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lesmislettersdaily · 1 year

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What He Believed

Volume 1: Fantine; Book 1: A Just Man; Chapter 13: What He Believed

We are not obliged to sound the Bishop of Digne on the score of orthodoxy. In the presence of such a soul we feel ourselves in no mood but respect. The conscience of the just man should be accepted on his word. Moreover, certain natures being given, we admit the possible development of all beauties of human virtue in a belief that differs from our own.

What did he think of this dogma, or of that mystery? These secrets of the inner tribunal of the conscience are known only to the tomb, where souls enter naked. The point on which we are certain is, that the difficulties of faith never resolved themselves into hypocrisy in his case. No decay is possible to the diamond. He believed to the extent of his powers. “Credo in Patrem,” he often exclaimed. Moreover, he drew from good works that amount of satisfaction which suffices to the conscience, and which whispers to a man, “Thou art with God!”

The point which we consider it our duty to note is, that outside of and beyond his faith, as it were, the Bishop possessed an excess of love. It was in that quarter, quia multum amavit,—because he loved much—that he was regarded as vulnerable by “serious men,” “grave persons” and “reasonable people”; favorite locutions of our sad world where egotism takes its word of command from pedantry. What was this excess of love? It was a serene benevolence which overflowed men, as we have already pointed out, and which, on occasion, extended even to things. He lived without disdain. He was indulgent towards God’s creation. Every man, even the best, has within him a thoughtless harshness which he reserves for animals. The Bishop of Digne had none of that harshness, which is peculiar to many priests, nevertheless. He did not go as far as the Brahmin, but he seemed to have weighed this saying of Ecclesiastes: “Who knoweth whither the soul of the animal goeth?” Hideousness of aspect, deformity of instinct, troubled him not, and did not arouse his indignation. He was touched, almost softened by them. It seemed as though he went thoughtfully away to seek beyond the bounds of life which is apparent, the cause, the explanation, or the excuse for them. He seemed at times to be asking God to commute these penalties. He examined without wrath, and with the eye of a linguist who is deciphering a palimpsest, that portion of chaos which still exists in nature. This reverie sometimes caused him to utter odd sayings. One morning he was in his garden, and thought himself alone, but his sister was walking behind him, unseen by him: suddenly he paused and gazed at something on the ground; it was a large, black, hairy, frightful spider. His sister heard him say:—

“Poor beast! It is not its fault!”

Why not mention these almost divinely childish sayings of kindness? Puerile they may be; but these sublime puerilities were peculiar to Saint Francis d’Assisi and of Marcus Aurelius. One day he sprained his ankle in his effort to avoid stepping on an ant. Thus lived this just man. Sometimes he fell asleep in his garden, and then there was nothing more venerable possible.

Monseigneur Bienvenu had formerly been, if the stories anent his youth, and even in regard to his manhood, were to be believed, a passionate, and, possibly, a violent man. His universal suavity was less an instinct of nature than the result of a grand conviction which had filtered into his heart through the medium of life, and had trickled there slowly, thought by thought; for, in a character, as in a rock, there may exist apertures made by drops of water. These hollows are uneffaceable; these formations are indestructible.

In 1815, as we think we have already said, he reached his seventy-fifth birthday, but he did not appear to be more than sixty. He was not tall; he was rather plump; and, in order to combat this tendency, he was fond of taking long strolls on foot; his step was firm, and his form was but slightly bent, a detail from which we do not pretend to draw any conclusion. Gregory XVI., at the age of eighty, held himself erect and smiling, which did not prevent him from being a bad bishop. Monseigneur Bienvenu had what the people term a “fine head,” but so amiable was he that they forgot that it was fine.

When he conversed with that infantile gayety which was one of his charms, and of which we have already spoken, people felt at their ease with him, and joy seemed to radiate from his whole person. His fresh and ruddy complexion, his very white teeth, all of which he had preserved, and which were displayed by his smile, gave him that open and easy air which cause the remark to be made of a man, “He’s a good fellow”; and of an old man, “He is a fine man.” That, it will be recalled, was the effect which he produced upon Napoleon. On the first encounter, and to one who saw him for the first time, he was nothing, in fact, but a fine man. But if one remained near him for a few hours, and beheld him in the least degree pensive, the fine man became gradually transfigured, and took on some imposing quality, I know not what; his broad and serious brow, rendered august by his white locks, became august also by virtue of meditation; majesty radiated from his goodness, though his goodness ceased not to be radiant; one experienced something of the emotion which one would feel on beholding a smiling angel slowly unfold his wings, without ceasing to smile. Respect, an unutterable respect, penetrated you by degrees and mounted to your heart, and one felt that one had before him one of those strong, thoroughly tried, and indulgent souls where thought is so grand that it can no longer be anything but gentle.

As we have seen, prayer, the celebration of the offices of religion, alms-giving, the consolation of the afflicted, the cultivation of a bit of land, fraternity, frugality, hospitality, renunciation, confidence, study, work, filled every day of his life. Filled is exactly the word; certainly the Bishop’s day was quite full to the brim, of good words and good deeds. Nevertheless, it was not complete if cold or rainy weather prevented his passing an hour or two in his garden before going to bed, and after the two women had retired. It seemed to be a sort of rite with him, to prepare himself for slumber by meditation in the presence of the grand spectacles of the nocturnal heavens. Sometimes, if the two old women were not asleep, they heard him pacing slowly along the walks at a very advanced hour of the night. He was there alone, communing with himself, peaceful, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the ether, moved amid the darkness by the visible splendor of the constellations and the invisible splendor of God, opening his heart to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. At such moments, while he offered his heart at the hour when nocturnal flowers offer their perfume, illuminated like a lamp amid the starry night, as he poured himself out in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not have told himself, probably, what was passing in his spirit; he felt something take its flight from him, and something descend into him. Mysterious exchange of the abysses of the soul with the abysses of the universe!

He thought of the grandeur and presence of God; of the future eternity, that strange mystery; of the eternity past, a mystery still more strange; of all the infinities, which pierced their way into all his senses, beneath his eyes; and, without seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible, he gazed upon it. He did not study God; he was dazzled by him. He considered those magnificent conjunctions of atoms, which communicate aspects to matter, reveal forces by verifying them, create individualities in unity, proportions in extent, the innumerable in the infinite, and, through light, produce beauty. These conjunctions are formed and dissolved incessantly; hence life and death.

He seated himself on a wooden bench, with his back against a decrepit vine; he gazed at the stars, past the puny and stunted silhouettes of his fruit-trees. This quarter of an acre, so poorly planted, so encumbered with mean buildings and sheds, was dear to him, and satisfied his wants.

What more was needed by this old man, who divided the leisure of his life, where there was so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the heavens for a ceiling, sufficient to enable him to adore God in his most divine works, in turn? Does not this comprehend all, in fact? and what is there left to desire beyond it? A little garden in which to walk, and immensity in which to dream. At one’s feet that which can be cultivated and plucked; over head that which one can study and meditate upon: some flowers on earth, and all the stars in the sky.

#les mis #les mis letters #volume 1: fantine #book 1: a just man #chapter 13

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dustedmagazine · 2 years

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Nora O’Connor — My Heart (Pravda)

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Nora O’Connor makes countrified songs with city suavity. They’re heartfelt but never maudlin, simply conceived but masterfully arranged and played. They feel direct and personal and authentic, but they evidence a great deal of craft, too. Nora O’Connor is a pro, but not spoiled by it.

Even if you’ve never encountered O’Connor in her solo guise, you’ve likely heard her in the background. She tours regularly with Iron & Wine and plays and sings with Andrew Bird. At various times, she has backed up Neko Case, the New Pornographers, the Decemberists, John Wesley Harding and Mavis Staples. She’s a member of the doo-wopping, barber-shopping, 40s-radio quintuplet the Flat Five, and along with Kelly Hogan, Jon Langford and Sally Timms, a staple of Chicago’s thriving alt.country scene. This is only her third solo album, but never mind that. She’s been busy.

With My Heart, O’Connor treads agilely across country styles, from slow rocking heartbreakers (“Sore”), to dusky, organ laced waltzes etched by experience (“Grace’), to a sprightly, bluegrassy ramble the heart of blue America (“Cambridge Cold”). A lone, finger-picked instrumental (“Winwoof”) showcases O’Connor’s Takoma-style skills. A handful of these songs—and some of the best—hardly sound like country at all. “My Heart” plunks down a terse piano line into its tale of romantic disappointment; it conjures art-song, cabaret music as much as twang. And “Follow Me” with its devastating pedal steel—that’s Jon Rauhouse, by the way—finds a Sadies-like magic interval between country and psychedelia.

O’Connor brings in her Flat Five bandmates for vocal and instrumental support—Casey McDonough on bass and guitar, Scott Ligon on keyboards and guitar, Alex Hall on drums and piano and Steve Dawson on guitars and keyboards. The arrangements are varied, interesting and expertly executed. These are not the kind of people who ever miss a note.

But mostly it’s Nora O’Connor with her wry, side-eyed view of the world, the clean, gorgeous lines of her melodies and that voice full of strength and vulnerability. She’s been off in the corner for a while, but not because she’s bad. It’s past time for her to come center stage.

Jennifer Kelly

#nora o'connor #my heart #pravda #jennifer kelly #albumreview #dusted magazine #alt.country #flat five #chicago

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thelensofyashunews · 2 months

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YTB Fatt Stars with GloRilla in the Video for "Same"

Born and raised in West Memphis, AR, YTB Fatt has the suavity and silver tongue of a Southern gentleman. Crossing the Mississippi to link up with Memphis's own GloRilla, the Loaf Boyz rapper shares the video for new single "Same." A nostalgic and romantic new single with an 00s R&B-sampling beat, the new song features Fatt cutting through the luscious instrumental with emotional outbursts and bits of relationship wisdom that belie his 22 years of age. In the video, Fatt dramatizes the love triangle, as he and Big Homiie G take turns romancing GloRilla, as she happily plays both sides, before Fatt wins out at the end. "Same" and its music video are the latest releases in what's shaping up to be a busy year for YTB Fatt.

With Moneybagg Yo's Loaf Boyz him and over 140 million streams in the bank, YTB Fatt had a breakout year in 2023, highlighted by his recent mixtape Who Is Fatt. His first full-length project, Who Is Fatt charted on Billboard and Apple Music, reaching #4 on Billboard's Heatseekers Albums and charting as high as #12 on Apple Music's All-Genre Album Chart and at #6 on Apple Music's Hip-Hop Albums Chart. The project is home to his breakout hit "Get Back" (19 million YouTube views), and the Pitchfork-praised "Poppin It Hard," plus guest appearances from Rob49, Big Homiie G and FTO Sett. Fatt followed up Who Is Fatt with the no-holds-barred 10-pack Foxes Only, featuring guest appearances from Lil Yachty, GloRilla, and BabyDrill. Both Who Is Fatt and Foxes Only are available on all platforms via Loaf Boy Ventures / 10K Projects.

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YTB Fatt has been rising steadily in the Dirty South since the beginning of last year. Born and raised in West Memphis, Arkansas, just across the Mississippi from the Tennessee rap hotbed, YTB Fatt caught the attention of an impressed Moneybagg Yo with songs like "Played Out" and "Don't Crash." Moneybagg Yo quickly signed Fatt to his Bread Gang label, collaborating with Fatt on the hit "Shot Off Gumbo" (11 million YouTube views) and connecting Fatt with Lil Durk on "Rock Out"–both of Yo and Fatt's collaborations appeared on the Memphis rapper's Hard To Love album. Since then, Fatt has continued to drop more street hits, and has become an in-demand featured artist, working with artists like Trippie Redd, Rob 49, Icewear Vezzo, and many, many others.

With two successful mixtapes under his belt, Fatt is tirelessly working to reach the top of the rap game. Stay tuned for much more.

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britesparc · 2 months

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Weekend Top Ten #629

Top Ten Actors Who Could Play James Bond (2024 Edition)

Dum-dada-dum-da-da-da, dum-dada-dum-da-da-da, DA-DA, da-da-dum. Yes, it’s that time again; time to needlessly speculate without any provocation about the casting of an iconic role.

This particular bout of “who will it be” is, of course, prompted by reports that erstwhile Quicksilver and future Kraven Aaron Taylor-Johnson has been offered the role of James Bond. Now, it’s fair to say that this remains a rumour; indeed, if I was a betting man, the very fact that this rumour has come out suggests to me that it isn’t, in fact, true. But it’s still got me thinking about who could be Bond; after all, the gap between the last film, 2021’s No Time to Die is ever-growing, and they usually like to be pretty speedy about these things.

Daniel Craig’s tenure as Bond is somewhat ridiculous, because even though at five films he’s not the most prolific in the role (behind both Connery and Moore), he was technically in the role for a whopping fifteen years. So long, in fact, that when Spectre came out, I actually did a list speculating who could replace him, and even that was nine years ago.

Anyway, we’re at it again; who could play Bond? And that’s what this list is all about, if you haven’t guessed. As usual, I’ve come up with some Rules, because that’s what separates us from the animals. First of all, these actors have to be British. Or Irish. Or maybe, at a push, Australian. Well, they have to be from the Commonwealth, at least. No Americans – that’s the takeaway. No Americans. Secondly, I have decided that they should be under forty. No offence to ancient people, especially the hideously decrepit 42-year-olds; but after Craig spent so long playing a variation on Old Man Bond, I think we should focus on a sprightly young chap. Presumably they’re going to be in this role for, what, six years? Ten? So I think it’d be best to plump for someone in their thirties, better to avoid Moore-style stunt-person-itis in their later films. I mean, look at Chris Hemsworth; it feels like he’s been Thor for a million years, but he’s only just turned forty. Maybe he really is Asgardian. Finally, I’ve picked all blokes. Why? Well, as much as I’m in favour of gender-neutral casting – or outright gender-swapping (if you’re gonna remake Highlander, Karen Gillan is right there) – I do feel that James Bond is, well, a bloke. The line between it not being a big deal or even positive to fuss about with a character’s gender is as blurry as the concept of gender itself, but I just feel like James Bond is a bloke.

That’s it. Now pay attention, 007…

Kingsley Ben-Adir: possibly the oldest actor here, but easily one of the most charismatic. He can be intense and brooding, with serious dramatic roles under his belt; but he’s also done more action-y stuff, big Hollywood stuff, and been a romantic lead. And he’s a Ken. Come on! He danced at the Oscars! Plus he had to be in Secret Invasion, he could do with a break.

Regé-Jean Page: he’s got the suave part down better than anyone (Bridgerton), he can do commanding and authoritative (Dungeons and Dragons), he’s even dabbled in action with The Gray Man. He’s done his bit in the Brit TV coal mines and has proven his acting chops. Look, just picture him in a tux with a martini. He’d rock it, shaken or stirred.

Henry Golding: absolutely nails it in the looks-good-in-formal-wear stakes. He’s tall, he’s attractive, he’s done his share of romances. And he kicks ass like the best of them; of all the guys on this list, he’s probably the closest to being a proper flat-out action star. And if you were hoping Bond was a Henry Cavill type, he’s the best of the bunch.

Dev Patel: the first three guys are broadly similar, in that they ooze traditional suavity. Patel, I think, possesses a looser, fuzzier air; think of the out-of-place charm he brings to the likes of Slumdog or Best Exotic. He’s so naturally charming, you’ll always root for him; but he can really bring the edge, the darkness, the rage. From the looks of Monkey Man, he can bring the thunder too.

Robert Pattinson: tall, lantern-jawed, traditionally gorgeous, with immaculate hair. He’s a superb actor, he can wear the hell out of a suit, he can be funny if he needs to be, he’s not afraid to puncture his own aura, and he’s cool in a Vintage Brad Pitt kind of way. However: can a person be both Batman and Bond?

John Boyega: arguably a bit shorter and scrappier than the other actors on this list, Boyega nevertheless is both a tremendous actor and a ball of screen-incinerating charisma. The Force Awakens really showed how, when put to good use, he can charm anyone off the screen – even, just about, Harrison Ford. I’m not really sure he’d want to be Bond, mind, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

Connor Swindells: possibly one of the lesser-known names on the list, and also one of the youngest; he’s part of the ensemble of Sex Education, where he’s very good indeed. He’s also a big, broad, square-jawed fella with a look of John Cena about him; he’d definitely convince as a buff, tough Bond. But he can do sweet and vulnerable incredibly well.

Will Poulter: like Daniel Craig, he probably wouldn’t be everyone’s first thought when it came to Bond; but like Craig, he’s got depths and charm galore. He can be supremely likeable very easily, but also play layers of depth and darkness. And I don’t know if you’ve seen him lately, but he’s hench now. If he’s not Bond, they really need to give him an Adam Warlock solo movie.

Paul Mescal: Mr. Flavour-of-the-Month, he’s the hot new star on the rise. He’s young, good-looking, charismatic; he has a glint in his eye, oodles of charisma. He’s about to star in the sequel to Gladiator, when he’s sure to look ripped with his shirt off and garner even more fans. In fact, it’s quite likely that he’s so hot right now, that there’s no way he’d do Bond. But he’d be good at it.

Nicholas Hoult: what can’t he do? Everyone’s favourite War Boy has the tall, lithe physique, plus a playful, flirtatious sense of humour that makes him convincing as a romantic lead. He made being a zombie sexy, for flip’s sake. And he can do the action stuff. In short, he’d be terrific, but he’s probably going to be too busy terrorising Superman for the foreseeable.

#top ten #films #movies #bond #james bond #007 #eon #daniel crai #actors #a list of actors who could play bond

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litafficionado · 3 years

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Four Questions with Garielle Lutz:

I’m extremely beholden to Garielle who took the time to respond to my silly, garbled, childish, intrusive questions. You can purchase her latest book Worsted here and here, among many other sites. --------- Q. You've attributed the resuscitation of your literary career in quite considerable measure to your teacher and editor Gordon Lish. It seems like you guys are particularly close, even as you seem to have largely confined yourself to Pittsburgh(mostly driven by your erstwhile teaching career but also by your liking the city over time). How does it feel to hear someone like Gordon speak so highly of you, “I think there’s more truth in one sentence of my student [Lutz] than in all of [Philip] Roth. Lutz gives [herself] away. “The speaking subject gives herself away,” says Julia Kristeva. I thoroughly believe that. What you see in Lutz, [her] lavish gift, is [her] refusal to relax [her] determination to uncover and uncover. It is, by my lights, quite wonderful, quite terrific.[…]Lutz is entirely the real thing?” Does one feel vindicated? How do you navigate the waters of self-effacement and self-indulgence as a writer and as a person? A. I haven’t had a literary career before or after studying with Gordon Lish. I don’t think one finds one’s way to him in hopes of launching a career. Anyone with vulgar ambition along those lines would have been shown the door pretty quick. I would never presume to be close to Gordon or to feel that I am part of his life other than in my role as a student. He dwells in another realm entirely. I attended his classes and tried to grasp, to the best of my abilities, the things he was saying about how to get from one word to the next. He also talked about how to free a word from the constricting range of its permissible behaviors, how to drain it of every sepsis of received meaning, until there is nothing left of the word but the skeleton of its former self, just the lank, gawky letters sticking out this way and that, and then how to fill the thing up again, to the point of overspilling, but this time with something that would never have been allowed to belong in there before, and then see whether the word, now close to bursting, can hold up and maybe have a new kind of say. I’m always surprised and relieved whenever Gordon says anything approving about anything I write. I think that for a lot of his students, his opinion is the only one that counts.

Q. You've said, "A typical day goes like this: noon, afternoon, evening, night, additional night, even more night, furtherest night, then bedtime, though I don’t have a bed or furniture of any kind.” Have you always been a lychnobite, sensing the overwhelming superabundance of life after the sunset or is it a relatively recent development facilitated by your retirement from teaching? Do you consider yourself in any way to be a minimalist? Does your room bear any resemblance with a sparsely lit opium den where all exchanges happen at the floor level?

A. I think the pandemic has had a lot to do with it. Lately I’ve been up until five, sometimes six. But I’ve always found mornings the harshest and ugliest part of the day (maybe it’s just because of the place where I live, but I never open the blinds anyway). There can be something awfully scolding about a sunrise the older you get Evening seems to extend every form of leniency, and in the dead of night, expectations go way down, which is where they maybe ought to stay. I do spend all of my time on the floor, but my apartment doesn’t bear any resemblance to an opium den. It’s more like a crawlspace or the back of a dollar-store stockroom.

Q. Even with your reputation of being a page-hugger than a typical page-turner, how do you decide which books to read apart from your line of work? Do you try to keep it largely in the familiar territory, like exploring the oeuvre of a time-tested writer? How does one unshackle oneself from this constant niggling that one ought to read so many books? Here's Ben Marcus: “When I was in graduate school, there was this sort of cautionary adage going around by the poet Francis Ponge that we can only write what we’ve already read and one way to hear that is you’re just sort of doomed to kind of regurgitate everything you’ve read and so if you’re just reading all the popular books, the books everyone else is reading, in some sense you’re maybe unwittingly confining yourself to a particular literary practice that’s gonna look pretty familiar. I remember at the time thinking, okay well if that’s true, if I’m just fated to that, then I’m gonna read things that no one else is reading. I loved to just go to the library and pretty randomly grab books, because I think for a little while, and I’m kinda glad this passed, but I really just had this feeling that a writer just consumes language and just sort of spits it out. So it didn’t matter. Like it didn’t have to be a great novel for it to be worth-reading. And I still read very little fiction in the end compared to non-fiction, essays, works of philosophy, science. And the other sort of dirty secret is: I don’t finish a lot of books. I just don’t care enough. I only finish a book if I have to or if I really want to. And, often, I’ll stop reading a book three pages from the end. I think that as writers, we probably feel a lot of pressure about what kind of a reader to be, what kind of a writer to be in, and we feel this shame, like “I haven’t read DH Lawrence, I’m such an asshole.” You begin to feel like you’ve these deficiencies and you gotta make them up and you never will and a lot of it is just kinda tyrannical. Of course, obviously, we must be naturally motivated to read and read and read and read but I guess I just started to notice that…I got a lot of my ideas by just reading…e.g. a gardening book…like the weird way a sentence was structured.” Then there's Moyra Davey: “Woolf famously said of reading: “The only advice … is to take no advice, … follow your instincts, … use your reason.” A similar thought was voiced by her elder contemporary Oscar Wilde, who did not believe in recommending books, only in de-recommending them. Later, Jorge Luis Borges echoed the same sentiment by discouraging “systematic bibliographies” in favor of “adulterous” reading. More recently, Gregg Bordowitz has promoted “promiscuous” reading in which you impulsively allow an “imposter” book to overrule any reading trajectory you might have set for yourself, simply because, for instance, a friend tells you in conversation that he is reading it and is excited by it. This evokes for me that most potent kind of reading — reading as flirtation with or eavesdropping on someone you love or desire, someone who figures in your fantasy life.”“What to read?” is a recurring dilemma in my life. The question always conjures up an image: a woman at home, half-dressed, moving restlessly from room to room, picking up a book, reading a page or two and no sooner feeling her mind drift, telling herself, “You should be reading something else, you should be doing something else.” The image also has a mise-en-scène: overstuffed, disorderly shelves of dusty and yellowing books, many of them unread; books in piles around the bed or faced down on a table; work prints of photographs, also with a faint covering of dust, taped to the walls of the studio; a pile of bills; a sink full of dishes. She is trying to concentrate on the page in front of her but a distracting blip in her head travels from one desultory scene to the next, each one competing for her attention. It is not just a question of which book will absorb her, for there are plenty that will do that, but rather, which book, in a nearly cosmic sense, will choose her, redeem her. Often what is at stake, should she want to spell it out, is the idea that something is missing, as in: what is the crucial bit of urgently needed knowledge that will save her, at least for this day? She has the idea that if she can simply plug into the right book then all will be calm, still, and right with the world. […] Must reading be tied to productivity to be truly satisfying […] Or is it the opposite, that it can only really gratify if it is a total escape? What is it that gives us a sense of sustenance and completion? Are we on some level always striving to attain that blissful state of un-agendaed reading remembered from childhood? What does it mean to spend a good part of one’s life absorbed in books? Given that our time is limited, the problem of reading becomes one of exclusion. Why pick one book over the hundreds, perhaps thousands on our bookshelves, the further millions in libraries and stores? For in settling on any book we are implicitly saying no to countless others. This conflict is aptly conjured up by essayist Lynne Sharon Schwartz as she reflects on “the many books (the many acts) I cannot in all decency leave unread (undone) — or can I?”” What way out do you suggest? Do you deem it worthwhile to eschew any shred of obligation and be propelled in any direction naturally? Like you said you found grammar books and lexicons more engaging and enjoyable than the novels.

A. I seem to remember that in some magazine or another, James Wolcott once said “Read at whim.” That has always sounded like the best advice. And I assume it means to feel free to ditch any book that disappoints. Like Ben Marcus, I’ve had experiences of abandoning a book just a few pages from the end, but I often don’t make it that far in most things anymore. I came from a long line of nonreaders, so I’ve never felt any guilt about passing up books or writers that so many people seem to talk about a lot, and I don’t expect other people to like what I like. Some books I’ll start about halfway in and then see whether I might want to work my way back to the beginning. Others I’ll start at the very end and inch my way toward the front, one sentence at a time, and see how far I can go that way. I seem to remember that in The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes recommends “cruising” a text, and maybe something like that is what I’m doing at least some of the time, if I understand what he means. And every now and then I’ll read a book straightforwardly for an hour and afterward wonder whether the time might have been better spent staring off into space. Too many books these days seem ungiving. It’s the ungivingness that disappoints the most. A lot of contemporary fiction has the gleam and sparkle of a trend feature in a glossy magazine, and I can appreciate the craft and the savvy that go into something like that, but I am drawn more toward stories and books that demand being read slowly and closely, pulse by pulse, the kind of fiction where everything--what little might be left of an entire blighted life--can pivot on the peal of a single syllable. Q. I'd like to ask you so many questions. But let this be the last one for matters of convenience. Also, in a capitalistic world, one's enshrouded with guilt for taking one's time without being remunerative in any way. Among the books and films that you recently encountered, which ones do you think deserve rereads/rewatches? A. I used to feel like the woman you’ve described so movingly above, someone who questions her choice of books almost to the brink of despair. At my age, though, I no longer have a program for reading, a syllabus or a checklist, and I’m okay with knowing there’s a lot I’ll never get around to. I’m happy being a rereader of a few inexhaustible books and chancing upon occasional fresh treasure. The one book that has shaken me the most in the longest time is Anna DeForest’s A History of Present Illness, which will be out next August. It’s a blisteringly truthful novel written with moral grace and unsettling brilliance and an awing mastery of language. A couple of recent books I have read in manuscript, books that totally knocked me out with their originality and uncanny command of the word, are Greg Gerke’s In the Suavity of the Rock (a novel) and David Nutt’s Summertime in the Emergency Room (a short-story collection). I haven’t watched many movies in the past few months, and the ones I watched aren’t ones I’ll probably be rewatching anytime soon.

#Garielle Lutz #lit #Worsted #Moyra Davey #Ben Marcus #Gordon Lish #Anna DeForest #A History of Present Illness #Greg Gerke #In the Suavity of the Rock #David Nutt #Summertime in the Emergency Room

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voodoochili · 2 years

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My 100 Favorite Songs of 2021

2021 was a strange year for music–it was a year of dashed hopes, full of unmet expectations and unimaginable loss. There were some great tunes, though. There always are.

My listening was a bit all over the place this year, but as a result, my list is probably as geographically and stylistically diverse as any I’ve made in the past. Check below to read about my favorite songs from the calendar year, with a Spotify playlist at the bottom. Hopefully you’ll find something you like!

Without further ado, my faves:

25. DJ Black Low - “Jaiva Low” ft. Hapas Music, DJ KS & Patna: Amapiano, a style that dominates its native South Africa and is gaining steam on the rest of the continent, is first and foremost music meant for the bleary post-midnight hours of a crowded club. But if amapiano has a secondary function, it’s to freak out your friends and neighbors. “Jaiva Low,” by 20-year-old producer DJ Black Low, succeeds wildly on both counts. The insistent snare and wobbly bass keep you moving your feet, but the vocal–which rests halfway between didactic dancefloor direction and a summoning ritual–might have you running for your life.

24. Esperanza Spalding- “Formwela 10”: “Formwela 10” comes from Spalding’s Songwrights Apocethary Lab, a music therapy project and now full-length album that “seeks to develop a structure for the collaborative development of new compositions designed to offer enhanced salutary benefit to listeners.” I don’t know about all that, and many of the “Formwelas” on the album leave me a bit cold, but I definitely pick up some of those salutary benefits from “Formwela 10.” Divided into two distinct halves, “Formwela 10” starts as a minimal, yet theatrical vamp, Spalding singing tentatively and curiously as she plucks her harp like an upright bass and describes her aimlessness in life and love. The second half is a vocal tour-de-force, as she’s touched by divine intervention in the form of a dramatic grand piano that echoes her immaculate descending melody. A reminder, in Spalding’s words, to “make space and time for your elders,” “Formwela 10” is the perfect prescription to gracefully wind down from an overstimulating day.

23. Chubby & The Gang - “I Hate The Radio”: They’re known for their lightning-quick bursts of pub punk, but English group Chubby & The Gang is the rare hardcore group whose ballads are as strong as their bangers. Joining a growing list of heartfelt highlights that includes last year’s “Trouble (You Were Always On My Mind)” and “Grenfell Forever,” the closing track on their 2021 album The Mutt’s Nuts is a clever inversion of rock music’s most well-worn tropes–Chubby Charles knows that the conglomerated radio of today doesn’t quite compare to the power of the AM Jonathan Richman so joyfully sang about in 1972. Instead, the Gang bemoans the format’s calcification, only playing “the songs we used to know,” songs that evoke happier times in the life of the narrator and the world at large.

22. TisaKorean - “How i walk in the club”: TisaKorean is one of the most restlessly creative artists in the game today, constantly brainstorming new ways to get your body moving. His songs often feel like pop hits beamed in from another dimension, none more so than “How i walk in the club,” a mutating, low-key number brimming with hooks, tempo changes, and Tisa’s silly flows. In a fairer world, this song would’ve been at least as big as that Makonnen song about molly.

21. Wiardon - “Stay Down”: Austin, TX producer/rapper Wiardon is younger than Tom Brady’s first Super Bowl win, but he has the confidence and suavity of a man twice his age (to be very clear, twice his age = 38). On “Stay Down,” he initially stumbles over the opening words of his verse, before collecting himself and calmly intoning preternaturally wise bars about staying true to your roots. Wiardon helps his own case by layering pizzicato strings over one of the year’s finest basslines, creating an instrumental that begs to be blasted out of boxframe muscle cars.

20. Axel Rulay - “Si Es Trucho Es Trucho”/”Si Es Trucho Es Trucho” (Remix) ft. El Alfa & Farruko: This was a big year for dembow, and Rulay’s expansive breakout track showed just how much a determined artist can do with the genre’s signature riddim. “Si Es Trucho Es Trucho'' does away with any sort of song structure, eliminating verses and choruses in favor of clipped chants, children’s choirs, and organic percussion to supplement the relentless beat. The remix takes the track in a more traditional direction, adding verses from undisputed dembow don El Alfa and imperial reggaetonero Farruko, sacrificing some of the unpredictability for ratcheted-up energy.

19. Olivia Rodrigo - “deja vu”: Olivia Rodrigo hit the music world like a comet this year, armed with a knack for writing and singing about heartache with the kind of poise, skill, and relatability that only comes around once a decade or so (and as Adele and Taylor Swift prove again and again, this is practically a license to print money). She found a perfect partner in producer Dan Nigro, who complements her with tasteful arrangement touches, never repeating the same trick twice on her debut album SOUR. “deja vu,” to me, is the perfect blend of song and production, with militant percussion and buzzing guitars that evoke Nigro’s work with erstwhile indie star Sky Ferreira.

The song is less theatrical and outwardly emotional than many of the album’s other highlights, but Rodrigo’s delicate, almost sickly-sweet falsetto makes her words sting that much more. What I love about “deja vu” and Rodrigo’s songwriting in general: despite the worldly affect and venomous barbs, the song still manages to capture the uniquely-teenaged kind of naïveté that makes one think that they were the first person to discover Billy Joel (not really something to brag about, but I digress).

18. Rauw Alejandro - “Desenfocao’”: It’s time to stop messing around and state the obvious: Tainy is one of the best producers working in any genre right now. He’s a master of atmosphere, creating wistful compositions that inspire the world’s most macho reggaetoneros to express some vulnerability for a change. On “Desenfocao’,” he fills space with cavernous bass, open hi-hats, and underwater, out-of-time synths, creating an anthem that owes as much to Beach House as it does Bad Bunny (it feels like a spiritual sequel to “Callaíta,” another Tainy-produced jam). As great as he is, Tainy is only half the equation here–Rauw fulfills his side of the bargain admirably, toe-tagging the programmed percussion with mathematical precision and floating over the swelling production with his achingly pure tenor as he tells a story of unfathomable heartbreak.

17. Bawo - “Starts With A Text”: “I’m hard-pressed for a reason to come out tonight,” intones West London emcee Bawo on the hook for “Starts With A Text,” a half-asleep pronouncement that echoed through my head during a year where leaving the house was a proposition that fell somewhere between unappealing and unsafe. Accompanied by liquid keys from producer Daniel Ness, Bawo’s delivery is somehow both lackadaisical and technical, as he sets about navigating the world of digital dating, and exploring how intentions get obscured when communicated through blue (or, heaven forbid, green) bubbles.

16. New Pagans - “Natural Beauty”: How come there aren’t more songs about frenemies? Perhaps the liminal nature of that relationship doesn’t provide the same kind of emotional clarity that more straightforward relationships do, and are thus not as translatable to pop song form? If that’s true, then nobody told Lyndsey McConnell, the frontwoman of Northern Irish indie rockers New Pagans. “Natural Beauty” walks a fine line between envy and pity, between worshipful affection and blazing contempt. It’s these contradictions that make the song such a fascinating character study. It empathizes with the subject’s need to live up to the expectations of those who idealize her, but wishes that she weren’t such a dick all the time.

15. Loraine James - “Running Like That” ft. Eden Samara: Loraine James specializes in finding the beauty within harsh, glitchy, distorted digital landscapes. She manipulates her voice and the voices of her collaborators to create a dense tapestry of sound, taking a jagged and unexpected path towards transcendence. “Running Like That” is frenetic and propulsive, but also probably the most traditionally beautiful composition James has ever put to tape, largely thanks to the performance of guest vocalist Eden Samara. James weaves Samara’s angelic paeans and conversational banter into a dialogue about trying desperately to escape the urges of your worst self.

14. Young Dolph & Key Glock - “Aspen”: Listen to Bandplay’s soulful blasts of organ; to Dolph’s ad-libs, especially when he helpfully clarifies that Aspen is in Colorado; to Glock’s confident, career-spanning verse. Look at their wide smiles in the song’s incredible music video. It’s cruel that such a joyful and triumphant piece of art will remain forever bittersweet. Long Live Dolph.

13. Yaw Tog - “SORE”: It boggles my mind how drill music, a street style pioneered by Chicago teenagers, has made such a large and varied global impact. It’s both an inspiring bit of cultural connection and a depressing realization that such a bleak style can be so resonant in so many different locales. The Ghanaian flavor of drill is one that I still need to get more familiar with, but it’s hard to deny a banger like “SORE,” with its apocalyptic, yet danceable beat and invigorating, intimidating hook. I slightly prefer the original, but the UK-ified remix (released in Feb 2021) does a solid job of refining the song for mass consumption, confirming that Kumasi, Ghana's Yaw Tog has enough charisma to be the strongest presence on a song with Stormzy on it.

12. Isaiah Rashad - “Lay Wit Ya” ft. Duke Deuce: “Lay Wit Ya” is as grimy as the mud caked on old rain boots. It slithers along at ground level, powered by Rashad’s understated charisma, before Duke Deuce arrives halfway through and busts the whole thing wide open. Duke’s entrance is probably my favorite single moment from a hip-hop song this year, a jolt of cantankerous comedic energy that doubles as an irresistible urge to do your best gangsta walk.

11. Anz - “You Could Be” ft. George Riley: “You Could Be” combines an irresistible pentatonic synth melody (I was racking my brain to figure out what it reminded me of and it turns out, it’s a syncopated version of the stereotypical “Oriental riff”), yammering bass, and sci-fi percussion into the year’s most delectable dancefloor confection. Tapping into the production's playful vibe, George Riley occupies a flirtatious, almost taunting mien, scolding the object of her affection for not leaping at the opportunity of a lifetime.

10. Cassandra Jenkins - “Hard Drive”: Mesmerizing and thought-provoking, “Hard Drive” is what would happen if Kaputt-era Destroyer collaborated with Carl Sagan. The song is structured as a series of conversations, Jenkins matter-of-factly weaving the dialogues into a tapestry about the digitalization of the human body and mind–our brains are mere hard drives, with limited memory, prone to overheating. Guided by the ringing guitars and wailing saxophone, Jenkins attempts to reunite our overstimulated minds with our spiritual selves, and for five-and-a-half glorious minutes, she nearly succeeds.

9. Bankulli & Not3s - “Foreign”: An immensely joyful, cross-generation collab between an Afro-Rap pioneer and a smooth-singing Brit, “Foreign” is a glorious celebration of all things imported. The song is gleefully nonsensical: Not3s smoothly delivers his hook in one of the most-pronounced London accents ever put to tape (his only competition, and with a totally different kind of London brogue, is that guy from “Parklife”), while Bankulli complements with a rugged Yoruba verse. The victorious synth horn fanfare in this song makes me feel like I’m 100 feet tall.

8. Irreversible Entanglements - “Open The Gates”: It starts with Tcheser Holmes’ clattering percussion, a manic and invigorating jolt that awakens a higher consciousness. It continues with Luke Stewart’s bass, laying down a primal, impulsively danceable beat to add a bit of sashay to the song’s stomp. Conducting the affair is Camae Aweya, the poet and performing artist known as Moor Mother, authoritative as she utters incantations powerful enough to collapse the walls of Jericho. Answering her call is the horn section, Keir Neuringer on sax and Aquiles Navarro on trumpet, who oscillate between recognizable melodies (do I hear “Camptown Races”?) and free expression.

That’s “Open The Gates.” Just listen, trust me it’s better than my silly description.

7. Armand Hammer - “Falling Out the Sky” ft. Earl Sweatshirt: The world lost producer Lee “Scratch” Perry and bassist Robbie Shakespeare in 2021, two dub masters who were directly responsible for a shocking amount of the best music ever made. Folks try every day to approximate the vibe created in the Black Ark, Perry’s studio, but few are able to capture the hallucinatory, haunted magic of its heyday. The Alchemist comes damn close with his beat for “Falling Out the Sky,” a reverie-inducing bit of ear candy that I could happily listen to for hours on a loop.

As an added bonus, we get three of the most thoughtful and philosophical rap verses of the year: Earl reflects on the loss of his father and reminds us that all life originated as matter from dying stars, Billy Woods harkens back to a summer he spent in a blissful haze of weed smoke before being rudely awakened by a state trooper, and Elucid makes sure we all recognize how the Isley Brothers paved the way for The Beatles.

6. Pa Salieu - “Style & Fashion” ft. Obongjayar: Pa Salieu has an uncanny ability to fuse African, UK, and American styles into an alchemy that is 100% his own. “Style & Fashion” isn’t really a mix or a fusion of anything, though, just Pa’s charismatic and darkly shimmering take on amapiano. An engaging master of ceremonies, Pa struts atop the syncopated snares like he’s the flyest person on the planet, while guest artist Obongjayar’s rasp arises from the ashes like an ancient voice heralding a very fashionable apocalypse. As Pa says on the hook, “welcome to the party.”

5. Mr Twin Sister - ”Expressions”: “Expressions” is a post-disco carnival, a glorious mess of bizarre interlocking parts that come together to create a well-oiled machine. You hear the disparate elements come together on the song’s intro, creating a groove that stops and starts but keeps pushing forward. My favorite touch in the song’s immaculate arrangement is the underlying current of acoustic guitar, which comes to the forefront during Andrea Estrella’s sighing bridge, adding a touch of ‘90s adult contemporary to mellow out the Chic Organization energy of the rest of the track. It seems chaotic and in lesser hands, it probably would be, but Mr Twin Sister specializes in taking what could be chintzy and making it sublime.

4. Burna Boy - ”Kilometre”: The ultimate heat check–can you make a banger about the metric system? Most can’t, but Burna Boy can, rolling the titular word on his tongue and releasing it like a missile targeted at the pleasure center of your brain. Produced by Chopstix, a regular collaborator of Burna’s who always seems to nudge him in a dancehall direction, “Kilometre” emphasizes the upbeat, punctuating Burna’s chatter with reverbed guitar strums and emphasizing his pugilistic boasts with perfectly-timed live drum fills. The dialogue between dancehall and Afrobeats has always fascinated me, and songs like “Kilometre” that exist halfway between the two are near-guaranteed bangers. Hopefully we’ll see more of this side of Burna in 2022.

3. PinkPantheress - “just for me”: I’m a natural curmudgeon, always skeptical of things that have 100% approval rating. It can’t be that good if it appeals to everybody, can it? PinkPantheress’s music is one of those things that is just suspiciously good, unlocking the secret sauce that unites ravers, indie kids, and TikTok teens. The earliest PinkPantheress tracks had lots of DIY charm, with their obvious samples and tender vocals, but she leveled up when she connected with Mura Masa for “just for me.”

Rather than using samples of songs by the likes of Crystal Waters and Adam F. as a nostalgic cheat code, Mura Masa creates a perfect homage to chill room UK garage, with backwards strings, record scratches, and an indelible guitar arpeggio embellishing the traditional 2-step percussion. The arrangement is complex, but not busy, and it leaves plenty of space for PP to lay down a sighing, oblique, and ornate melody that messes with meter and never resolves where you expect it to. The vocal is so soft-spoken that you almost miss how delightfully deranged the lyrics are, lines like “I found the street of the house in which you stay” and “I followed you today, I was in my car” (accompanied by the playful tooting of her car’s horn) eliminating the divide between devotion and dangerous obsession.

2. Remble - “Touchable”: Remble became a meme of sorts because of his crisp elocution. Lyricists of any genre rarely use such writerly syntax, and the combination of his precise enunciation and his songs’ gruesome subject matter provides the tension that animates his music. His style could come off as gimmicky if he weren’t so darn good at stringing together one-liners into the kind of song you want to memorize and recite. On “Touchable,” in particular, Remble rhymes like the very model of a modern major general, calmly attacking 10Fifty’s minimalist, bell-tolling horror movie instrumental and dropping more memorable lines than you can count: “I know a lot of demons, I can summon any one of 'em/Bodies holding bodies, it was as if they were cuddling”; “Put 30 in my chop', and then I turned him to a huxtable/Came a long way from Pre-K and eating Lunchables”; “Peter piper picked a pack of bullets, now they're touching you.”

1. Ayra Starr - “Bloody Samaritan”: There’s a certain type of confidence that only teenagers have, the absolute surety that there couldn’t possibly be anyone smarter or funnier or cooler than you and your friends. “Bloody Samaritan” takes that feeling and bottles it. Ayra Starr cannot fail, she can only be failed; her immaculate vibe unassailable, unable to be touched by the killjoys in her midst. When she’s not taking dead aim at bores and lames, she’s aggressively, almost confrontationally flirtatious, accosting the object of her intentions with a series of come-ons that beg to be IG captions: “I see you watchin' my stories/I see you gaugin' my lifestyle/I see you watchin' my movements/This bad bitch bad every day.” Listening to her tiptoe among mournful violins and slinky saxophone, you believe her every word–maybe the 19 & Dangerous artist is the coolest person on the planet??

Thanks for reading! HERE is the Spotify playlist of the full 100 songs in order.

And here's the rest of the list:

26. EST Gee - “Riata Dada” 27. Tokischa - “LINDA” ft. Rosalía 28. Casper Nyovest - “Siyathandana” ft. Abidoza & Boohle 29. Abra - “Unlock It” ft. Playboi Carti 30. DJ Manny - “Signals In My Head” 31. Monaleo - “Beating Down Yo Block” 32. Blxst - “Don’t Forget” ft. Drakeo The Ruler 33. Car Culture - “Sell Out” 34. Rio Da Yung OG - “Last Day Out” 35. Valee & AYOCHILLMAN - “HIMMYyimmy” 36. Tems - “Found” ft. Brent Faiyaz 37. Rx Papi - “A Man Apart” 38. Sybyr - “The Mill” 39. ComptonAsstg - “Colder & Colder” 40. The Goon Sax - “The Chance” 41. Key Glock - “Ambition For Cash” 42. Ethel Cain - “Michelle Pfeiffer” ft. lil aaron 43. Doja Cat - “Kiss Me More” ft. SZA 44. Duke Deuce - “Intro: Coming Out Hard” 45. Erika De Casier - “Polite” 46. Bandgang Lonnie Bands - “Glocks & Choppas” ft. Young Nudy 47. Low - “Days Like These” 48. The Peacers - Ghost Of A Motherfucker 49. Lucy Dacus - “Thumbs” 50. YN Jay - “Summer Time” 51. 42 Dugg - “4 Da Gang” ft. Roddy Ricch 52. Farruko - “PEPAS” 53. Peewee Longway & Cassius Jay - “Pink Salmon” 54. Really From - “Yellow Fever” 55. Maxwell - “Off” 56. Tiwa Savage - “Tales By Moonlight” ft. Amaarae 57. CEO Trayle - “Loose Lips” 58. Japanese Breakfast - “Be Sweet” 59. The Narcotix - “Esther” 60. Noname - “Rainforest” 61. SPELLLING - “Little Deer” 62. Wolf Alice - “Safe From Heartbreak” 63. BfB Da Packman - “Weekend At Solomon’s” 64. Heather Trost - “Love It Grows” 65. Cktrl - “zero” ft. Mereba 66. Natanael Cano - “Diamantes” 67. Faye Webster - “Cheers” 68. Tonstartssbandht - “What Has Happened” 69. Nao - “Antidote” ft. Adekunle Gold 70. Chvrches - “Asking For A Friend” 71. Kaytranada - “$payforhaiti” ft. Mach-Hommy 72. Bruiser Wolf - “Momma Was A Dopefiend” 73. Offset Jim - “Face Card” ft. Kenny Beats 74. Dawn Richard - “Bussifame” 75. Bad Bunny - “Yonaguni” 76. Moneybagg Yo - “Wockesha” 77. Sloppy Jane - “Party Anthem” 78. Tony Seltzer - “Joyride” ft. Eartheater 79. Magdalena Bay - “You Lose” 80. The Weather Station - “Atlantic” 81. Yg Teck - “Question For You” 82. VanJess - “Caught Up” ft. Phony Ppl 83. Lushlife - “Depaysment” ft. Dalek 84. Payroll Giovanni & Cardo - “Eyez Closed” 85. MAVI - “Time Travel” 86. 03 Greedo - "Liar Liar" 87. Babyface Ray - “Foreva” (prod. Top$ide) 88. Polo G - “GNF (OK OK OK)” 89. AG Club - “Noho” ft. ICECOLDBISHOP 90. Yves Jarvis - “Projection” 91. 30 Deep Grimeyy - “First Day Out” 92. Summer Walker - “Constant Bullshit” 93. Drego - “Dis Dat” 94. BONES - “TwasTheDarkestNight” 95. Shelley fka DRAM - “Exposure” 96. Surf Gang - “CINDERELLA” 97. Baby Keem - “Family Ties” ft. Kendrick Lamar 98. Billie Eilish - “Happier Than Ever” 99. Daemoney - “Moments Of Drugs” 100. Lou Hayter - “Time Out Of Mind”

#ayra starr #olivia rodrigo #remble #burna boy #mr twin sister #pa salieu #earl sweatshirt #moor mother #isaiah rashad #Spotify

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smallblip · 3 years

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Come down when you’re ready.

Jeankasa | Pretty PG, they did the deed, but nothing explicit

It’s on Ao3! https://archiveofourown.org/works/28873656

“When this war is over, I would like to take you out.” Jean says. He thinks maybe he’s tired. That’s the reason he’s being so bold. He’s tired and he simply can’t care enough to dam the thoughts rushing behind his eyes.

“Where?” She replies, teetering on the edge of wakefulness and sleep. She chuckles, drawing self-conscious laughter from Jean. It’s silly. He’s spent so much time in his childhood thinking about bubblegum kisses and girls in babydoll dresses. They would hold hands, take a walk in the park, have ice cream, the works. But when it comes to her and the time he’s spent dancing with death, he’s slightly embarrassed at how frivolous they now sound.

But Jean remembers going to town for supplies in the Summer and watching the crowds near the riverbanks. And he remembers Mikasa watching the families on their picnic mats, something he reads as longing crossing her face. “A picnic?” He muses, “we could take a picnic basket to the markets in the morning, gather some food, head to the river...” He trails off, suddenly hyper aware of how he must sound. Like a fool throwing rocks at shut windows, serenading the winds. He bites the inside of his cheeks.

“What would you like to do?” Jean asks after a moment of silence.

Mikasa hums, “I haven’t really... Thought about it...” and she leaves it as that. Jean doesn’t push further, because her shoulders are tense, like she’ll scurry for cover if he does. They’ve been at this so long- this practiced dance, ginger steps balanced on tip toes- one wrong move and the lights come on.

Thankfully, she shifts a little closer to him, head on his chest, listening to the thrum of a heart through flushed skin- a heart that beats for her. Past the guilt, she allows herself to relax into the warmth.

Even though he knows her in ways only a lover would, even though he’s seen the curves and lines of her body, has trailed his palms over every scar, the proximity never fails to make his breath catch in his throat. There’s a squeezing in his chest and it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell if it’s love or the pain of knowing she’ll never love him back.

“I’m sorry...” she says, as if she hears the war in his mind. Her fingers pad over imaginary lines on his chest.

“It’s alright.” He replies without missing a beat. They’ve been through this before. Talked about it one too many times because she doesn’t want to hurt him or promise him more than she can afford.

You know I can’t give you what you want, Jean... she had said when he had first undressed her. The reality of the situation settles in the pit of his stomach like sediment. But he had dreamt of this moment for years, since they were children, a little too curious for their own good. I know, he had said. I know, once more for his benefit.

But night after night, Jean asks if he can kiss her, and every time the answer is a breathless-

Yes.

So he night after night he peels back her skin like a lover, with shaking hands, painfully gentle. He hopes that he can take her mind off everything, off the hot sear of blood on skin, off the orders to kill and destroy and take, and off the boy with the green eyes. The rest of the world be damned. He kisses her until they’re both breathless and lightheaded because the feeling that blossoms in his chest is exquisite. The feeling of being impossibly close to her is exquisite. They are almost always gentle. After years of fighting, there’s little pleasure in brute force.

Mikasa you know how I feel about you. Jean says when they’re both slick with sweat, their hearts steadying. It’s for his own benefit. He doesn’t need to hear it back. He already knows the answer. This proclamation of love is one of the last things he owns on this mortal coil. He thinks about getting a cigarette, but he wonders what she would think about his new habit, if she would mind. So he doesn’t. He leaves the cigarettes to stolen moments by the trees, sometimes joined by Connie, sometimes by a sheepish Armin, sometimes by Hanji who never seems to have a stash of her own.

I know... And I’m sorry... she says. And Jean hates how she always feels the need to apologise. He wasn’t looking for an apology.

Nothing to be sorry about, he smiles, I just wanted you to know. He tells her again that he expects nothing in return. But a part of him feels sorry for himself. He thinks about the girls back when life had been simpler. Wonders about a future with them. But all he can picture is her raven hair, her porcelain skin, the blush on her cheeks, her brows set with the determination of a soldier.

In another life maybe... she says.

And Jean had understood what she had meant. He thinks about it now as he holds her flush against his chest, fingers stroking her arm absentmindedly.

Mikasa thinks she’s cursed. She has to be. Everyone she’s ever loved or cared about in her cursed life ends up getting hurt. The only boy she’s ever loved has pushed her away more times than she can count. Everything is clear now in the light. He’s never wanted her- will never want her. And soon they will have to kill him.

And yet Jean is here. He’s drifting off to sleep, she can tell. He’s breathing in a way that can only mean he’s only partially conscious. Mikasa allows herself to smile at the sight. And a part of her wonders why he stays, why he allows himself to hurt over and over. This life has given her nothing, and yet, there is beauty in the way Jean chuckles when she trips while pulling her trousers on in the morning, and he’s looking at her with such endearment that she almost thinks she could be the luckiest girl on earth. She would return a smile then, sheepish, hoping her inexperience with anything tender isn’t showing.

Jean on the other hand, has always been a natural. He tells her who she is when they’re making love, whispered sweetly in her ear-

you’re beautiful, Mikasa, you’re so beautiful.

He pulls her close even in sleep, he gives her his last piece of meat, he has saved her more times than she remembers.

Mikasa reaches tentative fingers to his face, cupping his cheek where stubble has grown, he’s a man now, features as handsome as ever. And she’s a woman. Her body taut from years of fighting, her breasts tight against her chest, and the softness around her hips fading. Sometimes she wonders what Jean sees in her still.

“You’re so good to me...” she whispers, half hoping he wouldn’t hear. But he does-

“My mother taught me well...” he winks, a try at suavity, but his eyes had widened from her hand on his cheek, and the tips of his ears have gone red. “You deserve it...” he says, quieter, so quiet that Mikasa almost misses it.

Your maman would hate me... Mikasa thinks. The cursed girl with the cursed life, everything withers under her touch. “She sounds lovely...” Mikasa says instead.

“She would love you.” Jean shrugs.

“Really?” Mikasa says, completely absorbed in how gentle his gaze is, her hand slips from his cheek to the back of his neck where she plays with the soft fuzz of hair.

He presses a chaste kiss on her forehead. “What’s there not to love?”

She laughs. Mikasa you’re so loved... her mother had said to her once when she had been a child, wide-eyed and innocent. Perhaps she is the luckiest girl on earth, she thinks, surprising herself with her sudden defiance.

“My mother...” Mikasa starts, hesitant. She never talks about her parents, not to anyone. So this is unfamiliar territory. “She would love you too...” Because she remembers the things her mother had told her about gentle boys, the ones who are patient, who will look at her like she’s treasure.

And Jean looks at her now, like she’s the best thing in the world- something amazing to behold, even though her hair is now cropped short and she has traded in her softness for callouses from gripping her blades- like treasure.

“Your dad... Would he chase me with a shotgun?” Jean attempts at humour and it works because she’s giggling. What a beautiful sound, bright like a bell.

“He’s a very good shot...” she teases, “but no... He’ll offer you some of the jerky he makes... I think... And if you tell him they’re good, you’re essentially family.”

“Jerky huh... Got it...” Jean says and Mikasa thinks this is nice. It’s nice to laugh and talk about the past, to talk about what ifs. It’s especially nice talking with Jean. He doesn’t push her away, doesn’t expect more of her than she can give. In fact, he doesn’t expect anything of her at all. It’s nice inhabiting this space with him, where a kiss on the lips can mean nothing or everything all at once.

So Mikasa pulls him down towards her and presses her lips against his. He deepens the kiss, brushing his tongue against hers exactly the way she likes. And she pulls on his bottom lip the way she knows would drive him crazy. When they pull apart to breathe she can’t help but chuckle at the dazed expression on his face. Jean scoffs, but there’s no harshness behind the sound, he grins, ever so charming, and reaches to tuck her hair behind her ear.

Mikasa thinks maybe she’s tired. That’s the reason she’s being so bold. She’s tired and she simply can’t care enough to dam the thoughts rushing behind her eyes. So she starts with-

“A picnic sounds nice...”

#jeankasa #jean kirschtein #mikasa ackerman #jean x mikasa #jeankasa fanfic #shingeki no kyojin #mine #my fic

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theartoftiinyideas · 5 years

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the art of commoner slang

[tamaki suoh x fem! reader]

a/n: an oldie but a goodie (i guess¿? i hope). i love love love this anime where’s the second season goddamnit also, prepare for dumb shenanigans honestly what did u expect from this gang

word count: 1.6k (some curse words ahead)

summary: to you knowledge, here are the new trends for filthy rich people: 1. having flowers delivered to their doorsteps (check), 2. trying to woo innocent girls (you) with cheesy lines (uh.. that’s a check), 3. learning “commoner” slang (apparently so)

——————

Nope, you take it back, you can't do this, where the hell is the exit? Heck, where's the entrance? Where are you?

This was a nightmare. Ouran Academy wasn't a school for the rich and elite, it was a recreation of a gigantic maze for people exactly like you to get lost in. Normally, you were all for adorning architecture, but whoever designed this place was an idiot. Not to mention they clearly went overboard with the pink.

Your already evident frustration was growing more by the second as you continued to march down the silent hallways while mentally cursing the gatekeeper. ‘Go find music room three,’ he said, ‘it will be easy,’ he said. Easy my ass.

As weird as it sounds, you were currently trying to deliver an order of roses. But, like, a lot of them. You worked part-time for a company called Golden Petals, just so you could earn some extra cash. Apparently, the company was so amazingly successful that flower deliveries were a common thing. For filthy rich people, anyway.

Since you had no other tasks today, you decided to help your boss with one of the orders. But of course, the second you arrived at your destination, your boss got a phone call that his wife's water just broke. The poor man nearly fainted and immediately ran off to get a taxi to the hospital, leaving you to finish the job.

‘This baby better be cutest baby in the history of babies or else I'm gonna sue someone,’ were your thoughts as you turned a corner, surely walking past these set of windows for the 3rd time already. Who knows, you didn't know.

Wondering around, you were absolutely ready to start pulling your hair out, when you suddenly spotted the correct sign. In your utter relief, you broke into a sprint and without thinking sent the white doors flying as you entered the room.

In an instant, petals brutally attacked your face, some of it even landing in your gaping mouth. You heard a pair of laughs, but you were too busy trying not to choke to care.

“Oh, a new guest? We were just closing up, but no matter, we still got a little more time on our hands,” spoke a smooth voice. When you finished not dying, you glanced up at the guy in front of you. He was tall and slim, and carried himself elegantly.

“Tell me my dear, what brings you here?” he asked, his blond locks falling in front of his striking violet eyes as he outstretched his hand towards you.

“Um, business purposes?” You ignored his hand, not amused. His brows furrowed in confusion, taken aback by your harshly delivered words.

“I'm afraid I don't understand. You must be mistake-” suddenly his eyes twinkled, as if a lightbulb just popped for him.

“Oh, I see what your trying to attempt! Pulling the damsel in distress card with me, very tricky! I must say you almost fooled me, princess, but I'm highly experienced in this sort of thing,” he babbled on with wild hand gestures and graceful spinning.

“That's wonderful. I'm only here for the—woah!” The guy cut you off as he grabbed your wrist and pulled you into his side, an arm around your shoulder as he continued talking, explaining something about the other dudes in the room.

“So what's your type? Do you like the strong, silent type? The boy Lolita? Or maybe the mischievous type? What about the cool type? We also have a natural here! Or maybe,” he suddenly turned to you, slender fingers gently holding your jaw, “you want m–”

And that's the exact moment you've had enough.

“Get your hands off of me, pervert.” You didn't actually mean the accusation, but it sure had the effect you were going for. Blondie gasped and dashed three feet away from you, mortified.

“W-WHAT?! How could you say such a horrible thing?! I'm not a pervert! Mamaaa!”

A dark haired boy with glasses sighed as the redheaded twins began hysterically laughing.

With a soft chuckle, you made your way to Glinting Glasses man, as his appearance just screamed I'M SMART AND I HANDLE COMPLICATED FINANCIAL STUFF. You briefly explained your situation and he signed the necessary papers, thanking you at the end. Blondie was sulking in the corner, the others trying and failing to cheer him up.

“Is he alright?” you asked Glinting Glasses man, who had introduced himself as Kyoya.

“I’m sure he's fine. He tends to overreact and take things to heart when insulted.”

You frowned, feeling just a little guilty. You didn't mean to hurt his feelings, you were just still frustrated about almost getting lost. You smirked, and idea forming in your head. Blondie liked being dramatic? Game on.

“Oh, no!” you exclaimed rather loudly, throwing your arms in the air, “how will I make it back to the front gate, I don't know the way! Whatever will I do? If only there were a smart and handsome guy here, who could guide me back and save me!”

You saw Blondie immediately perking up at the suggestion, hoping to make things right with you. But unfortunately, the twins beat him to it.

“We could help you,” said one as he leaned his arm on his brother's shoulder.

“Besides, two guides are better than one,” reasoned the other. Blondie got up from his sulking corner at the speed of sound as he blocked the way of the redheads.

“Nonsense! Don't listen to these shady twins, princess! They're nothing but trouble! I'll be happy to escort you out safely!”

“Who you calling shady?!”

“You can’t just keep her to yourself, boss–”

You watched dumbfounded as the bickering continued. Kyoya and another guy with suspiciously feminine-looking eyes stood near you, eyebrows twitching. Okay, so your masterful plan wasn't going the way you hoped it would.

“Guys, cut it out!” shouted the smaller brunette besides you, promptly putting a stop to the three hosts' ruckus. “Tamaki, why don't you help her find the way back?”

Tamaki's eyes sparkled with joy as he abandoned the twins to squeeze the living daylights out of Suspicious Feminine Eyes.

“Oh, Haruhi, how thoughtful of you to think I'd be the better guide! You're right, of course,” he gloated.

“That's not it at all, senpai,” Haruhi grunted, “you're the only one who's currently available. Hikaru and Kaoru are failing biology so Ms. Young asked me to tutor them.”

The twins' eyes flashed with mischief as they sandwiched Haruhi between their bodies wearing shit-eating grins.

“Of course, how could've we forgotten? Sorry, Haruhi, let's go to our place and start this study session.”

“Biology is all about body parts, right? We could totally begin with studying each other's body parts.”

The two carrot heads were eyeing Blondie slyly, while he looked about ready to explode.

“Oh, no you don't! Don't you even dare- hey! Get back here you two! Bring back my daughter! Haruhiii!”

Tamaki frantically scrambled after them, but the twins were too fast. They cackled as they dragged a probably very confused and terrified Haruhi away with them. Tamaki slumped to the floor dramatically, his face absolutely devastated, while Kyoya just facepalmed and shook his head.

“Does this.. happen often?” you asked Kyoya after some silence, trying to cover your snickers.

“Often doesn't even begin cover it,” he sighed before taking out his cell phone, probably to take care of the roses.

You nodded awkwardly, rocking on your feet before you approached the white double doors where you entered. Guess you'll find your way back alone after all. You were almost at the end of the hallway when you heard shouting and stomping feet. You turned to see Tamaki skidding to a stop next to you, his expression significantly brighter.

“My most sincere apologies, princess, I shouldn't have acted the way I did back there. Especially in front of a new guest. It was rude of me.” His earlier suavity seemed to have disappeared as he glanced at you, nervously scratching his neck.

“Hey, it's cool. Don't worry about it,” you smiled reassuringly. If anything, you found the little fiasco in the music room quite funny.

“Oh, it's cool? Are you cold? I guess it can get a little chilly. Here, have my jacket.” His demeanour indicated concern as he draped his purple suit jacket over your shoulders so fast you didn't even have time to react. As your mind caught up to the situation, you involuntarily let out a laugh. Your eyes crinkled shut for a few seconds, so you didn't notice the slight red hue that crept up Tamaki's cheeks.

“No, not like that,” you giggled, “it's an expression. It basically means ‘it's okay’, only in a more breezy way,” you explained.

“Breezy? Like a wind?” Tamaki asked, totally lost.

You snorted unattractively and started walking, Tamaki falling into step beside you. “Forget the weather, man!”

As Tamaki escorted you back to the front gate, you introduced him to, what he called, ‘commoner slang’. He hung on every word you said, listening to you intently, sometimes asking a few questions. His glee was ridiculously contagious, and you found yourself grinning as he tested out new expressions. Him saying ‘dope’ in a really posh way was by far your favourite.

In no time at all, you were back at the gate, the empty delivery truck waiting for you. Tamaki thanked you for the roses, bid you goodbye, and ran back to the host club, eager to tell his friends what he learned.

You waved at his back, only realising you still had his suit jacket when he completely disappeared from sight.

i keep writing stuff i wanna continue with second parts help

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conpop · 5 years

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Suavity’s Mouthpiece – Live at Black Forge

Suavity’s Mouthpiece will perform live at Black Forge Coffee House in Pittsburgh on Saturday, May 25.

The evening will include performances by Pittsburgh indie rock band The Petals, Pittsburgh R&B performer Andrew Muse, and Greensburg rock fusion outfit Loosely Defined.

Doors will open at 6pm. The performance will begin at 7. The venue is located at 1206 Arlington Ave - Pittsburgh, 15210. OFFICIAL FB EVENT

#live music #new music #indie #r&b #indie pop #indie rock #fusion #punk #post punk #pittsburgh #diy music #support your local library

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go-redgirl · 4 years

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Trump Is Cleaning Up Two Decades of Mediocrity

As the unprecedented effort of the elders of the Democratic Party to use the Justice Department and intelligence services to manipulate and then undo a presidential election collapses, their response is a study in the corruption of unchallenged incumbency.

The reason the country is in its present impasse is inadequate post-Reagan presidential leadership. Franklin D. Roosevelt and his chosen successor, Harry Truman, got the country out of the Great Depression and salvaged 95% of the economic system that had collapsed, did the necessary to assist the democracies to stay in the war against Hitler, and then conducted the American war effort with great skill and put in place the structure of future peace and the institutions that won the Cold War, relatively bloodlessly.

When the time came for change, after five Democratic terms, it was gentle change, to Dwight Eisenhower, and almost no discernible policy change. There followed almost a decade of peace and prosperity, as Ike extracted the country successfully from the Korean War and kept it out of Vietnam.

The country reached for bold and vigorous change in moving a whole generation to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s New Frontier and Great Society.

Civil rights was a triumph for LBJ, but he left Nixon a terrible crisis in Vietnam. Nixon successfully triangulated Great Power relations and withdrew from Vietnam while retaining a non-Communist government in Saigon, but the Democrats, exploiting Nixon’s mismanagement of the trivial Watergate affair, brought his administration down and abandoned Indochina.

The country was not ready for Jimmy Carter’s forlorn lamentations of a national malady as he urged Americans to wear cardigans and turn down their thermostats during an oil crisis. Ronald Reagan was a more activist and charismatic Eisenhower, though a film star did not have the prestige of a successful World War theater commander. Reagan restored confidence and prosperity and won the Cold War, bloodlessly, by escalating the arms race into defensive anti-missile weapons.

He left America content and alone at the summit of the world.

Except for Carter, all the presidents from Roosevelt to the first term of Clinton were somewhere between adequate and outstanding.

But it had all started to come apart with George H. W. Bush.

He was competent and managed the Gulf War very well, removing Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, but he had no program and was an ambiguous leader, and he allowed his party to split badly — the first president to do so since William Howard Taft in 1912.

The unbalanced billionaire and political charlatan Ross Perot captured 20 million mainly Republican votes and the Clintons made the giant leap from Little Rock to the White House.

Bill Clinton was also a competent manager and an astute political strategist, but he underreacted to the early terrorist incidents, the bombings of the Khobar Towers, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole at Aden (1996 to 1998), which killed a total of 260 people and injured about 4,500 (most of them not Americans).

He also decreed and legislated the commercially unviable mortgage — the political free lunch of raising home ownership and boosting the building trades at no cost to the taxpayer. Eventually, the greatest economic crisis in the world since the Great Depression was the result.

George W. Bush had committed the country to an almost endless war in and around Iraq that has effectively handed much influence in that country to the Iranian enemy we were supposedly confounding, and generated an immense humanitarian disaster.

Barack Obama didn’t get a real economic recovery despite a 233% increase in the previously accumulated national debt, and produced an unsatisfactory health-care plan, a misguided attempt to appease Iran with a green light to nuclear weapons in another five years, and a self-punitive and inadequately researched commitment to radical environmental goals.

Because of his suavity and the earned national satisfaction of having broken the color bar on the country’s highest office, Obama has had a charmed public-relations life. But the brutal fact is that the George W. Bush and Obama administrations were failures, and so was the second Clinton term.

From Reagan to Obama, annual per capita GDP growth declined from 4.5% to 1% and the post-Reagan Republican presidential candidates were indistinct — the Bushes, Robert Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney; none of them had the prestige of Eisenhower, the political cunning and government experience of Nixon, the panache and eloquence of Reagan.

They were essentially also-rans. Bush Senior won what was as close as could be found to a third term for Reagan, and George W. won very narrowly against unprepossessing Democrats — Al Gore and John Kerry. Trump was elected to clean up after the 20 most unsuccessful years of presidential government in American history, worse than the decade before the Civil War and the three terms between Wilson and FDR, both periods that ended in calamities.

Trump was elected because the political class was completely cut off from any grasp of what the average American thought of the "flatlined new normal" of no growth in income for the middle and working classes, and a great deal of useless human and financial sacrifice in the Mideast.

George W. Bush responded to the economic disaster on his watch with "this sucker could go down," and millions resented the condescension of Obama’s disparagement of the working-class and agrarian-class Americans who relied on guns and the Bible, and his belief that the country could be pacified with just moderate unemployment and cheap gasoline.

Since Trump attacked the entire system, both parties, and the national political media, they have attacked him with unprecedented ferocity — an overwhelming barrage of media hostility, and since the Republican congressional leaders, such as speaker Paul Ryan, were not behind their presidential candidate, the Democrats, confident of victory, went where none has dared to tread in American history before: They used the intelligence services to feed to the press defamatory fiction about Trump collected from unreliable sources in Russia but almost unquestioned because it was the fruit of a spurious counterintelligence investigation that conducted espionage on the Trump campaign and transition team.

Once Trump was elected, they tried to sandbag him with a fraudulent special-counsel investigation into the Russian-collusion allegations, which they knew to be unfounded, for the purpose of covering up their own crimes.

Obama and Biden were present at the Jan. 5, 2017, meeting where these matters were aired, and they do not have clean hands. Serious crimes were committed by high officeholders. This was as close as America has come to an attempted coup d’état and it is all about to blow up, finally.

In these circumstances, it must remain a howling mystery what President Obama was thinking over the weekend when he ruefully announced his uneasiness when a man "charged with perjury gets off scot-free" and described Trump’s management of the public-health crisis as "chaos."

General Flynn wasn’t charged with perjury, he wasn’t guilty of anything, but he was ruined and threatened with imprisonment because of his dissent from Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s mismanagement of the terrorist threat.

As for Trump’s "chaos," Obama is the president who left no emergency medical resources at all, who gave us dissolving "red lines" in Syria, midwifed ISIS by his petulant withdrawal from Iraq, and modestly described his half-measures of response as "American leadership at its best."

Obama was an unsuccessful president who is "totally invested" in defeating Trump because he is now under investigation for having attempted to stop Trump’s election illegally.

That is what is shocking, and when it is objectively confirmed and legally established, it will demonstrate the danger of running weak candidates against inadequate presidents, and of electing an assortment of unsuccessful presidents to four consecutive terms.

George W. Bush and Obama were the first unsuccessful presidents to be reelected; Hoover and Carter were defeated, and succeeded by great presidents, and Franklin Pierce was defeated and succeeded by James Buchanan, who had the decency not to seek a second term as the Union was disintegrating.

Whatever one may think of the foibles of the incumbent, he is cleaning up after much misgovernment, and is persevering despite an illegal assault on his office of a magnitude that no previous American president has faced. It will now fail, but the country and its political class must learn the lesson of it.

This is no time for a shower of Pulitzer Prizes, as in the Watergate nonsense. Venal and inept government in both parties and all branches of government came dangerously close to entrenching itself.

This article first appeared in National Review.

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wandchoosesthewizard · 7 years

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[ it's misterpercivalgraves ! ] ☜: five things my muse sucks at

Headcanon Symbols || @misterpercivalgraves || Still Accepting

Tim

Conviction in her own opinions - Tim is very much a follower. She has difficulty forming her own opinions - articulating them - and consummating them. It is easier to allow other people to tell her what to think and how to feel than to probe her own emotions.

Standing up for herself - Actual Pushover Tim has spent her childhood & adolescence being bullied and bossed around by her mother and her peers. It is only when a situation becomes completely untenable that she can be spurred into action. It lends itself to her being petty, passive-aggressive, but explosive when cornered.

Physical exercise. Tim is not fond of running and sweating and climbing stairs and dancing and whatever else you can think of. She can fly, she can play Quidditch well enough - but anything that involves physical effort is a no from her, an unwillingness which is increased only tenfold by her innate clumsiness.

Flirting, suavity, relationships - Tim is rocking that ‘V’ card and is every inch the bumbling teenager when it comes to all things romantic, unless, of course - she is playing a scenario in her head, in her imagination, she is far more confident than she is in reality.

Being open with people - being honest and vulnerable. Actual image of Tim being open & honest. She gets trapped in the lies that are her life, and even once exposed, she has trouble sloughing them off.

Credence

Making friends / Approaching People - Credence is painfully shy. People need to come to him. Which causes problems when he has his own needs to fulfil.

Magic - his power is strong, but he as yet remains untrained.

Lying and deception - his face is an open canvas for his emotions. His grief, his rage once exploded out of him like a beast. He is too guilty, and not creative enough to lie well.

Music - He can no more play a musical instrument than he can grow feathers and fly. His singing is quiet and pleasant enough - but one would not call him talented.

Reading people - Credence will ally himself with anyone who offers him a sliver of kindness, despite repeated betrayal or pain. He is easy to manipulate and simple enough to not look for the hidden machinations in someone who he deems himself ‘unworthy’ of.

#misterpercivalgraves #⌜✍🏻⌟timberly headcanon⌜📖⌟#⌜💔⌟Credence Headcanon⌜😭⌟

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sayitwithsarcophilus · 7 years

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Icons of bi culture

Glam rock

Bob haircuts (or afros, for the curly-haired)

Dapper dark-haired actors with that particular je ne sais quoi balance of suavity and camp

Elizabethan drama

#bisexuality

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geekade · 7 years

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Before Their Time, Gargoyles

One thousand years ago, superstition and the sword ruled. It was a time of darkness. It was a world of fear. It was the age of gargoyles. Stone by day, warriors by night. We were betrayed by the humans we had sworn to protect, frozen in stone by a magic spell for a thousand years. Now, here in Manhattan, the spell is broken, and we live again! We are defenders of the night. We are GARGOYLES!

So begins Gargoyles, some of the best animation on television in 1994. I loved this show so much that when it finally came out on DVD in 2013 I was afraid to revisit it. After all, I remembered loving She-Ra: Princess of Power, jumped at the chance to rewatch it on Hulu, and regretted it almost immediately. Childhood is treacherous that way.

I’m happy to report that Gargoyles still merits a spot alongside Batman: The Animated Series and X-Men as a well-executed and rewatchable 90’s classic. In addition to complex characters and plot arcs, the series boasts terrific animation (including some killer fight sequences) and fabulous voice talent (an assortment of Star Trek alumni make appearances of varying duration). Gargoyles also represented my first encounter with a starring woman of color, more than one fully developed female character, and sympathetic villains. Of course, Disney cancelled it after only two seasons; ABC ran a third season called The Goliath Chronicles, but…let’s just say there’s a reason it’s not out on DVD.

The series premiered in 1994 as part of the Disney’s syndicated after-school cartoon block. It shared several writers and directors with Batman, including Michael Reaves, Brynne Chandler Reaves, and Frank Paur, and they brought a similarly brooding sensibility to Gargoyles. Like most of the short-lived shows I love, Gargoyles opened strong and just got better and better until its untimely demise. The pilot clocks in at five episodes, cutting between the gargoyles’ history in 994 AD and their reawakening in 1994. Considering it aired before DVR was even a glimmer in some startup’s eye, and that it couldn’t count on the character recognition of comics-based shows like Batman or X-Men, a five-episode pilot was pretty damn ambitious. As if that wasn’t daring (or dark) enough, Gargoyles opens with a genocide; before the show even gets going, its titular characters face a breach of trust that exterminates nearly their entire clan. The remaining gargoyles – Goliath (Keith David), Hudson (Ed Asner), Brooklyn (Jeff Bennett), Broadway (Bill Fagerbakke), and Lexington (Thom Adcox-Hernandez), along with watchdog Bronx (Frank Welker) awaken in a world ten centuries and an ocean removed from the one they knew.

Although the surviving clan from Goliath all the way down to Bronx get rich characterizations, histories, and performances, I was always captivated by three of the supporting characters, two of them villains. My favorite character was Elisa Maza (Salli Richardson-Whitfield), the NYPD detective who discovers the gargoyles while investigating a disturbance at Xanatos’ skyscraper. She guides the clan through the new world and protects them from discovery. Perceptive, resourceful, and trained in hand-to-hand combat, Elisa was the first major animated character I ever saw who looked remotely like me and the first heroine who did the rescuing.

The first person she saves our heroes from is David Xanatos. Jonathan Frakes voices him with an oily suavity that channels Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark but is more grounded, amoral, and dangerous than either of them. Xanatos understands that has earned a kind of medieval debt-loyalty for relocating and reawakening the gargoyles, and he wastes no time exploiting this for his own ends. When he can no longer use Goliath’s clan, he develops technology to replicate their abilities, forcing them to face off against a series of robots, cyborgs, and clones. His brand of villainy – elegant, elaborate, and nearly unbeatable – lends its name to the Xanatos Gambit.

Like I said, Tony Stark minus the alcoholism and moral compass. Riker wishes he was this cool. Xanatos reunites the clan with another member they’d believed lost in the sack of their castle: Goliath’s lieutenant and mate, Demona (Marina Sirtis). Demona possesses a Machiavellian single-mindedness; she resorts to magic, treachery, and brute force in the pursuit of her goal to exterminate humanity. Much like Magneto, she’s convinced that humans will never coexist peacefully with gargoyles, and once you’ve witnessed the distrust and cruelty that precede the destruction of her brethren, this logic almost makes sense. She’s gotten this far on a series of Faustian bargains and a heady cocktail of rage, survivor’s guilt, cognitive dissonance, and loneliness, but her conviction masks a longing for everything that might have been – for her, for Goliath, and for their lost clan. An object lesson in the dangers of revenge, Demona is no less tragic for being irredeemable.

Goliath, Elisa, and the clan battle Demona, Xanatos, and a series of other adversaries (not all of them dispatched by Xanatos) in sequences that showcase thoughtful character design. I love good fight choreography, and the hand-to-hand in Gargoyles never ceases to amaze me. The airborne combat sequences are particularly mesmerizing, combining dogfighting and midair grappling, but the earthbound stuff is no slouch either. Most kids probably wouldn’t have noticed if the gargoyles fought like large humans, but the animators make good use of their talons, tails, and wings, especially all the ways these things change the gargoyles’ relationship to gravity.

While the first season (13 episodes) follows the clan’s efforts to adjust to modern Manhattan, the second season (52 episodes) takes Goliath, Elisa, and Bronx on a “World Tour” which starts with a visit to the enchanted isle of Avalon. Referencing anything that happens after Avalon would be spoiling some neat surprises, but I can tell you that the series travels through a collection of places, times, and mythologies that would make Neil Gaiman blush. As you might have guessed from the introduction of Avalon, these episodes reference Arthurian legend and Shakespeare (mainly Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream) liberally, and I have to tip my hat to anybody who can make Oberon and Titania’s marriage make sense. Gargoyles united many of the elements that made Batman and X-Men so compelling, especially the darkness of the former and the xenophobia of the latter. But the show grew to more than the sum of its parts, its heroes and villains alike the products of complex and often surprising histories. If you loved it then, know that you can revisit it now without fear of disappointment. And if you’ve just learned about it here, know that Gargoyles is rendered beautifully, visually and auditorily. I defy you not to be seduced.

HOW TO WATCH: Seasons 1 and 2 are available on DVD. Season 2 is divided into two parts. All 3 DVDs are available on Amazon.

MUST WATCH: “Reawakening,” the final episode of the first season, features Michael Dorn as a resurrected gargoyle inhabited by three different souls. “Bushido,” the Japan episode of the World Tour, is a touching reintroduction of the trust between humans and gargoyles.

FAVORITE LINES: “Lot to go through for a piece of lawn sculpture.” “What are you doing here?” “Making sure you weren’t being ambushed.” “Man, you guys are paranoid even for New York.” “Someone had to make sure those comic book rejects didn’t find you.” “And they say the Middle Ages were barbaric.” “Flabby as I am now, I probably wouldn’t last a second in a Central American war.”

PAIR WITH: Jalapeños

LISTEN FOR: Everyone, but especially for anyone who ever starred in a Star Trek show. You already know about Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis, but Michael Dorn, Brent Spiner, Kate Mulgrew, Nichelle Nichols, Avery Brooks, LeVar Burton, and Colm Meaney all make appearances. Notable non-Star Trek voices include Clancy Brown, John Rhys-Davies, Sheena Easton, Tim Curry, Diedrich Bader, Tony Shalhoub, Charles Shaughnessy, and Roddy McDowall. Seriously, everybody was on this show.

ODDS & ENDS: The magic spells sprinkled throughout the show are actually quasi-functional Latin. They are collected and translated here.

Gargoyles’ characters and plots mostly hold up today, but much of the first season’s storyline is only possible without cameraphones. Every time the gargoyles wind up in a populated area I find myself waiting for the cut to the YouTube footage.

Every gargoyle has a battle cry, equal parts growl, roar, and avian scream, which is as awesome and terrifying as it sounds.

It would have been more in character for Elisa to wear her hair short or tied back, but flowing Disney princess locks seem a small price to pay for being able to take somebody out even when you’re on crutches.

In closeup shots Xanatos appears to be rocking some serious guyliner; somehow this seems appropriate for a character voiced by Jonathan Frakes.

AFTERWARDS: The Goliath Chronicles are not available on DVD, and I strongly advise you to accept this as a sign from the TV gods, because ABC took over the show with an entirely different writing and animation staff, and it shows. Disney did approve two comic book runs, one by Slave Labor Graphics (SLG) and the other by Marvel. Both are out of print and I can’t vouch for either, but I do know that Greg Weisman, one of the show’s creators, worked on the SLG run, and that lots of fans consider it the canonical third season.

#TV #articles

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networkingdefinition · 4 years

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Movie Quotes

Official Website: Movie Quotes

• A Great Movie Evolves when Everybody Has the Same Vision in Their Heads. – Alan Parker • A lot of movies are about life, mine are like a slice of cake. – Alfred Hitchcock • A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together. – Louis C. K. • A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar – you pretend it’s not there. – Tom Stoppard • A movie star is not an artist, he is an art object. – Richard Schickel • All industries are brought under the control of such people [film producers] by Capitalism. If the capitalists let themselves be seduced from their pursuit of profits to the enchantments of art, they would be bankrupt before they knew where they were. You cannot combine the pursuit of money with the pursuit of art. – George Bernard Shaw • All of my problems are rather complicated – I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It’s like a personal therapy. – Manuel Puig • All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish. – Clive James • And at the end of the day, if the movie’s no good, I’ll live to fight another day. – Scott Caan • And I love a scary movie. It makes your toes curl and it’s not you going through it. – Anthony Hopkins • And what I like about it is it makes me happy and I think it makes a lot of people happy to go to the movies and to not think about the problems of the day or the problems of tomorrow or the yesterday and just go on for the ride and have the fun of losing oneself in a fantasy. – Nicolas Cage • And what movies we saw! All the actors and actresses whose photographs I collected, with their look of eternity! Their radiance, their eyes, their faces, their voices, the suavity of their movements! Their clothes! Even in prison movies, the stars shone in their prison clothes as if tailors had accompanied them in their downfall. – Paula Fox • Be your own hero, it’s cheaper than a movie ticket. – Douglas Horton • Coming Home had been made before and Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, different kinds of movies. – Oliver Stone • Delay and indecision are first weapons in the armory of moviemakers. – Shirley Temple • Directing a movie is serious, it’s not a joke. – Fred Durst • Directing ain’t about drawing a neat little picture and showing it to the cameraman. I didn’t want to go to film school. I didn’t know what the point was. The fact is, you don’t know what directing is until the sun is setting and you’ve got to get five shots and you’re only going to get two. – David Fincher • Do you know what makes a movie work? Moments. Give the audience half a dozen moments they can remember, and they’ll leave the theatre happy. – Rosalind Russell • Don’t be an extra in your own movie. Move out of your comfort zone. Don’t be afraid of feeling uncomfortable or awkward. Step-out and make it happen. – Bob Proctor • Dude, I didn’t say Jude Law can’t act. I didn’t say Jude Law was in bad movies. I just said he’s in every movie. – Chris Rock • Ego problems are endemic in every walk of life, but in the movie business egomaniacs are megalomaniacs. – Lynda Obst • ‘Election’ is a movie I’d give a leg to cross the director’s name out and put mine in. – Jason Reitman • Every actor you learn from, take something from everyone – big actor or not. Whether they’re big movie stars or not doesn’t really matter. – Diane Kruger • Every time I’m shooting a movie I want to kill myself. Because I don’t see the light in the end of the tunnel. – Emir Kusturica • Every time you make a movie it’s an adventure. – Shia LaBeouf • Everyone related to me in my circle was from church: church friends, church school, church activities. All my friends weren’t allowed to watch MTV or go to PG-13 movies or listen to the radio, so I didn’t really know anything different. That’s how I was raised. – Katy Perry • Everyone told me to pass on Speed because it was a ‘bus movie.’ – Sandra Bullock • Everything I learned I learned from the movies. – Audrey Hepburn • Filmmaking is a completely imperfect art form that takes years and, over those years, the movie tells you what it is. Mistakes happen, accidents happen and true great films are the results of those mistakes and the decisions that those directors make during those moments. – Jason Reitman • For my wrap present, Colin Farrell gave me a first edition book. I got so involved with this character and I was so sad when the movie was over that when I got home and I tried to read the book I got really emotional and I started crying. – Salma Hayek • For the most part, studio movies have huge budgets. They don’t do anything under 30 to 40 million. When you have that much money at stake, you have so many people breathing down your neck. – Penelope Spheeris • Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions. And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie. – Al Pacino • Give me B movies or give me death! – Clive Barker • Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. – Pauline Kael • great villains make great movies. – Staton Rabin • Hollywood’s old trick: repeat a successful formula until it dies. – Gloria Swanson • ‘Home Alone’ was a movie, not an alibi. – Jerry Orbach • I always feel like I can’t do it, that I can’t go through with a movie. But then I do go through with it after all. – Meryl Streep • I am in so many movies that are on TV at 2:00 a.m. that people think I am dead. – Michael Caine • I can direct breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I take pride in my kitchen, but I’m not going to direct a movie. – Julia Roberts • I don’t have people following me around, like bodyguards. I don’t know how people live like that. Maybe the young movie stars have to live like that, I don’t know. But it seems a little crazy to me. I don’t think you need all that stuff. – Anthony Hopkins • I don’t know what your childhood was like, but we didn’t have much money. We’d go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book. – Robert Redford • I don’t think London has been given enough credit in a lot of the movies that we make here. – Mel Smith • I don’t think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can’t kiss a movie. – Jean-Luc Godard • I don’t want to make movies for kids, and I don’t want to make movies for adults either. – Kristen Stewart • I encourage film students who are interested in cinematography to study sculpture, paintings, music, writing and other arts. Filmmaking consists of all the arts combined. Students are always asking me for advice, and I tell them that they have to be enthusiastic, because it’s hard work. The only way to enjoy it is to be totally immersed. If you don’t get involved on that level, it could be a very miserable job. I only have one regret about my career: I’m sorry that we are not making silent movies any more. That is the purest art form I can imagine. – Vilmos Zsigmond • I first wanted to be an actress after seeing a play – not a movie. – Kim Cattrall • I get that same queasy, nervous, thrilling feeling every time I go to work. That’s never worn off since I was 12 years-old with my dad’s 8-millimeter movie camera. – Steven Spielberg • I have never acted he has never been cast in a romantic lead or has been cast opposite a female love interest in any movie he starred in. – Morgan Freeman • I haven’t sold to the movies. In other words, I haven’t gotten any enormous checks yet. – Jack Vance • I like celluloid, I like film, I like the way that when a movie is projected it sort of breathes a little in the gate. That’s the magic of it to me. – Gary Oldman • I love Elmore Leonard. To me, True Romance is basically like an Elmore Leonard movie. – Quentin Tarantino • I love the grandiosity of Hollywood movies, and even in independents, I love the canvas you can tell your story on. I love fiction filmmaking, you really feel like you’re creating something. – George Hickenlooper • I loved old black and white movies, especially the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals. I loved everything about them – the songs, the music, the romance and the spectacle. They were real class and I knew that I wanted to be in that world. – Sharon Stone • I loved the movies and I wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe. I thought she was so glamorous and everyone seemed to love her. I wanted to be like that and I told everyone I would be the next Marilyn Monroe. – Sharon Stone • I make movies I want to see. – Neil LaBute • I never thought about becoming a professional singer, but I am in touch with Bono about releasing a musical movie. It will be about an Irish band during the ’70s who are looking for fortune in Las Vegas. I should play the singer of the band but I don’t want to sing in front of anybody. – Liam Neeson • I never want to be away from you again, except at work, in the restroom or when one of us is at a movie the other does not want to see. – Daniel Handler • I think less is more when it comes to kissing in the movies. – Julia Roberts • I want to make a good, solid kung fu movie. – Keanu Reeves • I was never a fanatical movie person. – John Malkovich • I wasn’t trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie. – Quentin Tarantino • I would be more frightened as a writer if people thought my movies were like science fiction. – Neil LaBute • I would say the film world has stopped operating as one. We have divided it into Hindi movies, Bengali movies, Tamil movies and so on. Earlier, there was only one channel and we all knew what was going on. Today, it is hard to keep track of programmes due to the advent of regional channels. – Mithun Chakraborty • If movies are causing moral decay, then crime ought to be going up, but crime is going down. – Jack Valenti • If somebody for some reason, for music or for movie, becomes famous, it’s because they have something, something special. – Roberto Cavalli • If you don’t like my movies, don’t watch them. – Dario Argento • If you have a friend who suffers, you have to help him.«My dear friend, you are on safe ground. Everything is okay now. Why do you continue to suffer? Don’t go back to the past. It’s only a ghost; it’s unreal». And whenever we recognize that these are only movies and pictures, not reality, we are free. That is the practice of mindfulness. – Nhat Hanh • If you’re a movie actor, you’re on your own – you cannot control the stage. The director controls it. – Michael Caine • I’m doing ‘Les Miserables,’ the movie. I’ve done a lot of musicals and a lot of movies, and I know there are not a lot of people in Hollywood who have been down those two paths so I’ve been like, ‘Come on, let’s do a movie/musical.’ – Hugh Jackman • I’m interested in doing movies I wouldn’t normally be interested in doing. – Eric Stoltz • I’m mad, true. But only about one thing. Horror movies. I love spooks. They are a friendly fearsome lot. Very nice people, actually, if you get to know them. Not like these industry chaps out here – Kishore Kumar • I’m not a real movie star. I’ve still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago. – Will Rogers • I’m not saying I’m a writer, but I’ve been in movies for a long time, and I think I could write a script for a movie. – Benicio Del Toro • I’m not surprised that Spielberg was able to capture the heroism of Schindler; so many of his movies are about the better part of mankind. – Gene Siskel • I’m terrible at horror movies, by the way. I get scared so easily. – Oliver Stone • In every movie I do have a dialogue. – Jackie Chan • In the movies Paris is designed as a backdrop for only three things–love, fashion shows, and revolution. – Jeanine Basinger • It (his contract) has options through the year 2020 or until the last Rocky movie is made. – Dan Quisenberry • It is not as mirrors reflect us but, rather, as our dreams do, that movies most truly reveal the times. If the dreams we have been dreaming provide a sad picture of us, it should be remembered that – like that first book of Dante’s Comedy – they show forth only one region of the psyche. Through them we can read with a peculiar accuracy the fears and confusions that assail us – we can read, in caricature, the Hell in which we are bound. But we cannot read the best hopes of the time. – Barbara Deming • It’s just lovely to be involved in a movie that does go back to the basics – characters and great writing. – Clive Owen • It’s something that was very interesting to me to be a part of and all of them again because of the relationship. Some of the superhero movies are better than others. – Blair Underwood • I’ve always found that when you’re trying to create illusions with sound, especially in a science fiction or fantasy movie, that pulling sounds from the world around us is a great way to cement that illusion because you can go out and record an elevator in George Lucas’s house or something, and it will have that motor sound. – Ben Burtt • I’ve always wanted to do a family movie. – Adam Sandler • I’ve always wanted two lives – one for the movies, one for myself. – Greta Garbo • I’ve got to see my movie to see how I’m acting, see what little things I can learn about my craft. – LL Cool J • I’ve had to make the transition from sweeping in for 15 minutes, doing my stuff and clearing out, to carrying a movie for the duration – in a dress. – Philip Seymour Hoffman • I’ve seen too many ups and downs in the movie industry. – Jackie Chan • Keep your eye on your inner world and keep away from ads, idiots and movie stars. – Dorothea Tanning • License to Kill’ is not one of the great Bond movies. – Benicio Del Toro • Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It’s part ballet. It’s part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage. – Steve Sabol • Many times when you make a movie, it feels like your biggest mistake. But even if a film isn’t a hit, you shouldn’t view it as a mistake. – Ang Lee • Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he’s that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it’s not, I assure you. – Michael Caine • Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied… That’s why they can keep on working. I’ve been able to work for so long because I think next time, I’ll make something good. – Akira Kurosawa • Movie failures are like the common cold. You can stay in bed and take aspirin for six days and recover. Or you can walk around and ignore it for six days and recover. – Gene Tierney • Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down – there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF. – Dan Simmons • Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts. – Yahoo Serious • Movies are the art form most like man’s imagination. – Francis Ford Coppola • Movies are very subjective. – Jeff Bridges • Movies both reflect and create social conditions, but their special charm is to offer fantasy clothes as virtual reality, a world where people consume without the tedium of labor. Characters float in a world where the bill never comes due … and we wonder why we’re a debtor nation! – Molly Haskell • Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood. – Walt Disney • movies have mirrored our moods and myths since the century began. They have taken on some of the work of religion. – Jennifer Stone • Movies have now reached the same stage as sex – it’s all technique and no feeling. – Penelope Gilliatt • Movies make you immortal and ageless. – Kristin Scott Thomas • Music is the soundtrack to the crappy movie that is my life. – Chris Rock • My dream role would probably be a psycho killer, because the whole thing I love about movies is that you get to do things you could never do in real life, and that would be my way of vicariously experiencing being a psycho killer. Also, it’s incredibly romantic. – Christina Ricci • My goal has been to learn how to get movies made without losing sight of the reasons I began. I have had to learn to recognize the insidious nature of the beast without becoming one. – Lynda Obst • My movies were the kind they show in prisons and airplanes, because nobody can leave. – Burt Reynolds • Mystery makes movie stars! If you see someone on the cover of the weeklies all the time, why would you want to pay to see them in a movie? – Sophia Bush • No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan, has ever had the power that a filmmaker has; the power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark. – Frank Capra • oh mothers you will have made the little tykes so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies they won’t know the difference and if somebody does it’ll be sheer gravy – Frank O’Hara • On planes I always cry. Something about altitude, the lack of oxygen and the bad movies. I cried over a St. Bernard movie once on a plane. That was really embarrassing. – Michael Stipe • One cannot overstate the potential for hysteria on a movie set. Everyone always acts as if making the movie is as important as eradicating malaria. – Delia Ephron • One of the things we learn in movies directed by men is what the ‘fantasy woman’ is. What we learn in movies directed by women is what real women are about. I don’t think that men see things wrong and women right, just that we do see things differently. – Jane Campion • People go to movies or listen to music because they want to be inspired. – Daphne Zuniga • People have a preconceived notion about who I am and it’s interesting. It’s like picking who you want to win for the Oscars and not seeing the movie. – Amanda Bynes • People have perhaps gotten to the point where for the most part movies are a just bit of escape. – Neil LaBute • Quite often – a lot of the work I had done had been extensively with women. Most especially in the theater, but also quite often in the movies. That has its own delights, and maybe pitfalls too. – John Malkovich • Really, it’s the director’s job to disappear and allow the movie to just feel. – Jason Reitman • Revealing yourself, physically or emotionally, to cast and crew is frequently uncomfortable. But it is essential if you want to to tell the truth. I felt more at ease being bold with some than I did with others. I was incredibly fortunate to have worked with Randy Harrison as Justin Taylor. We share enough taste in music and art to have had a real camaraderie, and luckily that evolved into a deep friendship. – Gale Harold • So yes, I hope to act in other people’s movies, big and small, because that’s how I make my living, really. – Stanley Tucci • So, I installed a CCTV system to tape what’s going on inside my mind.

Thousands of hours of drama, confusion, discussion, huge special effects and futuristic scenarios. Also a lot of chatter, drama and suspense.

Is like to go to the movies for free, every day.

The CCTV technology used is the SSM-X45. Whose initials stand for: Sit down, Shut up and Meditate (X45 is just to sound more hi-tech) – Marcelo Goianira • Some men have a silly theory about beautiful women – that somewhere along the line they’ll turn into a monster. That movie gave them a chance to watch it happen. – Salma Hayek • Sometimes I’d like to play the bad guy and sometimes I’d like to die in a movie. – Jackie Chan • Sometimes in movies, I still have to be the hero, but it’s not all that important to me anymore. – Dennis Quaid • South Sea natives who have been exposed to American movies classify them into two types, ‘kiss-kiss’ and ‘bang-bang. – Hortense Powdermaker • Stars don’t make movies. Movies make stars. – Darryl F. Zanuck • The art of these Fifties movies was in sustaining forever the moment before sex. – Twyla Tharp • The Bollywood distribution system is so corrupt that they have trouble making money off movies. So they sell shoes that an actress stepped in. If they turned up the amps some, maybe they could sell the actresses. – Bruce Sterling • The difference between a movie star and a movie actor is this – a movie star will say, ‘How can I change the script to suit me?’ and a movie actor will say. ‘How can I change me to suit the script?’ – Michael Caine • The fact is, when I wrote ‘Juno’ – and I think this is part of its charm and appeal – I didn’t know how to write a movie. And I also had no idea it was going to get made! – Diablo Cody • The great thing about the movies … is-you’re giving people little … tiny pieces of time … that they never forget. – James Stewart • The interesting thing about a movie is the movie. – Christian Bale • The movie business is a big gamble. – Jackie Chan • The movie medium will eventually take its place as art because there is no other medium of interest to so many people. – Irving Thalberg • The movie says, You can lose your job and your way and still rescue yourself. ‘Larry Crowne’ creates a self-excavated utopia, and I love that idea, that message. – Julia Roberts • The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure. – Marshall McLuhan • The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself. – Will Rogers • The only thing worse than watching a bad movie is being in one. – Elvis Presley • The reason I took Early Edition – besides the fact that I liked it – was that it enabled me to start a production company in New York City. It’s a low-budget film company to produce and direct movies. – Fisher Stevens • The shooting of the movie is the truth part and the editing of the movie is the lying part, the deceit part – Paul Hirsch • The sorrow of not being movie stars overwhelms millions. – Mason Cooley • The Super Bowl is like a movie, and the quarterback is the leading man. – Leigh Steinberg • The thing about movies these days is that the commerce end of it is so inflated and financiers are just expecting this enormous return on their investment. – Alex Winter • The truth is that everyone pays attention to who’s number one at the box office. And none of it matters, because the only thing that really exists is the connection the audience has with a movie. – Tom Hanks • There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare, basically. If I feel that the script is a movie, I would be interested in doing any role of Shakespeare’s. – Al Pacino • There’s an electrical thing about movies. – Oliver Stone • These movies are like my kids. I just love them to death. Some of them go to Harvard and some of them can barely graduate high school. – Barry Sonnenfeld • To me the recognition of the audience is part of the filmmaking process. When you make a movie, it’s for them. – Michel Hazanavicius • To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence. – Quentin Tarantino • Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will. – Steven Soderbergh • We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies. – Walt Disney • We lay out our lives in a narrative we understand, like a movie, but are you enjoying making it or are you wondering who’s watching my movie. – Donald Glover • What I’ve learned is that life is too short and movies are too long. – Denis Leary • When I do a political movie, I do a political movie. – Antonio Banderas • When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home. – S. E. Hinton • When the movie comes out, what anybody thinks of it doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t go to the wrap party. I don’t go to the premiere. – Henry Rollins • Whether in success or in failure, I’m proud of every single movie I’ve ever directed. – Steven Spielberg • White people scare the crap out of me. I have never been attacked by a black person, never been evicted by a black person, never had my security deposit ripped off by a black landlord, never had a black landlord, never been pulled over by a black cop, never been sold a lemon by a black car salesman, never seen a black car salesman, never had a black person deny me a bank loan, never had a black person bury my movie, and I’ve never heard a black person say, ‘We’re going to eliminate ten thousand jobs here – have a nice day!’ – Michael Moore • with all these tentpoles, franchises, reboots and sequels, is there still room for movies in the movie business? – Lynda Obst • Writing a book is like masturbation, and making a movie is like an orgy. – Clive Barker • You are not just here to fill space or be a background character in someone else’s movie. Consider this: nothing would be the same if you did not exist. Every place you have ever been and everyone you have ever spoken to would be different without you. We are all connected, and we are all affected by the decisions and even the existence of those around us. – David Niven • You just have to realize that Jet Li is a movie star. He’s great at what he does, but if he stepped into our world he wouldn’t last long. – Chuck Liddell • You know those movies where the people in the audience are screaming, ‘Don’t go in that door!’ because you know the killer is there? Well, it is the same thing with this debt. We know how this ends. – Marco Rubio • You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to. – Philip Seymour Hoffman

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