#also the music is so lit but of course it is this is toby fox we are talking abt

[grouchycouchy]

just started playing deltarune a little while ago and can i say i would literally die for ralsei???????? ffffffff im going to actually die

[c-crow-chatters]

Music headcannons.

Hi, it's me again.

I was a bit lost in tought when this popped out. So, please enjoy. Also, thank you for all your love on the last post. And I almost forgot, obviously an Modern!AU. Forgive any spelling mistakes again.

What kind of music they listen to?

Has a very flexible music taste. But most of the time, Indie or Pop. One day he's listening to the whole discography of Mitski, the other one is enjoying Lady Gaga.

Probably listens to Olivia Rodrigo a lot.

Dances when he's alone, or enjoys in a calm way melancholic lyrics.

If a movie is catchy enough, you'll see this man searching deeply for it's soundtrack.

Gently sways to jazz while cooking. Loves to hum melodies while taking the pastries from the oven. I think if he had the time to, he would open a cafeteria so he can listen to the songs that are lit in the moment while making desserts or pouring coffee.

His favorite song is probably: It's been a long long time by Harry James.

Oldies, pop-rock, or rock. Sometimes dance or metal. Doesn't mind trying new genres or music that is completely opposite of his usual mix. Often is being influenced by Sypha's choices of music.

No, Trevor, listening to Gorillaz every day doesn't make you that special, but you are to us.

If he's feeling a little blue, he'll listen to Artic Monkeys.

Would like to try and play the bass or guitar, but too lazy to actually go and take classes.

Doesn't like to burst the music out loud unless it's a party, prefers to use earbuds to listen. Sometimes he falls asleep while listening to some track and ends up losing an earbud.

Actually likes to slow-dance on the living room in a quiet evening.

His favorite song is Through the Fire and Flames by Dragonforce, but he keeps denying it.

Pop, dance and electro-swing queen. No matter what song, she'll make a bop out of it. Energetic dances all over. There's also Lo-Fi.

She SLAYS on Just Dance, or any kind of dance game. She very much enjoys them.

Yes, she also likes K-pop, really likes HIP by Mamamoo and knows the whole choreography.

Pretty much sings too. Madonna? bring it on! Britney Spears? of course, The Weeknd? yes.

Mostly songs that are lively, or full of rythm. She knows what songs are lit on the moment, and her playlists are variant. The playlist she made with Trevor is a constant mood swing. She keeps teasing him by how it changed from "Hips Don't Lie" to "Careless Whisper".

Her favorite song is Single ladies (Put a Ring On It) by Beyoncé.

This man's taste goes from Panic! At the Disco to videogames soundtracks. Alt rock, lullabies, Ambient.

While he does handmade jewelry he loves to listen It's raining somewhere else by Toby Fox.

He actually knows how to play piano basics. And flute lol, jk-.

Plays music on the studio or work, often searches for music for his pets too. He's more into the calm side of music, but sometimes explores other genres.

Alt rock goes from Radiohead to Fall Out Boy.

His favorite song is in between Doubt by Twenty One Pilots and Pompeii by Bastille.

Blues, Jazz, and classical music. He also listens to traditional music.

Definetly drinks tea or coffee while sitting on a big couch, letting Lacrimosa by Ludwig van Beethoven flow in the air.

Quiet, starry nights, watching the city from the balcony of his apartment, soft piano and bass in his phone or a small speaker. Meditates with calm breathing.

Most of the time listens while reading. He doesn't like to use apps, or so, since he has a gramophone and a cassette player; both are very old, but are very well cared of.

He doesn't like to dance, but will sway or rock gently if he's really into an specific song.

Has an alarm clock with The Four Seasons that wakes him every morning. A big Vivaldi fan.

His favorite song is Requiem: II, Dies Irae by Giuseppe Verdi.

[aion-rsa]

Labyrinth: the Unsettling Second Character Played by David Bowie

https://ift.tt/3A2oNto

Not everything we enjoy is good for us. A chocolate-filled doughnut, for instance, can be delicious even while it crams our arteries with trans fat. The simple fact of knowing that something is unhealthy doesn’t stop it from being fun, which is to say that it’s still okay to love Jim Henson’s 1986 cult kids’ film Labyrinth while acknowledging that its sexual subtext is creepier than a drunk uncle on a camping trip. 

It’s not as if nobody noticed the vibe between lead characters Sarah and Jareth at the time, or in repeated viewings since. Like Bowie’s codpiece, it stares you in the face all the way through the film. Jareth’s a 300-year-old Goblin King (played by a 38-year-old pop star) who wants to live within 15-year-old Sarah. Jareth spies on Sarah, comes into her bedroom, drugs her, dances with her, and promises to be her slave if she’ll love him, fear him and do as he says. Their dynamic is wrong in every size and colour, and – depending on whether you’ve spotted the other character Bowie plays in the film – could be about to get a little bit more wrong.

Sarah’s scrapbook in Labyrinth (1986)

The events of Labyrinth are a fantasy that takes place in Sarah’s mind. Using the childhood dolls, stories and ornaments spotted around her bedroom in the early scenes (Hoggle and Ludo toys, a Goblin King statue, a wooden labyrinth game, storybooks from Snow White to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland…), Sarah invents a scenario in which she’s a put-upon fairy tale hero who saves her baby brother. It’s a coming-of-age fantasy that teaches Sarah to leave her childhood behind, recognise her inner power and step into the adult world. The film starts with her dressed as a princess and play-acting, and ends with her literally clearing her room of toys and games, and symbolically passing on her beloved teddy bear Lancelot to her little brother Toby.

If Labyrinth were a ‘real’ fairy tale, then Sarah’s absent mother (the girl lives with her father, stepmother and new stepbrother) would be dead. She isn’t, as we can see from recent photos around Sarah’s mirror and the scrapbook of press clippings Sarah keeps about her, decorated with hearts, the word “mom”. Sarah’s mother Linda Williams is a theatre actor who’s famous enough for her love life to be written about in the papers. Several of the newspaper articles in the scrapbook show her mother pictured with another actor, topped by a headline about their on-again-off-again romance. The other actor in those photos is played by David Bowie. That means that when Sarah was dream-casting the much older lead in her personal coming-of-age fantasy, she gave that role to… her mother’s boyfriend. Therapists of the world, start your engines.

A.C.H. Smith’s 1986 novelisation of Labyrinth was written with input from Jim Henson and screenwriter Terry Jones. In this 2018 podcast interview, Smith explains that Henson gave him over 20 pages of feedback about the draft manuscript and invited him to visit the set and watch several days’ filming. Jones also spent an afternoon with Smith and gave him permission to use an abandoned boneyard scene in the novelisation which had been originally written for the film. The novelisation is canon, is the point. It bears the official stamp. And the novelisation gives us more on the characters of Linda Williams and her actor boyfriend Jeremy. Here, it describes Sarah’s bedroom press clippings:

Sarah’s mother and her co-star, Jeremy, were cheek to cheek, their arms around each other, smiling confidently. The photographer had lit the pair beautifully, showing her to be so pretty, he so handsome, with his blond hair and a golden chain around his neck.

Novelisation-Sarah clearly has a thing for Jeremy, who comes over in the book as louche and flirtatious. Smith describes Sarah as being thrilled by Jeremy’s French-speaking sophistication. She’s impressed by his language and mockery of others, and keeps repeating an actorly phrase she’s heard him say about “finding a way into the part.” 

Sarah’s bedroom mirror in Labyrinth (1986)

In one scene from the book, Sarah remembers celebrating her 15th birthday with Jeremy and her mother. The novelisation describes them giggling poolside at Jeremy’s members’ club before receiving his gift of “an evening gown in pale blue” (her mother gets her a music box, so the evening gown is a Jeremy-only deal). Sarah wears the dress that night to a musical, after which Jeremy takes them all to a dimly lit restaurant:

Jeremy had danced with Sarah, smiling down at her. He kidded her that a flashbulb meant that they’d be all over the gossip columns next morning, and all the way home he drove fast, to shake off the photographers, he claimed, grinning.

That’s not the only time Sarah dances with Jeremy/Jareth. Film audiences will remember the masked ball part of Sarah’s labyrinth fantasy, a hallucinatory scene that plays out in the feature as romantic yet sinister, but which is made explicitly sexual in the book. In this Sam Downie interview, Smith says of the novelisation’s dance scene, “It gets quite sexy when she is in the bubble and dancing with Jareth and so forth. I made a little more of that in the book because I felt the book needed that, it needed that extra little emotional kick at that point.”

Read more

Movies

Labyrinth: David Bowie in an ’80s Fantasy Classic

By Louisa Mellor

Culture

Labyrinth Conceptual Designer Brian Froud Talks David Bowie, Dark Crystal, and Sequels

By Louisa Mellor

The book scene has Sarah being perved at by a stranger who “relished her face, then her white shoulders, her breasts, hips, and legs,” and sidled up to tell her that she was remarkably beautiful. Dancing with Jareth, the 15-year-old is described as feeling like “the loveliest woman at the ball” and finding “the touch of his hands on her body thrilling.” 

When he told her that she was beautiful, she felt confused. 

“I feel … I feel like … I — don’t know what I feel.” 

He was amused. “Don’t you?” 

“I feel like … I’m in a dream, but I don’t remember ever dreaming anything like this!” 

He pulled back to look at her and laughed, but fondly. “You’ll have to find your way into the part,” he said, and whirled her on around the room. 

Jeremy’s catchphrase, there. In the book, fantasy-Jeremy/Jareth then tries to kiss Sarah, when she realises that the whole room is watching them and laughing:

“Jareth seemed to be unperturbed, but she turned her face sharply away from his, horrified. He held her more tightly, and insistently sought her lips with his. Suffused with disgust, she wrenched herself free of him.”

This is supposedly Sarah’s fantasy. She’s the one in whose imagination all this is happening. In 2016, the film’s conceptual designer Brian Froud explained the thinking to Empire. Sarah, says Froud, is approaching the age of sexual awakening, and so has created Jareth as a composite image of the kind of men who turn her on. “We’re not looking at reality, we’re inside this girl’s head.” Jareth’s costumes were designed to reference “a leather boy”, the armour of a German knight, Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, and male ballet dancers. “He’s an amalgam of the inner fantasies of this girl. Everyone always talks about Bowie’s perv pants, but there was a reason for it all! It has a surface that’s fairly light, but then every so often you go, ‘Oh, my God! How did we get away with that?!’”

Telling a children’s story about a girl’s veiled sexualised fantasies of her mother’s boyfriend is getting away with a fair bit. There’s more to the film of course, and ultimately, Sarah vanquishes Jareth by rejecting his sinister allure and asserting her own power. Her attraction to him though, especially in the novelisation, is undeniable. What makes this uncomfortable isn’t the fact that Labyrinth is in part a story about adolescent female sexual awakening, but that its vision of that awakening was dreamt up by grown men and shows an underage girl drawn to a man of their age. Thought of that way and it’s less sure that Sarah’s is the fantasy we’re watching.

It was a different time, though, the 1980s. All this stuff was much more mainstream back then. 16-year-old Samantha Fox could be photographed topless for Page Three of national newspaper The Sun. Bill Wyman of The Rolling Stones could openly ‘date’ a child. The charts regularly featured songs about adult men heroically wrestling with their sexual attraction to schoolgirls. And the 83-year-old writer of a children’s film novelisation could reminisce about how thrilling it was to have danced with the film’s young star at the wrap party, and laugh at how much more thrilling it might have been if only her mother hadn’t insisted on staying so close to her “very beautiful 14-year-old daughter” all night. A different time. (Except, that last anecdote was recounted in 2018. Perhaps the time isn’t quite as different as it should be.)

Don’t let any of this put you off though. Like a chocolate-filled doughnut, Labyrinth remains a sweet childhood treat… with a slightly sickening centre.  

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Labyrinth celebrates its 35th anniversary in the US on June 27th.

The post Labyrinth: the Unsettling Second Character Played by David Bowie appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3y0POvp

[ryanjtrimble]

The Boxcar Kids

Reading time: 10 minutes

A new gang of artists, armed with gall and heart and tools from Harbor Freight, threatens to diversify Provo, Utah, with fine art, artisan coffee, haircuts, tattoos, and community events. They’ve taken over the tired midcentury building located at 156 West 500 South and have turned it into a parlor of sorts, a source of golden light and autumnal galas and monthly Drink and Draws with nude models. They call the place The Boxcar Studios.

The Boxcar Studios opened twelve months ago, unofficially. Jake Buntjer—father, photographer, found art sculptor, and now community organizer—founded Boxcar when he acquired the building on a bargain lease. Inspired by Corey Fox, owner of Velour and godfather to Utah Valley’s music scene, Buntjer set out to create a marketplace and community for fine artists and their patrons. “I knew in my gut,” says Buntjer, “if I could acquire this space, if I could create the opportunity for myself and then share it with other people, that we could hook dreams. And if I hooked a dream with somebody and they hooked with me, then we could hook more dreams together and create an ecosystem that benefitted everybody.” Boxcar has since endured on Buntjer’s vision, enlisting artists’ faith and gumption and gristle from volunteers. On any given day at the Boxcar, Millennials and Gen-Xers can be found rewiring electrical circuitry, plumbing new pipes, nailing up reclaimed boards, or painting walls. On weekends you’ll find art shows, musical performances, mingles, and costume parties. This February you can attend a private carnival for $50, which includes live music by Timmy the Teeth, premium cocktails, fire dancers, contortionists, stilt walkers, and whatever shenanigans might ensue in such an environment. In recent months, Boxcar has hosted Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s gatherings, providing a free space for friends and community members to gather for drink and food.

Seven artist studios flank the rear of the Boxcar, while three shops comprise the storefront—Revolución Barbershop & Co., Man in the Moon Mercantile & Reclamation, and Rugged Grounds, a coffeehouse. Azure paint adorns the building’s face, corrugated steel roofing runs down its west side. Out front, on a crumbly sidewalk, a wooden sign beckons folks inside, where they are apt to meet Jeremiah “Pete” Hansen behind the glass counters of the Mercantile.

Pete is lean and blond, wears a newsboy cap. A reassuring Paul Newman-like smile springs easily and frequently across his face, erasing the worry that traces his temples and brow. Pete’s background is in the restaurant and construction industries and his first love is culinary arts, but the vagaries of life have sent him meandering. He got to know the Boxcar while patching its roof one day, working odd jobs. It didn’t take long for the unheated and leaky building—combined with Buntjer’s vision—to seduce Pete, like an empty frontier. He soon began regularly working and hanging around the Boxcar, volunteering his time. Now he mans the entry point five days a week.

What inspires a grown man to abandon a recurring paycheck for some impossible opportunity, to take a chance on art and community?

“The short story?” says Pete, “I grew up in a big-ass family, the seventh of nine kids. Always shared a room. Married young, always shared a house. Got divorced, didn’t know what the fuck. Got remarried, tried to make that work. Didn’t work out. I don’t know how to be alone. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what 'me' is. So why not?”   Besides, he adds, "I can reinvent myself, I can be whoever I want. And reality is what?”

Reality does seem to twist and morph inside the Boxcar. The Mercantile, for example, is bedecked with green soda bottles, burlap bags, clackety typewriters, trilobites, brass belt buckles, wired spectacles, fraying leather jackets, false teeth, and black-and-white postcards. Drunken Sailor Radio plays on Pandora. A gray housecat named Toby toes about, purrs. There’s a velour chaise lounge, a yellow Tonka truck, a stuffed piranha, bat, and boar’s head, one sheep skull covered in turquoise, and a brocade sofa in the colors of The Mystery Machine—sea green and aqua. In the evenings, bistro lighting colors the timbered room copper and gold. In the mornings, the large south-facing shop window is platinum white, a portal back to a world of concrete and cubicles, where the pathway is known. But inside the Boxcar, possibility wafts around like an invisible river, and there’s the sense that, if lucky, you can hitch and ride the flow.

Next door, inside Revolución Barbershop & Co., California natives E’Sau and Lizzy Negrete cut and buzz hair. Actually, Lizzy quietly works the counter, swiping cards, taking money, smiling at the conversations that ricochet around the shop. E’Sau wields the scissors, clipping hair with jabs and hooks, while she dances around each customer. Rectangular black-rimmed glasses accent her round face. She talks in loud, quick gestures, her tattooed arms unfurling in all directions. Old liquor bottles—Jack Daniels, Don Julio, Jim Beam—fitted with spray nozzles, line a shelf below a mirror. E’Sau’s been cutting hair for 24 years.

“I’m the oldest of fourteen kids,” she says, “and I have ten brothers. My mom bought me a pair of clippers from K-Mart one day, when I was 13. I’ve been cutting hair since.”

Being the eldest, E’Sau spent most of her life taking care of younger siblings. “I never got to know who I really am until I moved away,” she says. Until she came to Provo.

And until Revolución, she’s always barbered from home. Having an actual shop, for the Negretes, is a dream come true. To see it through, E’Sau provides the chutzpah, Lizzy provides pragmatic oversight, encouraging her rebellious partner to play by the rules and file for all the appropriate licenses.

To the other side of Mercantile lies Rugged Grounds, set to open for business this February. Partners Skyler Saenz and Sadie Crowley, with help from friends, have renovated the old tax and payroll office entirely with reclaimed materials, from the paneled walls to the stainless counters to the modified sawhorse tables. They plan to sell traditional espresso and coffee, but will also offer kombucha, pour-overs, and cold-brew. The two blow kisses to each other from across the room, hug when they collide in the kitchen area. They both are young and attractive, and their endearments give off an intoxicating air of youthful promise, but without naivety. What they have seems solid, rugged, adding charm to the already quaint quarters.

“I’ve thought about doing something like this forever,” says Sadie. “Since I was pre-teen. And Skylar thought about it forever, too.”

Skyler confirms this. “Big dream on a whim,” he says.

When Boxcar hosts a gathering, the three storefront shops come alive. Doorways connect the structural trio like tunnels between funhouse rooms. The Negrete’s Latino community descends on the brightly lit barbershop en force, showing this gringo what familial relationships should look like—the generous hugs and fearless laughter. Ceviche and tequila abound. In the dimly lit Rugged Grounds and Mercantile, the scent of dried fruits and cocoa drifts between the chatter of Provo’s curious and outcast, who flock to the Boxcar on such evenings. Espresso and soymilk swirl inside paper cups, mimicking déjà vu.

After coffee and conversation—or during or before, there are no rules—guests mingle their way up a flight of creaky stairs, northward through Buntjer’s own atelier, and back down a set of creaky stairs into the industrial tail of the Boxcar. Depending on the evening, a band plays on a makeshift stage or art hangs from the rafters—photographs, paintings, mixed-media installations. The artists in residence open their doors and answer questions about their work.

Painter and illustrator Chase Henson rents a studio. Pencils, brushes, and tubes of paint litter his space. A while back he was studying aviation mechanics, following his father’s footsteps, but an internship opened his eyes. Chase realized mechanics wasn’t for him, so he altered course and earned a degree in art. Around the same time he abandoned the religion of his upbringing, became fascinated with religion in general, and in particular Hinduism. He now portrays its mythologies and gods in his paintings, metamorphosed in various ways. Of the Boxcar he says, “This place saved my artistic life.” Chase recently lost a tattooing apprenticeship and was ready to forsake the starving artist’s way. Boxcar, with its burgeoning community and forthcoming tattoo shop, represents a second chance.

Artists desperately need second chances in Provo. With a pious religious base and a politically conservative worldview that spiders through its suburban sprawl, the third largest city in Utah feels more like the set of The Donna Reed Show than an actual metropolis. Culture is something primarily emitted via Mormondom. Artists who have succeeded in Provo tend to paint portraits of Jesus Christ or depict dead Mormon prophets, Mormon temples, scenes from the Book of Mormon, and so on. Photographers succeed by snapping happy and glistening pics of Utah’s scenery. So making Hindu-inspired paintings that connote mysticism (Chase Henson) or honest photos of naked men (Trevor Christensen) or found art sculptures that hint of death and magic (Jake Buntjer) or photos that color youth and playfulness with loneliness and nostalgia (Lyndi Bone) or mixed media that decry industrialism and corporatism (Kelly Larsen) is a labor of love and uphill battle. But the Boxcar has enabled this motley crew to concentrate their artistic efforts, and they are puncturing cultural barriers, pushing through.

The crew is more interested in building than in tearing down, however. Buntjer’s vision of Boxcar is inclusive. Despite being an ex-Mormon and divorcee—marks that Mormondom customarily frowns upon, even shames—Buntjer doesn’t want to alienate members of the dominant culture. He in fact sees Provo’s homogeneity as artistic promise—a clean page on which to score a new song. He wants to give back to the community that shaped him by sprouting a culture that it can one day appreciate. And if that day doesn’t come, well, he and the other misfits will have each other and whatever they make of themselves through art. “I just want the community,” Buntjer says. “I want church.”

The community is coming together, and maybe the “church” is too. Boxcar is akin to a clubhouse for adults, a chapel, a place of play and spiritual replenishing. Sometimes in the late hours, usually between one and four a.m., when the night is taut and black and all that remains of the crowds is echoing whispers, three or four or six overgrown youth will circle within the gold light, among the stuffed beasts and skeletal fragments and vintage tools, and share wine or whiskey or whatever alcohol can be found hiding in a dilapidated desk drawer. The stars turn overhead. Those gathered begin to skip and leapfrog their words, so that they end up communicating more through vibes and frequencies than actual language. Psychologists call this “flow,” except they’ve yet to study it in conversational contexts. To a stranger or latecomer, it would sound like gibberish. In truth, it’s a deeper form of communication than everyday chatter, something that occurs at the level of the soul, and often regards matters of the same—what it is or isn’t, how to attain it or express or channel it. The details of these revelries are often forgotten by morning, but lingering impressions remain—footprints on each being’s nucleus, pictographs of the night tattooed onto vital organs. Of these clubhouse sessions, Pete says, “They happen when they need to.” You can’t buy tickets. No money required.

The beasts and skeletons and tools belong to Buntjer. His studio is where the Boxcar’s more serious and subdued meetings occur. His also radiates the greatest amount of magic. Whereas the other studios feel like studios, splotched with paint, flung with framed illustrations and photos, Buntjer’s studio is part shop of horrors, part dreamland, part American Pickers collective. There are leather and felt hats, fur coats, and twenty-one pairs of rusty pliers. There are hammers, saws, tapes, an old tequila bottle filled with purple goop. Block letters on a beam read: MISTER PAUPER. There are springs, wires, cloths, razor blades, dressmaking torsos in wicker, iron, and plastic, and over twenty-five doll heads, many with their eyes plucked out. A horse bust sits blindfolded in one corner. There are canvas bags, model ships, birdhouses, dusty jewelry boxes, a wall of brass curiosities. Buntjer reimages the refuse when he sculpts, which involves grinding, cutting, stitching, tying, wiring, hammering, gluing, and dreaming. The floor creaks. Light streaks through its cracks. A stuffed desert bighorn sheep stands in the center of the room. Above it drapes a large white flag bearing a red X, as if to suggest: this is the place.

Buntjer, with his pointy beard and heeled boots, resembles a satyr. Fitting for a mythmaker. Between overseeing Boxcar’s operations, sculpting, shooting photos, pitching art shows, and directing art for a new theatre in Provo, Buntjer works sometimes eighteen hours in a day. He is in the Boxcar’s tail, the storefront, and out back unloading his Jeep all at once, planning, directing, organizing. Sculpting. Sometimes following a Boxcar event, which represents the climax of a month’s work, he retires to his studio, the hearth of Boxcar, on a burgundy sectional next to the desert bighorn, for a clubhouse session. For church. But even as he unwinds, a vision visibly turns in his head, one he has expressed a hundred times in a hundred different ways, but that always resounds the same:

“I knew in my gut if I could acquire this space, if I could create the opportunity for myself and then share it with other people, that we could hook dreams. And if I hooked a dream with somebody and they hooked with me, then we could hook more dreams together and create an ecosystem that benefitted everybody. Then maybe everybody could be a little more creative, a little more real, a little more daring, a little more risky, because they were connected to other people doing the same thing. It’s a family.”

A family of foolhardy misfits, a chest of coupled dreams. Without them, Boxcar is just an old building. But, for now, it feels like a train car being pulled toward some remarkable, enchanting place. And I, for one, am aboard, if only to see what's at the next stop.

A version of this story was originally published February, 2017, at Utah Stories.