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shinygoku · 1 year ago

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Please Please Me (1963)

Part 1 in the CutCat Reviews Beatles Albums series, and what better place to start than the beginning?

Dang... they were sure Baby Bugs back then!

I ain't yet listened to every song on this here album, so this'll be interesting and strangely new, haha (Though I should disclaim that I'll be listening to the highest quality versions I can find on YT, so some will be innately more advantaged than others)

SIDE ONE

I Saw Her Standing There: One, Two, Three, FAUWH!! While part'a me raises eyebrows at "Well she was just 17, and you know what I mean" part (which is also somewhat mitigated by their own youth at the time! lol), the rest is such a fun, high energy bit of Rock n Roll that I enjoy this quite a bit, and it makes a great energetic opening to the album to boot!

Misery: A sad song set to jaunty music, if I didn't understand English I'd prolly miss that detail XD - Though I defo prefer said upbeat instrumentations to the otherwise kind of stock breakup song

Anna (Go To Him): Ahh, our first cover! Not keen on their harmonies here, something sounds Off. The song itself is fine, but as they didn't write it I won't be going into much about the words :P

Chains: Harmonica! Another cover so I'm gonna skip the lyrics, but the instruments and harmonies are on good display here~ I'm sorry to say I didn't notice it was George on vocals until I checked though, sorry! ^^;;

Boys: Ringo's turn with a cover!! He puts a lotta energy into this, and I like that they didn't change it to Girls or something instead lmao - His range works well for this, there's great guitar and Paul screaming in the background too, but the lyrics themselves don't stick in my mind much, it seems to be mostly "Talk about Boys, [Yeah Yeah Boys]"

Ask Me Why: We leave the sea of Covers for this side, for a lot of stringing out single words lmao, it kinda feels like an inverse of Misery, being much lower key but being Glad, though again the lyrics ain't really making a strong impression on my memory so when I get to the next side I doubt I'll be able to recall it well

Please Please Me: NOW WE'RE TALKING, BAYBEE! The words may be cheeky and arguably shallow, but it's got such energy and rhythm that I really do feel motivated to stand and move in response! The instruments all do a strong job here, and I think I actually first heard this as an instrumental and knew I needed to check it out more lmao. I can't think why Love Me Do got the #1 and this didn't, man!!

SIDE TWO

Love Me Do: I do not care for this song! Objectively it has a lovely bass, nice steady drums and impressive harmonica. But URGHHHH I cannot stick the vocals saying such inane, repetitive words! I feel like this is the only Beatles song that Beatle Haters hear, and form their entire opinion on. I can't fathom how it reached a #1 slot, other than it having been an exceedingly slow period for Tunes, or maybe the mouth organ really WAS that novel?! But when playing the Number Ones CD I always, always skip it, and even the newest version with the Now and Then release fails to win me over. And Ringo ain't even the drummer here!!

P.S. I Love You: Really benefits from following LMD, lmaoooo. It's a nice little tune with some instrument I can't identify (castanets?). I feel like From Me To You kinda does the long distance thing better, but there's a nice rhythm and harmonies that make this pleasing. It's also not Ringo drumming, again - no offence to Andy White, but y'ain't one'a the Lads! :T

Baby It's You: We're back in the Cover Realm. This song is nice. When I first heard the "Cheat" I thought they were saying "Shit" though, which I think woulda made it better XD ...15 mins after listening to it I have no memory of how it sounds :v

Do You Want To Know A Secret: In original and George territory! Gotta say the "secret" was extremely predictable :P The music is perfectly nice, but it doesn't strike me as Beatles Standard, ya know? That applies to a fair few on this album, not just this, but it's now that I really Am Thinking it ^^;;;

A Taste Of Honey: Cover! Less to say! They do good! When I listen to it my brain tries turning it more into a meme song, like it goes "A taste of Honey! Tasty!!", so idk what that says about the song itself but it's not the most glowing of reviews lmao

There's A Place: Ahh, the last Original on this album~ Sounds oddly modern in the sense of maladaptive daydreaming...! They really WERE ahead of the time (or having a Mind Palace is old as Hunter Gatherers maybe, both work lol). It's another inoffensive but hard to really talk about number, musically.

Twist And Shout: I've been pretty Cool to all the covers here, but this is quite the exception, and OOOOH IT'S SO RAAAAW (Infamously so, we all know John had to save this one for last as it shredded his vocal chords somewhat!). Another one that actually makes me Move, which is impressive, and it closes the Album on a very strong note~

CONCLUSION

Best 3: I Saw Her Standing There, Please Please Me, Twist And Shout

Blurst 3: Love Me Do, Anna (Go To Him), Baby It's You. [To be honest I kinda wanna put LMD here three times instead, but myeah]

Overall Quality?: It's Decent! In the context of it being their debut album, it's more impressive, but knowing how much the songwriting and music would develop does rather cast this in a long shadow. My 3 faves here are also the only ones* that got Red Album remasterings by the looks of it, and I sure see why they were chosen over the rest (*Though Love Me Do's omnipresence baffles me!)

🪲🪲🪲🪲

Neeext Time on my Bug Music reviews, we shall be With The Beatles ;3c

#The Beatles #Please Please Me #and some other songs of variable quality #CutCat listens to Bug Music #Music Review #[ as written by someone with a shaky understanding of Music. But I do ENJOY it!! When it's good ;) ]#Sorry if anyone is a Love Me Do enjoyer but the first harmonica notes have turned into a Rage Button for me lmao

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alexesguerra · 1 month ago

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What Makes You Bloom: Cultivating a Practice for Connecting with Your Divine Self What Makes You Bloom: Cultivating a Practice for Connecting with Your Divine Self Contributor(s): Garcia, Kevin Miguel (Author) , Lewis, Jacqui (Foreword by) Publisher: Broadleaf Books ISBN: 1506493580 Physical Info: 1.2" H x 8.1" L x 5.8" W (0.9 lbs) 218 pages "A guide to creating a new spiritual practice after your faith has fallen apart. Through stories, insights, and guided meditations, Garcia shows how everything we need to connect with the Divine is already inside us. Cultivate meaningful spiritual practices that will help you heal from your past, tap into the present, and imagine a delicious future"-- Review Quotes: "This work is intentional, resourceful, and a place to land, heal, and grow." --Library Journal "The implications of religious trauma don't begin and end in church; they bleed into our entire culture. This book shows you how to put that down, reconnect with your faith, and find a new home in your spiritual heart. Reading Kevin's work always makes me tear up. I feel cared for in such a profound way that my whole being relaxes, and a tear comes as a sign of relief. This book is a new kind of church that genuinely gives all of us the refuge we need." --Sah D'Simone, author of Spiritually Sassy and 5-Minute Daily Meditations "Kevin Miguel Garcia is a natural-born truth-teller! And in What Makes You Bloom, their storytelling, vulnerability, passions, and voice all come together to deliver truth, sometimes an uncomfortable truth, with earnest delight. Garcia's words are wise, winsome, and potent, a powerful offering to help all of us blossom into our truest selves." --Matthew Paul Turner, #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Is God Like? "The perfect example of integration, What Makes You Bloom is a seamless blend of ancient wisdom with modern insight, irreverence woven into an accessible and nourishing sacred lens on all things, and truth-telling that is at once gentle and incisive. This book is sure to wake you up, stretch you, and affirm you." --Hillary McBride, PhD, registered psychologist, podcaster, speaker, and author of The Wisdom of Your Body "Kevin Garcia is someone who just exudes peace. From the moment I met them, I felt at ease just being in their presence, and thanks to this book, I now know why. They have gifted us their story coupled with a practical guide for how to embrace our divinelycreated selves and live lives of joy. Each page is cultivated into a demonstration of what makes Kevin bloom, so we can bloom too." --April Ajoy, cohost of Evangelicalish "For a world of us budded humans seeking a space to bloom intentionally, purposely, and freely into our divine and connected selves, Garcia offers not a guide but a single stone on a path we have been conditioned to believe that we can't create ourselves. Every meditation, reflective exercise, and gentle offering allows our learned petals of shame and guilt to unfold into freedom and safety. What Makes You Bloom is the sunshine we wanderers need to find the light and learn what it means to find it for ourselves time and time again." --Arielle Estoria, actor, poet, and author of The Unfolding: An Invitation to Come Home to Yourself "Kevin combines their humor and genuine love for us in what can only be described as a true hug from heaven. Pushing us all to discover what makes us bloom, Kevin dares us to tap into who we were created to be--and thrive." --Candice Marie Benbow, author of Red Lip Theology "THIS IS THE BOOK I NEED. I'm exhausted by thinking about how to live; I just want to . . . live. This book helps me relax, breathe, and connect to myself and simply be. What a gift." --Cindy Wang Brandt, author of Parenting Forward and You Are Revolutionary "What a gift this book is. Kevin put all the wonderful aspects of an intimate conversation with him in this helpful resource." --Scott Erickson, author of Honest Advent and Say Yes Table of Contents: Read This First: An Introduction to What Makes You Bloom Chapter 1: Feel Your Way Back: On Practice, Rhythm, and Self-Control Chapter 2: Lay Your Ass Down: On Rest, Imagination, and Gentleness Chapter 3: 1%: On Willingness, Devotion, and Faithfulness Chapter 4: Forget Finding Community: On Friendship, Solidarity, and Generosity Chapter 5: I Said What I Said: On Radical honesty, Defenseless, and Kindness Chapter 6: No Matter What: On Boundaries, Unbearable Compassion, and Patience Chapter 7: Let That Shit Go: On Surrender, Forgiveness, and Peace Chapter 8: This Shit is Fucked Up: On Acceptance, Grief, and Joy Chapter 9: The Sacred Erotic: On Pleasure, Wonder, and Love Chapter 10: A Living Practice Acknowledgments Notes Publisher Marketing: Get ready to heal from your past, get real about the present, and imagine a delicious future by rebuilding a living practice that actually works for you. So many of us are leaving conservative faith traditions behind, rightly saying goodbye to toxic theology, bigotry, and harm. But in the process, we often lose our rhythm of gathering, prayer, and worship. We may even lose our sense of connection to God. And we think it's our fault. But spiritual coach, speaker, and podcaster Kevin Miguel Garcia is here with a reminder: "We don't need saving because we were never in danger. We don't need to get found because we've never been lost. Everything we need to connect with the Divine is already inside us." What Makes You Bloom is a guide to creating your new spiritual practice after your life or faith has fallen apart. When going to church, praying, and reading your Bible just doesn't cut it or outright disturbs you, this book will show you how to cultivate new, meaningful spiritual practices--like stillness, presence, breath, and movement--that will help you overcome the pain of your past and root yourself in the present. Through stories, insights, and guided meditations, Garcia explains how the goal of every spiritual practice should be about the attainment of peace--about finding what truly makes you bloom. Along the way, you will discover that the smallest changes in your life can bring about the biggest transformations, and that a feeling of bliss is only a few breaths away. Contributor Bio:Garcia, Kevin Miguel Kevin Miguel Garcia (they/them) is a digital pastor, spiritual recovery coach, mystic theologian, sought-after speaker, and host of the podcast A Tiny Revolution. Garcia holds a master of practical theology from Columbia Theological Seminary. They coach clients from around the world through deconstruction, coming-out processes, and cultivating spiritual practices to promote resilience, solidarity, and self-compassion. Garcia is the author of Bad Theology Kills and is based in Atlanta, Georgia. Contributor Bio:Lewis, Jacqui The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis is Senior Minister and Public Theologian at Middle Church in New York City. In her activism, preaching, speaking, writing, and teaching, Jacqui advocates for racial equality, gun control, economic justice, and equal rights for all sexual orientations and genders. A world-renowned theologian, Jacqui has been featured on The Today Show, All In with Chris Hayes, Good Morning America, The Jonathan Capehart Show, The Brian Lehrer Show, The Takeaway, NY1, ABC, NBC, PBS, CBS and many more. Her writing has appeared in outlets like Harper's Bazaar, Vox, Ebony, Essence, The Huffington Post and Religion News Service. She is the author of several books, including the children's books You are So Wonderful and The Just Love Story Bible. Her most recent book for adults is Fierce Love: A Bold Path to a Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World. Jacqui created two television shows, Just Faith (MSNBC) and Chapter & Verse (PBS) and is a frequent guest on national television talking about faith, politics, and art. Her podcast, Love. Period. is produced by the Center for Action and Contemplation. She and her husband John live in New York City. Together, they have a son, daughter-in-law, and two magical little grandchildren who keep them laughing.

#Broadleaf #Bloom #Cultivating #Divine Self

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kamreadsandrecs · 5 months ago

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Title: The Kingdom

Author: Emmanuel Carrère, trans. by John Lambert

Genre/s: literary fiction, historical

Content/Trigger Warning/s: misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, fatphobia, ableism

Summary (from the publisher's website): A sweeping fictional account of the early Christians, whose unlikely beliefs conquered the world

Gripped by the tale of a Messiah whose blood we drink and body we eat, the genre-defying author Emmanuel Carrère revisits the story of the early Church in his latest work. With an idiosyncratic and at times iconoclastic take on the charms and foibles of the Church fathers, Carrère ferries readers through his “doors” into the biblical narrative. Once inside, he follows the ragtag group of early Christians through the tumultuous days of the faith’s founding.

Shouldering biblical scholarship like a camcorder, Carrère re-creates the climate of the New Testament with the acumen of a seasoned storyteller, intertwining his own account of reckoning with the central tenets of the faith with the lives of the first Christians. Carrère puts himself in the shoes of Saint Paul and above all Saint Luke, charting Luke’s encounter with the marginal Jewish sect that eventually became Christianity, and retracing his investigation of its founder, an obscure religious freak who died under notorious circumstances.

Boldly blending scholarship with speculation, memoir with journalistic muckraking, Carrère sets out on a headlong chase through the latter part of the Bible, drawing out protagonists who believed they were caught up in the most important events of their time. An expansive and clever meditation on belief, The Kingdom chronicles the advent of a religion, and the ongoing quest to find a place within it.

Buy Here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-kingdom-emmanuel-carrere/1408878

Spoiler-Free Review: Okay. OKAY. This was an interesting ride. And I honestly don’t know any other term to describe it except that.

First things first: the author is VERY egotistical. Like, his ego is large as a planet and it permeates EVERY SINGLE THING in this book. The ENTIRE FIRST FOURTH of the book is just him explaining (though some might argue he’s actually just whining) about how he fell into a deep Catholic fervor for around two years before he drifted out of it after a while.

But, once one gets past this part (or even while reading it), one will also have to deal with the author’s many prejudices, including: misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, fatphobia, ableism, and imperialism. These, on top of the author’s aforementioned ego, will DEFINITELY grind on a reader who tries to get into this based solely on the premise that the book’s blurbs present: that this is a book about the history of the early Church.

If the above two points don’t make a reader drop the book, then this third one probably will: the author’s utter disregard scholarly responsibility. Oh sure, at first it seems like he cares about it, but it quickly becomes clear that he doesn’t really give a damn. He constantly throws out pronouncements that will read like he’s stating fact, when he really, really isn’t. He also has a tendency to pick and choose which version of an idea or theory he prefers, and THEN puts that forward as fact, just because he likes the way it comes together in his head, or supports some prejudice he has, or some other, silly reason that will definitely raise the blood pressure of any scholars who read this book, no matter which subject they study.

There is a moment in the book where, after he claims to have read all the important texts related to early Church history, he says that, like a chef who’s read many cookbooks, he is now ready to do away with the experts and write what he wants. Which, if the reader approaches this book as a nonfiction piece of work - and it certainly feels like it at the beginning - will be utterly rage-inducing because who the hell claims to have read EVERYTHING in terms of scholarly documentation? This is especially true when it comes to a subject like history, which is constantly changing and being updated as discoveries are made and previous evidence is adjusted and altered.

Which brings me to the question of narrative style. This book reads A LOT like nonfiction: like an autobiography at first, and then nonfictional history of the early Church. But there’s a reason why this book is categorized as "fiction": precisely because of the author’s aforementioned tendencies to play VERY fast and loose with facts, both about himself and the story he’s trying to tell about Church history. For a while I contemplated calling the narrative slightly Borgesian, because Borges does a similar thing with his writing where he blurs the edges of the fictional and the nonfictional, but I quickly withdrew that notion. The comparison would be an insult to Borges’ work, not least because his technique is far more subtle than what’s going on here.

Honestly I think the best way to actually get through this book is to think of it as absolutely fictional instead of nonfictional. As in: do not even consider the facts to be facts, just presume they’re all made up. When I started viewing the book that way it became a bit more tolerable because then I could consider the author/narrator as a fictional entity, instead of a real life person who is also an absolute shithead. This also has the benefit of making all the scholarship-related bullshit a bit more tolerable too, because then one can approach the material in the same way one would a historical novel: with some grace to allow for artistic license.

But despite ALL OF THAT, there is something very compelling about this book, and it has to do with reading how the author grapples with his Catholic faith. It’s fascinating to read how the author goes from falling in, then out, of love with Catholicism, and how he basically uses this entire book to wrestle with how he feels about it, struggling to come to a conclusion about how to answer the question: “Do you believe in God?”

Overall, this is definitely a read that will require immense patience, and many readers will give up within one-fourth of the book, maybe even after the first five chapters. But for readers who decide to be stubborn mules about it and hang in there (if for no other reason than they don’t want to be beaten by this asshole of an author), they might find a read that’s complicated and also interesting. There is PLENTY to dislike about this book, very many reasons to put it down before I actually finished it, but as I said, it’s immensely compelling. I attribute that a little bit to the writing style itself (which is a credit to both the author and - especially - to the translator), but I think the main reason I stuck around to the end is because I’m a lapsed Catholic myself and related, in some small way, to what the author was going through when he was struggling with his faith. The final line is the answer to his main question of “Do you believe in God?”, and I have to say: it’s an answer I agree with.

Rating: 2 and a half gospels (2.5 stars)

#book review #book reviews #the kingdom #emmanuel carrère #john lambert #literary fiction #historical fiction #books

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thejoyofviolentmovement · 4 years ago

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New Audio: New Orleans' Pocket Protection Releases A Strutting and Funky New Single

New Audio: New Orleans' Pocket Protection Releases A Strutting and Funky New Single @colorredmusic

https://soundcloud.com/colorredmusic/pocket-protection-paul-p-sure-color-red-music Pocket Protection is an instrumental groove project that features a collection of accomplished New Orleans players including — The Revivalists‘ George Gekas (bass), Ed O’Brien (EOB)‘s PJ Morton‘s, Raphael Saadiq’s and Pretty Lights touring musician Alvin Ford, Jr. (drums), Lembo‘s and Deltaphonic‘s Paul Provosty…

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azspot · 3 years ago

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Unlike today’s Hollywood, where jobs represented on-screen are mostly superhero assassin (Marvel or DC), architect or web designer with the apartment of a tech mogul (romantic comedy), or high-powered executive giving it all up to start a scrappy small-town bakery (Hallmark), 1970s films often found drama and meaning in everyday workplace scenarios that audiences could recognize: Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek bonding and competing as health spa workers in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, or Dustin Hoffman working dead-end jobs while flirting with returning to crime as a paroled convict in Straight Time, or, of course, Sally Field toiling in a textile plant while discovering herself and her power as a union organizer in Norma Rae.

Far fewer people remember Blue Collar, the 1978 film about Detroit autoworkers trying to get ahead without losing their souls. The directorial debut of Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader, it features major stars — Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, and a nervy, incandescent Richard Pryor, in what Pryor biographers David and Joe Henry call “his finest film performance.”

Blue Collar received strong reviews upon release. Yet today it is rarely counted among the essential films of its time. As one Letterboxd reviewer put it this month: “This movie rips so hard. Why isn’t this on every single list of great films from the 70s?”

To be sure, Blue Collar is not comfort viewing. It is a grim, often brutal portrait of men trapped in a grim, brutal situation of working-class life in Detroit, looking for the wrong ways out, and coming to bad ends. It was made under unhappy conditions and tells an unhappy story. But it brilliantly succeeds as a film and as a dramatization of essential dilemmas facing American working-class men. If you care about good movies or class struggle, you need to see it.

#movies

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sunnixsunshine · 5 years ago

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Medic: I'm so excited! We're finally investigating my apartment!

Sniper: What exactly did you say was paranormal here anyway?

Medic: I bought a creepy doll a few years back and ever since I've been waking up to my kitchen chairs fallen down on the ground.

Sniper: That doesn't sound too bad.

Medic: Oh and a bit of my own blood is always smeared on the bathroom mirror.

Sniper: W-what?

Miss Pauling: You sure this isn't just Eugene? You really think it's another spirit?

Medic: Oh ja. Eugene is pretty docile. Only thing he's done to harm me is call me mean names through the ghost box. It's never gotten to the point of me almost bleeding out in the middle of the night. That only happened once on week two of creepy doll.

Medic: Anyhoo! Into the scary house we go!

***

Scout: If I die here, during this investigation, tell Ma I love her.

Spy: Right. Got it. Tell your mother you did every single drug in existence and you died while robbing a candy store.

Scout: I hate you.

Spy: I love you too, son. :)

***

Demoman: How many houses do you own and why are they all haunted?

Merasmus: Wouldn't you like to know..

***

Heavy: There is a perfectly rational explanation as to why that glass case shattered on its own.

Engineer: And whys that?

Heavy: ......gravity.

***

Scout: We got a new review online. It says "I can't believe these idiots are considered professionals. That one guy always wearing the army helmet ate his microphone. And no one said a thing. All of this is fake anyway. The French one a really bad actor."

Scout: ...Solly you ate your microphone? What the hell dude?

Spy: I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW I PLAYED THE TINMAN IN MY 5TH GRADE SCHOOL PLAY! AND I WAS THE BEST TINMAN EVER! FUCK YOU!

***

Sniper: Maybe if we set the mood to match up to when he was killed we could trigger something?

Medic: What did people do in the 1830s?

Scout, clears his throat: Ow! Fuck! The plague really hurts! Come out and check my booboos Mr. Jedediah!

Sniper: Ya nailing it, kid!

Medic: I-I don't think the plague reached the Americas. Neither did it run rampant in the 1830s....

Sniper: Shut up he's nailing it!

***

Demoman: May the dark lord beckon you.

Medic: No one else here watches Star Trek, Tavish.

***

Demoman, just waking up: W-wha happened? Why's everyone standin' around me?

Miss Pauling: You just started throwing up a lot of black goop and then chanting in like.... Spanish?

Spy: Sounded French. Trust me. I am French.

Medic: I think it was Yiddish.

Miss Pauling: Well whatever it was you blacked out.

Demoman: ....Guess I was drunk then. Cool.

***

Pyro: Mmmh.

Engineer: MISS P! PYRO USED ONE OF THE BANNED WORDS!

Scout: SHUT UP, WE'RE TRYING TO BLESS THE FUCKIN MURDER HOUSE!

Heavy: STOP YELLING! I AM TRYING TO WATCH ELLEN!

#tf2 #tf2 au #tf2 ghost au #tf2 all mercs #gxvshs this shit is so much fun to think up tbh #theyre all idiots and i love them

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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years ago

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Marvel Cinematic Universe: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

Yes, once.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Seven (30.43% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Sixteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Significantly flawed, and well-known in fandom for it. Unpopular opinion? I still think it’s better than the first Avengers film.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Natasha and Laura pass in a single-line trade. It’s sooo close to not counting.

Female characters:

Natasha Romanoff.

Wanda Maximoff.

Maria Hill.

Helen Cho.

Peggy Carter.

Laura Barton.

FRIDAY.

Male characters:

Tony Stark.

Steve Rogers.

JARVIS.

Thor.

Clint Barton.

Strucker.

Pietro Maximoff.

Bruce Banner.

Ultron.

Sam Wilson.

James Rhodes.

Ulysses Klaue.

Heimdall.

Nick Fury.

Erik Selvig.

Vision.

OTHER NOTES:

Everyone talking about Strucker like we already know who he is...

The “Shit!”/”Language!” gag was funnier before they hung a lantern on it. Not least because it takes almost a full minute before Tony harks back to it (fifty seconds, actually. I checked). If you’re gonna make a Thing out of it, you gotta follow up immediately, not after fifty seconds of cutting around to different character intros and action shots and a whole lot of other dialogue.

Urrgghh, ok, I’m going to break my standing rule about not discussing source material, because we gotta acknowledge the colossal wrongness of re-writing the Maximoff twins - canonically Jewish Romani - as willing volunteers in a Nazi science experiment. It gets worse the more you think about it. There are a few things about this movie which generated significant negative outcry, and this incredibly offensive decision is one of them.

Tony and Thor fighting over who has a better girlfriend does have a certain charm to it. If you’re gonna have a testosterone-off, it might as well be about how great your partner is.

I got a zero out of ten on this out-of-nowhere forced romance crap with Natasha and Bruce. We’ll come back to this later.

“I will be reinstituting Prima Nocta,” Tony declares, as he prepares to lift Thor’s hammer and thereby theoretically take charge of the Nine Realms. Primae noctis (believed to in fact be a myth) refers to a supposed Dark-Ages law that granted lords the ‘right’ to take the virginity of any newlywed peasant woman who lived on their land. So, this is a wonderful little rape joke from Tony (or, y’know, not so little, since primae noctis in reality would make Tony a serial rapist). Ha ha ha ha. Hilarious. Good one.

I’m really mad about the parts here that are total garbage, because mostly, the revels sequence has a nice low-key quality to it, good solid team dynamics.

I can’t fucking believe that they played the ‘and then Bruce falls with his face in Natasha’s cleavage!’ gag. I cannot believe it. Is this a disgusting frat-boy comedy from the nineties?

Honestly, Tony, just shut up and admit that you KNEW from the get-go that it was wrong to try and make Ultron happen (that is why you kept it secret from everyone else to begin with); don’t try to defend the decision now that you’ve got a ‘murderbot’ on your hands. Take responsibility for a bad choice instead of talking shit about how you had to and everyone else is just too short-sighted, damn it!

Andy Serkis is delightful.

The Iron Man/Hulk fight absolutely KILLS the momentum of this film. It goes for way the fuck too long (eight minutes) and has no narrative significance at all. Pro tip for action scenes: they should always be driving the story somewhere. You can pull off eighty minutes of action so long as your plot is advancing alongside/within it.

Also, Iron Man causes a huge amount of additional damage during this fight, in the service of the aforementioned pointless action. His efforts to minimise Hulk’s effects are extremely poor, and calling in his relief organisation to clean up after the fact does not negate that.

Gotta love that throwing a wife and kids at Hawkeye at the same time as we suddenly start pushing this Natasha/Bruce thing. That’s not transparent at all. I also understand this to be a major deviation from Clint’s identity in the comics, and very unpopular with fans for that reason, but regardless; reinventing him as a family man to reset the romantic blather after baiting fans with the possibility of Clint/Natasha in the first Avengers movie is such a shitty move. I was not invested in the ship myself and would have loved to have them reinforce the just-friends relationship between Hawkeye and Black Widow, because there are not enough platonic friendships between compatible men and women in fiction, but 'they’re not interested in each other because they’re busy with someone else!’ is a weak reinforcement indeed. Less forced romances, and definitely less token wifey who exists for no other Goddamn reason at all. This comes out of nowhere, and not in a clever-surprise kind of way.

“You still think you’re the only monster on the team?” Natasha says, after telling Bruce about her sterilisation. This earned a HUGE backlash, and for good reason - despite all arguments about how what Natasha meant was that her being raised to be an assassin makes her a monster, the direct implication of her words as they are phrased and as the discussion is structured is that her inability to have children makes her monstrous, and that’s deeply offensive. It’s also completely in keeping with a narrative which is often played out against women, in which their value as people is attributed directly to their ability to produce offspring, so it’s not even like this outrageous implication of monstrosity - the corruption of what it means to be female! - is that unusual. It’s awful, but not unusual. Add on the fact that 1) Natasha’s nightmare-flashes specifically foregrounded her sterilisation over all other details of her training, supporting the idea that she believes that it’s what makes her irredeemable (instead of, y’know, all the murdering and stuff), and 2) this is Joss Whedon’s work and he is OBSESSED with highlighting the womanhood of his female characters and treating it like their defining trait while also variously punishing them for it, and you’ve got every reason to interpret this terrible fucking line as exactly the heinous thing it (presumably, unwittingly) seems to be.

Steve ripping a log in half with his bare hands is the funniest thing in this whole movie.

Thor’s brief side-adventure with Erik Selvig is pretty out-of-place. He just...goes for a swim in a convenient magic pond that Selvig chances to know about. Seems normal.

Ultron is full of such boring, empty rhetoric. Reminds me of Loki in The Avengers, with all that sound-and-fury.

I love Paul Bettany.

Man, they sure do find Natasha instantly. It’s almost like making a damsel-in-distress of her who needs to be rescued by the team was completely meaningless...

Breaking my no-BTS rule (since I already have done for this movie at this point) because it’s well-known how Joss Whedon ordered Elizabeth Olsen not to show exertion or ‘ugly emotion’ on her face in this film, because God forbid she compromise her attractiveness by being human. Joss Whedon is not human; he’s fucking trash.

The final fight sure does just, y’know, get to a point where it ends. They really did not ratchet up the tension over the course of the Sokovia conflict, it just goes along until it stops (also, they say Sokovia is a country, but then they never call the city anything else, it’s just Sokovia. Is the city conveniently named after the country (very confusing), or is it a city-country, like The Vatican? I kinda assume it’s option three, which is that no one bothered to care because it’s just some fake European placeholder anyway and we’re not supposed to notice such a dumb oversight).

“I was born yesterday.” This is the best quip in this whole thinks-it-is-way-wittier-than-it-is movie.

Helen Cho deserved better than to be a prop rapidly dismissed and then just trotted past at the end for an ‘oh, she survived, btw’.

Back when I reviewed the first Avengers movie, I said that I considered that film to be heavily overrated, so maybe it’s not such a surprise that I actually like this one better. The two primary problems I had with that first film were the overly simplistic plot, and the fact that most of the characters were OOC compared to previous films, and this movie does do better on both scores, so I feel more engaged by it, and less annoyed. That said...this movie has still got a lot of problems, and those include iffy characterisation and a plot with various holes, nonsensical complications, and conveniently ignored or smoothed-down dynamics. When I say I like this movie better than the first one, I mean just that: I like this better. That does not mean I am here to sing its praises.

The tacked-on romance is part of the problem - for Clint as well as Natasha (but especially for Natasha). After Hawkeye was so heavily under-used in the first film (and his slightly-ambiguous relationship with Black Widow was the only human element that made him a character instead of a prop), Age of Ultron attempts to compensate by giving Clint a personal life, in the form of a magically-appearing heavily-pregnant wife and a pair of nameless children. The function of this family appears to be 1) to give Clint a reason to not be interested in Natasha, and 2) to ‘humanise’ him by giving him something to fight for and get home to, because we all know nothing legitimises a character quite like some otherwise-irrelevant dependents. Want a man to seem lovable and important? Give him a pregnant wife. That’s what women are for, anyway, right? To enhance a man’s story? In this case, to provide a man whose purpose in the story has been contested with insta-personality, because ‘he’s secretly a family man, ooh, twist!’ is way better than having to spend time on giving him something to do in the plot that is actually meaningful in some way. Great logic. Makes Hawkeye super dynamic, right?

Natasha, unsurprisingly, is hit much, much harder. As the only female avenger and one of only two prominent female characters in a cast which has seven-to-nine male characters of equal or greater importance/screen time (YMMV on whether or not you think Fury and Vision count for that list), the pressure is already on for Natasha to be served up a quality narrative, because if she doesn’t get one, well...she doesn’t have six-to-eight alternative characters to pull the weight for her gender. The best solve for this problem would be to avoid the ‘Token Woman’ cliche in the first place, but since we missed that boat...not having the personal story of your only primary female character revolve completely around her womanhood and her catering to heteronormative expectations of a love interest would have been a good choice. This weird, forced, chemistry-free thing with Bruce Banner? Was the worst thing they could have used to define Natasha’s presence in the film. It sticks out like a sore thumb every time they have an awkward interaction, and it leads in to that atrocious ‘monstrous infertility’ element (though that particular egregious mistake could have been included with or without a romantic blunder, it...probably wouldn’t be, and we’d all be the better off). Even the Hulk-whisperer part of the relationship - while not awful on its own with all the unnecessary romance and Unresolved Sexual Not-Tension removed - serves to highlight Natasha’s female-ness by making her the soft maternal figure for the team, because God forbid one of the other male members of the team be asked to ASMR-speak to the Hulk while delicately caressing his hand. If Natasha’s presence in the first Avengers film leaned too heavily on her gender identity as a defining trait (and it did), this movie doesn’t fix that problem at all: it doubles down on it.

The good news for most of the excess of male characters is, they by-and-large don’t feel as OOC as they did in the first film. The boorish romantic entanglement aside, Bruce Banner is still a naturalistic character highlight (all credit to Mark Ruffalo, who probably doesn’t know how to turn in a bad performance in the first place), and Thor’s dialogue is way less ridiculous this time ‘round, so he lands a lot closer to his personality from previous films simply by virtue of sounding like the same guy (unfortunately, the plot does not have the faintest idea what it wants to do with him as a character). Steve Rogers is still being written as if being Captain America is his character, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of his identity, albeit one which conveniently allows him to behave in a stereotypical self-righteously bland manner, thus avoiding the need for any nuance in his perspective or actions. This borderline fanfic-flamer ‘Captain America is my least favourite character so I’m going to write him as a boring stick-in-the-mud and then hopefully no one else will like him either!’ approach doesn’t grate quite as badly as it did in the first Avengers, and it can’t cancel out the innate level-headed charm of Chris Evans, so as disappointing as the bias is, it’s still a better balance here than it was last time. The one character who is not so flatteringly handled, however? Also happens to be the one who was arguably handled best last time, and unfortunately, he’s the one who is essentially treated as the ‘lead’.

The big problem for Tony Stark is that this movie is not interested in digging in to the pathos of any character, it’s all-flash-no-substance on that front, and Tony really, really needed a less heavy-handed slathering of ‘afraid of what might come (feat. messiah complex)’ to motivate his actions and reactions in this film, because without any exploration he’s basically just a billionaire kid playing with matches. If this were an Iron Man film (either the first or third one, anyway), we’d get into some tasty deconstruction of Tony’s mental state and confront his hubris, etc, and - crucially, most crucial of all, it’s a mainstay of all his past stories in the MCU - Tony would own up to his mistakes, listen to the advice of those around him, and take contrite steps toward fixing the problem not just in the direct sense of ‘beating the bad guy’, but also in the personal and emotional sense of working on his own flaws and making amends with the people he hurt along the way. This movie offers none of that. To begin with, Tony’s ‘I know best and I will not be taking any questions’ approach to creating Ultron feels like a significant step backwards in his character development so far (Iron Man 3 was specifically about addressing his PTSD and associated tumultuous emotions surrounding the fear of imminent alien invasion, so his reactionary and secretive behaviour in this film feels particularly out-of-touch with a mental reality Tony has been explicitly working on for the past couple of years); Tony is actively aware that it’s a bad call and thus hides it from the other Avengers until it’s too late, and then he’s bizarrely unrepentant about his mistake. Worst of all, he actually attempts to repeat that mistake, only worse, late in the film (the fact that his idiotic ‘mad scientist’ pep talk actually convinces Bruce to help him again is the weakest character moment for Bruce outside of the aforementioned romance crap). The plot rewards Tony’s second, far worse mistake, in the creation of Vision, who turns out to be ‘worthy of wielding Thor’s Hammer’ and whatnot and conveniently provides every necessary skill to defeat Ultron in a deus ex machina so overt you could use it as a textbook example, so even though Tony had absolutely no way of knowing that he’d get a good result this time and almost every reason to believe he’d just compound the existing problem, his reckless disregard for the literal safety of the planet is treated like a good thing because it happens to work out this time, and they just kinda sweep under the rug the fact that Tony is playing God (and being uncharacteristically stupid and selfish about it - in other films, Tony is normally only reckless with his own safety, and it’s when his actions spill out into unintended consequences for others that he realises the error of his ways and cues up a positive learning curve; it’s what makes him palatable). At the end of the film, once Ultron is gone and Tony has thrown some dispassionate wads of cash into ‘relief efforts’, he strolls and quips and eventually drives off into the sunset in his expensive car, with nary a mention of, I dunno, maybe a little guilty conscience? Maybe a hint of having learned a valuable lesson? The closest he gets is just suggesting that it might be time he retires from Avenging, but neither he nor anyone else lets on that there’s a need for serious self-reflection. The Tony Stark in this movie is the nightmarish male-fantasy version of the character, the playboy with the cool tech and no limits who does whatever he wants and then...literally rides off into the sunset in the end, no muss, no fuss. He’s kinda like a complete reversion to his original self, pre-Iron Man, frittering money around and designing weapons of mass destruction while convincing himself he’s bringing peace to the world one explosion at a time, but that Tony has no business here, seven years of character development down the track.

While we’re talking iffy characterisation, we should also segue into plot, and that’s something we can do easily enough by looking at our villain, Ultron. Calling Ultron an actual character feels...ambitious. He’s a CGI robot full of empty rhetoric and, you guessed it, more of those quips that this movie has in place of any meaningful dialogue. I’d call him self-fellating, but he ain’t got nothing to fellate, so instead he just blathers a lot in a manner that sounds vaguely poetically intelligent but is, upon a moment’s consideration, just vapid nonsense (much like Loki in the first Avengers, as noted above, but at least Loki had the benefit of a flesh-and-blood actor delivering his lines with conviction; James Spader does solid work as the voice of Ultron, but trying to make a CGI robot who spouts a school-kid’s attempt at edgy philosophy sound like a genuine menace is an uphill battle). Speaking of genuine menace, I assume the reason the film is called Age of Ultron is because A Couple of Days of Ultron Causing Disturbances in a Handful of Specific Locations was too much. For all the big talk (and there is..so much), Ultron doesn’t get up to all that much trouble, most notably in the sense that he apparently has his code all over the internet and yet he doesn’t bother stirring up a single ounce of chaos with that ungodly power. Why bother including this as an element of the character if it achieves zero story? Is it purely to make Ultron seem ~unstoppable~ because he keeps downloading into new robots? Because it didn’t really land, y’all. They try to play it like a big victory for the good guys when Vision burns Ultron out of the ‘net, but in context it’s meaningless because he didn’t do anything while he was there. Pretty much everything about Ultron was all talk, little to no action - even a whole bunch of the trouble he did cause happened off-screen, with Maria Hill just popping in to let us know that ‘there are reports of metal men stealing shit’. Cheers, cool. And you know, Ultron makes a song and dance about how he’s going to save the world by ‘ending the Avengers’, but then he...does not pursue that at all. He tries to make himself a pretty body, the Avengers thwart him, and then he enacts a doomsday machine to destroy all life on Earth. Like every other aspect of the character, the whole ‘end the Avengers’ schtick is just white noise, there’s no meaning in it. Ultron is just a same-old-same ‘What if Artificial Intelligence wants to WIPE US OUT?!’ cliche, and maybe that’s what he was in the comics too, I don’t know, but it’s the job of the film to tell that story in a dynamic way, and they had two and a half hours to do it. And yet.

There should be more to this than a nondescript placeholder villain concept and a series of action set pieces that just kinda happen until they stop. At least the first Avengers had some variety in each of its action sequences, using the location and the different skills and weapons of its antagonists, whereas this one is just ‘there are robots and the good guys punched and shot them until they were all broken, the end’. Even making the city fly in the end doesn’t actually make it interesting, not least because the characters spend most of their time running around the (weirdly, perfectly stable) streets not having to deal with any consequences of being up in the air anyway, and the doomsday device is too nebulous to ratchet up any real tension about figuring out how to deal with it. The conflicts with the Maximoff twins have at least some spark of life in them, but the characters themselves are treated to an over-simplified and very contrived narrative arc that uses what they do and what they know more as plot devices than as details of actual people’s lives, leading to a cheap death for Pietro so that Wanda will be distracted enough to abandon the big ol’ doomsday button, and it’s just all so convenient. There’s no heart in any of it, and it makes the moments that try to have heart all the more embarrassing and out-of-place (don’t even get me started on what a prescribed attempt at tugging the heart-strings it is to have Hawkeye name his magnificently well-timed newborn after Pietro, because DAMN). When I said I liked this movie better than the first Avengers, I meant just that: I like this better. That’s not to suggest that it is significantly better in any sense, because it isn’t, and I can’t even argue that this one has a better story, because honestly, it doesn’t. The first film made more sense, it was just less interesting to watch, and the things about it that were contrived were contrived in different ways. The first film was weaker and more irritating on character, and character is always the most important part of a story for me, so as annoyed as I am by the major character blunders in Age of Ultron, I’m still not as annoyed as I was after The Avengers. That is damning with the faintest of praise; this is just not a particularly good movie, it makes a poor use of its cast at the best of times, delivers a sub-par action extravaganza, and the script is not half as witty as it gleefully convinces itself that it is. It comes as no surprise, I’m sure, that I am very glad a certain writer/director departed the franchise after disappointing everyone with this outing. I say I like this better than the first Avengers, but gee, it’s a close call.

#Avengers: Age of Ultron #Marvel Cinematic Universe #Bechdel Test #female representation #MCU #Age of Ultron #Avengers

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jennmoslek36 · 6 years ago

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IT HAS BEEN about a year now since my involvement with the Dozier School For Boys began taking over my world. Kicking off the whirlwind was my need to get my hands on the school’s student ledgers. I won’t rehash the entire adventure but what I will say is that it took many frustrating nights online, several emails to the Archivist, the potential of an $600+ bill to get digital copies & finally an 8 hour round trip before I’d actually have what I wanted…Well at least a quarter of what I wanted!

HAVING ABSOLUTELY NO clue what I was looking for, I spent the next several weeks trying to organize what I had. Almost immediately number of very distinct patterns began jumping out at me. The same sentencing judges over & over again, the SAME sentence length OR lack there of & a crap load of blank spaces; Specifically under the “WHEN/HOW RELEASED” columns. One would expect that any institution handling children would be required to keep detailed & accurate records of ALL of its charges, especially when it comes to their last known whereabouts BUT that would make too much sense, now wouldn’t it…

THE INFO THAT I had gotten was only from the latest volume of the ledgers & didn’t even make a dent in the number of boys that had been shoved through the doors to be reformed. I knew there were hundreds OR even thousands of names in those books. I maybe had a few hundred at the most. By now, I had gotten used to what I like to call the “Hurry Up & Stop” method of researching. Basically I’d need specific info, finally get said info ONLY to start looking it over & promptly figure out that I needed additional material OR even worse, I’d need something entirely different altogether. In this case, I had just assumed that I’d eventually be making another trip to the Archives; That is until I ended up becoming involved with Bob Straley & taking over his website…And right there on one of the site pages was a link to the detailed, handwritten notes that WHB Mr. Andrew Puel had spent hours putting together.

Mr. Andrew Puel At The State Archives…Sitting In The EXACT Same Spot That I Did When I Was There!

NOT IT!!

WHEN I SAW that link, I was beyond thrilled! I was finally going to have something reliable to validate what I had come up with! I had spoken with Andrew at Bob Straley’s memorial service & knew that any research he had done would be the best & most accurate info that I could possibly get. When the page loaded, it definitely did NOT show what I had been hoping for; In all actuality, it showed nothing but this:

ODDLY THE INFO was missing! I started clicking on some of the other older links on the website & sure enough, there were quite a few that led to nowhere. I don’t know why it gone OR where it went, only that it’s not there. I tried not to get to aggravated, thinking that there had to be a hard copy among the thousands of documents that I have. I spent the next several weeks going through EVERY page, folder, digital file, etc. & found nothing. Bob kept everything, so to say I was puzzled that he wouldn’t have a copy of something so important was a huge understatement. I did another look through, literally taking out every piece of paper, one by one; Still nothing.

Well Damn….

AN EVENING IN GAINESVILLE

ON A FRIDAY in late February, I made the 3 hour trip to Gaineville. With me was a small black bag filled with what I believed to be the most important material related to the Arthur G Dozier School for Boys. I pulled up to a beautiful home, tucked back in a quiet sub division that was surrounded by forest. Standing outside was a familiar face, Mr. Bryant Middleton. The “Whitehouse Boy” greeted me with a smile & a brief hug before inviting me inside to meet his wife. Both graciously spent several hours telling their personal story of Dozier & how the WHB’s Organization was founded. They were both lovely people & I was grateful that they had been so willing to meet with me & be as open as they were. When we finally moved into the dining room to look over the things that I had brought, I began pulling things out. I yanked a folder out that had been wedged inside of my over full bag & a stack of papers fell out. The stack was stapled together & folded in half. I picked it up to see what it was & as I unfolded it, my jaw hit the floor!

OH…MY…GOD…It was a hard copy of the list of missing boys! The same list that I had just spent weeks trying to find! The stuff inside of that bag was the stuff that I pulled out & reviewed quite frequently & there’s absolutely NO way that I would missed that thick stack of ledger pages! I slid the stack across the table, explaining to Bryant why I was a bit stunned at finding them. He thought it was strange as well. I’m not going to get into the specifics of my time with the Middletons in this post, although I will say that I’m very fortunate to have met with them. They’re great people & they continue to work toward keeping the future from repeating the past.

WHERE COULD THEY BE?

OF COURSE THERE is minimal info on the boys on this list. What is known is that most were listed as escaped but never recovered. A lot lacked permanent homes OR guardians, so there wouldn’t have been any concerned parents wondering about the whereabouts of their lost boy. It should also be noted that the last place they were seen was the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna. That leaves so many unanswered questions; Could ALL 185 boys on that list have actually successfully escaped & moved on to a better life? Even if that did happen, would it be possible that NOT 1 single child ever be heard from again? I suppose it could be possible for some BUT for All 185? I seriously have my doubts & given the history of Dozier, I’d say that’s highly unlikely. Especially considering the significant proof of other burial sites on the school’s 1200+ acres.Whether or not they continued life after Dozier OR their lives were taken at the school, they each deserve to be recognized. I’ll let them speak for themselves….

☆☆☆☆☆☆

JOSEPH WILK – 17 JAME HENRY COLSON SMITH – 16 BEHARD STEPHENS – 15 JOHNNIE J. RICHARDSON – 17 AB DURDEN – 16 WILLIAM RICHARD WHITE – 16 MONROE ROGERS – 16 NOWLA (SONNY) VENOS – 16 BERNARD WILLIAMS – 15 WILLIAM NICOLAS BURNETT – 15 FRED RUSH – 16 HORACE MECHOM – 16 J.W. HARRILL, JR. – 14 EDWARD MATTHEW MITCHELL – 17 LARRY DAVIS – 14. ALFONSO DEWEY DAVIS – 16 JAMES ARTHUR HARELL – 13 CARROL PITTMAN – 15 CARL HUBBARD REWLS – 14 RICHARD PEUDRY TYLER – 15 HAROLD OLDS – 14 LYNVILLE RAY – 16 LAIRD WILDES (age unknown) ALFRED SMITH GOODSON – 16 QUINCY LEWIS – 16

☆☆☆☆☆☆

ZANE HOPKINS – 12 ROBERT WALKER – 13 WILLIE FRANKLIN FARROW – 13 EUGENE JOHNS – 14 GABE BELL – 15 WILLIAM DEWARS – 15 LELAND LLOYD BRADY – 16 JASPER ALLEN HOLDER – 15 WILLIAM JOHNSON – 16 GEORGE HENRY ABBEY – 16 HARRY L. SAULS – 15 BEN BUNDRICK – 15 LOUIS VALOIS COUTURE – 16 ROBERT GILBERT ALBRITTON – 16 LAUDRIC BASKIN – 17 JAME HENRY COLSON SMITH – 16 JOHN JOSEPH COOGAN, JR – 16 ARINAUDO MACHIN, JR – 16 JULIAN GREEN – 15 CARL UNDERHILL – 16 WILLIAM DANIEL HATCHER – 17 DWIGHT SPRINGER – 14 JASON EDWARD LOGAN – 15 PAUL HERSHEY, JR – 17 CLARENCE C. RAULERSON – 16

☆☆☆☆☆☆

EVERETT BRADDOCK – 15 HAROLD EUGENE NORMAN – 16 RICHARD RUSSEL TODD – 14 EDWARD POOLE – 14 BILLY RAY BURNS – 16 MARCO GUTIERREZ – 14 WALTER C. GREEN – 16 LEON MANNING – 16 LEONARD JAMES NELSON – 16 GODSON WHITTAKER – 15 ROBERT GORDON – 15 ROBERT LAURIN GODDARD – 15 KENNETH LEE YORK – 17 TRUBEE BYRD – 17 ROWANE HOLLIDAY – 16 BOBBY WHITEHEAD – 15 WILLIAM EDWARD LEGGETT – 16 ROBERT HELGRAN – 13 OSCAR EUGENE MCCURDY – 16 WILLIAM RIVERA EMANUEL, JR – 16 JOHN LENNARD NAVE – 16 JACKIE CREWS – 16 ERNEST WOODARD – 16 ARTHUR KENT PATTERSON (aka William S. Johnson) – 14 DAVID EVANS HARRIS – 16

☆☆☆☆☆☆

JOHN HARRIMAN – 16 GB IRWIN – 14 HOWARD MCCALL – 17 OSCAR LEE CALDWELL – 14 JD THOMAS – 13 GEORGE F. CLAY – 13 WILLIS BUNYAN – 16 JAMES CAMPBELL – 15 BERTRAM THOMPSON – 16 WILLIE JAMES MURPHY – 17 SANDY JONES – 15 RALPH HALL – 16 MELVIN FALSON – 13 HERBERT LEE COVINGTON – 14 LUKE BENJAMIN – 16 TOMMIE L. WOOTEN – 15 WALTER ADAMS – 15 DAVID JONES (aka Cockran) – 15 EDWARD BROWN – 14 EDWARD DEMERRITT – 16 WILLIAM JENKINS – 13 MATEO BENARD COLUMBUS – 14 WILLIE C. MITCHELL – 13 CLARENCE MORTON, JR – 15 JOSEPH JOHNSON – 16

☆☆☆☆☆☆

CURTIS WILSON – 10 EUGENE FULLER – 16 THOMAS BOWERS – 15 LEON DUNBAR – 16 DAVID EAGLETON – 14 HENRY JUNIOR JOHNSON – 14 EDWARD FOSTER – 15 GEORGE EDWARD THOMAS – 17 ODIS SINGLETON – 16 JAMES WILEY BRYANT – 14 CURTIS DOWNING – 15 WALTER LEE NIXON – 15 JOHN TYLER – 16 ELMORE JOHNSON – 15 HENRY MELVIN JONES – 16 DOCK SMITH – 15 ROBERT LEE KING – 16 WILLARD LAMAR SHELTON – 16 ROBERT HAYS – 16 CHAS W. CHAMBERS – 16 RUSSEL HUTTON – 15 HOWARD CAYWOOD – 15 BOBBY HAYES – 16 BILLY CAUDELL – 16 WALTER R. HAYES – 17

☆☆☆☆☆☆

ARTHUR KENT PITTEBON(?) – (age unknown) WILLIAM P. NUNES – 16 EDWIN T. FINNIE – 15 MILTON LEDBETTER – (age unknown) LEROY SMITH (aka Leroy Gregory) – 17 JOE RODRIGUEZ – 17 BENARD MIXON – 15 ROBERT WESLEY DAVIS – 16 PAUL DAVID HUGES – 12 ROY JOHNSON – 13 LENARD JAMES LOTT – 16 JERRY LLOYD – 16 GABRIEL THURMAN – 16 ROBERT LEE BOSTIC – 14 GEORGE HILL – 13 JOHN ALBURY – 14 NATHANIEL TURNER – 15 LEO COLLIER – 17 TEEVESTER JAMES – 15 FLOYD RILEY, JR – 17 GEORGE NELSON – 15 NORMAN MCAULEY – 15 LYLE MACK PAULK – 16 EDWARD GIBSON – 14 WILLIAM EDWARD CORTEZ – 16

☆☆☆☆☆☆

ROBERT CHRISTMAN – 16 HUBERT BERRYMAN – 15 CHARLES LACGUEY – 16 CHARLES EDWARD KIDDY – 15 JOHN CHARLES CLANCEY – 15 DANNY LEE BOWMAN – 16 HOWARD GEORGE FAGG – (age unknown)

ROBERT ALTON SINGLETARY – 17 ELLIS MARLOWE HASKIN – 16 JAMES PHILLIP SLAWSON – 16 JAMES JOHNS – 17 BENARD JACKSON – 14 ARLISS BLACKMON – 15 BENJAMIN UDEL – 13 NATHANIEL BOWLES – 16 ROLAHO LYLES – 16 CLARENCE BOBBY BROWN – 15 WILLIE BRADFORD – 16 BILLY JACKSON – 13 RICHARD GILLYARD – 14 LEONARD WHITEHEAD – 15 FREDERICK NATHANIEL HARREL – 16 HENRY MCLENDON – 17 SAMOLE DARBY – 17 WILLIE LEE DOUGLAS – 15

☆☆☆☆☆☆

MOZELL BRADLEY, JR – 16 J.C. STEPHENS – 15 CHARLES BROWN – 15 GRANT BERNARD KEMP – 13 RONNIE FRANKIE ROSE – 16 JOE EDWARD ALLEN – 15 VICTOR STEPHEN GRICE – 16 TOMMY COOK (Mathias) – 15 JERRY COOK – 16 JOHNNY LEON WRIGHT – 16

IT’S AN ENTIRELY different feeling you get when you’re able to put names to the children you’ve been speaking of….

♤Please Consider Helping In The Fight For Justice By Signing The 1st Petition: https://www.change.org/p/jenn-moslek-re-investigation-of-the-arthur-g-dozier-school-for-boys♤

☆ IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW SUFFERED ABUSE, PASSED AWAY, WENT MISSING OR WITNESSED ANY WRONGDOINGS WHILE AT “THE FLORIDA INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL FOR BOYS” AKA “THE ARTHUR G. DOZIER SCHOOL FOR BOYS” OR THE OKEECHOBEE SCHOOL FOR BOYS, PLEASE REACH OUT VIA HERE AT findingflorida.blog OR ANY OF THE CONTACT INFO LISTED BELOW!!☆

Want More “Finding Florida?” BE SURE TO “SUBSCRIBE”!

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http://thewhitehouseboysonline.com

AND

http://www.whitehouseboys2007.com

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THE LOST BOYS OF DOZIER: Have You Seen Me? IT HAS BEEN about a year now since my involvement with the Dozier School For Boys began taking over my world.

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thecomicsnexus · 6 years ago

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Heroes for Hope

HEROES FOR HOPE DECEMBER 1985 BY CHRIS CLAREMONT, ANN NOCENTI, JIM STARLIN, JIM SHOOTER, STAN LEE, ED BRYANT, LOUISE SIMONSON, STEPHEN KING, BILL MANTLO, ALAN MOORE, HARLAN ELLISON, JO DUFFY, MIKE BARON, DENNY O’NEIL, GEORGE R. R. MARTIN, BRUCE JONES, STEVE ENGLEHART, MIKE GRELL, ARCHIE GOODWIN, BERNIE WRIGHTSON...

JOHN ROMITA JR, JOHN BUSCEMA, BRENT ANDERSON, JOHN BYRNE, CHARLES VESS, RICHARD CORBEN, MIKE KALUTA, FRANK MILLER, BRIAN BOLLAND, JOHN BOLTON, STEVE RUDE, BRET BLEVINS, HERB TRIMPE, GRAY MORROW, PAUL GULACY, ALAN WEISS, JACKSON GUICE, HOWARD CHAYKIN...

AL GORDON, KLAUS JANSON, JOE SINNOTT, TERRY AUSTIN, DAN GREEN, JEFF JONES, JON J MUTH, TOM PALMER, AL MILGROM, BILL SIENKIEWICZ, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, CARL POTTS, AL WILLIAMSON, SAL BUSCEMA, BOB LAYTON, JOE RUBINSTEIN, STEVE LEIALOHA, WALT SIMONSON...

DAINA GRAZIUNAS, MARIE SEVERIN, BOB SHAREN, PETRA SCOTESE, CHRISTIE SCHEELE, MICHELLE WRIGHTSON, GLYNIS OLIVER, GEORGE ROUSSOS, LESLIE ZAHLER AND JANET JACKSON (NOT THAT JANET JACKSON)

SYNOPSIS

The X-men are attacked by a strange entity that makes them feel despair and end up going to Ethiopia to help people against the famine (and fighting this entity after a while).

OFFICIAL CONTEXT

CONTEXT BY CHRISTOPHER PRIEST

The most heated racial episode in my career occurred during Marvel's production of their charity book for Ethiopian famine victims. Promoted as work from "the top writers and artists in the industry-- the very best of the very best," profits from this effort were going to be donated to help the poor starving Africans. It was a truly noble effort, one the entire industry rallied behind (at least until DC decided to do their own book, thus dividing the talent pool along company lines). Denys Cowan dropped by and mentioned, amused, that he'd seen the list of talent working on the famine relief project. There wasn't a single African American creator invited to participate. This actually amused me tremendously, and I went over the list myself to make sure, but, yup, no blacks had been thought of as, "the very best of the very best," and none were invited to work on this book.

Tickled, I picked up the phone and called Larry Hama, telling him no blacks were on the list. Larry was hugely amused, and suggested we do our own charity relief book for the poor white trash of Appalachia. He and I howled with laughter, and then shook off the dumbness of it all and got on with our lives.

Only, a white staffer had overheard part of the conversation (I assume the notion of my "recruiting" Hama to do my "own alternate charity book"), and some warped interpretation of my conversation with Hama got reported down the hall to the X-MEN office (where the book was being developed). The editors became incensed and loudly demanded my head on a plate for, essentially, inciting the black talent to stop working for Marvel. I mean, this thing got blown to huge proportions, so much so that, by the end of the day, it was largely accepted as fact that I was organizing a walkout of black talent, and the EIC kind of put me and the X-Men editor in a room to negotiate a deal.

I just couldn't stop laughing. I mean, it was all so stupid. These were stupid people. It was extremely stupid to do an African relief charity project and not invite any damned Africans to work on it. It was even sillier for these stupid people to invent some massive protest out of a silly joke in a 30-second phone call with Larry Hama.

The X-Men Ed was not amused, and refused to believe me when I said I had no intention of bad-mouthing the project. I was invited to participate, but I just chuckled and said, "No affirmative action, please." And this just set the Ed off into a screaming match that could be heard everywhere in the office, "What is WRONG with you? Why do you have to make a RACIAL ISSUE OUT OF EVERYTHING?!?!?!"

It just got out of control, and the episode (along with my paying my assistant to stay home on MLK's birthday once it was ratified as a national holiday but Marvel refused to recognize it, other than the numbingly patronizing "We got us our own holiday" speech by Luke Cage in the VISION & SCARLET WITCH Miniseries) fairly cemented my pariah status at Marvel. Without saying a word and without actually doing anything, I was routinely assumed to be some radical activist who saw everything as a race issue.

I felt trapped in a world of loons. It was totally no-win, and I tended to simply withdraw from the office more and more, from people who, in my view, had now invented a justification to do what they'd been doing all along: fencing themselves off from me.

CONTEXT BY JIM SHOOTER

Pam had arranged for Oxfam America to receive our donation. Their reaction to our offer, at first, was what one might expect from people who had never seen a comic book up close: “Comic book? There’s nothing funny about famine!” Sigh.

For some reason Pam was determined that we should donate the money to them, though, and we convinced them that comics weren’t always comic. They still demanded to review the finished book before they would commit to accept our donation.

When the book was ready to go to press, we sent a mock-up to Oxfam America to review.

Their response was that they wanted nothing to do with it. Flat rejection.

Furthermore, they said that the book was unbelievably offensive and that we, the people of Marvel Comics, were racist, sexist and reprehensible.

When this was told to me by Pam and Marvel President Jim Galton I felt as if I were being called on the carpet. I was flabbergasted. I showed them the mock-up.

They didn’t see anything wrong with it.

Galton called the exec at Oxfam America we’d been dealing with to ask what their specific objections were.

Their response was that, while under no circumstances would they have anything to do with our project or with us, they would send an executive to meet with us and explain the many horrific, repugnant, disgusting elements that made our “comic book” anathema.

So they did. Oxfam America’s representative came to meet with Galton and me. The meeting took place in Galton’s office.

I do not remember the man’s name.

He was a nice-looking, thirty-something man. He had on a suit that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. Designer shoes. He had on more gold and diamond jewelry than I’d ever seen on a human being. Jeweled watch. Cufflinks. Stickpin. Bracelets. A neck chain that would make a rapper blush. Doubt me, go ahead. Discount by two-thirds what I’m telling you and you should still have an image of a guy wearing clothes and jewelry that at market price would feed a thousand starving people for a month.

After the greetings and handshaking, Galton, making conversation, said that he imagined that Oxfam America and other charitable organizations had, at least, gotten a lot of people to focus on the ongoing tragedy in Africa, and had inspired many efforts such as ours from musicians and performers and artists.

This Oxfam America fellow, let’s call him Midas, just plain gushed about how good for business the East African famine was, how donations were rolling in at record levels. He talked about the millions dying as if it were a great marketing opportunity.

Galton and I were stupefied. We couldn’t believe how thrilled Midas was that his business was booming.

Midas explained that the purpose of his visit wasn’t here to request changes or negotiate. He had come to save us from our own folly. He made it clear that Oxfam America had nothing but contempt for us and our work. He came as a favor, to urge us not to publish the abomination that we had created. He assured us that it would destroy Marvel Comics.

Right. Well, naturally, I wondered why.

Midas flipped through the mock-up. Again and again he pointed out black characters that he said “looked like Michael Jackson.” We were obviously trying to capitalize on Michael Jackson’s image and fame.

Michael Jackson in particular and the Jackson family in general were huge supporters of Oxfam America, by the way. Every drawing of a woman, he said, was sexist and exploitative. He was particularly offended by depictions of Storm, which he thought were more than sexist, a denigration of women of color.

I mentioned that the men were heroic and glamorous, too. Just like in the movies, stars tend to be good looking.

He pointed out a panel in which Chris had a carnival barker saying: “Yowza….” That, he said, was racist in the extreme. I don’t have the book handy, as explained above, but wasn’t that character Caucasian?

Moore and Corben’s pages? Yikes.

I cannot begin to tell you all the racism, sexism and hate that he (and Oxfam America) read into the words and pictures.

Wow.

The punch line is this: Midas accused Marvel of “stealing Janet Jackson’s logo.” He believed that the Heroes for Hope logo, credited to Janet Jackson, was ripped off.

I offered to introduce him to the designer on our staff who had created the logo, one Miss Janet Claire Jackson. He dismissed my obvious attempt at a cover-up.

No, really, we have a designer named…. Oh, never mind.

No wonder Janet Claire Jackson eventually started going by the name “Blog Elf.”

Finally, the lunatic left. Galton and I shared a moment of “what a jerk.”

Pam was instructed to find some other organization to which to donate the money. She came up with the American Friends Service Committee.

Heroes for Hope was a huge success. Thanks to our sales department, we got donations from downstream—distributors, retailers, even fans.

Can’t find the press release and the picture of me and Galton giving the AFSC honchos the PR “Big Check” created by our production department to symbolize the real check. I think the initial donation was $500,000. Much more came later.

It was a great thing. Jim Starlin, Bernie Wrightson, Ann Nocenti and Chris Claremont are great heroes in my book. Heroes for hope. There are people alive today who wouldn’t be without their efforts.

AND ABOUT THOSE STEPHEN KING PAGES

The non-comics writers who participated needed some help in most cases, which Ann and Chris provided. The biggest challenge was Stephen King’s contribution. I may be exaggerating here, but not by much—he gave us something like 5,000 words for three pages. Almost overnight, by the way. Chris, Ann and I somehow cut that down to what would fit on three comics pages. 500 words? I forget. Has anyone else ever had to cut out 90% of Stephen King’s brilliant words?

REVIEW

This was bound to not be a nice comic-book to review. The famine in Ethiopia at the moment had political origins that people decided to look over in favor of Live Aid and We Are The World.

Let’s just say that sending super-heroes there to help doesn’t guarantee a success (although they could have done something more against politicians, but let’s not go there).

The story is a bit abstract and the characters pretty much end up making sense of it without ever checking their facts (like the entity being a mutant and why it exists). The sequences about each X-man being tortured psychologically was too repetitive. By the time they end up in Africa (something that happens on a wild guess), the book is almost over.

The art doesn’t have a nice unifying feel. Something that could have been possible with breakdowns and less inkers and colorists.

But you know what? I understand why it had to be like that. This book was made ad honorem, and people did a great effort to just put the damn thing on the stands.

My other concern is that the X-men weren’t the right fit for a story like this. I understand they were popular back then, but these comics should attract non-readers as well (it’s for a good cause after all). And to be frank, things like Rachel Summers, Storm not having powers, Magneto being the leader... those are things of that time. Very hard to relate to. The Avengers would have been a better choice, or even Spider-man and the Fantastic Four (even if Spidey was looking a bit different at the time).

I like the message of not losing hope, and hope being the one thing keeping people alive in such tragedies... but then they kind of go back home. Leaving hope?

I don’t think the ideas in the book were brought down on something concrete or to keep thinking on. It is just confusing.

I give the book a score of 5

#heroes for hope #famine #marvel comics #x-men #1985 #comics #review #modern age #live aid #arthur adams

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downthetubes · 6 years ago

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Comics artist John Tucker reflect on his first Thought Bubble Festival experience, the culmination of his busy year as a creator…

Well, here we are then. Our first Thought Bubble is in the bag. The show I’ve wanted to do for the best part of a decade, over in the blink of an eye. I am now back in my house, near Swansea, with a cup of tea and the biggest convention of my “career” thus far in the rear view mirror. Let’s try our best to make sense of the show, the year that preceded it, and what it all means. Easy.

Thought Bubble 2018

What can I say about Thought Bubble that somebody else won’t have already said? It’s the big leagues of indie comics; small press tastemaker and impresario Sarah Harris (of Swindon’s Incredible Comics) once said that Thought Bubble is where you go to “arrive”; to announce your presence on the scene. A lot of people were making that announcement this year, including us (me and my wife, who is my salesperson and spokesperson while I’m busy drawing or scowling).

Thought Bubble looks, superficially, like other conventions, but it is not like other conventions. On its face, the process of getting to Thought Bubble was identical to the Cardiff Independent Comic Expo and True Believers processes – we applied early, sent in some JPGs and text, then we turned up with comics and a roulette wheel. There was a folding table and some chairs, and nearby people were putting up those wire print holders that you clip together. Same old. But, as we soon learned, Thought Bubble is unlike anything else we’d encountered previously.

I knew Thought Bubble was big, but I had no real concept of its breadth and scale until I saw it all laid out, taking over a large portion of the city centre. The marquee we were in, alone, would have been the largest comic convention I’ve ever exhibited at, before you consider it was one of four venues. Thought Bubble is almost too much, but of course if you’re into comics there’s probably no such thing as too much. I had grand plans to see so many people, almost all of which were lost to the blur of the event (except for Tony Esmond, Todd Oliver, and Sarah Millman, and even then I didn’t even get to see at her at her actual table; I bumped into her purely by chance in the street).

If you want to experience Thought Bubble, don’t get a table. You can either be at it or in it, and never the twain shall meet.

Image: Thought Bubble Festival

The mid-con party was a godsend in that regard, and it was a real pleasure to talk shop with other exhibitors while watching a flamboyant German attempting pistol squats to Boney M’s “Rasputin” in full cosplay.

In fact, of all the things that happened in Leeds this weekend, I think I enjoyed the mid-con get-together more than anything. It’s so rare you get to really talk to other people doing this sort of thing – comics is, by nature, an isolationist pursuit, and even if you’re tabling next to good people (as we, fortunately, have done every time so far – this time with Paul Moore, a true gent and a talented man) you never really get to talk.

I also managed to get some good conversations in with Jon Laight, fellow weird comic producer Todd Oliver, and Andy Barron (whose work is so unique it looks like it was produced off-planet, a distant civilisation’s take on sequential art). And I saw the pistol squats. Great party, cheers lads.

In regard to the actual show itself, I’m probably one of the worst people to write about Thought Bubble, because I saw very little of the actual show. We had so much fun – we met lots of great people, saw friends from shows past, Lauren met somebody off the Bake Off (I don’t watch it but she seemed very nice) – but it was just so hectic we couldn’t get a sense of what the punters experienced.

Image: Thought Bubble Festival

All I can really tell you is how we did as exhibitors, as rookie exhibitors with a half-table in a marquee large enough to accommodate several hundred of the most talented indie comic artists in the country.

How Did We Do?

I went to Thought Bubble feeling relatively conflicted in regards to expectations. What would low sales mean? What would high sales mean? Would we sell anything at all? Would we be kicked ceremoniously in the arse with a big pointed boot if we didn’t meet quota? No way to know. Had to just go there and see what happened. I had advantages here that I hadn’t had at our first show at True Believers – we’d had some experience, and some success, and we had the roller banner, at once repulsing and attracting, a cursed beacon luring punters towards it against their will.

It’s impossible to deduce your standing in comics from any one show, but if there’s one thing I learned from Thought Bubble, it is that any lessons you have learned from other shows do not apply there. Thought Bubble is a different animal; the punters look the same as the punters elsewhere, but they are not the same. They will do what other punters do – look at the roller banner with either amusement or disgust, pick up a comic to a gruesome page before sidling away, the usual – but these are not the people we encountered in Cardiff, Cheltenham, or Swindon.

At smaller shows, we sold a lot of bumper packs (complete sets of my entire back catalogue, with a sketch, for a tenner). We offered a very similar package at Thought Bubble, and we priced competitively as we always do (or at least I feel we do). But the vast majority of money that came over the table was either for a Death Roulette on its own (£5, and fine by me – it’s the highest margin item on the table, considering I’m going to be at the table anyway and I genuinely love doing them) or a single issue, typically Adrift or one of the other shorter minis (Hell – my £1 mini-comic – was the breakout star).

We put this down to the sheer crushing weight of the competition; whereas a £10 pack of comics may seem like a good deal at a smaller show, at a show the size of Thought Bubble the smart play is to get a little taste off everybody. We’ll be making sure we’ve got more little things for sale next time, and I would definitely recommend anybody thinking about Thought Bubble to make sure you have plenty of “easy pickups” – badges, short comics for cheap etc. It also helps if you have something unique, which we will come to shortly.

We didn’t quite break even – nor, frankly, did I expect to; how could we? We’d driven from Swansea and spent two nights in a hotel, and then there was the cost of the table on top.

But we came closer to breaking even than I would have imagined; very close indeed. Especially considering:

– I’m still a no-name, in the grand scheme of things (though some people did seek me out to pick up Adrift based on good reviews they’d read, and I signed my first few honest-to-goodness autographs for people who don’t realise my comics are actually worth lessif they’re signed).

– What an honour it is for anybody to spend anything at your table at an event like that. Considering the exhibitor list was essentially a who’s who of UK indie talent, I know how lucky we were to have made one red penny. I wouldn’t have bought anything from me if I’d been a visitor at that show, for fuck’s sake.

If you bought from us this weekend, even if it was just a badge, or you just took a business card or talked to us for a minute, I’m very grateful. I’m especially grateful if you joined the 2018 class of Death Roulette.

Death Roulette

For those who aren’t aware, Death Roulette is my signature convention sketch game; we bring a small toy roulette wheel, and each of the 37 numbers corresponds to an improbable mode of death that I keep hidden under the table. You pay £5, spin the wheel, I take a good look at you, and you come back in 10 minutes to find out how you died.

We welcomed an all-time record number of people to the Death Roulette hall of fame at Thought Bubble; nearly 30 people elected to be mangled, crushed, decapitated, stabbed, shot, frozen, impaled, or otherwise maimed. I love doing Death Roulette portraits, and thankfully everybody so far has seemed happy with the grim vision of their own demise they’ve received. Here’s some of my favourites from Thought Bubble.

Death Roulette has been a godsend at conventions; it’s gotten conversations started and it’s driven comic sales (either from people “upgrading” to a bumper pack that includes the portrait and all the comics, or people getting a sense of what’s inside the comics from their portrait).

Out of respect to those brave enough to take a blind punt on their own demise this year, I’ve decided to draw a line under the 2018 class of Death Roulette, in that any deaths that were drawn this year will never be repeated. If you took part in Leeds, or Cardiff, Cheltenham, or Swindon, thank you so much. You are more handsome than god and braver than the troops.

In Conclusion…

Thought Bubble has been a long time coming for me; I may have had the highest ratio of “years planning on exhibiting” to “years exhibiting” of any attendee this year. When I moved to Manchester for university (in – ugh – 2008), myself and my good friend Paul Capewell arrived a little older than our contemporaries and unenthused about the idea of chugging beer through a funnel or playing soggy biscuit on a flag frisbee team.

We were hugely fortunate, then, to have found a poorly-advertised “society” – the ragtag group of misfits responsible for running PULP Magazine, the student union publication. We signed up in the afternoon one day, and joined the editorial board that evening. I would spend my every waking hour that year writing print and video content for the magazine and the website, and Paul became its defacto web lead, building its website and churning out videos that looked far better than they had any right to considering the equipment on which they were made.

PULP Magazine had no money, no time, and no oversight beyond its perennially overworked editor. Paul and I were not the best-qualified people on campus for the jobs we did at PULP, but we were available, and willing, and if we didn’t do things, nobody else would. The editorial team of PULP 2008/09 spun straw into gold in a way I’ve not really experienced since (and would do anything to experience again).

I think everyone who worked on PULP that year got something out of it, but the main thing I got out of it is that you don’t have to ask permission to make things, and you can’t afford to wait. PULP changed hands the following year and folded shortly after due to perennial mismanagement on the part of the student union (leaving Manchester Met – a university that so prides itself on its art and design faculty – as the largest university in the world without an official print outlet for its students’ work), and shortly after it died, I began producing photocopier comics under an assumed name. I think I just needed something to fill the void that PULP had left behind. They weren’t the best work I’ve ever done, but that doesn’t matter.

Manchester had a vibrant, healthy culture of weirdo small-press bullshit where the only thing that mattered was the willingness to make something; be it zines full of emetic-grade poetry, or – in my case – self-produced compendiums of the worst comics ever made. I had experienced a late-stage conversion to comics after becoming intoxicated by the beguiling work being put out by Kate Beaton and KC Green, whose work seemed to single-handedly wash away the ungodly stench brought on by the mid-2000s webcomic “boom” (many people think the 90s was comics’ nadir, but all the foil covers in the world cannot touch the sheer volume of excruciatingly poor content produced by the supposed champions of webcomics in the early-to-mid 2000s). And PULP had taught me that nobody’s going to tap you on the shoulder to let you know it’s time – you just have to crack on with what you’ve got and hope you eventually land somewhere you want to be, knowing that even if you don’t you’ll probably feel better for having done something.

I had heard, through regional channels, of Thought Bubble, which was growing each year. I swore I would, one day, when I was ready, fill out an application, set up a table, and do it. Just do it, f*** it, see what happened. That was 2010.

A lot happened between those first photocopier comics and my Thought Bubble debut – I graduated, got a job, got married. Got a kitten, called it Potato. Life happened. I stalled on comics, but the idea of comics never really went away; I dabbled with it the whole time, aimlessly, never sure what exactly I ought to do with it. Just over a year ago, I decided to actually make a proper go at it for the first time; really put all my effort into it, and see what happens. I didn’t know what success looked like, but I thought I’d know it when I saw it.

Looking back over the past year, I think I have had a successful rookie year in comics. I’ve had profitable showings at good comic conventions, my work has had good reviews from established critics, and I finally held my own at the convention that has been my white whale, taunting me from afar, for eight years. It’s hard for anything to live up to eight years of hype, especially when that hype is entirely self-generated.

But I think the past year, and Thought Bubble with it, was a bigger success than I could have reasonably hoped for. And I believe now, perhaps more than ever before, in the ethos I learned at PULP Magazine – if you don’t make whatever it is you have the urge to make, nobody else will, and there’s never a good time. You just have to get on with it. It took me a while, but I’m just glad I finally got on with it.

Thanks for making my first year in comics a success, and hopefully I’ll see you at next year’s Thought Bubble.

John Tucker

John Tucker is an independent illustrator and writer from Cardiff, South Wales. After spending a year on the writing staff of PULP Magazine in Manchester, he began self-publishing short-run comics.

His recent works include Adrift (reviewed here by Tony Esmond), the horror-comedies The Taxi and Night Watch, the short comics Hell and Gang Culture set in 1950s Swansea, and the critically acclaimed one-shot Bald. His first graphic novel, The Floating Hand, is set for release in late 2018

• Find John Tucker online at www.johntucker.co.uk | Follow John Tucker on Twitter @johntuckerart | Facebook | Instagram

• The Thought Bubble Festival returns in 2019: www.thoughtbubblefestival.com

Thought Bubble is a not-for-profit organisation that seeks to promote literacy and artistic skills through the medium of comic art. We see sequential storytelling as an important cultural art-form, and believe it is the most diverse artistic medium in the world.

From the Trenches: Thought Bubble 2018 and My Rookie Year Comics artist John Tucker reflect on his first Thought Bubble Festival experience, the culmination of his busy year as a creator...

#Adrift #Andy Barron #Creating Comics #John Tucker #Jon Laight #Leeds #Paul Moore #Sarah Millman #Thought Bubble Festival #Todd Oliver #Tony Esmond

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masterofd1saster · 3 years ago

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CJ current events 23nov21

D/P commuted last minute

On July 28, 1999 Julius D. Jones murdered Paul Howell in the course of a carjacking in Edmond, Oklahoma. He was sked to be executed at 4:00pm on Thurs, 18nov21. Oklahoma Gov. J. Kevin Stitt announced a few hours before the execution, “After prayerful consideration and reviewing materials presented by all sides of this case, I have determined to commute Julius Jones’ sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.”

Mr Jones still argues that he's innocent. https://aleteia.org/2021/11/18/oklahoma-governor-commutes-death-sentence-hours-before-execution/#

The .25 caliber chrome-plated semi-automatic pistol which was used to kill Howell was found in Jones's home in the insulation near an attic access in Jones's bedroom, and it was properly admitted. Jones admitted to his girlfriend prior to Howell's murder that he had a .25 caliber chrome semi-automatic pistol which he kept for protection. The codefendant Jordan testified that Jones had a gun, that Jones planned to use it when they planned to rob Howell and take his Suburban, and that he saw Jones with the gun in hand at the time Jones approached Howell. Jordan testified that he was with Jones when he bought the pistol and saw Jones in possession of the gun days prior to the murder. Further, the evidence established that Jones had a prior felony conviction.*** Jones v. State, 2006 OK CR 5, ¶ 37, 128 P.3d 521, 538.

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Comparative criminal law

Steve Simon, the CEO and chairman of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), says he’s tried to speak directly with Peng Shuai, the tennis pro from China who’s has hasn’t been seen or heard from since she accused former vice premier of China, Zhang Gaoli, of sexual assault on Nov. 2. He has asked sources at the Chinese Tennis Association to connect him with Shuai, a two-time Grand Slam doubles champion who in 2011 was ranked as high as No. 14 in the world in singles. The WTA has reached out directly to Peng, 35. Thus far, these efforts have proved fruitless.*** https://www.yahoo.com/news/head-womens-tennis-fight-chinese-153205893.html

Some 3d world/totalitarian countries have a habit of disappearing people. The way it works is the [sometimes secret] police show up at your house and take you away in the middle of the night. The next day your wife or your mom goes to the police station and asks to see you. The police tell you they've never heard of you, and you're not there. The whole gov't denies any knowledge of you or your existence.

When I worked in Iraq, the republican government had created a crime of disappearing people to punish this act.

Meanwhile, the NBA Commissioner announced "Hong Kong? What's that?" He followed up telling reporters "Profits are more important than Uyghurs, which, I'm not really sure what they are."

https://rocketswire.usatoday.com/2020/10/04/today-in-2019-daryl-moreys-hong-kong-tweet-ignites-firestorm/

https://spectator.org/uyghur-protest-silenced-by-the-nbas-corporate-greed/

https://news.yahoo.com/enes-kanter-says-nba-officials-174728147.html

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*** [U. Chicago students recently] protested , demanding more campus police and better campus security after the shooting death of recent graduate Shaoxiong “Dennis” Zheng. Zheng was killed near campus on a Tuesday afternoon, and he is the third University of Chicago student killed this year.

Students at the university had a far different tone just one year ago. Starting on Aug 29., students occupied a block outside of Provost Ka Yee Lee’s home for one week to try and pressure the university to disband the University of Chicago’s Police Department. In June, students held a 19-hour sit-in at the department’s headquarters.

The university newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, published an editorial demanding the university “disband its private police force.” Now, the paper reports that a public letter from over 300 faculty members “called on the University administration to make anti-violence a top priority, urging a larger border of University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) jurisdiction and increased surveillance and security guards in Hyde Park.”*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/students-at-university-of-chicago-discover-the-folly-of-abolishing-the-police

***

The FBI is investigating the possibility that union boss Jimmy Hoffa’s body is buried in a former landfill in Jersey City under the Pulaski Skyway, a report said.

The search was sparked after a tip passed down from a worker who said he buried Hoffa in a steel drum just outside the former PJP Landfill, now Skyway Park, the New York Times said.

An FBI spokesperson confirmed to The Post that agents had conducted a “site survey” under the Skyway last month after obtaining a search warrant, but wouldn’t say if the search had anything to do with Hoffa, the mob-connected Teamsters leader whose July 30, 1975, disappearance has become the stuff of legend.

“On October 25th & 26th, FBI personnel from the Newark and Detroit field offices completed the survey and that data is currently being analyzed,” Special Agent Mara Schneider said in a statement. “Because the affidavit in support of the search warrant was sealed by the court, we are unable to provide any additional information.” *** https://nypost.com/2021/11/18/fbi-search-jersey-city-landfill-for-jimmy-hoffas-remains/

***

Charm City

BALTIMORE (WBFF) — It's Baltimore's unbearable burden.

In just week one, no place is sacred and no age is off limits.

Thursday mourners remembered a 69-year-old woman murdered inside of her east Baltimore church.

A 13-year-old girl was shot and killed at a west Baltimore recreation center.

A 5-year-old girl marked the city’s 300th murder victim.

"If you are growing up in a community where you’re hearing the constant pop, pop, pop of gunfire you are growing up with not post traumatic stress but a constant traumatic stress syndrome," said Adam Rosenberg.*** https://foxbaltimore.com/news/city-in-crisis/the-magnitude-of-murder-expert-says-killings-taking-psychological-toll-on-city

***

Life should not imitate pornhub, especially if you're 12

BROMLEY, Ky. (WKRC) — A Kentucky woman is accused of raping a 12-year-old boy three different times. Morgan Roberts, 18, faces rape and sexual abuse charges.

Ludlow, Ky. police said the boy's mother contacted them after finding a text on her son's phone that read, "I took your V card and you liked it".***

The boy was able to describe Roberts in ways that were only possible if he'd seen her without clothes.

Two of the boy's friends also said Roberts admitted to the abuse.

All three boys said Roberts made them call her "mom," police said.*** https://foxbaltimore.com/news/nation-world/woman-charged-with-raping-12-year-old-boy-had-him-call-her-mom-police-say

***

Waukesha madness

Waukesha, Wisconsin Police Chief Daniel Thompson confirmed in a press conference Sunday that a red SUV drove through Christmas parade barricades and struck at least 20 individuals, including children.

Thompson said an officer who has been on the force for just over six years opened fire on the vehicle. A person of interest is currently in custody but Thompson stressed that the investigation is “very active."***https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/waukesha-christmas-parade

+++

A woman who lives on Main Street says she saw the SUV barrel through a dance team of girls between 9 and 15 years old. Sam Kraemer tweet.

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The man being questioned after a red SUV plowed through Waukesha's Christmas parade, killing at least five people and injuring dozens, has been identified as Darrell E. Brooks Jr., a Milwaukee man with a criminal history dating back to 1999 that includes numerous violent felonies.***

In July 2020, police charged him with three other felonies – including reckless endangerment and being a felon in possession of a firearm. He’s also listed as a Tier 2 registered sex offender in Nevada.

A background check from Wisconsin's Department of Justice came back with over 50 pages of charges against Brooks stretching back decades. In 1999 he received his first felony conviction for taking part in an aggravated battery – for which he received three years of probation, records show.*** https://www.foxnews.com/us/waukesha-christmas-parade-darrell-brooks

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He pimped a 16 y/o girl.

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Even the New York Times had a problem with Brooks being released on low bail after assaulting his girlfriend. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/us/wisconsin-waukesha-parade.html

***

How about "adult dirtbags who molest kids?" "People who commit intercourse by force and without consent of women?"

Colorado’s Sex Offender Management Board plans to no longer recognize the term “sex offender” in its own guiding principles and policies.

The board, which controls treatment standards for people already convicted of sex crimes, voted 10-6 Friday on a controversial proposal to replace “sex offender” with “adults who commit sexual offenses.” Board members weren’t in lockstep on the issue and voted even more narrowly — 8-7, earlier this year — to consider the language change in the first place.***

Jessica Dotter, sexual assault resource prosecutor for the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council and a member of the SOMB, said before Tuesday’s vote that the new terminology — “adults who commit sexual offenses” — “fails to convey or represent any sort of victim-centeredness.”

Dotter said victims of sexual abuse “want their offender to be held accountable and to be known as an offender.”***

Ironically, the Sex Offender Management Board (SOMB) will not change its name even as it renounces “sex offender” as outdated language. That name is determined by state statute, and thus up to the legislature. https://www.denverpost.com/2021/11/19/colorado-sex-offender-state-baord/

***

Approximately 80 looters in ski masks reportedly robbed a Nordstrom near San Francisco while wielding crowbars on Saturday night.

A local restaurant owner recounted the shocking scene that occurred in Walnut Creek around 9 p.m., explaining that 50-80 people were involved with the brazen robbery.

“I probably saw 50-80 people in like ski masks with crowbars, a bunch of weapons,” said local PF Chang's manager Brett Barrette, CBS San Francisco Bay Area reported . “They were looting the Nordstrom.”*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/80-burglars-ransack-nordstrom-store-crowbars-weapons-scene-out-of-a-movie

***

NCVS Dashboard - https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/Home#hometopHome

Epstein killed himself - https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/Home#hometopHome

***

A Florida man pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud after attempting to obtain $25 million from the family of Rep. Matt Gaetz, federal prosecutors announced on Monday.

Stephen Alford, 62, appeared in federal court in Pensacola and admitted to orchestrating an extortion scheme against Don Gaetz, the congressman's wealthy father, and making false promises that he could secure a presidential pardon for his son, who has been linked to a sex-trafficking investigation.*** https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/florida-man-pleads-guilty-in-attempt-to-extort-25m-from-matt-gaetzs-father

***

In homicide acquittal/conviction news

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A Kansas City, Missouri, police detective who shot and killed a Black man in December 2019 has been found guilty.

Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Dale Youngs announced the verdict Friday, a week after Det. Eric DeValkenaere’s four-day trial wrapped up on Nov. 12.

It was a bench trial, so no jury was seated, and Youngs ruled on the case alone.*** https://www.fox13now.com/news/crime/white-missouri-officer-found-guilty-of-killing-a-black-man-in-2019

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A St. Paul man has been acquitted on all charges in a jury trial stemming from an incident where he shot at Minneapolis police officers in self-defense last summer.

Court records show 28-year-old Jaleel Stallings was acquitted on Wednesday [1sep21] of multiple charges, including two counts of attempted second-degree murder, two counts of first-degree assault, two counts of second-degree assault, second-degree riot and intentional discharge of a firearm that endangers safety.

Stallings claimed self-defense in court.*** https://kstp.com/news/saint-paul-man-who-shot-at-minneapolis-police-in-self-defense-acquitted-of-all-charges-by-jury/6224974/

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BTW, a jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse after he shot three white men.

***

0 notes

plungermusic · 3 years ago

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“Kinda bent, but we ain’t breakin’… in the long run”

Maverick Saturday stretched out before us like a challenge - thirteen hours is a long time on your feet for a couple of oldsters, but we’d give it our best shot…

We didn’t catch all of Dan Walsh’s opening Barn set, but his closing number, a lyrical, backwoods folk-flavoured instrumental that peaked in an increasingly frenetic celtic reel to the whoops and stomps of the crowd, was enough to impress us with its fleet-fingered dexterity.

Kelly Bayfield made her second barn appearance with another stylish set drawn from the new album: Kelly taking to the piano to give us a new short number Sing which was twinned (“well, they’re a similar flavour, and in the same key!”) with her last single Hitchhiker, both oozing classy 70s chanteuse vibes and the latter closing in some great Telecaster work from Andy Trill in a majestic closing solo.

There’s not much that’d drag us away from a Kelly performance early, but having spotted his programme picture (“Long hair, Les Paul? That’ll do!”) we pottered down to the open air Green Stage for David Banks and his band. He did exactly what we thought it said on the tin: lots of Springsteen/Petty influenced muscular Americana with a dash of Molly Hatchett topped with excellent southern-fried guitar and classic ‘big endings’… marvellous.

He was followed by Simon Stanley Ward (another ‘old fave’) who brought his Jonathan Richmanish irreverence and wit to Old Time Country in Excuse Me While I Feel Sorry For Myself; the Graceland-African-style I’m A Worrier (”…that’s worrier, not warrior”) a swinging rock’n’roller Bigfoot, Baby (Eddie Cochran meets cryptobiology) and Rocket In The Desert (the salad leaf not the projectile) with its Lawrence Of Arabia theme tease. While lampooning his own assumed-Nashville twang in American Voice the accompaniment was as echt as you could want, and the deadpan humour of Beluga Whale was sung to a properly stirring Journeyesque anthem.

As it wasn’t raining The Green seemed the place to stay, where Forty Elephant Gang came next. Reviewing their album we were a little sniffy about their ‘crowd-pleasing festival songs’ but aside from the field holler-meets-O Brother Where Art Thou-style Songs Of Praise, this set was mostly the ones we’d liked: the relaxed Tex-Mex of Strange Things Happening with three-part harmonies and intertwining mando’n’guitar lines; the melancholic waltz of Young Man’s Game and the Squeeze-y domestic wit of Drunken Promise Song. A final ‘crowd-pleaser’ came in the chugging bluesy Hands Out Your Pockets, an instruction the assembled masses eagerly followed to add the required clap-along.

Sam Chase Trio made another appearance at The Green, wooing the larger crowd with both edgy humour (including praising UK portaloos in comparison to US versions, and introducing Everyone Is Crazy But Me as “a children’s song... now, what they mean is that it’s simple, since kids are generally at the dumber end of the spectrum”), and songs as varied as the fiery protest of What Is All The Rage and the haunting, wistful Lost Girl, (from the “Faustian Spaghetti Western Of Epic Proportions Known As The Last Rites Of Dallas Pistol”) sung by cellist Devon.

Now Plunger do like a bit of bluegrass, whether it’s grainy b/w Flatt & Scruggs clips from the 50s, through Sam Bush and New Grass to Béla Fleck and Greensky Bluegrass so The Folly Brothers should have been our kind of thing… however what we heard of them was more My Old Man’s A Dustman than anything Appalachian so we wandered off…

Back at The Barn Dean Owens and the Southerners drew a large and attentive crowd, but the popular Scot also left us a bit underwhelmed. Mellow, melodious troubadoury country that wouldn’t have been out of place on a mid-afternoon 70s Radio 2 show, the kind of thing that takes a deep listen in your bedroom to appreciate the stories told: very easy on the ear for sure but without any particular thing to grab us at a festival.

After an abortive attempt to catch Ella Spencer and her accompanist at The Moonshine (an extremely long soundcheck with problems with feedback from pretty much everything they touched meant we gave up) we caught a snatch of Los Pistoleros as we rounded The Green: probably the most C.O.U.N.T.R.Y. thing of the weekend, complete with draggy fiddle, pedal steel and old time vocal harmonies… if I’d not left my cowboy boots at home I’d have been out line-dancing with the best of them.

Plunger had only just seen Alyssa Bonagura (with Tim De Graaw’s band) less than a week since. Here at The Barn she was nominally solo but Tim joined her to add sweet harmonies and mellow guitar to Alyssa’s polished Cali-country: her strong yet ethereal vocal equally at home in slow emotional confessionals or giggly upbeat Big Yellow Taxi-style big strummers.

Listed only as ‘Dogs Play Dead’ it was only a lucky guess that took us down to The Green for what turned out to be Friday’s headliners Black Eyed Dogs playing a set of Grateful Dead classics. Mainly those with a countryish twist to them already, like Casey Jones, I Know You Rider and Friend Of The Devil; and bringing that flavour with fiddle and pedal steel to others like Truckin’, China Cat Sunflower, Playing In The Band and the epic closing Franklin’s Tower. All done with the right degree of loose, shambling rhythms and discursive noodling on guitar (and fiddle!) Fabulous stuff for grooving on the grass under what by now were glorious sunshine-filled blue skies.

Brooks Williams’ jangly sonorous acoustic and warm, smooth higher register vox was ideal early evening fare at the barn, in covers like Dave Alvin’s King Of California, traditional numbers like Deep River Blues and originals like the Gordon Lightfootish melancholy of Frank Delandry, and the damp-eyed nostalgia of Palomino Gold, aided toward the end of his set by some more excellent banjo from Dan Walsh.

The USP of Eddy Smith & the 507 is Eddy’s gravelly soulful voice, ideal for their bluesy-edged material, like the harp-led strut of It Don’t Feel Much Like Living and the new single Ticket Out Of Here, a bustling two-step with impressive three-part harmony vocals. They definitely have moved up a level since we last saw them a couple of years back.

Somehow we managed to miss Sarah Petite with her band completely on Friday, and almost all of her stripped-back Moonshine set on Saturday. Which was definitely our loss gauging by the brief snatch of crackling husky vocal over restrained bass and reverb laden guitar that we heard while hunting for a still-open toilet (a water supply problem having rendered all loos unusable for a considerable portion of the late evening... pretty much the only fly in the ointment all weekend!)

As the sun set the two-month date differential was beginning to tell: clear night skies in September aren’t quite the same as July and the growing chill was testing our stamina a bit. We headed for The Peacock and the tribute show to John Prine, hosted by Rich Hall. Pretty much every act who was on site came to do a turn in honour of the recently-deceased songwriting legend, with their own favourite from his oeuvre. Kelly Bayfield band gave us Hello In There, Tim De Graaw with Alyssa did That’s The Way The World Goes Round, Alyssa gave us the obligatory Angel From Montgomery, and Simon Stanley Ward (plus Kelly) gave a fantastic rollicking Lake Marie. Entirely in character, Sam Chase Trio broke the mould and gave us their own tribute song John Prine.

Rich Hall had to skip out on MC duties to attend his own set at The Barn: sacrilege to say, but the appeal of stand up (even to music, even from such a big name) palled a little. It was getting bitterly cold (you could see your breath hanging in the air) and given that what we could hear of his set was the same as we’d heard last time he was here we spent much the time attempting to warm up with piping hot beverages. However it was by far the rammedest set of the weekend, with the tightly-packed crowd spilling out of The Barn for some distance.

Jon Langford was unsurprisingly somewhat hindered by the draw of Rich Hall (which left The Peacock a bit underpopulated!) His spiky, punky approach wasn’t entirely our bowl of chilli, although the rendition of Eddie Waring (originally by Help Yourself with Deke Leonard and BJ Cole, who was sitting in with Jon tonight) was very good.

The programme description of headliner Jerry Joseph did its best to weaken our staying power too: with our deep suspicion of any write-ups that include the ‘p-word’, and somewhat incredulous of the mention of ‘jam bands’, Jerry looked like he wouldn’t be our kind of thing at all. However he didn’t live down to expectations (wholly). A very animated stage-prowling audience-provoking figure in shorts and no shoes, there was no shortage of energy even if it was largely unchannelled and could get a little wearing… (maybe it was that, maybe it was the chill, but The Barn steadily thinned out during his set, ending less than half full). War At The End Of The World was the pick of the bunch, although like most of his material it would probably have sounded better with a band (like, erm, Stockholm Syndrome, which he co-founded; or, erm, Widespread Panic who he has written for… so much for our ‘jamband incredulity’!)

While it might have ended as a bit of a test of endurance, there were more than enough high points to make Saturday another enjoyable Maverick experience.

“Did we do it for love? Did we do it for money? More like stubborn dumb persistence and hot chocolate, honey…”

#Maverick Festival

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yourdailykitsch · 7 years ago

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Taylor Kitsch Gets in Touch With His Inner David Koresh in ‘Waco’

Taylor Kitsch loves being Taylor Kitsch, and one of the charms of the 36-year-old actor is that if you meet him, you’ll love that Taylor Kitsch loves being Taylor Kitsch too. It was a crisp afternoon in late October, and Kitsch was sitting at a picnic table on the patio of the Mean-Eyed Cat, a Johnny Cash–themed bar on West Fifth Street in Austin. Kitsch was enjoying the sunshine. (“The weather’s been insane. It’s why you live in Texas, you know?”) Kitsch was enjoying his barbecued pork ribs. (“Eating a plate of meat is rare for me, but it’s fun right now.”) Kitsch was enjoying his sleek and very expensive-looking BMW GS Rallye motorcycle, which he’d parked in front of the bar’s entrance. (“That bike’s spanking new. It’s like my child. I love it.”)

Over the past few months, Kitsch had gone on a two-thousand-mile motorcycle trip through the mountain west, riding up Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road, winding along Idaho’s Salmon River. He’d visited Africa, “because I didn’t know what the **** was going on with all the poaching, and I wanted to know.” He’d traveled to San Diego to skydive with a bunch of Navy SEALs and his friend and mentor, the macho-man director Peter Berg. He’d gone to the “Harvey Can’t Mess With Texas” benefit show at the Frank Erwin Center in Austin—“a really great concert, like top five for me”—and afterward “tipped, like, 48 beers” with his friend country music star Ryan Bingham. Now Kitsch was preparing to leave the South Austin apartment where he has lived for the past decade and move into his dream house, a 6,500-square-foot bachelor pad on Lake Austin. His whole family—mom, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews—was coming down from British Columbia for Christmas, and Kitsch couldn’t wait to show off his new place. “My mom’s going to lose her mind,” Kitsch said. “We grew up in a single-wide mobile home, then moved to a double-wide—she’ll lose it.” Kitsch was going “full Griswold” on yuletide decorations. He’d already purchased a ten-foot-tall blow-up polar bear to put on his front porch, and he and his oldest brother, Daman, were planning to install an elaborate light display before the rest of the family arrived. “It’ll hurt your eyes,” Kitsch said. “Literally, I hope we get fined by the HOA. That’s our goal, so we’ll do it.” Kitsch became famous for playing the Dillon Panthers’ bad-boy fullback Tim Riggins on the TV show Friday Night Lights, and over the course of five seasons, he made the character irresistible to watch—a teenage jumble of empathy, anger, machismo, and freewheeling fun. When the show ended, Kitsch appeared to be on a rocket path to superstardom, but he still hasn’t quite gotten there. Instead, his career since Friday Night Lights has been defined by soaring expectations, big-budget disappointments, and consistently good acting. When Kitsch and I met in Austin, he had just finished back-to-back press tours for two fall movies in which he plays supporting roles—the espionage thriller American Assassin and the wilderness-firefighter drama Only the Brave. But we were there to talk about Kitsch’s latest part—“the best work of my career, for sure”—which forced the actor to command the screen as never before and might just turn him into a bona fide Hollywood leading man. On January 24, the first episode of this project, Waco, a six-part miniseries about the 1993 standoff at the Branch Davidian compound in Central Texas, will premiere on the newly renamed Paramount Network (formerly Spike). The show stars Michael Shannon, John Leguizamo, Rory Culkin, and Melissa Benoist, but Kitsch has the plum role. Kitsch is playing David Koresh. The Waco siege has been the subject of a dozen or so documentaries that range from serious-minded to crackpot, but the new series is improbably the first dramatic re-creation of the entire event: 51 days of stalled negotiations and rising tensions that ended in an inferno that killed Koresh and 75 of his followers. The project’s genesis is unexpected: it was written, directed, and produced by brothers John and Drew Dowdle, whose handful of career credits includes low-budget horror films like Devil and Quarantine and the poorly reviewed Owen Wilson–Pierce Brosnan thriller No Escape. (Harvey Weinstein was an executive producer on the series, but his name has been removed from the credits.) The Dowdles may not have had much experience, but they had a plan: though the Waco siege has been a political and cultural lightning rod for the past 25 years, the brothers decided that their film wouldn’t dwell on the controversies. They wanted to tell the tragic, human, “no-bad-guys version of the story.” To do that, they knew that their single most important decision would be casting someone who could bring tragic humanity to Koresh. “We thought Koresh as a character is a deeply flawed individual, but there’s something a bit everyman about him, there’s something about him that people liked,” Drew Dowdle said. “The Taylor Kitsch version of David Koresh is inherently someone you would enjoy being around.” When Kitsch first heard about the part, he had only a hazy memory of news coverage of the Waco siege. But the more he read, the more fascinated he became. After meeting with the Dowdles, he reached out to his agent and said, “If they want me to do it, I’ll swing. I just need prep time.” Shooting was set to start in Santa Fe in April 2017, and as 2016 was coming to a close, Kitsch steeled himself for the next half year of preparation and production. “I went to Telluride for New Year’s and just blew it out—like, pizza, anything you could drink, ski, just go all out, don’t even worry about anything,” Kitsch said. On January 2, he arrived back in Austin, ready to begin his transformation. When Kitsch first came to Austin, in 2006, to film the pilot for Friday Night Lights, he was 24 years old, “green and raw” and mostly in the dark about acting and the entertainment business. “I genuinely didn’t know what a critic was,” he told me. Kitsch had grown up four hours west of Vancouver in the city of Kelowna, British Columbia, with his mother and two older brothers—his dad was mostly absent—and until he was 20, he dreamed about playing professional ice hockey. When back-to-back knee injuries ended his career, he moved to New York to try to make it as an actor, beginning a scrappy period in which he took classes, modeled, and, for a several-week stretch, spent his nights sleeping on the subway. Kitsch had almost missed his screen test for Friday Night Lights due to visa issues, and when he arrived, Berg, the series’ creator, first made him improvise in character for thirty minutes. Berg was suitably impressed. “What you did in there, make sure you do in this screen test with all the execs, and I think we’ll be just fine,” he told Kitsch. Friday Night Lights never had a big audience, but to the people who watched it week after week, it might as well have been War and Peace, except about high school football, and way more fun. Kitsch was the heartthrob, and even while the show was in the middle of its run, he was getting movie work, playing Gambit in an X-Men movie and the war photographer Kevin Carter in The Bang Bang Club. After Friday Night Lights ended, in 2011, Kitsch was primed to really make it big. Going into 2012, he had starring roles in two massively hyped movies with enormous budgets, John Carter and Battleship, both of which seemed like good bets to turn into franchises. “I had two ten-year contracts,” Kitsch said. “I would have been going Carter, Battleship, Carter, Battleship, and maybe an indie somewhere in there if I could.” But both films fizzled at the box office, and Kitsch’s career was forced to become more interesting. “I still have my journal from when I was in acting class in New York where it’s like, ‘All I want to do is indies and these characters and Sean Penn, Sean Penn, Sean Penn,’ ” Kitsch told me. He got his wish. He’s spent the past four years bringing a coiled-up intensity to men as varied as Navy SEAL Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy in Lone Survivor, Gay Men’s Health Crisis president Bruce Niles in HBO’s The Normal Heart, and patrolman Paul Woodrugh in the much-maligned second season of True Detective. Instead of conquering the world as an above-the-title star, Kitsch became our most finely featured character actor. When Kitsch arrived back in Austin after his Telluride bacchanal, he got down to studying. He read the memoirs of Branch Davidian survivor David Thibodeau, watched home videos of Koresh preaching, and made a stab at grasping the Branch Davidians’ end-times theology. “I literally had a beginner’s-Bible-study version of the Book of Revelation,” Kitsch said. Koresh was an enthusiastic rock guitarist and singer (followers wore “David Koresh: God Rocks” T-shirts), so Kitsch took guitar and voice lessons to pull off the on-screen performances. To physically transform into Koresh—who did not have movie-star muscles—Kitsch dropped thirty pounds, limiting himself to eight hundred calories a day and running around Lady Bird Lake while listening to Koresh’s sermons. As Kitsch dug into his research, he saw a clear path to playing the public persona of the Branch Davidian leader. “Before the siege, it’s his birthday every day,” Kitsch said. “It’s all about him. He’s got a go-cart track and a shooting range, and he’s a rock star—obviously the lead singer, obviously the lead guitarist.” In Waco, Koresh, as played by Kitsch, oozes charm and bravado and knows just how to manipulate the people around him. That’s not a stretch. The 33-year-old self-proclaimed “Lamb of God” was in the habit of waking up his followers in the middle of the night so that they could listen to him show off his savant-like recall of the Bible. He had about two dozen “spiritual wives,” including some who were already married to other Branch Davidians. After a claimed revelation from God, he commanded all men in the compound to be celibate, with the singular exception of David Koresh. (“I’ve assumed the burden of sex for us all, but not for my own kicks,” Kitsch as Koresh says in the show’s first episode.) He was good at a drawling, tough-guy act too: he drove a ’68 Camaro, loved his firearms, and famously sent a message to the FBI saying, “You come pointing guns in the direction of my wife and my kids, dammit, I’ll meet you at the door any time.” But Kitsch also had to reckon with Koresh’s darkness. Among Koresh’s wives were women whom he had married when they were as young as twelve years old, and even if you think the federal government acted disastrously at Waco, it’s hard to see Koresh as blameless in the deaths of the 86 people who perished in the initial raid and the final fire. “Taylor and I had long talks: ‘How do you play this guy in a human way?’ ” John Dowdle said. “That was a big part of the preparation, just trying to get through the ugly stuff so he’s not a monster from the get-go.” Kitsch seized on Koresh’s childhood to understand him, trying to find that part of the Branch Davidian leader that was still Vernon Wayne Howell, Koresh’s given name. During his research, Kitsch read about a phone call that Koresh placed to his mother during the ATF raid on the compound. Koresh had been shot twice, was bleeding profusely, and thought that he was minutes from the end. His mother didn’t pick up, but he left a message, telling her he was dying, asking her to “tell Grandma hello for me,” and saying, “I’ll see y’all in the skies.” “I broke reading it,” Kitsch said. “I was crushed. And after that, I was like, ‘I’m dialed in now and I’m ready to go.’ ” The call hadn’t been in the script, but Kitsch emailed the Dowdles and urged them to add it: “I’m like, ‘This will take fifteen, twenty minutes to shoot, guys, we’ve got to have this in there. This is not Koresh—this is Vernon calling his mom.’ ” The Dowdles agreed. When Kitsch arrived on set, cast and crew who were wondering what he’d bring to the role didn’t have to wait long. On the first day, the Dowdles had scheduled a scene in which Kitsch delivered a nine-page sermon on divine joy to his congregants. “It was pretty remarkable to see him get up and do that,” Paul Sparks, who plays Koresh’s deputy, Steve Schneider, told me. “I had heard some of Koresh on the internet, but to be in the room and listen to this person talk about these complex, different ways of looking at Scripture—it was like, ‘Right, that’s what it was like.’ ” Regardless of whether Waco is a hit, Kitsch has his next project lined up. He’s planning to go to a friend’s San Saba ranch in February to shoot a movie currently titled Pieces. It will be his debut as a screenwriter and feature-film director. Pieces tells the story of “three best friends who take an opportunity to change their lives.” In this case, that opportunity is to intercept a drug drop on the Texas-Mexico border, after which, as you might assume, “all hell breaks loose.” Kitsch wrote the script over the course of several motorcycle road trips, and he used the journeys not only to clear his mind for writing but as an opportunity to conduct research. “I remember being in Idaho and there’s this truck-stop hooker, basically, and I had a coffee with her,” Kitsch told me. “Don’t read into that, it was—literally, it was a coffee—and I just bombed questions at her, and she was just super cool. I put a character based on her in the movie.” Kitsch seems to have exactly the kind of fame that he wants. He can build a dream house and get a dream role, but he can drop by a truck stop in Idaho and bomb questions at people who don’t recognize him. He has famous friends and wild adventures, but every interaction he has doesn’t have to be about his celebrity. As we were sitting at Mean-Eyed Cat, Kitsch told me about turning down a role recently. It was a “little rom-com for five days’ work,” he said, and it was “stupid money.” He would have made more on that movie than he did on Waco, Only the Brave, and three Normal Hearts combined—“for five days’ work,” he said again. I asked him why he’d said no. He did the voice-over work for Ram Trucks commercials, after all. First he answered like an actor. “It’s just not where I want to be, it’s not the story I want to tell,” he said. Then he added a caveat that was pure Taylor Kitsch. “I mean, I’m for sale,” he said, a big smile breaking out over his face. “If you want to give me $20 million for something and my mom never has to work again and my family’s good for the rest of their life, yes, I’m going to do it—don’t care who you are. I come from nothing, so to give my mom that call would just be awesome. I mean, I wouldn’t do porn, but, you know?”

#taylor kitsch #waco #austin texas #interview

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deadcactuswalking · 4 years ago

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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 22/05/2021 (Olivia Rodrigo, J. Cole’s ‘The Off-Season’, Nicki Minaj)

Yeah, it’s a big week, given the impact of J. Cole, Jorja Smith, Olivia Rodrigo (more on that next week) and the remaining impact of the BRIT Awards. There’s a lot of nonsense on this chart, a busy as hell one at that, but this surprisingly did not affect the #1, as the remix to “Body” by Russ Millions and Tion Wayne spends a third week at the top. Let’s just attack this head on. Welcome back to REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

Rundown

First of all, let’s get this nonsense out of the way: what happened to songs already on the UK Top 75 chart, which is what I cover? Well, a fair few of them dropped out. Any song that spent five or more weeks in the chart or peaked in the top 40 is considered a notable drop-out, and this week, they include “Wants and Needs” by Drake featuring Lil Baby off of the return last week, “Track Star” by Mooski, “Heat” by Paul Woolford and Amber Mark, “6 for 6” by Central Cee, “Patience” by KSI featuring YUNGBLUD and Polo G, “Hold On” by Justin Bieber, “We’re Good” by Dua Lipa, “Commitment Issues” by Central Cee (Gosh, didn’t think J. Cole would take a chunk out of this guy’s audience specifically), “Up” by Cardi B, “Streets” by Doja Cat and finally, “Get Out My Head” by Shane Codd, but also interestingly “i n t e r l u d e” by J. Cole dropping out off of the top 40 debut despite the album boost. This doesn’t mean it didn’t perform well but rather this is demonstrating this silly chart rule where in the top 100, one artist can only have three songs, preventing album bombs that you see on the US Billboard Hot 100. It makes the chart less accurate but arguably more diverse and hence fun for me to talk about.

There are also a few returning entries to add some fuel to this chart fire, one that has already combusted in the US this week, as “Slumber Party” by Ashnikko featuring Princess Nokia is back at #70 thanks to the video, “All You Ever Wanted” by Rag’n’Bone Man is back at #51 thanks to a delayed album boost, and the same can be said for “Addicted” by Jorja Smith at #49.

Then we have our notable losses, songs that fell at least five spots down the chart this week, including “WITHOUT YOU” by the Kid LAROI at #18, “Higher Power” by Coldplay falling big off of the debut at #25, “Your Power” by Billie Eilish at #26, “Didn’t Know” by Tom Zanetti at #28, “Heat Waves” by Glass Animals at #30, “Leave the Door Open” by Silk Sonic at #31, “Don’t You Worry About Me” by Bad Boy Chiller Crew at #39, “Latest Trends” by A1 x J1 at #46, “Last Time” by Becky Hill at #52, “All I Know So Far” by P!nk at #55 off of the debut, “My Head & My Heart” by Ava Max at #57, “Martin & Gina” by Polo G at #58, “Miss the Rage” by Trippie Redd featuring Playboi Carti dropping hard off of the debut at #60 (Really, what was expected here?), Travis Scott’s remix of HVME’s remix of Travis Scott’s “Goosebumps” at #61, “Cover Me in Sunshine” by P!nk and Willow Sage Heart at #63, “Don’t Play” by Anne-Marie, KSI and Digital Farm Animals at #65, “Sunshine (The Light)” by Fat Joe, DJ Khaled and Amorphous at #66, “Tonight” by Ghost Killer Track featuring D-Block Europe and Oboy at #71, and finally, “Calling My Phone” by Lil Tjay and 6LACK at #73.

That’s not to say there weren’t any notable gains however as we do have some interesting remnants of BRITs excitement and some other reasons for our gains this week, which include “One Day” by Lovejoy (more on them later) at #54, “It’s a sin” by Elton John and Years & Years at #47, “Way Too Long” by Nathan Dawe, Anne-Marie and MoStack at #43, “drivers license” by Olivia Rodrigo at #35 off of the success of “good 4 u” (again, more on that later), “Black Hole” by Griff at #23 thanks to the BRITs, and finally, “deja vu” by Olivia Rodrigo at #11. Really, all of this is just me stalling because this is a massive week – I’m writing this early – let’s just get through this... starting with—oh, for God’s sake.

NEW ARRIVALS

#75 – “Taunt” – Lovejoy

Produced by Cameron Nesbitt

Two weeks in a row, ladies and gentlemen: Minecraft YouTuber-core. How this happens I have no idea but regardless, the people of the UK seem to enjoy this Wilbur Soot guy’s new band. Is the new single better than the last one that charted from this EP, at least? Well, yeah, it is, mostly because at least this one’s an actual pop rock tune that, whilst derivative again, has more hooks than “One Day”, especially those stop-and-start-again verses that give me mathcore flashbacks, just with less of a catharsis to come from it other than that infectious, trumpet-laden chorus. The content is pretty gross if anything, seemingly focusing in on this past relationship from secondary school in which Wilbur tears into a girl for being insecure despite her privileges... for seemingly no reason. I mean, surely, you’ve moved on, right? Thankfully, Wilbur does get his comeuppance by the end of the song as the girl throws his drink at him, but it does leave the rest of the song with a pretty spiteful taste in my mouth that can’t be avoided by some pretty, 2000s indie rock-esque instrumentals. It doesn’t help that Wilbur Soot is such a non-presence as well, which I can see improving as the band goes on to record more material but the problem is with this early stage is that for now, it’s all rather primitive... yet it’s still charting. Oh, and if any people happen to find this that are fans of this guy, I am terrified of you so I’ll clarify that I don’t dislike this band at all, I’m just not a fan of what I’ve heard. I just wanted to put that out there because I value my personal information.

#74 – “Crocodile Teeth” – Skillibeng

Produced by Adde Instrumentals and Johnny Wonder

So last week, Nicki Minaj re-released her classic 2009 mixtape Beam Me Up Scotty onto official streaming services for the first time, with a remastered mix of some of her classic remixes as well as some new tracks or fan-favourite loosies sprinkled in. Why do I say this in reference to some random unrelated track, you ask? Well, we’ll get back to Nicki later but this song was actually remixed by Nicki and appears on that mixtape, despite baring no resemblance or relation to that mixtape at all, given this was released in 2020. The UK Singles Chart is particularly inconsistent is crediting remixes however, so we have the original here and, for what it’s worth, I quite like this. Skillibeng isn’t the most interesting presence but does his job in being vaguely menacing and violent over this cheap piano-led Afroswing instrumental with some questionable bass mastering. The song is in Patois but you can get the gist that it’s gunplay and flexing, typically stuff you’d hear in any UK drill track and it’s generic for sure but catchy enough to ignore. This version of the song is completely passable but I do think it is elevated by Nicki’s short introductory verse on the remix. I’d obviously have preferred there be more interplay but the remix was probably only known to Skillibeng when Nicki’s lawyers reached out anyway.

#72 – “Straightenin” – Migos

Produced by DJ Durel, Atake, Sluzyyy, OSIRIS, Nuki and Slime Castro

So Migos are finally preparing to release their highly-anticipated record Culture III as the boys are back together after some time apart, in which they have had varying levels of success, with Offset probably delivering the best solo material because he has both the best qualities of Takeoff and Quavo and always delivers on guest verses... I’m sorry, what about this needed six producers? This beat is not bad by any stretch with some vague flute loop eerily played under a rote trap beat, of which the bounced 808s are probably of most interest, but I do not understand how one person, let alone just an AI, couldn’t have made this alone. Regardless, the beat is good enough to make Quavo sound like he finally cares, even if he’s just going to talk about how he just saw Tenet – a bit late to the party – and how he turned a pandemic to a “band-emic”. Yeah, okay, so we’re going to ignore Mr. Quavious and move onto Takeoff and Offset who... at least have some good flows, albeit just the same triplet deliveries they’ve had for years. I think the most interesting part about this whole song is the slippery backing vocal that follows Quavo in the later choruses, which shows an attention to detail I missed from these guys. There’s only so much I can hear Quavo say “don’t nothin’ get straight ‘bout straightenin’” before I lose my mind, though, especially by the time we get to that awkward outro, so I can’t call myself a fan of this. If we’re speaking trap-rap from acts on hiatus, I really would have preferred “Lay wit Ya” by Isaiah Rashad and Duke Deuce to chart but I guess these guys will do.

#64 – “Independence Day Freestyle” – Fredo

Produced by Handz

By the end of this episode, I will never want to hear skittering hi-hats ever again. For now, however, we’ve got the same genre, different country as we go home to Fredo, a British rapper who’s pretty consistently good to be fair to him and did release an album I liked earlier this year. This is just a random freestyle he dropped last week because he felt like it, and here it is on the chart. Okay, well, it isn’t an actual freestyle because nothing that’s called a freestyle actually is in 2021, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a trap banger in itself and it’s got the foundation for it. I love the eerie chipmunk vocal sample that adds a touch of soul to the menacing keys before they get drowned out by trap percussion and Fredo going through his typical rags-to-riches commentary and memories of gang violence in one massive verse that somehow keeps my interest throughout the entire three minutes. The flow is about as smooth as it gets with UK rap, typically a lot stiffer, especially in drill, and the mixing’s fine, so yeah, I can’t really complain. I’d have preferred a chorus, obviously, and there are extended freestyles we’ll talk about later that do this a lot better, but for now, I can dig this, especially considering it’s pretty damn quotable for what it is. “If I fell off, I must have fell off the stairs into some elevators” is a bar, as is when he says he’s got more foreign cars than an Asian wedding or when he calls himself “Lord of the Bling”... okay, maybe that one’s not as impressive.

#62 – “The Great Escape” – Blanco and Central Cee

Produced by LiTek and WhyJay

Central Cee is a more familiar name but you may not know Blanco who, despite the collaboration with Cee making it ripe for comparison and comedy, is not a French white rapper. Rather, he’s from pioneering drill group Harlem Spartans and this is actually his first solo charting song thanks to Cee’s appearance. As you’d expect, this has some loud drill production and vague acoustic guitar loop as well as some stuttering vocal production peppered with dark 808s (that do bang here in all honesty) and pointless alarm sounds. Whilst drill is so standardised now, I do actually like this beat because it’s what I want to hear Cee on; sure, it’s got the guitar and the flutes but it’s also got a sax riff, which is what made “Loading” so fun. Blanco himself is also a more charming presence than Cee and their two energies bounce off of each other pretty well, even if the most witty their punchlines get are just referencing Powerpuff Girls characters... and when they’re not basic, they’re borderline incoherent but whatever, this is a fun slice of misogyny and violence that you’d expect from the genre with at least some care put into it. Not bad at all.

#56 – “Bussdown” – Jorja Smith featuring Shaybo

Produced by Riccardo Damian, Jeff “Gitty” Gitelman and Kal Banx

This is the break-out single from the most recent “project” from Jorja Smith, going the Drake route of not bothering to name it an album, mixtape or EP, and this one features London rapper Shaybo in a track about materialism but not as much embracing it as becoming increasingly alienated by it as whilst wealth may bring you luxury and connections, it detaches you from reality, which is the point in Shaybo’s verses about being Miss Naive, someone who is increasingly aggressive as a result because, well, she always gets what she wants, right? This is not a project I listened to but the content is promising... until I actually hear the song, with its awkward, clattering percussion showered in overwhelming vocal mixing that fails in whatever intimacy it attempts to present, and that’s before the decidedly unsubtle air horns and guitar licks. The song is minimal enough for the content to kind of fall flat as well, as a song like this feels like it deserves more than a slick bass groove, rather some kind of maximalist yet subtlety eerie production. I’m thinking Shaybo would actually make more sense there than she would here as well as her awkward, pathetic-sounding flow is delivered in the most dead-pan cadence, so much so that it drifts off fully into background “vibe” music but even then, it feels too distracting in the mix to work as that. I did want to like this but it just ends up as a really disappointing track from Jorja Smith, once again.

#42 – “Seeing Green” – Nicki Minaj, Drake and Lil Wayne

Produced by GOVI and Kid Masterpiece

We’re half-way through our batch of new arrivals and what better way to celebrate than a posse cut by three rappers long past their prime by now without a chorus that pushes six minutes? Normally, that would be sarcastic, but in this case it is absolutely not as this is awesome. I love 2000s hip-hop and a chipmunk soul-inflected beat blended with early 2010s era proto-trap production is obviously going to appeal to me as that type of contrast is what I love about more lyrical hip-hop, hell, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was said this was a Kanye beat or more accurately perhaps one by Harry Fraud. It helps that over that gorgeous soul sample we have all three rappers proving they still have it as performers, with some detailed verses from the classic Young Money crew that if nothing else provide a perfect nostalgia button for their era of dominance in hip-hop, not that it’s ever stopped since. I also just love hearing Lil Wayne hungry again, because I am a pretty big fan of his voice, delivery and even some of his wordplay and one-liners, all of which he expresses perfectly in his high-energy verse that switches through flaws as if it were all some off-the-top freestyle, and knowing Wayne, it might as well could have been. I love how he starts his verse off by shooting a guy and then saying it was his bad for doing it because he was a “good cat” and somehow it gets more off the rails afterwards, as he calls his girl a vacuum and says he’s peeing lean, before this self-proclaimed “badonkadonk bikini fiend” reminisces about his bisexual ex from Atlanta in a pretty clever use of repetition in rap. This is all with his sludged drawl of a delivery, which becomes especially important when he calls us all back to 2010 as when Wayne was in prison at his career peak, Drake always said “Free Weezy” and now 10 years later, Wayne’s saying “Free Drizzy” because Drake’s locked up in Canada because of the COVID-19 pandemic... because of course. I know it just seems like I’m itching out tiny little details in the verse but that’s what’s so great about repeated listens to detailed and great rap verses. That’s not to say Wayne is the only stand-out here either as Nicki Minaj impresses with that confident delivery she’s known for as she clarifies her beef with Cardi B being less about her “copying her homework” as it was about her up-hill battle with the industry, she recites how bitches are infamously her sons and delivers some pretty clever and quotable lines of her own, like “brand new Vanilla Maserati, I’ve been Haagen-Daszin’”... which again sounds like a bar straight out of 2010. I think the best verse here might actually be from Drake as much as I hate to say it, with bravado out of the gate that seems pretty deserved for someone with as immense success as he’s had. Not only is he referencing back to 2010 and even his Degrassi days, comparing it to the run-up to his upcoming album since he’s back on two crutches, but he’s also delivering some of his most interesting and quotable lines in years, and it all runs off so effortlessly and smoothly, but with a constant hunger and conviction reminding me of some of his deeper cuts like “Dreams Money Can Buy”. I won’t go further than I already have with this song – even though I could gladly quote practically the entirety of Drake’s verse, even when he aspires to be Vladimir Putin (I guess it’s better than accidentally comparing himself to Hitler) – but I’ve rambled on enough about this wonderful track. Triumphant lyrical rapping over soulful vocal loops will never be a thing I stop having a fondness for; these are some of my nostalgia biases creeping in – especially since these aren’t close to being the best verses any of the trio have delivered – but it’s so great hearing all three back on form together. Check this out if you haven’t as it’s absolutely a highlight off of the mixtape’s re-release.

#37 – “Build a Bitch” – Bella Poarch

Produced by Sub Urban and Elle Rizk

Bella Poarch is a name I had to search up and it turns out she is another one of these TikTok stars turned pop singers and all power to them for starting their career through such a useful and culturally important platform, honestly, and realistically, anyone regardless of their career background could make a song I enjoy, so there’s no use in dismissing them as a result, especially if I actually enjoy the concept of this song. The writing tends to be a bit childish as expected – again, more on that later – particularly when she sings lines like “Bob the Builder broke my heart and told me it needs fixing”, but the song’s theme of embracing young women for how they really are instead of Photoshopped, unrealistic beauty expectations is a message I like being expressed to her audience of teenage girls; I see it as necessary in the social media age. I do think that this message could be expressed with more tact than a Build-a-Bear parody but it never goes the slut-shaming route and is more critical of the men demanding or expecting perfection from their female partners, or on a wider scale the expectation for successful women to follow fashion and beauty trends, especially by men in their industries and fields. Poarch herself is a light-hearted vocalist kind of reminding me a bit too much of a self-serious Ashnikko but the melody in the chorus is infectious enough for me to ignore how void a personality she is. It’s harder however to ignore the stiff 808s that drown out clattering, awkward future-bass production and that drop just being really gross, kind of ruining the song in how it’s clearly a lean towards hyper-pop without fully drawing itself within that lane. Either way, this is fine, and at barely two minutes it struggles to find itself as a finished song let alone anything I can be offended by. This is remarkably okay, and that’s more than I expected.

#16 – “a m a r i” – J. Cole

Produced by T-Minus, J. Cole, Sucuki and Timbaland

These songs don’t even show up when you search them on Spotify and to be honest, I was hoping that would lead to limited success but of course, it didn’t. J. Cole’s latest album The Off-Season is yet another mediocre instalment in a dull catalogue full of rambling verses from a guy who thinks he has much more to say than he actually ends up saying, and it’s exhausting to listen let alone discuss the man’s art out of a sheer lack of personality or wit that follows his every move. His Dreamville label is filled to the brim with people more consistent, skilful and interesting than Cole has ever been so it’s just frustrating to see the label boss get all of the recognition. Regardless, I’ve never liked Cole as an artist – especially not a conscious one given the ableism, homophobia and tone-deaf exchange with Noname just last year – so I’m almost glad he’s stripped off half of the pretence of making a woke, important album. He’s just rapping on this record, which gives me the excuse to run through the rest of these consecutive bores from Cole as quickly as possible. First of all, we have “a m a r i”, a barely sufferable dud from the album scored by a blend of acoustic guitars and squelching trap percussion that fails to platform Cole’s Auto-Tuned moaning, oftentimes just aggravating and barely listenable, and sometimes disguising some pretty weak, topic-less verses for a man who claims to be focused. “Want smoke? I’m a whole nicotine company” is not the silliest bar on the album, but I’m almost convinced the song ends as abruptly as it does because Timbaland’s embarrassed that he helped produce such an underwhelming beat and not even someone praised as a modern great can save it from being worthless.

#15 – “p r i d e . i s . t h e . d e v i l” – J. Cole and Lil Baby

Produced by T-Minus

One of my favourite hip-hop releases of last year was Aminé’s Limbo, a diverse selection of tracks that ranged from conscious hip-hop about his ambitions and fears about growing up and raising children in a modern world as well as typical trap-rap flexing and R&B crooners about girl problems. All of this is smoothly stirred into a pot of personality that actually attempts to bridge a gap between older and newer generations of rappers rather than just claiming to. “Can’t Decide” is not one of my favourite tracks from that record – “Compensating” with Young Thug executes its ideas just that little bit better for me – but it’s still a fun, R&B-adjacent tune with insanely catchy hooks about Aminé’s relationships. So why did we need a J. Cole remix? This guy sucks the fun out of beats like a vacuum in a bouncy castle, as he sloppily whines in an almost emo-rap cadence over a cheaper West Coast slide he just can’t convincingly sell. Lyrically, Cole focuses on the idea of pride and how it corrupts someone’s morals, criticising the flashing of money and social isolation from the family... both of which seem like Cole’s M.O. at this point, right? Success amidst independence? Platinum without features? This time around, there is a feature however from Lil Baby, who much like Cole claims to be focused in this very focused whilst pick-and-choosing between random trains of thought in his typical frog-throat delivery. Hey, at least Lil Baby flows with less strain and unwarranted, desperate effort that Cole does, and ends up out-shining the primary artist entirely, even if he’s going to “pay silly bands to have sex on the jet”. ..What?

#13 – “m y . l i f e” – J. Cole, 21 Savage and Morray

Produced by WU10, J. Cole and Jake One

The first lines of this song are “Spiralling up just like a rich person’s staircase; no fly zone, please stay out of my airspace”. Cole, I thought pride was the devil! I understand that one can still acknowledge the flaws in their worldview whilst embracing it and engaging themselves in it – that’s really a lot of the point of rags-to-riches rap – but some subtlety or at least some explanation from someone who wants you to see him as focused, woke, hungry and a master of his craft, would have been nice, right? This is Morray’s first charting hit in the UK and I’m glad he’s here as he’s basically what differentiates this from the duo’s prior collaboration “a lot”, a song that not only banged harder but felt smoother and Hell, just more coherent, especially with some soulful production that this new collaboration glaringly rips off. Morray’s biggest hit is “Quicksand” but his mixtape Street Sermons is full of soulful and honest trap-rap that I’d absolutely recommend for gospel flavour on the surface and the lyrical detail behind the bravado being extensive and confidently delivered, especially standing out on his own with no features to speak of. He has the chorus on here and I’m surprised DaBaby doesn’t have the second verse so this could be a North Carolina anthem but we do have 21 Savage, who delivers his typical brand of cold-hearted (or rather no-hearted), stoic paranoia bars but at least that’s a personality. 21 Savage delivers a slick flow over this sample and spits the pretty simple yet profound bar of “I pray that my past ain’t ahead of me”, leading to probably the most enjoyable verse on the whole album. If you couldn’t tell, the new guys outshine the old guard so obviously with so little effort it’s kind of impressive on Cole’s part even. I’m glad this is the biggest hit from this album so far as not only is this one of the best tracks out of a slim selection but it’s big for both 21 and especially Morray, who I’m really rooting for against, say, a Rod Wave or Kevin Gates in terms of southern rap with a lot more soul and grit. Oh, and Cole, “know it’s on sight when I see you like I’m working at Squarespace”? Really? Again, it’s not the dumbest bar on the album.

#2 – “good 4 u” – Olivia Rodrigo

Produced by Alexander 23 and Dan Nigro

It’s pretty fitting to book-end a batch of new arrivals mostly consisting of hardcore gritty trap with two up-beat alternative rock tracks, and I’ll say I prefer this to Lovejoy mostly because, well, like I said with “Seeing Green”, my biases will always be on full and honest display, and as someone who’s a sucker for pop-punk of all eras, especially if it’s a female-fronted band with some youthful, raspy vocals, this will obviously hit for me. Throughout Sour, I found it hard to buy into the teenage melodrama due to Dan Nigro’s production often sounding too clean for its own sake, never allowing the guitars to really crash into some lo-fi, distorted noise like they seem to want to do on tracks like this, “deja vu” and especially the opener, “traitor”. Sadly, that cuts the chances of radio airplay by a ton more than it should, so we end up with mixing that slides off Rodrigo’s reverb-drenched vocals too smoothly, creating a rather formulaic album, unfortunate for its sheer excess of promise. With that said, this is one of my favourite tracks off of the album, if only for that funky bassline and some of Nigro’s most interesting stylistic and production choices, particularly in the drumming, which sounds as organic as possible for something that was programmed by him and Alexander 23. The sarcasm-laced post-break-up kiss-off is already not unfamiliar territory for Olivia Rodrigo and neither was it for Avril Lavigne, which this track tends to sound almost like an imitation of, down to the inconsistently PG-13 image as “screw you” is delivered with as much conviction as the actual F-bomb in the same verse. Regardless of how much it wants to consistently kill its own momentum, this janky songwriting actually reminds me of early Paramore, much of which holds a special place in my heart, so whilst Hayley Williams has been off doing her solo work – and Paramore seem to have moved on from this kind of bitter, petty pop rock anyway – this quenches that thirst pretty effectively.

Conclusion

Olivia Rodrigo bags the Honourable Mention for “good 4 u” as well as it’s one of two songs debuting this week I think are pretty damn special, the other one being “Seeing Green” by Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne and Drake as it grabs Best of the Week. For the worst, I mean, pick your J. Cole-flavoured poison but personally I’d say “a m a r i” can be crowned Worst of the Week with a Dishonourable Mention to... great, I don’t want to seem like I hate J. Cole but nothing else here is even as bad as his Lil Baby collaboration “p r i d e . i s . t h e . d e v i l”. Here’s this week’s top 10:

Expect two more of those spaces filled up by Olivia Rodrigo next week as whilst we may not get any new entries from her the album will have an impact regardless on the chart. Otherwise, I guess we’ll have to wait and see with how a Queen-sampling BTS song wrecks the chart – probably will give both Olivia and “Body” some #1 competition – as well as new songs from Little Mix, Lana Del Rey, Polo G and Lil Nas X popping up not too far behind it. It should be just as busy next week, folks, so strap in, I suppose. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you then!

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