#like how james asks the players to contribute with details when they get to a new setting | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mikeyhatesit113 · 4 years

Text

forever and never: Chapter 12

My Toyota Matrix speeds down the highway, leaving the New York City skyline behind us in the rear view mirror. Janie sits in the passenger seat, admiring the engagement ring I had given to her just hours before in Times Square.

Ahead of us, the sun sinks slowly toward the horizon. Everything about that day had been perfect, and it was sending us off with a beautiful sunset. I felt proud as Janie smiled genuinely at her ring, knowing in my heart that I had treated her like a true princess that day.

“It’s beautiful,” she says. “I love you.”

I look over at her with a smile as wide as the Brooklyn Bridge itself.

“I love you too,” I say, pride swelling in my chest.

“Forever and ever,” she says.

“Plus a day,” I whisper.

2 Years Later

Janie and I step onto our front porch step, anticipation building in my chest. I had not been home in more than 3 weeks, and I had no idea what awaited me on the other side of the front door.

I had spent sleepless nights at my grandmother’s house, mental images torturing me during the night. Wicked animations produced by an imagination hell-bent on punishing me. Images that took place in the very dwelling I was about to re-enter for the first time in over 21 days.

Janie opens the door, and I take in the scene before me.

The smell hit me first. The scent was unfamiliar, as if something else had inhabited the place since my abrupt departure.

Stale cologne?

What was more, the furniture had been rearranged. The kitchen looked different, decorated with additional chairs and flat surfaced stands.

It was at that moment when I noticed that Janie was studying me, awaiting my reaction to the many changes to the place I had previously called home.

This, however, did not look like home. This was a foreign place, accented by a foreign occupant who was hiding in plain sight.

But what, or who, I could not put my finger on.

I forced a smile, hugging Janie. Though I did not recognize this environment, another part of me desperately wanted to call it home again.

Janie gave me a tour, which proved to be an orientation into her new world. A universe she had constructed in my absence, but a galaxy I was almost certain that she did not build alone.

“Wow,” I mumbled as we trudged up the stairs to the bedrooms. Brock’s room looked almost untouched, but James’ room yielded a big difference.

There was now a ball python resting in a tank beside his TV.

“Who’s snake?” I asked.

“Steppenwolf’s,” Janie said anxiously. “He brought it as a gift for the boys,” she quickly explained.

“He stayed here?” I asked, a familiar irritation arising in my chest, despite my best efforts.

“Only when the boys wanted him to, for a sleepover,” she replied.

“Oh,” I said. I immediately felt trapped again, like I was going against everything I had tried to stand for. I felt outraged. I felt like I had been violated.

I felt sick.

“And uh, where did he sleep?” I asked.

“Downstairs on the couch,” she said. “He didn’t stay here often.”

“And where did you sleep when you went to his house?” I asked.

“On his couch or in a spare room,” she replied as a matter-of-factly.

I wanted to believe her. I needed to believe her. It was the only way this could work.

“Ok...” I spoke, trying to shove her truth down my throat.

I hoped to God that he didn’t see the inside of our bedroom, which in fact, had also been transformed during my absence.

My brand new queen-size bed was long gone, currently locked up in a dark storage unit. In its place was a twin bed with a frame that creaked, and a mattress with springs that groaned. Additionally, the right side of our room was lit up with a red light that glowed from another large reptile tank which housed a lizard.

That night, I slept warily beside her in that crimson-lit room. I laid awake, wondering what I didn’t know. Wondering what she wasn’t telling me. Wondering if I was making the right decision.

I certainly didn’t have the support from my friends and family, who were incredulous that I returned to her embrace.

“I just want your support and friendship right now,” I texted my friend one day. “You got it,” he wrote back.

His response was not what I was looking for, but did he have the right words to make me feel like I was doing the right thing?

No one did, but in the effort of leaving no stone unturned, everyone’s opinion could not matter.

This was my journey, and no one else’s footsteps or words could complete the distance for me. I had to do it myself, whether it was 3 days, 3 weeks, or forever and ever, just like we had always promised eachother.

Logistically, the tricky task was moving the right amount of stuff back home to Janie and I’s place. I was not ready to empty my room at my Grandmother’s house, nor did I touch my storage unit.

They had been safe zones, and as happy as I was to be back home, I was still rather uncomfortable. I wanted to take it slow, if there was a such thing for a married couple.

Of course, there were other things returned. Janie drove with me to my grandmother’s house one Sunday afternoon to grab one of the things she had missed the most; her Lancer.

In the Lancer’s absence, her father had bought her a $300 mid-1990’s Oldsmobile that had an oil leak problem. It did not have a 6-disc CD player, but it did have a cassette player with cracked vinyl seats.

Call it vintage appeal, if you will. A time machine back to the 1990’s on 4 wheels.

I remember handing Janie the car key to the Lancer and her excitedly hopping in the driver seat. “I love this car,” she said, taking in the interior all over again as if it were the first time ever.

When the boys came home from their father’s house that evening, it was the reunion I was looking forward to most. I hugged them both, telling them both how much I had missed them. As far as I was concerned, I was back for good. And they’d never feel that pain again.

I did have unfinished business, however. I had seen enough photos of the boys sporting fedora hats, indicating that Steppenwolf had bought them their very own wacky hats. I did not appreciate these photos, so one afternoon, I found his Facebook.

I simply sent him this:

It wasn’t long before he answered me.

“Hello?” he responded.

I couldn’t resist myself.

“I want to thank you for trying to take care of a family that wasn’t yours, and I hope you kept the receipt from whatever costume shop you bought those ridiculous hats from.”

“That purple sports car will never fill the void.”

“How does it feel to be an empty old man?”

“What’s wrong, Steppenwolf? Answer me.”

Steppenwolf did not respond, and I was blocked shortly thereafter.

Janie, however, was not happy that I had attacked Steppenwolf. When I told her about what I had sent him, she told me that she already knew I had done so, and that she just wanted me to leave it alone.

Nothing had happened between them. He had been just a friend.

Upon our reunion, Janie and I agreed to participate in marriage counseling. One October evening, our pastor showed up to our home and ate a nice dinner with us. Afterwards, with the cool, Autumn air flowing through the screen door near the kitchen table, Janie and I sat across from each other as our pastor looked on from the side.

We had each written down our concerns on a piece of paper, and it didn’t take long before the dialogue spun out of control.

In my endeavor to overlook so much and ignore so many little details, I could not bring myself to believe that she hadn’t lied to me. That she hadn’t kissed one of my best friends.

That she hadn’t betrayed me.

That I wasn’t her fool.

I guess in the end, even though I felt worthless, I owed myself some semblance of the truth.

I felt the conversation turn against me, and our pastor was soon siding with Janie about my paranoia. He hadn’t lived the nights I had, and he hadn’t seen the dark shadows drift in and out of our lives for the past 2 years.

Specters of betrayal. Phantoms that she denied ever existed.

Ghosts and goblins that haunted the life I thought we’d build.

Secrets that wouldn’t stay dead. Rotting corpses that wouldn’t stay buried.

“Michael,” our pastor chuckled. “You have these...construction crews...in your head,” he spoke. “And they build things out of these thoughts you have,” he said, laughing softly. Janie sat beside him, smirking at me.

I’ll never forget the smug look on her face as she stared at me, enjoying the fact that another human being had taken her at her word.

Nothing happened. He’s angry. He’s paranoid.

I couldn’t take it. I had tried to suppress it, bury it, destroy it, even...but the rage had returned. I stood up abruptly from my chair, anger coursing through my veins.

So many friends and family had contributed to my mental health over the past weeks, and this is how I repaid them? This is how I rewarded myself?

Being mocked by my pastor and my wife during marriage counseling?

“You sit there,” I bellowed, pointing a finger at her. “Laughing at me, looking down on me from your pedestal? Trust me, hunny, I’m looking down on you. I have nothing for you.”

I went to walk away, but my pastor called me back to the table.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Ekim,” he said. “Where are you going? Get back to this table.”

I returned to the table slowly, staring at Janie. Her smirk was gone, replaced by a poisonous look of revulsion. I echoed her emotion.

We truly were toxic.

Of course, that counseling session was the start of the downward slope. More odd occurrences around the house sparked more questions and suspicions.

Like the Earl Grey Teabags on the counter, and the Syracuse hoodie I found in the wash basket one morning while I was folding clothes.

Janie was not a tea drinker, nor was she a Syracuse fan. Janie wasn’t home at that time, so I texted her a picture of the hoodie with the simple question, “What’s this?”

“Uh, a Syracuse hoodie,” she responded.

“I get that. Why do you have a Syracuse hoodie?” I texted.

“My family lived in Syracuse for a little bit when I was a little girl,” she texted back.

This was a blatant lie. Her family had never lived in Syracuse, much less another county.

Janie and I hobbled on, but our legs were giving out. The fighting soon made a vengeful comeback, and our tempers boiled over one rainy day.

I struggled with the lies. I struggled with the stories. I struggled with the person I had become. I hated him. I hated what I saw in the mirror. I hated his guts.

I hated what I did to Jay, now that I was at some capacity to understand it years later.

My mood became tense, and the suspicions only increased.

In the kitchen one day, we locked horns. Janie was making dinner when an argument started. It would be futile to try to tell you exactly regarding what, as I cannot remember due to the violent maelstrom we were trapped in. The reasons for conflict and discord were abundant and vicious. Pick one.

After a venomous word exchange, Janie slammed the casserole dish down on the stove top, cracking it. I turned away and marched out the front door into the pouring rain. I unlocked my car, sobbing as I flung open the door and sat in the driver seat.

I had not noticed Janie following me, and she came into my view as I shoved my key into the ignition.

“Where are you going?” she pleaded.

I didn’t plan to say it, and to be honest, I didn’t even know I felt it like I did.

But it came from the heart.

“I fucking hate my life,” I cried, looking her in the eyes. She stared back at me pitifully, the cold rain drops falling on both of us as we took each other in.

Who were we? What had we become?

How had our house of cards collapsed like this? We thought we were the exception.

We hobbled on.

One sunny Saturday morning before Halloween, we were ready to go to a pumpkin patch. However, before walking out the door, I noticed that James was apprehensive.

Everyone else had walked out to the car, and I seized the moment to address James alone.

“James, what’s wrong?” I asked, walking up to him and kneeling down.

“I’m afraid you’re going to leave again,” he said, looking at the ground.

I was taken aback, but I was encouraged all the same.

“James, I love you, your brother, and your mommy very much,” I said. “I love you, and I’m not going to leave you,” I assured him, pulling him into a tight hug.

“I promise, I’m here for good.”

After Halloween, we saw another November 1st arrive. Our anniversary, a day we hailed for years as the day we found eachother.

A day, 5 years earlier, that changed both of our lives forever.

A day I had progressively become more and more ashamed of.

I gave her the gift I had gotten her, a flashy trinket with the engraving, “Forever and ever”.

As soon as she opened it, I could tell she was expecting more. Another disappointing gift on another day we had no reason to celebrate.

Little did I know, that November 1st would be our last.

This is where I’m going to ask you to dig in your memory bank and pull out a date. A date I asked you to remember many chapters ago.

A date with more significance and karma than you could guess.

November 4th.

Welcome to the End.

“Passion or coincidence, Once prompted you to say, "Pride will tear us both apart". Well, now pride's gone out the window, Cross the rooftops, Run away... Left me in the vacuum of my heart.

What is happening to me? Crazy, some'd say. Where is my friend when I need you most? Gone away.”

Duran Duran “Ordinary World”

NOTE: Though this is my side of the story, including my own personal recollections and opinions, the reader should not consider this note anything other than a work of literature. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

#dating #depression #suicide #relationships #breakups #relationship advice #forever #hate #love #loyalty #taylor swift #horror #broken #papa roach #marriage #karma #marriedlife #divorce #daddysgirl

6 notes · View notes

chibivesicle · 4 years

Text

Golden Kamuy chapters 239 & 240 - character background arrives for Kikuta

Hello all, this is a much belated meta for the past two chapters. I was very busy with work last weekend and I’m feeling the usual work related exhaustion with the covid-19 situation on top of it. I’m currently living in a part of the States which still has a much stricter social distancing policy and it is still unclear when I can return to work, even if we follow new social distancing policies. Suffice to say, it has been a huge struggle for me. I’m already more prone to suffer from depression and this situation has just been really hard with friends and family very far away from me.

I usually like to give my all into my meta analysis of a chapter but I really didn’t like chapter 239. The sense of humor that underlies the “midnight shoot out” just well - well. I wasn’t keen on it. I have a pretty dirty sense of humor so it isn’t even the fact that it is a part of male body part humor; just how it was implemented.

So I’m just going to go with this. Usami and our “Jack” convict are men cut from the same cloth who link sexual acts with violence. The only difference between them is that Usami was found and groomed by Tsurumi, thus appearing to be a more contributing member of society (as a member of the military), while “Jack” has been left to his own devices and is a free roaming serial killer. Usami is the correct member of the 27th to do the field work for this convict. What is more interesting is teaming him up with Kikuta. After Usami and Jack’s “shoot out” Usami pursues him on foot while he’s on horseback. Usami’s general response is to try to beat someone via brute force. It isn’t surprising that he just jumps for the man only to get knocked down, he acts on instinct.

Kikuta has a much more tempered response as he first had Usami and him split off to try to pinch him off between the alleys/streets. It gives him a clear shot at Jack. Here he’s using one of his revolvers in his right hand.

Jack is lucky as Kikuta hits his top hat. This pause in action allows Kikuta to spring into action. He sprints towards Jack tossing his revolver so that he can grab onto the convict with his right hand. What I really like about this is how is shows how Kikuta thinks very quickly on his feet as we saw at the hot springs.

He’s able to use his left hand to reach into his coat where he likely has at least another revolver in a holster. It should be game over for the man as he tells him that he’s got him with the revolver to the back of his head.

Unfortunately, Kikuta is defeated by “Jack’s” manly abilities and it is just plain gross and unnecessary. Kikuta is one of my fav current members of the 27th, I just didn’t like this entire scene. As a result he escapes and Kikuta is likely feeling - well feeling used, gross and assaulted.

Usami and Kikuta continue to pursue him and hear a woman scream. Sure enough he managed to kill her and Kikuta looks shocked as they find the body. The fact that Usami looks at Kikuta from the corner of his eyes makes me think that Usami is not surprised by anything our killer does.

In contrast, despite his years of experience, Kikuta is uncomfortable with this type of criminal activity & violence. He’s no stranger to violence but he clearly has a strong moral compass.

The next day, they return to the scene of the crime in daylight. The sketchy and questionable police officer is there with our sad and pathetic reporter. Kikuta muses what the killer is thinking. Due to all the things that have transpired so far, it is clear that Kikuta is really trying to rationalize things. In contrast,’knowing’ his mind, Usami just offers an explanation that makes sense to him since it takes one to know one.

This only further highlights the difference between these two men. It is clear that Tsurumi wants them to keep working together, even if Kikuta is really uncomfortable with Usami.

Usami is eager to visit the other crime scene, Kikuta hangs back and lets Usami go ahead. He uses this time to casually approach Ariko. Everything about Kikuta’s body language, behavior and vibe scream - spy/secret agent. He’s able to address Ariko with a calm demeanor and then when Ariko almost panics he instructs him how to behave.

Kikuta cuts the tension by teasing Ariko, stating that he’d recognize his figure anywhere and to think he’d be difficult to recognize is a bit of an insult to Kikuta’s intelligence.

He’s able to approach Ariko about his role as an unwilling double agent. Since he’s there under direct orders from Tsurumi he knows that for the time to being he should be in the loop as far as Hijikata’s movements. If Ariko is in Sapporo, it is a logical extension that Hijikata is there as well.

The chapter then wraps up with Tsurumi leading most of his men to Sapporo leaving only two to remain near Otaru to look for Asirpa. He reports that Kikuta is the one who sent him the telegram about our convict, Jack. If Tsurumi is reporting the truth to his men, it means that Kikuta only reported on the convict and requested backup but Kikuta may be withholding information about Hijikata being there as well. This chapter leaves it up in the air as it shows Tsurumi looking military dictator-ish while Hijikata stares off into the distance.

What is most important in this chapter is setting up how Kikuta is going to be some sort of player in the hunt for this convict in particular.

Chapter 240 begins to bring the manga plot back to the aspects that I like of it, more intellectual, big picture moves of the different groups as well as a side of good old fashioned spy business.

The chapter title page helps us to establish Ariko’s and Kikuta’s personalities even more. Ariko is playing cat’s cradle with Tanigaki in the trenches while Kikuta literally has Ariko’s back and he watches them.

This shows several things. 1.) Kikuta is similar to Ogata as he’s always watching. Since he was one of the “Russian” kidnappers, we know he has a background in intelligence and he’s a clever guy. We also know that he cares about Ariko as a person, hence comfortable enough to lean up against his back as well as cover that back. 2.) It let’s the reader know that Ariko is similar to Tanigaki. He’s a large, soft, dopey man. He is simple, he’s outwardly friendly and like Tanigaki he has natural outdoorsman/hunting skills but that he’s an okay solider and but isn’t the most intelligent. Neither man is a good liar and they are predictable.

Ariko is 100% out of his element and trying to be a double agent is pretty much a situation ripe for failure. He just can’t do it. In direct contrast, Kikuta looks completely natural and at ease. He’s used to doing things like this and he’s confident with the games of espionage and intelligence.

Ariko is barely able to hold himself together, voice unsteady, sweating, looking like he’s got no out. So Kikuta tells him to team up with him in contrast to Hijikata and Tsurumi.

Of course Ariko is shocked by this statement. Kikuta continues his argument. He frames himself as Ariko’s only option. They survived the war together, they saw that same moon together. The flashback shows, Kikuta reaching out to touch Ariko while he goes to hold his hand.

They’ve survived together against the odds. So Kikuta is willing to ask Ariko to ignore everything else. Forget about his father’s involvement in the gold theft and his murder and the fact that Tsurumi will try to get his cooperation by threatening family. He summarizes it doesn’t matter which man he tries to align himself with, the outcome is same - it is terrible. So then he let’s him know that “central” is going to let things play out in Hokkaido.

This is enough information for Ariko to figure out why Kikuta was so keen to regain Tsurumi’s trust. He’s the spy for central that Tsukishima has been always on the look out for.

The angle of this panel is just great, Ariko is in shock while Kikuta adjusts his bowler hat. And with that, a running joke that originated on a discord server when Kikuta first showed up became the truth.

With Kikuta’s appearance several of us tried to figure out what is role would be and we came up with a nickname for him, “Roger”, which was coined by Merdopseudo. This was due to how he looked like Roger Moore, one of the actors that played James Bond. I 100% agreed with the Roger nickname and as a result, I struggle to write any meta post about Kikuta without referring to him as Roger instead. I personally was leaning toward a more Clark Gable inspired look but Roger was just better.

The chapter then has Jack hanging around a church with no informative text.

The action then shifts to Hijikata’s group which is all in disguise.

The wee babe, Kantarou is a newsboy, selling newspapers. Hijikata is a goldfish vendor. Ushiyama and Toni are buddhist monks, and Kadokura is a Koya-san pilgrim. Ogata is a filial piety puppet performer and Nagakura and Ariko are just random looking civilians. Kirawus remained as himself. Perhaps they thought if he tried to blend in as Japanese it would be obvious?

Our morally bankrupt reporter, is able to elaborate on the details of the Sapporo serial killer - calling him a copycat of Jack the Ripper. The Cliff Notes version of things is that if this is a true Jack the Ripper copycat, the fifth and final murder will happen 40 days after the two murders from the night before. It seems proper that Hijikata is the one to summarize the situation that his group is in.

Interestingly, Kadokura, Kantarou and Kirawus are shown sweating in the background while Ogata is deadpan. Clearly, Ogata is not bothered by the 40 day time limit.

This makes a nice transition to Sugimoto, Shiraishi and Asirpa now in Barato. Shiraishi, being the smart dude that he is, points out an interesting article. Sugimoto assumes it is about “Jack” but instead he notices children have gone missing. Boutarou is able to immediately connect these crimes to another tattooed convict.

Asirpa looks nervous as, well she’s a child and she was teased additional information than what Sugimoto got from meeting him. Boutarou is upfront and immediately is able to identify him for the rest of the group. Asirpa is totally freaked out as the identifies him as the candy peddler.

Sugimoto then has murder eyes and angry screentones as he concludes that he is of course one of the convicts.

This chapter is setting up a clear confrontation between all the different groups. I like how it finally begins to ratchet up the the tension and put pieces in place. Usami showing that he’s terrible at spying and discretion both makes them stand out but also tips Kikuta off that something else is likely afoot on Tsurumi’s side.

The missing children are a trail indication the direction of Ueji Keiji. I like how Shiraishi and Sugimoto are looking at the paper while Boutarou towers over them and looks at the paper.

The chapter ends with our two shaded convicts surrounded by swirling newspapers. Both men are making their actions clear to the public. I would guess are both reading the newspapers as Jack let’s his activities know while Ueji is potentially communicating with him as his own actions are showing his direction, moving towards Sapporo.

The chapter then ends with a dark Ogata joke. He’s really into his filial piety act and has to be yelled at firmly by another member of the group.

Overall impressions on 240 and some brief ponderings.

1.) I love Roger, er Kikuta so much. His character has a level of class and sophistication that many characters lack. He is also a ‘self’ made man who rose through the ranks to be a valuable member of military intelligence. It is clear now why Tsurumi would have kept his distance from him and why he was so insistent on getting back into Tsurumi’s inner circle. It is clear that Kikuta is not a “Tsurumisexual”. He is also the type of man who Tsukishima was suspicious of going back to his showdown with Ogata. Tsukishima is livid that Ogata sniped Maeyama and told him that he’s the pet cat of “central” he’s waiting to sell out the 27th to gain position in the military establishment.

Therefore, our three “Russian” kidnappers are all originally enlisted men who likely gained a lot of skills working for a fallen elite like Tsurumi. Tsukishima stresses loyalty to comrades. Ogata has never shown much loyalty to those around him, but it is obvious that Kikuta has loyalty to Ariko. He had to put on an act to look like Ariko had betrayed him and Tsurumi.

I have begun to wonder if Ogata is the red herring deflecting the focus from Kikuta. Ogata doesn’t believe in the words of Tsurumi that are used to stir loyalty and dedication to a cause. Is this because Ogata believe it is complete bullshit or that he’s aware that Tsurumi uses these types of concepts to control most people?

What I want to know now is if Ogata is working with or in parallel to Kikuta. I still don’t see Ogata as a spy for central. It goes against by gut reading on Ogata. I could see Ogata and Kikuta being aware of each other and their objectives where Ogata may have even tried to make it look like he’s the spy to deflect attention from Kikuta. Again, Ogata’s goal from this entire situation is still completely unknown. Was Kikuta linked to the rebel group - RIP bear death trio. I still haven’t forgotten you.

But based on Tsukishima thinks of Ogata as a putative spy, it fits Kikuta’s personality better. Kikuta still has loyalty and connection to others from the 27th, e.g. Ariko. His discomfort working with Usami on Jack’s trail shows that Kikuta has a stronger moral compass and thinks about what actions are justifiable and which are more ‘evil’ or morally questionable.

2.) Ogata needs a therapist. Of all of the “disguises” he could choose, Ogata picks the filial piety puppet show. >_< He put on makeup to look like his own father, and a son puppet that has a striking resemblance to his half brother Yuusaku. Therefore, the bastard child is performing an act where his devoted brother does everything he’s expected to do as a model son for their asshole father. The fact that his line is “What a dutiful son. Please give him the reward that he deserves.” can be read on several levels. Basic text reading - Yuusaku was a good son, and he truly deserved the reward for being a good son. He kept his virginity and purity, was un-corruptable by Ogata and therefore, he had no choice but to snipe him. Subtext reading - due to Ogata’s clear “daddy” issues, he is actually the dutiful son and he wants the reward that he deserves. Ogata entered the military and performed well both in intelligence for Tsurumi, on the battlefield as a sniper and did everything that was asked of him before he liberated himself from Tsurumi. In that regard, Ogata was an excellent solider if not better one that Yuusaku with hands on/real world experience long before Yuusaku was a flag bearer. I think this situation should both be read on the text and subtext level. ‘Cause it is Ogata dammit and he’s not some obvious character.

Ogata is a character who wants and desires nothing more than love and acceptance. Of course being the cynical intellectual that he is, he would pick something like this. . . . it just makes you want to cringe and go “Ogata . . .”

The fact that they almost left Ogata behind indicates to me that he’s acting out his own plan for - something. Our man of mystery - Ogata.

#golden kamuy #golden kamuy meta #warrant officer kikuta #Usami Tokishige #tsurumi tokushirou #hijikata toshizo #nagakura shinpachi #ushiyama tatsuma #kirawus #kantarou #kadokura #ogata hyakunosuke #sugimoto saichi #Shiraishi Yoshitake #ASIRPA #boutarou the pirate #hanazawakoujiro #hanazawayuusaku #ariko rikimatsu

21 notes · View notes

buzzdixonwriter · 4 years

Text

Compare & Contrast: Trumbo vs Mank

It’s the rare movie that’s about screenwriting, and rarer still the ones about actual screenwriters engaged in their craft.

Recently two films about two of the most famous (or notorious, depending on your point of view) screenwriters were released, and not only are they about actual screenwriters involved in writing scripts of actual films -- genuine classics in both cases -- but their protagonists are done in by the same group of antagonists (though to be fair, one film paints them merely as adversaries, not villains).

Yes, we’re pitting 2015’s Trumbo (directed by jay Roach, written by John McNamara off Bruce Cook’s Dalton Trumbo) nose-to-nose with Mank (directed by David Fincher, written by Jack Fincher), and may the best bio pic win.

First off, the bad: Neither film really jells seamlessly.

Both come across as a series of scenes, not a coherent story flow.

The dialog in both is too theatrical, too self-knowing though in the case of Mank’s Herman J. Mankiewicz, apparently a fair depiction of how he actually spoke (for the cheap seats: Like a pompous asshole).

Advantage: Mank because it never asks us to pity Mankiewicz as a self-destructive alcoholic no matter how brilliant his writing is. Mank’s struggles are more in the trenches -- even if those trenches run through the plush offices of MGM. Trumbo talks a lot about the struggles of the little guy but never really dips down to street level. For all its insights and good intentions, it remains a limousine liberal story.

You can’t do a Hollywood bio pic without having Hollywood celebrities in it, and for the most part Mank keeps the most famous names and faces at arm’s length.

Yes, Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) plays a pivotal role but virtually nobody today remembers the real Davies except as she was unfairly depicted in Citizen Kane.

Orson Welles is the best known name and face in Mank and Tom Burke does a top notch job of capturing him at his charismatic young genius stage. Other off screen personalities also serve to flesh out their roles adequately, including Ferdinand Kingsley as Irving Thalberg, Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst, and Arliss Howard as Louis B. Mayer.

On the other hand, virtually none of Trumbo’s famous players look anything like their real life counterparts. Dean O'Gorman as Kirk Douglas comes closest in a dinner theater level of resemblance, but Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G. Robinson and David James Elliott as John Wayne are virtually unrecognizable as their actual counterparts.

Trumbo also features Richard Portnow as their version of Louis B. Meyer and it needs be said thar Mank’s Meyer is far more dynamic and compelling.

Props to Christian Berkel as Otto Preminger for coming closest to capturing the real persona behind the role, but then Preminger himself deliberately created a living caricature of himself for public appearances -- no matter how far over the top you go, he’s already w-a-a-a-y ahead of you.

Helen Mirren as Hedda Hopper is fairly accurate in her portrayal of Hollywood’s original queen of mean / notorious gossip columnist and plays the role as close to an absolute villain as possible.

John Goodman and Stephen Root as producing brothers Frank and Hymie King are a delight, and Goodman simply backs up a truck and drives off with the picture every scene he appears in.

Advantage: Mank because less is always more.

In terms of direction and cinematography, Mank is filmed in gloriously luminescent black and white. Mank also plays with and explores the boundaries pf film making much more than Trumbo. Trumbo is an expertly made film, but a very conventional one.

Advantage: Mank

The key question for both is how accurate are they?

Truth be told, not very for either of them.

Oh, both films get their broad strokes down, but a lot of minor details are garbled or misrepresented.

Dalton Trumbo, for instance, did not originate The Brave One, which won him a best screenplay Oscar under a pseudonym while he was on the blacklist. That project was handed to him by the King brothers who acquired it from special effects legend Willis O’Brien (i.e., the guy who brought King Kong to life) but then stripped out O’Brien’s fanciful stop motion allosaur to concentrate on the story of a boy and his bull.

One understands why this aspect was ignored -- it would contribute nothing to the actual story of Trumbo -- but it is the height of irony that O’Brien’s participation was cancelled due to Trumbo coming onboard.

Likewise in Mank there’s a scene where Thalberg complains the Marx Brothers started a fire and roasted hot dogs in his office; in real life Groucho & his siblings roasted potatoes. One can understand Mank changing the menu -- the audience can “smell” a roasted hot dog easier than a roasted potato.

But enough fiddle-faddle! How well did each capture their central character and their dilemma?

Ah, there we have a split decision.

While Trumbo focuses on Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston), it also spends a lot of time with the struggles of his coterie of fellow blacklisted scribes.

Both Dalton Trumbo and Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldmam) fell under the curse of always being the smartest guy in the room, and when you’re the smartest guy in the room you grow impatient with all the others.

In Trumbo’s case, he runs roughshod of the eminently justifiable concerns of others involved in his crusade, and in the end his miscalculations of the era’s real politik led to the notorious blacklist and the rise of McCarthyism.

That he subsequently tries to mitigate this by creating an underground talent pool of ghost screenwriters is shown as positive in one sense and capitulation in another. Trumbo -- quite accidentally -- torments screenwriter Arlen Hird (a composite character played by Louis C.K. as if he were channeling the late Ricky Jay) , turning his already stressful life into pure misery.

Again, it is a tribute to Trumbo’s character -- at least the screen version of same -- that he recognizes the harm he inflicted and tries -- however inadequately -- to atone for it.

Herman Mankiewicz, on the other hand, was just an asshole -- a charming, entertaining asshole, to be sure, but an asshole nonetheless.

Both writers are laid low by far right politics determined to root out any and all “leftist” influence in Hollywood -- both the ideal and the workaday reality.

Trumbo depicts him as “a communist with a swimming pool” who enjoys the finer things in life while championing the largely unseen underdog.

The film doesn’t shy away from this and an encounter in prison with African-American felon Virgil Brooks (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) is played as a reverse Shawshank Redemption in which Trumbo learns exactly how the underclass perceives his efforts on their behalf.

Mank makes more direct contact with this underclass -- while skewering Mankiewicz’ own hypocrisy in this area -- but Mankiewicz himself steers away from any direct involvement.

He’s bright and erudite and his scenes with Marion Davies do much to show the complexities found at the intersection of art / commerce / politics -- but in the end he remains more of a spectator (albeit a spectacularly self-destructive one) than a participant.

Mank creates the fictious character of Shelly Metcalf (Jamie McShane), a low grade MGM employee who makes anti-socialist propaganda for Hearst and comes to a tragic end.

This is part of what spurs Mankiewicz to a drunken rant at San Simeon aimed at Meyer and Hearst, and in the fallout of that, the inspiration for Citizen Kane itself.

This is where the two films share a profound overlap,

But with wholly contrary messages.

Both films try to humanize their players.

Mank gives Meyer, Thalberg, and Hearst very human and wholly believable reactions to Mankiewicz’ assholery -- they sincerely try to save him from himself and failing that, only then do they cast him quite literally into the outer darkness.

Yet in trying to humanize them it also shows their monstrous natures.

Hearst, escorting Mankiewicz out of San Simeon for the very last time, tells him the parable of the organ grinder’s monkey, and while the story is delivered in an almost sad patrician tone, the underlying threat and menace is unmistakable.

Trumbo, on the other hand, does a better job of humanizing its players, Hedda Hopper not withstanding (and she is depicted with deeply personal motivations, not purely ideological ones).

Quoting from the real Dalton Trumbo’s acceptance speech for his WGA lifetime achievement award, Trumbo the movie takes pains to recognize its story possesses no simplistic duality of good and evil, heroes and villains.

Both sides were caught up in a storm of societal change that swept the world and both sides did what they felt they had to do in response to it.

Trumbo doesn’t shy away from choices having consequences, but it recognizes the vast spectrum of gray in the middle.

Advantage: Trumbo

In summation: Two good but not flawless movies. Mank is the more fully realized one and all around better production, but Trumbo is then one that gives you the most to chew on.

#Compare And Contrast #Trumbo #Mank #screenwriting

4 notes · View notes

warehouse13pod · 6 years

Text

Show Notes 103 "Magnetism"

Agents, you are getting sleepy… Very sleepy…

Click play on the player above to listen to this week’s episode while you read, if you so choose.

Wow! We covered so much this week! Where to start… Where to start…

Well, first of all, we had a lovely Warehouse Agent from our Patreon page where people can be Patrons for our show (Hey, did I mention we have a Patreon) introduce us!

This week’s Warehouse Agent was a representative from Emp-RSS.com, an online presence dedicated to empowering women to find their voice and providing mentors for young women entering the workforce. I can’t think of a Patron more appropriate to Myka’s arc this episode.

So, the first thing we had questions about was what all the jurisdictions were for the Secret Service, CIA, FBI, and NSA. I linked the answers above, They’re pretty dry, BUT—

The interesting thing I found—as a person who is decidedly NOT a law enforcement agent or a lawyer—is that basically the Secret Service’s jurisdiction is basically whatever protects presidents, vice presidents, former presidents and their spouses and children. Unlike other agencies that have geologically defined jurisdictions, the Secret Service’s jurisdiction seems pretty vague. I can definitely see how that could be exploited by the Warehouse. Pete and Myka are technically protecting those people but also protecting, like, literally everyone else in the world. LOL.

The episode opened with Pete and Myka in France taking the blade of the guillotine that took the life (and head!) of Marie Antoinette. Want to know more about Marie Antoinette and her grizzly end? Boy, oh boy do the History Chicks have you covered! They have an amazingly detailed and informative two part episode dedicated to her fascinating life—there was much more to her than a beheading and a misquote about some cake (Part 1, Part 2). The link to each part links to the audio for each episode as well as the show notes for each respective section. Don’t worry about the fact that the episode is called a “reboot.” You’re not missing something. The first episode of the History Chicks ever recorded was about Marie Antoinette, and it was very poor audio quality. They deleted the original file, re-recorded the episode, and included new information the second time around—hence, reboot.

Still not enough Marie? Don’t worry! There’s more! On the History Chicks’ side podcast, The Recappery, they recap the 2006 film, Marie Antoinette. That episode is also a two-parter (Part 1, Part 2).

There are so many emotional moments in Marie Antoinette’s life that could have led to the creation of artifacts. The History Chicks cover those and anything else you want to know, too! They did a series of Biography Channel mini-documentaries on famous historical women. Three(!) of them focused on Marie Antoinette: a general one about her life, one about the scandalous but rarely discussed affair of the diamond necklace, and one about her small house called the Petit Trianon on the grounds of Versailles.

Moving on, we talked about the famous Mission Impossible scene that Pete was attempting to imitate with perhaps, ahem, a tad less grace. This is the image we were talking about:

Miranda brilliantly discussed the importance of Affect Theory to the Warehouse and its artifacts. Here’s a very brief overview about that.

Miranda made a reference to the purple goo shower that Artie inflicted on Myka and Pete being like slime. For those who didn’t grow up watching the American television network, Nickelodeon, here’s what you need to know about getting slimed. It was a huge thing when we were growing up. On kid/family game shows on Nick (the affectionate slang name for Nickelodeon Network), contestants who lost or got a wrong answer or who won a prize were punished/rewarded with being slimed—i.e. having green goo rained down upon you from above. Why were punishments and rewards both related to slime??? 1) Because it’s always funny to see adults have copious amounts of green goop poured onto adults heads. 2) It supposedly tasted like vanilla pudding!

To this day, adults attending or presenting at the Kids Choice Awards (presented by Nick) should be wary…anybody can be slimed.

We also mentioned that Myka and Jill share a love of True Religion flap-pocket jeans. Here’s what those are.

We talked about the collaborative involvement between M.C. Escher, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison in the early days of the Warehouse.

Tesla and Edison didn’t like each other very much. And the internet is full of links that can fill you in as to why. I wouldn’t even know where to start. So, instead, please enjoy this rap battle between Tesla and Edison from the legendary Epic Rap Battles of History YouTube channel. (I can’t speak for Miranda, but I am totally #TeamTesla).

We also went into a little more detail on M.C. Escher. In particular, we discussed his art works, Relativity and Drawing Hands.

We also discussed his vital contributions to science and to mathematics (Math Link 1, Math Link 2).

Jill also talked about how much second-hand embarrassment she felt when Myka started talking about how much she hated men to Father Braid. Here’s actual footage of Jillian watching that scene.

That scene and earlier discussions of Myka’s feminist rage led to a discussion about the Bechdel Test. The test is a huge part of feminist theory, media studies, and film studies. And, honestly, it’s a super low bar that you’d be astounded how few pieces of media even reach. Want to see if your favorite movie passes the test? Click here! There’s actually a film festival dedicated to celebrating films that pass the test. The theory is not without its critics, however. Many people think that the bar of the Bechdel Test is not high enough and we need to expect more of female representation in media than their mere existence in scenes together and the absence of discussions about men. I’m inclined to agree that we should expect more, but I also think that the Bechdel Test is still a great way to assess if a piece of media is able to do a basic job of representing women on screen. Interested in the criticism? There’s an op-ed from The Washington Post and The Verge that might pique your interest.

When discussing magnetism, with Jill and with our incredible and intelligent guest, Kameron Sanzo, Miranda mentioned her (not really) favorite song (LOL). Here’s that song that asks the ever important question, “Fuckin’ Magnets. How do they work?!”

If you’re actually interested, this is how magnets work.

Anyway…

Other things Miranda discussed with our guest, Kameron Sanzo, include animal magnetism and mesmerism as well as hypnosis. Some cursory information about the founder of Mesmerism, Anton Mesmer, can be found here. A fun exploration of mesmerism can be found in the eleventh episode of the Audible original podcast, Stephen Fry’s Victorian Secrets, which has been linked before in a previous episode’s show notes, because of its relevance to Spiritualism. You can purchase the podcast from Amazon or with an Audible subscription.

Of course, this episode would not be complete without addressing the creator of this week’s artifact, James Braid. There was some discussion of the similarities and differences between hypnosis and mesmerism especially before and after the development of the scientific method.

Now, I’m not a doctor.

(And yes, I know that fans of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Parks and Recreation just said “Not a doctor” in the voice from the end credits. Don’t worry, Internet. I’ve provided a clip of that for you, also)

Now that we’ve got that out of the way…

I’m not a doctor and don’t want to seem like I know too much about the evolution and modern usage of hypnosis/hypnotherapy in a medical sense. But what I can say is that—while mesmerism is widely understood by scientists to not be a real thing—hypnotherapy is actually still quite relevant to modern medicine. Its origin may share the outlandish nature of mesmerism. However, there is apparently a difference between traditional and modern hypnosis. There is also a difference between hypnosis and hypnotherapy. The Mayo Clinic goes into more detail on the topic as does Psychology Today.

Kameron Sanzo also compared mesmerism and hypnosis with Reiki. Here’s a couple links that provide more information on what Reiki is (Link 1, Link 2).

Finally, we also discussed the use of filmic language and angles and how they can induce feelings of fear and anxiety. No one was better at this than Alfred Hitchcock. Here’s some information on the filmic language he created (high-angle shots, other techniques).

Now, let’s delve into some ~Heavy Themes~

We gave a shout-out to Eddie McClintock to celebrate his 18 years of sobriety! A monumental achievement!

Addiction is a serious issue and if the themes covered in this episode of the podcast or show regarding addiction affected you in any way and you need or want help, here are some links that may provide what you’re looking for.

For substance abuse, please consult Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. If you are a loved one of someone who struggles with alcoholism, there are resources for you, too! Please check out Al-Anon—not to be confused with Alcoholics Anonymous.

The episode also with issues of suicide, abuse, and gun violence. Please, please reach out if you are struggling with trauma or mental wellness as a result of abuse, mental illness, or any other reason.

Some resources that may help (where possible, phone numbers are listed beside links to resources in case your web usage is monitored and you don’t feel safe clicking links):

The Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration: 1-800-622-HELP (1-800-622-4357)

For LGBTQIA+ listeners who are struggling, here is a whole list of resources.

The Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233

Finally, if you are non-verbal or are deaf/hard of hearing/unable to use a phone for any reason: THERE ARE STILL RESOURCES FOR YOU!!!!

Please, don’t give up hope.

Check out the Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741

We love you. Stay safe, Agents.

6 notes · View notes

nogodsnomasters138-blog · 6 years

Text

GOATWHORE Gather Blood for the Master

Editor’s note: Another blastbeat from the past. A 2012 interview with GOATWHORE bassist James Harvey.This one is unique because it’s an email interview that actually turned out to be decent. The editor of the site I was writing for at the time said he had an email interview lined up and asked me to send him a set of questions for GOATWHORE. I don’t even think I knew what member was going to answer when I wrote the questions. (Oh yeah, and I’m actually going to edit it for this posting.) GOATWHORE RIP! LISTEN TO MORE GOATWHORE!!!

Recently GOATWHORE came out with their new album on Metal Blade Records, “Blood For The Master.” Phillip Lawless talked to bass player James Harvey about the new album and his time with the New Orleans band.

Phillip Lawless: Hi, James. Thanks for taking time out to speak to Metal-Temple.com. “Blood for the Master” will be out soon, and it’s a killer. Tell us a little about the writing process for the new album.

James Harvey: Well, the writing process was pretty simple … coming up with riffs and jamming on them, creating songs. Other elements like guitar solos, intros, etc., come in later, after the songs are pretty much complete. Nothing really too out of the ordinary.

PL: Who brought in material? Did you guys work on any songs as a band?

JH: Yeah, most of the stuff we worked on as a band – we would get together and jam pretty much every night and work on stuff. Sammy would usually bring riffs in, he and I might tweak them some, and then we would start to assemble parts into songs, etc. If I was out of town, Sammy and Zack would usually get together and work on stuff as well. Once the basic skeletons are there it is easy to customize drum parts, bass parts, guitar solos, etc.

PL: Which songs do you think will be your favorites to play in a live setting?

JH: So far we have chosen a few new songs to play live. “In Deathless Tradition” and “An End to Nothing” have been really cool to play live. In the future we will work in more stuff, including “Death to the Architects of Heaven,” which should be a fun one to play.

What was it like working with Erik Rutan in the studio? How did he contribute to “Blood for the Master”?

JH: It was great to work with Rutan – he has an awesome studio and really knows what he is doing. He drives us to get the best performances possible and has a good ear for detail. Erik provides input and feedback for the overall sound of things as well as getting good instrument sounds, etc. He also provides input regarding more detailed things in songs, such as a certain guitar solo or bass line, or vocal pattern, etc. If it doesn’t sound quite right, he will let us know, and it is helpful to have a fifth person outside of the band to contribute an opinion.

PL: The new album cover is pretty sinister. Where did the album artwork originate?

JH: Our friend Jordan Barlow did the artwork – he is a very talented tattoo artist in New Orleans. Ben reviewed ideas with us, they talked about what it should look like, and he drew it up. All the artwork came out killer. If you are ever in New Orleans, stop by Jordan’s shop – “Hell of High Water Tattoos” – and get some ink! He is one of my best friends and is a great artist.

PL: Whose idea was it to unleash the album on Valentine’s Day?

JH: Actually it was a coincidence. It just ended up that way with Metal Blade’s release schedule. It worked out quite well though.

PL: How is the band’s relationship with Metal Blade Records? Is it a good situation for GOATWHORE?

JH: Well, I have to say Metal Blade definitely stepped it up with this album. They did the pre-order bundles, vinyl, etc., as well as advertised. We were pleasantly surprised. This new release is a good situation for GOATWHORE and Metal Blade.

PL: You are the newest member of GOATWHORE, having joined in 2009. Take us back a couple years. How did you land the bass player position in the band?

JH: Well, I had been jamming with Sammy for a few years beforehand in RITUAL KILLER, so I already knew him and all the guys from living in New Orleans and going to shows, etc. The timing was perfect as I was just finishing up my Master’s degree when I joined the band. I got the call one day and hit the road shortly after…

PL: Did the other guys put you through a hazing period when you joined?

JH: Of course they did, I think we always still ‘haze’ each other to some extent still, but I get it the worst!

PL: How does living in New Orleans affect the band sound and attitude?

JH: Well, the sound still retains that super thick and heavy sound, even though we do much faster stuff than the traditional ‘New Orleans’ sound that many people associate with EYEHATEGOD and CROWBAR. As far as the attitude goes, it affects us in positive and negative ways – there is more to New Orleans than shrimp po-boys and daiquiris.

PL: Since you’ve joined in 2009, what’s been the strangest show you’ve played with GOATWHORE?

JH: We have definitely played some strange shows before … probably the craziest was a show we did a couple of years back with EYEHATEGOD and PIG DESTROYER – on a boat that went around the Hudson Bay while the show went on. It was packed and was absolutely insane. I couldn’t fully stand up on the ‘stage’ – it was too short!

PL: What are some bands you haven’t toured with that would be a good fit to share the stage with GOATWHORE?

JH: We want to go out opening for SLAYER! As far as other bands to play with – touring with new bands is usually how I am introduced to new music. I don’t really listen to too much new stuff myself. Some bands that we have gone out with and really had a good time with include SKELETONWITCH, BLACK ANVIL, EXHUMED, HAVOK, SAVIORS and TOXIC HOLOCAUST to name a few.

PL: James, thanks a lot for your time but before you go, please tell us about GOATWHORE’s upcoming tour plans.

JH: Well we are out on the road right now with LOCK UP, we will be meeting up with HATE ETERNAL for a two-week run of dates then meeting up with DYING FETUS for a short run. There are plans to go to Europe in the spring/summer and Australia in the summer. Then we will be doing another US tour in the late summer. Stay tuned for details!

#neworleans Goatwhore MetalBlade ErikRutan

0 notes

readersimagine · 8 years

Text

X reader Part 4

part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4

Lily’s POV

I got out of Sirius’ dorm room, still in search for an answer. I have all these questions flying around in my head. I mean everything was fine a week ago but now, things are falling apart. Y/N was so happy. I was relief that she was. I was worried about her. She seemed down for weeks and I didn’t know why. I wished she told me about it especially now when things are different from what it used to be.

I have different theories that would explain it all: Bella’s relationship with Sirius, what happened between Y/N and Sirius, and what happened between Sirius and James. Based from what I know, some things are making sense but I need to talk to Remus. He could probably help.

As I was walking down the boy’s dorm hallway, I see Remus walking towards me, looking down. When he looked up, he has this exhausted look on his face but he eventually sees clarity when he looked at me in the eyes.

“Lily.” He says as he walks towards me.

“Everything. Everything just fell apart.” He continues. I nod. He takes a deep breath and exhales loudly, turning his head to his left.

“Our suspicion was right.” I tell him straight in the eye.

“It can’t be.” He says with disbelief. His face filled with shock as if deep down inside he is hoping that we were wrong.

“It’s the only way to explain it all. Their actions, the Bella thing, James being punched, Y/N in distraught and completely shocked. It's the only explanation as to why everything is in shambles.” I whisper to him quietly to avoid drawing in attention. Tonight’s drama is already enough.

He shakes his head and runs his fingers through his hair. I can see that he is still in denial.

“It can’t be right.” Is all Remus can mutter as he stares at nothing.

“Remus, snap out of it.” I gently shake him back into reality. He quickly looks back at me as if I offended him.

“How can you be so calm?!” He exclaims.

“At least one of us has to be.” I tell him.

He looks away and bites his fingernails. He looks back at me and asks “What should we do?”

“I don’t know. This thing was week in the making. All the build up tension just wanted to get out in the open and tonight was the final straw.” I assume

“It’s easy to a blame on someone but no one is really at fault.” Remus whispers

“I know.”

Remus and I figured something big would happen eventually. I did not think it would happen so soon. We knew something was going on but we did not quite know what it was. All we both know is that Sirius, James and Y/N are involved with it.

“Remus?”

“Yeah?” He looks at me

“Do you remember what happened on October?” I ask him

“I do, why?” he asks with a puzzled look on his face

“I think it contributed to the whole thing.” I reply.

Back in October, James decided to have a celebration party and a Halloween party. Everyone dressed up. It was my suggestion. Believe it or not but James and I became closer as friends. He became less of an flirtatious git that he was, which surprised me at first but it was a good change. I saw him as a friend now.

Everyone was having a blast. As usual someone snuck in two or more bottles of firewhiskey but no harm done. I tried to enchant the doorway to muffle the sounds but I hadn’t quite mastered it yet, so I stood by the door as lookout hoping we wouldn’t be caught. From where I am standing, I could see the whole scenery. Remus was by the unused record player chatting with Peter and some Hufflepuff girls from our potions class. Y/N was sitting down by the couch facing the punch bowl. James was checking the music playlist and the sound system. Sirius was standing by the punch bowl with Bella, the Ravenclaw girl.

I was just observing everyone, making sure nothing stupid goes on when I noticed that Y/N was down. She was nursing her drink on her red solo cup for a while now when she usually has two or three cups for the night. She was looking down her cup, leaning forward with her elbows on top of her knees supporting her weight. I saw James noticed that as well so he went over to her. When he sat down, I saw Y/N lifted her head up to check who sat beside her. She saw James with a comforting smile on his face. I was not trying to pry but I was close enough to hear the conversation.

“Seems like you’re not enjoying your night.” He stated. She nervously laughs and waved her hand.

“Yeah. Not my scene for tonight.” She said and looked at James with a forced half smile.

“Shouldn’t it be?” he asked. She turned her head to see Sirius flirting with Bella and quickly glanced back down to her cup. Her face changed from that frown to a dull-pale-shocked face. She looked as if she saw something she did not want to see. James did not notice, he was looking around when she flinched after looking up.

“I mean it is celebration time. We did win against the Slytherins.” He continued and took a sip from his cup. His gaze still on the crowd.

“Yeah, I know.” Y/N said as she was staring at nothing.

“But?” He pushed on and turned to her. Y/N looked up at James, looked him in the eyes as if she was about to tell him the reason why but she stopped herself. She swiftly turned away.

“Nothing.” She whispered. She looked at her cup and gulped down her entire drink.

Y/N stood up quickly with a stoic face which alarmed James so he stood up as well. James was looking at her, about to touch her shoulder when she turned to him and said “I’m wanna dance.” She smiled and walked towards the dance floor. James followed suit looking worried. I wanted to move closer but I had to guard the door because we did not want anyone to find out about this party.

“Lily, you said that Sirius was flirting with Bella right?” he ask

“Yes, I did.” I clarify

“That’s not what happened that night.” Remus comments

“What do you mean?” I ask. This is confusing. What would Remus know about the Halloween party that I did not know.

“From where I was sitting, I could see and hear Sirius talk about algorithms with Bella the entire night.” Remus states

“How sure are you?” I ask with disbelief

“He was. I swear. I found it weird but they did talk about the arithmetics equations we did during the week.” Remus answers.

“Maybe it is Sirius’ new flirting tactic?” I suggest

“No. It wasn’t. He wasn’t aiming for Bella to blush, he wasn’t giving flirtatious compliments. They were talking about how hard the examples were. Bella was explaining how to do it most of the time.” Remus explains

“That’s out of the ordinary. Usually he would flirt his way through the night if he can, not talk about math.”

“I thought so too. It bothered me more when he started laughing with Bella about derivatives.” Remus mentions.

“But at that time, that popular muggle pop song started playing, Sirius abruptly stopped talking to Bella, looked up and listened to the music.” he adds. I listen to Remus intently.

“Sirius looked at the dance floor and saw Y/N dancing to the music with James snickering at her.” he says

“I noticed that too. I saw Y/N dancing. She stopped to pout and dragged James in the floor. They both began to dance. I was happy that she started dancing. It looked like she was having fun especially when James started doing his lame Robot dance.” I mention and smiling a little bit when I remember Y/N momentary happiness.

“Yeah, I could hear Y/N laughing as she tried to imitate James.” Remus smiles for a little bit as we both recall that moment. Remus smile falters and clears his throat.

“Sirius was locking his jaw the whole time. He was bothered by the whole thing.” Remus states

“Why? Did Bella said something?” I ask

“It was just weird, Lils. He was happy for a minute but when he saw Y/N with James, his face just changed. Do you think something was going on between them?” He questions every little detail we both just recalled

“I wouldn’t know. I mean. Isn’t Sirius dating Bella?” I lean closer to Remus

“It looked like he was. But… I don’t know. They didn’t go out to Hogsmeade. They just hung out. It was weird.” Remus shakes his head.

Y/N’s POV

I know I am not suppose to go here. I KNOW I am not suppose to be here. I know this would be a mistake. I definitely know I do not want to see him… but I need to. I need answers.

I twist the knob of their dorm room and push the door open. I could see that Sirius is alone in the room, compressing an ice bag to his hand. He turns his head towards the door and sees me standing by the doorframe. His eyes are staring directly into mine, in shock. I guess he thought the last person I would want to see is him. He still is, but, still I am here.

As I look into his eyes, everything comes flooding in me. It is all coming back to me now like everything happened yesterday. The way he is looking at me now just triggered all these healed wounds I have. The once calm beating heart I have begins to beat faster. The once relaxed composure I have begins to deteriorate into nothingness, leaving an empty shell of my old self. The same shell he made me become that night he broke things off. I am back to where I started. I expected this to happen because every time I see him, it reminds me all of the what if’s, heartaches, and all the torment I felt in loving him.

I remember him being that adorable goof he was when we were just friends. I remember him being that romantic and amazing lover when we were at our secret rendezvous. Now, he is the guy who broke my heart into pieces because being a friend and lover would not be enough. He is the guy I thought I always wanted to be with but could never. He is the guy who rejected someone like me. But on top of it all, He is the guy who is the source of all the problems we have now. All I can feel is anger and hatred towards him.

I breathe in the tension filled air that always seems to accumulate whenever we are together in the same room. The air is cold, similar to that night we broke it off. I step in the room and gently close the door behind me. The only sound that we can only hear are my footsteps. I stop in front of his bed. His face still looks puzzled, wondering why I am here.

“Why did you punch James on the face?”

I ask calmly as I could. This the first time I had talk to him alone in three months. His face changes from puzzled to a grimace, look tired and unwilling to talk.

“Y/n not now.” He pleads. He takes his gaze away and looks to the window pane.

WHAT?! Why would he say that?! Why would he just brush things off?

“Punching James earlier wasn’t really a good timing either and so is this. So, why don’t we just get on with it, shall we? Why did you do it?”

“Y/n, enough.” He said sternly.

That just ticked me off. I tried to hold it all in but I could not handle anymore of his bullshit. I could feel my blood boiling and my ear steaming. My face is flushed with fury, clenching my jaw and fist.

“Enough?! You always brush things off as if they were nothing! You are always like this! You are inconsiderate of what other people feel. Why would you punch your best friend out cold?! Huh?! Did you thought it would be the best way to deal with your issues?!” my voice is getting louder now.

“You want to know?” he stood up, discarding the ice pack to the side. ‘I pissed him off’ I thought. He is clenching his fist and I could see his is looking mad. His veins are popping out.

“Yes, I want to know!” I shout at him

“You really want to know, huh?!” He says louder than before

“Yes, I do!” I scream.

“Because I was jealous. Ok?!” He shouts back with his hands in the air. He walk back to the side of his bed, breathing heavily. After that screaming match, all I could hear is our breathing.

“What?” That is what I could only say.

“I was jealous.” He repeats and he clears his throat. He is feeling calmer now. The tension that rose earlier elevates.

“Wha-why? Huh what?” I am confused. What does he mean jealous? I do not understand.

“I was jealous of you two being together.” He answers.

I start to pace from left to right. I could not comprehend what is going on. My heart starts to beat fast. My breathing quickened. I think I am hyperventilating. Everything on my line of vision is moving too fast, I can not keep up.

“Why would you be jealous? You broke it off. You dated Bella. What do you mean? What? Umm… what-“ I am scrambling for words! What am I supposed to say?! There is no subject in Hogwarts that could have prepared me for this. I want to add on but he cuts me off.

“I still love you, Y/N.” he says.

His words cause me to stop pacing. I am frozen but those warm words have melted away my cold heart. All the thoughts in my head are calming down. His words just rings in my ears. Everything in me just pauses as if time itself stopped moving for a second. Those are the words I have always wanted to hear. I still love you. Yes. I wanted to hear those words long time ago but.... everything is different now.

I shake my head in disbelief, bringing sense in me. What is he saying?! My eyebrows furrow and I could feel myself heat up with frustration.

“How can you say you love me when you didn’t even love me in the first place?!” I said

He is only telling lies! He is trying to divert the situation. Why is he trying so hard to fool me?

“I did love you, Y/N. I just didn’t see it.” his face looks heartbroken as he speak.

My face is still flushed. I could feel my eyes start to sting. I feel overwhelmed.

“I don’t believe you!” I scream at him

“It is true!”

“If it is true, why would you let me go?” He could not reply.

“Why aren’t you saying anything? Cat caught your tongue? Because nothing what you say is true! It was all a game for you! That’s not love. It’s torture. You break people’s heart and step on them. You steal all the innocence we have for love and leave us with nothing but heartache, broken hopes and unmendable hearts.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He steps closer but I take a few steps back.

“But you did.” I retort quickly

“You don’t have the right to be jealous. You lost that right when you broke me. Now, I can’t accept the fact that you did that to your best friend out of stupidity. I won’t forgive you for dragging him into this.” I tell him. I turn around, left him in the room alone.

As I walk away, I can hear muffled sobs. I kept walking.

I did not look back.

Happy Valentine’s Day!!!! :)

120 notes · View notes

oscopelabs · 8 years

Text

From Script to Screen: The Strange Alchemy of ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’ by Soheil Rezayazdi

The word “iguana” doesn’t appear in the shooting script of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. And why should it? Written by veteran TV writer William Finkelstein, the script unfolds with the cause-and-effect logic of a tight police procedural. Prior to penning Bad Lieutenant, Finkelstein wrote more than 50 episodes of L.A. Law, created and wrote on Brooklyn South, and contributed to such cop show staples as Law & Order and NYPD Blue. The man knows how to write a coherent crime drama. He’s devoted his career to the genre, mastering its plot points and character arcs for network television.

So why, in Bad Lieutenant, does a routine scene of police surveillance devolve into a full minute of shaky close-ups of iguanas? Why do scenes end with mystifying non-sequiturs like “Shoot him again...his soul is still dancing”? Why does its protagonist enter a bar shouting, “Sup! Sup! Sup, motherfucker!” for no reason? And why does he aim a gun at an old lady’s head and seethe “Maybe you should drop dead, you selfish cunt!” long after a director should have shouted “cut”?

William Finkelstein wrote none of that. His script originated in the early 2000s as a New York-set TV pilot. Over time, he reworked the material—first into a feature, then into a New Orleans noir. He finished revisions on the script in 2008 as the film was in production. The final script, which he sent me prior to our recent meet-up at an Italian bakery in the West Village, bears the signature of a police procedural master craftsman. Over espressos and lemon ices, I implored Finkelstein to discuss the brazen changes made to his script by the erratic tag team of Nicolas Cage and director Werner Herzog.

Our discussion, along with a close look at the unpublished shooting script, reveals how many of Bad Lieutenant’s most singularly strange moments were born.

“I always wanted to pull back to the procedural nature [of the script],” Finkelstein said, “and Werner basically didn’t give a shit about any of that.”

---

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is a true curiosity. Neither a remake nor a sequel to Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant, the film attempts to turn that film’s premise—a cop with a severe drug problem—into a franchise. Finkelstein likened the connection between his film and Ferrara’s to the Bond series. “From Russia with Love is not a sequel to Dr. No,” he said. “It’s a different movie with different bad guys and settings, but there’s a character in the midst of it—who’s played by different people over the years—who has certain traits that make James Bond James Bond.”

And so the refined Bond martini, shaken not stirred, becomes the bump of coke before work, the hit of crack with your local dealer, the shot of heroin to end the night. Take your pick. Both bad lieutenants love it all. Not surprisingly, there’s no word yet on a third installment to a film franchise whose trademarks include hardcore drug use, gambling debts, and sexual bribery.

The 2009 film is a gleeful exercise in provoking head scratches, raised eyebrows, dropped jaws. Where to start? That a Nic Cage cop drama is the biggest budgeted film of Werner Herzog’s career? Or how about its supporting cast, a grab bag of the formerly famous (Val Kilmer, Fairuza Balk, Xzibit) that gives the film its straight-to-video flavor? Or maybe we focus on the title, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a name as indecisive and unwieldy as the film itself?

Above all, though, we have the enchanting interplay between three distinct voices: Herzog, Cage, and Finkelstein. The three operate as something of a jazz trio— Finkelstein keeps time while Herzog and Cage solo over his material. Each player takes turns taking control of what’s on screen. Cage brings the Tourettic outbursts of a repressed superstar unchained. Herzog injects the film with lyrical (and often very goofy) interludes. And Finkelstein gives contrast to his partners’ more self-indulgent noodling. Together, the three don’t exactly harmonize; their agendas clash on the screen, birthing moments of wondrous strangeness. You either dig the contrapuntal pleasures, or you hear nothing but noise.

This piece focuses on the film’s noisiest moments: those flashes of improvisation and left-field obsession smuggled into Bad Lieutenant. I select four scenes where the film erupts into delicious chaos. These are the scenes where a genre picture, penned by an industry veteran, morphs into a kind of madness no screenwriter could dream up.

---

“You’re the fucking reason this country’s going down the drain!”

A police officer investigates a homicide while battling his own demons. Bad Lieutenant, for all its digressions, hinges on a fairly straightforward premise. As the film’s tagline cutely puts it, the only criminal Lt. Terence McDonagh can’t catch…is himself. Our protagonist stumbles around New Orleans, getting into all kinds of trouble, as he gathers evidence against the likely perp, a local drug dealer named Big Fate (Xzibit). McDonagh has shades of the great stoner detectives—The Dude, Doc Sportello, Altman’s Philip Marlowe—only he doesn’t shy away from conflict; he seeks it out like a commuter with low blood sugar.

His biggest meltdown arrives in a luxury nursing home. McDonagh’s there to interrogate Binnie, a nursing home assistant, on the whereabouts of her grandson. In the script, he badgers Binnie and a patient in her care, an elderly woman in a wheelchair. Binnie refuses to talk—until McDonagh cuts off the patient’s oxygen supply. Aghast, Binnie gives up her grandson’s location. McDonagh reattaches the oxygen tubes, having extracted the information he needs to move the plot forward, and leaves. End scene.

This two-page exchange runs a sadistic three minutes in Bad Lieutenant. The unscripted touches start right away: Cage hides behind the old lady’s bedroom door as she enters, surreally shaving with an electric razor. He attacks this material with the whisper-or-scream volatility of his famed freakouts. Dialogue-wise, he sticks to Finkelstein’s words for the first two minutes, drawing out lines like “Children...were executed” for maximum menace. From there, he transforms the moment into macabre humor. Cage introduces a gun into the scene, shoving it up against Binnie’s temple as he fumes, “Where the fuck is he?” Once he gets his answer, Cage extends the scene with a virtuoso verbal assault on the old lady. “Maybe you should drop dead you selfish cunt!” he erupts after a few seconds of silence.

It’s too much to print here in full. You can find it in any Nic Cage supercut worth your time.

“You’re the fucking reason this country’s going down the drain!” he screams to close the scene, a head-spinning non-sequitur from a character who’s never expressed concern for the state of the nation.

For Finkelstein, the scene was way too much.

“When I first saw it I thought, ‘Wow, we can’t do this,’” he said. “‘This is terrible. It’s so extreme. It takes us out of the scene.”

Finkelstein wrote the sequence as an homage to the 1947 noir Kiss of Death, in which Richard Widmark shoves a woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs. He saw an early cut of the film and dined that night at Herzog’s house. He decided, rather than suggest a dozen small edits, he would focus on two or three big asks. This scene was one of them. Cage’s assault serves no real purpose. It’s just a full minute of over-the-top Cage rage. I’d imagine most writers would question the inclusion of such a tone-shattering addition to their script. Herzog overruled him.

“I saw it again at the premiere, and I’m sitting there in the theater and I just loved it,” Finkelstein said. “I thought it was funny as hell. The extreme nature of the annunciation is what sold it. I think I was a little conservative, a little cautious.”

“I was so happy that nobody listened to me in the end,” he said.

---

“What’re these fucking iguanas doing on my coffee table?”

Little can prepare first-time viewers of Bad Lieutenant for the iguana interlude. In perhaps Herzog’s most ostentatious addition to the script, he stretches less than a page of script action here into two minutes of on-screen delirium. It’s the film’s most infamous scene, a narrative and aesthetic sideswipe of the highest order.

On the page, the moment unfolds without much incident. McDonagh arrives in an apartment being used to surveil a drug dealer. He has a routine exchange with two officers about the suspect’s whereabouts. McDonagh and Stevie (Val Kilmer) disagree about whether to call the SWAT team. Soon, all five cops leave to apprehend the suspect. No outbursts, no obscenities, no iguanas.

In the film, Herzog opens this sequence with a shot of Cage snorting heroin in a bathroom stall. This bit appears elsewhere in the script; Herzog moves it here, we can presume, to prime us for the psychedelic journey to come.

Cage enters the surveillance site with an un-holstered gun comically bulging out of his pants. Finkelstein was on set the day Cage decided to wear his gun like this throughout the film. Initially, he felt compelled to protest.

“There’s times when an actor wants something like this, and you got to say no,” Finkelstein said. Having worked on cop dramas for decades, he took pride in getting these details right.

“Cops don’t carry their guns like that,” he said. “But as extravagant as this was as a gesture, Nic understood something about this character. He was playing this guy bigger than I’d imagined, but in fact he was right and I was too cautious.”

Heroin in his veins, gun in his groin, Cage storms into the scene and spots two iguanas matter-of-factly lounging on a coffee table. He stutters in extreme agitation, turning script lines like “Let ’em stay there” to “Naw! No...just no SWAT, let ’em stay there.” He then drifts into a fugue state with the invisible iguanas. Amid a story of cops and criminals, Herzog asks us to stare at garish close-ups of the animals for 60-some seconds. Louisiana native Johnny Adams wails on the soundtrack. To make the narrative rupture even more pronounced, he films the ordeal in ugly, consumer-grade digital video.

I’m not so concerned with what this all means. Animals and nature have long fascinated Herzog, from the “fiendish stupidity” of chickens to the “obscene, explicit malice” of the jungle. Animals permeate Bad Lieutenant—fish, iguanas, gators—and almost all of them were introduced by Herzog. As a viewer, a part of me wants to rationalize these moments. Perhaps Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters brought the wilderness into the city, turning New Orleans into a literal asphalt jungle? Or maybe it’s more intuitive: “There is nothing more wondrous,” Herzog has said, “than seeing Nicolas Cage and a lizard together in one shot.”

Finkelstein gave his blessing for the iguana hallucination, despite its total disruption of the story. The scene came at the expense of an action sequence Finkelstein had written. In the shooting screenplay, Cage’s character has a coke-fueled fight with some strangers at a gas station. Herzog refused to shoot the scene to ensure his iguanas made the final cut. Finkelstein tried to sell him on the merits of the rest stop melee, and lost.

“Herzog said ‘I think we’re going to go long, and then [the producers] are going to make me lose my iguanas—and if they make me lose my iguanas I feel like I can’t be a filmmaker anymore,’” Finkelstein recalled. “And I thought ‘Whoa, this cat is serious. He’s not fucking around.’ I just had so much respect for him as an artist. I didn’t give a good goddamn if he shot the scene or not once he said that. That beats anything.”

---

“To the break of daaaawn, baby!”

Bad Lieutenant’s script detours tend to arrive at the start or end of a given scene. Consider the above examples: Herzog and Cage hit the scenes’ narrative beats, and then they start riffing. As Finkelstein put it, the two “always knew what had to happen in the scene.” Once they hit those notes, they had carte blanche to treat the script like mere bullet points to a freeform lecture of their choosing.

“Nicolas knew that sometimes after a scene was shot I would not shut down the camera if I sensed there was more to it,” Herzog wrote in 2009. “I simply would not call ‘cut’ and leave him exposed and suspended under the pressure of the moment.”

The film’s catchphrase grew from this loose set dynamic. Toward the end of Bad Lieutenant, Cage’s character cons Big Fate to both gather evidence against him and score some of his drugs. In the script, McDonagh, Big Fate, and his men share a moment together after a successful drug deal. McDonagh demands his cut of the money and a cut of the drugs. He pulls a gun on Big Fate and wins the exchange, closing the scene with an unambiguous threat to a car full of drug dealers: “I’ll kill all of you.”

Cage doesn’t end the scene there. To begin, he colors the exchange with spastic ad libs like “Sup!” to get the men’s attention. The actors stray from the particulars of the screenplay, but they convey all the key information to move the story forward. Then the scene trails off into loopy nonsense. Cage waves his gun around like a toy and, sensing radio silence, mutters—and then roars—“I’ll kill all of you...to the break of dawn. To the break of daaaaawn, baby!”

You can see the smirk sneak onto Cage’s face just before he opens his mouth. Clearly pleased with himself, he delivers the line with the Elvis-like drawl he used in Wild at Heart. All four actors erupt in laughter, and suddenly it’s as though we’re watching a closing credits gag reel. Cage swings the mood from sinister to silly; Herzog, the enabler, lets him get away with it.

“This was pure Nic,” Finkelstein said. “That was one of my favorite moments because he can’t help but get this smile on his face when he says it. He’s so enthused.”

I smiled, myself, upon hearing this. As a viewer, I’d long wondered if Finkelstein found moments like this offensive. Here’s Cage, after all, undercutting his words, cracking up fellow actors for kicks. It could be interpreted as mockery. For Finkelstein, though, Cage’s untethered rambles “all seemed to work of a piece.” Finkelstein had years of experience making on-set changes to other writers’ scripts as a TV showrunner. His words, he told me, need not be “cherished” by an actor struck with inspiration.

“The story felt like it could incorporate all that,” he said. “There was a basis for it because this guy was fucked up all the time.”

---

“Shoot him again...his soul is still dancing.”

The script revisions get downright operatic by the film’s climactic shootout. Over an eternal five and a half minutes, Cage and Herzog here transform the script’s most violent moment into a surreal and comic medley of their wildest impulses.

They make far too many edits to detail them all. In Finkelstein’s text, the scene begins as a meeting between Big Fate, his henchmen, and McDonagh. Spirits high, McDonagh smokes crack with the men to test out their new product. He proposes that, in lieu of his cash payment, he gets a cut of the dope. The men agree, and McDonagh spoons his share into a baggie. He then invites Big Fate to take a hit from his “lucky crack pipe.” McDonagh, we later learn, will plant the pipe at a crime scene to seal his case against Big Fate.

A trio of thuggish debt collectors arrives at Big Fate’s home to shake down McDonagh for the money he owes them. McDonagh suggests they take his dope as payment; the head gangster, Dave, threatens to take all of the dope, Big Fate’s included. A tense moment follows. The debt collectors reach for the dope on the table; Big Fate and his men shoot all three of them. “Clean this shit up,” Big Fate says to close the scene.

Cage and Herzog’s gonzo take on this material is at once faithful and ludicrous. The scene begins, as in the script, with the characters in a celebratory mood. The four men smoke as Xzibit orders his men to “light the Caucasian’s rock”—the first of many ad libs smuggled into the scene. For Cage, the drugs are a green light to go berserk. He proposes a business idea and explodes into a pipe-bursting laugh few on this earth could imitate. From there, the floodgates open. Cage runs through a nonsense story about a football player who sprouts antlers. We’ve all been there: loaded, desperate to tell a story with no point. Wild-eyed and blissed-out, he ends the unscripted monologue with another abrasive laugh. Pure Cage, uncaged.

Xzibit and his men worry Cage might die from the crack intake. Here, the actors use snippets of Finkelstein’s dialogue about other drug users dying and apply it to Cage, given how feral he’s decided to play the scene. “Easy, easy, easy...cuz I’m not Eazy-E!” Cage retorts, another improv line that makes Xzibit laugh.

From there, the scene plays out as written for two minutes. Finkelstein, a native New Yorker with an agreeably gruff voice, plays Dave, the lead debt collector. The confrontation between him, Xzibit, and Cage ends in a shootout set to “Lost John,” the same song Herzog used for the dancing chicken sequence in Stroszek.

Cage then passes the freak flag to Herzog. Instead of “clean this shit up,” Herzog has Cage implore the gangsters to shoot Finkelstein again because “his soul is still dancing.” Cage erupts into his asthmatic laugh as Herzog pans to reveal a breakdancer dressed like Finkelstein spinning near his dead body. Cage stares ahead, transfixed by the breakdancing soul. An iguana saunters through the room, an emblem of his hallucination. A shootout has devolved into a freakout.

None of this, of course, was scripted. It’s all too perfect: A screenwriter gets his work butchered, and then he gets killed on camera. Finkelstein called these edits “happy bastardizations.”

“Some of that big shootout was improvised, yeah,” he said. “That thing about the gazelle sprouting antlers, Cage made that up. The breakdancing was Werner. Absolutely Werner.”

Finkelstein compared Bad Lieutenant to other gangster films freed from the shackles of genre, from Breathless to the crime dramas of Jean-Pierre Melville. He also likened it to Cop Rock, a short-lived ABC show he co-created. A true curio, the 1990 show operated as part cop drama, part musical. It was a fascinating, supremely awkward marriage. “Audiences were not happily startled,” as Finkelstein put it. Though he didn’t write it that way, Bad Lieutenant became a similar experiment in police procedural storytelling.

“There’s a tradition of being able to take the form and blow it up and make a movie that’s more lyrical and not realistic,” he said. “I think that’s what we all wound up doing.”

---

Who captains this ship? The answer changes from scene to scene, shot to shot, line to line. A big-name actor, an art-house iconoclast, and a veteran TV writer each take turns steering. Finkelstein guides much of the first act; his instincts as a successful writer/producer orient viewers into this world. Herzog takes the film on its strangest journeys, refashioning this material into an exploration of what he calls “the bliss of evil.” And Cage grabs the mic like a drunk wedding guest, holding viewers hostage to his artful, overlong eruptions. Each contributor has his marquee moments. Like a stoner pizza topped with cream cheese, bacon, and Nutella, it shouldn’t work—but it does.

Bad Lieutenant reveals cinema for what it is: a messily collaborative medium. Every film is the work of many voices. What makes the film wonderful is that, despite their strong and distinct personalities, Cage, Herzog, and Finkelstein’s voices don’t compete; they complement. They produce a sound neither could create on his own.

Finkelstein stressed this point throughout our talks. His impulses did, at times, conflict with the liberties taken to his work. He returned several times to Cage’s unhinged attack in the nursing home. Finkelstein’s voice, calibrated over decades on television, couldn’t make sense of such excess. Of course he came around. Had he been in charge that day, though, he “almost assuredly would have pulled back,” he told me. “That Nic didn’t is a testament to one of the joys of a collaborative process.”

The word “alchemy” feels appropriate for a film this volatile. To watch Bad Lieutenant is to witness a bizarre and unlikely combination of elements collide on a screen. We’ve seen these elements before, in isolation: Cage’s tantrums, Herzog’s lyricism, Finkelstein’s cop drama chops. Together, they produce something new, unclassifiable—a drug you’ve never taken before. As with all great cult films, my recommendation comes with a warning: Be careful. It’ll mess with your head.

#werner herzog #nic cage #nicolas cage #william finkelstein #bad lieutenant #bad lieutenant: port of call new orleans #xzibit #val kilmer #abel ferrara #nypd blue #law & order #iguana

8 notes · View notes

candace71o8955-blog · 7 years

Text

Does Completely different Bedding Make Your Bed Extra Comfortable?

It is breathable, so it can be ready to maintain your child cool and dry as it simply lets air through the fabric. Basically, the Choose Consolation mattress utilizes the know-how of air chambers. Our luxurious linens and coverlets enhance your sleeping consolation and protect your valuable sleep funding. Though many bed sheets look nice which is a vital a part of buying, they also must be delicate and will help improve the quality of sleep you get each evening. Simply the flannel you want for a very good night’s sleep. This is identical cause it is advisable to cover your fall-planted garlic (which I meant to plant yesterday!). Of course a majority of these materials are costlier, nothing will dress up your room in the same way, or enable your total home to look unbelievable. Bamboo plants will develop on sloping hillsides where other crops aren't likely to grow. It is easy to suit into your crib mattress because the elastic edges are taut and deep enough to be adjusted for a variety of mattress sizes. The selvages, or finished edges of the woven sheet as it's made on the loom are used as side seams and thus there isn't any want for hemming on the sides.

If you must know in case your bank is concerned in forex trading, you possibly can ask any supervisor or you can look on the financial info sheets that banks are to report back to the general public on a quarterly baiss. Again, remember the corners have elastic which Earlier than trying to put in your bed it's essential work the elastic by way of the fabric first a bit; especially after washing. They’re fitted properly with robust elastic that holds the sheet snugly to the mattress without it bunching up. The set additionally consists of one flat sheet, one fitted sheet as we as 4 pillowcases. Charisma King Basic Stable 310TC Sheet Set Details Feather contact finish sheet set. The concrete platform tops are made up from little squares of 1.5mm plastic sheet. The next quality of sheet will use cotton with further long fibres which can be spun into very fine however strong yarns.

The last word selection on what kind of sheets, pillows and blankets your child will spend most of the early years of their lives around remains to be as much as you. Fashionable bedding, and by extension trendy furniture, should be an individual choice that helps carry the feel and appear to a room that you are trying to perform. Whether or not you want to use these linens, on your bedroom, your guest room, your RV or your kids’ room, you can find them to be the perfect selection. Followers who will would not provide those expensive wears, are buying cheep replica soccer uniforms. Choosing a card, shopping for flowers or chocolates and principally going by way of the usual commercially pushed route is what 99% of individuals do these days. I do know a lot of people aren't allowed to staple into their wall so removable hooks are superior for this because they come off with out damaging the wall when you are finished with them. Splendor is a whole lot greater than that also it could Robert Griffin III Jersey be custom made so as that it works with your own schedule. Should you fall into the primary class, you may have a field day procuring for your new king comforter.

You must have a look at these luxury mattress sheets. His books (I have 5 of them) are concerning the baseball players and the subjects of the time. Mates sounds make the most of the gift concepts for just a most wonderful time-frame. The remaining 10 minutes may be the stroll at lunch time. You may give your child an amazing head begin by providing a safe and healthy sleeping atmosphere with all-pure natural crib sheets. She was meticulously clean, in fact she even ironed her sheets. Use the drop-down menu to pick out a amount of 4 to get two yards of each print, then off you go to sew awesome sheets! You might also use satin or silk but these sheets could be arduous to be stored clean. Cotton used for comfortable dwelling furnishing is available in various forms of sheeting. I discovered the coverlet starting to get itchy and the sheeting a bit worn out and that i determined to move to a lodge all-white bedding look. Would you choose to get new clientele? Salwars kameez, Lehengas and Saris are the widely used dresses many components of India. Thus, the rises of Natural Bath Towels accessible out there at the moment are among the businessmens manner of contributing to Mom Earth.

Writer: Richard Ralph James Are you fed up along with your double mattress? Nothing beats watching a film outdoors on a heat summer season evening. Superior softness., Highly durable woven fabric, Full/Queen Measurement, 88 x 88 inches One Duvet Cover, with nook ties, Excessive thread rely with high quality yarn for soft finish., Natural Cotton made from finest certified natural cotton plus authorized non-toxic processing. Wool natural child steal bedding, as well as, isn't coated with chemicals and, in detail, has pure fire retardant, antimicrobial, and anti fungal properties. My daughter’s solely a bit extra elders . Remember, the extended warranty simply isn’t the mattress. The buttery softness of Egyptian Cotton without potential for pilling, rough texture, and allergens. Other than our Grammy Girlfriend, after all! The LED can be utilized to signal something to user. A minimum of with DIY kits, you can do all this stuff by yourself. Grade 316 is also used in the dealing with of meals and pharmaceutical merchandise and is a standard choice. Our manufacturing unit has 4 advanced manufacturing line, hundreds of staff and workers. Inside the tune, "Best Thing" through Usher feat.

0 notes

judefan832-blog · 4 years

Text

inflatable wing and harness are used to experience

So why would you build a website? And, in general, why do people create websites? What's the point?! There are many great reasons to build your own website. Maybe you have a plan of cheap jerseys building a small business and would like to have a place on the internet in which to interact about it. Or, maybe you just want to advertise your skills, such as photography or cooking?!.

The YinzCam sensor weighs just a half ounce, lasts a half hour and can be recharged wirelessly viainductive charging the same technology that powers up an electric toothbrush. Referees would swap the sensor containing footballs out for charged ones frequently. This shouldn't disrupt the game because footballs get rotated in and out of the game now anyway..

"Think about David nfl jerseys Braley and what he done for this league," said Cohon when asked about reports the Argos are being run as a bare bones operation while Braley tries to www.cheapjerseysofchina.com sell the franchise. "I confident in his ability with the Argos. We should step back and pause for a minute they won the Grey Cup two years ago.

Strengths: Pure shooter with a picture perfect stroke and excellent range (44% career 3 point shooter). Gets his feet set quickly and gets solid elevation on his jumper. Long arms also help him to get his shot off. It is deceptively difficult to find such a narrative in T20 cricket. The five World T20 tournaments have been won by five different teams. In domestic competitions like the IPL and the BBL, team rosters are so fluid that it's hard to keep up with who plays where.

Sleight of Hand ProI love this perk, straight up. You get to reload faster and aim down the sights faster, how much better can that get. Practice your aim and this will be a deadly perk for you. His super elite, super tall teammates stroll silkily along in Nike practice Cheap Jerseys free shipping uniforms, a lustrous assemblage of future NBA players. Up close and in person, these are majestic human beings, particularly freshman player of the year Anthony Davis, the presumptive No. 1 pick in the cheap nfl jerseys upcoming NBA draft and he of the 7 foot 4 wingspan, wholesale nfl jerseys from china and fellow All American Michael Kidd Gilchrist, a lethal blend of strength, speed and energy..

We live in a culture of entitlement. This is particularly true when it comes to knowledge. We feel entitled to know everything and see everything. That had been a hotel until six years ago, but now sign of the wholesale nfl jerseys times it's a private house. In the centre of the island, at Rookley, Pidford Manor, a five bay Georgian home with 11 acres is on the market for 1.7 million (Christopher Scott). Locals who grew up in Cowes slap their foreheads at the prices that seafront houses command.

HE DID WHAT LOOKED LIKE wholesale jerseys from china A CHOREOGRAPHED DANCE NUMBER WITH THE FLAG. JUST AS QUICKLY LOST INTEREST, WALKED AWAY, AND APPEARED TO BE SAYING, "SEE THIS GOLF BALL? I KEEPING IT. IT MINE." AND, YES, THERE WERE SIBLING BEARS AND PERHAPS EVEN A MOTHER BEAR IN THE ROUGH JUST OFF THE GREEN.

What! Skydiving in www.cheapjerseys-football.com India! Who? How? Where?Aligarh is also very conveniently located. There are over 29 buses from Delhi ISBT to Aligarh plying every 2 3 hours and the approximate travel time is 2 and half hours. An inflatable wing and harness are used to experience this free form of flying.

Costs a lot of money, but I think it's irrelevant, he said. Think the fans will enjoy cheap nfl jerseys it. I think that's the most important thing. A: There's a football sized field. You can't run with a Frisbee. The object is to catch a pass in the other team's end zone.

Employees who abandon Cheap Jerseys free shipping their jobs are entitled to the same benefits as those who wholesale jerseys from china voluntarily resign. This means that they are eligible for continuation of health insurance coverage for up to 18 months under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA). In addition, they are entitled to cheap nfl jerseys any retirement or pension plans to which they have contributed under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).

As part of the contracts, players and officials were provided with cars. A new jersey with the logo was also launched 13 months ago.Ashling Thompson keen to keep focus on camogieRena Buckley: 'There wasn't enough time in the day'Dr Una May hits back at Eamonn Fitzmaurice claimsSpotlight sharper on officials than Diarmuid ConnollyLions lose to Blues in AucklandJonny Hayes senses a window of opportunityPadraig Harrington injured after being struck by amateur at coaching sessionamonn Fitzmaurice: Who leaked the details? That's the big Cheap Jerseys free shipping questionQualifier draws made for football and hurling championshipsClare's ideal world: In cheap nfl jerseys a final with much to work onNEWSAll New Renault Mgane Launches in Ireland Pricing from 155 per monthAll New Renault Mgane Launches in Ireland Pricing from 155 per monthWORLDClare's ideal world: In a final with much to work onThe big read: Why Lima in Peru is the world's best food cityBUSINESSDBRS: Irish repossessions to riseSPORTParty piece is over. From now on everybody wants Lions' scalpLeBron James www.cheapjerseyssalesupply.com inspired by ghost of JordanLIFESTYLEWATCH: This video will make you an expert at making Crepe SuzetteWATCH: This video will make you an expert at making Crepe Suzette.

0 notes

jobsearchtips02 · 4 years

Text

As big corporations state ‘black lives matter,’ their performance history raise uncertainty

Financing, tech and retail companies are declaring assistance for a demonstration motion that has galvanized the American public amid a pandemic that has disproportionately declared black lives and incomes

Pushed by staff members in many cases, and in others by a fear of losing consumers, corporations are being required to examine their functions in perpetuating inequalities in hiring, pay and promo, cultivating hazardous office cultures and consumer discrimination. Their performance history have raised apprehension about whether they will certainly present the type of change that would make this moment a turning point for racial equity.

” There’s a great deal of performative allyship going around,” said Y-Vonne Hutchinson, president and creator of diversity consulting company ReadySet. “No one’s requesting a CEO to take a knee. You take the knee after you change your policies.”

The image of Dimon, hands gripped over his right knee, was suggested to communicate his “support for social justice,” said JPMorgan Chase spokeswoman Patricia Wexler. “Our leaders and our business have actually done a lot more than kneel, investing hundreds of countless dollars in combined humanitarian and company resources to resolve some of the most consistent challenges dealing with the black neighborhood,” she stated, highlighting the bank’s programs to help black-owned organisations, construct budget-friendly housing and hire individuals with rap sheets.

After George Floyd was eliminated in the custody of Minneapolis cops last month, hundreds of business blanketed social networks with statements knocking discrimination and professing their commitment to racial justice.

Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Twitter and Square, stated Juneteenth (June 19) a business holiday to celebrate completion of slavery, a relocation more companies are making. Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, who is wed to tennis star Serena Williams, resigned from the board to give way for the first black director in the company’s history. Bank of America guaranteed to spend $1 billion over the next 4 years to address “ financial and racial inequality sped up by a worldwide pandemic“

Walmart, the country’s biggest seller, vowed to stop locking up “multicultural” hair and charm products in display cases, and Sephora committed to committing at least 15 percent of its rack space to black-owned beauty brands. Toymaker LEGO suspended marketing for police-themed sets after video emerged revealing an officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than 8 minutes.

Popular opinion on policing and racial equity has shifted quickly considering that the 2014 protests versus police killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., and New York.

Surveys now show a large bipartisan majority of Americans support the protests. That’s a dramatic departure from three years ago when few of the business speaking up now voiced assistance for the NFL gamer protests, and President Trump called for a boycott over players kneeling throughout the pregame national anthem. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell now states the league was wrong for not listening to players.

But activists, employees and variety specialists say they question how much business promises to “do more” will assist upend a system of economic variation in which a normal black family has just one-tenth the net worth of a normal white household.

Part of closing the racial wealth gap, they state, indicates ensuring chances for black workers to get in and rise in rewarding industries such as finance and tech, whose leadership has actually long been dominated by white executives and board members.

” I value your Black Lives Matter post. Now follow that up with an image of your senior management team and your board,” stated Brickson Diamond, president of variety consulting company Big Responses and previous chief operating officer of the Executive Leadership Council, a nonprofit concentrated on increasing the variety of black executives.

After viewing countless protesters march past his Manhattan apartment, James Gorman, chief executive of Morgan Stanley, held a conference call with a few of the bank’s highest-ranking black executives, and announced the promotion of two black women to positions on its operating and management committees.

This period “will not be quickly forgotten in history, and it should not be,” Gorman stated “God ready, it will be seen as a turning point in race relations.”

However like a number of the nation’s biggest and most prominent banks, Morgan Stanley has actually struggled to increase variety within its ranks. Only 2.2 percent of its senior executives were black in 2015.

Just 4 percent of JPMorgan Chase’s top executives are black, despite years of public, prominent efforts to increase its variety. Wells Fargo saw the portion of black senior executives fall from 8 percent in 2015 to 3.5 percent in 2019.

And at Bank of America, which paid a $ 4.2 million settlement in 2015 after being accused of victimizing black, Hispanic and female job applicants, about 5 percent of senior leaders are black. The business denied allegations of discrimination.

Goldman Sachs, which just announced a fund to support system that deal with racial injustice and financial variation, had actually paid $9 million in 2019 to settle federal claims of racial and gender pay bias. The firm said at the time that it disagreed with the government’s analysis and was dedicated to equivalent pay for workers.

The scarcity in diversity extends throughout the business world. Of the business in the Standard & Poor’s 500- stock index, 187 did not have a black board member, according to a 2019 analysis by Black Enterprise publication.

African Americans consist of a fraction of the senior leadership at the largest tech firms– 3.1 percent at Facebook, 3.6 percent at Google, 4.4 percent at Slack, 5.3 percent at Twitter and 2.7 percent of executives at Microsoft, according to business information. Amazon did not reveal the demographics of senior leadership, however their report shows that 8.3 percent of U.S. managers are black. (Amazon founder and president Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The numbers are lower in the world of equity capital. One percent of endeavor funding went to black start-up creators in 2018, according to a study carried out by Silicon Valley Bank and others. And 1 percent of decision-makers at the top 100 venture capital companies were black in 2018, according to a yearly study by the Details, a tech news site.

In addition to employing and pay disparities, banks have actually come under fire for supposedly victimizing minority customers. Some have settled claims in recent years for targeting black and Hispanic home purchasers with dangerous, expensive loans. Homeownership, one of the most essential ways to build wealth, has remained essentially the same for African Americans since 1968.

” These are a few of the very same banks that ripped a lot wealth from black and Latino communities throughout the foreclosure crisis,” said Maurice BP-Weeks, co-executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy, a nonprofit focused on racial and financial justice.

Business statements supporting Black Lives Matter stand empty, he said, without significant actions such as directing earnings back into black neighborhoods, removing racial pay variations, increasing hiring from black neighborhoods and promoting black staff members. “All of these things would reveal that this is more than just platitudes.”

The American Bankers Association said in a statement that the market “condemns discrimination of any kind in the financing market, the office and beyond” and that banks of all sizes are devoted to “enhancing variety, equity and addition within the industry” and attending to “racial oppression and injustice in the nation.”

JPMorgan Chase has actually fought allegations of discrimination against black monetary consultants and customers, most just recently in recordings obtained by the New York Times in2019 The bank has actually stated it was examining how it operates “so that we could acquire a much deeper understanding of what more we can do to root out bigotry and discrimination anywhere it exists.”

At Wells Fargo, which paid $10 million last year to settle a suit filed by the city of Philadelphia accusing the bank of steering black and Hispanic customers into riskier, more costly home mortgages, a committee of senior executives is fulfilling daily to develop recommendations for addressing social inequalities facing black employees and clients. The bank rejected claims of victimizing minority customers.

” As a white guy, as much as I can try to understand what others are feeling, I understand that I can not actually appreciate and understand what individuals of color experience and the impacts of prejudiced behavior others should cope with,” Charlie Scharf, chief executive of Wells Fargo, wrote to staff members

Feeling pushed by what they want to be a transformative minute, black workers are more willing to speak out about their experiences of discrimination in the office and pressure supervisors for change.

Black tech workers are openly voicing grievances that their business are counting on their “complimentary labor” to help with hiring and recruiting. At social networks platforms, worker groups established to support members of color are asked to double as a voice for black users, an unsettled job they however feel called to satisfy.

Since the protests began, this sideline has actually become much more stuffed, according to interviews with group leaders from tech companies in the Bay Area and New York City. SoFi, the venture-backed finance business, and others have tasked black employees with choosing where business contributions ought to go and participating in company listening sessions about race. Requested for remark, SoFi indicated its declaration on Twitter that said it dedicates to “defending diversity and addition.”

” You can not stunt on social saying that you do not endure bigotry at your company then leave the labor of fixing your race problem [to] fall on your black employees,” Raki Wane, who formerly led Twitter’s resource group for black employees, Blackbirds, and now operates in policy interactions at Instagram, posted on Twitter.

To indicate its assistance for the movement, Amazon put a “Black Lives Matter” banner on its home page and at the top of Prime Video. Later on, Bezos posted angry consumer emails about the banner to his Instagram account. “Dave, you’re the sort of client I enjoy to lose,” Bezos composed in one caption.

To critics, these public statements masked the harmful effects Amazon’s items and practices have actually had on the black community, consisting of profiting from the sale of white supremacist propaganda as well as selling facial recognition innovation to authorities departments, which the company recently revealed it would suspend for one year.

Black tech employees are even sharing stories declaring bias at Slack, which established a reputation as a welcoming environment when CEO Stewart Butterfield sent four black female engineers onstage to accept an award on his behalf for the fastest-growing tech start-up in2016 This month, the very same black engineers confronted Butterfield on Twitter about their experiences at Slack.

Duretti Hirpa, an engineer who helped start an internal group for staff members of color, shared that she had actually been informed her work was considered an extracurricular activity when it came time for promotions, regardless of the company publicizing her group as proof of its inclusive culture. When Butterfield reacted that he was sorry her diversity work was not valued, Hirpa tweeted back, “Alas, you’re simply a CEO in the position of power to change that!”

Black workers working for consumer brand names are speaking up as well.

At Adidas, Julia Bond, a 25- year-old assistant designer for guys’s clothing, said the demonstrations assisted influence her to email senior executives on June 3 seeking a “public apology for the bigotry and discrimination that they have actually freely made it possible for and perpetuated across the brand.”

A number of months after joining the sports clothing firm in 2015, Bond said she was provided a design packet that included a picture of a man wearing a T-shirt with a Confederate flag. Seeing that image at work “was truly traumatizing,” Bond remembered. “If our greatest style motivation [includes] a Confederate flag, how are we ever going to reach black customers?”

In an Instagram post, another Adidas designer alleged a colleague had actually utilized the n-word. And in an e-mail to senior management posted on social media, Aaron Ture, a worker who works for Reebok, which is owned by Adidas, stated that he remembered Karen Parkin, head of global human resources at Adidas, dismissing a concern about internal bigotry during a 2019 conference as “sound we only hear in North America.”

Parkin on Friday sent a message to staff members promising to enhance company culture to “ensure equity, variety and chance.” As the company’s personnels executive, she wrote, “it was my obligation to explain our conclusive stance against discrimination, and this I did not. Must I have actually upset anyone, I apologize.”

Adidas stated that the company would need a minimum of 30 percent of all open positions in the United States to be filled with black and Latino employees and invest $120 million in programs for the black neighborhood over the next 4 years.

Bond said speaking out has actually made her “exceptionally worried.” But there’s “strength in numbers,” she stated. “I believe everyone can feel that. The numbers are showing up, and that’s what’s pushing this wave of modification.”

Adidas said the company has actually promised to “continually and actively” fight bigotry.

After L’Oreal Paris just recently posted a message stating “Speaking up deserves it,” model Munroe Bergdorf accused the cosmetics company of hypocrisy. She stated L’Oreal dropped her from a project in 2017 for speaking up versus bigotry and white supremacy following the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville. L’Oreal reacted by rehiring her to serve on its recently formed UK Variety and Inclusion Advisory Board, the business posted on Instagram.

” I are sorry for the absence of dialogue and support the business showed Munroe around the time of termination,” L’Oreal Paris Brand president Delphine Viguier composed. “We ought to have likewise done more to develop a discussion for modification as we are now doing.”

Staff members at other companies are promoting the elimination of leaders for habits they state perpetuates racism– some with fast success.

More than 100 staff members at Estee Lauder are demanding the ouster of the founder’s boy and successor, Ronald Lauder, from the board– asserting that his political contributions to Trump are harming the business’s relationship with its black staff members and with the black community at large. In action, the business said it would double the amount it invests in contracts with black-owned suppliers and recruit and promote more black workers.

CrossFit’s founder and CEO, Greg Glassman, was forced to retire over several remarks he made about Floyd’s death, including a recording of him on a conference call stating: “We’re not mourning for George Floyd– I do not believe me or any of my staff are.” In a statement, Glassman stated he had actually “developed a rift in the CrossFit community and inadvertently harmed much of its members.”

The CEO of the Wing, a private club for ladies to work and interact socially, and the editors in chief of Refinery29, a fashion and charm blog site, and Bon Appétit publication, which is owned by Condé Nast, all resigned in recent days after black and brown workers described a work environment swarming with pay variations and discrimination.

” It’s a turning point,” Diamond said. “My biggest fear is we are going to get to a location real quickly where the establishment states, ‘Well, that was uneasy. No more, thank you. Now let’s return to work.’ “

Find Out More

from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/as-big-corporations-state-black-lives-matter-their-performance-history-raise-uncertainty/

0 notes

biofunmy · 5 years

Text

The N.B.A. Elite Are Now From Everywhere

Want more basketball in your inbox? Sign up for Marc Stein’s weekly N.B.A. newsletter here.

It was at the 2018 All-Star Game in Los Angeles that I asked Steve Nash, one of the foremost imports in N.B.A. history, if the league would ever be ready — really ready — for a Rest of the World vs. United States format for its annual midseason showcase.

“We’re getting there,” Nash said then.

Nash suggested that perhaps 2022 would be “the time to try it,” as a 30th anniversary tribute to the original Dream Team that wowed the world at the Barcelona Olympics.

That forecast is looking smarter every day.

Understandably somewhat lost last week amid the very sad news of the former N.B.A. commissioner David Stern’s death was the bulletin from the league office detailing the first batch of returns from fan balloting for next month’s All-Star Game in Chicago.

The leading vote-getter in the Eastern Conference: Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo from Greece.

The leading vote-getter in the West: Dallas’s Luka Doncic of Slovenia.

Fan voting will always generate outrage for one reason or another. Boston’s little-used Tacko Fall, who placed sixth among East frontcourt candidates, and the Los Angeles Lakers’ Alex Caruso, who landed at No. 8 among West guards, were the primary causes for complaints from the opening round of polling. Yet you scarcely heard a quibble about the fact that LeBron James trailed both Giannis and Luka even though he has joined Anthony Davis in powering the Lakers to a 29-7 start.

Antetokounmpo is the league’s reigning Most Valuable Player Award winner and is playing at an even higher level this season. Doncic has yet to appear in an N.B.A. playoff game, but he has established himself as a consensus top-10 player by averaging a ridiculous 29.7 points, 9.7 rebounds and 8.9 assists in his sophomore season — leading the upstart Mavericks to a surprising 23-13 record in the process.

Unlike Nash’s era, when the N.B.A. certainly featured numerous successful international players but only a few who were considered truly elite, there are several at that level besides Giannis and Luka.

The Cameroonian duo of Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid and Toronto’s Pascal Siakam have their own gaudy stat lines that make them All-Star locks.

Denver’s Nikola Jokic (Serbia), despite some slippage in his numbers from last season, remains the unquestioned fulcrum for the team with the second-best record in the West.

Utah’s Rudy Gobert (France) is not assured of making his All-Star breakthrough next month because a defense-first reputation like his historically doesn’t help much in All-Star campaigning. But Gobert has made such an all-around impact for the Jazz that you can find his name on Basketball Reference’s M.V.P. tracker at a solid No. 10.

Minnesota’s Karl-Anthony Towns, who was born in New Jersey but represents the Dominican Republic internationally, played in the past two All-Star Games and would be a cinch for a third appearance if not for a recent knee injury — and the Timberwolves’ slump to a 14-21 record from a 10-8 start.

Throw in top All-Star contenders such as Philadelphia’s Ben Simmons (Australia) and Indiana’s Domantas Sabonis (Lithuania) — as well as All-Stars of recent vintage such as Orlando’s Nikola Vucevic (Montenegro), Philadelphia’s Al Horford (Dominican Republic), Toronto’s Marc Gasol (Spain), Miami’s Goran Dragic (Slovenia) and Dallas’s Kristaps Porzingis (Latvia) — and the point becomes clear.

There may not quite be 12 internationals playing at an indisputable All-Star level as we speak, but it’s increasingly fair to ask, as Nash predicted, if we’re all that far away.

Porzingis, after all, is working his way back to an All-Star standard after a lengthy injury layoff. Two of Nash’s young fellow Canadians — Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Denver’s Jamal Murray — have also flashed All-Star potential. Recent top-five lottery picks include Phoenix’s Deandre Ayton (Bahamas) and the Knicks’ R.J. Barrett (Canada).

The way things are going, as we dribble into a new decade, it looks as though mathematical fairness is the only deterrent to N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver’s trying out a United States/World format.

There were 108 foreign-born players on opening-night rosters this season, meaning there were more than 300 American-born players. It simply wouldn’t be equitable for two groups of such disparate size to battle for 12 All-Star spots each.

But I also don’t believe that the league is married to its two-year-old system in which the two leading vote-getters, as captains, pick their respective squads without regard to conference. For all the anticipation and chatter that the made-for-television selection show generates, momentum from the first game played using this format in L.A. in 2018, after years of waning interest, did not carry over to the 2019 edition in Charlotte.

Don’t forget that Silver, when he initially proposed the introduction of an in-season tournament starting with the 2020-21 season, was looking at the final four of that competition as a potential replacement for the All-Star Game entirely. The league ultimately backed off that proposal when teams and the players’ union voiced resistance to an in-season tournament that would fall any later on the league’s calendar than December, but Silver’s original thinking suggests that the N.B.A. remains concerned about how flat All-Star Games tend to feel.

At the M.I.T. Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston in March, remember, Silver himself said the 2019 All-Star Game “didn’t work” and admitted that the most recent changes were akin to putting “an earring on a pig.”

Maybe the starry imports who have succeeded Nash, Dirk Nowitzki, Pau Gasol, Tony Parker and all the international stars from the last decade will never get their chance to engage the Americans in an All-Star duel. Maybe restricting that format to the Rising Stars Game featuring first- and second-year players, as the N.B.A. has done for the past five seasons, is the right call.

Yet the mere fact that the debate only gets stronger may be as fitting a tribute as we can muster for Stern — since taking the N.B.A. global before any other North American sport, and to a much greater degree, is such a huge slice of his legacy.

The Scoop @TheSteinLine

This newsletter is OUR newsletter. So please weigh in with what you’d like to see here. To get your hoops-loving friends and family involved, please forward this email to them so they can jump in the conversation. If you’re not a subscriber, you can sign up here.

You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I’ll field three questions posed via email at [email protected]. (Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, and make sure “Corner Three” is in the subject line.)

Q: Where would you rank David Stern as a commissioner compared to those in other sports like Pete Rozelle in the N.F.L., Bowie Kuhn or Fay Vincent in baseball, etc.? — Bob Purcell (San Diego)

Stein: I covered a smattering of all the major North American men’s team sports in my youth, but I have been covering the N.B.A. almost exclusively since February 1994. So it’s not really fair for me to answer this one.

I would naturally put Stern ahead of all his competitors because I know so much more about his work. Most of my older peers always say that mythical top spot has to go to either Stern or Rozelle. But as our own Harvey Araton sagely noted when I asked him, Stern’s edge may well be that on his watch the N.B.A. achieved relevance on social, cultural and international fronts that the N.F.L. — for all its advantages in TV prominence and in-stadium attendance — can’t match.

What I can say with greater confidence is that I will always wish Stern, upon ceding his office to Adam Silver in February 2014, would have spent a few years trying to bring order to a sport he loved almost as much as I do: tennis.

Tennis has always suffered greatly from the lack of a commissioner who could exert authority over the sport’s many (too many, really) competing factions. But Stern’s focus, for pretty much his entire adult life, was the N.B.A. and growing/enhancing/protecting his league. So I am forced to concede that it probably would have been hard for him to muster anywhere near the same passion for another sport in a working capacity.

Q: I have to agree with the recent comment here that the Raptors are mostly ignored by the American sports media. Maybe you are an exception, but why aren’t more people writing about the Chris Boucher story alone? — Kent Goodwin (Stowe, Vt.)

Stein: I think we’ve reached the point in this discussion where nothing I say is going to persuade the skeptics. But I think I will be vindicated when Coach of the Year Award voting results are released in June.

The Raptors awoke on Tuesday on a 54-win pace. If they maintain that level for the rest of the regular season, given the ridiculous string of injuries they’ve faced along the way, Nick Nurse will have a real shot at winning the C.O.Y. prize — and thus prove how closely the Raptors are being monitored south of the border in the post-Kawhi Leonard era.

It was suggested to me last week by a trusted insider that the Raptors just might surprise us again before the Feb. 6 trade deadline and emerge as buyers to fortify themselves for another playoff run. The widespread assumption coming into the season held that Toronto would trade the veteran likes of Kyle Lowry, Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka to prepare for a reset in the summer of 2021 built around the free-agency pursuit of Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo. (I predicted as much myself.)

The safe bet remains that Masai Ujiri, Toronto’s president of basketball operations, will avoid any deals that affect the Raptors’ cap space in 2021. But the Raptors will be a huge source of curiosity over the next month — thanks in part to the unexpected contributions from the likes of Boucher, Terence Davis, Matt Thomas, Oshae Brissett and O.G. Anunoby — whether or not they’re generating reams of coverage.

Q: How convenient for you. Now you get to expand your hate for Houston beyond basketball. — @venramamurthy from Twitter

Stein: This tweet came in response to my social media cheering for the Buffalo Bills as a proud former Western New Yorker — which lasted until the Bills unraveled in Saturday’s A.F.C. wild-card loss to the Houston Texans to extend their drought without a playoff win to 1995.

The supposition from Venkat is that rooting against the Texans was a natural for me because I “hate” his Rockets.

We’re still not past this stuff in 2020, friends?

My only issues with Houston, here in the real world, are the traffic, how hard it is to get to Cafe Adel for some wonderful Bosnian food in that traffic when staying downtown and the oppressive weather from June to September (my quarrel with every city in Texas — including the one I live in).

Happy New Year!

Numbers Game

$2,615,000

In 20 years as the team owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban has accrued more than $2.6 million in publicly announced fines from the N.B.A., according to this ledger maintained by the longtime Mavericks historian Patricia Bender. Not all fines issued by the league office are made public.

The N.B.A.’s two Florida teams sport quite the contrast with their records in overtime games so far this season: Miami is 6-0, and Orlando is 0-0.

16-19

The Pacers finished three games under .500 last season after losing Victor Oladipo to a ruptured quadriceps muscle in his right leg and were swept by Boston in a first-round playoff series. After acquiring Malcolm Brogdon in an off-season sign-and-trade with Milwaukee, Indiana is on a 51-win pace this season without Oladipo but still doesn’t know when he will return.

3-2

The potential downside of the Los Angeles Clippers’ well-chronicled “load management” strategy with Kawhi Leonard is that they may have to settle for a playoff seed that forces them to play the Lakers sooner than the conference finals. Thanks to an underwhelming 3-2 mark since their impressive Christmas Day defeat of the Lakers, Kawhi and Co. awoke on Tuesday as the West’s No. 4 team — which has the Clippers on course for a second-round playoff encounter with their Staples Center cotenants.

The Lakers’ 20 blocked shots in a home win on Sunday over Detroit were a rarity. According to Basketball Reference, no N.B.A. team had recorded at least 20 blocked shots in a game since it happened twice in 2001: Toronto with 23 against Atlanta in March 2001 and the Raptors with 20 against Golden State in November 2001.

Hit me up anytime on Twitter (@TheSteinLine) or Facebook (@MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram (@marcsteinnba). Send any other feedback to [email protected].

Sahred From Source link Sports

from WordPress http://bit.ly/39TfrDq via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes

torentialtribute · 5 years

Text

England Test skipper Joe Root admits obsession with Ashes revenge as he plots to beat Australia

As a club of England, Joe Root plays a pioneering role in attempts to create the white-ball legacy in this country – yet

Inundated with the bid for a first world cup victory – his contribution of 279 points includes two hundred – but the double draw of this seismic summer, and a determination to pay for 4-0 losses for the Australians for 18 months ago, thoughts about Edgbaston and August 1 mean.

Fortunately, the nature of a tournament like this offers many downtime periods in which the 28-year-old can use the privacy of his hotel room to judge future English players on his laptop or discuss their login details with the selectors.

Joe Root is determined to take revenge on Australia in Edgbaston in August "

Australia in Edgbaston in August

<img id = "i-486e707bc07ab789" src = "https://dailym.ai/2Xhch94 21 / 14833528-0-image-a-18_1560629080899.jpg "height =" 456 "width =" 634 "alt =" Root uses its downtime during the World Cup to view county cricket "to watch county cricket"

[IwouldliketouseitonmysidebutitisnotthatIhavetospendtimeoutsidethehousewithlookingatPatrickandIdon'tknowwhattodo'saysRot

& # 39; I'm a big cricket fan, like checking the county scores, how players are doing, talking to men like James Taylor and Ed Smith to find out what they're watching in the county game and trying to watch images myself. I find that pretty relaxing.

& # 39; Many people would think that I am crazy or a tie, but I love the sport and I will continue to do it without compromising my focus to perform well and perform well. perform during the tournament.

Issues for root and management of England to focus on with their video clips and chats feature the identity of those who meet the top of the order and how to accommodate the latent talent that is Jofra Archer.

Of the current top three established players, only Rory Burns can refer to the type of domestic numbers to justify retention, and although it is a word between county bowlers that he is not performing at 2018 levels, the batsman's currency is valid, and he has 471 of them on 47.1

Keaton Jennings has demonstrably played another test he should have, versus Wes

He stuttered in division two this season despite the dominance of his employer Lancashire.

An Indian Premier League match and a single Royal London Cup appearance preceded his strange fate with England for the World Cup.

He would not be the first player in recent history to be knocked down after half a century in his previous appearance.

] James Vince, who knows the feeling, could be the beneficiary, as he was when he came to redistribute the places of the World Championships.

Root is pleased that England is gaining momentum at an important moment to gain momentum at an important moment "

Meanwhile, Root retains the greatest attention to the assets of Gary Ballance, his teammate from Yorkshire and former roommate, who is at the top of the run of the 609 run One-scorers

Ballance, 29, responded well to taking last winter, one in which he married, away;

[bewerken] [lijst toevoegen] Eat

Ballance & # 39; s most recent experience with international selection was a curious case.

His technique is usually dissected by critics since he was first shot in 2015, but he would have done less well

Root & # 39; s vision for the development of the test team is a more dynamic approach, which would improve the prospects that Jason Roy will be asked to transfer his daring stroke from limited surpluses

Archer's casually moderate pace has added another dimension to the limited attacks of England and it seems unthinkable that his name will be omitted from the first test team of the summer

Jason Gillespie, his national coach at Sussex, emphasizes that Archer is best suited for the first-class game (131 wickets at 11:44 p.m.) and has simply used his natural gi

The emergence of the 24-year-old provides Root with an attack on all circumstances.

The previous one-dimensional nature was the most

This time England was able to remove such surfaces from the comparison by combining Archer with Mark Wood, who presented such a convincing case

When it nibbles about , the vulnerability of Australia against the moving ball, such as in Birmingham and Nottingham on The Last Visit of Australia, Stuart Broad and Chris Woakes come in the comparison.

Root retains the greatest attention to the ability of Gary Ballance, his Yorkshire teammate "

Gary Ballance, his Yorkshire teammate"

Root retains the highest regard for the ability of Gary Ballance, his Yorkshire teammate

When summer swings against India, Sam Curran – one of those currently on Surrey's injury list – offers – a left variant.

The shape of the carrot with the bat is an important part of England's blueprint for success, but more surprising was the pair of wickets he endured against the West Indies in Southampton.

With Moeen Ali ove

& # 39; It was nice to pick up some wickets, but probably I could not have done it.

& # 39; I am not the most skilled off-spinner, I do not have the best stock ball because it is about being as unpredictable as possible.

& # 39; If you lack the power, you will find different ways to contribute and I have worked hard on different variations to make it easier for someone to stand there and get out of the park to hit.

& # 39; It was nice that it paid off. & # 39;

And when Root & # 39; s very occasional off-spin comes off, you know this is a team that believes that everything they touch turns gold.

Root agrees with this and says: & # 39; We are talking about momentum in competitions like this and it is nice to feel that we are in a role. We have a few big games around the corner, they come thick and fast, it's nice to perform as well as we have. & # 39;

Root wants England to take revenge for Australia's victory in the Ashes of 2017-18

Root wants England to take revenge for the triumph of Australia in the axis of 2017-18

The only drawback of their trip to the Hampshire Bowl came in the form of injuries to Captain Eoin Morgan, who sustained a back spasm, and opener Roy, who hurt his hamstring.

Root, who wrote his second century of the campaign to seal the victory against the Windies,

& # 39; Of course I am

& # 39; is what we have prepared to participate in this tournament, we have power in the depth and we have

& # 39; There are also so many good things that can come out of this game. & # 39;

Source link

#England Test skipper Joe Root admits obsession with Ashes revenge as he plots to beat Australia"

0 notes

thrashermaxey · 6 years

Text

Injury Ward: Karlsson, Edler, Kadri, Letang, Hart, & Hall

Here’s the latest in the world of NHL injuries! Before you ask (and I know you were about to), the Jets haven’t provided us with a significant update on Dustin Byfuglien as this article is being written, so I recommend you follow me on Twitter @BrennanDeSouza to see his status as soon as it’s made publicly available.

Ryan Miller – The 38-year-old goaltender was originally slated to start on Monday against the Canucks, but a lower-body ailment kept him out of the game. This injury isn’t expected to keep him out for too long.

Ryan Getzlaf – The Ducks captain has been sidelined for the past three games with an upper-body injury. According to GM/coach Bob Murray, there’s no sign that Getzlaf is improving and his status for Wednesday’s game against the Blackhawks remains up in the air. Despite a disappointing 39 points in 54 games this season, Getzlaf still leads the team in scoring. That should give you an idea of how miserable this season has been for Anaheim.

John Gibson – Anaheim’s top goaltender could be available on Wednesday when the team faces off against Chicago. He had his wisdom teeth removed during the Ducks’ most recent three-game road trip (February 19th to February 23rd). If he doesn’t start on Wednesday, I’d expect him to be an option on Friday against the Golden Knights. Whatever the case, he should be able to contribute to your fantasy hockey playoff matchup.

Antti Raanta – Has been skating as he continues to recover from knee surgery. While Raanta isn’t expected to play for the rest of the regular season, if you’re participating in a playoff pool and the Coyotes make the playoffs – he might be an option.

David Pastrnak – Will be out for at least two more weeks as he needs to keep his thumb in a cast. After those two weeks, he’s probably going to need a short amount of time to get comfortable holding his stick and shooting the puck. Danton Heinen has been filling in for Pastrnak on the Bruins’ top line with Brad Marchand and Patrice Bergeron, he has nine points in his last 10 games.

James Neal – Is currently week-to-week with a lower-body injury. He’s expected to be evaluated at some point this week, after which we’ll probably have a more concrete timetable for his return.

Micheal Ferland – Left Tuesday’s game against LA with an upper-body injury. No further updates have been released as of right now.

Justin Faulk – Left Tuesday’s game against the Kings with an upper-body injury. No further updates have been released as of right now. Did I just copy and paste Ferland’s update for Faulk? No. I changed ‘LA’ to ‘the Kings’. Okay?

Ian Cole – Has been skating in a non-contact sweater. With that being said, he’s dealing with a broken orbital bone (a bone which surrounds your eye) so the fact that he’s skating doesn’t exactly mean he’s about to return.

Ryan Murray – Is out week-to-week with an upper-body injury. The Blue Jackets did acquire Adam McQuaid at the trade deadline, so maybe that slightly offsets the loss of Murray? Very slightly? Not at all?

Mats Zuccarello – Imagine what it’s like to put on a different jersey after nine seasons of being a Blueshirt. Imagine having an incredible debut with your new team, putting up a goal and an assist through 13 minutes of ice time. The next thing you know you’re doubled over after blocking a shot from Blackhawks’ defenseman Connor Murphy. Such is the life of Mats Zuccarello, who will be out for about four weeks with a broken arm. While he did have surgery on the arm, the purpose of the surgery was to hold the arm in place and speed up the healing process – this wasn’t some reconstructive surgery where he’ll need to learn how to hold a stick again.

Jamie Benn – He left Sunday’s game against the Blackhawks with an upper-body injury, which also kept him out of the lineup on Tuesday against the Golden Knights. Fortunately, he’s expected to return to the lineup on Thursday when the Stars take on the Kings. Benn has struggled to produce offensively this season with just 41 points in 61 games.

Thomas Vanek – Is expected to be out long term with a hip flexor injury. If you’re unfamiliar with the intricacies of the hip flexors (like I was until seconds ago), all you really need to know is that they allow the joint between your hip and your leg to bend. Since the injury is expected to keep Vanek out for a long time, it sounds like he’s dealing with a relatively large tear that’s going to significantly decrease his range of motion until it heals. Another important note – especially considering Vanek is 35 years old – is that you’re more likely to injure a hip flexor if you’ve injured it before. See how much fun this article can be when teams actually give us details on an injury? Three cheers for learning!

Jesse Puljujarvi – The belief is that he requires surgery for a lower-body injury. What exactly is he dealing with? How long will he be out? Find out in next week’s episode of ‘Spoiled Oil’ (copyright pending).

James Reimer – Looked like he tweaked something in his leg on Tuesday night against the Coyotes. No word yet on how long the injury will keep him sidelined.

Mike Matheson – Hopeful to return from a lower-body injury on Thursday against the Golden Knights.

Alec Martinez – Has been skating for the past few days as he gets closer and closer to a return. The team is hopeful to see him back in the lineup within the next week.

Craig Smith – You know what my favourite kind of update is? No update! At this point, all we really know is that Smith is dealing with a lower-body injury. Nashville’s acquisition of Mikael Granlund and Wayne Simmonds at the Trade Deadline should relieve any pressure of rushing Smith back into the lineup.

Will Butcher – Is day-to-day with a lower-body injury but he has been skating.

Jesper Bratt – Is day-to-day with a lower-body injury and won’t be in the lineup against the Flames on Wednesday. The Devils have been absolutely decimated by injuries recently. If you can name a player in the lineup who isn’t Nico Hischier, I’ll give you a high five.

Sami Vatanen – Will return from a concussion on Wednesday against the Flames.

Kyle Palmieri – Out week-to-week with a lower-body injury.

Taylor Hall – The Devils expect to find out sometime this week whether Hall is going to play again this season. Considering the team isn’t playoff-bound, there’s really no reason to rush Hall back into the lineup and risk his long-term health. GM Ray Shero made it clear that if Hall does return this season, it’s because the team’s medical staff is absolutely confident that his return won’t have any long-term impact on his well-being. While it’s easy to say Hall should be shut down for the rest of the season considering there’s nothing left to play for, he’s a hockey player. Hockey players want to play hockey.

Carter Hart – The rookie goaltender is expected to be out for at least a week with an ankle injury. If everything goes well he’ll be back on the ice this weekend, with a return hopefully following soon after. Hart has been fantastic this season, sporting a .917 SV% and a 13-8-1 record.

Brian Dumoulin – Suffered a concussion after this hit from Wayne Simmonds in an outdoor game with the Flyers. No timetable for his return is available at this time.

{youtube}Y5xxUAwDpF8{/youtube}

Kris Letang – If you watch the video above closely, you’ll notice that Kris Letang went after Wayne Simmonds following his hit on Brian Dumoulin. In an attempt to defend Simmonds, Shayne Gostisbehere came in and threw Letang to the ice. Letang suffered an upper-body injury following the takedown and is currently out on a day-to-day basis.

Bryan Rust – Left Tuesday’s game against Columbus on crutches after this hit from new Blue Jacket Adam McQuaid. He’ll be evaluated on Wednesday and we’ll probably get a better idea of how severe the injury is.

{youtube}TOG5fIlExVU{/youtube}

Erik Karlsson – Left Tuesday’s game against the Bruins with an injury, but we don’t yet know if it’s related to the groin injury that caused him to miss significant time recently. What we do know is that he wasn’t able to put much pressure on his left leg. This clip from late in the second period shows Karlsson’s skating was not at 100 percent. He didn’t play in the third period.

Alexander Steen – Missed Tuesday’s game against the Predators because he was sick. Don’t expect him to miss too much more time as a result of the illness.

Brayden Schenn – Remains day-to-day with an upper-body injury. He’s expected to be back sooner rather than later. While we still don’t know exactly what the injury is and when he was injured, some believe it’s a concussion.

David Perron – Has been skating but is still officially day-to-day. GM Doug Armstrong stated that he should be back sooner rather than later. I feel like I’ve been saying his return is just around the corner for a long time now, but maybe this time it’s true?

Jake Gardiner – Has missed the team’s last couple of practices and won’t be in the lineup against the Oilers on Wednesday. Coach Mike Babcock has noticed Gardiner’s skating hasn’t been as good as it normally is. It’s possible he’s still dealing with back spasms that were bothering him earlier in the season.

Nazem Kadri – Skated on Tuesday for the first time since suffering a concussion. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: concussions are unpredictable because everyone experiences symptoms differently, so there’s a lot of variation in recovery times.

Alexander Edler – The Canucks begin a three-game road trip on Wednesday against the Avalanche and it’s still not clear whether or not Edler will be travelling with the team. While he has been skating, we still don’t know when exactly he’ll return from a concussion.

Erik Haula – May start skating soon! While that’s great news considering he had knee surgery a couple of months ago, I don’t think he’ll be back in time to have an impact on your fantasy hockey playoff matchup.

Josh Morrissey – Will be out of the lineup for the rest of February and the entirety of March with an upper-body injury. Once April rolls around we can start expecting a return.

from All About Sports https://dobberhockey.com/hockey-home/injury-ward/injury-ward-karlsson-edler-kadri-letang-hart-hall/

0 notes

kimklaneusa · 6 years

Text

The Age of Influence Online

In 2005 Martin Geddes asked me to outline how Nokia could use bloggers to help properly introduce their upcoming line of smartphones, dubbed the "N Series" to overcome the challenges faced by their USA Country Comms team in the USA and Global Comms worldwide. In the past they had tried to work with bloggers and never got past the starting gate I was told.

Over a chat I outlined the program, and a day later presented the program to Nokia Global Comms lead charged with the N Series rollout. The program, simply named "The Nokia Blogger Relations Program" became a runaway hit six months later when we launched it. It was such a hit, the Washington Post credited it with changing Nokia's fortunes.

Back then, metrics like we have today wasn't available. There was no Twitter and Facebook was just getting going. My hand picked group of "bloggers" included the likes of Om Malik, who then was GigaOm, Michael Arrington, who was TechCrunch, Rich Tehrani of TMCNet, Jeff Pulver, Kevin Tofel and the late James Kendrick of JK On the Run, Matt Miller of Palm Solo, now with ZD Net, Alec Saunders who had launched Windows Mobile at Microsoft and others like them.

Unlike today, where social media managers use data, I relied on my sports era training of how to find the right players and volunteer leaders to help grow the Philadelphia Flyers amateur hockey communities presence.

Stats like webtraffic wasn't really a factor. Instead I looked for those who could provide insight, perspective and opinion surrounding the devices. I also looked for passion in their writing, and a fundamental apsect of their work life. They had to have experience with some smartphone. Back then it was either a Palm Pilot, a Blackberry or a Windows Mobile devices.

Today, data like number of followers on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram are how decisions are made, and in turn a lot of money is wasted on targets who will never buy the product or use the service. In the social influencer world there are three types of influencers:

Those who are all about New and Shiny - they simply reflect what they've been told by the company behind the product or service. Often the coverage is based on a news release, a photo or a short statement. Rarely is their any hands on experience and almost never is their factual comparative reporting, as too many companies fail to let the media have long term, unfettered access to a product or service. In the Nokia program we simply said to the bloggers to return the devices whenever they wanted to. We followed a similar approach with Boingo where we provided test accounts that were not supposed to expire though sometimes they did and we would reactivate them almost immediately. Most of what you read in high traffic news sites are using this approach.

Second is Release and Review this is where the actual service or product is provided under embargo, or post launch to reviewers for the purpose of detailing the many features and benefits. The music world or books were great example of this years ago, and in the days or real media, restaurant critics, many who were unknown on sight, would honestly provide a comparative critique and offer the kind of detail that helped buyers and customers make informed decisions. A great example is Kevin Tofel, a long time friend, peer and colleague (I was the intermediary who suggested to Om Malik that GigaOm purchase JK on The Run.) Kevin's recent review of the Pixel Slate is a fine example of a targeted review by a well informed expert. When you compare his review vs. those from general market tech reporters who have larger audiences you see why Kevin's the go to guy for Chromebooks and Slates. Many of the other reviewers have never touched a Pixelbook or whose experience was for a week or two. This goes back to why in 2005 we aimed for smartphone using bloggers to be who received the Nokia devices whenever possible.

The third and most important group are those who demonstrated their blogging provide what we nicknamed IPO for Insight, Perspective and Opinion. That meant long form writing, not short, simple, thin and unimaginative reporting. This allowed for the kind of coverage that people like Oliver Starr, Tofel, Miller, Malik, Pulver, Tehrani, Arrington all were providing their audiences. The IPO blogger or influencer also have what the release and review and new and shiny influencers don't have. Deep experience and subject matter expertise.

Today, influencer relations is not about quality for many, especially, those not versed in direct marketing vs. digital marketing. It's why social media managers who never learned about TRPs (target rating points) vs. Ratings often buy their influencers based on mass media numbers - like the number of followers, vs. the right people who are followed. The Kevin Tofel example is key here. His numbers are far lower than CNET, TechCrunch or The Verge, but his knowledge about Chromebooks is far richer and his opinion is based more on deeper insight, and a far more experienced perspective.

What This Means

Twitter is more akin these days to the envelopes full of coupons that comes in the mail. 99% of what you see is from businesses or people you would never do business with unless the deal arrived at exactly the time you needed it as most expire a few weeks later.

Instagram is like a glossy magazine of the past that you subscribed to and has "ads" from the places you shop, or want to shop in. When you start to follow influencers (i.e people you don't know and who surely don't know you) this is an example of vicarious living, much like the glossy magazines like US and People were or what watching TMZ or ET provide. The feeling of being an insider in Hollywood or New York when you live in, say Iowa (no offense to Iowans).

Facebook started out similar to a mailing list where friendship was the common thread. It has in some ways replaced your personal address book and phone as you can connect, keep tabs and communicate with your friends. It was supposed to be only about your friends, but has become a home of businesses too who use your friends relationship as currency to get you to follow them. With LIKES related to what your friends approve of being shared to you, very specific geotargeting and more, Facebook had the right idea with its core idea, as its cap of 5000 friends limits overreach. Unfortunately, Facebook let the genie out of the bottle and the more they add in ads paid for by businesses augmented by promoted content, or what we used to call "the advotorial," the less meaningful the content has in value, and likes become nothing more than a checkbox. Checkins are meaningful to Facebook. It's the content surrounding the checkin that is meaningful to your friends. Unfortunately, Facebook's search relevance is not really that good, eliminating the value of a historical post to your friends.

Linked In has always been the most restrictive to marketing, so beyond the InMail offers from people you don't know, LinkedIn level of control was enough to keep the excess marketing to a minimum. That's why LinkedIn has always been a higher value service for influence as the longer form seeking audience. Think of LinkedIn like what was directory assistance or the White Pages directory with additional content about people you know, want to know or used to know.

Review Sites/Blogs/Personal Websites once you get past the pay for player, the bloggers who are paid to write, or produce videos for product and service companies, you'll find deeper insight and better advice. For example, the Costco Wine Blog is a great site for wine buyers who shop at the wholesale club. Costco permits it to use their name, because its not harmful to the brand. If anything it provides an outsider opinion on what's only found on their shelves. It highlights only the best wines based on real tastings of the wines, not simply, the fact that they are sold there.

Sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp in theory are valuable, but only to a point. They are helpful in researching what's where or who's who. Unfortunately, the content is user contributed, making the authority value rather low. In essence they are more like the almost defunct Yellow Pages directory ads.

Each social media approach has value, but as a pioneer in social media marketing, too much of what was advertising dollars are being spent on mass audience, where if you reach a large enough audience you'll get some traffic and in turn some customers. Today, Social Media today is too much like Mass Media of the past. It needs more.

Smart social media management means taking the approachs of direct marketing first, so if you effectvely target the right influencers from the start, then you don't need the mass part at the start, but after you've built the quality content that's real.

from News & Updates https://andyabramson.blogs.com/voipwatch/2018/12/the-age-of-influence-online.html

0 notes

dorothydelgadillo · 7 years

Text

Monthly Web Development Update 3/2018: Service Workers, Building A CDN, And Cheating At Design

Service Worker is probably one of the most misrepresented technologies we currently have. When I hear people talking about it, the topic almost always revolves around serving an app when a user is offline. However, Service Worker can do so much more than that, and every week I come across new articles that show how powerful the technology really is.

This month, for example, we can learn how to use Service Worker for cross-tab messaging and to load off requests into the background with the Background Sync API. I think the toolset we now have in our browsers already allows us to build great experiences regardless of the network state. Now it’s up to us to make the experiences so great that users truly love them. And that’s probably the hardest part.

News

Microsoft announced that support for Variable Fonts is coming in EdgeHTML 17. This means that all major browser vendors are now working on implementing variable fonts into their software.

The latest Adobe XD Update brings a Photoshop and Sketch integration, so you can now open .psd and .sketch files, copy symbols between documents, and style grouped elements.

Chrome 65 is out, now shipping with the CSS Paint API, the Server Timing API, and support for display: contents (which is already built into Firefox and Safari as well). This article explains the new features in detail.

Great news: The nginx server now supports HTTP/2 Push in the mainline release 1.13.9 (not stable yet).

Sketch 49 brings prototyping as native functionality.

Webpack 4 was released and brings along build performance improvements of up to 98% and easier configuration.

Sketch 49 has arrived, and with it comes the new Prototyping in Sketch feature which lets you see the entire flow in action. (Image credit)

Getting the process just right ain't an easy task. That's why we've set up 'this-is-how-I-work'-sessions — with smart cookies sharing what works really well for them. A part of the Smashing Membership, of course.

Explore features →

General

Ed Ellson examined Chrome’s Background Sync API and the retry strategy it uses to perform a request. By allowing synchronization in the background after a first attempt has failed, the API helps us improve the browsing experience for users who go offline or are on unstable connections.

UI/UX

Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger share seven practical tips for cheating at design which we can apply directly. Strategies for clearer interfaces are also included.

Vivian Zhang explores the importance of designing for human working memory and shares reasons why our designs should reduce cognitive loads.

Use color and weight to create visual hierarchy instead of size is only one of the seven practical tips for cheating at design that Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger share. (Image credit)

Security

With GraphQL you can query exactly what you want whenever you want. This is amazing for working with an API but also has complex security implications. Instead of asking for legitimate, useful data, a malicious actor could submit an expensive, nested query to overload your server, database, network, or all of these. To prevent this from happening, Max Stoiber shows us how we can secure the GraphQL API in our projects.

Privacy

WebKit is introducing the Storage Access API. The new API targets one of the major issues with Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP): Identifying users who are logged in to a first-party service but view content of it embedded on a third party (YouTube videos on a blog, for example). The Storage Access API allows third-party embeds to request access to their first-party cookies when the user interacts with them. A good solution to protect user privacy by default and allow exceptions on request.

Web Performance

Janos Pasztor built his own Content Delivery Network because he thinks it can be a better solution than using existing third parties. The code for the CDN of his personal website is now available on Github. A nice web performance article that looks at common solutions from a different angle.

A year after Facebook’s announcement to broadly use Cache-Control: Immutable, Paul Calvano examined how widespread its usage is on the web — apart from the few big players. Interesting research and it’s still sad to see that this useful performance tool is used so little. At Colloq, we use it quite a lot, which saves us a lot of traffic and load on our servers and enables us to serve a lot of pages nearly instantly to recurring users.

Global stats for the custom CDN that Janos Pasztor built. (Image credit)

HTML & SVG

Scott Jehl wrote about swapping images with the sizes attribute without any JavaScript magic. A nice reminder of how powerful sizes and srcset are when combined.

JavaScript

Addy Osmani wrote up the fundamentals of loading third-party JavaScript. The guide takes privacy, security and performance problems into account.

Jad Joubran shares how to run fetch in a Web Worker to offload it from the main thread into its own. This could be a useful experiment for tasks where expensive requests are triggered, and maybe even at regular intervals.

James Milner shares how we can use a Service Worker to send messages between browser tabs that are in the same domain scope.

CSS

Sara Soueidan explains the difference between CSS Grid’s auto-fill and auto-fit.

Jens Oliver Meiert’s new article “We write CSS like we did in the 90s, and yes, it’s silly” is a thought-provoking piece that shows that despite more tooling and conventions, we fail to improve how we write CSS. This is not about writing CSS in Javascript or a class naming convention but more about how our tools work and how we try to optimize things while keeping the bigger picture intact.

Preethi Sam shares various tricks on how to create knockout text effects with pure CSS. Interesting to see how many different techniques we have nowadays to create such effects.

Accessibility

Stefan Judis collected good and useful accessibility resources.

Heydon Pickering wrote about building inclusive notifications, not only from a technical perspective but the user experience point of view. This resource gives useful advice for designing notifications, what content to include, and how and when to present them to users.

Harris Schneiderman explains how to create an accessible list reordering component.

Vox Media shared their accessibility guidelines. A great interactive checklist we can use to confirm that we did our job correctly.

The Accessibility Checklist helps build accessibility into your process no matter your role or stage in a project. (Image credit)

Work & Life

This week I read an article by Alex Duloz, and his words still stick with me: “When we develop a new application, when we post content on the Internet, whatever we do that people will have access to, we should consider just for a minute if our contribution adds up to the level of dumbness kids/teenagers are exposed to. If it does, we should refrain from going live.” The truth is, most of us, including me, don’t consider this before posting on the Internet. We create funny things, share funny pictures and try to get fame with silly posts. But in reality, we shape society with this. Let’s try to provide more useful resources and make the consumption of this more enjoyable so young people can profit from our knowledge and not only view things we think are funny. “We should always consider how teenagers will use what we release.”

The MIT OpenCourseWare released a lot of free audio and video lectures. This is amazing news and makes great content available to broader masses.

Jake Knapp says great work requires idealism and cynicism and has strong arguments to back up this theory. An article worth reading.

There’s an important article on how unhappiness has grown in America’s population since around the year 2000. It reveals that while income inequality might play a role, the more important aspect is that young people who use a lot of digital media are unhappier than those who use it only up to an hour a day. Interestingly, people who don’t use digital media at all, are unhappy, too, so the outcome of this could be that we should try to use digital media only moderately — at least in our private lives. I bet it’ll make a big difference.

Following the theory of Michael Bradley, projects don’t necessarily need a roadmap for success. Instead, he suggests to create a moral compass that points out why the project exists and what its purpose is.

Going Beyond…

Why do we forget most of what we read and watch? Jason Kottke tries to find answers.

Anton Sten reminds us of wise words from Apple CEO Tim Cook: “You have to make sure that you’re focused on the thing that matters.” We can not only apply that to business but also to our own lives: Focus on things that really matter, and embrace them.

We hope you enjoyed this Web Development Update. The next one is scheduled for April 13th. Stay tuned.

from Web Developers World https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/03/monthly-web-development-update-3-2018/

0 notes