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nickiehausen · 2 years

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Daniel Garcia v. Lee Moriarty (Limitless Suffer No Fools) 4/16/21

Technical wrestling is an acquired taste. The greater emphasis on mat-based grappling and intricate submissions is a turn-off for some, due to its supposed slower pace and less exciting action. People who think that way certainly have a right to their opinion, and I respect their right to be wrong.

When done correctly, technical wrestling can be art, and I mean that in more ways than one. It’s art in the sense that it’s an expression of creativity and skill in visual form. It’s art in the sense it’s a skill involving doing a specific thing. It’s art in the sense that it’s two artists coming together to craft a cohesive work. And, simply put, it’s art in the sense it’s a beautiful display of passion. Or, I should say, it can be. Not all examples of technical wrestling fall under those descriptions. Sometimes, it’s bad. And when it’s bad, it can get real bad. Sloppy technical wrestling is just hard to watch. It can be sluggish and dull, which has the potential to kill a live crowd. All in all, the best way to describe the style is “hit-or-miss”. When it misses, it misses badly; but when it hits, it hits harder than possibly any other style of wrestling (not literally HITS harder, though). That’s why it’s so comforting to know that technical wrestling isn’t falling out of popularity just yet, at least not with wrestlers themselves. Right now, a crop of young, ultra-talented grapplers are continuing to show how magical the style can be when done well. This class of new-age technicians is headlined by names like Wheeler Yuta, HOOK, Charlie Dempsey, Fred Yehi, Edith Surreal, Robert Martyr, and the two stars of this particular match: “Red Death” Daniel Garcia, the Limitless World Champion, and “TAIGASTYLE” Lee Moriarty, the challenger.

Both of them are known now for their roles in AEW, Lee as a part of The Firm and Garcia as a member of the Jericho Appreciation Society. Garcia enjoyed a reign as ROH Pure Champion last year, and Lee had a short but sweet reign as Independent Wrestling Champion after dethroning Warhorse in 2021. Around the same time as Lee’s reign, Garcia held the World title in Limitless Wrestling, and at the promotion’s Suffer No Fools event, Red Death put the title on the line against Moriarty in a rematch from the 2020 Vacationland Cup, this time being stipulated as a submission match. The term “wrestling soulmates” isn’t to be used lightly, but I’d use it here. Garcia and Moriarty have an innate level of chemistry that’s not often seen in wrestling, which is actually surprising seeing as they’ve only wrestled a handful of times. The way they go at it, you’d think they’re career rivals.

The opening sequence of the match is absolutely delightful. It’s fast-paced right off the bat and the back-and-forth grappling between the two is a sight to behold. At least in the beginning, neither man has a true advantage. Seeing the two of them struggle to gain it is a perfect way to kick things off.

It’s things like proper transitioning that creates a feeling of fluidity, and fluidity is part of what separates a good match from a great match. Lucky for this match, it flows like water. The way the wrestlers go from move to move, hold to hold, submission to submission, at such an accurate yet still swift pace almost makes the match feel like it’s been done countless times over, and we’re simply witnessing the best take of it. Remembering that this is wrestling and is happening in front of a live crowd makes it all the more impressive. Moriarty countering Garcia’s modified Sharpshooter by attacking his fingers with joint manipulation, Moriarty somehow evading a piledriver attempt to lock in his own sharpshooter, Moriarty catching Garcia’s leapfrog attempt only for Garcia to counter it himself into a crossface; it’s all done so precisely and discreetly. It's the little things like that that make the match so good.

An interesting element of the match is how much of it is spent solely in the ring. In two separate trips to the outside, a combined total of 27 seconds is spent out of the ring. With the match lasting just around 16 minutes and 9 seconds, that means about 97.2% of the match is spent inside the ring. Compare it to Garcia’s title defense against JD Drake at The Games We Play on 5/7/21, where only 93.7% of the match was spent in the ring. That 3.5% difference, on paper, isn’t notable at all, but it’s actually pretty interesting if you consider why that 3.5% difference is there. Against Drake, Garcia was constantly on the run. On three trips to the outside, the shortest time he spent was 18 seconds and the longest time spent was 40 seconds, with each trip either being to catch his breath or get away from Drake. In the Drake match, his average time spent out of the ring on each trip was 31.3 seconds; against Moriarty, it was only 13.5. This is because Garcia wasn’t trying to escape from Moriarty like he was with Drake. The only time either wrestler left the ring in this match was to get out of a submission, as rope breaks weren’t allowed. All of these statistics probably don’t matter, but to me, the focus on staying in the ring elevated the match even higher for me.

The finish is also very well done. Moriarty locks in a cross-armbreaker and, after failing to escape the hold, Garcia taps out - but he does so out of the view of the referee. Lee’s leg obstructs the ref’s view of Garcia’s hand, and what should be a victory for the challenger goes unnoticed. While Lee argues with the referee, Garcia returns to his feet and traps Moriarty in a chokehold, forcing him to pass out. Daniel Garcia is declared the winner and defends the Limitless World Championship, but the crowd knows he should’ve lost. This is a pretty smart finish as it 1) allows them to keep the belt on Garcia, while 2) still having Moriarty be protected even in defeat. At the time of the match, Garcia was the Limitless World champ and Moriarty was IWTV’s Independent Wrestling champion. The contest being booked as a submission match put a DQ or count-out finish out of the picture (though an ending of that kind likely would’ve left fans dissatisfied anyway). Of course, either man losing clean isn’t ideal no matter the outcome. This created a slight issue, one that would wind up having a pretty simple solution: shenanigans. A referee failing to notice a tap-out isn’t a wholly unique stipulation, though it is fairly uncommon. Notable instances of similar endings include Kushida v. Drake Maverick v. Jake Atlas from the 5/27/20 edition of WWE NXT, in which the referee missed Atlas tapping to Kushida due to Maverick pinning Atlas right as it happened, and Brock Lesnar v. The Undertaker from Summerslam 2015, where the referee failed to notice Taker submitting to Lesnar’s Kimura Lock. Another factor to consider that I think makes the ending make even more sense is Garcia’s status as the heel. By having him tap out and still win, the match makes it clear that Moriarty was the better man while still letting Garcia walk away with the win and the title. When you really boil it down to the basics, it’s a classic booking strategy, one as old as wrestling itself yet still kept fresh in its usage today.

I really enjoyed this match. I’m a big fan of technical wrestling as a style so maybe I’m a bit more biased to this kind of match, but it’s just superb. If anything, my biggest problem with the match is I wish it could’ve gone on longer. Obviously it’s not perfect, and I could understand if someone didn’t like the finish, but everything about the match is smooth as can be. There’s just something special about these two, some kind of magic that’s consistently made when they face off in the ring. Their two matches in Limitless, their clash on AEW: Dark, they’re just great together. They’re not bitter rivals by any means but the way they wrestle, you’d think they are. Both Moriarty and Garcia are phenomenal in the ring, and I really hope we get to see them put on matches like this for years to come.

⭐⭐⭐⭐. 25 stars out of 5.

#wrestling #pro wrestling #daniel garcia #lee moriarty #aew #limitless wrestling

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xtruss · 2 years

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These Facial Reconstructions Reveal 40,000 Years of English Ancestry

As the U.K. wrestles with issues of identity and nationalism around Brexit, a new exhibit is putting fresh faces on the region's ancient residents.

— By Kristin Romey

The Stafford Road Man, left, and the Patcham Woman, right, are among the facial reconstructions of ancient “locals” who lived on the coast of southern England over the past 40,000 years.

In 2018, the dark-skinned, blue-eyed facial reconstruction of Cheddar Man, a 10,000-year-old British resident, made international headlines and sparked discussions about “native” identity in a nation grappling with Brexit and issues of migration.

A year later, an exhibit at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery revealed the faces of seven more ancient “locals” who lived on the coast of southern England over the past 40,000 years, showing how science confirms that the history of the region is much more complicated than we once thought.

Five of the seven individuals are true “locals,” forensically reconstructed from skulls excavated around Brighton in the southeastern county of Sussex. The most modern “local,” a 40-something man excavated during building construction in the 1980s, dates to the Anglo-Saxon period, a time when England was first unified under one king, explains Richard Le Saux, the museum’s senior keeper of collections.

The most ancient natives are a Neanderthal woman and an early modern man. Their facial reconstructions are based on remains from elsewhere in Europe, but artifacts found in the Brighton area show that both were local residents some 40,000 years ago.

Left: Neanderthal Woman! While this Neanderthal woman’s remains come from elsewhere in Europe, movement between what is now continental Europe and the British Islands was easier during the last Ice Age, and artifacts from southern England show that both Neanderthals and modern humans were residents of Brighton some 40,000 years ago. Coutesy Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

Right: Early Modern Man! The skeletal remains for this early modern man also came from elsewhere in Europe, but tools manufactured by Homo sapiens show that modern humans were living in Brighton just as the Neanderthals were going extinct. Studies suggest that Neanderthals and modern humans may have overlapped in Europe for as much as 4,000 years. Coutesy Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

Back to Life

The bygone Britons were brought back to life over the course of 14 months by Oscar Nilsson, an archaeologist and sculptor who has reimagined the faces of other individuals in history, including a 1,200-year-old Peruvian noblewoman and a 9,000-year-old teenager from Greece. Nilsson’s forensic technique starts with an exact 3D replica of the original skull, scanned, printed, and then modeled by hand to reflect bone structure and tissue thickness based on the individual’s origin, sex, and estimated age at death.

Recent genome studies of ancient European populations enable Nilsson to outfit his reconstructions with reasonably accurate estimates of skin, hair, and eye color. The Neolithic population that the 5,600-year-old Whitehawk woman belonged to, for instance, generally had lighter skin and darker eyes than earlier occupants of Britain such as Cheddar Man, but were darker than the exhibit’s Ditchling Road man, who arrived on the island in the first wave of light-skinned, light-eyed Beaker people from continental Europe around 4,400 years ago.

Left: Patcham Woman! Patcham Woman was a resident of Roman Britain, and her burial may be a 1,700-year-old crime scene: She was discovered by ditch diggers in 1936, buried in a fairly deep pit with a nail driven deep into the back of her skull. More nails were scattered by her knees, and a male skeleton was found lying feet-to-feet with her. Signs of stress and disease in her spine and joints show she led a hard physical life before dying sometime between the ages of 25 and 35. Coutesy Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

Right: Stafford Road Man! Discovered in 1985 during building works, Stafford Road Man is among the first wave of Saxons to enter Britain after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Buried with a spear and a knife around 500 A.D., he lived an unusually long and active life and died after the age of 45. Apart from arthritis in his spine, shoulders, and hips, skeletal analysis shows Stafford Road Man suffered from an enormous dental abscess, which would have caused terrible pain and likely killed him after the infection spread to his brain. Coutesy Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

The faces of ancient Brighton residents likely sparked Brexit-related conversations about the regions previous occupants and cultural connections to continental Europe, says Le Saux.

“One of the stories that we're going with is how often we've been linked to Europe, and how much of our history is informed by series of mass migrations in each period,” he explains, adding that Britain has been physically part of mainland Europe several times over history, the last time just 8,000 years ago.

Left: Ditchling Road Man! Ditchling Road Man, named for the road-widening project that revealed his remains in 1921, was part of the first wave of farmers from continental Europe that arrived in Britain with their distinctive Beaker pottery around 2,400 B.C. His remains show that he suffered several periods of malnutrition while growing up, which may have slightly stunted his growth. Ditchling Road Man died between the ages of 25 and 35 and was buried with a Beaker vessel by his feet and a small number of snail shells next to his mouth. Coutesy Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

Right: Slonk Hill Man! Slonk Hill Man died about 2,300 years ago, but his cause of death remains a mystery. Excavated in 1968 during a highway project, he was an active, strong, and healthy man in his later twenties when he passed away and was buried in a semi-crouched position in the bottom of a storage pit, a practice typical during the Iron Age. What makes the burial unusual, however, is that he was laid atop a thick pile of uncooked and uneaten mollusks—especially considering that seafood would not have been a common part of Slonk Hill Man’s diet. Coutesy Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

Individual Lives

What makes the ancient Britons portrayed in the exhibit so interesting, Nilsson says, is how science reveals the lives they’ve lived. “I’ve worked with so many skulls, but these were the most characteristic ones I’ve seen. The faces that developed became so individual.”

Whitehawk Woman stands out for the apparently unusual circumstances of her life and death: Scientific studies show that she was born more than 5,000 years ago on the Welsh border, then moved several hundred miles [east] to Sussex at some point, and was buried with good luck charms in a grave at the entrance to a Neolithic ceremonial site.

The remains of a fetus found in her pelvic area suggest she likely died in childbirth, a scientific insight that informed Nilsson’s artistic depiction.

“I wanted her to look a bit curious—thinking about the future—because I'm thinking of the moment when you see her is perhaps before she's giving birth to the child that probably led to her death,” says Nilsson.

The swaggering 2,300-year-old Slonk Hill Man posed his own particular problems, Nilsson adds. According to his bone structure, the Iron Age twenty-something was “probably kind of good-looking,” which can sometimes lead to a reconstruction that looks too much like a mannequin, the sculptor explains. The skull also featured a pronounced point where the brow ridges joined, which could have given Slonk Hill Man a bit of a “cruel” expression. “It was difficult to make him smile without looking too creepy,” Nilsson says.

Whitehawk Woman! Small and slender, Whitehawk Woman lived about 5,600 years ago and died before the age of 25, possibly during childbirth (the remains of a fetus were found in her pelvic area). She was excavated in 1933 from a burial in the Whitehawk Enclosure, one of Britain’s earliest Neolithic monuments. Recent DNA analysis from the Neolithic Whitehawk population suggests they were generally dark eyed and dark skinned in comparison to the Beaker population that eventually replaced them around 4,400 years ago. Coutesy Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

Then there was the artistic decision that had to be made with Stafford Road Man, a Saxon-era adult who likely died from a terrible facial abscess. The infection was probably grotesquely swollen at the time of his death, but Nilsson chose not to exaggerate the ailment. “I wanted to show him with some kind of dignity, and establish a connection between him and the visitor to the museum.”

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flyonthewallmedstudent · 3 years

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New Amsterdam. Pilot first episode.

It’s No.2 on Netflix apparently. I’m watching it. As I wrestle with a toddler hooked on rice crackers.

In rough, it’s about a guy who takes the job of medical director at a hospital called New Amsterdam.

Opening scene - music of James Brown. Off to a good start. Guy’s phone alarm goes off at 5 am, for his morning jog. I’m usually still try to get back to sleep after the toddler wakes up to party around this time.

Spanish is spoken by staff in the locker room shared by all - doctors, nurses and custodial staff. This would never happen. Even doctors have segregated staff lockers - interns, residents, registrars (senior residents, ahem) are separated from attendings (or consultants). And then it’s split by gender. The surgical lockers are shared by medical and nursing of all levels, but that’s another part of the hospital.

What is accurate is that in my particular hospital (and I would dare think in most metropolitan hospitals in Western countries) the most commonly spoken language is actually not English. Sometimes it’s a close 3rd, forget 2nd. It’s very multicultural and reflective of different waves of immigration throughout history. Most of my patients are in their 70s-80s, and their generation fled wars - whether in Europe, Africa, India etc. It’s not unlike subsequent generations of immigrants either, but for whatever reasons, we’re now less embracive of refugees.

Next scene, the new medical director speaks to his wife on the phone. They live in a swanky, large, New York apartment and she’s pregnant. She’s giving him a hard time for being largely absent in their obviously cushy life. This is probably true of my life (minus the fancy high rise). Depending on what variety of doctor you marry, you may rarely see them as the significant other. He’s lucky he’s finished training and is head of a hospital. Many of us in our reproductive years are still paying off loans, driving used cars and can barely scrap together a mortgage on a first home. If lucky, our parents bail us out, but not everyone has that luxury.

He has a large staff meeting the first day. This meeting is unrealistic as a hell. He fires a whole surgical department. Just cardiothoracics. What is he going to replace it with at last minute exactly? Most surgical departments have massive wait lists that don’t just disappear and if you have thoracic related emergencies, they will need to be diverted. The neighbouring hospitals aren’t going to thank you for that. Also, the trainees are then in jeopardy as you’ve erased their residency program from under them. There’s been cases where residents have been removed from program with some notice so they can be transferred elsewhere, due to safety or harrassment issues. Hospitals made headline for this and it would go directly to the ministry of health for investigations. It’s just not that simple.

Next issue at the meeting is related to the ED. An ED doc jokes that she wants the waiting room abolished. He responds with done - they’ll do it. No one likes having a waiting room or patients waiting, but you only have so many beds physically in a hospital (as we’ve all learned from wave after wave in this pandemic). You can try speeding up discharges, but then if you discharge too prematurely (and frankly unsafely), they come back the next day. After that, you’ve created more problems than you’ve solved.

And then I have to stop watching..

It just becomes too unrealistic. It was promising, as it’s based on the life of an actual medical director but they probably took too many departures from reality.

Again, hardly any nurses or allied health staff shown. emphasizing the constant fascination with doctors. just doctors. no one else in healthcare. As clearly no one else works in a hospital. And again, no wonder the general public has incredibly unrealistic expectations of healthcare. These shows sell it to them.

#medblrs #medblr

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abqryan · 4 years

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What an interesting web of absolute lies posted as a incredibly news looking piece of analysis.

I give them credit that it at least does say analysis really small under the headline, where almost no one not specifically looking will see it.

Then the article goes on to claim everything Trump said is a lie, with zero supporting evidence or logical reasoning to support those claims. Quote after quote from Trump accurately describing what's been happening in America is given and said to be inaccurate despite the total lack of support.

Even the area on coronavirus which provides a tiny amount of backup for why Trump's statements are again claimed to be factually inaccurate really only provides as proof that other people disagree with him, there's no actual facts or statistics given supporting either opinion. With a few anecdotal situations thrown in, including some positive tests among staffers that are attributed to his recent Oklahoma rally, despite absolutely no way to determine that causality aside from pulling it from one's own behind. But the actual overall facts support the view the article reports as inaccurate, since testing is up and deaths are down, exactly as Trump said.

It's no wonder the polls show people don't support him, when this is what passes for media, an absolute crap low quality hit piece that simply states that Trump is wrong and lying without even bothering to explain why or how.

I would give this an F if it was submitted in a middle school English class assignment on journalism.

Of course, we don't have assignments of journalism in schools any more because if they did then everyone would be able to see that journalism is dead.

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kny111 · 5 years

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There are many startling things about the Emmett Till case. But, 63 years after his death, perhaps the most startling of all is the fact that Americans know his name, even recognize his face.

Back in the summer of 1955, when J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant savagely beat the 14-year-old Chicago kid, shot him in the head, weighted his body down and dumped it in the Tallahatchie River, they thought that was the end of it.

Till had whistled at Bryant’s wife Carolyn, or spoken suggestively to her, or laid hands on her — the story kept changing. It was the classic Southern tale of a black male accused of violating the region’s taboo against interracial intimacy. Literally thousands of African American men were lynched under such accusations.

The civil rights leader Aaron Henry once remarked that the most surprising thing about the Till story was not its horror but the fact that white people even noticed. After all, black boys had been lynched for decades with impunity. African American bodies were not supposed to reemerge, and they certainly were not supposed to stir national and even international outrage.

But this one did. Killing Till and dumping his body did not end the story, quite the contrary. Thirty-eight articles in TIME magazine have discussed Emmett Till since 1955. Daily newspaper databases reveal even more extensive coverage. In the New York Times alone Till appears in 600 articles.

Most of the Till coverage came in the first six months: The discovery of the body; the deeply emotional funeral in Chicago (to which 100,000 South Siders came to pay their last respects); the indictments and trial, when nationally famous reporters swarmed tiny Sumner, Miss., and television cameras caught the scene outside the courthouse. Day after day, Till was headline news.

But then the story disappeared. There were few articles in the press commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Till slaying, even fewer on the 25th. Early histories of the Civil Rights Movement barely mentioned him.

More accurately, the Till story became segregated, living on among African Americans, not whites.

Young black activists, who sometimes referred to themselves as “the Emmett Till Generation,” carried his memory into their struggles of the ’60s. John Lewis, Anne Moody and Muhammad Ali all recalled their shock at seeing Till’s funeral photos in Jet magazine, Emmett in his coffin, his face a grizzly ruin. They recalled too how the story gave them grim determination to change things. The photos became part of “Jim Crow wisdom,” visual lessons parents gave children about growing up African American.

Seared though they were into the memory of the Till Generation, very few whites saw those pictures. No mainstream newspapers or magazines published them in 1955, or for three decades thereafter.

That changed in 1987 when the photos reemerged, most prominently in the popular documentary Eyes on the Prize, which began its history of the Civil Rights Movement with Emmett Till. Rather than avoid Till’s face, Eyes on the Prize lingered on it. Only then did the truism that Emmett Till’s martyrdom launched the Freedom Struggle start to take hold among whites.

What about the Till story today? Look more closely at those 600 Times articles focused on Emmett Till. One-third of them appeared in the last five years, and it is roughly the same for other newspapers and magazines. Histories, novels, television reports, news stories, websites, on-line publications, historical markers, scholarly essays, documentaries—all have come with growing frequency this century.

Current events brought Emmett Till’s name back. Oprah Winfrey called the Till memorial in Washington’s new African American History Museum “profound,” and added that Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Laquan MacDonald gave us “a new Emmett Till every week.” A few months later, LeBron James held a press conference when someone painted an ethnic slur on his front gate. The first thing James talked about was Mamie Till Bradley’s refusal to be silent in the face of her son’s murder. Then late last year, Dave Chappelle ended his comedy special by discussing Carolyn Bryant’s confession that Emmett Till did nothing to deserve his fate.

This year alone, Emmett Till was in the headlines again when someone shot upthe historical marker where his body was dumped, then again when Carolyn Bryant recanted her recantation that she lied about Till back in 1955, and again when the FBI announced it would reopen the case.

Why so much attention to a story once mostly forgotten? Because it speaks to our growing awareness that racism is on the rise, that it did not disappear with slavery or Jim Crow, that we never became a “post-racial” society.

Till’s is a story we can grasp, not of unnamed millions but of a single knowable martyr to racial hatred. The sadism of his killers, the horrific beating they inflicted on the boy still shock us today. The Till case also reminds us of our long history of racism in criminal justice, from policing all the way through trial and incarceration. His fate reminds us too that white supremacy was never just a set of ideas and opinions, but a charter for violence inflicted on living bodies.

Above all, the face of Emmett Till embodies America’s tragic racial history, the good-looking lad smiling on Christmas Day, that same innocent face smashed to a hideous death mask on the long lonely Mississippi night of his murder.

Racism is the shape-shifting demon that America wrestles once again. Lies proliferate about minorities, the kind that got young Emmett Till lynched. So we continue to retell his story, to probe its meanings, to expose and explain what happened. Just as Anne Frank became the young martyr whose story helps us grasp Nazi horror, so Emmett Till’s is the face that reveals white supremacist depravity. His ghost haunts us because his murder exposes racism’s bloodthirsty heart.

And so, 63 years later, we know his face, we know his name. In his lynching lies shame, in remembering it lies hope.

#racism #history #white supremacy #white rage #antiblackness #white fragility #white feminity

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softpunks · 5 years

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we can fly / jason todd-centric / 3.8k / for jason todd birthday week

“I told you this was stupid.” Jason tells Dick.

“Shut up.” says Dick miserably.

Damian glances at him. “You look stupid, Todd.”

Jason sniffles. “You think I don’t know that?”

AKA: 16 prompts for jason todd’s birthday.

read it either on the ao3 link above or keep reading

i. — first

The stars are dazzling from this view. This is Jason’s first thought.

Tim, who is the sibling that ends up riding the ferris wheel with Jason since the only one really willing to ride with Damian is Dick, notices the look of amazement on the older’s face. “Have you ever been here before?” he asks.

“No.” Jason admits. Entering cost money, and though it was relatively easy to sneak in, it was a bit disheartening to see families and friends enjoy themselves and carelessly spend their pocket change on snacks and games when you were a hungry orphan who didn’t have any of those. Back then, Jason would make sure to not even look twice at the rides, because that would only sour his mood more. “Not if you count loitering outside.”

“So this is your first time.”

Jason can’t help but bristle, even though Tim doesn’t mean anything bad with his comment. He’s just stating a fact. “So?”

They’re here for Damian, really, because Dick said he lacked a proper childhood — they all did, to some extent, but somehow, none of them turned out as aloof and arrogant as Damian, so — and didn’t know anything about the joy of carnivals and theme parks. From there, it isn’t difficult to see Dick’s logic: exposing Damian to relatively happy things should make Damian a happy kid.

(Jason did not have to be as smart as Tim or Barbara to know this way of thinking was entirely bullshit, but he also didn’t have the heart to argue with Dick.)

Jason’s never actually been to a carnival or theme park either, since he never thought it was a big enough deal to ask Bruce to visit these places back in the early stages of being his ward and being a lot more childlike and demanding. But he hadn’t wanted the entire visit to be about him because that meant he cared about those kinds of things— and he didn’t, it was just something interesting — so he didn’t say anything. Still, with Damian currently not in the picture and generally not for Jason to worry about, he could pretend like the night at the carnival was meant for him and enjoy it to the fullest, admiring the new sights and experiences with the wonder he could never afford as a kid.

Tim just shrugs, unaffected by Jason’s attitude. “It’s nice, right.”

“Sure.” Jason says flippantly, leaning back and crossing his arms. He doesn’t want to admit Tim’s right, and that it’s more than just nice. It’s goddamn beautiful. He’s seen the sky from rooftops when he’d patrol, so it’s definitely not the matter of height, but seeing it from here still feels a lot different. Jason can’t exactly describe it, but he’d like to think that it’s because it’s not often they have times like these, where they get to act like normal people and appreciate the mundane things in their lives when so much other outworldly things occur. Like a reminder that this is why Jason fights crime, besides looking after and protecting those who can’t save themselves. To have moments like these that they can enjoy to the fullest because they’re safe and they’re alive.

“We’ll come back here.” Tim continues, like a promise even though Jason hadn’t even asked. “We’ll take Bruce with us, next time. And Alfred.”

“Like I care if Bruce is with us.” Jason replies, but it’s half-hearted, because he’s still staring at the bright-lit sky.

From the side, Tim smiles fondly at his older brother.

ii. — healing

“Meditation,” starts Talia. “Is an essential part of the healing process.”

“But I’m fully healed, you know.” Jason whines. “I don’t need this kind of crap.”

Talia glances at him sharply and kicks him firmly at his side. Jason yowls in pain and cradles his abdomen. “What was that for?” he demands. “I’m injured!”

“Hmph,” Talia huffs. “I thought you said you were already healed.” Jason just pouts. Talia does not look amused. “This is healing for your mental state. Not your physical one.”

“Whatever.” he grumbles, because it isn’t as if he has brain damage anymore. But Talia clearly isn’t going to budge, and he doesn’t think they’re getting out of this strange zen-like garden in the middle of nowhere anytime soon unless he follows her.

She closes her eyes and returns to her earlier pose. “Now, let’s continue.”

iii. — unconventional

It's a loose but also the most accurate term they have for it— for their relationship that involves Renee Montoya occasionally running into this Crime Alley kid she caught one night trying to steal Batman's tires. She has the savings to take him in as her own and provide for him, and considers doing it by the fifth time they've met and got to know him better, but every time she'd offer, he'd take off, like the thought of trusting his life to an adult's hands scares him more than anything. Regardless, he always comes back to their meeting place at Gotham Park every Sunday evening. Renee is disappointed, but as Kate constantly reminds her, being a cop doesn't mean you can save everyone, and just because people may need saving doesn't mean they necessarily want it.

"He's a kid." Renee argues. "Like, ten."

"Then maybe he's testing how long you'll be willing to stick around with him and keep that offer." Kate says. "Maybe he'll come to you when he's ready."

Renee listens to her girlfriend and waits, but that time never comes. It doesn't mean they stop their weekly run-ins, or that she doesn't give him anymore life advice when he voices out his problems. It doesn't mean she retracts her offer because it's been years or she stops paying for his school supplies when he finally admits to her that he decided to go to school so he could get a job and get out of the slums. It just means he isn't officially hers to keep and call her own kid.

But when he wears her brown leather jacket and says he looks just like her, it feels a lot like that anyway, and she can live with that.

iv. — open

“I can’t open it.” Damian admits sullenly. The unintentional pout on his face makes Dick coo and Tim look away because it looks embarrassing. It makes Damian angry, of course, but there are currently more important matters to deal with.

Jason simply laughs loudly, clearly amused, takes the jar from Damian’s hands, and twists it open easily.

v. — grip

Alfred’s grip is so tight on Jason’s clothes that it's enough to rip his worn-out but well-loved clothes off and tear through them with ease. He almost thinks that the butler is angry, for whatever reason, but when Alfred looks up, there is nothing but pride and sorrow in his eyes.

“How you’ve grown, Master Jason.” he says. “It was as if it was only yesterday when Master Bruce took you home and said you were going to be staying with us.”

Jason’s gaze can’t help but soften. It’s just college, but somehow, Alfred makes it sound like it’s so much more than just that. “I promise I’ll visit.”

Alfred nods before reluctantly letting him go. “I should hope so. As much as Master Duke tries, he’s not as good at helping around in the kitchen as you are.”

“I’ll tell him you said that, you know.” Jason teases. “You’ll break his heart.”

“Just as you’re breaking mine?”

Jason rolls his eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic.” he says, but the reprimand is half-hearted. He beams at the butler. “I’ll be going now. Take care, okay?”

“You too, Master Jason.”

vi. — siblings

He grew up an only child, so he doesn't know exactly what siblings are supposed to be like. The headlines have said they were always a strange bunch, and given their respective secrets, Jason is inclined to agree.

Still, he takes his biweekly trip to the Manor and sees Damian angrily chasing Stephanie down with a water hose around the garden, both their faces and clothes dirty with paint. Dick and Cass are sitting right outside the porch, eating popcorn as they watch the entire scene unfold like they're viewing the best movie of the year; Duke can be seen through the window, looking mildly exasperated as Alfred beckons him with a gesture to focus on whatever task they're doing inside the house.

Tim opens the front door and steps out with a tablet in one hand and a mug likely full of coffee in the other. He looks down at Dick and Cass before gazing straight ahead, where Stephanie and Damian have finally stopped running and have resulted to downright wrestling in front of everyone. "I don't want to know." He says loudly, immediately retreating back into the Manor when he sees the mess outside. Cass and Dick share a look before going back to Steph and Damian.

Jason may not know what siblings are supposed to be like, but these are what his are like. And though the press may call them strange, this is probably the most normal Jason's ever going to get.

vii. — resurrection

Resurrection is a fickle thing. Or maybe that's just because there are only a few ways to go about it. When Jason died, Bruce mourned him terribly, but never thought about bringing him back. The same way he never thought of bringing his parents back.

Somehow, Jason returned anyway. In the end, Bruce realizes that it's pointless to sweat the details of it— or at least, too much of it — because all that matters is that his son is alive, and he's okay. Sort of.

But resurrection doesn't solve everything. Not their strained relationship because he refuses to kill the Joker, not those moments when Jason would just shut down without warning and wouldn't respond to anything until he's taken back to his old room in the Manor and looked after by Alfred for a night or two, because Jason's always been attached to him.

Not the white paper with the doctor's signature that confirms that his son only has five months to live.

Jason isn't dead— not yet, anyway, but Bruce mourns like already is, and it drives their entire family insane. He wants to leave to find a cure, because for someone as pragmatic as he is, he's also always been good at denial.

"Don't." Dick says, gripping him hard on the shoulder. "Jay doesn't need a Batman right now; he needs a Bruce. He needs his father. You might as well start acting like one now."

Bruce relents. He sits by Jason's bedside and reads him lines from his favorite classical books — the original copies he used to treasure before Ethiopia, because Alfred and Bruce both value sentimentality — as if Jason was still a kid and needed bedtime stories to go to sleep.

One night, Jason, who pretends not to be bedridden most days because he's always been a proud boy, stops him mid-reading. "You know," he says. "Moments like this make me glad I came back."

And you'll stay. Bruce wants to say, because the only time he'll ever let himself be naively hopeful is when it's for the sake of his children. Resurrection may not solve everything, but at least it gave him this.

Instead of talking, Bruce reaches out and holds Jason's hand.

viii. — protect

“Why the hell are you protecting me?” Tim snaps, and Jason would’ve taken the venom in the younger’s voice a lot more seriously if not for the fact that he was clutching onto his bleeding harm and sprawled on the floor like a wounded animal. “I thought you hated me!”

“That was yesterday.” Jason replies easily, surveying their surroundings. They’re surrounded by around twenty men, but he can take them. “I’m in a better mood now.”

ix. — touch

Though Dick is the most physically affectionate one, Cass communicates with people through touch. Jason is naturally averse to that sort of thing, growing up in Crime Alley where it meant that being touched meant you were in trouble, but she’s his first sister, and he has an undeniable soft spot for her the way the rest of them do. So when she pulls him back to ask something because she’s always spoken softly and doesn’t plan on changing that, he lets her; when she pats him on the head like she’s the older sister even though he’s pretty sure they’re around the same age, he doesn’t protest.

When she wants a hug, he lets himself melt into her embrace supposedly more for her sake, but actually for his own too. Dick will definitely throw a tantrum later on, but right now, he’s too busy enjoying the warmth only Cass can give.

x. — another

“Another one for the boy right here.” the man tells the bartender. Jason smiles sweetly at the tattooed woman before turning to the man beside him. Though the forty year old is dressed plainly, there are hints of his wealth scattered around him in the most subtle of ways— the Rolex watch, the gold ring, the manicured nails, the neat way his hair is pressed back, the glasses Jason recognizes to be around triple the price of Tim’s.

Jason shifts in his seat, thankful he’s already used to wearing fishnets and tight clothing. He hates these kinds of gigs, but it’s what puts money on the table, and Dick says that the deadline for the payment for Damian’s tuition is next week. The cash Jason can nab from this guy should be enough to cover the expenses for that, so Dick’s bodyguard job can pay for their rent instead.

“Thanks.” Jason says gratefully, when the lady returns and gives him his drink. It burns his throat and he doesn’t like the feeling, but he knows he’ll need this to get through the night. Even if he has to deal with Dick’s incessant scolding because alcohol is a bad vice they can’t afford.

(“Where’d you get all this?” Tim asks later on, eyes wide as he stares at the wads of cash Jason dumps on the dining table the next morning. Damian already left for school, Dick accompanying him as always even though Damian is perfectly capable of going on his own by now. Cass hasn’t left her room, knocked out from returning just a few hours ago from her job at the gym.

“Oh, you know,” Jason shuts the cupboard with the cereal box in his hand. “I got another job.”)

xi. — hour

It takes an hour of radio silence before Jason grows concerned. “You’ve been gone for quite a while, red.” he says through the comm. “You sure you’re alright? Your boyfriend will never forgive me if I let something bad happen to you.”

“Relax.” Barbara finally says after a few moments, and Jason crushes down the urge to let out a sigh of relief. “I didn’t know you were such a worrywart.”

Immediately, he scowls, even if she can’t see it. “Fuck you. Am not.”

Barbara laughs, but it’s immediately cut off by Bruce’s stern voice leaking through their earpieces. “Break it off, you two. We have a mission to complete.”

“Aye, aye, captain.” Jason and Barbara chime in unison, though they’re both snickering.

xii. — time

There isn’t enough time, he thinks, as he stares at the bomb going down second by second in the horror. The doors won’t open, and he hears his mother sobbing. He wishes he had the voice to scream, to comfort her, sit back and make the most out of these last moments he has thinking of all the goodbyes he hadn’t said and all the things he shouldn’t have done.

But the only thing circling in his head is, there isn’t enough time. There isn’t enough time.

Bruce might not make it in time.

xiii. — morning

Jason’s favorite time of day has always been the morning, because it reminds him of the times when he’d catch his mother whistling a happy tune as she waters the plants in their tiny backyard, of his father listening to the radio on the kitchen counter. Eventually, Jason learned to appreciate it for the smell of Tim’s coffee drifting from the dining area to the hallways, the careless padding of Bruce’s footsteps when he’s just woken up and is too groggy to be conscious of his loud movements; the way Dick decides to do his morning stretches right outside the kitchen and how Damian carries around all his pets’ food and meticulously puts them into their respective bowls, while Cass urges Duke to go on a morning jog around the garden before settling down for food.

Besides, Alfred always cooks breakfast best when there’s someone awake enough to enjoy it, and maybe that’s why he likes mornings the most.

xiv. — believe

“There is no way the brat is going to believe this.” Jason states, giving Dick a dirty look. “He’s been trained by the League of Assassins and by Bruce.”

“Oh, c’mon, little wing! Damian’s eleven. Kids like those believe anything!” Dick insists. Jason helplessly shoots Tim a look.

Tim shrugs. “This was Dick’s idea, not mine.”

“Yeah, clearly, because no one would think of something this ridiculous.” Jason rolls his eyes. “Why don’t you do it? You’re the one who actually gives a shit about that kid.”

“He’s right.” Tim agrees, voice slowly fading as he leaves the cave, not wanting to be involved with Dick’s plan anymore.

Dick crosses his arms. “Because Damian already thinks I’m the jolly guy himself. I need him to believe we’re two different people, so I definitely can’t be in the costume.” The thing is, Jason doesn’t even have the build needed to pull this kind of shit off. Not to mention that it’s, well, stupid. “If you do this, it’ll totally make up for you trying to kill Damian before.”

Jason raises an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t he be giving me that kind of forgiveness instead of you?” But Dick is pulling the biggest puppy dog eyes he’s ever mustered in his entire life, and while Jason really wouldn’t fall for that, the sight is disgusting enough to make him relent, so it probably doesn’t matter. “Fine. But I don’t owe any of you jackshit for the rest of my life.”

“You don’t even give us presents!”

—

The plan to make Damian believe in Santa Claus fails spectacularly, of course. Even if Jason did put on the fake belly, he just doesn’t have the Santa Claus vibe, despite having the bulky build for it — because of the muscles, not the fat; Jason will skewer anyone without hesitation if anyone tries insulting him — and Damian is too pessimistic to believe in an old man who loves children with the ability to tell whether they’ve been good or bad and sneak into their houses to give them presents. Damian would rather much stick to his belief that Dick leaves him anonymous gifts under the Christmas tree that somehow always end up being the best things he’s ever gotten.

“Santa Claus sounds like a pedophile, Grayson.” Damian says. “Why would anyone want to believe in someone as vile as that?”

Jason has to hand it to the kid; he easily beats Jason in ruining any situation. Dick unconsciously flinches, while Tim looks like he has to agree with Damian’s point, no matter how much he also looks like doing so would result in him vomiting in the bathroom. Cass and Duke are ignoring the entire exchange, mostly for Jason’s sake, since he’s still dressed in the ridiculous Santa Claus getup, and way more focused on opening their own presents despite how Bruce told them to wait until tomorrow.

“I told you this was stupid.” Jason tells Dick.

“Shut up.” says Dick miserably.

Damian glances at him. “You look stupid, Todd.”

Jason sniffles. “You think I don’t know that?” He shrugs off the thick red coat before setting the pointed hat on top of Dick’s head and sauntering off. “Christmas is a capitalist movement anyway. You shouldn’t follow it.”

“Jay!” Dick protests.

Jason says that, but on Christmas Day itself, there’s a gift for each of them under the tree.

(“I thought you didn’t believe in Christmas.” Damian points out after Christmas dinner.

“Well, I don’t believe that middle-aged men who live in basements and dress in all black can actually save people, but here we are anyway.” is Jason’s only reply to that.)

xv. — over

Jason has nights when he forgets it's already over—the warehouse, the crowbar, the laughter, the bomb — because there will be times when it's the only thing that runs through his head when he dreams. It's likely Fate's design that the nightmares are always at their most frequent whenever the anniversary of his death inches near, so Jason makes it a point to never sleep during that week. Or at least make himself tired enough to just black out so he can't dream.

"You look like you could use a drink," Roy comments, turning to him and handing him a bottle. "It's on the house."

Jason snorts. "Your boss is gonna kill you for this."

"Eh." Roy shrugs. "Figured we deserved it. Yesterday's mission was a shitstorm." Jason can't help but hum in agreement to that.

"Well," Roy pours the both of them and glass and raises one in a faux-toast. "At least it's over, right?"

"Yeah," Jason says quietly, glancing at the clock. A few minutes to midnight, and then it'll be the day of his death. The tick of the clock faintly reminds him of the tick of the time bomb, but there is no awaiting explosion here and no death lurking the halls in the quietness of this bar in Star City. Jason's safe and alive. "It's over."

xvi. — robin

"That's a stupid name." Jason states, eyeing the uniform in his hands with distaste. "Robin?"

"It's what Dick chose to use." Bruce simply says. Jason can't help but frown. He doesn't really like it when Bruce talks about Dick, even though he is the first son, because Bruce always tries to hide how sad he really is at the thought of Dick and fails at it. Jason doesn't really understand, not when he's here, the new son, but despite the look on Dick's face when Bruce introduced him to Jason that screamed replacement, he isn't that, really. Or rather, he can't be. Dick is the golden circus boy with jolly laughter; Jason is the dirty street rat with good survival instincts. They're different, so of course things won't be the same. Or at least the same that Bruce unconsciously wants. But that doesn't mean Jason won't make it worthwhile. For both him and Bruce. "You could always pick a new one, if you want."

"Nah." Jason says. Bruce looks at him, and there's a newfound determination in his eyes. "I'll keep it."

"Yeah?" Bruce raises an eyebrow. "What changed your mind?"

"I'm gonna be the better Robin." Jason declares confidently, grinning up at Bruce. "I'll be so good you'll stop moping about the first one. Just you wait."

#jtbdayweek #jtbw19 #dailyjasontodd #jason todd week #writeblr #jason todd fic #dc fic #batfam fic #jason todd #mine #one word prompts

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all-hail-the-witcher · 5 years

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carrying the banner choreography

ya girl is back at it again teaching herself newsies choreography

DISCLAIMER: I HAVE NOT ACTUALLY TRIED THIS OUT CAUSE IM LAZY AND ALSO IT REQUIRES SPACE THAT I DO NOT HAVE SO NOT ALL OF IT MIGHT WORK AND SINCE I LEARNED IT OFF OF A VIDEO AND HAD TO REVERSE IT IT MIGHT NOT ALL BE ACCURATE

*they do the whole tower thing*

*jack tried to flirt*

*the crutchie thing*

*ah yes dance finally*

Stick fight part (romeo and mush)

Hit hit hit hit jump back (summer stinks and)

romeo - double inside right pirouette mush - duck (winters freezing)

romeo - jump mush - swipes stick under romeos legs (when yous works outdoors)

Awkarly wrestle (start out sweating end up sneezing)

Touch hat (inbetween it) chasse, one handed cartwheel (pooooUUUUURS)

Group part (albert and race)

Inside right pirouette (still its a fine life) tour with high knees and hands over head (life) *CLAP*

Prep - plie second turned out -, really weird jump thing where you cross your left leg over your right leg and do opposite arms (carrying the banner)

Right sutinu, kick left leg to the side and plie standing leg while looking left and hands in fists with arms to the left (its a fine)

Prep (life) barrel turn (carrying the banner)

Trench trench trench trench with bent opposite arms (a bunch of big)

Prep (shots) inside 2.5 right turn with right leg slightly off the floor and in front (tossin out a)

Land facing back, extended arms with jazz hands to the left (freebie)

Turn over right shoulder to face front, big plie second (a buncha)

Right arm, left arm, clap, throw (big shots)

Chasse (tossin), jump posse (outta), single right tour with left arm up (HEY)

What's the hold up

Waitin makes me antsy

I likes livin chancey

Haul um to delancey

What a fine life

Carrying the banner through the

*nuns part*

*curdled coffee*

*more singing*

*earthquake war part*

*yee dance time*

Group 1 (albert buttons and i think its sniper)

Newsies jump - right arabesque jump with right arm up and left arm out (uptown)

Step step right kick with left arm forward right arm side (to grand)

Take hat off with right hand, right single tour with right arm up (central station)

Land facing left, pivot turn with right hand going over the head to face back (down to)

Run run (city) double right inside coupe turn with arms crossed over chest (hall)

Group 2 (finch, elmer and smalls) (at the same time as group 1)

Newsies jump (down to)

Step step right leg kick with opposite arms (city)

Chasse, take hat off head with right hand, single right tour with right arm above head (hall)

Big circle (alot of people)

Step step, switch hat from right to left hand, bent leg jump to face right and throw left arm which is still holding hat - over your head (we improves)

Run in a circle going counter clockwise (our)

Tondeflesh while holding left arm - which still has hat - above your head and look at it (circulation)

Circle splits and clears the center of the stage (walkin till we)

Cartwheel, backflip, jump up (falllLLLLL)

Jordan Samuels Flip™ (*DUN DUN DUN DUN*)

*more singing*

*headline part*

*delancys being assholes*

*dancy time yayyy*

*disclaimer this is where the camera angles get weird and i cant really see what theyre doing some of the time so some of this might not be right*

Tommy Boy (and some others)

Right bell (well all be out there)

Right tour but you kick your legs out into second at the end (carrying the banner man to man)

Run toward the right around the back of the stage, kick right and lean back, right tour, (were)

run to downstage left (always out there) straddle jump (soakin every sucker) a bunch of half turn coupe jumps to the left (that we can)

Race, Smalls, JoJo, Finch (at the same time as tommy boy and friends)

Face stage left, attitude swing front and back, don't put your foot down and pivot to face the right, sote with arms up and fingers jazzed (carrying the banner man to man)

Turn back around yourself so your facing right again, single right inside pirouette on a bent leg, and in fourth facing right with arms above head (*do do do do do do do do do do do do* were always OUT THERE)

THIS IS THE PART WHERE THE CAMERA SHIFTS AND I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEYRE DOING BUT ITS NEWSIES SO ITS PROBABLY A TOUR or wait i think its a cartwheel actually (soakin every)

Plie pike jump facing stage right (sucker) face back (that we can)

Two giant double attitude turn jumps with the usual arms, trench trench with opposite arms (its a)

Headline

Newsies on a mission

Kill the competition

sell the next edition

(well be) newsies jump - but this time its a left arabesque jump -(out there) jump land feet apart, pull arms back, fix hat, and look tough (carrying the banner)

(see us) newsies jump (out there) jump second and swing bag around shoulders (carrying the banner)

(always) newsies jump (out there) jump second, take hat off and gesture with it toward the audience (carrying the banner)

Ahhhhhh

ahhhhHHHH

AYYYYYYYYEEEEE

GO !

*pose*

if anyone actually attempts to learn this first of all dont break your neck and second send me a video

#newsies #newsies live #newsies choreography #carrying the bannner #pls reblog so it spreads around im sure some people will find this useful

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joey-pierree-blog · 5 years

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UFC 248

UFC 248 is the card this upcoming Saturday, and it headlines a title fight between undefeated champion Israel Adesanya vs. battle tested veteran and former title challenger Yoel Romero. Adesanya known for his craft and accurate kickboxing style is looking to make his first title defense against Yoel Romero’s brute strength and olympic wrestling.

In my personal opinion, this is Yoel’s last chance to win the middleweight title. His best chance to win in my opinion is to clinch with him and get him to the ground. If he tries to stand and strike with Adesanya, Israel will use his range and pick him apart the entirety of the fight. Romero needs to break Adesanya’s takedown defense and control him on the ground, otherwise I think Adesanya will win. My prediction for the fight is that Adesanya wins in a exciting decision, but Romero definitely can win this fight if he sticks to a grappling game plan.

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mafreemantle · 5 years

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What is finished?

An essay commissioned by SMITH to accompany Dale Lawrence’s solo exhibition, Further Prototypes at the gallery.

When is an artwork finished? At show time? When the artist says so? What if an artist isn’t ‘finishing’ them on purpose, and what if he’s active in the gallery throughout the show? What if he’s asking himself—and us—whether there is such a thing as finished at all?

This is one of many curveballs thrown by Dale Lawrence in Further Prototypes, his third solo show at SMITH, the latest stanza in his wry inquiry into the ambitions of art and its practitioners. With Look Busy (2016) and Another Helping (2017), as with his Art Joburg show Amateur Hour (2018), Lawrence scratched at these ideas, studying the tension between focused intent and wilful abandon. Here, he puts the ideas to theatre.

“Finished is dead,” says Lawrence, who chooses instead to work with the vitality of experimentation. Doing so brings action, change, motion and surprise into another distinctively considered collection of mixed media offerings that this time includes imagery variously scratched into animal fat, drawn onto photocopier glass and printed on bread. There’s also a bath in the gallery and, yes, he will bathe in it. Every day for six weeks.

In Seen and Not Seen, the bathtub work, Lawrence will prove his interactions with it without showing them. We will see solely the evidence of his activity; the memory of it. A wet footprint, perhaps, or a crumpled towel. By repurposing the gallery as a working space, a conduit through which Lawrence passes, he draws attention away from the idea of finished works hanging inert on a wall and towards the lively, uncertain environment from which his works are made.

Throughout the show, Lawrence will be otherwise active in the space, working on his largest canvas to date, the 1.75m x 3.5m Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Large Bathers in situ. These elements of his normal life—the painting, the bathing—help to set the show in a state of flux, placing artmaking as a functional part of the everyday. Here Lawrence draws from German artist Joseph Beuys, who considered art much broader than painting, sculpting and exhibiting. For Beuys, as for Lawrence, the impulse to create is seen as a basic component of human life.

“Completeness and incompleteness coexist. We are never finished. Our routines become rituals and our rituals can degenerate into routines. Art is a form of distilling reality, where grand intentions and everyday mundanities are the subjects—with sometimes overwhelming and sometimes underwhelming results.”

Hercules is Lawrence’s playful tracing of a mashup of two classic scenes with similar compositions by Frederic Lord Leighton and Paul Cézanne. Leighton’s horrified characters, Cezanne’s indifferent bathers and finally Lawrence’s cursory retelling of these stories probes at how the function of art has changed. Art used to need to capture critical and epic moments, later just moments. What do we ask of it now?

That this and other works are in fact or appear ostensibly unfinished stems from a disregard for finality that permeates this collection and can be traced further back. Amateur Hour fleshed out an argument that achievement is subordinate to the act of the pursuit thereto. Then as now, pursuit is Lawrence’s first virtue. To arrive is to abandon pursuit, to be finished. And finished is dead.

Lawrence’s use of masterpieces as source material in the show stems from this notion. His respect for striving over finding sees prototypes as new models of thought. The creative sphere is one for experiment and testing, where new ideas and aesthetics are prototyped and test-driven before being adopted in the real world.

“When a work is considered a masterpiece it implies that an idea has been refined to the point of absolute completion and perhaps exhaustion, leaving it short of much of the vitality of the prototype.”

Lawrence’s most pointed jab at this is the work St. Lawrence Handing out the Treasures of the Church, where he treats a photocopy machine’s glass as a printing plate. Viewers of the work will be able to print out a copy of the famous scene, as artist and device stage a modern parody on the doling out of churchly treasures. The cumbersome photocopier is the artist himself, a dubious intermediary through which an original and pure thought must traverse. Repetitions mean diminishing returns. More is less.

“If art is a means by which to pay homage to inspiration it is also proof of the inability of human beings to accurately express the purity of that inspiration. The observer principle suggests that it is impossible to observe a phenomenon without changing it. Art is an interference.”

Portrait of Ideal Self as St. Paul the Hermit, Except Not so Poor and Hungry and Naked and Lonely and Cold is a relief print on a sheet of bread, akin in both substance and design to the communion offering but depicting a figure engaged in a leisure activity. Bread is a basic unit of substance and signifier of spiritual nourishment, yet only represents meaning. It has none in and of itself.

St. Lawrence? Communion bread? Has Lawrence gone all religious on us? The gallery is, after all, art’s church. This is where a form of aesthetic communion is practiced. This is where we gather to drink wine and hear nominated spokespeople muse on the meaning of it all. The substance of the offering depends in some part to the faith we place in the institution that houses it, and of course the person handing us the sacrament. Communion bread is either metaphysical and full of meaning, or vacuous and in dire need of some Marmite.

Or, as Lawrence suggests, lightly salted like a Lay’s crisp. Perhaps the crowning piece of the show is another remake, this time a riff on the 'Tragedia Civile' by Jannis Kounellis. Lawrence uses Lay’s crisp packets where Kounellis used gold leaf to festoon a wall signifying the accomplishments of the past. Lawrence replaces the original’s hook, hat and overcoat with a bowl of Lay’s lightly salted crisps lying on the table for consumption, while a mobile phone lies charging on the shelf instead of a paraffin lamp. This self-administering of communion, a modern offering of no substance in an age of cheap imitation and distraction, wonders at the depth of our dubious relationship with conveyors of meaning.

But accomplishment implies some measure of success and finality, and we know how Lawrence feels about those things. His title for the installation, Tragedy of the Rainbow Warriors, mashes up the original with a newspaper headline marking a supposedly seminal moment in recent South African history. Nelson Mandela, dressed in a Springbok jersey, hands captain Francois Pienaar the 1995 Rugby World Cup trophy. Here is a moment that aimed to tell us something had ended. But was this the end—or the beginning—of anything?

Clearly, Lawrence detects a kind of idiocy in viewing this or any moment as a conclusion or resolution. “We were supposed to feel like something had been solved. We were offered absolution from our sins, cheap closure in a flash. The truth was something a lot less certain.”

Lawrence doesn’t miss this opportunity for another witticism. Noting that we lay our crisps onto our tongues like communion wafers, he nominates a Western brand as our priest. As Apartheid ended and sanctions were lifted, we South Africans were rewarded with a deluge of attractive but empty gifts from the West. The Gods were good to us.

If Lawrence is playing with his use of the pedestal it is more as jester than preacher. Like a king’s clown he agitates, entertains and excites, making himself vulnerable, present and unguarded. Lawrence’s work can also be downright funny. A found ceramic vase lies shattered on the floor beneath its pedestal, surrounded by a handful of rubber bands, the dull accoutrements it was used to contain. The ornate is reduced to a vessel for cheap, functional detritus. A vessel, grand and full of potential, tragically reduced to its base utility. But is an ornament less impressive when it is being used?

With Nameless and Friendless, Lawrence removes the legs from one found chair and attaches them to the ends of another, making one absurdly tall and the other comically legless. The height difference implies a hierarchy yet both are made precarious and arguably useless by the modifications. Does more chair make a chair not a chair? How much chair can you remove before a chair is not a chair anymore?

In a series titled Attempts, Lawrence shows a stack of Indian ink on paper drawings, each attempt piled on top of the next. The drawings are gestural and impulsive, full of Lawrence’s trademark concerted playfulness. The sum total of these attempts are presented as works in themselves, their finished-ness abrupt and questionable.

Lawrence’s fat works—for which he avidly carved into slabs of tallow made according to a Joseph Beuys recipe—dig into the idea of fat as both an essential, life-supporting substance and one that signifies superfluity and excess. Self-portrait in Front of the Burning Cathedral references the recent Notre Dame fire and queries the potential of burnt wood as something very much alive and useful. Lawrence’s surface this time is burnt yellowwood, South Africa’s national wood, mirroring the French oak beams used to support the Notre Dame’s spire.

Further Prototypes may speak to Kounellis’s work in one instance most clearly but the kinship runs deeper and permeates the show. Kounellis was famously direct, his work keenly responsive to its time. When invited to inaugurate an upmarket art gallery in the late 1980s, he filled the space by suspending large pieces of ox carcass on iron panels. “I apologise to everyone: I would like to have made an Arcadian landscape, but the times did not permit that,” Kounellis told the curator.

For Lawrence, like Kounellis, art is an occupation and a mirror. It is what it sees. What Lawrence sees is uncertainty, possibility, transience. The magnificent in the mundane, the mundane in the magnificent. A loop with no end, an endless question.

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anthonybialy · 5 years

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Bumbling Rumble

Women's wrestling champion of the world Andy Kaufman couldn't have planned a more hilarious presidency. The problem is Donald Trump may be serious. All evidence indicates he truly believes he's a heavyweight champion. McDonald's makes reaching the division easy.

A slapfest between NBA players who've never thrown a combined punch in their lives doesn't make for thrilling bouts. The unpleasant president squaring off against the repulsive media is the Iran-Iraq War of politics without the fun explosions.

Our tough guy executive spars with foes who couldn't do a chin-up. It's even in its way. Trump is Eric Cartman as the Coon attacking someone sitting in the park and pretending he stopped an assault.

The self-proclaimed top puncher won't fight for real. Trump's pattern of running his mouth when it was safe to talk tough only became clear about 30 years before he ran for the presidency. I'm sure there's no reason to verify if someone's as muscular as claimed, especially for a politician. The fact it took him so long to join the club is supposed to be an argument for him.

There are real victims of not backing up reputation. Hong Kong is getting shoved around by one of the globe's most brutish regimes, and Trump will gallantly fight back by slapping tariffs on them someday, too.

Making Americans pay more for Chinese goods will really teach us a lesson. At least Obamacare still hasn't been repealed. Plus, the tough bastard bravely refuses to do anything about entitlements that'll doom those who weren't born Fred Trump's son.

Ignoring a problem makes it disappear according to an inspirational leader. You'd think the best businessman ever would be able to diagnose an awful deal and sell Americans on saving for their own retirements instead of letting an entity connected to Nancy Pelosi squander it. And it took true bravery to start bitching about the wall as soon as his ostensible party was in the congressional minority.

Moaning about injustice is sure to remedy it. Of course the media's comprised of pathetic shills for the losing side of the Cold War. The profession teems with self-styled intellectuals who are so stupid that they majored in journalism. But it's something to not let ruin one's perception.

Adults presume life's unfair in general and in this case particularly. Stenographer pinkos are so consumed with changing the world they forget to do their actual tasks, which involve recording what interesting people do. So, do good work and let voters see that instead of the improper classification. Trump considers bitching part of his job.

The embarrassment of whining that people are mean to you should have sunk in by sophomore year of high school. Humans should expect teasing, especially those in particular who become Earth's most powerful person. Pouting is undignified for any adult, especially one with this job. Even more so, an executive who's spent a lifetime spent lucking into promotions naturally doesn't feel grateful. Trump is technically presidential.

But what about not throwing tantrums? The sort of people who believed Mitt Romney was out to ban tampons still wonder how they ended up with Donald freaking Trump. Either way, we end up with liberals who think every Republican is a murderous demonic racist out to cancel lovely insurance for personal amusement. Elizabeth Warren could switch parties like she tried with ethnicities, and suddenly she'd be a heartless orphan-kicker.

Has anyone been convinced by a Trump tweet? Even the moments where he pleasantly surprises by uttering something correct don't change minds. Take how he supposedly imposed a Muslim ban did just that except for the part how it didn't ban Muslims. Nobody was swayed by his shrieking about unfair coverage. George W. Bush wouldn't have kvetched and gotten the same result. But he fights!

An aggrieved leader's kvetching has convinced precisely zero voters. His fervent cultists treat anything he utters as prophecy as self-appointed enemies won't hear him out on the rare occasion he's accurate. The undercard is similarly dull.

Battling for truth would be easier if his grasp on reality were more than tenuous. Trump is so busy explaining how everyone against him is a mean bully that he doesn't have time to research his claims. They're undoubtedly winners.

Write off the idiots. There are always going to be suckers. On top of that, the most deluded are convinced everyone else is gullible. Pompous dolts who think they're informed after skimming a headline or hearing Jimmy Kimmel's enthralling take on compassion aren't going to be convinced by Trump's truculence.

The real answer to the question of media bias lies in winning the culture. Fight the problem at the source instead of waiting for it to pollute all the way downstream. We've forgot Andrew Breitbart's lessons, which is unfortunately easy to do considering the site with his name on it degenerated into a doughy pale pride site.

Do what's right and trust truth to win out. It's tough when mendacious zombies slime you. But if the media truly bites it as much as suspected, the one way to not help is sinking to their level. Whining others are being unfair is as undignified as it is ineffective.

You'd think a president concerned about fake news be worried about accuracy himself. That doesn't exonerate his target. The mendacious press shrieking at an exhausting president is what would happen if the Red Sox could play the Patriots. You don't have to align with either group of fiendish ghouls.

Are you genuflecting to a blithering phony or do you want the socialists to burn the Constitution with a lit flag? The lame binary choice applied to everything just makes a supposed brawl that much more of a letdown. Use your nails!

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your-dietician · 3 years

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Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare | The New Yorker

New Post has been published on https://depression-md.com/britney-spearss-conservatorship-nightmare-the-new-yorker/

Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare | The New Yorker

On June 22nd, Britney Spears’s management team started getting nervous. Spears, who is thirty-nine, has spent the past thirteen years living under a conservatorship, a legal structure in which a person’s personal, economic, and legal decision-making power is ceded to others. Called a guardianship in most states, the arrangement is intended for people who cannot take care of themselves. Since the establishment of Spears’s conservatorship, she has released four albums, headlined a global tour that grossed a hundred and thirty-one million dollars, and performed for four years in a hit Las Vegas residency. Yet her conservators, who include her father, Jamie Spears, have controlled her spending, communications, and personal decisions.

In April, Spears had requested a hearing, in open court, to discuss the terms of the arrangement. It was scheduled for June 23rd. Members of Spears’s team, most of whom have had little or no direct contact with her for years, didn’t expect drastic changes to result. Two years earlier, in the midst of health struggles and pressure from Spears, Jamie had stepped down from his duties overseeing her personal life, and now the team thought that perhaps she wanted to remove him as the conservator of her financial affairs. Some of the team told reporters that they believed Spears liked the conservatorship arrangement, as long as her father wasn’t involved.

Running the business of Britney had become routine: every Thursday at noon, about ten people responsible for managing Spears’s legal and business affairs, public relations, and social media met to discuss merchandise deals, song-license requests, and Spears’s posts to Instagram and Twitter. (“This is how it works without her,” one member of the team said.) Spears, according to her management, typically writes the posts and submits them to CrowdSurf, a company employed to handle her social media, which then uploads them. In rare cases, posts that raise legal questions have been deemed too sensitive to upload. “She’s not supposed to discuss the conservatorship,” the team member said.

On the eve of the hearing, according both to a person close to Spears and to law enforcement in Ventura County, California, where she lives, Spears called 911 to report herself as a victim of conservatorship abuse. (Emergency calls in California are generally accessible to the public, but the county, citing an ongoing investigation, sealed the records of Spears’s call.) Members of Spears’s team began texting one another frantically. They were worried about what Spears might say the next day, and they discussed how to prepare in the event that she went rogue. In court on the 23rd, an attorney for the conservatorship urged the judge to clear the courtroom and seal the transcript of Spears’s testimony. Spears, calling into the hearing, objected. “Somebody’s done a good job at exploiting my life,” she said, adding, “I feel like it should be an open-court hearing—they should listen and hear what I have to say.” Then, for the first time in years, Spears spoke for herself, sounding lucid and furious, talking so fast that the judge interjected repeatedly to tell her to slow down, to allow for accurate transcription. “The people who did this to me should not get away,” Spears said. Addressing the judge directly, she added, “Ma’am, my dad, and anyone involved in this conservatorship, and my management, who played a huge role in punishing me when I said no—Ma’am, they should be in jail.”

For the next twenty minutes, Spears described how she had been isolated, medicated, financially exploited, and emotionally abused. She assigned harsh blame to the California legal system, which she said let it all happen. She added that she had tried to complain to the court before but had been ignored, which made her “feel like I was dead,” she said—“like I didn’t matter.” She wanted to share her story publicly, she said, “instead of it being a hush-hush secret to benefit all of them.” She added, “It concerns me I’ve been told I’m not allowed to expose the people who did this to me.” At one point, she told the court, “All I want is to own my money, for this to end, and for my boyfriend to drive me in his fucking car.”

Spears’s remarks were incendiary but, for people familiar with the creation and the functioning of her conservatorship, not surprising. Andrew Gallery, a photographer who worked for Spears in 2008, attended the hearing, watching the lawyers’ faces on a monitor. “As she spoke, I wanted to scream, and gasp, and shout ‘What the fuck is going on?’ ” he said. “But the lawyers had no reaction. They just sat there.”

The conservatorship was instituted by Spears’s family—in part out of real concerns about her mental health, people close to the family said. But the family was divided by money and fame, and Spears, in an underregulated part of the legal system, was stripped of her rights. She has fought for years to get them back.

As a pop star, Spears sustained a multinational industry of managers, agents, producers, lawyers, publicists, and assorted hangers-on. As the subject of the conservatorship, she has provided for the livelihood of even more lawyers and other court-appointed professionals. Jacqueline Butcher, a former friend of the Spears family who was present in court for the conservatorship’s creation, said she regrets the testimony that she offered to help secure it. “At the time, I thought we were helping,” she said. “And I wasn’t, and I helped a corrupt family seize all this control.”

Jamie Spears, who is sixty-eight, has graying hair and a hangdog demeanor. When he was thirteen, he endured an unimaginable tragedy: his mother committed suicide on the grave of one of her sons, who had died eight years earlier, at just three days old. In high school, Jamie was a basketball and football star; later, he worked as a welder and a cook. Lynne Spears, Britney’s mother, grew up with Jamie, in the small town of Kentwood, Louisiana. Sixty-six years old, she has a smile like Britney’s and thick dark hair with bangs. She used to run her own day-care center. Friends describe her as traditional and nonconfrontational. In a conversation in June, she was fastidiously polite as she declined to answer detailed questions about the case. She spoke in a whisper and apologized that she might have to hang up abruptly if other family members walked in and discovered her speaking to a reporter. “I got mixed feelings about everything,” she said. “I don’t know what to think. . . . It’s a lot of pain, a lot of worry.” She added, a little wryly, “I’m good. I’m good at deflecting.” Jamie and Lynne eloped when she was twenty-one, and the marriage was troubled from the start: in divorce papers filed, then withdrawn, in 1980, less than two years before Britney’s birth, Lynne accused Jamie of cheating on her on Christmas Day. Jamie wrestled with alcoholism, going on benders so egregious that Lynne once shelled his cooler with a shotgun.

But Jamie and Lynne worked together to make Britney, their second child, happy and a success. She was a born performer, a scene-stealer at dance recitals starting at age three. Her parents drove her to small dance competitions in Lafayette, then to larger ones in New Orleans. They borrowed money from friends to pay for gas to get her to auditions. Spears snagged an understudy role on Broadway and then a stint in the nineties version of “The Mickey Mouse Club.” When she was sixteen, she signed a six-album deal with Jive Records, thanks to an enterprising entertainment lawyer named Larry Rudolph, who became her manager. A precise and commanding dancer with an unmistakable vocal tone of sugary coyness, Spears emerged as a teen-pop singularity. In 1998, the music video for her début single, “. . . Baby One More Time,” featuring a sixteen-year-old Spears in a Catholic-schoolgirl outfit, exploded across American pop culture like fireworks on the Fourth of July. The pleated skirt and bare midriff were her idea—a fact that’s sometimes cited as evidence of her self-determination but might also suggest an intuition, common among teen-age girls, of the compromised power of sex appeal.

Because Jamie and Lynne had two other children to look after, a family friend chaperoned Spears for much of her early career. But Spears remained close to her mother, and, in 2000, she built a four-and-a-half-million-dollar estate for Lynne in Kentwood. That year, according to “Through the Storm,” a memoir that Lynne published in 2008, Spears urged her mother to divorce her father, knowing that “years and years of verbal abuse, abandonment, erratic behavior, and his simply not being there for me had taken their toll,” Lynne writes. She and Jamie divorced in May, 2002, and Spears told People that it was “the best thing that’s ever happened to my family.”

Spears had just broken up with Justin Timberlake, a fellow teen-pop icon, whom she had met when she was eleven, when they were both cast as Mouseketeers. The breakup destabilized her, people close to her remember; her status as half of a golden couple had become an integral part of her identity, and after the split her sex life became a regular topic in the news. She began going out more and hanging out with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, forming a holy trinity for tabloid culture at its early-two-thousands peak. “The paparazzi were out of control,” Hilton recalled, of one night with Spears at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Fighting over getting the shot, pushing each other against my car, scratching it with their cameras. It was overwhelming and frightening.” The hairdresser Kim Vo, Spears’s longtime colorist, remembers how, one day, as Spears was getting her hair done, a paparazzo scaled a wall and broke a salon window with his fist.

Spears distracted herself with work—a relentless grind of dance rehearsals, studio sessions, photo shoots, stadium performances, long nights on the tour bus, and hotel check-ins before dawn. “The schedule was crazier and crazier,” Julianne Kaye, a makeup artist who worked with Spears in the early years, said. “She would have little breakdowns. She was always crying, saying, ‘I want to be normal.’ ” Spears blew off steam by partying: she smoked weed, used cocaine, took Molly with her dancers and jumped into the Mediterranean Sea. But the machinery around her only grew. When she toured, the crew took at least a dozen buses and filled entire hotel floors.

In the spring of 2004, Spears met a dancer named Kevin Federline at a night club, and they were married within six months. Spears initially did not secure a prenuptial agreement, which prompted panic in her family. A considerable fortune was at stake. “Lynne lost her mind,” Butcher, the family friend, recalled. “They weren’t gonna allow the wedding to be made legal.” The marriage contract wasn’t signed until the month after the ceremony, when Federline legally agreed to limit his stake in Spears’s estate. But Spears seemed thrilled, and commissioned a photo shoot in which she dressed up as a French maid and served drinks to Federline, who wore a trucker hat, cargo shorts, and flip-flops. Spears wanted a family. “I’ve had a career since I was 16, have traveled around the world & back and even kissed Madonna!” she wrote on her Web site, two months after getting married. “The only thing I haven’t done so far is experience the closest thing to God and that’s having a baby. I can’t wait!”

Spears’s first son, Sean Preston, was born ten months after the wedding. “Our life was running at 150,000 miles an hour,” Federline later told Us Weekly. “I’d walk into a club and get a table worth $15,000 a night with unlimited free drinking. . . . But everything got so crazy.” Spears had been so sheltered that Paris Hilton had to show her how to use Google, according to a person who was there. She negotiated the hormonal and logistical turbulence of early motherhood while paparazzi, eager to monetize her mistakes, chased her down, pointing flashbulbs and shouting provocations any time she left the house. After she was photographed driving with an infant Preston on her lap, she explained that she had been trying to get away from paparazzi—and besides, she added, she had grown up riding on her dad’s lap on country roads. A few months later, visibly pregnant and holding Preston, she stumbled while surrounded by photographers; the paparazzi kept shooting as she retreated to a café, cradled her baby, and cried.

Spears had her second child, Jayden James, in September, 2006. Three weeks later, Federline took a private jet to Vegas to party with his friends. Spears filed for divorce in November, reportedly notifying Federline by text message. At a night club, he scrawled on a bathroom wall “Today I’m a free man—f**k a wife, give me my kids bitch!” He requested full custody. While the divorce was being adjudicated, he and Spears divided parental duties. Preston was a little more than a year old, and Spears was still nursing Jayden; she wanted to be with them all the time, and hated being at home without them. “I did not know what to do with myself,” she said later, in an MTV documentary. Spears and Federline both went out on their free nights, but Spears was the one who became the target of tabloid blood sport. (“MOMMY’S CRYING,” Us Weekly blared, over a full-page photo of Preston.) In February, 2007, she shaved off her hair, at a salon in Tarzana; five days later, she attacked a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. The two incidents cemented her image as “crazy.” Both were precipitated by her driving to Federline’s house, trailed by photographers, and being refused access to her kids.

Many people who were close to Spears during her early career suspect that she was dealing with postpartum depression, but none of them remembers anyone bringing it up with her. Some of the same people said that Spears was also struggling with drugs and alcohol. Her mother and Federline insisted that, if Spears wanted to spend more time with her children, she needed to go to rehab. In early 2007, she checked into a treatment center in Antigua, then checked out after just one day. The judge in the custody hearing, who had cited Spears’s “habitual, frequent uses of controlled substances and alcohol,” gave primary custody of the children to Federline, granting Spears four days of visitation per week, under the eye of a court-ordered monitor named Robin Johnson.

Around this time, Spears met Sam Lutfi, a Hollywood operator with a knack for insinuating himself into the lives of turbulent female stars. Spears had recently parted ways with Larry Rudolph, her longtime manager, and she began to entrust her professional and private affairs to Lutfi. Now forty-six, Lutfi cuts a nondescript figure: average height, occasionally goateed, favoring baseball caps and black T-shirts. Over coffee at a Los Angeles restaurant this spring, he said that Spears took to him in part because he told her that she didn’t have to work nearly as hard as she was. “She’d always believed there were massive consequences if she didn’t work, that she’d lose so much, and it blew her mind that she could just call the shots,” he said. “You want to cancel that meeting? Cancel it. You’re gonna lose five grand? Lose it. She’d walk into a car dealership, say she wanted something. I’d say, ‘Buy it.’ Her parents would say, ‘Why would you let her do that?’ But it’s an eighty-thousand-dollar car, not a yacht, and she just got fifteen million from Estée Lauder. Anyway, she’s an adult. I’m not gonna tell her that she can’t buy a fucking yacht.” (Lutfi later assumed a similar role in the life of Courtney Love, who called him a “street hustler,” and he said that he advised Amanda Bynes’s family as they placed her in a conservatorship. He is currently subject to a five-year restraining order filed against him, in 2019, by a conservatorship lawyer, on Spears’s behalf.)

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jamesginortonblog · 7 years

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Twenty years from now, you might find yourself sitting by the fire, telling tall tales to young ’uns about the madness and the mayhem of this century’s teenage years, and you might find yourself thinking — if only there was some kind of, I don’t know, TV drama that accurately encapsulated almost everything that was going on in the world in 2017, one that also felt like James Bond meets The Godfather. My friend, the drama you would be looking for is McMafia.

The series is the BBC’s big-budget new-year crime drama. Starring James Norton, Juliet Rylance and David Strathairn, alongside a host of Russian, Israeli, Brazilian and Serbian stars playing mob bosses from their home territory, it blends the stylish globetrotting of The Night Manager and The Sopranos’ take on family values, with a dark underpinning in reality.

McMafia’s script began life as a 2008 book of the same name, an epic study of organised crime by the investigative journalist Misha Glenny; it was then wrestled into a drama by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Hossein Amini, best known for the Ryan Gosling thriller Drive. At first sight, this looks like another of those impossible-to-film tomes with which British TV is currently besotted. (The City & the City? The Patrick Melrose novels? Are you all insane?) Glenny’s tome details the rise of criminal empires from the dust of eastern Europe’s communist states and the globalisation of crime across continents, using free-market tropes. The term “McMafia”, for instance, is a reference to the Chechen gangs who franchise out the feared Chechen name to thugs across Europe, like a gun-toting Ronald McDonald.

Amini was hauled into the project by James Watkins, the director of Black Mirror and The Woman in Black, who had been trying to squeeze Glenny’s sprawling book into a feature film. “We sat in a little garden at the V&A — which, ironically, ended up in the series — and decided it could only be a TV series,” Watkins recalls as we squat on some antique furniture during a break in the filming of a violent chase in a country house. “It’s got whorls and tone, but no actual characters.”

Over the book’s fragmented vignettes, Amini lays an action thriller-cum-family-drama structure at whose heart is Alex Godman (Norton), the son of a Russian oligarch who was educated at an English boarding school, runs a successful hedge fund and is preparing to marry his ethical activist girlfriend, Rebecca, played by Rylance. When his dodgy uncle starts meddling in Moscow, Alex’s perfect life falls apart and he is thrown into the family business with increasing vigour.

“There are elements of Alex that are based on me,” Amini explains as he joins us. “I came to the UK from Iran in 1977. I was bullied at school for being foreign and found it hard to adjust. My parents can’t go back to Iran, although I could… All of this I put into Alex. So that notion of what it’s like to be Russian, but sometimes be ashamed of being Russian, and trying to work out if you’re British or Russian or something else — that’s very personal.”

Amini writes — or at least rewrites — roles once the lead actor has been cast. Drive’s sparse, moody script was as inspired by Gosling as by James Sallis’s original book. With Norton, he has done much the same thing, sculpting Alex to fit Norton’s natural sense of cool detachment as he boots up his inner Michael Corleone, against the backdrop of a violent global black economy that snakes its tentacles through everything from politics to the illegal deals smartphone makers rely on for their raw materials.

“We saw James playing the Russian aristocratic gentleman in War & Peace, a cultivated Englishman in Grantchester. Then there was Happy Valley, where he’s got this quiet, damaged fury — and it was obvious he would be perfect for a Russian bear inside a bowler hat,” Amini says.

“The thing about Alex is, he’s not a villain and he’s not a hero,” Norton tells me a few months later, as we sit by the Adriatic on Croatia’s Istria peninsula — which is doubling as the south of France and Tel Aviv. “He’s trying to do the right thing, but he’s being screwed up and twisted and turned, and he gets into this sort of spiralling, chaotic mess. They tell me they didn’t see anyone else for the role — I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. What did they see in me?”

Norton’s performance here will do nothing to dampen rumours that he’s the next Bond after Daniel Craig hangs up his Walther PPK. From the moment he steps out of a black cab in a tux onto the steps of the V&A — through spectacular assassination attempts, scenes of brutally trafficked young women, oblique references to the criminal machinations of the Russian government, high-speed chases through luxury mansions and dubious deals in pulsing Tel Aviv nightclubs, with some flashy high finance thrown in — his role has pretty much every ingredient necessary for 007, including the occasional raised eyebrow.

“To be honest, it’s mad, this crazy speculation,” Norton says with a quick laugh. “I think Daniel Craig’s going to do another two. I’m aware that James and Hoss putting me in a tux at the V&A couldn’t be more incendiary. I did say to them, ‘Are you just baiting me and stoking the fire?’”

Either way, he’s aware that this is a potentially career-changing role — not that he’s done badly so far. His elegantly foppish performances in Death Comes to Pemberley and Life in Squares led, unexpectedly, to Sally Wainwright picking him to play Royce, the dark, psychopathic nemesis to Sarah Lancashire’s troubled Catherine Cawood in two series of Happy Valley. The crime-solving vicar Sidney Chambers in Grantchester came shortly after, and he’s been in War & Peace, Flatliners and Black Mirror since then. As Alex, though, he has finally earned leading-man status.

“It’s terrifying in a way, because there’s nowhere to hide, really,” he says, giving a small smile. “Before, my agent was saying I should maybe move to a bit of theatre or a bit of film. Now he’s saying I need to decide how this is going to affect me and where I go next... It’s an AMC and BBC show, the budget is huge, we have Hoss, David Farr and James Watkins on the script, the supporting cast are all A-listers. Being the thread through all those people, I just hope I’m not the one to cock it up.”

The A-list cast, it’s fair to say, is not only impressive, but requires a little explanation. Every television drama project these days has to scream a little louder than the last just to get attention. In 2016, roughly 1,200 brand-new scripted shows were launched in the world’s main television markets, according to the industry number-cruncher the Wit — and estimates for 2017 suggest there will have been considerably more, as Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat launched scripted streaming services and Netflix alone produced 90 shows just in Europe.

McMafia is effectively the BBC’s answer to this internationalisation of talent. The Leviathan star Aleksey Serebryakov and Mariya Shukshina, a Russian TV stalwart, play Alex’s dubious oligarch parents; the Georgian actor Merab Ninidze proves oddly charming as the Kremlin-connected mobster Vadim; the Czech actor and regular Hollywood heavy Karel Roden delivers a weary ex-cop turned crime lord; and the Bollywood star Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays a corrupt Mumbai importer, Dilly Mahmood.

Russians, in other words, play Russians, Indians play Indians and Brazilians play Brazilians. When nationalities speak among themselves, they do so in their own tongue, rather than in the heavily accented pidgin English beloved of earlier shows. Sometimes there are subtitles, sometimes not. It’s a mark of how cosmopolitan the British viewer has become that a primetime drama on a mainstream channel can now drift seamlessly between languages.

“People in the UK don’t really know who these people are, but in their own world, they’re enormous superstar figures and have this immense skill set,” Watkins says. “Some of the Russian actors do so much with so little. Whenever anyone comes in to act with the Russians for the first time, we have to take them aside and say, ‘Look, this isn’t about you or your work, which we love — but before you act with them, watch what they’re doing and make sure you can match it, because they’re setting the tone for the whole piece.’”

Watkins is keen to stress that the tone is gritty, rather than glamorous. Each location is shot with different filters, and the dark, unsettling horror underpinning the action tends to be in the bleached-out bright sunlight of the Middle East. This is grimly true of the second episode, in which a young Russian beautician, Ludmilla, arrives in Egypt for a hotel job. She is picked up by a couple of cheerful locals, who drive her out of Cairo to a concrete shed where she’s beaten, tied up and shoved into the back of a van before being sold on to an armed gang — the first stop in a brutal series of events that leave Ludmilla in Israel, sold on yet again to a haughty brothel keeper.

It’s a shocking subplot, coming so soon after an exotic party at the Palace of Versailles thrown by Vadim — the Russian gangster with Kremlin links — and all the more so because it is the one story lifted directly from Glenny’s book, and is thus, effectively, a dramatised documentary. Indeed, all of the darkest elements in the series are echoes of real life — Amini based one early killing on the 1991 assassination of the former Iranian prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar. And Dimitri Godman’s drunken decline echoes the last grim years of Boris Berezovsky’s life. “We’ve tried not to chase events, because real life is always going to move faster,” Watkins says. “But every fresh headline almost seems to confirm the thesis that the corporate is becoming criminal and the criminal is becoming corporate — the intersection between criminality, intelligence agencies, banking and government.”

“Like most people, I thought the mafia was compelling and exciting,” Norton adds. “There’s money and fast cars and yachts and beautiful women. I hope people see that while we tell that story, we also tell the story of the cost — from human trafficking to drug-dealing and poverty-stricken junkies in Mumbai whose habits pay for someone’s superyacht.” He pauses. “Though I’m now aware that there are things in this phone that are unethically sourced, and I’m still using it every single day. So this probably won’t make a significant difference.”

Which is part of the final trick that Watkins and Amini play — constantly taking us back to London parties and ethical business launches by semi-legal tycoons, making clear our complicity in all the sordid crime and violent murders the show depicts. The most chilling paragraph in Glenny’s book does exactly the same.

“Organised crime is such a rewarding industry,” he writes, “because ordinary Western Europeans spend an ever-burgeoning amount of their spare time and money sleeping with prostitutes; smoking untaxed cigarettes; sticking €50 notes up their noses; employing illegal untaxed immigrant labour on subsistence wages; admiring ivory and sitting on teak; or purchasing the liver and kidneys of the desperately poor in the developing world.”

So, if you do end up in 20 years’ time using McMafia as a document of our fractured era — from Russian political meddling to dubious oil deals to corrupt hedge funds and ruined human lives — you might want to prepare yourself for the obvious question from your loving offspring: what did you do to try to stop it?

#james norton #McMafia #Hossein Amini #article #The Times

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