#perhaps like how brits or americans talk about d-day

[thedreadvampy]

like I am not trying to be unreasonable or excessively defensive when I say ‘oh my god shut up about Britishness’ or at least, not to talk the talk without walking the walk

I definitely have had a lot of unlearning to do from those heady far-off Bush administration days where we here in the UK all turbocharged our superiority complex about how America was a pit of fools led by an idiot and that made it not just ok but Noble and Politically Justified to rip the piss out of like. the McDonalds eating Walmart shopping mass media consuming oil chugging school shooting flagwaving white trailer park hyper-Christian anti-abortion racist ignorant American that lived in our heads and Spoke Weird and Thought They Were Real People and ate freedom fries and thought Iraq and Afghanistan were the same country and couldn’t do basic maths and barged around European cities in shorts and sunglasses yelling to each other about how cute it was and thought they were the only people in the world who mattered. and that’s not imo any different to the way American conceptions of Britishness tend to be framed 

(not to say that that image of Americans is a thing of the past At All and it’s something I often notice myself slipping into)

and this was viewed as a moral position, particularly among the hard left, for a lot of the reasons that ragging on Britain is also often seen as a moral stance. America was (and is) powerful and imperialistic, culturally hegemonic, politically far to the right of where Europe tended to see itself. America was the architect of the Iraq War, and a whole string of imperialist invasions before that, and the “special relationship” with America was seen as emblematic of how far right the Labour government had swung. I knew old communists of my dad’s generation who took as a point of deep pride that they wouldn’t interact with American exports and were actively hostile to Americans. America was seen through the lens of Bush (and is now often seen through the lens of Trump). It felt good to shit on America and, by extension, Americans. 

America represented imperialism and racist, exploitative global policy, filtered through a lens of glossy TV and film, stars-and-stripes-forever military glorification, Disney, loud tourists and a whole heap of shitty ideas about Things That Signified Americanness And Were Therefore Bad like

Talking funny

Simplified/differing spelling

Liking different sports

Being fat

Eating weird food

Using unfamiliar idioms

Seeing the world through a very culturally American lens

A lot of class signifiers that don’t exist to the same degree/don’t mean the same thing here (living in trailer parks, shopping at Walmart)

now you may have noticed that these aren’t.......super cool things to rag on? and also that there are a lot of parallels between that and the stuff I get pissy about when people make jokes about Britishness.

because the justification is that This Country Is Bad. It’s a Global Force For Evil. And that is, in both Britain and America’s case, definitely not wrong. Both Britain and America are violently imperial, culturally hegemonic, white supremacist world powers with a strong vested interest in considering themselves the Only Ones Who Are Really Normal People. It’s totally reasonable to hate Britain (I sure do!!!!!!). It’s also totally reasonable to hate America.

What I take issue with is the conflation of hating America with hating Americans. The conflation of hating Britain with hating the British. A country is not its people. A government is not its people. As I’m sure most of us have noticed, governments that fuck over the world are often simultaneously fucking over the poor, marginalised and vulnerable within their own borders (this is something as well that a lot of North Korean, Russian and Chinese people have brought up - that they’re held personally responsible for the shitty things their governments do even though they’re the people those things are targetted at)

That isn’t to say that people in both these countries (and indeed Canada, France, etc) shouldn’t think critically about the ways in which they benefit from their countries’ hegemonic power, or the ways in which they’re complicit in the imperialistic attitudes. But a lot of this mocking, both ways, boils down to

a) your government/country is bad and you should feel ashamed (like ‘you suck because the British Empire was a genocidal monolith’ or ‘Donald Trump just goes to show what America’s really like’) b) your country sucks to live in, haha, more fool you for living in it!!!!!! (Brexit! School shootings!) c) you are Foreign and that’s Weird (often coupled with ‘haha can you believe people in that stupid country do [thing that is generally associated with poverty]? GROSS’) d) you look/sound funny (British people all have bad teeth and are ugly, Americans are all fat and/or have had 20000 tons of plastic surgery and dental work)

and idk I just think perhaps that’s not...productive or good #praxis. like. not everything has to be Good Praxis it can just be a lazy joke about national stereotypes. but it’s not a Strong Moral Stance to hate (white) Brits or (white) Americans (and another thing is: these types of stereotypes very rarely include the racial diversity and multiculturalism of both Britain and America, choosing instead to only bring up non-white Brits/Americans as faceless Victims Of Bigotry). it’s not Good Leftist Praxis and people are, in fact, justified in getting annoyed about it even if they ARE white people from an imperialist country. because it is personal. it’s made personal.

and of course everything I and others have said in the past about classism holds true. in both the American and the British cases, a lot of the most commonly raised stereotypes other than language differences are about class (in that the things framed as gross/weird are overwhelmingly things which are looked down on within the culture because they’re associated with poverty - the Gross British Food, the People of Walmart, the lack of education, the slang, fatness, etc). 

(also don’t get it twisted. a lot of people thought the last time I mentioned how class affects British stereotypes people thought I was making some class reductionist Working Class People Are Exempt From Racism And Benefitting From Imperialism argument which. no. but you’re not criticising racism or imperialism you’re criticising Poverty Food, just like you’re not criticising lack of global political awareness or a culture of rampant neoliberal capitalism when you laugh at Americans for being fat. you’re just shitting on people for things they’re already being shat on for.)

this is obfuscated by the fact that these stereotypes slap together high and low class signifiers at random, but the high class signifiers that get mocked, at least in the American stereotype, are mocked because in a British  context they are low class signifiers. like a lot of what gets mocked in Britain about Americans is the high-capitalist Conspicuous Consumption of the Trump and McMansion types, and the plastic surgery and glow-in-the-dark Hollywood smile. but it’s mocked because it’s, at its heart, seen as gauche and tasteless and Not Classy, whereas the British rich know how to be Tastefully Rich (boke)

like I’m not saying people outside a country shouldn’t criticise that country. both Britain and America deserve to be criticised roundly, not just on a political level but on a societal level. yeah man I do benefit from power and I am very able to slip into cultural supremacist ways of thinking. but ‘har har they talk funny’ isn’t criticism, it’s bigotry. To Be Clear: it may be bigotry but it’s not oppression. It’s not a matter of ‘oh woe the Americans are Bullying Us From A Position Of Power.’ Neither side of this holds hegemonic power over the other, realistically (Americans are not oppressed by Britons for being American; Britons are not oppressed by Americans for being British) But what it is is round after round of the same sneering cultural supremacist oneupmanship that’s characterised the relationships between powerful imperial nations (and particularly between Britain and America) for centuries. we’re both, nationally speaking, desperately pitching the argument that We’re The Good And Civilised Ones and They’re The Stupid Weird Embarrassing Ones.

we’re BOTH weird embarrassing countries with sordid, racist, imperialist political structures. we’re both horrendously shitty nations it’s not a competition about which country is shittier because the answer is always Who Cares They’re Both A Nexus Of Awful Global Consequences.

also nations are not real. we should criticise nations as they exist but people? bully people about something real you cowards. “britishness” or “americanness” is only as real as you make it

#boy howdy that's a long post #lotta words to say 'actually I've just been insecure about my accent since I was 4'

[cetaceanhandiwork]

Disneyland Reloaded

So a week ago, give or take, I replied to a post on another website which basically asked “if you were given the job of rebuilding Disneyland, would you change anything?” The question got me thinking a fair bit about the Anaheim Disney resort’s overarching themes, and where they work or don’t work, resulting in a giant three-part comment to fully explain my redesign.

Today, I feel like sharing those ideas with y'all over here, too!

Let's begin with the assumptions that...

we can get permits in Anaheim but no new land...

we have a budget that could theoretically rebuild the whole park if it had to but not too much beyond that, and...

original Walt-era Disneyland stuff may be difficult to move without damaging or destroying, and deliberately destroying and rebuilding it, while allowed, may not be desirable for reasons of preserving park history.

Given that, my high-level approach would be a refocusing of each park's experience on its core concept. I envision three parks:

Disneyland - worlds of "yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy" - embodied by the genres Walt himself grew up with.

A reimagining of California Adventure that synthesizes the original idea of "Califorina, the real place you are visiting right now, presented as a fictional place to explore" with the running Pixar theme of "secret peoples and communities that live alongside humanity, in the here and now, just outside our line of sight".

A new third gate that focuses on stories of larger-than-life heroism and villainy - the native park of Star Wars, MCU, Pirates-the-movie-series, and other similar properties.

This effort, as I see it, would have to start with some Tetris-ing, in an attempt to make the most of the limited Anaheim acreage:

Utilidors. This Disney World system - of putting backstage and CM areas underground - was invented precisely because WED wished they’d done it in Anaheim. If we’re starting from scratch, we can backport this design and immediately unlock a lot of space.

Drop Disneyland Drive north of Cerritos underground as well.

Consolidate remaining parking. At worst, this is a third Mickey & Friends that encompasses all other resort parking. At best, we get permits to put underground levels on parking structures and reduce the footprint further. Put this in the southeast corner of the resort; get rid of the Paradise Pier Hotel for now.

Strip Avengers Campus off of DCA, strip Galaxy's Edge and the Fantasyland Theatre off of Disneyland. This will free up enough space to put DCA and the GCH east of Disneyland, with its gate on the other end of a rerouted Downtown Disney.

That done, we can move on to the main event.

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Of these, Disneyland itself would see the fewest changes, both in the interests of preserving the history and because it's already fairly close to what we want. The paradigm is as it always was: each "land" represents a genre in microcosm, matched not against any particular IP, but presented as a... prototypical or archetypical space in which all those stories might occur.

This is a good framing device and a solid core concept, and I'm not gonna mess with it. However, there are still a few things I'd rearrange.

For instance: Critter Country would move to the eastern side of the Rivers of America, placed between the rural American Frontierland, the funny animals of Toontown, and the fable-laden Fantasyland. I imagine it taking up sort of the same space as the old Big Thunder Ranch and Fairgrounds, connected with Frontierland on one side (with Splash Mountain still bordering the Rivers of America) and Toontown (bordering Winnie the Pooh) and Fantasyland (bordering a new indoor/outdoor Robin Hood darkride) on the other.

Toontown would need few changes, other than a careful touching up of the effects to match modern standards. I would like to squeeze in one minor expansion, though, if possible, by moving the Monorail wheelhouse: a small Disney Villains themed area - perhaps a seedy watering hole? - nestled away in Downtown Toontown.

Fantasyland, meanwhile, would reclaim the Theater and some backlot space (thanks Utilidoors!) and use that room for a couple new rides - particularly, a Beauty and the Beast attraction and a Frozen attraction. I resist here the impulse to put Frozen next to the Matterhorn mainly because that Fantasyland real estate has another important purpose: the Fantasia and Tomorrowland lagoons get rejoined, and become the show area for a Little Mermaid ride, boarding near Small World, that actually takes place "unda da sea". (The technology for underwater, low-occupancy-vehicle ride systems does exist in the current state of the art, although it'd need some iteration to theme as properly Fantasyland.) As much as I would personally regret seeing the submarines go, I can't deny that their ride system is claustrophobic, stuffy, and poorly accessible, and that guests deserve something with lower "minimum requirements" to ride.

Compared to those, Tomorrowland would get a more comprehensive refocusing. I've posted before about my take on Tomorrowland's DNA: that isn't just "the future", but "the challenge and promise of the future". People talk a lot about how it's a Land that's perpetually out of date - that our vision of the future changes too fast for the Park to keep up. Aesthetically, that's a fair point. But on an attraction level... we don't have to aim a mere five minutes into the future to talk about its challenge and promise - to talk about the future optimistically, as as better world we can reach towards today and eventually grab onto.

Space is, of course, an easy example; space has been an "unreasonable but longed-for future" since Walt's days. Bring back the mission to Mars. Add a space elevator that you can ride as an observation tower, or take the "express" and make it a droptower that uses its drop to simulate zero gravity. On a more terrestrial side... put in a dinosaur or giant animal dark ride - fantastical experiments in biology, at once excited for the potential there, and cautious about how important it is to get right. Maybe do something with Inside Out as a "fantastic psychology" concept. Give the Land an AI caretaker character, puppeteered by several CMs behind the scenes to create the illusion that it's a single person multiplexing.

You can keep Star Tours - the galaxy of Star Wars may be a gritty and cynical world, but Star Tours is a lighthearted and hopeful take on it. You can keep the monorail, too - it's still futuristic to Americans - and route it through the Land's rides the same way the PeopleMover once did, and the same way the boats and trains do in other Lands. Maybe you can even fit in a Wall-E based attraction - now that's a story that's an emulsion of the future's "challenges" and its "promise" if ever there was one in Disney's catalogue.

As for Adventureland? It's got a different obsolescence problem than Tomorrowland: not that the world has left a particular vision behind, but that the world has left the whole genre it represents behind. Walt grew up with the "Adventure" genre, of pith helmet explorers in the Southeast Asian jungle or the African veldt, but we don't really have that genre anymore. And with Disneyland as a worldwide tourist destination, it becomes... strange to have people coming from the places that genre was based on, only to see this caricature of the places they know reflected back as it was seen by clueless Brits a century ago. I want to believe there's something sensible to do with this Land, something that can preserve its essence and history while still making it meaningful to the stories we tell today and the people who were on the other side of the old stories, but I honestly don't know how to do it, or what it would even look like when we were done. All I know is that if nothing else I need to stick a giant bookmark here, because I'd have to do something.

Main Street, finally, would remain mostly unchanged by the advancing years, except for one upgrade: its illusory second floor would at last become a real one - not as shops, but as Dream Suite-esque prestige accomodations. On any given night, roughly half of these would be booked like on-property hotel suites, at rates befitting the rare magic of spending the night inside the Magic Kingdom's pomerium. The other half would be handed out at random to guests who bought resort/GNH packages, or otherwise booked their trip such that Disney knows they're staying overnight, to put that magic, in theory, within every guest's reach.

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So for Disneyland, the changes have been less structural, and more focused on rearranging an existing structure to update and future-proof it.

California Adventure, on the other hand, needs something deeper, because at the moment, its theming is... confused. When it first opened, it was designed single-mindedly as a pastiche of California as a whole: Hollywood, San Francisco, Yosemite, Sonoma, Monterey, the Central Valley, and Santa Monica Pier. Over time, this theming - which proved less compelling than the Imagineers had hoped it would be - has eroded to make room for Intellectual Properties that could find no space on the other side of the Esplanade.

Today it's a hodgepodge of the old California theming, skin-deep Pixar references, and an increasing amount of Marvel stuff. There's no central idea like there is at Disneyland, or at Epcot and Animal Kingdom down in Florida.

Where I see the potential here is in Pixar's long-running theme: "what if [fill in the blank] were people", often imagined as those people secretly existing in our modern everyday world, which just so happens to be paired with a park that's themed to a real place, in the present day.

In other words, what if we made that pairing of themes explicit? What if we lean into the idea that you're "exploring" California, both to discover what's prosaically there, and what's fantastically there? What if we present that sort of Californian adventure?

I'm imagining a park pomerium based on the concept of the "road trip", inasmuch as it is the classical way to explore California. No miniature rail here; you'll pile into a trailer towed by Goofy and Max in their (now window-tinted) car, or by the Onward boys' van, or so forth. (I'd love to get the Cars cars in on towing duty but I don't know if the animatronics are good enough yet.)

You'll still pass through places like Grizzly Peak (where e.g. Bugs might also Live), a Pacific Wharf that's annexed some of Paradise Pier (where we can Find Nemo now that the submarines are closed), and the Hollywood Backlot (where city-dwelling nonhumans - like Monsters and Muppets - might lurk). Radiator Springs would be easily reconciled to this Park concept - melding it with the old Route 66 and I-5 travellers' towns, building it about half for humans and half for cars.

I would need external advice, at this point, to figure out how far this theme can go. I see... some potential in making explicit room to pay homage to Mexican heritage of California (with its hidden world being Coco's fantastical take on the Land of the Dead). But it'd have to be done respectfully, and would be easy to screw up without guidance on what exactly qualifies as respectful or not respectful.

From another angle, I'm also not sure yet quite where Toy Story fits into the picture, but every element of the park's Pixarish theming points to that headline IP needing to fit in somewhere.

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And with that taken care of, comes the question of the third gate. We position it across from Disneyland proper, in California Adventure's old real estate. Pragmatically, this mystery Park must support stories like MCU or Star Wars - the new additions to Disney's IP stable, set in soft sci-fi universes chock full of larger-than-life heroism and villainy. It would have more strict, single-setting-per-Land theming, to support Galaxy's Edge, the Avengers Campus, the new Artemis Fowl series, and so forth. Perhaps Tortuga as well - the cinema vision of Pirates is popular enough that it should be able to support a home, and building one for it here will ease pressure off of its Disneyland predecessor to be flagbearer for an IP it was never designed to host.

How does one support this with a gateway/hub Land? How does one define a pomerium around it? Strict set construction as a principle of the park implies that we have to invent a new IP for this purpose, something Kingdom-Hearts-like but less... cartoonish, to match the less cartoonish worlds it lets you visit. A futuristic mode of transportation seems called for to ferry guests from Land to Land. Perhaps this is where the iconic Disneyland Monorail design finally finds its place in Disney fiction and not just history: to be - within this new setting - a vehicle for interdimensional travel. The park's hub would then have platforms for two Monorail lines: one bound for "Earth 1313: Tomorrowland, Hollywood, and the Disneyland Hotel" (for we would expand the resort-wide monorail track to support park hopper travel), and the other bound for this new park's immersive Lands.

The third gate's position across from Disneyland proper, combined with the increased use of underground tunnels and infrastructure, adds another potentially useful gimmick: the ability to link it to Disneyland in a manner similar to Universal Orlando's Hogwarts Express. Imagine park-hopper-only lines where your Star Tour will land on Batuu, or your Pirate cruise will end in Tortuga.

There would, of course, be a new hotel attached to this park, just like the Grand Californian was attached to DCA on its opening. I'll leave the specifics of this up in the air; it could be another Galactic Starcruiser, but it could just as easily be based on some other property.

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And what of the rest of the resort?

As mentioned, Downtown Disney shifts north, encroaching slightly into what's currently the backstage area of New Orleans Square, to better link up with the new position of DCA. So as not to "isolate" DCA, the third gate's entrance would be halfway along this new route.

Trams would use underground infrastructure to cross from the southeast unified parking area into the DTD/Esplanade corridor at the appropriate places for different Parks.

The Disneyland Hotel would remain, as a nod to its historical status, but against two park-adjoining hotels, it's clearly the farthest from the action after all this rearranging - hence hooking it up to the Monorail as a way to give it connectivity.

#imagineer theory #disneyland #original content #california adventure

[tumblunni]

Stuff to appreciate:

* the pokemon theme remix sounding like football/rugby/otehr sports tourney music! we’ve seen it confirmed that there’s poke-football here so i hope they do reference rugby too and maybe some hockey? we’re honestly a really sports mad nation, tho not as much as america perhaps

* All the lil touches of random normal british stuff that i just TOTALLY MISSED the first time watching cos well its fuckin normal for me lol! im just realizing this is the first time ive seen a house have a wheelbarrow out front in a pokemon game. do other countries just not have as many wheelbarrows or do you like to hide them or somethin?? HOW DO YOU GARDEN! we like wheelbarrows so much there’s several characters in old kids shows thatre just a wheelbarrow, and lots of grandmas like to keep broken wheelbarrows and turn them into plantpots just for the aesthetic of wheelbarrows. Also welly boots!! what do people even call them in other countries cos wellingtons is a very british thing right?

* other nice touches: route signs being like our traffic signs LOL IM CONSTANTLY GONNA MISTAKE THEM FOR A SPEED LIMIT, a lot of those nice pastry crust lookin turf-roof cottages even tho sadly they arent super common anymore nowadays, generally showing a LOT of different british housing architecture like even got the old london double chimney stack things!

* oh man they even got those ground staircase things what is even the name of those actually? i always like the aesthetic of country villages that are more in harmony with nature and it sucks that so much of britain is more industrialized instead nowadays

* BIG BAGS like lol i was going OMG IM SO GLAD THE PROTAGONIST FINALLY HAS A BIG BAG even before i realized it was britain like wow is that a stereotype about us that we carry giant bags everywhere cos thats fuckin true. ‘tardis purses’ are really common amoung anyone who doesnt use backpacks, like everything has to be hybridized with a backpack somehow or else u wear a cardigan just cos stupid modern clothes aint got good pockets FUCKIN HELL I COULD FIT A WHOLE HOUSE IN A CARDIGAN i still remember how in high school i cut a hole in the bottom of my pockets so i could stuff things into the entire lining of the jacket and basically wear a bag like OH i just realized this stereotype must be really old and maybe thats legit where the tardis/mary poppins/d&d’s bag of holding actually came from? you ask for literally goddamn anything on a train in britain and someone’s gonna pull it out of apparantly nowhere, being prepared is just a Thing here

* lol they cant really show how much Pub Culture we have over here in a kids game probably? like we’re one of the world’s biggest consumers of alcohol and HOO BOY, drunken riots are a frequent occurance along with the sports obsession. also over here we straight up dont have non alcoholic cider and i was REALLY CONFUSED that america ONLY has non alcoholic version like i DIDNT KNOW IT EXISTED so i just thought they gave their kids beer?? cider festivals over here are real fun, its part of how ‘pub culture’ is kinda an all ages thing even if the kids cant drink the stuff. like there’s all fun farm events and kids rides and bbq and stuff at a cider or ale brewing town festival thing. and basically the difference between pubs and more american style bars is that pubs are..like.. homey? they really are just the ‘jrpg tavern’ thats a thing of old history in america. its more of a hangout spot thats open all day and is more spacious with comfy seating and they do food and gardens and stuff. its common to bring kids to a pub during the day and its only in the evening that its adults only, which is kinda arbitrary cos i mean they still sell booze in the mornings its just that its ONLY booze in the evenings and the family meal kitchens close. also in the mornings they still have all the gambling machines turned on and lol as a kid my dad used to plonk me down on them so i could ‘play games’ while he talked with his friends. it was extra funny how the european gambling laws made them take the game corner out of pokemon cos i knew what a slot machine was even before i played pokemon and i was like 4 when it came out XD

* yay for big fancy libraries and museums!! i hope maybe they also show buses and trains? its generally a thing that we have more extensive and well funded public transport and buildings than america. like no offense but i was fuckin FLOORED when i learned that there’s whole states that have no trains! like over here buses and trains are used even more than cars! having even one single place unreachable by bus is enough to cause protests! also maybe have some hospital themed gym leader to symbolise good healthcare but honestly they could have put that in ANY of the regions so far except for unova. srsly im always so scared for my american friends cos of that...

* IS THAT A FUCKIN REUSEABLE CARRIER BAG?? like what a weirdly specific thing to reference! do other countries have the carrier bag tax too?

* also LOL putting stickers on the back of the wardrobe!! thats such a brit kid thing, whenever u move to a new place and it has furniture included you’ll always turn something around and see a bunch of stickers someone left from years ago. it was alwyas funny as a kid to see which ones got wrecked in the move, i dunno why a headless bugs bunny was the height of my afternoon at age 9

* Weird notice: this house looks a lot like the Old Chateau from sinnoh? except obviously its more modern and not abandoned and all. makes me think that the dub kinda hecked up by calling the place french and it might have been intentionally meant to be british? its just called a ‘foreign style house’ in japanese, not a chateau.

* ALSO SINNOH FEELS! please bring the minigame back! i always felt an odd kinship with oreburgh town as a kid cos the town i grew up in was also a former mining town that turned from a capitol city port into absolute disrepair after the industrial boom ended. struggling to find a new identity and mostly getting by on tourism value of the mines and all. so makes me think this is actually legit a wales town and maybe even cardiff in particular? or other former mining towns of britain. cos having an extensive cave network thats completely unused and youre just allowed to walk around in it like its no big deal = honestly 100% accurate, the underground minigame would completely fit us. i wonder if japan really does have a similar case of the mines all being 100% abandoned and only repurposed into history museums and travel routes?

* this npc is cute and also i appreciate the accuracy to school uniforms over here! this is usually what its like for primary school (i think thats elementary in america?) and itd be in different colours for different schools and have the school badge on the left side there. and summer uniform is often just taking the jumper off and then the shirt underneath also has the same logo on it. but in my school as a kid they annoyingly made us buy a whole separate set of identical shirts but in a different colour to indicate summer uniform like GEEZ DUDE its already expensive enough! made more sense in high school where winter shirts are button up blouses like suit jackets and its only summer that gets a regular cotton shirt. but there you also wear blazers (kids’s suit jacket) instead of jumpers, and jumpers are optional if it gets extra cold but its more of a light cardigan style instead. also boringly every damn school’s colours are black blazers except like one or two rare exceptions. i got extra unlucky and the two high schools i went to also had red shirts so i kept getting them mixed up until i noticed the wrong logo halfway thru the day

* hey lol literally the park behind my house. we get real shitty weather here and i actually kinda hope maybe umbrellas are something we could pick in character customization?

#pokemon spoilers

[panelshowsource]

hell yes! happy holidays!

aww you’re so sweet anon! i have a couple more definitely coming down the pipeline after new year (greg davies being desperately bi for 8 minutes straight, for one), but otherwise we’ll see! idk who much is interested in them besides you lot.....but you lot is enough for me 💕

i’ll be honest with you, i haven’t watched it yet. as you know, i really like jimmy and i really like katherine and i really like them together. but......i don’t prefer watching panel shows that aren’t british panel shows. i don’t prefer guests who aren’t british. i don’t prefer audiences who aren’t british. i don’t watch gruen, or any aussie or nz series, i didn’t particularly enjoy taskmaster us, and panelists like rich hall and desiree burch and reginald d hunter and rob delaney and colin lane and sam simmons and michelle wolf (and henning wehn, as we’ve recently discussed) are usually ranked incredibly low in terms of my personal preferences......to me, it really boils down to what kind of comedy you like and i love british comedy. so when a series veers from british comedy for any reason, i tend to love it less. the fix is stacked with non-brits and non-british topics, and that’s fine, and i’ve heard tons of great things about it, but i’m not sure at the end of the day if that’s for me. and on top of that i really wouldn’t want to introduce something so culturally british to someone in such a watered-down form. if they want to watch a british panel show, they should get a british panel show. but at the same time, i don’t see the necessity or even the benefit of introducing americans to panel shows; what might happen besides british series becoming saturated with americans and/or british series migrating to america? i don’t want american comedy or culture touching british panel shows, personally; they already talk enough about american politics (how much do they expect someone living in the uk to actually give a shit about the miscommunications of the us national security council, and individual people involved in various partisan schemes? like, come on), and yeah i’m looking at you, hignfy. anyways. sorry about the rant. i am genuinely glad you enjoy it and i hope when i get around to, i do as well! but if you want to show your american friends a panel show, i would encourage you to start with wilty x

i cant believe ur asking me to rank david mitchells. what kind of traitor to the king do you think i am

;)

right here for you lovely! happy holidays x

it was amazing, this part was my fave tbh it’s just too Like Her

i don’t post any blog recs, or reblog shoutouts or boosts. thanks for understanding!

big fat quiz 2018 - dec 26 big fat quiz of everything 2018 - jan 4

for a basic set like this, probably 20 minutes? but for something like this, upwards of an hour or sometimes longer depending. it takes me fucking ages to fill the queue for the week because i’m borderline out of the things to reblog from the site...i used to rb about 80% of the content on my blog but now i make about 80% of it. so to fill 50 posts in the queue for the week, it’s way more hours than i’d like to admit. i do a massive portion of the work for this blog at my job, where i have a fancy ass computer and all the adobe programmes (and a lot of downtime), which is probably why i’m able to keep up (during the week)! do what makes you happy anon, trying never hurt anyone :)

hi anon i’m sorry but i don’t think i’ll take the time to do that this year, though i’ll certainly think of it in the future! and thank you for your kind words x

i politely tweeted at him but alas! no response (which is no surprise, he doesn’t tend to interact much with the plebes). we can see if someone here will comment, or perhaps you could post in /r/findfashion? i have a feeling it’s not available anymore as he’s had it for a while, but who knows :o

f.a.q. // watch links masterpost

#a #mine

[impressivepress]

Félicia Atkinson: A Closer Listen interview

Do you have a favorite piece of gear you’d care to talk about?  With this series, I try to not fetishize equipment the way that often happens but rather to try to demystify the creative process.

Some people have all this expensive stuff and produce nothing of interest, others use literal garbage or broken old things and produce beautiful soundworlds.  So, not necessarily from a technical standpoint, but as a piece of equipment that you’ve developed a kind of relationship with.

I like to collect stones from my travels, especially the ones I find on empty beaches or desert. I put them in my pockets, forgetting where they come from, and then use them during my show with micro contacts. Sometimes I just hold them during shows, they don’t make any sounds but they give me energy or at least the courage sometimes to stay silent or not add anymore sound to what’s already in the air. It’s difficult sometimes not to add more, you have break yourself somehow in order to keep the focus and sharpness.

I am fascinated by this image of you deriving inspiration from these stones, even when they are not making a sound. Do you have any early memories of sound, as listener or recorder, that stand out to you, that you draw inspiration from as you do with your found stones?

I think the first sounds I enjoyed were birds in the evening and trains passing. Especially just before nightfall. I am still always moved when I hear them. I leave not far from the station in Rennes and there are birds in my garden, and every day I feel still deeply touched by those sounds.

I seem to recall you’ve spent some time in the American southwest, a residency perhaps? Were you at Taliesin West? Can you talk a bit about your interest in the region?  Quite a contrast to Brittany, no?

We went to Arizona, California’s Mojave and Nevada, and also New Mexico quiet often. Each year since 2014 we do the LA Art Book Fair with Shelter Press and we manage to add some wandering time before or after, a kind of research time where I can record, see, draw,s  listen, write, paint…

We actually went to Taliesin West, and the Biosphere, and Arcosanti, but also to the Meteor Crater and the Petrified Forest. Arizona is Crazy! In New Mexico we visited Georgia O Keefe’s ranch and Agnes Martin’s room in Taos. It’s very inspiring.

There are so many contrast and different energies and people out there.

My relationship to those places is very intimate and I don’t know how to speak about it rationally; but let’s say my records Hand in Hand andCoyotes are my way of explaining and sharing my relationship to those environments.

But speaking of stones, you know Brittany is very rich in dolmens, monoliths and megaliths, that are sacred stones…

May I ask about your musical formation?  Did you study an instrument as a child, or play in more traditional bands in your youth?  How did your current practice develop? Can you describe what led your interest in making music? What is your musical background, both in terms of playing instruments and musical “scenes” which you were shaped by?

I studied harp and piano as a kid, listening to classical music mostly, but was very bored with « solfège » and music theory.

I remember learning « Methode Martenot » [an unconventional form of music pedagogy] that was more intuitive and based on rhythm and really enjoying it.

Also, some people came to my public elementary school to present to us the Structures Baschet by the Baschet Brothers and I was fascinated by them.

I grew up in Paris and my parents were listening to music all the time. My dad, who was working as a psychiatric nurse, was listening to Robert Ashley, Stockhausen and Pierre Henryand my mom, who was working as a librarian at the National Library to world music such as Yiddish songs, Cape Verdian music, Polish music…

I stopped playing music at the age of 14 when I discovered grunge music, Brit pop, indie rock and trip hop. I decided to keep on studying theatre instead. I even wrote a few plays.  I wanted to be a writer at that time and was writing all the time; poetry, novels… I destroyed everything I was really living in my imagination.

In those years (14-18), I was listing to music all the time and reading the NME, The Face Magazine, Les Inrockuptibles… I was a music fan, collecting images, reviews, of the bands I was adoring!

I was doing a lot of baby sittings all my teenage years to buy records and go to shows. (There is no age restriction in shows in France.)

I even went to Bristol when I was 16 with a friend to see where Massive Attack and Tricky where coming from, but we were so broke and young the only thing we could afford was to hang out in parks. But we really enjoyed it, Ahha!

Then in my twenties I was a fan of Sonic Youth, Cat Power, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Smog, and Low and the voice of Kim Gordon showed me you can speak in songs. I still enjoy the mood those musicians were putting me in, the importance of the lyrics and the feeling of being very close and intimate to the singer. The energy, the experience.

Then I started writing a bit in French magazines such as Octopus and Mouvement about music, read The Wire Magazine, and thinking about it in a more theoretical way.

At the same time, I discovered in my late twenties improvised music, avant-garde music, going to see shows at Instants Chavires, Fondation Cartier, Centre Pompidou…. I studied at Les Beaux Arts de Paris and did a workshop with Christian Wolff that was very influential to me. I started listening to Luc Ferrari, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, but also Jim O’Rourke, David Grubbs, Fennesz, etc… I started playing music, in different projects such as Strechandrelax with dancer Elise Ladoué and a spoken word project with Sylvain Chauveau.

Then, when, and then around 28 years old, under my own name and the moniker Je Suis Le petit Chevalier. With Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier I made a lot of tapes and CD-R on great DIY labels that really encouraged me to be prolific and use recordings as a kind of sound diary. I feel it was a very liberating time because there was no pressure. I was doing live shows that were very short, very loud and noise, I felt since at that time I was playing in talking audiences I had to be louder than the audience. It was like an exorcism. I really enjoyed that psych / synth DIY scene with labels such as Not Not Fun, Stunned, Digitalis, Ruralfaune, Kaugummi…

And then, in 2011 we created Shelter Press with Bartolomé Sanson and it changed a lot for me, knowing I had my own home to release my music and trying to shape things with more specificity and control.

I had a very important discussion when we were living in the Alps with Bartolomé with our friend Pete Swanson. I think he asked me something very basic, like «  what kind of music do you want to record » and it made me rethink the whole thing. I discovered also new composers, such Ruth White, or Moniek Darge and came back to Pierre Henry, Ferrari and Robert Ashley, and then I released A readymade ceremony, which is for me the volume 1 of a kind of new moment in my music, that I am still following now.

I’d like to ask about Shelter Press.  You’ve brought together quite a roster of artists, with some incredible aesthetic variety.  Shelter Press also publishes books and artist’s books. This feels very right to me, and isn’t something that is as common as one might think, as there is so much overlap between artists who produce work in small editions, whether it be music or books, but I’d imagine that the second decade of the 21st century has been a challenging time for such an endeavor.  Please, tell us more about Shelter Press, how you go about business, how you tie these various threads together.

Well, Shelter Press is 90 per cent run by my partner, Bartolomé Sanson, he is the captain,  holding the vessel on an everyday basis, thinking things ahead and making it possible; even though we take all the decisions together. I am more like the passenger, watching the GPS, looking at the window and tuning the radio accordingly to the drive…and making sandwiches!

It’s a lot of work to publish in the same time books and records, especially since he is handling creative direction, design, editorial, sales and shipping on his own

I think in many ways we often feel overwhelmed by work!

I can imagine!

But we are very happy and proud of what we put out: for example lately from the Ocean Scores of the artist David Horvitz to the latest Eli Keszler record, Stadium,  passing by a compilation of essays about utopian pedagogy (In The Canyon Revise the Cannon), the first record in ten years by Tomoko Sauvage, or the first album by CV & JAB in collaboration with artist Zin Taylor, etc…

We try to draw a kind of circle that links a kind of sparse but connected family.

We try to always meet people in real life before working with them, this is why we do not accept demos, we are not a dating app of some kind, a record doesn’t happen in one sec, it’s a slow process of exchange, not a fast delivery.

Metaphorically, we invite people to eat our table, and in that order, we like to know them first and then take our time to eat different courses and have a good conversation.

Shelter has just released Spectres, in collaboration with INA-GRM, in which you have a text. I’m looking forward to reading this, it looks fantastic.  Can I ask about how you understand the relationship between theory and practice in this context, between ‘research’ and the production of artistic works? You mentioned that in preparation of producing new works you have a period of absorbing various inspirations (books, films, landscapes, etc). Does the intellectualization of the process, as with this essay, come as part of the process or is it more removed (before, after)?

I just believe things are never isolated. Sometimes my ways of rehearsing is making a salad. I am very inspired by John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Ana Halprin, or Alison Knowles in the way they embrace(d) the world as a whole. A walk in the forest could be a research.

More and more time passes more and more i believe there is not in one hand theory and in another practice, everything in embedded.

Right now I have a small child, we spend most of the day in the park under the trees, and observing an Atlas Cedar for an hour is for me a way of deep listening.

I understand more time since I started to do soft boil eggs, for example. They handle a very good duration I feel.

And music is about duration.

It’s an important stage. The thinking part is the moment where you allow yourself to stop producing, and look back and forward. What have I done? What am I gonna do?

What is around me? What is missing? What is too obvious? Who / what should I call? Where should I go? To whom am I connecting, referring,  in order to say/ show/ make what I feel /want?

I feel full of questions. I need to share those questions sometimes, and take the risk to make some hypothesis. It’s part of the game. Share your ideas and the risk to be wrong or boring.

Right now, for example, I have a small baby at home. My creative time is very limited, my hands being full all day with this little and wonderful person. Well, it allows me time to think and observe.

I go to the park with my baby, I go close to the Sequoias and Cedars of the park with him, I am not playing music, but I feel it is something that prepares me as much as a rehearsal to play shows or record later.

It’s about being alive. I don’t separate life and theory and creation. Each one is one hour of a whole day.

I feel close to John Cage again in that way. Picking up mushroom is also making music. Or making music is just a part of a bigger process.

I’ve only been able to read the first page of your essay in Spectres so far, but it concerns the voice. It seems to me that your work often foregrounds the voice (and the body, as in Hand in Hand). Can you tell me more about the role that your voice and language plays in your music?

I bring my voice with me. I record it and then, a double exists, and people are listening to the double, to this strange stamp called recording. I find it fascinating.

Language is an obstacle to fascination. It brings doubt and subjectivity. I use language to break the image and I use the voice to play with its plasticity and its ghost-like ability to be multiple, pitched, distorted, doubled or vanished. Voice is a wind that penetrates the ear and leave again and come back, it’s also a feminist embodiment of a flexible force.

I believe also in the power of hushing versus screaming. Getting closer to the ear where the shout push you outside. I believe in energies and flux through the voice and its recording.

The voice for me is interesting because it’s always with you. It’s also for me something that travels; from inside to outside, passing walls, staying recorded and filling a room while your body has always disappeared.

The voice is the metaphor of the spirit in that way. It can talk but in the same time stay difficult to understand. It brings images but also confusion. It’s like a stream or cloud. You can see in it or not, it can appear and vanish.

I am very fond of Robert Ashley or John Cage’s voices. Even if they passed away they are still speaking to me.

Sometimes I feel inspired by that, I want to talk to some listeners who are not born yet; at least to people I will never meet. Recording my voice is a way to travel in time and space.

One of the tensions Sound Propositions is concerned with is the difference between working as an artist in the studio (producing records and compositions in “fixed,” recorded form) and in performances.  Do you approach to a live situation in terms of improvisation as opposed to how you work in the studio?

Aha, I would say it is almost the opposite: I improvise way more in the studio than live

Most of the outtakes on my records are first takes with a lot of improvisation in it, whereas live I construct more the performance with diffusion and scheduled sounds.

I feel that the fact that the record is « fixed » allows many strata of improvisation, because you can pile up time on it, the record has to be played several time, and is recorded in that goal of fighting with age and time;  whereas a live event is meant to disappear and therefore has , in my opinion , to be anticipated ahead, so it’s strong enough to face such a rapid and short amount of time and existence; like fire works!

Perhaps working as a writer brings with it a similar tension?

Almost all the texts that are not borrowed from literature or cut ups from magazines are improvised, they “happen” to me when I record and then I convoke them again live.

Animals, or Twenties are Gone, the two books of poetry I made were written within the same process, very condensed and fast.

How does this vary between working solo and working (live or in the studio) in collaboration with others?

I don’t do that many collabs, but for example with Jefre Cantu Ledesmathe process was like a mail  correspondence : I send you this, you answer, I react, etc… we never recorded on the same room / continent!

We would conceptualize very little ahead but rather exchange links of records and books we like to read / hear. The connection and language was a very special way of listening that, I think, we have in common.

How do you approach or conceive of the process of musical composition?  Is it a studio-based practice for you?

It’s a slow process, very similar to the way I do art. First I read books, watch films, listen to music, walk in landscapes. Then some ideas and desires appear out of this contemplation. Therefore I start producing various materials: field recordings, melodies, modular patterns, voice…. and then I listen to everything and assemble, like making a bouquet of wild flowers, according and tuning sounds into this first hunch I had at the beginning. This « feeling » or « idea » that will be the shape makers of those drafts, that will give sense and cohesion.

I think of composition as way to create form in space, with layers, blanks, densities, perspectives and light.

Would you be willing to choose a recent or upcoming track and break it down, talk about its development, equipment used, etc?

This is impossible for me to answer, I never follow recipes, neither in the kitchen, nor in the studio.

I can explain what inspires me, the environment of a composition but  I’ve always been a bit skeptical about technique demonstrations. I find it often obviously masculine and even sometimes even shallow; like ooh look how much gear I’ve got.

I feel creation, wherever it’s music, literature or painting can be analyzed as an objet, of course,  but what the artist does can only be explained in terms of intention and context, that’s it. It’s always completely relative, because at the end, the listener might catch something very different, because he/she is a different person than the artist, at a different time, in a different place, and that’s the beauty of the artefact. To be able to travel, to be able to remain a mystery and in the same time, to be able to be explained and analyzed in many different ways. Like a diamond with different facets.

In fact, I feel rather the same. I don’t mean to imply that the particulars (of the studio or a particular track’s creation) should have some universal importance, or be instilled into some kind of hierarchy, such that readers might think, oh “this piece of gear or software would make my work better.” I absolutely do not subscribe to this idea, and I’m very much moved by work that comes from making do with what is available. (Arte povera artists, or the sculptures of Louise Nevelson for instance, or the artists I’ve profiled in the series).  So, yes, I absolutely agree (about cooking as well!), improvisation is key, and formulas are generally to be resisted. Art is not a recipe to be followed.  I also concur regarding the masculinist tendency of gear shots and demonstrations of skills, flexing in the studio and all that.  (I for one dislike FACT Mag’s On the Clock series in part for this reason.)

So perhaps the question is more pedagogical: what advice would you give to someone starting out to make music or art in whatever form?  

Take your time. Believe in small forms.

Be curious and imaginative. Don’t forget to have some humour and distance around you . it’s only music. It’ s just music.  and to paraphrase JL Godard what is «  une image juste / juste image »?

You evoke Godard, and I think there’s something pedagogical in all we absorb. So, I always like to ask about an artist’s favorite work outside of sound art or music. What books, visual art, plays, films, etc you are inspired by, or find common cause with? Are their artists working in other media (past or present) that you feel an aesthetic kinship with?

So many of them of course. I wish i could have seen the Anni Albers retrospective in London and the Hilma Af Kint retrospective in NYC. Both of those wonderful women are very inspiring for me. They are both masters of colors and shapes, and I could watch their work all day. Same with many other artists such as Ruth Asawa, Agnes Martin, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Sonia Delaunay… Painting is source of every day joy for me.

I was lucky enough to catch the Af Klint at the Guggenheim while I was home for the holidays. What a revelation, when viewed all together in a space such as that. She knew her work would be misunderstood, so she imposed this long restriction on public exhibitions of her work. To think it’s taken this long for her work to be appreciated. Imagine what else is out there, still hidden.

What is on the horizon for you? What future projects can you tell us about?

Horizon is a line in the sky I am always contemplating and questioning. We never know.

I am currently composing a piece inspired by the work and persona of the painter Helen Frankenthaler for Atonal in Berlin this summer and another piece called Hedra Helix for Musica Sanae in Sokolowsko in Poland in August. [Episode 6 of the podcast includes an excerpt from her live performance at Musica Sanae in Napoli in May of 2019.]

I am gonna play at Le Poisson Rouge in New York in September and I’m working on the score of a dance piece by the choreographer Rebecca Chantinell in Stockholm.

Thank you so much.

~

by thenewobjective · July 5, 2019

#music #félicia atkinson #a closer listen #electronic #interview #music interview

[kasiopeiae]

Cheese and Whine

not my gif

The wind whipped harshly around you, and it would have hurt the exposed skin of your cheeks and nose had they not already been decidedly frozen and numb. Walking twenty minutes to your favorite bar usually wasn’t an issue, but perhaps you should have checked the weather and grabbed a thicker scarf before heading out tonight. As you passed the RenCen, you took notice of the temperature; eighteen degrees. You vaguely recalled hearing someone mention in passing that temps would drop below zero tonight with the wind-chill and had considered, only briefly, that maybe you should enjoy the game from the comfort of your home. But, you reasoned, it was the last game of the season and they’d played so well every time you watched at the bar. If you watched from home and the game was a complete blowout, you’d feel personally responsible for the loss. So out in the cold you went. Never could anyone question your dedication or loyalty to your team. The frozen tip of your nose was evidence of all you were willing to sacrifice for a win. As the wind howled around you, you struggled to pull open the door to the Greektown bar. A brief moment of reprieve from the wind allowed you to yank it open and finally find shelter from the elements. You were hit with a blast of warmth as you stood in the doorway that instantly began to thaw your frozen body. Someone else was coming in behind you, forcing you to move further into the bar and that’s when you noticed how absolutely packed it was. All the booths and high-tops were full, servers buzzed around as quickly as they could in the sea of Honolulu blue. There were specks of gold and green throughout, but Lions fans easily out numbered the few cheeseheads. But of course the only empty spot you could find was at the bar next to a guy in a heavy brown coat, hunched over his drink with eyes intently on the screen, with a green and gold beanie pulled tightly over his head. The game was about to start and you didn’t want to risk having to stand all night, so you reluctantly headed for the empty spot, fixing your own blue beanie to proudly display the logo so this guy would know that you were not going to be friends. You hoped against hope that perhaps this would be one of the few civilized Packers fans in the world so you wouldn’t have to listen to any taunts and could focus on the game in peace. This game was a big deal. Not as big of a deal as it could have been, thanks to the Giants doing their job and winning earlier that day, but still. If the Lions won tonight, they’d be the champs of the NFC North, earn a bye week heading into the playoffs, and have home field advantage for the duration of the playoffs. If they lost, well, it’d be same day, different shit, playing the Packers again, but at Lambeau—a stadium the Lions managed to be completely incapable of winning in. You settled into the barstool next to the cheesehead, and he straightened a bit, shuffling closer to the wall to give you more space. Before taking a swig of his beer, he tipped it in your direction and smiled. “May the best team win,” he said, finishing his beer. He had an accent, but not that of the typical Midwesterners that traversed this area. He was British. And beautiful, you noticed, as you let your eyes linger on him a bit longer than necessary. His dark hair was just peaking out from under his hat, curling at the ends, and he had these dark pink lips that settled into a charming smile.

What was it about Brits that made them all so charming? And what was it about this one that made him even more charming, even though he was a fan of Satan’s own team? The bartender came by to collect his empty, and you took the opportunity to order the same drink you’d been drinking all season. You began to truly settle in for the game, shucking your coat and hanging it off the back of your stool. As cold as you had been only a few minutes prior, now you were sweating as you thawed from the inside out. You wondered how your seatmate hadn’t overheated as he’d clearly been in the bar long enough to finish at least one beer, but then noticed the tight white jersey he had on underneath. “Scared to take off your coat?” you teased as the bartender sat your drink in front of you. You pulled the orange from the rim and bit into it, sucking the juices. The way his eyes trailed from your own to the fruit between your lips did not go unnoticed; you weren’t the only one intrigued. “It’s rough in the D,” he responded with a smile, his attention turning back to the screen. The game was about to start. “Not in Greektown,” you snorted. “Well, how do I get there? Need t’be free to show where me loyalties lie,” he asked, enjoying the banter. The loud laugh and way you covered your mouth with your hand brought his attention back to you. “This is Greektown, innit?” His cheeks were slightly pink from embarrassment as you laughed at him. “It’s alright, you’re foreign,” you said through small laughs as you patted his hand. You stopped laughing as you could feel the heat exchanged between your fingers. The two of you made eye contact again, suddenly feeling much closer than you had been a second ago, then turned back to watch the kickoff. After the first commercial, he leaned over with eyes still trained to the screen and murmured, “M’Harry.” He glanced away from the tv when you didn’t immediately respond, so you smiled and gave him your name. Neither team had scored yet, but the Packers were driving down the field with a vengeance and their lead was inevitable. With a sigh, you occupied yourself with your drink and adverted your gaze so you didn’t have to watch them score. “So yeh like disappointment?” Harry asked, turning himself to face you completely during the next commercial break. Had any other green and gold fool been ribbing you, you’d have let them know where they could shove their comments, but Harry was charming. Harry was British. Harry was hot. “Hey, once you’ve gone oh-and-sixteen, literally nothing else can be disappointing. The worst has already happened.” “So yeh…hopeful?” You captivated Harry. His face was alight with curiosity as he awaited your answer. Never had he expected someone so cute, and a bit feisty, to sit next to him in a little bar in a strange city and pique his interest the way you had. “Yes,” you responded earnestly. “And proud. The team’s played very well this season, despite a less than stellar defense and losing such an essential player during the offseason. Everyone doubted our potential, but we’ve sure showed them.” Harry’s smile grew as you warmed up to him, letting your passion for the team seep out. He wanted to keep you talking, keep your attention, so he could take in the your way eyes widened in excitement and your lips puckered a bit as you thought about what to say. “Another one, miss?” the bartender asked, touching your empty glass. Harry was disappointed when he lost your gaze when you turned to face the bartender and was determined to get your attention back. “Um, actually, can I just get a pop?” you answered. You’d downed your first pretty quickly, and if anything was going to happen with Harry, you wanted to make sure you were coherent for it. The bartender nodded, taking your empty glass as he turned to fulfill orders. ‘“A pop’,” Harry mimicked in an exaggerated American accent. The glare you shot him and the way you clucked your tongue in disapproval enthralled him further. That was the moment he decided he would rile you up all night long and see what it got him. “And what do you call it? ‘Fizzy drink’?” Your attempt at a British accent was awful and caused a hearty laugh to come out of Harry. “Summat like that,” he laughed, shaking his head as he eyed you with amusement. The two of you turned back to the game, each with less focus than before. You were conscious of just how close Harry was, and every subtle shift and adjustment he made in his seat prickled your body with awareness. You had never felt so in tune with another person before, which made you desperate to continue the banter. As the players gathered around the line of scrimmage, you nudged Harry with your elbow and pointed at the screen. “Bet it’ll be a false start here.” “Why?” Harry asked, incredulous that you’d insinuate a penalty against his team. “Just got a feeling,” you said with a shrug. Sure enough, just before play started, one of the Packers adjusted his position, the Lions defense calling it to the attention of the referees, and a five-yard penalty was issued. You were shocked. Harry was perturbed. He narrowed his eyes and pointed an accusatory finger your way. “What kind of witchcraft was that?” There was no stopping the giggles that escaped and your only response was a shrug. “I think you’re bad karma for this game.” “I’m bad karma? My team is the one that’s down!” The next few minutes of gameplay were incredible. For you, anyway. After the penalty, the Packers threw an interception, which was promptly returned for a Lions touchdown and field goal that evened the score. “Yeh bad juju, love,” Harry muttered, holding his head in his hands as the first quarter ended. He stood up and pointed at you once he got the bartender’s attention. “Bring her another one of those drinks with the orange.” “I’m good,” you giggled, waving your hands in dissent. “I don’t need another.” “Yes, yeh do. Ever since yeh switched to pop my team’s been dreadful. In fact, she’ll have two, please.” “I won’t drink them.” Your protest was feeble through the fit of giggles. “How ‘bout this,” Harry conceded as the bartender sat two drinks in front of you just before play resumed at the beginning of the second. “They get a first down, you’ll drink ‘em.” The fire in Harry’s green eyes was the only reason you agreed. There was a promise within them if you played along with him. Of course, Green Bay got the first down and began their assault down the field as you led the assault on your liver by switching the pop for the orange drink. With a stroke of luck, they were unable to convert on a third down and had to settle for a field goal. Three points were better than seven, so you took a swig and hoped the Lions would pick it up. The smug smirk on Harry’s face was accentuated as he chewed on his gum, so you decided it was your turn to ante up. “How ‘bout this,” you echoed, getting his full attention. “If the Lions score on this drive, you’ll take that hat off.” “This one?!” Harry pointed to his cap. “Now yeh askin’ too much!” “Then counter.” “Right. Fine. We’ll do yours, but if the Packers intercept, you’ll take yours off.” “My…?” You waggled your eyebrows coyly, but Harry saw right through the innocent façade. “Hat, love,” he replied emphatically before lowering his voice. “Or more, if yeh’d like.” The heat rose to your cheeks as Harry’s words sunk in. Suddenly you cared less about the game itself and more about the game that now surrounded it. “Play’s starting,” you murmured, but neither of you were in a hurry to resume watching. It was the groans of the crowd that signaled that Green Bay had, in fact, intercepted the ball and your hat needed to be removed. Harry glanced at the tv for confirmation before closing the small distance between you two and fingering the knitted edge of your hat. “Can have it back later,” he said softly as he pulled it off. Your hair fell around your face, but before you could attempt to fix the hat hair, Harry ran his fingers through your strands and smoothed back the disheveled pieces. He stuffed your hat in the inside pocket of his coat, and you followed after, but not before he grabbed your wrist to stop you. “Don’t forget to give it back.” “Promise.” He crossed his heart with a finger on his free hand. “Or maybe I will so yeh have t’see me again.” He released his grasp on your wrist, returning your hand to your lap, but instead of retreating back to his personal space his hand remained atop yours. Your thighs squeezed together in response to his closeness, a movement that did not go unnoticed by Harry. “Or you could make tonight worth my while so I want to see you again. Then you don’t even have to steal anything.” “S’not stealing,” Harry replied, his fingers caressing your thigh. “A bet’s a bet.” “Fine, fine,” you relented. This game with Harry was bringing out your competitiveness, and you were not one to be outdone. As play resumed, you wracked your brain for another bet. Your eyes lingered on the jersey beneath his coat. While the heaviness of his outwear sheathed his lithe frame, the tightness of the jersey clung to his chest muscles. “If the Packers score, you’ll take your coat off.” Harry’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Why yeh bettin’ against your team, love?” “Well, either they don’t score or they do and I get to see all that you’re hiding underneath that heavy coat. It’s a win for me no matter what.” Harry rolled his gum around his mouth, his chewing becoming more exaggerated as his jaw fell slack in awe. The way you were so eager to play along with him, mixed with the feisty competitiveness you were exhibiting made him wonder what you’d be like in bed. “Guess we better watch then?” Reluctantly, you both turned away from each other to watch the play unfold. When the Packers scored, you swore under you breath, but your mood quickly improved as Harry wiggled out of his coat. Vindication swirled through you as you admired how the fabric tugged tightly around his broad shoulders and the rest pulled closely around his torso. A shirt had never fit so perfectly on a human body before. “Help take yeh mind off things?” A knowing smirk crossed his lips. “Told you it was a win-win for me,” you replied, taking another sip of your drink. You’d never been happier for a commercial break as it gave you the opportunity to admire Harry more. He drank up your appreciation of him and let it fuel his confidence, making an effort to brush his fingers against you more and let his eyes linger all around you just long enough to stoke the fire in your belly. Through all this, your chairs had slowly been brought closer together; a shift by one, an adjustment by the other. All were meant to be nonchalant movements, but Harry took it upon himself to close the gap unabashedly, bringing his chair to touch yours and capture your knees between his. Neither of you bothered to face the screen anymore, both turned to face the other. Harry leaned against the bar, elbow propped against it as he took his lip between his thumb and forefinger, considering the next bet he wanted to make. “Lions score and you’ll give me a kiss.” His voice was gruff with the desire he felt to have your lips between his. You eyed him and he needed no explanation. “S’a win-win fo’ me.” You had never cared less about a football game as you did in this moment, yet you turned to watch your team line up and hoped against all hope that they’d pull one out for you. And even if they didn’t, you’d come up with a reason to kiss Harry anyway, but it’d be more fun if it happened this way. And as if the football gods were looking down upon you themselves, your quarterback dodged around his defenders, lobbed the ball high in the air and it fell gracefully into the waiting hands of the wide receiver who turned and ran eighteen-yards for the touchdown. As cheers and high-fives were exchanged around you, you vacated your seat to stand between Harry’s legs. His hands came to rest on your lower back as you held his face in yours, pushing back a soft curl of dark hair behind his ear. You held each other for a minute, just looking into one another’s eyes and feeling the rise and fall of each other’s bodies before you pressed forward and bound your lips to his. Harry kissed back softly, his warm lips tasting slightly of the beer he’d been drinking. You ran your tongue against his lip, begging to be let in further to see if the taste permeated throughout. He parted, allowing you entrance and you found the beer taste was still evident, but it didn’t taint him fully. There was still a hint of spice from his gum, and underneath a flavor so unlikely anything you’d ever experienced before that you’d forever remember as pure Harry. His large hands squeezed you closer as you continued to kiss and eventually you wound up on his lap, arms looped gingerly around his neck as the two of you continued to explore each other’s mouths. You’d kissed for what felt like hours, but couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes as halftime was now over. Both your lips were a bit pinker, a bit plumper, and a bit more chapped as you pulled back. Harry ran a finger across your bottom lip as you looked down at him with sleepy eyes. Both of you were debating if you should just say screw it about the game and find somewhere more quiet where you could explore the other areas of your bodies, but you both cared just a bit too much about football. You continued to watch the game from your perch on Harry’s lap, allowing his hands to wander and caress your sides. Between commercials, sly kisses were exchanged. A few more bets had been made, causing you to lose your hoodie and Harry to buy another round of drinks. As the fourth quarter started, teams tied, you decided to go for it. “Harry,” you murmured, pulling his attention back to you before kickoff. “Final bet?” “Lay it on me.” You swiveled a bit on his lap, letting your ass brush and rest a bit closer to his member as you turned to face him. “If the Lions win…” He waited with bated breath. “You’ll eat me in that bathroom.” You pointed behind you, indicating exactly where you wanted the act to take place. His breath hitched, lips pursing a bit. “And when the Packers win?” You contemplated for a second. “S’pose it can go both ways. I’ll suck you off.” An appreciative sigh escaped Harry’s lips, his hold on you going a bit slack. You wiggled a bit on top of him and felt him growing beneath you. “S’not fair,” he whined. “What?” “You can feel me, but I can’t feel you.” Desire had been pooling heavily between your thighs all night, it was a wonder some hadn’t seeped through to puddle on Harry’s lap. With a coy lick of your lips, you responded quietly. “Then I guess you better hope my team wins so you can feel me.” “S’nother one of yeh win-wins,” he muttered as you slid off of him, stretching your legs a bit before leaning against the bar on your elbows, your ass not-so-subtly on display for him. “Quit it,” he growled, giving a harsh pat to your bum to straighten you out. “S’like you want me on display.” With a smirk, you shrugged keeping your eyes plastered to the screen. His black jeans were sheathing his massive hard-on well, but only to those who didn’t know what was going on. When you looked, all you could see was the outline of his thick cock, the shape of which made it evident he was uncut—something of a rarity ‘round these parts. Despite yourself, you almost hoped your team lost so you could experience pealing him back to reveal his bulbous head before worshiping him with your tongue. You kicked yourself later when, drive after drive, the Packers dominated. They seemed to be everywhere, forcing turnovers, catching interceptions, and, of course, scoring. The game had turned into an absolute blowout. As your mood soured, Harry had stalled his ribbing, taking to rubbing the small of your back comfortingly every time you swore at the tv. And when you downed your drink after a particularly embarrassing interception and consequent touchdown, Harry ordered you another—not one of the orange, but a pop. “Fuck,” you sighed, sitting down hard in your chair as the seconds ticked down and the game ended. “What’s the point of even being in the playoffs if they’re just gonna drop the first game? Might as well have lost out and gotten a decent draft pick.” “Hey, summat’s gotta give,” Harry said, caressing your arm. “They’re not gonna stay winless at Lambeau forever. Next match just might be it.” You faced Harry. Kindness radiated through him. He was so sweet. You stood, coming between his legs as you had been earlier and gripped his hand. All around you, the other bar patrons had either left or began drowning their sorrows in alcohol. No one was paying any attention to the two of you. A man had just come out of the single person bathroom, so you knew the coast was clear. It was time to make good on your bet. “C’mon,” you said, tugging him by the hand. Confusion crossed Harry’s face as he got to his feet. “Wha’?” You nodded in the direction of the bathroom while biting your lower lip. You wanted to forget about this horrible game. And you wanted to taste Harry. Really taste him. “Hey, no, we’ve not got to—” “C’mon, Harry, before someone occupies the bathroom.” You pulled harder on his hand, willing him to follow you, but he stayed rooted to the spot. “Really, we don’t have to. S’alright. Just a silly bet, s’all.” He let you hold his hand, his free one moving to stuff awkwardly in his pocket. He shuffled on his feet. His jeans were still pulled tightly over his bulge, and you knew his cock must have been throbbing; yet, he genuinely was willing to forget it all, not wanting to make you keep any promise you may no longer want to. Which only made you want to get your lips around him even more. You pressed yourself against him, giving him a hard kiss that you hope conveyed your deep desire to take him in your mouth. “A bet’s a bet,” you reminded him. And this time when you tugged him along behind you, he followed. Any reluctance Harry was feeling quickly dissolved as you locked yourselves away in the bathroom. You had him pinned against the wall, hands roaming his body as you exchanged feverish kisses. A low whine came from Harry as you undid the button on his jeans and relieved some of the pressure on his erection. Dipping your hand into the front of his boxers, you gripped him tightly, earning a moan from him. “Fuck, you’re big,” you sighed, lust dripping off each word. Harry could barely keep his eyes open they were so heavy with desire. His mouth hung open slightly as his breathing grew shallow. A million different responses ran through his mind, but none of them were good enough, so he just closed his eyes in satisfaction, letting his head lull back against the wall. You left a trail of blazing kisses down his throat and lifted his jersey slightly to continue down his belly. You kissed around the ink of his tattoos as you sunk down to your knees and tugged his jeans and boxers down with you. Holding your thumb and forefinger together, you circled him, but shit he was so thick your fingers were practically miles apart. Harry shivered from your touch as you marveled at his size. You pushed back the foreskin a bit, revealing only a portion of his tip and placed a soft kiss right at the slit. Harry whined. You rubbed the tip of him against your tongue before taking him into your mouth, swirling your tongue around him to coat him completely. Pulling back, you let him pop out of your mouth while maintaining a light grip on him. Now that he was properly covered in your saliva, you worked your hand on him moving the skin of him on and off, back and forth, over his sensitive head. “Fuck,” Harry moaned, his hands curling into fists at his sides as he pounded the wall with him. “I thought American girls didn’t know their way around an uncut cock?” “Some of us are curious,” you responded, before returning him to your mouth. As you bobbed on him, you sucked your cheeks in, creating a nice suction that made Harry feel like he could come at any second. Could, not would, but goddamn it felt good. Hesitantly, he reached a hand into your hair, stroking his fingers into your strands. He didn’t want to overstep or offend you, but you absolved all his worries as you positively hummed on his cock over his touch. You started to get a bit creative with your moves by swirling your tongue inside his foreskin lightly, which caused Harry to moan and buck his hips into your mouth. “Sorry, sorry!” he sputtered. “Just—Jesus, that felt good.” So you did it again and again until you were satisfied with Harry’s grunts and whines. As you cupped his balls and continued to lick and suck on his member, both his hands wove deeper into your hair. He pushed you gently along to your own rhythm, and when you chanced a glance up at him you could tell he was completely done for; Harry’s eyes were closed, his mouth open slightly as he leaned back against the wall, breathy words tumbling out his lips. “Tha’s right, love…tha’s good…oh fuck jus’ like tha’…” You sucked your cheeks in and gripped his shaft a bit tighter as you moved his foreskin in the opposite direction that your mouth moved in. Harry looked down at you in astonishment—no one had ever done that to him before. And he quite liked it. “More?” he begged. So you continued. And his thighs stiffened while his core tightened. “Fuck, babe…gonna make me…gonna make me come.” Hearing him begin to unravel encouraged you further. You sucked enthusiastically, licked eagerly, gripped zealously, doing everything you could to let him know you were ready for him. “Shit, babe, really…Gonna fuckin’ come. Better ge’off.” He attempted to push you off him to save you from taking all of him in your mouth, but you wouldn’t budge. You wouldn’t even take a second to let him know that, no, you wanted this; you just kept your pace. “Babe, really. I’m gonna—you’ve not got to—” And with a flick of your tongue over his slit, Harry was lost. His hips bucked, his grip on your hair tightened as he fucked your mouth, letting every last salty drop fill your mouth. You sucked, taking it all in stride and savoring the flavor. Now this was pure Harry. He slumped against the wall as he finished, his cock loosening from between your lips. With closed eyes, he wiped at his forehead as you sat back on your heels, looking up at him. “Won’t be offended if yeh don’t swallow,” he murmured. But as his eyes slowly opened and he caught you licking the corner of your lips, your mouth beautifully empty, he felt like he could get hard again. With a, what Harry would call, a cheeky grin and a devilish waggle of your eyebrows, you asked, “Swallow what?”

tell me how you liked it masterlist This Only Looks Like Love - Chapter 8

#Harry Styles #harry styles smut #harry smut #harry writing #harry styles writing #harry styles one shot #1d smut #one direction smut #original writing

[virtual-lara]

IGN FilmForce - Iain Glen  Interview - Lara Croft Tomb Raider

Interview appeared on the IGN FilmForce website, dated to 30th May 2001. Article was written by Spence D.

Glen discusses swordplay, stunts and playing the villain Manfred Powell in the upcoming action-adventure film.

Up until this point Iain Glen hasn't been much of a household name over here in the States. Sure, he had a bit part in Gorillas in the Mist and he played Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead. And yes, that was him opposite Nicole Kidman in “The Blue Room” on Broadway. Plus those lucky enough to catch the recent art house fare Beautiful Creatures got to see him as a raving smack addict. But, for the most part he'd be what us Yanks consider a Merchant Ivory type player. You know what I'm talking about. He's one of those actors who's spent a vast amount of their time starring in period dramas predominantly created for and by British television. But to label Glen as just another Brit doing angst-ridden period dramas would be a total shame. I mean the man's done his share of stage, to boot, and coupled with his Royal Academy training, calling him anything less than a thespian would be an insult.

While Glen has racked up a worthy body of work, one can't help but wonder just how much of it can be said to have helped prepare him for the road ahead. I mean he's about to be thrust into the pop cultural mainstream thanks to his role as baddie Manfred Powell in Tomb Raider. Talk about doing a 180. But hey, every actor has his day and it's about time that this Edinburgh-born Scotsman cracked the Hollywood inner circle.

I caught up with Glen last October on the set of Tomb Raider. Decked out in his Powell expedition garb – black fedora, black jeans, white shirt, black hunting vest – Glen allowed us into his dressing room during a break in the shoot. While we assaulted him with our tape recorders and asundry questions, Glen kicked back, had a smoke, and swigged some water (trust me, after repeating the same line 30 times in a row inside of an artificial fog saturated set that's hotter'n an easy bake oven – those lights they need to illuminate sets emit some serious heat waves, and you'd wanna kick back with a bottle of water, too).

The fact that he was only too eager to talk to the press, further illuminates his readiness to weather the media storm that a summer blockbuster of this caliber will no doubt create. Toss in the fact that he's down right charming and witty (during the course of our meeting the man pulled a veritable Merle Streep, slipping in and out of more eclectic UK dialects – ranging from working class Scotsman to hoity-toity Londoner than one could easily keep track of) and you know that he was more than capable of holding his own against Angelina/Lara. But then you wouldn't expect anything less from a classically trained Scottish actor, would you?

IGN FilmForce:

I saw a little bit of a working clip and noticed that you engage in a little swordsmanship in the film. How much extensive training did they give you on the blade?

Iain Glen:

Well, luckily I went to drama school at the [Glen affects a stuffy Brit post accent] Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and there are various classes that you can take extracurriculum. And I and Ralph Fiennes were completely obsessed with sword fencing so there's this evening halfway through the course called "The Prizefights" where you're supposed to do armed or unarmed combat, which most students spend about two weeks preparing for. But Ralph and I had been at it for like two years, you know, endlessly rehearsing our fight. Just 'cause we loved it so much. So I was very familiar with swords. Actually, as often is the case in film, you're kind of pushed for time, but they got the right chap on board and he showed me this simple sequence. And it's like anything that you do in a skill that you need, don't try and learn how to use the thing as a whole, just use it for the particular tune you need to play. So I felt lucky that I had had so much sword training in my early days.

IGN FilmForce:

Did you at all immerse yourself in the games? Or did you try and distance yourself from them? I realize that Lara is the only character that has been transferred from the games to the movie and the rest of you have been created for the sole purpose of the film itself.

Iain Glen:

No I didn't. I mean I was unfamiliar with the game. But actually the producers very kindly gave me, as one of a number of gifts before we started, the game. I looked at it, obviously, with interest, but as I say, I really think that it's something for the director that's useful, it's very useful probably. But for an actor, I can't see it being useful, really. I mean you can get a mood of something perhaps, but if it's not on the page, if it's not within the world that we're creating from the script, then I don't think you're gonna be able to nick anything from the game that's gonna help you in a way. And certainly not for a character who doesn't exist, you know, except for in the story. So, no...you just hope that, you know if you're doing it right and you're doing the story, then connections will be made and people might assume different things, which should be nice. But I don't think as an actor, unless I'm missing out on something hugely, that there was a lot to be gained from really immersing myself in the game.

IGN FilmForce:

Are you all afraid that if this movie really takes off and becomes the proverbial summer blockbuster, that you will become typecast as the typical English villain?

Iain Glen:

Hmmmm. Right. Well, it's nice because I don't think...I mean if I look back at what [I've done] I don't think I've done the sort of English villain for me as an actor before. I don't think so, particularly, certainly nothing that has got any big overlap with what I'm doing now. So, as far as I'm concerned, in relationship to where I am, it was a really valid choice and respectable, whether it was a big movie or how much money they might want to pay you, it was purely as an artistic choice. It was about something new to do and thus it was a good choice. Subsequent to that, if people want to send me a lot of parts in playing a baddie villain, the only way I'll be typecast is if I accept them. So it's kind of...you know, you might be frustrated that people don't think "Oh, he's a good actor, he did that and maybe he could do something else." But my fate is in my own hands and you know, I can guarantee I won't be doing anything that's kind of like what this is or you know, is such a match to this that it's sort of not interesting to do. We'll see. I mean I've loved the shape, if I've had any, of my [slips into a Scottish brogue] career. My credo has always been to just keep duckin' and divin and keep dodgin' and keep doin' different things. I've loved going from the mediums and doing theater and doing new writing and doing Shakespeare and doing classics, doing musicals, doing film, doing small English films, doing medium-sized European films, and doing American – hopefully – big films. That's what I'll keep doing, if I possibly can. It's nice to inhabit an area that I haven't, you know, for a good few years been in this sort of scale...well, I probably have never been in this sort of scale of picture, but I have been on sort of large scale pictures before, and it's nice to do it again.

IGN FilmForce:

I know that Angelina did quite a few of her own stunts. I mean she did the wild bungy dance of death and the motorcycle slide out. Do you get to do any stunts of that caliber? And how much of your stunt work did you do?

Iain Glen:

Ummm, well I don't really...I suppose on the sort of stunt scale she has the most and then Alex, the character Daniel [Craig] plays has the second most. They're kind of the active tomb raiders. I kind of have an army of people around me, which I can then sort of dish out to my minions a lot of the dirty work. Ummm, but that being said, we are entering two sequences right now where all of the kind of action stuff will take place and it's a bit of a...I don't quite know how we'll do it, but there's a fair amount of action in that. But nothing in her league. There's just lots of running, tumbling, and shooting sort of stuff, but not what Angelina is up to. And quite rightly, you know, 'cause she's Lara Croft [this last bit he says with a wink and a smile].

All rights belong to IGN and/or their affiliated companies. I only intend to introduce people to old articles and preserve them before they are lost.

#All Interviews #VL Posts #Lara Croft Tomb Raider #TRM1 Interviews

[thisdaynews]

F-Bombs Away!

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/f-bombs-away/

F-Bombs Away!

The surprise attack on Hawaii came on a quiet Sunday morning, and it fell to the president of the United States to rally a confused and stricken nation one day later in a momentous address to Congress:

“Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941—a date which will live as totally fucked up—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of Japan.”

Story Continued Below

That’s the power of language at work. And who can forget the image of an American commander in chief in Berlin on the front lines of the Cold War: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this fucking wall.”

Let’s be mature about this. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan both surely dropped a choice word or two in private, even on solemn subjects like Pearl Harbor and Soviet tyranny. Democrat Beto O’Rourke, meanwhile, has not actually signaled that he will make the F-bomb a central part of his rhetorical arsenal in the unlikely event he becomes the next president.

He is, however, apparently hoping that vulgarity will be an engine of his political revival in the Democratic presidential contest. In doing so, he is part of a confluence of factors serving to mainstream what once counted as the most forbidden entry in the roster of four-letter words.

Notice to reader: The examples above are just two of 14 profanities in this story. Editors decided to skip the coy dashes and asterisks and more straightforward [expletive deleteds]. How else to handle it when a candidate for president infuses a policy statement after a horrific mass shooting with the phrase, “This is fucked up”?

On social media and in interviews, O’Rourke’s profanity has proved to be something of a political Rorschach test.

Pro: He has found a searing and even eloquent way of cutting through the madness and violence of the age. The real obscenity, by these lights, is routine mass shootings and the paralytic response they engender from the governing class, to which O’Rourke’s incredulity is a powerfully authentic rejoinder.

Con: O’Rourke’s profanity is risible, a perfect summary of a campaign that even before was mocked for its alleged preening and Wayne’s World affect. Even if the first time he dropped the F-bomb came as a genuine outburst, his repetition on Twitter and now official campaign T-shirts reveals calculation and contrivance—making his vulgarities the opposite of the authenticity they supposedly convey.

Either way, the Texan’s coarse language is a frivolous dimension of a serious question for Democrats: Should progressive leaders confront the rawness and norm-shattering nature of President Donald Trump’s political style with something similar? Or should they stand for a return to standards that used to be assumed for any presidential contender—including language reflecting the gravity of the office, or at a minimum was G-rated?

Before O’Rourke, the public figure who arguably was most notorious for his prolific use of the F-word was Rahm Emanuel, who kept the salty parlance of a political operative even as he became a member of Congress, White House chief of staff, and mayor of Chicago.

Emanuel, who calls himself “a reformed swearer,” acknowledged in an interview, “I’ve got this notorious reputation and I’m not saying that I don’t swear but you’ve never heard me publicly swear. … I actually don’t think it’s the right thing to do.”

“I think people are being exhausted by vulgarity and I think [the candidates] should be engaging people on the future” through the power of ideas, Emanuel explained.

But some other Obama White House veterans were more tolerant of O’Rourke’s rhetorical excesses.

“It’s good for him to show a little emotion and get angry so that people can see exactly where he stands and that he will fight for what he believes in,” said Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s former 2012 deputy campaign manager and cofounder of Precision Strategies.

“Most candidates do talk like this and they talk like this to their teams and at the bar with reporters, and they get credit for being real people and not engaged in some veneer,” said former Obama press operative Ben LaBolt. “Beto has used it to demonstrate outrage about some really outrageous issues that the United States should have been able to solve many years ago, and so his approach would distinguish himself from somebody who would serve in the Senate and say ‘my dear friend’ and ‘my dear colleague.’”

By so frequently crossing a line that once might have been career-ending, O’Rourke is partly changing the political culture, and partly reflecting changes that are already underway.

As far back as September 2014, Trump tweeted: “Every time I speak of the haters and losers I do so with great love and affection. They can not help the fact that they were born fucked up!” More recently, in late March of this year, Trump told a campaign rally that Democrats should stop “defrauding the public with ridiculous bullshit.”

In June 2017, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who recently ended her presidential campaign, tried to stir a conference on technology and democracy by imploring, “If we are not helping people, we should go the fuck home.”

At the start of the year, newly elected Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib made a splash by saying of Trump, “We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker.”

Another newly elected member of Congress, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, was recently quoted by The Cut noting the annoyance of being asked as a female candidate about her “self-care” on the campaign trail: “I’m like, ‘I don’t have fucking self-care! I’m running for Congress.’”

But O’Rourke is the one who has made the word his signature. After making his Texas Senate race surprisingly competitive, before narrowly losing, in 2018, O’Rourke went viral with his concession speech in which he praised supporters, “I’m so fucking proud of you guys.”

When he began his bid for president, O’Rourke was scolded at a campaign stop by a voter who urged him to “clean up his act” and not use profanity in ways were children will hear it. “Point taken, and very strongly made,” O’Rourke replied, promising to “keep it clean.”

But last month, meeting with reporters after the mass shooting in his hometown of El Paso, O’Rourke seemed impatient with what he regarded as the naivete of some questions about Trump’s role in inciting violence. “Members of the press, what the fuck?!” he exclaimed.

There are two facts about the F-word that most people learn early in their teenage years: The reaction it gets depends on context, and its shock value tends to diminish rapidly. O’Rourke’s initial uses of the word did seem a little like a young person at a family dinner:Wonder how the table will respond?

On balance, O’Rourke seems pleased with the reaction, at least among the people he cares most about. After new shootings in Texas, he went on CNN last Sunday morning to say: “We’re averaging about 300 mass shootings a year. No other country comes close. So, yes, this is fucked up.” He also defended his swearing by saying that it was “just honest” and important “to shock the conscience of this country.”

O’Rourke’s campaign also noted that all of the proceeds for his profane T-shirt go to March for Our Lives and Moms Demand.

Brit Hume, the prominent Fox News journalist, commented on Twitter, “As if his sewermouth will somehow give his argument more power.”

But Matt Bennett, a Democratic strategist unaffiliated with any presidential campaign and long-time gun control advocate, believes O’Rourke was rightly trying to shake people and signal that conventional politics isn’t adequate in the context of recurring mass murders.

“I think he’s decided that profanity can help him add emphasis where other language fails,” said Bennett. “Indeed, how else does one underscore their anger with, frustration at, and contempt for public officials who fail to act in the face of such horror? We all have been railing about this for years (decades in my case). How else do we signal that this situation is singularly obscene?”

George Lakoff, a retired Berkeley linguist who has written extensively on how Democrats sometimes lose political arguments by not effectively employing the power of language, was uncertain on the wisdom of O’Rourke’s shattering of old proprieties. “It’s basically saying: This is really important. Pay attention.”

O’Rourke may have grabbed attention, but it’s not clear how long he will keep it, at least based on the power of profanity. Forty-five years ago, the country was shocked by the prodigious use of Oval Office profanity—often as part of contemptuous and vindictive rants against opponents—by Richard Nixon and his aides when the White House tapes were released. The news media, reflecting the standards of the time, didn’t print the words but replaced them with “[expletive deleted].” Anticipating Tlaib by several decades, protesters outside the White House gates carried placards saying “Impeach the expletive deleted!”

But a generation that currently has made a star of Lana Del Ray and her album “Norman Fucking Rockwell” with its hit song “Fuck It, I Love you” isn’t likely to stay shocked, or perhaps even interested, for very long by O’Rourke’s language.

Back in 2004, when then-Vice President Dick Cheney told Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy to “Go fuck yourself” on the floor of the Senate, many news organizations debated internally about how to report the obviously newsworthy exchange—since it involved words that were forbidden by their editorial standards.

Those qualms seem irrelevant in the current climate.

Veteran reporter Nicholas Lemann, a former dean of Columbia University’s school of journalism, said these days, as politics grows more openly coarse, the news media should have no compunction about just reporting exactly what public figures say. The old notion of news organizations as a kind of unifying public square, in which editors had to primly enforce rules to ensure that the most sensitive people in the audience weren’t offended, has gone by the wayside now that every online reader is essentially his or her own editor.

“If they said it, you should quote it,” Lemann advises.

Another journalist, James Fallows, also served as a stint as a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, who he recalled sometimes swore in private but very rarely.

He sees O’Rourke’s language as a sign of the times.

“As an old guy,” said Fallows, who last month turned 70, “I’ll avoid any decline in civilization, but I guess until recently public figures felt that they had to observe a public-private barrier. … Politicians have always been earthy people, but we are seeing the time, at least for the moment, the earthiness membrane is being pierced or is permeable.”

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America, the Gerontocracy

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/america-the-gerontocracy/

America, the Gerontocracy

Hate crime is rising, the Arctic is burning, and the Dow is bobbing like a cork on an angry sea. If the nation seems intolerant, reckless and more than a little cranky, perhaps that’s because the American republic is showing its age. Somewhere along the way, a once-new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal (not men and women; that came later) became a wheezy gerontocracy. Our leaders, our electorate and our hallowed system of government itself are extremely old.

Let me stipulate at the outset that I harbor no prejudice toward the elderly. As a sexagenarian myself, not to mention as POLITICO’s labor policy editor, I’m fully mindful of the scourge of ageism. (I’ve had the misfortune on occasion to experience it firsthand.) But to affirm that America must work harder to include the elderly within its vibrant multicultural quilt is not to say it must be governed almost entirely by duffers. The cause of greater diversity would be advanced, not thwarted, if a few more younger people penetrated the ranks of American voters and American political leaders.

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Let’s start with the leaders.

Remember the Soviet Politburo? In the waning years of the Cold War, a frequent criticism of the USSR was that its ruling body was preposterously old and out of touch. Every May Day these geezers would show up on a Moscow reviewing stand, looking stuffed and fix their rheumy gaze on a procession of jackbooted Red Army troops, missiles and tanks. For Americans, the sight was always good for a horselaugh. In 1982, when Leonid Brezhnev, the last of that generation to hold power for any significant length of time, went to his reward, the median age of a Politburo member was 71. No wonder the Evil Empire was crumbling!

You see where this is going. The U.S. doesn’t have a Politburo, but if you calculate the median age of the president, the speaker of the House, the majority leader of the Senate, and the three Democrats leading in the presidential polls for 2020, the median age is … uh … 77.

It doesn’t stop there. We heard a lot last November about the fresh new blood entering Congress, but when the current session began in January, the average ages of House and Senate members were 58 and 63, respectively. That’s slightlyolderthan the previous Congress (58 and 62), which was already among the oldest in history. The average age in Congress declined through the 1970s but it’s mostly increased since the 1980s.

The Deep State is no spring chicken, either. POLITICO’s Danny Vinik reported two years ago that nearly 30 percent of the civilian federal workforce was over 55; two decades earlier, it was closer to 15 percent. Of course, the entire U.S. workforce is getting older, thanks to the aging of the Baby Boom—that giant Hula-Hoop-shaking cohort born during the prosperous post-World War II years from 1946 to 1964. But the federal bureaucracy is even older, apparently because civil-servant Boomers, despite their defined-benefit pensions, are less inclined than their private-sector counterparts to retire.

America’s ruling class is of course more nimble than the Politburo ever was. And indeed, the two Democratic presidential candidates proposing the most dramatic departure from the status quo are Bernie Sanders, who’ll turn 78 on September 8, and Elizabeth Warren, who’s 70. Still, there’s something to be said for youth and vigor. John F. Kennedy (then 43) tapped into that feeling in his 1960 bid to succeed Dwight D. Eisenhower (then 70) when he campaigned on the slogan, “Let’s get America moving again.”

Why should we care how old our leaders are? As the journalist Michael Tortorello reported three years ago in POLITICO Magazine, cognitive functioning declines dramatically on average after age 70, and the types of intelligence that decline most sharply on average are “the capacity to absorb large amounts of new information and data in a short time span and apply it to solve problems in unaccustomed fashion.” It would seem advisable to have at least afewmore people in the higher reaches of government on whom we can rely still to possess this skill in youthful abundance.

The cognitive-function issue is not a theoretical one, if political commentators are to be believed. The past month has brought near-daily speculation about our 73 year-old president’s state of mind. “He’s getting worse,” CNN’s Brian Stelter said earlier this month. “We can all see it. It’s happening in public.” In recent weeks, Trump has canceled a meeting with the Danish prime minister because she wouldn’t discuss selling Greenland; suggested that his own Florida resort be the site of the next G-7 conference; and been quoted suggesting that hurricanes be deterred from reaching landfall in the U.S. through the detonation of nuclear weapons. “If Donald Trump were your father, you would run, not walk, to a neurologist for an evaluation of his cognitive health,” John Gartner, a psychologist, wrote in an AprilUSA Todayop-ed.

Whether Trump’s cognition is declining is a question muddied by a wealth of evidence that his speech and behavior were always at least somewhat erratic. (This is a man, recall, who more than 30 years ago confessed to giving his second-grade music teacher a black eye, which may not even be true.) A similar ambiguity surrounds Joe Biden, 76, whose well-documented history of verbal gaffes helped sink two previous presidential candidacies, one of them (similarly) more than 30 years ago. “Biden has always made gaffes by the bushel,” Fox News commentator Brit Hume (who’s also 76) tweeted earlier this month after Biden appeared to think he was in Vermont when he was really in New Hampshire (a state of no small significance in the primary race). “But some of his recent ones suggest the kind of memory loss associated with senility.” (Trump and Biden’s physicians, I should note, have vouched emphatically for their mental fitness.)

Even if the speculation that Trump and/or Biden might be a little bit gaga is unfounded and terribly unfair, isn’t it strange that we’re talking about the 2020 front-runners in the same worried tone we might adopt discussing with our siblings whether Mom and Pop should still be driving? It isn’t the first time. The 2016 election occasioned more muted speculation along the same lines about Trump, and even a little bit about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, who’s only slightly younger.

None of this means a septuagenarian can’t function effectively as a political leader. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are 79 and 77, respectively, and by all reports they’re operating at peak mental capacity. But to affirm that not all elderly people are impaired cognitively is very different from affirming that none is.

Even the healthy older brain is, well, different from the healthy younger brain, and if you care about politics that’s worth making some effort to understand. Certain tasks are just harder as you get older, even if you’re very smart. Your mental reflexes are slower. (How do I know? None of your damn business.) It takes you longer to remember someone’s name. Multitasking is more challenging. Learning foreign languages is more difficult, and adjusting to unfamiliar cultures is perhaps a bit harder. You can overcome these obstacles if you make some effort, but not everybody—not even all American leaders—makes the effort.

The most important compensating benefit to old age is greater wisdom, which comes from experience. When you’re making decisions that affect others, it’s much better to have a deep well of experience to draw on than to maintain the mental reflexes of an auctioneer. Wisdom may be more valuable in the digital age than ever before, because the velocity of information and normative judgments on social media, cable news and elsewhere constantly threatens to make glib idiots of us all.

But here’s the rub: The aging of America’s ruling class does not automatically increase its experience level. In presidential politics, notes Brookings Institution senior fellow Jonathan Rauch, political experience, which “used to be a selling point,” has “become a liability. Voters and the public have come to see experience as inauthenticity.”

In a November 2015Atlanticarticle, Rauch plotted experience level for presidential candidates from 1960 to 2012. His graph showed a clear increase in experience level among the losers and a corresponding decrease among the winners. Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter. George H.W. Bush won with more political experience than Michael Dukakis, but four years later lost to Bill Clinton, who had less. John McCain lost to Barack Obama, who’d been in national politics a mere four years.

Donald Trump, who is 73, entered the Oval Office with no political experience at all. The single greatest mental compensation that age provides was therefore unavailable to the oldest president in American history.

***

Why is America governed by old people?Maybe because it has so many elderly voters.

The American electorate is older than it’s been for at least half a century. One reason is aging Boomers. The other is the greater tendency (despite a rising mortality rate) of people who make it into old age to go on living. By 2030, every living Boomer will be elderly (that is, age 65 or older), and by 2035, the Census Bureau projects, the elderly will outnumber minors for the first time in U.S. history.

This demographic trend has an exaggerated effect on politics. According to the Pew Research Center, in the 2020 election nearly one-quarter of the electorate (23 percent) will be elderly, “the highest such share since at least 1970.” But that understates the size of the elderly vote because the elderly are much likelier than any other age group to show up on Election Day. Old peoplereallylike to vote. In 2016, for instance, 71 percent of eligible elderly voters reported to the Census that they voted. For other age cohorts, the turnout percentages were 67 percent (aged 45-64), 59 percent (aged 30-44) and 46 percent (aged 18-29).

The electorate is even older in primaries, and older still in local elections. In 2016 Phil Keisling, chairman of the National Vote at Home Institute, led a Portland State University survey of 50 cities that found the median voter age in municipal elections was 57, “nearly a generation older than the median age of eligible voters.”

The broad outlines of this trend are widely understood, which explains why, for instance, Donald Trump said in 2015 that “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican.” (He nonetheless proposed in this year’s budget to cut more than $500 billion from Social Security and Medicare, which he’d also pledged to protect, but that’s another story.)It helps explain why the federal government spends more on Medicare, which provides medical coverage to elderly people, than it does on Medicaid, which provides medical coverage to poor people. (Another reason for the difference is that the elderly require more health care.)

It also may help explain why racial tolerance seems in some respects to be in decline, as measured, for instance, by the unnerving quasi-respectability afforded white nationalism by some mainstream players in national politics (including Trump). The elderly, polls show, are in the aggregate less concerned about racial prejudice than the young. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found a 21-point spread between the elderly and young adults (18-29) when they were asked whether racial discrimination was the “main reason many blacks can’t get ahead,” with 54 percent of young adults answering in the affirmative but only 33 percent of the elderly. The age divide on this question was almost as wide as the 24-point divide between black respondents and white.

Similarly, political support for immigration restrictions may reflect an aging electorate. Pew found a majority in all age categories agreed that “immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents,” but the spread between the elderly and young adults was 31 points, with 51 percent of the elderly answering in the affirmative but 82 percent of young adults.

It’s often claimed that the elderly care less about the future than the young, but that’s a canard. The elderly care quite a bit about what will happen to a world they spent a lifetime building and populating with their children and grandchildren. (Their lives wouldn’t have much meaning if they didn’t.) Recent polls show the elderly care, if anything, slightlymore about the budget deficit than other age groups (despite not wanting to give up Medicare and Social Security benefits), and are slightlylessinclined to complain they pay too much in taxes.

That said, the young care a lot more than the old about climate change. Polls aggregated by Gallup from 2015 to 2018 show that concern about it drops with age. Fully 70 percent of respondents age 18-34 worried “a great deal” or “a fair amount” about global warming, compared with 63 percent age 35-54 and 56 percent age 55 and up. That’s a 14-point generation gap between the young and the elderly and near-elderly.

You often hear older Americans complain that the younger generation, with its fixation on social media, can’t distinguish between fact and opinion, making it difficult for them to apply the critical thinking necessary to consume news and be responsible citizens. A 2018 Pew survey found that Americans do indeed experience great difficulty telling these two things apart: Given five factual statements and five statements of opinion, a majority of Americans couldn’t identify them properly.

But younger Americans actually scoredbetteron this test than older ones. Thirty-two percent of 18-49 year-olds were able to identify all five factual statements, and 44 percent were able to identify all five statements of opinion. Among the over-50 cohort, only 20 percent identified all five factual statements correctly, and only 26 percent did the same with the statements of opinion.

***

The final leg of America’s gerontocratic triadis its system of government. That, too, is old and a bit creaky.

We think of ourselves as a young country, and in many respects we are. But we are also, as Paul Ryan famously noted in 2016, “the oldest democracy,” provided you exclude older ones that didn’t last (Athens, Rome) and ignore various undemocratic restrictions to the franchise that persisted into the 20th century. No nation in the world has a written Constitution older than ours. And it shows.

The list of the Constitution’s anachronisms and ambiguities is long.

Article One says Congress may “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States,” phrasing that strictly limited the regulation of private business at the federal level until the New Deal, when the Supreme Court reversed itself and concluded the federal government’s power to regulate private business was pretty vast. Had the Founders grasped that the modern economy would all but eliminate purely local commerce—and that it could, unchecked, alter the very climate of planet earth—they might have had more to say on the subject. As things stand, the powers of the regulatory state are the subject of endless legal combat.

Article Two says you must be a “natural born Citizen” to be president, which excludes for no apparent reason Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer Granholm, who previously governed two of the nation’s most populous states. The racist “birther” movement that challenged the legality of Barack Obama’s presidency (and that ushered Donald Trump onto the national political stage) wouldn’t have been possible without Article Two.

Article Two also established that presidents be elected through the Electoral College, an antique mechanism borrowed from the Holy Roman Empire that twice during the past two decades delivered the presidency to the popular-vote loser.Some people have a problem with that.

The Second Amendment frames the right to bear arms within the context of “well-regulated” state militias that no longer exist, an ambiguity that the Supreme Court interpreted in 2008 to mean the Constitution protected the right to bear arms, after holding for the preceding seven decades that it did not. Had the Founders known the extent to which the nation would tear itself apart over the regulation of firearms more deadly than they ever imagined, they might have laid down a few broad parameters.

And so on.None of this would matter much if our government were more amenable to reconsidering first principles, but that’s getting harder, too. The Constitution can be amended, and it has been, 27 times. But growing political polarization in recent years has made that difficult. Only two constitutional amendments were ratified during the past half-century (one giving 18-year-olds the right to vote and another, more anodyne amendment that makes it a little harder for Congress to give itself a raise).

Congress could perhaps pick up some of the slack, but it’s slowed down, too. According to the Pew Research Center, Congress passes fewer substantive laws today than it did 30 years ago.Increased use of the filibuster (which isnotmentioned in the Constitution, but has been around almost as long) almost certainly played a role, and a fed-up Senate has during the past decade started phasing out its use. In a provocative June 2018 essay inCommentary, the political scientist Yuval Levin posited that 231 years on, Congress had acquired a problem James Madison never anticipated: a reluctance to compete with the other two branches of government in the exercise of power. Partisanship, he concluded, had displaced ambition to legislate. Senators and representatives, he wrote, now “see themselves as players in a larger political ecosystem the point of which is not legislating or governing but rather engaging in a kind of performative outrage for a partisan audience.” Levin didn’t put it this way, but he seemed to be suggesting that Congress had grown decadent, likefin de siècleVienna, but without the solace of Sacher tortes.

A more modest theory of governmental decadence was set forward by Rauch in his 1994 bookDemosclerosis. The idea was that democracy had developed arteriosclerosis, not because its system of government was creaky, but rather because the accumulating power of interest groups over time was choking it like a weed. Demosclerosis differs from gridlock, Rauch argued, because gridlock implies that nothing gets done. In a demosclerotic government, plenty gets done. Rather, Rauch wrote, the government’s ability to solve problems is compromised because it can’t easily reassign a finite set of resources. Old allocations must continue, and therefore new allocations can’t be experimented with.

Think of it, Rauch says, like leaving a bicycle in the rain. The bicycle may be perfectly fine, but if you leave it outside long enough rust will corrode it. All things considered, Rauch says, the Constitution is in excellent working condition. But its machinery has been left out too long in the rain.

Bringing a bicycle in from the rain should be within the ability of America’s somewhat doddering polity. Our gerontocracy is a bit rheumatic, but it isn’t hopeless. Still, the task will likely be easier and go much faster if a few more young hands pitch in.

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Little Britain? The U.K. loses its mojo in Washington

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/little-britain-the-u-k-loses-its-mojo-in-washington/

Little Britain? The U.K. loses its mojo in Washington

President Donald Trump talks with British Prime Minister Theresa May during the opening day of Argentina G20 Leaders’ Summit 2018 at Costa Salguero on November 30, 2018 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. | Amilcar Orfali/Getty Images

foreign policy

Close observers say Britain’s influence in Washington is at a low point, suffering from a long-term decline accelerated by Brexit and Trump’s election.

When he visited Britain last year, President Donald Trump nodded to the venerable “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom. “Our bond is like no other,” he proclaimed.

But as he prepares for his first state visit to the longtime ally next week, close observers say Britain’s influence in Washington is at a low point, suffering from a long-term decline accelerated by the one-two punch of Brexit and the election of Trump, whose actions have done more to harm the relationship than his words may suggest.

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On the military front, Britain is arguably less important to the United States than in years past, as its armed forces have shrunk and France has stepped up to catch wandering American eyes. On economics, the Trump administration is already pushing a hardline stance ahead of potential negotiations for a trade deal that would take effect once Britain leaves the European Union. Even the two countries’ famously close intelligence relationship is hitting obstacles as Trump aides threaten to withhold secrets if Britain doesn’t bar the Chinese firm Huawei from building its cellular networks.

Diplomats say that despite his occasional oratorical assurances, Trump himself appears to care little for the countries’ “special relationship” or international alliances in general. He has accused Britain of spying on his presidential campaign and undermined outgoing British Prime Minister Theresa May in interviews and on Twitter, essentially endorsing one of May’s critics for her post and questioning her efforts to engineer a proper Brexit.

“At no moment has the fact of being an ally in anyway prevented Trump from trying to twist the arm of the other side,” said Gérard Araud, until recently the French ambassador to the United States. “The special relationship was more special on the British side than the American side.”

The state of the relationship will face intense scrutiny next week, when Trump travels to Britain for his official state visit. The visit, which the British promised early on in Trump’s tenure, was once seen as a chance to reaffirm the countries’ bond, but the pomp and circumstance-filled event is likely to instead expose the spreading cracks.

Trump will land in Britain amid chaos. May is due to quit her post within days of Trump’s departure, she has no clear successor and British politicians have been unable to settle on a plan to leave the EU. The British are wary that Trump will wade into the fractious debate, perhaps endorsing Brexit hardliner Boris Johnson to replace May, or even meeting with Nigel Farage, leader of the populist Brexit Party.

During Trump’s trip to the U.K. last year, dubbed a “working visit,” London erupted with demonstrations, generating lasting images of a giant diapered and screaming baby Trump balloon. Protests are expected this time, too.

The British Embassy did not offer anyone for comment, while the White House pointed to Trump’s past comments praising the British-U.K. relationship. But a former staffer at the British Embassy in D.C. told POLITICO that the main change in the “special relationship” is simple — Trump.

“Trump is always looking for leverage,” the former staffer complained.

A White House official pushed back on the characterization.

“The special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom is fundamental to our shared security and prosperity,” the official said. “The United States has no closer partner than the U.K.”

On trade, Trump and his aides have shown no inclination to offer favorable terms to London, which is desperate to strike a bilateral deal with Washington once it leaves the EU.

The Trump administration is already pursuingtough termssure to be deeply unpopular in Britain. For instance, the U.S. wants the British to drop restrictions on GMOs — genetically modified foods — and chlorine-washed chicken products. Such restrictions currently align the U.K. with EU standards on food products.

America’s ambassador to Britain, Woody Johnson, recently published a column in which he urged the British to embrace the American approach to such products and ignore the “smear campaign from people with their own protectionist agenda.”

Trump has long taken a hard line on trade negotiations, convinced that even U.S. allies are cheating Americans on such deals, so his administration’s treatment of the U.K. so far isn’t exactly a surprise.

Araud, perhaps, put it most bluntly. “Trump is really very transactional,” he told POLITICO. “I don’t see any reason to believe that he will be nice with the British.”

Democrats have similarly cautioned that Brexit could hurt the two countries’ future trading relationship.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recentlytoldthe Irish parliament that there will be no post-Brexit U.S.-U.K. trade deal if Britain’s departure from the EU threatens the 1998 Good Friday peace accord that eased tensions in Northern Ireland, a notable remark given that Trump will likely need lawmakers’ approval for any trade deal.

Britain’s expected exit from the EU has raised concerns that a border will have to be imposed between Northern Ireland, which is considered part of the U.K., and the rest of Ireland, given that Ireland will remain in the EU. The notion of imposing a “hard border” has already to led to warnings that violence could return to the region.

While Britain will remain a member of the NATO alliance, the bilateral U.S.-U.K. military relationship has grown weaker, observers say.

When speaking of how the British had “vanished” in Washington, Araud told the Financial Times earlier this year: “The British ambassador told me — and I loved it — that every time the British military is meeting with the American military, the Americans are talking about the French.”

Former U.S. officials and analysts say Araud is not entirely exaggerating.

The size of the British armed forces has shrunk in recent decades, and the country has imposed repeated funding cuts while struggling to articulate a military vision and get new recruits, according to analysts.

“You talk to the Brits, but you don’t expect a lot because they’re so tied up in their own drama,” said Derek Chollet, a former top Pentagon official in the Obama administration. “For many years, for decades, they stood out from the pack of partners. Now they’re kind of back in the pack a little bit, and others are playing a role that traditionally they would play.”

Michael Shurkin, a senior political scientist with the RAND Corporation, said it’s not so much that the U.S. thinks less of the British as it is that it’s intrigued by the French. He compared the situation to the famousmemeof the young man walking with his girlfriend while eyeing another woman.

“The French have this incredible cohesion and coherence when it comes to their vision of what their military is for,” Shurkin said. “The money is there, they know what to do with it and they’re moving forward.”

While the British joined the French and the U.S. in intervening in Libya against dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, the U.K. parliament voted down an attempt to pursue military strikes against the Syrian regime in 2013 after it is alleged to have used chemical weapons.

“We could look back and see Libya as kind of the last gasp of the U.K. in terms of its meaning in the world,” Chollet said.

Even the British-U.S. intelligence relationship faces new strain.

Amid his praise of the “special relationship” on a recent visit to Britain, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cautiously warned the British that if they move ahead with using the Chinese firm Huawei to help them build their future telecommunications networks, the U.S. will think twice about sharing information with them.

“Insufficient security will impede the United States’ ability to share certain information within trusted networks,” Pompeo said.

Despite the strains, compared to most other bilateral relationships, the one between Britain and the United States remains unusually tight, even the most cynical observers acknowledge.

The cultural and linguistic similarities between the two countries run deep, as does the shared history encompassing World War II and its aftermath. During Trump’s state visit next week, he will attend a ceremony to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a powerful reminder of how the two countries have stood by each other in the darkest moments.

“Our countries cherish the same beliefs in liberty, democracy and the rule of law,” said Jeremy Hunt, the British foreign secretary, when he hosted Pompeo earlier this month.

In turn, Pompeo repeatedly praised U.S.-U.K. ties, pointing out that British diplomats even get unusually broad access to the State Department. “The ‘special relationship’ is the beating heart of the entire free world,” Pompeo said.

But Brexit has so thoroughly dominated British politics that the country appears to have little capacity for much else, analysts and officials say.

The bitter divorce with the EU was supposed to have already taken place, but political disarray has led to several extensions, with no end in sight. And when the expected separation takes effect, a huge chunk of the British apparatus will have to focus for years on actually implementing it.

Former U.S. officials and analysts described Brexit as a self-imposed wound that is hastening the decades-long downward trend in British influence worldwide.

Some even say that, due to Brexit, Trump or other reasons, the U.K.-U.S. relationship is at its worst point since the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, which saw a falling out between the two countries over Britain’s decision to join a military campaign against Egypt.

“I think it’s much worse than the Suez crisis, in the sense that the Suez crisis occurred during the Cold War so there still was this external threat that was pushing the United States and the U.K. together,” said Charles Kupchan, a former Obama administration official now with the Council on Foreign Relations.

The former British embassy staffer who bemoaned Trump’s effect on U.S.-U.K. ties took some solace in pointing out that — in the grand scheme — it’s not just Britain that has had tensions with America under Trump. Neither France nor Germany have fared much better.

Instead, Trump appears to save his kindest words for strongmen in countries such as Russia and North Korea, while the leaders of traditional allies are left scratching their heads over how to respond to his unpredictable moods.

“The president has a preference for autocratic regimes,” the ex-staffer said. “Everything is so reactionary for all Western countries in Washington.”

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