#Mythos Paparazzi

[awesomefringey]

did you see Harry and Luis greet the paparazzo? lol

I’m away for the weekend and I almost disregarded your message as trolling. But now that I had time to look through all the recent pap pictures…

Oh my god, you were indeed serious! 😅

[brandwhorestarscream]

*kicks down the door* ONE PERSON ASKED FOR IT SO HERE WE GO! Have some TF1 AU-ish fic. Potential spoilers under the cut!

This involves an oc originally crafted for Hindsight, the Acolyte of Alpha Trion, named Charade

So, imagine when Sentinel murders the Primes and tries to take the Matrix, he goes back to the cybertronians and tells them everyone's gone but they've left him with a master plan. He takes control and starts moving the survivors below the surface, and the sleaze bag decides to gloat over the dead/coma-trapped.

He marches on Alpha Trion's temple, and intends to take the greatest prize of all, the only one of the Primes to have such a thing: he wants to take Alpha Trion's mate. Of course, no one knows that Charade is actually romantically involved with the god he serves: officially, he's the Acolyte and nothing else. But Sentinel, as their internal mediator, was privvy to that information. And Charade is undeniably beautiful, touched with a holy glow and vibrant colors. He'll make an excellent trophy for the new Head of Cybertron

Charade is naturally extremely opposed to the idea, tells Sentinel to kick rocks and already prepping with his priests to oppose whatever the hell this scumbag is planning

Then, you know. Sentinel reveals his connection to the quintessons, and manages to strongarm poor Charade into an unsteady surrender by threatening to raze the temple, fully knowing that a very young newspark Mythos is somewhere in the building. Charade wouldn't hesitate to die for Alpha Trion, but he's not willing to risk the sparkling's safety, nor is he willing to allow Alpha Trion's holiest place to be desecrated. Defeated, he's forced to Sentinel's side, and his support and "public declaration of bonding" is more than enough to get the meager survivors of the war to follow him without question. They rebuild a miniature civilization beneath the surface, naming it Iacon too, as it mirrors the previous one on the other side of the planet's crust.

For untold vorns, Charade is Sentinel's prisoner. The other Acolytes were assumably hunted down and Charade knows not their fate, nor does he ever find out what happened to Alpha Trion. He had held out hope for awhile, that the Primes might rise again, but... nothing happens. With baby Mythos cradled in his arms, he's forced to watch as Cybertron's people slooowly comes back from the brink of near-extinction, but this new Dynasty built under a false Prime is a miserable one. Every cold construct that Sentinel orders make, he plucks their t-cogs from their newbotn chests, before they even come online. He decides who can transform, who does what, and forces the lowest tiers of his new system to toil ceasessly in the mines. Charade is sickened by the mutilations to newsparks and the near-daily casualty reports as countless mecha are lost in the unstable mining systems. But it's not nearly as sickening as his so-called "bonded" presents himself to the people.

Now, Sentinel isn't stupid. He knows an unhappy population will upend their overlords eventually. Look how he got here, after all. He packages himself as a kind and charismatic leader, spouting empty words of love and appreciation with such tender optical and a soft smile that everyone believes him. Every single one of them really, truly, genuinely believe that their Sentinel Prime is gracious and grand, and cares so deeply for them he's tirelessly exploring the surface searching for the lost Matrix and Primes. And he's even a loving family mech--look at his beautiful mate and child, who's the spitting image of his carrier but still so doted in and adored. His mate, Charade, prefers to keep himself out of the spotlight, shielding their newspark from press and nosy paparazzi in favor of lots of one-on-one time at home with mama. Better for his little spark'a development, of course! They're the perfect little family for the perfect leader, and everyone is happy

Then, there's the whole mess with the Iacon 5000 race. It's one of the few times Charade makes public appearances, or rather, one of the few times Sentinel lets him make an appearance. He has control of Charade, but just barely: he knows the pretty viper next to him is always thinking about how to topple everything he's built, how to run, how to escape. But he can't, so long as Sentinel has the potential to catch Mythos in the crossfire--while fiercely and viciously devoted to Alpha Trion, he was also an exceptionally protective, loving mother. He wouldn't dare do anything if he thought there was the slightest chance Mythos would be harmed. The Iacon 5000 is an annual event that everyone loves, and is massively crowded: there's no way any sort of mischief wouldn't cause massive harm. If not to them, then the innocent citizens. Charade's servos are tied.

It's expected that the much beloved Prime would watch the race with his family. Celebrating something that may as well be a public holiday without his family would be very strange indeed. They watch it together every year from their special VIPrime seats. Mythos, at least, seems to enjoy it, bouncing in his carrier's lap and squealing as the racers zoom on by.

Then... Orion Pax drags D-16 into the race. They do smthn this underground Cybertron has never seen before. By now, all memories of the surface have died with the previous generations. To see miners that can't transform doing something *so crazy* is the most fun anyone's had in ages. Charade actually finds himself giggling at their antics while Mythos has a blast in his lap; it's like watching the hyper younglings horsing around on the playgrounds they had on the surface.

After the race, Sentinel of course goes to see them, wanting to ride this wave as much as he can and use them to motivate the other miners to increase quota. As he speaks with the two troublemakers, he notices D-16's awed optics keep flitting between himself and something behind him--a little to the left. He glances down and finds Charade at his side, lurking in his shadow as he often does when they're in public, baby Mythos still cradled on his hip. The sparkling is asleep, cheek down on his carrier's shoulder and drooling all over him, out like a light.

"Ah..." the Prime's eyes glint. "You've never seen a sparkling before?"

"N- No sir...!" D-16's tone is mystified, as if he can't quite believe that this is *happening*, and Charade's spark aches for him.

The Acolyte can't resist. "Well, you're in luck then, little one," the Acolyte says, stepping around his bonded and forward. "My Mythos very much enjoyed the show you two put on."

"He did...?" This time it's Orion Pax who sounds mystified, leaning forward to look at the tiny sparkling. "Oh, w-wow-! He's... s-so small..."

"Oh, but he'll grow!" Sentinel Prime jumps back in, one arm snaking around Charade's waist to pull him close. "All sparklings grow with time, and it's thanks to bots like you who make the world brighter for sparklings like him. We're both really grateful for how happy you made our son today."

Charade nods with an invincible, dazzling smile, mask never slipping. "It's true! He really loved it, didn't you baby?" He turns his face to press a series of gentle kisses to the sparkling's forehelm, and then, bitty optic shutters twitch.

Mythos suddenly makes a squeaking, staticy noise and yawns widely, so wide his little chin quivers, before sleepy blue optics suddenly squint open.

"Bah!" The baby squeals and immediately reaches out to grab Orion's nose, who reels in surprise, leaning so far back he falls off the bench with a great clamor.

The sparkling spooks easily, optics wide and shrinking back against his carrier with a distressed cry. "Oh no-!" D-16 looks distinctly panicked as the sparkling's lip wobbles threateningly and his optics start filling with oily tears. "No no no, d-don't cry, it's ok! He- He didn't mean to scare you, um, uh... h-here! Here look, see? Shiny!" He angles his left shoulder toward the sparkling, and his fresh new Megatronus decal glints and sparkles appealing. Immediately, the sparkling forgetsbhis tears and coos with wonder, clumsily clapping his chubby little hands.

Charade regards it was interest and quiet approval. "Oh, a fan of Lord Megatronus Prime, are we?"

"Ah-" D-16 looks sheepish, reaching to touch the back of his helm. "Y- Yes, ahem, yes sir! He's my hero- oh! N-Not that you're not a hero too, Sentinel Prime sir, cuz you are! I- I just meant that-"

"It's alright," Charade gently cuts him off, struggling to hold the increasingly-wiggly sparkling barely confined in his arms. He bounces Mythos distractedly, trying to shush him. "We know what you meant, little one. We take no offense." Well, perhaps Sentinel might, but Charade wasn't terribly concerned.

The sparkling suddenly keens loudly and begins to kick against his carrier, trying to push his way out of his arms. "Mythos, what are you-" he follows his son's line of sight, and finds him fixated on the purple sticker on the young miner's shoulder. "Oh." He's recognized his Uncle's visage, evidently.

"Uh... is he-"

"Do you want to hold him?" Charade shuffles forward, trying to scoop Mythos back into a more secure hold but the bitty is having none of it. He begins to whine and tug at his carrier's arms. "He wants you to hold him."

"Oh-" D-16 looks embarrassed but delighted, waving his servos shyly in front of him. "N-No, I couldn't, I- I've never-"

"Aw c'mon, D!" Orion slings an arm around his shoulders, conveniently trapping him. "Don't be rude to Mr. Charade~"

"I- I wasn't-"

Too late, Mythos is done waiting and Charade has given up trying to hold him: he steps closer and deftly deposits the sparkling into the miner's lap. His servos are shaking and his arms are stiff and clumsy as they wrap around him, but the little bot doesn't seem to mind. Bitty hands planted on his chest and tiny pedes shaking as he stands on the juvenile's thighs, knock-kneed but managing to hold himself up. They're face to face and Mythos babbles at him, gently papping at his face and squealing in excitement. He promptly falls to the side and D-16 yelps as he hurries to catch him, sandwiching the baby just where he wants to be. He purrs and rubs his little face into the sticker, beginning to lick and suckle at it in affectionate sparkling kisses. It's been so long, but seems he still remembers his Uncle Megatronus's face. It gives Charade hope, that Mythos will still remember his sire, his real sire, as he grows up.

D-16, on the flip side, is quietly amazed: he's never held something so warm and gentle and sweet before. Before Charade eventually takes Mythos back, the sparkling gives him a big, warm hug, bitty arms around his neck and nuzzling under his chin. He doesn't even care that the kid slobbered on his decal, he's just so entranced. His first time seeing a sparkling is nothing short of magical.

Shortly after, they have to wrap up their meeting. Sentinel has another "crusade" to the surface and needs to make preparations, but promises to reward the two miners. Charade lingers behind for a moment as he leaves with Airachnid, whispering to the two boys, "Thank you, for what you did today... I know it's going to make a lot of people happy. Don't... mm. Don't give up, ok?"

And then, yk, Darkwing finds them throws em onto sublevel 50. They find the old datachip from Steve (rip Steve). They decide to break onto the surface by hitching a ride on the delivery train

Now, I'm not sure exactly *how* or *when*. Maybe Charade noticed that Mythos had grabbed something he wasn't supposed to and went to return it. Maybe he decided to keep an eye on them and noticed their shifty behavior. Maybe he heard about their "reassignment" and went to correct it. IDK. But the point is, somehow Charade overhears their conversation about going to find the Primes.

He demands to come along and they refuse initially, because surely they can't bring Sentinel Prime's beloved mate to the most dangerous place in the world! They argue back and forth and back and forth, tensions rising until eventually,

"You have to let me go with you!"

"Charade, sir, we *really* can't-"

And Charade eventually just. Breaks. Tears that he's been holding in since the day Alpha Trion disappeared and Sentinel took over and rush down his face and they seem him crack and shatter in real time. "I *have* to go," he sobs, rasping hoarsely. "I *have* to see what's left of him! If there's anything left, I *have* to see it-!"

They don't know what Charade's not telling him, but his rapidly-crumbling state speaks of the importance very frankly.

"Please-!" He stumbles down to his knees, shoulders shaking as he clasps his servos over his chest. Misery courses potently theough his EM field. "Please... I'm begging you," it was a horrible thing, watching someone they respected so much on his knees and begging. D-16 and Orion both approach him, looking troubled and sparksick. "I beg you... let me go. I need to know- kn-know what happened! Please. I'll not be in the way, I- I must see him again, no matter what."

They concede, of course. They're not heartless. Charade goes along with them and is so troubled seeing Cybertron's surface. Organic flora has begun to sprout and ensnare everything in its vines and foliage in light of the quintesson's work. It was slow going, but it was happening: they were slowly turning the surface of Cybertron into a place for their kind to live. It sickened him to the core.

When they find the Grave and all of the dead Primes and the lost Matrix, Charade is sparkbroken. Solus Prime impaled and splayed out in death, he can barely look. Pallas would weep, to see her beloved goddess like this. He wonders, for the umpteenth time, what became of her. Had Sentinel killed her? Did she escape? No one knew, and no one would tell him. He stops before each of the Primes to pray, reciting their thirteen commandments and pledging to honor their memory and sacrifice. It's not until Orion Pax alerts them to something blinking and buried is Alpha Trion unearthed, and Charade can't take it. Rushes forward to repower his frame thanks to the energon stores of sweet B-127, and he watches with awe and horror as he emerges from his coma. Still calling for help, still primed and ready for battle, still reeling from the horrid betrayal of Sentinel

As soon as he's freed and gets his bearings thanks to their soothing words, he notices Charade there and his jaw visibly drops.

"My... My Ac-"

"LORD ALPHA TRION!" Charade can't contain himself another minute and throws himself at his god's feet, weeping tears of joy as he folds to his knees and clasps his hands. "It's really you-" he sobs. "Praise Primus, thank you Primus, Alpha Trion, my lord, I-"

Quick as lightning the old mech is grabbing Charade by the waist and hauling him into the air with strength that amazes all of the bystanders. "My Acolyte," he rasps and promptly kisses him right there, in front of everyone. Charade squeaks in surprise and promptly wraps his arms ariund his helm, even as the young bots, "Woah!" and avert their optics behind them.

It's Orion Pax who speaks first. "I, um- I thought you were. Uh... bonded to Sentinel Prime?"

"He is no Prime!" Alpha Trions booms and spins to face him. "He does not bear our name!"

After this the truth is revealed and everything plays out pretty much the same, except when they're being hunted Charade tries to stay with Alpha. He's either dragged away kicking and screaming, or stays and dies alongside his mate, fighting fearlessly. Either one works, I'm not picky. Main ending I'm envisioning is, when Megatron starts tearing down the towers, he and Optimus both realize at about the same time that poor bitty Mythos is in one of the collapsing buildings. He targeted Sentinel's tower first, after all 😌 whether or not they manage to save baby remains to be seen

I seriously think that, has D-16 and Orion had a mediator, someone to intervene at the climax and separate them? Let them cool off, have a good night's sleep, and reconvene the next morning, and emotions would bend. Heads would clear and they could salvage this, together. They were so close and so intimately trustful of one another, it didn't have to end with a horrible rift. Perhaps, had they had an experienced adult on their side, things could've been better. That's what Im hoping this AU accomplishes: Alpha Trion's dedicated Acolyte keeping those two from tipping over the edge 🤭

Anyway, I'm done now. Hopefully this was semi-coherent because I just spewed words for an hour to write this, was just so excited and full of thoughts i just had to write them down as fast as possible. Enjoy!

Also if you wanna scream about TF1 with me this is an open invitation to drop into my dms or join my discord or send me asks or literally ANYTHING

[phoenixtakaramono]

ELDRITCH BILLY/ HOMELANDER THREADFIC

SUMMARY: I've written werewolf!Butcher/ vampire!Homelander threadfics before. Here's another 🔞 butchlander monsterfucking AU, this time with Billy essentially being a powerful eldritch god that Homelander wants to fuck.

CW: tentacle sex, oviposition (body horror if you squint but not really)

(The rest of the threadfic can be read here!)

If you don’t have a Twitter account, I have screenshotted the rest of the spicy half below the line break:

Q&A

You mentioned a couple times that a thread in Homelander's mind snapped. What does that mean? It's typical Lovecraftian eldritch mythos where if you gaze upon their true form, you lose your sanity. It's subtle foreshadowing of Homelander becoming more and more insane in Billy's presence. What’s the mucous-like substance the tendrils secrete? It’s like an aphrodisiac; I wanted to be funny and pay homage to the tentacle h3ntai p0rn tropes out there. It's my first try with this trope so please go easy on me, haha. What happened at the end? They destroy the world, plain and simple. This AU is short and to the point but the idea is that Billy provides revenge on Homelander's childhood tormentors. (All those scientists? Slaughtered or driven mad.) Even with Billy's offer to ruin everything, despite HL’s pettiness, there's still a shred of humanity inside HL that didn't want to see everyone dead (his logic: how can he be a god when there's nobody left to worship him?). With him being conditioned to depend on Vought and the corporation subliminally advertising himself as “earth’s mightiest defender,” HL charitably grants Vought “one last chance.” …But subconsciously he’s looking for a reason, any justification, any excuse to bury this rotten planet that’s been nothing but cruel to him (in his opinion). He’s waiting to be disappointed for the last time. He just needs that one final push to finally forsake humanity—because now it’s not his fault, you see? You did this. You guys have no one to blame but yourselves for dooming the rest of this world. (This is how, in his psyche, he avoids taking responsibility. Because he has “justification” on his side.) Whether it be Vought’s board of directors, his fans or sycophants, the constant paparazzi and public scrutiny, etc, it’s inevitable someone will piss him off the deep end. I wanted a somewhat nihilistic lovecraftian ambiguous ending and leave it up to readers’ interpretation, but you are free to imagine after Butcher's rampage and after returning earth to void, he takes Homelander who's carrying their eggs back to his realm. And they raise their half-Supe, half-eldritch terrors happily. I HCed Billy originally wanted to fill Homelander with a thousand eggs, but the human colon can only take so much. Most of the eggs end up duds and need to be pushed out/ pulled out (which, y'know, can also be fun *wink wink nudge nudge* I can't say HL didn't enjoy that—a lot), and they ended up with only a couple surviving clutch. The children can adopt a human form (with tentacles) like their papa (inheriting both parents' features) or revert to their true monstrous forms.

Thank you for reading! Hope you enjoyed!

[mariacallous]

Donald Trump’s youngest son, and his only child shared with Melania Trump, has largely remained out of the public eye to the degree any former president’s child could. Well, until recently. Newly 18, Barron Trump is now a freshman at NYU and a burgeoning political adviser to his father.

For the past two weeks, my TikTok For You page has been filled with posts from New York University students posting clips of Barron Trump attending classes as if he were Sasquatch: the videos are all blurry and taken hurriedly, and mostly feature fellow students trying to track down the once-elusive Trump. These cryptic videos, complete with shaky camera angles set to songs like Chamillionaire’s “Ridin,’” are all over, taken from “day in my life”-style student videos and reposted to the dozens of Barron stan accounts across TikTok and Instagram.

These posts have garnered millions of views and look like paparazzi shots. You can tell from the camera angle that the people filming are trying to hide their cameras under backpacks or sweaters. New genres of Barron memes have flourished.

“I feel like Barron could’ve gone to any school, but the fact that he chose one of the most liberal schools in the country speaks volumes,” Grace Rowley, an NYU student who posted about Barron on TikTok, told me. “I was shocked and super intrigued that he would choose NYU. Would love to speak with him and would love to read his ‘why NYU’ essay.”

This kind of projection has been part of Barron’s story for years.

Before September, Barron was an enigma. He had no social media accounts and rarely made public appearances. For eight years, his personal life and interests were left to the public’s imagination. In 2020, rumors spread on TikTok that his then classmates had identified his Roblox username, “JumpyTurtlee.” The account’s bio said that the user was a fan of anime and K-pop and supported LGBTQ+ rights. While the rumor was never confirmed, it became part of Barron’s online mythos. Users would grab clips of him looking glum and make it sound as if he were miserable and despised his father, and then post them under the hashtag #savebarron2020.

Barron was the subject of dozens of pieces of fan fiction on sites like Archive of Our Own and Wattpad, and on fan accounts that recycle the same few clips and images over and over again. As Slate writer Luke Winkie noted earlier this year, Barron became a blank canvas for anyone even somewhat interested in the Trump family to project their own “fantasies” on to.

As Winkie also noted, the weird Greco-Roman antiquity-obsessed wing of the conservative base has obsessed over Barron as well, comparing his jawline to that of Alexander the Great and referring to him as America’s Caesar. Earlier this week, someone made an account seemingly impersonating Barron, making it appear as though he were making misogynistic comments about Kamala Harris. That account has since been suspended.

But fans of Barron won’t need to make up their own personal headcanons any longer, especially as it looks like Barron is beginning to take on a more public-facing role supporting his father. He made an X account on Monday to join a Space hosted by Trump to announce the former president’s new crypto venture. “He talks about his wallet, he’s got four wallets or something, and I’ll say, ‘What is a wallet?” the former president said. When Trump sat for an interview with Kick streamer Adin Ross earlier this year, he said that Barron was a fan of Ross. “My son’s told me about you,” Trump told him.

Time will tell, but for now, I'm not sure the internet can assume Barron is merely a weeb anymore. At least we'll probably find out on TikTok soon.

[whileiamdying]

What Was So Special About Greta Garbo?

An enigma onscreen and off, the actress only magnified her celebrity by suddenly renouncing it.

By Margaret Talbot December 6, 2021

“If only once I could see a preview and come home feeling satisfied,” Garbo said.Photograph by Edward Steichen © 2021 The Estate of Edward Steichen / ARS, courtesy the George Eastman Museum

Fame is so powerful that renouncing it can seem like the supreme power move. Celebrities who retreat from the public eye (Howard Hughes, J. D. Salinger, Prince) will always be legends, no matter what else they may be. Rumored comebacks tantalize. Paparazzi circle. The mystery deepens. In 1941, at the age of thirty-six, Greta Garbo, one of the biggest box-office draws in the world, stopped acting and, though she lived for half a century more, never made another film. For a star who, more than any other, “invaded the subconscious of the audience,” as Robert Gottlieb writes in his new biography, “Garbo” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), this was an abdication, a privilege of monarchical proportions. But it was also a decision made by one particular, peculiar person who had never been temperamentally suited to celebrity in the first place. There was a reason, beyond the exertions of the Hollywood publicity machine, that a single line she uttered in one movie—“I want to be alone”—became so fused with her image. What can look like a strategy for keeping the public interested can also be a sincere and committed desire to keep it at bay.

Few other performers have ascended as quickly to mononymic status as Garbo did—she started off the way most of us do, with a first and last name, but the first soon fell away, like a spent rocket booster, in the ballyhoo surrounding her. When she appeared in her first sound picture, “Anna Christie,” the ads proclaimed, “Garbo talks!”; for her first sound comedy, “Ninotchka,” it was “Garbo laughs!” Quite why she became such a phenomenon is a puzzle to which film critics and biographers keep returning. Garbo made only twenty-eight movies in her lifetime. (By comparison, Bette Davis made close to ninety, and Meryl Streep has made nearly seventy and still counting.) That slender output could be part of the mystique, compounded by her disappearing act. But Garbo had acquired an enigmatic mythos even before she ended her career—the Hollywood colony treated her like royalty. Nor has it seemed to matter that only a handful of her movies are much watched or admired today.

What Garbo had to offer, above all, was her extraordinary face, at a time when the closeup, with its supercharged intimacy, its unprecedented boon to the emotional and erotic imagination, was still relatively new. Many of the shots credited as the first closeups were unlikely to have set hearts aflame, since they were often of objects—a shoe, a wrench. But filmmakers soon grasped the centripetal seductions of the human face in tight focus. The screenwriter and director Paul Schrader picks as a turning point the moment in a D. W. Griffith film from 1912, “Friends,” in which the camera comes in tight on Mary Pickford’s face, revealing her ambivalence about which of two suitors she should choose. “A real close-up of an actor is about going in for an emotional reason that you can’t get any other way,” Schrader writes. “When filmmakers realized that they could use a close-up to achieve this kind of emotional effect, cameras started coming in closer. And characters became more complex.”

A face as beautiful as Garbo’s—the enormous eyes and deep-set lids, the way love or tenderness or some private, unspoken amusement unknit her brows in an instant, melting her austerity—was almost overwhelming when it filled the screen. She belonged, as Roland Barthes wrote, “to that moment in cinema when the apprehension of the human countenance plunged crowds into the greatest perturbation, where people literally lost themselves in the human image.” This is not to diminish her craft as an actress. But her acting was perhaps most effective in her silent films or in nonverbal scenes in talking pictures in which her face is the canvas for emotion. In the famous last shots of “Queen Christina” (1933), Garbo’s androgynous Swedish ruler stands at the prow of a ship bearing her away from her country; the body of her lover, killed in a duel over her, is laid out on the deck. Garbo stares into the distance, her face a kind of mask but no less eloquent for it. The film’s director, Rouben Mamoulian, had told her that she must “make her mind and heart a complete blank,” empty her face of expression, so that the audience could impose whatever emotions they wanted on it. The scene would then be one of those “marvelous spots,” he said, where “a film could turn every spectator into a creator.”

She was skilled at inciting such projection. More than one contemporary in Hollywood noted that her magic truly showed up only on celluloid, like a ghostly luminescence undetectable until the film was developed. Clarence Brown, who directed Garbo in seven films, recalled shooting a scene with her, thinking it was fine, nothing special, then playing it back and seeing “something that it just didn’t have on the set.” On her face, he said, “You could see thought. If she had to look at one person with jealousy, and another with love, she didn’t have to change her expression. You could see it in her eyes as she looked from one to the other.” Garbo herself, with a kind of arch, adolescent indifference, never wanted to look at the rushes. According to Brown, she’d watch only when sound pictures were played in reverse: “That’s what Garbo enjoyed. She would sit there shaking with laughter, watching the film running backward and the sound going yakablom-yakablom. But as soon as we ran it forward, she wouldn’t watch it.”

Much has been written about Garbo over the years, but Gottlieb, a former editor of this magazine, has produced a particularly charming, companionable, and clear-eyed guide to her life and work—he has no axe to grind, no urgent need to make a counterintuitive case for her lesser movies, and he’s generous with his predecessors. By the end of the biography, I felt I understood Garbo better as a person, without the aura of mystery around her having been entirely dispelled—and, at this point, who would want it to be?

The actress who came to embody a kind of unattainable elegance, who would someday wear sumptuous period costumes with a grace so offhand that they might have been rumpled p.j.’s, grew up in a cramped apartment with no indoor plumbing, in one of Stockholm’s most impoverished neighborhoods. She was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson on September 18, 1905, to parents from rural stock. Her mother was, in Gottlieb’s description, “practical, sensible, undemonstrative”; her father, an unskilled laborer, was handsome, musical, and fun, and Greta adored him. But he was stricken by kidney disease, and Greta, the youngest of three children, made the rounds of the charity hospitals with him. “She never forgot the humiliations they endured as poor people in search of live-or-die attention,” Gottlieb writes. She was fourteen when he died, and she dropped out of school, leaving her with a lasting embarrassment about her lack of formal education. She went to work to help support the family, first at a barbershop, where she applied shaving soap to men’s faces, then at a department store, where she sold and modelled hats. She said later that she was “always sad as a child for as long as I can think back. . . . I did some skating and played with snowballs, but most of all I wanted to be alone with myself.”

Alongside her shyness and her penchant for solitude, Greta harbored a passionate desire to be an actress. As a kid, she’d roam the city by herself, looking for theatres where she could stand at the stage door and watch the performers come and go. The first time Garbo was in front of the camera was at age fifteen, in an advertising film for the department store that employed her. Sweden had a thriving film industry, and she soon quit her day job to appear in a couple of movies. At Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, to which she was accepted at seventeen, the young actors were instructed in a system that “scientifically” analyzed the semiotics of movement and gesture. Remarkably, some of her lecture notes from that time survive—she jotted down that “the head bent forward equals a mild concession” or a “condescending attitude,” and that “the throwing back of the head” conveys “a violent feeling such as love.” Barry Paris, an earlier biographer whom Gottlieb cites approvingly, notes that “Garbo in silent films would employ that system of gestural meaning to a high degree.” She did so in her sound pictures as well. When she plays the Russian ballerina in “Grand Hotel” (1932), her body language is jittery, neurotic. Depressed, she lets her head droop as if it were simply too heavy to hold up; surprised by delight at the prospect of a romance with John Barrymore’s gentleman jewel thief, she tosses her head back at giddy angles. It might have been laughable, but instead it’s riveting.

In the spring of 1923, the gifted film director Mauritz Stiller approached the Stockholm theatre looking for actresses to cast in his new movie, an epic based on a Swedish novel, “The Story of Gösta Berling.” Stiller came from a Jewish family in Finland; orphaned young, he had fled to Sweden to avoid being conscripted into the tsar’s Army. Garbo and he were never lovers—Stiller preferred men—but their relationship was perhaps the most important in both of their lives. With his commanding height, his taste for luxury (full-length fur coats, a canary-yellow sports car), and his domineering style with actors, he had more than a touch of the Svengali. But Stiller believed in Garbo at a time when, as one veteran actress put it, Greta was “this little nobody . . . an awkward, mediocre novice,” and he loved her. (He also seems to have been the one who suggested replacing “Gustafsson” with “Garbo.”)

When Hollywood came calling—in the form of Louis B. Mayer scouting European talent for M-G-M—it wasn’t clear whether Stiller was the lure or Garbo; the director was certainly better known. In any case, Stiller made sure that they were a package deal (and, Gottlieb adds, later upped Garbo’s pay to four hundred dollars a week, an “unheard of” salary for an untested starlet). The two sailed for the United States in 1925, arriving in the pungent heat of midsummer New York. (Garbo’s favorite part of the visit seems to have been the roller coaster at Coney Island.) Then it was on to Hollywood by train.

The studio moguls gave an unknown such as Garbo a very short runway. M-G-M signed up the Swedish girl for two pictures, “Torrent” and “The Temptress,” and, as the film historian Robert Dance writes in his smart new book, “The Savvy Sphinx: How Garbo Conquered Hollywood” (Mississippi), “if those first two films were unsuccessful financially M-G-M would not renew her contract for a second year.” As it happened, both were hits. Motion Picture was among the industry outlets declaring her début “a complete success.” (“She is not so much an actress as she is endowed with individuality and magnetism,” it said.) Garbo became a fan favorite, even though she was almost uniquely averse to the kind of goofy stunts and mildly salacious photo shoots that other stars put up with. When she got to be as famous as Lillian Gish, she told one interviewer early on, “I will no longer . . . shake hands with prize-fighters and egg-and-milk men so they will have pictures to put in the papers.” Instead, she worked with consummate portrait photographers who lit her gloriously. Eventually, her films were earning enough that she was able to negotiate an unusual contract, one that gave her the right to veto scripts, co-stars, and directors. And she shunned interviews so consistently that in the end her privacy became its own form of publicity.

Despite such badassery, she never really adjusted to her new country or her new destiny, at least beyond the movie set. What looked like carefully cultivated hauteur was partly the product of awkwardness, disorientation, and grief. She hardly spoke English when she first arrived, and, within a year, she learned that her beloved sister, an aspiring actress herself, had died back home. Stiller did not make a smooth adjustment to Hollywood and, in a blow to them both, he was not chosen to direct Garbo’s first American picture. Garbo wrote to a friend in Sweden about how miserable she was: “This ugly, ugly America, all machine, it is excruciating.” The only thing that made her happy, she claimed, was sending money to her family. At a young age, Gottlieb writes, she found herself “trapped in a spotlight extreme even by Hollywood standards,” and with no psychological preparation for grappling with the kind of fame—movie stardom—that was new not just to her but to the world.

Athletic and physically restless, she soon took up the long nighttime walks that became a refuge; with her hat pulled low over her head, as it customarily was, she would have been hard to recognize. Stiller, who probably felt that his young protégée no longer needed him, returned to Sweden, where he died in 1928, at the age of forty-five, reportedly clutching a photograph of her. “He never seems to have resented her dazzling ascent to fame,” Gottlieb writes, “only wanting her to be happy and fulfilled.” Back in Sweden to mourn him, Garbo went with his lawyer to the storehouse containing his possessions, where she walked around touching his belongings and murmuring about her memories. Gottlieb says that this episode must surely have been an inspiration for the scene in “Queen Christina” in which Garbo’s character moves around a room at an inn, touching all the inanimate reminders of the lover she will never spend another night with. On sets, she would sometimes talk softly to herself about what her mentor might have told her to do—one director she worked with referred to Stiller as “the green shadow.”

Garbo appears to have been emotionally stunted in certain ways, damaged by the loss of her father, her sister, and Stiller, abashed by the limitations of her English and her education. Though she had a sense of humor, she emerges in Gottlieb’s portrait as prickly, stubborn, and stingy. The sudden onslaught of celebrity made her more so. She never married, had children, or apparently wanted to do either; she had brief romantic relationships, mostly with men (the actor John Gilbert, probably the conductor Leopold Stokowski), and likely with women, too (the leading candidate seems to have been the writer Mercedes De Acosta, the “ubiquitous lesbian rake,” in Gottlieb’s words, who had affairs with Marlene Dietrich and many others). Her longest-lasting relationships were with friends, especially, as Gottlieb makes clear, those who helped her logistically, advised her devotedly, and steadfastly refused to spill the tea about her. In these, she had pretty good, if not unerring, taste. Probably the closest and most enduring friendship was with Salka Viertel, the intellectually vibrant woman at the center of L.A.’s remarkable community of refugee writers, composers, and filmmakers from Germany.

From the start of her Hollywood career in silent pictures, Garbo was often cast as a vamp—the kind of man-eater who shimmied and inveigled and home-wrecked her way through so many nineteen-twenties movies. (See the entire career of Theda Bara.) As Robert Dance notes, “Adultery and divorce were catnip to post World War I audiences.” The parts quickly bored her: “I cannot see any sense in dressing up and doing nothing but tempting men.” Off the job, she eschewed makeup and liked to dress in slacks, men’s oxford shoes, and grubby sweaters. Her closet was full of men’s tailored shirts and ties. She often referred to herself as a “fellow” and sometimes signed her letters “Harry” or “Harry Boy.” The movie role she seems to have liked best was the learned cross-dressing seventeenth-century monarch Christina; it allowed her to stride around in tunics, tight-fitting trousers, and tall boots, to kiss one of her ladies-in-waiting full on the lips, to declare that she intended to “die a bachelor!” (As plenty of gender-studies scholars will tell you, this is one queer movie.) She expressed a longing to play St. Francis of Assisi, complete with a beard, and Oscar Wilde’s vain hero Dorian Gray. In today’s terms, Garbo might have occupied a spot along the nonbinary spectrum. Gottlieb doesn’t press the point, but remarks, “How ironic if ‘the Most Beautiful Woman in the World’ really would rather have been a man.”

Her third American film, “Flesh and the Devil” (1926)—the ultimate nineteen-twenties title—transformed her into an international star. It’s about a love triangle involving two best friends, played by the magnetic John Gilbert and the handsome Swedish actor Lars Hanson, with Garbo at its apex. It, too, is a pretty queer movie, though it seems less in control of its signifiers than, say, “Queen Christina.” As Gottlieb points out, the two male leads are forever clasping each other fervently, bringing their faces close together, as if about to kiss. (It heightens the vibe that, in silent-movie fashion, Hanson appears to be wearing lipstick some of the time, and Gilbert eyeliner.) “Flesh and the Devil” also features some of the most erotic scenes I’ve ever encountered on film. There’s one, in a nighttime garden, in which Garbo rolls a cigarette between her lips, then puts it between Gilbert’s, her eyes never leaving his, as he strikes a match and illuminates their gorgeous, besotted faces. There’s one where she lies back in sensual abandon on a couch, Gilbert’s head lolling against her lap, and he lifts her hand and drags her fingers across his mouth. And then there’s my favorite: she and Gilbert are at a Communion rail in church. By now, Gilbert’s character has killed her first husband in a duel, and she has married the other friend, but they’re still crazy about each other, natch. Gilbert sips from the chalice just before she does, and, when the priest hands it to her, she turns it around to drink greedily from the side her lover’s lips have just touched. Her expression is one of slow-burn ecstasy.

Gilbert and Garbo fell in love while they were making the movie, but their story is a sad one, mainly because Gilbert is a sad figure. He is often offered up as an example of an actor who couldn’t make the transition to sound—his voice was said to have been too reedy or something. That turns out to have been an urban legend: his voice was fine. The trouble was that he was best at playing boyish men undone by love at a time when, as Gottlieb observes, Depression-era Hollywood was more into “gangsters, snappy dialogue, musicals.” Garbo and Gilbert lived out a “Star Is Born” trajectory. When they made “Flesh and the Devil,” he was a big-name actor at the height of his powers, and he helped Garbo by making sure the camera angles were right for her and each take of her was the best it could be. One story is that he planted a stand of trees on his property in the Hollywood Hills to remind her of the woods in Sweden, and he apparently proposed to her repeatedly. (She professed herself puzzled that she kept refusing a more permanent bond, but she did.) By the time she made “Queen Christina,” in 1933, she had top billing, and she insisted that Gilbert, who was then married to someone else, and professionally on the skids, play her romantic interest—rejecting the studio’s choice, a young Laurence Olivier. Gilbert later remembered that she was tactful and considerate with him on the set, though he was drinking heavily, throwing up blood, and nervous about his performance. “It is a rare moment in Garbo’s history,” Gottlieb writes, “when we can fully admire, even love her, as a human being, not only as an artist.” Gilbert died three years later, at the age of thirty-eight. Garbo was characteristically unsentimental. “Gott, I wonder what I ever saw in him,” she remarked while he was still alive. “Oh well, I guess he was pretty.”

Why did Garbo stop acting? It wasn’t as though her star was truly on the wane. It had been years since she’d made her successful transition to talkies, with a dialogue-heavy adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie.” (From the moment she uttered her first lines, “Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side—and don’t be stingy, baby,” her accent proved to be a sexy asset.) She’d been nominated for four Best Actress Oscars. In 1939, she’d made “Ninotchka,” the romantic comedy in which she played a Soviet apparatchik on a mission to Paris who falls in love with a playboy count and discovers, as the pitch for it went, “capitalism not so bad after all.” It was a huge hit—more than four hundred thousand people went to see it at Radio City Music Hall during a three-week run, Gottlieb says. Garbo is very funny, deadpanning her way through the first half of it in boxy jackets, rationally assessing Melvyn Douglas’s charms. (“Your general appearance is not distasteful.”) As one biographer, Robert Payne, wrote, the performance worked so brilliantly because it satirized “Garbo herself, or rather her legend: the cold Northerner immune to marriage, solemn and self-absorbed.”

The next and last movie she made, “Two-Faced Woman,” a clumsy attempt to re-create comedy magic with Douglas, was a turkey, but she could surely have survived it. Instead, she considered projects that fell through, turned down others (offered the female lead in Hitchcock’s “The Paradine Case,” Gottlieb writes, she is supposed to have sent her agent a telegram saying “no mamas. no murderers”), and slowly drifted away from the business of moviemaking. She had never liked the limelight and, Gottlieb says, lacked the relentless drive that animated contemporaries such as Marlene Dietrich or Joan Crawford. She doesn’t seem to have been particularly vain about her beauty, but she was practical enough to know its precise value, and to anticipate the cost of its fading. And, though she seems to have enjoyed acting, she was never satisfied with the results. “Oh, if once, if only once I could see a preview and come home feeling satisfied,” she remarked after one film screening. Garbo was no Norma Desmond, viewing her old films over and over to admire her own image. Screening some of them years later, at moma, Barry Paris reported, she got a kick out of imitating herself: “R-r-rodney, when will this painful love of ours ever die?” She once told the actor David Niven that she’d quit because she had “made enough faces.” The analysis was typical of her—unreflective, cryptic, deprecatory.

She was, Tennessee Williams thought, “the saddest of creatures—an artist who abandons her art.” Yet Garbo doesn’t seem to have seen herself that way. Perhaps attuned to the perils of growing old in Hollywood, she moved to New York, to an apartment on the East Side, spent long stretches of time in Europe with friends who were wealthy or witty or both, went to the theatre, collected a bit of art. She did not reinvent herself as a memoirist or a philanthropist (though her estate was valued at roughly fifty million dollars when she died, in 1990) or an ambassador of any sort of good will. People loved the mystery of it all; photographers were always chasing after her. But she wasn’t in hiding; she got out. One wag called her a “hermit about town.”

Did Garbo have a rich inner life to sustain her for all those years? There isn’t much evidence of it. She was not a remarkable or notably confiding letter writer, journal keeper, or conversationalist; she does not seem to have had a surfeit of intellectual curiosity. In the movies, she had always been able to convey a sense of hidden depths, of memories and emotions lighting room after interior room, never quite surfacing to be articulated. Were those feelings complex, interesting? We were persuaded they must be. The relationship to fame that she enacted in the last decades of her life was something similar: it looked profound, perhaps even spiritual—a renunciation of celebrity’s blessings as well as its scourges. But who knows? Maybe she was just tired of making faces. ♦

[awesomefringey]

Let me add exhibit a-z to their private relationship - and these are only the official pap agency pics:

If she’s not in the pic above, I promise you she was there, just didn’t fit the frame.

the gaslighting is getting out of control

This, coming from the woman who has the paps on speed dial. 🙄🙄🙄 And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t she the one whose separation and custody battle and one-upsmanship with Jason is being played out in the media? Seriously, it’s frightening how easily this woman lies.

[cheryls-blossomed]

Jordan said they (Eric I'm assuming) have big plans for Bart. Was he told about these big plans or was just assuming and making a guess? Why has Eric let the audience in on these big plans?

Why didn't Grant spill about Bart coming to the show? No way he didn't know. He knew about Nora way back in S4

To answer your questions:

Jordan definitely knows what those big plans are. They would have told him ahead of him signing the contract. They also wouldn’t cast Jordan Fisher as Bart Allen, if they didn’t have big plans for the character. Plus, it’s Bart Allen... of course they have big plans for him.

Eric hasn’t let the audience in on those big plans. We have no idea what they’re planning for Bart. All we know is that Jordan has been cast in the role of Bart, and to reiterate what I’ve said before, there are likely two main reasons for this: (1) Bart Allen is a hugely famous character in the Flash mythos, and he’s probably the most anticipated arrival on this show, so of course to build hype around his first appearance, they would announce that he’s been cast. Additionally, Jordan’s casting, in itself, is a pretty big deal and builds hype, given that Jordan is very well-known, and (2) the information would have leaked that he’s quarantining. The paparazzi know that Jessica’s quarantining right now, so the information would have been leaked, and fans would have figured out he’s playing one half of the twins, at the very least.

I’m sure Grant has known for awhile, but he didn’t say anything about Bart coming to the show, because why would he spoil that? That’s for the network and showrunner to officially announce. 

[darkeyesshine]

At The Studio with (Sik-K) AMBW

𝐂𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐲'𝐬 𝐏𝐎𝐕

Being wrapped up in a fuzzy cover with shaved legs and no pants on is amazing. I grabbed my glass of red wine that was on the nightstand next to me and took a sip of it as I read through some pages of "The Sun is Also a Star." This is how every Friday night would be. At home chilling alone until my boyfriend Kwon Min-sik (also known as Sik-k) would come from the studio and spend the rest of the night with me. He's a Korean rapper and is blowing up by the second. That's why I understand the late nights, the photoshoots, the paparazzi, and the concerts.

But most of all 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠.

I have a love-hate with touring because I hate it when he would go but I also love it because he's doing it for the fans. They are so loving and supportive of him especially with me. Once the news got out that Korean rapper, Sik-k was dating a black girl some people were disgusted and not impressed with us. But his fans would go at it with anyone on social media who would say anything that wasn't right to me. I got to admit, I love it when they do that. But Sik-k one time went on his Instagram live and kissed me on camera just to show the haters that he doesn't care about what they say he will still be with me anyways.

Kwon was always like this with me and that's what I love about him. He is bold, handsome, smart, loving, caring, and did I already say handsome?

Speaking of him, my phone started to vibrate and I saw that it was Sik-k calling me. Why was he calling me in the middle of the night?

"Hello?" I answered the phone.

"Hey, baby. I need your help with something," He says on the other line.

"Why? Is there something wrong?" I put the wine glass down on my nightstand.

"No..well, yeah. It's not something serious but it is important. You know how I am when it comes to my music," He says and I nodded as if he was here in front of me.

"Yeah, so what do you need help with?" I asked.

"With a song, I am working on. I've been trying to find the right words to say but it's coming out the wrong way and you know you're my inspiration now for songwriting. So, I need you to-

"Come over there?" I finished his sentence, already understanding the situation.

"Yeah, that would be so nice. I know you are getting out of your comfort zone and everything." I could hear how sorry he was.

"No, it's fine, baby. I will be there in a sec," I took the covers off of me and threw on some white sweatpants.

"Thank you so much, Cindy. Call me when you get here," He says before hanging up the phone.

I got up from the bed completely and drunk the rest of my wine before getting dressed into a black crop top and Kwon's jean jacket. It looked oversized on me but I still looked cute. I put on white and grey sneakers before going into the bathroom mirror to check my hair. I had knotless medium braids in so I didn't need to do much with them but I did fix my edges a little bit before walking out of the bathroom. I grabbed my phone and keys before heading out of the house.

The studio was literally ten minutes away from our house but the way I drive I will get there in five minutes. I applied lip gloss while I drove on the streets of South Korea and played some of his songs to get me in the mood for studio time. I was a singer myself but didn't start making music until now. And our fans want us to collaborate with each other, which I find cute. Once I pulled up to the studio, I called Sik-k and he picked up immediately.

"Hey, Cindyyyy. Are you here?"

"Yes, bighead. Open the door for me," I heard him chuckle then scrabbling. It sounded he was walking then he hung up.

Once I parked our 2018 Mythos Black Metallic Audi S4 in the parking lot, I came out and walked towards the building. As I kept walking, I saw Sik-k holding the door for me. He was wearing white sweatpants and a black shirt, the same as me. But the only thing he was wearing different from me was his white jacket and he had on a black beanie.

"Hey, boo," I said once I got in the building with him.

"Hey, sweetcakes." He says before kissing me on the lips. I felt his hand go down to my butt and gave it a light squeeze.

"Sik-k, stop!" I hit his chest playfully causing him to laugh. "Not in public." We started to walk down the halls.

"There is no one around," He did a whole 360 on me and I laughed while shaking my head.

𝐇𝐞'𝐬 𝐬𝐨 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐟𝐲.

"Not even Jay Park, he's a busy man," I asked curiously as we walked into the neon studio. He sits down on a chair in front of the sound booth.

"Not even him, it's just us." He smiled widely as I sat down on his lap.

"Okay, soooo. What did you need help with?" He wrapped his arms around my midsection as I got comfortable with him.

"Well, the lyrics. I need it to sound romantic because it is a love song and it goes perfectly with the beat."

"You wanna hear it? He asks and I nod before he pressed play on a red button.

The music filled the studio and I nodded my head to the beat. This instrumental had Sik-k written all over it and I loved it. Kwon looked at me the entire time with a smile on his face as I listened to the song and I was mentally smiling.

"I am doing this song with Ph-1 and HAON." He paused the song and I nodded.

"Okay, what do you like to do with me?" I got up from his lap and sat on the other chair next to him.

"Make love?" He smudges. I threw the small pillow behind me that was on the chair to help with back supports at him and he laughed.

"Umm...I like to watch movies with you. I like it when you wear my clothes, like how you are doing now." He smiles at me.

"Yeah, what else?"

"Yeah, I really like the way you dress. Let's start with that." He says before grabbing a pen and writing it down on his cute black notebook that he likes to write his songs in.

"Okay, I will record this." He stands up from the chair. "Then you tell me how it sounds once I am done," He walks into the sound booth and tells me to play the instrumental.

생각만 해보고 있어 beach house La pam-pam-pam, 바다 바람 따닥거려 장작 불에 멍 넌 눈에 넣어도 안 아프니깐 내 눈에 넣어 내 폰 사진첩에 살고 있어 넌 왜 받아야 돼 월세, 쭈욱 살고 있어봐 원한다면 천생 둘이 시작하기 딱인 Feng Shui

Baby 나라를 골라 pick one 2주만 보내고 오자 Week 1, 맛있는 술 마셔 Week 2, new outfit 사러 Nike and all designer My drip wetty, wetty, wetty, wet, wet 내 stance daddy, daddy, daddy bad See me, run it up, see me, f$ck it up 얼른, hurry up, hurry up, yeah

As he went on I sat back into the chair and just enjoy the view of a beautiful man rapping lyrics to a beautiful instrumental, that was probably going to be about me. Even though Sik-k and I have been together for three years, he still gives me goosebumps every time he performs or writes music in front of me. I don't think I will ever get used to it.

"Okay, I am done." I heard him say causing me to pause the instrumental. He walks out of the sound booth and sits next to me again.

"So, how did it sound?" He asks nervously and I smiled at him.

"I don't know. You tell me," I said before I pressed play on the song and his voice came into the speakers. I turned to him and saw that he was bobbing his head which meant that he was enjoying himself. I loved seeing him happy and being able to be comfortable with me.

"Yes!" He gets up from the chair and picks me up surprisingly. I wrapped my legs around his waist as he spun us around in the studio. "Thank you so much, baby."

I kissed him on the lips and he put me down on the black couch that was behind us. We continued to kiss passionately as he hovered over me but someone knocked on the door causing us to look. We saw Jay Park standing by the door, looking at us with a smirk on his face.

"Hey, kids. We just got that couch so don't ruin them, okay?" He says before laughing and we joined him. When our laughter died down, Jay came inside and took a pen.

"We ran out of pens from my side," He says while walking to the door. "Peace out." Jay closes the door behind him and I straighten myself on the couch.

"I thought you told me that he wasn't here," I crossed my arms at Sik-k and he shrugs like the goof that he is.

"My bad." He said before we started to make out on the couch again.

[drneilfox]

I'm The Fucking Dancer: Music Films Book Blog 5 (February 2021)

Strange month. Lots of watching as I finished watching the films for my chapter on punk only for a couple of new finds to emerge that I’ve now added to my March watching. I started watching the films for my chapter on women but didn’t get through them all.

I didn’t finish writing my draft punk chapter (I still haven’t even as I write this on March 6th).

Weirdly I don’t feel behind. I think in March I can catch up and finish the punk chapter and I reckon, due to some research leave, pretty much all of the chapter on women. I think I can be back on track in April.

What’s stopping me?

Work mostly. It’s taking so much from and out of me. It’s exhausting and mostly demoralising (save for the rays of light from colleagues and students, you know who you are) and makes it hard to write. I’m proud of the fact that over the last couple of weeks I kept my watching and note taking schedule up so that didn’t fall too far behind. I think that’s why I don’t feel behind. The basic forms are still being supplied in scrawls in my dedicated journals (I’m onto Vol. 2 already), it’s just finding time to transcribe.

February saw me revisiting the film that started it all really. Don Letts’ The Clash: Westway to the World was the film that both introduced me to that band in a real way and also lit a fire in me that, admittedly, lay dormant for years. It’s a film designed to make you fall in love with the band. It leans into mythos and romance and is fast, creating an energy that sucks you into the world of the band only to blow you back out with the ferocity of them at their best, live. Rewatching it for the purpose of the book was a joy, to really get into how it works and what it’s doing, without losing its mystery or that of its subject.

Also rewatched, and a film that I hated as much this time round (probably controversially) is Amy. I find this film deplorable and I don’t use that term lightly. I find it immoral, cruel and cowardly. I find it hard to avoid the feeling that the filmmakers deeply dislike Amy Winehouse and look forward to getting into why I think that in the book.

A wonderfully illuminative and enjoyable first watch was the documentary about Taylor Swift, Miss Americana, a film that similar to the imminent Questlove documentary Summer of Soul suggests Sundance might be being used to showcase the big and defining music docs of the year. Miss Americana is a good counterpoint to Amy , in how it incorporates tabloid/paparazzi footage but also how to incorporate it critically.

Ok. I’ll sign off before my simmer turns into a boil.

On a more positive note, my looooong interview with Stewart Lee and Michael Cumming about King Rocker, my second time talking to them and this time with added Robert Lloyd was published by the Quietus ahead of the film’s barnstorming premiere on Sky Arts in Feb. Read it here.

Here’s what I was listening to while writing in February:

Don’t forget you can listen in to my book themed playlist here.

Finally, a bit of fun. Here are my favourite notes from this month’s viewing sessions:

“Back Up Your Brother”

Wedding Video Chilling

“I’m the Fucking Dancer!”

Iggy Pop reading lyrics from Grammar Wanker

Reggae in rehearsal

“Like trousers, like brain”

Mick looks ridiculous

“We present the story on stage”

L7 dressing up as the Melvins for Halloween

What/how are all these musicians doing during the pandemic?

“Always have black and white bands together”

Topper magnanimous

Topper looks good

Psychogeographical

London’s Burning goes OFF!

All in the Volvos

Big song

Jeff Ellis’s Channel Orange grammy.

Late like Mick Jones

Saul Bass-y title card

“Please be good"

Those flashbulbs

Hats!

“I’m never like this”

Piano and cat, solo

#taylorswiftisoverparty

Lomax tapes in the loft

“Radical young curious people”

Washed Ashore grave

The feel of a cabal

Cuts out mid slagging off

[verumace]

@theheartstreasure / Modern Day Mythos

         Finding her had been N E I T H E R easy or difficult.          After an eight hour flight from Paris ( and having to rouse from a restless evening, three hours rest in all ) he had managed to give those exhausting paparazzi hounds the slip whilst still at the airport. Some tabloids claimed he was paying someone overtime in helping him dodge them. One even suggested he had taken some lessons from MI6, but of course had nothing to support such a theory.                    ( it was amusing how quick they would drop a good quid on the truth but will only ever come up with outlandish ideas to print. they'd all eat their hats to see how he did it. )          With no irksome tail to worry about, that left him free to disappear to his penthouse. He did not dawdle, only stopping by to drop his luggage off in the master bedroom and freshen himself up from the long trip. Though he did fortunately remember to check to make sure he had the « surprise » on him before leaving.

             From there he had travelled from the GLARINGLY obvious wealthy side to the rundown buildings that were all but a slum section in name. The transition did not bother him, even if he would never understand what drove his the woman's kind heart to reside there.          She was not, as he suspected, to be found in her flat. He wondered if it were LUCK or FATE responsible for that, but decided it mattered little in the grand scheme of things. He left the rotting steel cage she called home, instead hopping around her usual haunts. None of the volunteer soup kitchens or shelter for the homeless yielded results, and by the third he switched pattern.          && there he found her, seated in her little hole-in-the-wall café. Owned by an older woman and her daughter, the place had been around and stood the test of crumbling economies and failing structures, surviving where much else had not on that street.          Seated as she was, he was afforded a chance to surprise her twice over. Yet he hesitated at the door, Italian leather squeaking lightly as fingers tightened around the metal bar serving as handle. It was absurd that he paused to check his reflection in the window, the glass showing a handsome devil in black and grey and blue Armani casual. Aqua had never been shallow creature, she had never held it against him when she saw him looking less than well put-together.

                       The moment passed, and then he was inside, with her only three tables away, back turned to him as she poured over what seemed like a novel of some sort. For the space of a few STUTTERING heartbeats, he gazed at her with plain fondness that the nearly empty room bore witness to.          ‘You know darling,’ unable to resist allowing a teasing undercurrent in rumbling tone, his graceful gait carrying him in her direction, ‘I can't recall another soul who makes reading look both precious and attractive at once.’

[awesomefringey]

All those pap pics were taken last week before anyone knew he was there so he might didn’t call them himself but Jeff or Tommy for sure did

Do you mean all these pap pics were from last week? What makes you think that? 👀

[waspalisades]

in honor of the 2019 met gala theme "camp," i am ranking all of lady gaga's longform music videos

for my purposes, i distinguish "longform" from other videos by a loose combination of these qualities: adding at least 3min to the runtime of the original song length, being longer than 7 minutes, and including some kind of narrative, either solely through aesthetics or through dialogue connected to the theme of the song. they are ranked in order from weakest to strongest. let's go, girls and gays:

6) paparazzi

ofc the decadance of celebrity is fun, and love the staging of all the dead women everywhere. the (french?) confuses me bc it is not very good but that's like, part of it, maybe. point is that the major setback for this one is that it's the earliest, and miss gaga only grows more powerful with time.

5) g.u.y.

the angel costume+makeup is so gay and powerful. love the embrace of bottom culture. the weakest narrative of all six, for sure, but it IS from artpop.

4) born this way

the creation mythos is wonderful and i love the scaryish visuals. the flat shots of the dances are uninteresting to me, but i love the sort of gritty rainbow look.

3) alejandro

the horniest of the six by a long shot. the aesthetics of fascism plus gothicism plus leather plus nun should not work, and yet! no narrative, really, just an extended mix of the song.

2) marry the night

"BUT I STILL HAD MY BEDAZZLER!"

1) telephone feat. beyoncé

perfect video. the lesbianism...the caution tape...the lit cigarette sunglasses...the pussy wagon...the feat. beyoncé feeding miss gaga a honey bun...telephone 2 when

[wraith-of-thiodolf]

4. what are you looking forward to?

12. what is something you want right now?

31. 3 random facts

60. when you take layla on walks how do you deal with all the paperazzi trying to take photos of her?

4. what are you looking forward to? nothing right now :(

12. what is something you want right now? drooling over some weights i cant afford right now

31. 3 random facts: whales have hip bones. conan the barbarian is canonically in the cthulhu mythos. sharks dont have ribs

60. when you take layla on walks how do you deal with all the paperazzi trying to take photos of her? she outwits them be refusing to go on walks, a position i am not entirely pleased about but it does avoid the paparazzi issue :V

[blueberryhope]

I need to put this down somewhere. I keep thinking about that weird Princess Tutu Japanese high school AU setting that I used for the Kabedon scene where all of them has memories of the story and dancing animals:

-So I don’t really get the timeline, but the main ot4 at least remember the events in Goldcrowne via dreams or realization over time

-Fakir and Rue are in japan just because

-They are foster children with Charon or maybe adoptive children? Anyways, fun bit with the last name they take on is Kinoshita, meaning “Under the tree” (you know, Rue always go on picnic dates under that lovey dovey tree, and Fakir and tree motifs)

-Rue and Fakir had a hard time fitting in because of completely different culture and concepts :(

-They both still pursue ballet, 1) because they genuinely love it, 2) it’s the only connection to that other “story“

-3) Rue is actually hopeful to find Mytho via ballet, because if anything, they figure in this world Mytho must at least have some connection with ballet even if he is an actual prince in some country. Fakir is a bit skeptical, it would probably take them years to find either Mytho or Ahiru and maybe only after they decide to travel outside the country(as a professional). Fakir never attempts to try story spinning in this world(and in my rule book, it doesn’t work)

-Funny thing is Mytho actually becomes a world renown dancer(please forgive me, I don’t know the terms) at an extremely young age and he get’s famous on tv. Both Fakir and Rue see him on an documentary during one of their classes (probably during elementary school). Fakir, Rue, and even tiny Ahiru end up working their butts off, trying to reach even remotely to that level. Because if they can get good enough, they might just get on the radar as new upcoming promising dancers. And if they get on this radar, that means it is one more step closer to meeting with Mytho, to show him that they are here in this world. (still probably going to take until they are full grown adults)

-Nope. Rue was the one who broke through. She was actually getting bullied by some of the ballet students when competing for both Odette/Odile role of Swan Lake to test the student’s skill (you know, in classic Japanese sports manga fashion, the most improbable selections and choreography for MIDDLE SCHOOLERS) But Rue did it. She channeled her possessiveness into Odile and her pain into Odette. It was the most beautiful and moving performance ever, that a part of the scene was recorded and shown on air. It became a sensational hit in japan that it reached the world (I honestly doubt that could happen but w/e).

-Of course after that ordeal, Mytho hears about a moving Swan Lake performance in Japan and watches the clip. At that, he recognizes Rue and immediately flies to Japan. There Mytho, Rue, and Fakir reunites and all decide to study ballet in Japan instead of anywhere else. >_>;

-So where is Ahiru? She’s in Russia. She is younger than the rest of the cast, so it took her a while to get to Japan (why to japan? because the ballet paparazzi was following Mytho to Japan and also found out about Rue and Fakir) Edel is Ahiru’s rich caretaker (Drosselmeyer isn’t in this) and Uzura is Edel’s daughter. They finally go to Japan to the same ballet school that the rest of the crew is studying at. Ahiru really wants to see the others, even from a far, but is hesitant because of this strange world(without dancing animals and dead authors).

-So when Ahiru does finally get there, she is in a completely different class/level, which bums her out. It was only when the teacher let them go on a little trip to show the behind the scenes of an up coming production with the school’s students that Ahiru finally reunites with the others. She was so worried that they had forgotten about her or that they won’t recognize her. Instead it was a heartfelt reunion, letting Ahiru show off her skill level, everyone freaking out at Fakir’s reaction(the teary eyes, small smile, and the hug), and lots of catching up to do :’)

[spicynbachili1]

Shattered Memories and the fears in your ears

Utilizing sound to create a continuing state of terror

Final yr I began a brand new custom the place round Halloween, I’d escape my assortment of Wii video games and play what I contemplate to be the best horror sport in my assortment. Whereas I would not say I am the largest horror fan — and possibly that is why my favourite sport within the style is taken into account by most to be the least scary within the sequence — I do have a number of horror titles tucked away in storage. There’s a few the Resident Evils, Everlasting Darkness, ZombiU and a handful of others. They’re all nice video games, all scary in their very own approach, however none of them have caught with me, have festered into the very cloth of my being, like Silent Hill: Shattered Reminiscences has.

Launched for the Wii again in 2009, Silent Hill: Shattered Reminiscences is the second Silent Hill sport from Climax Studios. The sport went by way of a number of completely different iterations earlier than author/director Sam Barlow landed on the idea discovered within the remaining bundle. As an alternative of making an attempt to additional increase the mythos of Silent Hill, Barlow would supply avid gamers an alternate tackle the primary sport within the title, re-imagining the way it performs, the way it appears, and who the characters are. The story would nonetheless function Harry Mason on the lookout for his daughter Cheryl, however now his journey could be intercut with persona quizzes that give form to the trail at hand. Solutions right here, in addition to interactions on the planet, alter Mason’s search. Typically in little methods, like whenever you colour a home within the remedy session and the following scene incorporates a home painted within the colours you selected; different occasions in greater methods, like whenever you leap by way of the required hoops to get entry to the Good Ol’ Days Bar close to the start of the sport, as a substitute of the Diner 52 restaurant.

All of that is well-known by now, as is the twist ending. I’ve performed by way of Shattered Reminiscences 4 occasions, and regardless of the Ice World segments and Uncooked Shocks by no means providing up the scares they need to, I nonetheless discover my physique crawling with goosebumps each time I pop it in. How is it sport the place I do know every thing that is going to occur and when it occurs is ready to nonetheless spook me out after practically ten years? Throughout this most up-to-date journey to Silent Hill, I discovered the key to its scares lies in its sound.

Whereas the general scariness of the horror parts present in Shattered Reminiscences is up for debate, one factor even detractors can agree on is how excessive the manufacturing values are. For a Wii title from 2009, this sport appears and sounds wonderful. Its cutscenes are nicely animated, Silent Hill is ripe with particulars in each room or hallway you enter, and the sound and music consistently push Mason, and gamers, backwards and forwards between the road that separates dream from nightmare. I can perceive the complaints concerning the Ice World missing precise frights, as a substitute selecting a sort of overwhelming panic that comes with being misplaced in a maze, however when you actually need to really feel terror on this title, simply stroll round within the “actual” world for some time and take a take heed to the sound pulsating out of your audio system.

Early within the sport, Mason will get use of a smartphone that has a frighteningly small inside storage capability. The earpiece to the cellphone is represented by the speaker on the Wii distant. Once you place or take a name, the sound comes out of the speaker (clearly, that is completely different with the PSP and PS2 ports, however I do not personal these so I do not care). There are cellphone numbers scattered all through the linear path Mason walks and characters he meets alongside the way in which will message him every so often. The cellphone additionally picks up on imprinted recollections scattered concerning the land, and that is the place Shattered Reminiscences can chill you to the bone.

The imprinted recollections give form to the world of Silent Hill by detailing its residents and the horrible issues they do. There’s the woman who’s drugged and generally dies — relying in your decisions — the safety guard looking for a troubled younger teen, the creep who turns into irate when the highschool scholar he is sleeping with seems to be an of-age prostitute, and lots of conversations that spotlight Mason’s relationship along with his ex-wife and daughter. Whereas generally humorous, these recollections and the messages related to them paint a grim image of life in Silent Hill, one the place its residents are merciless, its girls are handled like whores, and its youngsters are sometimes the bane of their dad and mom’ existence.

Gamers are notified of a close-by reminiscence by a screech of Mason’s cellphone that grows louder the nearer they get to it. Now, let me make one factor clear: none of those recollections are scary. There’s nothing that is going to leap out at you. Probably the most scary factor that’ll occur is an image will fall or a ball will mysteriously bounce. I do know that going into every subsequent playthrough, and but that screech, that high-pitched howl from my Wii distant speaker, has my arm hair standing on edge and goosebumps overlaying my pores and skin the longer it goes on. 

This is not a response to annoyance. The one annoying a part of Shattered Reminiscences is the paparazzi portion of the varsity chapter. It is precise concern. Although I do know the one time I’ll face off in opposition to Uncooked Shocks is within the Ice World, the screech of a nearing reminiscence is nearly unbearably petrifying, a noise that dominates every thing else popping out of your audio system. There’s music, nevertheless it’s used sparsely. The sound results do the heavy lifting right here. The sound of Mason’s sneakers within the snow, the chilling wind of this limitless winter day, the howl of the Uncooked Shocks after they spot me, the cryptic interjections of Cheryl’s voice all through the sport; that’s how Shattered Reminiscences achieves scares. It isn’t by way of monsters or fight or operating away, it is the moments of abrupt audial assault that curls the toes and brings on the heebie-jeebies.

Even on my fourth playthrough of the sport, these cases nonetheless handle to shake my soul. Even when the concern I really feel instantly subsides, in these moments of absolute terror, as I frantically seek for the reason for this caterwauling, I really feel an immense unease that pushes me to the purpose of tears. I am not truly going to cry, however that mad hunt for the supply of this sound is an excruciating pressure that rattles me excess of any leap scare ever may.

There are various nice examples of how efficient this sound impact is, however two moments stand out to me most. The primary occurs early within the sport. Mason is deserted by Cybil after a automobile trip and units off on his personal. He comes throughout a ranger’s station and ventures into the woods out again. This part is a superb instance of all the parts of manufacturing coming collectively to create one thing terrifying. The forest is darkish and eerie, and the sunshine of his flashlight does not do a lot to dispel this overarching feeling of doom as he heads additional into the bushes. The sound of Mason’s ft stomping by way of the snow retains Akira Yamaoka’s otherworldly soundtrack to a minimal. There’s a path to observe, one that can lead him to a lake, however enterprise off the trail and the screech of a close-by reminiscence begins to emanate. Relying on which route he begins from, the supply of the sound will not be simple to search out. 

A great chunk of recollections you may come throughout in Shattered Reminiscences may be rapidly recognized. This isn’t certainly one of them. It may be simple to stroll proper previous it, and as you do, the howl of the Wii distant grows extra high-pitched. It eases off as you progress away from the goal, however returns full throttle whenever you flip round and head again within the route of this unknown entity. It’s the unusual gathering sticks that make a peculiar shadow whenever you shine your flashlight on them? May or not it’s this tree with the names of a number of women carved into it?

You search — or I suppose I search as that is me recounting my final playthrough — however you may’t discover the supply. Your pores and skin begins to the crawl because the screech mocks you want Poe’s titular raven. The hair on the again of your neck stands erect and also you begin to fidget and panic, questioning, “Why? Why will not this finish?” You backtrack your steps time and again, practically being pushed mad by the sound of this hidden reminiscence. It is virtually overwhelming you till all of a sudden, like the nice and cozy embrace of a mom’s hug, the concern exits your physique as you stumble throughout a wreath tied to a tree. It flaps within the wind for a second. The screeching stops and Mason’s cellphone will get a brand new message, dredging up a very darkish reminiscence. A younger boy is planning to affix his brother quickly. About 100 yards from that wreath, you discover out what occurred to the boy’s youthful sibling.

The second second happens later within the story. Mason is misplaced in Toluca Mall, wandering by way of the deserted shops of this closed down procuring middle. He calls a safety quantity and the individual on the opposite finish of the road tells him there’s an exit in Cine-Actual, a single display screen theater positioned within the mall. Although the remainder of the mall is draped in darkness, the neon lights of the marque are illuminated as Mason approaches it. Contained in the foyer, there are busted Galaga, Contra, and Rush’n Assault arcade cupboards, in addition to posters for the film that adjustments relying in your solutions for Dr. Kaufmann. As soon as he begins up the steps to the display screen, the screech of his cellphone beings to sound. It grows louder as he approaches the theater, drowning out the noise of every thing else as soon as he begins strolling the aisles.

In contrast to the occasion within the woods, and a lot of the different imprinted recollections, there isn’t a drastic seek for the supply of this sound. It is fairly apparent it may be the display screen, and but as a result of that is so completely different from previous occurrences, it is capable of generate the identical stage of trepidation because the hunt by way of the woods. As a result of when the noise lastly breaks and the reminiscence seems, it is not some small rustle of the wind or a paper falling off a wall. A shot of Mason or Cheryl is blasted throughout the display screen, relying in your psych analysis solutions. Seeing a terrified or probably drugged Cheryl is upsetting, however the picture that completely will get underneath my pores and skin is that of Mason, sporting a most unsettling grin for the digital camera. It is the kind of picture that will look regular if zoomed out however is totally disturbing as a two-tone close-up.

These are simply two however in actuality Silent Hill: Shattered Reminiscences is full of moments like these, moments that do not go for outright scares however relatively construct a pressure that grows extra terrifying the longer it lasts. It is a fully terrible sound, however the way in which it coaxes gamers into these little hunts for items of a puzzle that give form to Mason and the city of Silent Hill is extremely efficient. It makes what are largely unimportant bits of backstory resoundingly pressing as this sound may absolutely drive an individual mad the longer it goes on and louder it will get.

This essay actually solely scratches the floor on the brilliance of this sport and I may simply write one other 3000 phrases on the inspiring Ice World section after discovering the grownup Dhalia, or chasing the younger woman by way of the Tunnel of Love, however I’ll have to save lots of these for subsequent yr’s playthrough. If you need extra on Silent Hill: Shattered Reminiscences, try Stephen Turner’s piece on it from his retrospective on the sequence.

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[newstfionline]

Bravado and branding: Trump brings a new leadership style to the White House

By Marc Fisher, Washington Post, January 19, 2017

From his picture window overlooking New York’s Central Park, Donald Trump could see the public ice rink that the city government had spent six years and $12 million trying--and failing--to repair. Most people saw the shuttered rink as a maddening waste of public dollars. Trump saw an opportunity to lead.

In 1986, Trump, then a brash newcomer in the New York real estate industry, offered to fix the rink in six months at his own expense. Trump’s move was at once bold, magnanimous and biting. In the same letter in which he made his offer to New York Mayor Ed Koch, Trump reminded the mayor that the “incompetence” the city had demonstrated in the rink project had to be “one of the great embarrassments of your administration.”

Trump got the job done two months ahead of schedule and $800,000 under budget. The city paid for the work--the mayor insisted on that--but Trump slapped his name all over the place and generated months of adoring press. For decades to follow, the story of how he swooped in like Superman to save the day became a bedrock foundation of the Trump mythos, his carefully polished narrative of the billionaire who led by smashing through rules and expectations.

The man who now moves from his very own gilded skyscraper on Fifth Avenue to noticeably smaller and less lavish quarters in Northwest Washington is the most unusual leader Americans have ever elected to manage their nation. He is a salesman, not a diplomat; a master marketer, not a bureaucratic manager. He is an entrepreneur who has always thrived on controversy and confrontation, bucking up against the establishment types who often sneered at him.

As president, Trump seems eager to lead in very much the same ways as he has through four decades as frontman for his personal brand.

America, he promised in the campaign, will “win so much, you’ll get tired of winning.” Already, he has launched what he hopes will be a cavalcade of victories. Just three weeks after his November win, the president-elect reached into his box of finely honed tools and pulled out his favorites--surprise and showmanship--to craft a small triumph for workers at a Carrier plant in Indiana: 800 jobs now wouldn’t be moved to Mexico.

Critics contended that the number of workers involved was insignificant in a nation of more than 300 million people, but Trump accomplished just what he’d achieved in the ice rink incident 30 years earlier: He burnished his reputation as a leader who makes deals happen, even if the process isn’t pretty, even if egos and precedents get smashed. And Trump demonstrated that he intends to govern as much by anecdote as by principles or policies.

Trump brings to Washington a leadership style built on his father’s success in the rough-and-tumble world of developing apartment buildings in New York’s outer boroughs, and refined under the tutelage of Roy Cohn, the infamous Manhattan lawyer who taught young Donald that all publicity is good publicity and that victory comes only to those who fight back a hundred times harder than any hit they might absorb.

Trump built a real estate empire that morphed into a casino gambling business, which largely failed, driving the struggling mogul to pivot into a period of leasing his name to all manner of luxury and not-so-fancy products. Through it all, Trump spent much of his time not on the finances of his initiatives or on their daily management, but rather on cultivating his own image as a playboy billionaire who was bluntly decisive, refreshingly impolitic and singularly devoted to all things Trump.

He rewarded loyalty (he called himself “a loyalty freak”), summarily sacked those who showed him up, and won fame and sometimes fortune as he put himself center stage in all his enterprises.

“The show is Trump and it is sold-out performances everywhere,” he said in 1990, soon after he appeared on the cover of Playboy, brushing against a cover girl who eyed him adoringly.

The show--Trump has often called himself a “ratings machine”--is very much at odds with the private nature of the man, a loner who says he has few, if any, close friends, an insomniac who often leaves social events as quickly as possible, returning to his apartment to watch TV by himself through the small hours of the night.

In public, though, Trump is all business and all show, blending the two in ways that have now shattered the boundary between politics and celebrity.

As he launched his career in real estate, Trump broke with his father, who had warned him against taking on debt or working in the tough market of Manhattan. Donald longed to reach for the next level and build in midtown, and he did it by creating a business that looked bigger, bolder and brasher than the competition. He led that business into the big time with tough, loud, showy tactics that he would hone through the decades, methods that became familiar to all Americans through the 2016 campaign and into the presidential transition.

Trump led by creating an image of himself as a rich playboy with fabulous connections in media, politics and entertainment--and by parlaying that image into actual deals with the city’s rich and powerful. He led by making competitors, government regulators and bankers believe he was farther along than he really was. And he led by neutralizing or even winning over his opponents by attacking, threatening, wooing and even hiring them.

During his very first project, the rehab of New York’s decrepit Commodore Hotel in the mid-1970s, Trump persuaded a New York Times reporter to write about him as “a major New York builder,” though he had never built a thing and had no financing. Trump needed top New York politicians’ cooperation to get his hotel project underway, and so he hired Gov. Hugh Carey’s chief fundraiser, who had key political connections. It didn’t hurt that Trump and his father had donated more money to the governor’s campaign than anyone but the candidate’s brother.

Trump wasn’t shy about touting his ties to power. He took the head of New York’s Port Authority, a major landowner in the city, to lunch and asked for his help. “You wouldn’t last in your job very long if Governor Carey decided you weren’t doing the right thing,” Trump told Port Authority director Peter Goldmark, according to Goldmark. “You should know I have a lot of weight in Albany.”

Trump denied Goldmark’s account, saying, “I really don’t talk that way.”

Similarly, in the push for the same project, Trump sought a tax exemption from a state authority created to build racially integrated housing. The agency’s chairman, Richard Ravitch, had grown up in the real estate business; Trump’s father had hired Ravitch’s father’s construction firm to build Trump’s largest apartment complex. Now Donald met with Ravitch and told him, as Ravitch recalled, “I want you to give me a tax exemption.”

Ravitch declined. Trump repeated the request, and when Ravitch declined again, Trump said, “I’m going to have you fired.” Trump, in an interview last summer, denied that account and called Ravitch “a highly overrated person.”

Trump wasn’t done. When city politicians who were opposed to the tax incentive called a news conference outside the shuttered hotel, Trump showed up and threatened to abandon the project if the city didn’t give him tax relief. Trump had prepared for the event by directing his workers to replace the clean boards over the once-grand hotel’s windows with dirty scrap wood, dramatizing the state of the midtown eyesore. The theatrical flourish had the desired impact. Trump got the exemption.

For four decades, Trump led his business empire through triumphs and disasters, through domination of the Atlantic City casino world and through six corporate bankruptcies, devoting his time and energy perhaps above all to his dealings with the news media.

The “key to the way I promote is bravado,” he wrote in his best-selling book, “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. ... I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration--and a very effective form of promotion.”

In business and in the 2016 campaign, he alternately bashed reporters and privately treated them to praise and access. “From a pure business point of view,” he wrote, “the benefits of being written about have far outweighed the drawbacks. ... Even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business.”

His longtime construction executive Barbara Res said that “Donald had a way of getting to print whatever he would say, even if it weren’t necessarily the whole and honest truth. He managed to say what he would say, and people would write it, and then it would be the truth. That was the thing with him that they call the big lie. You say something enough times, it becomes the truth.”

Asked how he shaped his image by working the media, Trump flashed an impish smile, shrugged his shoulders and repeated his mantra that “all publicity is good publicity.”

Trump has refined the art of working the levers of public opinion to pressure those who would block his initiatives. In 1985, after he bought the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., Trump broke with the traditions of the wealthy enclave by chopping down his hedges to give gawkers a clear view of his castle, inviting a raft of celebrities with the accompanying paparazzi, and opening the facility for wedding and event rentals.

The town council, annoyed by the increased traffic and attention, tried to impose restrictions on street use and party attendance. Trump responded by sending council members classic movies about discrimination--“Gentleman’s Agreement,” about anti-Semitism, and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” about racism--to remind them and the public about how the town had long tolerated the exclusion of Jews and blacks from private clubs in Palm Beach.

The effort to embarrass the politicians into easing restrictions on his club, which was open to all who could afford it, was successful.

Throughout his career, Trump has measured success by the reach and power of his reputation and image. All of his ventures, in gambling, sports, television and politics, were designed to spotlight the message that “Trump” means ambition, wealth and success.

He always worked with a tiny inner circle of top executives--his campaign staff was about a tenth the size of Hillary Clinton’s--remaining loyal to those who played by his rules: No one steps out on their own, all credit goes to the boss, and the message to the public is that Trump--the man, not the corporation or its other executives--is the rainmaker.

If Trump believes an executive has done something behind his back, he pounces: “You have to realize that people--sadly, sadly--are very vicious,” he told an audience at a motivational seminar in 2005. “When a person screws you, screw them back 15 times harder.”

He hires for loyalty but also to build a staff that looks the part--a factor he has often mentioned through the years, including during this winter’s transition, when he would comment to aides about whether job candidates presented themselves in ways that would convince a TV audience that they were right for the job.

But Trump’s methods for picking people can also be more subtle. Throughout his career, he has hired people who had been obstacles to his projects, both to neutralize their opposition and take advantage of their knowledge. In 1989, when a New York real estate analyst Trump had never heard of went on a TV news show and opined that Trump had taken on too much debt, overpaid for properties and now faced a severe decline in his business empire, Trump filed suit against the man, Abe Wallach, alleging slander and defamation. But Trump then invited Wallach to see him and offered him a job as executive vice president for acquisitions and finance. Wallach accepted and stayed for 12 years.

In addition to defusing the opposition, Trump hires to create rival power centers. Many Republican leaders thought Trump would have to choose between Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus and former Breitbart News chairman Stephen K. Bannon to set the tone for the leadership of his White House. But Trump hired both men--the establishment choice and the rogue outsider--and gave them equal billing in his hiring announcement. Through the years, Trump has similarly hired opposing voices, both to prevent any one faction of his operations from gaining too much power, and to put competing views in play to see which might prevail.

When a group of Silicon Valley tech executives visited with Trump in December, he told them: “You’ll call my people. You’ll call me. It doesn’t make any difference. We have no formal chain of command around here.”

Building such uncertainty and unpredictability into his leadership and decision-making allows Trump to float possibilities, test ideas and remain antagonistic to the powers that be--all before he puts a decision into play. Add his infamous lack of impulse control--his predawn tweets, his thin-skinned reaction to criticism, his insulting comments about people he’s already defeated--and a short attention span--he said he has no patience for reading reports or briefings--and the result is something not quite like any previous occupant of the White House.

If he follows his life’s pattern, he will leave the day-to-day administration of the government to his top aides, much as Ronald Reagan did. But unlike Reagan, Trump is unlikely to stand aside as he puts his governing philosophy into play. He is demanding and impatient with his staff, and anything but shy about making his displeasure known. But he is not the boss Americans got to know on “The Apprentice”; his top executives say that in real life, he rarely fired anyone and was far from the cavalier brute he portrayed on TV.

He listens well and takes advice, said Res and other top Trump staffers. But there was never any master plan, just as there was no organizational chart. There was just Trump at the center of all things--the definition of Trump being Trump.

He scoffs at deep study and goes, instead, with his gut. He believes in his instincts. He believes he will naturally do the right thing. He believes, as he wrote in his book, “Think Like a Billionaire,” that “a narcissist does not hear the naysayers. At the Trump Organization, I listen to people, but my vision is my vision.”