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hd-wireless · 4 years

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🎶 H/D WIRELESS FEST - REVEALS 🎶

At last, the day you’ve been waiting for! It’s the REVEALS!

Come check out the talented people who created your favourite Wireless fics and artworks!

Massive thanks once again to all the 54 creators of our 64 works (yes some people created multiple works! Special mention to cloudlesslysky who wrote FIVE fics!). And thanks also to all the readers, betas and supporters of H/D Wireless! It’s been a bumper year!

Without further ado...

🎶 H/D Wireless Art 🎶

📻 Stuck on the Bridge Between Us (G) by pygmy_puffy @pygmy-puffy

🎵 Song prompt: Talk Me Down by Troye Sivan

🎵 Summary: finding the courage within themselves to be vulnerable, so they can stop hurting the other and start loving each other as they so deeply want and need to

📻 So Let's Dance, Take a Chance, Understand Me (T) by Dazed_and_Inked @dazedandinked

🎵 Song prompt: T.Rex, Get It On

🎵 Summary: The War is over and everything has changed.

He really likes the small bar down the road, a place that serves cheap, awful drinks and plays good old classics. It’s always crammed with people talking, laughing or dancing along with the riff of electric guitars.

From the first time he crossed the threshold, Harry thought it was perfect, the right mix of noise and warmth to be alone without feeling alone. Just what he needed.

He couldn’t imagine that someone else was there for the very same reason, looking for a place where the Dark Mark was only a tattoo.

Blame it on the alcohol, on the music or whatever you want, but when Harry’s eyes landed on Draco’s slim figure, swaying on the dancefloor, something warm and inexplicable possessed him.

📻 The Pass (T) by julchen_in_red @julcheninred

🎵 Song prompt: The Pass, by Rush

🎵 Summary: Draco, lost in darkness, seeks a guiding light.

📻 If you knew… (T) by gnarf @gnarf

🎵 Song prompt: Young Folks from Peter Bjorn and John

🎵 Summary: The war had left scars on all of them. Some were obvious. Some only if they looked closely. But the worst ones were those they couldn't see. Those that were hidden inside.

📻 an ode to the boy i love (G) by nettleforest @nettleforest

🎵 Song prompt: Animal - Troye Sivan

🎵 Summary: an evocation of vulnerability, trust and tenderness

📻 Home Sweet Home (G) by gnarf @gnarf

🎵Song prompt: Radioactive - Imagine Dragons

🎵 Summary: In the middle of a Zombie apocalypse Harry made it his main goal to find a safe home for Draco and himself.

📻 Turn back time (T) bt erlasart @erlasart

🎵 Song prompt: If I Could Turn Back Time - Cher

🎵 Summary: Draco's had a rough few years, if that's what you call falling in with a bad lot, attempted murder and a close brush with death. Now facing the weight of his misdeeds, Draco tries to pinpoint when it all went wrong.

📻 Time to Get Out (T) by SoldSeperately @secretartlair

🎵 Song prompt: My House - PVRIS

🎵 Summary: A few years post-war, Pansy convinces Draco to go on a night out at a muggle club. They run into some familiar faces.

🎶 H/D Wireless Art and Fic 🎶

📻 A Different Kind of Meaning (E, 17k) by p103 @p103 (art by Zigster)

🎵 Song prompt: Outnumbered - Dermot Kennedy

🎵 Summary: The ceiling doesn't hold any answers, but there are cobwebs scattered across the corners with shadows tangled in their threads. The rug against his back is rough and scratchy, threadbare and devoid of colours other than various shades of brown. Harry takes it all in, absorbs the dingy and depressed state of his home. There's a pointed moment of decision, a note about to be played, a silence about to end, and then he rolls to his feet and sets to cleaning.

It's the first constructive thing he's done in years.

📻 Keep Holding On (M, 33k) by gnarf @gnarf (fic) and MaesterChill @maesterchill (art)

🎵 Song prompt: Welshly Arms - Sanctuary

🎵 Summary: After the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry and Draco both fall into their own battles with their mental states. Draco is sent to Azkaban, and Harry turns to drinking, hoping to forget.

Months later, Harry visits St Mungo’s new ward on request of a friend, only to find Draco in a deep vegetative state.

Not willing to give him up, Harry stays by his side, while simultaneously dealing with the Ministry's newest grand idea to make everything worse.

Making new alleys, and losing old ones on the way, would hopefully be worth it in the end.

📻 Fic : Modern Love (E, 61k) by tackytiger @tackytigerfic

📻 Art : Our Love Song (G) by chachisoo @creeeee

🎵 Song prompt: Modern Love by David Bowie

🎵 Fic summary: Harry Potter, of all people, knows that life isn’t always fair. And no one gets to be happy all of the time. But surely there’s something more—something better—than a rubbish Ministry job, and a lonely old house, and that feeling that everyone out there is doing a better job of living than Harry is.

And it really doesn’t seem fair that Draco Malfoy is back in Harry’s life, all of a sudden, and even though he’s wandless, and living with Muggles, and making his mother cry with his lifestyle choices, he’s happy. So what's he doing right, that Harry isn’t?

Because things don’t really change, do they? And if Harry can’t be happy, he’ll settle for a good night’s sleep, some posh antiques, and the opportunity to find out what Malfoy has been up to for all these years.

And that’s what starts it all.

🎵 Art summary: Harry and Draco enjoying a Sunday morning bus ride in London.

📻 For the Thousandth Time (T, 14k) by bluefay @thesleepiesthufflepuff (fic) and mehroomiyat (art)

🎵 Song Prompt: Lucky by Aurora

🎵 Summary: When Draco's wand refuses to work after the war, he turns to Harry for help.

📻 Fic : Returning Tides (E, 24.5k) by Zigster @zigster-ao3

📻 Art : Love Will Tear Us Apart (G) by Zigster @zigster-ao3

🎵 Song prompt: Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division

🎵 Fic summary:

Is my timing that flawed? Our respect run so dry? Yet there's still this appeal That we've kept through our lives

🎵 Art summary: Art piece to accompany the fic ‘Returning Tides’, based on the song claim, 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' by Joy Division ***** Harry's brooding while straddling a motorbike. Need I say more?

📻 That Sweet Sweet Craving (E, 33.2k) by TheUltimateUndesirable @ultimateundesirable

🎵 Song prompt: Bleeding Out by Imagine Dragons

🎵 Summary: Harry is miserable living a lie because he thinks being a gay role model is wrong. Fake dates raising money for a charity that ends up putting him in a situation he had never expected. Draco Malfoy appears back in his life by some odd chance trying to flip his world upside down and he isn't sure it's a good thing. Malfoy always worked that way to him. Mental health issues, sex, escaping, and that sweet sweet craving of happiness.

🎶 H/D Wireless Fic 🎶

📻 Follow the Water (T, 38.2k) by xanthippe74 @xanthippe74

🎵 Song prompt: “Follow the Water” by Calexico/Iron & Wine

🎵 Summary: Harry Potter’s life is fine. Maybe a little dull and predictable, but he shouldn’t complain about that, right? When he unexpectedly finds himself at Luna’s house one afternoon, Harry gets invited to join the secret wonderland that she’s creating with a surprising group of friends. Maybe a summer outdoors is just what a former hero needs to bring some zest back into his life.

📻 Life goes not backward (T, 8.8k) by shealwaysreads @shealwaysreads

🎵 Song prompt: Daughter by Loudon Wainwright

🎵 Summary: Harry still isn’t used to gifts, but this one is different.

A story of coming home, finding safe ground, and the wild courage of putting down roots.

Leaving one life behind isn’t always a sacrifice, and sometimes the greatest good comes from embracing the people you love.

📻 The Way We Used To Love (E, 5.3k) by Zzzara @big-draco-energy

🎵 Song prompt: 'Used to Love' by Martin Garrix & Dean Lewis

🎵 Summary: Is there hope when what is not enough for the one happens to be too much for the other?

📻 but if you close your eyes (T, 3.3k) by cloudlesslysky @cloudlesslysky

🎵 Song prompt: Pompeii by Bastille

🎵 Summary: The New Magic Order is trying to take over Wizarding Britain. They're not the Death Eaters, but they're not any better either.

The lines of alliance have shifted, but Harry is still on the front lines working tirelessly to stop them.

📻 Haunt the corner of my eye (T, 23k) by harryromper @harryromper

🎵 Song prompt: Echoes of You - Marianas Trench

🎵 Summary: Harry’s life is very much on track. After a successful career as an Auror, he’s set to become the youngest ever Minister for Magic. But strange things are starting to happen at Grimmauld Place. Items he doesn’t recognise are appearing left and right, and somehow he never feels quite alone. There’s only one thing Harry knows for sure: it has something to do with Draco Malfoy.

📻 Now that the spring is in the air (T, 5.7k) by cloudlesslysky @cloudlesslysky

🎵 Song prompt: Seasons in the Sun by Westlife

🎵 Summary: A surprise attack in Diagon Alley leaves Draco struggling to make peace with the fact that he won't live long enough to experience his own wedding.

📻 Seven Days to Monday (M, 11.7k) by static_abyss @static_abyss

🎵 Song prompt: Say Something - A Great Big World

🎵 Summary: There are seven days before Harry has to meet Draco for the final signing of their divorce papers. It's been months and the surprise at finding nothing but more cold sheets and an empty pillow next to him still catches Harry unaware. He doesn't know where they go from here. Whether it's possible to go anywhere after everything that's happened between them.

📻 Blond Brew (E, 30.4k) by MicheleBlack @micheleblack

🎵 Song prompt: “Blondes” by Waterparks

🎵 Summary: A blond roast with soy milk makes Draco's morning, but a pair of green eyes makes his week.

📻 A Series of Nonsensical Events (T, 12.8k) by CoffeeCurse @coffee-curse

🎵 Song prompt: My Gospel by Charlie Puth

🎵 Summary: Malfoy is up to something. When Harry and the other Aurors are called into a Gringotts break-in and find him the culprit, Harry’s at a total loss.

But things only get weirder from then on.

📻 Ignore the Truth (E, 2.6k) by static_abyss @static_abyss

🎵 Song prompt: Dangerously - Charlie Puth

🎵 Summary: "Longtime on-again-off-again lovers Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy were caught in a compromising position in one the Ministry's lifts yesterday evening. While fans of the couple are optimistic, there's still doubt as to whether or not this particular reconciliation will last. When asked directly about the nature of his relationship with Draco Malfoy, the Boy Who Lived had simply this to say, 'Fuck right off, we're busy.'"

- The Daily Prophet, "Love Is In The Air," 28th Oct. 2005.

📻 Your Daddy Knows (You're A Flame) (E, 27.8k) by Ladderofyears @ladderofyears

🎵 Song prompt: Babyfather by Sade (2010)

🎵 Summary: It's just over a week until Draco's twenty-fifth birthday party and Harry Potter is a busy wizard. Amongst all the excitements of fatherhood, work and friends, Harry realises something special about his husband Draco. He is pregnant with their second, much wanted baby.

There's only one problem: Draco is entirely oblivious to the fact and seems determined to remain so.

📻 Don't search me in here (E, 6.7k) by Sassy3 @sassy-sassy3

🎵 Song prompt: Gone - Charlie XCX & Christine and the Queens

🎵 Summary: Draco spotted him in a corner, crowded by Ministry employees. He looked like an animal, trapped in a cage. He had a strained smile on his , and his eyes were looking everywhere else than on the people in front of him.

Draco can’t quite help himself, watching Potter from afar. Just out of curiosity, of course. He’s happy with his life, nothing is missing, and if he’s lonely it’s entirely by choice.

📻 I Can Be Your Lighthouse (T, 4k) by orpheus87

🎵 Song prompt: The Lighthouse by The Used

🎵 Summary: When Harry gets called to investigate reports of Dark magic, the last thing he expects to find is an almost unconscious Draco Malfoy. After multiple instances, he resolves to find out what's going on.

📻 Drop Everything Now (T, 21k) by parkkate @parkkate

🎵 Song prompt: Sparks Fly by Taylor Swift

🎵 Summary: After accidentally bonding himself to Malfoy, Harry finds himself in an utterly precarious situation…

📻 No one fucks with us (T, 3.3k) by Laura_Sinele @laurasinele

🎵 Song prompt: NFWMB by Hozier

🎵 Summary: Draco Malfoy wonders for how long has Harry Potter been a terrifying force of nature. Harry Potter thinks Draco Malfoy has been a badass MF all along. If the world has to end so they can have some peace and quiet, be it. They'll set it on fire.

📻 Will You Stay with Me? (M, 10.2k) by EvAEleanor @eva-eleanore

🎵 Song prompt: ‘Run’ - Daughter

🎵 Summary: Ten months ago, Draco had found none other than Harry Potter blindly drunk and bleeding outside a Muggle pub. He'd brought him home and hasn't left his side ever since. He looked after him, took care of him when yet another nightmare plagued him.

Harry is sure that Draco will leave him at some point, and he can’t let it happen. He can’t have another person leaving his life unexpectedly. So, Harry forces him to leave — after they spend one last night together.

📻 until the sun has changed the colour of my hair (T, 4.9k) by cloudlesslysky @cloudlesslysky

🎵 Song prompt: Jag saknar dig mindre och mindre - Melissa Horn

🎵 Summary: Draco's life has been one big mess ever since Potter broke up with him. He doesn't want to see his friends, he's too ashamed to see his parents, and his apartment is one giant mess. He's constantly prepared for disaster, and spends his time either alone in Muggle parks or in his apartment. But one day... One beautiful day... He will forget Harry, surely.

📻 Love Found (E, 7.5k) by peachpety @peachpety

🎵 Song Prompt: I Found, by Amber Run

🎵 Summary: During Harry’s sixth year, Draco Malfoy joins the Order as a double-agent and continues with his task to get the Death Eaters into the castle as assigned by Voldemort. Draco succeeds with his mission the evening Harry returns from the caves with Dumbledore. The boys reunite on the Astronomy Tower and, with the Death Eater’s arrival, are forced to engage in a fight, driving Harry to come to terms with his feelings about true friendship and romantic love.

📻 On the Third Day He Took Me to the River (M, 14.4k) by pixiedustatsundown @pixiedustatsundown

🎵 Song prompt: 'Where the Wild Roses Grow - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds ft. Kylie Minogue'

🎵 Summary: This is a story of two lonely young men falling in love.

This is a story about dreams and duty, about witches that give purpose to the one and doom the other.

You think you know how the story goes, but this is a different story, and it doesn't end well.

📻 (When They Only Hear You Whisper) I'll Be Loud For You (T, 2.8k) by VeelaWings @veelawings

🎵 Song prompt: There for You - Martin Garrix/Troye Sivan

🎵 Summary: Potter must have been having nightmares again. He was restless in his bed across the room. Moonlight shone through his open bed curtains and highlighted the contours of his body, the grimace on his face blatant. His thick blanket was kicked down, one leg still covered by his twisted sheet, the musk of his sweat pungent in their small dorm. Low grunts accounted for the majority of the noise he made, but it was peppered by the occasional groan or unclear shout of words. However, ‘No,’ was always clear.

Draco hated it.

📻 The Interview (T, 17.3k) by Cibee (Cibeeeee) @cibeewastaken

🎵 Song prompt: Just Say Yes - Snow Patrol

🎵 Summary: One interview had Draco realizing how naïve he was for thinking he deserved Harry.

📻 Lookalike (M, 1.4k) by Zzzara @big-draco-energy

🎵 Song prompt: 'Lookalike' by Conan Gray

🎵 Summary: When you look in his eyes, Do you think of mine? And when you look at that smile, Do I cross your mind? I know in your head You see me instead 'Cause he looks a lot like I did back then Baby, don't lie, He's just a lookalike... ©

📻 As Fascinating As a Slap Bracelet (T, 13.2k) by acupforslytherin @acupforslytherin

🎵 Song prompt: Have It All - Jason Mraz

🎵 Summary: Who would have thought that a wacky little Muggle toy would lead to an unlikely friendship between Harry and Draco? Not Harry, certainly.

Who would have thought that this friendship would bloom into something more? Well, Ron, for one.

📻 If Sex Is the Drug, Then What Is the Cost (E, 3.8k) by EvAEleanor @eva-eleanore

🎵 Song prompt: I Almost Told You That I Loved You - Papa Roach

🎵 Summary: For quite some time, Harry has been seeing Malfoy. Well... Actually, he's hired Malfoy, to keep him company, in his bedroom. It's only sex — honestly — and since Malfoy is the best, he's the only person Harry wants. That's all it is, right?

📻 I Grow Fonder Every Day (M, 21.6k) by Drarrelie @drarrelie

🎵 Song prompt: One and Only by Adele

🎵 Summary: Draco still doesn’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, sharing a flat in Muggle London with Harry Potter.

It’s all Draco’s ever wanted — more than he’d ever wished for. And if it entails suppressing his inconvenient feelings for the man, so what? He’s perfectly happy with his life as it is, perfectly content with just having Potter close and enjoying his company.

That is, until one Friday evening at the beginning of April when the end starts.

📻 How Can I Live Without you? (G, 2.2k) by ununquadius @ununquadius

🎵 Song prompt: "So Far Away", by Avenged Sevenfold

🎵 Summary: After Draco's death, Harry wonders how can he live without the one he loves when he's so far away.

📻 Following the Arrow to Your Heart (E, 10.9k) by goddessofthehearth

🎵 Song prompt: Give Me Love by Ed Sheeran

🎵 Summary: After the war, Draco is recruited into the Department of Love (aka Cupid's Arrow). His job is to bring together witches and wizards whose magical signatures are only compatible with each others' (essentially soulmates). As they all learned during training, Cupids are chosen because they do not have soulmates.

Six years later, Draco's convinced himself that he's perfectly fine with not having a soulmate. But his latest client turns out to be Harry Potter, and he's forced to reconsider in light of his old feelings.

📻 cos I only need your name to call the reasons why I fought (T, 6.6k) by cloudlesslysky @cloudlesslysky

🎵 Song prompt: War, by Poets of the Fall

🎵 Summary: Ron and Hermione leave the Horcrux hunt, leaving a hurt Harry behind.

But at least Draco is still there with him.

📻 Madness (M, 10k) by tigersilver

🎵 Song prompt: House of Fun by Madness

🎵 Summary: A desperate search for contraception all around Diagon Alley.

📻 Between Myth and Man (E, 16.2k) by slytherco @slytherco

🎵 Song prompt: Why'd you only call me when you're high? - Arctic Monkeys

🎵 Summary: Draco, lost and a little broken, navigates post-war reality convinced that people like him should not be allowed to make their own choices. To solve the problem of his self-sabotaging tendencies, he starts taking a few drops of Veritaserum every morning.

A story about the complexity of choices, repressed desires that come to the surface when we least expect them, and the utter hopelessness of truths built on a foundation of lies.

📻 stay awhile (stay here with me) (T, 3.1k) by panicparade @panicissharp

🎵 Song prompt: I like me better - Lauv

🎵 Summary: "Then when?" Harry tries again. He's not sure if he really wants to see the photo or if he just wants to keep talking to Malfoy. This Malfoy, who is so different from what he was expecting. In his Muggle jeans and smartly pressed sweater, with an air of vulnerability around him that Harry isn't used to seeing, Malfoy looks approachable in a way he never has before.

Harry stops his fidgeting as Malfoy looks up to meet his eyes. Through the hum of the crowded pub, he has to strain a little to hear him. "Maybe," Malfoy starts, hesitating a little but never breaking eye contact, "one day?"

📻 All it needs is messing it up and stars (G, 5.9k) by a_reader_and_writer @harrypotterfanfictionwriter

🎵 Song prompt: Tongue Tied by Faber Drive

🎵 Summary: After the war all the Malfoy's came off with light sentences. Now during 8th year Draco is finally free to be himself and date his crush; Harry Potter. Or at least so he thought..

A letter from his father rips that happiness away.

But maybe in the end it will take just a bit of messing up and some stars to get that happiness back.

📻 I'm gonna let it happen (E, 12.3k) by tomoewantsdolls @tomoewantsdolls

🎵 Song prompt: Florence + The Machine - Shake it out

🎵 Summary: And I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't So here's to drinks in the dark at the end of my road And I'm ready to suffer and I'm ready to hope It's a shot in the dark and right at my throat 'Cause looking for heaven, found the devil in me Looking for heaven, for the devil in me Well what the hell I'm gonna let it happen to me

📻 I feel it in my bones (M, 6.3k) by cloudlesslysky @cloudlesslysky

🎵 Song prompt: Radioactive - Imagine Dragons

🎵 Summary: Harry’s heartbeat is loud in his ears as his heart pounds in his chest. His lungs burn as he pants for air. His legs are screaming in protests as he continues to push them to their limit, forcing himself to run ever faster.

📻 Born in the U.S.A. (M, 9k) by KittyCargo @kittycargo

🎵 Song prompt: I'm on Fire by Bruce Springsteen

🎵 Summary: “You need to come home, Draco.”

“What? Why? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, I just have an opportunity for you, and you need to come home to take it.”

When Draco's mother insists he comes home, he drags his feet and convinces his friends to take a road trip.

📻 just tell me when it's alright (E, 23k) by M0stlyVoid @bonesliketambourines

🎵 Song prompt: Teeth, Lady Gaga

🎵 Summary: Harry’s been fighting tooth and nail for any bit of normalcy he can get his hands on. He’s sick of feeling like something’s wrong with him, tired of feeling different. He thinks he’s finally gotten to the root of it, and has settled into a routine that makes him happy. Naturally, that’s when Draco Malfoy walks back into his life and upends it once again. Has Harry bitten off more than he can chew with his former rival?

📻 The Courting by the Pureblood Who Only Has Five Milligrams of Romantic Intelligence and Thinks He’s Real Smooth (T, 19.4k) by Cibee (Cibeeeee) @cibeewastaken

🎵 Song prompt: Cupid - Amy Winehouse

🎵 Summary: Draco could grab Potter and shove him into a stall before proceeding to suck his soul out of his dick, but secretly, deep down, in the part of Draco that he will never admit to anyone, he is (everyone pauses to shudder) a romantic. Potter is not someone Draco wants a one-off with. Potter is — Draco’s beloved!

So Draco decides to boldly go where no one has gone before: to put himself through scrutiny; their friends’ teasing and pranks; unsound romantic advice from a house-elf; wearing pretty clothes; all to try and win Potter’s heart through courtship.

(An unnamed ginger bastard can be heard yelling from afar: “This is actually a detailed guide on how not to court someone!”)

But who cares about the opinions of redheads? Literally no one.

📻 What Will We Do With a Drunken Harry? (E, 4.9k) by Thunder_of_Dragons @thunder-of-dragons

🎵 Song prompt: "Drunken Sailor" by The Irish Rovers

🎵 Summary: A victorious Quidditch match, a claimed Quidditch Cup, and a wild House party can mean only one thing. Will the aftermath lead to one excruciating hangover in the morning, or will it perhaps lead to something more?

📻 Though Your World Is Changing, I Will Be The Same (E, 15.9k) by hephaestiions

🎵 Song prompt: Slave To Love by Bryan Ferry

🎵 Summary: “I shower after work,” Harry had told him once when Draco had asked what cologne had such longevity as to be effective after a full day of gruelling Auror work.

“For me?” Draco had asked. Teased, just a little. There had been a smile lingering on the edges of his consciousness, threatening to traipse onto his mouth.

“For Ginny,” Harry had said, voice flat. “She hates it when I come back sweaty and crackling with other people’s hexes. Did you know magic has a smell? I didn’t until she told me.”

–

It's all fun and games, till somebody falls in love. Given his luck, it's obviously Draco who has to go and do it.

📻 I Can't Help Falling in Love with You (NR, 4.8k) by readdreamwrite26 @readdreamwrite26

🎵 Song prompt: I can't help falling in love with you - Elvis Presley

🎵 Summary: Harry stood up and set his hand out to Draco. “Dance?” “I didn’t know you danced, Potter.” “Hm, I’ve danced a lot in my time," Harry replied smugly. “How do I know you won’t step on my feet?” “You don’t, but I think the risk will be worth it.”

📻 Searching For a Place to Hide (T, 12.5k) by Erin_Riwen @erin-riwen

🎵 Song prompt: Love Will Keep Us Alive - The Eagles

🎵 Summary: After the war, there were threats against the Malfoys. Needing them kept safe until the trials are over, the Ministry puts them in protective custody but a murder attempt proves there’s a Ministry leak. Desperate, the Ministry decides a safe house is best, but who to trust to keep it secret and keep them safe? Narcissa calls in a life debt, the Minster calls in a favour and Harry Potter wonders why his life continues to hate him.

Along the way, the Malfoys learn how to be a family again, Harry learns that some things are not how he thought and maybe never were, and the touch-starved boys discover that they may be each other's forever answer.

📻 Isolated Thunderstorms and Scattered Showers (T, 21.3k) by triggerlil @triggerlil

🎵 Song prompt: Iris - the GooGoo Dolls

🎵 Summary: Post-war, Harry needs space. Everything is too much all at once, and time and time again, he finds himself pulling the invisibility cloak over his head, just for a bit of peace.

Returning for eighth year is hard, especially when you're considered a war hero, and your name is Harry James Potter. It's just that things go a little wonky when Harry starts following Malfoy, and finds that he can't (or doesn't want to) stop.

📻 Kiss It Better (E, 1.5k) by articcat621 @articcat621

🎵 Song prompt: Kiss It Better by Rihanna

🎵 Summary: When Harry's injured, Draco knows there's no place he'd rather be than by his side.

📻 (shut up and) dance with me (T, 7.9k) by punk_rock_yuppie @punk-rock-yuppie

🎵 Song prompt: Shut Up and Dance - Walk the Moon

🎵 Summary: Four dances Harry and Draco share.

📻 In Love with the Ferret (E, 21.9k) by Pineau_noir @pineau-noir

🎵 Song prompt: I'm Yours by Jason Mraz

🎵 Summary: Harry has never been the most observant bloke. Sometimes to the point of him not realising his feelings for a particular pointy, pale git. And it's not his fault if literally everyone else knows about said feelings except for Harry and the git in question. So it's really not his fault, when faced with the scope of his feelings, he suddenly has a hard time talking to one Draco Malfoy. Or looking him in the eye. Or not being a total weirdo around him.

There's nothing to do but take the advice of his friends and try to woo Draco over dinners with friends, Ministry cases, and an unfortunately named Italian restaurant.

Harry just can't stop the flutter in his chest when he sees Draco smile.

📻 Dance with me? (M, 8.2k) by Aylaar @accioxanxiety

🎵 Song prompt: I Wanna Dance With Somebody - Whitney Houston

🎵 Summary: Draco had given up on love, until one day sitting outside the usual gaudy cafe he frequented 'people watching' he spotted Harry Potter lurking, a suspicious Draco investigates and a series of events ensue.

📻 The Cupid Incident (E, 12.6k) by meandminniemcg @meandminniemcg

🎵 Song prompt: Can' Get You out of My Head - Kylie Minogue

🎵 Summary: Draco gets into the way of a potions attack and can't get Potter out of his head.

📻 Carouse (E, 19.9k) by Drarryismymuse (Hatchersn) @drarryismymuse

🎵 Song prompt: Dead by Madison Beer

🎵 Summary: Carouse (verb): To drink plentiful amounts of alcohol and enjoy oneself with others in a noisy, lively way.

Harry finds himself using alcohol in increasingly dangerous ways to cope with the stresses of life. When he is put on leave from work to sort out his issue, he instead falls head first into a lively club scene where he can drink and fuck his worries away. That is, until a certain blond from his past reappears and throws off his entire routine.

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201 notes · View notes

allavengedromance · 3 years

Audio

A compilation of interactions between Jon and Helen from beginning to end because they had the best dynamic

Transcript under the cut

[MAG 47]

[CLICK] [SOUND OF PEN SCRATCHING AGAINST PAPER IN SHARP, FRUSTRATED MOVEMENTS]

ARCHIVIST

Statement of Helen Richardson, regarding, uh… how would you describe it?

[PEN SCRATCHING CONTINUES]

ARCHIVIST

…Miss Richardson?

[PEN SCRATCHING CONTINUES]

HELEN

– uh, what?

[PEN SCRATCHING CONTINUES]

ARCHIVIST

Your experience, how would you summarize it?

[PEN SCRATCHING CONTINUES]

HELEN

Um, well, I’ve been, I’ve been trying to draw you a map, but, it doesn’t, it doesn’t work.

[PEN SCRATCHING CONTINUES; HELEN CAN NOW BE HEARD BREATHING HARD AS THE ARCHIVIST SPEAKS]

ARCHIVIST

– Right. Statement of Helen Richardson, regarding a new door in the house she was selling. Statement recorded direct from subject, 2nd October, 2016. Statement begins.

[MAG 101]

HELEN

Do you want to come in?

ARCHIVIST

Wh… Helen? H-Helen Richardson? But… But y– Michael…

HELEN

Michael isn’t me. Not now.

ARCHIVIST

What happened?

HELEN

He got… distracted. Let feelings that shouldn’t have been his overwhelm me.

Lost my way.

ARCHIVIST

And now? Y-__you’re__ Helen?

[MAG 115]

[KNOCK, KNOCK]

[Calls] Come i–

[KNOCK, KNOCK]

[More sombrely] Come in.

[A NEW DOOR CREAKS OPEN]

[Sharply] What do you want?

HELEN

Not sure. To talk.

ARCHIVIST

You’re keeping her face, then.

HELEN

I am Helen.

ARCHIVIST

Don’t pretend to be people I know. Knew.

HELEN

I’m not pretending.

ARCHIVIST

You’re not Helen Richardson.

[MAG 115]

HELEN

Before, talking to you made Helen feel better.

ARCHIVIST

You’re not that Helen!

HELEN

I just want… I just want to feel better.

ARCHIVIST

…

I don’t believe you.

HELEN

You don’t?

ARCHIVIST

Wh-what? Why should I believe… a-a-any of this? You’ve told me over and over that you’re… what was the phrase? The ‘throat of delusion’? All of this is –

HELEN

I have never told you a lie, Archivist. I wouldn’t dare. I, I just thought you might understand.

ARCHIVIST

Uh… How could I possibly…

HELEN

We’re both changing, Archivist. I had hoped, that together –

ARCHIVIST

[Furious] Get out.

[MAG 131]

[MELANIE SIGHS, KNOCKS ON THE DOOR] MELANIE

She’s been helping us.

ARCHIVIST

[Sharply] It has never helped anyone. Not without a cost.

[THE DOOR CREAKS OPEN] HELEN

If I am an “it”, Archivist, then what does that make you?

[THE DOOR CREAKS CLOSED] MELANIE

Hi, Helen.

ARCHIVIST

[Coldly] I have been told you can help.

HELEN

I have been trying to. But the last time you were very rude to me.

ARCHIVIST

You’re still wearing her face.

HELEN

Not this again. I’m not “wearing” anything, Archivist. I am at least as much ‘Helen Richardson’ as you are the ‘Jonathan Sims’ that first joined this Institute.

[MAG 143]

ARCHIVIST

Why are you here?

HELEN

I told you! I’ve decided to help. I thought you might like a way home?

ARCHIVIST

Another door?

HELEN

If you want it. (short pause) How was it?

ARCHIVIST

Hm?

HELEN

Looking upon the Dark.

ARCHIVIST

I thought I was going to die.

HELEN

You seem to think that a lot.

[MAG 152]

HELEN

(“delicately” hinting) Although – some of us are always lost, in a sense.

ARCHIVIST

Wait, are you saying you can navigate it?

HELEN

Not exactly, but my door has been part of these tunnels for some time now.

ARCHIVIST

Wh – (frustrated sputtering) – what’s it hiding, wh-what’s in the middle?

HELEN

(suppressed laughter) A delightful surprise…!

[HE SIGHS. SHE LAUGHS, OVERLAPPING HIM AND HERSELF, SEEMINGLY OUT OF SEVERAL THROATS AT ONCE, AND WITH A DRAINED, SLEEPY QUALITY TO IT WHEN SHE FINDS THAT SHE HAS LAUGHED TOO LONG, AND MUST STOP TO INHALE. HER LAUGHTER, IN SHORT, NOW SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE MICHAEL’S. THE ARCHIVIST SIGHS AGAIN, RESIGNED TO HER.]

[MAG 152]

HELEN

Hungry, are we?

ARCHIVIST

(angrily) That’s not –

– I haven’t done anything –

HELEN

– yet.

ARCHIVIST

(roughly) I feel like if I don’t… I might die. Fade away into nothing.

HELEN

…

Do you… Know that?

ARCHIVIST

No. But I… (frustrated noise) I can’t die. They need me.

HELEN

Come on, John, no excuses.

[HE SIGHS AS SHE SPEAKS.]

They don’t need your protection.

[MAG 152]

HELEN

Helen was like you, at first.

[HE CAN BE HEARD INHALING UNHAPPILY IN THE BACKGROUND.]

She felt such guilt over taking people. Until one day she realized she wasn’t going to stop doing it. So she chose to stop feeling guilty.

ARCHIVIST

Fine. I get it.

[MAG 157]

[CLICK] [HEAVY KNOCKING ON A DOOR. IT SWINGS OPEN.] ARCHIVIST

Helen.

HELEN

Jonathan.

ARCHIVIST

I need – you said before you knew the tunnels, right? That you’d been a… part of them?

HELEN

Not my exact words, but close enough.

ARCHIVIST

I need to know what’s in there. What’s at the center? (urgently) I-it’s important, Martin – I need to know.

HELEN

(cheerfully) That’s a shame, because I’m afraid I’m not going to tell you!

ARCHIVIST

(aghast) What? Why not?

HELEN

Because I have a good enough sense of what’s going on to know that it will be much more fun without my involvement! (begins laughing)

ARCHIVIST

What? You – you said you were going to help!

HELEN

I am.

ARCHIVIST

I don’t have time for this.

[164]

HELEN

Remember? And please – my name is Helen.

ARCHIVIST

Like you said, I can know everything now, including how much of a lie that really is.

HELEN

Don’t mistake complication for falsehood, dear Archivist. And remember, that knowledge is not the same thing as understanding!

ARCHIVIST

What do you want.

HELEN

To say hello! And check up on the happy couple.

[She laughs again.]

[166]

ARCHIVIST

Hello, Helen.

HELEN

Oh, hello! In a better mood, are we?

(lower, teasing) Feeling more secure now you’ve learned how to kill?

[As she speaks, a shimmery, high-pitched sound starts to layer over the background.] ARCHIVIST

(inhale) Something like that.

MARTIN

Will you tell me how he did it?

ARCHIVIST

Martin…

MARTIN

He just keeps going all vague about it.

HELEN

Oh, goodness. You see what you’ve done to the poor boy, John? He’s coming to me for clear answers.

[She snorts, and it turns into her trademark laugh.]

ARCHIVIST

Shut up.

[177]

HELEN

Oh, John? Not to sound like a squeaky hinge, but do try to lighten up. Don’t get me wrong, the brooding thing’s a good look on you, but it is starting to get a bit tired. Especially now you’ve got someone else to do the intense, driven thing. I think you might need to get a new schtick.

ARCHIVIST

[Sarcastic] Thank you for the feedback. I’ll try to bear it in mind.

[183]

ARCHIVIST

What we want doesn’t matter much these days.

[HELEN MAKES A RASPBERRY NOISE]

HELEN

Oh nonsense. What we want is the only thing that matters these days. And Basira wanted to join Daisy.

ARCHIVIST

She made her choice.

HELEN

With your assistance.

ARCHIVIST

It was still her choice.

HELEN

[Sighing] What a waste.

ARCHIVIST

No.

It wasn’t.

[MAG 187]

HELEN

You really don’t like me, do you?

ARCHIVIST

No.

HELEN

And you never have.

ARCHIVIST

Not really.

HELEN

Even though I saved you from Michael.

ARCHIVIST

You were Michael.

HELEN

Argh. I’m The Distortion, as was Michael, but I am not him, and never have been. Surely you know all this by now, what with your shiny new eye powers?

ARCHIVIST

It’s not about what I know. It’s about what I feel.

HELEN

[Disparagingly] Oh, what do you feel?

ARCHIVIST

I liked Helen.

HELEN

I am Helen.

ARCHIVIST

The real one.

HELEN

…

Helen-Classic.

ARCHIVIST

Sure.

HELEN

But that doesn’t make any sense. You barely met her. You had half an hour together, and she spent most of that ranting about mazes! She was positively delirious with paranoia!

ARCHIVIST

True. But as you’ll recall, I was pretty paranoid myself at that point.

[MAG 187]

ARCHIVIST

I got you rattled.

HELEN

I’m not scared of you.

ARCHIVIST

Helen… Was that… a lie?

HELEN

[Too quickly] No!

ARCHIVIST

A lie. A genuine untruth. Like a little bit of loose thread, flitting in the breeze.

HELEN

Fine. You can go.

[SHIFTING, AND A NEW DOOR OPENS]

There’s the door. Just go!

ARCHIVIST

Ceaseless Watcher!

HELEN

No!

[THROUGH THE INCANTATION, THE HARSH BUZZ OF STATIC MINGLES WITH CREAKING WOODWORK AND CRUMBLING CRICK]

ARCHIVIST

See this lie, this golden strand of falsehood. Take it in your gaze and pull it, follow through its curves and twists and knots as it unravels all before you.

HELEN (BACKGROUND)

No. No! No! No, Archivist! Stop! John, it’s me, it’s Helen. It’s me. I’ve always been your friend. Don’t do this to me. I have always helped you. I have always helped you and lent you doors. Think of all that I have done for you. If you do this, everyone inside me is dead!

ARCHIVIST

Unweave it now, its fear and its falsehood, its hidden teeth and the ones it wears so proudly.

HELEN (BACKGROUND)

You’re no different – You are no different from me! You can’t save anyone!

ARCHIVIST

Take all that it is and all that it has. It is yours!

HELEN

No! NOOOOOO!

[HELEN’S VOICE IS STRETCHED AND VANISHED] [EXTENDED SOUNDS OF DISTORTED DEMOLITION]

[MAG 47]

HELEN

Finally, [suppressing tears] after the latest bout of nightmares, I decided to come to you and tell you my story. Maybe you can make some sense of this.

ARCHIVIST

…Perhaps. Leave it with us. We’ll… do some digging and see what we can find.

HELEN

[tearful] You believe me, then?

ARCHIVIST

I… yes. Yes, I think I do.

#tma #tma spoilers #helen richardson #helen distortion #tma audio #might do one for martin and helen in a bit #s5 spoilers #mag47 #mag187 #mag101 #mag115 #mag131 #mag142 #mag152 #mag157 #mag164 #mag166 #mag177 #mag183

82 notes · View notes

nuflashprose · 4 years

Text

It was a Who's Who of the East Village scene—the legends of Post Pop Art gathered at the Pyramid Club in New York on September 4, 1986. Among the guests were Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Marcus Leatherdale, Ann Magnuson, Karen Finley, John Sex, Wendy Wild, Steve Rubell, Andy Warhol and, of course, Madonna. They were gathered to celebrate and support one of their own, the artist, Martin Burgoyne.

Though a central figure in the scene that would become the hallmark of the era, and a contemporary of many of the leading names in art and music of his generation, Burgoyne is little known outside the Madonna fandom. Shortly after arriving in New York to attend the Pratt Institute, Burgoyne met Madonna and the two moved in together after Madonna was robbed by neighborhood kids who stole her music equipment and Burgoyne (who lived in an adjoining apartment) was robbed two days later. Burgoyne was instrumental in the early stages of Madonna's career: According to Edo Bertoglio, whose film, New York Beat, resurfaced years later as the indie hit Downtown81, starring Jean-Michal Basquiat and Debbie Harry, "Martin Burgoyne... always advised [Madonna] on where to go, how to dress, with whom to go out, what were the right places." Burgoyne did the art work for the cover of the single, "Burning Up," which later appeared on Madonna's first album. The first album was originally called, Lucky Star, and Burgoyne designed the original art work (it was abandoned in favor of the famous black and white photo that graced the cover). Later, Burgoyne designed album covers for DJ Jellybean Benitez, the Jamaica Girls and General Public. He worked as Madonna's road manager for a brief tour promoting her first singles and was a dancer for Madonna's first live performance of her single "Everybody," at Haoui Montaug's No Entiendes, a cabaret show Montaug hosted at Danceteria.

Like many artists who went on to become famous, Madonna and Burgoyne worked and played at Danceteria in the early 80's, where among the crowd of then-unknowns was another Who's Who of the era: Madonna worked the coat check, the Beastie Boys were waiters, Keith Haring painted Danceteria's interior and worked as a bus boy as did David Wojnarowicz; while LL Cool J and Debi Mazar worked the elevators and Sade tended bar. By that time, circa 1982, Danceteria eclipsed its predecessors as the hub of the art/club scene of the day, and Madonna and Burgoyne were regular fixtures. "They were like fraternal twins," wrote Jordan Levin in the Miami Herald "Cherubic urban imps with identical curly blond hair and precisely ragged, tight black clothing." Though Madonna's irrepressible energy and unrelenting ambition were off-putting to most, Burgoyne, by all accounts, was universally liked and admired. "He was... much beloved and lusted after," wrote Levin, "an incandescent boy even in the darkest after-hours club."

When Madonna was practicing her pirouettes at Martha Graham, modeling nude at the New School and playing at Max's Kansas City, CBGB's and dives in New Jersey—striking her best Pat Benatar pose while doing her Chrissie Hynde imitation—the punks and art students of the East Village were gathering at Club 57 and the Mudd Club. Sibling clubs with a fair amount of sibling rivalry, each was a Warholian mix of art, theatre, film and music. The clubs held the first showings by soon-to-be-renowned figures like Kenny Scharf (whose first show was at Club 57 in September '79), Keith Haring (his Erotic Art Show premiered in August 1980), and Jean-Michel Basquiat (whose No Wave band, Gray, played at the Mudd Club) amid live music by punk and New Wave bands, screenings of No Wave films by Amos Poe (among others) and a constant rotation of New Wave cabaret acts like John Sex (whose Acts of Live Art premiered in April 1980) Wendy Wild, Karen Finley and Ann Magnuson who was also the manager of Club 57.

Born of the vestiges of the punk scene at CBGB's, Mudd Club was the anti-Studio 54, albeit with its own door policy and just enough star power (Bowie, Warhol, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg frequented the club; Bowie filmed the video for his song "Fashion," there) to give it a celebrity sheen while maintaining its street cred. Mudd Club was the darker twin to the decadent free-for-all and campy shenanigans of Club 57, which, in addition to art and cabaret shows, hosted Ladies Mud Wrestling and a Monster Movie Night. Still, enough competition existed to inspire Steve Mass, owner of the Mudd Club, to lure Ann Magnuson to come to work for him in 1981 and where Magnuson went, others followed. Haring became curator of Mudd Club's fourth floor art gallery, though by that time (after the New York/New Wave show at PS 1 that year, often regarded as the Armory Show of the 80's) Basquiat, among others, was commanding thousands of dollars and selling to wealthy collectors despite considerable debate over whether the work was worthy or mere novelty. At the same time, the music in the clubs was also changing. Many of the East Village artists were graffiti artists themselves or were in with the graffiti artists like Fab Five Freddy and Futura 2000 who in turn were familiar with both the punk/New Wave bands of downtown and the rappers and break dancers of the emerging Hip Hop scene in the South Bronx. That the seemingly disparate groups—artists, musicians, rappers—of seemingly disparate styles would eventually converge was all but inevitable.

Anita Sarko began her stint as DJ at the Mudd Club shortly after arriving in New York in 1979, spinning an eclectic mix of oldies, rarities, punk and New Wave, playing anything that got people moving. Sarko eventually left Mudd Club for Danceteria in 1983 and there she co-hosted No Entiendes with Haoui Montaug, famed door man of Hurrah, the Mudd Club and Danceteria. Like Club 57 and the Mudd Club, Danceteria was a Factory-like mix of art, film and music and was also one of the first clubs to have a video lounge on its third floor, modeled after the video monitors that were installed at the Ritz (arguably the first club, in 1980, to have videos) and Hurrah, the club now credited as the birthplace of the video VJ. It is due in part to the performances that were filmed at the club and then played in Danceteria's video lounge (and earlier at Hurrah) that many of those early performances by Madonna, New Order and the Beastie Boys as well as Wojnarowicz's band, 3 Teens Kill 4, are available on YouTube and social media today, not to mention an installation at MOMA.

In videos and photos of Burgoyne and Madonna taken at the time the two are nearly identical due in no small part to Burgoyne's androgyny and gender-shifting fluidity. The two appear like an inversion of early photos of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith: Both blond, seraphic and playful where Patti and Robert were shabby, dark and brooding; New Wave chic where Patti and Robert were gothic proto-punk. In one set of pictures Burgoyne and Madonna are dressed identically in ripped denim and white T's, arms covered in black rubber bracelets, a mop of gold hair spilling out of the caps they are both wearing. In another, they both don pink punk wigs (Madonna wore hers on an early appearance on British television). In another set—taken during the filming of Desperately Seeking Susan—Madonna sits on Burgoyne's lap, both dressed in identical jeans, leather boots and leather jackets. What is most striking in the photos, however, is Burgoyne's blatant femininity: Like Madonna, he dons armfuls of rubber bracelets, large hoop earrings and wears nail polish, black eyeliner and lip gloss, his lips pursed—like Madonna's—kissing at the camera. Though he was fond of the leather attire common to the clone and S & M scenes of the gay community at that time, he also cultivated an androgynous look more common among the British New Romantics (who in turn were inspired by the glam rockers of the previous decade), a gender-fluid look that even at the time set him apart from the other downtown denizens of New York’s Lower East Side of the early 80’s. Though certainly, even at that time, artists like Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and Wojnarowicz and performance artists like Jobriath, Klaus Nomi and Stephen Varble incorporated homo-aesthetics in their work, for Burgoyne it was more than a performance or a pose or even mere fashion; it seems—even in the most casual or private of photos—to have been his way of being in the world. Madonna’s own homo-aesthetic—and her influence on the artists who subsequently followed her—owe a debt to Burgoyne’s early influence on the fledgling diva who, clearly—given the mirroring of Burgoyne evident in the photos—took much of her own homo-aesthetic directly from Burgoyne (among others). According to Christopher Ciccone, in his admittedly trashy biography of his famous sister, it was Burgoyne who introduced Madonna to the seedier side of gay life, an edgy underworld that would become a prominent feature of her later, post-Sean Penn work. “He openly [played] on the dark side and [liked] it,” wrote Ciccone. “Perhaps due to her friendship with Marty, S&M [became] one of the leitmotifs of Madonna’s career.” Further, observed Ciccone:

“Marty [introduced] Madonna to photographer Edo Bertoglio and his girlfriend, French jewelry designer Maripol, who designed those seminal colored rubber bracelets that everyone else in the Village is now wearing as well. However mainstream and oft-imitated her concepts would later become, Maripol’s influence on Madonna’s image can’t be understated, as she is responsible for creating her punk-plus-lace look.”

Neither, then, can Burgoyne’s influence be underestimated. However, like many anonymous gay men who dressed, shaped and helped form a Diva who would go on to, in Madonna’s own words, “rule the world,” Burgoyne has gone virtually unheard of and—like his own work—remained all but obscured.

There are photos of Burgoyne clubbing with Keith Haring and a later photo of Burgoyne riding in the limo with Warhol on the way to Madonna's wedding to Sean Penn (Warhol was Burgoyne's plus-one at the wedding according to Warhol's diary); in all the photos of Burgoyne from that time it is clear that these legends adored him; both Haring and Warhol wrote in their diaries of their devastation at Burgoyne’s death. However, Burgoyne remains elusive in most of the candid pictures taken at Danceteria or the Mudd Club or such celebrity gatherings; he is there but immersed in the crowd or just off to the side. In one photo, for example, Burgoyne peeks out from the edge of the picture, eyes locked with Madonna as she commands the center of a dancefloor. In the video of Madonna's performance at Live Aid, Burgoyne is there just off stage while Madonna sings a medley of her hits. Sean Penn and Keith Haring are just off stage to her left; Burgoyne is opposite, crouched on the floor nearby to Madonna's right, watching from the wings.

Like Warhol and the Warhol superstars, this generation of young artists, writers and performers coveted celebrity and were eager for the riches and success that were the zeitgeist of the greed-is-good 80's. After Basquiat's first showing at Nosei in '81, and Haring's first showing at Tony Shafrazi in '82, the art world took notice. The Whitney Biennial in '83 legitimized the East Village art scene and with legitimization came money and the beginnings of the gentrification that has left New York homogenized and unrecognizable; unlivable for anyone but the wealthy even to this day. When Haring was attacked at his '85 showing at Shafrazi by purist horrified by the gentrification in the Village brought on by the influx of money and notoriety, the East Village Eye declared that the scene was officially over before it started: "We, who were the first to take credit for the birth of East Village art," wrote Carlo McCormick, "now want to take credit for killing it." Then, in February 1987, Michael Musto of the Village Voice issued the final blow when he wrote about what he called, “The Death of Downtown,” following Warhol's passing. Martin Burgoyne died three months earlier of complications from AIDS surrounded by his parents and friends, including Haoui Montaug and Madonna, who held his hand while he died. In 2015, 2017, and again in 2018 to commemorate World AIDS Day, Madonna tweeted photos of herself and Burgoyne from the old days. "If we only knew then," she wrote "all the things that would happen."

According to Keith Haring's journal, he saw Burgoyne on the Fourth of July 1986 and Martin told him that he recently tested negative for the HIV virus. "But when I saw him," wrote Haring, "I saw death." Jordan Levin saw Burgoyne around that time outside the Pyramid Club, complaining of exhaustion and recurring bouts of the flu. “When I got sick," Burgoyne later told Michael Schnayerson from Vanity Fair, "they thought I had measles, so I stayed in for a month.” By August, according to Warhol in his diary, Burgoyne was sick and preparing to return to Florida where his parents lived: "[W]hat they thought was the measles wasn't," Warhol wrote, “And I said that the people we knew who had "it" had had the best care money can buy, and they were the first to go, so I didn't know what to say.”

By late August, when Warhol saw Burgoyne backstage after Madonna's play,Goose and TomTom, Burgoyne's face was covered with sores. He asked Warhol to draw a picture of him for a party to raise money for his medical costs to be held at the Pyramid Club in September. Warhol drew the picture and Keith Haring designed the invitations for the benefit, held on September fourth.

A feature about the party and the group of artists gathered there appeared in the New York Times. Hosted by Burgoyne's friends and caregivers Deb Parker and Jody Kurilla, guests and performers included Madonna, Haring, Warhol, John Sex and Wendy Wild, Haoui Montaug, and Walter Durcatz (DJ at Danceteria and the Pyramid Club who left Danceteria when someone fell down an elevator shaft). Marcus Leatherdale did a slide show. Karen Finley—the poet and performance artist who was later one of the notorious NEA Four—also performed. According to the New York Times, Burgoyne was told three weeks prior that he had ARC (AIDS related complex) and was too weak to dance, but joined in, "kissing and hugging his friends." ''We have all been friends for years and years," Haring told the New York Times, "since the days at Club 57.'' Six thousand dollars was raised that night to help pay Burgoyne's living expenses. Steve Rubell noted, "We know many AIDS patients who have been deserted, treated like lepers by their own families.'' AIDS had, by 1986, become an all-too-common occurrence for most in the once thriving East Village scene. Most at the party knew several friends who had already died. ''It's like a war is going on,'' said designer, Katy K. Reports leaked in The New York Post and the National Enquirer that Madonna's former roommate was dying of AIDS and that her support of her friend had caused strife in the notoriously volatile marriage of the Poison Penns. Sean Penn is often portrayed by Madonna's biographers as homophobic and paranoid about AIDS, but not so, according to Jordan Levin: "Martin was frantic," when the stories came out according to Levin, "[H]e'd been publicly branded a plague outcast who horrified his best friend's husband.” "`Sean isn't angry at me,'” Burgoyne assured Levin, “'I saw them last week and he hugged me. How can they do this?'" It was Sean Penn, in fact, according to Madonna biographer, J. Randy Taraborrelli, who traveled to Mexico at Madonna’s behest to obtained experimental drugs they hoped would prolong Burgoyne's life. By October, however, he was too sick with "cancer," Warhol wrote in his diary, to attend Kenny Scharf's Halloween party with Warhol. On November tenth, Madonna appeared in an auction at Barney's in which denim jackets designed by various artists and modeled by various celebrities were sold to raise money for St. Vincent's AIDS ward. The model, Iman, wore a jacket designed by Keith Haring; Madonna wore a jacket designed by Martin Burgoyne who was, himself, receiving treatment at St. Vincent’s. "I had a dream last night," Burgoyne told Vanity Fair two weeks before his death, "that I went to the art-supply store and there were so many things I wanted. But I couldn’t have any of them. All I want to do is work, work, work," he said, "And I can’t, can’t, can’t."Before 1980, there were fifteen AIDS-related deaths in NYC; by 1981 there were seventy-four AIDS related deaths when The New York Times reported on page twenty that year about a "rare cancer" afflicting gay men. In 1982, there were two hundred and seventy-six AIDS deaths and eight hundred and sixty-four AIDS deaths the following year. "Health Chief Calls AIDS Battle 'No. 1 Priority'," read a headline in the New York Times on May 24, 1983—the first time AIDS made the front page of the paper. By 1984 there were one thousand nine hundred and sixty AIDS deaths in New York City and by 1985 the number of deaths doubled. President Ronald Reagan, in a response to questions at the National Institute of Health that year, mentioned AIDS publicly for the first time, stating that he did not think children with AIDS should be allowed to attend school until it was certain the virus could not be passed by casual contact. He did not mention the epidemic publicly again until 1987. By 1986 there were six thousand four hundred and fifty-eight AIDS deaths in New York City alone. Martin Burgoyne died on November 30th, 1986. He was twenty-three years old.

#Martin Burgoyne #Madonna #Keith Haring #Marcus Leatherdale #New York #1980's #East Village #New Wave #No Wave

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fluidsf · 3 years

Photo

Polar Visions Amplitude reviewing -

John Wiese - Deviate From Balance

Released on 15 June 2015 by Gilgongo Records

Reviewed format: CD album

Connected listening - there are various ways to order a selection of John Wiese’s further discography. The Helicopter mail-order stocks various John Wiese releases as well as Sissy Spacek releases and releases by by John Wiese in collaboration with associates, you can find it here: https://helicopter.storenvy.com/collections/924921-john-wiese

Several solo releases by John Wiese are also available on physical and digital format from his Bandcamp page here: https://johnwiese.bandcamp.com

Many releases on Gilgongo Records are available on physical format through their mail-order store here: https://gilgongorecords.storenvy.com

After looking at one of Sissy Spacek’s recent new albums Featureless Thermal Equilibrium in the previous Polar Visions Amplitude it’s time today for the first of two follow-up reviews in which in this case we’re focussing first on one of John Wiese’s past solo albums, Deviate From Balance. Released back in 2015 on both a 2 LP vinyl package as well as a CD version on James Fella’s label Gilgongo Records our look is on the CD version which features the packed 79 minute album in full and what a collection of pieces it is. While the Sissy Spacek album showcases John Wiese’s talent in mixing Grindcore aggression with monolithic Noise screeches as well as maxing out the energy throughout, Deviate From Balance showcases John’s more restrained side in a collection of 10 tracks encompassing mostly live recorded compositions and improvisations that are leaning more towards intense choppy sound collages and noisy electro-acoustic interplay of acoustic and electric instrumentation with John’s electronics with a more conceptual edge to them. However while some of the titles of the 10 pieces suggest a somewhat philosophical or technical meaning behind these pieces, listening to these reveals a much more playful and raw sense of composition and performances from John and all musicians and artists involved in this album. Whilst John’s sound can be related to Free Improvisation, his rapid-fire editing and manipulation of sonic material on this album is much more complex and dazzling than many other artists and carries John’s signature knack for surprise, high frequency distortion crunches as well as shifting and abusing lo-fi sound recording equipment and electronics in as many ways as possible, almost as if they turn into crumbling fragile rocks. Disintegrating broken sound and dadaist absurdist humour is a recurring theme in John’s sound, making for an album that is much more enjoyable than overly academic contemporary Tape Music can be at times. Besides John’s sonics the involved musicians on this album are definitely an important element that adds many rich colours to the 10 pieces, featuring musicians like guitar virtuoso Oren Ambarchi, violin artist Jon Rose, sampling expert David Shea and drum machine musician Ikue Mori as well as many others. Before we’re diving deep into the 10 tracks on Deviate From Balance, let’s have a look at the packaging design of the CD version. The CD comes in a neat glossy oversized gatefold sleeve showcasing John Wiese’s minimalist design, artwork as well as a very colourful artist photo of John by Martin Escalante on the back. In terms of artwork I do like the photo-collages and art pieces on the inside of the gatefold a bit more than the cover this time as while the cover does highlight the general collaged, choppy nature of the album well in a visual manner, its subdued grayscale grainy images aren’t as striking as John Wiese’s other album covers but still, it’s a decent cover and the typography is quite stylish and repeats on the spine in a similar manner. The aforementioned imagery on the inside of the gatefold showcases both grayscale abstract art in the form of archaeological artefact style fragments on the left panel as well as a film roll like photo collage of a rather disturbed looking lady blowing up a balloon. The abstract images are a bit similar to the album cover though with darker and more distinct contrast but the photo collage also adds another good visual reference to the packaging regarding the tracks themselves in that balloon like squealing and screeching can be heard on some of the pieces and it also seems to refer to the album’s quite off the wall type of abstract humour. The left panel additionally features all album credits neatly laid out so you can find out all about the involved artists and recording locations plus sources. The CD itself comes in a convenient little black envelope with plastic protection and features a more LP like label design featuring simply the artist name, album title and Gilgongo label logo, somewhat similar to a Japanese mini-LP replica package. Now that we’ve looked at the package, let’s pop in the CD and dig in.

Deviate From Balance starts with Wind Changed Direction which is one of the most atmospheric pieces on the album. The piece blends organ like drone, chopped up distorted recordings of what sounds like children’s voices, machinery as well as other Industrial noises together to form a quite surreal mysterious soundscape. Quite like the title suggests the music sounds quite like you’re floating through the clouds right after the wind has changed direction. The drone feels both calming but also a notch ominous whilst the auto-panned chops of sound are both vaguely abstract and at times recognisable with John varying between distorted and resonant shards of crunchy sound and cleaner metallic elements. The voice samples hint somewhat at sonified memories, they sound like fragments from the past, conversations or event you might remember from childhood though the actual words are unrecognizable. This first piece is definitely one of the most straight-forward compositions on here in terms of structure with the drone both introducing and rounding off the piece as in both cases it eventually fades into the background. A quite lush start of the album. Following piece 356 S. Mission Rd continues the soundscape like approach but in a more ominous manner sounding quite like a cross of dark sounding orchestral music samples with strange hollow metallic resonances and washy shifting noises. The metallic resonances bring plenty of subdued Industrial shine to the piece but the aforementioned orchestral samples are what draws me into this piece the most as the screechy dissonant strings combined with ever so slightly differently timed horn crescendo suggest an ever apparent danger which is getting closer but just like in an abstract nightmare is stuck in a loop with the danger never reaching further than a certain indiscernible point. The shifting noise elements add some rawness to the piece which suggests some kind of turntable manipulations going on in the piece, a lovely brooding collage piece this is. Segmenting Process For Language, the next piece, is where things start to get more chaotic and free-wheeling though still very much controlled. The track featuring a live performance recorded at East Brunswick Club in Melbourne, Australia consists of wild and inspired mixtures of saxophone, (junk) objects, percussion, drums, guitar and noise as the musicians move into always differing “segments” made up of shards of sound, wildly swirling melodies, chords and tones. This does make for quite some literal clashes of sound but rather than being one of the more random sounding Free Improv performances the sections of interplay follow a much more recognisable structure in that certain droning tones as well as feedback lays somewhat of a base underneath the bursts of sonic mayhem. Whilst there are a whole lot of things happening in this recording I would like to name a few particularly enjoyable bits. These include the short bursts of squelchy synth swirls, resonant ground vibrating feedback laden noise, the hilarious goofy but still playful wordless vocalisations spat out by the musicians but also the at times disturbing dissonant chords which are formed and culminate in an absurdly, almost 50’s Horror film soundtrack like waves of organ droning at the ending of the piece after which we can hear the only applause that could be fit in on the tightly edited CD. An inventive juxtaposition of out of the blue musical absurdism with the more dadaist lightning strike like approach of collage based Harsh Noise carrying John’s seal of quality. The next track Superstitious does match its title rather well in terms of the sounds within and it’s the most Noise focussed piece on Deviate From Balance though still more along the lines of a layered soundscape. After the instrumental interplay of Segmenting Process For Language we’re back to a more noticeably composed piece which moves through various phases emitting a definite ambience of superstition through somewhat disturbing concrete sounds, noise and tones. Its beginning featuring chopped and quite heavily scrambled recordings of a scared woman wailing as well as various other waves of distorted sound and tone overtime moves to the climax of the piece which is an extended section of the aforementioned noise from by a nicely low end grounded stream of screechy sound featuring especially piercing high frequency sound manipulations quite like some kind of dystopian alien machinery, though your interpretation might definitely be much different. Regardless of how you interpret it, the piercing noise does give off quite an intense feeling of dread and fear and while the sounds used in the piece are sometimes somewhat recognisable, like dirt like crumbling sounds, coffee cups, car related sounds etc., again they’re manipulated and structured in such shifting and distorted manners that they feel like sudden waves of mind imagery than things you can really grab onto. The finale of the piece in which John frequency manipulates a continuous tone is quite gripping too and Superstitious as a whole sounds quite like both a physical and mind gripping piece. Cafe OTO is the track that follows and it’s obviously a live recording that was made at Cafe OTO. Moving back to the more improvisation based style of collaborative group performances that John Wiese has done together with other musicians this piece has a more continuous flow of sonic events and instrumental interplay and a generally might lighter edge to it than some of the other pieces. Especially the percussion blended with effect manipulations and saxophone performances are particularly good on here with percussion clattering, clinking, jumping around the room in quite hilarious surprising manners moving from crystal like tinkling to shells and wooden percussion whilst the saxes wildly swirling melody lines and screeches form sweet tonal abstraction that are wild but not going overboard and staying well in tune with the other elements of the performances. The “spat” out vocalisations are quite matching with the saxophone performance and whilst somewhat more subtle for most of the recording, there’s also some tasty, albeit less abrasive crashes of objects near the end of the recording. Again, John Wiese’s talent in highly abstract but always varied and uncompromising electronics and instrumental performances combined with the excellent inspired energy of all musicians that appears in his group performances shines through with the fun and details in the layers created making this suitable for many repeat listens. The following track Battery Instruments (Stereo) does work quite like an extension of the sounds from the Cafe OTO recording, though in a bit more minimalistic fashion being made up of mostly small, clicky and quite sounds. A collage of instrument, objects, electronics as well as short vocal bursts the piece puts the freely moving aspect of John Wiese’s group pieces into more of microscopic lowercase territory. It’s the shortest piece of the album at 2:12 minutes and works as kind of transition from Cafe OTO to the quite abrasive walkman Noise collage piece Memaloose Walkman, showcasing various crackling, scraping, spiky sonic details, a mysterious subdued drone as well as some quite tasteful bass string scratchings all panned quite widely (as this was originally a multi-channel piece). A sweet short piece this one. The aforementioned piece Memaloose Walkman then follows and it’s quite straight-forward in nature consisting of a mono tape collage of various recordings of gunshots. Besides splices and perhaps a bit of pitch adjustment there’s not much manipulation added to this but as a Noise piece it’s quite effective letting you hear the different swishing phased textures of shots from various guns as well as some bits of talk and music in between with a layer of crunchy saturation on top of everything. Simple but effective. Afterwards Dramatic Accessories continues within the Noise territory as a piece of quite a lot of instrument / object and especially turntable abuse featuring quite a lot of bassy and wild distorted screeches mixed with chopped recordings all presented through some crazy panning. One that will especially please harsh heads, within Dramatic Accessories there are various sections in which John and the other artists involved use all kinds of methods to create a variety of sounds ranging from the shifting kind of turntable warble, clicks, grating washes of distortion, chunks of feedback, amp hiss and metallic ringing. However whilst there are a lot of distorted sonic events happening within this piece, there is some sense of dynamics within however, created by the wild panning as well as shifting the phase and using some of the room acoustics and feedback of equipment to create some loud / softer / loud sections leaving some headroom for the sounds to not fully max out and become a bit overblown. The garbled object and instrument chops are clattering around often but strange distorted disturbing recordings of voices are also thrown in the mix making for an at times frightening but thrilling ride of unpredictable sounds. One element that is recurring throughout the wildly fluttering barrages of different sounds are certain grounded tones that bring forth some kind go base for all sounds to lean on as they continue changing in at times rapid manners. All in all Dramatic Accessories is another enjoyable sonic ride on Deviate From Balance in which rich and uncompromising textures are brought out in memorable ways through some fine inspired performances from all people involved. Solitaire follows, which is one of the two longest and final pieces on Deviate From Balance, at 11:15 minutes. In terms of approach the piece is somewhat similar to Dramatic Accessories but with the difference that rather than using vinyl, tape is being used here as one of the elements that create the various sounds within the piece. Solitaire follows a more continuous structure than other pieces on Deviate From Balance in that it’s mostly based on a set of repeating patterns within it's structure acting a bit like the compositional and performance equivalent of mechanical processes. Whereas Dramatic Accessories featured experiments with both clean and distorted sounds, Solitaire moves more into a quite crunchy rough direction featuring shards of chopped up instrument and music recordings, junk objects, voices as well a various especially percussive and resonant concrete sounds that ever continue to change in form. These repetitive patterns do give some kind of rhythmic drive to the piece but change often enough to not become sampler like and are more akin warbled broken tapes as the recordings are mercilessly abused through speed manipulations and ever increasing distortion. This is combined with a constant shift of stereo phase, through which on headphones you get the idea that the shards of sound are flying over your head and are forming 3D shapes in between your ears. A great listening experience which even works as the distortion gets quite murky and harsh nearing the end of the piece. Whilst the pattern style, on the fly pitch warbles and crunching noises carries on throughout, it’s great how some depth is slowly forming near the end of the piece, in which soft ticking percussive bits are being scattered between out ears and rimshot like ticking sounds are added for nice clean percussive accents. A very fluid piece in terms of progression and sound work which shows that whilst John Wiese’s solo and band works might at times sound very free-flowing and chaotic, he’s always got quite some noticeable control and focus within every piece, inspired and always different. Final piece Segmenting Process (Oregon) is indeed somewhat related to the earlier Segmenting Process For Language although in the case of this recording the segmenting of the several parts of the piece is even more clear. Being the longest piece on Deviate From Balance at 21:45 minutes the piece is also one of the most introspective and ��organized” sounding tracks on the album as in here we can find the by now familiar mixture of acoustic, electric instrumentation with both electronic sounds and manipulations but also a more restrained approach to the Noise elements John Wiese has explored in various ways in most tracks before this one. Rather than almost overtaking the non-electronic instrumentation either through loudness or sharp (harsh) frequencies, the Noise is more in tune with the instrumentation as being a part of a blend of various sonic elements. This is also helped by the fact that with the larger group setting featuring brass, percussions, drums and more the piece required a larger venue to be performed which gives the piece some welcome acoustic space, adding some room ambience and keeps the piece nicely dynamic. Sounding most similar in approach to Electroacoustic Improvisation the pieces segments blending vibrant instrumental performances which vary from fluttering percussive tones, noises as well as more drone focussed falling and rising tones with crackling, noisy, humming, distorted, sample based and glitchy electronics sound quite like the piece is based on a mixture of dreams. Like a sonic interpretation of a dream world the piece moves from segment to segment with all of them featuring somewhat recognisable sounds like the instruments themselves or voices mixed with shaped abstract noises but everything carries some kind of mystery within it, which is especially caused by the somewhat unnerving textures created by the brass instruments within the performance. The absurdist humour element is still apparent within the piece however with at times goofy squeaky noises, drum kit hits, tinkling bells and other pointy bits of abstract sound keeping things nicely playful and light but still powerful as always. The flow of the piece also helps to keep things captivating and interesting throughout as its length might take some listeners a bit to get into it but with so many different events happening throughout there’s never any idleness in here. And with this last piece I’m getting into the conclusion of this review of John Wiese’s Deviate From Balance. I award this album a Polar Visions Amplitude of 85 dB, recommending you to definitely check out this album. Deviate From Balance showcases both John Wiese’s compositional and performance talents through a varied selection of recordings in which you can hear John’s approach in various settings ranging from surreal sound collages, Noise infused instrumental improvisations to rough tape manipulation and Electroacoustic Improvisation. Never resorting to mere academic musical studies John Wiese’s pieces on Deviate From Balance keep hitting the ears and mind in excellent and inspiring manners and will be a great discovery for fans of free spirited contemporary music, both analog and digital based sound collage works, (Harsh) Noise fans as well as anyone into inspired improvised music and will be a great addition to the collection of fans of John Wiese and Sissy Spacek.

Deviate From Balance is available on CD from Gligongo Records mail-order store here: https://gilgongorecords.storenvy.com/products/20648396-john-wiese-deviate-from-balance-cd-gggr-077

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soveryanon · 4 years

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Reviewing time for MAG159, shortly before I’m Eradicated I Guess. TT___TT

- Hhhh over the quietness compared to last episode: less characters, less urgency, less twists and things happening on every side. Just the slowness, the repetitions of the waves, the footsteps, the echoes (down to the structure of the exchanges: Jon-Peter, Jon-Martin, Jon-Peter, Jon-Martin). Peter’s voice was really cool with earphones, because:

(MAG159) PETER: [DISTORTED] He doesn’t~ want~ to see you~ ARCHIVIST: Where are you? PETER: [DISTORTED, END OF SENTENCES ECHOING] I’m not here, Archivist – no one is. It’s only you.

Given how his voice was circling (sometimes far, closer, on the right, on the left), it really felt that indeed: he was nowhere at all, and everywhere at the same time. Everything felt more intimate, more personal, more intrusive: Peter’s personal story, Jon’s own sense of losses (the friends or people he cared for lost over his journey, the threat that Martin would meet the same fate), The Lonely feeding Martin with a false sense of security… everything was really fitting, for our first inside experience of The Lonely?

- I’m going to miss Peter’s own static, because it really felt to me, every time, that the tape recorders were just plain hissing at him for being there, “we do not like you, hhhh go away go away go away!!”. Though: Peter is dead (exploded/was ripped from existence), but Martin is still around (for now ;;), has been trained to be dual-Lonely, managed to disappear on Georgie in MAG149, has admitted that he was “getting there”, so… if Martin survives the end of season 4 and is not sealed or stuck somewhere afterwards, or at the very least, if we still hear him from time to time, we could still get some trademark Lonely static. This time from him. Sob.

- “If Peter loses, it won’t be (all) that bad” Simon and Elias said.

(MAG151) SIMON: I think… [INHALE] I think Peter is taking a rather large, but calculated gamble. Not just on you, but on a lot of things. If it works, he’ll be in a very strong position. And if he fails… it won’t be all that bad. MARTIN: You don’t think it will be the end of the world? SIMON: Oh! It very well might be, but…

(MAG158) PETER: … Fine. MARTIN: Great. [VERY SHARP SQUEALS OF DISTORTION INCREASING] Now, perhaps if one of you, then, can tell me what– [SHARP SQUEALS OF DISTORTION REACHING A PEAK, BEFORE DECREASING] ELIAS: It won’t be that bad, Peter~ [CHUCKLE] You’ll see. Now: he’ll be here soon, so you can leave, or…

Cue Peter being disintegrated. “won’t be that bad”.

(In Elias’s case, it was probably about The Watcher’s Crown happening and Peter having to live under The Eye, since it was before Peter announced that no, he would stick around to make it hard on Jon? But ouft.)

- I do love how Peter’s own statement didn’t even try to portray him in a good light (filthy rich, not doing much with his life or to create money on his own, only spending it? And utterly unrepentant about sacrificing people), but also showed how… pathetic he actually was? It really feels like he was broken since his childhood, and I was especially !! over this bit:

(MAG159) PETER: Gertrude was the one that scared me. She seemed to have no interest in meeting me whatsoever, something… I appreciated, but there was something in her eyes when she looked at me, as though she was making a calculation and I was an unwanted integer she was deciding whether to remove. It wasn’t until much later that I realised exactly how true that was. Still, it seems I was never a pressing enough concern for her to sail out after me, or even wait until I’d made port and waylay me. I suppose even she couldn’t have predicted how it would all turn out.

… He described her as a child would. How this big, undecipherable, scary adult could harm him, and how he would have been unable to do anything against that. It was also there in the way he seemed to constantly miss the point, although he had claimed to Martin that he was “focusing on the big picture” (MAG126):

* The Daedalus project. The Dark went full-force into it, created a device they would use for their ritual (and which had survived the failed attempt until Jon destroyed it in MAG143); it contributed to Simon’s research for his own next ritual attempt (MAG151: “Oh goodness no, that’s the future my boy! […] Honestly, I’m pinning most of my long-term hopes on space – but that’s at least a hundred years away.”); meanwhile, Peter:

(MAG159) PETER: I started it, shortly before Simon convinced me to join him with his little space experiment. It was interesting, of course! But in the end, a tremendous waste of money, just to scare a single astronaut. But I had it in my mind that it might distract from my true attempt.

Peter “focusing on the big picture” Lukas only spilled all that cash for an experiment on one person without… even… thinking… that maybe… it could serve… bigger/greater plans…

* The fact that a few details from his ritual attempts were personal biases – the only description we have of Peter is that he’s “white” and “very pale” for a sailor, so, big surprise that he would only pick white people for his project. (And he was obsessed with so many details in his description of the building? I mean, on the one hand, he got a good reading of how modern people’s fears worked (although he got help to nail it); on the other hand, it also read as an accumulation of small silly little details meant to casually make people’s lives worse… but not a Grand Plan or something. It was fairly efficient, it fits The Lonely, but still. The Dark and The Stranger plotted their ritual for years with an accumulation of esoteric symbols and dedication and The Lonely had to be an attempt coming from One Guy, and one of the evilnesses of said plan relied on cutting off people’s Internet. And he got defeated by a headline in the newspaper.)

(I’m not even sure that it was Gertrude who was responsible for the headline because, to be fair, that could as well have been Elias’s doing.)

* Still rezudisjnezd that he named the ritual “The Silence” only because he thought they had to have a name. It’s just. Lacking so much love and Conviction.

* Peter was ultimately played by everyone: Elias staged his encounter with Martin in MAG108, ensuring that Peter would pick him (was it because of Melanie&Basira’s conversation in MAG106, about the fact that Martin had a crush on Jon? Did Elias think that it would work as a safeguard to ensure that Martin would choose Jon over The Lonely?), and riled him up enough to go wait for Jon in The Lonely although it wasn’t part of their deal. Martin waited his time before dropping Peter at the last moment in the Panopticon. Even in this episode, Jon… lured him out:

(MAG159) PETER: [DISTORTED] Yes. I suppose you did. [FOOTSTEPS] … Where are your friends, Archivist? [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: Tim and Sasha are dead. [FOOTSTEPS] PETER: [DISTORTED] Yes. [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: Daisy and Basira are… probably dead. [FOOTSTEPS] PETER: [DISTORTED] Because – of – you. [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: Georgie and Melanie have left me. [FOOTSTEPS] PETER: [DISTORTED] And? [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: Martin’s gone. [FOOTSTEPS] PETER: [DISTORTED] You’re alone, Archivist. The last one standing. I did warn you, I did want you to leave but… perhaps it would be better if you stayed a while. After all, you can’t hurt anyone in here. [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: Yes… [FOOTSTEPS] PETER: [DISTORTED] Yes. [FOOTSTEPS STOP] ARCHIVIST: [STATIC] … Or perhaps you could answer some questions. PETER: [DISTORTED] … What? ARCHIVIST: [STATIC INCREASES] I wouldn’t try to leave if I were you. I can See you now. I can find you wherever you go.

(J–Jon, that does count as “honey-trap”.)

* Feeding the pitiful vibes (not sympathetic ones): the fact that Peter was aware of his fatal flaw and the fact that he was predictable, not a big enough threat for anyone? And there was the casual awareness, too, that he wouldn’t come back, or at least wouldn’t come back to what he loved:

(MAG159) PETER: Some of my most peaceful memories were on the Tundra. I had gathered a small group of trusted souls, who I knew were loyal and dedicated – to… my money. They had no qualms or morals about what we did on that boat, and at my request, each signed to the ship under a false name, so I would never have to know who they were. Those Lonely nights of sacrifice, and waiting, hearing the dreadful sound of my ancestors’ whistle drift over the dark and brooding waters, knowing another soul was leaving this world… God, I wish I was there now…! Locked in my cabin, staring over the quiet emptiness of the open ocean. But it’s moored now, and I came on land, at Elias’s request. My crew is out there waiting for a call I think I am now unlikely ever to give them. […] Thinking about it now, perhaps one of the reasons I lasted as long as I did was that I was, at the end of the day, predictable. A “known quantity”. I had my little patch, sending my poor lost sailors to their Forsaken end, but I rarely stepped outside of it. When I think of all those I met who travelled in this secret world we found ourselves in – Gertrude, Simon, Mikaele, even Rayner… there are plenty whose lives might well have been easier with my death, but it was rare that I strayed outside my habits. […] Maybe that’s why, when I crossed paths with Adelard Dekker, we ended up talking, and he told me his theory of The Extinction – something that stayed with me even after he died pursuing it.

(* The way Adelard Dekker just casually chatted to Peter about his theory was revealing: we saw Adelard binding the Not!Them to the Web table, following an End avatar to neutralise him for some time and prevent further victims, confronting John Amherst at the cost of his own life… but Peter Lukas? Adelard chatted with him about his convictions and theories regarding a new Fear emerging.)

* The way Peter was obliterated on all accounts?? He got played by everyone, learned that Martin was not loyal to him, lost his bet with Elias, Jon tore his statement from his sore mouth (and DANG was Alasdair’s voice acting incredible, with Peter’s voice getting hoarser and hoarser as his story was dragged down from his throat; Peter wasn’t used to talking that much, clearly), then obliterated him in his own territory – The Lonely, with the sound of the waves reminiscent of the sea Peter loved. And Jon managed to get Martin and to get him back to himself, and is now ready to leave The Lonely. And nail into the coffin:

(MAG159) ARCHIVIST: Martin…! He’s gone, Martin. He is gone. MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] His only wish was to die alone. ARCHIVIST: Tough…!

… he didn’t even get to get his last wish respected. (That “Tough…!”, jON… Jon was acting like Tim in MAG118, when Jon was complaining about cobwebs.)

- I’m surprised we never saw a Eye-Vast-Lonely collaboration at work because??? Perfect trinity, they’ve all pointed out how close they were to each of the other two?

(MAG091) MIKE: A little bit of privacy. Is that really so much to ask? I suppose it is, isn’t it? From you and yours at least. We have a lot in common, really. After all, what, what good’s the height, the terrifying draw of gravity, unless you, unless you really know the scale of what you’re facing?

(MAG151) SIMON: I mean, yes, if you want to get technical, he serves The-One-Alone, and I serve The-Falling-Titan, but – those two are a lot closer than you might imagine. After all: the larger the space you find yourself alone in, the more isolated you feel. MARTIN: [RECITING] And being aware of how lonely you are can make anywhere feel more empty. SIMON: Exactly. I’ve actually been toying with the idea of trying to do something with the scale of humanity itself; you know, emphasise all that “overpopulation” nonsense, but… honestly, it just… doesn’t ring true for me. We’re all just so tiny and pointless, you see; it’s hard to really get past it.

(MAG159) PETER: [DISTORTED] Just go. [RUMBLING SOUND] ARCHIVIST: Make me. … Unless you can’t. The Lonely and The Eye aren’t too far apart, are they? Not really. What good’s being alone if you don’t know how alone you truly are.

Though yeah, The Eye sounds compatible with a lot of things – especially given how it just fed on Peter’s misery, indiscriminately (even to the point that, you got messed up by The Dark? Well, telling your story will still feed Beholding).

- I’m not sure I understood well what Peter meant, chronology-wise, regarding his ritual:

(MAG159) PETER: My instinct was much like the others: I thought that if I could complete my ritual first, then the potential birth of the Dreadful Change would be meaningless. I started it, shortly before Simon convinced me to join him with his little space experiment. It was interesting, of course! But in the end, a tremendous waste of money, just to scare a single astronaut. But I had it in my mind that it might distract from my true attempt.

If it’s how I think it went: Adelard talked to Peter about his theory of The Extinction, so Peter began to think about his ritual, but Simon distracted him with the Daedalus project first, Peter got involved with the Daedalus, then began to get invested in his Lonely ritual for real? If so:

* Adelard’s oldest letter regarding The Extinction was from January 2006 (MAG134). He probably talked about it with Peter around that time, since…

* “Stratosphere group” launched the Daedalus in early 2007 (MAG057).

* Peter brought Gertrude and Michael Shelly towards The Great Twisting (MAG101), some time after October 2009 (as it was coming close in MAG126).

* Sean Kelly was sacrificed on the Tundra in/shortly after October 2010 (MAG033).

So the big question is whether Gertrude had already thwarted Peter’s ritual attempt by The Great Twisting, or if she did it afterwards. Peter mentioned that he was a mess right after:

(MAG159) PETER: It really knocked me back. Took me years to find myself again. I returned to the Tundra, tried to forget.

And it could fit Carlita’s description of him in MAG033? (It would mean that Peter was actually MOPING when she saw him, which could match and explain why he had felt so different from the Peter Lukas who later started looming around the Institute.)

Another question is whether “[C/K]onrad Lukas” was actually Peter under an alias, or another Lukas:

(MAG057, Carter Chilcott) “I remember the man in charge of my particular project, Conrad Lukas, made a face of rather overstated disgust when he told me I wouldn’t be up there entirely on my own. I got the distinct impression he was one of those people who feel that ethical restrictions do nothing but bind the hands of the true scientist, and leave them at the mercy of their subjects’ limitations. […] Mission Control had also supplied me with a lot of books and films and other entertainment as, like Conrad had told me at the first briefing, the experiment was into isolation – not boredom.”

But given Peter’s own stance towards fiction:

(MAG159) PETER: I had no time for… books, or television, or any of the escapes and artificial friendships of fiction. No; I was myself, and that was enough.

I’m leaning towards the idea that it was another Lukas there. So: Peter being indeed the “favoured son”, official heir, in control of the family money, and sending other Lukases to do this or that.

- Re: Adelard’s email from MAG157:

(MAG159) PETER: Maybe that’s why, when I crossed paths with Adelard Dekker, we ended up talking, and he told me his theory of The Extinction – something that stayed with me even after he died pursuing it.

It doesn’t mean that Peter was the one who put it on Jon’s desk, but at the very least, he did indeed know that Adelard was dead. (I was strongly suspecting it since Peter had never mentioned to Martin the possibility of finding Adelard or working with him, so yeah, that checks out!)

- So…

(MAG111) GERARD: Families are just useful ‘cause they can push you in the right direction. And the Lukases are very good at that. ARCHIVIST: And I imagine they’re not… reluctant to remove any members that might put that legacy at risk. GERARD: Right. You know, for a group that worships a power of Loneliness, they never seem to have any problems breeding, or finding spooky singles to marry them. Just one of those things, I guess. But most times you try to put your descendants on the path to worship, it doesn’t go great. Just takes one stubborn heir to freak out about the truth, and the whole thing comes crashing down.

(MAG159) PETER: I suppose to call myself an “only child” is, technically, untrue. Two of my sisters still live, though they disavowed the family and moved far, far away. Still… to be cut off from one’s family is its own… very special sort of loneliness, isn’t it? So we all serve, in our own ways. The other two – my brother, Aaron, and sister, Judith – well… they weren’t considerate enough to quietly grow to adulthood and disappear. They simply didn’t have the temperament to thrive in a Lukas household, always trying to… instigate games… make friends… connect with people… As far as I’m aware, they were sent away, to live their lives with very distant relatives, never to return. I’m sure it’s possible my mother resolved the matter in a less pleasant manner, but in my limited interaction with her, she never struck me as a cruel woman, and I would imagine for children that age, the fear and isolation of being uprooted, and sent away, is just as strong as that of meeting a more… grisly fate.

I’m still not sure what happened with Evan Lukas, but this episode pointed out that, actually, Lukases that do not embrace The Lonely… are the norm. Out of the five children, Peter was the only one to willingly take that path, although growing up in such a family was, yeah, enough to mess up the others and make their lives casually miserable just because they had been born in the wrong family. On the one hand, funerals seemed to be a regular thing in the family (“When I returned, I was met by my mother and a small group of stern-faced relatives that I had never seen before – except at funerals. […] I left the house again shortly after, and took to the sea, and never saw my mother again – except, of course, at funerals.”); on the other hand, I think Peter would have mentioned it, if being a Lukas but straying away from the family god had a known tendency to kill you very soon, very fast…?

So what happened with Evan Lukas exactly…? Since ~having a heart~ was actually not that uncommon, since choosing not to partake in the family faith happened to almost all Lukases, what happened for him to suddenly die and for the family to try to feed Naomi to The Lonely…?

(- The mention of funerals was so awful and funny at the same time because, yes, you understand why in this family, funerals would constitute the ideal family gathering instead of getting everyone together over birthdays or life-oriented celebrations.

… at the same time, oops, it’s exactly Like That in my extended family too.

But still: Peter’s delivery was so… Peter. I’m love him, I’m gonna miss this awful man.)

- So, we got our ~Beach episode~ with the waves in the background, complete with a murder and a hug /o/ But the atmosphere was exceptionally fitting since, when Carter Chilcott was losing it in the Daedalus, he had dreamed about graveyards and the sea (MAG057: “I’d be sleeping, strapped into my bed in the middle of the void, or at the same time floating through ancient graveyards or the open, empty sea. They weren’t hallucinations though, they were dreams – even if the cold seem to seep out of them, and into the bones of me.”). In MAG159, we had waves, but also the sound of Jon walking on gravel, which was reminiscent of a graveyard? So, the two places Peter was associated with: the sea (and the Tundra), and the graveyards (from the funerals).

- I love how the (potential) Lonely Eyes was brushed upon with subtle touch / was “maybe there” behind what what Peter wasn’t saying:

(MAG159) PETER: My mother had five children over her life, before my father finally drifted away. She was a Lukas to the core, though not born into the family, while my father, for all he believed himself keen on a life… without… obligation, gradually withered away to nothing, as she cultivated the space between them. […] It was the sort of childhood that would not be allowed if we didn’t have money, but we’re an old family with, shall we say, a… [CHUCKLE] remarkably direct line of inheritance. […] I, of course, was the favoured son, being quiet and reserved and, at all points, deeply engaged with my own loneliness.

Not surprising for a Lonely avatar? But still noticeable that Peter never mentioned the concept of producing children of his own, when he was the “favoured son” in a family with a “remarkably direct line of inheritance” (you don’t have to be gay to not want children, but.). Same with his meeting with James-Elias-Jonah:

(MAG159) PETER: But it’s moored now, and I came on land, at Elias’s request. My crew is out there waiting for a call I think I am now unlikely ever to give them. … I will call him “Elias”, for that’s how I’ve known him for most of our… acquaintance, though I originally met him when he was still “James Wright, Head of the Magnus Institute”. I considered him a dull little man at first, so keen to watch other people’s misery, to lose himself in second-hand pain and drama – exactly the sort of thing I’d always been so keen to avoid. […] I suppose that’s why I was so keen when Elias contacted me. We kept in touch, of course: my family helped fund the Institute, and he’d always been good about tipping me off to potential victims. Going through something horrific can leave you feeling very isolated indeed, especially if you know no one else will believe you. And of course… he knew I find it hard to resist a wager.

Peter “considered him a dull little man at first”, and that “at first” is saying a lot on its own, uh? (I’m screaming a bit less dignifiedly over that hesitation before “acquaintance”, because that one really felt like a way to circumvent The Eye’s compulsion, to not lie but not go into TMI territory.)

As Peter mentioned, he was a creature of habit – so, it’s almost sweet, in its own way, that he stuck to “Elias”, since it was the body he was mainly accustomed to (… well. “host-body”.)

(- SCREAMING over the concept of Elias “tipping off” Peter to victims as potential Lonely sacrifices: OF COURSE, he would, and that’s??? So horrible??? And yeah, really putting back in mind that the Institute has never been a “good” place, or even that passive: getting stories from people, feeding their trauma to The Eye, trapping them in the Archivist’s nightmares if they gave their statements live, never helping you to deal with the things that were going after you… and even ensuring that you could be snatched up by other Fears. I thought that sending Brian to the Lonely in MAG100 was a power display (snatching a victim in The Eye’s own temple under Elias’s nose), and maybe it was; but it was… also linked to the fact that anyway, Peter was used to get statement-givers after the Institute was done with them.

… come to think of it, that’s almost “sweet”/blasphemy from Elias, to throw potential victims in Peter’s direction, since it means they wouldn’t feed The Eye anymore?)

- … Peter’s statement also highlighted that Peter was (assumingly) pretty young compared to Elias-Jonah? I’m a bit sad about how ouuuuuuuuuuuuuft, in the end, Peter and Elias’s relationship doesn’t feel like two terrible people casually annoying each other and their plans, after all, but… mostly Elias indulging/toying with Peter, from start to finish? The way Peter described it, they were absolutely not on equal ground:

(MAG159) PETER: And of course… he knew I find it hard to resist a wager. If I could convince one of his staff to willingly pledge themselves to The Lonely, it was all mine. He even let me pick the victim. He was so sure the prize of the Institute, the Panopticon, and a willing vessel to use it, would be just too much for me to resist. And… he was right. Just didn’t go quite as I’d hoped. … You know, this is one of the first bets I ever made with him that I’ve actually lost. But I guess that’s how hustlers work, isn’t it? They lose, and lose, until you’re willing to put it all on the line, and then… the trap shuts. So I suppose that’s probably why I reacted so rashly, trying to rip his victory away. Keep you here. But it looks like I might have underestimated my opponent, once again.

Elias absolutely manipulated Peter from the start? He pushed him in Martin’s direction (MAG108) so the pick was rigged from the start. He lost previous bets, assumedly on purpose, just to give Peter a false sense of security. Elias got what he needed from Peter, which was at the bare minimum getting Jon to willingly experience The Lonely, and a potential few petty bonuses (making Martin’s life miserable for a few months after Martin plotted his arrest; ensuring that the Archives team would drift apart with The Lonely’s presence in the Institute; pushing Basira to leave Jon alone with the coffin, then encouraging her to take Jon to Svalbard so Jon would both face The Buried and The Dark)… meanwhile, Peter didn’t manage to get anything at all except for a few researchers? It seems that Peter was the only one to think that Elias and him were on kinda equal footing?

(I’m not excluding the possibility that Elias will be surprised/upset to learn that Jon absolutely butchered Peter, and that Elias was assuming that Peter would get out damaged but not dead, but… not banking on it. From the letters we saw, Jonah Magnus wasn’t really into attachments, and given Elias’s cackle when Peter went off to wait for Jon in The Lonely? Yeah no, all according to plan.)

- ;; Martin got back this time, but I’m not sure that his involvement with The Lonely won’t have long-lasting (well. First assuming he survives.) effects on him? His description of the comfort he found in it didn’t come out of nowhere – it’s how he had described it to the tape recorders before:

(MAG142) MARTIN: [SIGH] Th–the worst part is I don’t even want to talk to him about it. I’m just… [SIGH] I suppose I’m just getting comfortable with the distance. [SIGH] Cut off. [DRY CHUCKLE] “Lonely”. [INHALE] Mind you, Peter’s not wrong. It really is easier than actually just trying to communicate with people.

(MAG149) MARTIN: Sort of… surprised Peter hasn’t rocked up with some more… “insights”? Haven’t seen him around for a while, actually. I mean… eh, it’s not like I miss him [CHUCKLING] but, at least he was someone to– [PAUSE] … Ah. [HUFF] [PAPER RUSTLING] Yeah, that makes sense. [EXHALE] A’ight, fine. Just… me on my lonesome for a while, then. … Could be worse. … Peaceful, at least. … I don’t miss all the shouting. [CHUCKLE] Even if it w–

(MAG156) MARTIN: Mm. “Emptiness or maggots”…! It’s kinda the shape of things around here, isn’t it? Still, kind of nice to talk to some… thing. [INHALE] It’s always… quiet, these days. For me, at least. I guess I technically have the power to make it not quiet, to… to talk to people, but like… You know, I–I also have the power to clean out the fridge, and it’s still a mess. It’s not that I don’t want to clean the fridge, it’s just… Some things are just hard…! Anyway. I know he’s been listening to the tapes so, [INHALE] I guess that’ll have to do. I think I still care that he hears my voice. It’s hard to tell, sometimes. How much do I actually care; how much is just feeling that I should care. I’m on my own so much these days, I… just wish I didn’t like it so much.

(MAG159) MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] N–No. No, I don’t think so. ARCHIVIST: … Why? MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] This is where I should be. It feels right. ARCHIVIST: Martin, don’t say that. MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] Nothing hurts here. It’s just quiet. Even the fear is gentle here. ARCHIVIST: This isn’t right, this isn’t you! MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] It is, though. [CHUCKLE] I really loved you, you know? […] ARCHIVIST: Listen – I know you think you want to be here, I know you think it’s safer and w– … well, maybe it is… But we need you. I need you. MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] No, you don’t. Not really…! Everyone’s alone, but we all survive. ARCHIVIST: I don’t just want to survive! MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] I’m sorry.

Some of the things Martin said over season 4 might have been in case Peter would hear them, but there was still some bits of truth, eh? And it’s absolutely nasty from The Lonely to sell him promises of distance – not losing anymore, not being hurt ever again – when Martin had indeed lost and lost and lost.

(And ouft, the shared bits regarding how Jon and Martin experienced The Lonely and/or Peter’s influence… Peter reminded Martin of Tim and Sasha’s death right at the start of MAG158, simply by mentioning Tim and freeing Not!Sasha; Jon had to once again acknowledge whom he had lost, so Tim and Sasha, while walking in The Lonely. Martin got promised to not be hurt again; Jon got encouraged to give in because he couldn’t hurt anyone again.)

* Cries in season 4 trailer:

(S4 trailer) MARTIN: We really need you, Jon. Everything’s… It’s bad. I–I don’t know how much longer we can do this. We– … I need you. A–and… I know that you’re not… [PAUSE] I–I know th–there’s no way to… [PAUSE] But we need you. Jon. Jon, please, just… Please. If–if there’s anything left in you that can still… see us, or–or some power that you’ve still got, or–or, or something, anything – please! … Please… [SHAKY BREATHING, STRANGLED VOICE] I… I can’t…

(MAG159) ARCHIVIST: Listen – I know you think you want to be here, I know you think it’s safer and w– … well, maybe it is… But we need you. I need you. MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] No, you don’t. Not really…! Everyone’s alone, but we all survive.

Because!!! Gnn, Martin could deflect Jon like this since he had already tried to beg for help, for Jon to come back, down to the correction of “We – I need you”, and it hadn’t worked back then.

And that’s the thing with Martin, I think? He highlighted in MAG158 that he wasn’t a “chosen” one and, given his life, it indeed feels like a long string of never being chosen or favoured or saved. His father dumped him along with his mother when he was a kid (MAG118: “How old were you when your father left? Eight? Nine? When you mother began to sicken and he decided he was done with you both.”), his mother had grown to hate him although he had sacrificed his life for her well-being, quitting school to find work (MAG118: “Your mother… simply hates you. You just don’t know why! It’s not your fault. Though I know that isn’t any consolation, it’s just bad luck, really.”). Tim… had favoured him a lot, at first (still following him when Martin wanted to check on Jon at the end of season 2, warning him over what it meant to read statements during season 3) but ultimately followed his own path to avenge his brother without considering Martin a reason to stay (MAG114: “You know how long that thing pretended to be Sasha? […] And I had no idea? I knew Sasha for years, we… I don’t know Martin as well as I knew her; I barely know what Melanie and Basira look like, or that weird murder-cop.”). It has been the case with a lot of characters (Martin did that to Tim by favouring Jon over him, too?), but Basira and Daisy had each other, Georgie and Melanie found each other, and given his backstory, it’s… not really a surprise that a weak spot would be the fact that, although he’s trying to be the caretaker and the caregiver, Martin mostly wanted to be cared for by someone…? (And it wasn’t anyone’s responsibility or duty to provide that, except for his parents, and that part had been screwed for most of his life already.) (Well, tho. Technically, Martin has been “chosen” thrice recently: by Elias when he pushed Peter in his direction, by Peter when he picked Martin for their bet – and now by Jon.)

So tl;dr SOMEONE CAME FOR MARTIN, and independently from the fact that it was Jon, I’m so glad for him? ;w; Especially with the contrast between the two times Martin was made to experience Eye powers:

(MAG118) ELIAS: The resemblance is quite uncanny: the face of the man she hates, who destroyed her life, watching over her; feeding her; cleaning her; looking down on her with such pity– MARTIN: [RAGGED] Shut! Up! ELIAS: Do you want to know what she sees when she looks a you? [STATIC INTENSIFIES] MARTIN: [STRANGLED BREATHING AND CRIES] [FOR LONG] [LONG] [STRANGLED SOBS] [STATIC FADES OUT] ELIAS: Don’t. burn. any more. statements.

(MAG159) ARCHIVIST: Martin… Martin, look at me. Look at me, and tell me what you see. [STATIC RISES] MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] I see… [INHALE] I see you, Jon. [BREATHLESS CHUCKLE] [PRESENT, ECHO FADES] I see you…! ARCHIVIST: Oh, Martin… [CLOTHES RUSTLING] MARTIN: [FRANTIC BREATHING] I w–I was on my own…! I was all on my own… ARCHIVIST: Not anymore. Come on – let’s go home…

In both cases: showing, seeing… but in order to hurt him (thx Elias), and in order to comfort/love him (jON!!). Souring and taking vs. … giving?

And it felt like such a completion for Jon, too! Because Sasha had died in a blind spot, unnoticed until Jon could pick up on and puzzle together what had happened to her. Tim died “thanks” to Jon giving him the means to fight against The Unknowing’s effects, through the compulsion.

(MAG119) ARCHIVIST: Tim!! [STATIC] What do you see? TIM: I see my asshole boss! W– wait… wait… SARAH: Spoil-sport. NIKOLA: Tim… TIM: … Grimaldi. NIKOLA: Once, a long time ago, before Orsinov made me. And sometimes, even now, on special occasions. Like your brother! DISTORTED MALE VOICE: Shall I? ARCHIVIST: Tim! [STATIC] What’s in your hand? TIM: It’s… I don’t… the– the– … the detonator…

And we got a glimpse of how the people Jon had lost, permanently or spiritually, were still impacting him:

(MAG159) PETER: [DISTORTED, END OF SENTENCES ECHOING] I tried to tell you. He’s gone. He made his choice. And it wasn’t you. [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: … It was for me, though. I’m the reason he…! … I did this to him as much as you. PETER: [DISTORTED] Yes. I suppose you did. [FOOTSTEPS] … Where are your friends, Archivist? [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: Tim and Sasha are dead. [FOOTSTEPS] PETER: [DISTORTED] Yes. [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: Daisy and Basira are… probably dead. [FOOTSTEPS] PETER: [DISTORTED] Because – of – you. [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: Georgie and Melanie have left me. [FOOTSTEPS] PETER: [DISTORTED] And? [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: Martin’s gone. [FOOTSTEPS] PETER: [DISTORTED] You’re alone, Archivist. The last one standing. I did warn you, I did want you to leave but… perhaps it would be better if you stayed a while. After all, you can’t hurt anyone in here.

Jon, who had failed to save anyone… finally managed to get Martin (/an assistant) back. Regardless of Jon’s personal feelings for Martin, it’s still so much…! Peter was right to point out that they don’t know each other that much (and I’m glad that someone finally addressed it), but it’s not that much relevant when there is still a desire to reach the other, like we saw? I’m glad for that this small bubble of hug and comfort was found…

(;; But. He did save Martin. Thanks to The Eye’s powers. It was a mix of himself as a human and of supernatural means, but… It’s not the kind of series where using these powers is ever a positive thing in the medium to long run.)

(I’m still not sure what I want Jon to have done there!! If it was to focus and anchor Martin, or to Show His Inner Self to him. Whatever Martin saw, it pleased him; it might not be a Good Thing given that Jon had just murdered someone but!! Still. Martin was happy?? Relieved??? In my TMA??? I’m so worried over what the next episode will do to shatter that orz)

- edcnjxerfd Peter please.

(MAG159) PETER: [DISTORTED] You’ve still got time, Archivist. Turn around, and leave. You’ve played your part; now, go. ARCHIVIST: What’s wrong, Lukas? Afraid of talking face to face? PETER: [DISTORTED] [LAUGH] Of course! Or haven’t you been paying attention? ARCHIVIST: [GRUNT] [FOOTSTEPS] Mar–tin!

Glad that it was acknowledged that yeah, Peter had been avoiding him for the entirety of season 4; extra-glad that Jon is receiving that as a slow burn.

- Re: Jon => he was incredibly scary, I’m Very Worried because, despite the hug, despite the comfort, despite Martin being found/chosen and Jon finally managing to save someone, it was still Jon’s powers who saved him… and it had been a good thing when it had happened with the coffin according to Elias.

And Jon was incredibly predatory in this episode: he didn’t need Peter’s statement! He crushed him to extort it, like with Breekon and Manuela! He still pushed to get more afterwards, leading to Peter’s annihilation! … and yeah, One Less Avatar Doing Harm, but it had nothing to do with that or saving Martin. It was pure Eye hunger; and we saw with Daisy and the Section 31 officers that this kind of violence is not written to be perceived as positive (it’s cruelty and violence for the sake of violence, it has nothing to do with fairness or justice). As much as I prefer to see Jon being like this to other avatars rather than to innocents… I’m afraid that it could also mean that he’s going to fall back into hunting people, if Elias’s immediate plans don’t incapacitate him? Who would make sure that he doesn’t? Melanie has left; Daisy is lost; Basira is… we don’t know yet. (And Martin but ;; Martin was too happy, there has to be a trick and he’ll be either stuck back in The Lonely or in the Panopticon or serve as a new body for Jonah, or get killed and trapped in the End book, uh.)

- Something that gets me is how heavily Jon’s journey to The Lonely sounds like his descent into the coffin?

(MAG128, Breekon) “It was waiting. I fed her to it. She took him from me. Made us a me, and she doesn’t get to die for that. She gets to live, trapped, and helpless, and entombed forever. No prey, no hunt, no movement. We failed, but I have at least that comfort. I am without him, now. I. am. I can feel myself fading. Weak. No reason to move. Nothing to deliver. But I am no longer tied to the casket; so you can have it. You can stare at it, knowing how your feral friend suffers, knowing how powerless you are to help. And when you can’t bear it any longer, knowing that you can climb in and join her…”

(MAG132) ARCHIVIST: I have her voice. I think that should be enough to find her, and I’m leaving my– … I’ll leave it with the tape. I should be able to find my way back to it… I think. Wish me luck…! … Although I suppose if you’re hearing this, then I… I didn’t have any. I don’t know. I’m… I’m scared. [SHORT CHUCKLE] When does the fear go away…? […] It’s okay… I’ve… I’ve got a plan. DAISY: I–is this like all your other plans? ARCHIVIST: It’s fine, I just… I just need to… to find it. DAISY: What? ARCHIVIST: Come on… Come on, where I… DAISY: Jon? ARCHIVIST: … Come on… [STATIC] [SHAKY BREATHING] DAISY: Jon? ARCHIVIST: I know… DAISY: Th–the way out? ARCHIVIST: No… I know where we are! There isn’t no out, not here. This is… this is forever deep below creation. Where the weight of existence bears down… This is The Buried, and we are alive… There isn’t even an up. … Oh god… What have I done! What have I done… […] [STATIC RISING] D–Daisy… DAISY: Uh, I’m, I’m here. ARCHIVIST: I I can… I–It… it’s closer. DAISY: What is? ARCHIVIST: M–my, my… my anchor? My… A–a rib, I can f–, I can fee– … I know the way! [DIGGING SOUNDS] DAISY: Wh–what? H–how– ARCHIVIST: I don’t… It’s like… My mindlink is… it’s stronger…

(MAG134) PETER: What does puzzle me, though, and I mean that genuinely, is… why you were piling tape recorders onto the coffin, while Jon was in there. [PAUSE] It’s a question, Martin, it’s– it’s not an accusation. MARTIN: I don’t know. And I just… felt like it might help. He’s always recording, I thought… it–it might help him… find his way out. PETER: Interesting. Were you compelled? MARTIN: [SULLEN] … I don’t know. … M–maybe? I–I, I definitely wanted to do it… PETER: But? MARTIN: I’m… I’m not sure where the idea came from.

(MAG135) ELIAS: I needed a way to force him to harness his ability more acutely than he had before. The coffin was a useful tool; Daisy an adequate bait. BASIRA: Then you messed up. Way he tells it, he doesn’t know how he got out of there. ELIAS: But he did. And his powers were no small part of it. Even if he required some assistance, they were what saved him. And he’s still achieved what no one – mortal, monster, or anything in-between – has ever been able to. He climbed out of The Buried.

(MAG136) DAISY: Jon… when you went into the coffin. Was it you choosing to do that? Did you actually think you could save me, or was… that something telling you to do it? [SILENCE] ARCHIVIST: It was me. I was… drawn to it, I’ll admit, but it was my decision. [PAUSE] It wasn’t entirely about you, though. […] If I do die, now, or get sealed away somewhere forever… I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. And I don’t want to lose anyone else so, if I can maybe stop that happening, and [DRY CHUCKLE] the only danger is to me, I– I’ll do it in a heartbeat; worst case scenario… the universe loses another monster. DAISY: That’s messed up. ARCHIVIST: [LOW SELF-DEPRECATIVE DRY LAUGHTER] … Yeah. I suppose it is. DAISY: Did you know the coffin wouldn’t kill you? ARCHIVIST: I– guess I thought imprisonment wouldn’t… wouldn’t be as bad as it was. DAISY: [SHAKY SIGH] ARCHIVIST: And it’s a lot easier to make that choice than it is to actually… endure the result. You might have noticed when I was in there with you, I… I had regrets.

So: warned about the danger of going inside the coffin, fearing it when he was on the verge of doing it, suffering from it once inside; a main motivation to still try was that it was a way to save Daisy; was initially trapped/made to experience what The Buried is about… until Jon’s powers kicked in and he managed to get back to the surface.

Rinse and repeat with The Lonely:

(MAG158) ELIAS: Peter. [PAUSE] It’s time. [SILENCE] PETER: … Fine. MARTIN: Great. [VERY SHARP SQUEALS OF DISTORTION INCREASING] Now, perhaps if one of you, then, can tell me what– [SHARP SQUEALS OF DISTORTION REACHING A PEAK, BEFORE DECREASING] ELIAS: It won’t be that bad, Peter~ [CHUCKLE] You’ll see. Now: he’ll be here soon, so you can leave, or… PETER: Oh no. No. I’m not gonna make it easy on him. You haven’t won yet. ELIAS: Your choice. Just make sure to leave the door open. […] ARCHIVIST: … You want me to follow him. ELIAS: No, Jon. You want you to follow him. I simply want you to know that if you do so, you are almost certainly not coming back. To go into The Lonely willingly is as good as death. ARCHIVIST: … How do I do it? ELIAS: [INHALE] Wasn’t too long ago. And I’m sure traces of their passage still remain. Just open your mind. Drink it all in. Know their route, [VERY SHARP SQUEALS OF DISTORTION, INCREASING] and simply… follow it. ARCHIVIST: [LOUDER BREATHING] ELIAS: Very good. Are you scared, Jon? ARCHIVIST: Yes… ELIAS: Perfect.

(MAG159) PETER: [DISTORTED] You’ve still got time, Archivist. Turn around, and leave. You’ve played your part; now, go. […] You’re alone, Archivist. The last one standing. I did warn you, I did want you to leave but… perhaps it would be better if you stayed a while. After all, you can’t hurt anyone in here. [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST: Yes… [FOOTSTEPS] PETER: [DISTORTED] Yes. [FOOTSTEPS STOP] ARCHIVIST: [STATIC] … Or perhaps you could answer some questions. PETER: [DISTORTED] … What? ARCHIVIST: [STATIC INCREASES] I wouldn’t try to leave if I were you. I can See you now. I can find you wherever you go. […] MARTIN: [FRANTIC BREATHING] I w–I was on my own…! I was all on my own… ARCHIVIST: Not anymore. Come on – let’s go home… MARTIN: How? ARCHIVIST: [SOFTLY] Don’t worry. I know the way.

In both cases, Jon went in to save someone despite his own fears (or because of them), got initially stuck (Buried and made to understand he couldn’t leave it; haunted by Peter who was trying to goad him to stay in the Lonely because of everything he had lost) until… his powers kicked back to the surface, fighting resistances until he could get out of here – in both cases, “I know the way”.

Still unsure over what was his anchor or the thing that actually pulled him out of there – was it his connection to The Eye, through the statements…? Was it truly his rib, though it needed a bit of amplification? Was it specifically his connection to the audio recordings, Web stuff, the lighter? Martin was used to do something, back with the coffin, and given that 1°) Peter and Elias had an ongoing bet relying on Elias’s non-interference, 2°) Peter accused Elias of having interfered in MAG158, so it was a possibility (and put in another perspective the way he asked if Martin had been “compelled” to help Jon in MAG134: he may have suspected it was Elias’s doing), 3°) … Elias apparently can “call” Jon indeed (MAG158: “Ah, Jon. I was almost worried…! You found your way all right.” “Yes. … Ye–yes, I did… How?” “Suffice it to say I called you.”), it’s also possible that it is just Elias calling him back right now… we’ll see, I guess. Are Martin and Jon going to come out surrounded by tape recorders…? …………… or past statement-givers who have been “called” here too…?

- Another point of worry when comparing the coffin and The Lonely trip: what happened after Jon… got out from the coffin.

(MAG146) ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] Jess Tyrell, the woman on the tape… [SIGH] She was the fourth. I–I just tried to… I was weak, r–ravenous, I–I didn’t feel… … The first was a supermarket cleaner. Em, ended up lost for a week in an endless warehouse. I didn’t even…! I–I just went in for some shopping, and he was there, and I–I just… asked. The second was, uh, it was after I got… stabbed by Melanie. MELANIE: You are not putting this on me! ARCHIVIST: No, that’s not what I meant! [SIGH] I was walking the streets, I–I thought I was trying to clear my head– DAISY: [DELIBERATE] But you were hunting. ARCHIVIST: … Apparently. I found a woman who… every year on her birthday, wakes up in a fresh grave. Just for her. DAISY: And the third was after the coffin. ARCHIVIST: A man rejected by all who knew him, searching ever-darker places for love. When he told me his story, he started… weeping maggots.

On the one hand: Jon gave in and took Peter’s statement – it should count as “feeding”. On the other hand: he used his powers on him right after (to the point of Peter’s… destruction), used them again with Martin, and may be relying on them again to leave The Lonely. The situation mirrors what happened with the trip against The Dark – taking Manuela’s statement, then using his powers to destroy the Dark Sun – and that one had not left Jon in an amazing state (MAG145: “We’ve been back in London for just over a week, now. I’m… more or less recovered physically.”).

Right when he left, Trevor and Julia had been wrecking havoc in the Institute, Hunting staff members; Basira had pointed out that cases happening in the Institute meant an automatic Section 31, which means there could be Section’d officers full of stories heading there… Which… is extra bad given Jon’s current state…?

- ;; Martin was at his softest and I still can’t believe the sheer relief in his voice, the fact he was getting One Nice Thing… But aouch, the context in itself hurts so much?

Jon taking Peter’s statement had nothing to do with saving Martin, and it was clearly an Eye monster getting what it wanted here:

(MAG159) ARCHIVIST: Yes… [FOOTSTEPS] PETER: [DISTORTED] Yes. [FOOTSTEPS STOP] ARCHIVIST: [STATIC] … Or perhaps you could answer some questions. PETER: [DISTORTED] … What? ARCHIVIST: [STATIC INCREASES] I wouldn’t try to leave if I were you. I can See you now. I can find you wherever you go. [STRONG STATIC] PETER: Fine! It was just a thought. [STATIC DECREASES] So leave. ARCHIVIST: Not before I get some answers. PETER: That’s not going to happen. ARCHIVIST: [STATIC] Tell me your story, Peter Lukas. [STATIC INCREASES] PETER: No…! ARCHIVIST: Tell me! PETER: [GROANING, STRUGGLING] Fine! Fine. […] I’m. Not saying. Another. Word. [STATIC INCREASES] ARCHIVIST: Tell me, or I will rip it out of you! [STATIC INCREASES] PETER: [STRUGGLING] No…! ARCHIVIST: Answer. My question! PETER: NO! Leave – me – ALONE! [STATIC INCREASES] ARCHIVIST: TELL ME! PETER: [GROANING SCREAM] [RIPPING, EXPLODING SOUND] [STATIC FADES] ARCHIVIST: … Stubborn fool…

Peter was not an innocent, was horrible; although he was indeed born in a bad family, we clearly saw that that doesn’t necessarily mean turning into a monster (his brothers and sisters either didn’t have the personality, or cut ties as soon as they became adults). This is still a lifestyle he chose to embrace, relying on sacrificing innocents?

But even then, it really doesn’t make Jon’s actions heroic and “right” at all: forcing Peter to spill his story, destroying someone who couldn’t do much more damage to him or Martin and whose last words were “Leave me alone” (ffs), and almost shruggingly putting the blame on Peter afterwards. In this episode, although Peter tried to ~seduce~ Jon into The Lonely, the monster clearly was Jon: Jon, who fed The Eye through Peter and got himself fed through Peter’s misery and revealed secrets, and who used Eye powers to destroy Peter. Even if he did some good (?) to Martin, it was still by using the same powers, granted by that Fear god, in the same episode during which Jon broke his hunger strike (“only” three months, from Manuela on the 16th of June, to Peter on the 25th of September)… and that really can’t be good, uh.

(- ;; Also ;; That association of the archives/the institute as Jon’s “home”…

(MAG143) HELEN: Go find your Basira. Then, let’s get you both home. (MAG159) ARCHIVIST: Not anymore. Come on – let’s go home…

Not good ;; Maybe it will turn out that Jon was planning to get Martin out of the institute in that last one, but I doubt it ;;)

(But that switch, with Jon going from “I killed a man because he didn’t want to answer my questions” to “Martin!”:

(MAG159) ARCHIVIST: … Stubborn fool… [FOOTSTEPS] Martin…! He’s gone, Martin. He is gone. MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] His only wish was to die alone. ARCHIVIST: Tough…! Now, listen to me, Martin. Li–listen… MARTIN: [DISTANT, VOICE ECHOING] Oh, hello, Jon. ARCHIVIST: Listen – I know you think you want to be here, I know you think it’s safer and w– … well, maybe it is… But we need you. I need you.

Jon confirmed as a cat, going from murderous to uwu in a few seconds.)

- There were a few things in Peter’s statement which put me in mind of Robert Smirke’s letter:

(MAG138, Robert Smirke) “I have been blessed with a long life, something few who crossed paths with the Dread Powers can boast, but now… at the end of it, my true fear is that I have wasted it, chasing an impossible dream. […] So many have abandoned us, casting about for rituals that I helped design. In my excited discussions with Mr. Rayner, I… perhaps extrapolated too much from his talk of a “Grand Ritual” of darkness. The Dark, I thought, was simply one of the Powers so, it stands to reason that each of them should have its own ritual. Perhaps they already did, even before I put pen to paper. They certainly do now, and I shudder to think how Lukas, Scott and the others may use this conception.”

(MAG159) PETER: Thinking about it now, perhaps one of the reasons I lasted as long as I did was that I was, at the end of the day, predictable. A “known quantity”. I had my little patch, sending my poor lost sailors to their Forsaken end, but I rarely stepped outside of it. When I think of all those I met who travelled in this secret world we found ourselves in – Gertrude, Simon, Mikaele, even Rayner… there are plenty whose lives might well have been easier with my death, but it was rare that I strayed outside my habits.

It was mostly the overall tone of someone who knows they’re going to die soon, with the statement feeling more like a testament at that moment? But, in Smirke’s case, he was still seeing people (although corrupted) still going on, which quite contrasts with Peter since…

Season 4 really feels like a season clearing up and “concluding” a lot of stories which had been ongoing until now? We learned about so many rituals, and how they weren’t a pressing concern or an ongoing issue for the next decades (Gertrude took care of The Spiral, The Buried, The Flesh, The Lonely; The Slaughter and The Vast have wasted their chance recently, same for (Jon thinks) The Corruption; both Elias and Gertrude had understood that The Dark wouldn’t succeed in 2015; Agnes’s doubts prevented The Desolation’s from happening; team Archives handled The Stranger at the end of season 3; The Hunt, The End and The Web can’t complete their rituals or don’t have any interest in doing so). And at the same time, we also got so many confirmations over reccurring characters’ fates and the circumstances in which they died and got neutralised, at least officially: The Stranger’s minions exploded at the end of season 3 (only leaving Breekon, who was Known by Jon rather forcefully); Gertrude’s hypothesis regarding Tom Haan in MAG130 revealed that we had probably witnessed his ending in MAG030 already (fading away, following his failed ritual); there wasn’t any trick and Maxwell Rayner seemed to have indeed been taken care of in the events related in MAG073 (MAG135, MAG140, MAG143), [Vardan Darvish] had indeed been killed in the events described in MAG109, and Manuela Dominguez, one of the last cultist, was swallowed by Helen’s doors in MAG143; we witnessed a (?) Web avatar’s last moment in MAG136; Agnes Montague indeed organised her assisted suicide in MAG067 (MAG139, MAG145); though still shrouded in mystery, Mikaele Salesa has been (at least officially) dead for years (MAG141); Eric Delano had indeed been dead since the 90s (MAG154); Adelard Dekker died shortly before Gertrude (MAG157), ensuring John Amherst’s confinement and neutralisation for a long time at least. We already knew about Gertrude’s death (we heard her getting shot live in season 4, tho); we heard Leitner’s murder; Gerry Keay stopped living and then actually died when Jon burned his page; Mary Keay had been dead for a few years and Gertrude had burned her page; Jane Prentiss died at the end of season 1; Arthur Nolan’s death was described in MAG055; Diego Molina in MAG012; Raymond Fielding had been taken care of by Agnes in the 70s; Mike Crew was murdered/Buried in MAG091; “Michael” was replaced in MAG102… and now, we can add Peter Lukas to the list of avatars/monsters who are not current concerns anymore.

Who are the recurring figures left and still kicking, at this point? Amongst the old or middle-aged ones: Jared Hopworth (Flesh, turned avatar in 1996, manhandled by Helen at the end of MAG131 but set free), Jude Perry (Desolation, turned avatar in 1991, still kicking though their ritual was neutralised), Trevor Herbert (Hunt, old as balls), Daisy (Hunt, began to deal with the supernatural as a child and formally starting 2002; Trevor and Daisy might be currently destroying each other), “Elias Bouchard” (Beholding, Jonah being more than 200 years old), Simon Fairchild (Vast, a few centuries old, having a blast).

We have a few recent avatars around: Oliver Banks (End, turned in or after 2015), Annabelle Cane (Web, turned in 2010), Helen-the-Distortion (Spiral, took over in 2017), Julia Montauk (embraced The Hunt in Summer 2010), Jon (Beholding, gradually groomed into avatarhood from late 2015 to early 2018), potentially Martin (Beholding-touched Lonely, late 2017 and 2018).

… it really feels like a clean slate? What can there be afterwards, an expansion of that new generation of avatars, or nothing at all…? (We still have The Extinction, and Hill Top Road, and most likely Beholding happening or trying to happen right now… but it really feels like a current cycle has been reaching its end…?

- WorriedAboutElias™ T____T

(MAG135) BASIRA: [DRY SIGH] What was the point? You won’t be getting your ritual off from in here so, what do you need him for? What’s so important you need him stronger?

(MAG158) ELIAS: You’ve lost, Peter. Admit it. […] Peter. [PAUSE] It’s time. […] It won’t be that bad, Peter~ [CHUCKLE] You’ll see. Now: he’ll be here soon, so you can leave, or… PETER: Oh no. No. I’m not gonna make it easy on him. You haven’t won yet. ELIAS: Your choice. Just make sure to leave the door open. [VERY SHARP SQUEALS OF DISTORTION INCREASING, REACHING A PEAK, THEN DECREASING AND STOPPING] ELIAS: [LONG, ECHOING, DELIGHTED LAUGHTER] [SELF-CONTENDED SIGH]

(MAG159) PETER: So I suppose that’s probably why I reacted so rashly, trying to rip his victory away. Keep you here. But it looks like I might have underestimated my opponent, once again. ARCHIVIST: … What was his prize? What did he get, if you lost? PETER: Oh, he got you. ARCHIVIST: … I, I don’t understand. PETER: And you won’t. Not from me. I’m done.

… I do love and hate equally both meaning behind that “he got you”: as in, “he fooled you” and “his prize was you”.

Question still open as to what Elias wanted Jon to do exactly, and how he’s now planning to use it. For the second part, given his questions about Jon’s fear, I’d say it was about Jon’s experiencing The Lonely as a fear and/or getting an experience of it through first-hand experience (Jon being afraid of it, Jon picking it apart once inside of it and knowing it intimately); could still be about collecting the statement of a Lonely-worshipper, too, since Elias had been… delighted… right after Peter had decided to make it harder for Jon although his presence wasn’t part of their deal (given how Peter had been played by everyone until now… he could have been fooled about that part too. Elias did mention that “Your choice~”, and the bastard is all about rubbing your own mistakes in your face, even when he engineered everything for you to make that decision).

And now, Jon has known all the Fourteen Fears, got to “to experience them, whether first-hand or through the eyes of others” (MAG092): he has done both, completing the set of getting statements, live or written, from people serving through the sacrifices of innocents or overtaken by a Power, and experiencing direct manifestations:

* Everything about The Eye.

* The Web: Annabelle Cane’s insight into The Web (MAG147) / being controlled by A Guest For Mr. Spider (MAG080).

* The Corruption: Jane Prentiss’s being contaminated by The Hive (MAG032) / The Hive’s worms burrowing themselves into him (MAG039).

* The Spiral: Michael-The-Distortion’s statement (MAG102) / Michael’s and Helen’s corridors (MAG078, MAG079 and MAG143).

* The Desolation: Jude Perry’s statement / his hand burned to a crisp (MAG089).

* The Vast: Mike Crew’s statement / enjoy sky blue from your chair (MAG091).

* The Hunt: Daisy’s statement (MAG061), Trevor&Julia’s statement (MAG109) / hunted by Daisy (MAG091) and Julia (MAG107) (“Do I miss being chased…?”).

* The Stranger: Breekon’s “extracted” statement (MAG128) / got to learn the feeling through the Not!Them in season 2, got to “See” Nikolas (MAG119), the overall Unknowing experience.

* The End: Oliver Banks’s statement (MAG121), bonus Tova McHugh (MAG155) / the whole refusing to die and becoming something else post-explosion (MAG120, MAG121).

* The Slaughter: Melanie’s account (MAG117) (?) / Melanie’s murderous attempts in the second half of season 3 and beginning of season 4, culminating with getting stabbed at the end of MAG125.

* The Flesh: Jared Hopworth’s statement / body twisted and two ribs being taken (MAG131).

* The Buried: Hezekiah Wakely’s statement (MAG152) / going into the coffin and learning what is Too-Close-I-Cannot-Breathe (MAG132).

* The Dark: Manuela Dominguez’s written (MAG135) and live (MAG143) statements / killing the Dark Sun by sight (MAG143).

* The Lonely: Peter Lukas’s statement / going into The Lonely (MAG159).

=> idk if it was misleading, or if yeah, completing the set was the point all along, but if the latter: I hope that Elias minimising The Extinction and not initially factoring it in could bite him in the arse (MAG138: “In my case, while Peter has talked of it before, it is only very recently that I’ve been forced to admit The Extinction is real.”)

Other actors who could do something in MAG160:

* Helen, who’s probably been eating popcorn and enjoying the chaos but… could still do something else to make things a bit worse.

* Annabelle: we know that she has plans for Jon and needed him alive for something (MAG147: “I’ve simply been… watching. I’m sure you understand that. Maybe I’ve occasionally been nudging something here and there to keep you safe, to keep everything on track.” + Oliver went to push Jon to wake up at the request of someone from The Web), and we still don’t know what that is… She could be collaborating with Elias, or she could be planning to stab him last moment, I guess?

* Baaaaaaaaasiiiiiiraaaa: she had left the chaos by the end of MAG158, I don’t think she has many other options than trying to reach the Panopticon herself…? And all season has been about her getting misled and manipulated by Elias, making bad decisions and/or not managing to get any “win”… (=> on the one hand, there is still a knife in the Panopticon near Jonah’s original body and his current one; on the other hand, Basira had also been associated to her search for Annabelle Cane in this second half, insisting to go to Hill Top Road, being told by Elias to drop it, explaining to Jon that she was still trying to find her… So if anything regarding Annabelle happens, I’m kinda expecting it to be through or with Basira.)

(Oooooooorrrr… plain timeskip and we don’t know what happened exactly / only get glimpses and clues thanks to MAG160? MAG158’s summary felt a bit more canon/relevant than usual: “#0182509-A – Original recording of events leading to the disappearances of Jonathan Sims, Martin Blackwood, Alice Tonner and Peter Lukas.” and we got a B-side with MAG159. That leaves Basira and Elias as people who aren’t perceived as having ~disappeared~ by the time of that summary, so… either dead, or in plain sight.)

MAG160’s title is [REDACTED] and that’s a 16th Fear on its own. Idk. Straightforward “Watcher’s Crown”, terrible Eye Pun, “Anniversary”, “Mr Blackwood-Sims”, surprise!Web title (“Mother”)?? I have no idea, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrg ;; (I wanna hope for a kinda soft, bittersweet ending for this season, allowing us to breathe a bit and enjoy the hiatus before everything ends terribly in season 5? But realistically: it’s prob Watcher’s Crown Time or Extinction emergence time or Web hijacking time and we’ll spend the next months in agony and dread and worry and mourning, uh.)

(Had a dream last night that the episode was delayed and released when I was on my way to get another friend back to my home, so I only came home to witness the early chaos of Aza and other people listening: title was “If I stay long enough to live” (???), and it was mostly dealing with Tessa Winters and Extinction (???). Fun times

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #the magnus archives #tma season 4 #tma liveblog #mag159 #done in time and now it's coming so soon and i'm not reaaaadyyy aaaarrggg #long post/

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tabloidtoc · 4 years

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OK, August 3

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Kim Kardashian’s $1 billion divorce hell -- she’s scared to leave Kanye West

Page 1: Big Pic -- Mike Tyson is ready to kick off Shark Week

Page 2: Contents

Page 3: Contents

Page 4: Jessica Simpson’s best body ever -- the healthy approach she took to achieve her slimmed-down figure

Page 6: Jason Aldean’s untold story -- he experienced his fair share of hardship and heartache on his wild ride to the top

Page 7: Mariah Carey’s memoir shares her incredible story of living in the spotlight and her struggles with body image and the people who helped her and who failed her, Gwen Stefani and ex-husband Gavin Rossdale’s relationship has gone from bad to worse -- they never saw eye to eye when it came to parenting but Gwen has been even more up in arms since their son Zuma broke both his arms in two separate incidents and Gwen wants the boys to be supervised a lot more when Gavin has them, being one of the world’s most in-demand actresses is a double-edges sword for Jennifer Aniston -- she’s looking at 18-hour days juggling the second season of The Morning Show with the Friends reunion and she’s got a couple other projects in development and there won’t be enough hours in the day to do everything

Page 8: After giving each other the cold shoulder for years Heather Locklear and Denise Richards have mended ties -- the animosity began in 2006 when Denise broke girl code by dating Heather’s estranged husband Richie Sambora but Denise has apologized and now the two are talking like good friends again, David and Victoria Beckham are thrilled about the engagement of their son Brooklyn Beckham to actress Nicola Peltz, though Emma Roberts may be understandably nervous after finding out she and boyfriend Garrett Hedlund are expecting their first child together Emma’s aunt Julia Roberts has promised to guide her through every step of the pregnancy

Page 10: Red Hot on the Red Carpet -- from emerald to neon stars inspire envy in shades of green -- Charlize Theron, Selena Gomez, Constance Wu

Page 11: Lupita Nyong’o, Angela Bassett, Lilly Singh

Page 12: Who Wore It Better? Olivia Palermo vs. Lala Rudge, Vanessa Bell Calloway vs. Zuri Hall

Page 13: Mia Goth vs. Kaia Gerber

Page 14: News in Photos -- Olivia Culpo, Brian Austin Green picked up a cup of coffee

Page 15: Duchess Camilla reopening the Youth Action Wiltshire Oxenwood Outdoor Education Centre

Page 16: Celeb parents dote on their little ones -- Alessandra Ambrosio and daughter Anja, Shay Mitchell and daughter Atlas, Cardi B and Offset and daughter Kulture, Christina Milian and daughter Violet

Page 18: Baby Steps -- these celeb tots prove good genes run in the family -- Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade and daughter Kaavia, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend’s kids Luna and Miles, Kate Hudson’s daughter Rani, Anderson Cooper and son Wyatt

Page 20: No Passport Needed -- these stars know how to have a fun staycation -- Rita Ora and her cat Bruno, Sofia Vergara, Elizabeth Hurley, Kate Upton in daughter Genevieve’s princess tent

Page 22: Melissa Gorga in a red bathing suit, Katherine Schwarzenegger, Gavin Rossdale brought his dog to the tennis court

Page 23: Christina Anstead and her husband Ant Anstead and her kids Taylor and Brayden, Luann de Lesseps showed off her bikini bod

Page 24: Inside My Home -- Krysten Ritter’s bohemian base

Page 26: More troubles for Will and Jada Pinkett Smith -- Will didn’t want to go on Jada’s show Red Table Talk because he felt awkward and embarrassed about airing their dirty laundry so publicly but he reluctantly agreed to it because Jada begged him

Page 27: Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott are already parents to five children together and Tori is eager to add another one to their brood because six kids is the number she’s always dreamed of, Chandler Powell is growing concerned over the welfare of his workaholic wife Bindi Irwin -- due to the coronavirus pandemic Bindi and her family had to lay off some of the staff at their zoo in Australia and as a result Bindi has been working around the clock to pick up the slack, Kate Beckinsale is planning to whisk her Canadian beau Goody Grace away on an overseas vacation because she wants to introduce him to her native London and her favorite parts of Europe as soon as it’s safe to travel

Page 28: Zach Braff and Florence Pugh are ready to walk down the aisle together around the holidays and may even start a family shortly after that, Meghan Trainor and husband Daryl Sabara were planning to start a family later this year after she finished up her tour with Maroon 5 but now that the pandemic has caused the shows to be postponed until 2021 Meghan and Daryl are unsure if they should stick to their original timeline, Love Bites -- Rachel Bilson and Bill Hader called it quits, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and husband Justin Mikita welcomed their first child, Skylar Astin and Lisa Stelly dating

Page 30: Cover Story -- Kim Kardashian and Kanye West marriage in crisis -- Kanye’s erratic behavior has pushed wife Kim to her breaking point as a billion-dollar divorce looms

Page 34: Losing Kelly Preston: A family’s heartache -- how a devastated John Travolta and his kids are doing after tragically losing wife and mom Kelly

Page 36: Summer of Fun -- take some vacay inspo from these stars who’ve been having a blast visiting spots around the country -- Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez in the Hamptons, Max Ehrich and Demi Lovato in Southern California, Mike Fisher and Carrie Underwood in Wyoming

Page 37: Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck in Yucca Valley, Hailey and Justin Bieber in Utah, Kristin Cavallari in Barrington, Illinois

Page 38: Interview -- Ricky Martin slows down -- the hip-shaking singer dishes on his raw and soulful new tracks

Page 40: Model Condition -- they’ve still got it; find out how the top supermodels of the ‘80s and ‘90s have managed to stay fit and fabulous -- Christie Brinkley, Elle Macpherson, Naomi Campbell

Page 41: Christy Turlington, Tyra Banks

Page 44: Style Week -- Devon Windsor’s latest collection

Page 46: What’s Hot Right Now -- Sara Sampaio

Page 47: Travel like a celeb

Page 48: Summer goals -- Olivia Palermo

Page 50: Black swimsuits -- Barbara Palvin

Page 51: Fruit minis -- Issa Rae

Page 54: Entertainment

Page 58: Buzz -- Liam and Chris Hemsworth’s adventure time -- living it up while down under; Aussie brothers Liam and Chris spend the weekend on the Queensland coast

Page 60: Sound Bites -- Chrishell Stause when asked who she’d like to date, Drew Barrymore on her body, Vivica A. Fox on how she’s keeping busy during the pandemic

Page 61: John Legend joking about why he would never cheat on his wife, Mandy Moore on quarantine life, Charlize Theron on being single, Tom Bergeron revealing he was axed from Dancing With the Stars

Page 62: Horoscope -- Leo Maya Rudolph

Page 64: By the Numbers -- Christian Slater

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rufussewelldaily · 5 years

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I have transcribed the BLANK podcast for all you lovely people! It’s very long in text format so be forewarned, but hopefully some of you will find it useful. Feel free to read along with the podcast itself on Spotify, Acast, Apple podcast, Castbox.fm, or Podbean! And check them out on twitter!

The transcript is under the cut since it’s so long:

*** : means I'm not sure if this is correct (I'm never 100% sure if it's Jim or Giles so please let me know if you can tell and I have it wrong lol)

[music intro] Jim Daly: Hello and welcome to the BLANK podcast, the podcast where we delve into those frustrating moments with some well-known people. I'm Jim Daly, and joining me, as ever, is the wonderful Giles Paley-Phillips. Giles Paley-Phillips: Aw, back to wonderful. Jim: Have I used that already? Giles: Yeaaah. Jim: HA! [banter about superlatives, mention of upcoming live podcasts] Jim: And saying hello this week is our guest-- Giles: [in background] Hahaha Jim: --that's not a very good way-- is, er, Rufus Sewell! Giles: Rufus Sewell! Jim: A legend! Giles: Ah, such a legend! I mean, I first saw Rufus in a movie called Dark City, which was a great movie by Alex Proyas, who was the director. Came out kind of the same time as The Matrix but it was a kind of similar dystopian kind of futuristic, dark, noir kind of film. But it didn't get the critical acclaim that The Matrix did. I just remember thinking it was a shame because it was a great movie and he was brilliant in it. A sort of brooding--which he kind of plays a lot those kind of brooding characters. Jim: He does, yeah. In fact, I forgot to mention during our chat but he also is in one of my wife's favorite movies which is called Martha Meets--Well I think it's called Martha Meets Matthew Martin Luke and John but it's actually called Martha Meets Frank Daniel and Lawrence. Which I think was a 90's? Late 90's movie? But apparently he's very good in that as well so, erm, I forgot to mention that in the chat so I thought I'd mention it now! Because I think he's in quite a lot of people's favorite movies. Jim: He is, he is! He's very prolific, actually, he's been in a lot of stuff. In most recent years he's been involved with the huge Amazon show, The Man in the High Castle. And he plays a sort of slightly shady character. Giles: Which he talks about. Jim: Yeah, in this chat. Actually, he's kind of been known to play villains often actually. And he's obviously very good at doing that. But in real life, he's a very very nice chap! Giles: He is a very very nice chap, and you're gonna discover that right now, because we're gonna go straight into our talk with Rufus Sewell on the BLANK podcast. [music] Rufus Sewell: I know, yeah, but I have a book that I place on the coffee table. And it just sits there. [background laughing] Rufus: It's sat there for about two years. Different books, obviously. I shift 'em around, you know. Giles: Yeah, yeah. Jim: I went to a friend's house the other day and they had a whole wall bookcase of loads of books, it looked amazing. They haven't read any of them, but it looks incredible. I want that. Giles: Well I think we do get them now is interior sort of things, don't we. They're just there. Rufus: Well they did that recent interior design "suggestion" which was the books but facing the other way? So you get that lovely little [laughing] just the pages! But like, oh you don't know which book is which, obviously, but "they look great." I mean just, that was... fabulously horrifying. Jim: I've seen like a Waterstones or something do that as a kind of marketing, as like a mystery-- Rufus: Yeah you get a Wetherspoons with the kind of old cricket bats, like you know. Jim: [laughing] Wetherspoons! Rufus: Wetherspoons library. [laughing] Rufus: I'm going back a little. Giles: Yeah, I was gonna say. Jim: Wow. I'm learning quite a lot already today. Giles: So I apologize for your coffee not being quite as nice as yours. Rufus: Mmm! [sarcastic] Is that cafe? Giles: Yeah Americano [laughing] It comes in a tin! It's tin-packed so apparently it keeps the freshness in. That's apparently how it works. Rufus: Yeah. I was wondering how this works. [laughing] Jim: Other coffees are available. Rufus: Other better ones, like yours for instance. Jim: Yeah yeah from a proper coffee shop. [laughing, chatter about coffee] Jim: Rufus Sewell, welcome to the BLANK podcast. Rufus: Thank you, lovely to be here. Jim: It's very nice to see you. Have you been busy? Rufus: Um, I've been dramatically un-busy, up until the two weeks leading up to today. Which is the ideal way to have it but I've finished a job yesterday night. Which nearly spilt over into this morning, so I'm glad that didn't happen. Giles: Did you do many night shoots? Rufus: No, no, it was just the last day so it went a little bit late. [laughing] Rufus: Yeah, to try to accomodate you. Giles: Well that's very kind! [laughing] Giles: And it's a wet day today, so it's not obviously that great, is it? Um, okay, so we normally start the podcast by going back to school days. What was school like? 'Cause you're from London originally, Twickenham. Rufus: Yeah, Twickenham. Between kind of, I had a kind of strange upbringing that set me up quite nicely for being a kind of um, equal opportunities impostor. [laughing] Rufus: I had a bit of suburbia, really, which Twickenham, which is a lovely tiny little place. Um, and Soho, where my dad's studio was 'cause he was an animator, and we saw his weekends. Jim: And he did some stuff on one of the, the Yellow Submarine-- Rufus: Yeah, he did the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds scenes. When I was really little, 'cause you know how conservative kids are, and I remember in 1975 stepping over the punks at the 101 Club, [small snobby voice] "Dirty!" Like this little old lady. My son was the same when he was that age, I called him Granny Billy. [laughing] Rufus: You know, because of that kind of slightly pursed mouth... So, I was slightly embarrassed about how scritchy and scratchy my dad's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds--'cause I liked a kind of Hannah Barbera, do you know what I mean? Jim: Yeah, yeah, okay! Rufus: And then I grew older and I realized that that is actually the most fantastic piece of it! And he did this tiny film in the 60's called "Half In Love with Fred Astaire" which was basically rotoscope, his own technique but it was mismatched, childlike rotoscope like a 3-year-old with crayons trying to draw over a filmic image. So he got all this stuff of Fred and Ginger dancing and stuff, and then just basically-- Jim: Ahhh, amazing. Rufus: --fucked it up. [laugh] Rufus: And someone saw that. The family legend is the Beatles saw that but I think it's probably not true, but um asked him to kind of reproduce it for the film. So now it's a source of enormous pride! Where at the time I was slightly embarrassed about it, *twat* that I was. Jim: That's quite pioneering techniques, wasn't it? Rufus: Well, I mean, actually, rotoscope was done very early days, that if you watched Snow White and the really really early form animation, you know, of Disney, that's all they did. They would get the little actors and actresses--not little, some of them were quite large, I imagine--[giggling]um, to do, to act out certain scenes and then they would just draw around them, you know. But his technique was, you know, slightly 60's. We'll put it that way. [laughing] Giles: And your mum was artistic as well, is that right? Rufus: Um, yeah, she still is, actually. She'll tell you about her painting courses at great length, if you like. Giles: So you were kind of destined to do, maybe, go into the creative arts. Rufus: I don't know, not really, I mean... [grave sigh] For me, one of the great liberations of getting older is admitting that ultimately I'm quite suburban. You know? Just thinkiing, oh fuck's sake, this kind of--And also the realization that all of my heroes, you know all of the people who invented what we think of as "dangerous" rock and roll, they're all suburban. They were, you know? Giles: Yeah. Rufus: The Stones, and Bowie, and... And actually, I caused myself a lot of strain [giggling] trying to project to myself this idea of my own exoticism. But actually, I'm f--I'm a Twickenham boy, you know. Um, and I kind of, I think, a feeling of being slightly not good enough when I was very young, 'cause our family was a bit odd, maybe led me to a certain kind of fantasizing. [giggles] You know? Because my family was quite, um, we were very poor... I mean, my dad was, they weren't living together, but he was supposed to be kind of supporting us, but he generally didn't. So at one point, my mum had a--she had various jobs, like worked in pubs, so she brought us up on her own, especially after my dad died when I was ten. But she worked. She had a vegetable round, where she'd purloined this old black London cab which she drove, which didn't have the taxi sign on it, and she'd drive that, and she'd get cheap or free vegetables from queue markets, she'd kind of hoodwink it out of the barrel boys or whatever, and then she'd sell what wasn't rotten to a little collection of friends and housewives and stuff-- Giles: Okay, walking down the street from, yeah yeah. Rufus: Yeah. And we'd live on what was left. So my mum would turn up to pick me up, this shoeless six-foot woman with wild hair in a black London cab full of rotting pomegranates-- Giles: My god. Rufus: --would turn to pick me up from school, you know. [giggling] Jim: Your mum sounds fantastic! Rufus: Yeah, she began to sound fantastic when I reached my teens. [laughing] Rufus: Up 'til then it was a little bit more of a complex proposition. Giles: Did you feel about them, then, did--you felt like [shaky] ohhhh? Rufus: In that kind of conservative way, it was like, you know, she just wasn't like the other mums. Which of course was the best thing in the world, but you don't necessarily appreciate that when you're seven or whatever. [laughing] Jim: Well I think that's a young thing anyway, you don't always appreciate what you've got in general. Rufus: No, exactly. Jim: Be it the suburban lifestyle or anything, really. Rufus: Yeah, especially if you watch and believe the tv. I remember that I'd watch these adverts and think, 'We don't eat portions that small. What's wrong with us? Why don't we eat mini kievs and you know--' [laughing] Rufus: 'Why don't we all dress in white and eat Ski yogurts?' Jim: The 70's were great, weren't they? [laughing] Rufus: I'd just think, oh is that what all the other families are like? You know, god, so. This feeling of having to like pass for one of them, those kind of clean families that all dress or don't have shit all over their clothes, you know. And then, when I was older and I realized that, you know, friends of my mum's had kids who were also in my school, and it made me realize that oh they're kinda normal people too. [giggling] Giles: So what was school like, then? Was it difficult with that? Rufus: Um... yeah! I didn't really immediately fit in at school, I think it came as a bit of a shock to me. And I think, you know I ended up being like, I was a truant. It's difficult to know how much of it was a reaction to my dad dying out of the blue when I was ten. When people always used to suggest to me, '[uppity voice] So was it basically a psychological reaction?' I, 'Oh fuck off' you know, but... it probably was. [giggling] Jim: Yeah, yeah. Rufus: You know, '[silly voice] Don't be so cliched! I'm just an individual!' You know, I mean-- Jim: Actually, yes. Rufus: Actually, yes, that's what it was about. And uh... Jim: Just going on that, 'cause I lost my mum when I was very young, and it was never really talked about in the house. Like I dunno if you had a similar experience, but it was kind of... She'd gone, she'd passed away, and it was kind of we had to like--it was almost like, get on with it and move on. It was never really something that was talked about particularly. And certainly I think it's come out in later life that that was a reaction to that. I don't know if you had a similar experience. Rufus: Well I think what's come out in later life is my entire personality. [laughing] Rufus: 'Cause people ask me what's that like? I mean, my question, my answer to that if I'm being honest, is I don't know what it's like for that not to happen. Jim: Yeah, well yeah, likewise, yeah. Rufus: Um, it's not so much that it wasn't talked about. We talked about Bill a lot, but I don't think we really talked about the effect of it, and the trauma of it. Do you know what I mean? Jim: Yeah. Rufus: My mum ended up being a social worker, you know, she's very sensitive. But still, there's lots of things that I thought were great about my childhood until, you know. The fact that my mum and dad split up but we weren't fully aware, I know realize that actually that's kind of confusing, as well. So a lot of the things you think of as being very good ways of dealing with things, actually possibly the more painful way of dealing with it might've been more healthy. Giles: Yeah, yeah. Rufus: So there's definitely an element of that. But yeah, I mean, my secondary school, I mean I was a truant, I was trying to get attention, I was... Giles: What did you do when you were bunking off? Was it just hanging down the park or the bus stop or outside the? Rufus: Yeah, it was slovenliness and cowardice rebranded as rebellion. Do you know what I mean? Like I'd kind of oversleep-- Jim: '[angry voice] I'm an anarchist!' [laughing] Rufus: Exactly! I'd oversleep-- Jim: 'I don't need--' Rufus: And I'd be to scared to sort of come up and make an excuse so I wouldn't go in, and then I wouldn't know how to explain why I hadn't gone in so I'd miss another day, and that just became a thing. It was basically anxiety. Giles: Yeah, yeah. Rufus: It took me YEARS to realize that I was kind of ruled by this kind of hidden anxious insect inside me which was operating the controls. And somehow, between that little bubble where that creature lived and the outside, it managed to re-translate itself as ebullience. But basically, that was all bollocks. Giles: Yeah. Rufus: You know, so... Jim: Isn't that a lot of what all of us, especially young kids, are dealing with anyway? Rufus: Absolutely! But it's fantastic to recognize it. 'Cause there's nothing inside you that's unheal--You give it more power by refusing to acknowledge its existence. You shine a light on it, and you can think, 'Alright, there's this part of me that can be like that. I can be a bit like this.' If you know it, and you own it, it doesn't have the same power over you, and you can kind of watch it pass by. Haha! You know, hopefully. Rather than realize at the end of a long day, or a long relationship [sheepish giggling]-- [laughing] Rufus: --that actually you had a bit more to do with it. Jim: And it starts to explain stuff as well. Rufus: Yeah, of course. Jim: You can use it to explain stuff that happened or the way you reacted to stuff. Rufus: You can use it to excuse everything and move on. [laughing] Giles: So, obviously academically then maybe you didn't put in as much effort as you could've done then. Rufus: No. But again, I think a lot of that was... was... fear. I think it's often the case that laziness is actually fear with a mask on. [giggle] You know, sometimes it's just laziness with no mask on, but that was a habit of mind that actually continued into drama school that I--it was one of the first things that I actually thought to do. You know, I'd actually had some agency in that. I'd decided that I wanted to audition for drama school. My teacher, at what was basically a sixth form college, lent me the money to audition-- Jim: Wow. Rufus: --because you have to pay for it, and then I got up early in the morning, which was miraculous in itself. I set an alarm, I made it, I learnt speeches, I went out, got it, and then I turned up and I was... I had the habits of a truant. It was just, you know. And it took a bit of a kind of scare to break that. And I've realized, almost too late, that it wasn't just that, it was a tendency, I had a fear of over-rehearsing. Giles: Oh, okay. Rufus: Which manifested itself as being late or not doing my work or whatever. But it took me a while to work out what that was. I was kind of scared that the only chance at any kind of magic or, you know, juice that I had was based on, um, not so much lack of preparation but the initial buzz, the excitement, you know, that nervous energy. And i had a terror that once that was went away, there was nothing left. Because I'd had one experience very early on where I'd done a reading at a drama group and it had just gone down like a house on fire and everyone was slapping me on the back, and then when it came to do it on stage two weeks later it was just shit, it wasn't there. And I thought, god, oh--because I'd worried it out of existence. So as an effort to make sure that never happened again, I tried to fox them out of rehearsal. Which you can't sustain for an entire career. [laughing] Jim: In a way, there is some sense behind that. To me. I mean, I'm not an actor, obviously. Rufus: Well there's certainly sense within that circle of pathology, it's, well that's the problem with all of these things there's a certain, you know, sense. You can certainly think your way into the most terrible trouble. Um, you know, there was a logic to it. Um, but... Giles: But there isn't. Rufus: Well it's a trap, also. After a while what I realized, and I realized it because I had to, I didn't, you know, all the wisdom that I've come to I've been dragged towards it, all the wisdom. I don't have a lot, but such as I have, I've been dragged to, kicking and screaming, having, for everything I know now... I have got a collection of memories of doing the opposite. [giggling] And waiting for the results to just steamroll over me. So I had a job, and I had to do it for months and months and months. I was lucky enough to get a job after I left drama school. And all of that nervous energy did disappear, and for a while I was left with something empty, and then something started to come in its place that was based on relaxation. And it was a revelation to me. And with that, it meant that the fear went away because I realized that a lot of it--the only problems that I was suffering from were a kind of negative demon inside me. [sounds of agreement] Rufus: I call it, The God of And That's Why You Can't Have Nice Things. [laughing] Rufus: It's the little voice that goes, "[soft sinister voice] Oh, it's gonna go wrong now. And why do you even bother?" Do you know what I mean? It's that little, "Ah, typical!" You know? And um, so that's been quite revelatory, you know. Um, it's been a slow process, but when I look back at my time at school, and when I look back at drama school, rather than complain in the past about not getting breaks, you know, I used to think about things I didn't get and jobs I should've gotten, but now when I look back I think, God, I was so lucky to have gotten the jobs that I did actually get, considering. Gratitude is quite a useful thing to get hold of, you know. And actually, looking back, and actually considering my mindset, I've been unbelievably fortunate--fortunate to still be around to practice whatever I've learnt. Jim: Is that voice ever still there? Rufus: Oh yeah! Absolutely. But now I just say, there you go. [soft giggle] I remember sitting in a room where someone was talking about being hard on themselves, and the quite moving little, you know. And I remember this little voice in my head went, "You're quite hard on yourself." And another voice went, "No you're not, you fucking cunt." [laughing] Rufus: Like a little evil Jiminy Cricket. Jim: But what was it about-- Rufus: I can laugh at it now, but-- Jim: Yeah, I know, I know-- Rufus: If I catch it. Jim: But what was it about drama really? Because obviously, you've said you weren't into academia and such. What was it about drama that caught your attention or made you wanna continue to do it? Rufus: I don't know. [thoughtful sigh] It's always quite interesting--[sarcastically] interesting--I mean I scoff sometimes at interviews because, or not just interviews but people talking about their lives, people, you know, our habit of narrativizing our history in this linear form. "[narrator voice] And there was the day that I realized--" You know, all this stuff that people say, and that's not how life happens. When people tell you why they did things, it's not necessarily true. Giles: Yeah. Rufus: It's like a memory. Every time you revisit it, you revisit it based on the requirements of that moment of remembering, and that's when it gets reshaped. Next time you remember it, that's the memory you come to, this reshaped one. So these things kinda transmogrify according to the needs, you know, of the ego or whatever. So I don't know, I don't know, but I do know that [giggly] when I was really young, I played Rumplestiltskin in a school play. Giles: Great part. Rufus: Ah, the great, "[proud voice] Have you seen my Rumplestiltskin?" [laughing] Jim: It's actually a great part. Rufus: Um, and I was larger than any of the other kids, so I had these little boots coming up to my knees, so I'd-- Jim: Oh, were you? Like Clouseau, do you remember that film-- Rufus: Exactly! Like Clouseau's Lautrec. And I came out and I remember my first line. "[old man voice] Hello, pretty lady, why do you cry?" I remember, and-- Jim: Still got the voice. Rufus: Still got the voice, hard to get away from it sometimes. And, I was a sensation. [laughing] Rufus: I mean, to the point that years-- ***Giles: There was adoration in the crowd, yeah? Rufus: Yeah, not just that, but to the point that years later people's parents would still refer to me as Rumplestiltskin. Jim: Oh really? Next thing you know, stopped in the street, "Do your Rumplestiltskin!" Rufus: Actually... About 8 years ago I was in Twickenham, and I didn't have any identification or my check book or anything, and I needed some money from Lloyds Bank. And I went in and asked if I could see someone, a kind of manager or, and I pleaded and begged and blah blah, and she said, "That's alright, Rumplestiltskin." [laughing] Giles: Amazing! Rufus: And I thought, finally I'm getting something from my work! Jim: The Rumplestiltskin of Twickenham. Rufus: Exactly! Giles: So was it that buzz off the crowd then? Because it obviously went down well. It was that-- Rufus: Well, yeah, for whatever reason. So I think whatever was, you know, broken and crippled in me was pre-broken before my dad died. [laughs] I was already, you know. But... yeah... it was... I dunno, it just expressed something. The reasons you do something can change, and there was definitely, just an enormous portion, round about a hundred percent, of just showing off and wanting the attention. Why I felt I needed that is anyone's guess. But you know, it still is an element of that, but it's been replaced by other things that I get from it now, you know. Um, but... And then I went to--I think in a way, it just gave me access to stuff that maybe in some ways--I know I hate how typically English this sounds because I don't think of myself as repressed--but in some ways, um, maybe I was able to express things or examine things, not while I was playing Rumplestiltskin, that's too pretentious, "[high voice] It really taught me" [giggles] No, right, but later on, I think maybe that was, you know, it expressed something. Giles: Do you think it's been a kind of therapy for you in some ways? Rufus: I don't know. Giles: Exploring yourself. I don't know if that sounds-- Rufus: Well, it's a good opportunity to be honest with yourself. Giles: But yeah, to explore human nature and the human condition a little bit, through your acting. Rufus: Yeah, or to kind of 'fess up to yourself about who you are, you know? And like... I always find that quite interesting. It's like, okay, rather than judge this person, in what circumstances would I do that? How could I do that and think that I was a reasonable person? You know, and you can kind of, you have to, um... I don't know, brave's a bit of a big word, because it's not brave, but you know, you have to just look at yourself honestly. Because actually, I believe it also gives you empathy for other people, because it's, you know, if you can examine yourself, it stops you from judging other people with such a kind of closed-minded way, that you can see that people can arrive at things. That's why, you know, it's been very interesting doing this last tv series. I was doing Man in the High Castle and I was reading as much as I could. I wanted to know about how normal people got through, went through that. What story did they tell themselves? You know, people that weren't "evil" people, people that had their fair share of, you know, 50/50, 40/60 good and bad or whatever you'd call it, and um, approaching it from that point of view. You know, what would I have done? Jim: Do you think--I've got three questions about that. Firstly, do you think people in the arts are more empathetic as a result of that? Rufus: [slowly] Not necessarily... Not necessarily. I think there's... I mean, I mean, yes, one could generalize and say that, you know, in order to be a--you know, a lot of very good critics have a lack of empathy. [giggling] Rufus: I don't mean that in some kind of a vengeful way, but I just mean the ability to just judge something strictly on face value without, you know. Um, I've thought that in the past. But yeah, it's possible, but I'm not suggesting that, you know-- Giles: Well, and people are different, you know, everyone's different. Rufus: Yeah. Some people are surprisingly lacking in that as people, but have qualities in what they do. You know, it can be quite surprising when you meet people who have seemed to have enormous empathy and warmth and intelligence when they work, but they have a much more kind of brittle energy in real life. It's always quite interesting, that. And vice versa. Jim: That is interesting. Like it's almost like a switch that once work happens... Rufus: Yeah, it's work, or the fact that it is, there is only one route for that part of them. That's not always the case. Often, you'll find that the qualities that people show are the qualities they have. But sometimes, it can be surprising. That people who, you know, that you are attracted to on screen because they have a kind of doe-eyed availability, you meet them and you immediately see a flintiness in the eye that wasn't there. [sounds of agreement] Rufus: And vice versa! I have to believe, because I play so many baddies. [giggles] Jim: Well that's my next question! Yeah, because I know you've spoken in the past about it as well, but why do you think that they--or do you get bothered by it? Rufus: Well I think it's changed... Not anymore. I have a certain amount of... I don't worry so much about what people think, because I realized that the people whose opinions I was worrying about were the people, by definition, whose opinions I didn't respect. They were the only ones I cared about. 'Cause the people whose opinions I respected, I didn't worry about what they thought, because I kind of felt like they had my back. It was the twats I was worried about. You know, the people who didn't have that, you know, because generally the kind of people that I like are kind of like me [giggles] or whatever. You know. Giles: Yeah. Rufus: "[cranky voice] It's the other lot! Why don't they like it?" You know. I think it's one of the advantages of getting older, is that now I've realized I don't, there's nothing I need to prove. I mean, I'm no longer in doubt, myself. I think the evidence, if you wanna know that I can do other things, the evidence is out there. If you're not gonna see that, there's nothing I can do, you know. You end up trapped in a little circle, which you have to be aware that you're doing half of that, so I think of myself, I'm retired from that level of thinking now. And I pop out of retirement every once in a while. [laughing] Rufus: No, I mean, this is a statement of intent. Jim: Well, what brings you back out of retirement, then? Rufus: Um, well... For me, um... What I've been in the business of trying to jump out of, the bowl I've been trying to jump out of, is the idea of... results. The idea that what you're doing something for is for an improved life after that thing. You know, if I do this, then this! Because if you're in that mindset, which I realized I was--I blew a lot of my life, you know, that's why I would kind of run into some kind of trouble one way or another when I was doing dream jobs. Because there's, you know, it's a very over-used phrase, but there's no *there* there. So, if I get this, then... that's when my life will start, and you get there, and then nothing happens. Jim: Always reaching. Rufus: Yeah, always reaching! And that way, there's--you trick yourself out of any kind of happiness. I don't mean happiness the happiness of achievement 'cause that's a racket. I mean that happiness of just--that's why I realized I love doing theatre, not always, but generally love doing theatre. People say, "[pretentious voice] Oh, is that your contact with the crowd?" No, it's going to the same place every day, having a sandwich in the same place-- Giles: Routine. Rufus: Routine. That realization that I am... suburban. I am as not rock and roll as I--this was my fear is that I wasn't. Fear, you know, why be afraid? Actually, realizing that's all just toxic bollocks is the key to kind of starting to enjoy your life, you know. Jim: That is a really powerful realization, that. Rufus: [sound of vehement agreement] God, it took a while. Yeah, because, either you get hung up on the idea of a job leading to a thing which will be the moment--you know, because as soon as you get the job, the job's importance as an experience, it completely evaporates, because it's replaced by the next stone you're trying to leap on. So everything you've got is suddenly not good enough because it's the thing you've got, and then it becomes this other thing. And maybe that other thing is another job, or maybe it's the reaction to the job, or the new way you'll be seen. It's just a, it's a trap. Jim: When we had Hal Cruttenden on, he was talking about progressing in his career and going from "I really want this" to then you get it, to "Oh I might lose this!" Rufus: Exactly. Well, I... Jim: A new fear is replacing the other one. Rufus: Yes, exactly. I haven't got there yet. [laughing] Rufus: I've got this and thought, Christ, I might be stuck with this. Um, kind of fear of that. But yes, I hear that's what happens, and you know, I just tend to think that we seem to have our allotted, you know, pie chart's worth of insecurity and worry and satisfaction complaints, and we take that with us in a little bag wherever we go in life. You know, we either pay too much attention to that or not. So now, what I'm trying to do, I'm not saying I'm over it entirely, but I'm getting closer as I just try to enjoy jobs, or things, or unemployment, for the moment, having... Yeah, I mean, for years--I'm now unemployed, I don't know what my next job is, and I didn't work for 2 months before this. I just worked for 2 weeks, basically, and it's been bliss, I have to admit, knowing that I have a 2 week job because that just stopped the anxiety. I've got a five-year-old girl. And I've obviously got a seventeen-year-old boy who's now six-foot-four-and-a-half, you know. Giles: [deep voice] Hey, dad! [laughing] Rufus: So I know that this little sausage-faced, squidgy, you know, she's five years old, it doesn't last. It goes so quickly. And what's more important than that? [sounds of agreement] Rufus: If I read a script now, I say, is this better than being with my little girl? Not that I'm ever gonna read anything and go, "Yeah, actually, this is better." [laughing] Rufus: But is this good enough, at least, to like, you know-- Jim: "Was it worth my time?" Rufus: Exactly. I mean, when I read a play, and I love doing theatre, but I'm really fussy about it, and when I do a play is when I read a play and I go, "Oh fuck, I'm doing this." You know, and then you have to work out the--If I don't feel that... So, for me, I was never into money, so I was always really bad with it, and I would end up in situations where I'd have to work. I've never done anything that I thought would be bad, I always thought I could get, you know. But at the moment, I'm just trying to kind of not get tempted to spend money on nonsense. By nonsense I mean holidays, anything like that, because I wanna be able to say no to things I'm not in love with. It gets very difficult, because after a while, in the past what's happened is that I've been so fussy that after a year or nine months of not working, the thing that I eventually say yes to is not quite as good as the stuff I've been turning down. Jim: I had a presenting job recently that got offered to me. Really didn't wanna do it, so I quoted really high. They came back and said yes. So I was like, yes, I want the money! Oh shit, I've gotta do the job. [laughing] Jim: Actually, it was fine in the end, but... Rufus: The Producers. [laughing] Jim: But what are you like in those sort of down tone moments, then? Rufus: Much better than I used to be. *Much* better than I used to be. I mean, now I really love my little routine when I live in Los Angeles, as I said, but the reason I live there--I went there with a job, and then I met someone, so I stayed. But my, when people say, I mean actually, weirdly enough, the one thing that happened with me moving to Los Angeles is that England suddenly fancied me again. [laughing] Rufus: You know, in this kind of desperate, but good kind of way. It's like, "[high voice] Oh! Could you come back from, you know, Hollywood?" But in fact, when I was there, and when I am there, I don't have anything to do with the business. I don't really go out. I don't do any of that stuff anymore. So when I do, I rather enjoy it. So like, if I ever do a red carpet there, I'm like "Ooh, I've seen a celebrity!" [laughing] Rufus: Because it's just not my life at all. I think there's possibly a world I could inhabit in which whatever level of notoriety I have would have some currency, and I do everything I can to keep away from that particular, you know. It's death. I don't want to talk to anyone who that means something to in that way, you know? Jim: But it could suck you in, though, I'd imagine, especially living out there. Rufus: Not really. I don't find it very attractive. Jim: Even if you don't want it to. Rufus: I suppose so--Well, not if you're sitting at home watching telly [giggles] with your daughter. But no, I don't feel in danger of that, because it's just not part--I mean, to the extent that I can just go out and kind of enjoy that thing, well, literally every two or three months I'll do it, I'll go out and see people, you know, and for me it's quite funny. But it's so not part of my life. Actually, when I come to London, it's a bit more showbiz, to tell you the truth. Giles: OKay. Jim: Can I go back just a minute--Sorry, Giles--but you were talking earlier, this is ages ago in the podcast, about a teacher that gave you money. Rufus: Yeah. Jim: What was that, for drama school? Rufus: Yeah, I paid her back. [laughing] Rufus: [right into the mic] Tina Hurley. She still comes to see my plays. Jim: That's amazing, because we've had a lot of people on this podcast, certainly in the acting world, and they've nearly always come back to one teacher somewhere-- Giles: Or a mentor or something. Jim: --who believed in them, said you should do this, said why are you doing this you should try acting. Rufus: Tina even wrote to--because I was on the waiting list for Central, I had to go back and audition five times, which is a thing that stays with you for three years, because people would be like, that had some kind of currency. So they would say, "[pretentious voice] So uh, did you get in first time? I got in first time. Did you have a recall?" I was like, yeah, I had five. "Ohhh..." You know, it's like the grades of how much promise you had. ***Jim: [unintelligible] Rufus: Exactly. So me and my mate Peter d Jersey, who was like, my best mate, we both were in the last recall together, and I remember looking at him and thinking, he looks like a wanker. And he thought the same about me. Um, and we both got in. But in between, Tina Hurley wrote them a letter, saying, "No, he is good." [laughing] Rufus: "You might think he's a bit shit, but he's really really good." And she told me about it, she told me that she was exaggerating, which was nice. Um, and I don't know how much sway that had on it, but when I said, "Oh I've got into drama school now, I don't need to do my A-levels." She said, "I'll write to them again, you little shit, and I'll tell them I was making it up." Um, but I thought, I don't really need to because I'm not gonna do anything else. So, me and Pete got in, and it took a while for the cloud of being a five-recall student to lift. But me and Pete were the first two to get jobs as well, so, you know, fuck off. [laughing] Jim: It's amazing, isn't it, that people in those positions like Tina Hurley? Rufus: Mhm. Jim: Can have that influence. Rufus: She still runs the course. Jim: That's amazing! Rufus: FEDAS. Jim: Is that the name of the course? Rufus: Yeah, FEDAS. Film, English, Drama, and Art Studies. Jim: I just love that, that there's someone that can have that influence. Rufus: Because I was broke, you know. And this thing of like, all the actors, not enough working-class--I mean, I was a strange mix because I was probably one of the poorest families in the school because we were on free school dinners and blah blah blah, but I was quite well-spoken. We were, we had books and a piano, you know? Giles: Yeah. Rufus: So it's like [giggling] a mixture like, you know, as I said, an impostor everywhere. Giles: Yeah, yeah. Rufus: People took the piss out of me for being a bit posh. Jim: Really? Rufus: Yeah. Or sounding--you know, not being, um... yeah. Giles: Did you feel like it, though? Do you think, oh do I sound posh? Rufus: No, but nobody thinks--"[posh voice] The thing is, we don't have an accent, do we?" [laughing] Giles: Yeah, but I assume though, 'cause obviously I've got a double-barrelled name, so my dad was quite middle-class, but then his parents were working-class. Rufus: Yeah, my granddad, great-granddad was a Welsh miner and, you know. And my dad was from Australia so who knew what that meant! [laughing] Rufus: He was kind of mysterious about his background. Jim: So, I guess one of your big breaks was when you did a play and Judi Dench was-- Rufus: It wasn't a play, no, that was at drama school. Jim: It was at drama school, was it? Rufus: Yeah, it was at drama school, and it was a kind of nightmare for me, nightmare day. It was er, because... [quietly] I don't know if I've ever told this story, it's so embarrassing. But I was so, talk about anxiety. She came, she was doing Macbeth, which I can say because we're not in the theatre. And I was really disappointed to be cast as the Porter. Because when I was at drama school, I just did comedy, right? Or I'd do my serious roles, but everyone, "[goofy voice] I look at you and I laugh, Rufus, haha!" And I'd think, fuck off, I'm a serious actor. Giles: Rumplestiltskin. Rufus: Exactly. But you know, funnily enough, that "[old man voice] Hello, pretty lady!" That voice was, I always played the little old man and stuff like that, and when I didn't get cast as one of the kind of striding dudes, and I was you know, the Porter, I thought, "Oh, bloody typical." But, I did-- Giles: You nailed it. Rufus: Well, I eventually did, I eventually nailed it, but on the day, on the night before the read-through, I was so paranoid about over-sleeping. 'Cause I had a long journey, I had to come in from Hounslow, which is a really really long, you know--And I didn't have any money to get the tube. I was so terrified because I couldn't get to sleep. It was like one in the morning or whatever, I had to be there at nine or something, or ten in Room A. And I remember I set an alarm clock, I had another alarm clock by the door, and I had an alarm call, which at the time was quite expensive, and I woke up, and it was eleven. And I woke up and realized what the time was and I just sat on the edge of the bed keening for a little while, just thinking, "My life is over, it's over, it's over, it's over." And my brother came in and said, "Your fuckin' alarms were so annoying." I said, "What?" He said, "Yeah, I turned them off. They were like..." [incredulous laughter] So my brother had just turned off all the alarms, and I remember sitting there and thinking, "Okay okay okay, I'll go out in the street and I'll get a bin knocked over, and then I'll call from the hospital, and then I'll, yeah yeah!" I mean I seriously thought that at one point. And then I realized I had no money, and I thought, "I know what I'll do. I'll get a cab in, but then I'll get the cab to take me to Lloyds and then I'll beg and see if they can give me some money or--" So that's what I did, and then I got to the door and it was like quarter to twelve, and I could, I walked out, I could see through the porthole, and I just thought, "What can you, what can you...?" You know. And I just couldn't open the door. I just stood there and I thought on count of ten I'm gonna open the door, and then I just couldn't. And then suddenly the door opened and Judi Dench was there, and she said, "[soft calm voice] Rufus, I presume." [laughing] Rufus: And I went, "[tiny strained voice] Yeah!" And she said, "Never be late again, Rufus." And I went, "Okay!" And she forgave me, but I was like, you know, two hours early every day after that. And I started sleeping in the cushion loft above the theatre because it was the only guaranteed way of--I was known for it for a bit, that was my residence for a while. [laughing] Rufus: Directly above the second year showers. People would give me a shout. They'd be like, "Rufus!" I'd come down and you know. [chuckling] Rufus: Um, and in the end, I mean, I was on super good behavior after that, but god, the cloud of that. And then eventually, I got a call from Julian Belfrage Associates, just around the end of the play, and they wanted to come in and talk to me. He was this awesome agent who happened to look after Judi Dench *and* Daniel Day-Lewis and, you know, John Hurt, and a lot of my heroes. And I also got a call from Tim Pigott-Smith, who was doing a play, which was for two parts. Goethin Price, who was this comedian in this play, a comedian who was like a bit nuts skinhead, you know, and also playing this Franciscan friar in the Royal Hunt of the Sun, one that we were going to be doing around prisons, the other that was in the theatre. So it was like a dream job, and I got that, and i found out afterwards that that's because Judi Dench had called them and told them that there's this crawler who's turned up and been, you know, two hours early for the [giggles] But you know, that's a... I mean, I talk about it now because it's an amazing story but um... Yeah, she's not been very easy to thank for that, but that was my first. But then after that, I didn't work for ages! So this has been, I think, the making of me not career-wise but just it's meant that I've ended up having to have some kind of balance, because every time something like that has happened, there's been a correction, which is, you know. I've always said, or I used to say, I was only ever two or three well-chosen compliments away from being a bit more of a wanker at any given point. That as soon as I started to think, "Oh this acting career thing is going to be pretty straightforward, then." [laughing] Rufus: That suddenly, it would all just fall apart. I was going to auditions for amazing things and, one by one, I just didn't get any of them. And then I just sat around. And that's been kind of the pattern in a good way now that I don't worry about-- Giles: Never get carried away. You always, you know-- Rufus: Well, it's not because I'm above it. I'm beside it, or maybe I'm below it, so I really need to look out. You know what I mean? IF I was above it, I wouldn't have to worry about it. [chuckling] Jim: I think that's a good way to be in general, to be fair, with any work really, isn't it? Rufus: Yeah. Jim: Not to be too confident. Or work can knock you back, can't it? Rufus: Exactly, and also really to try and have some gratitude, which is, you know, difficult. Giles: Yeah. Rufus: You can be grateful one day and suddenly lose touch with it. Just find that your mind is wandering on to other things, and you know. Jim: Very true. Speaking of minds wandering, obviously this podcast is about blank moments, this is a seamless segway-- Rufus: [laughing] Yeah, it was going to it! Jim: Have you had any blank moments, on stage or in auditions or? Rufus: Yes. Jim: You must have loads, I imagine, but... Rufus: Yes. Giles: What are you trying to say? Jim: Sorry, I-- [laughing] Rufus: "Yeah, look at your career!" Thanks, brings the film Gods of Egypt to mind. [laughing] Jim: Sorry... Rufus: Um, yes, but my relationship, my attitude, and my affair with my blank moments has gone from being a very abusive one to a very, I think, kind of er... Your blank moments are your muse! I mean, but you can trick yourself otherwise, you know. I had an experience and have had a couple of times on stage while doing a play for a really long time. I did this play Rock 'n Roll, which was a Tom Stoppard play which I did in London for about six months, and then we did it for a similar amount of time in New York. And towards the end of both of those runs, I started to have white-outs on stage, where that little voice, the And This Is Why You Can't Have Nice Things voice, would start to go, "[sinister voice] You don't know what happens if you forget the next bit, you might not remember the next--" And that was really productive for a while, because it meant that my way through the scene, which is you know, I say this, I think this, I look at that, I react to this, you know I've got a little kind of storyline to follow through so I don't have to worry about acting. I'm just doing stuff. After a while, there'd be gaps between that, that that voice could get into, towards the end when anxiety started to get me, when if there was a moment that I hadn't absolutely pinned down, that would happen. And after four or five months, I'd need to work out moments between the moments. And so what it ended up being incredibly, by necessity, complex, what I was doing, as a kind of way of forestalling oblivion, or a panic attack. But it won in the end, a little bit. And in the last week of both of those six month periods were white terror. You know, because it was just a battle to, I'd just suddenly lost all my confidence, and that started when I had a blank moment in which the actor opposite me just looked at me and I just looked at him as though we were all underwater and he was bobbing around going, "Bububub!" It's like, um, when you know it too well, people talk about well you start doing your shopping. Imagine catching yourself doing that and jumping back, but jumping back into the wrong one. So I found myself with my Tesco's bags on stage, thinking, "What are you doing in... in this aisle?" Giles: Yeah, yeah. Rufus: And he gave me my line, and I remember just shaking my head at him and thinking, "I'm in a different world, I don't even know what that means." And we got back, but from that moment onwards, I got scared of the blank. I got scared of that blank moment thinking that it was, you know, because actually, it took a while for that fear to go. Because I just didn't, I haven't done a play every couple of years after that. The first one was really scary, I went through the whole thing thinking that might happen again. Until the last play I did, I can happily enjoy that because that's, you know, it's just like with improvisation, it's just like you're not trying, you're just open to it. So I think I've tried to welcome that kind of blank back. Because, in the right circumstances, that's where nice stuff can happen. Jim: It does take a certain confidence for that, doesn't it? And that anxiety kind of road-- Rufus: Yeah, exactly. And it's, I think for me, the reason it happened on that particular play, is because it's the first time I had been universally praised. It's the first time that I'd just like, you know, it's quite healthy if someone's "Oh, the best acting in the world," and you read another one of those, and it's just "The wooden Sewell" and argh! And after a while, it kind of evens itself out, you kind of like, to use someone else's phrase, you feel like all your organs have been taken out and then put back in again. You know, it's just like, you feel like you've had a bit of a jostle. But it ends up, you know. Giles: Yeah. Rufus: So the first time I'd ever been universally praised, so I had this feeling that people went, "Oh, this'll be good!" And it scared me. So I kind of, I think if people had been saying that I was a bit shit, I don't think that would have happened. Jim: Really? Rufus: That's my theory. ...That's probably why it hasn't happened since. [laughing] Giles: How are you with that kind of stuff? Because um, it comes up quite a lot on the podcast, you know, how sometimes you might get that one bad review, and it really... Rufus: Yeah... I think I changed. I think the play before last, I mean I do read them because I tried not to read them, and I became such a fevered over-interpreter of shoulder-rubs after that, that someone would come and say "Heeey" and they'd hold you and you'd think, "Why? Was the Times bad?" In the end, I found that I could deal with people better if I knew it all. So I wasn't, I felt prepared for anything coming at me. And I had quite a funny experience reading the reviews when we did Closer at the Donmar Warehouse. Giles: That's the Patrick Marber. Rufus: Yeah. And I got a review from The Daily Mail that was so hilariously bad. And I read it late at night, and it made me genuinely laugh, 'cause the fucker got me. It wasn't true but it--it was a bit true, actually! What was interesting is reading the terrible reviews and the really good reviews, some saying a particular moment "Whoa, incandescent blah" and the other one saying "shit" that they were both kind of right. Because sometimes it was good, and sometimes it wasn't, and you know yeah. And what's his name, Tookie? I remember it--Quentin Letts. Giles: [derisively] Ah. [laughing] Rufus: I mean, bless him. He said there was a moment when I clapped my hands to the side of my face in shock, and I resembled an owl with a toothache. And I thought, you fucker, you ruined my owl with a toothache moment! [laughing] Rufus: But I fell asleep chuckling to myself, and I thought, that's probably like all of these things I'm gonna realize that's really hurt me. I'm gonna wake up tomorrow morning and I'm gonna feel bad. And I didn't. I just, every time I've ever thought of it since, it's made me laugh. Maybe that's just because he's such a prat. Giles: Yeah. [chuckling] Rufus: I mean, everyone knows that, but still. But I'm hoping that that meant something, because to me, when I review like I did, I got reviews that said I was really really really good, it's not like I believe those, I'm somewhere in the middle. And my position is kind of reflected between the really good reviews and the really bad ones. I know what I think. I've done work that I'm really really proud of that hasn't been noticed, and... This is why I think, I try not to to be too unhappy with things not being noticed or whatever, because by the same token, I've done things that I don't think are very good that I've been unfairly praised for. So I think it works out about fair. Jim: But doesn't it prove, as well, you can get reviews on the exact same moment of a performance, and it's quite subjective. Rufus: Well that's what I've realized, it's totally subjective, because you tend to find the same things--that the moments the reviewers pick out, whether they're gonna use them as an example of what's wrong with the production or what's right, what makes you the supreme actor of your generation or what makes you woefully miscast and why are you even doing it, are the same moments. Generally. And obviously, it's normally a bit of an obvious moment. So that's been quite interesting. I'm not saying I'm cured, but-- [giggling] Rufus: But it certainly worked better--Maybe one day I can--I have friends who I admire who don't read them at all. I'm not there yet. Giles: Yeah, and I guess it's that thing isn't it, that trying to compartmentalize the good and the bad. You know, 'cause the good's not gonna make you perform any better necessarily and the bad's maybe not... Rufus: Well, I don't think you need to compartmentalize them if you treat them all with kind of benevolent contempt. They don't know. They don't know, it's just the opinions. You know what I mean? It's their job to pretend to have an opinion even when they don't. You know. Giles: Yeah. Jim: They gotta right something. Rufus: Yeah. It's like well you've gotta write something, haven't they? Jim: It's kind of what it's like with sort of modern social media as well, you know. Rufus: Of course it is. Or outrage, or whatever, you know Giles: Yeah, yeah. Click-bait, as well. Rufus: Exactly. People pretending to be offended or pretending that someone has had a row, when in fact they've just had a conversation, you know. But yeah, it's been said before, but everyone likes to read a really nice review of yourself. There's a difference between that and thinking it's true. And I've been witness to, and probably suffered from in the early days, of having moments ruined by them being over-described. You know, you can tell when an actor is coming to a "moment when time stands still." [giggles] You know. 'Cause it gets little inverted commas around it, and then it's like [clears throat], you know. Giles: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rufus: Then, after a couple of months, if you're not careful, it's got double inverted commas, and then it's got fucking Belisha beacons 'round it. [laughing] Rufus: And that's what happens. It kind of ruins drawing people's attentions to, you know. Jim: Yeah. Giles: What's it like being a high-profile actor in a social media world, though? I mean, do you come across criticism directed directly at you? Do you know what I mean, it's one thing to read it in the newspaper but when it's tweeted to you or whatever-- Rufus: Yeah, but you know, my attitude towards people who don't like me is, I probably wouldn't like them. As opposed to what it might've been at one stage, which is oh how can I make this person like me? Giles: Yeah, like getting approval from them. Rufus: Yeah, it's not like it's a surprise. In fact, I often write things thinking, oh this'll get rid of some people who probably wouldn't be my friends. Jim: [surprised] Really? Rufus: Yeah! Well it's like, if you're doing The Man in the High Castle, you might be followed by people who enjoy--'Cause there was a point where I would deliberately post things to offend Nazis. To offend right-wingers. Fuck off. Jim: [giggling] Oh, I love that. Rufus: No, exactly, like you shouldn't be following me. Giles: Yeah, yeah, you want to-- Rufus: If you're gonna be disappointed by me, don't follow me, you're not gonna like me. You know, I don't want to offend them, I just want them, if they go [angry grumbling]. Jim: Do you think people were following you because they, you know, because of your character? Rufus: They certainly were early on. I mean, I think The Man in the High Castle became a bit more complex--a bit less easy to, you know. But the way it was presented... Ironically, we thought this kind of couple as a kind of ideal Nazi family, I had lots of followers, you know, people whose--what's the picture that--your avatar or whatever were pictures of me, who were right-wingers. Were more than right-wingers, Nazis! Giles: Wow. Rufus: You know, the idea that they would express disappointment in some of my opinions is not something I was gonna worry about. In fact, it's a good way of what I would call flushing the pipes, so to speak. Giles: Yeah. Jim: Yeah yeah, absolutely. Rufus: But I don't, you know, but my... If someone irritates me, I'll mute them. If they irri--I don't want to offend people. If someone's offensive I'll block 'em, but if someone just tends to say stuff that just gets on my tits about--I just try not to pay attention. And also my attitude towards it, I imagine it's just like um, having people around your house. Or being in a pub full of people you like and just chipping in and taking the piss and you know-- Jim: Yeah, that's the way it should be! Rufus: But if anyone you wouldn't want 'round, you know, I feel happy to just... I only block 'em if I want them to know, but most of the time I just look the other way. Giles: Do you ever soft-block? Rufus: What's a soft...? Giles: That's when you block them, and then you un-block them immediately, so then they're not following you, and you're not following them. But they don't notice. Rufus: Ohhhhh! Jim: Aw, look at this! Rufus: But that's the thing, I'm not trying to punish, I'm not trying to do this tit-for-tat stuff, because you can't win. I'm not gonna try to convince anyone or change anyone's mind. Jim: I used to be like that, I think. I wanted to try and convince people, but actually there are some people that are so far gone. Rufus: Yeah. Giles: There's a lot of noise on those platforms, aren't there? That's the thing is you can't always shout over the ongoing noise. Rufus: No. Giles: And why should you? Jim: Well, Rufus, we normally end the podcast by asking our guests for advice for our listeners that might have blank moments or any struggles in their lives. Do you, what would your advice be? Rufus: Um... [thoughtful sigh] Um, I don't know... I would say that um, the blank moments, I suppose it's what I said before, it's actually, you know, the blank moments are, that's where peace is. You know, for me, the relationship, I used to be terrified. If someone had said to me when I was young, you're gonna go in an isolation tank, it would've terrified me, because I was afraid of that blank. But the only thing that was there to be scared of was my fear, actually. I think it's the most beautiful thing in the world, if you can make friends with it. And that's where God is, you know. Jim: I guess, as well, for a lot of people blank moments are isolation in that way. You're just dealing with yourself. And some people may be quite scared of that, scared of being with themselves. Rufus: Yeah, but it's like meditation, you don't have to think about yourself. Sometimes being with yourself can be by letting go of all that, letting go of yourself, actually. It's the self is the problem [giggles] you know? That actually, I used to struggle, I try to meditate, you know, I used to struggle and I'd sit down and I remember talking to someone like, "I just sit there and like..." The joke I made was that meditation for me is just thinking about my career with my eyes closed for 20 minutes. But actually, what someone said to me, you don't fight that. Just let it come and go and you know, the blankness where you're not thinking about the past, or thinking about the future, or that actually just inhabiting the space, in the same way that discovering for me mundanity is what's happiest, because that's kind of a blank. You're not caught up in the dream of what will be or making up for what the past is, you're not complaining, you're not explaining, you're just *there*. And that's the least self you have. And that is, that's happiness, as far as I'm concerned. Jim: Just existing Rufus: Just existing, yeah. The rest is, you know, this pursuit of happiness thing, is a bit of a trick, I think. 'Cause you can't, you know. Jim: Yeah. Just appreciate what you've got. Rufus: Yeah. Jim: Good stuff. That's such a beautiful place to end on. That's really nice. Giles: Thank you so much, Rufus. Rufus: Alright, thank you. Giles: It's such a pleasure to sit down and talk to you. [music] Giles: Well, that was Rufus Sewell on the BLANK podcast. Jim: What a nice guy. Giles: Lovely guy! And it was just so great to be--Actually, Rufus is a bundle of energy, really. Jim: Yeah. Giles: You know, really great to talk to and he had lots of stuff to tell us about. ***Jim: He was really open to quite early doors. Giles: Yeah. Jim: Just got straight into what's happened, talk about anxiety and stuff like that, how he lost his father when he was young, and talking about sort of going through that, and yeah well just a perfect guest for us, really, with some great stories! Giles: Yeah, and very open about blank moments, which was good. Jim: Yeah, top man. So thank you, Rufus, for joining us. Really enjoyed that. Giles: Yeah, thank you very much. [discussion of twitter comments on the podcast, mention of email and patreon] [music outro]

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johnnymundano · 5 years

Text

Punisher: War Zone (2008)

Directed by Lexi Alexander

Screenplay by Art Marcum, Matt Holloway and Nick Santora

The Punisher created by Gerry Conway, Ross Andru and John Romita Snr.

Music by Michael Wandmacher

Country: United States

Running Time: 103 minutes

CAST

Ray Stevenson as Frank Castle/The Punisher

Wayne Knight as Linus Lieberman/Microchip

Colin Salmon as Paul Budiansky

Doug Hutchison as James Russoti/Loony Bin Jim (LBJ)

Dominic West as Billy Russoti/Jigsaw

Dash Mihok as Martin Soap

Romano Orzari as Nicky Donatelli

Julie Benz as Angela Donatelli

Stephanie Janusauskas as Grace Donatelli

Larry Day as Agent Miller

Ron Lea as Captain Ross

T.J. Storm as Maginty

Mark Camacho as Pittsy

Keram Malicki-Sánchez as Ink

Carlos Gonzalez-vlo as Carlos Cruz

David Vadim as Cristu Bulat

Aubert Pallascio as Tiberiu Bulat

Bjanka Murgel as Arm Candy

(Guilt Belch: I took the images from The Internet. But everything everywhere is ©®™ Marvel©®™.)

The Punisher©®™ is Marvel©®™’s greatest and most lovable mass murder. He’s an utter nutter. No two ways about it, Frank Castle is no hero. A 1974 comic book knock-off of other vigilante figures in other media, back when New York was doing a good impression of both Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s The Punisher©®™. Basically. Over the years the need to shift units to children meant he developed into a sympathetic character, but one whose stories, once childhood faded, were really only worth reading for the art; and then only some of them (I liked the ones drawn by Joe Kubert, John Romita Jnr and Klaus Janson). With the exception of about six Mike Baron scripted issues in 1987 and, for sheer WTF?!?, that time in 1991 where The Punisher©®™ turned into a black man, they were forgettable stuff. It wasn’t until Garth Ennis started writing them that The Punisher©®™ comics were wholly decent comics. Garth Ennis being Garth Ennis there was an initial emphasis on unfunny playground humour, but his later Punisher Max©®™ series burned this out and concentrated on Frank Castle as Soulless Monster. Which was nice. Punisher: War Zone©®™, a belated sequel to the forgettable 2009 The Punisher©®™, takes its cue from both sets of Ennis’ Punisher©®™ comics, and is as good as neither.

Obviously I am openly a pinko limp-wristed snowflake who believes in rehabilitation and (shhhhh!) not descending to the level of your enemy; basically I’m temperamentally pretty much the complete opposite of The Punisher©®™. But I can afford to think like that; after all, I haven’t had my whole family gunned down in Central Park while picnicking between two rival criminal factions. (Frank Castle is as good at picking picnicking spots as Thomas Wayne is at choosing shortcuts.) Had I cradled the bloody corpses of my family amongst the pulped tuna sandwiches, crushed crisps and spilled soft drinks of a murderously truncated picnic, perhaps I too would be waging a war on crime from my lair under the New York subway, aided only by that hefty fella from Jurassic Park (1993) and some cops on the down-low. I’m not sure I’d find time to spray paint a skull on my chest armour, but I’d definitely have a big comfy chair to brood in like Frank has. Mine would have a cup holder though, perhaps an antimacassar if I was feeling bold.

From that simple premise Punisher War Zone©®™ manages to make an intermittently entertaining, occasionally fantastically violent, movie suitable for viewing with your teenage son. If anyone involved had any higher ambitions then I would say they failed. In the post-John Wick world in which we dazedly find ourselves it is readily apparent that much of the problem with Punisher: War Zone©®™ is too much plot. There’s just too much faffing about trying to get reasons to have Frank kill people. If John Wick has taught us anything, it’s that we really don’t need much of a reason for the killing, but that killing better be spectacular stuff. Such a simple lesson would not be learned until 2014, alas. So here, back in 2008, there is much huffing and puffing about Frank accidentally killing an FBI Agent, feeling bad about it and killing lots of cartoonishly bad people. Killing lots of people remains a remarkably efficacious solution to all the problems presented in Punisher: War Zone©®™. Which is entirely as it should be in a Punisher©®™ movie (but I feel the need to stress that in real life it’s less effective).

Lexi Alexander directs in that rapid-fire music video style popular at the time, and has a marked penchant for lighting scenes in one key colour. I enjoyed this latter aspec,t but less so the kind of blurred out approach to detail in longshots; mostly because I don’t need a sneak preview of what cataracts will be like, thanks. Oh, it’s probably worth noting for fans of Marvel©®™ movies that Punisher: War Zone©®™ dates from before Marvel©®™ brought things in-house, so there’s no cameo from Iron Man©®™ being insufferably smug or an after credits scene of Fin Fang Foom©®™ playing blackjack in the bath. There is, though, an actor who looks a lot like comics’ most overrated writer Brian Michael Bendis, so you could pretend that’s a cameo if you’re really desperate.

Unusually for a comic book movie most of the actors in Punisher: War Zone©®™ act like they believe they are actually in a comic. Nuance is not on the agenda in Punisher: War Zone©®™, and I can’t say it is missed. Dominic West as vain goombah Billy Russoti is hilariously extreme in his foghorning Bronxness; so focused in his accent is his bombastic hammery that his lips seem a separate entity entirely. This, uh, interesting acting choice is soon explained when his face gets gorily mangled and he is reborn as Jigsaw©®™ . Wearing a big false head proves no impediment to a performance of such, er, force. Everybody else kind of fades into the background, mostly because they haven’t much to do, and also because giving them a name from an issue from the comic is as far as characterisation goes. But, again, it’s not On Golden Pond (1981) is it now? Essentially 99.9% of the cast exist to get killed. There’s an Urban Freeflow gang, for example, who exist purely so that Frank can shoot one of them in mid-air with a rocket launcher. Again, appropriate enough stuff for a Punisher©®™ movie.

Ray Stevenson gets top billing as everyone’s favourite homicidal loon, and he is very good value as The Punisher©®™ when The Punisher©®™ is cutting through hoods like a hunting knife through unset jelly. There’s a real sense of the implacable to his murderous movements. He’s less successful, however, when Frank has to emote. It’s not so much Ray Stevenson’s acting that’s the issue, there’s nothing wrong with his emoting; it’s the fact emoting is called for at all. Literally nobody who wants to see a Punisher©®™ movie wants to see The Punisher©®™ bond with a small child, certainly not to the extent that he does a little wave back at her with his wee handy pandy hesitantly raised. Literally everybody who wants to see a Punisher©®™ movie wants to see The Punisher©®™ nonchalantly shoot a hood’s face right off as a cop is reading him his rights. Both these things exist in Punisher: War Zone©®™. But only one should. As a Punisher©®™ movie Punisher: War Zone©®™ is sporadically successful, and as an action movie it’s okay if you want to bond with your teenage son. Ultimately though, as entertainment, it’s creakily obsolescent in a post-John Wick world. But then so much action cinema is.

#Punisher War Zone #The Punisher #movies #Action #Comics #Dominic West #Ray Stevenson #Marvel Comics #Marvel #Lexi Alexander #2008 #The 2000s

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ralph-n-fiennes · 5 years

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RALPH FIENNES LOOSENS UP - GQ MAGAZINE

Well, loose for Ralph Fiennes, anyway. The actor and director lives a life of high culture like practically no one else alive. Lately, he's been making us laugh, too.

Ralph Fiennes seems both parodically English and consummately European, the way classical music isn't bound by borders, either. In addition to all measure of British, he has played, to my count: Austrian, Irish, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, and unspecified Balkan—as well as American (both WASP and serial-killer varieties), and Snake. He appears to carry with him, among many other charms, a cache of words, phrases, and proper pronunciations of non-English languages, like a deep pocketful of pre-Eurozone coins. It is very fun to listen to him talk in movies—and in person in London, as I did, for a few hours in late January.

I say all this to help explain why Fiennes registers to many interested in his life and career as one of our ultimate cosmopolitans. He is, just to list some of his culture bona fides, one of the living actors most associated with Shakespeare. He has said that he and his six siblings grew up listening to vinyl recordings of poetry recitations. He has often acted in films based on the acclaimed novels of major-prize-winning authors. He has said the talent he would most like to have is playing the violin. He has said that when he travels for a film, he always does so with the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, a “talisman” and “safety net for when one is feeling a bit bruised or battered.” He has described the greatest love of his life as “having a transforming encounter with a Work of Art, either as a listener, viewer, reader, spectator, or participant.” He is fluent in painting styles and the names of museum directors and the great theaters of both the East and the West. He is fluent in ballet now, too, since he's just directed a movie about the Soviet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. He enjoys hopping on the Eurostar to Paris from his home in London. He enjoys short flights to European capitals. He enjoys picking up his rental car in Umbria so that he may drive—the only time he drives—to his “tiny farmhouse” in the Italian countryside, where he goes “to read.” He has said his idea of perfect happiness is “swimming naked in the sea.” He has said that when and where he was happiest in his life was “swimming in Voidokilia Bay in the southern Peloponnese.” While we were together, he sounded most like Ralph Fiennes when he said European-sounding nouns, like “Peugeot” and “Tchaikovsky” and “salade niçoise.” He pronounced the little tail thing on the c, and, as a Fiennes character might direct him to, he pronounced it trippingly.

This cosmopolitanism seems to have sort of become the point about Ralph Fiennes in recent years. Wes Anderson may have been the first to recognize a new use for this caricature: that in the post-heartthrob Fiennes, a filmmaker could mine middle-life pathos, as well as levity and humor; that if a character were to possess an arch knowingness about the fact that he was being played by Ralph Fiennes, it might be really, really fun to watch.

Actually, maybe credit belongs to Martin McDonagh and In Bruges. The joke there was that Fiennes—the very high culture of his cells—could play the antithesis of so many counts and kings: an irritable East End gangster with a Shakespearean facility with fucking fuck fucks. Maybe that was the pivot?

Or, scratch that, too—perhaps it started earlier, with his first nose-less “Avada Kedavra!” in a Harry Potter movie. Maybe that was when we felt the options expand.

Regardless, there's been a slow shift, iterative at first, and then all at once wholly present, in a new series of roles for Fiennes over the past decade or so. There would always be the bedrock of English/European-set drama (Schindler's List, The English Patient, The Constant Gardener, The End of the Affair, Sunshine, just to name some acclaimed heavies), but there was space now for a fresh kind of on-screen presence. You get the Oscar-nominated talent and the self-awareness, too.

Take Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash, for example, where Fiennes plays a motor-mouthing cocktail of taste and devil-may-care that could be reduced to something like: Ralph Fiennes type—but with all of the shirt buttons unbuttoned. Ralph Fiennes type—but with a Jagger falsetto and breezy linen. There's a scene in which Fiennes's Harry Hawkes leads his compatriots to a no-tourists dinner spot on a secluded hillside on an Italian island, doling out por favores and grazies as he gracefully inserts himself into the hospitable hands of the locals. I remember thinking in the theater, or on the plane, or wherever: This. This is what you get when you strip off the uniform of haughty propriety, but still have all the knowingness—all the language and command and wisdom amassed from a lifetime of moving fluidly across European borders. The result is very funny and very cool.

When we met in January, Fiennes had just finished a 76-show run of Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre in London. He'd spent the previous day—his one and only day off between the play and a new film shoot—reading books and responding to e-mails. (He'd been journaling when I first approached our table.) Fiennes still had his beard from the play, but it would be gone by that evening. He made reference to “what little hair I have left” on top, a style that changes often. The fixtures of his face were plenty there, though. The prominent nose and brow. The sticky-outy canines. The sensitive pale eyes, ticklish to the light—ever-present in the heroes and the villains alike, the same pair on Count Almásy as on Voldemort. The eyes were so familiar. As was the voice. His voice sounded exactly like Ralph Fiennes.

Sometimes actors make choices to pivot their careers. Other times those choices—those theories about their work, the sort of I've just laid out above—are more arbitrary, connecting unrelated opportunities in an effort to make sense of them, the way we trace weird animals out of the stars. Fiennes has said that, at times in his career, he felt people presuming that he only did a certain kind of dramatic role. I asked him if the run of films including In Bruges and The Grand Budapest Hotel and A Bigger Splash felt like a pivot.

“It did feel like that,” he said. “I cannot tell you how thrilled I was when Wes asked me to be in the film. And when Martin McDonagh approached me to be a kind of London gang boss. Which is not my obvious casting bracket.… And then Luca came to me with that great part, and it felt exciting to me, that ‘Oh, great, I'm not being seen as, I don't know, English intellectual or sort of cool, crisp bad guy.…’ The thing that people were responding to was the comedic, or the humorous, that was clearly in Wes's script, and Martin's, and in A Bigger Splash, and also the wonderful scene I was asked to do in the Coen brothers' film [Hail, Caesar!].” (Would that i' t'were so simple...)

I told him I'd been wondering how active he was in the pursuit of that pivot, since it's difficult to know how much an actor's hands are on the wheel.

“I think it's a very valid question. And I think sometimes actors are absolutely going: I want to do this and this.And other times it comes to you. All the stuff I've loved doing most has come to me. Sent to me.”

In the case of A Bigger Splash, Luca Guadagnino, who'd made it “an aim” of his to work with Fiennes ever since seeing Schindler's List and Quiz Show, told me he knew the actor for Harry “had to be somebody who could carry a complete buffoonish, clownish character combined with melancholy—and there was no doubt Ralph was the right person for that.” At the time, Fiennes had done The Grand Budapest Hotel, Guadagnino continued, and a trailer had just come out: “And I saw him briefly in a pink tie, being suave and swarthy in that little clip, and it was, ‘See, he's perfect.’ He's not only a master of shades of brooding-ness and melancholy, but he can also bring a levity and a capacity of likability that is really unique.” That well-worn heavy, and the new light. Perfect.

Fiennes is a voracious reader, and many of the films he's best known for have been adapted from the works of renowned authors. Michael Ondaatje. Graham Greene. Peter Carey. Shakespeare and Dickens. Even with the more genre-y, it's the best of the genre: Ian Fleming, John le Carré. I asked him if there was any intentionality to those clusters, to working with material from notable novelists.

“I know, I've been asked that before,” he said, seeming to consider it fresh. “But I think I'm responding to the film. And I've been happy to do things that are not based on a book, like In Bruges or The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

I asked if “his people” know what he's going to go for at this stage.

“I believe they know what I respond to,” he said. “But I'm actually not a good reader of film scripts. I'd rather read… I mean, I think I try the patience of the people who represent me.” He laughed knowingly. “If there's a book to read, and they're both sitting there…I'll go to the book, I'll read the script later.… If a certain amount of pressure is put on me, I'll go, Sorry, sorry, I'm doing it.”

I asked Tony Revolori, who played Fiennes's teenage co-lead in The Grand Budapest Hotel, if he remembered what Fiennes was reading on set. “A book of Shakespeare's sonnets,” naturally. Revolori said that Fiennes taught him “the proper way” to read those sonnets and then presented him with a “beautifully designed book” of those poems at the end of the shoot. On set, there were discussions of diction with director Wes Anderson. Tongue twisters were introduced. She stood upon the balustraded balcony inimicably mimicking him hiccuping while amicably welcoming him in. “Tongue-twister battles” ensued. (I would be disingenuous if I described any of this as being shocking.)

From a distance, it is hard to see Fiennes's life as anything but full and packed wall-to-wall with high culture. I asked if he, as a Known Culture Person with a love of things like theater and opera and classical music and art, worried there was something “slipping” in culture?

“I think, 'cause the National is fresh, I can talk about that with a bit more—I can know my thoughts more about the National more than…”

“Than all of culture, like I'm asking you?” I said.

He laughed. “It may be nostalgia, it may be how I'm choosing to remember, but you felt that within the National Theatre—and certainly at Stratford it is the case—they have to function as the company. I think it's probably impossible to do that now because of the way the entertainment business works, and the way actors need to be a part of—the pay is not high—so you have to make money on television or doing voice-overs. But maybe I have a romantic sense of the company.”

Fiennes's first big break came in 1988, in Stratford, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the company of companies. “I wanted to be an actor because I was excited by Shakespeare. It was thrilling and moving. I don't know, I had a quite naive infatuation with Shakespeare. I thought, What a wonderful thing to be in the Royal Shakespeare Company, or the National—and I didn't really think about films, because that seemed like another world.”

Shakespeare led to his first films, which led to a meeting with Spielberg and a role as an Austrian Nazi. In 1993, he was nominated for his first Oscar and embarked on the 25-year movie career that's followed. “If he picks the right roles and doesn't forget the theater,” Spielberg said of Fiennes at the time, unwittingly providing a useful blueprint, “I think he can eventually be Alec Guinness or Laurence Olivier.”

Fiennes didn't forget the theater, and he returns to Shakespeare frequently. The plays were his first love. And despite all forces pushing younger actors toward other kinds of work, he finds that that same infatuation endures with a new generation. “Even just walking back from our last-night Saturday, across the bridge to a party we were having [to celebrate the end of the production], one of the younger female members of the cast, a tiny part, but a lovely presence…she was saying, ‘I just wanted to do Shakespeare. I just love it. I just…’ And she expressed what I had felt. I was so touched, actually, because she said it with such ‘I just love Shakespeare.’ ”

“I know the film asks questions; I don't know that it answers them. I don't know that a film should answer. I like films that provoke me to think.”

Walking back across the bridge. I love that. Every actor, unknown and galactically famous, leveled out, in it together, the intimacy with one another, and with the city where they performed each night. It was fun to get a glimpse of Fiennes in London. It'd almost be a shame to encounter him anywhere else. We walked around Covent Garden for a bit, and he pointed out the grand theaters of the West End. That's where Eliza Doolittle sells flowers in the beginning of Pygmalion. That was Dickens's office. Fantastic. He delineated the precise border of the City of London, pointing at “that church-y thing over there,” a critical marker. We ended up facing the National Theatre—across the very bridge he'd mentioned—and it was sort of like being Ouija-ed by a drunk back to his favorite bar. The theater felt like home position, like all wanderings might wind up back there. Fiennes has lived and worked mostly in London all his career. I asked him if he ever thinks about elsewhere.

“I love London. I think London is a great city. I think it's got fantastic things. I don't know, I guess I've thought about elsewhere but haven't done it, because if it's working, why fix it?” he said. “I'm at a funny time, and I keep wanting to make a shift in the way I, where I live or how I live. I live in London, I've lived in London all my adult life, I live in the East End Shoreditch area, before it became über-hip, I bought a place in 2000. I've got a very lovely place in New York, which I love going to. But most of the work I get tends to be based out of here. And the theater work… I keep going back, because I miss it, I miss that thing.”

Fiennes has the rest of the year “chalked up” already. Five new films: a Kingsman prequel, a new Bond (“I'm waiting to get a Bond script; I'm hoping for a sexy location”), and three-ish other interesting-sounding dramas. Plus the release of The White Crow—Fiennes's third film as director—about a young Rudolf Nureyev, the famed Soviet dancer, and his defection from the USSR to France in 1961.

The White Crow features several scenes that capture those “transforming encounters with a Work of Art” Fiennes has described as the loves of his life. In one flashback, a young Nureyev—born on a trans-Siberian train to poor parents—is taken by his mother to the theater. We don't see what's transpiring onstage, only what's transpiring across his face. We see it happen again when Nureyev, older now and in training in Leningrad, stands before the Rembrandts at the Hermitage Museum. And then, once again, when he wakes up early one morning, to make sure he's the first person at the Louvre, so he can have Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa all to himself.

Again and again and again—“transforming encounters with a Work of Art.”

I read Fiennes's words back to him.

He laughed in recognition. “Yeah, okay. I'd forgotten that.”

I asked him about those scenes in the film.

“Those scenes,” he said, “the one in the Louvre and the one in the Hermitage, with the Rembrandt, those were the scenes that really moved me. Because the engagement with the Rembrandt… I thought The Prodigal Son, looking at it, when we shot that, I was so emotional, I wasn't crying, but on the inside… Those were holy days for me.”

I told Fiennes I knew he'd answered this question after directing his first two films, but I wondered if the answer had evolved during his third: Among the directors he'd worked with, had he cobbled together bits from one or another to help inform him, or was he standing on his own now?

“I don't know that I'm consciously taking from the films I've been in, in terms of visuals, in terms of cinematography,” he said. “But I certainly, in terms of ways of working…I'm often interested in Spielberg, whose energy, vocal… He's not a quiet sort of monosyllabic, quiet-voiced director. He's just direct. ‘Just go here.’ ‘Just put this lens on.’ ‘Come sit down.’ ‘Do it quickly.’ Very clever. Totally positive. And you can feel it. I remember the set, people loved it, because there was a sense of momentum. I think generally actors and crew love it when they feel this forward momentum and, along with it, good work.”

“Deliberate intention,” I said.

“Deliberate intention,” he said. “Wavering, wavering on the set is…” He chuckled darkly. “Too much wavering is worrying. And, like, Anthony Minghella [during The English Patient] was brilliant with actors. A gentle provocation towards looking for something other… It was in my lack of experience that I thought he was wanting me to ‘hit it,’ to ‘nail it.’ But I think actually, quite rightly, he's looking for ‘What else is there that I can get that this actor can own so that they're not contriving something to satisfy me?’ ”

“The pleasure is that I see a French film and meditate on what it, being an Englishman, what it says to me...it offers up new provocations, and also confirms common identity of being a human being.”

After lunch, we walked a short distance to the Royal Opera House, where Nureyev had danced and where a large black-and-white portrait of him hangs in the wings, hovering above the dancers as they step onto the stage. The Royal Opera House is also where Fiennes took ballet lessons of his own—eight or nine, he says—with a dancer in the Royal Ballet named Bennet Gartside, in preparation to play the legendary Soviet ballet teacher Alexander Pushkin. Once, and only once, in my presence, Fiennes did that incredibly weird thing where an actor transforms his head and face and body into another human being in a flash, a total magic trick, while showing me the way Pushkin did something or other.

The White Crow centers on the 1961 trip to Paris by the Kirov—the famed Leningrad ballet company. Nureyev is played by the Russian dancer Oleg Ivenko, who leaps and spins throughout as tightly as the threads of a screw. The film builds to a masterfully suspenseful climax at Le Bourget Airport in Paris, where Nureyev has to choose between defecting to the West or being sent back to the Soviet Union to face some unknown—but likely terrible—fate.

“It's not an easy decision as he sits there in the room. We've seen the love of the mother, we've seen the support of Pushkin, and we've seen those friends—it's not just the oppressive evil empire, it wasn't stifling,” Fiennes said. “When we shot Leningrad, the Soviet scenes, I wanted it quite classically framed, and ever so slightly, we bring the color up. We don't want to confirm the cliché of the gray Soviet world. And when I tried to look at color stills of the Soviet era, they're quite hard to find, but when you find them—bang!—I mean everyone, the women, the red, red being the political color, but red is everywhere. But it pops! And we see so many black-and-whites, it's so weird what this very basic visual thing does. Yeah, I just…it's complicated.… I know the film asks questions; I don't know that it answers them. I don't know that a film should answer. I like films that provoke me to think.”

When I met Fiennes in London in late January, politics was on the surface. Theresa May's Brexit plan had just been rejected by Parliament. And Fiennes had recently given a little-seen speech at the European Film Awards, in which he had spoken about film's role in Europe, and Europe's present relationship to Britain. The speech was economically rendered, but urgent and unequivocal in its diagnosis of political crisis in Europe and the U.K., and of film's role as a remedy:

In anticipation of this occasion…I couldn't help but reflect on what it is to consider oneself European. Is it an instinct? A feeling of belonging? Can I be English and European? Emphatically: Yes. That is my feeling in my gut.

There is arguably a crisis in Europe, and our feeling of family, of connection, of shared history, shared wounds, this feeling is being threatened by a discourse of division. A tribal and reactionary vocabulary is among us. It is depressing and distressing to witness the debate in my own country about who we are in relation to Europe. In England now, there is only the noise of division.

But film, filmmaking, the expression within a film, can be a window for us to see another human being, another human experience, and we can celebrate our differences of language, culture, custom, and our common humanity at the same time. But the act of seeing, seeing another, seeing through the lens, carries in it, I believe, the vital act of bearing witness. Perhaps if we truly bear witness, there can be a true connection, and a better understanding.… Our films can be songs, crossing borders and languages with melodies and harmonies in the form of light and sound and narrative patterns.

We discussed the speech, and his intentions with it. I asked him how much some of the ideas in The White Crow—the way ballet could move across borders, like the films he describes—were on his mind when he delivered the speech.

“I just had an instinct, that I wanted to say how much, how important I felt the community of filmmakers are, and given what this was, I would really be meaning European filmmakers, at the time when my own country is divided about what it means to be linked to Europe,” he said. “Not that countries have to make films that express [exclusively] their culture.… The pleasure is that I see a French film and meditate on what it, being an Englishman, what it says to me…it offers up new provocations, and also confirms common identity of being a human being. And I do feel, I suppose it links what I hope is identifiable in the film: [that he is] being moved and therefore changed by exposure to a work of art. It's a dialogue.”

There are the works of art in The White Crow, I said, and also the cities themselves. Before Nureyev sees the performances or the paintings, he's walking about first Leningrad and then Paris, experiencing that new feeling of somewhere else, letting it in. Fiennes doesn't shy away from his comparable feelings for Russia. The feelings you discover when a place becomes for you the people who live there and not just the political systems that dominate headlines.

“I've formed over the years a handful of friendships in Russia, a handful who are very important to me, and I love going there. And I'm aware of the… I mean the authoritarian nature of their regime that's in control of mostly all the press, and the creep of censorship and control, is very disturbing. But when I'm there, I sort of: There's life going on. I see amazing theater plays, and I have friendships with people.… What interested me was the common humanity underneath the ideological, political fisticuffs.”

I said that hearing about his friends in Russia reminded me of the same dynamic in the United States, the dissonance between the noise of American politics and the lives of most Americans, how most people have nothing to do with the political headlines, how most people are trying to do their best, to generally be kind to their neighbors.

“That's it. Exactly. Exactly. I'm sure that, you know… I mean, nothing that I read about Republican politics makes me think I would ever be sympathetic…but I'm sure that I could go to a Republican community in America and be welcomed, and looked after, and treated with extraordinary generosity and decency and kindness, and those people might go support a Republican candidate the next day.”

That continued exchange between human beings, whether ultimately fruitless or not, seems critical to Fiennes. And art continues to be one of the pre-eminent currencies of at least the exchange of culture.

“Ballet, not being connected to any spoken language, is an extraordinary communicator.… And as an audience member, whether it's a film, or a ballet, or a play, it feels so important to me that we have the privilege of being exposed to these things.... This is the one area, cultural interaction…where we can talk to each other. So when that's impacted, it seems serious.”

We discussed performers and companies struggling to get visas.

“I'm not saying that they're not coming anymore, but it is a challenge that you have to get a visa to go to Russia. And it's funny, isn't it, that I think the cultural interchange, interaction, exhibitions, theater, ballet, coming, that is where we can be like—”

Fiennes threaded his fingers together, hopefully, like hands in prayer.

Daniel Riley is GQ's features editor.

A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2019 issue with the title "Ralph Fiennes Loosens Up."

PRODUCTION CREDITS: Photographs by Scandebergs Styled by Jon Tietz Grooming by Ciona Johnson-King Set design by Zach Apo-Tsang at Magnet Agency Produced by Samira Anderson/Mai Productions

Huge thanks to the amazing @tessa-quayle for helping me out with this impossible-to-open article

#ralph fiennes #interview

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chiseler · 5 years

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Little Devils: 50 Years of Killer Kid Movies

Face it, children are just plain creepy—especially the really cute ones.

Historically—and I’m talking about going back thousands of years—we’ve always been scared to death of the children we’ve spawned. Before they’re born we worry they might be physically deformed or just a little off in the head somehow. And after they’re born and as they start to grow and think and talk, hoo boy, that’s when things really start getting scary, as you start to glean a little something about what’s going on behind those cold, staring eyes. I’m not a parent myself, but having been a kid once I fully understand the panic and fear that can grip parents as they come to better understand their kids. What if they’re no good at sports? What if they start hanging out with a bad crowd and using drugs? What if they get bullied by the other kids and take revenge by shooting up the school? Worse still, what if they decide to bludgeon us to death with a crowbar in our sleep one night? What if they turn out to be the bona fide offspring of Satan himself? What the hell do we do then? Sure, we all pretend to be shocked and dismayed when we hear news stories about some eight-year-old in Kansas or Oregon stabbing the little neighbor girl twenty times for no apparent reason, but let’s be honest—we all know what these pint-sized miscreants are capable of doing, and have simply come to expect it.

As with a few of those other fundamental adult fears, like asteroids, nuclear war, clowns and deadly plagues, over the years our fear of children has led to its own unheralded cinematic subgenre of Killer Kid movies.

While countless slasher films from Halloween onwards feature tykes with butcher knives who grow up to become adults with butcher knives, I’m focusing here on those films in which the snot-nosed killers remain snot-nosed throughout. While I could have included those rambunctious hobo youths from William Wellman’s Wild Boys of the Road (1933), those little back-to-nature wastrels from Lord of the Flies (1963) and the matricidal zombie girl with the trowel from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), I, um, didn’t. So sue me.

Here’s a quick chronological list of a double handful of notable features about murderous children. It’s interesting to note that as the years pass, the films themselves seem to grow less clever, endearing, original and interesting. Just like kids!

The Bad Seed (1956)

I’ve long been a big fan of that Mervyn LeRoy. As a director, he always understood the darker side of human nature, and had a sly sense of humor about it. In 1931 he directed my two favorite (and two of the bleakest) Edward G. Robinson pictures, Five-Star Final and Two Seconds. Then eight years later he directed The Wizard of Oz. I always like to think (though I’m undoubtedly wrong about this) he intended his 1956 creeper The Bad Seed as a kind of bonk on the head to those audience members who hadn’t recognized the darkness that lay at the heart of The Wizard of Oz.

Okay, Nancy Kelly plays Christine, the nightmare-plagued mother of the world’s most perfect little girl. Not only is blonde, pigtailed and always immaculately dressed Rhoda (Patty McCormack) perfect, the ten-year old knows she’s perfect. As a perfect child, she also knows what she deserves out of life and those around her, and lord help anyone who doesn’t cough it up. As time goes on, Christine begins to suspect Rhoda may somehow be responsible for the tragic drowning of a classmate who’d recently won an award Rhoda felt she rightly deserved. And if she was responsible for that, maybe she was responsible for all those other weird deaths that have been happening all over town, too. And what the hell’s the deal with that recurring nightmare, anyway?

Although based on a stage play that was itself based on a novel, it was LeRoy’s film that would become the standard reference point and template for so many of the Killer Kid movies down the line, though few would come close to matching it.

Village of the Damned 1960

John Wyndham was a reasonably popular pulp writer in the 1930s. While his crime stories gained him the most attention at the time, these days he’s best remembered for his occasional forays into sci-fi and horror. Day of the Triffids, his end-of-the-world masterpiece about killer plants (a personal phobia) was a major hit when adapted for the big screen, but his cautionary evil kid tale Village of the Damned had a much longer reach after director Wolf Rilla got ahold of it.

Yes, we all know the story: one day everyone living in a small English village falls asleep at the same time for some unknown reason. When they awaken several hours later, all the women of child-bearing age (even the virgins!) find they’re pregnant. Weirder still, they all go into labor at exactly the same time.

Ten years later, all the kids born that day have turned out to be extremely intelligent, blond, beautiful, and emotionless. Snappy dressers though they may be, they’re also arrogant little snots who have no time for adults or other kids, and only hang out with one another all the time. They also seem to share a psychic connection, and there are hints they have some larger purpose in mind. Anyone who tries to interfere with them gets the creepy glowing eyes treatment shortly before unexpectedly committing suicide. George Sanders at the top of his game plays a rational sort who tries to get to the Bottom of what all the hell,

It remains a starkly eerie and atmospheric picture that to this day can still make you want to punch blond British pre-teens right in the face.

The film went on to spawn one lesser sequel (1964’s Children of the Damned), one superior sort-of sequel (Joseph Losey’s 1962 These Are the Damned), a 1995 remake directed by Jon Carpenter, and a Simpsons parody. My favorite bit of cultural impact, however, is that some of your more out-there paranoids have worked Village of the Damned into the Montauk Project conspiracy, claiming beautiful, blond alien/human hybrids were created in the secret government labs in the caves beneath Montauk, Long Island. These Montauk Children, as they’re called, were set out into the world as sleeper agents (though most settled in Denver for some reason), and to this day are awaiting their secret orders from above.

The Twilight Zone: “It’s a Good Life” (1961)

It was included as one of the segments in Twilight Zone: The Movie, but good as that was, there’s just no topping the original. And there’s no topping the original because back in the early Sixties Billy Mumy was the creepiest kid on the planet. Rod Serling clearly recognized this, which is why he kept casting him.

Little Anthony Freemont (Mumy) lives in a pleasant small town where everyone knows him and everyone’s really nice to him. I mean really, really, REALLY nice to him,. And they’re really nice because over time they’ve come to realize that even if he doesn’t opt to simply blink them out of existence if they don’t do what he says, he has the power to make incredibly awful things happen to them. Even thinking bad things about Anthony isn’t such a hot idea. Things aren’t any better in the Freemont household, where his terrified parents (John Larch and Cloris Leachman) have to walk on eggshells out of fear he might do something else to his siblings, or them. )“It’s a…very GOOD thing that you did that…”)

It remains one of the most delightfully wicked and true portraits of just how terrified adults are of kids, and just how sinister kids can be.

Interestingly, Mumy apparently also had this power in real life, later going on to have a big hit with the novelty song, “Fish Heads.”

The Other (1972)

Kids alone are creepy enough, but you get twins to boot, you know you’re in for some bad news. And you get twin boys in a rural town in the 1930s? Holy mackerel, you might as well just pack it in right there and go home. Nothing good is going to come of it.

I don’t know how many times I watched Robert Mulligan’s film (based on the Thomas Tryon novel) on TV in the early Seventies, but it was a lot. Enough that to this day I still remember every shot and every line of dialog., but it still gets under my skin as one of the most effective of the lot.

Real twins Martin and Chris Udvarnoky play Holland and Niles Perry. As with most twins, one is mostly nice and sweet and innocent, while the other, Holland in this case, is the dominant, wickedly mischievous one.. Also like most twins, Niles and Holland share a weird psychic link. But in their case, and under the guidance of their Russian grandmother Eda (Uta Hagen), they can use a special ring to take things one step further. They call it The Game. As in Being John Malkovich, they can actually enter the consciousness of anyone they choose, from a magician in a traveling carnival, to a passing crow, to a corpse.

It’s a Northern Gothic tale complete with dark family secrets, farm accidents, dead babies, emotionally shattered mothers and real freaks. And an evil twin. It unfolds very slowly and quietly, and even though we get the Big Revelation at the halfway point, it doesn’t matter because the story rolls on with a few more twists and surprises left. It’s not shocking or terribly bloody, but extremely unnerving. Featuring an early turn by John Ritter and a Jerry Goldsmith score.

Don’t Look Now (1973)

Nicholas Roeg’s brilliantly shattered, hallucinatory narrative with the shock ending might be a loose fit here, but it had such an influence on other sort of Killer Kid movies (like David Cronenberg’s The Brood) it deserves mention.

The great Donald Sutherland was rarely better than he was here as John, an architect whose young daughter recently drowned near the family home in England. He takes a job in Venice, thinking a few months away from home might be just the thing to help him and his wife cope. Shortly after they arrive, however, they encounter a blind psychic in a restaurant who tells them their daughter’s spirit is around, and seems happy. Being the slide Rule sort, John is less willing than his wife to accept this at face value. At least until he starts having recurring visions of what seems to be his daughter all over Venice. Dresses like her, anyway. He becomes a little obsessed with that little girl in the red cloak who may or may not be his daughter. Who cares if she might have something to do with that whole nasty string of brutal stabbings around the city?

The less said about it at this point, the better (and easier, to be honest). Almost 45 years on now, it still works, that ending still gets me, and there’s nothing else like it.

It’s Alive! (1974)

People might cite Rosemary’s Baby as the be-all and end-all of films about pre-natal anxiety, but think about it. Sure, she gave birth to the Antichrist, but she has a good support network right there in the building, and if she treats him right, she’s set for life. No, for my money Larry Cohen’s breakthrough monstrous infant hint trumps them all, beginning with one of the most unsettling ad campaigns of the Seventies.

Funny thing is, though it’s remembered as a film about a baby with fangs and claws who slaughters all the doctors in the delivery room before escaping to go on a killing spree around town, if you go look at it again now you realize that’s only a minor subplot. It’s also a conspiracy film about government scientists using unwitting citizens as guinea pigs. Above all else, though, it’s an indictment of the mass media, which has the power to destroy the lives and reputations of innocent people on a whim, in this case the Davis family. And damn but that John P. Ryan is great as the horrified and disbelieving father who finds himself and his wife being publicly blamed (as is So often the case) for giving birth to a kid who isn’t quite right.

Much smarter and more subtle than most would give it credit for, It’s Alive ! Is loaded with Frankenstein references, and went on to spawn two equally good (and very different) sequels. To this day I will not put my face or fingers anywhere near a baby’s mouth.

Devil Times Five (1974)

The early to mid Seventies were mighty good years for Leif Garret. Not only was his picture plastered all over every teeny-bopper magazine in the country month after month, he was also scoring supporting roles in huge drive-in hits like Macon County Line and Walking Tall. Let’s just say considering his squeaky-clean image, Devil Times Five (aka Peopletoys) was a departure.

Garret plays one of five kids traveling on a bus which crashes in the mountains during a snowstorm. With the driver dead and not knowing what else to do, the five youngsters take refuge in a nearby resort.

It eventually comes out the bus was actually delivering the kids to an institution for the criminally insane, as they’re all kookoo bananas and extremely violent. There were hints of this beforehand, as per the standard asylum movie cliche, each nutty kid has a telltale tic—this one thinks she’s a nun, the black kid thinks he’s in the military. etc. But it’s all just mild comic relief until they pick up the knives.

Well, before you can say “Mr. Green Jeans,” they begin slaughtering everyone at the resort in a variety of hilarious ways, and occasionally in slow motion.

Unlike other Killer Kid movies which try to explain away antisocial behavior by blaming it on assorted external forces (government scientists, radiation, aliens, Satan, or an eclipse), these kids are just plain old evil by nature, and that’s all there is to it.

It wasn’t a big hit, it didn’t do much to propel Garret into leading roles, but today it’s earned itself solid cult status as a pre-slasher grind house number. And what’s not to love about the ol’ “piranhas in the bathtub” gag?

The Omen (1976)

In the Seventies and Eighties, a number of once-huge stars—Ray Milland, Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Rory Calhoun, Ida Lupino, George C. Scott and, in this case Gregory Peck—found themselves making genre pictures simply because that was all that was available to them. Granted, The Omen was a few cuts above The Devil’s Rain and Tentacles, but still.

Okay, regardless what the producers and screenwriter David Seltzer may claim about the franchise’s origins, the original trilogy of Omen films was lifted wholesale from “The Devil’s Platform” episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Be that as it may, when you get a cast like this, a smart director like Richard Donner, a simply astonishing score by Jerry Goldsmith, some diabolical camera trickery and editing, wonderful practical effects (Lee Remick’s fall from the balcony kept me going for years), and a story about a smiling, (mostly cheerful 3-year-old Son of Satan wandering around England leaving a trail of beheadings, impaled priests, seriously pissed off baboons and hanged nannies in his wake, how can you go wrong? Even if the script itself is absurdly silly.

In an interesting postscript, like so many other child actors deeply associated with high-profile horror films of the era—think Danny Lloyd from The Shining—Harvey Stephens (who as Damien spoke, what, five words onscreen?) would not appear in another film for the next four decades. And even then he hasn’t been in much, though he did have a cameo as a reporter in the remake of, yes, The Omen a few years back.

Alice Sweet Alice (1976)

I dare you to show me one worthwhile horror film about Presbyterians. No, as far as religious sects go, Catholics have it all over everyone when it comes to horror. You got your robes, your chanting, your weird rituals, your transmutation, your Inquisition, your fetishism, your magic relics, your ghostly visions, oh, it just goes on and on. The Catholic Church is just one big horror show, top to bottom. As a result, Catholicism lay at the heart of countless horror films, and Alice, Sweet Alice is among the best.

The tagline read, “If you survive this night, nothing will ever scare you again,” which may or may not have been a reference to the fact this was Brooke Shields’ film debut. Shields plays 10-year—old Karen, the cute, quiet, polite and well-dressed younger sister of that moody, smart-mouthed and generally ornery Alice (Paula Sheppard), who likes to pull nasty pranks and doesn’t dress nearly as well as her sister. Everyone from the neighbors to their own parents to the local priest adores Karen and showers her with gifts, while they just wish Alice would go away. She clearly needs to see a shrink or something. So when Karen is brutally stabbed to death outside the church on the morning of her first communion and Alice is found with Karen’s veil in her pocket, well, there you go. And then when a whole bunch of other people around town somehow connected with Alice end up all stabbed to death as well, well, there you go again. I mean, she just looks like someone who could do something like that, right?

Alice, Sweet Alice is an American Giallo, so the less said about the story the better. For having such a tiny budget, the visuals are rich and gorgeous, filled with Catholic imagery and ritual throughout, featuring a cast of wholly unlikable characters you honestly don’t mind seeing stabbed to death (especially that Little Miss Perfect Karen). The one standout is Alphonso DeNoble as the crass, sleazy, filthy and morbidly obese landlord Mr. Alphonso. DeNoble has a terrifying charisma, which may have come from being a bouncer at a gay nightclub in Jersey in real life.

Yes, the film owes quite a bit, and blatantly so, to Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but aimed at a more lowbrow mainstream audience. It’s a bloody, nasty little shocker still held dear by thousands of disaffected girls who survived Catholic school.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)

1976 was not only a busy year for Killer Kid films, it was also the busiest year of Jodie Foster’s career, during which she appeared in half a dozen films ranging from Taxi Driver to, well, this, a film she and other cast and crew members would bad mouth down the line. In retrospect, it’s not really as bad as all that.

A 13-year-old Foster plays 13-year-old Rynn Jacobs, a precocious girl who may or may not be living alone in a rented house in a secluded section of a small, affluent seaside town. Her rich, nosy and suspicious landlady keeps barging in uninvited to ask too many questions, the landlady’s perv of a son (Martin Sheen) keeps putting the moves on her, a local cop is endlessly curious but nice enough, and a gimpy teenage magician from the area knows the score. But Rynn is self-sufficient and smart beyond her years. Enough so anyway to dispatch with all those nosy yokels who’d try and pry into her business.

It’s less a horror film than an atmospheric mystery that ties up all the loose ends by the three-quarters mark. Based on a 1974 novel, the claustrophobic stagebound film is mostly forgotten today, but back in ’76 the poster creeped the hell out of me. Certainly more than the film did.

The Children (1980)

Although “creepy bloodthirsty children” seems to be a simple, straightforward notion just bursting with possible storylines, 1980 marked the point at which screenwriters and filmmakers everywhere seemed to run out of ideas, so simply began rehashing those earlier, better films. Case in point is this slight variation on Village of the Damned.

This time around, instead of mysterious alien impregnation, a school bus full of perfectly normal kids drives through a cloud of yellow radioactive fog released from a nearby nuclear power plant. The radiation, it seems, turns all the tykes into shambling, emotionless and murderous zombies. Instead of glowing eyes, the infected kids have black fingernails (which was easier on the fx budget), and instead of psychically driving adults to kill themselves, the mere touch of these evil zombie children can fry any adult to a crisp. With little else to do, the radioactive zombie kids lay siege to their small town as the adults try to figure out just how to handle this. I mean, it was already hard enough trying to get them to go to bed on time.

Oh, derivative as it is, the film does have it’s moments. In fact it includes one scene I must admit I’ve never seen repeated in any other Killer Kid film, in which a group of well-armed adults barricaded inside a house open fire on the army of evil radioactive curtain climbers massing in the front yard. And when the adults finally do figure out how to dispatch the little monsters, well, let’s just say it was unexpectedly gruesome.

The Godsend (1980)

Given the year had already provided a Village of the Damned knockoff, it was apparently time for a Bad Seed knockoff, and an obvious one at that.

A pleasant and kindly British couple, the Marlowes (Malcolm Stoddard and Cyd Hayman) decide to take in a young unmarried pregnant woman even though they already have six kids of their own, telling her she can stay with them until she has the baby. What nice people those Marlowes are! But wouldn’t you know it? As soon as the ungrateful wench spits out the baby she vanishes without a word, leaving them with a seventh mouth to feed.

Being pleasant people they don’t complain too much, and over time the child grows into a polite and lovely little girl named Bonnie (Wilhelmina Green).

Well, sure enough before you know it all the other Marlowe kids start dropping like flies, and the parents take their own sweet time connecting the dots. I mean, come now people! We all know what happens to the youngest kid in a large family.

Itself based on a less-than-original novel, director Gabrielle Beaumont’s low-budget film plays like a TV movie, and lacks pretty much everything that made The Bad Seed so effective.

Bloody Birthday (1981)

On June 9th, 1970, three women in a small California town give birth during a total solar eclipse (uh-oh!). The resulting three kids—Debbie (Elizabeth Hoy), Curtis (Billy Jacoby) and Steven (Andy Freeman)—understandably share a tight bond, and as their tenth birthday approaches in 1980, plans are underway for a big bash pretty much everyone in town is expected to attend.

In the week before the party, maybe just to trim that guest list down a bit, the trio of little scamps undertakes a killing spree. They bludgeon and strangle a couple of stereotypical slasher film teens making out in a graveyard, beat Debbie’s dad (the local sheriff) to death with a baseball bat, shoot a teacher, and attempt to lock a classmate in a refrigerator in a junkyard. No one suspects them, of course, because they’re freaking nine years old. Nowadays we know better. While you’d expect the big party to be the film’s climactic scene, it just comes and goes without much happening, and those darn kids keep killing.

Around the halfway point, a teenaged amateur astrologer offers up the closest thing we get to an explanation for such naughty behavior. During that eclipse, see, both the sun and moon were blocking Saturn. Since Saturn controls the emotions, these kids were born with no conscience. Okay, so you come to accept a lot on faith in these things. Ultimately, though there are hits of both Village of the Damned and Bad Seed here, the picture owes much more to Devil Times Five.

Director Ed Hunt had made a handful of genre cheapies prior to this, but today Bloody Birthday remains his most memorable film. The dialogue is often painful, the soundtrack is comprised of library music from TV movies, and it’s not nearly as gory as would become standard for slasher films, but his three little killers all exude a believable David Berkowitz vibe, and the film contains enough boobs to earn an R rating. In an irrelevant sidenote, it remains one of the very few entries here in which the kids use guns, and, I think, the only one in which they use a bow and arrow.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

Writer/director Robert Hiltzik’s weirdie is a delightfully oddball number not only within the Killer Kid subgenre, but also among slasher films, which is doubly surprising considering when it was released.

Although the film at the outset has all the standard earmarks of a cookie-cutter post-friday the 13th slasher film (a bunch of youngsters at summer camp, and endless supply of sharp implements, a fast-rising body count), careful viewers will note a few unsettling details. First, apart from the counselors, most of the campers (and victims) are pre-adolescent, and all the males, young and old alike, wear shorts that are just a little too short and a little too snug. Hmm.

Anyway, Angela (Felissa Rose), has been sent to summer camp against her will with her older brother. She’s pretty and nice and shy, but has clearly been damaged in some way. She adamantly refuses to go swimming or play games ore shower wit the other kids, despite repeated (and usually understanding) pleas from the counselors. She prefers to be alone, and isn’t much interested in making new friends. I know the feeling. I was sent to summer camp once, and after a lummox named Trent got to go home because he got a fish hook in the eye, I considered bribing those kids with the fishing poles to do the same to me.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen it, the less said the better. Let’s just say it fits the category, but with a notorious twist, and remains near the top of the lists of many slasher film fanatics I know. I do wonder, though, given the age we’re living in, how this one would go over today. It also leaves me wondering what the deal is with that Robert Hiltzik.

Children of the Corn (1984)

Yes, it’s a stinker, but remains a memorable touchstone within the then exploding subgenre of Stephen King stinkers. I always find it funny that King continues to bitch about Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, but never has a word to say about this, or The Mangler, or Silver Bullet, or Maximum Overdrive or…

But that’s beside the point. Given the subject at hand, both the original short story and Fritz Kiersch’s film adaptation are interesting in that they represent a genre-blending crossover between Killer Kid movies and Religious Zealot horror.

AS much as there is to chuckle at here—my goodness what an awful bit of filmmaking, from the script to the performances to the camera set-ups and fx—dammit I keep going back to it. I do enjoy that flashback in the diner, as well as the fact the initial slaughter of the adults is never clearly explained. Not really, anyway. And I do dig the amateurish overacting on the part of John Franklin as the crazy young preacher Isaac and Courtney Gains as his True Believer henchman Malachai. And I’ll watch that R.G. Armstrong in anything. Mostly, though, I think I keep going back time and again just to hear the line “He wants you, too…Malachai!,” which has been a catchphrase of mine for years now.

Firestarter (1984)

Amid the mid-‘80s flood of Stephen King quickies, at least director Mark L. Lester had a few more chops than most. He also had a much larger budget, which allowed him to sign a cast that included George C. Scott, Art Carney, Louise Fletcher, Martin Sheen and Heather Locklear (!).

So a young couple who met in college while volunteering as research guinea pigs in a secret government drug test later get married and have a daughter. As these things happen (see Blue Sunshine or Jacob’s Ladder), those secret government drug tests have a way of hanging around awhile, with some mighty unexpected side effects. In this case, their new daughter Charlie (Drew Barrymore, who was in a few King adaptations) was born with pyrokinetic powers, meaning she can set anyone or anything she doesn’t like ablaze, the lucky brat.

Well, a few years later when the secret government agency that ran the secret government drug test catches wind of what little Charlie can do, they decide they’d like to have a little chat with her, and maybe her dad too (the briefly popular David Keith), who himself might have psychic powers. Or maybe they’d like to have something more than a chat.

Less a horror movie than conspiracy thriller and chase picture, Firestarter remains an oddity here, as it’s one of the few Killer Kid films in which we’re asked to root for the Killer Kid, actually hoping the wee pyro in question, even though she’s cute and blond, will set a few of those icky, mean adults on fire.

It’s hardly on a par with The Shining, Carrie, or The Dead Zone, but at least it’s better than Night Shift, Sometimes They Come Back, Children of the Corn IV, Cat’s Eye, Maximum Overdrive…

The Omen IV: The Awakening (1991)

As would become standard for plenty of other franchises that had seemingly run their course, some bright TV executives thought there was still some money to be made with that whole Omen thing. A decade after the last and supposedly final entry came out, why not give it the TV movie treatment? And while we’re at it, why not give it a fresh twist by doing a little gender switcheroo, right? So this time around, why not make Damien a girl? That’d throw viewers for a loop, wouldn’t it?

(An Omen IV novel had actually been released shortly after The Final Conflict came out, but it had nothing to do with this.)

The events of the previous three films have long been forgotten by the time we get underway here, I mean, don’t we see the Second Coming of Christ at the end of Final Conflict? Okay, so I guess Jesus had gone on vacation or something by the time two young smug and wealthy lawyers (Michael Woods and Faye Grant) adopt a new daughter without asking too many questions.

Their daughter Delia (Asia Vieira) grows into a pretty, dark-haired young girl who is extremely unpleasant. Oooon, but she’s a bratty little smartass who could use a spanking. I always thought the Antichrist was supposed to be charming and charismatic, but I’ll let it slide. In any case her New Age hippie nanny starts to suspect something far more sinister than smug parents might be at the heart of Delia’s bad attitude. When all her magic crystals turn black in the little girl’s presence, she starts making frantic calls to her other New Agey friends.

I’m going to stop there. Hilariously awful film, save for one scene, And that one scene alone is reason enough to forgive the film’s countless other unforgivable flaws.

The nanny drags Delia to a New Age fair in a park in hopes of getting a snapshot of her aura, and let’s just say things don’t go well for much of anyone. In simple slapstick terms, it’s on a par with Final Conflict’s montage of baby murders.

The Good Son (1993)

As he transitioned from the “dorky, buggy-eyed but still weirdly cute” kid in the Home Alone pictures into a “dorky, buggy-eyed and much less cute” adolescent, Macaulay Culkin decided to prove his range as an actor by playing against type in still another take on The Bad Seed.

Instead of telling the story through the mother’s eyes, in Joseph Ruben’s film we see things through the eyes of a nice, wholesome kid named Mark (a young Elijah Wood). After his mother dies, he’s sent to live with an aunt and uncle and two cousins. Not yet knowing he should avoid anyone named “Henry,” Mark and his cousin Henry (Culkin) become good friends. But after Henry is clearly delighted when one of his silly boyhood pranks triggers a deadly multi-car pileup, and after he shows off his homemade gun to Mark, and furthermore hints he once tried to kill his own brother, Mark starts to get the idea Henry might well be a psychopath with bigger diabolical schemes in mind.

Ruben’s picture is a slight cut above the likes of, say, The Godsend thanks to that change in perspective. Although Culkin makes for a believable psycho kid, it didn’t really do much to revamp his career and set him on that road to an Oscar. Thinking about it, though, Henry’s use of improvised and homemade weaponry wasn’t that big a step away from his Home Alone character, but with more fatalities and fewer cartoon sound effects..

Home Movie (2008)

The found footage/hand held video/POV horror film was pretty well dead and buried as a style by 2008, but that sure didn’t stop anyone. It was a cheap way to make a movie, after all. In this case, though, the story would have worked much better as a straight narrative, as the POV gimmick just gets in the way, leaving viewers (or maybe just me) repeatedly asking, “Why would anyone be filming this?”

Why, for instance, would an alcoholic Lutheran minister (Adrian Pasdar) choose to film an intimate argument with his psychiatrist wife (Cady McClain)? And why would a psychiatrist use the family video camera to record private patient notes, leaving them mixed in there with the Christmas and Easter home movies? Maybe writer/director Christopher Denham was trying to make a point about people so obsessed with living through screens that they can easily ignore the obvious and increasing threat posed by their clearly disturbed twin children, who mostly just lurk in the background as the parents focus on themselves. I doubt it though.

The creepy ten-year-olds Jack (Austin Williams) and Emily (Amber Joy Williams) were born on Halloween. While their parents try to desperately prove just how fun and cool and hip they are by setting up haunted houses in the basement and teaching their kids how to pick locks, Jack and Emily spend the first half of the film staring sullenly at the floor. Soon enough though, they begin killing goldfish, crushing toads in vices, crucifying the family cat, and attacking schoolmates, working their way up the evolutionary chain toward You Know Who.

Oh, I’m not giving a goddamn thing away here—the goddamn tagline gave it away! And even without the tagline if you couldn’t see exactly where this was headed with the first scene, maybe you need a nap or something.

To it’s credit, like Devil Times Five, Home Movie offers no explanation for why the kids are funny in the head. If you wanted to push it you could make something out of that Halloween birthday or the fact the family name is “Poe.” Myself, I just tend to accept that any kid unlucky enough to have a preacher or a shrink as a parent is fucked from the start.

Case 39 (2009)

Renee Zelwegger stars as a young sincere and overworked case worker at Children and Family Services. After the seemingly unbalanced parents of a shy, sweet and neglected girl on her case list try to cram the pre-adolescent into the oven (repeatedly!) one night, the parents are institutionalized and the social worker adopts the girl.

Okay, same as with Home Movie, if you can’t see where this one was headed ten minutes in, theres something wrong with you. Funny twist is, while I initially took it to be simply yet another Bad Seed knockoff (which it is) before deciding it was simply another Omen knockoff (which it is), by the half way point it finally became clear: what I was watching was in fact a knockoff of Omen IV: The Awakening. And that’s pretty bad. To make it all even sadder and more pointless, Case 39 is capped by a climax that makes absolutely no sense, if you think about it even for a little bit. Even the Omen IV had a better ending, and that’s saying something.

Considering all the above, the ultimate lesson to take away here is that, talk as we might about The Terrible Twos, it’s when the little monsters turn ten that you really need to watch out.

by Jim Knipfel

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beverlyfdole · 5 years

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21 Quotes to Help You to Stop Overthinking (+ My 5 Favorite Tips)

One of the most common things that gets people stuck in inaction and in not doing what they deep down would like to is the destructive habit of overthinking.

You can overthink a small problem or challenge until it looks like a huge and undefeatable monster.

Or overthink something positive in your life until it doesn’t look so positive anymore.

And sometimes you may even be zapping a simple moment happening here right now out of all it’s joy and magic by overanalyzing and dissecting it.

I’ve done all three of those things. All too many times.

So in the first part of this week’s post I’d like to share 21 of the quotes that I’ve found the most helpful myself when I’ve gotten stuck in overthinking.

And in the second part I’d like to share 5 of my own favorite tips. The ones that have helped me the most to stop overthinking in the past 10+ years.

“Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

“Thinking too much leads to paralysis by analysis. It's important to think things through, but many use thinking as a means of avoiding action.” – Robert Herjavek

”Spend eighty percent of your time focusing on the opportunities of tomorrow rather than the problems of yesterday.” – Brian Tracy

“Rule number one is, don't sweat the small stuff. Rule number two is, it's all small stuff.” – Robert Eliot

“Don't get too deep, it leads to over thinking, and over thinking leads to problems that doesn't even exist in the first place.” – Jayson Engay

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Don’t brood. Get on with living and loving. You don’t have forever.” – Leo Buscaglia

“If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you’ll die a lot of times.” – Dean Smith

“Most misunderstandings in the world could be avoided if people would simply take the time to ask, “What else could this mean?” – Shannon L. Alder

“We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday's burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.” – John Newton

”People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.” – George Bernard Shaw

“The more I think about it, the more I realize that overthinking isn't the real problem. The real problem is that we don't trust.” – L.J. Vanier

“When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.” – Winston Churchill

“It's a good idea always to do something relaxing prior to making an important decision in your life.” – Paulo Coelho

“Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.” – Napoleon Hill

“In a moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing to do, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” – Theodore Roosevelt

“Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere.” – Erma Bombeck

“Trust the still, small voice that says, “this might work and I'll try it.” – Diane Mariechild

“Do not anticipate trouble or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.” – Benjamin Franklin

“A year from now you may wish you had started today.” – Karen Lamb

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

How to Stop Overthinking: My Top 5 Favorite Tips

1. Use a reminder to save yourself from winding up there in the first place.

Staying aware of your negative habit and catching yourself as soon as you start falling into that trap of overthinking as you go about your day can be a big help.

But just trying to keep it in mind at work, in school or in your private life tends to not work that well in my experience. Because we forget all the time.

So what’s needed for this to work a lot better is a reminder.

When I focused on getting a handle on my own overthinking I used a whiteboard on the wall in my home office. The message I wrote on that board was this:

Keep things extremely simple.

This helped me greatly to more often and quicker snap out of overthinking and reduce the number of times that the destructive habit grabbed a hold on my thinking.

Two other kinds of effective reminders are in my experience:

A small note. Put a post-it or something similar with your reminder somewhere where you cannot avoid seeing it every day. You may even want make a few copies and put them in strategic places like your workspace, bathroom mirror and on the fridge.

A reminder on your smart phone. This is the kind of reminder that I use the most these days. I use the free Google Keep app and usually set a reminder to pop up 1-3 times a day to help me to stay on track.

2. Reframe the situation and see it from a wider view.

When you’re thinking and thinking about something then ask yourself:

Will this matter in 5 years? Or even in 5 weeks?

Zooming out in this way will help you to see things with clearer eyes and from a more level-headed perspective.

It will help you to not let medium-sized issues become something that causes more stress or concern than is necessary.

And to more quickly let go of situations where you’re honestly making a hen out of a feather (or out of simply nothing) and to not waste any additional energy on them.

3. Get out of your own head.

When you’re stuck in your own head and thoughts then it can be hard to break out of an overthinking loop about something.

A simple solution that works well but can be a bit counter-intuitive is to then direct your focus fully outward instead of inward.

Two good ways to get outside your own head are:

Help someone else out. Listen and encourage someone close to you that is in a negative situation. Help a friend to plan for a party or for an upcoming meeting or date. Or help out physically by for example lifting moving boxes as your friend is moving into a new house.

Exercise. I find that lifting weights or going somewhere on my bicycle and simply focusing on the exercise and my surroundings and nothing more to be a great way to get out of my own head and to find new energy and a sharper focus once again.

4. Simply small step it.

If overthinking becomes a way to procrastinate or to not face the fear of getting out of the comfort zone you’re in then small step it.

Find just one small or tiny step you can take to move forward. One small action that takes 1-5 minutes. Do that and focus only on that one step until you’re done.

This will get you moving, build momentum and often leads to more small steps being taken (as the first step is most often the hardest one).

5. Just realize and accept that you can’t control everything.

Not even if you think a situation through 50 times or more.

To try to control everything or cover any possible eventuality through overthinking so you don’t risk making a mistake or looking like a fool can be appealing. It has sometimes been the biggest reason for why I’ve thought things through all too many times.

But I’ve also learned that accepting that it simply doesn’t work is the honest truth. To prepare and plan is helpful but going overboard with it isn’t.

A better and healthier way forward is in my experience to understand that making mistakes, failing and sometimes looking like a fool is natural part of stretching your comfort zone.

It has happened to everyone that has wanted to live life fully and to anyone you may admire.

And for most of them those experiences have been very valuable.

Because such situations have helped to them to learn game-changing lessons, to grow and are often invaluable ingredients to their success.

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hd-wireless · 4 years

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🎶 H/D WIRELESS FEST - ANONYMOUS MASTERLIST 🎶

Welcome to our H/D Wireless Anon Set List Masterlist!

With this we want to say THANK YOU to all the creators, readers, and lovers of H/D Wireless! We're overwhelmed by your creativity and support for everyone! We had a mind blowing year with:

33 Days, 50 Fics, 8 Artworks, 6 Art and fic combos 64 WORKS IN TOTAL!

AND 740,337 WORDS! CAN YOU BELIEEEEVE?

Which makes this the largest H/D Wireless Fest EVER! We are just blown away by all the musically inspired creations people have made this year.

Take this week to catch up on the creations, listen to the playlists, and just generally dance around your living room to your hearts content!

🎙️ Check out the Playlists:

Youtube

Spotify

🎶 H/D Wireless Art 🎶

📻 Stuck on the Bridge Between Us (G)

🎵 Song prompt: Talk Me Down by Troye Sivan

🎵 Summary: finding the courage within themselves to be vulnerable, so they can stop hurting the other and start loving each other as they so deeply want and need to

📻 So Let's Dance, Take a Chance, Understand Me (T)

🎵 Song prompt: T.Rex, Get It On

🎵 Summary: The War is over and everything has changed.

After a few of years of travelling around the world, Harry decided to move to Muggle London, looking for peace and a place where the scar on his forehead doesn’t have a meaning. His new flat is in a perfectly normal neighbourhood close to the centre, quiet during the day but full of students at night. He really likes the small bar down the road, a place that serves cheap, awful drinks and plays good old classics. It’s always crammed with people talking, laughing or dancing along with the riff of electric guitars. From the first time he crossed the threshold, Harry thought it was perfect, the right mix of noise and warmth to be alone without feeling alone. Just what he needed. He couldn’t imagine that someone else was there for the very same reason, looking for a place where the Dark Mark was only a tattoo. Blame it on the alcohol, on the music or whatever you want, but when Harry’s eyes landed on Draco’s slim figure, swaying on the dancefloor, something warm and inexplicable possessed him.

📻 The Pass (T)

🎵 Song prompt: Prompt 98: The Pass, by Rush

🎵 Summary: Draco, lost in darkness, seeks a guiding light.

📻 If you knew… (T)

🎵 Song prompt: Young Folks from Peter Bjorn and John

🎵 Summary: The war had left scars on all of them. Some were obvious. Some only if they looked closely. But the worst ones were those they couldn't see. Those that were hidden inside.

📻 an ode to the boy i love (G)

🎵 Song prompt: Animal - Troye Sivan

🎵 Summary: an evocation of vulnerability, trust and tenderness

📻 Home Sweet Home (G)

🎵Song prompt: Radioactive - Imagine Dragons

🎵 Summary: In the middle of a Zombie apocalypse Harry made it his main goal to find a safe home for Draco and himself.

📻 Turn back time (T)

🎵 Song prompt: If I Could Turn Back Time - Cher

📻 Time to Get Out (T)

🎵 Song prompt: My House - PVRIS

🎵 Summary: A few years post-war, Pansy convinces Draco to go on a night out at a muggle club. They run into some familiar faces.

🎶 H/D Wireless Art and Fic 🎶

📻 A Different Kind of Meaning (E, 17k)

🎵 Song prompt: Outnumbered - Dermot Kennedy

It's the first constructive thing he's done in years.

📻 Keep Holding On (M, 33k)

🎵 Song prompt: Welshly Arms - Sanctuary

🎵 Summary: After the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry and Draco both fall into their own battles with their mental states. Draco is sent to Azkaban, and Harry turns to drinking, hoping to forget.

Months later, Harry visits St Mungo’s new ward on request of a friend, only to find Draco in a deep vegetative state.

Not willing to give him up, Harry stays by his side, while simultaneously dealing with the Ministry's newest grand idea to make everything worse.

Making new alleys, and losing old ones on the way, would hopefully be worth it in the end.

📻 Fic : Modern Love (E, 61k)

📻 Art : Our Love Song (G)

🎵 Song prompt: Modern Love by David Bowie

And that’s what starts it all.

🎵 Art summary: Harry and Draco enjoying a Sunday morning bus ride in London.

📻 For the Thousandth Time (T, 14k)

🎵 Song Prompt: Lucky by Aurora

🎵 Summary: When Draco's wand refuses to work after the war, he turns to Harry for help.

📻 Fic : Returning Tides (E, 24.5k)

📻 Art : Love Will Tear Us Apart (G)

🎵 Song prompt: Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division

🎵 Fic summary: Is my timing that flawed? Our respect run so dry? Yet there's still this appeal That we've kept through our lives

📻 That Sweet Sweet Craving (E, 33.2k)

🎵 Song prompt: Bleeding Out by Imagine Dragons

🎶 H/D Wireless Fic 🎶

📻 Follow the Water (T, 38.2k)

🎵 Song prompt: “Follow the Water” by Calexico/Iron & Wine

📻 Life goes not backward (T, 8.8k)

🎵 Song prompt: Daughter by Loudon Wainwright

🎵 Summary: Harry still isn’t used to gifts, but this one is different.

A story of coming home, finding safe ground, and the wild courage of putting down roots.

Leaving one life behind isn’t always a sacrifice, and sometimes the greatest good comes from embracing the people you love.

📻 The Way We Used To Love (E, 5.3k)

🎵 Song prompt: 'Used to Love' by Martin Garrix & Dean Lewis

🎵 Summary: Is there hope when what is not enough for the one happens to be too much for the other?

📻 but if you close your eyes (T, 3.3k)

🎵 Song prompt: Pompeii by Bastille

🎵 Summary: The New Magic Order is trying to take over Wizarding Britain. They're not the Death Eaters, but they're not any better either.

The lines of alliance have shifted, but Harry is still on the front lines working tirelessly to stop them.

📻 Haunt the corner of my eye (T, 23k)

🎵 Song prompt: Echoes of You - Marianas Trench

📻 Lookalike (M, 1.4k)

🎵 Song prompt: 'Lookalike' by Conan Gray

📻 Now that the spring is in the air (T, 5.7k)

🎵 Song prompt: Seasons in the Sun by Westlife

🎵 Summary: A surprise attack in Diagon Alley leaves Draco struggling to make peace with the fact that he won't live long enough to experience his own wedding.

📻 Seven Days to Monday (M, 11.7k)

🎵 Song prompt: Say Something - A Great Big World

📻 Blond Brew (E, 30.4k)

🎵 Song prompt: “Blondes” by Waterparks

🎵 Summary: A blond roast with soy milk makes Draco's morning, but a pair of green eyes makes his week.

📻 A Series of Nonsensical Events (T, 12.8k)

🎵 Song prompt: My Gospel by Charlie Puth

🎵 Summary: Malfoy is up to something. When Harry and the other Aurors are called into a Gringotts break-in and find him the culprit, Harry’s at a total loss. But things only get weirder from then on.

📻 Ignore the Truth (E, 2.6k)

🎵 Song prompt: Dangerously - Charlie Puth

- The Daily Prophet, "Love Is In The Air," 28th Oct. 2005.

📻 Your Daddy Knows (You're A Flame) (E, 27.8k)

🎵 Song prompt: Babyfather by Sade (2010)

There's only one problem: Draco is entirely oblivious to the fact and seems determined to remain so.

📻 Don't search me in here (E, 6.7k)

🎵 Song prompt: Gone - Charlie XCX & Christine and the Queens

Draco can’t quite help himself, watching Potter from afar. Just out of curiosity, of course. He’s happy with his life, nothing is missing, and if he’s lonely it’s entirely by choice.

📻 I Can Be Your Lighthouse (T, 4k)

🎵 Song prompt: The Lighthouse by The Used

📻 Drop Everything Now (T, 21k)

🎵 Song prompt: Sparks Fly by Taylor Swift

🎵 Summary: After accidentally bonding himself to Malfoy, Harry finds himself in an utterly precarious situation…

📻 No one fucks with us (T, 3.3k)

🎵 Song prompt: NFWMB by Hozier

📻 Will You Stay with Me? (M, 10.2k)

🎵 Song prompt: ‘Run’ - Daughter

📻 until the sun has changed the colour of my hair (T, 4.9k)

🎵 Song prompt: Jag saknar dig mindre och mindre - Melissa Horn

📻 Love Found (E, 7.5k)

🎵 Song Prompt: I Found, by Amber Run

📻 On the Third Day He Took Me to the River (M, 14.4k)

🎵 Song prompt: 'Where the Wild Roses Grow - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds ft. Kylie Minogue'

🎵 Summary: This is a story of two lonely young men falling in love.

This is a story about dreams and duty, about witches that give purpose to the one and doom the other.

You think you know how the story goes, but this is a different story, and it doesn't end well.

📻 (When They Only Hear You Whisper) I'll Be Loud For You (T, 2.8k)

🎵 Song prompt: There for You - Martin Garrix/Troye Sivan

📻 The Interview (T, 17.3k)

🎵 Song prompt: Just Say Yes - Snow Patrol

🎵 Summary: One interview had Draco realizing how naïve he was for thinking he deserved Harry.

📻 As Fascinating As a Slap Bracelet (T, 13.2k)

🎵 Song prompt: Have It All - Jason Mraz

🎵 Summary: Who would have thought that a wacky little Muggle toy would lead to an unlikely friendship between Harry and Draco? Not Harry, certainly.

Who would have thought that this friendship would bloom into something more? Well, Ron, for one.

📻 If Sex Is the Drug, Then What Is the Cost (E, 3.8k)

🎵 Song prompt: I Almost Told You That I Loved You - Papa Roach

📻 I Grow Fonder Every Day (M, 21.6k)

🎵 Song prompt: One and Only by Adele

🎵 Summary: Draco still doesn’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, sharing a flat in Muggle London with Harry Potter.

That is, until one Friday evening at the beginning of April when the end starts.

📻 How Can I Live Without you? (G, 2.2k)

🎵 Song prompt: "So Far Away", by Avenged Sevenfold

🎵 Summary: After Draco's death, Harry wonders how can he live without the one he loves when he's so far away.

📻 Following the Arrow to Your Heart (E, 10.9k)

🎵 Song prompt: Give Me Love by Ed Sheeran

📻 cos I only need your name to call the reasons why I fought (T, 6.6k)

🎵 Song prompt: War, by Poets of the Fall

🎵 Summary: Ron and Hermione leave the Horcrux hunt, leaving a hurt Harry behind.

But at least Draco is still there with him.

📻 Madness (M, 10k)

🎵 Song prompt: House of Fun by Madness

🎵 Summary: A desperate search for contraception all around Diagon Alley.

📻 Between Myth and Man (E, 16.2k)

🎵 Song prompt: Why'd you only call me when you're high? - Arctic Monkeys

A story about the complexity of choices, repressed desires that come to the surface when we least expect them, and the utter hopelessness of truths built on a foundation of lies.

📻 stay awhile (stay here with me) (T, 3.1k)

🎵 Song prompt: I like me better - Lauv

📻 All it needs is messing it up and stars (G, 5.9k)

🎵 Song prompt: Tongue Tied by Faber Drive

🎵 Summary: After the war all the Malfoy's came off with light sentences. Now during 8th year Draco is finally free to be himself and date his crush; Harry Potter. Or at least so he thought..

A letter from his father rips that happiness away.

But maybe in the end it will take just a bit of messing up and some stars to get that happiness back.

📻 I'm gonna let it happen (E, 12.3k)

🎵 Song prompt: Florence + The Machine - Shake it out

📻 I feel it in my bones (M, 6.3k)

🎵 Song prompt: Radioactive - Imagine Dragons

📻 Born in the U.S.A. (M, 9k)

🎵 Song prompt: I'm on Fire by Bruce Springsteen

🎵 Summary: “You need to come home, Draco.” “What? Why? What’s wrong?” “Nothing’s wrong, I just have an opportunity for you, and you need to come home to take it.” When Draco's mother insists he comes home, he drags his feet and convinces his friends to take a road trip.

📻 just tell me when it's alright (E, 23k)

🎵 Song prompt: Teeth, Lady Gaga

📻 The Courting by the Pureblood Who Only Has Five Milligrams of Romantic Intelligence and Thinks He’s Real Smooth (T, 19.4k)

🎵 Song prompt: Cupid - Amy Winehouse

(An unnamed ginger bastard can be heard yelling from afar: “This is actually a detailed guide on how not to court someone!”)

But who cares about the opinions of redheads? Literally no one.

📻 What Will We Do With a Drunken Harry? (E, 4.9k)

🎵 Song prompt: "Drunken Sailor" by The Irish Rovers

📻 Though Your World Is Changing, I Will Be The Same (E, 15.9k)

🎵 Song prompt: Slave To Love by Bryan Ferry

🎵 Summary: “I shower after work,” Harry had told him once when Draco had asked what cologne had such longevity as to be effective after a full day of gruelling Auror work.

“For me?” Draco had asked. Teased, just a little. There had been a smile lingering on the edges of his consciousness, threatening to traipse onto his mouth.

“For Ginny,” Harry had said, voice flat. “She hates it when I come back sweaty and crackling with other people’s hexes. Did you know magic has a smell? I didn’t until she told me.” – It's all fun and games, till somebody falls in love. Given his luck, it's obviously Draco who has to go and do it.

📻 I Can't Help Falling in Love with You (NR, 4.8k)

🎵 Song prompt: I can't help falling in love with you - Elvis Presley

📻 Searching For a Place to Hide (T, 12.5k)

🎵 Song prompt: Love Will Keep Us Alive - The Eagles

📻 Isolated Thunderstorms and Scattered Showers (T, 21.3k)

🎵 Song prompt: Iris - the GooGoo Dolls

🎵 Summary: Post-war, Harry needs space. Everything is too much all at once, and time and time again, he finds himself pulling the invisibility cloak over his head, just for a bit of peace.

📻 Kiss It Better (E, 1.5k)

🎵 Song prompt: Kiss It Better by Rihanna

🎵 Summary: When Harry's injured, Draco knows there's no place he'd rather be than by his side.

📻 (shut up and) dance with me (T, 7.9k)

🎵 Song prompt: Shut Up and Dance - Walk the Moon

🎵 Summary: Four dances Harry and Draco share.

📻 In Love with the Ferret (E, 21.9k)

🎵 Song prompt: I'm Yours by Jason Mraz

There's nothing to do but take the advice of his friends and try to woo Draco over dinners with friends, Ministry cases, and an unfortunately named Italian restaurant.

Harry just can't stop the flutter in his chest when he sees Draco smile.

📻 Dance with me? (M, 8.2k)

🎵 Song prompt: I Wanna Dance With Somebody - Whitney Houston

📻 The Cupid Incident (E, 12.6k)

🎵 Song prompt: Can' Get You out of My Head - Kylie Minogue

🎵 Summary: Draco gets into the way of a potions attack and can't get Potter out of his head.

📻 Carouse (E, 19.9k)

🎵 Song prompt: Dead by Madison Beer

🎵 Summary: Carouse (verb): To drink plentiful amounts of alcohol and enjoy oneself with others in a noisy, lively way.

Again, thank you to everyone who’s been involved this year, and there’s still time to get out on the dancefloor before the final reveals (although of course the dancefloor will always be open in your heart and in processor of your chose electronic device)

#hd wireless 2020 #hd wireless anonymous masterpost #hd wireless masterpost

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