Prioritize.

Scratch out words you do know and circle ones you don’t.

Take charge by deciding what is priority and work with that. Knowing how to say “Nice to meet you” is much more important than knowing what Nebraska is.

Sorry Nebraskans…

3. Drill it again and again.

Although it may sound like it, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do repetitions.

What makes musicians learn music quickly is by changing how you repeat! Artists make it fun and useful. Keeping it varied also helps avoid burn-out.

Try the following options:

Read a phrase syllable by syllable.

Again, but this time In different rhythms or speeds.

Use what opera singers and actors call “back-chaining.” Back-chaining is the practice of going backwards and building up a word one syllable at a time. (More on this in the video.)

4. Record yourself at normal speed to listen to and identify problems.

After practicing something for awhile it’s easy to feel proud of yourself. Sometimes you might even feel as though you can take on the world.

The fix for that is recording yourself. Why?

Once you hit the record button, something clicks. You’ll be making mistakes you’ve never made before and it’ll show you what to improve. Being under stress no matter how small, produces changes in performance.

Speaking of which, Lindsay Does Languages is doing what’s called the Instagram Language Challenge (#IGLC). I can tell you from personal experience that it’s nerve wracking. So why do I still do it? Because afterwards, I can evaluate my mistakes and fix them! The other participants are also quite helpful in correcting any mistakes. And best of all, it’s FREE.

5. Practice again with these new ideas

Review the various points as well as the video. As you wrestle with the ideas I’ve shared with you, adjust them to how you learn best. Our goal is to turn you into a highly effective independent learner.

6. Go public!

Assuming you haven’t already done this step, going public sets you up for accountability. When people are watching what you’re doing, you’re less likely to slack off.

One last idea. Never be afraid to keep asking for a second opinion. When you let others check your progress, you’ll find that their insight is priceless.

Now, enough theory. Go practice!

There’s a lot of information here in this post, so feel free to come back to it whenever you’re feeling stuck.

For now, get out there and apply what you’ve learnt today. Whether it be language learning, cooking, music practice, it’s time to do things better.

Here’s to a productive 2017!

Want more tips on language learning from a musical perspective? Be sure to check out Fiel’s presentation at the Polyglot Gathering in 2016.

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The post How to use Chunking to Fire up your Language Learning appeared first on Eurolinguiste.

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nickreposted · 8 years

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nicreations shared this story . (Brinson Banks for The Washington Post) Published on February 16, 2017LOS ANGELES — One day last summer, Lin-Manuel Miranda, on break from “Hamilton,” stopped by neighbor Jimmy Fallon’s house in the Hamptons. They both love music and Fallon has a listening room in the basement, so it wasn’t long before they were downstairs sharing another passion: “Weird Al” Yankovic.“I said, ‘Do you know “Polka Party!”?’ ” Fallon says. “He’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I know it word for word.’ ”Fallon threw Yankovic’s 1986 record on the turntable, and the Broadway phenomenon and the late-night TV star sang along to an accordion-driven medley that covers 12 songs in three minutes, from Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” to Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach.”“Picture Jimmy Fallon and I sitting in a basement laughing our asses off singing, ‘I’m gonna keep my baby, keep my baby, keep my baby,’ ” Miranda says.“We were crying, laughing and singing,” Fallon says.They’re not alone.Yankovic has sold millions of albums, played 1,616 shows and outlasted so many of the stars he once spoofed. His most recent album, 2014’s “Mandatory Fun,” featured parodies of Iggy Azalea, Lorde and Pharrell Williams, a polka medley and his usual smattering of original songs. The album hit No. 1. At 57, he’s now readying a complete set of his 14 studio recordings, plus an album of bonus tracks. “Squeeze Box,” on sale through a PledgeMusic drive until the end of February, will naturally come in an accordion-shaped box. “Comedy recording and funny songs go back to the earliest days of the record industry,” says Barry Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento, the radio host who introduced Yankovic to the public 40 years ago. “But Al is unique. There’s nothing like him in the history of funny music.”For Chris Hardwick — the comedian who created the Nerdist empire and hosts two game shows, “@midnight” and “The Wall” — Yankovic is more than a musical success story. He’s a triumph for all the oddballs and outsiders.He remembers being a kid in Memphis the first time he heard Yankovic on Dr. Demento. And then the rush of spotting his nerd hero on MTV.“When you’re young,” he says, “you kind of wonder: ‘What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I like the same things other kids like? I must be broken or flawed.’ And then you see this guy who is like, ‘Yeah, me neither, and it’s okay but we can f— with these people, but in a friendly way, not in a toxic way.’ ”'Weird Al' breaks down his 'Tacky' video with Kristen Schaal and Jack Black Play Video An accordionist is bornAlfred Matthew Yankovic is unflinchingly polite, doesn’t curse and pays off his monthly credit-card bill on time. He lives in a beautiful but not ostentatious house in the Hollywood hills. Sometimes, on a beautiful night, he and his wife, Suzanne, and daughter, Nina, 14, will bring their sleeping bags out on the deck and camp under the stars.And he is, at heart, still a nerd.During an interview in his living room, Yankovic has a confession. He’s in the process of re-ripping his entire CD collection because he’s read that FLAC files sound better than MP3s.Yankovic on the set of his music video for "Fat" in 1988, and with his wife, Suzanne, on the red carpet of a movie premiere in 2013. (Byron J. Cohen; Todd Williamson/Invision/AP)“My wife sometimes will question the sanity of it,” he says, laughing. “Like, ‘Are you sure this is worth your time?’ Hmm. Maybe.”On a video set or in the studio, he’s just as deliberate. He plots each shot, studies the charts, thinks through each step. When Huey Lewis filmed a Funny or Die riff off of “American Psycho” with Yankovic in 2013, they barely spoke. “It was serious business, and Al was on his game,” says Lewis, whose “I Want a New Drug” had been spoofed by Yankovic in the ’80s. “The best comedians always are.”He can be so quiet, you wonder whether he’s hiding something. How could a guy who throws on a fat suit to perform funny songs in front of thousands of fans be shy? Easy.“He’s an introvert,” says Scott Aukerman, the comedian and “Comedy Bang! Bang!” host. “It’s tough to kind of break through that in interviews with him.”Suzanne Yankovic acknowledges that even she was caught by surprise. When a mutual friend suggested in 1999 that they go on a date, she declined at first.He can be so quiet, you wonder whether he’s hiding something. How could a guy who throws on a fat suit to perform funny songs in front of thousands of fans be shy? Easy. “My immediate thought was that maybe he was going to be a little bit on and a little bit wacky, and I wasn’t sure if that would be a good fit,” she says now. “Then I thought about it and said, ‘How shallow of me.’ ”Yankovic, for his part, doesn’t feel walled off in any way.“But I am, at heart, sort of a shy person,” he says.He traces his personality to his late parents, Nick and Mary Yankovic. Neither went to college, with Nick working at a steel-manufacturing plant and as a security guard at different times. Mary took care of their small house in Lynwood, just south of Los Angeles.“My father was very outgoing and gregarious, and my mother was kind of withdrawn and soft-spoken,” he says. “Both sides of my personality are there.”His parents got him started in music, buying him an accordion just before his seventh birthday. While other Woodstock-era kids were strumming their Fenders to emulate Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page, Yankovic was learning “Dipsy Doodle” with Mrs. Fesenmeyer.That’s not to say he didn’t love the British Invasion. He did. But instead of rebelling, he adapted.Yankovic, 10, holds the accordion he learned to play as a youth, and poses with his parents, Mary and Nick, as a toddler. (Family photos)In lessons, he learned classical and polka, and to read music. In his free time, Yankovic figured out how to play the songs he loved by ear, whether it was Mason Williams’s “Classical Gas” or Elton John’s entire “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” album.Yankovic was more than a good boy. He skipped second grade, got straight A’s and was Lynwood High’s valedictorian. As an only child, he was loved and sheltered. Church was every Sunday and sleepovers were forbidden, as was anything even remotely risque. Yankovic remembers an issue of TV Guide arriving at the house that contained a photograph of an actress in a bikini. Mary took out a felt pen to fill out the suit. Did he ever do drugs? No. Because his parents told him not to.Did he ever consider ditching an instrument that only Lawrence Welk’s mother could love? Never.“It’s not like, ‘If I only got rid of the accordion, things would be perfect,’ ” Yankovic says. “I was two years younger than everybody in my school. I didn’t go through puberty at the same time. I didn’t learn to drive at the same time. I was a straight-A student, a high school valedictorian. I was always the nerdy kid.”If he found an escape, it was through the satirical humor of Mad Magazine and novelty songs on the Dr. Demento radio show. Hansen, with a master’s in musicology from UCLA and an expansive record collection, exposed listeners not just to Spike Jones and Allan “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” Sherman but to more-obscure one-goof wonders such as Nervous Norvus. Hansen also gave Yankovic his first break. On March 14, 1976, he introduced “Alfred Yankovic” to his audience by playing a tape made by the 16-year-old high school senior. “Belvedere Cruising” centered on the family’s Plymouth. Yankovic accompanied himself on accordion. “When he sang the line, ‘There’s something about a Comet that makes me want to vomit,’ that kind of perked up my ears,” Hansen remembers. “He would do far better songs after that and he’s a little embarrassed about ‘Belvedere Cruising’ today, but I thought, as soon as I heard it, ‘That guy has some talent.’ ”Yankovic works as a student DJ for KCPR, California Polytechnic State University’s radio station, in 1980. (Tony Hertz/San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune)Becoming ‘Weird Al’He arrived at California Polytechnic State University in the fall of 1976 and immediately made an impression. The mismatched clothes. The flip-flops. The accordion. One kid in the dorm derisively named him “Weird Al.” Another stumbled into his room.“It looked like a homeless encampment,” his friend Joel Miller remembers. “There were just little paths. One was to his desk, one was to his bed, and one was to this accordion in the corner of the room. And I had never seen an accordion before, I mean in real life. So I asked him, ‘Can you play that thing?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah. What do you want to hear?’ ”Elton John. Which song? And within minutes, Yankovic launched into “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding.”“We were just blown away,” Miller says. “People started coming out of their dorm rooms to see what was going on. My friends knew I played percussion. So I ran and got my bongos and we started playing, and we had so much fun.”They began appearing on Thursdays, amateur night, at the student union. Others would bring their acoustic guitars and do Dan Fogelberg songs.“And we’d be playing, like, Tom Lehrer covers, and we’d do a medley of every song written in the world, or we’d segue from ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ into the theme from ‘The Odd Couple,’ ” Yankovic says. “Just random and stupid, and people were looking at us like we were from outer space. And that was the first time I felt that kind of wave of acceptance and appreciation from an audience. And it was kind of addicting, I have to say.”Barry Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento, with Yankovic in 1996. Yankovic has been a working musician for nearly 40 years: His first single debuted in 1979, and his first album was released in 1983. (Courtesy of Jon Schwartz; Brinson Banks for The Washington Post) He kept scoring with Dr. Demento. “My Bologna” was inspired by the Knack’s “My Sharona.” The Queen parody “Another One Rides the Bus” was recorded live in the studio. Both songs ended up on Yankovic’s self-titled 1983 debut. By then, Yankovic had also recruited the band that remains intact today — bassist Steve Jay, guitarist Jim “Kimo” West and drummer Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz. He also made an important discovery. Funny songs could get you on Dr. Demento. Funny videos could make you a star. In “Ricky,” Yankovic ditched his glasses and mustache to portray Desi Arnaz from “I Love Lucy.” The song cracked the top 100, and Yankovic felt confident enough to quit his day job working in the mailroom at Westwood One.'Weird Al's' music videos through the years Play Video “He made people stop and look at the TV and say, ‘What the hell was that?’ ” remembers Les Garland, MTV’s head of programming during the 1980s. “Every type of research that we did — familiarity. Do you like it? Are you getting enough of it? Do you want more? — the numbers were huge. And from that, he absolutely was an MTV star.”He was so polite and respectful it almost hid his subversive genius. Yankovic’s parodies poked holes in the bubble of pop pretension. Take his treatment of the Michael Jackson hit “Beat It.”Jackson’s original, released as a single in 1983, revolutionized music by ushering in MTV’s golden age, an era when a video could aspire to become art and take on something as serious as gang violence.Yankovic’s “Eat It” video opened with the flatulent beat of “Musical Mike” Kieffer’s hand percussion before giving way to a sonically authentic backing track. “Weird Al,” slap-sticking through some ofJackson’s iconic dance steps, sang corny lines about food: “Have some more yogurt. Have some more Spam. It doesn’t matter if it’s fresh or canned.” As he pranced, viewers were treated to a steady stream of “Airplane!”-worthy sight gags.Yankovic’s 1992 spoof of Nirvana would be another creative triumph.To get permission, Yankovic called Kurt Cobain on the set of “Saturday Night Live,” where Nirvana was set to perform.“One of the first things he said is, ‘Oh, is it going to be a song about food?’ Because at that point, I was sort of known as the guy that did food parodies,” Yankovic remembers. “I said, ‘Actually, it’s going to be a song about nobody can understand your lyrics.’ There was a brief pause on the line. Then he said, ‘Oh, that’s funny.’ ”In his video for “Smells Like Nirvana,” Yankovic donned a stringy wig and sang unintelligible lyrics as marbles spilled out of his mouth.“‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was a powerful jam that changed the face of music,” says actor Jack Black, who considers Yankovic an inspiration for his work in his comedy rock duo Tenacious D. “It created this new genre and sort of destroyed hair metal. It was a big cultural moment, and he comes in and marble-mouths it. There’s something really important about laughing at things that take themselves too seriously.” Coolio was not a fan of Yankovic's ''Amish Paradise,'' a parody of the rap artist's biggest hit. They appeared together at the American Music Awards in 1996. (Courtesy of Jon Schwartz; Kevork Djansezian/AP) Desperate for approval“That makes me sad,” Yankovic says.He’s in a car being driven to an event at San Francisco’s Sketchfest, a comedy festival he’s speaking at, when he’s told that Coolio is still annoyed. The issue dates to 1996, when Yankovic donned a giant hat and fake beard and released “Amish Paradise,” his parody of “Gangsta’s Paradise.” Years ago, the rapper complained that the song was recorded without his approval. (Yankovic has always maintained that it was a misunderstanding.) These days, Coolio says he’s more upset with the quality of the sendup.“Okay, damn, if you’re going to make a parody of my song, can’t you do a better job?” he says. “He killed ‘Beat It’ when he did ‘Eat It.’ ”Sometimes, Coolio will go to a bar and they’ll have Yankovic’s parody on the jukebox.“And what do they do? They play ‘Amish Paradise,’ ” he says. “And everybody’s looking at me with this big, stupid-ass smile on their face.” As the car rambles through the city, Yankovic says, “I wish that everybody that I parodied enjoyed what I did.”The reality is, almost everyone has.“It was a vote of confidence,” says Greg Kihn, whose top-10 1983 hit, “Jeopardy,” was turned into “I Lost on Jeopardy” by Yankovic. “If you’re not well-enough known to be parodied, well, you’re just not well-enough known.”Yankovic really does care. As his friend Miranda has reminded him, he doesn’t have to get permission from artists. Parody is protected by the First Amendment. But Yankovic has built his reputation on respecting artists’ wishes.Parody is protected by the First Amendment. But Yankovic has built his reputation on respecting artists’ wishes. “I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings,” Yankovic says. “I don’t want to be embroiled in any nastiness. That’s not how I live my life. I like everybody to be in on the joke and be happy for my success. I take pains not to burn bridges.”Prince never agreed to let him parody one of his songs, so he didn’t. Paul McCartney dissuaded Yankovic from turning “Live and Let Die” into “Chicken Pot Pie.” The former Beatle, a vegetarian and animal rights activist, suggested “Tofu Pot Pie.” Somehow, that didn’t have the same ring to it.Then there’s Iggy Azalea.In 2014, Yankovic decided that “Mandatory Fun” needed one more killer parody, and he focused on the Australian rapper’s hit “Fancy.” But he couldn’t get a response from Azalea’s manager.So Yankovic flew from Los Angeles to Colorado and worked his way backstage for an Azalea concert. The singer’s road manager told him it wasn’t going to work. Azalea was too busy to chat. Perhaps he could try to see her in London when she played there in a few months. A few months? Yankovic could see his release deadline drifting away.“Then I thought: ‘I’ve got to be proactive about this. Do something,’ ” he says. “This is my one chance. And this is not like me, but basically as she was walking offstage I kind of jumped in front of her and said: ‘Iggy, hi. I’m “Weird Al” Yankovic and I’d love to do a parody of your song.’ She looked at me like a deer in headlights, as was befitting the occasion, and she said, ‘Oh, well, I would need to see the lyrics.’ And I said, ‘I happen to have them right here.’ I pulled them out of my pocket. She glanced at them for several seconds and then said, ‘Looks fine with me.’ ”Yankovic on the set of his video for “Eat It” in 1984 and with his Grammy for best comedy album, "Poodle Hat," in 2004. (Courtesy of Jon Schwartz; NARAS)The ‘Weird Al’ rebootAt Sketchfest, Yankovic sits on a panel about the late, great IFC show “Comedy Bang! Bang!” He served one season as Aukerman’s musical sidekick, against his management’s advice. They thought he was too big for a low-rated cable show. Yankovic loved every minute.Next, Yankovic heads to a podcast hosted by comedian Pat Francis.There is a lively crowd and cheers throughout the interview when Francis plays many of Yankovic’s ’80s classics. Afterward, Yankovic is asked whether it bothers him that his original songs and more-daring experiments are overshadowed by “Eat It” and other hits.“That’s fine,” he says. “I have to be self-aware enough to know that those are the songs that most people care about.”Musically, he has come a long way. Yankovic was green when he recorded his debut in 1982. Back then, he relied heavily on producer Rick Derringer, known for his hit “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo.” But by the following year, Yankovic was bringing horn charts and vocal arrangements to the sessions. Tony Papa, his longtime engineer, says Yankovic began to produce out of necessity. Derringer, in those days, wasn’t always at his best.“He would do a line of coke, then mellow it out with a joint and then drink,” Papa says. “A lot of times Rick would fall asleep. I think that’s when Al realized he didn’t really need Rick.”(Derringer, responding via email, said that he regrets using drugs — he’s clean now — but that “we made great records TOGETHER.”)By 1992, Yankovic got sole production credit on his albums. His songs also became more varied and complex, whether he was doing hip-hop, grunge, candy pop or, on 2003’s “Genius in France,” a nearly nine-minute tribute to Frank Zappa.“People ask me, ‘Hamilton’ has a fairly diverse base in terms of the kind of music I’m writing for it,” Miranda says. “And I say, when you grow up with ‘Weird Al,’ you learn that genre is fluid.”And so is a business plan.Yankovic decided even before finishing “Mandatory Fun” that he was done with traditional albums. In a viral society, it takes too long to go from idea to approval to creation for a 12-song release. He also doesn’t need a label. Consider how he promoted “Mandatory Fun.” Record companies no longer provide video budgets. So Yankovic partnered with other outlets, including Funny or Die, College Humor and Nerdist. He launched his album by releasing eight videos in eight days.He plans to return to the road next year. But it will be a different show, with the “Fat” suit and pinpoint production plans left behind. Yankovic and his band will play smaller venues, do a different set every night, and focus on deep album cuts and originals. The idea is to connect more with his fans.That is something that comes natural to him. Backstage in San Francisco at Sketchfest, a family has been ushered in to say hello and pose for pictures. Jill Gould, a longtime fan, makes her request.“Can I touch your hair?” she asks.Yankovic doesn’t groan or pause, even if he is asked this all the time. Instead, his eyes widen and he tilts his head toward Gould and returns the question with a mischievous, cartoon smile.“Can I touch your hair?”And like that, they stand there smiling, fingers running through locks. The most successful song parodist ever and a die-hard who heard him first 30 years ago on Dr. Demento. The moment is meant to be shared. Just a man, a pool and his accordion. (Brinson Banks for The Washington Post) Editor’s picks &amp;lt;img src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&amp;amp;c2=3005617&amp;amp;cv=2.0&amp;amp;cj=1" /&amp;gt; &amp;lt;img src="//me.effectivemeasure.net/em_image" alt="" style="position:absolute; left:-5px;" /&amp;gt; Signed in as nicreationsShare this story on NewsBlurShared stories are on their way...

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