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transgenderteensurvivalguide · 3 years

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“Elliot Page doesn’t remember exactly how long he had been asking.

But he does remember the acute feeling of triumph when, around age 9, he was finally allowed to cut his hair short. “I felt like a boy,” Page says. “I wanted to be a boy. I would ask my mom if I could be someday.” Growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Page visualized himself as a boy in imaginary games, freed from the discomfort of how other people saw him: as a girl. After the haircut, strangers finally started perceiving him the way he saw himself, and it felt both right and exciting.

The joy was short-lived. Months later, Page got his first break, landing a part as a daughter in a Canadian mining family in the TV movie Pit Pony. He wore a wig for the film, and when Pit Pony became a TV show, he grew his hair out again. “I became a professional actor at the age of 10,” Page says. And pursuing that passion came with a difficult compromise. “Of course I had to look a certain way.”

We are speaking in late February. It is the first interview Page, 34, has given since disclosing in December that he is transgender, in a heartfelt letter posted to Instagram, and he is crying before I have even uttered a question. “Sorry, I’m going to be emotional, but that’s cool, right?” he says, smiling through his tears.

It’s hard for him to talk about the days that led up to that disclosure. When I ask how he was feeling, he looks away, his neck exposed by a new short haircut. After a pause, he presses his hand to his heart and closes his eyes. “This feeling of true excitement and deep gratitude to have made it to this point in my life,” he says, “mixed with a lot of fear and anxiety.”

It’s not hard to understand why a trans person would be dealing with conflicting feelings in this moment. Increased social acceptance has led to more young people describing themselves as trans—1.8% of Gen Z compared with 0.2% of boomers, according to a recent Gallup poll—yet this has fueled conservatives who are stoking fears about a “transgender craze.” President Joe Biden has restored the right of transgender military members to serve openly, and in Hollywood, trans people have never had more meaningful time onscreen. Meanwhile, J.K. Rowling is leveraging her cultural capital to oppose transgender equality in the name of feminism, and lawmakers are arguing in the halls of Congress over the validity of gender identities. “Sex has become a political football in the culture wars,” says Chase Strangio, deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU.

(Full article with photos continued under the “read more”)

And so Page—who charmed America as a precocious pregnant teenager in Juno, constructed dreamscapes in Inception and now stars in Netflix’s hit superhero show The Umbrella Academy, the third season of which he’s filming in Toronto—expected that his news would be met with both applause and vitriol. “What I was anticipating was a lot of support and love and a massive amount of hatred and transphobia,” says Page. “That’s essentially what happened.” What he did not anticipate was just how big this story would be. Page’s announcement, which made him one of the most famous out trans people in the world, started trending on Twitter in more than 20 countries. He gained more than 400,000 new followers on Instagram on that day alone. Thousands of articles were published. Likes and shares reached the millions. Right-wing podcasters readied their rhetoric about “women in men’s locker rooms.” Casting directors reached out to Page’s manager saying it would be an honor to cast Page in their next big movie.

So, it was a lot. Over the course of two conversations, Page will say that understanding himself in all the specifics remains a work in progress. Fathoming one’s gender, an identity innate and performed, personal and social, fixed and evolving, is complicated enough without being under a spotlight that never seems to turn off. But having arrived at a critical juncture, Page feels a deep sense of responsibility to share his truth. “Extremely influential people are spreading these myths and damaging rhetoric—every day you’re seeing our existence debated,” Page says. “Transgender people are so very real.”

That role in Pit Pony led to other productions and eventually, when Page was 16, to a film called Mouth to Mouth. Playing a young anarchist, Page had a chance to cut his hair again. This time, he shaved it off completely. The kids at his high school teased him, but in photos he has posted from that time on social media he looks at ease. Page’s head was still shaved when he mailed in an audition tape for the 2005 thriller Hard Candy. The people in charge of casting asked him to audition again in a wig. Soon, the hair was back.

Page’s tour de force performance in Hard Candy led, two years later, to Juno, a low-budget indie film that brought Page Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations and sudden megafame. The actor, then 21, struggled with the stresses of that ascension. The endless primping, red carpets and magazine spreads were all agonizing reminders of the disconnect between how the world saw Page and who he knew himself to be. “I just never recognized myself,” Page says. “For a long time I could not even look at a photo of myself.” It was difficult to watch the movies too, especially ones in which he played more feminine roles.

Page loved making movies, but he also felt alienated by Hollywood and its standards. Alia Shawkat, a close friend and co-star in 2009’s Whip It,describes all the attention from Juno as scarring. “He had a really hard time with the press and expectations,” Shawkat says. “‘Put this on! And look this way! And this is sexy!’”

By the time he appeared in blockbusters like X-Men: The Last Stand and Inception, Page was suffering from depression, anxiety and panic attacks. He didn’t know, he says, “how to explain to people that even though [I was] an actor, just putting on a T-shirt cut for a woman would make me so unwell.” Shawkat recalls Page’s struggles with clothes. “I’d be like, ‘Hey, look at all these nice outfits you’re getting,’ and he would say, ‘It’s not me. It feels like a costume,’” she says. Page tried to convince himself that he was fine, that someone who was fortunate enough to have made it shouldn’t have complaints. But he felt exhausted by the work required to “just exist,” and thought more than once about quitting acting.

In 2014, Page came out as gay, despite feeling for years that “being out was impossible” given his career. (Gender identity and sexual orientation are, of course, distinct, but one queer identity can coexist with another.) In an emotional speech at a Human Rights Campaign conference, Page talked about being part of an industry “that places crushing standards” on actors and viewers alike. “There are pervasive stereotypes about masculinity and femininity that define how we’re all supposed to act, dress and speak,” Page went on. “And they serve no one.”

The actor started wearing suits on the red carpet. He found love, marrying choreographer Emma Portner in 2018. He asserted more agency in his career, producing his own films with LGBTQ leads like Freeheld and My Days of Mercy. And he made a masculine wardrobe a condition of taking roles. Yet the daily discord was becoming unbearable. “The difference in how I felt before coming out as gay to after was massive,” says Page. “But did the discomfort in my body ever go away? No, no, no, no.”

In part, it was the isolation forced by the pandemic that brought to a head Page’s wrestling with gender. (Page and Portner separated last summer, and the two divorced in early 2021. “We’ve remained close friends,” Page says.) “I had a lot of time on my own to really focus on things that I think, in so many ways, unconsciously, I was avoiding,” he says. He was inspired by trailblazing trans icons like Janet Mock and Laverne Cox, who found success in Hollywood while living authentically. Trans writers helped him understand his feelings; Page saw himself reflected in P. Carl’s memoir Becoming a Man. Eventually “shame and discomfort” gave way to revelation. “I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” Page says, “and letting myself fully become who I am.”

This led to a series of decisions. One was asking the world to call him by a different name, Elliot, which he says he’s always liked. Page has a tattoo that says E.P. PHONE HOME, a reference to a movie about a young boy with that name. “I loved E.T. when I was a kid and always wanted to look like the boys in the movies, right?” he says. The other decision was to use different pronouns—for the record, both he/him and they/them are fine. (When I ask if he has a preference on pronouns for the purposes of this story, Page says, “He/him is great.”)

A day before we first speak, Page will talk to his mom about this interview and she will tell him, “I’m just so proud of my son.” He grows emotional relating this and tries to explain that his mom, the daughter of a minister, who was born in the 1950s, was always trying to do what she thought was best for her child, even if that meant encouraging young Page to act like a girl. “She wants me to be who I am and supports me fully,” Page says. “It is a testament to how people really change.”

Another decision was to get top surgery. Page volunteers this information early in our conversation; at the time he posted his disclosure on Instagram, he was recovering in Toronto. Like many trans people, Page emphasizes being trans isn’t all about surgery. For some people, it’s unnecessary. For others, it’s unaffordable. For the wider world, the media’s focus on it has sensationalized transgender bodies, inviting invasive and inappropriate questions. But Page describes surgery as something that, for him, has made it possible to finally recognize himself when he looks in the mirror, providing catharsis he’s been waiting for since the “total hell” of puberty. “It has completely transformed my life,” he says. So much of his energy was spent on being uncomfortable in his body, he says. Now he has that energy back.

For the transgender community at large, visibility does not automatically lead to acceptance. Around the globe, transgender people deal disproportionately with violence and discrimination. Anti-trans hate crimes are on the rise in the U.K. along with increasingly transphobic rhetoric in newspapers and tabloids. In the U.S., in addition to the perennial challenges trans people face with issues like poverty and homelessness, a flurry of bills in state legislatures would make it a crime to provide transition-related medical care to trans youth. And crass old jokes are still in circulation. When Biden lifted the ban on open service for transgender troops, Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che did a bit on Weekend Update about the policy being called “don’t ask, don’t tuck.”

Page says coming out as trans was “selfish” on one level: “It’s for me. I want to live and be who I am.” But he also felt a moral imperative to do so, given the times. Human identity is complicated and mysterious, but politics insists on fitting everything into boxes. In today’s culture wars, simplistic beliefs about gender—e.g., chromosomes = destiny—are so widespread and so deep-seated that many people who hold those beliefs don’t feel compelled to consider whether they might be incomplete or prejudiced. On Feb. 24, after a passionate debate on legislation that would ban discrimination against LGBTQ people, Representative Marie Newman, an Illinois Democrat, proudly displayed the pride flag in support of her daughter, who is trans. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, responded by hanging a poster outside her office that read: There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE.

The next day Dr. Rachel Levine, who stands to become the first openly transgender federal official confirmed by the Senate, endured a tirade from Senator Rand Paul about “genital mutilation” during her confirmation hearing. My second conversation with Page happens shortly after this. He brings it up almost immediately, and seems both heartbroken and determined. He wants to emphasize that top surgery, for him, was “not only life-changing but lifesaving.” He implores people to educate themselves about trans lives, to learn how crucial medical care can be, to understand that lack of access to it is one of the many reasons that an estimated 41% of transgender people have attempted suicide, according to one survey.

Page has been in the political trenches for a while, having leaned into progressive activism after coming out as queer in 2014. For two seasons, he and best friend Ian Daniel filmed Gaycation, a Viceland series that explored LGBTQ culture around the world and, at one point, showed Page grilling Senator Ted Cruz at the Iowa State Fair about discrimination against queer people. In 2019, Page made a documentary called There’s Something in the Water, which explores environmental hardships experienced by communities of color in Nova Scotia, with $350,000 of his own money. That activism extends to his own industry: in 2017, he published a Facebook post that, among other things, accused director Brett Ratner of forcibly outing him as gay on the set of an X-Men movie. (A representative for Ratner did not respond to a request for comment.)

As a trans person who is white, wealthy and famous, Page has a unique kind of privilege, and with it an opportunity to advocate for those with less. According to the U.S. Trans Survey, a large-scale report from 2015, transgender people of color are more likely to experience unemployment, harassment by police and refusals of medical care. Nearly half of all Black respondents reported being denied equal treatment, verbally harassed and/or physically attacked in the past year. Trans people as a group fare much worse on such stats than the general population. “My privilege has allowed me to have resources to get through and to be where I am today,” Page says, “and of course I want to use that privilege and platform to help in the ways I can.”

Since his disclosure, Page has been mostly quiet on social media. One exception has been to tweet on behalf of the ACLU, which is in the midst of fighting anti-trans bills and laws around the country, including those that ban transgender girls and women from participating in sports. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves says he will sign such a bill in the name of “protect[ing] young girls.” Page played competitive soccer and vividly recalls the agony of being told he would have to play on the girls’ team once he aged out of mixed-gender squads. After an appeal, Page was allowed to play with the boys for an additional year. Today, several bills list genitalia as a requirement for deciding who plays on which team. “I would have been in that position as a kid,” Page says. “It’s horrific.”

All this advocacy is unlikely to make life easier. “You can’t enter into certain spaces as a public trans person,” says the ACLU’s Strangio, “without being prepared to spend some percentage of your life being threatened and harassed.” Yet, while he seems overwhelmed at times, Page is also eager. Many of the political attacks on trans people—whether it is a mandate that bathroom use be determined by birth sex, a blanket ban on medical interventions for trans kids or the suggestion that trans men are simply wayward women beguiled by male privilege—carry the same subtext: that trans people are mistaken about who they are. “We know who we are,” Page says. “People cling to these firm ideas [about gender] because it makes people feel safe. But if we could just celebrate all the wonderful complexities of people, the world would be such a better place.”

Even if Page weren’t vocal, his public presence would communicate something powerful. That is in part because of what Paisley Currah, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, calls “visibility gaps.” Historically, trans women have been more visible, in culture and in Hollywood, than trans men. There are many explanations: Our culture is obsessed with femininity. Men’s bodies are less policed and scrutinized. Patriarchal people tend to get more emotional about who is considered to be in the same category as their daughters. “And a lot of trans men don’t stand out as trans,” says Currah, who is a trans man himself. “I think we’ve taken up less of the public’s attention because masculinity is sort of the norm.”

During our interviews, Page will repeatedly refer to himself as a “transgender guy.” He also calls himself nonbinary and queer, but for him, transmasculinity is at the center of the conversation right now. “It’s a complicated journey,” he says, “and an ongoing process.”

While the visibility gap means that trans men have been spared some of the hate endured by trans women, it has also meant that people like Page have had fewer models. “There were no examples,” Page says of growing up in Halifax in the 1990s. There are many queer people who have felt “that how they feel deep inside isn’t a real thing because they never saw it reflected back to them,” says Tiq Milan, an activist, author and transgender man. Page offers a reflection: “They can see that and say, ‘You know what, that’s who I am too,’” Milan says. When there aren’t examples, he says, “people make monsters of us.”

For decades, that was something Hollywood did. As detailed in the 2020 Netflix documentary Disclosure, transgender people have been portrayed onscreen as villainous and deceitful, tragic subplots or the butt of jokes. In a sign of just how far the industry has come—spurred on by productions like Pose and trailblazers like Mock—Netflix offered to change the credits on The Umbrella Academy the same day that its star posted his statement on social media. Now when an episode ends, the first words viewers see are “Elliot Page.”

Today, there are many out trans and nonbinary actors, directors and producers. Storylines involving trans people are more common, more respectful. Sometimes that aspect of identity is even incidental, rather than the crux of a morality tale. And yet Hollywood can still seem a frightening place for LGBTQ people to come out. “It’s an industry that says, ‘Don’t do that,’” says director Silas Howard, who got his break on Amazon’s show Transparent, which made efforts to hire transgender crew members. “I wouldn’t have been hired if they didn’t have a trans initiative,” Howard says. “I’m always aware of that.”

So what will it mean for Page’s career? While Page has appeared in many projects, he also faced challenges landing female leads because he didn’t fit Hollywood’s narrow mold. Since Page’s Instagram post, his team is seeing more activity than they have in years. Many of the offers coming in—to direct, to produce, to act—are trans-related, but there are also some “dude roles.”

Downtime in quarantine helped Page accept his gender identity. “I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” he says.

Page was attracted to the role of Vanya in The Umbrella Academy because—in the first season, released in 2019—Vanya is crushed by self-loathing, believing herself to be the only ordinary sibling in an extraordinary family. The character can barely summon the courage to move through the world. “I related to how much Vanya was closed off,” Page says. Now on set filming the third season, co-workers have seen a change in the actor. “It seems like there’s a tremendous weight off his shoulders, a feeling of comfort,” says showrunner Steve Blackman. “There’s a lightness, a lot more smiling.” For Page, returning to set has been validating, if awkward at times. Yes, people accidentally use the wrong pronouns—“It’s going to be an adjustment,” Page says—but co-workers also see and acknowledge him.

The debate over whether cisgender people, who have repeatedly collected awards for playing trans characters, should continue to do so has largely been settled. However, trans actors have rarely been considered for cisgender parts. Whatever challenges might lie ahead, Page seems exuberant about playing a new spectrum of roles. “I’m really excited to act, now that I’m fully who I am, in this body,” Page says. “No matter the challenges and difficult moments of this, nothing amounts to getting to feel how I feel now.”

This includes having short hair again. During our interview, Page keeps rearranging strands on his forehead. It took a long time for him to return to the barber’s chair and ask to cut it short, but he got there. And how did that haircut feel?

Page tears up again, then smiles. “I just could not have enjoyed it more,” he says.”

#suicide m #transphobia m #Elliot Page #transgender #representation #celebrities #actors #tv #movies #rep #trans #transmasculine #nonbinary #queer #long post

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littlewomenpodcast · 2 years

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Since you've given your opinion on the miniseries...I'm curious about your thoughts on the 1949 film. That is my personal favorite version of the story (even with the switch of Beth and Amy in terms of birth order). There's something about it that feels so warm and inviting and it's gorgeous to look at. I get why some people don't love it as much as the 1994 film (and I'll agree that the '94 film is the best film, objectively), but I love the 1949 version so much!

I actually saw the 1949 film for the first time just a couple of years ago. I do love it for the same reasons you mentioned. June Allyson might be my favourite film Jo. I really like Winona Ryder and Katherine Hepburn as well, but I think June manages to show Jo´s growth in the most believable way, transforming from this tomboy with "masculine air" to a spirited woman.

I also love the scene where Jo is writing her story and crying (like in the book) and I heard that June and the girl who played Beth were good friends and you can see that in the film. I also read June saying how sweet Elizabeth Taylor was.

One of the problems with Amy in that film is that it shows her as vain, which she is in the book as well, but doesn´t really show how Amy grows, which happens in the book. It´s a bit odd when Amy and aunt March pop into New York to tell that they are going to Europe and Jo can´t come (not at all like in the book since Jo herself blew her chances of going) but you can see in the movie how bad Amy feels about it.

It has the best Jo/Fritz feedback scene of all films and like @the-other-art-blog said, the 2019 Jo should look up to 1949 Jo, when she says "If I can´t handle feedback I will never be a good writer".

Rossano Brazzi is a bit too pretty to play Fritz but one of the things that I like about his performance is the way it shows him feeling an outsider. There are quite a few scenes that portray him as an outsider, he feels like world goes around but he is not truly part of it. That part where he plays the piano, it has Louisa May Alcott connection since he is playing music that was composed by Goethe.

When he translates the song for Jo, it sort of becomes a pinning point of their relationship, because the song tells about loneliness and longing to the other person.

I even made a video about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZMcpxsy53o&t=59s&ab_channel=LittleWomenChannel

I like Janet Leigh as Meg and that the film shows her getting angry at aunt March and then realizing she is in love with John. I have mixed feelings about Peter Lawford as Laurie, esp since he and the guy who played John are the same age. He is quite idealized but then there are scenes where he doesn´t really get why Jo wants to earn money. So there are subtle hints that he doesn´t really understand his position, which is loyal to the book, but then again most people who I´ve come across say that they ship Jo with both Laurie and Fritz in this version, nothing new under the sun.

If I ever get a chance I´d love to make a podcast episode and just deep analyze Jo´s and Friedrich´s relationship in this film, since it's perfection.

Thanks for the question <3

#little women 1949 #little women #june allyson #rossano brazzi #goethe #peter lawford #janet leigh #elizabeth taylor #laurie lawrence #amy march #jo march #friedrich bhaer #jo and friedrich #ask little women channel a question

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fizzyxcustard · 4 years

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Something Borrowed (1)

Fandom: North and South (modern AU)

Summary: Requested by the wonderful @dabisburntnut Your eldest sister is getting married and you have been invited. However, your family are quite pushy about hooking you up with someone, so you ask your boss (and friend), John Thornton to go with you.

Pairings: Modern!John Thornton x Fem!Reader

Warnings: Silliness, insecurity, drunkenness, very slight anxiety mention, slight overweight!reader mention.

Word count: 1544

Comments/Notes: My newest tag list is still under construction, so by all means send me an ask or message if you want to be added for all fics, a particular series or fandom. I’m using Lucas North as my modern!John Thornton. Come on, it’s RA anyway. ;)

Music listened to while writing this piece: ASMR video by FredsVoice ASMR on YouTube.

Masterlist of fan fiction here

It was your lunch break. You plopped down in the seat opposite John, your boss and owner of the factory where you worked as his receptionist. “Can I borrow you for the weekend?” you asked, grinning.

John looked up from the stack of papers on his desk and gave a tired smile.

“You bloody well need it by the looks of it,” you said, seeing the dark circles beneath your friend’s eyes. Had John been sleeping at work again? A couple of times you’d come in at half seven, only to find him asleep in his chair, arms and head on the desk.

“Isn’t your sister getting married?” John asked, stretching back in his seat.

“She is, and my mum is pushing at me to take a guest with me, preferably a man,” you sighed.

“Ahh, a means to an end?” John chuckled wryly.

“No. I didn’t say that,” you replied. “I was thinking of asking you before, but you’ve been so snowed under with all these orders and signing them off, and opening up the new factory, I didn’t think you’d want to go. Or have time to. I’m comfortable with you, John. I don’t feel that with many people.”

John couldn’t help but smile shyly at you. “Well, I’m glad you feel like that.”

“The wedding is at some large country townhouse. Most of what my sister tells me just goes in one ear and out the other, so I don’t really know. All I know is that I’m getting a lift up with my auntie and uncle. We don’t want to take too many cars, so we’re all piling in as few as we can.”

John leaned forward in his chair and watched you, your arms moving this way and that as you explained everything to him. He loved watching you gesticulate; you were so passionate and every word you spoke always sounded so heartfelt. You did nothing by half measure. So if he had been invited to such a close family member’s wedding, then you must have really thought a lot of him.

When you left the office, John sighed to himself and leaned back in his chair, looking out the window behind him. His heart was finally beginning to settle back down to its normal rhythm. You always had this effect on him, but he enjoyed every second of it. The only thing he didn’t enjoy was pondering constantly if you actually felt something for him as he did you. Each lunch break you shared with him; you text each other regularly out of work and, a few times, John had even given you a lift to and from work when your car was being repaired.

***

For the next three days, you began searching for your dress. Of course, like you normally did, you left things to the last minute if they were things you didn’t want to do. Seeing your sister get married was not something that particularly bothered you; she had always seemed to dislike you, constantly taking the opposite stance to you in debates, and she made it clear that her life was more complete because she now had a man she was about to marry and had three children from a previous relationship. Her husband to be wasn’t much better either. Most of the time he ignored you, only passing pleasantries because he felt obliged. The saving grace in all of this was John. He would be your comfort and your familiarity. None of your family made sense to you. Your parents were middle-aged, fairly well off, and found more interest in their twice yearly holidays in Spain and Italy. Your two sisters had their own lives to lead now, and you rarely saw them.

It hadn’t come as a surprise that your sister hadn’t chosen you to be a bridesmaid or her maid of honour. Those titles went to your sister’s best friends, more people who looked down on you like you were a piece of excrement they had just trod in.

By the time you chose your dress, it was almost closing time, two days before the big day. You had settled on a lilac strap dress. It was quite modest, simple and wouldn’t (hopefully) bring too much attention to your thicker curves.

***

On the morning of your travel to the wedding venue, you got up and began your normal routine of shower, breakfast and podcasts on your phone. John would be arriving at ten and then your aunt and uncle at eleven to pick you both up. Your uncle was nearing eighty now so you had asked John if he would possibly take over driving half way as the town house was about a two-hour drive away in the middle of nowhere.

Your small suitcase was ready for the two-night stay away. The voice of a kind man spoke into your ears as he discussed ways of combating anxiety and making the most of your life. Listening to podcasts in a morning and journaling always encouraged you to meet the day with a brave face, and today you would desperately need that brave face. The thought of all your judgemental family in one place didn’t particularly please you. If only the earth could open up and you could disappear somewhere for a couple of days.

John arrived at ten promptly. You let him in and closed your eyes, basking in his wonderful aroma as he wafted past you. “Do you want any breakfast?” you asked.

“I already ate before I came out,” he replied. John placed his weekender bag down in the hallway next to your wheelie suitcase.

***

The drive to the venue was quite uneventful. Your uncle Mike drove slowly and you couldn’t help but keep looking across at John from your seat, ready to laugh at the speed. In the middle of you was your five-year-old niece, Lily. She kept looking up at John, grinning.

“Is this your boyfriend?” Lily asked you.

“No, he’s my friend,” you replied, blushing hard.

“Come on now, dear. You’d make a lovely couple,” your aunt Janet chuckled.

John folded his arms and looked out of the car window. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for him; his long legs made him look incredibly uncomfortable, as though he had been folded over many times to fit in the car.

“You should be looking for a nice husband, you know?” uncle Mike said, looking at you through the review mirror. “Mr. Thornton here seems like a good match.”

“Can we just change topic, please?” you insisted. “I think you’re embarrassing him.”

“We didn’t mean anything by it,” aunt Janet replied, sounding sad for upsetting you both.

Once you had arrived at the large house, the grounds covered in acres of trees, plantations and fountains, you all grabbed your belongings from the car and began a steady walk to the hotel which was situated just behind.

Lily held your hand, and for the first time you wondered why she had been forced to come with you. Why hadn’t she gone with your mum and dad? Not that you minded your niece coming along, but it seemed quite harsh breaking her up from her siblings. At least she was with family.

“Auntie (y/n)?” Lily asked politely.

“Yes, sweets?”

She beckoned you down with her small hand so she could whisper in your ear. Her high pitched, melodic voice became low in your ear. “Can you ask Mr. Thornton to dance with me?”

“I’m sure he won’t mind,” you replied, looking over at John.

“Pardon?” John asked, still looking a little uncomfortable and out of place.

“Lily was asking if you’d dance with her at the reception.”

John bent down to the little blonde haired girl and smiled. “You’ll be first on my list,” he said.

The sight of John interacting with your niece made you feel something warm in your chest and it spread outward through you.

“Come on, darlings,” aunt Janet called.

The hotel behind the main venue was a lot more modern, having television screens in the reception and plenty of coffee machines. “Hello,” a well set, dark-haired man said, offering you all a smile. He was dressed in a black suit and you noticed the name Peter on his name badge. “You must be part of the group for the wedding planned for this weekend?”

“We are,” aunt Janet said.

You still kept hold of Lily’s hand and watched John avert his gaze towards the door, as though he wanted to disappear and never be seen again.

“You’ve all been booked into rooms. Can I take all of your names, please?” Peter asked.

Of course you knew that Lily would have to check in properly with her mum and dad, who were strangely absent. Considering that your uncle drove so slow, you seemed to be the first group who had arrived.

Peter then turned to you and John. “I see we just have a ‘plus one’ for you, Sir,” he told John. “But can we take a name.”

“John Thornton.”

“That has all been checked for you. A king-size room is now available for you both.”

You blanched. “Is that one bed or two?” you asked.

“It’s one large bed.”

Oh, shit!

Main tag list: @shikin83 @deepestfirefun @emrfangirl @dabisburntnut @aspookybunny @karlthecat15722 @tigereyesf @swoopswishsward @sunnysidesidra @la-meneur-louve @moony-artnstuff @mama-tole-me-not-2-come @wolfavatar17 @morganofthecoves1 @narnvaeron @hobbitoferebor @meganlpie @thequeenoferebor @mynameisnoneya1991 @jumpingmanatee @xxbyimm @annewoods91 @nowiloveandwilllove @inhabitant-of-the-void @thorinthehottotty @rachel1959 @reinabell @paracosmfantasy @blankdblank @sherala007 @creativelyquestioninglife @c-s-stars @phyreblue @middleearthmama @luna-xial

#John thornton #modern!John thornton #north and south #John Thornton x reader #fanfic #request #north and south au #fanfiction #weddings

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sophieellisbextorarchives · 4 years

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Sequins, songs, kids... dance! This is what saved SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR’s sanity during lockdown

‘I think I’m doing this for me.’ But for now, we need to head back to her house, where Sonny has appeared, and Mickey is delighted to see his mum. Plates are waiting to be spun, and as I let myself out, Jesse is putting on a show in the kitchen, with Sophie as the audience, sitting under the disco ball. ....and her wonderfully joyous discos filmed in the family kitchen helped lift the nation’s spirits too. She tells Hattie Crisell why Friday nights round at hers became so precious

ORIGINAL ARTICLE: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-8549299/Sequins-songs-kids-dance-saved-SOPHIE-ELLIS-BEXTORs-sanity-lockdown.html

Sophie Ellis-Bextor opens the door to me with a toddler in her arms – smiley 18-month-old Mickey – and her four-year-old son Jesse behind her, his hair a deep shade of copper. ‘You have the most beautiful hair I’ve ever seen,’ I tell him, genuinely quite dazzled, and he replies bashfully, ‘Well, I’ve just had it cut.’

Welcome to Sophie’s world: a large and glittering house in West London, packed to the rafters with kitsch, toys, cats and boys. I don’t know how many cats are around, but the boys number five: Mickey, Jesse, eight-year-old Ray, 11-year-old Kit and 16-year-old Sonny. Managing the lot are the singer, her husband Richard Jones (bass guitar player with The Feeling and the supergroup Loup GarouX), and a nanny, who joins them Monday to Friday during the working day. ‘I used to have a nanny who was with us all the time, and to be honest I felt like it was too much,’ says Sophie. ‘It’s fine if it’s my thing that I think about 24 hours a day, but I think it’s healthy for other people to have their own life away from it all. It’s five kids – it’s a lot.’

It certainly is, and it’s hard to imagine how demanding it must have been during lockdown, when the only one missing was the nanny. The public got a glimpse of this when Sophie performed a weekly series of ‘kitchen discos’, broadcasting them live via Instagram, her husband filming on his phone. They launched these shows during the bleakest part of the pandemic, and the good will that emanated from them was enormously cheering. She would appear in a sequined jumpsuit or rainbow-striped dress, a pair of platforms at the end of her mile-long legs, and would serenade the camera while children wandered casually in and out of view. Sometimes her teenage son would jump in to rescue the baby from a trailing wire, or one of the boys would need a cuddle, and their mother would pull them in close, keeping her other hand on the mic.

It was charming chaos. The music encompassed hits from Sophie’s back catalogue such as ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ and ‘Take Me Home’ – or ‘Stay at Home’, as she rechristened it – but also crowd-pleasing covers and theatrical numbers from shows such as Grease. For the audience, it offered uplifting relief from the frightening reality of the time: climbing death rates and isolation. It was comfort music, I say. ‘Exactly,’ she agrees. ‘And disco’s always had that for me anyway. It’s so euphoric and joyful, and it’s complex. In disco you can have the most painful, heartbreaking scenarios, but they’re in among something that makes you want to put your hands in the air and sing along. I think music can allow you the space to feel joy and anxiety at once.’

I am delighted to find that one end of their large kitchen still looks very much as it did, with the disco ball and a half-deflated helium balloon in place over the sofa. She confirms that it’s more or less always like this, perhaps minus the tinsel curtain. Colour and fun are everywhere in the house, from the framed retro artworks filling every wall, to the pinball machine in pride of place. At the other end of the kitchen, a diner-style menu-board for the kids bears the words, ‘Be polite or no service.’

Leaving the children with the nanny, Sophie and I head out to chat on a bench in the park. She’s wearing an embroidered navy dress and a red fluffy cardigan, with red lipstick that has mostly worn off; at 41, she’s truly beautiful, with very pale green eyes. Despite what we’ve seen from her on Instagram, it hasn’t been an easy time. For one thing, there was the fall from her bike in June that left her in hospital with a gory head wound. When I mention it, though, she brushes it off with, ‘I cannot dine out on that any more.’ Then she adds, ‘I mean, I don’t recommend cycling off a towpath – it did hurt.’

‘I knew that this was something that was happening in millions of households. I do worry about all my parents – I say “all” because I’ve got step-parents as well – but I think really it was focused on John, because he’s so vulnerable. It’s such a weird, torturous thing isn’t it for human beings, if you say that hanging out with someone you love is the one thing that might actually endanger them? How can you wrap your head around that?’

She hasn’t been thrilled with the government messaging around the virus. ‘“Stay at home” is clear and concise and all ages get it. “Stay alert”? I hardly ever feel alert. I don’t feel alert now.

And we’ve all shown we’re good at following guidelines that make sense, but you can’t keep bending it for people. Look at the effect when the rules were made flexible.’ She seems to be referring obliquely to the Dominic Cummings/Barnard Castle debacle. ‘We all thought, “Oh well, if we could have been going off and having day trips all this time, why was I staying at home and not seeing my mum, who lives ten minutes away?” I found that really tough.’

The kitchen discos were as much for her and the family as they were for the audience. ‘It was Richard’s idea. One day we were making plans and doing stuff, and the next day it was like, boomph, everything shut down. Suddenly we were just home all the time, all work cancelled, all the festivals… I was supposed to be going to Australia, New Zealand, I had gigs all round Europe. And Richard was, like, “Well, why don’t we do a gig here, and it gives us something to do and a bit of fun?” I think we missed everybody.’

Performing during that time, even via Instagram, gave her a huge sense of connection, she says. ‘I honestly don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had that, and I don’t know how it would have been for our family, because it became really precious.’ She’s now planning a Kitchen Disco Tour next May (there will also be an album, out this October), and hopes it will offer audiences a cathartic experience. ‘I want to provide a place where people can get lost in the moment. I want them to walk out of there and go, “Oh my goodness, I didn’t know how much I needed that.”’

It was no surprise to her boys to see her dressed up and performing; Mickey sleeps in the room where she keeps her fantastic stage wardrobe, and they’ve all been with her to festivals, gigs and recording studios. It was clear from their low-key presence in the kitchen discos (she left it up to them whether they wanted to be there or not) that they’re not fazed by it. ‘The older I’ve got, the more the me at home and the me on stage is the same person anyway,’ she says. Her first solo album came out almost 20 years ago; this one will be her eighth.

She’s also just celebrated her 15th wedding anniversary with Richard. Theirs was a whirlwind romance that stuck: ‘I found out I was having a baby after only about six weeks,’ she says with a smile. ‘We’d known each other for a while – he’d been in my band – but we’d literally just started dating and I hadn’t even really told anybody.’ Sonny was born two months prematurely, thus arriving only eight months after they’d got together.

And they’ve now got him almost to adulthood, I say. ‘Yeah, and he’s lovely; he’s his own person. You know, parenthood is so much more reactive than I ever thought,’ she says. ‘I thought it was all about what you put in. It’s not. I realised it the day I had him: I looked at this tiny baby and I thought, “Oh my goodness, you’re Sonny, and now I’ve got to help you show me who you are and what you need from me.”’

To raise five children while continually working is no mean feat, and she mentions that there were tense moments during lockdown. But she and Richard clearly make a good team. ‘I guess the thing that’s often not celebrated as much in long-term relationships – and I think this goes for family members, friends, all sorts of relationships where there’s love – is that we actually really like each other,’ she says. ‘I really like who Richard is, and I respect him and I like spending time with him.’

She took an extended break after Sonny came along, following a difficult birth. ‘But to be honest, the more babies I’ve had and the older I’ve got, the more confident I’ve become about what I can do around being pregnant and having kids,’ she says. ‘I’ve been better with the last couple at just keeping going with the work either side of it. I have a job where I can basically call the shots a bit. I’m very lucky with that and I totally exploit it. Also I like it if I do a big gig and I’m six months pregnant – I feel quite clever,’ she laughs.

The challenges of this complicated life have inspired Sophie’s new project – the podcast Spinning Plates, on which she chats to other working mums, including Caitlin Moran, Fearne Cotton, the mummy blogger Candice Brathwaite, and her own mother Janet. ‘I’ve got such a brilliant array of women, and honestly it feels like a privilege to sit there for an hour and ask them loads of nosy stuff,’ she says. ‘Obviously the springboard is the idea of the working mother, but actually what really unites us is we’re all women, and there are so many things about being a modern woman… It’s a rich pot of stuff to go through, really.’

She loved having the chance to interview her mum. ‘In my head she’s always been this real trailblazer and very confident. She never seemed to have any guilt with any of her work, and I’m glad, because it gave me a good role model of “It’s OK for me to be selfish enough to have my work and keep it separate if I want to, and do the things I want to do.” I don’t think I would have been confident enough if I hadn’t had a mum like that; I’ve struggled a bit to give myself permission sometimes even with that.’

Another chat, with Yvonne Telford, founder of the fashion brand Kemi Telford, made her realise that at times she’s too self-critical. ‘She said she hates it when she hears women say, “Oh, I’m such an idiot,” and I was, like, “God, I do that all the time.” Even with the podcast, when I first started writing to people I wanted as guests, I’d say, “Don’t worry, I know how it goes – you’re probably too busy to reply.” Then I was, like, what am I doing? I’m saying to them, “Ignore me!”’ She bursts out laughing. It sounds as though making the podcast might be rather empowering. ‘Yes,’ she agrees.

#Sophie Ellis-Bextor #British #singer-songwriter #kitchen disco #Richard Jones #The Feeling #Loup Garoux #photoshoot

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roominthecastle · 6 years

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[ Michael's a bit of a dandy, often very nattily dressed. Some of his bowties are made of feathers, I think. ] That's correct. I think in the first episode we used the feathered bowtie. Initially, Michael was gonna be professorial. We know him - initially - as somebody who is this good guy, an architect who built this great place for the humans. He's like a professor who loves all things human. So he'd like all the little knickknacks and things that we love to play with. He had a fascination for that kind of thing, so using a bowtie would make sense. If he's watching things on Earth, that would be something that he'd be drawn to. And when we were in the fitting with Ted, initially we probably would have gone more the tweedy professor route, but as we were trying on looks, and we had bowties and ties and all kinds of things, Ted put on the bowtie and completely felt like "This is it. This is him." We both felt that way and when that happens in a fitting room, that feels really good. [ The bowtie also works so well because it makes him seem so harmless, innocuous, and then the big reveal happens. ] I wasn’t told about the big reveal at the time but Ted was aware, so I won't take credit at all but it circled around to perfection, I feel. And then we’ve moved on to different ties as we're progressing.

When I read the first script, I felt very clear about what Janet looked like. When I was younger, I used to fly alone and the stewardesses were like goddesses to me. They helped me and lived in the skies as far as I was concerned as a 5-year old. I saw Janet like that. Mike is so generous to all departments, letting them be creative, and he was game. Then we found fabrics that we felt like would work perfectly. And I love the color purple because somehow it means unity to me. It's harmonious and Janet is not taking any sides, she's just giving out information and all sorts of things to everybody. We designed 10 to 12 outfits for her and made multiple shirts. Generally, since S1, Janet has been mainly in her purple suit and a white blouse with blue clouds. You can guess why we picked the clouds. In S2, when we kept rebooting her, we did many different looks and then kinda landed back at purple. But when we go to the Janet Warehouse, Janet is in white. When we see Bad Janet, again, it's a different look. [ If Good Janet is a 60's, 70's airline hostess, what is Bad Janet? ] I don't even like saying this because I don't know what it is to Mike and D'Arcy, but in my mind, she is Olivia Newton-John in Grease. It's like a good girl trying to be bad. Bad Janet just jumped off the page like that for me.

The Eleanor that we see in Arizona is a little bit more of a party girl and a little bit more of a wild dresser. The closet that she inherited when she arrived at the Good Place was supposedly the Good Eleanor's. So she is the impostor and ends up wearing flannel shirts, clogs, and jeans that don't really belong to her and wouldn't be her natural clothing choice. She is wearing somebody else's clothes. Whenever we see her as the Eleanor Shellstrop we know, she isn't wearing clogs. Those were just like "the good person's clogs".

[ Was Tahani's wardrobe informed by Jameela? ] Absolutely. She came in to the fitting dragging a suitcase. She brought lots of dresses for us to look at and we looked at silhouettes on her. We patterned some of her dresses and used fabric that we wanted. She has a great figure and everything looks good on her. She definitely has a closet full of dresses that look very similar to Tahani's. Somebody told me that years ago they saw her at a casual California barbeque in this glamorous gown. She so easily pulls it off and never looks out of place. She does not love wearing pants. We don't put her in a lot of pants but we did put her in cargo pants a couple of times in S2 and also in S3.

Mike picked the blue and yellow colors for the “chaos sequence fabric”. It's a reference to the University of Michigan where his dad went to school. Mike is sweet like that. We ended up making bolts and bolts of that fabric because it doesn't exist at fabric stores, definitely not in the amount that we needed. It’s a dream for me to be able to make bolts of fabric. You rarely get to do that. You go the fabric factory and you show them what you want it to look like and they print you a sample and ask "this?" before they make hundreds of yards. You say yes and they start printing. Once we got the bolts, we had a pretty big sewing room where we exactly patterned everything that everybody was wearing, and then sewed the costumes. Ted is wearing a bowtie made of this fabric and also a jacket exactly like the jacket he was wearing in a prior scene. Everybody is wearing their outfit in that blue/yellow fabric. Mike is so decisive and when he picked blue and yellow, I was thinking, "How can I make sense of these colors so that it feels right to me?" Well, green is the color of the Good Place. Blue and yellow equals green and what's happening in those scenes is the teasing apart of good, pulling those two colors away from each other that would equal green.

- Kirston Mann, costume designer (The Good Place: The Podcast, chapter 11)

#the good place #tgpedit #long post #kirston mann #michael tgp #janet tgp #tahani al-jamil #eleanor shellstrop #mine #everybody associated w/ this show is so detail obsessed and i... am in love #they work out their own separate headcanons and nerd out about them just like us #this podcast feels like home #a forking gem in an otherwise shirt world

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wasiandonuts · 5 years

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The Good Place Season 3 Finale: after-thoughts

*SPOILERS! duh..also it is very long, read at your own discretion*

So, that was a rollercoaster ride of a season. It started with Eleanor finding Chidi, for like the 803rd time, and it ended with Eleanor having to say goodbye to Chidi. After years of getting the soul squad back together, they are all having to face the torments of The Bad Place once again. Can’t they get a break?

Before getting in to Chidi and Eleanor’s storyline, I want to start with Michael, Janet, Tahani, and Jason.

For Michael, he is just the sweetest demon in the entire universe. In the first season, he was not only an evil liar but also hated humans and did not want to do anything else in his immortal life other than to punish the four humans. Now, he literally is doing everything to save the four from eternal damnation while trying to fix the inevitably corrupt modern society we live in today. To me, he truly had the greatest glo-up. I am very hopeful to see Michael return to his Architect position and perhaps solve mankind’s greatest issues. In this episode, it was very insightful to see how he referred to himself as middle management because he technically is. The stress of the pressure of running this universe-changing experiment is insane and the humanity in Michael really showed during the finale.

Janet, too, had a great character arc within this season and throughout the show. She/It (remember she is not a girl!) was merely a physical version of Alexa and now, Janet is almost like the humans with feelings and the incredible ability to throw shade. I do feel bad about the situation with Jason. To be honest, I never really gave much importance to it until the finale. Going in to season 4, I see what the writers did there. They set up this supposedly insane love story between a Floridian DJ and a “Busty Alexa” (Eleanor’s words, not mine) who fell in love hundreds of years ago in literal hell. Now, Janet is going to play a much larger part in the new neighborhood but importantly, she/it is now a human-like member of the Soul Squad and will probably be Eleanor’s source of strength in the upcoming season(s). Woo go Janet!!

Tahani al-Jamil has been through a lot. Just this finale episode alone she was the first to be targeted by the Bad Place and their schemes. It was almost deja vu when she was planning to plant the ‘Marc Fake-obs’ joke on John, but then again, the Good Place reminds us of the evolution each of the characters went on. Though she is a supporting character, I would really like to see her play a bigger part with keeping the integrity of the soul squad together during the upcoming seasons and perhaps find love herself.

I felt kinda sad that Jason Mendoza wasn’t in this episode that much, but his character providing some much-needed comedy relief in all of the heaviness in the finale. I do wonder though why he is back in the monk outfit, maybe to keep him quiet for safety purposes. There must be a secret Schur reason why he is in different garb for this iteration of the Fake Good Place. Like with Janet, I think they are pretty cute together and I need at least some happiness. Also, he is also one of the remaining few to not have an ex or a gossip blogger in the new Good Place yet. It will be interesting to find out. I think it will either be his dad or an ex-dance crew member or even Pillboi.

Okay. Here we go. I just rewatched the episode a few times to not only feel the feels but also to catch any details that the podcast mentioned and I might have forgotten. Without knowing it, the entirety of the show’s plot relies heavily on the unlikely relationship between Chidi Anagonye and Eleanor Shellstrop. Looking back at this season, there were little hints that the writers planted that makes this ever the more heartbreaking.

In 3x08 (Worse Possible Use of Free Will), the entire episode is basically a flashback through cheleanor’s development in Reboot 112, a previously mentioned version in season 2. I was really excited to be fed that day and the subsequent episodes but I just rewatched it again and I noticed that the same type of situation happened again. (yes I know, reboots happen every second in this show) At the end, Eleanor promises Chidi that they will find each other again and that they are true soulmates. Even in the very first episode of season 3, Eleanor comes to Australia to ask Chidi for help to be a better person and the end of season 3, it once again is Eleanor in a doorway meeting Chidi.

A lot of this season had to do with faith and memories. the Janet(s) episode reminded Eleanor, in this case, who she was because she did not remember and Chidi, like the amazing man he is, snapped her back to reality with a kiss and all was well (for a few eps). The sad part is that this time, when Chidi won’t remember Eleanor or any of the gang, Eleanor can’t just kiss him back to reality because he doesn’t even know how much she means to him.

I cry a lot at very emotional things, but this episode was a kicker. It touched a lot of people since 1) the writers are very good and also very cruel, 2) the past few episodes saw a happy cheleanor, and 3) it was all very real in a way. We all have dealt with loss and love. Seeing one person love another and miss another but the partner doesn’t remember is so devastating. In all of the reboots, every one of them forgot everything. The sad thing is only one of them can’t remember the rest and that one is the moral glue that held all of the squad together. And looping back to a previous episode when Eleanor is crying and talking about how she is both happy and sad, she mentions something about love isn’t a sure thing and now, that love that she has been so afraid to give for the longest time was ripped away from her and now she has to watch and take care of the man she loves from a distance.

Going in to season 4, we are steering less towards philosophy and hard factual morals but rather towards the pathos side of things. What it means to be a human in the face of adversity and tragedy is the theme for upcoming seasons. I do hope the slow burn of Chidi finding Eleanor again is not so slow because they truly deserve to be happy in the little dot on top of the ‘i’. I also wish for less reboots now and tears because I never expected a comedy show that makes fart and sex jokes and puns all the time to make me sob over fictional characters but here I am and I don’t regret it.

Gah this whole episode was all too much. The memory video was touching and also very soft. The line that made me bawl was when Chidi said “I am gonna miss you” and his voice cracks, then Eleanor responds “but you won’t” and then “Bye, Chidi”. I felt that. To end, I just want to say thank you to Michael Schur, Megan Amram, and Jen Statsky for this episode and the entire crew for this crazy, funny, smart, and now very sad show that never fails to make my day. Also lots of hugs to Jameela, Manny, D’Arcy, Ted, and most especially Kristen and Will for gracing our screens. By the way, KB and WJH are two of the best actors I know and I love them as Chidi and Eleanor. Ok good night everyone and thanks for reading my braindump about my feelings.

Everything is fine.

#the good place #cheleanor #eleanor shellstrop #chidi anagonye #tahani al jamil #jason mendoza #janet #tgp #my thoughts #yeah its long #i just needed to express how i felt #i regurgitated my feelings #but wow #heartbreaking episode #i rewatched it like 3 times and cried each one

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miss-musings · 6 years

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The Good & Bad of NBC: or, Why “The Blacklist” is everything that’s wrong with TV, and “The Good Place” is everything that’s right (SPOILER EDITION)

(Written Oct. 2018… pre-S6 of TBL and mid-S3 of the Good Place.)

NOTE: THERE WILL BE MAJOR SPOILERS OF BOTH SHOWS. DO NOT PROCEED UNLESS YOU HAVE SEEN THEM BOTH!!!!!!!

In case you haven’t, there is a spoiler-free version of this post here.

(Author’s note: So, if you’re reading this you may or may not have read the other version first. If you have, I’m basically going to be going over the same material with the same structure, with some of the text basically copy/pasted from the first version. But, where I held back on the spoiler-y details before, I’m now going to be going all out. I’ll reiterate: PLEASE DO NOT READ THIS VERSION UNLESS YOU HAVE SEEN BOTH SHOWS!!! Thank you.)

For any of you unfamiliar with my content, I’ve been analyzing different aspects of The Blacklist for the past few years, including calling attention to what I believe are flaws in its plotlines and characterizations.

This April, I happened upon The Good Place on Netflix and absolutely gobbled it up. I watched all of S1 in pretty much a single day; S2, in a similarly short time frame. Now, I’ve probably seen every S1 and S2 episode at least four times, and I’m watching the S3 episodes as they air on NBC before The Blacklist returns in January for its sixth season.

Now, it’s definitely not fair to compare The Blacklist and The Good Place. The former is an hour-long (44 minutes/episode) crime drama procedural that has had 22 or 23 episodes per season in five seasons. The latter is a half-hour (22 minutes/episode) ‘genre’ comedy set in the afterlife that has 13 episodes per season in three (ongoing) seasons.

So, TBL has an approximate 4,840 minute run-time, and TGP’s is approximately 858 minutes (including all of S3).

That means that The Blacklist’s overall runtime is almost SIX times the length of The Good Place.

Even so, both of these feature prominent TV actors, including Emmy Award winners James Spader and Ted Danson, respectively; both center on a relationship between a 30-something white woman and an older white man(whether that relationship is romantic, platonic or pseudo-familial is debated by fandoms of both shows); and both of these are NBC shows.

So, while it might not be exactly fair to compare these two shows, I’m going to do so anyway, because I feel like where the Blacklist struggles, The Good Place shines as a quality television program.

Now, don’t think for an instant that The Blacklist is a completely worthless show or that The Good Place doesn’t have its flaws. There are good and bad aspects of both shows, but I’m going to be comparing the two by focusing on three key things that make a TV show compelling:

Plot Progression

Character Interactions

Character Development

1. PLOT PROGRESSION

I think anyone who’s seen the Blacklist will tell you that this show’s plot is convoluted AF. In S1, it seemed like the show was setting Berlin up to be the show’s overarching Big Bad. But, then he gets killed off in S2 while the Cabal takes the forefront. The Cabal kinda hangs out until the end of S3, really, and then gets mostly forgotten until Ressler kills Hitchen in S4. And, Mr. Kaplan becomes Red’s enemy because she was once Liz’s nanny????

This show is so fucking weird.

It continues to frustrate me that all of the show’s major plot developments/revelations come during a mid-season or season finale, or a season or mid-season premiere. The Blacklist’s plot structure continually revolves around the idea of ‘sweeps week,’ when the network tries to boost its ratings by promising major reveals and developments during certain time frames.

Why not space some of these things out more instead of giving us what is essentially filler? We go along for the ride week after week, hoping to get clues or developments to the overarching story, only to be frustrated at the world’s slowest drip ever.

I feel like the first part of S5b really fell into this trap. It reveals to the audience shortly after Keen’s return that Ian Garvey is a dirty cop. And then we wait like 4-6 episodes (I don’t remember exactly how long) until Liz realizes this too. Jeez. Why drag it out so long?!?!

Now, I will say that the decision to kill Garvey in 5x19, rather than the season finale was a good idea. As it breaks the mold of having to wait until the (mid)season finale for the Arc’s Big Bad to finally bite it.

But, while that might’ve been a small victory, it still doesn’t make up for all the times this show has thought it was pulling the rug out when all it was doing was being predictable AF.

Between Liz “dying,” Kaplan helping her, Kirk being her stepdad, Mr. Kaplan being the one coming after Red, Tom dying, Liz trying to trick Red into revealing his secret by playing like she’s in danger and needs him to rescue her, the bones being the Real Reddington, etc... it continually frustrates me that folks here on Tumblr predict everything that’s going to happen with pinpoint accuracy. It makes the show boring and rote. (Not the folks on Tumblr; more the fact that this show’s plots are so predictable.)

Conversely, the Good Place – per the show’s creator Mike Schur – centers on the idea of subverting expectations. Based on the pilot’s premise, you might assume that the finale will be Eleanor revealing that she doesn’t belong in the neighborhood. But, Schur and his writing team have said multiple times that they focus on trying to make each episode end with a cliffhanger, and doing those big reveals or developments earlier in the season than the audience expects.

As Schur (or maybe some other writer or exec) recently said on the Good Place podcast, 2x09 “Best Self – where the crew leaves the Good Place to head to Bad Place HQ – feels a little like a season finale, despite the fact that there were three more episodes left in S2.

The Blacklist, IMO, also suffers from overdramatic promotions that sometimes make it seem like each episode is going to have some shocking development, when in fact, you could probably skip it and not really miss much (unless it’s a premiere or finale).

I feel like I remember the S2a promos about Liz hiding Tom in the boat, which of course, everyone predicted, really hyped up that reveal so that it was a real let-down whenever we finally got the truth.

TGP, on the other hand, doesn’t really have episodic promos like The Blacklist does, which might work in its favor. (Although, I will say that I was pissed the NBC Thursday night comedy line-up promos ruined the 3x01 Trevor reveal before the actual episode ended.)

I mean, compare how TBL handled the Boat Door Reveal in S2 versus how TGP handled the Michael-sacrifices-himself-to-save-Eleanor development. If TGP had done it like TBL’s, we would’ve known a week or two in advance that someone was going to sacrifice themselves to save Eleanor. It would’ve been these dramatic promos going like “Who! Will! It! Be?!?!!” with like pictures of all the cast members flashing by. And, of course, everyone would predict it would be Michael and/or Chidi, we would all be right and subsequently disappointed.

Also, while I feel like TBL tends to play things safe – very rarely breaking away from the crime drama procedural vibe – TGP doesn’t mind taking chances, so long as whatever they’re taking a chance on fits within the ‘world’ of the show.

If you haven’t seen my rant about TBL’s S5b, I was so excited after Liz woke from a coma to see how the show might tackle that plotline. Would Liz be traumatized? Would she be reluctant to rejoin the Task Force? What if she decided to give up her life with the FBI altogether and raise Agnes? What if she had PTSD? etc.

And, the show went the very predictable route of not showing much, if any, of Liz’s physical therapy or psychological trauma, and having her get back ‘out in the field’ (proverbially speaking) pretty much right away. She pawned Agnes off to Scottie and then kicked it in the woods for an episode.

Whereas, with The Good Place, we got to see major glimpses of Eleanor’s year after her near-death experience in 2x12. Granted, not much of it, but given the show’s time constraints and break-neck speed (in terms of plot development as opposed to TBL), it was nice that we got to see Eleanor become a better person, backslide, and then make a decision on whether she wanted to try to make progress again or whether she was going to stay in her rut forever.

Clearly, you can seen how one’s plot progression is preferable – as a viewer – to the other. It’s also helpful, I imagine, as a writer, to let the plots unfold organically, as fast or as slow as they need to… instead of having to either rush them or drag them out to reach a certain point in the season’s schedule.

2. CHARACTER INTERACTIONS

As said above, both shows focus on the connections between its male protagonist and female protagonists. While ultimately it’s the female protagonist’s journey, the male protagonist is a guiding force in her journey, helping her along and pushing her to make decisions (whether good or bad).

(Although, I guess you could argue that Chidi is really TGP’s male protagonist, but considering that Ted Danson is more heavily promoted, I’d argue Michael is really TGP’s male protagonist.)

And, for both shows, its two main protagonists are part of a six-person main cast.

For The Good Place, the cast is Eleanor and Chidi, Tahani and Jason (two other residents in Eleanor’s neighborhood), Janet (the neighborhood’s anthropomorphized mainframe/help desk), and Michael.

The Blacklist’s cast, as of the end of S5, is Reddington and Keen, her fellow agents Donald Ressler, Samar Navabi and Aram Mojtabai, and their task force director Harold Cooper.

Now, the Blacklist primarily focuses on the relationship between Reddington and Keen; he doesn’t interact with the other cast members very frequently and Keen’s interactions with them are pretty basic and often work-focused. There aren’t very many crucial interactions between non-Reddington/Keen pairings, especially in more recent seasons of the show. While S1 and S2 tried its best to have Keen interact with Ressler, Ressler interact with Reddington, Cooper interact with Reddington, Keen interact with Navabi, etc., S3-5 have more focused on the Reddington/Keen dynamic at the expense of everyone else.

Granted, I like the Reddington/Keen dynamic (in some respects), but giving it more weight in the runtime unfortunately means that the remainder of the cast has to tackle the more procedural aspects by trying to track down the Bad Guy of the Week while Reddington and Keen get to have more of the character-driven serialized moments and developments.

Compare this, though, with TGP and its interactions outside of the Eleanor/Michael dynamic.

Throughout different points in S1 and S2, we got significant interaction between almost every single possible pairing of characters on this show. (And I mean pairing in a non-romantic sense.)

We see Eleanor fall in love with Chidi, become ‘mates’ with Tahani, become bros with Jason, and try to kill Janet and then later give her relationship advice. Meanwhile, Michael has his falling out with and subsequent heartfelt apology to Chidi; he admits to Janet that she’s his most loyal friend; in S1, he seeks out Tahani’s help; and in S2, he seeks out Jason’s feedback. Tahani and Jason’s romantic connection is explored, as is Jason and Janet’s. Chidi and Tahani have an important bonding moment in S1, and even the dynamic between Chidi and Jason is touched on some.

So, while TBL’s cast feels a little separated and almost cliquish, TGP’s six castmembers feel like a cohesive team where any two or three characters can be trusted to carry a scene and have an emotional connection/interaction. The former comes off as weak writing and show structuring, while the other is far preferable to watch.

3. CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

As I’ve said in several other TBL posts, THIS is probably my biggest grievance with the show … even more so than the weird-ass plot structure.

Despite supposedly being major characters, Ressler, Cooper, Samar and Aram get very little in the way of growth or development. I can barely describe them, their personalities, their desires, their moral codes, etc. in maybe a paragraph for each character. And these are people who have been on this show for FIVE FUCKING YEARS!!! How is that possible that they’ve gotten so little development in so much screentime?

Again, remember, TBL’s runtime is SIX TIMES that of TGP. And yet, I feel like any and all of The Good Place’s major characters get way more development simply in the first season than TBL’s peeps do in five.

I could definitely describe Jason, Tahani, Chidi and Janet’s personalities, desires, moral codes, etc. in like a page for each character.

Now, granted, I suppose the show’s structure lends itself better to that. The characters have to do a lot of soul-searching, so to speak, in almost every episode. Whereas, the Blacklist’s cast has to chase down the week’s bad guys, which takes up at least 20-30 minutes per episode.

Okay, okay. Maybe it’s not fair, considering that TBL clearly doesn’t care about its non-Reddington/non-Keen characters. So, let’s focus on both shows’ two leads and their character arcs.

Let’s look at Reddington’s character development versus Michael’s.

Despite having much more screentime and weight within the show, Reddington’s arc PALES in comparison to Michael’s. Granted, Michael started out as a literal demon whose entire purpose was to torture people. But, over time, we saw his genuine curiosity about humans transform into a genuine desire to understand them and want to be one of them. Yes, he only seeks them out after 802 reboots because he feels he has no other options (thanks to Vicky threatening to blackmail him). But, as he learns ethics alongside the humans, he realizes he needs to become a better ‘person’ (read: demon) to better care of them. Because he OWES IT TO THEM.

Reddington’s character development, meanwhile, seemed to come more in the latter half of S4 when he was trying to deal with Mr. Kaplan coming after him and he was trying to confront this spectre of death that seemed to be looming over him.

Yet, even after all that bullshit with Mr. Kaplan, where he called him out for keeping secrets from Elizabeth that she had the right to know, he still held all the cards and kept his secrets to himself and killed anyone who got in the way.

If Red had really grown, the way Michael did in S2, he would’ve confessed to Elizabeth at some point that he wasn’t the real Reddington, that he stole her father’s identity, and he’d been keeping it from her all this time because of “x.”

While Michael has learned and grown as an individual, Reddington has stayed relatively static in terms of personal growth. Not to say we haven’t seen different sides of him, what he would do when he faced difficult scenarios, like Liz’s death or losing his criminal empire… but the Reddington in the S5 finale is too much like Reddington in the pilot episode. Which is absolutely ridiculous, given how much screentime and emphasis he’s gotten over FIVE SEASONS!!!

Michael has learned to admit when he’s been wrong, apologize and become a better friend to his humans, while Red still has yet to do Liz (a woman he loves immensely in some capacity or other) the basic kindness of telling her that he stole her dad’s identity.

Alright. Now let’s look at Elizabeth Keen versus Eleanor Shellstrop.

Both characters have suffered from character regression, where they start at Point A, then develop and grow over time to reach Point B, and then – for whatever reason – regress to Point A again.

Elizabeth Keen started out happy and bubbly in S1a, went to dark and gritty in S1b-3a, then went back to happy and bubbly in S3b to S5a, then back to dark and gritty again in S5b.

Eleanor started off as an Arizona dirtbag, then became a good person to the point where she decided to sacrifice herself by going to the Bad Place... then got rebooted 802 times... then started as an Arizona dirtbag again, progressed to the point where she was the only one of the four humans who passed her test from The Judge ... then was sent back to earth and was saved from death, so she decided to change her life, backslided and now is AGAIN trying to become a better person.

Now, while Eleanor’s character regression fits within the confines of the show, Keen’s makes no sense. She’s confronted and overcome so many challenges over the show’s the five seasons… so, why hasn’t she learned from them? Why is she still relatively the same, especially considering that x-number of seasons ago, she was so completely different?

Why is she back to being all angry and hateful and dark, etc., when it’s like... she has a young daughter who’s lost her father, she lost 10 months with her after being in a coma.... and she just wants to go beat up dirty cops??? I feel like if they wanted us to see an Elizabeth Keen that had learned from her experience, she would’ve given up her life with the FBI, saying that it’s put her in danger, severed ties with Red (or tried to) because he’s also endangered her (via the bones), and spent time with her daughter, whom she claims is more important than anything else in the world.

And, whereas Eleanor was not a very likable protagonist at the outset but she becomes more likable over time, Keen started out as somewhat likable but has become more annoying as her character continually regresses.

All in all, to quote (or at least paraphrase) some other Tumblr user, “I can’t believe The Good Place literally invented character development.”

TL;DR

Again, just to reiterate, I think there’s good and bad in both shows. But, there’s a reason why I’ve seen every episode of the Good Place at least four times and why TGP S1-2 is currently #4 on my list of All-Time Favorite TV Shows.

The Good Place pushes the envelope by subverting expectations and having major developments earlier in the season than expected; it makes sure that almost every character has significant moments with every other character; and it ensures that each of them has a major character arc that works within the confines of the show.

The Blacklist, in comparison, does what too many other shows on TV do: it treads water plot-wise; it focuses too much on some characters at the expense of others; and even the characters it focuses on don’t show any significant or organic growth.

And, that’s why, IMO, The Blacklist represents everything that’s wrong with television now; and The Good Place represents everything that’s right.

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amandajoyce118 · 6 years

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Ant-Man and the Wasp Easter Eggs and References

I never posted this. Whoops. Since I’ve been lacking on the six-sentence Sundays, have this instead.

Obviously, there are going to be spoilers for the movie. Since it’s been out for a while now, I probably don’t have to warn people about that, but… just in case, you’ve been warned.

(Also, I’m going to be honest, while typing this up, I realized it’s been so long since I made my notes, that I couldn’t even read some of them, so there’s probably a reference or two missing.)

The Original Wasp

The original costume that we see for the Wasp is muuuuuccch closer to the comic book costume than the one Hope wears. Funnily enough, her clothing in the Quantum Realm is also what she wears when stuck in the Microverse after being shrunk down because she was turned into a living bomb. Good times. Fun fact: Janet actually designed all of the Avengers’ costumes in the comics. She was a fashion designer in addition to being a scientist and a hero.

The Red Queen

On the wall of Hope’s childhood bedroom is a print of what looks like the Red Queen from Alice Through the Looking Glass. In the comics, the Red Queen is Hope’s supervillain name. Yes, she’s a supervillain in another universe.

Cassie

Cassie’s really good at the game to steal a priceless artifact for a little kid, isn’t she? In the comics, she becomes a superhero in her own right, and this whole sequence just made me think she’d be pretty good at it.

The Accords

For the reason Scott is on house arrest see Captain America: Civil War. Is this really an Easter egg at this point? I don’t know. But it was in my notes anyway.

X-Con Security Consultants

It’s not a subtle pun, but I love it all the same. It’s also a nod to the fact that when Scott gets out of prison in the comics, he also started his own security company.

“Snap your fingers.”

While Scott is learning about magic, he watches a video that features this line when discussing how to effectively use misdirection. Was this whole movie a big chunk of misdirection so that we didn’t think about the finger snap? Maybe. Was the finger snap itself some giant misdirection? Maybe. Who knows? I just like that it got a nod here too.

Agent Jimmy Woo

The FBI agent is a character from the comics. He worked for Agents of Atlas at one time, and later became the head of a school for gifted kids in Mumbai. (BTW, he’s also listed as a contact in May’s phone on Agents of SHIELD.)

Animal House

When Scott is being “kidnapped,” he was busy watching Animal House. Specifically, he’s watching a scene that involves Donald Sutherland theorizing about how small the universe really is.

Hank’s Cars

Much like his keychain of a tank he carried around in the first movie, Hank carries around a whole set of cars in this movie. He also carries around his shrunken lab. In the comics, he also carried a pouch full of things he shrunk down, just in case he needed them.

Sonny Burch

The guy dealing in black market goods exists in the comics. He was the chairman of Cross Technologies. We met Cross in the first movie. Funnily enough, the company used to be under Obadiah Stane. You might remember him from the Iron Man movies. (Geoffrey Ballard, the guy Sonny calls to give a tip about Scott and Hope to, is also a comic book character. He became the villain Centurion.)

Hydra Doesn’t Exist

According to the folks in this movie, anyway. Anyone who keeps an eye on the TV side of the MCU knows that Hydra is still kicking at this point in the timeline in the form of Ruby, her mom, and their soldiers on Agents of SHIELD. (No, those timelines might not exactly line up, but that’s probably pretty close to where we are.)

Baba Yaga

Baba Yaga is actually a mythical being, but it’s funny that this story is used in reference to Ghost. Why? Because there is a Marvel character named Baba Yaga. She was the Russian goddess of witchcraft and misfortune… and she also ran a branch of the mafia and set up base in Brooklyn because… why not? Ghost, of course, was also a character in the comics, but the story for the character has been completely reworked for the movie.

Elihas Starr

Father to ghost here, he’s also a comic book character. He was an atomic scientist who became a villain known as Egghead. He was once hired to kidnap the Wasp, amongst other things.

Bill Foster, Former SHIELD Agent

Bill was Hank’s lab assistant for a while in the comics. You know what else he was though? Husband to Claire Temple for a while. He also worked for Tony Stark. And he became a hero in his own right - Goliath. (BTW, Laurence Fishburne's son plays the younger version of the character in flashbacks.)

Team Caps

I’m sorry, but did anyone else find it funny that Hope and Scott decided baseball caps were how they would walk around without being noticed? It’s the same way Captain America and company try to stay under the radar. I guess it’s good Scott ended up on Team Cap.

The Chalkboard

I’m sure there are some Easter eggy things on the board that me, a non science nerd, wouldn’t catch. More eagle eyed fans will.

Project Goliath

Like I said, Bill was once a hero named Goliath. That’s also a code name used by Hank Pym when he was “Giant Man.” It’s also been used by other characters when they were supersized. It was also a project already mentioned by Tony Stark in one of the Iron Man movies when he was looking into old SHIELD projects.

“Janet was the one to endure…”

Bill says this about Janet’s working relationship with Hank. I found the wording purposeful. In the comics, Hank’s mental health disorders and experimentation with his abilities end up combining to create multiple personalities. One of them is Yellowjacket, who was abusive. His temperment in the MCU doesn’t seem to be all that different according to those who worked with him before.

“It’s them!”

Bill Foster says this when he sees a bunch of ants. Why is this a reference? Because it’s a shout out to the movie THEM! from the 50s. It featured giant ants. Hope, Scott, and Cassie, also watch it on a rooftop later.

Ava’s Place

There’s a nod to another Disney franchise in her home/lab. I spotted a Darth Vader helmet on one of her shelves.

Argentina

This is an interesting choice for Ava’s backstory. For one thing, we haven’t seen much of it in the MCU before. For another, the country is most often associated with Black Tarantula in the comics. Magneto has also gone after Nazi war criminals there, Maya Hansen (you remember her from Iron Man) has been kidnapped there, and portals to other realities have opened there. It’s a happening place on the page, so maybe we’ll start to see more of it on screen.

Truth Serum

The whole back and forth about whether or not truth serum worked reminded me of Skye being threatened with it on Agents of SHIELD in the pilot, only for it to be used on Grant Ward to gain her trust instead. It was made very clear that there was no such thing as a truth serum after the fact, but maybe there is.

Stan Lee

The 60s were fun, he says in his cameo. And he wasn’t kidding. It featured Jack Kirby’s psychedelic style, for sure. It was also definitely a good decade for Marvel. The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Daredevil all got their first solo titles that decade. (It was a good year for DC too. Poison Ivy and Batgirl both made their comic book debut during the decade.)

Tim Heidecker

You’ll recognize him as the boat captain from the big confrontation scene. He’s actually the co-host of a podcast. His co-host Gregg Turkington appeared in the first movie in a cameo as well.

The Infinity War Tie-In

Ant-Man ends up stuck in the Quantum Realm while everyone waiting for him outside dissolves into ash. This gives us an explanation for just what Scott was up to during the events of Avengers: Infinity War as the end of that movie is where we see all of that dissolving into ash. This movie apparently takes place over roughly the same time period, just like the last few episodes of Agents of SHIELD likely do as well, making this a very packed time period on Earth.

#ant-man and the wasp #MCU #marvel comics #marvel easter eggs #easter eggs

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sophieebdaily · 3 years

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Sophie gave a really strong and powerful interview for today’s edition of ‘You Magazine’ talking about her book ‘Spinning Plates’, out on October 7th. She looked back in her old days and there are some deep relevation she’s never talked about before and personally it shocked me a lot. Read the article below, written by Hattie Crisell:

With six albums, five children, a podcast and her fabulous lockdown kitchen discos, SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR appears to lead a perfect charmed life. But as she tells Hattie Crisell, writing her new memoir took her back to much darker days.

This is the second time I have interviewed singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor, and she is exactly as I remember her. I’m not referring to her appearance, although of course she’s memorably striking – tall, green-eyed and beautiful, and today wearing a typically colourful floral jumpsuit that she picked up for £20 at a festival.

But there’s also something distinctive about her manner, which I admired last time, and even find myself envying. Sophie puts it best in her new memoir, Spinning Plates: Music, Men, Motherhood and Me. ‘It’s been my goal to be unapologetic. Kind, considerate, but clear with my boundaries.’ And that’s exactly how she comes across.

It’s not always easy for women to maintain those boundaries, and I include myself among them – traditionally, we’ve been encouraged to ease social encounters by being obliging. But while Sophie is polite, friendly, and prone to bursts of raucous laughter, she also projects a steady, low-key faith in who she is and what she thinks. Interviewing her is straightforward precisely because her boundaries are clear: I know that if she objects to a topic, she will say so. Yet when I warn her that I have questions about the more difficult parts of her book, she assures me that she feels fine talking about any of it.

Because the thing is, the 42-year-old woman I’m having lunch with today – an artist who has released six studio albums, produced five children and entertained the nation through lockdown with her famous kitchen discos – is in a much happier place than the girl I’ve been reading about in her memoir, who perhaps didn’t have that confidence. While Sophie always felt she was destined to be famous (‘Cringy to write but also true,’ as it says in the book), she went through a number of deeply unpleasant experiences in her late teens and early 20s that have shaped who she is today.

It started, she explains, with the ladette culture at the end of the 1990s, just as she was emerging from adolescence. The ladette ‘drank pints and had one-night stands, she could talk the talk and walk the walk, she wore a Wonderbra and could banter with the boys. She was ‘who I was supposed to be,’ writes Sophie. It was all about showing bravado when it came to sex and booze; but there wasn’t space to let on if you were uncomfortable or felt vulnerable. ‘It was intimidating and I felt way out of my league.’

Sophie joined her first band, Theaudience, aged 17, and soon started to be interviewed by male journalists, all of whom were older. They asked questions about her favourite sexual positions and commented on her breasts. During an early appearance on Never Mind The Buzzcocks, she was mocked humiliatingly for being the daughter of a Blue Peter presenter (Janet Ellis), and told ‘You’re not cool.’

And then there was her image, which was treated just as brutally. One photographer took an upskirt photo of her without her knowledge and sold it to the papers. Later, when Theaudience’s second album had faltered, she took work as a model. During a photo shoot to promote a hair salon, she was pressured into posing semi-topless, despite this being against the terms she’d agreed with her agency. Those photos – ‘me with sequins barely covering my modesty and the saddest eyes ever’, she writes – were eventually sold to Heat magazine.

None of this seedy treatment should be surprising to anyone who remembers the late 90s, yet two particularly damaging experiences stand out. At 17, Sophie met a man in a club and went back to his flat. They started kissing, but when she told him to stop, he didn’t. This rape – a term she took a while to recognise, because consent wasn’t such a hot topic at the time – is how she lost her virginity.

The second experience began shortly afterwards, when Sophie was studying for her A-levels: it was a relationship with an older man that lasted for several years and was increasingly abusive. ‘Teeny tiny, almost imperceptible shifts that make you think it’s normal to be routinely humiliated in public, or to be told you’re an idiot when you make a mistake, or that you’re past it and wrinkly. Before you know it you’re being threatened if you try to show independence,’ she writes. At its worst, her boyfriend wouldn’t allow her to walk down the street alone or look out of the car window. During one argument, he twisted her wrist so hard that the next day it was too swollen for her to put on a watch. She’s opened up about this now simply because a publisher approached her about writing a book, and lockdown seemed as good a time as any. Still, there was plenty to fill her autobiography, including tales of teenage rebellion, a rise to major pop success, an unexpected baby in her mid-20s, and life with a large family – so why did she choose to include these very personal traumas?

‘I think firstly, those things are really quite common,’ she says, as we dig in to lunch at a restaurant near her home in West London – a tiny eaterie where Sophie is such a regular the waitress already knows her order. ‘I think a lot of people have those experiences, and I’m hoping they resonate and reassure them a bit. I remember, in the midst of writing, I read Candice Brathwaite’s book I Am Not Your Baby Mother, and she talks about a similar experience for her. I thought, “Wow – actually seeing it written down by someone else, I find that reassuring.”’

Part of the reason the abuse was so insidious was that her ex’s constant criticisms and put-downs were so casually delivered. ‘You just think, “Oh, this must be what a grown-up relationship is like, this must be how people talk, this must be normal,”’ she says. ‘So much so that with my husband Richard [Jones, bass player in The Feeling], I almost thought, if I did something silly, “Why are you not calling me an idiot? Oh, OK, is that still passionate, then?” And actually yeah, you don’t have to go around punching people to be an amazingly strong person.’

What she went through, she thinks, has helped her to call out abusive behaviour in other situations. ‘Certainly, I’ve been straight-talking with girlfriends about things I think aren’t very healthy. Hopefully, I’ve done it in a way that’s tactful, but sometimes you just have to say to people, “You don’t seem very happy, and I’m just going to repeat back to you the things that you’re telling me,” and hold a mirror up to it, really. Then people make their own decisions.’

Though most of the book is more lighthearted, these two painful events were the chapters she wrote first. ‘I thought, I really want to tell those stories now. It was going back to give myself a voice, the times when I didn’t say something. And also I thought, if you’re going to write a book, what’s the point? To me being brave and bold and honest is all part of it.’ She’s keen to show her fans that an abusive relationship doesn’t have to dictate your future. ‘You can still end up somewhere happy and not be defined by things that weren’t great. Plus, I suppose it was a way of coming to terms with it myself, because you contextualise it in a different way than you did at the time – particularly the dynamic of how women were being written about back then, and what was seen as the goal of how to be a successful young woman. I think that was quite damaging for my generation.’ The ladette stuff? ‘Yeah. I think among my peers, we’re probably all able to say, “What was that about? Thank goodness we don’t have to think about that any more.”’

Though she’s been married for 16 years to Richard and seems to live a largely happy life, what she went through left its mark. She writes in the book that she recently went to a boxing class with her husband, and when the instructor suggested they spar and Richard raised his fists in preparation, she burst into tears: ‘It took me completely by surprise. The sparring had reminded me of something I’d put in a hidden corner of my memory.’

Her ex sounds vile, I say, and she nods. ‘You do crazy things, don’t you? You give so much of yourself. I tried so hard to turn it into something it was never ever going to be. But I did get out. I did change it.’

She talked the book over with her husband before she started it. ‘Richard was incredibly encouraging,’ she says. ‘And we’ve been together a long time now, so there were no surprises. I think he understood the reason why I was motivated to write it; to maybe reach other people in similar situations. He thought it was important for me to do that.’ Her parents, Janet Ellis and the film-maker Robin Bextor, have both read it. ‘Most people that know me, of course, they know bits anyway,’ she says, then laughs, ‘and they also focus on all the stuff that involves them.’

Her kids – Sonny, 17, Kit, 12, Ray, nine, Jesse, five, and Mickey, two – were another reason for writing it. ‘They can start thinking about how they feel about those sorts of things as they get older,’ she says. The book explains that she taught them about consent early on: ‘When they play we use the words, “Stop” and “No”, and they are powerful. No matter how much fun they’ve been having up to that point, if one of them – even laughing – says “No” or “Stop”, then they must stop whatever they are doing. I want to raise considerate, kind people who can take other people’s feelings into account.’

None of them has read her memoir, but Sophie has already told her eldest son what she went through. ‘You gauge it on each child. It might be that it’s not right to talk about it at the same stage with the next child down, but certainly with Sonny I felt like he could understand. I did it in a way that was appropriate – I just told him, “I spent a lot of my time in something that wasn’t great, and you don’t have to do the same.” I’m selective, but I try to give them the insight of whatever I’ve learnt – it’s part of raising someone.’

Beyond that, she’s not worried about their reactions to the book. ‘I don’t think there’s anything that I would struggle to talk to them about. In fact, if I’m perfectly honest, I think they’re going to be pretty uninterested in the whole thing!’ She laughs. ‘My mum’s quite an open person. I’ve learnt things about her from what she’s said on the radio. That’s how she’s comfortable talking about herself, and it’s never bothered me, so my kids have just got to deal with it. They can cope with knowing I’m a whole adult person who lived a life before I was with their dad.’

Her life involved a lot more than the bruising experiences mentioned above. Sophie writes about her parents’ split when she was four, but also about the playground kudos that came with her mother’s presenter role on Blue Peter. Sophie talks fondly of the step-parents she acquired as a child – her mother’s husband John Leach (who died last summer) and her father’s wife Polly Mockford. And she charts the arrival over the years of her younger siblings: Jackson Ellis Leach, 34, who is a drummer in Sophie’s band, Martha Ellis Leach, 30, Dulce Bextor, 24, and 23-year-old twins Bertie and Maisy Bextor.

But perhaps the most heartwarming section of the book is devoted to her husband. It’s a love letter of sorts, that details the kindness and respect he has always shown her, and the easy friendship that evolved into more. She met Richard towards the end of her relationship with the abusive ex, when he auditioned to join her band. She recalls that the first thing she ever said to him was, ‘Nice amp,’ which was surprising, she writes, because ‘it is the only time in my life I’ve either a) really looked at an amp or b) complimented anyone on one.’ At home, they now have a neon sign bearing the words ‘nice amp’.

Things moved fast. She found out she was pregnant six weeks into their relationship, when they hadn’t even yet exchanged ‘I love you’. Shocked, Sophie considered terminating the pregnancy – ‘but I couldn’t get to that headspace,’ she writes. ‘As my tummy grew, so did the love that Richard and I felt for each other.’ Then, nine months after Sonny was born, Richard proposed to her – though she blurted out ‘Yes!’ before he’d even asked the question.

When I bring up this high romance, she becomes a bit awkward. The chapter on Richard was the hardest to write, she admits. ‘I’m not very good at that kind of thing. But I was much better at writing it down than I am at talking about it.’ She knows he liked it, but he didn’t say much, which she seems relieved about. ‘He’s much more likely to be romantic than I am, so he probably didn’t want to embarrass me.’

Whether or not she can say it out loud, her book suggests they are very well suited and deeply devoted to each other – but that’s not to say they haven’t been through some tough times. During Sophie’s pregnancy with Sonny, and even while she was still in hospital after his birth, she was trying to untangle her finances from those of her ex. Despite being given her home studio equipment and a brand-new car in the split, he felt he was entitled to more. Her pregnancy was also mysteriously leaked to the press, leading her to worry about who she could trust with personal information; it later emerged that her phone, as well as her mother’s and Richard’s, had been hacked.

Then at 28 weeks pregnant she was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia, a condition which causes high blood pressure and meant that Sonny needed to be delivered by caesarean two months early. Sonny stayed in hospital for six weeks, with Sophie and Richard visiting twice a day. But it’s what happened a couple of months after he returned home, when the new family had settled into a happy routine, that makes for the most alarming reading. Sophie woke to find that Sonny had slept through his usual feeding time, and had a temperature of over 41C. He had meningitis.

Thankfully, the doctors were able to treat him quickly and his temperature was back under control later that day – ‘but I think the jolt of fear and adrenaline took a while to process,’ writes Sophie. ‘For years after I would freak out if any of the kids had a high fever.’

She’s typically philosophical now when she reflects on the stress of that period. ‘The main thing was, we didn’t know any different, and I’m quite an optimistic person anyway so I didn’t go through it all in a state of panic,’ she tells me. ‘It’s more that I look back and think of it as quite an intense period of our lives. Richard and I deal with quite a lot all the time and I think that was what forged our ability to cope – because there was not any let-up.’

Perhaps it also primed them to cope with the wobble in their marriage that was to come nine years later – during Sophie’s 2013 stint on Strictly Come Dancing, in which she was a finalist. She doesn’t mince her words about this experience in the book: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’ she writes.

Her opinion of the show is based on that series, so it’s hard to know whether it would resonate with more recent participants – but I suspect much of it would. She believes pastoral care is lacking, and that there should be a counsellor on board to make sure everyone’s coping. ‘Everybody’s dealing with really big, real-life things, and it takes over probably like nothing else you’ve ever done,’ she says. ‘So much of it is ridiculously wonderful – the sets, the lighting, the music, the costumes, the make-up. I just think if there was a bit more emotional support for the people in the midst of it, it would at least be a nod to the fact that they’re thinking about it.’

She points out how demanding the schedule is, with rehearsals or recording six days a week for up to 13 weeks. The professional dancers, she believes, shoulder more strain than they should: ‘I think I was very unusual in that I never cried in front of Brendan [Cole, her dance partner]. But they’re like counsellors as well. I heard stories about previous contestants. You know, imagine the confessional at the hairdressers, and then pretend you’re doing a paso doble with your hairdresser.’

Richard (who gave his blessing for her to write about this) struggled with her involvement in the show. ‘At the TV studio everything was adrenaline-fuelled and exciting but at home things were strained and I was finding it hard to give Richard the reassurance and support he needed,’ she writes. It took a while after the show finished for their marriage to recover.

She also found the judges’ emphasis on sexual chemistry deeply uncomfortable. ‘When we did the Argentine tango, all the comments were about whether it came across as a man having an affair with his other woman, because that’s apparently what that dance is about,’ she says, still a little incredulous. ‘And I’m like, “I’m not sure I want an extra couple of points for looking like I’m having an affair, because my grandpa’s watching, and my husband’s in the audience.”’

Did she expect Strictly to have an impact on her marriage? ‘God no! I had no bloody idea. I’d never seen it.’ Though she doesn’t name names, it’s well documented that two celebrities’ marriages ended during that series. ‘That’s not a small-fry thing,’ she says. ‘If I go on tour and there’s 15 of us in a crew bus, I don’t have two of them leave their partners at the end of the tour.’

Speaking of tours, her next one as a headliner – the Kitchen Disco Tour – has been pushed back to March next year. In the meantime, she’s promoting the appropriately titled Spinning Plates in between recording episodes of her podcast of the same name, performing at festivals, gearing up to support Steps on tour, and dealing with her toddler’s nocturnal wanderings (the week I meet Sophie, she and Mickey had spent a night sleeping on the floor outside her bedroom). She likes to be busy, but is glad the book allowed her a moment to stop and think.

‘My 40s are a good time to reflect on where I’m at,’ she says. ‘I’m clear in my mind about what I want, but also a lot more open, and more aware of where I’ve been in the past. For me the book is all part of taking stock, and thinking actually, I’m quite a happy person.’ She does seem happy – and refreshingly unapologetic, too.

Photos: Laura Lewis

#you magazine #photos #sophie ellis bextor #spinning plates

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ramialkarmi · 6 years

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Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes opens up about sudden wealth, how a walk with Mark Zuckerberg changed his life, and why he wants millions of Americans to get free cash each month

Chris Hughes rose to prominence as a cofounder of Facebook and the director of online organizing for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

His new book, "Fair Shot," is part memoir, part policy proposal.

Through his organization the Economic Security Council, he's advocating for a monthly check of $500 for Americans making under $50,000, to be funded by those in the highest income bracket.

He said his early successes, as well as his failure with the New Republic magazine, has shaped his approach to this latest venture.

Chris Hughes had the good fortune of making it to Harvard, and the even better fortune of being Mark Zuckerberg's roommate.

As the most outgoing of the Facebook cofounders — Zuckerberg called him "the Empath" — he was responsible for getting the social network's first press coverage, and helping develop the site's user experience.

We spoke with Hughes, who just came out with a new book, "Fair Shot," for our podcast, "Success! How I Did It."

Hughes worked at Facebook for only three years, but his 2% stake in the company made him $500 million. And while he came from a solidly middle-class family in North Carolina and had an elite education, nothing could have prepared a kid in his early 20s for suddenly becoming rich.

After leaving Facebook, Hughes decided to join the 2008 presidential campaign of a freshman senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. When Obama became president, the media was quick to call Hughes a tech prodigy, a force behind both the biggest social network and an inspirational new commander-in-chief. Hughes and his future husband, Sean Eldridge, a marriage-equality activist, were a celebrated power couple.

So when Hughes bought the magazine The New Republic in 2012 and soon found himself in over his head, it was all the more dramatic to see an onslaught of public attacks toward him. The bright young hero of tech and progressive politics was now cast as a disconnected, clueless Silicon Valley elitist ruining a beloved source of journalism. He sold the magazine after four years.

Things have had a chance to cool down and he's back. Hughes' new book is a chance for him to tell his version of his story, and to explain why he is now dedicating his life to achieving a guaranteed income in the US. His ideal is a country where working people making less than $50,000 receive a monthly check for $500. People in the highest income bracket, like him, would foot the bill.

When we spoke, it became clear he's not just latching onto a trend. It's something he's connected to his unexpected career path, and an evolving idea of what it means to be successful.

Listen to the full episode here:

Subscribe to "Success! How I Did It" on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app. Check out previous episodes with:

KPMG chairman Lynne Doughtie and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark

Deloitte chairman and CEO Janet Foutty and Salesforce president Cindy Robbins

Microsoft's EVP for business development, Peggy Johnson

"Shark Tank" star and FUBU founder Daymond John

Barstool Sports CEO Erika Nardini

The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Feloni: Your new book, "Fair Shot," is largely a policy book, but it's also a personal statement. Why is that?

Hughes: My story, in many ways, illustrates the unfairness at the heart of the American economy today. I grew up in a middle-class household in a little town in North Carolina called Hickory. My mom was a public-school teacher, dad was a traveling salesman, and I got financial aid to go to a great boarding school, and then later on to Harvard.

Then I had the good fortune of rooming with Mark Zuckerberg, and we started Facebook in 2004. And that story has been written. It exploded in popularity and became one of the largest companies in the world.

As a result, I made a boatload of money for three years' worth of work, and as much as people might want to see the American dream in that, I actually think it's indicative of the fact that a small number of people are getting extremely lucky, while 99% of everybody else is working hard and is having a harder and harder time to make ends meet, and we have the power to change it.

Feloni: You're known for Facebook and for your involvement in the Obama campaign. With all stories about you, do you think this is a chance for you to tell your story the way you see it? Did you feel misunderstood before this?

Hughes: Well, in the years after Facebook's IPO in particular, my husband and I came into this immense wealth, and for a little while we thought our case was just totally unique, that I'd experienced a lucky break. And over time I've come to believe that that's not actually right. My case may be extreme, but it's actually not that uncommon. Millions of people in that 1% are consistently getting very lucky — not because they're winning lotteries, but because we've structured an economy that creates these windfalls for a select few, and everybody else has a harder and harder time.

As I became more aware of that, I felt like using my example to illustrate what's happening more broadly at work in the economy.

A fateful conversation with Zuckerberg

Feloni: I found it interesting that you really embrace this idea of right place, right time. Do you ever wonder what things would have been like if you ended up in a different dorm in Harvard?

Hughes: I mean, suffice to say, my life would be very, very different. I'm really proud of the work I did at Facebook. I worked for three years on communications, marketing, and product development. But the economic reward, if you will, that I got for three years' worth of work, was just totally disproportionate with the time put in. There's no doubt my life would have taken a very different route, and I could very well just be one of the 99 percenters, working hard, and not able to make ends meet. But that is how the economy is working today. These small decisions, small conversations like the one I talk about in the book, where Mark Zuckerberg and I went on a walk a couple of months after Facebook had launched and we had an equity conversation. I came out of the gate saying, "I want 10% of the company."

Feloni: It was a rainy day, right?

Hughes: It was a raining night. It was a perfect way to have the conversation. He was stressed; I was stressed. It was not the best setup. I made the case for 10%. He said, "I don't think you've earned that much." I caved pretty fast, and in the book I say it was at once a spectacular failure of negotiation and also the most successful conversation of my life, because that 2% of Facebook ended up being worth nearly half a billion dollars a decade later.

But what keeps happening in this economy is these small chance events have these outsized impacts, because there's a snowballing effect, because of the winner-take-all kind of system. So that what seemed like passing conversations in the rain, in college, can have these outsized effects. That's a new phenomenon. Never before in history have 20-somethings been able to create these companies.

I mean, Facebook is now worth $500 billion, and in just over the course of 14 or 15 years. And I think something structurally is at work that's making that possible, and it's those same forces that are causing income inequality to be at record highs, and median wages to be flat.

Feloni: At what point did you realize the weight of that conversation on your life?

Hughes: There was never one particular moment afterward. Facebook just kept growing, and in some sense the goalposts kept moving. We had 6,000 people at Harvard on it. We're like, "Well, this is amazing. We have to open it up to other schools and see if they're interested." Then people from those schools flooded in, and over time we went from college students to everyone, the general population — later international.

There was a moment, I guess a couple of years, in 2006, when Yahoo offered us $1 billion to buy the company. I'm not sure: I guess I would have been 21, 22 years old, let's say.

Feloni: A billion dollars, yeah, at 21.

Hughes: Well, yeah, I mean it was a billion dollars for the company.

Feloni: Sure, sure.

Hughes: It was a lot of money at a very young age. The question at the time was, "Do we take this or do we not?" Mark and the board made the decision not to, and then all of a sudden, the kind of goalposts — you know, if you'd asked me two years before that, if we were offered $1 billion for Facebook, clearly that's the definition of success. There's no question that that would have been a good decision. But Mark made the right call, and the goalposts moved yet again.

To answer your question more directly, there was never one particular moment where we realized how enormous Facebook would become. There were just a series of moments when it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. It continually reset my expectations and, I think, our collective expectations.

Feloni: Was there ever a time where you could have imagined something as wild as discussions in 2018 about the company's effect on democracy as a whole?

Hughes: In 2004, no, but later on, yes. I mean, some of the structural problems that Facebook is investing in, finding solutions for, now, have been a long time coming. I mean, the "filter bubble" — a friend, Eli Pariser, coined the term and wrote the book on that — and that was years and years ago.

So in 2004, in the early days, Facebook was an experiment, if you will: a dorm-room project that exploded. And then the real hard work was not so much in coming up with that initial idea — it was in scaling the network over time. And to be clear, again, I was there for three years. When I left Facebook, it had 18 million users. Today, there are 2 billion. So the vast majority of that work has been done since I left. But initially, I think there was a sense of experimentation and openness. But I think Facebook's role in the world now, it has been on this trajectory for a while. And with the growth and with the level of the intense relationships that people have with the platform, just the amount of time that they use it, comes a great responsibility. I think the company is increasingly recognizing that.

Obama's tech guy on the campaign trail

Feloni: The next major chapter in your life was joining Obama's 2008 campaign. What persuaded you to move to Chicago for that?

Hughes: I loved working at Facebook, but it wasn't a religion for me in the same way it was for Mark. And I think to be able to be in the trenches and have the resilience and the dedication — with any startup, really — you have to believe in the mission of it. Almost with a kind of religious zeal.

And I enjoyed working on Facebook, but I felt in many ways inspired by Obama's campaign message. But also galvanized to put our country back on track. If you remember back in 2007, seven to eight years of George W. Bush, massive tax cuts that mostly went to the wealthy, invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq. I mean, it was incomparable to the moment that we live in now, but it felt like a darker time, and Obama held immense promise and inspired me, just like he inspired a whole generation of Americans and people on the left and some on the right.

I decided to move to Chicago to throw my hat in and see if we could use some of the things that I learned at Facebook and elsewhere to create a campaign that would be powered from the grassroots up. Grassroots campaigns have been something that have been talked about a lot of the time, but particularly at a presidential level, it's really the hub-and-spoke model that was how they were organized.

Obama had been a community organizer, wanted to experiment to see what might be possible with more of a grassroots approach. So I came onboard pretty early and over the following couple of years, just specifically, digitally, we ended up having several million people engage with the campaign, many of whom were on the social network. Lots of them organized events and groups and raised money, and it really became a kind of digital community of sorts, in a way that that truly exceeded my expectations, and I think our collective expectations.

Feloni: And did you think from day one that he had a real shot at being president?

Hughes: I did.

Feloni: You did?

Hughes: Yeah, and in retrospect, it's like, "What was I thinking?" But the crazy became possible. That really was the lesson for me, from both of those early career experiences, that what seems impossible was actually more possible than we thought.

Feloni: Following Obama's win, Fast Company proclaimed you "The Kid Who Made Obama President." What did you think of that when you saw that on the cover?

Hughes: I mean, "exaggeration" is an understatement. It was crazy. I mean, you've got to sell magazines. I understand why headlining is often aspirational, let's say.

But people would — particularly after the Obama campaign, when Facebook and Obama were both very fresh in people's minds — people would treat me like I had the Facebook fairy dust, to just come in and sprinkle! And I remember speaking to a group of ophthalmologists, for some reason, and they wanted to know how to use social media. They definitely left the speech a little disappointed, because I didn't have some magic solution to whatever problem they were facing. I have no idea what problems they were facing.

So anyway, I think that there was a sense that people were excited about the changes happening in the technological landscape, but also were expecting a cult of genius around me or a lot of other people, which was more a figment of imagination than reality.

A lot of that felt overstated at the time. I mean, it felt like I was the knight in shining armor in some sense, so then a few years later, when I had a lot of press coverage in the opposite direction, to be honest, that too felt a little too far, a little too extreme.

Buying into a ditch

Feloni: On that note, you buy The New Republic magazine, in 2012. You end up investing $25 million over four years before selling it, and yeah, you made some enemies in the process, as you describe in the book. Do you regret it?

Hughes: I regret some of the decisions that I made. I mean, I came in guns blazing. I really — I loved the journalism that the New Republic had done for decades, nearly a century at that point, and really believed that more people should be reading it.

I took those early lessons from Facebook and the Obama campaign and set really unrealistic goals. Those goals I do regret. I wanted to take the journalism and move it to an audience of millions, or tens of millions, and, in the process, skipped over the fact that The New Republic was a small print magazine with a circulation of 35,000 when I bought it.

And I think I would have been better served and the institution would have been better served had I adapted more modest means to the enterprise. If I'd invested that kind of money, but over a longer period, and instead of trying to reach tens of millions all of a sudden with a somewhat niche kind of magazine, trying to reach a smaller and more engaged audience.

I'm extremely proud of a lot of the journalism that we did. I think we made a lot of good progress, but I also think I could have made better decisions, and I carry a lot of those lessons forward into the work that I'm doing now. I mean, that's why I didn't start an organization to campaign for UBI right off the bat.

A fight for a guaranteed income

Feloni: I want to step back for a second. So UBI: universal basic income. At what point did this become the issue that you wanted to dedicate yourself to?

Hughes: Even before Facebook's IPO, to be honest. I sold the first tranche of stock on the private markets in 2008. I sold a million dollars' worth of stock, and my parents had taught me to tithe. I grew up in a pretty religious household and they tithed religiously. Every month, they took 10% of their income and gave it away, and so I, all of a sudden, in 2008, had $100,000 that I wanted to give away.

It turns out when you start on that road, there are no shortage of causes, but it's sometimes hard to figure out what's the most effective thing to invest in. Over the years I did a lot of work, talked to a lot of different nonprofit leaders, made a lot of different investments, but really came through GiveDirectly, this program that works internationally, to understand that if you look at the research, cash — providing people with money, no strings attached — has all of these secondary benefits, like improving education and health outcomes, and leading people to be less stressed.

So that's how I got on the cash wagon, if you will, and then I began to learn much more about its power here domestically, and that's how I ended up fighting for a guaranteed income.

So UBI is a big-picture ideal that motivates a lot of people, including myself, to think about 2030, 2040, in the future. Today, however, I think a guaranteed income of $500 a month to people who make $50,000 or less — so a more modest starter version, if you will — is what's most required. And that's because I believe that a guaranteed income is the most powerful way to combat income inequality.

Feloni: In 2016 you cofounded the Economic Security Project, the vehicle for your ideas on a guaranteed income. What is that organization?

Hughes: The idea with the Economic Security Project is to convene as many smart people as possible, to ask big questions about "How do we provide financial security to all Americans using cash?"

We have a lot of people in our network who come from a background of advocating for UBI, but we also have folks who want to put a price on carbon and distribute the revenue as a dividend. And we also invest money in a lot of nonprofits and social entrepreneurs, and doing things like the demonstration that we're doing in Stockton, California, where we're providing a guaranteed income in conjunction with the mayor, to many Stocktonians. So that's kind of the stuff we do.

Feloni: An interesting thing about this notion of guaranteed income is that it has supporters on the left, very leftist supporters of it, all the way to libertarians on the right. It basically covers a full spectrum. Would you be OK if there were some form of a guaranteed income passed, just not the one that you're advocating in the book?

Hughes: Well, I mean, listen, I have a general openness. There are lots of different ways to do a guaranteed income, and I think that, I mean I make the case for one particular one. There are others that I'm also interested in and supportive of. The place where I do draw the line is cashing in the existing safety nets.

So, my view is that the social safety net that we have now — food stamps, unemployment insurance, housing vouchers — is woefully underfunded. We live in a time when it's undergoing historic assaults, really, I mean, by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans. And I think those are incredibly important to defend against. And, if anything, the safety net should be expanded.

The guaranteed income I see as working in tandem with those benefits, not replacing them. That's where I draw a pretty clear line of an approach I don't think would be, on balance, workable. It would be effectively taking money from the people who need it most and redistributing it upwards, which I don't think stays true to the values of the guaranteed income movement.

Feloni: What does your political future look like?

Hughes: I don't have any future in politics!

Feloni: OK, it's just from an advocacy standpoint then?

Hughes: Entirely from an advocacy perspective, yeah.

Feloni: So, as you're taking this opportunity to look at your entire career, you're thinking about how you've been in the spotlight with all your ups and downs, what has your career taught you about the notion of success?

Hughes: Well, I definitely don't think there's one way of having success. I made a lot of money at a young age, but I didn't feel in connection to the work that I put in. So success I feel like for me is having an opportunity to work on what I want to work on, and hopefully having an impact on the world as part of the process. But even that is a more modest kind of definition, I guess, than others might have.

Feloni: Is this an opportunity to own your story when, as we were saying, others tried to make you into someone else?

Hughes: I don't know. I feel like I've always owned my story. I don't know about that. I mean, people are going to say all kinds of things.

Feloni: Sure.

Hughes: Good things, negative things, and I feel like you've got to stay focused on — I have to stay focused on what I care about most. That's the work that I do on a day-to-day basis, and, of course, my family. And as long as I'm focused on the impact that I want to have through work, through my family, then I'll be fine.

Feloni: At the end of the book, at the time you were writing, you were expecting the birth of your son. So how —

Hughes: He's here! He's 2 months old now.

Feloni: Congratulations!

Hughes: Thank you.

Feloni: Has that changed your perspective on your life and what you want to accomplish?

Hughes: I'm like a lot of new parents in feeling extremely fortunate, very lucky, and also a little overwhelmed. Yeah. I mean, having a son has been an incredible experience. I feel like my learning curve has not been this steep in a very long time, but it's really wonderful and something I wouldn't trade for the world — the most fulfilling thing that I've been able to experience so far.

Feloni: How are you thinking of, as you're raising your son, what values do you want to instill? You're starting at a different place from where you started. How are you viewing that?

Hughes: I think the most important thing is that he have a sense of responsibility to the people around him. In the book, I dedicate it to my parents, and specifically for teaching me that no one is invisible. Much of it was through the prism of religion, but not exclusively. They really taught me to always see and not just see, but in seeing, care about and think about the roles that other people are playing in the world, and what I can do to be of use.

That is so hard-coded into me that it just feels like the language that I speak, and I hope that I'm able to pass that along to our son.

Feloni: Well, thank you so much, Chris.

Hughes: Thank you.

SEE ALSO: Before Daymond John became a millionaire investor on 'Shark Tank,' he was waiting tables at Red Lobster and talking his way onto LL Cool J's music video sets

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: LinkedIn's founder explains how Mark Zuckerberg transformed from an awkward kid to one of tech's best CEOs

#Tech Insider #Arab #Entrepreneurship #sillicon alley insider

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martinfzimmerman · 7 years

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Jim Rickards Exclusive: Dollar May Become “Local Currency of the U.S.” Only

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Mike Gleason: It is my great privilege to be joined now by James Rickards. Mr. Rickards is editor of Strategic Intelligence, a monthly newsletter, and Director of the James Rickards Project, an inquiry into the complex dynamics of geopolitics and global capital. He’s also the author of several bestselling books including The Death of Money, Currency Wars, The New Case for Gold, and now his latest book The Road to Ruin.

In addition to his achievements as a writer and author, Jim is also a portfolio manager, lawyer and renowned economic commentator having been interviewed by CNBC, the BBC, Bloomberg, Fox News and CNN just to name a few. And we’re also happy to have him back on the Money Metals Podcast.

Jim, thanks for coming on with us again today. We really appreciate your time. How are you?

Jim Rickards: I’m fine, Mike. Thanks. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Mike Gleason: Absolutely. Well first off, Jim, last week, the fed increased the fed funds rate by another quarter of a point as most of us expected, but during that meeting, we also heard Janet Yellen say she wants to normalize the Fed’s balance sheet, which means the Fed could be dumping about $50 billion in financial assets into the marketplace each month. Now you’ve been a longtime and outspoken critic of the fed and their policies over the years. So, what are your thoughts here, Jim? Do you believe they will actually follow through on this idea of selling off more than $4 trillion in bonds and other assets on the Fed’s books? And if so, what do you think the market reaction would be including the gold market?

Jim Rickards: Well, I do think they’re going to follow through. Of course, it’s important to understand the mechanics of the Fed. They’re actually not going to sell any bonds. But they are going to reduce their balance sheet by probably two to two and a half trillion. So just to go through the history and the math and the actual mechanics there, so prior to the financial crisis of 2008, the Fed’s balance sheet was about $800 billion. As a result of QE1, QE2, QE3, and everything else the fed has done in the meantime, they got that balance sheet up to $4.5 trillion. By the way, if the Fed were a hedge fund, they’d be leveraged 115 to one. They look a really bad hedge fund. But that’s how much the Fed is leveraged, they have about 40 billion of equity, versus 4.5 trillion of assets. Mostly U.S. government securities of various kinds. So, they’re leveraged well over 100 to one.

And if you mark the balance sheet to market, not always but sometimes depending on what interest rates are doing, they’re actually technically insolvent. There have been times, again not all the times, but times when the mark to market basis, the Fed would have negative equity or basically would be broke if they were anyone other than the Fed. So that’s how leveraged they are. That’s how bad it is.

Now, what they want to do is to get the balance sheet down to what they consider normal. Now normal is completely subjective. There’s no rigorous scientific formula for what’s normal. The way you would do it is go back to 2008, start with the 800 billion, and say well look, if we had grown the balance sheet on the prior path, where would we be today in 2017, going into 2018, 2019? That number’s around two trillion. I mean it wouldn’t have been 800 billion. They’re not going to hold it steady. But probably just two to two and a half trillion for an approximation, which means that they have to reduce the balance sheet by two trillion dollars or more to get back to normal.

Now the question is, how do you do that? And again, I just want to emphasize, they’re not going to sell any bonds. What they do is they let them mature. If you want to go buy a treasury bond, let’s say we bought a 5-year note, five years ago and it was maturing today. What would happen? The Treasury just sends you the money. It’s like any bond. You don’t have to sell it. You don’t have to do anything with it. They just send you the money. They have your account and the money just shows up in your account. Well, it’s the same thing with the Fed, they have all these trillions of treasury notes and bonds and bills and mortgages and all that. And when they mature, the Treasury just sends them the money.

So, if that’s true, which it is, why hasn’t the balance sheet been going down all along? Well the answer is, they have been reinvesting the proceeds. So, as I say, if you have a 5-year note you bought five years ago, it matures, treasury sends you the money. Well the Fed has been going out buying a new 5-year note to replace the 5-year note that just matured. So that holds the balance sheet constant. During QE, they were actually doing more than that. They were not only rolling over the existing balance sheet. They were buying new securities with money from thin air.

That, by the way, for listeners who may not be familiar, that is how the Fed creates money. So, the Federal Reserve calls one of the so-called primary dealers which are the big banks. It’s Goldman Sachs, City, JP Morgan, the usual suspects. And they say, “offer me 10-year notes or 5-year notes, whatever.” And the dealer will offer them a price. And the Fed will say, “Okay, you’re done.” And then the dealer delivers the treasury notes to the Fed. And the Fed pays for them. But the money comes from nowhere. If you or I called Merrill Lynch of Goldman Sachs or somebody and said, I’d like to buy some 10-year treasury notes, they would sell them to us, but we’d have to pay for them with real money. I mean the money would come out of our brokerage account or a bank account. Whereas when the Fed does it, they just say, “Here’s the money.” And it literally comes from thin air.

So that’s what Quantitative Easing was. That was printing money to buy bonds to build up the balance sheet. And then that money went into the banking system. Of course, all the banks did was give it back to the Fed in the from excess reserves. On which they got interest, so the whole thing was just a way to funnel earnings from the treasury to the banks at the tax payers expense without anyone knowing. I mean obviously, technically I just described it, but this is not something that the everyday American necessarily understands that well. So, that’s what QE is, and this is now the opposite. And the name for it is quantitative tightening. So, when they were printing money, it was Quantitative Easing. Now that they’re making money disappear, that is what happens, it’s Quantitative Tightening, so we call it QT.

So, we had QE1, QE2, QE3. Now we’re going into QT or quantitative tightening. Now this does make money disappear. It’s the opposite of creating money. So again, simple example. The 5-year treasury note on the Fed balance sheet, it matures. The Treasury sends you the money. Now what they’re going to do, Mike, this is what you referred to, instead of going out and buying a new one to roll it over, they do nothing. And then the money disappears, the bond disappears, because it matured. And the balance sheet shrinks. So, the significance is not that they’re dumping bonds, because they’re not going to sell a single bond. The significance is that they are not buying new ones. Now at the margin, that still affects the market. The Fed has been the biggest buyer of new treasury issues for the last eight years.

In recent years, they’ve been buying as much as 30% of all the treasury bonds. So of course, the treasury issues bonds all the time to cover the deficit, right? So, we’ve had these huge deficits. They were over a trillion dollars back in the Obama days. They’re now down to around 400 billion, but that’s still a very big number as a percentage of GDP. And the Treasury covers those deficits by issuing notes and bonds. Well, the Fed has been buying 30% of them. So, it’s like any market. You take the biggest buyer out of the market, what’s going to happen? Well prices are going to fall, which means that interest rates go up. So that’s going to be a very strong headwind for the economy.

Now the Fed is trying to pretend that that’s not going to happen. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but here’s the way they’re spinning this whole thing. The Fed is saying, “Look, our policy tool is interest rates.” When they were zero, they didn’t have any flexibility. They couldn’t go below zero. I mean technically, you could go to negative interest rates, but the Fed never did. The evidence is pretty good that negative interest rates don’t work anyway. So, let’s just put negative interest rates off to one side for the time being. They are a tool in the toolkit, but not a tool that the fed has ever used or is planning to use. So, put negative interest rates to one side. Treat the zero interest rates as a hard boundary. When they were on the boundary, they couldn’t really do anything with interest rates. They couldn’t cut them anymore. They certainly weren’t going to raise them at the time.

But now they’ve got them up to 1%. We’ve had four interest rate hikes. December 2015, December 2016, March 2017 and June 2017. So, we have four rate hikes behind us – 25 basis point each. So that actually got rates up to 1%. Now they’re indicating they’re going to raise them some more. I don’t see that until December at the earliest. Maybe not even then, but I don’t think they’re going to raise rates in September. But they’re hinting that they will. They think they can raise them. If somehow we dropped into a recession, they wouldn’t do this right away, but they could cut them.

So, the Fed feels that the interest rate tool is now in use again. They can raise them or cut them. They’ve got a little bit of flexibility both ways. So, they don’t need to use the balance sheet. So, what they’re saying is, “Okay, starting now, we’re not going to sell any securities, but we’re not going to buy new ones. The amount that we’re not going to buy.” It’s kind of a strange concept, how much are you not going to buy? Or in other words, what’s the ceiling on the amount that you’re prepared not to roll over. And it’s going to start low. They’re going to start at 10 billion a month at six billion in treasuries and four billion in mortgages, but they’re going to ratchet it up. Every three months that number’s going to go up and up and up. Until they get to the point where, and this is the number you mentioned, it’s $50 billion a month broken into 30 billion in treasuries, 20 billion in mortgages.

But it’s 50 billion a month times 12 months is 600 billion dollars a year. So sooner than later, meaning late 2018, early 2019, the Fed is going to not roll over $600 billion a year. Put differently, $600 billion a year in money is going to disappear. The Fed would like us to believe that that’s not a monetary tightening, that that’s not going to have any impact on the economy. That’s nonsense. How could they tell us for eight years that Quantitative Easing was stimulative, that Quantitative Easing acted through the portfolio channel sect by pumping up stock prices, by pumping up house prices, making it good collateral for loans. This would increase funding and spending, have a wealth effect. All this wonderful stuff.

By the way, a lot of what I just said is nonsense. I mean I’m describing how the Fed thinks about it. It’s not necessarily how I think about it. Nor do I think all that stuff works the way they think it does, but that’s what they told us. That Quantitative Easing would have all these wonderful effects. Well how come Quantitative Easing has those good effects, but Quantitative Tightening or QT doesn’t have any bad effects? That seems ridiculous. So, little by little, they’re going to work their way up to $600 billion a year of money that disappears, that reduces the base money supply (M0), but somehow, we’re all supposed to pretend that that’s going to have no impact on stock prices or housing. I think that’s nonsense.

So, it’s a very big deal and the Fed says they wanted to run on background, wants to pretend that this not rolling over the 600 billion a year is going to run on background, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. We’re not going to use it as a policy tool. We’re just going to do interest rates up or down over here, so ignore this. Well they can say that, but the market’s not going to ignore it. The market understands what’s going on. And it will have this tightening effect as you described.

So, the Fed is blundering once again. They can’t seem to get anything right. That’s not really surprising when you have the wrong models, obsolete models, you’ll get the wrong policy every single time. But the economy’s weak. It’s getting weaker. We may be in a recession sooner than later. The market looks vulnerable and now the Fed wants to launch this major tightening program. I think it’s nonsense to think that won’t have some very bad effects.

Mike Gleason: Switching gears here a little bit. I want to talk about the dollar. It’s long been said that the U.S. dollar is significantly boosted and allowed to maintain its status as perhaps the world’s most reliable fiat currency or the tallest midget at the circus, so-to-speak, because the world’s financial system is built around the dollar. It is used to settle trades of oil and practically everything else. Now you’ve written a lot about currency wars and how this type of thing plays out and what goes on behind the scenes with all of this. And you just know people like the Chinese and Russians would love nothing more than to see the Petro-dollar taken out and replaced. Is our US dollar going to retain its Petro-dollar status over time here, Jim?

Jim Rickards: I don’t think so. There’s a very famous line from an Ernest Hemingway novel. The novel is The Sun Also Rises. It’s basically two guys, they’re having a drink at the bar and the one guy’s recently gone bankrupt. The other guy’s a little incredulous and he says, “Well how did you go bankrupt?” And his very famous answer was, “Slowly at first, then quickly.” Meaning, with any exponential algorithm or any exponential function, it starts slowly at first and then quickly. In other words, it’s the famous story of the courtier to the emperor of Persia, who did the emperor a service. The emperor was so pleased, he said, “I’ll give you anything you want. What do you want?” And the guy took out a chess board and he put one grain of rice on one corner. He said, “I’d like you to double the rice every square, so I’ll get two grains of rice on the second square, four grains of rice on the third square. And eight grains of rice on the fourth square, etc. around the board. And that’s how much rice I want.”

So, the king goes, “Done. You got it.” And then of course, he didn’t do the math. That’s two to the 4th power because there’s 64 squares on a board. And then the king’s administer came back later and said, “That’s more rice than the entire kingdom.” So, it’s an example of how starting with a grain of rice, you can bankrupt a kingdom when you have any kind of exponential effect going on. So, with regard to the U.S. dollar, yeah, the dollar is 60% of global reserves today. It’s 80% of global payments today when you look at all bank wire transfers and purchases of securities and currency trading and global trade, etc. No doubt that it is used to price oil and a lot of other things. So, no doubt that the dollar is the dominant global reserve currency today.

But I see at least seven or eight different, very powerful threads. Those grains of rice are going two, four, eight, 16, 64, 128 and so forth, leading to the demise of the dollar. So, what are they? Well number one, is gold. I think the China gold acquisition story is pretty well known. The Chinese officially say they have about 800 tons of gold. By the way, all these numbers I’m going to recite, these are all government gold. I’m not talking about private gold, which is a separate area, also important, but just government gold. China says they have about 1,800 tons. But (there’s a) very good reason to believe, based on Chinese mining output figures, Chinese gold imports, activities of People’s Liberation Army, which moves the gold. I’ve been to China recently. I met with the top gold banks in China.

I’ve also been to Switzerland recently and met with refiners there who actually sell gold to the Chinese and based on a lot of sources, it looks like they probably have more like maybe 4,000 tons, maybe even higher than that from all it’s probably higher, maybe 5,000 tons of gold. Russia is a lot more transparent than China, but they have tripled their gold reserves in a little over 10 years. In 2006, they had about 600 tons. And now they just passed 1,700 tons. We just got the numbers for May. That may not sound like a lot compared to the 8,000 tons that the United States has, officially 8,133 tons, but remember Russia’s economy’s only 1/8th the size of the U.S., but they have almost one quarter the amount of gold, which means that their gold to GDP ratio is double the United States.

If you had to back up your economy with gold, Russia would have twice as much as the United States again, all relative to the size of their economy. China is about on the par with the United States. It seems determined to pass the United States. So, two of the most powerful countries in the world are buying all the gold they can lay their hands on. The way I put it to people is, you can draw two conclusions. Number one, the Chinese and the Russians are really dumb. Or, they see something that you don’t. They see something that most people don’t see coming. I’ve spent time in Russia and China, they’re not dumb, meaning they see something that most people don’t see. And they’re preparing for a post dollar world or a world in which the confidence in the dollar is greatly eroded. So that’s one thread right there.

Beyond that, we have crypto-currencies. And I don’t want to get into Bitcoin and all that, but that’s a whole separate subject. It’s a long subject and a difficult one for a lot of people. But in all my discussions, I’ve always separated block chain from bit coin. Block chain is the technology behind the distributive ledger and how you actually account for the bitcoins. Bitcoin is the specific digital currency. And there are others out there. Bitcoin may or may not be the future though. That remains to be seen. I have my doubts, but others disagree. But there’s no question that block chain technology has a bright future. Russia is exploring that. If you were Russia, then you were the central bank of Russia, why would you want to be talking to the founder of Etherium or other experts on block chain technology.

Well one answer would be that you’re building a digital currency alternative to the dollar that the U.S. cannot hack or disrupt, because right now everybody’s vulnerable to dollar sanctions. So, Russia doesn’t love the dollar. They don’t love the United States, apparently. But when they sell their oil on global markets, they get paid in dollars. Now they then take the dollars. They do stuff with them. Sometimes they buy gold. We talked about that, and that they store the gold of Russia. They don’t store it in New York by the way.

Or they can buy U.S Treasury securities and they have some of those. They can buy European or Euro denominated securities, German government bonds – they have some of those etc. or they can put it into their sovereign wealth fund. So, there are a number of things they can do with the money, but they always start with dollars. And when you start selling dollars for euros, or buying gold, sending the dollars to a Swiss refinery, getting the gold in return, etc. you’re trapped in this dollar payment system that I was describing earlier, where all of what is called the message traffic – I pay you, you pay me. And we do it through banks. How is that actually done? Is it through these MT forms on Swift MT stands for message traffic?

That’s how we make irrevocable transfers. Well the United States has a choke hold on all that. We definitely have a choke hold on Fed-wire, which is the dollar payment system. And through our allies and out intelligence services, we have a choke hold on Swift, which is the international payment system.

Russia is very uncomfortable having to transact through a system that the United States holds in its grip. It’s like you’re in intensive care and you’re on oxygen and your worst enemy has his hand on the oxygen supply. They can cut it off anytime they want. So, Russia is building alternative payment systems. It’s not enough to try to get out of dollars into gold. You actually – if you’re going to transact, if you’re going to pay people for things – you need an alternative payment system that the U.S. does not control. Block Chain offers that. So, Russia and China are pursuing that.

There are there threads out there. The Chinese are very heavily diversifying into euros right now. Not all at once… none of these things happened all at once. But if you look around at the landscape, and Russia and China are buying gold. Russia and China are looking at digital payment systems, block chain type technology that the U.S. can’t control. Russia and China are doing currency swaps. China’s doing currency swaps throughout the world with Brazil, Switzerland, and with a lot of other countries. Saudi Arabia is looking at perhaps pricing Chinese oil in yuan. They’ve done currency swaps with China. They’re working on these block chain based technologies. China’s buying euros. This has the look of, you lose your status slowly, and then quickly at the end.

So, yes, I think that the dollar will sooner than later lose its status as the dominant global reserve currency. It doesn’t mean dollars go away. It does not mean that we wake up one day and, “Oh, gee. There’s no dollars.” It just means that it becomes less and less important, the U.S. loses its financial leverage, and the dollar may end up like the Mexican peso. If I go to Mexico, I’m going to get some pesos, because I need them down there for taxi drivers or tips or bartenders or whatever. So, it’s a local currency, but I’m not going to take them back to the United States with me.

Well, the dollar could get to the point where it’s the local currency of the United States. You’ll have some when you come here. And you and I might get paid in dollars or spend money in dollars or whatever, because we live in the United States. But it loses its global reserve currency status. And that’s a very big deal in terms of the ability of the United States to run perpetual trade and budget deficits without having to suffer inflation or suffer devaluation or the consequences that countries like Argentina know all too well.

And we haven’t even talked about the SDR, which is another alternative to the dollar. I’ve been talking about Russia and China and block chain and gold and euros, but the SDR is out there as well. The last issuance of SDRs was fairly recent in 2009, in the aftermath of the financial crisis. And then the next global liquidity crisis, which again, you can foresee and expect. Independent of the decline of the dollar. That’s something that’s just happening in front of our eyes. But a global liquidity crisis could happen at any time. And it begs the question. How do you re-liquefy the world? How do you put out or end a global liquidity crisis?

The last time it was the central banks bailing out Wall Street and really bailing out the world, but going back to the earlier part of the interview, Mike, when we talked about the Fed reducing their balance sheet. Well the way the fed dealt with it last time was by expanding their balance sheets. From 800 billion to 4.5 trillion. Printing money in other words.

Well what if a global liquidity crisis hit soon or maybe even next year long before the Fed reduces their balance sheet? Why is the Fed reducing their balance sheet? Why do they care? Why not just keep the 4.5 trillion? What’s the big deal? Well the answer is they’re at the outer limit of a confidence boundary. They’re at the outer limit of how much money they can print before people start to question the value of the money itself. So, they want to get it down to two trillion, so they can go back up to 4.5 trillion again if they have to. In other words, if here’s another liquidity crisis. And you start at maybe two trillion, you can take your balance sheet up to five trillion with, that would be QE4 and QE5 and QE6.

And that would help to maintain the U.S.’ dominance. But here’s my question. What if the liquidity crisis hits before the Fed can get their balance sheet normalized, which in my view is very likely. Well in that case, you need another source of liquidity, and that source would be the IMF issuing SDRs and that would be the end of the dollar. So, the threats are everywhere. They could come from a lot of different directions. In fact, all these things will tend to converge, each one will amplify the other. But they all point in the same direction, which is the devolution in confidence in the value of the dollar and much, much higher dollar prices for gold.

Mike Gleason is a Director with Money Metals Exchange, a national precious metals dealer with over 50,000 customers. Gleason is a hard money advocate and a strong proponent of personal liberty, limited government and the Austrian School of Economics. A graduate of the University of Florida, Gleason has extensive experience in management, sales and logistics as well as precious metals investing. He also puts his longtime broadcasting background to good use, hosting a weekly precious metals podcast since 2011, a program listened to by tens of thousands each week.

The post Jim Rickards Exclusive: Dollar May Become “Local Currency of the U.S.” Only appeared first on Gold Silver Worlds.

from Gold Silver Worlds http://goldsilverworlds.com/gold-silver-experts/jim-rickards-exclusive-dollar-may-become-local-currency-u-s/

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oratorealis · 7 years

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Dimepiece :: Janet Rogers

Why poetry?

Poetry came out the winner between it and visual arts like painting and photography. When I moved to Coast Salish territory from Haudenosaunee territory, I came here with a little budding career as a visual artist in full swing. Two years after living here I began writing, pretty steadily. After a while the writing was going farther in a shorter amount of time than the visual work ever did and I must have made a conscious decision to follow the path of writing, although I can’t pin-point exactly when that was. So I would say writing and writing poetry in particular was a gift I found here on the west coast. It was like the words were waiting for me here. A blessing to be sure.

What are you working on right now?

I just completed an article for CBC digital which is a reflection of the Lament for Confederation penned and recited by Chief Dan George in 1967 at Canada’s 100th Anniversary. I had planned to respond to his poem/speech with poetry and I still plan to do that, but CBC reached out and I thought providing a current perspective on that iconic piece of writing by a well known and highly revered man, would be a way of addressing our progress or lack there of, as a country with a very abusive history with Indigenous nations. A kind of a how-far-have-we-come sort of piece.

I’m also writing a pitch for a media project with APTN – The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. The way I see my history and experience as a visual artist coming back into my work is through media i.e. combining film and poetry or visuals and audio. Neither of the writing listed here sounds very creative, but I have recently launched my 5th poetry book Totem Poles and Railroads and after traveling with it in the fall, I’m taking a bit of a break before I start to take it on the road again later this month and throughout the year.

What is your routine for writing? Do you have one?

I’ll answer this question like this; Whenever I am on the road or away for projects or conference work or what have you, I bring my cat Mister Bakerman to my mother’s (his grandmother) where he gets to luxuriate in her attention and regular routine of being fed on time the same time each day, he gets brushed regularly and upon request, she basically spoils him and he loves the regularity built into her lifestyle. With me, he sees me come and go frequently. He gets fed first thing in the morning, but he sometimes has to remind me about afternoon cat-snacks. I usually don’t have time to brush him and my bedtime is never the same time from night to night.

My writing is the same way.

What is the best advice you've received as a poet?

Name your babies – in other words always title your work. Richard Van Camp told me this.

And, there are no good writers, only good editors. Garry Gottfriedson told me this.

Why do you live where you do?

I lived in Toronto for 13 years - 10 of which I was drunk. After I got sober I took a look around Toronto and thought, geeze I better get out of this place. There was a small contract available to work at the Victoria Native Friendship Centre on a summer festival so I came out to do that, and thought I’d give it 5 years to see if this territory and I would get along. Well I have to say, this place embraced me from the start, things really clicked when I got here and I’m so glad I came here as a sober person, that I could offer my true self to this place. Further more the Salish people really welcomed me too so that was the clincher. I’ve been a guest and a visitor on Coast Salish territory for 23 years. I’m here for the trees. Some folks come here for the ocean, but I’m here for the trees and the fresh clean air.

Where is the wildest place poetry has taken you?

In August of 2013 I was invited to read/perform at a poetry festival at the Lincoln Centre in NYC, called LaCasita. As it so happened, there was an historical Two Row canoe paddle down the Hudson River the week after I read so I stayed to partake in that. The Two Row is a 400 year old agreement between early Dutch settlers and my people. Without going too much into that agreement, I had written and developed a piece of writing the year before the paddle, which I got to present at the 2nd to last rest stop of the canoe convoy. It was pretty surreal to be sharing my poem, which spoke directly to what the paddlers were actually doing. The next day they reached their destination at the Piers in Manhattan where Pete Seeger was in attendance (just months before he passed). We then all marched over to the UN Building and were allowed inside to hear the speeches on the Day of Indigenous Rights. That was the coolest and proudest poetry moment of my life. A side note: my Mohawk people were the original inhabitants of Manhattan before we got pushed up through the Ohio Valley into parts of what is called Canada today.

What artists most inspire you, and why?

Black artists and Indigenous artists inspire me because I get to learn about my own life and see reflections of my own truth in work/art by Black and Indigenous artists.

What was the last book you finished reading?

Robbie Robertson’s biography titled Testimony. I’ll be interviewing him this week for my radio program Native Waves Radio. He’s a really good story teller and his life is so amazing. His Mom is from my rez, Six Nations. So I look forward to interviewing him.

What has been one of your favourite moments on stage?

I got to dance on stage twice last year. I love dancing!!!!!! When Prince died, I asked the DJ at the gig to turn up some good Prince music and I just danced my little heart out for him. And in Hamilton, I complimented the DJ at that gig and he cranked some A Tribe Called Red so I did my best pow wow steps on stage for a bit. That was really fun. It’s good energy to share with people. When people see other people dancing, it makes them happy.

What would you like to be doing five years from now?

Five years from now it will be 2022 – is that right? Holy shit!

In 2022 I’d like to have a few very successful media projects under my belt such as podcasts and documentaries and media installations. I’d really like to be able to live part-time here and part-time on my rez so I can have access to Mohawk language classes and resources. I’d like to be able to garden more.

Janet Rogers is a Mohawk/Tuscarora writer from Six Nations. She was born in Vancouver British Columbia, lived in Stoney Creek, Hamilton and Toronto Ontario and is living as guest on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish people (Victoria, British Columbia) since 1994. Janet works in the genres of poetry, spoken word performance poetry, video poetry and recorded poetry with music. Janet is also a radio broadcaster, documentary producer, media and sound artist. Her literary titles include; Splitting the Heart, Ekstasis Editions 2007, Red Erotic, Ojistah Publishing 2010, Unearthed, Leaf Press 2011 and “Peace in Duress” Talonbooks 2014 and Totem Poles and Railroads ARP Books 2016. You can hear Janet on the radio hosting Native Waves Radio on CFUV FM. Her radio documentaries “Bring Your Drum: 50 years of Indigenous Protest Music” and “Resonating Reconciliation” won Best Radio at the imagaineNATIVE Film and Media festival 2011 and 2013. Janet Rogers and Ahkwesase Mohawk poet Alex Jacobs make up the poetry collective Ikkwenyes, which produced the poetry CD Got Your Back and won the Loft Literary Fellowship prize 2014. 2Ro Media Inc is the production company she and Mohawk media artist Jackson Twobears own and operate which produced the short experimental documentary NDNs on the Airwaves about CKRZ FM Six Nations radio. Janet produced and launched a 6-part radio documentary series titled NDNs on the Airwaves focused on the current history of native radio in Canada, in February 2016.

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sophieebdaily · 3 years

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English

A house tour with Sophie Ellis-Bextor

A treat for you this week as Sophie and I actually got out of our duvet dens to meet and record the podcast in person and we were thrilled to be able to tour round the home of Sophie Ellis Bextor, who lives with her husband, Richard Jones, also a musician, and their five sons. Sophie, for those of you may not know was also labelled as “the woman from lockdown kitchen disco” by the BBC (charming!) and for those of you who didn’t see her joyful instagram kitchen concerts, she has had a string of hits, seven albums, a very successful spin on Strictly Come Dancing and, well if that’s not ringing any bells her Mum is Janet Ellis who was a Blue Peter presenter between 1979 and 1987.

So come on in and of course we have to start in the kitchen – familiar to so many as the place where Sophie dressed up in sequins and heels and hosted a virtual disco for anyone who wanted to watch on instagram while deftly manoeuvring round a crawling Mickey (then aged 14 months in the first lockdown) or dancing with one of her other four sons who wandered on and off set with a casual acceptance that showed either how they are used to their mother’s performing or didn’t quite realise what was going on.

For anyone who may have forgotten (!) or who isn’t in the UK, the first lockdown started on 23 March 2020. Sophie and her family had already been isolating at home for a week when it was announced as one of her sons had been sent home from school with a cough.

“Suddenly all our work was cancelled – we had tours planned and live performances and a year of work and suddenly it was tumbleweed,” she says. “The news was so heavy and I was feeling really useless and I had all these amazing friends who starting doing things and playing the piano and accompanying themselves and I didn’t know how to do that.

“Then Richard said ‘Let’s just do a gig. We can put some songs on and we’ll do a party set,’ and there was something about the sheer lunacy of it that appealed. So I got out my sequin catsuit and put my rollers in and off we went. And our youngest, Mickey, was just 14 months old at the time and he was crawling around the floor and there were wires everywhere and I thought this is just destined for disaster and if we do manage to broadcast it people will laugh at me for looking so ridiculous.

“But actually I loved the scattergun nature of it; singing is what makes me feel better when everything outside the walls is a bit wonky.”

The kitchen disco was an instant hit. Not least because everyone was desperate for some light relief and an excuse to dance in their own kitchens to familiar songs but also because of the sheer relatability of it. Stepping over kids, handing drinks to others, the multi-tasking that is familiar to so many parents even our relatibility is more about trying to break up a fight silently while attending a phone meeting rather than dancing round lego in stilettos while wearing sequins.

The discos continued weekly through the first lockdown and intermittently afterwards as the children were in and out of school. Sophie points out that her kitchen really does look like this too with sequin bunting and laser lights and a giant pinball machine dividing the disco (usually playroom) from the kitchen.

The walls are painted in Farrow & Ball Setting Plaster, which is a perfect neutral with a blast of deep orange Charlotte’s Locks facing the window. This is where she wrote her lyrics in case she forgot but as the weeks went on her sons would rub them out mid disco in an effort to put her off. It never did.

“I learnt all the lyrics and so it wan’t a problem but it was there as a safety blanket.”

Sophie and Richard bought the Grade II listed house 12 years ago and its status means that they aren’t allowed to make many structural changes – and any that are made have to have permission. So most of the changes have been cosmetic and exuberant.

“The walls were white before I found this pink and that did bother me. I love doing my home up and it is constantly evolving. It’s like tending a bush to make it flower non-stop.”

She is also an avid collector and the home is full of vintage posters, religious iconography, kitsch statues, ornaments and lego. There is a giant milkshake and a supersize ice cream cone in the living/dining room.

“Richard wouldn’t dare push back and I have tried to clear surfaces and stuff but it makes me feel more anxious. I like being surrounded by stuff. This house looks very grown up from the outside but I like that it’s a riot inside.”

One of Sophie’s more unexpected red threads is the House of Hackney Artemis wallpaper which she has in four different colourways in different rooms.

“This is an Arts and Craft house and the Artemis wallpaper is their William Morris inspired design and that’s a good link. And it’s good in a kitchen because it’s not very kitcheny but I love that. Also we spend a lot of time in here and I want excitement everywhere I look.”

Which is a very good rule of thumb for decorating I think. Even if you tone it down from excitement to joy. But essentially why decorate to give yourself boring views – always try to create a vista that you want to look at.

In addition to the colour and collections there are a couple of neon signs. One, in an echo of Sophie’s tattoo says Family. The other, just visible from the kitchen into Richard’s studio says Nice Amp – apparently the first thing she ever said to him.

So Richard has his studio but where does Sophie write and practice? Like many women: “There is no space for my work but that is ok – I have found a way through that. My work is any spot I happen to find at the time.”

And then I took a break during the typing of these notes and saw an instagram story from Sophie saying she was working on her bed using her kids’ coloured pens to edit her book manuscript. She is also used to being interrupted constantly. But how does all the stuff work with so many children?

“I have got five kids and I want them to be stimulated and see stuff all the time and see where it leads in their thoughts so of course they can touch and look. Everything will break, and while I love all the things if there was a fire it can all go up in smoke. I don’t feel defined by things.

“But I do love them and they do tell a story. I remember when I bought them and where from and some are things that have been given to me. Everyone is here and everywhere I have been and everyone I have met that I care about they are all here.

“We spend too much time worrying about what other people think of our homes and our taste but no-one sees unless you invite them in.”

Source

#interview #entrevista #photos #home style

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martinfzimmerman · 7 years

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Michael Pento Warns of Exploding Debt, Inverted Yield Curve, and Then “Economic Armageddon”

Your browser does not support the podcast player element. DOWNLOAD MP3 Mike Gleason: Michael, how are you today? Welcome back.

Michael Pento: I’m doing fine, Mike. Thanks for having me back.

Mike Gleason: When we had you on last you commented that you believed the market was pricing in President Trump getting virtually all of his policy agenda pushed through Congress, the tax cuts, repealing Obamacare, and so forth. To say Trump has encountered some resistance in Washington would be a major understatement. The establishment of the right doesn’t seem to like him. The left and the mainstream media of course hate him. So, Michael before we get into the effects this will have on the markets here, first off, handicap for us the chances of Trump, based on what’s been transpiring in recent weeks, miraculously gaining enough allies in Congress in order to get his initiatives passed.

Michael Pento: I did say that the market was pricing in the imminent effect of a massive tax cut — and I meant tax cut, not a tax reform package. In other words, cutting the rate from 30% to 15% or even 20%, but certainly not offset by any spending cuts or an elimination of deductions. The market is still pricing in a lot of that hope and hype, in my opinion. But I had said and warned from the beginning, this was back right after the election, I did say that the Trump “stimulus” package — and I’ll put “stimulus” in quotes and I’ll explain why in a second — I said that the Trump “stimulus” plan would be both diluted and delayed.

It looks like that’s exactly what’s going to happen and is happening. I would be very, very shocked if we see anything before the August recess in the realm of healthcare, certainly in the tax reform package. It is my best guess that in early 2018 Trump will ram through a very adulterated and attenuated package that will be mostly a minor reduction in the rates, which is for the most part offset by some type of a reduction or elimination in write-offs.

In other words, the market is extremely, extremely overvalued, and – and we’ll get to this later – the only thing left holding this market together on top of a massive bubble is the perpetual QE from Europe and Japan. I do not expect the QE from Japan to end any time soon, although I do expect later this year at least some salvos from the BOJ, that that’s something that they might be able to do in the future. I do expect QE to end in 2017 in Europe.

Mike Gleason: Leads me right into my next question here. You summarized things very well in your Pentonomics piece this week. And for folks who aren’t getting those, you simply have got to get on the email list and get those on a regular basis. Go to PentoPort.com and sign up for that. It’s truly fantastic stuff. I want to read an excerpt from that and then get your comments here. You wrote:

“The truth is this extremely complacent and overvalued market has been susceptible to a correction for a very long time. But just like Trump, it has so far behaved like it is coated in Teflon. North Korean atomic bomb tests, Russian election interference, Trump’s alleged obstruction of justice, an earnings recession, GDP with a zero handle; who cares? As long as a tax cut could be on the way and global central banks keep printing money at a record pace, what could go wrong?”

With all that said, talk about the danger and when and where things might finally fall apart here, Michael.

Michael Pento: Wow, what a great question. Let’s just look at the earnings picture for a second here. In Q1 2017, the projected, not the actual yet, but the projected earnings is going to be $30.77. This is from FactSet data. If I look at Q1 2015, and I’m going to explain in a second why I’m going to 2015, the S&P 500 earned $29.01. So, we have earnings growth in this country, if you go two years back, is only 6% over those two years. And, more importantly, let me say, Wall Street loves to cherry pick data, so if you look at the earnings growth year over year, it’s much better. It’s close to 15%. Of course, this is pro-forma earnings that I’m talking about here, not gap earnings.

The reason why Wall Street likes to do that is because we had a vicious draw-down in the oil price right around that time. There was negative earnings in the oil sector. Now the oil sector is displaying year-over-year growth of 630%. I can assure you, that’s not going to be repeated in the future. So, if you look at earnings, the trailing 12 month earnings for all of 2016: $119.27; 2014: $118.96. so, the S&P 500 is up 30% in that time frame with virtually no growth in earnings. You have to ask yourself, why? Why would the stock market be up 30% — after being up, by the way, significantly before then – when there’s no growth in earnings?

People say it’s all about earnings. I’ll tell you, Mike, and this proves my point, I’ve always said the stock market is a function of monetary expansion. It’s a function of the yield curve and it’s a function of central bank money printing and private bank expansion of the money supply. And what we see now – and this is not my data, it’s data you can find very easily – that the first four months of 2017 central banks have printed anew over one trillion dollars of phony fiat confetti credit. That stimulus primarily coming from Europe and Japan is fungible. It finds its way all over the globe.

That’s when I wrote that commentary. I said, “You know what? Literally we have nuclear bombs being tested in North Korea. We just came out of an earnings recession, but the stock market went up 30%. Trump may be impeached. The market goes down one day and it’s buy-the-dip. Why would this ever be the case?” Why would it be the case when the stock market, if you look at it as a percentage of the economy, is virtually at an all-time record high outside of a small window in the year 2000? If you look at price to sales, it is virtually at a record high.

Why is the market so expensive? Why is it so overvalued? Because central banks are still in the process of blowing up asset bubbles. That is changing. It has already started. In December of 2013 the Fed started tapering. That was tightening. They started to raise rates. This will be another rate hike probably in June. I think that’ll be the Fed’s last rate hike, but I do think they try to get one more in. And I’m fairly confident that the yield curve will invert sometime between June of this year and June of 2018.

If I can just have a little more leeway here, Mike, I want to explain why I think that is and why it’s so important. Right now, you have to understand that the yield curve is very important to the economy and to the money flows that I was talking about into the stock market, because we have a fiat, debt-based money system. Banks lend money, and that increases the money supply. Banks will not lend money when the yield curve inverts. In other words, when they’re paying their depositors more than they can collect on their assets, why would they make new loans? They stop. And when new loans dry up, asset bubbles plunge. That happened in the year 2000. It happened in the year 2007. The yield curve inverted, bank loan growth dried up, and the stock market fell 50%.

Right now, we have a 1% Fed Funds rate and a 2.3% 10-year note. A 2-10 spread is what I’m particularly talking about. And the 2-10 spread is 1.3 to 2.3, a little bit less than it is right now, a little bit less than 1%. Very, very narrow spread. The Federal Reserve says that they can raise rates to 2.75%-3% on the Fed Funds rate by the end of 2018. You get that? In the next year-and-a-half, which is not too far away, the Fed is convinced they can take the Fed Funds rate to nearly 3%. I will tell you that if you have a 10-year note at 2.3% and a Fed Funds rate at 3%, economic Armageddon is around the corner.

Now I don’t think they ever get anywhere near there. I don’t think they can ever raise the Fed Funds rate anywhere near 3%. But I do believe they can raise it to around 1.5%. That means that the 10-year note, instead of rising, will fall, because what is the long-term rates most concerned with? They’re most concerned with inflation. So, the long-term rates will fall, short-term rates rise, yield curve inverts, and you look at a chaos and a catastrophe sometime between June of this year and June of 2018.

Mike Gleason: The last time we had you on we were kind of wondering out loud together about whether Trump is going to be aiming for a strong dollar or a weak dollar. Now that we’ve seen him at work here for the last four or five months, what does it look like to you on that? Is what we’re seeing and hearing from his administration and him indicative of his policies being dovish or hawkish?

Michael Pento: I’ve got to tell you, it’s another good question. We don’t know. (During) the campaign Trump was (saying): Janet Yellen must go, the Fed must raise rates rapidly, pop the bubble’s extent in real estate and in equities, and we want a strong dollar. Now that’s candidate Trump. So, President Trump … In fact, even yesterday, I listened to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claiming that we can’t have a border tax adjustment, we cannot have a BAT, because of its potential effect on the U.S. dollar. In other words, surging value of the U.S. dollar. That means to me – and Steven Mnuchin gets his marching orders from Trump – so that means that President Trump is diametrically opposed to candidate Trump as far as what he believes is a bubble and where he thinks the value of the dollar should be.

We have Trump is going to be able to appoint several members, five to six members, on the FOMC, including a chairperson. I think Yellen goes out February 2018. So, we will see for sure what kind of individuals. Are they Taylor-based, rules-based FOMC members? Or are they uber-doves? And it’s my belief looking at what I see from Trump so far that they will be more on the dovish side of the ledger.

Mike Gleason: You have addressed some of the macro events that markets are facing. Let’s get more specific for a minute and talk about the outlook for metals in the months ahead given the larger picture. Gold and silver got off to a strong start in 2017, fell back, and have begun a bit of a rally here the last week or two. Do you think we can expect safe haven buyers to return in force in the months ahead? And are there any drivers in particular you think investors should focus on when it comes to the metals?

Michael Pento: I’m looking very closely at the data, Mike. You had a big divergence between the hard data and the soft data. Now the latest data, if you look at the Richmond Fed manufacturing survey and the Empire State manufacturing survey, these formally erstwhile, very strong soft data points are starting to come out soft. The argument was, will the soft data lead the hard data up, or will the soft data drop down to the hard data? Looks to me like Q2 is not starting out very strongly if you look at new home sales, existing home sales that came out today, and various other soft data metrics that I just mentioned all point to the fact that I don’t think you’re going to have a Federal Reserve that’s going to have the ability to raise rates two or three more times in 2017.

And on the other hand, you see some pretty good strength in Europe. Now I don’t think the European strength is going to last either, but the point of the fact is that the diametrically opposed monetary policies, one of we have 60 billion euros printed a month in Euroland with Mario Draghi, and actually being prepared for quantitative tightening, I’ve called this quantitative tightening, where the Fed, instead of QE, which is when they buy longer-dated assets to push down on the yield curve, they are actually going to be unwinding their balance sheet, supposedly, later this year or early next year. We’ll find out more when the FOMC minutes are released today. So, you have a fact that the Fed is actually threatening to sell trillions of dollars’ worth of bonds.

I don’t think any of that’s going to happen. As I said before, watch the yield curve for the value of equities. As the value of equities and real estate go, so goes the economy. That’s been proven over and over again. Watch the yield curve. Watch these asset prices. I think as the yield curve continues to tighten, and all of your listeners should go and look at a 10-2 spread, look at a chart and notice how trenchantly dynamically that is tightening very, very rapidly. I think that we’re going to have an inverted or very, very shallow real curve by the end of 2017, and that’s going to bring about a change in monetary policy. This change in monetary policy to equal that of the ECB will cause the dollar to fall, and that is the big watershed change in precious metals prices.

That’s what’s holding gold back, especially in the miners. We haven’t had stellar performance from the miners, or even gold, even though gold is up about 9% so far, 8%, 9% this year. I think we’re going to go right back to all-time highs once that watershed event occurs. Again, what is that event? That event is when the Fed has to admit that it can no longer follow its dot plot and it reverts from a tightening monetary policy to one that is static or easing.

Mike Gleason: A bit off topic here, and as we begin to close, Michael, at what point do you see the banksters on Wall Street coming up with a way to short Bitcoin? Because you know the Wall Street and central banking elites cannot be too thrilled with seeing Bitcoin’s amazing rise.

Michael Pento: Well, I’ve got to tell you, I understand the philosophy behind Bitcoin. I’m not a huge fan of Bitcoin, because while I believe it’s a wonderful currency and it represents the desire to get out of a fiat currency regime, we already have something called gold, which is not only a pretty good currency, but it’s also perfect money. It’s transferable. It’s portable. It’s beautiful. It’s very rare and virtually indestructible. Where Bitcoin fails is that it’s not money. It’s not virtually indestructible. If you bring down the internet, your Bitcoin is worthless, or the grid or the internet. And it is not very rare because there’s a virtually unlimited number of these digital currencies. So, it’s trying to be money, and even though it’s a perfect form of currency, it lacks all the qualities necessary to become money.

Gold, on the other hand, is perfect money, but it’s an okay currency. But, if you ask me, what’s the rationale behind Bitcoin? The rationale behind Bitcoin is very solvent and very true in that we need another alternative to central banks. Because I believe in the coming few years, and it might not even be that long, Mike, that physical currency will be banned and you will have negative interest rates in your bank deposits. So, the government will steal your money, telling you that you get a negative rate for this period of time, quarter or year — say negative 5%, negative 10% — and you must spend your money. You can either keep your money in the bank and lose the nominal purchasing power as well as in inflated adjusted terms, or spend it. And that is their way to get inflation going.

That’s I think where we’re headed down the road. It’s a very real and credible danger. It’s not my imagination. It’s not my conspiracy theory. It’s what they’re actually discussing, and things of this nature have already happened around the world in countries such as India.

Mike Gleason: That’s a very real possibility, and if the time does come when that happens, those that actually have something other than dollars, whether it be gold or Bitcoin or something along those lines, are going to be very glad that they had it when the time comes.

Michael Pento: Mike, one more thing I wanted to mention about gold. And for those who are temporarily suffering under gold, you should understand this, that we are in a condition in this country, in this nation that uses dollars, which is the world’s reserve currency for now, we are in a condition now where deficits are set to absolutely explode in the next few years. I want to just go over it real briefly. The CBO projects that our deficit will be a trillion dollars per annum in the next 10 years, very early in that time frame. If we have a recession, you can add another $1.4 trillion, like we did last time, to the annual deficit.

The Fed is threatening to do something called quantitative tightening, like I mentioned before. They’re going to sell around $3 trillion worth of treasuries and mortgage-backed securities over the next seven years. You can add that several hundred billion to that total. If we do have tax cuts that are not paid for, you can add about $5 trillion – even after assessing for growth – $5 trillion over the next 10 years. And for every 1% move higher in interest rates, you’re looking at $200 billion each year.

So, deficits in the next few years have a very real chance, especially when we enter a recession — and I don’t think the Fed has repealed the business cycle — to be multiple trillions of dollars in the next recession. That’s a very, very real danger. And if you don’t think that’s going to bring back a change in monetary policy, you’re sadly mistaken. That’s when I think gold really hits its full stride.

Mike Gleason: Excellent stuff as always, Michael. It’s great to have you on again. We certainly appreciate you making some time for us today. Now before we let you go, as we always do, please tell people who want to both read and hear more of your wonderful market commentaries and also learn about your firm and how they could potentially become a client if they’re so inclined, tell them how they could do all that.

Michael Pento: The website is PentoPort.com. You can look under my Mid-week Reality Check there, sign up for it. You get a free trial. It’s only $49 a year. You get all kinds of arcane facts and details and statistics that the mainstream media won’t get you, but people like you, thank God, will have people like me on to talk about. So, it’s PentoPort.com. The email here is [email protected], if you want to email me directly. The phone number for the office is 732-772-9500.

Mike Gleason: Again, wonderful insights, Michael. Thanks so much for joining us. Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend, and we look forward to having you back on again soon. Take care.

Michael Pento: Thanks again, Mike.

Mike Gleason: Well that will wrap it up for this week. Thanks again to Michael Pento of Pento Portfolio Strategies. For more information just visit PentoPort.com. You can sign up for his email list, listen to the midweek podcast and get his fantastic market commentaries on a regular basis. Again, just go to PentoPort.com.

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