#Marvin Tate

[dustedmagazine]

Marvin Tate’s D Settlement — S-T (American Dreams)

Marvin Tate's D-Settlement by Marvin Tate's D-Settlement

“Turn Da Fuckin’ Lights Back On,” stomps and rolls and struts. Its skeletal foundation of bass drum and cowbell, its shout-along choruses, are clearly aware of and inspired by 1990s hip hop, as well as the whole lineage of hard funk, James Brown and Funkadelic especially. But it is worth observing that the tune is not about sex or dancing or afrofuturist fantasia. It’s about getting Con Ed to turn the lights back on, after a blackout, as practical an activism as can be imagined. Marvin Tate’s D Settlement grounds its art in the here and now, in making things better in a hands-on way, block by agonizing block, on the south side of Chicago.

Marvin Tate is a visual artist, poet, teacher, band leader and musician, but most of all an empowerer, whose life’s work is to make art, but also to inspire others to make art. He works at the nexus of Chicago based jazz, soul, spoken word and protest, and he’s given a leg up to artists including Angel Bat Dawid, Ben LaMar Gay, Theaster Gates, avery r. young and Angel Olsen. In 2013, a group of admirers made the tribute album Tim Kinsella Sings the Songs of Marvin Tate by Leroy Bach Featuring Angel Olsen to introduce him to a wider circle, and that was a good thing. But this four-album/three CD set is a better one, since it delivers a broad swath of Tate’s work in the man’s own voice and idiom. It includes his first three albums with D Settlement, 1997’s Partly Cloudy, 1999’s The Minstrel Show and 2002’s American Icons, accompanied by an oral history with contributions from Angel Bat Dawid, Jaimie Branch, Ben LaMar Gay and others.

Tate was a poet before he was a band leader, and you can get a glimpse of the man who won poetry slams all over Chicago in “When a Black Poet Reads Poetry to a 98% White Audience,” from the first disc. Here Tate skewers listeners, the thrill-seeking north shore bros drinking like they’re at a sports bar, the gaggle of beautiful lesbians, the mousy faced art students, who seek to appreciate—without really understanding—Tate’s incendiary, enraged art. It’s powerful and funny.

Still, the work really comes into its own when Tate enlists a large and talented ensemble: guitarist and vocalist George Blaise, bassist and vocalist Olin Langley, singers Tina Howell and Renee Ruffin, drummers George Jones, Virus X, David Hilliard and Debi Buzil, multi-instrumentalists Adam Conway and CJ Bani. They frame his hallucinatory wordscapes with seething, inflaming arrangement that touch on rock, jazz, reggae, blues and funk.

The best and most memorable of these cuts (the one I can’t get out of my head) comes on disc two from the American Minstrel set in “The Ballad of Corey Dyke.” Here slinky, skanky rhythms, push forward from the hips, while a woman soul singer sends up flares of otherworldly vocal beauty. Tate narrates the story, about a young man in trouble at school, who ends up shooting a teacher who’s been hard on him. It’s a shocking, engrossing story, one in which you feel for the boy as well as the teacher, and in which the real villain is a system that put a gun in the hands of a kid who still believes in Santa. And despite the heavy subject matter, it cooks.

This is a marvelous introduction to a Chicago force, a musician who has had outsized influence on artists in many different genres but who has never gotten the attention he deserves. You can put it on for the history, for the inspiration, or just the joy of it, and it works at all of that. Viva Marvin Tate. Viva D Settlement.

Jennifer Kelly

[paintgroove]

Paint Groove #122 “Autumn Lullaby”

1. The Golden Lamp - Pharoah Sanders

2. Flamengo Até Morrer - Marcos Valle

3. Floating With an Intimate Stranger - Mike Reed, Ben LaMar Gay, Bitchin Bajas, Marvin Tate

4. YOU'LL NEVER GET TO HEAVEN - Sam Gendel, Sam Wilkes

5. Quando O Carnaval Chegar - Quarteto Em Cy

6. Gloriosa - Amaro Freitas, Brandee Younger

7. Space 7 - Nala Sinephro

8. La Forma del Esqueleto - Diles que no me maten

[iiiiiiits-m]

hey! awesome Dr two brains profile pic and did anything ever happen with that FiddAuthor Falsettos AU you commented about in, like, september? I fear you may have been cookin with that

I totally didn’t forget about this au

It’s mostly something that resided in my brain, although I did attempt to make a lil animatic with the song Tight-Knit Family that I quickly lost steam on cause I forgot how much I hate animating. I am still in school, so my free time is limited unfortunately for such projects :(

If we’re being honest, I can’t remember where I got the idea for this au, or if I posted about it or happened to comment on someone else’s post and you saw

The overall AU puts Fidds in place of Marvin, Emma-May in place of Trina, and Tate in place of Jason. Ford acts as Whizzer, though in this au instead of being sex obsessed he’s work obsessed and keeps trying to lure Fidds back into working on the portal with the promises of sex (though like Marvin and Whizzer their relationship evolves to be healthier by act two. I can’t figure out who from GF would become the lesbians from next door…

I’ve also got a Paul McCartney and John Lennon au for them

[pk-freezer-burnt]

[who-canceled-roger-rabbit]

Definitive Reservoir Dykes fancast:

Miriam Margolyes as Jo Cabot

Aidy Bryant as Nice Gal Eddie

Salma Hayek as Ms. White (Señora Blanca maybe?)

Janelle Monáe as Ms. Orange

Gwendoline Christie as Ms. Blonde

Catherine Tate as Ms. Pink

Kate McKinnon as Ms. Brown

Maggie Smith as Ms. Blue

Tatiana Maslany as Marvin Nash

Danai Gurira as Detective Holdaway

Kristen Stewart as the radio DJ

[romanbymarta]

Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, Barbara Parkins, Krzysztof Komeda, Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Lee Marvin, Bob Evans at a premiere of Rosemary’s baby at the Screen Directors Guild, June 1968.

[incorrectolivia]

i have had to say goodbye to some of my fave girls on tv this year and now tabitha and bess have joined the list! some fictional characters just end up having a bigger impact on you than you ever imagined! like it's just a tv show but why does it feel deeper than that? I'll be holding on to my best girls as long as I can😭���

[2ndaryprotocol]

The manic melodrama ‘Valley Of The Dolls’ made its way into theaters this week 55 years ago. 💊🍸🎥

“𝙽𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚌𝚊𝚗 𝚍𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚘𝚢 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚎𝚗𝚝; 𝚋𝚞𝚝, 𝚜𝚑𝚎'𝚕𝚕 𝚍𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚘𝚢 𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚏!”

[kickmag]

Media Questions Of The Week

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Is Larenz Tate right about Hollywood placing a higher value on Black British actors? 

Are AI-generated songs of artists like Ghostwriter's  Drake and The Weeknd "Heart On My Sleeve" duet really a threat to the artists whose work gets used? 

Did Ed Sheeran plagiarize Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" for his single "Thinking Out Loud?" 

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Who painted over the Frankie Knuckles and Juice WRLD murals in Chicago? 

[jelly-o630]

Okey not sure how big the overlap is between gravity falls and musical theatre fans is but in the gravity falls falsettos au obviously Fiddleford is Marvin, Stanford is Whizzer, Tate is Jason, and Fidds wife is Trina sooooooooo would Stan be Mendel or would that role go to bill and who do we make the lesbians from next door

[weepingchoir]

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 14: A FULL SEASON REVIEW

Another decade, another frantic Doctor Who resuscitation. (Not that there were news of potential cancellation, but things must’ve been dire for the BBC to sell one of their most storied shows to the Mouse.) Chibnall is out, Moffat on retainer, Russell “Thee” Davies is in. The theme song is the best since Matt Smith, which, through weird and inexplicable coincidence, was also the last time I watched Who with any serious interest. Good start.

The Star Beast

While not technically part of the season, the specials preceding series 14 signal the beginning of a shift in tone and rules for Doctor Who, including the introduction of the new Doctor. Not yet, though. First we get an OLD DOCTOR FUCK YES DAVID TENNANT IS BACK.

I already know Tennant won’t stick around, and I’m glad. That would’ve stunk of Disney nostalgia-raking. Nevertheless, as a returning viewer, I’m grateful for the breakfall. “The Star Beast” doesn’t yet carry the magic that’ll characterize Gatwa’s series. It’s a standard scifi monster of the week serial, and the monster rules. Looking for returning companion Donna Noble, the Doctor runs into the Meep, a no-pronouns gremlin-Yoda puppet living in Donna’s shed, under the care of her daughter, Rose.

UNIT comes under attack by Kamen Riders. The Meep tears off the blorbo mask to reveal a genocidal dictator on the lam from the Intergalactic Criminal Court. It’s a hilarious turn in an episode whose emotional core relies on Rose’s transgenderedness. Pronouns are a real-time strategy game and evil space aliens are better at it than humans.

Quick dustup on weird plot shit: if Donna remembers the Doctor she dies. She has to remember anyway, in order to stop the Meep’s ship from taking off. Turns out that she’s since become immune to Time Lord neuron overload by offloading it on her daughter. Donna and Rose expel the toxic memories by harnessing their feminine emotional intelligence.

I don’t want it to land. Facing the Doctor, who was a woman one episode ago, Rose says that a man could never understand how she just harnessed the divine feminine. Nevertheless it passes, maybe because any representation of a transgender woman as through-and-through female is a gasp of fresh air. For better or worse, this also cues the season’s cardinal rule: what you feel is true is more important than what makes sense.

Wild Blue Yonder

The TARDIS crashlands at the edge of the universe and disappears when it senses danger, one of those things that it’s never done before and will only do again if it’s funny or cool.

The “edge of the universe” is a spaceship floating in ink-black, with Marvin the Paranoid Timebomb making its way down the hall, one step at a time. This is a great opportunity to ease us into the budgetful new Doctor Who, with sleek but understated shots of the spaceship’s exterior. When the Doctor and Donna split up to fix the ship, they converse with each other’s doppelgangers: “not-things” from beyond reality, looking to assimilate physics. Communication with the not-things goes awry as an eerie set of medium close-ups pull back to reveal their overlong limbs.

Backed with half a decade of set chemistry, Tennant and Catherine Tate ace all four characters in this bottle episode. Much of the runtime consists of the Doctor and Donna’s mind games against each other. It’s less a restatement and more a self-justifying exploration of why bother with a last hurrah for two fan favorites. Well-earned, too, as the Doctor nearly leaves the real Donna to die in the ship’s explosion. It’s impossible to be done exploring the fullness of a relationship. But one day, and soon, we will have to move on.

The Giggle

 Two crucial stopgaps against the not-things. One, a line of salt on the floor, which the Doctor tricks them into thinking they can’t cross, since they’re sorta vampires. Two, cognitive dissonance. It’s hard enough for the uncreatures to assimilate beliefs, let alone simultaneous contradictory ideas.

The Doctor fears that, by invoking fiddly rules at the edge of reality, he’s opened a door for fell mythos. This episode stars the Toymaker, a villain from a partially restored First Doctor serial. Originally a Fu Manchu caricature, the new Toymaker is Neil Patrick Harris putting on a German accent, which he can always do, it’s never racist.

The Toymaker has snuck a mind-warping signal into every screen, starting with the 1925 Stookie Bill experiment. Now mankind is mad , reacting with explosive hostility at any confrontation. Over the last decade, as writers have moved from mocking subsets of people for being on phone to everyone being on phone, we’ve uncovered more cohesive portrayals of what 24/7 connection is doing to us. Writ large, more and more of us are looking to win arguments. Even losing is a thrill.

It’s a contrived plan for a villain whose power transcends mere limitless control over physical matter. The only thing that binds the Toymaker is the rules of the game. We can trace the evolution of TV drama by comparing his first appearance to his last, William Hartnell’s almost congenial gotchas to Tennant’s panic at genuine omnipotence. The Toymaker traps the Doctor and Donna in a theater for a puppet play about the many deaths of the former’s companions. The Doctor, ever the hero, denies them three times.

Well, are they dead? These specials have proven that, even in the megacorp mines, fan favorite returns don’t have to be Rise of Skywalker gruel. Donna, and the Fourth Doctor’s returning Mel Bush, bring necessary continuity to the transition into new-new Who.

Not everything, at least, has to end in tragedy. When the Toymaker commandeers the giant laser gun the government is cool with UNIT keeping in uptown London, the Doctor bigenerates, splitting into straight Tennant (presumably) and gay Ncuti Gatwa. Together they beat the Toymaker at catch, which banishes him for good.

From here on, we follow Gatwa’s Doctor. Tennant stays with Donna. There is movement in rest, organic, within. Their relationship may continue to develop, just where we can’t see it. Not everything is for screen consumption.

The Church On Ruby Road

Every time I see this episode’s title I get Hüsker Dü’s “Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill” stuck in my head, except the Inter Arma cover because that’s the first time I heard that. The Doctor is fortunate enough to run into one of the few actresses that can match his energy, Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday: songwriter, orphan and ingenue. Ruby lives a zoomer kitsch apartment with string lights on the walls, alongside her adoptive mother and grandmother. She suffers from a curse of bad luck, bewitched by an airshipful of baby-eating goblins.

The Doctor and Ruby stop the goblins from eating a baby, to the tune of an R&B paean to Jabba-the-Hut, the only logical step from the Toymaker’s Spice Girls lipsync sequence. The goblins retaliate by traveling in time to eat baby Ruby, abandoned by her mother on Christmas day on the porch of The Church That Lives On Ruby Road. Watching Ruby’s mother go, Gatwa cries his series-first tear of silent grief. He’s very good at that.

The Doctor’s rule of no self-interaction has fucked his opportunity to let Ruby meet her biological mother. Pay attention, this’ll be on the test. Other than that, “The Church” is an easy, fun, low-stakes introduction to the Doctor’s companion and many of the season’s dominos, only some of which will receive a proper knockdown.

Space Babies

The first real ostentatious show of Disney budget is a quick but lush visit to James Cameron's Mesozoic. A CGI diplodocus doesn’t have to be bad. CGI baby mouths, on the other hand.

Budget cuts strand a colony spaceship, replete with babies in a bizarre state of semi-suspended animation: they’ve been toddlers for six years. Only accountant Jocelyn remains. The babies are terrorized by the Boogeyman, a snot monster generated by glitched-out educational software. Jocelyn almost airlocks the Boogeyman until the Doctor reminds her that it’s kind of her baby also.

The Doctor’s memory of Ruby Road changes to feature Ruby’s mother pointing at him. It starts snowing indoors, another magic plot puzzle piece. Cue tear of silent grief. There’s not much else to say about “Space Babies”. It’s a lot of terrible ideas, executed with functional neatness: quoting a friend, the platonic ideal of a Russell T 6/10.

The Devil’s Chord

1925 again! There’s a whole pantheon of Toymaker-type evil gods. This one’s Maestro, the god of music, played by a spectacular Jinkx Monsoon. Over the course of four decades, Maestro ruins music so thoroughly that even Abbey Road sounds like dogwater.

The Doctor and Ruby negotiate with the Beatles, who make dodgy gestures towards the whole of music being an embarrassing business. It’s never made clear how Maestro has convinced the world of this, or, like the Toymaker’s giggle, why they bothered when they have the power to eat music itself. We’ve crossed into the realm of magic. It’s not about the method, but the goal: within a hundred years, musicless mankind will self-exterminate to vent its anger, leaving Maestro to enjoy pure aeolian tones.

It’s hard to agree that music is the salve keeping mankind from abject violence when contending with the history of, Burzum, Chris Brown or Meni Mamtera. Nor does the idea that Maestro can be defeated by a seven-note scale available to basic Western music theory hold much water. “The Devil’s Chord” is an altogether less cohesive “The Giggle”, and only three episodes after its predecessor, too. On the other hand, as a piece of musical cinema, it’s a brilliant watch for Monsoon’s performance, the playful metanarrative gestures, and the closing number, ‘There’s Always A Twist At The End’.

Boom

On the ravaged planet of Kastarion-3, there is only war. A landmine vaporizes a guy, attracting an 'ambulance' automaton to euthanize his friend Vater by reducing him into an awesomely gross flesh tube.

Gatwa leaves the TARDIS in a super-sexy leather jacket and steps on a mine. What follows is ten agonizing minutes of the Doctor and Ruby figuring out the logistics of the situation. The Doctor can’t move off the smart mine or exhibit high emotion. On finding Vater’s tube, Ruby convinces the Doctor to let her hand it to him to use as a counterweight, in a move that almost kills them both. The pressure is immense, achieved with nothing but close-ups to tears of silent grief and a silly prop of a landmine with LEDs.

Vater’s daughter finds the duo, triggering the flesh tube to generate a grief counselor hologram of her father. Ruby gets shot while managing a haywire ambulance. The only way to get the ambulance to treat her is to admit that the Kastarians never existed. With a full third of characters dead, Cyber-Vater betrays its parent corporation to end the war. This is the most stressful Doctor Who gets, in all the best ways. For a second, and against all logic, I was even convinced it might be the end of Ruby Sunday.

“Boom” is the closest Gatwa’s Doctor has to a companion capsule episode. This focus on their relationship might’ve gone over even better if it’d been earlier in the run, especially given “The Devil’s Chord” has the opposite problem. I suspect the prime reason why it’s placed in an awkward middle slot is to not give away the game: “Boom” front-and-centers Susan Twist, who’s played minor roles in almost every episode since “Wild Blue Yonder”, as the face of the combat ambulance AI. There’s always a twist at the end, remember?

73 Yards

The Doctor’s always stepping on some bullshit. After intruding on a ritual circle, he disappears, leaving Ruby alone with a mysterious woman that’s always standing 73 yards away. Everyone who talks to the woman flies goes no-contact with Ruby: a hiker, a bar-goer, UNIT, even, in a harrowing turn, Ruby’s adoptive mother. So Ruby spends the next twenty years alone. Without her family, and also alone in this ethereal way where she’s meant to be on startlit adventures, not half-there on a wine bar date.

Gibson carries this mammoth episode on her shoulders, evolving from panicked 20 year old to middle-aged, purpose-driven mercenary. The closest thing to a co-star is the cinematography, following her eyes towards the woman-shaped hole in the near horizon. This is one of the subtler metanarrative moments of the season: the woman is impossible to photograph, blurry in pictures just as she’s never in focus for the camera.

Ruby makes up a mission: save the world from ‘Mad Jack’ Roger ap Gwilliam, a presidential candidate whom the Doctor off-hand warned would lead the world to nuclear ruin. Infiltrating, Jack’s presidential campaign, she maneuvers the woman into manifesting next to him, which makes him run screaming from office. The world is saved. Ruby isn’t. As she lays dying of old age, alone, the mystery woman is revealed to be herself, traveling back in time to warn the Doctor off the circle.

This is the furthest Doctor Who can stray from its own standards before becoming a different show altogether. The theme song doesn’t even play (shame). Not a coincidence, it’s also the episode to most demand that we trust emotion over logic, and it pays back that trust with dividends. It doesn’t matter that we never find out why there was a shrine to Mad Jack atop a cliff in Wales twenty years before his time, or the mechanism by which Ruby created a closed time loop. The important bit is the emotional resonance, the click of catharsis when we discover just enough details to let it rest.

Dot and Bubble

I feared, as “Dot” opened on a woman so dependent on social media that she can’t navigate her immediate surroundings without GPS, that this would be the Phone Bad episode “The Giggle” had managed to surpass. The truth is more complex: Finetime’s residents can afford to spend all day Whatsapping because they’re the offspring of another planet’s leisure class, here on permanent vacation.

Giant man-eating slugs have invaded Finetime, and the Dot-Bubble navigation system is walking people straight into their maws. Our lead is neither Gatwa nor Gibson, but Callie Cooke as Lindy Pepper-Bean in yet another of the acting masterclasses that characterize this season. An ongoing tension point is whether Lindy can keep her Bubble down long enough to string together two tasks. This means the season’s highest ratio of close-ups to other shots. Cooke carries this focus with recidivist disdain, processing the situation in arbitrary bursts only to default to anger at the Doctor for intruding on her groupchat, or elation at meeting a celebrity singer.

The slugs are an invention of the Dot, which, after years of servicing Finetime, has learned hate. Huddled outside the habitat dome, the all-white survivors reject the Doctor’s 'dirty' safe passage, and strike out to colonize the wilderness, ‘like their ancestors’.

Laterally to Phone Bad, an ongoing trend in wronghead fiction is Rich Bad. Movies like Bodies Bodies Bodies portray the bourgeoise as a self-obsessed bunch who will fall snarling on themselves at the first provocation. This is not what makes the bourgeoise dangerous, but in fact the exact opposite: because the rich have everything to lose, they will close ranks against you, no matter how much good you’ve done for them, no matter what you could yet do.

Rogue

Before the season ends, anybody want to defend England one last time? Playing nobility at a Regency London ball, the Doctor runs into Rogue, a bounty hunter who mistakes him (at gunpoint) for a shapeshifting, murderous Chuldur.

The Chuldur are fans of Bridgerton, on Earth to cosplay it to death. In order to lure them out, The Doctor and Rogue publicize their whirlwind romance. If “Dot and Bubble” was a response to the idea that Gatwa might run into racism if he travels to the past, “Rogue” is its inversion: the plan works because the modern Chuldur can’t resist the titillation of wearing a black gay man. They run after the hypervisible Doctor, while the white Rogue becomes “the other one”. He’s less problematized, less interesting, the one you get stuck with if you don’t call intersectional shotgun.

After the trap is sprung by accident, Rogue's banished alongside the Chuldur to a random dimension of nobody’s knowing. The Doctor declares it’s impossible to find him. We’ll see about that.

For all its nods towards fandom, “Rogue” isn’t a po-faced condemnation of fan culture. Ultimately, the Chuldur too are defeated through cosplay. Plus, it’s a straight beat-by-beat of the strongest points in Who structure: strong side characters, scifi logistics, a villain as goofy as it’s horrific. Whether its back-to-back placement with its thematic mirror, or as a segue to the season finale, is ideal, is anyone’s guess. 

The Legend of Ruby Sunday

The Doctor asks for UNIT’s help in figuring out why Susan Twist follows him everywhere. On 2024 Earth, she’s Susan Triad, tech CEO on the verge of releasing some kind of Alexa thing. But before we get to that, the Doctor decides now’s the time to meet Ruby’s biomom.

Using a ‘Time Window’, Ruby visualizes The Church That Lives On Ruby Road. Ruby cries: the Window refuses to show her mother’s face. The machine goes all creepypasta on some UNIT boot. Panicked, the Doctor chases down Triad, who reveals she can remember her past lives in dreams.

Triad pulls away to her conference. Though she’s live worldwide, her soundstage is empty, the crowd canned. Where much of this season has dealt with the phenomenons of mass media and TV, “The Legend” digs into a grief specific to Doctor Who, an ill-kempt archive of decades forever on the verge of cancellation.

Little else happens, for two good reasons. First, this episode is a two-parter. Second, much of its runtime is dedicated to extracting maximum stress out of the situation. Ruby is too compromised to act, while the Doctor and UNIT are late from the start, only just figuring out the situation in time to witness it unfold. The big reveal paying off all this anxiety, crossed purposes, fear and despair is, unfortunately, a CGI dog with a hat.

Empire of Death

Sutekh is a Fourth Doctor villain who’s been locked in the Time Vortex for thousands of years or a dozen seasons, whichever’s longest. He has spawned harbingers like Triad in every planet that the Doctor’s visited, and his “dust of death” has the power to kill nost just everyone, but everyone at every point in time. In the era of streaming television (and stream-only television), the C-suite can overnight erase all evidence that a show ever existed.

Through a bit of absurd circular logic, the Doctor declares that the Time Window’s memory of a TARDIS is in fact a functioning TARDIS. The crew escapes to roam a deserted universe. The memory TARDIS begs to tie long-dangling plot strands into knots of neat logic. Instead, a bunch of nonsense dialogue happens. When Ruby asks the Doctor why Sutekh has a The Mummy thing going on, the Doctor answers “cultural appropriation”, and fails to elaborate. Laterally, when Ruby casually lists the chameleon circuit’s AOE as 73 yards, the Doctor asks how she knew that. She’s not sure. Nothing comes of this.

Because Sutekh is incapable of seeing Ruby’s mother, the Doctor decides it’s all tied together and heads to a government office in Mad Jack Britain, containing the UK’s forcibly harvested genetic data. Much more cohesive commentary on racism than reminding us cultural appropration is a thing Doctor Who has done. Armed with knowledge, the Doctor baits Sutekh into the Time Vortex, where he forces him to, like, kill death and then die in turn.

It’s a fantastic turn of character for the Doctor, who oft makes a spurious point of not killing in order to condemn villains to fates worse than death, or adopts a ‘War Doctor’ persona which kills a bunch of people anyway. It’s a matter of framing, but also a genuine point of no return. As for less satisfying character beats: Ruby gets to meet her mother, who’s just some middle-aged Instagrammer with a bad haircut and a passion for rocky beaches.

So why was this character immune to everyone from the Time Window to Sutekh, and the unwitting carrier of Ruby’s inherited power to make it snow? Because, the Doctor explains, we cared about her.

Which begs the question: who is we?

The easiest answer is: the last people left alive in the universe. But Ruby’s been making it snow since “Space Babies”. Not proximity to the Doctor either, else the Doctor himself would have magic powers: on the contrary, he’s spent the whole season grappling with his limited ratfic ability to deal with the supernatural. And there’s millions of orphans out there. Ruby is, in this regard as in most else, not special.

Taken all together along with the season’s metanarrative overtures, which keep going right up to the last second of “Empire”, the only answer is that we are the audience. Or the audience and the crew, anyhow: the camera, the screen, Ruby’s protagonism and the people that accept it. We have imbued Ruby Sunday with transcendental power, because we would like her to transcend.

This doesn’t work unless I am more emotionally than narratively invested in Ruby Sunday.

Not that I didn’t get torn up when Ruby met her mother. But that’s just cinema trickery. A season’s worth of promises, a bit of music, very good acting: of course I was going to care. Not more than I care about finding out what the fuck was going on, though. As an explanation, this all rounds out to: what was going on is what was going on. Ruby’s mom was important because she mattered to us, and it mattered to us because she was important. Me, I refuse to be complicit.

There is an unpleasant extreme to the logical lens, the CinemaSinners combing through scripts, sacrificing the greater story to the tendentious idol of Plot Holes. Doctor Who has long been plagued by these types, pitfalls of being an easy-watching BBC show with a large audience. Series 14 scans like a concerted effort to not give these guys an inch. In overcorrecting, it created a maudlin mess of unfulfilled promise.

That is as far as the season's connected plotline goes. Fortunately, most of the episodes are gems, directed with a sense of fun almost unseen in the revival series’ longstanding gloom. The Doctor has turned into a killer, maybe for good. We are promised that his tale will end in tragedy. I hold out hope that, next time the story tries to hit me where it hurts, it’ll follow through.

7/10

[dustedmagazine]

Mike Reed — The Separatist Party (Astral Spirits)

Photo by Liina Raud

Well into our fourth year living with COVID, the effects remain. People continue to suffer long-term medical consequences, cycle through repeat infections and negotiate the breakdown of civility gnawing at the heart of social and political life. The Separatist Party is the first of a trio of collaborative albums on which Chicago drummer and composer Mike Reed explores seclusion and isolation. Cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, multi-instrumentalists Rob Frye, Cooper Crain and Dan Quinlivan from Bitchin Bajas join Reed on tracks which flow easily over Reed’s dexterous rhythms. Poet Marvin Tate adds a gritty presence as he moves between rough improvised soul and browbeating spoken word.

Opener “Your Soul” builds from a minimalist South African rhythm with circular keyboard and guitar motifs as Tate riffs around the line “Your soul is a mosh pit” an intensely energetic contrast to the easy lope of the music. Frye’s tenor and Gay’s cornet helm “A Low Frequency Nightmare” trading licks over woozy keyboards and Reed’s drums which build from a straight-ahead almost komische drive into a syncopated excursion around his kit. On “Hold Me” Gay nags and wheedles as Tate’s exhortations to touch, talk, understand and his kiss-off lines, “The truth is layered, layered/bone, flesh and politic/You never like the way I kissed/and I never cared for your race play/too predictable and historically inaccurate” capture miscommunication that slides too quicky into dispute. The tonal difference between this and tracks like “Floating with an Intimate Stranger” “Our Own Love Language” in which Frye’s flute, Crain’s guitar and Gay’s cornet trace filigreed windmills in the pastoral air can be jarring but The Separatist Party works as a mosaic of mood and styles that demonstrate the often contradictory emotional and artistic responses to common experience.

Across a range of styles that mirror the musical range of the participants, Reed and company find ways to meld their influences into a cohesive whole. Tate’s declamatory poetry hits hard, but the essence of this project lies in the reciprocity of the sextet’s playing. Each member maintains their identity and brings it forth in service of the whole in a display of mutual respect that provides a pathway back into the world. A powerful lesson indeed.

Andrew Forell

[rhyliethelovelycaterfly]

Cast

Erika Henningsen Voiced Willy Charlie

Sam Lavagnino Voiced Catbug

John Omohundro Voiced Daniel "Danny" Vasquez

Hynden Walch Voiced Bonnibel Bubblegum

Olivia Olsen Voiced Marceline

Trey Parker Voiced Randy Beauregarde, Stan Beauregarde, Beavery The Beaver, Beary the Bear, Rabbity the Rabbit, Raccoony the Raccoon And Skunky the Skunk

Edward Bosco Voiced Joe Salt

Minelli Chavez "Tito" Jiménez II Voiced Marvin Teavee

Britt McKillip Voiced Ribbon

Vivian Nixon Voiced Millie Salt

Jordan Fry Voiced Lewis Teavee

Amy Birnbaum Voiced Kirby Gloop

Adrian Beard Voiced Squirrely the Squirrel

Mona Marshall Voiced Foxy the Fox, Batty The Bat And Chickadee-y the Chickadee

Matt Stone Voiced Harey the Hare, Opossumy The Opossum, Ottery The Otter, And Mousy The Mouse

April Stewart Voiced Porcupiney the Porcupine, Deery the Deer And Woodpeckery the Woodpecker

Jessica Makinson Voiced Wolfy The Wolf, Weasely The Weasel And Boary the Boar

Jeremy Jordan Voiced Lucifer Morningstar

Ian Jones-Quartey Voiced Wallow

Alex Walsh Voiced Christopher "Chris" Kirkman

Liliana Mumy Voiced Beth Tezuka

Colleen Villard Voiced Willy Charlie (Young)

Emma Tate Voiced Katsuma

Phillipa Alexander Voiced Poppet

Deleted Scene Cast

April Stewart Voiced Wendy Prinzmetal

Scrapped Characters Cast

Clancy Brown Voiced Eugene H Prune And Betsy Prune

Jess Weiss Voiced Chica Piker

Jade Kindar-Martin Voiced Bonnie

Michelle Ruff Voiced Cream Hypnoski

Rebecca Honig Voiced Vanilla Hypnoski

Tom Kenny Voiced Rabbit Hypnoski

I Gave Credit To @expandismgold For His Art That I Requested Him

[projazznet]

Quincy Jones – Gula Matari

Gula Matari is a 1970 studio album by Quincy Jones.

Pepper Adams – baritone saxophone Danny Bank – bass and baritone saxophones Hubert Laws – flute solos Jerome Richardson – soprano saxophone solos Freddie Hubbard, Danny Moore, Ernie Royal, Marvin Stamm, Gene Young – trumpet/flugelhorn Wayne Andre – trombone Al Grey – trombone solos Toots Thielemans – guitar and whistle solo Herbie Hancock, Bob James, Bobby Scott – keyboards Grady Tate – drums Don Elliott – bass marimba on “Gula Matari” Jimmy Johnson, Warren Smith – percussion Ray Brown – bass Ron Carter – bass on “Gula Matari” Richard Davis – bass on “Gula Matari” Major Holley – bass and voice solo Milt Jackson – vibes Seymour Barab, Kermit Moore, Lucien Schmit, Alan Shulman – cello Valerie Simpson, Marilyn Jackson, Maretha Stewart, Barbara Massey, Hilda Harris – vocals

[pk-freezer-burnt]

It's Sou's birthday! TORCH IT SCHILLY!!

[mstornadox]

I liked how RTD decided to follow up fixing Donna’s terrible ending with a two-hander episode that celebrates the chemistry between the Doctor and Donna (and David Tennant and Catherine Tate.) Fan service? Yes, please.

Other things I liked:

These specials have been good at showing how the Doctor has changed through the years. 14 might have the same face as 10, but he has different emotional responses. And he’s okay with those changes. Character development

Also, RTD is not ignoring 13

Best use of intentional uncanny valley cgi since Severance’s opening credits.

I really wanted the robot to be called Marvin. Give a shout-out to Douglas Adams

Wilf!