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peachyteabuck · 5 years

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eye on the prize

summary: commission for astrid, who asked for chris evans x reader interview fluff.

pairing: chris evans x reader

words: 3,006

trigger warnings: RPF, slow burn, heavy flirtation, idiots in love, nondescript mentions of misogyny in the media as a business, a likely poorly reconstructed timeline (time fake and reality is a construct!)

ask box / masterlist / commission info / ko-fi

The hotel bed is large, big enough for four of you. The blankets are thick and the soft, the pillows a perfect balance of structured but plush. Sunbeams stream onto the mused sheets, warming your face. It’s nice, but only as nice as the calm before a major tropical storm can be. As your phone alarm blares next to you, you start to wonder if being caught in a category five hurricane would be better than press junkets.

A whole day talking to people about a movie you made months ago that you know jack shit about. Sometimes you have nightmares about giving a book report on a novel you’ve never even opened (you’re how old? And high school is still haunting you? Jesus, you need to go back to therapy) that cause you to break out in a cold sweat and kick all the covers from your bed and buy a bunch of stuff online to distract yourself from your racing heart and shaking hands.

Still, those are never as bad as interviewers asking about character arcs and plotlines and your relationship with actors you’ve barely (if ever) met and whatever else a normal interviewer would ask a normal interviewee when all you know is your character, the fact that she does shit with magic, and she’s Dr. Strange’s daughter. Anything other than that is anyone’s guess.

Your stylist and makeup artists are the ones to eventually drag you out of bed and plop you into hair and makeup after squeezing you into an incredibly tight pair of jeans and a non-controversial sweater. The forty-five minutes are a complete blur, but then again, nothing feels real until Sebastian hands you a large coffee in a travel cup that bares no logo or other kind of copywritten signifier – your knight in shining…cardboard? What are travel coffee cups even made of? Paper? Can paper even “shine?”

You’re nearly purring when the taste of caramel macchiato burns your tongue. “Ah. Thanks, Seb. I appreciate it.”

Sebastian shrugs, sipping at his own drink masquerading as generic brand. “No problem. I didn’t want you to bite an interviewer’s head off this morning. Or worse, mine.”

You play-hit him in the face and laugh with him, making small talk and trying to kill the time before the mind-numbingly long day really begins. You’re halfway through a rant about the woes of make up artists trying to put you in a full face of makeup to a man who barely has to put on concealer, the fucking asshat, when Chris makes an appearance.

“Hey, guys,” he’s is also drinking coffee from the unmarked travel cups. He looks you up and down before taking another sip. “You look really nice today.”

You blush, smoothing out your sweater – one of the color-blocked ones that sits at the intersection of casual, feminine, and not-intimidating. “Thanks, you too.”

Sebastian’s about to say something snarky when someone wearing a headset calls upon the three of you.

“Let’s get going, people!” she calls, ushering you into three barely-comfortable seats. You’re between Chris and Sebastian, the sheer mass of them making you feel approximately three feet tall. It doesn’t take much to forget how large they both are – even if Sebastian doesn’t weight two hundred pounds anymore and Chris was able to tone down his exercise regime since finishing Infinity War, you still feel like you’re sitting at the big-kid table for the first time.

The first interviewer is from some YouTube channel you only know because your fourteen-year-old niece gushes about them every family dinner. The woman who sits in front of you is young, cute. Dresses trendy, dark eye makeup and red lips.

She’s nice, too, along with being knowledgeable about the projects of each of you. She banters with Sebastian about his seven million movies before turning to you.

The interviewer turns to you. “And you! You’re nominated for some pretty major awards!”

You smile wide, unable to help yourself. “Yeah, best actress and best original score.”

“That’s so cool,” Chris mumbles. You blush and pretend not to hear him as you speak again.

“It’s just super crazy,” you tell the interviewer. “Not even gonna lie. When I was younger, I would look at stars who like, cried when they found out they were nominated. Not even winning, just their name shows up on the ballot. But now I’m like, it’s me, two-time Grammy nominee! I was nominated for a Grammy, twice!”

Sebastian chimes in, laughing. “When we were at bunch together, I got there early and the caterer showed up and they were like, we’re here for the two-time Grammy nominee?”

“You had a brunch?” The interviewer asks.

You nod. “Yeah, I bunch of the Avengers cast and the cast from my last movie were in my hometown, which is super rare, so I hosted this giant brunch-”

“As one does,” Sebastian chimes in with a crooked smile.

You nearly hit him. “Yes! As I do! I wanted to see all my friends, whom I love, so I host a brunch. Sue me! Anyway…I hosted this brunch and invited a bunch of people over. Just a bunch of my favorite food from my favorite restaurants. Everyone I’d wanted to see for such a long time was there. It was amazing.”

The interviewer paints a faux frown across her face, looking at the man on your right. “Chris, you look very sad.”

“I didn’t get invited to the brunch,” Chris frowns. Unlike the woman in front of you, he looks genuinely sad. A twinge of pain bounces in your ribcage, and you rub his cardigan-clad back

“You were out doing Broadway shit!” you laugh. “You were halfway across the country!”

Chris continues to frown, staring at the printed-out pictures from the social medias of various guests. A few are from yours – you in a flowy sundress with your head thrown back laughing, a shot of you and a few of your friends from college drinking alcohol in the bright mid-afternoon sun. One you recognize from Sebastian’s Instagram, another from Hemsworth’s. A few from Twitter of a few of your non-movie-star friends. You look so happy in all of them, so beautiful in each shot. “I still wanted to be invited.”

You just roll your eyes. “Okay, call me when you’re in my region of the country and I’ll host a brunch,” You touch your forefinger to his nose. Chris blushes, profusely, in his cheeks and his ears. “just for you and me.”

You don’t hear much after that, too focused on Chris’ eyes meeting yours and his small smile. You’re taken aback by how sweet, tender he looks, and before you know it the interviewer is saying goodbye and the next one is taking her place.

It’s a man this time, a little older than the last one with artsy facial hair and a button hip. He mostly pays attention to the two men and soon your brain goes on battery-saver and you’re lost in your own thoughts.

Are hipsters still a thing? Is that what this guy is trying to be? Do hipsters even like Marvel? Is that too “mainstream for them?”

Eventually he asks a question about you, your recent entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, your music, your composing. You’d be happy to talk about your passions, of course you are, but the first genuine question of the interview is positing towards…not you. You’re about to tune everything out again, but then Chris speaks and you snap back to attention.

“It’s always interesting to meet people who bring something new to the art form, ya know? A huge part of acting is learning and evolving and all that, especially from other actors,” Chris avoids your gaze, and the gaze of everyone else, as he speaks. “If you stop learning, if you stop growing, what’s the point? Why would I do this job if I didn’t think it could change me for the better?”

There’s a moment of thick silence, the heavy weight of Chris’ introspective answer settling over the people in the room. It’s one of the things you lo-

It’s one of the things you enjoy most about Chris, how dedicated he is to acting as more than a job. It’s amazing, truly, how much he adores what he does. You could spend the rest of time with him, a plate of cheese, and a bottle of wine; listening to him talk about how he thinks of acting as an art, how that art can impact people and society, how actors have a responsibility to that art (that is, of course, after you mock him endlessly for Not Another Teen Movie and Fantastic Four).

You feel like a high schooler again, doodling your first and his last name in hearts in your math notebook with your favorite pink glitter pen. You’re an adult, why are you blushing red as a raspberry every time he says something smarter than a fast food order?!

The rest of the day goes down in a blur, the only time you start to care again when someone on the production staff calls for dinner (yeah, no lunch on press junket day. You can ask for a light snack, but you learned the hard way a full meal is “bad for your figure” and “makes you likely to burp on camera” and a bunch of other stuff you care very little about).

All three of you groan in happiness when you enter the room designated as craft, the thick smell of barbeque hitting you like a baseball bat. But a good baseball bat, though, like…one you ask to be hit with. Honestly, you have no idea what you’re talking about because you’re so hungry.

When you finally manage to scavenge food, Sebastian’s right behind you as you stare at a very delicious looking tray of pulled pork. Your plate is already full, but what if they take the food away? And then what if you get hungry later?

“You know he’s flirting with you, right?” he whispers as you watch the man in question scroll through Twitter on his phone. Chris is eating about the same thing you are, plus celery. You almost make a quip about it being “nature’s floss,” but then you realize that would be dumb because Sebastian definitely wouldn’t find it as funny as Chris would.

You shrug, picking up a French fry from your plate. “Yeah, but you were, too.”

He scoffs into his second Americano of the morning. “Nah. Not like that. He likes you! He like likes you!”

“He does not-“

“And you like-like him!” He boops you on the nose and pinches your cheek like some sort of grandmother who hadn’t seen her fifteen-year-old son since he was five. “My little baby has a cruuuush!” he coos while making small kissy noises.

You’re about to bite back about how you’re not that much younger than him, but then the sound guy on the other side of the meat tray glares at the both of you. Looks like, while Chris couldn’t hear your bickering from the across the room, this dude definitely could – and he’s not very happy about it.

“Sorry,” you both mumble, shrinking away from the persecuting techie and his judgmental eyes.

Sebastian only talks again when you find an unpopulated corner, devoid of prying eyes and anyone who could be annoyed with the two of you gossiping like high schoolers.

“You know I’m not wrong, right?” he says around a bite of crisp apple. What is up with this guy and fruit? Sure, he’s on a restrictive diet for a role to keep him from bulking up (something at the intersect of keto and vegetarian but able to eat lean meats) but he’s can’t eat like, the vegan stuff? Why must he always eat like rabbit in your presence? “Have you not seen what he says on Twitter?”

You scoff. “No, because I don’t have a Twitter. And neither do you!” You narrow your eyes accusingly. “How do you know what he posts?” Sebastian rolls his eyes. “I see screenshots on Instagram, first of all. Second, he could be complimenting your music on the inside of a cave. It’s about the principle.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” you hiss. “Also, I’m done arguing with you about this. Let me find a cheeseburger and eat in peace. Is that too much a woman to ask, Sebastian!?”

He just laughs you off and lets you eat in peace, eventually getting his own food. Though, you suppose the meal was specially timed, because then Chris Evans is sitting next to you.

He’s about to say something, too, and you’re about to listen, but then you get called for an individual interview for a women’s health magazine and you have to leave him and you plate of food and fuck…you hate this job. A lot.

The interview is boring, once again, and the next time you have another coherent thought you’re taking the elevator back up to your hotel room and waving off your manager, who is telling you to be downstairs by seven tomorrow to catch your flight back home.

You’re just kicking off your heels when you hear a faint knock at the door. When you look through the peephole, you see a very sad-looking Christopher Evans. With his small frown and hunched shoulders, he looks like a kicked puppy; and even though all you want to do is take your bra off, you let him in.

He’s quiet for a moment before speaking as if he was a child preparing to be scolded.

“I lost my hotel key. And my backup got demagnetized.”

You bite back a laugh, trying to seem sympathetic. “Do you want to chill in here until security brings you another one?”

Chris nods solemnly as he steps through the threshold. “Thanks.”

Neither of you speak for a while, instead Chris looks around your quite messy (or “homey,” as you call it when you FaceTime your best friend and she scoffs at how easy you can make a room look like a hurricane tore through it) room and you…find an outfit for tomorrow?

You’re the first one to speak, only breaking the quiet after changing into fuzzy socks and sneakily taking off your lacey bra (and tucking it under the covers of the bed for you put away later).

“Well, that was excruciating,” you mumble. All you want to do is change into your biggest, most comfortable hoodie and your cotton panties and order room service and ignore humanity until you leave for a flight the next morning, but a man you’ve had a crush on since he appeared as Johnny Storm is right in front of you and after that talk with Sebastian your world is kind of shaken to its core and should you make a move? Is he the kind of guy to not like that? Would you want to be with a guy that doesn’t like that? What if he-

“Always are, I guess.” Chris interrupts your train of thought, saving it from going off the rails. When you at him he looks just as, if not more than, exhausted than you are. “That’s one of the things that you forget, I think. How hard it is to talk about these movies.”

You snort. Out of the corner of your eye, you can see Chris smile a little wider as you laugh. “Yeah. Other movies I can talk about like, characters and plots and shit. With these I live in constant fear I’m gonna pull a fucking Ruffalo and get my ass fired from the best paying gig I’ve ever had.”

Chris laughs with you, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Word.”

An awkward silence fills the room and you find something, anything to do to avoid his heavy gaze under those thick eyelashes and his thick beard that you just want to run your fingers through or his even softer hair that you want to mess up while you-

“Do you want to get dinner together sometime?” you blurt. You’re ready to take back the words as soon as you say them, wanting to backtrack or say “just friends” or “ha-ha, just kidding!” or something else that absolves you of non-platonic commitment.

By a long stretch of luck that you can’t even begin to thanks a long number of deities for, Chris doesn’t laugh at you or turn you down or even walk out of the room. He meets your gaze with excitement in his eyes and a smile wider than your home state. “I’d love to,” is all he says. It’s all either of you get to say before his phone rings loudly, and the name of the head of security flashes on his screen. He sighs loudly, apologizing as he takes it. Somehow, you feel more awkward as he turns away and answers the call. You fidget with your hands, with a loose thread on the sweater you’ve come to hate more than anything else in the world, with your phone. Nothing makes it easier to face Chris again once he hangs up.

“That was…,” he laughs lightly. Not laughing at you, maybe at life or how weird his life is, but never at you. “You know. They fixed my key and want to give it to me in person.”

You swallow and nod. “Yeah, understandable. I’ll, uh,” you clear your throat. “I’ll see you…”

Chris finishes for you. “How about we find a good restaurant near here after I’m confirmed to actually be me by the private security detail our employers hired to make sure no one kills us? We can have that second dinner I’ve heard you always eat late at night.”

Holy shit…he remembered that time you vaguely mentioned how much you enjoy staying up late and eating lots of food. It makes you blush as you respond.

“Yeah that sounds,” you sigh happily, smile just as big as his is. “That sounds great.”

#chris evans x reader #lukis does commissions #lukis writes stuff #chris evans imagine

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yourdailykitsch · 6 years

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Hi. It really sucks that Taylor didn't get nominated for his remarkable, multilayered performance as David Koresh. And the nomination for John Leguizamo, although well deserved, seems more perfunctory than anything. His nomination is also the only one Waco has received. Was this too contentious an issue for the Emmy award panel to be bothered with? Are they such moral cowards that they prioritise pleasing the masses rather than giving proper recognition to a very important series?

It’s actually not a panel. It’s Emmy voters in general so it’s not like they sit down around a round table and talk it out and come to a consensus. It’s members of the academy who are generally peers to actors, other performers, makeup and hairstylists, camera people, etc. They are overwhelmed with DVD screeners of hundreds and hundreds of shows with various marketing gimmicks. Netflix sent out a size 11 pair of black pumps to every Emmy voter (if you’ve seen the show you’d understand) to urge them to consider Mindhunter. It’s all about getting the voters attention.

Emmy voters have a reputation of being pretty loyal to past nominees and winners, that’s why you’ll see repeat winners, repeat nominations. John Leguizamo is a former winner and nominee.

Waco did receive two other nominations in sound editing and mixing. So three nominations total.

I’ve cautioned previously that it was going to be an uphill battle for Taylor. Waco was on a new network, a network that while has strong ratings still is not recognized as a prestige TV viewing experience…yet. Also, the reviews for Waco were not overwhelmingly positive. They were for Taylor in general, but not the show. So those that don’t think highly of the show may not even give a performance in the show a shot for a nomination because they don’t believe the show should be nominated.

It’s also a category that is very very broad, so you have someone like Jesse Plemmons who did one episode of a TV show that was nominated or John Legend who did a TV special who was nominated v. someone like Taylor who did six hours of lead performance.

Try not to think too much about the lack of awards for the show. It’s incredibly political, it’s about which network pushes their shows the hardest (not that impressed with Paramount on this front), and all about name recognition. In the end it’s still a huge positive for Taylor. He was definitely considered for the Emmy nomination, he gave a great performance that showed he could carry a TV show. His reviews were great.

#ask me anything #Ask Me #taylor kitsch #Emmys #waco

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youreinreality · 7 years

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FLIGHT 42

AU where Harry’s received a Grammy nomination

part 3 of the 2018 AWARD SEASON catch up on the 2018 AWARD SEASON HERE

a/n: Thank you for everyone who has been patiently waiting for this chapter to arrive. This is formatted a little differently than the other two chapters. Since this was an AU, I also had to bring in a familiar face or two just for fun. PLEASE SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS. I’D LOVE TO HEAR THEM.

January 27, 2018. 12:42pm. California. I’m on my couch watching the newest season of The Crown on Netflix when I see my phone light up beside me. Even though it’s resting upside down on the coffee table, I can easily recognize some of the words. The blue little bird on the side alerts me that it’s a Twitter notification, and right next to it, in bold, is Harry’s Twitter username. I stare at in disbelief for a while because I’m not expecting to hear from him so soon. It’s been less than a week since the SAGs, and the Oscars are next week. His actual message is unclear to read from my position, so I reach for the phone and flip it right-side up.

Direct Message from @Harry_Styles: Hello. Ed says he wants to meet you. Just warning you now so you don’t pass out when he says hi tomorrow. See you there. xx H

I reread the message a couple times as my brain tries to race back in time to our interaction at the SAGs. I don’t remember making plans to hang out in-between the award shows, let alone a hang out that involves Ed Sheeran. I take a moment and gush at his thoughtful effort to warn me ahead of time, but my mind continues to flashback through our conversations, and nothing about making plans during the week comes up. I reply anyway, in hopes that I can try to discreetly gather information from him without making it seem like I had forgotten our prior arrangement.

Direct Message to @Harry_Styles: Hi there! Thanks for the warning. Remind me when and where again.

I play the cards right because judging from his quick response, he doesn’t seem to realize that I’m clueless about the whole situation. I don’t even get a chance to resume The Crown before my phone buzzes again.

Direct Message from @Harry_Styles: During commercials probably. We’re sat in the front row. They don’t want him walking too far to get those Grammys.

My eyes stay locked on one word.

Grammys.

He’s talking about the 58th Grammy Awards, which is happening in New York City, tomorrow night. I instantly remember him saying, “See you at the next one,” at the SAGs. I also remember how quickly I promised, “I’ll be there.” Little did any of us know we were both talking about two different events. Since I’m the only one that has realized our miscommunication so far, I respond to his message quickly, not wanting to waste another second.

Direct Message to @Harry_Styles: SOS. Currently still in LA in my pajamas with NO plans at all to go to NYC. SOS.

I know that Harry understands the messy situation we’re in because he doesn’t reply instantly. My phone buzzes after ten minutes. Harry’s sent his number. Without a second thought, I tap on the chain of numbers and press my phone to my ear. It rings one and a half times before I’m greeted by the deep and smooth voice I’ve become so well acquainted with.

“Cori, I’m an idiot.” He sounds tense and frustrated.

My instant reaction is to laugh because this is one of the most ridiculous situations I’ve ever been in. “We’re both idiots actually.”

My light-hearted reaction seems to ease him. “No, I’m the idiot,” he says it again. “For thinking that Lady Bird was nominated for a Grammy.” There’s a pause. “Actually, you know what? This is all your fault. I asked you if you’ll be at the next one and you said yes!”

“Um, I thought you were talking about the Oscars!” I raise my voice as I try to defend myself, but even then my tone is still playful

“You got my hopes up, Corinna Duval.” Even though he is on the other side of the country, I can clearly visualize the cheeky little smile on his face.

“No, don’t say that.” I refuse to allow him to make me feel guilty for a situation that was both of our faults. “You didn’t say you were talking about the Grammys!”

He laughs again. “You didn’t say you were talking about the Oscars!” he says, mocking my tone.

It’s weird only being able to hear him. I’ve gotten used to the luxury of having all our interactions be face to face with each other. I was used to seeing the crinkles around his eyes and the dimples form near his mouth when he’s happy. From where I am now, I can only imagine that that’s what he looks like while I’m talking to him.

“I feel awful though,” I tell him. “I promised that we’d go through this whole award season together.”

He lets out a very dramatic sigh, but I welcome it anyway because it confirms that he’s still trying to make my conscience feel guilty. “Yeah, I was kind of looking forward to it, you know? To see you. To introduce you to my friends. To hang out again.”

My mind lingers on three words. To see you. I don’t let it linger for too long just because his tone suggested he was just saying it to spite me. I decide to continue on as if it didn’t affect me. “Wow, you really know how to make a girl feel better, don’t you?”

“I know.” I can picture the smug look on his face for being able to accomplish his mission.

“I really hope you trip or something when you win your Grammy. You’d deserve it with all the guilt you’re trying to make me feel.”

“If I win,” he corrects me. That’s when I start to recognize the nerves he must be feeling. The confident and playful tone of his voice is replaced with a shaky tremble. “There are some pretty big names next to mine in this category.”

“You’ll be okay, H.” Again, the letter rolls off my tongue so easily that I wouldn’t even remember myself saying it. The only reason why I do is that he makes a comment about it.

“I like when you call me that,” he says softly. “It sounds really nice when you say it.”

For the first time in this conversation, I’m actually glad that he’s not physically here with me. If he saw my rosy cheeks right now it would just give him another reason to pat himself on the back. Again, he’s left me at a loss for words.

“It’s just a letter.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know,” he mumbles. “There’s something about –”

To my disappointment, his thoughts are left unfinished. I hear a rumble of voices from his side of the line. I take it as a sign that our conversation is about to end. He confirms my thoughts when he says, “Hey, Cori. I’m needed for a fitting. Do you mind-“

I cut him off. “Of course. Go ahead. I’ll see you next week!”

“At the Oscars, right?”

“That’s the one.”

“Alright, I can’t wait. See you then.”

January 28, 2018. 6:23am. California. I’m still on the couch. This time, the television’s off. My attention’s on my laptop screen, which is currently on a website that is showing me various round-trip flights from LA to New York City. My phone’s resting on the coffee table, with Saoirse on the other line. I’ve been in this position since 4:43 in the morning when I finally realized that I wasn’t going to get any sort of sleep because my mind and heart were having an internal battle as to whether or not I should go to New York and see Harry. There are only two factors that are stopping me from going.

One: I have a work commitment tomorrow morning, here in LA. Because of the massive success of Lady Bird during award season, we’re required to do more press than ever. Tomorrow, I have several interviews lined up. Two: It seems too romantic of a gesture to make. Flying out and surprising one another seems like something a couple would do for each other, and that’s something that Harry and I definitely aren’t.

I’ve been expressing my thoughts about the situation with Saoirse since I woke up. Her willingness to talk to me before the sun’s even decided to rise further proves how amazing of a person she is.

“Okay, your first reason is dumb,” she tells me. “You’ll just drink a lot of coffee and you’ll be fine. Problem solved.”

“I don’t like coffee.”

She completely ignores my statement and continues, “As for your second reason, yeah, it’s a romantic gesture, Cori. But who cares? If he questions you about it, deny it like he did.”

“Like he did?”

“The hand warmer thing?” she reminds me. “You make a comment about his cold hands the first time that you see him, and then the next time you see him he shows up with hand warmers.”

“No, that wasn’t romantic. He did that for himself.”

She lets out an unpleasant sound, just to exaggerate how annoyed she is. “Okay, Cori. This is getting a little ridiculous. You’re overthinking it way too much. You want to go see him? Okay, go see him. Do it. Just don’t think about it. Worry about it being a “romantic gesture” later when you actually have the flight booked.”

“I-”

“You really think Harry’s going to think about how romantic it is that you bought an airplane ticket for him when he sees you? Probably not. He’s going to just be excited that you’re there. He’s going to want to show you the Grammy that he’d just won. He’s going to poke your cheeks or whatever it is that you guys do. He’s going to be happy. So you should just be happy too. Worry about everything else later. Just live in the moment and do what you want to do.”

There’s silence from both of us.

“Are you still alive, over there?”

“I booked it,” I tell her. Halfway through her rant, I finally chose a flight. It was the only decent option left. I’d land in New York around the same time that the Grammys would end. Then, I have five hours to hang around before I’m off to a returning flight back to LA. When I tell Saoirse the flight details, she doesn’t hide her unimpressed feelings.

“So you’re only going to be in New York for five hours? You’ll be spending more time on a plane than with Harry.”

“That was the only flight that would get me here in time for work tomorrow. There’s no other option.”

Saoirse groans. “I’ll fix this. Go figure out what you’re going to wear. I’ll text you later.”

January 28, 2018. 11:36pm. New York. The butterflies in my stomach appear as soon as the plane lands in New York City. For a while, I forget about them as I try to gather my surroundings at JFK airport. As soon as I take my phone off airplane mode, I’m greeted with a chain of texts from Saoirse. The first one is just an address. The second one tells me that Ed knows I’m here. The third one says that Ed’s going to be waiting for me at this address and that he’ll take me to Harry. The fourth one says that Ed’s invited me to tag along on their flight back to LA, which is leaving just one hour later than my original returning flight.

The fourth text is the one that I stare at the longest. The fourth text is the reason why I decide to call Saoirse while I’m in a taxi, heading to the address she sent. She answers quickly, almost as if she’s expecting my call.

“Cori, don’t yell at me,” she says.

“YOU ASKED ED SHEERAN IF I CAN JOIN HIS PRIVATE FLIGHT BACK TO LOS ANGELES?”

The taxi driver gives me a weird stare through the rearview mirror, but I’m too busy panicking to acknowledge him.

“Fuck Cori. That’s my left ear you’re damaging.” There’s a rumble in the speaker, so I assume she’s switched from her left ear to her right ear. “Okay,” she continues, “Ed offered. He asked how and when you were getting back home, and I told him. Then he said you might as well tag along with them because they’re going back to LA tonight too.”

“Okay, I’m just going to politely decline then.”

“Cori-”

I interrupt her just so I can avoid being persuaded into accepting Ed’s offer. “Thank you for being my fairy godmother tonight, Saoirse. I really do appreciate it. I love you. I’ll call you later.” I end the call because the butterflies in my stomach seem to make for better company than Saoirse at the moment.

After about thirty minutes, the taxi finally pulls up to the destination. From the window, I can see that we’re on an isolated street. There’s no one around. If it wasn’t for the blinking neon sign that said HIGH DIVE, I would have assumed Saoirse had sent the wrong address. As I’m thanking the taxi driver and passing him the cash I owe for his service, the passenger door opens.

“Hello, Cori Duval!” Ed Sheeran is standing on the curb. His iconic ginger hair is a shaggy mess. He’s wearing a white button-up with a loosely fit tie, and black pants. He’s completely barefoot, and he’s sipping on a bottle of beer.

I express my thanks to the taxi driver one last time before getting out of the taxi. As soon as I’m out, I brush my hands through the fabric of my navy blue dress, trying to get the creases off.

“Must not have been a comfortable flight in that outfit, I assume?”

I shrug. “It wasn’t as bad as you think actually.” I reach my hand out to him. “It’s nice to meet you, Ed. I’m a very big fan.”

He slaps my hand away, and before I know it, he wraps his arms around me. “Harry’s going to flip his shit when he sees you,” he tells me when he pulls away. “Am I really supposed to believe that you did all this just so you wouldn’t break a promise?”

“Promises are very important to me, Ed.”

“I don’t know. It seems like quite a romantic gesture to me.” The way he emphasizes ‘romantic gesture’ makes me think that Saoirse hasn’t resisted telling him my dilemma. When he winks at me, that just further confirms it. “It’s kind of adorable,” he adds. He nods his head towards the bar and starts walking.

“What is this place?” I ask, stumbling behind him. Now that I’m closer to the building, the small details like the tinted windows and brick walls that make up the exterior of the building caught my eye.

“It’s one of the best dive bars in the city,” Ed says, opening his arms up as if it was possible to give this building a hug. “It’s New York City’s hidden gem. Come on in.”

The interior of the building is the complete opposite of its exterior. It’s alive. The first thing I notice when I walk in is the size of the bar. It sits on the far left side of the wall, and it extends all the way from the door to the other end of the building. The music that’s playing is so excruciatingly loud that the sound of the bass makes it seem like the floor’s vibrating. There are people everywhere. The lights are pretty dim so it’s hard to recognize any famous faces, but everyone is dressed so nicely that it would have been easy to assume everyone has at least a million dollars in their bank account.

“I’ll take you to Harry. Follow me,” Ed says.

So I do.

Ed wedges himself in between people so easily, and I struggle to keep up with the pace that he’s going. As we’re weaving through, I notice that people are smiling at Ed as he passes by. If they can reach him, they give him a pat on the shoulder, and he turns back and smiles at them, promising that he’ll come back later. It isn’t until I hear someone yell, “CONGRATULATIONS,” that I understand what’s going on.

I hadn’t been able to catch up on who won big at the Grammys, or if Harry was one of them. From the way that people are reacting towards him, it’s safe to say that Ed picked up an award tonight.

“Wait up, Ed.” I tug on his arm to get him to stop walking.

“Is something wrong?” There’s a deep look of worry sketched on his face.

I hug him. “I didn’t get to congratulate you!”

Ed pulls away, and I’m happy to see that his worried look has disappeared. “You don’t even know what you’re congratulating me for.”

“It’s not that hard to guess,” I tell him. “Congratulations. I’m very happy for you.”

“Thank you, Cori.” I can see that he is genuinely appreciative, but he quickly turns and continues to walk. He finally stops when we’ve arrived at a hallway. On the opposite end that we’re standing on is a spiral staircase.

“He’s up there. Good luck, Cori.” He gives me an encouraging pat on the back before he disappears.

The top of the staircase takes me to the rooftop of the building. The first thing I notice is the small little table that’s tucked away in the corner. I notice it first because of the one thing that’s resting on top of it: A Grammy so golden, that even in the darkest hour of the night, it’s very visible. I squint my eyes to look at the engraved text just to make sure my assumptions are right.

HARRY STYLES 2018 Best Pop Solo Performance Sign of the Times

It’s hard not to shed a tear seeing that combination of letters form into those specific words. I pull it together though because Harry’s straight ahead of me, his back turned to me. He’s leaning over the edge of the railing. One hand is in his pocket, the other is holding the phone that’s next to his ear. On the other side of the call, I can hear a female voice. He stands out amongst the dull colors at the rooftop, and a lot of it has to do with the floral light blue Gucci suit he’s wearing. If it’s any other situation, I would’ve left and waited for him to finish the call. However, after all the work it took to get here, I can’t wait another second. I come closer to him and tap his shoulder two times. I take a step back to give him room to turn around.

When he does and our eyes meet, the world freezes. His jaw drops. I notice his eyes squint, probably trying to confirm if it’s actually me. I don’t blame him since the rooftop is quite dark. It’s hard to even distinguish the green tint to his eyes that I’ve gotten so familiar with. If I were in his position, I’d be doing the same thing. The only assurance I have that it is Harry I’m staring at, and not just some random guy in a Gucci suit, is the left dimple that appears on his face, as he smirks. Then, the hand that isn’t holding the phone moves to rest on his waist, and he crosses his ankles together. His tongue is slightly visible as it tries to fight past his smiling teeth.

It’s hard to fight back a giggle because, whether he realizes or not, he’s doing the Kiwi pose right in front of me.

“All right, Gem,” he says to the phone, although his eyes are greeting me with a hello. “I have to go. I have to say hi to someone…Yeah, I’ll call again tomorrow…Love you, too. Bye.” He drops his phone, tucking it into his jacket pocket. He remains in the pose, with the smuggest look on his face. “Well, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

I bite my lip, trying to fight back the biggest grin in the world. Being able to witness the happiness that’s encapsulating him at this very moment was worth every single stressful decision and butterfly in my stomach. I wish my mind can take a photo right now because it would make for the most beautiful picture.

“What are you doing here, Cori?” he asks, taking a step closer to me.

With my hands behind my back, I take a step to him too. “You made me feel guilty for not coming here.”

“Hmm, is that so?” His head is tilted and he’s smirking. He takes another step.

I’m forced to bend my neck back he’s so close. “Yes. This mess is all your fault,” I poke him in the chest.

“Well, this is the most beautiful mess I’ve ever been a part of.” After those words leave his mouth, I feel myself being lifted up into the air. His hands are around my waist and we begin to twirl.

“Harry!” I clutch tightly onto his neck to balance myself. “Put me down!” I’m glad he doesn’t listen instantly because I’m enjoying this moment far too much.

When he finally places me back on the ground, we’re both out of breath. I step back from him, trying to gather my surroundings, but Harry’s not having any of that. He reaches for my wrist and tugs me closer. “I can’t believe you’re here.” He’s tucking the strands of hair that got loose from his twirling attempt.

“We’re supposed to get through this award season together, aren’t we?”

His face is hard to read. He’s searching for something in my eyes. He stares at them for a very long time. He’s wearing an expression on his face that I haven’t seen before. It’s completely unreadable. There’s a smile on his lips, but it’s so faint that it’s unfamiliar. I’m searching his eyes to try and figure out his emotions but I’m unable to find anything recognizable.

I poke his cheek, and that seems to snap him out of his trance. “Your tie’s all messed up now.” It’s untucked and the back end of the tie has grown longer compared to the front. “Do you mind?”

He extends his neck out, welcoming me to fix it. It takes only a few seconds for me to actually remember how to tie a tie. When I finish it, and my hands are about to let go, he looks downwards. That sudden movement puts the bottom of his face right in the palm of my hands. He moves his head even lower, so then my hands are on his lips. I feel him take a deep breath. His eyes are on me. I hear the faint sound of his lips puckering.

“What are you doing?”

He sighs, leaning back and giving me full access to my hands again. “Just needed to prove to myself that you’re actually in front of me right now.”

“How’d it go? Am I just a figment of your imagination?”

“No, you’re very real.” He pokes my upper cheek. I expect myself to wince from his cold touch, but I don’t. His hands are warm, but the warmth radiating from them is much different than the warmth I felt at the SAGs. This time, it’s easy to tell that it’s his natural warmth coming through. It’s not artificial. I decide to not mention it for now.

“Oh,” he says suddenly. “I almost forgot.” He goes back to the small little table and grabs the Grammy. He doesn’t know that I’ve seen it already, but he doesn’t need to because when he hands it over for me to hold, I start to tear up again. The first thing I touch is the engraved letters that spell out his name. I look up at him and he’s already staring at me, just waiting for my reaction. “What are you crying for?” His index finger swipes the couple of tears that started to fall. “I’m supposed to be the one doing that.”

“You’ve done it, Harry.” My voice is terribly shaky, and my eyes repeatedly glance at him and the Grammy. “I’m so proud of you. This is all yours. You’ve written songs about your life and you just got given the biggest compliment any musician can get.” I put the Grammy right in front of his face. “You know what this means?”

His head slightly shakes, urging me to go on. So I do.

“You’re proving everyone wrong. You came out of this boyband and they were all expecting you to continue with your cheesy little pop songs, but you didn’t. Instead, you gave them Sign of the Times. You gave them Kiwi. You gave them From the Dining Table. You’re not just someone in this little boyband anymore. You’re Harry Styles. You just won a fucking Grammy.”

Now it’s my turn to wipe the couple of tears that have started to form around his eyes. As I do so, he chuckles. “Was that your fangirl side?”

“I don’t even know anymore,” I tell him, and it’s the truth. That little rant could easily have been blamed on my fangirl side, where words come out of my mouth before I can even comprehend them, but this time it was different. As I was saying those words to him, I meant every single one. It doesn’t feel right to just blame it on that part of me. “It felt great saying it to you though. I don’t think many people get to express how proud they are of someone that they’re truly a fan of.”

Ed pops out of nowhere, interrupting our conversation. “Hey, you two. I don’t know if you’re aware but there’s a party downstairs. Come on. The tab’s on me tonight and no one’s buying enough drinks for me to complain about it just yet.”

I can tell that Harry wants to stay. I don’t blame him. I do too. However, Ed’s right. He has a reason to celebrate and he should be doing that with everyone he loves. “Let’s go down there.” I give the Grammy back to him. “You can’t be all mine tonight.”

I hear him mumble something under his breath, but he says it too quickly and too quietly for me to be able to understand.

When Harry and I come downstairs, we’re immediately greeted by a small crowd. It’s a little overwhelming at first because they’re all hollering with excitement at Harry. He gets submerged in the crowd easily. I notice him look back at me with an apologetic look in his eyes, but I just wave him off. He has no need to feel sorry for me tonight. This is his night.

I don’t have time to even be sad about losing Harry because Ed takes his spot rather quickly. “You want a drink?”

“No thank you,” I say politely. Even though I’m talking to Ed now, I’m still staring at Harry. Luckily, he’s wearing something quite colorful that stands out amongst the sea of neutral colors that are surrounding him.

Ed has my attention once I hear him mention Saoirse’s name. “Sorry, what did you just say?”

“SAOIRSE,” he says a little bit louder as if it was the music’s fault as to why I was unable to hear him the first time. “SHE SAID THAT YOU’RE GOING TO TRY AND TELL ME THAT YOU DON’T NEED TO FLY WITH US BACK TO LA, BUT THAT I SHOULDN’T LET YOU DO THAT.”

“Ed, you don’t need to shout. I hear you perfectly fine.” I rub my ear with my finger, trying to wipe away some of Ed’s spit that landed on it.

“Oh, sorry. But yeah, you’re going back to LA with us. I won’t take no for an answer because Saoirse says that I shouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“Ed, it’s fine. I already have a flight.”

He shakes his head. “I’m going to tell Harry, right now. Once he knows, it’ll be too late for you to back out.” He winks and runs to Harry’s direction.

“Ed! WAIT! NO!” My effort to stop him goes to waste because he’s well out of reach from me now.

After being ditched by Ed, I find a secluded area in the corner of the bar to attach myself to. There is a leather couch and a coffee table, and it reminds me of where I was exactly 24 hours ago. I dig my phone out of my dress pocket, and my fingers begin to viciously tap a message to Saoirse. I’m in the middle of a sentence that’s questioning why Ed is so heavily involved in this situation when I feel the cushion I’m sitting in sink lower. After that, I feel a poke on my cheek, and I don’t even need to think about who has come to sit next to me.

“Are you really flying back with us or is Ed just trying to fuck with me?”

If I had kept my eyes on my phone or on my feet or anywhere that wasn’t those green eyes, I would’ve been able to lie and tell him that I was okay with taking the flight back to LA by myself. However, I have no self-control when it comes to him.

“Only if you want me there,” I say to him.

He nudges my shoulder playfully. “Of course I want you there, Cori. Why wouldn’t I?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. You and Ed probably have a lot of people you’re flying back with. I wouldn’t want to interrupt.”

He’s smiling again and even though it’s my millionth time seeing it, the effect of it still hits me as if it’s the first time. “You might actually like the people we fly back with.”

I’m about to ask him to clarify, but a waiter comes along to interrupt us. He places two glasses of champagne on the coffee table in front of us. I have no plans to get drunk tonight, but a free drink is hard to resist. As I reach for it, Harry follows suit. We clink our glasses together and take a sip.

“You want to know something crazy?” he says, setting the glass back down.

“Tell me.”

“I was going to do it.” He takes a long pause. “I was thinking about getting you a plane and flying you out here myself.”

It’s hard to tell if he’s being serious or not because his face is happy all the time, so it’s a default of mine to just assume that he’s joking around. “Very funny.”

“I’m serious, Cori! I was going to do it. After I hung up, I was going to call back asking if you wanted to come here or not.”

“But you didn’t.”

Even while he takes a sip of champagne, he’s still smiling. “I didn’t.”

“You’re not going to tell me why you didn’t?” He’s being so coy. It’s adorable, but it’s also irritating.

“I will, but only if you tell me why you decided to come here.”

“I already told you,” I say. “You made me feel guilty.”

He scrunches his face up showing how unpleasant he found my answer to be.

“Harry!” I push him away. “You’re being annoying.”

“I just want you to tell me the truth,” he says innocently.

“I am!”

Before I can even comprehend what’s happening, he leans over to me, our foreheads crash into each other. “It’s okay, Cori. You don’t have to tell me now.” He doesn’t seem to accept my answer. “We have the whole night ahead of us.” He lets out a groan as he leaves the comfort of the couch. “Now, come on. It’s time to show you off to my friends.”

As much fun as it is being introduced to all these very important people in the music industry, I’m having much more fun watching Harry. There’s something much different about him tonight. It’s a version of him I’ve never seen before. I remember marveling at his self-confidence at the Golden Globes. He looked like he belonged there. That’s why I was so shocked when he expressed his nervousness to me at the SAGs. If he hadn’t told me how much he sought comfort from my presence, I would’ve never known. Tonight is much more different. The confidence when I first met him was easily visible but tonight, it’s practically oozing out of him. He’s so comfortable. This is where he belongs. This is his world, and it’s a complete honor being able to see him in it.

There are so many people to greet and smile at that I let out a sigh of relief when Harry steers us back to the corner sofa and coffee table. Our butts land on the sofa together and somehow he manages to sling his arm over my shoulder. I commend myself for not stiffening at his touch.

“I had to get you away from them,” he reveals to me. “They like you a little too much, and that’s not fair because I met you first.”

“Are you saying you were jealous?”

“Yeah, I was. They’ll have to get in line,” he says it so casually that it shocks me. I was hoping to get some banter off of him. By the look he’s giving me, I can tell that he wanted me to be shocked. He looks proud of himself. “You want to tell me why you came here now?”

I clear my throat. That’s why he was so open to me because he wanted something in return. However, the truth he’s seeking from me isn’t quite ready to be shared yet. I don’t even know if my inner conscience has shared it with myself.

“I’m guessing that’s a no.”

“We got the whole night ahead of us, don’t we?”

January 29, 2018. 4:32 am. New York. I’ve never been to a private airport before. In fact, I technically still haven’t because the car that’s taking Ed, Harry, and I there immediately swerves away from the small little building and drives us right next to the airplane that’s taking us back to California. The three of us shuffle out of the car. Harry immediately goes to the trunk and picks up his bags. Because of my last minute decision to come, I’m traveling light so there’s nothing for me to carry. It seems that Ed is doing the same because all he’s carrying in his hands is his Grammy.

A man exits the plane and comes down the stairs to greet him. “Mr. Sheeran, welcome aboard.”

“Good to see you again, Tom. This is Cori Duval.” He nods his head in my direction. “She’s going to be flying back with us too.”

Tom bows his head to me. “Welcome, Ms. Duval.”

“Thank you. This plane is quite beautiful.”

“Isn’t she? She’s quite new. I think this is her 42nd flight.”

My breath hitches for just a second at the mention of that specific number. I’m about to turn back and call Harry over so I can repeat that fact to him, but, of course, he’s already right behind me, with a couple of bags slung over his shoulder. With the glee that’s written on his face, I can tell that he’s heard it. He winks at me.

“Make yourself at home, Cori,” Ed tells me, obviously not realizing how significant that number is to Harry and me. He climbs up the stairs to the plane first. I follow him up, holding on to the railing. Harry’s behind me, and I feel his hand on my lower back, guiding me to make sure I don’t fall.

Surprisingly, the small plane can provide for quite a number of people. On the left side is one long sofa, extending as far out to the end of the plane. It can easily fit six people. On the other side is the regular layout for an airplane. Three pairs of seats all back to back with each other.

When I enter the plane, Ed is already lounging on one of the airplane chairs with his eyes closed. I jump towards the sofa, extending my legs and giving them a breather for having survived quite a night. When Harry enters, he places his bag on one the seats and sits down on the remaining space of the sofa that I hadn’t taken over yet. He lifts my legs and places it on his lap so he can scoot closer to me.

“Other people are still coming right?” I ask out loud.

“Yeah,” Harry answers. “They just texted me. They should be here in a couple of minutes.”

“Will there be enough room for them?”

“Yeah, it’s only two other people.”

Ed’s eyes open. “Two? I thought three, Harry?”

“No, we’re meeting up with Lou in LA. We’re all getting breakfast.”

I recognize Lou Teasdale’s name instantly. My face might’ve lit up because Harry glances at me and smirks. “You know Lou?”

“I think everyone who knows you know Lou. She’s a legend.”

Harry opens his mouth to speak, but the noise coming from outside of the plane stops us. It’s easy to figure out that it’s the voice of two men They were talking to each other, and they were laughing. It’s the laughs that give away their identity to me. Harry has finally released my legs, so I’m able to sit up from my spot on the sofa. My eyes are locked on the airplane door, waiting for them to walk through it. From the corner of my eye, I notice that Harry’s gaze is on me. I meet his eyes for a moment and he smiles, and that’s all the confirmation I need. He knows that I know who’s about to walk in the plane.

“Knock, knock.” Liam Payne enters the plane first, holding an unopened box of beers. He’s wearing a black hoodie and grey sweatpants. “Hello, friends!” I’ve never seen a happier face walk into a room.

“Payno!” Ed’s out of his seat quickly and hugs Liam.

“Oh. My. God.” My hands come up to my mouth just so I can hide the surprised look on my face.

Even though Ed and Liam are hugging near the door, I still manage to have a look at the final person that enters through the door. “There they are!” Niall Horan steps inside, also donning a simple outfit consisting of a sweater and some joggers. Instead of bringing a box of beers, he’s clutching on to a black guitar case. “I thought it smelled like Grammy winners in here!” He sets his guitar on the floor and reaches for Ed.

Harry leans over and takes my hand out of my mouth. “I wasn’t talking about Lou Teasdale,” he says softly. I felt him kiss the top of my forehead, and if it were any other moment I would’ve freaked out. However, there are much bigger things to freak out about, like having three out of five One Direction members right in front of me.

“Harry, I-” My sentence is left unfinished because he’s already left me and walked over to his former bandmates.

Ed excuses himself out of the company of Niall and Liam to properly give the three of them a moment with each other. At first, the three of them engulf each other in a group hug. Niall and Liam fit comfortably in each of Harry’s arms. Then, they step out and Niall attacks Harry with a hug. ‘Attack’ is the right word to describe it because he literally tackles him into one of the airplane seats. As they’re hugging, Liam asks him where the Grammy is. What Harry says is inaudible to me, but Liam must’ve understood because he starts rummaging through Harry’s bags.

“Well, that’s a beauty isn’t it?” Liam says once he’s dug it out.

Niall shrieks when he sees it and lets go of Harry instantly. “Give it to me, I want to hold it!”

“Hold on!” Liam tells him. “It’s my turn!”

I could stay here and watch this moment unfold for the rest of my life. My attention is solely focused on the three of them, and watching their interactions with each other that I fail to realize Ed has chosen to sit next to me. “You’re staring at them like they’re fucking dinosaurs, Cori.”

“How often does this happen, Ed?”

“Every couple of weeks, I think.”

I look at Ed. “Seriously? That’s crazy that none of that has leaked to the press yet.”

“Yeah,” Harry joins us now, settling on the other empty spot next to me. “We’re very good at keeping it private. I trust you won’t say a thing?”

“Are you kidding? I’m about to call TMZ right now!”

Harry bursts out laughing and as he does so, his arm slithers around my shoulder again. It’s weird that I’ve already gotten used to having him in such close proximity. “Oi!” He shouts at the two boys who are still fawning over the Grammy. “Don’t be rude, lads. Come say hi to Cori!”

Niall comes first, and he takes the seat to my left. “Hello, darling. Nice to meet you!” Even though I’m squished between Ed and Harry, Niall still makes the effort to kiss both of my cheeks. He even tries for a hug, but it just becomes an awkward pat on the back from both of us because Harry doesn’t let go of me.

“Geez, Haz. Share her, will you?” Niall glares at him before grabbing his guitar case and slipping into one of the airplane seats.

Liam comes next, and this time Harry lets go of me, so I’m able to give him a proper greeting. It’s a big deal hugging Liam since he is my favorite member of One Direction. Being able to see his puppy eyes and the way his face crinkles when he’s happy can easily be checked off my bucket list.

“Hi Liam,” I say, entering his chest. My fangirl side overcomes me and I squeeze him tightly, just to remind myself that this moment is real.

“Finally nice to meet you, babe. Harry’s been talking about you for quite some time now.”

“Thanks, Liam,” Harry says from behind me. “Want to tell her my blood type while you’re at it?”

Everyone finally settles down after a few moments. Liam, Ed, and Niall are on the other side of the plane, excitedly talking amongst themselves. Harry and I remain on the couch, his head in my lap. His eyes are closed as my fingers rummage through his brown curls.

His breathing is relatively calm so I imagine that he’s already asleep. He’s had such a long night that it makes sense as to why he’s so tired all of a sudden. However, I can’t stop myself from whispering to him. “Thanks for having me, H.”

He stirs, and his eyes flutter open at the sound of my voice. “Thank you for coming.”

“Are you sleeping already, Haz?”

“Yes, I’m exhausted. Leave me alone.”

“We haven’t even sung anything yet!” Liam whines.

“I’m tired,” Harry grumbles, cuddling closer to me.

“Do you want to hear anything, Cori?” Liam asks me, and his eyes were screaming at me to say something. “I’m sure Harry would sing with us if you asked him to.”

The fangirl side of me is not letting go of this opportunity to be serenaded by part of One Direction and Ed Sheeran. Although I care about Harry’s well-being a lot, it would be a crime to waste this opportunity. It doesn’t take long for me to figure out what song they can all sing together.

“Over Again, please.”

Niall hollers when he hears my song request. “That’s a good one!” He passes his guitar to Ed, who gladly accepts it. Even he shoots me a happy smile. “Come on Haz! Let’s not disappoint this pretty girl.”

Beneath me, I feel Harry take a deep breath. “Fine. Go on, Liam.”

Ed begins to strum his guitar, and Liam clears his throat.

Said I’d never leave her 'cause her hands fit like my T-shirt Tongue tied over three words, cursed Running over thoughts that make my feet hurt Bodies intertwined with her lips...

January 29, 2018. 7:06am. California. Two cars are awaiting us once we land in LA. After hugging and saying goodbye to Niall, Liam, and Ed, they jump into the same vehicle. Harry and I are walking to the car behind them when I hear Niall roll his window down.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come for breakfast with us, Cori?”

“Yeah!” Liam adds. “We’ll sing more songs to you if you want! It’ll sound better since Louis will be there!”

“That’s okay!” I yell back at them. “I have interviews to get ready for! I’ll see you guys soon though!”

“Alright! Bye, darling!” Niall puckers his lips and blows me a kiss.

“Good luck at the Oscars, babe!” Liam gives me a thumbs up.

“Don’t forget to tell Saoirse how good of a job I did taking care of you,” Ed reminds me, giving me a wave from the front seat.

When they roll their windows back up, Harry instantly pulls me into a soul-crushing hug. I feel his mouth rest on the top of my head. My arms cling on to his waist as we start to rock back and forth together.

“Corinna Duval,” he mumbles into my hair.

“Harry Styles,” I whisper against his chest.

“Our night’s over. Don’t you have something to tell me?” Since he’s still leaning on my head, I feel a smile start to spread on his face.

I pull back from his chest to look up at him. “I was hoping you’d forget about that.”

“So?” He’s awaiting my answer.

“I don’t know, Harry.”

“Coriiiiiii!”

“No, listen to me.” I cover his mouth with my hand. “I don’t know. That’s my answer. Something was just telling me that I needed to do it, so I did. I wish I had this long and drawn out explanation but I don’t. I just felt like I should be here for you, so that’s why I’m here.”

“That’s it? You just had a feeling and you just went for it?” He’s searching my eyes again as if I was hiding the truth from him.

“I mean I hesitated for a while. I was worried you were going to see it as this one big romantic gesture, but I decided to just let it go. Worry about it later, you know?” He says nothing, continuing to look at me as if I’m something he’s never seen before. “What?”

“I wish I did that,” he says softly, pushing the loose strands of hair out of my face. “I wish I didn’t hesitate.”

It’s my turn to poke him in the cheek. “You’re going to tell me why now?”

I wish he has a hard time telling me just like I did to him, but he doesn’t. He’s so easy going. “I thought it was selfish of me to do it. I mean, how arrogant is that? Expecting a girl you like to just drop everything and go see you just because you ask her to? The women in my life would shame me for the rest of my existence.”

“A girl you like, huh?”

“Ah, the truth slips out.” Though from the look he’s giving me, I can tell that he spilled the truth on purpose.

“I don’t know what to say to that.”

“Hmm.” He pulls me into his chest again. "I’ve left you at a loss for words again?”

I let out a groan, but since my head is against his chest, it’s just muffled into his body.

“You don’t have to say anything else, Cori.” I feel his fingers start to draw shapes into the back of my spine. “The fact that you came to see me on your own will, without me asking you to says enough. It means that whatever I’m feeling right now isn’t one-sided, so that makes me happy.”

The honk from Ed, Niall, and Liam’s car startle us enough to break our hug. In a way, I’m glad because that means that neither of us would have to do it ourselves. From past experience, I know that Harry never breaks the hug first, and having been smothered in a lot of his hugs for the last couple of hours, I don’t think I would’ve had the strength to let go myself.

“Your carriage awaits,” Harry sighs, opening the door for me. It’s easy to read the look of sadness on his face.

I step into the car and Harry closes it. I immediately push the button that rolls the window down. Harry bends down and pushes his head in. “Remind me when I’m seeing you again?”

“Six days.”

“Ugh, that’s too far away.”

“We went two weeks without seeing other after the Golden Globes.”

“Well, these couple of hours have spoiled us pretty well.”

The car in front of the one I’m in honks again.

“It seems that your carriage is getting tired of waiting too.”

“They can wait one more second. Excuse me, sir,” he says, acknowledging the person sitting in the driver’s seat of the car. “Please make sure you get this one home safely. She has to pick up an Oscar on Sunday.”

I roll my eyes at him for the first time in long while.

Harry notices too. “There she is! I was wondering when you were going to do that.”

“I didn’t even realize I hadn’t rolled my eyes at you yet.”

“I did,” he says proudly. “That just means I’m winning you over more and more.”

The car honks again. This time, it’s paired with a very angry Niall. “HARRY! IF YOU DON’T GET IN HERE RIGHT NOW IM GOING TO STEAL YOUR GRAMMY.”

“You better go. Niall’s going to change the name on that Grammy to ‘One Direction’ any second now.”

“I’ll see you soon then.” He pokes his head through the window and leans in closer to me. I close my eyes because I’m expecting to feel his fingers press into my cheeks one last time, but he doesn’t. Instead, I feel his lips brush the side of my face. His kiss technically lands on my cheek, but it’s so close to my lips that it makes me aware that if I had angled my face a little differently, it would have landed right on my lips.

“Bye, H.”

#FINALLY IT'S HERE #harry styles #one direction #grammys #2018 award season #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles imagine #harry styles blurb #harry styles au #harry styles smut #harry styles fluff #harry styles drabble #one direction fanfiction #ed sheeran

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marvelandponder · 7 years

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3 for the Price of 1!

When My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) finally came out, I wanted to review it right. And to do that, I had to call in a few friends.

I basically knew this had to be a collab of some sort, but instead of reaching out to big names in the fandom, I decided to ask a couple of friends to review the movie with me. What’s more in the spirit of things than making something with the friends, new and old, that we made because of this show and its ridiculous fandom?

I have links to Mr. Mikail’s and DigiKate’s spoiler-free and, in the case of DigiKate, full-length spoiler reviews!

I’ll wait until the blu-ray/DVD comes out in January to release my full spoiler-filled review (mostly because you know how busy I’ve been the past two months, but also because I have friends who haven’t seen the movie yet), but until then, here’s some general thoughts on the movie and how it fits into the modern animated films scene.

How does it measure up to other movies? Should we be comparing it differently because it’s a movie based on a TV show? How the fuck did the Emoji Movie get nominated for Best Animated Feature when MLP: The Movie didn’t?

Meta-Narratives in Kids Movies

Gotta get this out of the way first. Big surprise: I loved it.

I knew I’d enjoy it, but I couldn’t believe how much I was smiling, even by the first big musical number. Every time a minor character came on screen that I recognized, I had to hold back a scream. I was so proud of the girls, and so impressed with DHX’s work.

I just. Fucking. Loved it.

So, there’s no denying it. My Little Pony: The Movie is an absolute joy for fans (for reasons I can’t get into in the spoiler-free review), but I think what separates this from being a universally beloved insta-classic anywhere except among fans is the landscape of kids movies these days.

Take a look at the likes of Frozen, Moana, and Zootopia and you’ll find a lot of meta commentary on the way Disney usually tells its stories—sometimes, even while embracing those cliches if necessary.

Inside Out and How to Train Your Dragon 2 tackle deeply emotional subjects, as modern Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks love to do.

Even Lego: Batman was a ceaselessly rapid-fire comedy with a heart, and hit on all fronts for it.

So, what? Is there something we’re missing? Well, MLP: The Movie does have all those elements to various degrees---meta humour, emotional subject matter, and quite a number of great jokes. But then, what’s the real missing element for general audiences and movie critics?

A clever, unique message and/or implementation. As much as we love MLP, we know it’s not the first to talk about the value of friendship. And it’s certainly not the first movie to use the 3-act fetch-quest structure it does.

If you wanna know what’s stopping MLP: The Movie from being as phenomenal to other people as it is to me, it’s that this is something I haven’t seen before, and this is something they’ve seen a hundred times (even if it was done pretty well here).

As a fan, who knows these characters inside and out, I haven’t seen these characters pushed to their limits in quite the ways they are here. Leaving Equestria and the lore and worldbuilding therein is inspiring, as it expands the possibilities and the map itself of a world I love so much. And to be honest there are one or two dark moments (by MLP’s standard) that I couldn’t believe!

Basically, the novelty and originality of the movie, at least in terms of story, comes mostly from the perspective of fans and staff members who have been dealing with this world and its characters for the better part of a decade now.

But since they used both the message of friendship without bells and whistles and the tried-and-true road trip movie plot beats, I can see why some audience members think this is adorable, but bland.

If however you think of MLP: The Movie as a response to the recent string of Disney movies that playfully roll their eyes at Disney’s happy-go-lucky (or meet-cute-and-go-marry as the case may be) philosophies, then it’s very relevant.

And a bit of that structure is actually there. Within the movie itself there’s a bit of that eye-rolling, and as seen in the trailers, it comes from the villains. The heroes remain genuinely positive and even schmaltzy, and that’s what wins the day in the end.

These days Disney in particular feels the need to call itself out on all that, and while it can be refreshing, that can also put a bit of a cynical edge into these movies that, frankly, doesn’t always need to be there. Sometimes you do need to believe in the cheesy, sometimes you need your friends and all the sentiment that comes with them. A kinder world can be incredibly charming. Trust me.

But maybe I’m being a bit harsh. All those movies have teams and budgets multiple times the size that MLP: The Movie did. Maybe it’s fairer to compare it to other animated show turned theatrical releases.

So what does that landscape look like?

Adaptation Land

There’s nothing like seeing your favourite show on the big screen for the first time. Upped visuals, bigger stories---what more could you want?

It’s here where I think MLP: The Movie measures up in wonderful ways.

Even going from a seemingly similar medium like TV to movies is a pretty hard transition, and I think there are any number of common pitfalls and crowning moments of awesome that come along with that.

But it’s very rare for an theatrical adaption of an animated show to quite meet the same level of quality as the big Disney, Pixar, and sometimes Dreamworks movies.

And it’s obvious as to why. The lower budgets, teams often having to split their time between the show and a movie, bigger-and-better-itis, you name it.

But even if I can’t say most of these movies are transcendent, there’s often still a level of excellence achieved. Even with the relatively low-performing Powerpuff Girls Movie, or the cheesiness of Pokemon: The First Movie, you can still find great movies in this category.

It’s just... they’re always better if you’ve watched the show. Always. There’s more depth, greater knowledge of what this means for the characters, a built-in love and understanding ofthe world. The phrase “for the fans” is implied. It has to be.

Unless, of course, you’re like the Lego: Ninjago movie which (I haven’t seen but heard) totally and completely abandons the canon of the show. But then, what’s the point in making a movie based on that show?

You see the problems show staffs face here?

So, I think MLP: The Movie is exceedingly enjoyable, but is that really just for fans? And if it is, did it cater enough to fans?

In her review, ILoveKimPossibleALot made a good point: we spend the movie with a new set of villains, in new territory, with new characters, and a new story unrelated to the backstories and lore that we, as fans, are so interested in.

I’ve seen a number of fans actually wish the season seven finale’s story and MLP: The Movie’s story were switched.

The season seven finale is straight up lore porn, and one of the greatest two-parters MLP has had. And honestly I would love to see this expanded on in a way to see what it would be like for Starswirl to be emotional. Build it all up even more so the weight of the regret hits home harder.

But, see, that would be impossible, because MLP: The Movie went into production 3-4 years ago.

You can tell, too. No spoilers, but Twilight’s arc in this movie is very reminiscent of something she might go through in season 4 and Rainbow Rocks.

That’s yet another reason animated adaptations are so tricky---unless you’re in the case of Hey Arnold, which is about to premiere its final movie this friday over a decade after the end of the show. In that case, no matter how long the movie took, they knew for sure where the characters would be, and thus, where they could take them.

Which isn’t to say MLP: The Movie doesn’t do anything with the characters, far from it, but I think it’s also far from how deep it could’ve gone.

But then... that rounds back to the top, and how it compares to other animated movies in the eyes of general audiences, and how they might feel alienated, and we just keep going ‘round and ‘round in circles.

So, does any of that make it a bad story or a bad movie? No, certainly not! For fans, this is a moving character study and a celebration of a lot of the elements we love most from the show (meta humour, genuine heart, the works). The beats, as standard as they are, pretty much all work, save for maybe Grubber’s comic relief depending on your sense of humour.

But, you know, it’s funny to be left with the feeling that you just watched something incredible, that made you so happy you couldn’t believe it, only to have to admit it’s understandable that critics and even general audiences won’t feel the same way. But, that’s where I am.

Depends on the context.

Go check out Mr. Mikail’s review here! And Digikate’s reviews here (spoiler-free) and here (spoiler)! *Will be updated with links shortly

Year of the Pony

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creativitytoexplore · 4 years

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Announcing the 2020 Winners of the Insider Prize https://ift.tt/2DNkREu

For the last three years, American Short Fiction has sponsored a contest for incarcerated writers in Texas. A group of writers at the Connally Unit, in Kenedy, Texas, came up with the name: The Insider Prize. Each year we get dozens of essays and short stories from men and women in prisons and jails across the state, some handwritten and others produced on typewriters. They tell stories about their lives before prison, about the conditions inside, and about the many places their imaginations take them.

This year’s award is marked, like so much in our world these days, by tragedy.

Back in April, as we prepared to share the good news with the winners and finalists, we learned that finalist Timothy Bazrowx had died at a prison hospital after testing positive for COVID-19. He was 63. As the virus continues to rip through shockingly ill-prepared prisons and jails, the men and women inside remain especially vulnerable. Bazrowx knew this—he wrote to one correspondent that in prison, “sickness runs like a crazy horse through a flower bed.”

Through three books and countless shorter pieces, Bazrowx had cultivated an incisive, vivid, and frequently hilarious style, which he didn’t abandon even as his home became a deathtrap. As the virus spread in his prison, officers threatened to punish his peers for going shirtless in a common area. “The world is dying and these bastards want us to be fully dressed to see it happen,” he wrote. “Geewiz.”

It is with his unique spirit, of smiling while speaking truth to power, of finding joy in the face of horrors both natural and manmade, that we present this year’s winners, along with Bazrowx’s own submission.

The winners were selected by guest judge Justin Torres, whose award-winning 2011 novel We the Animalshas proven popular among writers behind bars.

In the fiction category, Torres selected “That Place on Daniel Island” by F.R. Martinez. Martinez also won in the fiction category last year, when Joyce Carol Oates selected his story “Mother’s Son.” This new piece is told entirely in dialogue, and Torres wrote that it “feels so alive, to not just the syntax and rhythms of everyday speech, but also to the very need for dialogue itself. Talking is a way to both dig up trouble, and put it to rest. The two characters are talking from two very different sides of a shared experiences—marriage, incarceration—and the effect is quite moving.”

In the memoir category, Torres selected “The Promise” by Steven Perez. “What I loved most about this piece,” Torres wrote, is “that the story moves beyond the narrative of the gruesome attack that serves as the inciting incident to raise important questions about witnessing, responsibility, codes of conduct, failed guardianship—all the systemic issues that foster and allow for prison violence. It is tremendously well written.”

The memoir runner-up this year was “My Time Paradox,” by Jacob Jills, which Torres called a “real achievement in prose style” that “provoked an eerie claustrophobic feeling while reading.” The fiction runner-up this year was “Classic Rock,” by John Rodgers, which Torres called “troubling, funny, and hazed with a kind of dreamlike nostalgia.”

We hope you enjoy this year’s winners.

—Maurice Chammah & Emily Chammah

So I said to her ‘Let’s go to that place over on Daniel Island where we used to go.’ And she said ‘What place?’ I said ‘You know, that place that was kinda like a beach bar or something.’ ‘Beach bar? I don’t know what you’re talking about. You mean the bagel place? The one that had the everything bagels?’ ‘No, no. Well— is that still there? We used to go there.’ ‘They only open for breakfast and lunch. Not dinner.’ So I said ‘I mean that place that had the jukebox with that Billy Joel song we like.’ ‘Juke box?’ ‘And there was a bar in the front, even though it was always half empty. They had good burgers.’ ‘You don’t mean the hotel? The restaurant in the hotel where we went with Nick and his wife before they broke up?’ ‘Damn. That must be like twenty years ago. No. Is that still there? I don’t even remember how to get there.’

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‘Well, I’ll drive.’ ‘I sure would like to go to the other place though. I used to think of it when I was down for some reason.’ ‘Really. Were the burgers THAT good?’ ‘No. I mean they were good but—I don’t know I just liked the place because it was so laid back, so peaceful, so—Charleston. I mean, I know there was no beach there on Daniel Island, but when I remembered that place it felt like there shoulda been one nearby, like right down the road or something. It’s hard to explain, but when you’re locked up a place like that just seems like heaven, you know? To be away from everything. . . ’ ‘There’s that other place on Daniel Island over there by where we used to live.’ ‘That’s right. I forgot we lived on the island for a few months when they were building our house.’ ‘Over there in the mall, where the Ross was,’ she said. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s gone now. It’s been gone for like–I don’t know—ten years?’ ‘Ten years—’ ‘You were gone a long time.’ ‘Yeah. I barely recognized that part over there when we come into our neighborhood off the highway. That used to be a Piggly Wiggly over there.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘What happened to the Blimpie’s?’ ‘That’s gone. Been gone.’ ‘I was down a long time, but I bet that place on Daniel Island is still there. Maybe with a different name and a different owner.’ ‘Maybe. But don’t have to go there. There’s lots of new places. There’s one by Folly Beach. I’ve gone there with Tina and Rosemary.’ ‘Rosemary?’ ‘Yeah. She used to work with me at Bosch, remember? She retired before I did.’ ‘I didn’t think you were friends with people from Bosch, I mean except for Dennis.’ ‘Dennis died two or three years ago. I don’t remember exactly when. You know how memory is. I didn’t go to the funeral. It was too sad.’ ‘I remember you told me he died. . . on the phone.’ ‘You’ve been gone a long time, baby.’ ‘I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I used to hear people in prison talk about their lives outside. I’m talking about people with fifteen and twenty year sentences. They had a long way to go, and they’d just started. I used to wanna say to them: listen, forget that life, man. It’s over. But I did it too, talked about my life, you know, with you and the kids here. But that was at first. After a couple of years, I stopped that. I didn’t talk to anybody. What for? People left. Or they got transferred to other prisons. Or they died. What was the use of trying to make friends, to get close to anybody.’ ‘You used to talk to me on the phone about your ‘friends.’’ ‘That was nothing. Just people I met. People to hang out and bullshit with, people to bitch about the conditions and whatever was going on. There’s no real friendship in there. The place is like a bus station, or an airport. Anyway, it’s illegal to contact other ‘felons.’’ ‘Is that what you are now? A felon?’ ‘No. I’m still me. I’m still the same guy you married.’ ‘No. You’ve changed.’ ‘You’ve changed, too. I mean, c’mon, thirteen years. I swear. I thought I was gonna die in there. I had one celli who was a psycho, another one was a drug addict, another one almost killed me with B.O. Another was a pest, always begging for attention, bugging me with his problems. And then you had that stroke. I thought you were gonna die. The kids wouldn’t answer their phones.’ ‘I know. That must’ve been terrible.’ ‘More terrible than you think. I thought I’d have nobody left when I got out, you know? And then I used to think you didn’t forgive me—for what I did.’ ‘I was angry. I still am. You fucked up our lives.’ ‘I think you need to put some of the blame for that on the wonderful government.’ ‘No. I put it on you. What you did was wrong.’ ‘Not thirteen years worth of wrong! For God’s sake! I didn’t kill anybody!’ ‘You should have known better.’ ‘How could I? It’s not like they tell people what kind of sentences they’re giving out.’ ‘You should’ve known. Somebody smart like you should’ve known. What you were doing. . . didn’t you ever think there were consequences?’ ‘Okay. Right. Whatever. I just felt like all of you just let me rot in there. That if I died no one would care. I mean sometimes it was months before I heard from any of you.’ ‘You think it was easy for us? Paying the bills, keeping things running, ignoring all the people that kept telling me I should divorce you, that you were no good. It was no picnic, all right?’ So I said to her ‘Okay. Well. . . can we go to that place on Daniel Island? It was nice there. I remember we used to drink Coronas under one of the umbrellas in the tables on the patio.’ She was quiet for a minute, and then she said ‘Oh! THAT place. The one with the patio furniture outside.’ ‘Yeah! That’s it!’ ‘It closed down. About six years ago.’

—

Cuban-born writer and composer F.R. Martinezimmigrated to the U.S. as a result of the Cuban Revolution. He grew up in Miami then moved to New York City to attend the Juilliard School where he studied with David Diamond and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree. He went on to compose music for film, television, radio, and theater. He is the recipient of two Emmys (in conjunction with the writing team at Children’s Television Workshop, currently Sesame Workshop), and a Grammy for the Sesame Street album Elmopalooza in 1998, on which his song “Mambo I, I, I” is performed by Gloria Estefan. He worked with several other notables such as Cindy Lauper, Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Trini Lopez, and various Latino music stars of the late twentieth century. In 1998, along with writer Luis Santeiro, he was the recipient of the Richard Rodgers Award offered by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for the musical Barrio Babies. He worked for Disney on the show “Handy Manny” as a composer, completing background music and songs for 100 shows. “Handy Manny” was also nominated for an Emmy in 2009. With the Charleston Symphony Orchestra he worked on various projects including one for Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish fame. He’s been creating poetry and fiction since the age of twelve and has only returned to a more serious involvement with writing in recent years. In 2016, his poem “300 Min” received an Honorable Mention from PEN America. In the past five years, he has completed over a hundred poems and five novels as well as a number of short stories. He is looking to publish more fiction and poetry and would be grateful for sample copies of literary journals and submission guidelines. For his mailing address please contact insiderprize[at]americanshortfiction.org.

Two days ago, ATX, a five-foot-two pallid hispanic prisoner on our cell block in his mid- to late-twenties, got his throat slit with a razor from ear to ear. I was at the law library when it happened. I came back, and the officers were locking us all up in our cells while three prisoner janitors mopped blood off the floor. The bright sun and the smell of fresh air seemed miles behind me.

ATX had had a fistfight in the dayroom with Bubba, a fifty-sevenish bald-headed five-foot-seven clean shaven black man with another thirty years in prison, before I left to the law library. I caught the end of that fight when I came back to the cell block after lunch.

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Seeing Bubba exchange punches with ATX puzzled me because since I had moved in to the cell block two weeks before, Bubba had been polite, helpful, and respectable. He would life coach some of the men on the cell block. He was also an expert tailor. He had recently hemmed up my visitation pants. And I had been helping him identify some legal problems he had with his conviction. He complained about misidentification. I had written down some case citations for him so he could look into them.

ATX had only been on the cell block for about four days, but he too had been laid back and respectable. He and Bobby, who lived two cells down from ATX, had been exchanging ideas about God and the Bible.

The hispanic and black gang members in the dayroom (Tango Blast, Bloods, and Crips) were unsettled. There’s an unwritten G-Code on this building that the youngsters do not fight with older prisoners. ATX was violating that code. Bubba and ATX had had some kind of falling out in line in the chow hall. Bubba had accidentally bumped into ATX. ATX said, “You must think I’m some kinda ho!”

Bubba’s from the old school. He spent years in lockup for killing one of his cell mates. He couldn’t overlook ATX’s hostility.

ATX said, “If you fucked up about it, we can get under the TV and get that.” So they fought under the TV, and ATX got a good hit in and busted Bubba’s lip. After the fight, ATX kept bringing the issue up to other men on the cell block out loud. In doing so, he kept the fire burning. For the next three hours, Bubba told the men he wanted to cut ATX.

Those men tried over and over to talk Bubba out of it. Bubba wouldn’t listen. His mind was set. To make matters worse, with Bubba’s old school penitentiary mentality comes the idea that once you say you’re gonna do something , it’s like making a promise. And you gotta follow through with it. You gotta keep your word. Even if it doesn’t make any sense. Even on some shit like this. Never mind the fact that Bubba’s sister was talking to him about hiring a parole lawyer for him. That’s the old school penitentiary mentality. That’s what this system does to you.

Twenty years in prison is enough for a man to learn his lesson. Anything after that pushes you to the limit. The point of no return. If you’re not strong enough mentally, physically, and emotionally, the system turns you into a fully programmed machine. Bubba had reached that point.

These days, no one expects you to keep that kind of promise. Instead, they try to talk you out of it. The younger generation of experienced prisoners have to counsel the older, more experienced, more traumatized lifers. We have to carry the burden of trying to talk these men out of keeping those kinds of promises.

My neighbor Rudy was sitting next to ATX on the bench. Rudy told ATX, “Watch out because that old school’s gonna try to shank you.” ATX didn’t listen. He fell asleep on the bench while sitting down in front of the TV in the dayroom. Bubba snuck up behind ATX and slit his throat ear to ear.

ATX stood up and started walking around the dayroom talking shit. “I’m ready to die in here!” Blood leaked out of his neck and soaked into his white T-shirt. The gash on his Adam’s apple was wide enough and deep enough to stick the tip of your pinky into all the way past your pinky nail. “Somebody give me a blade!” No one did.

Yesterday, after Rudy and I finished working out, we got into a conversation under the stairs of the cell block about what happened. Me, Rudy, and Bobby. Rudy stands six-foot-one. He’s lanky, but physically fit. A hispanic thug out of San Antonio who recently told me that he used to inject into his veins a half an ounce of meth every day before he came to prison. He’s thirty years old. He has the San Antonio Spur emblem in the middle of his chest with Aztec Indian art all over the rest of his upper back. He will discharge a four-year sentence in eight months, and he complains that his lawyer fucked him over. His modus operandi is car theft rings.

Bobby is a five-foot-three white boy in his early forties with the body of a middleweight weight lifter. He’s got fifteen years in on a ninety-nine-year sentence for bank robbery. His brother-in-law testified against him at his trial. He’s a recent revert to Christianity and a recovering alcoholic with salt and pepper hair. His sister and two of his nieces were shot and killed in the mass church shooting at the baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017. His nephew was shot five times and lived. Another niece looked into the eyes of the killer and lived without a single gunshot wound. He told me yesterday that when his sister and the kids got shot, his sister covered his nieces with her body to protect them. He said, “She tried to cover their mouths so they wouldn’t make any noise. My sister was bigger than me. She wasn’t huge, but she was big boned.”

Me, I’m forty-one years old. Chicano brown skin. Thirteen years in on a sixty-year sentence with a murder conviction under the law of parties.

Rudy was sitting on the bottom flight of the stairs. He said he saw Bubba coming. He got up from the bench and shied away. He said, “I got up and left.” He cracked a slight smile. He had a shadow of guilt in his eyes. He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.

Bobby’s lips took the shape of a seagull in the distant sky back home in Corpus Christi, at the beach on North Padre Island. I saw parentheses at each end of his lips. His eyelids formed a straight line and almost halfway shut. His eyebrows curved up toward each other. He looked at Rudy with disappointment. Bobby said, ‘How would you like it if I got up and left you there to get your throat slit?”

Rudy said, “I told him to watch out. And what did he do? He went to sleep. Shit, Old School could’ve cut me! If I’d have got in, it would’ve started all kinds of shit. He shouldn’t have been fighting with that old school. And he should’ve listened to me when I warned him.”

I said, “He should’ve stayed in the cell. He was already in there. He shouldn’t have come back out.”

Bobby said, “I thought about trying to make peace between them. We all ate on the same table at chow. But Bubba was already with that mindset. He probably would have come after me. You saw the way he got after his own people for trying to get involved. I could’ve said something or tried to do something to prevent it.” He told us that Bubba had big-faced ATX in the chow hall. He concluded that he and Rudy had cowered by not intervening.

Unsure of what to say, I took a deep breath and rubbed my head. I looked down at my brown skin; at my threadbare tennis shoes; at the snake and dragon wrapped around my leg that I paid a thousand dollars for twenty years ago during the cocaine-dealing chapter of my life, at Axis Tattoo shop, in downtown Corpus Christi across from the Greyhound bus station, before U.S. District Judge Janice Graham Jack sent me to federal prison, where I lost my wife Iris to cocaine, meth, Xanax, and other men. I can still hear her in 2001, eighteen years ago, behind limo tint, singing to me in the passenger seat of the red Grand Am I bought her while I drove through palm trees past the million-dollar mansions on Ocean Drive on the way to our house with the sparkling salt water bay to our left. Serenity, our then one-year-old baby girl, our pageant prize and trophy winner, sat in the middle of the back seat in her car sucking on the nipple of an empty Enfamil bottle. I can still see Serenity’s long eyelashes curling up and her black button eyes, blinking. I can feel Iris’s smooth milky skin at my fingertips; her long reddish brown hair in between my fingers. I can still hear her sober million-dollar voice in my head. The only woman who’s ever called me handsome. “How will I live without you?” The song from Con Air. Her voice echoes in my memories. I remember thinking, My life is complete.

Bobby said, “We’re supposed to stop things like that from happening.”

Rudy said, “Fuck that!”

I said, “We gotta be prudent in what we do. It’s like being in a war. We gotta get out of here alive.”

Later on, I reflected on the conversation. I thought, It’s like a war in many respects. But not all. ATX was not a fellow soldier. We didn’t even know him. And he violated too many prison principles. But does that make him less human? Does that make him deserving of death? We gotta make sure that we get out of here alive. That’s a duty we owe our families and ourselves. If you were there, what would you have done? And don’t tell me you’d have told the officers. You don’t do that in prison. If you do, then you might be the one getting your throat slit. Besides, the officers want us to kill each other. Not all of them are like that, but it always seems like the worst ones are around at the worst times. They won’t do anything for us until the deed is done. Then they’ll throw it in our faces as if we proved them right.

Weeks later while I sat in my cell thinking about how to end this story, I thought about promises. How promises are so easily broken. I remembered being in federal prison and promising myself that I’d never come back to prison. I was released. Yet here I sit. I write. Some promises you just don’t keep.

—

Steven Reynaldo Perezwas born in Corpus Christi, Texas, on July 5, 1978. He is a member of the Pen City Writers inside team at the John B. Connally state prison in Kenedy, Texas, which was established and is led and taught by author Deb Olin Unferth of the University of Texas at Austin. Steven is a self-taught paralegal; a staunch prisoner advocate against unlawful convictions and sentences and mass incarceration; and an avid defender of prisoner rights. In 2019, he earned a creative writing fellowship from the U.T. Austin English Department. He is in his 14th year of a 60-year sentence.

Back in the age of the dinosaurs, which most consider around 1964:

My family and I lived in a small town called China, Texas. We had a huge rice farm/ranch operation with an average cattle count of fifteen-hundred head. We also had our cow horses (around twenty) and two Shetland ponies.

I was, at the time, around eight years old. My brother was eleven months younger than myself.

In my family, there were six kids, and at this time of year, in the dog-days of summer, us kids were not in school and pretty much had to make our own adventures manifest.

Read the Full Story

Mom had a new baby, another girl, and now there were four of them, with just the two boys, so the girls pretty much stayed in the house playing with Barbie dolls that had broken knees, for I couldn’t figure out how they worked. So, to make a long story short, my brother and I were pretty much exiled to the outside of the house to keep the peace. Besides, mom breast-fed, and we certainly didn’t want to see that; it was better this way because we got to play with our many dogs, and we killed water moccasins, which were in abundance because of the small rice field we had by the house. So my brother and I were guards of the ole homestead, terrors incarnate in the bodies of two rambunctious small boys.n other words, we were normal, mischievously under-supervised little boys doing what we considered fun.

My stepfather worked the big fields, and we had some chores that took place mainly if we were being watched closely, or if it had to do with our horses. We liked our horses.

We liked going out into the next pasture. Our house was surrounded on three sides with pastures, and rice fields.

The horses, or most of them, liked it when we went there. A couple of them always got special treatment. Blaze was my regular riding horse. A standard quarter horse mare with a white face and white socks, roan in color, a lustrous red, she knew that when she saw me, she was in for a good curry-combin’ and brushing, along with the sugar cubes that we gave those horses that would come to us.

Most were on to us. We went in the pasture with an empty bucket making them think we had sweet oats for them. When they got fooled a few times, only the sugar-addicted horses would stay for their rewards of sugar cubes, and yes, sweet oats, for my brother and I liked playing tricks on the horses. We only wanted to curry-comb the horses that liked us.

Of course, we made sure the water trough was filled. Playing with water in the hot summer days was fine with us, and when we got wet, who cared? That was our job.

Now the bigger horses were fun to mess with, but it was rare that we could saddle or ride one of the cow ponies without the help of our stepfather. Even though we rode them a lot, they weren’t kid horses, and when the saddles came out, it was work time for them, and they knew this. We did ride bareback at times, but this story isn’t about that.

We had two Shetland ponies, which this story is about, for they were the kid horses. They were for the girls, but we rode them more than anyone.

SugarBee was one of the most genial of creatures, and very tolerant of us. We liked her, she never tried to bite us. She liked sugar cubes, and to be combed as well as saddled and rode.

I don’t know where she came from, but she was such a sweetheart that even with two miscreants around her, her disposition rubbed off on us, and we always gave her special attention.

Frisky, though, was another matter. Frisky was an un-castrated cattle stud with a painted hide. He could have almost been an Indian Pony had his legs been longer. What he didn’t have in height, he had in malignity.

He would bite, he would kick, and step on feet with sharp little hooves as well as buck you off. . .if you could get on him that is. He was won by our neighbor during a raffle at a Catholic church fundraiser. When our neighbor came over to our place and just gave this critter to us to be rid of it, we knew that there had to be a good reason. I had to ear-hustle his conversation with my stepfather.

The neighbor was explaining how mean this pony was. He was also telling him that this horse didn’t like the sulky wagon, which basically is a seat with two wheels in it. You see harness racing with these wagons.

It seems Frisky waited for our neighbor to hook up this wagon, then, after he got in, the pony went into “stupid-gear” when the reins were snapped over his back. Frisky went to kicking, and bucking as well as snapping like a mad Chihuahua, then kicking the buggy until the neighbor fell off. The pony then kicked the light-weight wagon over his head, then backed out of the harness. He ran down old Highway 90, causing a cussing, winded foot race with the neighbor. Frisky now became ours, and with rascally glee I ran to tell my brother the good news.

Time would go on, and the summer dragged on. We had got Frisky in the spring, and got him used to us. I even rode him bareback, and was bit a couple of times, as well as had my toe stepped on, but he would come to us readily enough.

We kept these horses in the small field with the horse barn that had hundreds of mesquite and Chinaberry trees — which by the way, is where China, Texas gets its name.

One morning before it got too hot, my brother and I, like each day during the summer, were off and running full tilt into our shenanigans.

Being met at our front door by our mismatched pack of dogs (somewhere around fifteen of them) we headed off to the horse field.

Dogs were running all around, chasing rabbits, and finding snakes and killing them. My brother and I were just accepted members of the pack.

We went into the horse pasture, grabbed the bucket, and were able to get SugarBee to us, then Blaze, but the others weren’t falling for these two human pups’ tricks. It made us no difference, because we were just out and about trying to stay away from the stupid girls that always wanted to dress us up in dresses. No sir, we was off and running because both my brother and I knew to get caught by that female horde might mean my other ear was getting a needle driven through it. It was safer out with the snakes, nutria rats, gators, horses, and such.

When we had finished messing with SugarBee and Blaze, we saw Frisky wandering slowly toward us. I had a couple of sugar cubes left, so when he got to us we were able to comb him, which he liked, and he smelled the sweet oak bucket, but we hadn’t gotten that far yet.

Now horses aren’t known for their proper etiquette, so while we were treating this mean little fart with kindness, he of all things decided to pee on us. He just flowed the ole whiz-wand out and peed like a racehorse on us, causing it to splash all over both my and my brother’s feet and legs.

“Oh no you didn’t!”

Yes he did, and now my brother and I backed away from the flash flood this guy caused.

Oh yeah, the horns came out on both my brother’s and my head. In fields like this what we called crawdad holes were everywhere. Small towers of hard mud-balls that crayfish have erected were everywhere, and ready ammo for two pissed off, and pissed on, boys.

We, of course, started throwing these things at the pony. I know it was wrong, but being seven and eight years old in 1964, we didn’t care, for retribution was at hand.

The pony must have held all that water through the night just for us. He continued on while we threw small clods of mud at him surely aiming for the offending member.

What we didn’t see was that menacing look and evil, what looked like a smile I later remember seeing; which, come to think of it, looked more like a snarl.

With his ears laying back now, as we got closer to throw these mud clods, that little fart’s back feet started flying up. He kicked me in the arm, throwing me to the ground.

My brother was close to a barbed wire fence, and he got kicked over and over as he went under the fence. I jumped up, and found an old rotten stick, then whacked him, breaking the stick. He then started chasing me with blood in his eyes, kicking and snapping at my butt with those sharp horse teeth while I tried to find a faster gear to get in.

My brother chased after the horse, or Shetland pony, which is what he was. He grabbed the tail, getting another kick in the leg, while the horse spun around, I yelled for my brother to climb a Chinaberry tree that was close by. I also headed for our ethereal heaven.

This heathenish fiend saw both my brother and I was out of reach now, so he started cropping grass under the tree. My brother and I could just look at each other and laugh.

Oh no, it wasn’t over though. Each time the horse edged away, we would try to sneak down the tree, and Frisky would lay his ears back, then start bucking, and running back and forth under the tree, thus keeping us stranded up that Chinaberry tree for at least two hours, until he finally wandered away. We got down and ran out of the pasture. I wanted to get even with him for doing that to us, but he had got our attention.

We never threw dirt clods at him again, and we seemed to have some deep rooted respect for each other. I would ride him, and he would bite me, or step on my foot, and I’d push him off, limp a little, then get on. I kept a small switch handy.

We would leave a year or so later because Mom was looking for another life. She took us with her, but I’ll never forget when that wild pony ruled the day.

—

Timothy Bazrowx grew up in China, Texas, and his writing about life in prison and out was published by The Marshall Project, Prisons Foundation, and Uncaptive Voices. In April 2020, he died due to complications from COVID-19.

About the Organizers & this Year’s Judge

Emily Chammah and Maurice Chammah are assistant editors at American Short Fiction and co-direct the Insider Prize. Emily is a Fulbright Fellow, and the winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction can be found in The Common. Maurice is a staff writer at The Marshall Project, where he reports on the U.S. criminal justice system. His first book, Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty will be published by Crown Books in January.

Justin Torres has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, Glimmer Train, Flaunt, and other publications, as well as non-fiction pieces in publications like The Guardian and The Advocate. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Justin’s novel We the Animals has been translated into fifteen languages and was recently adapted into a film. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for five Independent Spirit Awards. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. The National Book Foundation named him one of the 2012’s 5 under 35. He was the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at UCLA.

#American Short Fiction

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foameye7-blog · 4 years

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Bodily Advertising Campaigns Have Been Actually Made Worthless.

What Is Actually Geared Through Digital Marketing?

When it involves recognizing what is actually meant by digital marketing, it is very important to bear in mind that there are plenty of various things that digital marketing is able to do for you. A great way to obtain a clear photo of just how this marketing is actually visiting benefit you is to utilize the copying of exactly how you could possibly make use of digital marketing in your very own service or even in your individual lifestyle. The benefits that you will certainly have the ability to acquire coming from digital marketing are also visiting arise from what type of marketing initiatives you are carrying out on the web in addition to the amount of funds you are willing to acquire marketing your organisation.

The primary thing that is visiting be performed when digital marketing is utilized is to provide your firm or on your own high quality customer information. This can be carried out through including client assessments as well as acquiring client testimonials. This is something that will certainly need to be actually done regularly, yet it will assist a whole lot to receive a strong bottom to create your organisation. As a matter of fact, often times individuals are going to start to give feedback on their clients that they may certainly not like due to the fact that it is going to help to give a far better customer support knowledge to every person involved.

The next trait that is going to be performed with digital marketing is actually to utilize it to bring in brand-new customers to your business. This is actually heading to be actually performed by acquiring words out that your company is making changes to create them take place. You will definitely desire to make sure that you supply rewards including totally free examples and free of charge gifts so as to make it possible for individuals to view for themselves what is actually great about your company. Once they have made their acquisition, it is visiting be the aspect of return for all of them to keep going back as well as purchasing additional products.

Next off, consumers are mosting likely to need to know what they may do to create their purchasing adventure less complicated. Digital marketing is actually mosting likely to help to transform that through using tips about what you can do if you want to produce the shopping adventure simple. With only a simple click, you will definitely have the ability to discover exactly how to make the buying expertise also simpler.

Last but not least, you are going to would like to see to it that you use your clients support for questions that they may possess. This is actually heading to be performed with online client assistance which may be accessed from your website. If your customers are asking concerns, you will definitely intend to have the capacity to give them with the responses that they need to have to be sure that they manage to move forward with their investment.

Yet another factor that is heading to be actually utilized by digital marketing is actually to gain references. This could be carried out by utilizing sites like referralscafe.com as well as digitalmarketingpros.com. These web sites will certainly enable you to obtain these references and they will be actually really devoted customers that are willing to recommend others to your business.

The last thing that is actually heading to be actually finished with digital marketing is to establish a partnership with your consumers. In this particular case, you will definitely want to have the capacity to recognize what is actually taking place to them individually. This is something that will certainly operate in that you may be able to stay in contact along with your clients and give them ideas and ideas that they can use along with receive them associated with one thing that they have an interest in.

Keep in mind that when you are looking at what is meant by digital marketing, you will definitely intend to see to it that you have the ability to obtain each of the above components benefiting you. It is actually always visiting be necessary to utilize every one of the various information that are actually on call in order that you can ensure that you manage to be the very best in your market.

What SEO Means

What SEO suggests resides in brief, seeing to it that the whole website as well as certainly not just a small area of it is optimized for the search engines. This can be done by utilizing web links coming from higher web page rank web sites to give your web site a really good rank in the internet search engine. A website ought to be maximized for different categories to ensure that each type will certainly offer you various kinds of key words. You also have to enhance each webpage in order that your website will obtain crawled much faster as well as at the same time, will definitely get indexed faster too. Likewise, if kijk hier are actually using information composing for your web site, you need to include keyword phrases in each your short articles so that they may be conveniently recorded due to the search engines.

Likewise, you must use the keyword padding approach if you want to create your site crawler pleasant and are going to make it very simple for the online search engine to mark it. Meta tags may be made use of in your web link tags as well as your labels. Keyword phrases are actually all over your website to provide it a good appearing internet site to ensure that it may easily be actually crawled. All this need to be adhered to by various other SEO methods like article submission and keyword padding in blogs, discussion forums. All these approaches need to be actually adequately executed if you want to create your site ranking higher in the online search engine.

By administering SEO in your website, it is going to definitely assist you to rate high in the online search engine. But, there are few things that you must consider to make sure that you will definitely have the ability to do it ideal as well as your website are going to place higher in the search engines.

When folks think of what is actually SEO as well as just how it operates, a number of all of them are actually stunned to know that it really functions in an extremely simple way. This is actually certainly not a difficult technique that will definitely need any individual to devote manies dollars to create. This is actually not something that only a specialist are going to have the capacity to carry out. This is actually an approach that is actually utilized through 1000s of folks each day to get end results as quickly as feasible.

Seo, also referred to as SEO, can be broken down into three various areas. These three different factors will be actually utilized to obtain the best results for an individual. One of these 3 different techniques is actually phoned keyword research study. Keyword investigation is the procedure of locating the very best key words that the person are going to be using when composing their article. The other 2 strategies of SEO are actually more involved yet one of the most significant of these is actually link building.

SEO could be perplexing however it is not difficult to know. It is among the best important think about the results of a person that intends to create a post. All of the relevant information that has actually been delivered right here should provide anybody a better understanding of what SEO is actually as well as just how it functions. Any individual who is anticipating trying to acquire their write-ups out into the planet as well as generating cash ought to recognize each one of the crucial things that they require to find out about this procedure.

What Are SEO Capabilities? Just How Can I Calculate What Are Actually SEO Abilities?

Exactly how can I identify what are actually SEO skills? There are a number of SEO software program available out there, yet they all claim to be the most ideal, and also each of them is actually offered through firms who have actually remained in your business for long. All the instruction given along with these software resources is nominal, and nobody provides you a detailed strategy. All you receive is a lengthy checklist of resources as well as guides, and that's it. You do not receive all the know-how concerning just how to make use of these devices, and also most of the guides and also resources are developed along with little bit of or even no care about your certain requirements.

If you wish to achieve success in marketing your website, after that you must understand what are SEO capabilities? Initially, you must find out about the significance of key phrases in SEO. It's important to know that key words participate in a significant task in your website's effectiveness. Key words participate in an essential function considering that online search engine consider them when they're trying to recognize your website's function, so they position your website based upon the use of key phrases in your web site information and also on the headline tag of each page.

Along with suitable SEO, your website will have the capacity to rate in the best 10 end results for a key words that is essential to your website. The second trait is your aim of possessing an one-of-a-kind headline tag and unique web deal with. Duplicate material is never ever suitable for your web site. Because internet search engine only check if a website includes new and special web content, helping make duplicate material will definitely not aid you position higher. For search phrases, use anchor text message web links that point to your articles as well as material.

youtube

What is Hyperlink Building SEO?

Online marketing (SEO) is the procedure of boosting a website's positions in online search engine leads web pages (SERPs). It is an important step for businessmen to optimize their sites and also take advantage of all search engine optimization (SEO) methods. SEO helps to boost a website's direct exposure and additionally delivers the chance to enhance website visitor traffic. SEO fulfills pair of objectives: first, it targets prospective customers to your site; as well as 2nd, it raises the variety of links that lead your visitors to various other web sites. The general results of your web site depends upon the means you use key phrases as well as crucial words in your headline tag, in your body system content of your page and also in the Links. Key phrases are essential considering that they can easily say to an internet search engine what your internet site concerns.

Connect Building is an important portion of SEO. It includes developing links that visit your internet site or URL, which are going to direct visitor traffic to your site. The best type of hyperlink property is a reciprocatory hyperlink. A reciprocatory link is actually one that guides a customer to one more website coming from all yours. You may additionally have incoming links through blog and also article directory sites.

You can conveniently develop links by participating in online forums, publishing your posts in different post directories and also providing your web link to post marketing discussion forums. Writing a blog may additionally be a great source of link building. Additionally, you can easily have inbound web links through discussion forums, discussion forums with high quality material, online forums with the really good voting system, as well as from individual blogging sites. These are simply some of the methods which you can easily build hyperlinks. Utilizing SEO methods is crucial. Do certainly not cease at developing links to your web site. You ought to consistently be optimizing your website.

Exactly how Perform I Become an AdWords Expert? - A Quick guide For Beginners

Just how perform I end up being an AdWords expert? This inquiry can be responded to by checking out what makes a prosperous search marketing project. The expert pays out additional focus to their AdWords initiatives. While your target is actually to drive visitor traffic to the web site, the expert chooses which hyperlinks need to go to each user and also exactly how they wish the guest to click on these web links.

What makes it an AdWords procedure is actually the AdWords individual pays for a lot less attention to this sort of initiative than to a ppc (Pay Per Click) initiative. The significant distinction between the two is that the Pay Per Click campaigns are actually automated. The AdWords projects are not. The method entails opting for which add links most likely to which users and enhancing those advertisements based on the keyword phrases and the website visitor's web browser style. The ppc user has to always remember to connect on their own to the appropriate adds.

Furthermore, there are a lot of factors you need to have to consider when you start out with AdWords. First, you need to consider the hunt conditions you would like to make use of and also choose some that will draw in the guests who hunt for these phrases. You additionally need to make sure that the website is actually as visitor-friendly as feasible. By design, you do not wish visitors who may not be thinking about what you have to deliver to go elsewhere. Second, it is actually important that you find out which key words need to be your target audience. At that point, you need to have to make use of the appropriate keyword device to find out what form of internet sites have these terms and how many of all of them possess a great deal of web traffic. Finally, you likewise need to identify which advertisement groups are well matched for your website.

Just How Can Marketing Improve Your Company?

There are many meanings for the condition "digital marketing." Many individuals make use of the condition in an even more general feeling to define any marketing that entails a pc system and the world wide web. The web is actually the base of what a person carries out daily; as a result, it is essential that the person knows how to market properly making use of the net.

People today have actually ended up being extra highly intelligent as well as recognize that they can easily generate cash offering online consumer products. One of the most usual strategy of marketing is to offer to individuals that wish to get the products you are actually marketing.

Many of the benefit from an online company will certainly come from customers who acquire goods and also companies. A number of the standard approaches of internet marketing feature offering a product and services via a website, utilizing seo procedures, and producing top quality information on your website. Furthermore, the essence of marketing through the net is actually to steer as much visitor traffic to the website as possible.

Before opting for exactly how to enhance your business's image, it is important to understand what is actually indicated through digital marketing. This includes all kinds of marketing advertising that entail online promo. Digital marketing likewise incorporates marketing such things via a web gateway like eBay, to ensure clients can view what is actually accessible, proposal on the thing, and after that purchase it. Digital marketing likewise features marketing your business via e-mail e-newsletters, social media sites, as well as website forums.

The very first step in digital marketing is to figure out what is suggested through digital marketing as well as develop a tactic for its own application. To accomplish this, you require to acquire details coming from others who are actually taken part in the process. A qualified expert is going to assist you determine how to apply your concepts and put together a budget the venture.

Most people who possess an on the web organisation will definitely not also think about carrying out digital marketing tactics. However, there are numerous services that fail simply considering that they carry out not know just how to strengthen their graphic and also their sales. These services stop working considering that they carry out certainly not recognize the value of a premium photo; therefore, they neglect in offering their items.

If you are a business person, you must know truth capacity of marketing via the net. You need to realize that to market the goods you are marketing, you should have the capacity to create purchases as well as improve the value of your business. Without recognizing this reality, you will certainly remain to be disheartened with failure.

It is feasible to discover exactly how to raise your market share by means of digital marketing if you wish to come to be an effective entrepreneur. All you need to have to accomplish is to request for the details that is needed to have, set up a budget, and also established a program to accomplish effectiveness.

What is actually WordPress Web Design? Learn What WordPress is actually

What is actually WordPress web design? Do lots of people question what is actually WordPress web design? For those that are not familiar with the term, WordPress is actually a complimentary blogging platform that is being used on the Internet. It resembles a blog post in a standard means, yet it possesses many additional attributes and also features, as well as it is one of the best prominent blogging systems on call today. Today, the majority of internet sites utilize WordPress, because it is easy to put in, easy to use, as well as really easy to use.

Thus, what is actually WordPress website design? One of the greatest perks of making use of WordPress is actually that it is uncomplicated. Considering that WordPress is pretty brand new on the net, most web designers perform not have a great idea regarding just how to create a website from square one. WordPress could be set up to make the procedure easy. Having said that, there are actually also lots of "cheats" accessible for beginners, as well as they can supply some support. If you wish to learn more regarding producing a WordPress website, there are actually several guides on call online that educate you all you need to find out about how to make a website in WordPress. The very best means to begin is by selecting a template considering that the template are going to offer you a concept of what you may get out of a WordPress website.

What is actually WordPress web design? Another advantage of making use of WordPress is that it is compatible with several CMSs. WordPress is compatible with Drupal, Joomla, and also various other open-source CMSs. It is additionally very easy to include plugins to WordPress, that makes it simpler to add brand new functions to the website. Having said that, if you pick to make use of a customized design template, you can simply include functions to the website as well as customize it to your requirements.

#SEO service #SEO bedrijf #beste SEO bedrijf #zoekmachineoptimalisatie

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squashhelium5-blog · 4 years

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Development Hacking For 2020: 42 Simple, Must-use Digital Marketing Methods To Electrical Power Your Company.

What Is Actually Destined Through Digital Marketing?

When it comes to knowing what is suggested through digital marketing, it is necessary to always remember that there are actually a lot of various things that digital marketing is able to do for you. A good way to get a clear photo of just how this marketing is going to help you is to make use of the following examples of just how you might make use of digital marketing in your personal organisation or even in your personal life. The perks that you will certainly have the ability to acquire coming from digital marketing are additionally going to arise from what type of marketing efforts you are actually performing on the internet and also the amount of loan you want to acquire marketing your business.

The very first thing that is going to be actually done when digital marketing is actually made use of is to provide your provider or even your own self excellent quality client information. This could be done by including client testimonials and also obtaining client endorsements. This is something that is going to must be actually performed regularly, but it will definitely help a whole lot to get a sound foundation to build your service. As a matter of fact, sometimes individuals are going to begin to provide reviews on their consumers that they might certainly not as if due to the fact that it will assist to give a much better customer care expertise to every person involved.

The following factor that is heading to be done with digital marketing is actually to utilize it to attract brand new consumers to your service. This is heading to be performed by obtaining words out that your provider is making changes so as to make them occur. You are going to desire to ensure that you give motivations such as free samples as well as free of charge presents in order to permit individuals to find for themselves what is great concerning your service. Once they have actually made their investment, it is visiting be the point of yield for them to maintain returning and also purchasing even more items.

Next off, customers are going to like to know what they can possibly do to create their shopping adventure much easier. Digital marketing is heading to help to alter that by providing suggestions about what you can possibly do if you want to produce the buying expertise very easy. Along with simply a straightforward click on, you will be able to know just how to make the purchasing expertise also easier.

Last but not least, you will wish to make certain that you give your consumers sustain for concerns that they might have. This is actually visiting be actually made with on the internet client help which could be accessed from your website. If your clients are actually asking questions, you are going to desire to have the ability to give them along with the responses that they need to make sure that they are able to move forward along with their purchase.

An additional point that is visiting be actually utilized through digital marketing is to obtain references. This can be done by using sites like referralscafe.com and also digitalmarketingpros.com. These internet sites will definitely allow you to get these recommendations as well as they will certainly be actually very loyal clients that are willing to recommend others to your company.

The final factor that is actually visiting be finished with digital marketing is to create a relationship with your customers. Within this scenario, you are going to desire to manage to recognize what is actually happening to all of them individually. This is something that will definitely work in that you can be able to remain in touch with your clients and provide suggestions and also ideas that they may make use of and also get all of them associated with one thing that they want.

Keep in mind that when you are considering what is actually implied by digital marketing, you will wish to make certain that you are able to get each one of the above components working with you. It is always heading to be important to utilize all of the different sources that are readily available to ensure that you can be sure that you are able to be actually the greatest in your sector.

What SEO Way

What SEO means resides in brief, making certain that the entire website and not merely a small area of it is actually enhanced for the online search engine. This can be performed by using links from higher web page position websites to give your site a great ranking in the internet search engine. A site needs to be optimized for various types to ensure that each category will certainly provide you different sorts of keywords. You also need to maximize each web page to make sure that your website are going to acquire crept much faster and also all at once, are going to obtain listed faster too. Additionally, if you are making use of content writing for your web site, you need to consist of search phrases in each your write-ups in order that they can be quickly catalogued by the search engines.

Additionally, you need to use the keyword stuffing strategy to make your website crawler helpful as well as will make it incredibly effortless for the search engines to index it. Meta tags can be utilized in your link tags and your headlines. Search phrases are all over your website to give it a wonderful looking website in order that it may easily be crept. All this ought to be actually followed by other SEO methods like article submitting and keyword filling in blog posts, discussion forums. All these approaches have to be actually appropriately executed to make your website rank high in the internet search engine.

Through administering SEO in your website, it will certainly help you to rate higher in the internet search engine. However, there are few points that you have to always remember to ensure you are going to manage to do it right as well as your website will rank high in the internet search engine.

When folks consider what is actually SEO and also how it works, many of them are actually startled to learn that it actually does work in an incredibly easy technique. This is actually not an intricate strategy that is going to demand anyone to invest dozens dollars if you want to produce. This is not something that simply a specialist are going to have the ability to perform. This is actually a strategy that is utilized through lots of individuals daily in order to get outcomes as rapidly as feasible.

Online Marketing, also referred to as SEO, could be malfunctioned in to 3 various parts. These 3 various factors are going to be utilized to receive the most ideal results for someone. One of these 3 different techniques is actually phoned keyword research study. Key words study is the process of discovering the best key phrases that the individual will definitely be actually utilizing when creating their post. The other two strategies of SEO are a lot more involved but the absolute most vital of these is web link building.

SEO may be perplexing however it is actually simple to understand. It is among one of the most crucial factors in the results of an individual who wishes to write a short article. Each of the info that has been delivered below must give any individual a far better understanding of what SEO is actually as well as how it operates. Any individual that is actually intending on making an effort to obtain their short articles out into the planet and also earning money should know every one of the crucial points that they need to know about this approach.

What Are SEO Abilities? Just How Can I Establish What Are Actually SEO Capabilities?

Exactly how can I identify what are actually SEO skills? There are actually numerous SEO software application on call out there, yet they all assert to be the very best, as well as each of all of them is actually marketed through companies that have been in the business for long. All the instruction offered along with these software application resources is actually nominal, and also nobody provides you an extensive plan of action. All you obtain is a lengthy listing of tools and also manuals, and also's it. You don't get all the expertise concerning how to use these tools, and also most of the manuals as well as tools are actually created along with little or no love your details requirements.

If you desire to achieve success in marketing your website, then you must know what are actually SEO skills? Initially, you should learn about the value of key words in SEO. It is necessary to understand that key words play a huge job in your website's excellence. Key phrases participate in a significant duty given that online search engine consider all of them when they're attempting to understand your website's reason, so they place your website based upon the use of key words in your site web content and on the headline tag of each page.

Along with proper SEO, your website will definitely have the capacity to rate in the top 10 outcomes for a key phrase that is necessary to your website. The 2nd trait is your aim of possessing a distinct title tag and also distinct web address. Wordpress is actually certainly never suitable for your website. Since internet search engine only check if a web site includes new as well as one-of-a-kind information, producing duplicate information will definitely certainly not assist you rank high. For keyword phrases, utilize anchor message links that lead to your write-ups as well as web content.

youtube

What is actually Hyperlink Structure SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is actually the process of boosting a website's positions in search engine results webpages (SERPs). It is a critical measure for small business owner to enhance their web sites and capitalize on all search engine optimization (SEO) methods. SEO aids to improve a website's visibility and additionally gives the chance to raise website web traffic. SEO serves pair of reasons: first, it targets potential consumers to your web site; and 2nd, it increases the lot of backlinks that lead your website visitors to various other websites. The overall success of your web site relies on the method you use keywords and crucial words in your headline tag, in your physical body text of your page and also in the URLs. Keywords are vital considering that they can say to a search engine what your site concerns.

Link Structure is actually a crucial part of SEO. It includes developing links that most likely to your internet site or even LINK, which will definitely route traffic to your site. The most ideal form of hyperlink property is a reciprocal web link. A reciprocatory web link is actually one that guides a user to one more website from your own. You can easily additionally possess incoming web links through article and also write-up listings.

You can conveniently develop hyperlinks through joining discussion forums, publishing your articles in various article directories as well as sending your hyperlink to write-up marketing online forums. Blogging may also be an excellent source of hyperlink property. Additionally, you can easily have inbound links through discussion forums, discussion forums with high-grade content, forums with the good ballot device, and coming from personal weblogs. These are simply several of the ways in which you can develop hyperlinks. Utilizing SEO approaches is essential. Perform not cease at developing web links to your site. You should always be actually optimizing your website.

Just how Do I End Up Being an AdWords Expert? - An Overview For Beginners

Just how do I become an AdWords expert? This concern may be addressed through checking out what makes a prosperous hunt marketing project. The expert pays more focus to their AdWords campaigns. While your objective is actually to steer traffic to the site, the expert determines which web links must go to each consumer and how they desire the website visitor to click these hyperlinks.

What makes it an AdWords process is actually the AdWords individual pays for much less focus to this sort of initiative than to a pay per click (PPC) initiative. The large variation between the 2 is that the PPC initiatives are actually automated. The AdWords initiatives are not. The procedure entails selecting which ad hyperlinks go to which individuals and improving those advertisements based upon the keywords and also the visitor's browser type. The pay per click user needs to remember to link themselves to the correct advertisements.

In addition, there are actually a considerable amount of factors you need to have to bear in mind when you begin along with AdWords. To begin with, you need to have to think about the hunt terms you want to utilize and select some that would bring in the site visitors who seek these terms. You likewise require to be sure that the site is as visitor-friendly as achievable. By design, you don't yearn for site visitors that aren't curious about what you must supply to go elsewhere. Second, it is crucial that you find out which search phrases ought to be your target audience. Then, you need to have to utilize the best search phrase tool to find out what kind of web sites possess these conditions as well as how many of all of them possess a lot of web traffic. Lastly, you also need to have to identify which add groups are well satisfied for your website.

Just How Can Marketing Improve Your Service?

There are lots of significances for the phrase "digital marketing." Many individuals utilize the phrase in an extra basic sense to explain any marketing that involves a personal computer system as well as the net. The net is the structure of what a person does on a daily basis; consequently, it is essential that the individual recognizes just how to industry efficiently using the internet.

People today have actually ended up being more scientifically smart as well as recognize that they can easily make money offering on-line buyer items. The absolute most popular method of marketing is to market to people that would like to purchase the items you are offering.

A lot of the benefit from an on the web business will certainly originate from consumers who purchase goods as well as companies. A number of the standard methods of internet marketing feature supplying a product and services through a website, making use of online marketing approaches, and producing top quality information on your website. Furthermore, the core of marketing with the internet is to steer as a lot visitor traffic to the website as possible.

Prior to picking exactly how to strengthen your business's image, it is necessary to know what is actually suggested through digital marketing. This entails all forms of marketing marketing that involve on-line promotion. Digital marketing also includes marketing such items via a web gateway such as ebay.com, to make sure that consumers can easily view what is offered, proposal on the item, and after that obtain it. Digital marketing likewise features promoting business with email e-newsletters, social media sites websites, and also website forums.

The very first step in digital marketing is to find out what is indicated through digital marketing as well as create an approach for its application. To accomplish this, you need to compile info from others that are actually participated in the procedure. A specialist expert is going to aid you establish how to execute your concepts as well as put together a budget for the task.

Most individuals who possess an on the web business will certainly certainly not also consider implementing digital marketing techniques. Having said that, there are several organisations that stop working simply considering that they perform not know exactly how to improve their photo and also their sales. These organisations neglect due to the fact that they carry out not comprehend the market value of a premium graphic; therefore, they neglect in selling their products.

If you are a businessman, you have to know the true possibility of marketing by means of the internet. You have to discover that to market the goods you are offering, you need to have the capacity to produce purchases as well as enhance the market value of your provider. Without comprehending this truth, you will definitely continue to be disheartened along with breakdown.

It is achievable to know how to improve your market reveal through digital marketing if you intend to become a productive business person. All you require to perform is to request for the details that is actually needed to have, established a finances, as well as established a strategy to obtain success.

What is actually WordPress Web Design? Discover What WordPress is

What is WordPress web design? Perform many people ponder what is WordPress web design? For those that are actually certainly not accustomed to the condition, WordPress is actually a free writing a blog system that is being actually made use of online. It resembles a blogging site in a standard method, but it has several extra attributes and also functionalities, and also it is among the best well-known blogging platforms readily available today. Today, a lot of web sites make use of WordPress, because it is actually simple to set up, easy to make use of, as well as incredibly user-friendly.

So, what is actually WordPress web design? Some of the largest perks of utilization WordPress is that it is actually user-friendly. Due to the fact that WordPress is reasonably brand new online, most web designers carry out not possess a great tip regarding how to develop a website from square one. WordPress could be configured to make the method very easy. Nevertheless, there are actually likewise several "cheats" accessible for beginners, and also they may supply some aid. If you wish to discover more regarding developing a WordPress website, there are lots of quick guides offered online that show you all you need to have to find out about how to create a website in WordPress. The most effective technique to start is actually by picking a template because the layout will certainly give you a tip of what you can easily get out of a WordPress website.

What is actually WordPress web design? One more advantage of utilization WordPress is that it works with many CMSs. WordPress is compatible along with Drupal, Joomla, and also various other open-source CMSs. It is actually likewise very easy to incorporate plugins to WordPress, which makes it much easier to add brand-new functions to the website. Nonetheless, if you pick to make use of a custom-made template, you can easily add performance to the website and personalize it to your necessities.

#SEO service #SEO bedrijf #beste SEO bedrijf #zoekmachineoptimalisatie

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weekendwarriorblog · 5 years

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Welcome to Awards Season Part 2 – The Movies 2019 (Chapter 1)

Hopefully, you’ve already read Part 1 of this semi-weekly series and already know some of the players when awards season begins in early December. A few of them have already announced their awards for the year.

I was going to use this second installment to talk about the various Oscar categories and what they signify or represent, and how they are selected, but that can clearly wait until January. Instead, I’m going to get into some of the movies being bandied about this awards season, and there seems to be more than ever.

Mind you, this won’t be one of those, “These are my eight to ten picks to get nominated for Best Picture,” since you can keep track of that over at GoldDerby, even if my reasons and analysis aren’t listed. I may do something akin to that closer to January once we get some precursors. (See Part 1.)

In each section, I’m going to list the movies in alphabetical order but I’m also going to give a number to each in terms of its Oscar potential. While I’ll talk a little about some of the factors in play for each movie, I’m going to try to not get too deeply into the performances, since that will be saved for a future installment. I’m also going to leave off the desire to talk about animated films or documentaries much, even though the latter is definitely one of my specialties – the former, not so much.

SUNDANCE FAVES

Even before the Oscar nominations are announced for the previous year, the movie biz kicks into high gear with the movies that will be talked about over the next year with the annual trip to Park City, Utah for the newest independent films, including from many who have already established themselves at Sundances past.

Plenty of Sundance premieres have gone onto get awards (or at least nominations) on Oscar night including Little Miss Sunshine, Precious,Beasts of the Southern Wild, Winter’s Bone (whatever happened to that “Jennifer Lawrence” girl?) and more, but it feels like every year, it gets tougher and tougher to make it through the whole year, especially when movies are released during the summertime.

Clemency (NEON) (5)

It’s almost hard to believe that Chinonye Chukwu’s prison drama, her second movie, premiered all the way back in January, because distributor NEON (who is having a fantastic year!) is waiting until the very tail end of December to release it. The movie stars Alfre Woodard as a prison warden who is trying to juggle her own domestic issues with the impending execution of an inmate, played by Aldis Hodges (who was also excellent in the overlooked Brian Banks). Both performances are solid, having already gotten a few Gotham and Independent Spirit nominations.

Late Night (Amazon) (3)

This Mindy Kaling comedy vehicle, which she wrote and stars with the always wonderful Dame Emma Thompson is a fantastic example of films that come out of Sundance that are based on personal stories but told in an entertaining way. This comedy about Kaling’s character becoming a bit of a diversity hire in the writers’ room for a legendary late night talk show host (played by Thompson) comes from out of Kaling’s time as an intern for Conan O’Brien. It’s a wonderful and very entertaining film, although Amazon hasn’t been supporting its award chances by sending out screeners, maybe since it only made $15.5 million in its early summer theatrical run despite getting a wide release. I really like this movie a lot and in any other year, Kaling’s screenplay would get recognized – it really should have been this year’s The Big Sick*– but at this point, its best bet is a Golden Globe comedy nod for Thompson. (*Remember how everyone thought Holly Hunter would get an Oscar nomination for this that year?)

The Farewell (A24) (8)

Lulu Wang’s family dramedy based on her own true story (or based on a lie, going by the opening title) is easily one of the year’s best films. The movie burst into Sundance with many raving about the performance by Awkwafina and Chinese vet Shuzhen Zhao, who are both wonderful, but I’m not the only person who absolutely loves this movie, which I expect to do decently among critics groups. It also has that personal thing of The Big Sick,but it’s also a movie set mostly in China, mostly in Mandarin, yet it still has found a fairly wide appeal among moviegoers despite only making slightly more than Late Nightin theaters, peaking in less than 900 theaters. Wisely, A24 is giving this another seasonal push with Wang and Awkwafina doing the rounds, which will guarantee awards voters check out those screeners. It’s a wonderful movie with a fantastic script, and hopefully its support at the Gothams and (less so) at the Independent Spirits will help its Oscar chances.

The Report (Amazon) (4)

Frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator Scott Z Burns’ second feature as a director took on the CIA’s use of torture techniques to get info out of Iraqi detainees, which makes it a pretty serious film. Many people at Sundance were raving about the performances by Adam Driver as Daniel Jones, the man writing the report for years, and Annette Bening as Senator Dianne Feinstein, more than for the overall movie. The Reportjust hit Amazon Prime a few weeks after its so-so theatrical showing. (Actually, Amazon took a cue from Netflix and didn’t REPORT (rimshot) its box office.) I feel like Driver’s performance in Marriage Story(see below) has been taking away from this equally great performance and Bening’s performance while great as always isn’t too groundbreaking. In any other year, Burns’ fantastic screenplay would get attention and maybe the WGA will do so, but it’s playing in a tough adapted screenplay year.

Beyond those four films mentioned above, there are also a lot of strong docs that premiered at Sundance and will go all the way to Oscar night, as well as a number of genre films, some which will become popular favorites but not necessarily be in the awards conversation.

CANNES SHENANIGANS

(Actually, there were no actual shenanigans, but it rhymed, so the subtitle sticks!)

As the summer movie season begins in May, the Cannes Film Festival brings many industry insiders to the beach-side Croisette to see some of the fanciest world premiere galas of the year. I personally have never been but it sure looks like a nice working vacation.

There are quite a few strong festivals in between Sundance and Cannes: Berlin, SXSW and Tribeca being three, but to date, they haven’t proven to be particularly strong for delivering Oscar winners or even nominees. Movies like Olivia Wilde’s Book Smart, which premiered at the middle of the three, has proven popular among younger critics but just didn’t take off at the box office

Cannes is another story, and again, in alphabetical order, this year’s festival presented…

Atlantiques/Atlantics (Netflix) (2)

Mati Diop’s feature narrative debut left Cannes with the Grand Prix award, which got it a lot more attention with its look at a love affair between a construction worker and a 17-year-old promised to another man. This is Senegal’s selection for the International Film category, and it has a good chance of getting into the shortlist and nominations, although probably not into other categories persé. It will be interesting to see if this can win any of the critics’ awards in the foreign language category over Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. The New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC) just awarded it as a debut feature, so that’s a start.

The Lighthouse (A24) (3)

There was a lot of buzz out of Cannes for Robert Eggers’ follow-up to his horror-thriller The VVitch, this one a two-hander starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as two men taking care of a remote lighthouse where they get stranded as they both start to go insane. (Actually, Dafoe’s character is already halfway there, which might be why his performance is a likely awards contender.) It’s a weird movie that certainly has its fans but it really will need some critical support this week to be taken seriously for anything other than another Dafoe nomination.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (NEON) (3)

This French drama from Céline Sciamma (Girlhood) about a lesbian love affair between a painter and her subject found a lot of fans at Cannes and subsequent festivals. Many of the film’s fans were upset when France decided to go with Les Misérablesfor its “International Film” selection, and it’s hard to think that this French film will do very well except among critics. The only problem is that it will continually be competing against Parasitein the Foreign Language category, and the best it can do is maybe get a Golden Globe nomination. The New York Film Critics Circlejust awarded it a Cinematography award, so maybe that’s somewhere it might get more attention, but more likely, it’s in the same boat as Atlantics.

A Hidden Life (Fox Searchlight) (4)

Terrence Malick’s latest film debuted at Cannes out of competition, and oddly, it didn’t get nearly as much attention as his previous few films, although it’s amazing how prolific he’s been in the last decade since last being in the awards race in 2011 for The Tree of Life. Not all his movies since then have been great, and he’s made a few forays into documentary, but A Hidden Lifeis a real return to form in terms of dramatic filmmaking. It takes place during World War II when an Austrian farmer refuses to hail allegiance to Hitler and though it’s long at three hours, it certainly is beautiful, and the Academy has frequently gushed over Holocaust films, which this is. It should get some attention for its Cinematography, and we’ll have to see if it might get other awards.

Les Misérables (Amazon) (3)

Ladj Ly’s French police thriller proved that #BlackLivesMatter is not just a United States phenomenon, as it follows a trio of police officers who get involved with the attack on a young boy in the projects and the attempted cover-up. It’s a movie that’s maybe not one that people might think of an “Oscar movie” but France did pick it as its selection in the “International Film” category, and we’ll have to see how much of a push Amazon will give this over its English narrative films. Again, we’ll have to see how things shake out once the Golden Globes announces if it made their own foreign language category.

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (Sony) (10)

One of the big Cannes World Premieres and a huge coup for the festival was getting previous winner and jury leader Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film quite a few months before its July theatrical debut by Sony Pictures. Every Tarantino release is a bit event, but this one reunited him with Django Unchained’s Leonardo DiCaprio and Inglourious Basterds’ Brad Pitt, except that this time they were both playing much larger roles. It also brought on Oscar-nominated starlet Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, and as you can guess, it took place in Hollywood in 1969 revolving around the time of the famous Tate-LaBianca murders by the Charles Manson family. This was another true original from Tarantino that has been well-marketed by Sony to gross $141 million domestically and another $230.9 million overseas. That’s more than Basterdsbut just behind Django, although the film’s Cannes debut vs. Oscar chances shouldn’t be a shock when you realize that both Pulp Fiction and Basterdsdebuted there on their way to the Oscars.

Pain and Glory (Sony Classics) (6)

Pedro Almodovar’s latest film entered the Cannes competition and walked away with a Best Actor award for its star and Almodovar’s frequent leading man Antonio Banderas, who is thought to be in the Oscar race for Lead Actor. (More on him in the next installment.) But the movie itself was such a remarkable comeback for Almodovar who hasn’t been in the Oscar race since 2003’s Talk to Her, although the film’s other star, Penelope Cruz, whose first Oscar nomination was for Almodovar’s 2007 film Volver. There’s always hopes that Almodovar will once again be nominated for his original screenplay (which is excellent) or direction, but those are both crowded fields this year. It’s a shame because this really is among Almodovar’s best films and the NYFCC picking Banderas as their Best Actor gives the actor a nice boost at the start of awards season.

Parasite (NEON) (9)

Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho’s sixth feature film burst into Cannes much like the impoverished family in the movie who wheels and deals their way into the home of a wealthier family. It would walk away with the coveted Palme d’Or prize, and with tons of rave reviews from the critics that have helped the movie make its way to theatrical release in which it’s become the highest grossing import from Korea (movie-wise, anyway). The movie is still sitting at 99% on Rotten Tomatoeswith only 3 negative reviews out of 300, and audiences seem to like it almost as much. The only negative is that it is a foreign film with mainly unknown actors and the Academy has never nominated a Korean film for ANY Oscars EVER… isn’t that crazy? Director Bong’s movie will change that as it’s this year’s Amor, Michael Haneke’s Palme D’Or which was nominated for a number of Oscars, only winning one for Foreign Language film. Parasite is so far ahead of the competition in the “International Film” competition, it’s scary, and it’s begun its run of critics awards by taking the Atlanta Film Critics Society’s top honors.

The Traitor (Sony Pictures Classics) (2)

Marco Bellochio’s crime drama (which I haven’t yet seen) premiered in competition with generally decent reviews, and like many other Cannes premieres, it’s best bet is in the International Film category where it will lose to Parasite. It will be the 80-year-old Bellochio’s submission by his country after a number of well-respected films.

Outside the Festival Circuit

There are quite a few movies released in the summer and early fall that aren’t necessarily considered awards movies, the big one being Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Endgame (Disney), which I’ll probably write more about o6ver at The Beat. Focus Features managed to have the biggest hit of their 16-year-plus career with the movie incarnation of the popular BBC show Downton Abbey from previous Oscar nominee (and Emmy winner) Julian Fellowes, and they’re likely to try to push that into the awards race especially if some of their other offerings (see below) don’t click.

Okay, this is already getting too long. So I’m going to cut it off here and get to the rest of the year in Part 2… yes, there will be a Chapter 2, Part 2. Deal with it.

#Awards SundanceFilmFestival Cannes Movies

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concurringconqueror · 5 years

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The Most Effective HD Songs Download Sites Our Company Discover on the internet|Digital Trends

The change from MP3s to high-resolution music that goes over Compact Disc high quality may have certainly never taken the dramatic become the mainstream that companies like Sony, stone celebrities like Neil Youthful, or even unpopular audiophiles wished it to, however no matter Spotify's requisition, those along with high-end equipment and high-class ears are actually regularly on the hunt for high quality electronic popular music to incorporate to their assortment.

Although an increasing number of premium stereo recipients and even mobile phone have actually developed with excellent digital-to-analog converters on panel, finding high-resolution audio reports has remained an uphill struggle. The problem originates coming from a shortage of digital recordings at the high sample rates and little bit intensity (starting at 48kHz/24 little and also up) needed to have to create clear sonic quality.

If you intend to possess the music for all eternity-- somewhat than "lease" it monthly-- you perform have possibilities.

If you're seeking to stream popular music in the greatest achievable quality, you currently possess pair of strong alternatives. The very first is actually the Tidal music service. Regardless of its own traits, Tidal permits users to flow at around 24-bit/96kHz high quality, which is among the highest settlements of the primary streaming solution. Best of all, a lot of modern-day receivers possess system relationships, making it effortless to combine up a Tidal account along with your hi-fi configuration. The 2nd is loved one novice Qobuz. Qobuz has really been around for an even though, but it just recently debuted its streaming membership strategies in the UNITED STATE Along with one lossless, CD-quality tier, as well as two hi-res, 24-bit/96kHz rates, it undoubtedly gives Tidal an operate for the cash.

If you own a lot of vinyl and would certainly choose to make your own hi-res recordings rather than spending for them, visit Sony's excellent PS-HX500-- a turn table with a wonderful hi-res DAC and USB hookup-- it is actually the easiest means to create your very own hi-res assortment from reports you already own.

Yet if you're appearing for new material, and desire to have the music for all eternity-- somewhat than "rent" it month-to-month coming from a service like Tidal-- you still have alternatives. There are several internet outlets out there certainly that give a wide range of music to contribute to your catalog if you know where to locate them.

To help you on your quest, our experts've collected this checklist of some of the very best internet sites to please your hi-res sound repair. Take a look at our checklist listed below, and allow the music loose.

File styles: WMA, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC Greatest settlement: 24 bit/192kHz

The veritable Mac computer Father (or is it Father Mac Computer?) of on-line stores, HDtracks possesses one of one of the most comprehensive collections of high-resolution stand out, stone, timeless, and jazz songs online. David Chesky, a kept in mind composer, artist, and manufacturer, co-founded as well as chairs the internet site, as well as continues to establish its directory.

Essentially each one of the files on the web site are offered in numerous layouts, with resolution prices that rise to the highest business standard, though a lot of are only offered at Compact Disc high quality. You'll discover a lot of your favored performers listed below, coming from Bob Dylan to Bob Marley, Rush to Marvin Gaye-- but don't search for any sort of Beatles songs. If you're aiming to collect a major hi-res sound assortment swiftly, this is actually a wonderful starting aspect.

Submit styles: FLAC, ALAC Highest settlement: 24 bit/192kHz

If you will like to have Peter Gabriel and the Greater london Symphony select your HD songs for you, this is actually the website you've been actually looking for. Much less of an establishment and even more of a club, B&W will deliver you two curated cds monthly with your registration, which costs around $60 yearly, along with grant you access to a variety of selections from the magazine.

The website even features a safe of audios used the based binaural audio strategy. Don't anticipate a ton of radio favorites, having said that, as the majority of the collections are actually from eclectic performers or the timeless category.

File styles: WAV, WMA, AIFF, ALAC, FLAC, MP3, WMA, AAC Greatest resolution: 24 bit/192kHz

Remember we pointed out that Qobuz was one of two options for streaming hi-res popular music? Effectively, it's additionally an area where you can easily acquire as well as install it as well. Qobuz operates its own hi-res popular music store, with a wide option of categories-- every little thing from pop/rock to classical as well as plenty in between. Though it does not use as a lot of hi-res file styles as a number of the other establishments, it's the obvious selection to get your popular music if you're a Qobuz Sublime And also streaming subscriber, as you'll acquire liked rates on downloads, typically sparing as long as five dollars every album. If you acquire a great deal of hi-res music, that rebate alone could possibly validate the $300 yearly Sublime Plus subscription.

Submit layouts: FLAC, ALAC, DSF, DSD Highest resolution: 24 bit/192kHz

Acoustic Seems is actually a great deal more than its label indicates. This internet site uses a bevy of pop and stone collections from knowledgeable musicians that are sure to quit that all-too-common HD feeling that you've wandered into a soundtrack coming from a Sundance film. You'll locate big stars like Norah Jones, Aerosmith, Steely Dan, Depeche Method, as well as Eric Clapton, along with even more indie stuff like The Public Wars.

There is actually even a pleasant peppering of funk and also bluegrass in the mix, and every little thing is offered in higher resolution coming from DSD to FLAC documents. If you wish to boost your collection of premium radio hits and also classic stone audios, this web site should be on your list.

File layouts: WMA, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, FLAC studio surround 5.1 Highest resolution: 24 bit/96kHz

Formerly recognized as the Timeless Shop, as well as right now going by the name Chandos (including the Classical Store), this shop bunches songs from more than 200 labels and also boasts an enormous collection of classic and jazz paths numbering over a thousand. There are actually likewise an asserted 80,000(!) brand new monitors being included monthly, though several are provided along with only CD quality as the highest settlement.

Sadly, because Chandos took control of, the valuable hunt resources for arranging through style are actually right now gone. A host of subgenres in the timeless and jazz music arena are additionally on call in hi-res center experts.

File layouts: FLAC, Compact Disc Greatest settlement: 24 bit/96kHz

Though not almost as comprehensive as The Timeless Shop, this 15-year-old French-Canadian web site possesses a terrific collection, really good institution, and even a trendy directory section along with webpages that transform like a digital book. The web site multitudes numerous titles, and can conveniently be actually browsed through author, performer, or style. Probably most importantly, the costs are really reasonable, can be found in at around $13 to $15 per cd.

Submit formats: WAV, DSD Highest resolution: 24 bit/96kHz

For those searching for something a little bit a lot more diverse and under the radar, the Blue Shoreline site/label gives a good variety of indie rock and also stand out hits, a lot of which were actually taped due to the tag and then "hand-chosen coming from Grammy-nominated manufacturer Biscuit Marenco." Customers receive a handful of cost-free downloads upon authorizing up, and also there are extra options on call on the excitably entitled sis website, Downloads NOW! These sites aren't the most beautiful online, however they do have some cool online songs from musicians you're improbable to locate in other places.

Submit styles: FLAC Highest resolution: 24 bit/48kHz

Beautiful Classical has a huge assortment of popular music that gives a serious burst from the tape-recording past, with several selections pulled from audios that reach back in to the early 1940s. Every one of the tracks have been actually diligently remastered, though they will definitely cost you a king's ransom in many cases.

The very best resolution available looks in the reduced realm, at 24 bit/48kHz, but if you wish to listen to the songs your grandparents (or even great-grandparents) went to observe live, this is one of the most ideal means.

Those are our preferences for snatching the absolute most quality selections for your priceless internet time. Nonetheless, there are a lot of various other sites to choose from, which our company've listed under.

Particular Niche Music Sites

Each one of the internet sites on our list deal HD audio files, but some entertain abroad and might possess restrictions concerning what web content is on call for investment in the USA

Analekta Records: Classic Boston Chamber Orchestra: Local area efficiencies from the Boston Harmony and also Boston ma Pops bands, etc. . Cedille Records: Music coming from the Chicago Classic Audios Foundation Network Standards: Classic Gubemusic: Classical, jazz music, world High Meaning Strip Transfers: Classic, jazz Melba Recordings: Classical functionalities coming from the Melbourne Symphony Naim Label: Indie rock, timeless, folk, stand out Sound Liason: Classic, ensemble jobs, stand out deals with Subradar: Free jazz music, free stone, contemporary, digital

This content was originally published here.

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toldnews-blog · 5 years

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Critics’ Notebook: When It Came to the Tony Nominations, the News Is the New

Shortly after Bebe Neuwirth and Brandon Victor Dixon announced the nominees for the 2019 Tony Awards on Tuesday morning, Ben Brantley and Jesse Green, chief theater critics for The New York Times, took a first look at the results. Were they mad as hell, à la Howard Beale of “Network”? Or were they singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” in honor of “Oklahoma!”?

BEN BRANTLEY Good morning, Jesse. Having watched the nominations, I’m reeling from one startling omission: “To Kill a Mockingbird” is not in the running for best play. And I had my (virtual) money on it to win. (Psst — Peter, who’s doing the office pool — is it too late to rejuggle my choices?) What do you think happened?

JESSE GREEN This was an odd year, with many different kinds of shows in different styles and with different provenances. Some chaotic crosswinds are inevitable when 34 one-of-a-kind productions are considered by 42 nominators. And “Mockingbird” may have been penalized for some of the legal fights it got mired in: with the Harper Lee estate and with the licensers of a different adaptation. But I think the main reason it wasn’t recognized in the best play category is that even though it has been totally rewritten, by Aaron Sorkin, it is not fundamentally a new work. (That’s part of why it’s a hit.) Likewise “Network.” Their spot seems to have been taken by “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,” despite its being highly divisive and surely the oddest bird on Broadway. I wasn’t displeased by that.

[“Hadestown” and “The Ferryman” get Tonys love | Here’s a complete list of nominees.]

BRANTLEY Maybe this will be the year of the rara avis. The nominators seemed to favor something new over something borrowed, for once. “Gary,” “What the Constitution Means to Me” and, in musicals, the love shown to the radically reconceived “Oklahoma!” and the myth-inspired “Hadestown” — this suggests a willingness to embrace departures from the norm. Very healthy, I’d say.

GREEN Aside from “Hadestown,” the nominations for new musicals were more conventional. “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” “The Prom” and “Tootsie” cleaned up. Were you surprised not to see more love for “Be More Chill” and “The Cher Show”?

BRANTLEY “Be More Chill” would have required a body of much younger nominators to score big this year. The other shock for me was the near shutout of “King Lear.” (Ruth Wilson was acknowledged for her doubling as the Fool and Cordelia.) Glenda Jackson seemed like a guaranteed nominee, if only for memorizing all those lines at the age of 82. And it was an admirable performance. Maybe it’s because she won last year (for “Three Tall Women”), or maybe people just didn’t like Sam Gold’s obstructive staging of Shakespeare.

GREEN I rarely think in terms of snubs, but that did seem like one. Back in musicals, I was surprised that Rebecca Naomi Jones was not nominated for her troubled Laurey in “Oklahoma!” But it was a crowded category and the fifth spot seems to have gone to Caitlin Kinnunen, the feel-good lesbian of “The Prom.”

BRANTLEY I know some theatergoers missed the soaring soprano of more traditional Laureys. But I agree, it was a deeply felt and original interpretation of a classic character by Ms. Jones. I was glad, though, to see “The Prom” strutting so proudly through the lists. It’s the most conventional of the nominees for best musical (even more than “Tootsie,” which had David Yazbek’s urban-neurotic score), but it did the old steps so very well — and in a new, socially conscious context.

GREEN Also notable were Jeremy Pope’s two performing nominations, one for a play (“Choir Boy”) and one for a musical (“Ain’t Too Proud”). But in terms of direction and writing, this was an extremely nondiverse year on Broadway; something like 85 percent of the artists eligible in those categories were white men. It was nice to see the nominators reaching out to recognize Camille A. Brown’s fantastic choreography for “Choir Boy” — a play; the category is usually stocked with musicals only.

BRANTLEY I, too, was struck by the homogeneity of the nominations. All the more reason to celebrate Rachel Chavkin (the director of “Hadestown”) and Heidi Schreck (the writer and star of “What the Constitution Means to Me”). I was also pleased to find the name of the excellent playwright Dominique Morisseau, who did very well within the confines of the jukebox format, for her book for “Ain’t Too Proud.” And it was good to see that Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “Choir Boy” was remembered.

GREEN That said, I think the best play contest is going to come down to “What the Constitution Means to Me” and “The Ferryman” (with maybe a bit of “Ink” spilled too). Which sets us up for our own big contest. I found “Constitution” to be the best and most important new play of the season. (Heidi Schreck was nominated as both its author and leading actress.) I’m pretty sure you disagree, though you liked it — as I liked “The Ferryman.”

BRANTLEY Well, that’s an argument for another day. (Plug: See our dialogue in the upcoming Arts & Leisure Tonys issue on May 19.) I can certainly understand how you might feel “Constitution” is the most important, in terms of creating an immediate conversation with the audience about an extremely topical issue. Speaking of topical, no best play nomination for “Hillary and Clinton,” I see.

GREEN Nor for its director, Joe Mantello. My sense is that people see the play (by Lucas Hnath) and the production as some kind of found object, not the result of artists working.

BRANTLEY It’s more than that, although I did feel Hnath’s script, though very clever, didn’t take me anywhere I hadn’t expected to go. On the other hand, Mantello’s supremely inventive staging did. So did the performances by perennial nominee Laurie Metcalf (as Hillary) and non-nominee John Lithgow, whose Bill Clinton was a disarmingly fresh take on a very, very famous person, without the pandering ickiness of impersonation.

GREEN Which I suppose brings us to the hairy ape in the room: “King Kong.” For all that money it garnered just three nominations (all for design) and a special noncompetitive Tony for the puppet.

BRANTLEY That was some puppet, you have to admit. Do you think the Tonys should initiate some new categories?

GREEN Projection design, when it’s honored, is bundled with one of the other design categories, but it’s going to need its own slot soon. This season, “Network,” “Ink,” “King Kong,” “Beetlejuice” and “Be More Chill” might all have been nominated.

BRANTLEY And what about a special acting category for best performance by an actor or actress as a living person? We had a lot of those this year: Bertie Carvel as Rupert Murdoch, the various Chers, the Clintons.

GREEN And Otis Williams, the last Temptation, played by the best actor nominee Derrick Baskin.

BRANTLEY The Last Temptation. Sounds like a title that mighta been a contender — and a lovely musical phrase to go out on.

#9ja entertainment news update #channel 4 entertainment news #entertainment news 2007 #entertainment news uk #radio 1 entertainment news sinead garvan #wyff 4 news entertainment

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shrimpkardashian · 6 years

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I am going to post this text which I used to make this 90-minute podcast where I ranked all of David Lynch's films. It’s close to 5,000 words long. Since I took the time to write all this out, I wanted to post it, edited for the page. Enjoy:

David Lynch has created ten feature films in forty years, specifically between 1977 and 2017. I am going to rank all ten films right now.

I’ve broken down the Lynch filmography into four tiers.

Tier #4 consists of two films that, while they’re not necessarily horrible, I’d be OK with never re-watching again.

Tier #3 is Dune, just… Dune… (crickets)

Tier #2 also consists of two movies, two features that are close to being really great, but are ultimately flawed for very different reasons.

And then there’s the Final Tier, Tear #1, ALL-TIME CLASSICS, of which, by my count, there are five. Not bad, considering that equals, oh I don't know... half of his filmography.

You might be wondering what constitutes an ALL-TIME CLASSIC... great question. In my book, it’s a movie that scores a 9.500 or higher on my highly scientific to-the-thousandths scale movie review scoring system. All ten of these feature films have been scored between 5.999 and 9.819. Using the thousandths scale allows for accessible gaps as I slowly fill in the list as I continue to compile my personal ranking of the greatest films ever made (and also... the not so great). I urge you to go to my website www.movies.myameri.ca to see the list of over 200 films that I've reviewed and ranked thus far.

Now, let’s get to the list...

#10

Perhaps, The Elephant Man––David Lynch’s second film, from 1980––doesn’t work for me because you can feel, in a sense, that he’s selling his soul. Sure, it's "good" and was recognized as such in all the ways and by all the metrics that the most mainstream critical pipelines assess and award art that is "good."

It's what I couldn't put my finger on at the time I recorded my initial review, and the truly repulsive thing about it: It's bad in the way these "good" films often are. It feels older than it is: a 1980 film about the 1920s that feels like it was made in the late 50s. It’s stylistic feel is both confusing and confused. The brief intrusions of Lynchian originality are present and welcome, but they’re all too quickly dispersed by stale set pieces, and performances that are either overwrought or stiffly boring. Only Freddie Jones, in the devious role of the elephant man’s original "handler," strikes a cord.

The look and feel of John Hurt’s titular character is effective, because it is grotesque. It is in no way fantastical, even if we’re looking at the height of movie magic, because this person existed. And through this realism, a sickening is induced. With every one of Hurt’s nasally slurps––while that’s surely the point, and it wholly succeeds on that level––the film becomes less re-watchable, a major tenant of my grading scale. Wherein Eraserhead’s baby is pure fantasy––a goofy, disgusting, horrifying little buddy that the viewer wants to spend time with––the Elephant Man is an abomination. Our horror with him, at him, over him, is both the movie proving its thesis, and shutting itself down.

David Lynch is on record as having been pleased with the film, but what amount of that pleasure has been framed by four decades of opportunity in large part because of its success, isn’t clear.

The Elephant Man was nominated for eight Academy Awards. No other David Lynch feature was nominated for more than one. It is his worst film by a wide margin.

It would be easy to dismiss 1999’s The Straight Story as a joke disguised. Here was David Lynch making a relatively, well, "straight" movie about a man named Alvin Straight and it was titled The Straight Story. It was released by Disney. When I rewatched this recently I imagined what the movie might have been like if it had the same plot but, you know, felt Lynchian. What it would be like if the entire film had the tone of my favorite scene, the "I LOVE DEER" scene... but, alas, it isn't that.

The film is just a feel-good story. Sometimes, when you peel back the layers, there's just more goodness hiding underneath, and nothing more. And maybe there's a kind of horror in that as well.

Dune stands alone.

Released in 1984, it's the only film among the ten wherein Lynch didn't have complete final cut. It's, by any classic metric, a bad film. At the end of the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, which details one of the first attempts at bringing the best selling science fiction book of all-time to the big screen, Alejandro Jodorowsky describes going to see Lynch's version and being filled with a perverse glee that the movie was a failure, that it sucked. And it is definitely a failure.

The film is a god-awful mess. Do not under any circumstances attempt to watch the 3-hour "extended cut" version. Lynch had nothing to do with this and it does not re-insert anything by way of noteworthy lost footage. It merely accentuates the worst elements of the original theatrical cut. The biggest crime by far being... the dreaded voice-over, which plagues both versions.

In 2011, a YouTuber posted a 9-minute super-cut compiling all of these whispered voice-overs, which––if you aren't familiar––are meant to give more clarity to the story by presenting the audience an inside look at "the thoughts" in various characters' heads. But these "thoughts" do exactly the opposite: bogging down the story and actually making it harder to follow (in my opinion).

But even with all of its many, many flaws, the film is not without its charm. The look of it is extremely interesting, if not inconsistent. Some imagery looks dated, while other effects seem ahead of their time. The soundtrack, an amalgamation of Toto's overblown rock aesthetics and a nuanced main theme co-written by Brian Eno, is kind of awesome

But really Dune is just a huge mess of ideas. For example, in one scene the actor Freddie Jones is given a cat with a rat taped to its side, hooked to a contraption, and is told to "milk the cat" if he wants to stay alive. His character is never seen or mentioned again. These are the ideas of Frank Herbert told through the lens of David Lynch and filtered by producers who were so damn concerned whether or not the plot would make sense that they butchered the whole damn thing. What's left are pieces, intriguing pieces strewn about the 2-plus hours.

It would be easy to submit this film as the last place entry, #10 out of 10. But I just can't do that. I would re-watch this under the right circumstances. The strange convergence of wild visuals, bad editing and too-fast, too-big, too-soon nature of the production, puts this in a special category among the Lynch filmography. It almost hits "so bad it's good" notes, in a way. When Denis Villeneuve unleashes his high stakes, huge expectations version of Dune in 2020, David Lynch's third film will likely become nothing more than a footnote.... a grain of sand among the great DUNES of film history, one might say. (Sorry.)

Inland Empire is, technically speaking, the final film of David Lynch's career. Released almost thirteen years ago in 2006, it's certainly the most confounding. Three hours of lo-fi footage, welded together by a director whose contempt for the industry he was a part of had reached a boiling point. And that boiling point is INLAND EMPIRE.

For years, I attempted to watch this film in stops and starts. That, for quite a long time, I never got past the relatively straight, narrative-driven first hour is probably telling. Outside of a classic Grace Zabriskie appearance as Laura Dern's crazy Polish neighbor, not much really happens.

But it isn't so much that nothing is happening that's the issue. It's that nothing interesting is happening. An actress gets a role. Her co-star is a womanizer. Her husband might be jealous. There's some mystery concerning the development of the project. They have an affair. After a burst of imagery at the start, this all unfolds in a fairly normal fashion. The most noteworthy thing about it is how it looks. Lynch used a digital camera to film some ideas with Laura Dern one day and then decided to make a feature film out of it. He's stated that he had to keep using the same camera out of necessity. That he had to make it look this way, is a very Lynchian answer to the question "Why does INLAND EMPIRE look like garbage?" Because it does truly look like trash. You can get better video fidelity from any cheap Android phone nowadays. It has not aged well.

Some might point to this and say that's exactly why it's genius, why it's underrated... but I ain't buying that line of thinking, either. It's a misstep, in my opinion. The film is a bloated experimentation of a script written on the fly. It has only one true saving grace... Laura Dern.

Even if they hadn't reunited for the successful collaboration that was Twin Peaks: The Return, I think I'd be OK with this being the pair's final work together. The film only works because of Dern. The entire thing is a testament to her ability and it transcends the hardware that was used to capture it. When I finally got around to completing this watch, I was struck by how weird it got. Which is saying something about a David Lynch film! Without Dern this might play like someone's forgotten student project of the mid 2000s. With her, it's a strange bookend to an amazing career.

One that I have no other choice but to start, and stop, and start again. Someday.

Wild at Heart was produced at the height of David Lynch's success in 1990. Riding the high of Blue Velvet, arguably his most beloved work in a critical sense, even to this day, and filmed just as the world was experiencing TV’s Twin Peaks. Lynch's fifth movie arrived just as the concept of "Lynchian" was soaking into the cultural landscape. It's a brash, outrageous film that feels like the work of an individual who could no wrong. This cockiness both makes it fun, and provides its flaws.

While there seems to be "a point," however cloudy and/or veiled and/or vague, behind most things in every David Lynch film, Wild at Heart seemingly indulges in bombast for the sake of bombast. It's no surprise this Louis CK's favorite film and the film that nearly gave Roger Ebert a heart attack. (See this video)

I'd like to split the difference between those two sentiments, if I may. I don't agree that Lynch is always trying to "get off the hook" as Roger Ebert put it. But that may be the case with Wild at Heart. That it is the only Lynch film to take the top prize at Cannes, perhaps speaks more to the idea of Lynch and his influence in the culture at the time, then it does to the film itself. CK was right to read this film as a comedy, it's the only way it works. And Ebert was wrong to crucify it for being such. But It stands outside the top tier of Lynch's career for a different reason. With cockiness comes laziness. Lynch notoriously had his hands full during the development of this project, as he abandoned the TV world of Twin Peaks to make it. Wild at Heart feels half-baked as a result.

Sure, it has its moments. Willem DaFoe gets to hang his hat on the mantle of notable, completely over-the-top supporting characters in the Dennis Hopper / Frank Booth tradition. And Nicolas Cage and Diane Ladd are every bit as crazed in their performances as well. And yet, therein lies another problem: the movie has only one speed, out of control. The Sailor-Lula love story is meant to provide the downbeat, something earnest in a sea of chaos. But it falls short. You can't stop to smell the roses if the car never stops.

That half of David Lynch's filmography constitute all time classics is no minor accomplishment. I imagine there are only a handful of directors with a better batting average. And so, the order of these next five films is fairly insignificant. Certainly there are biases at play which have placed them into the positions you find them here. For example, I certainly haven't watched Eraserhead enough and I've probably seen Mulholland Drive too many times by comparison. It's also about timing. Maybe This Moment™ in My Life™ is more fitting for Lost Highway then it is Blue Velvet, for myriad reasons, and so on and so on.

The thing to know is this... These five projects have all stood the test of time, and any one of them is deserved of the top spot. Now, back to the countdown...

Eraserhead was exactly like I thought it would be.

I neglected to watch this film for a very long time. I kept telling myself "Now is the right time to watch Eraserhead, Jeff." What I didn't realize until I finally watched it is that the answer to that question is both never and always.

Eraserhead is a feat of nature. A film that took years to complete feels and flows like it was molded together over a single month. It almost feels silly to expound on the film at this point. It's been dissected to death. Even critics who fail to understand it can appreciate it on the most basic of levels. This. Is. Art. PERIOD. There's no denying that.

Wherein the surrealists who decided to make films couldn't get past the concept of the singular idea, confining their work to shorts OR a series of loosely connected "living paintings," Lynch was able to extrapolate the aesthetic to feature length and also tell a story.

It's soundscape alone is a work of art, and perhaps the most important facet of the film from a historic point of view. This world sounds exactly as it looks: manufactured, fractured, jarring and glum. What brief respite the Lady in the Radiator provides with her haunting, off-kilter serenade is all we get by way of counterpoint to the unnerving soundtrack of Lynch's debut feature. It took Lynch, working in tandem with master sound engineer Alan Splet, nearly a year to complete. From the 1991 book, Midnight Movies:

"The soundtrack is densely layered, including as many as fifteen different sounds played simultaneously using multiple reels. Sounds were created in a variety of ways—for a scene in which a bed slowly dissolves into a pool of liquid, Lynch and Splet inserted a microphone inside a plastic bottle, floated it in a bathtub, and recorded the sound of air blown through the bottle. After being recorded, sounds were further augmented by alterations to their pitch, reverb and frequency."

Lynch's first film is also his shortest, just shy of ninety minutes, and it's hard to find any flaws. Is the detour with the severed head at the pencil factory meaningless? How about the next-door neighbor character... unnecessary? Inside the Top 5, I won't be nitpicking just to do so. In the Top 5, everything is fine.

While I don't necessarily think Blue Velvet is the best film of David Lynch's career, it's hard to argue that it isn't the most important. It is the world from which all subsequent Lynch things are built. Following the creative and commercial disaster of Dune, Lynch's fourth feature is a dark psychological horror that both expands upon and completely blows apart the aesthetic of Film Noir. And there really isn't a single David Lynch film project after Blue Velvet which doesn't also explore this form to a degree.

The movie marks the debut of a pair who would turn out to be lifelong collaborators in the David Lynch cinematic universe: Laura Dern, acting here in one of her first "adult" roles at age 19, and the composer Angelo Badalamenti. Badalamenti would go onto write the scores for every subsequent entry in the filmography except Inland Empire, and his main theme to Blue Velvet remains one of the most memorable.

Blue Velvet is also notable as being a vehicle for Dennis Hopper's re-entry into mainstream cinema. Relaunching his career, Hopper's portrayal of the deranged Frank Booth remains as skin crawling as ever.

I think the fact that I have watched Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive more than any other of Lynch's films had a lot to do with where I've placed them on this list (that they aren’t higher). But I swear I'm not being contrarian for contrarian's sake. As I said a minute ago, all five of these films are worthy. When it comes to the movies of David Lynch, well, I guess you could say, "....HE PUT HIS DISEASE IN ME." (Sorry.)

The strange origin story of Mulholland Drive somehow eluded me for years. I only found out that this movie, Lynch's ninth, released one month after 9/11, was literally developed and shot with the intention to be a TV pilot for ABC. I found this out from the book, Room to Dream, by the way. The half autobiography/half biography of Lynch's life, which came out last year that I highly recommend. Only when it was clear that it wouldn't work for television did Lynch decide to re-cut and film additional footage to release as a feature. Though this was common knowledge, I managed to watch this many times over the years with no idea. When I rewatched it again recently with this information, I couldn't help but try to pick out what was filmed when in the timeline, and if I could see any inconsistencies... a true hellish way to watch a picture. I don't recommend it. But I digress..

From Blue Velvet on, each one of David Lynch's films (outside of The Straight Story) has had a longer running time. At close to 2½ hours, 2001's Mulholland Drive was his longest to date by a decent margin. It’s something of a misnomer that Lynch's films meander, as people mistake deliberateness for slowness or frivolity. Mulholland is filled with detours, inhabiting the film like micro movies in their own right. This also continues the loose Los Angeles trilogy (after Lost Highway and concluding with Inland Empire), which, at their heart, are films about coming to grips with who you really are. This might be the most direct lampooning of the film industry itself, but all three deal with being someone who you're really not.

Lynch has repeatedly stated his admiration for the 1950 film noir classic Sunset Blvd., another film about the film industry. In some respects, the naïveté of Naomi Watts' Betty is the counterpoint to Norma Desmond. In Mulholland Drive, her character says, "I'd rather be known as a great actress than a movie star. But, you know, sometimes people end up being both." Whereas, Norma Desmond portrayed by Gloria Swanson, has already reckoned with the true fate: "No one ever leaves a star. That's what makes one a star."

The arc of the characters—plural—Betty and Diane, and the power of Naomi Watts' performance as them both, is behind the wheel on Mulholland Drive. I found it odd that she took second billing in the opening credit crawl to co-star Justin Theroux. Was this because she was unknown to the masses at the time, or perhaps another piece of the puzzle to this movie's greater themes?

Mulholland Drive touches all the bases. At times bleak and bizarre. Sometimes bright and hopeful. In many ways, it's modeled after the next film on our countdown, as it can almost be read as two separate entities: converging, crossing and meeting together again? Well...

No film surprised me more during my recent rewatch binge then 1997’s Lost Highway. David Lynch’s seventh film might be his most divisive, in so much as it failed to ignite the critical response that really any of his other films did upon their release.

While it’s industrial rock heavy soundtrack perhaps dates the film to its actual era of production more than any other Lynch picture, it also works as an anchor. Outside of Inland Empire, this is easily his most abstract and seemingly rambling work. It is grounded through style and feel. And it might just be his best singular statement.

Bull Pullman is a revelation as the jazz saxophonist Fred Madison. His chaotic emoting on the stage through his blaring instrument is but another counterpoint, this time to his subdued, confused off-stage demeanor. Who knew the goofy President from Independence Day could pull this off?

My critique of Patricia Arquette in many of her other roles is that she comes across as lifeless. Well, with her performance here as a dead-on-the-inside beauty, that mode has never played better. She's tremendous, acting the conduit in this strange play, this circuitous journey that is often described as a theatrical möbius strip, where our leading man has quite literally been replaced.

And that brings up another interesting point: There doesn't seem to be a traditional main character in this film. Arquette in her dual role as Renee and Alice is functionally it, but she gives way to Pullman and Balthazar Getty's Pullman––a car mechanic named Pete––for long stretches, and its Lynch's most diplomatic film in terms of dolling out the heavy lifting in this regard.

And last but not least we have to talk about... Robert Blake.

In a sea of outstanding, intensely weird and occasionally unforgettable supporting characters throughout the Lynch filmography, Blake’s Mystery Man might just take the cake. That Robert Blake, more than likely an actual sociopath, instructed Lynch on his character’s look––which, let me remind you was such: Blake decided to cut his hair cut extremely short, parted in the middle, white Kabuki make-up on his face, and an all black outfit––might be the best example of the auteur trusting his instincts, and having it pay off completely. Only on screen for a handful of scenes, Blake, who would be arrested and acquitted for the murder of his wife just a couple years later, delivers a truly unsettling performance. In his final film role ever, he encompasses true evil more than Twin Peaks’ BOB or Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. The Mystery Man is the lurking, vile corruption of what’s good that Lynch has always been looking for.

But Lost Highway is not a “what’s beneath the surface” film like Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks or even Mulholland Drive are. The “point” of Lost Highway might just be that evil exists in plain view... and there’s nothing we can do about it. Gary Busey sometimes has to watch his only child disappear in a lightning bolt of spoiled meat and that’s that. When they reappear, broken and struggling, and falling down the same path until it happens again, well... that’s just life.

One of my favorite parts of the entire movie is a scene early on when a detective asks Fred Madison if he owns a videocamera. His wife, Renee Madison, portrayed by Patricia Arquette, responds, "no, Fred hates them." Fred responds, "I like to remember things my own way." The detective asks, "what do you mean by that?" Bill Pullman, as Fred Madison, replies, "how I remember them. Not exactly the way that they happened."

(DISCLAIMER: I’m sorry if you think it’s cheating that I am including the expanded Twin Peaks Universe as one single entry on this list. I’m sorry if you think the only thing that should count is Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me because that is the only Twin Peaks thing that is actually a “feature film.” But also: SORRY NOT SORRY.

This is my list and I’m putting Twin Peaks at #1, specifically: all of Season 1 of the original TV show, plus the beginning of Season 2 (until the episode where we find out who killed Laura Palmer) and the Season 2 finale. Then of course Fire Walk with Me, and the 18 hour MOVIE that is Twin Peaks: The Return, or Twin Peaks Season 3, if you will (I prefer the former as it gives the masterpiece the gravitas it deserves).

If you put a gun to my head and I ABSOLUTELY had to only include Fire Walk with Me, I would probably drop it to #4 or #5 and slide everything else on the list up a spot. End of DISCLAIMER.)

I was given the Twin Peaks Gold Box as a Christmas gift in 2007. The 10-DVD set had just come out and this was still an era when people treasured physical things like that. It was really important and meaningful to me, and I still own it despite no longer having a DVD player. Watching it for the first time was a treasure and a fond memory. The feeling I got when I heard that Badalamenti theme music start the show and everything in between...

...yes, even James in Season 2. I loved it all: the good, the bad and the ugly, the whole kitten caboodle. The original TV series is, obviously, far from flawless. Lynch stepped away for long stretches before going fully AWOL after it was revealed that Laura Palmer's father, portrayed by the great Ray Wise, is in fact her killer. After that, the show took a turn (to put it lightly).

But Lynch never gave up on the world. He returned to helm the stunning Season 2/de facto series finale. So much of the mythology that Fire Walk with Me and certainly The Return is built upon is ignited in that finale, fittingly titled "Beyond Life and Death." But really, the original series is most notable for merely existing at all. A precursor to the "golden age of television" that was right around the corner, there still hasn't been a network series remotely this daring. There's often much made, too much if you ask me, about the "cult of David Lynch." Critics of this “cult” say its followers are blind: The man can do no wrong. It's weird for weirdness' sake. And so on, they drone. Now, I'm a fairly big David Lynch fan (no duh). But I've always tried to remain grounded in regards to this. He's not perfect. But he has made near-perfect art. And I'm a fan of ART first. A practicer of admiration? Maybe some distant second, third, fourth or beyond. I see his infiltration of the masses with Twin Peaks as one of his finest achievements in the arts. How many powerful people had to be convinced that the mainstream was ready for something like this. It's baffling. That, of course, they weren't ready is kind of besides the point. Someone has to poke the bear.

If Lynch had closed the books on Twin Peaks with Fire Walk with Me, his sixth film released in 1992, that would have been fine. It's a polarizing feature and was a fairly significant box office bomb, even for Lynch. Fire Walk with Me nonetheless retains an otherworldliness among the filmography. Given the subject matter––you know, just your average super-violent father-daughter incest rape thing––it's hard to argue this isn't his darkest tale by a wide degree. It's perhaps not ripe for repeated viewings. In fact, I did not rewatch it for this review, the only film of the ten. Why? Well, I had given it a replay back in 2017, just before the debut of Showtime's Twin Peaks: The Return. And, to be honest, I just wasn't ready to return to this madness quite so soon.

Only David Lynch could mold one of the loftier aspects/thematic devices/main characters (?) of the long-awaited follow-up to perhaps his most beloved work on one of the most random, seemingly meaningless, toss-away lines spoken in a bad Cajun accent in a cameo role by David Bowie. "We're not going to talk about Judy at all..." Until, that is, the time is right... Say... 25 years later?

I just recently began to rewatch The Return and I'd like to say thank you for this, David Lynch. This needs to be put into the discussion with his greatest work, if it's not already there. I can recall after various episodes of its original run (May to September 2017), feeling a sense of awe and wonderment and confusion and joy. I say to anyone that's curious that this is an 18-hour movie. David Lynch made an 18-hour movie when it wasn't certain if he'd make any more movies again.

It would be dumb, if not downright foolish, to try and hash out the plot-lines or gush over Kyle MacLachlan's performance in not two, but three distinct roles. Here, the duality of man has fractured yet again in these modern times. And when I got to that final two-hour finale, I found myself on a family vacation. So I carved out a block of time to watch it at the house we were renting on my laptop, alone, in the dark, as the rest of my family enjoyed a sunny day at the beach. I filed Kyle and Laura Dern's Diane into one more sketchy motel and then onto El Paso, Texas, of course, just as everyone had guessed, and then back to Twin Peaks, Washington, where the series ends on a question... Special Agent Dale Cooper turns to Laura Palmer outside her childhood home and asks, "what year is this?" She screams into the abyss and the lights in the home spark off and the screen explodes into darkness. For a series that was, ultimately, about the passing of time as much as it was about the origins of evil in the universe or anything else, it was a fitting end.

#movies

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fun-family · 6 years

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Predictions for 2019 Oscars

Every year I read through predictions, critics picks, and anonymous voter ballots on various websites and from that I make my own predictions. I feel less emotionally involved this year as I have in prior years (i.e. “The Shape of Water” and “Moonlight”), likely because many of my favorites from 2018 were left out. I don’t have a personal Best Picture front runner, it doesn’t seem like anyone does. Critics and voters seem torn on more categories this year than in year’s before - so in some ways this Oscars may be one of the most interesting yet (without a host, even!).

That said, here are my Will Wins, Should Wins, and Biggest Snubs for tonight’s ceremony:

Best Picture Will win: BlacKkKlansman Should win: Roma Biggest snub: Leave No Trace

It seems very likely that “Roma” will win Best Foreign Language Film and I think that expectation could have hurt it’s chances of getting votes for Best Picture. Also, from what I’ve been reading “Roma” isn’t as easy to digest for voters as “BlacKkKlansman.” “Leave No Trace” was on almost every top 10 list I read in 2018, why it wasn’t nominated is beyond me.

Lead Actor Will win: Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody) Should win: Christian Bale (Vice) Biggest snub: Lucas Hedges (Boy Erased)

It’s really surprising to me that Willem Dafoe was nominated over Ethan Hawke, as much as I love Willem in general. Nearly every article I’ve read has complained about Ethan Hawke being snubbed. I watched “First Reformed” specifically because I thought he was the frontrunner for Lead Actor this year. Anyway, from what I’ve read Rami has been campaigning hard and he’s a likable guy, so he’ll probably win. Christian Bale was in a better movie but he’s less of a likable guy. Lucas Hedges had his career-best performance in “Boy Erased”, so it’s a shame he wasn’t recognized.

Lead Actress Will win: Glenn Close (The Wife) Should win: Olivia Colman (The Favourite) Biggest snub: Toni Collette (Hereditary)

I fully believe that Toni Collette should have not only been nominated, but that she should have won. Hands down. I truly don’t believe anyone could have pulled off her role in “Hereditary” to the same caliber. I know the oscars rarely bring in horror films these days, but I thought “Get Out” may have paved the way for these underrated performances. She is the winner in my heart. BUT Glenn Close will win because everyone says she is due (and I don’t think they’re wrong). Olivia Colman won’t win because too many voters think she should have been in the Supporting Actress category. Olivia was amazing though and based on performance, would deserve to win.

Supporting Actor Will win: Richard E. Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) Should win: Richard E. Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) Biggest snub: Alex Wolff (Hereditary)

I was all in for Mahershala before seeing “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” He’s such a wonderful actor and it didn’t really bother me that he was more of a lead in “Green Book.” But Richard E. Grant was just a true supporting actor. He and Melissa portrayed such a strong and honest kinship. It seems voters have recognized this as well. I would be happy with either Richard or Mahershala winning, though. Alex Wolff should have undoubtably been nominated in place of Sam Rockwell. I love Sam, but he played such a small part in “Vice” and didn’t have to give himself to the role in the same way as Alex Wolff in “Hereditary.”

Supporting Actress Will win: Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk) Should win: Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk) Biggest snub: Carey Mulligan (Wildlife)

One anonymous ballot I read complained that there was only one scene in “If Beale Street Could Talk” that really showed Regina’s acting chops. It’s weird to me that that’s a criticism because that scene was so powerful. She held that scene on her own. I could go on a tangent about how that was certainly not the only scene, that her poise, compassion, and love were subtle but a strong presence throughout the entirety of the film. But I think few people need convincing that Regina King should win. Carey Mulligan was especially good in “Wildlife” and it’s a shame that movie wasn’t on enough radars.

Director Will win: Alfonso Cuarón (Roma) Should win: Alfonso Cuarón (Roma) Biggest snub: Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here)

There were three films in 2018 with a particular intimacy, when you watched them it was like you were looking behind a curtain. It felt like a culmination of an artists memories and dreams, they felt personal. Those films were “Roma”, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” and “You Were Never Really Here.” I hope Alfonso wins. I’m sorry that Lynne Ramsay was left out.

Animated Feature Will win: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

I haven’t seen this yet! I’m almost embarrassed to admit that. It’s definitely going to win, there hasn’t been a prediction to the contrary.

Animated Short Will win: Bao

I know it’s hard for other short film makers when big companies like Pixar enter the ring, but I did love “Bao”. It made me cry. That said, I didn’t see the other nominees yet.

Adapted Screenplay Will win: BlacKkKlansman Should win: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Biggest snub: Leave No Trace

I loved “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” I think to create so many interesting stories in one film in the same universe is such a huge feat. That said, it seems likely that “BlackkKlansman” will take it because of Spike Lee. I keep seeing “he’s due for a win”. While I don’t necessarily agree with the win for this particular film, I won’t knock it. “Leave No Trace” was a great story. It takes a melancholy subject and makes it unexpectedly uplifting.

Original Screenplay Will win: The Favourite Should win: The Favourite Biggest snub: Tully

This will be the category I’m most excited for if “The Favourite” does win. I just think it so deserves the recognition. I think Tully deserved a nomination too, but I understand the early 2018 release made it difficult to stand out so many months later.

Best Cinematography Will win: Roma Should win: Roma Biggest snub: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The only argument I’ve read against Roma winning for Cinematography was that “directors shouldn’t be cinematographers for their own movies”, however others applauded Alfonso for taking the position. Personally, I think Roma had beautiful cinematography and he deserves the win. I didn’t particularly like the cinematography in A Star is Born and thought The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was far more deserving.

Best Editing Will win: Bohemian Rhapsody Should win: Vice Biggest snub: You Were Never Really Here

The talk seems to be that Bohemian Rhapsody is banking on a tale of woe about being edited without a director. I certainly don’t know the truth behind it all, but I found Vice to be a (far) better edited film. That said, neither is as good as “You Were Never Really Here.”

Original Score Will win: If Beale Street Could Talk Should win: If Beale Street Could Talk Biggest snub: You Were Never Really Here

I’ll be so glad for “If Beale Street Could Talk” if it does win. The score to that film was wonderful and such an integral part of the storytelling. I would also say that about “You Were Never Really Here” had it been nominated.

Makeup and Hair Will win: Vice Should win: Vice

I don’t think there’s any doubt here on who will win.

Costume Design Will win: Black Panther Should win: Black Panther

One of the first things I said after I saw “Black Panther” was “wow those costumes were amazing.” I just think the costume design in that film was too special not to win.

Production Design Will win: The Favourite Should win: The Favourite Biggest snub: Hereditary

“Black Panther” could certainly win this as well, but I couldn’t always tell what was CGI so for that reason I am leaning toward “The Favourite.” I wish “Hereditary” had been given a nomination for the essentially life-size doll house they created, but alas they were not.

Best Foreign Language Film Will win: Roma Should win: Shoplifters

I loved “Shoplifters,” and that’s not to say I didn’t like “Roma.” I just felt more personally impacted by “Shoplifters.”

Visual Effects Will win: Avengers: Infinity War Biggest snub: Annihilation

I find it really sad that “Annihilation” wasn’t nominated here. I loved the effects in that film and they didn’t take me out of it in the way that VFX sometimes can. Even though I wasn’t a fan of Infinity War, I don’t have any adverse feelings about it winning this award.

Sound Editing & Sound Mixing Will win: Bohemian Rhapsody Biggest snub: Annihilation

I paired these two categories because I think “Bohemian Rhapsody” will win both and I think “Annihilation” should have won for both (if it had been nominated). One problem with these categories is that too many people don’t know the difference. I wonder if there would have been such outrage about categories being read during commercial breaks if these had been the categories. I digress. It’s a shame that “Annihilation” wasn’t nominated. Anyone who has seen the movie and experienced the chilling bear scene would agree.

Best Documentary Feature Will win: Free Solo

I haven’t seen any of these nominees, but I would have loved to see “Three Identical Strangers” nominated. From what I’ve read it seems like “Free Solo” is the likely winner, with “RGB” being a close second.

Original Song Will win: “Shallow” from A Star is Born

This is definitely going to win and honestly after hearing it so many times the song unexpectedly grew on me.

Best Documentary Short Subject Will win: End Game

I sadly didn’t see any of these, “End Game” just seems to have a popular consensus. The other possible winner seems to be “Lifeboat.”

Best Live Action Short Film Will win: Marguerite

Again, I regrettably didn’t see any of these. From what I read “Marguerite” was the easiest for people to swallow. However, there’s a good chance “Skin” could get it.

#oscar ballot

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lauramalchowblog · 4 years

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Top 10 | Rookie of the Year

The 2019 WEGO Health Awards turned out to be our biggest celebration yet! With over 6k nominations and 130k endorsements, we were able to celebrate more Patient Leaders than ever before.

The program celebrates the top 5 finalists in each of the 15 WEGO Health Awards categories, but with so many nominations, it’s nearly impossible to shine a bright light on all these deserving nominees! In hopes of recognizing even more nominees, we’ve compiled the Top 10 Patient Leaders in each category based on community endorsements.

WEGO Health Awards Rookie of the Year Award

Every year, more and more health bloggers are excited by empowerment, raising awareness, and helping others. This particular group of Patient Leaders just started their blog, site, or community work this year and are already making a huge impact. Though they’re new to the scene, they show a ton of promise and are, without a doubt, going to do amazing things in the future.

Help us welcome these Top 10 Rookies of the Year to the online health community:

Emily Garnett | Breast Cancer Patient Leader

2019 Rookie of the Year Winner

“I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer at age 32, the same week my son turned two and my husband and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. (Big week for our family). After my diagnosis, I began blogging about my diagnosis, treatment, and thoughts about all of it. I found that there needed to be further conversations about the nuances of life with/around cancer, and started my podcast, The Intersection of Cancer and Life, in 2018. Since my diagnosis, I have been a corporate speaker, program organizer, advocate, and collaborator for a number of research and community groups relating to metastatic breast cancer. While I was busy with all of that, my cancer was also quite busy, and spread from my bones to my lung, liver, and brain. Despite being composed of mostly tumor at this point, I continue to blog, podcast, and talk everyone’s ear off about the need for research, advocacy, and better understanding of metastatic cancer.”

It’s with deep sadness we share Emily passed away in early 2020, read more about her legacy here.

PodcastDX | Rare Disease Patient Leader

2019 Rookie of the Year Finalist

“Many Americans turn to friends and family for support and advice when they have a health problem. Since people’s networks are expanding to include online peers, particularly in the crucible of rare disease, we decided to implement a podcast series to interview and discuss various diagnoses with actual patients. Health professionals remain the central source of information for most Americans, but “peer-to-peer healthcare” is a significant supplement. We are just entering our second year, but the impact we are making shows with our ever growing listener base. Our numbers are fast approaching 10,000, and we are picked up in dozens of countries! We hope to continue this growth as we add a new arm to our company, bringing mental health into clearer focus.”

Add PodcastDX to your feeds to stay on top of their advocacy.

The Living Tree | Fibromyalgia Patient Leader

2019 Rookie of the Year Finalist

“Helping others is something I have always been passionate about so when I started accumulating all this knowledge and tips and tricks, I knew I had to share it with others. Just like that, my YouTube channel The Living Tree was born! I love being able to share everything that I’ve learned so far and sharing my experiences with others who may need that information the most. My goal is to continue to better myself, to keep growing and learning, to continue to share my truths about life with Fibromyalgia through the good days and bad days, and to always be there for my fellow spoonies.”

Brighten up your feeds by following this passionate fresh voice.

Mia Gaudenzi | Cystic Fibrosis Patient Leader

2019 Rookie of the Year Finalist

“My story begins the day I was born although no one knew it yet, I was incredibly ill. At 3 years old I began getting frequent pneumonia’s and doctors couldn’t figure out why I was so unlucky. Mom and I would make regular trips to the ER for answers and receive the same answer over and over “your daughter is fine, she’s just caught a virus, don’t worry too much” so after many google searches and symptom checkers my mom had unofficially diagnosed me with life threatening, terminal Cystic Fibrosis. Later on genetic testing would confirm that diagnosis and my life changed forever!”

Learn more about this young leader and her advocacy.

Fab Fertility with Blair Nelson | Infertility Patient Leader

2019 Rookie of the Year Finalist

“My husband and I began trying to grow our family when we got married two years ago. Being the impatient woman I am, after 6 months of BFNs (big fat negative tests), I had to be proactive. After very basic and preliminary testing we found ourselves with a challenging infertility diagnosis and in a Reproductive Endocrinologist’s office with IVF as our only option to start a family. Marital bliss was slapped in the face with infertility reality. After our first round of IVF we were able to make 4 viable embryos to transfer. Our first attempt and our second ended in miscarriage. The miscarriage was what finally shook me to my core. My heart was broken, I was lonely and confused. I had no where to turn. So I did what anyone in this day and age would do… turned to the internet! I started Fab Fertility to find community and cope. That quickly turned into a passion to help educate and encourage others so they never felt how I did. I’m still in the middle of my journey but I feel a sense of purpose from it all and I am forever grateful for the opportunity to advocate for others trying to make their dreams of a family come true.”

Find education and encouragement by following this inspirational leader.

Rafaela Estrougo | Epilepsy Patient Leader

“Hi! I’m Rafaela, from Brazil living in LA. I was diagnosed with epilepsy when I was 1 year old. Discovered my path is to help and support, but especially spread the word out there. Join the epilepsy community and raise awareness to end stigma. Epilepsy doesn’t define me. And it doesn’t define you either!”

Learn and grow along with Rafaela by adding her to your feeds.

Myisha Malone | Crohn’s Disease Patient Leader

“I am dedicated to helping raise awareness for Crohn’s disease and all chronic illnesses and I run a support group on facebook called @gameofcrohnsandchronicillness. My goal is to raise awareness as much as possible so no one feel as alone as I felt when I was first diagnosed. I love being an advocate for others.”

Love to be educated and inspired? Click here to follow Myisha.

Ellen Bookman | Parkinson’s Disease Patient Leader

“It took a Parkinson’s diagnosis to realize I have a gift. The other day, John, one of my boxer friends, said to me ‘thanks for being my friend and making my situation easier.’ To anyone who will listen, here’s my message — Get up. Get up now, and don’t wait for a diagnosis to change your life. And, if you happen to get a life changing diagnosis, my advice is to LIVE. JUST LIVE!!!!”

Check out Ellen and her positive advocacy.

Jamie Teachey-Pyle | Chronic Illness and Mental Health Patient Leader

“Before I became disabled I was a teacher. I will teach forever. I will teach people to advocate. I will teach people to KNOW THEIR patient rights. I will be an unpaid patient advocate. It took 30 years for me to get a diagnosis. I will teach people to advocate so this does not happen to them.”

Stay updated on Jamie’s incredible advocacy by following her.

Fabulous and Fatigued – Sara Naveed | Fibromyalgia Patient Leader

“It’s difficult having an invisible illness – being in a place where nobody can ever tell how it impacts you on a daily basis, yet it affects every single decision you make in your life. I’ve come to realize that I consider it to be a blessing, and a curse at the same time.”

Click here to learn more about Sara and to add her to your feeds.

These rookies are ready for the big leagues. Don’t forget to follow them!

The post Top 10 | Rookie of the Year appeared first on WEGO Health.

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squashhelium5-blog · 4 years

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SEO Providers: # 1 SEO Administration Crew Ready To Increase Your Website

What Is Destined By Digital Marketing?

When it relates to knowing what is actually suggested by digital marketing, it is crucial to consider that there are numerous different things that digital marketing has the capacity to do for you. A great way to get a clear image of exactly how this marketing is actually heading to benefit you is actually to use the following examples of how you could use digital marketing in your own company or in your private lifestyle. The advantages that you will certainly have the ability to acquire coming from digital marketing are likewise going to arise from what form of marketing efforts you are actually performing on the web as well as the amount of money you agree to buy marketing your organisation.

The first thing that is actually going to be actually performed when digital marketing is actually made use of is to give your firm or yourself premium customer relevant information. This could be performed through including customer testimonials as well as acquiring client recommendations. This is something that will definitely need to be carried out often, but it is going to aid a great deal to receive a solid foundation to create your business. In reality, sometimes people are going to start to offer responses on their consumers that they might not as if due to the fact that it will aid to give a better client service experience to everyone entailed.

The upcoming point that is going to be made with digital marketing is to utilize it to entice brand new clients to your organisation. This is actually heading to be performed through acquiring words out that your provider is making changes in order to produce them take place. You will desire to ensure that you supply rewards such as totally free samples as well as free presents in order to allow people to find on their own what is fantastic about your company. Once they have actually created their investment, it is actually going to be the factor of profit for them to maintain coming back and also acquiring additional items.

Next, consumers are heading to would like to know what they may do to create their purchasing knowledge easier. Digital marketing is mosting likely to aid to change that by supplying pointers about what you can possibly do to create the buying adventure very easy. Along with only a simple click, you are going to be able to find out how to create the buying expertise even easier.

Finally, you will desire to make sure that you use your clients support for inquiries that they might have. This is actually visiting be actually made with on-line consumer assistance which can be accessed from your website. If your clients are asking inquiries, you will desire to manage to offer all of them with the answers that they require to be sure that they manage to move on along with their investment.

Another factor that is going to be actually utilized through digital marketing is actually to acquire referrals. This can be carried out by utilizing websites like referralscafe.com and also digitalmarketingpros.com. These web sites will definitely allow you to acquire these recommendations as well as they will be actually extremely loyal consumers that want to refer others to your business.

The last point that is heading to be actually made with digital marketing is to create a relationship with your clients. In this particular scenario, you are going to wish to have the ability to understand what is actually taking place to them directly. This is something that will certainly do work in that you may be capable to keep in touch with your customers and give them ideas and also tips that they can use as well as obtain them associated with one thing that they are interested in.

Bear in mind that when you are taking a look at what is meant through digital marketing, you will wish to ensure that you are able to acquire each one of the above aspects benefiting you. It is regularly mosting likely to be essential to utilize each one of the different information that are readily available to make sure that you may make sure that you have the ability to be actually the most effective in your business.

What SEO Means

What SEO suggests resides in short, being sure that the whole website and also certainly not only a tiny section of it is improved for the online search engine. This could be performed by utilizing web links coming from higher web page ranking internet sites to give your web site a great rank in the internet search engine. An internet site must be actually enhanced for different categories so that each group will offer you various kinds of key phrases. You likewise must optimize each webpage to make sure that your website are going to receive crept much faster and all at once, will receive catalogued a lot faster too. Also, if you are utilizing web content composing for your web site, you have to consist of keyword phrases with all your articles to make sure that they could be quickly listed due to the online search engine.

Likewise, you must use the key phrase padding procedure in order to produce your website crawler friendly as well as will certainly make it extremely effortless for the internet search engine to mark it. Meta tags may be utilized in your link tags as well as your labels. Keywords are actually all around your website to give it a wonderful looking internet site to make sure that it can easily be crawled. All this should be adhered to by other SEO strategies like post submission and search phrase padding in blog sites, online forums. All these methods need to be correctly applied if you want to make your site position higher in the internet search engine.

By applying SEO in your website, it will certainly aid you to rank higher in the internet search engine. Yet, there are actually couple of points that you need to bear in mind to ensure you are going to be able to do it best and also your website are going to rank higher in the internet search engine.

When folks think of what is SEO and also just how it functions, many of all of them are stunned to learn that it really functions in a really easy means. This is actually not a complex strategy that will certainly demand any individual to invest thousands of dollars in order to assemble. This is actually not something that merely a specialist will be able to do. This is actually a strategy that is utilized through hundreds of individuals on a daily basis to get outcomes as swiftly as achievable.

Search Engine Optimization, additionally known as SEO, may be broken into 3 various sections. These 3 different elements will definitely be utilized to acquire the very best outcomes for somebody. Some of these three various techniques is actually contacted keyword analysis. Search phrase research is actually the process of discovering the best key phrases that the individual will certainly be actually using when composing their post. The various other pair of strategies of SEO are actually much more involved yet the most vital of these is actually link property.

SEO could be complicated however it is simple to comprehend. It is just one of one of the most vital consider the results of a person that intends to write a write-up. Every one of the information that has been offered listed below must give anybody a far better understanding of what SEO is as well as just how it operates. Any individual who is considering trying to receive their short articles out into the world and also earning money should know every one of the significant points that they need to know about this approach.

What Are SEO Abilities? How Can I Establish What Are SEO Capabilities?

Exactly how can I establish what are actually SEO capabilities? There are actually many SEO software application offered in the market, but they all assert to become the most ideal, as well as each of them is sold through firms that have been in the business for long. All the instruction provided along with these software tools is nominal, and also no person gives you a comprehensive plan of action. All you receive is a lengthy checklist of devices and also quick guides, and that's it. You do not get all the knowledge about how to utilize these resources, as well as a lot of the guides and also devices are developed with little or no love your details demands.

If you want to achieve success in marketing your website, then you must recognize what are SEO capabilities? To begin with, you have to understand about the significance of key phrases in SEO. It is vital to recognize that key words play a major part in your website's excellence. Keywords participate in an essential job considering that search engines consider them when they are actually trying to recognize your website's function, so they rate your website based on making use of search phrases in your site material and also on the label tag of each web page.

Along with effective SEO, your website will have the ability to position in the best ten outcomes for a key phrase that is essential to your website. The second point is your purpose of possessing an unique label tag as well as distinct web handle. Duplicate material is actually certainly never helpful for your site. Since online search engine only check if a website consists of fresh as well as unique content, producing reproduce material will definitely certainly not assist you position higher. For search phrases, make use of support message web links that suggest your posts and also web content.

What is Hyperlink Property SEO?

Online marketing ( SEO ) is actually the procedure of boosting a website's positions in online search engine leads web pages (SERPs). It is an important measure for small business owner to improve their websites and take advantage of all seo (SEO) methods. SEO assists to boost a website's direct exposure as well as additionally gives the chance to raise website web traffic. SEO fulfills 2 functions: to begin with, it targets potential customers to your internet site; and second, it improves the number of back links that lead your site visitors to various other websites. The overall effectiveness of your website depends on the means you use search phrases and vital words in your label tag, in your physical body text of your webpage and in the Links. Key words are vital given that they can easily inform an online search engine what your website concerns.

Link Structure is actually an important part of SEO. It involves developing web links that most likely to your website or even URL, which will certainly route web traffic to your web site. The very best type of web link property is actually an equivalent hyperlink. A reciprocatory web link is actually one that routes an individual to an additional website from all yours. You can likewise have inbound links via article and article directories.

You can conveniently build hyperlinks through joining forums, posting your articles in various article directories and also submitting your hyperlink to article marketing online forums. Writing a blog may additionally be a good source of link structure. On top of that, you may have inbound web links through online forums, online forums with top quality web content, discussion forums along with the really good voting system, as well as coming from personal blogging sites. These are merely some of the methods which you may develop hyperlinks. Making use of SEO approaches is very important. Do certainly not stop at constructing hyperlinks to your site. You need to constantly be actually optimizing your website.

How Perform I End Up Being an AdWords Expert? - A Guide For Beginners

How do I end up being an AdWords expert? This inquiry can be responded to through checking out what makes a successful search marketing initiative. The expert pays out even more focus to their AdWords initiatives. While your objective is to drive web traffic to the web site, the expert decides which hyperlinks ought to head to each individual and just how they prefer the guest to click these links.

What makes it an AdWords method is actually the AdWords individual pays out much less interest to this form of project than to a ppc (PPC) initiative. The big variation in between both is actually that the PPC initiatives are actually automated. The AdWords projects are actually certainly not. The process involves deciding on which ad links most likely to which individuals as well as enhancing those adds based upon the keywords and also the website visitor's internet browser style. The pay per click individual has to bear in mind to link on their own to the ideal advertisements.

Moreover, there are actually a ton of things you require to bear in mind when you start along with AdWords. To begin with, you need to think about the search conditions you want to utilize and decide on some that will attract the guests who seek these conditions. You additionally require to make certain that the internet site is actually as visitor-friendly as feasible. By design, you don't wish website visitors who may not be interested in what you have to supply to go elsewhere. Second, it is actually essential that you establish which keywords need to be your target market. Then, you need to have to utilize the ideal key phrase device to determine what kind of web sites have these phrases and the number of of all of them possess a lot of traffic. Finally, you also need to have to find out which advertisement teams are actually best fit for your website.

How Can Marketing Improve Your Company?

There are actually numerous significances for the condition "digital marketing." Many individuals use the condition in an even more basic feeling to define any marketing that includes a pc device and the web. The world wide web is the foundation of what a person performs on a daily basis; as a result, it is vital that the individual comprehends how to market successfully using the net.

People today have actually come to be extra highly sensible as well as understand that they may earn money offering on the internet customer products. One of the most typical approach of marketing is actually to sell to individuals who wish to acquire the products you are offering.

The majority of the make money from an online organisation will certainly come from clients who purchase products and companies. A number of the general methods of internet marketing include delivering a product or service through a website, using seo methods, and generating high quality information on your website. On top of that, the main point of marketing through the internet is actually to steer as much web traffic to the website as achievable.

Before deciding on just how to strengthen your business's graphic, it is actually essential to know what is indicated by digital marketing. This involves all kinds of promo marketing that include on the internet advertising. Digital marketing also encompasses marketing such things through a web portal like ebay.com, to ensure that consumers may see what is readily available, quote on the product, and after that acquire it. Digital marketing likewise features marketing business through e-mail bulletins, social networks internet sites, and also website online forums.

The 1st step in digital marketing is actually to discover what is suggested through digital marketing as well as develop a strategy for its execution. To carry out this, you need to have to acquire relevant information from others who are actually participated in the method. A specialist consultant will certainly assist you establish exactly how to execute your tips and put together a budget for the venture.

Lots of people who have an on the web business is going to certainly not even consider implementing digital marketing methods. Nonetheless, there are many companies that neglect just since they perform not know how to strengthen their graphic and also their purchases. These services neglect since they carry out not understand the worth of a top quality image; hence, they fall short in selling their products.

If you are an entrepreneur, you must recognize truth ability of marketing via the net. You must realize that to market the goods you are marketing, you must have the ability to create sales and also increase the worth of your provider. Without understanding this reality, you will definitely continue to be actually discouraged with breakdown.

It is actually achievable to find out how to raise your market reveal with digital marketing if you would like to end up being a productive entrepreneur. All you need to perform is to request the details that is required, set up a spending plan, and also set up a plan to attain excellence.

What is WordPress Website Design? Discover What WordPress is

What is WordPress web design? Do lots of folks question what is actually WordPress web design? For those that are actually not familiar with the phrase, WordPress is a free of charge writing a blog system that is actually being made use of online. It corresponds to a blog post in a conventional means, yet it has lots of additional features as well as functionalities, and it is among the best popular blogging platforms accessible today. Today, many websites make use of WordPress, given that it is actually effortless to put up, basic to utilize, as well as incredibly uncomplicated.

Thus, what is WordPress web design? Among the greatest advantages of utilization WordPress is actually that it is actually straightforward. Considering that WordPress is actually fairly brand new online, most webmasters do not have an excellent suggestion about just how to create a website from scratch. WordPress may be set up to create the method easy. Nonetheless, there are additionally several "cheats" accessible for novices, and also they may provide some help. If you intend to learn more concerning creating a WordPress website, there are actually lots of manuals available online that instruct you all you need to have to know about just how to make a website in WordPress. The best means to begin is through deciding on a template considering that the design template will certainly offer you an idea of what you can easily anticipate from a WordPress website.

What is actually WordPress web design? An additional perk of using WordPress is actually that it is compatible with lots of CMSs. WordPress is compatible along with Drupal, Joomla, as well as other open-source CMSs. It is actually additionally simple to add plugins to WordPress, that makes it much easier to incorporate new functions to the website. However, if you pick to use a personalized template, you can easily incorporate capability to the website and also individualize it to your needs.

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