#ALSO THE CONTRAST TO HOW HARVEYS VOICE WAS ORIGINALLY....

[martyrbat]

batman: the animated series S2E01

[VD: an exterior shot of a house in Gotham City at night. One side is pristine, with crisp white paint and clean windows. The other side is decrepit, the windows bordered up as the building itself looks rusty and like it's falling apart. Inside, Bruce Wayne is shown in his Matches Malone disguise and is unconscious on the floor after being electrocuted for sneaking in through a window. In the foreground we can see a man's shoes as he sarcastically announces, “It appears we have a prowler!” His voice is low and growled as his henchman flips Bruce over so he's laying on his back.

Bruce groans lowly as the goon slaps him twice to wake him up. He's hoisted up on his feet and then is roughly turnt around to face the shadows, where the mystery man is standing with his arms crossed. He asks, “Who are you? What are you doing here?” Bruce stutters his explanation in a fake voice as he rubs his head, “I'm Matches Malone. Heard bout a new mob. Thought I could make some more dough…” The man steps closer and jeers, “Is that so?” He walks away as Bruce watches him. The man flips a coin once with one hand as he continues, “Well, you heard right. In fact, you can double your take on the jobs we’re pulling... Assuming I let you live to join my gang!” He dramatically steps out of the shadows, revealing to only Bruce's surprise that it's Harvey Dent!

Bruce gasps slightly and stares at Harvey in shock as Two-Face steps closer to him. He sneers, “Matches Malone, huh? Never heard of ya. But theres something about you that I don't like.” He jabs his finger against Bruce's chest as he goads, “Nothing that I can put my finger on but I trust my hunches. Kinda like a second sight, y'know?” He pulls out his coin and states the stakes, “Good heads you live, bad heads you don't. Simple, huh?” Behind Bruce, the goon cocks his gun as Harvey flips his coin. Bruce stares wide-eyed as Harvey looks at him with an impassive expression. The coin lands in Harvey's palm—the scarred side facing up. Bruce looks down at it with that same appalled expression before looking over his shoulder—where the gun is already being raised to bluntly hit his head with the muzzle of it. We hear Bruce's pained grunt as the scene cuts back to the exterior. END VD]

[batmanfruitloops]

Happy 1st Anniversary to the Batmanfruitloops!!! 🎉

Whoo! This is such an achievement, but also it's such a crazy thought that it's been a WHOLE YEAR??? It means a lot that so many other people like our au as much as we do, and even more that we've been able to make friends; we want to thank all of you new and old for joining us here to have fun and enjoy the journey of our au!

With that said, I'd like to share some old art that's "behind the scenes" stuff from out time since we started our au.

also if you've been here since these were the profile picture and banner, you're a real one;

Fun fact, I (Sarsee) don't like fruit loops, but it was the first thing I thought of to name the blog, plus it was memorable. The au name being "Batman: A New Gotham" came later! Double plus, the abbreviation is BANG and I find that coincidence just delightful.

One of favorite changes that happened out of nowhere was John's eyes changing from more round to almond. He used to look a lot more like the Telltale Joker, but I feel like his current eyes fit better with his personality in our au. This also isn't going to show up because it's file names, but I had originally wanted to call the Joker "Jbird" like Batman calls him in the Lego Batman movie. (for context, it's the scene where Joker is tied to a bunch of balloons - you know the one - and side note, I want to redraw a screenshot from that with our Joker eventually) I don't have any pictures with a "Jbird" design because I never got the idea to work, I just thought it could have been interesting considering Joker works with Batman in our au and that would put him on theme with the Batfam being flying mammals/avians.

Most of the other original designs aren't too drastic either - or at least it doesn't feel like it to me. Scarecrow and Riddler have changed a lot though. And I think the changes that came about with Fluffy joining on board were much needed (Scarecrow's costume was always done by Fluffy, but I designed him out of costume originally -I was originally making the au myself, but that didn't last long when we started yapping about ideas to one another and never stopped) She also couldn't understand how I stylized his hair, so it became puffy and unruly instead of curly and gelled back. Ed can still gel his hair if he wanted to, just for special occasions.

Some old sillies as well from Fluffy;

we find the contrast between Batman vs. Scarecrow and Joker vs. Riddler very funny because it's so drastically different. The Joker and Riddler never really try to hurt each other, they just like to play into the dramatics and vibe while still on their separate sides. Batman and Scarecrow want to tear one another's throats out and watch them suffer for it because they have no idea what's going on in their heads.

with the villain!joker timeline, there's an alternate version of the Goon squad (Dork Squad + Joker) where it's Harvey instead of the Joker. Or as well, there can be all five of them. Harvey is the only person who can scruff Jo like the gremlin he very much is and he'll just let it happen.

I don't know if this will show up in the comic anymore, but at one point the Joker was going to refer to Scarecrow and the Riddler as Samhain and a leprechaun because they're both partially Irish - couldn't really be that specific with voice claims, and they'd be offended

and lastly, Ed gets cranky when he's tired

Batman and Riddler are the only two to get digital references at the time and man, do I much prefer how streamlined the final ones look. I mean, what was the dingy brown I had behind Batman? For a split second, Ed's coat was almost purple, but thankfully, Fluffy convinced me otherwise and suggested his shoes be purple. This is also before his vest, and now there's an in story reason for why he doesn't have it in the beginning. Also look at how skinny and tall Ed looked!! (he was still short, he's not allowed to be tall in our au)

That's all I have for now, we'd love to hear any thoughts/memories/etc. in the comments!

Love, Sarsee and Fluffy, your batmanfruitloops creatures

[commajade]

Your inbox must be a shitshow but I'd love to hear/see you talk about SHINees 1and1 album

<333333333333333

tell me what to do is sooooo goooood that styling is sooo good i have such clear memories of watching it for the first time with my best friend lying on my bed in high school. the styling was just outfits for lesbians to steal thank u shinee from the lesbians. it was the perfect concept and sound for the repackage of 1of1 because it makes a kind of sequence with odd and mmtm. tell me what to do is 90s angsty view in a lot of ways and mttm and 1of1 r very high concept. father of kpop yoo youngjin was involved in both the lyrics and production.

i skip the ballads on this one ngl i don't like cute happy ballads and shinee makes a LOT of them i think i hate the piano and/or guitar in those for some reason. that's also why i don't listen to a lot ost music. beautiful life is the best one i think it sounds more musical theater. if you love her gets good for me like a quarter of the way in minho's part and then those harmonies r lovely.

rescue one of the best songs there are. genuinely. every single sound in that track is gold. it's harvey mason jr and kenzie of course it's gonna be good. taemin's vocal entrance rly left an impression cuz of textural contrast and then the centerpiece of the song is that layered vocal harmony with the big bass sound. also the postchorus jongyu duet section it is SO good the way jjong's sexy lower register creeps in the back of jinki's voice that's amazing. perfect perfect ending. pls look up the slightly slowed down version of this it's amazing too. the vocals are absolutely top notch. only shinee could do this song. those perfect perfect tight harmonies. only shinee can do this, it only sounds this good when it's their voices. everyone says this but they have 5 such distinct voices that come together so tightly.

prism just makes me want to yell with love. jonghyun worked really hard producing this one. i literally hit play and hear jinki's opening notes and i'm already done i'm out it's perfection and then jjong comes in under. i would like this song no matter who sings it but it wouldn't be quite as gripping. deez is another producer i rly like and forgot to mention before. i love shinee songs that are shinee themed, the lyrics r about how they're recipients of light. the backing harmonies are kinda buried but it somehow maximizes impact that way.

i forget regularly just how good the song 1of1 is jesus that stripped down bridge that guitar with jinki's effortless super extended rnb riff his lung capacity and vocal control is of the gods. that funk guitar is gonna kill me. the drumtrack on this is perfect. my first thought for this was that it's 90s new jack swing and i was so right.

is feel good the original adrian mckinnon classic for shinee? with tay jasper too. this is actually the opposite of my usual taste it's that western pop sound i usually hate but once the chorus of this hits nothing else matters. minho's voice in his lower register REALLY shines in this one the texture just pops. god the bridge is so good too. god this is a great song. and then the breakdown with the beat switch just gets you there. and then it right up with that suspended moment and then the upward chromatic synths. perfect drumtrack yet again. god it's one of the many shinee songs that just leaves u a little bit breathless when it's over.

and then don't let me go (clear umbrella in korean) comes in to let you breathe. it's a fan favorite in korea cuz koreans have taste. the tight harmonies are back. it's such a nice groove while being so light and clear and happy like you're breathing in fresh air after being in a subway. minho and key both wrote part of the lyrics. that one moment where key goes from a rly compressed kind of flat nasal (in a good way) rapping singtalk tone to wide open ballad singer vocals was actually incredible. there's absolutely no pause between the register changes and it's completely different jaw and mouth placement but he does it live easily it's kind of insane. jonghyun's adlibs near the end sound like rain falling.

lipstick. a masterpiece. jonghyun kills u with that opening. that guitar sounds incredible with the drumtrack. this is incredible rnb pop. who was the guitarist on this!! oh of course this is a harvey mason jr masterpiece. he's worked with aretha franklin whitney houston michael jackson britney spears. the other producers are extremely credentialed in western pop as well. no wonder this is perfect. the lyrics are gorgeous too, minho wrote his verse.

don't stop was one of my faves on the first listen. i think the genre is house? minho's whispering in the back is so funny but also adds that perfect final kick to the song. jonghyun minho and key all wrote lyrics for this. this one's produced by the stereotypes, pls google them.

by the time u get to shift u just start yelling "ok now this just isn't fair" because this is a kenzie AND adrian mckinnon AND ldn noise tack. this is rly key's genre his shift solo cover could be a title track performance. this is runway music this is as sharp and fluid and luxurious and precise as key is.

i'm including it here because i want to and cuz this song doesn't have a full group performance

and then as soon as ur done with that experience shift is like absolutely perfect futuristic synth rnb pop that kinda hits u in the face with that production. that warm slightly distorted live bass??? inspired. the sounds are so weird but so slick and stylish and experimental and very very shinee. and vocals just as interesting as the production??? only shinee. the key change with jjong's riff near the end phewww.

and then so amazing as the feel good end credits. very happy uplifting and fun and very well produced. and jinki wrote the lyrics!

this album is really really really really really good.

[animatedminds]

Let’s Get Dangerous Review!

It’s dangerous. In a good way. <cue dramatic music> Okay, obviously there’s more thoughts than just that. I’ve been waiting for it for weeks, and it arrived just as awesome as I hoped. For the first time, let’s give my full movie style review to the double length Ducktales special: “Let’s Get Dangerous.”

The spoilers are open and widely discussed, so maybe don’t look past the following image if you haven’t seen the episode yet.

To note, I’m not entirely convinced that this was actually meant to be a pilot. It definitely does introduce a new status quo for the Darkwing trio of characters (minus Honker for now, here’s hoping they haven’t forgotten him), but it’s also a very remote story that still tries to take place within the context of Ducktales’ universe, so it really depends on what they choose to do.

But let’s just get down to it.

First off, as I mentioned in my earlier post… Taurus Bulba. He was maybe the biggest and most eye-catching aspect of the first part of the episode, as one of the few elements we hadn’t already seen yet, and his reputation as a really, really bad guy has quite preceded him. As I may have gushed somewhat about, he’s one of the best parts of the special.

James Monroe Inglehart, for those living away from the Disney scene for a decade, is an actor and voice actor most famous for being the original Genie on Broadway’s Aladdin. A grand, bombastic presence, he generally plays characters who - much like the genie himself - a big, jolly, kind but maybe a little mischievous souls that take the attention of a room and brighten up the characters’ day - like Lance, in Tangled the Series. The most interesting thing about Bulba is that Inglehart brings that exact same energy to the role, and so Bulba keep that jollity and lofty personality in a package that becomes increasingly less nice as the story goes on. As someone who keenly remembers Taurus Bulba as cruel monster willing to hurt kids and capable of crushing Darkwing like nobody’s business, the contrast was immediately fun to watch - and I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

In this story, Bulba is recast from a crime lord intending to use a super weapon go on an endless plundering spree to a FOWL scientist with a respectable reputation who intends to use a super weapon to take over the world, and the transition goes off fairly well. The end result is a pretty standard mix of superhero fight and Bond plot, as Bulba ends up holed up in his lab with his squadron of elite supervillain minions - all plundered a particular fictional universe - with the heroes having to break in / escape from his captivity and stop him before he destroys everything. It’s very Silver Age, with Bulba in the role of maniacal villain, and he’s contrasted very well with Bradford - who is as always an antagonist who prides himself on pragmatism. This contrast leads to some great moments: Bradford’s increasing frustration with the cavalier attitude of both the heroes and the villains gives him the best stint of characterization he’s had since the beginning of the season - he basically spends the whole episode arguing with everyone about how badly thought out their actions are, while also badly hiding his own secrets.

The Fearsome Five (of which Quackerjack is voices by his original actor) are great to see, though used minimally. If you’re expecting to see classic show dynamics between the villains and Darkwing, that’s not really what they’re used for. Mostly, they’re minions with personality, and they’re more there to establish both to the audience and to Drake the character himself that he is ready to take on really big threats even with his lack of superpowers.

But enough about the villains, on to the heroes!

A couple episodes ago, with the Halloween episode, I criticized that story for not balancing its A and B plot all that well. This episode does not have that problem. The story is actually maybe about three fifths Darkwing’s story, and the rest of it is Scrooge and the nephews as they figure out what Bulba is up to independently of Darkwing and try to stop him themselves. It’s somewhat similar to Timephoon, where they’re there constantly and are doing their own bid to solve the story but the focus isn’t primarily on them. Instead, we have some of the best “HDL actually matter to the story” bits of the show, where they escape Bulba’s prison on their own and lead Bradford out, all the while slowly figuring out that something is shady about the guy. Meanwhile, Scrooge gets stuck in the original Ducktales universe’s most memed scene, which was a fun gag (but not the best gag - that would be the one and only Bonkers D. Bobcat as the Harvey Bullock-style cop in the Darkwing show).

Which I suppose can lead to a digression about the mad science bit here. The alternate universes here are… interesting. I always pay special attention to how things like time travel or other dimensions or alternate universes work in a series, and this one reminds me the most - I think - of DC’s Dark Multiverse: a collection of universes that are both explicitly fictional but made real because people created them. Ultimately, it’s less as if the OG Darkwing universe exists independently of the Ducktales universe and more that the in-universe Darkwing show as a world based off of it that the characters can reach into. I wish the episode had delved into that more, and now you’ve got people trying to use it to look for more establishment of OG Darkwing elements (though I was fine with it being separate, perceiving anything else as rather needlessly inexplicable), but ultimately that is not specifically what the episode is about, and is kept rather separate.

So what is the episode about? Like you didn’t already know…

As always, Gosalyn Waddlemeyer is a little girl whose grandfather was done away with by Taurus Bulba, and who falls into Darkwing’s lap over the course of his adventure with him. Here, her grandfather is (possibly) still alive, just lost in the ether a la Gravity Falls’ Grunkle Ford. And like the mighty glazed McGuffin, Darkwing’s goal in the episode is less strictly defeating Bulba as it is helping her get her grandfather and her home back. Gosalyn here is self-sufficient and action oriented (it may be my inner Brooklyn 99 fan talking, but I loved Stephanie Beatriz as her, and kind of wish she had gotten a wider range of lines), taking on her own crusade against Bulba until she realizes she can go to Darkwing for help, and is constantly trying to pull him into the fight - even while he is reluctant, and no matter what the danger - so that they can win and she can get justice. But in the end, she has to accept that they might not be able to.

As a longtime Batman fan, I immediately recognized a plethora of Robin references with Gosalyn. She’s a kid who’s family was taken from her by a villain, given a surrogate home by the hero - like Dick Grayson. She’s a street tough who originally met the hero committing a crime, and who is both skeptical of his heroism and heavily critical of his flaws - like Jason Todd. And she’s a young genius with a lot of scientific knowledge, tech skills and common sense - just like Tim Drake. There’s even elements of Carrie Kelley or Terry McGinnis there, in her determined if not gung-ho approach to heroism despite her circumstances and the hermit-like behavior of the hero.

And in the end, this is a fairly apt comparison, because Gosalyn essentially ends the story more as a Robin figure than previously, now as Darkwing’s more of a ward and official sidekick alongside Launchpad. The story does not, to note, involve her being adopted by Drake or becoming Gosalyn Mallard. Indeed, they don’t really end up having that sort of relationship. They’re distant and don’t really know how to relate to one another, and not about to broach the subject of family except in distant terms. There’s ultimately far less emphasis than before on Gosalyn and Drake being similar and hitting it off on a personal level, or even really Drake keying into Gosalyn’s potential and spirit as a person vs an element in his adventure. Throughout the story he regards her as a victim to be saved, then ultimately as an ally with potential to be respected, and in the end he gives her an offer to take up the mantle along side him while they search for her family… which ultimately creates something very different.

For people expecting something a little more akin to the implications the show made with Gyro and BOYD, Gosalyn here. The implication that they could be a family is brought up by Launchpad, but neither Drake nor Gosalyn are really there at the end of the story - I want to say they’re not there yet, but the way the story goes gives off the impression that the dynamic duo dichotomy is the relationship for the two the writing is most comfortable giving them.

Again, I’m a longtime Batman fan, so I understand and appreciate the nod. It gives them a really cool status quo that’s distinct from what came before it. Still, the strong father/daughter relationship between the two was very much the heart and soul of the original show, an endearing quality that created the character traits we love about both characters, and ultimately one of the primary characteristics that set the Darkwing family apart even from most comic book superhero stars - so even if they made something great out of it, it’s a shame to see Ducktales ultimately keep that relationship at arms’ length.

But that’s less a criticism and more just something I wish they had chosen to do differently - and it makes sense for the 2017 team’s take on Darkwing, which has always been more focused on “irrepressible hero who doesn’t give up” - a pluckie rookie growing into his competence - than “former fool whose great potential is unleashed through the people around him.” The latter is there, sometimes, but it’s not prominent. Original Darkwing was a man made better by his daughter, while the modern Darkwing doesn’t quite need that to find the hero within.

The only (and I mean only) criticism I have is the way the characters kind of jump around in how they respond to things. Drake wanting more crime, and then freaking out when super crime shows up and it’s way more than he thought he can handle is fine, and is one of the better character bits in the special. It being unclear whether Drake is against fighting supervillains because he thinks they’re too powerful vs because he doesn’t want to risk Gosalyn’s safety is another thing, though - it seems the show intended to imply the latter but forgot to include the line somewhere, so it’s not inferred until later and Drake suddenly benching Gos towards the end lacks set-up.

For her part, Gosalyn is suddenly and quickly afraid to fight for a brief moment so Launchpad can inspire her to face impossible odds, even though it was hardly the first time she had done so in the special. The ending I think wanted the characters to be somewhere that the rest of the special hadn’t gotten them to yet. But it’s all good - it ends well, so all’s well. Best gag of the episode, btw? Fenton, who is awful at keeping his secret identity secret, has hooked up Darkwing with his own hi-tech hero lair. Darkwing, despite supposedly being a detective (or at least an actor playing a detective), ends up as one of the two or three people remaining on Earth who hasn’t figured out that Fenton is Gizmoduck. Darkwing considers himself good friends with Fenton, despite hating Gizmoduck. It’s actually very funny.

It’s as of now unclear what is coming up for Darkwing. We know the St. Canard characters are going to factor in more as the FOWL plot progresses, and this episode kicks that plot into high gear - the characters now know about FOWL and their intentions, and are preparing themselves for a far more dangerous fight than usual. In short, with the midseason comes the renewed focus on the primary plot of the season, as per the usual. Like I said before, while I’m not as on board as most with the idea that this was a pilot, St. Canard was definitely established here - with series regular Zan Owlson as it’s new mayor, and a general aesthetic and set of protagonists. It wouldn’t be remiss for a future episode this season to take place there (though we know Negaduck isn’t happening this season).

The new few episodes, however, are focused more on the quest for Finch’s treasures and FOWL, so that’s going to have to wait for a while. We’ve been promised, as I recall, an episode that brings all the kids together (unless that’s part of the finale), which is nice - I may have mentioned before that the best episodes of the series have been the ones that put the kids (who are the characters with the most focus throughout its run) together and let all their personalities run through an adventure together - and with the cast growing somewhat constantly, it’s nice to know that no one is being forgotten.

Either way, I give the episode a great deal of recommendation - I only had a couple things that bothered me, and a few wishes for different choices, and ultimately I’m planning on watching it a ton of times just like I did the first Darkwing episode. From a classic Darkwing fan, and in the words of Bat-Mite, it’s a different intepretation to be sure, but not at all one without merit.

So thanks to Frank Angones, Matt Youngberg and the Ducktales crew! I hope my virtual thumbs up reaches them somehow, but either way, it was a good day to be dangerous.

[aion-rsa]

Did The Dark Knight Really Influence the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

https://ift.tt/2QyP40k

In 2008, there were two seismic events in the superhero movie genre so close together that you’d be forgiven for thinking they signaled the same thing. Over the span of a few months, Marvel Studios launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) via Iron Man, and director Christopher Nolan changed the perception of how seriously to take these movies with The Dark Knight. Both are credited as watershed moments for how audiences and (more importantly) the industry approached such stories; and The Dark Knight is specifically singled out as the gold standard by which all other masked crimefighter films are measured.

However, was Nolan’s haunting vision—one in which a lone avenger is the last, best hope for a major American city on the verge of collapse—really that influential on its genre? The Dark Knight certainly had a monumental impact on the culture, then and now. You saw it when Heath Ledger’s searing interpretation of the Joker made him only the second actor to win a posthumous Oscar, as well as when the film’s exclusion from the Best Picture race changed the way the Academy Awards handled its top prize. And just last year, The Dark Knight became only the second superhero movie inducted into the National Film Registry.

Yet when a friend watching last week’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier premiere told me Marvel was returning to the “realistic” approach of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and by extension The Dark Knight, I couldn’t help but disagree. The new Disney+ series may have a slightly more grounded aesthetic than the last time we saw these characters (back when they were fighting space aliens over magic stones in Avengers: Endgame), but the medium-blending existence of the series belies the idea that Marvel took anything significant from the insular and self-contained Dark Knight Trilogy.

The Dark Knight vs. Iron Man

It’s interesting to look back at just those 2008 films since at face value they bore minor similarities. They both were focused on fantastically wealthy billionaires using their fortunes to fight wrongdoing on a potentially global scale; each movie was directed by filmmakers with indie cred thanks to Nolan helming Memento (2000) and Jon Favreau writing and starring in Swingers (1996); and each starred unexpected casting choices with Ledger as the Joker and Robert Downey Jr. jumpstarting a career comeback as Tony Stark.

But their goals and approaches were worlds apart. The obvious thing to note, besides The Dark Knight being a sequel to Batman Begins (2005) and Iron Man being an origin movie, is that Iron Man had an slyly hilarious sensibility, and The Dark Knight fancied itself an allegory about post-9/11 America. The former’s success was engineered in large part by Downey’s gift for comedic improvisation and freestyle. Indeed, co-star Jeff Bridges said in 2009 that he, Downey, and Favreau were essentially improvising their scenes from scratch every day during primitive rehearsals. “They had no script, man,” Bridges lightly complained with his Dude diction.

By contrast, The Dark Knight appears at a glance to be an exercise in self-seriousness and lofty ambition. Every scene, written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan, appears like a chess move, and each character a pawn or knight who’s been positioned to put contemporary audiences in a state of pure anxiety with War on Terror imagery and dialogue. Of course this clocklike presentation is itself another Nolan illusion, as smaller players like Michael Jai White, who portrayed gangster Gambol in the movie, have been quite candid about. As with almost every film, there is still a level of fluidity and workshopping on Nolan’s set.

Ultimately, the bigger difference between the Nolan and eventual Marvel approach is what each is hoping to accomplish with the film they’re currently making. More than just offering a “realistic” vision of Batman, The Dark Knight attempted to tell a sweeping crime drama epic that would stand alone, separate from its status as a Batman Begins sequel. Rather than being “the next chapter,” The Dark Knight was meant to be a cinematic distillation of Batman and Joker’s primal appeals writ large. With this approach, the film also broke away from the superhero movie template Batman Begins followed three years earlier, and which nearly all superhero films still walk through the paces of.

In essence, The Dark Knight showed that superhero movies could be dark and mature, yes, but they can also be subversive, unexpected, and genuinely surprising. Nolan’s previous superhero movie, as good as it is, followed the beats set down by Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie nearly 30 years earlier. They’re the same beats trod by Iron Man and pretty much every other superhero origin movie, including a large bulk of Marvel Studios’ output. The Dark Knight, by contrast, reached for a cinematic vernacular separate from its specific genre. The movie’s not subtle about it either. The opening scene of Nolan’s epic wears its homages to Michael Mann’s Heat on its sleeves, and the story’s structure has more to do with Jaws than Jor-El.

The approach shook audiences in 2008 after they’d come to expect a certain type of movie from masked do-gooders. In The Dark Knight, superhero conventions could be subverted or obliterated when love interest Rachel Dawes is brutally killed off mid-sentence, or stalwart Batman is forced to claim a pyrrhic victory over the villain by entering into a criminal conspiracy and cover-up with the cops. The thrill of novelty was as breathtaking as the movie’s allegorical elements about a society on edge.

And even with The Dark Knight’s open-ended finale, it stood as a singular cinematic experience, complete with then-groundbreaking emphasis on IMAX photography. Nolan was so adamant about making this as self-contained an experience as possible that he jettisoned his co-story creator David Goyer’s idea of setting up Harvey Dent’s fall from grace for a third movie. Dent’s fate, as that of everyone else’s, would be tied strictly to the events of the movie you’re now watching.

“We Have a Hulk”

In Iron Man, and then more forcefully in Iron Man 2 (2010) and the rest of its “Phase One” era, Marvel Studios demonstrated a wholly different set of priorities. Similar to how Batman Begins paved the way for Nolan to do what he really wanted with that material, Iron Man 2 came to encapsulate Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige’s grander designs for the type of movies he was making. Where The Dark Knight was singular, unconventional, and two steps closer to our world than its comic book origins, Iron Man 2 was episodic, entirely crafted around audience expectations for a sequel, and even more like a comic book world than our own.

In other words, the first Iron Man gently submerged audiences into the fantasy by beginning with contemporary images of Tony Stark in a Middle Eastern desert; Iron Man 2 then made sweeping strides in defining what that MCU fantasy is as quickly as possible: Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) is introduced solely to establish the superspy who will be vital to The Avengers two years down the road, and the central narrative about Tony Stark fighting an old rival is put on pause to reintroduce the character Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) as a supporting, and superfluous, side character. The post-credit scene even arbitrarily introduces literal magic with a glowing hammer that has absolutely nothing to do with the story you just watched. Still, it’s a hell of a teaser for Thor which was due in theaters a year later.

With the release of Iron Man 2, Marvel Studios’ emphasis became diametrically opposed to the driving concept behind The Dark Knight Trilogy. Rather than each film being an insulated, standalone cinematic experience like the Hollywood epics of old, Marvel’s movies would be interconnected episodes in an ongoing narrative saga that spanned multiple franchises and countless sequels. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Unlike Nolan after The Dark Knight, Feige and his stable of writers always know where the next movie (or five) is going, and have a better idea of what the overall vision is than any single director working within this system. Ironically, this returns power to the studio and producer as the seeming authorial voice of each movie. Like in the Golden Age of Hollywood, directors are more often hired hands than influential auteurs.

However, this means the aspects Nolan really valued on The Dark Knight beyond a gritty “realism”—elements like spontaneity, subversion, and a distancing from superhero tropes—became antithetical to the type of movies produced by the MCU. For at least the first decade of its existence, the Marvel Cinematic Universe flourished by creating a formula and house style that is as predictable for audiences as the contents in a Big Mac.

When you go to a Marvel movie, you more or less you’ll get: an ironic, self-deprecating tone, a story that often revolves around a CG MacGuffin that must be taken from the villain, and a narrative in which disparate heroic characters come together after some amusing, disagreeable banter. In fact, more than Iron Man, it was Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (2012) which refined the Marvel formula into what it is today.

There are of course exceptions to this rule. Black Panther became the first Marvel movie since Iron Man to arguably tackle themes significant to the real world, in this case specifically the legacy of African diaspora. It also became the first superhero film nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture as a result; James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies might follow the narrative formula of most MCU movies, but they’re embedded with a cheeky and idiosyncratic personality that is distinctly Gunn’s; and in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and Captain America: Civil War (2016), directors Joe and Anthony Russo, as well as screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, attempted to inject a little bit of that “realistic” aesthetic from The Dark Knight. But only to a point.

Particularly in the 2014 effort, there was a push by the Russos to rely on in-camera special effects and cultivate what they often described in the press as a “1970s spy thriller” style. Ostensibly, the hope may have been to make The Winter Soldier as much a spy thriller as The Dark Knight was a crime epic. In this vein, there were even attempts to graft onto the story very timely concerns about the overreach of a government surveillance state, which had only grown in the decade since the U.S. PATRIOT Act was passed, despite a change in White House administrations. However, all of these ambitions had an invisible ceiling hovering above them.

Despite having overtones about the danger of reactionary if well-intentioned government leaders, like the kind personified by Robert Redford’s SHIELD director in the movie, Captain America: The Winter Soldier couldn’t become too focused on the espionage elements or too far removed from the Marvel house style. The story still needed to interconnect with other Marvel films, hence Redford’s character turning out to be a secret HYDRA double agent, and it still needed to give audiences what they expected from a Marvel movie. Thus how this “1970s spy thriller” ends in a giant CGI battle with citywide destruction as Captain America inserts MacGuffins into machines that will blow up HYDRA’s latest weapon for world domination.

It’s easy to wonder if the movie was developed a little longer, and didn’t have to play by a certain set of rules and expectations, that instead of backpedaling into comic book motivations, Redford’s character would’ve been a well-intentioned patriot amassing power “to keep us safe,” and in the process destabilized the institutions he claimed to revere.

Read more

Movies

What Did Batman Do Between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises?

By David Crow

TV

WandaVision: The Unanswered Questions From the Marvel Series

By Gavin Jasper

A Universe Without End

The Marvel method breeds a heavy need for familiarity and comfortable predictability, as opposed to disorientation and discomfort. Yet both methods are valid. While Nolan achieved near universal praise for The Dark Knight, his attempt to replicate it with the even more ambitious The Dark Knight Rises—an unabashed David Lean-inspired epic that took more from A Tale of Two Cities and Doctor Zhivago than DC Comics—left fans divided. It also was a narrative dead end for the corporate/fanbase need of an ongoing franchise. Nolan instead reached a final, artistic, and emphatic period for his cinematic interpretation of Batman mythology. By comparison, Marvel Studios has created a new cinematic vernacular that only ever uses dashes, semicolons, and commas. There is always more to tell.

Nolan reflected on these changing circumstances for superhero movies in 2017 when he said, “That’s a privilege and a luxury that filmmakers aren’t afforded anymore. I think it was the last time that anyone was able to say to a studio, ‘I might do another one, but it will be four years.’ There’s too much pressure on release schedules to let people do that now, but creatively it’s a huge advantage.”

This lines up with what Jeff Bridges said about the evolution of the Marvel method way back in ’09 after the first Iron Man: “You would think with a $200 million movie you’d have the shit together, but it was just the opposite. And the reason for that is because they get ahead of themselves. They have a release date before the script [and they think], ‘Oh, we’ll have the script before that time,’ and they don’t have their shit together.”

Bridges’ unhappiness with the new process notwithstanding, Marvel was rewriting the playbook about how these types of movies were made. Nolan’s approach of one at a time and years-long development processes created three distinctly different and relatively standalone Batman movies. But Marvel has shifted the idea of not just what a franchise can be, but also what cinematic storytelling means.

Instead of three movies, their rules and structures have generated dozens of well-received and adored entertainments, that when combined can produce experiences as unique as Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019): two movies that were more like a two-part season finale on TV than individual stories. And the latter became the highest grossing film of all time.

The success of this approach is further underlined when one considers competitors that tried to emulate both Marvel and Nolan’s approaches, relying on a lone auteur to build a shared cinematic universe—while also arguably taking the wrong lessons from the “dark” in The Dark Knight title. In the case of the DC Extended Universe, that approach collapsed on itself after three movies, leaving the interconnected “shared” part of its universe in tatters, and fans and studio hands alike divided on how to proceed with the franchise.The Marvel Cinematic Universe took a narrower road than that of The Dark Knight. But it turned out to be a lot smoother and much, much longer.

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The post Did The Dark Knight Really Influence the Marvel Cinematic Universe? appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3lKi0hp

[riarushi]

dnyl | healing

❥ m.list ↳ ch.1 / ch.2 / ch.3    dnyl | heartbreak

❥ summary- the odd distractions from a terrible heartbreak. ↳ genre- high school au, fluff, angst   word count- 1.4k

➵

"So, who's the new guy?"

You raised your eyebrow at your friend. "What new guy?"

"You know, the pretty one you're always talking to!" She pouted as she began to question your honesty. "I see you guys talking whenever I pass your calculus class, don't lie to me!"

"Ohhh," you sounded. "You mean Harvey?"

"That's his name?" Nodding her head, she began encoding the information into her mind. "When did you guys get together?"

You laughed. "You make it sound like we're dating."

"Are you not?"

A blush made its way onto your cheeks. "Of course not, we're only classmates."

Your friend narrowed her eyes at you. "Hmmm..."

"W-what?"

The comfortable distance returned as she moved beside you. "Okay, if you say so." She shrugged, acting unbothered before changing the subject. "Wanna go to a cafe with me and the love of my life? One just opened nearby!"

"I can't," you responded. "Harvey and I have to work on our bio project."

"Whaaaaat?" Your friend huffed. "Are you spending all your time with that guy?"

You shake your head. "I promise I'll go next time."

"... Fine."

You watched as the girl approached her boyfriend, who was waiting at the doors for her. A smile crept onto your face as you watched him take her books from her arm, effectively making your cheery friend turn red. As they left the building, you decided to make your way to the classroom where Harvey wanted to meet.

I wonder how long he'll be..

You peeked inside, scanning over an almost empty classroom only lit by the sunlight pouring from the windows. Double checking the room number, you stepped in and took a seat near the front. There wasn't much to take in from, just the rows of wooden benches and desks to your sides. On the whiteboard were doodles of hearts and happy faces, probably left behind by students. Perhaps the teacher was the friendly type, enjoying their students' art.

When you turned around, you noticed another student sitting in one of the seats at the back. It was a boy, probably in your grade. You weren't really sure, since he didn't seem to be in any of your classes. His hair was dyed a fashionable silver, covering his face as he was hunched over the paper on his desk. Curiosity was burning in your mind. Surely, it wouldn't be weird to converse with the only other person in the room.

Slowly, you made your way out of your chair and up the small stairway. What you saw him working on made you speechless. It was a random drawing, but it looked professional. The shading made everything pop out, almost as if the paper was three-dimensional. Shuffling closer behind him, you tried to peak over his shoulder and get a better look.

"Do you mind?"

The sudden voice made you jump. He was looking at you, clearly a bit pissed off. His glare was intimidating, contrasting the aura that had previously made him so approachable. You noticed his arm was now covering the art piece.

"Oh, um, sorry..."

The boy let out a sigh, flipping the paper over to the blank side and hiding his work. "Is there something you need from me?" he asked. He leaned back in his seat, still facing you with an irked expression.

"Um..." Honestly, you just wanted to spend time talking to someone while waiting for your bio partner. It didn't seem like asking this student to do that was going to end well. "I... was wondering if you know where this guy named Harvey is?" you began rambling. "He has blonde hair and really blue eyes. And.. um.. he also has--"

"I know who you're talking about," he interrupted. His expression lost its forced softness, scaring you a bit. "If you're looking for him, maybe the last thing you should be doing is sitting in a classroom doing nothing except bothering people."

What is up with this guy? You frowned, thinking about how you had originally meant to approach him in a friendly manner. Now, you didn't even want to be in the same room as him.

"That wasn't my intention," you defended.

"Well, I'm clearly busy," he snapped back.

Just then, you heard a familiar voice come from the doorway. "Y/N!"

You turned to see the blonde running up the stairs to meet up with you. He had a bright smile on, as usual. The tense air immediately fell in his presence.

"Sorry for keeping you waiting," he started. "I had to help a friend out with something."

"It's no problem." You turned your back to the artist sitting behind you. Harvey glanced over you, noticing him.

"Oh, Renjun! I didn't know you and Y/N were friends." His surprise took over the grin on his face, making his lips form a small 'o' shape.

"We're not." Renjun returned to his original hunched posture, flipping his paper over and picking up the pencil. "She was just asking where you were."

"Oh, whoops." The other boy laughed, slightly guilty. "What're you doing here? There's no club today."

"I just wanted somewhere quiet to sketch."

Harvey, the sweetest person you've met in the past month, is friends with the person that couldn't even say a single polite thing to you two minutes ago? You watched them chat for a while, eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

"Well, Y/N and I should probably get going. See you tomorrow, Renjun!" Your partner taps your back gently before running down to grab your bag at the front of the desk. "Come on, we need to get that project done, don't we?"

You took one more look at the guy known as Renjun, who had already become engrossed in his creative mind. I guess Harvey is the type that can befriend anyone.

"Do you want me to carry your stuff all the way to the library?" the boy beside you teased.

"Oh, sorry." You smiled, taking the backpack offered to you. Feeling a comfortable atmosphere between the two of you, you decided to satisfy your curiosity. "Who was that guy?"

"Hehe, he's a scary one, isn't he?"

Right on.

Harvey's gaze moved up towards the roof, still keeping his pace with you as you made a turn towards the far exit at the end of the hall. "He's not as mean as you think, y'know. Renjun and I are in the same club."

"What club?"

"Hehe, wouldn't you like to know?" he joked. Noticing you vigorously nodding your head, he continued. "DNYL, or 'Don't Need Your Love'."

You had never heard of that one before. "What does the club do? Or, like, what kind of club is it?"

"It just a gathering club," he explained, "for people who have had their hearts broken."

Ouch. That hit you in a spot that you didn't want to think about.

"Have you had your heart broken before?" you asked quietly.

"No, not really." Harvey pushed the door open, ushering you outside. "I just think a club like this is nice. People who've been hurt can find others that understand them, and together they heal. Even if I haven't experienced heartbreak, I can still cheer people up."

What a Harvey thing to say.

"What about you, Y/N?"

The question caught you off guard. "Have I ever had my heart broken?" His encouraging smile tempted you to keep going, but you were unsure about how much to share. Maybe you weren't close enough just yet, or perhaps he would think you were over-explaining. "Um, no. I haven't really had something like that, either," you lied.

"Really? That's cool." His obliviousness allowed you to relax a bit. "You should still join our club, though! We're pretty small and I could use some help building the community~"

"Don't you think it would be weird, though?" you asked.

"Why would it be weird?"

Your mind immediately went to your two friends and your crush (or, previous crush). By joining a club called DNYL, you were basically admitting your pain. "Wouldn't people think I got rejected...?"

"No, of course not! Everyone's welcome," he exclaimed. "Take some time to think about it, I think our members would like having you around."

You nodded silently, walking side by side towards your partner's home.

Maybe we should focus on getting a good grade before worrying about a club.

[aurora-daily]

Nine Songs: AURORA

Interview by Thomas Harvey for The Line of Best Fit (May 30th, 2019).

Ahead of the release of her third album, Norway’s greatest pop export talks Thomas Harvey through the songs that have shaped her life and sound.

From a bustling city to the stillness of the forest; one of the first things that AURORA says to me is that as much as she loves music, she rarely listens to it. Instead it’s the sounds, sights and smells of the world that truly influence the Norwegian singer/songwriter.

Aurora Aksnes grew up without a television or radio. It’s not been the study of listening that’s carried her craft as a songwriter, rather the experiences and feelings she’s discovered and observed. Consequently, when we meet in London to talk about the songs that have made an impact on her, she references the memories attached to each of them, rather than musical influences.

AURORA feels it’s important to take solace in the finer details of a piece of music, as well as the core of good song-writing. Many of her selections are from timeless, legendary artists, unsurprisingly for a writer whose productions can often be modernised on songs like ‘Queendom’, from 2018’s Infections Of A Different Kind - Step 1, the follow up to her debut All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend.

With the next chapter of the songwriters musical story arriving with A Different Kind Of Human - Step 2, AURORA explains how these nine songs have helped to shape her during the different periods of her life, from the feeling of kinship she felt with the audience at a Mastodon show at the age of eleven, to her honour in playing in the name of Leonard Cohen, to whom she paid tribute in a museum exhibition to his memory in Montreal

“Perfection is impossible” AURORA explains, an idea that’s an important reminder to herself when creating her music. Nonetheless, her relationship with music always stays with her as a friend.

“Rez” by Underworld

“I discovered this song and this band a year ago, quite randomly. I love going to rave parties alone and of course I don’t drink, because I don’t want to be vulnerable to an attack and get into any trouble. I don’t drink, but I stay safe and I just dance.

“I just really love to dance. It’s kind of like a workout for me, because I’m very energetic on stage. I was at a rave party in France on a boat and I heard this song and I had to ask someone ‘What song is this?’ and I found it later.

“Now I listen to it sometimes when I cook - everything techno is my cooking song. The last meal I was cooking and listening to it with was waffles I think. I have a new waffle maker and it can cook two waffles at a time.”

“Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen

“May he rest in peace, the lovely little angel. I love this song. Musically we only heard Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Enya when I was a child, there was nothing else as we didn’t have a radio. I love Enya as well, especially the way she just stays the same and doesn’t change her sound. She knows what she’s here to do and she does it.

"This was one of the songs that I really loved when I was unable to understand what he was saying, because I didn’t know English then, or at least I didn’t know these lyrics yet, because they were so complicated. I ended up learning my English mainly from online gaming or computer games like World Of Warcraft.

“A Seated Night” by Moby

“This song was on my computer, by a mistake I think, and on our family computer. We had a computer much later on - before computers were normal to have in every house - and we didn’t have a radio or MTV when I was growing up.

“I didn’t discover music when I was a kid and I still don’t really, because I don’t have many music platforms on my phone, but ‘A Seated Night’ was randomly downloaded through LimeWire onto our computer and it was the first song that I discovered through technology.

“I really love Moby, although I haven’t dived deep into him yet. I love the choir and I think that’s why I fell in love with this song, it’s just so nice. I love arranging myself into a choir and I’ve used a real choir for my music, a gay choir from Norway called Faggots. They’re really good, they just sing like real people and are really talented, more than I ever knew before I was working with them.

“They’re on “It Happened Quiet” and “Churchyard” and they’re also on my new record, where you can hear them quite promptly. They’re gorgeous. Ever since I heard this song, it had always been my dream to have a choir on my record.”

“Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles

“This was the first song where I really enjoyed some of the production stuff in it. I really love different cultures and I’m really into this kind of vibe. I really liked it when I was a kid, I heard it when I was a sixteen-year-old kid, not like four, I was a bit older.

“I found all my music through CD’s, even though there were other platforms, I was just really slow. We didn’t have stuff at home like a TV or radio, so I discovered this through a CD because I really liked the cover and that’s why I bought it, an LP actually, so old-fashioned! It was the second LP I ever bought for myself.

“The cover was really nice, and I just really liked it. And of course I knew about The Beatles, I knew that they were a big name, and I should listen to them and see if I like them or not. I just really realised that you can play along with things, and that’s when I became a producer.”

“Born Slippy” by Underworld

“I was driving through Iceland listening to this song and it’s just really gorgeous. I think this is how people feel when they take drugs - they begin on this floating cloud and then it becomes a bit chaotic at the end.

“It sounds like they were on drugs when they made it, but it doesn’t make me sad when I think about it, there’s something with it, it’s positive without making me vomit, which I really enjoy. Sometimes happier music is hard to listen to, because you can question as to why you aren’t as happy as the people in the song, but I like this song.

“I discovered this song much later, after ‘Rez’. When I hear one song I don’t automatically go and find the whole album, I kind of stop and just have fun with that song for months - I get really patient with songs and I can listen to them for months. I saw that ‘Born Slippy’ was on the same album as ‘Rez’ and now of course I have the whole album and I have rave parties for myself, just me.

“I also love to listen to this song whilst I paint, when I paint something without meaning. I’m full of opposites or coherent contrasts, one day I like to be at rave parties and then I like to be in forests. I like to see what the world has to offer me.”

“American Beauty: Original Motion Picture Score” by Thomas Newman

“This is my alarm clock; I wake up to it every morning. It’s so brilliant because it begins with this... and then I listen to it when I read books on a loop and it’s enough for me. It’s all I need. I have like one song for every mood.

“I heard this way before I watched the movie American Beauty. It was many, many years ago and it was one of the first songs I had. I had an orange iPod which I got for Christmas and I only had this song on it for years. I still think if I went into that iPod now, this is the only song I would have on it. I haven’t had it for years though, and they were such nice colours.

“It’s good for walks in the forest, it’s like everything is still. Another is the Finding Nemo soundtrack which is also good for timeouts or when you go for walks. It’s really lovely.”

“The Hunter” by Mastodon

“I really love heavy metal. I’m very open, so I don’t really care about genres and often with heavy metal I just like it. I was a huge fan of many heavy metal bands when I was a kid, the first concert I went to was Gojira and then Mastodon and then Slayer. I was eleven and I really loved it.

“None of my friends liked the music and so I remember feeling at home at the shows, because I met people who understood it. It’s so angry without being hostile if you really listen to it, but it can sound hostile to people who don’t understand it.

“This is quite a calm song by Mastodon. It’s a childhood memory, but a song that allowed me to discover Mastodon with a more melodic song than most heavy metal bands I knew. I saw them play two times actually.

“I try and turn what I love about heavy metal into something that more people can understand, like in songs like “Under The Water” and “The Seed”, the single I just released, is more heavy. I like the weight.”

“The Partisan” by Leonard Cohen

“I did this song for an installation at a museum in Montreal, I covered it in one of the rooms in his memory and it was really an honour. It was all of his life and achievements as pieces of art in the museum, and they asked artists to showcase his art so that people could see those that he influenced.

“I really love this song. I know that he speaks of the Second World War and I think that’s not often spoken about, considering how much pain it brought the world. Also, in art and music we don’t really paint or sing much about it but it’s important that people talk about it, because it’s something we carry on our shoulders and we did it to each other as a species.

“I think about it a lot, but it’s good to distance ourselves from the memory too. I have a few songs about the matter, though some are more obvious than others.”

“Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap

“This is a really sad song for me. I listened to it in a sad stage of my life, I could have gotten through without it, but it encouraged self-pity and staying in the sorrow, and I think that’s not always a bad thing. Sometimes you can stay for a while on things and cry and move on a bit later. I never listen to this song anymore because it reminds me of a sad time, but it’s still an important song to me.

“I like Imogen Heap as a producer. I like the vocoder on this, even though I think she’s using a different machine than the standard vocoder; I don’t really like the way a vocoder makes double voices sound so thin. If it sounds like I’m using a vocoder then I have always made it myself, but it’s a good balance here with this song. It works. I think vocoders are an ugly thing, but the way it’s executing its mission in this song is good.

“A Different Kind Of Human” is out now via Decca.

[grimelords]

I’m all caught up and presenting my August playlist just in time for September to end! Disco! Italo-pop! 90s gangsta rap! 3 hours worth of music for everyone!

Good To Me - THP: The most surefire way I’ve found to track down a great song you’ve never heard before is to look up every single sample on the Duck Sauce album. It has quite literally not failed me yet. This song is great, and being so used to the sped up sample in Goody Two Shoes this song sounds like the expanded chopped and screwed version to me which is even better.

Who Do You Love - THP: The other thing about THP is they’re extremely hard to search on Spotify because it thinks you’re trying to type ‘The’ and suggests 'The Beatles’ which is helpful.

Beleriand - The Middle East: I started rereading The Lord Of The Rings this month, and even got so deep in it that I started reading the Silmarillion for the first time and I suddenly remembered the time The Middle East wrote a song about Melkor and Angband and all that. Maybe the best Lord Of The Rings song I’ve heard almost exclusively for the drum work in the intro before it really settles into its Tolkein vibe.

Dead - San Fermin: I love this song but god I wish it were louder and more out of control. The sax sounds great but every other part isn’t nearly as turned up to 11 as it should be. The problem is that everyone in this band is such a professional they don’t know how to play like the maniacs this song deserves!

Tuesday Fresh Cuts - Bree Tranter: I’ve been looking up what all the members of The Middle East have done since they broke up and the best thing I’ve found is Rohin Jones writing music for a Dulux Paint commercial after the verse in Ninth Avenue Reverie about the guy who sniffs paint every night and dreams about being dead. Anyway as far as I can tell Bree Tranter is the one that’s had the most consistent and normal output since they broke up. This song is very much an ultimate night driving type song, except the lyrics are really not great but you can ignore that for how great it sounds, especially near the end when it really gets into a meditative state.

Ted, Just Admit It - Jane’s Addiction: Continuing my Jane’s Addiction phase, I really love this song. This is such a great brooding piece of music before it finally explodes into the declaration that sex is violent. Kind of a shame that it’s a serial killer song because he’s right about everything. Sex IS violent, the tv DO got them images, etc.

Fire Back About Your New Baby’s Sex - Don Caballero: I think this is probably Don Caballero’s most popular song, and with good reason. It’s among the most straightforward of their backward-ass songs and gives you a good grounding in how to understand the total chaos that is everything else they’ve done.

Ballad Of Circling Vultures - Pageninetynine: The entire last half of this song, when it slows down, is one of the best things I’ve ever heard. It feels like the entire mix begins to close in around you as it gets darker and darker before a door slams and you wake up somewhere else entirely.

You’ve Never Been Alone - Andrea Balency: I was watching this live video of Mount Kimbie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6co64HYurg and they’ve got like a full band now! They’ve been slowly expanding from a duo and I suppose it makes sense because their last album really sounded like a band playing in a room rather than two guys on computers. Anyway it turns out the woman in their band is Andrea Balency and this song of hers is very beautiful and you can see exactly why they asked her to join.

The Conspiracy Of Seeds - 65daysofstatic: I was going through Circle Takes The Square’s performance credits on discogs (very cool hobby) and found out they’re credited on this 65dos song and was shocked that I didn’t know that already. It feels like they pretty much split the song down the middle and did half each, which is great!

Spanish Sahara (Deadboy remix) - Foals: This song isn’t on Australian spotify as far as I can tell, so if you’re in the UK I think you can listen to this. Otherwise it’s on youtube for everyone here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk24ujPN4Lo This is probably one of my favourite pieces of music ever, it’s such a beautiful remix even though it’s not particularly far from the original. It just does the work of focusing the vibe down to a laser point. I love how mechanical every part of it is contrasting against the dreamy vocals and organ, until it almost feels overloaded with hats and clicks in the highest points before it focuses down again and introduces the bassline alone. Then the last section! The stabbing insistence of the synth driving the whole thing to a fever pitch.

T69 Collapse - Aphex Twin: I’ve never been huge on Aphex Twin because all his songs sound like you pressed the demo button on a keyboard and then turned the tempo way up but I really like this one, almost exclusively for the bassline the comes in in the second half after the big space-out breakdown. It’s groovy! It’s the most I’ve ever liked the evil man!

Kansas City Star - Kasey Musgraves: The Kasey Musgraves album everyone was going wild for didn’t really do much for me but this cover is so fantastic, the slight melody change she’s done to the chorus is such an improvement and really makes it soar. Also google is good because right now the 25th image result for 'kacey musgraves’ is a deviantart pic where someone’s photoshopped her to be extremely obese called Kollosal Katy. Not really related to the song but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Pyramids - Frank Ocean: A big group of friends and I went to karaoke a couple of weeks ago and the version of Pyramids they had didn’t even have the second half! If I can’t subject everyone to ten full minutes of me doing it badly then what’s the DAMN point?

Aqua - Eurythmics: I heard this song on NTS and was instantly in love with the lyrics. Don’t touch me, don’t talk to me, throw me in the water, watch me drown! It’s that simple!

gonk steady one - Autechre: I went and saw Autechre when they were here a few months ago and I’m still thinking about it because it was like a multiplayer dream. They insisted on total darkness and everyone just kind of stood still or sat down for the whole show in the dark while an endless wave of sound from another dimension washed over us all. Then eventually the music stopped and the lights came on and I never actually saw Autechre the whole time I was there. I’m still working my way through their fucking 8 hour long new album but this is an early highlight. I don’t know how to explain this but it sounds good. It sounds like music by and for aliens that we can listen to and understand a small part of.

Poor Kakarookee - Venetian Snares: I was listening to this song and thinking the other day there’s a certain subset of Venetian Snares songs that sound like that bit from Parks and Rec where Adam Scott is like 'could a depressed person do THIS?’ and is holding up his deformed little stop motion figure from the deformed little stop motion movie he’s making. This is absolutely one of those songs. It’s a great song but it’s one of those songs.

Future People - Alabama Shakes: For a long time the only Alabama Shakes song I’d heard was Don’t Wanna Fight because it was just so good I figured there was no need to go further, which it turns out was extremely wrong because this whole album is completely killer. I just can’t believe her voice. The album version is great but the live version really shows it off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbR999N5MiALa 

Mia Mania - Giani Morandi: I rewatched all of Harvey Birdman a couple of weeks ago and finally looked up what the song is in this clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xkhqce43mA because it gets stuck in my head all the time, and the only version I could find is this one with vocals which sounds even better!

Capriccio - Gianni Morandi: Then I dug deeper and started looking up the rest of this guy’s songs and totally loved it. There’s nothing better than digging around and finding what you think is some obscure artists before looking them up and finding out they’re incredibly famous and like the Italian Neil Diamond.

Parli Sempre Tu - Gianni Morandi: This is my favourite of his just for the insane pitch shifted vocal at the start, what an insane piece of sound for 1964! I’m desperate to know how they made it.

Forgotten Children - Mouse On The Keys: I suddenly remembered Mouse On The Keys the other day and thank god. They’re an instrumental band that’s two pianists and a drummer that looks like its jazz because of the instrumentation but is really more like post-hardcore in execution.

Can’t Get Right - Ghost-Note: I normally don’t go in much for this sort of drum clinic type music for musicians only but the central groove in this is just so good. It feels like two completely different songs playing at the same time, except if that sounded good. I found it because the bass genius Mono Neon played on it, watch the video and see if you can tell which one is named Mono Neon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVw1b4gVYrU Also one of the guys seems to be playing a vibraphone that is a midi controller which I have never seen before in my life.

Shoot Myself - Venetian Snares: Venetian Snares has such a great melodic sense and it feels kind of underappreciated just because of how much his percussion is at the forefront of every critical appraisal. In songs like this where the drums are more restrained you can really feel the melody and harmony shine through, the layers of cascading synth lines piling up louder and louder before returning to the jazzy organ near the end is just such a beautiful moment.

Bad Boy - Den Harrow: This song sounds like an 11 year old wrote the lyrics and I absolutely love it. The best and most sexy lyrics: “Some dress Valentino, others wear t-shirts to show what a shapely bust they’ve got.”

Summertime - Barney Kessel: Barney Kessel the jazz guitarist that I only found out about this month did a bossa nova album when bossa nova was the biggest thing in the world and it’s so so good. He also does some very interesting playing on it that’s a lot closer to surf rock and rock n roll than anything else I’ve heard of his. This is also a good example of that thing when Stereo sound was brand new where every single instrument is panned hard left or right which is a treat in headphones.

Slice Of Heaven - Dave Dobbyn: It’s kind of a shame that this song never really gets better than the intro but when the intro is this good it’s fine. I remember this song from when I was a kid because it’s on the soundtrack to New Zealand’s first ever feature length animated film, Footrot Flats which I watched a lot.

Sailin Da South - ESG + DJ Screw: The hardest part about putting any one song from 3 N Tha Morning Part Two on a playlist is they’re not designed for that and it sounds awful and cruel to cut them off like that. So really instead of listening to this song listen to the whole album and turn purple.

Right Action - Franz Ferdinand: I think Franz Ferdinand deserve better than the sort of one hit wonder status they’ve got, because they’ve got a lot of great songs and this is one of them, and probably the danciest summary of the Noble Eightfold Path I’ve ever heard.

The Thing That Should Not Be - Metallica: I have done zero research but to me the 80s feels like the decade when HP Lovecraft and the Cthulu mythos really hit the mainstream. Dungeons and Dragons and all that. Anyway apparently Cliff Burton was a huge Lovecraft fan and they would all read his stories in the tour van which is a funny thing to imagine. Metallica have five or six Lovecraftian songs and the bulk of them were written after Cliff Burton died which is sort of touching in a way. Paying tribute to your friend by invoking the nameless horror that sleeps in R'lyeh.

Waters Of Nazareth x We Are Your Friends x Phantom - Justice: Justice’s new album is so good because it’s sort of halfway between a remix album, a live album and a Best Of. It’s essentially a studio live album, or maybe just a live recording straight from the soundboard with no crowd noise. Either way it’s great and leads to incredible three way mashups of their best songs like this one.

Mr Ice Cream Man (feat. Silkk The Shocker) - Master P: I was thinking about how you don’t really hear about Master P these days, but according to the first result when you google 'richest rappers’ he’s doing fine with a net worth of $227 million, which is more than Eminem. So good for him. Even if his music hasn’t really lasted I’m sure his many, many business dealings will leave him in good stead for the rest of his life. I’m just going to copy and paste some phrases from his wiki article here because it’s truly ridiculous: “He has since parlayed his $10,000 initial seed capital investment into a $250 million business empire spanning a wide variety of industries” “As a businessman, Miller was known for his frugality and keeping business expenses down and profit margins high” “He has since invested the millions of dollars he made from his No Limit record company into a travel agency, a Foot Locker retail outlet, real estate, stocks, film, music, and television production, toy making, a phone sex company, clothing, telecommunications, a jewellery line, auto accessories, book and magazine publishing, car rims, fast food franchises, and gas stations.” “Miller also has his own line of beverages, called "Make ‘Em Say Ughh!” energy drinks" “first rapper to establish a cable television network.”

The Party Don’t Stop - Mia X: Anyway via Master P I found Mia X, who sings the hook on Mr Ice Cream Man, and her album is actually good as fuck for an 80 minute No Limit album, mostly because it’s so packed with guests (it feels like everyone else on No Limit is on here, including guys with great names like Mo B. Dick and Kane & Abel, but also Mystikal and Salt N Pepa are here!) that you never get tired of the flow, and the production is nicely varied too.

Shut Up - Stormzy: This is like Stormzy’s biggest song and I’m dumb as fuck because I haven’t heard it until now when I was listening to Functions On The Low and found out he used it as the beat for this song. What an absolute thrill to see this perfect beat back in the limelight thanks to the man bringing grime back to the limelight!

All N’s - Mia X: I wanna talk about the beat on this Mia X song because it’s incredible front to back. (Lyrically this song is fucking great, especially the chorus) but the vocal synth bass sound is just amazing, and the hook melody is the damn 'there’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance’ melody. Every part of it’s insane.

Milk - Kings Of Leon: I got into a real groove this month and learned how to play this whole Kings Of Leon album on guitar for some reason. So now I’ve got that knowledge. But I forgot just how incredible this song is. It’s a testament to how if the music is good enough and the performance is good enough the lyrics can be absolutely anything. By the time he says “she’ll loan you her toothbrush, she’ll bartend your party” I’m already crying.​

listen here

[callmetippytumbles]

Pick a song for every letter in your URL

I know I am late AF with this post, so much for that resolution.  I have finished the Spotify playlist I made for this days ago, but I just have not sat down and written this part. I am doing it now. This post and all subsequent productive posts are brought to you by the new ADHD meds that I am testing out on a Sunday.

I was tagged by @lizzybeth1986 and @maxattack-powell. If you tagged me as well, I am sorry I did not mention you here, it got lost in my activity feed.

I am not going to tag anyone else, because I am hella late, but if you want to do this tag feel free to do so and tag me.

Here is the list.  Yes, I talk about the tracks because I am extra like that.  I used to do music reviews in college and I still like doing that. The music review part is below the “Keep reading”.  I made a whole playlist though so I will not link to any songs. See below.

C--Cadillac by Miguel This song is fun and one of my favorites from the Get Down soundtrack. I watched this during that dance competition scene, and I too would like to do the Hustle to this song in a scene-stealing dress.  A--Alright by Kendrick Lamar This song gets heavy play.  Especially if I am just going through it and I just need to be encouraged.  Sometimes all you need to hear is "We gon' be alright" to make it. Love this song. L--Lovely Day by alt-J Okay, so there are a bunch of covers of this song.  I love the original by Bill Withers. I like the Jill Scott version. I chose to share this one.  I think it is because of the tone and feel that this version brings as opposed to the others.  First, it's sonically different.  The other versions are upbeat and lean into that feeling of the song. This one doesn't do that.  It's haunting. The song plays like everything in your life is shit. Just terrible but because this person is in your life you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and you can make it through.  This song is not something you play in anticipation of the beginning of a good day. Instead, the song is something that you play to make it through that day. (Many TRR fans will connect to that feeling. It should be on all of your angsty playlists.) L--Lookin Ass by Young Money, Nicki Minaj Look I know men can be trash. I like to play this when I need a reminder.  The n-word is all over this song.  If that is not your ministry, then this song is not for you.  I like it because its a woman calling men out that want to judge women but are in no position to do so. I live for that.

M--M I L K by Leikeli47 This song is perfect for working out and just feeling yourself.  I play this when I am working out but need a reminder that I am working out for me. The base and beat is just hypnotic and can pace a run or a speedwalk. E--Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him by Yoko Ono Say what you want about Yoko Ono, you have to admire her artistry.  I like her music. This is one of my favorite songs. When I read reviews of Double Fantasy, a lot of them shit on Yoko Ono's contributions even though she is on ALL of the tracks, produced the tracks (including the tracks that Lennon leads), and wrote/co-wrote them.  Double Fantasy is intended and created as a joint album. It was designed to be a conversation.  That's why the tracks alternate.  That aside, I am drawn this particular song.  The straightforward lyrics, and that guitar that echoes and chimes in the background.  The music, like the actual organization of the instruments on the track, is impressive. The instruments from synthesizers to the base, the guitars blend in a way that is layered but not excessive or cluttered. This is a track that is very well suited to Ono. Her vocals match the mood of the song. The song is a delicate song about a woman and led by one. Definitely deserves a listen.

T--That's All by Genesis The song is mesmerizing.  The grand piano, to the drums to the base build to make this constant pace that sticks with you.  It has excellent repeat value.  Phil Collins vocals really match the frustration of the lyrics. I--I'll Call U Back by Erykah Badu This track is on one of Erykah's mixtapes.  This song is an exhale.  Everything from the beat to her voice, to the mood, is about chilling.  Erykah is very unbothered on this track. She'll call you when she calls you.  A song that is this deliberately mellow could easily meander and play for several minutes, but that isn't what happens here.  It's very short.  That is a deliberate choice too.  She is not going to spend a lot of time or energy to reclaim her time.  Unlike Lookin' Ass which is about telling a man off aggressively, this is shooing someone away and going back to doing you. Play this track when a debt collector tries to call you and fuck up your day. It's fun. P--Plastic 100°C by Sampha Sampha is the kind of artist that has an incredibly unique voice that is used a lot for features.  He was the man singing along with Solange (who is a Cancer like me, won't stop claiming that) on “Don't Touch My Hair”. Also, he features a lot on SBTRKT tracks (like “Something Goes Right”).  His features are good, but his solo songs deserve way more shine than I feel they get.  This song has a sense of drama to it even is the instrumentation is really delicate and lush in contrast. It was written after he lost both parents to cancer and he found a lump in his throat while his career was growing.  Before I found out about the events of his life that inspired this song I kept thinking of intense vulnerability, how scary that really is but opening up and exposing yourself despite that.  He sings "It's so hot I've been melting out here/I'm made out of plastic out here/You touched down in the base of my fears." You hear the panic in his voice. It's a gorgeous song.  Like its waiting to be turned into a songfic. P--Phantom Punch by Sondre Lerche This is kind of a departure from his usual very thoughtfully arranged, very romantic fare.  This man is a FUBU romantic.  He is a romantic that writes for romantics. This song is still about someone who is infatuated with someone.  It's just really lively with a focus on electric guitars and synthesizers.  It makes you as giddy and filled with energy as Sondre is.   Y--You Come Through by PJ Harvey I am a person that likes a ballad, plenty of my favorites come from artists that are not known for them.  I think why I enjoy if not prefer ballads from artists that do not always set out to do them because it's like being let in on a secret.  You are seeing an artist expose themselves in a way they don't usually don't.  This is one of those tracks.  PJ Harvey is a force of nature.  You are more confronted by her work than you are entertained.  This song is entirely different.  It could be viewed as a confession of love and mourning a love lost or even both. The lyrics leave a lot of room for interpretation.  What is unquestionable is the vulnerability that she conveys during the performance of this track.  The track is bare and stripped so that her vocals are the focus and not the music backing them.  Her vocals are softer and restrained as opposed to at full force. This combination creates the effect that you get as a listener that you are an interloper on her private thoughts and emotions as well as becoming as vulnerable and exposed as she is. It's beautiful.

T--Transit by Robin Hannibal I noticed that I chose a lot of deceptively simple songs that are quite complex, like vanilla.  This track leads with the drums.  You hear the drums in the track before the keyboard or Robin's vocals.  The lyrics are about a complicated relationship. "Break up, just to make up" are some of the words to this song.  While the relationship described is complicated, the arrangements don't seem that way.  The song doesn't sound fraught or in a state of panic.  Robin is not in any kind of emotional anguish while performing this track.  It's calmer and mellower.   U--Until Then by Broadcast Until Then is a song on an album full of beautiful, stand out tracks. The Noise Made by People is a delightful album and worth a listen.  It's very nostalgic without going full-on throwback in a way that seems like a poorly executed 60's costume.  The album feels like it should be the score and soundtrack to some kind of play, but it isn't.  Until Then feels the most like a track that could be sung in a theatrical production.  The climax just hit, and all of the characters have reached ruin, and this is the song they are all singing before the plot tracks their recovery from said ruin.  This could be a reprise sung by a musical theatre group or sung on the album by Trish Keenan.  Both work. M--My Love by Jill Scott I have to say; I do not really like songs that intro with a conversation break and not the song starting.  I can do a quick sample but do not interrupt the music.  I am here for the music.  I can make an exception for this song.  My Love is about a woman who finds out a man that he may have been on again/off again with is marrying another woman and she is confused by this.  I may have played this on repeat after the TRR1 finale.  Halle may have too.  Jill croons "My love is deeper, tighter/Sweeter, higher, flyer" comparing herself to the woman the man chose to marry but this is quickly followed by "Didn't you know this?" like he should have known better. It's not mournful like "I miss this man so much." Jill don't play that.  The tone is more like "you dared to choose her and not me, and you knew better."  It's poetic, soulful and lush.  Even if Soul is not your thing, this song could still find its way to your catalog. B--Blind by TV on the Radio TV on the Radio is what happens when you let art nerds start a band. This song is on the Young Liars EP.  It's the longest song on the playlist, clocking in at over 7 minutes.  This song uses that time to kind of lumber around the issue presented in the lyrics.  It's about a guy who suspects his girlfriend may or may not be cheating on him. The words go through all of the questions, the doubt, action and inaction that happens when confronted with that kind of situation. This track features organs, a droning beat that builds as lead singer Tunde Adebimpe sings with a voice filled with melancholy and ambivalence. It's a compelling track.   L--Lost in the Plot by The Dears If Adebimpe in the last song sings with a voice with melancholy and ambivalence, Murray Lightburn of The Dears sings like is either about to have or recovering from complete emotional upheaval.  His voice is just filled with such intensity and fervor you are forced to reckon with whatever emotions he is dealing with.  This song in particular really showcases this.  By the time he is shouting "It's the same old plot", you are just as over everything as Lightburn is. E--Elephant Woman by Blonde Redhead Elephant Woman is the opening track to Misery is a Butterfly.  The song is about being broken emotionally as well as physically.  It was reportedly inspired about when Blonde Redhead lead singer, Kazu Makino, being thrown off her horse and severely injured as a result.  It grapples with feeling betrayed by something (but can easily apply to someone) you love and struggling with the damage after the fact.  It's set to beautiful and haunting strings and whirling guitars. You ache when Makino delicately sings "Now inside and outside are matching." It's beautifully crafted and magnificent to listen to. S--Sleeping Ute by Grizzly Bear While it feels weird to close a playlist with a song that was an album opener, this just feels right.  If you are someone who likes guitar riffs (looking at you @lizzybeth1986), this song opens with some great ones. It's a song that deals with restlessness and seeking reprieve from chaos.  The arrangement reflects those themes by opening with trashing cymbals and guitars that sound like they are on top of each other and it mellows into a calmer melody as the drums fall back and the guitars come into foreground like the calm after a tumultuous storm.

[syrvses-blog]

❝ ┅ THIS GOT LONG. | QUESTIONNAIRE. |

everything you could ever want to know about syrus is under the cut.

death tw, smoking tw, alochol mention

❝ ┅ BASICS.

Full name: seung-jun han

Any nicknames?: syrus (please call him that), hades

Age: 27 (holla @ yo ridiculously young mob boss)

Birthday/Zodiac sign: january 7 // capricorn

Height: 6′2

Any tattoos, piercings?: no piercings, but he does have a few tattoos. the first and most prominent one reads “you will always be fond of me. i represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to admit” located on his right rib cage. this was done both because he is a nerd for classical literature and because the quote reminds him of his father, whom he never wants to become. he also has ( these ) two, in honor of cronus (eye) and his deceased best friend (rose), who died in a similar time span.

❝ ┅ FAVORITES.

Sound: yasmin’s voice…jk jk the small sounds that echo against the walls of a silent space. a clock ticking, methodical and orderly. the scribbling of a wooden pencil, curious and erratic. the turning of a novel’s page and the certain sense of completion, of progress that comes with it. the muffled bass of club nyra hammering below his feet. the various beats of life in the dead of stillness that keeps him on task, keeps him enthralled in his work.

Color: surprise, surprise, black. but, likewise – white. in fact, his flat above club nyra is nearly completely white with tiny pops of color, such as that in the green apples that sit on the marble counters of the kitchen area. even more surprising, he’s also rather fond of warm neutrals, such as those found on his blog. in complete contrast to his flat, his actual apartment that can be found in ever changing locations across nyc is very warm, very home-y, and washed in those soft oranges and browns.

Person: may he rest in peace, cronus. though his friend found deceased years ago does come in as a close second, no one has altered his life more than harvey johnson. the first father figure in his life to ever truly love him as son, to ever truly look at him and not see a tool or a potential weapon, but as a human being. he has fought for years to preserve the work cronus has done to promote the olympians, and he will continue to work tirelessly for the man who proved to him not all is bad in the world syrus was raised in.

Memory: for his twelfth birthday, his father took him and his now deceased friend to the metropolitan museum of art. whenever the story was shared (by his friend more so than syrus, who rarely speaks of his past), his friend would always claim that the museum “broke” syrus, who had always been a more reserved, professional person. this is because in those few hours, syrus was, for one of the few times in his life, a kid. having always been a nerd and especially a nerd for things that are old, being surrounded by so much history and being able to see the influences of the history he read on the artwork made him genuinely giddy. though his friend and father certainly weren’t as enthused as he was, they entertained him by allowing him to drag them around as he rattled on about certain eras and certain paintings and possible influences. he has a particular memory of a tour guide with long, dark hair and a friendly voice joking to her clients that they should simply follow him around instead of her as their group passed him by. this whole ordeal was a complete surprise to him, seeing as he thought his father was simply taking him and his friend out to breakfast, and though he usually isn’t a fan of surprises, this one was undoubtedly appreciated.

Place: he has three. the first is the metropolitan museum of art for the reasons described earlier. the second is the new york public library. it is no secret or shock that syrus is obsessed with books and with reading, so a place stocked with millions of books is a dream come true for the man. every single time he walks in he has a moment similar to the one in beauty and the beast when the beast guides belle into the library. of his few complaints about being a mob boss, not being able to read more is definitely one of them. continuing forward, his third and final favorite place is club nyra, minutes before it opens. he has a circular couch in corner raised up a few inches that he usually does business with other club owners in, and occasionally he’ll slide into the white leather seats with some paperwork for the club before the doors allow the mass of people to flow in. in his seat in the intersection, he can view the bartender wiping down the bar in the middle back of the club one final time and the dj readying the track list in the other far end. with the dancers stretching and julian speaking to one of the various workers and the faint smell of vanilla (proven to make people happier) in the air, it truly is a priceless scene. once the doors open at 11 pm sharp, the setting isn’t ruined by the influx of people. instead, it is enhanced, for seeing the success of the club he rebuilt essentially on his own brings him a joy little else can bring.

Vice: oh, syrus and his nicotine. he knows what it’s doing to his body and he knows that he’ll probably pass due to lung cancer if he lives long enough to develop it, but the addiction doesn’t seem to care. he doesn’t drink, primarily because he genuinely doesn’t like alcohol aside from a few of the club nyra speciality drinks and he will sip on wine to seem professional. likewise, he doesn’t dabble in any other drugs, nor is he a slave to sex. his only physical vice, truly, is the packet of cigarettes in his suit jacket’s pocket. to steal madi’s (current medusa/octavia) idea of my favorite vice for syrus, since nicotine is certainly his favorite vice, i have to admit–i love how unfeeling and unempathetic syrus is in times of betrayal or when people fail to meet his expectations of perfection. in my head he truly is horrifying when in “scary syrus” mode. if a character is having a meeting with syrus and they know they’ve disappointed him, they should be prepared for the absolute coldest aura surrounding a merciless man who won’t accept excuses, regardless of how valid they are. this is my favorite vice primarily because it’s so much fun to write and fits how i originally conceived syrus to be all the time (like honestly i was going to originally use these gifs a lot tbh). but, then he sort of turned into a very formal, very intelligent CEO with a Nerd Dad part tucked under all that professionalism and distance. i still love him with all my life, but there is something so satisfying about writing syrus when he is in his pique of ruthlessness.

❝ ┅ HAVE THEY EVER...

Been in love?: he has never been in love, nope! nor does he ever see himself being in love or getting married. to revive an old meme, my thoughts and feelings towards this are ( x ).

Done drugs?: his entire list of drug use starts and ends with his cigarettes.

Killed someone?: yes, of course. he is a mob boss, after all. he has killed 17 people and could tell you the names of all of them. names are actually quite important to syrus, seeing as he’s unusually terrible with them unless he has a reason to remember them. when he was younger, part of his training with his father was memorizing the names of everyone in the olympians. unfortunately, because syrus’ mother disappeared when he was two and he didn’t know the cause of her disappearance was something that would be so important to his beliefs until 18 years later, he never learned her name and doesn’t know it now. he also has no real way to learn her name, being that he has no contact with his family in korea and little access to the conventional methods of finding her name.

Betrayed someone’s trust?: aside from the whole “splitting from old olympus,” never.

Had their heart broken?: with the death of cronus and his friend, yes. but, in the implied sense of via the loss (whether it be through break up or through some other method) of a significant other, nope.

Lost someone?: far too many people.

❝ ┅ DO THEY...

Have any pets?: ah yes, the infamous dog megara (but her friends call her “meg”) – a border collie that he loves more than life itself. he adopted the dog when meg was quite young, probably around 1-2 years old, after his father passed away seven years ago. he absolutely adores and would happily be with her over most human beings.

Have a family they still talk to?: they’re all dead or chillin’ out in korea, so nah! the only family he would want to talk to even would be his mother, but being that she died when he was two, it would be sort of a difficult situation without a medium. perhaps he would also enjoy speaking to his extended family, seeing as he doesn’t know the name of his mother and would rather enjoy having that knowledge.

Have a best friend?: that’s…iffy territory? like, he trusts julian/dionysus quite a bit because he does manage club nyra but that’s definitely a very father/son relationship despite syrus being the younger of the two. likewise, he’s rather close with octavia/medusa and felicia/cerberus, though the former is certainly more of a working relationship and he’s sleeping with the latter despite also having a working relationship. continuing, he’s also decent friends with kit/icarus, though it’s more of an unconventional friendship. friends are quite difficult for him with his position and personality, but best friends are particularly hard to come by since that implies a certain level of trust that syrus hasn’t had with anyone since that friend.

Want to get married and/or have kids?: as mentioned earlier, syrus, at this very moment, never sees himself getting married. but, if he did find the right person (insert finger guns), he’d happily marry. he simply would never predict this for himself since he has issues with trusting people completely due to being ridiculously independent/worried about endangering those he’s close to. as for kids? oh god, though syrus is really just Dad somewhere under all that formal business talk, he is absolutely horrible with children. perhaps it is because he doesn’t quite know how to communicate with people who do not understand his language. but, i’m sure if (when) he does marry, he’ll be so enraptured with the person he’s with, he’d be more than glad to have children with them.

Want to leave?: if this question was posed not even ten years ago, syrus would have most certainly confirmed that he did want to leave and was planning on opening his own business in a place as far away as korea. but, being that he now has club nyra and a duty to protect cronus’ legacy from crumbling under the wrong hands, he could never picture himself leaving. his sense of duty to cronus and to the people who depend on him is far too strong for him to allow himself to fade away. he simply must protect his people, must protect the few things in life that keep him from falling into a state of complete roboticism.

❝ ┅ THIS OR THAT?

Phone call or text? face to face conversation? yes? no? anyways, though he sees the appeal and necessity of both with texts doing well for quick updates, organizing plans, and stealth operations, he prefers to call. when in “scary syrus” mode, as i like to call it, he can be rather terse. but, with the people he actually would like to call for reasons other than business, he can become very loquacious and quite the storyteller. furthermore, he enjoys hearing people’s voices when they speak, it adds on a sense of reality to the conversation.

Wealth or loyalty? regardless of the fact that syrus is a wealthy man himself and does enjoy the comfort of wealth, at the end of the day, he’d take loyalty over wealth without second thought. he may be seen as the ultimate traitor to old olympus, but his loyalty to cronus and to the people who follow him under new olympus spans far beyond the average human and he values loyalty from others just the same. though all human life is irreplaceable to syrus, those that prove themselves loyal to a strong cause and prepared to meet the expectations required to further that cause are especially valued.

Love or lust? n…either? syrus doesn’t have feelings–only a strong moral compass. joking, joking mostly. on a serious note, though he remains largely unaware of the benefits of love and how much he would love being in love at the moment, once he does get a hold of himself – love, all the way. lust is nice and he certainly won’t complain about it, but ultimately he would much prefer to be in love than in lust. wow i’m making him sound so soft those of y’all who don’t know syrus are going to be So Surprised when you interact with him and He’s So Not Soft.

5 Friends or 100 Acquaintances? 100 acquaintances, or “contacts,” as syrus would refer to them as. 100 people for him to reach out to to help advertise a new night at club nyra or to potentially persuade into doing something for the furthering of new olympus. in syrus’ mind, friends either leave with too much information or die and shake him out of his phlegmatic state. but, if he has 100 loyal acquaintances who know him to be trustworthy, then he’s set.

Summer or winter? winter!! wow, hades, you’re so surprising. albeit that summer is arguably a more profitable time for club nyra, syrus without a doubt prefers winter. this may be because i don’t think he owns a short sleeved shirt and his typical attire is a full on suit, or it may be because he runs both of his spaces at a below average temperature and enjoys it completely. winter is the time of year when the temperature outside matches the temperature of his homes, if not is far colder (which may be better).

❝ ┅ OTHERS.

Wanted plots/connections:

everyone: comes to new olympus k bye

new olympus: i’d love to plot with how and why the other character came to new olympus. what did syrus offer, whether it be an actual offer such as safety or just what made him seem better over zeus? did they have a past together or something? also, syrus makes a very good trainer if you need someone to help your character learn to punch someone.

old olympus: syrus grew up in the mob, so if your character has been in the olympians for a while, then chances are they knew each other. did they work together? did they get along/not get along? was syrus just some mystical figure in the background?

titans: this is a tad harder being that the titans were in germany for so long. but, if they’re a more recent titan addition, i’d love to have some like tension-y thing with syrus if they were active members of the olympians. he’d feel a little miffed that they chose to join the titans but skipped out on new olympus.

neutral: someone could be his neighbor at wherever his apartment is now! furthermore, if they are ex-olympians, we can develop a past from there. anything with club nyra could work out too!! whether it be someone was hitting on your character drunk and syrus kicked them out or they’re just regulars at club nyra.

anyone: my son adopts your child because syrus needs a million fake kids. also possible is to play off of syrus’ dad side where syrus finds your character drunk/hurt/etc and takes care of them. alternatively, we could have our characters start a book club.

[breakingthecrown]

The Sick, Dumb & Happy by The Charm The Fury, Review

By Dan #d

(view my personal tumblr here)

Album Title: The Sick, Dumb & Happy

Band: The Charm The Fury

Genre: Melodic Death Metal, Metalcore, Groove Metal, Pop, Rock

Label:  Arising Empire / Nuclear Blast

Release Date:  March 17, 2017

When I read Metal Hammer or Revolver magazine, I usually just stick to reading about bands that I’m familiar with. Occasionally I’ll read a random article. But in the most recent Metal Hammer, I decided to do some more exploring and pay attention to the ads and new band articles. The Charm The Fury are one of the bands I saw an ad for, and I am glad I did. This album is something else, plus I’m all about female fronted bands. Yeah yeah Floor Jansen, I know it’s not a genre.

The Sick, Dumb & Happy opens with the song, Down On The Ropes. I wasn’t entirely sure of the song’s message (which would happen more than once proceeding), however it was very pleasing upon first listen. Opening with some speedy guitars and awesome drum beats, it eventually transcended into some nice grooves. Which instantly reminded me of Pantera. When vocalist, Caroline Westendorp made her first appearance, I was instantly drawn in. These vocals are not your typical Halestorm or Evanescence. They’re dirty and raw. Kind of reminded me of Christine Maynard of Level C or Carla Harvey of Butcher Babies. The next song Echoes put me on a trip (in a good way). I had to read the lyrics like ten times to figure out the message of the song. I suspect it’s about believing that fighting yourself is dumb. The lyrics say “Step down, show respect, for the folly of man. Some things are better left unsaid”. Then continues to explain that pounding forces (presumably in her head) are not a war within, but just echoes. Explained by the lyric “This is not a war, this is who we are. I remember what I stand for. It echoes in my head”. On this lyric, the song sounded like Demi Lovato or some pop singer stole the mic for a second. I was very confused by the sudden mood change in the music, but I was cool with it.

Most people know that love is a huge risk. The third track, Weapoonized says “You barely even know that you’re ever going to die” and “You’re just a victim of love’s industry”. Well I knew love was risky but that’s a sad (but probably realistic) view on love. This song is cool in that it has what I like to call “battle of guitars”, in which high guitar riffs and low guitar riffs play interchangeably. Love it. I also like the low, gut wrenching vocals during the bridge. Reminds me of Marilyn Manson or Chris Motionless of Motionless In White. The later is probably a realistic influence, as she also says “Fuck!” at the end of the bridge in a similar manner to how Chris says “Ugghh!” in multiple songs.

When No End In Sight came on, I started to hear even more influences in Caroline’s voice. Her screaming vocals reminded me a lot of Angela Gossow, previously of Arch Enemy. She even reminded me of Jill Janus of Huntress at one point. Specifically because she was still screaming, but in a lower octave then I think Angela usually sung. I’m all about the instrumentation on The Future Need Us Not. There is an epic opening that reminded me of the intro music you hear before fighting a boss in a video game. Okay Okay I admit it, its another high and low contrast. But it almost sounds like during the low riffs, the guitarist is stroking the very bottom of the guitar strings to make a very warped sound. When the singing begins with “The future need us not. It will go unopposed”, there’s so many cool things going on. The low gut vocals are back, with a guitar riff that sounds like the strings are old and deteriorating. All with some awesome, deep drum beats in the background. This is all just within the first 30 seconds of the song

Towards the end of the album is Silent War; which marks the very first appearance of an acoustic guitar. The Demi Lovato pop vocals are totally high jacked, however there are some nice clean vocals here that kind of remind me of Storm Large or Lesley Roy. This is the only non-metal song on the album. It talks about a man who is being tortured by his own mind. The man is “using all of his strength, but still loosing. A war in his head”. Some of the reasons why he’s loosing may be because “the memories won’t show mercy”. Also towards the end is Songs of Obscenity, which I wonder if it’s about Avril Lavigne. The verse “We don’t wear brands. Don’t watch TV. Oh can you say, hypocrisy? We’re singing Woo oo oo, Woo oo oo. Straight to the bank we run this scene” makes me think so. I know Avril Lavigne was sported wearing Dickies in her “punk” days, but when I hear “Woo oo oo, Woo oo oo”, I instantly think Avril. Cause she sings it in a lot her songs. Is this song about her possibly? Probably not.

Overall I’d give this album a 3.5 out 5. While it is original and I applaud the many influences, it does get lost a bit. What exactly do they want their sound to be? Do they want to tour with Arch Enemy, or Motionless In White? Sorry, I went to school for Entertainment Management. I think about marketing shit and packaging bands. However their sound is original, and their lyrics are pretty intelligent. I applaud them for coming up with lyrics I didn’t understand upon first read. As Marilyn Manson says, “Art shouldn’t be answer, it should be a question mark”.

[viralnewstime]

Harvey Cantwell has been setting the foundations for a very promising career over the past couple of years. Through the release of his debut EP’s ‘Holiday’ and ‘Talk To Ya’, he joined artists like Little Mix, The Vamps, Lawson and Jessie J on tour in the UK and started building a passionate local fanbase.

Through the power of social media, his fan base started expanding and the 21-year-old singer-songwriter was able to embark on his first world tour in 2018 which included a sold-out run of dates in Australia.

Following the conclusion of the tour, he jumped back in the studio feeling even more inspired by what he wanted his sound and vision to be, and started working on his debut album. The first taste of this new directional shift in his artistry was the infectiously penned ‘Million Ways’ and ‘ME BECAUSE OF YOU’.

HRVY was supposed to be returning to Australia in May for shows in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, but Australian Government restrictions on large events due to the coronavirus pandemic means these shows are now being rescheduled.

When they do happen though, HRVY has assured this live show will be even bigger than before with new choreography and the inclusion of a live band.

Pre postponement, we had a chat to HRVY about the world tour and the improvements he’s focused on to deliver a bigger show, as well as the creative process behind his new single ‘ME BECAUSE OF YOU’ and why he loves the art of collaboration.

Music Feeds: What have you been working on to make this tour bigger and bolder creatively?

HRVY: I’ve been working on my dancing and constantly striving to improve myself, so I feel like that aspect is a lot better this time around. And I’ve got a live band, so that’s going to be even bigger as I usually perform with track, and still do, but it’s really cool to add live players to that dynamic.

MF: So how long do rehearsals for a tour like this usually go for? And how intense are they because with the incorporation of dancing and a live band they sound like they can be pretty crazy?

H: We normally do a week and a half of solid rehearsals for dancing, just so everyone confidently knows the direction for each song. Then we spend about 2-3 days with the musicians and pull all the tracks together and make sure everyone knows how to play the songs and that it collectively sounds good.

To be fair, I’ve been doing a lot of shows in the UK so we feel pretty comfortable with most of the set, but like I said I love changing things up and making things more interesting. So yeah usually around 2 weeks.

MF: After going on your first world tour in 2018, what was the biggest thing you learnt about yourself as a live performer and what you wanted to personally work on?

H: For my last tour I discovered that sleep was a really important thing. Because I was a little bit younger, I was really excited to be travelling and I wanted to stay up and explore each city which was fair enough. But when you combine that with jet lag, it would end up ruining me before shows.

I would be so tired, and luckily once I got out onto the stage the adrenaline would kick in and I would be fine, but this tour I need to get a lot more sleep so I’m more prepared for the shows.

These upcoming shows are also a lot longer than our previous ones as I’ve got more songs out and a bigger catalogue to perform, so I’ve just gotta make sure that I’ve got the stamina to make the whole show to look and sound great.

MF: Reflecting on that Australian leg of the tour, what was one of your favourite memories from your time down under?

H: One thing that stands out to me the most is something that initially sounds like a bad thing, but now that I look back on it I think it’s quite funny.

I had such bad jet lag that at the Sydney show I sat backstage and I literally couldn’t keep my eyes open. So I fell asleep and I got woken up about five minutes before I had to go on stage. I’m not a crier but I just started crying because I was so exhausted and I had never felt this feeling before in my life. I didn’t want to go out on stage in the state I was in but I knew I had to.

As soon as I got out onto the stage and started playing the first song, the atmosphere from the fans just made me switch completely. The Australian fans are just mental and the energy they bring to every show is magical. They are so passionate and thinking about that moment makes me so happy and has become a highlight in hindsight even though it could be looked upon as a negative moment.

MF: You’ve toured with some huge names including Little Mix, The Vamps, Jessie J and Lawson. So has there been a piece of advice or a mantra that one of these artists have given you while out on the road that you’ve really held onto?

H: There have definitely been a few! Brad from The Vamps told me about this straw that helps warm my voice up. It sounds really weird but I was struggling warming up before shows while I was on tour with them and he was like “bro, try this straw, just trust me”. I was a bit reluctant at first but basically, it’s a rubber straw that you put it in a bottle and blow into it, and you warm up doing that so you don’t damage your voice. And he basically just gave me some really good advice about warming up which really helped me.

I also did a show a couple of years ago and I met Shawn Mendes, so I asked him about warming up and he was like, “bro, every time you warm-up, do it in the shower’.

So every time I speak to another male vocalist I just pick their brain about how they warm-up. I always want to improve and these people do it for a living too, and have amazing vocals so I think it’s important to all help each other.

It may sound really boring, but it’s just stuff I needed to know as I wanted to sound and feel better on stage. And there’s no one better to ask than Shawn Mendes, so if he tells you to warm up in a shower then you warm up in a shower *laughs*.

MF: Your new single ‘ME BECAUSE OF YOU’ is a slick pulsating synth bop. So how did this song come together in the studio because it’s quite groovy?

H: It’s a cute little story because I saw a comment on Instagram from a fan that said, “I’m only me because of you” and I immediately loved that line so I went into the studio with the concept to write a song around it.

The producer brought up a beat and it had that 80’s drums with the pulsating feeling during the chorus, which I immediately loved. But I decided to switch it up and start the song acoustically to show that contrast before rolling into that full-blown sound.

We wrote the song and I loved it, so I went back to say thank you to the person who wrote the comment but couldn’t find them.

MF: A bit of a Cinderella moment, isn’t it?

H: *Laughs* it literally was! I actually jumped on my Instagram story and asked people whoever commented that to please message me and I obviously got quite a lot of people saying it was them, so I didn’t know who to believe.

MF: There is a beautiful gospel version of the track on YouTube. So how long did that version take to come together because it seemed so seamless?

H: Thank you bro! It’s always been a big dream of mine to have a choir in one of my songs but it’s never really fit into the actual singles I’ve put it out. With ‘ME BECAUSE OF YOU’ I was approached to do an acoustic version and I was so excited to do that because the song is so drum-driven that I knew it could turn out quite cool and drastically different stripped back.

After we had talks about the direction of the arrangement I got approved to have a choir involved which was so exciting as it meant I got to finally have my dream come true. The choir were insane, and brought the track into a whole new world and made it sound completely different.

When they came into the session they had a listen to the song and came up with their own choral arrangement and showed it to me and I died. They made it their own song and I was blown away.

Like, I love my song and I’m so proud of the original track, but this version is definitely my favourite and it’s also my mum’s [favourite].

MF: I think the most exciting thing about this version of the song was that is showed a completely different side of your artistry to what listeners have heard so far.

H: One hundred per cent! And that was another thing I wanted to do, I wanted to show people another side to me. It’s always great to give fans that sort of content, but it’s great to also show the older audiences that while I may be a young pop kid, I can do something more mature sounding.

MF: You started off as a really young artist who was continually growing and evolving while finding his feet in the industry. So looking back on your first two EPs and where you are at now with your music, do you get self-critical when you listen to those songs back?

H: Bro, I could release a song yesterday and I would be critical about it today *laughs*. I’m always changing my mind about things and always will be. But looking back at those songs, I see them as stepping stones as without those songs I wouldn’t be where I am today, and without releasing that music I wouldn’t be able to improve and get better.

Don’t get me wrong though, I do listen back to some of those songs and think that they are proper cringey but I was also 15/16 years old at the time. I do love the music I have put it out as it made sense at the time and the fans love it and still do, which is why it’s still apart of the live show.

MF: You’ve done a lot of collaboration with artists like Jonas Blue, NOTD, Sigala, NCT Dream and Red Foo. So what is your favourite thing about collaborating with other artists?

H: I just love hearing other people’s thoughts during the creative process as you could be both on different wavelengths, but you end up coming together in such a cool way. It’s also just great to have another brain in the room as creating music can be a little lonely sometimes.

I collaborated with NCT Dream and they are from South Korea and it was just an amazing experience as I got to go out there and experience their culture and meet their fans and make new fans at the same time.

I just love collaborating really. It’s also the way forward I think, definitely with streaming and social media as the more people on the track equals the wider it spreads.

Music has become the universal language. Like the fact you can have multiple languages in one song is crazy and exciting. I never thought I would have a song with a Korean speaking band, but it’s happened and it’s amazing.

MF: Previously in interviews and social media you’ve said that you’re not going to start working on an album until you’ve really found your sound and are fully comfortable with your vision. So through the release of these recent singles would you say that you’re closer to finding that?

H: Yeah, I feel like I have now. I’ve actually been working on an album and it’s going to be released really soon.

But a little while ago I would say that I hadn’t found my sound yet, and I just wanted to focus on experimenting and discovering what that sound was. Whereas now I feel like I’ve discovered who I am as an artist, and found music that I love and feel confident with.

The post HRVY On Lessons From Touring & How A Fan Comment On Instagram Helped Write His Latest Single appeared first on Music Feeds.

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[richmeganews]

Fosse/Verdon Muddies the Myth of Great Men

Toward the end of the first episode of Fosse/Verdon, the dancer Gwen Verdon (Michelle Williams) has finally flown to Munich at the beseeching of her husband, the choreographer and director Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell). Fosse is directing the film adaptation of Cabaret, starring Liza Minnelli as a nightclub entertainer in Weimar Berlin, but things are going awry: The shoot is behind schedule, the costumes are all wrong, and Fosse is locked in a battle of wills with the movie’s producer, Cy Feuer (Paul Reiser), over their divergent ideas about what Cabaret should be. But then Verdon arrives. She dresses Minnelli in a backless black brassiere from her own closet; she melts crayons to apply black wax to dancers’ arachnid eyelashes and calms them by whispering character backstories in ASMR-tingly tones. Verdon also translates Fosse’s dark, corrupted vision for Cabaret into words Feuer can understand. “Boy, I wish you’d been here from the start,” Feuer replies, patting her on the arm. “He needs you.”

The kind of work that Verdon does on Cabaret, alas, is not the kind of work movie studios give credits for. Fosse’s labor is creative; Verdon’s, in this instance, is emotional. He is—Fosse/Verdon points out—almost useless without her, a fact that Rockwell’s Fosse is only too aware of, even if it never occurs to him to respect her for it. She’s the unpaid, unrecognized ballast to his overinflated genius balloon. In the series, when Fosse subsequently accepts the Academy Award for Cabaret in 1973, Verdon watches the ceremony at home with their daughter, Nicole.

It is gratifying to see a television show stick a pin in the “great man” bubble, and FX’s Fosse/Verdon, which debuts Tuesday, is sharp enough to measure the mythology of so many Male Genius stories. Produced by Hamilton’s Thomas Kail and Lin-Manuel Miranda with the Dear Evan Hansen writer Steven Levenson, the eight-part series is simultaneously in thrall to Fosse as a legend of musical theater and critical about his excesses. It’s a tricky high-wire to walk, and Fosse/Verdon tries to manage it by positioning Verdon as Fosse’s counterforce, the backward-and-in-high-heels feminine yin to his fiery masculine yang. In reality, though, her character is less equal and more reactive: Fosse erupts, Verdon soothes. He creates, she nurtures. He cheats, she endures. Both are plagued by perpetual sounds they hear inside their heads—the staccato of tap shoes for Fosse, and the wailing of an abandoned baby for Verdon. Balance is necessary for great art, the show emphasizes. This approach is a graceful one, storytelling-wise, but what it neglects to underline, at least in the first five episodes, is that Verdon was an artist, too.

There’s a difference, after all, between collaborator and muse. One implies partnership, the other passivity. In Fosse/Verdon, when Fosse is choreographing scenes, he tends to shape dancers like inanimate balls of clay, tilting a leg or splaying a knee, repositioning bodies that are too rote or too pleasing. His aesthetic isn’t one of bright, smiling vigor or neat, Busby Berkeley synchronicity. He wants movement to reflect effort, pain, reality. “I wanna see the sweat. I wanna see the spot where they missed their foundation,” Rockwell’s Fosse yells in the first episode, when he’s directing the movie adaptation of Sweet Charity. Such is his commitment to verisimilitude that for Cabaret, he hires Munich sex workers to play patrons at the Kit Kat Club.

Not everyone understands what he’s doing. But Verdon, instinctively, does. The most striking scene in the series so far is a flashback to 1955, when Fosse and Verdon first meet prior to rehearsals for Damn Yankees. Verdon, irritated at having to endure what she believes is an audition with an upstart choreographer, arrives with a pasted-on smile and an air of nonchalance. (“I didn’t see your show,” she tells Fosse, who replies, “I didn’t see yours, either.”)  Lola, the character Verdon is playing, is a seductress, and Verdon is initially disconcerted by Fosse’s interpretation of Lola as a past-her-prime burlesque queen. But as soon as they start dancing, she gets it. She improvises an errant leg itch that deglamorizes the character even more. Fosse is enthralled. The scene has a crackling, meeting-of-the-minds zip that suggests an unleashing of creative energy for them both.

What follows, though, feels much more like standard biopic fare. In part, that’s because of the source material. Fosse/Verdon is adapted from Sam Wasson’s 2013 biography of Fosse, a book that delved into the predilections and demons of one of Broadway’s defining stylists. Verdon is, at best, an ancillary character, and so the series simply has less to draw on when it comes to her life and work. Originally, Fosse/Verdon was conceived as a series about a single subject, but after the reverberations in Hollywood following allegations against Harvey Weinstein and hundreds of other powerful men in 2017, the show was reconceived around Fosse and Verdon’s partnership. The idea, Levenson told The New York Times, was to probe the dynamics of creative alliances, and to question why men tend to be remembered and women sidelined.

Question asked and answered: Fosse’s personality in the show is so overpowering that it tends to engulf everything around it. Scenes play out as if viewers are seeing them from inside the director’s head, experiencing the swings between his hyperego and his crashing insecurity. In one scene, after a box-office failure, we see him dart nimbly out of a chair, across the room, and out an open window, as if he’s imagining the choreography of his own suicide. In another, Fosse arrives at a studio to edit Cabaret, and interprets his walk down a hallway as a dance sequence, complete with women in candy-colored dresses revolving around him, and a jaunty moment of hat play. Minutes later, after a disappointment, Fosse leaves, but instead of walking out he’s dragged by editing equipment that wraps around his feet like an anchor.

These moments are ingenious, and they bring a vibrant theatricality to the series. Other interludes communicate Fosse’s various addictions: pills (uppers and downers rattle as reliably as percussion in his hand), unfiltered cigarettes, and women. Even as Fosse/Verdon considers why Fosse might have been so obsessively priapic—his early sexual history, for what it’s worth, is remarkably similar to Don Draper’s—it never expects you to sympathize with him. In one scene, Fosse tries to force himself upon a dancer who’s rehearsing Pippin with him, only to cut her from a number after she knees him in the crotch. When Verdon confronts him after discovering that he’s having an affair with a German translator, he tells her that all he wants is to “be able to see Hannah and then come home and not bullshit you.” “Maybe I should find a lover too, then,” she replies. “That’s not your style,” he says, primly.

Rockwell, counterintuitively, tends to downplay Fosse, making the character feel more like an observer than anything else. Everything he says and does is conducted at a relatively even tempo, which somehow makes the contrast between highs and lows feel more disturbing. Even when Fosse is in a psychiatric institution and heavily medicated, he sees the world as a backdrop, watching the other patients raise their heads in synchronized grace. What’s most striking about Fosse/Verdon is how it captures Fosse’s motivations—how fiercely he wanted to take the edge off Broadway’s megawatt, sanitized cheeriness. In his hands, a mambo for Damn Yankees becomes a testament to the physical ordeal of performing. “That’s what we do, isn’t it?” Fosse asks Verdon. “We take what hurts and we turn it into a big gag, and we’re singing, and we’re dancing, and the audience, they’re yukking it up, they’re laughing so hard they don’t realize that all they’re laughing at is a person in agony, a person who’s peeled off his own skin.”

Williams inhabits her role as Verdon, reconstituting herself so thoroughly as a middle-aged, disappointed stage actress that she’s hard to recognize. Her voice is pitch-perfect, mannered and illusive, and her physicality as a dancer conveys Verdon’s understated magnetism. But it’s hard not to feel like she’s underserved by the material, which presents her as a partner first and a performer second. With Fosse, the show is clear that there’s no boundary between the artist and the man: The scenes in which his memories and daydreams bleed into the reality the audience perceives make that much clear. The show offers flashes inside Verdon’s head—images of her and Fosse together, and glimpses of a lost friend—but they lack the defining aesthetic of Fosse himself, the caustic, sleazy, bewitching glamour that Fosse/Verdon has shaped itself around. Verdon helped shape Fosse’s career, the series makes clear. What’s less easy to see is how she might have shaped her own.

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[glasscanyons]

Jan 2014

Over and over I write words, read them, and erase them. I look at the notes I’ve written down beside me, then back at the screen, trying to form a first sentence. I can see the webs of similar artists and songs spread out before me. Mark Linkous, Sparklehorse’s lead vocalist and founder, shows similarities to many other artists, yet he created a sound that, thus far, seems to evade the explanatory grasp of so many music reviewers. So here’s my jab at it.

Earlier this week while discussing Sparklehorse with a friend, my first instinct was to compare them to Radiohead. This could either be a stretch (given the musical scope of each respective band) or a rather general comparison (it can be argued that, to varying degrees, Radiohead’s influence can be heard somewhere in the writing of most western rock groups since 1990). However, one element that seems to bring together Yorke and Linkous is their truly unusual yet beautiful lyrics: ‘now she combs her hair with blood,’ ‘a flock of knives cut the sky/and buried in my black eyes.’ Both bands use this style of writing that both wakes you up with its surreal strangeness while also having this odd romantic air about it (from the song Vegetable by Radiohead: ‘Your words surround me and I asphyxiate/and I burn all hate’). Both Radiohead and Sparklehorse songs have consistent undertones of alienation, loneliness, and the general strangeness of life while also somehow maintaining a romantic atmosphere throughout. Although most musical groups write about loneliness, love, and loss, these two groups seem to weave these themes into their songs in a way that goes beyond the words on the page. No matter how abstract their lyrics seem originally, you know exactly what they’re singing about.

Elliott Smith, while serenading us in a similar manner, presents feelings of isolation in a much darker way. However sad a Sparklehorse song may be, the musicians are able to make you comfortable - even hopeful at times. You can sit in the sadness of a song like Morning Hollow and somehow know it’s a transient feeling - the next song, aptly named ‘It’s not so hard,’ will get you up again. The parallel of suicide between Smith and Linkous may be one of their only ties. Smith doesn’t try to comfort, to add cheer to a song just for the sake of it. He’ll go on for five songs about how awful he feels and bring you on for a sixth without apology. Sparklehorse seem to dip their songs only slightly into sadness, lingering there for a while, but without indulging and falling into depression. Sparklehorse seem like the more glitter-eyed cousins of the sometimes bipolar Elliott Smith (see Figure 8 vs. From a Basement on a Hill). For each artist, though, their success could be entirely driven by the undeniable beauty that emerges naturally from the genuine sadness of their songs - both lyrically and instrumentally.

If you do a search for bands similar to Sparklehorse, you will not find Ambulance LTD, but they share very stark, fundamental similarities. Ambulance is the proof of Sparklehorse’s (if subtle) happy, soothing, resilient energy. Ambulance LTD formed 5 years later than Sparklehorse, but the parallels at least help clarify Sparklehorse’s mysterious magic. The two bands share the strange ability of being able to very quickly relax the listener with a subtle but distinctively grungy electric guitar sound. ‘The Ocean’ (Velvet Underground cover) and ’Swim’ have a clear, energetic but calm voice contrasting the upbeat instrumentals. The singer eases the listener through the sways of the strong guitar and drums, ensuring that the song stays calm even through its swells. Sparklehorse does a very similar thing in King of Nails - Linkous keeps his voice to almost a whisper throughout.

(starting to get distracted here…sorry guys)

When chosen well, female singers lighten and strengthen songs, and Sparklehorse pulls this off this very skillfully. The addition of PJ Harvey (Piano Fire) and Nina Perrson (Gold Day), bring up the magical nature of the songs and lighten Linkous’ sometimes heavy presence.

So what is it about Sparklehorse? Maybe it’s their calmness, maybe it’s their subtle energy, or their beautifully sad lyrics. Maybe it’s too many tiny factors all at once, thrown in all together to prevent us from ruining the mystery.

[aion-rsa]

The Public Enemy Solidified Gang Rule Under James Cagney for 90 Years

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William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931) turns 90 this weekend. When the film first came out, a theater in Times Square showed it nonstop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The movie marks the true beginning of gangster movies as a genre. Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar may have hit theaters first, but The Public Enemy set the pattern, and James Cagney nailed the patter. Not just the street talk either; he also understood its machine gun delivery. His Tommy Powers is just a hoodlum, never a boss. He is a button man at best, even if he insisted his suits have six buttons.

The Public Enemy character wasn’t even as high up the ladder as Paul Sorvino’s caporegime Paul Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. But Cagney secured the turf Edward G. Robinson’s Rico Bandello took a bullet to claim in Little Caesar, and for the rest of his career Cagney never let it go.

Some would argue genre films began in 1931. Besides mob movies, the year introduced the newspaper picture with Lewis Milestone’s The Front Page and John Cromwell’s Scandal Sheet; Universal Pictures began an unholy run of horror classics via Tod Browning’s Dracula and James Whale’s Frankenstein, with the two turning Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff into household names; and Howard Hawks’ Scarface would land the knockout for the gangster genre, even if it didn’t get released until 1932.

Sadly, the classic “Gangster Film” run only lasted one production season, from 1930 to 1931, and less than 30 films were made during it. Archie Mayo’s The Doorway to Hell started the ball rolling in 1930, when it became a surprise box office hit. It stars Lew Ayres as the top mug, with Cagney as his sidekick. For fans of pre-Code Hollywood, it is highly recommended. It includes a kidnapping scene which results in the death of a kid on the street. Without a speck of blood or any onscreen evidence, it is cinematically shocking in its impact.

Both Little Caesar and The Public Enemy earned their street cred, defying the then-toothless 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, which preceded the Hays Code. After New York censors cut six scenes from The Public Enemy to clear it for release, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) set further guidelines for the proper cinematic depiction of crime.

Public Enemy director Wellman was an expert in multiple genres. He spit out biting satires like Nothing Sacred (1937) and Roxie Hart (1942), and captured gritty, dark realities in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and Story of G.I. Joe (1945). He won his only Oscar for A Star Is Born (1937). The Public Enemy is the first example of what would be his trademark: stylish cinematography and clever camera-work. The dark suspense he captures is completely different from the look of German expressionism. It captured the overcast shadows of urban reality and would influence the look of later noir films. His main character would inspire generations of actors.

“That’s just like you, Tom Powers. You’re the meanest boy in town.”

Orson Welles lauded James Cagney as “maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of a camera.” Will Rogers said watching Cagney perform was “like a bunch of firecrackers going off all at once.” The New York City born performer explodes in this movie. Even in black and white, Cagney’s red hair flares through the air like sulfur on a match. It turns out to be a slow burn, which will reach its ultimate climax in 1949’s White Heat. The Public Enemy is loaded with top talent, but you can’t take your eyes off Cagney. Not even for a second. You might miss some tiny detail, like the flash of a grin, a wink, or a barely perceptible glare.

Cagney had a simple rule to acting: All you had to do was to look the other person straight in the eyes and say your lines. “But mean them.” In The Public Enemy, the characters communicate without lines. When Tom and Matt Doyle (Edward Woods) sneak a peek into Larry the Limp’s casket, we understand this is the first time the two young thugs lost someone their own age. The scene barely implies how fortunate they are not to be in that box, but their curiosity is as palpable as the loss of their last shred of innocence.

Cagney was originally cast as Matt, and scenes were shot with him in the role. The parts were switched mid-production, but they didn’t reshoot the flashback scenes, making it look like the pair swapped bodies between 1909 and 1915. It’s a shame because Frankie Darro, who plays the young Matt, made a career out of playing baby face Cagney, and later joined the East Side Kids franchise.

Former “Our Gang” actor Frank Coghlan Jr. took on the role of young Tom. He takes the lashes from his cop father’s belt, backtalking him the whole time. Tom Powers is reprehensible. He never says thank you and doesn’t shake hands. He delights in the violence and sadism. Powers doesn’t go into crime because of poverty; he just can’t be contained. Cagney’s mobster mangles, manhandles, maims and murders, and still needs more room in his inseam. 

Dames, Molls, and Grapefruits

Besides defying the ban on romanticizing criminals, both The Public Enemy and Little Caesar broke sexual codes. There are explicit signs that Rico Bandello represses his sexuality in Caesar. Scenes between him and his friend Joe, and his gunman Otera, thinly veil homoerotic overtones. Public Enemy’s Powers, by contrast, subtly encourages the gay tailor who is openly hitting on him.

There are strong indications Putty Nose (Murray Kinnell) is grooming Tommy and Matt for more than just fenced goods. Look at the way Putty sticks his ass in Powers’ face while he is shooting pool. Putty Nose’s execution at the piano is creepily informed by the unspoken sins between the men. Tommy relishes the kill.

However, Tommy doesn’t relish being manhandled when he’s too drunk to notice. While the gang goes to the mattresses in the movie’s gang war, Tommy is raped by Jane (Mia Marvin), his boss Paddy’s girl. Powers protests the best he can, but the camera angles leave no doubt. Tommy wakes up hungover, horrified, and feeling impotent. Matt, however, has no trouble getting “busy” with his girlfriend Mamie, played by Joan Blondell, in one of the scenes trimmed by the censors.  Blondell, Jean Harlow, and Mae Clarke, who plays Tommy’s girlfriend Kitty, represent a glitzy cross-section of white Roaring Twenties glamour. In the opening credits, when Harlow and Blondell smile at the camera, male audience members of the time blushed.

Harlow was Hollywood’s original “Blonde Bombshell,” starring in the movie that coined the term. Her earthy comic performances would make her a major star at MGM, but she was a dud to critics of The Public Enemy. Hers was the only part which was criticized, and the reviewers were brutal, declaring her voice untrained and her presence boring.

Harlow’s greatest asset had to be contained within the Pre-Code era. Straddled with a wordy part as a slumming society dame, she is directed to slow her lines to counter the quick patter of the rest of the cast. Yet Harlow uses that to her benefit in the film’s best moment of sexual innuendo. While telling Tommy about “the men I’ve known,” she pauses, and appears to be calculating them in her head before she says, “And I’ve known dozens of them.” When an evening alone with Tommy is cut short, Gwen’s exasperation over the coitus interruptus is palpable. Members of the Catholic Legion of Decency probably had to go to confession after viewing the film for slicing.

Most people know The Public Enemy for the famous grapefruit scene where Powers pushes a grapefruit into his girlfriend’s face. “I wish you was a wishing well,” he warns, “so that I could tie a bucket to you and sink ya.” Tommy treats women like property. They are status symbols, the same as clothes or cars. Kitty’s passive-aggressive hints at commitment get on Tom’s nerves. He can only express himself through violence. There are rumors Cagney, who would go on to rough up Virginia Mayo in White Heat and brutalize Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me, didn’t warn Clarke he was going to use her face as a juicer. According to the autobiography Cagney by Cagney, Clarke’s ex-husband Lew Brice loved the scene so much he watched it a few times a day, timing his entrance into the theater to catch it and leave.

Both actors have said it was staged as a practical joke to see how the film crew would react. It wasn’t meant to make the final cut. Wellman told TCM he added it because he always wanted to do that to his wife. The writer reportedly wrote the scene as a kind of wish-fulfilling fantasy.

The screenplay was written by Harvey F. Thew. It was based on Beer and Blood by John Bright and Kubec Glasmon. The unpublished novel fleshed out press accounts of the bootlegging Northside gang leaders, Charles Dion “Deanie” O’Banion, Earl “Hymie” Weiss, and Louis “Two-Gun” Alterie. Cagney based his Tommy Powers character on O’Banion and Altiere. Edward Woods was doing his take on Weiss. The book reflected the headlines in the Chicago papers, which reported Weiss smashed an omelet into his girlfriend’s face.

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The Public Enemy borrowed from the day’s headlines in other ways too. Hymie Weiss was assassinated in October 1926. It was the first reported “machine-gun nest” murder. It is recreated in the killing of Matt Doyle. While shooting the sequence, Cagney ducked real machine gun fire to bring authenticity to the scene. Also taken from real life is the fact that after O’Banion was killed in ‘24, Alterie’s first reaction was to do public battle with the killers. This is similar to Tommy’s final shootout at Schemer Burns’ nightclub headquarters.

Leslie Fenton’s dashing mob captain Nails Nathan (“born Samuel”) flashes the greatest grin in mob movie history. He is based on Samuel “Nails” Morton, a member of O’Banion’s mob. Both “Nails” were driven to their coffins the way it is depicted in The Public Enemy. The real Morton died in a riding accident in 1923, and “Two-Gun” Alterie and some of the other gang members went back to the stables, rented the horse which kicked Nails in the head, and shot the animal. Mario Puzo may have been inspired by this scene when he wrote The Godfather. It is not only tie to the Francis Ford Coppola movie. Oranges have as much vitamin C as grapefruits. Another similarity between the two films is the threat of being kidnapped from the hospital by a rival gang.

The Powers brothers’ relationship vaguely echoes the one between war hero Michael and Sonny Corleone, who believes, as his father does, soldiers were “saps” to risk their lives for strangers. Donald Cook, who played Mike Powers, didn’t pull any punches on the set. In the scene where he knocks Tom into the table before going off to war, he really connects. Wellman told Cook to do it without warning so he could get that look of surprise. Cook broke one of Cagney’s teeth, but Cagney stayed in character and finished the scene.

“It is a wicked business.”

After the stock market crash, get-rich-quick schemes seemed the only way through the Great Depression. The gangster was an acceptable headline hero during Prohibition because the law was unpopular with the press. But after 1929, the gangster became the scapegoat villain. The Public Enemy was the ninth highest grossing film of 1931. But the genre lost its appeal after April of that year, as studios pumped out pale imitations and audiences got tired of the saturation, according to the book Violence and American Cinema, edited by J. David Slocum. Religious and civic groups accused Hollywood of romanticizing crime and glamorizing gangsters.

The Public Enemy opens with a dire warning: Don’t be a gangster. Hoodlums and terrorists of the underworld should not be glamorized. The only MPAA rule the film didn’t break was portraying an alliance between organized crime and politics. The studios passed the films off as cautionary tales which were meant to deflate the gangster’s appeal by ridiculing their false heroism.

Through this hand-wringing, however, Cagney turns false heroics on its head with the comic brilliance of a Mack Sennett short. Stuck without a gun, he robs a gun store armed with nothing but moxie. Powers never rises in the organization. He takes orders and whatever the boss says is a good cut, only asking for more money once from Putty Nose. Unlike Rico, who rose to be boss among bosses, Powers has no power to lose. This is just the first gig he landed since he was a regular “ding ding” driving a streetcar, and it connected with audiences like a sock on the button. They identified with the scrappy killer, and it surprised them.

Even Gwen notices Tommy is “very different, and it isn’t only a difference in manner and outward appearances. It’s a difference in basic character.” Strict Freudians might lay this on his mother (Beryl Mercer), the greatest enabler Cagney will see until White Heat. Ma Powers’ little boy is a budding psychopath knocking off half the North Side, but look at the head on his beer. For audiences at the time, Tom was the smiling, fresh-scrubbed face of evil. He is consistently unsympathetic but likable from the moment he hits the opening credits.

Like Malcom McDowell’s Alex in A Clockwork Orange, he is the fiend’s best friend. Even if it is Tommy’s fault his best pal Matt gets killed. While Cagney spent his career ducking his “you dirty, double-crossing, rat” line from Taxi, the actor wasn’t afraid to play one in Powers. He’s not a rat in the sense he’d snitch on anyone. He’s the last of the pack who sticks it out for his pals when his back is up against the wall.

A Hail of Bullets

Tommy Powers goes by this credo: live fast, die young, and leave a corpse so riddled with bullets, not even his mother can look at his body when he’s done. But then, no one can end a film like Cagney. He’s danced down the White House stairs in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), been rolled across the concrete steps of a city church in The Roaring Twenties (1939), and was blown to kingdom come in White Heat. He gets two death scenes in The Public Enemy, a rain-soaked climax, and a denouement as scary as The Mummy. Tommy only brings one gun to the gang fight, and by the time he hits the pavement, he’s got more holes in him than the city sewage system.

“I ain’t so tough,” Tommy says on his final roll into the gutter. Cagney’s first professional job was in a musical drag act on the Vaudeville circuit, and he called himself a “song and dance man” long after retirement. For The Public Enemy, conductor David Mendoza led the Vitaphone Orchestra through such period hits as “Toot Toot Tootsie (Goodbye),” “Smiles,” and “I Surrender Dear.” But the song “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” is the one which lingers in the memory. Martin Scorsese has cited it as a reason his films are so filled with recognizable music.

Street violence comes with a natural soundtrack. Transistor radios accompany takedowns. Boom boxes blast during shakedowns. Car stereos boost the bass during drive-by shootings. In The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, mobsters feed quarters into a jukebox to cover up sounds of a beating.

In The Godfather, Part II, a street band plays traditional Italian songs while Vito Corleone puts bullets in the neighborhood Black Hand, Don Fanucci. The last thing we hear in the abrupt close to the mob series The Sopranos is a Journey song. The first thing Tommy’s mother does when she hears her boy is coming home from the hospital is drop a needle on a record.

The ending leaves us with two questions: Who killed Tommy, and what’s his brother going to do about it? We figure whoever did the job on Powers was probably a low-level button man from Schemer’s rival outfit. Probably even lower down the ladder than Tommy, and on his way up, until another Tommy comes along. Crime only pays in the movies, Edward G. Robinson often joked.

Mike’s reaction to the bandaged corpse is ambiguous. He’s already shown outward signs of the trauma following the horrors of war. Is he clenching his fists in anguish or anger? Is he broken by the battlefield or marching off in vengeance, a soldier on one last duty? Cook’s exit can go either way.

After 90 years, The Public Enemy is still fresh. It’s aged better than Little Caesar or Scarface. Cagney wouldn’t play a gangster again until 1938, but the image is etched so deeply in the persona, audiences forget the vagaries of villainy Hollywood could spin, and the range of characters Cagney could play. He and the film continue to influence filmmakers, inform culture, and surprise audiences. Tommy Powers was just a mug, but those streets are still his.

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[kyndall-cunningham-blog]

The silence of men at the 75th Annual Golden Globes

Photo courtesy: The Hollywood Reporter

It’s a common virtue among well-meaning, progressive men that women should be heard and that the empowerment of women equals the silencing of men. It’s an idea that’s often encouraged by women themselves fighting to end the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and the systems that allow these behaviors to go unpunished. 

They aren’t wrong. The same kind of intimidation that prevents women from reporting sexual harassment in their workplaces also prevents them from sharing their ideas with their male bosses or voicing their opinions in meetings. Silencing is an insidious form of violence that ultimately limits women’s access to positions of authority. So we tell men to let us speak — not only that, but to listen.While men should listen to women, while our experiences should be believed, valued and understood, the sole instruction of “sit down and listen” to privileged white men in response to gender inequality is all too rudimentary and performative to affect real change. 

Listening is an accommodation, one that turns into silence. It’s not advocacy. 

These thoughts infiltrated my experience watching the 75th Annual Golden Globes on Sunday night. As an unabashed consumer of pop culture and celebrity gossip, I was excited to see the films, television shows and actors I adored over the past year being celebrated but, most importantly, the demonstration of a movement led by women, Time’s Up. Time’s Up became an initiative after the #MeToo movement peaked social consciousness last October and exposed the abusive, predatory behaviors of some of Hollywood’s most elite men, most notably Harvey Weinstein.

Nearly every actor, writer, director and random celebrity that was invited to the ceremony got the memo to dawn all black in solidarity with women in all industries who have suffered sexual misconduct in their workplaces and private lives. Men, who would typically wear black suits, wore pins with the Time’s Up logo.

While the night was one of meaningful conversation balanced with moments of levity and hilarious digs at grimy men and all-male award categories (shoutout to Natalie Portman), women did most, if not all, of the talking. Actually, I’m 100% sure that Seth Meyers was the only man on that stage to address Harvey Weinstein or the fact that men can be garbage, all because he was hosting. For other male attendees and award recipients, it was business as usual. Men thanked their families, fellow actors and managers for their achievements and walked off stage.

If you couldn’t tell already, it bothers me that a societal issue that is so overwhelmingly perpetuated by men is left for women to make a talking point. The clearest example of this during the show was the harsh contrast between Nicole Kidman and Alexander Skarsgard’s acceptance speeches for their roles in HBO’s Big Little Lies. Like her acceptance speech at the Emmys last year, Kidman used her platform to shed light on the prevalence of domestic abuse and how authentic storytelling can hopefully affect change. Skarsgard, who played her brutally violent and manipulative husband in the series, didn’t have anything to say on the topic. He also referred to his adult, far more experienced female co-stars as “girls,” but I digress.

In the midst of my frustration watching the Golden Globes, I was reminded of Emma Watson’s HeForShe campaign that began in 2014. The goal of the campaign is to recruit men and boys as “agents of change” against gender inequality and hurtful stereotypes. Her speech to the UN was originally met with pushback from certain feminists who believed her campaign ultimately aimed to make feminism a more accommodating space for men. Pictures of male celebrities like Harry Styles and Tom Hiddleston holding handwritten signs that read #HeForShe didn’t exactly help, with activists and social media users accusing men of priding themselves on their feminist beliefs without doing any real work, the type of performative activism displayed by men at the Golden Globes.

I never really agreed with these sentiments when I heard them, as I understood Watson’s message as one of male accountability and sharing the workload. There’s a particular way we talk about sexual abuse in American and global culture that has always bothered me. Discourse about this subject often mislabels rape and sexual assault as “women’s issues,” placing the burden of these injustices on the shoulders of its victims, not its perpetuators. The silence of all men — the good ones and the bad ones — may sound pleasant to some, but it’s ultimately dangerous. The extremity of the patriarchy is represented in the idea that women have to work to end the problems that have been inflicted on them by men. Therefore, men should not be able to pride themselves as socially conscious, enlightened “good guys” based on minimal involvement in a movement. Looking back, I’m satisfied with what Emma Watson established in her campaign, like so many other feminists: that sexual assault, rape and the overall mistreatment of women are men’s issues, that gender inequality is not our burden to carry, that all men should be held accountable for the patriarchal systems in place. Just listening is not enough.