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cruciatusforeplay · 3 years

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This is part two of a hella big post. Check out part one here. These are all a lot more recent, so I'm gonna try to be less spoilery, but there are gonna be some.

A not-so-brief history of Hawkeye in Comics Part Two (spoilers below the cut)

A note on events, dying and doubling down on Hawkeyes

Comics love doing big events, and I'm not covering them in here. Partly because they are huge and complex and to just focus on Hawkeye would be an injustice to the stories, but also because the amount of stuff I would need to spoil would be way beyond just a little Hawkeye. Clint was involved in Secret Wars (1984), which was one of the first crossover events of its kind. Another notable era is 2004-2009, where there is an incredible amount of superhero politics driving big narratives. If you're new to comics, you might not know that characters dying is common and rarely permanent. This is relevant because while I said that I wouldn't talk about events, I think it would be pretty uncool to not mention that Hawkeye dies and is brought back to life (Avengers Disassembled, House of M, New Avengers #26). It's around here that Clint picks up the Ronin mantle.

This is also when Dark Reign/Dark Avengers is going on. For anyone who'd like some Clint whump from this era, there's a top notch naked torture scene in New Avengers Annual (2009). Clint is involved in several other big events and crossovers over later years, but that's definitely a seperate list.

In the time where Clint is dead, Captain America is hanging out with a group of newly formed Young Avengers, including archery badass Kate Bishop. Cap suggests to her that she take up the Hawkeye mantle and gives her Clint's old bow. After Clint returns, he becomes initially her mentor, before they form a very close friendship. Clint is initially doing Ronin things, but even when he lays down ninja robes, they decide to be very Hawkeye about the whole thing and both keep calling themselves Hawkeye, despite the obvious confusion this causes.

Hawkeye's ears: Hawkeye vs. Deadpool #0-4 (2014)

This is a fun little miniseries that you could treat as a Halloween special if you so desired. It's set in the time after Fraction's run and there are a few callbacks, but nothing major if you've not read that. Clint is a little short-tempered and hypermasculine in this run for my personal taste, but it's got lots of grumpy Clint Vs sassy Wade while they vaguely attempt to team up. The thing this run does really well is Clint's deafness, despite the lack of visible hearing aids. There are comments around lip-reading, wearing aids when wearing other headgear, there's some sign language, and this is the run where Deadpool pulls his mask up so Clint can lipread and see his face while he signs (facial expressions are really key in sign language). It's lovely. Otherwise the run gives you a Kate cameo, some Deadpool and Hawkeye disaster/shenanigans, and perhaps most importantly, the return of the skycycle.

Key background: All New Hawkeye #1-6 (2015)

This run is often overlooked, but the art in the flashbacks is beautiful. We get some key information around Clint and Barney's abusive home situation - with their dad who drank and beat them, and how they ended up in care after their parents died, and subsequently their early days in the circus. There is a definite shift in how Barney is characterized as a bad influence compared to the 2003 run. It parallels with the rest of the arc which focuses on Clint and Kate Bishop working together to get some kids out of a very bad situation. The rest of Lemires run is a little weird and has no major repurcussions for anyone except Barney (which I won't elaborate on because it's relevant to the Fraction run).

Back to your roots: Tales of Suspense #100-104 (2017)

Seeing Clint cycle back and return to Tales of Suspense is really lovely. This comic is one of my all time favourites. It's incredibly tight story-telling with a great plot and really fun dynamic. The premise is Clint and Bucky teaming up to figure out the body trail being left after Black Widow's death. Clint is obnoxious and a delightful mess, Bucky is sporting a permanent scowl and is hilariously level-headed. It's a lot of fun and it's a lovely build on the tension and teamwork between these two idiots (who I, as an avid Winterhawk shipper, am completely gone for, but even without that, this is a great comic.) It also has some killer covers, and the facial expressions are absolutely hilarious.

Hawkeyes together: Hawkeye #13-16 (2017) and West Coast Avengers #1-10 (2018)

The Hawkeye run is Kate Bishops run and it has a larger continuing storyline that runs from the beginning of her Hawkeye and way into WCA, but I've listed the issues that you'll want for Kate and Clint shenanigans, and you should be able to catch up without the rest if you don't want it. These comics are ridiculously fun, especially West Coast Avengers, which has Kate leading the team this time. There's loads of jokes, and it strikes a nice balance between Hawkeyes being disasters and being hyper competent. Truthfully, this is Kate's show, and Clint takes a backseat, but their dynamic is killer here so I think is deserves a mention. There are also plenty of Clint related wardrobe malfunctions and Lucky the Pizza Dog is around.

Our most recent boy: Hawkeye freefall #1-6 (2020)

I haven't read this one yet, but it's been extremely well received by the fandom. As a result, good news: no spoilers! It's a short run, which may have had something to do with it being published during 2020, and specifically around a time when Marvel were experiencing some major distribution issues (which would have led to digital release only and as a result lower sales), but that's all guesswork because I haven't actually researched it. This run has someone dressing as Ronin and letting Clint take the blame for their nefarious deeds (oh no!). Clint makes some classic Clint (read: dumpster fire) decisions, and the art looks fun and vibrant. Can't really give you more without reading it myself 😅 If you need more Clint still, he's also rumoured to be knocking around in the 2020 Black Widow run, but I've not had the money to get my mitts on that yet either.

Notable AUs:

Marvel is a big fan of throwing a well known cast into an alternative universes, so there are a few other places to look for him.

The Ultimates universe was largely speaking a bit of a shitshow, but they did give us a very dark and gritty Clint, so if that's your jam, ultimate hawkeye is the place to be. Old Man Hawkeye appears alongside Old Man Logan, and they are both, you guessed it, old. It's not the only time we get Clint as a wrinkly dude (the second half Lemire's run also has some timey-wimey stuff happening), but this is a version of Clint who is going blind (granted we've seen that before too, but this is a darker vibe than Blindspot). Wanna know who the greatest marksman is without his sight - old man Hawkeye for you! Finally there's the Zombie 'verse: zombie Clint is a little confused, but he's got the spirit. Clint got zombiefied and then left in some rubble as only a head for 40 years before getting picked up, so he's a little worse for wear. If you need that in your life then Marvel Zombies is your universe. For a full rundown of all the universes including animated and MCU, click here.

Notable aliases:

Clint's been a few other people than Hawkeye in the 616 universe (the main Marvel Comics universe). He used one of Hank Pyms growth serums and became a giant strongman in Avengers #63 (1969) and stuck around in his Goliath form for more than a few issues. After Cap had died, Clint returned from the dead and tried on Captain America for all of one issue in Fallen Son #3 (2007). He decided (with a little help from Kate) that it wasn't right to wear the uniform, which in turn led to some interesting tension between him and Bucky Barnes when Buck did become the new Captain America. Finally, there's his most well-known alternate persona: Ronin. Clint becomes Ronin after returning from the dead, wanting a break from his Hawkeye persona and an opportunity to become Ronin arises in New Avengers #27 (2007). Clint is not the only person to have used these aliases. Additionally, Hawkeye has been used not only by Clint and Kate Bishop, but also by Bullseye during the Dark Reign.

The things we haven't talked about

Like I said at the very beginning, there is a lot of Clint Barton knocking around in comics and even with all this there's a lot of content I haven't focused on. For instance, I've not talked a lot about his relationships, beyond his marriage to mockingbird (and really I only scratched the surface with that), and honestly once you start getting into interpersonal relationships we're starting to move on from what can be done in a Tumblr thread.

There are also some topic specific threads floating around, which you might like to look at too.

@vaguelyrotten has done a run down of some great dumpster fire Clint Barton comics (some of which I haven't listed) and you can see that here.

@bobbimorses did a great summary of Clint's historical deafness for instance which you can find here.

There's also this little bit all about Clint and Bucky in canon (thanks to @nightwideopen ) and how Winterhawk became a thing (thanks to @1000-directions )

This is slight sidenote, but @clintscoffeepot did a really great comprehensive of Fraction Clint's apartment which is just a really useful writing resource and you can get that here.

There is also this website which I stumbled across fairly far into writing this post which does actually look like it might be comprehensive.

If I've missed anything major, or listed something incorrectly or you just have some Clint related opinions that I need to know about, do hit me up.

#clint barton #Hawkeye #hawkeye comics #hawkguy and other costumes #deaf hawkeye #comic #comic books #marvel comics #let's talk about comics

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theyearsiturnedintoaghost · 3 years

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Hello, Is This Thing On?

Hi! (as mentioned above). Do people still use this thing? I have no idea. Years ago, and I do mean YEARS ago, I had one of these. I didn’t use it for much, just reposting things, following humans I’d met in online communities, a ‘celebrity’ here or there, sometimes screaming about shit I couldn’t control into the void that is the endless scrolling interweb, and being pointless in wasting my time between classes, work, and twenty-something. Regardless, my previous tumblr had minimal followers, made minimal impact, and that was okay. It was honestly just a nice place to sort of hide in plain sight. Still be part of a social world without actually having to do much. This was also pre a billion other apps and social media outlets to express yourself or scroll mindlessly at a million other pointless things that people were posting to make you giggle or even just stop for a second and think.

Clearly, the point of this, back then, felt like something I would use to help propel my writing career. Turns out, it did not. I did not write much, if at all. And most of the time I think it was because I was scared nothing was as good as any of the other stuff I was reading from people I liked, and thought were so much cooler and smarter than me; I still feel this way all of the time, but I do realize this was me being nervous, small minded about myself, and completely unconfident.

Unfortunately, I am still most of these things a lot of the time, but recently, after getting fired from a job, having my heart broken by pretty much everyone on the planet, especially a few specific people, cancelled by all of my friends (?) - this is a thing btw. (It’s not as awful as being cancelled publicly, but it does still ruin your life, mindset, confidence, and overall physical and mental wellbeing) Getting a new job, hating it and feeling like I was going no where, and missing out on living a life I felt proud of and that I was actively participating in, I decided maybe I should just try to write it all out and see what happens.

To be frank, I expect nothing of this. I can’t fathom a world where anything I have to say truly matters to people because lets be real - everyone has this own shit and everyone is going through so much all of the time. And we all think we have something new, quirky, interesting, and important to say. And in a world that constantly shoves perfection down our throats and works so hard to make each of us feel completely inadequate to every Kardashian, Beyonce, Grande, etc., it’s hard to really think that anything I have to say will matter to anyone; at all.

(I also hate that all of my ‘perfectionist’ people were female, but maybe it’s harder to compare to Golden Boys when you are a female. Either way, there are many boys/men/theys/thems that are put on a pedestal and made out to be perfect out there, as well, and they deserve that notation as well. I just have no points of reference off the top of my head, so please forgive me; I am trying to do this in a stream of consciousness type thing.)

I mean, the truth is, I’m a fucking mess. I’m 33, single, living at home, afraid of my own shadow most of the time, and spend about 98% of my time alone. I pay for a phone plan that I literally only use to send memes to my two sisters, and that’s about it. I rarely receive texts, invites out, or even calls to make plans for something. And while a lot of this is my own doing - again, I did cut off most of the world after I realized I was sort of the joke to a lot of people - it’s still kind of pathetic, and entirely uncool. I am not a socialite, or someone cool and trendy, and to be honest, I kind of never want to be.

Which is a semi-false statement, because years ago, when I had one of these previously, I sort of hoped it would work out and that I could write and be ‘cool.’ Whatever the fuck that means. But now, years later, I’m honestly beyond glad I am not cool; not in the slightest. Maybe that’s making it to your 30s? Maybe the trade for having to create a daily routine of lathering up my body with like 9 different versions of FDA-Approved-Vampire-Juice on my skin to prevent me from looking any older than I already do, you in turn get to have a brain that finally realizes... having a ‘normal’ life is honestly pretty cool? Normal is clearly subjective here as everyone is normal, famous, notoriety, or not; They’re all still humans and people with feelings, thoughts, and emotions. This is a hard thing to realize when you see stadiums full of people screaming at Harry Styles (Boom! found a male perfect in this scatterbrain) or hundreds of paparazzi lined up to take photos of every person on a red carpet wearing clothing that costs as much as my student loan debt (Which sidenote, is VERYYYYYY much). It’s hard to fully realize that maybe some of those people who became ‘icons’ never really knew what they were getting into when they signed that deal with the Devil to make them seemingly immortal; especially in a world with the internet where everything can exist forever (or until the world explodes, clearly). But maybe getting into my 30s and removing myself from most social media outlets, even listening to the news, or caring about whatever fucking popular haircut was in this season (it’s always bangs, and I’ve already made that mistake. No thanks), that I learned to realize - the truly most important people in your life are the ones that stick with you when it’s tough. When getting out of bed is so hard your limbs ache and you cry every morning on your way to work, at your desk behind your computer screen hidden in a corner, or in a bathroom stall during your lunch break. The normalcy that comes with realizing your prayers to ‘just make it to five o’clock,’ are heard and that you are just so thankful for that that you don’t even desire the innate feeling in most of our egos to stand out, be seen, ‘Make it’ in a way that lets people notice we ‘succeeded.’ Maybe this only comes with the realization of how nice it is to go to a grocery store braless and unnoticed.

Maybe this is also something I, and so many of us in this point and shoot viral world, are trying to still learn.

Sure, a lot of days I still crave being able to make a perfect Pintrest project, practice my Late Night interview with Letterman where I sound funny, charming, and likeable to all walks of life, or recreate a recipe from the New York Times website so great that The Barefoot Contessa finds out through word of mouth, and comes to my basement hide out, and offers to give me, a fellow barefoot loving bitch, her title and crown along with a glass of wine and a kiss from her husband, Jeffery. We’ll both laugh at how lovely it feels to be Barefoot ladies who understand that wanting ‘fame’ or ‘recognition’ in your twenties is only really a pathway to destruction by your 30s.

And this is not exactly something that I learned easy. In fact, I spent most of my twenties destroying my body with drugs - plenty of hard ones - and alcohol - various kinds of the same things - in order to numb my brain from the sadness that is just... being young, lonely, scared, unsure of yourself, and nervous that all of your hopes and expectations for yourself in your ‘dream life’ are too much for what you and your actual self will ever be capable of ever becoming. That I would never become the comedian I dreamed of being, or sing the perfect song in front of a crowd of admirers, or write that best selling book to tell everyone who thought I was nothing they could go fuck themselves. It’s something I still have to remind myself, and my brain and ego, that are most likely things I will never do because those are lottery dreams. And people you know don’t actually win the lottery. And at the end of the day, I am people you know. And sometimes it breaks my own heart to realize I may never feel that rush of making a crowd laugh, or creating a piece of art that makes someone feel seen, but as Pam, from The Office said, and I am paraphrasing, ‘there is beauty in ordinary things.’ And I think reminding myself of that as I sat on the beach this summer and watched a dad teach his son to surf, and how happy they both were when he got up, gave me that brief feeling of... being okay. I won’t lie, I did cry a little at this realization at that moment, and I am slightly teary now as I write it, but I think I’m not ashamed of that because being normal means I get to feel things as I do, in that moment, and that is something I think I lacked in my desiring-bigger-flashier- twenties; actually being present in the world and your place in it. Even if that is just as small as being kind to a random person on the street.

I think that is why everything I felt I wanted to write never came out correct. It never came out ‘Perfect.’ And that was my problem for most of my life, even up until today, I’m afraid that I am a perfectionist in the ways that are preventing me from becoming... me. I’m still fearful that I am too late in ever ‘accomplishing’ anything I ever dreamed. I doubt I will ever actually write a book. I’m unsure I’ll ever make a decent living. I am beyond doubtful I am ever going to be loveable to someone whom I also want to love back. And maybe I’m a little scared that I’ll never have a kid, or that if I do have a kid, I’ll never be a decent parent. And I’m still working on breaking the cycle of thinking something has to ‘sound’ or ‘be seen as important’ to be meaningful. There is beauty in the ordinary. I’ve started to make it my mantra. Spoken in my head every time I see a teenage couple holding hands walking in town, a father holding their baby close to his chest, a woman dressed in a power suit striding through an office building or city on their way to make their own careers or push equality further. I’ve started to dream of how actual normalcy makes the real changes. How every 4th grade teacher has a chance to change some kids life.

Clearly, a lot of these personal fears I have about myself not being ‘enough,’ or doing something good enough to become successful at it and build a life out of it, are monotonous fears and privileged middle-class complaints. I’m aware they may not resonate with anyone, anything, or mean much more than just being an online public diary entry to my own meandering thoughts, but, still - I finally felt like I had to try.

So here it is, the whole truth on how I let myself become a ghost for years.

I hope someone will stick around while I just... try to explain it all, figure it all out, and hopefully make sense out of even being whatever a human who is hoping to grow even means. Hopefully, something here will resonate with someone else and we can create our own little weirdo corner of the world where we’re not seeking more than just trying to be honest with ourselves and what it means to be human. Even if that means just posting a recipe for banana bread (thank you Gwen Steffani for keeping me able to spell Banana), reposting random memes about how we all want to scream for 30 seconds and feel better, or sad-girl diary entry posts about how I ruined my own life a million times over. Oh, and maybe I’ll give you tips on how to stain your wood deck, because I spent my day doing that yesterday and basically, Home Depot is calling me to be in their ADs.

But at the core of it all, lets be very real, it’s hard to be human in so many ways. And I’m just hoping this connects with anyone. Especially any of us who wished we were different - in any way.

xoxo

-K

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exeggcute · 4 years

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it’s funny (by which I mean irritating) when people refuse to earnestly engage with a piece of art and are then surprised when they later discover that said piece of art has genuine themes and ideas to offer to anyone who hasn’t shrouded themselves in a safe cocoon of detached irony... which, okay, I know I just said “art” like some super-serious thing which means you have full liberty to point and laugh at what I’m about to say next.

but, that being said, I think one of the few relatively consistent strengths of kojima games is that they’re very earnest, even when they’re goofy as hell. and I’m definitely not of the “kojima is a prophet who does no wrong” camp, not by a long shot lol. but if you’re willing to engage with some of his themes without pretense (in the sense of “without mockery,” not “without well-founded criticism”) then there’s a lot of stuff you’re gonna take away from it that you’ll overlook or dismiss if you’re just coming in to crack jokes and nothing else. death stranding is a weird game that sometimes takes itself seriously, sometimes doesn’t, but if you buy into its conceit (i.e. give some of its more goofy shit the benefit of the doubt) then it does have some really touching moments about making connections with other people and building bridges and working together to rebuild the rubble out of catastrophe. and the game’s not even subtle about it, if anything it’s pretty hamfisted at times (in a way that, personally, seems more admirable than refusing to take itself seriously at risk of being Uncool), which is why it’s so surprising to see people who are just now going “damn guys maybe this game had something important to say after all.” like, yeah, it did!! were you not a little bit touched every time you worked together with another player to complete a structure? didn’t you feel yourself getting attached to sam’s bb just a little bit?

and stuff that’s wacky is wacky, no doubt about that, but I feel like it’s the difference between laughing with your friend when they show you a funny part of their short story versus laughing at them behind their back when you describe their short story to someone else. and it’s not a kojima-specific thing either, or even a gaming-specific thing, but it’s definitely a more extreme example of something that is mostly known for being Silly and Hilarious despite having a consistent undercurrent of serious themes about war, imperialism, community, whatever, and not even being subtle about those themes. but when we all get so caught up in making the most aloof commentary (which, to stress again, is very different than pointing out rightful flaws) or making the most clever-yet-detached jokes, you end up closing yourself off to anything meaningful. engaging with stuff this way is like picking apart the carcass til there’s nothing but bones left.

sometimes you gotta be serious and heartfelt in a profoundly uncool way! and it’s hard, yeah, but it’s better for all of us in the long run. you’re never gonna get through to other human beings we’re all too wrapped up in our own armor of ironic defense

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donnerpartyofone · 4 years

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working for a giant corporation taught me some really crazy things about myself and others. for instance, i think that if you grow up as like a responsible little goody two shoes like myself, you develop this delusion that people in high-powered jobs are mature and intelligent in proportion to how far up the ladder they are, because how else could they possibly have become the boss of everybody? in reality there is absolutely no such correlation between mental and social ability, and what you get to do, and actually i think that most people in a position of authority get there by being so thin-skinned and intolerable when they’re not satisfied that people just give them stuff to get them to shut up. but i digress. what i’m really thinking about is the shocking realization that older, more experienced, more “qualified” people (or just as bad, people who appear to be on exactly the same level as you) don’t read. i mean, they just will never read an entire email. i used to write these emails that included every single piece of information the person might need to know about whatever the subject was; not that they were pages long, but they’d introduce the topic, ask my main 2-3 questions, and include whatever the person might need to know in order to answer me, if there was anything extra that they shouldn’t know already. then i started to realize that no matter what i did to try to finish the conversation in as few emails as possible, the person would like, read the first line, respond only to that in a confusing incomplete way, and then later get mad because i “never told them” all the stuff i explained in that first message. so, i had to learn to start dumbing down everything i wrote until it was like something i would send to a child, in the simplest terms possible and never with more than one piece of information OR one question at a time. i found it pretty disturbing to have to do this, just like i found it disturbing that in this day and age you really HAVE to use stupid little smiley face emoji in a professional environment or else no one is capable of figuring out if you’re like furiously screaming at them or not. even though some people are legitimately so busy and overwhelmed that you have to spoonfeed them information for both your sakes, these experiences can go a long way toward making you feel like everyone you work for is a fucking idiot and they shouldn’t be allowed to push you around and condescend to you if they can’t even fucking read as well as you apparently do.

anyway this isn’t exactly the same thing AT ALL but last week i sent a tattoo proposal to this person who is a really successful, sophisticated artist. it’s not my first time at the rodeo, or even at that specific shop, so i bulleted the stuff that has to go into every proposal, and added whatever extra description i thought was necessary. admittedly there was a bunch of that, because what i wanted them to do was a little complex, like i want an existing image but in a different style, and i wanted to be as clear as possible about that. the other unusual thing i did was to send a link to my reference images (all in one place after the jump), instead of attaching them--part of what i sent was a video showing the available space on my arm (i needed to turn my arm over to show the whole spot), and i couldn’t email it, so this seemed like an ok solution. this is starting to sound like a lot but it really wasn’t, it was like, read a half-page email with clear bullet points and then follow a link. about a week passed (that part is normal), and then i noticed that they sent me a DM over instagram, from a blank account i guess they keep for this purpose. that was weird since we’d never interacted over there, and also since they didn’t respond to my email; why would this be easier? so then i look, and there’s no message, they just forwarded me their booking faq--which outlines exactly what i did. i don’t know what they think i didn’t send already--i’m guessing they didn’t like or didn’t notice the photo link but i can’t be sure because they didn’t say anything--but it was all in my email. suddenly i found myself back in that office mentality. do i

a) resend everything in a different format, to try to figure out what email style works best for them? understanding that it’s always possible they won’t get it the second time either, for some reason? or b) reply that i already DID read the faq and i sent them exactly what it asked for, so they should just look at my email again, in a tone that magically doesn’t make me sound mad or rude?

OR, let’s say i don’t want to do this with them anymore because i’m worried about letting someone modify my body when we’re already struggling to communicate. like to be honest it bothered me that they didn’t type anything, even like “your message is missing stuff, read the faq and try again”, and/or “i’m sending my faq over instagram so check your DMs.” also they sent the faq as photos over DM so they expire; i thought to take screenshots, but if i hadn’t, i’d be fucked. so, i think now i have to figure out how to terminate this. do i

1) reply to the DMs, or to my email which i guess they got even though they switched channels on me, and make a formal declaration that i’m not going to pursue this with them so there’s no further confusion, or 2) just ghost, because who really cares, and they’re probably really busy anyway, which would explain everything that happened/didn’t happen.

i wish i didn’t agonize over stuff like this but that’s just my deal. this is slightly like when i realized that now some professionals only write in this infantile internet speak, which has the dual effect of making me feel strangely uncool even if they’re older and dorkier than me, and also like i’m just not sure if they’re actually reading and understanding what i tell them because their responses are in like baby talk. i think it’s becoming obvious that the answer is 2 just forget all about this, i already thought of someone else for this project anyway and it’s too anxious-making for me to figure out someone’s love language or whatever just so i can tailor all my messages to them. probably a lot of people would just drop it without even worrying about it. i just wish i gave less of a shit about things in general.

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headspace-hotel · 4 years

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can u explain autism vs cringe culture? I'm confused abt the correlation

One of the major characteristics of autism is having “special interests,” that is really specific/narrow subjects you’re interested in to an “abnormal” degree. That’s the textbook sort of way of putting it.

in my personal experience, special interests kind of help you interact with the world. You connect everything to your special interest, and when you talk to other people, you usually talk about your special interest because that’s a reliable thing you know how to navigate. for example, Star Wars used to be one of my special interests. lots of people like Star Wars, but I knew the names of ALL the aliens and even minor background characters and insane amounts of lore and I thought about Star Wars all the time. I could hold a really animated, enthusiastic conversation with you about Star Wars, but couldn’t do small talk or very much else. but telling people facts about Star Wars was a way of connecting, and connecting conversations to my special interest helped me with them! it’s also kind of something you can retreat into when the world gets stressful, like, when everything is bewildering and you don’t understand, you can just think about all the stuff you know and love about your special interest and it’s familiar and it belongs to you.

the thing about special interests is that they’re often one of our first experiences with social shame, because people get annoyed with you when you talk about the same thing all the time, and sometimes can be very nasty. Special interests mark you out as “weird” and “different,” and that often sticks with you.

special interests can be kind of odd...for example one of mine was Lewis and Clark, and though it was very intense and I brought up Lewis and Clark in nearly every conversation, there’s not exactly a fandom for very many 19th century explorers. They can also be considered “age-inappropriate” for example if an autistic adult liked a children’s tv show that would be considered shameful.

autistics generally hate cringe culture because it targets people who are interested in things “wrongly” whether they’re interested in something “uncool,” something they’re “too old” for, something they’re “too obsessed with” or something they use as a coping mechanism.

It’s considered acceptable to make fun of people for being “too” involved in a fandom, using it for emotional support, or just being a big fan of something that’s getting dragged online right now for whatever reason.

Cringe culture also extends in general to a lot of “weird” or “socially awkward” behaviors, which is...also a major trait of autism.

Growing up autistic you often end up with intense shame surrounding the things you like because you know they’re “wrong” somehow but you can’t really articulate what it is. I used to get intense secondhand embarrassment whenever something about one of my special interests would even come up. Later in my teen years that evolved into anxiety that was triggered whenever I even tried to talk about something I liked. Just a couple weeks ago a friend invited me over to a movie night to watch Star Wars in her dorm. About half an hour before I was supposed to go over, I started getting intense anxiety, like heart palpitations and stuff. I spent the entire walk to her dorm fighting off tears and when I arrived, stood outside of her door feeling like I couldn’t be courageous enough to come inside because I was convinced that I would be met with resentment and hatred from everyone else. That they were just trying to appease me in watching a movie I liked, and hating every second of it, and that I needed to apologize to them, and that I shouldn’t have even been there.

“cringe culture” is pointing at people who are a little bit “weird” in some way, usually in what things they like or enjoy, and being like “look how weird and abnormal they are! People like this should feel ashamed.”

People who make jokes like “people who like X thing should be bullied” or something claim that it’s not about autistic people, but when the subjects of the jokes start to clearly line up with autistic traits, it seems less innocent. I don’t think these people are consciously thinking “ah yes I hate autistic people and want to bully them” but I do think that many of them have hated many autistic people, specifically for the things that make them autistic, without knowing it.

People say that “cringe culture doesn’t exist outside of the internet” but for autistic people, liking something a little “too much” or liking something “weird” has usually caused a lot of fear and shame that in some cases has caused great emotional/psychological damage.

I’m in college now. This past summer, I came to the uncomfortable realization that I no longer had any idea who I was as a person, because I had pushed back and ignored all my interests to the point where I didn’t even know what I enjoyed. On Star Wars night I panicked, thinking that just because we were watching Star Wars, everyone must have been resenting and hating me specifically.

autistics are upset by cringe culture online because often, it’s just repeating the same things that hurt us as kids and that stick with us even into our adulthood. Fandom isn’t shameful, but there’s a “norm” of how to interact with fandom. For example, no one would ever make fun of someone for just having seen the Marvel movies, but if that person had watched them all 20 times and blogged exclusively about Marvel, that would be “abnormal” and it would be considered ok to shame them. That person may not be autistic. But when we see people making fun of them, it’s impossible not to see ourselves, happily ranting to friends about the thing that we love and getting rejected and hurt for it. I don’t even care much about Marvel, but when someone says something like “we should bully marvel fans more lmao like watch a different movie” it hits in a personal way just because I was that kid, happily watching a movie over and over, and grasping desperately at other people with my facts about Star Wars aliens, and I know deep down that they hate that kid too. Because she’s annoying and cringy and needs to feel shame for liking things too much.

For being too into it, too invested.

For not “watching another movie.”

For being annoying by talking about the thing that she loves.

For being weird. Abnormal. Different.

And I’m an adult now, and yet a couple weeks ago, I was still that kid, starting to comprehend that her love of Star Wars aliens was wrong but totally unable to understand why, and feeling too wrong to even walk into my friend’s dorm.

The premise of cringe culture is “Some people are Weird, and it’s better if they are ashamed so they will be less weird.”

And I don’t believe that is true. I believe that the weird twelve year old I was didn’t deserve this awful shame and fear. And I don’t deserve it now. None of the autistic kids like the one I was do. None of them.

#autism #cringe culture #actually autistic #me #ask

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moviegroovies · 5 years

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okay so one of my points in the original incoherent longpost ramble i wrote while fending off the the post-lost boys haze that overtook me after watching it for, i believe, the fifth time, was that i thought the reason it was such a good movie was how quickly it checked the “oh, i like these characters and want to think about them now that the movie is over” box. in that post, i then proceeded to not talk about the thoughts i’ve actually been having about these characters at all, so let’s get down to work and try to fix that, shall we?

okay i was going to just write another impossible to read multiple paragraph long post, but y’know, how about i make things easier on all of us and do this in bullet points. so, in no particular order..... headcanons!

despite her later desire to get out of the gang, star wasn’t tricked or pressured into becoming a vampire like michael was. rather, she had been hanging around them for long enough that she pieced together what they were and asked to join, only coming to realize that it would mean killing other people for her own continued survival and wanting out later on.

in the 6-issue lost boys comic, it’s implied that star has cystic fibrosis, informing her decision to become a vampire. i’m definitely not taking all of that comic into my own personal canon, but i stand by that part--esp. bc it fits with vampirism being her decision, even if it was one she later regretted.

marko is the smallest of the lost boys, but also the most dangerous, even exceeding david. have you seen that part where he’s peeling a man’s head like a fruit? that bitch is BLOODTHIRSTY.

not that he’s exactly an upstanding citizen on his own, but a good deal of the reason that david abuses exercises his control over the other boys is that he knows that they (but marko in particular) are always just about ten minutes and one show of weakness on his end away from staging a coup, and he knows that with anyone else in charge (save maybe dwayne, but dwayne isn’t interested in the leadership role) the group would become too violent and draw too much attention, getting them all killed.

okay now i feel like i’m vilifying marko which. i definitely stand by what i’ve said, but i also don’t think he’s like, pure evil or anything by any means. i like marko!

i feel like i owe marko some nice headcanons now so like: i agree with the general consensus that marko cares for the pigeons in the vampire hotel, to the point where he feeds them and maybe talks to them. he DEFINITELY has named them all, although honestly he can’t tell them apart that well so usually when he sees one and calls it a specific name, he’s fucking with everyone else. loves to make fun of the other guys for not knowing which one is which, though.

one day he looks at a bird flying into the cave and casually announces “hey, vlad’s back,” and after hardly a glance, michael deadpans “vlad? that’s lestat.”

marko goes into existential crisis mode for a week. this is the first time he starts to respect david’s decision to make michael one of them.

he never figures out if michael was just fucking with him the way everyone else or if he could really tell the difference between the pigeons and it haunts him to this day.

ok wow that was a LOT of marko

back to star: she’s trans. you know that part on the boardwalk where she and michael are introducing themselves to one another for the first time, and michael goes “oh, your parents too, huh,” when she says her name is star? i always felt like she didn’t really get what he was saying, even after michael elaborated and told her he meant that her parents were ex-hippies. now i’m totally choosing to read that as her being like, a little offended that he thought someone would only be named star because they were burdened with it by uncool ex-hippie parents, because honestly when she picked it she thought she had the coolest name of all time.

i will not take constructive criticism on that last part because it is already perfect.

on the subject of star, the general consensus i’ve seen in fic and stuff is that she had been a vampire for a few months or maybe a year before the events of the movie, but honestly i’d disagree.

personally, i feel like she’s been there for a lot longer than that--like, have you seen how she dresses? that immediately pinged “free spirit hippie girl” to me, which was kind of out of place, especially considering that everyone else dressed so 80′s. imo, star might have been turned as early as the start of the 70′s--making her the ex-hippie, and not her parents, like michael assumed. this fic here (which is SO good, by the way) explains the way that she was able to last a year with the hunger while michael was already struggling after about a week by having star steal sips from david’s bottle to tide her hunger when she could. that’s basically the way i see it, too, tbh, except over a longer time scale--rather than one year, something around 15.

which means star is nearly as old as michael’s mother. oops.

alright, it’s weird, but i don’t actually think it’s that weird. the way i’m choosing to see vampirism in this universe is that it permanently halts the emotional maturity of the vampire at whatever age they get turned; david and the guys are nearly grown, at ages like, 18-22 or so, but not quite, and they’re never going to grow up and out of their immature mindset. the worst is for laddie, who’s permanently stunted around 8 years old. the others respond to this with a certain degree of pity, but since he doesn’t actually know what he’s missing, it mostly translates to a really rabid older brother/sister instinct. heaven help anyone who tries to pick on that kid--they’re immediately going to face 5 angry vampire dudes and one absolutely enraged vampire chick.

(not to mention that his emotional immaturity means he’s got no real self control over the hunger he feels... if he ever snaps and becomes a full vampire, he’ll be the most dangerous of the group for a plethora of reasons)

on that note, if i were to list the lost boys by most control over their urges to least (or, y’know, least to most actively bloodthirsty), i think it’d be something like this: michael -> david -> star -> dwayne -> marko -> paul -> laddie, with the caveat that while marko is technically better at controlling himself than paul, paul has more moral reservations about the actual act of violent murder, while marko is more inclined to kill for fun.

david being so high on that list may be a point of contention for some but tbh i feel pretty strongly about it

a majority of that call for me comes from the unmade screenplay for the lost boys: the beginning, a prequel to the film set in 1906. before reading that, i honestly had different headcanons entirely, and a lot less sympathy for david, but if you take the script as canon, i think a lot of things change about his characterization.

in the script, the four main lost boys are together (plus one other member named jasper, which is the only crossover name between the lost boys and twilight) as a petty gang before they became vampires. the start of the movie sees them pickpocketing to try and pay for a place to sleep that night, and david seems to luck out early, lifting a wallet with a $100 bill inside.

however, when he realizes the guy has a family, including two babies, and he just took everything the guy has, he gives the wallet back, to marko’s intense dismay.

basically, david starts out a criminal, and he definitely does care about self preservation above most other things, but he still has morals. later, when the movie’s big bad is pressuring him and the others to drink blood and live eternally, he’s the only one who refuses, spitting out the wine when he’s forced to drink it and showing the others that it’s blood. notably, even before that he’s warning his friends that they don’t have to drink it if they didn’t want to (mirroring the way that star told michael he didn’t have to drink of the bottle), protecting not just himself, but also them. he resists becoming a vampire the longest, too; david refuses to join the movie’s villain, even after the other lost boys have been turned, right up until he’s shot by some military men in a scuffle and it’s a matter of life and death. then, his self preservation wins out, but even once he’s been turned, david doesn’t lose who he used to be.

tl; dr: i feel like david is a better person than the events of the movie alone would have you think.

in my opinion, he’s been looking out for his friends from the very beginning, and he’s never stopped doing that. yeah, even before he turned, he was a crook and kind of a burnout, but he had morals. i’m not going to deny that david enjoys being a vampire--enjoys drinking blood, the physical rush, the power over people who pushed him around--not by any means. i just think that comes from an understandable place, given that he was a streetrat who got pushed around a lot in the events of that script; he likes that he’ll never be a victim to assholes with knives who are bigger than he is again.

plus, if you look at the people the lost boys kill over the course of the movie, they’re not exactly innocent victims. there’s the asshole cop who restrained david with a baton to his throat for pretty much just the act of putting his hand on a dude’s face, a jerkass who starts fights on boardwalks, steals comic books, and ignores his girlfriend’s protestations in the car when he’s trying to make out with her, the girlfriend, who stuck by him while all that shit was going down (and was reading one of the stolen comics, if i interpreted that scene correctly--not that this means she necessarily deserved to die, but she wasn’t innocent), and a bunch of assholes calling themselves surf nazis. david and his gang only go after people who have started the fight themselves in some way or another, and i think that david is a big part in keeping it that way--he’s the one who deescalates the tension on the carousel to keep things from an all out bloodbath, after all, and was the one keeping the gang in check since the turn of the century from doing anything too unforgivable for their own gain. that to me says he’s got a pretty good grasp of self control, and he keeps the gang to a level of violence that sustains their bloodlust without being totally gratuitous as much as possible.

re: his placement on the sliding scale of vampiric self control, you might be wondering why i put michael at the absolute top. honestly, it’s not that i think he’s a saint or anything. i just think he was the one member of the gang (jury’s out on laddie, but he’s automatically at the bottom because of his age and inability to control himself) who didn’t make a conscious choice, one way or another, to become a vampire. marko, dwayne, and paul gave into the temptation of the prequel’s big bad. david and star were given the choice between vampirism and death, and chose to live. michael, though--michael gave into peer pressure, but the worst crime he committed was drinking some wine. watching the others kill absolutely fucked him up, but he was able to resist any kind of bloodlust that might have had him joining in the slaughter on the beach that night. when pushed to the absolute wall by david in the ending of the movie (an ending you might have noticed i’m completely ignoring in favor of a full gang inc. laddie, star, and michael for my headcanons lol), his strength was tested against david’s and he won. michael isn’t perfect or superhuman, but he’s making the choices an essentially good, normal human being would make, and when everyone around him for one reason or another chose what they have, he’s got that tiny bit of a head’s up on them that makes all the difference.

tbh tho, i think david was right when he said there was something of a killer in michael. i think on some gruesome level he’s kind of fascinated with the vampirism he’s fallen in with, which makes him more susceptible than, say, sam, or really any of the other emersons, who would rank above him on that scale, were they vampires too.

paul to me is just a fun happy dude. i was endeared to him when he clapped michael on the back after he drank and announced, totally earnestly, “you’re one of us!” i just, you know, liked his eagerness to welcome in a new friend. tbh i think he’s a bit of a ditzy airhead (or, dare i say it, a himbo), but he’s ultimately got his heart in the right place.

i really like dwayne. i like that he’s the quietest of the group (i saw a headcanon that said he didn’t speak that much because he’s got a stutter he’s embarrassed of, which i have absorbed into my canon), but i especially like that he does speak--to laddie, telling him what’s going on when he’s riding on the back of his bike. other than star, i think dwayne’s the most protective of him, and probably the most “maternal” of the guys. he’s under star in the sliding scale thing because to me he doesn’t really have qualms with killing assholes to survive, but at the same time, he’s never really tempted to take more than he needs, like marko is.

i like the idea that dwayne’s really into music, like, ‘can name the artist, album, and song title of any song made since 1890 from the first line’ into music. immortality is a hell of a thing for music buffery.

ok i have sooooooooo much more i want to say, i didn’t even realize i’d put together this many thoughts about this movie but Apparently I Have, holy god, but i need to cut off this post at some point sgfdshgh

one more fun marko one: totally love the hc that he paints, especially that he paints murals on the cave wall. artist boy.....

#the lost boys #text post #david #star #marko #michael emerson #paul #dwayne #this post got the FUCK away from me can you tell sgfdhgfnh #it was just going to be fun little headcanons that i'd thought of and then it turned into a david character study halfway through #no ragrets #peace OUT!!!!

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musicimissedinhighschool-blog · 5 years

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What I want to do here

When I was in high school, I was afraid of one thing above all: being made fun of. I think this is a pretty common problem. Most kids fear bullying of some form or another, and thinking that you are going to be embarrassed in front of your peers is something no one wants.

My fear had a specific area of concern though. I was always worried that people would make fun of me because of what I was interested. This was particularly true when it came to music that I liked. I associated the type of music a person enjoyed with how cool they were, and I assumed that people would think I was uncool because I didn’t like the right stuff. I also had no one who could give me insight into what music was cool at the time. This lead me to have little to no engagement with the world of popular music during my high school years.

To be clear about this, I don’t mean the pop hits of the time. I was 14 years old in 2005, so I heard “Hollaback Girl”, and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” a lot. I meant to the grocery store and listened to the radio in the car. I knew the big artists pretty well. What I am talking about are the indie hits, the tastemakers, the music the “cool kids” were listening too.

On this blog, I am going to be looking back to the years 2005-2009 and I will review five albums from each of those years. I will be looking back through lists of what the best albums of each year was to help guide my selections. The biggest thing I want to learn is if I was really missing out on anything at the time? What could I have had if I was willing to get out of my comfort zone and tried something new? Now, 14 years later, I can begin to experience the music I missed in high school.

#music #high school #nerd #2000s #albums

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lelliefant · 5 years

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Hiddleswift: A Defense in Retrospect

Two-and-a-half years later, I’m still seeing haters on Tumblr trying to trash Tom for this three-month romance. At the time (summer of 2016), I was pretty much silent on Tumblr, but I’m gonna give this argument a go now, as it appears the hate just won’t die.

A lot of people like to believe that Tom and Taylor’s relationship was just for publicity, but if you knew anything about what actually happened, and about Tom’s personality, you'd realize that makes zero sense.

First, I can confidently say that Tom had no motivation to seek out notoriety, but every reason to fall in love. It’s possible that Taylor thought about the prospect of publicity, and it might even have made him more attractive to her, but she hardly needs extra publicity.

Taylor’s known to have had a crush on his Loki character from the Avengers,* which is probably why she arranged to sit next to him at Anna Wintour's party (where they first met) and then again later at the 2016 Met Gala.

As for Tom, he fell for her like a rock. She is exactly his type; she's an amazing, beautiful, and talented young artist and a smart businesswoman; she pursued him; and he was smitten. He had no reason at the time to look for publicity (nothing to promote), and he has always otherwise avoided that kind of personal notoriety.*

In fact, he strictly avoids sharing his personal life with the Media.* He's never been an overexposed bubblegum pop culture icon; he's always pursued work as a serious, gifted dramatic actor with a lot of indie and theater cred, particularly gifted in Shakespeare.

At Cambridge (where he earned a double-first in Classics) Tom once performed as Orestes in Electra, speaking entirely in Ancient Greek:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-AmRve7EZRE

When creating Loki, he sourced his characterization on research of Norse mythology and what was familiar to him: Shakespearian characters. He returns to the stage whenever possible, between films.

Last year, he decided to take a year-long break from film. If he only cared about advancing his fame, this was not a good career move. Instead, he participated in a number of charity events, including a run as Hamlet for the tiny RADA theater to raise funds for his alma-mater. Of course, he took no payment.

Those are not life goals, accomplishments, or qualities that mesh with or demonstrate any interest in drawing the attention of the unwashed masses, or teenaged Taylor fans for that matter.

But what really makes me convinced that it was all real--at least for him--is that it fits perfectly with his personality. This is a guy who jumps headlong into life, especially in love. He is, in a word, enthusiastic. He has said many times that his only fear/regret in life is not living it to the fullest.

https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/celebrity-news/tom-hiddleston-admitts-his-biggest-fear-mine-is-regret-looking-back-at-things-i-haven-t-done-a3356611.html

If I made quote the man on this point, "We all have two lives. The second one starts when we realize we only have one."

And he's also said many times in many ways that he just doesn't see the value in living a fake existence.* A fake, painfully public romance would simply have had no appeal for him, personally or professionally.

But people like to think the worst of others; they think it makes them seem superior, sophisticated, and smart to be cynical.* And nobody would actually be so naïve to believe two famous, beautiful, successful people could actually be genuinely attracted to each other, right?

It’s just a much more profitable story for the Media to frame these two as cold, calculating, self-promoting, deliberate liars who would actually want that type of shallow, populist, Kardashian fame. Even though they had both already earned and achieved a deeper quality of fame based on their genuine talent and professional success and acclaim. And the general public eats that stuff up, without question, because it’s what they want to believe.

All this being said, I know very little about Taylor, personally. I suspect that when she actually got to know Tom, he turned out to be an overwhelming energizer bunny, an overeducated egghead, and a giggly dork, when she had expected a dark, brooding, and mysterious bad boy.

Case in point:

Tom:

Loki:

Tom:

Loki:

I think Taylor realized her mistake and acted immediately to cut the relationship off, because she is not the type of person to stick around for something she doesn't want. And I think that totally took him by surprise, because he had jumped wholeheartedly into the relationship without a parachute. You might say he was too impetuous for his age but, like I said, that fits with his demonstrated personality traits--whereas the idea that the relationship never meant anything to him clearly does not.

Another relevant quote from Tom (this was prior to their relationship): "I gave myself permission to care, because there are a lot of people in this world who are afraid of caring, or afraid of showing that they care because it's uncool. It's uncool to have passion. It's so much easier to lose when you've shown everyone how much you don't care if you win or lose. It's much harder to lose when you show that you care, but, you'll never win, unless you also stand to lose. Don't be afraid of your passion."

https://www.bustle.com/articles/122067-tom-hiddlestons-best-advice-to-his-fans-to-help-them-live-life-to-the-fullest

“Don’t be afraid of your passion.”

This is the guy I admire. A smart, erudite, accomplished man who hasn't let life beat him down or make him cynical--quite the opposite. This guy thrives on the challenge. He chooses optimism in spite of hardship; almost--weirdly--because of hardship. This deliberate fool is not afraid to risk his heart, and he grabs life with both hands, knowing the risks.

TL;DR:

Y’all can stop hating on Hiddleswift. It was real, which makes sense if you look at the evidence.

If you scoff and say I’m being naive, I have another one for you: you’re the one naively believing the trash people say and going along with it, trying to be smug and superior.

I don’t know much about her, but I know from Tom, and Tom was (and always strives to be) genuine.

Fame isn’t everything to everyone, especially not to people who already have plenty of it.

If I haven’t made this clear: tabloid noteriety is not the same as fame, much less professional acclaim.

Can we please let it go now?

Relevant Resources

https://www.bustle.com/articles/122067-tom-hiddlestons-best-advice-to-his-fans-to-help-them-live-life-to-the-fullest

https://www.bustle.com/articles/51780-tom-hiddleston-is-making-people-care-about-shakespeare-english-teachers-everywhere-should-rejoice

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/08/tom-hiddleston-interview-crimson-peak

http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2015/10/tom-hiddleston-your-comfort-zones-what-youre-frightened-of

https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/celebrity-news/tom-hiddleston-admitts-his-biggest-fear-mine-is-regret-looking-back-at-things-i-haven-t-done-a3356611.html

*Note: For some d@mn reason, Tumblr is not letting me include very many links in this post (the draft won’t save when I add them). I have a number of additional specific resources in support of the statements in this post. Additional sources are available upon request.

#tom hiddleston #Hiddleswift #taylor swift #Tom is a lovable dork #Loki #noteriety is not fame #Deliberate fool #cynicism is a choice #Don’t be afraid of your passion #Shakespeare nut #Badass Loki #Catullus V #Look it up

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betterbemeta · 5 years

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this is so weird to me because when I was a kid it wasn’t some kind of inflicted adult-to-kids power dynamic that original characters were ‘cringy’-- maybe adults had more resources or skills to make certain mary sue litmus tests or organize attack forums or whatever, but quizilla existed and minors were a driving force in laterally bullying their peers. It was primarily other minors, not ‘no-fun’ adults leading the charge to harass and shame people their same age or younger. There were also plenty of adults who wrote stuff badly that got flames, though I admit those were rarer because just fewer adults have time to write fanfiction because they tend to have jobs.

Ironically the two halves of mary-sues and mary-sue-shaming were both part of the same power fantasy a lot of the time: an inferiority thing going on and a soreness/defensiveness or even internalized self-hatred that came through strongly in the written work and in the flame forums focused around not being respected, mature enough, correct enough in their shared spaces. By being more respectable than these other people, some people hoped to be the good guys in that culture of shame, fighting a corruption of immaturity, low quality, and ego they saw as infesting their fan spaces.

What was really going on was that they were entitled to content and the way that content was sorted in archives back then meant slogging past a lot of beginner efforts that just didn’t please them to get to what they wanted. Making certain content shameful was an effort to curate their spaces so they contained... idk... only the most quality harry/draco without having to roll past whatever got in their way.

And like, if you were an adult that bullied kids on fan spaces outside of your insular communities you exposed yourself as an uncool person. It wasn’t like 4chan where nobody would realize that you’re an uncool adult person who has the time to waste on bullying kids rather than just another anon getting the ball rolling.

This “safe spaces for kids” vs “mean mean adults” thing is so weird to me when the internet is an equalizer of power in many (but not all) ways and a power dynamic of adults purposefully targeting kids to threaten and make fun of them in specific was absolutely not a thing when I was younger. There were many more minors, at the time I was a minor, who perpetuated ‘cringe culture’ than there were adults who had the time to bother.

#long post #like straight up either this dynamic is emergent completely within the past 5 years #or it's made up and not real and people are manipulating fan attitudes on a complete lie of how things go down #or based on some form of shared insecurity of adult stranger danger and not on the fact that minors have the most time and most contact #to bully minors

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beardyallen · 5 years

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Day 3 - An extensive recap

First, I want to extend my apologies to those who have been patiently awaiting this post. I had every intention of writing this yesterday, which got away from me (as you’ll see if you keep reading), and then I had every intention of writing this in the morning, which disappeared (again, as you’ll see if you keep reading). It’s now 5:38pm on Wednesday, February 20th as I’m typing this sentence, and I’m once again exhausted from a long day.

[Edit 2: TL;DR for the following TL;DR -- A bunch of cool stuff happened, including books, dragons, lions, motorcycles, KFC, banks, SIM cards, a Starbucks, public transit, and traveling to two opposite ends of Beijing in a single day. Also my trip went from horribly lonely and daunting to pretty freaking cool and slightly less daunting in less than 24 hours. Done typing this at 8:55pm]

Edit: It’s legit 8:37pm when I’m making this edit, only a bit after posting the original. I wanted to add a tl;dr for those not interesting in reading all of this shit. Basically, I made 4 friends in Beijing, none of them from the same country, only one of them is white, only one is male, and only one is from the US. All three of these descriptions describe CB, my supervisor. His wife, RB, is Indian and works with children orphaned due to birth defects. There’s ML, a half-Brazilian, half-Japanese Communications instructor at ICB, and her friend R, who is herself a former Chinese physician turned public health professional/liaison/something-or-other that seems far more impressive and is exactly what she wants to be. All of them are really cool, interesting people that I’m very glad I had the opportunity to meet. In no particular order, I went to several bookstores, a Starbucks, a KFC early in the morning, the supermarket (twice) and got beer (both times) for ridiculously low prices, experienced the Lantern Festival (still not entirely sure what this is, but there were dragons and lions and motorcycles doing crazy synchronized stunts in a metal globe) at an amusement park, rode 5-6 different subway trains and a city bus, ate 10+ new foods, bought a book (because of course I did) which has both the original English and the translate Chinese characters on each page, tried to open a bank account, then got a SIM card, then actually opened a bank account, finally unpacked my luggage, and spent 3 hours typing this blog post. Also the long flight and trip from the airport to my new apartment were mostly uneventful. See? Even this was super long!]

The last you all heard from me here was as I was sitting in a bar in the Vancouver Airport, Sunday morning. Which was sort of 2 days ago, but sort of 3. Time zones are funky, especially when you cross the International Date Line. *shrug*

After I finished writing that post, I lumbered over to my gate and waited to board with the other couple hundred passengers. At one point, I noticed an older woman (probably in her 60′s or 70′s?) trucking along on one of those things that I can only manage to call a human-conveyor-belt that you see in airports. I mention this as she, had she been on carpeted flooring, she would have been making good time; as it so happens, she was on the conveyor belt that was going opposite of her destination. She was still making progress, but every so slowly, and seemed maddeningly oblivious to the fact that the floor was fighting her at every step. Fortunately, she made it to the other end without incident, although the same cannot be said for when she attempted to enter the next belt; a concerned employee using that particular belt in the intended fashion beckoned that she stop and try the other. So she stopped walking. And didn’t do anything, even when her feet made it back to where she had started. Naturally, she took a pretty solid tumble, lessened only by the shocked, and rightfully flustered, employee, who managed to help her to her feet as half of the onlookers gawked.

The actual flight, all 9 hours of it, went off rather uneventfully. Especially compared to the above story. It was nice having the longer flight second, as completing the first gave me an unearned sense of accomplishment; I’m nervous for my return as I’ll have actually achieved something when I get back to Vancouver, only to have to sit back down for three more hours. Seems less enticing, especially as I won’t be going back to an apartment that I’m renting. Oh well: that’s a problem for Future-Me, as are most things. I will say that the food on the flight was quite satisfying, and the complementary wine was much tastier than expected! And I managed to read a good chunk of Dan Brown’s Origin.

After landing in the Beijing airport, I managed to get through customs without too much trouble and had my first several experiences of what I’ll just refer to here as stranger-staring. #sarcasticwoo

I was met near baggage claim by an undergraduate at the University who chose to call himself Paul. I would later find out that, although it is common practice for Chinese residents to give themselves “American” or “Western” names, they don’t seem to share those names with their fellow residents.

Needless to say, I was exhausted and just wanted to eat something and lie down without dealing with anymore people. To his credit, Paul was an excellent host, his English was quite good, and he helped me to my apartment without incident. I think he was expecting to escort me to dinner at one of the nearby dining halls on campus (Princess Building), but I (hopefully graciously) conveyed that I would really rather just go to bed. After he left, I took a stroll on campus to the Princess Building to check it out for myself, and then stopped at a nearby convenience store to grab some snacks. GUYS! THEY HAVE CUCUMBER-FLAVORED LAYS POTATO CHIPS!!! And so many other flavors that are mind-boggling, and somehow simultaneously vague and specific.

Once I was back in my apartment, I chowed down on some fruit bread, drank some water, had a moment of near paralyzing fear/anxiety/regret/shame/etc., scolded myself for being (I think understandably) pathetic, and then went to sleep. By that point, I had been up for nearly 23 hours, and it was somehow already 7pm on Monday, Feb. 18. I slept until 6am the next morning.

That morning, I got in touch with CB, my supervisor, who was more than happy to meet with me around 11am. So I spent the morning figuring out how to be an adult person in Beijing. Several standard things took place that were daunting only because I’m in Beijing: showering, brushing my teeth, grabbing some toilet paper to carry with me, deciding how much cash to keep in my wallet, etc. I also came to the disturbing realization that there are precisely three outlets, each with one port. One of them was occupied by the television, one by the mini-fridge, and one was free to charge my tablet; it was then that I decided to try to go shopping and track down a power strip.

Day 2: Merry Mart

First, I want to say one quick thing: the exchange rate from RMB (also called yuan) to USD is approximately 0.15:1. So, as an example, I spotted a can of beer for 5.90 yuan, or roughly $0.90. For those of you who know me, you may understand why this was my first example.

Now, the supermarket that I was heading towards is located on the other side of the north gate of the CAU (China Agricultural University, which houses ICB, or the International College of Beijing, where I’m living and instructing), and my apartment is in the very southeast corner of campus, about a 10 minute walk away. And it’s not even 8am yet. I mention this as, when I approached the supermarket, or rather the building housing the supermarket and a dozen or so other shops, I noticed a KFC right next door. Now, I shouldn’t have been shocked to see the advertisements were for food that you would never find at a KFC in the States, but I was. What I feel completely justified in being shocked at was that the KFC was already quite busy. Naturally, I stepped inside and saw that a “Chicken Burger” with a glass of milk (and maybe a side?) was going for 12 yuan, or $1.80. So cheap!!

I stepped out without buying anything and continued into the supermarket. Oh, the wonders I beheld. I’ll try to keep it short, but I’ll point out that I’ve never paid so much attention in the produce and meat sections of a supermarket as I did yesterday. Once I made it past these sections, I experienced an onslaught of packing that looked both familiar and foreign (yes, I realized how stupid that sounds as I typed it). As I was on a bit of a mission (for hand soap and a couple power strips), I contained my curiosity as best I could. But I did take a peak at all of the flavors of Lays Chips in the snack section...

Fortunately, I managed to find a power strip! They had Philips power strips going for 70 yuan (~$10.50) and some from a company I’ve never heard of for 30/40 yuan. Naturally, I grabbed on of the cheaper variety. It seems I didn’t bring enough cash the first time. I moved on, failing to find anything that I could guarantee was hand soap, but let me tell you: after being around people who I could not understand, guessing at products based on the images along, and recognizing that I’m waaaaay in over my head, I have never been so happy to see a can of Budweiser in my life!

Now, I can’t be certain, but I’m pretty sure a 3-pack 16-oz or 500 mL or whatever-their-volume cans came out to 9 yuan, or $1.35. What a deal! (Fast forward to this morning, and I stumbled an even better find: 500 mL cans of Guiness with nitrous rockets for 15 yuan ($2.25) a pop! In the States, those usually run $16 for four!)

After spotting way more milk (a recent trend, apparently) than I’ve ever seen, ultra-pasteurized so it can sit on an uncooled shelf for months at a time, heaps and heaps of “sanitary tissue” and slew of snacks that boggled my poor, unworldly mind, I made my way to the checkout. Fortunately, I stick out so damn much that people just expect that I don’t speak Chinese; the look of mild irritation isn’t grating at all, it just lets me know that I’m not the only one who feels moderately uncomfortable at my residing in Beijing for these next 4 months. The interaction at the stand was pleasant enough, and we mimed our way through the bits that weren’t communicable. Then I headed back home to meet with CB.

Day 2: The Book

So, I’m already feeling wildly unprepared to teaching a senior-level mathematics course, but one of the few things that was keeping me grounded was that the book was to be selected by administrators at ICB/CAU, so that would save me having to make most of the decisions regarding content for my Probability class. Moreover, the university would provide the textbooks to the students. Little did I know, and little did CB know, and little did the person supposedly in charge of retrieving said textbooks from the library, no textbook was on file for this class. #sarcasticwoo

FORTUNATELY (can’t believe how many lucky breaks I’m catching!), there happened to be a textbook titled Probability and Statistics for Engineers and something-or-other. To be honest, my eyes glazed over at “Engineers,” not because they are lesser scientists, because they are most assuredly not, but because they just don’t appreciate the fine nuances of theoretical mathematics. That is to say, they’re lesser scientists. ;) #allinjest #imsuretheyvegotsickerburnsforme So, I guess I’m teaching from an Engineering textbook.

During this brief window of time with CB, I learned how various countries measure the breathability of the air, acquired a facemask, and snagged an air purifier. Things necessary to life in Beijing! I was then invited out to lunch with CB and his wife RB; I was unaware that their would be fourth, ML. Having never met RB, and being unaware that ML existed, I waited for the 20 minutes that CB needed to get a couple things ready before lunch in my room, then headed down to the entrance of the Guest House (where my apartment and office are located, in case I haven’t mentioned it by name yet). Waiting there was a 30-something Asian-descent woman who somehow didn’t look like she was a native Chinese resident. Best guess: RB. She smiles at me and asks if I’m here to have lunch with R, to which I say confirm and ask if that’s her. Turns out it’s ML, and a reference to a particular Disney movie popped into my head. (I bet you’re not thinking of the same one I was, though!) Anyway, it’s 12:30pm at that point, and I wouldn’t spend the next 11 hours with ML, a Communications instructor for ICB who has only been in Beijing since September, barely speaks any Chinese and gets by reading it as she knows Japanese. Turns out she was born in Brazil, though! That certainly explained why her features were not quite Chinese.

CB and RB showed up a few awkward, mostly silent, minutes later as, not anticipating a fourth left me just socially awkward enough to just keep my mouth shut and let my mind wander. RB led the way to a Chinese restaurant around the corner, and we had a ridiculously cheap meal. Everything was delicious, even the rice noodles and cabbage dish! CB asked how open I was to trying things I’ve never had before, and I responded that I’m hear to make the make the most of this opportunity. He followed up with, “So, you’ll try chicken feet?” I’ve never so quickly doubted my convictions before! Fortunately, the food we order was basic enough fare for a Chinese restaurant, so I didn’t have to prove my grit just yet.

Day 2: The Big Adventure

During the meal, ML mentioned that the “lantern festival” was that night, and that she’d be joining a friend of her’s somewhere in Beijing, TBD. CB mentioned off-handedly that there was a 4-story bookstore several kilometers away. My interest was piqued, but having no means of transportation, I kept my mouth shut. ML did not. She expressed serious interest in venturing out to the store, and I asked if it would be in imposition if I joined. After lunch, CB and RB gave us a rough pin location for the building, walked us over to a bus stop, explained to me how to use my transit card (Thanks, CG!!!), and saw us off on our adventure. At this point, it seems relevant to mention that, although I have two cell phones (my usual American one, and a Chinese phone bought secondhand from ES) (THANKS ES!!!), I don’t have internet access or any real means to contact CB or RB. I also don’t access to a map app (see: I don’t have internet access). As it turns out, ML’s access is hindered by the fact that her iPhone is apparently dated enough to not operate at full capacity with a Chinese SIM card. So she has spotty internet. SPOILERS: Her cell phone would die later that evening. #dundundun

The bus ride was uneventful, and we got off where we thought was should. Without the name of the bookstore or any solid evidence to suggest precisely where the bookstore was, ML then confides in me that she has frequently found herself incapable of finding her destination, wandered around for several hours, then given up and went home. My confidence was soaring. But, as they say, “When in Beijing...”

After finding a map of the surrounding area and comparing it to a screenshot of the rough-pin-location of the bookstore in question, I managed to match shapes cut out by walkways and roads and spot where we should be heading. The pin led us to a bookstore. But this bookstore had only one floor, although the building housing it had 20 floors and an elevator that looked out over the surrounding area. Needless to say, we rode the elevator for a moment before deciding to continue exploring. Stepping outside, we tried to reach CB...and we did! He gave us a more accurate pin and the name of the bookstore. Only one of those two things wound up being helpful.

On our way over to the new location (2 more blocks West), we stumbled on a developed “alley” that housed a wide plethora of shops, including....A BOOKSTORE!!! Dudes and Dudettes: let me tell you, this bookstore was amazing!! Check out the pictures below:

So cool! But this wasn’t where the pin was located, only had two floors, and when we scaled the spiral staircase, some 20-something employees started walking towards us and speaking in Mandarin. ML goes, “I’m sorry, we don’t speak any Mandarin, but we think we know what you’re trying to say. Have a nice day!” And we walked out of the store with our tails tucked loosely between our legs.

I was I could accurately convey all of the things I saw that struck me as fascinating while we explored this area of Beijing, but honestly there was just too much, and I can’t imagine you all are still reading this carefully, given that I’m not exactly giving the “Reader’s Digest” version of events. Or so you may think. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m doing my best to keep this short while still conveying how crazy this day was. And we’re only a couple hours into my afternoon/evening with ML. I applaud any and all who keep reading attentively. I’ll try to make it entertaining.

I will say that in this alley, I got stared down by a police officer. Mildly intimidating and recalled to mind the other intimidating visual to grace me. Just after checking out at the supermarket that morning, while I was packing the couple of items I had purchased into my backpack, I looked up and saw, for the first time in my life, 4 full sets of riot gear. Helmet, vest, nightstick (or whatever it’s called), and some sort of gun in a padded case. Sure, I know that I’ve been around those things before in my life, but never were they in plain view, seemingly on display.

After a few more minutes, a few more crossed streets, and pulling ML out of the way of a car that didn’t seem to care that she was there, we made our way to the pin’s location. And none of the stores around us bore the name of the 4-story bookstore. But we did find another bookstore.........and it turned out to be the right one! Crazy!! Of course, this was after trying out what we guessed was a calligraphy shop that seemed to primarily sell books? The words on the door were somewhat misleading. Anyway, let me tell you: in spite of being in a bookstore filled with words that I can’t understand, I still felt so calm and secure being surrounded by all of those books!

At this point, ML and I seemed to have figured out each other’s senses of humor and made frequent jokes and shared stores as we roamed the shelves, looking desperately for books written in English. After searching all four floors, some twice, we find a section with no markings nearby that happened to have some books in English. After looking over all of the classics (pretty much all they had), discussing the ones we’ve read, conversing about those we haven’t, we each picked one out to buy. I’ve seen Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World referenced too many times in crossword puzzles and trivia questions to not have developed an absurd curiousity for this book I’ve never read. So naturally I bought it. It seems like a rather nice-looking copy, no artwork to speak of, but elegant in a somewhat formal-Chinese kind of way. It came to 26 yuan, or about $3.90. HOW AM I BUYING A BOOK FOR THAT CHEAP?! WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING WITH MY LIFE?! *sigh* Well, I seem to be getting by without my Kindle fine enough for now...(THANKS AGAIN RS FOR SHIPPING IT TO ME!!! I’ll let you know as soon as it arrives!)

Day 2: The Lantern Festival

At this point, ML had heard from her friend who I will just call R (have yet to become privy to her family name), and we were given the name of the place we were headed towards: Happy Park. By now, it was around 4:15pm, and we needed to somehow figure out where Happy Park was, how to get there, and manage to not get lost in the process by 6:30pm. So we went for tea. The place we stopped in was what seemed to be a solid attempt at a German tea/coffee shop-slash-bakery. And I got a cup of English Breakfast Tea for 22 yuan ($3.30). Not the best deal, but I learned an invaluable lesson: just take a picture of what you want to order! So simple, so elegant, so effective!!! I was also by this time learning that most people make purchases using the main “social media” app, WeChat. In fact, many shops and restaurants don’t carry any cash as WeChat is just a more effective means of payment. You can link a debit card to your account and you’re good to go! (More on this in Day 3).

<I’ve been writing for almost 2 hours! Yikes!!!> <I wonder if I can get a book deal out of this...>

Without really knowing where to find a subway station, ML and I headed back to where the bus dropped us off, thinking at the very least we could head back to campus and the subway station there. (Also, for those of you who don’t know: I’ve never ridden a subway. Sure, I use RTD rails almost daily in Denver, but somehow this just seemed different. Especially given how many lines there are and that we didn’t actually know where we were going...) We found a bus heading back towards campus, hopped on, and almost immediately spotted a subway station. The bus didn’t drop us off for 2-3 more blocks...

After meandering back to the subway station, we found a map and lo-and-behold there was a stop dedicated to whatever Happy Park is. And it’s on the complete opposite side of town. #unethusedyay #adventuretime We plotted our course and hopped on the train without incident if you don’t count the pile of vomit that I would almost certainly have stepped in had ML not avoided it just before me! *phew* The subway itself was on par, if not nicer, than the trains in Denver, if only a bit louder. Confined spaces and all that. By the time we made our three transfers and got to the other side of Beijing, the sun had set, it was 6:20pm, and we had made it just in time! R met us at the station minutes after.

When we turned to see where we were headed, I was floored. Right in front of us with giant glowing words spelling out (in two languages) “Happy Park” was an amusement park that rivals some Disney parks in it’s show-y-ness. As it was dark, I can’t say precisely how big it was, but I was impressed. Tickets for entry were 145 yuan (roughly $20), which I fortunately had brought along that morning, not realizing precisely how crazy the day would get.

Once inside, R informed us that there’d be a show starting in a few minutes. We tried to find a spot, but the girls had trouble seeing over the heads of the people ahead of us. In fact, I had to stand on my tiptoes as most of the people in front of me were holding up their children, phones, and self-sticks. There was a small mound that almost certainly was not intended for foot-traffic, but nonetheless had a solid 75 people standing on 6-foot-tall trees. When we joined the crowd up there, hoping for a better vantage point, we were disappoint. That is, until ML decided to climb a tree. And I joined her. Naturally. I don’t have pictures of the entire show, sadly. I was too busy being floored and hoping that my one leg that was supporting my weight would hold up! I’m also not including them here as I have to format the videos. But stay tuned in the near future for videos!!

After the show, we wandered around the park for several more hours. I was quite impressed. And the food we got was quite delicious!! Small, fried potatos balls, and donut-hole sized balls loosely-based on a Japanese dish that I couldn’t possibly spell correctly, topped with dried fish. YUM! Check out the pictures of some of the attractions we saw:

This was the interior of an Aquariam-themed section of the park. It was a welcome respite near the end of the night, given that it felt like it was nearing 10F outside.

A Mayan temple, with a restaurant inside and, probably, a water-slide ride built into it? Hard to say. If only our phones hadn’t died and we weren’t so cold by the time we made it to the Athenian/Spartan-inspired section of the park! So many cool statues and buildings!

A still shot as 5 motorcyclists entered the arena after some drum-dancers! Stay tuned for videos of them riding inside the wire ball on the right! [Edit 3: the videos will likely get posted as gifs. Quality will probs be not great. One of them will involve the motorcyclists doing loop-stunts, and the other will involve a dragon-dance with dope fireworks. I didn’t get any video of the lion-dancers from earlier in the show, but take my word for it: it was dope as fuck. So much so that I don’t feel bad about dropping an f-bomb in this edit. I can’t possibly find the words after 3.5 hours of writing to convey just how cool this show was!]

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what this is, but it looked cool!

This was a small bridge, reminiscent of the bridges in Europe where people write their initials on padlocks and toss the keys into the river below. From what we could tell (thanks to R’s understanding of her native tongue), the pieces all talk about the love between family, friends or significant others.

After the Aquarium-themed building got us toasty warm, and it was ticking closer and closer to 10pm, we bee-lined it out of the park and back to to the subway station. Another three transfers, some more conversation, and we were back on campus. While on the trains, either to or from Happy Park, I don’t remember which, ML commented on how quiet I had been earlier that day while waiting for CB and RB before lunch. Given how quiet I was at lunch, she was understandably worried that the pattern would continue. If you know me, you know it just takes a bit for me to get comfortable and figure out how to talk to you. Needless to say, I told too many stories with a surplus of details in each of the bookstores, on each of the trains, and all of the time in between. I’m thinking ML is going to be a pretty solid friend these next couple of months, if I she doesn’t get sick of my stories first!

As I alluded to above, it was around 11pm before we were back in the Guest House. I was ridiculously pooped but not entirely unimpressed at how not-jet-lagged I was! I passed out soon thereafter and woke up for the third and final time around 7am.

Day 3: Merry Mart II, the Second Part

Alas, morning came; and with it came a surplus of energy to spent getting my life together in Beijing. I still hadn’t unpacked my luggage, there were too many things my apartment was still missing, and I didn’t have a reliable means of feeding myself as I had been warned (and witnessed) that many places just simply don’t carry cash. And naturally don’t accept American credit cards.

So I packed a small bag and headed out again. I stopped by Starbucks, attempted to order a Black Tea Latte from the girl who said “Morning” to me, and made the false assumption that this particular colloquialism implied English-fluency. I wound up with a regular Latte. Still good, though! After that, I made my way to the KFC near the Merry Mart only to find that this establishment is one described above. My cash wouldn’t do me much good there. *shrug*

In the Merry Mart, I grabbed several more bread-based food items, a microwavable meal in a bowl, another power strip, some gum, and more chips. Pringles. American flavors. Two cans of Guiness, and two bottles of hand soap. This time, I kept track of the price of each individual item so I knew how much cash to have ready at the register. This time went far more smoothly, and I filled my entire backpack with items that ran up to 134 yuan (~$20). HOW?! HOW AM I GETTING SO MUCH FOR SO LITTLE I LOVE THIS!!!

Day 3: Getting my shit together

After that, my mind was set on opening a bank account to connect to my WeChat account. I reached out to CB, who graciously offered his assistance for a small amount of time. Ideally, this wouldn’t take too long. After all, he has plenty of work to be getting on with!

Well, the first bank we tried didn’t work because I’m not staying in town for more than 2 years. The second bank was more accepting. He translated exceptionally while I filled out documents written completely in Chinese. I was having an internal panic attack as I did something that felt incredibly wrong or anything. No, not at all. It’s totally okay to sign your name on documents that you can’t read. Yup, totally okay...

As it turns out, the bank would need to send me verification texts, so I gave them my phone number. But my American phone number wouldn’t work for them (they didn’t even try!), so after 30 minutes of waiting and 10 minutes of paperwork, CB and I headed down the street to get a SIM card and a cellular plan. Oh boy. All told, I think I waited for another hour there while CB got some work done; the paperwork and discussions took another 20-30 minutes. Once I had my phone situated, CB assured me that I could handle the rest of the bank stuff on my own as the staff would certainly recognize me and remember what I wanted. Plus, most of the paperwork was already filled out, right? Right? *sigh

The staff at the bank were less than enthused to find that CB hadn’t joined me. This was gonna be a blast, let me tell ya...

All told, I filled out twice as much paperwork as the staff scrambled to find a way to communicate with the moronic American who didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on around him. Of course, filling out this paperwork and determining exactly what they wanted and whether or not I wrote down the right things (i.e. understood exactly what information they were after) included 5-8 different sessions with several different employees, each with somewhere between 10-70 min wait-times. On the plus side, I’m almost done with Dan Brown’s Origin. Not his best work, but certainly entertaining enough to pass the time in a bank surrounded by people who probably would rather I not exist. To be clear, I don’t begrudge them at all; their service was impeccable, and their patience was never-ending, and the entire thing was significantly less annoying than it had any right to be, given the language barrier.

I left their establishment many hours later with a debit card, Chinese bank account, and the means to buy stuff wherever I wanted to go. And a significant amount of confidence that I can get through the next four months quite contentedly. Granted, I didn’t do nearly as much to earn this confidence as the staff at my new bank did!

After the fiasco at the bank, I went back to the Guest House, unpacked my suitcases, and laid down in bed to type this novella. That was several hours ago.

Convinced that I’ve had a crazy few days?

A coworker from Denver asked me how China has been so far, and I told him that it “[w]ent from shit to fantastic so damn fast.” Hopefully my long, rambling story has here has justified that claim for those of you reading this.

There was only one other day in my life that I can recall feeling as justifiably petrified as I did Monday night. I described the feeling as trying to wake up from a dream only to find that you’re wide awake. I was encouraged earlier today to remember that I don’t have to get through all 4 months of this experience at once; I just need to take it one day at a time. I usually don’t find these adages and idioms to be particularly helpful, but this one seems to be true.

In the future, blog posts probably won’t be nearly as long. Thanks for reading!

Now to finish this beer and book!

Sláinte,

BeardyAllen

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jeff-the-gnome-king · 5 years

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😡 for the ask meme?

Worst role play-related encounter and what advice you would give to others to avoid similar situations?

Okay, so I don’t get how some people can be mean/dismissive of one person….while trying to talk/RP/ship and be nice to one of their friends and actually be surprised/mad when that person tells them to….fuck off? Like?

And I say this as being the person (in multiple scenarios actually) someone has tried to smoodge/curry favor of while they are shitty to my rp friends.

Like. Do you not think that no one will spread word of your toxic shit orrrrrr…..?

Specifically in one instance I told the same person, multiple times, to fuck off. To go away. Because they were mean to my friend (and we had no chemistry whatsoever) And they wouldn’t. I blocked them. And every so often, they’d change their url or use someone else to try and talk to me. And would never change their behavior, never give a real apology when confronted or given the spot light like they wanted. No. And when they weren’t well received, they’d turn around and Vague Post and talk shit about me and my rp friend(s) that they actually had the beef with. Like, they were only performing so I/others we knew would rp with them. Not because they were sorry.And then had a tantrum.

It was always “I’m sorry you were offended. Now I feel like shit. Please forgive me, you have to I’m troubled!”and yaddya. Yaddya. Yaddya.

Don’t be any of the people in this scenario. Don’t be a manipulative asshat, and don’t give said manipulative asshat the time of day. Once someone proves they’re a jerk…….they’re usually going to stay one. Unless they get some real help, and a change like that Takes. Time. And. Effort. That doesn’t usually happen in the RPC. Sadly.

So just be wary and honestly it can be pretty obvious when someone isn’t being sincere about stuff. And if people keep telling you that you’re victim blaming yourself, saying stuff wrong, or what have you…maybe actually consider if you ARE being a manipulative dick? And how….uncool that is?? Instead of being defensive and…..shit talking….even months later about them on your blog….

just saying…..

#its been a LONG four years on tumblr lmaooooo

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deanmiles13 · 5 years

Text

I WANNA’ BE ELECTED

“THE TIME I CADDIED FOR ALICE COOPER AND LIVED TO TELL ABOUT IT!!!”

I Wanna Be Elected! Well not really. You see.... I was working at a shop that had been bought by Neil Lomax. He was a Portland native, who had graduated from P.S.U. and had a career in the NFL. The Cardinals to be specific. Which, had relocated to Phoenix Arizona in 88.

Home of J.F.A., The Meat Puppets and the great Mighty Sphincter. Oh and George Lynch, and Rob Halford. And the one and only Alice Cooper.

Now, almost everyone knows that Alice is a serious golfer. And that’s where we are going with this story. Not really a Rock and Roll story except for when I hound him with trivia questions, later. So, back to Neil. Super sweet man and excellent human being. He was heading to play a golf event that Alice would be at, in Phoenix one weekend, and he said, “Hey Dean, going to see your buddy Vince Fernier. See, Neil actually thought his name was ALICE COOPER. I corrected him one day and he loved VINCENT. He even came back from this event with a framed Hatch Show Print poster of the event. He let us display it in the shop when he got back. I was hoping he didn’t care for it and would part with it. But alas, my reward was yet to come. He actually had another golf tournament and I sent him down with a copy of Killer.

It came back signed and I was stoked. But there would be more....

So, then Its Neil’s turn to have his big golf event “The Quarterback Shootout”.

It’s an annual charity event he is really known for in Portland. A meet and greet with NFL legends and local celebs. The big ones I can recall are Drew Bledsoe, Marcus Allen, Charles Barkley, Jim Plunkett.

Having worked with Neil for a while, he had events and people would help and volunteer from work. The big event was this golf thing. Everyone fought over caddying for Charles Barkley. He was big tipper. The real cool thing was, this year Alice was coming up for it as a favor to Neil. No one at work was stepping up to caddy for him. What I knew about golf fit into a golf tee.

I imagined me out there fumbling around and dropping clubs to the sound of all that iron clanging and people laughing. So I was petrified, to say the least, when it was decided that I was going be Alice Cooper’s caddy. They demanded that the “residential rocker” at work, handle this rock royalty on the links.

Well the thought of me on a golf course was as foreign to my mind as being a surgeon, so I spent the morning getting ferociously stoned at home. The event was held at Heron Lakes Golf course and I lived pretty close. I got to the golf course and met up with everyone from work and just kinda waited.

Some people were already on the part where you tee off and practice. The driving range?!?!? You can see I’m out of my element here!

Anyway, we are kinda waiting for our assigned celebs to show up when a car pulls up, out comes this really petite person. All in black with their back to me. I was unable to make out who it was. They turn around and it’s Alice. People cheer and they hand me his clubs. This is the first time I have EVER held golf clubs. I used a golf bag for my drum stands to carry to many clubs, but this was the first time the had actual clubs in it.

He signs some stuff and is escorted my way, and I’m on the driving range. The first thing I tell him after we are introduced is “Alice, there is NOTHING I can tell you today to help you in any way on the course today!!!” He smiled and said “ I think I got it.”

That put me at ease right away.

We made our way to a practice area of sorts and already, people were coming up for autographs. I got the impression I would be doing a little security work today as well.

That was no problem actually since I had done set security on movie sets and all sorts of events. And he was approached by all sorts of people. Old, young, and everything in between. The first person I remember to approach held out a cassette and said “I took your music to Vietnam with me!” Alice stopped on a dime and just talked right to the guy. Not to/at him, but TO HIM!!!.

I could tell right away that this dude was genuine. Little kids with Todd McFarlane/Alice Cooper dolls would come up and he would sign the smallest signature. Taking time with everyone he took a photo with. He had a line for everything. After the photo was snapped he would say “Now, I may not show up in the picture when you get it developed.” He was, in a word “PROFESSIONAL”

This is a guy who hung out with Harry Nelson, Keith Moon, Salvador Dali.

I mean, he was on the Muppets for cryin’ out loud!!!

I know we were paired up with Jim Plunkett and played against Drew Bledsoe and Rick Mirer. Jim was an old school NFL dude and was here to have a good time. Drew Bledsoe did some things that day that I thought really were uncool. For someone being asked to a charity event, to sign autographs and take pictures, he was acting like he was being put out. It was interrupting his game. That was the whole point of this thing. You could saddle up next to the celebs and say hi and a bit more. It’s what they paid for, quite frankly. He was taking his golf game a little too serious if you ask me. Jim and Alice had wagers going as to who could drive the ball the farthest and stuff like that. Alice was a petite guy and Jim was a bigger dude.

Alice won the drive contest. The main thing that I took a way that day was answers to a load of questions that I had. Some prepared and most just off the top of my head.

As I relate some of these, just realize, that I’m paraphrasing what was said. He was so totally open and honest with me, it was quite staggering to be honest. I would feel horrible if anything was misinterpreted.

I started by asking about Johnny Rotten doing the liner notes on a Rhino Box set and he said “Johnny hates EVERYONE.... EVERYONE! Except ME! I can’t believe it.

I guess him and Sid used to play Dead Babies on acoustic guitars to make pocket money.”

I was like, Oh, it’s on! We proceeded to hole one, and I started chronologically with his career and headed back to Detroit. I asked about Ted Nugent, Bob Seger, MC5 and Iggy. He said “I’ll open for anyone! The Stones! The Who! But not Iggy! He just wipes the crowd out. Uses them up and wrings em’ out, and I can’t come on after that.”

I asked about his song “Only Women Bleed” and he said that was a number one multiple times, multiple countries, for multiple people.Tina Turner had a hit with it and he was proud of that.

I asked if he was a WHO guy or a STONES guy. He said “Listen to the opening of Elected.” DUH!!!

There were some interesting crowd interactions. From, two young dudes that wanted to have him sign a joint they had, to the McFarlane dolls and everything else. I told kids with the joint, there was no way... Then I mentioning it to Alice and he said “Yeah, it’s like right when you quit smoking weed and your friend comes over with 8 ounces and says “Hey, I’m leaving town for a few months, can you hold onto this for me?!?!”

This one women came up to us and was yelling to get his attention. Frankly, I was a little sketched about having to “deal” with her. We go over, she says “Can you sign something for me?” He says “Of course, what do you want signed?” She starts pulling scarp pieces of paper out of her pocket and I mean like a match book, a receipt, and just whatever. So he signs whatever it was and we walked away. He is being real silent, like in his head and he said “Man, that was 40 miles of rough road!!! I often wonder what I would be like if I had kept drinking and what not ?!?!”

That was probably one of the most profound things he said that day. I asked him when he quit drinking and he said, when his daughter was born. I too had recently quit with drinking and found this to be sort of a bonding moment for us. I remember that I had brought some items to have him sign. A postcard and an album etc. But the cool thing was I asked him at the last minute if I could have the ball he had used for the whole game. That was awesome, and I still have THAT.

I had all the stuff I wanted to asked and had kinda prepared the questions in my head, but it was the interaction with his fans that was really neat to see. The two young women who came up and started to bow and say “We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy.” I had kind of spaced the whole Waynes World thing, and when I told him “Oh man, I kinda forgot about that!” He replied “ I didn’t!!”

I asked if he gets that from people all the time, seeing as it was a whole new generation of exposure sorta thing. He said “No! It’s just that, when you get a movie script and you just see your scene, it’s not like you get to see the whole movie. It’s just me, backstage, Mila-wa-kay- and then we split.”

I’m still not really picking up what he’s putting down... “So when they asked us what we wanted, we just took my day fee for the movie and didn’t worry about any “back end” so to speak. So what happens? The movie goes on to make 18 million opening weekend.” He was not kidding... you could see that this one hurt.

I had mentioned a quote from him in Rolling Stone, I had recently read in which he commented on Marylin Manson. He said “Yeah... Real original. Call your self a girl name and put makeup on. Where have I heard that one before?”

Not in a rude or snide way, but in a kinda joking way. With a smile... I guess that’s what it all came down to that day. Here was a man who had done it all, seen it all, drank it all, and snorted it all. And in the end, he was alive, enjoying something that kept him sane (golf). Now, he’s out the other side, meeting people, saying HELLO - HOORAY!!! Let the show begin!!!

He was so at ease with it all and it was a true pleasure to watch him “work”. When anyone ask, what was he like?

I just say... “In a word - KILLER”

He was a man who seemed very content where he was. I mean if you weathered a storm like he did and lived to crawl from the shipwreck and right yourself for a second, third career?!?!?

Man... that’s it!!! That’s a success.

Telephone is ringing......

#alice cooper #golf #rockandroll

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thekillerssluts · 7 years

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Win Butler on why he ignores the internet, and why he expects Arcade Fire to stick around

No matter how much professional rock critics and casual cultural commentators may find the Grammy-winning alt-rock act Arcade Fire exhausting, the group shows no signs of fading away. Arcade Fire’s fifth LP, Everything Now, was released a few weeks ago to some of the most negative reviews the band has yet received, with songs slammed for everything from earnest preachiness to clumsily ripping off old disco records. Yet the album still became Arcade Fire’s third straight to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard album charts, with some of the year’s highest sales figures. And after a successful European summer tour (which helped goose some of Everything Now’s initial singles up the charts overseas), the band’s about to begin a jaunt through North American arenas in September.

Days after Everything Now’s release, Win Butler spoke with The A.V. Club about making and marketing the record, as well as Arcade Fire’s fluctuating critical reputation and why he thinks people who’ve already made up their minds to dislike the band may be missing out on the wit, exuberance, and communal connection that fans enjoy.

The A.V. Club: It took about eight months to record Everything Now. How much of that time was spent actively working on it?

Win Butler: Well, we’ve ended up building a studio for every record, so that takes time. The space you make it in ends up being the first step of figuring out how it’s going to sound.

AVC: Wasn’t this one recorded in multiple studios?

WB: Yes, but I would say 80 percent of it was recorded in New Orleans, in our tiny studio. We did some sessions in Paris and a little bit in Montreal, but not too much. Just some finishing touches. Régine [Chassagne] and I moved to New Orleans, but my brother’s in New York, and the rest of the band’s in Montreal, so the guys would come down for a couple weeks at a time and we’d record for two weeks or so. Then they’d go away and we’d listen to stuff. It’s a process.

Every once in awhile you get a gift of something that’s super easy. Like “Good God Damn” is an example of one of the most stripped-down things we’ve ever done. We cut it at midnight, with the guys flying out the next day. I had Tim [Kingsbury] and Jeremy [Gara] play it with me to make a demo so I could figure out what the lyrics were going to be. We played it once and never touched it again. It ended up being this perfect take.

But most songs just take forever, to figure out how the pieces all fit together. It’s historically taken us about a year to make a record. Even the first EP. There’s just certain things that we have to go through.

AVC: Do you do a lot of tinkering with the style and arrangements? For example on the new album, you have multiple versions of “Infinite Content” and “Everything Now.” Is that a common practice for you, to record different styles of the same song?

WB: Sometimes. Part of the idea with “Infinite Content” was that we put a thing online that was just the MIDI files and a score, and we had a bunch of people submit versions. The idea of that was to end up with 150 versions of the same song. A friend of mine who plays in this amazing Cajun band called Lost Bayou Ramblers just sent me a zydeco version of “Infinite Content” in Creole. It’s pretty amazing. I’ve heard a Kraftwerk-type version of it. Pretty all over the place.

AVC: On both Reflektor and Everything Now you’ve worked with high-profile collaborators like LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter. What do you get out of that process, bringing in someone not in Arcade Fire to work on a song?

WB: It’s mostly stuff we’ve done through friendship. James, we toured with, and we’ve been friends with him for a long time. We were actually talking about working together on Neon Bible, and it never really lined up. Markus Dravs first came in just to help us with our studio. We owned a small church outside of Montreal where we recorded Neon Bible. Markus had recorded Post and Homogenic, and our manager was managing Björk at the time, and Björk is one of my all-time heroes, so Markus came out to help us with some recording and ended up becoming a lifelong friend. Same thing with Steven Mackey [of Pulp] and Thomas.

These people all have just incredible taste in music. I think when you’ve been in a band for a really long time, sometimes you don’t appreciate what’s good about yourself. It’s easy to play something and get too focused on some small detail. It’s helpful to have somebody around who can say, “No, that was good.” Just so you don’t get too lost or forget what you do. You need somebody you really trust who has great taste.

AVC: Do you think that critics read too much into all that? If they find out that you worked with someone from Daft Punk, do they say, “This song sounds like Daft Punk?”

WB: Yes. [Laughs.] One hundred percent. I think probably everyone that has worked on an Arcade Fire record would be just as happy to do it anonymously. Five years from now, it won’t really matter, but during the promotion of a record, when people are writing reviews, I feel like a lot of people don’t take the time to understand it. It’s like people are still writing reviews of Reflektor with our new album. They say, “James Murphy is into dance-y music. James Murphy made Arcade Fire be dance-y.” And what’s funny is that an extremely large percentage of the world’s population has never even heard of Arcade Fire or James Murphy. That collaboration is really only interesting to people who write about music and the small part of the demographic who pay attention to those kind of details.

AVC: It’s not at all uncommon for people who write about music to be “over” a band that a large, large portion of the world has never heard of.

WB: Yeah, but maybe it works in the opposite way, too. If you were a critic when our first record came out, you kind of had to like it. I’m sure there were people who had to pretend to like it because it would’ve seemed uncool not to. It’s a cyclical thing.

So yeah, there’s blowback. But I’ve been experiencing that to some extent since we formed. I remember an early Arcade Fire show, where we played a song called “Headlights Look Like Diamonds,” which is kind of a dance-y, New Order song. It was our first hit, really. We played it, the crowd went crazy, and everyone was dancing. Even these super punk kids were just losing their minds, until like, a week later, when we played again and the context had changed. I saw them lose their shit, and then a week later they were all, “This band sucks.”

And it’s been like that for a long time. It wasn’t very cool to like Bruce Springsteen in the ’90s. When Nirvana was huge, there weren’t a lot of people saying, “You know who’s amazing? Bruce Springsteen.” You know what I mean? It’s very cyclical. And impossible for us to control.

AVC: I’ve had a somewhat different relationship with your band, in that I wrote a mixed review of Funeral and was converted by Neon Bible. More specifically, my mind was changed by your Austin City Limits performance. There was something about seeing the songs from the first two records in a live context. Suddenly, the music made sense. You’ve had a strong reputation as a live act from the very beginning. When you’re working on a record, how much do you think about how the songs are going to translate onstage?

WB: We’re essentially a live band, so they’re completely related. I don’t think about it like, “How’s this going to sound in an arena?” But we’re on our fifth record now, so we already have all the songs we wrote already, and with the songs we haven’t written we’re trying to do stuff that’ll serve a different purpose.

We’ve traveled the world so much and have played our music for so many different cultures and for so many different people. You can really feel how people react differently to different music in different places. Even within Europe, there’s such a big difference between a big French crowd and a big English crowd, or a big Portuguese crowd and a big Spanish crowd. There are different nuances in rhythm, and different feelings and different lyrics that translate differently. If we’re playing Coachella, a song that people are going to be really into isn’t the same song that people are going to be into if we’re playing Port-Au-Prince.

By the way, Austin City Limits is great. I grew up in Houston, and I still remember seeing Tom Waits on Austin City Limits. It’s still what I think about most when I think of Tom Waits. It really felt like he was from outer space. What is this music? Who is this person? I never got super deep into Tom Waits, but it still resonated for me.

I kind of feel the same way about The White Stripes. The White Stripes did a performance on one of Conan O’Brien’s shows, and I don’t even remember what the record was or the song, but Jack White was playing the guitar, and he went over to Conan’s desk doing his guitar solo, and I was like, “I can never talk shit about this band.” That one performance was so great that they could’ve honestly made 50 horrible records and I’d never talk shit about The White Stripes. Because I know they’re fucking for real.

It’s all really deeply related to the live thing, to me. The records and the concerts give each other life.

AVC: You played several of the new songs during the European leg of your tour before the album came out. Have you learned anything from playing them live?

WB: Everything Now is our first album where the songs have been played on pop radio in Europe. Radio 1 and Radio 2 in the U.K., which, it doesn’t really get any bigger than that. And it’s interesting, because when you really know a song, it’s amazing what your mind does. Your mind fills in all sorts of details.

When I went to see Prince play just before he passed, he was doing a greatest-hits kind of show. Like, every single fucking song he played the whole night, you’d heard a million times—and it almost didn’t matter what he was playing, because your mind knows the material so well that it fills in all the details. It’s really different.

So it’s interesting, because we got a really amazing energy playing in Montreal and in Europe, and a really great response. It’s some of the funnest shows we’ve played in a long time.

AVC: Even though the lyrics on Everything Now are often bleak, the music seems more joyous than Reflektor. Is that fair to say?

WB: I don’t know. I think we tried to make a funky record—something that we found satisfying rhythmically. I don’t really think of our band as dance music, although in the U.K., you’d hear songs from Funeral on some clubs’ disco nights, because we’ve always made music that favors four-on-the-floor. That’s one of our go-to things. If you hear the new record through a big system, there’s a lot going on in the low end. A song like “Good God Damn” sounds like a little song, but you put it in a big PA, it’s massive. There’s nothing in the low end fighting for those frequencies, which was something I was a lot more aware of on a production standpoint, just from deejaying and hearing music in different systems. You start to appreciate amplification.

I was deejaying at a party and they had this enormous PA, playing super-banging house music all night. I played “Use Me” by Bill Withers, and it nearly blew out the whole thing, because even though it’s just electric bass and a little bit of drums, the amount of low information in an acoustic bass is actually insane. Same thing with “Iko Iko,” which is someone playing a double bass and someone hitting some cans. Put it in a big system and it’s like, “Holy shit!” What is going on on the low end of these records?

That was definitely something I wasn’t as aware of, like, five years ago. I’d never heard a lot of that music on a real PA.

AVC: As I recall, there was a Rolling Stone magazine article back in the ’80s about the making of Don Henley’s Building The Perfect Beast, where the reporter mentioned that Henley insisted on taking the tapes of the final mixes to his jeep, to hear how they sounded coming out of those speakers. Do you do anything like that? Testing out the different ways an album will sound?

WB: We have a bar in Montreal, a Haitian bar, where there’s a really good sound system—a big, proper, Jamaican-style sound system. I definitely play mixes in there sometimes. Compared to the stuff you’re listening to on your laptop, it’s almost like 3-D versus 2-D.

AVC: The marketing of this record has been unusual, in that you released a new video of a new song every week or two, over a month in advance of the release.

WB: We put out four songs, I think every two weeks. So the whole thing was two months basically, from when we released the first song. And that was probably two months sooner than someone on the label would tell you to do it. But the speed at which things come and go has hit such a point that under normal circumstances a record doesn’t stand much of a chance to have people hear it. Everything seems like it’s around for forever now, but that’s just because news cycles are so fast and so early.

Look at Funeral. It came out in September in the U.S., but didn’t come out in the U.K. until six months later, because we didn’t have a record deal outside of America for those six months. It came out overseas, and we did the whole promotion thing again. Back then we were in a van, with one cellphone, and we didn’t have a manager. I don’t even fully understand how press people got our number. Régine and I did a press tour by ourselves. I think it was our first time to Europe. We thought, “Oh, it’s going to be fancy, and we’re going to get to see all of Europe,” and then it was just, like, traveling from city to city in a room from 10 a.m. until 10 p.m., talking to journalists.

If that happened now, people would be like, “What went wrong?” [Laughs.]

AVC: Was the decision to put out these videos so early all guided by the band?

WB: Yeah, it was just a way to give people a chance to hear some of the record, because once it comes out, it’s like people are onto the next thing immediately. This was an opportunity for people to spend some time with songs they might not have paid attention to otherwise. Ultimately, that’s what it’s about, getting people to hear the music. That’s why you make it.

AVC: Were you tracking the response? Seeing what fans had to say, what critics had to say, how many hits it was getting?

WB: No. I mean, I think the internet is where negativity thrives, very easily. People get an emotional hit from it. It’s unhealthy to worry too much what people think—and particularly what someone thinks who’s just hearing something for the first time and writing a response as they’re listening. That’s not useful information.

AVC: Can anticipating the response affect your creative process? Multiple pop artists lately have put out records that have tried to make a social statement and have been mocked or even pilloried. Everything Now doesn’t shy away from sociopolitical commentary. Did you think about how it might be received?

WB: Whenever you do anything or say anything, you’re opening yourself up to criticism. But that’s okay. That’s part of the deal. We’re a political band. Like, we didn’t expressly make a record about Donald Trump, but I’m not interested in pretending like he’s not the president, or that it’s not an insane cesspool of nightmare reality that we’re all living in, all day, every day.

It’s no accident that Donald Trump is by far the most successful Twitter user in the history of Twitter. He’s the master—the Rembrandt of Twitter. But the hope with some of the social media stuff we’re doing is to work with some really funny writers and… I don’t know, just maybe have people be a little more critical about what they’re reading. It’s meant to be kind of lighthearted, in a somewhat toxic environment.

AVC: It’s not unusual for Arcade Fire to do something lighthearted, because your presentation is so theatrical and theatricality often demands a certain amount of whimsy. The band is often pegged as serious and dour, but do people miss your sense of humor?

WB: I think it’s possible that people miss the point. But what are you going to do?

It reminds me of an interview I read where Sacha Baron Cohen was talking about this insane French clowning school that he went to, to study the tradition of clowning. There was this very serious clown-master, and when people would get up onstage, he had a little bell that he would ring, and the second he’d ring the bell, you were done. You weren’t funny. You were off the stage.

So he’s doing his bit, and the teacher started ringing the bell, and he just kept ignoring him. The teacher got angrier and angrier, and kept ringing the bell more and more, getting more and more furious. He said, “In that moment, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. The clown teacher yelling at me for clowning, ringing that bell and being furious, is the funniest, highest form of clowning that could possibly exist.”

I find that really inspiring. [Laughs.]

AVC: When a band’s starting out, people try to pigeonhole who you sound like, which means you’ll get questioned a lot about your influences. But you don’t get asked about that as much once you’ve established your own sound, even though your roots can become even more tangled as you evolve—especially if you’re as successful as Arcade Fire. So I’ll ask, have your musical role models changed, from Funeral to Everything Now?

WB: Well, there are different things you look up to about different artists. Look at someone like Tom Waits or Neil Young or David Bowie or even Dylan to a certain extent. They’ve all been so uncompromising. The real question though may be, who would I change careers with? And there’s no one where I’m like, “Man, I wish that was my life.” I’m very proud and satisfied with where we’re at as a band, and how we’ve done it.

Y’know, we’re just still in the middle of this thing. My grandfather was 96 when he passed away, and he was still playing until he was, like, 94, and still recording in the basement. He had ProTools on his computer, in the basement recording himself with an optic pedal on the guitar, making bass lines and shit. He’s my role model.

#Arcade Fire #Win Butler #interview #Everything Now

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