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teacup-crow · 3 years

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The Christmas Runner

On the 12th Christmas Eve after the world ended, Molly and Carena told someone the story of the Christmas Runner. Major end of S3 spoilers, very minor spoilers for early S5.

I spent all day in bed and this happened? Will probably go on AO3 once I polish it (and when it’s actually close to Christmas). Promise it’s wholesome!

(In my headcanon here Carena is 15, Molly is 13 and Sara is 7)

“Sam’s givin’ you how much to watch her?” Carena Skeet spluttered, towering over the younger girl, leaning her hands over her head on the brick wall of the housing block. The moon was a sharpened, thin crescent, and lights winked in the guard towers. Over in the main barn, they could faintly hear the twanging of a slightly out-of-tune guitar and some tipsy singing, suggesting the grown-ups’ Christmas Eve party was already in full swing.

Everyone said that Molly Harrison was the prettiest girl in Abel, with blonde curly hair and eyes blue enough to knock out zoms, but right now she was shifting foot-to-foot, looking more irritated than anything else.

“A loaf of crusty bread and a pot of blackcurrant jam, and… you’re not having any of it, Caz.”

“Dr Cohen only promised me a bloody book!” Carena pouted, but avoided stomping her foot. She’d about grown out of that. Nobody would dare call her pretty, but she was too, in a fiercely intimidating way. It was two months until she turned sixteen and could finally start Runner training, and she’d already begun practicing first thing every morning, tearing around the training shed when the sun had barely risen. Where Molly was soft and homely, she was angled and muscular. “You can read it if you let me have a spoonful.”

“That’s a rubbish trade and you know it! I won’t always go along with everything you tell me to do, you know, it’s not fair-“

“Oh blah blah blah, quit whinin’, let’s just get the job done before they realise they double-booked.” She dropped her hands and stalked away. Her foster dad’s old fireman jacket was too big on her, but wearing the king’s clothing added to her swagger.

“You don’t like kids,” Molly pointed out, stumbling a little behind her as she strode off to the front door.

“Kids is fine. Kids is kids. I have, like, fifteen siblings. I know what I’m doing.”

“Yes, and you don’t like any of them. And they’re all the same age as you!”

“What can I say, I’m not good at sharing.” She turned and gazed pointedly at Molly, who shrugged it off. “It doesn’t take two people to babysit a seven year old.”

“Yeah, so go away, Caz. You don’t even want a book.”

“Gotta get on Dr Myers’ and Sam’s good side if I want to be recommended for Runner, don’t I? Janine respects their opinion more than anyone else except Runner Five.”

“So go and sit on guard duty with Runner Five and earn their approval.”

“You jokin’? Five’s batshit.”

“They’re also the only reason we’re not dead, so maybe you should be a bit more respectful.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t try to tell me what to do, Molly Harrison...” Carena’s tone was affronted, teetering on nasty. Then she stopped herself. “But yeah, you’re right. Five’s batshit bonkers, but they’re awesome.”

“And scary?” Molly added.

“Yeah, if you’re a wuss.”

They’d reached the green wooden door of Maxine and Paula’s apartment, a wreath on the outside, a menorah in the window. Sara had hung paper chains all down their part of the corridor. It made both the teenagers smile for a second or two.

Carena knocked, to no reply. She tried again.

“That’s weird,” she muttered.

“Sara, you in there?” Molly tried, peeking through the window.

“Sara, we brought chocolate!”

This caused a patter of feet to charge towards the door. Carena grinned. “First rule of kids is lie through your teeth.”

“MOLLY!” Sara sprang through the door in a bright blur of red sweater and green trousers, and jumped into Molly’s outstretched arms. “Did you bring Galileo too?”

Years before, when Archie Jensen had lost Mildred van der Graff to an explosion, Five had managed to get their own chicken back to Abel relatively unscathed. Molly, already interested in animals even as a small child, had adopted Galileo Figaro, a now-geriatric menace with a beak that had lasted longer than anyone expected. The hen had strong memories of her dinosaur roots, and, apart from Molly, Five and Sara, would attack almost anyone who dared enter the coop.

“Galileo’s an old hen, she’s resting.”

“She went cluck-cluck-cluck over the rainbow bridge to Ed Harrison’s stomach, you mean.”

“Caz! Dad would never!” Molly looked scandalised as Carena burst out laughing at her own joke. Thankfully, it went over Sara’s head as she dropped down from Molly’s arms and stared up at Carena’s jacket in awe. Caz ruffled her mop of springy hair affectionately. She liked this kid, at least. It was very difficult not to.

“Hello, baby Sara, how’s it goin’?”

“Good, Princess Caz! I’m making a jigsaw puzzle. It’s got a million trillion pieces!”

“Sounds like an absolute riot. Tell you what, Molly can finish it with you and I’ll heat up the rations.”

Molly nodded despite herself, taking the pudgy little hand in hers and stepping into the cosy apartment. “Okay, let’s go, hopefully we have all the pieces...”

“Daddy had to remake some of the missing ones but he said you can barely tell the difference, sort of! Anyway, you said you had chocolate?”

This was still one of the oldest housing blocks in Abel, but instead of enough bunks for eight people the two rooms comfortably housed the little family of three, bathroom splitting a bedroom on one side and a family room on the other with a table and a bookshelf and warm candle-lit lamps too high for Sara to knock over on the mantelpiece. Woollen throws covered the kind of battered armchairs you sank into and artwork lined the walls. There was even a tidy kitchen corner with a kettle and a camp stove and a stack of chipped plates and mugs. It was one of Carena’s favourite places: better even than sharing a room with some of the roller girls on a rare trip to see her foster dad in London; much better than her own springy bunk in the children’s dorms, the wall behind her chequered curtain plastered in pictures and photos and plans but still not private enough to block out the whining and crying of the little ones all night. It was nice to see a place where a real family lived. When she stood in the centre of the room, she could squeeze her eyes shut and almost picture the faces of her real parents, her actual bedroom, the kitchen they’d had with a white-tiled floor. Or was it sand-coloured tiles? She wasn’t quite sure, not that she’d admit it. Whenever anyone asked, she always said she remembered the pre-zombie world perfectly.

“Caz? Are you heating up the food or...?”

“I’m getting to it!” She stomped towards the stove, where Sara’s parents had already left a few crumbling Tupperware containers of pea soup from the kitchens, and Molly had brought a bowl of eggs to hard boil if they felt snacky. Not particularly inspiring, but then food had been limited for the last week as the kitchens saved all their supplies up for Christmas Day. And none of them knew how to be fussy: Sara and Molly did not remember a time when food was plentiful, and Carena’s last remnants of pickiness had been starved out of her when the Ministry occupied Abel. She’d been nine, and her stomach hadn’t stopped rumbling for that whole terrible ten months. It ached again a little just thinking about it. She wondered if that had left her weaker, permanently damaged her chance to become a Runner or a roller-girl. As if her asthma wasn’t enough of a handicap. Well, she’d do it anyway. Nothing was going to get in her way, least of all the legacy of those who had hurt her foster father.

“Three bowls of green soup, coming up!” She added a lick of salt, and stirred the metal pot. The ruckus from the square was louder now, almost matched by the younger girls playing with the puzzle behind her.

“I can’t tell if this is supposed to be a man’s face or a rat.”

“Daddy’s not a very good draw-er.”

“I mean… he could use some practice, to be honest. Any clue on where this piece should fit, Caz?”

Carena doled out the bowls and spoons. “Looks like a squiggle with earmuffs to me. Sam’s crap at art.”

“Don’t swear in front of Sara!”

“She’ll be fiiiine,” Carena rolled her eyes. “Lighten up, Molly.”

“Yeah, lighten up, Molly!” Sara echoed jubilantly. “Crap, crap, crap.”

“Okay, you can cut it out now. Eat your dinner.”

Molly changed the subject, sensing another mischievous outburst of swearing on the horizon. “Are you excited for Christmas, Sara?”

“Yeah! Did you hear that we’re going to have a hog roast and potatoes?! And games! And, and, Ms Marsh knitted me a hat and mittens!”

“How do you know about that?” Molly admonished. Sara immediately looked caught in the act.

“I… maybe heard her and Mama talking about it.”

“Did you ‘maybe hear’ or were you spying on your Mama?”

“I wasn’t spying! People just think kids can’t hear stuff!”

“Hey, spyin’ is a great skill, don’t knock it, Mol. Don’t worry, we won’t tell.”

“I wasn’t spying!” Sara drank down the last of her soup, licked the bowl, and pouted adorably. It was hard for the babysitters not to laugh.

“You know, I think that piece might actually be a clockwork mouse. I think it goes down at the bottom…”

They finished the jigsaw with only four missing pieces. “It’s… a big man in a red coat with a white beard! With lots of toys. I’m going to call him Mr Bob.”

“Sara, that’s Santa. Do you not know about Santa?”

“Father Christmas?” Molly tried, although she wasn’t completely confident either. Sara looked blank.

“You know my father is called Sam Yao?”

“No, baby, Santa Claus is different. He brings things to good children at Christmas.” In the back of her mind was an image of Ed in a terribly cobbled together Santa suit, a tiny Molly on his shoulders. A good memory in a flock of bad ones. It twinged in her chest.

“He’s a Runner?”

Carena sighed. “Basically. Yeah. Santa Claus is just another name for the Christmas Runner. Every Christmas Eve, he goes from township to township, leaving gifts for all of the children.”

“How does he get through the gates?”

“Well, duh, he lets the township leaders know what time he’s going to come on Rofflenet first. And he’s really fast, so he doesn’t need to worry about Raiders or zoms. He’s got a big sled drawn by nine dogs for all the presents!”

Sara’s eyes sparkled. “What are the dogs called?”

“Well, the main one is Rudolf, and he’s an, an Irish red setter. Or he wears a red jumper, like you. Something to do with red. The other ones…” she looked to Molly for assistance, and realised the blonde girl was just as enraptured. “The other ones aren’t important.”

“Caz!”

“Fine! Dasher, Dancer, Prancer… Victor?”

Her mind drew a complete blank. Somewhere in her subconscious, a woman’s voice read the words of Twas the Night Before Christmas, but she couldn’t quite make them out. “Um… Gold, Frankincense, Myrrh and Spam?”

Molly snorted in surprise, her face contorting and shoulders shaking as she tried to hold back a peal of laughter. At least Sara seemed satisfied. “Okay, so how come I don’t hear them all?”

“He sneaks in with magic and only when you’re extremely tired so it’s, like, impossible to stay up to hear. But if you leave a sock on the end of your bed he’s guaranteed to put sommat cool in it.”

“How will he know what I like?”

Molly looked thoughtful. “Maybe you should leave him a list? But you like a lot of things.”

“And my socks are quite small.” Sara looked pensive, kicking her feet in the air to check the size of them. “You two should write lists as well!”

“I’m too old to write one-“ Carena tried, but Sara was already insistently jabbing a pencil and an old receipt at her from a scrap paper drawer in the cabinet.

“These big long lists from the olden days are perfect, we can use the back.”

Carena’s eyes flitted over the receipt. Morrisons. Mango, papaya, hummus, avocadoes. All words she didn’t recognise, foods she would never get to try, and, suddenly intimidated, she laid it down on the table. She wasn’t the strongest reader or writer at the best of times - she’d learned too late, and it was difficult with so many new things in a row. Sara sounded out the letters on her own list as she wrote, her reading already confident.

“Dear Christmas Runner. Thank you for all your hard work, and for taking so many risks to deliver presents…”

Molly glanced over at Carena with a dash of awkward concern. They’d shared a schoolroom as children, and again for the last few years, and had some of the same frustrations, although Molly struggled more with maths and numbers and the purpose and point of algebra and geometry than writing and words. “Can I write both of ours, and you do the pictures? Your drawings are really good.”

Carena nodded, and got up abruptly to wash out the pot and make some tea. Outside, the town choir had drummed up enough numbers to give a few carols a go. She cracked open the window a little to let the sound filter up.

“I would really like some bubblegum but I know it is hard to find and my mothers don’t like it so don’t worry if you can’t find any. I also like marbles and you can fit lots of them in a sock!”

“You’re already running out of space!”

“Okay. Lots of love from Sara Myers-Cohen-Yao, kiss kiss kiss! What are you going to ask for?”

“Nicer soap,” Molly said, quite serious. “And I need a new metal bucket for chicken feed and milking. Mine is close to holes.”

“A bucket won’t fit in a sock!” Sara scoffed with childish mirth. “That’s ridiculous!”

“I don’t know, she has really big feet.” This made Sara giggle even more, and slide off the chair to look at Molly’s feet more closely.

“Ha, ha, ha,” Molly gave Carena a mock-withering stare. “What do you want, Caz? I’m doing yours now.”

Carena thought as the water began to bubble. All she really wanted was to be a Runner. To explore. To get buckets and soap and marbles and gum and make faces back in the township light up. All she wanted was her lungs and airways to do as she commanded, her muscles and heart to work with her, to let her push past exhaustion.

“Eh. Shoelaces would be nice.” She smirked at Molly. “Or some chicken fat.”

“Make one more threat to my chicken’s life, Carena Skeet and you won’t be getting anything from the Christmas Runner!”

“I surrender, I surrender!” Carena laughed, and poured the tea. “Anyway, shouldn’t you be in bed by now, Sara? If we’re going to get this Runner to come at all.”

“But I’m not even tired,” the small girl yawned, still on the floor with her head on the chair and cuddling one of the throws her mothers had stacked on the sideboard.

Molly grabbed the rest of them. “Come on, we’ll build a blanket den, have our tea in there, and Caz can tell you more about the Christmas Runner.”

“Startin’ to feel like Caz does all the work around here,” Carena added, stirring in milk and honey and using the puzzle box as a makeshift tea-tray. “Go on then, lead the way.”

Five minutes later, they’d constructed a large blanket fort and, huddled together inside it, Carena began to tell them everything she remembered from the world before, embellishing the odd detail or ten.

“You’re lying, there were no flying snowmen.”

“Well, I saw a film about them!”

Eventually, Sara curled up and fell asleep, thumb in her mouth, dreaming up a jumble of tinsel and angels and dancing snowmen and turkeys.

Molly smiled, sleepy herself. “You know, you’re actually really good with kids.”

“You’re actually good at lightenin’ up.”

“Yeah! This was fun. I had a really nice evening.”

“Molly…” Carena began, and stopped. She tucked Sara’s blankets around her a little tighter. She didn’t know how to say how safe she felt, maybe for the first time since she lost her brother, warm and wanted and hopeful, surrounded by the peace she wanted so badly to fight for. “I think tomorrow is gonna be a really good day.”

The bell in the square jangled once, twice, twelve times and for once they didn’t panic. It had been years since a horde went anywhere near the gates. This was midnight.

“Merry Christmas, Caz.”

“Merry Christmas.”

***

Carena awoke under a pile of blankets, her head on the end of Sara’s bed, the sound of Dr Cohen humming in the kitchen as she fried the eggs for breakfast, and caught three bulging stockings out of the corner of her eye. A lump came to her throat as she saw the book, as promised, bound in ribbon, that she recognised even without reading the words.

The Abel Runner’s Handbook, fourth ed.

She nearly knocked the wind out of the doctors in her rush to hug them.

#zombies run #zr #carena skeet #molly harrison

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yasbxxgie · 6 years

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'Gil Scott-Heron saved my life': After a traumatic childhood Abdul Malik Al Nasir seemed to be heading for jail or an early death. Then, at the age of 18, he met the famous poet and musician – with remarkable consequences

My brother Reynold introduced me to the music of Gil Scott-Heron. Little did I realise how it, and more importantly Gil, would go on to shape my life.

I was 18, had just come out of a childhood in care, was traumatised, illiterate and had no prospects. Reynold, who was older, showed me an album called Moving Target, which had a picture of Gil running through the streets of Washington seen through the telescopic lens of a gun. Reynold was politicised and well-read – unlike me. I didn't take life too seriously, partly because I couldn't face up to what had happened to me. He made me sit down and listen to the song Washington DC and the lyrics summed up so much of my life: "The symbols of democracy pinned up against the coast, the outhouse of bureaucracy surrounded by a moat./ Citizens of poverty are barely out of sight/ The overlords escape in the evenings, brothers on the night."

Gil was talking about the White House surrounded by the urban ghettos, the bits the tourists don't see – the reality of the city's ghetto life. My brother explained what the song meant. He drew a parallel between what Gil was talking about in Washington DC and what we, as black people, were facing in Toxteth, Liverpool, in the run up to the riots of 1981.

Reynold was trying to wake me up to consciousness. I had already got in with the wrong crowd, and he was concerned that if I didn't dissociate myself from them it would only be a matter of time before I was incarcerated again – and this time not in a care home.

Why had I been put in care in the first place? My name back then was Mark Trevor Watson, and when I was eight years old my father had a stroke. Dad was black from Guyana, my mum white Welsh. All the family (there were four kids, and mum and dad) were the butt of racist abuse. Dad, a former merchant seaman, was a real worker. Nothing could stop him. He even volunteered to work on Christmas Day 1974 for the Netherley Property Guards, who patrolled the warehouses on the Liverpool docks. It was a horribly cold winter. He left the house at 5am to wait for the bus to take him to work. It never came. Dad waited till 10am and eventually trudged home defeated. That was the only time I saw this big strong seaman cry. He didn't open his Christmas presents, he just went straight to bed. He had a stroke in his sleep and when he woke up he was a quadriplegic, paralysed from the neck down. He stayed like that for the rest of his life, in and out of the geriatric ward until he died four years later.

Mum, who worked in the Meccano factory, continued to struggle with the four of us. But she couldn't really cope. I was a handful – dyslexic and dyspraxic, but undiagnosed. I hated school. We were virtually the only black kids there, and the pupils used to be brought into school assembly to the sound of the headmaster's favourite recording – Black Sambo: "Black Sambo, black Sambo, living in the jungle alone, except for Big black Mumbo and Big black Jumbo." No one considered it a problem. After that everyone would turn to me and my sisters and call us black sambo. There were fights, and everyone called us troublemakers. At nine I was expelled from that school, which resulted in me being taken into local authority care in 1975.

I was "sentenced" to nine years under a care order having committed no crime. They didn't see it like that, of course. They labelled me maladjusted and told all of us that we were menaces to society; that society needed protecting from us. On the night they took me into care, they put me in an admission unit where they locked me in a room with bars on the window for 14 days and 14 nights. This practice later came to be outlawed following the infamous pin-down scandal in Staffordshire, but in the 70s it was common. It was the most traumatic experience of my life, for which I would later seek justice in the courts.

Just before Christmas 1975 I was taken to a place called Woolton Vale assessment centre, otherwise known as Menlove. It was a large, Victorian prison with bars on every window, locks on every door and an isolation cell inside. It had previously operated as a remand home for prisoners. In 1974 it had been converted to an assessment centre for kids, but still operated illegally under the old rules. Confinement might not have been permitted, but it didn't stop them. Meanwhile, the local remand centre, Risley, was full, so Menlove became an overspill for prisoners. This meant they were mixing children from broken homes with hardened criminals – and locking them up. Another matter over which I would later sue.

From there I was moved to several different community homes where I suffered varying degrees of physical and racial abuse over the years until I was 18 and my care order ceased. I was visited by my social worker who gave me £100, made me sign a form to say I would never come back for more money, and within a few months I was living in a hostel for homeless black youths.

That was when Gil changed my life. He was playing at Liverpool's Royal Court Theatre, and the gig was sold out. It was 1985, Gil had a record in the charts, and was at the peak of his fame. A friend of mine, the late photographer Penny Potter, got me in – she had a backstage pass and told his team that I was her assistant. I watched the show and was mesmerised. It was hard to describe what he did exactly – he rapped, he played jazz, he was a poet, he educated – he was just singing a song, but it was as if he was part of a collective soul that existed in the room.

After the show I went backstage with Penny. Gil was standing there with a bunch of people around him – photographers snapping away, reporters stuffing mics under his nose, promoters with bags of money, and the band members trying to get paid. Everybody seemed to want something from him. I shook his hand, thanked him for the performance and turned round to leave. He said: "Hold on a minute brother, what's going on round here? I heard you had some riots". I told him about Toxteth and how the black communities had rioted across the country in the long hot summer of 1981. He said: "Yeah we had some of them back in DC". He wanted to know about the people of Toxteth so I offered to take him to the scenes of the riots. The next day we toured the area and I gave him a running commentary of what had happened in each place, all the places that had been burned down and what had happened as a result.

Now if there's one thing they taught us in care it was how to cook, and I offered to feed Gil and the band. The trouble was I didn't have a place to live. So I asked my friend Dobbo if I could borrow his flat, cashed my giro cheque, and spent my two weeks' money on food. Gil bought his whole 17-strong entourage back to the flat and I fed them all. Entrees, starters, mango juice, the works. He tried to pay me £100, which was a lot of money then. I wouldn't accept it; he tried again and I refused again. When he realised there was no point in trying to pay me, he said to his promoter: "We'll be back in England in a few weeks. Give the brother the details of the hotel where we'll be." Then he said: "I'd like for you to join us on the tour." To do what, I asked? "Whatever the fuck you wanna do, carry some drums, whatever you want," was his response. And that's what I did.

Gil took it on himself to spend whatever time he could in the evening mentoring me, giving me encouragement and trying to foster in me a sense of self-worth. I had been indoctrinated by the care system to believe that I was maladjusted and useless from the age of nine, but Gil refused to accept it. He saw something in me that I did not see in myself – my potential.

I had told Gil everything about my life. Except for one thing – I could hardly read. I was just so ashamed. It was 1988 and I'd been on the road with him for four years. This time we were touring America with Richie Havens and Gil passed me a book and asked me to read a page back to him. I felt like my heart was going to stop. I'd always had the attitude that if Gil asked me to do anything I'd do it, and for the first time he'd asked me to do something I couldn't do. I'd always made myself useful by doing anything, from the band's laundry to flogging Gil's books at gigs, to helping the roadies, to navigating for the driver. I was always conscious of not trying to be a burden because I was aware he was paying for my flights and hotel rooms, and when he asked me to read and I couldn't I felt cold, and fumbled and fumbled, to the point when he said "What's the problem? Are you not fluent in reading?" That was the first time I ever knew a person could be fluent at reading. Being a child of the streets, fluency was something I'd always associated with talking; talking was my survival mechanism. Gil made me take stock of the fact that illiteracy was something not to be ashamed of, but something to address. I told him I'd never been taught – that was the first time I'd admitted it even to myself. In the care system education or literacy weren't encouraged, and most people came out of it like me.

Not many people know that Gil was a teacher – he had a Masters degree in English from Lincoln university. Despite not having a first degree he was accepted on to the Masters programme on the strength of two books he had written as a teen; The Vulture, a murder mystery, and The Nigger Factory, which was about life on black college campuses. I'd been running with the wrong crowd and he took it as a personal challenge to turn me around; to take me away from a life of hustling and make me productive. If I'd ended up like most of my peers in care I'd be dead or in jail by now. Gil's intervention saved my life.

He used to introduce me to people as his son, despite the fact that he has his own children. It was so touching. At the age of 12 I lost my father, and when I met Gil at 18 he took on that role and took it on seriously.

Back then, I had so many problems; my mind was like a spaghetti junction. There were so many narratives going on in my head that I couldn't unravel them, and Gil would listen to them all. At the end he'd invariably say one or two sentences that would sum up what it had taken me so long to say, and also direct me to what I should do about it.

In 1987 we were on tour and Gil suggested it was time for me to get a job. For two years I went to sea, working as a steward on a ferry, then on oil tankers, scrubbing decks, cleaning toilets, serving food. Every night from 6pm to midnight I taught myself to read and write. I started experimenting with language by writing poetry and songs. When I got to port I'd write to Gil, and enclose poems or songs for his appraisal. In between stints at sea, I would go on tour with Gil and he would appraise my work. By 1990, at the end of a period at sea, I had a considerable body of work; poetry, prose and songs. But I just put them in a box in a cupboard in my mum's house and left them for years

Gil then encouraged me to go to college and university and educate myself. The problem was, I didn't have any qualifications. So in 1990 I took a job with Littlewoods on a positive-action training scheme where they took on four black kids a year and trained them in management, and through that they sponsored me to go to college to study business and finance. I got a degree in sociology and geography, which seemed appropriate for a seaman with my background, followed by a postgraduate diploma in social research and a Masters degree in media production.

I continued to tour with Gil when I could. He was so proud of me. My degree was the culmination of everything he had invested in me and I'd invested in myself. What Gil gave me was a reason to live. At the age of 18 I couldn't see anything to live for.

In 1992 I met the Last Poets, a band that had been Gil's mentors and who are often credited as being the first rappers. Gil's famous song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was inspired by the Last Poets' Niggers Are Scared of Revolution. There was a yearning in my soul for spirituality. I had lots of questions about religion, but Gil was more spiritual than religious. Jalal and Suliman from the Last Poets spoke to me about Islam, it struck a cord and in 1992 I became a Muslim and changed my name from Mark Trevor Watson to Abdul Malik Al Nasir and started managing The Last Poets' leader Jalal. I later started my own record company and worked with the likes of Public Enemy, Run DMC, Wyclef Jean, Sly Dunbar, the Wailers and Steel Pulse.

Over the years things took a toll on Gil. For many years he had preached against the evil of drugs, but he became an abuser himself, and in 2001 he was sent to jail in New York State for possession of cocaine. When he got into trouble, it reminded me how much he'd helped me. So I flew to New York and visited him in jail – he'd been pumping iron, eating three square meals a day, which he rarely got when we were on the road, and looked more relaxed and fit than I'd seen him in years. I went through all the security checks, and they told me to take a seat in the visiting room while they got the prisoner. He didn't know who was coming, and when he saw me he had a huge smile on his face. The guard called him over and said: "Ah, the famous Gil Scot Heron . . . tuck your shirt in." It was just an attempt to humiliate him. I bit my tongue.

By 2004, I had received substantial compensation for what I suffered in care. I dug out my old poems from that box in my mother's house, and showed them to my wife Sarah. She said I should do something with them, so I set up my own publishing company, Fore-Word Press, and published my first book, Ordinary Guy, in my original name Mark T Watson. Gil was elated when I sent him a copy. Not simply because it was dedicated to him but also because he knew without his mentoring, I wouldn't have been able to read or write.

In 2008, I was producing an album at Wyclef Jean's studio in New York and there was a huge commemoration concert at Radio City Music Hall for Martin Luther King Day. Wyclef was performing, and he introduced me to Stevie Wonder. Now Stevie and Gil had been integral in fighting for a national holiday to celebrate Martin Luther King, and I told him about my relationship with Gil. "Is Gil out of prison?" he asked. Yes, I said. "Well, bring him here now." So I phoned Gil, and brought him to the show. When we arrived at Stevie's dressing room and I announced Gil to Stevie, Stevie Wonder stood up, and said: 'Gil Scott Heron y'all', and the whole dressing room burst into rapturous applause.

Last year Gil made a comeback album, I'm New Here, which got great reviews. I joined him on what would be his final tour of Europe.

It's three weeks since Gil died, and I'm still in shock. I'm 45, married with five children, and Gil has been the most important person to me throughout my adult life. His funeral in Harlem was a sombre affair. What touched me most was all the love in the room. After the band played a beautiful tribute and Gil's ex-wife Brenda delivered a eulogy, the rapper Kanye West took to the pulpit and sang Lost in the World, a song that contains a sample from Gil's poem Comment #1. It was a beautiful tribute.

After the service, I told Kanye my story and asked if he would take part in a tribute concert for Gil in Liverpool, the place where we met all those years ago and he took me under his wing. This is my way of saying: "Thank you Gil. You saved my life."

#gil scott-heron #gil scott heron #abdul malik al nasir #the guardian

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ratherhavetheblues · 5 years

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INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘AUTUMN SONATA’ “People like you are a menace”

I can’t, for the life of me, regard Ingmar Bergman’s film, Autumn Sonata(1978), as the flat-out domestic clash others choose to believe. What is the real fascination and entry-point here, to me, is that the film’s protagonist, Eva, played by actress Liv Ullman, is made to look like a carbon copy of the actress, Ingrid Thulin, in the Bergman film, Winter Light (1963). Whereas Ullman generally holds forth as a flakey dreamboat, Thulin forever relishes looking and behaving scary. And, moreover, the latter’s performance, as an off again/ on again lover of a rural clergyman, looms very large in Autumn Sonata.Arguably the most contentious and demanding of all Bergman’s films, Winter Light needs to be carefully fathomed, if nonsensical soap opera is to be avoided here. Thulin’s Marta, in that 60’s puzzler, perseveres as a fatuous humanitarian infatuated by an angst-ridden atheist priest. The latter has come to detest her ugly body and her even more ugly attitude. But he is very fortunate that the sexton of the church (a retired, hunchback railway man, named Algot) is a far deeper student of spirit than he (which is to say, a far better acrobat)—quixotically larding his sense of Jesus as a misunderstood, sensualist mortal (mortal, period)—and, as such, a slow-dawning supplement of the so-called expert’s long-held, heretical orientation. It is this ironic eventuality of risk-taking which opens the door to Marta being still in the picture and now a beneficiary of a regime of that “juggling” of opposites so dear to the vision of this film series.

The return of the aura of Marta within the orbit of Eva effectively messes up the facile supposition that we are here to deal with the dynamics and possible salvation of a family. One other inspired touch, apropos of the elephant in the parlor, is the choice of career-long wayward Ullman’s adversary, namely, Hollywood star, Ingrid Bergman, a career-long, banner sentimentalist, in her swan song, as Eva’s mother—light years away from all her other pleasing roles confirming eternal feminine wisdom. As if to lend a hand in clarifying where these rather abstruse landmines lurk, the first scene ignores “timeless truths,” in order to broach something quite new. Eva is married to another clueless preacher, Viktor (no less), who idolizes her imaginative—Algot-like—zeal, and his is the sermon of the day. With Eva at her desk in the blurred distance, there is Viktor, just outside the study, addressing us, in close-up, with some good news, pertaining to her apparently significant, individual source of reflection, salient in its disinterestedness. (A preamble, to that singularity we’re supposedly to buy into by means of the acolyte/ guide, is Victor’s sense of seeming miraculousness in becoming her husband. This would constitute a sort of inversion of Jof and Marie, from the mother lode that is The Seventh Seal. It would also constitute this Norwegian backwater being a vaguely subversive agency.)

At that doorway, where we meet them, Viktor also provides a smattering of Eva’s rather cosmopolitan background. She had a several years’ relationship in Oslo with a medical doctor and had written “two small books” during that time, before cutting off the technician. (We should, on the basis of that sketch, recall the imaginative protagonist in Bergman’s film, Through a Glass Darkly[1959], who comes to grief with a husband/ doctor, loathing her failing to worship in the church that is rather bloody-minded science for the tone-deaf and feeble courage, and convincing her that she is schizophrenic and needing to be locked up in a mental hospital. In her being violated, she comes to regard God as a giant spider. As it happens, Ingrid’s role here, as Charlotte, a famous classical pianist, comes to show us her technique on the keyboard, which reveals one hand in action being like a flitting spider. Moreover, in the Ingrid vehicle, Gaslight [1944], she finds her run-of-the-mill-crook/ husband attempting to see herself insane, and ripe for suicide and a nice payday.) Eva’s next gig was as a journalist; and in that capacity she met Viktor at a bishop’s reception where she wouldn’t have to linger long—though seeing in Viktor a gentle front to make some progress.

On the day we meet them, he explains that he often pauses by her workshop/ study/ dining room to try to imagine how newish thoughts come about. Pulling out one of the “little books,” he tells us, “This is the first of her books. I like it so much. She has written, ‘One must learn to live. I practice every day. My biggest obstacle is that I don’t know who I am. I grope blindly. If anyone ever loves me as I am [which is to say, loves her vastly unusual and usually hated presence], I may dare at last to look at myself [to become a factor in a hitherto, totally, hostile jungle]. For me that possibility is fairly remote.’” Viktor reverts to his own statement, to confirm to us that the mild spouse looms, notwithstanding a strong loyalty, as part of the jungle which bedevils her seemingly placid home and militant planet. “I’d like to tell her just once that she is loved wholeheartedly, but I can’t say it in a way that she’d believe [she in fact not looking to him for accompanying her high-risk leaps]. I can’t find the words [he can’t find the daring].”

He leaves his post as Eva approaches us, folding a letter to Charlotte (of whom there has been not a word in seven years). Coming to his office, she’s of a mind to have Viktor read aloud what she’s now proposed for their partnership, with the one silent partner. (First, though, we hear from the active partner that she has learned, from a mutual friend, that Charlotte’s lover, a Renaissance man, Leonardo [no less], has died.) “Dearest, Mama, I know what a terrible blow this must be to you. [She and he actually knowing nothing of the sort.] I was wondering if you’d care to come to visit us for a few days or weeks. Please don’t say no, right away… We have a piano and you can practice all you want to. [A vaguely cavalier gambit.] It would make a change from a hotel. [Superstars don’t usually get kicked around like that.] …We’ll make a fuss over you and spoil you.” [The ambiguities of “fuss” and “spoil,” in play.]

For whatever reason Charlotte agrees to come, it is clear the fjord locale is not the attraction. On reaching Eva’s bailiwick, the visitor is most struck that her drive has aggravated her chronic back condition. “Well, here I am,” the communicator fails, a communicator who had failed to look at the letters mentioning that their four-year-old had drowned several years ago. (Don’t for a second imagine that this is a family reunion or any form of family. Both of the women are out for something transcending family. And both of them crash miserably.) Charlotte does feel obliged to say, “It’s beautiful here,” and promises to her daughter’s hope, “Indeed, I will” [stay a long time]. Getting down to business, Eva asks, “You’ll give me some lessons, won’t you?” Charlotte’s, “Yes,” could just as well mean, “That wasn’t what I came to do here.”

Eva, I think, when you take account of her daily “practice,” could well be using Charlotte’s disarray in order to challenge the long-term, almost forgotten, contempt she sees everywhere, but particularly in the mother who could and should be exposed as being far from the real deal. And what chased Charlotte out of the woodwork? The end of a gratifying liaison in an ancient villa, the loss of which prompting a revamp of her solicitousness? (She will mention, after the skirmish to come, “I am always homesick, but, moreover, I find it’s something else I am longing for…”)

The musical royalty inherent in Charlotte, after iterating that her back hurts (sign of a weak backbone?), dashes into a long account of being wonderful under the stress of Leonardo’s final days. (Travel does have a way of crowding out what you really should be attending to. Rather than shooting her geriatric face off, her agenda would be better met by listening and watching.) “I sat with him through his last day and night. He was in bad pain. They gave him shots every two hours. Now and then he cried because it hurt. He wasn’t afraid of dying.” This tug-of-war about grace might have been an avenue taking her and us a long way. Losing, as she carelessly does, such a field of well-being and ascendance might have put Charlotte seeing some playability about the hosts, a primer in a new solitude. Being an acrobat of high distinction in the mode of music does closely coincide with juggling as to others. Could she take that opportunity with Eva and Viktor? Did Leonardo open a door to her where there is much to be learned and enjoyed? (During the brawl to come, Charlotte reveals that her nothing of a set of parents—nothing but money—hurled her into a process of regarding nothing but the gratifications of brilliantly hitting the right notes.)

Eva’s moment to shine would be at the piano and its heretic arrangements. But her mother has tossed such a load of dismal screwballs at the outset as to shred her (truth to tell frail) reflective traction. (What looked, to her, at that sanctuary at the silent desk, being a go, nearly instantly becomes the ruin of all her rosy plans. The paragon of a range of sublimity puts foot to the floor a very common bilge of gossip pertaining to her friend’s cancer implicating the factor of plague, so omnipresent in the films of Bergman, where the functional so rapidly slips to the dysfunctional.) “The sun was blazing down and there were no awnings.” Then there were troubles securing a better room in the hospital. She opens the window at sunset (without any sharing of the beauty). “He said it wouldn’t be long…”—the kind of insert familiar from the world of Nicholas Ray. “The nurse said I should eat. But I wasn’t hungry… The smell was making me sick. Leonardo dozed off; then woke up and asked me to leave the room. He called the night nurse, and she came with a shot. A minute or two later, she came out and said Leonardo was dead… We had lived together for 13 years. And had never had an angry word. As often as I could, I went to see him at his villa near Naples. He was kind and thoughtful and happy about my success… One day, he gave me a long look and lovingly said, ‘This time next year I’ll be gone… but I’ll always be with you.’ It was sweet of him to say so, but he was apt to be rather theatrical… I can’t say I go around grieving. Of course he left a gap but it’s no good fretting… Do you think I’ve changed much?” “You’re just the same,” Eva tells her, having been seen, by quick cuts, overrun by Charlotte’s remarkable grossness.

The visitor/ technocrat eventually notices the disappointment and tears on her daughter’s face. “Did I say something wrong?” the star asks. Eva brushes it off as being excited and a bit tense. Tentative hugs break up to news of such a supposed vacuum here, specifically, activated by Eva’s church accompaniment and recitals. This prompts Charlotte to compare that virtual nothing with the five school concerts she gave in Los Angeles, each time seating 3000 children. “I played and talked with them. I was a huge success…” That unspoken provocation, now part of a new realization that her mother will always be a sterile, but volatile, brute, shifts the sophisticated hope into the shadows in order to posit a cheap assault of her own. With the fanfare, “There’s something I have to tell you,” Eva melodramatically discloses that her cerebral- palsy-victim-sister, Helena, whom Charlotte consigned to a clinic of the hopeless, years ago, to forget (later she will reason, “Why can’t she die?”), has for the past few years been living with the hosts. The doting mother had prefaced her annoyance with, “Some people are so naïve.” When Eva retorts, “You mean me?” the now feeling-besieged guest snarls, “If the shoe fits.” Not surprisingly, on meeting the one she hoped to never see again, she takes off her wristwatch, and, placing it on her daughter, tells her, “It was a gift from an admirer who said I was always late…”

A quick cut from this bemusing good deed finds Charlotte in her room devouring a cigarette and firing off the soliloquy, “Why do I feel like a fever? Why do I want to cry? I’m to be put to shame. That’s the idea. A guilty conscience. Always a guilty conscience. I was in such a hurry to get here. What was I expecting? What was I longing for so desperately?” Cut to the dining room where the hosts, putting out the best tableware, have become tentative, and in the case of Eva, pathological. “You should have seen her when I told her Lena was here! She actually managed a smile…” What she actually managed managed—along with the hostess who imagined taking the classy road—was to obliterate any traction toward disinterested discovery between them. Now tightened like snare drums, the duration of the visit becomes a fevered battle, testing us to see through shabby rhetoric (like the dead sermon of Tomas, in Winter Light, and the dead childishness of Isak, in Fanny and Alexander).

We’ll cover this death march in two ways: a brief unpleasantness which probably never should have seen the light of day; and, a more extensive survey, of the textures of civilized hate. “I’ll cut my visit short,” the world traveler tells herself. “Then I’ll go to Africa, as I originally planned” [hoping to find in exotica the coverage she hardly dares to admit she lacks]. At any rate, she is ruthless (not the same thing as resolute) in her makeover. (“I held her [Helena’s] face and felt the disease twitching at her throat muscles.”) What needs to be recognized here, for Bergman’s work, is that the convention of family, for all its pragmatism and caring, is grossly overrated and stands essentially as a means of instinctively crushing serious lucidity, which is to say, serious love. Eva is embarrassed in her no longer seeing any point of contributing her musicianship in Charlotte’s presence, while being forced to suffer it, anyway; that night, the hostess invades the top dog and rains a dismal hurricane upon her mother, for having been a very poor instance of the form. The visitor leaves in the morning, never to be seen again.

However unforthcoming the interplay proves to be, it’s a gold mine treating of endeavor and its quicksands. With Charlotte dressing like a Mayan goddess for the Nordic 4 pm dinner, and handed, by a phone call from her agent, a small fortune for a week’s labor, she’s ready for what’s left of the day. Before she has surfaced, however, the hospitality-2 slips into a register often heard in the films of Nicholas Ray. Eva blurts out, “It’s like a ghost falling on top of you… Do you think I’m an adult?” Viktor tells her, “I guess being an adult is being able to handle your dreams and hopes, not longing for things… Maybe you stop being surprised.” Eva adds, “You look so sensible with your old pipe. You’re very adult.” (Viktor being a cipher; but her rapid decline being chilling.) After the end of that premature dinner, there is, by the protagonist’s one and only fan (unaware that the recital is now a bad idea), his urging her to what in fact is an arrangement of a Chopin prelude being shot forward a century to come forth as discrete notes reaching for others of that kind and taking the pulse of the infrastructure of sound itself. “But you wanted your mother to hear you play,” the innocent calls out. A nervous and unnerved performance ensues, with cuts to Charlotte, clearly unimpressed. The latter’s formulated politeness—“Eva, my darling. I was just so moved—adds to Eva’s annoyance. “Did you like it?”/ “I liked you.” The expert adds, “We each have our own.” The hostess’, “Exactly,” does not rise to diplomacy. Nor does her insistence to have Charlotte deliver her own rendition. Not only does the guest provide a powerfully professional effort; but she adds a conceptual commentary, which comes to bear as an exploding of the revolutionary’s emotionality. “Chopin was emotional but not sentimental. Feeling is very far from sentimentality. The Prelude tells of pain, not reverie. You have to be calm, clear and even harsh. Take the first bars, now. It hurts but he doesn’t show it. Then a short relief. But it evaporates immediately, and the pain is the same. Total restraint the whole time. Chopin was proud, passionate, tormented and very manly. He wasn’t a sentimental old woman. The Prelude must sound almost ugly. It is never ingratiating. It would sound wrong. You have to battle your way through it and emerge triumphant.”

Eva gives credit to Charlotte’s cogency, particularly since it is, appearances notwithstanding, surprisingly close to her own cogency. Crowning her lecture, the leader of thousands intimates, “For 45 years I’ve worked at these terrible preludes. They still contain a lot of secrets…” (Secrets, in fact, which Eva, the fragile rebel, had broached at her hermetic writing table, and also, perhaps, in face of the sentimental accompaniment of the popular music of her era. Thereby, not only the rather heroic involvement with Helena, but the shrine she has maintained in her dead son’s bedroom, being for her a way, “to let my thoughts wonder” [also a shock to Charlotte], implies, despite quixotic concomitants, a concern for some kind of holistic action, which her present guest seems intent to avoid at all costs. During the cattiness when setting the table, Eva emphasizes her upbringing in the style of “beautiful words,” which she equates with a large measure of phoniness (and explicitly nails hapless Viktor—he’ll tell the inoperative mother-in-law that Eva’s tenure here involves never a moment of love [in fact, her experience in total never entailing love]—for his being one such weakling when trying to be affectionate). And yet, at the shrine for the boy, she runs with “beautiful words,” hoping to mesmerize the multi-faceted celebrity along a course of rather facile “secrets.” “All I have to do is concentrate and he [toddler, Eric]is there. Sometimes, as I’m falling asleep, I can feel him breathing in my face… It’s a world of liberated feelings… There must be countless realities, not only the reality we perceive with our dull senses… It’s just fear and priggishness to believe in limits…” Eva looks to the Mom who is not a Mom, to corroborate these findings. Charlotte, for all her scandal, is far too savvy to buy into that scenario.

And that rebuff, in the vernacular of another era of confusion—Viktor telling Charlotte, “She [Eva, the myopic seer] got lazy, gazing at the play of light over the mountains and fjords”—goes viral soon after the clichés of pleasant dreams are done. Just before that, however, a little pothole springs up, when Charlotte (never straying from the forum having made her a rich goddess) brings up the loveless marriage. “If only you’d leave people alone!” Eva snaps, before assuring that she’s cool. The cool one fumes in the stairwell, while the pragmatist counts her recent inheritance and fantasizes giving the hosts a better car. “It’ll cheer them up.” Where things stand now—livid that she’ll never be part of a majority—nothing could cheer her up. Hearing Charlotte having a nightmare provides a pretext to attack. The aftermath of such an event being a prelude, for Bergman’s work, to cling to security, there is the mother, who isn’t a mother, fishing (as her daughter had gone fishing) for solicitude: “You do like me, don’t you?” / “You are my mother,” comes back, as if she’d pulled a handgun. Ready to be devastating, the one who loves no one plays a game of love. “Do you like me?”/ The rapid response is, “I love you. I broke off my career to stay at home with you and Papa.” Eva adds the cutting complement, “Your back prevented you from practicing six hours a day. Your playing got worse and so did your reviews. Have you forgotten it? I don’t know which I hated more, when you were at home or when you were on tour. I realize now you made life hell for Papa and me.”

She’ll go on to skewer the guest for being unfaithful to her father, amused by the attempts to maintain that everyone in the loop was cool. She’ll go on all night in that domestic vein, while the concise drama comprises her caring not a whit about that matter (while confronting her impotence as a thinker and cowardly laziness as a human being, along with large amounts of wine, put her in a temporary perspective of such madness). Of course, some sanity would prevail—one of Eva’s eyes fastened over the glass, her eye distorted—as she cries out, “I’m so confused! I thought I was grown up and could look clearly at you and me. Now it’s all one big muddle!” But when Charlotte attempts to state the obvious, “You’re exaggerating,” she’s met with, “You’re interrupting!” After more ridiculous momentum, the interrupted (largely self-interrupted) investigator asks, “What am I to say?” The nasty drunk replies, “Defend yourself!” [the ugly brawl, in Sawdust and Tinsel, 1953, putting in a brief visit]. To which the sort of Merry Widow asks, “Is it worthwhile?” Eva relives a time when Helena was hale, if not hearty, and Charlotte and Leonardo came by the homestead for a visit. The celebrity soon hopped off to Switzerland to prepare more fabulousness, and Leonardo was confronted by an adolescent Helena being infatuated by him. The less than Renaissance Man rudely bolts to Alpine power, disturbing the young girl to a point of her condition flaring up. This memory becomes an indictment going so far as to Eva’s accusing her mother that her poor behavior was the cause of the sister’s being a cripple. (“He left on the last plane…” [a touch of Casablanca melodrama].) “There’s only one truth and one lie. You’ve set up a sort of discount system with life, but one day you’ll see that your argument is one-sided. You’ll see you’re harboring a guilt, just like everyone else…” During the long night, Charlotte had had her own confusion and tears, in addition to needing to lie on the firm floor to offset a lack of backbone. Eva had spent most of the night in a chair which becomes an ironic throne, to Charlotte’s being a supplicant. The last word really registering, as the night dribbles down to clichés, like an Ingrid Bergman movie, is the visitor on the way out: “What guilt?”

Eva takes a walk in a graveyard by the fjord, untrammeled by the bilious self-expression that shot down the proposals of the thinkers of the day before. It’s getting dark, and the mystic has an agenda—making dinner for Helena and Viktor. But the rather alarming multi-tasker gives us a break. Though being surrounded by the dead, she commences a dialogue (frequently complemented by cuts to Charlotte and her agent, in a first-class train coach, on the matter of “something else I’m longing for…” as they flee from a cursed detour). “Are you stroking my cheek? Are you whispering in my ear? Are you with me now? We’ll never leave each other.” [The artist/ profit-center asks her neat-as-a-pin associate, “What would I do without you?” She’s suddenly troubled and looks into the darkness outside, her reflection leaving her cold.]

Once again, Viktor addresses us about his wife’s singularity: “She’s in such distress since Charlotte left so suddenly. She has not been able to sleep. She says she drove her mother away and can never forgive herself.” Once again, he’s to read out loud a letter to Charlotte, which can’t be seen as annoying. “Dear, Mama, I realize that I wronged you. I met you with demands instead of affection. I tormented you with an old hatred that’s no longer real. I want to ask for your forgiveness. I don’t know if this letter will reach you. I don’t even know if you will read it. Maybe everything is too late. But I hope all the same that my effort will not be in vain. There is a kind of mercy, after all. [It’s interplay by her has not been well engaged by the puppy-love that she’s reached.] I mean the enormous opportunity of getting to take care of each other. I will never let you vanish out of my life again. I’m going to persist. I won’t give up, even if it is too late. I don’t think it is too late.” [“Beautiful words, going nowhere.”] Though Bergman would have regarded the films of Jacques Demy as an abomination, the latter helmsman, a student of Robert Bresson, does, in his musical fantasy, Donkey Skin (1970), provide an oracle right out of our guide here, to wit, “Life is not as easy as you think.”

We’ve been challenged, by Autumn Sonata, to investigate a musical cosmos both elegant and vicious, both solo and infinite. (The backdrop of the initial credits presents us with a wildfire [perhaps including blood].) Each of the protagonists readily sees through the other’s shabbiness. Charlotte refers, with much validity, to her daughter’s being a “crybaby.” Eva, finding her mother a lot like her long ago, Oslo boyfriend, describes Charlotte as, “People like you are a menace. You should be locked away and rendered harmless.” While Eva dabbles with, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” Charlotte, far more self-critical and sophisticated, notes, “Leonardo [in a seer role] once said, ‘A sense of reality is a matter of talent. Most people lack that talent and maybe it’s just as well.’” She asks if Eva knows what he meant. Recalling her mantra, “One must learn to live. I practice every day…” she comes to the matter differently. Talent and practice. The colloquium being a bust. But not a waste of time.

#ingmar bergman

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emily971 · 5 years

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Things You Can Do To Save Lives

In April 2005, the American Hospital Association’s magazine, Hospital and Health Networks (H&HN), published the article “25 Things You Can Do to Save Lives Now.”1 In it, experts from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the National Quality Forum (NQF), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), commented on an action plan to advance hospitals’ patient safety activities.

Now The Hospitalist has researched hospitalists’ views on these same 25 items. Those views are presented below.

A number of these items “are already highly ensconced in the JCAHO and CMS criteria,” says Dennis Manning, MD, FACP, FACC, director of quality in the Department of Medicine and an assistant professor at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, Minn. “In terms of power of the things on the list for potentially saving lives, what we sometimes look at are the things that have the potential for the most prevention.”

Brian Alverson, MD, pediatric hospitalist at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, R.I., adds his thoughts on the 25 items: “We have to hold in our minds a healthy nervousness about patients being hospitalized, in that there is an inherent danger to that phenomenon. No matter how hard we strive for perfection in patient care, to err is human.”

Shortening hospital length of stay to within a safe range, he believes, is one of the best ways to reduce those daily dangers.

Some of the 25 items pose more challenges for hospitalists than others, and the contrary is true as well. Some were judged to be of lesser concern due to guidelines or imperatives imposed on hospitals by regulatory organizations. Other items fall outside hospitalists’ accountabilities, such as incorrect labeling on X-rays or CT scans, overly long working hours, medical mishaps (such as wrong-site, wrong-person, and wrong-implant surgeries), and ventilator-associated pneumonia. A few items were those that hospitalists found challenging, but for which they had few suggestions for solutions. In some, there were obstacles standing in the way of their making headway toward conquering the menace. These included:

1. Improper Patient Identification

“Until we set up a system that improves that, such as an automated system,” says one hospitalist, “I’ll be honest with you, I think we can remind ourselves ’till we’re blue in the face and we’re still going to make mistakes.”

2. Flu Shots

“Flu shots are probably more important in the pediatrics group than in any [other] except the geriatric group,” says Dr. Alverson, who strongly believes that pediatricians should be able to administer flu shots in the inpatient setting, “because we can catch these kids with chronic lung disease—many of [whom] are admitted multiple times.”

3. Fall Prevention

This item is one of the National Patient Safety goals, and one that every institution is trying to address. In pediatrics, says Dr. Alverson, the greater problem “is getting people to raise the rails of cribs. Kids often fall out of cribs because people forget to raise the rail afterwards, or don’t raise it high enough for a particularly athletic or acrobatic toddler.”

The other items on the list of 25 are below, including a section for medication-related items and the sidebar on a venous thromboembolism (VTE) prevention program.

4. Wash Hands

Provider hand-washing has been well studied, says one hospitalist, and “the data are so depressing that no one wants to deal with it.” Another says, “We just nag the hell out of people.”

One of the hospitalists interviewed for this story read the H&HN article and responds, “We do all these things.” But a lack of self-perception regarding this issue—as well as others—is also well-documented: Physicians who are queried will say they always wash their hands when, in fact, they do so less than 50% of the time.2-5

Despite the value of hand sanitizers—whether they are available at unit entrances, along the floors, at individual rooms, or carried in tiny dispensers that can be attached to a stethoscope—some pathogens, such as the now-epidemic Clostridium difficile, are not vulnerable to the antisepsis in those mechanisms.

“C. dif is a set of spores that are less effectively cleaned by the topical hand sanitizers,” says Dr. Alverson, who is also an assistant professor of pediatrics at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “In those cases, soap and water is what you need.”

Peter Angood, MD, FRCS(C), FACS, FCCM, vice president and chief patient safety officer of JCAHO, Oakbrook, Ill., says provider hand-washing is a huge patient safety issue and, in general, a multi-factorial problem that is more complicated than it would seem on the surface.

“We can rationalize and cut [providers] all kinds of slack, but at the bottom line is human behavior and their willingness to comply or not comply,” he says. “It’s like everything else: Why do some people speed when they know the speed limit is 55?”

Addressing the solution must be multi-factorial as well, but all hospitalists can serve as role models for their colleagues and students, including remaining open to reminders from patients and families.

5. Remain on Kidney Alert

Contrast media in radiologic procedures can cause allergic reactions that lead to kidney failure. This is a particularly vexing problem for elderly patients at the end stages of renal dysfunction and patients who have vascular disease, says Dr. Manning. Although the effects are not generally fatal, the medium can be organ-damaging. “This is a hazard that’s known, and it has some mitigating strategies,” he says, “but often it can’t be entirely eliminated.”

Measures that reduce the chance of injury, say Dr. Manning, include ensuring that the contrast medium is required; confirming that the procedure is correct for the patient, with the right diagnosis, with a regulated creatinine, and well coordinated with the radiology department; “and then getting true informed consent.” But at a minimum, he emphasizes, is the importance of hydration. “There is some evidence that hydration with particular types of intravenous fluids can help reduce the incidence of the kidney revolting.” And, he says, “there are a number of things that we have to do to make sure this is standardized.”

6. Use Rapid Response Teams

Use of “[r]apid response teams [RRTs] is one of the most powerful items on the list,” says Dr. Manning, who serves on SHM’s committee on Hospital Quality and Patient Safety as well as the committee helping to design the Ideal Discharge for the Elderly Patient checklist. “Whereas every hospital has a plan for response,” he says, RRTs are “really a backup plan.”

In 2003, Dr. Manning served as faculty for an IHI program in which a collaborative aimed at reducing overall hospital mortality. The formation and application of RRTs at six hospitals in the United States and two in the United Kingdom was the most promising of the several interventions, with impact on a variety of patients whose conditions were deteriorating in non-ICU care areas.

The advantage of RRTs with children, says Daniel Rauch, MD, FAAP, director of the Pediatric Hospitalist Program at NYU Medical Center, New York City, is that it is often difficult for providers to know what may be wrong with a child who is exhibiting symptoms. “Is the kid grunting because they’re constipated, because that’s the developmental stage they’re in, they’re in pain, or are they really cramping on you?” he asks.

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shielduniversityrp · 6 years

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“ Hey! Geriatrics! Let's get a move on. The Avengers need us! ”

NAME: Thomas “Tommy” Shepherd ALIAS: Speed POWERS/SKILLSET:

Superhuman Speed Molecular Acceleration Accelerated Perception

ALIGNMENT: Hero

BIOGRAPHY:

Tommy was born to Frank and Mary Shepherd, he was a difficult child, who added extra strain to their already rocky marriage, by the time he was three they were divorced, and Mary was granted full custody, by age four he was in his first of many foster homes. He bounced around, staying in homes all over New Jersey, but never settling. As he grew older, he began to grow restless, and that restlessness lead to curbside warnings and stationhouse adjustments, before leadingto him being placed in a juvenile detention centre.

The X-Gene + puberty + stress + a room full of violent bullies = one eleven year old speedster in a medically induced coma for the better part of a year. Manifesting was rough, adjusting was rougher, and life after that just went downhill from there, until he was spending more time locked up than not, and he lasted in each home less and less time until he was 15. At 15 Tommy had had enough, already deep into his fascination with Magneto and his brotherhood, and in several underground groups of mutant extremists, he decided to take a stand against the high school he never felt welcome in.

It was never his intention to blow up the school, but that didn’t matter come his trial. It didn’t matter that he just wanted to give people a scare, to show them he was more powerful than they could ever dream of being, but one wrong move running though a wall and he got a gas pipe. Combined with the sheer heat he produced while running, it caused an explosion that lead to his arrest. He was tried for the deaths of 273 people, and then placed in a S.H.I.E.L.D. run facility for powered individuals where he was experimented on and tortured for several months, with the intention of turning him into a living weapon.

After being rescued by the Young Avengers, he had a choice to make. Join them and try do some good, or go on being a menace. But with homelessness looming over him, and no ability to provide for himself, he decided to join them, and stayed with them until the team mostly separated after a few years, and headed to space with Noh-Varr for a short time before returning to Earth. With no formal qualifications and his criminal record preventing him from living a normal life his options were slim, so at the Kaplan’s urgings, he decides to join SU to try get his GED, before hopefully going on to take some university courses.

SPEED is TAKEN played by ROBIN

#young avengers rp #marvel rp #thomas shepard rp #marvel rpg #avengers rp #mutant rp #x-men rp

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bruddahme · 6 years

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The best Xbox One games 2018: 30 must-play titles

Even though the Xbox One is approaching its fifth birthday (which makes it positively geriatric in console years) we think it's just reaching its peak. With a strong library of games and services to offer and lots more exciting new games in the pipeline, we think the Xbox One family of consoles has a lot of life in it yet.

Although the Xbox One receives criticism for its first-party lineup, it does have some unmissable genre-defining exclusives which include the Forza, Halo, Gears of War and Sea of Thieves series. And with the 4K capabilities of the Xbox One X, these games are looking better than ever.

Aside from its AAA releases, Xbox One is also a great place to find high-quality indie games thanks to its ID@Xbox program which has made titles like Ori and the Blind Forest and Cuphead absolutely essential plays for this generation.

It's from this massive collection of titles that we compiled our list of the best games on the Xbox One – 30 essential games we think every gamer should have in their library. You could spend your time anywhere, but if you're new, these are the game worlds we recommend visiting first.

Read on to see which games make the Xbox One shine – and, keep checking back periodically, as we update this list all the time with new titles we feel have become part of the exclusive society of must-play games.

Got the shiny new 4K console? These are the best Xbox One X games

Make the most of your console with the best Xbox One accessories

On the PlayStation platform? Check our our picks of the best PS4 games

Looking to Switch it up? These are the best games on Nintendo Switch

Check out the best Xbox One gaming headsets

Check out the video below to see more on the Xbox One X

The best Xbox One deals and Xbox One S deals

A Grecian epic

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is the latest edition to the action RPG franchise. Odyssey is set during the Peloponnesian War and sees you stepping into the sandals of either Alexios or Kassandra as they try to uncover the truth about their history while navigating the turbulent world of Ancient Greece as a mercenary.

Odyssey is a graphically stunning title which will take you to the heart of Ancient Greece – just make sure you have the time to place it because there's over 100 hours of content.

Making the old feel new again

The second Assassin's Creed title in our list, Assassin's Creed Origins sees you going back to ancient Egypt, before the brotherhood and before the Templars, where you play as the original assassin Bayek.

Assassin's Creed is a series that was growing increasingly stale but with Origins the formula has been refreshed with new RPG mechanics, story-driven side quests and a far more free-flowing combat system.

Whether you're new to the series or a fatiguing fan, Assassin's Creed Origins is absolutely worth playing as it's the strongest installment we've seen in years.

Read our full review of the game and our tips and tricks guide. If you're already been there and done that, then check out everything we know about the upcoming Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

A refreshing jump back in time

In the latest Battlefield game, DICE takes players back in time to World War One and by doing so completely rejuvenates the once stagnating franchise.

The game offers a poignant and entertaining single-player campaign that sets a new standard for first-person shooter. Broken into six sections, each following a different character and front line location, the campaign never feels dull or repetitive –and even feeds neatly into Battlefield 1's multiplayer mode which, while familiar, also benefits from the much-needed breath of life that the change in setting gives.

Graphically impressive, entertaining, and sometimes touching, Battlefield 1 is a return to form for the series.

It's not long until Battlefield V releases – November 20. So, here's everything we know about Battlefield V so far.

Beautiful and frustrating in equal measure

After a long development and lots of anticipation, Xbox indie exclusive Cuphead has finally been released. Was it worth the wait? It certainly was. Cuphead is a run-and-gun platformer with stationary boss fight levels thrown in.

With visuals and a soundtrack inspired by 1930s animation but gameplay inspired by the platformers of the 80s this game has had us torn since we first tried it at Gamescom. It's lovely to look at but its gameplay is challenging and you're going to find yourself frustrated and dying a lot.

We enjoyed Cuphead so much we named it Best Xbox Exclusive in our 2017 Game of the Year Awards.

Still, it's an indie experience that shouldn't be missed and you'll only find it on Xbox and PC.

Master the remaster

Dark Souls is an iconic series in the gaming world and with this remaster you have the chance to go back to where it all started in 2011, but with improved visual fidelity and performance. All the better to see those horrific and punishing enemies.

This is the same original game with all of its DLC but that's no bad thing. Dark Souls is a fantastic, must-play title and it's great to see it on the latest generation of consoles. Not just because the framerate bump to 60 fps makes it a much smoother and more exhilarating gameplay experience.

A smart, stealthy, steampunk adventure

Following the surprise 2012 hit Dishonored wasn’t going to be an easy task, but Dishonored 2 has more than lived up to its expectations.

Picking up 15 years after the events of the original, Dishonored 2 takes players back to the Victorian Steampunk city of Dunwall. This time, though, you have the choice of whether or not you want to play as the original title’s protagonist Corvo, or his equally-skilled protegee Emily.

Dishonored 2 doesn’t differ wildly from the first game, but there was nothing wrong with Dishonored in the first place. What we get is a vastly improved and close to perfected take on it.

Anyone who likes their games filled with atmosphere, character, and a bit of wit and intelligence will find Dishonored 2 worth picking up.

The best Xbox One deals and Xbox One S deals

A retro-slash-modern romp through the underworld

DOOM is very, very good. Not in a “wow, that’s good for a remake” kind of way, either. It’s genuinely a great shooter – so much so that we gave it a Game of the Year award in 2016. While Overwatch reinventing the wheel for first-person shooting games, DOOM impresses us by bringing us back to the time where dial-up internet was the only way to access AOL email: DOOM is, in so many ways, an excellent evolution of what the series was 20 years ago. It’s brutal. It’s bloody. It has devilish, frightening creatures that bleed when you slice them in half with a chainsaw. It’s the experience we wanted two decades ago but couldn’t articulate it because of the limitations of technology.

“Our weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency and gigantic sidequests.”

Inquisition is the proverbial RPG banquet – a 200-hour array of quests, magic-infused scraps, postcard landscapes and well-written character interactions that’s perhaps a bit too familiar, at times, but makes up for it with sheer generosity.

It puts you in charge not just of a four-man party of adventurers but also a private army with its own castle and attendant strategic meta-game, tasked with defeating a mysterious demon menace.

The choice of Unreal Engine makes for vast open environments and sexily SFX-laden combat – fortunately, you can pause the latter to issue orders if the onslaught becomes overwhelming. It’s a genre giant.

The homecoming we’ve waited seven years for

All things considered, this is one of the best games Bethesda has made. It ticks all the boxes: a massive, detail-oriented open-world; still-fantastic tenets of looting and shooting; a story filled with intriguing side quests and subplots that feel like they matter; and of course a classic soundtrack that brings it all to life.

In many ways it's the game we've been waiting for since Fallout 3 steered the series away from its top-down role-playing roots. Not only is the world itself wider, but the plot is better, and more digestible, than any of the games before it. There's still a sense of mystery about what's happening but you no longer have to dig forever and a day through terminals to piece it together.

Welcome home, stranger.

Still the best football sim money can buy

FIFA is, for many console owners, a highly anticipated annual event. The latest and arguably greatest installment in the football sim series has arrived in the form of FIFA 18.

Whether you're looking to play against others online, build up a management career on your own or play a cinematic story mode that'll give you an insight into the dramatic life of a premier league footballer, FIFA has a game mode just for you.

The best thing is, there's always more than enough to throw yourself into and agonize over until the next game rolls around with further incremental improvements that'll convince you to upgrade.

You can read our full review of FIFA 18 right here and make sure you're the best on the pitch using our tips and tricks guide.

A free 1-vs-100 shooter set on an epic scale

Fortnite Battle Royale is a certified gaming phenomenon. Pitting 100 players against each other on a single map, it melds fun, cartoonish gameplay with a fierce competitive streak, and has attracted millions of players across the globe.

When starting up, you're thrown onto an island with no weapons or armor and you must scavenge for supplies and fight for your life to be the last man (or squad) standing at the end of the game. The catch is that the map closes in as the match progresses, forcing players into tighter skirmishes and often whiteknuckle encounters. Best of all, however, the game is available for free on Xbox One, with in-game purchases limited to purely cosmetic options.

If you're relatively restricted financially and need something to tied you over until the next big release, Fortnite is better than all the rest.

Huge, exotic and amazing to behold: Australia is a petrol-head's dream

While the original Forza titles were about pristine driving skills around perfectly kept tracks, the Horizon series has a penchant for trading paint and isn't afraid to have you get down and dirty with off-road races from time to time.

While the first two entries in Turn 10's spin-off franchise surprised and delighted, Forza Horizon 3 is the unabashed pinnacle of the series, and stands amid some of the greatest racing games ever made. Good news for Xbox One X owners – Forza Horizon 3 now has its 4K and HDR patch.

The Gears keep on turning for this excellent third-person shooter franchise

Despite a new platform, a new development team and a new-ish set of muscled heroes on its box art, Gears of War 4 isn't some grand reimagining of the series that helped Xbox 360 go supernova back in 2006. But then again, such a revelation shouldn't come as a shock – this is the cover shooter that made cover shooters a fad-filled genre all unto itself, so messing too drastically with that special sauce was never a viable option.

Instead, the Xbox One and Xbox One S get the Gears of War template we all know and love with a few extra features gently stirred into the pot. For a start, the jump to current-gen tech has made all the difference to The Coalition's first full-fat Gears title. Spend a little time in the previously remastered Gears of War: Ultimate Edition and you'll see how small and confined those original level designs were, even with a graphical upgrade to make it feel relevant again.

It's more than just graphics, though. It's the return to form for the franchise; the focus on what makes a Gears game so great, that really won us over.

There’s no fear and loathing in Los Santos – just explosive entertainment

Yes, including one of last generation’s greatest games among this generation’s finest is rather boring, but GTA V on Xbox One is too good to ignore, with HD visuals, a longer draw distance and a faster frame-rate.

Among other, more practical perks it includes a first-person mode, which genuinely makes this feel like a different game, though the missions, tools and characters are the same. The new perspective pushes Rockstar’s attention to detail to the fore, allowing you to better appreciate the landscape’s abundance of in-jokes and ambient details.

GTA V’s open world multiplayer remains a laidback thrill, whether you’re stuntdiving with friends or teaming up to complete a Heist (a long overdue addition to MP, but worth the wait) – it’s probably the best place to hang out on Xbox Live.

Halo multiplayer at its best

A franchise that has defined Xbox as a platform for a long time is Halo and Halo 5: Guardians is a worthy addition to the series. With both a single-player campaign and the usual thrilling multiplayer combat, this is the Halo game for Xbox One you don't want to miss.

Though its single-player campaign isn't the best in the franchise in terms of story, this is Halo multiplayer combat at its most fun and anyone that loves playing online with friends will enjoy what the various modes on offer.

Say hello to the triple indie

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is developer Ninja Theory's first attempt at publishing its own game and it's quite an achievement. The game follows Senua, a Celtic warrior suffering from psychosis who travels to Hell to rescue her lost lover.

The game uses an interesting mix of binaural audio and innovative visual techniques to communicate Senua's experience with her psychosis to the player, resulting in a game that's likely to be quite different from anything else you've played recently.

Disturbing, insightful and extremely enjoyable to play, this is a game worth taking a look at and we're glad to see it makes its debut on Xbox One. Xbox One X owners will have the benefit of being able to choose between three visual modes which promote either resolution, framerate or visual richness.

You can read all about our experience with the motion capture tech behind Hellblade right here.

How many Snakes does it take to change a lightbulb?

Okay, so Hideo Kojima’s last game for Konami – and his last ever Metal Gear game – might be a little tough for the MGS n00b to get to grips with, but it’s still one of the best stealth-action games ever crafted. The open-world shenanigans will satisfy all your behind-enemy-lines / Rambo fantasies and probably confuse you with crazy plot twists and a million characters all with the same gravel-toned voices.

But hey, that’s all part of its charm, right?

Bold, brilliant and brutal

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is the sequel to the accomplished Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and builds upon all of its strengths.

Taking up the role of Talion once more, this game takes you back to a beautifully realized world that's bursting with originality. If you were a fan of the original game, we highly recommend that you pick of Shadow of War as it's an improvement in almost every way.

Read our full review here and check out our handy tips and tricks guide.

Friends who slay together, stay together

You've probably heard of the Monster Hunter franchise before now – it's a classic that's been going a long time. But we haven't seen it on console for a while. Until now. Monster Hunter: World is the franchise's debut on the latest generation of consoles and it's a true breath of fresh air.

Giving players the option to play solo or team up with up to three other friends, this game invites you into a living, breathing game world to hunt down some monsters. For research. And fun.

You'll face a learning curve with Monster Hunter: World and the dark-souls style of combat has the potential to frustrate, but this is the most accessible Monster Hunter game we've seen in years. If you've been looking for a chance to break into the series, this is it.

In our review we called the game "a bold and confident new chapter" and gave it a "play it now" recommendation. Thinking of becoming a Monster Hunter yourself? Make sure you check out our full survival guide.

A Metroid-Vania platformer with light RPG elements and loads of heart

Although Ori was released early on in the Xbox One's life cycle, it remains one of the best platformers on the console, bar none. Shockingly beautiful and ultra-deadly, the world of Ori and the Blind Forest inspires and impresses in equal measure. Add to that the game's phenomenal, easy-to-learn-hard-to-master control scheme and light RPG elements and you have the recipe for a timeless classic.

Sure, there are some sequences that aren't as enjoyable as the rest of the game (we're looking at you timed post-boss fight sequences) but ultimately this is a series that continues to enthrall long after you put the controller down.

Not had enough Ori in your life? We've learned that the game will be getting a sequel in 2019 called Ori and the Will of the Wisps. It will pick up where are story left off (no spoilers, please!) and will see Ori platforming his way through the eponymous forest for a second run.

The team-based shooter you need to buy on Xbox One

Overwatch has, without a doubt, been one of our favorite games to come out of the last year – garnering our Game of the Year 2016 award.

It's a classic team arena shooter from Blizzard that sets two six-person teams of wildly different characters against each other in a bright and cartoonish science fiction universe. And while it feels similar to the Call of Duty you've played before, Overwatch turns traditional shooters on their heads by adding unique character abilities and cool-downs to the mix that force you to strategize every once in a while instead of blindly running from room to room.

Great graphics, tight maps, and a good roster of characters to enjoy playing. Overwatch is good old fashioned fun and we thoroughly recommend it.

A chilling return to form

Your gaming collection isn't really complete if it doesn't have a quality horror title and if we had to suggest one it'd be the newest installment in the Resident Evil franchise.

Resident Evil is the franchise that put survival-horror games on the map and though it lost its way slightly in later titles, the newest game is a return to form for Capcom.

By going back to the survival-horror basics and getting them dead on, Capcom has made Resident Evil 7 a genuinely frightening and exhilarating gaming experience. If you have the stomach for the gore, it's absolutely worth playing.

Don't miss our full review of the game.

The name of the game is freedom in Lara’s latest sprawling outing

Despite being the sequel to a prequel about the young life of the Lara Croft, this still feels like a Tomb Raider game that has grown up. The reboot which saw a brave new direction for the franchise seemed a lot of the time to be little more than a bit of light Uncharted cosplay, but Rise is a far more accomplished game.

There’s now a genuine open world which feels like there is always something to do, and something more than just harvesting up collectibles in exchange for a light dusting of XP. There are also tombs. Yes, that might seem a fatuous thing to say given the name, but the previous game gave them short shrift. In Rise though they are deeper and more plentiful. Rise also has one of the best narratives of any Tomb Raider game, penned again by Rhianna Pratchett, it’s sometimes rather poignant.

So come on, ditch Fallout 4’s wasteland for a while and give Lara some love.

They had the technology to rebuild him, better than before

The original Titanfall was a great game – so great that it long held a place on this very list. However, its sequel, Titanfall 2, improves on it every conceivable way: the motion is more fluid, there are more distinct titans to choose from and, hold onto your hats here, there’s actually a single-player campaign that might take the cake for the best first-person shooter story of the year.

This game’s pedigree is inherited from one of this generation’s smartest and most unusual shooters. The original Titanfall married ninja-fast on-foot combat to the gloriously thuggish thrill of piloting giant mechs, which are summoned from orbit a few minutes into each match.

The skill with which Respawn has balanced this mix of styles in the sequel is remarkable – Titans have firepower in excess but they’re easy to hit, and maps offer plenty of places for infantry to hide. These ideas coalesce into one of this year’s most remarkable entries in the genre and is well-deserving its own shot in the spotlight as well as a Game of the Year nomination.

Stories don’t come bigger than this

Geralt didn’t have the smoothest of entries to consoles, but after some heavy patching and a lot of angry words about visual downgrades, we’re left with an RPG boasting tremendous scope and storytelling.

Oh, and combat. And don’t forget Gwent, the in-game card game. And there’s the crafting to get stuck into. And the alchemy.

You’re rarely short of things to entertain yourself with in The Witcher 3’s quasi-open world, then, and all the better that you’re in a universe that involves the supernatural without leaning on the same old Tolkien fantasy tropes. Invigorating stuff.

Superb in every sense

Looking for an incredible single-player shooter? Look no further than the 2017 wonder that was Wolfenstein II. Picking up from where the original game left off, this game is a timely social commentary and a superbly silly adventure all rolled into one well-written package.

With tight mechanics and a story worth caring about this is one of the most satisfying first-person shooters we've played in a long time. In our full review we called it "expertly crafted" and recommended that you play it now.

A strong narrative and emotionally compelling

Life is Strange is an episodic graphic adventure which tells the story of Max, who moves back to her hometown and reunites with her best friend Chloe – who is a bit more rebellious than she remembers.

On top of trying to navigate the difficulties of teenage life, Max discovers that she has the ability to rewind time at any moment and only she can prevent a storm on its way to destroy her hometown.

Rather than focusing on combat, the crux of Life is Strange is the choices Max (AKA you) makes and the effect these choices have on the overall story.

A game for those who appreciate an engaging story. The prequel, Life is Strange: Before the Storm, is equally mesmerising.

Scallywags

Rare's swashbuckling adventure Sea of Thieves released earlier this year, allowing players to take on the role of a pirate sailing the seas of a fantastical world – either alone or as part of a crew of up to four members. It's up to you whether you choose to focus on trading, treasure-hunting or plundering the loot of others.

This is a great title for those who enjoy playing with others in an open-world environment – plus it doesn't look too shabby.

Here's all the latest Sea of Thieves news and updates.

Another brick in the wall

Minecraft released nearly ten years ago, but it's still as popular as ever with adults and kids alike. The sandbox, survival game allows players to build with blocks in a 3D-generated world – providing a perfect creative outlet for those artistically inclined.

If you're less creative, there's also the option to explore the world, harvest resources, craft items and square-up to enemies.

Check out the history of Minecraft.

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spynotebook · 7 years

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The first season of Twin Peaks is almost perfect.

The gist of the core plot is not unique to David Lynch’s soon-to-be revived brainchild, but he pulled it off better than anyone else. A local teenage’s grisly murder and the subsequent investigation take center stage, and the unraveling of that central mystery soon sweeps up the whole town. The seemingly idyllic town that gives the show its name is, surprise!, not the sleepy hamlet it may seem. Unnervingly dapper FBI agent Dale Cooper sifts through the fresh horrors stirred up by Laura Palmer’s death while a rich cast of supporting characters help him out, get in his way, or navigate their spooky town outside of Cooper’s orbit.

Twin Peaks’ first season works so well because the show goes to such extremes when it both portrays the town’s endemic evil and paints saccharine portraits of small-town life in 1990s America. Lynch’s show is a loving paean to small towns and TV sitcoms, which makes his subversion of all their seemingly placid elements that much more disturbing. The line separating the two is paper-thin and liable to blur at any time. A tryst between high school lovers might get interrupted by a murderous psychopath. A character’s independent investigation might lead to her almost being fed to her father, who runs a secret brothel over the Canadian border. The evil shown in the first season oscillates between a sketchily-defined cosmic rupture and a tightly plotted story of a police investigation, and Lynch never shows all his cards. It covers a lot of ground but does not meander.

Lynch preceded Twin Peaks with 1986's Blue Velvet, which is perhaps the best film of the 1980's and resembles Twin Peaks on several fronts. A puppy dog-perfect Kyle MacLachlan stars as a college student who returns home to his idyllic small-town home and falls for a mysterious woman being lorded over by a maniacal creep (played by Dennis Hopper, who puts forth one of the scariest performances I have ever seen). Laura Dern plays interlocutor and audience surrogate, as Lynch plumbs the same thematic depths that he returns to with Twin Peaks: the hidden savagery at the heart of supposedly placid American life. No mater how calm things seem, no matter how cleanly the lawns are mowed, violence and perversion are woven into the fabric.

MacLachlan’s all-American steadiness drives both projects. Blue Velvet works in part because the boyish, innocent-looking MacLachlan (who had just starred in Lynch’s Dune, a legendary flop, as a 25-year-old unknown) is a peerless representative of the sort of Americana that Lynch seeks to simultaneously skewer and praise. His character in Blue Velvet is an innocent college kid who is nonetheless curious about the kinkier, darker side of town. Dale Cooper is almost a progression of that character. He has seen the lurking menace at the heart of the American experience, and he’s on a crusade to eradicate it wherever it pops up.

Given the thematic heft of the show, it could easily lurch into soap opera nonsense, but Cooper is utterly unflappable and the town’s inhabitants are not written as clueless rubes, even if they are acutely dramatic people. Twin Peaks plays it all straight, which makes it all the more unsettling. As someone who wasn’t born when the series ended and only came across it after the whole thing had been turned into one big meme, I was struck more than anything by the uneasiness of the world. The coffee habit that launched a thousand tote bags is there, and, yeah, the red room scene is deservedly iconic, but the show isn’t a campy send-up of the American television show. Its subversion comes from its unrelenting weirdness and obtuse horror. Lynch’s camera fixates on screaming mouths and spinning sawblades, picking away at the fabric of the town as it shows it to you.

Then it turns into a big mess.

The tightly-knotted yarn of Season 1 unravels the moment Season 2 starts. Instead of a resolution to the season-ending cliffhanger where Cooper gets shot in his room, viewers get their heads dunked into a big bucket of cold water and are forced to watch Cooper lie on the floor bleeding and rambling. A geriatric waiter enters the room and instead of helping, he just sort of bleats at the camera. It’s a grating and abrupt capsule of the entire season in miniature: a once mysterious and claustrophobic show has bloated out and glazed over.

Yet it still works. The consensus is correct; Season 2 is the inferior season. The majority of its episodes are worth a damn, though, and things don’t truly go off the rails until the home stretch. The show’s second batch of episodes reach higher highs than those in the first season, and ambition and restlessness serves the show well. The episode where the audience discovers who Laura’s true killer is features perhaps the most chilling single scene in the entire series. I am amazed that so many moments made their way onto television screens unedited, and nothing short of the finale is as chilling as watching the killer take his second victim while he garbles desperately at the camera.

The schlock also gets dialed up to 11 in Season 2. The first season balanced its horrifying impulses and tendency towards grandiose sweetness well by playing them off each other and never going too far in either direction. By the time Episode 9 rolls around, the show has abandoned any restraint. Season 2 isn’t anything like the evenly-tempered pilot episode (for my money, the best pilot ever put to wax) and it goes way too far in every direction as David Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost became less involved with writing and directing as they pursued other projects. One of the James-centric subplots is pure soap opera trash; a core character has a breakdown and lives out an extended fantasy that he’s a general in an alternate universe Civil War where the South won; there is perhaps the schlockiest scene in TV history.

If you dig the atmospherics of Season 1 and enjoy the moments where the shows fully indulges in its own whimsy, you’ll like the bulk of Season 2. It’s the apotheosis of everything that made Twin Peaks unique, for better and for worse. I can’t defend the back third of the season, where a ratings nosedive caused producers to flail at all manner of rotten and nonsensical plotlines. There’s nothing good about Audrey’s sudden fling-ette with a dapper cowboy guy from out of town or the ham-handed way the entire Windom Earle plot is carried out. It’s a big dumb mess and there’s little to enjoy.

However, the show did not end with a whimper. The hallucinogenic finale, where Cooper enters the Black Lodge and seeks to confront BOB and Earle in an interdimensional M.C. Escher nightmare world, does not hold back. Cooper plunges deeper into new layers of a funhouse-mirror infested chamber, unsheathing new horrors at every turn. A malevolent spirit devours his rival as doppelgängers wail and shriek. The grotesquerie of the Black Lodge is relentless and nigh-inscrutable, as if Lynch (who took charge of much of the episode personally) wanted to pull back the curtain once and for all, exposing the supernatural rot and savagery at the heart of Twin Peaks.

Lynch briefly returned to the town of Twin Peaks for the 1992 prequel Fire Walk With Me. At this point, the humor and spirit that animated the show was gone and all that was left was the repulsive side of things. The movie tells the story of Laura Palmer’s last days on Earth. MacLachlan is briefly present, but the film spends most of its time digging into the grittier stones that Twin Peaks turned over. One could make the case for Fire Walk With Me as a fittingly unflinching meditation on abuse, but as for the town of Twin Peaks, the mask had come all the way off and the product Lynch put forth was gross and listless.