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the-everlasting-dream · 5 years

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Walk of Shame - Drake x MC, The Perfect Cliché

A/N: So I’ve been playing around with the idea of Drake and Liz would have met if the whole TRR book never existed and I thought it would be fun to shove the into as many cliche situations as possible. Given my terrible track record of keeping up with series, this is gonna be an unofficial one. Stand alone fics that make up The Perfect Cliche.

Cliche count:

New neighbours

Mutual pining - or the beginnings of it

Awkward interaction

Walk of shame

Word Count: 2540+

Warnings: None

Drake rolled his eyes at the large moving truck situated in front of his apartment building destined to make him late for work that day. Tanner is going to have my guts.

He shrugged on his jacket and dashed out the door, slamming it shut behind him. The lift wasn’t working — of course it wasn’t working — so he wrenched the door to the stairs open, glad he only lived on the fourth floor. Close to the bottom, he was in such a rush he barely registered a stack of boxes on legs headed towards him until the last second when he twisted his body, clipping the new tenant as he shoved past.

‘Hey —‘

‘Sorry!’ He called over his shoulder, barely glancing back to glance at them before rushing off.

- Elizabeth huffed setting the last of her boxes down onto the floor of her new apartment, arm still sore where that asshole on the staircase had clipped her while bulldozing through. She looked around. This was her new apartment. That sure felt weird to say. Back home the prospect of going it alone and making it big in the big city was a lot more romantic than the sad little space before that cost more than it was worth. But going back wasn’t an option, she told herself, picturing her fathers furious face when she stalked out of his house for the last time. Shaking her head, she reached for the box of cleaning supplies, determined not to fail like he taunted her she would.

The day passed quickly and by the time the sun was setting, she’d accumulated a huge garbage bag of dust, bug carcasses and other unmentionables she’d found in the apartment. Now where was the bin?

She paused realising the superintendent hadn’t showed her where to dispose of her rubbish and there was no way she was leaving the bag in her apartment for another second. Hefting it, she opened the door to find it.

A few minutes later, Elizabeth realised that she was completely lost, and by some miracle had ended up at her own door. She was just about to give up when the sound of a door clicking caught her attention and she watched a tall broad shouldered man step out, carrying a garbage bag of his own. Perfect.

She wanted to leap after him but cautioned herself. Jesus Elizabeth let’s try not to creep out the new neighbours just yet?

He had headphones on so he wouldn’t have hear her approach but she followed behind him at a safe distance just to be safe. He lead her unaware the the fifth floor where the disposal awaited and she paused letting him throw away his bag first before stepping up for hers. As her neighbour turned, Elizabeth saw the tired lines on his unexpectedly handsome face. Noticing her staring, the stranger gave her a grim half smile before stepping aside to let her throw her giant bag away.

- As soon as Drake got back into his apartment, his phone vibrated with a text.

Kiara: Dinner on Friday?

Sounds good.

He clicked his phone off and sighed.

Kiara was... high maintenance to say the least. She was beautiful and smart and way out of his league and sometimes he wondered what he was doing with a girl like her. Their physical attraction was undeniable but in all other aspects, he felt severely lacking. He’d never pictured himself dating a high class New York socialite like her.

In his mind, he’d always pictured himself with a down to earth, jeans and t shirt kinda girl who wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty for fear of ruining her manicure. Kinda like that girl he’d run into in the hallway. The new tenant he guessed, just finished cleaning judging by the giant garbage bag, messy hair and streak of dust on her cheek. His lips twisted up a little at the memory.

Yeah someone more like her.

‘So how are you liking New York?’

Elizabeth took a sip of her latte as her best friend sat expectantly on the other side of the lunch table. ‘It’s... certainly an experience.’

‘Welcome to the real world baby girl. It sucks. You’re gonna love it.’ Her best friend Athena Park replied mischieviously, earning an eyeroll in response. ‘Have you gone out since you got here?’

Elizabeth shook her head. ‘I’ve spent most of the week cleaning and unpacking and prepping for the interview today.’

‘How’d it go?’

‘Good I think? The guy wasn’t too sure but the lady liked me. They said they’d get back to me at the end of the week.’

‘Yes!’ Athena crowed loudly, other patrons of the restaurant cringing at her. ‘That’s a perfect reason to celebrate. You free tomorrow night? Doesn’t matter. You’re free tomorrow night. We’re going out!’

‘Thanks!’

Elizabeth tipped the delivery boy in exchange for one supreme pizza that was definitely not recommended for just one person. After the interview today she was hoping for a nice quiet night in to relax. She shut the door waiting for a few moments for the delivery boy to leave before sticking her head out in hope of catching sight of that handsome stranger. She’d caught herself in the act of looking out for him in the hallway each time, hoping for a glimpse of her mysterious stranger, who despite his attractive looks, seemed to be permanently grumpy.

Elizabeth had no idea what she was trying to achieve by this. It’s not like she was interested interested. After her recent break up with Robbie, she definitely was okay with being single for a very very long time. Still a little bit of eye candy wouldn’t hurt. Seeing nothing, she shut the door and settled in for a long night with Emma Swan, Regina Mills and Killian Jones, main characters of her favourite TV show.

‘C’mon babe you know I didn’t mean it. It wasn’t personal.’

‘Felt pretty damn personal to me Drake. Kiara snapped back, tossing her perfectly flat ironed hair as she glared at herself in her compact in the dim light of the cab. 'He’s my cousin.'

'He’s a pretentious prick.'

‘Drake!' She snapped her compact shut and fixed him with a furious look.

‘Sorry,' he mumbled half heartedly, not meaning the single word because anyone that complained that his exotic caviar had been served two degrees warmer than it should have been, deserved prick status in his mind. Still he felt guilty for making Kiara upset after she had worked so hard to maintain a good relationship with her cousin and he had probably ruined it.

'Babe I’m sorry.' He leaned over kissing her cheek, nuzzling her neck.

‘Mmhmm.' She hummed in annoyance, arms folded across her chest as she stared out the window.

Drake wasn’t giving up yet. Sliding close, he brushed her hair away from her neck, stubble grazing the exposed skin, a hand finding her thigh. 'Let me make it up to you.'

Kiara scoffed but he could tell her resolve was wavering. He began tracing little circles on her thigh, as he pressed his lips to her neck, searching for her sweet spot.

‘Please.' He murmured, finding it and she let out a moan. ‘I’ll do anything you want me to.’

‘You’re lucky you’re so fucking cute. Kiara muttered before slamming her lips onto his.

Elizabeth was completely enraptured by the final episode of season three of Once Upon A Time, pizza dangling between her mouth and hand. When the big reveal happened—

Shit! Both her hands clamped over her mouth, eyes bugged open as she sat in horror for a few moments after the end credits ended. It took a stick wet sensation on her stomach to pull her out of her stupor and she looked down to see the piece of pizza that she had slathered in child sauce lying face down on her shirt. Groaning out loud she glanced at the time and the big basket of dirty laundry that she had been putting off for the last three hours that she’d spent on the couch.

Surely no one would be doing laundry at 1:30am right?

Hefting it on her hip, she tugged the door open, shoving her foot between the crack distracted as she leaned over to grab her keys from the glass bowl when a strange sound reached her ears.

Is that moaning?

Poking her head out the door, her eyebrows shot towards her hairline.

Oh... he has a girlfriend. Of course he has a girlfriend.

Her very mysterious, very attractive neighbour currently had his tongue down a girl’s throat as he pinned her to his front door right in full view of anyone walking by. Pressed so tightly together, Elizabeth had no idea where he ended and she began, she forced herself to shut the door, opting not to be the creepy neighbour with a voyeurism kink. She would just wait until they were gone and escape down to the communal laundry room. Her neighbour and his girl didn’t seem to be stopping any time soon, she observed after a good five minutes had passed.

Their moans grew louder and louder until —

'Get a bloody room will ya? Some of us are tryna to fuckin sleep!'

Thank you cranky Australian dude from 145.

With armed with her phone, earbuds and throwback playlist on, Elizabeth hoisted the basket on her hip, ready to take the monster that was her laundry basket.

Drake sighed to himself again, the argument still replaying in his mind.

'You don’t even try.'

'All I’m doing is trying!'

'Well maybe you need to try harder!’

‘I don’t know what the fuck you expect from me!’

‘Clearly too much!’

Still shirtless, he ran a hand over his face wondering how they could go from making out to a yelling match in mere seconds. Too riled up to stay in this room as the scent of Kiara's Black Opium cologne still remained, he grabbed his phone and stalked out the door, remembering he had a pile of laundry to pick up from the laundry room downstairs.

A movement at the corner of his eyes, he realised he wasn’t alone. Glancing behind the second row of washing machines, his eyebrows shot towards his hairline.

His new neighbour, the girl who had followed him to the bin the other night, the one that he couldn’t help sneak looks at locked in her own little world, completely unaware of his presence. Earphones on, dancing like no one was watching because as far as she knew no one was. Interestingly enough she was also shirtless, save for a pair of pyjama shorts and a sports bra. As she attempted and failed to do what he guessed was meant to be a Spice Girls dance move.

The sight brought a smile to his face despite his earlier fight with Kiara. Not wanting to embarrass his new neighbour, he crept away, resolving to introduce himself properly sometime.

'What?’ Elizabeth yelled over the loud music of the club, having clearly drunk more than she should have.

Athena repeated herself, trying to be heard over the pounding bass beat with even less success than the first two times she’d tried.

‘What?’

Her best friend rolled her eyes, making a circle with one hand and stabbing her pointer finger through it repeatedly, needing no further clarification.

Elizabeth turned to the blonde guy whom she was currently dancing with knowing at once that a similar though was on his mind. She sized him up, weighing the pros and the cons of this while Athena was already heading off with another girl. Her partner raised an eyebrow at her playfully and Elizabeth felt a grin begin to grow.

Why the hell not?

Now that he thought over it, Drake truly felt like an asshole for the night before. Kiara wasn’t wrong, he hadn’t been trying his hardest at all. He’d know what life he’d been in for when he started dating her, the demands and requirements of her socialite status and he’d promised her he was worth it.

He liked to think of himself as a trustworthy guy and in the interest of not throwing a two year relationship out the window, he grabbed his jacket, phone and keys before he could talk himself out of it.

Adjusting the large hastily purchased sunglasses on her face, Elizabeth glanced around self-consciously as she made her way across the street to her apartment building, hoping no one would see her messy hair and hastily donned nightclub dress and put two and two together. Waiting for the elevator induced a spiral of anxiety as she prayed that none of the building’s fellow residents would show up. Glancing behind her, she caught the eye of the rotund building’s superintendent, regarding her with a thoroughly unimpressed gaze. When the doors finally dinged open, she rushed inside, hastily jabbing the close button. Adequately satisfied that no one had seen her do the most embarrassing walk of shame ever, Elizabeth slumped against the side, so ready for a hot shower and a six hour nap.

'Hold it!' A hand slipped past the closing doors, preventing them from closing.

She could barely stop herself from gasping as her grumpy-but-attactive-and-also-kinda-mysterious neighbour joined her in the small space, looking just as dishevelled as she was.

They stood there in silence, both not wanting to state the obvious cheesy elevator music trickled through the crackling speakers as Elizabeth struggled to think of something to say.

‘Rough night?'

The guy picked up his dark head, giving her a half hearted nod. 'Yeah you could say that. You?'

'You have no idea,’ she sighed, wracking her brains for something to say. 'I’ve seen you around sometimes. Your girlfriend is really pretty.’

Elizabeth’s eyes widened as her neighbour’s narrowed in confusion.

'I just mean.. uh... I’m not stalking you or anything uh.. I’ve seen you together.'

'Uhh thanks... I think?’ He ran a hand through his ruffled brown hair. 'Would probably mean more if she was still my girlfriend.'

Guilt immediately bloomed in her. Good one Richmond. 'Oh. I didn't mean to...I’m sorry to hear that.'

'Don’t be.’ He shrugged it off. 'It was bound to happen sooner or later. But hey at least the sex was good right?’

‘Yeah,’ she answered weakly. ‘It was… it was good.’

Mercifully the elevator dinged, getting to their floor and to her dismay, they were headed the same way, forced to walk together.

‘You’re not from around here are you?’

‘Was it that obvious?’ Elizabeth replied, surprised that he interested in making conversation after not one but two verbal blunders from her.

He shrugged again, making her clock that as one of his trademark gestures. 'You liking it here?’

‘Its definitely taking some getting used to but its not too bad.’

‘Huh, yeah. There’s no place like it.’ His tone was strange but she couldn’t decipher what he could mean by it as they were already at her door.

‘Well this is me.’

‘So it seems,’ he replied, already turning to go.

‘I’m Elizabeth.’ He paused, regarding her for a moment, lips twisting into a half smile.

'Drake.’

‘See you around I guess.’

‘Yeah, you too.’

Tags: @chantelle-x0x , @choicessa, @drakewalkerwhipped , @thewolvesss , @mfackenthal , @srawesleyghuewrites , @topsyturvy-dream , @enmchoices , @gardeningourmet @debramcg1106 , @alesana45 , @meladoridarcy, @blackcatkita , @tmarie82 , @annekebbphotography , @lizk77 , @jayjay879 , @tornbetween2loves , @akrenich , @theroyalweisme , @likethetailofacomet , @sleepwalkingelite , @ooo-barff-ooo , @drakewalker04 , @mkatschoicesblog , @speedyoperarascalparty , @carabeth , @fairydustandsarcasm , @drakewalkerisreal @mrsnazariowritesagain

#tbh idk what im trying to achieve here #can i even write fic anymore #half my permatags dont read lmao #but if y'all want i'll write more #inspo and time are hard to come by these days ugh #drake x mc #drake walker #trr drake #drake x elizabeth #elizabeth richmond #TRR AU #The Royal Romance #playchoices #choices #choices fandom #choices fanfiction

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bingewithbee · 5 years

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June Binges

When They See Us

This series was hard to take in. It usually takes me about a week to finish a Netflix original but this one spread out through the entire month, as it was that mentally draining for me. Similar to Adan Syed’s case, with no hard evidence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time, this series shows the story of the Central Park 5. Please watch this show, everyone needs to know that false confessions happen and that they need to stop. Available to stream on Netflix.

I am the Night

This show follows a young girl named Fauna who finds out she is related to George Hodel. Who is George Hodel? The doctor who was a prime suspect of the death of Elizabeth Short (aka The Black Dahlia). It’s a suspenseful show as it shows Fauna discovering all her family’s secrets. Available to stream on Hulu.

Ghost Adventures: Artifacts

Ok, you’re either a fan of Ghost Adventures or not. So, if you are, you’ll love this series. People bring in “possessed” items and tell their haunting experiences with them. From the dybbuk box (google it, it’s freaky) to Charles Manson’s TV, this show is full of chilling artifacts and history. Available to stream on Hulu.

Good Trouble: Season 2

If you still haven’t started this series… what is wrong with you?! There’s only been two episodes so far, but they touch on politics, women’s rights and following what your heart wants. I seriously cannot stress this show enough; it is THAT good! I feel empowered each episode i watch. New episodes added every Wednesday on Hulu.

Marlon

I don’t know about y’all but I LOVE MARLON WAYANS. This show is about “Marlon” who is recently divorced from his wife and his journey with co-parenting. It’s straight comedy- from the kids to their friends, it’s just a feel-good show and super relatable. Season 2 recently added on Netflix.

Confession Tapes: Season 2

Here i am to talk to you about false confessions again! On this show, it touches on all different true stories about false confessions in which a few are still incarcerated for. Episodes 1 and 2 of Season 1 is still a case that I think about constantly. Watch for yourself and let me know what you think? Season 2 available on Netflix.

MOVIES

Always Be My Maybe

Love, love, LOVE! Cutest movie of the year! It follows Sasha and Marcus who grew up together as neighbors and drifted apart when life happened, and Sasha followed her career. They happen to rekindle their friendship and it’s just a great story from there. Keanu Reeves also makes an appearance, in case you needed more of a reason to watch this film. Available to stream on Netflix.

Adam Devine: Best Time of our Lives

One of the best stand-up comedies I’ve watched in a while! Adam Devine is seriously one of a kind and not only are his jokes hilarious but just watching him on the stage is entertaining. If you watch Workaholics, you know what I’m talking about. You’ve never watched Workaholics? (it’s available on Hulu). This stand-up is available to stream on Netflix.

Murder Mystery

Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston are one of my favorite duos. They have such a good chemistry and are HILARIOUS. This movie is good, people. Follows a couple who go on a European vacation and are stuck right in the middle of a framed murder. Good thing Adam plays a NY cop! Available to stream on Netflix.

Throwback movie of the month:

October Sky

It’s based on a true story of Homer Hickman who grew up in a small coal mining town. His father is one of the top miners and every young boy in the town eventually grows to become a miner. Homer is fascinated by rocketry although his father doesn’t approve. Mesmerizing film that explains the story of one man’s dream which lead him to one day becoming a NASA engineer. I’m working on a separate post that focuses on all Jake Gyllenhaal movies so be on the lookout for that! Available to stream on HBO Now.

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lexkinncird · 5 years

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( theo james ╲ 34 ╲ cis male ) ALEXANDER ‘LEX’ KINNAIRD has been in THE UNHOLY for 10 MONTHS as a HUNTER. HE can often be seen with a BROKEN WATCH; how sweet is that? their friends see them as the MACGYVER - which makes total sense seeing as they’re +RESOURCEFUL & +BRAVE as well as being -COOL & -ABRASIVE. I wonder how long they’ll survive for…

hello is it me you’re looking for ?? prOBS NOT but here i AM BEECH !! ok this is my last character ( for today LMAO ), so let’s jump right into it and stuff. i haven’t done his fancy info page yet because listen, i am only one woman and there’s only so much i can be bothered to do in one day. let’s crack on...

alexander ‘lex’ thomas kinnaird III — oh hell yeAH you better believe this rich bich was a THIRD — born to alexander thomas kinnard jr ( side note: how weird is it that people literally name their kids DIRECTLY AFTER THEMSELVES like settle down pal ) and elizabeth katherine kinnaird nee huntington. he has a younger brother ( with a different name thank god imagine if they were all named the same thing ) and a younger sister ( i... haven’t named them because it’s 9pm and i am a 105 year old ladyyyyy and i’m tired but look i might add that later ). but GOD, don’t call him alexander. it’s lex. it’s definitely lex.

lex grew up in london, the son of a prominent politician from a political family, and as the eldest son, lex was entitled to a seat in the house of lords ( think colin firth in what a girl wants ). but, naturally, lex didn’t want that at all, he had no interest in politics, other than he wanted to do what was right, he wanted to vote for the party that would change things for the better. but being a politician was not for him.

studying at the best schools, young lex matriculated ( god look at these words ) alongside henry windsor aka prince harry, duke of sussex, and counts him as one of his good friends ( i mean why not ). he travelled with harry on his gap year in australia, and it was from that moment that lex knew he didn’t want to go home and do what was expected of him.

once he returned to england from his gap year, the expectation was that he would attend his grandfather and father’s alma mater, cambridge university. he complied, though, begrudgingly, with the condition that he be allowed to choose his own path after school. he studied law and economics.

once he’d graduated, his parents seemed to forget their deal and expected him to go into politics. he refused.

his refusal to play along with his parent’s wishes had him thrown out of the house, told not to come back until he was ready to speak “sensibly” about his future and the family legacy.

lex never went home.

instead, he moved overseas again, this time, across the oceans to another member of the commonwealth, canada. he fell in love with the country immediately, settling finally in toronto.

he worked a number of jobs while travelling, happy with anything that allowed him the freedom to travel, working as often as he could and then jetting off to another country. he loved being free.

he’d just gotten back from a trip when the apocalypse hit, and slowly, but surely, he made his way to the unholy where he’s now a hunter.

he can seem unapproachable and that’s probably accurate, to be honest. he’s aloof, distant, perhaps a throwback to the cool very british upbringing he had. and he can be blunt and sometimes rude if you get on his nerves. on the flip side, he thinks outside the box, he’s resourceful and adventurous, not afraid to get his hands dirty and fight.

the only thing he has left from his days in the uk is the old watch from his great great grandfather, a family heirloom gifted to him when he was accepted into cambridge. his father demanded it back when he left home, but he refused. it broke during a scuffle with a zombie, right at the start of the outbreak, but lex won’t ever part with it.

i’m... tired, and i have to get up at 5:30am tomorrow, but YES if you want to plot with my half macgyver half four from divergent askjdhaskjd, please... smash that like.

#walkersintro #*breathes heavily in australian*

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halsteadproperty · 6 years

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Halstead Agents’ Favorite Small Businesses

Last Sunday marked the end of National Small Business Week, and there is no better way to honor this past week than to highlight the very businesses that keep our markets unique and special. As neighborhood experts with a plethora of knowledge, our Halstead agents leverage small shops and restaurants to show what makes their areas of business distinctive. In honor of this past week, we decided to share with you the exact places that make NY, NJ, CT and the Hamptons the best areas to live.

Tipsy Scoop

217 East 26th Street, New York, NY

Ice cream and liquor are two hot commodities on their own. Now, imagine them together. Agent Elizabeth Abbott knows just the place. “Tipsy Scoop is New York’s first ice cream ‘barlour’ that serves liquor infused ice cream that is not only delicious but visually creative,” Elizabeth says. Owned by a young entrepreneur, Melissa Tavss Beranger, the Kips Bay shop has a high enough alcohol content to actually get you buzzed.

(Recommended by Elizabeth Abbott of our Park Avenue office)

The Momogram Shop

19 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY

According to agent John Scott ‘JT’ Thomas, The Monogram Shop has been a staple in the Hamptons for more than 10 years. “It’s family owned by a mother and daughter, and it’s my go-to place for all gifts,” JT says. “Whether it is for a closing, dinner party, wedding, new baby, etc., The Monogram Shop is somewhere to provide a warmer, more personal touch to your gifts. Everyone loves to receive something personalized!”

(Recommended by John Scott ‘JT’ Thomas of our East Hampton office)

Kirby and Company

1029 Post Rd, Darien, CT 06820

Run by a motivated, strong, talented role model named Elaine Kirby, this adorable gift shop is agent Amanda Davenport’s favorite place to buy closing gifts. “Their assortment isn’t the only draw, as the owner always has a bright smile on her face and she knows how to create the perfect gift,” Davenport says. While the shop appeals to anyone who searches for boutique decor and other adornments, Elaine believed Darien needed something for a younger group of residents. Thus, Kirby Girl was introduced as a sister shop to celebrate being kind, witty, smart, fierce, unapologetically awesome, confident, fast, athletic, creative, and proud of what makes each girl different and unique. Kirby Girl is located at 14 Brook Street.

(Recommended by Amanda Davenport of our Darien office)

Mediterraneo

1260 Second Avenue (Corner of 66th Street), New York, NY

“With a relaxed European ambiance, simple interior décor, and charming café details, I feel like I have taken a trip back to Rome,” agent Jennifer L. Hoxter says. Mediterraneo, an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side, is known for their thin crust pizza and wood-burning pizza oven. Jennifer’s favorite Roma-style pizza is the Pizza Al Portobello, with Portobello Mushrooms, tomatoes, mozzarella and garlic and fresh basil. “The ingredients are so fresh,” she says. “There are many varieties of thin crust pizzas, such as, Pizza Mediterraneo with shrimp, tomato sauce, capers, garlic and scallions. I would also recommend the homemade pastas, and Grilled Calamari.” Mediterraneo’s outside seating has just opened for the warmer months so enjoy your favorite pizza and an ice cappuccino, and maybe run into Jennifer!

(Recommended by Jennifer L. Hoxter of our East Side office)

Taszo

5 Edward M Morgan Place, New York, NY 10032

“Taszo is just one of those neighborhood joints you grow to really love and appreciate,” says agent Erik Freeland. Owned by a Tunisian who grew up in Sweden and Paris, Taszo offers the highest quality espresso, craft beer, and wine in a relaxed brick-walled setting. They have delicious bites to compliment your favorite beverage. “They have great coffee and pastries (from Balthazar) in the morning. Then, in the evenings it switches over to a great, cozy wine/beer bar and the owner makes an amazing lamb tagine and Swedish meatballs,” Erik explains. With very reasonable prices, this double-edged sword is a Washington Heights staple.

(Recommended by Erik Freeland of our West Side office)

Columbus & 74th Thrift Shop

306 Columbus Avenue at 74th Street, New York, NY

Known for their large inventory of clothing, shoes, and accessories, this Housing Works thrift shop will soon take over your closet. “For over 20 years this store has provided unique deals on clothes, furniture and bric-a-brac that I never would imagine I wanted until I saw the item,” says agent Ed Herson. Most of the staff have been working there for many years and I always get a friendly smile when I go there.”

(Recommended by Ed Herson of our West Side office)

Birch Coffee

171 E 88th St, New York, NY 10128

“You know it’s the place to be when the baristas know all the locals by name and the coffee is strong enough to keep you awake all day – even in the city that never sleeps,” says agent Nicole Hay. Birch Coffee, is intentionally situated mid-block directly across from the magnificent new development 188 E 88th Street. It is a cozy nook among the hustle and bustle of New York, with a Brooklyn vibe on the Upper East Side.

(Recommended by Nicole Hay of our Park Avenue office)

White Gold Butchers

375 Amsterdam Ave, New York , NY 10024

“This artisan butcher/restaurant has the best quality meat out there,” agent Keith Marder says. “To top things off, they allowed Olga and I to do our lifestyle photoshoot inside the restaurant.” White Gold Butchers is a place where you can eat and also buy meat at the butcher counter. This restaurant has been featured in Fobres, Viceland, New York Times, Vogue and Eater NY, to name a few.

(Recommended by Keith Marder and Olga Bidun of our West Side office)

The Ballfield Café

65th St Transverse, New York, NY 10019

This hidden gem in Central Park is surely mistaken for just another annex/shack in the park for those who don’t know it. “Across from the baseball diamonds in Central Park is a small cafe with umbrella shaded tables where lunch and a light supper are served, plus delightful summer cocktails,” explains Christine O’Neal. This café boasts a good beer/cider/wine list and delicious, quick comfort food. You can order to-go at the counter or sit down for a full-service experience outdoors. “The baseball diamonds are just south and the carousel is within sight,” Christine says.

(Recommended by Christine O’Neal of our West Side office)

Round Swamp Farm

184 Three Mile Harbor Road, East Hampton, NY 11937

“Beloved by its loyal clientele, Round Swamp Farm is a throwback to days gone by,” says agent Philip Judson. “Originally started over 50 years ago by Carolyn Lester Snyder in a small red wagon to peddle her family’s vegetables grown on their farm, now four generations continue the tradition. The produce grown on the 20-acre, 250-year-old farm is picked by hand and used to make carrot cakes and zucchini breads, chutneys, sweet and hot pepper relishes, pickles and salsas, fruit jellies and jams, cobblers, pies and muffins. In addition, the farm has an eye-popping array of local seafood caught by family members and dozens of made-from-scratch-daily prepared foods that change with the seasons. The stand is charming and quaint – kids will love visiting with the chickens and rabbits out front – and goods are displayed old style in wicker baskets and baked goods are ties with gingham ribbon. Carolyn and her extended family have become family to us over the 20 years we have been shopping there and we always look forward to their opening (May 11th this year) and to almost daily visits during the summer and fall. In fact, we stock up on homemade soups and dinners before they close after Thanksgiving and freeze them so we can enjoy Round Swamp Farm all winter.”

(Recommended by Philip Judson of our East Hampton office)

Riverdel

820 Washington Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11238

Riverdel offers the widest variety of artisanal vegan cheeses around, and a well-curated selection of non-dairy yogurts, nut milks, and gourmet foods. You can sample fresh breads, pastries, and made-to-order sandwiches! “I love getting the ham and cheese croissant but they also have great desserts like Cinnamon Snail, and lots of vegan grocery items too,” says agent Kris Sylvester. “The store owner Michaela is almost always there when I go in and they carry more vegan cheeses than any store in the city. They’ve been in business for 3 years and I am happy to see they are thriving,” Sylvester explains.

(Recommended by Kris Sylvester of our Village office)

Kick Axe

622 Degraw St, Brooklyn, NY 11217

Looking to release some stress, or maybe just some thrills? Agent Marta Quinones-McCarthy recommends trying out a new axe throwing venue in Gowanus. “At Kick Axe, you rent a lane and get an experienced axe thrower who organizes games and gives you instructions on how to throw an axe,” explains Marta. Sounds like a kick ‘axe’ time to us!

(Recommended by Marta Quinones-McCarthy of our Cobble Hill office)

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fuckyeslilkim · 7 years

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Throwback Interview: The Mask Of Lil’ Kim

In a nondescript warehouse in Manhattan's Chelsea district, the rapper Lil' Kim is being primed for yet another fashion shoot. The theme of the day is baby-doll innocence, and the 4-foot-11 celebrity is appropriately undressed in a sheer blue and pink negligee and high-heeled sandals. With the final touches of turquoise eye shadow, pink lips and, of course, her trademark blond wig and blue contact lenses in place, the picture is complete. Sex symbol. Feminist icon. Freak mama.

Change the circumstances only slightly and you could imagine a porn shoot happening in this warehouse. The final products--the photographs that will sell Kim's raunchy lyrics and persona to the world--often come close to that. A full-page advertisement for her new album, "The Notorious K.I.M.," shows the star in the back seat of a limousine, naked except for black spike-heel boots and a safari-style hat. It's like the kind of pinup men find useful in prison cells and toilets.

But nobody seems bothered by the actual work of this shoot--least of all Kim, who patiently strips down. Quite the contrary: She considers herself a good role model--an empowered, independent woman in the highly misogynistic world of rap. Her fans include many young women who find in her an enviable example of personal strength.

To cash in on the marketing moment, corporate America has come running, showering her with endorsement offers--from Candie's shoes to Viva Glam lipstick. She earns cover treatments from mainstream and edgy magazines alike: The Source, XXXL, Vibe, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Jet, Interview (on which she appeared wearing nothing but head-to-toe Louis Vuitton body tattoos). And now, Atlantic Records has provided the 25-year-old with her own label, Queen Bee.

From the moment she was discovered by rapper Christopher Wallace (a k a Notorious B.I.G., a k a Biggie Smalls) as a round-the-way girl roaming the streets of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Kimberly Jones has set new standards for female rappers. Her 1996 solo debut, "Hardcore," made the highest-ever debut on the Billboard charts for a female rap artist. An unparalleled fusion of hip-hop and pornography, the album opens with a scene in which we hear a fan buy a ticket to a triple-X flick, and then loudly pleasure himself while watching Kim onscreen.

At last year's MTV Music Awards, her outfit spawned a media frenzy fueled by the shocked response of presenter Diana Ross, who reached out and jiggled Kim's exposed breast on national television. (Ross later offered a public apology, noting that she thought Kim "was beautiful and . . . didn't need to dress in that manner.") The incident solidified Kim's image of sexual fearlessness--and her career as a fashion trendsetter.

We've seen so much of her, and yet nothing at all. Who is Lil' Kim, really?

Talking to her, you're taken by any number of contradictions. She considers herself a devoted child of God, for example. "I'm not perfect," she explains. "I mess up. I'm not Miss Sanctified, but I believe in my Father. We have a really good relationship."

She has allowed powerful men to shape and exploit her sexpot image, but touts her own brand of feminism. "If you look at me, no man has really given me anything," she contends. "I got my own money."

She raps about the joys of fellatio, but likens herself to Queen Elizabeth, the so-called Virgin Queen of England. ("I watch that movie over and over again," she says.) Like Elizabeth, she has had an unhappy love life. "I had a lot of guys betray me," Kim says, "and she reminds me of myself because, toward the end, she really wanted a man. She was lonely. She didn't wanna be this strong woman that everybody portrayed her to be, but she had to be."

On one point the star is adamant: Lil' Kim is not Kimberly Jones.

Except: "Most of the things that I talk about [in my lyrics], yeah, they're true." In the song "Hold On," for example, "I talk about the pain of being pregnant and having an abortion."

"I talk about the things that women have gone through that they don't think I've gone through," she says. "Like fightin' with your man or losin' a man to death. Being alone. I talk about just bein' in the streets having no money and having to do illegal things to get the money."

All of which happened, too.

So, after one spends many hours with both Lil' Kim the rapper and Kimberly Jones the woman, the similarities between the two become as apparent as the differences. "We wear the mask that grins and lies," wrote Paul Laurence Dunbar, "with torn and bleeding hearts we smile."

It is not easy to remove the mask of Lil' Kim, which she wears as a brilliant defense against full disclosure. She doesn't want to show us all of the damage that lies underneath. Like many other black women, she has become so good at conjuring the mask--signifying at a moment's notice, for hire--that we no longer know where it ends. Or where Kimberly Jones begins.

In the June issue of Vibe magazine, there is a photograph of young Kim dressed in a neat school uniform: plaid dress, white blouse, knee socks. She is brown-skinned, with brown eyes and nappy hair, neatly pulled into a bun. She sits like a proper schoolgirl with her hands folded in her lap and legs crossed at the ankles, smiling and polite.

But inside, she feels ugly. She thinks of herself as too dark and too short. She has just moved to an all-white neighborhood in suburban New Rochelle, N.Y., where little blond girls tease her and confirm her monstrosity.

Her mother, Ruby Mae Jones, brought her to live there, at age 8, fleeing the ruins of a marriage. But Kim wants to go back to Brooklyn. She wants to go home, to her old neighborhood where little girls look like her. Even if it means going back to the home of her father, Linwood Jones, a former military man who enforced a brutal discipline on wife and children.

"There was a great deal of verbal abuse," she recalls. "And there was times . . . when my mother had black eyes. My father told people she had fallen."

Linwood Jones could not be reached for comment, and there is no record of his having spoken publicly about his daughter's career or her allegations of physical abuse. According to Kim, he did comment privately on her overtly sexual image, asking that she "tone it down."

After her parents' separation in 1983, Kim's life became increasingly unstable. At first she and older brother Christopher stayed with their mother, who relied on the kindness of friends for shelter--including the time spent in New Rochelle. But when options ran out, Ruby Mae Jones granted custody of her children to her husband.

"I was basically living out of the trunk of my car," Kim's mother explains over a posh dinner in a New York restaurant--a contrast made all the more striking by her fur coat and her gold-and-diamond-spangled hands. "And I didn't feel it was appropriate for [the children]. So I let Kim go to live with her father."

When he was away--sometimes for weeks, for reserve duty--the children were deposited with an aunt who was raising several sons of her own. "I grew up around . . . maybe eight guys in my family," says Kim. "I stayed with my cousins when my father went away. They lived in the projects."

"Kim had no sisters," adds Ruby Mae Jones. "She was surrounded by boys all the time. But she had such a strong personality, I never had to worry about her taking care of herself. I knew that she would be able to do that. From when she was like 2."

Despite the frequent absences, father and daughter remained on good terms during Kim's prepubescent years.

"We were very close," she recalls, "until I was about 13." Which is when Kim committed an egregious offense in her father's eyes: She liked a boy and agreed to be his girlfriend. Although the circumstances seemed innocent enough by Kim's account--the boy was 15, a schoolmate--Linwood Jones was outraged. Kim says he called her a bitch and a whore, "just like your mother."

The words had a devastating effect. "If he hadn't said what he said to me," speculates Kim, allowing the idea to play in her head for a moment, "I probably would have stayed a virgin until I was 21. But after that I rebelled."

Fights between father and daughter became more frequent--and violent, she says. On at least one occasion, Kim remembers, her morning wake-up call was a fist crashing into her face. At the age of 14, she packed a bag and hit the streets, wandering in and out of neighbors' homes. Lil' Kim has often described her life during those years as a procession of doing "whatever I had to do to survive."

She peddled drugs for boyfriends. Worked odd jobs in department stores. And had sex with the men who housed and fed her. By the time she met up-and-coming rapper Biggie Smalls at the age of 17, Kim was, by her own admission, desperately in need of protection.

Biggie, who at age 19 was a 6-foot-3, 300-pound drug dealer who had already done nine months in jail, signed on for the job--bringing Kim into the fold of what everyone called the "B.I.G. family." There was Sean "Puffy" Combs, who had been working day and night to launch Biggie on his emerging label, Bad Boy Entertainment; Mary J. Blige, whose success as an R&B artist had also been strongly influenced by Puffy's hand; Damion "D-Roc" Butler, Biggie's friend and security guard; and "the boys"--James "Lil' Caesar" Lloyd, Antoine "Banga" Spain, and Money-L, who would later become members of Junior M.A.F.I.A. (Masters at Finding Intelligent Attitudes), a rap group Biggie hoped to launch on the momentum of his own success.

"She came from the streets," says 22-year-old Spain, who lives today, along with several of the other "boys," in Kim's New Jersey mansion. "I could relate to her 'cause my mom sent me to the city when I was, like, 13."

It was at Wallace's behest that Kimberly Jones assumed the role of Lil' Kim--a vulgar-mouthed emblem of what had been dubbed "porno rap." Following Biggie's lead, the young protege exploded onto the hip-hop scene as the lone female member of Junior M.A.F.I.A. at the age of 20.

Almost immediately, Kim became the showcase of the act. They were like "peanut butter and jelly," says Voletta Wallace, Biggie's mother. "Kim and Christopher were the same voice."

And that voice was determined to push the limits of gangsta rap, a genre whose biggest selling points were unabashed violence and uncensored sex.

By the mid-1990s Biggie Smalls and his crew were at the top of their game. Biggie's second album, "Life After Death," would eventually sell eight times platinum, and with the release of her 1995 solo debut, "Hardcore," Kim arrived in her own right. But the good times were not to last. Kim loved Biggie and hoped to be his wife, but he married and then quickly separated from R&B artist Faith Evans (who would also become the mother of his son, Christopher). There were rumors that Evans had been having an affair with rapper and longtime Biggie rival Tupac Shakur. One Biggie music video co-starred Kim as the defiant and loyal mistress.

Amid the lovers' quarrels and sexual betrayals, tragedy struck in the early hours of March 9, 1997. Following a Soul Train Music Awards party in Los Angeles, a still-unknown killer approached the passenger side of Biggie's GMC Suburban and unloaded seven rounds into the rapper's head and body at close range. Both Lil' Caesar and Damion Butler were unharmed as they ducked down in the back seat. Puffy, who was driving his own Suburban in front of the target vehicle, rushed to Biggie's side reciting psalms. But Christopher Wallace was dead at age 24.

Since the loss of her mentor, Kim's allegiance has remained eerily well preserved. In the immediate aftermath, she and the Junior M.A.F.I.A. boys stayed in Big's New Jersey condominium--where, according to Kim, she shared her slain lover's bedroom with her would-be mother-in-law, Voletta Wallace, and T'yanna, Biggie's daughter from a previous relationship.

In an article for People magazine, a mourning Kim posed for the camera draped in Biggie's shirt, coat and hat. Even today, more than three years after his death, she often refers to her "big poppa" in conversation and lyrics, and even credits the rapper as a posthumous producer on her new album. The bond seems unhealthy, as even Kim's friend Blige noted in an interview: a "kind of co-dependency with someone who just isn't here anymore."

It took Kim four years to release her second album, which had been held up due to conflicts with her label, the theft of material by bootleggers and her own creative process. Meanwhile, Kim's marketing machine hummed along, patiently building her image despite a lack of new releases.

"She's brilliant," says Michael Elliot, president of Source Entertainment. "I mean, here's a woman who [hadn't] had an album out in years and she's a presenter at award shows, and a successful model. She's found a way to market herself and, at the end of the day, she's a businesswoman."

"I think she's a feminist in a funny sort of way," says John Dempsey, president of MAC cosmetics, one of many packagers that hold up the Kim image as a bold new form of sexual expression. "She speaks like a man would speak."

Her fans agree. "She doesn't care what anybody has to say," says 19-year-old Teena Marie Schexnayder, a Los Angeles psychology student and aspiring singer. "She's a bad girl . . . doing whatever she has to do to survive. She's deep. I love the stuff she talks about."

While '80s female rappers like Queen Latifah and MC Lyte embraced "womanist" images, combining ancestral and gender consciousness, Kim provides a very different social commentary for young black women and men. The message behind Lil' Kim is, in fact, heartbreakingly feeble.

Sex, she believes, is a commodity. It is a way for a woman to earn money--and, in her view, respect. She learned that lesson on the streets. As for the women selling their bodies, "I don't see anything wrong with that."

"Money is power," says Kim, and "a lot of women out there are just givin' it away." Kim aims to change that. As she raps in her new single "Diamonds" (sung to the tune of Diana Ross's "I Want Muscle"):

"She says she wants a man / To buy her a Lexus Land/ Well that's all right for her / Still it ain't enough for me / I don't care if he's young or old / Just make him very rich / I want diamonds / This p---- ain't for free."

Is this really feminism?

"I'm a feminist because I love women," she ventures, graciously asking her interviewer to correct her if she misunderstands the term. "And I feel like, in this rapping game, men have been bashing women for years. But some women overemphasize that feminism word. And some of them are very male-bashing. I'm not a male basher."

In her collection of images titled "Women," photographer Annie Leibovitz captures something of the inner sorrow of Kimberly Jones, a black girl who covets blue eyes and blond hair. Juxtaposed with the image of a gloriously dreadlocked Toni Morrison, who is seen looking into a wide expanse of clouds and possibility, Kim appears small and helpless against a wall of color that threatens to engulf her--her nipples visible beneath a trashy net T-shirt. In this image, we see more of Kimberly Jones than Lil' Kim: the real woman who has masked private suffering as public defiance.

"She's just like every little abused girl that I knew growing up," asserts Asha Bandele, a poet, author and critic who is attuned to hip-hop culture. "I do not believe that Kim is in control of her image because there's nothing powerful about it, nothing rounded, nothing human. It's a caricature. Just like when you see a male presenting himself as only a gangsta. . . . We're so much more complicated than that."

But if it is icon status we're shooting for, Kimberly Jones is the real deal. Closer in spirit to Monroe than Madonna, she is a genuine enigma, which is precisely why she intrigues us. The same little girl who remembers jumping into the middle of a fight between her father and older brother (taking a chair across her stomach in the process) became the grown-up Lil' Kim, who prefers "big poppa" lovers because daddies "don't let nothin' happen to their baby girl."

"Kim needs to ask herself what she's selling," says Voletta Wallace in her Jamaican-accented, no-nonsense way. "When my son was here, that's all you would hear: Kim and Christopher [saying], 'Sex sells, sex sells.'

"But . . . when you look at Kim, the strength is there. The beauty is there. The talent is there. And she needs to let [the world] know . . . they need to see a human being. She needs to find her inner self and see what she has to offer."

At the Gazelle Beauty Center and Day Spa in Manhattan, I have requested a private room in which to interview Kim. I am trying to get closer to the real woman, to get behind the mask. But it is a busy day and there are constant interruptions from other clients (who include guests on "The Montel Williams Show"). Nevertheless, Kim and I enjoy a lunch of Caesar salads, as well as joint manicures, pedicures, massages and facials.

We are two sisters drinking herbal tea now, and Kim is relaxed, makeup-less and wearing a cozy white robe and paper slippers.

Unanswered questions have been nagging at me. Kim is like so many other women, it seems to me, who have grown up with trauma. And yet there is no talk of the long-term effects. I decide to put the question of sexual abuse to her plainly. She tells me that yes, something did happen in the home of a relative when she was a girl, but she doesn't want to get into the details. She has never talked about this before. She doesn't want to dwell on the pain. I am saddened by her admission, and the fact that so many years later, she is still so clearly devastated.

And I am saddened that even here, in a place for relaxation and nurturing, she is unable to divest herself, even for a few hours, of the blue contact lenses and blond wig.

"Think about it," she confesses when I ask her to talk about her experience of skin color. "The girls that [men] dated when I was younger were light-skinned and tall. I'm short and brown-skinned. And I always wondered . . . how do I fit in?"

Did she ever overcome the feeling of being ugly?

"I really haven't," she admits. "Honestly, though, I think being Lil' Kim the rapper helped me deal with it better. Because I got to dress up in expensive clothes, and I got to look like a movie star or whatever. I think doing photo shoots and seeing all the people respond to me has helped. [But] I still don't see what they see."

can't help but think of Kim as standing on a precipice, making a great leap toward transformation. In recent years, she has expressed a desire to tone down the raunch and express more of "who I really am." There are rumors that she was wary about spreading her legs for the photo shoot for "Hardcore," and she herself has said she would have rather done four sexual songs instead of seven. "You get tired of certain images," she explains.

So what's stopping Lil' Kim from showing us more of Kimberly Jones? "It's hard," she says. "Because in our world, the rap world, you have this thing called selling out. You don't want people who liked you for doing a certain thing on your first album to not like you for not doing it on the second album. So I have to stay in that realm."

Yes, there are market forces pushing her to stay in the same place, but the market is also a fickle lover and people tire of what is too easy to predict. "Notorious K.I.M." started out at No. 4 on the Billboard album chart, but has slipped to No. 35.

"How much more of her body can she show?" asks Ramon Hervey, manager for R&B artist Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds. "From Madonna to Prince, everybody has to re-create themselves at some point."

"I see the strength in her," Mary J. Blige says of her friend. "All she's gotta do is let go of the fear."

Source: The Washington Post

#A must read #lil kim #lil' kim #rap #rapper #hiphop #hip hop #female rap #female rapper #washington post #queen bee #queen of rap #fashion #real life #interview

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Why Pirates of the Caribbean Didn’t Need Any Sequels

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Pirates of the Caribbean was never meant to be a franchise. Not really. Of course one could also argue the concept was never meant to be a movie either. Originally a theme park ride which opened at Disneyland in 1967, Pirates of the Caribbean becoming a movie is the kind of high-concept thrown around by Disney execs huddled at a conference table. Indeed, it was creative executives Brigham Taylor, Michael Haynes, and Josh Harmon who brainstormed the basic plot for a Pirates movie during the same period the studio greenlit The Country Bears and The Haunted Mansion movies. However, what made the eventual Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl a classic came from the type of creative inspiration Disney couldn’t anticipate or control… yet.

Released in 2003 with modest expectations from the Mouse, and even more cynical predictions by the rest of the industry, the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie ended up standing tall among the last of a dying breed: a surprise box office hit not based on a property with a built-in audience. Coming out at the crossroads of summer blockbusters being driven by practical and digital effects, and analogue filmmaking versus digital cinematography, the movie was released as an old-fashioned adventure yarn in the spirit of Errol Flynn with a modern twist.

Curse of the Black Pearl was not seriously set-up for sequels, prequels, or a shared universe, yet it would spawn all of them in one way or another. Still, in its most undiluted form, Pirates’ success was predicated on a creative spark from the filmmakers involved, chief among them director Gore Verbinski and actor Johnny Depp, which Disney could not stifle or curb. Instead the pair made a throwback quite unlike anything else in the marketplace, and its singular quality is also why its eventual sequels would, to varying degrees, fail to recapture that 2003 lightning in a bottle.

After being thought up by Disney executives, the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie incubated during a very different era for the studio. Disney’s live-action movies then released under the Sleeping Beauty’s Castle banner had long been struggling. Worse still, their animated movies were also beginning to falter with duds like Dinosaur (2000) and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) signaling the Disney Renaissance was over. Within this anxiety, Disney first hired Jay Wolpert and then Stuart Beattie to write screenplays between 2001 and 2002 for Pirates, even as the studio vacillated on what they wanted. For his part, Wolpert imagined his heroic Jack Sparrow to be played by Hugh Jackman (hence the name Jack), but the studio didn’t think he could carry a blockbuster solo. In fact, Disney wasn’t even sure Pirates was going to be a blockbuster.

On the one hand, the studio was approaching Matthew McConaughey to play Sparrow after the actor proved a solid team player on their Touchstone Pictures’ Reign of Fire—it also helped that executives believed McConaughey resembled Burt Lancaster, who just happened to star in the last successful Hollywood pirate movie… 1952’s The Crimson Pirate. But Disney was also considering shuttling the concept over to the direct-to-video market, with either Cary Elwes or Christopher Walken as Captain Jack. Aye, then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner had such cold feet on the project, and eventually about Depp, that he tried to stop production at the eleventh hour before cameras rolled in 2002, nervous because The Country Bears (starring Walken) flopped that summer.

But given the original setup for the picture in those early drafts, it is easy to see why there was a lack of confidence in the material. In its initial conception, Pirates of the Caribbean was intended to be a PG buddy comedy about a pirate named Jack Sparrow and his jailor Will Turner setting off to rescue the governor’s daughter; she’d been kidnapped for ransom by the dastardly Captain Blackheart, a generic baddie for a more generic plot. There were no twists or turns, Aztec treasure and curses, marooned islands, or the subversive streak cherished by the eventual filmmakers who discovered the heart of the movie was “sitting on a beach drinking rum.”

That inspiration luckily came in the quick turnaround of Dick Cook, the newly minted Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group chairman, convincing first Jerry Bruckheimer to produce the flailing Pirates of the Caribbean project and then, at Bruckheimer’s insistence, talking oddball actor Johnny Depp into starring in a Disney movie. Depp actually took the meeting with Cook to land an animated voice acting gig that would appeal to his children, but upon hearing the word “pirates” and the prospect of sword fighting, his ambitions for working at Disney quickly grew.

With a screenplay being hastily rewritten by new scribes Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, who’d just come off Shrek and another all-time classic swashbuckler in The Mask of Zorro, Pirates of the Caribbean became a movie produced too quickly by a struggling movie studio to fully control, especially as its moving parts were transported to the actual Caribbean, including Elliot and Rossio, who continued rewriting the movie on-set to director Gore Verbinski’s specifications. For context, Verbinski’s biggest hit at that time was the decidedly not-family friendly The Ring.

“To make this film in under a year from an outline, it was really essential to bring them in,” Verbinski said about Elliot and Ross during his Curse of the Black Pearl audio commentary. The director had the writers’ shrewd intuition, which added a supernatural curse that upped the movie’s CG-spectacle for modern blockbusters and made it more in line with the Disneyland ride, as well as the ability to add narrative and verbal complexity on the fly.

Said Verbinski, “In looking at the genre and saying, ‘Why hasn’t it worked?’ I found a lot of the sort of dialect [in recent pirates movies] didn’t feel like it was really from Robert Louis Stevenson. You know, the ‘Black Spot,’ any kind of that pirate flavor out of Treasure Island. It sort of went away.”

With Pirates of the Caribbean, it came back with a vengeance. Released eight years after Renny Harlin’s lackluster Cutthroat Island failed at modernizing pirate movies by way of ‘90s aesthetics, Verbinski and Depp brought the old-fashioned wonder of Stevenson and Golden Age Hollywood pirate movies of yore roaring back. While the film’s marketing revolved around the then-cutting edge CGI effects of cursed men who in the light of the full moon turn into skeletons like they’re right out of some Disney park attraction, the reason the movie is still extraordinarily satisfying nearly 20 years later is because of what occurs outside these relatively limited digital set-pieces.

Narratively and visually, Verbinski and his merry crew of filmmakers pulled from Michael Curtiz’s classic Captain Blood (1935), which is likewise set around the escape of an imprisoned pirate with a brand on his flesh at the British Port Royal colony in Jamaica. Several scenes, like the decidedly PG-13 levels of roustabout action on the island of Tortuga, are even lifted directly from that movie. Others, like when Jack Sparrow and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) sneak aboard an enemy ship while breathing underwater in a capsized rowboat, are taken shot-by-shot from the much goofier Crimson Pirate.

But more than just paying homage to classic pirate movie iconography, the original Pirates of the Caribbean recaptured those earlier movies’ mirthful sense of adventure. The “dialect” Verbinski refers to is not resurrected by Depp’s idiosyncratic Jack, but it oozes out of stage thespian Geoffrey Rush. A classically trained character actor, Rush leans hard into the hard-Rs of his speech, all but literally muttering “argh.” He leans into every pirate stereotype and makes a feast of the scenery while doing so. Verbinski even joked he only wanted Rush because Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers were dead: that old school charisma is what turned this potential “paycheck” role into one every bit as essential in recapturing swashbuckling fun as Depp’s.

The same could be said for so many of the other elements, from the use of actual on location shooting (and in the Caribbean for parts of the movies unlike the Californian coasts used by Captain Blood) to at least one actual replica of an 18th century merchant vessel—The Lady Washington, redressed to look like the Interceptor in the film. The other two major vessels in the movie, the Black Pearl and Dauntless, were at least built two-thirds to scale on sea barges while CG filled in the rest.

And despite it being her breakout role, Keira Knightley’s performance as Elizabeth Swann is often overlooked. At only the age of 17, Knightley holds her own against co-stars Depp and Rush, and creates a compelling protagonist who is visibly working the angles of her situation in every scene. In lesser hands, Elizabeth could’ve been blandly innocuous, the “love interest,” but in the finished film she drives the plot, convincingly outsmarting Barbossa and Sparrow at every turn. And while performing the functions of an old-fashioned Hollywood love story, Knightley’s screen presence turned her into a star just as readily as a teenage Olivia de Havilland became one after Captain Blood.

But then that first major Hollywood pirate movie was on Verbinski’s mind during the production of Pirates of the Caribbean, both in how that 1935 movie’s swashbuckling scope made its director and two leads A-listers, and also in how he could subvert its tropes now in the 21st century.

“I knew the film could support [Depp’s performance] because Orlando’s doing Errol Flynn,” Verbinski said. “I mean if you look at Jack Davenport [as Commodore Norrington] and even Orlando’s performances, on their own they’re really solid, but in context they’re fuel for [Depp] to consume.” And consume them he did.

Captain Jack was always meant to be the amorous hero of Pirates of the Caribbean, a mischievous Han Solo to Will Turner’s Luke Skywalker that gets to kill Darth Vader at the end. But as screenwriter Elliot surmised in 2003, “The characterization, the personality of Jack is what we wrote. The expression of that is purely Johnny Depp.” He’d swing from pulleys like Flynn, but do so while screaming in bloody terror. He was a familiar narrative archetype, but as singular an anti-hero as Hollywood has ever seen.

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A performer best known for eschewing his handsome good looks at this time in favor of prosthetics and off-center performances like in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood, Depp was not an obvious choice for the role. But at Bruckheimer’s insistence the character actor was in, and when he first met with his director Verbinski, the only thing the filmmaker was certain of is that Depp would play against his good looks.

Thinking back on their first meeting with affection, Verbinski recalled, “[He] said, ‘I don’t think Jack has a nose because he lost his nose in a sword fight, but it got sewed back on and it’s blue because the circulation is bad.’” It was a radical choice, one certain to die once Disney executives heard it, but it indicated the kind of subversive streak Verbinski thirsted for—one that could bounce off an old Hollywood aesthetic.

Said Verbinski, “This was in the infantile stages of the Bruckheimer and Dick Cook experience, and Synergy back home is talking about McDonald’s cups and happy meals. And on the third bottle of wine at a restaurant in London, we’re talking about a nose being sliced off.” It was the counterbalance the movie needed, and the type of creative-leaning these two eccentric talents gravitated toward. In Verbinski’s mind, Bloom must be D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers so Depp can play the rock star (Keith Richards to be exact). It also freed Depp up to improvise lines where he pondered if Will Turner, or the entire male population of France, were eunuchs. “You have to pervert the genre at almost every opportunity,” said Verbinski.

Yet perversion is not exactly a word that comes to mind with Disney. Not before 2003, and not soon afterward. But in the fast turnaround on a pirate movie in 2002, Verbinski and Depp could be quite perverse with the material, although not without pushback. For example, while the studio accepted Bruckheimer’s insistence that a pirate movie needed to be PG-13—a first for a Disney movie released under the studio’s official banner—there was immediate repulsion when Depp showed his personally selected wardrobe for Jack Sparrow, complete with five teeth capped to look like a golden grill in front. Depp was instantly summoned to a meeting with Bruckheimer and Cook.

“Three went away and then I secretly added one,” Depp said in 2003. “But the two that went away were the ones I used as bartering material.” In a 2010 interview, Depp later clarified how much concern there was over his performance as the dailies rolled in.

“They couldn’t stand [Jack],” Depp said. “I think it was Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time, who was quoted as saying, ‘He’s ruining the movie.’” Depp even referred to several executives as “Disney-ites” who feared he’d turned their heroic pirate into an openly gay character. “[They were] going, ‘What’s wrong with him? Is he, you know, like some kind of weird simpleton? Is he drunk? By the way, is he gay?’ And so I actually told this woman who was the Disney-ite; ‘But didn’t you know that all my characters are gay?’ which really made her nervous.”

According to Verbinski, Eisner even panicked when he saw a daily of the final shot of the movie, with Jack caressing the phallic-shaped handles of the Black Pearl’s steering wheel.

These were bold and bizarre choices made by both Depp and Verbinski at the peak of their creative talents. Today, it’s easy to forget how transgressive Depp’s Captain Jack appeared at the time, particularly after he turned Sparrow into a paycheck-generating caricature during the fourth and fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movies. But in 2003, the character was brazenly unlike anything any studio would put at the forefront of a summer tentpole, least of all Disney. For that matter, it’s impossible to imagine such creative mojo being left unchecked on a Disney tentpole today, not when the studio has turned superhero movies into a finely tuned assembly line, and still seeks to do the same with Star Wars.

Of course the changing tides were imminent in ’03 too. Ahead of release, Verbinski, Elliot and Rossio, and the armada of filmmakers attempted to make the ultimate pirate movie. The director even mused there were only five types of pirate stories to be told: buried treasure, building a crew, marooned anti-heroes, kidnapped damsels, and the good-man-turned-scoundrel. Pirates of the Caribbean did them all in a single movie, complete with Aztec curses.

But shortly after principal photography wrapped, and even as Disney executives privately stewed over what Depp was doing to the movie, the studio quietly added the subtitle “The Curse of the Black Pearl,” signaling they wanted sequels. Yet considering the kitchen sink approach to every classical trope being honored and subverted in the original movie… did there really need to be a sequel?

In retrospect, no. Admittedly there’s quite a bit in the second Pirates movie to enjoy: Verbinski and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s sun-drenched photography of Caribbean locations was back, as was Penny Rose’s historically authentic costuming, and of course Depp. But the script was looser; and though the CGI was impressive with the motion-capture performance of Bill Nighy as new heavy Davy Jones and the giant tentacles of a Kraken, which harkened back to another Disney favorite, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the more enmeshed the franchise became with CG-spectacle, the more it got away from what made the first a brilliant throwback.

The initial Pirates sequels also fell prey to the franchise fad of the early 2000s. Before gritty reboots or “shared cinematic universes,” the buzzword in studios offices was “trilogy.” While the original Pirates was a blast of creative energy put into one film with no setups or dangling plot threads, it was released in an era when Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and the Star Wars prequels dominated the box office; even superhero movies were haphazardly trying to jump on the fad via X-Men and Spider-Man rushing awkward threequel finales.

But no matter how grandiose composer Hans Zimmer’s score became, Pirates of the Caribbean was not Lord of the Rings, and trying to force that square peg into a round hole triggered diminishing returns. While the second movie had fun developments like Davenport’s Norrington becoming a major character who washed out of the British Navy and was now a disgraced pirate crossing swords with Depp and Bloom during a spectacular three-way sword fight, the third film had no clear vision of what to do with him after a cliffhanger ending. So he was unceremoniously killed off. I’d even argue the third movie didn’t know what to do with any character to match the franchise’s sudden pretensions. So Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner, designed to be classic happily-ever-after types in the vein of Captain Blood, are unconvincingly morphed into tragic star-crossed lovers with an ending that reaches for the majesty of J.R.R. Tolkien. By trilogy’s end, they’re doomed to see each other only one day per decade. It wants to be mythic, but it’s really bloated melodrama.

Still, it was better than what came afterward. Realizing there was yet more money in the Pirates brand after the trilogy concluded, Disney churned out two more movies where everyone but Depp and Rush were gone. Gorgeous 35mm cinematography was replaced by bland digital photography, on-location shooting in the Caribbean was kept to a minimum, and the performance that once got Depp an Oscar nomination became a phoned-in parody of itself. Even the characterization of Jack is off, with the resourceful pirate tactician everyone mistakes for a fool turning into a fool everyone inexplicably mistakes for being clever.

In this way, all the elements that made the original so refreshingly lovable were run aground, much the same way Disney’s modern attempts to repeat the narrative beats of George Lucas’ once revolutionary Star Wars movies from earlier decades had led to a recycled emptiness by the time we reached last year’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The creative transgressions of Verbinski and Depp in their prime were sandblasted and smoothed by a studio system that’s only become better at dulling the edges of any and every intellectual property. Just ask Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the original directors of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

The fifth and final Depp-led Pirates of the Caribbean movie attempted to use prequel elements wherein audiences met a de-aged Jack Sparrow winning battles in his youth. But by then audiences had tired of the shtick. So Disney now seeks to reboot the brand with Margot Robbie in the lead. Undoubtedly her maiden voyage in the franchise will be loaded with easter eggs and dangling setups for sequels and spinoffs, and perhaps even a shared universe of Pirates movies. It’ll surely make for a smoother transition than the original movie had to indefinite expansion. And yet, I suspect the standalone quality of the first is what will always make it the most valuable treasure buried in this franchise’s sea.

The post Why Pirates of the Caribbean Didn’t Need Any Sequels appeared first on Den of Geek.

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xtina-fan-ever-blog · 6 years

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Christina Aguilera Is Back With a New Transformation

Christina Aguilera has lived through many lifetimes — in her career, in her personal life and, of course, in her aesthetic. Her look has evolved from assless chaps and two-toned plaits to old Hollywood-inspired retro glam to the now-current deep necklines, slick-backed hair and minimal makeup.

Does this pivot to a more toned-down look mean she's done with the drama?

"I've always been someone that obviously loves to experiment, loves theatrics, loves to create a storyline and play a character in a video or through stage," she explains while her makeup artist removes glitter from her eyelids. "I'm a performer, that's who I am by nature. But I'm at the place, even musically, where it's a liberating feeling to be able to strip it all back and appreciate who you are and your raw beauty."

As she says this, she's bare-faced, her freckles peeking out and her blue eyes sparkling without a trace of eye makeup �� but don't think she's shelving her contour kit just yet. "I mean, I'm a girl that likes a beat face, let's not get it twisted," she laughs.

This self-assurance and ease is something that the 37-year-old believes comes with age. In the almost 20 years since we first saw her dancing on a beach in the "Genie in A Bottle" video, she has been nominated for 18 Grammys, won five, sold more than 50 million records worldwide, starred in a movie with Cher, served as a judge on The Voice, gone through a divorce, found love again with fiance Matt Rutler and become a mom to Max Liron, 10, and Summer Rain, 3.

Throughout all these significant life experiences, Aguilera has remained unabashedly cheeky. In January, when impatient fans inquired about a new album — which would be her first since 2012's Lotus — via a hilarious handwritten note on her Walk of Fame star, she sent a sassy Insta-story response ("It's coming bitches"). While getting her eyes painted bright pink at our shoot, she shares an anecdote about one of several wigs her hairstylist has brought with him on set: a tousled, dirty blonde hair piece. Apparently, Christina had asked to borrow the wig...for the bedroom. "You were really good about it, you were a sport," she tells him while the whole room laughs. "I think I wanted to go home and have sex that night and you were like, 'Okay, don't get her too messed up.' I was like, no guarantees, thanks."

Born in Staten Island, New York on December 18, 1980 to father Fausto and mother Shelly Loraine, Aguilera had a far from picture-perfect childhood. She witnessed domestic abuse both in her family and around her neighborhood, something she has always discussed openly during her career. "I watched my mom have to be submissive, watch her Ps and Qs or she's gonna get beat up," she recalls. One of two things can happen if you grow up in that type of situation, she says. "You can either be, unfortunately, so damaged by it that you take a turn for the worse, or you can feel empowered by it and make choices to never go down that route." Aguilera decided at an early age that she would never allow herself to be in a position where she'd have to rely on anyone else in order to be happy. At the same time, it taught her compassion for people who aren't able to get themselves out of similar situations so easily. "I hate when people say, 'Why doesn't she just leave?' There's psychological damage and mental abuse that comes with being in a situation like that. A lot of people don't have the ability to vocalize it themselves or have the know-how to get out."

This strength and compassion also spurs Aguilera to be a dedicated ally to the LGBTQ community. In 2003, Aguilera nabbed a GLAAD Media Award for the positive portrayal of gay and transgender people in the video for "Beautiful." She continued her support through videos like 2012's "Let There Be Love," and in 2016, she dedicated the song "Change" to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting and donated proceeds to their families through the National Compassion Fund. When asked why it has always been important to her to speak up for the LGBTQ community, she answers, "These are people who I grew up with and who are brilliant, talented and strong that deserve for their voice to be heard and fought for, as well."

Pop stars are notorious for going through transformations, but Aguilera's hunger for experimentation in both her music and her style is part of her unique appeal. She says every one of her albums allowed her to venture off in a different direction and explore a different side of herself. There was the release of her self-titled debut, when Christina became one of early aughts' pop princesses alongside former Mickey Mouse Club co-star Britney Spears. The record was, according to Aguilera, exactly "what an older label head male's perspective was." Her clothes were typical of the era: midriff-baring tops, flared pants and glossy lips. The 2001 "Lady Marmalade" collab with Pink, Mya and Lil Kim allowed Aguilera to flex her vocal range, and she began experimenting with an edgier look (colorful braids, more revealing outfits). From there, she dropped 2002's Stripped and the single "Dirrty," which Aguilera calls a "game-changer." She explored a fashion style of two-toned hair, bikini tops and those iconic leather chaps. At their most respectful, critics deemed her look "risqué," and at their most aggressive, they called her the "world's skeeziest reptile woman" (a description that appeared in a 2002 Entertainment Weekly article). 2006 birthed the album Back to Basics, which had Aguilera belting out throwback songs that were straight out of the '40s and donning a pinup-inspired look and what would become her signature red lipstick. With 2010's electronica-influenced Bionic, Aguilera seemed to marry the two styles of edgy and retro. Case in point: At the MTV Movie Awards that same year, she wore her hair in a retro-style victory roll with red lipstick and an Atelier Versace gown with straps that looked like heavy chains.

"[New artists] don't have as much backlash when they come out on the scene. And I did. It was a controversial time for me."

"I can't stay in a stagnant place for too long, which is why I think the position I was in with television just became very stifling," she says, referring to her six-season stint on The Voice. "I need movement, I need to go explore, be an artist, create and transform."

In 2017, Aguilera voiced the character of Akiko Glitter in The Emoji Movie, but she hadn't starred in a film since 2010's Burlesque. This year, she'll be featured in two movies, portraying a robot in Drake Doremus's sci-fi flick Zoe and appearing as herself in the Melissa McCarthy comedy Life of the Party. Anyone who has followed Aguilera's career has been aware of her comedic prowess for years. (Remember her iconic turn as Sex and the City's Samantha on SNL?) Aguilera wouldn't mind doing more of it. "My ultimate would be to do something with Will Ferrell. Just super funny, just laughing and being stooges." Later, when she puts on the aforementioned wig, Aguilera exaggeratedly runs her fingers through the hair (aka "her") and makes a sound akin to the beginnings of a Cher vocal run. Low-key hilarity at its finest.

Aguilera is a true Sagittarius: curious, eager to learn and a little bit restless. But she isn't above indulging in simple comforts, especially when she's in need of a self-care session. She enjoys yoga, massage (she's very "touch-based") and chilling around the house in sweats. "I love hanging out with just my close girlfriends and guy friends, which happen to be my gay friends," she says. "Just good, quality time with people who are super down to earth." Describing herself as "old school," she says she always keeps an emergency DVD player and DVDs with her in case something "goes wrong with technology." When she travels, she likes to play the DVDs when she goes to sleep. Her go-tos are films that are "mood-driven and inspiring," she says, movies like Frida, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Amadeus, Elizabeth and Basquiat.

With music, she's inspired by a lot of current hip-hop, particularly what artists in the genre are doing with sound and visuals. She namechecks Childish Gambino ("He's genius"), Chance the Rapper ("He's made it without a label, without any strings attached, and being so charismatic at the same time") and Cardi B ("She makes people really crack up just by being herself, and it's genuine") as some of the artists she's most impressed by.

For some of us, it can be hard to pinpoint when exactly we were done with crushing self-doubt and finally became Cardi B-level cool with being ourselves. It might be the end of a relationship, or the discovery of a new hobby or career, or even just a quiet, unremarkable moment when that lightbulb goes off, signifying a feeling of I'm okay. For Aguilera, it's whenever she was performing onstage. "I think we go through up and down moments. There are outlets where I feel like I'm good, and that was being onstage, able to exude and release and feel. That was my form of feeling empowered." But in her younger years, that feeling never really followed her offstage.

When Aguilera released 2002's Stripped, it was a fearless time for her. She made the jump from her debut album where she was "creatively unhappy at that time" to being able to finally sing songs that she felt were true to herself, all while having fun with a more provocative wardrobe. But as the album allowed her to embrace her sexuality and femininity, it also encompassed a lot of insecurities and vulnerability. "You heard it on 'Beautiful' and a song called 'I'm OK,'" she says. "It was like, am I honestly? Obviously, I'm not fully ok. It's a journey into never quite bandaging my wounds." Aguilera always pulls from her pain, which she describes as "a muscle memory" to help tap into her art.

One of the most admirable, and relatable, things about Aguilera is her ability to reflect on her painful experiences and to know what truly matters in life, like just making sure to be surrounded by good people. It's the kind of cliched, yet true, peaceful wisdom that can only come from someone in their thirties — after the craziness of the twenties; after the cosmic rite of passage of a Saturn return. In your 30s, you've mostly figured out who your ride-or-dies are, and you've let go of those who aren't. This was important to Aguilera. "You have to connect with the right people that bring certain energies into your life. And have the ability to let go of a lot of things that have hurt you. It's a big deal."

"I watched my mom have to be submissive, watch her Ps and Qs or she's gonna get beat up... You can either be, unfortunately, so damaged by it that you take a turn for the worse, or you can feel empowered by it and make choices to never go down that route."

Aguilera is excited for what's happening with new artists in the entertainment industry, because of how much more progressive it is. "They don't have as much backlash when they come out on the scene. And I did. It was a very interesting and controversial time for me." She points out how much more accepted it is now for an artist to take risks and to also be sexually empowered than it was back then. "Either women are not sexual enough or we're not fulfilling enough of a fantasy for you, but then if we're overtly sexual or feeling empowered in a certain kind of way, then we're shamed for it." She's proud of herself during the "Dirrty" era, even with the harsh criticism she received. "Madonna had to go through it in her day, and she paved the way for my generation to come up. And paying it forward, now a younger generation is coming up and I'm loving what I'm seeing. It's so incredible."

She says adventurous fashion is also more accepted, and it's true. With celebrities being able to get dressed by a stylist and have the images quickly posted to the public, it's easier for them to experiment and get immediate praise, or disapproval. Aguilera says back then an artist would play with their look from video to video, or record to record. "It was more of a slow-moving thing, and now it's like, a different red carpet look. It's very interesting how that happens." She doles out one piece of advice: "Be fearless in breaking new boundaries and don't be afraid to go against the grain of criticism along the way." That can be helpful to anyone, whether they're an artist or not.

It's the same kind of advice she'll tell her daughter when she's old enough to understand. "I don't want to inject too much upon her as to how I'm choosing to live my life and what I've done in my career," she says. "I just hope I can allow what I'm doing to influence her to be her own person. That's truly what I hope for her." (She'll also let her daughter dye her hair a crazy color if she wants to.) "I really want to make sure my children are both very confident in the sense that they know who they are and that they won't be easily swayed by outside opinion."

As with many parents these days, there's the topic of social media and its influence. Aguilera recognizes that it's a double-edged sword. "There's always gonna be the good and the evil, the dark and the light. I think now is the time, more than ever, that we're seeing that in every sense of the word." She thinks that the fashion and beauty industries are also progressing in the right direction, as far as more inclusive beauty and body image standards, which we're seeing play out on social media. "There's always gonna be those trolls out there or people that have their own definition and ideals of beauty, but I think we're progressing to a place of pushback and more people coming out." And if you're not on board with the fight for inclusivity and diversity, Aguilera has no time for that.

"It's like my Instagram says right now," she proclaims, referring to her avatar in which she's wearing velour track pants, sunglasses and a fur coat draped over a particular slogan shirt. "Everybody that can't hop on that train can suck our dicks."

credits: http://www.papermag.com/christina-aguilera-transformation-2553214651.html

#Christina Aguilera #New Magazine Cover #Paper Magazine #New Photoshoot #More #Interview #2018

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ontheapex · 6 years

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Veils of Medellin part 1

Medellin is like a lover you easy fall for. A lover so charming, you fail to observe what is underneath that charm, and even if you discover some ugly truth’s, you are quick to forgive or overlook it, and focus back on the charm.

Medellin is called the land of eternal spring. Sounds too good to be true, like an unbelievably charming person. Well there is some truth to that. Everything in this universe is in flux, and so is the weather in Medellin. Dramatic drops from highs of thirty degrees Celsius, to nightly lows of seventeen degrees, so that is definitely spring like. As in, you can feel the change of spring into summer every twenty four hours. Its maybe one of the more comfortable cities I have travelled to, and that’s where the charm begins. Like Bogota, mountains surround Medellin. However unlike Bogota, transportation infrastructure is vastly different, and much more modern. There are light rail trains, three cable car lines that scale three different mountains, and a bus service with dedicated bus lanes. Take notice Bogota. Getting around the city is easy, and cheap. For about a dollar, you can take the train and bus lines to most parts of the city. For two dollars you can take the cable car to different parks with spectacular vistas. However taking the train you can see some amazing views of the city as well. Regardless the mode of transportation I took, I was immensely stimulated by the surroundings. I couldn’t help but look around in wonder, and curiosity wherever I was. In my first trip on the metro I observed the mountain, numerous colourful trees and flowers, cascading houses built on the slope, and even the interactions of the locals, were fascinating.

My neighbourhood called Floresta, was a safe and very local neighbourhood. It was much more catered for locals than the trendy Poblado neighbourhood, which was filled with hostels occupied by first world travellers. A tinto, (coffee) in the neighborhood cost five hundred pesos. In Poblado it would be triple. The same would go for local fare. Three times the price with half the flavour, and fare fewer places for local fare. If you want pizza in Colombia, Poblado is your spot. Floresta on the other hand, had numerous restaurants, serving the popular local dish, bandeja de paisa, (basically a plate filled with chicharron, sausage, steak, fried plantain, rice and beans, and a fried egg), as well as arepa shops, bakeries, and fried chicken joints. I could have spent a month and probably couldn’t have sampled all the cafes and restaurants in Floresta. The main avenue was filled with delicious local fare as well as numerous street vendors who would come out at night to serve the inebriated. This neighbourhood was harmonious, active, and felt much more real rather than simulated Poblado experience.

Meeting locals, I fell deeper for the charm. The hospitality provided was unexpected. My host’s aunt, Elizabeth showed me around the neighbourhood, was patient with my Spanish, and even took me to a neighbourhood market where we purchased some fruits and veggies and cooked together. Elizabeth was a trained chef specializing in pastries. Unfortunately we didn’t have much time together, however she took the time to show me how to make a delicious chicken soup called ajiaco. It was kind of simple; corn, potatoes, and a few herbs I have never heard of, boiled together, then place cooked pieces of chicken in a bowl and pour the soup over, and finish with a teaspoon or two of cream.

This experience kind of made me feel like these folks were very similar to my friends and family. As though they had the same values, and only wanted to provide for my well being. I thought to myself, there isn’t much difference on their expectations and out look in life. They certainly don’t have as much money, or entitlements, but fundamental values of treating human beings with dignity, hospitality, comfort and safety were as important. It was so comfortable at times that it almost felt like a first world city. However I soon realized my hosts were sort of simulating my experience because they were concerned for my safety. I was given a lot of touristy suggestions, like shopping malls, museums, and the planetarium. If I told them I was going to particular neighbourhood they deemed a little concerning, then I was given instructions on how to behave, interact, and protect myself. I jut took this as great hospitality, because I was in love. All of this in my first two days, I couldn’t help but romance the idea of living here, or at least staying in the city for a few months. However I soon discovered a world I couldn’t fathom to imagine. But first, a night on the town was in need.

Night life is lively in Medellin. Lots of bars and lively avenues to frequent to. I didn’t partake in much, and looked more for a slower tempo of night life, and I found that at a Tango bar in downtown Medellin. Salon Malaga is a throwback to a generation that grew up on Tango when it was the trendiest cultural movement. I can safely say, my friend Valeria, and her friend, (some german woman), were the youngest individuals at the bar. Average age was about sixty I would say. Valeria knew one of the musicians, and we were able to secure a table, which is normally booked weeks in advance. The only catch was that you had to purchase a minimum amount of alcohol, which turned out to be like $40 between the three of us.

When you walk into the Salon Malaga, its quite bright, and seems kind of strange for a bar. But I think that made the experience all the more unique. The space was filled with antique music instruments, like phonographs, guitars, and saxophones. There were also various photos of famous latin American tango musicians, of which I knew none. We sat down, and ordered a bottle of Aguardiente, which is a liquorice type flavoured colombian liquor. Quite cheap in all of colombia, an gets the job done. There was a three piece band playing; guitarist, accordion, and keyboardist, atop a very tiny stage. Shortly after a few sad instrumentals, a man in a suit emerged. He looked like a real crooner, and soon sang like one. After a few songs, he was joined by a woman. They did a couple duets together, and it was captivating. They were true vocalists, and the joyful sadness of the music was captured by these two old people. I look around and I see other tables filled with people and bottles of rum, singing along and weeping uncontrollably with a smile of their face. Valeria told me how this music was referred to as cutting your wrists, because of how sad and traumatic the stories of lost love were. A quote that resonated with the patrons heavily was “you only hate what you have loved.” Throughout the night these two vocalist’s serenaded various tables, and with the exception of my table, everyone knew the words to the songs that were sung. I felt like I was taken back fifty years in South America. One last highlight, a man selling empanadas showed up near the end and it was delicious. One weird fact; this place had two stalls for men to take a leak, right by the bar. Everyone in the room could see various men taking leaks, if they chose to. The only thing providing coverage were saloon style half doors from the wild west. It was weird and kind of liberating, that I could piss, and hear this beautiful sad music.

I did not expect to see any of this in my travels or nor did I ever consider to. I just went with the flow of my travels, and I’m grateful to have experienced the glory of that past era, and the culture and individuals it created, before it all goes extinct.

#medellin veils colombia antioquia spring eternalspring tango past southamerica travelling observer food paisa

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i-am-very-very-tired · 7 years

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American Media — the company behind the National Enquirer, Radar Online, and a handful of others — recently acquired Us Weekly. Its editorial director, Dylan Howard, has an old-fashioned newfangled vision for the future of the tabloid in the era of Trump. Posted on April 30, 2017, at 4:08 p.m. Anne Helen Petersen BuzzFeed Senior Culture Writer Close your eyes and imagine what you think the editor of the National Enquirer might look like. Dylan Howard, who in 2013 took over the magazine — and, soon after, editorial oversight of its parent company, American Media Inc. — is not that. The dandyish Australian has thick blonde hair styled in the bro version of a pompadour; in his Twitter profile picture, he’s wearing a bright pink tie. When I met him earlier this month, it was at an old-fashioned steak house in Manhattan’s Financial District, where the waiter knew not only his name and his order, but also when the next National Enquirer special would air on TV. In many ways, Howard is a throwback to an older age of journalism — the age of fat expense accounts and meals at restaurants with Frank Sinatra playing on the sound system. And he wants to restore the most notable names in his stable of publications, which includes the Enquirer, the Globe, The Examiner, OK magazine, Radar Online, and, most recently, Us Weekly, to their once-vaunted positions within the publishing world. His strategy is twofold: By restoring the old-school, glorious heart of each brand, he hopes to fashion American Media into the 21st-century version of a multimedia conglomerate, leveraging its power across the celebrity gossip spectrum. Howard knows that each publication does its own thing, for its own audience, and does it well. There’s no reason for the Enquirer to try to expand its social media footprint, especially when, according to Howard, only 6% of his readership gets their news online. Instead, he’s refocused on the print magazine itself, doubling down on the populism that made the Enquirer dominate the newsstand in the 1970s. He’s re-embraced the old-school “postcard” polling method, which, coupled with email/online surveys, made it clear, more than a year ago, that his audience wanted more Donald Trump. So that’s what he gave them: covers proclaiming “How Trump Will Win!,” “Donald Trump’s Revenge on Hillary and Her Puppets!,” and “Hillary: Corrupt! Racist! Criminal!” In officially endorsing Trump, the Enquirer joined just two of the 100 major US newspapers — one of them owned by a major Trump contributor. Howard didn’t care how lonely the Enquirer was on the Trump bandwagon. He cared that his readers were there with him. Like other tabloids, the Enquirer both intensifies and soothes its readers' anxieties and fears. It’s political, but it’s not necessarily dogmatic, and certainly not partisan: The tabloid, even one with an owner chummy with Donald Trump, has always been ideologically flexible. The Enquirer’s resurgence isn’t just about Trump; it’s a return to its core readership, and a recognition of how tabloid tactics actually work. Us Weekly may seem like a distant relative to the Enquirer, but its glossy exterior elides the fact that it’s been adapting tabloid tactics for nearly two decades. The Us reader who makes fun of the Enquirer is like the snobby cousin who moves to the big city: No amount of fancy clothes can cover up where you come from. For now, Howard has no plans to turn Us Weekly into an Ivanka lovefest — unless, of course, polling suggests that’s what the audience wants. Instead Us becoming the Enquirer, each AMI flagship publication will lean more into its primal self: Us will return to, as Howard puts it, “the glory days of Janice Min,” when, back in the mid-2000s, it became a must-read rival to People. The Enquirer will continue to speak to the audience that’s long been ignored by the rest of the mainstream media — an audience that has read the Enquirer for decades, that is skeptical of pretty much everything, that loves celebrity news, that largely voted for Trump, and that still avidly reads tabloids purchased for $5.99 a pop at the newsstand. Somewhat remarkably, it's an audience that grew 84% among readers aged 18–34 over the last year. (In fall 2016, the Enquirer’s certified circulation was 370,000, with a total audience of 6.9 million — a 12% increase from spring 2016. For context, Entertainment Weekly has a circulation of 1.5 million and an audience of 9.24 million; Better Homes and Gardens has a circulation of 7.64 million, making it the fourth-largest magazine in the country, and an overall audience of 37 million.) “Everyone paints a picture of the magazine business as something that’s dying a very quick death,” Howard said. “And the reality is, it’s not. In fact, at American Media, we’re thriving.” To understand why, you have to stop simply conceiving of the Enquirer and its sister publications as a propaganda arm — and start considering why the tabloid industry at large flourishes in the age of Trump. The National Enquirer has been part of the American tabloid landscape for over 90 years — but it didn’t become a household name and shorthand for a certain type of coverage until the 1970s, when Generoso Pope Jr. transformed it from its “blood and guts” coverage (read: lots of shots of gruesome car crashes) to a softer, more palatable tabloid. Like the editors who launched People in 1974, Pope saw a gap in the celebrity landscape: The old-school fan magazines had devolved into Elizabeth Taylor–obsessed jokes, and American audiences, jaded by the Vietnam War and Watergate, were hungry for what became known as “personality journalism” — stories about the lives of remarkable people, both everyday and celebrity. People packaged personality journalism in the respectable format of the Time Inc. magazine and became the most successful magazine launch of all time. The National Enquirer reframed it in tabloid form, and, by 1978, was reaching 5.9 million readers a week — twice the readership of People. While People had the polish of posed photos, exclusive interviews, and heartwarming stories of triumph over adversity, the National Enquirer used paparazzi photos, gleaned quotes from other publications’ interviews, and interspersed its celebrity coverage with features that warned readers against potential dangers and health concerns. One exploited the tendency to think the best of celebrities and the world; the other exploited the desire to doubt and interrogate those narratives. One toed the celebrity line; the other obtained a photo of Elvis in his coffin — and sold a record-breaking number of copies. Both could broadly be considered populist, but People was targeted at middle-class readers, while the National Enquirer excelled with lower- and working-class audiences. The success of Pope’s National Enquirer can be traced to three brilliant business decisions. Up until the 1960s, the Enquirer and other tabloids were generally sold at newsstands, at drugstores, and on street corners. But Pope wanted to make the tabloid seem more domestic, less sensational, less tawdry — so he lobbied supermarket associations to position the Enquirer on the shelves of the checkout stand, in racks emblazoned with the magazine's logo. He even guaranteed the sale of half of the issues on display. This seems rote now, but it was a stroke of genius at the time: He effectively positioned the Enquirer as an impulse buy, a move that more than doubled the circulation, outpacing even Reader’s Digest. In 1971, Pope moved the Enquirer’s headquarters to Boca Raton, Florida — not out of some desire to be among the people, but because real estate was cheaper — and all the staff would be isolated, in one place, together. (According to Howard, Pope once planned to have all Enquirer employees live and work together on an island.) Plus Florida was known as a “haul back” state — most freighters bring products to Florida, but have little to haul back. A move there further decreased the cost of delivery to distribution points across the nation. Many confuse the National Enquirer with its onetime publication cousin, the Weekly World News — which filled its pages with the most fantastical of unsubstantiated stories (Bat Boy, UFOs, aliens), stories that were too out there for the Enquirer. (Recently, Chris Matthews slammed the National Enquirer on Hardball, invoking an article that stated JFK had been found alive. The article in question was, in fact, from the Weekly World News, which ceased publication in 2007.) While the Enquirer often used — and continues to use — outrageous, unflattering, and otherwise suggestive photos and headlines, it has not been in the business of the supernatural. When Pope took over and redesigned the magazine in the 1960s, he commissioned a team of researchers to visit dozens of cities, anonymously questioning residents, according to the Los Angeles Times, “with the singular objective of learning what the public really talked and cared about.” Pope then crafted the magazine to respond to those issues, extrapolating and expanding upon the desires, ideas, and concerns already percolating across a wider swath of the US. Unlike traditional journalism, which often serves as an arbiter for what people should care about, Pope refined the art of figuring out what people already cared about, or were scared of — and focused on feeding, assuaging, or fanning those emotions. Some of those topics were related to movie stars and celebrities, but such stories were intermingled with ones that cultivated fear or anxiety over looming disaster, whether medical, natural, or financial: “The U.S. Will Almost Certainly Have a Nuclear Disaster Within 10 Years,” one 1972 Enquirer headline read; “98-Year-Old Who Got First Social Security Check Still Complains Payments Too Small,” declared another. Whether rooted in scientific findings, dabbling with the occult, or recounting celebrity mishaps, these stories invoked feelings of contempt, sympathy, fear, heartbreak, and joy. The Enquirer’s primary skill wasn’t reporting; it was storytelling — its ability to create small melodramas with each article, whether it be photos of wild animals “kissing” or Elvis in his coffin. You can draw a straight line from Pope’s conception of the Enquirer — and its invocation of melodrama — to the recent surge in the magazine’s Trump coverage. “It’s a soap opera,” Howard told me. “And that is what sells magazines. That’s why Brad and Angelina and Jen Aniston dominated the covers for 10 years. Because it was a soap opera — and political coverage and Donald Trump is the new Brangelina.” CNN chief Jeff Zucker recently made a similar analogy: “The idea that politics is sport is undeniable,” he told the New York Times Magazine, “and we understood that and approached it that way.” People has been transforming politics into (slightly more highbrow) soap operas since it first put Gerald Ford, in a swimming pool, on the cover of its fifth issue in 1974. “Melodrama” might not be how political purists like to think of the work they’re doing, but it’s become the dominant framework through which politics is processed, packaged, and consumed today. The National Enquirer just happened to figure out the way that fit this particular set of politicians — and its particularly pro-Trump, antiestablishment set of readers. This past year is not the first time the National Enquirer has dealt with politics or political scandal. When Pope died in 1988, the Enquirer was sold to a publishing company that, under the name American Media Incorporated, began to consolidate all of the major tabloids under one umbrella, acquiring Star from Rupert Murdoch in 1990, as well as The Examiner and the Globe (both purchased in 1999). AMI began to practice a sort of investigative scandal journalism, actually breaking news: It was the Enquirer that found a photo of O.J. Simpson wearing the same brand of shoes whose footprint was visible at the crime scene, the Star that got its hands on the tapes outlining Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. (He and Hillary denied the affair on 60 Minutes, but in 1998 he admitted, under oath, that it had occurred.) The Enquirer exploited the titillation of Clinton’s affair (one cover line reads “Clinton: The Cheating, Lying, Dirty Phone Calls and Steamy Sex”) but wasn’t anti-Clinton, per se: An issue from 1992 promises to reveal how Hillary Clinton saved her marriage; one from 1999 declares “HILLARY BEATS UP BILL.” While Bill Clinton’s affairs had a material effect on his political career, the Enquirer did not explicitly engage with his or other politicians’ policies. Crucially, its journalists were equal-opportunity scandal-dwellers, investigating the backstories of leaders across the political spectrum. Sure, they covered the Lewinsky scandal for years — but that’s because Clinton was in office for years. They weren’t breaking news or doing investigative journalism; they were inflating and distorting news, making it at once aggressive and digestible for larger audiences. That changed, at least somewhat, in October 2007, when the Enquirer published a story alleging that then-presidential candidate John Edwards had an extramarital affair in 2006 with a filmmaker hired by his campaign. At the time, most dismissed it as yet another Enquirer exaggeration. The following July, the Enquirer published a follow-up story claiming Edwards had met with the woman and a child it claimed he had fathered; a month later, Edwards admitted that he had been unfaithful to his wife, who was fighting cancer, but denied fathering the child; he was later indicted for using campaign funds in an attempt to cover up the affair and parentage of the child, who was, indeed, Edwards’. The scandal — and the Enquirer’s reporting — is credited with tanking Edwards’ 2008 presidential bid, and the Enquirer’s move to submit its reporting for a Pulitzer prompted industry-wide hand-wringing about the state of journalism. But the magazine went on to report aggressively on Sarah Palin’s family, breaking the story of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy and threatening to publish information about a potential Palin affair. Its response to the McCain campaign’s threat of a lawsuit laid out its claim to a new kind of tabloid investigative journalism: “The National Enquirer's coverage of a vicious war within Sarah Palin's extended family includes several newsworthy revelations, including the resulting incredible charge of an affair plus details of family strife when the Governor's daughter revealed her pregnancy. Following our John Edwards exclusives, our political reporting has obviously proven to be more detail-oriented than the McCain campaign's vetting process. Despite the McCain camp's attempts to control press coverage they find unfavorable, the Enquirer will continue to pursue news on both sides of the political spectrum.” The Enquirer was taking a page from TMZ, which, in 2005, had transferred the hybrid investigative/scandal-mongering tactic online to enormous success, cornering the market on the next generation of tabloid readers and, in the process, essentially eating AMI’s lunch. Like so many gossip publications, AMI had essentially ignored the online market altogether; its websites were simple and janky, its social media presence nearly nonexistent. In an effort to compete, the company transformed its online property Radar Online to compete with TMZ, first gaining national recognition when the site obtained audio of Mel Gibson’s expletive-laden rants against ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. But AMI’s turn toward investigative journalism was short-lived. In 2014, David Perel, who’d overseen the Edwards investigation at the Enquirer, moved to In Touch. Perel replaced the existing team there with his own, including reporters Alexander Hitchen and Rick Egusquiza — both of whom had been instrumental in breaking the Edwards story and would later be responsible for breaking the Josh Duggar molestation scandal at In Touch. Gradually, what remained of the Enquirer’s operation began to fall apart. In 2014, the tabloid published a story claiming that David Bar Katz, the man who had discovered Philip Seymour Hoffman’s body, was his lover. (They received that information from an interview with a different man named David Katz.) Katz filed a libel suit against the Enquirer, and in an unprecedented move, the Enquirer published a full-page apology in the New York Times — and started a foundation that would pay $45,000 a year to a playwright in Hoffman’s honor. Circulation fell to just 500,000. Tony Frost, who had succeeded Perel as the Enquier's editor-in-chief, stepped down. In his place: Dylan Howard. Howard first figured out how to write about celebrities while covering sports for the Seven Network in Australia. He came to the US in 2009, serving as a producer for Reuters before joining American Media, where he worked for a number of publications, distinguishing himself at Radar Online, where he wrangled the Mel Gibson tapes. He briefly left, in 2012, to lead Celebuzz, but returned a year later — this time as editor-in-chief of the Enquirer. Howard immediately made himself a student of the magazine’s glory days. While AMI maintains a massive storage space in Florida, Howard had a room’s worth of material sent up to its current Soho headquarters in New York. He found the original Elvis photo and had it framed and placed in his office. He bought dozens of Enquirer issues on eBay, along with copies of Confidential — the legendary scandal magazine from the 1950s — which he’s had bound in leather volumes. “I studied the old magazines because, to me, the Enquirer of the ’70s and ’80s — it was the institution,” Howard told me. “And I think we’ve done very well to restore a lot of what worked in the ’70s and ’80s. That’s why we’re performing better than our competitors.” The company has expanded its television offerings — the National Enquirer Investigates series on Reelz; Casey Anthony and JonBenét miniseries on Investigation Discovery — and promotes them heavily both in print and online. “The week before Casey Anthony airs, look, there’s Casey Anthony on our cover,” Howard said. “That’s old-fashioned cross-promotion that’s actually effective.” The other reason for its recent success? Its return to political coverage. “Regardless of what my political persuasion is, I did something the mainstream media didn’t do,” Howard said. “And that was poll the readers. That’s why we endorsed Donald Trump. Never once did he fall below 60% with our readership. He got as high as 80%. So as an editor, I was duty-bound to create content they wanted.” It’s unclear how much of that “service” is also in service to AMI’s owner, David Pecker. In 1991, the Enquirer published a piece alleging an affair between Trump’s then-wife Marla Maples and Tom Cruise. Since Pecker bought AMI in 1999, however, the coverage of the Trump family has been overwhelmingly positive. “I have known Donald Trump for 25 years and I am proud to call him a friend,” Pecker told Bloomberg in September. “I support his candidacy for president and greatly admire what he has achieved in a relatively short period of time as a non-politician.” It was the Enquirer that published an unscientific poll in 1999 suggesting Trump run for office — a suggestion he seriously pursued for half a year. In 2011, the magazine again implored him to run; when he did declare his candidacy in 2015, he penned an exclusive for the magazine, declaring, “I am the only one who can make America great again!” The magazine also celebrated its 90th birthday at Trump’s Soho hotel; in 2013, Trump repeatedly tweeted that Pecker deserved to take over the helm of Time magazine — a publication Trump holds in highest esteem. Howard deflects accusations of Trump favoritism — or chalks it up to general snobbery about the Enquirer and its coverage. “The mainstream media doesn’t take celebrity media as a legitimate form of the trade,” Howard said. “But what is celebrity journalism today? It is journalism. It is the mainstream media. The New York Times reported about Eliot Spitzer’s scandal, which would’ve been a sacrosanct story that should never appear in the pages of the Gray Old Lady.” Plus, the National Enquirer invests a tremendous amount of resources — particularly for a tabloid or gossip magazine — in actual reporting. “Anyone can publish a website, and curate and aggregate content, whereas no one spends the money that we do to actually have boots on the ground to actually investigate stories,” Howard said. “I had people in DC all week covering a story unfolding. That story didn’t materialize, but I still had people there.” (TMZ’s content is largely derived by a combination of tips, scouring the Los Angeles court filings, and paparazzi shots, although their DC coverage has recently expanded thanks to an unlikely collaboration with Jason Chaffetz). Yet Howard has no interest in the Enquirer joining the ranks of alt-right outlets like Breitbart and NewsMax, which have jockeyed their way into the White House press corps. “One of the first things I learned working in the American media system is that when a story breaks, run the complete opposite direction of the press conference,” Howard told me. “Because you’ll never find the real story at the press conference — or the story our readers want.” The story Howard’s readers want is found by talking with tipsters, by looking under rocks, by relying on longtime Trump advisor and "trickster" Roger Stone, by chasing the counter-narrative. Stories like the “exclusive” from March 27, relying on the testimony of ex-NSA whistleblower William Binney, that “agents of Obama turned an NSA surveillance operation into secret tool to sabotage the new administration.” The Enquirer pays sources for stories, but “every word” it publishes is signed off on by a lawyer and a researcher. All sources, according to Howard, also take polygraph tests and sign a contract that testifies that the information they’re providing is true, which has the secondary effect of indemnifying American Media. “The checks and balances that we have in place are more than any mainstream media organization has,” Howard said. “That’s in part for a business decision. We know that we have a larger target on our back, and we’re a susceptible target, so it’s important that we’re buttoned up to the top.” In other words: They make sure they’re legally immune to libel charges. Ultimately, the actual veracity of the story matters less than the existence of sworn testimony of its veracity. As for the allegation that paying sources somehow sullies the content of the magazine, Howard is unequivocal. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” he said. “The mainstream media pays for stories; they just make it under the guise of licensing photos or videos or documents” (e.g., People magazine pays to “license” the photos of a celebrity’s wedding or their child). “They’re doing it, and we’re doing it, but we’re not ashamed about it. We advertise in our magazines that we pay for good gossip, and I've got a checkbook, and it’s open and it’s large.” That sort of statement is typical of Howard, who has the swagger of a man who knows that what he’s doing, at least in New York, might make him unpopular at cocktail parties. (It depends on the cocktail party: Howard told me that at a recent one, a high-profile former politician heard that he worked for the Enquirer, sent his wife home, and sat down to talk to him for an hour.) But Howard insists that he’s just pursuing the soap opera where it leads him. “I understand that the types of stories we do — they’re the type of stories the mainstream media won’t do, that will get us attacked by the liberal media. But you know what? We’re being talked about.” It’s undeniably true: Shots of Enquirer covers proliferate on Twitter. But Howard thinks the derision is misplaced. “Sean Hannity spoke about us when he was interviewing Ben Carson, and questioned a story that we reported about Carson allegedly leaving a sponge in a patient’s brain,” he said. “Which was a court-filed lawsuit! A legitimate story! To me that’s the story the mainstream media should do but wouldn’t do. We dig into people’s backgrounds to find those kind of stories — because they’re important, and yes, they’re juicy, and yes, they help sell magazines.” For the week of April 24, American Media’s political coverage felt less like “digging into people’s backgrounds” and more like wish fulfillment. The cover of Globe featured a story headlined “HILLARY: THE REAL RUSSIAN SPY!” while the Enquirer went full military hawk, pairing a picture of Trump in a military cap with the headline “TRUMP DECLARES WAR ON DICTATORS!” and an inset of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Bashar al-Assad. Inside the magazine, the three are labeled as “Weasel #1, Weasel #2, and Weasel #3”; a two-page full-color spread on victims of Assad’s chemical weapons attack is labeled “OBAMA’S SHAME!” On the next page a poll reveals that 52% of Enquirer readers “highly approve” of Trump’s performance as president, while 12% “simply approve” and “30%” label him a “total failure.” Alongside that poll: an “Enquirer Exclusive” with radio talk show host Wendy Walsh about sexual harassment by Bill O’Reilly. “As Bill O’Reilly continues hosting his popular Fox News program unpunished,” the piece begins, “one of his alleged victims claims she has been the target of a sinister intimidation campaign to compel her silence!” (Just days later, O’Reilly was forced out of his position at Fox.) The Trump and O’Reilly stories might seem to be in conflict, but they reflect a similarly ideologically conflicted readership. A cover story from earlier this month on “What Trump Doesn’t Know” (second headline: “Putin’s Deadly Election Hack”) alleges that Putin killed 10 spies in order to cover up an election hack — hardly the sort of head-in-the-sand reportage one would expect of a Trump propaganda arm. AMI’s publications may be Trump-friendly, but they also know which way the wind blows. Which might be why Howard claims he would’ve published the Trump intelligence dossier. “I can’t sit here and say that I wouldn’t do that, because there are similar situations where I’ve done the same,” he said. “The public has a right to decide for themselves. Our job, as journalists, is to shine light in dark places. There was no darker place than the allegation that the deep state was working against the incoming administration.” It’s a fantastically altruistic statement. But it’s harder to square with the knowledge that the National Enquirer paid $150,000 for the story of Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal’s alleged affair with Trump during his marriage to Melania — and then squashed it. Some corners, especially those related to a “good friend” of the publication’s owners, might remain too dark to truly explore. (An AMI statement maintains that it “has not paid people people to kill damaging stories about Mr. Trump.) Anyone closely watching Us Weekly over the months leading up to its sale, in February, would’ve noticed a change. People had started featuring Donald Trump — and his sprawling, photogenic family — in its pages as early as the summer. After Trump’s election, Trump himself made his way to the cover, despite allegations levied by former People writer Natasha Stoynoff that Trump had sexually assaulted her while she was on assignment for the magazine back in 2005. Since the early 2000s, the two magazines had been competing for the minds and eyes of the gossip-consuming public, often offering counter-narratives and competing exclusives and tell-alls. But Us did more than one cover. One week, there was the entire Trump family gallivanting on the cover; the next, there was “Ivanka’s New Life” as “daughter-in-chief.” Then there was “Melania’s Struggle,” an attempt to softly humanize the otherwise distant and largely invisible first lady, and “Ivanka and Jared: Under Pressure,” highlighting the “strain” the couple had felt after “two roller-coaster weeks.” Four weeks, three Trump covers. In December 2016, Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone editor and publisher who’d owned Us Weekly since 1985, began actively looking for a buyer for the magazine. It seemed Tronc — the rebranded name for Tribune Media — was poised to buy. But within media circles, rumors were swirling that Wenner was courting another buyer, and the Trump covers were a deliberate ploy to show the potential suitor what the magazine was capable of. Us Weekly's Trump family covers. Those rumors came true on March 15, when Wenner announced that American Media had purchased Us for $100 million. For most readers, the purchase was unremarkable: A gossip rag is a gossip rag — who cares who owns it? But those who’ve been watching the industry closely know better. AMI saw it as a completing puzzle piece in its “suite of brands,” which includes, as Howard put it, “a publication aimed at baby-boomers” (Globe and The Examiner), a publication “capitalizing on the soap opera of politics” (the Enquirer), and magazines that “trade in celebrity gossip” (Star and OK!). According to Howard, Us Weekly “adds a really compelling and unique brand that is cooperative with celebrities — and I think that sets us up for the future better than any other publisher.” That’s publishing-speak for “Us does something slightly different than what the rest of those publications do” — and, crucially, hits a different reader demographic. Us Weekly’s readership is significantly younger and more affluent than the rest of the gossip magazines': Us loves to tout the statistic that its overall readership is wealthier (with a median household income of $107,000) than Vogue’s ($85,000). With those affluent, younger readers comes a different set of advertisers: Oil of Olay, Tampax, Sketchers, Secret, and Mirena (an IUD). (Current OK! advertisers include Satin Hair Color, Advil, Febreze, SlimFast, Special K, and Oscar Mayer; current Star advertisers include Littleton Coin Company, Viviscal hair supplement, Ritz Crackers, GetEnergy3.com, Alert 911, and Sally Hansen.) Us’s circulation has fallen, dropping from 2.03 million in 2013 to 1.96 million in 2016. But its digital presence is robust: It currently boasts 2.2 million Twitter followers and 3.65 million Facebook likes. Those followers are increasingly difficult to reach without paying to “boost” content into reader feeds, but they’re still a desirable, discernible market. The National Enquirer has been working to expand its digital presence, but Howard understands it’s just not a digital brand: His readers don’t get their news online, and those who do don’t want it showing up in their likes. After all, just because you read the National Enquirer doesn’t mean you want to broadcast it. As one AMI comms person put it to me, “there’s your Netflix queue, and then there’s what you really watch on Netflix. Your queue is filled with documentaries and award-winning movies; what you’re really streaming on a Saturday night is Weekend at Bernie’s.” The Enquirer, then, as the Weekend at Bernie's of the publishing world. If AMI wants to keep those readers (and, by extension, those advertisers), it needs to keep the product consistent. It’ll remain “celebrity-friendly,” which is to say it’ll collaborate, on and off the record, with publicists and celebrities. It won’t publish photos of celebrities looking fat. It won’t speculate about pregnancies, although it will post cute photos of “pregnancy style.” And according to Howard, it’ll aim to return to the Janice Min cover philosophy. That philosophy was first established by Bonnie Fuller, who took over Us Weekly in 2002 and transformed it from a boring also-ran into a scrappy gossip competitor. When Fuller left the magazine, Min — until then her deputy — stepped in and further refined the Fuller sensibility. Her covers would either pose a question (“Will They Ever Have Babies?” — 2002) or promise the answer to a question you didn’t even know you had (“Why Ben Won’t Marry Her” — 2004). See also: “Mariah: What Really Happened,” “Why Rosie Came Out,” “Why I Left Billy Bob,” “Why I’ll Always Love Justin.” Recently, Us has pivoted more toward People territory — profiling, rather than posing and answering the central questions at the heart of a celebrity’s moment in the spotlight. See: “A Ring for Taylor!,” “Love, Lies, and Dancing,” “Prince’s Final Days,” “Teen Mom Wedding,” and “Our Olympic Stories.” “Janice Min was a pioneer in so many ways,” Howard said. “But the brand, to an extent, has lost its way. It’s also evolved — it’s more of a lifestyle brand now, which is important. But we are really excited to return it to its core, to what Bonnie and what Janice did.” That includes maintaining the famous Fuller philosophy that people don’t actually like reading — they like looking. Scrollable content, then, before you were scrolling. Under AMI, the magazine’s consumability won’t change — nor will its status as a “guilty pleasure” that’s still not so trashy that you’re ashamed to buy it at the airport. Fears that Us will turn pro-Trump — or, more precisely, more in line with the aesthetic and messaging of the Enquirer — are unfounded. “One of the great myths of our acquisition of Us Weekly is that it’s going to go down-market tabloid," he said. "No one invests $100 million in a business to make a dramatic U-turn on the foundation that it was built on.” That doesn’t mean it won’t cover Ivanka or Melania, but that, according to Howard, is just good business sense: Those covers sold. As for the suggestion that Us leaned heavily into Trump coverage in order to court AMI, Howard dismisses it. “It was good business on their behalf,” he said. “They knew that we were having a spike because of our political coverage, and imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.” As for a recent cover headlined “Melania’s Struggle: A Life She Never Wanted,” Howard called it “a little risqué — perhaps too risqué for a brand that is celebrity-friendly.” “We’re not in control of the editorial management of the magazine at the moment,” he continued. “So read between the lines there. I think they’re doing some coverage that is a sort of middle finger to the acquisition.” Unlike People, Us doesn’t have the (explicit) ethical quandary of how to cover a figure who allegedly assaulted one of its former staff. “People took a very vocal and public stand,” Howard said, referring to People’s decision to stand by Natasha Stoynoff — and then, the day after the election, put Trump on the cover of the magazine. “Ultimately, what they presented was not consistent,” Howard said. “I think readers know that. Don’t underestimate the intelligence of the tabloid reader.” Underestimating the tabloid audience is what got Trump into office. There was a preconceived notion of who Trump’s audience was, and they were largely ignored. But the Enquirer saw that audience clearly. “I go out to [focus group] room in Long Island and sit around with women who read out magazines to find out what they want,” Thomas added. “To service them.” There’s a tremendous body of research, spanning the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and media studies, that suggests that gossip performs a crucial societal function. Whether published or spoken, gossip sustains and interrogates values in flux or under threat: The things we can’t shut up about are the things that point to larger fissures and growing fractures in society. That’s why the Enquirer couldn’t shut up about O.J. Simpson or Monica Lewinsky in the ’90s, and why it can’t shut up about Trump today. Those ’90s stories were rooted, respectively, in societal traumas of race (buttressed by murder) and sex (and how our president should be expected to behave). Today, the scandal of Trump — at least how it’s manifested in the Enquirer — has revealed itself to be one of presidential vulnerability. Enquirer readers already know how Trump behaves. That’s not new information, nor, to their minds, is it scandalous. The real conversation is whether our country has opened itself — via Obama, Hillary Clinton, or now Trump — to outside forces. Put differently, whether the security of our nation has come to reflect the insecurity of the typical American reader. The Enquirer legitimizes those fears, but it also expands and intensifies them. Us Weekly does something different. Some call its celebrity coverage a “distraction,” but the more appropriate term, especially when it comes to the coverage of the Trump women, is domestication: It transforms the political into the personal, allows conversations of clothing and children and romance to subsume the real-life ramifications of legislative policy. What we don’t talk about when we talk about Ivanka’s clothes, then, is the ramifications of her father’s policy decisions for millions. And maybe that’s the genius of AMI’s strategy: With its stable of publications, it’s figured out how to simultaneously inflame and soothe the wound at the heart of the American psyche, up and down the age, class, and taste spectrum. That’s a tremendous power, especially when you consider rumors of AMI’s interest in purchasing Time Inc.’s weekly magazines — including People and Time. (“I think that Time magazine should be the Vice of today,” Howard told me, after softly deflecting the question of AMI’s interest in the Time Inc. publications, “an organization that has the guts to go behind enemy lines in North Korea, or confront children fighting for ISIS.”) With great power, the adage goes, comes great responsibility. Howard and his iteration of AMI acknowledge that responsibility, but like so many tabloid and gossip masters of the past, they approach that role from a different angle. Back in 1972, the Los Angeles Times asked then-editor Nat Chrzan about the Enquirer’s success. “The reason is fairly obvious,” he said. “We’re giving readers what they’re interested in, not what we as editors think they should be interested in.” It’s not about educating the reader. It’s about, as Howard put it, “servicing” them. Good service is contingent upon deference to the consumer; good journalism, however, hinges on a willingness to piss that consumer off, especially if it’s in service of the truth. Truth can require bravery; good service just requires good market research. As the check came for our lunch, Howard leaned in close, almost conspiratorially. “I reintroduced a very important thing to the Enquirer that you’ll appreciate,” he said. “It’s the old slogan: the only magazine with the guts to tell it like it is.” The guts, in other words, to meet readers exactly where they are. Update: The piece has been updated to clarify a misattribution of a quote.

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