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bananaofswifts · 5 years

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IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.” Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?” Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

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makistar2018 · 5 years

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Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

AUGUST 8, 2019 By ABBY AGUIRRE Photographed by INEZ AND VINOODH

Cover Look Taylor Swift wears a Louis Vuitton jumpsuit. Rings by Cartier and Bvlgari. To get this look, try: Dream Urban Cover in Classic Ivory, Fit Me Blush in Pink, Tattoostudio Sharpenable Gel Pencil Longwear Eyeliner Makeup in Deep Onyx, The Colossal Mascara, Brow Ultra Slim in Blonde, and Shine Compulsion by Color Sensational Lipstick in Undressed Pink. All by Maybelline New York. Hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman

Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.

Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.

Speak Now “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” Swift says. Celine coat. Dior shoes. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.

For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.

Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.

After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.

My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote.

Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.”

The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked!The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.

“MAYBE A YEAR OR TWO AGO, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”

I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.

Balancing Act Later this year, Swift will appear in the film adaptation of Cats—as the flirtatious Bombalurina. Givenchy dress. Bracelets by John Hardy, David Yurman, and Hoorsenbuhs. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.

In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.

Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”

Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?

Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)

Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.

Watch Taylor Swift Take Over Go Ask Anna:

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In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”

When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.”

Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.”

I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”

I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!”

I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday.

IT'S ENLIGHTENING to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.

Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it.

“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ”

Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.”

I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift.

To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.”

An overhaul was in order. “I realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,” Swift says. “I knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.”

State of Grace Dior bodysuit and skirt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that would become her album Reputation—and fighting off Mueller’s lawsuit—a portion of the media and internet began demanding to know why she hadn’t un-canceled herself long enough to take a position in the presidential election.

On that: “Unfortunately in the 2016 election you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement. He was going around saying, I’m a man of the people. I’m for you. I care about you. I just knew I wasn’t going to help. Also, you know, the summer before that election, all people were saying was She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar. These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability? Look, snakes of a feather flock together. Look, the two lying women. The two nasty women. Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared. In many senses.”

Swift previewed Reputation in August 2017 with “Look What You Made Me Do.” The single came with a lyric video whose central image was an ouroboros—a snake swallowing its own tail, an ancient symbol for continual renewal. Swift wiped her social-media feeds clean and began posting video snippets of a slithering snake. The song was pure bombast and high camp. (Lest there be any doubt, the chorus was an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.”

IN MARCH, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.

We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)

Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”

In Focus Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23. Hermès shirt. Chanel pants. Maximum Henry belt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”

She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”

Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.

“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you."

Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.”

At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”

Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”

Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.

Eyes On Her Designer Stella McCartney on her friendship with Swift: “In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” Stella McCartney coat. In this story: hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.”

Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.”

SWIFT HAS HAD almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.”

But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.

At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)

Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.

It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

Taylor Swift Talks Googling Herself, Which Celebrity's Closet She'd Raid, and the Bravest Thing She's Ever Done:

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Vogue

#taylor swift #vogue #september #2019 #cover girl

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hearyourheart · 5 years

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Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

“Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23.

Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

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trevaleyn · 6 years

Text

The Lines

There was something that happened in the process of anticipation. Tarjei had been exposed, Sani Had been exposed, Sue hand been exposed. Rolance, Ulysses, Pleo, even Archelaos to a limited degree. All had at one point in time or another, felt the power of the erudite or eldritch in their body, in their veins, in their mind, altering perception and reality forever. After all, once the brain knew something, it couldn’t forget it. It could repress, it could mask, but what knowledge had been achieved couldn’t ever truly be deleted.

For the newest additions, however slight they may be, there were always two occurrences; the first was the glimpses into altered perception. Once a heavier dose was applied, they would see the world this way all the time, but for now, it would fade in and out, the brain having trouble processing this new piece of information that remained inconsistent, it was akin to being able to hear a song that was ambrosia to you if the song were only just barely audible through a wall or door. Something fundamental that had been lacking had been provided, then replaced with a ghost of itself for those who lacked proper exposure, this of course could be coped with. For people like Pleo or Archelaos, whatever cravings or knowledge that was granted they likely had tried to replace, either with other sources of power or distractions. For people like Rolance and Ulysses, exposure had been so profound and so long that it was in thier genetics, a part of them, forever, the craving not ever sated but dulled, like getting the first bite of a delicious meal after going all day without food, that first bite alleviating pangs of hunger, promising more food behind it. For those like Tarjei, Sani, and Sue, where the exposure was entirely a foreign experience, the craving was only just starting.

It came in the form of dreams--the brain was getting time to truly process in sleep, if the brain was a negative of a film then sleep was the process of developing said film into a much more clear picture, though still not a full one. Shapes, geometry, unknown formulas of physics, magic, the universe being written on their minds, whether they understood them or not. Colors--something outside of what the human mind could normally perceive would appear in the mind. They didn’t have names, for what did you call a color no one else had ever seen before? Yet all the same, they were there. A part of the true reality that had been opened up to them. They were seeing the world for the way it truly was for the first time, not what their perceptions limited them to seeing, the binding of atoms, the charges of energy within leylines that moved through Azeroth. If they concentrated, they could know the rate at which their own cells in their body were aging and able to calculate based off that internal estimate the exact date at which their bodies would expire from age, though whether that thought would stick in their minds or not was unknown.

How one reacted varied, always. For Ulysses it had been a sense of profound euphoria; answers to questions he had always had, solutions to problems that constantly nettled him, had been provided, truths, even about himself, that had been ugly or hard to accept, had been set in stone in his mind, any sense of denial washing away, for Ulysses it had been the exact moment when he truly knew himself. For Rolance it had been something else, no doubt, the magic was always what you needed and wanted it to be, even if part of you denied those wants and need. the eldritch could be a welcomed antidote or a tough pill to swallow, but regardless it had already been administered. You were going to get better, one way or another.

The fact of the matter is the dosing of eldritch magic showed anyone who was exposed something beyond. A barrier that was instilled in all mortal races had been pulled away, just another fabrication that in Ulysses opinion, needed to be stripped away. This would be the next step, for all of them--all that chose it, anyway. To see reality for the profound greatness, to gain the ability to shape and alter it, to bend anything you wished to your will and forge it into a better version of itself, if god or the light or titans had created mortals in their image, then the eldritch was a dose of the power to go along with that image. The only question left would be how would they proceed? Would the cravings that came after the dreams, after each new color or esoteric realization of the universe struck their minds, would the craving that came after each unlocked mystery be further indulged, or would it be repressed? Denied the ability to flourish, a stunted plant on the landscape of their perceptions, a reminder of what the truth is.

In his secreted away location, Ulysses sat before the source of this power now, legs crossed, hands tilted downwards. A malevolent looking obelisk before him. The black pillar made of... Metal? Stone? No, something altogether different, covered in lines that surged with power. Crimson lines that ebbed and flowed with energy radiating power into the pool of water it had been sunken partially into. His eyes opened, and for the first time in a long time, the paladin ceased his meditations. Stepping forward to the edge of the pool, Ulysses knelt down, cupping his hands together he scooped some water out of the pool. Perhaps it was the lighting of the cave, but the water looked as though it had a slight tint, somewhere between lavender and pink. Drinking the water from his hands, the slight trickle of eldritch Ulysses inherently held in his DNA surged the way a fading fire might if it had gasoline poured on, suddenly brimming with almost more energy than he could handle.

It could be whatever he wanted it to be. This world could be whatever he wanted it to be. The souls who had come to him, seeking guidance, seeking redemption no matter how meek, how pathetic, how weak, how broken physically or mentally they were, this could be anything for them. Those who thought themselves too far gone, those who crossed the line, this was the way back across it, to if not undo the damage they did, grant the opportunity to create something new and better for the world. Azeroth had been wounded. The world itself had been scarred and many of the denizens on it were just as scarred.

Time to undo those scars.

[mentions: @tarjei-harjuk @eldritchwrath @spirit-talker @assannihilator and others whose blogs I don’t know]

#ulysses #eldritch #rp #ic #Wow Rp #Things are gonna happen I swear #dreams #character development #WRA RP

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gilly-psycho-journal · 3 years

Link

This might be a wise place to remind you that the opinions expressed in these blogs are not necessarily representative of WCC and they are not given on behalf of the organisation.

Without further ado here is David Gill’s wonderfully erudite and entertaining responses. Please enjoy!

LD: Why and when did you decide to become a counsellor? DG: After I left Afghanistan and closed the door on my life as a social documentary filmmaker and photographer, I realised that I was still looking to find a way to continue to engage with humanity. To listen and to learn from people. I was looking for a fresh challenge. Three years ago, I had a germ of an idea about wanting to be a therapist. If you’d asked me to give you an answer as to why I wanted to do this, it would probably be much different to the answer I’d give you right now and probably different in another three years. I suppose like everything it depends on who is asking and what I think they want to hear.

Having spent three years in the academic system, I still hold the opinion, despite the over-medicalisation of therapy, that this vocation has room for creative individuals and free thinkers. This optimism is based on delving into the lives of its originators such as Rogers, Freud, Klein, Adler and Ellis and it’s more weird and wonderful leftfield luminaries such as Jung and RD Laing. One thing that struck me about all of these people and what kept me going was that every single one of them at some point was regarded as frauds, charlatans, quacks, counter-culture renegades or just plain bonkers. To a man (and the odd woman) they were all rule-breakers, all of them questioned and challenged the status quo in their desire to unlock the secrets of the human psyche.

LD: What did you do before you became a counsellor? DG: My last quantum leap was a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker, living and working in Afghanistan for seven years.

LD: Why and when did you decide to join the team at WCC? DG: I joined WCC back in February 2019. I found the whole atmosphere warm and extremely welcoming, and without sounding too affected – it has ‘soul’. It’s also very diverse in both practitioners, and it’s client base which is what I am looking for in my private practice. They were also the first people to say ‘yes.’

LD: Is there a certain model of counselling you use in your work? Can you explain in less than 10 words what it means? DG: Integrative Approach – ‘Promiscuous and flirtatious around the psychodynamic, relational and humanistic theory.’ = 10 words – I did it!

LD: How have you adapted to doing your counselling work during the lockdown? DG: Novelist Tom Holt summed it up for me, ‘Human beings can get used to virtually anything, given plenty of time and no choice in the matter whatsoever.’ I accepted the inevitability of going online with a certain grim foreboding. Within weeks I realised that I was spending a third of the session looking at myself. I Googled it and found out it was normal. Then I discovered how to mute my face. Concealment was a revelation. Now there’s a paradox!

LD: Do you feel as though the lockdown has increased peoples’ need for counselling and therapy? DG: The media has been reporting a lot of research highlighting the negative impact on people’s mental health and finding it difficult to cope with the emotional challenges of isolation. Personally, I thought lockdown was enlightening at first, aside from the grim death toll I found exhilaration in its novelty. No traffic, low pollution, endless sunny days. ‘All in it together’ and all that malarkey.

The current lockdown is very different, and I can sense a collective anxiety building amongst all my clients. It is impacting everyone in a myriad of ways, but now I feel as though we are all yearning for things to return to normal. Although as James Hillman said in, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World’s Getting Worse, ‘In a world like ours, where what’s considered normal is a sickly compromise between how much boredom you can stomach and how much denial you can defend, new thoughts and explorations are often couched in terms of psychosis’. So maybe it is an opportunity for people to look at new meanings and new beginnings instead of looking back. It could be the jolt some of us require.

LD: What would you say to someone who is thinking about receiving therapy or counselling? DG: Be careful, as Carl Jung said, ‘Be aware of unearned wisdom.’ Searching for the truth is not the same as what’s desirable. My god that sounds enough to scare the pants off anyone. Honestly, it’s great. How about Socrates? ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ No, that also sounds quite intimidating. Ok… just do it you’ll never look back. Oh no! That’s the whole point. What about; Be as truthful as possible with your therapist and ask questions. Get stuck in and do the work. It will reward you.

LD: What do you find most rewarding about being a counsellor? DG: The trust that clients place in me and the utter privilege I feel from receiving that trust. James Andreoni claimed the ‘glow of giving makes acts of generosity ultimately selfish.’ In sum; Helping people is a win-win.

LD: What do you find most challenging about being a counsellor? DG: The trust that clients place in me and the utter terror I feel from receiving that trust. Which is good right? Terror broadens the mind. When you’re scared, the stress response induces an adrenaline rush and floods your brain and body with oxygen, increasing your stamina.

LD: What advice do you have for people who are thinking about becoming a counsellor or therapist? DG: Take the red pill. It represents an uncertain future. Living the “truth of reality” is harsher and more difficult than you could imagine. But as Morpheus says in The Matrix, “if you take the blue pill…the story ends.” If you haven’t seen the Matrix, then that won’t make any sense. But maybe this is a trick question because as counsellors we are not meant to give advice. So perhaps I should adopt the Oscar Wilde approach on this one, ‘I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.’

LD: What’s your favourite technique to keep happy and healthy at home during the lockdown? DG: Cooking hearty soups and getting stuck into a Cold War Steve jigsaw puzzle. Twitter @Coldwar_Steve

LD: How do you start your day? DG: Tragically, like most people, these days, going to the loo and staring at my iPhone.

LD: Which 3 people would be on your guest-list for your dream dinner party? DG: RD Laing, Dorothy Parker and Keith Moon. Although I might be too terrified to attend.

LD: What’s the best book you’ve read in the last year? DG: I’m a Joke, and So Are You – Reflections on Humour and Humanity by Robin Ince & Stewart Lee.

LD: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? DG: Not sure it is solid advice but more of a statement from Maya Angelou, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’ She sounds a bit harsh and judgey, but I get the point. But I think the best advice I have read is that therapists should read more stories, more great literature, more Greek myths. Case studies, diagnosis, theories are great, but a lot of the time we are dealing in fiction. Freud said, ‘It’s how you remember, not what actually happened.’ That’s what clients do. They tell us stories that they have told themselves, and we should be always aware of that.

LD: What’s the most adventurous thing you’ve done in life? DG: Besides embarking on a career in therapy, I suppose it must be going to live in a so-called ‘war-zone’ and eating meat-based Kandahar street food in the blazing summer.

LD: When you were young, what did you want to be when you grew up? DG: In the Navy, but my mates told me that it was a bit ‘gay’. Please don’t blame me. It was Yorkshire in the 1970s in and literally, everything you didn’t like or understand was pejoratively called ‘gay’.

LD: What thing are you most excited to do once the lockdown has finished, and it’s safe to travel again? DG: Travelling on the Central Line in rush hour and licking shop windows outside Harrods.

LD: What are you irrationally scared of? DG: I am scared of faking it and making it. Freud called it ‘success neurosis’, but the great poet Phillip Larkin, said, ‘Life has a practice of living you, if you don’t live it.’ So I try not to be scared of living.

LD: What 3 things would you bring to a desert island? DG: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I have never managed to read it (the paperback is over 1100 pages) but apparently, it echoes a timeless conundrum: the propensity for humans to distract themselves, often mindlessly, from boredom and the trauma of life. If that doesn’t work the complete audio works of Alan Watts and Screamadelica by Primal Scream and maybe something to play them on if that’s not too greedy.

LD: What does 2021 hold for you? DG: Hopefully spending less time staring into a screen and shouting, ‘Can you hear me?’ However, I must end on another quotation since this interview is drowning in them. ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.’ Woody Allen.

David Gill [email protected] www.gillypsychotherapy.com

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monstersdownthepath · 7 years

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I've been thinking of Mordiggian and ghouls a lot lately, specifically the Leng Ghouls. Ghouls of Leng do not physically resemble either Denizens of Leng or humans in general; possessing hooves, leathery green skin, large ears, and wide mouths, they resemble goblins more than anything else. It's possible that the insectoid Denizens of Leng were supposed to be closer to the satyr-like creatures in the original Mythos works somewhere early in development, but Paizo went with a different (better) design without considering how out of place it would make the Ghouls look. In any case, despite their inhuman and strangely lively appearance (there's no visible signs of rot or decay), Leng Ghouls are still Undead beings for some odd reason and are capable of passing on a version of Ghoul Fever that turns other people into Leng Ghouls... Provided they have high enough hit dice, or else they just turn into normal ghouls. Also surprising is their intelligence. Their minds are unlocked to secrets of the universe and anyone becoming a Leng Ghoul is often plagued with a curiosity as powerful as their hunger. Leng Ghouls are Erudite, not only having all Knowledge skills as class skills, but also ignoring the otherwise prohibitive need for Spellcaft or Caster Level checks in order to use scrolls and certain other magic items. Their intelligence is staggering and, played well, can throw some players for a loop if they see this large goblinoid carrion-eater and think it's just a dumb brute. Leng Ghouls are noted for their bizarre hospitality, often politely debating with creatures that cross them, going so far as to invite "guests" into their subterranean home-libraries if they believe their guest knows something they want to know, only ever attacking if pushed into doing so. After all, there's no real need for them to get their hands dirty unless there's a food shortage.

#Pathfinder #in this house we love and respect [LENG GHOULS]

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Top New Fantasy Books January 2021

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

Type: Novel Publisher: Tordotcom Release date: Jan. 12, 2021

Den of Geek says: McGuire’s Wayward Children series is a loosely connected group of novels all playing with fantasy tropes. What does it really mean to be a chosen one in a magical world? In the latest installment she turns her careful wit to centaurs and unicorns.

Publisher’s summary: “Welcome to the Hooflands. We’re happy to have you, even if you being here means something’s coming.”

Regan loves, and is loved, though her school-friend situation has become complicated, of late.

When she suddenly finds herself thrust through a doorway that asks her to “Be Sure” before swallowing her whole, Regan must learn to live in a world filled with centaurs, kelpies, and other magical equines―a world that expects its human visitors to step up and be heroes.

But after embracing her time with the herd, Regan discovers that not all forms of heroism are equal, and not all quests are as they seem…

Buy Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire.

The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner

Type: Novel Publisher: Ace Release date: Jan 12, 2021

Den of Geek says: Romance and magic come together in what looks like a fun tale with a wide variety of characters. The roguish setting reminds us of The Lies of Locke Lamora with more women. Publisher’s summary: Dellaria Wells, petty con artist, occasional thief, and partly educated fire witch, is behind on her rent in the city of Leiscourt—again. Then she sees the “wanted” sign, seeking Female Persons, of Martial or Magical ability, to guard a Lady of some Importance, prior to the celebration of her Marriage. Delly fast-talks her way into the job and joins a team of highly peculiar women tasked with protecting their wealthy charge from unknown assassins. Delly quickly sets her sights on one of her companions, the confident and well-bred Winn Cynallum. The job looks like nothing but romance and easy money until things take a deadly (and undead) turn. With the help of a bird-loving necromancer, a shapeshifting schoolgirl, and an ill-tempered reanimated mouse named Buttons, Delly and Winn are determined to get the best of an adversary who wields a twisted magic and has friends in the highest of places.

Buy The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner.

The Forever Sea by Joshua Phillip Johnson

Type: Novel Publisher: DAW Release date: Jan. 19 Den of Geek says: A gorgeous and mysterious fantasy world is ready to unfold. The world-building here looks delightfully weird, with sailing ships on fields of greenery.

Publisher’s Summary: On the never-ending, miles-high expanse of prairie grasses known as the Forever Sea, Kindred Greyreach, hearthfire keeper and sailor aboard harvesting vessel The Errant, is just beginning to fit in with the crew of her new ship when she receives devastating news. Her grandmother—The Marchess, legendary captain and hearthfire keeper—has stepped from her vessel and disappeared into the sea.

But the note she leaves Kindred suggests this was not an act of suicide. Something waits in the depths, and the Marchess has set out to find it.

To follow in her grandmother’s footsteps, Kindred must embroil herself in conflicts bigger than she could imagine: a water war simmering below the surface of two cultures; the politics of a mythic pirate city floating beyond the edges of safe seas; battles against beasts of the deep, driven to the brink of madness; and the elusive promise of a world below the waves.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Kindred finds that she will sacrifice almost everything—ship, crew, and a life sailing in the sun—to discover the truth of the darkness that waits below the Forever Sea. Buy The Forever Sea by Joshua Phillip Johnson.

Subscribe to Den of Geek magazine for FREE right here!

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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deansdirtylittlesecretsblog · 7 years

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Raiders of the Lost Ark

Title: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Summary: Dean and Donna fluff.

Author: Dean’s Dirty Little Secret

Characters: Dean Winchester x Donna Hanscum

Word Count: 1242

Warnings: explicit language, low self-esteem on Donna’s part

Author’s Notes: This was written for @thing-you-do-with-that-thing Favorite Things Challenge. My prompt was Indiana Jones and my pairing was Dean and Donna. This might never have been written if it wasn’t for @climbthatmooselikeatree. Thank you, love.

“It’s one of my favorite movies,” Donna explained, the phone balanced between her shoulder and ear. “The Oakdale does it every year. Everybody dresses up, what do they call it, cosplay, and there’s prizes and food and the movie. I’ve always wanted to go , but I never have. I thought it might be fun.”

“Donna -” Dean sighed. “I don’t know. The hat, the whip, I think I’d look ridiculous.” She could hear the reluctance in his voice.

“You wouldn’t,” she mumbled. “But, if you don’t want to, I understand.” She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice, thankful that he couldn’t see her face.

“Now you’re upset,” he murmured.

“No, no, I’m not,” she lied. “I’m fine.” She quickly changed the subject, drawing Dean into a conversation about the latest case he and Sam were working on. They stayed on the phone for another fifteen minutes until Donna made some excuse to go. She shut it off as soon as she hung up and shoved it in her purse.

Five minutes later she was in bed, the blankets pulled up over her head, her pillow cradled in her arms, praying for sleep. She scolded herself repeatedly; she shouldn’t have expected so much of Dean, after all he was busy, had a lot going on in his life. There was no reason for her to feel so hurt over something as silly as this. She’d get over it.

She’d get over it.

“I’ll get over it,” she sighed, the words like a mantra in her head, playing over and over, until she fell asleep.

Saturday was cold and rainy, miserable, like Donna’s mood. Late in the afternoon, she dragged her pillow and her favorite quilt downstairs and curled up on the couch, Raiders of the Lost Ark in the dvd player. If she couldn’t go to the movie in costume, she’d at least enjoy it at home.

She was sipping her third cup of coffee, burrowed under the blankets, when she heard the kitchen door open. She set her coffee on the table and eased out from beneath the blankets, judging the distance from where she stood, to her gun in its holster by the door.

“Donna!” the all too familiar voice called. “Where you at, gorgeous?”

Dean walked through the door between the kitchen and her living room. She started to giggle the second she saw him. He was wearing a brown fedora, light scruff dusting his cheeks, a white shirt, and a brown leather jacket. Coiled at his waist was a whip. He tipped his hat and winked at her.

“What are you doing?” she laughed.

“Taking you to see Raiders of the Lost Ark at the Oakdale,” he shrugged. “But first -” He held out a plain white box, a pink bow haphazardly tied around it. “Go on, open it.”

Donna took the box, set it on the coffee table, and kneeled in front of it. She slipped the bow off and slowly removed the lid.

“It’s beautiful,” she gasped, pulling the white gown free of the box. She rose to her feet, shook it out, and held it against her body. “It’s just like -”

“The dress that Marion chick wore in the first Indiana Jones movie,” Dean grinned. “What would Indy be without his Marion?”

Donna dropped the dress to the couch and threw herself into Dean’s arms. “You didn’t have to do that,” she whispered, peppering his face with kisses.

“Yeah, I did,” he shrugged. “I’m sorry I was an ass.” He leaned over her, his tongue dancing across her lips.

Donna rose up on her toes, pushing into the kiss, her breasts pressed against his chest, a sigh escaping her.

“Let me make it up to you,” he murmured against her lips. “Go put the dress on or we’re gonna be late for the movie.”

She kissed him again, then grabbed the dress, and sprinted up the stairs.

Donna giggled, holding the hem of the dress in one hand and the small trophy they’d won in the other. Dean’s hand was on her waist, his lips on her neck, his attention divided between kissing her and unlocking her back door. Once he had it open, they fell inside, stumbling over each other. Donna twisted in his arms to wrap her herself around him as he pushed her backwards, kicking the door shut behind him, not stopping until she was pressed against the counter.

“How are you feeling, Miss Best Costume?” Dean smirked.

“Like a million bucks,” Donna laughed, throwing her head back.

Dean laughed with her, hugging her to his chest. “You look like a million bucks in this dress. Fucking gorgeous.”

“Dean,” she gasped, smacking him on the shoulder. “Language.”

“You’re blushing,” he teased, leaning into her, so close there wasn’t an inch of space between them. He twisted his fingers in her dress and dragged it up her leg, his fingers skimming over her skin. “I love it when you blush.”

A shiver raced through her and a moan fell from her lips. The things this man did to her with just a touch, it was insane. She couldn’t get enough of him.

“Thank you, Dean,” she whispered. “Tonight was, well, it was the most fun I’ve had in a long time. You didn’t have to come all the way up here just for me, do all this for me.”

He dragged his fingers through her hair, holding her close, his lips against her temple. “I wanted to,” he said. “I’m sorry if you thought I didn’t. I was kind of a jerk on the phone.” He stepped back, tipping the hat at a rakish angle, peering at Donna from beneath the rim. “But, hey, I make a pretty good Indiana Jones.”

Donna nodded, gnawing at her lower lip as she stared at the man standing in front of her. God, he was gorgeous, beautiful, really, and sweet, always so worried about upsetting her, about hurting her feelings. And by some miracle of God, he wanted to be with her. She felt like she needed to pinch herself to make sure she was awake.

Dean pulled the whip from his belt, unfurled it, and cracked it against the floor. She jumped, a scream escaping her, a knot of anticipation twisting in her gut. Dean gestured for her to come closer, which she did, eyeing the whip warily. Once she was standing in front of him, he wrapped the whip around her shoulders and tugged her closer. He kissed her again, groaning a little in the back of his throat.

“I’m serious, you look unbelievable in this dress,” he growled. “But, it would look better on the floor.”

Donna pressed her face against his jacket, muffling the laughter bubbling out of her. She squealed when Dean scooped her up and threw her over his shoulder. She pounded on his back, squirming and protesting as he made his way through the house and up the stairs. He didn’t stop until he reached her door, it was only then that he set her on her feet.

Donna walked backwards into the bedroom, tugging down the zipper of the dress as she walked, letting the gown fall to the floor, leaving her in only her white lace bra and panties. Dean lunged across the room, catching her once again in his strong grip.

“Told you it would look better on the floor,” he smirked.

Dean and Donna Tags: @mamapeterson @aprofoundbondwithdean @sweetmisseddreams2002 @katnharper @ultimatecin73 @thebunkerismyhome @deathswaywardson @chrisatplay @geekylibrarian24 @jessica-bones-winchester @winchesterswoonathon @for-the-love-of-dean @tonifish @nichelle-my-belle @torn-and-frayed @ksgeekgirl @missandmrsgalxy @prettyboydean @tia58 @nerdyplantbasednurse @madamelibrarian @icantthinkofaname-oops @bringmesomepie56 @waywardjoy @iwriteshortstuff @piratedaydreams @that1seniorchick @starswirlblitz @pizzarollpatrol @lazairahel @hidingfrommychildren @thing-you-do-with-that-thing @district12-erudite @castiel-angelofthelord @misswhizzy @deansdirtywhore @wonderless-screwup @downworlder--impala @superbluhoo2 @deandoesthingstome @jencharlan @feelmyroarrrr @okay-okay18 @spnbrennafae @rattyretro-blog-blog @ladyroche @climbthatmooselikeatree @rizlow1 @smoothdogsgirl @mischief-maker1 @winchesterprincessbride @just-a-touch-of-sass-and-fandoms @sckslife @sis-tafics @youwerelikeadream @i-dream-of-dean @oriona75 @writingbeautifulmen @meeshw777 @mrswhozeewhatsis @gemini75eeyore @vote-for-pedro @tom-is-in-my-tardis @percywinchester27 @atc74 @chelseafartnoise @missbeccamay @findingfitnessforme @tas898 @munroe-foster

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theloverera · 5 years

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IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It��s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” REDACTED lol Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

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bookliteratibookreviews · 6 years

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I can’t believe we are at the end of another year, but what a wonderful year it has been for books. In the past twelve months I have read one hundred and ten books, which is quite an achievement for me, but it has been a pleasure to read and share them with you. There have been so many fabulous books that choosing my top ten has been a difficult process, but finally I have narrowed it down, so here are my top ten reads of 2018, in no particular order.

The Moon Sister by Lucinda Riley. It is no secret that I am a huge fan of Lucinda Riley’s books and in particular her Seven Sisters series. This is the fifth book, and tells the story of Tiggy and where she originally came from. Like the previous books we travel to some wonderful places, Spain, Portugal, South America, and meet some unforgettable characters, like her great grandmother Lucia. This is a tale of love and passion, flamenco and self discovery and Lucinda Riley seamlessly weaves it all together into another perfect read.

Tombland by C.J Sansom. This book was the big surprise of the year for me. Like many others I thought Lamentation was the last Shardlake novel, so I was super excited to learn of a new book. Set three years after the previous book, Shardlake goes on business to Norwich on behalf of the Lady Elizabeth and finds himself caught up in the peasant rebellion. With the return of many familiar characters, some memorable new ones and the impeccable attention to historical detail, this book is immersive, erudite and entertaining.

The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton. I always enjoy Kate Morton’s books and for me this is her best yet. This a beautiful read in all senses; the writing, the plot, the characters and the atmosphere. The Location of Birchwood Manor is very much a character itself, and is the focus point where all the different threads comes together. The book centres around artist Edward Julius Radcliffe and his relationship with his muse, that all came to an end one night in 1862. The different story lines radiate out from this one event that ended with a death and a theft. Love, loss, art and a mystery combine to make this such a compelling read and reminds me why Kate Morton is on my list of top ten contemporary fiction authors.

The Great Alone by Kristen Hannah. I read this at the beginning of the year and it is a book that has stayed with me. Ernt Albright moves his family up to Alaska to try and make a fresh start. He is a troubled POW from the Vietnam war, who can’t hold down a job and can be violent to his wife. In the vastness of Alaska Ernt, his wife Cora and daughter Lent have to learn to fend for themselves. Kristen Hannah captures the vastness and harsh reality of living in Alaska and how Ernt’s emotions mirror the change of the seasons. This is a powerful read full of emotion and drama.

Thirteen by Steve Cavanagh. Before I even got to the book, Thirteen was on my radar from the hype alone, and it didn’t disappoint. What drew me was the premise that at the murder trial, the real murderer is on the jury. This is such a clever concept and had me gripped throughout. This is the fourth book in the Eddie Flynn story but can be read as a standalone, which is whatI did. Thirteen is a thriller that will have you on the edge of your seat with tension until you reach the shocking final chapter.

Cuckoo by Sophie Draper. Cuckoo had my attention from the first page and finished with me thinking WOW, and that is why it is part of this list. We all remember the fairytales from our childhood with the wicked step-mother, naughty children getting their comeuppance, and strange occurrences, and this sums up Cuckoo. At her step-mother’s funeral Caro reconnects with her estranged sister and moves back into their family cottage, where her step-mother died. But whilst there she starts having flash backs to her childhood and strange occurrences happen in the house. Caro needs to understand her past, but at what cost. This is a dark, chilling and breathtaking read.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life is a book that will stay with me forever, and one of the few books I have kept to read again. This was on the Booker Prize Shortlist in 2015, and in my opinion should have won. The book follows four friends who meet at college as they go through the ups and downs life throws at them. The writing of this book is sublime, and although it deals with some very difficult subjects, Hanya Yanagihara is able to keep the prose lyrical and a pleasure to read. This is an emotional book to read in parts, due to some of the subject matter; depression, self-harm and abuse, but it is well worth reading. In my opinion this is a monumental novel, fiction at it’s absolute best: perfect.

The Burning Chambers by Kate Mosse. Kate Mosse has been one of my favourite authors for thirteen years now so I am always excited when she releases a new book. In The Burning Chambers Kate Mosse takes us back to Carcassone and the history of the Heugenots that were in the Labyrinth Trilogy. This time we are in the sixteenth century during the religious wars that were the result of the Reformation in Europe. Full of historical detail this book seamlessly blends fact and fiction to make an outstanding read. Even more exciting is that this is the first in four books that will span three hundred years from sixteenth century France to nineteenth century South Africa and the displacement of the heugenots. This is a must for fans of historical fiction.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris. This was one of the most highly anticipated novels of 2018 and I think it has lived up to expectations. Based on the lives of Lale and Gita who met at Auschwitz, this is a remarkable and thought provoking book on so many different levels. Lale is the tattooist who marks each prisoner as they enter the camp and this post gives him some privileges that are denied other prisoners. He obviously sees some terrible things, and has to go to incredible lengths to survive, but what stands out in this book is Lale and Gita’s self survival, their belief that they will get out of the camp and their love for each other.

The All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness. Technically this could be seen as cheating, as it is three books, but I couldn’t just choose one. A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night, and The Book of Life opened up a new literary world to me as I never read fantasy or magical books. These books follow Diana and Matthew, a witch and a vampire, who are thrown together in the Bodleian Library when Diane calls up the enchanted manuscript Ashmole 782, that has been lost for hundreds of years. This is the beginning of their journey across continents, a visit to Elizabethan England in the quest to unlock the secrets of the manuscript. Deborah Harkness is an amazingly talented author, her characters come to life, her attention to detail draws you in and her historical knowledge shines through. I fell in love with these books and have kept them to read again.

I am now looking forward to 2019, and already have a list of some exciting books due out in the New Year, including a new Eddie Flynn book from Steve Cavanagh, a stand alone thriller from M.J.Arlidge, and some books by new authors; The Doll Factory by Elizabeth MacNeal and The Familiars by Stacy Halls. Below are the ten books I am most looking forward to read.

I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and thank you for all your support over the last year; it means such a lot to me as I am virtually housebound due to heath problems. I look forward to sharing more book love in 2019.

Top Ten Reads Of 2018 and a look forward to 2019 I can't believe we are at the end of another year, but what a wonderful year it has been for books.

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befoundonlinemarketing · 7 years

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CMWorld Interview: Ann Handley Shares the Secrets to Her Success (with Sass)

We all have the same number of hours in each day. But every once in awhile you find someone that come across a content marketing maven that seems to have the amazing ability to slow down the clock. It’s amazing to witness the things they are able to accomplish before you’ve even finished your morning avocado toast.

While this year’s Content Marketing World conference is filled with amazing marketers that can do just that, there is one content captain that sticks out in particular.

This marketer is one of my favorite speakers (and humans) of all time and is none other than the amazingly talented Ann Handley.

In addition to being one of the smartest and most accomplished marketers on the planet, Ann is a delightful combination of wit, humor and charm. So if your goal is like mine, “to be a little more Handley”, then buckle up and get ready for the ride of your life.

What does your role as Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs entail?

I am gently awakened in the morning by the sweet calls of the downy-throated songbirds welcoming me into a new day.

I arise and dine on a firm scramble of eggs laid at dawn by my cluck of heirloom chickens, while I sip coffee from the rarest Kopi Luwak bean, harvested deep in the Sumatran jungle.

It’s hand-picked.

By monkeys.

So, after that… you can imagine that I flit to my desk, dip the nib of my fountain pen in the corner inkwell, and the marketing insights spill out of me onto the page with the same intensity as the yolks of those heirloom eggs spread onto my breakfast plate.

Or: I wake up, sit down at my computer, and force myself awake by scrolling through Twitter. (I have zero chickens and no songbirds. In case anyone is wondering.)

What does your day look like? What do you like best?

Most of my time at MarketingProfs is spent…

In meetings with speakers, content creators, writers, MarketingProfs staffers (or, as I call that last group, “the Navy SEAL team of Modern Marketing.” See below.)

Dealing with the relentless crush of email. (Least favorite thing.)

Focusing on more substantive work in my backyard Tiny House. It’s really a tiny office. But it’s a dedicated space that helps me focus and do the work I need to get done. (Most favorite thing.)

(I’m here right now, in this Tiny House, because you’ve already extended the deadline for this interview. So I need to get my butt in gear.)

You have a fulltime job at MarketingProfs, speak around the world and still seem to find time to write bestselling books. How do you balance all of these priorities?

I have a Franklin Planner and a label maker.

I’m kidding. I have a lot of help on the MarketingProfs front. I have an entire team of whatever the marketing version is of Navy SEALs: highly trained and talented human specimens who are also the finest people I know.

What do you mean when you encourage marketers to “slow down” with their marketing?

Close to 90 percent of B2B companies we surveyed are using content in their marketing. Yet just 34 percent of business-to-business marketers say that their content marketing is truly effective.

What’s up with that?

It’s important to slow down our marketing to get the basics right.

Like developing a documented content strategy.

Like doing the required research.

Like developing robust, non-one-dimensional Flat Stanley buyer personas.

Like articulating your bigger story.

Like investing in quality: excellent writing (and editing) and storytelling.

It’s also important for Marketing more generally to be that voice of reason within our organizations, to be the voice of sanity. We need to be the ones whose hands put up a TIME OUT signal to stop play on dumb plans, non-customer-centric programs, or technology “innovations” that ultimately erode the customer experience and disrespect the very people we need to serve.

And it’s important not just because we want to sell more stuff to people who love us but also because we need to sustain ourselves as people—to be proud of what we create, and embrace our own value at our companies. I believe that a disrespect for Marketing is in part why CMOs on average have the shortest tenure among all the C-suite roles.*

*I know this is a complex topic. But let’s start somewhere, shall we?

Why is it important for content marketers to “find their squad”?

Most every brand needs #squadgoals.

(Side note: I’m tempted to say “every brand” needs a squad, categorically. But there’s an exception to everything, isn’t there? Life isn’t black and white. It’s more nuanced than that, with shades of gray and taupe and rainbow, too.)

But anyway: It’s far more valuable to connect with a smaller squad that loves you—far more valuable to foster a shared mindset—than it is to try to appeal to a broader, less-engaged group of people who can take you or leave you.

Said algebraically:

smaller squad >> broad audience

(a smaller squad is much greater in value than a broad audience)

What are the 3 most important things marketers need to do to create a memorable content experience?

Be empathetic. Develop next-level, pathological empathy for your customer, your prospects, your audience.

Be brave. Take risks. Face your fears. Stare down your critics. Be a little weird.

Zig when others zag. Look what others are doing, and then do the opposite. Or look at what others are doing in other industries but not in yours, and do that. Or what’s the thing everyone says is over, out, done, dead, kaput…? Go for it.

What do you see as the biggest content marketing opportunity that many marketers aren’t taking full advantage of?

Tone of voice.

I’ve been saying this for so many years that I’m starting to hate my own droning, repetitive, broken-record tone of voice on this topic… but still: Tone of voice is still vastly undervalued by almost every brand or company or organization I meet in my daily jog around the Internet.

Has there been a defining moment in your career that you credit for your success, and if so, what was it? You mean the time Oprah mentioned Everybody Writes in her book club?

Or when my speaker reel went viral?

Or when I sat next to Malcolm Gladwell on an airplane and he was so intrigued by our erudite conversation then he gushed about me on Jimmy Fallon that night?

None of those things happened.

So, no: there was no one defining moment.

Success is less a one-time ignition and more a deliberate, slow burn fueled by love for the work, a need to understand (and to be understood), and the ability to shut off the incessant prattle of the Internet because enough already I need to get stuff done.

By the way, I almost quibbled with your characterization of me as successful. Another key is this: I never think of myself in those terms.

First, because describing oneself as “successful” is like calling yourself a good friend, or a good parent, or a marketing influencer. Claiming such terms for yourself is arrogant: It’s more meaningful when others call you any of those things.

And, second, because calling myself a “success” somehow would mean that I’ve somehow stopped working toward something. I’ve already reached a pinnacle. Or checked a box. Or unlocked an achievement or level in some weird professional gaming system somewhere.

Life isn’t like that. You never really stop trying to accomplish, no matter how accomplished you or others believe you might be.

Which speaker presentations are you looking forward to most at Content Marketing World 2017?

Is anyone still reading this?

I have been at every single Content Marketing World since its inception—which was, what… #CMW1973?

So I’ve seen a lot of the great speakers who have been there year after year like I have… and who are back again this year. People like Andrew Davis, Lee Odden, Michael Brenner, Doug Kessler, Ardath Albee, Jay Baer, Heidi Cohen, Marcus Sheridan, and that’s just off the top of my head.

Rock stars, all of them. Any of them individually is worth the entire price of admission.

But my strategy this year is to go support the newbies and the first-timers. There are a lot of them this year, too.

So I’m going to hit as many as I can, and I’m going to clap the loudest.

Want More?

Thank you for taking the time to share your content marketing smarts with us Ann!

To get more content marketing insights from Ann Handley and 11 of her fellow Content Marketing World speakers, be sure to check out the second eBook in our series, The In-Flight Content Guide: Creating a Memorable Content Experience.

Still need more from your CMWorld flight crew? Check out our recent interviews featuring Adele Revella and Amanda Todorovich.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

The post CMWorld Interview: Ann Handley Shares the Secrets to Her Success (with Sass) appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

CMWorld Interview: Ann Handley Shares the Secrets to Her Success (with Sass) posted first on http://ift.tt/faSbAI

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christopheruearle · 7 years

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CMWorld Interview: Ann Handley Shares the Secrets to Her Success (with Sass)

While this year’s Content Marketing World conference is filled with amazing marketers that can do just that, there is one content captain that sticks out in particular.

This marketer is one of my favorite speakers (and humans) of all time and is none other than the amazingly talented Ann Handley.

What does your role as Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs entail?

I am gently awakened in the morning by the sweet calls of the downy-throated songbirds welcoming me into a new day.

I arise and dine on a firm scramble of eggs laid at dawn by my cluck of heirloom chickens, while I sip coffee from the rarest Kopi Luwak bean, harvested deep in the Sumatran jungle.

It’s hand-picked.

By monkeys.

Or: I wake up, sit down at my computer, and force myself awake by scrolling through Twitter. (I have zero chickens and no songbirds. In case anyone is wondering.)

What does your day look like? What do you like best?

Most of my time at MarketingProfs is spent…

In meetings with speakers, content creators, writers, MarketingProfs staffers (or, as I call that last group, “the Navy SEAL team of Modern Marketing.” See below.)

Dealing with the relentless crush of email. (Least favorite thing.)

Focusing on more substantive work in my backyard Tiny House. It’s really a tiny office. But it’s a dedicated space that helps me focus and do the work I need to get done. (Most favorite thing.)

(I’m here right now, in this Tiny House, because you’ve already extended the deadline for this interview. So I need to get my butt in gear.)

You have a fulltime job at MarketingProfs, speak around the world and still seem to find time to write bestselling books. How do you balance all of these priorities?

I have a Franklin Planner and a label maker.

What do you mean when you encourage marketers to “slow down” with their marketing?

Close to 90 percent of B2B companies we surveyed are using content in their marketing. Yet just 34 percent of business-to-business marketers say that their content marketing is truly effective.

What’s up with that?

It’s important to slow down our marketing to get the basics right.

Like developing a documented content strategy.

Like doing the required research.

Like developing robust, non-one-dimensional Flat Stanley buyer personas.

Like articulating your bigger story.

Like investing in quality: excellent writing (and editing) and storytelling.

*I know this is a complex topic. But let’s start somewhere, shall we?

Why is it important for content marketers to “find their squad”?

Most every brand needs #squadgoals.

Said algebraically:

smaller squad >> broad audience

(a smaller squad is much greater in value than a broad audience)

What are the 3 most important things marketers need to do to create a memorable content experience?

Be empathetic. Develop next-level, pathological empathy for your customer, your prospects, your audience.

Be brave. Take risks. Face your fears. Stare down your critics. Be a little weird.

What do you see as the biggest content marketing opportunity that many marketers aren’t taking full advantage of?

Tone of voice.

Has there been a defining moment in your career that you credit for your success, and if so, what was it? You mean the time Oprah mentioned Everybody Writes in her book club?

Or when my speaker reel went viral?

Or when I sat next to Malcolm Gladwell on an airplane and he was so intrigued by our erudite conversation then he gushed about me on Jimmy Fallon that night?

None of those things happened.

So, no: there was no one defining moment.

By the way, I almost quibbled with your characterization of me as successful. Another key is this: I never think of myself in those terms.

Life isn’t like that. You never really stop trying to accomplish, no matter how accomplished you or others believe you might be.

Which speaker presentations are you looking forward to most at Content Marketing World 2017?

Is anyone still reading this?

I have been at every single Content Marketing World since its inception—which was, what… #CMW1973?

Rock stars, all of them. Any of them individually is worth the entire price of admission.

But my strategy this year is to go support the newbies and the first-timers. There are a lot of them this year, too.

So I’m going to hit as many as I can, and I’m going to clap the loudest.

Want More?

Thank you for taking the time to share your content marketing smarts with us Ann!

Still need more from your CMWorld flight crew? Check out our recent interviews featuring Adele Revella and Amanda Todorovich.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

The post CMWorld Interview: Ann Handley Shares the Secrets to Her Success (with Sass) appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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allcheatscodes · 8 years

Text

bound by flame xbox 360

http://allcheatscodes.com/bound-by-flame-xbox-360/

bound by flame xbox 360

Bound by Flame cheats & more for Xbox 360 (X360)

Cheats

Unlockables

Hints

Easter Eggs

Glitches

Guides

Achievements

Get the updated and latest Bound by Flame cheats, unlockables, codes, hints, Easter eggs, glitches, tricks, tips, hacks, downloads, achievements, guides, FAQs, walkthroughs, and more for Xbox 360 (X360). AllCheatsCodes.com has all the codes you need to win every game you play!

Use the links above or scroll down to see all the Xbox 360 cheats we have available for Bound by Flame.

Genre: Role-Playing, Strategy RPG

Developer: Unknown

Publisher: Focus Home Interactive

ESRB Rating: Mature

Release Date: May 9, 2014

Hints

Currently we have no tips for Bound by Flame yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Cheats

Currently we have no cheats or codes for Bound by Flame yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Unlockables

Currently we have no unlockables for Bound by Flame yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Easter eggs

Currently we have no easter eggs for Bound by Flame yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Glitches

Currently we have no glitches for Bound by Flame yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Guides

Currently no guide available.

Achievements

Achievement List

.the harder they fall – You have bested Lord Blackfrost himself! – 15

A fulfilled elf – You have shown Rhelmar he can count on you. – 20

And I don’t throw things away – You’ve learned to recycle objects that you no longer need, instead of throwing them away. – 10

At the lady’s service – You have made the effort to respond to all of Edwen’s demands. She even thanked you.once. – 20

Beasted – You have bested a Juggernaut. and that’s just the beginning! – 15

Blacksmith – You have learned the secrets of improving weapons and armour. – 10

Bloody hell – You have killed 50 enemies with a dagger. People often talk about you to frighten small children. – 10

Buffalo – As a good veteran, you have managed to complete Bound by Flame under difficult conditions. – 45

Captain – As a worthy Captain, you have completed Bound by Flame under the most extreme conditions. – 110

Chivalrandy – Randval has abandoned his deathwish while succumbing to your charms. Double whammy! – 30

Chrysalid – You have played the poison card more than 50 times. It works every time. – 10

Craftsmanship – Congratulations! With all the objects you have made, you could open up a store. – 10

Erudite love – Responding both to your kindness, and your advances, the ravishing Sybil has the hots for you. – 30

Farewell my Concubine – Your aggressive stance on polygamy has taken its first victim in Blackfrost’s entourage. – 15

Firestarter – Skill after skill, you have truly mastered the art of playing with fire. – 20

First come, first served – Knowing that no one would argue with you, you have looted 20 chests. – 10

First steps – You have upgraded your first skill, and improved your chances of survival at the same time. – 10

General demoted – You have slain a Deadwalker General and saved the village of Valvenor from a massacre. – 15

Hawk – You have reached the end of Bound by Flame. Not bad, for a scout. – 25

Humanist – You have controlled the inner voice and taken care to preserve your humanity until the end. – 30

I’m on fire – You have transformed your enemies into flaming torches 50 times. They have probably got the message. – 10

Ice breaker – Romance with pointy ears – 30

It’s a trap! – You like setting booby-traps and they work. More than twenty have already fallen to them. – 10

Just a slaughter – With 150 victims, you are officially the bane of the Deadwalkers. – 110

Just a warm-up – You learn to use your weapons. 25 people have already done so before you. – 10

Just a warning – You had earned the curiosity of the Ice Lords. 75 kills later, you have their attention. – 30

Master at arms – There is no better warrior than you in all of Vertiel. Even among the Freeborn Blades. – 20

Master Ranger – The Ranger skills hold no more secrets for you. – 20

Mercenary – Either for love of your fellow human or simple greed, you have accomplished your 20th side quest. – 110

Patron – You proved yourself a guardian of the seekers of knowledge by fulfilling all of Sybil’s missions. – 20

Psycho killer – You have slain enough victims with an axe to fuel urban legends for centuries to come. – 10

Purifying fire – You decided that there was nothing left of Vertiel to save, and taken extreme measures. – 15

Quite a hammering – You have slain or re-slain more than 50 enemies with a warhammer. That is rather violent. – 10

Romance with pointy ears – You have bested Rhelmar at his own game – The ladykiller Elf has a crush on you. – 30

Sacrifice – Your heroic actions have saved Vertiel…and you have paid with your own life. – 15

Shot your bolt – Thanks to you, 50 crossbow bolts have found a new home in your enemies’ flesh. – 10

Sword it out – 49 enemies killed with a sword. You crossed the line.and then some. – 10

The one and only Lord – You have stripped the Ice Lords of their power and taken control of Vertiel. – 10

Unleash the Beast – To hell with humanity, even your own – you have decided that the power is worth the sacrifice. – 30

Vulture – You have learned the habit of looting the bodies of fallen enemies. That’s war for you. – 10

Without fear, without reproach – You have helped Randval resolve all of his personal problems.well, most of them anyway. – 20

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