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themonotonysyndrome · 3 years

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REDACTED verse - Guardian angels

Prompt: any fandom / any pairing / “everything is going to be okay” kisses

Word Count: 2,650

Author/Team: LadyMonotone

Fandom/Original: Redacted ASMR (David Shaw/Angel. Freelancer/Gavin + Damien, Lasko, Huxley & Caelum)

Rating: T

Triggers: Near accident. Panic attack. Angst with a happy ending.

Summary: Guardian angels can be the most unlikely people you ever come across. That includes a group of college students.

ConCrit: Y

OK, so, first off. A bit of a warning for this oneshot. I’ve never written anything about a vehicle accident or panic attacks so I did some research and read some references. So yeah...

I meant to post this last weekend but it turned out be a hectic Saturday and Sunday for me. Oh well.

I’ll be editing this oneshot again tomorrow so please excuse me for any grammar or spelling mistakes. It’s quite late in the evening here in my country, but I really wanted to post this oneshot today.

A split second is enough to change a person's life. Be it for the better or worse.

A left here, a right turn after the bakery shop on the path that Angel thought was right towards their new job, ended up turning into theirs and David's first meeting. They may be late for their first day of work, but it ended with a happy ending and a man that will one day become their husband.

Today, however, what was supposed to be a relatively normal Wednesday turned out for the worst for Angel.

It's a windy Wednesday, signalling that Autumn is fast approaching. The trees that line the streets bear its dark orange leaves where the passing breeze carries every falling one. Pedestrians are milling about in thick coats, scarves and boots - some are rushing back to work after their lunch break while others are trying to catch the next bus or Uber to head to their next destination. You could also smell the scent of pumpkin and cinnamon pastries wafting from the nearby bakeries.

Walking down the streets with a pep in their step, Angel is glad that they could end work earlier than usual. Their team had successfully launched a project that they've been working hard on and losing sleep over for days (David was not happy about that), so their bosses allow Angel and their team members to pack it up and spend the rest of their day resting at home.

Angel wasted no time packing their laptop and notebooks. They shouted their goodbyes to their colleagues and left for home after their lunch break.

With a phone in their hands, Angel stops beside the signal traffic light at the pedestrian crossing. They press the button and continue to text David.

'Yup. I ate with my friends before I left. I'm planning to do the laundry after my shower and probably play some Minecraft or something.'

Not a minute later, David sends his reply.

'The new laundry detergent is in our storage. I couldn't find the lavender fragrance, so I bought the one with rose-scented. Where are you now? Do you want me to pick you up and drive you home?'

'Got it and nah. I'm nearing the bus stop now. The next bus should be coming in a few minutes. Besides, aren't you busy at that magical school today?'

Angel glances up from their phone. Vehicles rush through the road while the signal traffic light is still flashing red. Their attention returns to the phone when it chimes once more.

'We're discussing the security rotation and details with the faculties and teaching staff now for the Games. The most important things are out of the way so Asher can take over for an hour. I can pick you up.'

'It's cool, Davey. I'll see you at home. I love you!'

Just as Angel sent their text, the light for the pedestrian crossing switch to green. They nudged the straps of their bag higher on their shoulders and began walking with their eyes occasionally glancing down at their phone.

Angel is too focus on their phone to hear the screams and shouts in the background and the screeching tires and blaring horn becoming louder. It's only when something big is approaching from their right did Angel blink and look.

"Wait! What are you - "

"No, don't!

"You can't - "

" - too many people! Risk of Covert - "

"Lasko!"

"I-I can try! Wait - "

Angel couldn't hear anything. At that moment, all they could see is the head of the truck seconds away from their face, and their heart froze.

"What are you doing!? Freelancer - "

Everything happens in a split second; someone grabs Angel's backpack and yank them backwards with enough force that they both fall on the pavements. Arms immediately latch themselves onto Angel and pull them away from the crossroads just in the nick of time that a rushing wind blew past them.

What comes afterwards is a loud crash and the screeching tires that are so loud that they nearly shatter the eardrums. More people start to scream and shout.

The arms around Angel immediately let go, and not even a second later, they find themselves surrounded by a group of people.

"Oh my god! A-Are you alright!? Are you hurt anywhere!?"

"Did someone call the ambulance already? Are they coming - "

"Already on it, dude! Fuck. That was so not fun at all!"

"Caelum? What do you - "

It's too much. Everything is too much! Angel's heart is hammering painfully; as if it's going to burst out from its ribcage. The shadows surrounding them and the cacophony of noises makes the world shrink tighter and tighter around them.

Overwhelmed, shocked, frightened and disbelieve could hardly begin to describe what Angel is going through right now.

"Guys, guys, back off a moment! Give us some space, please." Someone from Angel's left pleads. It sounds like they were having trouble speaking too.

Immediately, the tall shadows that were surrounding Angel rush away from their immediate area. Far out that Angel feels like they could breathe again yet near enough to offer help when needed.

Angel's head is spinning. Their brain struggles to process where they are and what has just happened. Their heart is still beating like an erratic hummingbird.

"Can... can you hear me?" That same voice who ushered the crowd away gingerly asked. Angel blinks. They look down at their hands and realise that they're sitting on the rough pavement with their phone nowhere in sight.

"W-What just - " Angel stutters, eyes slowly widening. Their body starts to shake once the adrenaline begins to wear off. It was a good thing that they had already ended up on the floor because Angel could hardly feel their legs at the moment.

Wait. Their hands... their phone! What -

"Whoa, don't!"

"I don't think you should - "

"You don't need to look at... it."

Three young men quickly huddle together to block the view in front of Angel when they jerk their head up towards the pedestrian walk. Their eyes search around, wildly. Oh fuck. Oh shit. The truck! They nearly died -

"They're starting to have a panic attack, Deviant!"

Angel couldn't breathe; it feels like the air is sucking out of them. A pair of invisible hands choking them all of a sudden with their head spinning. It doesn't help with the blaring sirens in the distance.

"Hey, hey... easy. Easy there." A gentle and kind voice pierce through the chaos around Angel like a beacon of light in the dark. "Take a deep breath with me; come on. You can do it. One... OK, let go. Again. Two... let go. Good job. Three... yes, you're getting it! Four.. let go. Just a little more, c'mon on. You're doing amazing."

Angel did as instructed. They made sure to match their breathing along with the stranger on the pavement beside them. When the stranger gently ask if they could hold their hand, Angel shakily nods and squeezes back.

"The ambulance is here." The stranger patiently informs Angel. "Do you think you can follow us to the hospital? We... both of us need to see a doctor. Is that OK?"

"Please..." Angel gasps; their chest feels so painfully tight. "Don't let go. I-I can't - "

"I won't. I'm right here." The stranger is quick to assure them. "I'm right here. We're going to go together, OK? My friends will be coming along too. You're not alone."

Angel takes one deep breath and exhale. They nod once and finally allow the group of young men to help them get into the ambulance. They explain the situation to the emergency response team within the vehicle, fuss over Angel and the stranger before the ambulance pulls away and drive off to the hospital.

They were all very kind to make sure that Angel couldn't see the aftermath of the crash behind them.

The hospital trip, conversation with the nurses and doctor, and the check-up are a blur for Angel. Their head is still reeling with their near brush of death. The stress, anxiety and horror are still threatening to overwhelm them.

But despite it all, the stranger kept their promise. They never let go of Angel's hand, even for a moment. Even when the doctors wanted to treat their minor injuries separately.

Their friends are staunch pillars of support too. One by one, they introduce themselves - Damien, Lasko, Huxley and Gavin. The group are students, currently attending the local academy. The stranger introduces themselves by the nickname the boys gave them - Freelancer. Angel deduced that it must be an inside joke between them.

After the round of introductions, they then made sure that Angel and the stranger had a water bottle with them and some snacks when Angel could stomach some food. They would constantly take turns distracting Angel and their friend by chatting about the latest movies, that one professor they're having trouble with and the newest drama circulating their academy.

They'd even made sure that Angel feels included in their conversation by asking about their favourite food to eat whenever it rains, what's their ultimate pet peeve and even what's their favourite sweater to wear during Autumn.

Hours went by, and before Angel knew it, evening had fallen. Angel and the stranger (their saviour!) are now waiting at the lobby to be cleared by the doctors. The group of young men are ever around them.

"Hey, um..." The stranger suddenly interjects while the nurse finishes up their paperwork behind the counter. "Is it alright if we accompany you home? I-I just want to make sure you get there safely. "The young man beside them - Angel assume is their boyfriend - wrap his arm around their shoulder to ground them. They throw him a weak yet grateful smile.

The whole ordeal shook them too. They've been so strong, so it's Angel's turn to be strong for this incredible group of people too.

"You don't have to. You all... are so very kind." Angel said quietly. Their voice might be devoid of their usual cheer and liveliness, but Angel wants to convey their sincerity. "If it weren't for you... I..." God, Angel couldn't imagine it.

"You're alright. You're right here with us." One of the young men - Damien - is ready to calm Angel down. They notice that this one has a bit of a temper, but Angel had noticed how gentle they hugged their friend after the doctor finished checking them. "Look, your phone was... destroyed in the incident. Is there anyone you'd like us to call? We'd feel better if we knew that you're not alone."

Someone to call... Angel's heart begins to sink, their eyes wide as they remember that they were texting David!

Seeing Angel's dramatic change in expression, Gavin quirks up a shapely eyebrow. "I take it you have a special someone that you just remembered?"

Before Angel could say anything, a voice bellowed through the lobby. "Angel!"

Everyone except Angel flinches. They all watch, transfix, as David runs into the lobby and straight towards Angel. They didn't hesitate to throw themselves into his arms and buried themselves into his chest. Feeling how David's arms curl themselves tighter around Angel and David's murmurs of "Everything is going to be okay" accompany calming kisses on their head and cheeks finally burst the dam that Angel unconsciously has been holding in the entire day.

Angel burst into tears. "D-Davey... oh god, Davey..."

"I'm so, so glad that you're alright, Angel," David replies with a ragged sigh. In a much quieter tone, he continues, "I thought I lost you. I thought I lost my Mate. When you didn't answer my text and when news came out that there's been a freak accident on the street across your bus stop I... I couldn't think of anything else."

Angel sniffs loudly and holds back a choked sob. Their tears are making a mess out of David's uniform, but neither they nor David cares about it. "H-How did you know where to find me?"

"Milo showed me the news about the accident on his phone. He remembers the street where you work. I... I thought of the worse when my calls to you weren't getting through." David explains. Angel could detect the pain in his voice and how his body began to shake. "After Milo told me which hospital responded to the accident, Asher took over the job, and I came here as fast as I could."

It feels good to cry. Even if they're currently in the middle of a hospital's lobby with visitors and patients walking around. They are kind enough to give Angel and David the spaces they need.

Once the waterwork stops, Angel juts their chin upwards to stare into David's eyes that are filled with love, worry and immense relief. "I'm here because of these incredible people, Davey. One of them saved me at that pedestrian crossing." They explain and gesture to the group of college students still standing nearby the counter.

However, their reactions confuse Angel.

Lasko is gaping like a goldfish. Damien's mouth curved into an 'o', surprise written all over his face. Huxley tilts his head as if he's thinking hard. Gavin's eyes keep glancing at his side, where there's nothing but the air. Angel's saviour just smiles happily at the couple, oblivious to their friends' behaviour.

It's David that breaks the strange silence amongst the group. "Thank you... for being there for my partner."

"We were fortunately at the right time and place." The Freelancer humbly reply. "I'm just glad that the both of us are alright."

David nods once. "You have my gratitude. More than you can possibly imagine." David pauses here to squeeze Angel's small body when Angel starts to sniffle. "Each one of you has earned a favour from me and my... family. If there's anything we can do to pay you all back, don't ever hesitate to come to me."

"Davey?"

"On behalf of the group, we are honoured to receive such a high favour from you, Mr. Shaw," Damien replies, his body suddenly went rigid and his voice adopting a formal tone. "However, as our friend said, we were there at the right time and the right place to help your partner with no thoughts of a reward."

Angel and the Freelancer stare at each other, lost and confused at the sudden formality that the boys are having.

"And b-besides," Lasko joins in on the conversation. So sweet and nervous, but he presses on, "You and your security are helping us a lot with the Games, Mr. Shaw. That's more than enough."

"That's business." David corrects him. A passing nurse who had been watching them hands some tissue to David. He quickly thanked her and proceeded to wipe Angel's wet eyes and cheeks before addressing the group. "D.A.M.N contacted my company for extra security, and that's how we treat it as such. So my offer still stands."

The Freelancer, not knowing how to respond to that, just awkwardly accept it. "If you say so... Mr. Shaw, was it?"

It's Gavin who interjects to finally clued in their partner. He snaps his fingers to make sure his explanation remains in a bubble around them. "Those guys that you've been seeing wearing the same uniform here belongs to the Shaw Security. They're also known as the Shaw Pack; the most powerful Werewolf Pack in Dahlia and the whole region. Mr. Shaw here, Deviant, is the Alpha of said Pack."

That got the Freelancer's eyes to widen in surprise. They begin to splutter out apologies for the lack of recognition; their cheeks start to reddened in embarrassment. So it's Angel's turn to save their saviour.

They lightly tug on David's jacket to get his attention. When their boyfriend tilt his head down at them, Angel innocently blink their watery eyes and asks, "You're a Werewolf, Davey? Why did you never tell me before?"

"Wha - Angel!"

#redacted asmr #fanfic #they/them pronouns #gender neutral s/o #david shaw #angel (listener)#freelancer (listener)#gavin #damien #lasko #huxley #caelum

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papermoonloveslucy · 4 years

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MY THREE SONS at 60!

September 29, 1960

“My Three Sons” was a situation comedy produced at Desilu Studios. It premiered on ABC TV on September 29, 1960 and finished its first run on April 13, 1972, with 380 episodes making it the second-longest running live-action sitcom in TV history after “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett” (1952-66).

Seasons 1 through 5 were aired in black and white on CBS. In 1965 it moved to CBS when ABC declined to underwrite the costs of airing in color. The series was initially filmed at Desilu Studios in Hollywood, but at the start of the 1967–68 season, the cast and crew began filming the series at the CBS Studio Center in Studio City, California due to Lucille Ball’s sale of Desilu to Gulf + Western, which owned Paramount Pictures. The sale also affected the filming location of another family sitcom, “Family Affair.”

Incredibly, “My Three Sons” ran concurrently through both “The Lucy Show” and “Here’s Lucy.” Both Steve Douglas and Lucy Carmichael (and later Carter), where single parents raising children.

September 16, 1965 was a big night for CBS airing the very first episode of “My Three Sons” after moving from ABC titled “The First Marriage”. It was also the first episode of the series broadcast in color, something “The Lucy Show” did three days earlier with “Lucy at Marineland” (TLS S4;E1). The premise of the series is a widowed father (Steven Douglas) raising his three boys with help of his extended family. Initially, the three sons were Chip, Robbie, and Mike, but in 1967 Mike was written out and replaced by Ernie, whom Steve adopted. The extended family at first consisted of Bub, Steve’s father-in-law and the boys’ maternal grandfather, but in 1964, that character was replaced by Uncle Charley, Steve’s uncle and Bub’s brother.

The leading role was played by film star Fred MacMurray, who the series was built around - including his hectic schedule. To suit MacMurray, scenes would be shot out of sequence and even alone on a soundstage and later edited to create a complete episode. This was not MacMurray’s first time at Desilu. In 1958 he played himself on the “Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour” in “Lucy Hunts Uranium” set in the Nevada desert outside Las Vegas. He was joined by his second wife, actress June Haver. MacMurray (1908-91) appeared in over 100 films in his career but is perhaps best remembered for the film Double Indemnity (1944), which Lucy references in this episode. MacMurray’s name was first mentioned by Ethel in 1953 in “The Black Eye” (ILL S2;E20) when flowers arrive for Lucy mistakenly signed “Eternally yours, Fred.”

Although Lucille Ball was their landlord (and ultimate boss) she never acted on the show, but many of the actors who appeared on Lucille Ball’s sitcoms did appear on “My Three Sons”.

From 1960 to 1965, MacMurray was joined by William Frawley as Bub O’Casey, the family’s live-in maternal grandfather. Of course, Frawley came to fame on “I Love Lucy” as the crusty landlord Fred Mertz. Frawley had worked with MacMurray in the 1935 film, Car 99. When Frawley had to leave the show due to ill-health (and it was too costly to insure him) he was replaced by another Desilu alumni, William Demarest, as Uncle Charley. Like his previous co-star, Vivian Vance, Frawley was not especially fond of Demarest personally or as an actor. Demarest had, however, done three films with Lucille Ball. Frawley kept watching “My Three Sons” on his TV set bitterly. He never really got over being replaced by Demarest. On March 3, 1966, Frawley died of a heart attack.

For Christmas 1959, Frawley and Demarest both appeared with Lucy and Desi in “The Desilu Revue” (above with “December Bride’s” Spring Byington). At the time, Demarest was working on the Desilu lot appearing in NBC’s “Love and Marriage.”

On “My Three Sons” two of Steve Douglas’ boys had been seen on “The Lucy Show”: Don Grady (Robbie Douglas) had played Chris Carmichael’s friend Bill and Barry Livingston (Ernie Douglas) had played Mr. Mooney’s son Arnold. Ted Eccles, who assumed the role of Arnold Mooney when Barry Livingston was busy on “My Three Sons,” also did an episode.

The children of “The Lucy Show,” Ralph Hart (who played Viv Bagley’s son Sherman), Jimmy Garrett (Jerry Carmichael), and Candy Moore (Lucy Carmichael’s daughter Chris) were also on episodes of "My Three Sons.”

Other “Lucy” performers who were on “My Three Sons” include:

Mary Wickes ~ Jeri Schronk (1964)

Doris Singleton ~ Helen & Margaret, 8 episodes (1964-70)

Shirley Mitchell ~ Sally, 2 episodes (1968)

Barbara Pepper ~ Mrs. Brand (1966)

Verna Felton ~ Mub (1962)

Kathleen Freeman ~ Lady Checker (1967)

Jerry Hausner ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1964 & 1966)

Reta Shaw ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1962 & 1965)

Elvia Allman ~ Maude Prosser (1967)

Eleanor Audley ~ Mrs. Vincent, 9 episodes (1969-70)

Burt Mustin ~ Various Characters, 5 episodes (1962-70)

Olan Soule ~ Various Characters, 5 episodes (1963-70)

Alberto Morin ~ Professor Madoro (1967)

Herb Vigran ~ Caretaker (1967)

Maurice Marsac ~ Various Characters, 3 episodes (1964-72)

Tim Mathewson ~ Various Characters, 3 episodes (1962-63)

Bill Quinn ~ Doctors, 4 episodes (1964-66)

Barbara Perry ~ Mrs. Thompson & Mrs. Hoover, 3 episodes (1964-72)

Nancy Kulp ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1962)

George N. Neise ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1960 & 1967)

Maxine Semon ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1964 & 1967)

Roy Roberts ~Various Characters, 2 episodes (1965 & 1967)

Lou Krugman ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1966 & 1967)

Richard Reeves ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1962 & 1965)

Dorothy Konrad ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1961 & 1962)

Ed Begley ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1962 & 1968)

Gail Bonney ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1965 & 1970)

Rolfe Sedan ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1968 & 1971)

Tyler McVey ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1962 & 1967)

J. Pat O’Malley ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1963 & 1964)

Paul Picerni ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1965 & 1967)

Sandra Gould ~ Various Characters, 2 episodes (1963 & 1964)

Richard Deacon ~ Elderly Man (1960)

Mabel Albertson ~ Mrs. Proctor (1964)

Joan Blondell ~ Harriet Blanchard (1965)

Leon Belasco ~ Professor Lombardi (1966)

Dayton Lummis ~ Dr. Blackwood (1963)

Lurene Tuttle ~ Natalie Corcoran (1968)

Robert Foulk ~ Pop Action (1962)

Dick Patterson ~ Bunny Baxter (1963)

Jamie Farr ~ Itchy (1964)

Larry J. Blake ~ Policeman (1968)

Amzie Strickland ~ Cora Dennis (1968)

Barbara Morrison ~ Mrs. Murdock (1969)

Louis Nicoletti ~ Caddy Master (1962)

Frank Gerstle ~ Policeman (1964)

Gil Perkins ~ Painter (1963)

Tommy Ferrell ~ Mr. Griffith (1964)

Eve McVeagh ~ Clara (1966)

Remo Pisani ~ Pepe (1970)

Dub Taylor ~ Judge (1963)

Frank J. Scannell ~ Emcee (1968)

Ray Kellogg ~ Henshaw (1965)

Romo Vincent ~ Charley (1964)

Stafford Repp ~ Sergeant Perkins (1969)

Jay Novello ~ Vincenzo (1966)

Leoda Richards ~ Restaurant Patron (1966)

CHILD STARS!

Other child stars who appeared on “My Three Sons” included Butch Patrick (“The Munsters”), Jay North (“Dennis the Menace”), Oscar-winner Jodie Foster, Angela Cartwright (“Make Room for Daddy”), Flip Mark (”Lassie”), John Walmsley (”The Waltons”), Tony Dow (“Leave It To Beaver”), Erin Moran (“Happy Days”), Maureen McCormick (”The Brady Bunch”), Ann Jillian (Gypsy), and Heather Menzies (The Sound of Music).

On November 22, 1977, ABC TV (and Dick Clark Productions) brought together a reunion of two of television's favorite sitcoms "The Partridge Family" and "My Three Sons." Hosted by Shirley Jones and Fred MacMurray this would be the only time that the surviving cast members would get together to celebrate the series which included clips, a song from David Cassidy, and an update of what each cast member was doing in 1977.

Also in 1977, some of the stars of the series reunited on a morning program titled "The Early Show", including Stanley Livingston (Chip Douglas), Barry Livingston (Ernie Douglas), Tina Cole (Katie Miller Douglas), and Don Grady (Robbie Douglas).

TRIVIA

In “Lucy Helps Danny Thomas” (TLS S4;E7) in 1965, there is a large framed photo of Fred MacMurray in the studio hallway. He is joined by other Desilu stars like Jim Nabors (of “Gomer Pyle USMC”), Andy Griffith (of “The Andy Griffith Show”) and Danny Thomas (of “The Danny Thomas Show”).

#My Three Sons #Lucille Ball #Desilu #1960 #TV #Desilu Studios #Fred MacMurray #William Frawley

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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In Defense of Spectre: Daniel Craig’s Last James Bond Is Better Than You Remember

https://ift.tt/3a60miY

It’s hard to believe that it’s been six years since the release of the last James Bond movie. The gap even ties the near fatal six-year distance between Licence to Kill and GoldenEye. But it’s true, Spectre came out in 2015. And as we stand on the cusp of its follow-up, No Time to Die, finally arriving in theaters after a delay of 18 months, it’s strange to think back to the arrival of Spectre, and the polarizing response it received.

The last James Bond movie to star Daniel Craig still sits with a 63 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, right in that vague netherworld between “fresh” and “rotten.” And while it was an enormous financial success ($881 million at the worldwide box office), it was considered something of a step back since its predecessor, 2012’s Skyfall, which grossed more than $1 billion. It might have been unrealistic to think Bond could hit that mark again, so in relative terms Spectre did quite well on its own terms and as part of the overall franchise.

There are, let’s face it, only a handful of truly great 007 adventures: Casino Royale, Goldfinger, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and The Spy Who Loved Me come to mind. But there are likewise several that are almost all universally despised: Die Another Day, A View to a Kill, Diamonds Are Forever, and a couple of others tend to fall into that sorry category. The rest tend to exist in a mushy middle: fun to watch on a lazy Sunday afternoon but instantly forgettable until the next time you turn it on while doing laundry.

And yet a pall hangs over Spectre, and it seems as if the fans and critics who found it disappointing are really down on the film. Yet I’d place it solidly in that middle category, and if anything closer to the top. With the exception of its third act (more on that later), it’s a solid Bond outing for the Daniel Craig era, with its star more terse than ever (watching it again, one is struck by how little dialogue Craig actually has), while its action and plot points are mostly in line with the “gritty” feel of Craig’s previous three outings.

It also stretches the Craig template a little, allowing for a few more gadgets, some homages to past films, and a little more humor. In other words, it lets Craig come as close as he ever previously had to the fully formed Bond played by the previous five actors. No, he’s not winking and letting his eyebrows do all the acting the way Roger Moore did toward the end of his run, and he’s not quite the cruel misogynist popularized in the beginning by Sean Connery. But this is Craig’s version of that man.

Some of the Bonds that fall lower in the standings tend to have overly complicated plots, like The World is Not Enough or Octopussy. The plot of Spectre is pretty simple and straightforward: following the death of M (Judi Dench) in Skyfall, Bond goes on one last mission at her request (via a message recorded before she died) and without official authorization from the new M (Ralph Fiennes).

He learns that the man he was sent to kill, an Italian terrorist named Sciarra, has taken his marching orders from an ultra-secret criminal organization—the same entity that was apparently behind the actions of Le Chiffre (Casino Royale), Dominic Greene (Quantum of Solace), Raoul Silva (Skyfall) and Mr. White (the first two). Bond also learns that he and the head of this organization, which is named SPECTRE, have a personal connection going back decades.

Although he’s officially suspended from duty, Bond goes in pursuit of SPECTRE and its chief, Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), while also making a promise to the dying Mr. White to protect his daughter, Madeline Swann (Léa Seydoux). To make matters worse, there’s also a mole in MI6 who plans to surreptitiously turn the entire surveillance apparatus of British intelligence over to (you guessed it) SPECTRE and Oberhauser.

The story has a linear, straight line: Bond must find and stop Oberhauser while bringing down SPECTRE. There’s plenty of action along the way, including a vertigo-inducing opening battle in a helicopter, a chase in which Bond steers a plane down a snowy mountain slope, and a brutal fight aboard a train between 007 and SPECTRE’s top assassin, the monstrous Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista), which deliberately channels the classic train clash between Connery and Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love.

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Hinx and Bond also have a traditional car chase of their own through the winding streets of Rome, in which Bond utilizes some of the enhanced features of his Aston Martin, such as a rear-facing flamethrower and an ejector seat (sadly the machine guns are not loaded, much to Bond’s amusing chagrin). Speaking of gadgets, Bond also gets to deploy an exploding watch, just one film removed from Q (Ben Whishaw) asking him in Skyfall, “Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don’t really go in for that anymore.”

It’s all in good fun, and most of the first two hours of this lengthy adventure breezes along with a bit less of the solemnity of Skyfall and a touch more (but not too much) of the old Moore and Pierce Brosnan swagger. We also thoroughly enjoy seeing Ralph Fiennes’ M, Ben Whishaw’s Q, Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny, and Rory Kinnear’s Tanner work as a team and even get their hands dirty in the field.

But then that last half hour hits and it kind of all goes to hell.

We’re not here to yet again relitigate the ending of Spectre and the big reveal of just who Oberhauser is. We’ve done that in our original review and in another recent feature right here. But just to quickly recap: Bond and Madeline are captured by Oberhauser and brought to his lair in a giant crater in the Sahara desert (a crater that looks suspiciously like SPECTRE’s extinct volcano hideout in You Only Live Twice). There we learn that Bond was adopted by Oberhauser’s father after Bond’s parents were killed, and a jealous Franz killed his father, staged his own death, and launched SPECTRE while renaming himself Ernst Stavro Blofeld—all for the sole purpose of seeking vengeance on Bond.

The idea of SPECTRE and Blofeld being behind all the other villains Daniel Craig’s Bond has faced is a sound one—it was, after all, the basis of the first few Connery films—but the notion that Bond’s estranged foster brother started this deadliest of all criminal organizations just because his daddy made him feel sad is ludicrous. By all means, have SPECTRE target Bond, especially after he defeats some of Blofeld’s most fearsome lieutenants, but does it have to be a retconned family squabble?

On top of that, after Bond foils Blofeld’s plan to destroy MI6 and take over its intelligence operation, he leaves Blofeld on the street for M to arrest and walks off into the night with Madeline, woman with whom he has no appreciable chemistry. Their romance isn’t nearly as well-developed as that of Bond and Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) in Casino Royale. When Bond almost resigned from the service for Vesper, you believed it. His actions at the end of Spectre are a little more ambiguous. We don’t know if he’s leaving for good or just taking a holiday, and it’s hard to imagine that this Bond, at the height of his skills, would chuck it all away for a woman he barely knows. Which as we’ve since from No Time to Die is definitely what was supposed to happen.

If you take those two plot points out of the equation, Spectre is a good film and even an above-average 007 outing. Sam Mendes directs with flair, even if a few sequences are too long and the movie overall could be a little tighter. Meanwhile cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shoots the hell out of it, and Thomas Newman’s score is propulsive and exciting. The cast is uniformly good, especially the MI6 crew, Waltz, and Craig himself, even as we wish the long-awaited return of Blofeld could have been… different.

But as Madeline Swann says to Bond, “I’m not going to ask you to change… you are who are you are.” Spectre is what it is. And we’re okay with that.

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dustedmagazine · 3 years

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Dust Volume 7, Number 1

Phicus

Another year, another volume of Dust, which means we’ve been collecting these brief, pithy reviews for seven years now. This time around, we sample the usual cornucopia of genres, from ambient death metal to Iranian punk to noisy skree to shoegaze-y lookalikes to polyglot global dj grooves, with the usual stops in free jazz and improvisatory environments. Contributors include Jonathan Shaw, Bill Meyer, Ian Mathers, Jennifer Kelly, Bryon Hayes and Andrew Forell.

Aberration — S/T (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Aberration by Aberration

Not sure what “ambient dark death metal” is, but recently formed band Aberration claims to play it. The “ambient” bit may be a nod to the drone that sometimes resonates deep in the mix of the three songs on this 10” EP. Other than that, Aberration’s music sounds pretty typical of the death metal created by bands on the primitive, murky end of the genre’s sonic continuum. Some of the musicians are in other, more established projects: John Hancock plays guitar and provides vocals in the widely admired death doom outfit Void Rot, Dylan Haseltine plays bass and sings for the blackened death metal (mostly black metal, it seems to me) band the Suffering Hour. Those bands have much more specific musical identities, and their intense records express the players’ clarity of vision. Perhaps Aberration wants to live up to its name, presenting something unprecedented, an unpleasant mutation — and hence, perhaps, the decision to release the vinyl version of the EP on an unusual format. That’s sort of fun. The music is not. But that’s nothing new in death metal, and to be honest, these songs don’t warrant the announcement of a new sub-subgenre. They are just fine, if you like your death metal atavistic, cavernous and claustrophobic. But an aberration? Nope. Maybe a weeping pustule. In death metal, isn’t that enough?

Jonathan Shaw

Steve Baczkowski / Bill Nace — Success (Notice)

Success by Steve Baczkowski/Bill Nace

Dallas is synonymous with a sort of excess that begs to be perceived as success. Old TV shows, memories of oil, nation-splitting politics, you name it; it’s bigger, badder and gaudier in Dallas. A tape of a free improv show that was recorded at a Dallas bookstore might not fit your preconceptions of longhorn accomplishment, but go ahead and tell that to Steve Baczkowski and Bill Nace. If they answer at all, they might let you gently know that it’s your problem, and then pop in the tape. This 42-minute-long recording will hook you by the belt, take off into the stratosphere, drag you through an asteroid belt, and deposit your cindered remains by the bar (yes, The Wild Detectives serves liquor as well as literature) before the tape reverses. That still leaves plenty of time savor the duo’s mastery of transition, from stout-sounded duel to fading filigree framing the sounds of the cash register opening and closing. Yeah, that’s the sound of Success.

Bill Meyer

Aidan Baker — There/Not There (Consouling Sounds)

There / Not There by Aidan Baker

Unsurprisingly, 2020 doesn’t seem to have slowed Aidan Baker (Nadja, WERL, Caudal, Hypnodrone Ensemble, and many more) much at all. Of the many records released under his own name, the recent There/Not There stands out for being a surprisingly accessible entry to his personal metal/drone/ambient/shoegaze melting pot, even given the opening 20-minute title track. “There/Not There” marries some whispery shoegaze songwriting with a beautifully monomaniacal repeating drone. Over the course of the track, it does slowly transition until we get to a crescendo as intense as any Baker’s done, but even more so than normal the unwary might get lured in by the low key, blissful opening and the frog-boiling slowness with which the tension is ratcheted up. One of the other two tracks is really just a way to section off the real noise-squall coda of “There/Not There” but then “Paris (Lost)” offers a more concise, quieter storm version of the same framework. Like a lot of Baker’s work, it sneaks up on you, but when it hits it hits hard.

Ian Mathers

Ballrogg — Rolling Ball (Clean Feed)

Rolling Ball by Ballrogg

The Scandinavian combo Ballrogg changes direction once again on Rolling Ball. Founders Klaus Ellerhusen Holm (clarinets) and Roger Arntzen (bass), who are both Norwegian, started out reinvestigating the folksy jazz vibe of Jimmy Giuffre, then sought out a new home on the range by adding slide guitarist Ivar Grydeland. Now, incoming Swedish guitarist David Stackenäs and his rack of pedals have redirected the trio into a technology-enhanced future. Not the sci-fi imaginings of Sun Ra, but a future more like 2019 might look if you stepped straight into it from 1959; in some ways quite familiar, but in others, different enough to be disorienting. The Giuffre-esque and country elements are still there, but when punctuated by minimalist-influenced compositional flourishes and illuminated by the diffuse, digital flicker of Stackenäs’ effects, it suddenly becomes clear that those Viking cowboys didn’t put a key in the ignition before they drove out towards the horizon.

Bill Meyer

Bipolar — S-T (Slovenly)

BIPOLAR "Bipolar" EP by Bipolar

For a band named Bipolar, with a single called “Depression,” this EP sure is a lot of fun. Two of the band’s mainstays are apparently Iranian emigres, now seeking the more permissive environs of Brooklyn. (The only hint of that exotic origin is in “Sad Clown,” where there might be an imam exhorting the faithful, but who knows? I don’t speak Farsi.) One of them sometimes plays keyboard with the Spits, and in fact, the Spits are a pretty good reference point for these hard, fast, bratty songs. “Virus” pummels a relentless pogo beat, the one-two of the drums rocketing ever faster, the shouted all-hands chorus in tumbling sync. “Fist Fight” is even more exhilarating, with its blaring, roiling guitar blast and adrenaline-raising refrain, “It’s a fist fight. It’s a fist fight.” There’s nothing profound here, but it’s a good time.

Jennifer Kelly

Bosq — Y Su Descarga Internacional (Bacalao)

Y Su Descarga Internacional by bosq

Bosq, a globally omnivorous DJ formerly based in Boston (real name Benjamin Woods), recently moved to Colombia, perhaps to get closer to his source material. The Colombian influence is certainly strong on Y Su Descarga Internacional, which opens with a scorching “Rumbero,” featuring the Afro-Colombian star Nidia Góngora. Dorkas, another singer from Colombia, follows immediately with “Mi Arizal,” an intricately textured dance track which erupts with fiery bursts of Latin brass. Justo Valdez, whose Son Palenque did much to define the Cartagena sound in the 1960s and 1970s, drops by for two of the album’s best tracks: a rollicking “Mambue” and the hand-drummed, bass-thumping hand-clapping “Onombitamba.” And yet the album doesn’t just document the singers and artists of Bosq’s new home. Kaleta, a Benin-based Afro-beat artist who has worked with Fela Kuti and Eqypt 80, takes the lead on funk psych “Omo Iya” and the stirring, horn squalling “Wake Up.” Bosq knows how to pick collaborators, and there’s not a dud track on the disc, but wouldn’t almost anyone sound like a genius in company like this?

Jennifer Kelly

Deuce Avenue — Death of Natural Light (Crash Symbols)

Death of Natural Light by Deuce Avenue

If you are a lurker of the cassette underground, you may remember a West Virginian outfit called Social Junk appearing in the mid-aughts. This duo offered up crackling melodic scree, blown out murky fuzz and semi-coherent mouth sounds like an industrialized version of The Dead C or a new wave outfit newly recovered post-coma. Noah Anthony, the male half of Social Junk, has since moved on to releasing solo material under both the Profligate and Deuce Avenue monikers. The latter is the more recent project and is quite minimal compared to his other work. With Death of Natural Light, there are no cold wave rhythms and vocals à la Profligate. What’s left is a dank, steamy vapor. Contrails of filter-swept hiss slowly develop into a more enigmatic and darkened tonal palette. The ominousness continues to thread its way into the second half of the cassette, fittingly entitled “Blood Turns Black”. Loops of nocturnal jump scare fodder coalesce into rhythms that provide skeletal forms to foil the menace of the more oblique textures. Those who enjoy their horror in slow motion will latch onto these sounds like a facehugger to… …well, a person’s face.

Bryon Hayes

Fleeting Joys — Despondent Transponder (Only Forever)

Despondent Transponder by Fleeting Joys

Let’s start with the obvious. Despondent Transponder sounds a lot like MBV’s Loveless, with wild sirening guitar tones, waves of noise-y feedback, thunderous drumming and sweet, fragile lyrics engulfed in the swirl. “Go and Come Back” has the same fluttering guitar melody as the great “To Here Knows When,” while “Satellite” blusters with the dopplering, dissonance-addled grandeur as “I Only Said.” Fleeting Joys — that was Rorika Loring singing and playing bass and John Loring on guitar and vox — never made any secret of their love of MBV. Despondent Transponder was an homage right from the start. The album was the debut for this Sacramento-based twosome, released originally in 2006, then as now on Loring’s own Only Forever label. And yet, while no one will ever top Loveless, from an ear-bleeding psych-noise daydream perspective, this one has its own particular beauties. “Magnificent Oblivion” surrounds a lullaby-pure melody with a reeling, caterwauling mesh of inchoate sound; guitar notes stream off in bending contrails as Rorika murmurs sweetly into the mic. “Patron Saint” lurches to motion on a Frankenstein bass riff, but softens the brutality with calming washes of vocal hypnotism. It’s all super beautiful and, anyway, even after the reunion, there aren’t nearly enough MBV albums. Plenty of room for a band that sounds so similar.

Jennifer Kelly

Get Smart! — Oh Yeah No (Capitol Punishment)

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Push play: driving staccato guitars, rubbery bass lines, lockstep drums, declamatory vocals and it’s the mid-1980s all over again. Lawrence, Kansas trio Get Smart! — Marcus Koch (guitar, vocals) Lisa Wertman Crowe (bass, vocals) and Frank Loose (drums, vocals) — have that timeless mixture of English post-punk and American indie down. Then see that 33 years after it was recorded Oh Yeah No finally sees the light of day on the back of the band’s reformation. Time and the cycle of musical fashions are fickle beasts and in this case the wheels turn in Get Smart!’s favor. They sound both of their time and thoroughly in tune with the steady flow of recent guitar bands mining this lode of choppy, melodic indie. The Embarrassment, Big Dipper, Pylon and other regional heroes are being rediscovered and reassessed and, here’s the thing, Get Smart! are really good at what they do and this six-track EP is both a testament and, hopefully, a taste of what the future may hold.

Andrew Forell

Rich Halley / Matthew Shipp / Michael Bisio / Newman Taylor Baker — The Shape Of Things (Pine Eagle Records)

The Shape of Things by Rich Halley

If the bolt strikes twice, it’s probably not lightning. The Shape Of Things is the second successful meeting between Rich Halley, a tenor saxophonist based in the Pacific Northwest, and the current members of the Matthew Shipp Trio. The album is, like its predecessor Terra Incognita, a congress of strengths. Shipp’s trio follows the pianist easily into one of his classic roles, that of supplying sonic foundation and harmonic framing for an extroverted saxophonist. Halley fights right into the spaces that they create, rippling easily over the trio’s turbulent surfaces. He works within the broader jazz tradition, sounding equally at home patiently sketching a lyrical line and blowing raw, acidic cries. This ensemble plays achieves a state of centered abandon which feels wilder than Halley’s recordings with West Coast musicians, but fits right into the spectrum that contains Shipp’s work with the David S. Ware Quartet and Ivo Perelman.

Bill Meyer

A Hutchie — Potion Shop (Cosmic Resonance)

Potion Shop by A Hutchie

Hamilton, Ontario-based producer Aaron Hutchinson has his fingers in many pies. He nimbly dispenses free jazz, hip hop, outré pop and even more enigmatic forms of song. Potion Shop is his debut LP, although he is a long-time fixture in the Steeltown music scene. This immersion in a small, tight-knit domain has led to many fruitful collaborations. Hutchinson features many of his compatriots in these recordings, in which his music snakes alongside their vocal stylings. Mutant 21st century soul singlehandedly played by Hutchinson is a foil for the slam poetry of Benita Whyte and Ian Keteku, the latter of which the producer warps with a vocoder. Sarah Good’s vocals morph into those of a ghostly chanteuse among smeared strings, while the soulful Blankie swims beneath narcotic R&B beats. When imbibing these intoxicating concoctions, you will be immersed in a warmth of familiarity tempered with the unsettling yet exciting sense of the uncanny. Like absinthe, the disquiet is illusory while the intimacy is authentic.

Bryon Hayes

Imha Tarikat — Sternenberster (Prophecy Productions)

STERNENBERSTER by IMHA TARIKAT

Imha Tarikat’s principal member Ruhsuz Cellât (stage name of Kerem Yilmaz) breaks with black metal orthodoxy by musically engaging his family’s Muslim heritage. That’s a provocative move in an artform dominated by glib nihilism, rampant anti-religious sentiment and (somehow sometimes all at the same time) ardent claims of Satanist faith. And that distinction at the symbolic level likely doesn’t come near the intensities of being of Turkish descent, living and recording in Germany, in a scene that flirts (and at its extreme margins actively identifies) with fascism. Beyond those ideological and social dimensions is the music. Imha Tarikat demonstrates facility with tremolo riffs and song forms that twist and snake even as they hammer and pummel. But Cellât’s unusual vocal style cuts against convention’s grain, and it’s immediately apparent as album opener “Ekstase ohne Ende” commences. There’s a lot of grunting and hollering, but rather than contorting his voice, shrieking and croaking in mode of most black metal vocalists, Cellât goes for more straightforward intensity. He often shouts, and the lyrics frequently come in bunches, explosive and punctuated bursts of verbiage, but he makes no attempt to distort the lyrics or his voice. I wish my grasp of German were even halfway close to fluent, in order to report on the lyrics’ thematic content with some coherence — because Cellât clearly wants the words to be heard.

Jonathan Shaw

Jon Irabagon / Mike Pride / Mick Barr / Ava Mendoza — Don’t Hear Nothin’ But The Blues Vol 3 Anatomical Snuffbox (Irrabagast Records)

I Don't Hear Nothin' but the Blues Volume 3: Anatomical Snuffbox by Jon Irabagon

Never mind the blues; if you don’t exercise caution, when you’re done playing this loud-at-any-volume recording, you won’t hear nothin’. The latest installment in tenor saxophonist John Irabagon’s series of one-track, meta-blues recordings starts out with a spray of sound as bracing as Saharan sandstorm, but quickly solidifies into a veritable wall of sound. At the outset, Irabagon and drummer Mike Pride engage in a high-speed dance of charge and countercharge which, if heard without accompaniment, would sit comfortably on the same shelf as your Mars Williams and Mats Gustafsson records. But when you put guitarists Mick Barr and Ava Mendoza on the same stage and tell them both to start shredding, the effect is somewhat akin to putting the pyrotechnic specialists in charge of the circus. Subtlety, dynamics and even the oxygen you breath all disappear as everything catches fire. If any of the participants here have effectively bent your ear, you ought to listen all the way through once. By the time it’s done, you’ll know in your heart whether you ever need to hear it again.

Bill Meyer

John Kolodij — First Fire / At Dawn (Astral Editions)

First Fire • At Dawn by John Kolodij

Where there’s fire, there’s often smoke, and while this tape claims alignment with Hephaestus’ element, it’s more likely to evoke thick clouds. As the capstans turn, the murk of “At Fire” accumulates gradually, filling the room with an increasingly dense atmosphere. By the time you notice flashes of flame, it’s too late. “At Dawn” brings to mind a lesser conflagration — maybe the embers of the previous night’s campfire. John Kolodij (who has, until recently, recorded mainly under the name High Aura’d) pushes his heavily processed guitar sound into the background, where it lurks with a bit of birdsong, and leads with an unamplified banjo and acoustic guitar. Fiddler Anna RG (of Anna & Elizabeth) further bolsters the melody while some sparse percussion played by Sarah Hennies heightens the sense of moment. Once more, a mass of disembodied sound rises up as the piece progresses, but this time the effect is the opposite; instead of getting lost in sound, the listener finds a moment of peace and light.

Bill Meyer

Lytton / Nies / Scott / Wissel — Do They Do Those In Red? (Sound Anatomy)

Do they do those in Red? by Paul Lytton, Joker Nies, Richard Scott, Georg Wissel

“Do they do those in red?” The title may speak to the particular peculiarities of this combo, which is formed from several pre-existing duos, Joker Nies is credited with “electrosapiens,” which seem to be self-constructed electronic instruments, and George Wissel applies various items to his saxophone to modify its sound. Georg Wissel’s synthesizers come with some assembly required, and it would appear that Paul Lytton, best known for playing drum kits and massive percussion assemblages, confines himself in this setting to the stuff he can fit on a tabletop. What, you think your saxophone is prettier because it doesn’t have anything red jammed into a valve?

Moving on to the music, while the sound sources are heavily electronic, the interactive style is rooted in good old-fashioned free improvisation. Lytton’s barrage sounds remarkably similar to what he achieves playing with a full drum kit, and Wissel’s lines may be more fractured, but his alto sound has some of the tonal heft and agility that John Butcher exercises on the tenor. The electronicians’ bristling activity brings to mind a debate between opposite sides of the electrical components aisle at the hardware store, but it’s a lucid one, thoughtfully expressed on both sides.

Bill Meyer

Ikue Mori Satoko Fujii + Natsuki Tamura — Prickly Pear Cactus (Libra)

Prickly Pear Cactus by Ikue Mori, Satoko Fujii, Natsuki Tamura

Pianist Satoko Fujii and trumpeter Natsuki Tamura spent February 2020 touring Europe with their combo Kaze, which they’d augmented with the electronic musician, Ikue Mori. As lockdown wore on, they kept the connection going via Zoom chats between their abodes in Kobe and New York. After Fujii shared her experiences of trying to mic and stream her piano online, Mori suggested that she send some recordings. Mori edited what showed up and added her sounds; Tamura contributed additional elements to nearly half the tracks. Some of them are balanced to sound like live recordings, with Mori’s neon squelches and high-res, bell-like tones gathering and dispelling like real-time reactions. Others feel more overtly constructed, with the piano situated within a maelstrom of sounds like a view of a TV set turned on in a room with a party going on.

Bill Meyer

Phicus — Solid (Astral Spirits)

Solid by Phicus

Phicus is the Barcelona-based assemblage of Ferran Fages (electric guitar), Àlex Reviriego (double bass) and Vasco Trilla (drums). The line-up looks like a power trio, and if you heard them two seconds at a time, you might think that they were. Reviriego and Trilla each play in ways that convey a sense of motion, and Fages’ bent notes and serrated harmonics are just the sort of sounds to cap off a display of guitar heroics. But if you note that each track is named for an element or chemical compound, and that the album is called Solid, you might get a clearer idea of their concerns. This music is all about essential relationships, and its makers are more interested in making things coexist in productive ways than they are in re-enacting rituals borrowed from jazz, fusion or free improvisation. That means that even the sharpest sounds don’t hook you, nor do the fleetest charges carry you away. Phicus isn’t interested in settling for the familiar. But if you’re ready to observe that thing that looks like a duck making sounds that ducks never make, you’ll find plenty to ponder on Solid.

Bill Meyer

Quietus — Volume Five (Ever/Never)

Volume Five by Quietus

Quietus songs unfurl like cream in coffee, spiraling curlicues of light into dark liquid drones amid clanking blocks of percussion. The songs expand in organic ways, picking up purpose in the steady pound of rhythm, strutting even, in a loose-limbed rock-soul-psych way you might recognize from Brian Jonestown Massacre’s “Anemone” or Grinderman’s “I Don’t Need You to Set Me Free,” but quieter, much quieter, and seething with submerged ideas. The words are mumbled, croaked, submerged in surface hum, but when pushed up towards the surface, arresting. “This life can be sunlit hills turned all to their angry sides,” murmurs Quietus proprietor Geoffrey Bankowski in the relatively concise “Reflex of Purpose,” which sprawls anyway, notwithstanding its 2:36 minute duration. The music’s better, though, when it’s allowed to find its slow way forward, unconforming to any pre-existing ideas of how long a pop song should be. I like the closer “Posthemmorrhagic,” the best, as guitars both tortured and prayerful intertwine, and Bankowski breathes slow, moaning poetry into a close mic, and the song revolves in three-time like the last dancer on the floor, not just tonight but forever.

Jennifer Kelly

Ritual Extra — In Luthero (Dinzu Artefacts)

In Luthero by Ritual Extra

In Luthero was performed inside an empty water cistern, and the ensuing reverberations act as microscopic versions of the grander ebb and flow within which French-Finnish trio Ritual Extra operate. Percussionist Julien Chamla’s cymbal scrapes and tom hits form a backdrop of bomb blasts and shrieking, missives from some war-torn locale long since vacated by the populace. Steel structures seem to groan and collapse as they are rattled by percussive ordnance. This bleak setting is given a sense of color by Lauri Hyvärinen’s acoustic guitar. A stew of string scrapes diverges into discrete plucks, which morph into strums. The metronomic chords are enriched as they bounce around the walls of the cistern, folding in on themselves through echo, becoming a mechanical mantra. Tuukka Haapakorpi’s voice rises from the ashes, soaring polysyllabically yet wordlessly. As In Luthero begins to take shape, these vocalizations are almost inhuman: whispers and gurgles that come on in waves. Later, more anthropoid utterances take shape, yet fall just shy of coalescing into a discernable language. Across 24 minutes, Ritual Extra musically narrate the pre-history of humankind, the primordial essence from which everything good — and bad — about us originated.

Bryon Hayes

Subjective Pitch Matching Band — Twenty-One Subjectivities in Six Parts (Remote Works)

Twenty-One Subjectivities in Six Parts by Subjective Pitch Matching Band

Chris Brian Taylor has trod a serpentine path on the journey that culminated in the creation of his first large ensemble electroacoustic composition. His roots are in punk and rave — he still DJs house and techno — but he recently shifted his gaze toward improvised electronics. Rather than stifling his ambition, COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdown encouraged him to think big: he would cast a wide net and compose a piece of music for as many people as he could get to participate. He reached out to friends, relatives, and internet acquaintances to assemble his orchestra, and borrowed the melody and chords from Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring” to act as the foundation of the work. Twenty people responded from a variety of musical disciplines, and all agreed to participate remotely. The composer gave each player audio cues to work with and encouraged the performers to respond subjectively. They could either stay true to the pitches provided, harmonize against them, or play ornamentally. Taylor collected the resulting tracks and structured the resulting thirty-minute piece of music based on what the respondents provided. Dense yet graceful, the composition unfolds like a slow-motion blaze. Flames of sonority form a sinuous body from which sparks of discrete sound leap heavenward. There is nary a moment of silence, as Taylor weaves a plethora of long tones together to form an undulating core over which stabs of piano, guitar and percussion materialize momentarily. Naivete didn’t keep Chris Brian Taylor from aiming as high as he could with this piece, and we are the benefactors of this ambition, rewarded with a rich and complex sonic brew to enjoy.

Bryon Hayes

TV Priest — Uppers (Sub Pop)

Uppers by TV Priest

TV Priest works the same corrosive, hyper-verbal furrow as Idles or, in a looser sense, the Sleaford Mods, spatter chanting harsh, literate strings of gutter poetry over a clanking post-punk cadence. The vocalist Charlie Drinkwater snarls and sputters charismatically over the clatter, a brutalist commentator on life and pop culture. The band is sharp and minimalist, drums (Ed Kelland) to the front, guitar (Alex Sprogis) stabbing hard at stripped raw riffs , bass (Nic Bueth) rumbling like mute rage in the back of the bar. And yet, though anger is a primary flavor, these songs surge with triumph as in the wall-shaking cadences of “Press Gang,” the blistering sarcasm of “The Big Curve.” This is a relatively new band, their first and only tour cut short at one gig by the lockdown, but the songs are tight as hell on record and likely to pin you to the back wall live. “Bad news, like buses, comes in twos,” intones Drinkwater on theclearly autobiographical “Journal of a Plague Year” against an irregular post-everything clangor, loose and disdainful and hardly arsed to entertain us; it’s as fitting an anthem as any for our lost 2020. But when band gets moving, as on the chugging, corroscating “Decoration,” it’s unstoppable, a monstrous thing bursting “through to the next round.” Sure, I’ll have another.

Jennifer Kelly

Voice Imitator — Plaza (12XU)

Plaza by Voice Imitator

Voice Imitator, from Melbourne, Australia, rips a hard punk vortex through its songs, ratcheting up the drums to battering ram violence, blistering the guitar sound and scrawling wild metallic vocals over it all, with nods to noisy post-hardcore bands like the Jesus Lizard and McClusky. “A Small Cauliflower” takes things down to a seething, menacing whisper, Mark Groves, the singer, presiding over an uneasy mesh of tamped down dissonance and hustle. “Adult Performer” is faster and more limber, all clicking urgency and sudden bursts of detuned, surging squall. All four members—that’s Per Bystrom, Justin Fuller, Groves and Leon O’Regan—have been in a ton of other bands, and the sounds they make here have the rupturing precision of well-honed violence. If you like Protomartyr but wish it was lots louder and more corrosive, here you go.

Jennifer Kelly

Sam Weinberg / Henry Fraser / Weasel Walter — Grist (Ugexplode)

Grist by Sam Weinberg / Henry Fraser / Weasel Walter

Ornette Coleman once called a record In All Languages; these guys ought call one Any And All Possibilities. Saxophonist Sam Weinberg, bassist Henry Fraser and drummer (this time, anyway) Weasel Walter are scrupulous student of improvisation in all its guises, and they’re ready and able to use what they know. You could call it free jazz, for they certainly know how that stuff works, but they’re under no obligation to swing; that’d be a limit, you see. This music bursts, darts, expands and contracts in a sequence of second by second negotiations of shape and velocity.

Bill Meyer

Chris Weisman — Closer Tuning (Self-Released)

Closer Tuning by Chris Weisman

Chris Weisman is a Brattleboro, VT songwriter, in the general orbit (not a member but seems to know a bunch of them) of the late, great Feathers and one-time member of Kyle Thomas’ other outfit, the fuzz pop band Happy Birthday. A shunner of all sorts of limelight, he is nonetheless very productive. Closer Tuning is one of five albums he home recorded and released in 2020. You might expect a certain lo-fi folksiness and there is, indeed, a dream-y, soft focus rusticity to the tangled acoustic guitar jangle, the blunt down home-i-ness lyrics. And yet, there’s a good deal more than that in Closer Tuning. The chords progress softly, gently but in unexpected ways, a reminder of Weisman’s jazz guitar training, and the sound is warm and enveloping and every so slightly off-kilter, as if filtered through someone else’s memory. Cuts like “Petit Revolution,” with its close shroud of harmonies, its eerie, antic guitar cadence, feel like Beach Boys psychedelia left out in the garden to sprout, or more to the point, like Wendy Eisenberg’s brainy, left-of-center pop puzzles. “My Talent” is hedged in with blooming bent notes and scrambling string scratches, but its center is radiant, weird, astral folk along the lines of Alexander Tucker. “Hey,” says Weisman, in its slow dreaming chorus, “I gave my talent away.” Lucky us.

A.A. Williams — Forever Blue (Bella Union)

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There’s a dim and shadowy corner where heavy music, orchestral music and post-rock all meet, and A.A. Williams’ music resides there as naturally as anyone else’s. That’s what you might expect when you get a professional cellist who fell hard for metal as a teenager and then started writing songs after finding a guitar on the street. After an EP her first LP is the kind of assured, consistently strong debut that balances calmly measured beauty with the kind of crushing peaks that give that sometimes hoary quiet/loud dynamic a good name. At its best, like the opening “All I Asked For (Was to End it All)” and “Dirt” (featuring vocals from Wild Beasts’ Tom Fleming), Forever Blue is as gothically ravishing as you could hope for, and by the time it ends with spectral lament “I’m Fine” it might tempt even those not traditionally inclined that way to don the ceremonial black eyeliner.

Ian Mathers

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hsiao-kang · 5 years

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Fiona Shaw by David Yeo for The Telegraph, ‘Killing Eve's secret weapon Fiona Shaw on finding new fame, and falling in love at almost 60’ by Jessamy Calkin (full article under the cut)

Fiona Shaw has found a new audience thanks to her scene-stealing turns in Killing Eve and Fleabag. The Shakespearean actor turned small-screen sensation talks spies, celebrity, tragedy, and getting married later in life.

You look great, I tell Fiona Shaw. Must be the pig’s placenta. Shaw, 60, pretty and angular in a soft grey shirt, smiles enigmatically from the sofa of her north London home. Pig’s placenta is her MI6 officer Carolyn Martens’ beauty secret in the second series of Killing Eve, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s dark, wildly successful thriller about a psychopathic female assassin called Villanelle and Eve Polastri, the agent hunting her down.

But pig’s placenta aside, Shaw puts her youthful appearance down to ‘not being in the theatre every single night’. Which is where she’s been for pretty much the past 30 years. Formerly known for a huge body of iconic stage roles, including Hedda Gabler, Medea, Electra and Richard II, as well as for playing Aunt Petunia in the Harry Potter films, Shaw’s fame is now more attributable to her transition to television.

In Killing Eve, Waller-Bridge has taken a genre that’s a little worn out – the international-assassin thriller – and given it a completely different slant. The show won five awards at the Baftas earlier this month – including Outstanding Drama Series and Best Supporting Actress for Shaw, who in her acceptance speech referred to the ‘glass-shattering genius’ of Waller-Bridge.

Carolyn Martens, head of Russia at MI6, is a perfect example of Waller-Bridge’s wayward approach. Carolyn is very still. Arch, deadpan, erudite, severe. But she has a tipsy flirtatious side, and a hidden messy streak. She’s oblique – and the viewer doesn’t know how much she knows, or whether or not to trust her. Nor does Eve (played superbly by Sandra Oh). ‘I once saw a rat drink from a can of Coke there,’ Carolyn says earnestly to a bemused Eve when they’re in a rubbish-strewn alley. ‘Both hands. Extraordinary…’

‘Carolyn’s a joy to write,’ says Emerald Fennell – best known as an actor for Call the Midwife, and The Crown’s new Camilla – who took over from Waller-Bridge as lead writer on the second series (Waller-Bridge remains an executive producer). ‘Her blood runs very cool. She’s like a freediver who has trained herself to hold her breath and slow down her heartbeat – she’s done it for so long it’s now a permanent state. Her ability to steer an awkward conversation into blithely surreal territory is unparalleled and somehow seems very British.’

The character is entirely dependent on Shaw, adds Fennell. ‘She is unbelievably brilliant, funny, and scarily clever. In one of the episodes, another character mentions [11th-century saint] Anselm’s ontological argument [for the existence of God], and during the read-through it transpired that Fiona had written a literal thesis on it. Quite embarrassing for those of us who only had the most passing Wikipedia acquaintance with Anselm (me). Fiona’s cleverness and wit are built into the fabric of who Carolyn is.’

Shaw compares playing the part to keeping a secret at the same time as delivering a line. ‘It’s not easy to do. I have to say I do lose sleep over it – I’m playing somebody very different to what I normally play. Normally I have to expose the truth. When I’m in the theatre, where I would be swimming with the tide, it’s my job to lasso the audience and to make sure they understand the moral dilemma of the piece – that’s what leading players do. You are sort of the MC for the night…

In Killing Eve, most of my work is about knowing more than everybody else in the scene and hiding it. And it’s a terribly lonely thing to do. It feels all wrong – like rubbing my tummy and patting my head at the same time. I want to smile, I want to make jokes – but you are left with an ambiguity. You don’t know whether I know I’ve made a joke or not. It’s very good exercise for me.’

Even though they are friends, stepping into Waller-Bridge’s shoes must have been tricky for Fennell. ‘I think of Killing Eve as a beautiful, haunted doll’s house that Phoebe built,’ she says. ‘She’s already made this incredible world full of insanely compelling people, so the pleasure of writing it is to get to play in there, to put in a few of your own trapdoors and secret passageways, to move those characters around and occasionally push some of them down the stairs.’

Earlier this year, Shaw appeared in the second series of Waller-Bridge’s other seminal television show, Fleabag. Initially she had to turn it down because she was directing Cendrillon at Glyndebourne (directing opera is another of her talents). Then Fleabag overran, and she was able to join in after all.

Waller-Bridge is the definitive young auteur of our times, and it seems she can do no wrong. The stage production of Fleabag – coming to the West End in August – sold out in an hour. ‘I feel she’s nearest to Oscar Wilde,’ says Shaw now, ‘which is to say she’s greater than the sum of her parts.’ Comedy, in some ways, is quite a conservative thing, Shaw thinks, although it may not seem that way. ‘But it always has a frame; it stays within that frame but it kicks against it, like a child in a playpen.

‘Phoebe develops people so they turn into bigger people, and bigger people, and I think that’s  a confidence that’s come with her previous work. She’s mastered one form, and she’s been able to take the gate off and let the characters run out into the field – and yet they’re still intact, and the audience follow them. It’s superb.’

For actors, she says, that approach couldn’t be better, which is why so many of them, including herself, Andrew Scott and Kristin Scott Thomas, are desperate to work with Waller-Bridge.

‘I could have played the boss of MI6 and pretty well come up with the same “ker-chings” every week,’ says Shaw, who also played an MI6 officer in BBC One’s recent Mrs Wilson, ‘but that isn’t what happens in Killing Eve.’

Waller-Bridge was always on set during the making of the first series, constructing and reconstructing her work like a Rubik’s Cube. When Sandra Oh pointed out that the actor Sean Delaney, who plays Kenny Stowton (a young ex-hacker recruited by MI6), looked like Shaw, Waller-Bridge decided to make his character her son in the story, and wrote it in, just like that.

Killing Eve, though it seems so British, is a BBC America production, having been initially overlooked here, according to executive producer Sally Woodward Gentle (this was before Fleabag became a TV hit). Woodward Gentle had read the Codename Villanelle novellas by Luke Jennings, on which Killing Eve is based, and approached Waller-Bridge. She had seen her one-woman play in Edinburgh, and thought she would bring a different energy to the show.

Shaw is taken aback by its popularity, and  particularly by the wide demographic to which  it appeals. ‘Fathers and sons watch it, mothers   and daughters, husbands and wives. I don’t think it bears much analysis. I suppose it has no politics, it’s fantasy really and that’s why I think the violence is nearly allowable – it’s cartoonish.’

It’s also stylish – the music is great; the costumes are superb; the graphics are slick – and clearly a high-budget project, shot in London, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam. Shaw is often recognised for playing Carolyn. She was amazed when, on a New York street recently, someone reacted so wildly on seeing her that she appeared to be having a fit.

Fiona Shaw grew up in Montenotte, Cork, with three brothers. Her father was an ophthalmic surgeon and her mother was a physicist. She always wanted to be a tennis player, she says, but instead studied philosophy at University College Cork and then went to Rada in London. She still remembers the audition: the teacher told her later that she smelled of libraries.

That’s because it was as if she was born into the 19th century, she says now, compared to the other applicants. She was not cool. Everyone was instructed to wear a black dress. Shaw had made her own and it was a bit wonky. She was terrified. ‘I remember some American guys at the audition were doing press-ups, and people were talking about the Royal Shakespeare Company – and I thought, I haven’t a hope in hell.’

Hearing she’d got in was, she says, ‘one of the nicest moments in my life’. She is still an advisor at Rada. She worked hard and went straight into the cast of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The Rivals at the National Theatre, alongside Michael Hordern and Tim Curry (‘I couldn’t have been in better company’). Her father had his reservations, ‘but I think he thought I would come to my senses’. A year later she joined the RSC. Her parents would come and watch her, and her obvious success calmed her father’s fears. ‘He got much more interested when he could read about me in the paper – in the end he was incredibly supportive but I had to go through the firewall of his disapproval for a while.’

Then her brother Peter was killed in a car crash. Shaw was 28 at the time. ‘That was such a blow to my family. Neither of my parents could really function for about a year after that. It was very hard for them.’

Two years after her brother died, she was offered the role of Electra (for which she won the first of two Olivier Awards), and in some strange way found herself channelling her grief. ‘I loved comedy – but then I was asked to do Electra. Deborah Warner was directing and I thought, oh well, I’ll give it a go. But I didn’t see the point of a tragedy and I couldn’t do it at all. And slowly I realised that it’s much more about yourself. And I discovered a new world through tragedy.

‘Electra has a brother who she thinks is dead – and I knew something about having a brother who was dead. I wouldn’t say in any way that I was mainlining my brother, but I suddenly realised that plays are about life, and domestic tragedies are heightened in the theatre – but they are the same as all our tragedies – and that is what the theatre is for. I don’t know why I hadn’t worked that out before.’

It was the first of many collaborations with Warner (with whom Shaw also had a relationship), which went on to include Hedda Gabler, a controversial Richard II at the National in 1995, and Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children.

Shaw’s first major film role was in My Left Foot with Daniel Day-Lewis (1989). Soon after came Three Men and a Little Lady (1990), and later the Harry Potter series. It is the former, she says, for which she is most recognised by the public. She has just finished filming Ammonite, an historical drama directed by Francis Lee, in which she plays Elizabeth Philpot, a palaeontologist, opposite Saoirse Ronan, and Kate Winslet as fossil hunter Mary Anning.

Was there a moment when she felt she had made it on her own terms? ‘I think I was very lucky. I didn’t do film on my own terms – you’re either a film star or you are not – because I was so obsessed with the theatre when I was young. Probably I would have had to go and sit in Hollywood – but I wouldn’t do that.

‘But I have done a lot of things on my terms, just being allowed to do those shows: Electra, Hedda Gabler – and Richard II, which seemed quite nerve-racking at the time, but that was part of the thrill of it. So I’ve always tried to do things which are hard to do – maybe even to a fault.’ She has never, she says, been trapped in a long run of a West End show she didn’t want to do. ‘There always had to be an element of experiment.’

And she loves taking theatrical risks. Like her rendition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which premiered at Epidaurus in Greece in 2012, then went to the Old Vic Tunnels in London in 2013, and on to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Or (with Warner) the dramatisation of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land she performed in locations including an old disco in Brussels and a former munitions factory in Dublin. Last month she revisited it in New York, reciting it against the backdrop of a sculpture exhibition in Madison Square Park – it wasn’t advertised but word spread and people came in their hundreds. ‘It was a huge pleasure, it happened almost by accident – “Will you turn this water into wine?” And I did. It was lovely.’

Shaw’s father, Denis, died in 2011, but her mother, Mary, is 93 and still lives in the house that Shaw grew up in. She drives, plays tennis. When Shaw goes back home she sleeps in her old bedroom. ‘Well, I try not to – it’s awful to sleep in the bedroom you had when you were 14. Some things are still exactly the same, the wardrobe and the poster of Narcissus – do you remember those terrible posters?’

Shaw lives between the house in north London and New York, where her wife Sonali Deraniyagala, a Sri Lankan economist, teaches at Columbia University. In 2004, Deraniyagala was on holiday in Sri Lanka with her family when they were caught in the tsunami. Her husband, parents and two young sons died. For years, Deraniyagala lived in a haze of madness and grief. In 2013, she wrote an extraordinary memoir, Wave, which won several awards and had some remarkable reviews.

Shaw was in New York performing in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary when somebody gave her Deraniyagala’s book. She read it in her dressing room. ‘I thought it was the best thing I’d read for a long time, on any level.’ She mentioned this in an interview. Then things came together in a felicitous way: Shaw was supposed to return home straight after the play closed, but she had a serious ear infection (due to having to disappear for several minutes in a plunge pool every night on stage), and was unable to fly. She stayed in New York and went to a Laurie Anderson concert, where she was invited to Anderson’s book club – they were reading Wave – to meet the writer.

‘I was so surprised that she was that person – not the person in the book. We spent half an hour chatting. When I left I thought, I have just met life.’

She pauses. ‘The play had been exhausting and so much about death, and I was feeling so miserable, and I thought, that person is life – even though she has had more death than you would wish on your worst enemy, there’s a force in her that is just life.’

When Deraniyagala came to London they met up again. ‘Very quickly I thought, I just want to live with this person, and it’s been one of the most marvellous things to happen – but it was also highly unlikely. But in my profound self, at my core, I thought, I want to live with this person. It was deeper than anything. And thankfully, she thought the same – it’s been a beautiful thing to happen at this stage of my life.’

They got married in Islington town hall in January of last year, and then had their wedding party on the day of the royal wedding. ‘It was fantastic. Half of Sri Lanka came and it was a very beautiful wedding – everyone was wearing saris and looking gorgeous. My mother played the piano and sang, which was quite hilarious, and we had a band and dancing, a very late party.’

Her mother sounds very enlightened, being 93 and coming from a small town in Ireland. Were there no raised eyebrows at the fact that Shaw was marrying a woman? (As well as Warner, she previously had a relationship with the actor Saffron Burrows.)

‘More than raised. But it’s fine – the world is changing fast. My mother was very good about it and also very impressed by who Sonali is.’

So she’s not religious? ‘Oh she is, but she’s also terribly funny about it. And she’s a sort of nouveau old person. I think being old is quite a shock for her – and a lot of friends are dead, and some of them have lost their minds. But she’s very well – and very happy for me.’

Deraniyagala and Shaw have been to Sri Lanka several times to visit Deraniyagala’s aunt, and love it there. Given what happened to Deraniyagala, recent events – the bombings at Easter – must have been completely destabilising. ‘Sri Lanka has been very much at peace for the last 10 years since the war, but the scale of what happened with those 250 people dead – it’s as big as 9/11 for them, because it’s such a small island. They were innocent people, and it’s the most depressing thing – and terribly hard for Sonali – because the mass funerals are very near to the mass funerals of her family; it’s terribly hard for her to revisit that time. It feels a bit like a natural disaster because it has no rhyme or reason. It’s a black hole of destruction.’

Shaw is about to start work on a film called Corvidae, a thriller co-written and directed by young film-maker Joe Marcantonio. Then Killing Eve series three is on the cards for next year. If she had to choose only one discipline to work in for the rest of her life – theatre, film, opera or television – which would she choose?

‘That’s a cruel question. I would find it very difficult, but I would probably say television because I’ve done 30 years of the theatre. I’ve worked morning, noon and night, sometimes rehearsing all day and performing every night for decades. That’s a lot. I don’t have any great need to do that again.

‘And I’m very interested in television now because one of the new pleasures it’s given me is the scope of the audience. We used to be thrilled when we had 500 people, or 1,000. Now we have millions and you think, oh God, this is so obvious. Especially when the material is of such great quality and so uncynical. A few years ago they were just churning television out, but they aren’t now – it has some of the best minds working in it. So I feel in a way like I’m in the same profession, it’s just the shape of the stage which has changed.’

In the end, she says, in any medium, it all comes down to the same things she has always aspired to, and which she is so excited about – that sense of infinite possibility in a role, and the thrill of making the heartbeat of the audience quicken.

Killing Eve returns to BBC One and iPlayer in June

#fiona shaw #killing eve #not a particularly well written profile #there's a huge chunk about pwb at the beginning wtf #but it's behind a paywall so i thought i'd post #fshaw fascinating as always #she talks about how she met her wife and their wedding!!!#it's so sweet #(obligatory: that's what i want)#it's also the most i've read about/heard her talk about her personal life #pwb #sonali deraniyagala #for future reference

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weekendwarriorblog · 3 years

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ED’s Top 10 (or so) Albums of 2020

I would like to dedicate this year’s Top 10 list to Tim Burgess and his amazing #TimsTwitterListening Parties (aka TTLP), which had me eagerly listening to new music and classic favorites on almost a daily basis throughout the pandemic. Those sessions surely have led to a few odder choices and surprises on my list than previous years. In fact, I don’t think a single artist on this list has ever made it into my Top 10 list in previous years, although to be honest, in the past, this list has only been an addition to my Top 25 movie list, and not something I’ve put nearly as much time or focus into.

Anyway, let’s get to the list.

10. Paul McCartney - McCartney III

Having been released just before Christmas, you can’t have a much more late entry than the latest solo record from Mr. Paul McCartney, the third record in which he played all the instruments himself. It’s another great example of how artists/musicians/songwriters were able to use the pandemic creatively and constructively. There are some great songs on here, including some highly experimental tunes, but appearing on #TimsTwitterListeningParty sent me down the deep well of his amazing previous work, which I remember absolutely adoring from when I was a young lad in the ‘70s.

Standout Track(s): “Deep Deep Feeling” “Seize the Day”

https://open.spotify.com/album/1P7h3400RJA3YZm8Va2884?si=bOeYLZe6TzCQfYSQDPr2Vw

TTLP Replay: https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/pages/replay/feed_590.html

Everyone beyond this point should be proud that their records ranked higher than this rock music legend...

9. Slow Readers Club - 91 Days in Isolation/The Joy of the Return

If there’s one band that clearly defined my 2020, it’s this post-punk-ish band from Manchester that just really blew me away not just by the fact they made three great albums before the two released in 2020, but even more shockingly, that they have never played a gig in the United States or in New York City! Definitely have to change that as soon as possible! Fortunately, I was able to catch a number of their livestreams this year, some recorded from previous years, and a couple done live as a band that has to be considered not only of the hardest working bands but also one of the most attuned to their fanbase.

Standout Track(s): “The Wait” “Last Summer”

https://open.spotify.com/album/5mGjQoTtQY16FCSleB3fpU

TTLP Replay: https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/pages/replay/feed_30.html

https://open.spotify.com/album/3AghJLF4yVqdau5NpQYQYg?si=rlclqEucR9mgm-ghr_IC7g

TTLP Replay: https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/pages/replay/feed_503.html

And now... for a string of women to counterbalance the lads...

8. Throwing Muses - Sun Racket

It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to Ms. Kristin Hersh and her band, although I did see them a few times in the ‘80s/90s. Thanks to the TTLP, I was able to relisten to one of the band’s earlier records which reignited my passion, and as luck would have it, Throwing Muses released a new record this year, one that’s much darker and heavier. I also learned that Hersh had created a similarly heavy almost metal side-project called 50FootWave, which is equally awesome. Definitely gonna be on the lookout to see them again down the road.

Standout Track(s): “Dark Blue”

https://open.spotify.com/album/6CAe3KknCE98ny4ufsACKT?si=gyWevKobSWC3jeoQm4ywlg

TTLP Replay: https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/pages/replay/feed_417.html

7. Kylie Minogue - Disco

Hopefully, this will be the biggest shocker in this list, because it’s certainly my biggest surprise. If you had told ‘90s ED that a record by Kylie Minogue landed higher than one by Throwing Muses, he would have through you were absolutely nuts. I’m not sure I would even have listened to it if Ms. Minogue hadn’t made a guest appearance on TTLP, but I soon learned why Ms. Minogue’s work is so infectious, and honestly, in 2020, even if I didn’t actually get up and dance to the record— you’re welcome, downstairs neighbors— I was always dancing inside… and that’s something we all truly needed this year.

Standout Track(s): “Last Chance” “Where Does the DJ Go?”

https://open.spotify.com/album/7EBIA9cqbuqkyWfp3UCitD?si=bIzG51FRR8W6OK2SC6oy6g

TTLP Replay: https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/pages/replay/feed_525.html

6. Emmy the Great - April/月音

I was only really aware of Emmy the Great from her work with Tim Wheeler, lead of my favorite band Ash, but I hadn’t really kept track of her career or checked out her solo records. If Disco is the record that makes me happy with its joyous danceability, then Emmy the Great’s Autumn is one that does similarly with its mellow tunefulness that I found so relaxing and comforting. Plus her lyrics are pretty amazing.

Standout Track(s): “Writer” “Dandelions/Liminal” “A Window/O’Keefe”

https://open.spotify.com/album/4UKkCTAvqBAWVBnakgxmo2?si=nRvbuOqhRiGRM7nQtrQf8A

TTLP Replay: https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/pages/replay/feed_536.html

5. Nadine Shah - Kitchen Sink

Yet another terrific UK artist that I discovered through #TimsTwitterListeningParty, first with one of her earlier records and then through her latest— noticing as trend here? Dark and mysterious with a mix of genres and arrangements and instrumentation that puts her in league with an artist like PJ Harvey, Ms. Shaw is an artist who has already found huge acclaim in the UK and I’m sure the rest of the world will soon follow.

Standout Track(s): “Ladies for Babies (Goats for Love)” “Trad”

https://open.spotify.com/album/0Your9tq4Z8voUjLG9pubz?si=z2-Ff0k0SXeAymHLzdPm5g

TTLP Replay: https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/pages/replay/feed_279.html

4. Sofie - Cult Survivor

And then we have this record, the debut by a singer/musician that should not be confused with that OTHER “Sophie.” This record is almost as enigmatic as the artist herself, but it runs the gamut from David Lynch’s classic work with Julee Cruise and the ephemeral Cocteau Twins to low-fi dance music with a melancholy countered by beautiful tunefulness and true passion.

Standout Track(s): “Hollywood Walk of Fame” “Happen 2 B There”

https://open.spotify.com/album/50B74mMTKzwo8jaKLOR9Su?si=NRZW-96qRdmEKBo-eAIXug

TTLP Replay: https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/pages/replay/feed_285.html

3. The Lottery Winners - The Lottery Winners

Another Manchester band that I only discovered since fans of the Slow Readers Club share a love for this far poppier British export, also from Manchester. This was another record that I could throw on any time during the pandemic and it really gave me joy and got me motivated. Yes, it’s unapologetically the kind of pop/rock the UK was delivering on a weekly basis, but every song is almost perfect pop with amazing production. I’m sure they’re gonna be huge in the U.S. as soon as they come over here… hopefully bringing the Slow Readers Club with them!

Standout Track(s): “The Meaning of Life” “Little Things” “I Know” “21” “I Don’t Love You”

https://open.spotify.com/album/1VPGAdyPZWykKN5hnEoV8T?si=sNvJ6uRpQAeldFtatH_oAQ

TTLP Replay: https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/pages/replay/feed_517.html

2. Badly Drawn Boy - Banana Skin Shoes

It’s been 20 years since Badly Drawn Boy’s brilliant debut ”The Hour of Bewilderbeast,” and while I’ve mostly kept track of Mr. Gough through his soundtrack contributions, I was blown away by his 2020 offering, which was such a nice bookend to his beloved first record with a number of truly great songs. (Sadly, this record still hasn’t gotten a #TimsTwitterListeningParty, but considering who else made this list, you should trust me that this record is indeed one of his best!)

Standout Track(s): “I Need to Someone to Trust”“Is This a Dream?” ”I Just Want to Wish You Happiness”

https://open.spotify.com/album/1cAXo6rl91xweqLM9M54KP?si=WITCPmbEQaqFWtCnL4pypA

TTLP Replay: NONE!!! A TRAVESTY!!!

1. Rufus Wainwright - Unfollow the Rules

Of course, I’ve known about singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright for decades. I probably even had more than a few friends who were true fans, although none of them ever told me, “Hey, Ed, you should listen to this guy”…so I didn’t. Like most of the others on this list, Mr. Wainwright did a Tim’s Twitter Listening Party for one of his earlier records that immediately sold me, so when his latest came out in August, I was ready to give it a try. It became a record that probably became the most symbolic for my pandemic, as I would return to it again and again to discover all its treasures.

Standout Track(s): “Angels and Devils””Damsel in Distress” “Peaceful Afternoon”

https://open.spotify.com/album/07XUVGf2M6rXVsbdNqogTk?si=DCRc3nhAQTq8yv9EKIf9tg

TTLP Replay: https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/pages/replay/feed_314.html

Honorable Mentions:

Holy Fuck - Deleter Everything Everything - Re-Animator Thurston Moore - By the Fire Nada Surf - Never Not Together Sparks - A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip Working Men’s Club - Working Men’s Club Guided by Voices - All Three 2020 Albums!

#Top10Albums #Music #Reviews

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disappointingyet · 3 years

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Mank

Director David Fincher Stars Gary Oldman, Lily Collins, Amanda Seyfried, Sam Troughton USA 2020 Language English, a tiny bit of German, some Latin sayings 2hrs 11mins Black & white

Lovely-to-look at but essentially pointless delve into ancient and very dull Hollywood gossip

The selling point for this film is, apparently, its contribution to the debate over who wrote Citizen Kane. Really? Really? After almost 80 years, is it vital to figure out exactly how much Herman Mankiewicz contributed to the script versus how much (if anything) Orson Welles put in? What about John Houseman, Roger Q Denny and Mollie Kent, all of whom the IMDB suggests made uncredited contributions to the screenplay but whose possible input is not acknowledged in this movie? (Other than Houseman supplying the stationery and surroundings for Mankiewicz to do the work.)

This all seems remarkably small beer – it’s not as if Mankiewicz was like one of the blacklisted writers whose names didn’t appear on the work they wrote. His name was in the movie, he did get the Oscar. He’s one of the reasons Kane is a terrific film, but then so were Joseph Cotton and Agnes Morehead (actors) and Gregg Toland (cinematographer) and Robert Wise (editor) and Bernard Hermann (composer) and everyone else who worked on the picture.

Likewise, are there really people out there desperate to revisit the accident gossip about William Randolph Hearst, especially as this film takes a fairly unexciting take on him? Maybe I’m wrong, maybe this is all the stuff of urgent debate. Maybe you’ve been smarting since 1999’s RKO 281told the same story, only from Welles’ side.

One thing the two films have in common is that they are littered with limeys. In RKO 281, we had David Suchet as Louis B Mayer and Fiona Shaw and Brenda Blethyn and as gossip column rivals Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and even Roger Allam as Walt Disney! In Mank, meanwhile, we’ve got Gary Oldman as the lead character, plus Tuppence Middleton as his wife Sara, Ferdinand Kingsley as Irving Thalberg, Charles Dance as Hearst and Tom Burke as Welles. It’s ridiculous. The only fully* British character is played by the less British-than-you-might-think Lily Collins, who indeed struggles with the accent.

New Cross’ Gary Oldman is 62 years old. Herman J Mankiewicz was only 55 when he died in 1953. The film doesn’t fudge this: Oldman’s Mankiewicz actually says. ‘I’m 43,’ presumably to the bafflement of the audience. And that’s during the 1940 segment of the movie – there are plenty of flashbacks to the 1930s when Mank was in his thirties. There’s no obvious attempt to de-age Oldman – I think we’re meant to accept that Mankiewicz’ alcoholism had taken a brutal toll.

So the plot is this: Mankiewicz, who has been injured in a car crash, is parked by Welles and Houseman on a ranch in the desert to write a script, tended to by a German nurse (Monika Gossmann) and a British typist (Collins). While working on the script, he flashes back to how he first met Hearst and Hearst’s mistress, actress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), his friendship with them and troubled working relationship with MGM bosses Louis B Mayer and Irving Thalberg.

There’s something admirable perverse/ambitious about a glossy 2020 production that invites its audience to join with Mank in sneering at people who don’t know the difference between Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis.** Upton Sinclair’s candidacy for the governorship of California indirectly triggers the crisis in the friendship between Mank and Hearst, which ultimately leads (in this telling of the story) to Kane. This section of the movie is both protracted yet incomplete and unconvincing.

Mankiewicz was by all accounts a big character. Unsurprisingly, then, directors chose grand hams to play him: John Malkovich in RKO 281 and Oldman here. For me, there’s no getting past how ridiculously old Oldman is for the role. The drinking and his reliance on a young secretary also reminded me of Oldman’s portrayal of Winston Churchill in The Darkest Hour, one of the most despicable and disgraceful films of recent times. But as Oldman performances go, this is one of the more likeable. Just not one that should ever have happened.

The best thing about the film by a very long way is the luscious black & white photography. The film plays around a bit – at times it hints a full pastiche of old movies, including the use of rear projection when the characters are in a car and having cue marks, the little circles on the top right of the screen to tell the projectionist to change the reel. At other times, though, it’s quite clearly using all the tricks and tools of 2020. It’s great work from cinematographer Eric Messerschmidt, whose previous director of photography stints have mostly been on TV.

The feeling I was mostly left with by this film is: why? What’s it for? To give a juicy role to an overindulged and miscast actor? To recreate the glory of lost Hollywood, just because we can? There have been far better recent excursions into the movie industry’s past: the Coen’s Hail, Caesar!, Trumbo or the TV show Feud, for instance. And, to be fair, there have been worse: this probably has the edge on Rules Don’t Apply. But I feel that if someone like me – who goes into this knowing who Thalberg and Houseman and Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and so on were – doesn’t really care, why would anyone else?

*Houseman was half-British and very much English educated. He’s played by Sam Troughton, who you could probably correctly guess is Patrick Troughton’s grandson. **I’m happy to admit this is something I’ve always struggled with, having never read a word either wrote.

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daggerzine · 4 years

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Ray Farrell on music and his time at SST, Blast First, Geffen and many more.

Ray Farrell has had a lifetime surrounded by music. First as a fan as a young kid and then eventually working for a series of record labels. He’s obviously a fan first and foremost as you can tell by reading below. It also seemed like he was there at the beginning of some major music scenes happening.

I had met Ray very briefly at one of the A.C. Elks hardcore shows that Ralph Jones put on in Atlantic City in the Summer of 1985 though Ray doesn’t remember it (honestly, a bunch of us were standing in a circle and chatting so I’m not even sure if any proper introductions were done).

Anyway, knowing some of the record labels that Ray had worked for I wanted to hear the whole story. I contacted him and shot him some questions and he was more than happy to elaborate and let us know where he’s been and where he’s going. Take it away, Ray!

Where did you grow up?

RF-Jersey City and Parsippany, New Jersey in the 60/70’s. I have two younger brothers.

What did you listen to first…classic rock or stuff earlier than that?

RF-Rock wasn’t classic yet. My earliest memories of music are my parents’ modest collection of 45’s and grandparents’ 78’s. My mom had a handful of singles on Chess and Satellite (pre-Stax) that she said fell off a truck. We rented our house from a family connected to the mob. The records probably came from them. My mom and her sisters often sang Tin Pan Alley era songs at family gatherings. Harmony was encouraged!

Some records I heard as a toddler stayed with me forever. Lonnie Donegan’s “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor?” is a skiffle classic. Chuck Berry’s “Guitar Boogie” and “Last Night” by the Mar- Keys are still favorites. I remember being spooked by the overblown production of the “Johnny Cash Sings Hank Williams” e.p. on Sun Records. In the mid 60’s, my mom had top 40 radio on in the house unless my dad was home. When I was in kindergarten, a high school neighbor in our building babysat me for a couple hours after school a few days a week. Her girlfriends came over regularly. They listened to a lot of doo-wop, which I still love today. The babysitter and her friends taught me how to slow dance, even though I wasn’t nearly a full grown boy. J

My best friend in 7th grade was a Beatles fanatic and we immersed ourselves in decoding clues to the “Paul McCartney Is Dead” gimmick. That was a brilliant scam and a fun short term hobby. It was a deep dive into The Beatles music as a junior music detective. By the time I started buying records, The Beatles were on their way out.

I happily lived for many months on only three albums-

CCR’s “Bayou Country”, Iron Butterfly’s “In A Gadda Da Vida” and the Beatles “Sgt. Pepper.” I joined the Columbia Record Club. I got the first twelve albums for one buck. That was a popular scam. Those first twelve records shaped my taste because they were the only records I had. I didn’t know what to order but I chose very well in retrospect. After that, I bought a lot of records. I didn’t smoke, but many of my friends did. A carton of cigs cost the same as an lp- 5 bucks.

I learned in 7th grade that if I knew the songs that girls liked, we would have something to talk about. Girls loved Tommy James and The Shondells and The Rascals. I still do! I had a wider range in music taste than most of my high school friends. Everyone in my extended circle loved the Stones, Neil Young and the Allman Brothers. In a tighter circle we were into David Bowie, Lou Reed, Sparks, Todd Rundgren etc. I loved Mountain, Led Zep, Hendrix, Budgie, The Kinks, Alice Cooper, Sabbath. At first, The Stooges seemed too deep and serious for me. A little scary because I thought if teenagers felt like this all over the world, I’m doomed. I bought the album with “Loose” and played that song for weeks before listening to the rest of it. The girl next door had Iggy’ s “Raw Power” album the week it was released. When glam rock was happening in England, there was a weekly NYC radio show that played the Melody Maker Top 30 singles. I was fascinated by T.Rex, Slade, Hawkwind. I don’t recall if prog rock was a tag yet, I knew that I didn’t like songs that rambled on for more than 7 minutes. There were exceptions of course- some King Crimson, Yes, Mahavishnu. I was impressionable. Radio station WBAI hosted “Free Music Store” concerts with local acts. One show was a keyboard group called Mother Mallard that had banks of synthesizers on stage. They were similar to the music of Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, who you would only hear on that same radio station. I talked myself into buying their records, but it took years to comprehend them. I was too young to be listening to such serious stuff. I played soccer and ran track for a couple years. During meets at other schools, I made friends. At parties I heard Issac Hayes, Bohannon and James Brown records. Brown was all over top 40 radio. Rhythm guitar was my jam! Soul and funk records were best for that. I spent many nights listening to AM radio. The signal travels farther at night, so I’d listen to stations far away. It didn’t matter what kind of music it was. Some of my relatives had short wave radios. I was more interested in radio production than short wave content. The production quality has not changed much since then. It often sounds like broadcasts trapped in the ether for the last 30 years.

While I was in high school, it was common for local colleges to host rock and jazz concerts for low prices, sometimes free. The schools had to spend the money sitting in the student union coffers. There was a live music club in my town called Joint In The Woods. The venue began as a banquet hall that doubled as a meeting hall for Boy Scout Jamborees and the like. When it became the Joint, it was a disco. The first night of live music was a show with Iggy & The Stooges. The regular disco patrons were pissed! The guys were mostly goombah’s in Quiana print shirts and bell bottoms. Three or four guys smacked Iggy around after his set. Sure enough, he played Max’s Kansas City the next night as if nothing happened. Because of this club, touring bands were suddenly playing in my town. Badfinger, Roy Wood’s Wizzard, Muddy Waters. The NY Dolls were scheduled but didn’t show up. Springsteen was often an opening act. The N.J. legal drinking age had just lowered to 18. It was a great time. I was still in school, so I wasn’t staying out on weeknights.

I was determined to learn NYC music history by hitting all the Greenwich Village clubs and talking to the owners and bartenders. It didn’t matter what kind of music they specialized in- I was into the vibe. There were occasional scary nights parking near CB’s or jazz spots in that neighborhood. Folk music was on FM radio at the time. A high school friend booked a local coffee house called Tea & Cheese. Mostly locals and ambitious tri-state artists. Martin Mull, Aztec Two Step, Garland Jeffries. Some of Lou Reed’s touring band, The Tots, played there. I went to all kinds of record stores, mainly those that sold rock imports and cutouts. I was fascinated by the street level buzz of a record. In ’74, I heard dub reggae for the first time. The only stores to get that music were in Queens because there was a strong West Indian community there. It may have been the “Harder They Come” soundtrack that got me started. There was a “pay to play” radio station in Newark - WHBI. DJ’s had to buy their airtime. Arnold “Trinidad” Henry had a weekly show playing new calypso and reggae. He was more into calypso than reggae. A lot of calypso was political and comical. Arnold was fascinating! There was often a personal crisis he’d talk about on the air. My favorite incident was when he said that his life had been threatened during the program, so he locked himself in the studio.. Someone called the cops. They convinced him to unlock the door. He just wanted more airtime. Arnold played the first reggae dub track I’d heard- full dub albums were a new concept at the time. Most dub was found on the flipsides of reggae 45’s. One of the shows sponsors was Chin Randy’s Records in Queens. I trekked out there by train to buy my first dub records. That was a trip! Randy Chin’s family went on to start VP Records.

What was the first alternative/independent music you got into? How did it happen (friends? older siblings?)

RF-The term “punk” as a music style hadn’t been coined yet. I vaguely recall equating “punk” with the great “Nuggets” compilation or something Greg Shaw might have writ in Bomp Magzine. I didn’t identify labels as independent. I knew that if the label design was simple and the address was listed, it was probably a small company. There were plenty of record stores carrying obscure stuff. I bought import records from a few NYC stores. I took the bus in until I was old enough to drive. One store Pantasia, was up in The Bronx. I went there one Christmas eve day to get the import of the second Sadistic Mika Band album. The clerk talked me into buying the harder to find first album as well. He said it sounded like Shel Talmy produced it. I knew who that was and it was a revelation to talk to somebody in a record store at that level. That is what a record store should be! I read Phonograph Record magazine, Bomp and Trouser Press regularly. Patti Smith and Television self released their debut singles- those are the first “indie” records I bought, followed by the first two Pere Ubu singles. I remember hearing the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner” from the Bezerkley Chartbusters comp on WFMU and thinking that there must be more music like that. It was refreshing.

Seeing Patti Smith and Television perform at CBGB’s changed my life. I connected the dots. I had BÖC albums on which Patti had co-writes. She had a poem insert in Todd Rundgren’s “A Wizard, A True Star” album. She read a Morrison poem on a Ray Manzarek lp. She wrote for rock music mags with distinctive style. I read a brief story about her in the Voice and went to see her do her annual Rock N’ Rimbaud show. Shortly after that she and Television played CBGB’s for six weekends in early ’75. Both bands were really great. Patti didn’t have a drummer yet. Richard Hell was a big inspiration to me. He looked cool. He played bass like he just picked it up the month before. That was a new concept. Television changed bass players in the middle of the residency. Television was the first band I saw with short hair and they dressed like teenage delinquents circa 1962. The CBGB’s jukebox had a good number of 60’s garage records. In my head I conceived Television to be inspired by that music. Made sense to me- Lenny Kaye, who assembled the “Nuggets” comp, is in the PSG. When I went back to see Television headline, The Ramones opened. Seeing The Ramones again, Talking Heads opened. It seemed like the streak of seeing great new bands would not end. They were distinctly NYC sounds. They could not have merged anywhere else. I remember avoiding the band Suicide because I didn’t think the music could be good J. Bands like Tuff Darts, Mumps and The Marbles opened shows but I wasn’t thrilled by them. A CBGB’s band that doesn’t get mentioned much is Mink DeVille. They wore matching outfits like they were playing a low budget Miami dive in 1962J. The club still had the small corner stage. The p.a. was ok and the bands had small amps. The music wasn’t loud in a “rock” way. You could sit at a table right in front of the band. Although we consider the club a birthplace of punk, the club showcased local bands that had been around for a while. I think the club upgraded the p.a. once before building the big stage. I realized at that point that when a band was great or at least interesting live, the records were basic documents of the band’s sound.

What was your first job in the music scene/industry?

RF- Before realizing I wanted to be in the business, I hounded import mail order guys on the phone about non-lp b-sides and albums that weren’t released stateside. I was fascinated by the process. Why were some records not in stores even though they had local airplay? My dad did not listen to much music, but he had an army buddy that made a living in Al Hirt’s band. He came to our house once. He gave my dad a copy of John Fahey’s “After The Ball” album, which he played on. I liked his stories about the session man side of the business. Fahey treated him well. I was generally shy, but when it came to music I would approach anyone I thought I could learn from. I heard horror stories about the music biz in NYC but learned later that those were a mob related labels. At the time, I thought the entire NYC music biz might be that way. I planned to move to California anyway. In high school, I go-fer’d at local Jersey radio stations and talked my way into meeting a few top FM radio dj’s. I thought I wanted to be a professional dj, but my dad wisely talked me out of that. The itinerant radio jock life would not be for me. It was a racket.

In ’76, I took a long low budget cross country trip with my high school sweetheart. Along the way, I stayed in Memphis for three weeks with a cousin who was stationed at the Millington naval base. Got a job at a hip movie theatre that served liquor. I found Alex Chilton in the phone book and spent an afternoon talking with him. I wasn’t yet legal drinking age in Tennessee. It amused him that a fan showed up in his town who was not old enough to drink. En route to Cali, Tulsa, OK was on my route to find Shelter Records and studio , but it shut down and the label moved to L.A. At the time, Dwight Twilley’s “I’m On Fire” was a radio hit. I didn’t think there were still bands like that. Twilley was from Tulsa, but had moved to L.A. by that time.

When I arrived in L.A. I visited small label record company offices. A few offered me jobs or references. I spent two weeks crashing at the Malibu house of a distant family friend. I didn’t want to live in L.A. but I was encouraged by the opportunities. I got a job at the famous record store- Rather Ripped in Berkeley, CA.

Patti Smith told me about Rather Ripped before I left Jersey. In ’75, she and her band went to California for shows in L.A. and Berkeley. The northern Cali shows were set up by the store. She did a poetry reading there. This is well before “Horses” was released. I bought a couple records from the store’s Dedicated Fool mail order service. They had a monthly catalog on newsprint. Thousands of records in tiny font. Every record was described with a few words. This is 1976 and punk rock was just getting started. I worked as a prep cook in a charcuterie associated with Alice Waters’ famous restaurant Chez Panisse. The proprietor knew the record store owners. I wasn’t actively looking to work there, but I talked about music all day every day. They fast tracked me for an interview. Because of a scheduling mistake, Tom Petty interviewed me for the job. His first album just came out and “American Girl” was close to being a hit single. The band came to the store before a local show. Tom overheard the owner apologizing for not being able to do the interview, so he offered to conduct it. It was great. I knew all about his label, Shelter Records. I deliberately avoided talking about The Ramones and Patti Smith because punk was new and against the grain. At the end of the interview Tom told the owners that if he lived in Berkeley, he’d buy all his records from me. The store owner still had to interview me formally the next day, but I knew that I nailed it.

It was owned by two dynamic gents that were connected to Berkeley society and Bay Area journalists. They weren’t typical record store guys. They celebrated the 70’s in the moment. They held court with well known music scribes, musicians, dj’s. They were good friends of The Residents. Perhaps my strangest story is meeting The Residents with the Rather Ripped owners at a S.F. Irish bar that specialized in Irish Coffee’s. I had only recently heard of the group, so I was not cognizant of their marketing myth. At the bar, we were with our girlfriends and wives. One of the Residents tried to convince me and my gf to go back their place for a hot tub session. I laughed out loud and said “geez, what a bunch of hippies”! We didn’t go. In retrospect, I should have gone on the condition that they wore eyeball heads in the tub. At that time, The Residents rarely performed live, but they did in 1975 for the store’s birthday party. The early Bezerkley Records (Jonathan Richman, Greg Kihn) was distributed to stores through Rather Ripped. Their office was a few blocks away. At the store, each employee had unique music taste and expertise. Pop music was changing rapidly with a new energy. Some of us were tapped into it. We all had to know the key new releases in every genre because we were tastemakers. Major labels would beg us to do window displays for new releases. But if they could not find a store employee that liked that artist, it was no go. So, no Pablo Cruise window display. We weren’t against major labels, but we put a lot of energy into selling the ton of music that we loved. Our focus was on imports, indies, promos and cut outs where we could get a good price mark up. We had a rare record search service with customers all over the world. We’d find rare records through trade-ins and by combing record stores all over the state.

There were a few import distributors, but they weren’t hip to many small run U.S. independent releases. That was understandable because bands didn’t often press enough records for a distributor to get excited about. In other words, why spend half your day hunting down records that were only pressed in small quantities. Just as they start selling, you’re out of stock. There gonna sell a hell of a lot more Scorpions’ picture discs! As always, some distributors financed exclusive re-pressings of records that had momentum. The only way to get records like Roky Erikson’s “Two Headed Dog” single or The Flamin’ Groovies’ “You Tore Me Down” 45 was directly through mail order. I wrote to label addresses listed in Trouser Press and fanzines to buy direct in order to sell them in the store with no competition. Major label sales reps didn’t prioritize us because we didn’t shift bulk units of the hits. However, we were so plugged in to the lesser known artists that we were a good place for record companies to try and start a buzz. We could swell 50-100 of a record that all the other stores sold a handful of. Bands showed up at the store while touring. Springsteen bought Dylan bootlegs from us by mail order. Patti Smith’s manager Jane Friedman used the store as a home base when Patti and John Cale came through the area.

Berkeley is in the East Bay of the S.F. bay area. A few months after starting at Rather Ripped, I realized that the city had a rich music scene well before punk /new wave started. There was Fantasy Records, a well known jazz r&b label but best known for CCR; Arhoolie, Solid Smoke, Metalanguage; the contemp classical labels- Lovely Music and 1750 Arch; folk and blues labels like Takoma and Olivia. Of course, bands like Chrome and others started labels to release their own music. Ralph Records was started by The Residents, and they began signing bands. Rather Ripped was also a center for improv, electronic and meditation records.

In ’77 or ’78 I joined the nascent Maximum Rock N Roll radio team. This was well before the magazine. In the early days there were weeks when we didn’t have enough new punk records to fill the two hour weekly show. Tim Yohannon was all about energetic, real rock n roll, so he filled in the program with records by Gene Vincent, The Sonics etc. BTW, Tim applied green masking tape to the three closed sides of every record he had. He gave me a Mekons double single he decided he didn’t like. It was in a gatefold sleeve that he sealed shut with his green tape! Sometimes he re-designed the cover art…never for the better. He made his own pic sleeves for 45’s that didn’t have them. Bands would stare at their own records in bewilderment. Tim was archiving the records of the entire punk and hardcore movement worldwide.

Eventually, Tim brought in Ruth Schwartz, and Jeff Bale as co-hosts- both great people. Jello Biafra was a frequent guest. Tim assembled the “Not So Quiet On The Western Front” lp and later organized syndication for the radio show. I remember hearing the first Disorder ep and thinking -this is the future! J It was exciting. But soon, most hardcore records sounded alike to me. It was like- “Do you want more fries with your fries?” I went to plenty of live shows without knowing a lot about the bands playing them. I was happy when the fashion trended away from jackboots to sneakers…getting a boot kick to the head in a stage dive could be brutal. I didn’t see a lot of skinhead violence at shows, but I know it was changing the scene.

San Francisco and Berkeley were important music centers, activist meccas as well as creative artistic and intellectual hubs. Yohannon had history as an activist. He identified with public protests for causes & social issues. For many teenagers, punk rock was a rite of passage. I think it changed a lot of kids’ lives for the better. The overriding message was to be civically aware of what is going on around you and what affects your life.

Tell me about your time at Arhoolie Records. Where was it located?

Rather Ripped’s owners had a falling out and the remaining owner just wanted to sell records and antiques with his wife. He moved it to a nearby city. Just before the store closed, he told me of an open position at Back Room Distribution, a division of Arhoolie. It was in El Cerrito, a small town north of Berkeley. Chris Strachwitz, the owner of Arhoolie is a legendary record man. He recorded many of his early blues albums with a tape recorder in his car. He owned the legendary Down Home Music store in the same building. Separated by partition behind the store was Back Room. It was an indie label distributor for blues, folk roots music. Rounder Records was still a new label at the time. I gotta admit, when Rounder issued The Shaggs “Philosophy Of The World’ I was in seventh heaven. I worked primarily for the distributor, grooming to be a sales rep but I spent a lot of time in the store. At first, I didn’t yet relate to blues and country music. But there were a lot of touring artists in those styles making a living. It was a strong network of clubs, fans, radio shows and press that fueled it. The store had an incredible selection of obscure 50’s/60’s rockabilly and garage band comps. The Cramps were my favorite band at the time. The rockabilly comps mostly on a the Dutch White Label, were treasure troves of insane songs. My heart was in new music- whatever you wanna call it, punk, new wave, art music. That’s the business I wanted to be in. I used my time to learn more about distribution operations. The people that worked at Arhoolie and in its community were fun music heads. There were a lot of good musicians among them. It was a great time to live in Berkeley.

What was next, Rough Trade and CD Presents? Was that in San Francisco? I went to that Rough Trade store a few times and it was an amazing store.

I knew folks from Rough Trade UK because I bought imports from them to sell @ Rather Ripped. When they wanted to open in the U.S. they contacted me, but at the time the wage was low and there wasn’t enough space to work. I was interested in working in the distribution division, not the store. They speiled something about it being a socialist business. I stayed at Arhoolie for a little while longer. In the meantime, I was offered my own weekly late night radio show on Pacifica’s KPFA in Berkeley- same station as Maximum Rock N’Roll. I took over a show called “Night Sky”, an ambient music program. My interim program title was “No More Mr. Night Sky” until I settled on “Assassinatin’ Rhythm”. The station’s music director was a contemporary classical composer closely associated with avant -garde and 20th century music. A major segment of my show was for industrial, post-punk and undefinable music. I hosted a few live on- air performances with Z’ev, Slovenly and Angst among others. Negativland’s “Over The Edge” program started on KPFA around this time. KPFA was 100,000 watts of power with affiliate stations covering the Central Valley down to Fresno and Bakersfield.

When the time was right, I moved to Rough Trade’s U.S. distribution company in Berkeley. The record store was in San Francisco. We distributed a lot of British records sent by Rough Trade UK, often in small quantities. Rough Trade US was set up to press and distribute select RT and Factory records by Joy Division, ACR, The Fall, Stiff Little Fingers, Crass. It was cheaper and more effective to press in the U.S and Canada. I also distributed some U.S. labels but there was one Brit on the staff that hated most American music. On top of that, it could be a dangerous place to work. One of the staff was importing reggae records and weed from Jamaica to our warehouse. The local connection was shot on his porch shortly after he picked up a shipment! I was lucky to spend a few days travelling with Mark E.Smith of The Fall. He loved obscure rockabilly and garage band records. I was able to return to Memphis for a while to prep the first Panther Burns album for release. Tony Wilson of Factory put up most of the money to keep RTUS going. He was a brilliant character, but I learned from talking with him how not to conduct business. I often got sample records from bands that wanted distribution. Pell Mell’s “Rhyming Guitars” e.p. was the start of my long association with the band. I enjoyed selling records to stores all over the country. I learned about local scenes, records, fanzines, clubs and college radio stations everywhere. Making these sources connect for touring bands and record sales was exciting. Because Rough Trade is British, we had the benefit of connections with club dj’s. We pressed and promoted New Order’s “Blue Monday” single on a shoestring budget. For a long time, it was the best kept secret from the mainstream. I left Rough Trade for Subterranean Records ( Flipper etc) for a spell while working in a record store. The guy that put up the money for the record store ran guns to Cuba through Mexico. Thankfully, not through the actual store. I booked Cali shows for Panther Burns, The Wipers, Sonic Youth, Whitehouse.

Who owned the CD Presents label? I remember that Avengers compilation.

It was owned by a lawyer, David Ferguson. He had a recording studio as well. I didn’t understand why he wanted to run a label. He did not have an ear for music. But we did release a Tales Of Terror lp! He almost released a DOA album that I thought the band would kill him over. Many years later I got into a fist fight with one of David’s employees in a limo ride shared with Ferguson and Lydia Lunch. We fought through the window separating the driver from the passengers. I would love to recreate that for a film. Good times!

My main role there was to set up the first Billy Bragg record in the U.S. Billy’s manager was the legendary Peter Jenner and both were great to work with. They were using CD Presents as a stepping stone to a major label. In the meantime, I knew a few people at SST. Joe Carducci is an old friend. He was pitching me to move to L.A. and work there, but I resisted for a while. I had just met the woman that I knew would be the love of my life. I didn’t want to move to SoCal. Joe gave me an ultimatum. He sent three advance cassettes that convinced me to go- Meat Puppets’ “Up On The Sun”, Minutemen’s “Double Nickels” and Huskers’ “New Day Rising” That’s an excellent recruiting strategy. I later married the love of my life.

On the side I booked shows for bands I loved. Gerard Cosloy asked me to book Sonic Youth first northern Cali shows. I also booked shows for The Wipers and noise band Whitehouse

Was SST Records next? How long did you last there and what was that like?

I was there for three years. “How long did you last there?” sounds like I was biding my time :) I’m often asked about my time with SST.

Carducci hired me to do PR. That meant publicity, college radio, regional press. Video was a valuable promo tool. MTV’s “120 Minutes” program was a great way to promote our records.

In 1987 we put out more records than Warner Brothers. By that time, I hired people to help.

I’ve done a number of interviews about SST. If you have specific questions, shoot. I recall that my social life was almost entirely with my co-workers and bands on the label. I was nearly oblivious to music from other labels. I was a big fan of Dischord and Homestead. Metallica, COC, Voivod and the Birthday Party/Nick Cave were my non-SST staples.

I think around this time I had met you briefly in NJ at one of the Elks Lodge shows that my old friend Ralph Jones put on. Were you living in NJ at that point or just visiting?

You’ve mentioned that before and I don’t recall the specific show. I moved out of NJ permanently in ’76. I came back for annual summer visits to NYC, north Jersey and Philly. Some high school friends went to Upsala College, then the home of WFMU. On my first visit back in ’76 I met Irwin Chusid and R. Stevie Moore. Some high school friends were connected to Feelies before they took that name.

Was Blast First! next? I met Pat Naylor once and hung out with her at a show and she was really sweet.

Yeah around the time I left SST, the folks in Sonic Youth called saying that they had left as well. They wanted me to be involved with Blast First! in the U.S. I knew Paul Smith because he released their albums in the UK. Blast First UK released a number of Touch N Go and SST records. The label was a division of Mute which had a U.S. deal with Enigma. My job was almost entirely “Daydream Nation” promotion. It was so much fun to be able to go deep with one album. We issued Ciccone Youth shortly afterward, which augmented the overall Sonic Youth story. The only other active touring band was Band Of Susans and on a limited level, Lunachicks and Big Stick. It was only one year of work before Enigma cut Mute/Blast First loose. I went on Sonic Youth’s Soviet Union tour and I had a few memorable meetings with Sun Ra. David Bowie called a few times asking about recording studios that Dino Jr and Sonic Youth used. Bowie had a brilliant idea to record Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” with Glenn Branca’s large guitar group. We tried following up on it but Bowie was immersed in Tin Machine and other projects.

Was it on to Geffen then?

Yes, Sonic Youth had good meetings with the label. I had recently met Mark Kates who was championing the signing. He suggested that I come in to meet the entire company. He brought my name up with David who said, “we need someone like that here”.

I had fleeting thoughts that working for a major was “selling out”...punching corporate clock. I wanted to apply what I knew on a larger scale.

What was that like, working for a proper major label? Was David Geffen still involved?

On my second day there, David called me into his office. He is down to earth, street smart. Like many of the best in the biz, he didn’t have an attitude. He had met with the Meat Puppets. He sensed that Dinosaur Jr. was important. I reminded him that I was not hired for a&r.

He said- “I don’t assign job titles. If you find something else you’d like to do here, you can pursue it ‘after 5pm’ ”. I found reissue projects like the Pere Ubu box and Raincoats catalog. I recorded a new Raincoats album. I signed Southern Culture On The Skids, Garrison Starr, Skiploader. I assembled and recorded Rob Zombie’s Halloween Hootenanny comp. With Sonic Youth, I pondered making records with John Fahey and Townes Van Zandt. After ten years, it was time to move on.

Tell us what you do now, didn’t you get involved with digital music at some point?

Geffen Records was folded into Interscope in 1999 and I was bored with the limitations of the business as it was. Digital music was gaining ground solely through illegal file trading on Napster. I knew there would be a major shift in the business moving to digital. I worked for the download site. eMusic.com, signing distribution agreements with labels. This was years before iTunes and YouTube. Major labels would not work with us because mp3 files are open source files that could be traded freely without control. They saw eMusic as a facilitator of illegal file trading. Like marijuana use leading to hard drugs! In the big picture, I knew that digital downloads weren’t “sexy”. But at some point, digital music would develop into something easier to track and use. We skipped the major labels. The bigger independent labels understood that digital music would be the future. It was a great place to be. I knew a lot of music, but I had no idea there were so many labels in every country. One label owner told me that I had the best job in the world. I knew that to explain this new unproven music format it could be an uphill climb. So I took the time to research label websites for song samples. That way I could find common ground with label owners. There’s surf music in Brazil? There’s a young female cellist duo in Prague that make energetic music? There’s archaic royalty rules connected to opera arrangements? Bring it on! It certainly changed how I listen to music.

It was a time when business rules and legal rights had to change in order to deal with digital income disbursement. For example, digital downloads could be sold by the song while royalty payments were based on album sales. eMusic was at the forefront of those changes. When iTunes launched, digital music was “legitimized”. Borne out of eMusic was RoyaltyShare which provides a royalty accounting platform for labels. It is now a division of The Orchard and I divide my time between The Orchard and RoyaltyShare.

Who are some current bands you are into?

A loaded question! I listen to a lot of new music. I spend a lot of time listening to records and cd’s in my collection. Of current artists, I really like Steve Gunn’s music. I listen to the projects involving members of Sonic Youth. Bill Nace, Kim’s partner in Body/Head is a guitar genius. Body/Head’s music is a cathartic experience for me. London is lucky to have Thurston Moore living and working there. I think the music they make separately is far more exciting that what Sonic Youth would’ve made if still together.

Lately I’m digging Melenas from Spain, Hayvenlar Alemi from Turkey. Quin Kirchner is a Chicago based drummer that put out a great jazz record in 2018 called “The Other Side Of Time”. I think he plays on Ryley Walker ‘s records.

Because I’ve spent so much time with the music of Sonic Youth, Branca and Rhys Chatham, I crave the occasional dive into instrumental symphonic guitar army and tonal stuff. Current favorites in that vein are Bosse De Nage, Pelican, Sunn O)))

Given the chance I’ll see any performance by Mary Halvorson, Ches Smith, Marc Ribot or Mary Lattimore.

It took me years to get it, but I’m now a big fan of Keiji Haino’ music. Dean McPhee is a British guitarist I really like. I just bought a couple of Willie Lane lp’s on Feeding Tube.

I research music history and the development of the industry. There are historical and social components of every type of music by culture, country, time period. I love stories about riots at premieres of new avant garde works. I read a book about famous classical composers in the 18th Century playing home concerts (salons) where people are talking the entire time…but they are paid handsomely for the performance. Streaming music sites and YouTube are vast repositories of music and cultural documentation.

Do you still make it out to many shows?

I go to two/three shows a month when I’m home and more when traveling especially NY/London. I start work early in the morning so I’m not out late often. I understand why people see less live music as they get older. I’m done with music festivals. The Big Ears Festival is the only Stateside event that might inspire me to stand for eight hours.

I always hear music by new artists that I really like. I don’t always go to see the live show. Sometimes I hear a new band that sounds like a band I liked 20 years ago. I wouldn’t deliberately see a band that uses another band’s sound as a template.

What are your top 10 desert island discs?

I cannot do 10. It’s 20 or nothing. If you say sorry Ray, it will be nothing. FineJ If I’m on an island, I’ll listen to the ocean waves and sounds of nature. If I’m relegated to a desert, I’ll listen to the blood coarsing through my veins.

Miles Davis- Kind Of Blue

Television- Marquee Moon

Peter Brotzmann- Machine Gun

Sex Pistols -Never Mind The Bollocks

Rolling Stones- Let It Bleed

Soundtrack – The Harder They Come

Billy Harper – Black Saint

Kleenex/Liliput- First Songs

Patti Smith Group -Easter

Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers- Houserockin’

Led Zeppelin- Houses Of The Holy

Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation

Elvis Presley- Sun Sessions

The Cramps- Songs The Lord Taught Us

Pell Mell -Flow

Procol Harum- A Salty Dog

Sibelius- Complete Symphonies

Lou Reed -Coney Island Baby

Meat Puppets- Up On The Sun

The Kinks- Kinks Kronikles

“Hmm....Flow or Star City?”

Any final words? Closing comments? Anything you wanted to mention that I didn’t ask.

I’ve been involved off and on with the artist Raymond Pettibon for a music project called Supersession. He has made records under this moniker before. This project began in 1990 and stalled for many years. We revived it a couple years ago. I play bass. Raymond wrote many pages of words and lyrics that he passed to the band, encouraging us to write music behind them. It’s different from Raymond’s other records because it is not improvised. Rick Sepulveda, our guitarist is a great songwriter and he wrote music for Raymond’s words. Rick sings a bunch of the songs because Raymond loves his voice. We did a NYC performance in November that was really fun. So now of course, I’m thinking we should play monthly in L.A. We are nearly finished with the album that we recorded at Casa Hanzo, the San Pedro studio Mike Watt owns with Pete Mazich. Raymond is a brilliant man; fun and inspiring to work with. When I practice with Rick, he’ll often break into a cover song deep in the recess of memory. Like John Cale’s “Hanky Panky Nohow” ,Kevin Ayers’ “Oh Wot A Dream” or the Doors “Wishful Sinful”. We may cover a Harry Toledo song. It’s a blast. I hope to have the album finished in July.

Tav, Bobby, Pell Mell and Ray

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oscopelabs · 5 years

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The Murder Artist: Alfred Hitchcock At The End Of His Rope by Alice Stoehr

“Rope was an interesting technical experiment that I was lucky and happy to be a part of, but I don’t think it was one of Hitchcock’s better films.” So wrote Farley Granger, one of its two stars, in his memoir Include Me Out. The actor was in his early twenties when the Master of Suspense plucked him from Samuel Goldwyn’s roster. He’d star in the first production from the director’s new Transatlantic Pictures as Phillip Morgan, a pianist and co-conspirator in murder. John Dall would play his partner, homicidal mastermind Brandon Shaw. Granger had the stiff pout to Dall’s trembling smirk.

The “interesting technical experiment” was Hitchcock’s decision to shoot the film, adapted from a twenty-year-old English play, as a series of 10-minute shots stitched together into a simulated feature-length take. This allowed him to retain the stage’s spatial and temporal unities while guiding the audience with the camera’s eye. In the process, he’d embed a host of meta-textual and erotic nuances within the sinister mise-en-scène. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents (Granger’s boyfriend, for a time) updated the play’s fictionalized account of Chicagoan thrill killers Leopold and Loeb to a penthouse in late ‘40s Manhattan. There, Phillip strangles the duo’s friend David—his scream behind a curtain opens the film—immediately prior to a dinner party where they’ll serve pâté atop the box that serves as his coffin. It’s a morbid premise for a comedy of manners, and Brandon taunts his guests throughout the evening. (Asked if it’s someone’s birthday, he coyly replies, “It’s, uh, really almost the opposite.”)

Granger deemed the film lesser Hitchcock due to two limitations. One was the sheer repetition and exact blocking demanded by its formal conceit, the other the Production Code’s blanket ban on “sex perversion,” which meant tiptoeing around the fact that Brandon and Phillip—like their real-life inspirations and, to some degree, Rope’s leading men—were gay. That stringent homophobia forced Hitchcock and Laurents to convey their sexuality through ambiguity and implication; the director would use similar tactics to adapt queer writers like Daphne du Maurier and Patricia Highsmith. (“Hitchcock confessed that he actually enjoyed his negotiations with [Code honcho Joseph] Breen,” notes Thomas Doherty in the book Hollywood’s Censor. “The spirited give-and-take, said Hitchcock, possessed all the thrill of competitive horse trading.”) The nature of the characters’ relationship is hardly subtext: Rope starts with their orgasmic shudder over David’s death, then labored panting after which Brandon pulls out a cigarette and lets in some light. A few minutes later, Brandon strokes the neck of a champagne bottle; Phillip asks how he felt during the act, and he gasps “tremendously exhilarated.”

Like Brandon’s hints about the murder, the homosexuality on display is surprisingly explicit if an audience can decode it. The whole film pivots around their partnership, both criminal and domestic. In an impish bit of conflation, their scheme even stands in for “the love that dare not speak its name,” with David’s body acting as a fetish object in a sexual game no one else can perceive. The guests, as Brandon puts it, are “a dull crew,” “those idiots” who include David’s father and aunt, played by London theater veterans Cedric Hardwicke and Constance Collier. Joan Chandler and Douglas Dick, both a couple years into what would be modest careers, play David’s fiancée Janet and her ex Kenneth. Character actress Edith Evanson appears as housekeeper Mrs. Wilson, a prototype for Thelma Ritter’s Stella in Rear Window, and a top-billed James Stewart is Rupert Cadell, who once mentored the murderers in arcane philosophy.

This was the first of Stewart’s four collaborations with Hitchcock. It cast the actor against type not as a romantic hero but as an observer and provocateur, his gaze shrewd, his dialogue heavy with irony. The role presaged his work in the ‘50s, with Mann rather than Capra, emphasizing psychology over ideology. Rupert, like L.B. Jeffries or Scottie Ferguson, is rooting out a crime, and in so doing comes to seem more loathsome than the villains themselves. “Murder is—or should be—an art,” he lectures midway through Rope, eyebrow arched, martini glass in hand. “Not one of the seven lively perhaps, but an art nevertheless.” Half an hour in real time later, having seen David’s body, he flies into a moralizing monologue: “You’ve given my words a meaning that I never dreamed of!” It takes up the last several minutes of the film, with Rupert snarling from deep in his righteous indignation, “Did you think you were God, Brandon?”

Stewart was a master of sputtering, impassioned oratory, and his facility for it renders Rupert’s hypocrisy especially stark. He taught these murderers; he can’t just shrug off his culpability. The Code decreed that “the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, or sin.” Every transgression reaps a punishment. The ending of Rope abides by the letter of this law, as Rupert fires several shots into the night, drawing a police siren toward the building. He sits, deflated, while Phillip plays piano and Brandon has one last drink. But none of David’s loved ones get to excoriate his killers. The one man here with no integrity, no moral authority, is the one who gets the final, self-flagellating word.

The Code forbade throwing sympathy to the side of sin, but if Hitchcock meant any character in Rope as his stand-in, it was Brandon, not Rupert. The top to Phillip’s bottom, he’s the director of the play within a film. He’s storyboarded it to perfection. Janet, realizing he’s toying with her, cries that he’s incapable of just throwing a party. “No, you’d have to add something that appealed to your warped sense of humor!” Hitchcock, who’d built a corpus of corpses, must have gotten a chuckle from that line. Whereas Phillip fears discovery, Brandon puts symbolism above pragmatism, prioritizing what Phillip dubs his “neat little touches.” He needs to have dinner on the chest, the murder weapon tied around antique books, and his surrogate father Rupert in attendance, much as the film’s director needed to shoot in long takes—not because it’s pragmatic, but because it’s beautiful. He went to great lengths for verisimilar beauty here, as Steven Jacobs details in The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Miniatures in the three-dimensional cyclorama seen through the broad penthouse window were wired and connected to a ‘light organ’ that allowed for the gradual activation of the skyline’s thousands of lights and hundreds of neon signs. Meanwhile, spun-glass clouds were shifted by technicians from right to left during moments when the camera turned away from the window.

Jacobs notes as well that a painting by Fidelio Ponce de León hanging on Brandon and Phillip’s wall actually belonged to the director and had previously hung in his own home. Rope is avant-garde art wrapped in a bourgeois thriller, about avant-garde art wrapped in a dinner party, pushing moral and aesthetic boundaries while collapsing any distinction between the two. In this nested construction, Brandon the murder artist becomes a figure of auto-critique or perhaps apologia. Did you think you were God, Alfred? By 1948, he’d already made dozens of films, often obliquely about sex and violence, across decades and continents. He’d become the world champion sick joke raconteur. Rope is a reckoning with the ethics of his genre.

By 1948, the world had changed. A few years earlier, Hitchcock’s friend (and Rope co-producer) Sidney Bernstein had asked him to advise on a film about Germany’s newly liberated concentration camps. As Kay Gladstone writes in Holocaust and the Moving Image, Hitchcock worried that “tricky editing” would let skeptics read its footage as fraudulent and asked the editors “to use as far as possible long shots and panning shots with no cuts.” The director took his own counsel to heart.

Rope was also his first color film, the start of his fascination with dull palettes. (A quarter-century later he’d limn Frenzy’s London with every shade of beige.) Genteel browns and grays dominate the penthouse, the hues of men’s suits. Only after nightfall does the apartment glow with, in Jacobs’ phrasing, “the expressive possibilities of urban neon light.” The dinner party takes place at the crest of postwar modernity, a world away from the camps. Here, among the East Coast intelligentsia, murder’s merely a thought experiment. When David’s father mentions Hitler, Brandon dismisses him as “a paranoiac savage.” Yet even in polite society, the evening can begin with a secret killing and end with that iniquity brought to light. “Perhaps what is called civilization is hypocrisy,” says Brandon. “Perhaps,” David’s father concedes.

In 1948, the world was changing. That year saw the publication of Gore Vidal’s landmark gay novel The City and the Pillar and the first of the Kinsey Reports. Antonioni was a documentarian about to make his first feature; Truffaut was a delinquent catching Hitchcock movies at the Cinémathèque. Rope’s amorality and pitch-black humor augur a world and a cinema that were yet to come. It’s thorny gay art through a straight auteur. The film’s last thirty seconds show Rupert’s back to the camera while Brandon sips his cocktail and Phillip plays a tune, the trio lit by flashing neon. In this denouement lie decadence and damnation, art and death, the Code-closeted past and a disaffected future.

#alfred hitchcock #rope film #rope movie #hitchcock #james stewart #farley granger #john dall #gore vidal #michelangelo antonioni #francois truffaut #frenzy film #the wrong house: the architecture of alfred hitchcock #musings #film writing #film essay #oscilloscope laboratories #o-scope labs #adam yauch #Beastie Boys

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onenettvchannel · 4 years

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BREAKING THIS MORNING: Jack TV is now Online only, leaving to it's commercial-free rebrand to the Front Row Channel

MANDALUYONG, MANILA -- Rebrand is so no joke for April Fools for this year in 2020. Here in Shaw Boulevard in Mandaluyong City, Jack TV was reportedly announced as it shifts to online only by this month of April as permanent.

Solar Entertainment Corporation was made a final strategic decision to make way for it's last broadcast to go digital.

A short statement from Jack TV, was told exclusively to OneNETnews...

The first broadcast, was launched early by Wednesday on April 6th, 2005 as a test broadcast. 3 months later by Tuesday on a different date... The actual Grand Launching is on July 12th, 2005.

youtube

It offers the entire Western programming in America as consisting to it's different kind of entertaiment.

youtube

So today in the present, the final programme of Jack TV in the Philippines... goes to "Jack TV's Playlist" on Tuesday night by March 31st, 2020. The following morning however on April 1st, 2020 on Wednesday... This is NO JOKE. It is replaced to the "Front Row Channel", after the final broadcast was ended after 12mn (Manila local time).

You'll see this transition from this Facebook video, by the online only rebrand.

Almost 15 years of cable entertainment broadcasting in the Philippines... It is no longer a pay-TV cable channel, leaving as usual... to Online only in social media. The newest slogan says "This is how we play it!" & "Your Online Playground". Entertainment & Lifestyle was the priority in the Television Market.

Additional statement from the Jack TV's blog, along with the person-in-charge with Cesar Emaas, Jr.:

"Solar Entertainment Corp. will focus its attention and strengthen its two homegrown channels; the male skewed Solar Sports and female skewed ETC (Entertainment Central). Solar Sports will see an expansion in it's programming line-up as it will carry some of JackTV’s most popular content that our viewers and advertisers love and follow. The move we see as a way to strengthen the brand and cater to a broader male audience."

Front Row Channel is all commercial-free with almost the best of LIVE Concerts, Performances and even the world's top musical acts like David Guetta; which is the musical full-hour EDM person. This channel is open 24hrs. a day non-stop.

That said, the entertainment closes it's curtain and the show was over to this cable channel to Jack TV in the headquarters of Mandaluyong.

SOURCE: *https://jacktv.ph/blog/limitless-fun-now-at-your-fingertips- *https://www.mysky.com.ph/Dumaguete/updates/1295/2020/03/26/jack-tv-cease-broadcast *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_TV

HONEST DISCLAIMER: The views & opinions expressed from this news article are not those from the Solar Entertainment Corporation & Jungo TV. Furthermore, the assumptions of this news article will NOT state or reflect those of our Radyo Patrol reporters. The station, management, interwebs and the network. Thanks for reading!

-- OneNETnews Team

#national news #mandaluyong #manila #television #Final Broadcast #turnover #online only #jack tv #philippines #front row channel #solar entertainment #OneNETnews

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emma-nation · 5 years

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Thinking Of You (Mona x MC Fanfiction) - Chapter 11

You said move on Where do I go? I guess second best Is all I will know

Summary: Years later, Allison has everything she wants, a brand-new internship as a doctor, a handsome boyfriend… but her first nightshift won’t go as expected…

Genre: Romance, Angst

MonaxMC Tag list: @zoe6111, @simsvetements, @whoinvitedalx, @abunchofbadchoices, @kamilahmademedoit, @talkinlikeateen, @eagle-one-1, @andreear17, @monagf, @fal-carrington, @crazzyplays, @honorablebicycle, @teja-desai, @iam-the-fuckin-queen

Notes:

- English is not my first language, forgive me for any mistakes.

- Next chapter is the last. I really gonna miss this fic! 😢 But I have another multi-chapter fic of this pairing in my plans!

- I’m still having issues to tag people on my posts, please forgive me if it doesn’t show in your notifications. I re-typed the tag list and if your name has been included is because Tumblr didn’t let me reach you.

Allison took a deep breath, remembering advices she heard from her father about how to proceed in dangerous situations. She entered Dr. Carlson's car, trying to remain silent and calm. She didn't protest or offered resistance.

The doctor asked for her cell phone and started driving, headed to his family's mansion in Santa Monica. Allison wondered if his wife was home and if she even knew what her husband and son were doing. Dr. Carlson guided her to a secret laboratory in the basement.

"Please, take a seat," he calmly asked, pointing to a comfortable armchair. Allison obeyed. "Drink?"

"No, thank you," she answered, afraid the man could drug her or worse.

Dr. Carlson poured himself some whiskey and sat in front of her. He smiled, showing Mr. Wheeler’s cell phone.

“I’ve learned your father was leading the investigation about my performance enhancers. So, I dropped by for a visit this morning and borrowed this."

Allison swallowed hard.

"Please, don't hurt him. He's only doing his job."

"Hurt him?" Dr. Carlson smiled. "I don't plan to hurt him, or even you, darling. As long as you cooperate, of course."

"Tell me what you want," Allison asked. "How can I cooperate?"

"Good girl, Allison. First, I need you to answer, where's the boy?"

"What boy?"

"The one who attacked me inside Krista’s house.”

Allison's eyes went wide in shock. How could him possibly have found out about her being part of the investigation?

“I-I... I don’t know what you're talking about, Dr. Carlson."

“Allison," he shook his head in denial, "don't lie to me. I have contacts inside the University. I've been informed you and that girl, Mona, are secretly working for the police."

Allison sighed frustrated. Being so influent, it was obvious Dr. Carlson had easy access to this kind of information.

“We dropped him at the bus station," she lied. "He was going to his parents house in San Francisco.”

“Hmmm, I’m gonna investigate this further. Now, give me the evidence."

"What evidence?"

"That boy, Brian is his name, isn't? He was secretly filming my goddaughter's meeting. We found the camera he left behind. The footage is stored somewhere, where is it Allison?"

"In a flash drive. It's in Mona's car, I don't have it."

"Are you sure?"

Allison nodded.

"We're going to do it the hard way, then," Dr. Carlson grabbed her by the wrists, forcing her to stand up. Then, he pinned her against the wall, searching inside her pockets. "I told you, Allison," he retrieved the flash drive, "don't try to lie to me. I'm familiar with the body language."

He plugged the flash drive on his laptop, confirming its content. Then, he smashed it under his foot. Allison took the opportunity to run to the door. She attempted to open in but, as expected, it was securely locked. Now Dr. Carlson had gotten what he wanted, she began to imagine what he'd do. If he was going to keep her alive, or silence her with death.

"Y-You've got what you wanted," she said with a crackling voice. "Now let me go home. Mona and my dad will start to suspect if I disappear for too long."

"Oh, darling, they won't," he handed Allison her cell phone. "Because you're gonna call your dad to tell him the news."

"What news?"

"That you decided to come back to Griffin and will be going to New Zealand with him in the morning."

"I won't."

Dr. Carlson let out a soft laugh.

"Yes, you are. Do you know why? If you stay, my son’s car will get stolen. He's going to report it to the police and they'll eventually find it… with Mona's fingerprints.”

"Don't you even dare!" Allison clenched her fists and advanced in his direction. She needed to grab the laboratory keys inside his pocket.

Dr. Carlson easily grabbed her fists, immobilizing her.

"And if you try, by any manners to warn your father, something terrible will happen to him. Like a phone call, reporting a false lead. He arrives at the location and ‘bang’! It was a trap.”

“Your psychopath! Leave my father and Mona alone,” Allison started crying.

She sat down at the armchair again, hoping her dad or Mona would suspect when she didn't return home. Then, a bad feeling erupted inside her chest. Where was Griffin?

----------

Mona parked the Santagata in front of the Wheelers’ residence. There was no space for one more car in the garage. She’d be returning it to her father in the earliest hours of the morning, as it could be easily recognized by Dr. Carlson or Griffin.

Her phone buzzed inside her pocket. She expected it to be Allison, bringing news about the investigation, but it was David instead.

“ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?”

“My car is all over the internet. And on the news too.”

“I’m gonna face charges for your insanity.”

Mona let out a laugh, before replying.

“Your test drive is made. The car is suitable for sale.”

She stopped texting, with had the impression she was being watched. Looking around, she was alone on the street. Mona shrugged.

"You could've died or killed someone."

"If your mother finds out I provided you the car, she'll murder me with her bare hands."

"Chill out, would ya? I'm --"

The impression of being watched made her stop typing again. Putting the phone back in her pocket, along with the car keys, she decided to get inside. Before, she grabbed the pocket knife, only to feel more secure.

While she unlocked the door, she heard a familiar 'click’ behind her, that made a shiver run through her entire body. Turning around, she was face to face to the barrel of a gun.

“Make a noise and I’ll shoot you right here, right now.”

Allison’s ex was trying to pose as bad boy, aiming his little toy at her forehead while trying to sound scary and intimidating.

“Gavin,” she said. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

“It’s Griffin and you know it!” He grabbed her by the jacket with his free hand. “What, huh?! I’d like to see you act fierce and mock me now!”

“It’s not the first time I have a gun pointed at me.”

“But no one has wanted you dead as much as I do, that I can assure you.”

For some reason, she began to feel anxious. Flashbacks of the night Shaw accidentally shot her returned to her mind. She was alone in the hospital, losing a lot of blood. Her mind was foggy and her vision beginning to get blurred. Distantly, she heard the comments of doctors and nurses, who were more interested to gossip about who she supposedly was, than providing her the care she needed. She never let it show, but she was afraid. Before falling unconscious, two people were in her thoughts, her mom and Allison.

Griffin looked down, noticing the knife in her shaky hand. He grabbed it violently and threw it across the street.

“You’re coming with me,” he wrapped his arm around her, still pointing the gun to her head. “And don’t even attempt to get funny.”

He took her to his car, parked only a few meters away and shoved Mona hardly against the driver’s door.

“Open it!” Griffin ordered.

“Give me the keys?” Mona asked.

“I don’t think you understand… you’re going to do it like you’re used to. You’re going to steal my car. In case I decide to not kill you tonight, I need a plan B to get rid of you forever.”

“I need tools.”

Griffin handed her a complete set of car theft tools. Mona studied the car’s lock, picking the one she thought being the most appropriate. As she connected the magnetic device on the car's door, the alarm started to beep loud. He slapped her hard on the face.

“Your bitch! Do it again and you’re dead,” he said, pressing the gun against her head again.

“I’m not familiar with recent car models, jackass. I’ve spent eight years out of picture, in case you don’t remember!”

“Shut. The. Fuck. Up!”

Griffin punched her hard in a place he knew it would inflict her a lot of pain. In the place she had been recently operated. Mona fell on the ground, squirming in pain. So much pain she started feeling sick.

“Get up!"

"Fuck you!”

“I said…” he attacked her again, landing a kick at the side of her body. “Get up!"

Noticing the strange motion, a neighbor turned on the lights and observed through the front window.

"Look what you've done," Griffin opened the car's door, then forced Mona to stand up and enter the car. "One more trick and I'll kill you."

Still pointing the gun at her, the young doctor made her hotwire the car and drive to his house. The pain in her abdomen was still so intense Mona could barely focus.

"Allison..." she thought, closing her eyes. She needed to act carefully. When Allison and her dad returned home, they'd know something was wrong.

By her side, Griffin was sweating and acting like crazy.

"You're like a fucking ghost," he shouted. "I never had a place in her heart because of you. She called for you in her sleep, all the time. Once she had this high fever and she began to hallucinate, saying she loved you! And there were those stupid letters... she never wrote anything similar for me..."

"My bad," Mona smirked.

She felt Griffin's nails digging deep into her arm's skin.

"Get cocky as much as you want... In the end I'll win, either way you'll never see Allison again."

"That's what we'll see," Mona thought. She observed, waiting for a moment of distraction where she could take that gun from Griffin's hands.

"It's here," he announced after a few minutes. "Keep driving, to the garage."

They entered a mansion in Santa Monica. Leaving the car, Griffin distracted himself for a second, while he unlocked a door that lead to the basement. Mona decided to take that one chance, she went for his left arm, trying to disarm him.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

Griffin turned around abruptly, hitting her in the forehead with the gun's handle. As blood started streaming down her face from a cut, Mona felt dizzy from the blow. Her entire body was weak. She was about to pass out.

"Get up," he forced her to stand up again, holding her tightly to support her body.

They started walking down a stair. Mona had difficult to keep balance, almost falling several times. Griffin opened another door, the light inside made her eyes hurt. Through the unsteady vision, she managed to distinguish as a laboratory.

"There's she, dad," he announced, releasing her from his grip. Mona fell on the ground. "It was a lot of work to get her, but I kinda had fun."

"Mona!" She heard a familiar voice, distantly. "What have you done to her?"

"Allison..." Mona mumbled, noticing she approached.

"O-Oh my god! Y-You're going to be okay... it's only a concussion... I'm going to take care of you."

Feeling her touch was a confirmation Mona wasn't hallucinating. She fought a smile.

"Allison, get up!" Griffin yelled. "You're my fiancée and you're coming with me."

"Over my dead body!" Allison argued.

"If you don't come with me, I'm gonna kill her right now, in front of you."

He drew his gun again.

Mona felt a kiss on her cheek. A few tears dropped from Allison's eyes, getting mixed with the blood on her face.

"I'm coming back," Allison whispered. "Stay strong."

"Allison, I..." Mona tried to speak, but it was too late, Griffin had grabbed Allison by the shoulders, dragging her away. She still could her cries and appeals getting distant. Until they were completely silenced. A moment later, a male voice spoke.

"It seems like it's only you and me now."

----------

Looking at the sky, starting to show the first rays of morning, Allison couldn't stop crying. Her thoughts were driving her to insanity. What would Dr. Carlson do with Mona now? And Detective Wheeler... she wondered if the Carlsons had found a way to silence him too.

"Stop crying," Griffin told her, as they arrived at the airport in his father's car. "People will notice."

She scowled at him, before opening a false grin.

"You have no idea how happy I am to be here, my love," she said, ironically.

"Watch your tone. Act more natural."

A private jet was already waiting for them. As they passed through the airport, Allison desperately looked into people's eyes, attempting to show signs she was being taken against her will. She looked at the police officers, hoping they'd have more knowledge to read her signs.

Nobody noticed. Within minutes, she was inside the jet in Griffin's company.

"What do you plan to do when we arrive?" Allison asked.

Griffin didn't answer. She insisted.

"Are you going to kill me? If you are, just do it. Save me from the pain of looking at this disgusting playboy face of yours."

"I'm making you my wife. And we'll be happy, have our house and children, the way it was always supposed to be."

Allison let out a sarcastic laugh.

"God, you're completely crazy. How didn't I notice before?"

"I'm not crazy, Allison. You were letting your feelings for that criminal get in our way. But now she's gone, you'll finally have eyes for me."

"You won't be able to imprison me forever," Allison argued. "Someday I'm going to escape. And I'll go back to Mona again. She's the one I always loved, just deal with it."

"Don't waste your time," Griffin smirked. "At this time, my dad has probably gotten rid of her already."

Allison swallowed hard, wondering what Griffin meant by that. She remembered the shape Mona was in last time she saw her, barely conscious. She wouldn't be able to do nothing to save herself in that state. Her eyes filled with tears.

"Champagne?" Griffin smiled again, getting himself a drink.

Allison needed a plan to return and warn the police. Griffin was cold, selfish and had a big ego, that was his strongest weakness. She needed to appeal to this side of him. She walked closer, embracing him from behind.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm kinda shaken up after finding out about the performance enhancers. But... if you could make me understand, if you proved that you really love me..."

"Oh Allison," he started telling. "It's my father's biggest project. He's so proud of his findings, about how he could help these young guys to accomplish their goals. It's a great source of income too."

"Really? Maybe you can show me when we arrive. I'll be glad to help you in this research, if it's so important to you and your dad."

Griffin smiled, looking straight into her eyes. Allison needed to keep acting.

"I... Mona really messed up with my head. She seduced me, then convinced me to break up with you."

"Did she?" He turned around, raising his eyebrow, interested to hear.

"She's not even half of the person you are. How could I even consider leaving you, with such a successful career and a wealthy life..." Allison caressed his chest, "for her. A former criminal, that can't even get herself a job."

"Now you're coming back to your senses. I bought you something, to prove you my love."

He took a small box from his pocket, containing a ring even more expensive than the first one. Allison opened a grin, before kissing his lips passionately. Her hands traveled down to his waist, searching for his gun. Discreetly, Allison took it.

"Stop this fucking jet right now," she pushed him away and pointed the pistol at him.

"Allison, what are you doing? Give it back."

"No. And if you take another step, I swear I'll shoot you."

"Fuck! We were going so well!"

Griffin grabbed her wrists, trying to retrieve the gun from her hands. Allison elbowed him hard in the stomach. He pushed her to the floor, pinning her down.

"Allison, stop... you're gonna kill us... give me the gun..."

"Never!" She kept fighting, resisting to let the pistol go.

A loud bang echoed in the entire jet. Griffin stood up, looking at Allison in horror.

"L-Look what you've done. I... I didn't..."

She didn't really notice what was going on until her shoulder started to burn in pain. She had been hit.

"Hmfff..."

Allison winced in pain. But she couldn't let it prevent her from stopping the jet and return to save Mona. Mona risked her life for her, multiple times. She owed her everything.

"Let me check it," Griffin approached. "It seems to have just grazed your shoulder."

That was an opportunity she couldn't miss. Ignoring the pain completely, she kicked him hardly between his legs.

"Your bitch!" He screamed. "I knew I shouldn't have trusted you."

Allison wasted no time. As he was vulnerable, she hit him with a punch in the nose and several other kicks. When he dropped the pistol, she grabbed it again.

"Lay on the floor," she ordered.

Griffin lunged in her direction, ready to attack her again. Allison aimed, closed her eyes and pulled the trigger.

"Nooooo," he cried loud in pain. She opened her eyes, confirming she had successfully shot his knee, what should be enough to slow him down.

While he was on the floor, Allison tied both of his hands behind his back, immobilizing him as the jet made its way back to the airport. When it landed, the police was already waiting to arrest Griffin. Detective Wheeler was also there.

"Allison! You're hurt, oh my god."

"It was nothing, dad."

"How didn't I noticed the monsters these men were?" He wiped some tears from her cheeks.

"How did you find me anyways?" Allison asked.

"This kid named Leon, he called me. Ask me to meet him in Gramercy Park. After I watched that video, I went home to find you and Mona, but... I only found her car. When you called me, saying you were leaving to New Zealand, I already knew you were in danger."

"Dad," Allison began to sob in his arms. "W-We need to go. I think Dr. Carlson did something to Mona... last time I saw her, she was not okay..."

"I'll ask a team to rescue her. I'm taking you to a hospital."

"No! I'm going with you."

----------

After passing out for a while, Mona finally woke up. Her head still hurt, though it felt a lot better. Her vision was also back to normal and she regained some strength. Attempting to get up, she noticed her arms and legs were restrained to a hospital bed. Her vitals were also being displayed on a monitor.

"You finally woke up," Dr. Carlson said, working behind a desk. "I was beginning to get worried."

"What do you want from me, psycho?" She asked.

"I was hoping you could help me."

"Tell me your price."

"My performance enhancer," he came to her direction with a syringe in hands. "I need to conduct some final tests before leaving to New Zealand."

Mona remained silent. Still confused by the concussion, she tried to remember what Krista explained to Brian in the previous night.

"I injected you a small amount. Unfortunately, you showed no sensitivity."

"Yeah, unfortunately. Dying for drug usage is all I ever wanted."

"I'd like to study better this side effects. But..." he rolled up her jacket's sleeve. "I still can test what happens to the body for overuse."

"No," Mona thrashed on the bed, attempting to free herself. "Let me go, you bastard!"

"I can't, my dear. You know too much."

He held her arm still, inserting the needle in her veins. The content made Mona feel a tingling sensation all over her arm.

"Don't worry, it won't last too long," Dr. Carlson assured her. "I made a concentrated sample to test on you."

Mona relaxed her body, letting her head rest on the pillow. She thought about her mom. Right now she should be flying back to New York. She didn't even had a chance to say goodbye or tell her how much she loved her.

And Allison... this time she failed to protect her. Griffin took her to New Zealand, where he'd probably keep her captive and do her the most horrible things. She should've told her how she felt back in Gramercy Park, or even in the very first day, when they met at the hospital.

A single tear escaped from her eyes. Dr. Carlson watched her expectantly behind his table, just waiting for her body to start to collapse.

"See, my dear?" He smiled. "You shouldn't have tried to play tough against me. You may have a reputation, but me... I'm an expert playing this game."

"Wrong, doctor. I knew you could play dirty. I made several copies of that flash drive... you're going down. I won."

Even if he hid it too well, Mona could see her words caused an impact on him.

Her heart rate began to get unstable, causing some discomfort.

"We're almost there," Dr. Carlson laughed, satisfied. "After you die, I'm placing your body in Griffin's car. I'll abandon it somewhere, and when the police find you, they'll think you committed suicide, after failing to resist your old habits."

His laughs were muffled by the laboratory's door slamming open. Mona raised her head, expecting it to be the police but...

"Get away from my daughter, your son of a bitch!"

"David?" She was surprised to see her father, especially armed. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm saving you. You accidentally called me last night, I heard the entire altercation you had with his son. Then, I tracked his location by the keychain in your pocket. All of them have an integrated GPS to prevent theft."

“To be saved by daddy,” Mona rolled her eyes. “One less item in my bucket list.”

“Save your sarcasm for later, okay?” David helped her to get rid of the restraints. “We have to go.”

"Can you call an ambulance? He... he injected a lot of his drug on me."

"Right now."

As David requested an ambulance, Mona looked at the door, where Dr. Carlson was ready to escape.

"David!" She yelled. "He's running away."

"Oh no, he isn't," he turned around, pointing his gun at Dr. Carlson.

Without thinking twice, Mona's father pulled the trigger, shooting Dr. Carlson's hand and preventing him from opening the door.

"Nice shot," Mona said.

"Uh... It was accidental." David lamented, while he kept Dr. Carlson immobilized.

Mona attempted to sit down, but the effort only made her feel worse. She had trouble breathing and her heart seemed to be exploding inside her chest.

"Hey, stay put. The ambulance will be here in a minute. You need to stay calm, breath in and out slowly."

She did as David said, but it was useless, she felt suffocated. Dr. Carlson started laughing.

"You're too late, David. Her body is failing. It's a matter of minutes before she..."

David silenced the doctor with a punch on his jaw.

"Badass," Mona smiled to her father.

"Not as much as you."

The door opened and a group of cops entered the laboratory, immediately handcuffing Dr. Carlson and taking him under arrest. Together with them, Mona spotted Detective Wheeler and Allison.

"Mona!" Allison rushed to her, in tears. "Y-You're going to be okay. The ambulance is here, they're taking you to the hospital. I'll be with you, okay?"

"Allison," Mona squeezed her hand tightly, "He... injected me... a lethal dose. But... I’m glad to see you.”

"You'll get tired of seeing me soon. We'll never be apart again, not even for a minute. And there's our celebration, remember? There's a question you wanted to ask me."

"Our celebration is officially cancelled... I..."

"Don't you even dare to say that," Allison pressed a kissed on her lips. “Everything will be alright this time. Nothing or no one will separate us.”

"I know I... I suck at his, but... I love you," Mona said as they parted.

Allison smiled, caressing her cheek. She was about to say something but Mona couldn’t hear it. Reality became too distant, as she fell unconscious.

----------

Allison followed to the hospital in the ambulance. The paramedics did all the procedures to revert Mona's cardiac arrest, but she was still highly unstable. She could no longer see her when they arrived at the hospital.

After having her shoulder patched, she sat down at the waiting room with her dad and Mona's. Her mother arrived shortly, crying desperately and blaming each one of them, especially Mr. Wheeler.

Some time later, she went searching for anybody that could inform her about Mona's state, being closer to her fighting parents was only making her more anxious and insecure. A doctor she previously worked with, during her internship, invited her in to his office. He explained Mona was given an antidote, but her vitals were still unstable and she also had a seizure.

"What are her chances?" Allison asked, holding herself to not cry.

"It was a very concentrated sample of the drug. Dr. Carlson really intended to kill her."

"But... she can pull through, can't she?"

"Allison," the doctor sighed. "It's up to her body to react now and succeed to expel the drug from her system. But considering she went through a surgery lately... her health is kinda fragile."

He didn't know Mona so well as she did. Allison knew how strong she was. She'd fight until the end to survive. She was sure of it.

She entered the room, where Mona was lying in bed, unconscious and with a lot of wires plugged on her body, to monitor her vitals and help her to breath.

Allison grabbed her hand and whispered softly.

"Please, Mona. Come back to me. You didn't even give me a chance to say it back but... I love you too."

----------

Note: Don't worry, I won't be pulling the PB on Mona. Our cinnamon roll deserves only the happiest ending.

#ride or die #mona #mona rod #mona x mc #playchoices #choices stories you play #ride or die fanfiction

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scratchybeardsweetmouth · 5 years

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Game of Thrones’ Iain Glen on the fiery finale and saying goodbye to Emilia Clarke

Game of Thrones is coming. And as the world’s most popular TV show gears up for its fiery finale, Iain Glen – aka Ser Jorah Mormont – explains what life in Westeros is really like. ‘Tits and dragons’ and all… By Chris Harvey 23 March 2019 Photos by Frank Allias

Put under a read more because I included almost the entire article. It Is quite long:

[...] One abiding memory of Glen will be from the last season, when Jorah, infected with the slow-creeping but deadly greyscale, bites down on a leather strap as the thick, scaly layer that covers his torso is cut away piece by piece with a scalpel. It may not have been his most nuanced performance but the agony on his face made it impossible to look away. ‘I was pretty spaced out,’ he tells me. The prosthetic took eight hours to apply – it had underlayers that would ooze pus and blood as it was sawn off – so Glen had to be on the filming base at 11pm, have make-up applied all night and then shoot a 12-hour day. ‘After what it required, the acting became quite easy,’ he says. We’re in a photographic studio near the Thames. Glen biked here from his home in south London. ‘I’m addicted to cycling,’ he says. He will even cycle to red-carpet events and park his bike around the corner. ‘I find it a very sterile atmosphere being in the back of a limo… and [cycling] is quicker. I duck and dive, and I’m not somebody who will wait endlessly at a red traffic light. I go up one-way streets the wrong way, too.’ He looks fit and lightly tanned. He was at home in Dulwich, where he lives with his partner, actor Charlotte Emmerson, and their two children, Mary, 11, and Juliet, six, when the scripts for the final season of Game of Thrones landed in September 2017. ‘Security around the series has got more and more fierce,’ he says, ‘to the point where nothing was allowed on printed paper throughout the whole season.’ It could only be accessed online, with extensive security protocols – it wasn’t even allowed on the cast’s own devices. ‘There was a bit of resistance from actors to that,’ he adds, ‘particularly of an older generation.’ He performs a convincing harrumph – ‘“I need to look at my lines, how can I possibly…?”’ When he read the scripts, ‘I felt, “they’ve done it, they’ve pulled it off”,’ he says, ‘that balance of satiating people’s desire for things to be complete, but leaving enough questions in the air for people to try to project forward what world will follow, individually for all the characters and universally for the world that Thrones has occupied.’ Sadness at the end of ‘the best ride in the world’, after almost 10 years of the show, was tangible at the read-through of the series with all of the main cast in Belfast 10 days later. ‘There’s a real sense of loss, it’s like a family… there were lots of tears because it was coming to an end, but real excitement and joy that we were going to shoot it.’ As characters died within the story as they read, it felt to Glen and others as if they were really being lost. ‘We’ve all grown very close to each other.’ The filming would prove to be punishing. An enormous battle scene involving many of the key characters, pitched against the Night King’s invading Army of the Dead, was shot at the set of the fictional castle of Winterfell, in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. It took 11 weeks of night shoots in sub-freezing temperatures, enduring rain, mud, high winds and ‘sheep s—’. Glen has described it as ‘a real test, really miserable’. [...] Young actors like Kit Harington (Jon Snow) and Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) ‘are made’ by being in the show, Glen says. His storyline has been joined to Clarke’s almost from the start. What was their parting like in real life? ‘We’re friends and we’ll always be friends,’ he says. ‘Emilia went through an extraordinary story arc for herself as a person, and her character. I saw her as a nervous young actress, who had just got this big gig and everyone, [from] directors [down], was saying, “Is this the right actor? Is this how she should look? Does the wig look right?” It’s an incredible amount of pressure and I saw this young girl cope with it incredibly well.’ ‘She did ask for guidance and invariably I was saying, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” Emilia’s very gifted, she really has no idea how good she is – she remains very vulnerable but it’s not a destructive vulnerability, it keeps her very focused… She’s [also] a very altruistic, warm person, who was the great generator of social life during Thrones. I’ll always keep an eye on what she’s doing and take pride in it.’ In the series, Ser Jorah is in love with Daenerys. Although Clarke’s character was aged up from the books for TV (in George RR Martin’s novels, she is in her early teens) fans have worked out that Daenerys can still only be 16 or 17 at the start of the show (Clarke was 22 at the time of the first season). ‘There was a point when it was definitely unrequited sexual love,’ Glen says, ‘but I think there’s always been a reciprocated love without the physicality.’ Given that Ser Jorah is in his mid-40s in the show and Glen is now 57, is his love for Daenerys age-appropriate? ‘You have to say that there’s a lot in Thrones that’s not “appropriate”,’ he returns, ‘but it feels plausible for a very different period.’ At the end of season one, Daenerys emerged from her husband’s funeral pyre unburnt and naked, with three newly hatched dragons. I wonder how Glen feels about former cast member Ian McShane’s contention that the show is ‘just tits and dragons’? ‘If tits and dragons is a negative, it doesn’t seem to stop it being a massive hit, does it?’ he says. He accepts that ‘there might have been a degree of HBO trying to arrest people’s attention, and you could accuse The Sopranos of doing that as well – there were tits and violence but there was a psychology that was underlying the whole thing.’ He thinks it might have been overstated in the first season of Thrones, in ‘putting everything on the line’ to establish the world, but says he has never felt concern about the many controversial scenes in the show, from sadistic sexual fantasies to rape. ‘At the end of the day, you can choose to watch or not to watch. When I look at history, at things that have taken place in real life that are just awful, I think there is room for dramas that try to depict that, so I’m not into censoring. I never felt things were gratuituous… Violence wise, it’s never bothered me.’ After filming their final scene, each of the main cast members was presented with a drawn storyboard from the making of the show. Glen’s depicted the bloody gladiatorial battle Jorah fought to win back Daenerys’s favour in season five. It was shot in the bullring of Osuna, in Andalusia, southern Spain, and had special memories for him. His family were with him, and the director took his daughter Mary, then seven, into the make-up tent to get blood all over her face ‘so she looked like Daddy’, then had her shout ‘action’ and ‘cut’ for the scene. After the presentation speech by writers David Benioff and DB Weiss, Glen says he was in floods of tears. Glen, who also has a son, Finlay, 22, from his first marriage to actor Susannah Harker, says he adores being a father. ‘I keep producing children… it imbues your life with a great amount of fun and magic and exhaustion. I have to be away working sometimes, and if I could I would have them with me all the time, because being woken up by a child, or having to wake up a child and deal with the minutiae and a lot of the boring crap, just having those eyes looking at you full of discovery... I love it.’ 'I always think it’s a woman’s prerogative,’ he adds, ‘I think my lady is now done on the kids and that’s fine, but I would always have more.’ He breaks off to take a call from her. As a boy himself, growing up in Edinburgh (he has two older brothers, Hamish and Graham) he was equal parts shy and extrovert, he says, and had no sense of danger. He would happily crawl out of a very high window and climb along gutters. His escapades saw him hospitalised a few times. He was adept at pretending to fall over and hurt himself – ‘I could even do it for you now.’ He still has an earring in his left ear, which he pierced himself with a pin, aged 12. ‘Dad refused to take me to the golf club unless I took it out. I thought, “F— it, I’m not going then. No.”’ His investment banker father paid for him to attend the independent Edinburgh Academy, but he had to stay on to try to improve his grades, then got the same ones again. He managed to get into Aberdeen University to study Russian, where he discovered the joy of drama and dropped out to go to Rada. He studied alongside Ralph Fiennes, Jane Horrocks, Imogen Stubbs and Jason Watkins, but still walked away with the top acting prize for his year, the Bancroft Gold Medal, previously won by the likes of Mark Rylance, Fiona Shaw and Kenneth Branagh. Glen built an acclaimed stage career alongside early TV roles, but has always managed to mix blockbuster paydays – for films such as Tomb Raider (2001) and the Resident Evil franchise – with more personal work. As Thrones’ popularity has grown, salaries have risen exponentially, with the top-end cast paid a reported $500,000 per episode (around £380,000). He notes that it’s a flat fee for a season, however many episodes you’re in. Have the rewards felt life-changing? ‘No, not really,’ he says. ‘I’ve always been lucky and busy as an actor.’ Glen experienced the negative side of press attention when his first marriage broke up in the early 2000s. Some of it was ‘intrusive’, he says – questions that related to the fact that he ‘sailed close to another relationship,’ which was [that of] Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. ‘I did a two-handed play with Nicole, which was about a sexual relationship.’ The play was David Hare’s adaption of La Ronde, The Blue Room, which famously featured Kidman’s nude bottom and Glen performing naked cartwheels. It led, perhaps inevitably, to tabloid rumours of an affair between Glen and Kidman, whose marriage ended around the same time. Glen has always denied it, but it ensured that his separation from Harker was played out in public. ‘Compared to what some people have to deal with, it was fine,’ he says. ‘But you have a lot of eyes on you and pressure on you, when you just want to deal with your own private life.’ There’s generally no other downside to fame, he notes (‘My wife says it’s like getting your bottom patted every day’), although he will politely refuse to pose for selfies if he is with his family. Game of Thrones’ vast, global appeal means that he was once even surrounded by fans while visiting a township in South Africa. [...]

#iain glen #iain glen interview #interview #the telegraph #long interview but a great read #some got stuff are #he remains friends with emilia #the storyboard he received was the gladiatorial scene #he was in tears at the presentation speech by david and dan #because he remembers that his family was with him during filming #and that his daughter had cuts from make-up #and she was able to shout Action and Cut for the scene #also this wonderful article could have used a better title lol

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vernonfielding · 5 years

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Life Writes Its Own Stories

Chapter 9. (AO3)

By mutual agreement, they declared a ban on “fancy” dates, which were defined as anything requiring a tie (for him) or high heels (for her) or financial gymnastics (for both of them). “I just don’t think we’re that kind of couple,” Amy said. “I just don’t think I have more than a dollar in my bank account,” Jake said. He could tell she thought he was joking and he was disinclined to correct her, for the time being.

So they got creative.

Amy treated him to a picnic at their fountain in Prospect Park, with Italian subs from the deli that he said was his favorite but never went to because his third favorite was closer to the precinct.

She took him to the T-rex exhibit at the natural history museum and made out with him in a dim corner of the gem room, where they got caught by a trio of middle-schoolers on a field trip who followed them around the rest of the afternoon.

She dragged him to the button store near Bryant Park, so he could experience the insanity of an entire shop with nothing but buttons. She’d loved visiting the store as a child with her mother, she said to him, and just as she had when she was young, she filled a silky pouch with mismatched buttons, picked out by both of them. She told him to keep it, and he stuffed it in his sock drawer, then changed his mind and set it on his bedside table instead. On nights he wasn’t with her, he’d hold it in his hand while he messed around on his phone or watched TV; the slip and slide of the buttons through the cloth, the gentle clacking sound they made, was soothing to him.

Jake took her to his go-to thrift store for undercover attire, and made Amy buy clothes for her alter ego, Eldora Senegal, and he picked out something for Pineapples, and they wore their costumes to a shady bar near his apartment and day drank and fell asleep on his couch at 8 p.m. on a Saturday.

He led her on a midnight crime tour of Brooklyn, and the next morning he bought her breakfast sandwiches from the sketchy looking bodega across the street from his apartment, and she said they were the best she’d ever had.

He took her to a kids’ soccer game at Prospect Park, where they set up cheap folding chairs and shared a bag of peanuts and drank PBRs out of paper bags, and each of them picked a team – the winner got to control the TV for two weeks. They got aggressively, perhaps inappropriately, competitive, and in the lulls between plays, Jake told her about the one season he’d played soccer as a kid, after his dad had left and he’d quit Little League. And she didn’t look at him with pity or indulgence, just smiled softly and brushed her thumb over his cheek, then screamed at the goalie on her team for diving the wrong way on a shot.

Amy figured out pretty quickly that Jake was kind of a slob and that it was true she’d have to get used to him showing up late for dates or canceling last-minute when he got stuck on a case. Eventually he had to tell her about the crushing debt, when she gently suggested he might need a new mattress. Her eyes grew wide with alarm, and for the first time he felt he’d disappointed her and it was awful. But then the dismay on her face shifted to something more like fond exasperation – the same look when she saw the stacks of unwashed cereal bowls in his kitchen sink or when he showed up for dinner with his hair still wet from a precinct shower – and honestly, that wasn’t so bad.

Jake learned Amy was a terrible cook and a nerd about word games and kind of a control freak, and that she was prone to absurd bouts of stubbornness when she was having a bad day. He could always tell when the Times or some other newspaper had beat her on a story because she would refuse any help or small kindness from him for the rest of the day, even if it was just opening a door for her or offering to pick up takeout before coming over.

And he found that she’d meant it when she said her career was her priority, which wasn’t to say he ever felt pushed aside, or like she took him for granted. But she worked as many nights as he did, and though she didn’t often go into the newsroom on weekends she almost always had her police scanner on low at her apartment and she obsessively checked Twitter for breaking news.

“I have a new rule,” he said to her one lazy afternoon, as he came up behind her and pressed a kiss to the side of her neck. She was sitting at her kitchen table, working on the Sunday Times crossword puzzle; her phone sat next to the paper, buzzing at irregular intervals.

She angled her head to expose more of her neck and said, distracted, “What’s that?”

“Turn off Twitter notifications.”

She stiffened and looked over her shoulder at him. “Are you crazy?”

Jake sighed and sat next to her. “You’re making me a little crazy, Ames.”

She assessed him, eyes narrowed. “I’ll turn off 30 percent of the notifications.”

“Deal.” He leaned over and they kissed, a promise, and she turned back to her puzzle. “Also, no more scanner during sexy times.”

“Now you’ve gone too far, Peralta,” she said. But then she got up and turned off the scanner humming low in the corner, and straddled him in the chair. So yeah, he knew she had her priorities just right.

+++

A month after they started dating, they went to Gina’s dance recital in Queens, where they sat in the last row in the dark and whistled and cheered at her solo moves. When it was over they dropped off flowers for her with someone backstage but they didn’t stick around to say hi. Gina didn’t know they were dating, and Jake wasn’t entirely opposed to telling her, but he wasn’t sure how she would react, if she’d be angry or happy for him or just bored by the news.

A few days later, Jake was at Shaw’s with Rosa after an especially dumb day chasing scooter thieves – “We should just let them go, they’re doing the city a favor,” Jake said. “Yep,” Rosa said. They caught the guys two hours later – when someone called out “Jakey!”

He looked up and saw Amy at the same moment he spotted Charles, who was waving and pointing crazily at Jake. Amy’s jaw dropped and Jake was convinced for a second that he’d been roofied because it was the only way to explain these people all in one place at the same time. Then Rosa hit him.

“Dude, why is your girlfriend here?”

For a second Jake wasn’t sure if she was referring to Amy or Charles, but he knew Rosa would never make fun of someone’s masculinity and he felt bad about the thought even crossing his mind. “How did you know?”

“You’re super obvious,” Rosa said.

Then Charles and Amy had crossed the room and were standing at their table, and Charles was saying something about how he thought they’d be perfect together and he’d been trying to make this happen for so long and what did they think, was it a love connection? And Rosa said, “Shut up, man, they’re already dating.”

Charles looked wildly between them before his knees buckled and he fell into a chair that was conveniently just under him. Rosa pushed her beer across the table to him and he picked it up and finished it in one go.

“I’m Rosa,” Rosa said to Amy.

“Amy,” Amy said.

“I can’t believe this,” Charles said.

“Seriously, how do you know everyone I work with?” Amy sat down next to Jake and stole his beer.

It was like this, Jake told her: He’d met Charles five years ago, when Charles’ ex-wife had been holding his sperm hostage and Charles had filed a complaint, and the case had been too obviously insane for Jake to not take it. He’d known Charles’ job had something to do with editing but he hadn’t realized he worked at the Bulletin.

“How can you not know that?” Amy said.

“We kind of only ever talk about my job,” Jake said.

Charles nodded agreeably. “Jake’s work is way more interesting than mine.”

“Oh, and we talk about food. Super gross food.”

“Also true,” Charles said.

When Rosa got up to get more drinks and Charles got up to ask about the Shaw’s selection of balsam liqueurs (“None. I’m sure it’s none,” Jake told him, but Charles wanted to check anyway), Jake turned to Amy and kissed her, firm but fast, and said, “You need to get out of here.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, but this is a cop bar and there are so many people watching us and-” He flapped his hand around weakly, because he didn’t want to have to say it.

“And you can’t be seen with me,” she finished for him.

It was too loud and too dark in the bar for him to read her, but his heart seized up at the words. “It’s not that I don’t want to-”

“Jake, it’s okay,” Amy said. She took his hand and squeezed it, then quickly let him go and stood. “I’ll grab Charles and get him to take me home. Call me later?”

She wasn’t even annoyed when he called that night, perched on the edge of his bed with his shoes still on, prepared to go to her if she was mad or upset or just sad.

“I get it,” she said.

He flopped back on his bed. “I don’t think I deserve you.”

She laughed and said he probably didn’t. “Also, you are definitely taking me and Rosa out to dinner soon and no, I don’t care about your debt, because I didn’t have time to win her over tonight,” Amy said.

Jake was too crazy about her to argue.

+++

The second weekend of November was cold and drizzly and gray, the perfect weather for staying inside all day with a week’s worth of notes to transcribe and catalogue and a man to send out for snacks as needed. But it was also the weekend that Amy was going to introduce Jake to her family, or some of them: David was having a barbecue at his Flatbush apartment.

They were swarmed within a few minutes of their arrival, and Jake was introduced to three of her seven brothers all at once, though he’d met some of them before, just not as their sister’s boyfriend.

And that was what she called him. “This is my boyfriend, Jake,” she said to Manny, the fourth brother in attendance, who was supervising the grill in the backyard (Amy was never not going to be annoyed that David had managed to find an affordable apartment in Brooklyn with an actual backyard). The “boyfriend” probably wasn’t necessary because she had her arm looped through Jake’s when she said it and she went up on her toes to kiss his cheek. But she liked saying it, and Jake beamed when he heard it.

“You’re with the Nine-Nine, right?” Manny reached out a hand to shake, then dug into the ice chest at his feet and handed over two Tecates. “Only the best for Amy and her boyfriend.”

Jake chuckled and popped open the beer, briefly tapping his can against Manny’s and Amy’s before taking a sip. “Isn’t it a little cold for a barbecue?”

“It’s fucking freezing, but David’s boyfriend asked for our mom’s pollo asado for his birthday, and Mom can’t resist David, so-”

“Wait, Mom’s here?” Amy said, her voice gone high-pitched as she looked all around the backyard.

“She’s in the kitchen. David didn’t tell you?” Manny sounded genuinely surprised, but Amy could tell by the look on his face that he found the situation hilarious.

“He did not,” Amy said, her grip tightening around Jake’s arm.

Jake was looking a little panicked but obviously trying not to show it. “Is your dad here too?”

Manny busted up laughing and slapped him on the shoulder. “No, man, you’re safe for tonight.” He nodded his head toward the house. “Go inside and talk to her, sis. I’ll keep Peralta occupied.”

Amy glanced at Jake and he gave her a small nod and a kiss on the forehead. She squeezed his arm and then let go, squared her shoulders, and walked toward the backdoor.

She hadn’t yet told her mom she was dating anyone, let alone a cop. Family politics such as they were, she was afraid that bringing an NYPD detective home was going to be instantly divisive, solidifying her place on Team Cop and firmly pitted against Team Not-Cops, which was led by Camila Santiago – loving mother of eight, champion of the people, and vice president of her neighborhood chapter of Black Lives Matter.

Bringing Jake to David’s barbecue had been a calculated move on Amy’s part. She’d counted on a gentle Santiago initiation, an opportunity for him to gain a few allies before meeting the rest of the family. Leave it to David to foil her plans, again.

She found him in the kitchen, chopping cilantro and singing along with a showtune she vaguely recognized. Amy hissed in his ear, “You did this on purpose.”

“Amita! You made it!”

Amy punched him in the arm. “Do not call me that, traitor.”

“Amy! My only daughter, come here.” Her mom crossed the kitchen and swept Amy in a hug, kissing both of her cheeks. She smelled faintly of garlic and chilis, and the floral-scented face powder she’d been using as long as Amy could remember.

“Mom, I’m sorry I haven’t called-”

“You’re very busy, I understand.” She held Amy at arm’s length, looking her up and down, and then peered over her shoulder toward the backyard. “David told me your boyfriend was coming.”

Amy could practically feel David smirking at them. “He’s in the backyard.” She took a deep breath and let it out all at once. “Mom, Jake’s a detective. In the NYPD.”

“So David said.”

“It wasn’t like I planned to date a cop, it just happened,” Amy said, in a rush. “I don’t want you to think I’m choosing sides. And I don’t want you to hate him. He’s really great, Mom. If you just give him a chance-”

But her mom was laughing. “Mija, I married a cop. And I happen to love your father very much.”

Amy stared, dumbstruck, because somehow that very important detail hadn’t occurred to her.

“Come,” her mother said, tucking her arm through Amy’s and steering them toward the backyard, “let’s go meet Jake.”

Amy smiled, and she wasn’t even annoyed – much – at the smug look on David’s face when she caught his eye. At the top of the stairs down to the yard, Amy’s mom stopped her and just looked her over again, long enough that Amy felt a blush rise to her cheeks.

“Mom?”

“I’m proud of you,” her mother said. “I know I don’t say it enough.”

Amy felt her eyes fill and didn’t trust herself to speak. Her mom stroked her hair, tugging a little at the ends, and said, “You need a haircut.” Amy laughed, and she pulled her mom forward to introduce her to her boyfriend.

CHAPTER 10

#b99 fic #peraltiago #jake and amy au #newspaper au #life writes its own stories

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