#my favorite corporate stooge

[allonsos-evil-lair]

Final Space

I finished watching the series a month or so ago, but I wanted to join my voice in praise of Final Space. I based this on a poster for the original Star Wars

Sadly, once again I discover a great new show only after it has been cancelled and given a cliffhanger ending (I seem to have a penchant for that).

I love this show! I has not one, not two, but three! of my favorite things to see in stories:

1. A guy become a better person through the pursuit/influence of the woman that he loves

2. Guys being best friends and supporting each other

3. Good dads! And this show has it so nice they did it twice!

Bonus points for the found family trope and for David Tennant, too!

Final Space is fantastic and I hope that whichever corporate stooge chose to cancel it suffers lifelong regret for that heinous decision.

[t-tex-edwards]

THE STASH DAUBER

RANTS OF AN UNRECONSTRUCTED MUSIC GEEK WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12, 2022

https://stashdauber.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-nervebreakers-face-up-to-reality.html

The Nervebreakers' "Face Up to Reality"

[This time it's personal. My second most anticipated release of the millennium (after the Peter Laughner box) is here. I'm not going to review it, because I wrote the liner notes, which are reproduced in full below, including the part that wouldn't fit on the jacket. To say these guys are important to me would be an understatement. If my drummer from college hadn't seen them open for the Sex Pistols, I might not have moved from New York to Texas. Between 1978 and 1981, I saw them more times than any other band besides the Juke Jumpers. Mike Haskins remains my guitar hero, and Barry Kooda my human being hero. Bob Childress once surprised me with a message on the RadioShack corporate net after I'd written something about them online. My wife and I once made a pilgrimage to Austin to see Tex Edwards play a bar gig. And I'm proud to say that Carl Giesecke once played sleighbells on "I Wanna Be Your Dog" with Stoogeaphilia. But enough about me. I've got to go listen to this again.

]Think of this record as a follow-up that took a while to emerge.

It was 1980, 40 years ago as I write this, when the Nervebreakers -- who’d bossed the nascent Dallas punk scene from its inception, opened for every punk/”new wave” touring act that passed through Big D (Ramones, Sex Pistols, Clash, Police, Boomtown Rats), and made the pages of Rolling Stone via the image of guitarist Barry Kooda with a fish in his mouth onstage at the Pistols show – recorded their sole long player, We Want Everything!, which then took 14 years to make it onto vinyl.

The Nervebreakers coalesced in 1975 when Kooda, a junior college theater major back from Army service in Korea, managed to insinuate himself into the “arty rock band” Mr. Nervous Breakdown, formed by his high school best friend, guitarist Mike Haskins, with fellow record store employee Thom “Tex” Edwards. Haskins and Edwards bonded over their mutual appreciation for the Raspberries’ combination of tuneful songcraft and rock crunch. Drummer Carl Giesecke was a moonlighting symphony percussionist, while bassist Bob Childress, who’d joined after the Ramones show, held the distinction of having seen both the Stooges and the New York Dolls every night for a week at Richard’s in Atlanta while attending Georgia Tech.

Onstage, they had a formidable presence, honed over years of four-set gigs, with frontman Edwards draped rakishly over the mic stand, Kooda in his Army helmet and pistol belt, Haskins looking like Donnie Osmond’s axe-slinging twin, Childress bouncing around like the Uberfan who got to join his favorite band, and Giesecke pounding out a solid pulse. Their repertoire included covers as diverse as We Five’s “You Were On My Mind,” George Jones’ “The Race Is On,” and the Troggs’ “Strange Movies.” More to the point, they penned potent originals: “Hijack the Radio,” “Girls Girls Girls Girls Girls,” “My Girlfriend Is a Rock.” Haskins and Edwards were the main writers, with occasional contributions from Kooda, but drummer Giesecke claims credit for their best known song.

When the sessions for We Want Everything! were complete, Haskins and Childress left to form Bag O’ Wire, while the Nervebreakers recruited replacements for an East Coast tour, after which the band folded. Edwards and Kooda followed different musical directions, while Giesecke toured with Roky Erickson (whom the Nervebreakers had backed in 1979).

Fast forward to 2008, when the Nervebreakers reconvened in Haskins’ home studio to record some songs they’d never gotten around to documenting back when. The energy and excitement of the band in its heyday were still in ample supply, along with tunefulness, crunch, and sardonic wit. Highlights include the title track’s snaky rifferama, the leg-twitching rockabilly of “Just Yawn,” the splenetic snarl of “Don’t Wanna Be Used,” and the sprightly punk-country of “I Don’t Wanna Hold Your Hand.” Kooda penned the ennui anthem “Wake Me Up,” and co-wrote the dance-craze theme “They Were Doing the Pogo.” The closing triptych of “It’s Obvious,” “Breaking Down,” and “I’d Rather Die” provides a rousing conclusion to a rockin’ set of tunes that’s long overdue, but right on time.

POSTED BY STASHDAUBER AT 1:30 PM

[mindstriker]

my blorbos from my shows (all fandoms edition)

blorbo (favorite character, character I think about the most):

Really varies, but at the moment, it's definitely Timothy Lawrence from Borderlands (my beloved identity crisis in progress who has consumed over 42 thousand bucks in scotch, and simultaneously cries over cute cat images and shoots someone point blank.)

scrunkly (my “baby”, character that gives me cuteness aggression, character that is So Shaped)

I don't know about "my baby" per se, but Mortality from The Walten Files is one hell of a Shaped Bastard and I feel Cool Design Aggression every time I see them. They please my ape brain.

scrimblo bimblo (underrated/underappreciated fave)

Patricia Tannis, from Borderlands! I absolutely love her despite not being a fan of BL3 making her a siren, and it pisses me off how little fandom content there is for her </3 she's so funny and the way she slowly grows closer to the Crimson Raiders will never cease to be endearing to me. I want the best for her.

glup shitto (obscure fave, character that can appear in the background for 0.2 seconds and I won’t shut up about it for a week)

Rouxls Kaard from Deltarune, love that unhinged puzzleman father figure. I need more content of him naow he's my favourite.

poor little meow meow (“problematic”/unpopular/controversial/otherwise pathetic fave)

OHHHOHO Definitely Katagawa Jr. from Borderlands. Look, the guy's a shithead but HE IS MY SHITHEAD AND I LOVE HIM AND WISH HE HAD THE CHANCE TO GET A REDEMPTION ARC/ JUST BE IN THE GAME FOR LONGER BECAUSE HE DESERVED MORE CONTENT. He had the potential to be So Well Written even if he wasn't a great guy, and he was done dirty. RIP you hedonistic corporate stooge with a dehumanizing barcode tattoo.

(can you tell my autistic ass is hyperfixated on him right now? ;) )

horse plinko (character I would torment for fun, for whatever reason)

...I'm so sorry, but definitely Randy Jade from Dialtown. I'm definitely attached to him n' want better for that funky little disaster man, because it would be super cool to see him happy, but ALSO I'm going to put him in the horse plinko machine and laugh and nobody can stop me.

If he fell over and cried I would be stuck between ":(" and ceaseless mirth for at least 5 seconds before helping him up.

eeby deeby (character I would send to superhell)

I would pick Max from Sam and Max up by his ears and hurtle him into superhell because I think he would have a hell of a time there. (adoringly.)

[maxwell-grant]

Vincenzo: The Gentleman Villain Reborn

Long before there were loudmouth buff guys in spandex, there was the gentleman villain.

There once was a time when the gentleman villain, whether a gentleman thief in the Raffles or Lupin mold, or murderous arch-criminals like Fu Manchu and Fantomas, organizations like Les Vampires, and even in-between figures like Rocambole and Judex, was the coolest thing in the pop culture block. The figures right around the corner of Baker Street, when Nick Carter and Sexton Blake and any billion old serial detectives weren’t quite cutting it. Their time was not to last long in the spotlight, as the pulp heroes consolidated domain in the 30s and then the superheroes took over, but every now and then, they return in various forms, never fully gone. But I’d dare say I’d never seen a gentleman villain story quite so bold, so modern, so dynamic and so gloriously over-the-top in pride over it’s existence, until I began watching Vincenzo.

Vincenzo is BADASS and I don’t use the term lightly. Not just the titular character, but the show itself. It’s currently a couple episodes short of the finale and you should stop everything you’re doing or watching and go watch Vincenzo. It’s been an utterly glorious ride from beginning to end with no shortage of great characters, terrific writing, great relationships and jaw-dropping moments as every episode succeeds in topping each other in WOW HOLY SHIT factor. It’s a shot of adrenaline and storytelling excellence to the eyeballs and you don’t have anything better to be doing right now than watching this.

I mentioned a while ago that Black was a show that, besides being also terrific in quality, captured my interest as a Shadow fan specifically because I saw in Black what I believe is the heart of The Shadow as a character: an embodiment of evil, motivated and created and warped by social catastrophe and strife, set loose to punish true evil in order to protect humanity. In that regard, if Black is where I find the heart of The Shadow, Vincenzo is where I find the spirit of what I like about The Shadow as a series: Cathartic urban fairytales where an extraordinary agent of change, armed with incredible cunning, sleight-of-hand and combat skills, rises above a dark background to command a folk brigade of ordinary people who reveal themselves to be extraordinary through their newfound purpose, to right the wrongs of society’s predators, by being better at their tactics than they are and turning their tools against them. 

I’m gonna spoil it a bit under the cut but please go watch it. I cannot praise this show enough and I’ll do my best to try.

Vincenzo centers around the titular character, Vincenzo Cassano, an Italian lawyer who works for the mafia as a consigliere, adopted by it’s Don at the age of eight. After the death of the Don and an attempted betrayal by his son, Vincenzo flees to Seoul and ends up taking residence at a ramshackle building called Geumga Plaza. Geumga Plaza is the hiding place of a gigantic stash of gold hidden by one of Vincenzo’s former clients, and he intends to retrieve it to rebuild his life somewhere else. Naturally, not only is the hidden room completely impenetrable, but the building is occupied. by residents who are being forced out of it by criminals working for the Babel corporation, which intends to take possession of the building. And thus, Vincenzo has to put his skills into working out progressively bigger problems, as his efforts to uncover the gold turn into a fight against Babel and it’s lawyers, as the problems take on bigger and bigger proportions. 

Vincenzo’s got a lot of what you’d expect from a k-drama at first glance. The leading man is a dashing young man, the leading lady is headstrong and stubborn, you see their romance coming a mile away and they take their damn time getting there, there’s emotional backstories that take a long time to be revealed, lots of wacky side characters and comedy interspersed with the darkest moments, a focus on corporate corruption, and so on. But it’s got an intrusion of elements brought by Vincenzo’s inclusion, such as mob drama, tonal and cultural imbalance, and the gentleman villain tropes that Vincenzo brings, as the catalyst of change whose antics backflip through action hero, romantic hero, super hero and super villain, cunning puppetmaster and gun-toting warrior alike, and start to have an effect on the world around him. His allies become stronger, more determined and effective, and the villains grow smarter and more horrid as they desperately try to avoid their own downfalls.

On paper, Vincenzo is almost a textbook example of how to craft a villain protagonist. He’s a mysterious foreigner with a hidden past and incredible skills who shows up uninvited in “our” world, who starts terrorizing and manipulating people into doing his bidding. He’s got a hotheaded and foolish investigator chasing after his every move, and frequently employs misdirection and sleight-of-hand to fool the authorities. He commits crimes and employs underhanded methods in the service of stamping out people worse than himself. He never really makes any claim of being a hero and actively rejects the notion he’s fighting for justice, but instead states he’s doing it as a matter of principle. One of the characters early on even states he gives off the vibe of a movie villain, even Vincenzo himself tells Hong Cha-Young, the female lead, that he’s teaching her how to be a proper villain. In another series, Vincenzo would be the hypercompetent sidekick to the main villain, or secretly the main villain, the lone badass that the action hero would have a tough fight against before defeating and moving on. But Vincenzo does not allow himself to be dismissed so easily. 

On the first episode, when we’re introduced to him in Italy, he’s painted as the badass to end all badasses. But the minute he arrives in Seoul, he falls for a trick at the airport and is mugged by two cabbies, and has to walk around penniless and without dignity, shouting curses in Italian that nobody understands. He has to sleep in a broken down apartment, his “taking a steamy shower with classical music playing” fanservice scene keeps being interrupted because the shower doesn’t work, and a pigeon chattering outside his window keeps ruining his sleep. 

The tenants of the building are all introduced as varying levels of unsympathetic and useless, or downright creepy. The tailor screws up his favorite suit, the chef who claims to have studied in Italy is a total fraud, there’s tenants who scare us by passing as ghosts and zombies, and Hong Cha-Young is introduced as an unlikable stooge for Babel. Vincenzo is a villain protagonist who is forced out of his grand mafia epic film, where he conducts business around lavish manors while classical music plays, and stumbles onto a korean drama, a world that operates by different rules and where no one has any reason to take him seriously at first, and gradually finds out that the difference between both worlds is not as big as he’d imagined.

It’s only at the very end of the first episode, when the neighborhood gangsters show up to terrorize the tenants, that Vincenzo starts to kick ass again, and he has not stopped so far. In fact, not just him, ALL of the tenants have gradually started kicking ass with him. Hong Cha-Young severs all connections to Babel and proves to be, as his main partner in crime, just as cunning, twice as driven, and three times as batshit and kooky. The tailor who ruined his suit turns out to be an ex-gang member capable of fending off groups of thugs with only his scissors. The creepy piano girl reveals herself a hacking genius, the zombie impersonators become incredible actors, the failed wrestler and badass wannabe becomes his most active field agent along with his equally strong wife, the chef improves his cooking and lends his restaurant as a meeting center, all of the characters, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM gradually become incredible, competent, resourceful people, really no different than they were before, it just took a little courage and pushing. 

The headstrong and foolish agent pursuing Vincenzo becomes 100% smitten with him and quickly becomes one of his greatest allies. Even the neighborhood gangsters, after being left to die by Babel and forced to start anew, quickly become some of his most loyal allies, and gradually redeem themselves in the eyes of the tenants to the point they become friends. In departing from his old family, Vincenzo forms a new one, even if never by his intention. They even all get matching suits.

This incredibly potent, human core surrounding the antics of an extraordinary figure of action is part of what used to make the Agents of The Shadow such a special, meaningful and beloved part of the series, and something every adaptation since then has been 100% poorer for neglecting. But Vincenzo does it, and does it right. I could watch a billion adventures with these people and never get sick of them. 

Vincenzo is a slick, modern take on the gentleman villain that takes many of it’s oldest conventions and provides blueprints for making them work in modern times. His plans often take a performance art-edge as he employs tactics both old-fashioned and modern, like using social media to stage an event in front of the Plaza so the bulldozers set to demolish it won’t be able to pass, or copying files and passing them to his police contact while keeping the real ones when said police contact inevitably betrays him. The tenants put all of their skills to use, no matter how unusual or seemingly useless. Every episode lays the groundwork for a smashing finale where all of the threads come together and we bare witness to a grand tapestry of karmic retribution.

The villains themselves are no slouch, and also have that modern edge that gradually ramps up. They stage discreet assassinations involving gas leaks and watches meant to burst into flames. They stack the deck impossibly against all characters. They employ masked goons by the dozens, armies of lawyers to smudge any connections between themselves and their actions, and every sector of society in covering them, from journalists publishing pro-Babel propaganda to police commissioners. The assistant of the main villain does zumba classes amidst ordering assassinations, and is often likened to a snake and a witch with her "Crystal Ball” (the name she uses for ordering assassin contacts by the phone), complete with a cowardly, scheming assistant she bullies at every turn. The CEO of Babel has a dual nature not out of place in a Jekyll & Hyde/Dorian Grey kind of story. 

The main villain is often painted as a slasher villain backed by massive corporate power, murdering people with hockey equipments and even outright named “Jason” at one point, with a tense string theme song accompanying his deeds. The show hides the villain at plain sight by using one of the most familiar set-ups of romantic dramas and the tension never stops even after he’s revealed. 

Mobster films tend to paint an idealized version of it’s protagonists, not necessarily because of a genuine love or interest with mobsters (I mean, it really goes without saying that real life mobsters are obviously not admirable figures), but out of a sense of displaying a “this is what it could be” fantasy, a fantasy where the mafioso is a dark hero who will still ultimately do the right thing and stick up for the little guy, in a similar way to how superheroes often function as police officers except, y’know, actually dedicated to protecting people. 

Vincenzo does go to great lengths to address the imbalance of putting such a dark figure as it’s hero, through showing how the situation can only be addressed by the intrusion of a figure such as Vincenzo. There’s a scene where Vincenzo and Hong proceed to explain extremely succintly to their cop ally why the “bad apples” argument is horseshit.  One of the show’s characters, someone who’s spent his entire life being the best person he could, and dedicating himself 110% percent to fighting evil even at the expense of connecting with his own family, someone who absolutely should be the hero to take down Babel, admits shortly before dying that it wasn’t enough, that it was never going to be enough, and that what the situation calls for isn’t a hero, but a monster. That monster being Vincenzo, who is not only powerful and monstrous, but commands the loyalty of people high and low class alike, criminals and law enforcement agents, to fight Babel. In his words, “the ultimate monster”, something even the world’s biggest badass cannot defeat by himself. 

On most other set-ups, Vincenzo would be pretty unmistakably the villain. But here, when he’s set up against a starkly realistic depiction of how corporations actually function in our world, depicts that Vincenzo’s ability to clear his way through goons John Wick-style is nowhere near enough, and to that end, he’s gonna have to fight impossible battles using his brains and his allies. And in the end, he defeats them, time and time again, and proves that they were not that impossible after all. 

One can only hope he’s on to something.

Oh yeah and THE PIGEON BY HIS WINDOW ALSO KICKS ASS and I will not explain how, just watch the show, I can’t do it justice no matter how much I talk about it.

[princesssarisa]

Top 12 Snow Whites, Wicked Queens, Princes, and Seven Dwarfs

These are my favorites of all the leading performers in the various screen adaptations of Snow White. I've listed them in chronological order because it's too hard to rank them in exact order of preference.

Maybe later I'll post exactly what I like about each of them, as well as the names of the "honorable mentions," whom I also liked in the roles but don't rank quite as highly as these people.

Snow White

*Marguerite Clark (1916 silent film)

*Disney animation/voice of Adriana Caselotti (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937)

*Carol Heiss (Snow White and the Three Stooges, 1961)

*Zeynep Degirmencioglu (1970 Turkish film)

*Anna Jo Trowbridge (Seattle Children's Theatre, 1987)

*Nicola Stapleton/Sarah Patterson (Cannon Movie Tales, 1987)

*Nippon Animation/voice of Sakiko Tamagawa (Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics, 1989)

*Natalie Minko (Schneewittchen und das Geheimnis der Zwerge, 1992)

*Tatsunoko Productions animation/voice of Yuri Amano (The Legend of Snow White, 1994)

*Laura Berlin (Sechs auf einen Streich, 2009)

*Lily Collins (Mirror, Mirror, 2012)

*Tijan Marei (Märchenperlen: Schneewittchen und der Zauber der Zwerge, 2019)

The Queen

*Disney animation/voice of Lucille La Verne (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937)

*Patricia Medina (Snow White and the Three Stooges, 1961)

*Suna Selen (1970 Turkish film)

*Herta Kravina (1971 Swiss/German short)

*Vanessa Redgrave (Faerie Tale Theatre, 1987)

*Diana Rigg (Cannon Movie Tales, 1987)

*Nippon Animation/voice of Kazue Komiya (Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics, 1989)

*Gudrun Landgrebe (Schneewittchen und das Geheimnis der Zwerge, 1992)

*Miranda Richardson (Snow White: The Fairest of Them All, 2001)

*Sonja Kirchberger (Sechs auf einen Streich, 2009)

*Charlize Theron (Snow White and the Huntsman, 2012)

*Nadeshda Brennicke (Märchenperlen: Schneewittchen und der Zauber der Zwerge, 2019)

The Prince

*Creighton Hale (1916 silent film)

*Disney animation/voice of Harry Stockwell (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937)

*Edson Stroll (Snow White and the Three Stooges, 1961)

*Richard Browne (Snow White Live at Radio City Music Hall, 1980)

*Rex Smith (Faerie Tale Theatre, 1984)

*James Ian Wright (Cannon Movie Tales, 1987)

*Alessandro Gassmann (Schneewittchen und das Geheimnis der Zwerge, 1992)

*Tatsunoko Productions animation/voice of Takehito Koyasu (The Legend of Snow White, 1994)

*Nicolás Artajo-Kwasniewski (Sechs auf einen Streich, 2009)

*Jamie Thomas King (Grimm's Snow White, 2012)

*Locus Corporation animation/voice of Sam Claflin (Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs, 2019)

*Ludwig Simon (Märchenperlen: Schneewittchen und der Zauber der Zwerge, 2019)

The Seven Dwarfs

*Disney animation/voices of Roy Atwell, Pinto Colvig, Otis Harlan, Billy Gilbert and Scotty Mattraw (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937)

*Arthur Reppert, Jochen Köppel, Georg Irmer, Fred Delmare, Heinz Scholz, Willi Scholz and Horst Jonischkan (Schneewittchen, 1961)

*Mr. Magoo/voice of Jim Backus (The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo: Little Snow White, 1965)

*Billy Curtis, Phil Fondacaro, Daniel Frishman, Kevin Thompson, Lou Carry, Peter Risch and Tony Cox (Faerie Tale Theatre, 1984)

*Douglas R. Mumaw, Floyd van Buskirk, Peggy Platt, David Whitehead, Edward Christian, Sena Merrill and Jeanne Lee (Seattle Children's Theatre, 1987)

*Billy Barty, Mike Edmonds, Ricardo Gil, Malcolm Dixon, Gary Friedkin, Arturo Gil and Tony Cooper (Cannon Movie Tales, 1987)

*Iwan Sabijak, Igor Sanikow, Nikolai Misyura, Atka Janousková, Imre Schnellert, Janos Petrowski, Atilla Vega and Sándor Köleséri (Schneewittchen und das Geheimnis der Zwerge, 1992)

*Tatsunoko Productions animation/voices of Hiroshi Naka, Junichi Sugawara, Nobuyuki Furuta, Kozo Shioya, Katsume Suzuki, Wataru Takagi and Tetsuya Iwanaga (The Legend of Snow White, 1994)

*Warwick Davis, Michael J. Anderson, Michael Gilden, Mark J. Trombino, Penny Blake, Martin Klebba and Vincent Schiavelli (Snow White: The Fairest of Them All, 2001)

*Danny Woodburn, Martin Klebba, Sebastian Saraceno, Jordan Prentice, Mark Povinelli, Joe Gnoffo and Ronald Lee Clark (Mirror, Mirror, 2019)

*Locus Corporation animation/voices of Sam Claflin, Simon Kassianides, Frederik Hamel, Nolan North and Frank Todaro (Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs, 2019)

*Peter Brownbill, Cem Aydin, Peter Gatzweiler, Jona Bergander, Pavel Ponocny, Michal Túma and Mick Morris Mehnert (Märchenperlen: Schneewittchen und der Zauber der Zwerge, 2019)

@ariel-seagull-wings, @superkingofpriderock, @astrangechoiceoffavourites

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: His Name Is Alive

While Warren Defever’s name is perhaps less recognizable than that of his band His Name Is Alive, he’s also been connected with a seemingly endless array of other projects: Princess Dragon-Mom, Elvis Hitler, ESP Beetles, Control Panel, and far more. This doesn’t get into his recording and production credits for the likes of Michael Hurley, Iggy and the Stooges, and Mdou Moctar. Forever associated with Michigan’s weirdo-underground music scene, Defever has recently been issuing a series of long-buried recordings as His Name Is Alive. In February, the Disciples label released Hope Is a Candle, the third and final volume in the "Home Recordings" trilogy exploring Defever's teenage tape experimentation as well as A Silver Thread (Home Recordings 1979 - 1990), a four-volume collection of many of Defever’s solo home recordings prior to His Name Is Alive releasing their debut album Livonia on 4AD in 1990. In his review of A Silver Thread, Tim Clarke writes “For a collection of home recordings, what’s most striking about this music is how fully realized and carefully executed it sounds, comparable at times to contemporary artists such as Grouper, Benoît Pioulard and Tim Hecker. This is not the 1980s that I remember.”

Defever gives us his “What Else Is New” list, a set of personal snapshots, memories of a life spent in music, warning the reader that “the descriptions don’t always have an obvious correlation to the video, but welcome to my nightmare brain.”

In The Line of Fire

I started performing when I was five. My grandfather was a self-taught musician from Saskatchewan in Western Canada and he showed me and my brothers how to play banjo, guitar and fiddle. One of my earliest memories is having a full size 127 lb. accordion placed onto my lap and my grandmother voicing her disappointment when I refused to play. I did learn slide guitar from her later though. I have many, often terrible, memories of performing at square dances with his band and we would play old timey country music, folk songs, polkas and waltzes. There were also gigs at the trailer park, old folks homes and a convent. Although my grandfather believed that popular music died with Hank Williams in 1953, he still found room in his heart for Lawrence Welk and Slim Whitman.

Meet Me By The Water

By age ten I had a tape recorder and was using it to capture the sounds of nearby lakes, thunderstorms, and my older brothers LP collection played at the wrong speeds. I recently found the cassette, Echo Lake (1983) which features waves crashing onto the beach on the Canadian side of Lake St. Clair but it was recorded right after I got an echo pedal so it’s got a heavy dose of dreamy delay. Tape loops of the next door neighbor raking leaves and shoveling the driveway would be repurposed a few years later as rhythm tracks on the first His Name Is Alive LP, Livonia (4AD, 1990). Detroit in the late 70s and early 80s had totally insane radio and one of the highlights was Met-Ezzthetics, a late night show on WDET hosted by Faruq Z. Bey who also played saxophone in Griot Galaxy. Shortly before his death he played with His Name is Alive and we had a chance to formalize our student-teacher relationship.

Search For Higher Energies

In high school I was studying Bach Chorale harmonization and counterpoint during the day but recording and touring with the band Elvis Hitler at night. The other guys in band were older but at 16 I was a familiar sight at shitty Detroit punk clubs and Hamtramck dive bars, the nerdy teenager reading a book or doing homework sitting at the bar waiting ’til midnight or 1am for our slot to play our hellbilly hits, “It’s A Long Way From Berlin To Memphis,” and “Hot Rod To Hell.” I was still trying to make sense of the post 1953 music scene and when I met the guy with a giant afro and shiny super hero outfit complete with shiny cape I had no idea he was Rob Tyner of the MC5. We released three records before I was twenty one and played shows and toured with Devo, the Dwarves, the Dead Milkmen, Reverend Horton Heat, the Beat Farmers, Helios Creed, Babes In Toyland, the Cro-Mags, Corrosion of Conformity, the Frogs, the Gories, Pussy Galore, the Unsane and way more I can’t remember I was just a kid. It was some kind of education.

You Don’t Have To Go Home But You Can’t Stay Here

When I signed with 4AD I thought I was a composer and they let me write my own bio, so I called His Name Is Alive the work of a “fucked up, irresponsible teenage composer.” I had only been writing music for three years. When I heard “Tom Violence” by Sonic Youth I thought for the first time in my life, “I think I could do that.” In 1988 I made a mixtape with Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, Leadbelly and some of Big Star’s third album and I tried to arrange it like it was an album, then I made my own album in that same shape, it was called I Had Sex With God and I sent it to 4AD. Our first album contained three of the first five pieces of music I had ever written. Within a few years I was playing festivals for contemporary classical composers and new age artists who were thirty or forty years older than me. His Name Is Alive played the Musicas Visuales Festival in Mexico with Harold Budd, Paul Horn and Jorge Reyes. The mayor of the city presented me with a guitar but then dramatically walked out of the theater during our performance realizing he had made a terrible mistake. I remember the surreal moment when from across the room Harold Budd walked in and greeted me as “Mr. Defever.” He had a cold and was sniffling during his set, the audience thought he was crying. I recorded his show and when I got back home to Livonia I added my own guitar to some of his songs and then edited the tapes, looping my favorite parts and editing out the parts I didn’t like, also adding additional layers of reverb and echo. More recently I did a concert in a five hundred year old temple in Japan where the unamplified meditation music never rose above a whisper and the monk had to turn off the furnace because the heat molecules were too loud. The show was recorded and released under the name Mountain Ocean Sun and features Ian Masters and Hitoko Sakai.

Energy Dealer

Both my parents were born in Canada, my mother in Saskatchewan, my father in Ontario. I have dual citizenship as my father was American and my mother had Canadian citizenship. I spent summers, holidays and weekends in a tiny cottage on Lake St. Clair that did not have a telephone and had curtains instead of doors separating the two rooms. Myrt Fortin who lived next door would receive phone calls for my mom, walk over to our place and yell into the window, “Hey wake up your ma, your dad’s on the phone.” My mom took a lot of naps, so she was always asleep when something important was happening. I remember always getting cut on broken glass while swimming in the lake or getting stabbed by one of the neighbors and having to go wake up my mom to take me to the hospital.

Lord I Don’t Believe You Exist

When I was ten my parents sat me down and told me it was time that I got a summer job. There were only two businesses in town, a gas station and a hardware store so I walked up to the hardware store and asked the owner for a job and immediately fell to the ground crying. Completely fell apart. He asked me why I wanted to work in hardware. I didn’t know what to say, I was only ten but I knew not to tell the owner that his store was stupid and I didn’t think he could handle the truth. It turned out he also owned the gas station so that didn’t really work out. Later that summer, I began working for the Pickseed Corporation as corn de-tasseling season was just beginning. All the moms would drop off their kids in the church parking lot in Tecumseh, just outside of Windsor, around 4:30am where an unmarked windowless cargo van was waiting that had cinderblocks and 2'x4' boards instead of benches so they could squeeze in the maximum amount of children. There were three job requirements to work in a cornfield, the child (it was only children, no adults) needed to show up with a baseball hat, a thermos with water and a large black plastic garbage bag. I think this was before sunglasses were invented. Upon arriving at the cornfield, we were separated into pickers and checkers, younger kids each taking a row of corn (a row could extend a mile or more) and a slightly older kid would organize and manage several of the younger kids. In the morning we were instructed to poke two arm holes and a head hole into our garbage bags and put it on like a raincoat because the corn was covered in dew and kids wearing wet clothes would walk slower than dry kids. So almost every day there was a point, usually around 11am when the dew would dry and we would be roasted alive from the summer sun coming down on our ridiculous shiny black plastic outfits. We worked from sun up until sun down. I received three dollars and thirty five cents an hour. For all you city folks, corn is planted in alternating rows of types of corn so that when the top part of the plant is removed, or “de-tasseled,” it can seed or cross-pollinate easily. It’s a terrible job with a high turnover rate and every day I would hear the sound of kids in nearby rows that had given up hope, sat down in the middle of the field and crying for hours. The following year, at age 11, I was promoted from picker to checker, and was put in charge of a group of about ten sixteen year old’s.

Sleep It Off

Mostly I like to record – His Name is Alive has over a hundred releases and I’ve done another fifty records under various names, Control Panel, Warren Michael Defever, ESP BEETLES, ESP SUMMER, Forest People, Infinity People, Jeepers Creepers, Layla al-Akhyaliyya, Mirror Dream, Princess Dragon-Mom, the Dirt Eaters, the Fishcats, the Whales, plus way more I can’t remember probably because the names were so dumb. I’ve recorded about four hundred records for other bands at my house or other studios. I’ve worked on records with Danny Kroha, Ida, Fred Thomas, Elizabeth Mitchell, Wild Belle, Michael Hurley, and when I was a teenager I helped record the first Gories album which was especially unique as I was the junior assistant engineer who helped move their equipment into the dirt floor garage next to the studio where it was decided the acoustics would be way worse. Also, I helped collage about a hundred Destroy All Monsters tapes from the 70s for a couple of their releases which led to remastering a bunch of tapes from the John Sinclair White Panther Party archives. I’ve done remixes for Thurston Moore and Yoko Ono and when Iggy and The Stooges started touring again I got a phone call from Ron Asheton seeing if I would help them record demos for their reunion album with Mike Watt on bass. They wrote the songs together while they were recording in Niagara’s basement sort of simultaneously. Iggy didn’t have a notebook with all his lyric ideas, instead he just sang about whatever happened that day – one song was about the airline losing his luggage, one about ATM machines and another was about reading in a newspaper that Ray Davies of the Kinks had been shot in New Orleans. In the end they weren’t terribly excited by my suggested song titles including “No Shirt” (you know because it’s like “No Fun” plus you know Iggy never wears a shirt) and they didn’t seem to love the mixes that I did that sounded kind of like those crappy Raw Power bootlegs.

Cost Of Living

Two summers ago I recorded an incredible concert by Mdou Moctar live at Third Man Records in Detroit. They’re wild hypnotic Hendrix style jammers who live in the desert. The band didn’t speak much english but I think I was able to communicate to them how excited I was about their amazing fingerpicking and hot guitar solos after the show by screaming and replaying the best solos over and over again and then screaming the word fuzz and pointing at their fingers. It’s insane and having seen them a few times since then with a different drummer and the addition of a bass player, I’m convinced it’s their best album. It’s wild but it’s still not Tchin-tabaraden wedding wild.

Licked By Lions

Jonathan Richman walks into Ethan and Gretchen's studio and asks if I can remove all the rugs, take the acoustic treatments off the walls and strike the baffles which normally separate the instruments, drums and amps, so the room will have the most echo possible, he has also invited about ten friends including Johnny Bee Badanjek the drummer from Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and Mary Cobra from the Detroit Cobras to dance, sing and play percussion in the studio while he records. He has two vocal microphones set up at either end of the room and has brought his own microphones for the drums along with his own desired placement for them. He notices a tamboura near the control room and asks if I know how to play it or if I know how to tune it. Within seconds he’s tuned it and proceeds to sing Indian classical music accompanying himself on tamboura drone for about thirty five minutes. It’s beautiful and very surprising. He asks me if I recorded it, I lie and say no. Later he asks me not to play it for anyone. We record for hours. Some songs are quite long – ten and fifteen minutes, some are medleys of oldies or soft rock hits from the seventies segueing into new songs of his. It’s a confusing session as it’s not clear when songs are starting and ending and he often plays guitar and sings nowhere near a microphone. The distance between him and the microphone seems to have some meaning, there’s some formula to when he chooses to walk away in the middle of a verse but I am unable to determine the secret code. At the end of the session three or four songs are deemed usable, edited and mixed, although, sadly, an attempt at a completely insane and unexpected fuzz guitar solo is left unreleased. (The Harold Budd piece is at the opposite end of this spectrum.)

Calling All Believers

Shortly after Tecuciztecatl was released, I received an email from Dr. James Beacham at CERN inviting us to perform at a series of concerts that would combine experimental music with experimental science at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. He didn’t contact our booking agent, which would be how we generally receive offers for gigs, instead he sent an email to me, which would be how we generally receive crazy messages from our completely insane fans (murderous, delusional, poetic, threatening messages usually). I assumed the invitation was fake or a prank and replied that we would prefer to wait until they had successfully opened a pathway to interspatial dimensions and we’d play on the other side or that if that was unlikely to happen at a convenient time then perhaps we could set up our equipment right on the edge of a mini-black hole and perform as the Earth is being destroyed so we could release the concert film “Live At The End Of The World.” After a few messages back and forth, it was clear that he was legit and I apologized for being such a jerk. Soon I discovered poetry within the language of particle physics as well as a certain beauty in the idea that these scientists have devoted their lives to dreaming, searching and discovering basic principles that connect all things in existence. The song “Calling All Believers” refers to this devotion. “Energy Acceleration” compares the scientists to monastic life in medieval times and mystics trying to find and define the line between this world and the next and at the same time invoking the incredible amounts of energy needed to create the collisions experiments. The Patterns of Light LP was released in 2016 on London London Records and is about interpreting visions of light, trying to find universal truth with whatever tools available, it’s about the search for how everything works, why it works and how it got that way but also about being inspired on a basic level by the way a thing looks and how all your senses take in a thing. A thousand years ago Hildegard Von Bingen was writing about this same thing in letters, songs, medical texts, and had even developed her own language to use in her mystical writings, similar to Magma drummer Christian Vander using his own language for their concept albums or French black metalists Brenoritvrezorkre and Moëvöt.

The Light Inside You

We get a lot of letters from fans, mostly weirdos though. I think it started when we released Song of Schizophrenia, that sort of connected us to a certain demographic I suspect. Here’s a recent typical message we received. “Growing up in Panama City, Mouth By Mouth and Livonia were like passages to other realms. I drank a ton of cough syrup at the time but those albums helped make life more livable. I was about to go to art school for sculpture and graphic design and the textures I heard on those records had actual shapes to them. Most music I knew at that time was flat or linear. I got them on cassette via mail-order from an ad placed in a bmx magazine. Mouth By Mouth arrived just before going to work at the amusement park and I was able to listen to it twice on the way thanks to the never-ending beach traffic. As luck would have it, I worked on “The Abominable Snowman” ride, basically a tilt-a-whirl inside a dome with lots of fog machine action, blue lights, mirrors, and lots of air conditioning. It took about 10 listens that day before it wasn’t as weird as when I first put it on. Maybe it was my bubblegum flavor/robitussin combo slushie on top of no-doz that pulled it all together, but it was probably a weird ride for a lot of vacationing beach tourists and townies when all they really wanted to hear was “Naughty by Nature” by O.P.P. I had no business running those rides at the age of 17 but I really loved how disorienting that ride could be with all the mirrors, the fog, the cold and for the final 90 seconds the ride would go in reverse. I had a buddy named Kevin that did acid at work and would repeatedly run the mini-train off the tracks and all the riders had to walk back through the woods for about a half mile that summer.”

[aion-rsa]

How the Saving Private Ryan Cast Launched a New Generation of Stars

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This article contains spoilers for Saving Private Ryan.

Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) is known for a number of things: the gut-wrenching, visceral terror of its battle scenes (especially the opening landing at Omaha Beach), the shocking way in which bodies are torn to pieces during the course of those battles, the attention to period detail, and a powerful performance by Tom Hanks that rates as one of his finest.

But one thing that the film may not be as widely recognized for is the lineup of young actors who played members of Capt. John Miller’s (Hanks) squad, or soldiers they met along the way as they searched throughout Normandy for the missing Pvt. James Francis Ryan. From Matt Damon to Vin Diesel, Spielberg recruited relatively new faces who were all, in one way or another, either launching their careers outright or just starting to make their mark on Hollywood.

Saving Private Ryan is now considered one of the greatest war movies of all time. Part of that is due to its incredible realism, part of that is due to the skilled direction by Spielberg at the top of his game, and no doubt part of it is thanks to the work of its youthful cast. Let’s look back at who those actors were then, and what they went on to accomplish afterward.

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Matt Damon (Private James Francis Ryan)

Matt Damon was largely unknown until around 1996 when he gained some good critical notices for his role in Courage Under Fire. At the same time, he and childhood pal Ben Affleck got to finally see their screenplay Good Will Hunting filmed, with Damon in the title role. The movie was in rehearsals in Boston when Steven Spielberg — who was shooting some scenes for Amistad there — stopped by the set to visit with Robin Williams, who introduced Spielberg to Damon. That led to Damon getting the title role in Saving Private Ryan. He’s the young soldier than Tom Hanks and company are trying to find — and who must “earn” his ticket home.

By the time Ryan came out in mid-1998, Damon had gone from unknown to star thanks to the success of Good Will Hunting (which arrived in December 1997), and his and Affleck’s Oscar win for Best Original Screenplay instantly became the stuff of award season legend. Damon has stayed a superstar ever since, starring in the Bourne and Ocean’s Eleven franchises, along with other hits like The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Departed, True Grit, Contagion, The Martian, and Ford vs. Ferrari. Next up for Damon is in Stillwater and reteams with Affleck as co-writers and stars in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, both due out later this year.

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Edward Burns (Private Richard Reiben)

Ed Burns had already garnered some attention before landing the role of the feisty, rebellious Pvt. Reiben, one of the few members of Miller’s squad to survive the film. He wrote, produced, directed, and starred in two independent features, The Brothers McMullen and She’s The One, with McMullen in particular earning acclaim and awards (including an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature).

Reiben was Burns’ first role in a major Hollywood production, and he followed that up with parts in films like 15 Minutes (2001), Confidence (2003), Life or Something Like It (2002, and the notoriously bad sci-fi thriller, A Sound of Thunder (2005). He also continued to make his own pictures, including No Looking Back (1998), Ash Wednesday (2002), Newlyweds (2011) and Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies (2019), while also creating, directing and starring in a TV series called Public Morals (2015) that lasted for one season on TNT. Not exactly a household name, Burns has nevertheless remained active and prolific.

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Vin Diesel (Private Adrian Caparzo)

Before being cast as Pvt. Caparzo — the first member of Miller’s squad to die while searching for Ryan — the only credits Vin Diesel had to his name were a short film called Multi-Facial, an uncredited walk-on as an orderly in 1990’s Awakenings, and the tiny 1997 indie release Strays, a semi-autobiographical piece which Diesel wrote, directed, and starred in himself. He was, for all intents and purposes, a complete unknown when he was gunned down by a German sniper in a memorably tragic scene early on in Saving Private Ryan.

Things happened quickly for Diesel after that, as he landed the title voice in The Iron Giant (1999) and launched two franchises back to back: in 2000 he introduced the world to the space criminal Riddick in Pitch Black while 2001 brought the film The Fast and the Furious, not to mention Diesel’s signature character, Dominic Toretto. While his other films since have had varying degrees of success, the Fast and Furious series has turned into one of the biggest box office behemoths of the past decade, with F9 coming this summer. Diesel has also played in the world of comic book movies, voicing Groot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and launching his own superhero film venture with last year’s Bloodshot.

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Paul Giamatti (Sergeant William Hill)

The same sequence that features the death of Vin Diesel’s character also introduces the sardonic, war-weary Sgt. William Hill, played by Paul Giamatti, whose inadvertent collapse of a wall leads to a tense standoff with a hidden group of German soldiers. Before Ryan, Giamatti had bounced around in small film and TV parts for the early part of the ’90s, scoring his breakout role in the 1997 Howard Stern biopic, Private Parts, as radio station program director Kenny “Pig Vomit” Rushton.

After Ryan, Giamatti continued to work steadily and garner more acclaim for outstanding performances in films like Man on the Moon, American Splendor, and Sideways, a movie for which we’re still angry that Giamatti did not receive an Academy Award nomination. He did earn one the following year for his supporting role in Cinderella Man and has continued as one of today’s best working actors in movies like Barney’s Version, Win Win, The Ides of March, 12 Years a Slave, and Private Life, along with his exemplary starring work in TV on John Adams and Billions. He even won an Emmy for playing the United States’ second president.

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Nathan Fillion (Private James Frederick Ryan)

He’s only onscreen for a few minutes, but Nathan Fillion makes a distinct impression as the “wrong” Pvt. Ryan, a soldier with nearly the same name whom Miller and his men come across — only to realize that they have to keep looking. The Canadian-born Fillion first scored some attention in the mid-1990s as Joey Buchanan on the daytime soap One Life to Live (he returned briefly in 2007). Aside from an obscure 1994 film called Strange and Rich, Saving Private Ryan was for all intents and purposes his major motion picture debut.

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Since then, Fillion has worked steadily with his biggest successes coming on TV and in the world of geek culture, where he remains a fan favorite. The Joss Whedon-created sci-fi series Firefly didn’t even last one full season between 2001 and 2002, but has become a cult classic and spawned the movie Serenity (2005). Fillion’s later series, Castle and the currently airing The Rookie, have proven more durable. His other notable film and TV credits include James Gunn’s Slither, Desperate Housewives, Modern Family, Santa Clarita Diet, and Monsters University, while his voice work has also included a recurring role as Green Lantern/Hal Jordan in a number of DC animated films. Next up: more comics-related fun as Floyd Belkin/TDK in Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, and the voice of Wonder Man in Hulu and Marvel’s animated M.O.D.O.K.

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Jeremy Davies (Corporal Timothy Upham)

Jeremy Davies is unforgettable as the terrified, cowardly Cpl. Upham, a nerdy translator who is brought on the mission for his linguistic skills and can only stand paralyzed paralyzed with fear as his fellow soldier Mellish is stabbed to death just up a flight of stairs by a Nazi. Like many of his castmates, Davies kicked around in small acting jobs before garnering acclaim in the 1994 black comedy Spanking the Monkey, which also marked the directing debut of David O. Russell.

Saving Private Ryan was his next big attention-getter and cemented his position as one of the more quirky and compelling character actors in film and TV. Following Ryan, Davies worked in films like Ravenous, Solaris, Secretary, and Rescue Dawn, but has also found success on the small screen in series like Lost, Sleepy Hollow, and Justified. He’s also appeared as Dr. John Deegan in the “Elseworlds” arc of the Arrowverse shows The Flash, Supergirl, and Arrow. We’ll see him next in Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone, based on a story by Joe Hill.

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Giovanni Ribisi (Medic Irwin Wade)

Acting since he was a young child, Giovanni Ribisi already had a substantial career under his belt before playing the doomed medic Wade in Spielberg’s powerful war epic. He had recurring roles in the late 1980s and early 1990s on shows like My Two Dads and The Wonder Years while guesting on a number of other series as well. In the latter half of the ‘90s, he landed parts in movies like That Thing You Do!, Lost Highway, and The Postman, with Ryan easily his highest-profile big screen effort during that time.

After that, Ribisi continued to do character work in movies like Gone in 60 Seconds, Lost in Translation, Cold Mountain, and Public Enemies, before landing the part of the villainous corporate stooge Parker Selfridge in James Cameron’s massively successful and creatively groundbreaking Avatar (2009). He’ll return in Cameron’s upcoming Avatar sequels and has kept busy on the big and small screens, most recently finishing up a three-season run in the title role of the Amazon series Sneaky Pete (fun fact: Sneaky Pete was co-created by Bryan Cranston, who also has a small role in Ryan as one-armed War Department Col. Bryce).

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Barry Pepper (Private Daniel Jackson)

Hailing like Nathan Fillion from Canada, Barry Pepper had just a handful of small credits to his name when he landed the role of the God-fearing but lethal sniper Jackson in Saving Private Ryan. Jackson is perhaps the deadliest weapon in Capt. Miller’s arsenal, although he is eventually killed along with Miller and most of the others during the film’s climactic defense of the bridge in the shattered town of Ramelle.

Pepper probably remains best known for his portrayal of Jackson, but he scored notable roles soon after that in The Green Mile (1999), the TV movie 61* (2001) as baseball legend Roger Maris, and Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2002). He also appeared in the starring role of 2000’s disastrous Battlefield Earth with John Travolta. Pepper’s recent film work has included roles in The Maze Runner franchise and the sleeper horror hit Crawl (2019).

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Adam Goldberg (Private Stanley Mellish)

“Juden,” says Pvt. Stanley Mellish, pointing to himself and the Jewish Star of David he wears around his neck as a stream of German POWs is marched past him. It’s a small but powerful moment in Saving Private Ryan for the defiant, wisecracking Mellish, who’s there to wipe out as many Nazis as he can. In the movie’s climactic battle, he bravely and viciously fights hand to hand with a German soldier before the latter sinks a knife slowly into his chest in one of the film’s most intensely horrifying moments.

Adam Goldberg had already appeared in a number of notable films before Ryan, including Billy Crystal’s Mr. Saturday Night (Goldberg’s 1992 debut), Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), John Singleton’s Higher Learning (1995), and the cult horror classic The Prophecy (1995). Mellish remains perhaps his most famed role, but other standouts like A Beautiful Mind (2001), Déjà Vu (2006), and Zodiac (2007) dot his filmography. He’s guested frequently on TV as well and currently has a regular role as Harry Keshegian opposite Queen Latifah on The Equalizer. He’s also directed three features of his own, recorded four albums of his own music, and has exhibited his work as a photographer.

The post How the Saving Private Ryan Cast Launched a New Generation of Stars appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[ninevoltcolt]

✿

Send a ✿ to my inbox and my muse will fill this out about yours!

A thought about them that they’d never share: “Kinda hot. For a corporate stooge, at least.”

First impression of them: “Corporate. It’s weird that someone who’s clearly a squint would be out on Pandora alone, an’ without a whole gaggle of armed guards- ESPECIALLY at a bandit camp!”

Favorite thing about them: “He’s not Hyperion. Or Atlas. Plus he seems to want whatever that hoverboard-lookin’ thing is, so I can use that.”

Least favorite thing about them: “I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him.”

Hopes for their future relationship: “He’s rich, right? Looks it. Maybe I can convince him to part with some eridium...”

[smokeybrandreviews]

Smokey brand Movie Reviews: Slide

David Fincher is one of my favorite creators. Dude has punched out great cinema over the years. Se7en, Gone Girl; All his work. Interestingly enough, he got his start in the Alien franchise with Alien 3. I think Fincher could have crafted something great but meddling from the top ruined his film. At the time, he couldn't make the movie he wanted because he was brand new, a stooge put in place to finish a corporate cash grab It's f*cked up because I kind of like Alien 3. I liked the potential it had. I may do a proper review on that flick later in life but this one is about the movie that really made me pay attention to Fincher. This one is about his masterpiece, his magnum opus; Fight Club.

The Great

This is a proper, star-making performance from Brad Pitt. If I recall, his clout was on the rise when he got the role of Tyler Durdan but hat he did with this character was truly something special. Durdan is this chaos given form, this anarchist who seethes with raw disdain for society, just below a smarmy surface. His overt confidence belies a truly horrifying genius. You love this dude even though that voice in the back of your head screams that he is dangerous. Tyler Durdan is one of the best written antagonists I have ever seen and Brad Pitt brings this complex, eccentric, force of nature, to the screen with a realism that is often scathingly unsettling.

The Narrator is very interesting. Fight Club is the visual representation of a grown man, having a complete and total mental breakdown; A fact Norton did not miss. Edward Norton pulls off this performance that degrades over the run time. You see the Narrator deteriorate and it's jarring. Norton imbues this decay with a viscerally desperate, almost manic by the end, energy to a character that starts off so tightly wound. By that closing scene, you're as exhausted as The Narrator and that is testament to Norton's ability, for sure.

Last but certainly not least, Marla f*cking Singer. If there was ever a more accurate presentation of my dream girl, I don't know who it could be. Marla is just this broken, nihilistic, sexually liberated, shell of a person. She's freer in ways that I rarely see in people and it's proper endearing to my f*cked brain. Who else do you get to articulate those nuanced eccentricities other than Helena Bonham Carter? HBC has built a career on  the abstract and alienated. Marla was perfect for her and Carter played her perfectly.

This entire cast, man, was absolutely excellent. From Meatloaf's Robert Paulson, to Jared Leto's , and even The Narrator's boss, everyone came through and dropped a tone fitting, scene stealing, performance. Even the extras, one-and-done characters like that waiter recommending to pass on the soup or the detectives who tried to get The Narrator's balls, were awesome.

None of these characters would have been so ably depicted without the outstanding direction of David Fincher. I saw this before I saw Se7en, but after Alien 3 so, going in, I was a little suspect. I was pleasantly surprised by how well put together this movie turned out to be, how naturally it flows, especially considering the context of the narrative. Fight Club probably reads as un-filmable, considering some of the scenes that were captured, so for Fincher to give that much life to the overall plot is a proper masterstroke

Speaking of narrative, the writing in this thing is exception. I mean, some of the dialogue is just ridiculous. The sh*t Marla says, the philosophical nature of Durdan, the way certain situations are framed; It's all brilliant. I mean, who writes, “I haven't been f*cked like that since grade school.” and expects that line to be delivered with a straight face? F*cking outstanding!

Seriously, I can't commend the writing enough. To tell this story, the way it's presented, that script had to have been one of the best in Hollywood for the time. There's no way you pack that much detail in a world without a tight ass focus to pull from.

I love the narrative of this story. Most cats would write it off as little more than a hyper-masculine fantasy or tag on to the very aggressive commentary toward the consumerist mentality of the US, but I just love the underlying exploration of  man, having the most violent mid-life crises, ever. I mean, the dude disassociates from reality, bags the girl of his dreams, becomes who he always wants to be, and it turns out he wants to be the greatest domestic terrorist in history! That sh*t is awesome! Fight Club is also one of the most earnest, endearing, love stories I have ever seen. I mean, Marla and The Narrator's entire relationship is doomed going forward, but they had one helluva honeymoon phase.

The fight choreography in this thing is brutal. I love a good martial arts outing but this ain't that. This is raw, punishing, no frills, face pounding. This is the curb stomp you get into when cats are after you for your J's. This is that panicked, adrenaline filled, fight for your life. There are no fancy spin kicks or one-inch punches or knees delivered from helicopters. No, the is only the hard, wet, slaps of fist to flesh and it's glorious.

This movie is gorgeous. The way it's shot, the scene transitions, the composition of said scenes, the cinematography and frame work; All of it is f*cking exceptional. There is just this grim, filthy, haze over this surreal vision and that malignancy grows as the film progresses. That aggressive corruption is as much a character in this film as Marla or Durdan, themselves.

The Verdict

If you haven't guessed by my unbridled praise of this movie, I love Fight Club. It's one of my favorite films, ever. It's influenced how I tell my stories and create my characters. Indeed, I believe that Tyler Durdan is one of the best antagonist ever brought to life onscreen, standing equal to Darth Vader and Ledger's Joker. Fincher is in prime form, crafting a chaotic, fever dream of testosterone, mid life crises, and toxic masculinity, package in a scathing social commentary about materialism and superficiality. As a kid, the dope visuals and pulp brutality shocked me. As an adult, the subtle story telling and great character work enthrall me. Edward Norton is excellent, per usual, as The Narrator but Brad Pitt surprised. Tyler Durdan gave him room to play, to experiment, and show us what he could do. Pitt definitely did that. For my money, though, Marla Singer made this flick. No one but Helena Bonham Carter could have made that role work. Fight Club is chock full of gritty performances, surprising cameos, rich writing, great fights, and raw emotion. This film is absolutely excellent and, while earning the reputation as a favorite to the Hot Topic crowd, deserves to be seen by everyone. The first time you experience this narrative is amazing but, upon repeat viewing knowing what you know. It gets better. I don’t believe it’s a perfect film, it’s not as tight as Alien in some parts, but it’s damn close. Fight Club is a modern classic that should absolutely be seen by everyone, at least once.

[papermoonloveslucy]

BOB HOPE

May 29, 1903 - July 27, 2003

Bob Hope was born Lesley Townes Hope in England in 1903. During his extensive career (in virtually all forms of media) he received five honorary Academy Awards. After a brief marriage to his vaudeville partner Grace Troxell, he wed singer and actress Dolores Read, with whom he adopted four children. Although they stayed together for the rest of his life, their marriage was not always an easy one, with Hope having a reputation as a womanizer, and constantly his constant travel for performances.  He was so busy on screen and off that he was facetiously dubbed “Rapid Robert”. 

Aside from his collaboration with Lucille Ball, he was known for his partnership with crooner Bing Crosby on the “Road” films, his devotion to the USO, and his love of golf.     

In 1945, Desi Arnaz was the orchestra leader on Bob Hope’s NBC radio show. 

HOPE (about Lucy and Desi): “Lips and hands were all over one and another. I never saw a couple loving each other more after Bogie and Bacall.”

Ball and Hope had made four feature films together: Sorrowful Jones (1949), Fancy Pants (1950), The Facts of Life (1960), and Critic’s Choice (1963). 

Hope and Ball first collaborated on television on September 14, 1950 on the third installment of “The Star-Spangled Revue”, Hope’s first regular television program.  Lucy played the mayor of NYC and Bob her henpecked husband. 

Kicking off season six of “I Love Lucy” in October 1956, Bob Hope guest-starred as as himself. The story was built around the real-life fact that Hope was part owner of the Cleveland Indians Baseball team.  

Two weeks later, in one of TV’s first network cross-overs, the entire cast of “I Love Lucy” appeared on “The Bob Hope Chevy Show”. The premise of the sketch (later colorized for home video) supposed that Bob, instead of Desi, married Lucy and became her bandleader husband on the sitcom.  

In October 1959, Lucy and Hope were two of many celebrities paying tribute to “Eleanor Roosevelt on Her Diamond Jubilee” aired as part of “Sunday Showcase” on NBC. 

On January 10, 1960, Hope and Ball were two of the stars profiled in “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood.”  Lucille is seen in front of her Desilu Playhouse on the backlot. Standing amid a pile of suitcases, Bob Hope talks about Hollywood in general, presenting almost a monologue on the subject. 

Hope:“Hedda has a fabulous fund of Hollywood knowledge. She has to wear those big hats to keep the secrets from leaking out.”

On February 15, 1961, Ball served as a presenter on “The Bob Hope Buick Sports Show.” Boxer Floyd Patterson could not attend the ceremony on the West Coast, so Hope shows footage of Lucille Ball presenting him the award on the East Coast, where she was appearing in Wildcat on Broadway.

On October 24, 1962 Bing Crosby and Juliet Prowse joined Lucy for “The Bob Hope Show”. In a sketch, Lucille plays a District Attorney and Bob a gangster named Bugsy.

During the “Bob Hope Special: TV Guide Awards” on April 14, 1963, Lucille Ball is nominated for Favorite Female Performer. Ball is not present so a still photo of her is shown instead. The winner is Carol Burnett.  

On a May 5, 1963 “Toast of the Town” (aka “The Ed Sullivan Show”) from New York City, Bob Hope and Lucille Ball promote their new movie Critic’s Choice. 

The pair continued their Critic’s Choice promotion tour that same day (May 5, 1963) by appearing on “What’s My Line?”  This would be their last film together and one they both considered a failure.

On April 19, 1964, Hope and Ball teamed for a CBS Comedy Special titled “Mr. and Mrs.” in which they played themselves and a husband and wife acting team.  

Hope made a cameo appearance in "The Lucy Show” (TLS S3;E2) on September 28, 1964, that starred Jack Benny as a plumber with hidden talents. 

In “Bob Hope Presents Chrysler Theatre: Have Girls, Will Travel” on October 16, 1964, Lucille Ball does a cameo as Hope’s wife in a cast of ‘girls’ that includes Jill St. John, Marilyn Maxwell, and Rhonda Fleming.

“A Bob Hope Comedy Special: Bob Hope’s Leading Ladies” on September 28, 1966, Lucile Ball played herself and arrived in Bob Hope’s bedroom on a chauffeur-driven adult-size tricycle! During their scene, old friends Ball and Hope continually crack each other up.   

“Jack Benny’s Carnival Nights” (March 20, 1968) featured both Ball and Hope, although they did not share any scenes together.  

Bob Hope was there when Lucille Ball won her fourth (and final) competitive Emmy Award on a May 19, 1968 telecast from The Hollywood Palladium. Don Adams and Bill Cosby also won.

“The Dean Martin Christmas Special” (December 19,1968) featured many celebrities including Hope and Ball in (separate) cameos. Lucy promises that the kids at the City of Hope Medical Center will have a Merry Christmas.

Bob Hope, Lucille Ball (and dozens of other stars) make guest appearances on “The Dean Martin Show” sixth season opener on September 17, 1970. 

On “Jack Benny’s 20th Anniversary Show” (November 16, 1970) Lucy plays Benny’s maid, Janet. Bob does a monologue about Benny but does not share the screen with Lucille Ball. 

That same date (November 16, 1970) Ball appeared on “The Bob Hope Show: Bringing Back Vaudeville.” Bob plays a hypnotist who takes Lucy out of the audience to be his stooge.  

“Swing Out, Sweet Land” (November 29, 1970) was a star-studded patriotic special featuring Lucille Ball (voice of the Statue of Liberty) and Bob Hope entertaining the troops - at Valley Forge!    

“Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Jack Benny* But Were Afraid To Ask” (March 10, 1971) featured Bob Hope in a quick cameo as a juggler and Lucille Ball plays a star-struck young Goldwyn Girl seduced by leading man Benny. 

Ball and Hope were both recognized with plaques on “Zenith Presents: A Salute to Television’s 25th Anniversary” on September 10, 1972.

An October 12, 1973 episode of “The Merv Griffin Show” is a Salute to Lucille Ball featuring her husband and children, and her two most famous male co-stars, Bob Hope and Gale Gordon.

On “Show Business Salute to Milton Berle” (December 4, 1973), the Friars Club celebrate Berle’s 60 years in entertainment. Sammy Davis Jr. hosts with guests Lucille Ball and Bob Hope.

In “The Bob Hope Christmas Special” aired on December 9, 1973, Lucille Ball played herself, thinking that Bob is buying her expensive presents because he is in love with her.  

Naturally, Hope is on the dais for the “Dean Martin Celebrity Roast of Lucille Ball” on February 7, 1975. 

Bob Hope: “Lucy’s always doing nice things. Even though she’s not with Desi anymore she got him a job as a dialogue coach on ‘Chico and the Man’.”

“Bob Hope’s World of Comedy” (October 29, 1969) naturally included Lucille Ball. 

“NBC: The First Fifty Years” (November 26, 1976) was a four and a half hour extravaganza that featured NBC’s biggest star Bob Hope, but somehow also included CBS star Lucille Ball, four years before she would leap over to the peacock network.

Two days, later (November 28, 1976) “CBS Salutes Lucy: The First 25 Years” includes Hope singing his signature song “Thanks for the Memory” with special lyrics about Lucy.

“Bob Hope’s All-Star Comedy Tribute to Vaudeville” (March 25, 1977) featured Lucy and Bob in a sketch titled “The Housecleaners”....

... as well as one titled “The Hospital” in which Lucille Ball is the clumsy Dr. Spinebender and Bob Hope is a heavily bandaged patient. 

On April 15, 1977, “Dinah!” presented “Bob Hope: The Road to Hollywood” with Dinah Shore welcoming guests Lucille Ball, Rosemary Clooney, Jane Russell, Rhonda Fleming, and Dorothy Lamour.

“A Tribute To Mr. Television Milton Berle” (March 26, 1978) included testimonials from Lucille Ball and Bob Hope. 

Lucille Ball took to the Kennedy Center stage to say “Happy Birthday Bob” on May 29, 1978. 

LUCY: “I starred with Bob in four pictures and they were all fun, frantic, and foolish.”

John Wayne hosted "General Electric’s All-Star Anniversary” which recalls the music, song, and comedy of the past 100 years and marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the General Electric Company with stars such as Lucille Ball and Bob Hope. 

Lucille Ball is guest-host on “The Mike Douglas Show” and they interview stars that include Bob Hope (November 3, 1978). 

“Bob Hope Salutes the Ohio Jubilee” (December 3, 1978) has Lucy in a flimsy negligee to get her husband’s (Hope) attention during a football game. 

“The Annual Friars Club Tribute Presents a Salute to Johnny Carson” on May 6, 1979 was a testimonial dinner at Waldorf-Astoria with Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Kirk Douglas and, of course, Ed McMahon. Lucy was accompanied by her husband and daughter.

After three decades on rival networks, Lucy joins Hope as an employee of the National Broadcast Corporation (NBC), kicking things off with this special: “Lucy Moves To NBC” on February 8, 1980.

“Bob Hope’s 30th Anniversary Television Special” took place on January 18, 1981.  It was a retrospect of Hope’s first 30 years on TV. Celebrating with Bob were guests Lucille Ball, Milton Berle, Danny Thomas, George Burns, Glen Campbell, Sammy Davis Jr., and many more.

On February 26, 1982, “The John Davidson Show” featured both Bob Hope and Lucille Ball.

Hope takes a look back at the beautiful and funny women he has worked with over the years. Lucille Ball and more than 60 of Bob’s co-stars are presented in studio segments, as well as television and film excerpts in “Bob Hope’s Women I Love - Beautiful But Funny” aired on February 28, 1982.

“On the Road to Hollywood - Part II” (March 2, 1983)  was a tribute to Hope’s film career, with clips from many of his films and appearances by many of his female co-stars, including Lucille Ball, Dorothy Lamour, Martha Rae, Jane Russell and others.

Hope returns to the site of his 75th Birthday Special, the Kennedy Center, for another three hour special with Lucille Ball, George Burns, Kathryn Crosby, George C. Scott, and Jim Henson in “Happy Birthday, Bob: A Salute to Bob Hope’s 80th Birthday” on May 23, 1983.

“Who Makes The World Laugh? - Part II” on April 4, 1984, answered the question in the title by presenting Lucille Ball and Hope together!  

Hall of Fame winner Lucille Ball and Governor’s Award recipient Bob Hope are  presenters at the “36th Primetime Emmy Awards” on September 23, 1984. 

“Bob Hope’s Unrehearsed Antics of the Stars” (September 28, 1984) found Lucille Ball recounting her disastrous audition for the role of Scarlet O’Hara in the 1939 film Gone With The Wind.

Lucille Ball makes a cameo appearance in “Bob Hopes Buys NBC?” on September 17, 1985.

An “All Star Party for Clint Eastwood” on November 30, 1986, features former honoree Lucille Ball and Bob Hope paying homage to Eastwood. 

Lucille Ball and Bob Hope were part of an all-star cast for “Happy 100th Birthday, Hollywood” on May 18, 1987. This was a two-hour special on ABC TV that won an Emmy for editing.

On the deck of an aircraft carrier, Bob Hope salutes the US Air Force’s 40th anniversary. Lucy and Bob sing “I Remember It Well” in “Bob Hope’s High-Flying Birthday Extravaganza” aired on May 25, 1987.

“America’s Tribute to Bob Hope” on January 2, 1988 - to celebrate the opening of the Bob Hope Cultural Center at Palm Springs, Lucille Ball and dozens of friends gather and offer comedy and musical performances to honor the building's namesake.

On May 16, 1988, Bob Hope celebrates the 85th of his 100 birthdays in “Happy Birthday, Bob: 50 Stars Salute Your 50 Years at NBC.” Lucille Ball sings “Comedy Ain’t No Joke,” her last ‘performance’ on television before her death. 

Lucille Ball’s final appearance was at “The 1989 Oscars” on March 29, 1989, appropriately alongside Bob Hope. They introduce a performance by ‘the stars of tomorrow. Lucy appears to be enjoying herself immensely, giggling at all Bob Hope’s jokes. 

After Ball’s passing, Hope hosted “Bob Hope’s Love Affair With Lucy”, a tribute which aired on September 23, 1989. Hope invited such stars as Betty White, George Burns, Danny Thomas, and even Kirk Cameron, to pay tribute to the Queen of Comedy. 

“100 Years of Hope and Humor” on April 23, 2003 was the last television appearance by Bob Hope. This tribute aired 29 days before his 100th birthday and 95 days before he passed away.

HOPE (on turning 100): “I don't feel old. In fact, I don't feel anything until noon. Then it's time for my nap.”

Thanks for the memories, Bob. RIP

[chain-unchained]

May 24 (Flower Festival)

(I might have written quite a lot of this story before deciding to post it here >.>’ )

For the story, I’ve been adding in characters that obviously aren’t in the game. I read somewhere that originally ConcernedApe was going to include a rival farmer in the game, a la the older Harvest Moon games (I’m looking at you, Jamie). While I think everyone is glad that he instead chose to put Joja as our ‘goal’ to work towards in the game itself, I felt like having a rival would be an interesting addition to the story. So enter Percy Wellington III, token rich boy and Joja stooge. Obviously there’s more to him than that-- I don’t think there’s anything less satisfying than a one-dimensional bad guy-- but from the get-go, he’s meant to be the kind of guy that you just wanna knock down a peg or two. With that being said, I hope you enjoy the main characters completely ignoring the main event of the Flower Festival. <3

The Flower Festival was… a unique festival, to say the least. Once a year at the end of spring, the town gathered at the festival grounds to celebrate and give thanks to nature—or at least, that’s what it used to be. These days, it was a glorified prom dance for grown adults, complete with the crowning of a King and Queen after a ritualistic dance of sorts.

For Ashe, who missed out on the last two years of high school in order to work at a Joja corporate office, it was a chance to have that experience—and he really had no interest in taking that chance. For all his enthusiasm in making friends with Shane, and his friendliness towards the townsfolk, he was rather on the shy side, with an event like the Flower Dance being way outside of his comfort zone.

What wasn’t, however, was the company of the grumpy chicken loving Shane, who was perfectly content to spend the festival at the buffet table helping himself to Gus’ cooking. “Aren’t you gonna dance?” He inquired curiously as he came to stand beside Shane, who was in the middle of his second plate of pepper poppers.

The question made Shane snort. “Fuck no, I look like a fucking tool when I dance.” He responded bluntly, glancing over in time to see Emily doing her ‘thing’ where she completely lost herself in the rhythm, or whatever it was, he had no idea. “Gotta admit, I’m surprised you aren’t over there. I figured you’d be all up in this type of shit.”

“Oh, nope. No way.” Ashe held up his arms in an X-shape and shook his head fervently. “I can’t stand being the center of attention like that.”

“That so?” It was a surprising thing to learn for Shane, who had this image in his head of Ashe being the social butterfly because he loved the attention. “And here I thought you liked being in the spotlight.” He bit down on a nice juicy popper and chewed slowly. “Guess that’s one thing we’ve got in common, then—”

He was abruptly cut off by Ashe making the loudest, most exaggerated gasp in the history of the world, like he’d just seen Atlantis in the punch bowl. Actually concerned as to why the kid would make such a noise, he followed Ashe’s line of sight until he spotted the platter of chocolate cornets sitting on the far end of the buffet. “For fuck’s sake, Ashe…” He muttered, watching as Ashe traipsed around the table and began to help himself to them—chocolate cornets were to Ashe what beer was to Shane, so he really couldn’t talk, since he had basically the same reaction to seeing his favorite beer on discount.

“Yay~” Happy as a clam, Ashe piled a plate high with the shell-shaped pastry and came back to Shane’s side, even though there were literally infinite spaces where he could eat instead. He began the ritual of eating them, which to Shane was perhaps the most ridiculous, unintentionally funny thing ever—he’d start eating from the narrow end, instead of at the fat end where there was a big hole for the chocolate cream to ooze out of, and then he’d panic and hastily lick up the cream that had been pushed out before it could spill. Rinse and repeat, until it was gone.

“You know, if you ate it from the other end you wouldn’t have to do that.” Shane pointed out as Ashe did his little panic face.

His comment made the youth pause mid-bite to look at him, surprise written on his face at the comment. “Oh, I know.” He answered, lowering the cornet with that dumb smile of his. “But you know how the first time you do something is the way you always remember how to do it? That’s me and this.”

“Fucking wierdo.” Shane shook his head and turned his attention back to his pepper poppers; he had hoped that Gus would make those special deviled eggs he made for the Egg Festival today, but he’d settle for gourmet poppers too. “Guess that makes two of us, though… if it weren’t for the food and Jas and Marnie I wouldn’t have bothered coming today.”

“Really?” Ashe stopped again to look at him, the smile on his face becoming somewhat muted; he could tell by the tone of Shane’s voice that the latter really did not want to be there.

“What do you fucking think?” Shane sighed and popped another one into his mouth to chew on slowly. That morning had been especially hard for him to get up out of bed; it was only Jas and Marnie’s resulting disappointment if he didn’t show up that eventually made him kick the covers off when all he wanted to do was stay in bed.

Almost as if on cue, he could see Jas break away from where she had been watching the dance with Vincent and start heading his way; as much as he loved the girl to bits, he wasn’t in much of a mood to entertain her, but he did his best to pick himself up as she drew near. “What’s up, squirt?”

“Shane, I wanna dance!” She announced, her hair buns bobbing up and down with each step she took; she came to stand before her godfather, looking up at him with the most hopeful expression on her face. “Can we? Please?”

It was the question Shane was desperately hoping she wouldn’t ask, even though she asked it every year without fail. And every year, his answer was the same. “Sorry, kiddo… I’m not really feeling up to dancing.” He felt like shit as the words left him, and he could see the letdown clear on her innocent little face as she quietly accepted his response and made her way back to Vincent.

“Wow, talk about cold.”

As soon as the little girl was out of earshot, the snide voice spoke out; both Shane and Ashe glanced over their shoulders to see the snooty face of Percy sneering at the pair. Like Ashe, Percy was a newcomer to Pelican Town, having arrived just before Ashe did—and having claimed squatters’ rights on his grandfather’s farm, intending to clear it out to build a Joja Co. factory. Suffice it to say, Percy was not a very well liked person in town, even though the whole story with him and Ashe was only known by Lewis and Robin.

“Nobody asked for your fucking opinion.” Shane muttered with another quiet snort as he turned his attention once more to his poppers. Of course this asshole was going to try and start shit today of all days.

“Oh, but I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut after seeing such an atrocious display.” Percy sighed and shook his head dramatically, speaking with a faux posh accent that really made Shane want to punch him in his smug face. “Honestly, the poor girl—she really deserves better, don’t you think? Perhaps I shall go over and offer to dance with her in your place. I can’t help but pity her, having to be stuck with such a pathetic godfather—”

               Shane bristled, opening his mouth to tear into him. There was a blur of movement in the corner of his eye, and before Percy could finish his insult, Ashe was upon him, both hands clutching fistfuls of Percy’s shirt as he glared up at him with genuine, raw fury. “Don’t you dare, you lowlife.” He growled, with no trace of his happy go lucky persona to be found. “You shut your mouth, right now.”

He didn’t care what Percy said about him—the jerk could call him every name under the sun, belittle and berate him, attempt to sabotage him, whatever he wanted, it didn’t matter. But Ashe wasn’t going to stand by and let him spew that same vitriol towards his friend. He already didn’t like Percy for what he and Morris were trying to pull with his grandfather’s farm, and for what they did to his mother, so this was just another reason to dislike them.

For a moment, Percy didn’t react; seeming to regain his composure, however, he laughed condescendingly, sneering down at the diminutive farmer with contempt and derision written clear on his face. He leaned down close to Ashe’s ear, speaking quietly so that only he could hear. “If I were you, I’d be a little more careful. I can easily call our little bet off and our lawyers will have you in court faster than you can say ‘crop rotation’.”

“Kkh…” Ashe’s hands were shaking slightly as he loosened his grip on Percy’s shirt; annoyed, Percy smacked his hands off and fixed his now wrinkled shirt.

“There’s a good little farmer boy.” The man’s face split into a smirk as he settled back into his skin.

“Listen asshole.” Shane gave Percy a cold glare as Ashe stepped back. “Say whatever shit you want about me, but go near Jas or Marnie and I’ll put you six feet underground.” Yeah, he was a worthless squishy shitbag, but there was no way in hell he was going to let anyone touch his family.

“Oh don’t get your boxers in a bunch, bumpkin.” Percy scoffed, puffing his chest out as his air of superiority returned. “I wouldn’t bother with any of you inbred savages anyway.” Seeming to have his dignity still in tact, the man stalked off, with Shane and Ashe both silently staring daggers into his back.

With a quiet huff, Shane bit down vehemently on a popper, imagining for just a moment that it was a miniature version of Percy screaming in pain as his guts squirted everywhere. It was a nasty image, to be sure, but it gave him some satisfaction at least. “Fucking smug ass Joja prick… I didn’t expect you to lose your shit like that, though.”

“Huh?” Ashe looked to him cluelessly, having returned to his usual cheery self. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t play dumb.” Shane’s brow cocked doubtfully. “You were pretty damn close to socking the guy. Not that I’m against the idea, I fucking hate him, but I’ve never seen you freak like that. Why’d you get so worked up when he was talking shit to me?”

“Because you’re my friend.” The answer was given so simply, so plainly, that it made Shane falter. “I won’t let anyone ever talk about my friends like that.”

For a long minute, Shane couldn’t think of what to say to that. “… Dammit, why are you so determined to make friends with me? I’ve done nothing but be rude and awful to you since you got here.”

“Hmm….” Ashe knelt down to pick up the plate he’d dropped, and the now dirty chocolate cornets that would have to be thrown away. “I needed a reason? I just wanted to be friends.” He straightened up and looked to Shane with a carefree smile, as the gentlest of breezes brushed through the festival grounds. “I guess out of everyone in town, I just… relate to you the most.”

“…. Fucking weirdo.” For some reason, the kid was really good at saying shit that tripped Shane up. And it was all sincere, too, which made it even more confusing. “… I appreciate you standing up for me. Yoba knows I won’t stand up for myself.”

There was a part of Shane that hated how Ashe was wearing him down; it scared him shitless that he was letting someone past the barrier he’d erected around himself. And yet, at the same time, he couldn’t keep himself from letting it happen, however reluctantly it was.

[loplainlointhemorning]

@itunkala-okicita tagged me and I’m super super super sad so thank u honey ❤️

What Are You Currently Listening To?

The Doors, Patti Smith, and Leonard Cohen primarily.

Do you listen to music every day?

Yes, of course.

What band do you always come back to?

The Stooges!!!!

What are your favorite songs right now?

Kimberly- Patti Smith

Back Door Man- The Doors

I’m Your Man- Leonard Cohen

Famous Blue Raincoat- Leonard Cohen

I’m A Boy I’m A Girl- Johnny Thunders

What’s your Spotify?

bluejean1947 but I hate Spotify so

Three favorite genres?

Punk, alternative, original glam

Favorite albums of all time?

The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars- David Bowie

Hunky Dory- David Bowie

Raw Power- The Stooges

Unplugged In New York- Nirvana

Live Through This- Hole

The Blue Album- The Beatles

Velvet Goldmine Soundtrack

Rid Of Me- PJ Harvey

Placebo- Placebo

Favorite song lyrics:

“Every time that I stare into the sun, angel dust and my dress just comes undone, every time that I stare into the sun, be a model or just look like one”

“No one knows she’s Hester Prynn, someone please tell Anne Boelynn, chokers are back in again”

“Get well soon, please don’t go any higher how are you so burned when you’re barely on fire?”

“I found my nest of salt, everything is my fault, so I take all the blame, I concede from shame”

“ I just want you to know I don’t hate you anymore, there is nothing I can say that I haven’t thought before”

“Amazes me the will of instinct”

“I’d put stars at your feet, put Mars at your head”

“Been lookin at the moon she’s so bright, she’s so bright, she’s so clean, I’m telling you she’s everything I give it all my starry eyes, give just anything she’s got me so mesmerized”

“Tell you my name, F-U and CK”

“Sit down beside me, there’s something I got to ask you. I just want to know, what are you gonna do for me I mean are you going to liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression? Come on, don’t be shy. I just want you to know we can still be friends...Fear of a female planet?”

“Little sister sky is falling, I don’t mind, I don’t mind, little sister the fates are calling on you”

“It was as if someone spread butter on all the fine points off the stars cause when the boy looked up, they started to slip”

“New York is cold but I like where I’m living, there’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening”

“She feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China”

“THE SOUND OF HER YOUNG LEGS IN STOCKINGS- YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT!”

“There is always suffering, it flows through life like water”

“There’s a Devil lyin by your side, you may think he’s asleep, but look at his eyes, he wants you baby to be his bride, there’s a Devil lyin by your side”

“People often talk about being scared of change, but me I’m more afraid of things stayin the same, cause the game is never won by stayin in any one place for too long”

“London Calling- Yes I was there too! And you know what they said? Well some of it was true! London Calling At the top of the dial- And after all this, won’t you give me a smile?”

“A table made of wood, how I wish you would, fall in love with me”

“Candy says, I’d like to know completely what others so discreetly talk about”

“Jackie was just speedin away, thought she was James Dean for a day, then I guess she had to crash, Valium would’ve helped that bash”

“I wish I was born a thousand years ago, on a great big clipper ship, goin from this land here to that, oh in a sailor’s suit and cap”

“There’s nothing in my dreams but some ugly memories, kiss me like the ocean breeze”

ive already done too many oh my god they’re endless

Songs that describe your life right now?

Touch Me I’m Sick- Mudhoney

Jesus Of The Moon- The Bad Seeds

Kiss Off- The Violent Femmes

I’m A Boy, I’m A Girl- Johnny Thunders

Candy Says- The Velvet Underground

Heroin- The Velvet Underground

Always Crashing In The Same Car- David Bowie

Fall In Love With Me- Iggy Pop

A song that gets you through shit?

No Fun- The Stooges

A song to shut everything out?

Hot One- Shudder To Think

A song for when you’re lonely?

The Passenger- Iggy Pop

i tag:

@wherearemyelephants @lionslove @fledgelingsart @joestrummershowl

[ahundred-andathousandmore]

Highland Adventure Day 2: Loch Ness, Culloden, Dunrobin Castle & John O’Groats

Day 1: Culross & Inverness

The second day of our trip began with a drive to the tip of Loch Ness. Like Inverness, everyone I know told me that Loch Ness is not really worth the trip... and they were right. My advice would be to skip Loch Ness and go instead to Loch Lomand in the Trossachs, honestly! But because we were north and because we felt like we had to, we took a few obligatory pics of the lake, my dad was disappointed that we didn’t see Nessie (I sincerely hope he was joking but to this day am not sure), and that was that. Oh and in hindsight the pics I took are pretty terrible so I won’t even share them here 😂

Embarrassingly, I had NO idea that Culloden was near Inverness... I’m not sure why I didn’t know that/why I don’t pay attention to anything, but we decided to go even though it wasn’t in our original plan. And let me tell you, it was SO WORTH IT! The museum is very interesting, the battlefield eerily beautiful... if you have any interest in Scottish history, this is a MUST! And yes, of course, there is an Outlander connection here, and like a nerd fan I took a photo of the Clan Fraser stone. #sorrynotsorry... 

Clearly I wasn't the only Outlander fan here...

...which Culloden’s gift shop capitalizes on

From Culloden we drove on to Dunrobin Castle in Sutherland. Or that was the plan, until my dad got sidetracked by Balblair distillery and decided we had to stop. We didn’t take a tour or anything, but we did a tasting- or more accurately my dad and brother did a tasting and I had a single sip of the whisky my dad ended up buying. Needless to say, I drove after that, lol. I’m not a whisky fan but even I have to admit that this was excellent, and it’s not owned by one of the big corporate stooges so win-win! 

Dunrobin looks like an actual Disney princess castle, absolutely beautiful. The gardens are exquisite and the castle is situated on the water. Just breathtaking. While touring the grounds, we saw a fantastic presentation of some of the birds that are kept on the estate. The trainer showed us how he trains and rehabilitated a peregrine falcon along with two other birds. Not usually my thing but it was fascinating! 

Me in my Cait jeans, gazing longingly at the castle...

...and posing in front of it pretending to be royalty. My brother was so embarrassed taking these pictures of me (also please note how quickly the sky went from blue to grey)

But let me give you a fair warning: DO NOT VISIT THE VICTORIAN MUSEUM ON THE CASTLE GROUNDS. There is a sign on the door that says something like “Warning: Large animal heads, some visitors may be offended”, but idiot me thought large animal heads meant, like, really huge deer heads or something. WRONG WRONG WRONG. Because what greets you as you walk through the front door is the neck and head of a fucking giraffe, with an elephant head on the wall just behind (the rest of the walls are filled with any number of deer, fish, moose, etc. etc.). I’m not a vegetarian or anything but I found it EXTREMELY upsetting and was disturbed for the rest of the visit. And other than that sign you get zero warning or indication of what’s inside, which I think is a huge failing on their part. 

We then drove the rest of the way to John O’Groats, one of the northernmost points on mainland UK. This area of Scotland was pretty much all of our favorite from the entire trip... we spent two nights at the most AMAZING self-catering apartment, I cannot recommend this place enough, it’s pricey but 150% worth it. I’m already dream planning another visit here... 

We stayed in the white building but each of the six structures has flats you can rent!

Apologies, it got dark out for this one. But as you can see, the buildings are directly at the John O’Groats sign, and on the water. 

[jcrman617]

The first color palette is about the cartoon show Tom and Jerry that is a kids show that last from the 1940′s to today. The main color of this pallet is the red in the middle showing the violence that was in the show during it high end days. The red in the middle shows how while a kids show can be violent and fun for them providing slapstick comedy that compares to the Three Stooges and other comedies during it time. While very violent the show is a comedy about being smart and watching little animals outsmarting big animals.

The other pallets colors the accent ones are colors representing the characters of Tom and Jerry and their personalities. The left side represents Jerry the mouse with him being brown and showing his reliability to himself in getting out of sticky situations and blue in the other side is Tom trying to be calm and reliable but is ironic because he fails most of the time against Jerry.

The other colors represent the personalities of both characters to me and while it came out like that I believe they look good. The orange around the brown and red show Jerry uniqueness in the show and next to it is violent against his rival Tom. The other side of the light blue is a darker shade of blue showing his confidence that turns into cockiness and being violent against his rival Jerry but fails most of his time. This show while violent is a very fun and colorful cartoon for kids and the palettes show the personalities of both characters and the violence between them.

The second palette is the social work of raising the minimum wage to 15 dollars for corporations like McDonald's, Walmart, and Amazon companies. The main color of this palette is green representing the money that workers need to live in a decent wage. The color also can show how corporations can see their employees as just another field of workers on a farm working thinking they could get away but people want more.

The accent color is red as a way of social democracy with the policies that can support the raising of the minimum wage for workers. The red also has the meaning of the social democracy mixing in capitalism with socialist programs helping the people around them like raising the minimum wage.

The different colors while the same is the green getting more lighter seeing the dark green world of pure capitalism turning into a lighter green. The light green signifies the growing liking to a different system from a capitalist system into a social democratic system for this country. The colors represent the growth to make this country better and raising the minimum from the help of many social work sites like the DSA and the Fight for 15 helps people believe in change.

The third palette is a regular food truck you can see in any borough in New York especially in Queens. The main color of the trucks is the dark red for the meats they usually sell. The Red meat they have on the trucks can be specialized to burgers, Hot Dogs or gyros from other countries and cultures. The meats from the trucks can provide many goods for people who like the food from these trucks especially hungry New Yorkers.

The accent colors is the change is the changing colors into lighter orange and yellow because not all food trucks provide meat. The trucks can also provide fruit drinks to have healthier options for people who do not like meat. It can help diversify food trucks to be more healthy in New York.

The other colors represent the diversity of the food trucks in New York going from the red meats into the more colorful fruits that they can sell. The trucks have a lot of food that is very diverse and can be sold to people that either want to taste good meat or more into healthy fruits. The Queens food trucks have a lot of diverse food from red meat like burgers and gyros to fruit shakes and actually fruit snacks they have with that classy New York attitude.

The fourth palette is the news blog the Huffington Post and the colors that are in their web site. The main color of this palette is the darkish green representing the issues they want to talk about which is mostly environmental issues. The green is about which issue is important  which is the environment and also that they support the people to help inform them about the issues which can help calm people about the news. The people that mostly support the Huffington Post also supports the Green party which wants pro environmental policies than most other parties.

The accents colors of this palette is the various green on the palette which includes darken green and lighter greens. The darker greens is because the issues that are reported by this blog are very serious and can cause long time damage to the environment and world. The lighter green means that while the world is darkening ng it could be light with the help of real news being reported by the Huffington post.

The other greens help display the site of being green friendly and reporting the news for the country to know these things outside the world. The greens also show they want the the environment to protected and world to know how it can be achieved with the right policies. The Huffington post is a very important site now with showing that the news can affect the whole world and the green around it shows that they care about it and are more positive than other outlets.

The fifth palette is about my favorite sports team the New York Mets who at times can rip my heart spit on it and stomp on the ground so it can be fixed up and be ready next Spring. The dominant color is the orange and blue which is the team's colors showing the pride for Queens. The colors were based of past New York teams from the 1940’s that moved away but kept the colors to remember them. The orange and blue help identify the team as the reliable and unique team in New York for mostly the wrong reasons but let’s move away from that.

The accent colors is the moving into a new season of spring for a better year. The light blue can mean another season went into the toilet and have another year were they are a clown show in the sport. The Mets mostly gives fans the blues faces and reasons to be drunk sad fans but will be green again in April. The love for the team can be blue and sad but once they win it can be a very happy moment for me and other Mets fans but mostly blue because they suck in the worst way.

The other colors is green which can signified another season for hope of the team to win for the fans as hope springs eternal until reality hits them. The green can help get my brother, father and I hope for a season that will make this team good showing that anything can happen. Even though they break Mets fans heart  almost every year their still my team with the blues out off this year the green grass of Spring will bring us hope even though they make us want to drink all the bleach in Queens.

[dustedmagazine]

“1, 2, 3, 4!”: Jennifer Kelly’s 2018 review

Jennifer Kelly is a frantic romantic.

Rock and roll forever, sure, but it’s hard to avoid the fact that the guitar/bass/drum idiom has been pushed way off to the side in the cultural conversation. Mainstream sites list “best rock records” as a weird, subcultural genre, with a slightly bigger audience, perhaps, than best cumbia records or top Hawaiian slack key recordings (but not much). Worse, to come up with a reasonable size list they include all kinds of things that don’t belong. I mean, really, is Mount Eerie rock by any definition?

Rock isn’t dead, but it’s been made to sit in the corner. The only time in 2018 when everybody thought at once about a guitar band was when Pitchfork’s Jeremy Larson dropped his scathing, hilarious review of the Greta Van Fleet. For a moment, we all snickered as one.

Big rock was terrible in 2018. It almost always is. Yet there’s something disingenuous about the genre of year-end write-ups that laser in on the absolute worst and most bloated of rock bands to make a point about the art-form as a whole. Sure, Imagine Dragons suck. Yes, “Africa” is a soul-destroyingly awful song no matter who sings it. No, I’m not wading into the whole 1975 thing. Who has time? Who has the heart for it?  

Because this year, against a tide of commercially viable horse shit, against a backdrop of monolithic indifference, rock bands of all configurations, from all countries (but really especially Australia), continued to make great punk and rock records. And, I, for whatever reason, heard more of them than usual, and it made me happy. And maybe that’s the secret to being happy in music, in any year…find your niche, listen to the best in it, forget about what the mega-corporations are trying to sell.

Also see it live. My big highlight this year was seeing the Scientists in October (with Negative Approach, too!), but it was a pretty great 12 months for live music. It started with a fantastic show comprised of Mike Donovan, the Long Hots, J. Mascis and his Stooges cover band and Purling Hiss (with J on board for one song) at the Root Cellar, a venue I’d never heard of before that show, and that ended up putting on a string of great events. I saw Marisa Anderson, Paul Metzger, Speedy Ortiz, Howling Rain, Trad Gras Och Stenar with Endless Boogie, that Scientists show and Gary Higgins at the Root Cellar this year, and I missed a lot of shows I would have liked to see. Other great shows happened outside the Root Cellar – The Thing in the Spring in Peterborough with William Parker, Bonnie Prince Billy and others, Amy Rigby and Wreckless Eric at the Parlour Room, Messthetics at the Flywheel. Western Massachusetts has been in a commercial chokehold for years, with one organization controlling most of the venues, but there were a lot of options this year.

So, here’s to the drummers with their sticks in the air, counting off the four. Here’s to the guitar player wrecking his knees jumping up and down as he/she furiously slashes away. Here’s to the sweat and muck and black humor of $10 shows with four bands on them, two of them still in high school. And here’s to the people (me at least and possibly you) who like these things. Eddie Argos of Art Brut, who used to top these lists and now merits a footnote, spoke for this tiny, beleaguered sub-cult when he urged “Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s rock out.”

Indeed. Let’s.

Amy Rigby—The Old Guys (Southern Domestic)

The Old Guys by Amy Rigby

Let’s just set aside the fact that the first and best song on this album is an imagined email exchange between Philip Roth and Bob Dylan on the eve of the Nobel ceremony or that Rigby namechecks three of my favorite ever TV characters in “New Sheriff.” Let’s forget, too, how rare it is for a woman of roughly my age to be making her own music and controlling her own destiny even now in 2018. No, let’s focus on the songs which are sharp, smart and full of hooks, the clean, romantic chime of Rigby’s electric 12-string, the viscous pleasure of the arrangements. This is the very best kind of rock record, one that doesn’t attempt to remake the genre but somehow makes it bigger, brighter and more necessary. The songs sounded great, live, too, with the great Wreckless Eric in tow, and the two of them bickering like old married couples do, and Rigby glowing with triumph by the end of the show.

 Shopping—The Official Body (Fat Cat)

The Official Body by Shopping

Bubbly in a hard way, strict and minimal in a manner requires body movement, this album arrived early and stayed on my go-to list all year. For Dusted, I wrote, “You could bounce a quarter off the bass lines in this third Shopping full-length. They’re pulled hard and tight against minimalist syncopated drums, the leaning, waiting, anticipating space between the thwacks as important a character as the beats themselves. The London-based trio harks back to the funky, stripped down post-punk of bands like ESG and Delta 5, with hints of the boy-girl bubble and pop of the B-52s and Pylon.

 Salad Boys—This Is Glue (Trouble in Mind)

This Is Glue by Salad Boys

Always weak for NZ lo-fi and equally a fan of the early R.E.M., so of course I fell for this buzzy daydream of a record. “Psych Slasher” bursts with immoderate, glorious joy in the chorus, then cuts back to uncertainty in the verse, the ideal blend of rambunctious rock and wistful pop. “Exaltation” is a gentler sort of classic, just as radiant but moodier, its murmur-y vocals disappearing into cloud banks of fuzzed guitar tone. The whole record sits on the knife edge of rock and indie pop, leaning one way and the other, but never falling over.

 Patois Counselors—Proper Release (Ever/Never)

Proper Release by Patois Counselors

I went all in for “So Many Digits” in my Dusted review this year, but the two great punk songs on Proper Release are “The Modern Station” and, especially, “Target Not a Comrade.” This latter song chugs and lurches on guitar and bass, trembles with wheedly keyboards and crests in a massive, hummable refrain. It’s a catchy, twitchy punk tune that’ll hit you in the part of your brain where you keep Wire and the Buzzcocks, hooky as hell in a weird, distorted way.

 Bodega—Endless Scroll (What’s Your Rupture)

Endless Scroll by BODEGA

Flipping the gender cliché, Bodega is an all-woman band with a male singer. Its tight, nervy, jangles wrap around themes of internet-age dislocation and movie references. Smart, sarcastic, ironic, sharp, Bodega bristles with what you want from a garage punk band but reveals a surprisingly soft heart uncovered round about “Charlie,” a wistful song about a boy who died too soon.

 Bardo Pond—Volume 8 (Three-Lobed)

Volume 8 by Bardo Pond

The eighth in a series of improvised albums, this year’s Bardo Pond record towers and surges with monumental heaviness. I wrote at Dusted that, “The sound, vast and muscularly monolithic as ever, seems more like a demon summoned periodically from a ring of fire, than the product of any sort of linear development.”

 Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore—Ghost Forests (Three Lobed)

Ghost Forests by Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore

This year’s most beautiful album, Ghost Forests undergirds lyric folk melodies and angelic pizzicato harp plucks with roiling, violent darkness. My Dusted review observed “The best and most interesting [tracks] juxtapose the muted violence of electric guitar with a harp’s serenity. A guitar howls from a distance throughout “In Cedars,” pushing a simmering turbulence up under sun-dappled lattices of harp picking. Later “Painter of Tygers” does the same trick of joining muscle to fairy dust, the electric guitar raging from far away, while harp and voice spread delicate magic over the tumult.”

 Seun Kuti & Egypt 80—Black Times (Strut)

Black Times by Seun Kuti & Egypt 80

Fela Kuti’s youngest son inherited his dad’s fierce political commitment, his rhythmically unstoppable Afrobeat style and a few of his band members, but this wonderful album is more alive and present than a tribute. “Struggle Sounds, “ with its hard-bounce of a beat, its blurting sax, its ecstatic backing chorus, its swagger of horns and fever-dreamed keyboards dances through history right up to the modern day. “Last Revolutionary” enumerates past African heroes and connects them to the now. I wrote, “Kuti extends his father’s legacy, its tight rhythmic interplay, its fervent political engagement, its relentless exhilarating uplift, while bringing it a bit further into the present.”

Ovlov—Tru (Exploding in Sound)

TRU by Ovlov

I first noticed Ovlov at the Thing in the Spring Festival, on an eclectic Thursday night in a book store, where the sweet surge of guitar sound felt solid enough to body surf on. Later, for Dusted, I said of Tru that “Ovlov churns a monumental fuzz, a wave of surging, undulating, feedback-altered sound …. You can almost poke it with your finger, this onslaught is so palpable. It stirs your hair like an oncoming breeze.”

Speedy Ortiz—Twerp Verse (Carpark) 

Twerp Verse by Speedy Ortiz

There’s something so bendy and unpredictable about Sadie Dupuis tunes. They hare off in unexpected ways. They stop and start. They interpose weird little intervals of pop and noise. They refuse to behave, and end up exactly as they should be, though never what you’d expect. Twerp Verse takes more pop turns than other Speedy joints, but in the tipsiest, most eccentric way, with acerbic asides in the lyrics that catch like fishhooks and stay with you. “Speedy Ortiz offers a serrated sort of pop pleasure, full of rhythmic complexity and gender confrontation,” I observed in my Dusted review.

 Had enough rock? Me neither

Here are some more punk rock and garage records that I couldn’t squeeze into the top ten overall, mostly in the order that I thought of them, but Constant Mongrel and Richard Papiercuts are pretty great and that’s probably why I thought of them first.

Constant Mongrel—Living in Excellence (La Vida Es Un Mus)

Richard Papiercuts— Twisting the Night (Ever/Never)

GOGGs—Prestrike Sweep (In the Red)

Hank Wood & the Hammerheads—S-T (Toxic State)

Obnox—Bang Messiah (Smog Veil)

Zerodent—Landscapes of Merriment (Alien Snatch!)

Sleaford Mods—Stick in a Five and Go (Domino)

Ethers—S-T (Trouble in Mind)

IDLES—Joy as an Act of Resistance (Partisan)

Bad Sports—Constant Stimulation (Dirtnap)

Lithics—Mating Surfaces (Kill Rock Stars)

Art Brut—Wham! Bang! Pow! (Alcopop)

 Whoa, slow down!

Also a shout to the musicians who made more than one really excellent album this year. Ty Segall made five, I think, but I didn’t love all of them as much as Freedom Goblin and Prestrike Sweep.

Obnox—Sonido del Templo/Bang Messiah (Astral Spirits)/(Smog Veil)

Mount Eerie—Now Only/(After) (Elverum & Sons)

Ty Segall—Freedom Goblin (Drag City)/GOGGs—Prestrike Sweep (In the Red)

Ryley Walker—Deafman Glance/The Lillywhite Sessions (Dead Oceans)

  Nevertheless, they persisted

And finally, hats off to the bands and artists that have been going forever and continued this year to produce great music.

Kinski—Accustomed to Your Face (Kill Rock Stars)

Low—Double Negative (Sub Pop)

Loma—S-T (Sub Pop) (Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg plus Cross Record)

Oneida—Romance (Joyful Noise)

Wreckless Eric—Construction Time and Demolition (Southern Domestic)

Messthetics—S-T (Discord) (The great Fugazi rhythm section plus a young guitar ripper—one of the best live shows of the year for me.)

Charnel Ground—S-T (12XU) (This is Kid Millions from Oneida, Chris Brokaw and James McNew from Yo La Tengo, and as you’d expect, it’s really good.)

[smokeybrand]

Smokey brand Movie Reviews: Slide

David Fincher is one of my favorite creators. Dude has punched out great cinema over the years. Se7en, Gone Girl; All his work. Interestingly enough, he got his start in the Alien franchise with Alien 3. I think Fincher could have crafted something great but meddling from the top ruined his film. At the time, he couldn't make the movie he wanted because he was brand new, a stooge put in place to finish a corporate cash grab It's f*cked up because I kind of like Alien 3. I liked the potential it had. I may do a proper review on that flick later in life but this one is about the movie that really made me pay attention to Fincher. This one is about his masterpiece, his magnum opus; Fight Club.

The Great

This is a proper, star-making performance from Brad Pitt. If I recall, his clout was on the rise when he got the role of Tyler Durdan but hat he did with this character was truly something special. Durdan is this chaos given form, this anarchist who seethes with raw disdain for society, just below a smarmy surface. His overt confidence belies a truly horrifying genius. You love this dude even though that voice in the back of your head screams that he is dangerous. Tyler Durdan is one of the best written antagonists I have ever seen and Brad Pitt brings this complex, eccentric, force of nature, to the screen with a realism that is often scathingly unsettling.

The Narrator is very interesting. Fight Club is the visual representation of a grown man, having a complete and total mental breakdown; A fact Norton did not miss. Edward Norton pulls off this performance that degrades over the run time. You see the Narrator deteriorate and it's jarring. Norton imbues this decay with a viscerally desperate, almost manic by the end, energy to a character that starts off so tightly wound. By that closing scene, you're as exhausted as The Narrator and that is testament to Norton's ability, for sure.

Last but certainly not least, Marla f*cking Singer. If there was ever a more accurate presentation of my dream girl, I don't know who it could be. Marla is just this broken, nihilistic, sexually liberated, shell of a person. She's freer in ways that I rarely see in people and it's proper endearing to my f*cked brain. Who else do you get to articulate those nuanced eccentricities other than Helena Bonham Carter? HBC has built a career on  the abstract and alienated. Marla was perfect for her and Carter played her perfectly.

This entire cast, man, was absolutely excellent. From Meatloaf's Robert Paulson, to Jared Leto's , and even The Narrator's boss, everyone came through and dropped a tone fitting, scene stealing, performance. Even the extras, one-and-done characters like that waiter recommending to pass on the soup or the detectives who tried to get The Narrator's balls, were awesome.

None of these characters would have been so ably depicted without the outstanding direction of David Fincher. I saw this before I saw Se7en, but after Alien 3 so, going in, I was a little suspect. I was pleasantly surprised by how well put together this movie turned out to be, how naturally it flows, especially considering the context of the narrative. Fight Club probably reads as un-filmable, considering some of the scenes that were captured, so for Fincher to give that much life to the overall plot is a proper masterstroke

Speaking of narrative, the writing in this thing is exception. I mean, some of the dialogue is just ridiculous. The sh*t Marla says, the philosophical nature of Durdan, the way certain situations are framed; It's all brilliant. I mean, who writes, “I haven't been f*cked like that since grade school.” and expects that line to be delivered with a straight face? F*cking outstanding!

Seriously, I can't commend the writing enough. To tell this story, the way it's presented, that script had to have been one of the best in Hollywood for the time. There's no way you pack that much detail in a world without a tight ass focus to pull from.

I love the narrative of this story. Most cats would write it off as little more than a hyper-masculine fantasy or tag on to the very aggressive commentary toward the consumerist mentality of the US, but I just love the underlying exploration of  man, having the most violent mid-life crises, ever. I mean, the dude disassociates from reality, bags the girl of his dreams, becomes who he always wants to be, and it turns out he wants to be the greatest domestic terrorist in history! That sh*t is awesome! Fight Club is also one of the most earnest, endearing, love stories I have ever seen. I mean, Marla and The Narrator's entire relationship is doomed going forward, but they had one helluva honeymoon phase.

The fight choreography in this thing is brutal. I love a good martial arts outing but this ain't that. This is raw, punishing, no frills, face pounding. This is the curb stomp you get into when cats are after you for your J's. This is that panicked, adrenaline filled, fight for your life. There are no fancy spin kicks or one-inch punches or knees delivered from helicopters. No, the is only the hard, wet, slaps of fist to flesh and it's glorious.

This movie is gorgeous. The way it's shot, the scene transitions, the composition of said scenes, the cinematography and frame work; All of it is f*cking exceptional. There is just this grim, filthy, haze over this surreal vision and that malignancy grows as the film progresses. That aggressive corruption is as much a character in this film as Marla or Durdan, themselves.

The Verdict

If you haven't guessed by my unbridled praise of this movie, I love Fight Club. It's one of my favorite films, ever. It's influenced how I tell my stories and create my characters. Indeed, I believe that Tyler Durdan is one of the best antagonist ever brought to life onscreen, standing equal to Darth Vader and Ledger's Joker. Fincher is in prime form, crafting a chaotic, fever dream of testosterone, mid life crises, and toxic masculinity, package in a scathing social commentary about materialism and superficiality. As a kid, the dope visuals and pulp brutality shocked me. As an adult, the subtle story telling and great character work enthrall me. Edward Norton is excellent, per usual, as The Narrator but Brad Pitt surprised. Tyler Durdan gave him room to play, to experiment, and show us what he could do. Pitt definitely did that. For my money, though, Marla Singer made this flick. No one but Helena Bonham Carter could have made that role work. Fight Club is chock full of gritty performances, surprising cameos, rich writing, great fights, and raw emotion. This film is absolutely excellent and, while earning the reputation as a favorite to the Hot Topic crowd, deserves to be seen by everyone. The first time you experience this narrative is amazing but, upon repeat viewing knowing what you know. It gets better. I don’t believe it’s a perfect film, it’s not as tight as Alien in some parts, but it’s damn close. Fight Club is a modern classic that should absolutely be seen by everyone, at least once.