#black sails details

[threadbareturnbacks]

Dooley's Screen Worn Stunt Double Wardrobe Set

[firelise]

See the reason Black Sails fucks so very hard is bc the writers know the end to which they are writing towards and they know how to write in beautiful circles within circles and close a motherfucking loop. I could stare at this renaissance painting of a show forever.

[patroclusdefencesquad]

it always blows my mind how quickly the events of black sails season one and two occur. like. john silver has tricked his way onto a pirate ship, gone on the run from said pirates, been caught, schemed his way out of the consequences, schemed his way out of More consequences, almost been hanged, almost been kicked off the crew again, schemed his way back in, made himself indispensable, betrayed them all again, decided Not to commit a totally different betrayal against them, lost his leg, and became so beloved they made him quartermaster. all in the space of like two weeks.

[cashmere-caveman]

one thing i am really noticing on this rewatch is how long it takes for silver to start looking like silver. seeing him in (especially in the early part of) s1 always feels so jarring to me idk why but with everyone else already having their Look down (character driven style pivots of flint and eleanor nonwithstanding) he still feels very Unformed.

idk if thats just me on my nth rewatch projecting my foregone conclusions and opinions abt him as a character on him but i do think even w the change he undergoes being a very gradual one (unlike the previously mentioned pivot of eleanor from Pirate Boss to Ladywife or flints buzzcut of grief and political radicalisation), there is a definitive period where he is not yet locked in, so to speak.

i think what gets me as 'not silver yet' is him being clean shaven and that he wears light colours but genuinely. thats a chameleon still deciding which colour to turn while it watches the room and once hes decided with whom to side he commits not only to a 'personality' but also to a wardrobe style which in his case is first unassuming dark clothes and growing his hair and beard and then slowly bit by bit hes adding details like necklaces and rings and starts wearing his hair differently etc until he ends in his Coat Era once he starts to assume real power as he begins the transformation from 'john silver' into 'long john silver'

[rapselsstuff]

Hey guys remember in Charlestown when flint tells billy to ready the guns and billy asks What are we aiming at? and flint says Whatever’s left, and then we cut to Charles Vane (the guy who thinks it’s gay to have a house) and he looks like he’s just peed his pants a little?

[alexwatchesshows]

My ADHD ass trying to do spot the difference as a kid

[sekkitsune]

so here i am (re-)watching Black Sails (let's talk about that some other time), and there's a bit where a priest is reciting psalm 23 at a funeral (warning, spoilers, there's a funeral in a 10-year-old TV show about pirates)

the words are a bit off, so being me, i dig up the text from the book of common prayer, 1662 edition (which would have still been current in the time of the show, aftermath of the war of the spanish succession). Some similarities, but not the text.

reader, they were using the text from the nineteen-seventy-eight new international version. that priest was a time traveller with no poetry in his soul, i tell you.

[jackannemax]

8 men | VI. & XXVI.

[nikinacky]

woe! flint sketch be upon ye!

[leztit]

maybe treasure island is in the middle of the bermuda triangle does that explain everything

[shezamaverick]

25 Years of Black Sails

Into and Out of the Sunset

By: Davey Havok

Not long before the final tour of the A Fire Inside EP, a mutual friend asked Mark what type of AFI record he planned on writing to follow our third full-length. His earnest reply: “Unlistenable. Something everyone will hate.” Though this was the type of chaos I would have certainly supported, he never said this to me. He’d stopped speaking to me sometime in the fall of ‘98. Jade took his place shortly thereafter.

The first time I wrote with Jade was in my room beneath the stairs at the defunct frat house that AFI lived in at the time.* That evening in 1998, promptly at our scheduled hour, a knock came upon my thick wooden door. I opened it with an anticipatory smile and nod. “What’s up man?” Jade walked into the shadows of my ill-lit room carrying his acoustic guitar. My mattress and boxspring, set under the flight of stairs leading to the third floor, was the only place to sit. Our new guitarist sat on its edge. I sat on the floor with my microcassette recorder, facing him. The room was scented of cheap vanilla candles. Peter Murphy stared at me from a poster behind our new guitarist. I was excited. Jade was then and is now one of the greatest songwriters I’ve known. My band of seven years was about to begin its metamorphosis. “So, I was thinking,” he offered. “I miss the melodic stuff in AFI. How about we add some of that back in? Nothing crazy, just a bit.” As genuinely ready as I’d have been for Mark’s repellant HXC vision to take AFI down a path that forked toward cacophonous supernova (or 2024 Taco Bell commercials?) I felt Jade’s as well. Limiting myself to screaming limited my abilities of emoting and evocation as well. It was becoming unfulfilling and suffocating.

Jade picked up his acoustic, strummed some chords, and in falsetto sang, “We all begin to burn…” He’d come prepared with these parts and I was immediately hooked. Working from the scratch lyric intended to act as a gang callout, I expounded with conceptual responses and so came the rest of Malleus Maleficarum. I believe some weathered copy of the tome itself had been lying about my room—if not, some witchy text that referenced it. Malleus was the first song we’d ever written together. I can recall our writing of Clove Smoke Catharsis and God Called in Sick Today in that tiny dark room as well. With those tracks, I felt certain our next record was going to be well beyond anything I’d ever thought I would have been capable of being a part of. I was utterly inspired. In our latest writing sessions together, 25 years later, I’ve felt beyond this. What a luxury.

During that late '90s East Bay winter Jade, Hunter, Adam and I put BSITS together in our tiny Oakland practice pad, off 20th, then tracked it with Andy at the Art Of Ears in Hayward. I shredded my voice during my allotted two days of time, screaming out 15 tracks that defiantly sat steadfast at the top of my range. Oh, but to have my 23-year-old healing powers back.

Weeks later, I pulled the advanced master from the mail and squirreled to my parking space by the dumpsters behind the frat house. Sat in the faded burgundy upholstery of my driver seat, I slid the cassette into my ’83 Accord’s silver player and depressed the play button. Click. Adam’s ominous preface to Strength Through Wounding began. The gang of Skinhead Rob, Fritch, and our buddy Dan followed the warlike beat. Then came the impure chant, ominously brooding through my crackling speakers with all the blasphemous piety I’d hoped. I was so happy with what we’d made.

When Dexter Holland, singer of The Offspring and owner of the label we were on at the time, first heard Black Sails in the Sunset he told our A&R guy, “I don’t get it.” Commercially, this wasn’t a great sign. Artistically, it was affirming.

Be they pretty fly, or even barely fly, BSITS did alienate a lot of fans (as had Shut Your Mouth and every record thereafter), but with it we gained more fans who were ready to join us on the ever jagging sonic journey we’d begun. My look at the time was arguably even more confronting than the relatively unorthodox sounds of Black Sails. The rigid regulations of the extremely masculine ’90s hardcore scene didn’t make much room for a singer in whiteface, black lipstick, fishnet, and PVC. Philosophically this remains unacceptable to me. Our fierce and fabulous ancestors gave us our glitter. I’ll leave you with one of the more delightful heckle memories from the unparalleled Life on the Ropes Tour with Sick of It All, Hot Water Music and Indecision:

INTERIOR: a compact second story theatre, packed with hundreds of hardcore kids. AFI is onstage somewhere in the midwest. Clouds of fog spill over the carmine valance as Jade begins the opening riff to their final song. God Called in Sick Today whispers to life as your author crouches in the crawling billows, his vinyl pants reflecting red light into the baffled eyes of dreadlocked white boys in capacious corduroy JNCOs and commodious VOD tees. They impatiently await the NYC legends, SOIA.

A heckle bursts through the gentle riff. “Let’s go, Trent Reznor!”

Your author rolls his heavily shadowed, lined, and mascaraed eyes. How elementary, he thinks. The opening riff continues.

“Come on, Peter Murphy!”

Begrudgingly impressed by the boor’s finer reference, your author’s plucked brows slightly raise with imperceptible surprise. He gives the heckler no acknowledgment, remaining in the song. The opening line of the verse is seconds away when the boy barks,

“Ok, Count Chocula!”

Grinning, your author chuckles for the first and last time ever before singing, “Let’s admire the pattern forming…”

25 years later, the pattern continues to shift.

[noknowshame]

an epiphany: Silver does not, and cannot, have a backstory, simply because he is the archetypal pirate. and pirates do not have histories.

I do a lot of research on pirate history in my free time, and one thing that has always really struck me is just how little we have to go off of. We do have primary source records of their exploits - primarily reports from the crews of ships they attacked, and if they were unlucky enough, transcripts from their trials and executions , but as soon as you ask "well, who were they before they were pirates?", almost always, there is simply nothing to draw up, even for the most famous of figures. Calico Jack Rackham appears on the scene in 1718, already Charles Vane's quartermaster, with nothing to say of where he came from. Samuel Bellamy sailed from Cape Cod to raid the treasure-wreck of the Urca d'Lima, but his life in Massachusetts is marred in speculation. Blackbeard made landfall in Nassau soon after the War of Spanish Succession, but so many pirates used pseudonyms that we cannot even be sure that his real name was Edward Teach. All we can say is maybe, maybe, maybe.

so of course Silver, being the icon that we can trace nearly all of our modern conceptions of piracy to, would have no past. the real ones didn't either. As far as written history is concerned, the sea conjured them up. Even if their stories were not unremarkable, they were simply... without relevance.

[patroclusdefencesquad]

every time i read nightrunner i'm just like god this would make such a good tv show

[donnapalude]

also speaking of silver's prior experiences. i am ambivalent about silver previous sex worker theory because ofc most clients of sex workers are male and this brings me back full circle to -> he never made a pass at flint. i think if he was used to compartmentalizing sex with men from his sexuality to perform sex work, again, he would have clocked flint's desire the first time he looked like he wanted to spank him and he would have exploited it to stay alive. but i do agree there's something there wrt kinship with max and general tendency to work his way out of things by seducing (even if not really in a sexual way, strictly speaking) people to like him.

[cashmere-caveman]

sometimes someone will reblog my "silver lied in the finale no idea abt what tho" post and their tags all full of #flinthamilton angst and i just really am forcefully reminded that even though we all watched the same show . we did not in fact watch the same show. like yes their affair is basically what set the whole plot in motion and i really love thomas as a plot device but i do have to confess that idc abt thomas as a person at all lmfao

[purgaytorysupremacy]

can someone who’s watched Black Sails spoil the Ned Low storyline for me? I’m not sure how much longer I can watch with him not knowing what happens with him. (I’m on S2E2, I think.) It’s just a lot a lot, even on a show about 18th century pirates lol