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dragonrajafanfiction · 3 years

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Lionheart Party

In straight white slacks, the dark green Cassell blazer and a button up shirt tucked in neatly, Tigre couldn’t have looked more preppy. His dark hair was slicked back in a flamboyant green bow that highlighted his aqua eyes. He smiled and greeted Lionheart members courteously as instructed by Celeste.

“Look them in the eyes, smile warmly and shake their arms firmly. Maybe pat their shoulders as they pass through the door but not too hard and not too soft, like a caress. Less with the ladies. Just a smile will suffice. Thank them for coming and direct them straight to the wine.”

“Really? The wine?” Tigre said, startled.

“Yes.” Celeste grinned.

“Welcome! Thank you for coming!” Tigre said, shaking the hand of a guest and patting his shoulder as he walked inside. “The wine is on the bar to your left!”

Celeste didn’t bother even announcing the party campus wide. She was only interested in entertaining Lionheart members. He was the S-ranked student, but she was the host. She hung him outside the door like a decoration. Her first accomplishment here.

Word of the unorthodox living accommodations spread like wildfire around the campus but Tigre said he was fine with it. The girls were helping him tremendously and he didn’t care much for the rumors. He was excited that he was on his way to becoming a dragon-like person, just like his ancestors.

The Lionheart men weren’t interested in him anyway.

As he shook the hand of one tall blue-eyed man with the looks of a male model, he drew Tigre in for a surprise hug and asked, “So which sister is yours huh?”

Tigre laughed awkwardly, recalling the conversation in the car. The whole reason they liked him is because he didn’t demand their attention. “I uh… will let them decide that. It’s their choice.”

The man threw back his head and laughed. “Smart! I like you!”

“The wine is that way.”

The svelte handsome man winked and went that way, but he took his hand and dragged him inside.

Tigre dug in his heels and trie to delay. “Wait, I’m supposed to... “

“Hey my buddy bought cookies. You should try them.”

Celeste stood like a bold centerpiece in the dorm, speaking to the three of them with a flute of champagne. She spoke in short clips, smiling in a floor length white satin dress, gesturing her dark arms and shoulders. Her neck glittered with a diamond on a thin gold chain. Her hair was done up in a braided crown.

Ruby was helping to serve the drinks and keeping everything stocked up. She had been talking to a man with dark skin and black eyes with straight hair held back with enough gel to make it stick together in lumps, when she suddenly broke eye contact with him and caught eye contact with Tigre. Her expression caught the attention of her suitor who followed her gaze back to him. As soon as he saw the Cassell S-rank watching them, he backed away, hands up in innocence and wandered off in defeat.

Ruby mouthed the words, “Thank you.”

Porsche was laughing on the couch in a green dress that was cut all the way up to her knees, leaving her leg completely bare as she crossed one over the other. The two guys on either side of her couldn’t seem to keep their eyes on her face, she wiggled her heeled shoe a bit and smirked when they looked before continuing her conversation about the wonders of her home country of Tanzania.

Tigre lowered his eyes a bit. They were having so much fun. He should do or say something, but nothing comes to mind. What they were doing was none of his business. They wanted to be friendly with all these people because they wanted to lead the club so it was important to show off in the meet and greet. He couldn’t hold a conversation like they could. If he tried to chat, he might ruin things.

He nodded to himself that, for now, it was fine to hang out. When he reached the bar, he turned around and looked into a pair of beautiful dark eyes with a pale face.

“Hey there.” Her skin reminded him of Celeste’s satin dress, smooth and shining in the light. He was supposed to welcome and smile and lead to the wine and that was all, but he found himself suddenly tongue tied.

“I’m Veronica. A pleasure to meet you.” She held out her hand, palm down, displaying her painted red nails that matched her elegant straight gown.

“Hi…” Tigre looked at her hand. He wasn’t supposed to shake hands with them, right? Her hand wasn’t in the right position to shake anyway. His arm twitched, not sure what to do.

Veronica’s smile vanished and her expression darkened as she lowered her hand, but she smiled again, recovering. “This is the party right?”

“Yes. The wine is right over there.” Tigre said, happy to get back on script.

“I’m not interested in wine. I don’t drink.” She said, “And I know. I’ve been standing here for ten minutes.” She was standing over a tray of cookies. “Want to try some?”

“Sure!”

Veronica smiled and stepped next to him. “Mind if I keep you company?”

“Not at all!” Tigre said. He felt a sense of relief not to be by himself any more. The cookies were good, sweet, warm and chocolatey. He reached for another.

The next person came up and Veronica stepped forward and shook his hand.

“Veronica… fancy meeting you here.” The blonde man said.

“I’m a member of Lionheart now so…” She looked up at Tigre. “Tigre… is that your real name…?”

“It is.” Tigre nodded.

“Tigre, I’m Henry Everton. My parents are of an old dynasty in Poland that immigrated to the US during World War II and made money in the oil business.”

“Oh I see.”

“Where is your family from?”

He almost said he didn’t know. But he did know. “Dragons!” he exclaimed confidently.

Everton wheezed for a second, trying to hold in his mouth full of wine, and then laughed. “Wow. That’s what it all comes down to right?”

Veronica nodded. “That’s why we’re all here. Cassell attracts the highest purity hybrids from all over the world. Tigre knows why we’re here as well. According to the registry, he majored in martial arts.”

“Oh really? You might as well so long as you have the physique and energy for it. I personally can’t handle getting into too many fights. But you look like you’ve been in a few yourself.”

Tigre self-consciously bit into another cookie. “I have.”

He felt a sudden sense of relief. He seemed comfortable just standing at the bar and holding a conversation.

“OH you know who has your same major? Alex.” He turned and shouted. “Hey Alex!”

Alex looked to be about 6 foot 50 and about as wide. He lumbers across the living room and towers over Tigre like a goliath. Tigre didn’t remember this guy coming in. Wait…

He turned to the door. People were just walking in! He’d left his post and people were just flowing in like crazy!

Celeste was staring at him, with angry black eyes.

Panicked, Tigre looked up at Alex who stared down at him like he could pound him completely through the floor.

“Yeah I think he’s in like all your classes this is awesome! You guys should exchange numbers.” Everton beamed and slapped Alex on the bottom before going to greet the people coming in.

“Ah sure…” Tigre pulled out his phone that he got from Toyama and tried to remember how to add a contact. After a few awkward seconds he gave up. “Can I… just give you my number?”

Ruby has gone to the door for crowd control but she isn’t nearly the presence that Tigre apparently was. Soon, she’s surrounded and fielding awkward questions from guys who looked like they were drunk already. There must have been another party somewhere and maybe it had ended? Or were people here just drunk all the time?

Porsche wasn’t going to help her sister, she was busy taking selfies on the couch, holding out her phone and making a victory sign with her fingers. “Okay now give me all your numbers.” She commanded. All the guys were happy to comply.

Tigre finally got the number to Alex the Giant, who apparently was in all his classes.

He grumbled. “I look forward to seeing you in battlefield training.”

“Right…” He whispered. “S...same here.”

Tigre turned to the bar where three guys were filling the cups of the people in line. One man had a cup in each hand and spilled a bit on the floor as he walked back to the door to give beer to people as they were coming in.

He was so distracted he didn’t realize Veronica was talking to him. “As part of my study, I was tasked with researching S-ranks like Principal Anjou and Lu Mingfei. They seem very ordinary on the surface, but their minds are anything but ordinary. They’re not overly obsessed with anything in this world. Anjou appreciates good things in the world but can hardly enjoy them because this is not his world. Lu Mingfei seems to feel the same way. No matter how much he attains in power or status, he’s not truly interested in it. So it didn’t surprise me at all to see you outside the party on your own. This is exactly how S-rankers act.”

“I… I guess?” He stammered. He turned and caught sight of Porsche who was in a full blown make out session with one of the men on the couch. They way his hand moved up her body and over her shoulders and then over her hair and…

Someone knocked into him and apologized. “Oh wait!” He looked up at him wide eyed. “You’re the S-ranker. That’s awesome! So are you half lizard or something? I hear you guys turn into dragons when you’re really pissed off.”

“I… don’t think so?”

The man shoved a beer into his hand. “Here bottoms up. I want to talk to you and hear your story. Are you from a whole family of dragonslayers?”

“No..”

“Really? Where are you from?”

“Mexico… I…”

“Mexico? I haven’t heard a lot about dragons there but you know what? I had a sister who did a whole report on the legend of Quetzocoatl… I wonder if you have some sort of Dragon Lineage from that, but it’s also possible that Hybrids came from the Conquistadores. I mean, it’s possible that Cortez and Montezuma were hybrids… or maybe even Dragons!”

Tigre couldn’t walk without bumping into someone. The whole place smelled like alcohol. The music was suddenly extremely loud and people were bouncing in the living room. This was all his fault. He had one job. Celeste was going to kill him.

The man ushered him onto a couch with two other people. He introduced them but he could barely hear over the noise.

“By the way, I live downstairs down the hall. I heard the party going on and you know…”

“Wait, all these people live here?”

“Yes, like, I think three quarters of these people are your neighbors. How’d you get a pad like this? I mean dang, shackin’ up with the Smith girls? Lucky you.”

“They might kick me out after this…” He squeaked.

“No they won’t.” This guy switched out his empty cup with a full one. “You’re kind of quiet…”

Tigre looked down at his cup and realized it was plastic and a shade of red. He didn’t remember these cups being in the bar area. “Where did this cup come from?”

“If you crash a party you bring your own booze. Common courtesy. So which one of those girls is yours?”

Tigre suddenly felt very dizzy and tired. “I don’t know. I don’t…”

“Oh come on, be honest… There’s one you got your eye on? I don’t want to step on any toes.”

“Porsche likes guys a lot. You should talk to her.” He kept trying to focus his eyes. People were laughing awfully loud.

“Excellent. By the way, Veronica is nice. You know if you don’t like chocolate.”

Tigre squinted at him and realized this was not the person who was talking about Mesoamerican mythology earlier. Someone else had sat next to him and he didn’t even realize it. He suddenly wondered if there was some sort of time skip and he’d been sitting here for a longer time than he realized.

It sank in that he was intoxicated. He didn’t drink that much. How could he feel this listless and out of it? He decided it was probably best to just stay on the couch and not move too much. He was afraid of falling because the room was tilting so bad.

Two freshman hooked up microphones and a beat started playing. They were speaking quickly at each other and insulting each other with quick words and phrases that somehow rhymed. People cheered and goaded on the best rhyming phrases and much to his shock Celeste broke from the crowd and snatched the mic.

Her dress was slightly stained. “This is my party, this is my house, so listen up, Mama Celly gonna rap now. Yo all you fellas walkin’ like you wanna piece o’ me. But I’m not your baby girl who’s gonna go down easily! Disses just starting, Kiss and kowtow, I’m gonna take you ‘part as future Lady Lionheart!”

She wasn’t angry? She was having fun?

“Oh… good…” Tigre slid down the couch, laid down and blacked out.

#Dragon Raja

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superpaperclip · 4 years

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From Time to Time

Kennedy Moore, the first openly non-binary First Child, moved into Alex Claremont-Diaz's old room- the East Bedroom.

Read here on AO3

CW: Description of a panic attack

“Almost every queer person knows their names- Alexander Claremont-Diaz and Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor. The First Son of the United States and the Prince of England who, after being cruelly outed in a giant scandal, lived happily ever after together. Well, today I’m lucky enough to move into Alex’s old room- the East Bedroom. Hopefully, I’ll be able to live up to his legacy as your First Child of the United States.”

With a smile, Kennedy Moore posted the picture of their new bedroom to Instagram, quickly turning off their phone before the flood of likes and comments came and jumping backwards onto the bed. They glanced around the room, trying to imagine a young Alex Claremont-Diaz walking around.

It had been renovated for Kennedy, the walls a nice cream color and the bed swathed in a deep red. Their fancier clothes hung neatly in the closet and various papers were stacked on an oak desk. There was a fireplace on the far wall that they didn’t quite feel brave enough to light and a small table under the frosted window. Boxes and bags of stuff were stacked in a corner, but they resolutely ignored the pile.

The room was still alien to Kennedy, not quite home yet. Although, they supposed, it would be home for at least the next four years. They had done what they could as a newly 18-year-old to help their father get elected, and it worked- their father won with a landslide. Kennedy recalled Alex Claremont-Diaz talking about Texas flipping blue for the first time in 44 years back in 2020, and their chest swelled with pride at how far the country had come- Texas was regularly blue these days.

Lost in thought, they almost fell off the bed at the knocking. Opening their door revealed Danny, their brother, with his arm raised. He pushed past Kennedy despite their protests, strolling around the room with a scrutinizing eye.

“Get out of here, you pest.” Kennedy jabbed their thumb at the hallway, holding the door open. Danny ignored them.

“It’s not very personalized. You should make it more personalized. We’re gonna be here for at least four years, you know. Unless Dad does something to get impeached. Which I don’t think he will. What were we talking about? Oh, yeah- your room. I know for a fact red isn’t your favorite color.” Danny was right, of course, but Kennedy would never admit it. Red was a good color for the oldest First Child.

“Get off my bed, you ass. And don’t you dare spill that in my room, or you’re gonna pay.” They gestured at the bottle of soda Danny had seemingly produced from nowhere. ”As for my room… well, we just moved in. I need some time to decorate. Besides, what’re you giving me shit for? I’m sure your bedroom looks the same as mine.” Danny shook his head, and Kennedy raised their eyebrows.

“Did you really get everything unpacked? We’ve only been here one day!”

“Yep!” Danny grinned, popping the P. “I busted my ass. And I asked Asher for help.” Asher Woodward, the Vice President’s youngest kid, and only son. The four of them- Kennedy, Danny, Asher, and his older sister Bianca- had become close friends on the campaign trail, having spent countless late nights and early mornings together brainstorming ways to win.

“Hey, that’s cheating! Asher and Bianca have their own unpacking to do. Don’t be mad just because you didn’t think of it.”

“Whatever, kid. Just get out of my room.” Kennedy grabbed Danny’s arm and tugged. He slid off their bed, hands up in mock surrender, and left the room.

Suddenly tired, Kennedy slumped into the desk chair. They had always struggled with bouts of fatigue, but it had gotten worse when their dad announced his run for president. Usually they would take caffeine pills, but they’d run out last night and hadn’t gotten more. Groaning, Kennedy collapsed on their bed. Before they knew it, they were asleep.

***

Kennedy had known it would be a bad day when they woke up. Their head had been throbbing, but all they could do was take some Tylenol and try to ride out an important day of being the First Child of the United States. They’d tried to power through meetings and classes, but it just wore them down. A snide comment muttered under someone’s breath was their breaking point.

Kennedy’s throat closed, and it felt like someone had punched them in the gut. Tears threatened to roll down their cheeks. They managed to get up the stairs to their floor before breaking down. Clumsily, they grasped at the doorknob and yanked it open, slamming it shut behind them.

I can’t do this. I can’t There’s no way I can do this for another four years. There’s no fucking way. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!

Thoughts raced through Kennedy’s head as tears streamed down their face. Distantly, they noted that their bedroom door was cold against their back. Through blurry vision, they scan the room, their mind shouting to hide. Hide from the stress, from the hatred, from the X. One shape came into view- the open rectangle of the closet. The shape was comforting, familiar, not alien like the rest of the room.

Kennedy scrambled for cover, almost diving into the closet. The hardwood floor is unyielding against their knees and palms, grounding them. They turn over and sit with their back against the wall, hunched over and hugging their knees. The position is familiar- they used to do the same thing as a kid. In the safety of the closet, Kennedy begins their breathing exercises. In through the nose, slowly out through the mouth, repeat. Their heart rate starts to slow to a normal rate- nothing can get them in the closet.

Their breathing and tears slow, and then finally stop. Kennedy wipes their eyes, but doesn’t move from their spot. Slowly but surely, they unclasp their hands and let their legs slide out, away from their chest.

As they settled their hands on either side of themselves, there was a creak, and the board under their left hand shifted out of place. Kennedy picked it up, fully intending to put it back properly, but an envelope underneath caught their eye. On the front, it read FUTURE LGBT FIRST KIDS . Turning it over in their hands, they began to read.

01/19/2025

Dear whoever finds this letter,

My name is Alex Claremont-Diaz. I’m the first publicly out and proud bisexual FSOTUS, and I’m here to give you advice. Being LGBT and a First Kid is stressful, especially when you’re forcibly outed right before the election, and especially when your boyfriend is the Prince of Wales. But I hope that it will be easier for you than it was for me. I hope that you don’t feel the need to hide your identity for the sake of our current president. I hope that you can be proud about who you are- that everyone uses your correct name and pronouns, and doesn’t blink at whoever you like. If you’re not able to be out, for any reason, let me say this- eventually, you will. You will get to a point in your life when you can unapologetically be yourself. I promise you. Please don’t give up, no matter what. Things will get better. Just hang in there.

I wish you all the best.

Yours, Alex Claremont-Diaz.

PS. Henry says hello and good luck, and seconds everything in this letter.

***

Kennedy took the old letter from Alex Claremont-Diaz out of their desk drawer. It had resided there for eight years, through both of President Moore’s terms. Kennedy had taken it out and read it countless times over the years when they needed it most. And now, it would be going back under the loose board in the closet for the next person who needs it.

Kennedy folded the letter along the creases that no longer existed, the paper worn from being handled. Then they folded another piece of paper, containing a letter of their own. Over the past month, Kennedy had written and rewritten it multiple times. There was no time now to fix anything- the Moore family would be moving out of the White House that afternoon.

Smiling, they placed the papers under the floor of the closet and replaced the board. Hopefully, the letters would help someone else as much as Alex’s letter had helped Kennedy.

#red white and royal blue #rwrb #rwarb #alex claremont diaz #henry fox mountchristen windsor #firstprince #my OCs #i might write more about kennedy in the future

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hms-chill · 5 years

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Coming Home

It's been years since either Alex or Henry has had a place that they can really settle into and call 'home'. Luckily, Henry has just bought the perfect one.

Kensington has never felt much like a place Henry lives. It feels like a hotel, a beautifully impersonal place to stay for a few nights before moving on. When Alex visits, he sees more of himself in the warren of rooms than he ever sees of Henry (though that may be due to their differing levels of cleanliness). Henry appears in the little things, in his journals and books and that damn copy of Le Monde that makes Alex feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but even the bedroom still feels like a hotel until Alex plops a bag into an ancient chair and lets his shoes fall haphazardly on the antique rug. He leaves things scattered around the room, and Henry asks if he's trying to spread his manifest destiny to his former ruler.

Alex doesn't say anything, and he certainly doesn't tell Henry that Bea occasionally sends him pictures of Henry wearing the sweatshirts and pajama pants he leaves behind. Those are saved in a special folder on his phone, and the way Henry looks in his clothes, everything a bit too short, is one of the best things he can imagine. Kensington may not look or feel like Henry's home, but it is still a place he can relax. It's a place where he can wear clothes that don't fit quite right but remind him that he's loved, wholly and unconditionally.

Alex especially doesn't tell Henry that he's printed a photo from Bea of Henry and David curled up in an antique chair, Henry wearing Alex's old lacrosse t-shirt and reading his copy of The Prisoner of Azkaban, or that the photo is framed on his desk. He just keeps leaving dirty clothes and battered paperbacks and color coded notes around Henry's rooms as if to scream that someone lives there. Someone lives in these staged rooms, and someone uses this museum furniture, and that someone is dating a queer brown American. Centuries of racist, homophobic monarchy can deal.

The White House bedroom is a bit more Alex's than Kensington is Henry's, but it's not really his, either. The White House is, after all, America's house. His family are essentially long-term renters, and no matter how much he tries to settle in, it's still a borrowed space. In four years, some other first child will come along. They'll find the message behind the wallpaper and the few unsealed windows, and maybe they'll paint over his walls like he painted over Sasha's. Hopefully they'll replace the ugly dog painting in the hallway.

He doesn't have quite the warren Henry does, and Henry doesn't settle into spaces the way Alex does in Kensington, but that doesn't mean he doesn't show up in the White House bedroom. He's in the V&A map hanging beside the congressional schedule and in the stacks of classics beside the Hamilton biography on Alex's bookshelf. When he visits, he doesn't stay in Alex's room, but Alex accumulates more and more little pieces of Henry every time. There's the Smithsonian guide book Henry bought and left, the tickets from their trip up the Washington Monument, and the 'emergency jumper' that Henry stores in Alex's closet and Alex absolutely does not study in. He is far too dignified to cozy up in his boyfriend's sweater and let the too-big sleeves flop over his hands (he doesn't know it, but Henry has a framed photo of him working in the jumper and his glasses, courtesy of June). Still, every time Alex hangs something on a wall or moves something in, it's with the knowledge that he will have to move it out in a few years.

The bedroom in the house in Texas that he'd move it to, though, isn't really Alex's anymore, either. It's the bedroom of the person Alex used to be, before he met the love of his life, found out he was bi, caused an international sex scandal, and learned to stop living ten years down the road. It's the bedroom of a boy who refused to look anywhere but dead ahead, and it shows. For years, there was a family photo on the desk, but he'd shoved it into the back of a drawer sometime during the divorce and never bothered to unearth it. There is a photo of him with June and Nora hanging on a bulletin board, but it's surrounded by old to do lists, tutoring schedules, an out of date calendar, and plans for 2016 campaign stops. The walls are decorated with memorabilia from Ravael Luna's and his mom's first campaigns, nearly covering a lacrosse team poster. It's the bedroom of a boy whose only goal was politics, now foreign and slightly dusty from disuse, and a part of Alex cringes every time he sees it. He wasn't happy when he lived in the room as it is now, not really.

Henry says it's good he doesn't fit the room anymore; it means he's grown in the four years since he lived there. That doesn't mean it's not strange to go home to a place that raised him, but no longer feels like home.

His dad's house out in California is the same way, though it never felt like home. Alex has a room there, but it's never really been his, no matter how many campaign posters he hung on the wall or lists he hid between the matress and the box spring. The lake house is the only place from his childhood that remains unchanged, and it's somewhere indescribably special to him, but it was never fully home. It's a place to relax and recharge, a great vacation home, but it's not somewhere he ever fully moved into.

In short, when Ellen Claremont-Diaz is re-elected, neither Alex nor Henry have a place that truly feels like home. Luckily, Henry's bought one. He's bought a four-bedroom Brooklyn brownstone where they can live together, and when he shows Alex the listing, Alex nearly smothers him in affection. They spend election night curled up in a bed that used to be Alex's, looking through floor plans and photos until they fall asleep.

When he crosses the threshold of the brownstone for the first time, Henry's hand in his, Alex can't help but imagine what it will be. They'll paint the walls and furnish it themselves, and everything in it will be theirs, al theirs. No more beds bought by dead people, no ugly paintings as political gestures, no jumping through hoops to put a nail in the wall and hang one picture. Henry tugs him forward, leading the way through the house they get to settle into together. Sure, another family may have lived here before, but it feels refreshingly new after their old homes. There are no ghosts in these walls, no centuries of previous owners to contend with. It's a new place for their new life together.

Hand in hand, they explore the living room, deciding where to put the TV and how big of a sectional they can fit in the space. They decide which bedroom to share, and Alex calls dibs on an office, and they plan out a decorating scheme for the guest bedroom that all of their friends and family will be comfortable with. They pick paint colors and enlist the help of June, Nora, and as many secret service and PPOs as they can, and by the end of the day, they're sleeping on the floor of a well-painted house.

The next morning, they take their regular fleet of security vans and spend the morning at Ikea, making final furniture decisions over meatballs and enlisting Cash and Amy to help carry boxes. The photo Henry takes of the living room two hours later shows Amy sitting on the couch she's built and Nora leaning against a bookshelf she put together while Alex and Cash are surrounded by a pile of boards and screws that should be an entertainment center. Eventually, a pizza dinner happens on the coffee table, with paper plates, the first card games in the new house, and lots of laughter. That night, they've moved their sleeping bags to a mattress that should go on a bed they haven't built yet.

They take the building and move in process slowly, interspersing it with walks around their new neighborhood and coffee runs to new shops nearby. They've dedicated the second day to their individual offices, but by noon, Alex has spent as much time in Henry's office as he has in his own, and the same is true for Henry. Which means that after lunch, they're dragging Henry's desk and bookshelf into Alex's office, re-organizing a bit, and planning another trip to Ikea to furnish a second guest room in what used to be Henry's office. By the third night, they're sleeping in a bed (though it doesn't have sheets yet), and when the moving van arrives on day four, the furniture is finished and it's beginning to feel like a home.

Day four is dedicated to all of the personal belongings left in their respective former homes. Cash and Amy help with the heavy lifting as Henry fills most of their bookshelves, leaving an anthology of queer fairy tales on the coffee table. Alex settles into the kitchen, hanging pots and pans from a rack on the ceiling and adding a command hook for his apron near his beloved coffee machine. Henry hangs a framed, pressed green carnation from Bea beside two of Alex's framed photos: one of a gay couple holding a sign that says "STAY OUT OF MY OUR BEDROOM" and another of a man whose jacket says "IF I DIE OF AIDS- FORGET BURIAL- JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA". Nora stops by with a plant and a pair of pride flags for them, and June brings them a photo book of supportive street art from around the world. Shaan buys Henry an 'out of the closet' mug with queer figures from history on it, and Zahra gets Alex one that says 'Dumbest Creature on Earth' as housewarming gifts, and they find a home between the coffee maker and the electric kettle.

David finds his beds scattered around the house, one in nearly every room so he has a place to go if he needs it. By the fifth night in their new home, Alex walks into the bedroom to find Henry cuddled up and reading under the framed issue of Le Monde, wearing one of Alex's t-shirts with David dozing at his feet. He looks content and settled, and it is the most wonderful sight Alex can imagine.

Notes:

Ya girl's back to working in theatre, and since I got into theatre through set that means I'm back to thinking about physical space. I always feel weird writing about settings in prose, because I love the little details but I feel like describing them detracts from the overall mood and plot. Last time I was struggling with something I wrote up a little firstprince study, and y'all were great, so I'd love any feedback on how space is working for you in this. Is there enough of a balance between little details and bigger plot points? Does the space feel real/like it helps develop character? Let me know!

On AO3

#FirstPrince #alex claremont diaz #henry fox mountchristen windsor x alex claremont diaz #henry fox mountchristen windsor #rwrb #rw&rb #rwrb fic #my fic: rwrb #june claremont diaz #nora holleran #tooth rotting fluff #my fic:rwrb #Hannah Writes: rwrb

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lucyreviewcy · 5 years

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The Mummy (2017) Dir. Alex Kurtzman

What can I really say about this movie?

I wasn’t allowed to watch the original Mummy movies as a kid, so when I eventually came to watch these forbidden films I was vaguely disappointed that they weren’t spooky enough. As a result, I was pretty excited for the much spookier looking Tom Cruise reboot (even though it had Tom Cruise in it - usually something that drives me away from the movie).

There were a few alarm bells in the first fifteen minutes of the movie. For starters, we have a love interest who is a solid 23 years younger than our protagonist. She’s also definitely a love interest: she doesn’t do very much apart from get injured and be sad.

The second alarm bell was something I hadn’t picked up on before seeing this movie, but which I believe to be generally true. Rule: if the main character in a movie is called Nick, the main character in the movie is usually the worst. The Mummy compounds this issue by layering the Nicks all over the place. The first two characters we are introduced to are Nick (Tom Cruise) and Sgt. Vail. Sgt. Vail is played by Jake Johnson, who most of us will know as Nick from new girl. This issue is then made even worse by the introduction of Russell Crowe’s character, Henry, who is essentially the Dark Universe version of Nick Fury. THAT IS TOO MANY NICKS. More Nicks than a well-used broadsword. More Nicks than a Santa vs Satan themed birthday party. More nicks than Adrian Dunbar in a room full of bent coppers.

Aside this sig-nick-ficant issue which probably only affected me. There are so many other problems with this movie, but before I list them I want to state that I found it a fun romp. I would probably watch this movie again as a spooky treat around Halloween. I am fully disappointed that the Dark Universe never took off, because if this were the first offering I would have been so ready for the rest of the franchise. Sadness abounds.

That said, I can completely understand why audiences may have had trouble with this movie. Please see the following list of glaring flaws in The Mummy:

Tone. This movie has more trouble with tone than a dog trying to tastefully decorate a penthouse apartment. I don’t know much about its development, but it feels like an original version of the movie was shot and then producers said “Can’t you add a funny in every scene?” I don’t know if it was intentional, but even the big scary Pharoah-faced statue has something vaguely comical about it. As they lower the Mummy into her prison, past this big ol’ face, the face just looks really shocked and vaguely disgusted by her. I guess that’s a nice way of hammering home that the evil lady who just killed a baby really is evil. But also… She just killed a baby. We know she’s evil. We don’t need a statue to make an emoji-esque face to tell us that. This gets worse when later, as she’s lifted out of the prison, the same statue looks shocked and afraid. But we know that she’s bad. We don’t need to be told to be shocked and afraid by a big statue. Stop telling me what to feel, statue! This is typical of the film as a whole. Spooky fight scenes have comical sound effects and any brief emotional scene involving Nick is punctuated by a witty one-liner. I would have been happy with this in smaller doses, it works really well in Jurassic Park. In Jurassic Park we have lots of comical one-liners and witty banter from Jeff Goldblum in the early stages, but as the film darkens and characters start dying, Goldblum’s character is removed from the action and the gags are fewer and farther between. That doesn’t happen in this movie, we have jokes all the way through and a lot of them aren’t even funny. Especially this exchange: “You’re a good person Nick, I know that because you gave me the only parachute.” “I thought there was another one.” This doesn’t work for lots of reasons but it especially doesn’t work when it is referred back to as an emotional flashback in the final scene, sans punchline. The punchline of “I thought there was another one” is Nick’s way of brushing off this and indicating that actually he might just be an asshole through and through. You can’t use that compliment later on as proof that he’s a good person! You think you can do these things but you just can’t Nemo... sorry... I digress...

Gender. There’s a blonde female character who’s vaguely intellectual but actually clearly only there to roll her eyes at Nick and how he’s the worst. She earned her right to eye-rolling by having sex with him at some earlier point but now that’s all she’s allowed to do. She also provides the emotional core of the movie… What a shock, said no-one ever. Perhaps this is just because the last movie I saw that I loved this much was Fast and Furious: Hobbs and Shaw which has Vanessa Kirby kicking ass and propelling the plot forward with sheer force of will, but I found the character of Jenny unnecessarily dull and cliche. She just screams a bunch to tell us about the threat that’s happening. In case we weren’t feeling threatened by the zombie mummies that are attacking her. But we were aware because we could see that happening. So… Thanks for trying, Jenny. Then there’s the Mummy herself. I swear no actress on the planet gets her talent squandered as frequently as Sofia Boutella. Equal parts terrifying and beautiful, Boutella is at her best when she gets to wreak havoc in Kingsman - but since then I’ve only ever seen her in limiting roles that don’t make the most of her delicate threat/allure balance. From almost bond-girl in Atomic Blonde to the-hit-woman-in-the-red-dress in Hotel Artemis (She’s a hitman = THREAT, but she’s in a red dress = ALLURE - delicate, subtle…), Boutella gets landed with characters that are tired stereotypes. Ahmamet is not much of an improvement. The parts of the film where the Mummy is less CGI and more makeup and physicality are really satisfying, allowing Boutella to be her spooky self. It’s disappointing that the mummy makes people into other mummies by kissing them, because of course the only way a woman can win a man over is by using her sexuality. FEMINISM. The Mummy could have pushed her much further, but if this movie proves anything it is that Sofia Boutella would have made a far better Enchantress than Cara Delavigne did in Suicide Squad.

This movie doesn’t know the difference between Zombies and Mummies. As soon as she wakes up, the titular Mummy starts snog-converting all of the locals into mummies who then become her lackeys. But they just look like zombies. She’s made zombies. They shamble around like zombies. We have the “Zombie on the car” sequence that I’ve seen before in zombie movies. These are zombies. I didn’t come here for zombies. I came here for mummies, the risen dead. Not zombies, the undead. The thing that’s really irritating about the snog-mummification sequence is that she turns all the living people into zombies even though it is later established that she can cause corpses to rise from the dead. So why is she bothering to turn all these alive people into zombies when she is in a graveyard. That’s so much extra effort. Has she never mapped a process? Has she not considered she may need to conserve her resources? Have you ever heard of RECYCLING? I mean she’s from ancient history so I guess not. Eventually, we do end up with a significant number of mummies because of some very heavily established buried knights (SO MUCH EXPOSITION), but those are fine. I’m just mad about all the zombies.

Tom Cruise. I regret to inform you that Tom Cruise is no-longer a bankable star. The Mission Impossible movies are a bankable franchise and that is a different thing. I am never tempted to go and see a movie because Tom Cruise is in it. I spent the last hour of this film listing actors who could have made this movie better. The list ended up with one name on it and that name was Ryan Reynolds. Reynolds’ typical cynicism in the face of a well-loved franchise might have resulted in a more consistent tone to the movie. We know from every other movie that he does that he can balance serious and silly in a way that keeps the audience laughing and crying. We know that he can make even the thinnest of storylines seem plausible. We know that he does well opposite another equally sarky character so the chemistry with Jake Johnson (one of the few commendable parts of this movie) would still work and maybe even be improved.

I loved Russell Crowe in this movie and there won’t be any more Dark Universe movies and it is all Tom Cruise’s fault. This point doesn’t need much expansion. Russell Crowe is just really fun as Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde and I loved every second of his performance. The structure of the movie is weird because it introduces him and then drops him almost immediately for about an hour, but he’s just great. I don’t normally love Russell Crowe in anything and this really won me over. I would have watched all the Dark Universe movies for Russell Crowe alone. My boyfriend pointed out, from only hearing his voice emanating from my laptop, that Russell Crowe in this movie sounded like he was voicing the big fat posh tuxedo cat that used to live near us. I loved it.

I didn’t know how many feelings I had about this movie until I started writing them down. I loved the idea and I felt like I was enjoying it but now that I look back there were so many problems. It’s like if I spent a few days knitting a scarf without looking at my work and then discovered that I’d dropped like half the stitches and it was just a mess. That’s how I felt.

I hope you can look past the many problems I have highlighted with this movie next time you need a wild, undead but also risen dead romp. In a lot of ways, The Mummy is just like Sofia Boutella’s characters in everything: both alluring and threatening at the same time.

#themummy #the mummy #tom cruise #movie review #mummy 2017 #sofia boutella #feelings #stop telling me how to feel statue

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bee-kathony · 6 years

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ONCE UPON A TIME | CINDERELLA AU

Inspired by the beautiful moodboard created by the talented @balfeheughlywed

Once Upon a Time there was a beautiful girl named Claire Beauchamp, she was strong, independent and kind. She lives in the Kingdom of Lallybroch, ruled by King Brian Fraser, his son James Fraser is a young, sharp and handsome lad, unsure of his responsibilities. Claire's world shifts when her Uncle Lamb announces he is to be married. This is a tale of family, strength, kindness.... and love.

Chapter 1 | First Impressions

The wind blew across the field, making Claire’s unruly curls fly over face, momentarily blocking her vision. She had been sitting under her favourite tree all afternoon, the same tree she often had dreams of. In her dreams, she saw a beautiful woman smiling down at her, brown hair cascading down her shoulders and tickling her skin. Claire remembered a young man too, he must have been her Father, Henry.

Claire knew that in these dreams, these people smiling down at her were her parents but she could barely remember them. They had died when she was very young, on their way to visit Claire’s Uncle Lamb when they were caught in a terrible storm, their carriage had run into a fallen tree and turned over several times, crashing down the side of a mountain.

She had been with her Uncle Lamb ever since. He often told stories of her parents when she asked him to. Claire never wanted to forget where she came from, who she was.

Claire tucked her legs against her chest and folded her arms around her knees. She didn’t want to go back to the house just yet. Soon her Uncle would come looking for her, to bring her back to reality. The reality that her Uncle, her guardian, her only family… was getting married.

Quentin Lambert Beuchamp, her Father’s brother, was a passionate man. He enjoyed digging things up in the ground, discovering their origins and the history surrounding those objects. His day to day life was as a Merchant, selling those artefacts he found from town to town, often leaving Claire to herself.

Claire didn’t mind being on her own, in fact she preferred it. They lived in a quaint house that was plenty big enough. It was the house that she was born in, her Uncle had moved in when he became her guardian. They had a small garden and collection of animals like chickens, one cow, two goats and two very lovely horses.

But Claire’s favourites were the little mice that ran throughout the house. Most people would think mice simply vermin but Claire had grown to think of them as friends, as odd as it sounded.

Animals were her first love, if you treated them with kindness then they reciprocated in turn. Her uncle was marrying someone that on first impression she saw no trace of kindness in. Jonathan Wolverton Randall was his name. She always knew that her uncle had an eye for the lads but never thought he would marry a man. Claire had no objections of course but this man… there was something quite off about him. Not to mention his children that came along from his first marriage, the twins.

Laoghaire and Alex Randall, the two most annoying and self-possessed humans to ever walk this earth. Claire had just celebrated her twentieth birthday, she was finally not in those awkward teenage years. Laoghaire and Alex were just seventeen, obnoxious teenagers indeed.

“Bloody children that’s what they are.” Claire’s first meeting with the twins was not altogether a pleasant one. They had stepped out of the carriage both wearing the most vile and obscene pieces of clothing Claire had ever seen. She put on her brave face and greeted them, welcoming them into her home.

They tossed their bags at her feet, assuming she was the maid. She had stared down at the bags and when she didn’t pick them up, Laoghaire turned on her, “Ye better pick up those bags lass or my daddy will have ye out of this house, lookin’ for somewhere else to work.” Her eyes were wicked, her tongue most foul, and Claire didn’t like her one bit.

“I’m not the maid… I’m Claire, your new sister.” She had stuck out her hand in greeting but Laoghaire and Alex turned to each other and burst out laughing.

“This girl? Our sister?!” More laughing and Claire had begun to grow frustrated and a bit embarrassed.

“Well your outfit…” Alex looked her up and down, taking in Claire’s simply frock made of pale blue linen. “Is atrocious, no wonder you mistook her for a maid!” He laughed to Laoghaire and turned back to Claire, “As long as ye’re dressed like a maid, ye best pick up our bags and take them inside.”

Claire had treated everyone with kindness and in return she received the same. It wasn’t in her nature to be feeling what she felt know, hatred.

How could she live in that house and put up with those two? Not to mention her new step-uncle. Jonathan Randall was a man of few words, he was British, like her and her uncle, an officer of the King and apparently quite the charmer.

Her uncle did look happy, that was what mattered right?

Just as she suspected she saw her uncle walking to where she was. He didn’t say anything as he approached her but sat down beside her, sighing as his joints popped and cracked on the descent.

“Ah Claire, my sweet Claire.” She rested her head on his shoulder, wrapping her arm around his elbow.

“I know you’ll grow to like them, first impressions aren’t always correct.” In this case Claire wasn’t too sure about her impressions of them changing anytime soon.

Claire looked up at her uncle then, “I love you, you know that. You always told me that my mother was the kindest woman you had ever met.”

“Yes she was. And she gave that same kindness to you my dear.” He placed his finger under her trembling chin. “Don’t worry my child, I know that this is difficult for you. Having it just been the two of us for so long now. But I do think it will be nice for you to have Laoghaire and Alex around to keep you company.”

“If you say so uncle.” Claire smiled and Uncle Lamb gave her hand a gentle pat and she stood from her spot, reaching her hands down to help him up.

They began the short walk back to the house, the Autumn sun shined behind them, creating a peaceful glow on the house.

It was anything but peaceful when they arrived inside. Laoghaire and Alex were screaming at each other about wardrobes being too small and there not being enough room for all their shoes. Jonathan Randall was in the sitting in the lounge, ignoring all the commotion and reading a novel, obviously used to all the racket.

“What on earth is going on?” Claire asked, looking at the chaos that had exploded in the form of colourful clothing and wigs strewn about all over her bedroom.

“Well ye’re room is the biggest ye ken, Alex and I always share a room so we moved our stuff in here.” Laoghaire grunted as she picked up a pile of Claire’s clothes and dropped them in the hallway.

“But… this is my room. The only other room is-“ Claire groaned inwardly.

“The attic lass.” Alex smirked, tossing yet another audacious piece of clothing on his bed.

“Ye best get all ye’re stuff out of the hall Claire, Daddy doesna like a mess.” Claire sighed, she must show them kindness if she expected to receive an inkling of it in return.

“Yes of course.” She smiled and left the room, careful not to trip on her belongings scattered on the floor. A reflection down the hall caught her eye and she walked over to it.

It was her Mother’s hand mirror, one of the only things she had that was hers, lying broken and shattered. Claire didn’t cry often but a tear slid down her cheek as she bent down and picked up what was left of her Mother.

She held it gently to her chest and shut her eyes tight. “It’s okay Beauchamp, you’ll get through this.” Claire took several deep breaths and returned to pick up the few remaining earthly possessions she owned.

Her Uncle Lamb, she saw was now in the lounge sitting beside Jonathan Randall, holding his hand and smiling. She wiped away her tears and walked to the end of the hall, opening the door that led up to the attic.

It didn’t take her long to arrange everything, while it was quite dusty and there wasn’t much in the way of decoration, soon it was suitable enough. Her bed, her books and her friendly mice were really all she needed.

Claire didn’t return downstairs that evening, she thought she wouldn’t be missed in any case. She rose early the next morning, waking with the sun.

As she walked through the halls and down the stairs, she heard no sound. Everyone was still asleep, nothing was demanded of her so Claire went to the small stable that housed their two horses.

She saddled Brimstone, her favourite and set off into the woods surrounding the house, eager to escape with her own thoughts.

Claire loved how the air whipped across her face, it always helped to clear her mind whenever something troubled her.

She rode towards the sun, slowing down to a trot when she reached the river and continued to follow its path.

Brimstone snorted and neighed as they turned past a corner of trees, “What is it girl?” Claire stroked her mane, trying to calm the horse down, “What do you see?”

Claire spotted the root of Brimstone’s agitation, another horse was tied to a tree, it’s owner no where to be found. She clicked her tongue and brought Brimstone to a halt, leaping off and tying her next to the other horse.

The owner of the horse couldn’t have gone far she thought. Claire walked through the trees and down a small slope that led to the river. When she looked up she spotted him. A tall red haired man, drinking from his hands as he dipped them in the running water.

She stepped forward and her foot met a branch making a ‘crack’ sound. The man leapt to his feet, pulling out his sword and brandishing it in front of him making Claire take two steps back. She tripped on a rock wedged in the ground and fell on her bottom.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” She exclaimed, her hands going to her now sore bottom.

The man slid his sword in its hilt and ran over to her, crouching down to her level, “I’m sorry lass, I didna mean to scare ye” He laughed, amused with the situation. “I wasna aware of anyone else bein’ in this part of the wood, it was ye that gave me the first fright.” He held out his hand for her to take and she looked from his hand to his eyes.

Claire saw his face for the first time. He had a strong jawline, a straight nose, a bit of scruff on his cheeks and neck and the most gorgeous ocean blue eyes. He looked familiar but she couldn’t quite place him. Claire forgot her words as she looked into his eyes and he laughed again.

“C’mon lass, let me help ye up.” The man now reached for her hand and she shook her head, trying to collect herself. Claire was brought to her feet and swayed a little, unsteady on the uneven ground. The man’s hands immediately went to her waist to hold her upright and she felt a spasm of energy run through her body.

“Sorry” He said and removed his hands, holding them in fists now at his side, almost like he was afraid to involuntarily touch her again.

“Thank you.” Claire finally managed to speak. “And I’m sorry I snuck up on you like that, I saw your horse and came to investigate who it’s owner could be.”

“Aye, it’s my horse, Donas, I heard the river and needed a wee drink.” He smiled again, he was absolutely beautiful Claire thought.

He said something but Claire was too distracted by the way his mouth quirked up on one side to hear him.

“Sorry what did you say?” Claire blinked several times. She really must get better at concentrating.

The man smiled, his mouth doing that thing again which made her stomach do somersaults.

“I said, do ye live around here? I can tell by ye’re accent ye’re not from Scotland… a Sassenach.” He called her a Sassenach, often a derogatory word meaning ‘English person’ or ‘Outlander’, and not always the nicest thing to say to someone she thought.

“Meanin’ no offence to ye of course lass.” He said quickly once he saw the expression on her face.

“It’s alright. I take no offence to the word.” She actually liked the way he said it, his Scottish accent was like the bird song, sweet and musical. “And yes… I live just back there a ways” Claire pointed behind her, it was quite a ways actually and she had better be getting back before the household realised she wasn’t there… if they realised she was gone at all.

“Do you live near here then? I don’t normally see people when I come here to ride.” Claire put her hand over her eyes to shield them from the rising sun.

The man shuffled back and forth on his feet, he seemed a bit nervous. “Och, no. I live more in the city I suppose.”

“You suppose? You mean you don’t know where you live?” Claire tried to suppress a laugh, this man was becoming more and more interesting.

Aye, I ken where I live,” he laughed and ran his hand through his curly red hair, “I do live in the city, in Lallybroch.”

Lallybroch, it was the where the palace was, the King Brian Fraser and his recently late wife Ellen, the Queen, had ruled over the kingdom all her life. She had been into the city quite often, going with Uncle Lamb to help him sell his artefacts or pick up a few new books from the local bookseller.

“Which area do you live in? I go into the city quite often, would I know it?” Claire asked, the man’s cheeks blushed crimson red which she found odd but also charming.

“Aye, you would know it.” He didn’t say more, but suddenly turned and walked up the slope, Claire followed and saw another man come riding from the opposite direction.

“Who’s that man? Do you know him?” She asked and pointed in the direction of the stranger.

The red haired man cursed in Gaelic and untied his horse, mounting it easily and guided his horse back to the path. “Aye, he… works for my Father.” The man said unsurely.

“Your High-“ the stranger said to the red haired man but he interrupted him all too quickly, “It’s Jamie, Jamie! It’s Jamie!” He rushed out, stopping the other man from continuing his sentence.

The other man chuckled, “Well then… Jamie. Ye’re Father has asked me to come and fetch ye. Ye have…” He looked over at me, barely visible behind Jamie on his horse, “some important business to attend to.”

“Aye, I suppose I do. Fine Murtagh, I’m comin’.” The man, whose name I now knew was Jamie turned back to look down at me, his smile as bright as ever. “I must leave Sassenach, duty calls. Will I see ye here again?” He looked hopeful, almost childlike.

Claire blushed, her hands untying her horse from the tree as she spoke, “Perhaps I shall see you in the city some day.”

The other man suddenly laughed and then began coughing causing Jamie to glare at him. “Aye lass, maybe ye will.” Claire climbed on Brimstone and grabbed the reigns, pointing the horse in the direction of home.

“Sassenach!” James called before she raced off, “What’s ye’re name, ye know mine is Jamie…”

“Goodbye Jamie…” She smiled coyly and clicked her tongue, her thighs pressing against the horse beneath her and began riding in the opposite direction of Jamie.

She dared a glance back and saw that he was watching her, his mouth agape. “Sassenach!” He called out to her once more but she was too far away to respond.

If she ever saw that strange red haired man again, she promised to tell him her name but for now she kept that to herself, the only part of herself that she felt she owned anymore.

#claire beauchamp #jamie fraser #his royal highness #claire fraser #fairytale #cinderella au #balfeheughlywed #incredible moodboard #cinderella #outlander fanfic #mclairefras #once upon a time fanfiction

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impressivepress · 4 years

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Cubism After the War, Part One

During the disruptive years of the Great War, Picasso and Matisse continued their work, enjoying an uninterrupted stretch of creative development.

Both Picasso and Matisse moved beyond Cubism and Fauvism, running ahead of the artists who were away at war. When the War was over, their former colleagues had to return to their artistic practices and put their lives back together, and they did so in the shadows of Picasso and Matisse, now major artists, stars who now outranked them and had moved on to new ideas. For the returning Cubist artists, modern art was Cubism and they carried on as they had before the War. Their stance may have seemed regressive, but their post-war Cubism continued with what was now a historical style.

Their efforts to revive Cubism were, in effect, a “return to order.” To return to order, post-war Cubism had to become more “classical” or more conservative to appeal to new patrons and, indeed, it is generally conceded that even before the War, Picasso and Braque were leaving experimentation behind in favor of a version of Cubism that was more “decorative.” The last few months of their partnership was marked by a series of paintings that were delightfully dotted and frankly charming, in a rococo fashion, and the real future of the second stage of Cubism would be the realization of its decorative potentials, which would be played out in Art Deco.

When the prominent Cubist artist, Georges Braque, returned to the Parisian art scene, it was after serving on the front, being gravely wounded. Braque spent a long time being temporarily blind, but after a long recovery he began painting again. The partnership with Picasso was broken, simply because the two men could no longer share their experiences. Their lives had diverged. In his biography on Braque, Alex Danchev discussed how the Great War divided the two men. Picasso remained concerned about Braque’s safety during the War, especially after he was wounded in 1915, saying to Gertrude Stein, “Will it not be awful when Braque and Derain and all the rest of them put their wooden legs up on a chair and tell us about their fighting.” This statement was made well before Picasso had exited the relationship with Braque and left Cubism behind, and during his transition to his next act in art, Braque spent the next year in the hospital. Unlike the other Cubist artists, as a Lieutenant, Braque had carried an officer’s responsibilities, and he suffered as he waited for his full recovery. “It wasn’t so much the wound that I suffered, but the possibility of painting for those long months. It was more the mental than the physical wounding..” he said. In his book, Georges Braque: A Life, Alex Danchev quoted Braque who was not above critiquing the conduct of the War: “Our soldiers, in 1914, charged in red trousers! They came back from the war with pigs’ snouts (gas masks).” He also remained bitter towards Robert Delaunay, who waited out the War in Spain, Duchamp who fled to New York, and criticized Albert Gleizes and Francis Picabia who served briefly and then moved on–Gleizes thanks to his “convenient” medical condition and Picabia who had a well connected father-in-law. As Léger said, “That bastard Gleizes.”

In fact Gleizes himself found it difficult to reenter the post-war art world of Paris. As Daniel Robbins, the chief biographer of Albert Gleizes, explained, By 1919 the unity of the Cubist movement, the pre-war sense of common effort, had been totally shattered. Paris was dominated by a strong reaction against those dreams of revoltionary construction and common effort which Gleizes continued to cherish, while the avant-garde was characterized by the anarchic and, to him, destructive spirit of Dada. 26 Neither alternative held any appeal for him and, with the Salons once again dominated by conservative painters, his old hostility to the city was constantly nourished. Although supported by Archipenko and Braque, an attempt to revive the spirit of the Section d’Or failed. Similarly, an effort to organize an artists’ cooperative received the support of Delaunay, but of no other major painters. Gleizes, although he had enjoyed considerable prestige both as a man and a painter, gradually became alienated from the Paris art world. Like the ideal protagonists in a Henry James novel, he and Madame Gleizes had enough independent income to pursue their goals without bowing to material considerations, remaining unfettered by the realities that made such heavy demands on many other artists. The Gleizes spent more and more time in the country, at Serrieres, Madame Gleizes’ family home, or at Cavalaire, then an even quieter spot on the Riviera.”

The Cubism of Picasso and Braque no longer existed. Picasso turned to the classical and conservative in the 1920s, while Braque settled on a variation of Cubist collage, painting the various elements instead of pasting paper on a support. Unlike Picasso who followed the latest art styles, such as Surrealism at the end of the decade, Braque did not flirt with the latest trends. Instead, he spent the rest of his life painting still live arrangements laid out on the top of a gueridon. The simplicity of objects and fruits sitting peacefully on a three-legged table seemed to symbolize the security of life after the trauma of the Great War. There was a second life for Cubism after the Great War. It was the Salon Cubists who inherited pre-war Cubism and carried it on to its new destiny in the years between the Wars.

This lingering phase of Cubism, a further development of an important art style, was carried on by the so-called “Salon Cubistes,” who, although they had been away at War, were still famous to the art public, due to their participation in public salons. Before the War, in the Salon d’Automne, they were scandalous dissidents and horrifying innovators; in the Salon des Indépendants, they were heroes, braving the scorn of critics. After the War, when they returned to Paris, one by one, these Cubist artists learned that the dominant painters were now Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, both of whom had remained in the city during the war, developing independent styles. Although Pablo Picasso had taken off in his own many new directions, these former Salon Cubists sought to extend Cubism, now a historical and hence, lucrative art movement into its new afterlife. For the Cubist artists, the art scene in Paris had changed and, in the wake of the war, the Salon exhibitions were not the only game in town. The artist-dealer system, used so successfully by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso to extricate themselves from an antiquated and dysfunctional system, began to become a major factor in exhibition and sales. But the players were new. The pre-war dealers had been interested in gambling on risky emerging artists who wanted to stay outside the system. The post-war art dealers were more concerned with courting a new collector base that wanted either established “name” artists and signature styles or conservative young artists. These newcomers on the late Cubist scene had the good fortune to walk into an open field with pre-war dealers aging out or simply absent.

When War was declared, German national and Cubist dealer to Braque and Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, was in Switzerland and was unable to return to France. Now that Kahnweiler was an enemy alien, his goods, his paintings, his property—Cubism itself—were sequestered by the French government, and his artists were left without financial and emotional support. Léonce Rosenberg, who collected modern art because it gave him pleasure and because he believed in what he called “l’effort moderne,” took Kahnweiler’s place as the supporter of Cubism. With the exception of Picasso and Braque, Rosenberg signed the German dealer’s artists and continued the exhibition and promotion of Cubism during and after the war.

Rosenberg had a new vision of Cubism, seeing it not as a unique style developed by a group of artists influenced by Paul Cézanne, but as part of a new and modern way of thinking that was manifested well beyond the fine arts. This modern world based upon the machine was revealed in a world view that appeared in posters and in advertising, popular culture and fine art, becoming the visual language of its time. Under the stewardship of Rosenberg, Cubism changed, disentangling itself from complex ideas of mobile perspective and becoming more flat and colorful, a strong design that could be moved from painting to advertising even to fashion and architecture and product design.

The poet Jean Cocteau may have argued that “rappel à l’ordre,” referred to a return to a traditional classicism and an end to disorderly experimentation, but the so-called Salon Cubists rejected classicism and embraced a conservative version of pre-war Cubism. This tamed Cubism was the “house style” of Léonce Rosenberg’s gallery, “L’Effort modern,” and the focus of his publication, Bulletin de l’Effort Moderne. Picasso waited until 1918, four years to join Paul Rosenberg, the brother of Léonce. Just as Léonce had been a dealer in antiquities, Paul Rosenberg had been a dealer of Impressionism and recognized the coming respectability of Cubism as a collector’s item. Although Paul handled other Cubist artists, he was the main support for Picasso, and the artist lived next door to his dealer whose gallery was at 21 rue de la Boétie. With the Rosenberg brothers becoming the dealers for Cubism, the task, which they both seemed to have realized, was now to make of Cubism something historical and valuable.

As with Futurism in Italy, Cubism was now experiencing a second life, but Cubism flourished discretely, flowering as a commodity in a consumerist-driven art market. Caught up in the post-war political scene in Italy, Futurism slid into an enthusiastic Fascism. Historically or, to be more specific, inthe eyes of art historians, these post-war phases of the two major pre-war avant-gardes have been traditionally by passed over in favor of an emphasis upon Dada and Surrealism. Art history was willing to examine the Russian Avant-Garde, a left-wing artistic production, but not Futurism which became decidedly right-wing. And art historical research on post-war Cubism is still in its early stages. And yet this overlooked phase of Cubism deserves to be examined in its own terms.

#Pablo Picasso #painting #cubism #ww1 #art article #history article #art history unstuffed #georges braque

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cha-melodius · 3 years

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Fic vibes tag thanks to @heytheredeann.

Above the break are works and series currently in progress, as well as recently published standalones. Feel free to drop into my ask box if you have and questions or comments about them or any of my other fics! Full fic list under the break. Main links are to AO3.

Kiss Ficlets on Tumblr (Firstprince, Napollya, Lokius)

RWRB, Alex/Henry

Flowers Only Grow Where There Are Seeds (white house gardener AU)

Tonight, You’re Gold (Olympics AU)

Our Get Along Oodie (grad students AU)

Body and Soul(mate) (bodyswap soulmate spy AU) cover art on tumblr

The Impossible Soul (westworld/android AU)

TMFU, Napoleon/Illya

Playing Cat and Mouse with the Light (non-linear partners-to-lovers-to-exes-to-lovers)

The Harrowed and the Haunted (paranormal investigator AU)

Black Moon (For All Mankind/space AU)

Just a Shot Away from You (5+1 ordered to kill each other)

Loki Series, Loki/Mobius

Ain't No Place for a Better Man (old west AU)

Enemies of the Ocean (stranded on a lifeboat AU)

Cold Light (Norway AU)

True Hollywood Romance (fake-dating actor AU)

Other Fandoms

No Ordinary Friend (The Pairing, Blond Calum/Ginger Calum, missing scenes from the novel)

RWRB, Alex/Henry

The Hazards of Unsolicited Toy Advice (pet store meet cute AU)

So Close to Something Better Left Unknown (spy AU, fuck or die) cover art on tumblr

False Dichotomy (You’ve Got Mail AU) cover art on tumblr

Trying My Patience (Try Pink Carnations) (florist/cake artist wedding AU)

You're the Perfect Gift for Me (Alex is a Hallmark movie ‘bad guy’ AU)

This Hell of a Season (Nova-verse spies Christmas 3+1) cover art on tumblr

Taste the Way You Bleed (WWDITS AU)

In the Dog Days (supernatural/magic AU)

Falling Down the Stairs of Your Smile (canon-divergent Kensington hookup AU)

Something To Be Proud Of (Edinburgh Pride AU)

Lessons in Foreign Diplomacy (1785 ambassadors AU)

Will You Brie Mine? (cheesemonger AU)

Step Into My Office, Baby (office AU)

Getting Clinical (STI clinic meet-cute AU)

Theory and Practice (rival grad students AU)

That's My Trouble (detective/ME AU)

Please Don’t Let Me Be So Understood (accidental couples therapy AU) cover art on tumblr

Always Where I Need To Be (roommates AU + David cuteness)

The Sky is Open (1970s Pan Am pilots AU)

All the Old Showstoppers (canon-divergent Celebrity Bake Off AU) cover art on tumblr

Nova, Baby (CIA/MI6 AU) cover art on tumblr

All for a Taste of the Honey (FBI agent AU feat. stripper!Henry)

May Your New Years Dreams Come True (office NYE party AU)

The Spirit of Giving (neighbors holiday party AU)

Class(room) Warfare (professors AU)

Sun in the Sky (You Know How I Feel) (post bonus-chapter canon)

(Forever) In My Way (5+1 of Henry getting in Alex’s way, AU)

Tiny Little Movies (drabble collection)

TMFU, Napoleon/Illya

Canon-Setting

All Comes Crashing (last night to live, confessions)

Love is a Deserter (canon-set exes getting back together)

A Home for the Holidays (decorating a Christmas tree)

The Life You Had in Mind (Glass Onion crossover)

Eyes on the Horizon (early relationship, sequel to “I Trust No One”)

A Kiss Away From Being Dangerous (4+1, warnings about being dangerous)

Loving You is Cherry Pie (5+1 Napoleon wearing aprons)

That's What Other People Do (outside observer, together but they just don’t realize it yet)

Double Dutch with a Hand Grenade (Illya wears short shorts, Napoleon loses his mind) illustration on tumblr

Cold Hands, Warm Heart (Illya comforts Napoleon)

I Trust No One (And Especially You) (Istanbul mission, the bath house)

Half Asleep (All Your Dreams Come Alive) (clothes/bed sharing + comfort after a nightmare)

Hard to be Soft, Tough to be Tender (Illya takes a bullet for Napoleon)

Another Sunny Day (ficlet; the boys have a picnic)

Good To Me (Illya does nice things for Napoleon, misunderstandings ensue)

Follow You Into The Dark (whumptober, presumed dead)

Where Doesn't It Hurt? (tropetember H/C, cleaning wounds)

All Your Little Words (5+1 Napoleon telling Illya “I love you”)

The Lost Art of Keeping A Secret (undercover as a couple)

Another First Kiss (6+1 stolen kisses)

Enough of a Natural Disaster for Me (apologies + kissing in the rain)

Impostors (sleeping with lookalikes, series)

What You Meant (5+1 Illya telling Napoleon he’s a terrible spy)

The Definition of Madness (time loop mission fic for whumptober)

And I Was The Boy Who Was Lucky (KY derby mission fic) cover art on tumblr

Light Will Keep Your Heart Beating in the Future (nonlinear sleep deprivation)

Love is a Chemical (Illya gets dosed with a love potion)

AUs

How’s About Cookin’ Something Up With Me? (teacher AU, baking)

Another Christmas Song (This Time I’ll Sing Along) (neighbors AU)

Consider the Price to an Elf (santaland AU)

A Hard Habit To Break (canon-verse AU, secret relationship)

White Knuckles (Olympic figure skating AU) cover art on tumblr

The Makings of a Perfect Christmastime (Christmas in Connecticut AU) cover art on tumblr

Love is a Losing Game (60s chess AU; series) cover art on tumblr

The Best Thing About NYC is You and Me (modern roommates art student/fashion designer AU; series) part 1 cover art on tumblr, part 2 cover art on tumblr

Love Is A Great Teacher (professors AU; series) cover art on tumblr

Loki Series, Loki/Mobius

Don We Now Our Gay Apparel (ugly holiday sweater office AU)

Got My Love to Keep Me Warm (stranded at a Christkindlmarkt)

It's Been a Bad Day Lately (post s01 time loop)

The Truth is Just a Rule That You Can Bend (canon-divergent AU, secret relationship, fallout of Roxxcart divorce)

The Hardest Cut (bodyguard AU)

My Name Stitched On Your Lips (exes getting back together AU)

You, or Your Memory (troptember amnesia, fix-it)

Once in a Lifetime (Bookshop/GO AU) cover art on tumblr

What Makes A Good Man (Art Thief/CIA Agent AU; series) part 1 cover art on tumblr, part 3 cover art on tumblr

Mandalorian, Cara/Din

You Left Me Under Your Spell (15 independent one shots or short multichaps)

Hanging On For Dear Life (8 stories inspired by songs from the album Dear Life by Brendan Benson)

Do You Want to Know a Secret? (epic story of Din, Cara, and the kid following season 1)

Crossovers

Maybe, This Time (Mandalorian/BSG, Cara/Din, Lee/Kara) cover art on tumblr

Familiar, But Not Too Familiar (Mandalorian/Witcher, Cara/Din, Geralt/Jaskier)

#my fic #masterlist #napollya #lokius #caradin #tmfu #loki #napoleon x illya #loki x mobius #rwrb #firstprince

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tacticalgrandma · 7 years

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U :)

U: Coming home

So uh. While reading @because-cur-non‘s Revolutionary Fuckboys, I made a joke about future Thanksgivings at the Laurens residence to Alex. And so this is kind of a fic of that fic, though it also completely works independently:

“Okay okay okay. If you could add anything to this house, what would it be?”

Martha Laurens looked over her wine glass at Alex. They had just finished the pies, and since Henry and John and his brothers were still watching the game, Martha had announced that she and Alex deserved an early Thanksgiving drink or two for their patience.

Maybe, in retrospect, he had had a few too many.

“I have no idea,” Martha said. “Why?”

“Well, you know.” He stroked the white marble countertop. Martha raised an eyebrow. “John gets the house eventually, right? So we’ll be living here. And since the fact that he gets the whole house is some patriarchal bullshit, I thought I’d let you know now that you will always be welcome to move in with us.”

“Thank you for your generosity. I cannot wait to live with my older brother in the house I grew up in. For the rest of my life.”

“No problem. But like I was saying,” Alex said, gesturing towards the room behind him with his glass. Martha reached over and gently took it from him. “what would you want? Because like, no offense, I love the… size… of the house, but there are some things here I would change.”

“Would you now.”

“Yeah. So…?”

“Mmm.” Martha took a sip of wine. “Have you talked to Jack about this?”

“Yeah, but you know. He’s all—“ Alex took on a British accent, “—‘don’t talk about that Alex, it’s gauche.’” He shook his head. “I think he might actually like all the wood panelling.” Martha looked down and Alex stared at her dubiously. “Seriously?”

“I didn’t know there was anything wrong with it!” she protested.

“It’s in almost every—“ Alex stopped himself as Henry Laurens and John walked in to the kitchen.

The two looked between Alex and Martha in the sudden silence. Finally, Henry asked, “So what have you two been talking about?”

“Mutual friends,” Martha said immediately.

“Yeah, Eliza’s moving into a new place,” Alex added. “And she’s doing some redecorating now. Have you done any of that recently, Henry?”

Martha gave him her most poisonous smile and Henry frowned slightly. “Not anything significant, that I can think of. We put seasonal decorations in the entryway, of course.”

“Of course!” Alex said, snapping his fingers. “They went very well with the chandelier. How is that thing installed, by the way?”

“Did you guys need anything here?” Martha asked loudly.

“Just some beer,” John said. He turned to his father. “You know, I think I hear the game starting back up. You head on back, I’ll be there in a second.”

“Thanks, Jack.” Henry looked between Martha and Alex one more time. They both smiled brightly. He turned and headed back towards the sound of the TV.

“Thanks again for finishing up cooking, you guys,” John said as he slipped past Martha, squeezing her shoulder as he went. He disappeared behind the enormous fridge door and reappeared with a case. He started back to the living room, then stopped at the island. He turned, his back to Martha, and smiled at Alex.

“What?” Alex asked.

“Nothing. I’m just… glad you and my dad are getting along now.”

Martha gesticulated wildly in frustration behind his back. Alex smiled serenely. “Of course, J. I know how to behave.”

#a far more enjoyable strain of passive aggression than what's currently going on in rf #w the same oblivious jock john #hamilton #hamilton fic #lams fic #lams #martha laurens #alexander hamilton #john laurens #henry laurens #asks #cattlaydee #fic

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tvserieshub · 7 years

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Season 4 was never guaranteed, but boy, has it ever been satisfying. There was a lot of fear in the viewing audience when Abbie was killed at the end of Season 3. Fear, and anger. Personally, I was shocked that they decided to eliminate her character, but I have felt this entire season that this was not a matter of dislike of character, OR actress. It has felt with the entire storyline as if they wanted to take the show in a different direction than Season 2 or 3 allowed with the complement of existing characters. I have been very satisfied with the season. The story arc has been interesting, Tom Mison has had free rein to be playful, somber and show off his stage talents within the TV show – quite clever of the writers. Much of the whimsy AND horror of the first season returned with this season. Every single new character was useful. As you’ll see from my recap, this episode really allowed for a lot of closure. So, while I would be sad and disappointed if it was not renewed, at least I don’t have the awful unresolved cliff-hanger feeling.

The reviewcap begins here:

A horse gallops across a field with redcoats and other revolutionary-war-accoutered individuals observing. It appears a duel has been arranged. Dreyfuss (Jeremy Davies), Jenny (Lyndie Greenwood), Henry (John Noble)and Ichabod (Thomas Mison) are there and per Crane’s instructions, Jenny opens up a box of dueling pistols. Henry states the nature of the offense, Crane has usurped Henry as War. Stepping 10 paces, they turn. Henry fires, striking Crane. Crane says that he must take Henry out of the world, and although he’s shot, he shoots and mortally wounds Henry.

We return to present and the duel was a vision that Jenny and Crane are sharing. This vision confirms for Jenny and Crane that Henry has taken up the mantle of war. They want confirmation, so they will use Alex’s method of confirmation. Adult Molly (Lara) (Seychelle Gabriel) and Diana (Janina Gavankar) discuss how in Lara’s timeline, she spent time in the vault, but she was tutored by Jobe. All she learned came from him (and she is still apparently fond of Jobe, in an odd way). Lara wants to meet Molly. Diana realizes that Lara is actually stuck in this timeline. Jake (Jerry MacKinnon) shows Alex (Rachel Melvin) that his research shows that the four horsemen are likely more powerful together. Jake is concerned that Alex is not ok. He asks if he offended her, but Alex said the opposite. Everyone convenes with Jake and Alex. Alex says she’s been able to track but is trying to get a thermal picture, and Jenny asks if she can try to hack the satellite image. Four warm images are clearly visible. They realize the horsemen are very close to Camp David (I guess we don’t need to worry since the CURRENT president is most often at Mar-A-Lago). They try to figure out how to warn the President without sounding utterly crazy. As they watch, the horsemen take off.

At Camp David, the guards fire away at the horsemen, but are unable to stop them. A burning ax mark appears on the door of the President’s (Charmin Lee) safe room, and Headless bursts in. He swings his blade and a blue glow knocks all the guards out, but not the President. As she wonders what the creature is, Malcolm Dreyfuss enters with Jobe (Kamar de los Reyes). Malcolm sends a video message informing DHS that he has the President. The team discusses that there’s no way that the government will concede to Dreyfuss’ demands, and they all decide that in order to stop this, they have to figure out how to kill an immortal enemy.

The team rummages thoroughly through the vault, but without success. However, Lara suggests that she appeal directly to Jobe. She thinks she has a way to convince him. She uses the last summoning crystal to bring Jobe to the tunnels. Lara tells Jobe that Dreyfuss is growing tired of him. Jobe growls what seems to be a curse. “Via ad Infernum!” Although the team initially says that Jobe told them to “go to Hell,” Crane realizes that he was actually DIRECTING them to literally GO TO HELL. Diana is very unhappy with the thought of Crane and Lara going, but Crane says he’s found his way back from Purgatory AND New Jersey (heh). The team jokes about bringing back souvenirs, like a snowglobe. Crane researched, and picked his apartment because the visit would not attract attention. But, before they can complete the “go to Hell” spell, Crane gets a visit from the cable guy. (“Icheebod Crane”) Crane reschedules. That scene was really amusing. Crane and Lara successfully execute the spell, and as Crane describes Hell as Valley Forge, during winter, Lara remarks that she isn’t seeing the same thing. She sees St. Agatha’s Home for orphaned kids. This was an extremely unique and compelling way to convey the uniqueness that the afterlife and Hell might have for everyone. “Hell is the damned places we bring with us.” Great writing! Crane tells Lara that he can relate with how Lara feels, out of time. He wants to make sure that Lara knows he will never abandon her. The filming was remarkable, because as each actor spoke their lines, the scene shifted to their individual hell. They jointly see (with a great alternating screen) the entry to the actual inferno. “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter” in Latin.

Back in the vault, although they have searched the place exhaustively, Alex notices that the bookshelves appear to be more than decorative. Jenny notices a symbol, and they are switches, when depressed at the same time, release hidden compartments. They find a hidden volume dated 1789, which documents the creation of the archive. Washington (Mark Campbell) and Bannaker (Edwin Hodge) discuss a mural, and while Betsy Ross’ participation can’t be disclosed, they do leave the tricorn hat as a secret recognition of her contribution. Bannaker says that he wants to keep the archive separate from elected officials, and Washington asks if Bannaker will ever forgive him for the events which led to Crane’s “long slumber.” They realize that the weapons are IN the archive, somewhere. Crane and Lara descend a long and gorgeous staircase and arrive in Hades, where they hear the Devil (Terrence Mann) singing. (It’s “BOB the skull” from The Dresden Files!) They ask if he’s the Devil who struck a deal with Malcolm Dreyfuss. They ask the Devil to help kill Dreyfuss, but the Devil asks why he should interfere, because Malcolm is bringing the Apocalypse. Then he threatens the Witnesses. Crane asserts that the Devil can’t keep them there because they came of their own free will. Crane asks if they are going to strike a deal. (Uh oh).

In the vault, they locate a drawing on the back of a picture which identifies that there is a spot in a wall. They break the wall and see a bow and other old looking weapons. At the same time, Lara and Crane reappear. Crane shows that the Devil gave him the Philosopher’s Stone. The team dubiously shows the weapons. Crane, sensing their doubt, gives a pep talk. At Camp David, Henry thoughtfully notes that he can feel his father coming (while Dreyfuss gloats). Henry remarks that Crane was able to overcome him before. Dreyfuss reassures him and asks Henry to trust in him. (This results in an excellent opportunity for John Noble to show off his stage chops, too.)

Alex and Jake are in the forest and Jake will not lie about their chances. But, Jake reassures Alex about how far they have come as capable fighters. Alex finally admits that it bugs her that for three years she’s been working with the one person she can’t live without, and didn’t realize it, and they finally kiss (YAY!). Jenny lets the team know they are on their way. Everyone tells each other to stay safe, and Diana tells Lara that she’s still her Mom and to be careful.

Crane and Diana approach the house, and they encounter War. The team sees the other three horsemen: Famine, Plague and Death, but they notice that War is not there. They don’t know why Headless can be out in the daylight – and decide that the horsemen are more powerful together. The weapons that the team has are activated because the team is close to the horsemen. Crane gets War to talk to him, as Henry. Crane identifies that regardless of all that they have experienced, they bond over Freedom. He points out that Henry’s hatred will enslave him. Henry realizes that Freedom is a cause even he is willing to sacrifice for, so he declares a truce. The team fights the other three.

Crane and Diana arrive at the building where Jobe and Dreyfuss are holding the President. They enter and tell Dreyfuss it’s over. Crane tries to persuade Dreyfuss that he has a lot of gifts and he’s wasting them. Dreyfuss says he wants to cut the President’s throat. He staggers and Crane sees that the Philosopher’s Stone has been activated. Diana shoots Dreyfuss who jokes about his shirt. He wonders why he’s still injured. Crane shows him the stone. And, Dreyfuss asks Jobe to help. But, Jobe grabs Malcolm and says since Malcolm’s contract has come to an end, Jobe is a free agent. He grabs screaming Malcolm and they burst into flame. Crane hopes that the Horsemen have gone with him. We see the team fighting and the remaining horsemen disappear. The President asks who Crane and Diana are and they explain they are Agency 355. She says there is a conundrum but that the solution is for Crane and Agent Thomas to report directly to her. Crane points out that he is not a citizen and she instantly makes him one.

Back in his apartment, Crane is completing his voter’s registration. Lara shows up and Crane thinks he’s late for their meeting with young Molly and Diana. Lara says she’s not sure it’s a good idea. Lara points out that Molly has been liberated because Lara is the Witness, not Molly. So, Lara decides she needs to go out and figure out for herself what it means for her. Crane bows and lets her go. Crane explains to Diana and Molly that Lara needed to go. Molly is disappointed. Crane tells Molly that her future is her own now. She can choose. Plus, not only is Molly free, but so is Diana. But, she tells Crane that she felt her calling and that they all are a family. Diana gets a text from Jenny about a siren.

While they head out to the lake, Diana challenges Crane about the Devil and Crane concedes that he made a deal. He shows Diana the symbol he now has branded on his arm. He has a lien on his soul. “Sorry, what was that? Situation dire? Prognosis grim? Just another day at the office.” But, Crane says that he’s certain that since he has such a good support network, he will fix this and Diana says he won’t do it alone. They discuss what this woman in the lake might be. Not a siren…it’s a Kraken! And finish the season (and perhaps the series) “Shall we punch the clock?”

Grade: A+

This episode, in particular, was sweetly satisfying. Young Molly is released, Diana commits to the business, Jenny appears to be staying, Jake and Alex have realized they love each other, older Molly (Lara) is the Witness and gets along well with Crane, Dreyfuss has been called to the Devil and Jobe is a “free agent.” War isn’t gone, but does seem to have declared a temporary truce. We got to see Hell and the Devil (who was both charming AND scary/menacing!). The team is now officially working directly for the President. This season was tightly and enjoyably written. It managed to be light-hearted, serious, funny and scary – difficult attributes to evenly achieve. The special effects were very well done and they returned to filming techniques that Len Wiseman originally introduced the first season. Most importantly for me, the cast seemed to genuinely enjoy working together and that quality makes scenes more believable and invests the audience to a greater degree than just a good story. I sincerely hope that Fox grants one more season, because the writers and the show team appear to still have room, and they had the chops to go a completely different direction this year and still hearken back to what made season 1 so special.

Next Episode: Awwww, there ISN’T ONE! Please renew this show, Fox!

Sleepy Hollow (S04E13) “Freedom” Season 4 was never guaranteed, but boy, has it ever been satisfying. There was a lot of fear in the viewing audience when Abbie was killed at the end of Season 3.

#Devil #Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse #Hades #Ichabod Crane #Philosopher&039;s Stone #Sleepy Hollow

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torentialtribute · 5 years

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Barclays FA Women’s Super League season preview

All eyes are focused on the Barclays FA Women & # 39; s Super League this weekend, while top-class action returns with great match-ups on Etihad on Saturday and Stamford Bridge on Sunday.

The renewed interest in the ladies game, ignored by the lionesses' ability to capture the imagination of the nation in France has seen the competition as a main sponsor, bumper marketing deals and free online match streaming platform by The FA

But the biggest challenge the competition faces this year is getting fans through the gates on seats, week after week, something that the Division 1 Female in France despite a home cup failed

Here, Sportsmail Previews of the 2019-20 Barclays FA WSL season …

Arsenal won the Super League last season and will be pushed hard while fighting to keep it

Large stadiums organize major games after the opening weekend of the season

With the opening of showpieces, including the Manchester derby and Chelsea v Tottenham Hotspur, played in the Etihad and Stamford Bridge, respectively, it was only a matter of time before other clubs followed.

Spurs announced that the Women & # 39; s Super League & # 39; s first derby will be played in North London in November at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. West Ham then followed by revealing their plans to organize their game against Spurs at the London Stadium with 60,000 seats later this month.

Etihad Stadium in Manchester City will host the Manchester derby on the opening weekend

Can Arsenal successfully

Joe Montemurro continue to be the main focus this season, despite the fact that Arsenal has been hunting for the UEFA Champions League trophy for the first time in more than five years.

Dutch defender Dominique Bloodworth left North London to join Frauen-Bundesliga, Wolfsburg this summer, but that remains their only major departure.

Although the Gunners still have set favorites this season, you can guarantee that they will be pushed hard by last season's runners in Manchester City who have reached a top two finish in their last five WSL campaigns. .

Although Nikita Parris made the switch to Lyon, Nick Cushing & # 39; s double-winning party added firepower with the arrival of Lethal England striker Ellen White from Birmingham City.

Arsenal has to contend with a Champions League campaign under Joe Montemurro

How will the Newly promoted teams rate in the top flight?

Casey Stoney has played the title chances of Manchester United despite smart summer recruitment and the support of one of the world's largest football clubs

But let's not forget that only 15 months ago the United Women & # 39; s Women & # 39; s team did not even exist. Promoting promotion for the top flight champions in their inaugural season was an achievement, but only lost once – although they were the only full-time team in the competition.

Second place Tottenham Hotspur, who made the leap from part-time contracts, now play their home games at The Hive.

Head coach duo Karen Hills and Juan Amoros won nine new signings, in particular the 32-year-old English winger and four-time WSL title winner Gemma Davison. For a party that went toe-to-toe in a tight title race with United last season, everything less than a mid-table finish would be disappointing.

United have backed up for the summer and are ready for their inaugural top flight season

Which teams are most likely to be involved in a relegation battle?

Only four points apart Brighton and Everton at the bottom of the table last season and they only missed narrowly demotion by the Yeovil Town 10-point penalty for entering the administration

Everton , who won only three games last season, is undergoing some rebuilding, with manager Willie Kirk preparing for his first full season. After shipping seven players and registering six, making this squadron click could be a big challenge for Kirk.

Who were the biggest surprises in the transfer window?

Casey Stoney, the boss of Manchester, has admitted that Lyon & # 39; s last-minute dive for club captain and first choice left back Alex Greenwood surprised them.

On the blue side of Manchester, city wing Claire Emslie made the switch to the National Women & # 39; s Soccer League side Orlando Pride. The Scottish international now plays alongside six-time world player of the year Marta and double world cup winner Alex Morgan.

Alex Greenwood from England made a last minute move to Lyon in one fell swoop for Manchester United

THE BARCLAYS FA WOMEN SUPER LEAGUE: SIX PLAYERS TO WATCH

1. Jackie Greens – Manchester United

The Dutch central midfielder was Casey Stoney & # 39; s first major signing this summer prior to their debut season in the Women & # 39; s Super League and could prove to be one of the smartest things in this transfer window

The 24-year-old judo champion and, who became a member of FFC Frankfurt, returns to English football four years after leaving Chelsea. Jackie Groenen also scored in particular the goal that Holland scored this year in the World Cup Final.

2. Vivianne Miedema – Arsenal

After becoming top scorer last season, with 22 goals in 20 games, the productive Dutchman of Arsenal confirmed her name in the history books to be summer by its top scorer of all time.

Vivianne Miedema is only 23 and already has three career competition titles to her name plus a winner's medal of Euro 2017 and a silver medal of the World Cup in France.

Vivianne Meidema enjoyed a successful summer and once became Dutch top scorer of all time

3. Erin Cuthbert – Chelsea

Chelsea striker Erin Cuthbert led Scotland this summer to their very first World Cup and pulled out despite their dramatic exit the 21-year competition worldwide attention.

Known for her ability to score spectacular goals from a distance, her semi-volleyball match against Lyon in the Champions League semi-final last season was chosen as the goal of the tournament.

4. Jordan Nobbs – Arsenal

The England's captain scored from his first shot in a pre-season win over Tottenham Hotspur last month after turning nine months tilted with an earlier cruciate ligament injury.

Jordan Nobbs successfully helped the Gunners to retain the WSL title in 2012, and with so far 12 trophies won in her nine-year career in North London, the midfielder could play a crucial role in the attempt by Arsenal to defend their title.

England Deputy Captain Jordan Nobbs scored from his first preseason shot win Spurs

5. Melissa Lawley – Liverpool

Securing Melissa Lawley's services is a letter of intent from Liverpool boss Vicky Jepson . In her two and a half year spell in Manchester City, the 25-year-old midfielder won two FA Cups, the Continental Cup, and reached the semifinals of the Champions League.

After being called up for the England squadron this month to replace the injured Jade Moore, Lawley will set her sights on becoming a more regular face in the side of Phil Neville with the 2020 Olympic Games and home Euro & # 39; s coming in 2021.

6. Maeva Clemaron – Everton

The international midfielder of France, who was trained at the Lyon Academy for a year, made the move to Merseyside FC Fleury after he had been called Corinne Diacre & 23's player World Cup Team

Given that she competed with decorated skipper Amandine Henry, it is no surprise that Maeva Clemaron did not manage the starting line-up of the to reach the host country. The 26-year-old is one of the external players to watch.

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oscillate-wilde-ly · 7 years

Text

Enough

Listen – listen! It’s not like Henry doesn’t know he has a problem, it’s just that it’s part of the whole gig, the whole folk-rock-singer-slash-drifter thing. You just don’t do that kind of thing without developing a drinking problem; it’s practically a pre-requisite to be at least halfway to drunk before attempting any Bob Dylan song in earnest. Even your basic college-aged indie youth with an acoustic knows that.

Waking up hung over with his head pounding on an unfamiliar couch, mouth as dry as the overflowing ash tray on the floor beside him – it’s just part of the look. Part of the lifestyle that justifies the early graying at his temples and the beaten shadows under his eyes, the way he shakes with sobs in his sleep a couple times a month, and the way he can’t remember what happened last night.

Last night. What happened last night.

The question echoes through him unanswered but full of pregnant possibility, and Henry knows better than to chase it any longer. Not here, anyway. Here with the Ikea couch and found-artisan rug and the who-rescued-who shelter cat sleeping square on his chest, all of which belong to the very nice couple who – this much Henry remembers – have just been beside themselves with sedated, bohemian excitement to put up local legend Henry “Hank” Darling for the night.

With a quiet groan he sits upright – or, as upright as the feline weight on his chest will allow. Soft gray light filtering in through the blinds on windows just above the couch tells him it’s just barely morning. It’s the kind of wake-up after the initial pass-out where he’s still a little tipsy, but sober enough to know he wants to be gone when his hosts wake up wanting to hear tales of the gig from the night before.

The night before.

It drops heavy like a cannon ball in a kiddie pool and in a second Henry’s up. The cat’s on the floor and so are his feet.

The best thing about being a folk-rock-singer-slash-drifter is that it’s real easy to pack up your stuff and go when everything you own fits in a guitar case and the pockets of your jacket. The best thing about staying with millennial-hipster-youth is they always put a glass of water out for you before going to bed when you pass out on their couch. He drinks it too fast but keeps it down – a trick of the trade that gets him out, out, out the door so that the little black rescue cat barely has time to sprint for the opening before it’s closed again.

Hangover sunglasses? On.

Guitar case? Secured.

Leering next door neighbor? Ignored.

Whenever the walk from the front door to the sidewalk takes longer than five seconds on account of the landscaping, you know you’re in a nice neighborhood. Whenever there’s someone outside before seven AM in matching jogging clothes or anything that buttons, you know you’re in a nice neighborhood. The aesthetic configuration of succulents and perennials dotting porches and hanging from verandas is utterly lost on Henry.

What matters now is the motion. Moving one foot after another, so that the little townhouse filled with rare vinyls and unchallenged monogamy and Swedish furniture is only getting smaller and smaller behind him all the time. It’s enough to get his blood going again so that the pain in his head is joined now by an ache in his back and one on his side, bruises fresh and festering. Little lines of red flecked across the fingers on his right hand, glowing pink cuts only a few hours old.

New.

Gained most likely in the past twelve hours judging by the blooming blue color on the ones he can see. The past twelve hours.

Out here in the newborn daylight, with the sounds of mechanical fits being had by lawn sprinklers and the occasional errant Labrador barking at his footsteps, Henry tries to remember.

…

It was like this: the open mic night part of the gig was open to anyone, but only he – Hank Darling – would be headlining, listed, and therefore, getting paid. At the best of times it was a “kitschy” hipster bar that had discreetly set up a stage in the back corner for local talent. In reality it was a dive of a place with a lone stool and a microphone older than the yellowing health-inspection paper forgotten on a wall (a wall plastered decoratively with cigarette-scented coasters and questionable stains).

It paid mostly in drink tickets and “exposure”, but that had never stopped Henry before.

And – listen! Henry would never judge anyone for the way they chose to live, or who they chose to fuck, or not fuck, okay? He wasn’t – isn’t – “-phobic” of any kind. That kind of shit could never stick to a kid too sad and scared to give a fuck, and it wasn’t apt to change just because the kid managed to survive long enough to make a career out of his drinking problem.

It was just that he didn’t – he didn’t expect to see him there, in the audience, bobbed black hair just perfectly curled under his ears, with eyelashes just too long to be natural and lips just too red to be naked and – what was he wearing? Henry had only just been a few beers back when he’d spotted the gender-bending boy who’d been babbling in his ear these past couple nights suddenly conjured before him in the audience like a spirit, all glitter and fish-nets and post-grunge-pop-crop-tops that flashed wildly when he talked (as if he ever stopped doing that).

The boy was like a siren who refused to even pretend that he wasn’t luring you to your doom in a shirt that said “SLUT” in big holographic letters and a mouth that said, “Come crash on my rocks, baby.”

His name was Alexander and only Alexander the way Henry’s name was Henry and only Henry. Hank was strictly the name he sang hopeful love songs under, or slow and sad covers of love songs someone else wrote, or long ballads of admiration and awe to nature that he shut up inside him when he shut up the guitar case every night.

Alexander had told him he didn’t go by Alex anymore, not since people assumed too fast it was a girl’s name, not since someone else’s assumptions meant someone else’s fist in his made-up face when they didn’t find the parts that they assumed matched the name under his skinny jeans or mini skirt or hot pants. (He told Henry this with a smile and a wink and a hand on Henry’s shoulder just barely touching).

From backstage (otherwise known as the corner behind the stage equipment) Alexander locked eyes with him long enough to curl that Cheshire cat smirk on his face before going back to making eyes at a stranger, like he was interested in whatever conversation he was having with whoever was buying his drink currently.

Fuck, maybe Alexander was interested in it. Not up to Henry to notice, to look, to care. One leg swung wantonly from the barstool Alexander was propped up on, too short to reach the ground even with platforms on.

He should have stuck out like a glittering thumb, looking like that in a shitty bar like this, even with the collection of riot grrls and nu-goths milling about. Alexander stuck out in the way that you were either looking At Alexander or Not At Alexander and never anything or anyone else. But the confidence Alexander exuded like a neon glow on some offensive sign dared you to want to fight him or fuck him; either option you chose said something about you, not him.

Either way it was your problem.

Either way he’d still be there.

It was only ever a question of how long it’d take Henry before he had to resign himself to approaching the bar to turn in a drink ticket for something to hold in both hands, just like it was only a question of how long after doing that before a newly familiar voice was in his ear, buzzing like a radio or maybe purring like a cat.

“This place is a shit hole.”

The best thing about being a folk-rock-singer-slash-drifter was most fans felt it was uncool to approach you before a gig. But Alexander was not a fan, and even if he was (was he?) nothing he did was uncool, anyway.

Henry leaned his front too hard against the bar for a second so that the sharp corner of the top bit sweetly into his stomach before he turned a lazy expression on Alexander. He replied first with a sip of his beer, then, “So you should feel right at home, then.”

The slightest tug at the corner of Henry’s lips when he spoke betrayed a whole lot more than his teasing intentions – not that he was noticing. Henry rubbed at the tip of his nose, sniffled, and settled on watching some kid with a laptop and a keyboard struggle to find enough plugs for her set-up behind the mic.

“Ha. Ha,” Alexander said the words in favor of actually laughing, but there was a grin on his face and in his too blue eyes that Henry refused to linger on. “Maybe I should have said something like: ‘Come here often?’ Would that have been better for you, Henry?” Alexander said it like the set up for a joke but the punch line never came.

Henry answered with a shrug and drink.

“Mm,” Alexander hummed undeterred by Henry’s silence, his back to the bar and his elbows on top so that his hands dangled off it with red-rubbed knuckles and bitten-down fingernails. “That’s my sister.” He nodded towards the woman on stage, then, after a beat he added: “You didn’t think I was here to see you, did you?”

Henry ignored the question (again).

She was a waifish thing with hair some impossible color of pink and she was wearing enough layers to suggest she had tried to walk out with the whole thrift shop on (if it was a thrift shop for very small drag queens). There was glitter under her eyes (they must share glitter, Henry figured) and when she opened her mouth to sing it sounded like what Henry imagined an especially innocent kitten might sound like if it knew how to work a Mac laptop and a synthesizer.

“I can see the resemblance,” Henry noted, and he plugged his mouth with a beer to keep from saying anything else.

Instantly Alexander’s face was in his as much as their height difference would allow, smug and sparkling, his lips saying: “Oh yeah? Is that because she’s so cute and I’m so cute? You can just say it, Henry. It’s okay. You can. Just. Say it.”

A groan. A grumble. Another beer to stop up his voice. It burned inside him alongside the alcohol, made his free hand ball into a fist now and then, choked him up into communicating with grunts and nods as Alexander carried on the conversation for him – both their parts and then some.

One or two dark-eyed boys stumbled on stage with their poetry journals in tow and left in the wake of scattered applause for bravery; now and then Alexander would put a hand on Henry’s shoulder when he talked, or on his arm. Chipped black nail polish winding around some loose threads of Henry’s jacket, winding and winding and Henry ignoring the way his muscles tense with every touch.

By the time Henry was meant to soundcheck, he had already moved on to hard liquor. Alexander’s voice was in his ears telling him, “Go get ‘em, Hank,” with that knowing self-satisfied smile that he seemed to always wear as if he always, always, always had something to be smug about.

Like just his existing in front of you was a triumph of rebellion.

It was an expression that had been searing itself into the back of Henry’s mind, which was arguably where he kept the majority of things that stuck with him for too long. A therapist had told him once in a stuffy counseling office in elementary school that trauma makes us compartmentalize differently, makes us wall things off and scale things back so that the focus is just on surviving today – right now – and everything else just gets pushed out of sight as a means to an end. Henry liked to think he was acutely aware of what was on the other side of his own mental walls, and that’s precisely why he kept them up.

His walls were translucent; hazy glass so he could squint and look at the monsters on the other side whenever he needed to, whenever he wanted to, and like a beta fish squaring up at his own reflection it made his colors brighter. By forcing himself to stare down his own monstrous self-destructive origins on a regular basis, Henry could justify his total inability to be anything to people other than an inevitable let-down. It made his music ache deeper. And it made every true emotion that managed to break through his haze of cigarette smoke and cheap whiskey drinks sear through him like a hot iron out of control.

It wasn’t something he would recommend, but it was one way to live.

With whiskey in one hand and his guitar in the other, Henry sat down at the rickety stool amongst casual whistles of approval and still out, over the little crowd that had gathered, was Alexander’s come-up-and-see-me-sometime smirk leering at him from the bar. Every passing sip made every coming strum of his guitar sound more and more and more like the mewling voice of indiscretion singing:

“Go get ‘em, Hank.”

…

After that, things get a little hazy.

A lot hazy.

The kind of hazy that makes his headache worse when he tries to push through it, and the way the sun keeps getting higher and brighter as Henry puts pavement behind him isn’t helping. There are some things that even hangover sunglasses can’t block out.

By now there are signs of life all around him as he walks; the front lawns have become invariably shorter and the picket fences have begun to morph into chain-link. Garages turn into rusted-out beaters haphazardly driven onto driveways and forgotten for eternity. The faces he passes aren’t glancing away at the last second when he comes close like they do in the nice neighborhoods – they never look at him in the first place.

The cuts on his knuckles sting in his pockets and shifting too much makes his bruises sing hymns of regret but walking with his head down is safe, it’s always safe.

Hands in his pockets, it’s only now that he’s dipped back into reality that he realizes what he’s been fiddling with in there. The little paper he’s been fondling idly, Henry discovers as he pulls it from his the pocket of his jacket, is a small napkin, partially shredded and particularly worn from his idle fingering.

In curling handwriting and black ink that seems too black and thick to be pen but otherwise unidentifiable to Henry, are the words:

5350 S Mryland ave #142

Beneath it, there’s the half-smudge of a too-red lipstick stain: a kiss mark done in haste.

Beneath that, Henry’s hands feel heavy and sluggish. There’s an itch in the back of his brain like something waiting to be overturned, some face about to come into focus – only if he starts looking for it, it might look back. So he crumples the thing, forgets he knows exactly where that address is, forgets that he’s trying to remember anything at all except how to put one foot in front of the other.

It’s the telltale crunching of glass under his feet that sends him back to the night before for the second time, this time against his will; broken glass from broken bottles that stick in his memory with edges jagged enough to cut through the blackout.

…

It was like being caught in an undertow: wave after wave crashing over him in slow, agonizing succession. Or it was like a prizefight with Henry Darling in both corners. The memory of his actual show was gone almost completely aside from picking up on those blue blues occasionally glancing at him from the back of the bar – occasionally! – with lazy disinterest and maybe one finger drawing circles on the bar top.

That image was clear as blue skies, but then – nothing.

Henry’s typical post-gig ritual was like this: find a table near the back and make his drink tickets and pocket change take his liver as far as they could. He kept his sunglasses on, mostly to discourage the average bar patron from making the mistake of thinking he was looking for company – if they happened to do anything to hide his own expression, or where his eyes were, that was purely coincidental.

The level of excitement that this tradition involved tended to vary from town to town, depending widely on the company he was keeping at the time, or lack thereof as the case may be. If anyone visited for very long that night, Henry’s blackout consolidator had efficiently wiped them from the scene.

The only thing that had stuck was, predictably, Alexander.

Alexander not coming over to sit with him the way he had the night before, or the one before that. Alexander not wheedling whatever words he could out of Henry with teasing back-handed compliments and fleeting touches.

(“So are you always this grumpy or is it just because you like me so much?” / “I bet all the girls think the gray in your hair makes you look like a sexy professor or something.” / “Henry. Henry! Say something nice to me and I’ll share my cigarette.”)

Instead it was Alexander and his sister trading cigarettes and mixed drinks. Alexander always just in his line of sight giving lingering looks and touches to some pair of fair-trade sneakers with a trendy haircut and always, always, always with that smile on his had-to-be-painted lips.

It figured, Henry argued to himself from the other side of the bottom of his glass on the other side of the room. It figured that Alexander would eventually lose interest, would eventually move on to someone who didn’t shut up tight like a vice any time things got too comfortable or close. He couldn’t tell you why Alexander had followed him around for a while up until now in the first place, but it didn’t come as any surprise that he’d figured out it wasn’t the best use of his time. The best thing about being a folk-rock-singer-slash-drifter was nothing surprised you about people, anymore.

Didn’t mean he wasn’t allowed to be pissed about it, though.

Pissed! Not jealous. Pissed.

Pissed that some wet-eared college drop-out with a sob story of student loans had replaced him as the object of Alexander’s chosen attentions as if the Henry was interchangeable with that kind of mediocrity.

From his table in the back of the bar, Henry considered just how forgettable the kid was, how utterly unimpressive. It took him a good full ten minutes of whiskey-fueled brooding to even recall that the face that Alexander was mooning at had also come up on “stage” at some point during the open mic before Henry’s gig, reciting some hack-job poetry that tried to force you to feel something in the name of art or ego or circumstance.

Comedy acts were better live, because you went with a purpose – with the intent to laugh. Same thing with shitty poetry: it just sounded better with a brick wall behind you and the lights down low. Going with the intent to feel. What a fucking joke.

So: a bottle, a broken bottle, the sound that pulled from the abyss the remains of images that he was moving towards closer and closer in his mind – it was louder than anything, louder even than the sound of performative laughter at unfunny jokes and the longer that Henry sat in the memory of watching and drinking and watching and drinking the louder it got.

There was the distinct feeling of burning anger in his stomach, brewing and bubbling like poison threatening to unleash itself from his lips. It was the sort of drunken anger that settled on him like increased gravity: made it hard to get up or do anything else except watch and drink (and watch and drink).

It was the napkin that finally made Henry snap.

The worst thing about being a folk-rock-singer-slash drifter was how you didn’t get to pick and choose what stuck and what the alcohol washed away. Some things you always lost to the liquor, like when he’d got a beer bottle in his hand or what he’d said when he crossed the room in a tempest two seconds later. All that had stuck was the feeling of fire in his chest, the way the bottle felt smooth and tense in his hand like it was about to pop.

Through the drunken lens of memory Henry saw himself snatching the napkin from Alexander’s fingers as he’d finished writing on it, just as Alexander was sliding it across the top of the bar over to whatever no-name emotional plagiarist he’d been oozing all over.

Henry couldn’t remember reading it at the time, or even trying to; the content didn’t matter to that version of Henry who had been marinating in a potent combination of alcohol, self-loathing, and a new kind of repression he hadn’t before thought possible for himself. Slow-cooked at a cool seventy-eight degrees on a mid-summer night, shaken, stirred, and ready to blow.

“Alexander!“ Henry heard his voice say it like it was someone else talking, but he felt the words rumble up from inside him as he wheeled on Alexander so he knew it was himself talking. He watched as he wedged himself between Alexander and this boy, this Not-Henry, like he was watching a movie.

A biopic.

Starring: Alexander’s blue-blue eyes sparkling like the glitter on his cheeks and six shades too dark from behind the lenses of his sunglasses, staring up at Henry with a fixation to suggest he was watching a car crash, a train wreck, a forest fire. The bar buzzed around them, the dim lights swimming and glowing like fireflies.

There was no one else.

Then that sound – that sound of glass shattering, and it was only neck-deep in his own inebriated flashback that Henry could now place the origin of the little bright cuts on his hand. The beer bottle was broken before he could think twice about it; smashing it on the bar was a knee-jerk reaction to the sounds of protest coming from the boy he’d cut out when he’d inserted himself in the situation like an expletive.

There was no one else because Henry had made sure of it.

Shattering the bottle on the top of the bar took less than a second. “Enough,” Henry uttered the word more like a prayer than a command and then as if in answer the bar went quiet. He couldn’t be sure for how long because now with bits of glass on his knuckles and his mouth dry from all that he’d shut up inside of it, the seconds stretched on with impossible slowness.

It could have been an eternity that he stood there and Henry wouldn’t have noticed, for all Alexander’s expression had caught in that moment rooted somewhere between animal fear and sheer incredulous excitement.

And there it was: that little smirk tugging at the corners of his ruby lips, pulling just up through his cheeks and then finally flooding into his eyes so that he was practically beaming at Henry from where he sat on the barstool, legs still swinging, glitter still flashing and blinking on his cheeks like pinball lights.

Like a slot-machine jackpot – and Henry was going to get his cherry.

There was no denying that Henry was the one who kissed Alexander first, desperate and more than a little frustrated against Alexander’s still-smirking mouth. Henry would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought of kissing that smirk off his face once or twice before, but lying was half of surviving most days. This was more than surviving.

Alexander tasted like sugar-flavored vodka and clove cigarettes. He was warm and pouring all over Henry like water, flowing into him and flooding his senses with soft skin and a softer tongue. At some point Henry must have put his hands in Alexander’s face hair because it was between his fingers in an instant, threaded through them like the glittering siren might slip away through them.

The last thing that was clear to Henry was the feeling of hands in his pockets, and the upcoming rush of sound of a bar responding to some drunken asshole breaking a beer bottle coming to crash over him.

…

Then it goes blank: just the couch, the daylight, the cat.

By now he’s walked enough blocks to feel as at home as a homeless drifter can; the shouts of children and the errant smell of burning cigarettes feel more like home than manicured lawns or minimalist-modern-brownstones.

There’s a moment where Henry has to decide on a street corner: right or left. He can look up, catch the street signs and consider one or the other as though it might make a difference but he knows better. His feet know better.

A simple turn around the corner and he’s there: “5350 S Mryland ave”. He folds and unfolds the napkin in his hand, not looking at it – just holding it.

Number one hundred forty-two is visible from the sidewalk. It’s always been visible, each of the countless times he’s walked past it during each of the countless times he’s drifted through this city. Now, through the haze of a summer mid-morning, it looks different somehow. Henry has never before noticed the little Dollar Store paper lanterns dangling from the overhang, partially shredded from weather and age, but they seem appropriate now. The string of fairy lights wrapped around support beams peeling with paint look even more so.

Whether or not he meant to end up here, and why his feet took him here, are two questions that Henry kills with his fist against the door – knock knock – one for each. Seconds pass where Henry is just some guy with a hangover, waiting on a doorstep of an apartment he’s never really seen before, and then it opens to the petite pink-haired pixie whom Alexander has identified as his sister. She’s either half-dressed or whole-dressed in half-clothes, and her face goes from casual annoyance to screwed-up distaste in record time when their eyes meet.

“What the fuck do you want?” She demands, her voice going up and down on “fuck” and “you” and she’s looking him up and down like he’s made of garbage and oozing something worse.

It’s not the least hospitable greeting Henry’s had – not even the worst he’s had in this city – maybe the worst on this block.

She’s got her hands and arms crossed over her chest and they’re covered in various bracelets and rings and tattoos that are small and black and simple. Henry can see over her shoulder and into the tiny apartment (which is particularly easy, given that she’s even shorter than her brother by Henry’s judgment) to where Alexander has flung himself on a couch that’s ragged and may have once been a nice shade of green. He’s laying there like a ragdoll of Daisy Buchanan or Dorian Gray, cheeks rosy from the oncoming summer heat or something else entirely.

“Just thought I’d drop by,” are the words out of Henry’s mouth, though his eyes are still over the sister’s shoulder.

She observes: “How fucking considerate,” and from inside in a perpetual whine Alexander calls out without lifting his head and with mock fascination,

“Is that Hank Darling? Artemis! Don’t be rude.”

The pastel-pink princess who is apparently Artemis offers him a very un-nymph-like scowl to make it clear she isn’t moving out of his way with anything short of reluctance. Henry understands, as his reflection prompts a similar scowl on his own face most days, and he moves inside careful not to brush past her too close.

The apartment is what nice people would describe as cozy, more accurately an explosion of books, clothes, posters, ash trays, lighters, and throw pillows strewn across so many second-hand surfaces, all of which contributed through color and the apparent possession of a Bedazzler to an overall aesthetic kicking somewhere between Lisa Frank and heroin-chic. If one looked closely, it might be noted that none of the wall adornments have been hung in such a way as to leave any structural marks on the apartment itself. For how littered the place is, it’s small enough that the two of them could pack it into so many boxes and disappear without leaving so much as a fleck of pink hair dye to mark their history there.

Alexander pulls his legs up from where he’s lying on the couch, tucks them under him presumably to make room for Henry who doesn’t need to look to see the pleased smile on Alexander’s face. He sits. Alexander stretches his legs out across Henry’s lap and makes a kissy face at him and the loud sounds of smooching to match.

For her part, Artemis affords them both a healthy scowl before disappearing behind one of two closed doors in the place (the one with strands of star-shaped lights carefully balanced on the top of the doorframe and handing down on either side as opposed to the other one which is similarly decorated only by some repurposed bar signage now used, Henry assumes, to mark the bathroom, as it reads “The Boom-Boom Room”).

The morning-turned-afternoon light makes the place feel warm and for a little while it causes the yellowing pink bong on the coffee table to throw rosy colors across the room as sunshine filters through it. Alexander’s toenails are painted some old shade of lavender and he’s on his back watching Henry, his arms thrown casually over his head to dangle off the side of the couch like someone tossed him here and then just walked away.

“How’s your hand?” Alexander asks with a knowing look, and he has to press his lips together to keep from grinning about it. Henry opens the fist he doesn’t realize he’s been making, and for a moment he examines the tiny cuts on his knuckles born from beer bottle glass.

“Fine.” Henry answers with the faintest hint of a laugh. He takes his sunglasses off, and the little bit of stomach peeking out from under Alexander’s shirt and the sun-bleached green of the couch all get six shades lighter. Six shades brighter.

Suddenly Alexander is moving, upright and shifting closer to him. “I wasn’t sure you’d get my note,” Alexander declares like he’s singing a victory song. He’s on his knees crawling towards Henry, and he reaches across into Henry’s jacket pocket and pulls out the napkin like a prize.

Alexander asks: “How much did you drink last night?”

“Enough.”

Alexander puts his head on Henry’s shoulder, looking away from him, into the sunlight coming in through the blinds and, again, asks: “How much do you remember?”

With a smile just audible in his voice, Henry answers:

“Enough.”

#short story #henry #alexander #enough #original content #oc

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mischkebusiness · 7 years

Text

I keep waking up in the middle of the night. Sometimes from the acid ravaging my esophagus from some annoying ailment, sometimes from the jet lag that sits heavy on my eyelids at two in the afternoon and pries them awake at four in the morning. I tell myself that first thing in the morning, I will finally compile all of the golden thoughts and sparkling experiences- and predictably, this will vanishes as soon as the sun’s morning rays streak through the window. But after fingers fluttering around my neck and keyboard and apartment for several days, it’s time to write of the past two weeks. My past two weeks in Australia. Our past two weeks in Australia.

September 24

We’re fairly used to early morning flights: ours to Australia was no different. With a 3am wakeup call and generous pickup from Mom and Geza, we began the first leg of our journey. Because of an upgrade, sleeping tablets, and noise-cancelling headphones, the 17-hour flight went as well as could be. By the time we arrived in Townsville, Australia three plane changes later- our bed at the hotel was deeply welcome.

September 25

After sleeping on what felt like a cloud made of mashed potatoes, morning came early and we sorted our rental car to Airlie Beach and stocked up on Aussie snacks, including a long awaited introduction to Vegemite via Cheesymite Scroll.

It was an arid three hour drive through the Australian countryside: carcasses of wallabies strewn about the roadside, craggy, beautiful trees seemingly reaching upwards and outwards for a drink of water, rolling hills changing from brown to green to red. I am sure that Mark and I were both feeling the excited compression of emotions after months of planning this trip. We were on our way to visit Olivia, Mark’s thirteen-year-old daughter, to spend the next three days together.

After driving in what felt like desert for hours, an electric shock of blue greeted us as we turned a corner. The ocean with its soft white veil and Cowry-shell necklace and ceaseless heave beckoned us closer and we followed unquestioningly.

When I first saw Olivia loping through the sliding glass door and out into the yard with two dogs at her heels, the resemblance to her father struck me. The height, the stance, the slight squaring of the shoulders with neck bent and gaze seemingly turned upward even though I fell inches well below.

I was presented with my first tube of Vegemite- which rests in my kitchen cabinet- along with a generous offering of some of Australia’s sweetest gifts. After some time arranging activities for the following day and marinating in the heat, Mark and I left to check into our hotel across the city before meeting back up with Olivia for a dinner of burgers and wings at Little Vegas. After stuffing ourselves full of Americana-inspired sandwiches, we crashed into sleep hard and fast- prepared for an early, exciting start.

September 26

exploring

Tom, Liv, Mark

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Whitehaven

Anna, Liv, Tom

After a frenzied start of the day Mark, Olivia, Olivia’s cousin Tom, and I hopped aboard a bright purple catamaran for a day exploring the Whitsunday Islands. A stunning boat-ride cresting waves shared with turtles and dolphins and sharks, we arrived at Whitehaven Beach. As we tromped our way up the hill to the overlook, we chattered about snakes and the rocks and leaving as many people in our dust as we possibly could. The trees around us pointed their gnarled fingers toward the ocean and we followed, shocked at the tableau that surrounded us. Alabaster sand met water that azure only begins to describe, encompassed by a sky of blue fondant, soft and delicious. Our feet hit ground that felt less like granules of broken down minerals and rocks and more like powdered sugar.

We spent hours married to that sand: grazing our fingers across, sinking our bodies in, comparing the hard, barnacled slabs of earth to the softness surrounding it. We became neighborly with stingrays and I cried from happiness when I felt the small, viscous muscles of a sea snail work their way across my fingertips. I became lost in a tide pool the size of a credit card, fully absorbed in an alien world bursting with life I don’t understand, much like that around me most of the time.

September 27

Hideaway Bay

cockatoo

cockatoos in the trees

Liv, Little Vegas

My senses were shattered after such an incredible day prior: filled with new friends, discovery of life, snorkeling, sailing, and nautical exploration. It took a walk at dawn to start our final day in Airlie to refocus my mind. We met again with Olivia and were eager to continue our play in the sea, extending our expedition to Hideaway Bay. We were welcomed yet again by the sea and her unrelenting generosity. We were gifted with dozens of cowrie shells, picturesque views, and beams of sun roasting our skin as we splayed out, eyes expectant and intent on each centimeter of prosperous strand.

We ended a sun-soaked day back in the same seats at Little Vegas, chowing on fried chicken and balls of macaroni and cheese and burgers. It was relaxed, it was easy, it felt like a home- in a way.

September 28

Vegemite Toast

Whitehaven, Liv and Mark

off to Maggie

new markers and books

Saying “goodbye” never gets easier, particularly after mornings like this. I had my first proper Vegemite toast, made by Olivia and Mark, before he and I left for our journey back to Townsville. The flavor still reminds me of salty tears.

We retraced the roads back toward Townsville and were met by Mark’s sister Lizzii and her husband Jason at the rental car lot. We shared a first “double date” at GYO, a favourite Japanese restaurant, before we boarded the ferry toward Magnetic Island (aka Maggie), where they live with their sons Harry and Flynn. They’re almost neighbours with Mark’s mother and stepfather, Sue and Mal, just a few twists and turns up the street.

I fought through exhaustion to enjoy a delicious home-cooked roast chicken (which Flynn, the voracious meat-eater, particularly loved) with the beautiful, welcoming Watson family and Mal: sipping champagne, tasting light-as-air Pavlova and settling into a new pace, new place.

September 29

bedtime stories

koala, sleeping

Flynn, Mark, Harry

hungry kookaburra

the Forts

Mark started the day with one of his pavement-pounding too-many-kilometers-to-be-reasonable runs while I continued to sleep off jet-lag and started my day watching Mal feed kookaburras mince off the balcony. We shared brekkie (juicy bacon and perfectly over-easy eggs) complete with the Vitamin B wonders of Vegemite followed by a dip in crystal clear water in Radical Bay.

Mark and I had our first proper bush walk up to the Forts, eyes peeled for koalas. Those sleepy, stoned creatures did nothing but rest their fluffy behinds in the crook of gum trees and sleep through the sweltering heat. We garnered views of Magnetic Island and its stunning bays that reminded me of why people choose to live on the tropically bucolic island- backpackers and tourists rivaling the local population in size.

It was an exciting time as dusk fell when the rock wallabies began to truly debut. Carefully retrieving the snacks of carrots and apples the boys brought, I finally got to see wallabies that were alive and well. We began to wind up the day with the Watson crew at a perfectly deserted park smack dab in front of the ocean. We ate sweet chili burgers and threw sausages to the blue-winged kookaburras laughing peculiarly at us from their perches in the dusk. The evening ended with bedtime stories of Diary of a Possum and Possum Magic.

September 30

My birthday and our final morning on Maggie was crowned with eggs, bacon, pancakes, and gifts with the family with a few games of UNO, something I had never played until Harry taught me the ways of the game. I am now a convert.

We hugged Lizzii almost-teary-eyed goodbyes before taking Harry to a club dedicated to training lifesavers, apparently a very important thing in Australia. Donning a purple wetsuit, fluoro pink vest, and lime green swimming cap- young Harry walked onto the beach among his classmates for the first time with determination and ease. Flynn spent the next half hour being a charming spider in the web of playground equipment, crafting a trap where he would nip-nip-nip us until our fly-bodies were drained of invisible blood. Eventually, our time had to end and we caught the ferry back to Townsville for our flight to Hobart, Tasmania.

Sue, Mark’s mum, met us at the airport and we drove to the chilly harbor to share a bottle of bubbly and toast to the next set of adventures back in the city where Mark created so many of his stories. We sat around the pitiful heat of a decorative flame and chatted about the flight and the days to come. Immediately I felt at ease, like Hobart was telling me to stay for a bit. Soon after, the brightness of Alex and Amy joined us. Two incredible constants in Mark’s life, they were welcome familiar faces not seen since January in the brutal cold of Milwaukee. It felt as if family had walked into the hotel lobby.

After moments of flushed, bright reunion we made our way to St. Albi to meet Matt and Ange, more of Mark’s dearest friends. “Quick with a joke and to light your smoke” describes Matt well, minus the smoking part, and he is balanced by the pure loveliness of Ange. I felt wholly invited to the table and we laughed, sank into some of the best steak I have ever had, and left plumed in red after too much good wine.

October 1

The Henry Jones Art Hotel

clearly thrilled and ready to be an engaged adult

Landscape

best calamari, ever

The glorious day started with Billie. Two years old with more charm, cheek, and cleverness than fair for one little girl, she scooped us back up into her expressive, curious world. We took a road that reminded me of a curly-fry to Matt and Ange’s for brunch (savory corn fritters and bacon) in a house seemingly plucked off a glossy page of Dwell. We met little, lion-haired and hearted Liam for the first time and just as he began waking from his nap, we went home so that I could begin mine. We had late lunch scheduled with Sue, Mark’s grandparents John and Joan, and his Great Aunt, Pam; I wanted to be well-rested and in top form.

Mark nudged me awake for a tour through Tasmania for glimpses of his previous home in Huonville to the farm in Woodbridge. He always told me how Washington resembled Tasmania, but I don’t think I ever truly believed him until I began to view the landscape in person. The unending hills draped in greenery, the blue-tray water dappled with crisp, clear light, the gentle clearness of the air. The Eucalyptus, Mark driving on my right, and the soft white flocks of lambs freshly introduced to spring were the small reminders that I was in a world unknown to me.

Our lunch was nearing and Mark wanted to show me one last place: the jetty where he and his late father spent “hours on end, talking about anything and everything”. The tide announced its familiar greeting as we creaked across the timber, out to sea. To my delight, a flock of inky cockatoos screeched in a frenzy to our right. Mark laughed as I laughed at the clamour and took my into the arms that feel like home. He expressed himself simply and perfectly and knelt. It felt as if my lungs were removed and replaced with sugar-spun lanterns filled with moths and he asked. And I answered. And we were engaged.

Catching my breath, I said I wanted to remember every part of that moment: the mellow temperature, sound of the birds now in the distance, soft saline bite in the air. He told me I wouldn’t need to and turned me around to a photographer, a friend of his from his days working at the newspaper, The Mercury. Her name is Amy and she captured every candid moment so that I could revisit the memory at any time.

The next several hours were a shaky, delicious whirlwind. I met heaps of Mark’s beautiful family who were under the impression that they were waiting at the restaurant for a surprise birthday party for me. There were tear-inducing toasts, staticky video calls to my friends and family back home, photos upon photos, and endless embraces. It took an hour for my champagne-flute grasping hands to stop shaking.

The filminess begins to drop away by the time we were sitting in the window of our room at The Henry Jones. We came into focus a bit more as we sat, painting my nails (it was necessary!), Mark sipping a beer, and a rendition of Can’t Help Falling in Love floating from the speakers. In a deliriously happy and slightly shocked state, we wandered around Hobart’s city center in the dusk among the places he used to frequent, around the marina filled with ships that have seen the world.

We ate richly and langourously at Landscape, on silky scallops and firm orechiette, delicate calamari gilded with miso caramel and a plump gem of fillet. We chased the meal with a bottle of glittery light Tasmanian Jansz, sent as a gift to our room from Seattle by Mark’s wonderful sister and brother-in-law, Anna and Nick.

We slept beautifully.

October 2

teething madonna

posh pit to mona

We had left a day behind that felt like a watercolor, so we followed it up with an oily canvas covered in slashes of acid: the Museum of Old and New Art, MONA. The gallery- more like an asylum- is well described here. I was captivated by a pageant of taxidermied kittens sharing tea and a game of croquet; the ridiculous faces of the animals preserved by Noah’s Ark in a painting struck my fancy.

We drank champagne to and from the museum on a fast ferry, glimmering from within from the sheer nearness of each other.

October 3

After sausage rolls at the athletics track where Mark used to train, we noshed on flaky meaty pie from Jackman & McRoss in Princes Park, and shared an unfussy burger at Jack Greene with Mark’s crew of friends. We wandered through the galleries in Salamanca and continued to explore Hobart before dinner at Blackman’s Bay with Sue, a meal of gnocchi ragù tender as the company we dined with.

After a day of eating my heart out, I felt like vomiting my heart out. And then I did. Damn acid reflux. Note to self: schedule endoscopy.

October 4

It was an ideal last day in Tasmania, filled with small charms and everyday comforts that reminded us that the wonderful comes both in sweeping, grand gestures and the quiet, simple routine. One of my favorite things to do in a new country is visit a grocery store. I love aimlessly walking through the aisles to gape at the artfully wrapped sweets and goggle at what I consider bizarre meats and drool at the hundreds of foreign flavors of potato chips. I filled my basket with jars of Vegemite to bring home as gifts (which were taken away when going through security) and lollies before spending a few last hours with Alex and Billie before we left to spend our last night with Liam, Ange, and Matt.

Ange prepared a perfectly light and luxuriously hearty lamb salad, we sipped more bubbles, and digested over some trash TV- soaking up our last moments on the island.

October 5

Sydney Harbor

Longrain, Mark and Anna

Josh, Mark, Justin

Our taxi arrived in the dead of night to pick us up for our 6am flight to Sydney. Barely awake, we made our way to the city: only two stops away from home in Tacoma, but a world’s distance away.

We spent the morning traipsing through the city that reminded me a little bit of so many places I have loved: New York, Seattle, Glasgow, Hong Kong. We stopped for a coffee at one of the many vibrant little cafes in the back streets that Mark used to frequent during his time working and living there. The streets were alive with people smoking their reeking, modelesque cigarettes, working hard or working hard to look working hard on their cell phones, and dressed to the sixes, sevens, eights, and nines.

After stopping to stare at the Circular Quay and all its activity for a bit, we took a ferry out to Manly Beach for a wander- drinking in our surroundings the way there, the brisk wind raising the hairs on our skin as we stood on the port of the ship.

After a stroll around the beachtown and lunch on the docks, we made our way back to the Modern Art Museum and then onto the balcony of the Aurora for drinks with Mark’s previous coworkers from the old newspaper days, Justin and Josh. Although far too short, it was a delight meeting these friends from far away times and far away climes who clearly hold their friendship as highly as Mark does.

Our last proper meal in Australia was relished at Longrain: clean Tassie sparkling with welcome dishes of Betel leaf wrapped chicken, bright acidic Som Tum, comforting stir fry, and succulent pork hock. Of course we stopped at McDonalds on the way home so that I’d have a midnight snack: the Double Cheeseburgers are far better in Oz than the US.

As we spent our last hours remembering the past two weeks we had spent together in a place so familiar and so foreign, I felt tiredness nuzzle into my chest like a kitten, soft and inviting as a warm baguette.

I fell asleep next to my fiancé- ready to commence tomorrow, together.

australia. I keep waking up in the middle of the night. Sometimes from the acid ravaging my esophagus from some annoying ailment, sometimes from the jet lag that sits heavy on my eyelids at two in the afternoon and pries them awake at four in the morning.

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nofomoartworld · 8 years

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Art F City: This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Rejoice! Our Times Are Intolerable and Nasty Women Are Front-and-Center

Jenny Holzer’s eerily prescient works from the late 70s and early 80s open at Alden Projects on Friday.

New York’s week is characterized by two dominant themes: revisiting art history, and women owning “nastiness”. Monday, NYU’s Grey Art Gallery is launching Inventing Downtown, an ambitious look at how artist-run spaces informed the city’s radical aesthetics decades ago. Tuesday, Kate Hush illuminates archetypal feminine deception and betrayal at Cooler Gallery. She’ll be joined by legions of Nasty Women starting Thursday, when the Knockdown Center kicks-off a four-day fundraiser for Planned Parenthood featuring art, dance parties, and more. Alden Projects has a timely survey of Jenny Holzer’s early poster work that opens Friday, and White Columns is opening it’s 11th Annual, Looking Back. That’s but a sampling of the art history-mining going on this week. Stay nasty, New York, and remember that you always have been.

Mon

Grey Art Gallery at NYU

100 Washington Square East New York, NY 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Website

Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965

Curated by Melissa Rachleff, this exhibition presents the first comprehensive look at midcentury artistic innovations from the perspective of artist-run spaces. We’re big fans of archiving the oft-forgotten artist-run spaces of yesteryear, so this ambitious show is near and dear to our hearts. Many of the wildest advancements in art history happened in spite of established institutions, in lofts and cheap storefronts back when Downtown was in its affordable, seedy glory. Who wouldn’t kill to be a fly on some of those walls? With archival photographs alongside art from the era, Inventing Downtown can hopefully help us fantasize.

Artists: Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Alex Katz, Yayoi Kusama, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Mark di Suvero, Emilio Cruz, Lois Dodd, Rosalyn Drexler, Sally Hazelet Drummond, Jean Follett, Lester Johnson, Boris Lurie, Jan Müller, Aldo Tambellini

Tue

Cooler Gallery

22 Waverly Ave Brooklyn, NY 7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. Website

Kate Hush: Female Behaviour

Kate Hush’s neons are what I imagine strip club signs would look like if they were designed by Patrick Nagel. By that I mean they’re awesome. Here, though, she wants sexiness to communicate something quite sinister. She seems to invoke and reclaim the misogynistic archetype of the deceptive seductress:

“The men have suffered, and will suffer. The women are conniving and manipulative, naturally. Their tears are phony and their heels are high. I am bringing to light, literally, their wicked ways. They are fiery, guileful, calculating, crazy … or is it just that their brightness is harder to shield?”

Wed

David Nolan Gallery

527 West 29th Street New York, NY 10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.Website

Barry Le Va: Cleaved Wall

Barry Le Va, pioneer of Process Art, returns to David Nolan Gallery with a 1969 piece that made it to the Whitney one year later. “Cleaved Wall” was conceived of following a Midwestern road trip that involved a stop at a butcher supply shop. There, Le Va purchased meat cleavers, which he began using to hack patterns into the gallery wall. This is a very cool chance to see a piece from the Wild West days of conceptual art resurrected.

Galleria Ca' d'Oro New York

529 W. 20th St. New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.WebsiteWebsite

Tabula Rasa

Apparently there was an ancient Roman art trend of trompe l’oeil “Unswept Floor” mosaics. These depicted the remains of decadent feasts, as if party guests had discarded half-eaten rare delicacies on the floor. Leslie Lyons and J.B. Wilson draw inspiration from this art historical oddity, creating sublimated print tiles that both reference the “Unswept Floor” as well figurative tile works which “remove the trappings of mythologizing human behavior and return to a place of rational accounting and purification.”

I’m not sure what that means, but one of the tile floors depicts spent bullet casings and money. I can’t believe we haven’t seen this in a rapper’s foyer on MTV’s Cribs.

Thu

COMPANY

88 Eldridge Street New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Paul Kopkau: Palm Crest & Suites

Paul Kopkau’s dystopian wall works mash-up details from mass-produced interiors. These include luxury hotels with signifiers of domesticity to apartments that aspire to become more like luxury hotels for the Airbnb market. To add to the pseudo-home-non-place vibe, the whole installation will be carpeted. I’m curious about this show—if decor blandness has become the signifier of commodified space, how do we approach its representation as a decorative object?

Knockdown Center

52-19 Flushing Ave Queens, NY 7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.Website

Nasty Women

A weekend-long fundraiser exhibition for Planned Parenthood in Trump’s America, this show was open to artists who wished to donate artwork to be sold for $100 or less. It could be a good opportunity to snag something cool for a good cause. We can’t guarantee the quality of the work here, but this opening kicks off four days of programming that looks great—from dance parties to art installations. We’re especially looking forward to Friday night’s “Chasm,” curated by artist Julia Sinelnikova and featuring work from Alfredo Salazar-Caro, JJ Brine, and others. And Saturday, the organizers will host a sign-making workshop in anticipation of the Women’s March on Washington. Rad.

Fri

Alden Projects

34 Orchard Street New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Rejoice! Our Times Are Intolerable: Jenny Holzer Street Posters '77-'82

There’s perhaps no art-historical exhibition this week as timely as Jenny Holzer’s work from the twilight Carter era and advent of the awful Reagan administration. Inspired by anonymous posters she encountered in pre-gentrification Times Square, Holzer mashed-up conflicting statements, ideological truisms, and other blocks of arresting text for colorful posters. Many of these read so much like the contradictory manifestos we’re bombarded with in today’s politically uncertain media—almost eerily prescient.

Lehmann Maupin

201 Chrystie Street New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Kader Attia: Reason's Oxymorons

Kader Attia is one of my favorite living artists, largely because he’s unafraid to cast a critical eye across various cultural lines to search for humor and empathy in misunderstanding and absurdity in different societies’ hypocrisies. He usually accomplishes this task without an obnoxiously didactic tone and a light, highly-aestheticized touch.

So one line in this press release caught me off-guard:

“In Western society, there is an unspoken ideology of flawlessness where any physical injury or deformity is ‘fixed’ with plastic surgery or other extreme interventions; applied to emotional wounds, this approach can result in suppression. In non-Western cultures, there is often a celebration of flaws or deliberate and ritual acts of scarification and physical modification.”

That’s such a bizarrely specious, brash statement I don’t even know where to start—particularly coming from someone who attended art school in “The West” and must’ve seen more than his fair share of “acts of scarification and physical modification.” What about North Africa’s booming, unspoken industry of hymen “repair”?

Obligatory knee-jerk West-bashing aside, the show’s worth checking out. Attia’s installation evokes a sterile office or research space, wherein video interviews with African and European psychiatrists. philosophers, and other professionals in the industry of thought discuss a variety of topics. These include “Genocide,” “Totem and Fetish,” “Reason and Politics,” and “Trance.” My hope here is that these are presented more like individuals with agency dialoguing despite cultural differences and less like an ethnographic study. Attia’s usual nuance could be the antidote to the dominant narrative of reductive identity politics.

MAW

56 Henry Street SE 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Matthew Leifheit, Your Giorgio

We’re big fans of the work of Matthew Leifheit—a former AFC intern and photographer, writer and curator extraordinaire. His new show, “Your Giorgio”, includes 13 works inspired by the secret scrapbooks of George Platt Lynes. Expect to see a collaged book, a short film and original photographs—all poetic interpretations of the original documentation. Those seeking to get a flavor of the work need look no further than our own F.A.G. Bar presented at Miami last year. Leifheit presented a large 8 foot photograph drawn from Lynes archives. It was the center piece of our show and a draw to all who saw it.

Sat

Smack Mellon

92 Plymouth Street Brooklyn, NY 5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

ruby onyinyechi amanze: STAR FISH

One can get lost in the large, dreamy drawings of ruby onyinyechi amanze, despite generous amounts of negative space. Her series “aliens, hybrids and ghosts” features surreal chimeric figures floating through ambiguous spaces defined by photo transfer, calculated mark-making, and washy mixed-media. They feel introverted and contemplative but don’t lack a sense of humor.

Lichtundfire

175 Rivington Street New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.Website

Sportsvergnügen

Join curators D. Dominick Lombardi and Augustus Goertz for an exhibition walk-through and artist talk before this show’s opening reception—this show about SPORTS!

The two were encouraged to seek out artists making work about sports after a Google image search for “sports related fine art” brought up little in the way of contemporary art. That’s not to say the two aren’t aware of and interested in millennia worth of art historical precedent. This looks to be a really smart show about something a lot of the art world thinks is kinda dumb.

Artists: Gennadi Barbush, Ryan Cronin, Chris Dimino, Don Doe, Cary Leibowitz (Candyass), D.Dominick Lombardi, Ray Materson, Antony Petracca, Tyson Reeder, Karen Shaw, Lewis Smith and Robert Yoder

White Columns

320 W 13th Street New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Website

Looking Back / The 11th White Columns Annual

We know nothing about White Column’s 11th Annual other than the fact that it’s been curated by Anne Doran.

A lot of the names on this list, though, are enough for us to recommend it:

Bas Jan Ader, Hilton Als, Sara Cwynar, Raoul De Keyser, Sara Deraedt, Liz Deschenes, Thornton Dial, William Eggleston, Nicole Eisenman, John Ferris, Silvia Gruner, Marcia Hafif, Denzil Hurley, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Kinke Kooi, William Leavitt, Zoe Leonard, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Carol Rama, Jessi Reaves, Robert Bittenbender, Cameron Rowland, Fred Sandback

Sun

Anthology Film Archives

32 Second Avenue New York, NY 7:30 p.m.Website

Inventing Downtown: Artists Make Movies

The ambitious Inventing Downtown exhibition program includes this gem, a night of artist-produced films from the tumultuous 1960s Manhattan art scene. For most of these films, this is an all-too rare chance to see them on the big screen, so don’t pass-up the opportunity.

Red Grooms & Mimi Gross: FAT FEET (1965-66, 19 min, 16mm, b&w) Alfred Leslie: THE LAST CLEAN SHIRT (1964, 42 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.) Yoko Ono: ONE (1965, 5 min, 16mm-to-digital, b&w, silent) Carolee Schneemann: VIET FLAKES (1965, 7 min, 16mm-to-digital, b&w) THE MEDIUM IS THE MEDIUM (1969, 17 min, video)

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