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kemetic-dreams · 1 year ago

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Carol Diann Johnson was born in the Bronx, New York City, on July 17, 1935, to John Johnson, a subway conductor, and Mabel (Faulk), a nurse. While Carroll was still an infant, the family moved to Harlem, where she grew up except for a brief period in which her parents had left her with an aunt in North Carolina. She attended Music and Art High School, and was a classmate of Billy Dee Williams. In many interviews about her childhood, Carroll recalls her parents' support, and their enrolling her in dance, singing, and modeling classes. By the time Carroll was 15, she was modeling for Ebony. "She also began entering television contests, including Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, under the name Diahann Carroll." After graduating from high school, she attended New York University, where she majored in sociology, "but she left before graduating to pursue a show-business career, promising her family that if the career did not materialize after two years, she would return to college.

Carroll's big break came at the age of 18, when she appeared as a contestant on the DuMont Television Network program, Chance of a Lifetime, hosted by Dennis James. On the show, which aired January 8, 1954, she took the $1,000 top prize for a rendition of the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein song, "Why Was I Born?" She went on to win the following four weeks. Engagements at Manhattan's Café Society and Latin Quarter, nightclubs soon followed.

Carroll's film debut was a supporting role in Carmen Jones (1954), as a friend to the sultry lead character played by Dorothy Dandridge. That same year, she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her role in the Broadway musical, House of Flowers. A few years later, she played Clara in the film version of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1959), but her character's singing parts were dubbed by opera singer Loulie Jean Norman. The following year, Carroll made a guest appearance in the series Peter Gunn, in the episode "Sing a Song of Murder" (1960). In the next two years, she starred with Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward in the film Paris Blues (1961) and won the 1962 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical (the first time for a Black woman) for portraying Barbara Woodruff in the Samuel A. Taylor and Richard Rodgers musical No Strings. Twelve years later, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her starring role alongside James Earl Jones in the film Claudine (1974), which part had been written specifically for actress Diana Sands (who had made guest appearances on Julia as Carroll's cousin Sara), but shortly before filming was to begin, Sands learned she was terminally ill with cancer. Sands attempted to carry on with the role, but as filming began, she became too ill to continue and recommended her friend Carroll take over the role. Sands died in September 1973, before the film's release in April 1974.

Carroll is known for her titular role in the television series Julia (1968-71), which made her the first African-American actress to star in her own television series who did not play a domestic worker. That role won her the Golden Globe Award for Best TV Star – Female for its first year, and a nomination for an Primetime Emmy Award in 1969. Some of Carroll's earlier work also included appearances on shows hosted by Johnny Carson, Judy Garland, Merv Griffin, Jack Paar, and Ed Sullivan, and on The Hollywood Palace variety show. In 1984, Carroll joined the nighttime soap opera Dynasty at the end of its fourth season as the mixed-race jet set diva Dominique Deveraux, Blake Carrington's half-sister. Her high-profile role on Dynasty also reunited her with her schoolmate Billy Dee Williams, who briefly played her onscreen husband Brady Lloyd. Carroll remained on the show and made several appearances on its short-lived spin-off, The Colbys until she departed at the end of the seventh season in 1987. In 1989, she began the recurring role of Marion Gilbert in A Different World, for which she received her third Emmy nomination that same year.

In 1991, Carroll portrayed Eleanor Potter, the doting, concerned, and protective wife of Jimmy Potter (portrayed by Chuck Patterson), in the musical drama film The Five Heartbeats (1991), also featuring actor and musician Robert Townsend and Michael Wright. She reunited with Billy Dee Williams again in 1995, portraying his character's wife Mrs. Greyson in Lonesome Dove: The Series. The following year, Carroll starred as the self-loving and deluded silent movie star Norma Desmond in the Canadian production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version of the film Sunset Boulevard. In 2001, Carroll made her animation debut in The Legend of Tarzan, in which she voiced Queen La, ruler of the ancient city of Opar.

In 2006, Carroll appeared in several episodes the television medical drama Grey's Anatomy as Jane Burke, the demanding mother of Dr. Preston Burke. From 2008 to 2014, she appeared on USA Network's series White Collar in the recurring role of June, the savvy widow who rents out her guest room to Neal Caffrey. In 2010, Carroll was featured in UniGlobe Entertainment's breast cancer docudrama titled 1 a Minute and appeared as Nana in two Lifetime movie adaptations of Patricia Cornwell’s novels: At Risk and The Front.

In 2013, Carroll was present on stage at the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards to briefly speak about being the first African-American nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. She was quoted as saying about Kerry Washington, nominated for Scandal, "She better get this award."

Carroll was a founding member of the Celebrity Action Council, a volunteer group of celebrity women who served the women's outreach of the Los Angeles Mission, working with women in rehabilitation from problems with alcohol, drugs, or prostitution. She helped to form the group along with other female television personalities including Mary Frann, Linda Gray, Donna Mills, and Joan Van Ark.

Carroll was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997. She said the diagnosis "stunned" her, because there was no family history of breast cancer, and she had always led a healthy lifestyle. She underwent nine weeks of radiation therapy and had been clear for years after the diagnosis. She frequently spoke of the need for early detection and prevention of the disease. She died from cancer at her home in West Hollywood, California, on October 4, 2019, at the age of 84. Carroll also had dementia at the time of her death, though actor Marc Copage, who played her character's son on Julia, said that she did not appear to show serious signs of cognitive decline as late as 2017. A memorial service was held in November 24, 2019, at the Helen Hayes Theater in New York City.

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delulu--lulu · 2 years ago

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Spider-Man into/across the spider-verse Spider-sona story

Oc name: Kyana (nickname is Yana)

I wrote a Spider sona story instead of drawing one because I suck at drawing more than writing... so 😃👍

Face Claim! :

Spider-Man into/across the spider-verse Spider-sona story

Oc name: Kyana (nickname is Yana) Her family moves a lot. She was born and raised in Dallas Texas and her family moved to Brooklyn New York later.

Her family moved because her father’s family lived there and her grandma was sick so they came to help.

Mr. Wilson’s family lives in the Bronx but he didn’t want to move back so decided to move to Brooklyn.

She has two annoying younger brothers; Keenan (10) Kel (8).

She speaks English and only knows a little bit of Spanish but the rest of her family speaks it well which Yana gets frustrated at cause she can’t understand the rest of them while her younger brothers speaks better than she does.

She understands it more than she can speak it unfortunately. So she hears what her family members say about her behind her back. She wishes she didn’t though.

On her dad’s side, they’re Dominican 🇩🇴 . Her mom is just American 🤷🏽‍♀️.

Yes, she knows how to dance bachata.

Yana’s parents swear she was born in the generation because she’s an old-head, loving all the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s classics. One of her favorite songs is I Have Nothing by Whitney Houston.

Yana was bit by the radioactive spider before Miles was.

She went to Visions Academy prior to taking the test in Texas and getting in (another reason why her family moves).

Personality: she’s kinda awkward, little bit of anger issues, but is the nicest person on earth, she’s sensitive and gets taken advantage of sometimes because of it. A completely different person at school than at home (quiet kid 101).

Got bit by the radioactive spider before she went to school. She was bitten by it without knowing (kinda like a mosquito bite) while she was listening to music and senerioizng on the rooftop.

School was kinda ass for her. Despite the racial dysphoria of other people wanting to be her race, everything was semi normal.

“How come you’re Latina but your last name is Wilson?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe there’s something called colonization to other countries.”

She handled that better than she thought she would. “By the way I don’t identify as a Latina. I’m black but my ethnicity is Dominican and my nationality is American.”

Gwen noticed her powers first and they became friends first. Yana also spoke to Miles first.

But that was a mistake after she remembered that her parents were more strict about boys than they were with her brothers about girls.

Ain’t that a shame 😔

Yana was who Miles talked about with his uncle but Gwen happened to be there instead of her.

While he was trying to rizz up Gwen and his hand got stuck to her hair, he panicked and swung his arms around and it stuck to Yana’s uniform shirt (she happened to be walking by).

So they were all embarrassing each other in the middle of the hallway.

Yana spoke to Gwen about what happened afterwards when and explained to her that she thought Miles might be like them.

Spider-Man’s death didn’t take a surprise to Yana with all those crazy villains he fought.

They both “befriended” him in the forest after they stole the hard drive. She went with Gwen first to save them in her store bought spider man suit.

Miles and Yana had coincidentally wore the same store bought suit and Yana used one of his cringey lines from the beginning of school.

“Oh, my gosh! This is embarrassing. We wore the same suit.” She laughed but he wasn’t amused.

Yana goes with them to Aunt May’s for the first time and meets the new spider people. She befriends Peni first. She gets to tell her story: “Hi, my name is Yana Wilson and for the past two weeks, I’ve been Brand New Spider-woman.”

Her theme song is Push It by Salt-N-Pepa.

Yana’s spider-woman name is “Spider-Blast” because her spider suit is extremely colorful (she’s based off of the Green Bottle Blue Tarantula) it’s like a “blast” of color.

The spider team didn’t think that Yana and Miles were good enough to save New York and it made Yana feel insecure about herself.

Of course I’m not going to be good enough, I’ve only been spider woman for two weeks!

When Miles ran away and his crazy self started jumping off of buildings, Yana accompanied him.

They both helped each other personalize their suits. Yana made her suit colorful with the Dominican flag.

She wanted to practice with him because she felt like she didn’t deserve to be Spider-woman and if she was then she’d at least learn how to.

On that roof after Yana and Miles swung around the city they shared their first kiss.

During the fight and while everyone was going to leave, Yana almost cried when Gwen had to leave but she assured Yana that she would see her again.

After the fight with Kingpin and after they save New York City, Miles and Yana start a relationship.

A secret one at that matter. Mostly secret from their families.

ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

Yana got her phone taken away for failing a class (because she was doing spider things) so she couldn’t call or text Miles.

But he randomly called her phone that was sitting on the counter and Yana just happened to answer the phone before her mom could.

“Boy, it’s past 12! I got minutes.” She whispers angrily into the phone. “Ima call you back on the house phone. Do not call back if I hang up.”

It took a lot of convincing and serious talk with her parents about boys before Yana finally takes Miles to meet her family. But they like him and say that he reminds them of their daughter (no sabo kid).

Her aunts like that he’s Latino.

Keenan and Kel do not like Miles at all. They speak about him behind his back in Spanish. Yana tells them to stop though.

Being the only spider people in their dimension gets lonely so they of course miss their friends.

Yana notices that Miles seems to miss Gwen more than she does. (She finds his drawings of her).

Once Yana got home from fighting a villain and Spider-Blast was on the TV news in her family’s living room.

“Spider-Blast?” Her Tia Semira questions while helping fix dinner. “What kind of name is that?”

Although Yana knew that her Tia didn’t mean it in a criticizing way but it still made her cringe.

“I heard that she was from la caribe.” Her messy Tia Maia says, sticking her nose up. “She better not be dominicana.”

“Nah.” Yana quickly jumped in the conversation. “I’m pretty sure she’s boricuan.” Her tias shrugged it off with a scoff.

Yana quickly went to Miles’s the next day. “Man, I almost got caught by my nosy tias.”

“Oh, word?” He says, smirking. “Let me guess… she said that she hoped Miss Spider-Blast wasn’t Dominican.” Yana nods with an eye roll.

When Yana and Miles first met the Spot, as said, Miles didn’t take him seriously. Y’know, that “villain of the week” mess.

But Yana sensed something off and tried to tone Miles down but he wasn’t listening.

He had to go to his parent teacher conference and was already late so he was rushing.

Yo girlfriend is always right, Miles 🤷🏽‍♀️

When it’s the party that celebrates Jeff’s promotion to captain, Yana puts off her spider work to go while Miles clearly does not.

She gets to thinking that he supposes that he’s the better hero than her for still tryna save the city.

He obviously doesn’t .

When he does get there, his parents are on his ass about not getting there on time and Yana calms him down. While sitting in his room talking, Gwen arrives.

Yana is ecstatic to see her best friend after a whole year and a half. But Miles seems happier.

And she sho notices too 😒.

“Wanna get out of here?” Are the last words said that Yana immediately knows will lead to trouble.

Although swinging around the city with Gwen is fun, she feels like a third wheel even though she and Miles are together and not him and Gwen.

Yana’s petty like that and goes back to the party to see if Gwen and Miles would even notice if she was gone. They do, but not until a little later.

Strike 1

At the party, Yana sulks around watching Miles and Gwen interact on the tower thingy. Rio notices so she goes up to introduce herself to Gwen.

As you could tell, it didn’t go well.

After Gwen leaves Miles and Yana have a little serious talk about what happened and he says he won’t do it again.

Mhm 😒.

So to make up for the little argument, Miles decides to take Yana with him to follow Gwen.

Great job bro 😑

Miles turns invisible and Yana camouflages (another perk of the green blue bottle tarantula).

Blah, blah, blah, the learn about the spider society and follow Gwen into the dimension. Yana is the first to go in because she feels like she’s being pulled towards it.

Miles tries grabbing her hand to pull her out but he gets sucked in too.

Meeting Pavitr is the best thing that could happen to Yana. That instantly become friends and she joins in on Pavitr grilling Miles about saying Chai tea.

“That’s like saying Naan bread. Naan means bread. It’s like bread bread, Miles! I thought we talked about this.”

He got sad. “Man, even my own girlfriend is chewing me out.” He mumbles. “I SAID I WAS SORRY, YANA.” ☹️

When Yana met Hobie, it was over. She befriended everyone instantly and it made her happy to meet so many friends since she didn’t have a lot back home.

Gwen was a little upset that both of them were there because they weren’t supposed to be. But she didn’t have any control over it because Miguel requested both Yana and Miles.

Learning that the Spot was traveling dimensions to get power was nerve wracking to Miles because just yesterday he said that he was just a villain of the week and he wasn’t.

Yana told him he should’ve known better because she warned him.

Strike 2

Meeting Miguel could’ve gone better than Yana hoped. He wasn’t very friendly in her opinion. She definitely didn’t like him after how he talked to her and Miles.

She was tryna be nice and chill but obviously it didn’t work.

“Hey, my name is Yana-“

“You aren’t supposed to be here.”

“Damn. This is why you can’t be nice to ppl 😒.” Yana rolls her eyes at him.

When she learns about the canon events is when things really started to become trouble. Miles’s dad was supposed to die and by Miguel’s introduction on saying that “she isn’t supposed to be here” he explains that Yana is the only variant of herself.

Meaning there are no other Yanas in any other dimension.

Basically like America Chavez. 🤭

That’s when all her friends turn to stare at her in either awe, confusion, or anything else for that matter. Yana feels exposed in that moment. She didn’t even know it was true but somehow she felt judged.

But the look Miles gives her is something else. It’s the look as if he was hesitant.

It wasn’t until she and Miles were being chased by every single spider person in existence that Miles realized that she was too fragile. There wasn’t another Yana, so if she died, that was it.

He didn’t want to lose her just like that.

“Go find Margo and tell her to take you back to our universe.” He said.

Yana didn’t have much choice since she wanted to get out of the chase. These people were chasing her like she owed money. Yana didn’t find Margo until Miles found Margo.

He looked pretty upset.

Even though they were both invisible/camouflaged, they could sense each other.

Turns out Miles wasn’t even meant to be Spider-Man. So that meant Yana wasn’t either… or so he thought.

Margo didn’t want to send Miles and Yana to Ty roe dimension due to Miguel’s constant threats to not let Miles nor Yana go.

But she had too.

(She and Hobie the real ones).

Miles helps Yana into the dimension switching thingy (I don’t know what that thing is even called😭).

Yana and Margo made intense eye contact which was a whole conversation without even talking. Miles thought it was some girl telepathy thing.

Margo pressed the button. “42.” Yana says with furrowed eyebrows. “We’re not from 42-“

Miles yanks Yana along with him as they both tear down through the streets on New York to Miles’s house. Yana climbs through the window first and then Miles does.

His room looks the same… “but this isn’t our New York” she wants to say.

“We made it…” Miles sighs in relief before he turns to look at his girlfriend. “Yana, are you alright?”

She nods. “Yeah, I’m fine… But Miles, this isn’t our-“

The door opens, light filling the room. Panic fills Yana’s head. Since she’s the only version of herself in every universe, that means Rio won’t recognize her.

Yana swiftly hides behind the door. “Miles?” His mom enters with a basket of clothes. Miles had quickly put a large jacket on. “Is now a bad time?”

She continues to make conversation with him as Miles tries to figure out a way to tell her he’s Spider-Man.

Yana watches it all intently.

“I’m… I’m Spider-Man.” He zips his jacket revealing his suit.

Rio stares blankly at him. “Who?”

That’s when Yana realizes. It confirms her suspicions that they aren’t in the right dimension. There is no spider-person in this universe.

No wonder the streets looked so gloomy and dark. As soon as Miles and Rio are out of the room, Yana makes a break for the rooftop.

As soon as she’s on the roof she takes her mask off to breathe. Taking deep breaths in and out, don’t seem to calm her. They wrack her nerves even more.

Yana looks around. It’s night and it’s darker and gloomier than Brooklyn regularly is. Her eyes soon land on something that makes her jaw drop.

Jeff’s mural. It replaces Aaron’s.

He’s dead in this dimension.

The rooftop door opens. Yana panics again because this time she doesn’t know where to hide. So she goes over the roof but sticks to the wall so she can still see.

“You got the plan?” Aaron’s voice enters her ears.

Aaron?

“Yeah…” Miles follows quickly behind him looking just as shell shocked as she is. “But maybe we should go over it again… just to make sure.”

He looks around shocked at all the chaos. And at his face, that’s when Yana knows that he’s seen it. He’s seen the mural.

Aaron gets a text and upon that text, he turns to look at Miles suspiciously.

At that moment, a dark figure jumps up and punches Miles in the face knocking him down.

Now, how immature would it be for Yana to shout something at this moment? Very.

“Damn!” Yana exclaims. She didn’t mean to, it was an instinct. She quickly covers her mouth and ducks back down when Aaron and the figure look in her direction.

“Someone’s here. Check the area.” Aaron orders and slips back into the stair room while the figure disappears.

Yana panicky looks around for where the person went but doesn’t see or hear them until she’s getting smacked back into the rooftop floor right next to Miles.

Despite the pain and ringing in her ears, she can look up to see the figure more clearly. A more clean design of the “prowler” suit.

Another prowler?

The new prowler’s phone rings in his pocket. He takes it out and answers it and his mask opens up.

Yana’s eyes widen at the face. It’s Miles, but not her Miles.

It’s the last face she sees before she completely blacks out.

A/N : Do y'all know how long it took for me to finish this?? 😩 I was kinda on and off this this tho

#my oc #my sona #spidersona #spiderverse sona #spiderman across the spiderverse #spiderman spiderverse #spiderverse #spiderverse spoilers #spiderblast #i hate hashtags #i suck at hashtags

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driveinfilmreviews · 8 months ago

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The Heart-Warming Classic “Marty”

“Marty,” released in 1955, is a timeless classic that continues to resonate with audiences today, showcasing the universal themes of love, loneliness, and the search for connection. Directed by Delbert Mann and based on Paddy Chayefsky’s teleplay, the film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay, solidifying its place in cinematic history.

Set in the Bronx, New York, “Marty” follows the titular character, Marty Piletti, a kind-hearted and unassuming butcher in his mid-30s, portrayed brilliantly by Ernest Borgnine. Marty leads a simple life, working at his family’s butcher shop and spending his evenings with his friends at the local dance hall. However, Marty’s bachelor status and lack of romantic success often make him the target of pity and ridicule from his family and peers.

The film unfolds over the course of a weekend, during which Marty reluctantly agrees to accompany his boisterous friend, Angie, to the dance hall. There, Marty meets Clara, a shy and insecure schoolteacher played by Betsy Blair. Despite their initial awkwardness and self-doubt, Marty and Clara form a genuine connection, finding solace and understanding in each other’s company.

What sets “Marty” apart from other romantic dramas of its time is its authentic portrayal of everyday life and ordinary people. The characters in “Marty” are not glamorous or larger than life; they are ordinary individuals grappling with loneliness, insecurity, and the fear of rejection. In Marty and Clara, audiences see themselves reflected, making their love story all the more poignant and relatable.

Ernest Borgnine’s performance as Marty is the heart and soul of the film. With his rugged appearance and expressive face, Borgnine brings depth and vulnerability to the character, capturing Marty’s inner turmoil and longing for companionship with subtlety and nuance. Borgnine’s portrayal of Marty earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor, a well-deserved recognition of his talent and dedication to the role.

Opposite Borgnine, Betsy Blair delivers a standout performance as Clara, Marty’s love interest. Blair infuses Clara with a quiet strength and sensitivity, making her a perfect match for Marty’s gentle nature. The chemistry between Borgnine and Blair is palpable, creating a sense of intimacy and authenticity that elevates their on-screen romance.

In addition to its stellar performances, “Marty” boasts a sharp and poignant screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky, which captures the cadence and vernacular of working-class New Yorkers with precision and authenticity. Chayefsky’s script is filled with memorable dialogue and poignant moments that resonate long after the credits roll.

Delbert Mann’s direction is understated yet effective, allowing the performances and the story to take center stage. Mann’s decision to film on location in the Bronx adds to the film’s authenticity, immersing viewers in Marty’s world and enhancing the sense of realism.

At its core, “Marty” is a celebration of the human spirit and the power of love to transform lives. Through Marty and Clara’s journey, the film reminds us that true happiness often lies in the simple joys of companionship and connection. In a world filled with noise and distractions, “Marty” serves as a gentle reminder to cherish the moments of genuine human connection that enrich our lives.

Despite being released nearly seven decades ago, “Marty” remains as relevant and affecting as ever. Its timeless themes and universal appeal ensure that it will continue to captivate audiences for generations to come. Whether you’re a fan of classic cinema or simply appreciate a well-crafted love story, “Marty” is a must-see film that will warm your heart and leave a lasting impression.

#film blog #movies #cinematography #classic #thursday

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criticalbennifer · 1 year ago

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Woman of the Year: Jennifer Lopez

By: Brantley Bardin

1999

Those eyes. Those curves. That mouth. And oh, the things that come out of it! Those are just a few reasons why we can't get Jennifer Lopez, the star of Out Of Sight, out of our minds.

She's just what you'd want her to be: sassy, street, gorgeous, good. Especially right now. That's because right now the woman who left the South Bronx at twenty-one to become an In Living Color "fly girl," the woman who tells it like it is and don't we like that ("Madonna? Do I think she's a great actress? No," she said to a reporter. "Gwyneth Paltrow? I don't remember anything she was in . . . I heard more about her and Brad Pitt than I ever did about her work."), and - okay, maybe most of all - the woman who brought curvy backsides front and center is stretched across a plush couch in her midtown New York split-level hotel suite while late-afternoon sun floods the room. Packed into a provocatively tight gray Gucci turtleneck sweater, black stretch pants, and high-heeled leather boots, the five-foot-five Bronx bombshell casually raises her right leg skyward, then oh-so-slowly pulls it to the tip of her nose. And, before you know it, there it is right now: She's doing a split for you. Maybe it's just a dancer's thing. Maybe she's shamelessly flirting. Who cares? How could we not make a vision like this our Woman of the Year? Say hello to Jennifer Lopez.

Jennifer had a big year. Most importantly, of course, there was Out of Sight, in which the twenty-eight-year-old actress kicked her way into George Clooney's trunk and America's collective fantasy. It was also the film that earned her the biggest payday ever for a Latina actress: $2 million. But there were other milestones that made Jennifer a unanimous choice: appearances in Sean "Puffy" Combs' "Been Around the World" video and Marc Anthony's "Te Conosco Bien" video; that eye-popping "Danger: Curves Ahead" entrance at the Academy Awards; a big fat modeling contract with L'Oreal; a Sony record deal for her forthcoming debut album of Latin soul; and, oh yeah, a divorce from her husband of one year, followed by unrelenting speculation about an affair with - oh, you read that too? - Puff Daddy.

So join Jennifer as the Empire State Building shimmers outside her hotel (she's been living here since her divorce) and she shimmies around her glamorous abode du jour. She may not be here tomorrow, you know - she "might just fly to Miami - that's the way I am." But right now she's all yours. So get it while you can.

Hey there, Miss Lopez.

Hey, you want a chocolate? I got a big box. It's from Jeffrey Katzenberg and,,. (gets up from the couch, opens a big red box, and gasps). Who eats this much chocolate, Jeffrey? Oh, wait, this is a chocolate covered Oreo. Can't frown on that, right? (straddles the couch and munches down)

Chocolates from Jeffrey Katzenberg and a room with a view - wow, that's not bad for a poor little Puerto Rican girl from the South Bronx.

It's funny. I went to Paris for the Versace show with my assistant Arlene, who I've known since I was seven, and they flew us there on the Concorde. At the airport a silver Mercedes picked us up. So we get in, and I put a tape of my new album in the tape deck, and we're sitting there, smiling ear to ear, and I said, "Look at us. We're two simple girls from the Bronx in a Mercedes in Paris with a guard and a driver, listening to my album on our way to our two bedroom suite!" I felt like Audrey Hepburn.

So did you always want to be rich and famous, Sabrina?

Always. Well, I always wanted to sing and dance and be in movies, but when you're little, you don't really understand what the "rich and famous" part is all about - it's just a catchphrase that means (points at imaginary screen) "I wanna be doing what they're doing up there." And ever since I was three that's how I was - I always felt all this drama inside of me.

So what was this drama mama's favorite movie back then?

West Side Story, which I've seen more than a hundred times and I'd watch right now, if I could. I loved that it was a musical and about Puerto Ricans and that they were living where I lived. I wanted to be Anita because I love to dance and she was Bernardo's girlfriend and he was so hot. (pauses) But then Maria was the star of the movie. So it was basically like, I gotta be Maria.

But Maria's so dull.

She's dull, but she's the star! (laughs)

And you're an ambitious girl.

And I've always said I was.

And you were raised in one of the poorest, most notorious neighborhoods in America.

Yeah, I remember the word "bills" from when I was two. And yeah, my two sisters and my morn and dad and I, we all lived in a small apartment that was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. But hey, there was always rice and beans.

So what made you think you could ditch the rice and beans to become a future Woman of the Year?

Well, first off, chicken cutlets and red beans and rice is still my favorite dish, (smiles) but I don't know - I just always wanted to achieve and be proud of myself.

Were you a major babe as a young Bronx girl?

I wasn't one of the hotter girls - my body hadn't developed much - but I was one of the cooler girls. Then in the tenth grade, I started dating my first boyfriend, and he made me feel like a hot babe. I stayed with him for almost nine years.

And is he the man who made the first touchdown with you?

Yeah. (sighs) I was seventeen.

How was it?

I don't know if anybody has a great first experience - I mean, at the time you're just two kids trying things out and nobody knows what they're doing. Later, it became much more exciting, (ponders a moment) But you know - really, I still feel like I'm learning. And I'm open to learning more. And I want my partner to be, too. (worked up now) There's always room for improvement, so do not get too comfortable!

And how many men have you not gotten too comfortable with?

I'm embarrassed, 'cause I'll sound so inexperienced, but, well, let's put it this way: I can count them on one hand.

Wow. So how important is xes in your life?

Oh God, I can see already that this is gonna be the kind of article that'll make my mother say "Why did you talk about xes so much!" (suddenly yells) Arlene! Come here! (Arlene trudges in) I want you to sit here while we talk about xes. Okay, go ahead, ask whatever. She knows me better than anybody, even my parents.

Um, okay. Arlene, were you the first person that Jennifer told about losing her virginity?

JENNIFER (immediately): No - I didn't tell anybody!

ARLENE (rolling her eyes): She was a geek.

JENNIFER: But Arlene, that was a secret of ours - we didn't tell anybody.

ARLENE (deadpan smile): That's so sweet. Goodbye, (she leaves)

Goodbye. Okay, Jennifer, now that you're all embarrassed, let me ask you this: One of your best movie lines was in U-Turn when you said to Sean Penn, "You don't know whether to fµck me or kill me." When was the last time you had to say that in real life?

(laughs) I'm not as insane as that girl, so I don't drive men to that point. Until after I leave them.

Got it. So when you're fed up with a guy, how does he know?

I'm a very patient person, but the minute I lose my patience I don't beat around the bush - I cut to the jugular and you're there with your head on the floor, still talking.

Sounds like one of your movies. Let's see... so far you've pushed Sean Penn off a cliff and tomahawked Nick Nolte in the chest [both in U-Turn], punched out Wesley Snipes [Money Tram], and shot George Clooney in the leg [Out of Sight]. That's a good track record!

But I did all those things out of love. (smiles sweetly)

Did you, now? So how does the little killer's tough love translate into real life?

It depends on how the guy's getting out of line. But I don't allow them to really get to doing me wrong, 'cause I don't stay in those types of relationships.

How easily do you fall in love?

Not very, but when I do, it's intense. A successful career is not happiness, and if you look for it to be, when it goes wrong you're gonna be sunk, you're gonna be sick, you're gonna be finished. So love is very important in my life - I need to give affection and make people feel good.

And your life has now become a constant stream of tabloid items about people you may or may not be making feel good. Thus far you've been paired with Tommy Mottola, Marc Anthony, and Puff Daddy. Which rumor isn't true that you most wish were?

I swear to God I don't read the tabloids much. I've even trained my family not to call me and tell me what the garbage is - because unless they're saying you're killing dogs in the stairway for some religious ritual, it's better not to know. So, I don't know - which one do you wish was true?

Well, the Tommy Mottola rumor would be nice, because then you could get in fights with Mariah Carey and be sleeping with the head of your record company.(aghast) Why would you want that? That is so sick!

You're the one who asked.

Well, it's not true, thank God!

Okay. Those are lovely diamond rings, though. Where did you buy them?

I didn't buy them - they were gifts, (whispers) From a friend.

Must be a pretty good friend.

I told you - I make people feel special.

Uh-huh. So tell me, what's your secret recipe for seduction?

(stretches out on couch in full coquette mode) One teaspoon of flirtiness, one teaspoon of laughter, and a cupful of uninhibitedness.

And is that why Puff Daddy got you that ring?

(aghast again) Why would you even say that!

Because you know that's what everybody thinks. And also because right now you're humping that pillow between your legs.

No, I'm not- this is the way I sleep! Look, Puff and I have hung out and been friends since we did our video, so people started making up all these rumors.

So you're not dating him?

(none too convincingly) No.

Fine. New subject: Why, at the height of your movie stardom, have you decided to make your singing debut? It didn't work for Don Johnson.

Because it's tough, challenging, and scary - all the stuff I love. And singing and dancing is where I started - and when I was doing Selena, she inspired me to pursue that part of me all over again. I mean, I do get vibes from people like "She's crazy to be going after this," and it is a risk, but I have the same mentality I had with the movies: If I would've held back on that

because I was scared and from the Bronx, I wouldn't be where I am today.

So, like Selena, are you aiming for the Astrodome?

Aren't we all?

What'll you do if the album flops?

Make another.

Go, baby. So what are your songs about?Mostly love and partying.

Quick - what's your party cocktail of choice?

I don't drink, smoke, or take drugs. Never even tried them. I'm too focused.

Wow, again. Okay: The record?

I cowrote three songs. One, "It Shoulda Never," is about a situation when you just feel like you should have never touched that person. You know? Not that you really regret it, because you love that person, too.

People will assume, of course, that this is about your ex-husband, Ojani Noa.

Well, let 'em think whatever they wanna think. I really don't give a sh!t.

Okay, then, let's talk about what you're scratching right now.

My butt? (laughs) It's funny - a lot of people have been asking me lately, "When did people start talking so much about your butt? When did this happen?"

Yeah, some people are famous for their breasts, but you, little one, are famous for your booty.

I think it started with Selena and all those tight pants. But you know, I don't have to be a size 2 to be sexy. I love my butt and I was never ashamed of it, and I guess not being ashamed of something like that, which is uncharacteristic of this society, made it become a focal point.

Yup. A journalist told me that Mark Wahlberg said his personal high point of the MTV Video Music Awards was when you took him into a bathroom and showed him - and I quote - your "bare rear end."

Marky must be trying to score some points with his friends back in his neighborhood, 'cause if you think I would go into a bathroom and show anybody my ass, you must be crazy! I'm gonna have to call that boy and slap him across the mouth!

I guess this means there'll be no Playboy spreads for you.

Hell no - I'm not planning on showing anybody but my gynecologist what I've got between my legs.

You're a pistol, Jennifer. Do you ever feel insecure?

When I'm not prepared. Which is almost never.

What do you think of the term "Latin spitfire"?

I don't know. I mean, what is a Latin spitfire? One of the things that Out of Sight did was make people see me in a different light, in a role that wasn't constantly saying I was Latin. I was just a strong woman opposite a man, and that's always been a goal of mine. Which is not to say that if a Latin role came along I'd turn it down, because I'm more than proud of my heritage.

What's it like now when you go home to that heritage?

Everybody's supportive, but some people are a little weirded out. They've seen you thirty feet big, you're in the papers, and people talk about you on TV, so now they think you're a different person. After five seconds they realize you're still normal.

And, like you say, you're good at making people feel good, aren't you?

Yeah, honey, that's what I do. (picks up her box) Would you like another chocolate?

#jennifer lopez #jlo #press/article #1999 #details magazine

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alfredajprufrock · 1 year ago

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well it's Montaign & Emmaruth in Chicago. [U Chicago]

Keanu & Jovelyn in NJ. [fairleigh dickinson]

Carlito & --- in CT. [Quinnipiac]

Juanelo & Anela in PA. [Temple]

Louis & --- in Tampa, FL [U Tampa]

--- & Christie in NY [NYU]

--- & Jessa in CA [Chapman]

Michael & --- in Boston, MA. [BC]

--- & Ruti in Dumaguete, Visayas [Silliman]

my brother schools are Regis, Xavier, and Molloy.

my sister schools are Marymount, St. Vincent Ferrer, Christ the King.

my boarding school is Andover.

my 7 sister school is Mount Holyoke.

and my --- liberal arts school is Amherst. {like Skidmore & Oberlin}

P.S. - Grover Cleveland, Townsend Harris, Brooklyn Technical [Bronx Science]

School of Dance - Arlene's Dance Studio

Music School - Anita's

Academy - St. A's, DA, St. B's [Stuyvesant]

Emy & David [Albany]

~emmaruth

from pinterest.com

#pinterest #ruby tuesday

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trascapades · 2 years ago

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🏳️‍🌈🎙#ArtIsAWeapon

@baadbronx @lgbtq_museum and

@newprideagenda present "Paris is Still Burning: I'm An Icon Darling!", tomorrow, April 20th, 7PM at 📍BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, 2474 Westchester Ave, Bronx, NY 10461

Reposted from @lgbtq_museum Join us Thu April 20 (FREE RSVP) with @newprideagenda at @baadbronx for "Paris is Still Burning," a monthly speaker series with leaders of the House Ballroom community. International House of Milan’s @motherjocelynmilan will be joined by guests RR Chanel, Alyssa Ebony, and Luna Khan for a dynamic discussion on the history of Ballroom culture in New York City. Panelists will select clips from Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary film Paris Is Burning, and discuss the role of ballroom houses in constructing/creating chosen families for marginalized queer youth. Free with registration -

Presented in partnership with The NEW Pride Agenda and BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance.

*refreshments provided*

*proof of VAX required for entry*

#LGBTQIA #HouseBallroom #BallroomCulture #ParisIsBurning #QueerHistory #TheBronx

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theultimateflix · 2 years ago

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Irene Cara Escalera (March 18, 1959 - November 25, 2022) was an American singer, songwriter, and actress who rose to prominence for her role as Coco Hernandez in the 1980 musical film Fame, and for recording the film's title song "Fame", which reached No. 1 in several countries.

In 1983, Cara co-wrote and sang the song "Flashdance... What a Feeling" (from the film Flashdance), for which she shared an Academy Award for Best Original Song and won a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1984. Before her success with Fame, Cara portrayed the title character Sparkle Williams in the original 1976 musical drama film Sparkle.

Early Life

Irene Cara Escalera was born on March 18, 1959, and raised in the Bronx, New York City, the youngest of five children. Her father, Gaspar Cara, a steel factory worker and retired saxophonist, was Puerto Rican, and her mother, Louise Escalera, a movie theater usher, was Cuban. Cara had two sisters and two brothers. She began to play the piano by ear, studied music, acting, and dance seriously, and began taking dance lessons when she was five. Her performing career started with her singing and dancing professionally on Spanish-language television.

She made early TV appearances on The Original Amateur Hour (singing in Spanish) and Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show. In 1971–1972, she was a regular on PBS's educational program The Electric Company as a member of the Short Circus, the show's band.

As a child, Cara recorded a Spanish-language record for the Latin market and an English-language Christmas album. She also appeared in a major concert tribute to Duke Ellington, which featured Stevie Wonder, Sammy Davis Jr., and Roberta Flack. Cara attended the Professional Children's School in Manhattan. In 1985, Cara told Cosmopolitan "I don't mean to sound immodest but I'd never had any doubt that I'd be successful, nor any fear of success, I was raised as a little goddess who was told she would be a star."

Career

Cara appeared in Broadway and off-Broadway shows, starting with Maggie Flynn opposite Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy. Shortly thereafter, she was one of five finalists for the "Little Miss America" pageant. She also appeared in Via Galactica with Raúl Juliá, Ain't Misbehavin' and The Me Nobody Knows (which won an Obie Award). Cara was the original Daisy Allen on the 1970s daytime serial Love of Life. She later took on the role of Angela in the romance/thriller Aaron Loves Angela, followed by her portrayal of the title character in Sparkle.

Television brought Cara international acclaim for serious dramatic roles in Roots: The Next Generations and Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones. John Willis' Screen World, Vol. 28, named her one of twelve "Promising New Actors of 1976"; that same year, a readers' poll in Right On! magazine named her Top Actress.

Fame (1980) and international acclaim

The 1980 hit film Fame, directed by Alan Parker, catapulted Cara to stardom. She originally was cast as a dancer, but when producers David Da Silva and Alan Marshall and screenwriter Christopher Gore heard her voice, they re-wrote the role of Coco Hernandez for her to play. In this part, she sang both the title song "Fame" and the single "Out Here on My Own", which were both nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. These songs helped make the film's soundtrack a chart-topping, multi-platinum album, and it was the first time that two songs from the same film and sung by the same artist were nominated in the same category. Cara had the opportunity to be one of the few singers to perform more than one song at the Oscar ceremony; "Fame," written by Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford, won the award for best original song that year, and the film won the Academy Award for Best Original Score. Cara earned Grammy Award nominations in 1980 for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, as well as a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture Actress in a Musical. Billboard named her Top New Single Artist, and Cashbox magazine awarded her both Most Promising Female Vocalist and Top Female Vocalist. Asked by Fame TV series producers to reprise her role as Coco Hernandez, she declined, wanting to focus her attention on her recording career; Erica Gimpel assumed the role.

Post-Fame 1980–1999

In 1980, she briefly played the role of Dorothy in The Wiz on tour, in a role that Stephanie Mills had portrayed in the original Broadway production. Coincidentally, Cara and Mills had shared the stage together as children in the original 1968 Broadway musical Maggie Flynn, starring Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy, in which both young girls played American Civil War orphans. Cara was set to star in the sitcom Irene in 1981. The cast had veteran performers Kaye Ballard and Teddy Wilson as well as newcomers Julia Duffy and Keenen Ivory Wayans. However, the pilot was not picked up by the network for the fall season. In 1983, Cara appeared as herself in the film D.C. Cab. One of the characters, Tyrone, played by Charlie Barnett, is an obsessed Cara fan who decorated his Checker Cab as a shrine to her. "The Dream (Hold On to Your Dream)", her contribution to the film's soundtrack, played over the closing credits of the film, and was a minor hit, peaking at No. 37 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1984.

In 1982, Cara earned the Image Award for Best Actress when she co-starred with Diahann Carroll and Rosalind Cash in the NBC Movie of the Week Sister, Sister. Cara portrayed Myrlie Evers-Williams in For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story, the PBS TV movie about civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and she earned an NAACP Image Award Best Actress nomination. She also appeared in 1982's Killing 'em Softly. Cara continued to perform in live theater.

In 1983, Cara reached the peak of her music career with the title song for the movie Flashdance: "Flashdance... What a Feeling" which she co-wrote with Giorgio Moroder and Keith Forsey. Cara wrote the lyrics to the song with Keith Forsey while riding in a car in New York heading to the studio to record it; Moroder composed the music. Cara admitted later that she was initially reluctant to work with Giorgio Moroder because she had no wish to invite comparisons with Donna Summer, another artist who worked with Moroder. The song became a hit in several countries, attracting several awards for Cara. She shared the 1983 Academy Award for Best Original Song with Moroder and Forsey, becoming the first black woman to win an Oscar in a non-acting category and the youngest to receive an Oscar for songwriting. She won the 1984 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, 1984 Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, and American Music Awards for Best R&B Female Artist and Best Pop Single of the Year.

In 1984, she was in the comedic thriller City Heat, co-starring with Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds and singing the standards "Embraceable You" and "Get Happy". She also co-wrote the theme song "City Heat", sung by the jazz vocalist Joe Williams. In May 1984, she scored her final Top 40 hit with "Breakdance" going to No. 8. "You Were Made for Me" reached No. 78 that summer, but she did not appear on the Hot 100 again. In 1985, Cara co-starred with Tatum O'Neal in Certain Fury. In 1986, Cara appeared in the film Busted Up. She also provided the voice of Snow White in the unofficial sequel to Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Filmation's Happily Ever After, in 1993. The same year, she appeared as Mary Magdalene in a tour of Jesus Christ Superstar with Ted Neeley, Carl Anderson, and Dennis DeYoung.

Cara released three studio albums: Anyone Can See in 1982, What a Feelin' in 1983, and Carasmatic in 1987, the most successful of these being What a Feelin'. In 1985, she collaborated with the Hispanic charity supergroup Hermanos in the song "Cantaré, cantarás", in which she sang a solo segment with the Spanish opera singer Plácido Domingo. Cara toured Europe and Asia throughout the 1990s, achieving several modest dance hits on European charts, but no U.S. chart hits. She released a compilation of Eurodance singles in the mid-to-late 1990s titled Precarious 90's. Cara also worked as a backup vocalist for Vicki Sue Robinson, Lou Reed, George Duke, Oleta Adams, and Evelyn "Champagne" King.

In 1993, a California jury awarded her $1.5 million from a 1985 lawsuit she filed against record executive Al Coury and Network Records, accusing them of withholding royalties from the Flashdance soundtrack and her first two solo records. Cara stated that, as a result, she was labeled as being difficult to work with and that the music industry "virtually blacklisted" her.

21st century

In March 2004, Cara received two honors with an induction into the Ciboney Cafe's Hall of Fame and a Lifetime Achievement Award presented at the sixth annual Prestige Awards. In June 2005, Cara won the third round of the NBC television series Hit Me, Baby, One More Time, performing "Flashdance... What a Feeling" and covered Anastacia's song "I'm Outta Love" with her all-female band Hot Caramel. At the 2006 AFL Grand Final in Melbourne, Cara performed a rendition of "Flashdance" as an opener to the pre-match entertainment.

In 2005, Cara contributed a dance single, titled "Forever My Love", to the compilation album titled Gay Happening Vol. 12.

As of 2016, Cara had residences in both New Port Richey, Florida and Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was in Hot Caramel, a band which she formed in 1999. Their album, called Irene Cara Presents Hot Caramel, was released on April 4, 2011. Cara appeared in season 2 of CMT's reality show Gone Country.

Personal life and death

Cara married stuntman and film director Conrad Palmisano in Los Angeles on April 13, 1986. They divorced in 1991. Cara died at her home in Largo, Florida, on November 25, 2022, at the age of 63. The official cause of death was determined to be arteriosclerotic and hypertensive heart disease.

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polyphoniclandscapes2 · 2 years ago

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I Didn’t Have Any Choice But to Become an Artist

Basement NY, club in Queens

I love to dance and have ever since I was little. Growing up in the Bronx, I was on step teams and in different Boys and Girls Club events, always involved in dancing. I was even a choreographer. All kinds of dancing, but mostly hip-hop. As far back as high school.

High school was in the Bronx. I went to a school that doesn’t exist anymore: Foreign Language Academy of Global Studies in the South Bronx. It was just a small magnet school of six hundred students. I knew everyone and everyone knew me, and it was kind of awesome. Talk about safe spaces. It was a great experience. Actually, my high school experience was really exceptional, as a queer person, because that’s not common. Not so common in the Bronx, either.

I was one of four or five out people. And we ran that school. As a teenager, I was a gay boy, but always hyper feminine. Probably even more so back then. I was able to really be myself in school. The staff at school was really cool. My first altercation was when some kid bullied me. I put him in his place—publicly. After that, everyone had respect for me, and that made me feel really confident.

I was a singer, too. I sang a lot. I was always in chorus in school and at Boys and Girls Club. I took drum. I know how to play the drums. I took violin in high school, but none of that really stuck. Not really a church music person. I was a tenor. Since I was a little kid, I had singing groups. We did R&B, wrote our own songs, too. I always had this this kind of ringleader vibe. Always getting everyone involved in stuff.

In high school I didn’t really go out. We were such nerds, honestly. I would play hooky to go to the queer section at Barnes and Noble to read books and talk about them, and then go to the piers. I never had a fake ID. It wasn’t until I was in college that I started going out. There was so much nightlife in New York back then. I would go to Splash and Krash and these big clubs that don’t exist anymore—Limelight and Avalon, those kinds of places. That was my real introduction to techno and queerness.

That was before I found the ballroom scene. Even though I became very intrigued by ballroom music, I didn’t consider that techno then. It was more house music and disco. There were obviously techno aspects to it, but I didn't make the connection back then. It wasn’t until the clubs that I really found techno and danced for hours to it. Krash was a mix of house and techno, or anything Junior Vasquez was playing. The nightlife scene was richer back then, I feel. It seemed that way. There would be drag performances but by trans women. All of this stuff would be put all into one big, jam-packed night.

I went to St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. That was crazy. It was definitely culture shock to come from the city—an inner-city kid—where I was mostly surrounded by people of color, to then go really far upstate. It was this affluent school. Sorority girls, that kind of world. I arrived as this queer, black person. Of course, everyone loved me.

I was really lucky in my educational experiences to have such welcoming places. I initially studied Psychology. But I ended up graduating some ten years later in Creative Writing with a Gender Studies minor. I started Gender Studies freshman year, and that’s when I dropped out and started transitioning. So that helped me then.

I started transitioning the summer I became twenty-one. I came back to the city. My family wasn’t happy. I was kicked out, and stayed with different friends. That went on for years, actually. I ended up discovering my cousin. She was queer. We met randomly in the Village. I ended up living with her sometime later. And so that was kind of cool for a while. Then it was just the dark, dark side of being trans, having to do survival sex work. Survival took over my life. I didn’t have time to worry about aspirations or goals even though I still had them.

What I wanted to do was a magazine of my own, called Gag Mag. I wanted it to be a queer entertainment magazine. I interviewed Nome Ruiz from Jessica Six. I was a big fan of hers. There was just so much talent back then, but there was not as much coverage or notoriety that came with queer artists. I was always trying to bring attention to that. I didn’t know that I would become an artist.

Then there was another kind of party in Brooklyn: GHE20GOTH1K and Cherry Bomb and Juliana Huxtable’s parties, like Windows. There just wasn’t as much grassroots queerness to it. Coming from the big club scene, I didn’t even know about those parties. Those were two totally different worlds even though they’re both queer and definitely had techno-related music. The big club scene had bouncers. All very corporate, white gay, although Krash and Splash were Latinx.

I think my prime going out period started around 2010. The Brooklyn queer of color scene was really going off. That’s when I was interning for Venus X, who hosted GHE20GOTH1K. That was kind of a weird position. She needed someone to help her do music research on Facebook. I love music, I love techno, and I love the ballroom scene. What was really special about GHE20GOTH1K was the blending of those worlds. Whereas at the clubs there would be the queens in the back voguing to techno, but they weren’t necessarily bringing in that ballroom music of Mike Q or LSDXOXO. All those DJs that started merging techno, house, and ballroom sounds were really getting their start from GHE20GOTH1K. I found that amazing. That was something that I had always wanted to marry in this way.

New York was a center for that, although ballroom music itself comes from so many places—Baltimore club music, for example. Bounce music is in there. That’s just a cultural thing with people of color: booty, booty, booty! Ballroom music developed in the tristate area and then spread out: that marrying of bitch beats, house music, and artists like Kevin Aviance just saying cunty things over tracks.

Those things merged, at least for me, in the New York scene. I love playing bitch beats and I love playing vogue tracks and I love playing techno. It’s all of that merging, and I’m from New York, so I guess I guess it’s a New York thing. But it’s all over the place now. Lots of awesome tracks that I love are produced by people from all over and not necessarily even involved in the ballroom scene or anything. But they still make great music, right?

So I had dropped out of college and gone back to New York to transition. And there’s that survival period there. But then I went back and finished college. Before even starting to do sex work I was arrested and accused of being a prostitute. I eventually ended up winning all this money in a lawsuit. So that was a new beginning for me, financially. I didn’t have to do sex work anymore. It made sense to go back to school, because I had a free ride.

I made a new generation of friends at St. Lawrence. There were more queer people, and also other trans people at school. That was a new experience for me. As a queer person at St. Lawrence, I had already left a mark that paved the way for other people who were going to school there, who had even heard of me from when I’d been there before. So that was cool. It’s so weird being this trailblazer. Everyone kind of looks up to you in this particular way. They expect this strong, confident, headstrong person. It’s exhausting. Being ahead of the curve can break you down over time. Even though you’re paving the way for other people, you’re losing pieces of yourself. You’re being ravaged by the world. It’s always been this weird thing. The people who have felt that I made space possible for them end up being people who care for me the most because they have the strength now.

After I graduated, I moved to California, and that opened up a whole world. I went to California for someone who’s now an ex. I knew him here in New York when I was in a dark spiral. We were basically just stuck together in some weird way. Then I went to school to get myself together and he went to rehab in California because he’s from there. He supposedly got his shit together; I got my shit together. And then, together in California, neither of us had our shit together. And it just wasn’t what it was supposed to be. But I ended up making awesome friends and having an amazing life there. I was working for nonprofits with trans people and queer people, and became kind of iconic in my own right, just being a light and whatnot for people. I loved my job. I loved working with the trans community. I had so much freedom and it afforded me the money and interactions with people to start throwing parties.

That was the start of the New World Dysorder party. Before we started that were throwing parties with a friend who had access to a warehouse. This was with Burning Man type people out there. Moving to California introduced me to a whole other kind of world revolving around techno, around drum and bass and house music and raves, actual raves. Coming from New York, raves weren’t really happening then. New York was about clubs.

New World Dysorder started around 2015 or 2016. One of my roommates would just hear me listening to beats and stuff and said, “Oh my God, you would love my friend Mitch, aka K’hole Kardashian. He loves that kind of music.” Finding someone who knew ballroom music so far away from New York was a big deal for me, especially being out there and being from New York and not really knowing anyone. It was very underground.

I was just a host, you know, a face for the party, but I really wanted to learn to DJ and produce. One of my friends and cofounders of New World Dysorder, Erica Mar, was a DJ and producer. She gave me my start. She was producing witch house music back then, which I loved. I still love it, honestly. I love all kinds of music. You’d be surprised. Bored Lord was friends with Mitch and she would give me pointers. I was already a fan of Bored Lord as well. Before she was DJing as she is now, she was doing vocal music and performing.

New World Dysorder and Club Chai started developing at the same time. Both were about genre-bending music. Club Chai was started by two Bay Area natives who also thought it was important to center queer and trans people. To me, and to us, it was just queer music. Taking club sounds back. Prior to Juliana Huxtable, Venus X, and the Brooklyn scene, there were not many trans people, femmes, women at the forefront of these spaces in nightlife. Especially as trans people, we were supposed to stay in the bubble of being an “attraction.” I wanted to change that. Even though trans women were a big part of San Francisco nightlife, they were often performers, or working the door, or hosts. Similarly in New York, trans women were just these sexualized dolls used for decoration.

There was this one place called Asia SF. They had bachelor and bachelorette parties there. I tried out to dance on stage there—a buck’s a buck. They said I was too tall. It was just unfortunate to me that we had to allow these places to reduce us to being an attraction, like, “you wouldn't believe it, but this is a man!” or whatever.

Those places were basically chaser clubs. There was another one called Divas. I would go there since I had friends who worked there. It was just a place where trans people could make money, whether they were bartending, coming in and doing outreach, doing sex work, or working as dancers. I remember I was drunk one time and just ran through that place, yelling at all the chasers.

California was where I started DJing. We even had parties at Divas. I’d always wanted to do one at Asia SF, actually. San Francisco was in love with us. It was a magical coming together of friends. You see that in lots of different places, but I never had that in New York, with friends coming together and being creative and making something, and then actually doing it. Trans people coming together. We had the time, we had the energy, the resources, the connections, and we made something amazing happen. It was inspired by GHE20GOTH1K and everything that was happening in New York, but it had its own California flair. I think we created something new that also inspired other scenes.

And then I ended up back in New York. Nothing’s ever completely my choice. I’m just rolling with the punches, literally. We were visiting New York—me, Cali Rose, and Bella Bags, formerly known as London Jade. We had just thrown a party at the House of Yes in Bushwick. That party was chill, but the bouncers were rude to many of the guests. The bill ended up with so many big names on it. They made us feel like we weren’t enough. They wanted us to have another big name and another, all this kind of stuff. And I thought, “we're all big names in our own right, you know?” We would draw, especially back then. Their attitude was a slap in the face.

I got attacked after that party. We on our way to go to unter or something. We were walking past Happyfun Hideaway [a local queer bar] and I tried to go into this liquor store around the corner. I guess it was after the Puerto Rican Day Parade, so people were just drunk and messy, and these guys attacked us. I was in the hospital, and the doctor said that after the surgery, I’d need to come in for checkups. I stayed in New York rather than going back to California. I was supposed to continue on a tour, but that got cut short. I ended up here for six months, recovering. I could not afford to pay for my rent in California. I was back in New York, and I’ve been back ever since.

That was 2017 or 2018. Then we started doing New World Dysorder here at Bossa Nova Civic Club, but it wasn’t the same. It was still great, but the parties in California that we had in the beginning were amazing. It was the start of something. I feel it never quite got to the level that it should have in New York, but I do feel it made a difference. And I feel, more importantly than anything, that there was community formed around it and friendships made. And it inspired other people to create other parties. But it’s hard being a queer, black, trans person and doing this stuff. Especially in New York. It is so competitive here. It’s just hard. It’s hard to keep going.

I started producing around the same time as New World Dysorder was taking off. I would mess around with Traktor, just looping tracks and making different kinds of patterns. Friends would say, “that's a remix!” I would think to myself, oh, okay, that’s a remix. Then it was a matter of having that confidence and going from there. I learned Ableton. Bored Lord, Cali Rose, Mitch, and I would have these workshop days that were just us hanging out, smoking weed, messing around on CDJs—while one of us is on a CD JSR Versa, the other would be messing around on a computer with Ableton.

The Bay Area scene was psychedelic. That was the context where I was first learning Ableton, also with this guy 23 Odd Cats. He’s a DJ that I know from California. He’s more Burning Man and psytrance, drum and bass style. I was on ketamine, and he showed me Ableton and I’m like “wow, I get it.” And even to this day, there are things I know that I don’t necessarily remember learning.

Particularly in California, the rave scene was psychedelic. Ketamine and Molly and hippy-flipping (Molly and mushrooms). Mushrooms are a huge part of the culture of raves and music there. In New York, back in my day, in the gay clubs it was just cocaine and alcohol, over and over. Maybe ecstasy, sometimes. In California, there was definitely a more accountable approach with drugs. The DanceSafe people, for instance, making sure people drink water. Especially because of Burning Man and the desert, a lot revolved around keeping people safe while they’re having fun. I feel that in New York, it’s harder to do that.

In New York, we’re in a more oppressive environment. There’s not the freedom to be sloppy off in in the hills somewhere, rolling around on Molly. But I do feel with more substances being legalized, or available as treatments, attitudes change. It’s so great that you can smoke weed now in New York. I’ve been arrested for doing that here. It’s changing the perception of drug use, its role in the scene. With ketamine, there are studies of its uses, like for depression, that are maybe making it a little more acceptable for people to use.

I don’t necessarily condone that either, you know, people just willy-nilly doing stuff. It can be dangerous, but I do think that drugs have influenced techno music. There’s a connection between minimal techno and ketamine. Once I was in Pittsburgh with some folks from the Honcho party, and we were listening to a woman who does this amazing minimal techno. You could hear every little detail. Music is very mathematical, right? With ketamine, you really tune in to this mathematical side. You can feel the physics. A certain precision.

There’s always been stoner music. I love The Doors and stuff like that. I’m down for a trippy stoner vibe. Growing up, a blunt and voguing went well together, too. We smoked a lot. And then we’d vogue and we'd listen to Kevin Jay Z Prodigy, and even in the song he says, “pass the blunt Miss Thing, girl!” It’s definitely in the music, and the culture, but that’s a whole other conversation.

BXTCH SLÄP by Jasmine Infiniti, cover

BXTCH SLÄP (2020) was not my first project. I released SiS (2018) and Art and Performance (2019) and some other things. BXTCH SLÄP was my first really well received one. Over that period, I had a lot of notoriety. We were doing New World Dysorder all over the world. I was traveling a lot for the first time. That was very much a new experience and a very hard experience. Everyone is like, “you're traveling and oh my god, so lucky!” I am lucky and it is amazing, but it’s hard as a black trans person. Many people’s understanding of traveling is just the most glamorous aspects of it. As a black trans person, I've been detained, I’ve been denied entry into places. Going to countries can be like going to clubs. The bouncers of the country are like, “It's a private event.”

Being in the airport so much with my computer, I would just work and work on my music using Ableton. I start making things while traveling—working on most of BXTCH SLÄP at the same time I put out the Sis ep with Club Chai. Art and Performance was kind of a test run of me publishing my own tracks. BXTCH SLÄP was made the year before the pandemic. I wasn’t going to release it just yet, but then pandemic hit. People were talking about Covid, but I was just focused on working on my album. I didn’t know what was going on in the world.

I was planning on going to Mexico. Then I got really sick, but apparently not with Covid. I couldn’t go to Mexico, so I just put my album out and then it blew up. There was so much love and so much support for it. A lot of people have told me that it helped get them through the lockdown, and I’m always touched by that. It’s also been surreal because even now, I can’t believe people have actually listened to it. Since it came out during the early isolation of the pandemic, it never really hit me.

It seemed to resonate with people’s mood during the lockdown even though I made it before the pandemic. There was this vibe I felt even before. I’ve always wanted to express these darker vibes. I look at music as a sculptor might. I get the materials and just have this lump of sounds sitting there, and then I chisel away at it until it starts to sound like something. I say it's techno, but I’m not sure that it’s actually techno. What is techno? That’s a question. But maybe what my music does is define what it could be, or what else it could be. Genres can be limiting.

Maybe it wasn’t a “dark” album so much as a realist one. That’s just the mood, right? Here I am in my demon hole again. There’s a track called “Demonhole.” That was some movie my roommate and I were watching while I was working on this track in my headphones. That whole album is melancholic. But also, there's some driving, angry kind of loudness to it—this repetition. Plus, a certain amount of pure rage, but shaped into something.

I've never played piano or anything. I learned drums and the violin, but that was random. I do have these melodic moments, but I’m obviously not classically trained. I don’t really know how to execute proper chord progressions. I’m continuing to learn. I think it’s important as a queer, black person to not be so bound by the rules that are set, because even just as queer people, the rules weren’t made for us. We have to find our own way.

I feel I’ve just been finding my own way in the music. I love these ethereal feelings, like you’re in cave or somewhere where there are magical sounds going on. Or in a graveyard or something. It’s funny, I had never actually been to some of the places I imagined the tracks could be the soundtrack for. I have ended up visiting some of them since, once things opened up and I was touring again. Glasgow Necropolis, for instance.

In my next projects, I hope that I get to have some visuals to go along with some of the tracks that reflect the mood and vibe, because I do consider myself an artist in that way. Everything up until now, including BXTCH SLÄP, has been me testing the waters and just taking a chance, but I feel it has been building up to something bigger and better. I just need to be in a good place to be able to work.

Everything that I’ve done, or every choice that I’ve made, has been in the thick of it. Nothing has ever actually been a plan. It all works out, but how can queer, black, trans people make plans in this world? Everything can just be taken away at a moment's notice. Look at the pandemic, look at how that affected everyone’s plans. But especially when you’re queer and black and trans, sometimes it’s just about making it through the day.

I’ve gone through all these weird phases where I’m free, and I’m happy, and I don’t care. But then, being popular and well known—everyone has an opinion. Everyone wants to let you know their opinion. It’s okay, but being a black, queer, trans person and being notable is a weird position to straddle. For example, I need to access queer services and stuff, too. And then when I do, they'll know who I am. You don’t get to be incognito in the waiting room. I used to be punk and not care about what I might be wearing or how I look in certain pictures and stuff. That comes back to haunt me.

There’s pressure when you’re iconic. But where's my hair stylist? For public appearances, I'm having to rely on me and my limited wardrobe, but then also have to respond to this demand for even just pictures of me. There was even a time during the pandemic, there were a lot of people asking to photograph me and I don't even have my lashes done.

The pressure around how you look effects how you get treated. If bouncers don’t know that I’m the DJ, and I just come in a hoodie and a sweatshirt, they ask, “why aren’t you dressed up?” How people perceive me obviously has something to do with not being the stereotypical ideal of what a trans woman in nightlife is supposed to be. You’re supposed to be this glammed up thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not me.

The dolls set incredibly high standards for each other. And then I’m just coming in my Docs and whatever. I have a different purpose. I feel it’s good in a lot of ways because it’s pushing this idea that not everyone has to come glammed up all the time. That makes space for other people to feel comfortable. And I’ve been told that.

Pressure is still a hard thing deal with, though. Especially being a black, trans woman. Sometimes I'll go to these venues and the bouncers may not necessarily know who I am. They’ll treat me how they are used to treating someone like me. They’ll be rude as hell. It can be black masculinity versus queer, trans, black femininity, just that kind of bumping heads that was always being talked about even in the Black Lives Matter movement. How unaccepting the black community can be of its own people if they’re queer, especially if they're trans, and especially if they are queer and trans, and in ways that aren’t cis normative. When you don’t pass for what is acceptable, you really get a lot of shit for it.

I’ve been thinking, as we all have, about the shooting that happened recently at Club Q in Colorado Springs. Before that, there was the shooting at Pulse nightclub. An arsonist burned down Rash in New York when it was just building up to be something. Queer spaces are under attack in this way. I don’t know how to word this, but we party despite all the signals from society. We’re still out here, making space, having fun, being creative. Doing what we need for our sanity, our freedom.

Trans visibility was important and a lot of good came from it, but even while it was happening, there were a lot of weird authenticity issues. It was definitely an important to kind of shift just in the ideologies revolving around clubs, and around trans people in the club. People joke that if you're trans, you're either a DJ, a sex worker, or a hairdresser. Three options only. Visibility was about just expanding upon what our capabilities are perceived as being. But there were a lot of unforeseen and weird problems and appropriations that came from it, and of course the tokenizing of people.

Alongside expanding the culture is expanding the music. I always think it’s so funny how exclusive people are. I love genre bending. That was what I loved about Club Chai. I love almost all kinds of music. It really just depends on my mood and my vibe, even in my DJ sets. I’ll bring in stuff that doesn’t necessarily always work, but at least I take the plunge.

I love hip-hop, obviously, from growing up in the Bronx, even Cam’ron and real hood stuff. But I also love jazz. The other night I went to Blue Note with some old friends. I listened to jazz with my grandpa. Almost any black music I was exposed to growing up. It’s always going to be a part of me. But then, especially as I got older, especially in college, I wasn’t trying to study while listening to R&B or hip-hop.

Me and my friend Candy would listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees. I love old-school punk stuff. Back in the day, when I was really getting into music, I started with earmilk.com and some Tumblr site called post-punk. That was me discovering new music outside of my norms, which were ballroom, hip-hop, and R&B. A lot of this other stuff was exotic to me. Especially stuff coming from the UK.

Here's a random story from when I was in college the first time, being this queer, black boy on campus. There was this black guy, who was probably gay, and he was a DJ who said, “oh, hey, next time I see you, I got something for you.” He gave me a CD. And it was all these old-school house tracks and bitch beats, close to techno but definitely more house-y, from the same time that techno was being developed by the big names, by the boys, the cis straight men. That’s why the bitch beats and stuff were happening, I feel, because it was the same vibe that the bros were doing with this added queer layer, and with Kevin Aviance or Harmonica Sunbeam doing something over it. Usually it was chanting, which was also in the ballrooms. Queer people, specifically queer people of color, were taking this music and putting their own touch on it.

That’s been the motif, especially with New World Dysorder, that was the combination that started it. Now the power is in my hands to form something. To add to this great fabric of queer nightlife. We can throw a party here and there and make a couple of bucks, but moving forward, I want there to be a good foundation for a business that someone can take over that employs trans people. Give people a break from doing sex work or whatever. Just give people different or additional avenues to make money.

The ballroom scene was so separate from nightlife, but Venus X and her party really started to bring it together more intentionally. That was the start of a new genre for me. One of my big faves, LSDXOXO, came out of that. I saw it happening, saw it before it happened. I was just this weirdo from the Bronx that never really fit in, even, you know, to the Bronx stereotype, didn’t always fit into the ballroom stereotype, either, or even the nightlife stereotype. I didn’t have any choice but to become an artist.

#Music #Gender #Transgender #Black Studies #Queer Art & Theory #Drugs & Psychedelia

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djarinsidebitch · 2 years ago

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What Happens at Girl's Night Stays at Girl's Night {b.f/n.t/s.o}

pairing: Robert 'Bob' Floyd/Natasha 'Phoenix' Trace/Samantha 'Cosmo' Ortiz. Past!Natasha 'Phoenix' Trace/Samantha 'Cosmo' Ortiz. kinda insinuated future!Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw/Samantha 'Cosmo' Ortiz

[a/n] alright, this was supposed to go up yesterday but I had such a bad migraine that the idea of looking at a screen was death. I have come to the conclusion that I am going to just post both versions. This is the OC version since I have to go through and reformat some sentences to make it more accessible for everyone.

That being said the oc in here is Samantha "Cosmo" Ortiz, she is a top gun graduate and actual stealth pilot. She grew up with a single dad, who is a USMC vet, in the Bronx after her mother decided that being a mom wasn't for her. She got her callsign from punching another aviator so hard they knocked out, or "saw stars" and the callsign cosmo was born. It's not really mentioned until the very end but she has been friends with Rooster for years, and both act much closer than friends but refuse to do anything about it citing that they are "just friends" and just close..... some real idiots to lovers going on.

I am pretty sure that is all that you really need to know for this, the reader version should be out soon if you don't want to have to change the details in your mind. Love ya'll- Ani<3

p.s- i added in the headcanon that rhett abbot was bob's older brother(so he would be Rhett Floyd) and that they had matching tattoos, no I will not explain myself

Warnings: Minors fuck off- I will end you 18+ only I don't know how to write a threesome, dirty talk, oral (f&m receiving) unprotected p in v sex (this is fiction wrap it before you tap it) kinda ooc in some parts, dirty talk, face sitting, I said bob fucks and ran with it. Not beta-ed we die like real men here

“Girl's Night” is something that Cosmo and phoenix had along with any other female pilots when they needed a break from the never-ending pissing contest that is the navy. After the uranium mission, there was an exception to the “no boys allowed at girls' night” and that exception was none other than Robert “Bob” Floyd, the soft-spoken southern sweetheart. He was quickly taken in by the duo as an honorary member of “The Girls” and whenever they had a tough week the three would go to a bar (that wasn’t the hard deck- they wanted to get away from the navy) and just have a good time. Phoenix and Cosmo learned that after a few drinks Mr. Stealth pilot turned into a completely different person. His southern accent is much more present, he suddenly is a dancer pulling the two onto the dance floor and he talks much, MUCH, more. Talking about growing up on his family’s ranch, his dipshit older brother that rides bulls. It was a completely different part of bob that neither of them has known about, they also found out he knew how to line dance, Phoenix and Bob were naturals while Cosmo, who grew up in the Bronx was just trying not to fall on her ass.

The two women weren’t better than bob sobriety-wise, Cosmo has had one too many margaritas and she felt like she was floating, not just from the alcohol but from being around two of the people she loves the most. Cosmo and Phoenix had a long history, they were in the academy and top gun at the same time, always vying for first place they had a playful relationship. They would never tell anyone (with exceptions) that they had a sort of… friends with benefits situation for years, after being around navy men for so long you know how much of animals they were, they would sleep with a girl and all you heard the next day was them talking about it- rating how good they were, comparing them to other women, treating them like slabs of meat- it was disgusting. But you still need to burn off steam even as a woman, maybe even more for the amount of bullshit the men put you through.

Moonlight peaked through the blinds of the empty room, cutting through the silence of the night were hushed moans and harsh pants of breath. Natasha laid against the cheap basic issue sheets body covered in sweat and her hair was undone cascading across the pillow. One hand was gripping the pillow behind her while the other was entangled in Samantha’s light brown hair. Sam was settled between Natasha’s thighs, her hands having to hold her legs apart as her hips jump at every movement of Sam’s mouth against her pussy. They had Bering going at it for a while- the shine on sams mouth was testimony to that, she could spend the rest of her life between her legs hearing Natasha whine and try so hard to be quiet.

Speaking of being quiet Samantha moved to suck on her clit making Natasha almost scream out in pleasure as she came who knows how many times now. She brought her hand up to bite down on it to muffle herself

“Aw sweetheart, you gotta stay quiet- your noises are for me- not them” Samantha rasps removing her fingers from Natasha’s wearing hole causing her to whimper. Sam started trailing kisses up from her inner thighs, up Natasha’s stomach and sternum stopping to suckle on her breasts leaving light bites and bruises. The continuing up to Natasha’s lips, the kiss was messy, Natasha moaned tasting herself on Samantha’s lips. She wanted to return the favor but her body felt like a million tons- her bones absolute jello.

Samantha knew that and was completely fine- she got off just as much as Nat watching her squirm and lost in pleasure. Natasha tried to move and roll her over but Sam stopped her

“Hey hey hey, it’s ok- just rest” she softly caressed her cheeks as she looked confused “but-“ “I’m fine sweetheart- next time” she kissed her cheek and stood up grabbing a towel to clean up before finding her clothes and sneak back to her room.

“I’ll see you tomorrow starshine,” Natasha said- her brain finally catching up

“‘Course firebird” Sam winks, fully dressed while slowly opening up the door to sneak out before early patrol catches her.

It was almost the last call when the trio decided to leave, they all went to bob’s house, he was the only one with off-base housing that was closest to the bar they were at. None of them could drive so one cramped and overpriced Uber the three stumbled to bob’s front door Cosmo almost ate shit on a small step to his porch but caught herself, but that didn’t stop phoenix from wrapping her arms around her muttering- more like slurring something about not letting her pretty little ass fall, to which bob without looking back while trying to unlock his door with little success “there is nothing little about that ass- it is gorgeous” he finally unlocks the door and leans against it to open the door, almost falling himself before turning and making sure the two get in- not missing the large blush that was spread over the two girls face- especially cosmo she was beat red. Bob closes the door after they get in and locks it before walking around the back of the couch that separated the entryway to the living room. Both girls were laying on the couch, cosmo was laying on top of Phoenix as she traced circles on her hips, bob walked over and laid on top of them resting his head right below cosmos' breasts his forehead pressing against the bottom of them pushing them up and teetering on the brink of spilling out of the bra and tight white shirt that she had worn. Phoenix moved her hand to card through bobs messy hair, slightly tugging at the strands as she hits knots. Her hand gets caught on a particularly large one as she tugs he lets out a groan his hands coming up to grip Natasha’s hips and waist his hips moved on their own accord grinding down against Samantha’s plush thighs that had been squeezed into the jeans that she had on.

The air shifted and Bob looks up at the two women all three had the same fire lit in their eyes

“Do it again” he all but growls against Samantha’s breasts as Natasha pulls at his hair- more deliberately and he groans again moving to bury his head in Sam’s breasts. Natasha shifts up to slide out from under Sam moving to kneel on the ground next to bob and Cosmo.

“That was really hot,” Cosmo says grinding her hips against bob.

“Yeah- who knew Bobby was like this” phoenix tried to tease- but Bob wasn’t having it, he popped his head up Turing to the side a hand shot out pulling Phoenix’s lips to his effectively shutting her up. She moaned into the kiss as he shifted off of Cosmo following Phoenix onto the floor, their lips barely parting enough to get air.

Natasha grabbed his glasses pulling them off his face and throwing them to the side, both on their knees Nat grabbed onto his hips pulling his body as close as possible, her breasts squished against his toned chest. Bob’s hands roamed under her shirt pushing it up higher over her breast and she helped pull her arms out of the sleeves before disconnecting their lips to toss her shirt off. Bob took that time to reach behind him grabbing onto the back of his shirt and pulling it off in one go. He never worked out without a shirt off or when they played dogfight football-which is a disgrace as he was beautiful, nicely toned but not so over the top ripped like some of the other men, but what was the most surprising was the tattoo that sat on his peck, it was a silhouette of a man riding a bull. Natasha reached behind her to unclip her bra letting it fall to the growing pile of clothes, Bob pulled her back in, this time kissing down the collum of her throat lighting biting her at the conjunction of her neck and shoulder, then moving down to her chest, one hand coming up to knead the tender breast while he takes the other into his mouth.

While the two of them were making out Cosmo got to watch the show, she had one hand down the front of her jeans rubbing herself through the cotton of her panties. She let out a whimper that made Natasha look over and hold her hand out “get your pretty ass over here” that’s all it took for Samantha to slide onto the floor to crawl over to the duo, her breasts still almost falling out of her top. Natasha tugs at her shirt as a sign to pull it off, Samantha obliges crossing her arms over her front grabbing at the ends of the shirt, and pulling it off, truly showcasing her large breasts, cosmo would say they were a blessing and a curse- sports bra’s were her best friend and main defense against both men and the forces of gravity when it came to her breasts. Natasha tries to say something but is cut off by her loud moan as bob lightly bites down on her nipple. He lets the boob out of his mouth with a pop before looking at the art that is in front of him, his best friends the most gorgeous women on the face of this earth, is absolutely in shambles already….. and they barely have gotten started. Bob moves to give Samantha some attention his hands roaming all over her body, starting at her waist, moving down over her hips, and getting to her ass he takes what can be described as a handful of it, giving it a squeeze before slapping it, making Samantha jump at the action letting out a whine. He reaches behind her with one hand disconnecting her bra and pulling it off before throwing it to the side, he starts doing a similar thing to cosmo that he did to Phoenix fondling one of her breasts while he bites and sucks on the other, with his free hand he slides his hand to the top of Natasha’s pants, undoing them he slides his hand

undoing them he slides his hand down the front moaning against Samantha when his slightly calloused fingers came in contact with Natasha’s slick folds, he pulls back looking at the two of them once again “I've gone died and this is heaven” he croaks out.

Samantha laughs, it was light and airy as she runs her hands down his chest trailing wet kisses as she goes. Her hands made quick work of his belt and jeans yanking them down as far as she could as bob continues his motions with his other hand, his thumb rubbing against Natasha’s clit while his middle finger pushes into her weeping hole. She shudders, leaning back to pull her pants and underwear off then leaning back on her elbows.

Cosmo continued her wet kisses over his hip bones leaving some dark hickeys as a reminder, then starts to mouth his cock through his underwear causing his breath to hitch. He looks down at Cosmo who is resting on her elbows and knees, ass up in the air as she teases him.

“Gah-Please” he all but whimpers bucking his hips against her mouth. He slipped another finger into Natasha’s pussy pumping in and out aiming for the spongey spot, he knows he found it when her back arched and moans

“Is that it-“ he keeps aiming for the same movement and she nods, her eyes screwed shut as she reaches her first climax of the night. “Yeah it is sweetness, oh fu-“ He was so focused on Natasha that he didn’t even notice Cosmo pulling down his briefs until he feels her take the bulbous head of his dick into her mouth sucking on just the tip before taking it out and licking up the shaft pressing her tongue flat against the vein that runs up his dick. Once she gets back to the tip she takes him back into her mouth, this time sinking as far as she could; he was bigger than anyone she had been with, both fairly long and girth as all hell, her jaw ached as it stretched around him. Before she could try and use her free hand to wrap around what hadn’t fit he bucks up into her mouth making her gag.

“Fuck- she sucks dick so well” Natasha moans at the sight of her closets friend sucking her other friend off

“That she does- shit-“ Bob digs his hand into Samantha’s hair before starting to move her head up and down his cock.

Tears well in Samantha’s eyes as she focuses on sucking him off as he controls the pace, Her free hand comes up to massage his balls.

He feels himself start to get close then pulls cosmo off of his dick making her whimper, he shuts her up quickly “No no honey, if I am cuming it's in one of your pussies, got it-“ the fire behind his eyes has both of them nodding. “Good” Bob pulls off his pants along with cosmo, who was absolutely soaked, he could see the glistening on the inside of her thighs. He got an idea and tapped Natasha’s leg pulling his hand away from her

“Com’ere, I want you to sit on my face” Natasha almost came just from his words, he lays back on the floor as Natasha moves to put her thighs on either side of his face, she was facing Samantha, reaching out for her, she grabs the sides of Samanthas face pulling her into a messy kiss moaning into her mouth as bob pulls her against his mouth licking up and down Natasha's cunt circling her clit before thrusting his tongue back into her core. Samantha and Natasha continue to make out while sam grinds her bare cunt against bob’s dick, her juices mixing with the precum that leaked out of the head of his dick, Bob's groans are muffled and the sounds coming from all three of them are truly lewd, the slick sounds of Samantha and bob, and the whimpers and screams of pleasure muffled from Natasha as she starts to feel the knot start to tighten in her lower stomach. Sam pulled away from Nat letting Natasha’s noises echo in the room.

Cosmo finally takes bobs dick in her hand now slick and lines it up with her entrance. She starts to lower herself down and lets out an almost pornographic moan at the stretch, she had to pause letting herself get used to just how big he was. She soon sunk down farther, rolling her hips down until she sat flush against him. Bob grunts out still licking and sucking on Natasha's clit, one hand gripping onto her thigh and the other returning to thrusting into her. Her moans grow higher in pitch and more frequent as she reaches her peak. Sam starts rolling her hips her breaths were short like they were being pushed out of her chest every time she sunk back onto his cock, it felt like he was in her stomach.

As Natasha starts to come down from her second orgasm, her legs were already twitching she pulled away swinging her leg over to rest her back against the couch watching Sam place her hands behind her griping bob’s thighs as she bounces on his lap. Both of them start to get close, bob sits up moving Samantha to shift on his lap. Her legs were now untucked laying out on either side of his waist, one arm wrapping around her back and grabbing onto the back of her neck pulling her forehead to rest against his as he plants his feet more- now thrusting up into her but still rolling his hips in time with her’s. He looks down and you couldn’t see where one person ended and the other began, but he did notice something- every time he thrust in a little bump formed above her pubic area- he really was in so deep you could see the head of his cock. That lit a new fire in him.

“Shit- Darlin, so tight you can see me up in your stomach- so fucking perfect.” Samantha whines, the only thing coming out of her mouth a high-pitched “Ah. Ah. Ah” in time with each of bob’s thrusts. She hurries her head into the space between his neck and shoulder and her hand's grip onto his shoulders as the knot at the base of her stomach tightens, her cunt clenches up and bob bites down on her shoulder “You're squeezing me so good baby- so good, you gonna cum for me? Yeah… yeah you are- fuck such a good girl princess” his voice is so low and gravelly it was all she needed as her nails dig into his skin scratching the skin of his back, the knot snaps and she yells out as her pussy contracts as much as it could stretched around him. He didn’t slow down- he did the opposite pushing her back onto her back grabbing onto the backs of Samantha's knees bending her almost in half and starts pounding into her core. This whole time Natasha’s hand trailed between her legs as she started to rub her clit again.

Not allowed time from the first climax Samantha hits her second orgasm, this time it felt different as she soaks his dick, pubic area, and upper thighs. The only sound was the wet slapping of skin on skin, Samantha’s squeals of overstimulation, and bob’s grunts as he reaches his climax pushing in as deep as he can as he cums, his body shuddering as he coats her insides filling her to the brim. He stills, not pulling out for a second letting his breathing calm down before finally pulling out and watching his cum start to leak out of cosmo’s hole. He wipes up what leaks out before pushing it back inside of her. Samantha squeals still coming down from the endorphins swimming in her brain.

Natasha scoots closer, placing soft kisses over Samantha's flushed skin, what she didn’t notice was that bob was still hard, how- god only knows he just gave both of them two mind-blowing orgasms each and he still wants to go. His hand runs up the back of Natasha’s thighs fingers running through her still soaked folds and she moans “Fuck bob” and lays down resting her head on cosmo’s stomach on her knees- basically presenting herself for him. A deep laugh rumbles from his chest as bob grips Natasha’s hips sliding into her in one stroke. He wasn’t going as slow, right from the gate he sets a powerful pace, hips snapping against hers. Natasha made eye contact with Samantha as bobby pounded into her. The fucked out expression on both of their faces just made it all the more hotter. Nat spreads Samantha's thighs once more looking at her abused pussy, all red and puffy and dripping with bob’s cum.

Bob watched as Natasha started licking a stripe up Samantha's core licking and sucking up all of her nectar and his cum that was spilling out of her hole. He moaned speeding up his thrusts as both women moan. The grip he has on nat’s hips is sure to cause bruising but they all were marked up, he was still sensitive from his last orgasm and he felt himself already start to get closer to the edge, he reaches around and starts playing with Natasha’s clit, her moans grow higher and higher pitch as she is pushed over the edge for the third time, this time she did something she had never done- she squirted just like cosmo had done earlier. Her hips moved on their own accord and bob wasn’t able to hold back once nat clenched up on him, he pushed in as deep as he could, pushing her further into the floor grunting as the rope of cum coated Natasha’s insides. Cosmo came for the third time watching the two of them come undone coating Natasha's face in her release.

The three of them lay there soaked in sweat panting on the floor as the sun started to rise over the horizon. They truly fucked all night long. After what seemed like forever bob gets up and with little issue picks both women up and walks through the small house to his bedroom laying them down and climbing in bed along with them. They easily curl up against each other pulling the blankets over their bodies and drifting off to sleep.

It was well into the late morning or early afternoon when they started to wake up, Cosmo was the first- head pounding and the rest of her body felt like she was ejected out of her jet. She looks around her surroundings and notices the other two people in bed with her- and their lack of clothes reminds her very quickly of the events of last night, causing a blush to form over her features. Luckily she can slip out of bed grabbing a shirt that is definitely bob’s and walks out into the rest of the house with the plan of making breakfast and some coffee for the other two, but before that she showers through bob’s medicine cabinet for some pain killers and leaves the bottle on the night table with a full glass of water.

Once the other two wake up making the same connections of the events of the night before, they both take the painkillers that cosmo had left out and walked out to the kitchen, following the smell of coffee and breakfast, no one mentions what happened because……

What happens at girl's night, stays at girl's night.

Two days later.

The daggers set up a last-minute beach day and dogfight football. It was nothing out of the ordinary, everyone running across the sand, taking breaks to sit and drink beer. Until about halfway through the third game cosmo got pushed into a wave by Coyote soaking the shirt she was wearing. The fabric now clinging to her body she pulls the sopping piece of fabric off of her tossing it to the side. Completely forgetting about the bruises, hickeys, and marks that covered her chest, waist, and hips. She didn’t even notice until the boys (sans Rooster and Bob) started making a commotion letting out wolf whistles and praises

“Aye- yo what do we got here” “Someone had a fun past few days” “YEA get it, Cosmo!”

Her face heated up a little but she just shrugged it off rolling her eyes from under her Roosters sunglasses “Hey hey- not my fault I’m getting laid and your not boys” she laughs and then everyone focuses back on the game. Yet if you were to have looked closely you would have seen sweet little ole bob go as red as a tomato the second he saw her take off the shirt….. and a certain morning bird clenches his jaw and fists- eyes trailing over the lustful marks then back to the glasses, his glasses sitting on her face. It took everything in him not to finally make a move on his best friend that he has been in love with for longer than he would like to admit. But he does know- there is no way he is gonna let someone else touch his Stardust-

#robert 'bob' floyd x reader #natasha trace x reader #bob floyd x reader #bob floyd x oc #natasha trace x oc #top gun maverick x oc #top gun x reader #top gun x oc #bradley bradshaw x oc #bradley bradshaw x reader #top gun maverick smut #bob floyd smut #natasha trace smut #top gun smut

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heavenboy09 · 2 years ago

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Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 To A Very Talented Rising Star 🌟 / Latina Actress Of This New Age Of Acting She is Puerto 🇵🇷 Rican & Has African American & Partial Italian 🇮🇹 Descent This Young Latina Is A Actress, Dancer, & A Singer She Made Her made her television debut competing on the sixth season of So You Think You Can Dance in 2009, where she finished in the top 20. She then made her Broadway debut in Bring It On: The Musical in 2011 and continued her work on Broadway with roles in Motown: The Musical (2013) and Pippin (2014). From 2015 to 2016, she originated the role of The Bullet in Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical Hamilton, and appeared as Jane in A Bronx Tale (2016–2017). In 2018, she was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance as Disco Donna in Summer: The Donna Summer Musical. In 2022, she hosted the 75th Tony Awards. She appeared in the Netflix musical film The Prom (2020) and the Apple TV+ musical comedy series Schmigadoon! (2021), before gaining widespread recognition for her role as Anita in Steven Spielberg's musical West Side Story (2021). For her performance, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, making her the first queer woman of color to receive an Oscar in an acting category. Starring In 1 Of The Most Important & Legendary Musicals 🎼 Of All Times From The Play, Broadway 🎶 & To The Major Motion Picture Of The Year Written By Jerome Robbins with Music by Leonard Bernstein A Age Old Tale Of A Love Story Between 2 People in 2 Families & Groups That Have Been Feuding With Each Other For A Long Time In the Bustling City Of New York Of The Upper West Side A Story Is About To Be Told Through The Emotion & Heart Of Music 🎶 ♥ WEST SIDE STORY She has received multiple accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Golden Globe Award and a nomination for a Tony Award. In 2022, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Please Wish This Bright Young 🌞 Latina Actress 🙏 A Very Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 Arianna DeBose #AriannaDeBose #WestSideStory https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn2fu-Bys5YGCGfCDb7XGUk95zPv0t_5A5GFD00/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#ariannadebose #westsidestory

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tcm · 4 years ago

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The Golden Boy, John Garfield By Susan King

Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire was Marlon Brando’s signature role. It made the then 23-year-old Brando an overnight Broadway sensation in 1947, and he electrified movie audiences and earned his first Oscar nomination for the classic 1951 film version. But he wasn’t the first choice to play Blanche’s earthy brother-in-law. Producer Irene Selznick had her eyes on Hollywood star John Garfield, who frequently took time out from movies to return to the Great White Way for limited runs.

In fact, writer John Lahr reported in 2014 that on July 19, 1947, Selznick drew up a contract for the 34-year-old actor, “one of the few sexy Hollywood stars with a proletarian pedigree. The Selznick office leaked the big news to the press. The contract was never signed. On August 18 the deal with Garfield collapsed.”

One of the reasons bandied about was that Garfield turned down the role because the contract would have kept him away from Hollywood for too long. Though Brando is considered the performer who ushered in the more naturalistic style of acting (known as “the Method”) both on stage and in film, truth be told it was Garfield who was the catalyst for Brando, as well as Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, James Dean and Steve McQueen.

Just look at Garfield’s first feature film, FOUR DAUGHTERS (’38). Directed by Michael Curtiz, the cast includes Lane sisters Lola, Rosemary and Priscilla, in addition to Gale Page as the four musically inclined daughters of a widower music professor (Claude Rains). Enter handsome boy-next-door Jeffrey Lynn as a budding composer named Felix who endears himself with all the daughters, especially peppy Ann (Priscilla Lane).

The household is put in an uproar with the arrival of Garfield’s Mickey Borden, the original rebel anti-hero. Unkempt, slovenly and possessing a massive chip on his shoulder, Mickey is an orchestrator who has arrived at the house to work with Felix. You can’t keep your eyes off him especially in this early monologue where he explains his anger to Ann:

“They’ve been at me now nearly a quarter of a century. No let-up. First, they said, ‘Let him do without parents. He’ll get along.’ Then they decided, ‘He doesn’t need education. That’s for sissies.’ Then right at the beginning, they tossed a coin, ‘Heads he’s poor, tail’s he’s rich.’ So, they tossed a coin…with two heads. Then for the finale, they got together on talent. ‘Sure, they said, let him have talent. Not enough to let him do anything on this own, anything good or great Just enough to let him help people. It’s all he deserves.’”

There was a sexuality and eroticism to Garfield’s performance that was 180 degrees different from Lynn’s durable and safe leading man. He was so natural; it was almost like someone found Garfield walking down the street in the Bronx and asked him to star in the movie. “He was the prototypical Depression rebellion youth,” actor Norman Lloyd told me about Garfield for the L.A. Times in 2003. They first met in 1937 and worked together on Garfield’s final film HE RAN ALL THE WAY (’51).

“He combined all of these elements of darkness and rebelliousness with the charm and the poignancy and he became the prototypical actor of that time. He never changed as a person. He remained just as a wonderful guy. He was a man of great charm, a good fellow, very likable.”

There was a lot of Mickey in Garfield, who was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle in 1913 on the Lower East Side of New York to poor Russian immigrants. Julie, as he was called, had a rough and tumble upbringing. His mother died when he was seven. “He hated his father,” his daughter Julie Garfield noted in 2003. “His father was awful to him. He was torn away from his brother.” In fact, Garfield once said that if he hadn’t become an actor, he would have been “Public Enemy No. 1.”

Unlike Mickey, the fates and destiny were looking after him. First, it was educator Angelo Patri, who became a surrogate dad to Julie at P.S. 45, a high school for troubled students. With Patri’s encouragement, he joined the debate team where he discovered he had a gift for acting. That was further nurtured when he received a scholarship to Maria Ouspenskaya’s acting school. He was all of 18 when he made his Broadway debut in 1932 in Lost Boy and became the youngest member of the progressive and influential Group Theatre, appearing in Clifford Odets’ early masterpieces Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing.

Odets wrote the play Golden Boy for Garfield in 1937, but director Harold Clurman decided to give the lead role of boxer Joe Bonaparte to Luther Adler and cast Garfield in a minor role. His unhappiness with Clurman’s decision pushed Garfield into signing a contract with Warner Bros. And FOUR DAUGHTERS made him an overnight sensation. He earned a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, but lost to Walter Brennan who picked up his second Academy Award in that category for Kentucky (‘38).

The following year, Garfield, Rains, the Lane siblings, Page and Curtiz reunited for DAUGHTERS COURAGEOUS, in which the actors played different characters from the prior film. It was probably the best film Garfield made that year. But Warner Brothers put him in a lot of movies that were unworthy of his talent including BLACKWELL’S ISLAND (’39) where he was typecast as a gangster. He made some good movies in 1941, including THE SEA WOLF, which also starred Edward G. Robinson and Ida Lupino and reunited him with Curtiz, and also Anatole Litvak’s atmospheric noir OUT OF THE FOG also with Lupino.

Because he suffered heart damage from scarlet fever, Garfield couldn’t serve during World War II. But he entertained the troops on USO tours and opened the famous Hollywood Canteen with Bette Davis so the troops could be entertained and be served by some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Both Davis and Garfield appeared as themselves in the hit 1944 film HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN. Garfield also fought the global conflict on screen, giving one of his strongest and grittiest performances in PRIDE OF THE MARINES (’45), a poignant drama based on the life Al Schmid who was blinded by a grenade during the Battle of Guadalcanal. He returns home to his wife (Eleanor Powell) a bitter, doubting man who has a difficult time trying to deal with his new life.

The year 1946 saw the release of two of Garfield’s most enjoyable films HUMORESQUE and THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. HUMORESQUE was his last film under his Warner Bros. contract. It’s a delicious melodramatic wallow with Garfield playing a poor New York kid who becomes a famous concert violinist. Joan Crawford, coming off her Oscar-winning triumph in Mildred Pierce (’45), plays a wealthy patroness who sets her sights on Garfield. Garfield went to MGM for POSTMAN, which was based on James M. Cain’s best-selling thriller. Garfield turns up the heat with Lana Turner as illicit lovers who brutally murder her husband only to turn on each other when they are caught.

The actor teamed up with Bob Roberts to form an independent production company, Enterprise Productions, and their first feature was the boxing classic BODY AND SOUL (’47), for which he earned his second Oscar nomination as Charley Davis, a boxer who loses his way when he gets involved with an unscrupulous promoter. Not only does he have a strong chemistry with leading lady Lilli Palmer, but also African American actor Canada Lee as Ben, a boxer with brain damage. And Garfield gets to utter one of his greatest lines in BODY AND SOUL: “What are you going to do? Kill me? Everybody dies.”

Though his next Enterprise production wasn’t a hit, FORCE OF EVIL (’48), co-written and directed by Abraham Polonsky, is a terrific film noir with a hard-hitting Garfield as a corrupt attorney trying to save his numbers-racket brother (Thomas Gomez) from his gangster boss. Garfield returned to Warner Bros. and Curtiz in 1950 for THE BREAKING POINT, which was based on Hemingway’s 1937 novel, To Have and Have Not. It’s an outstanding film noir with a superb performance from Garfield as well as from Black actor Juano Hernandez who plays his partner on the fishing boat.

THE BREAKING POINT was Garfield’s penultimate film and was not a hit because The Blacklist was engulfing Hollywood and the actor, despite the fact he wasn’t a Communist. His film career was over in 1951 when he refused to cooperate with HUAC at his hearing. Before his death of a heart attack in 1952 at the age of 39, Garfield did appear in a short-lived Broadway revival of Golden Boy, which also starred Lee J. Cobb, a young Jack Klugman and Joseph Wiseman.

Though she was only 6 ½ when he died, Julie Garfield recalls seeing her father on stage in Golden Boy where he introduced her during the curtain call. “When he smiled at you it was like being in the sun,” she noted. “He was funny and sometimes he would like to dance and kick up his legs. I remember him adoring me. He used to take me to the merry-go-round a lot in New York. He was so strong, so handsome and he loved to kid me. He would give me this mischievous smile. I wish I remembered more about him…”

#John Garfield #Method Acting #Marlon Brando #Golden Boy #theatre acting #The Sea Wolf #Body and Soul #Four Daughters #Susan King #TCM #Turner Classic Movies #Huac #blacklist

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netflixaddictedd · 4 years ago

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10 lesbian books you should read

Leah on the offbeat: When it comes to drumming, Leah Burke is usually on beat—but real life isn’t always so rhythmic. She’s an anomaly in her friend group: the only child of a young, single mom, and her life is decidedly less privileged. She loves to draw but is too self-conscious to show it. And even though her mom knows she’s bisexual, she hasn’t mustered the courage to tell her friends—not even her openly gay BFF, Simon. So Leah really doesn’t know what to do when her rock-solid friend group starts to fracture in unexpected ways. With prom and college on the horizon, tensions are running high. It’s hard for Leah to strike the right note while the people she loves are fighting—especially when she realizes she might love one of them more than she ever intended. (Make sure to read Simon vs the homosapiens agenda before Reading this)

Her royal highness: Millie Quint is devastated when she discovers that her sort-of-best friend/sort-of-girlfriend has been kissing someone else. Heartbroken and ready for a change of pace, Millie decides to apply for scholarships to boarding schools . . . the farther from Houston the better. Soon, Millie is accepted into one of the world's most exclusive schools, located in the rolling highlands of Scotland. Here, the country is dreamy and green; the school is covered in ivy, and the students think her American-ness is adorable. The only problem: Mille's roommate Flora is a total princess. She's also an actual princess. Of Scotland. At first, the girls can't stand each other, but before Millie knows it, she has another sort-of-best-friend/sort-of-girlfriend. Princess Flora could be a new chapter in her love life, but Millie knows the chances of happily-ever-afters are slim . . . after all, real life isn't a fairy tale . . . or is it?

The price of salt: Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is shattered when Carol is forced to choose between her child and her lover.

The miseducation of Cameron Post: When Cameron Post's parents die suddenly in a car crash, her shocking first thought is relief. Relief they'll never know that, hours earlier, she had been kissing a girl. But that relief doesn't last, and Cam is forced to move in with her conservative aunt Ruth and her well-intentioned but hopelessly old-fashioned grandmother. She knows that from this point on, her life will forever be different. Survival in Miles City, Montana, means blending in and leaving well enough alone, and Cam becomes an expert at both. Then Coley Talor moves to town. Beautiful, pickup-driving Coley is a perfect cowgirl with the perfect boyfriend to match. She and Cam forge an unexpected and intense friendship, one that seems to leave room for something more to emerge. But just as that starts to seem like a real possibility, Aunt Ruth takes drastic action to "fix" her niece, bringing Cam face-to-face with the cost of denying her true self even if she's not quite sure who that is.

Late to the party: Seventeen is nothing like Codi Teller imagined. She’s never crashed a party, never stayed out too late. She’s never even been kissed. And it’s not just because she’s gay. It’s because she and her two best friends, Maritza and JaKory, spend more time in her basement watching Netflix than engaging with the outside world. So when Maritza and JaKory suggest crashing a party, Codi is highly skeptical. Those parties aren’t for kids like them. They’re for cool kids. Straight kids. But then Codi stumbles upon one of those cool kids, Ricky, kissing another boy in the dark, and an unexpected friendship is formed. In return for never talking about that kiss, Ricky takes Codi under his wing and draws her into a wild summer filled with late nights, new experiences, and one really cute girl named Lydia. The only problem? Codi never tells Maritza or JaKory about any of it.

Annie on my mind: Liza begins to doubt her feelings for Annie after someone finds out about their relationship, and realizes, after starting college, that her denial of love for Annie was a mistake.

Tell me again how a crush should feel: Leila has made it most of the way through Armstead Academy without having a crush on anyone, which is a relief. As an Iranian American, she’s different enough; if word got out that Leila liked girls, life would be twice as hard. But when beautiful new girl Saskia shows up, Leila starts to take risks she never thought she would. As she carefully confides in trusted friends about Saskia’s confusing signals, Leila begins to figure out that all her classmates are more complicated than they first appear to be, and some are keeping surprising secrets of their own.

It's not like it's a secret: Sixteen-year-old Sana Kiyohara has too many secrets. Some are small, like how it bothers her when her friends don’t invite her to parties. Some are big, like the fact that her father may be having an affair. And then there’s the one that she can barely even admit to herself—the one about how she might have a crush on her best friend. When Sana and her family move to California, she begins to wonder if it’s finally time for some honesty, especially after she meets Jamie Ramirez. Jamie is beautiful and smart and unlike anyone Sana’s ever known. There are just a few problems: Sana's new friends don't trust Jamie's crowd; Jamie's friends clearly don't want her around anyway; and a sweet guy named Caleb seems to have more-than-friendly feelings for her. Meanwhile, her dad’s affair is becoming too obvious to ignore. Sana always figured that the hardest thing would be to tell people that she wants to date a girl, but as she quickly learns, telling the truth is easy…what comes after it, though, is a whole lot more complicated.

Juliet takes a breath: Juliet Milagros Palante is a self-proclaimed closeted Puerto Rican baby dyke from the Bronx. Only, she's not so closeted anymore. Not after coming out to her family the night before flying to Portland, Oregon, to intern with her favorite feminist writer--what's sure to be a life-changing experience. And when Juliet's coming out crashes and burns, she's not sure her mom will ever speak to her again. But Juliet has a plan--sort of. Her internship with legendary author Harlowe Brisbane, the ultimate authority on feminism, women's bodies, and other gay-sounding stuff, is sure to help her figure out this whole "Puerto Rican lesbian" thing. Except Harlowe's white. And not from the Bronx. And she definitely doesn't have all the answers . . .In a summer bursting with queer brown dance parties, a sexy fling with a motorcycling librarian, and intense explorations of race and identity, Juliet learns what it means to come out--to the world, to her family, to herself.

Style: Kyle Blake likes plans. So far, they’re pretty simple: Finish her senior year of high school, head off to a good college, find a cute boyfriend, graduate, get a good job, get married, the whole heterosexual shebang. Nothing is going to stand in the way of that plan. Not even Stella Lewis. Stella Lewis also has a plan: Finish her senior year as cheer captain, go to college, finally let herself flirt with (and maybe even date) a girl for the first time and go from there. Fate has other plans for Kyle and Stella when they’re paired up in their AP English class and something between them ignites. It’s confusing and overwhelming and neither of them know what to do about it. One thing they do know is that their connection can’t be ignored. The timing just isn’t right. But is there ever a good time for falling in love?

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jafreitag · 3 years ago

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Grateful Dead Monthly: Gaelic Park – New York, NY 8/26/71

Fifty years ago today, on Thursday, August 26, 1971, the Grateful Dead played a concert at Gaelic Park in New York City.

Gaelic Park is located at West 240th Street and Broadway, five miles north and east of Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx. In 1926, the Gaelic Athletic Association purchased it to host the Gaelic Games. What are Gaelic Games? I’m a sliver Irish (just learned that a few years ago from a cousin who did some DNA stuff), but I didn’t know about such games until I asked the Google machine. Here you go, from the Wiki:

“Gaelic games (Irish: Cluichí Gaelacha) are sports played in Ireland under the auspices of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). They include Gaelic football, hurling, Gaelic handball and rounders. Women’s versions of hurling and football are also played: camogie, organised by the Camogie Association of Ireland, and ladies’ Gaelic football, organised by the Ladies’ Gaelic Football Association. While women’s versions are not organised by the GAA (with the exception of handball, where men’s and women’s handball competitions are both organised by the GAA Handball organisation), they are closely associated with it.”

Some to unpack there. What’s Gaelic football? It’s basically rugby. (The rules are probably way different, but this is a music blog, so don’t judge.) And hurling? Rugby with a small ball and sticks that look like sporty pizza paddles. (Again, don’t judge.) Gaelic handball? Racquetball, except you use your hands and you’re outside, not in some bougie health club from the ’80s. Finally, rounders? It’s actually alot like baseball. Pretty cool.

Why were the Dead there? A 9/2/71 piece in the Village Voice by Carman Moore, now archived on the Grateful Dead Sources blog, said that Gotham promoter Howard Stein, a Bill Graham competitor who booked the Dead to play at the Cap Theater in Port Chester, NY and the Academy of Music in NYC, had turned “the drab little Riverdale soccer field … into a summer rock mini-festival.” (Check out the poster above.) Moore’s writing has an early-70s sizzle, and he refers to his colleague, now-legendary rock scribe Robert Christgau. Here’s an excerpt:

“Last week’s Grateful Dead concert up at Gaelic Park was a usual Dead session, meaning that the band-to-fan-to-band electro-chemical process for which rock music is famed was on like high mass at Easter. Although I think I know most of the time what they are doing musically (Christgau will like this notion); I don’t quite understand them electro-chemically. Like the New York Knicks of two seasons ago, they can do excellent things together though they are not a group of deathless superstars. Garcia gets his songs across, but he can’t sing, and Bob Weir’s voice rises to about average…maybe better when he gets to screaming and the music sweeps him along. I still find it difficult to recognize the Dead songs that aren’t “Truckin'” or “St. Stephen” one from the other. I am not one of their fans, but seem to be one of their admirers. Their music speaks in a special language to their live listeners, and that language has the vocabulary of everybody else, but a convoluted syntax all its own. The note sequences are not completely dependent upon musical factors but are also dictated by how involved the band feels and also upon what kind of heat the audience is giving off. I’m trying to get to some essences of this thing.

The drama of a Dead concert revolves around the fact that wherever the band plays they know that a certain number (several tons) of their partisans will be there and that their crowd knows the Dead potential to excite them, but they also know that the Dead may not get into gear until the crowd begins to apply some heat, and so forth. Both parties also know that the concert will be long enough and informal enough for anything to happen on either side of the footlights, and so audiences improvise (smoke, go to the hot dog stand, kiss and snuggle, cheer, dance, listen like star-struck fools) just like their musician friends on stage (who play light and funny for awhile, retire backstage awhile, stand around, or get lost in a piece and turn on the heavy jets). Like good lovers, the Grateful Dead know the secrets of good foreplay, taking your time, surprising the partner for awhile, and then just reacting for a spell.”

The timing of the show seems odd. The band was on the East Coast in July, but began August back in Cali – LA, SD, Berkeley – before a three-night run at Chicago’s historic Auditorium Theater. Then they trekked back to NYC. Our resident Deaditor ECM explains that aspect: “This show was supposed to be played the day before the Yale Bowl concert on July 30, but some issues with the equipment trucks and/or weather prevented it from happening from the scheduled date. There are a few stories on the web about people who didn’t get the message (no twitter back then!) and dropped some acid only to show up to an empty stadium. Haha!”

Moore said that the show reminded him of “a high school stadium I used to know – low stands, unfulfilled infield grass, mud holes here and there, beer sold at one end in some quantity.” He continued:

“The formal shape of the concert was a general crescendo, light at the beginning and heavy-groovy at the end – not a shooting-star, call-the-law finale, just a heightened physical-emotional climate…the goods delivered as promised…sort of like good preaching in a church known to be a happy place. I did not enjoy their country-westernish opening tunes; maybe they didn’t either, because the pieces were awfully short. But by the three-quarter mark they had involved themselves, the crowd, and me too.

First they got the rhythm engaged and finally, courtesy of Jerry Garcia’s lead and interplays with Lesh and Weir, they went into the soloing and jamming which are the real magic music territory of this band. Much is made of the Dead soloists, but it became clear to me by last Thursday that bassist Phil Lesh plus those two drummers create the atmosphere that makes the Dead thing possible. The drummers were exceptionally understated, but Lesh kept bopping and thrumming away, heavily at all times, until his patterns were consistently getting the other players off. In the middle of “St. Stephen” there was a special coming together: Lesh had found a nice ambiguous but compelling set of licks; Garcia eased into a solo; Weir strummed a cross-time lick over all of it; it built; it quieted; Garcia started to play strange classical kind of lines; the drums dropped out; the audience got quiet; nothing at all could be predicted for a minute or so; then Lesh began to grope his way out with two chords and rhythms which began to regularize; audience began to jump and then to clap; guitars began to straighten out; the band came home to the cheers of the fans. Good music-making. The listener goes home without a little tune to whistle, but he hears music. As if they were finishing off some personal solos based over the last riffs heard, the fans went out of Gaelic Park without a thousand encores and without a lot of fuss on the streets outside.

It’s all very interesting, surprising, and I guess mystifying as before. All I know is that the Dead, or their fans, or the combination of both lure you into planning to return when they’re all assembled and back in town again.”

Apparently, there was some grief about bootlegs at this show. The GD Sources blog has a post that archives a 10/6/71 piece by the excellently-handled Basho Katzenjammer (Basho, the 17th Century Japanese haiku master; Katzenjammer, the German word for hangover) that gripes about an army of 200# “muscle freaks” at the direction of tour manager Sam Cutler liberating a handful of tapes from 100# weakling Johnny Lee. It’s a truly fun read. An excerpt:

“The biggest piece of shit spewing from Cutler’s mouth is about the reasons the Dead have for being so pissed off: they don’t like the quality (remember Garcia’s line in “I Got No Chance of Losin”? He says, “I’m only in it for the gold.” Yeah, music has a way of being more honest than the artist intends it to be at times…) The “quality”? Anyone who has bought a bootleg recently will know and agree that the bootleg stereo album called “Grateful Dead” is one of the best underground products yet. The tape was taken from a concert the group did at Winterland, on the coast a few months back. Yeah, Garcia fucks up a bit on “Casey Jones,” and Pigpen’s ego may have been deflated a bit by his voice coming over poorly on “Good Loving” but that was a concert. You do a concert and you stand by your performance, good or bad. That’s show business.

This effete artistic bullshit doesn’t matter anyway … When you’re out to get all the money you can out of your gigs, like the Dead seem to be (like all the groups seem to be) you might be accused of being a bit piggish; when you use strong-arm shit to insure that you get every last penny that you deserve — by making Amerikan standards — you are a Pig. Jerry Garcia, is that you?

Nobody buys that anti-bootleg shit about the artistic integrity of the artist in saying what goes out. One, you stand by your performance; two, even if you don’t want to, Jerry, somewhat, and say “all your private property is fair game for your brothers (especially when they sell records of concerts that don’t compete with coming releases) and your brother (who’s gonna continue to dig you as we live off your comets we’re gonna keep ripping you off because it is possible. As simple as that.” If you and Cutler and Stein continue your shit, though, we’ll just have to sing the song the same old way, you guys being put in the position of being the same old reactionary establishment that we’re all ripping off. It’s all around. You break your back playing gigs for ten years and suddenly success is staring you in the face. Bread: lots and lots of bread. You turn your back on your poor, ripping ’em off roots and start to tighten up. You’re in the biggest rip-off industry around, but no one cares as long as they’re having fun.

Money. That’s the whole story, isn’t it? If these were other times, in another land under a different set of rules maybe you could justifiably complain about the people who want to give your recorded performances out free because you didn’t screen them and pick out the sections you didn’t like and do them over for the cat, ’cause no one charges for their music, and because the means of production belong to the people, and they can turn out all the good sounds they can, and you have a natural right to screen all releases. But we’re here. Now. You guys are making millions — or soon will be. Money is power, especially as the concept of money is crumbling nation-wide and power freaks like Stein are cornering the market on it. The channels that the green-power the Dead bring in travel aren’t the healthiest for the generations of revolution to come. Stein is one of these hopeful images of a freak with a chance to change things positively gone sour, who uses all his power to consolidate his power; who’ll go to any extremes to insure the natural expansion of that power. Fuck him. Fuck you.”

Speak, Basho! Quaint that the beef about bootlegs back then was sound quality, rather than copyright. Stuff got figured out at some point, I think. Like when Bobby shut down the LMA, lmao.

Ed featured part of this show in the 2016 edition of his epcot 31 Days of Dead project. Here are his listening notes, which are typically spot-on (and better than than the not-quite-on-the-bus commentary from Mr. Moore):

“Less than three weeks after Pigpen’s definitive performance of Hard To Handle at the Hollywood Palladium (8/6/71), the Grateful Dead play the final date of their summer tour in 1971 at Gaelic Park in the Bronx. It will be Pig’s last show until December and the last time the band will ever perform in their original quintet configuration of Jerry, Phil, Pig, Billy and Bobby. By September, Keith will be rehearsing with the band to assume a full-time role on the keys. Perhaps anticipating his absence, Pigpen leads the band through 6 of his songs including the rarely-played Empty Pages and the last Hard To Handle. It is also one of the last performances of Saint Stephen, until the band revived it in 1976 with a major facelift, never to be played the same way again. When you consider these historical milestones along with the departure of Mickey Hart and the closings of the legendary Fillmore East and West earlier in the year it makes you realize that this concert carried a little more weight than anyone could have ever foreseen at the time. It truly was the end of a chapter in the life of the Grateful Dead. As you listen to each song you can’t help but feel a certain degree of nostalgia.

For me, the hidden gem of the show is the outstanding version of Uncle Johns Band. Jerry’s first guitar solo is an absolute joy to hear. His notes sing with irresistible melody and happy sunshine which perfectly capture the nostalgia of those carefree early years. If you listen closely you can hear Pigpen playing the wood claves.”

Speaking of Pig, this show features the second and final performance of Empty Pages. The NYS Music blog, which has a nice write-up of this show, describes it as a McKernan original that “pairs his traditional crooning style with a slow blues jam that’s nicely peppered with fiery guitar licks from Garcia. It’s a true rarity and a shame that the band wouldn’t be able to further develop this one.”

youtube

I feel like this was a try-hard post. It might be tl;dr, idk. Here’s the true goodness…

Transport to the Charlie Miller remaster of the soundboard recording HERE.

More soon.

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kvetchlandia · 4 years ago

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Dave Heath New York City c.1957

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night, who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas, who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels, who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain, who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa, who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago, who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets, who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword, who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom, who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices, who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium, who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion, who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery, who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music, who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles, who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity, who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes, who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second, who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz, who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave, who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury, who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy, and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia, who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia, returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East, Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination— ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time— and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane, who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

--Allen Ginsberg, “Howl, part 1″ 1956

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