#Clive dresses the same during all the story

[thricev]

There is information that exists about the lore..... But just in my mind....

[nickgammon-stories]

Dylan Thomas’ Last Train Ride and a Long Lost Poem

Recently, while looking for something else, I found a yellowing typescript at the bottom of an old box file. It was a transcript of an interview with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, made over 40 years ago for an almost instantly defunct magazine that closed before its second issue. For those who don’t know of him, Vaughan-Thomas was a distinguished World War II correspondent for the BBC, who died in 1987. He became an iconic voice of the corporation, covering events like the 1953 coronation with his mellifluous Welsh lilt. Along with much else, he was one of a triumvirate of Dylan Thomas’s literary executors.

And the subject of the interview? A Dylan Thomas poem. Not a great poem, nor even a good one. But nevertheless, a poem composed at least in part by a great poet. And one that carries the traces of a Swansea which, like Thomas, is long gone but not forgotten.

Bearing witness

I had found him standing at the far end of the bar, surrounded by a group of people he’d just made laugh. Small and white-haired, Vaughan-Thomas had the aura of an elderly elf on the lam. He was clearly having fun, telling how, incredibly, as war raged all around, he’d stumbled on Botticelli’s Primavera in a deserted castello in Tuscany. There, too, were dozens of other treasures from the Uffizi, concealed under dust sheets in a dimly lit room.

Then he went straight into another story, set at the beachhead of St Raphael during Operation Anvil. As the smoke and murk from the bombardment cleared, an immaculately dressed Frenchman emerged from one of the few Riviera villas still standing. He carried a tray of champagne and exclaimed, “Bienvenue, messieurs!” before adding in English, “ … even if you are a bit late.”

If Vaughan-Thomas’s war sounds rather jolly, it wasn’t always so. He delivered a powerful commentary from Belsen shortly after its liberation, and some said he became a gentler person after bearing witness to that inexplicable brutality. As a war correspondent, he was perhaps best-known for his broadcast Air Raid Over Berlin, which aired in September 1943 and made him a household name.

And on that same 1943 night, as Vaughan-Thomas recounted: “Suddenly the telephone rings as I was trying to put the bloody thing together, and he says, ‘Hello hero!’ ‘Who’s that?’ I said. He said, ‘It’s me, I’m in the last pub in the Kings Road … bring the money.’ I used to get these calls, I mean, we all did. ‘Right, I’ll get there straight away,’ I said. ‘You stay where you are.’ So I did my broadcast Air Raid Over Berlin and all the rest of it. I then get a BBC car, which was as rare as radium in those days. And they get me down there, to the last pub on the Kings Road.”

It was a good hour before Vaughan-Thomas could be there, by which time Dylan Thomas was in full flight in his role as a roaring boy from Wales, reciting a poem about the strange goings-on one Saturday night in New Quay, the small West Wales seaside town. Thomas had begun to set the poem down clearly enough, but as the beer flowed the manuscript became increasingly illegible.

“In the final lines you have to look at it sideways,” said Vaughan-Thomas. “It’s my rarest Dylan manuscript,” he continued. “You see the poet, not exactly at work, but getting tighter and tighter and tighter, until he decides not to work anymore.” As they left, Dylan Thomas stuffed the poem into Vaughan-Thomas’s pocket. And he thought he’d lost it in, as he put it, the “reeling King’s Road”.

A mad legacy

Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and Dylan Thomas had been friends since they both attended Swansea Grammar. My father Clive Gammon did too. When reviewing a documentary on Vaughan-Thomas for The Spectator in the 1970s, he described it as “an eccentric and lovable school where no one was made to do anything much if he didn’t feel like it.” This benign regime was driven by the headmaster, Trevor Lloyd. Spotting Vaughan-Thomas and Dylan Thomas ‘mitching off’ to play billiards when they should have been in class, he yelled out the window, “I hope you get caught, you wicked boys!”

Peter Williams, a Swansea lawyer who ran cross-country with Dylan Thomas at the school, remembered him as “a cherubic boy with black curly hair who, to everybody’s surprise, won the school mile when he was 12,” despite being incongruously frail and avoiding any form of physical training. It was a feat newsworthy enough to feature in the Cambria Daily Leader. The newspaper clipping was still in Thomas’s wallet when he died in New York in November 1953.

Another event was in keeping with Thomas’s later, famously transgressive persona. Williams recounted how their mutual friend, a boy called Glyn, visited Dylan Thomas’s house on the same afternoon that Mrs Thomas had invited a group of ladies over for tea. Seated at the table, Dylan Thomas turned to Glyn and said, “They talk so much, they don’t hear a word anyone else says. I’ll show you.” So the small boys sat quietly at the tea table as the women chatted away. Suddenly Dylan Thomas said, “Pass the f**king cake.” Without hesitation or a break in the conversation, Mrs Thomas passed them the cake. “Told you, didn’t I!” he said.

“[It’s] the interesting thing about the whole Dylan saga,” said Wynford Vaughan-Thomas. “I mean, you can’t pin down stories to fact, but the fact that the stories are there is fascinating. The whole of the business of Dylan hangs in the air. He left a mad legacy behind.”

Not least the dark comedy of the poet’s last night in Swansea, when Vaughan-Thomas received an urgent call late one evening. En route to America, Thomas had got drunk, disgraced himself in some way with his hosts, then passed out. They’d had enough. “Get him out of the house, and he can’t stay here again.” In Vaughan-Thomas’s words, ”This was about ten-thirty at night! There I had this poet – and Dylan, when he was drunk, wasn’t easy to cart around. It was all very well people taking great romantic views about it. I thought, what in God’s name do I do? As I drove around Swansea, I thought I’d get him into a hotel. So I went to the Mackworth, which was still open then, but they said, ‘No bloody fear!’”

​​Vaughan-Thomas had a car, which was unusual as 1953 Britain was still suffering post-war austerity. So he drove from hotel to hotel, but the reputation of Dylan Thomas ran on before him. The bald truth is that, during the great poet’s final night in Swansea town, no one would have him.

Vaughan-Thomas continued, “And then a brilliant idea struck me, so I drove to the station. I said to the stationmaster, ‘Have you got a warm train?’ And he said, ‘Well, Mr Thomas, there’s a train that goes off and wanders all over the bloody place, but I think it ends up in Darlington.’ I said, ‘I’ve got a man who wants to go there.’ So I bought a ticket, with another on to London, and I put some money in his pocket. I carried him past the stationmaster at the barrier and I said, ‘My friend’s very ill’. And he knew Dylan, so he said, ‘As always.’ So we put him in a corner of this train which disappeared off into the dark. And I feel … well, no, I did very well by him … I don’t feel guilty at all about it. I posted him to Darlington!”

The next time Vaughan-Thomas saw Dylan Thomas, he was with the Scottish poet Ruthven Todd in McLean’s Funeral Parlour in New York City. He recalled, “Of course, he’d been done up like ‘The Loved One’. And Ruthven looked down at the body and said, ‘God! Dylan wouldn’t be seen dead in a tie like that!’”

The macabre farce continued when they lost the poet’s body soon after it had crossed the Atlantic on the RMS Media. The undertaker, Phil ‘the Death’ Evans, had been dispatched from Laugharne to collect the remains from Southampton. And then he simply disappeared, along with the corpse. Panicky cables were telegraphed from the funeral director’s head office in Chepstow to all parts of the country, in search of the hearse. Eventually Mr Evans was ‘headed off’ in Taunton, as he doggedly ploughed on, westward towards Land’s End.

Vaughan-Thomas asked him, “Evans bach, what were you doing in Taunton?” “Well, Mr Thomas,” he said. “Did you know I’ve never ferried further east from Laugharne than Blaenau in my life, and nobody told me the bloody country forked!”

The immortal Dylan Thomas

The ghost of Dylan the younger consistently haunts Dylan the older. Thomas’s story Return Journey is strongly redolent of a lost pre-war Swansea, which is made all the more poignant because the town has just been blitzed. The narrator isn’t only searching through the rubble for the vanished town. He is also searching for his lost Swansea self, who variously,

“ … speaks rather fancy; truculent; plausible; a bit of a shower-off; plus-fours and no breakfast, you know; … worked on the Post and used to wear an overcoat sometimes with the check lining inside out so that you could play giant draughts on him. He wore a conscious woodbine, too … and a perched pork pie with a peacock feather …”

The self-portrait is well drawn, but it’s as if each characterisation is performative. It’s tempting to suppose this is because he was a keen actor as a schoolboy. But I suspect the instinct for both role play and transgression was purely a carapace, and that the roaring boy in some way cocooned the fragile Dylan the younger.

Peter Williams recalled that Dylan Thomas began to drink when he was, “I suppose about 16 or 17 … I remember to my amazement seeing Dylan one night in the billiard room of the YMCA and he was obviously plastered, and he told me that he’d been drinking whisky. But that was almost shocking — it really was, because in those days for schoolboys to drink was almost unheard of.”

“I only started to know Dylan seriously,” Vaughan-Thomas said, “When I came back from Oxford to Swansea. I was unemployed and trying to find a job, and met Dylan, the young man about Swansea, the reporter. And suddenly I said, ‘I remember you! We used to drink together in the pubs.’” That was the same pre-war period described in Return Journey, when Thomas was about 17, had just left school, and was working on the town’s paper, the Evening Post.

It was during one of those nights, perhaps a year or so later, in the Plough and Harrow in Murton, that the second lost poem was born. Dylan Thomas, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, Daniel Jones, and possibly the painter Fred Janes, had been enjoying themselves. Talk ran free and the conversation turned to the urinal in Pell Street, which had been – according to Vaughan-Thomas – “a splendid structure of complicated iron work” close to the Albert Hall cinema and the art school. It had been swept away, as he put it, “in an act of vandalism by the town council.”

The young men decided that a vampire should return to haunt the town councillors. So line by line, with Dylan Thomas orchestrating, pointing to each in turn, the poem was produced. And here it is for the first time since it was recited to me by the late Wynford Vaughan-Thomas at the Savile club in 1981.

At the corner of Pell Street a vampire appears

Singing garlic, sweet garlic, it’s sung there for years.

See it taps at the window of councillor Rees

And he sings as he taps a most sinister piece.

Councillor’s jugulars suck I with glee

Oh for the veins of a scrumptious JP

Tremble ye alderman! Town clerk beware!

As I hoover the veins of your succulent mare.

In the Guildhall bloodorium the council convened

The motion re. Pell Street and the blood-sucking fiend.

Proposer Rev Samuel, Labour, Llandor

Went WHOOP through the window, as the vampires roar

Singing, councillor’s jugulars suck I with glee

OOOOOH for the veins of a scrumptious JP

Tremble ye Aldermen! Town Clerk beware!

As I HOOOOver the blood of your succulent mare!

No doubt the drinkers would be pleased to discover that, 72 years later, the council came to regret that earlier act of hubris. In 2011, the Evening Post carried a short report:

A DESPERATE council has installed open air urinals to stop boozy locals relieving themselves … in Swansea city centre following escalating complaints about yob drinkers. A spokesman for the city authority said, “There is nothing more unsightly than irresponsible people urinating in public” … Mike Weaver, manager of the La Prensa tapas bar in Wind St, said: “My mother taught me to keep it in until I came to a toilet.”

[iamthenightcolormeblack]

Impressions of Maurice (1987): More than a "Gay Movie"

Maurice is a Merchant-Ivory (directing duo) film based on the novel of the same name by late Victorian/Edwardian era author E.M. Forster. I've seen other films by Merchant-Ivory (A Room With a View, Howards End, The Remains of the Day) and I've wanted to watch this film (and learn about the story) for a very long time because it features a gay protagonist who isn't ashamed of his identity and takes place in a time when homosexuality was considered a crime. Also the film was made during the HIV/AIDS epidemic (significant as an affirmation of the LGBTQ+ community because HIV/AIDS was called the "gay disease" at the time.) I have not read the book that this movie is based off so this is just my general reaction to the story as presented by the movie.

1. General Things:

The aesthetic is beautiful (because this is a Merchant-Ivory film). Lots of period details and beautiful yet suffocating costumes (starched, stiff collars, thick sweaters, long, non-revealing dresses & corsets for women) and interiors. Watching the film feels like traveling back in time to the Edwardian era.

The protagonist, Maurice Hall, isn't ashamed of his identity as a gay man; after a while he accepts that he's homosexual and that it's natural. He suffers a lot because he has to hide his true self but still finds love in the end.

Sex scenes: there aren't very many in this movie (compared with modern LGBTQ+ movies) but there is full-frontal nudity. The naked bodies aren't "glamorized" in any way, no shots of 8 packs or muscular chests; instead nakedness is a way of establishing intimacy among men and represents freedom from societal strictures (remember how suffocating the clothing is?).

James Wilby plays Maurice and Hugh Grant plays Maurice's first love Clive Durham.

I was surprised that Clive and Maurice didn't end up together because the movie posters feature the two of them.

I also recognized some other actors/actresses that reappear in Merchant-Ivory films: Rupert Graves as Alec Scudder (Freddy Honeychurch in A Room With a View), Denholm Eliot as Maurice's doctor (Mr. Emerson in A Room With a View), that actor who played Mr. Beebe in A Room With a View, Helena Bonham-Carter in a minor role (Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With a View, Margaret Schlegel in Howards End to name a few).

3. Quick Summary of the Movie:

Opening scene: The Talk.

While on the beach together, a male teacher tells Maurice Hall (a young boy) about puberty and “procreation.” He talks about erections and how sex works in very frank terms. This definitely isn't a stuffy period drama.

The teacher draws a picture of a vagina in the sand and tells Maurice that after he falls in love he will enjoy sex.

A girl sees the picture of the vagina and her guardians rush her away. It's a sad commentary on English society at the turn of the 20th century (the gender roles where men had all the power and women were treated like fragile dolls). Maurice as a boy gets sex education and is able to play outside while the girl has chaperones hovering over her and can't gain the special knowledge that the boy is getting.

Cambridge University 1910:

Maurice is now a university student and is having an intellectual conversation which sounds good but isn't understandable. Maurice wisely points out the difference between words and actions. Ironic how some of the intellectuals think words count as actions.

Maurice meets Clive Durham and they play some piano together. Durham is rebelling against his mom by not subscribing to her religious beliefs. Clive is a rebel at this point in his life and is going to challenge the strait-laced traditions of the Edwardian era.

Maurice, Clive and the students read some books about love (the sexual part of it) and it’s awkward because the books use euphemisms about sex. It reminds me of the sex education classes I got in school (the queasy feelings from learning how it works) and I like the book's presentation of societal attitudes towards sex. It's a natural (but also pleasurable) thing needed to produce babies but at the same time viewed as shameful. Society fears sex because sexual desire is a primitive thing older than the laws of society and also because desire can cause a person to disregard social norms. Consensual sex can be freeing and pleasurable, which can come at odds with moral standards.

Clive then talks about “the unspeakable vice of the Greeks," literally bringing up the existence of homosexuality (which the story presents as a natural thing that has always existed, even before the Christian religious morals that English society as presented by the film runs on). The professor continues to insist that the Greek homosexuals had purely platonic "friendships." (and some academics still kept, and probably keep, doing so).

Clive continues about beauty and the Greek homosexual tradition, while Maurice is still stuck with his traditional “Christian” morals as taught by English society. But Maurice begins to show a rebellious streak when he refuses to attend church, shocking his mother.

In a brief scene, Hall and Durham cuddle/hug each other and almost kiss. Together they look sad and beautiful because it’s a Merchant-Ivory period drama…until they get disturbed by their friends. Clive tells Maurice he loves him: “To be alone with you hurts me.”

Maurice is scared of his attraction to Clive, Clive apologizes and Maurice admits he loves him. Clive meanwhile is relieved Maurice didn't tell on him for his advances. Maurice Hall sneaks into Clive’s room and kisses him.

They defy the dean and go on a romantic getaway in the country (but the relationship is never consummated). Maurice gets punished for his getaway and expelled from university. He becomes a stockbroker.

Maurice visits Clive at his fancy country house (Pendersleigh hall) and they have another romantic reunion.

Clive’s mom is planning a typical future for him; he will become a magistrate/politician, then marry and deliver some heirs for the estate.

The mom asks if Maurice is in love with a woman; he's lovesick.

Maurice and Clive try to get away to a secluded area to be alone together but are disturbed by a biker. It's a recurring thing which happens; the two can't be together and away from the prying eyes of strangers.

Clive’s mom tries to do some matchmaking with his mom (marry the children). The mothers are happy with the “friendship” between the two men.

1911:

One of Maurice's Cambridge classmates, Viscount Risley, is caught and jailed for homosexuality. Clive is scared of what will happen to him if he is discovered to be gay.

The viscount consults Clive, who is a lawyer.

In a change from the book, Viscount Risley is imprisoned and subjected to hard labor (parallel with Oscar Wilde's sentence).

Clive faints and Maurice kisses him after he wakes up. Maurice wants to take care of Clive and the doctor thinks that’s weird (reversal of gender roles, in which women are nurses.)

1912:

A very accurate quote: “To give people a comfortable home is what public life is for.”

Maurice and Clive are partying; Clive is dissatisfied with boring English life. Clive travels to Greece but finds he hates it (beginning of his transformation from societal rebel to staid English gentleman).

Clive is ashamed of his homosexuality, fearing the risks, and Maurice still loves him.

One of my favorite quotes from Maurice Hall, accepting that his homosexuality is natural: “the leopard can’t change his spots.”

1913

Maurice is a referee in a boxing competition. There is a gay shower scene with lots of full-frontal nudity.

Clive Durham is engaged to a girl named Anne. Maurice is sad since Clive doesn’t call on him immediately after the engagement (their relationship is not as close as it was).

In a heartbreaking scene, Maurice tries to “come out” to his family doctor. The doctor examines Maurice's private parts and refuses to believe Maurice when he says he’s gay. He is told to find a young woman to cure his “love sickness.”

Clive gets married and Maurice is sad because he loves Clive.

Clive’s wife is good at reading other people and senses that Maurice is in love and suffering because of it.

The undertaker (Alec Scudder) at Clive’s house is gay and he and Maurice have a fling.

Maurice has to see a therapist; the therapist realizes Maurice is gay and needs to flee England.

Another of my favorite scenes from the movie: Maurice has a dream where he is trapped in a coffin next to a woman in white; it plays upon the idea of marriage as repressive, except that the victim is the man as well as the woman.

Alec is disappointed when Maurice doesn’t meet him for another fling. Maurice is scared because he thinks Alec is trying to blackmail him. They run into Maurice's teacher (the one who gave him the sex ed) and the misunderstanding is resolved. They forgive each other and have another fling.

Alec has to leave for Argentina because of his homosexuality. He chooses not to leave and sacrifices his job for Maurice.

Maurice tells Clive he loves Alec. Clive is pissed at Maurice not “controlling himself” and “submitting to temptation.”

Another of my favorite scenes from the movie: Maurice and Alec reunite. My heart was so happy when they hugged and kissed each other while swearing that they "shan't never be parted again." After all his suffering Maurice finally found a partner who loved him back!

Clive, although content with his boring English life, has some regrets, remembering Maurice’s love for him.

4. Why I like this movie: The characters are complex and gay love is treated as something normal.

Gay movies have some tropes which I dislike:

The protagonist chooses between 2 partners; one is bad and the other is good. The bad gay guy is attractive and sexually promiscuous; his only purpose is to introduce the protagonist to sex and then blackmail him. On the other hand, the good gay guy is less attractive and the relationship he has with the protagonist is much more platonic. It's ironic that the good gay guy is less sexual (like sex is a bad thing). The protagonist usually falls for the bad guy first, suffers emotionally from the blackmail, and then finds happiness with the good guy.

Another trope is the "suffering wife" who is jilted by the protagonist yet still loves him in a mournful way. I hate this trope because it implies that being gay is wrong (who would hurt the "suffering wife" in such a way?) Also, it implies that gay people can't have meaningful relationships with other people besides their romantic partners.

Here's how the characters in the movie are complex:

Maurice isn't extraordinary because he's gay (after all homosexuality is natural), it's because he has the courage to be true to himself in the face of great obstacles. He does struggle with his homosexuality, initially trying to "cure" it, but accepts it as part of who he is and ultimately finds love.

Clive Durham, from when we first see him, is to some extent fearful of societal punishment for his homosexuality. That fear grows until he becomes ashamed of his homosexuality and rejects it in favor of a comfortable, socially approved life as an English gentleman. I like that he isn't entirely unhappy with his new life; he seems to respect his wife and has some affection for her. Most importantly his rejection of his homosexuality is in part his own choice in addition to something imposed on him by society.

Clive's wife meanwhile is quite intelligent (she accurately observes that Maurice is suffering due to love, but can't guess the true nature of it) and has affection for her husband. They seem to be best friends, avoiding the trope of "suffering wife."

Conclusion:

Definitely watch this movie. It's so good and quite underrated compared with other Merchant-Ivory films. It's a revolutionary film disguised as a stereotypical period drama.

It's a fascinating exploration of societal attitudes towards sex, specifically how it's natural yet something to be ashamed about. It also shows how sex education (or lack of) can be used to reinforce cultural norms by controlling how people think about their body and whom they should love, etc.

Most importantly the characters are complex; they have other characteristics besides "I'm gay." Interpret what you will of the fact that Clive as well as Maurice gets a "happy ending" (in that they both get what they want).

@appleinducedsleep @thatvermilionflycatcher

[ausetkmt]

‘Reverse Freedom Rides’: An echo of Martha’s Vineyard migrant flights 60 years ago

Eliza Davis was bewildered the day she arrived in a wealthy tourist town on Cape Cod. An agricultural worker, she had been promised work and housing if she took a free trip to another state. Days later, disembarking with her eight children, she had little idea where she was, that a president had a family compound down the road, or that she was a “pawn,” as locals told the New York Times, in a political stunt.

Davis, 36, was not among the migrants who arrived Wednesday in Martha’s Vineyard — a resort island off Cape Cod where former president Barack Obama has a home — courtesy of a flight arranged by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). She was a Black woman from Alabama, bused to and abandoned in Hyannis, Mass., in 1962, not far from the holiday home of President John F. Kennedy.

Today’s migrants in Martha’s Vineyard are now being transported to the same Cape Cod military base that housed the “Reverse Freedom Riders” decades ago.

It was all part of the so-called Reverse Freedom Rides, arranged by White segregationists in 1962 in retaliation for the Freedom Rides of the previous summer, when Black and White volunteers rode buses through the South supporting desegregation.

The plot was organized by white supremacist Citizens’ Councils in Arkansas, who bought radio ads and made fliers advertising the “opportunity” to African Americans.

They focused on recruiting men with criminal records and single mothers with a lot of children, cynically presuming White liberals would welcome them the least.

Lela Mae Williams, an Arkansas woman who was also dropped off in Hyannis with her nine youngest children, was dressed in her finest clothes, because she had been told Kennedy himself was going to greet them when they arrived, according to 2020 NPR report. She had packed little else, because anything she needed was going to be provided, she was told.

Along with the new arrivals, local Hyannis officials received anonymous letters, according to the Times, saying things like, “Abe Lincoln sowed the seeds and now the North can reap the harvest,” and “We have put up with millions of n------ for 100 years, so why should you squawk?”

It was a contrast to the Great Migration of the previous decades, during which White residents did everything they could to stop Black workers from leaving.

Families would often have to sneak to the train station under cover of darkness or use other subterfuge to escape, described in detail by historian Isabel Wilkerson in her book “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”

Southern segregationist groups baldly deceived Black families using tactics “consciously parodying the Freedom Rides,” noted Clive Webb, an American history professor at the University of Sussex, in a 2004 paper on the Reverse Freedom Rides. The Greater New Orleans Citizens’ Council ran newspaper ads in 1962 promising "Free Transportation plus $5.00 for Expenses to any Negro Man or Woman or Family (no limit to size) who desire to migrate to the Nation’s Capital or any city in the north of their choosing.” Notices were also posted in prisons, offering free transportation to prisoners whose sentences were set to expire, Webb found.

The largest contingent of riders traveled from Little Rock to Hyannis. Amis Guthridge, an attorney and president of the Capitol Citizens’ Council in Little Rock, hoped to test Edward Kennedy, who was campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate, wrote Webb. “President Kennedy’s brother assures you a grand reception to Massachusetts,” said the council’s recruitment posters. “Good jobs, housing etc. are promised.”

Then, as now in Cape Cod, many residents of Hyannis met the riders with open arms. A local committee formed to provide housing, clothing and money to the new arrivals.

Davis and at least 50 others, including 33 children, were housed in the dormitory of a nearby community college; others were housed in private homes, and later, a nearby Army barracks was used until they could be placed with jobs and housing in the surrounding area.

Massachusetts Gov. John Volpe condemned the rides as “traffic in human misery.”

“The only way to meet such cruelty is by wisdom and love,” Episcopal Bishop Anson Phelps Stokes Jr. told the Associated Press. He urged residents to “show understanding and compassion.”

The welcome was not universal. When the Massachusetts governor asked for federal help, the Kennedy administration declined.

Kennedy called it “a rather cheap exercise” but otherwise avoided the issue.

In New York, when a few dozen Black people arrived from Louisiana, city officials paid the bus fare for at least six to return to their home state, according to the Times.

Some of the Southerners sent to Hyannis got jobs as cooks or chambermaids or in candle-making factories, according to a 1964 column in the Boston Globe. When the summer ended, the jobs in Hyannis dried up. All but one family left. Victoria Bell, who appears in the photo at the top of this story, lived in Hyannis for the rest of her life, working as a nurse to the elderly and volunteering to help the poor, according to news clippings in the Barnstable Patriot. At least one of her children made the honor roll at school, and some still live in the area. Bell died in 2000.

Within a few years, Lela Mae Williams and her kids ended up in a Boston housing project, where the family struggled without nearby relatives, one of her daughters told NPR’s “CodeSwitch” in 2020. Racist White neighbors resented their presence in public schools and harassed them.

The Reverse Freedom Rides ended up backfiring politically, Webb argued, because even “moderate” segregationists were put off by the “cynical manipulation” of poor African Americans. In Little Rock, the Arkansas Gazettesaid the scheme “had never been condoned by the better thinking people here.” New Orleans radio and television station WDSU denounced the campaign as “sick sensationalism bordering on the moronic.” A Gallup poll published in June 1962 showed widespread disapproval of the Councils’ tactics among White Southerners.

In the end, only about 200 people were sent on Reverse Freedom Rides — far fewer than the thousands of migrants who have been transported north to D.C., New York and now Massachusetts in the past few months.

On Thursday morning, two buses from Texas dropped off asylum-seeking immigrants in front of Vice President Harris’s residence in Northwest Washington.

There is one big difference between the migrant transports now and the Reverse Freedom Rides of 60 years ago.

In the 1960s, the buses were funded by anonymous people donating to private segregationist groups, which aimed to tell the North “to put up or shut up,” as one New Orleans leader said. DeSantis has not said how the flights he arranged to Martha’s Vineyard were funded, but Tex. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has used state resources and donations for the buses. And both have been eager to take credit.

[madrasbook]

Once Upon a City: Amusing Anecdotes about Madras

Madras that is Chennai celebrates its birthday on August 22, possibly on presumption, going by what S. Muthiah, the city’s finest chronicler who left a treasure of information on the city, records in Madras Rediscovered, which has run eight editions starting from 1981. A deed was signed on behalf of John Company by Francis Day and Andrew Cogan with the local Nayak rulers in Wandiwash and Poonamalle, Venkatappa and his brother Aiyappa, and that deed is dated as July 22, 1639.

That grant is dated July 22, 1639, but since Day reached Madraspatam – the name mentioned in the grant – only on July 27th, the chances are that ‘July’ is an error and August 22, 1639, is more likely the date the East India Company acquired the land to found their settlement.

The British men were given a small strip of land (which Muthiah terms “no man’s sand”) on lease on which they established a “trading post that was in effect a warehouse-cum-residence with some fortification,” to quote Muthiah.

And the land was chosen in Madras hyped up on a lie by Francis Day that cotton cheap in Madras as Day claimed in his recommendation to his superior, Andrew Cogan. And the city—which did have a notorious scale of gossip and scandals later on due to colourful men decorating the East India Company’s services or their agents, friends, or just men from England—was ostensibly founded on a famous gossip:

Day’s own explanation for choosing this barren, sandy site was that its hinterland offered “excellent long Cloath and better cheape by 20 per cent than anywhere else”! A noted gossip of the time, however, had it that the choice was determined by Day having a mistress in Portuguese San Thomé; the nearby settlement-to-be would ensure “their Interviews might be the more frequent and uninterrupted”! Whether this was indeed the case is a matter for conjecture, but that there was a mistress appears to have been gossip with some substance; a friend and successor to the charge of Madras, Henry Greenhill, is reported as having succeeded to the willing gentlewoman!

Madras Rediscovered is not a boring collection of facts and details to construct the past of Madras but a charming text to be read to understand how a small trading post evolved to become the metropolis of modern times, told in a very conversational, yet sophisticated and flowing language.

Where you actually give yourself to giggles, laughs, disbelief, and even tears are the anecdotes that punctuate the 20 chapters, which Muthiah chooses to name Once Upon a City. The first one begins thus:

I had promised to show him Robert Clive’s watering-holes in and around Madras. Little did I realise he’d turn up at my house in the best Clive manner, complete with coach and escort. His outrider that morning roared up on an iron steed, quickly dismounted at my gate and threw a smart salute. Moments later the carriage chugged up behind the police inspector and ensconced in the auto-rickshaw was a short, tubby, safari-suited Stanley Clives peering owlishly through heavy glasses to make sure he’d got right an address no Clive had ever known. Once sure, he broke into a broad, most unClive-like grin and proceeded to explain the comedy of errors that had earned him a police escort and which had raised in his esteem more than a notch the Madras police force whose sense of duty encompassed helping harassed strangers.

So a Clive (he also tells how the Clive became Clives) descendent arrived to meet Muthiah in an autorickshaw escorted by a police vehicle. What a setting! That engaging style, with wit and humour, is what you could expect to be treated to in these anecdotes. The main narrative about Madras is full of flourishing text that draws you in, arrests your senses, and piles up your curiosity.

You better read up on how the Survey of India had its roots in Madras. There are stories on mysterious murder, heads over heels love that would make would make “true love an eternal bestseller”, and the forgotten merchantmen (among whom my favourite is Coja Petrus Uscan, the Armenian merchant who enabled the connect between Mambalam and St. Thomas Mount through the Marmalong Bridge [now Maraimalai Adigal Palam]).

Muthiah delves into the Cooum (which once was a bather’s delight, now a polluted nightmare), the French dalliance with Madras that fell through only because of a poorly designed treaty, and life of Annie Besant and how printing came to Madras in the following anecdotes.

The stories of Parry & Company and Crompton & Company, two of the affluent British firms of Madras in their heyday, the founding of Indian Bank, Indo-Saracenic architecture, Edward Winter who was Day’s contemporary, film making in Madras and the city’s metamorphosis are captured in other anecdotes.

I have my favourites though in those Once Upon a City anecdotes—about The Hindu, on my lifeline poet Bharathi and on mathematical genius S. Ramanujan, and the Chepauk cricket ground.

The bewitching write on Chepauk first:

To me – and to most enthusiasts of the game as played in another, more leisurely, perhaps, even more gracious, age – cricket in Madras will for ever be associated with Chepauk’s lovely sward of lush springy turf tended with infinite patience and care to billiard table smoothness by Munuswamy of old, the entire emerald oval surrounded by towering cassias and acacias, some a century old, shedding their cool shade over low, tin-roofed stands. From these stands, which did nothing to mar the English county cricket ground atmosphere of Chepauk, you could watch in stretch-legged comfort Johnstone and Ward and Nailer, Gopalan and Ram Singh and Rangachari do epic battle against each other in the annual Pongal Week ‘Tests’, the Presidency Match that pitted European versus Indian in many a famous contest, then team up together to do yeoman duty for Madras against the rest of India in the Ranji Trophy matches of the 1930s and 1940s. [my emphasis]

Once Muthiah bowls you over, you go on to finish the story in double quick time and keep going back to it for inspiration, again and again. Talking of Pongal tests, which at one time the Chepauk was famous for, and we, the young then, often termed Indian sloppiness on the field as buttery fingers (after a generous scoop of Sakkarai Pongal with hands)!

The Hindu is an icon of Madras, always holding a place in the city’s ethos with an unparalleled history, a rare case of a newspaper intertwined with a city’s culture. Muthiah wrote Madras Miscellany for years in this newspaper without a break! Except once when his home was flooded in 2015 and when he finally had to give up due to his uncooperating health. Those stories were served on Monday morning with unfailing regularity, with this chronicler’s gaze often deep and amusing. But let’s get back to The Hindu itself, in Muthiah’s words:

“You might like The Hindu or you may not,” starts this chronicler, who should have collected copious paper cuttings of this newspaper in to his journals. And goes on to say, albeit grounded in the very tradition of the land:

… the paper has always reminded me of a one-time neighbour abroad. A middle-aged wisp of a woman in a nine-yard saree, chattering away in impeccable but strongly accented English, she organised the neighbourhood’s best coffee parties and bridge sessions in the mornings, drove herself through snarled traffic for sareed tennis in the afternoons, and with supreme aplomb threw boisterously successful cocktail parties or staid sit-down dinners, replete with her best silver and traditional vegetarian cuisine, in the evenings. Yet she remained true to Olde Madras in all those years, in dress and makeup, in habits and customs, above all in the practice of rituals of faith and worship. She was, bless her daunting soul, the finest example I knew of that rather overpowering but slowly vanishing personality, the Modern Orthodox Madras Conservative. And The Hindu has tended to be that over the years.

Only he could style The Hindu as “A middle-aged wisp of a woman in a nine-yard saree.” And what follows about the newspaper’s history is nothing short of fabulous. And he told me once that he was so inspired by the coverage of Lakshmikanthan murder case in the newspaper.

The mathematical genius of Ramanujan is not what Muthiah dwells upon but his life struggle and his work. Not so much with linguistic flourish though. On occasion, your eyes moisten while reading it because of the way the story is told. Combined in this anecdote is also the story about S. Chandrasekhar, the astrophysicist who won the Nobel in physics, long after it was due though. Maybe the future generations would get some inkling of this outstanding scientist from Muthiah’s account. I for one didn’t know much about this tall figure in such detail before reading it here.

Bharathiar is a universal poet. And there would be a few who wouldn’t have heard about him in the Tamil land. And to immerse yourself into his works gives not only inspiration but also a charge that would light up your life, for ever. Muthiah writes:

During the two years that he was a subeditor with the Swadesamitran, Bharati not only was trained as a journalist by Subramania Aiyer but also acquired his fire. The bouquet of heady wine made Bharati want to burst into patriotic verbal extravagance.

Not much about Bharathi’s fiery poetry finds mention but more of his journalistic career and life forms Muthiah’s focus. He says:

Bharati, in exile and deprived of a journalistic career, undoubtedly turned softer. The same thing had happened to VOC, who had come out of jail a crushed man, and, earlier, Subramania Aiyer, who had been shattered by the very threat of imprisonment. Aurobindo Ghosh, a fellow exile in Pondicherry, turned to spiritualism and V V S Aiyar, another fiery revolutionary in exile, turned to the world of letters, writing the first Tamil short story in 1917, Kulathangarai Arasamaram, after an initial spell of training gunmen. In this atmosphere of broken dreams and literary timewhiling, Bharati attempted to retain his interest in politics by writing sedate letters to the editors of Madras journals. As his prose became less fiery, his verse became more lyrical. He became the supreme poet. He also gave up his rural indifference to appearance and opted for a buttoned-up frock coat, loose turban to hide his baldness, and a pampered moustache to go with his clean shave.

Muthiah weaves into Bharathiar’s life as a careful observer, picking up the story in its magnificent simplicity, and this was so thrilling to read, of his meeting with C.R. Srinivasan, manager of Swadesamitran, when Bharathi rejoined the newspaper:

They introduced themselves. Srinivasan later recalled: “The Bharati I saw that day is indelibly imprinted on my mind’s eye. Middling height. Thin build. Shining, light brown complexion. Layer after layer of a turban wound round the head. A broad forehead. A dot of kum kum of a quarter anna size in its middle. Thick brows that stood guard over the roving eyes. The upturned nose highlighting the sunken cheeks. Though an aggressive moustache hid the upper lip, the lower lip revealed a listless life. A shirt without buttons to cover the body and an alpaca black coat over it. That too torn while jumping from the cart. He sat on the chair. Tongue-tied, the eyes rolled around, sizing everything. They alighted on me also, moving up and down. Rebellious eyes; sorrowful eyes; eyes that exuded peace; eyes that captivated. They stole my heart.”

The greatness of Bharathiar told in succulent text, captivating to read. Who says Muthiah has left us? His text speaks to us and the city’s now popular historian, Sriram V, has kept alive his memoirs of the city by covering many of the sites, especially favouring North Madras, described in the book in his heritage walks.

If working with these two men of letters and history isn’t a blessing, what is?

[papermoonloveslucy]

IT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT: LUCY & THE BOMPS!

by Earl Wilson, August 19, 1950

Lucille Ball wanted to keep Desi home and off the road so she petitioned for him to play her husband on radio’s “My Favorite Husband”.  The network balked and Richard Denning got the role instead. When it came time to transfer the show to television, Lucy made the same demand. Now a radio star in her own right, she was able to convince the network - nervous about America believing an ‘All-American girl’ like Lucy would be married to a Latin bandleader - to give them a chance to prove it!  The Arnazs’ built a comedy and musical act and took it on the road. When the show got to the Roxy in New York City, syndicated columnist Earl Wilson tagged along and wrote the following feature, which appeared on August 19, 1950.  Coincidentally, the Roxy was also the theatre where Desi Arnaz was performing when he wed Lucille Ball in 1940. 

[NOTE: Although the text of Wilson’s article is repeated below verbatim, the photos and footnotes were added for editorial consideration.]

Lucille Ball has been one of our most appreciated movie actresses for quite a while, but it was seeing her do a bump on the stage that made me really come to realize how talented she is.

It was after she’d done her clever act with husband Desi Arnaz at the Roxy that I talked to the flamin’ redhead about it.

“Wasn't that a bump?” I asked her, as we got into a cab and pulled away from the stagedoor. I wanted to be sure, because some snooty actresses wouldn’t want it thought that they ever did a bump.“That was a married woman’s refined version of a bump.”

Lucille was sitting back in the cab, exhausted from several shows that day, and clamoring to be taken somewhere to see a show. She said she had been entertaining all day and now she wanted to be entertained for a change.

“Did you say refined?” Desi looked across the cab at her. I was between them. “Any harder you do it and you will knock my hot off,” he said in his charming accent. (1)

At Desi’s urging, she told me a story showing that doing the bump is for her not new. It seems that once she made a picture for Eric Palmer called Dance, Girl, Dance. (2)

“He was telling me, ‘Those bomps. Don’t do those bomps bad or the sansors will keep the picture.’

“So I was doing a very tame dance, not bumping at all. I had on a 27-pound dress, silver lame, with bugle beads, and it rolled from side to side when I shook.

“Durin’ a scene, Palmer jumped up and said, ‘Oh, oh, that was a bomp. I told you no bomps.’

“I went up to him and I said, ‘Mr. Palmer, that was not a bomp. THIS is a bomp.’  “And I bumped and I wrapped those 27 pounds of beads right around his neck!”

It’s a pleasure to talk to two such honest, earthy people after listening to some others who are always posing. A lot of people are astonished that they are celebrating their 10th wedding anniversary because, as Desi points out, “Everyone said it wouldn’t last a month.” “And WE didn’t think it would last a week,” Lucille said. (3)

Being romantically inclined, I asked for the details which most everybody must have forgotten by now but the participants themselves.

“Where did you get married?” I asked Desi.

“The Byram River Beagle Club, at Greenwich, Conn.,” Lucille said. (4)

“Thank you, I can never say that,” said her Cuban husband.

“Yes, you can. Try it,” Lucille said.

“The By-ram River Bee-gul Club,” Desi said dutifully and slowly.

“Faster!” commanded Lucille. (5)

“The Byver Regal Civer Club,” responded Desi.

“Oh, my,” said Lucille, “We were married by Judge John J. O’Brien. He’s the one who married Tommy Manville so many times.” (6)

Although Desi missed a show at the Roxy, where he was then appearing, to get married, he remembers, just as vividly, how on his wedding night he woke up the bride about 5 A.M. and demanded that she get him a glass of water. The funny thing is that she did.

“About 9 o’clock she woke me up,” Desi recalls, “and she said ‘Listen, you—, the next time you want a glass of water you get it yourself!’” (7)

Desi explains that he’s never made such a request since.

Desi and Lucille have formed their own company which they call Desilu Productions, this being a combination, of course of their two first names. “First time I ever got top billing,” Desi says.

They plan to do concerts, radio, television and movies together. Lucille comes from Butte, Mont., and, as everybody knows, has red hair. (8)

Lucille made up a description of herself around which a movie will be made. The title which describes her so accurately is "Blazing Beulah From Butte," and we figure it ought to get the money. (9)

Never underestimate that Desi.

When they were getting married it appeared that she might not be able to because of a commitment to Harold Lloyd.

Desi called Lloyd from New York and defiantly announced to him that Lucille couldn’t be available that week, as he was marrying her. “Y-yes, D-desi, c-can she be back next k-weeek?” stammered Lloyd, who never does. (10)

Desi is pretty masterful; when he speaks, to Lucille he is her master’s voice.

FOOTNOTES

(1) The ‘bomps’ discussed are undoubtedly from the “Cuban Pete / Sally Sweet” number, where Lucy gyrates her hips while singing “Chick-Chicky-Boom Chick-Chicky-Boom.” The routine was repeated (with ‘bomps’ included) on “I Love Lucy” in “The Diet” (ILL S1;E3) in October 1951. 

(2) The article consistently mis-spells Erich Pommer as ‘Eric Palmer.’  Pommer was the producer of Lucille Ball’s 1940 film Dance, Girl, Dance at RKO. 

(3) Lucy and Desi’s marriage lasted twenty years, from 1940 to 1960, although Lucille divorced Desi in the mid-1940s, Lucy never signed the paperwork. After their second divorce was final, Lucy revealed that Desi was unfaithful and a drinker, and that they were no longer compatible. Lucy charged “mental cruelty” and told the court of Desi’s temper tantrums. Some years later, she described the reason for the split as “the same old booze and broads.” Both Ball and Arnaz remarried, although they stayed friends and later admitted that they had always loved one another. 

(4) Lucy and Desi married in Connecticut due to its shorter waiting period on licenses and blood tests. The Byram River Beagle Club in Greenwich was originally a Hunt and Kennel Club that became a speakeasy during Prohibition and after that a supper club. It was a favorite hangout of baseball great Babe Ruth. A single-family home now stands on the property.  In April 1952, “I Love Lucy” aired an episode called “The Marriage License” (ILL S1;E26) that was largely set in Greenwich and mentioned The Byram River Beagle Club, although no scenes were set there because Lucy purposely left Ricky’s wallet at home and they ran out of gas! 

(5) In “The Marriage License” Ricky also had trouble pronouncing the name. On “I Love Lucy” making fun of Ricky’s English was a usual source of comedy - mostly by Lucy - just as it appears to be here - in 1950.  

(6) Thomas Franklyn Manville, Jr., known as Tommy Manville (1894-1967), was a Manhattan socialite and heir to the Johns-Manville asbestos fortune. He was a celebrity in the mid-20th Century due to both his inherited wealth and his record-breaking 13 marriages to 11 women, which won him an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. At the time of this interview, however, Manville was only on his 6th wife!  The termination of his marriages usually resulted in gossip, widespread publicity, and huge cash settlements. At the time of his death it was estimated that Manville spent more than $1.25 million on divorce settlements.

(7) This exchange (with slight variation) was later worked into “I Love Lucy”! 

(8) At the start of her career - and apparently well into 1950 - Lucille Ball purported to have been born in Butte, Montana, despite her actual birthplace being Jamestown, in upstate New York.  Ball (who then went by the name Diane Belmont) thought it sounded more interesting and exotic.  

(9) Despite the alliterative title, "Blazing Beulah from Butte” was never made, perhaps because shortly afterwards Ball admitted her true birthplace. “Blazing Beulah from Jamestown” doesn’t have quite the same ring. It’s also likely that this was a clever bon mot on Desi’s part to create a more colorful interview. 

(10) Comic actor and director Harold Lloyd had put Lucille under contract for his film A Girl, A Guy, and A Gob, to be filmed in 1940. There was some speculation that marrying Arnaz would interfere with the shooting schedule. 

TRIVIA

While Lucy and Desi were at the Roxy, the theatre was also showing Night and the City, which had premiered there on June 5, 1950. At this time it was common for a larger entertainment venues like the Roxy to present both a stage show and a first run film. Night and the City starred Richard Widmark, who Lucy and Desi later convinced to guest-star on “I Love Lucy” in “The Tour” (ILL S4;E30) in May 1955. 

In “Return Home From Europe” (ILL S5;E26), Ricky gets a long-distance telephone call from the manager of the Roxy, Mr. Rothafel, offering him a job, if he can get back to New York immediately. In reality, Rothafel was the name of the founder of the Roxy, Mr. Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel. Rothafel died in early 1936, however, so this was probably Desi’s way of honoring him. 

Earl Wilson was mentioned on “I Love Lucy” in “The Fox Hunt” (ILL  S5;E16). While trying to wangle an invitation to Sir Clive’s country manor, Lucy makes up a story about the Mertzes meeting an Earl in the hotel lobby. When Sir Clive rattles off the names of some Earls to jog her memory, she fibs that he was just promoted from Assistant Earl, the Earl of Wilson, who canceled because he’s got the gout! Lucy’s imaginary Earl is actually a reference to Earl Wilson (1907-87), a journalist and television panelist of the time. His nationally syndicated column frequently mentioned Lucy and Desi. 

In 1974, Lucy strikes a pose for Wilson during her promotional tour for Mame.

[motleycrueimagine]

This Ain’t A  Love Song - Part Sixx - Nikki Sixx Fanfiction

Words count:    1771

Warnings: Language, alcol, drugs

N/A: Believe it or not I’m struggling to stick to my own deadlines XD I’ll try to post more regularly but i cannot fix a precisce schedule, at least for now. For the story i’m trying to keep all the events in a believable timeline and at the same time I’m trying to stick to some key events that marked the Crue’s real lives. I let you read now, as always taglist is open and feedbacks are really appreciated. xx

Huge thanks to @blonde-shamrock

Summary:

Maya Prescott has done anything possible to fix her life. It was 1977 when she left her groupie life: no more parties, no more concerts, no more drugs, alcohol or casual sex, just to achieve a full standard life. Now it’s 1981 and after a four years disappearance  Maya Prescott unexpectedly shows up to the party of one of the most promising emerging bands of the LA’s rock’n roll scene: Motley Crue. But what should be her last ride is destined to change her life in so many unexpected ways.  

TagList: @motleycrueee  @babygal-babygal@unknownoblivion @sweetshutter

Masterlist

31 December 1981

We were singing out loud down the stage of the Troubadour; the guys were rocking their New Year’s Eve performance. The beginning of Live Wire was marking the end of the concert and the crowd was ecstatic.

Vince came closer to us and shared the mic, “Cause I’m hot young running free a little bit better than I use to be!”  we sang out loud, I kissed his cheek before he got back up to keep singing the refrain.

Carol patted my shoulder and came closer to my ear, “Nik is looking at you,” she informed me and immediately my eyes wandered towards him.

“As always” I replied sending him a kiss, he winked back. He was outstandingly beautiful, even with all that makeup smudged around his face.

As the song ended, they started thanking the audience and saying goodbye to the fans. Me and my friends moved over to the back stage where a bouncer, 6 ft tall and covered in muscles, tasked with letting through the prettiest girls of the club, was already waiting for us.

“Thank you, Clive” I waved at him and then headed towards the back of the stage, Allan Coffman, Motley’s manager was waiting for them as well. I did not like him at all, he was weird and honestly made me kind of uncomfortable.

“Maya, it’s always a pleasure to see you around,” he greeted me, as always. I was struggling to understand if he was being sarcastic or not.

“Hi Allen.” I kept a neutral tone. Tommy ran down the stage clearly overexcited

“Woah it was fucking great!” he exclaimed grabbing a bottle of water and emptying it directly on his head. All the guys followed him.

“You did amazing guys.” I assured them, tossing a water bottle to Nikki and he grabbed it promptly.

“Thank you, honey.” While he reached to me sliding his arm around my shoulders.

“Oh c’mon you’re all sweaty, “ I laughed trying at the same time to free myself from him.

He was able to kiss my cheek playfully before being pushed away. “Really? You don’t like my hyper manly perfume?” he joked gaining another push on his shoulder.

“Cut it Nikki, go get cleaned up and we’ll talk about your manly perfume,” I retorted while he was walking towards the changing room. My eyes followed his figure until he disappeared behind the door, followed by Mick.

“What was that?” Emma asked as I turned to face my friends.

“What?” I was confused.

“All that flirtiness and puppy eyes,” Carol continued. All of my friends were looking at me.

“It was nothing -we weren’t flirting! We’re just friends, so stop dreaming.”

I knew how the relationship between me and Nikki could be perceived by the people, but the truth was that there was nothing. Yes, we had bonded in the last month because we had spent a lot of time together, but just as I had bonded with Vince, Tommy and Mick. I get that there was chemistry, and the sexual attraction was clear, but I wasn’t going to involve myself with that adorable dickhead.

“So if I were to fuck him, you wouldn’t be jealous?” Emma teased, making me raise a brow.

“No?” I answered just before letting a puff out of my mouth, “I can’t stand you. Let’s go I need a drink.” And without waiting for them I headed in the direction of the small living room where the staff had prepared some drinks for the guys.

—

Three hours and a new year later we were still drunkenly partying at the Rainbow. I was laying on the table letting the guys drink shots from my body, Tommy was licking rum from my collarbone while I was giggling because his tongue was tickling me.

“Okay enough, enough!” I laughed trying to catch my breath, I sat on the table feeling the alcohol flow from my skin into my top.

“C’mon I wasn’t done yet!” Tommy protested with a childish smile.

“You were tickling me on purpose you asshole!” His face was enough to confirm my theory. I jumped down the table and attempted to regain my balance before staggering towards the bar.

“Two shots of tequila please.” I asked the bartender. I was clinging to the bar counter trying to stand straight and to compose myself.

“I was patiently waiting for my turn and then I sadly discover that you are done with body shots.” Nikki’s fake sad voice joined me.

“It’s Tommy’s fault.” I cackled. I used to try to not be alone around Nikki when I was drunk, incidents would always occur when it happened.

“You ignored me for most of the night” he accused while the guy behind the bar served my shots. I frowned.

“I haven’t ignored you, I just decided not to ruin your date,” I explained. Beth had brought a friend that had clearly gone mad for Nikki, and they seemed to get along pretty well during the night.

“Well my date went home a few hours ago…” the smirk he gave me drove me crazy as always.

“Don’t look at me like that.” I warned him, gently pushing is face away.

“Like what?” He questioned making very clear how amused he was.

I chose not to answer - ignoring him was the best tactic. I started pouring salt on the back of my hand.

“Like what?” He repeated poking my side.

“Do you want your shot or not?!” He nodded in response, “So shut up and drink.” I licked the salt and then, with all the courage that the alcohol had gave me, I kissed him. It was not the kind of kiss you’d see in a romantic movie, more likely in a porn film. It had clearly caught him by surprise but he didn’t back down. His lips tasted like the cheap liquors he had drank the whole night. The flavour mixed weirdly well with the salt on my tongue. His hands reached my hair keeping me close and allowing him to deepen the kiss. That wet, breath-taking kiss lasted for a few seconds before I took a step back ending it to drink my tequila shot as nothing had happened.

Nikki took a little longer to finally drink his shot; I must had caught him a little off guard. Standing against the counter I was now looking at him with a drunk smirk.

“Was it worth the waiting?” I asked then biting my lower lip softly. Bad ideas were accumulating in my head. He came towards me, locking his eyes into mine.

“I’m still not sure, lemme…” and as he got dangerously close…

“Maya! We need a referee over here!” Tommy and his perfect timing were screaming from the other side of the club.

I was still looking at Nikki “I’m coming, honey!” And the atmosphere was over.

—

Nikki’s POV

As I entered the room, I found Maya sitting on the ground laughing hysterically, I was pretty confused.

“Are you testing the softness of the moquette?” I asked helping her to get back on her feet.

“Your stupid boots made me fall,” She mumbled while gripping my shoulder to get rid of her heels.

“I’m tired… my feet hurt, and I think I’m gonna throw up…” she walked across my room throwing her shoes to the side.

“Please don’t throw up in here,” I begged her. She was completely shitfaced. The night full of alcohol and drugs had destroyed all of us, but Maya and Tommy’s decision to attempt to roll in the middle of the road had sobered me up in seconds. So now here I was babysitting this stubborn beautiful girl that… well was now getting undressed in my room.

“Maya what are you doing?” I asked again for the millionth time.

“Making myself comfortable,” she answered while fighting with the dress that was stuck on her head. I got closer and I helped her free herself. She looked at me with a weird gaze.

“Let me guess, this doesn’t mean we’re about to fuck, right?” Already knowing the answer, I allowed myself to take a longer look at her exposed body.

Her flat belly was crossed by a big tattoo that I had only glimpsed till now, it was a huge snake: its tail was tangled on her left thigh and it went up crossing her hip diagonally till her right ribcage. The sight was almost enough to make me hard.

“Are you done staring at me like a creep?” she asked before turning around to get to the bed. And no, I definitely wasn’t done - not looking at that perfectly round butt would have been a real shame. Alright, now I was definitely hard.

“Maya where are you going?” I asked her as she slipped under my sheets. I was being a good boy but she could not sleep with me half naked and expect me to resist the temptation to put a hand on her.

“When you’re done complaining turn the light off.” I sighed passing my hand through my messy hair. I could not believe I was about to have the hardest night of my life.

So, I took all my self-control, got rid of my clothes and I joined her in bed.

“I was pretty sure you were going to sleep on the couch,” she said with an amused pitch, turning on my side “oh god…” she started giggling covering her eyes with one hand, “What the hell, why are you naked?!” she asked with a full sweet and drunk laughter.

“Well this is my bed, and I always sleep like this so…” since she wanted to play it dirty, I was going to do the same. “Just don’t touch me, I don’t want to fuck you tonight,” I said mimicking her voice.

“Oh shut up, I know you want it. This reverse psychology is not going to work with me,” she continued playfully before turning around again with her back to me. I gave her a not-so-gentle spank because the temptation was too strong.

“I knew it was coming,” she laughed shaking her head a little bit. “Can you at least cover yourself so that if I turn around I’m not gonna get blinded by your manhood?” I smiled enjoying this scene way too much.

“I don’t know if I feel like it,” I simply stated turning on my side. “Have a good night, Maya,” I wished her and then I turned the lights off.

[thewidowstanton]

The Widow’s Best of 2019

Welcome readers to our Best of 2019 round-up. Some of you might remember that when one half of The Widow, Liz Arratoon, started writing about the circus 25 years ago – with Widow other half Adrian Arratoon by her side – she was almost a lone advocate for the art form. Don’t you get jaded, people ask us. Absolutely not! But we do long for something a bit different, and this year we have been disappointed that so many circus shows and acts have started to look a bit similar and yawny.

One notable exception gets our Best Show, and we did love Company Soralino’s clowning with cardboard boxes, and Mizuki Shinagawa on silks at the 40th Cirque de Demain festival, but we have cast our gaze beyond circus to take in whatever else has taken our fancy. Just to remind people, and before any more sensitive hearts are broken, anything we have seen this year, no matter when it was created, is eligible for selection, but if we haven’t seen it, it isn’t. Our list, our rules, and, in no particular order, here it is. All shows are in London unless otherwise stated.

BEST SHOW: We really enjoyed Aurelia Thierrée’s Bells and Spells at the Norfolk & Norwich Festival, but our Best Show is La Nuit du Cerf (A Deer in the Headlights) by Cirque Le Roux, seen on French TV. This is the company’s follow-up to The Elephant in the Room, and new cast members Valerie Benoit and Mason Ames join the original troupe of Lolita Costet, Yannick Thomas, Philip Rosenberg and Gregory Arsenal. Together they showcase a sophisticated and exquisitely choreographed blend of top-flight acrobatics, handstands, hand-to-hand, roller-skating, tight wire, you name it, in a totally fresh and exciting presentation, all backed by a wonderfully eclectic soundtrack. If only more companies could come up with something so innovative.

FEMALE ARTIST OF THE YEAR: Extraordinary acrobat Esmeralda Nikolajeff, part of the line-up for Barely Methodical Troupe’s third show, SHIFT, which opened the London International Mime Festival at the Platform Theatre.

MALE ARTIST OF THE YEAR: Wes Peden, juggler, who had a scintillating guest spot in Gandini Juggling and Alexander Whitley’s show Spring at Sadler’s Wells. Don’t miss his solo show Zebra at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room during the London International Mime Festival in January 2020.

BEST GIG: Le SuperHomard in the library at the Institut Français as part of the Music Rendezvous season, and Durand Jones and the Indications, seen at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall during Meltdown.

MOST ENTERTAINING: Lucy Worsley’s talk about Queen Victoria at Southwark Cathedral.

BEST VENUE: The Poodle Club in Sydenham. 

BEST ACT: Foot-jugglers Marina and Svetlana Tsodikova, who are the Crystal Ladies in Cirque du Soleil’s Totem. They also get MOST GLAMOROUS.

BEST COSTUMES: Alejandro Gómez Palomo for The Male Dancer, choreographed by Iván Pérez, seen on the Arte app; Jean Paul Gaultier’s Fashion Freak Show (pictured below) seen at the Folies Bergère in Paris, and Queen Victoria’s crown, designed by Sheila Hay for A Night with Thick and Tight at the Lilian Baylis Studio, during the London International Mime Festival.

BEST INTERVIEW: Alec Baldwin’s chat with Elaine Stritch on his podcast Here’s the Thing.

BEST MAGIC TRICK: Shin Lim, winner of America’s Got Talent: The Champions 2019, doing card tricks.

LOUDEST GASP!: This photo of Joan Crawford, seen on @cjubarrington’s glorious Twitter account, where he posts vintage photos of Hollywood stars.

BEST MOVE: Anything by world champion football freestyler Liv Cooke.

BEST CASTAWAY: Living legend John Cooper Clarke on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4.

BEST GOWN: Kathleen Nellis’ fabulous recreation of Marlene Dietrich’s ‘naked’ dress for Peter Groom’s show Natural Duty, originally designed by Jean Louis. Peter also wore it in Dietrich: Live in London, seen at the Crazy Coqs, Live at Zédel, for which he gets BEST CABARET.

MOMENT OF WONDER: Andy Goldsworthy throwing handfuls of snow into the wind in the documentary Rivers and Tides.

BEST LOOK AT THE MET GALA: Harry Styles wearing a sheer Gucci blouse!

HOTTEST TICKET: Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s solo triumph, Fleabag, at Wyndham’s Theatre, and, yes, we did speak to Andrew Scott this year!

FUNNIEST PERSON: David Mills, who stormed New York with Bitter Endings, but we saw him at the Poodle Club. Someone! Book this show for London!

BEST DANCE: The Seasons’ Canon choreographed by Crystal Pite at the Opera Garnier, seen on the Arte app.

BEST SET: Anna Reid’s simple, stylish and effective design for The Sweet Science of Bruising at Wilton’s Music Hall.

BEST SHOWBIZ STORY: The Man Behind the Microphone, first heard on Outlook on BBC World Service. The story of how filmmaker Claire Belhassine discovered that her unassuming Tunisian grandfather, Hedi Jouini, had been a singing megastar. Then we found the film of the same name.

BEST DOCUMENTARY: Liz Garbus’ 2016 Leave Nothing Unsaid, in which Anderson Cooper interviews his remarkable mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, about her life. Devastating and moving.

MOST FLAMBOYANT: Zack MacLeod Pinsent, who dresses like this all the time!

BEST SHOWBIZ BOOK – MALE ARTIST: Me by Elton John with Alexis Petrides.

BEST SHOWBIZ BOOK – FEMALE ARTIST: Dreamgirl: My Life As a Supreme by Mary Wilson… of the Supremes, with Patricia Romanowski and Ahrgus Juilliard.

BEST AUDIENCE: Ah, woof!

MOST NOTABLE ANNIVERSARIES: Ten years of The Double R Club, which was founded by Benjamin Louche and Rose Thorne, and runs at Bethnal Green’s Working Men’s Club, and three years of Cabaret vs Cancer, the registered charity started by Rose.

BEST VINTAGE CIRCUS PICTURE: Coo!

BEST FILM: Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman – which should have won the Oscar – and Olivia Wilde’s delightful teen comedy Booksmart.

BEST FILM SCORE: Out of Blue by Clint Mansell.

MOST IMPRESSIVE MEMORY FEAT: An hour and 40 minutes’ worth of words spoken by the one and only Maggie Smith, who returned to the stage in A German Life at the Bridge Theatre.

MOST ALLURING: Dina Martina, seen at Soho Theate Downstairs in Forgotten but Not Gone.

MOST MISSED: Agnès Varda, Clive James (born Vivian Leopold James!), and the French TV variety show Le Plus Grand Cabaret du Monde, hosted by Patrick Sébastien, which started in 1998 and ended this year.

GONE FAR TOO SOON: The creative genius Nell Gifford, co-founder of Giffords Circus, who died at 46.

MOST ANTICIPATED: Obviously Wes Peden’s previously mentioned Zebra, and Daniele Finzi Pasca’s latest creation, NUDA, premiering on 11 September 2020 at LAC, Lake Lugano in Switzerland.

Look out for our first interview of 2020, with Scottish aerialist and acobat Lauren Jamieson, who has a PhD in chemistry but gave up her science career to focus on circus full time. She will appear in The Feathers of Daedalus show Tarot during the Vault Festival 2020.

Picture credits: Company Soralino, Valérie Thénard Béal; Wes Peden, Pierre Feniello; Peter Groom, V’s Anchor Studio. Any we’ve missed, please let us know.

Follow @TheWidowStanton on Twitter

© thewidowstanton.com

[fiinalgiirls]

GENERAL INFORMATION.

FULL NAME - ramira beatriz reyes bustamonte NICKNAMES - ram, mira GENDER / PRONOUNS - she/her DATE OF BIRTH - february 12, 1990 PLACE OF BIRTH - el paso, texas CITIZENSHIP / ETHNICITY - cuban-american RELIGION - agnostic SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS / POLITICAL AFFILIATION - upper middle class, liberal. MARITAL STATUS - single. SEXUAL & ROMANTIC ORIENTATION - pansexual. EDUCATION / OCCUPATION - horror author, librarian in some verses LANGUAGES - spanish, english

FAMILY INFORMATION.

PARENTS - diego and paola reyes  SIBLINGS - tbd OFFSPRING - none PETS / OTHER - none NOTABLE EXTENDED FAMILY - step-family

PHYSICAL INFORMATION.

FACECLAIM - jeanine mason HAIR COLOR / EYE COLOR - black / brown HEIGHT / BUILD - 5′7″ / slender TATTOOS / PIERCINGS - ears DISTINGUISHABLE FEATURES - red lips and a winning smile, long dark hair

MEDICAL INFORMATION.

MEDICAL HISTORY - none KNOWN ALLERGIES - nkda VISUAL IMPAIRMENT / HEARING IMPAIRMENT - none NICOTINE USE / DRUG USE / ALCOHOL USE - has a bit of a party problem in her past, now is trying to drink more responsibly and limit drug use to the occasional joint

PERSONALITY.

TRAITS - friendly, imaginative, enthusiastic ; a little vapid, distant TROPES - tbd TEMPERAMENT - sanguine ALIGNMENT - chaotic good CELTIC TREE ZODIAC - rowan, the MBTI - esfp HOGWARTS HOUSE - slytherin VICE / VIRTUE - tbd LIKES / DISLIKES: leather jackets and designer boots, red lipstick, the sound of a keyboard clicking, drop shots, stephen king and clive barker  /  doctor’s offices, family gatherings, ubers QUOTE:  ❝strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he’ll tell you the story of each small one.❞

FAVORITES.

FOOD - shrimp raviolis DRINK - red wine and black coffee PIZZA TOPPING - pesto chicken COLOR - red MUSIC - dark synth BOOKS - horror, thriller MOVIES - horror, thriller CURSE WORD - tronpon SCENTS - coffee, pasta, cloves, and pine

BIOGRAPHY,

trigger/content warnings: divorce mention, horror

ramira reyes was almost a household name by the time she’d finished her third book, but only her family called her beatriz. the sound of her birth name on their lips producing goose flesh as easy as the creak of a door in a house void of people. it had been a wise, yet impulsive, decision she’d made prior to her first publication that, were she to gain any small fame at all, she might like to keep some part of herself to herself. that she might want to some day found her own world absent of perfection without them. if nothing else, she could at least have her name and that small piece of autonomy and power that came with keeping it safe someday on the lips and hearts of her siblings, even if many of them did not appreciate or understand her chosen subject matter.

diego and paola met in artemisa, cuba in diego’s dental practice. paola was a dental hygienist with dreams of modelling and diego thought she had the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen. the pair were perfection, because they were both obsessed with perfection. despite the infidelity, no one could find a single flaw between them. beatriz was born eight months later and diego thought she and paola could offer him a more beautiful life than the one he already had. no hairs out of place, no stains on white couches. beautiful enough that he left his wife, and the children he’d already had with her, bringing his new bride and daughter to el paso, texas where they could start anew.

since the very first book, beatriz devoured the written word. she read every book she could get her hands on. she read in spanish and english. she read poetry and prose. she read history and the classics and all of shakespeare’s collected works by the time she was ten. it was stories like macbeth and the raven she loved most and she searched for their peers. disturbed by their daughter’s love of the macabre, paola threw out her stephen king paperbacks as easily as she found them and diego insisted she read more sophisticated authors. her parents’ efforts did little to sway her and, as her siblings were born after her, she was able to fly under their radar a little more with each birth.

a nervous child since birth, her parents control and idiosyncrasies only served to worsen her anxieties. allowance was not freely given to be spent; purchases had to be reviewed with both parents for approval. she became afraid to step out of line and yet she stepped on every crack in the sidewalk on her daily walk home from school. not because she believed some playground rhyme, but just to spite them. just to feel the imperfection underfoot as she plastered on her wooden smile. reading was her greatest escape and the school library her only refuge. it was there she discovered terrifying covers and flawed heroes. there was comfort in the frightening fantasies spun by horror greats. whatever her worries were, they were never as intimidating as the battle of good versus evil in the stand or the serial terror of books of blood. soon she was writing her own stories–sending shivers up the spines of girls at slumber parties and earning concerned, but approving glances from her creative writing teachers.

despite their dislike of her interests, both diego and paola were loving and supportive, they told her so. there was a long list of careers they had planned for her. she could follow in her father’s footsteps, she could be a model and fulfill her mother’s dreams, she could become a doctor, a lawyer, or go to business school like her uncle. and none among the prestigious careers laid out for her included horror writer. they stroked her hair and assured her it was not her fault when they finally split during her sophomore year in high school. in some ways, it only served to make things worse, but their divorce made it even easier to pursue her passion for writing. they were so focused on sabotaging each other’s happiness, she could easily slither through the cracks. finding herself with a hefty acceptance letter to sarah lawrence, where she’d always dreamed she’d go to escape the monotony and control of life in a dentist’s household in order to become who she’d always dreamed she could be.

college never felt pointless, despite meeting some of the same attitudes shared by her parents–one of the only things they could still agree upon. the nervousness that had driven her to the macabre seemed to dissipate the more she wrote about it. the more she wrote, the more she had to keep going and her first collection of short stories–her thesis project–was published the year she graduated. touted in the horror circles as a debut success, beatriz found herself in a whirlwind and, while her parents refused to read her work they did their best to support her; they told all their friends that they’d always pushed her to write. it burned that she couldn’t share everything she loved with them. that her place in the family was largely tied to her success. even her siblings seemed more afraid of stepping out of line than they did a desire to step out from underneath the reyes patriarch’s heavy thumb. and, as her success grew with each book, she felt further and further away from them. ramira reyes was a household name, but beatriz was the name she left behind with her family.

the distance only grew with her busy schedule and, as christmas neared, she found herself unable to travel back home under the threat of a new deadline for her latest tale of terror. procrastination became seductive with every daily distraction, and she found herself caught up in movie deal negotiations and parties. parties with people who were rarely critical of her, bathing her in the afterglow of sycophantic, unconditional love. after one such night out in a string of forgettable nights, she found herself drunk and lost in a subway car that felt eerily like midnight meat train with a broken phone and lost wallet. it was that morning, when she sat in a diner with last night’s party dress and smudged eyeliner, that she decided it was time to unplug. it was time to be scared again and it was time to write.

the loft apartment didn’t take long to sublet, nor did it take much time for her to pack. ramira had no idea where she was going, but she’d seen some rumors online about the mysterious town of boot hill, arizona and it seemed like the perfect place to unplug and be inspired. she sent her mother and father an email, apologizing to them that she’d likely miss christmas this year, but would make sure to come and see them all in el paso when she’d finished her book. the words were as wooden as her childhood smiles; nothing sounded worse than another christmas back home in el paso.

the flight wasn’t too long, but she was exhausted by the time she got into the rental car. assured by several people along the way that boot hill was simply an urban legend, ramira shrugged them off. it didn’t matter really. boot hill was more of an idea to her than a real place. as long as she found some small town where nobody knew her name and she wouldn’t be tempted by new york city nightlife, she was pretty sure she’d manage. maybe it wasn’t a real place, she thought dreamily, turning the dial on the rental car’s radio as she lost service, after following the directions she’d read on reddit and finding nothing. she could swear to god there’s no southbound highway and she’s barely able to keep awake any longer without any music, even with both windows rolled down.

it seems like it’s time to pull over at the next rest stop and catch some shut eye when she sees the sign. BOOT HILL, ARIZONA. IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME NOW! the quaint kitschiness makes her exhale sharply in amusement. fuck you, creepy gas station clerk, she thinks, tightening her knuckles at ten and two on the wheel with renewed resolve. i’m going to write a new bestseller in this town. white knuckled and red eyed, she drives on with the renewed energy of a second wind.

as a small smattering of lights appear in front of her, she can hardly hear the call of something sinister in the outskirts as she drives on. her phone still doesn’t have service, as she looks for an airbnb, but it doesn’t even bother her that she can’t call anyone to let them know she’s made it safely. hell, her publisher will probably lose his marbles until she sends him a draft, but all of that can wait. there’s something so calming about the sleepy town waking up in the wee hours of the morning. there’s something so magical about the pace of this place and ramira thinks, maybe she could write all her books in this town. maybe this is somewhere she belongs.

[truthbeetoldmedia]

iZombie 5x05 "Death Moves Pretty Fast" Review

This week’s iZombie proved that the show is capable of juggling its varying tone as well as make some significant plot advancements, making it one of the strongest episodes of the final season so far.

Our victim this week is a wealthy high schooler, Harris, who moonlights as a radio DJ. Having more money than he knows what to do with, he throws an elaborate 80’s themed party at his house. An investment at Bitcoin paid him out so well that he happens to be neighbors with the most untouchable man in New Seattle, Blaine DeBeers. The noise from the party begins to interrupt Blaine’s wooing of Al, and so he threatens Harris. Just a few hours later, the door to Harris’ sauna is screwed shut with him inside, exposing him to severe hyperthermia.

While investigating the crime scene, Clive slips and throws out his back, leaving this case up to Liv and Ravi. “Liv’s an OG Zombie, and I once took a kickboxing class,” Ravi reassures him. Liv turns Harris’ brain into bite size dumplings, and the brain hits just as Ravi is expressing anxiety about Isobel’s obituary. It includes the bit about how Isobel’s brain produced a cure, and Ravi is worried the story is going to go viral. Liv is having none of his moping, and transforms into a goofy Ferris Bueller-ish high schooler.

When Liv and Ravi visit Blaine’s house and question him about Harris’ murder, Al overhears. “They just popped by to see if I committed a murder. We do this every few months,” Blaine shrugs. In order to follow up, Al pays a visit to them in the morgue. Liv rarely has any problems with leaving her leftovers on the counter, but this time, their guest sneaks a bite. Al is still investigating Blaine, and it’s obvious she’s hoping to spark a vision from Harris’ memory to get a scoop on him. She asks Liv and Ravi if Blaine was ever investigated for Mayor Baracus’ murder. When she leaves, Ravi and Liv point fingers at each other, telling each other that they had a hunch Blaine was behind the slaying. Ravi mentions that he’s sick of how Blaine basically has New Seattle in a chokehold. 10,000 zombies all rely on the brains that he smuggles, which gives him a pretty unfair monopoly. It doesn’t help that he’s also a dastardly villain who will never change. Ravi makes a good point that Blaine shouldn’t be above the law, even if he is necessary to the survival of the city.

Their investigation leads them to Harris’ girlfriend, Amy, and Amy’s ex, Jamie. The three were in a complicated zombie-human love triangle, and Harris purchased Amy a zombie cure off the black market so they could be together. When Liv and Ravi go to question the two of them about this, it appears that Jamie lost his memory. It strikes Ravi as odd. “One does not catch dementia. It’s not like a cold. And zombies don’t catch things anyway,” he says.

It turns out that our rebel human groups are getting more and more clever. Dolly Durkins and her crew have robbed graves of Alzheimer patients, and poisoned FG’s brain supply. Even Major is affected. During a meeting with French Inspector Enzo, his vision is blurred and he can barely string two sentences together. Enzo takes advantage of this, and sends water cannons to attack the humans who are barcading the brain supply. It just gives Fillmore Graves even more bad press, and more damage control for Major. Enzo is such a strange character to me. It’s never clear where his motivations lie, or even what’s in it for him. His loyalty to Chase Graves hasn’t gotten him anywhere, and has led him to create some nonsensical allies. When Major gets his senses back, he punishes Enzo for riling up tensions between New Seattle and Fillmore Graves, and sends him to The Box to be frozen. This reveals another problem — the traitor FG zombies who were recruited by Shady Zombie Man were discovered missing, along with 17 other frozen zombies. We still don’t know who he is or what his plan is, but we cut to a shot of a “full Romero zombie.” Is Shady Zombie Man curating an army of them?

The murder plot wraps up with a hilarious scene of Vampire Steve dressed as Harris to draw out the killer. It turns out to be Harris’ best friend, who was tired of being his sidekick. “I was supposed to be visiting colleges when the wall went up, but instead I’m stuck here,” he says. While the murder and the killer might have been inconsequential overall, Harris’ brain does give Liv a pretty crucial vision — Don E in disguise, delivering the black market cure to Harris and Amy. Lucky for Al, she has the same exact vision — and it gives her the link she needs to connect Blaine to Baracus.

Al confronts Peyton, asking her to comment on a few “housekeeping” issues. She brings up the events of Meet Cute, cites other crimes, and questions their former sexual relationship. “I can’t believe you fell for his whole thing. You couldn’t see through it?” she says to Peyton. Okay Al, very fair question. One we were all asking ourselves a few seasons ago. It was a dark time. But that’s hardly helpful now! Al’s profile of Blaine is explosive, and comes at bad timing. Peyton was about to take a trip to DC to advocate on New Seattle’s behalf, and a story like this makes things a little difficult to defend. I’m not sure how Blaine is going to salvage his reputation, or if Peyton can spin this in front of the politicians she’s meeting with.

Another story going viral? AP picked up the Freylich Syndrome story. Liv walks in on a tearful Ravi who worries that all the Freylich victims are in danger of being targeted, now that everyone is aware of the gold mine in their brains. We see Blaine get distracted from his own profile to click on a news alert about the story — will he try to shoehorn his way into the team to help Ravi create a legitimate cure?

Final thoughts:

This episode had so many understated one-liners that had me chuckling the whole episode

Having Liv FaceTime Clive in order for her to “break the fourth wall” was such a clever way to directly address the camera without completely throwing out the structure of the show. Also, I loved when Clive was loopy on pain medicine and decided to join in the interrogation.

“Anyway, you complete me. See you later.” I love how close Ravi and Major have grown over these last five seasons.

Without a doubt, Vampire Steve is the MVP of this episode.

“Vive Chase Graves.” “Whatever.” Same, Major.

I love it when Ravi shows his soft side! It’s clear that Isobel’s life and death really had an impact on him, and I’m glad to see the ways they are carrying it over into this season.

Haley’s episode rating: 🐝🐝🐝🐝

iZombie airs Thursdays at 9/8c on the CW.

[abrilliantarchive]

HOW TO BE HAPPY: A Brief Guide for Citizens [Part 1 of 4]

(I haven’t seen this written out anywhere yet, so I thought it might be useful to the WHF community as a whole to have a full transcript for the We Happy Few Handbook found in the time capsule. SO with no further adieu) 

                                           INTRODUCTION.                                          - BY UNCLE JACK -

If you want to be happy, you’ve come to the right place because Wellington Wells is surely the happiest place on earth! If you do just as everyone else is doing and take your Joy, you’ll have a splendid time!

One of the reasons we’re so happy is that we take Joy to help us forget the past. If you can’t remember the past, then you won’t make the same mistake again! So start thinking of all the fun you can have today!

Our Executive Committee has graciously prepared this little book to help you enjoy life to the fullest. Whatever your interests - gardening, fashion, sports, you name it - your bound to find it in Wellington Wells. 

So as you’re reading this book, be sure to smile at just how lucky we are to be in Wellington Wells, where there are always rainbows after the rain, and no one ever feels hungry or sad. Are you smiling right now? That’s how you can tell you’ve had enough Joy. But just to be sure, why not pop another Joy right now? 

     A BREIF, HAPPY HISTORY OF WELLINGTON WELLS.

Wellington Wells has always been a delightful place! People have been having a splendid time here for centuries.

PAGAN BRITAIN.      Wellington Wells boast an ancient henge, which local scholars believe to have been the site of much prehistoric merriment. Until recently, people wrongfully believed the pagans practiced human sacrifice here, but we now know their rituals was more like a game of duck-duck-goose. 

DARK AGES.      Very little is known about the Dark Ages, as very little was written down during this time - perhaps because it was too dark to see to write. However, archaeologists have discovered evidence of a medieval tavern on Rat Holm, so we know that Dark Age Wellies already knew how to have a good time!

NORMAN CONQUEST.      William the Conqueror came to England in 1066, most likely because he was bored with France and its rich sauces. A little known fact: many people believe William the Conqueror’s name was Norman, but it’s actually William. Be sure to impress your friends with this tidbit!

TUDOR ERA.      The Tudor period is best known for it’s quaint half-timbre architecture and the easing of divorce regulations - both of which we can still enjoy today.

THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION.      The name says it all, doesn’t it?

VICTORIAN ERA.      Queen Victoria is famous for being easily amused - at least, that is what local scholars believe. Many of our loveliest buildings in the Parade date to the Victorian era. Queen Victoria loved parades. At least, we think she did. At any rate, we love a good parade, don’t we?

20TH CENTURY.      From the turn-of-the-century through the 1930s, Britain enjoyed decades of great progress. The 1950s are an even more impressive golden age of technology - most notably with the inventions of Joy and Motilene. ( Very little is known about the 1940s, because it was much too long ago for anybody to remember! )

                    HAPPY WELLIES AREN’T ALL ALIKE!

Citizens of Wellington Wells have a variety of hobbies and interest that keep them feeling chipper. Maybe one of them will inspire you!

THE BOBBIES.      The Bobbies enjoy whistling and improving their vocabulary. According to Constable Constable, a Word of The Day Calendar in the Bobbies’ dressing rom “permits us to ameliorate our epistemological erudition whilst arraying ourselves in sartorial, uh, uniforms.”

TABITHA DAINTY.      Mrs. Dainty, a resident of the Thomasina House, gets great satisfaction from her many cats - except for a certain naughty cat named Sebastian who hides and won’t eat his cake. Mrs. Dainty passes the time doing needlepoint and washing the windows whenever the Bobbies are exercising shirtless outside her house. 

HARRY PLANTAGENET AND CLIVE BIRTWHISTLE.      Harry Plantagenet and Clive Birtwhistle enjoy tracing their family’s genealogy, as they are both have royal blood. Says Plantagenet, “It does give one such a sense of pride to have been born to the right sort!”

DAVEY HACKNEY.      Fashion maven Davey Hackney enjoys both modern design and the elegant historic houses of the Parade District. “I can appreciate elegance from all eras,” he says. Unfortunately, he is not fond of the new vogue for Brutalist architecture, so he wears a pair of horse pair of horse blinders to block out any offending structures. Clever lad!

JOHNNY BOLTON.       Bolton is known as the rather serious chap who ran the Cryptology Intelligence Division during the unpleasantness with the Germans. But even Bolton manages to unwind. He finds advanced mathematics especially relaxing; his hobby is trying to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem. “I’ve always had a knack for seeing patterns others can’t see,” Bolton says. In his spare time, he also enjoys the cinema and detective stories. 

MARGERY FLOWERDEW.      Margery Flowerdew enjoys working in her garden. Gardening is something her family is famous for, though she can’t remember why - “We must have won some prizes or some such.” Her favourite flowers are roses, though she confesses to living all flowers, except for foxglove.

VANESSA TINKER-BELL      Literary luminary Venessa Tinker-Bell is the director of the Bloomsbury Road Lending Library. Venessa’s scholarly research recently proved that Shakespeare’s tragedies were actually intended as comedies. “Titus Andronicus is especially hilarious,” she laughs. In her role as editor of the Hamlyn Abridged Classics, she is adapting literary masterpieces so as to remove the unhappy parts, “because no one wants a book that makes them glum!” Her current project is the happy version of Les Miserables.

A SELECTION OF HAPPY WELLIES      So as you see, there are as many way to be happy as there are people in Wellington Wells! What makes YOU happy? Why not make a lists? We’ve already filled in the first item for you! (It’s Joy, of course).

[laurabelle2930]

At Last... An Olicity fic inspired by @mel-loves-all

Okay so my dear and amazing friend @mel-loves-all has been making these amazing mood boards. I was so inspired by this Mood Board that I asked if I could write this fic. She agreed so here it is! The song “At Last” is by Etta James. The mistakes are all mine and once again the idea came from Mel! 

Link to the Mood Board is posted above and below: 

https://mel-loves-all.tumblr.com/post/175888837918/olicity-modern-au-moodboard-oliver-queen-owner

Read it here or on AO3

“At Last” 

Two Months...

That’s how long Oliver Queen had been troubled, beguiled, inspired and, tortured by the woman at the end his bar… Oliver felt Tommy’s hand fall over his slumped shoulder before a soft, “Ollie are you ever going to give Clive back his weekend shifts?” left his signature smirk.

“It’s complicated,” Oliver managed to croak before his forehead fell to his forearm and, everything around him began to slowly blur….

Two Months Ago…

Every story has a beginning and, this tale was no exception. Oliver’s problem began about five years ago when he and his best friend Tommy Merlyn decided to thwart their parents expectations and, go into business together. Tommy’s father was Malcolm Merlyn and Oliver’s was Robert Queen. Both men were CEO’s of global companies and, both men wanted their sons on their respective thrones.

Oliver and Tommy both graduated with honors from Yale business school even though they both found the business world unbearable. They both wanted to make their father’s proud but, neither of them wanted the life that was laid out before them. It was a random act of fate that created the life they now thrived in.

The idea for the club was formed when Oliver met his father at an abandoned factory before they went for a late lunch. The building then was a condemned pile of steel and drywall but, all Oliver could see was the potential for more. Robert’s plan was to encourage Oliver’s creative thinking skills. Robert hoped that Oliver would find the buildings business potential. Robert never thought his son would see Verdant; Starling City’s most popular jazz club in nearly twenty years.

The details for how both Robert and Malcolm were convinced to loan them the seed money was long and tedious but, needless to say the money was granted and, both men were determined to succeed.

Now after five years Verdant was thriving. Oliver and Tommy had been smart enough to book established acts while also encouraging unknown talent. Weekends we're for the big names like the “Lyla Michaels Experience”. On the weekdays they held open mic nights for the local artists who were hoping to spread their wings by singing/performing for a live audience. The club itself was a two story building with wide open spaces and, windows to spare. In order to give the club a more intimate feel they’d filled the empty spaces of the first floor with oversized leather couches and comfortable oversized chairs to match. The cement floors were covered with dark hardwood panels and the walls were painted with hues of black, gray and green. The front doors had stained glass panels that glittered in the sunlight and, even glowed in the moonlight. The entire back wall was filled with floor to ceiling windows that let the world in both during the night and the day.  

Up against those windows was the stage. The dance floor of course was in front of the stage with small tables positioned at the edges for ease of access. The second floor held Oliver and Tommy’s offices, the employee break room and, another 40 tables for the patrons who’d rather listen than dance.

They had a small but, responsible staff that was made up of friends and family.  Sara Lance bartender and server extraordinaire was the younger sister of Laurel Lance who had once been in a relationship with Tommy. The romantic relationship between Laurel and Tommy ended but, the friendship between Laurel, Tommy and even Sara remained. Sara and Tommy had over the years become the best of friends. They’re bond was even strong enough that they eventually became sometime roommates whenever either of them was newly single. Clive their weekend bartender was an old classmate and Oliver’s college roommate. Oliver’s younger sister Thea was a server, her husband of a year Roy was another bartender. Even Laurel the attorney by day picked up a serving shift for extra cash about twice a week. Oliver and Tommy served as both bartenders and servers when needed but, the club while large always felt small and, intimate.

The night everything changed began with Oliver in a panic. No scratch that Oliver was just plain pissed off. His stormy blue eyes fell to his watch as the phone rang for the third time. He mumbled as the small hand inched toward the small, italic five. The front door’s were beginning to swing back and forth steadily as the night crowd began to move through the dimly lit room.

His soft mumbled, “Of all the nights for my bartender to be sick,” went unnoticed while the room around him slowly began to fill.

The phone rang for the fifth time. Oliver’s patience was nearly gone when to his dismay a very sick sounding voice gargled out a weak, “Ollie please don’t be mad…”

His heart sank to his stomach as a whispered, “Please don’t tell me you and, Clive are both sick?” fell from his frowning lips.

The voice on the other end of the phone coughed out a weak, “Yes and, before you ask no.”

Oliver’s frown grew. He knew what that no meant and, yet he still groaned, “Oh come on Tommy! Sara can’t still be angry about that? It was one drunk guy and, we both had him thrown out!”

His sick friend and, business partner let out a weak sounding laugh as he replied, “She is and, you’re not the one she’s currently living with!

Oliver’s brow crinkled when he realized what he’d have to do. “You realize I haven’t had to bar-tend in almost three years don’t you?

Oliver’s question must have fallen on deaf ears because the only reply he received was a soft, “You got this…” before the line went silent.

Oliver hung up in defeat as the once silent room began to almost glow with the sounds of laughter and, excitement at what the night before them could hold.  The only person who wasn’t excited was him.

With resignation Oliver began to set up the bar. He checked to make sure the booze was out and each bottle was full. He had a selection of white wines chilling and, a selection of reds placed along the back of the bar rail. The kegs were full, the bar snacks were out, and each station had a full array of bar napkins and sipping straws.

He glanced at his watch, it was now 5:15. The rush wouldn't begin until after 6. Oliver than glanced towards the stage. Lyla and her husband John were already getting set up for their first set. Lyla was in her signature dark green, strapless dress. Her short brown hair was gelled back, her makeup was minimal and as always she looked stunning. John wore his signature black vest with a white button up shirt underneath. His ebony skin glowed beneath the green and white spotlights that would change color as they went through each set.

As he watched them he marveled at the depth of love and respect that seemed to flow through every movement they made. When he first booked Lyla she was a one woman show. She packed the house but, Oliver always felt that she seemed lonely. About two years after they opened Oliver hired John to play the piano for the weekday open mic performers. They only met because Lyla stopped by to check out her local competition. The moment their eyes locked Oliver swore their hearts began to beat as one. Lyla waved when she caught him staring. Oliver smiled and waved back. She then went back to what she’d been doing and, Oliver did the same.  

Around 5:45 people began to arrive in droves. Oliver had Thea and Sara serving the upstairs patrons with Roy posted as their upstairs bartender. Oliver handled the main bar and the droves of thirsty customers. Thankfully, Laurel offered to come in and handle the downstairs tables which Oliver gladly accepted. Even though he was busy Oliver caught the first few lines of Lyla’s opening song before he was lost in the crush of incoming drink orders that seemed to swirl around him like an impending Typhoon. Oliver remained lost in the violent storm until he heard her first words...

“So what's better? A vodka cranberry or a Cosmo?”

Oliver's glance shot upwards from the sea of tickets and towards the sound of heaven. His heart slammed along his chest like thunder roars through the skies when he saw who owned the voice that silenced the storm all around him. She wasn't breathtaking, she was beyond that. She was love at first sight and, Oliver was stupefied by his reaction. He couldn't believe that she'd literally stolen his heart with a few simple words. He was drawn in by how her bright, pink hair fell along the angles of her oval shaped face in short ringlets. Her lips matched her hair, her blue eyes swam with warmth and amusement as they continued to stare at the other in an oddly comfortable silence. Oliver gulped as his own blue eyes traveled along the lines of her slender yet toned figure. Her black leather pants made her pink, leather halter top pop as she slowly placed her pink nails along the edge of the bar rail.

She smiled as she cocked her head and his heart dropped down to his aching toes. Her blue eyes glittered in amusement as she breathed, “Since you've gone silent I'll take the Cosmo,”. Oliver gaped but, nothing more occurred. He seemed to be frozen while the woman before him was beginning to walk away. He saw her fingers slipping along the edge of the bar. His heart suddenly was lodged in his throat. She moved them down off the rail and towards her purse. She then fished out a ten and a five dollar bill. She placed them on the bar, her tempting fingers were within reach and, all he could do was gulp as she whispered, “That should take care of it.”

By the time Oliver could manage a simple, “Okay,” she was already seated at the end of the bar. Oliver made her drink and then flagged down Laurel so she'd deliver it.

Laurel gave him an odd look which he shrugged away before returning his attentions to the other patrons around them. The night wore on like an endless wave as they very carefully traded hidden looks. He'd glance at how she swayed along the bar stool. She in turn seemed to smile secretly everytime she rebuffed any man or woman who was brave enough to even say hello. Yes Oliver watched her throughout the endless night. He watched as she ensnared her many victims only to leave them longing for the simple caress of her passing glance.

As the night came to close and, the club was beginning to empty Oliver felt something burning along his skin. He ignored the prickling sensation until his skin nearly erupted into flames. When he finally dared to seek out the source of his oddly enjoyable pain all he could find was a pair of sparkling blue eyes...

Current day…

“And that's how's it been every weekend for the past two months. This damn woman floats into my life like a flame and by the end of Sunday night she's gone,” Oliver lamented while once again “The Lyla Michaels Experience” began to take the stage.

“So you’ve taken Clive’s shifts so you can what feel her gaze fall upon you throughout the evening?” Tommy quired in utter amusement.

Oliver’s eyes rose to the ceiling in exasperation. “So what if I do. I’m addicted to how she makes me feel and I’ve yet to even share a single word with her…” he breathed in relief.

Tommy's mouth fell open with the obvious solution until Oliver swore he could see the tops of his expanding lungs. “Don't say it…” Oliver begged. “She's turned down everyone…’

“You're kidding?” Tommy quipped as Oliver's pink leather wearing siren song began moving through the front doors.

Oliver felt the familiar fire of her glance beginning to travel along his arched spine. His heart fluttered as her voice broke through the growing crowd. “Cosmo as usual,” she stated before she slipped her payment towards his waiting hand. He nodded and began to gather his necessary supplies. Tommy watched as the nameless woman took her usual seat and chuckled when she shot down two men in five seconds.

“Does she always look like that and, does she always pay in cash?”

Oliver mumbled a gruff, “Yes…” then once again flagged down Laurel.

Laurel appeared with her knowing smirk yet remained mum as she took the chilled glass to a pair of waiting lips.

“Does she always stare at you like that?”

Oliver was about to shout back “Yes, why do you think I’m taking these damn shifts” but, was stopped when the ache along his spine began to burn through his veins. He risked a glance…

His heart thudded madly when he saw her lips curve into a very soft smile. “She's gonna rip me to shreds…” Oliver lamented once he realized he couldn’t avoid her any longer.  

“Yeah,” Tommy agreed before he softly added, “or she's going to let Clive bar-tend again on the weekends.” Oliver glanced at friend begging for mercy. Tommy simply pushed him forward with a smirk and a stern, “Falling in love wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world would it?”

“I'm going to regret this….” Oliver breathed before he took his first step towards fate.

Lyla's voice moved like silk through the air between them. He began to measure his steps as John's fingers began to dance along the  ivories. His pink haired temptress kept her eyes  locked on his own as he slowly began to move toward her. She bit at her lower lip as the room began to grow quiet.

Oliver's stomach rolled when the chorus of his life for the past two months began to fill the room with spontaneous energy. Oliver glanced at the few couples dancing slowly as Lyla gently began to sing…

“At last, my love has come along. My lonely days are over and life is like a song…”

“Etta James is always a brave choice for any singer don't you agree?”

Oliver gulped as he placed his timid hand along the bar. She batted her bright, blue eyes while she slowly cocked her head. “Are you always this timid or are you trying to lure me into a false sense of security?” she asked once a minute of silence had passed.

Oliver mumbled, “Yes to the first and no to the second.”

“So you can speak,” she teased as Lyla began the second verse.

Oliver's eyes fell to the floor. Hers remained locked on his downfallen face while he murmured, “And you can apparently carry on more than a two sentence conversation.”

He felt her gaze washing over him. His skin burned as she slipped her index finger along the rim of her cocktail glass. The silence between them grew into a heated exchange once Oliver dared to meet her gaze. The air around them crackled as Lyla’s voice began to reach the climax of the song. Oliver's heart raced, his skin blazed with unseen flames as she searched his soul with her eyes. He felt exposed, naked and, afraid as she slipped through his heart and began to travel through his soul.

The crowd began to clap as Oliver's breathing began to increase. He nearly begged for her next words but remained frozen as her lips slipped into an delighted yet playful smile. “I can carry out a conversation if the person I’m talking to is the right one…” she offered before she slid her used bar napkin forward.

“What game are you playing?” Oliver breathed as the cold pads of her fingers gently moved across his own.

She smirked coyly, “Let's see if you can figure it out,”

Then like lightning had split the ground between them she left leaving him sputtering for the words to make her stop in her wake. Oliver quickly unfolded the paper. His fingers slipped over the condensation filled paper as his eyes scanned over her delicate print.

There was one word… and it was the only word he needed to be motivated to run…

Oliver swept through the crowds of happy people around him. He heard Tommy and Sara teasing Laurel about her latest disaster of a date. He saw Thea and Roy holding hands in the back corner as they watched the patrons before them. He felt a thousand eyes falling all around him as he came barreling through the front doors and, out onto the damp street.

Oliver scanned the crowds of future guests and, even a few who’d chosen to leave for the night. His feet skimmed over the surface of the rain covered streets until once again his skin began to prickle before the burn of anticipation moved through his suddenly very steady heart.

Oliver’s heart once again quickened as he hollered out the sole thing that had made him run… He hollered out a breathless, “Felicity!” once he caught the sight of her pink curls bouncing along the nape of her delicate neck.

Felicity froze, which caused Oliver to once again run. He ran as the weather once again turned to rain. He ran and didn't stop until his forearm was securely around her waist. Felicity turned until they were face to face. Her dazzling blue eyes made the world around him fall away as she said,  “So tell me bartender boy why did I choose you after I rejected so many others?”

Oliver slid his fingers along the curve of her delicate cheekbone until he had his thumb pressed along her quivering bottom lip. He grinned almost proudly. Felicity’s tongue darted out along the pad of his thumb making his heart quicken and still all at once.

“Are you always this confident?” Oliver pressed once he felt Felicity’s arms beginning to encircle his waist.

She pressed a chaste kiss to his thumb pad as she whispered, “Does it always take you two months to make a move?”

Oliver’s forehead fell to the crown of Felicity’s head, “If I’d known you’d accept my advances I might have given my bartender his shifts back…” he breathed as his eyes slid shut.

Felicity’s fingers squeezed along his sides. Oliver heard Lyla’s voice floating through the open doors of Verdant. The rain around them started to quicken, the once pleasant drizzle was becoming an all out downpour as Felicity’s lips began to move along his skin. “If you’re not the bartender who are you then?” she asked for once in genuine wonder.

Oliver bit back a chuckle as they began to sway beneath the falling rain. “I’m the guy who met a girl who’s heartbeat matched my own…”

Felicity moved her nose along his, “Nice line,” she smirked.

“Well it only took me two months to say,” Oliver chuckled swiftly.

“True,” Felicity mused before adding, “but, that doesn’t tell me who you are?” Her assertions came as she moved her hands up the sides of his now drenched black shirt.

Oliver placed a timid kiss to her cheek then breathed, “I’m the owner of the club and my name is…”

“Oliver Queen,” Felicity supplied as they each lifted their eyes towards the stormy skies.

“You knew this entire time didn’t you?” Oliver asked almost breathlessly.

She nodded her forehead along his own as she breathed, “I’ve been coming to the club for years. I’d seen you but up until about two months ago you’d never seen me…”

Oliver’s stomach once again flipped, “Well you’ve clearly made up for lost time,” he moaned as their bodies began to sway to the beat of the falling rain.

“I thought the confidence would spark your interest,” she laughed as her lips slid along his jaw.

“You’re not going to make this easy are you?” Oliver breathed as something inside his stomach began to flutter with the unknown feeling of contentment.

Felicity wrinkled her nose as she leaned forward. Oliver closed the distance between them slowly as she answered with a soft sounding, “You’re the one that made it complicated…”

Oliver’s lips began to cover hers while he murmured, “How did I do that?”

She kissed him softly and, Oliver’s heart nearly plummeted to the ground. He felt her laughter through his skin as she whispered along his upper lip, “You made it complicated when you took two months to say a damn word…”

Oliver was about to refute her claim but, before he could form another word the heaven’s above them opened leaving them drenched and, smiling while Felicity continued to kiss him as they simply danced in the rain.  

Tagging: 

@michealajulius @blondeeoneexox @relativelyobsessedfangirl @thebookjumper @emmaamelia95 @hope-for-olicity @coal000 @missyriver @supersillyanddorky06 @mel-loves-all @love2luvyyou @memcjo @smoakingarrow19 @independent-fics @green-arrows-of-karamel @blondiegrl00 @it-was-a-red-heeler @diggo26 @charlinert @oliverfel4 @swordandarrow @scu11y22 @vaelisamaza @ireland1733 @redpensandgreenarrows @emmilynestill @rivaroma23 @miriam1779 @jaspertown @marytagus @onceuponarrow @lalawo1 @pleasantfanandstudent @alemap74 @kathrynelizabeth89 @sweetzcupcake @jedichick04 @nalla-madness @quiveringbunny @mrsbubblelee @olicitylovemaking @almondblossomme @befitandchase @pimsiepim @andjustforthismoment @anonymiss118 @thelockpickingvictorian @yet-i-remain-quiet @lexi9515 @marniforolicity @myhauntedblacksoul @myuntetheredsoul @felicity-said-just-in-case @i-m-a-fan-world @danski15 @emilyp05 @missafairy @cainc3 @captainolicitysbedroom @yespleasehawkeyee @tdgal1 @wherethereissmoak 

[bethgreeneishopeunseen]

First of all, same name! Lol. I have been following your page for countless months and I was obviously skeptical at first, but I say there’s no way beth isn’t coming back now. Do you ever have any doubts? Like they may be doing all those small things to mess with us and she’s not coming back? No one in my family believes that she’s coming back except for my sister, who believes as much as I do. Also, totally agree with Daryl falling to his knees in tears at the sight of her. I’m so ready!

Hi there! Thank you for all of your continued support, I’m so glad to see that my blog is helping. :)

Personally, I don’t have doubts. There’s just too much evidence from various angles on and offscreen. It’s the size of a mountain range, and the Beth connections haven’t stopped. They’ve only grown stronger, more direct, and more frequent rather than slowed down. Your concern is one many TDers have had in the past and still do, but I have been around for a long time. AMC would never troll Beth fans. EVER. Not in the way you’re referring to. AMC would not be pouring valuable time, money, and resources into keeping Beth’s story alive on and offscreen just to get us to watch. For one thing, this isn’t high school and TPTB aren’t that juvenile. They are trying to tell a powerful story about hope, trauma, and family. They also do not need to remind us of Beth and how strong she is because we don’t need to be convinced. We aren’t their target audience. They want to keep Beth alive, in the back of the minds, of general viewers. From a business perspective, Beth fans are a drop in the bucket. Here is a quote from a post @bethgreenewarriorprincess wrote towards the end of the midseason seven hiatus:

“We know the petition to bring back Beth was 65,771 (x). Thanks to the mad math skills of @allatariel we know the average viewership over all the seasons is estimated at 10.7 million viewers. […] That’s an estimated 0.6% of total fans.” (X).

Let that sink in: We comprise less than one percent of viewership. Mathematically and financially we are a blip on the radar, especially in AMC’s eyes. The network is notoriously cheap: for example, they considered cutting Breaking Bad’s last season in half in order to help cover expenses for Mad Men (X). AMC had also TWD’s budget as this was back during production for season 2, which eventually lead to Frank Darabont’s departure. By spending all of this money on Beth, such as all of the missing filming spanning seasons 5 to 7 and social media campaigns, the network is taking money away from other projects.  They’re even diverting attention from other TWD actors and characters. Emily also goes out of her way to promote the show and her “former” role on it, and her music releases align with the show’s schedule. 

Furthermore, the Beth promotion started before Beth was even perceived as nothing more than a redshirt. Right after season 3 ended, CollegeHumor did a TWD-related video that required AMC’s permission, and the video included Beth as a main character, fighting walkers alongside Rick and Daryl, dressed like her future incarnation in 4x10 and 4x11 (X). This would have been at the time the writers were working on scripts and finalizing film schedules for the upcoming summer. (Scripts are started in February: X. The video came out at the beginning of April, which fits as most short videos are shot about a month before they’re aired.)

I’m going to quote one of my favorite movies, Paul. (It’s about two classic nerds who help an alien named Paul escape from the government and reach his people’s ship.) I feel it’s appropriate to the Beth situation:

“Clive: He looks too obvious.Paul: There’s a reason for that, Clive! Over the last 60 years, the human race has been drip fed images of my face, on lunch boxes, and t-shirts and shit.In case our species do meet, you don’t have a fuckin’ spaz attack!”

Essentially, the general audience has been drip fed reminders of Beth so they don’t have a spaz attack once she returns in full. If you would like to read more on all of this business stuff, please check out my related tag: X.

[ramajmedia]

Denzel Washington's 10 Best Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes

Denzel Washington is one of the most dependable stars in Hollywood. If he’s starring in a movie, then there’s a good chance that it’ll be worth watching, if only for his compelling performance. And ever since he started directing his own starring vehicles, like the August Wilson adaptation Fences, he’s become even more reliable.

RELATED: Christian Bale's 10 Best Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes

He’s played all kinds of roles, from the civil rights activist Malcolm X to the drug kingpin Frank Lucas, for all kinds of directors, including Ridley Scott, Spike Lee, Jonathan Demme, and Sidney Lumet. Many of his movies have been spectacular, so here are Denzel Washington’s 10 best movies, according to Rotten Tomatoes.

10 TIE: Inside Man (86%)

Spike Lee directed this intriguing cat-and-mouse thriller about a detective, played by Denzel Washington, investigating a convoluted bank heist pulled off on Wall Street by a criminal mastermind, played by Clive Owen. This movie has an unconventional structure that helps differentiate it from other entries in the formulaic, well-worn heist movie genre.

Spike Lee doesn’t usually make movies with this much mainstream appeal, but the work of an auteur can be seen underneath the typical Hollywood flash. The final gut-punch plot twist might not 100% make sense, but that’s a minor gripe when a thriller is this genuinely thrilling.

9 TIE: Unstoppable (86%)

This action-thriller about a runaway freight train stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as the two guys struggling to stop it. The premise, drawn from the real-life Crazy Eights incident from Ohio in 2001, might sound ridiculous, but in the hands of director Tony Scott, it’s an impeccably crafted thrill-ride.

Mark Bomback’s by-the-numbers script would’ve translated into a by-the-numbers film with a less inspired filmmaker at the helm or less talented actors in the lead roles. However, Scott turns it into something more exciting than its predictable plot and Washington and Pine find the nuances in their underdeveloped characters.

RELATED: 10 Movies To Watch If You Like The Raid

8 TIE: Crimson Tide (88%)

A classic example of a submarine thriller, Crimson Tide is about a standoff on a U.S. nuclear sub. Denzel Washington plays a hotshot new executive officer aboard the sub, while Gene Hackman plays his older commanding officer. The pair’s ideologies clash during the movie’s central skirmish, making it an interesting story about the relationship between its two lead characters, who have to learn to respect one another.

The brilliant Tony Scott directed the movie and Quentin Tarantino did some uncredited contributions to the script, mostly just adding pop culture references to the dialogue (which actually went a long way towards making it more interesting and digestible).

7 TIE: The Mighty Quinn (88%)

This thriller is a two-hander based on the book Finding Maubee. It stars Denzel Washington as a police chief whose childhood friend, played by Robert Townsend, becomes a suspect in a murder case. According to Roger Ebert’s overwhelmingly positive review of The Mighty Quinn, he attributed the whole success of the movie to Washington’s performance, calling it the kind of performance that turns a jobbing actor into a bankable movie star overnight – and that’s exactly what happened.

This is the movie that made Denzel Washington’s career, so it’s no surprise that it is also still considered to be one of his all-time best works.

6 TIE: Devil in a Blue Dress (88%)

This film noir set in 1940s Los Angeles is a fascinating detective story anchored by an incredible performance from Denzel in the role of Easy Rawlins, an everyman investigator who appears in a number of novels written by Walter Mosley. Writer-director Carl Franklin clearly has a lot of respect for Mosley’s work, as he adapts not only the mystery element, but also the historical context of racial tensions from the source material.

Critic James Berardinelli identified this movie as a “Whydunit,” one of the key Hollywood genres identified by screenwriting guru Blake Snyder. Who did the crime isn’t important; it’s why they did it.

5 TIE: Malcolm X (88%)

This biopic of the iconic civil rights activist of the same name is a powerful showcase for Denzel Washington’s talents as an actor. Producer Marvin Worth had to work for 25 years to get the biopic made, having met Malcolm X as a teenager in New York, and the final product is superb enough to make it worth the wait.

While there were initial concerns over director Spike Lee’s use of an artistic license in his depiction of Malcolm X and Denzel Washington’s lack of physical resemblance to X, the movie ultimately does its subject justice, mostly thanks to Washington’s impeccable performance.

4 TIE: A Soldier’s Story (90%)

Since it was only his sophomore screen outing and he wasn’t particularly well-known yet, Denzel Washington only has a minor role in this drama helmed by Norman Jewison, the guy who was originally slated to direct Malcolm X and cast Washington in the lead role in the first place, proving he made a big impression on him when they first worked together.

A Soldier’s Story is a powerful story about racial segregation in the military during World War II as a black U.S. Army officer is sent to investigate the murder of a black sergeant in Louisiana. The movie was showered with praise and awards when it was first released in 1984.

3 TIE: Much Ado About Nothing (90%)

Kenneth Branagh is Hollywood’s go-to guy for Shakespearean film adaptations. This big-screen take on the Bard’s classic comedy Much Ado About Nothing features an all-star cast including Branagh himself, Keanu Reeves, Michael Keaton, Emma Thompson, Kate Beckinsale, and of course, Denzel Washington.

Washington plays Don Pedro, who is noteworthy for being one of the very few single male characters who doesn’t get married by the end (the original meaning of a comedy from Shakespearean times was literally a story that ends with a wedding scene). The great thing about Branagh’s Shakespearean movies is that they make Shakespeare’s plays accessible to mainstream audiences.

RELATED: 10 Best Shakespeare Film Adaptations

2 Fences (92%)

Denzel Washington directed himself in this acclaimed film adaptation of the even more acclaimed August Wilson play of the same name. The movie’s greatest success is Washington’s respect for the source material. He hardly changed the play at all in translating it to the screen, which retained the powerful rawness of Wilson’s words.

Fences is a poignant look at working-class life told from the perspective of a bitter family man with a drinking problem struggling to make end’s meet and earn an honest living. Washington and Viola Davis are mesmerizing in the lead roles, reprising them from the play’s 2010 revival on Broadway.

1 Glory (93%)

Edward Zwick’s historical epic Glory might be the best movie ever made about the American Civil War. It focuses on the second African-American regiment to fight for the Union in the conflict, with Denzel Washington starring alongside Morgan Freeman and Matthew Broderick.

Washington won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the film, so it’s no wonder that it is ranked as his best work by his Rotten Tomatoes scores. In addition to being praised as a great movie, Glory was recognized for its social impact by the Political Film Society and the NAACP Image Awards.

NEXT: Robert De Niro's 10 Best Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes

source https://screenrant.com/denzel-washington-best-movies-rotten-tomatoes/

[makeover-blog1]

Marilyn Manson -2-

NEW: I NOW CREATE MUSIC, JOIN ME ON SOUNDCLOUD!

SHOP: www.icanvas.com/canvas-art-prints/artist/ben-heine

This is a pointillist work I made with yellow, red blue and black ink on paper. I just love Marilyn Manson’s personality and crazy style! Everybody should have an aura…

Please, see my other portrait of Marilyn Manson _______________________________________________

For more information about my art: info@benheine.com _______________________________________________

Biography

Brian Hugh Warner (born January 5, 1969), better known by his stage name Marilyn Manson, is a professional musician. He is the lead singer of the industrial metal band that bears the same name. His stage name is formed from the names Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson.

Brian Hugh Warner was born on January 5th 1969 in Canton, Ohio. He attended Heritage Christian School. After transferring to and later graduating from Canton’s GlenOak High School, Warner moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his family. While living in Fort Lauderdale, he studied journalism and theater at Broward Community College, and became the assistant entertainment editor of BCC’s student newspaper, the Observer.

Romance

Warner’s first serious relationship was with Melissa "Missi" Romero. As explained in his autobiography, during the production of "Antichrist Superstar," Missi became pregnant with Warner’s child, but had an abortion during her second trimester. He has also been linked to Traci Lords and Jenna Jameson. Jameson wrote about her sexual encounter with Manson in her autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale in which she noted him as being "massively endowed". Manson was engaged to Rose McGowan, but their relationship ended around the time he became involved with burlesque dancer and fetish model model Dita Von Teese. Manson photographed Von Teese for the December 2002 issue of Playboy. Manson and Von Teese wed in December 2005 in the Irish home of friend Gottfried Helnwein. Von Teese filed for divorce as of December 2006. The divorce came through in January 2007. In April of 2007, Marilyn Manson’s girlfriend, Evan Rachel Wood, admitted that they were actually a couple.

Marriage

Manson and Dita Von Teese started dating on Manson’s 32nd birthday, and Manson proposed three years later on March 22, 2004. On December 3, 2005 (court documents say November 28), the couple was married in a non-denominational ceremony at Gurteen Castle in Kilsheelan, County Tipperary, Ireland, the home of Gottfried Helnwein. The wedding was officiated by surrealist film director and comic book writer Alejandro Jodorowsky. Dita Von Teese wore a royal purple silk taffeta gown by Vivienne Westwood, complete with train and petticoats worn over a Mr. Pearl couture corset, topped off by a tricorne hat by Stephen Jones, while Manson wore a John Galliano black silk taffeta tuxedo with velvet trim and a hat also crafted by Stephen Jones. They reportedly exchanged vows in front of approximately 60 guests, including burlesque dancer Catherine Delish, Lisa Marie Presley, Eric Szmanda, David Lynch, Jessicka and Christian Hejnal, and Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne. Vogue magazine ran a multiple-page feature on the wedding in its February 2006 issue. Just before his own wedding, Manson criticized Britney Spears’ wedding to Kevin Federline, in which they celebrated by wearing personalized tracksuits: "If you’re going to do something like getting married, it should have a sense of celebration to it. It should be grand and not in tracksuits!"

As of January 30, 2007 Manson and Dita Von Teese reportedly split after her filing for divorce due to "irreconcilable differences" according to Von Teese. ET.com along with People Magazine has claimed that Manson was having an extramarital affair with actress Evan Rachel Wood, which may or may not be the true cause of the split. Manson’s alcohol abuse and distant behaviour have also been cited as cause for the split. It has also been claimed that Manson was not aware of Von Teese’s filing for divorce and moving out of their home at the time that the story was published, conceivably due to his reported stay in Paris, France. Von Teese reportedly took their two cats and two dachshunds, Greta and Eva, with her when she left. Manson fought for custody of the two cats, but only received one of them.

Evan Rachel Wood attended the grand opening of Manson’s new Celebritarian Corporation Gallery of Fine Art and among the most notable artworks were two portraits of Evan. She will also co-star in his upcoming horror film Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll.

In music

Jessicka of the band Jack Off Jill was an early friend of Manson’s, her band opened most of his South Florida shows. He not only produced most of the band’s early recordings but also played guitar on the song "My Cat" and helped name the band. Manson later wrote the liner notes for the band’s album Humid Teenage Mediocrity, a collection of early Jack Off Jill recordings.

In early 1993, after being instructed by his new label, Interscope Records, not to play any local shows, Manson formed Mrs. Scabtree. Mrs. Scabtree was a side project between he and newly hired Jeordie White. Manson played drums, while White (dressed as a black woman) shared vocal duties with then girlfriend Jessicka from Jack Off Jill who wore a blonde wig. Mrs. Scabtree only played two shows in South Florida.

Manson has helped or provided full scores for several major motion pictures, although several of his pieces have been cut, and his name dropped from the credits. Some of his more notable soundtrack score contributions include The Matrix, From Hell and Resident Evil.

Manson appeared as a guest on rapper DMX’s album Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood for the track "The Omen", produced by Swizz Beats, and has performed (with the rest of the band) on stage with Eminem as background music in the song "The Way I Am".

Manson sang vocals on "Break You Down" off of the Washington, DC-based industrial rock band gODHEAD’s 2000 Years of Human Error album. This album is distinguished for being the only one released on Manson’s vanity label Posthuman Records.

In film and television

Manson made a cameo appearance as a doctor in the Murderdolls’ music video "Dead in Hollywood", and also appears in the Nine Inch Nails music video "Starfuckers, Inc.", as well as "Gave Up", and Eminem’s "The Way I Am" music video.

His first appearance in a film was in the role of a pornographic actor in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, in 1997. He also had a minor role in former love interest Rose McGowan’s 1998 film Jawbreaker and a supporting role in 2003’s Party Monster, which is based on the events leading up to and the murder of Angel Melendez by the infamous Michael Alig of club kid fame, where Manson portrayed a psychotic drag queen named Christina . Manson made a cameo appearance in The Hire: Beat the Devil, a short film in the BMW films series (starring Clive Owen as the Driver), which featured James Brown as himself, and Gary Oldman as Satan. His most talked-about film cameo was in the Michael Moore political documentary Bowling for Columbine discussing the motivations of the perpetrators and allegations that his music was somehow a factor. He played himself, in animated form, on an episode of the television series Clone High, in which he sang a song about nutrition and the food pyramid. He is featured prominently throughout Not Another Teen Movie, and covered the song "Tainted Love" for its soundtrack.

His music is frequently featured on the show C.S.I.. The character on the show, Greg Sanders, is a big fan of Manson and the actor who plays him, Eric Szmanda, is a personal friend of Manson’s.

Manson was featured in the 2004 film The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, and was set to appear in Abelcain, directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Living Neon Dreams in 2005, although both of these projects are still unreleased as of 2007. He will also be seen as a bartender in an upcoming vampire movie starring Lucy Liu called Rise and possibly has pending roles in Abelcain, RISE and other projects.

Manson has produced 23 music videos, most of which have gone beyond the scope of a normal performance video and been well received by critics for their imagery and direction. Manson’s three most recent released videos – Personal Jesus, (s)AINT and Heart-Shaped Glasses – were voluntarily funded with his own money (to a sum of $1,500,000) and largely not that of the record company. Manson stated in June 2006 that he saw himself "as more a student of film than of music".

In July 2005, Manson told Rolling Stone that he was shifting his focus from music to filmmaking – "I just don’t think the world is worth putting music into right now. I no longer want to make art that other people–particularly record companies–are turning into a product. I just want to make art."

By 2006 Manson was working on his directorial debut, Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, but has since put the project off until November 2007 to focus on recording Marilyn Manson’s sixth studio album, Eat Me, Drink Me, followed by a world tour. The film is said to feature special effects using a magician rather than computer-generated imagery.

In graphic art

From the beginning Manson has been a recreational painter, the oldest of his surviving pieces dating back to 1995-1996, but it was after his 1998 Grey period that Manson began his career as a watercolour painter. In 1999 he made five-minute concept pieces and sold them to drug dealers with their knowledge that they would accumulate in value over time. Gradually Manson became more drawn to watercolors as an art form in itself, and instead of trading them, kept them and continued to paint at a proficient rate.

This manic creativity resulted in an exhibit for his art, The Golden Age of Grotesque, held at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Centre on between September 13 and 14, 2002. The reaction to his paintings was largely positive with one critic comparing them to Egon Schele’s pieces and describing them as heartfelt and sincerely painted, and Art in America went as far as to liken them to the works of a " psychiatric patient given materials to use as therapy ". Others however saw less merit in the works stating that the value was in the celebrity.

Two years later almost to the day, during September 14 and 15, 2004, Manson held his second exhibit on the first night in Paris and the second in Berlin, Trismegistus, which was also the title of the center piece of the exhibit – a large three headed Christ painted onto an antique wood panel. Again the reception to the works could be described as mixed but was largely in favour of the artist.

Manson opened his own an art gallery, The Celebritarian Corporation Gallery of Fine Art, on October 31, 2006 in Los Angeles for which his third exhibition (by invitation or appointment only after the opening night) was the inaugural show. From April 2 until April 17, 2007 Manson’s recent works were be on show at the Space 39 Modern & Contemporary in Florida.

A coffee table art book is in the works, initially titled The Death of Art. The last given title was Quintif. It will be published by the makers of Flaunt magazine.

40 pieces from this show were ported to the Gallery Brigitte Schenk in Cologne, Germany to be publicly exhibited from June 28 until July 28, 2007. After this they will return to the Space39 Modern & Contemporary Gallery thus leaving Manson’s own gallery in Los Angeles temporarily without his own work until 2008.

The price of Manson’s works has been a somewhat controversial point for fans and critics alike, with most fans realistically unable to afford the paintings save for fine art editions and lithographs. Manson’s prices though are realistic and reasonable considering the long-term value at a time when prices for contemporary art have never been higher.

During his European tour 2007 Manson has exhibited his paintings in Germany, Russia and Switzerland.

In other areas

Manson provided the voice of the alien Edgar in the 2005 first-person shooter video game Area 51, which also featured David Duchovny. Marilyn Manson also appears (as himself) as a playable character in the video game Celebrity Deathmatch. Allegedly, the artist posed nude for photos prior to his rise to fame. The pictures appeared in the March 1999 issue of Honcho.

Professional fallouts

Trent Reznor

One of Manson’s high-profile relationships, the defunct friendship with Trent Reznor, has been marked with mutual bitterness and perhaps vendetta. This started in the mid-90s, when Manson was due to make a track that would appear on the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Lost Highway, but instead Reznor was the one who wrote a song, "The Perfect Drug", for the film. In 1999, it seemed the two artists had patched their differences, as Manson made an appearance in the video for the Nine Inch Nails song "Starfuckers, Inc."

In 2004, Reznor was asked whether he had plans to do any covers; he sarcastically replied, "I was really hoping to do something unique and pertinent – like do an exact copy of "Personal Jesus" – but it was already taken."

In a 2005 interview, Manson said Reznor’s Nothing Records had lost the master recordings of Manson’s first three albums. He implied it was Reznor’s intention, "Now that Nothing Records doesn’t exist, I think there’s only one of two people responsible for that. Out of those two people, there’s only one that really has an opinion of me that is voiced very often."

Twiggy Ramirez

In May 2002 Twiggy Ramirez left the band, citing differences in perspective on the future of the band. He went on to play bass for A Perfect Circle and Nine Inch Nails. During this time, Manson claimed in interviews that he and Ramirez were still close friends, while Ramirez maintained that he rarely spoke to Manson. In an interview in February of 2006 Twiggy stated he was willing to record an album with Marilyn Manson if the right conditions were met. In Autumn 2006, Manson and Ramirez were photographed together at numerous parties in Los Angeles, in amicable poses.

In January 2008 it was announced that Ramirez had reunited with the band as live bassist for the last leg of the Rape of the World tour as well as co-writer of the band’s seventh studio album. In an interview with The Heirophant on January 11, 2008, Manson revealed that the reconciliation with Ramirez was not as abrupt as it initially seemed, and that the two had been occasionally communicating with each other since speaking at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California prior to the Winter European leg of the Rape of the World tour.

John 5

John 5’s reasons for leaving Marilyn Manson were cited as being mutual, despite the mysterious nature of his sudden firing by Manson’s manager in 2004.

John was quoted at the time as saying about the incident, "I don’t know. . . I was nothing but nice to him," he continued. "I never screwed up onstage — well not really badly — and I did everything I could to get along with him. Maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with the fact that I don’t drink or do drugs, and he’s not like that at all. Maybe he held that against me. I don’t know. He never said." John 5 was notorious among fans as being drug and alcohol free.

Before the incident, Manson had assaulted John on stage, notably, Manson kicked John in the face during a televised performance, leading to a brief confrontation in front of a packed and roaring audience (available on YouTube). This was during the intro to "The Beautiful People", when played at the Rock AM Ring 2003.

Also, during the tour John maintains that Manson spoke about matters other than business only once, "It was on my birthday, and he turned to me and said, "Happy birthday, faggot" — then walked away."

Despite this, John maintains he respects Manson, citing his skilled production style and his love for the band’s music. John was already a fan of the band before joining in 1998. In response to a question regarding the reason for the split with Manson, John 5 was quoted by Vintage Guitar Magazine as saying, "(laughs) At the end of the last tour, I decided I really wanted to do this solo thing and that I had to devote all my time to it. The split with Manson was totally amicable. It wasn’t one of those big breakups. We’re friends. I wish there was some good dirt, but there’s not (laughs)!"

In an interview prior to the January 19, 2008 performance in Orlando, Florida, Marilyn Manson revealed that John 5 would make a guest appearance during the show, stating: "I’ll have [John] come on stage and play songs with us this first show. It would practically be the Holy Wood lineup." This guest appearance ultimately did not take place, however.

Madonna Wayne Gacy

Before leaving the band nothing was heard of Madonna Wayne Gacy for over a year. In an exclusive conference conducted by Marilyn Manson in April 2007, he revealed the upcoming album Eat Me, Drink Me was recorded in collaboration between himself and Tim Skold. Essentially this meant Gacy did not partake in the album, but not ruling out the possibility of him performing as live keyboardist on the upcoming tour. Later, Manson revealed that Chris Vrenna (who previously drummed for the band during Ginger Fish’s hiatus in 2004) would be performing as live keyboardist on the tour, in Gacy’s place.

On August 2, 2007, Gacy filed a lawsuit against Marilyn Manson seeking a back pay of $20 million dollars. Gacy claimed Manson has been using the band’s money for personal interests, among which are his collection of Nazi paraphernalia, his drug addictions, his wedding with Dita Von Teese and the production of Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll.

On December 20, 2007, Manson countersued Gacy. As a reaction to the lawsuit Gacy filed against Manson in August, Manson claims, "keyboardist Stephen Bier did not carry out obligations to take part in master recordings [of Eat Me, Drink Me], concerts [of the Rape of the World tour] and the selling of band merchandise," according to this report which states that Manson is seeking unspecified general and special damages.

Insight

Even though he is known mostly for his music, which some refer to as crude and grotesque, Manson is a very intelligent and insightful man. In interviews he is always well spoken and is calm to the people who challenge him. Most people see his music as delivering the wrong message, but Manson states that his message was to be creative.

Causes

•In 2002, Manson worked with the Make-A-Wish Foundation to make the wish of a boy with a life-threatening disease come true. 16-year-old Andrew Baines from Tennessee had a wish to sing back-up vocals for a "big" band; Manson jumped on the task and took Baines under his wing to make his dream come true. Manson invited Baines to the studio on August 27, 2002, where he let Baines perform backing vocals for the then-upcoming album, The Golden Age of Grotesque. "Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with Andrew, who reminded me the things I create are only made complete by those who enjoy them. I just want to simply say, ‘thank you’ to Andrew for sharing such an important wish with me," Manson said, according MarilynManson.com.

•In 2005, Manson donated a signed collector’s edition mask to Music for Relief to help victims of the 2004’s Boxing Day Tsunami; this auction raised $155.

•In January 2006, Manson contributed a hand-painted guitar from the Six-String Masterpieces – The Dimebag Darrell Art Tribute to the Little Kids Rock auction. For every $100 raised by the product, Little Kids Rock would provide one low-income child with an instrument and lessons – Manson’s guitar raised $6,250.

•In 2006, Manson became a benefactor of Project Nightlight, an LA area foundation that uses short films, music, and apparel to grab teenagers attention and inspire them to speak out against sexual and physical abuse. Manson afforded Project Nightlight a stand at the opening of his art gallery, and in April 2007 gave the charity a print of his painting Eve of Destruction and a framed collector’s edition mask.

Legal history

Marilyn Manson was first arrested in Florida on December 27, 1994 after a concert at Jacksonville’s Club 5 for "violating the adult entertainment code." Manson was detained for 16 hours before been released without charge. Bizarrely police believed Manson had performed oral sex on stage with a man (when in fact it was Jack Off Jill vocalist Jessicka wearing a fake penis) and thrown either his or the man’s penis into the crowd. On February 5, 2001 in Marino, Italy Manson suffered what is to date his only other post-concert arrest when he was accused of blasphemy having worn the outfit of a cardinal on stage during the song "Valentine’s Day". Soon after the detention it was ascertained that Manson had not committed a crime and it appeared the legal troubles were over until the next day when Manson was arrested in Bologne on charges of public indecency relating to a 1999 show where it was alleged Manson had exposed his penis. Manson was released and the charges dropped, notably the arrests came a week after two teenagers brutally murdered an Italian nun which some less reputable sections of the Italian press blamed on Manson’s music.

Sexual misconduct

In a civil battery suit, David Diaz, a security officer from a concert in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 27, 2000, sued for $75,000 in a Minneapolis federal court. After two days deliberation the jury decided that Manson’s alleged molestation had been part of the show and that he had not overstepped his boundaries as an artist, ruling in favor of Manson and against Diaz.

Manson was charged with "sexual misconduct" on August 16, 2001 after Joshua Keasler filed a complaint that as he was providing security for a July 30 concert Manson had allegedly spat on his head, wrapped his legs around him and began to gyrate his penis along his neck.

Oakland County prosecutor David Gorcyca said that "It was offensive, crude and rude. This was not something that was orchestrated or choreographed as part of the act. The security guard was an unknowing and unwilling participant and, ironically, while he was there for protection… was sexually assaulted." The charge, punishable with up to two years imprisonment, was accompanied with a charge of disorderly conduct. The complaint came with an arrest warrant but Manson thwarted this by posting a $25,000 personal bond. In a one-day December 28, 2001 trial the presiding Judge dismissed the charge of "sexual misconduct" as Manson had in his view "gained no sexual gratification from the act." Manson pleaded "no contest" to the outstanding lesser charge, which carried only up to three months imprisonment, and was ordered to pay $4,000 in fines. After the trial Keasler pursued a civil lawsuit against Manson that was dropped when the two settled out of court in February 2004.

Lawsuits

•In 1997, former Marilyn Manson guitarist Scott Mitchell Putesky filed a lawsuit against Manson seeking unpaid royalties for his contributions to the band’s output up to that period, including the band’s recently released second studio album Antichrist Superstar. The case was concluded in 1998, although the outcome was confidential.

•On January 4, 1999, SPIN editor Craig Marks filed an assault and battery lawsuit against Manson in the New York Supreme Court. Marks alleged that Manson, upset at not making the cover of SPIN, the lawsuit specifically alleged Manson had yelled "I can kill you, I can kill your family, I can kill everyone you know!" before two of Manson’s bodyguards were said to have charged him and held him against the wall and threw him to the floor after which it was alleged Manson had said, "That’s what you get when you disrespect me." The case was dropped when, weeks later, Marks was fired from SPIN over financial irregularities.

•On April 2, 2002, Maria St. John filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court accusing Manson of providing her adult daughter, Jennifer Syme, with cocaine and allowing her to drive while under the influence. The case was settled out of court.

•On August 2, 2007, former Marilyn Manson keyboardist Stephen Bier filed a breech of contract lawsuit against Marilyn Manson seeking $20,000,000 in damages. Bier claimed Manson has used the band’s money for personal interests, among which are his collection of Nazi paraphernalia, addictions to cocaine and Valium, his $300,000 wedding with and $150,000 engagement ring given to Dita Von Teese and the production of Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll as well as Lewis Carroll memorabilia, human skeletons and taxidermy. Manson’s lawyers responded in January 2008 with a 101-page rebuttal of the claims, the case will be tried by jury in November 2008 in the Los Angeles Superior Court.

Major label discography

•Portrait of an American Family (1994) •Smells Like Children (1995) •Antichrist Superstar (1996) •Remix and Repent (1997) •Mechanical Animals (1998) •The Last Tour on Earth (Live) (1999) •Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) (2000) •The Golden Age of Grotesque (2003) •Lest We Forget (The Best Of) (2004) •Eat Me, Drink Me (2007)

Filmography

•Lost Highway (cameo, 1997) •MTV Video Music Awards (commercial, 1998) •Jawbreaker (cameo, 1999) •Clone High (cameo, 2000) •From Hell (score, 2001) •Not Another Teen Movie (score, 2001) •Resident Evil (score, 2002) •Bowling for Columbine (interview, 2002) •The Hire: Beat the Devil (cameo, 2003) •Party Monster (2003) •Doppelherz (director, 2003) •The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (cameo, 2004) •House of Wax (2005) (acting, score) •Abelcain (2007) •Living Neon Dreams (2007) •Rise (cameo, 2007) •Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll (acting, directing, writing, score, 2008)

Bibliography

•The Long Hard Road out of Hell (1998) •Holy Wood (Unreleased)

Trivia

•All Manson’s tattoos were done at Tattoos By Lou in Miami, Florida over a four-year span starting in 1991, until a new tattoo emerged in early-2007.

•In the 1990s, an Internet rumor spread stating Josh Saviano (who played Paul Pfeiffer in 1980s drama The Wonder Years) grew up to become Marilyn Manson. As of 2007, Josh Saviano is a licensed attorney in New York. He has, however, commented on the rumor, and thinks it is neat people believe him to be in a "goth band".

•Contrary to what some may deem "common knowledge", Manson has not had any ribs removed for the purpose of autofellatio. "If I really got my ribs removed," he said in the The Long Hard Road out of Hell autobiography, "I would have been busy sucking my own dick on The Wonder Years instead of chasing Winnie Cooper."

•In an E! interview, Manson revealed that he owns a Nintendo DS. "My friend got me this little Japanese lawyer game; it’s fucking amazing," he said in reference to Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. He also mentioned that he was "pretty good at Mario Kart".

•In an interview with MTV in 2002 Manson revealed that for most of his paintings he uses a children’s Alice in Wonderland tin. He also uses a 1920’s mortician paint kit originally used for retouching cadavers.

•Manson has Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, an erratic, rapid heartbeat.

•Manson, who cites David Bowie as being his biggest influence, claims his favorite songs by him are "Quicksand", "Ashes to Ashes", and "We Are the Dead". He even proposed to his ex-wife, Dita Von Teese, during a David Bowie concert (at the time Bowie was performing "Be My Wife") .

•Pets Manson has had in his life include the childhood dog, an Alaskan malamute named Aleusha, an orange tabby named O.J. which he found on the steps of Christian school, four Devon Rex cats named Aleister, Edgar, Herman, and Lily, and two dachshunds named Greta and Eva. After the divorce of Manson and ex-wife Dita Von Teese, Von Teese won the custody of both dachshunds and Aleister. For Manson’s 39th birthday on January 5th, 2008, girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood gave him a new cat, Charlie (Manson), as a birthday gift.

•When asked in 2007 by Rolling Stone what his current favorite playlist was, Manson chose among Radiohead’s "Exit Music (For a Film)", Amy Winehouse’s "Rehab" and David Bowie’s classic "We Are the Dead".

OFFICIAL WEBSITE : marilynmanson.com MARILYN MANSON on MYSPACE : www.myspace.com/marilynmanson

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–> This biography appeared on www.mansonwiki.com/ (Manson Wiki)

Posted by Ben Heine on 2008-05-09 23:47:25

Tagged: , Marilyn Manson , Brian Hugh Warner , USA , American , crazyness , mickey mouse , hat , fun , outrageous , make up , image , graphic artist , watercolor , singer , child , logo , band , rock , punk , Charles Manson , Marilyn Monroe , ink , black , Metal music , Grammy Award , musique , Mobscene , Mansinthe , industrial metal band , shocking , post modernity , badge , smart , tie , bretelle , lipstick , man , provocative , traditional art , ben heine , pointillism , black ink , painting , Disney , Antichrist , Antechrist , full biography , scary , fearless , androgyn , info@theartistery.com , print , copyrights , art , poster , wallpaper , contemporary art , Resident , Evil , fine art , expo , mixed styles , aquarelle , flickr united , anti-conformism , anti-capitalism , dark , romance , provocation , plume , pen nib , paper , music , Beat the Devil , bowling for columbine

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Marilyn Manson -1-

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This is a pointillist work I made with blue, red and black ink on paper. I just love Marilyn Manson’s personality and crazy style! Everybody should have an aura…

Please, see my other portrait of Marilyn Manson _______________________________________________

For more information about my art: info@benheine.com _______________________________________________

Biography

Brian Hugh Warner (born January 5, 1969), better known by his stage name Marilyn Manson, is a professional musician. He is the lead singer of the industrial metal band that bears the same name. His stage name is formed from the names Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson.

Brian Hugh Warner was born on January 5th 1969 in Canton, Ohio. He attended Heritage Christian School. After transferring to and later graduating from Canton’s GlenOak High School, Warner moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his family. While living in Fort Lauderdale, he studied journalism and theater at Broward Community College, and became the assistant entertainment editor of BCC’s student newspaper, the Observer.

Romance

Warner’s first serious relationship was with Melissa "Missi" Romero. As explained in his autobiography, during the production of "Antichrist Superstar," Missi became pregnant with Warner’s child, but had an abortion during her second trimester. He has also been linked to Traci Lords and Jenna Jameson. Jameson wrote about her sexual encounter with Manson in her autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale in which she noted him as being "massively endowed". Manson was engaged to Rose McGowan, but their relationship ended around the time he became involved with burlesque dancer and fetish model model Dita Von Teese. Manson photographed Von Teese for the December 2002 issue of Playboy. Manson and Von Teese wed in December 2005 in the Irish home of friend Gottfried Helnwein. Von Teese filed for divorce as of December 2006. The divorce came through in January 2007. In April of 2007, Marilyn Manson’s girlfriend, Evan Rachel Wood, admitted that they were actually a couple.

Marriage

Manson and Dita Von Teese started dating on Manson’s 32nd birthday, and Manson proposed three years later on March 22, 2004. On December 3, 2005 (court documents say November 28), the couple was married in a non-denominational ceremony at Gurteen Castle in Kilsheelan, County Tipperary, Ireland, the home of Gottfried Helnwein. The wedding was officiated by surrealist film director and comic book writer Alejandro Jodorowsky. Dita Von Teese wore a royal purple silk taffeta gown by Vivienne Westwood, complete with train and petticoats worn over a Mr. Pearl couture corset, topped off by a tricorne hat by Stephen Jones, while Manson wore a John Galliano black silk taffeta tuxedo with velvet trim and a hat also crafted by Stephen Jones. They reportedly exchanged vows in front of approximately 60 guests, including burlesque dancer Catherine Delish, Lisa Marie Presley, Eric Szmanda, David Lynch, Jessicka and Christian Hejnal, and Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne. Vogue magazine ran a multiple-page feature on the wedding in its February 2006 issue. Just before his own wedding, Manson criticized Britney Spears’ wedding to Kevin Federline, in which they celebrated by wearing personalized tracksuits: "If you’re going to do something like getting married, it should have a sense of celebration to it. It should be grand and not in tracksuits!"

As of January 30, 2007 Manson and Dita Von Teese reportedly split after her filing for divorce due to "irreconcilable differences" according to Von Teese. ET.com along with People Magazine has claimed that Manson was having an extramarital affair with actress Evan Rachel Wood, which may or may not be the true cause of the split. Manson’s alcohol abuse and distant behaviour have also been cited as cause for the split. It has also been claimed that Manson was not aware of Von Teese’s filing for divorce and moving out of their home at the time that the story was published, conceivably due to his reported stay in Paris, France. Von Teese reportedly took their two cats and two dachshunds, Greta and Eva, with her when she left. Manson fought for custody of the two cats, but only received one of them.

Evan Rachel Wood attended the grand opening of Manson’s new Celebritarian Corporation Gallery of Fine Art and among the most notable artworks were two portraits of Evan. She will also co-star in his upcoming horror film Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll.

In music

Jessicka of the band Jack Off Jill was an early friend of Manson’s, her band opened most of his South Florida shows. He not only produced most of the band’s early recordings but also played guitar on the song "My Cat" and helped name the band. Manson later wrote the liner notes for the band’s album Humid Teenage Mediocrity, a collection of early Jack Off Jill recordings.

In early 1993, after being instructed by his new label, Interscope Records, not to play any local shows, Manson formed Mrs. Scabtree. Mrs. Scabtree was a side project between he and newly hired Jeordie White. Manson played drums, while White (dressed as a black woman) shared vocal duties with then girlfriend Jessicka from Jack Off Jill who wore a blonde wig. Mrs. Scabtree only played two shows in South Florida.

Manson has helped or provided full scores for several major motion pictures, although several of his pieces have been cut, and his name dropped from the credits. Some of his more notable soundtrack score contributions include The Matrix, From Hell and Resident Evil.

Manson appeared as a guest on rapper DMX’s album Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood for the track "The Omen", produced by Swizz Beats, and has performed (with the rest of the band) on stage with Eminem as background music in the song "The Way I Am".

Manson sang vocals on "Break You Down" off of the Washington, DC-based industrial rock band gODHEAD’s 2000 Years of Human Error album. This album is distinguished for being the only one released on Manson’s vanity label Posthuman Records.

In film and television

Manson made a cameo appearance as a doctor in the Murderdolls’ music video "Dead in Hollywood", and also appears in the Nine Inch Nails music video "Starfuckers, Inc.", as well as "Gave Up", and Eminem’s "The Way I Am" music video.

His first appearance in a film was in the role of a pornographic actor in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, in 1997. He also had a minor role in former love interest Rose McGowan’s 1998 film Jawbreaker and a supporting role in 2003’s Party Monster, which is based on the events leading up to and the murder of Angel Melendez by the infamous Michael Alig of club kid fame, where Manson portrayed a psychotic drag queen named Christina . Manson made a cameo appearance in The Hire: Beat the Devil, a short film in the BMW films series (starring Clive Owen as the Driver), which featured James Brown as himself, and Gary Oldman as Satan. His most talked-about film cameo was in the Michael Moore political documentary Bowling for Columbine discussing the motivations of the perpetrators and allegations that his music was somehow a factor. He played himself, in animated form, on an episode of the television series Clone High, in which he sang a song about nutrition and the food pyramid. He is featured prominently throughout Not Another Teen Movie, and covered the song "Tainted Love" for its soundtrack.

His music is frequently featured on the show C.S.I.. The character on the show, Greg Sanders, is a big fan of Manson and the actor who plays him, Eric Szmanda, is a personal friend of Manson’s.

Manson was featured in the 2004 film The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, and was set to appear in Abelcain, directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Living Neon Dreams in 2005, although both of these projects are still unreleased as of 2007. He will also be seen as a bartender in an upcoming vampire movie starring Lucy Liu called Rise and possibly has pending roles in Abelcain, RISE and other projects.

Manson has produced 23 music videos, most of which have gone beyond the scope of a normal performance video and been well received by critics for their imagery and direction. Manson’s three most recent released videos – Personal Jesus, (s)AINT and Heart-Shaped Glasses – were voluntarily funded with his own money (to a sum of $1,500,000) and largely not that of the record company. Manson stated in June 2006 that he saw himself "as more a student of film than of music".

In July 2005, Manson told Rolling Stone that he was shifting his focus from music to filmmaking – "I just don’t think the world is worth putting music into right now. I no longer want to make art that other people–particularly record companies–are turning into a product. I just want to make art."

By 2006 Manson was working on his directorial debut, Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, but has since put the project off until November 2007 to focus on recording Marilyn Manson’s sixth studio album, Eat Me, Drink Me, followed by a world tour. The film is said to feature special effects using a magician rather than computer-generated imagery.

In graphic art

From the beginning Manson has been a recreational painter, the oldest of his surviving pieces dating back to 1995-1996, but it was after his 1998 Grey period that Manson began his career as a watercolour painter. In 1999 he made five-minute concept pieces and sold them to drug dealers with their knowledge that they would accumulate in value over time. Gradually Manson became more drawn to watercolors as an art form in itself, and instead of trading them, kept them and continued to paint at a proficient rate.

This manic creativity resulted in an exhibit for his art, The Golden Age of Grotesque, held at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Centre on between September 13 and 14, 2002. The reaction to his paintings was largely positive with one critic comparing them to Egon Schele’s pieces and describing them as heartfelt and sincerely painted, and Art in America went as far as to liken them to the works of a " psychiatric patient given materials to use as therapy ". Others however saw less merit in the works stating that the value was in the celebrity.

Two years later almost to the day, during September 14 and 15, 2004, Manson held his second exhibit on the first night in Paris and the second in Berlin, Trismegistus, which was also the title of the center piece of the exhibit – a large three headed Christ painted onto an antique wood panel. Again the reception to the works could be described as mixed but was largely in favour of the artist.

Manson opened his own an art gallery, The Celebritarian Corporation Gallery of Fine Art, on October 31, 2006 in Los Angeles for which his third exhibition (by invitation or appointment only after the opening night) was the inaugural show. From April 2 until April 17, 2007 Manson’s recent works were be on show at the Space 39 Modern & Contemporary in Florida.

A coffee table art book is in the works, initially titled The Death of Art. The last given title was Quintif. It will be published by the makers of Flaunt magazine.

40 pieces from this show were ported to the Gallery Brigitte Schenk in Cologne, Germany to be publicly exhibited from June 28 until July 28, 2007. After this they will return to the Space39 Modern & Contemporary Gallery thus leaving Manson’s own gallery in Los Angeles temporarily without his own work until 2008.

The price of Manson’s works has been a somewhat controversial point for fans and critics alike, with most fans realistically unable to afford the paintings save for fine art editions and lithographs. Manson’s prices though are realistic and reasonable considering the long-term value at a time when prices for contemporary art have never been higher.

During his European tour 2007 Manson has exhibited his paintings in Germany, Russia and Switzerland.

In other areas

Manson provided the voice of the alien Edgar in the 2005 first-person shooter video game Area 51, which also featured David Duchovny. Marilyn Manson also appears (as himself) as a playable character in the video game Celebrity Deathmatch. Allegedly, the artist posed nude for photos prior to his rise to fame. The pictures appeared in the March 1999 issue of Honcho.

Professional fallouts

Trent Reznor

One of Manson’s high-profile relationships, the defunct friendship with Trent Reznor, has been marked with mutual bitterness and perhaps vendetta. This started in the mid-90s, when Manson was due to make a track that would appear on the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Lost Highway, but instead Reznor was the one who wrote a song, "The Perfect Drug", for the film. In 1999, it seemed the two artists had patched their differences, as Manson made an appearance in the video for the Nine Inch Nails song "Starfuckers, Inc."

In 2004, Reznor was asked whether he had plans to do any covers; he sarcastically replied, "I was really hoping to do something unique and pertinent – like do an exact copy of "Personal Jesus" – but it was already taken."

In a 2005 interview, Manson said Reznor’s Nothing Records had lost the master recordings of Manson’s first three albums. He implied it was Reznor’s intention, "Now that Nothing Records doesn’t exist, I think there’s only one of two people responsible for that. Out of those two people, there’s only one that really has an opinion of me that is voiced very often."

Twiggy Ramirez

In May 2002 Twiggy Ramirez left the band, citing differences in perspective on the future of the band. He went on to play bass for A Perfect Circle and Nine Inch Nails. During this time, Manson claimed in interviews that he and Ramirez were still close friends, while Ramirez maintained that he rarely spoke to Manson. In an interview in February of 2006 Twiggy stated he was willing to record an album with Marilyn Manson if the right conditions were met. In Autumn 2006, Manson and Ramirez were photographed together at numerous parties in Los Angeles, in amicable poses.

In January 2008 it was announced that Ramirez had reunited with the band as live bassist for the last leg of the Rape of the World tour as well as co-writer of the band’s seventh studio album. In an interview with The Heirophant on January 11, 2008, Manson revealed that the reconciliation with Ramirez was not as abrupt as it initially seemed, and that the two had been occasionally communicating with each other since speaking at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California prior to the Winter European leg of the Rape of the World tour.

John 5

John 5’s reasons for leaving Marilyn Manson were cited as being mutual, despite the mysterious nature of his sudden firing by Manson’s manager in 2004.

John was quoted at the time as saying about the incident, "I don’t know. . . I was nothing but nice to him," he continued. "I never screwed up onstage — well not really badly — and I did everything I could to get along with him. Maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with the fact that I don’t drink or do drugs, and he’s not like that at all. Maybe he held that against me. I don’t know. He never said." John 5 was notorious among fans as being drug and alcohol free.

Before the incident, Manson had assaulted John on stage, notably, Manson kicked John in the face during a televised performance, leading to a brief confrontation in front of a packed and roaring audience (available on YouTube). This was during the intro to "The Beautiful People", when played at the Rock AM Ring 2003.

Also, during the tour John maintains that Manson spoke about matters other than business only once, "It was on my birthday, and he turned to me and said, "Happy birthday, faggot" — then walked away."

Despite this, John maintains he respects Manson, citing his skilled production style and his love for the band’s music. John was already a fan of the band before joining in 1998. In response to a question regarding the reason for the split with Manson, John 5 was quoted by Vintage Guitar Magazine as saying, "(laughs) At the end of the last tour, I decided I really wanted to do this solo thing and that I had to devote all my time to it. The split with Manson was totally amicable. It wasn’t one of those big breakups. We’re friends. I wish there was some good dirt, but there’s not (laughs)!"

In an interview prior to the January 19, 2008 performance in Orlando, Florida, Marilyn Manson revealed that John 5 would make a guest appearance during the show, stating: "I’ll have [John] come on stage and play songs with us this first show. It would practically be the Holy Wood lineup." This guest appearance ultimately did not take place, however.

Madonna Wayne Gacy

Before leaving the band nothing was heard of Madonna Wayne Gacy for over a year. In an exclusive conference conducted by Marilyn Manson in April 2007, he revealed the upcoming album Eat Me, Drink Me was recorded in collaboration between himself and Tim Skold. Essentially this meant Gacy did not partake in the album, but not ruling out the possibility of him performing as live keyboardist on the upcoming tour. Later, Manson revealed that Chris Vrenna (who previously drummed for the band during Ginger Fish’s hiatus in 2004) would be performing as live keyboardist on the tour, in Gacy’s place.

On August 2, 2007, Gacy filed a lawsuit against Marilyn Manson seeking a back pay of $20 million dollars. Gacy claimed Manson has been using the band’s money for personal interests, among which are his collection of Nazi paraphernalia, his drug addictions, his wedding with Dita Von Teese and the production of Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll.

On December 20, 2007, Manson countersued Gacy. As a reaction to the lawsuit Gacy filed against Manson in August, Manson claims, "keyboardist Stephen Bier did not carry out obligations to take part in master recordings [of Eat Me, Drink Me], concerts [of the Rape of the World tour] and the selling of band merchandise," according to this report which states that Manson is seeking unspecified general and special damages.

Insight

Even though he is known mostly for his music, which some refer to as crude and grotesque, Manson is a very intelligent and insightful man. In interviews he is always well spoken and is calm to the people who challenge him. Most people see his music as delivering the wrong message, but Manson states that his message was to be creative.

Causes

•In 2002, Manson worked with the Make-A-Wish Foundation to make the wish of a boy with a life-threatening disease come true. 16-year-old Andrew Baines from Tennessee had a wish to sing back-up vocals for a "big" band; Manson jumped on the task and took Baines under his wing to make his dream come true. Manson invited Baines to the studio on August 27, 2002, where he let Baines perform backing vocals for the then-upcoming album, The Golden Age of Grotesque. "Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with Andrew, who reminded me the things I create are only made complete by those who enjoy them. I just want to simply say, ‘thank you’ to Andrew for sharing such an important wish with me," Manson said, according MarilynManson.com.

•In 2005, Manson donated a signed collector’s edition mask to Music for Relief to help victims of the 2004’s Boxing Day Tsunami; this auction raised $155.

•In January 2006, Manson contributed a hand-painted guitar from the Six-String Masterpieces – The Dimebag Darrell Art Tribute to the Little Kids Rock auction. For every $100 raised by the product, Little Kids Rock would provide one low-income child with an instrument and lessons – Manson’s guitar raised $6,250.

•In 2006, Manson became a benefactor of Project Nightlight, an LA area foundation that uses short films, music, and apparel to grab teenagers attention and inspire them to speak out against sexual and physical abuse. Manson afforded Project Nightlight a stand at the opening of his art gallery, and in April 2007 gave the charity a print of his painting Eve of Destruction and a framed collector’s edition mask.

Legal history

Marilyn Manson was first arrested in Florida on December 27, 1994 after a concert at Jacksonville’s Club 5 for "violating the adult entertainment code." Manson was detained for 16 hours before been released without charge. Bizarrely police believed Manson had performed oral sex on stage with a man (when in fact it was Jack Off Jill vocalist Jessicka wearing a fake penis) and thrown either his or the man’s penis into the crowd. On February 5, 2001 in Marino, Italy Manson suffered what is to date his only other post-concert arrest when he was accused of blasphemy having worn the outfit of a cardinal on stage during the song "Valentine’s Day". Soon after the detention it was ascertained that Manson had not committed a crime and it appeared the legal troubles were over until the next day when Manson was arrested in Bologne on charges of public indecency relating to a 1999 show where it was alleged Manson had exposed his penis. Manson was released and the charges dropped, notably the arrests came a week after two teenagers brutally murdered an Italian nun which some less reputable sections of the Italian press blamed on Manson’s music.

Sexual misconduct

In a civil battery suit, David Diaz, a security officer from a concert in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 27, 2000, sued for $75,000 in a Minneapolis federal court. After two days deliberation the jury decided that Manson’s alleged molestation had been part of the show and that he had not overstepped his boundaries as an artist, ruling in favor of Manson and against Diaz.

Manson was charged with "sexual misconduct" on August 16, 2001 after Joshua Keasler filed a complaint that as he was providing security for a July 30 concert Manson had allegedly spat on his head, wrapped his legs around him and began to gyrate his penis along his neck.

Oakland County prosecutor David Gorcyca said that "It was offensive, crude and rude. This was not something that was orchestrated or choreographed as part of the act. The security guard was an unknowing and unwilling participant and, ironically, while he was there for protection… was sexually assaulted." The charge, punishable with up to two years imprisonment, was accompanied with a charge of disorderly conduct. The complaint came with an arrest warrant but Manson thwarted this by posting a $25,000 personal bond. In a one-day December 28, 2001 trial the presiding Judge dismissed the charge of "sexual misconduct" as Manson had in his view "gained no sexual gratification from the act." Manson pleaded "no contest" to the outstanding lesser charge, which carried only up to three months imprisonment, and was ordered to pay $4,000 in fines. After the trial Keasler pursued a civil lawsuit against Manson that was dropped when the two settled out of court in February 2004.

Lawsuits

•In 1997, former Marilyn Manson guitarist Scott Mitchell Putesky filed a lawsuit against Manson seeking unpaid royalties for his contributions to the band’s output up to that period, including the band’s recently released second studio album Antichrist Superstar. The case was concluded in 1998, although the outcome was confidential.

•On January 4, 1999, SPIN editor Craig Marks filed an assault and battery lawsuit against Manson in the New York Supreme Court. Marks alleged that Manson, upset at not making the cover of SPIN, the lawsuit specifically alleged Manson had yelled "I can kill you, I can kill your family, I can kill everyone you know!" before two of Manson’s bodyguards were said to have charged him and held him against the wall and threw him to the floor after which it was alleged Manson had said, "That’s what you get when you disrespect me." The case was dropped when, weeks later, Marks was fired from SPIN over financial irregularities.

•On April 2, 2002, Maria St. John filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court accusing Manson of providing her adult daughter, Jennifer Syme, with cocaine and allowing her to drive while under the influence. The case was settled out of court.

•On August 2, 2007, former Marilyn Manson keyboardist Stephen Bier filed a breech of contract lawsuit against Marilyn Manson seeking $20,000,000 in damages. Bier claimed Manson has used the band’s money for personal interests, among which are his collection of Nazi paraphernalia, addictions to cocaine and Valium, his $300,000 wedding with and $150,000 engagement ring given to Dita Von Teese and the production of Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll as well as Lewis Carroll memorabilia, human skeletons and taxidermy. Manson’s lawyers responded in January 2008 with a 101-page rebuttal of the claims, the case will be tried by jury in November 2008 in the Los Angeles Superior Court.

Major label discography

•Portrait of an American Family (1994) •Smells Like Children (1995) •Antichrist Superstar (1996) •Remix and Repent (1997) •Mechanical Animals (1998) •The Last Tour on Earth (Live) (1999) •Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) (2000) •The Golden Age of Grotesque (2003) •Lest We Forget (The Best Of) (2004) •Eat Me, Drink Me (2007)

Filmography

•Lost Highway (cameo, 1997) •MTV Video Music Awards (commercial, 1998) •Jawbreaker (cameo, 1999) •Clone High (cameo, 2000) •From Hell (score, 2001) •Not Another Teen Movie (score, 2001) •Resident Evil (score, 2002) •Bowling for Columbine (interview, 2002) •The Hire: Beat the Devil (cameo, 2003) •Party Monster (2003) •Doppelherz (director, 2003) •The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (cameo, 2004) •House of Wax (2005) (acting, score) •Abelcain (2007) •Living Neon Dreams (2007) •Rise (cameo, 2007) •Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll (acting, directing, writing, score, 2008)

Bibliography

•The Long Hard Road out of Hell (1998) •Holy Wood (Unreleased)

Trivia

•All Manson’s tattoos were done at Tattoos By Lou in Miami, Florida over a four-year span starting in 1991, until a new tattoo emerged in early-2007.

•In the 1990s, an Internet rumor spread stating Josh Saviano (who played Paul Pfeiffer in 1980s drama The Wonder Years) grew up to become Marilyn Manson. As of 2007, Josh Saviano is a licensed attorney in New York. He has, however, commented on the rumor, and thinks it is neat people believe him to be in a "goth band".

•Contrary to what some may deem "common knowledge", Manson has not had any ribs removed for the purpose of autofellatio. "If I really got my ribs removed," he said in the The Long Hard Road out of Hell autobiography, "I would have been busy sucking my own dick on The Wonder Years instead of chasing Winnie Cooper."

•In an E! interview, Manson revealed that he owns a Nintendo DS. "My friend got me this little Japanese lawyer game; it’s fucking amazing," he said in reference to Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. He also mentioned that he was "pretty good at Mario Kart".

•In an interview with MTV in 2002 Manson revealed that for most of his paintings he uses a children’s Alice in Wonderland tin. He also uses a 1920’s mortician paint kit originally used for retouching cadavers.

•Manson has Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, an erratic, rapid heartbeat.

•Manson, who cites David Bowie as being his biggest influence, claims his favorite songs by him are "Quicksand", "Ashes to Ashes", and "We Are the Dead". He even proposed to his ex-wife, Dita Von Teese, during a David Bowie concert (at the time Bowie was performing "Be My Wife") .

•Pets Manson has had in his life include the childhood dog, an Alaskan malamute named Aleusha, an orange tabby named O.J. which he found on the steps of Christian school, four Devon Rex cats named Aleister, Edgar, Herman, and Lily, and two dachshunds named Greta and Eva. After the divorce of Manson and ex-wife Dita Von Teese, Von Teese won the custody of both dachshunds and Aleister. For Manson’s 39th birthday on January 5th, 2008, girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood gave him a new cat, Charlie (Manson), as a birthday gift.

•When asked in 2007 by Rolling Stone what his current favorite playlist was, Manson chose among Radiohead’s "Exit Music (For a Film)", Amy Winehouse’s "Rehab" and David Bowie’s classic "We Are the Dead".

OFFICIAL WEBSITE : marilynmanson.com MARILYN MANSON on MYSPACE : www.myspace.com/marilynmanson

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–> This biography appeared on www.mansonwiki.com/ (Manson Wiki)

Posted by Ben Heine on 2008-05-09 23:39:26

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