#any iteration of Law my beloved though

[laidenbreecatchall]

Warm ups from sketches today and yesterday

Psst... ✨Commissions Open✨

#one piece #trafalgar law #my art #ryeart #sanji #art #I’m so sleepy no thoughts in my head #high anxiety day #sigh #I’ll probably draw more today but who knows what it’ll be #also the he wants to order one I’m sure someone’s done before but it it made me happy so I did my own #bepo one piece #also pre time skip Sanji is my fave Sanji I will not lie #there’s something about him post time skip doesn’t hit ya know #sorry babe maybe the homophobia is a major turn off ya know #fishman island is what did it for me. maybe I’ll change my mind later as the story progresses but damn #he’s so cool but I wanted to THROTTLE that man 80% of the time #also just pre time skip straw hats in general just have this lovely charm that I feel post hasn’t quite hit #any iteration of Law my beloved though #steven universe comic meme

[sunnysviolin]

So far you seem to have a really good grasp on everyone’s character so I just wanted to hear your thoughts on this: when people talk about hero’s reaction to the truth it never feels quite right, like it feels lacking, said thing that’s missing is the fact it was sunny that did it, Mari’s beloved little brother that hero knows loved Mari so much too, I never see people bring up that point which is sad because I think it would create a interesting conflict within hero because on one hand sunny killed Mari on the other hand it was an accident and after cooling down a little he realizes that Mari would probably want him to not hurt sunny over it plus even though sunny killed her he’s also the last piece of her left (on a different note my hc is that hero sees sunny as a brother in law even though he never got the chance to marry Mari) so does what I’m trying to make sense? I’m willing to clarify on some things if needed

No I totally get you nonnie!! For this I would direct you to my fic Promises (Here’s a direct link) It’s the very first thing I ever wrote for Omori, and it’s probably the thing I’m most proud of from this fandom to date. My perspective on this is really personal, and based a lot on a very intimate situation. I’m gonna put this in my normal style, but this is more meta and less headcanony So

Why I Think Hero Forgives Sunny (And Honestly Kind of Quickly) 

I personally really don’t like any iteration of “Hero hits/punches/hurts” Sunny. It makes me feel really uncomfortable because I find it to be intensely out of character, and misses one of the main points of Hero’s character

Think about the situation that we first meet Hero (Real World Hero) in. Basil is drowning. Sunny is drowning. Aubrey pushed Basil and she’s the reason that they’re both dying. Kel is screaming at her. 

What does Hero do? He saves both of the boys, makes sure they’re breathing and alive, and he tells Sunny that they need to get Basil somewhere safe and dry. He does not condemn Aubrey or take the time to even say an unkind word to her. In fact he continues to be really worried for her until they get to her house

I see Aubrey and Basil at the lake as a direct parallel to Sunny and Mari. I also see Kel and Hero’s argument as a softer (but still there) parallel. I think it was really purposeful of Omocat to give both Hero and Aubrey (the two characters who would be most likely to react in a harshly negative way to the Truth) a situation in which they were Sunny. 

Hero and Aubrey were the ones in the wrong in those situations. Aubrey pushed Basil for no reason other than she was angry. Hero was grieving and he snapped at his little brother who was in the same exact situation. Both of them immediately regretted it. Both of them got the chance to apologize and take it back. Sunny didn’t get that. 

So I really cover this better in Promises tbh....Go read it I swear it’s not too long but it hits exactly how I think Hero would react and why

Ultimately I don’t see Hero not forgiving Sunny, and I don’t see him like distancing from Sunny. Not after the last three days, and the Basil/Sunny fight, and everything he realized over the journey of the game. I don’t think it would be easy, there would defintiely be times he needs to walk away or scream into his pillows and weep and grieve, but losing Sunny? 

No Hero would never be able to lose anyone again. Not like he lost Mari. 

As for Hero seeing Sunny as a little brother...yeah absolutely. I think that’s another reason why Kel continued to reach out to Sunny for all those years. Kel also sees Sunny as a brother

I’ve covered this a little bit, and I’m working on an AU right now (not published yet) that really deep dives into this idea, but like I see the four of them have something incredibly deep. 

Hero and Mari knew their lives would be spent together. Kel and Sunny grew up tied together because of their siblings and the love they shared.

So I grew up with a best friend like Kel and Sunny. She practically lived at my house, I saw her every single day (like literally every single day) she slept over at my house more often than she did her own, and one day she just stopped talking to me. Out of no where. Complete cut off. 

We reconnected when we were 17/18 just like Sunny and Kel and we immediately fell back into lock step. There was no resentment that I thought I might have. It was just ‘oh there you are I’ve been missing you’ and we’ve been joined at the hip again ever since. 

Hero and Kel and Sunny are forever intertwined now, a deeper connection because they lost their girl. There was never a point where Sunny wasn’t “the baby” (This is also why Kel has such strong middle child energy before even becoming a middle child)

They were a group of six, but there was something different between the four of them. Aubrey and Basil were dear desperately loved friends, but Hero and Kel were Mari and Sunny’s family. 

That kind of love makes you have strength you don’t think you have- the strength to continue to reach out to a closed door day after day and the strength to forgive someone for the ultimate accident. 

#See I say all of this #Y'all don't even knowwwww whats coming with Hero's Journey wit the Occult #Nonnie if you wanted to see a different perspective on how Hero feels I would check that series out #I'm posting the next installation tonight #omori #omori hero #omori sunny #omori kel #omori aubrey #omori mari #heromari #omori meta #omori headcanon

[desiree-harding-fic]

On Loving one Taako Taaco

ReJEANcy again! Taako is away on business. Lup and Kravitz attend a party as new in laws. The people who can boast to be loved by Taako form an exclusive club. AKA: Lup and Kravitz are best friends and I will never not use the fact that Kravitz and Taako fell in love without Lup around in canon to my advantage because it has me feeling Some Kinda Way.

As always, thanks to @fandomsnstuff for you know... everything?

This felt longer when I wrote it but oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Enjoy!

ReJEANcy can be found Here and Here.

*~*~*~*~*

The evening came to its close, and with it, Kravitz and Lup retired with all due gallantry and ceremony, making their excuses and saying their goodbyes, until their coach was pulled around the front of the manor house drive, and Kravitz himself held out his hand to help Lup step up into the carriage.

She could not help but notice that the other guests began filtering out as well at their departure, and with it came the errant wondering - whether all in the county followed Kravitz’s lead in everything. She supposed they would, as he owned the majority of it. As the coach pulled away, beginning the long journey back to Astral, her thoughts strayed to the many introductions of the evening, to Kravitz’s neighbors, his friends.

Never had she been treated with such respect and deference in company. It was intimidating, in a way, to stand by Kravitz’s side; he could not stand in a room without one immediately taking notice of his excellent manner and breeding. He inspired a certain self-consciousness in company, it was clear, though he seemed at all times to combat it with a practiced grace. What a ridiculous thing money was, she thought, to inspire such feeling in a crowd. That simply because Kravitz’s wealth was so vast, he was treated as a great man. 

And by extension, she as a very great woman. And there lay the contradiction to her first inclination. That as intimidating as it was to stand on Kravitz’s arm, there was a power to it. That the difference between the treatment of Miss Lup Taaco, and Kravitz’s sister-in-law Miss Taaco was tangible.

It was another thing about him, she thought, perhaps the thing that most swayed her to liking him;  that beyond the other facets of his character, one thing had stood out: he had, from the moment they first met, treated Lup not as a lower-class member of the gentry, a supposed gentleman’s daughter with no fortune to her name. No, he had always acted, from the moment he was introduced to her, as though Lup was every bit his equal in rank, class, circumstance, breeding, and all. And in company, his example was always followed, for who would dare offend Lord Kravitz of Davenshire? 

She wondered if Taako had felt this way when Kravitz was courting him. There was something intoxicating about standing on Kravitz’s arm, being so well treated and highly thought of. It was no wonder he had been taken with the man in so short a time.

“You are contemplative,” Kravitz said, from where he sat opposite her. He was leaned back against the wall of the carriage, one leg bent on the seat, all relaxation now that they were unobserved. “What are you thinking of?”

He looked warm from the evening’s wine. Lup felt much the same: warm, loose, a bit tired from drink and company. It led her, perhaps, to speak more earnestly than she was used to.

“That you treat me better than I deserve, in their eyes,” she replied. His head cocked to the side, slow, brow furrowing inquisitively. “You behave in company as though I am your equal,” she explained,  “when women of my status are not even  allowed into the rooms in which you are treated as an honored guest. You have married Taako; I may be his sister, but my circumstances are unchanged. I am not accustomed to being treated as equal to someone of such rank as yourself.”

The man looked amused, a smirk on his lips.

“Taako would have me believe you are not my equal at all; rather he would tell me that you are my better. I believe he has said as much more than once.”

Lup laughed, quiet.

“He would say it.” She could not help but smile. Taako was better to her than she deserved.

“He thinks more highly of you than of any person living or dead,” Kravitz said, and Lup was taken, once again, by how… lucky she was.

“I am fortunate it is so,” she replied, her voice falling quiet. Kravitz looked at her fondly, and Lup thought how much more handsome he seemed here, quiet and relaxed and content in a comfortable space all his own. In company he was like a marble, fixed and perfected. He was much the same at the Estate when he was working, in order that those who worked under his name could follow a strong, confident example. She much preferred the softer iteration of him here, with life flowing through him, and so obviously. She thought that this must have been what Taako saw in him when he consented to marry him.

“My brother does not love easily,” she said, the words abruptly coming up from somewhere deep, secret, and true inside of her, spilling from her lips quickly and unexpectedly, lingering in the still air. She must’ve been inspired to say them by the drink, or by the intimate darkness of the swaying carriage, but now that she had said them, she felt at once as though there was a weight on her chest that, if not removed at once, would surely kill her. She tore her eyes from Kravitz, gazed toward the window at the blackness of the country night. 

“If I knew him any measure less than I do,” she confessed, “if anything had driven us from one another as children… I might believe that he had no heart at all.”

She looked back to Kravitz. His brow was furrowed once more, and he appeared fixed on her every word.

“It is quite the opposite you know,” she said. “It took me so long to understand, when we were younger. But he is not without feeling; rather… he feels so much, when he allows himself, that he can hardly stand it. He is so capable of love that he feels the need to conceal his heart behind wit and artifice, behind distant manners. It is how he survives this world; if everything were to touch him, as it touches us, he would drown from the force of it.”

Lup could not continue for the lump in her throat. She had always been the only one, save Auntie, who could understand the warmth under Taako’s iron exterior, the softness that he hid away for fear that it would one day be his destruction. Lup was the only one in the world who knew Taako enough to understand that to be loved by him was the greatest privilege man could bestow, so great, sometimes, that it was almost painful to know. Lup was the only one who understood the responsibility implied in being one of Taako’s beloved.

And then there was Kravitz.

“I apologize,” she said, around her tightened throat. “I am sure these are not revelations to you. But I must confess I was… taken off guard, upon my arrival to Davenshire, by how much he has come to care for you.” And suddenly it was vital that Kravitz understand, in no uncertain terms, how great his responsibility was too, alongside hers.

“Against all odds, you have captured my brother’s heart,” she said, looking at Kravitz, beautiful Kravitz, and she felt she would cry any moment. She spoke with as much gravity as she would muster, the wine in her blood loosening her tongue to an honesty she rarely felt confident enough to employ.

“You must be very careful with it.”

Kravitz looked warily at her, sympathy deep in his eyes. But with it, something more, something she could not yet identify. 

“I intend to be,” he hedged, and Lup shook her head, closing her eyes, and then looking at him imploringly, leaning forward in her seat. 

“You do not understand me. He will love you like no one alive can. I do not say it lightly. It is… to be loved by my brother, actively, is like nothing else. But betray the trust he places in you for a moment, Kravitz, and it will destroy him. It will break him so that he dares not allow himself to love again, and if there is one thing I will not see, it is my brother, shut off from this world and heartless.

“He weathered the death of our Aunt last year,” she said, “She was one of two people I could say definitively that Taako cared for. I am the other. You are the third I have seen him open himself to in the way that he has in my lifetime.” She swallowed thickly, thinking of Taako’s frightened, joyful expression the first moment he confessed to Lup that he loved Kravitz. Lup had never seen anything akin to it in the world.

“You must understand,” she said, “that you carry his heart in your hands now. He has made himself defenseless for you, and there is nothing in existence he fears more than that. There is no bravery he can summon greater than that which allows him to trust. It has never been simple for him. If he loves you, Kravitz, and he does, it is, whether you know it or not, the result of contemplation deeper and more labored than you can possibly have known when you asked him for his hand.

“I am his sister. He has always trusted me, in our own way. But he has chosen to place his trust in you, quite against his nature, and your responsibility is greater for it.” She blinked the tears from her eyes. To think Taako had only been absent a few days, and she missed him so terribly already. She did not understand how she had lasted in London without him, without being on the receiving side of that deep, overwhelming affection - without seeing him errantly in the hall or across a crowded room, and remembering, every moment, that she would do anything in the world for him.

Kravitz was gazing at her with wide eyes, half frightened, but immensely serious nonetheless, and Lup thought, of all people she had ever met, he seemed the one to hear her words and take them to heart more deeply than any.

“It is precarious ground upon which we stand, you and I,” she said, wryly. “Those who love him as we do.” She chuckled wetly. “But he is the best of us, is he not?”

“He is worth every trial,” Kravitz said then, conviction imbued in every aspect of his voice, and a wave of relief and affection swept over Lup so suddenly that she could hardly breathe. That Kravitz, with one sentence, had made it clear that he knew not only the weight of bearing Taako’s love, but also that he had come, independently, to the conclusion that he would bear it willingly, was a greater gift to her heart than any she could have received from her brother-in-law in all her life. The relief that there was someone in Taako’s life who understood him so that if she was made to leave him, he would be held in safe and loving hands was enough to finally bring the tears spilling from the corners of her eyes. And the kinship that had been lurking in the back of her mind; the sense that Kravitz knew her in an unspeakable way, simply for how much he was able to see the value of her brother, grew in her suddenly and fiercely until it was all consuming.

She smiled at Kravitz.

“Then you are worthy of  him,” she said. And she let her head rest against the carriage wall, and her eyes to slide shut.

*~*~*~*~*

#taz balance #lup taaco #kravitz #taakitz #reJEANcy #regency au #lup and kravitz are best friends because only they understand how dope taako is #and also guys? I love him #this entire excerpt is me waxing poetic about how good taako is while using lup as a thinly veiled excuse #imagine being kravitz tho #and lup randomly drops this on you #fuk my dude

[solesurvivorpaigeargot]

I wanna hearing about Paige's family with #5.

Super detailed questions about your OCs

5. Do they have any siblings? What’s their names? What is their relationship with them? Has their relationship changed since they were kids to adults?

HOO BOI my friend, you have volunteered for an infodump. I’m putting in a read-more cut to prevent dash clogging.

Paige was the second-to-last child out of five, with three brothers and one sister. 

Isabelle [Bella, Belle] -- the eldest, Paige’s sister and seven years older than her. Basically ended up as built-in babysitter/second mom. Paige calls her Izzy and is the only one who is allowed to call her that [anyone else will get whacked, including Bella’s husband]. Their relationship when Paige was a kiddo was pretty strained; Paige grew up running wild with her brothers whilst Isabelle, the eldest daughter of a very conservative and publicly religious family, was constantly being watched and judged on how responsible she was and how well she was growing into a ‘lady’ as she was expected to do. Meanwhile Paige, as the younger daughter and surrounded by boys, was excused for more wild behavior and often given a flavor of the ‘boys will be boys’ pass when she got into trouble until she hit puberty and suddenly got whacked in the face with more feminine expectations. 

Somewhere in Paige’s early teens, she and Izzy had it out in an honest to goodness, full-on fight, wherein Izzy accused Paige of being a spoiled brat who was incapable of understanding just how hard it was to hold up under everyone’s expectations, and Paige threw it right back by calling those expectations petty bullshit and questioning why Izzy didn’t just toss it all out if she hated being a lady. The two grew apart after that, maintaining some sisterly affection but mostly not getting in each other’s way. Izzy taught Paige how to look after her hair when she started growing it out, taught her how to do make-up, gave her advice on clothes and shoes for interviews, that sort of thing. 

They both ultimately stayed at arm’s length until Shaun was born, at which point Izzy had reached out to try and reconnect. She and her husband had been living in Pennsylvania when the bombs fell. Izzy’s family was well off enough that they might have gotten a spot in a vault, but Paige hadn’t been keeping up with them enough to know whether or not they’d registered...

Ethan -- eldest brother, five years older than Paige, she always looked up to him as her cool older brother. He and his friends had a garage band when he was a teen, but he gave it up when their parents put pressure on him to start figuring out something ‘real’ to do with his life. Music became a beloved hobby, noodling about on his guitar when he could get away with it, but never when their father was home, as he’d threatened to smash it on more than one occasion. 

Like Isabelle, Ethan was often leaned upon to be more adult than he actually was, looking after his younger siblings but with a touch more wiggle room. Where Isabelle was very much considered the one with full parental authority, and thus expected to enforce the rules to their fullest extent, Ethan allowed Paige, Daniel, and Zach to get away with the occasional mischief with a wink and a smile that assured them he didn’t see anything. 

Besides music, Ethan also had a gift of gab that made him excellent at talking himself and his siblings out of any trouble-- something he and Paige shared, and the two would get into deep arguments over tiny things as a kind of sport. At school a teacher encouraged him towards debate club and theater, and he participated in multiple school productions before, again, their parents reminded him that artistic careers were more fantasy than anything to build your life around. Instead, they pushed him towards law, which he fucking hated but attempted to make them happy.

He dropped out after his first year of college, arriving at home with black dyed hair, two tattoos and three piercings he hadn’t had when he left for school, giving their parents the finger, and all but disappearing when Paige was fourteen. Nineteen years old, he was technically an adult, his their parents couldn’t drag him back. Dad doesn’t talk about Ethan, and mom would cry when he was mentioned. Paige worried he died chasing a dream for the longest time, until she left for law school and started getting postcards-- turned out Ethan was still in contact with Izzy, and had embraced his musical career [and all the hardship that came with it] with everything he had. 

Last Paige heard, Ethan had been somewhere on the western seaboard when the bombs fell. She finds it unlikely that he, or any descendants of him, survived... though, if he went ghoul, she wouldn’t be surprised if he was still living the traveling musician life two centuries later. 

Daniel [Danny] -- middle brother, two years older than Paige, and oldest of the trouble trio. Daniel, Paige, and Zach were always the three making messes together as young kids, running wild, exploring the backwoods on the family farm, finding fun and odd ways to get chores done, and generally being kids. Danny was the tough one out of the three of them; easily the biggest out of all of Paige’s siblings and the one who got in people’s faces if anyone was messing with anyone else in the family. 

Danny and Paige frequently butted heads; they were both stubborn as hell and outspoken, and before Paige was expected to be more lady-like it very regularly came to blows. It’s thanks to Danny that Paige knew how to squirm out of most holds by the time she was an adult, even if the other person was larger than her, and exactly which soft spots to shove her elbows or heels into. This tendency towards brawling changed as they got older, however, as Danny realized that Paige was going to be a petite woman her entire life and went out of his way to teach her some honest-to-goodness self-defense tactics after hearing a few of his friends say a few... off color things about his sister. 

Danny stayed in Minnesota to attend a trade school, finding work in the automation industry; installing and maintaining machines used for mass manufacture. He married almost immediately out of highschool, and the timing of his first kid suggests that his wife was pregnant before the wedding. Paige kept in contact with him, and Danny actually made the trip out to visit her when Shaun was born. While Paige suspects that he’s dead, unless of course he ended up ghoul, she has occasionally speculated that if Danny and his family survived the initial bombing? He had practical skills that might have seen him through long enough to have descendants that survived to the present day.  Zachariah [Zach] -- the youngest, a year younger than Paige and her childhood partner in crime. Zach, like Paige, was kinda on the small side. Unlike Paige, Zach was also intensely shy in a family full of outspoken, opinionated, stubborn mules. It wasn’t that he didn’t have opinions, mind-- rather that he had a lot of trouble putting the words together to express them. Zach would often stick with Paige like her second shadow, because Paige was very good at picking up on what he meant to say to others and saying it for him, or re-iterating when he spoke too quietly and he got ignored. 

That said, Zach was often the mastermind behind what he, Paige, and Danny got up to as little kids-- quiet, but quick witted, and a grade-A prankster. 

As adolescents, Zach and Paige were occasionally confused for being twins despite there being a year difference between them. Their faces were strikingly similar, with Zach having deeply brown eyes rather than Paige’s hazel being the main difference. Sometimes their mischief would play into this, and Paige was allowed to get away with many things as a young teen simply by virtue of being mistaken for her brother. 

When Ethan ran out on the family, Zach was probably the one most deeply effected by it, and Paige did everything she could to support him at the time. They both looked up to Ethan, but Zach even more so because he was also musically inclined and had been learning the drums from one of Ethan’s friends. Sometimes the band even let him do some kind of back-up percussion when they were practicing before their father shut it down, and it was during those practice sessions that Zach tended to really light up. When Ethan left? Zach fell deeply into depression for a long time, and Paige felt like it was her responsibility to hold him up lest she lose another brother. 

Despite being the often-overlooked child in the family, Zach had damn near perfect grades... and yet, their parents appeared to lack specific expectation for him. Rather, the had a vague assurance that he’d simply do well at whatever he decided to do, and Zach confided in Paige that he had no idea what to do with his scholastic success-- that it didn’t feel real to him. That he wasn’t a person, but rather a mass of goo that could just be poured into whatever shape worked best for the people around him. 

Paige still regrets not having any good advice for him. Last she heard, he’d gone to school to pursue an engineering degree, like their father; imitating a ready example. She suspects that he might have gone after something musical, if not for what happened with Ethan, and that his choice paralysis was a form of avoiding even thinking about that kind of rebellion. Like Danny, Zach’s schooling didn’t take him far from the family home, and he still lived in Minnesota at the time of the bombing. He was, at the time, unmarried. Given time to think further on it, Paige actually suspects that Zach might have been some form of closeted due to still being close to the family and their parents intense involvement with the church. Thinking about that always makes her wish she’d been there for him more, that she’d been smarter and figured out what he’d been dealing with and helped him handle it better. 

Like everyone else, Paige is pretty sure Zach is dead... and he’s probably the one she’s mourns the most, because it feels like he never really got to live in the first place. 

#Paige #Paige Argot #about Paige #Zach #Izzy #Danny #Ethan #nukaworld-nora #Ask The Author

[newstechreviews]

In a slightly different world, Fargo season 4 might never have happened. After the FX anthology drama ended its third season, creator Noah Hawley admitted that he didn’t have an idea for a follow-up. And, he figured, “the only reason to do another Fargo is if the creative is there.” So, if there was to be a sequel, Hawley estimated it would take three years. That was in June 2017.

Thirty-nine months later (it would have been 34 had COVID not temporarily halted production), the show has reemerged with a story whose timeliness is obvious. It marks a significant departure from the earliest seasons of Fargo, which pitted good and evil archetypes against each other in arch, violent crime capers that ultimately erred on the side of optimism. Season 3 flirted with topicality, from an opening scene that hinged on Soviet kompromat to a hauntingly inconclusive final showdown between the latest iterations of pure good—represented by Carrie Coon’s embattled police chief Gloria Burgle—and primordial evil (David Thewlis’ terrifying V.M. Varga). Five months into Donald Trump’s presidency, that ending simultaneously reflected many Americans’ fears for the future and suggested that the battle for the human soul would be an eternal one. You can imagine why Hawley might have considered it a hard act to follow.

Instead of trying to top the high-flown allegory of its predecessor, the fascinating but uneven new episodes tackle conflicts of a more earthly nature: race, structural inequality, American identity. To that end, Fargo season 4 ventures farther south and deeper into history than it has gone before, to Kansas City, Mo. in 1950. For half a century, ethnic gangs have battled over the midsize metropolis. The Irish took out the Jews. The Italians took out the Irish. Finally, just a few years after a brutal World War in which fascist Italy numbered among the United States’ enemies, the Great Migration has brought the descendants of slaves north to this Midwestern city whose complicity in American racism dates back to the Missouri Compromise.

This upstart syndicate is led by one Loy Cannon (Chris Rock in a rare dramatic role), a brilliant, self-possessed power broker who doesn’t relish violence but is determined to exact reparations from this country, on behalf of his beloved family, by any means necessary. Loy’s deputy and closest friend is a learned older man by the name of Doctor Senator (the great Glynn Turman, all quiet dignity). In an early episode, the two men walk into a bank to pitch its white owner on an idea they’ve been testing out through less-than-legal means in the Black community: credit cards. (“Every average Joe wants one thing: to seem rich,” Loy explains to the banker.) He turns them down, of course, convinced that his clientele would have no interest in purchasing things they couldn’t afford. We’re left wondering how the ensuing saga might’ve been different if Loy and Doctor Senator had been allowed to channel their considerable intelligence into a legit business.

Elizabeth Morris/FXSalvatore Esposito and Jason Schwartzman in ‘Fargo’

The Italians, meanwhile, are starting to enjoy the rewards of their newfound whiteness—a largely invisible transformation marked in The Godfather by Michael Corleone’s relationship with naive WASP Kay Adams. (In keeping with previous seasons’ allusive style, Fargo often playfully evokes Francis Ford Coppola’s trilogy.) In the wake of their capo father Donatello’s (Tommaso Ragno) death, two brothers battle for control of the Fadda clan—a crime family that has Italian-accented patriarchalism written into its very name. Crafty, spoiled, crypto-corporate Josto (Jason Schwartzman, doing a scrappier, cannier take on his Louis XVI character in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette) has long been Donatello’s right hand. But his younger brother Gaetano (Salvatore Esposito, imported from Sky Italia’s acclaimed organized-crime drama Gomorrah), a brawny brute who came up in Sardinia busting heads for Mussolini, stands between Josto and the consolidation of power.

Generations-old tradition dictates that if two syndicates are to share turf in Kansas City, their leaders must raise each other’s sons. These exchanges are supposed to be a sort of insurance policy against betrayal; never mind that they never work out as planned. So Loy very reluctantly trades his scion Satchel (Rodney Jones) for Donatello’s youngest (Jameson Braccioforte). The boy finds a protector in the Faddas’ solemn older ward, Patrick “The Rabbi” Milligan (Ben Whishaw, humane as always), who double-crossed his own Irish family in an earlier transaction.

Ethelrida Pearl Smutny (E’myri Crutchfield from History’s 2016 Roots remake) is the show’s other innocent youth, a bright and insightful Black teenager whose parents (Anji White and indie rocker Andrew Bird) own the poignantly named King of Tears funeral home. Every Fargo season needs a personification of goodness, and in this one it’s Ethelrida. Not that her virtuousness makes her life any easier. In a voiceover montage that opens the season premiere, she tells us that she learned early on that, as far as white authority figures were concerned, “the only thing worse than a disreputable Negro was an upstanding one.” Her inscrutable foil is Oraetta Mayflower (Jessie Buckley), a white nurse neighbor whose patients tend to die before they can experience too much pain. Oraetta’s quaint Minnesota accent (another Fargo staple) belies the racist views she politely but unapologetically espouses; she seems fixated on making Ethelrida her maid.

Elizabeth Morris/FXE’myri Crutchfield in ‘Fargo’

It’s fitting that Oraetta is both the most tangible link to Fargo’s home turf and the first character who ties together the mobster’s story with that of the Smutny family. As her loaded last name suggests, she seems to embody a particular form of evil that has been a constant in American life since the colonial period: white supremacy. Oraetta harms, kills and plunders with minimal consequences. No wonder she has eyes for Josto, the first Fadda who knows how to wield his white identity, building alliances with government and law enforcement that would be impossible for the Cannon syndicate. (Josto’s version of Kay Adams is the homely daughter of a politician.) “I can take all the money and pussy I want and still run for President,” he boasts at one point.

The reference to our current President’s briefly scandalous Access Hollywood tape is so flagrant as to elicit an involuntary groan. It’s lines like this that expose the limitations of Hawley’s attempt to fuse the topical and the elemental. Fargo still creates an absorbing, cinematic viewing experience, with painterly framing, pointedly deployed split-screen and arcane yet evocative needle drops. A not-at-all-gratuitous black-and-white episode could almost stand on its own as a movie. And, as in past seasons, the show gives us many remarkable performances: Rock may seem an odd pick for a gangster role, but the same shrewdness and indignation that fuel his stand-up persona also simmer beneath Loy’s measured surface. The pain Whishaw’s character carries around in his body goes far beyond what can be conveyed in dialogue. Bird broke my heart as a meek, loving dad. But in his eagerness to make a legible, potent political statement, Hawley struggles to find the right tone and keep the season’s many intersecting themes straight.

Elizabeth Morris/FXJessie Buckley in ‘Fargo’

The show is simply trying to do too much within a limited framework. Fargo wouldn’t be Fargo without some eccentric law enforcement, so an already-huge cast expands to fit a crooked local detective with OCD (Jack Huston) and Timothy Olyphant—whose roles on Deadwood and Justified made him prestige TV’s quintessential cop—as a smarmy, Mormon U.S. Mashal who snacks on carefully wrapped bundles of carrot sticks. Yet Hawley also realized that he needed to break from previous seasons that, like the Coens’ film, cast a white police officer as the avatar of goodness; hence Ethelrida, whose investigation into her city’s criminal underworld takes the form of a school assignment, and whose soul is stained by neither corruption nor white privilege. She’s a wonderful character, but her and Oraetta’s story line can feel peripheral to the gang war.

With such a crowded plot, it’s no wonder the show can’t maintain a consistent tone. Each season of Fargo creates a hermetically sealed moral universe, doling out divine and definitive justice to each character according to their position on the spectrum spanning from good to evil. In the past, its archness has served as a self-aware counterbalance to the sanctimony inherent in such a project. And there’s still plenty of irreverence in season 4, particularly when it comes to Hawley’s depiction of the Faddas, Oraetta and the other white characters. But there’s nothing funny about the oppression and discrimination that Loy, Doctor Senator and Ethelrida face. Each of their fates is shaped at least as much by a society that is hostile to people who look like them as it is by the moral choices they make as individuals. So the scripts give them the dignity they deserve at the expense of inflicting earnestness—along with frequent reminders, such as Schwartzman’s Trump line, that the story’s themes remain relevant today—on a format that isn’t built for it. Realistic characters and absurd ones awkwardly mingle.

Hawley’s attempt to correct his show’s political blind spots is laudable, and some pieces of the allegory work well; the ritual of ethnic gangs trying—and failing—to work together by raising each other’s sons makes an inspired metaphor for America’s fragile social contract. Even so, Fargo seems fundamentally ill-equipped to address systemic inequality. Though that failing may well render future seasons similarly flawed, if not impossible, in our current political climate, it doesn’t negate the pleasures or insights of what remains one of TV’s most ambitious shows. Like this nation, the new season is a beautiful and ugly, inspiring and infuriating, a tragic and sometimes darkly hilarious mess. As frustrating as it often was to watch, I couldn’t look away.

#Blogger

[dailyaudiobible]

01/18/2020 DAB Transcript

Genesis 37:1-38:30, Matthew 12:22-45, Psalms 16:1-11, Proverbs 3:27-32

Today is the 18th day of January, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it's great to be here with you today as we end a…end a week. This is actually…I’m looking at a calendar…this is the third weekend of this new decade. I guess I hadn't realized that until just now. Nevertheless, we have set sail. We have moved all the way here 18 days on our journey and we will continue that journey today. We’re reading from the Christian Standard Bible this week, which is today, and we have been working our way through the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whose name became Israel. And now we’re going to pick up the story of Israel and Jacob's son Joseph. So, today Genesis chapters 37 and 38.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You for Your word and we thank You for another complete week together in Your word and starting to feel the rhythm of the year now, this new decade upon us, starting to settle in, which is one of the words that we spoke of this year. And, so, we ask that You help us to do that, to find within ourselves, amidst all of the disruption that the Bible can bring to us, that what's really happening here is that what's false is being shaken. And sometimes we didn't even know it was false until it's exposed. But there is the truth deep within us where You live where the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead dwells and this place is true and we want to learn about this place within us, because this is the place that Your word speaks to. And, so, come Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth. This is the promise the Scriptures give us, and we believe that You will. Lead us on the narrow path that leads to life. Come Holy Spirit we pray. In the name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, its home base, its where you find out what’s going on around here. So, be sure to stay tuned and stay connected

The Community section of the website, and for that matter, the app, you can get all these sections in the Daily Audio Bible app by pressing the Drawer icon in the upper left-hand corner. And by the way, while we’re talking about this, I mean, over the years of the Daily Audio Bible there’s been different iterations of the app. The latest iteration is the one that we are really trying to move everybody into and onto because we have finally reached a place where so many of the technologies that we were building and dreaming and living into and having to come up with, finally, we have like an incredibly stable environment where, if you check a box that you listened, it checks the box. We even had problems with that last year. Like if you check that box, it's checked, it's done. Done deal. In fact, you check a box it's checked on any device you are logged in. Like, so, I had a fun time playing with this. like logging in on the web player, then using the app and checking the checkbox that I’d listened to a certain day on the app and then watching it instantly appear on the computer. It’s like across the board, finally. So, I say all that to say, if you haven't updated recently then go to your web store and look for Daily Audio Mobile app. You may see other Daily Audio Bible apps. Some of those other previous apps, they are being depreciated, they’re going away. Look for Daily Audio Bible mobile app. And even if that's the app that you're using, but you haven't updated in a while, this most recent update that we've done back, actually back at the beginning of the year, is by far…I mean…what's under the hood….the technology under the hood…is really what you’re gonna want to be using. So, update. How did I get on all that? Like I was talking about navigation. So, like, alright, back to the website or the app, go the Community section of the website, find a different links to different social media channels that we participate in, links to the Prayer Wall, like ways to stay connected and praying for one another and now we’re a couple weeks into this year. So, one of the rhythms that become apparent is that we’re a community that's actually incredibly loving, incredibly accepting. Like everybody knows that we’re in this together and we’re all…like…we’ve decided to try to live in the truth, like Jesus is demonstrating for us, which means that…that we accept each other on…on the journey that were on knowing that we’re sharing some history together. And the best thing we can do is love one another, pray for one another, encourage one another. And, so, you know, that's…that's the Prayer Wall and that's the prayers that come in at the end every day. So, you know, kinda like a little bit of a discombobulated conversation, discussing all these things, but I think that's really, I wanted to say is stay connected. That makes all the difference in the world on a journey like this. So, stay up to date and stay connected.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There is a link that lives on the homepage and I thank you profoundly and humbly for your partnership. If you're using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I will be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hi, this is Candace from Oregon. I love you Daily Audio Bible. Have I told you that lately? And Brian and Jill thank you so much. Oh Lord that none of us ever take for granted this amazing situation. I want to thank Rachel from Pennsylvania and everyone else who’ve been praying for me and my household. We were under terrible attacks. Starting in November, it went on all the way into January and made…the holidays were good…but this was sort of underlying it and very stressful. I think it’s much better now. Please pray. January 28th, I have a beloved in law who might…who has to go to court and might end up doing some jail time. So, please pray that whatever is the best thing for this dear one will occur, be that jail time or not and that the judge and everyone he has to interact with will know how to point him in the right direction. Lord have your way. Also, please for my February 8th piano recital, that all the students will do well and that the whole experience of taking these lessons will be part of drawing them into a relationship with the Lord Jesus. Thank you so much for your prayers and I am praying for all of you as well. May the Lord’s name be praised.

[singing starts] I will send out an army to find you in the middle of the darkest night. It’s true I will rescue you. I will never stop marching to reach you in the middle of the hardest fight. It’s true I will rescue you [singing ends]. Hey this is for Anonymous who called back on December 27th and to anyone else who thinks since God’s so good and we’re so bad we’re not worthy and He doesn’t want anything to do with us, but like the song says He’s doing everything He can to get to us and He will rescue you. So, just a little encouragement.

Good morning Daily Audio Bible family this is Carla Jean from Las Vegas calling today asking you to pray for my son Noah. He’s 23 years old and has been fighting a spiritual battle most of his life. I keep thinking that God must have great plans for this boy for him to be so pursued by Satan. He’s 23 and he contacted me yesterday in the middle of an anxiety attack and we Facetimed for an hour trying to get him to seek help. He lives in a different state and he’s afraid because he has no health insurance and I told him I don’t care, just get the help you need, and I will take care of it financially. I’ve asked him if he wants me to come to him and he does not want me to go there. He is a sweet boy and I’m just…am asking you to storm heaven with me. Matthew 8:16 said many who were demon possessed were brought to him and He drove out the spirit with a word and healed all the sick. That’s my prayer for my son Noah and I’m praying for all of you who are fighting spiritual demons right now. May the Lord grant us all peace. Amen.

Some skim the surface while others dig deep yet both of them say Your commandments they keep one says confess and believe in your heart and you shall be saved you’ll have a new start and nothing and no one can take that away salvation is yours, whatever may but then the other one says action speaks louder than words and faith without works is just air for the birds if God is in your life then there should be some change all things are new if they’re not something strange but both of them say that Christ is the way that judgment is coming and you should trust and obey but yet and still both of them put others down including each other the cycle just goes round vicious in nature and not from our God which they both claim to represent which really seems odd traditions and customs leading to sin the Sadducees and Pharisees all over again what will it lead to where will it end misleading the children of God is a terrible sin though not by intention for they too are deceived but that original serpent also fooled Eve some skim the surface while others dig deep yet both of them say your commandments they keep

[email protected]. Like to give a shout out to Sherlock Washington and Kim and Michelle from LA. Hope you both are doing well and know you’re all in my prayers daily. And once again Brian and the Hardin family thank you for this wonderful podcast for God’s Holy Spirit flow. Keep it flown’ y’all. All right bye-bye.

Hello sweet DABber family this is Trusting Father in South Carolina. It is Sunday the 12th about 4 o’clock in the morning and I’m a five-year listener, this is my second time calling in, the first time being about a year and a half ago when my daughter had an affair. Since then she divorced and went into another relationship, a real bad relationship and from that she is pregnant, and we have a precious little baby boy on his way in April. But also, in her family she has two other little boys, one is five and the other soon to be three and I’m asking prayer for her. She…I don’t even know how to put it into words, but she is…she is very confused. She is in a high-powered job and, you know, before she went into her affair, she and her husband were…you know...they like to party and…and I’m…I just…I don’t even know. I feel like her…she’s just messed up mentally, emotionally, physically and, of course spiritually. So, I need to also tell you this, that I have a son who’s an alcoholic and a recluse and he’s 34 years old and we have another daughter who’s been in a 10 year relationship with another woman and my husband has been depressed before we were even married when where we are age 19 and 20. So, it has been very intense here, especially lately. And I want to, I don’t know, I just felt very led to reach out just ask for your prayer and I’m just so grateful in knowing that Father’s faithful. And thank you so much.

Hello this is Duncan from Fredericksburg Texas. I’ve tried…I’ve been on here once at least, I know that. For the lady in South Carolina whose sister is…is in...is in ICU let me pray right now. Oh Father so many hurting people and there are many listening to this who are broken and hurting and at various stages of grief, various stages of anger, various stages of anything that’s not good. Father, I know I’ve been in…I’m still…the post-holiday __ or hardships of life are…are sometimes harder to deal with and especially Father for those of us who have lost loved ones as I have lost my wife back in October. Father just take care of…of this gal, just please touch her and heal. Father just raise up people, more people who will love her back…back to health. Father, I believe that can be done with encouragement and father with being ministered to and I just ask you to do that for this lady who is suffering from bipolar and is in the ICU. And for…I cannot remember names, so many of them. So, just take care of them Jesus. Thank you. Amen. And now, just for me. I request, I am a pianist, I am…just happened to be totally blind but that doesn’t stop me. I’m 73 years old that does not stop me either. And I will be going to upstate New York next weekend and then to Long Island and then finally back up to Buffalo. I leave Saturday the 27th and then come back…no…Saturday the 18th and then come back the 27th then a player local gig on the 28th. So, I just ask you to pray for me…

Hello Daily Audio Bible family this is J from Nashville. Got a little bit of a something going on with my throat, but I wanted to take a moment to pray for the people who just feel like they can’t catch a break. Heavenly Father, in the precious and mighty magical name of Jesus Christ, God we come before You this morning adoring You and lifting up the holy name of Jesus. Mighty God bless You as we confess of any sins that we may have committed knowingly or unknowingly. Lord we rest in Your forgiveness and we thank You for Your grace and mercy allowing us to come to You again and again receiving this precious gift that You give us. Father, we need You in this moment. We pray for Your comfort. We pray that Your Holy Spirit will give us wisdom and understanding in these times where we just feel like giving up, where You feel like all the odds are against us and we can’t find a single way out. Lord we ask that in these moments of despair, confusion, fear, we ask that You will remind us in a way that only You know how, that You are there and You will always be there and You are in control. We love You Father. We praise You Jesus. We glorify You God and we thank You. In the name of Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen. I love you family. I miss you. Until next time.

[vmheadquarters]

Twelve years, two books, and one Kickstarter-funded movie later, one of TV’s greatest shows has made its triumphant return. Veronica Mars season 4 is just what Marshmallows around the world have been waiting for.

It’s hard to believe that a Veronica Mars season 4 exists, let alone that it has been twelve years since we all first thought we were saying goodbye forever to one of the wittiest, smartest, and most heartfelt shows to have ever been created. Who would have ever thought that a show that struggled to stay on the air as long as it did would have had such a well-deserved comeback?

I, for one, never imagined it. The hope of a small reunion, a one-off, was a glimmer on the horizon for the longest time. And then the announcement of the Veronica Mars movie came and it seemed like we hit peak-Veronica Mars revival culture. But then came the books. And the whispers of a new season.

But with every shiny new Veronica Mars property that came out, the question of “Could it possibly be as good as the original series?” always lingered in the background. Especially with this new season.

‘Veronica Mars’ season 4 review

Suffice it to say that Hulu’s Veronica Mars season 4 revival combines everything you love about the original run of the show with everything you enjoy about binge-worthy television. Updated to reflect the current world climate and to fit into the true crime era we’re now living in, this new season of Veronica Mars feels exactly like how you think a modern run of the show should.

Veronica Mars season 4 picks up not too long after the events of the movie, so a few years at most. Veronica and Keith Mars are working cases side by side, struggling as ever to keep business afloat. Though Veronica’s takedown of Bonnie DeVille’s murderer shone a bit of a light on Mars Investigations, business isn’t really booming. That is until a serial bomber threatens the lives of numerous young people and, even worse, the livelihood of Neptune: Spring Break.

Pooling their resources, connections, and keen instincts for detecting mischief and wrong-doing, Veronica and Keith set out to unmask the bomber before any more lives are lost and the 09ers achieve the return to the “idyllic” and clean (read “white” and “privileged”) Neptune they’ve been fighting so hard for.

There’s quite a lot going on in Veronica Mars season 4. So much so that it doesn’t waste any time jumping in to the conflicts or adding in any gratuitous (Marshmallow) fluff. In fact, this is probably the property’s leanest bit of storytelling as practically every scene and encounter serves a purpose in driving characterization or one of the two main plots (the bombings and the excess gentrification). Though they were also focused on one or two main plots, as well as character development, the movie and the books didn’t feel nearly this streamlined.

That could partially be due to the immense fan service those three bits of storytelling felt compelled to do. While the movie and the books trotted out fan-favorite character after fan-favorite character, there’s quite a bit less of that in this new season of Veronica Mars. While there are some beloved characters that make appearances from time to time, there are fewer of them and they’re not around as much as you’d expect.

In fact, there are perhaps more cameos that feel like they’ve come out of left field than there are appearances by some of the more well-known supporting cast. Without revealing anything, I’d say it’s important going into this season without high expectations of seeing a lot of your favorite supporting characters (if they even show up at all). Their absence is jarring at first, but, once the story gets going, it’s clear that they just don’t fit in well with the current story and shoehorning them in as fan-service just wouldn’t work.

Honestly, Veronica Mars season 4 is less about fan service and more focused on getting back into the groove of the show. Like the series’ original run, this new Hulu season is the perfect mix of darkness, laugh-out-loud comedy, and heartfelt moments. Veronica’s personal mantra that “the people you care about most will always inevitably let you down,” while not as prevalent, still very much lives in the shadows of every interaction she has and relationship she develops.

That being said, while it does work hard to return back to the show’s roots, this season isn’t an exact return to its original form. Given just how much time has passed since the show went off the air and how different the world is today, there’s no way it could be. For all of the way it emulates and pays homage to what has come before, this revival season demonstrates just how much the show, as well as the characters, has evolved.

There’s no better example of this evolution than by tracking all of the different iterations of the show’s theme song, “We Used to Be Friends.” It first changed in the show’s third season, after Veronica Mars‘s move to The CW where the story arcs and overall season structure, not to mention the setting, shifted. The Veronica Mars movie then introduced a more stripped-down and slightly upbeat version which matched the film’s fan-service/reunion vibe.

Now, in this revival season on Hulu, the theme shifts again, this time to a more haunting, ethereal, and noir-ish rendition by Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders. It takes an episode or so to get acclimated to (after all, the original theme is a classic), but it perfectly conveys just how much Veronica and the show have grown in the past fifteen(!) years. It’s sophisticated and dark yet still playful, just like this season. And it matches the stunning new opening credits perfectly.

Another example of the show’s evolution, as well as its return to form, is Keith and Veronica’s relationship in this new season. They may not have seen eye to eye on Veronica’s decision to stay in Neptune and officially join the family business, that storm cloud that hovered over their relationship in the movie has since dissipated. It’s clear that Keith still doesn’t agree with Veronica giving up her fast-paced lawyer life in New York, but he respects her decision. He makes one remark to his daughter about joining a law firm but ultimately drops the argument.

The show is all the better for this. The moments between Keith and Veronica are some of the best of the season, if not the entire series. They’re just as witty and sharp when interacting with each other, and yet there’s a more mature tenderness that has developed between them since we last visited Neptune, thanks in large part to the fact that they’re now equal business partners. Their relationship isn’t too mature, however, to not have at least one “Who’s your daddy?” quip!

Oh, and there’s a hilarious “cuss war” between Keith and Veronica that’s introduced in the first episode and runs throughout the duration of the season. Presumably, it’s a direct reference to Kristen Bell’s role as Eleanor on The Good Place, but, while it’s an allusion to the NBC show, it fits perfectly here. It’ll seriously have you laughing out loud every time it comes up.

For all of its similarities and callbacks to the previous seasons and stories, there are some pretty drastic differences between Veronica Mars season 4 and its predecessors.

Perhaps the most notable difference this season is the lack of “cases of the week.” Personally, I’m a huge fan of the “case of the week” structure because it’s a fun way to test our characters and reveal different facets about their personalities and relationships with one another. The cases also usually give the overarching mysteries and storylines space to breathe so that when those reveals do come, there’s no emphasis lost.

Additionally, these mostly self-contained mysteries provide a helpful background in distinguishing between episodes. As is so often the case with shows that are meant to be binge-watched, the episodes in Veronica Mars season 4 all run together and don’t have all that much to distinguish themselves from one another. It’s honestly hard to recall which episodes I enjoyed the most out of this season because the entire thing is a blur.

Though I do think there’s a bit of the Veronica Mars charm and cleverness that’s lost without the inclusion of smaller cases, there just wouldn’t be any room for them here with the way the season is plotted out. After all, it’s doubtful that Veronica or Keith would even dream about taking on additional cases after fully entrenching themselves in the case of the spring break bomber.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot packed into every episode of Veronica Mars season 4. Each episode is at least 50 minutes long, which means that, even though this Hulu revival season has a total of eight episodes, it’s almost like we’re getting nine and a half episodes worth of classic Veronica Mars (or about four movies).

It’s hard to determine whether or not the amount of episodes we get this season is optimal or not. On one hand, there’s just the right balance between effective character moments and plot. But on the other, this season’s plotlines don’t land quite as hard as past ones, at least on first watch.

The most drastic difference between Veronica Mars season 4 and the rest of the series is the fact that Veronica has less of a personal connection to the overarching mystery this time. Sure, she puts herself in the middle of everything and the bombings impact her daily life. But she takes the case because it’s the right thing to do, not because she or someone she cares about has been directly affected by the bombings.

Her lack of attachment slightly lowers the stakes for the season, which is kind of disappointing that the season focuses solely on the one mystery. Yes, people are being murdered by explosive devices. My observation here isn’t meant to make light of that. But, because Veronica’s personal stakes are generally lower throughout the season, the impact of the mystery is lessened considerably and the “whodunnit” just feels less pressing than usual.

Veronica Mars season 4 also deviates from the norm in its commentary on class and privilege. The plotline about the 09ers working to re-gentrify Neptune and drive out the “riff raff” (including the yearly spring breakers) is an underlying current, but it focuses more on how selfish the “haves” are rather than the impact all of this has on the “have nots.”

Though the movie indicated that a pretty big class war was on the horizon, that tense atmosphere seemingly evaporated in the time since Deputy Sacks was murdered in that “car accident,” most likely due to the sheriff’s department actually being not that corrupt this time around (which is a pretty big shocker).

It’s a small difference that perhaps I’m being too picky about, but after the movie did a great job discussing the racial inequality in Neptune and setting up the town itself as a bomb that was about to explode, the discussions in this new revival season are anti-climatic at best.

And then there are two side plotlines, one involving a senator and the other a Mexican cartel, that just don’t mesh well with the rest of the season at all. They’re directly connected the bomb and 09er plots, but really serve as nothing more than a distraction from everything else that’s going on. Yes, they (sort of) play their part in the season’s climax but are otherwise equal parts pointless and frustrating.

That all being said, the bombing storyline is definitely captivating from start to finish (and then some). The threat this season is no joke as the explosions come without warning and in crowded areas. The bomb that detonates in 4×04 is particularly gruesome and hard to watch, especially in the immediate aftermath. Not only that, but they’re hard to track. Many times, mysteries can be pretty easy to figure out but, true to form and thanks to a few pretty big twists, this Veronica Mars mystery will keep you guessing and feel like you’re missing something until the very end.

New to this season, Patton Oswalt’s pizza delivery guy character introduces a “true crime” element into the Veronica Mars universe which, honestly, I can’t believe we haven’t seen before. He follows all of the bombings going on, as well as the other cases Mars Investigations has taken on in the past, and adds a layer of skepticism. Not only that, but he also serves as a way of legitimizing just how intelligent Veronica is and how perfect she is in the role of a private eye, rather than a lawyer.

In this era of true crime that we’re all living in, it’s easy to forget that there are real people involved in the crimes and real lives at stake. While it’s not an official plotline for the season, one of the effective underlying currents is the slow takedown of true crime enthusiasts and just how much harder it is to solve crimes in real time and in the field rather than from a couch or a cell phone.

Speaking of characters with notable storylines, what would an article about Veronica Mars be without fangirling a bit over Logan Echolls and LoVe? After everything he has experienced in his life (especially the last few years), it makes sense that Logan we meet in Veronica Mars season 4 is quite different from the Logans we knew in previous seasons. Still a United State Naval Aviator, this Logan is regimented and reserved. He’s still witty and charming, but in a more subtle way.

However, Jason Dohring and Kristen Bell’s chemistry is still as sizzling as ever. Each scene they share is incredibly nuanced and emotional. Logan and Veronica may say one thing or act one way to each other, but their body language and facial expressions many times tell completely different stories. And yet, there’s still a sense that these two are not only completely meant for each other, but also that they’ll figure out some way to make it work.

This season takes extra care with Logan’s character, fleshing him out and bringing us all up to speed with just who he is at his point in his life. No longer surrounded in controversy, we’re able to see Logan the man rather than the Logan who’s almost always at the center of a storm. Not only that, but this season gives us a better understanding of who Logan is outside of his relationship with Veronica (or really, any other regular characters from the show). We get to see Logan for Logan. Jason Dohring gives his best performance as Logan in this season and, honestly, he’s a joy to watch.

And then there’s Veronica.

Veronica Mars is no longer the brooding teen and town pariah she once was. She’s all grown up now. Of course, Veronica still has her flaws (mainly her penchant for distrusting just about everyone and her unyielding pride), but she knows who she is and accepts all of the aspects of herself, for better or worse. This Veronica is self-aware enough to know when she’s in the wrong and she’s getting better about owning up and apologizing for it.

Also, although she tries to put up the same sharp, prickly front, it becomes increasingly apparent through the season that Veronica has softened considerably. Sure, she still just as witty and clever as she always was, but her second chance at love with Logan as well as her father’s brush with death has made her more of a marshmallow than she was before. Veronica wears more of her emotions on her sleeve and isn’t as quick to dismiss others as she has been in the past. In fact, dare I say, she’s more trusting and lets people in a lot more than she used to.

Veronica’s character development from the movie to now and all throughout this season is incredibly gratifying to watch. Following her trajectory has been a bit of a frustrating struggle sometimes, but this season makes it all worth it.

Veronica Mars season 4 has been a long time coming and, now that it’s finally here, it’s hard not to love it. This season is by no means perfect, but it feels like a proper return to Neptune and all of the characters we Marshmallows care so much about. Plus, it’s quite an enjoyable and emotional ride from start to finish with some pretty big twists and major events along the way (two in particular that will most likely set the internet ablaze).

Fans of Veronica Mars as a whole won’t be able to get enough of this fresh take on the show and will surely be clamoring for more as the final episode’s credits roll.

Random spoiler-free notes from watching ‘Veronica Mars’ season 4

The first episode makes it feel like truly no time has passed since the show went off the air. It sets up all of the season’s conflicts and storylines as effectively as its 1×01 and 2×01 predecessors.

OMG DICK.

I’ve never been more turned on by a Frank Sinatra song since 10 Things I Hate About You.

Wait, is this show actually introducing capable semi-capable local law enforcement with a sheriff that isn’t completely self-involved?

So Logan is effectively Veronica Mars‘s version of the Bruce Banner?

This season is very Jessica Jones-like in its story-telling. There are no “cases of the week,” but there is a lot of sardonic commentary to go around.

OMG THE BOOKS ARE OFFICIALLY CANON!

Is this show introducing a “new generation” here or something? Could you ever have Veronica Mars without Veronica Mars?

‘Veronica Mars’ season 4 will be streaming exclusively on Hulu starting Friday, July 26, 2019.

#veronica mars #veronica mars hulu revival #vm spoilers

[anhed-nia]

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

When my concerned parents faced the early and unpleasant realization that they were raising a ravenous little horror hound, it meant that they had to somehow split the difference between their strict curbing of my potentially mid-warping viewing habits, and their principled encouragement of unfettered reading. That must be how I came into possession of a copy of Thomas Harris' harrowing police procedural The Silence of the Lambs at the tender age of 10, even as the film adaptation was being touted by many viewers as The Scariest Movie of All Time. I carried that book around like the Bible well into my teenage years, reading and re-reading it with even greater fervor after my parents finally decided that the film was sophisticated enough for me to watch without it turning me into some kind of animal-torturing arsonist. (Said screening was chaperoned and accompanied by an academic post-viewing family discussion, of course) The decision seemed to make sense; after all, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS had swept the Oscars the year it was released, scooping up wins for Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture. This is not to say that my intellectual and art-appreciating family regarded the Academy as the ultimate arbiters of taste and achievement. I mention these accolades more to point out that, as my parents had surely noticed, the film holds a certain power over viewers on both sides of the high-low cultural divide, a spell that has hardly weakened in its twenty-seven years of life.

As a child, I certainly responded to the same things that piqued the general public: Anthony Hopkins' iconic performance as Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, his ambiguous romance with purehearted FBI trainee Clarice Starling, and the controversial perversity of serial killer Buffalo Bill. Though the story shares the influence of real-life ghoul Ed Gein with classic shockers like PSYCHO and THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, the impact of SILENCE is more akin to that of DRACULA. Much of the enduring discussion about the film revolves around the tantalizing chemistry between the preternaturally elegant Dr. Lecter and the virginal Starling; the rest is somewhat unfortunately focused on Ted Levine's eccentric performance as the (pseudo-) transsexual murderer at large, which has come under some understandable scrutiny. However, it would be unjust to reduce Jonathan Demme's movie to a gothic romance, or a gory shocker, or a campy cult item with ironic eroticism and a great soundtrack. There simply have to be better reasons for a movie to stick around this long, lingering in the minds of stuffy critics and the hoi polloi alike.

In preparing my statements about what makes THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS stand out, I learned something very shocking: It began its life as the directorial project of Gene Hackman. Hackman eventually dropped out when the script produced by (Oscar-winner) Ted Tally turned out to be too violent. Prospective Starlings like Michelle Pfeiffer and Meg Ryan were similarly disgusted, so Demme got stuck with a less likely candidate in (Oscar-winner) Jodie Foster. Personally, I find (Oscar-winner) Demme himself to be an unlikely candidate. The director cut his teeth on exploitation movies under Roger Corman, and by the time of SILENCE, had distinguished himself as a hipster extraordinaire, directing classic performance videos for the Talking Heads and Spaulding Gray, as well as chic comedies speckled with cameos from the likes of John Waters, and underground music firebrands from New York's new wave scene. Time would prove that Demme and his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, were perfect choices for this grim project, which only supports the idea that there is something more happening with SILENCE OF THE LAMBS than its gruesome violence and epic sexual tension.

In light of these more famous elements, one might expect an adaptation of Thomas Harris' grim and seductive novel to be grandiose, expressionistic, swathed in a dense physical and emotional mist, rumbling with its own pomp and circumstance. An orphan from the hills of West Virginia, Clarice Starling is a tragic hero from the start, guarding her broken heart against a world of condescending and hostile men. Her mentor Jack Crawford seems to distinguish himself from the herd by assigning her the ambitious task of interviewing notorious serial killer Hannibal Lecter for the FBI's files--but in fact, Crawford is counting on Starling's feminine charms and naivety, secretly using her to manipulate Lecter into profiling a killer at large, Buffalo Bill. In spite of this nasty revelation, Starling sticks with it, suffering Lecter's high-minded insults and penetrative analysis of her character, and eventually earning his admiration. She proves herself not only brave and determined, but a detective of unparalleled wit and instinct, single-handedly taking down the polymorphously perverse Buffalo Bill in his moth-filled subterranean lair, rescuing a high-profile victim where the entire rest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have failed.

This all seems to portend a bigger, louder movie than what has been committed to film. However, the book has a certain organic grit to it, something honest, downbeat and tragically real, which Demme and Fujimoto grasp instinctively. The film provides a dry, frank view of the life of Clarice Starling: the toil of academia, the drudgery of physical conditioning, the undermining attitudes of her mostly-male peers. Shot in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, Starling's world is bleak and desolate, but earnestly so, without the pageantry of the film noir and Universal horror movies with which it is so easily compared. Demme's education under B-movie king Corman shows here, and makes for a much more compelling iteration of the story than we might have from someone less accustomed to economy. While SILENCE has developed a reputation for its brutality, the film is not remotely so gore-drenched as many traumatized viewers would have you believe. That said, it may be the film's generally stark and desicated look, its workaday-ness, and its endless (wonderful) dialogic exchanges that throw into relief its comparatively minimal violence, which usually appears not in scenes of assault, but in crime scene photos or autopsy scenes.

The blanched, dreary look of the film also offsets the emotional plight of Clarice Starling. She is afforded no real romance, external or internal. The petite and clear-eyed orphan is visibly used to, and exhausted by, the constant need to look out for herself, and SILENCE will see her shuffled from one humiliating personal trial to the next. She is led into a perilous situation by a mentor who pretends to respect her abilities, but who really counts on her to fall short of discovering his scam; She is trapped in roomfuls of macho cops who scarcely acknowledge her; She has to negotiate the sexual attention of evidence technicians and bureaucrats; She even has semen flung at her by a particularly rambunctious neighbor of Lecter's. (And how often do you see that in any movie? As gross as it is, it has a way of reinforcing the extreme adult-ness of Demme's often dry, methodical movie) And then of course, there is Lecter himself, who turns Starling's personal vulnerability into a form of currency with which she can buy the scant clues that lead her to her quarry. Instead of eroticizing the anomalous femininity that Starling brings to the traditionally masculine world of law enforcement, Demme constantly reminds you of her fear, her embarrassment, her alienation. One can also imagine the temptation to Ripley-fy the character, presenting her as a fully-formed badass not to be fucked with. Instead, by eschewing both these femme and fatale modes, Demme describes Clarice Starling as three-dimensional human being whose heroism is extremely hard-won. While the character is undeniably one of the great Strong Female Protagonists, Jodie Foster's performance somehow defies the cinematic semiotics of gender altogether, giving us a person whose most important qualities are purely psychological. Tak Fujimoto drives the point home by frequently filling the screen with closeups of her face, focusing us on what she thinks and says, taking the proverbial heat off her body. Even as Lecter probes her for painful biographical information, Starling's sexuality remains entirely private--still a rare thing in any movie with a lady lead.

I don't mean to suggest that THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is principally successful because of its plucky girl detective--that contributes to its greatness, but not in the feminist fashion that I seem to be angling for. I am reviewing this movie presently because I recently found myself looking back on my own history with it, comparing my feelings with those of popular audiences, and thinking, "What is The Silence of the Lambs really about?" It can't be so beloved *only* due to the sexy slow burn between Anthony Hopkins' Count Dracula and Jodie Foster's Mina Harker. It can't be *just* a matter of the exotic insanity of the gender-bending madman sewing together the flesh of his victims and dancing provocatively to "Goodbye Horses" by Q Lazzarus (a sadly mysterious musician who Demme certainly knew from his involvement in the New York underground). All of these characters, and their respective dynamics, contribute to the important thrill of this movie, but not in the way that most people seem to think.

Rather like the director's earlier work with iconoclastic punk icons and indie auteurs, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is about authenticity. Hannibal Lecter, the unparalleled genius whose culinary expertise is part of his murderous MO, is a serial killer because he has such refined taste and decorum that he cannot live peaceably among other people. He favors victims whom he perceives as tacky, pretentious and impertinent--Starling knows that he would never harm her because, as she famously remarks, "He would consider it rude." Lecter is fascinated, not by her youthful beauty as Crawford had hoped, but by her sincerity. Starling is brilliantly intelligent in her own right, as she proves through her police work, but she doesn't have an ironic bone in her body. She is the most unpretentious individual alive, and nothing could be more interesting to Lecter, who preys upon people who are untrue to others and to themselves. Meanwhile, we have Buffalo Bill, who is attempting to change his sex by crafting a full-body "woman suit"--but, as Lecter insists, the killer is not a "true transsexual" whose legitimate identity is that of the opposite sex. Buffalo Bill is someone who was reared by his abusive parents to hate himself so much, that he is compelled to escape his natural identity; becoming a woman is less important as a matter of self-actualization, than as a means of becoming an entirely different person, *any* different person. He has been so radically alienated from his own essence by this self-loathing, that he is incapable of authenticity of any kind.

That, I really think, is the secret power of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS: the at-once satanic and profoundly innocent declaration, "to thine own self be true". I would really love to get into a deeper dive on this movie at some point, to discuss what I think must have been the very best and very last time that Anthony Hopkins gave us a fearless and unpredictable (and in this case, somewhat hilarious) performance; to insist that Ted Levine as Buffalo Bill and Brooke Smith as his would-be victim actually give the best performances in the whole movie; to talk about the problem of the Ubiquitous Daddy Figure (of whom there are no fewer than THREE in this movie) in so many narratives about powerful women; to simply analyze the movie's sly psychological techniques, like fully humanizing Brooke Smith *just* by showing her singing a few bars of a beloved pop song in closeup, immediately before her fate takes a disastrous turn. (I would probably not take such an opportunity to investigate accusations of homophobia and transphobia, which requires a smarter and more directly experienced voice than my own) There is really a lot to say about why SILENCE is so powerful, without even threatening to address its most famous features. Unfortunately, I don't have the gumption or the madness to commit all that to Letterboxd at the moment, so I'll have to be satisfied with my primary conclusion: That the film's simplicity and gritty naturalism mirror its commitment to spiritual purity, honesty, and self-knowledge at all costs. Even at the high cost of wearing a muzzle, any time they let you out of your cage.

#blogtober #the silence of the lambs #thomas harris #jonathan demme #tak fujimoto #jodie foster #ted levine #brooke smith #scott glenn #clarice starling #hannibal lecter #buffalo bill #horror #adaptation #ted tally #suspense #procedural #thriller

[mfmagazine]

Betsy Russell

Article by Star Noor

Photo by Sean Costello

Styling by Olivia Crouppen

Makeup by Shelly Samia  

Hair styling by Helena Van Zendbergen

Betsy Russell has reemerged from the 80’s teen sensation of acting careers past to perhaps her best known role as the queen of the Jigsaw Killer’s heart in the Saw film franchise.  The recently opened SAW VII 3D is said to be the last of the series; and, so Betsy’s character Jill Tuck can finally fulfill her destiny to stand by her man until the end game.  When I asked Betsy to iterate through her own eyes the dynamics of her beloved character Jill she clarified much like an old confidant would , “She fell in love with a man, married him, lost their baby, and he discovered he had cancer.  Her love for him never faltered.  She expressed her inner sadness and grief through helping to heal others. After his death she stayed true to him. I identify with her because I like to think I'm a loyal and strong woman as well. I love her because I can identify strongly with her pain.  She handles all situations with grace and love.  We could all learn from that!”

Betsy’s love of acting was apparent at first through childhood play. “I loved watching TV shows when I was a young girl.  "I Love Lucy" was my favorite and I would pretend I was Lucy and reenact scene from every show; I was obsessed with her!  My mother thought I was very funny and she made me believe I could be an actress if that's what I wanted to do.  She said she never had any doubt that I would be, and that's pretty much all I ever pursued from very early on,” she explains.  Having such a support system and examples like the renowned economist Richard Russell and author, philosopher, and syndicated columnist Max Lerner as her father and grandfather - Betsy knew success is possible, “I would have to say it only helped me to believe that if I worked hard at my dream career, it was within my reach.  Realistically not many people are successful at jobs they love! Those two men are, Max has passed on, and that was something that motivated me.  My father always said do what you're passionate about and success will follow!”

Success did follow and she went on to play bitchy roles in such films as the 1983 sex-comedy PRIVATE SCHOOL opposite Pheobe Cates, her then idol.  As her career took off and more films followed; Betsy quickly became a rising star.  It was at the height of her career when she fell in love with actor and tennis star, Vince Van Patten, whom she met at the Playboy Mansion where she was a frequent visitor thanks to her Grandfather’s relationship with Hue Heffner, “He was living there about half the year so I guess if it hadn't been for Hef and the mansion, I never would have known him.”

After her marriage to Vince and the arrivals of her sons, Betsy decided to take a break and raise her children.  She reminisces, “I felt a part of me had died when I quit acting and that's very true.  I missed it so much but I was happy being home with my babies and my in-laws were right next door!  I never thought it was forever though.  I always had a gut feeling I wasn't finished with what I had started.  I had no idea how I would come back but I believe everything happens for a reason so I was comfortable with my decision and I left it to the universe to figure things out for me.  My favorite saying is, “A miracle is what happens when you just get out of the way.”  That's pretty much what I did.”

When her marriage ended in 2001 Betsy moved back to California with her sons.  Little did she know that as miracles go, the universe had one all planned out for her.  Not long after her divorce the call came asking Betsy to join the Saw cast in Saw III, “You know that saying people come into your life for a reason? Well I know that's true... Mark Burg has been a good friend for many, many years.  He and Oren Koules have been my angels through all of this and I couldn't think of any better guys to take this journey with. They have started many big careers in Hollywood and asked me to come on board on SAW III to play a small role.  Who knew it would turn into this?”

Four SAW films, a recent role in CHAIN LETTER opposite Nikki Reed and Keith Taylor, and a starring role on SYFY’s UNEARTHED – Betsy looks forward to the future with the help of her training in spiritual psychology.  “I look at every challenge as an opportunity for growth.   It's also about forgiving ourselves for all of the judgments we have made.  Our job isn't to judge, and it's not about right and wrong.  Our job is to stay in balance.”

Her need for balance and healing came from personal pain, “my relationships have been challenging to me in the past and I really was walking through life with a broken heart and soul,” Betsy explains.  In her quest to find balance she, much like her character Jill Tuck, found a profound passion for helping others heal as well.  Through this passion she has found the balance she sought, and with this balance she has resurrected a promising new phase of her career.  Looking forward to the future, knowing she is just where she is supposed to be, Betsy Russell is moving on to her next big role which is in the works but strictly confidential.

[wtf-hollywood]

My first post is a repost. Deal with it.

I wrote this months ago after seeing The Mummy. It was on my main, and I recently have been thinking about other movie rewrites and shit, so, hey, yet another blog.

Lets start with the mummy movie. The antagonist is fucking strong, but the protagonists are lame.

So we’re going to do better. We start by getting a restraining order against Tom Cruise, and a costumer who can do “Sexy, but empowering” for our Egyptian Princess. Then we strike out all references to Set, and instead use Apep, who is basically the evil god of ancient Egypt that these movies keep wanting. We spill some exposition in the mummification scene about how mummification was the ideal method of burial in ancient Egypt, and Ahmanet’s deal was specifically not mummification, but ritual execution and imprisonment, possibly handwaving historical inaccuracy in the law and order part by making it explicit that this whole “bound alive in bandages, put in a sealed sarcophagus, and submerged in mercury” thing was him basically taking his best guess at how to make it as hard as possible for her to come back.

Next, we make our protagonist an awesome archaeologist who isn’t a cis male. Like, maybe we go Lara Croft, but less “tomb raider” and more “properly trained archaeologist who does things by the book but cannot fucking wait to learn shit.” So she finds this site in Egypt, or we can keep the “why the hell is there Egyptian stuff all the fucking way out here!?” thing, whatever, but she finds the site and says “Ho-ly shit, this is a big fuck all prison for someone they didn’t want getting up. I cannot wait to crack it open and see who was such a big bad!” And we get a very speedy montage of her doing basic archaeology, then cut to her cracking open the sarcophagus with a notebook full of drawings and notes about the site next to her.

And I mean, otherwise, we can follow the majority of the 2017 movie outline. We just don’t bring in Prodigium, and we have better characters. And we have actors for any Egyptian characters that are at least vaguely ethnically correct.

Side benefit- we can have some seriously empowering ho yay between the archaeologist protag and the Egyptian princess. Maybe Ahmanet can take a living disguise for a limited time and uses that to try to get close to Archaeologist Chick and we get some very sweet GALS BEING PALS scenes before its revealed that this awesome person is actually the Egyptian princess who wants to unleash Apep on Earth. But would also really like to do that with said Archaeologist chick by her side.

Oh, and we finish up with Prodigium coming in during a mid-credits scene, because lets not fucking pretend we’re not trying to pull a Marvel deal. We could use Dorian Gray instead of Dr. Jekyll, too, because getting some canon bi representation on screen would be kinda cool. So, end of the Mummy, Ahmanet is dealt with, definitely sealed back up and not killed, because we’re establishing an antagonist-based franchise, here, and Archaeology Chick is aware of, but not part of, Prodigium.

Alternatively, we could kick the “Ambition is Evil” trope to the gutter, and let archaeology chick redeem Ahmanet through the power of “Look at this cool new world you could have power over without slaughtering people.” And lesbian cuddles.

For the second movie, we could go with a Creature From The Black Lagoon movie. I mean, Shape of Water just came out, and is essentially an iteration of that creature, but it’s Fox, not Universal, so whatever.

We’re going to keep the Brazilian setting of the ‘54 movie, but we’re going to make a concerted effort to have a primarily Latinx cast. In this version, however, Gillman is some manner of eldritch god. Worshipped by an indigenous tribe centuries ago, but left starved for faith since then. Hell, we’ll throw Western Europe under the bus they oh-so-richly-deserve-to-be-hit-by and say that European conquerors killed the tribe. So the god has been left in a semi-submerged temple for centuries. Alone. And bored.

Now some asshole American has showed up, paying locals to aid their expedition, looking for “aztec gold.” (Plenty of people tell them that Aztecs lived in Central America, and proceed to list off tribes that were located in what became Brazil until they realize the asshole isn’t listening.)

They find this previously completely unknown temple, and the American strides right the fuck in, while the locals are all talking about how important it is, and that they should call the local college, and so on. Then realize that if they don’t do something, Asshole American will strip the place of anything that might be valuable, and destroyed the rest through negligence, by the time archaeologists get there. We could put in a “Blink-And-You’ll-Miss-It” shout out to Asskicking Archaeologist Chick from The Mummy here for a bit of arc welding.

So the locals rush in to look for Asshole American. They carefully shuffle around, and eventually find him.

Or his corpse.

He’s in an obviously ceremonially important basin, with giant fucking gashes in him.

The locals of course decide that there’s some kind of dangerous animal in the temple, and they need to get out. And probably call someone.

This is where they find they are completely unable to find the exit, even though it didn’t seem that big, or that labyrinthine going in.

The movie then plays out like a bit of a slasher, a bit Aliens, a bit Haunted House, while the bored god makes sport of them. Maybe there could be a sort of Saw-like deal, where mostly they’re put in death traps that have an out. Those outs could be various things that strengthen the god, and maybe there’s one big one towards the end where the locals have managed to reunite, and the out is for them to worship the god.

You could even get some Designated Asshole Victims here, maybe through a B Plot about corporate exploitation of nature, or some cartel fucks. This allows the locals to be put in positions where someone has to die, but it doesn’t have to be them. The god doesn’t care who dies, they care that someone kills someone else in a ritual dedicated to him. Maybe one of the locals buys in early because they’re sympathetic to the god’s concerns about the natural world, and a bit radical, and it doesn’t take much for the god to goad them into slitting some corporate exec’s throat.

End of the movie, the locals escape. It’s a personal win. It’s the thing they care about, that they live. The god isn’t dealt with in anything even approaching a permanent fashion, but he’s not powerful enough to be anything more than a monster that haunts that temple. For now.

We could get a mid-credits scene that shows Prodigium monitoring the temple, but taking a “wait and see” approach to it. Maybe they actually care about the lives of the people who live around there and not ravaging the wilderness, and mention that going in would risk undue collateral damage.

There’s no reason you couldn’t make a good, faithful, adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I mean, you’d want to skip the part where Frankenstein’s Monster immolates himself after killing Victor, but otherwise, you could just do a straight adaptation.

But, lets say you want a new take.

Why not make it a love story?

Replace Ambitious Asshole Victor Frankenstein with a med student who flunked out after the death of their beloved. Med Student was already into some pretty experimental shit that the admins frowned upon, and Deceased Lover donated their body to science. Maybe Med Student’s friend sees Deceased Lover being brought in, and slips Med Student in to say their last good byes.

But Med Student has other ideas.

They steal Deceased Lover’s body, or at least their head, or brain, and maybe some stuff for the experimental gene therapy and tissue rejuvenation stuff they were looking at before flunking out.

Or hell, maybe Med Student convinces Friend to help. Actually, that’d be pretty cool, especially if Friend’s name is something that is just similar enough to Igor.

Anyway, they make off with Deceased Lover, and they start the work of applying Experimental Gene and Tissue Rejuvenation Tech to Deceased Lover.

And it works.

Mostly.

There are some complications, and Deceased Lover doesn’t recognize Med Student, or Friend, and isn’t too rational, or controlled, upon waking up. Maybe Deceased Lover’s groaning and such draws attention, and between Deceased Lover seeming to have Come Back Wrong, and Someone Coming, Med Student and Friend flee. Deceased Lover lashes out in instinct at the person who investigated, killing them with inhuman strength, and Deceased Lover is alone. They slowly come to full consciousness, and slowly begin to realize that Med Student left them. They brought them back, and then left them, but not before showing an expression of horror and disgust.

Deceased Lover tries to find old friends and family, but is rebuffed in horror by the people who last knew them to be dead.

Then Prodigium gets involved, because someone reported a person apparently coming back from the dead. They attack Deceased Lover on sight.

Overall, the movie plays out similarly to Frankenstein, except, perhaps, in timescale. At the end, Prodigium decides to let Deceased Lover be, provided they don’t become a threat. Prodigium has Med Student’s research, but so does Deceased Lover, and Deceased Lover has realized that there is something about them that makes the living fear them. Deceased Lover’s best shot at not living alone until they kill themselves is to 1) find other monsters, 2) create more of themselves, or 3) join Prodigium.

I personally like the idea that they decide to create their own society, creating a third faction that can oppose both the monsters and Prodigium in the franchise. This could be presented in the mid-credits scene.

The complication with this route for the Frankenstein movie is that you can’t really use the name Frankenstein, because it’s just corny unless you’re doing a direct adaptation. But you could just call it Promethean or something similar, it’s fine.

This is probably a good point to bring in Dracula, and it could be the Dark Universe’s Period Piece to mirror Captain America. We’ll set it in the early 1900s instead of the late 1800s, though, because I forgot about this as I writing, and cars were decently available in the early 1900s, but almost completely unavailable in the late 1800s. Early 1900s still works quite well.

We start with a narrator who is dictating a report on a case handled by  Dr. Van Helsing. It’s a “How We Got Here” intro. The narrator’s voice is feminine, so audiences may expect Van Helsing to be getting a gender lift in this version, but the narrator never speaks in the first person.

We’re going to embrace some parts of various versions of Dracula, and kind of weld them together. We start by making up some history, saying that a Wallachian prince set out in a deranged, and desperate mission to establish a hold on what would become the British Isles. He managed to build a castle there, but was lost to history otherwise. The reason he wanted to do this is not given particularly straight, but we use some bad christian eschatology, and have it be some kind of religious quest, because we’re totally going to embrace the whole blood drinking/eternal life thing from Christian tradition as an impetus for Dracula’s origin.

So, Prince Dracula is some mad Wallachian prince, maybe he’s actually exiled, and he goes and builds a castle in the British Isles on a shaky religious justification. We get a very bare cliff notes version of this in the intro, and it really just sets up why in our next scene we see a British real estate agent walking up to a castle in bad disrepair, on a small island in the middle of a lake. Hell, we’re going to go super symbolic, and make it a caldera lake. I honestly don’t know how likely it is for a caldera to exist on the British Isles, but, eh, fuck it.

So, the real estate agent is writing to their fiance over breakfast in their B&B, explaining that the castle was owned by some super private individual, and pretty much completely unknown to the outside world until recently, when said owner was committed to an institution and his property liquidated. So now the agent’s firm has acquired the land, and they’ve been sent to determine whether it’s a better investment to tear the castle down, or repair it.

Deep inside the castle, they find a very odd chapel. It looks normal enough at first glance, but a closer look reveals that every saint has a monstrous face, and angels and demons have traded places.

Also, there’s the altar, which seems to be hollow.

The Agent who is completely untrained in archaeology cuts themselves while looking the scene over, deeming it “creepy as fuck,” and making a note of it before moving on. There’s a close up of the blood dripping through a crack in the altar, and a sound that Agent dismisses as just the settling of an old building.

As it gets dark, Agent calls it a night, and heads back to their B&B, where they get various ominous warnings about that island. One of which is that its known for having vicious wolves who only come out at night. Which Agent dismisses as ludicrous, because wolves have been extinct in Britain for a decade at least. The person who mentioned it just gives a knowing look and walks away.

Agent goes back the next day to continue their work. They note that things are slightly different in the chapel, but doesn’t think much of it. Figures a bird knocked shit over, or something.

Time gets away from Agent, and they find themselves walking back to their car after the sun has dropped below the trees of the surrounding forest. And they hear a howl. They dismiss it. Must be hearing things. Then there are more. They hurry back to their car.

It starts to rain. Hard. And the road goes through winding forests, and there are those howls, getting closer. There’s a quick shadow bolting across the road, making them lose control for a harrowing trip across the bridge from the island to the ring, and a sudden peal of thunder distracts Agent just as they make it across, causing them to crash into a tree. They call a tow, but wind up having to walk to the B&B in the rain when told that the area has no drivers on the road and he’ll have to wait til morning.

Next day, he gets a cab, and we get to play a little homage to the carriage in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 movie. Back at the castle, shit has definitely changed, and now Agent is seeing apparitions. Also, there’s some weird old man there, who introduces himself as a descendant of Dracula, and a relative of the man who previously owned the castle. A relative whom holds a copy of the deed, and persuasive arguments about the ownership of the castle. But he’s less interested in arguing over some small sum of money than he is in purchasing property in London and moving some of his more prized items there.

And then it plays out pretty similarly to the Dracula story, but with more “deal with the devil” and “dark inversion of communion.” Yes. More. Agent’s Fiance gets bit, and becomes a vampire. Van Helsing is called in, and is in fact a woman, but her voice doesn’t match the narrator’s. Dr. Van Helsing can totally be a woman, there were tons of women doctors in the 1800s.

Dracula starts a reign of terror on London, and Dr. Van Helsing has to reach out to others for help. Fortunately, she has a group of learned men and women, mostly women, who gather to trade stories, collaborate, etc. Mostly after going on expensive expeditions that polite society considers extremely wasteful and pointless. Their motto is “Prodigium de monstrum” (ess. “Prodigy out of monsters”), and they’ve proudly taken on the name The Prodigal Circle.

In the fight, Van Helsing dies, but Dracula is defeated, partially because of Mina’s ability to fight on his level as she resists his control.

Finally, it is revealed that Mina is the narrator, who has taken Van Helsing’s position in The Prodigal Circle, guiding their transition into a vigilant order from Van Helsing’s notes and instructions after being inducted by Van Helsing in one of her vigils over Mina when Mina was her patient.

The mid-credits scene shows Prodigium scientists removing Van Helsing’s body from storage, preserved through something between magic and science, as Mina, who doesn’t look a day older, supervises from above..

That is four fucking movie premises. And I think that’s enough for tonight. If there’s interest, I could write up premises/outlines for Wolf Man; Prodigium, the conclusion of Phase 1; and maybe a start of Phase two.

#Dark Universe #Universal Horror #Dracula #The Mummy #Creature From the Black Lagoon #Frankenstein #Frankenstein's Monster #Monsters #Universal Studios Monsters #The Dark Universe #Universal Studios Cinematic Universe

[aion-rsa]

Who Will Be Doctor Who’s Next Showrunner?

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When big changes come to Doctor Who it’s the Doctor who grabs all the headlines. That, after all, is showbusiness: children don’t ask for bedsheets bedecked with the faces of the show’s writing or production team. It’s the showrunner – much more than anyone else, including the actor playing the lead role – upon whom the fate and fortunes of the show rest. They decide everything from the look, feel and tone of the seasons, to the thrust and arc of the narrative, to who writes, directs and stars – from the smallest bit-part to the Doctor themselves. The buck stops with them, in other words, and a showrunner can very much make or break an era.

So while speculation rages about who will take on the mantle of the 14th Doctor, it’s Chris Chibnall‘s replacement as showrunner who will ultimately carry the weight of the universe on their back. Realistically, a candidate needs not just writing but also producing experience (Chibnall had co- and executive producer credits on Torchwood, Camelot, Law & Order:UK, Broadchurch and more before landing Doctor Who). Because the UK TV industry has significant work to do on widening access for writers and producers of colour, that requirement frustratingly narrows the field for such jobs at present. But let’s have a look at a few options; some shoo-ins for the top spot, some just wildcards, but all of them with something real to offer.      

Pete McTighe

Pete McTighe has the experience and qualities you’d want in a prospective Doctor Who showrunner: he’s been a long-time admirer of the show since the Classic days; he’s written for the show (Series 11’s ‘Kerblam’ and Series 12’s ‘Praxeus’); he’s helmed trailers for the Classic series’ Blu-ray sets; and, perhaps most crucially of all, he has hands-on experience of calling the shots. McTighe’s prison-drama Wentworth (pictured above) first aired in 2013 and has since racked up award after award in its native Australia (McTighe is British). It’s also been something of a critical darling worldwide, routinely praised for a realism and a grittiness that cleaves close to the best HBO dramas. BBC mystery thriller Pact concluded in June and Wentworth‘s final season airs later this month, meaning that McTighe now has a hole in his schedule. Might he be about to fill that jail-shaped gap with a police box? Quite apposite too, perhaps, that McTighe was able to take a show like Prisoner: Cell Block H (as it was known in the UK), a beloved old soap opera from the 1970s/80s, with rickety, wobbly sets and a low-budget aesthetic, and transform it into a lean, mean, emotionally-satisfying, rollicking thrill-ride with contemporary sensibilities. The man has form.

Sarah Dollard

Another Australian connection, this time in the form of bone fide antipodean Sarah Dollard, who wrote ‘Face the Raven‘ and ‘Thin Ice‘ during Peter Capaldi’s tenure. Prior work commitments prevented Dollard from writing for Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor, something she lamented at the time.

For those of the ‘Doctor Who has become too political’ persuasion, Dollard’s thoughts on the writing process for ‘Thin Ice’ should serve as both a rebuke and reassurance: “There was no way to write about a woman of colour going into the past on Earth without acknowledging how the colour of her skin would have impacted how people reacted to her there. Obviously, it also had to be entertaining and true to the tone of the show, so I tried to make it an intrinsic part of the story, rather than just add-on.”

Dollard cut her teeth on Australian soap opera Neighbours, and wasn’t long before she was writing for sci-fi and fantasy favourites including Merlin, Primeval, Being Human, Doctor Who, A Discovery of Witches (pictured above) and, most recently, an adaptation of the award-winning Young Adult horror fantasy Cuckoo Song (yet to air on Netflix). Availability could be an issue in whether Dollard could return to Doctor Who as its showrunner, given her busy schedule and writer-producer role on Netflix big-hitter Bridgerton.

Toby Whithouse

There was a time when Toby Whithouse was the heir apparent to Steven Moffat. At least in the eyes of Whovians. In 2015 he said this about speculation that he might be taking over the show post-Moffat: “No-one at the BBC has ever had this conversation with me. No-one has asked me, no-one has approached me about if Steven leaves, when Steven leaves. These are conversations that happen purely among fans, not on any official level.”

Still, he has the pedigree. Not only did Whithouse create Being Human for BBC Three (also one of Sarah Dollard’s first UK writing jobs), but he also wrote for the first three of modern Doctors, notably the episodes ‘School Reunion’, ‘The God Complex’ and ‘Under the Lake/Before the Flood’, showing terrific range, and a deft and respectful approach to the show’s mythos and history. Recently, Whithouse has written for the BBC’s new sci-fi series Noughts and Crosses (pictured above) but seems to have drifted away from Doctor Who. Acknowledging that this is just another conversation happening “purely among fans”, might the allure of the big chair tempt him back?

Kate Herron

Kate Herron may be a reasonably fresh face in the entertainment industry, but already she’s proven herself capable of taking on the sort of awesome responsibility that would make even a grizzled veteran wince. There can be few franchises heavier with expectation than Marvel (along with, perhaps, Doctor Who and Star Trek), and few characters as beloved as Tom Hiddleston’s Loki. Kudos to Herron then, for dazzling Kevin Feige with her talent and vision, earning directorial control of the first season of Loki and carrying it out to general acclaim.

Plenty have said that Loki was some of the best Doctor Who we’ve seen in years. It’s hard not to see where they’re coming from when considering the way Loki balances humour, heart, and sci-fi, whilst dabbling with time and dealing with multiple variants of its main character.

Herron recently announced that she wouldn’t be returning for Loki Season 2: ‘I’m really happy to watch it as a fan next season, but I just think I’m proud of what we did here and I’ve given it my all. I’m working on some other stuff yet to be announced.’ It’s this enigmatic ‘other stuff’ that has sent the Doctor Who rumour mill into over-drive. Might Herron be trading one time-wimey extravaganza for another? Might there be a further clue in this other snippet from a recent interview? Time will tell. 

Read more

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Mark Gatiss

In some sense, Mark Gatiss is Doctor Who. At the very least the show is encoded in his DNA. Very few people have done so much in, and for, the Whoniverse, and Gatiss has pretty much done it all. He’s written novels set in the Classic Who Universe; he’s acted in the modern iteration of the show (‘The Lazarus Experiment’, ‘The Wedding of River Song’, ‘Twice Upon a Time’); he’s written for the show (most notably ‘The Unquiet Dead’); he’s narrated documentary segments about the show; and he wrote the acclaimed 50th anniversary stand-alone about the early days of the show at the BBC, ‘An Adventure in Space and Time‘.  He’s even been both the Doctor and the Master, albeit in Big Finish form. About the only aspect of Doctor Who Gatiss hasn’t embraced is being in charge. Given how prolific Gatiss is outside of Doctor Who, and how the Sherlock and Dracula (pictured above) co-creator gravitated away from the show in recent years, it’s unlikely – though of course not impossible – that he’d take over from Chris Chibnall.  

J. Michael Straczynski

Now, Twitter is neither a negotiating table, nor often a particularly accurate representation of objective reality. Still, there’s no reason to suspect that J. Michael Straczynski’s recent enthusiastic offer to replace Chris Chibnall is anything less than sincere. Less tangible is the real-world prospect of the job ever being offered to him. Not because he couldn’t rise to the challenge – the man is a sci-fi behemoth, his work straddling the mediums of the graphic novel, TV and cinema, and encompassing damn near everything from Murder She Wrote to Marvel, DC to World War Z, and Ghostbusters to Babylon 5 (pictured above)– but down to the BBC preferring to hand the reins of its flagship family sci-fi show to someone UK-based. It doesn’t stop us wondering, though, how the man behind the deliciously cluttered, cultured and brilliant Babylon 5 would transform the Whoniverse.

Vinay Patel

For Series 11, Chris Chibnall wanted a range of fresh, representative voices that would better reflect the diversity of the show’s audience, and open up new avenues of dramatic possibilities. Vinay Patel is one of that influx of new writers who excelled himself by turning in arguably two of the Whittaker era’s best-regarded episodes. ‘Demons of the Punjab’ (pictured above) shone a light on a part of post-colonial history never before illuminated by Doctor Who, and did so with heart and conviction. ‘Fugitive of the Judoon’ proved that Patel could handle a more whacky, twisty-turny, lore-filled story.

Patel started as a corporate film-maker, but wasn’t satisfied with his lot, so poured his talents into an MA in writing for stage and broadcast media, an inspired choice that led him to the theatre, and then on to the BAFTA-nominated drama Murdered by My Father. His writing is intensely personal and political, barbed but with heart, intersecting notions of power, family, history and belonging.  

Whether or not Vinay Patel has a realistic shot at the top spot – he’s still relatively untested in TV (but then so was Kate Herron before Loki) – it’s a shame that a show so committed to representation on-screen has so few prospective showrunners from a BAME background. Wherever Patel’s talents are next channelled, though, it’s obvious he has a blindingly bright future ahead of him.

Reece Shearsmith & Steve Pemberton

An unlikely prospect, we’re forced to admit, but a delicious one. The pair are, of course, no strangers to the Whoniverse. Steve Pemberton played Strackman Lux in the fan-favourite Tennant-two-parter ‘Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead’. Reece Shearsmith featured in Season 9 episode ‘Sleep No More‘, written by Shearsmith’s old friend and fellow League of Gentlemen star and co-creator Mark Gatiss. Shearsmith also portrayed Patrick Troughton and the Second Doctor in ‘An Adventure in Space and Time’.

However, it’s Shearsmith and Pemberton’s astonishing work on the raven-black comedy-drama anthology series Inside No. 9 (pictured above) that makes them such a tantalising prospect for the top spot. They’ve proven that they can play around with places, times, and tones like true artists, offering up silent, screwball comedy one week, then cruelly funny farce the next, followed by something so truly beautiful and heart-breaking it’ll make your soul flat-line the next. They’d be wildcards, certainly, but quite possibly a cross between a game-changer and a Godsend for Doctor Who.  

Sally Wainwright

Sally Wainwright, like many of the candidates on this list, began her career writing for a soap opera, in her case the long-running and much-beloved BBC Radio 4 show The Archers. She was soon poached by the bosses of UK TV soap Emmerdale, but swiftly sacked when she said in a newspaper interview that Emmerdale“was shit, because the script editors re-wrote everything” and went on to Coronation Street.

Sci-fi fans can be sniffy about soap operas, as if sci-fi writers emerge from a cocoon fully-fledged and ready to write about far-off galaxies and alien races, but that’s tosh. If it weren’t for soaps, Paul Abbott, Jimmy McGovern, Sarah Phelps and countless other of the UK’s best screenwriters wouldn’t have had their starts. Step forward Sally Wainwright, who now stands as a behemoth in the UK TV landscape, having helmed arguably two of the most important and popular shows of recent years, Last Tango in Halifax and the astonishing Happy Valley. Her talent has now gone global. She’s currently in charge of HBO-BBC co-production Gentleman Jack, and is working with Sandra Bullock on a new TV series.

Sally Wainwright’s output and vision is supreme; her writing is raw and electric, real and illuminating, her characters so lived-in and realised that you could take them from the screen and put them in your living room and mistake them for your own family. Wainwright is probably too busy to take on the job of showrunner, but what a boon for Doctor Who her helmship would be.

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Doctor Who Series 13 will air on BBC One and BBC America this autumn.

The post Who Will Be Doctor Who’s Next Showrunner? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[wineanddinosaur]

How NYC Bartenders Are Building Pandemic-Proof Businesses

The days of sidling up to a bar in New York may feel like distant memories. But bartenders and business owners are fighting to bring them back by building imaginative solutions for the beverages, and the hospitality, that have been in such deficit over the past 11 months.

Some of these intrepid ideas involve new ventures and virtual bar experiences, while others pivot from traditional bar service entirely. One upstart is resurrecting an ancient technique to sell shelf-stable libations to-go. Another sees safety — in the form of rapid tests for Covid-19 at the venue entrance — as the new luxury.

In every story told here, there is resilience and a reimagined future. Here’s how a handful of NYC’s bar owners, workers, and newly minted entrepreneurs are attempting to survive and succeed in this pandemic.

Speakeasies Out on the Street

When Raines Law Room opened in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, it was the perfect example of the speakeasy style that many cocktail bars were emulating in 2009 — unmarked, hard-to-find door, tin ceiling, the works. With no standing room allowed, it was not easy to get in, which was the icing on the exclusive, hidden bar cake. These are not the sorts of places that thrive with indoor seating restrictions.

“Something that’s unique to all these frontline industries — and I hate to put us in the same category as health care, but we’re also some of the most affected — it’s like, ‘Come up with genius ideas while you’re kind of broke and uninsured!’” Meaghan Dorman, bar director of both Raines Law Room and Dear Irving, says. But bar people are immensely resilient, so Dorman opened up the bar’s intimate backyard and worked to obtain a bike lane permit in order to seat even more guests out front, in plain sight.

Though Dorman never thought she’d see a concept like Raines Law Room with a patio, it’s an increasingly common phenomenon in the streets of NYC. Even Attaboy, another infamous and elusive bar of New York, is now serving cocktails right out in the open on Eldridge Street.

“We’ve just really had to rethink how we can translate our philosophy into the only business we’re allowed to do right now,” Dorman says. For all of her bars, this entails not only in-person service, but a focus on to-go cocktails and virtual class offerings as well.

Paying for Safety is the New Luxury

In order to enter City Winery’s flagship location at Pier 57 in Hudson River Park on the West Side of Manhattan, both guests and employees alike are required to take a rapid Covid-19 test.* On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, patrons are responsible for the cost of a $50 test — a fee whose full amount goes directly to the testing company — and can spend their 15-minute wait for the results sipping on complimentary bubbles. Those who test positive for Covid-19 are sent home after being offered a follow-up PCR test with 24-hour turnaround, but they are not permitted inside. A negative result is rewarded with entrance to the restaurant, where all other safety protocols, such as social distancing and mask-wearing, are still enforced.

Michael Dorf, founder and CEO of City Winery, believes that offering tests at the door is “not just a scientific and social responsibility to keep people safe,” but an example of an expanding definition of hospitality. By ensuring that everybody inside what he refers to as “the bubble” has acquired a negative test result, City Winery is able to add another layer of comfort to the hospitality his restaurant venue provides. “And at some point in the not-too-distant future, we’re going to start to see [the need] to check people’s certificate of vaccination,” he says imaginatively.

Dorf believes there are “a lot of psychological considerations” to take into account to make guests feel as safe as possible, “and that’s our job,” he says. “Just like providing good bathrooms, we need to provide a good, comfortable situation for consumption. If people don’t feel safe, then they’re not going to come.”

Since City Winery is usually also a live-music venue, Dorf foresees thorough safety measures carried over for concerts when gathering restrictions are lessened. Until City Winery can host shows with an all-inclusive, test-and-ticket price for revelers, it is offering virtual concerts through its CWTV exclusive streaming series. Dorf says he is open to using it as an incremental offering for audiences who are unable to attend live because of logistics, “but we don’t see that at all in any way as a substitute.” As with its virtual wine tastings, he sees this more as a temporary bridge to connect people in a very solitary time, but also feels pushback on virtual gathering “because there’s so much of it,” he says. “And what we do really well, which doesn’t work in a Covid world … is bring people together.”

The Rise of the Salon

“My apartment, a brownstone with a large parlor, fireplace, and view of the Chrysler Building was my metropolitan dream. I was gutted at the thought of having to leave it,” recalls Georgette Moger-Petraske, a freelance food and drinks travel writer who lost her work last March. When her roommate moved out around the same time, keeping the apartment didn’t seem likely. Then she stumbled upon an 1860s perfume counter from Louisiana in an antique store during a day trip upstate. “I fell hard at first sight,” Moger-Petraske says of the beautiful bar-like structure. “Taking into consideration how much everyone was really missing bars and restaurants and attempting being home bartenders, I hatched a plan.”

The plan was to teach the fundamentals of classic cocktails like the simple yet elegant ones served at the storied speakeasy Milk & Honey, which was arguably the first of its kind in New York City to gain rabid popularity in the early aughts. Late owner Sasha Petraske and Moger-Petraske’s book, “Regarding Cocktails,” is filled with recipes for the at-home bartender and a fitting touchstone for any class. And so, with a little help from a PPP loan and a friend on the North Fork of Long Island with the Yennecott oyster farm, “Regarding Oysters” was born.

Moger-Petraske’s unique salon brings small groups into a Covid-safe learning space. During a two-hour session, guests are welcomed into her Murray Hill apartment with hand sanitizer and temperature checks before being treated to a class in cocktail-making and oyster-shucking at the little antique bar that had caught her eye so many months ago. “The salons are very intimate and there’s always a celebratory feeling in the air,” Moger-Petraske says of her small, reservations-only classes that will gather in honor of birthdays, engagements, and date nights.

Between the roaring fire, crystal clear Hundredweight ice cubes, and vintage barware that she has collected over the years, Moger-Petraske is able to present the feel of a curated bar to her students. The essence of hospitality is palpable. “Our favorite NYC dining rooms and bars put just as much consideration and passion into their establishments,” she says. “From the fold of a napkin to the charm of a miniature salt boat, the clarity of the cube chilling your Penicillin, to the delicate Depression-era coupe your Water Lily is served in. It’s my hope that in the absence of our beloved bars that my guests feel inspired to create some of this magic in their own homes.”

Your Friendly Neighborhood Grocer

St. John Frizell, owner of Fort Defiance in Red Hook, Brooklyn, tried to make his restaurant function as a delivery and takeout business for a short while back when nobody knew how long the shutdowns would last. Since sending out quality meals in to-go boxes is no simple feat and can require menu changes and more, “it was a question of how much investment,” says Frizell.

“Is this the best way to invest the money that I have left? And I decided it was not, so we closed the restaurant in late March,” Frizell explains. Not long after, he reached out to family-owned organic farm co-op Lancaster Farm Fresh to see about obtaining some of its CSA boxes. He found that enough people in town were interested in claiming one of their own to set up an online store on Fort Defiance’s website. Getting a box of beautiful vegetables through contactless pickup outside the closed restaurant was a popular notion in a time when nobody knew how Covid was transmitted and the supermarket was to be avoided. Business grew and soon people began asking for other items. “And I wanted other things too, like, cheese and milk, and eggs, and bread, and just started to build from there,” Frizell says.

It was decided then that the change for Fort Defiance was going to have to be permanent, not just a temporary closure until things got back to normal for restaurants. “That was an important decision because you can’t really ride two horses at the same time,” says Frizell. “You have to make a decision and just go for it with your whole heart.” The new iteration of Fort Defiance as a general store has since gotten into the mail-order and holiday catering business as he and his steadfast team roll with the punches of what their neighbors in Red Hook might need.

“I don’t want this to come off as corny, but [what] we went through, you have to ask, ‘How can I help?’ Like, ‘How can I be of service here?’” Much like when Hurricane Sandy flooded Fort Defiance and most of the neighborhood in 2012, “we were all kind of in the same boat as we are now. We all had problems, but we were all very ready to help each other at the same time,” Frizell recalls of his community.

As another way to reach out, he started a newsletter called The Fort Defiance Gazette with announcements of new items in the store, promotions, and more. “It’s also filled with the same kind of bullshit I would talk to people about across the bar. They’re still getting the content from me, whether they like it or not,” Frizell laughs. “But it’s another way to connect, and then people email me back all the time. So there’s this dialogue happening, it’s just happening in a different space.”

Room-Temp and Ready To-Go

“Our business really came about as we were watching our industry fall apart around us and feeling really sad and helpless about that,” says Blake Walker, co-founder of drinks delivery service Day and Night Cocktails. He and fellow Amor y Amargo alum Sean Johnson mitigated grief with conversations about possibilities for projects, contemplating styles of cocktail to best suit a pandemic hellscape. They settled on the “Scaffa” — a room-temperature and undiluted mixture of spirits found in Jerry Thomas’s 1860s “The Bartender’s Guide.” Recently appearing on menus at bars like Amor y Amargo and the late Pegu Club, the Scaffa also boasts the at-home allure of being shelf-stable, so it won’t take up space in the refrigerator.

Unlike many to-go models that can arrive alongside complicated instructions, Day and Night’s drinks are poured from their bottles without fuss. “What you get is exactly the way we would serve it to you if you were sitting across the bar from us,” Walker explains. Each menu features a fresh, bright “Day” cocktail alongside a deeper, richer “Night” mixture. For those not sold on the warm drink concept, think of cold as a flavor inhibitor and know that the professionals have layered some very indulgent ones in there.

Refreshingly, Day and Night isn’t only about the drinks — like bartending, it’s about taking care of people. “We decided right off the bat that we’d do a donation for each sale to an organization called Bushwick Ayuda Mutua, which is a mutual aid organization in Bushwick that I was volunteering for,” says Walker. After the murder of George Floyd, all profits for the month of June went to the Movement for Black Lives. Because of the smaller scale of the venture, Walker is also able to have an encounter with every customer. “I don’t take that for granted at all,” he says. “Having that personal interaction [is] the closest that I can get to the across-the-bar experience that I’ve missed so much about my job as it was a year ago.”

By the time Walker and Johnson’s workplace reopened to tackle outdoor dining, they already had their own regulars at what was becoming more than just a side hustle. “It made us turn towards Day and Night as a potential alternative because, at least for us, the experience of going back to work was not pleasant.” Less money for more effort with the added bonus risk of catching a deadly virus is a hard sell.

Instead, Walker started working full time on Day and Night Cocktails in December, quickly finding a way to make it a fully legal enterprise. He can now pursue an LLC and, with that, the potential of permanence. “We also are open to the possibility that this is meant to be a to-go concept,” Walker says. “It’s impossible to know exactly what drinking culture is going to look like on the other end of this, and I think that there may be some kind of a liminal time where both the to-go and physical bar spaces coexist.”

The Future

Are all of these innovations and modifications to the classic bar experience worth it if they don’t somehow improve the way hospitality workers are treated or protected?

For Day and Night Cocktails, the commitment to supporting good causes extends to its own hurting community. “Something that remains incredibly important to us is that whatever our participation is with this industry, on the other side of Covid, we just want to make sure that we’re working towards an industry that takes care of its own better,” Walker says. “We want to be a part of that rebuilding process.”

The real pain of newly vacant real estate where beloved bars once were is hard to ignore and important to acknowledge. There will be more empty storefronts as time trundles on, with plenty of talent waiting in the wings to fill them with new concepts. “It’s going to be a really opportunistic time,” Walker observes. Hopefully, the entrepreneurs jumping at these opportunities will have more than just profit in mind.

“Our guests need to understand that we’re not expendable and disposable, and our government needs to know that, too,” says Walker. “We need to remind each other all the time that our work is important and valuable and we shouldn’t be [a] disposable commodity that’s part of this gajillion-dollar industry. We have to do a little bit better [of a] job taking care of each other.”

As creative as bartenders are getting with side gigs and business-wide pivots, many want to get back to the bar as much as patrons do. “It’s all just so antithetical to what we love to do that I just can’t wait to serve someone at the bar again,” Dorman says longingly.

Despite everything, I do detect enthusiasm when speaking with these hospitality professionals about what the future holds for bars. I want to believe that fantastic transformations lie ahead, because perhaps it’s not a return to “normal” that we should crave, but a hope for an evolution. Dorman gets it right when she says, “It feels like the music has definitely changed at our party or something.” Here’s hoping for a better playlist on the horizon.

*At the time of publishing, City Winery is temporarily closed.

The article How NYC Bartenders Are Building Pandemic-Proof Businesses appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/post-covid-bars-nyc/

[melodymgill49801]

RIP China Chalet, Manhattan's Greatest Queer Nightlife Utopia

When DJ and nightlife entrepreneur Ty Sunderland created his flagship gay party, he envisioned stripper poles—an homage to the music video for Britney Spears’ 2007 single “Gimme More.” “But no strip club was going to let a gay promoter come in on a Friday night in New York City,” Sunderland recalls. “I asked if I could install stripper poles on the dance floor at China Chalet, and they said, ‘Yeah, totally.’ That’s how Heaven on Earth started.” 

One of the most beloved queer events in New York City in recent years, Heaven on Earth would also rank among the last of the great parties thrown at China Chalet, which shuttered last  month in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Opened in 1975, the two-story Cantonese dim sum restaurant was the last of its kind in many ways. For one, it was one of the only remaining full-service, multi-room dim sum banquet halls in the Wall Street area, but most famously, it was one of only DIY party venues in Manhattan where New York City nightlife could be everything it’s been promised to be since Studio 54: liberating, inclusive, and spontaneous. 

It’s unclear when, exactly, China Chalet started moonlighting as a nightclub, even to those who worked there toward the end. (Following the venue’s closing, owner Keith Ng has declined to comment for press.) Alex Kellogg, the venue’s party booker at the time it closed, says he’d heard of parties rumored to have been thrown there by Madonna in the 80s, but that the venue’s most prolific era began in the late 2000s. In the last decade, the venue was visited by the likes of the Olsen twins, Timothée Chalamet, and Jay-Z—plus, pretty much any young person who went out in New York City.  

“Anyone could come, and you could do anything you wanted,” Kellogg recalls of his first impression of the space, at a party thrown by _Sex Magazine_’s Asher Penn in 2013. “There was no one specific ‘genre’ of people. It wasn’t like when you went to a Bushwick party and you didn’t look DIY techno, so they didn’t accept you. Skaters could show up in ripped jeans, and then Alexander Wang could walk in behind them. And they’d be on the same level. Or you’d see Chloe Sevigny there, dressed in a bucket T-shirt and jeans drinking whiskey at the bar.” 

Photo by Megan Walschlager

The end of the aughts was an inflection point for nightlife. As the moment of downtown stalwarts like Beatrice Inn and Bungalow 8 began to fade in 2009 amid the backdrop of the financial crisis, the city’s cool kids decamped to various new stomping grounds, from old-school holdovers like Indochine and Lucien to warehouses in far Brooklyn. In Manhattan, temporary pop-up arrangements helped party-throwers find loopholes around the city’s draconian nightlife laws.

By 2011, the New York Times waxed of China Chalet’s instantly recognizable “chintzy floral carpet and pagoda paintings” in a trend feature on fashion-and-art–scene pop-up clubs, which also included Madame Wong’s, an exclusive party once hosted in the Chinatown establishment Golden Unicorn. The same year, The Observer documented an indie film after-party at China Chalet with an attendance of “ex-pat jet setters, debauched hipsters, and local lowlifes.” And the fashion house Opening Ceremony collaborated with homegrown psych rock band Gang Gang Dance for an album release party at the restaurant. 

Curtis Everett Pawley, musician and co-founder of the party-label 38 NYC, recalls seeing China Chalet for the first time at that Opening Ceremony party, noting that in the mid 2010s, the venue evolved from a fashion insider hideaway to a mainstay for local electronic music fans. In 2014, Pawley met Kellogg at the China Chalet while the latter was hosting a New York City offshoot of London’s experimental JACK댄스 party featuring performers like Doss and Stadium. 

“I don’t know how to describe the scene at JACK댄스—it was just a lot of people from the internet,” Pawley says. “But it was distinctly different from a warehouse party and other electronic DJ-oriented underground stuff that happened in Brooklyn. There was a Manhattan contingency that didn’t really venture into Brooklyn or maybe weren’t even into electronic music. The crowd was more diverse.”

Part of this broad appeal had to do with the functional and physical layout of the space. For first-timers, China Chalet would reveal itself one part at a time, starting with a steep entry stairwell that led into a main dining room, for lounging and gossipping, and finally through a mirrored hallway onto a packed dance floor—which was notoriously known to shake under the weight of hundreds jumping in unison. Then, there was the venue's far-flung location, which only contributed to its off-the-grid allure. And of course, there was the marvelously relaxed policy on cigarettes and other typical club contraband. 

“There was an air of freedom that everyone just instantly knew,” Pawley explains. “If you had even been there once, you understood it. It was a weird oasis away from the typical nightlife setting. Our parties were all over the map—it wasn’t ever pure techno or house. We didn’t want to overly aestheticize them to curate any certain crowd.” 

Photo by Tom Keelan

In the late 2010s, such a blank canvas would attract an increasingly diverse cast of revelers, spurred on by a new guard of social media-powered creative voices in the city. Nightlife photographer Megan Walschlager recalls visiting China Chalet for the first time to attend Club Glam, the fashion it-kid affair launched in 2016 by the powerhouse collective of DJ-artist Dese Escobar and siblings, celebrity stylist Kyle Luu, and influencer Fiffany Luu. Escobar told the Times earlier this year that the trio wanted to create a party that was distinctly “post-identity, meaning that it’s not strictly queer or straight, young or old.” 

“Club Glam was iconic—I remember they threw a ‘granny ball’ and people over 30 got in free, which I always found wonderfully funny,” Walschlager says, adding that there was a built-in sense of community at Glam. “People felt more at home at China Chalet because the venue let party planners use the space as their canvas, so everyone felt very relaxed. Security was pretty chill, and it was easy to get a drink at the bar, so it felt more communal.” 

During its three-year reign, Club Glam was a pioneer in its own right, offering a fresh approach to nightlife that united identities and industries without conforming to their norms. Themed events were announced just a few days ahead of time, and lines frequently rounded the block. The party’s organic aggregation of interdisciplinary creatives often draws comparison to the long-gone clubs of New York City nightlife’s storied past. 

The venue’s reputation in the queer community was further mainstreamed by the 2017 launch of Ty Sunderland’s Heaven on Earth, which drew the likes of RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Aquaria, Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing, and transgender pop icon Kim Petras. (As Sunderland retells it, the latter once famously grabbed the mic for an impromptu performance of her latest single.) The party would continue through 2020, with its last iteration taking place in February.

To this day, Sunderland credits the owner, Keith Ng, for his open-mindedness in allowing the party to thrive. “From 10 p.m. to midnight, we got to live our stripper-pole fantasies—no questions asked,” Sunderland says. “There were 400 gay men there on a weekend night. That’s hard to find in New York City in most places unless they’re LGBT establishments.” Kellogg, who first introduced Sunderand to Ng, adds of the China Chalet staff: “The coat-check girls would say, ‘Oh my god—there are so many pretty boys running around.’ They loved it.” 

Photo by Serichai Traipoom

For young queer people, including queer people of color, Sunderland’s party filled a much-needed void in gay nightlife far from the insularity of Hell’s Kitchen. Sunderland’s hosts were predominantly performers, artists, and partygoers of marginalized identities, explains drag queen Ruby Fox, who was known to captivate the dance floor at Heaven on Earth with an acrobatic routine between two stripper poles. 

“The artistry I push out into the world comes from the emotions I pull from people around me,” Fox says. “At China Chalet, in such close quarters, it was really exhilarating because I’m getting so much energy and so many positive vibes, whether that was spiritual or just a brain thing. But I would feel the wavelengths off of people to the point where I’d be like the Energizer bunny.” 

As COVID-19 brings an untimely end to tens of thousands of restaurants and bars across America, it’s hard not to feel as though a chapter of nightlife has closed. And while restaurants and other food purveyors are struggling to lobby for assistance, nightlife proprietors have even fewer options to obtain funding. That’s not to mention the thousands of freelancers and gig workers—performers, DJs, and party planners—who make their living by creating these spaces for community and expression. 

“It's funny—when quarantine hit, all of us who work in live music were all stressed about how our venues were going to stay open,” Pawley remembers. “I remember thinking, ‘At least we’ll always have China Chalet.’ That’s why its closing is such a hard blow. I really thought it would be the last thing standing.” 

But while China Chalet deserved a more fitting end—maybe one final party to commemorate its legacy—Pawley says what made it special is the creativity it fostered and the connections it created. “To this day, I met so many of my closest friends at China Chalet,” he says. “We’re all still friends. I really believe all the people in New York City are what made the parties great. I don’t think that energy will die.”

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RIP China Chalet, Manhattan's Greatest Queer Nightlife Utopia

When DJ and nightlife entrepreneur Ty Sunderland created his flagship gay party, he envisioned stripper poles—an homage to the music video for Britney Spears’ 2007 single “Gimme More.” “But no strip club was going to let a gay promoter come in on a Friday night in New York City,” Sunderland recalls. “I asked if I could install stripper poles on the dance floor at China Chalet, and they said, ‘Yeah, totally.’ That’s how Heaven on Earth started.” 

One of the most beloved queer events in New York City in recent years, Heaven on Earth would also rank among the last of the great parties thrown at China Chalet, which shuttered last  month in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Opened in 1975, the two-story Cantonese dim sum restaurant was the last of its kind in many ways. For one, it was one of the only remaining full-service, multi-room dim sum banquet halls in the Wall Street area, but most famously, it was one of only DIY party venues in Manhattan where New York City nightlife could be everything it’s been promised to be since Studio 54: liberating, inclusive, and spontaneous. 

It’s unclear when, exactly, China Chalet started moonlighting as a nightclub, even to those who worked there toward the end. (Following the venue’s closing, owner Keith Ng has declined to comment for press.) Alex Kellogg, the venue’s party booker at the time it closed, says he’d heard of parties rumored to have been thrown there by Madonna in the 80s, but that the venue’s most prolific era began in the late 2000s. In the last decade, the venue was visited by the likes of the Olsen twins, Timothée Chalamet, and Jay-Z—plus, pretty much any young person who went out in New York City.  

“Anyone could come, and you could do anything you wanted,” Kellogg recalls of his first impression of the space, at a party thrown by _Sex Magazine_’s Asher Penn in 2013. “There was no one specific ‘genre’ of people. It wasn’t like when you went to a Bushwick party and you didn’t look DIY techno, so they didn’t accept you. Skaters could show up in ripped jeans, and then Alexander Wang could walk in behind them. And they’d be on the same level. Or you’d see Chloe Sevigny there, dressed in a bucket T-shirt and jeans drinking whiskey at the bar.” 

Photo by Megan Walschlager

The end of the aughts was an inflection point for nightlife. As the moment of downtown stalwarts like Beatrice Inn and Bungalow 8 began to fade in 2009 amid the backdrop of the financial crisis, the city’s cool kids decamped to various new stomping grounds, from old-school holdovers like Indochine and Lucien to warehouses in far Brooklyn. In Manhattan, temporary pop-up arrangements helped party-throwers find loopholes around the city’s draconian nightlife laws.

By 2011, the New York Times waxed of China Chalet’s instantly recognizable “chintzy floral carpet and pagoda paintings” in a trend feature on fashion-and-art–scene pop-up clubs, which also included Madame Wong’s, an exclusive party once hosted in the Chinatown establishment Golden Unicorn. The same year, The Observer documented an indie film after-party at China Chalet with an attendance of “ex-pat jet setters, debauched hipsters, and local lowlifes.” And the fashion house Opening Ceremony collaborated with homegrown psych rock band Gang Gang Dance for an album release party at the restaurant. 

Curtis Everett Pawley, musician and co-founder of the party-label 38 NYC, recalls seeing China Chalet for the first time at that Opening Ceremony party, noting that in the mid 2010s, the venue evolved from a fashion insider hideaway to a mainstay for local electronic music fans. In 2014, Pawley met Kellogg at the China Chalet while the latter was hosting a New York City offshoot of London’s experimental JACK댄스 party featuring performers like Doss and Stadium. 

“I don’t know how to describe the scene at JACK댄스—it was just a lot of people from the internet,” Pawley says. “But it was distinctly different from a warehouse party and other electronic DJ-oriented underground stuff that happened in Brooklyn. There was a Manhattan contingency that didn’t really venture into Brooklyn or maybe weren’t even into electronic music. The crowd was more diverse.”

Part of this broad appeal had to do with the functional and physical layout of the space. For first-timers, China Chalet would reveal itself one part at a time, starting with a steep entry stairwell that led into a main dining room, for lounging and gossipping, and finally through a mirrored hallway onto a packed dance floor—which was notoriously known to shake under the weight of hundreds jumping in unison. Then, there was the venue's far-flung location, which only contributed to its off-the-grid allure. And of course, there was the marvelously relaxed policy on cigarettes and other typical club contraband. 

“There was an air of freedom that everyone just instantly knew,” Pawley explains. “If you had even been there once, you understood it. It was a weird oasis away from the typical nightlife setting. Our parties were all over the map—it wasn’t ever pure techno or house. We didn’t want to overly aestheticize them to curate any certain crowd.” 

Photo by Tom Keelan

In the late 2010s, such a blank canvas would attract an increasingly diverse cast of revelers, spurred on by a new guard of social media-powered creative voices in the city. Nightlife photographer Megan Walschlager recalls visiting China Chalet for the first time to attend Club Glam, the fashion it-kid affair launched in 2016 by the powerhouse collective of DJ-artist Dese Escobar and siblings, celebrity stylist Kyle Luu, and influencer Fiffany Luu. Escobar told the Times earlier this year that the trio wanted to create a party that was distinctly “post-identity, meaning that it’s not strictly queer or straight, young or old.” 

“Club Glam was iconic—I remember they threw a ‘granny ball’ and people over 30 got in free, which I always found wonderfully funny,” Walschlager says, adding that there was a built-in sense of community at Glam. “People felt more at home at China Chalet because the venue let party planners use the space as their canvas, so everyone felt very relaxed. Security was pretty chill, and it was easy to get a drink at the bar, so it felt more communal.” 

During its three-year reign, Club Glam was a pioneer in its own right, offering a fresh approach to nightlife that united identities and industries without conforming to their norms. Themed events were announced just a few days ahead of time, and lines frequently rounded the block. The party’s organic aggregation of interdisciplinary creatives often draws comparison to the long-gone clubs of New York City nightlife’s storied past. 

The venue’s reputation in the queer community was further mainstreamed by the 2017 launch of Ty Sunderland’s Heaven on Earth, which drew the likes of RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Aquaria, Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing, and transgender pop icon Kim Petras. (As Sunderland retells it, the latter once famously grabbed the mic for an impromptu performance of her latest single.) The party would continue through 2020, with its last iteration taking place in February.

To this day, Sunderland credits the owner, Keith Ng, for his open-mindedness in allowing the party to thrive. “From 10 p.m. to midnight, we got to live our stripper-pole fantasies—no questions asked,” Sunderland says. “There were 400 gay men there on a weekend night. That’s hard to find in New York City in most places unless they’re LGBT establishments.” Kellogg, who first introduced Sunderand to Ng, adds of the China Chalet staff: “The coat-check girls would say, ‘Oh my god—there are so many pretty boys running around.’ They loved it.” 

Photo by Serichai Traipoom

For young queer people, including queer people of color, Sunderland’s party filled a much-needed void in gay nightlife far from the insularity of Hell’s Kitchen. Sunderland’s hosts were predominantly performers, artists, and partygoers of marginalized identities, explains drag queen Ruby Fox, who was known to captivate the dance floor at Heaven on Earth with an acrobatic routine between two stripper poles. 

“The artistry I push out into the world comes from the emotions I pull from people around me,” Fox says. “At China Chalet, in such close quarters, it was really exhilarating because I’m getting so much energy and so many positive vibes, whether that was spiritual or just a brain thing. But I would feel the wavelengths off of people to the point where I’d be like the Energizer bunny.” 

As COVID-19 brings an untimely end to tens of thousands of restaurants and bars across America, it’s hard not to feel as though a chapter of nightlife has closed. And while restaurants and other food purveyors are struggling to lobby for assistance, nightlife proprietors have even fewer options to obtain funding. That’s not to mention the thousands of freelancers and gig workers—performers, DJs, and party planners—who make their living by creating these spaces for community and expression. 

“It's funny—when quarantine hit, all of us who work in live music were all stressed about how our venues were going to stay open,” Pawley remembers. “I remember thinking, ‘At least we’ll always have China Chalet.’ That’s why its closing is such a hard blow. I really thought it would be the last thing standing.” 

But while China Chalet deserved a more fitting end—maybe one final party to commemorate its legacy—Pawley says what made it special is the creativity it fostered and the connections it created. “To this day, I met so many of my closest friends at China Chalet,” he says. “We’re all still friends. I really believe all the people in New York City are what made the parties great. I don’t think that energy will die.”

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RIP China Chalet, Manhattan's Greatest Queer Nightlife Utopia

When DJ and nightlife entrepreneur Ty Sunderland created his flagship gay party, he envisioned stripper poles—an homage to the music video for Britney Spears’ 2007 single “Gimme More.” “But no strip club was going to let a gay promoter come in on a Friday night in New York City,” Sunderland recalls. “I asked if I could install stripper poles on the dance floor at China Chalet, and they said, ‘Yeah, totally.’ That’s how Heaven on Earth started.” 

One of the most beloved queer events in New York City in recent years, Heaven on Earth would also rank among the last of the great parties thrown at China Chalet, which shuttered last  month in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Opened in 1975, the two-story Cantonese dim sum restaurant was the last of its kind in many ways. For one, it was one of the only remaining full-service, multi-room dim sum banquet halls in the Wall Street area, but most famously, it was one of only DIY party venues in Manhattan where New York City nightlife could be everything it’s been promised to be since Studio 54: liberating, inclusive, and spontaneous. 

It’s unclear when, exactly, China Chalet started moonlighting as a nightclub, even to those who worked there toward the end. (Following the venue’s closing, owner Keith Ng has declined to comment for press.) Alex Kellogg, the venue’s party booker at the time it closed, says he’d heard of parties rumored to have been thrown there by Madonna in the 80s, but that the venue’s most prolific era began in the late 2000s. In the last decade, the venue was visited by the likes of the Olsen twins, Timothée Chalamet, and Jay-Z—plus, pretty much any young person who went out in New York City.  

“Anyone could come, and you could do anything you wanted,” Kellogg recalls of his first impression of the space, at a party thrown by _Sex Magazine_’s Asher Penn in 2013. “There was no one specific ‘genre’ of people. It wasn’t like when you went to a Bushwick party and you didn’t look DIY techno, so they didn’t accept you. Skaters could show up in ripped jeans, and then Alexander Wang could walk in behind them. And they’d be on the same level. Or you’d see Chloe Sevigny there, dressed in a bucket T-shirt and jeans drinking whiskey at the bar.” 

Photo by Megan Walschlager

The end of the aughts was an inflection point for nightlife. As the moment of downtown stalwarts like Beatrice Inn and Bungalow 8 began to fade in 2009 amid the backdrop of the financial crisis, the city’s cool kids decamped to various new stomping grounds, from old-school holdovers like Indochine and Lucien to warehouses in far Brooklyn. In Manhattan, temporary pop-up arrangements helped party-throwers find loopholes around the city’s draconian nightlife laws.

By 2011, the New York Times waxed of China Chalet’s instantly recognizable “chintzy floral carpet and pagoda paintings” in a trend feature on fashion-and-art–scene pop-up clubs, which also included Madame Wong’s, an exclusive party once hosted in the Chinatown establishment Golden Unicorn. The same year, The Observer documented an indie film after-party at China Chalet with an attendance of “ex-pat jet setters, debauched hipsters, and local lowlifes.” And the fashion house Opening Ceremony collaborated with homegrown psych rock band Gang Gang Dance for an album release party at the restaurant. 

Curtis Everett Pawley, musician and co-founder of the party-label 38 NYC, recalls seeing China Chalet for the first time at that Opening Ceremony party, noting that in the mid 2010s, the venue evolved from a fashion insider hideaway to a mainstay for local electronic music fans. In 2014, Pawley met Kellogg at the China Chalet while the latter was hosting a New York City offshoot of London’s experimental JACK댄스 party featuring performers like Doss and Stadium. 

“I don’t know how to describe the scene at JACK댄스—it was just a lot of people from the internet,” Pawley says. “But it was distinctly different from a warehouse party and other electronic DJ-oriented underground stuff that happened in Brooklyn. There was a Manhattan contingency that didn’t really venture into Brooklyn or maybe weren’t even into electronic music. The crowd was more diverse.”

Part of this broad appeal had to do with the functional and physical layout of the space. For first-timers, China Chalet would reveal itself one part at a time, starting with a steep entry stairwell that led into a main dining room, for lounging and gossipping, and finally through a mirrored hallway onto a packed dance floor—which was notoriously known to shake under the weight of hundreds jumping in unison. Then, there was the venue's far-flung location, which only contributed to its off-the-grid allure. And of course, there was the marvelously relaxed policy on cigarettes and other typical club contraband. 

“There was an air of freedom that everyone just instantly knew,” Pawley explains. “If you had even been there once, you understood it. It was a weird oasis away from the typical nightlife setting. Our parties were all over the map—it wasn’t ever pure techno or house. We didn’t want to overly aestheticize them to curate any certain crowd.” 

Photo by Tom Keelan

In the late 2010s, such a blank canvas would attract an increasingly diverse cast of revelers, spurred on by a new guard of social media-powered creative voices in the city. Nightlife photographer Megan Walschlager recalls visiting China Chalet for the first time to attend Club Glam, the fashion it-kid affair launched in 2016 by the powerhouse collective of DJ-artist Dese Escobar and siblings, celebrity stylist Kyle Luu, and influencer Fiffany Luu. Escobar told the Times earlier this year that the trio wanted to create a party that was distinctly “post-identity, meaning that it’s not strictly queer or straight, young or old.” 

“Club Glam was iconic—I remember they threw a ‘granny ball’ and people over 30 got in free, which I always found wonderfully funny,” Walschlager says, adding that there was a built-in sense of community at Glam. “People felt more at home at China Chalet because the venue let party planners use the space as their canvas, so everyone felt very relaxed. Security was pretty chill, and it was easy to get a drink at the bar, so it felt more communal.” 

During its three-year reign, Club Glam was a pioneer in its own right, offering a fresh approach to nightlife that united identities and industries without conforming to their norms. Themed events were announced just a few days ahead of time, and lines frequently rounded the block. The party’s organic aggregation of interdisciplinary creatives often draws comparison to the long-gone clubs of New York City nightlife’s storied past. 

The venue’s reputation in the queer community was further mainstreamed by the 2017 launch of Ty Sunderland’s Heaven on Earth, which drew the likes of RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Aquaria, Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing, and transgender pop icon Kim Petras. (As Sunderland retells it, the latter once famously grabbed the mic for an impromptu performance of her latest single.) The party would continue through 2020, with its last iteration taking place in February.

To this day, Sunderland credits the owner, Keith Ng, for his open-mindedness in allowing the party to thrive. “From 10 p.m. to midnight, we got to live our stripper-pole fantasies—no questions asked,” Sunderland says. “There were 400 gay men there on a weekend night. That’s hard to find in New York City in most places unless they’re LGBT establishments.” Kellogg, who first introduced Sunderand to Ng, adds of the China Chalet staff: “The coat-check girls would say, ‘Oh my god—there are so many pretty boys running around.’ They loved it.” 

Photo by Serichai Traipoom

For young queer people, including queer people of color, Sunderland’s party filled a much-needed void in gay nightlife far from the insularity of Hell’s Kitchen. Sunderland’s hosts were predominantly performers, artists, and partygoers of marginalized identities, explains drag queen Ruby Fox, who was known to captivate the dance floor at Heaven on Earth with an acrobatic routine between two stripper poles. 

“The artistry I push out into the world comes from the emotions I pull from people around me,” Fox says. “At China Chalet, in such close quarters, it was really exhilarating because I’m getting so much energy and so many positive vibes, whether that was spiritual or just a brain thing. But I would feel the wavelengths off of people to the point where I’d be like the Energizer bunny.” 

As COVID-19 brings an untimely end to tens of thousands of restaurants and bars across America, it’s hard not to feel as though a chapter of nightlife has closed. And while restaurants and other food purveyors are struggling to lobby for assistance, nightlife proprietors have even fewer options to obtain funding. That’s not to mention the thousands of freelancers and gig workers—performers, DJs, and party planners—who make their living by creating these spaces for community and expression. 

“It's funny—when quarantine hit, all of us who work in live music were all stressed about how our venues were going to stay open,” Pawley remembers. “I remember thinking, ‘At least we’ll always have China Chalet.’ That’s why its closing is such a hard blow. I really thought it would be the last thing standing.” 

But while China Chalet deserved a more fitting end—maybe one final party to commemorate its legacy—Pawley says what made it special is the creativity it fostered and the connections it created. “To this day, I met so many of my closest friends at China Chalet,” he says. “We’re all still friends. I really believe all the people in New York City are what made the parties great. I don’t think that energy will die.”

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RIP China Chalet, Manhattan's Greatest Queer Nightlife Utopia

When DJ and nightlife entrepreneur Ty Sunderland created his flagship gay party, he envisioned stripper poles—an homage to the music video for Britney Spears’ 2007 single “Gimme More.” “But no strip club was going to let a gay promoter come in on a Friday night in New York City,” Sunderland recalls. “I asked if I could install stripper poles on the dance floor at China Chalet, and they said, ‘Yeah, totally.’ That’s how Heaven on Earth started.” 

One of the most beloved queer events in New York City in recent years, Heaven on Earth would also rank among the last of the great parties thrown at China Chalet, which shuttered last  month in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Opened in 1975, the two-story Cantonese dim sum restaurant was the last of its kind in many ways. For one, it was one of the only remaining full-service, multi-room dim sum banquet halls in the Wall Street area, but most famously, it was one of only DIY party venues in Manhattan where New York City nightlife could be everything it’s been promised to be since Studio 54: liberating, inclusive, and spontaneous. 

It’s unclear when, exactly, China Chalet started moonlighting as a nightclub, even to those who worked there toward the end. (Following the venue’s closing, owner Keith Ng has declined to comment for press.) Alex Kellogg, the venue’s party booker at the time it closed, says he’d heard of parties rumored to have been thrown there by Madonna in the 80s, but that the venue’s most prolific era began in the late 2000s. In the last decade, the venue was visited by the likes of the Olsen twins, Timothée Chalamet, and Jay-Z—plus, pretty much any young person who went out in New York City.  

“Anyone could come, and you could do anything you wanted,” Kellogg recalls of his first impression of the space, at a party thrown by _Sex Magazine_’s Asher Penn in 2013. “There was no one specific ‘genre’ of people. It wasn’t like when you went to a Bushwick party and you didn’t look DIY techno, so they didn’t accept you. Skaters could show up in ripped jeans, and then Alexander Wang could walk in behind them. And they’d be on the same level. Or you’d see Chloe Sevigny there, dressed in a bucket T-shirt and jeans drinking whiskey at the bar.” 

Photo by Megan Walschlager

The end of the aughts was an inflection point for nightlife. As the moment of downtown stalwarts like Beatrice Inn and Bungalow 8 began to fade in 2009 amid the backdrop of the financial crisis, the city’s cool kids decamped to various new stomping grounds, from old-school holdovers like Indochine and Lucien to warehouses in far Brooklyn. In Manhattan, temporary pop-up arrangements helped party-throwers find loopholes around the city’s draconian nightlife laws.

By 2011, the New York Times waxed of China Chalet’s instantly recognizable “chintzy floral carpet and pagoda paintings” in a trend feature on fashion-and-art–scene pop-up clubs, which also included Madame Wong’s, an exclusive party once hosted in the Chinatown establishment Golden Unicorn. The same year, The Observer documented an indie film after-party at China Chalet with an attendance of “ex-pat jet setters, debauched hipsters, and local lowlifes.” And the fashion house Opening Ceremony collaborated with homegrown psych rock band Gang Gang Dance for an album release party at the restaurant. 

Curtis Everett Pawley, musician and co-founder of the party-label 38 NYC, recalls seeing China Chalet for the first time at that Opening Ceremony party, noting that in the mid 2010s, the venue evolved from a fashion insider hideaway to a mainstay for local electronic music fans. In 2014, Pawley met Kellogg at the China Chalet while the latter was hosting a New York City offshoot of London’s experimental JACK댄스 party featuring performers like Doss and Stadium. 

“I don’t know how to describe the scene at JACK댄스—it was just a lot of people from the internet,” Pawley says. “But it was distinctly different from a warehouse party and other electronic DJ-oriented underground stuff that happened in Brooklyn. There was a Manhattan contingency that didn’t really venture into Brooklyn or maybe weren’t even into electronic music. The crowd was more diverse.”

Part of this broad appeal had to do with the functional and physical layout of the space. For first-timers, China Chalet would reveal itself one part at a time, starting with a steep entry stairwell that led into a main dining room, for lounging and gossipping, and finally through a mirrored hallway onto a packed dance floor—which was notoriously known to shake under the weight of hundreds jumping in unison. Then, there was the venue's far-flung location, which only contributed to its off-the-grid allure. And of course, there was the marvelously relaxed policy on cigarettes and other typical club contraband. 

“There was an air of freedom that everyone just instantly knew,” Pawley explains. “If you had even been there once, you understood it. It was a weird oasis away from the typical nightlife setting. Our parties were all over the map—it wasn’t ever pure techno or house. We didn’t want to overly aestheticize them to curate any certain crowd.” 

Photo by Tom Keelan

In the late 2010s, such a blank canvas would attract an increasingly diverse cast of revelers, spurred on by a new guard of social media-powered creative voices in the city. Nightlife photographer Megan Walschlager recalls visiting China Chalet for the first time to attend Club Glam, the fashion it-kid affair launched in 2016 by the powerhouse collective of DJ-artist Dese Escobar and siblings, celebrity stylist Kyle Luu, and influencer Fiffany Luu. Escobar told the Times earlier this year that the trio wanted to create a party that was distinctly “post-identity, meaning that it’s not strictly queer or straight, young or old.” 

“Club Glam was iconic—I remember they threw a ‘granny ball’ and people over 30 got in free, which I always found wonderfully funny,” Walschlager says, adding that there was a built-in sense of community at Glam. “People felt more at home at China Chalet because the venue let party planners use the space as their canvas, so everyone felt very relaxed. Security was pretty chill, and it was easy to get a drink at the bar, so it felt more communal.” 

During its three-year reign, Club Glam was a pioneer in its own right, offering a fresh approach to nightlife that united identities and industries without conforming to their norms. Themed events were announced just a few days ahead of time, and lines frequently rounded the block. The party’s organic aggregation of interdisciplinary creatives often draws comparison to the long-gone clubs of New York City nightlife’s storied past. 

The venue’s reputation in the queer community was further mainstreamed by the 2017 launch of Ty Sunderland’s Heaven on Earth, which drew the likes of RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Aquaria, Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing, and transgender pop icon Kim Petras. (As Sunderland retells it, the latter once famously grabbed the mic for an impromptu performance of her latest single.) The party would continue through 2020, with its last iteration taking place in February.

To this day, Sunderland credits the owner, Keith Ng, for his open-mindedness in allowing the party to thrive. “From 10 p.m. to midnight, we got to live our stripper-pole fantasies—no questions asked,” Sunderland says. “There were 400 gay men there on a weekend night. That’s hard to find in New York City in most places unless they’re LGBT establishments.” Kellogg, who first introduced Sunderand to Ng, adds of the China Chalet staff: “The coat-check girls would say, ‘Oh my god—there are so many pretty boys running around.’ They loved it.” 

Photo by Serichai Traipoom

For young queer people, including queer people of color, Sunderland’s party filled a much-needed void in gay nightlife far from the insularity of Hell’s Kitchen. Sunderland’s hosts were predominantly performers, artists, and partygoers of marginalized identities, explains drag queen Ruby Fox, who was known to captivate the dance floor at Heaven on Earth with an acrobatic routine between two stripper poles. 

“The artistry I push out into the world comes from the emotions I pull from people around me,” Fox says. “At China Chalet, in such close quarters, it was really exhilarating because I’m getting so much energy and so many positive vibes, whether that was spiritual or just a brain thing. But I would feel the wavelengths off of people to the point where I’d be like the Energizer bunny.” 

As COVID-19 brings an untimely end to tens of thousands of restaurants and bars across America, it’s hard not to feel as though a chapter of nightlife has closed. And while restaurants and other food purveyors are struggling to lobby for assistance, nightlife proprietors have even fewer options to obtain funding. That’s not to mention the thousands of freelancers and gig workers—performers, DJs, and party planners—who make their living by creating these spaces for community and expression. 

“It's funny—when quarantine hit, all of us who work in live music were all stressed about how our venues were going to stay open,” Pawley remembers. “I remember thinking, ‘At least we’ll always have China Chalet.’ That’s why its closing is such a hard blow. I really thought it would be the last thing standing.” 

But while China Chalet deserved a more fitting end—maybe one final party to commemorate its legacy—Pawley says what made it special is the creativity it fostered and the connections it created. “To this day, I met so many of my closest friends at China Chalet,” he says. “We’re all still friends. I really believe all the people in New York City are what made the parties great. I don’t think that energy will die.”

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