#and humans of new york just published something from a resident that made it all sound so hopeless

[books]

Tumblr Exclusive: Forestborn

Do you like shapeshifters, epic quests, magic, dark forests, and obstinate princes? Well, have we got an exclusive excerpt for you!

Forestborn is an upcoming @torteen novel by debut author Elayne Audrey Becker. Becker graduated from Vassar College with a BA in classics and history. She is currently continuing her education at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland after time spent as an editor with a New York publisher. She grew up with a lake and woods as her backyard, spending long days outside and visiting national parks with her family.

Forestborn will be available at bookstores everywhere from August 31. Read the exclusive excerpt below, and thanks again to Elayne for sharing her inspiration moodboard with us!

Forestborn By Elayne Audrey Becker

One

I find her deep in the Old Forest, facedown in the dirt. 

Sharp pain needles my palms where I’ve balled my fists so tight, the nails have carved half-moon marks into the skin. Snaking across the twig-strewn ground, gnarled roots press against my boots like a warning as I roll the young woman onto her back. Best to be sure.

No, she is certainly dead. Cold, stiff, and hungry like the rest; even with forest debris masking much of her shirt, the threadbare cotton dips in unmistakable rivulets across her bony frame. I swallow my disappointment and push her eyelids shut, wanting to spare her kin the sight of those empty, pointless eyes.

“Sorry,” I murmur, sitting back on my heels. “I’m guessing you didn’t deserve this.”

Around us, the trees lean inward and down with ominous uniformity, leaves and branches straining against their holds, drawn to the dead woman as if tethered by ropes. The sway, the humans call it. I ignore the prickling in my belly. They’ll straighten out soon enough when the magic leaves her body. 

With a final nod, I push to my feet and wend my way back to the forest’s edge. It’s a close wood, with broad oaks in summer bloom crowding the grassy floor, their leafy canopy admitting shafts of sunlight that glitter like crystal chandeliers. All in all, too peaceful a setting for someone driven to madness to die alone. I breathe it in deep to savor the scent while I can, grateful that for whatever reason, these trees never seem drawn to the magic in my own blood. I’ve had enough of vengeful wilderness to last a lifetime.

“Well?” Seraline asks, her knuckles nearly white where they clutch the hem of her shirt. 

I shake my head. “Dead.”

Her shoulders sink. Though Seraline is sturdy as iron when she’s in her aunt’s tannery, shaping leather into draft horses’ yokes, standing a determined two paces behind the tree line now, she seems shakeable as snow.

“Come on,” I say, nodding to the stony town just across the open fields. “You’re going to be late.” I don’t ask if she plans to examine the body for herself. Seraline may have insisted on coming as a show of support, but our friendship has many limits, her discomfort with the dead and dying the least of them. 

After a brief hesitation, Seraline falls into step at my side, sweeping her seeing stick across the ground in broad strokes. “Poor thing.”

I nod, my jaw clenched tight. 

This time of year, the late summer air hangs heavy even in the early morning, enough that the back of my neck is already slick with sweat. The barley fields remain mercifully empty as we pick our way through the dusty rows, but still I plow forward with my head down and shoulders bent, half from habit and half spurred by the hour. Seraline isn’t the only one who’s running behind. 

“Will you not come with us?” she asks, her head tipping to the side as we near the town. “Aren’t you due back in Roanin, anyway?”

“I can’t,” I reply, making it sound like an apology. I’m not really sure why we still play this game when we both know it’s futile. “I have a few things to take care of first.”

“Today of all days,” she snorts.

“You know how it is.” In truth, I’d give my right arm to stay away from the capital today. But there’s no help for it.

“Her husband deserves to know,” Seraline adds after a while. “The two of them were inseparable.”

“He will know. The trail wasn’t hard to follow.”

Seraline is always trying to persuade me to talk to the deceased’s families. She believes I have a softer manner than many in uniform, and once she even called me heartless for refusing. That time hurt the most. But it isn’t my job to report any deaths I uncover to next of kin. Only to the king. And it’s not like she’s stepping up to volunteer, anyway.

Briarwend is a humble farming town that stretches all of three streets, a collection of squared off stone shops that deal in necessity rather than charm. Its weather-worn residents are the same. When I began seeking intel here four years ago, long days tending the surrounding fields made the people lazy and open over a couple of pints. Lately, they’re just hungry, poor soil and rising taxes leaving gaping holes that only tempers seem to fill. 

Each night under dwindling lamplight and over stained, sticky tables, the pub dwellers deal out anger and judgment like tossing seeds across the earth. The battered forest walker I helped home last night is not the only magical person I’ve found bleeding on cobbled streets. The humans’ anger is growing fists.

Seraline’s family is fixing their horse’s harness to an old wooden cart when we reach their cottage home. Most others have long since departed.

“Where have you been?” her mother demands, tightening the leather straps. The roan mare stamps a hoof, ears flicking nervously in my presence. “We should have left hours ago!”

“Lela needed my help. And you’re not ready, anyway.” Seraline shrugs.

“Nor are you. Breakfast is gone, so you’ll just have to wait. Go get changed.” She studiously avoids my eye, as if I’m not even there. 

Seraline bids me farewell with a light touch on the shoulder, which causes her little sister to quickly interlace two pairs of twisted fingers and pull them apart. The sign to ward off bad fortune.  

“You shouldn’t indulge my sister,” the dreadful Arden says once she’s gone, stomping over and swiping a greasy hand across his forehead. By far the weakest sibling in this family of four. “Seraline is delicate. She can’t be tramping about the kingdom with the likes of you.”

Which is ironic, really, since he was eager enough to sidle close last year, when he thought empty flattery might earn him a kiss. That was before a too-often empty belly soured his tongue, before he learned who and what I was. And though I truly could not care less what this boy thinks, I’m dismayed to find my stomach still burns with anger and something close to shame. My gaze drops to his pant leg, which bears splotches of dried blood from the night before. 

“Problem?” Arden sneers, white skin burned red from long days in the sun. 

A slow tingling feeling bubbles up from my core, threads of numbness that tiptoe across my arms and legs. I force myself to breathe deeply, to beat the threads back. “I know it was you,” I mutter. 

He traces his chapped lips with two fingers, beady eyes darting to his mother before he leans forward, his smile stiffening. “You know nothing,” he hisses.

“You forget I have certain resources at my disposal.” I raise a hand in front of his flaking face, where my nails have sharpened into claws. “And that I know where you live.”

I stare until a satisfying trace of fear tinges Arden’s expression before stomping away toward the town’s single inn, which is little more than a guesthouse with four creaking rooms. If Helos were here, he would tell me to not take the bait, that I’m better than that. What he never seems to understand is that I’m not better than anything at all.

#forestborn #tumblr exclusive #books #booklr

[danijimenezv]

Jill Valentine: What the Future Holds

For @openheartfanfics Meet My MC Event ☺💕

Career

After her residency ends, Jill takes over the Diagnostics Team, after the three other team members vote for her.

When Ethan steps down, Jill immediately jumps into action and starts interviewing possible candidates to fill the fourth spot of the team.

Finally, she decides to appoint Jackie. She’s proved herself time and time again, and she’s an exceptional doctor, so it made sense. And Jackie fits right in with their dynamics.

The team, and the hospital with it, thrives under Jill’s lead. They help a lot of people and earn a lot of worldwide renown.

The team was already known because of Naveen and Ethan, but there were doubts flying around when Ethan stepped down to become Chief of Medicine. Those doubts were quickly put to rest.

Jill is stubborn and determinate, and she works her hardest to make her team succeed. And the team succeeds more than ever because of her idea to work along with other departments at the hospital, creating a huge teamwork effort.

Harper is often busy, so Bryce and Ivy are her surgeons on call, and both of them give Harper a second and third opinion, so they consider every possibility out there. Rafael is the one she consults when physical therapy is on the table. Elijah, Baz and Zaid also help from time to time when they contemplate experimental treatments or when they need to research a new alternative, and Baz’s input is invaluable when it comes to immunology. Sienna is her pediatrician of choice. Even Esme and Gary come in handy from time to time. And even in retirement, Naveen is more than happy to help and give his input when the team hits a particularly hard slope. That applies for Ethan too; though, as much as he loves diagnostics, he tries to get involved the minimum, instead he lets Jill do her thing, and she’s damn good at it.

Jill’s management of the team also meant a new project she had been working on with Aurora. As soon as Aurora takes over Mass Kenmore’s Diagnostics Team, the two of them collaborate on projects and cases. And even if Kenmore’s renown isn’t as big as Edenbrook’s team, each group has something to contribute. They even collaborate on publishing articles and case studies. They work as well on their own as they do together. They help twice the amount of patients working alongside instead of competing with each other.

With Ethan as Chief of Medicine, she works perfectly with administration. They constantly help each other. He has the power to approve her projects and budget requests, but he only does it after hearing her pitch, just like other doctor, and he recognizes the true potential she shows.

She implements a program that gives third-year residents the opportunity to work with the diagnostics team. They are assessed and evaluated since their intern year, and when their third year comes by, Jill picks the two best residents. They’re not a part of the team per se, but they do a two-month internship with the team, work with them and learn from the experience.

Jill also dedicates part of her time to researching and working on zoonotic diseases. With her family of veterinarians, she’s more than qualified to do this, and after the maitotoxin incident, she knows there’s a lot of work to be done in that area.

Jill quickly becomes one of the most respected doctors and earned world-renown. She even becomes a published author.

Her books: “From Animals to Humans: Understanding Zoonotic Diseases”; “Diagnostics: A Comprehensive Science”; “The Challenges of Diagnosing”; “Solving Medical Mysteries: A Team Effort” (co-written with Aurora Emery) & “A Guide to Zoonoses” (co-written with Lucas Valentine).

A few years later, when Tobias decides to move to New York to marry Katherine, and inevitably has to leave the team, Jill is once again left with the task of looking at prospects for team member.

When that happens, Ethan is more than ready to step down as Chief of Medicine, after his fair share of working with administration, and he presents his curriculum to Jill, as if he was any other doctor.

Of course, Jill doesn’t have to think twice. She knows the kind of diagnostician he is, and she’s missed working with his brilliant mind.

Jill doesn’t just accept him into the team. She announces they’re both gonna be Co-Heads of the Diagnostics Team. After all, they’re better together than apart. Ethan tries to fight it at first but, well, he has never been particularly adept at denying Jill, and that was a matter she wasn’t willing to change her mind.

Though, as years working well with administration, both Ethan and Jill have earned other administratives favors, and working with them goes without a hitch as well. There are no more problems with the board like there were when Jill was a resident, and Ethan has learned to work with them, so the fights are almost non-existent.

Still, Tobias quickly earns his place as diagnostician in New York Presbyterian Hospital, and he continues to work along with Jill and Ethan.

Relationship with Ethan

Since confessing his love for Jill, Ethan was completely sure that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.

The idea of proposing hadn’t made it to his mind yet, but he knew he was ready for them to move in together.

Even if the question had been at the tip of his tongue every time they were together, Ethan held back. Jill was already trying to adjust to the transition from resident to attending, and to Head of the Diagnostics Team. He didn’t want to add to it by having her move to his place.

But he had his mind made up, and he would ask her to move in with him as soon as things settled back. He wasn’t going to be deterred.

Except he hadn’t contemplated something, and that something made him stop in his tracks and reconsider asking her.

Because Jill, as Head of the Diagnostics Team, had a new salary. And with that new salary, the first thing Jill had done was get a puppy.

And no, not a little Yorkie or a Chihuahua. No. It was a damn Bernese Mountain Dog, that was going to grow into a seriously large dog.

Ethan already had Jenner, and even Jenner spent more than half of the time at his dad’s place in Providence. He didn’t think his penthouse could take a hyperactive Bernese Mountain puppy.

But he also knew his girlfriend. Coming from a family of veterinarians, Jill wasn’t going to leave the damn dog behind. From the moment she got him (“Satchmo”), Ethan knew they were a package deal. If he wanted to live with Jill, he also had to live with the dog.

He didn’t know how that could work with Jenner and in his penthouse, but he was willing to risk it. He knew he wanted to wake up every day by her side and go to sleep with her.

So, in September, just a couple of months after settling in their new positions, Ethan and Jill moved in together. Unsurprisingly, Jill knew how to handle the transition for both dogs, and made the move easy for all of them.

And just a few months after moving together, in December, Ethan popped the question. Jill cried through his whole proposal speech and couldn’t say yes, but she nodded fiercely and kissed him.

They had a relatively long engagement, until finally, they got married the following year, on October 16th, 2022.

The reception was huge, hundreds of people invited (because of the Valentine’s connections), though neither of them seemed to mind too much. They were just happy to be marrying each other. According to the media and tabloids, it was the wedding of the century.

Naveen was Ethan’s best man, and Luke (Jill’s older brother) and Tobias were his groomsmen, while Sienna was Jill’s maid of honor, and Kat and Ivy (her two sisters) were her bridesmaids.

About six months into their marriage, they decided to move to an actual house, and started looking.

Funnily enough, Jill’s childhood best friend, Hunter, told them he was currently working on a few construction and design projects in the area of Boston. He was the one who hooked them with a house and was their architect, helping them design their dream house.

A few months later, they were moving into a bigger house in suburban Boston, along with Jenner, Satchmo and Vienna (the roomies figured Jill had more space than them and could take care of the fennec fox better than them).

Starting their own family

It was about a year after their wedding that they sat down and talked about having children. Ethan had already worked through his trauma, and his past with Louise no longer held him back. Jill stopped her birth-control, and they started trying to get pregnant.

It took Jill a couple of months, and deep down she was terrified to let Ethan down and not be able to give him children, now that he had decided he wanted them. Ethan obviously eased her worries and told her the only thing he needed in life was her; children would be nice, but he really only needed her.

Still, Jill anxiously took a fertility test, and once it came out that she could have children, she tried to brush it off as stress, but still worried inside.

A few months later, Ethan surprised Jill by taking her on vacation, to ease her worrying and stress. He took her to a wolf sanctuary in Alaska she had mentioned she wanted to visit a few times.

Jill and Ethan found out Jill was pregnant by accident, and it definitely took them by surprise, but the news were very welcomed. At the wolf sanctuary, the wolves changed their whole demeanor and body language around Jill, and the keeper congratulated Jill on her pregnancy. Turns out, wolves are excellent at telling when a woman is pregnant even if she doesn’t know it yet; the animals get all odd and careful around the pregnant woman and take defensive postures around her. It was definitely a reveal worth telling.

Her first pregnancy, thankfully went without a hitch, and soon, their first-born came into the world, through natural birth.

Their son, Nicholas Jonah Ramsey, was born on August 24th, 2024.

Everyone was enamored with the little baby, with his dark hair and intense blue eyes, the spitting image of his father.

Ethan and Jill decided to appoint Rafael and Jackie as Nick’s godparents.

Six years later, their second child came along, also through natural birth.

Their daughter, Brooklyn Marie Ramsey, was born on November 8th, 2030.

She has her mother’s distinctive ginger-bronze hair color, but her father’s blue eyes.

Brooke’s godparents are Hunter and Sienna.

After little Brooklyn was born, though, Jill was informed that a third pregnancy could be fatal for her, that her body wouldn’t be able to sustain another pregnancy. And, after much deliberation and talking it out as spouses, Jill went under a hysterectomy procedure, which meant no more children for them, but they were beyond happy with their two little blessings.

Family and Friends

The gang remained tight-knit close, to the point where their children called the others aunts and uncles.

Even when they no longer lived together, they promised to hang out constantly and see each other. It also helped that they kept working together.

Eventually, Elijah and Phoebe eloped, and Sienna moved in with Raf. Bryce and Ivy already lived together. Aurora and Jackie were the last remaining ones, and they got a smaller apartment for the two of them for a while.

Then Aurora moved in with Hunter (once he fully moved to Boston) and Jackie got a place for herself and her new boyfriend, which she keeps a secret from the roomies until she’s completely sure the relationship is the real deal, because it’s the least expected pairing in the world. (Spoiler alert: it’s Baz 😂)

Even paired off and building their own lives, the gang kept up some of their traditions and kept in touch.

They even celebrate a few milestones and holidays together.

It tends to get a bit chaotic, given that it’s double the people, counting the spouses, but they all get along great and enjoy spending time together.

Tobias moved to New York once he married Katherine, but both of them still visit from time to time.

After traveling the world, Kyra moved to New York as well, where she met and married Jill’s older brother, Luke. Just like Tobias and Kat, they visit constantly.

Jill remains close with her family. She’s always been close with her siblings, and even more when they married some of their friends. And she grew closer to her parents once her own kids were born. Haley and Matthew Valentine definitely spoil their grandchildren rotten.

Jill and Ethan, along with Ivy and Bryce, make the trip to New York once every other month, to visit Jill’s parents, Kat and Tobias, and Luke and Kyra.

And once every other month, alternating with them, Kat and Tobias, and Luke and Kyra make the trip to Boston.

Jill and Ethan also drive down to Providence to visit Alan every few weeks.

All in all, they’re a big, happy, messy and extended family.

Tags: @jamespotterthefirst, @takeharryandgo, @aestheticartsx, @choicesfanaf, @fireycookie, @liaromancewriter, @trappedinfanfiction, @tsrookie, @genevievemd, @lucy-268, @writinghereandthere, @queencarb, @gryffindordaughterofathena, @ohchoices, @anntoldst0ries, @bluebellot, @schnitzelbutterfingers, @mysticaurathings, @iemcpbchoices, @itsjustamesshonestly, @shanzay44, @lsvdw-blog, @heauxplesslydevoted, @starryeyedrookie, @casey-v​, @mercury84choices, @chaoticchopshopheart, @quixoticdreamer16, @a-crepusculo, @peonierose

#open heart #my oh mc #my open heart mc #jillian valentine

[frankiefellinlove]

THE STEVIE FILES PROUDLY PRESENTS - THE AMAZING ROCK & ROLL ODYSSEY OF STEVEN VAN ZANDT

From The Source to Soulfire via Springsteen and Sam & Dave

Recorded, transcribed, edited, written, produced, mixed and mastered by MIKE SAUNDERS

SIDE TWO (1975-1983)

Track 6: Miami Steve, The Asbury Jukes, Tenth Avenue and Hammersmith

In early 1975, Steven returned to New Jersey from Florida, inappropriately dressed for the winter weather. “I came back with the flowered shirts and the Sam Snead hat and continued wearing them in the snow.” For the next seven years, he was known as Miami Steve. He joined Southside in the Blackberry Booze Band and within weeks they’d altered and expanded its line-up (adding keyboard player Kevin Kavanaugh from Middletown and bass player Alan Berger from The Dovells’ backing band), transformed its musical direction, changed its name to Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes (referencing their mutual hero Little Walter’s band and first single release) and established a successful three-nights-a-week, five-sets-a-night residency at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park.

“Just before that, me, Southside, Bruce and Garry went to see Sam & Dave. A life-changing moment. So me and Southside basically decided we were gonna be the white Sam & Dave, with rock guitar. So the horns came in and although we didn’t know it, we would change the entire concept of what a bar band sounded like and the respect a bar band would get by making it creative, soul meets rock. ‘Bar band’ was an insult. ‘You’re a bar band,’ which means you can’t make it in the real music world. After the Jukes, they started using ‘bar band’ in reviews and they meant it as a compliment, with Graham Parker and Elvis Costello and Mink DeVille. We changed the way people thought about these things.”

The Miami Horns were a vital component of the new band. Steven composed the horn arrangements, but although he’s always possessed a natural ability to imagine horn parts, he doesn’t read or write music (“never have”) and has always required a little help from his friends to transcribe them. “I have people write ‘em down, to this day. I like that actually. You have to do a lotta things yourself so any excuse I find to collaborate I do it. I find other people will bring something to the party usually. That’s why [I’ve] used Eddie Manion for I don’t know how many years. He knows how I like to voice things. Once I think of something and create the parts, I get bored if I have to voice every part, exactly right. If I hear a voicing I don’t like, I will change it, but I get bored by the mechanics of everything.”

While the Jukes were building their reputation and growing their audience, Bruce invited Steven to hang out at the Born To Run sessions in New York, where he was working on “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” David Sanborn and The Brecker Brothers had been hired to play the horn parts, but Steven created a spontaneous new arrangement. He’s told this anecdote countless times, but I ask him to repeat it because it provides perfect examples of his innate musical talents in action (“I can hear the parts, who knows why?”), the nature of his friendship with Bruce (“I still am the only human being not afraid of him”), and his no-bullshit attitude (“I didn’t know anything about diplomacy”).

“So he says, ‘Whaddya think?’ I said, ‘It sucks, that’s what I think!’ I didn’t know how uptight everybody was. I didn’t give a fuck either. The managers and producers were all afraid of him already. He asked me a question, I’m gonna be honest. I’m trying to help my friend here, not make points with some fucking record company guy. Moment of silence. ‘He just said it sucks, which means we all suck.’ Bruce [says] ‘Alright then, go in and fucking fix it.’ So I did. I went in and sang the [new] parts. I didn���t know they were the most famous [session] guys in New York. It wasn’t insulting them, the chart was ridiculous. That was my thing, just from the Jukes being around maybe six months.”

“I wasn’t really feeling the pressure that Bruce was at the time. I didn’t realise his life depended on this album. His first two records hadn’t done very well. They wanted to drop him. I don’t know how aware I was of any of that. He invited me into the session and I’m laying on the floor. All I can think is, we’ve been hoping to get into recording our whole lives, I’m listening to this and it sounds fucking terrible. Not just the horn charts, everything. It was the worst period of recording in history. Virtually every record from the 50s and 60s sounded great, virtually every record from the early 70s sounded terrible. Because engineers took over, started close miking, padding the walls. Separation, separation, separation, all the things that make rock ‘n’ roll suck. The idea was, you isolate everything and make it sound exciting in the mix. Which they managed to do, miraculously, with the Born To Run album. Because it was pieced together in a bizarre way. Bruce made that record 100% out of willpower, he willed that into existence!”

Soon after making his instinctive artistic contribution (and singing backing vocals on “Thunder Road”), Steven was invited to join the E Street Band. It was a chance to complete the circle, play with his old friend again and settle any unfinished business from three summers earlier, when he’d been sent packing at the Greetings sessions. He made his live debut on the opening night of the Born To Run tour, which ran until New Year’s Eve. His input and influence over the next decade, onstage and off, would prove invaluable. (Bruce even began playing The Dovells’ “You Can’t Sit Down” as an occasional encore). In the fall, the tour took everyone to Europe for the first time, where the culture shock was off the charts. “There was no hamburgers, no peanut butter. The only place you could get a hamburger in the whole of Europe was the newly-opened first Hard Rock Café. There was a line around the block even then.”

Culinary deficiencies aside, Bruce also had to endure the overblown hype surrounding his first UK gigs at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, where Columbia had displayed the legend “Finally London Is Ready For Bruce Springsteen” on every available surface prior to his arrival. “[It was] completely obnoxious,” says Steven. “[Bruce] spent half the time ripping down posters. It was an embarrassing time for him, between that and Time and Newsweek. He didn’t like that stuff. You wanna be in charge of your life, that’s why we get into rock ‘n’ roll. Suddenly it was slipping out of his control. We made the mistake of playing a place with seats. It just made the show that much harder. But by the end, we got ‘em outta the seats. We went to Amsterdam, Stockholm, and back to London. The second one was a bit easier.” The experience had a prolonged effect on Bruce. “He was uptight in those days and would remain so through Darkness into The River, until he asked me to produce the record and we found a way to have some fun.”

Track 7: Epic Records, Steve Popovich and The Stone Pony

Back on the shore, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes continued the Stone Pony residency throughout 1975, gradually consolidating their line-up. For the next three years, between Springsteen commitments, Steven worked as their producer, arranger, manager, part-time guitarist and principal songwriter. In early 1976, after circulating a demo tape, they signed a recording deal with Epic, with assistance from Steve Popovich, the label’s Vice-President of A&R. “I Don’t Want To Go Home,” the song that Steven had kept in his back pocket since his days on the oldies circuit, became the title track of their debut album and their first single. Ben E King’s loss was Southside’s gain.

“I produced [the song] in a way which was appropriate for the Jukes. They didn’t have a big background vocal thing going on,” explains Steven. “I was very conscious of being able to try and do most of it live, although I put strings on it, on my very first production! There was no synthesiser in those days that could play strings. That’s why I re-cut it [on Soulfire] the original way I pictured it, with the singer and background vocals answering. That idea of writing for someone else is extremely important, critical and essential. It changes the way you write completely, from when you think of writing for yourself, which is extraordinarily complicated and confusing. It’s not easy, but easier, to write for someone else. There’s their identity in your mind at least. I’m writing them a song. That’s a wonderful exercise for songwriters.” I Don’t Want To Go Home was released in the summer of 1976 (“I’ve never received one penny of royalties, but whatever!”). The Jukes later began their first national tour and made their European debut in 1977.

Recommended by Bruce, Steve Popovich was one of a kind. “The last of the real music guys in the business. The only other person I can compare him to would be Lance Freed on the publishing side, who’s unique. He’s actually into music and songwriting and the things you’re supposed to be into when you have a job description like that. And Frank Barsalona, the only agent who really did his job and would set the standard for everybody to follow. Those three guys, really quite historic. [It was] Popovich’s idea to launch the record with a broadcast from the Stone Pony. Never been done before. Popovich loved the local scene idea and he largely made it happen. It never would have been recognised nationally, I don’t think, if it hadn’t been for Popovich, who had the vision to say it’s cool if you’re not from New York. Rather than being embarrassed if you’re not from New York, LA or Nashville, it’s actually cool.”

Track 8: Production Credits and Political Awakening

Steven developed his talents as a producer and songwriter with the Jukes in the late 70s, following I Don’t Want To Go Home with This Time It’s For Real and Hearts Of Stone. Successive releases featured greater quantities of his original material, which included “I Played The Fool,” “This Time Baby’s Gone For Good,” “Take It Inside” and “Some Things Just Don’t Change,” apparently written for another of his heroes, David Ruffin of The Temptations. During this period, he also produced the “Say Goodbye To Hollywood” single for Ronnie Spector and the E Street Band and provided production assistance on Darkness On The Edge Of Town. His relationship with the Jukes ended when they left Epic for Mercury in 1979 and he went on to co-produce The River and two comeback albums for Gary US Bonds, Dedication and On The Line. It was an impressive fast-track apprenticeship. Steven had no production experience when he began. He acquired the skills and learned from his mistakes in the studio. “That’s why all three Jukes albums are different,” he says. “By the time we did The River, I knew what I wanted to do. I got it all down by then. That’s how I tend to do things. I can picture what I want. Jump in, do it, let’s see what happens.”

Steven also kept his promise to himself to bring his musical heroes out of obscurity, initially as guests on the first two Jukes albums. “I did what I could, but I wanted to do so much more,” he admits. “First time I get in a studio, got Lee Dorsey out from under a car, where he’s a mechanic. Got Ronnie Spector out of retirement. Second album, we reunited The Coasters, Drifters and Five Satins. Me and Bruce worked with Gary Bonds. We got Ben E King and Chuck Jackson on that record. Those artists had a talent level noticeably above everybody that followed. I wish I’d been insistent on doing more of them. In those [early] days, you actually had to have talent to make records. You had to be able to sing a song, beginning to end, perfectly in tune, perfectly the right melody, and if you fuck up one word, you gotta do the whole thing again. Couldn’t do enough for those people, they were so much fun to produce.”

In addition to his studio accomplishments, Steven played more than 300 shows with Bruce and the E Street Band between 1976 and 1981, primarily on the Darkness On The Edge Of Town and River tours. The majority took place in North America, but the River tour included a European leg that took the band away from home and out of their comfort zone for nine weeks. Much longer than their previous visit in 1975, it was their first significant experience of foreign countries, languages, cultures and political perspectives. They received rave reviews wherever they played, but Steven gradually became aware that not all Europeans viewed the United States in a favourable light.

One particular encounter was pivotal in dramatically reshaping Steven’s worldview. “A kid asked me, ‘Why are you putting missiles in my country?’ I said, ‘I’m not, I’m a guitar player.’ I realised, for the first time in my life, at the age of 30 I’m embarrassed to say, that I’m an American. What the fuck does that mean? I managed to grow up in the middle of civil rights, the Vietnam War, demonstrations about every fucking thing and had no interest in any of it. Amazing when you think about it. Redefining tunnel vision. Suddenly, the tunnel is gone. We’re now successful. Who would have ever figured that would happen, right? Now it’s like, uh-oh, what did I miss, the last 20 years?”

Track 9: Men Without Women, Motown and Mixing In Mono

This revelation accelerated Steven’s growing political awareness, one of two important developments in 1981 that would change the course of his life forever. The second came when he returned from Europe and was approached by EMI America about making a solo album. Having spent six years producing and writing for others, he welcomed the opportunity to have his own creative outlet, which soon expanded into a separate career. In the fall, he enlisted musicians from the E Street Band and the Asbury Jukes to record most of the material for his debut album, Men Without Women, using his established rock-meets-soul sonic blueprint. Including “Lyin’ In A Bed Of Fire,” “Princess Of Little Italy,” “Angel Eyes” and “Until The Good Is Gone,” it remains an undisputed career highlight for Van Zandt devotees, but Steven feels that an outside producer might have helped him make a more commercial record.

“Conventional wisdom is you never should produce yourself and I have to say that’s correct. The only exception I can think of in the history of the business was Prince, who was an extraordinary genius, but other than him, I don’t know anybody who successfully produces themselves.” Describing himself as “extremely schizophrenic, I’m twelve different people, never mind two,” Steven explains how his inner producer failed to control the whims of his inner artist. “Without knowing it, the artist takes over. I was into this extreme naturalism, no logical reason why. I did the whole album live in one day. Came back the second day, did it again, beginning to end. Couple overdubs, that was it. There’s one guitar. The horns aren’t doubled. Nothing’s doubled. Bruce did all the harmony on that record but we couldn’t use his name. We [did] a similar thing with Born In The USA, where we just recorded live in the studio.”

“I made Bob Clearmountain mix ‘Forever’ in mono, to try and achieve the perfect Motown record. It’s never gonna be exact and it shouldn’t be exact, why should it be, but I wanted to capture a Smokey Robinson Motown record. The only way I could do that in my mind was to make it completely mono. He was so good in those days. I mean Bob’s still the best, but in those days he was beyond the best. He was something else when it came down to that Neve board that wasn’t automated, and he’s feelin’ those faders. I made him do something he’d never done before, which requires a whole different way of thinking. You’re now thinking depth-wise and vertically, not horizontally.”

“That’s where my head was at. Can I achieve the emotional communication that my heroes had provided me? My heroes being Motown in general, 10 acts there. Or my heroes at Chess, another 10 acts. Sam Phillips did ‘Rocket 88’ for Ike Turner (Jackie Brenston) and ‘How Many More Years’ for Howlin’ Wolf, three years before Elvis Presley. Unbelievable genius. [I’m] trying to achieve that level of quality in my own world, in my own little bubble, which has these ridiculously high standards. I’m absorbing the 50s and 60s and then trying to integrate them in my head and reproduce them in my own way, not the least bit interested in what’s going on in the 70s or 80s certainly, because it was shit to me, comparatively. An interesting moment here and there. Punk was certainly interesting. But mostly it’s all coming from what I call the renaissance period, ‘51 to ‘71, where it all was created. And that’s true to this day. That’s all I was interested in and that was enough for 10 lifetimes. I didn’t need another bit of input after 1972.”

Track 10: Little Steven, Little Richard and Bob Dylan

In 1982, after recording with Bruce and Gary US Bonds, Steven completed his album, formed the Disciples of Soul (which included Dino Danelli from The Rascals on drums, Jean Beauvoir on bass and Eddie Manion, Mark Pender, Stan Harrison and La Bamba on horns) and played a debut concert at New York’s Peppermint Lounge. Released in October, a month after Nebraska, Men Without Women preceded his first national tour and was credited to his new professional name of Little Steven, which would be used for all future solo activities. “I just wanted separation [from] being the sideman,” he explains. “Each of my personalities required a different name, in order to keep it straight in people’s heads and my own head.” The name referenced his early heroes Little Walter, Little Anthony and Little Richard. In his role as an ordained minister, the latter officiated at Steven’s wedding to Maureen Santoro in New York on New Year’s Eve. Percy Sledge sang “When A Man Loves A Woman” as they walked down the aisle and the reception included performances from Gary US Bonds, Little Milton, The Chambers Brothers and the wedding band from The Godfather. “Little Anthony was doing a cruise at the time or he would have been there.”

“All I can think is, we’ve been hoping to get into recording our whole lives, I’m listening to this and it sounds fucking terrible. Not just the horn charts, everything. It was the worst period of recording in history. Virtually every record from the 50s and 60s sounded great, virtually every record from the early 70s sounded terrible. Because engineers took over, started close miking, padding the walls. Separation, separation, separation, all the things that make rock ‘n’ roll suck. The idea was, you isolate everything and make it sound exciting in the mix. Which they managed to do, miraculously, with the Born To Run album. Because it was pieced together in a bizarre way. Bruce made that record 100% out of willpower, he willed that into existence!”

Steven toured internationally in 1983, then dropped the horns, adopted a more contemporary rock sound and made his second album, Voice Of America. It was an explicitly political record that featured “Solidarity,” “I Am A Patriot,” “Out Of The Darkness,” “Los Desaparecidos” and “Undefeated.” Triggered by his River tour experiences in Europe, this radical transformation was completed with a long period of self-education. “I read every book about post World War Two [US] foreign policy. [It was] shocking how often we were on the wrong side. All of these bad things were happening behind the scenes and nobody was talking about them. No political consciousness whatsoever in the country. I decided I have an obligation to say something about this stuff that we’re all paying for with our taxes.”

“Being conscious of the fact that everybody needs their own identity, I figured who the hell needs another love song from a fucking sideman? I’ll be the political guy. Nobody else is doing it. There were people demonstrating of course. Jackson Browne, John Hall, Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, those guys. The Grateful Dead were doing a benefit every week, but rarely did it end up in the work. In general, people weren’t putting much politics into the lyrics of their songs.” For artists with commercial aspirations, he concedes, that’s a smart move. “Jefferson Airplane being an exception with ‘Volunteers.’ Big exception, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, with Neil Young’s ‘Ohio.’”

Steven contends that Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” introduced the idea of political consciousness in rock ‘n’ roll. “His first electric song. It’s not given enough credit. The first sentence from Bob Dylan’s electric period, ‘Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine, I’m on the pavement thinking about the government.’ What? You’re doing what? You’re thinking about the government? Excuse me? Who does that? Whoever did that before, in a song, no less? There in that one sentence, Bob Dylan communicated what his entire career was gonna be about, which was having fun with language, with inference, symbolism, metaphor and nonsense lyrics that rhymed. ‘Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine,’ what does that mean? It means whatever you want it to mean, right? Then ‘I’m on the pavement thinking about the government.’ Holy shit! You mean we’re supposed to figure out the government? That, to me, is the most important sentence in all the history of rock ‘n’ roll, right there.”

All photos below by Mike Saunders

[stevepotterwrites]

An Appreciation of the Life and Work of Joanne Kyger

The bio in the back of On Time, Joanne Kyger’s collection of poems written between 2005 – 2014, describes her as, “One of the major women poets of the SF Renaissance.” That is, of course, correct, but I would make a case for removing the word “women” from the sentence. While I’m sure the intention of including that gender signifier was to emphasize the importance of her position as a woman in what was largely a man’s world/boy’s club, its placement before “poets” in the sentence diminishes rather than enhances her standing. It reeks of “pretty good for a girl” condescension, unintended as that may be.

Joanne Kyger was one of the major poets of the San Francisco Renaissance coterie, period. She was a woman. She was a woman who, despite operating in what was largely a man’s world/boy’s club, became a major member of that club. But even that SF Renaissance signifier, while more accurate than the Beat Generation designation emphasized in her New York Times obituary and useful in placing her in time and place and lineage, seems unnecessarily limiting. In his introduction to As Ever, her selected poems released in 2002, Kyger’s longtime friend and fellow poet, David Meltzer, says of the atmosphere in the late ’50s when they first met:

“It’s important to remember (or realize) that those days were before literary academicians freeze-framed them into ‘movements or ‘generations.’ The slickest, surest way to defang dissent and creative doubt is to accept it and (ugh) incorporate it into glossy narratives circulated throughout institutional castle culture. (A big irony many tapdance around.) Even then, Joanne was a thoughtful and thinking (and self-effacing) poet of deep innate knowing. Her early work was distinctly complex, personal, and resistant to expectations.”

So how about something like this: Joanne Kyger was a thoughtful and thinking and self-effacing poet whose distinctly complex and personal work made her a major figure in the SF Renaissance/Beat Generation orbit. That self-effacing quality is what gives poems such as “Town Hall Reading With Beat Poets” and “Bob Marley Night Saturday Downtown” and “Fact Checking” their charm. Her poems are at once deep and learned yet casual and conversational. They are also often quite funny. She comes across as a poet who took her poetry seriously while not overly-concerned with being taken seriously herself.

There is more to her poetry than self-deprecating humor, of course. A great sense of reverence is on display throughout her work when engaging with mythological themes, her Zen Buddhist studies, interactions with the natural world, and considerations of the lives and deaths of friends. From the poems in her first book, The Tapestry and the Web, published in 1965, to the late work collected in On Time, Kyger’s writing displays a marvelous way of finding the mythic in the mundane and revealing the mundane in the mythic. Here is how “Pan as the Son of Penelope,” probably her best-known poem, begins:

       Refresh my thoughts of Penelope again

Just HOW          solitary was her wait?

I notice Someone got to her that

                       barrel chested he-goat prancing                        around w/ his reed pipes

is no fantasy of small talk. More the result of BIG talk

                               and the absence of her husband.

In his thought-provoking essay, “The Great(ness) Game,” David Orr discusses how Elizabeth Bishop’s stature has risen posthumously while her friend Robert Lowell’s once-towering reputation has been in decline. It would not surprise me to find Joanne Kyger’s stature ratcheted upward by a similar recalibration of reputations in years to come while those of some of her better-known male peers and predecessors in the SF Renaissance/Beat pantheon are demoted. As a stunningly lovely, yet delicate, voice like Billie Holiday’s or Karen Dalton’s would be difficult to hear when a big booming voice like Pavarotti’s was bellowing nearby, so, too, a subtle poetic sensibility, like Joanne Kyger’s, can get drowned out when there’s a big personality like her friend Ginsberg Howling nearby. Not to mention Duncan and Spicer and Snyder and Whalen and McClure and Berrigan and others. She moved in serious circles.

But life is life and death is death. Reading the books of dead poets after their time has passed and their legends have cooled is a different thing than reading the living. Sometimes the poet of the moment isn’t a poet for the ages. Tastes change and change again. Who knows what the literary landscape of the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first Centuries will look like to readers a hundred years hence. In his essay, Orr quotes a passage from J. D. McClatchy wondering about how Bishop could be claimed as the favorite predecessor poet of contemporary poets as varied as John Ashbery, James Merrill and Mark Strand. Orr takes a stab at an answer: “It’s possible, one might answer, because Bishop was a great poet, if we take ‘great’ to mean something like ‘demonstrating the qualities that make poetry seem interesting and worthwhile to such a degree that subsequent practitioners of the art form have found her work a more useful resource than the work of most if not all of her peers.’” I predict that Kyger’s work will be similarly deemed a useful resource by poets to come.

The Times obituary includes Kyger’s poem “Night Palace” but, for some reason, they did not format the poem, which was composed in projective breath units and spaced on the page in the composition by field manner, as written. That’s a shame. The spacing, in large part, makes the poem the poem it is. It’s not unusual to come across poems laid out in the composition by field manner for which reformatting them with a standard left margin justification doesn’t detract much from the poem. Sometimes it’s little more than ornament. This is not the case with “Night Palace,” a fine example of how much emotional information can be conveyed by spacing and placement on the page in the hands of someone who fully understands the approach.

Her poem “Elegant Simplicity” written May 22, 2007 ends:

Demons are more or less human in appearance Monsters are more animal like

The first soul or spirit                 that resides in a person is immortal

The second soul is the animal spirit         you acquire at birth                 with a real counterpart                      animal spirit                                roving around in the world.

                    If it dies, you die                     That’s it.

Joanne Kyger’s real counterpart animal spirit died in March of this year, so that was it, but her poetry will live on and, I suspect, gain greater prominence in the years to come.

By Steve Potter. Previously published in The New Black Bart Poetry Society’s Parole Blog.

https://thenewblackbartpoetrysociety.wordpress.com/2021/03/21/set-four/

#joanne kyger #american poet #beat generation #san francisco renaissance #bolinas california

[fantasy-pens]

WIP Challenge

Thanks a lot for the tag @fictionalinfinity​ @miabrown007​ and @celestialtitania​!

So here’s my list:

Love is the Answer: (frozen)

The Queen opened her mouth to say something, but then decided to stay quiet. Agnarr was right. Discussing the past would do not good but only open the barely-healed wounds. She had lost her tribe, but he too had lost his Father in the war. 

And they both didn’t know whose fault it was. Just kids at that time, they did what childish innocence highlighted as the best. Protect each other whenever possible. She saved him from the war, and he gave her shelter in Arendelle, all the while protecting her, keeping her safe and close to his heart. Their love was unique,for it had not sprouted from any sort of beneficial royal alliances and friendships. Their love was strong, for it had braved the ravages of time, and had gradually morphed from close friendship to a bond that lasted for eternity.

The Frost In Our Hearts (jelsa)

Once upon a time, there was a girl

It’s weird to find your life story similar to a novel. It’s weirder to read a character’s life story as your own. It’s the weirdest to write your life story in first person.

So, don’t mind the strike, okay? Though I am sorry for ruining your first page like that ;p

2043: The Mystery of the Headless Hunt (Adrinette Miraculous)

“Detective, it’s past noon, so I thought-”Marinette snatched the sheets back from him and cuddled herself again, sighing into the envelope of darkness. “You and your tin brain, both can get the fuck outta here.”The sheets were snatched back again, and that was the moment of enlightenment for Marinette. Her roommate wasn’t a ball of sunshine; rather, he was one of Satan’s minions, pure evilness masked behind fake innocence.

Unnamed fic (maybe a supporting fic to some published work) (Lukanette)

“How do you manage to create these melodies?”

Strong arms wrapped around her waist as a chin rested on her head, and Marinette felt herself melt into the loving embrace.

“It’s simple. I just synchronise our heart songs together, ma cherie.”

A Golden Tomato fic (still deciding the title)

"And from here, you get the most beautiful view of the city of love, the city of Pa-"

"WHAT'S THAT??" shrieked someone. A tourist to be exact.

The guide broke from his praising speech, a bit chuffed at the interruption, and checked over.

Everything was normal. Birds chirping, traffic speeding on the lanes, houseboats floating down the Seine and tourists and residents flocking the city. The city, so peaceful, so calm.

Over-reacting tourists. Sigh. 

Fixing the clearly hyperventilating tourist with an unimpressed gaze, the guide spoke, "Everything is fine, sir."

"Really? Are you sure? ‘Cause if you are, then what for freak's sake is that?!", the tourist pointed frantically in the direction of the Louvre.

Ah!

 A fine piece of artistic malfunction was rampaging the area. Masked teenagers clad in red, black and yellow spandex were fighting a purple-clad bird-boy hybrid, all of them performing mind blowing circus stunts and parkour while fighting with a yo-yo, a baton, a top and a feathered fan. 

 The guide turned back to the group, grinning, "Yep. 100% sure. This is just another normal day in Paris. Now continuing the tour..."

A LadyNoir+Adrinette fic (Undecided title)

“MiLady, I know that look on your face. But please don’t take my Miraculous away. I didn’t even have a leather anniversary as a superhero!”

“I-what? No! I am not taking your Miraculous! And wait…” Ladybug steeped closer to him, and he caught the whiff of her pastries and flowers scent. He would have happily stayed in that small bliss had she not yanked him to her level by his bell.

“Do you specifically wanna celebrate a leather anniversary as a superhero ‘cause your costume is made out of leather?”

“Wow MiLady, you really are a genius. But, why are you still giving me this look?”

Another adrinette fic (I have too many unnamed WIPs...)

Nino had warned him earlier. 

The DJ had given the model the best advice a male human could ever give to another for the protection of sanity of their gender.

“Dude, no matter what happens, never ever, I repeat, NEVER EVER eavesdrop on girls’ talk. Especially when they are talking in groups in hushed whispers. You never know what is cooking in their minds, or what uproar they might create if they know that a boy had been listening. These veelas can turn into hornets in a matter of seconds. And you sure won’t want to be a crisp, sizzled cinnamon roll in the fire of their wrath.”

“Okay!” Like the blessed, not so innocent pure beam of sunshine incarnate Adrien was, he promised to follow the golden advice.

Being a Fox I Know Something’s Fishy

“Paris, it’s high time we realise that underneath the masks, Ladybug and Chat Noir are two ordinary Parisians, just like us, who love their city like we do. With the responsibility of an entire city over their shoulders, can’t we not just help our heroes a little by not complaining about the damage we suffered, when they saved our face in New York by dealing with our local supervillain out there?”

There are also some fully written unpublished fics in there in need of polishing soooo i m not gonna add them here as they are already complete!

Tagging @valiantwarrior37 @fanfics-she-wrote @ladykateofledfordpark @apopcornkernel and umm...whoever sees this!

#jelsa #agduna #adrinette #ladynoir #lukanette #chlonath #jack frost #elsa #adrine agreste #chat noir #ladybug #marinette dupain cheng #chloe bourgeois #nathaniel kurtzberg #luka couffaine #agnarr #iduna #my writing #miniwrites #wips #unnamed #wip challenge

[georgemackayhey]

More Than A Night Out

warning: Explicit content 18+ Only

w/c: 5k

───※ ·❆· ※───

You sat behind the roped off a section of a smoke-filled bar in one of Vegas' most hectic hotels, sporting a fancy dress and feeling a bit anxious.

"I'm George. And you're who I'm supposed to be introducing myself to, right?" He stood leaning in close before you clad in a casual leather jacket with his hands shoved in his pockets. Reading body language had become a much more important part of this job than you'd once figured. But there was a difference between assessing and staring. And you had to catch yourself on the edge of openly gawking at the lean beauty who called himself George.

"Yes, yes, thanks for sparing some time for a chat." You smiled warmly, scooting to the corner of the curved red vinyl booth. George let his nervous grin flicker into a warmer expression as he slid in to meet the opposite corner of the table.

You were a writer for an independent magazine based out of New York. Your publisher had sent you all over America to interview all kinds of talented people of current pop culture. You were used to celebrities and their lingo, and you were used to the pseudo niceties these interviews came along with. After answering your questions with nothing but pride, your subjects would leave and go on being popular. It was your job to make them seem like normal human beings, with an overload of charm.  

In your lap, a hardback notebook held all your hastily scribbled questions that you thought up in preparation for this moment. You were meant to ask George MacKay how his latest film had changed his life and about his rise to fame. You were supposed to get him to gush about acting and tell you some beautiful antidote no other interview had managed to hear the likes of. Your job tonight was to focus on George's latest project, 1917. But George asked the first question.

"So you've been doing this a while, huh?" The man with sky blue eyes asked. A waiter had breezed by, sliding a list of drinks for you pair to choose from.

"I only ask because the bio in your email was like, really impressive. I don't know if I'm worthy." George laughed, gazing at the beer list as you shrugged. You had conducted conversations with the likes of many old, jaded stars. Tonight was different. A young, spirited man sat across from you and his eyes were shining right into yours. You were completely unworthy.

"Don't worry. I'll only write exactly what you say." You smiled, eyeing the mixed drinks, but only ordering water when the waiter came back by.

"What's been your craziest interview?" George wondered, propping his chin in his hand as he looked to you like a boy in school, and you were a fireman on career day. You laughed out loud, because yes. You laugh because you were supposed to be asking the questions.

"I made Axel Rose cry." You grinned, peeking behind a strand of your hair to ensure this wasn't something you went around telling everyone. "He was the guest during a benefit for our magazine. I asked about his family and he just sort of lost it."

George laughed out loud, beaming at you. So far, this felt more like riffing with an old friend of a friend. You nearly forgot about the list of questions in your lap. But even after you cracked open your notebook, George still had more to say.

"With the right questions, I bet you get a lot of dirt." He rose a pale brow as if there was something he was trying to get you to understand. A code he wished you would crack.

"You should let me ask you a few." You mused, leaning in a little closer to establish your longing to get this show on the road. Not that you wanted the night to end sooner. You could have basked in the glow of his blinding smile for all time. But you were on a clock...

George watched your mouth move as you asked him about 1917. He looked you in the eyes when he told you his favorite memories from set. You watched his hands move around as he explained the impact that acting out such a tumultuous time period had on his personal and professional life. In the lulls in between conversation, when he paused to sip his lager, your eyes met each others. It was by far one of the more enjoyable nights of your career. He was easy to listen to and very lovely to look at.

When the clock struck midnight, and your notebook was filled with more information than you'd even consider finalizing, the night ended. With smiles and genuine thanks, you parted from the grotty Vegas bar. But as you made your way through the casino, you turned back to see George lingering near the elevators, watching you disappear into the crowd.

___

Up in your luxurious room, too nice for someone to stay in all alone, you checked your phone. You had a flight to catch in the morning, travel that would put you home right in time for the weekend.

But a dark email loomed at the top of your notification bar. Your flight had been delayed due to weather, a wicked snow storm had taken residence in New York. Seriously, this late in February? The airline had given you a limited few options for later flights, and you slumped on the downy hotel bed, booking the soonest flight out of this trashy city.

Looked like you'd be spending another day hanging around the hotel that felt more like a small city of its own. Luckily, you had something, rather; someone to write that would keep you pleasantly distracted.

___

Last nights silky was totally worth sporting in front of your modern-day movie star crush, but you were glad to be more comfortable this morning. After a long scalding shower, you slipped into reasonable leggings and an old band shirt that was a few sizes too large. This could pass as sporty, right? With thoughts of fashion draining from your head, you grabbed your laptop and started a lazy shuffle toward the lobby of the hotel.

You usually wrote in coffee shops, back home, but the lobby swarmed with tourists was a little too hectic for your liking. Luckily, you wandered to the opposite wing of the lodge and found a relatively cozy nook outside of a casino. It was too early for the swarm of gamblers to distract you with drunken cheers, but the stead buzz of well-groomed patrons coming and going from the bar was white noise music to your ears.

You nestled into a chaise lounge chair by a window and ignored everything besides your laptop screen. There was nothing that could stop you from spending a little too long scrolling through George's fan tag on Instagram. When you finally started to outline the story based on his interview, you were one hundred words from your limit of one thousand, and you still hadn't said everything you wanted. You could have gushed over his polite and charming nature long enough to take up every page of the magazine you worked for.

But you reigned yourself in, reworded for a while, and started to finalize the article when a passer-by disrupted your work for the first time in a couple of hours.

"Is that about me?" It was him.

"Oh my God." You laughed, clutching onto your laptop like an instinct. You were shocked to see George again; dressed in a fine-looking sweater that made your heart buzz with a silly warmth. You cursed your leggings and wondered why you were stupid enough to wear your old thrift store Bowie tshirt in public.

"Can I read it?" George grew a wicked grin, moving to sit at the foot of the chaise you occupied. You scrambled to straighten your poster as your heart speed up in search of an excuse. You really shouldn't let him do that- but you couldn't say no to his sweet face, especially when he was smiling right at you.

"Uh..." You glanced between George and the laptop you'd been staring at for far too long. You realized that you were one spell check away from sending the damn thing in. You pressed the spellcheck button in a flash, so you wouldn't have to lie. But no errors were found, and you were left with zero choice.

"Just know I shouldn't be doing this." You warned, scooting your laptop away with a cringe. George, in all his charm, waggled his brow at you as he leaned in a little closer to read your story. You held your breath at his silly expression and ceased to breathe the entire time his eyes locked onto your laptop screen.

"This..." George spoke up after a very scary bout of silence. He shook his head as his eyes scanned the page on your laptop, and you felt your heart begin to stall.

"You actually, like... listened to what I had to say," George smirked in unmistakable disbelief. "It's so much more than a Q&A. You drew conclusions and made our conversation into a story. It's perfect." George glanced up to you for the first time in a while, and his eyes were searing into yours.

"Geez," You chuckled nervously, digging your nails into the stitching on the cushion below you. "Thank you, George. I never really get feedback like that from anyone I write for." You realized. Sure, you're articles we're promoted by the people featured in them, but they hardly ever had a direct comment on your work.

"When is it coming out?" George wondered, leaning on his elbow, looking up toward you. You leaned toward the laptop that was the barrier between you and the pretty man, but were closer to him than ever before.

"I just have to change the font..." You noted, pressing buttons as you spoke.  "open my email..." George's eyes eventually flickered from your face back to your screen. "and send it in."

"Would you like to do the honors?" You grinned, moving the cursor over the send button on the screen. George gazed back to you with a hearty chuckle but didn't waste much more time before clicking the send button for you.

"And now we wait." You shrugged, wrapping your arms around your waist as the handsome man smiled your way. Oh if you'd only put on a little lipstick...

"How should we pass the time, then?" George wondered in a curious lilt. "Oh, let's go drink one of those thirty-four-ounce margaritas to celebrate. It's the perfect occasion to day drink." Was he kidding? Because you weren't entirely sure if you were being punk'd or not, you tried to hide your wide-eyed reaction as you responded.

"I'm hardly dressed for the occasion." You grinned, shutting your laptop.

"If it's any consolation, that bar is empty right now, besides there's a lady asleep in the back in her clothes from last night." George pointed across the way. There we're people flooding the casino and taking their drinks to gamble. There was no way you were about to pass up this opportunity.

In the blink of an eye, you were sitting at a bar top, turned toward each other to share a ridiculously overpriced thirty-four-ounce strawberry margarita out of honest to God silly straws.

"This should actually be illegal."

"Do you remember the prohibition, George?" You laughed, watching the blended ice travel through the purple looped straw as you sipped.

"Of course not." George laughed incredulously. "Just because I lived through the war doesn't mean I'm that old."

"Ha ha." You mused, wondering why it was so easy to be around George. You'd just met him, but from the moment he opened his mouth, it was like you'd been chatting together for years. It was like he saw past the questions you were being paid to ask, and heard you asking them. Maybe just because you really did want to know his answers.

"I want to know what you've lived through," George demanded, taking a turn to drink out his straw from the margarita you'd been sharing. He'd been asking questions like that since you'd met him, and your chest blossomed with nerves as he peered up at you through his lashes. In your nervous scramble to give George an answer, your brain settled on a story about the first time you met Will Smith.

"Wait, wait, wait." George broke away from his green silly straw and held a dismissive hand out in front of you.

"We're off the record now, y/l/n. I want to know the real shit! Ya know, the last time you cried. Your Chipoltle order." George was waving his hands as if his questions were obvious. You laughed out loud, throwing your head back and relishing the moment you realized how lucky you were to be living in this moment.

So you reluctantly told him some things. You couldn't justify giving your best details away, but you liked the idea of a stranger knowing you the worst thing you did in second grade, and a silly trademark your family coined. George kept his brilliant gaze set on you, and you could almost see your own stories coming to life in his eyes. He was actually listening to you.

The focus on you was becoming a bit too overwhelming, so you shifted to ask George a few more questions, tipsy enough to pry for a few of the same antidotes George had asked you for. After laughing over a few fun facts about his hometown and the time he ran away from his mum in the supermarket, you both settled into silence. You were busy trying to compute how wild this afternoon had turned.

"How long are you staying?" He asked after a beat. When he caught your attention, you realized he'd never lost it and you'd been staring at him like you longed to do last night.

"Oh uh-"

"I was gifted tickets to one of those Cirque shows and my friend's flights got canceled.. So... I thought maybe... you'd wanna..."

"I... sure." You sit up straight, trying to bite back the cheesy grin on your face. You weren't sure how you ended up here in Vegas, sharing a drink with a stunning boy, but you thanked your lucky stars as George went one telling you the details he'd roped you into tonight.

___

The storm in New York had only gotten worse, as you scrolled through updates on your cities local website. Your flight was supposed to take off tomorrow morning, but the storm hadn't let up since the last flight got canceled. You decided now wasn't the time to worry, and went about tearing through your suitcase praying you'd find something nice enough to wear.

You exchanged room numbers, agreeing to meet up at George's tonight. You had more than enough time to get ready but still scrambled to present yourself as perfectly as possible. Agreeing to a night out with George was as lucky as you'd ever been.

After shimmying into a pretty outfit and fixing your makeup just right, your phone buzzed with a notification. Your editor had sent you the final edit of the story you'd written for George, praising you for a job well done. You couldn't help but giggled as you skipped down the hall on the way to George's room, three stories higher.

"Hello, love! You look wonderful." George smiled wide as he opened the door, gesturing for you to come in. His single room was much like yours, a living area and kitchen big enough to house a family, and a bedroom off down the hall. Vegas confounded you.

You rested your room key on a desk near the door and watched George slide into a sharp blue jacket, bringing out the shine of his matching eyes. God, how did he get better looking by the minute?

He escorted you from his suite with a coy grin as if your outing was scandalous.

"Your interview should be published next week. My editor loves it." You informed, walking in step with George to the elevators.

"Of course they do, you're an incredible writer." George pulled a face as if this were a fact everyone knew. You pushed the elevator button with a roll of your eyes, unsure how to handle his outlandish flattery.

"All because of the answers you gave me. You're an incredible subject." You fawned, feeling brave enough to in one fleeting moment.

"Then we make the perfect pair," George smirked at you, keeping his eyes on yours as you passed into the elevator doors. Your legs must have figured out how to move on their own because you felt a bit stunned still by the look in George's eye after his soft comment.

The Cirque show was just across the street in another hotel. But because Vegas was insane, it took you a solid fifteen minutes to cross between traffic and a packed hotel lobby to get to the venue inside. By the time you and George settled into your seats, you felt all too unworthy of what was happening.

"Thanks again for bringing me along. I don't know how I got so lucky." You huffed a nervous laugh, trying not to openly swoon over how close you were to the boy. His leg was just barely far enough away from brushing against yours, and you were meant to sit there like it was totally cool for the next hour.

"Trust me, I'm the lucky one." George nodded, turning his head toward the stage as the lights went dim. Your heart was beating a mile a minute and during the first few minutes of the show, all you could truly focus on was how close George was to you. You felt like a schoolgirl on her first date, and reprimanded yourself for letting your feelings get this way.

But halfway through the show, something astounding happened. It was more thrilling than all the acrobatics and dance numbers happening on stage before you. George let his fingers bloom across your palm before they fit perfectly between yours. He sat holding your hand with his eyes fixed on the show, while you tried to keep from melting off the seat into a puddle.

The show ended and you walked out of the theater together, quietly flooding out into the street that was somehow busier than before.

"Thanks for that. I've only been to Vegas for work and have never had time to do the cheesy trashy fun bits."

"Me either." George looked to you and you could tell he was brewing some idea behind his sparkling eyes. Just then, his full name was called out from somewhere beyond your shared gaze. That's when you realized you were still holding his hand. You took a step back, untangling your fingers when you realized a group of drunk college students were excitedly asking for George's photo. You watched from a few steps away and swallowed the silly blooming crush you couldn't shake. What happens in Vegas stayed, right? Maybe you were both just blinded by the ancient ideal.

But when the fans disbanded, George didn't waste a beat slipping his hand back into your grasp.

"Let's go have some fun." He waggled his brow the same as he had hours ago, smirking all the while.

You proceeded to drink and laugh and gamble and dance into the early morning. Your evening became a blur of flashing neon lights and booming bass notes. Even in your alcohol-fueled daze, you fully felt George's fingers linger on your shoulder as he led you to and from the dance floor. His touch was warm and steady and the only thing that made sense in the night full of fast-paced fun you had no time to process.

On the walk back to the hotel, reality threatened to seep in as your feet burned in your heels. When you realized you left your room key in George's room, you felt no shame in taking your heels off and walking the hotel carpet with a little more ease. "I'm all for a movie night in but that was so much fun."

"Me too. Let's have a movie night next." George grinned, wasted as you were.

"Yes!" You fawned in exhausted excitment.

He led you into his room where your room key sat waiting where you'd left it. But the thought of walking one more step made you want to cry. So you asked if George minded if you sat for a moment; settling on the tiny loveseat giving your feet a break and talking yourself into the last bit of walking toward your room.

Yeah, big mistake. Before you knew it, you were totally passed out there and slept soundly on the sofa in a room that wasn't yours. When you woke up and noticed your shoe's near George's by the door you felt so embarrassed for having crashed like that, your weak hangover trumped by shame.

"Shit." You mutter, quietly moving to sneak toward the door. Your cellphone rested on the counter next to your room key. But as you reach for your things, you hear George shuffle into the room. He's dressed for a new day in a plain button-up and suit jacket.

"Oof, I'm really sorry for falling asleep." You cringed, grabbing your room key, a little afraid to look right in George's eye.

"It's alright really." He nodded. "It was so late, I don't know how you slept on that little thing. But  I didn't want to move you and make it weird." George kind of grimaced, hoping his comment wasn't as equally unwelcome as he seemed to think the action might have been. "I'm sorry you don't have to leave just yet."

"I have a flight, actually." You frowned suddenly, wishing you didn't have to leave this place you hated a day ago. But as you unlocked your phone to make sure you weren't too late, there we're a slew of emails from your flight agency, canceling your morning commute again.

"And now I don't have a flight."

George's phone seemed to buzz to life at the same moment, it was a new day after all. He glanced at his notifications frowning the same as you just had.

"Well I was going to invite you to breakfast but I've got another meeting added to my list of a ridiculous amount of things to do today." George sighed.

You knew the fun would have to come to an end sooner rather than later, he was a busy guy, an increasingly important, beautiful, busy guy. And you were stuck in Vegas all over again, without much to keep you occupied from how much you'd grown to love it here, just a little.

"Maybe we can have that movie night if I get back early enough." George smiled, leaning over to retrieve his shoes from the doormat. You couldn't believe George had remembered your off the cuff remark from early this morning, but somehow his comment felt more like a raincheck, than an invite. And whether you were hungover or paranoid, you couldn't tell.

So you took the cue to gather your things, opting to carry your shoes and stood in the doorway.

"You know where to find me, then." You offered, too afraid of agreeing right off and seeming too desperate to spend more time with him. You wished George good luck with all his movie star duties for the day and sulked on the long walk back to your shitty matching room.

___

Your day was spent ordering room service, exhausted by the idea of going back out and about in all the madness that made up Vegas. You scrolled through a measly list of flights to take, opting to stay another night and hoping the storm would pass soon. Soon, the sun was setting and after a long bubble bath, you slipped into your favorite pair of pj's, planning to listen to some podcasts to make the most of this evening. But just as you finished cleaning up, a knock came at your door. You hadn't ordered more room service, and there was a sign dangling from your door handle warning away the maids.

You were surprised to find George on the other side of your door, looking happy to see you. You honestly hadn't expected to see him again, you thought your luck had run its course. And you spent the whole day trying not to reminisce over the way you'd grown more comfortable near each other as the night went on.

You greeted him with a smile, comfortable enough in your pj's when you noticed he was wearing joggers now, too.

"You shed the suit?" You laughed.

"I figured if we're having a movie night I better dress for the occasion," George smirked. You hung your head to hide your blush and opened the door wider for him to come in all the way.

Okay, so maybe you had failed to plan this far ahead, but you hardly cared what happened next. You and George floated to the sofa in front of the television, and he reached for the remote.

“Have you memorized the tv guide yet?” George prodded as you sat next to him, leaving a sliver of space for good measure.

“I’ll have you know I’ve been far too busy running around the city this weekend.” You smiled, turning your gaze toward the television, too skittish to meet George’s baby blue eyes this close up.

He clicked his tongue as if to say “what a shame” all while flipping through channels. He landed on Hallmark, tossing the remote down ceremoniously. You couldn’t help but laugh as the movie seemed to just begin.

“Is that Betty White?” You chuckled.

“You’re welcome.” George boasted over getting lucky finding this film queued up perfectly for the two of you on this spontaneous night. You spent a little bit laughing over the cheesy musical flares and dramatics that made up every great Hallmark film, this one included. But as the film played on, you couldn’t help but notice the bits of genuinely good storytelling peeking through.

George kept you laughing throughout the film, but near the end, both of you got quiet and watched in silence until the credits rolled.

“Damn. That was actually just a little bit good.” George spoke up, a little quiet. That’s when you noticed how close he’d gotten to you. The sliver of space you’d left at the beginning of the movie was now barely noticeable.

“Yeah.” You laughed, amazed by more than just the film. “This whole weekend has been surprisingly wonderful.” You spoke softly, daring to glance right at George, who had already fixed his eyes on you.

You couldn't tell who made the first move but the next thing you know, you're kissing him. You and George took turns sharing feather-light pecks, each of you chasing each other kiss after one ended. George was definitely the first to place both strong hands around the back of your head and kiss you like he meant it. You were nearly too stunned to kiss him back, but once you started the floodgates broke off their hinges and there was no turning back. You climbed into his lap and latched on for all it was worth because surely this was a dream and you weren't ready to wake up at all.

You savored the steady build of his fingers trailing down your arms while your kisses grew deeper, mouths pushing against each others like you’d been doing this for ages. Your hands had a mind of their own, creeping softly under the hem of George’s soft tshirt to his hot skin below.

"Hey," George gently broke your kiss and cupped your face in both hands. You practically held your breath as his shimmering eyes searched yours. "You okay with this?" George seemed to genuinely wonder. His voice was dripping with lust and his body was warm underneath yours. It didn't take a detective to read George like a book, but he still had the self-control and gentle heart to make sure you were comfortable. It only made you want him more. But you were still far too shy to say so, no matter your actions. So you bit your lip and hummed in sweet agreeance, wrapping your hands around George’s neck.

You watched George’s face stretch into a smile before he ducked his head to the crook of your neck where he let out a contented sigh before grazing his teeth along your skin. You squealed with delight when he swiftly pinned you down on the sofa to playfully pepper your face with kisses like something less heated was taking place.

"You know, now would be the perfect time to carry me from the couch to your bed." You rose an encouraging brow, reminding George of just this morning when he was too afraid of disturbing your sleep on his sofa that matched this one. George let out a laugh as he peeled himself off the top of you and picked you up bridal style in his impressively buff arms.

"Right this way, madame." George teased, carrying you through his bedroom door.

You had thrown the covers into place the best you could the last time you woke up here. George rested you gently on the bed, much like you were sleeping and he was afraid of waking you up. But your heart was beating fast enough to win a race, somehow increasing when George rested beside you, pushing your hair behind your ear.

“You’re very pretty, you know?” George blinked, whispering to you.

“I’m glad you think so.” You spoke back even quieter, reaching out to touch his face. He was so handsome it nearly stopped your heart. George leaned in for another kiss, this one slow and steady. You hadn’t felt so content in ages, you could have laid there kissing George forever and been happy. But then his fingers trailed down your side to grab your hip, and you swore you saw stars. George pulled your leg over his and now you were pressed against one another, kisses growing deeper still.

“This alright?” He asked almost timidly, as his fingers crept below your nightshirt.

“Yeah,” You breathed as George moved his kisses down your neck, and his hand to your chest. Your fingers splayed through his hair as he reached around your back to find the clasp on your bralette

“It’s in the front.” You giggled, feeling George smile against your skin.

“Very cute.” He hummed in your ear before kissing your jaw and finding the button. He shoved your shirt most of the way off, and you had to move out from under him to remove it all the way. Before settling back against the pillows, you pulled off George’s shirt so you could revel in the warmth of his skin.

You settled in his lap, each knee on either side of his hips throwing your arms around his neck and kissing him again, somehow still enjoying each brush of his tongue against yours like it was the first time. George signed into your mouth, each pleasant groan traveling straight down your spine. You rolled your hips against his, and George’s groans grew darker.

His fingers were lost in your hair and you found a steady pace to rock against him, drawing out longer whimpers from his lips with each new movement. Soon, his hand toyed with the drawstring of your shorts and he had to break away from your kiss to ask if he could take them off you could only muster an encourageable nod as your breath got caught in your throat. George laid you back, keeping those stunning blue eyes locked on yours all the while, only breaking away when he slid the last of your layers off. His fingers slid slowly between your legs as he laid next to you, pressing his forehead against yours.

“You’re so fuckin’ pretty. How’d I get so lucky?” George spoke, you could feel his breath ghost across your lips while he went on building up the tension in your stomach. It didn’t take long for you to fill with fire, a contradictory chill shooting through your system. You couldn’t take it any longer.

“George,” You sighed, opening your eyes to look at him again, “need you.”

You watched his eyes go dark as he slowly moved away from you, slipping his joggers off and slotting himself between your legs.

“You’re sure?” He asked one final time.

“Please.” You groaned, placing your hands on his shoulders to brace yourself. With one last kiss on your lips, the Disney prince type, he pushed into you. If you thought the noises George had made before were beautiful, the ones he was making now could’ve moved you to tears. He found your hand and held it with one of his while the other slipped below your belly button.

Your heavy sighs and desperate moans synced up and you rode your highs on the edge of one another. George didn’t move off the top of you right away, instead, he stayed there with his face buried in your hair soaking up the quiet moment.

“That was wonderful, love.” George whispered in your ear as he fell to your side. You turned to face him, biting back a yawn.

“You’re wonderful.” You sleepily smiled. George pulled you against him then, and you rested your hand on his chest so you could feel his heartbeat. The steady rhythm puts you to sleep in no time.

___

The next morning came late, and the Vegas sun shone brightly through the space between the curtains you forgot to close.

George was still by your side, but you’d drifted apart in the night. So upon noticing his eyes were open and glued on you, you felt no shame curling up next to his side.

"This has been the longest one night stand of my life." You sighed dramatically, comfily resting your head on his broad shoulder. George was quiet for a beat and you were a bit worried you’d upset him. But then he spoke up, with a gentle voice saturated in sleep.

"Wanna see how long we can last? I don’t think I wanna stop waking up to you."

How could you say no? You’d spent the whole weekend saying yes to George, and look where it had gotten you. So you agreed to stay one more night in Vegas, hoping what happened there would last a lifetime.

───※ ·❆· ※───

Requests are open ♡

#george mackay #george mackay x reader #george mackay fanfic #george mackay imagine

[scifigeneration]

The US military has officially published three UFO videos. Why doesn't anybody seem to care?

by Adam Dodd

US Department of Defense

On April 27, 2020, the US Department of Defense issued a public statement authorising the release of three “UFO” videos taken by US Navy pilots.

The footage appears to depict airborne, heat-emitting objects with no visible wings, fuselage or exhaust, performing aerodynamically in ways that no known aircraft can achieve. The DoD doesn’t use the terms “unidentified flying object” or “UFO” but does clearly state “the aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified’.”

Thoughts about what UFOs are vary widely – from illusions to alien spacecraft. However, a workable, conservative definition is: “intelligently-controlled airborne objects not apparently made by humans”.

Only a small fraction of UFO reports collected globally over the past seven decades seem to describe such objects, but the Navy footage appears to fit the bill. Whether such objects are vehicles of alien invasion or not, their mere presence would seem to indicate a national security threat, which is partly what makes the Pentagon’s recent announcement so puzzling.

This is the first time the Pentagon has publicly confirmed the authenticity of UFO footage. It should have been a momentous announcement, but it seems to have barely moved the needle on the UFO controversy. Why?

The announcement is new, but the videos are not

The three grainy, monochrome infrared videos – one taken in November 2004, the other two in January 2015 – had already been leaked online, in 2007 and 2017, respectively. They also gained international attention after the New York Times published them as part of a December 2017 exposé on the Pentagon’s secret UFO research program, the so-called “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program”.

The three videos released by the US Department of Defense show ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’.

That program was allegedly headed by Luis Elizondo, who claims to have been instrumental in the 2017 leaks, although his background has been credibly called into question. After resigning from the DoD, Elizondo immediately joined To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a UFO research collective founded by former Blink 182 frontman Tom DeLonge.

In September 2019, Joseph Gradisher, claiming the title of “spokesman for the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare,” confirmed the authenticity of all three videos in an email to a well-known UFO blog called The Black Vault. This development was quickly reported by the Washington Post.

The UFO footage in question, then, has appeared less like a shot out of the blue, and more like an echo in the night. Its gradual, staggered confirmation by the DoD mirrors the entrance of the footage itself into the public consciousness.

Whether this happened by accident or design, we may never know. As the technoculture critic Richard Thieme has astutely observed, “the UFO world is a hall of mirrors. The UFO world on the internet is a simulation of a hall of mirrors.”

Not ordinary, but not entirely invented

Despite the maddening refractions of the UFO rabbit hole, we can be certain of one thing. The modern figure of the UFO maintains an uneasy residence on “the margins of the real”.

UFOs are clearly not ordinary objects, like rocks, chairs or smartphones. But neither are they utterly immaterial products of the cultural imagination, like werewolves, vampires or fairies.

If, as historian of science M. Norton Wise has argued, “to make something visible is to make it real, or to try to”, then the question of whether UFOs exist or not largely hinges on debates about representation and authenticity.

When it comes to phenomena that may not fit into our framework of what is real – phenomena like UFOs – what kind of representations of them will we regard as authentic?

More specifically, what would an authentic representation of a UFO look like? Who would have the authority to afford it that authenticity? And how would that authentication proceed?

What would ‘legitimate’ UFO footage look like?

In her widely influential 1977 polemic, On Photography, Susan Sontag observed “the images that have virtually unlimited authority in a modern society are mainly photographic images; and the scope of that authority stems from the properties peculiar to images taken by cameras”.

Within this paradigm, even the poorest photograph is always more “legitimate” than the most refined and accurate painting. The Navy UFO footage is presented as something more than a photograph, however. It is offered as professional data, collected by highly skilled practitioners.

Even if we fail to fully understand everything on the plane’s Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) display, or even how the video was made, it seems data-driven and authentic – an impression reiterated by the grainy, monochrome quality of the image itself.

As observers, we are led to believe that, despite the somewhat visually disappointing resolution, we are watching authentic footage. In a way, the visual disappointment helps to qualify the videos as candidates for legitimacy.

Even though few of us know what such a video “should” look like, we assume that, since UFO encounters are spontaneous and surprising, footage is likely to be somewhat less than satisfactory.

These expectations present a dilemma. If an image of a UFO is too clear it is likely to be read as obviously fake, but if it’s too blurry it could be anything.

A superficial reading of the Navy UFO footage would likely lead to the latter evaluation. But given the nature of the footage (it is infrared, not technically photographic, so establishes the heat signature of the objects depicted), and the institutional context (the Pentagon is not known for producing and distributing fake UFO videos), it’s hard to avoid concluding the footage shows genuine physical anomalies. If that’s the case, it would be worthy of serious scientific and military attention, both of which currently seem absent.

‘A hell of a video’

UFOs can be difficult and uncomfortable to think about. As I have argued elsewhere, one symptom of that difficulty is that individuals and institutions maintain their own ignorance of the situation.

A persistent trope in Western UFO mythology is that every American president is briefed on the reality of the situation on taking office. The current president and commander-in-chief of the US Armed Forces, Donald Trump, commented on the recently released footage: “I just wonder if it’s real. That’s a hell of a video.”

It was a rare unifying statement from a notoriously divisive and antagonistic president, perhaps encapsulating the most likely public reaction to this latest installment in the UFO mystery: just wonder.

About The Author:

Adam Dodd is a Tutor at The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

#ufo sightings #ufo

[darlingpetao3]

Seducing the Gem (Nash Wells x Reader, Chapter 1/9)

Rating: M (Smut in Chapter 6 only)

Summary: When a mysterious package shows up at your front door, you (a famous Romance novelist) are hurtled from your virtually uneventful life and into one of danger and adventure. In a quest to save your captured friend Caitlin from impending harm, you run into a suave adventurer named Nash who helps you along the way. Or is the charming Nash simply after something in your possession...?

A/N: My Romancing the Stone AU is finally here!! Again, check out the film if you haven’t already (it’s one of my favourites). This has been such a fun series for me to write and I really hope you enjoy it! Major MAJOR thanks to @mintchipcupcake​ for being my beta-reader for this story! (You’re amazing!!) Let me know if any of you would like to be tagged for upcoming chapters. There will be nine installments total and I will do my best to post every Tuesday.

The altered-human stood before me, looming in the shadows of my apartment. His fists glowed with the light of a thousand suns.

“I know who you are,” his voice croaked. A shiver ran down my back. Yes, I was only in my lace nighty, but I was by no means cold.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I feigned innocence. He took calculated steps towards me, and I knew I’d have to act quickly. This guy was not about to try to kill me a second time.

Luckily, ‘acting quickly’ was something I was exceptional at doing.

The brusque altered-human grunted, then lunged at me with a fiery fist. Little did he know that wouldn’t do much.

I saw the punch coming as if it was in slow motion and dodged his attack, watching his hand glide by my head at a turtle’s pace. I let the momentum return to normal before grabbing his wrist and uttering, “You came to the wrong house, pal.”

It was easy to flip him; he made a thump on my hardwood floor and groaned at the impact. I took that opportunity to run circles around him so fast that I could feel the electricity coursing through my veins until it culminated into a bolt of lightning in my hand.

Power up, baby.

I let the bolt fly, dead straight, until it connected with the altered-human’s chest. He shouted, and the impact of the shot hurtled him out my window to the street below.

There was a commotion outside - voices of distressed concern. I knew I’d be in some serious shit, and not just because I threw a man out my window.

I’d be locked up for being an altered-human too.

There was no time to collect any personal items, just my coat, and I knew my powers wouldn’t work again right away. It always took a while for them to store back up. The sirens already blared, announcing the authorities’ arrival. I climbed out the window of my bedroom and shimmied down the fire escape. Only, in my haste, my bare foot slipped and I lost my hold on the wet metal ladder. I screamed for what I thought would be my final act as a living being.

But there was suddenly a big, muscular arm wrapped around my nearly naked self. The wind whipped at my face, blowing my hair every which way. It wasn’t until I was safely set on the ground that I finally saw the face of my swinging saviour. But I’d know that touch anywhere.

My beloved Chase. The one man I trusted. The only real man in this godforsaken city.

“Aw, did you dress down for me?” he said cheekily, looking my scantily clad body up and down.

“Shut it, the cops are here,” I replied, trying to hide my blush, “and they’ll be after you too.”

“Then we better high-tail it.” Chase summoned his grappling hook into the barrel of his gun. “How ‘bout a kiss for the road?”

I pressed up onto the balls of my feet to ghost his lips with mine.

“How about I save us first, then you kiss me later?” I snatch the device from his hand. “Hold on.”

~

You can’t help but swoon at your desk, fanning your face with your hand. You could write about these two forever! However, you think that this is the perfect cliffhanger ending to your latest fantasy-romance manuscript. It will set up Book Two in the series wonderfully.

“You’ve done it again,” you congratulate yourself on a job well done. It’s been quite the journey in writing this, and of course, you’ve fallen in love with yet another male character you’ve created.

But there’s just something about Chase that makes him your favourite. You think that your readers are really going to like him, fall in love with him as you have.

Deciding you need to celebrate finishing your draft, you make your way to the kitchen in your sweats, hoodie, and fluffy socks. In doing so, you pass the numerous hanging posters of your New York Times bestselling novels and fanart done by fans.

Humming a tune to yourself, you make a beeline for the fridge, and - there it is - the small personal-sized cake you had bought for this moment. You knew you’d finish the book today, and if the happy-cliffhanger-ever-after ending wasn’t something to look forward to, the cake definitely was.

Maybe you’ll bust out the hot chocolate too.

And perhaps some Bailey’s to go with it. And a bubble bath? Oh, tonight was going to be fabulous!

It’s just you living alone in your apartment, along with all the characters you’d created, residing in your head and begging to have their stories told on paper. You didn’t win the Romance Writer of the Year Award for being a slacker. You didn’t have time for anything else. You didn’t have time for anyone else, or so you continuously tell yourself. However, if a handsome and dashing man like Chase were ever to enter your life, who knows?

What would it be like to be swooped in on and saved like that? What would it be like to save him in return? Alas, you think, you will never find out. You live a virtually uneventful life. You don’t have fictitious altered-human powers (though you wished you did), there’s no one chasing you or wanting to kill you. Likewise, there was no significant-other on the horizon, and now you feared that no one would ever compare to the fictional man you’d created for your latest novel.

These novels are your only means of romance and fantastic adventures. You live in your own creations. It’s an escape - An opportunity to live something so impossible.

Curling up on the couch, you sip your spiked hot cocoa and shovel spoonfuls of the delicious cake in your mouth.

“Here’s to you, Chase,” you toast the imaginary hero in your life.

***

You wake up to an incessant vibration. And while that may sound like a fun way to wake up, it’s just your phone.

Ew, someone’s calling me.

You give a quick stretch from your position on the couch where you’d fallen asleep last night before answering the call.

Strange… it’s an Unknown Caller.

Normally, you’d leave it. After all, as you like to say, “If it’s important, they’ll leave a message.” But today, you think, why not? You’re still on cloud nine from finishing your book.

“Hello?” you answer. There’s no reply, but the call still hasn’t dropped. Someone is still there. “Hello?” you try again.

Whoever it is on the other line ends the call, and you’re left incredibly confused. It’s too early in the morning for this-

Oh, shit!

You just remember you have a meeting with your publisher this morning! Shit! You throw your blanket off of you and dash to your bedroom to make yourself at least semi-professional looking. You think you manage to pull it off, too, but you know you won’t look half as gorgeous as Mrs. West-Allen.

As you scoop up your manuscript and take one step out the door, you see a small package that must have been delivered recently. What shocks you most is the name of the sender.

Ronald Raymond.

But that’s impossible. Ronnie, Caitlin’s fiancé, he’s dead…

You shove it back inside your apartment with your foot. That weirdness can wait, you’ve got a book to sell. Ahh!

It’s a brisk nearly-winter day in Central City. The snow hasn’t begun to fall quite yet, but you’re anticipating it. I wonder what it would be like to write about Chase and his adventures in the snow. Imagine being cozied up next to him in an abandoned cabin with a fireplace and a bearskin rug-

Okay, you are so going to write these thoughts down when you get the next chance. It could be fodder for the sequel!

By the time you make it to Jitters, Iris West-Allen is heading to sit down in one of the large comfy leather chairs in the middle of the cafe with two coffees. You sigh in relief that she’d only just arrived too.

“Hey, you!” she greets you. “There’s my favourite author!”

“Iris, hi,” you take the coffee she offers and you both air kiss each other’s cheeks.

“Is that the manuscript?” Your publisher points to the massive tome of printed-out pages under your shoulder.

“It most certainly is!”

Iris claps her hands together once. “I’m so excited to read it. Now sit, sit. We have lots to discuss.”

Over the next forty-five minutes, you both discuss the book itself, new book tour information starting in the new year, and everything in between. At one point, the conversation takes a turn when your friend and boss starts pointing out various men around the café. She’s always been keen to set you up with someone, as you have been incredibly single for a very long time now.

You wish she wouldn’t, though.

“What about that guy?” she points out a man at the order counter, but adds, “No, never mind. Too bland.” She eyeballs the room looking for eligible bachelors.

“Too gross.”

“Too desperate.”

“Too hipster.”

“Too happy.”

You laugh. “Iris, your husband is actual sunshine, remember?”

“Well, what about him, hmm?” Iris motions with her eyes off to the side - a man with a too-perfect coiff and a shit-eating grin. He winks at you.

You internally cringe. “No, no, it’s just, he’s not…”

“What? He’s not Chase Hutton? Come on, (Y/N).”

“I know, but Iris, I believe there’s someone amazing out there for me. I don’t know where, and I don’t know how, but I’ll find him. And he’s not that guy. Why do you have to bring this up all the time?”

Iris places a hand on yours. “Because I can’t stand seeing you lonely and waiting for someone who’s not real.”

“One - being lonely and being alone are two different things. And two - I’m not waiting for someone who’s not real. Here-” you slide the manuscript across the coffee table to her. “Read it and swoon. I did. Hundreds of times.”

Iris gives you a look.

“Let me know what you think,” you add, standing up and getting ready to leave.

“You’re leaving already?” she asks. “Stay, I’ll get you another coffee. I’m ordering you to. I’m your boss.”

“I can’t.”

“Listen, I’m sorry for that, (Y/N). I didn’t mean anything by what I said or for making you come out here. I just want you to get out, you know? You’ve worked so hard and are doing amazing work, and I know you’re still worried about Caitlin. Because I sure as hell am.”

“Yeah, it’s weird,” you muse at the mention of your mutual friend, “I thought she’d still need me to talk to about everything, but maybe she needs some space? I’m pretty sure she’s still in Africa doing Doctors Without Borders because I haven’t heard otherwise.”

Iris seems like she’s debating on saying something.

“Did they ever find her husband’s body?” she whispers.

“Ronnie? No, but no one could have survived such an explosion... But you know what’s even weirder? I got a package from Ronnie. Today. Which is totally impossible, though depending on when it was sent… I don’t know. It was just really strange.”

“Wow, yeah. God, I hope Caitlin’s okay. Can you imagine having your husband blown up? You’ll keep me posted if you hear anything?”

“Yeah… but yes, I’ll let you know if anything comes up.”

***

Fishing out your keys from your coat, you can’t help but think about everything Iris said. How could she think you were lonely? You are a strong, independent woman who doesn’t need a man (but would like one very much, maybe)! But he can’t just be any man. He’s got to be brave, and he’s got to be strong, and yup, now you’re singing Bonnie Tyler in your head.

You turn the key in the door, but it’s already unlocked. I did lock it when I left, didn’t I?

It only takes you a few steps inside before you see it all.

Your entire apartment has been completely and utterly destroyed.

Furniture flipped, cushions ripped, bookshelves fallen and books scattered everywhere, glass broken. There’s so much going on in this picture that you almost can’t believe this has happened to you.

You bring a shaky hand up to your mouth. It’s nearly impossible to catch your breath because it’s been stolen from you out of fear. As you survey the wreckage, you give a jolt when your phone rings and vibrates in your pocket.

Damn phone calls, Jesus Christ!

“Hello?” you answer, eyes still fixed on the disaster.

“(Y/N), it’s Caitlin.”

Why is she calling me now, all of a sudden? It’s been forever.

“Caitlin?”

“(Y/N), I need you to listen to me.”

There’s a quiver in her voice, which is very unlike the Caitlin Snow Ph.D. you know and love.

“Cait, what’s going on?” you press.

“I’m in trouble,” she replies slowly. “Did you happen to receive a package from Ronnie? A small, brown package?”

“Yes,” you draw out the word, “Why, what is it?”

“Oh, thank God. Inside is a sort of GPS beacon for a kind of treasure? I don’t know anything about it, but that’s what these men are telling me. I need you to bring that device here to me in the Congo as soon as possible-”

“Caitlin, the Congo? My God, what kind of trouble are you in?”

“Please, just- I need you to go to the Pullman Kinshasa Grand Hotel. When you arrive there, call this number-” Your friend rattles off a series of numbers. “But listen, you cannot tell anyone. They said they’d kill me if you alert anyone.”

This is all too much, too fast. It’s almost impossible to comprehend. “I can’t go to the Congo! And what men-?” You hear the sound of a weapon firing up. “Okay, okay, okay! I’ll do it, I’ll be there!” You shout into your phone so these men can hear you.

But the line goes dead.

#reader insert #harrison wells x reader #harrison wells imagine #harrison wells fanfiction #nash wells x reader #nash wells imagine #nash wells fanfiction #harrison nash wells x reader #the flash imagine #the flash fanfiction

[skidblast]

The Villains of Transformers.

This seems like a basic non-question. We got Unicron as the world-ending threat, and various incarnations of Megatron doing the rest of the job to keep the threat going. However, there is another angle to it.

Often we hear the phrase “write what you know”. Which seems simple enough, that you got experience with something that you can write it pretty true. But what does one know about mechanical aliens that have been fighting a war for 4 million years?

But the various writers of the Transformers franchise throughout the years have written what they know. There is an overarching threat in each one of the transformers incarnations that is different from the Megatron the Tyrant or the Planet-eating Unicron. It’s more like background noise, providing the constant that is happening, a crutch when writing.

Unfortunately I won’t be touching on Japanese produced media, I haven’t studied the history of Japan to know the nuanced details of culture background noise or incidental historic events to comment on Headmaster, Victory, RID2001, Unicron Trilogy and any other that I have missed.

I will also skip the Marvel, Dreamwave and FunPub comics/media as I’ve not read them. Cyberverse and the second IDW release are skipped as they are pretty recent additions. Rescue Bots and Rescue Bots Academy is skipped as well due to simplicity.

The main theme of the G1 cartoon is energy shortage. Cybertron is out of Energon, they flee Cybertron to find more energy. The Decepticons set up base on Earth because the humans have begun to harness the energy of their planet, allowing easy access to said energy and to ship it home.

This doesn’t come out of nowhere. In fact, most people have heard of the precursor in passing. The time when cars were lined up at the gas stations.

1979 was a bad shock for the oil market. Iran revolted, causing oil production to shrink a bit and caused panic, which in turned caused the prices of oil to rise dramatically. This was also the year where the Three Mile Island Accident happened, so people got vary of nuclear power. Gas rationing was discussed, and in some states actually implemented. Then recession hit in the wake of this.

The effects of the oil crisis and the following recession were still felt, so a cartoon about an energy crisis was very easy to write.

Beast Wars is an odd one to analyse. It came as the Transformers franchise was dying, and Hasbro was desperate to reinvent Transformers for the new kids. The appeal of cars turning into robots was no longer around, but making them animals was the push Hasbro needed to refresh the Transformers.

So we end up with the beginning basically rehashing the Transformers cartoon, but when the overarching plot hits, when the threads get revealed after a whole season of basically filler, we find the inspiration that the writers had. This time, it is not energy crisis, in 1996 we had put that behind us.

We have Megatron leading a team trying to restore the Decepticons as rightful rulers via time travel. We then discover he had actually gone against the so-called Tripredacus Council, the fractured Predacon Alliance who were biding their time and see the usefulness of what Megatron is trying to accomplish. In order to gain more power without breaking the peace made with the Pax Cybertronia, they use secret agents and secret police.

This is very familiar to a lot of people who haven’t seen Beast Wars or heard of it. This is Russia.

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and with that the Cold War ended. Peace was had. But as Russia threw off the communism ties from them, the ruling body still needed to exert control over the nation, and to broaden their influence beyond their borders. Russia went from Communism to Mafia-like control, using secret police, subtle threats and various other shady things. People saw what was going on, and with the new fear they were facing, they made it known in the media.

Beast Machines is a bit easier to figure out compared to its predecessor. It’s mostly because the message of Beast Machines resonates strongly today. 

Beast Machines came shortly after Beast Wars, as the toyline was trying to go away from the purely animal transformers and going for more mechanical look. But how do you really bridge those together?

At the tail end of the 80ies, environmentalism was on the rise. There was an undercurrent of that happening in Beast Wars, but in Beast Machines it had much more weight to it. With Megatron wanting to stamp out any biological influences from Cybertron, ready to eradicate any traces of it and mass-producing purely mechanical beings to repopulate Cybertron. While Optimus Primal was embracing the biological side of it, becoming sort of a guru through the Oracle.

The rise of industrialism is frightening prospect, seeing the nature retreat into near nothingness, and seeing the callousness of the industry just ignore it completely in favour for profits. But there was no denying that industrialism was there to stay, so while it is the main fear of the series, the message of the series was not to abolish it but to tame it, not let it out of control and make sure that the environment was put on equal grounds to it.

Animated is a strong reboot like Beast Wars was, coming at the same time as the Michael Bay films. Japanese production had taken over after Beast Machines finished, but Hasbro sought to retake the American market with media that they controlled. Importing Anime and dubbing it was all and good, but if they had complete control, they would have better chance to make it appeal to the market they wanted, the Western one.

It’s 2007. Following 9/11 the USA goes to war. And it is still going, with a certain hopelessness attached to it as people are getting more and more jaded by it. But most people never really felt the impact, only heard about it. There was no draft, there was no conscription. People joined the military, and those who came back came back either just a little bit off, or really suffering, and couldn’t get proper help.

Transformers Animated touches on civilians being basically forced into the war, against foes that were thought to be defeated long ago. It touches on the hardship of those civilians as they are part of it, feeling both the elation of being thought as heroes, and feeling the terror of the situation that they are in. A highlight of this is the episode Thrill of the Hunt, which came rather early, and touched on themes that are not common to see in media aimed at children, looking at Ratchet going too far, and suffering from some form of PTSD as well.

While the actual war had never visited the US or the spacebridge repair crew, the impact of it was felt on them, with all the horrors that entails.

Transformers Animated and first Michael Bay Transformers film came out on the same year. Yet the themes of the film series is far from what Animated did. One part of it is that Hollywood movies are more constricted as they have to appeal to a whole lot of audience in order to gain any return from the production cost. So everything is analysed in detail, making sure that nothing would alienate the vast majority of the Western World. We are in fact seeing it more obviously as China is growing stronger as a consumer market for Hollywood movies, and we see how the movies are made to appeal to that market as well.

So doing a commentary on the Afghanistan war like Transformers Animated did was out of the question. But it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a fear in the movie like in anything else.

Technology is on rapid rise. The rule of CPU power doubling every 18 months was still holding. New technology comes before anyone can really adapt to what had been introduced not so long ago.

The fear in the Michael Bay films is the rampancy of technology. We have severely advanced alien race make contact, and in fact made most of the technology based on one of them, found at the turn of the previous century. Technology that wasn’t even fully understood, that people thought they could easily control. But it goes out of control.

This concept is called Technological Singularity, where technology eventually becomes uncontrollable and we get swept up in the wake of it, having to deal with the new reality that we are no longer the masters of the world we are in. Grey Goo is one of the better known representation of this idea. Another is the idea of an overlord AI that either seeks to exterminate humanity, rule it with iron fist, or simply think of humans as we think of ants, insignificant.

IDW Publishing was on the scene two years earlier, in 2005. However given how long the first G1 iteration of it ran it gets mentioned after TFA and the movies due to that, allowing for Aligned continuity to come after it.

While TFA showed how the Afghanistan War impacted US citizens, who had not really experienced being at war while being so interconnected with the world and able to receive so much information, the IDW comics went for the other angle, the other fear that ruled in the USA at that time.

9/11. The fear of terrorism happening, the fear of foreign infiltration. The Decepticons had a plan on how the infiltration happened, every step of it planned, making sure that they could make the residents of the planet do most of the work of disrupting the peace, making it easy for them to swoop in and destroy the rest.

While things didn’t go as planned as the Autobots intervened pretty early, the Decepticons went public on full force, taking over New York City and almost dropped an atomic bomb on it. The connection to 9/11 is pretty hard to miss.

And then Phase 2 hits. James Roberts becomes one of the more interesting writers in the series. And this is where things go slightly off. James Roberts is more of a writer that knows what he’s writing about, instead of being influenced by current events.

And James Roberts has made known he has major interest in politics as he worked with politicians before picking up the pen for IDW Publishing. Write what you know, and James Roberts know politics, and political history.

In Phase 2 there is increased focus on the actual motivations behind the war. While Megatron Origins did go into how Megatron became the leader of the Deceptioncs, it was James Roberts that made it into the communism reflection that it became in the comics. It isn’t really some overarching fear in the background of the comics, it’s known quantity woven into the narrative of the comic.

Transformers Prime came in 2010, after Transformers Animated, seeking to remove the stylised aesthetics of the former toyline and try to be more like the movies.

And it wasn’t the only thing it changed. What was changed as well was the work that was actually put behind the actual lore of the series, making a true production bible that was used not for just the TV series but the accompanying video games as well, War For Cybertron and Fall Of Cybertron. And there was also a clear message along with that, this was a new continuity, new setting. Aligned, seeking to mesh together all the good from the various franchises into one good package.

But with all that background done on it, it’s easy to point out how Megatron went from a revolutionary to a tyrant and that would be about that. But it is not that simple.

What colors Transformers Prime is subtle and easily overlooked. In 2007 we experienced a dire financial crisis. Unemployment shot up, investments plummeted, there was no good safety net for people and a lot of them fell through the cracks. But these things are hard to really put into a show like this without it being explicitly about it. But there is another side effect of the recession that wasn’t that apparent in 2010, is more obvious now, but with the Transformers lore from the 1984 cartoon being similar, it blends into the usual Transformers noise.

Refugees.

Optimus Prime and his small team are simply refugees. Cybertron did run out of fuel, but the plots of harvesting energon and fighting over resources is more rehashing of the old cartoon plots. The focus is more on the Autobot team as they deal with being literal aliens in the US, escaping the tyranny that they fled. How they are treated by the locals, how they deal with the isolation of being in a culture different from theirs. They simply try to survive. Like how most people hit by the recession felt.

Robots in Disguise was released after Transformers Prime, going away from the expensive production and to more cheaper look. But with the so-called Aligned continuty having been a strong reboot of the “TV cartoons” series, Hasbro was in no hurry to abandon it, making Robots in Disguise a sequel to Transformers Prime.

Though with the war over, a new kind of threat had to be made. And Steeljaw steps into the role, not only as the main antagonist of the series, but as the representation of the fear theme of the series.

What isn’t really that obvious in Robots in Disguise is just how powerful Steeljaw is. Steeljaw isn’t just some generic Decepticon villain who escapes just so they can reuse his model instead of having to create even more Decepticons. He has fighting prowess, he is able to outwit the Bumblebee team. And the most dangerous weapons he has are his personality and voice.

Steeljaw is able to talk himself out of trouble. He has major ambitions, he knows what to do in order to recruit others. He wants power and respect, and if left unchecked, he will have it. And he knows that if there is some that he can’t convince, he can fight, and he will fight dirty.

Steeljaw represents a fear that people have experienced for a long time, but it wasn’t until recently that it really put into the spotlight. He is the abuser, the person in power that will make your life miserable. He antagonises Bumblebee and his team by causing them trouble, drive them off their safe haven of Earth and later drives them from their safe space, forcing them to go on the run. He finds power by leading a pack of Decepticons, then later by allying himself to the new council until he realises that he will not achieve his goals with him.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this massive post of mine.

#transformers #maccadam #megatron #robots in disguise #transformers prime #tfp #g1 #tfa #beast machines #rid15 #bay films #STUPID SPECULATION #long post #really long post #I'm sorry #literary analysis #analysis #fan analysis #8th grade english essay

[thefeministphysicist19]

Native Tongue and the Power of Language

     I recently read the book Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin and found that its themes strongly resonate with what is currently going on in gender debates. Most notably, the book deals with the power of language to shape our perceptions and reality. The past few years have seen a push towards more gender-neutral language, to the point of completely changing or stripping some words of all meaning. These issues can be examined in light of Elgin’s message on the power of language, which serves as both a warning and a beacon of hope.

     Native Tongue, published in 1984, is set in a highly patriarchal society 200 years from now. All progress made by women in the twentieth century has been lost, and men hold absolute power. The Earth’s economy in the twenty-second century relies on trade with various interstellar nations, and linguists are needed to learn alien languages in order to conduct trade negotiations. The novel principally focuses on Nazareth Chornyak Adiness, a linguist born to one of the 13 Linguist Lines. In the Lines, women are bred until they become barren, at which point they are sent to the Barren House for the rest of their lives. This is where the women are secretly developing their own language, Láadan, to express their own reality and regain their autonomy.

     Elgin, having received a PhD in linguistics, subscribed to the controversial linguistic theory known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In its “weak” form (which is more accepted than the “strong” form), it says that our language constrains and structures our perception of reality. In other words, people who speak different languages see the world in different ways. Moreover, the way we perceive the world depends on the word choice as well as the metaphors encoded in the language. These ideas have also been brought up by feminist thinkers outside of linguistics, such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, who examined how language reinforces gender relations and stereotypes. In The Laugh of the Medusa, Cixous writes: “It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence” (881). Thus, Elgin’s position that changing language can change society complements feminist writings of the time.

     The book’s fictional woman’s language, Láadan, is the result of the belief that language can change reality. The creation of Láadan is primarily based on Encodings, which are “the making of a name for a chunk of the world that so far as we know has never been chosen for naming before in any human language, and that has not just suddenly been made or found or dumped upon your culture. We mean naming a chunk that has been around a long time but has never before impressed anyone as sufficiently important to deserve its own name” (Elgin 22). The appendix of the book gives some examples of words in Láadan. One of these is “doóledosh”, which means “pain or loss which comes as a relief by virtue of ending the anticipation of its coming” (332). In this way, Láadan can express the true perception of women by redefining what is significant or not.

     There is a shift in perception happening today, as gender activists push for more gender neutral and inclusive language. However, this comes at the cost of denying biological reality and erasing women as a class. The most glaring example is probably the trend of replacing “woman” with “uterus-bearer”, “ovary-haver”, “menstruator”, etc. This reduces women to their body parts and is quite telling of the misogynist viewpoint these terms stem from. Indeed, since language acts as a lens through which we see the world, this change reflects the view that women are only good as child-bearers and sex partners. Moreover, the spread of this kind of language also perpetuates this ideology under the guise of “inclusive language”. As Láadan was created to show, the lack of female-centered language helps support the patriarchy.

     However, Native Tongue also provides hope for the efficacy of woman-centered language. Elgin believed language could shape reality and showed it in her book. After the women of the Barren House decide to start using Láadan and teaching it to the girls, the men note: “Women, they tell me, do not nag anymore. Do not whine. Do not complain. Do not demand things. Do not make idiot objections to everything a man proposes. Do not argue. Do not get sick […] No more headaches, no more monthlies, no more hysterics… or if there are still such things, at least they are never mentioned” (303). The Linguist men, unsettled by this new dynamic, decide to make all of their women live in a separate residence, thereby inadvertently giving the women something they want. This shows how the new language altered relations between Linguist men and women and as a result brought a change to their lives. The change need not be so drastic, however, as simply using a language that expresses their views and values makes the women more cheerful and cooperative when dealing with the men. They finally have the freedom that only a language of their own can provide.

     Elgin’s book is more relevant than ever at a time where feminists are fighting against the erasure of female-specific terms. The power of language is that it can oppress, like reinforcing gender stereotypes, but also liberate, as Láadan does for the Linguist women. The latter provides hope in the current battle against female erasure. We need language and writing by women, for women. As language is turned against us, so can we use it to fight back and create our own, more just, reality.

 Notes:

· This essay is partly inspired by the afterword to the 2019 edition (Encoding a Woman’s Language by Susan M. Squier and Julie Vedder).

· The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been largely abandoned in favor of biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited,  pioneered by Noam Chomsky. Since Elgin wrote Native Tongue in light of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, this essay does not question the validity of the theory. 

· For more about Láadan: https://laadanlanguage.wordpress.com/

· Native Tongue has many more themes to explore, such as the balance of power between the sexes, which I chose not to go into. I highly recommend this book, and I will definitely be reading the other two books in the trilogy.

References:

Cixous, Hélène, et al. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp.       875–893. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3173239. Accessed 6 July 2020.

Elgin, S. H., Zumas, L., Squier, S. M., & Vedder, J. (2019). Native tongue. New         York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York.

#feminism #radical feminism #radfem #linguistics #native tongue #suzette haden elgin #helene cixous #laadan

[hedgehog-goulash7]

These Sherlock Holmes films have gone missing. UCLA and Robert Downey Jr. are on the case

LOS ANGELES TIMES, September 5, 2019

Text under the cut if you can’t link due to paywall...

                                                                                                                                    By Christi Carras,                                                                                     Sep. 5, 2019                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

More than a century after Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes mystery, a new investigation is afoot. But this story features more local detectives.

The UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Baker Street Irregulars, America’s foremost Sherlockian society, are on the case with “Searching for Sherlock: The Game’s Afoot,” a mission to recover and restore missing Holmes films from the silent era and beyond. The project, honorarily chaired by “Sherlock Holmes” franchise star Robert Downey Jr., reflects a continuing ongoing global fascination with Conan Doyle’s amateur detective that has spurred countless onscreen adaptations, lost and found.

“Sherlock Holmes is really an international phenomenon,” said Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. “We decided that it would really be worthwhile to, first of all, do a research project and find out how many of these Sherlock Holmes films survived and in what condition, and what we at UCLA Film & TV archive could then do to preserve some of them.”

Horak estimates that more than 80% of American films from the silent era alone have been lost because of eroded prints, mislabeling, fires and other causes. Because the circumstances of their disappearances are so varied and unpredictable, it’s hard to say exactly how many Holmes adaptations wait to be discovered. But they are aware of some that may still be out there based on evidence of prints of long-lost films.

“It’s not like there’s a list anywhere,” Horak said. “I’m assuming that the great majority of the films from the silent era, when the most were actually made, are actually completely lost. But there are films that survived — that we know have survived.”

Finding the bygone works will, appropriately, require a bit of sleuthing, starting with contacting the Library of Congress and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, as well as historians, collectors and national film archives in Britain, Germany, France and other countries. Such efforts have seen previous success, particularly in the case of the missing 1916 Holmes production starring American actor William Gillette, which later turned up in 2014, mislabeled in Paris.

Like the best Holmes stories, the odds are daunting — but not impossible.

“Many of those hundreds [of films] are lost in the sense that there are no known copies,” said Baker Street Irregular and Malibu resident Leslie Klinger. “We know about the film, but nobody’s seen it for a generation or more. And we’re hoping that copies exist out there.”

While the hunt for Holmes officially kicked off last month,   obsession with Conan Doyle’s neurotic private eye is hardly novel. Conan Doyle’s page-turners were wildly popular when they debuted in late-1800s literary magazines. They’ve since inspired hundreds of books, TV series, movies, plays and even college curricula — as well as around 300 Holmes societies worldwide, from Canada to Japan.

“There aren’t many works of fiction — in English, at any rate — that are still read after over 100  years because people want to read them, not because they’re told to,” said Roger Johnson, a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. “When I was at school — even when I was taking my degree in English — the idea of studying Sherlock Holmes would have been considered almost unthinkable. But people do now. ... It’s an extraordinary phenomenon, and it’s gotten bigger with the increase in Holmes onscreen.”

Klinger, known as “the world’s first consulting Sherlockian” for his advisory work on projects including the Downey Jr. movies, has some hunches as to why the Victorian-era detective continues to capture the imaginations of readers, viewers and artists to this day.

“I like to call him an attainable superhero,” Klinger said. “We don’t have to find a radioactive spider to bite us or be born on another planet. We just have to work really hard and study so that we can be like Sherlock Holmes.”

But like all heroes, even the great Holmes has his kryptonite, whether it comes in the form of substance abuse (cocaine was his drug of choice), red herrings or sharp-witted femme fatales such as Irene Adler.

“He’s not perfect,” Johnson said. “Even as a detective, he’s a great detective but he’s not perfect. He gets things wrong — occasionally — but it makes him more human, and that’s something we can relate to.”

In addition to Holmes’ appeal as an accessible yet fallible beacon of justice, some Sherlockians speculate that nostalgia also plays a role in luring audiences back to Baker Street. If anyone can deduce why Conan Doyle’s creations continue to inspire, it’s Nicholas Meyer, who authored and adapted the screenplay for “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” — Oscar-nominated Holmes fan fiction — and is currently working on another Sherlockian caper titled “The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols.”

“Holmes exists — or at least initially existed when Doyle created him — in a world that was long enough ago to seem like a kind of fairy tale place or a fairy tale time,” Meyer said. “Perhaps, a time we like to tell ourselves was a saner time.”

That logic only stretches so far, however, when it comes to more recent small-screen adaptations such as “Sherlock,” the Emmy-winning BBC series starring Benedict Cumberbatch, or “Elementary,” a CBS hit featuring Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes and — notably — Lucy Liu as a rare female version of Dr. Watson. Both shows update the timeline of their source material to modern day, trading hansom cabs for subways and limousines.

“It turns out that you can put these two people into almost any landscape,” Meyer said. “You can make Watson a woman; you can call them Batman and Robin — it doesn’t make any difference. It’s the same idea of heroes who are fighting against anarchy and trying to be right.”

Liu isn’t the only woman to portray Watson. “Miss Sherlock,” a Johnson-approved Japanese series, flips the genders of both the titular detective and his loyal companion. In fact, according to Johnson, discussions have even swirled among Sherlockian societies as to whether Conan Doyle intended Watson to be female all along.

“There is no real reason why Watson shouldn’t be a woman,” Johnson said. “You have to ignore things like his mustache ... but when you translate the character into a woman for dramatic presentation, it works.”

With all the changes and updates the Holmes stories have successfully adopted over time, it’s not easy to pinpoint the fundamental elements of a good Sherlock Holmes adaptation — even for film and Holmes scholars.

“I can think of a time when I would have said fidelity to the original story,” Johnson said. “It’s fidelity to the spirit of the originals. I think that’s what it is.”

With “Searching for Sherlock,” Horak hopes that the archive can screen and upload some newly restored Holmes material to its website within the next few years. Despite all the witty modernizations and computer-generated bells and whistles that have since embellished the Holmes canon, Sherlockians and film historians agree that the earliest Holmes films — should they be recovered — still have great potential to teach and dazzle 21st century audiences.

“It doesn’t really matter whether it’s silent or talkie; it doesn’t really matter whether there were fancy special effects or not,” Klinger said. “We’re going to be gripped by the personalities and intrigued by the mysteries and also be satisfied that reason has prevailed. Evil has been conquered.”

###

#sherlock holmes #RDJ holmes #Robert Downey Jr. #RDJ #Jude Law #UCLA #Leslie S. Klinger #les klinger #movies #lost films

[holidcy]

i am actually embarrassed to say how long this intro too me to write out ? so im not gonna say it ! it’s not like it took be 3 hours or anything 👀 . and for what ? idk because this intro is a mess . but anyways ... i’m mia , i’m a whole twenty years old which really just feels like a glorified teenager but whatever , we’re not here to talk about that right now . we’re here to talk about my lil baby holly . guys she is literally the sweetest human ever ? but also ? to sensitive for her own good and really the good of those around her ? very happy feet energy coming form this girl . but without further ado , below you can read up on holly & if you wanna plot give this a like . also my discord is 𝖒𝖌𝖐'𝖘 𝖜𝖍𝖔𝖗𝖊#9789 if you wanna plot there or just generally chat !

𝐆𝐄𝐓 𝐈𝐍 𝐃𝐄𝐏𝐓𝐇

full name: holiday elena addams nickname: holly ( she’s basically turned this into her name , not one really calls her holiday ) , holls , elle ( by her parents ) birthday: june 3rd birthplace: chicago , illinois hometown: highland park , illinois ( although the family home was located in highland park her parents would in chicago and holly even attended private school in chicago ) residence: new york city , new york nationality: american ( est. 1999 through birth )  ethnicity: english ( maternal & paternal , 50% ) , polish ( maternal , 25% ) , spanish ( paternal , 25% ) religion: catholicism  orientation: heterflexible ( she claims being straight but in all actually she’s not closed off to anything despite not having much experience outside the opposite gender ) languages spoken: english ( fluent , first language ) , spanish ( fluent , second language ) , polish ( conversation , third language ) , mandarin  ( conversational , fourth language ) . father: leandro oliver addams  ( 49 years old )  was born & raised in chicago , illinois by a politician / businessman & a philanthropist . leandro went on to take a little bit from both of his parents as he is a highly esteemed business tycoon as well as being regarded as one of the most charitable men in the world .  ( relationship:  there has never been a day that has gone by where the two didn’t get along . if there is anyone in this world who gets holly it is her father . truly , daddy’s little girl . the two of them are as thick as thieves . ) mother : susanna renee addams ( nee daniels ) ( 48 years old ) was born & raised in long island , new york . the daughter of a hedge fund investor & a stay at home mother . susanna grew to be an amazing cosmetologist and which the help of her father’s amazing business mind she was able to start up a salon in new york city . she gained the most devoted clientele , loving every second of her work . she took a break for almost a decade before deciding to return to the beauty industry . today she has salons across the globe in chicago , los angeles , toronto , london , and new york city .  ( relationship: susanna often had to play bad cop when it came to parenting and because of this the two butted heads quite often whilst holly was growing up . despite this , her mom is her role model and the two have always had a friendship that underlined their mother - daughter relationship .  ) social class: upper education: attending new york university ( s. 2018 ) she spent her first year of university at usc , she’s majored in creative writing at both universities  career: author ( her book is a coming of age mystery called privilege that she’s recently admitted to writing the full book during a coke binge ) , internet personality , philanthropist , socialite , and student  notoriety: being apart of the prominent addams family , amassing over 32m followers on all social media platforms , publishing a new york times best selling book at the age of seventeen . weight: 120lbs height: 5′5″ hair color: brown ( with blonde highlights ) eye color: brown positive traits: benevolent, high spirited , extroverted , romantic , honest , affectionate , intelligent , friendly , ambitious , passionate , approachable , charming  negative traits: immature , vain , garrulous , critical , sensitive , stubborn , inattentive , naive , sarcastic , obsessive , insecure , impractical , irritable likes: anything strawberry flavored , flowers , driving fast , pink , watching the first snow fall , birthday parties , lips gloss , netflix , sunkissed skin , dogs , peanut butter , agatha christie , redecorating , driving with the windows down , long plane rides , denim jackets , taco bell , orange juice , makeup , sports , female empowerment , online shopping , fresh berries , roller skating , photography , writing , tea dislikes: liars , driving in the snow , coffee , having no siblings , deep water , bad drivers , body shaming , pizza , hateful people , being rushed , cuss words , repetition , disloyalty , being alone ,  horror movies , dentists , silence , cheap perfume , criticism , the unknown , traffic , wine , poptarts ,  small spaces ,  hobbies: reading with a hot cup of tea , video editing in the back of a car , smoking before bed to help fall asleep , going out to eat with her parents , napping , hiding alcohol in her bedroom , painting alternate universe cartoons , attending big soirees , stashing drugs in jewelry boxes , sleepovers with her closest friends , talking the dogs on walks , early morning instagram lives , old disney marathons , scribbling in a notebook while snuggled up in bed  chara inspo: olivia baker ( all american ) , leila faisal ( all american ) , tan france ( queer eye ) , elena gilbert ( the vampire diaries ) , dorothy gale ( wizard of oz ) , lucy pevensie ( chronicles of narnia ) , lara jean ( to all the boys i loved before ) , elle woods ( legally blonde ) , jeffree star , jenny humphrey ( gossip girl ) , cassie howard ( euphoria ) fashion inspo: vsco girls , bella hadid , megan markle , rihanna , selena gomez , perrie edwards , emma watson aesthetics: ghostly sounding music playing as background music to a pen to paper , eyes widened at the chance to do something positive , the annoying beg for approval , infectious energy , a pout so crippling , the swell of regret as you sneak a bottle into your bedroom , tanned skin tousling with silk sheets , big eyes threatening to shed a tear , the zip of a pink mclaren 

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐇𝐎𝐋𝐈𝐃𝐀𝐘 𝐄𝐑𝐀

holly is the only child to leandro and susanna addams ( the addams family 👀 ) . she was born with not just a silver spoon but the silver spoon . the addams are a prominent american family , that are regarded as one of the leading industrialist during the gilded age . in short her families been billionaire rich for a long time and are known as one of the families to bring wealth to the city of chicago . she was incredibly spoiled growin gup as you would assume but by the grace of her parents teachings she was anything but a brat . she had being filthy rich and being an only child working against her and she still managed to be the most giving and down to earth child . from a young age holly would give her toys to other kids during play dates & ask her parents if she could donate the things she didn’t use anymore to the less fortunate . 

although her father had a busying career as he took over the family company just a year before holly was born , but in spite of that he always made time for his family . luckily her mother had stepped away from her career soon after meeting holly’s father , so she was able to be a stay at home mom and be there for every important moment of holly’s life . by the way , susanna was straight of of a real housewives show only just an overall better person ? they had dinner together as a family every night , threw parties at the house for every big moment in holly’s life . everything from birthdays , graduations , academic honors , to becoming captain of the cheerleading team and everything in between warranted a celebration in the eyes of susanna and leandro . 

she grew up extremely sheltered , mostly because her parents wanted to keep their little girl well their little girl . they didn’t want the world to taint her . she went to church every sunday and even wednesday nights , if she wanted to have a sleepover it was always at the addams household , and her parents met the parent/s of every kid she befriended growing up . 

despite their attempts her parents couldn’t shield her from one thing . getting her heart broken and at sixteen she experience her first bout of heart break . the boy she’d falling head over heels for just stopped talking to her one day , with no rhythm or reason he moved on to another girl with a blink of an eye . she couldn’t understand why ( pst ? it was because she slept with him and that was all he wanted to begin with ) someone could be so cruel an play with someones heart like that . it was her first experience of how the world could really work and in all honesty , holly couldn’t handle it . she got her hands on her parents bar room in the house and would literally drink every night before bed so she could sleep . 

this soon turned into her going to parties , promising her parents "i just want to hang out with my friend , i wont touch any alcohol” and her promise was always kept , she didn’t touch alcohol at these parties instead she smoke weed and on the chance one of her friends had it on them she’d do a line . 

this double life , if you would , didn’t lead to any real issues , at least not while she was in highschool . she still graduated top of her class  and even got accepted into her dream school university of southern california .  it wasn’t until she was a semester deep in usc that she realized she was losing control over her life . maybe it was a mix of her derailing mental state , being separated from her parents , and the los angeles social make up . whatever it was holly wasn’t too far gone to see she needed help . 

instead of going back to school the following semester holly checked herself into rehab . her parents freaked out , unaware their daughter had touched a substance a day in her life . it was a long process and took alot of owning up for her own wrong doings but after a couple months she checked out of rehab and flew out to her parents .

she had decided upon leaving rehab that her best bet directly after getting out would be to surround herself with people who loved her . during her short stint in california her parents had made the temporary move to new york city so that her mom could focus on the salon in the city , so holly transferred to new york university to continue her studies and be around her parents .

she lives under their roof , despite being more than self efficient thanks to her multiple branches of income including her trust fund but she figures there is only so much more time before they leave to go back to chicago that the more time she spends with them the better off she’ll be when they leave the city . speaking of , she doesn’t know her parents will be leaving the city in the next few months . on a positive note they plan on paying the rent in the apartment they live in for her until she finds somewhere she likes better .   

today , holly is a sober ( she smokes weed here and there but it’s not a addictive so it fine 🙄 ) and happy . although due to how sensitive the girl is anything could make her snap , she’s incredibly fragile guys . like capable of having a mental break at any moment but like we ignore it because if we bring it up it’ll happen . wooo . 

not so fun fact ? when she has an off day she’ll literally sit in her room holding either a bottle she had hidden in her walk in closet or stares at the coke she keeps in her jewelry box . she hasn’t used any of it but she tells herself its there as a reminder when really it’s a crutch for if she ever needs it again , she has easy access .

secret time ? she pushed her ex boyfriend of a balcony while she was drunk . this happened before she went to rehab ... perhaps you could say it was what prompted her to realized her crazy ass needed to go to rehab . ummm , it’s not acceptable and she knows this but one thing we all need to know about holly is that holly + substances + being upset = toxic shit that is always the equation and there is never another answer to it . 

𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐍𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍

a girl squad or just a squad in general really , give my baby her lil group of people please

maybe a fellow chicago native ? who she dated in highscool and you know is the one who dropped her like a hot potato after she slept with him

ex hook ups 

frenemies but more like a blair & lil j circa season 1 situation ? 

someone who just doesn’t like her , but like she does everything she can think of to get them to like her 

an unrequited ting were he’s leading her one so he can sleep with her ?

or maybe someone has a crush on holly but she just doens’t have the heart to tell them she’s not interested so now here she is kissing and OMG YUP NOW SHES SLEEPING W THEM ...

someone she races ? she loves cars especially fast ones

a we hang out and watch/obsess over sports but the whole time i can’t help but think about how hot you are kinda vibe ?

someone who is v bad for her and they know it but she doesn’t care because she like them so much & he likes her too but knows he’ll hurt her ?!

someone who sees that she might be teetering on falling off the wagon ( maybe they were over her place and saw the stash of substances all over her room ), maybe they’re trying to get her to stop smoking weed bc they feel like for her that’s a huge gateway  

smoking buddies where they literally just hot box cars together and munch on taco bell talking about why sound vibrates & shit

someone who she used to party with & be wild with ( could be from chi or nyc because she visited alot as a kid ) and now they feel like she’s a lame bc she’s sober

she’s a good influence on them ? they’re a bad influence on her ? ride or dies ? partners in crime ? only friends when there is a substance involved ? sugar baby vibes ? unlikely friends ? flings ? crush ? friends with benefits ? everytime they are around one another its a fight ? someone she lets crash at her parents place sometimes ? someone she’s backstabbed but like she got tricked into doing it ? anything fluffy , anything angsty ... reall just anything you got , i’ll take ! 

#wealthyhq:intro #❛ 🍒 ── 𝐅𝐈𝐋𝐄𝐃 𝐔𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑. / intro. #did i proof read this ? the lucky conch shell say ... #NO

[sliceannarbor]

Ruth Reichl

Food Writer/Culinary Editor/Author Former editor-in-chief, Gourmet magazine Former restaurant critic for The New York Times/Los Angeles Times Spencertown, New York ruthreichl.com

Photo: Michael Singer

SPECIAL GUEST SERIES

In this, our 124th issue of SLICE ANN ARBOR, we are honored to present acclaimed food writer, culinary editor, and author Ruth Reichl. Reichl talks with SLICE about her long and storied career at Gourmet magazine, her passion for memoir writing — and life. 

Special to this issue and time, Reichl shares some thoughts about the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. She is currently self-quarantined at her home in Spencertown, New York.

_________________________________________________

INTRODUCTION

Ruth Reichl is a food writer, culinary editor, and the author of five critically acclaimed memoirs: Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir, For You, Mom. Finally, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, and Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table. Reichl served as editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine from 1999 to 2009. Prior to this, she was a restaurant critic for The New York Times and the food editor and restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times. Reichl is the recipient of six James Beard Foundation Awards for her journalism, magazine feature writing, and criticism. In 2015, she provided commentary for the Chef's Table (Netflix) series featuring Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York. Reichl also served as a judge on Top Chef Masters. She is the author of the novel Delicious!, and the cookbooks: My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life, and Mmmmm: A Feastiary. Reichl earned a B.A. and an M.A. in art history from the University of Michigan. When she's not working, you can find her cooking, walking, or reading. Reichl resides in upstate New York in a house on top of a mountain with deer, wild turkey, and the occasional bear prowling around outside, with her husband, Michael Singer, a television news producer, and two cats.

FAVORITES

Book: You must be joking!  One book? It's usually whatever I'm reading at the moment, which is, right now, Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light.

Destination: Any urban city with good walks and great museums.

Motto: The secret to happiness is finding joy in ordinary things.

Sanctuary: My writing cabin

THE QUERY

Where were you born? 

Greenwich Village, New York City

What were some of the passions and pastimes of your early years?

I have loved reading, cooking, and prowling the streets of the city since I was a very small child.

What is your first memory of food as an experience?

I am two. My mother feeds me a spoonful of something so disgusting I cannot swallow it. It is cold and fuzzy on my tongue and if I could have named the flavor I would have compared it to moldy herring. I spit it out. My mother looks surprised, takes a taste of the vile substance and says, ‘What is wrong with you? This is delicious!’ In that moment I understand that my mother cannot be trusted; she and I do not taste the same way. My mother was, in fact, totally taste blind. She had combined the dregs of three different cartons of melted ice cream, poured them into an ice tray, put it in the freezer and left it, uncovered, for weeks to absorb the various flavors of every leftover in the refrigerator. This was her idea of ‘dessert.’ Now, seventy years later, I can still taste it.

What intrigues you most about the art and science of food?

I believe that absolutely everything about food is interesting. The culture of cooking is what distinguishes us from other animals; we cook, they don't. We define ourselves as individuals and as members of society by what we choose to eat. Food brings us together — and sets us apart. And, above all, food is a source of immense happiness.

How would you describe the significance of Gourmet in the history of American culinary culture?

Gourmet was America's first epicurean magazine, and for almost 70 years it chronicled the way Americans were eating. If you want a snapshot of American history from 1941 to 2009, you could do worse than flip through the pages of the magazine. What you see is a country becoming increasingly conscious of the place that food has in our society. I was enormously fortunate to have been given the magazine just as Americans were beginning to understand that food is much more than something to eat, and that an epicurean magazine might offer more than recipes and travel articles. I hope that, at that pivotal moment in our history, Gourmet was able to help steer the national conversation about food to include issues of climate change, ethical eating, farm policy, gender and race — along with all the pleasures of the table.

Was there a period along the way [at the magazine] that presented an especially important learning curve?

For me the seminal moment was publishing David Foster Wallace's essay, Consider the Lobster. When he turned in what was, essentially, a piece about bioethics, I was stunned. It was a beautiful and important piece of writing, but I was also terrified. Were Americans ready to read about the morality of eating animals in a mainstream epicurean publication? As it turned out, they were not only ready, but eager to consider those questions — and it emboldened all of us to tackle the increasingly complicated issues that cooks face every day. 

How did you begin to realize your fascination with the art of memoir writing?

I'd been a newspaper journalist for most of my career, and I wanted to see if I could write long. When I thought about what to write, it occurred to me that I wanted to write about growing up at the table — about the many extraordinary people who had influenced my ideas about cooking and eating. I intended it as a group of short stories, but it grew into a memoir. As I was writing I began to see that memoir really was my genre. It's not that I think my own life is so interesting; everyone's life is interesting, but mine is the one I know best. And isn't the point, really, to underline our common humanity?

Do you have a creative process you typically follow as you begin a project?

I wish!  All I can say is that I just sit at my desk and wait for it to happen. And then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

How do you envision the future of the culinary enterprise?

We're at a turning point right now and the future very much depends on how we go forward. Since the end of World War II, when the American government made food a crucial part of the cold war, our country has been focused on cheap food. The result of these policies — which involved the industrialization of farming, the overuse of antibiotics and fertilizers, the creation of animal confinement facilities, the overfishing of the oceans, I could go on and on — has given us the cheapest and most abundant food in the world. It has also contributed to climate change, the destruction of rural America, the devastation of our waters and a crisis of obesity and diabetes. The result is that six out of 10 Americans suffer from chronic disease. We are only beginning to realize the consequences of the policies of the last 75 years. We can change. My hope is that the generation of young people who have been brought up in a culture of food, a generation who understand that eating is an ethical act, will do their best to undo the damage and create a more sustainable world.

In all your travels, what stands out as the most memorable meal you shared with others?

It was in Crete. I was on my honeymoon, visiting a beloved art professor who taught a course called "Light and Motion." He took us up a mountain for dinner.  We came to a tumbledown shack, with a huge pile of onions standing next to it. An old lady came out, set some chairs on the porch, and poured some olive oil into a dish. She picked herbs on the hillside and sprinkled them into the oil. She sliced onions. Set out some olives from her own trees. Gave us a loaf of bread she'd baked, and wine made by her neighbor. Then she picked up a fishing pole and went down the mountain. We drank wine. We ate bread and olive oil. We talked. The sun set. The air was fragrant with thyme. The moon was rising as the old lady returned and lit a fire of grape vines to grill the fish.There were some greens that she'd grown, more onions, and more wine. And for dessert, yogurt from her own sheep. It was a very simple meal. It was perfect. It could only have happened in that place, at that moment. And I realized that the professor had wordlessly made his point: in the right hands, food is art.

Who has had the greatest influence on your life, and why?

My parents. From my mother, who suffered from bipolar disease, I learned to be deeply grateful for my own sanity. And from my father, a book designer who loved what he did, I learned that if you follow your passions there is great joy in work.

Is there a book or film that has changed you?

I read The Grapes of Wrath when I was eight or nine, and it made me think about where our food comes from and all the people who grow it. As a city girl, I hadn't really considered that before. It made me see how much our community depends on food and farming — and it gave me a real desire for social justice for the people who work the land.

What do you consider your greatest life lesson?

Life lesson; it's such an odd concept. One of those words they always use to describe books. Not quite sure how to answer this, but I'll say that the word that I try to live by is generosity. If you always follow your most generous impulses, you can't go wrong. I mean that in every sense: be kind, be available, give away as much as you can. Be there — for your family, your friends, your co-workers. Even when your instinct is to say no, say yes instead.

How would you define a life well lived?

All you can ask, of anyone, is to live up to the best in themselves. Realize your own potential. Work hard, be kind, and have as much fun as you can.  

What are you most proud of in your long and storied career?

Sometime in the late 80s I became the food editor of the Los Angeles Times (I was already the restaurant critic). At the time it was the biggest food section in the country with two sections, 60 pages every week. For the next five years, Laurie Ochoa and I reimagined what a newspaper food section could be. We thought of food as culture, not just recipes, and we tried to take as big a bite out of the world as we could. We covered the politics of food, science, agriculture, history, and anthropology. We did profiles. We brought in great people: Jonathan Gold, Charles Perry, Russ Parsons, and David Karp. We encouraged Toni Tipton to stop writing about nutrition and think bigger. We begged writers who'd never written about food to write stories for us. The paper's editor, Shelby Coffey, was skeptical at first, but after a while he said, ‘You've shown me that food can be a great way for a paper to cover the city.’ It was enormous fun. I was really proud of that section, and it ultimately became the template for what we would do with Gourmet magazine.  

How would you like to be remembered?

I've been writing about food for fifty years. I hope I had some part in making other people think that it's an important subject. As MFK Fisher said, ‘I cannot count the good people I know who, to my mind, would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers.’

_________________________________________________________

Special to this issue and time, Reichl shares some thoughts about the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. She is currently self-quarantined at her home in Spencertown, New York. 

How are you weathering life in the days of COVID-19?

Like everyone else I'm edgy and irritable. As the days go by, it comes closer; people I love have died, others have tested positive. And I know this is only the beginning. At the moment I'm in self-quarantine. I read, I write, I do a lot of cooking.

What are you cooking in your home kitchen?

Fortunately I'm a condiment whore and my pantry is full of wonderful flavor enhancers. My freezer is filled with fruits and vegetables I put up last summer, and I live in the country, surrounded by farms and dairies so meat, milk, and eggs are easy to come by. And since it's just me and Michael, I basically get up every morning and ask, ‘What do you want to eat today?’ And then I make it. Lately it's been a lot of pizza, pasta, and Asian stir-fries. And of course, I'm baking bread. Isn't everyone?

How do you envision the future of the restaurant industry as it tries to rebuild in the months ahead?

I think it's going to be grim; restaurants are very low-margin businesses, and most squeak by in the good times. Many will never reopen. And many that do will become take-out only. That's the down-side. But a remarkable thing has been happening: independent restaurateurs have pulled together in ways they never have before. For the first time they're starting to understand what a huge industry they are part of, and they're using their political clout. Coming on the heels of the me-too movement it means that restaurants will be very different places on the other side of this pandemic. And I think customers will want different restaurants when this is all over. They'll cherish the ability to come together in groups. They'll want to talk, so restaurants will be cozier, quieter, and more comfortable. And I'm pretty sure the ridiculous excesses we've seen lately will vanish; people will want comfort food, not crazy food. And, of course, they'll be more demanding customers because they will all have learned to cook.

#ruthreichl #savemetheplums #gourmet

[cozyda]

Street Lamp

Hey, I said a few times that I have a published short story. This is it. It isn’t honestly my best work, I’m better at writing longer stories, but I tried.

“Street Lamp” by Erin *******

Charlie gazed out the window into the dark dreary night. A drizzle of rain pattered against the window pane. He didn’t understand why he was up at this hour, but something compelled him to be alert. Except for a single gas street lamp illuminating the alleyway across the street, the darkness of the night was overwhelming.

The nighttime was silent in Charlie’s area of the city. The community understood the dangers in the dark; no one dared to step outside. New York is a dangerous city to reside in, especially with mafia worming the dark crevices of the city.

Charlie squinted through the window again, looking for something, something unknown in the dark. The longer he sat, the more his eyes adjusted to the night; but the dark still dominated. Turning his head to look down the street, he saw a faint figure lumbering in the distance. The dark made it hard to make the figure out, but it looked like a man who was carrying a large bag. The street lamp flickered, and the light disappeared for a second. Charlie felt his heart thump against his chest, when the light flickered back on, the figure was slightly closer.

It looked like the figure hadn’t noticed Charlie, but he still ducked down in a fear of being seen. Charlie could feel his breath leaving his lungs, and a strange feeling overcame him; it felt as if someone was staring at him. He urged himself to look out the window again. Slowly he raised his head, he felt his insides shaking. The figure was now standing directly under gas lamp. Charlie identified the figure as a man; he looked to be wearing a bowler hat and a dark brown suit. As the gas lamp illuminated him clearly; he saw a glistening dark red substance covering the top part of the suit. The man’s face was tilted downward and his hat made his face unrecognizable. Charlie bit his lip, and noticed he was sweating fear; he felt the cold sweat stick to his clothes. His body was telling him something sinister was happening.

The large bag the man was carrying was now more distinguishable in the light, the man was clearly struggling to carry it. Charlie squinted to try to identify the object and it appeared to be raw burlap sacks tied around something long and wide, the object looked heavy.

Charlie continued to analyze the man, when all of a sudden the man’s gaze jerked up to the second story of the building Charlie lived in, like he sensed he was watching. Charlie could feel the colour drain from his face as the man’s gaze swept the windows and land right on his window. Charlie quickly ducked down and started gulping down air trying to calm himself down.

M-maybe he didn’t see me. It is dark; he was probably having a look around. Charlie thought, I don’t know this man, he might be having a calm nights stroll.. He tried to calm his fear but he knew he what he was witnessing.

Charlie urged himself to peak out the window again. The man was walking away and the fear started to subside. Charlie’s gaze drifted to the bag; the man was now dragging it on the ground. He gasped loudly and held his breath. There was a hand, a human hand, lapping outside of the bag. A wave of dizziness washed over him. He collapsed against the wall and closed his eyes; his jaw tightened and his eyes squinted, as if to try and push the image away. Charlie knew though, that this horrible image was a man moving carrying a corpse; that man in the boler hat was a murderer. What if he saw me? What if he comes after me? What was he going to do? Do I need to go to the police? Would they believe me? Anxious thoughts scattering through Charlie’s head, they just went on and on. Finally he thought, What if I went after the man on his own?

“No,” Charlie barked out loud. It would be foolish to even think of going out at night on his own, even the calmest of nights he didn’t take a step outside. And then be outside stalking a potential cold blooded murderer. He shook his head as if to let all of the crazy thoughts he was having jump out of his brain; he got up and started towards his bed, the exhaustion that comes after fear made his eyes feel heavy. His legs were weak. He flopped down on his bed, and welcomed his cold pillow. Sleep overtook him like a wave. Charlie's sleep was restless, night terrors had images about strange blood covered men hiding in the shadows of the night. He slept like he was being watched.

Charlie jolted awake from his alarm, he was anxious and yet exhausted from the night’s agitated sleep. The sun was filtering through the window. Charlie jumped out of bed, remembering last night’s occurrence. Was it a dream?

As the reality of being in the conscious world started to trickle in, Charlie felt his heart rattling against his chest. He pensively inched towards the window, the closer he got the more he became certain the image the evening before was not a dream. As he gazed out the window, the memory came more into focus; he was half expecting to see the sinister man from last night standing by the gas lamp, but in some sense as he gazed out the window it was like it was happening all over again. He shook his head back and forth and popped his eyes open again.

Nothing.

There was nothing outside. Charlie could feeling his pulse calm down. Maybe it was all a dream, and my fatigued brain fabricated the image. Charlie started in his morning routine. After finishing his oats he dressed and finally put on his pageboy cap. He knew it was going to be a long grueling day at work; he was fatigued and weak. He closed and locked his door, checking twice to ensure it was locked. He took a deep breath and began his walk to work; his mind created a mantra. You are safe, it is the day, you are safe, it is the day. As he approached the street light, fear overtook him; he could feel tingling in his belly, his chest started to constrict. It was as if his body took over and he started running; faster and faster, like he was running for his life. The image of the boler hat man chasing him blocked his reality. His cap flew off of his head; although it was his only one, he didn’t even stop to pick it up.

Charlie’s was met with disturbing images from the night before throughout the entire workday; he couldn’t eat lunch, the fatigue and nausea had taken over. His co-workers questioned him; it was obvious to others that there was something wrong with him. He told no one about what happened, as if to will the horrific image from the night before to be an illusion. He started walking home, following his usual path. As Charlie was nearing the lamppost, he noticed there was something hanging on it that wasn’t there before. Charlie ran up to the lamp, and jumped up to grab whatever was attached to the lamp post. Pulling the object down, Charlie saw a it was a pageboy cap. All of a sudden Charlie realized his hat was missing, he touched his head to make sure. Looking back down he noticed it was his hat; a wave of relief swept over him.

“That’s strange. Some lovely person must have found it and put it on the post for me.” Charlie pondered aloud “the world isn’t such a bad place afterall.” He flipped the hat to place it on his head, and noticed there was something inside. He reached in and pulled out a small piece of paper.

“What the hell.”

Charlie turned it over and saw there was a note on it. It read:

You shouldn’t have looked out that window Charlie.

Charlie dropped the note and frantically looked around, there was no one there, however a wave of fear rushed over him once again, as if he could feel those eyes from last night staring. Just like the man in the bowler hat from the night before, his head instinctively jerked up to look at his apartment. His eyes quickly landed on his window, the window he was seated at from the night before. His heart stopped.

The man in the bowler hat stood in his window gazing down at him; their eyes fused together.

#story #literate roleplay #writing #short story #reading #book #books #dark academia #dark academia aesthetic #studyblr #stories #read #write #autumn #horror #thriller #bookblr

[ghostly-doctor]

Unique Name / Phantom Menace

Name: Dr. Isaac Daniels

Age: 25

Height: 6’1”

Birthplace: Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

Birthdate: April 13, 1994

Alias/Nickname: Phantom Menace

Sexuality: Straight

Likes: Music, Art, books, Astronomy, and dive bars.

Hobbies: Writing stories about the unknown, driving, singing and researching a cure for Uniques.

Dislikes: Any type of seafood due to an allergy he had gotten when he was in middle school. The allergy is so severe that it could kill him if he invested any type of seafood.

History: Issac was born to a long line of great doctors, trailing back to the 1920’s and it was ideal for him to become a doctor but he had taken a sharp interest in writing. Becoming so good that some of the greatest writers even called him the modern Eresnst Hemingway. After graduating from high school, his mother began to suffer from Alzheimer’s and it gradually got worse in a short amount of time. His father tried to help in every way he could but he soon became overworked and sleep deprived. Issac saw this which was coupled with his mother’s recent disease and switched majors to become a doctor. Locking himself in the study of his family's home the summer between his sophomore and junior year, he gained the knowledge of all the doctors in his family which gave him an advantage. His father soon gave up when Issac earned his doctorate at 23 and where his father gave up, Issac stepped in. He worked everyday, his personal and material goals left him and he was close to finding a cure. Though.. It was too late. His mother's mind has left her and she soon died which left Issac with no purpose anymore. A year had passed and he soon began to work again, locally at a hospital as the resident doctor in Saint Croix. Until one night, a call came in from New York about a hospital that had been taking in patients that special abilities which was what Issac wrote his dissertation on. The dissertation was only a theory that humankind could evolve once more in the form of powers but seeing his work come to life was an opportunity of a lifetime. Moving to New York and getting the hospital, he began to research the patients and see some of these abilities in action. The government began to fund these projects to make the patients weapons to be used in wars but Issac had fallen in love with one of them. When D-Day came and it was time to ship off the battle ready patients, Issac attempted to take away the one he had fallen in love with but his plan failed due to circumstances revolving her hiding her abilities. Leaving Issac alone in life once again. During this time, an ill-intended militia found out about the hospital and raided it to sell the patients on the black market. The government attempted to hold them off but were unsuccessful as they entered deeper into the facility, then opening fire on the doctors. Issac was shot twice in the arm but managed to get out of the building and to the seaport that was connected to the hospital. Two men found him and prepared to open fire as he looked out on the setting sun as the men shot and killed Issac. A few moments later, Issac got up fully healed and threw two green balls of ectoplasm at the men, knocking them out. He did not really remember what happened but had a rough idea. It was then that he realized that he was what the doctors and news called the patients, a Unique. That was his 25th birthday. A few months later, he began to train while still being a doctor but at a normal hospital.

Description: Issac has gained abandonment issues and a very clear depression that is easily sunken into when things happen in his life. His usual masks are throwing himself into his work or the quips he makes. When the world becomes too much, he shuts down quite often. Not speaking and brooding and sometimes even just disappearing. His mother is a very sensitive topic of discussion and is hard for him to even begin to talk about. He believes that love is a laserquest and that true love is a myth. It is a perfect dichotomy. In some ways, Issac has been called the most human of humans because of how careful he is as a doctor. But then he can sink through the floor and hurl balls of ectoplasm at people and it is hard to not think of him as something more.

Love Interests:

Daphne Smoke

His first girlfriend and a brief one. They met in college and it seemed like they were going to get married until Issac threw himself into researching a cure for Alzheimer’s. She couldn’t handle it and left him short after.

Jasmine Maroon

The pair met at a dive bar in Saint Croix and struck up a conversation. It turned out to be a one night stand and that one night stand turned into a few more nights and soon enough, they were dating. It ended abruptly when she vanished one day.

Katherine Diamond

This one was a mistake for Issac. They met when he first came to New York since she was his neighbor and the duo began to date. She would randomly stand him up on dates and every time he tried to get out of the relationship, she would seduce him and get him to stay. They no longer date but she ossacionsally comes to his place for some… R&R. She is the most recurring of the four and the one that causes him the most depression because at one point, he did love her.

Quinn Monday

She was the Unique that Issac was overseeing and over time, they fell in love with each other. He brought her gifts and things from the outside world like a record player and a few vinyls. Kept her updated on TV shows and even somehow got her outside when it snowed. The government took her away to be used for Black Ops for her ability to turn invisible and he hasn’t seen her since.

Family Relationships:

Jeffrey Daniels

His father was a caring man and although he was richer than God, he didn’t act like it nor did he dress like it. He was approachable and did a lot of charity work. Though, as most men do, he had a dark side to him. Locked away in the basement of the house was body parts and whole bodies of Uniques that he was studying for the United States. When Issac was 5, Jeffery developed a serum that could grant people powers but kept it hidden away from the U.S and injected the serum into his son, making him a dormant Unique. When his wife became ill, he stopped his research on Uniques to focus on her condition. He is currently 78.

Rebecca Michael-Daniels

The loving mother of Issac and wife of Jeffrey. She was beautiful and so kind, Jeffrey even described her as a “beautiful angel that had slithered from Eden.” She was the CEO of Gram Industries which was a global marketing firm. He spent a lot of time with his mother and didn’t take her death very well. She was 75 when she died.

Unique Power:

Ectoplasm Manipulation

After his unofficial death, Issac’s spirit rejected the offer to enter Heaven due to him believing that he was not done with what he had to do on Earth. This inturn made him a Unique. Literally, he has one foot in the grave and one foot out but more specifically, he can use what he calls the, “Ghost’s Arena” to fuel his abilities. He has shown to be able to harness ectoplasm into harmful blasts that harm both humans and spirits.

Developed Powers:

Ghost Walk

He has shown the ability to walk through almost any surface and even have body parts go through surfaces. It has become his signature technique and is used quite often. In the beginning, he would have to concentrate in order to do it and has gotten stuck a few times but now, he is able to do it without even thinking about it. The only surfaces he cannot go through is surfaces that have been blessed like Churches and homes of devout Christians.

Ghostly Possession

This power was activated accidentally when he was… intimate with Katherine a few weeks after becoming a Unique. He can body jump into another person and take them over, forcing their subconscious down. The limit so far has been 5 minutes per body and 3 bodies before he becomes too exhausted. The further capabilities of this power is unknown because Issac doesn’t like to use it. He claims that it freaks him out when he does it.

Wailing Medium

Since he has one foot in, one foot out, he has the uncanny ability to speak with spirits. He ignores them but has often been overloaded by the multiple spirits. It does come with an interesting ability. He can bring spirits into the land of the living and bring people into the land of the dead which makes him a medium.

Brainstorm

His body has gained an early warning system but it is not consistent. What happens is that his head slowly starts to hurt when the danger is close and it turns into a full migraine when the danger is attacking. Though, he has had migraines when danger wasn’t there but a few days away and sometimes when danger had already hurt him. This leads him to believe that it might be precognitive but this has yet to be explored.

Trivia:

He sings very well.

Knows how to play the guitar and piano.

Whenever he is not being a doctor, he is often found writing.

He has written and published exactly 5 books. Most of which are Sci-Fi.

His favorite tv shows are Breaking Bad, Twilight Zone and Glee.

His favorite movie is Drive.

He has a strange addiction to 90’s movies.

Does smoke cigarettes occasionally.

His parents were originally going to name him Jack Daniels but settled for Issac because they realized that naming a child after a whiskey was… “tacky”.

He drinks often. Maybe too often.

He’s a sweetheart and a weakness for women with short hair.

His favorite decade is the 2000’s.

FC: Ian Somerhandler

[laramccullough1-blog]

Pop Music In America

Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell feels that the present music scene is ailing and believes that his band's first new album in sixteen years could also be just what the doctor ordered. But for all the different ways black culture is flexing its affect within the trendy pop sphere, as ever, pop's utilitarian center remains caucasian. The singles that make their way into historically white spaces still mostly relegate black artists to a featured credit in the event that they're included in any respect. Notice that Put up Malone, G-Eazy, and Machine Gun Kelly have labored their means into heavy rotation as lead artists while Quavo, SZA, and 21 Savage solely cross over as friends on songs that tend to gentrify black stylistic parts into snowblind oblivion. The week HUMBLE." hit #1 on the Sizzling one hundred, it did not even crack Billboard's Mainstream Prime 40 chart , which tracks high-forty radio airplay. The identical scenario occurred with Unhealthy And Boujee" — you couldn't escape it, besides by tuning to a pop radio station. Khuri sees the disappearance of dissent in music from a singular position. His Palestine-American upbringing (his mother and father are Palestinian refugees who emigrated to the United States from Lebanon) informs the band's lyrics. However Khuri also has an academic's understanding of politics. He graduated from Harvard's Kennedy School of Authorities with a master's, and his wife worked within the Obama White House as a speechwriter. But within the final couple of years, this framework has been nearly fully dismantled, owing in large part to the widespread adoption of streaming. What have been once regarded merely as pop subgenres — Okay-pop, Latin lure, melodic hip-hop and extra — have grow to be the center of the dialog.

In music of this type we discover not solely essentially the most good show of technic, however an ever growing feeling for musical beauty. Allied to this was a rudimentary taste for real looking results, taking form in an attempt to echo the sounds of nature and of human life, at first purely imitative, as in Gombert's musical imitation of hen calls and Jannequin's well-known Bataille de Marignan," and afterward extra inventive, as in Luca Marenzio's lovely madrigal, Scaldava il sol," with its chirping grasshoppers, or his still more beautiful Strider faceva," with its imitation of shepherd's pipes, or the quite a few cuckoo" items by English composers, in which the chicken's cry is used as a particular musical motive with admirable impact. Listeners love a superb Pop song and radio loves to play them. Whether you want to pitch your songs to established artists in the Pop discipline or sing them yourself, writing a modern Pop Music, business Pop song with hit-single appeal means writing a song that listeners can determine with and radio will want to play. Media and TELEVISION reveals like Star Search are partly guilty for brainwashing the general public to overvalue superficial elements (for instance, a performer's seems to be and operatic vocals) somewhat than high quality of music. I can't see them signing a younger Cat Stevens or Joni Mitchell in the present day and giving such an artist an investment in money and time. They appear to be targeted on finding the subsequent Taylor Swift or Justin Beiber. I used to be born in 1997 so I can't converse solely to pop music from before my time, however I am able to take heed to it. And I do assume that pop music, while nonetheless basically the same in the 70s and 80s, was objectively higher again then than it is at present. I believe it is extra natural and less studio pushed, although studios have been undoubtedly a serious part of the music industry for the reason that 1950s actually. I also think listening to people play music and principally writing their own songs is much more genuine than listening to adolescent models sing the identical four chords to a music they did not write that has been edited drastically. Expertise has driven numerous music to be extra generic and formulaic. Nevertheless it's also performed a number of good for the business by opening up tons of latest potentialities. In an unguarded interview with New York Magazine , Jones, eighty four, known as The Beatles "no-playing motherfers", accused Jackson of plagiarism, and stated trendy pop music producers were "lazy and grasping". Within the late Fifties, a new blues type emerged on Chicago's West Facet pioneered by Magic Sam , Buddy Man and Otis Rush on Cobra Information 99 The "West Side sound" had robust rhythmic help from a rhythm guitar, bass guitar and drums and as perfected by Guy, Freddie King , Magic Slim and Luther Allison was dominated by amplified electrical lead guitar. 100 one zero one Expressive guitar solos were a key function of this music. So you simply discovered that your favorite pop act does not share your politics, or that they've stated something hateful a couple of marginalized group of individuals, or that they've a historical past of sexual misconduct, or that they've a history of bodily abuse, or that they've a historical past of each, or all the above. The genre that put New York Metropolis on the map. For every Moldy Peaches, there were 1,000,000 Elefants, The Fevers, and stellastarrs. Briefly the musicians of New York Metropolis felt the anticipatory ecstasy of residing in Seattle in the 90s. Then we went again to tending bar. Because the bands on this genre turned an increasing number of fashionable, the time period eventually widened to additionally embody every main-label rock group it was OK to not actively hate. Music of the 1950's reflected the beginnings of major social adjustments on the earth and within the US, particularly. Rock 'n' Roll, R&B, and traditional pop dominated the charts while radio and tv connected the nation in our musical tastes and exposed the nation to a better variety of artists and styles. Some of the first major superstars of music emerged from this decade with individuals like Elvis Presley dominating the airwaves and the minds of younger ladies. For those who play acoustic rhythm guitar, take heed to guitar-pushed hits by John Mayer, The Script, or Phillip Phillips. Play together with the recording till you can comfortably play the rhythm by yourself, then write to it. Or check out the current Top 20 Pop hits or High 20 Adult Contemporary hits for grooves you possibly can recreate on guitar or keyboard.

Hadiq Kiani made her debut in Adnan Sami& Zeba Bakhtiar starrer "Sargam" in 1995 which became an exceptional hit and the music album of the movie was a chartbuster in Lollywood High 10 (PTV), Yeh Hai Filmi Dunya (NTM) and FM channels. However Hadiqa continued her music profession extra as a pop artist as a substitute of a play again. Her albums "Raaz, Rung and Roshni" offered thousands and thousands and made her an ultimate feminine pop star after Nazia Hassan. In 1997, Hadiqa grew to become the second worldwide female singer on the earth to be signed by Pepsi Pakistan. A lot of the experience listening to music — gospel and in any other case — is feeling it, catching the spirit. Earlier than Franklin starts the title track, the Rev. James Cleveland asks for a witness. Then Franklin takes over. It is simply her voice, the reverend on piano and a testomony to the extraordinary: I used to be blind, and now I see. The experience of its overwhelming you occurs whether or not a survey of music folks deems it canonical. But when canons are being shaped and published, why not embody this one alongside the standard suspects — your Sgt. Pepper's" and Rubber Soul" and Freeway 61 Revisited" and Pet Sounds"? Wonderful Grace" is a landmark, too. You do not want a listing to inform you that. God knows. But that is not fairly enough.