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elluendifad · 11 months ago

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Hi!! Could you talk a little about what following Tolkien elven religion is like for you? (Only if you want, of course.)

I'm a very newly awakened elf and I've just started reading the silmarillion. I haven't even gotten that far yet, but already it's the most connected I've felt to any religious system/religious lore before. I'm considering practicing Elvish religion, but idk. I feel a little strange saying I want to practice a religion from a work of fiction, y'know? (Please don't take this as me saying your beliefs are strange— I think they're incredibly cool. This is very much just a me thing.)

Anyway, I guess my question is something along the lines of How did you realize this was the religion for you/What do you believe wrt Tolkiens work being or not being fiction?

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, and doubly so if you choose to answer! Have a nice timezone :))

Alatulya, welcome kin! this one is a little long so there is a break. i also accidentally hit publish early, so we will see how editing it works lol.

table of contents: 1. my personal history and variety of practitioners 2. dealing with fictional mythology + my fave paper on this 3. specifics of tolk elven religion

Eldarin religion has been my primary religion (buddhism and my eclectic animistic witchcraft also there and co piloting) for seven years. I have been working with other eldar on our own group experience of this religion for two or a bit more years. I have taken a bit of priestly service role of collecting and organizing materials and keeping track of the calendar, which we call Loa and which assigns different holidays and themes in order throughout the year. i suspect this role is agreeable and natural for me as minya, but that anyone could do it. the degree of demand differs depending on the person, and i would say that much of my time is set to thinking of or practicing our religion. others have less involvement, and some of us feel our cosmology and philosophy is more cultural than religious the way humans might think being a member of a religious group should be. as for my own journey of getting here, i have been otherkin for most of my life and many years of that was 'generally a nature spirit type thing.' which became 'an elf but i am not sure what kind.' which then became 'oh god… am i one of those hoity toity tolkien elves?' bc there is a cultural expectation among elfkin that tolk elves are more dour and care what color clothes you wear or something… turns out that is not true! or, at least, i have not met these grim arbiters of what is becoming of the firstborn! reading the silm and other texts in the legendarium to fill in what i had absorbed from the hobbit and lotr (books and movies) was the lightbulb in the dim cellar. i use a mixed spiritual and psychological theory of origin and function for my several theriotypes and elven kintype, and this experience filled in some gaps i had just been sitting with. i personally feel that i am living one continuous eldarin life--awoken at cuivienen among the minyar, lived and died, spent my time in mandos, and was reembodied here. my sense of memory is dim, and i generally assume that is just a sign that memory is not necessarily important for this part of my life the way it was in arda. it is a great honor to live this life and to find other eldar and folks of all kindreds to share my love of life with. it was natural to transition from my magic and religious work with nature spirits to a cosmology centered on the legendarium-some of the spirits i still work and live with admit they are maiar, others are not maiar and are of the many kinds of spirit and sprite that entered into ea after its foundation to explore. our working relationships and the techniques i use for magic have stayed much the same. so how i do it is just one example in a variety.

2. i will answer first on dealing with the fictional aspect and wrestling with the nature of constructed or pop culture or modern mythology spirituality-the individual beliefs differ there, too!

for my part, i do not think the legendarium is a factual history of this actual world we currently live in. i do think jrrt was channeling something, and may or may not have been kin himself of arda reembodied here.

i think ea, like most faerie realms, is both here and not here and you have to open yourself up and step into it. once most people have experienced the enchantment of an otherworld, they are never fully able to drop the sense of it. i do feel that the legendarium makes a suitable mythopoetic 'history' for powers and themes that apply to both this world and ea and where they overlap, and that the legendarium becomes more historically factual the closer you move into ea and the further you go from current earth.

there is a lovely paper that i surely have annoyed everyone with titled the tolkien spiritual milieu by Markus Altena Davidsen of the university of leiden that really gets into the anatomy of constructed religion and what is present in certain medias that lends itself to that anatomy, which he calls 'religious affordances' in the text. it details a number of groups of many varied beliefs in the tolkien spiritual sphere, some active and some long gone, and i feel that it is a great way to expand one's vocabulary and mental concept of constructed religion and the wide variety that is possible in such constructions. the pdf is available from the university website here

if you check out mr davidsen's other published papers on that website, there are several others also relevant to fiction sourced mythology and spirituality including some by other authors.

3. that being said, there are religious affordances for the eldar in the texts, but not necessarily enough for a fully fleshed out practice as is prepared and given to new members of various world religions. it will take a bit of crafting, but we elves do love to craft! most of us blend legendarium cosmology and philosophy with practices or philosophies we are previously familiar with, like neopaganism or judaism or etc etc.

we have developed some structure in the forms of: a multiply layered observational calendar for the six seasons, eight holidays, twelve months, and seven days of the week; the fourteen valar and several named maiar associated with certain valar; the panentheistic experience of the creator Eru; and the use of witchcraft, meditation, devotional or worship activity, enchantments, glamor, and arts like music poetry painting crochet etc.

most of us practice our own personal flavor by ourselves, and group rituals or ensorcelments are rare at the moment. we are all exploring, and i would be thrilled to hear about your own explorations and what calls to you!

sooo… basically i have a worship and work relationship with our gods and supportive spirits, and give observation on the schedule of the loa. i have daily practices, like offering of beverage an thanks or an oil anointment of my body, and then weekly practices like an eruhini veneration and well wishes for the dead. and monthly practices on the full and dark moon, which is focused on the vala of that month, where i usually do spellwork for the constellation. there are holidays at the start of each season and at the solstices, where i will sometimes do magic for the group but is usually about the personal journey. the one time another elf was physically with me i did do some small rituals including that elda. my herbalism work is inherently religious to me and i also count both learning and practicing herbalism as a devotional activity, same with going on walks or drumming.

i invite you very earnestly to reach out any time and through any means you are comfortable with, and i wish you a very blessed full moon of winds. hantanyel ar namarie!

#elvenkind #elvenkin #elfkin #tolkien spirituality #ardan paganism #my mothers name is death #witchcraft #elfgang #elven spirituality #tie eldalieva #letinwesselma

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rosesnink · 9 months ago

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Red Threads of Fate (That Binds Us Together) Part One: The World Is a Napkin

Author's Notes

Was I inspired by @thosehallowedhalls 's 30 Days 30 Drabbles to make my own drabbles series? Yes, yes I was. This series won't be a series per se, but rather small drabbles of canon and my own universe with my OC Nerea and her trysts with the Thornes, as well as glimpses with Neera and Trystan, pre and post b1 and 2. I will try to keep them small and simple, but knowing my overperfectionist and wordy self? It'd be hard, lol, I'm recovering from writing +10k word chapters with TCH lol. Enjoy!

English isn't my first language, so please forgive any typos/grammar mistakes

No beta, we die like men and all that jazz

If you wish to be tagged in my COP stuff, let me know!

All Spanish dialogue will be translated at the end of the fic

Summary: Trystan's curiosity gets the better of her... and Neera

Word Count: 1.1k

Category: Pining idiots, mild jealousy

Pairing: F!Trystan x F!MC (Neera Rose) mentions of Vasili Thorne x F!OC & Sebastyan x F!OC (Nerea Rose)

Rating: PG-13

Book: Crimes of Passion

Princess Trystan had noticed two things about Neera when collaborating with Ginovesi Agency: one, she depended too much on cheap ‘migas’ and noodles to eat, and always smiled up when the name ‘Nere <3’ showed up on her phone, which irritated Trystan in a way she was yet to describe.

She always walked away and talked for very long minutes with her. She didn’t know who this Nere was, but she disliked her, and she couldn’t quite place why. She hogged all of Neera’s attention, and had not once showed up to the office.

“So,” she asked Luke, who was tying some complicated computer stuff “who is Nere? Is she Neera’s girlfriend or something?”

Luke stopped in his tracks, turned his gaze to her and looked at the princess like she had just turned blue “Her what now?”

“I mean, she smiles like an idiot when she calls, talk for hours with her and I haven’t met her yet.”

Luke blinked “And you think, just with those facts, that she’s her girlfriend?”

Trystan shrugged, trying to hide her burning jealousy “Isn’t she?”

“No!”

“Then what is she?”

A familiar voice called “Her cousin, to whom she considers a sister.” Trystan turned around to see Mafalda Ginovesi, staring at her gravely “And if Detective Rose were to date someone, it is none of our business, Your Highness. But, if you do consider it your business, then quit beating around the bush. Neera’s smart for clues and deductions, but for dating? She’s as clueless as a cloud.”

Trystan simply nodded. She felt terribly embarrassed, not only by her jealous assumptions, but of how called out she felt. “Got it, boss.”

“Good. Speaking of Detective Rose, she ought to be here soon. Do try to wash off your jealousy while you’re at it, perhaps by browsing at the clues gathered so far.”

Wanting nothing more than to stop being called out, she pretended to browse over the evidence. She found it impossible, for Neera’s fragrance was present in the office: leather, cherry and cheap Red bull. Waiting for Luke to be lost in his computer again, she browsed through her photos: one with her father, who was rather handsome, a beautiful woman with a pregnant belly, taken in the early 90s –Neera’s mother, she supposed—and two teenagers from the 00s posing and smiling wide- It was certainly Neera, and whom she supposed was Nerea: they looked alike, although Nerea’s skin was a bit more tanned than brown like Neera’s, had a sweeter face and a very long, wavy dark brown hair.

Then, it came to her as lightning; she had seen this woman before, somewhere. She quickly whipped out her phone and searched ‘Nerea Rose’. There it was. An academic genius all over the US and Europe: tons of academic credits and titles in Europe, endless essays that were too long for Trystan’s tastes, her Pictagram account, photos with friends, newspapers talking about her… and photos smiling and chatting with two of her brothers: Vasili and Sebastyan.

Not being able to help it, she started reading the articles: she and Vasili seemed like they were a thing, holding hands and some kisses on her hand and his cheek, and then what it seemed like a photo of her confronting him. The same with Sebastyan, but those photos of them being close reeked intense-ness, a very Bas-esque behavior. Then, a photo of her that looked like she was confronting him, and then, they seemed to move on to someone else.

It seemed like she just continued with her life, and quickly whipped out their Picta accounts. Indeed, thenerearosex_. followed them both and seemed to like every photo, though no comment whatsoever. She wondered if Neera knew. Or Luke.

“Morning,” Neera greeted. She stopped when she saw Trystan hovering over her desk, glued to her phone “Uhm, Trystan?” She broke out of her trance “The hell are you doing in my desk?”

She cleared her throat “That your parents? I see where you get your looks, Detective.”

Neera simply glared “Get out of there before I move you.”

She held her hands up “Oh, fine. What do we have today?”

Neera flatly declared “Since we got demoted from the Dormer case, we are retaking possible cheaters.”

Trystan smirked “We?”

Neera took a deep breath “The possible dirtbag is a socialite. I’m taking you because you’re, well, useful. Don’t make me throw you out of the car.”

“That’d be treason.” She mocked.

“I’ll live. Pick your drink of choice and let’s go.”

After a few silent ten minutes, Trystan spoke up “You never told me you had a cousin. Sister? Sister-cousin?”

Neera raised her eyebrow “Who told you?”

“Mafalda,” she tried to sound casual “I Googled her. Seems nice.”

Her expression softened “She is the best of us. If someone deserves to thrive in Europe, it’s her.”

Trystan cleared her throat, slowing down in case this backfired. “I also saw an interesting thing about her when Googling her.”

“And what is that? My sister does many things that gets on the Google page.”

Time to brace for impact “I’ve seen a… few photos of her with two of my brothers. They seemed… close.”

Neera froze. She looked at Trystan like she had just said that the sun was a planet and it revolved around earth.

“Que mi hermana ¿qué?”

Trystan wasn’t fluent in Spanish, but the vermin and anger in her eyes made her park the car on the side of the road.

“It seems that she dated two of my brothers.”

“No.” She spat.

“It seems likely.”

“Lies. Slander!”

“You don’t know that.”

“My sister’s far too smart for your lot.”

Trystan was shocked at her denial “Now that’s a bit—,” Aaaaand she was calling Nerea. She picked up, despite being probably 4 a.m. there “Nere, did I wake you?”

“Kinda. What’s up, Neera?”

“Is it true?” She asked brusquely “That you dated two Thorne princes?”

Her voice was hoarse and confused “Why?”

“You admit it?!”

“Nina, no grites, que son las cinco de la mañana.” She moaned.

“Nina?” Trystan asked.

“Tú callada.” Neera hissed.

“Nina, it was a long time ago. Besides, why do you care? We’re the same age, I can date whoever I want.”

“I just—,”

“I’m going back to bed. And Neera’s friend, perhaps try to calm her down? Sorry about that. Night, Nina.”

She hung up, and Neera grunted. Trystan observed her closely “Would it be so terrible, your sister dating one of my brothers?”

“Yes!” She yelled.

“Why?”

“Because! Because…” She looked at Trystan intensely. The air was thick with tension, and Trystan almost saw longing in Neera’s eyes. They looked at each other’s lip for a nanosecond that flew by too fast “Doesn’t matter. Let’s deal with this cheating dirtbag, hm?”

“Okay…” She was so calling Vasili asking for details later. Neera’s sister seemed like quite the character if she could command the attention of Vasili and Bas.

“Que mi hermana ¿qué?” - My sister what?

Nina, no grites, que son las cinco de la mañana - Nina, don't scream, it's 5 a.m.

Tú callada- You shut up

#playchoices fanfiction #crimes of passion #cop book 1 #trystan thorne #f!trystan thorne #mc: neera rose #oc: nerea rose #f!trystan thorne x f!mc #f!oc x vasili thorne #sebastyan thorne x f!oc #cfwc fics of the week

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eliteprepsat · 9 months ago

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Thinking about and preparing for the SAT or ACT, most of you probably went on your own version of a mental rollercoaster. You may have felt the pressure, then some boredom, maybe frustration, and any number of forms of anxiety. So you’ve finally taken the test (and hopefully recuperated from any dizziness from the ride). Now what? Here are six ideas for where to put your focus next:

1. CELEBRATE! 🙌

Now that you’ve put in so much hard work and took the SAT/ACT, it’s time to give yourself permission to put any thoughts about the test out of your mind for a bit. You’ve accomplished a significant milestone in your academic career and you deserve to celebrate yourself. Many of us are so used to being told we what we do wrong or what we need to do better—by parents, teachers and ourselves–that it’s easy to forget to honor our positive qualities and accomplishments. You are paving the way to a successful, fulfilling future, so right now, take a moment to tell yourself how amazing you are.

2. SEND YOUR TEST SCORES TO COLLEGES 📤

At the time you register for the SAT or ACT, you have the option to send your scores to a few colleges for free. While this is a good way to save money, keep in mind you will not be able to see your scores before they are sent, so it might be best to use these free score reports for colleges that want to see all your scores. Your other option is to wait until you get your scores back (usually within 2-4 weeks after your test date), when you can then choose to send or not send them wherever you want (albeit for a fee).

3. DETERMINE IF YOU WANT TO TAKE THE TEST AGAIN

Unless you are completely satisfied with your score the first time, it is a good idea to take the test at least two or three times, if for no other reason than scores will naturally vary depending on the test day. Regardless of how unhappy you might be with the score, don’t rip up your score report and throw it away. Examine it to determine which areas you could benefit from practicing more. You can also look at your target colleges’ test score averages as a way of setting your score goal for the next time you take the test. Lastly, if you are applying to any schools that offer superscoring, consider retaking the test to boost your score in a particular section.

4. GATHER COLLEGE APPLICATION DEADLINES 📆

As you think about which SAT/ACT date to register for, don’t forget to consider whether you might want to apply early to any college or university. Then check school websites to determine which date you will need to send your scores by and plan accordingly, especially if you also want to take SAT Subject Tests as these tests are offered on the same dates as the regular SAT and will thus limit the test dates available to you.

5. MAKE A LIST OF COLLEGE ADMISSIONS REQUIREMENTS 📝

With all of the attention we have given the SAT/ACT we must not neglect the other time-sensitive college admissions requirements. For example, if any of the colleges you are applying to require letters of recommendation, you will want to give your teachers plenty of time to write them. You will also want to give yourself enough time to craft quality college essays about yourself, take SAT Subject Tests, and, if you’re applying for any specialized programs such as art programs, put together any additional requirements.

6. MAKE A PLAN 📋

To keep track of all these moving parts, try starting a Google spreadsheet or get out a piece of paper and draw up a plan. Write down all important official deadlines—test registration deadlines, application deadlines, scholarship deadlines, summer program deadlines etc. You can also write down personal deadlines such as when you will ask your teachers for letters, when you will start drafting essays, and when you will prepare for any remaining tests. You can also add college visits and any other pertinent to-dos to your plan.

Writing everything down and taking each task step by step, well ahead of time, will minimize any feelings of overwhelm you might feel and will prevent any stress from forgotten or missed deadlines. This is your one shot to apply to colleges, so go all in; it’s worth it, and so are you.

#college prep #college admissions #studyblr #SAT #ACT #test prep #college #standardized tests #high school #education

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thesinglesjukebox · 1 year ago

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TWST - "OFF-WORLD"

youtube

Our own Hannah begins the D&B t.A.T.u revival...

[7.25]

Hannah Jocelyn: This gem was produced by Mike Spencer, whose maximalist EDM work graced Rudimental and Ellie Goulding's best music in the early 2010s. "Off-World", which TWST wrote with Lauren Aquilina and Marcus Anderson, brings that sound back to life with headier lyrics. The vocal sound is SO bright it's almost fatiguing, but that adds to the song's urgency; Chloe Davis will break through time, space, and the capabilities of de-essers to be their true self. Aquilina's previous song "Empathy" was about the perils of lacking emotional boundaries, but here, dissolving boundaries is a path to romantic transcendence: "Wanna float, wanna fly, wanna try to ascend this skin/Wanna feel what you feel, but I can't feel anything." I have a whole playlist of songs that attempt to verbalize that need for all-consuming intimacy, and in those songs it often ends up toxic. Davis is aware of this, which is why "I wanna give you it all" comes with the necessary caveat "...without giving myself away." Still, the most prominent queer art of the last quarter-century depicts this ache for a reason, whether it's Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye using their bodies as performance art, Neo and Trinity becoming The One in Matrix Resurrections, or everything involving Steven Universe. As "Off-World" careens into its drops, TWST approximates what that bliss must feel like. [9]

Aaron Bergstrom: A warm-hearted, techno-utopian update on "All The Things She Said," which unfortunately means it isn't quite as good. [6]

Katherine St Asaph: "All the Things She Said" deconstructed into its three elements. One: The hook -- well, one of them. Two: Ethereal yearning, and the desire to escape into the fantasy worlds and heightened emotional reality found in saturated pastorals, cities at night, dark chromed spaceships, or whatever other AMV aesthetic you personally want to get isekai'd into. Three: The frantic, obsessive pace of that yearning, which takes physical form here as a drum-and-bass break (probably the next sound to bubble back up to mainstream offline pop). [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The Expanse AMV-type beat [8]

Jackie Powell: It's been awfully hard to figure out why "Off-World" sounds so familiar. Is it similar to a video game theme? Or is this more like the theme to the French animated series Code Lyoko that ran on Cartoon Network for a few years in the 2000s? Sonically, not exactly. But what links them all is how they fit together as science fiction, with world-hopping. TWST explained that "Off-World'' is about "a cyborg girl who descends upon Earth, yearning to break free" who finds liberation in another place. TWST is best in the pre-chorus; the yearning and the struggle are there. But I question the potency of the chorus. Where is that conflict? Where's the payoff? It seems a little monotonous compared to the rest of this three and a half minute journey. The percussive elements in that hook, however, are exhilarating. Well done, Mike Spencer. [6]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: An epic about a cyborg girl descending upon earth and trying to find liberation, personal freedom, and authenticity sounds amazing, but it shouldn't take TWST's long statement about the track for me to understand the story. The musical experience of "Off-World" doesn't speak for itself, and despite how pretty it sounds, the track's immense ambitions are let down by the hook's flatness. [5]

Taylor Alatorre: How do I justify not slapping an automatic [10] on what is essentially Springsteenian cyberpunk? In part it's that "Off-World" suffers from its own success. The pre-chorus is substantially more stirring and anthemic than the chorus, which leads to the latter feeling like a deflation of energies, or an artificial limit on the possibilities the song wants to conjure. Songs about escape, whether from the "swamps of Jersey" or from the burdens of meatspace, are more dependent than usual on structure and momentum, on both mapping out a compelling journey and ensuring the destination lives up to expectations. But if "Off-World" falls a bit short in its goal of ferrying us to a frictionless utopia, that cliché about the journey and the destination isn't wrong here. "Meet me at the borderline" -- most of us are there already, but TWST knows how to make it sound like an undiscovered country. [7]

Will Adams: There's a point at which desire transcends the bounds of a standard crush, when the promise of being with someone seems so out of reach it becomes science fiction. They exist in a whole other world, you think. How could I ever meet them there? This is what that feels like: swirling synths that conjure the cosmic chasm separating you from them, but a breakneck d&b pulse that launches you into that open space. "Off-World" embodies the feeling of reaching out your hand, unsure whether your fingertips will ever meet theirs. [9]

Frank Falisi: The pre-chorus is the most sci-fi of all song parts, tipping into the transformation that comes next but unfolding with what came before still rattling in the air. A lot of pop invokes sci-fi imagery, but to treat the parts of a pop song as linguistic elements might suggest actual future-facing strategies of realizing a speculative electronic. In the meantime, comics-brained love-borgs promising the kiss of a world beyond this bad rock is a sweet time fizz. [6]

David Moore: A lovely take on one of my absolute favorite tropes in pop music: escaping the burden of society, and maybe corporeality altogether, in outer space! My personal standard-bearer is t.A.T.u.'s "Cosmos," which is to say I'm missing another dollop of melodrama, and I have minor quibbles with the words tilting more toward metaphor than they need to -- can I get one reference to a spaceship or something? But that's probably just a taste issue. [7]

Kayla Beardslee: Pop music is escapism, and hyperpop is pop music taken to the extreme, so why not interpret hyperpop to mean escapism so extreme that it creates an entirely new world?="margin:> [7]

Alfred Soto: Drum 'n' bass skitters! I run lukewarm on 'em, but when the track has a solid hook and okay lyrics they function like a laugh track in a pretty good sitcom. [6]

Micha Cavaseno: The last couple years have had drum & bass-style breaks wreak their revenge on pop in both the mainstream and the sub-stream (oh my god all the precious kids making "breakcore"), and it's reminded me of the worst aspects of the genre: unimaginative chopping of the same two or three loops. "Off-World" is a delightful whispy yearning little piece of leydrift, and I can't imagine it without that little baby's first junglism flourish. But I wish it had something that would make it feel properly unearthly. Of course, it's just that I don't know what I'd want that makes the sense of an unknown future so tantalizing, and that's what I'd hope this song could've gotten. [6]

Ian Mathers: I know I've heard the drum break that gets used in the chorus many times over the years, but it absolutely works for me every time. The sci-fi stuff only sorta coheres, but I'm a sucker for that too. [8]

Brad Shoup: Look, Mike Spencer did "Feel the Love". He will see heaven. I dunno that the venerable breaks contribute anything to the sci-fi metaphor--maybe they make things cyberpunk--but I still love 'em. Everything that happens between the verses is exquisite: the long bass notes that are practically detonated, TWST's perfectly urgent adult-alternative chorus (I'm hearing... Paula Cole?), and even the title itself. Just a really evocative thing to sigh. [8]

Nortey Dowuona: thank u Chloe Davis. [10]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

#twst #music #pop music #music writing #music reviews #music criticism #the singles jukebox #Youtube

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bluedalahorse · 2 years ago

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2. Do you read/reread your own fics?

3. What’s your favorite fic that you’ve written?

13. How much planning do you do before writing?

18. What’s one of your favorite lines you’ve written in a fic?

22. Do you know how your fic will end before you start writing?

Thanks for the ask!

2. Do you read/reread your own fics?

I do. Sometimes for the purpose of reminding myself what I wrote before and making sure later chapters line up with that (though of course there are inconsistencies in my longfic anyway) and but sometimes just for fun. Usually I’m rereading my own stuff because I can’t sleep and it helps to have something familiar and soothing, but not something so new and novel that it makes me more awake and I’m never able to fall back asleep again. And hey, I write the stuff I like to read, so it works.

3. What’s your favorite fic that you’ve written?

Don’t make me choose, I love all my children equally! Well, okay, maybe I’m glad that the Gundam Wing fic circa 2000 with the fangirl Japanese and the horrendously mischaracterized evil Relena is gone from the internet forever. I do not miss my era of hating on fictional female characters.

If I had to pick some favorite parts of what I’ve written so far (because I haven’t written a lot of short fics, more like longer stuff) I like chapters 11-15 of Heart and Homeland, which take place at a ball at the Ehrencronas’ estate. So many events and relationships happened in those chapters, it felt sort of like writing a season finale. We’re now getting in to chapters that feel more like a series finale, and it’s just as exciting.

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Terrain Boundaries Territory, my second person fanfic-in-verse where Sara is Getting Revenge On August. It was the first fic I’d posted to the internet for about seven years! Even though it is now heavily AU based on how season 2 played out, I’m glad I took the risk to write something in a completely unusual format, and then I’m glad I posted it to AO3. Sometimes it’s worth just putting your ideas out there and seeing what happens!

13. How much planning do you do before writing?

It depends. Also, there are also different types of planning that I do.

One way that I plan is by making big structural outlines. For Heart and Homeland, @heliza24 and I have a lot to keep track of, so we work in thematically linked batches of chapters. 1-3 was our first batch, 4-6 our second batch and so on. Each batch is a tab on a spreadsheet, and we then have a line for each letter, prose scene, whatever, along with a summary, who the thing is assigned to, and a link to the document with the thing. This helps us keep the flow of the story relatively structured, though occasionally we end up adding and subtracting ideas as we write things out, as well as flipping the order of certain scenes once we know how things are working.

Here’s what the spreadsheet can look like:

(Blue means something is assigned to me, yellow means it’s something assigned to Heliza. Also, sometimes our summaries get snarky, but because this was very early on in our plotting process I was being relatively serious.)

For a shorter work, I might not be as concerned about a big structural outline.

When it comes to planning out scenes, I will give myself a few minutes before I write a scene to make some notes about what I’m about to work on. I try to think about, what is the purpose of the scene? How do each character’s emotions shift (or not?) What are the things that happen? What important lines of dialogue do I need to remember? What images/appeals to the reader’s senses are going to give us clues about a character’s emotional state? That’s usually half a page of jotting—I mostly try to get down the things I don’t want to forget. I don’t try to get everything in a scene because sometimes that comes out while writing.

One more thought about planning: sometimes a season drops in the middle of a longfic and you end up adjusting things from your original plans! We wrote the first 19 chapters of H & H in the months between season 1 and season 2, and while we’re keeping 95% of our original plans intact, we did make some alterations and play with some storylines based on season 2 plots. For instance, we were able to use Marcus and Jan-Olof as part of the story where originally we were gonna have to invent some OCs. So season 2 turned out pretty useful for our plotting!

18. What’s one of your favorite lines you’ve written in a fic?

Answered that in this post with probably too much text.

If you want just one line, though, my inner twelve-year-old always giggles too much in this one Heart and Homeland letter where August is writing Erik early on, and he says, Were [Simon] not so dedicated to his studies or so adept at fencing, I would have a difficult time supporting Wilhelm’s continued association with him. If, after reading this, you have your own concerns, please send word and I will explicitly forbid any further intercourse between the pair.

Look, if you’re writing a 19th century AU and you can’t make a joke using the historic meaning of the word intercourse at least once, then what’s the point?

22. Do you know how your fic will end before you start writing?

Yes and no. I have a general idea but as I write themes develop, and then that helps me shape what the end is going to be like. It’s hard to get that balance of catharsis though! Endings are challenging.

Thanks for playing along! If anyone else wants to send me some numbers, the ask game is here.

#ask game #my fanfiction

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regarding-stories · 2 years ago

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Union versus Identity, Mind versus Soul: "Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki"

So, I've finished the latest installment of Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki available in English. Today is Monday. I read installments 4-9 since Friday, finishing up this morning. And what a ride it is! To sum it up: Volumes 8 and 9 deepen the series considerably. As the series goes on, it takes on a rather mature quality.

This even tracks through the cast - more adults show up. I don't believe this is an accident - this is convenience. As the series starts to tackle the nature of relationships and growing as a person more seriously, it really needed some characters that could say the words that the protagonist needed to hear to "get it." (And so that we do, too.)

But the beauty of this series is that in the end our focus characters also transcend what others told them and discover their own truths.

(Spoilers.)

A true third main character

A surprising development took place. I already liked the character Kikuchi-san, but the way she was introduced had a notion of pulp to it. In pulp fiction, you go the easy route of letting you know about a character. You tell us what a character is. This typically happens with "smart characters" - we're told how fiendishly clever, how perfectly cunning they are. Never mind that anything they do in the story is either stupid, or terribly contrived and for plot convenience. There's always a glaring contradiction visible between what we are told and what actually unfolds.

Kikuchi-san did not start as a character. She was a field of feelings, an invitation to union, a safe space. And given the nature of teenager infatuation, that was alright. You don't really know the person that you fall in love with when you do. And when you are a teenager, you probably project the hardest all your hopes and dreams on them. That doesn't mean Kikuchi-san couldn't exhibit these qualities. But she hadn't owned them yet, either. She was too perfect.

The early series focused on group dynamics, how popularity works, and how to make some basic move in life. This is, in a sense, also true for the author - finding his own legs to stand on. It's in fact surprising how long the series took until ventured into the territory of teenage love. As it did so in volumes 6 and 7, it began to rapidly change. Both love interests - Mimimi and Kikuchi-san - took on more life, became more real. Especially Mimimi's actions took on a sense of urgency as she tried to prevent failing in her own quest for romance, and yet all of it is satisfying and beautifully done.

But as always, falling in love is only the starting line. This is why The Quintessential Quintuplets movie was so anemic. Idolizing the idea of a magical moment can only take you so far. There was no meat on those bones. And you can't add the meat after you let the main story finish, either.

Kikuchi-san, however, comes into full view during volumes 8 and 9 and there's plenty of conflict because of what we learn about our three main characters, about Fumiya Tomozaki, Aoi Hinami, and last but no longer least, Fuuta Kikuchi. But in order to lay that out, I have to step into a different perspective for a moment.

Identity and Union

This perspective isn't uniquely mine - at all. I'm borrowing it because it is very helpful for framing the developments of these books I'm talking about.

Union is the desire to be one with another, to be of service to them, to dissolve boundaries, to experience oneness, to share, to blend into each other, but it can also be about giving in, losing yourself. You could call it Yin, or say it's accepting, depending on how you see the world also female, but it's not limited to that.

But as you get closer, you encounter something that is not its opposite, but its complement: Identity. In a sense it's what makes you you, as a separate person. But it's a tricky thing. Because some part of it may be the core of your personality, and some part of it may be things you've taken on from your environment, like a hedgehog romping through a pile of leaves. Identity is then a combination of self and environment.

You could call this Yang, maybe even male, if you want. But that's not the point. Identity plays a big role in why a self and self conception exists. But it's also what makes you feel lonely. Somehow you need to balance Union and Identity to be together with someone without giving up on your self. It's about striking a balance, and a lot of people find that hard to do.

If you let Volume 9 fully impact you, you will see that Union and Identity are concepts woven into it, deeply and meaningfully.

Take Kikuchi. From Volume 7 onward she takes on more Identity after initially being portrayed as an ideal safe space, a Union transcending what is possible for humans. Tomozaki's angel comes down to Earth, revealing her own motivations and drives, like wanting to live in a world with ideals guiding her. But she also shows she can become anxious, threatened, lonely - showing both her Identity and the weaknesses in it. She's afraid. She becomes erratic. Her balance between Union and Identity is off. She gets hurt and recoils.

Sometimes it's better to look at an extreme to understand a concept. And this extreme is Hinami. Hinami is only Identity, to an insane degree. In fact, this view is confirmed in the book itself:

"What we sensed there was nothing other than madness."

Ashigaru-san and Fumiya take a real look at Hinami, they convey the author's verdict. If Identity completely takes you over, you lose something that is fundamental to being human. Identity of the extreme degree starts to crowd everything else out in the name of overly focused, one could even say one-pointed, reason.

Her extreme driven-ness, her needing a reason for everything, crowds out any impulses she could get from intuition or the heart and supplants them with her abstract goals. More about that in a moment.

And finally on to Fumiya. He has a strong Identity, but pay close attention to the concept of what he "truly wants." As he confronts his fear of being lonely because of his very individualistic nature, he struggles both with his Identity but also his desire for Union. He can be alone. That's not the point - he's off track. But his desire to live life fully participating in it will require for him to balance this Identity with Union. And he's been committed to it since, let's say, Volume 3. Because what he truly wants takes him away from Hinami's control.

[EDIT:] After re-reading the ending of Volume 9 and Fumiya's thoughts about Hinami and Kukuchi-san, I want to add that while Kukuchi-san and Tomozaki have some balance in their Union-Identity setup compared to Hinami, both are lopsided. Fumiya makes this apparent by how he speaks about Kukuchi-san: He thinks she could, if he let her, break down the line (and barriers) between them. This means, he clearly assigns her the role of being Union-biased. He assigns himself the role of being lonely, separate, different, and behind barriers - he indirectly identifies himself as Identity-biased. Such biases are quite common.

Truly balanced people that have the right amount of core identity are rare. They can have strong personalities that still invite people to come closer to them. And by what Fumiya spells out for us it's clear that neither of them is such a personality. What he only partially gets is that love is the propellant that coaxes every human being towards this balance - and usually people draw opposites to themselves to balance things out. Very often this can show as co-dependence, but even in healthier relationships people are often called to change to reach a common ground together. If they fail to do this on too many counts, the relationship dissolves or deteriorates. But to be fair - even our overly smart Tomozaki is too young to know this.

This is played out very well in Volume 8. Kikuchi-san is jealous and insecure because her Identity is underdeveloped. And thankfully she does not simply succumb to the temptation of jealousy by erecting a wall around herself and her beloved just to avoid getting her weakness irritated by the outside world. Fumiya in turn has an overdeveloped Identity, so he is used to be a free-roaming particle with no responsibilities. He has yet to learn about togetherness and further stages of growing a relationship. This is what makes the final chapters of Volume 9 so satisfying. What these two do there is actually way too deep for a simple teenage romance, for a first love. They transcend into a higher level of relationship before they ever exchange their first kiss. A bit much, but that's how the series rolls. I like it.

Who holds the controller?

There's no parity between the three characters, but the cause is not what Kikuchi-san thinks. All of them are human, but only one of them is deeply flawed. And that is Hinami.

The end of Volume 9 drives this home bluntly and hard when Fumiya confronts Aoi. He wants to participate in life instead of watching from the outside - he wants to not only hold a controller and control his life like somebody else's experience, he wants to be in the game of life. It was left unclear for nine books why Minami was guiding him, and the revelation is very fitting and yet also very stunning.

Hinami only cares about being correct. She tries to overcome her inner lack of self-validation by proving to the world in every possible way that she's correct, that her approach to life is best, optimal, correct, validates by cold, hard facts. Correctness becomes her mad replacement for things like being content, happy, lost in the moment - the things that make life enjoyable. She didn't want to give Tomozaki a better life. She wanted to show him that if she took control of his life, if she held the controller, applying her methods, she could validate them as objectively correct. But the only thing that would do is serve her extreme concept of how to deal with a lack of self love.

She doesn't care if that hurts people. She dismissed earlier her own attempt to mess up Tomozaki's relationship by giving horrible advice, and Fumiya told her that he had to limit their contact before he would end up hating her. And when Fumiya lays bare her cold, rational approach devoid of any notion of care for him, the game ends, basically it means he unplugs the controller she used to steer him.

This is the struggle between the ego and the soul, the mind and the higher self. Tomozaki (the soul) takes the reins back because Hinami (the thinking mind) cannot be entrusted with them. His approach to life is too soulful. He acts on hunches, what he truly wants, on impulses from inside, he cares. His desire to participate in life instead of just manipulating himself like a character in a game makes him what he is, a person with a degree of intuition and somebody who truly connects with people. He doesn't figure them out like Minami. People love him because he actually cares inside. And it shows.

This is why you are wrong

Tomozaki thinks it was Hinami who added color to his world. I don't think he could be further from the truth. She is not the cause. Her prodding is a trigger - which is not the same as cause and effect. As soon as Fumiya engaged with the world it took on color. But this is not her doing. You can chill, Kikuchi-san. Both of y'all, Fumiya too. Fundamentally engaging with life is what makes a person grow and become beautiful to others, give them a soulful shine others can see.

Yes, Fumiya was indeed faking it for a while until he was making it. But the people in his life all saw through the fake and found the person behind. He did the work to clear the minimum threshold, but nobody likes him because of a cultivated mask or persona. That's why Mizusawa reminds him to be real, to not go for formalities. He recognizes to some degree that Tomozaki has the potential to be truly himself, and if you pay close attention, Mizusawa is already taking that as an example for leading his own life. Their relationship has changed balance.

But being wrong is what makes for interesting conflicts. Towards the end of the book it seems like we steer towards the inevitable conclusion that Kikuchi and Tomozaki will break up because their beliefs do not align. She wants to be ideal, she wants to be special, she values those things over emotion. Tomozaki, however, seems incapable of giving that.

What follows next goes way beyond teenage romance. Here we see two people fundamentally growing up. Fumiya learns that there are things he can't cut out of his life. Like Mimimi and the bonds of friendship. He's a social animal at heart, he just never realized it. He treasures his friendships. And yet he was daring to be so wrong about it that he would change that to make someone else happy.

Both Mimimi and Fuuta stay his hand. And Kikuchi gets off the high horse of ideals and makes choices for herself, stops being so passive, puts a stop to Fumiya having to enact her values. She choses to honor the emotions that they have for each other even if they are imperfect, she risks being even more vulnerable, she risks everything. She defuses a conflict that seems inevitable by making a true choice concerning her own priorities, the beliefs beneath them, by committing to what's in her heart.

For a long time the story focused on the lower emotions. What you often resort to when you are lonely, hurt, feel weak, exposed, unsure of yourself and the other. Jealousy, fear, running away. But these are not the only emotions that exist. There are lower and higher emotions. We often place the heart below the mind just as in our bodies, but love transcends. Love breaks down barriers. And this is how Kikuchi grows as a person and their relationship with each other deepens.

But let me add another thing. Teen-centric stories often focus on misunderstandings as the driver of conflict, and when they are resolved, the conflict resolves. This makes sense as poor communication drives a lot of human conflict and teenagers have yet to learn the art of relating to others, but Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki takes it to another level. Kikuchi and Tomozaki are still in conflict after having resolved most of their misunderstandings. They have arrived at a certain understanding of themselves and each other. And yet there is conflict. And that is the conflict Kikuchi's choices resolve.

At the end of Volume 9, their relationship has become real. They commit to each other and their feelings, they are vulnerable and trusting. They have navigated a struggle with the carnal underpinnings that accompany love but also exist outside of that. At the end of Volume 9, Fuuta Kikuchi is a character that is also a person, capable of holding contradictions within herself.

Her humanity eclipses that of Hinami, at least in the sense of becoming and being a healthy human. (After all, being flawed is also very human.) There's a real reason why she stands by Tomozaki's side and he by her side, for all their differences. The story has fully embraced the struggles to balance Union and Identity, mind and soul. It rejects the notion of things being fated or a special initial moment being what defines a relationship.

Love is shared experience.

The symbolism makes this very clear as both Fuuta and Fumiya talk about the meaning of those old, notched school badges that they were given. Others imbued them with a legend that being given those gives you a lasting relationship. But what they both realize is that the experience of having been there while these notches and scratches were made, together, is what forges something that lasts. They redefine what is special - and maybe they also let go of the notion of "special" to an extent.

And now I have to wait 6 weeks for another installment. At least that means I can sleep better now instead of holding my breath for what happens next...

#bottom tier character tomozaki #light novels #fuuta kikuchi #kikuchi-san #kikuchi fuuta #union vs identity #mind vs soul

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ollieofthebeholder · 1 year ago

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We have a light rail system in our area. It's not very long because when they were building it at first, they were only able to get a relatively short stretch of space for the tracks because of all the complaints about "not wanting that in our neighborhoods". And now there's a lot of whining about "there's no point in expanding it because nObOdY uSeS iT" (lots of people use it, it just only has fifteen stops in a more or less straight line - and if it went to certain places, LOADS of people would use it).

They wanted to expand it into the next city, all the way to the oceanfront. They've proposed this several times. There's a lot of enthusiasm from the public. It keeps getting voted down because there's a massive campaign about lowering property values and allowing "crime" into the tonier parts of the city.

Two things:

This city they're talking about expanding the light rail to used to be part of my city, a long time ago. It split off at some point to become its own independent city. It's also very, very, very predominantly white, even now. My city has a much higher proportion of BIPOC residents, many of whom use public transportation, and as of right now the buses that link the two cities often stop running relatively early.

The oceanfront is a tourist area with a LOT of high end hotels that charge astronomical prices. All the budget hotels in the area are in - you guessed it - my city. And during tourist season, parking anywhere near the oceanfront costs upwards of $25-$30 a day depending on how close you want to park, if you can even find a parking space.

So, and this is not me spitballing, this is literally the reason - the smear campaign against the light rail system is predicated on two things:

The well-off racist assholes that don't want to outright say they're racist nevertheless want to keep "those people" from being able to come to "their" city and hang out like they belong there.

The rich hotel owners don't want to lose the revenue of people paying $250/night for an interior room with only one double bed because it's the only way to guarantee you can get to the beach, and the people who run the parking lots don't want to lose out on parking revenue, because a family can get a room with two queen-sized beds at the Motel 6 for $75/night and pay $4.50 a person for an all-day public transit pass.

A Weird thing I have noticed people always complain about when a metro and light rail system expansion is proposed is the idea that the metro system will lower property values when typically they do the opposite for cities. Like I get concerns around gentrification but the whole fear of property values being lowered by public transit really seems like thinly vailed racism because white suburbanites tend to associate public transit with black people

#public transit #racism

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veronicatmakesthings · 21 days ago

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youtube

One of the best things about working with Celes is the amount of freedom she gives me in deciding the course of her musical output. It means a lot to me that she trusts in my judgment, and when I proposed tackling this sugarcoated disco-inspired hit from 2020, it took some convincing. Whenever we decide to cover a song, we make a conscious effort to turn it into a truly transformative work, not just a karaoke-style exercise in mimesis. When taking on "I Really Want to Stay at Your House", my pitch was to turn it from a technopop banger into a mournful piano ballad. The version currently available on YouTube doesn't accurately reflect this, but it can be found within the performance she gave at Holiday Matsuri 2024.

For "Say So" we decided to turn into from a smooth dancefloor groove into a chilled out, lo-fi experience that keeps the playfulness of the original.

This "fun idea" that I came up with riding on the high of previous success would turn out to be a fucking nightmare.

I started working on this project almost immediately after finishing up our last effort, and almost immediately, the project stalled. I struggled to weave together Celes's tender vocal performance with a song that seeks to stubbornly avoid committing to what I consider traditional syncopated pop rhythms. It's not a Danny Elfman-esque commitment to switching up time signatures, but it was enough to frustrate me and stretch the limits of my admittedly rust-coated engineering abilities. If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm not thrilled with the final product, but after sitting on it and procrastinating for the better part of two months, I forced myself to commit to a final render and send it to Celes.

It's true that we're our own worst critics, which has become somewhat impressive to me as the entire internet seems to have grown into the world's largest free-range hateclick troll farm to ever exist. Pretty much all the artists I know on personal level tend to look at a piece they've created and see only the things wrong with it. Those of us who made it through the soul-destroying machine of art school are typically savvy enough to keep our mouths shut if the viewing audience fails to notice them.

To put it bluntly, it's frustrating to see a piece of work that I'm frankly not happy with be the piece that begins to take off. To people who don't make art, that might sound a supremely ungrateful sentiment for me to hold. If you actually produce art (or "content", as I tend to refer to it through gritted teeth), then you understand exactly how I feel.

Have you ever played a game called Alan Wake? How about Control? It was in the process of creating this track for Celes that I rediscovered my love for the games that Remedy has produced, no doubt fueled by my nocturnal habits of binging YouTube video essays about decades-old video games. My tortured sleeping habits aside, my recollection of these games this time led me toward a facet of them that I hadn't really considered before, at least not consciously.

Within the shared world of Remedy's fiction, there exists a gloriously-1970s indebted metal band (think early King Crimson by way of Dio) known as Old Gods of Asgard, fronted by a pair of eccentric brothers who may or may not be either reincarnations of Norse gods, or even those selfsame gods, depending on how deep you want to read into the lore. Most people who have experienced the games are familiar with the metafictional role Old Gods of Asgard's music plays in-universe, but I don't know how many have gone on to look into the very real people who created the band's music.

Poets of the Fall is a Finnish rock band founded in 2003. They've since gone on to release a new record steadily every couple of years, their most recent (at time of this writing) being 2022's Ghostlight, which features the breathtaking single "Requiem for my Harlequin," a track that plucks the strings of my early-2000s goth heart as effectively as anything by Evanescence, Lacuna Coil, or Nightwish ever did. I sometimes wish I'd discovered Poets of the Fall far earlier in my life, but there were limits even to what a tech-savvy web 2.0 teen could achieve back then.

I bring up Poets of the Fall because, and I'm sure it will break my dear friend Celes's heart to read this, I often find myself looking at the work I've produced this year as not being my "real" work, or as lesser than my original compositions. Since falling in love with Old Gods of Asgard, I've gone on to comb through Poets of the Fall's discography, and I noticed something. There's not really a clear line where the bands diverge. Sure, the Anderson brothers have in-universe backstories and character arcs, but the exact point where the fictional band and the real one join up is less clear. It's interesting to note that Poets of the Fall's website describes Old Gods of Asgard as their "alter ego band that lives and rocks in the universe of Remedy Entertainment’s video games."

I think that's why there's not a tangible musical difference between the two, other than perhaps the metatextual lyrical content of Old Gods of Asgard's music. There simply isn't one. These songs (or the songs that HEALTH, another longtime favorite of mine who I similarly looked down upon for working on Cyberpunk, Grand Theft Auto, and Max Payne) don't fit neatly into my self-imposed binary of what is "real" versus "superficial," what is "art" and what is "content."

It seems profoundly stupid in retrospect that someone who detests arbitrary, reductive binaries as much as I do would cling to this myopic worldview for as long as I have. I claim to not be in the business of gatekeeping, and yet I perpetrated it upon myself unquestioningly, for over a decade. These songs are all works of art, which I've since come to define as merely "an act of creative expression that provokes an emotional reaction in the viewer."

I've seen firsthand the emotional reactions this cover has evoked.

I think that, just maybe, that's good enough for me.

#musicat!#celes aurion #iriam us #envtuber #vtuber music #vtuber #youtube #doja cat #cover song #veronicatwrites #Youtube

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dankusner · 2 months ago

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Remembering “Gone with the Wind”

Summer, some time in the nineteen-seventies.

The world was different.

School was out, and my mother—the head of our household—worked part time in a nursery school as a teacher’s aid.

Early in the morning—she woke up hours before the world woke up—she’d hitch her trousers up and face the world.

After she left for work, we were on our own, which never felt like being left alone; we knew what she had to do to survive, which included having to trust her children during the hours she was away, hours when she was not seen but felt.

We were her first boys.

Before giving birth to me and my little brother, my parents had had four girls.

Now her daughters were in the world with children of their own, lives they described to our mother over the telephone.

The little apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn was hot, next door to a gas station;

the fumes were part of our atmosphere, like the sound of kids playing ringolevio in the streets below, and the air that did not move.

I was about to be a teen-ager, and prized the idea of home; my brother was several years younger, bespectacled, and silent.

I loved him, but couldn’t be loving:

I was his older brother, and responsible for him, which meant being irritated by him, and feeling burdened by him, and sometimes treating him as our visiting father treated me: as a source of pride and incomprehension and scorn.

While our mother was at work, my brother and I made things. Bread from scratch.

Dinner.

Returning home to her little husbands, our mother smiled at what we managed to achieve, and what we wanted to achieve the next day and the next.

On Fridays, she treated us to take-out food.

We’d walk over to Flatbush Avenue, which was maybe three blocks down from where we lived, and eat pizza loaded with garlic, or beef patties from the West Indian shops that were fast replacing the neighborhood’s Jewish delicatessens.

Sometimes, on Saturdays, we’d go to the movies.

They showed serials then.

One Saturday, our mother asked if we wanted to see a film that was based on one of her favorite books—something called “Gone With the Wind.”

It was being re-released right near our house, she said—we should go.

The film was nearly four hours long.

My brother and I had never heard of such a thing. And it took place in the American South, a part of the world that was as alien to us as Manhattan or Queens.

The curtain rose, the music swelled.

The camera tracked toward a beautiful, dark-haired white woman as she said “War, war, war,” while dressed in a green dress with a full skirt.

The world was prettier up there on the screen than the world we’d eventually have to return to;

I didn’t want the movie to end:

the Civil War was the least of my problems.

Outside, there was a rapidly changing and swelling world;

the gas station would never go away.

But the heroine of this Technicolor epic got to suffer in a grand style in a not-crammed apartment.

After the house lights came up, I couldn’t wait to see the movie again, to sink into its long form and avoid those moments that made me feel ashamed—namely, whenever a black person entered the frame.

First published in 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s only novel was one of my mother’s favorites, but I didn’t know how I’d get through the book if slavery informed as much of the plot as it did in the film:

I could close my eyes in a movie and wait for a moment to pass;

this would be more difficult in a book;

words and ideas are entwined with, and depend on, other words and ideas.

But I did read the book, eventually, which felt like a blue print for the film.

Despite producer David O. Selznick’s best efforts to transpose as much of Mitchell’s text as he could to the screen, he had to leave out various subplots, of course, including Scarlett’s dependence on her beloved and scorned Mammy, played, in the film version, by Hattie McDaniel, who became the first black actress to win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role.

Later, I read what other writers had to say about the film, and specifically the Mammy character.

Jamaica Kincaid published her wonderful essay “If Mammies Ruled The World” in the Village Voice, where she described that her real interest in the movie was the Mammy character—and how the white characters didn’t deserve her.

In 1992, Claudia Roth Pierpont published her essential essay about Margaret Mitchell’s life and career in The New Yorker.

I can safely say that Atlanta-born Margaret Mitchell’s worldview helped me see how racist fantasies are borne out of a kind of realism—the realism of the ignorant oppressor.

Money—i.e. slavery and commerce—is central to the story she tells because it buys safety and homogeneity in the white world.

But after blacks are “freed,” some of them becoming carpetbaggers, it’s their blackness combined with an "uppity" attitude that perverts and alarms the white Southerner, not the blood and horror of slavery, and how it came to be in the first place.

Mitchell didn’t create the white Southerner’s antebellum view of blackness, but she helped popularize it in an artifact of great strength that even my mother admired, and that writers ranging from Dubose Heyward to the Atlanta-based Tyler Perry have created some version of, especially when it comes to the Mammy.

Sadly, these attitudes inform one's present-day life, life without mother.

Just recently I was with a young, white, single mother who was complaining about school-lunch fees, unavailable men, and so on, when I said something to the effect that I didn’t remember my mother paying for our lunch when we were in school.

The woman snapped: “She didn’t have to pay! You were underprivileged!”

Before I could correct her, I felt robbed of a response: to contradict her fantasy of privilege and struggle would be to challenge her reality, utterly.

And perhaps that’s why my mother could stomach Mitchell’s various depictions of black womanhood, and of blackness itself:

we have always worn the masks in order to achieve what she had with her boys from moment to moment, in a movie theatre or at home: the hard-won luxury of survival.

Looking back, I suppose what made me turn away from the screen—and, on occasion, away from the book—was Mitchell’s lens on what Mammy and blackness meant to the characters’ whiteness, and how it improved and bolstered their entitlement and vanity, and thus their relationship to power and history.

Mitchell’s Mammy was not my own, nor could my brother’s and my joined impulse to take care of our mother be relegated to Mammying, but such was the tremendous power of Mitchell’s evocation of that figure that after I saw the film version of “Gone With The Wind” and read the book I was brought up short against my mother’s ability to care, and my own and my brother’s.

At least for a time.

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ijustwantedtobeoneofthestrokesuk · 3 months ago

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Eel Pie Island

South London

Eel Pie Island is an island on the River Thames, near Twickenham, South London. Named after, ‘eel pies’, served in the inn in the nineteenth century however, it was in the ‘60’s when the Island gained a hedonistic reputation which then led to one of the 2000’s most unique bands, the Mystery Jets, who helped create the ‘Thamesbeat scene’.

In the ‘50’s and ‘60’s the Eel Pie Island Hotel ballroom had the likes of The Who, David Bowie, Hawkwind, The Kinks, Pink Floyd, Jeff Beck, Black Sabbath, Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones (The Rolling Stones played there every Wednesday for 5 months in 1963) played there before becoming the biggest hippie commune in the UK in 1970. The hotel went into disrepair after neglect and fires but the Island, accessible on a footbridge has continued to breed creativity as there was over 20 art studios there.

Henry Harrison, father of Mystery Jets frontman Blaine (as well as an occasional band member) bought part of the Island which became rehearsal space for the band and the place where the iconic Eel Pie Island parties took place.

Mystery Jets

Originally called The Misery Jets, after a headline in a local paper about the Heathrow airport fly path above them. The South London kids changed to Mystery Jets when drummer at the time, Blaine misspelled the name when painting it on a drum skin and never looked back (or up).

Blaine Harrison “For obvious reasons (Blaine has spina bifida which affects his leg muscles) I wasn’t a sporty child but I think my dad recognised the effect music had on me as a kid very early on and educated me with a steady diet of records to listen to, books and magazines to read and films to watch. I’d say it was Alan Parkers’ film ‘The Wall’ that had the biggest effect on me at that age. I remember hiding behind the sofa with Will when my dad put it on and just thinking ‘what is this fucked up shit!!?!?’

There was just something about the way Pink Floyd brought the sound and visuals together into something so terrifying that even a child could be impacted by it so strongly. I think it must have been seeing the way we reacted that made Henry think ‘maybe I should help these kids form a band of their own…

I met our founding guitarist Will at nursery school. When I moved to France to go to primary school, we started the band as a way of keeping our friendship. We played our first gig as Mystery Jets on my 10th birthday (1995). Our first album ‘Making Dens’ came out exactly 10 years later (to the month) and I’d say was a stylistic culmination of all the music we had been influenced by in the interim. Mainly my dad Henry’s record collection: King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Yes, The Beatles, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel… but also bands we got into at art school; Dexys, The Smiths, The Cure, The Stone Roses, The Cure, The Coral….

I think we might only have had a week leading up to our first gig on my 10th birthday so I’m pretty sure the gig mainly consisted of covers; Light My Fire by The Doors, Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd and Wild Thing by the Troggs. But we also played in the village bar later that summer and had a couple of originals by then, Rastamadeus and Moonlight Satellite. Both showed up on our first EP a few years later.

Our first song was ‘Moonlight Satellite’. I’d say it was a group endeavour, with Will singing the verses and all of us singing on the chorus. It had one giant drum fill in the middle which usually lasted somewhere between 8 bars and 16 bars depending on how much Sunny Delight we’d drank that afternoon.

We were pretty quick to adapt to the internet as a tool of mass self-promotion. We’d post the Eel Pie Party flyers on our Myspace and also spam the message boards of all our rival bands too. .org was always a good one because there was such a die-hard indie community there, and we knew Pete and Carl would sometimes post on there too so maybe they’d see it.

Once every couple of months we’d post a new track on our Myspace and then anxiously wait and watch for the play count to start clocking up. Sometimes we’d make the tracks downloadable, but even if we didn’t, it usually wouldn’t take long for someone to rip them and start sharing the files around on Limewire. I’d say that was the beauty of it, it was incredibly democratic, but also like the wild west. If what you were making was good or exciting or had something different about it, it would find a fan base very quickly.

My dad runs a boatyard on Eel Pie Island, on the Thames in Twickenham and there used to a famous blues club there which everyone from The Stones to Hendrix played at back in the day. It burned down in the ‘70’s, so we thought we’d bring some of that spirit back to the birthplace of British Blues and that’s when things really began for us.

We were at an Art School nearby so would print out our own handmade flyers, and copy and paste a text message to everyone in our phonebooks a day or two before, “BYOB and invite everyone you know.” We’d book anywhere between 5 to 10 other bands a night, playing 20-minute sets and didn’t charge anything at the door. No sound checks, no payment, no backstage and no security. It was complete chaos.

We’d put on a party every couple of months, over a period of about a year and a half. They went from 20 people sat cross-legged on the floor to people eventually showing up in their hundreds. Word spread so quickly. We’d have people falling in the river, swinging from the light fittings, smoking cigarettes indoors, and the room was covered floor to ceiling in Moroccan carpets so it was a huge fire hazard. On 2 occasions people left in ambulances.

The last party was kind of legendary. We had all our friends' bands at that time playing one after another; Larrikin Love, Jamie T, The Noisettes, Good Shoes, Dustins Bar Mitzvah and a few others I can’t recall. 700 people squeezed into our rehearsal room and we estimated a good third of them were music industry scouts, managers and booking agents, who ended up signing most of the bands on the bill. And then the authorities showed up and served us a £20,000 noise abatement order if we tried to do it again. So it ended there, but that was the right time to kill it. I still meet strangers on the street who tell me they had some of the wildest nights of their lives at those parties.”

After hosting parties at Eel Pie Island they started getting attention from labels. The Eel Pie Island EP was released via Liquid Sky Music in 2003 however, it was 2 years until their next release, a limited edition 7” single, Zoo Time on Transgressive Records which led to the band signing with 679 Records. The rest of the year saw the band release more singles.

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Blaine “The Monday morning after our final Eel Pie party, we received a phone call from our manager to tell us that 3 labels had put in offers, 1 major and 2 indies. I wouldn’t say it was a bidding war but it felt good to know that we had caught the attention of the industry on our own terms and on our own turf. We went with 679; the label with the most interesting roster, and put out our first 2 albums with them. Ironically, in the intervening years we’ve ended up being on both the others at one time or another too.

Rather than decamp to a pro studio and make a record in an unfamiliar environment, we took our first advance and invested in recording gear to track ‘Making Dens’ in our rehearsal room on Eel Pie, the same room we held the parties in. It felt like the most likely way we’d be able to capturing some of that frenetic energy from the gigs onto tape.

For the following couple of albums we worked in commercial recording studios, because we needed a change of environment, but ultimately we ended up having our own studios again from ‘Curve of The Earth’ onwards because it enables us to work at our own pace, and have a space to collaborate with other artists too.

A lot of the press we got around ‘Making Dens’ focused on the father/son relationship, my disability and Eel Pie Island. At the time we felt that was partly responsible for the album not connecting as well as it should have, no one was talking about the music. For ‘Twenty One’ we went back to the drawing board and asked our favourite DJ, Erol Alkan (from Trash) to step onboard. It was quite a freeing feeling to get our debut album out the way and having paid homage to so many of the influences of our youth, now we could make a record inspired by what was new and going on around us. Remix culture, French house music, synths and electronics were starting to influence guitar music and we decided that’s the direction we were most excited about moving in. And we tried to learn how to write choruses.

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I think any band would agree that the early days are the most exciting, because everything is happening for the first time. The first time you sell out a gig, the first time you hear your song on the radio, the first time you get stopped in the street by a fan, your first Reading or your first Glastonbury. In a way, past that point it’s all about sustaining the excitement and maintaining forward motion. Touring isn’t for everyone, but for me, the more crazy our touring schedules became the more I loved it. Around Serotonin/Radlands we were touring so much that we all had to have two passports. I dread to think what our carbon emissions were like but regrettably, that awareness just wasn’t really part of the public consciousness back then. We’d finish a tour in the States and shoot straight over to tour around Australia and Japan. After a few days back at home to do our washing and demo some new songs it would be straight back over to Mexico and Argentina for more festivals. We’d literally follow the sun. During pandemic times it was hard to believe that’s what life used to be like but there you go.

The bands we had the most memorable tours with are mostly the bands we’re still friends with today. We toured all around Europe and the UK with The Kooks in 2008 which was wild. We toured Europe supporting the Arctic Monkeys on their first album and again when they released ‘Humbug’. We supported Mumford Sons on a huge Arena tour across America and Europe which lasted the best part of a year. One of the most crazy ones was opening for Klaxons during the height of the nu rave craze. The band were on fire and the audiences were nuts. I remember us all going to Disneyland together on a day off and Simon from Klaxons getting recognised on Space Mountain and thinking how perfect it was. It doesn’t get better than that. Job done.”

2 months before the release of 7th album, A Billion Heartbeats in April 2020 William left the band. The release timing was unfortunate as it came at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, pausing all of the promotional campaigns, leading to the album reaching no.85.

Blaine “I could easily moan about how the entire campaign of ‘A Billion Heartbeats’ was plagued with obstacles, but so many of them were just completely outside of our control. 2 weeks before the album was meant to be released I went into hospital with a critically inflamed leg injury, pushing the campaign back 6 months to allow for my recovery. Then a month before the re-release the world went into lockdown and all the vinyl plants closed down.

Suddenly the streets were empty and no one was riding the tubes so we had no choice but to pull all our adverts and billboards. We also couldn’t tour around the record stores which just flatlined the sales, so yeah, the album never got the send off it deserved. But I still feel incredibly proud of it. It was the first time we addressed big social questions and themes in such a head-on way”

Whilst Mystery Jets were on the rise out of Eel Pie Island there were a bunch of young South and West London groups joining them, building a vibrant community. These included scene favourites Good Shoes and Larrikin Love as well as indie heavyweights The Maccabees and Jamie T.

Good Shoes

Good Shoes were on the horizon in Kingston and they would become Eel Pie Island party regulars.

School mates, Rhys Jones and Steve Leach had been playing music as a hobby in 2003 with Rhys on vocals and Steve on guitar. The pair had their first gig in January 2004 at a charity event at The Peel in Kingston where they called themselves Good Shoes. After a few months, the hobby transformed into a band when Rhys’ brother Tom and fellow Raynes Park High School mate Joel Cox got on board.

As a 4-piece they played their first gig at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University on the 1st February 2005. This was followed up with a gig at an Eel Pie Island Island party before playing as many London shows as possible.

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Think Before You Speak, the bands' debut album was released in March 2007 and they built up a following as they went on tour with several bands including The Rakes, Franz Ferdinand, The Pigeon Detectives and Maximo Park.

Although the band showed promise, they split up after releasing their second album, ironically called No Hope, No Future.

The Rumble Strips

The Rumble Strips, headed by Charlie Waller were a band that briefly exploded into the world however their history dates back to when they were at school in Devon.

Charlie “I loved Shakin’ Stevens as a young kid. My first gig was Vanilla Ice at Cornwall Coliseum when I was 19 or 11. Both pretty cool! My uncle bought me a guitar when I was 8 and would teach me chords and simple blues songs.

I guess I properly got into music in a big way like a lot of people my age with Nirvana and all the early ‘90’s grunge stuff. I stopped playing sport and started smoking with the skinny scruffy boys. I remember my dad had a guy he worked with who knew I liked music. He decided I should be educated and would make me tapes of blues and doo-wop. I really loved The Coasters from that. I loved the humour and all the range of voices.

I started going to a sort of music youth club when I was 12 with my friend Sam who became the bass player in The Rumble Strips. It was run by Henry's dad who taught us Captain Beef Heart and Frank Zappa songs. That became a band called The Mother Eating Blackberries. That then split into different bands when were around 14. I was in one called Harry and The Hormones and Tom and Henry from The Rumble Strips had a great Talking Heads kind of ska band called Scarper.

I don’t know if it was because we were in the countryside, or that it was just that time in general, but we would listen to all sorts of old music. It felt very untethered by what was fashionable. Though I did love Gorky's Zygotic Mynci from that time. That was a band that always seemed to link us when we were older.

I would buy a lot of old records. I loved The Kinks and Bonzo Dog Doo Bah Band. When I discovered Adam and The Ants I got pretty obsessed with them and collected most of that. I still think Kings of the Wild Frontier is a masterpiece.

I moved to London to go to art college. The band I was playing in moved to London as well. We broke up around about the time I finished college. I started meeting up with Tom who was also without a band. We would get stoned and write boy band pop songs to make ourselves laugh. Some of them were quite good so we started writing songs that we would actually like to play.

The first Rumble Strips was me, Tom and Harry on keyboards, who went on to make our early videos. He’s now a YouTube star going around the UK in a tiny speedboat.

Eventually, we got Matt to play drums who was in The Hormones/Action Heroes with me, and Henry moved to London and played keyboards and trumpet. Then Sam joined us on bass.

I met Mark (Vincent Vincent) at Chelsea College of Art. I remember talking to him quite early on about music. He really liked Bob Dylan who I like now, but at the time thought was a bit moany groany. We both liked the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band though, and early rock n roll.

We shared a studio in college at some point and got a lot closer, then we lived together with some other guys in our last year. We also lived together after college. We were very close and did a lot together.

I remember driving in his car listening to Dion and the Belmont’s. We thought that it would be cool if there was a band like that now. With all the harmonies and stuff. Then we thought well we could just do one. It felt like an exciting thought.

We had a duo for a while called the Heartbreak Snakes. We played every week in The Ten Bells pub in Spitalfields. We would write a new song for each gig I think. It was a lot of fun.”

The Rumble Strips weren’t getting anywhere. Mark invited him to join Vincent Vincent & The Villains and it was great until EMI was offering them a record deal and Chrysalis came along with a publishing deal but both of them wanted Charlie to focus on Vincent Vincent & The Villains, not The Rumble Strips which put Charlie in a difficult situation, he loved being a frontman and his Rumble Strips mates who he’d grown up with. Without Charlie, there wasn’t no Rumble Strips whereas in Vincent Vincent & The Villains he was sharing frontman duties with his best friend.

He chose The Rumble Strips and moved out of the flat, the pair didn’t speak for a while, they made up and both blame themselves for being egotistical lads.

“I was probably a bit egotistical or something and didn’t quite have Mark’s confidence, so I think I could be a bit quiet and grumpy. I do regret that now. It’s a shame we didn’t record one album. There were some great songs that just got lost. It probably spurred us both on to get signed when we went our separate ways, but I think it maybe took some of the fun out of it.

I was quite driven, but maybe not always happy. I remember my girlfriend telling me I was a cliche, which I probably was a bit.

The Rumble Strips did a couple of singles with Transgressive Records, then signed a deal with Island in 2006. Getting a record deal had just seemed like such a big drive for so long. It did make a lot of things easier, but ultimately it has to be the band that still drives it.

I didn’t feel like we were part of a scene, but maybe everyone feels that way a bit. I never really thought of us as an indie band. I think I wanted to be more funny than cool. We did hang out and play with a lot of bands though. I liked them as well. We probably weren’t that different.”

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The Rumble Strips were featured on the Sound Of 2007 list, headlined an NME tour and their biggest single, Girls and Boys got played on ads. The debut album was recorded in America while Mark Ronson produced the second album.

Charlie “I remember jamming in a studio one time. I was on one keyboard, Mark was on one keyboard, Dave from the Zutons was on bass and Sean Lennon was on drums.

I had no idea how to work the thing I was playing and I was quite high. I remember thinking to myself at one point that this is really bizarre and something that I would always remember. Also that it sounded pretty terrible.

We got dropped by Island and my marriage broke up so I went on a long holiday to Cuba. I was 30 and it was the first time since I was about 14 that I wasn't obsessed with being in a band. I got back and met up with everyone and said that it’s quite nice not being in a band. They kind of agreed so we just stopped. It was pretty chilled I think.

We got together and did some more recordings around 2016. I like the thought that we could maybe do that every 10 years. I really love them all.”

So, what about Vincent Vincent & the Villians…?

Mark Ogus, or Vincent Vincent as he became known as was introduced to ‘50’s rock ‘n’ roll after discovering his dad's record collection in his late teens. Mark was creative and went to art school where a lot of his work had a connection to music. While studying he met Charlie who he was in awe of, he used to watch his band Action Heroes and his on-stage persona made him want to do the same.

In 2003 Mark formed The Vincents, he wanted to be something more than “Mark” so he created a persona where he became Vincent Vincent and the band was Vincent Vincent & The Villains. Mark got creative on all aspects, everything was thought out, their live show was a performance, they had a ‘look’ and Mark was hands-on with artwork too while the sound was influenced by his love of ‘50’s rock ‘n’ roll. The band gained interest from labels and management early on.

Smoking Gun released the first single in March 2004, XFM’s John Kennedy picked up a copy from Rough Trade, he played it regularly on XFM. Both Radio 1 and the NME started to support them before signing to EMI in 2006.

With tension between Charlie and his two bands building Mark was inspired to write Johnny Two Bands about the situation, the song became Vincent Vincent & The Villains biggest song and Mark had to have an awkward chat about the song as they had become friends again by the time the song was released.

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EMI made them rerecord Johnny Two Bands with Stephen Street which wasn’t an enjoyable experience as the producer ripped out the fun of the process while Mark was already hating the song anyway. That resentment towards the song continued when they had to perform it (mime) on Top Of The Pops and it was the start of the end for the band.

Instead of releasing new material, EMI made the band rerelease the early singles. In 2008 the band released the long-awaited debut album, but they were already seeing a decline as the crowds at gigs were getting smaller, they were skint and lost in their 20’s watching their mates moving on with their life and they were going backward. There was no future for the band who faded away.

Les Incompetents

When it comes to the 2000’s indie, it’s impossible to overlook Fred MacPherson who was a fan as much as a musician. Once the Londoner discovered bands, he wanted to be in one, before even hearing The Strokes he was obsessed, they oozed cool and, like Alex Turner (and many boys in this era), he just wanted to be one of them.

While at school he formed Les Incompetents (2004), a band with 8 members, 2 of which (including Fred) were lead singers. They liked the idea of being in a band more than doing the work required to be in a band. Fred and Chris would turn up to house parties and whip out the acoustic guitar and play some covers. Hotel Yorba was the first song they learned, its simplicity inspired them to write their own.

After telling everyone they were in a band to sound cool, despite not having any songs they got a gig at The Rhythm Factory in Whitechapel but they needed a demo. They put a song together, recorded it on a 4-track and badgered the venue. They ended up supporting Martha Wainwright for their first-ever gig.

They started playing around London, they’d be on stage more than rehearsing, it was mostly chaotic but each gig was an opportunity to meet people. After being introduced to the Mystery Jets, Les Incompetents played the Eel Pie Island parties where they discovered a scene that was bubbling underneath with the likes of Larrikin Love and Jamie T. Fred appears on Zoo Time from the Mystery Jets debut album while Jamie T’s songwriting changed the way Fred structured songs.

Way Out West gigs were the first time they felt like they had a crowd who was into them. The band was still at school when they released their first double A-side single Much Too Much/Reunion (2005) on White Heat Records having played White Heat club night a handful of times. Matty who ran the club and label was into the band early on. The boys had been regulars at the central London indie disco since 15 (it was pretty easy to get fake ID back then).

Fred had a proactive personality, building relationships online as well as IRL. Fanboying Test Icicles on MySpace and connecting on the forums. He did work experience at Drowned In Sound and despite being involved in the party scene from an early age he was sober until he was 23.

They’d study all the bands, how they dressed, where they went out and how they wrote songs, taking influences from across the scene, How It All Went Wrong, their most recognised song was written after listening to Razorlight.

The bandmates stopped getting along with each other by 2006 and they realised they didn’t have enough songs for an album or plans for progression. There were so many bands out there, Les Incompetents weren’t signable. In June, as the band was about to put an end to it, Billy Leeson, the bands' other singer was attacked after an argument on the night bus and went into a coma for 3 weeks, during this time How It All Went Wrong started to get attention.

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On the 1st September Les Incompetents announced on MySpace that they were to split up and they would be playing one final gig at the 100 Club in November, which sold out. They ended up playing Way Out West at Acton Town Hall a few days later with Late Of The Pier, Fear Of Flying, Jamie T and Kid Harpoon (who has gone to be Harry Styles songwriter).

Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man

One month after Les Incompetents split Fred, Sean and Tommy formed Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man, a very different band to Les Incompetents on many levels. Where the former played live and rarely rehearsed, Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man was the opposite, where Les Incompetents were a bit messy and fun, the latter was dark, intense and self-indulgent.

They were heavily influenced by prog rock, Nick Cave and Doom Metal, the sound was gloomy but it was a dark time for the lads too who were in their early 20’s. Having put the groundwork in with Les Incompetents it didn’t take long for them to get a record deal with Transgressive. After just over 3 years the band split up but they never had the legacy of Les Incompetents.

Before Fred’s next big move, he had a few projects for fun including a comedy rap group with Charlie from Noah & The Whale and King Charles during the short-living ‘grindie’ scene. There are no recordings but they did support JME. There was Captain Kick and the Cowboy Ramblers, another line-up including Charlie of Noah & The Whale as well as some of Mumford & Sons.

He’d seen friends like Jamie T, Mystery Jets, Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons breakthrough and get jealous of their success. On MTV2 he’d interview the likes of Kings Of Leon and Interpol at festivals which would inspire him to have another shot at it, form his next band who we’ll come on to later.

Test Icicles

Over the years Fred, like many (including Harry Styles and Beyonce) has collaborated with Dev Hynes who arrived with the explosive trio, Test Icicles who were only around for 2 years and released 1 album but Circle. Square. Triangle. is a generation-defining song.

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Lightspeed Champion

After the noise and neon with Test Icicles, nobody would have predicted Dev Hynes next move, Lightspeed Champion. After leaving his East London life behind him in 2007, moved to New York and wrote songs that shared country/folk influences which turned into the solo project. His touring band included Florence Welch while Alex Turner, Faris Badwan, Fred MacPherson, Jack Penate and Keith Murray made appearances on stage.

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Blood Orange

Lightspeed Champion lasted 2 albums then Dev reinvented himself once again with another very different solo project, Blood Orange. He went into “producer” mode with Blood Orange which is beat-driven, soulful and smooth with r ‘n’ b vibes that has taken Dev into A-lister territory.

Jamie T

South London-born Jamie Alexander Treays launched himself onto the music scene with his half sing/half rap acoustic songs on London’s pub circuit under the stage name, Jamie T. His demos started to make their way through the online forums and on MySpace then in 2006 his songs started to get radio play.

In July 2006 Jamie’s breakthrough came with Shelia, a huge hit that sounded nothing like anything out there. It was followed by If You've Got The Money then Calm Down Dearest.

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His debut album, Panic Prevention documents his struggles with panic attacks as a kid and it became a cult classic, while follow-up, Kings & Queens reached a broader audience with breakout single, Sticks ‘n’ Stones.

“Where is Jamie T?” campaigns floated online after he’d gone quiet for some time but finally, after a 5-year wait he returned with Carry On The Grudge and Zombie, another defining song that showed punk influences and he can continue to disappear for years but he will be missed.

The Maccabees

As schools go, Alleyn's School in Dulwich is one to have bred some talent in such a short about of time as Florence and the Machine’s Florence Welch, Jessie Ware, Jack Penate and Felix White of The Maccabees all attended.

Jack was already a keen guitarist and Felix was obsessed with Oasis. After months of persuading, Felix got Jack to form a band together, they called themselves Jack’s Basement, as that’s where they practiced. The pair played a handful of gigs together, sharing the stage with The Maccabees who had already been going.

In 2004 when school was over Jack went solo and encouraged Felix to join his brother who was in The Maccabees. Frontman Orlando Weeks was heading to Brighton for uni so the rest of the band found jobs in bars and joined him on the south coast.

The band wrote a bunch of songs, played some gigs, wrote another bunch of songs, played more gigs. Each bunch of songs showed improvements and after the fourth time of trying everything clicked into place and they wrote X-Ray. Inspired by Interpol and The Strokes togetherness but with The Maccabees twist (play as fast as they can) it became their first single, receiving support from XFM and Radio 1 and released on 7”.

Fiction Records picked the band up and debut album Colour It In stood strong against what other bands were releasing at the time, however, the label weren’t completely comfortable with it until they heard a slight twist in creativity with the acoustic love song, Toothpaste Kisses, which took the band into the mainstream.

The band returned to Brighton to follow up the debut album, writing and recording for Wall Of Arms was a very different process. For 6 months the band would go into the rehearsal rooms for 8 hours a day to write the album. Some days they would come up with nothing, other times they’d spend hours working on a singular guitar part but when creativity came, all of them would jump on it. They’d end each day going home and getting stoned.

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A breakthrough moment for the band was when their manager played them The Teardrop Explodes albums, it inspired them to use instruments differently, specifically brass. The new outlook on sounds is what shapes the layers on the record which Colour It In lacked. They headed to Paris for 4 months to record the album with producer Markus Dravs who had recently worked on Arcade Fires album, another complex sounding record in terms of instrumental arrangements.

The label had allowed the band time to discover themselves, focus on who The Maccabees were and develop. Patience paid off as Wall Of Arms (May 2009) set a new bar, not only for themselves but for other bands, it was no longer acceptable to lazily piece together something basic.

Another very different approach came for their third record compared to how they worked on their previous releases. Following the success of Wall Of Arms The Maccabees were full of confidence and the label gave them creative freedom. Given To The Wild was self-produced, at their home in Brighton where, after years of being a live band, playing as fast as they physically could, they focussed on becoming a studio band where detail mattered.

The bands’ fourth album, Marks To Prove It was an intense period for The Maccabees who were reaching their late 20’s. They returned to London where they discovered The Jesus and Mary Chain’s former recording studio, The Drug Store in Elephant & Castle which had been left derelict. It took them 4 years to create the album as they struggled to find structure but it was finally released in July 2015.

After the 4 tough years making Marks To Prove It and 2 years of touring, the lads who had now grown into men decided to split up. They ended it on a high with some epic shows at Alexandra Palace where they were joined on stage by mates including Jamie T, Marcus Mumford and Mystery Jets. It was an end of an era.

The Maccabees story wasn’t over as, in October 2024 they announced they would be back in the next summer…

Fear Of Flying

Fear Of Flying was a school band that grew through MySpace but months before going to university they reinvented themselves as White Lies, a band that went on to have a chart-topping album.

The first roots of the band go back to 2001, after practicing at home they started playing at parties. Things started to get a bit more serious when they gave themselves a name, Fear Of Flying. Frontman Charles knew Fred Macpherson from school, they would go to gigs together. Fear Of Flying started supporting Les Incompetents, getting gigs through Fred’s connections and building up a fanbase on MySpace. The 3-piece played Frog, Nambucca and the Pleasure Unit early on as well as Way Out West and Young & Lost Club while being in sixth form.

They managed to get Stephen Street to produce their first single as they were good friends with his son. The band was contacted by managers via MySpace who got them on a support tour with Jamie T. They’d jump on the National Express with their instruments after school around the country, soundcheck, play the gig then get a coach home and get up for school the next morning. Issues with the manager started to come up, they sacked him the day before supporting The Maccabees on tour, he didn’t take the news well and ended up stealing their equipment. They explained the situation to The Maccabees and they let them borrow their equipment and stay on the tour bus after gigs.

Still in their late teens, on a gap year, they were reluctantly going to university in September as things with the band were starting to get a bit stale, the radio and press weren’t really supporting them and they had stopped playing live.

In July 2007 Charles started messing about on a piano, within minutes they had Unfinished Business, a song that sounded completely different to anything they’d released as Fear Of Flying.

They recorded a demo and had a complete rebrand with a new name, White Lies, and created a new MySpace page with no photos of the band members. With just one song on there they sent a link to Keith from Way Out West, he loved it, as did his industry colleagues. From then on they were inundated with messages from labels, managers and agents.

The band knew they needed to build on this new sound, taking influence from the ‘80’s they wrote Death which got an even better reaction, then the third song, Farewell to the Fairground. These three songs have lasted throughout the bands' career to date, featuring on the setlist for every gig.

NEXT CHAPTER

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bleuberries-and-video-games · 7 months ago

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I don't think enough people talk substantially about how the late 90s to early 2010s were kind of a prime period similar to the Prelude to World War 1.

Like I have a huge Fascination on both of the world wars for different reasons, the first world war because there is a local Museum about it, the one which moved my heartstrings so deeply it made me question my own life, and World War II because of Atomic Warfare the idea of the atom bomb. It's honestly one of those baffling things that people don't look at these things more and see the parallels between our time periods.

World War I had several, and I mean like a fuckload, of weapons manufacturers such as krupp and so on raring to use their fucking giant ass guns. They used like propaganda that told people that the more guns they had in their countries, and the bigger the guns were, the more likely peace would come out because nobody wants to go to war. Meanwhile tensions were rising, class conflict happened constantly, and social mores and ideas were changing.

All it took to Domino everything into a massive problem was a goddamn assassination attempt and then everything fucking folded.

The reason why the Russian Revolution happened, the reason why the war was so brutal, the reason why World War I sticks out in a lot of history is because when that tension snapped, everyone just fucking snapped. Like the entirety of history is scarred by World War i, it's part of the reason why the British Empire just like full on started to collapsing in the 1900s, why the Ottoman Empire just folded, so much shit happened and that's why they call it a world war. When people summarize World War I as a war between Colonial powers, while they're not wrong, they don't realize that that denies the agency and the participation of different non-colonial powers in World War I and what like happened to them. Like do you think a bunch of these countries just started rebelling all in the 1900s because they just felt like it? No, a ton of them had like battles there if not battles, they were forced to help their colonial power and realized they deserved better than to be making bombs for the British empire.

And we're in a very similar time because we have a ton, and I mean a ton, of industrial powerhouses ranging from military power, to Industrial and capital power just kind of Dick waggling their Warfare titties. They're doing the same shit that Krupp was doing and like that's not a coincidence. That's not like something we should ignore, we are in the Prelude to a World War I, and we've already had World War 1 and 2, so that means we're on track for World War 3 and the idea that it's going to be fought purely with atomic bombs doesn't take into Factor what modern warfare is.

World War 3 would probably be fought with atomic bomb threats, focused militant action in both urban and rural settings with asymmetric and oftentimes guerilla Warfare, and depending upon who it involves specifically and in what capacity, could be both proxy or non-proxy. It could have like six different Civil Wars going on, not to mention the amount of civil skirmishes and unrest that would precipitate.

I think so many revolutionary thinkers and radical people online do not take into fact that this is something that is wanted but something they will not have total control over. There is a difference between aesthetic posting mood boards on Tumblr of revolutionary action, and committing to the bit of becoming a fighter and a warrior.

Are you truly a participant in the revolution, or do you simply like reading theory and cosplaying, because an uncomfortably High number of you are the latter, not the former and you don't even know it.

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namolosanu · 8 months ago

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Essential Garage Door Repair Tips for Your Home

Knowing when and how to care for your garage involves more than just noticing issues when they pop up. With expert advice, this article teaches homeowners to be proactive in their maintenance. It stresses the need to maintain your garage door consistently. This avoids unexpected problems and keeps your loved ones safe from hidden dangers in our busy lives.

Key Takeaways

Importance of consistent garage door maintenance for functionality and safety.

Proactive troubleshooting of garage doors can avert expensive repairs.

Identify common signs indicating the need for repair to ensure home safety.

Guidance on when to handle issues yourself versus enlisting professional help.

Providing a roadmap for routine inspections and maintenance to keep your garage door operating smoothly.

Identifying Common Garage Door Problems

Garage door problems are common with regular use. Knowing how door mechanics work is key to keep your garage door running well. Issues can happen in tracks, springs, or panels. Each part is crucial for the door to work right.

Understanding Garage Door Mechanics

Garage doors have springs, cables, rollers, and tracks. If these parts aren't right, your door might not work. Knowing about these parts helps find problems early. It also stops dangers and a later expensive garage door repair .

Symptoms of a Faulty Garage Door

Unusual noises such as grinding, banging, or squeaking

Slow or uneven movement while opening or closing

The door fails to open or close completely

Visible wear or damage on cables, tracks, and springs

Spotting these signs early can stop your door from breaking down. This keeps you safe and makes life easier.

When to Seek Professional Help

Some garage door problems can be fixed by yourself. But, issues with springs and cables need professional garage door repair pros. Trying to fix these alone can be dangerous.

Getting professional help makes sure your door is fixed well. This saves you more trouble and cost later. If your door still has problems after you tried to fix it, it's time to call the experts.

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Maintaining Your Garage Door for Optimal Performance

Keeping your garage door working well is key. Regular preventive maintenance fights off sudden breakdowns. It also makes your garage door work better and safer. Here, we'll show you how to keep your garage door in top shape.

A smart move is to start a maintenance routine. Include lubrication and a detailed inspection checklist in it. Doing so will help you avoid expensive fixes. It will also make your garage door last longer.

Monthly Visual Inspection: Look closely at tracks, springs, hinges, rollers, and other parts for damage.

Lubrication: Every few months, use a good lubricant on parts like rollers, hinges, and tracks. This ensures things move smoothly.

Balancing Test: Sometimes check if the garage door is balanced well. A door that's not balanced puts too much stress on the opener.

Safety Features Test: Make sure the auto-reverse and other safety features work right.

Tightening Loose Components: Keep all bolts and screws tight to avoid wobbles.

Following these steps does more than just extend your garage door's life. It also boosts security and how well your door works, making sure your garage door works great all year. This preventive maintenance routine is a smart choice for a durable and reliable garage door.

Garage Door Repair: DIY Fixes vs. Professional Services

Homeowners often hesitate between trying DIY garage door repair and hiring professional garage door technicians. The decision usually depends on the damage and how well you can handle tools and repairs. We'll look at both options to help you decide. We'll focus on safety and service quality.

Assessing the Scope of Damage

Figuring out the damage level is key in choosing DIY repair or professional help. Simple issues like squeaky doors or slight misalignments might be fixable on your own with basic tools and online guides. But, problems like broken springs or track issues should be left to the experts. They ensure safety and get your door working again.

Safety Considerations for DIY Repairs

If you're thinking about fixing the garage door yourself, safety is crucial. Always turn off the electric opener and secure the door. This stops it from slamming shut. Use stable ladders and the right tools. If the task feels too hard, it's smarter to call in experts. This avoids injuries or damaging your garage door more.

How to Choose the Right Repair Service

Choosing a good repair service can seem hard. Begin by checking the credentials and reviews of garage door technicians near you. Good professionals will share their insurance info, repair guarantees, and clear repair costs. Usually, excellent service quality comes with a great local reputation and happy customers. This helps you find someone you can trust.

The Right Tools for Your Garage Door city

When you're fixing your garage door, the right garage door repair tools are essential. Here's a equipment checklist to make sure you're ready for most problems.

Screwdrivers and Wrenches: You must have these handy tools for tightening or replacing bits and pieces.

Clamps: These keep parts stable while you work, very important for your safety.

Pliers and Wire Cutters: A must-have for safely dealing with springs and wires.

Hammer: Good for putting things in place or aligning them correctly.

Measuring Tape: Necessary to get all repairs exactly right.

Level: It makes sure your door is straight and works properly.

Torque Wrench: Very important for tightening bolts just right without damaging them.

Choosing high-quality tools is crucial. Trusted brands are more durable and safer. High-end tools could prevent frequent repairs. They not only make the job easier but also help avoid harm to your garage door parts.

Building a good toolkit can save you money. With these handy tools, you can do regular check-ups and fix sudden issues. This might save you from spending a lot on professional help. Keep your tools clean and dry for when you need them.

Having the right garage door repair tools means you're set for most problems. You can tackle maintenance confidently and efficiently. So, the next time there's an issue, you'll be prepared and ready to solve it without stress.

Garage Door Repair: A Guide to Replacing Broken Components

When your garage door stops working right, it could mean some parts are old or broken. Fixing it usually means replacing parts worn down over time. You should check your garage door carefully to see what needs changing. This could be anything from springs and cables to rollers and panels. Knowing which parts you need is key to fixing it well.

Choosing the right replacement part is about making sure it fits and lasts. Go for parts from trusted brands. If you need torsion springs or special tools for track alignment, find a good parts guide. While you can change some parts yourself, safely, things like torsion springs are risky. This is when you should call a pro.

Fixing your garage door right means knowing how to put in new parts correctly. Common tasks include loosening spring tension, detaching the door from its opener, and setting up new parts right. But, be careful, as some tasks are very dangerous. If you're unsure, better to get a professional's help. They do the job safely and often offer a work warranty.

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