#and i thought having to see people playing frontiers at midnight when i had to wait a few more hours was hard ...................

[sonknuxadow]

its so hard out here for a guy who hates paying 50 dollars for a game and not getting a physical copy of it

[schismusic]

Joy Division, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love New Order, too

Spring is weird as hell because one time you have this glaring sun that powers you up like being plugged into a wall outlet, then not five minutes later clouds begin to gather and you feel like you're going to die if anything goes south. So the most obvious combination to represent two sides of this same coin, emotional and meteorological, is Joy Division and New Order.

Sometimes you need Transmission or Shadowplay for the sunny days — impassioned jolts, sparks flying everywhere. Sometimes The Perfect Kiss hits harder on a cloudy afternoon, coming back home and in need of that extra push to not fall asleep in the train. It's surprising to realize the versatility displayed by both bands, or the same band in two different iterations according to whomever you ask. Peter Hook says, as late as 1993, that the laziest member of New Order is Ian Curtis. Or again this other person, in the comments under the Atmosphere official video on YouTube, who went to see New Order (Hooky-less New Order, which might be a relevant distinction) at the O2 Arena a couple of years ago and they gave an encore, says "Those of us who stayed got the privilege of watching Joy Division perform three of their songs". Interesting outlook on the matter. I personally saw Peter Hook and the Light play both Joy Division records and, I'm pretty sure, an encore comprised of just Love Will Tear Us Apart at the Arti Vive Festival in Soliera, back when it was still free to attend some of the events. I remember being pretty mad that Hooky had stopped to take pics with basically everyone and then left exactly as I was approaching. In retrospect I don't exactly blame the man, it was like midnight anyway. I remember nothing of the back trip home.

My first contact with Joy Division happened when I was thirteen and very much in my prog era. I was in Rome staying at an aunt of mine's place for my fourteenth birthday and she told me I could get a CD, since I had gotten some money saved up over time. Some Facebook page dedicated to Pink Floyd I'd liked (yeah, Facebook at age thirteen — I literally just wanted to play a fucking Flash game, back when Facebook allowed them, and I ended up getting to be terminally online. Crazy how things turn out) used to share a lot of memes and fanart relating to the Unknown Pleasures album cover, and me being a massive Pink Floyd head at the time I thought "I mean, if these guys are pushing this band so hard, that's gotta mean something". The album cover was pretty striking, admittedly: a far cry from the paisley ass paintings that I had grown to accept as the gold standard for the music I liked, but its simplicity struck a chord closer to The Dark Side of the Moon, or perhaps The Wall. Those were records I liked a lot, probably called them "the best records ever made" to more than one person, not like they aren't but that's a very bold statement to make when your listening experience consists exactly of

Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor when I was six;

Daft Punk's complete discography (minus Random Access Memories, which wasn't out yet) when I was twelve;

Pink Floyd's complete discography, courtesy of a CD collection coming out with some Italian newspaper, that same year;

a couple random classic rock records recommended to me by older friends and relatives usually well into their fifties or sixties at the time, random people on Internet forums — which, for clarification, I did not actively attend, preferring to just lurk from time to time — and the OndaRock "milestones" page.

So browsing through the surprisingly expansive CDs section of this electronics shop in Rome, and being mesmerized by a vinyl rack in the days when Music on Vinyl was the final frontier of pretending you could re-analogue the digital ("you mean to tell me these are like CDs, but bigger? Whoever designed these truly lived in the future"), I came across that very same album art that had stricken me so hard. I had listened to the first seconds of the album on YouTube, but that weird drum sound — so echoey, so distant, ultimately not particularly powerful, meaning it didn't really sound like Bonzo: it sounded more like my own band, which at the time didn't even exist yet — I didn't really know what to make of. This store I was in had one of those preview listening machines that would scan the barcode on the CDs and give you a small snippet of the song. I pull the CD up to the scanner, the scanner lights up green, I put on the headphones and the solo from this comes up:

Clearly they had to be kidding me. I had come to know, sneaking into infinitely many rehearsals with the band from my mother's town, what it sounded like when someone tried to play lead without something else filling up the arrangement (even though I didn't really know all that, or at least lacked the vocabulary to properly express it) and, for Christ's sake, didn't these guys notice rehearsing? It sounded empty, weirdly so, and it wasn't my thing, I thought. I put that CD away and picked up a band I knew I'd like — Genesis, specifically. So Nursery Cryme became the first CD I've ever paid with my own money, the very day I turned fourteen. Not a bad pickup. I remember being very impressed with the fast blurring lead guitar on The Musical Box and digging the sweet pastoral atmospheres of For Absent Friends and Harlequin. I still think of that record more often than one would probably assume looking at this blog, or my most played on Spotify. At the time, that was the best move I could take, really: why beat my head against a record that, as your average prog nerd ballbreaker, simply wasn't speaking to me?

Then all of a sudden in August of the same year my friend's dad hands me a 16 gigabyte USB drive, full of random music from all eras of rock. A lot of it remains inscrutable to me for a really long time, most notably Tom Waits (see related post), but I spent the whole month reading random folder names, seeing if something catches my eyes, and at one point I come across the Mars Volta. Open the folder up, read the names of their first three records, and my first thought is "Christ, these guys look incomprehensible. I'm about to have some fun". Long story short: I end up having a lot of fun, the Mars Volta turns into my favourite band at the time and finding out that they had previously been called At the Drive-In makes me gain some measure of respect for punk rockers: if they tried hard enough, I must've thought, they could prog as hard as anyone. In the meantime the ghost of Joy Division remains at the back of my head. I feel like I'm missing something, for the first time in my life: it's not them, it's me. Too bad that same realization didn't occur to me when it came to the people in my life until much, much later, but that's being fourteen for you I suppose. Early King Crimson and the Mars Volta were the pinnacle of violence to me, and not even the very few Metallica songs I'd downloaded just to see what would happen scratched that itch. It felt a bit too cauterized for some reason (I would later find out I had been looking in the wrong direction the whole time: the Black Album "sucked", according to my favourite metalhead of the time, who somehow catalyzed my interest from the very second I saw him in the school's courtyard. Hard to imagine why I would imprint on people like puppies do, but what the fuck, not like I've ever outgrown that anyway, I've just gotten better at managing it). But I felt there was more than violence to this, or different forms of violence. When Christmas came around and my relatives tried to get me presents, my mother asked if there was anything specific I was interested in, and I basically told her "look, if they can get me some CDs off of this list, I'm golden". It had some bangers on it, namely Noctourniquet by the Mars Volta — it's one of their best and I will die on this hill, be warned — and The Downward Spiral, which might as well warrant its own post in an ideal world. But the best of them all I think came from a random purchase, once again with the little money I had lying around at the time.

Closer appears to be, right away, a bit more concrete, and if there's something inexperienced music fans like is a pretty packaging that conjures a strong emotional response before they've even played the record. Compare a color-inverted graph of pulsar emissions to a literal funerary monument. Opening up the booklet I was shocked to see that Genesis was used as a negative point of comparison (bad omen, I thought) by people close to the band, and I came across much more detailed information about Ian Curtis's untimely demise — at that time, something far too removed from my experience to be faced with the delicacy and attention it deserves. Atrocity Exhibition hits like a ten-ton truck, a reference which at the time I wouldn't have been able to make for obvious reasons, and Isolation exposes all the nerve tissue under the skin. Passover comes in and strips everything even barer, and then A Means to an End turns… danceable, for some reason? Big emotional moment with The Eternal and Decades, which I thought actually took them closer to my usual tastes. And yet at the same time I kept looking at Colony, Heart and Soul and Twenty Four Hours as the most compelling cuts. Geometric assault sounding like sheet metal if it were music; rhythmically driven emptiness that serves as a minimal backdrop for depressed poetry, and finally a rocking ebb-and-flow that would probably inform a lot of my interest in GY!BE-like post-rock in the coming years. Very interesting to think that the same guys who'd done Unknown Pleasures could think of this. To this day, when asked, I still do think that Closer is the best Joy Division record, but what does it even mean when the records are exactly two, compilations notwithstanding?

It was around this time that it came to my attention that both Joy Division and another band called New Order had a record called Substance out, both published by the same recording company, both coming out within a year of each other. Looking it up, it turns out it's fully intentional, because New Order is simply Joy Division minus Ian Curtis. It would turn out to be a tad bit more complex than that. Anyway, I look New Order up and kind of have to do a double-take. Synthpop? In my Joy Division? More likely than you'd think, considering Isolation exists. But yeah, that sort of seals it — I wouldn't care about this New Order for a million years. Until all of a sudden a couple of years later David Sylvian bursts like a comet in my face, which of course leads me straight to Japan, the same year as I'd come across Berlin-era Bowie, and you can probably guess where this is going, right?

Well, you'd be wrong. I still don't check out New Order. There's a whole new world open to me — vaporwave and therefore R Plus Seven come to my attention, which leads me to dissect that record like an alien tool of unclear purposes. This of course leads me onto an ambient tangent, taking me back to my Tim Hecker listens of that same year, which has the effect of renewing my interest in "pure" electronic music and the then-rising post-dubstep movement. The sheer experience of sound, the dazzling modernity and innovation, is what's in at the time. I have no time for nostalgia-pandering dimwits: the future awaits. Then all that jazz from the first Godflesh post hits, then God pulls the funniest gag in the history of viral infections to my memory, and I have some time to actually look back, a bit less prejudiced. As it turns out, synthpop is not the devil, as some of you might have surmised by now, and as I relisten to Blue Monday I realized I have never listened to either of the Substance record. I do know some, most perhaps?, of the tracks on the Joy Division one, and I do think the New Order one has the more striking cover art — not to mention I knew, by this time, that this was the one to give Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance its name, and that Your Silent Face soundtracked one of the most memorable moments in Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson. As the ultimate Hideo Kojima stan, I couldn't let this slide, so I pop the record on and get hit with this:

Way to go, guys. Holy shit. I knew that Ceremony was a Joy Division cut before they could record it, but what the hell — Bernard got it, too. It wasn't a matter of singing ability with songs like these, it's just getting it, finding the right energy. They had that right energy. And then it hit me just as many times these dudes have made Blue Monday over and over again before actually getting it right, and everytime I look into it it's funnier and funnier to realize just how many different attempts it took them to finally be Kraftwerk, but augmented — with the stellar results we all know. Everything's Gone Green, 5 8 6, Temptation potentially, all lead up to this one moment in the history of dance music where somehow three dudes and a girl hailing from Manchester managed to out-gay the Pet Shop Boys (by their own admission, apparently), to shake the whole world's collective booty, to do whatever it is they were supposed to do in this last comparison that would ideally make the previous one a bit less obnoxious but whatever, it's 3am as usual, you know how it goes by now don't you? But then after Blue Monday the record keeps going, and thank god it does, because it's banger after banger. How do these guys keep doing it?

So I spend some time with that record, then it fades down, then it comes back up last month, when the weather calls for it and its parent company. Which is when I find myself watching the Control movie for the first time, surprisingly enough seeing as I already enjoyed the work of Anton Corbijn as a photographer. Looking at all that, it is revealed to me that Joy Division never really having died is not a bug, it's a feature. Everyone is gasping, I get it, but please pick your jaws up and check this out: the band has never learned how to play their respective instruments. One might go so far as to argue they play their own stuff their own way, and that's basically it. Nothing could be further from the truth. These guys jammed, a lot; that's how Joy Division wrote songs, that's how New Order wrote songs, even going as far as having Bernard Sumner fucked up on acid so he could find the chorus to Temptation or the whole band bombed out of their minds on X in Ibiza clubs to write, basically, the entirety of Technique — and even then, not really, there's a couple jangly tracks that the X would most likely render unlistenable but what do I really know? Point being: it might now have been sparked by a music teacher or instructor, it might not have been the product of a process comparable to that within Television, which led them to organically seek out better, more "by the book" musicianship, but New Order were incredibly familiar with their instruments, had formed an element of comfort and understanding that counterbalanced the alien-ness to music terminology.

Peter Hook recently uploaded a Yamaha-sponsored video to his Instagram, which I am pretty sure has a say in running, where he jams on a Yamaha bass and, you know, it sounds like Hooky alright, but it's never a discernible bassline until he kicks into the A major strumming that opens Love Will Tear Us Apart. Before that, he just strolls around the neck, leisurely strumming away at power chords imbued with that thick chorus and reverb combo he became renowned for. I would never, in my wildest dreams, have imagined I'd find myself thinking "okay, awesome, stop talking — I want to hear you jam a bit more" referring to one of the musicians who were part of possibly two of the craziest storiest in the history of contemporary rock'n'roll, also notorious for playing the rockstar whilst carrying the minimum possible baggage of technical knowledge he could. Once again, this is nowhere near a knock to the man — quite the opposite. Ian Curtis asked "persistence, well, what does it matter?", and Hooky (and, of course, the other members of New Order) found a way to constructively answer that question. Moments before Coil, but a bit later than Israel Regardie, they said "persistence is all" and built a brand on finding a way to consistently sound like splendid, eternal, golden children: "like crystal", impassionate, tightly-knit performers with the purity of a child's heart. Ian Curtis had, in certain ways (at least artistically), the purity of a child in his heart, which some might even argue was a distinguishing feature of most of his literary idols — if you think about it, William Burroughs could be your dirty-minded classmate who walked in on his parents sharing an intimate moment in the bedroom (had his parents been gay men, the metaphor would probably fly better, but that most definitely wasn't the case). So the heart of Joy Division remains untouched, if a bit more naked. Heroes of post-punk, sons of the silent age, you can sleep soundly tonight.

[davidmann95]

Sooo… Superman and the Authority?

magnus-king123 asked: Your thoughts on Superman & the authority Give it to me...lol

Anonymous asked: Seeing Bezos take his little trip into space the same day Morrison puts out a Superman comic that touches on how far we’ve fallen from the days when we dreamed of utopian futures where everyone explored the stars was a big gut punch. Not used to Superman being topical in that way.

Anonymous asked: What'd you think of Superman and the Authority#1?

This is far beyond what I can fit in the normal weekly reviews, so taking this as my notes on the first six pages, with this and this as my major lead-in thoughts:

* Janin's such a perfect fit for Morrison - the scale, the power, the facial expressions selling the character work, the screwing around with the panel formatting as necessary to sell the effect, the numinous sense of things going on larger than you can fully perceive amidst the beauty and chaos. It's a shame he wasn't around 25 years ago to draw JLA, but I'll take him going with Morrison onto other future projects.

* His intro action sequence is such a great demonstration of why Black actually does have something to offer, and also how he's such a dumbass desperately needing Superman to save him from himself.

* While Jordie Bellaire didn't legit go with an entirely monochromatic palate the way early previews suggested, it's still an effect frequently and excellently deployed here. And glad to see Steve Wands carry into this from Blackstars since there's such an obvious carryover from its work with Superman.

* "Gentlemen. Ladies. Others." Great both because of the obvious - hey, Superman's nodding at me! - and because it's a phrasing that reinforces that this take on him (and let's be real Morrison) is old as hell.

* I'm mostly past caring about whether this is an alt-Earth Superman until it becomes indisputable one way or another, this and Action both rule so what does it really matter? But while there are still a couple signs in play suggesting some kind of division (the Action Comics #1036 cover, Midnighter up to time-travel shenanigans) the "lost in time" quote clearly thrown in after the fact to explain how he could have met Kennedy outside of 5G that wouldn't be necessary for an Elseworlds, the assorted gestures towards Superman's current status quo, the Kingdom Come symbol appearing in Action, and that Morrison would have had to completely rewrite the ending if this wasn't supposed to be 'the' version of Clark Kent going forward as was the intent when they first planned it all say to me that no, no fooling around, this is our guy going forward one way or another.

* Janin and Bellaire making the first version of the crystal Fortress ever that actually looks as cool as you want it to.

Anonymous asked: I like that Superman and The Authority is basically the anti-All-Star; instead of the laid back, immortal Superman who is supercharged, we have a stressed, ageing Superman whose tremendous powers are fading. The former will always be there to save us, but the latter is running out of time and needs to pull off a Hail Mary. Also, he mentions in his monologue to Black that he was "lost in time" when he met JFK, so maybe he is the main continuity Clark. Or he's the t-shirt Supes from Sideways.

* You're absolutely right - the power reversal is obvious and the ticking clock in play seemingly isn't for his own survival but everyone around him as he wakes up and realizes all the old icons grew complacent with the gains they'd made and he's not leaving behind the world he meant to. Both, however, are built on the idea of preparing the world to not need them anymore - it'll still have a Superman in his son, but that'll only work because of the others he empowers and inspires. The question is what happens to Clark if he's not going to live in the sun for 83000 years.

* Clark's 'exercise' here does more to sell me on the idea of Old Man Superman as a cool idea than however many decades of Earth 2 stuff.

* Intergang being noted alongside Darkseid and Doomsday speaks to how much Kirby informed Morrison's conception of Superman.

* This isn't exactly the most progressive in its disability politics but at least it makes clear Black's being a piece of shit about it.

* It's startling how much Clark can get away with saying stuff in here you'd never expect to come out of Superman's mouth. "I made an executive decision" "Privacy, really...?" "You have nowhere to go, Black. Nothing to live for." "There are few people in my life who I instinctively and viscerally dislike, and you've always been one of them." It only works because there's zero aggression behind it, he's just past the point of niceties and being totally frank while making clear none of these assessments preclude that he cares and is going to unconditionally do the right thing every time. He is absolutely, per Morrison, humanity's dad picking us up when we're too drunk to drive ourselves home.

* The story doesn't put a big flashing light over it, but it's not even a little bit subtle having the material threat of the issue be a ticking timebomb left by the carelessness and hubris of generations past.

* Manchester keeps trying to poke the bear and prove his hot takes about Superman and it's just not working. The front he put up under Kelley is gone after decades of defeats, and as Morrison understands what actually conceptually works about him as a rival to Superman underneath the aging nerd paranoia he's exposed as what he absolutely would be in 2021: a dude with a horrific terminal case of Twitter brainworms. I was PANICKED when I heard there was an 'offensive term' joke in this, I was braced for Morrison at their well-meaning worst, but it's such a goddamn perfect encapsulation of a very specific breed of Twitter leftist who uses their politics first and foremost as a cudgel and justification to label their abrasive, judgmental shittiness as self-righteousness (plus it's a killer payoff to a joke from way back in his original appearance). Cannot believe they pulled that off when they're so very, very open about basically not knowing how the internet works.

* @charlottefinn: Manchester Black using his telekinetic powers to force someone he hates to fave a problematic tweet so that he can screenshot it and start a dogpile

@intergalactic-zoo: “Once they cancel Bibbo, Superman won’t be *anyone’s* fav’rit anymore!”

* Friend noted this issue had to be fully the conversation because the whole premise stands on the house of cards of these two somehow working together, and with three 'silent' inset panels the creative team pulls off that turning point.

* So much of this feels on the surface like Morrison bringing back the All-Star vibes with Clark, but when he drops a "That's all you got?" in a brawl you realize what's underlining that bluntness and confidence in the face of failure is that deep down this is still the Action guy too. This dude ain't gonna get wrecked in his Fortress while the other guy chuckles about him being A SOFT WEE SCIENTIST'S SON!

* Bringing up Jor-El made me realize that Morrison already spelled out that this is the final threat to Superman, what he faces at the end of the road:

"Now it's your turn, Superman."

* A l'il Superman 2000/All-Star reference with the Phantom Zone map!

* There's so much intertextuality going on here even by Morrison standards - Change or Die with the old hero putting together a team of morally nebulous folks out to 'fix' everything, Flex Mentallo with the muscleman trying to redeem the punk, Doomsday Clock with the fate of the world hinging on whether Superman can get through to a meta stand-in for an idea of 'modern' comics cynicism, DKR and New Frontier and Kingdom Come and Multiversity and Seven Soldiers and What's So Funny and All-Star and Action and the last 5 years of monthly Superman comics and Authority and probably Jupiter's Legacy and Tom Strong - but none of that's needed. You could go in with the baseline pop cultural understanding of the character and not care about any of the inside baseball shit and get that this is a story about a leader of a generation that let down the people they made all their grand promises to as inertia and day-to-day demands and complacency let him be satisfied with the accomplishments they'd made long ago, looking at a new era and seeing the ways its own activists are dropping the ball. The only thing that fundamentally matters in a "you have to accept you're reading a superhero story" sense is that because he's Superman he's willing to own up to it and listen to people who might know better about some things and try to set things right while he and those who'll take his place still have a chance. And yes, the oldster looking back on their legacy with a skeptical eye and hoping for better from the next generation, hoping most of all that their little heir apparent can fulfill the promise inside of him instead of being a provocating little shitkicker, is obviously also autobiographical.

* The overlaying Kennedy reprisal is such a great visual of a sudden intrusive thought.

* The Kryptonite secret is the obvious "This is going to matter!" moment, but "He lied about his son" is a bit that doesn't connect to anything going on right now so maybe that's important here too? More significantly, the Justice League can't actually be the villains here but that Ultra-Humanite's crew are in an Earth-orbiting satellite makes pretty clear what's up.

* I've said before that between Superman, OMAC, and a New Gods-affiliated speedster this was going to use all of Morrison's favorite things. King Arthur playing a role isn't exactly dissuading me.

* Love the idea that all the antiheroes have their own community in the same way as the capes and tights crew. They definitely all privately think the rest are posers though and that they alone are Garth Ennis Punisher in a mob of Garth Ennis Wolverines.

* Manchester's fallen so far he's gone from trying to convince Superman to kill to convince him to dunk on people for their bad takes and Clark just doesn't get it. Official prediction of dialogue for upcoming issues:

"According to these bloody Fortress scans, the only thing that can restore your powers is an unfiltered hit of dopamine. Don't worry, Doctor Black has a few ideas."

"Hmm. Maybe I'll plant a nice tree?"

"...fuck you."

* Ok I already talked about how great the Fortress looks in here but LOVE this library.

* A pair of pages this seems like the right spot to discuss from Black's original appearance that underlines both his and Superman's inadequacies up to this point:

Responding to the problem of "the government and penal system are hopelessly corrupt" neither of them has any actual notion of what to do about it in spite of their respective posturing beyond how to handle individual outside actors - each is in their own way every bit as small-minded and reactionary as the other. Clark's coming around though, and he's holding out hope for the other guy.

* Superman: Have a lovely mineral water :) proper hydration is important :)

Manchester Black: *Is a dude who can get so mad he vomits and passes out. At water.*

* That last page is the one to beat for the year, and does more to put over the idea of this as an Authority book than that Midnighter and Apollo are literally going to show up. It also feels like Morrison tacitly acknowledging all the ways the premise could go or at least be received wrong - from Superman saying 'enough is enough' to who he's bringing into the fold to go about it - in the most beautifully on-the-nose fashion imaginable. Maybe they'll save us all! Or maybe they'll drown us in their vomit.

[thefivecalls]

Things I associate with each of the sides for no reason

Logan:

I understand he's supposed to be dark blue or indigo. Regardless, he will always be teal. This teal:

For some reason when I got detention that one time I got a Logan vibe so yeah theres that

"Space... The final frontier..." But uhhh just the opening has his vibes

Why is he always whereing a neck tie and not a bow tie? If anyone has necktie vibes its Janus not Logan

Logan also has chaos incarnate vibes that are only in check because of his last shreds of humanity one of these days he'll break and when he does thomas can and will set something on fire using bill nye the science guy tactics

He is waking up early and going to bed late

He is framing posters

He is dancing in your bedroom to awesome music that has never been such a vibe before that moment and will never be again.

Broken clocks

Beaker from the muppets? I don't quite get it but yeah

Rock of ages

Getting a pitcher of soda or tea or whatever and setting it on his desk, then getting 23 straws and taping them together so he can lay in bed on his phone and safely drink it without spilling

Grilled cheese

Kahoot music

Remus:

Death waltz. Not the synthesia no the one that takes 14 people to play.

Canoeing

Obviously he has close combat weapons but have you thought about giving him a bow and arrow? I have and yes thats a vibe because he is one of three people I've ever met with those vibes ok

Portable speakers

He is bonfires and fireworks.

He is hyperfixating on something and writing a story until 4 in the morning.

Potions!

The fact that witches ingredients are actually just named strange things but are edible somethings? Like mustard seeds being newts eyes and the like

Acid

In my human anatomy class we dissected deer hearts and when we found the blood clots we called them the Forbidden Jellies.

The county fair

The circus that comes around at fall festival time

Homecoming game in football/rugby

I feel like if he played an instrument he'd be a baritone

The lime green smoke Disney villians have

Roman:

Zootopia the movie

Hopping. Or bouncing in place.

My family's crest?? I think its because of his crest but he had those vibes before the outift upgrade???? Idk

The ponytail thing that give you a unicorn horn when you've got short hair but bangs that are beginning to grow out

He is picnics at the park

He is also going shopping

He is also dancing in the rain at four in the morning with the outside lights on and the music blaring but its ok the neigbors are four acres away and they sleep like the dead.

When I went to my first metal concert and I saw the mosh pit? The exhilaration that comes with wanting to join but not wanting to get crushed is a Roman thing.

Pancakes

Cold pizza at midnight

Succulents!

Fire and cane whiskey

The warm smiles that the bearer never gets to see because they don't get the chance to see it in a reflection

Butterscotch

Janus:

Springtime showers that makes snowmelt rivers

Prom. Dont ask this is just a him vibe ok

He seems like the guy that would make a blanket cacoon/nest when his bedsheets are in the wash and can I say mood

Sunlight

Looking off my back porch and seeing the feilds of corn beginning to dry out in late fall every three years.

Pumpkin soup

Apple cider

Lemonade

Not only is he snowmelt rivers he is also the first thunderstorm of summertime

Sun tea. Not the brand the stuff that you make via harnessing the suns power

Cucumber facemasks

Wildflower honey

The person who youd never guess goes to comic con but is actually the one who wins first place in the costume contest every year

Oversized sweaters

German Sheppards and yellow labs sunbathing after playing for hours

Antique mirrors

Burlap canvas bags

Oil paint

Espressos at ten at night

Late night chinese food runs

Dragons

Spice. Not the average spice either I'm talking could eat a carolina reaper and yes he'll be more red but he could still talk and thats more than I can say for myself

Virgil:

The red rubber balls from kick ball in elementary. By god I can smell the plastic just thinking about it

Flappy stims! Almost every time I flap he comes to mind I never really questioned it

The weighted blanket my dad got that I steal from him all the time

'He's a Mary poppins in a world of hasselhoffs" my friend once said that not even talking about Virgil but like. Come on.

Basically all of Star Lord's vibes are Virgils

Deadpool

Jack Skellington (kinda obvs)

Sample perfumes that are like the size of a pinky

Telescopes

Not writing an essay but instead learning all about world history or astronomy or psychology

Earings. Specifically hoops

Black pearls

Boardwalks that have tiny shops along them with a bunch of food.

Going to a club or a party with flashing lights and even though you're kinda nervous you have fun and live like tomorrow is still a dream away.

Ripped movie posters that the theater is selling

Tying ropes together to make nets.

Fairy lights

Taping movie theater tickets to your wall after you've gone and seen it

Scarecrows sitting on bales of hay at sunset next to my willow tree and the cicadas are on their 13th year so they're the loudest they'll ve until another 13 years have passed

The glint in someone's eye when they think of something mischievous

Bang by AJR

The corpse bride's tale/song

Patton:

The lazer eye meme. This one

Graham Crackers. Not smores, not candy crack-just the cracker ok

Pep rallies

The pet store??

Sugar sculptures

Corn pits (strictly midwestern thing)

Driving for hours upon hours and seeing the strange statues some towns have as you pass them by

Silver sparkles

Art herpes glitter

Photo booths

Riding in the back of a pickup truck on the county's main road

Wedding crystals cabinet where you put the fancy china you're going to give to your children that never gets used once but is probably worth half your house

The chubby bunny challenge

The moment when you tip your chair back too far and you know it but you can't do anything because you'll be on the floor in a second anyway

The thing maya did from Girl Meets World when she slammed lockers closed and caused the chalkboard to let its dust fly

Dusk.

That moment when everything is going by so quickly so you step back and watch the world go by for only a few seconds but then you're back in the present laughing with your friends

Snow cones melting and getting the syrup all over your hands

Orange Side:

All things citrus but especially lemons no not oranges lemons

Sunglasses

Men in black 1 not the rest just the first

Pineapple too hes got a lot of pineapple vibes

Combat boots but with spikes

Also lace?

And tea. Like, all kinds of tea but especially the really expensive stuff that I've only tasted like twice thats imported from Ireland

Himalayan salt lamps.

Sensies. the wax melting things

Candles too

Once we meet him I'll have more but this is it for him for now

Thats it! If this gets notes I might do emile remy and thomas but I think I'll leave this be for the moment. Have a great day y'all!

[jonogueirawrites]

Save me from myself.

Chapter 20.

AO3.

Summary:

Their biggest battle has come, and wanting or not they have to go.

With everything almost over, Lillian still needs to fight one more thing before she is done.

 TW: violence, mention of blood, death, mention of death, suicidal thoughts, suicidal tendencies.

Wait for me.

Lillian watched Bucky sleeping soundly on her stomach. Her fingers running over his long hair and curling the strands around them to feel their softness against her skin.

Lilly was the happiest woman in the world. She had everything she never knew she wanted, no, that she needed.

The smile on her face stubbornly refusing to fade away, and not only because he loved her, but because he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, and she would make every minute count.

She would do anything to see him smile. She loved to hear his laughter, and it was such a difficult thing to make him laugh. The way his eyes crinkled, and his hair brushed his face. His hand on his chest, trying to control the contagious sounds escaping his delicious lips. Those were all she wanted to witness.

Bucky was a terrible cook. His food was always bland. She was sure if it were up to him, they would live on pizza. She didn’t mind, though. She loved to cook for and with him. Sharing the small space, telling jokes, or stories. They always had that need to touch. A light caress on the arm, a quick peck on the shoulder, a stolen kiss while the food got ready.

She loved sharing her days with him. Was it easy? No. Was it worth it? Hell, yeah.

His clothes, that generally were put away, somehow found their way into her drawers and any other surface in the house. Once, she found his t-shirt on the kitchen sink… She laughed, of course, but only after scolding him.

Did he have flaws? Yes, but who didn’t? The fact that he was there when she needed him was more than enough to cover for them.

When she woke up after a nasty nightmare, the time she spaced out and didn’t notice she had been crying. Or the day she had a panic attack and thought she would die… He was always there. He would always be there. Telling her to breath and focus on him. Soothing her with his hugs and kisses.

She had always dreaded coming back home. The feeling of emptiness and absolute loneness always finding their way into her heart and mind, but since he moved in with her, things had changed. Her life turned upside down. If before she didn’t want to go home… with him there, she simply never wanted to leave.

Lost in thought, she felt him moving. His eyes opened and scanned the place, his face softened when they landed on her. His hand caressed her cheek and pulled her close for a kiss. When his lips parted from hers, she heard three simple words that would change everything.

The sigh that he let out was filled with heaviness. His eyes looked at her, and she saw sadness in their depths. Her chest tightened, and her soul was filled with fear.

“They are coming.” His words playing over and over in her mind.

He stood up and headed to the door. She followed close to him. Suddenly too afraid to be alone.

The shadows started growing bigger. They looked at her with their bottomless eyes. Their rotten teeth displayed in wicked smiles framed in gnawed lips. Their bony fingers beckoning her closer.

Her attention was driven away when his fingers intertwined with hers, and his words laced her in hope.

“I’m here, Lilly.” She took a deep breath when he kissed her wrist. “And I’m not going anywhere without you.” His arms around her, making her feel safe. His nose caressing the skin on her shoulder, making her feel loved.

Their eyes turned to the cottage’s entrance. Steve walked in their direction, his eyes filled with regret.

“Good evening!” His nod was slow and deliberate. “I am really sorry for interrupting. I know I promised you two some-”

“Where is the fight?” Lilly felt Bucky’s fingers tightening their grasp around hers. Her heart crushed when his sorrowed voice reached her ears.

“It doesn’t matter.” She pulled him to her. Her hands cupping his face to rest her forehead on his chin. “We are not going.” She looked up into his eyes.

“Lilly.” His fingers on her skin was the last drop.

Standing in front of Bucky, she tried to shield him from the menace Steve brought with him.

“You can’t do this, Steve.” One step in his direction and the super-soldier lowered his eyes. “Not now, please!” she pleaded with a quavering voice. When Bucky’s arms enveloped her body, his warmth crushed her heart. “Steve, please…”

The man raised his head, and she saw tears in his eyes.

“I’m so sorry…”

Lillian turned to Bucky, and her tears rolled down her face. Her lips trembled, and she couldn’t speak.

Her tongue was tied, and unable to utter a sound, she punched his shoulder. Her head shook in silent no’s. Her fingers curled around his t-shirt.

“Lilly,” he tucked her hair behind her ears. His thumb on her lower lip, “it’s okay.” She wanted to scream when he kissed her. “I promise you everything will be okay.”

Her tears blurred her vision, and she barely saw his silhouette. Throwing her arms around his neck, she pulled him close and buried her face in the crook of his neck.

“If anything happens to him, Steve.”

“I know.”

Five minutes later, she was looking over her shoulder to steal a glance at the future she had to put on hold.

She twisted and twirled the ring on her finger. Her eyes kept stealing glances at Bucky, who smiled back at her at each and every opportunity, and she, sure as hell, committed every line of his face, every detail of his smile to her memory.

Steve explained to the team what was happening and what everyone needed to do. By the third time he asked her to tell him what he had just said, she not only told him what he wanted to hear but also reminded him that she had earned her place among them. Steve fell silent after that.

The quinjet approached their mark, and Lillian’s instinct screamed at her. When they breached the country’s frontier, and it finally came into view, she allowed her eyes to roam the treetops and buildings in pure awe.

“Welcome to Wakanda.” Bucky’s voice silk on her ears. His arms around her waist.

They landed in an open area. And soon, the team started to walk away to take their positions.

Bucky pulled her near, kissing her deeply. His voice quivering when he finally broke the silence between them.

“Wait for me.”

“Always.”

Lillian watched his back becoming one with the horizon. His frame walking away to take its place beside Steve. With a last hopeful breath, she turned and walked in the opposite direction.

She hated to be away from him. Not being able to have his back, to be there when he needed her. He was a super-soldier just like Steve was, and it was a silly thing to think he couldn’t defend himself.

Then why did she have this feeling in the pit of her stomach?

Her hands closed into a ball, and she drew blood from her lower lip. He said he would always be with her. He asked her to wait for him. All she needed was faith, faith in him. He had never lied or deceived her… so far.

Shaking her head, she dismissed the damned thoughts away. Focusing on the woman beside her, she got ready for what was to come.

-----

“Friday,” Bucky’s finger touched the earpiece. He walked slowly, with no hurry to reach his friend. He had one last thing to do before the end, “I need you to record a message for me, please.”

“At once, Mr. Barnes.”

“Steve,” he spoke softly as soon as he reached his friend, “I need you to do a favor for me, okay?”

T'Challa gave the order, and it all began.

----

Wanda was on the ground. Nat and Okoye fought Proxima Midnight face to face while Lillian stayed back to help the Witch. Once she was up, Lilly drew her weapons once again and joined the fight.

It was brutal. People running, fighting, dying. She moved across the battlefield, helping where she was needed. There was so much blood. Too much happening at the same time when suddenly it all just stopped.

She looked to her right, and not even in her wildest nightmares, she would have been able to imagine what was happening.

Without batting an eye, she started to run.

“Bucky!” she yelled on the earpiece. “Bucky, please, please, don’t do this to me.” She almost tripped and cursed loudly. “It’s not funny.” She could see Steve a few meters away. “Answer me right now!” she yelled at the top of her lungs when more and more people started disappearing around her. “Fuck…” Her soul so small, she could feel the cracks spreading. Crushing the hope away. Giving place to the smiling shadows.

Her feet dug the ground, and she kept focus in front of her. All around, people were screaming and crying. Mourning their losses.

No. That wasn’t going to happen to her. He had promised… he had promised.

Her fingers reached the ring; her hand touched her cheeks. The tears rolled down. Mocking, offending, laughing at her.

“Such a fool.” The shadows whispered in her ear. “Did you really think you could be happy?” She heard their laughter. “Did you really think anyone cared about you?”

There was a cold, cold shiver down her spine. She was almost there. A few more steps and she would be able to embrace him, smell him, kiss him.

“No one wants to be with you, little one.” Their numbing fingers making their way to her heart. “Did he try to stay out of this? Did he try to stay away? Did he even try to stay with you?” Her heart stopped when Steve looked up to meet her eyes. His silent apology saying it all.

“We’ve warned you, little one. We told you you were an animal no one would want. We called out to you, and we waited. You tried to fight us…. But here we are once again.”

Her knees hit the hard ground. A thin layer of dust swirled in the air. She punched, screamed, and cursed.

“We never lied to you. You don’t need to suffer anymore. We can end this. Just let us.”

She cursed the day she let him in. She cursed the minute she fell for him. The second she gave him her soul. She cursed him to hell.

“Only us. We are the only ones who love you…”

“No,” she answered them in a whisper. “Shut up.” She grasped her ears, trying to shut them.

“Oh… You still hope? Do you think he will walk out of the bushes and kiss your pain away?” Their laughter beating in the rhythm of her dying heart. “LISTEN TO US!”

Lilly’s head snapped back. Her throat hurt when her scream finally escaped. The few birds who dared watch her struggle flew into the bright blue sky.

Someone hugged her, but their touch burned like hell. She fought to get free of the embrace and finally got rid of the person. Turning around, her eyes met Steve’s. She saw his lips moving, but his words never reached her.

She pushed him. She punched him. She cursed him.

Deep down, she knew it wasn’t his fault, but he stole their last moments together. She could have been with him until the end. She could have been the last thing he saw, the last thing he kissed.

She punched him until she had nothing left, and Steve was able to finally mourn with her.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered into her hair. “I should have… I… I…”

“Don’t.” Her voice loud and clear. “Don’t you dare!” she shouted at him.

“He was my friend, Lillian!” It was his turn to yell.

“Then what the fuck are you doing?” Her gaze hard. “He told me to wait,…” her voice cracked, “to wait for him.” She buried her head on Steve’s chest. Deep inside her mind, the shadows stirred. Laughing, singing a most familiar mocking tune. “And so I’ll wait.”

“Lilly, please…”

“I will wait until the end of times if I need.” Her breathing erratic and her mind set. “Don’t you ever talk to me again. Don’t you dare get close, Steve. I will kill you, do you understand?” Her hands grabbing his uniform. When he nodded, she let him go and stood up.

Her heavy steps taking her away. Her shadows the only company from now on.

Two weeks passed since the snap, and Lillian sat on the edge of the lake. Her fingers sending ripples on the calm water. Her thoughts a whirlwind of darkness.

A shadow crossed over the lake, and she looked up into the sky. Shielding her eyes from the blazing sun, she decided to eat something and stop her stomach from complaining about the lack of food.

Standing up, she had to lean on a rock; otherwise, she would pass out. She couldn’t remember when the last time she had eaten was. She made her way back to the cottage. One that she gave up everything for. She took all the money she had saved, she sold her parents’ company, she asked Tony one last favor, and she bought the last place she had been happy. The last place she had been with him.

She walked up the pebbled road. The flowers still decorated the place, and she allowed her fingers to touch the top of them. Their smell filling her nostrils with what one day she called amusement, but now was nothing more than sadness… a handful of what could have been’s.

Her trembling hands opened the door, and her eyes immediately feel on the gramophone, a silent melody played around. The jazzy notes too much for her to handle, so there, on the front door, she laid and finally gave in to the shadows. Her fingers caressed the ring, her eyes closed to a final view of their stolen future.

-----

Lillian kept going not because she wanted to, but because she promised she would wait for him. Minutes became hours. Hours became days. Days became a blur.

The garden around the house a proud testament that whoever lived there was filled with kindness, but long before the winter came, the flowers withered away. The fireplace was filled with ambers struggling to keep the place lit until they, too, were gone. The house was shrouded in the harsh winter darkness.

Lillian sat on the cold floor with her back leaning on the sofa. The only warmth in the place came from the lonely tear on her face.

She was tired and powerless to wait. Every day her strength faded a little at a time. She tried and tried to hang onto the small flame in her heart. She tried to cling to her promise. But the shadows…

The shadows were patient and calculating. Never speaking, only whispering. Murmuring things she couldn’t understand. Appearing in a simple blink. Hiding in the corner of her eyes. Making her question how much sane she still was.

Not really trying to muffle their evil laughter.

Long ago, she gave up leaving the place. She never went to the city for supplies until one day, they started to show up at her doorstep. Just like magic. Out of thin air.

She knew that all she had to do was to stand up and open the door, and once again, they would be there. Every little thing she might have needed.

Her body was so heavy that she slipped and lay on the floor. The blanket barely covering her at all. Her fingers trying to reach his heart in her hand.

From behind the cabinet, out of the shadows, she saw him walk to her.

“Ready, little one?” It had his features, his voice, but not his smile. Not that it was different; it was just the coldness in it. The way he stared down at her. “Go on.” He flashed her another one of his beautiful smiles. “Just grab my hand. We will be happy again. I promise you.” He neared his hand to her.

“Really?” Her voice a whisper. Her words rasping her parched lips on their way out.

“Have I ever lied to you?” He tilted his head. “Have I ever broken a promise?” There it was again, his beautiful smile.

She struggled to raise her hand. Her fingers touched his cold ones, and suddenly his smile grew. There was no space for his many teeth.

“Yes!” Was the last thing she heard before her eyes shut close.

There was a noise in the distance. A rumbling getting close. Hushing his no’s away.

A bang and someone calling her name. Her head was about to split open, and the door was kicked down. Footsteps around the house. Walking up the first steps upstairs. A familiar voice calling her name again. The footsteps walked away, disappearing into the kitchen.

The switch was turned on, and the room was bathed in light. A gasp reached her ears, and she barely felt fingers curling around her arms.

She was being carried, that was all she could understand. To where? Only the other person knew.

A glass was shoved on her lips, and when water touched her tongue, her mouth greedily swallowed the liquid.

Two voices shouted at each other, but as much as her brain tried to make sense of their owners, she passed out.

She didn’t know how long she slept, but she woke up sore as hell. Her mouth was dry, and her head was exploding. There was a machine on her left side. Needles stuck in her arms, and bags were hanging nearby.

With all the strength she could muster, she stood up and took the needles away. Covering her body with the silk robe and putting on the slippers, she headed downstairs, where an old jazz song played. A step at a time, she went down. Her body screaming at her to stop and go back to bed.

Coming downstairs, she saw a man sitting in the armchair. She tried to take one step forward but fell painfully on the floor. The man startled and turned around.

Steve’s eyes stared at her.

She wanted to be angry. To shout at him and send him away, but the smile he gave her was different, a very special one.

Allowing him to help her up, she thought he would lead her to the sofa, but they walked past it and into the kitchen.

Tony was talking animatedly to a little girl. Peter laughed with Natasha and Clint over the counter. Pepper prepared food in the small stove.

Steve coughed to get everyone’s attention, and six heads turned their way. Six smiles brightened the place until three voices reached her ears. The first one belonged to no one other than Thor, who laughed at something she could only guess. The second one was Bruce’s, who tried to explain something in all his seriousness, and the third one…

The third one made her run.

She struggled to put a foot in front of the other, but she made her way to the door. She was about to arrive at the wooden frame when a body collided with hers, almost sending her to the floor, but strong hands held her in place. And suddenly everything was still.

He was exactly how she remembered him to be, and before she could speak, he kissed her.

His arms circled her body, tightening the grasp around her. His fingers on her hair and his lips on hers.

Biting, pulling, soothing. Breathing life once again into her soul.

He parted the kiss way too soon, and the first thing his lips said to her was the only thing she never heard from him. Something she, herself, never dared to say.

“I love you.” His lips ghosted her wrist like he used to do. Sending the necessary force to restart her heart.

She couldn’t believe he was there. The wait had finally ended.

“I love you, too,” she said before kissing him again. “I waited for as long as I could…”

“I know. I know…” His fingers cleaned her tears away. “I’m here now. I'm not leaving anymore.”

“Are you sure?” There were doubts in her words.

“I’m a civilian now. No more fighting for me, unless it’s to fight for you.” His smile was contagious, and she smiled alongside him.

-----

Bucky had Lillian in his arms. He had almost lost her for good. He couldn’t stop staring at her when she suddenly frowned and slapped his shoulder.

“What was that for?” he asked, confused.

“Stop dying on us, alright?!” She pulled him closer and whispered in his ear. “It was never funny, and it will never be.”

He tried to contain the laughter but failed miserably.

“Alright, ma’am.” He pulled her legs up and carried her to the kitchen. Seating her on a nearby chair so they could start eating.

And out of the corner of his eyes, he saw her look at Steve. A smile and a nod from her, and he could easily say he had never seen his friend so happy before.

Her laughter made him smile, and he knew it would take a while to make up for the lost time.

Coming back all alone back in Wakanda. Disoriented and confused. Not knowing what happened. He could remember once thing clearly, though. Her name was the first thing he said. Her face the first thing he remembered.

Bucky watched her twirl the ring around her finger, and their future together played right before his eyes. He would stay by her side.

Forever this time.

                                      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hello! How are you?

The story itself ends here* and I REALLY hope you liked it but I will add an extra chapter with something special.

I would love to read your opinions on it so feel free to leave a comment!

Tight hugs from Brazil!

*I'm planning on continuing this fic when we finally have the TV Show on, so I guess I'll see you in 2021!

I hope you liked.

Likes and reblogs are super appreciated!

Bonus chapter to be written.

[drmedicsgamesurgery]

Danganronpa Togami Volume 3 Part 12 (Summary)

Oh boy things are getting crazy this chapter.

Thanks to @enoshima-pyon @shockersalvage​​ @jinjojess​​ @hopeymchope​​ 

CHAPTER 15- Trust, Choice, Hope, Despair, Pity, Sympathy, Sacrifice and, just maybe, a Conclusion

1.

> Enter Prague Castle

> Do not enter Prague Castle

2.

St. Vitus Cathedral is the largest church in the Czech Republic. It is located in the heart of Prague Castle. It is both a symbolic building in the Czech Republic and a royal tomb that has been there for generations. This representative building in Europe was said to have been built over six hundred years, so there should be many architects involved in its construction, and it is not known whether its construction policy has ever been offset. I pray for the soul of the original. That is, if there is such a thing.

3.

Then to follow on as usual.

4.

The story is simple. A young man tried to take over the world. 

A young man had extraordinary adventures one after the other, until finally, he got what he wanted, and was able to return home safely. And he lived happily ever after.

The problem is all of the means that were taken to that end.

5.

This story should have a happy ending.

6.

As soon as we entered St. Vitus Cathedral, we saw that God was standing in front of a large altar. The light shining through the stained glass shrouded his whole body, and his blond hair and blue eyes shone because of the thin pigment in his skin. God is bathed in this light enjoying this right of His. He huffs and says, "The time is five o'clock in the afternoon, not too late but not too early. I suppose the same could be said about my expectations."

The beautiful and charming voice echoed through the church, and I felt blessed.

Byakuya Togami.

My God.

"Sorry I am late, Byakuya-sama."

After only a few hours of reconvening, I felt as if I had been away from him for a hundred years, my voice trembled.

"I didn't say it was not too late or too early. Don't make me overturn my recognition."

“I am very sorry, I have kept you waiting.”

"I didn't wait for you at all. It was you, 'Blue Ink', who is currently covered in scars."

“I guess this is the so-called summer experience.”

"Can you write ‘Journey Under the Midnight Sun’ in your state?"

"About that..."

"Do not hesitate without my permission."

"I lost Borges. I am no longer the Super High School Level Secretary. I can't write ‘Journey Under the Midnight Sun’ anymore."

"Since you can't write ‘Journey Under the Midnight Sun’ I have no more uses for you. Wherever you now wish to go, then go."

"This is where I want to be and it’s not ‘Journey Under the Midnight Sun’ that brought me here, either. I heard that broadcast from you."

"I didn't intend to call you here."

"Alright."

I didn't take his words seriously. He looked at me. I felt that the situation raised some red flags. He deliberately cleared his throat and changed the topic. "If you have any questions, I can answer them for you, and only you."

Shinobu asks him how he managed to escape the train wagon, and he says that he borrowed a phone and called Sonia. She thought he was the Impostor since their voices are the same so she opened the door and he escaped. She was also the one who threw the incendiary bomb at Shinobu.

"You borrowed a phone? How is that even possible?"

"I borrowed the phone from a soldier who pointed his gun at me. That other party happily loaned it to me, and even said, 'I have always supported you.'" 

After all, even now there are people who support Byakuya Togami as a result of him being Super High School Level Heir and know he is unlikely to do anything as rash as world domination. As a result, it’s no wonder people are still supporting him.

Kazuya arrives on the scene and Byakuya at first asks if he would be angry with him, though Kazuya says to forget about it. Kazuya has something that he is missing and reports on Minoru’s death. Byakuya responds that he won’t pity Kazuya’s loss and states he will never die. He’ll crush Kazuya’s ambitions, achieve world conquest, and then lead the Togami Family towards a new frontier. 

“I’d stake the Togami name on it.”

Shinobu interrupts to ask what he intends to do about the Impostor, to which Byakuya begrudgingly responds he will let them escape. He says that there is no need to worry about him, since he received a leak saying that all of the Despair High Schoolers fled.

"Oh, I won't run away."

The voice comes from behind and Shinobu turns around. It’s the Impostor, standing on the altar with them, wearing the same style clothes, the same parted hairstyle, the same glass and the same everything as Byakuya, next to a silver coffin. The only difference being the large amount of fat, which the Imposter proudly bulges out. Imposter smiles behind their glasses and says "Heh, on this stage, I am also one of the actors. Of course I won’t leave. Let's start the performance and complete this story."

Apparently, when Byakuya was retrieved, so was the Imposter and thus they have been together in the castle for the time being. Byakuya says his victory is at hand, but the Imposter comments that the Imposter will win. Byakuya’s history will lose to the story the Imposter wrote. The Imposter lists examples of times where people in history created falsehoods and promoted them as truth towards the outcome they want. Imposter remarks that Blue Ink would know about that all too well.

I used to write the biography known as "Journey Under the Midnight Sun". I was devoted to writing a book that was purely composed of historical facts and excludes all virtual components. My efforts ended in failure. I wrote only the things I wanted to see. I saw it, and all of it was fabricated. It was a fictional work. ‘Jesus Christ is a white man’. [1] ‘Takeda is a stupid man’. [2] ‘The Empress Dowager Cixi is cruel and tyrannical’. [3] ‘The Japanese army is brave and warlike’. [4] It's a fabricated story all too similar to those. A fake book that people can't stand. A story of falsehoods far removed from the truth.

"Heheh, the truth is not important at all. Stories have the powerful ability to warp and distort history. Listen, Mr. Authentic, no matter how perfect your history, I will impose a story that suits my ideals, push others down, be greedy, endless. A history you cannot overturn."

Byakuya calls his bluff, but the Imposter is confident it can be pulled off.

“However, before my story starts, other fake books must be exposed to their true colors. It is enough to have one fake book in the annals of history. I will cut off all the other fake books and make decisions for them in their stead." says the Imposter.

As soon as he says that, a person drops from the ceiling. It’s the Super High School Level Soldier, Mukuro Ikusaba. She immediately charges Shinobu, who thinks that the reason she was saved by her from Yuika was that everything was planned. She must be one of the Despair High Schoolers.

“You will not harm my sister!!”

Kazuya quickly intervenes, using his dim light-blue lightsaber to hit the military knife the attacker is holding and making it fly away. However, she is holding another one on her left hand, and uses it to cut open Kazuya’s right arm. An unidentifiable red-black liquid spurts out. The lightsaber gradually disappears. But she doesn’t stop there. She kicks him on the ground and presses him under her foot. She then stabs his left eye with her military knife and pulls it out of its eye socket. She then gives it to the Impostor and steps aside.

“Heh, and here… is the first book.”

Shinobu is horrified by the scene of the Impostor playing with Kazuya’s left eye. As a reaction she shielded her own eye with her hand, and came to a realisation. She also had an empty socket. Her right eye, where Borges once was. Not only that but his right arm, where her fake arm also was. 

A prosthetic arm and eye?

"...return it to me," Kazuya turned his face with only one eye towards the Impostor "Give me my talents, give it back to me, give it back to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee----"

"Kazuya Togami, don't call false abilities talents," said the Impostor "Your sword is not a talent at all. It’s a mechanically made fake. How can that be called a talent?"

Kazuya exclaims that Imposter is wrong, and that the sword was a gift given to him by god himself in his time of need, and not to joke around like that. He will not accept what Imposter says as true.

"What are you talking about..." My voice was shaking. "And Kazuya... your eyes, your hands...what happened?"

"These? Sister, what are you talking about? They have been like that from the very beginning."

“From the very beginning? When was the beginning you are talking about?”

“When my village was attacked, I lost them then.”

"Impossible..."

"Heh heh, it seems that the older sister and younger brother are completely immersed in the fake book’s unreality. Kazuya Togami, Don’t you understand that not only was your sword fake, but your memory as well? The K2K system is installed in your eyes."

"So what?"

"So your existence is illusory. You have had a very long dream thanks to the K2K system of the failed 'Bible Plan'. That's all. Did you like your dream? After all, it was a dream tailored for you."

"I am me, I am Kazuya Togami and this will not change!"

“The Kuchinashi Village fire and the Biggest, Worst Incident in the History of the Togami Family are events that did happen but they have nothing to do with you. You were not there when they happened, this is the reality.”

"No! I am Togami Kazuya! My body burnt up in Kuchinashi village. My hope burnt up at Touajou Castle!"

"The judgement begins."

The Impostor picked up Kazuya’s eyeball and crushed it without hesitation.

"AGH!” cried Kazuya, but then he fell silent, staring with his mouth open wide, body stunned. I knew that when his eyeball was crushed, something vital in his heart was destroyed.

"Heh, can you still say that you are Kazuya Togami? The memories of the 'Biggest, Worst Incident in the History of the Togami Family', the memories of 'Blue Ink' and the life connected with the Togami’s, these are closely related. Everything is a dream that starts with the story AI's K2K system. Now that has been destroyed, that history and those stories have abandoned you, you are not Kazuya Togami. You are no one."

“No, I am… I am Kazuya Togami…”

Tears rolled down Kazuya’s face. Seeing my younger brother quietly cry tears of failure, I was upset. I stood in front of Kazuya, screaming at the Imposter and said, "You are not allowed to bully him!"

“Older sister, ‘Blue Ink’.”

“I am Kazuya’s sister.”

"Your memory is also utterly and completely false."

She turns it around to him and asks isn’t he is in the same boat? However for the Imposter, his lack of identity is his strength and he never has to wonder ‘Who am I?” unlike Shinobu or Kazuya.

"I will not worry about this kind of thing, because I am who I am."

"I have said it a hundred times. Your current self, your 'I' is an ambiguity created by the K2K system."

"Even if my memories are all falsified, I am still alive like this. Even if there is nothing in my mind to rely on, I have this flesh and this consciousness."

My existence is indeed ambiguous. I am alive now. I am thinking. Nothing can guarantee me that I am, except for this irreplaceable physical feeling. Even so, I will not waver, I will not collapse, I will stand firmly on the ground. I will clench my teeth and tell me that my memory is not important at all. The K2K system is not important at all, because I can be self-sufficient in this kind of story, at least now.

A scream echoes in the cathedral. It’s Kazuya, who fainted and fell on the ground. The Impostor doesn’t pay attention to him and keeps talking to Shinobu (who is relieved Kazuya is unconscious and hopes he’ll be better when he wakes up). The Imposter is impressed by Shinobu and comments that she has a solid ego, yet it’s still fragile. Imposter however will not be affected by whatever ‘Blue Ink’ says. After all, the Imposter is the one who shall become Byakuya Togami. 

“So if Kazuya Togami is not really Kazuya Togami, then who is he?” questions Shinobu.

“Kazuya Togami… may not be a real person in the first place.” [5]

“I am so tired of this talk already.”

“So then, who are you?”

“I am Shinobu Togami, of course.”

"Your basis is very simple. As long as there are two elements, the mind and the body, you can form the so-called self. Now then, allow me to eliminate all of that for you, just like the anonymous one on the floor as asleep as the dead. Let me destroy everything you know."

"I will not be destroyed, and Kazuya will be revived. If you believe in yourself, you will be able to keep yourself, and Kazuya needs to understand that soon."

"After hearing what I am going to say next, I don't know if you can still stick to the same opinion. Then I will decide for the second fake book," said the Imposter. "Do you know your own true identity?"

"My own true identity?"

"That said, why do you think you were being loaded up with the K2K system in the first place?"

“This is because…”

In order to prevent Hope’s Peak Academy from finding out the existence of the K2K system, K agreed to install it in Borges. At least, that is what I heard.

"If he just wanted to hide the existence of the K2K system, there was no need to put it in your body. Have you not thought about it? Has your ‘God’ not told you anything?"

When I heard him say this, I almost subconsciously turned my eyes to Bakuya Togami. Byakuya’s eyes did not change their colors, and they did not waver, but instead straightened to my sight. If this was a peaceful time, his attitude would have made me happy, but now it made me feel terrible.

But before she can think about anything, he speaks again. Byakuya Togami ordered Borges to be placed in her body. Shinobu comments that it was for the creation of his autobiography, but the Imposter points out that for the Super High School Level Secretary having Borges would be largely pointless. Byakuya knew what kind of havoc the K2K system would bring, yet he still ordered it to be placed in her body. He knew her personality and memories would become warped. Yet, he still ordered it anyway… a ruthless and cruel God, is he.

"The reason why he put the K2K system into your body is because there was a reason for him to do that. He needed to give you a false story that will make you believe in a false history."

I was extremely eager to find the truth from that sentence. I wanted to find out the truth before the Imposter announced it. At least to make myself more calm. However, before I found the truth, the Imposter had already said the next sentence.

"The Togami you hopelessly thought yourself to be was Shinobu.. Shinobu Togami is no longer in this world. She was killed in the Biggest, Worst Incident in the History of the Togami Family."[6]

"...Who am I?"

"You are the 'Kudan', you are the Secret to the Togami Family’s Prosperity."

Translation Notes:

[1]  “Jesus is a white man.” This is a fairly common misconception due to the fact that many anglo-saxon paintings from the middle ages tended to draw him that way. In actual fact, since most of the bible took place in the middle east he more than likely had a bit of a tanned complexion.

[2] “Takeda is a stupid man”. I’m not 100% sure on this one but given context clues in the book I think it's safe to assume it’s referring to Lord Takeda Shingen. Funnily enough his original name was “Tarou” which is also Dadgami (Kijo) Demoncastles original name.

[3] ‘The Empress Dowager Cixi is cruel and tyrannical’. According to documents in China at the time, women in chinese culture were heavily disrespected so there was much slander put against her that it’s actually quite difficult to tell what is the truth and what is not.

[4] ‘The Japanese army is brave and warlike’. To specify this likely refers to the WW2 army as japan no longer has an official “army”, but they have the JSDF, which is basically just a self defense army. What she means by this is the sort of riled up patriotism that all countries in ww2 had to boost morale for their side, however the japanese army did some pretty nasty stuff to POWs and more. The type of war crimes you only hear about in horror films.

[5] If you want my theory, I believe Kazuya was a real person, however this person poised as Kazuya is someone we already do know. The one K mentioned in chapter 13 who worked on the Bible Plan, and became a psycho murderer. As for who the real Kazuya and Shinobu is, I suppose I shall get to that in the next chapter summary.

[6] Byakuya in DR1 also said they were Killed in the Legacy Crown Championship, but specified that he meant dead as Togami’s. This is possibly the same context for the reason I shall get to in the translations notes next time.

To Be Continued

https://drmedicsgamesurgery.tumblr.com/GameSurgeryDRTranslations

[fallenfurther]

The beginning

This is an alternative WereVirgil story/universe where he gets his werewolf genes from his mother. This was meant to be a short introduction to set the scene for Virgil’s arrival, however it became a chapter of its own. Don’t worry the next chapter will contain baby WereVirgil. 

Many thanks to @soniabigcheese for thinking of the idea of WereVirgil and letting me take the character on a different journey. 

Enjoy

Lucille had been a bit apprehensive when Jefferson Tracy first asked her to dinner. They had been chatting all night and the conversation had flowed so naturally that they were surprised when they realised it was well past midnight. He had asked her after walking her to her hotel and her first inclination was to decline. He was Jefferson Tracy the astronaut, whose job meant he would be away for long periods at a time. Jefferson, call me Jeff, Tracy who was gaining fame for the firsts he was doing as he pushed the frontier of space travel. It was this fame that worried her. She couldn’t afford to be in the news, it wasn’t safe for people like her to be so well known. But as she looked into his face, see his wide smile and caring eyes directed only at her, she felt something more. Lucille took the risk, said yes and gave the man her number.

Two days later Jeff took her to a beautiful family restaurant which served comforting American classics, and again they talked the night away. One date had followed another and on the evenings they were apart they spent on the phone, and when he was in space, they sent little messages back and forth for the other to pick up when they could. Without even realising it, Lucille fell in love with the spaceman.

 Jeff often told her of the marvel of the moon, entirely unaware of the significance it had on her life, and even brought a piece of the moon back for her. He had placed it in her hand and Lucille was astonished by its weight. She half expected her body to react to it, but nothing happened. It felt so innocent, yet the rock held so much power over her. It was looking at that rock that she realised she had to tell him. It was a full moon that night, and she hated having to make excuses to him, but the fear in her heart always got the better of her. How would he react when he told her? Would he accept her? Her heart would break if he didn’t, and she would howl the night away if he walked away. She looked up from the rock into his blue eyes. Jeff’s face filled with worry as he took her face in his hands.

“My dear Lucy.” His finger wiped the tear that had escaped her eye. “There’s no reason to be sad.”

She leaned into his hand, savouring it in case it was the last time he held her. She took a deep breath and steeled herself for what was to come. Looking into his eyes she spoke. “There’s something I need to tell you…” and she explained everything. The moon rock never left her hand, her fingers turning it over and stroking its edges as she described to him her true nature, the part she hid from the world.

When she had finished Jefferson Tracy sat down on the couch and said nothing. Lucille sat on the chair opposite watching him in the silence, and expression of deep thought on her face. Her stomach was knotted, the piece of the moon her only distraction from the unsettled atmosphere in the room. Eventually Jeff leaned back and looked at her, really looked at her. She knew he was looking for anything that might look wolf-like, any hint of what she was going to become tonight. But there was no fear.

“Werewolves are meant to be vicious creatures, they used to stalk the world taking lives. They were meant to have been hunted to extinction.”

“We haven’t been. There are still genes being passed down families, and among the rumours, there are those who have been born a werewolf with no family history. My family carry a dominant gene, and I inherited mine from my father, who got it from his. It’s normal in my family, and we’ve even gotten together on the blood moon. But there are still hunters out there, still believing we are evil. That’s why we keep it secret, and why we tend to avoid living in urban areas. We need the privacy and space. We don’t kill people unless forced. My uncle had to take out a gang of hunters when he first moved. He had to protect my cousin.”

Jeff beckoned her over and Lucille’s heart lifted, he wasn’t repulsed. She joined him on the sofa where he pulled her in close. They sat like that talking things through. Jeff listened to her explanations and stories, absorbing the information and asking genuine questions. Time passed and dinner was forgotten. Feeling safe in his arm, Lucille was happy and contented, only to be startled by her muscles tightening. The change was happening. She got up in a fluster and ran to her room, shutting the door behind her. She yanked her clothes off, tearing one or two of the seams with her growing body. She hadn’t locked the door, but Jeff stayed the other side, calling through it.

“I’m changing.” Her voice already sounding rougher. She curled up on the floor behind the door and let the change come. When it was complete, she sat up and looked at the door. Jeff was still there; she could hear his head as he moved it against the door. There was concern in his voice, which pulled on her heart. This man loved her, and he was still trying to reach her despite all she’d told him.

“It’s done” she barked. She stepped back from the door, apprehension filling her, “You can come in now.”

***

Jeff opened the door slowly, still on his knees from where he’d been leaning against the door. His heart was beating fast in his chest. This day had taken an unexpected turn, but somehow it felt okay. He loved Lucy. That was what made this easier. He didn’t want to live without her, so he had to see this, so he could accept her. He froze when he saw her. In the room, amongst Lucille’s discarded clothes was a sandy coloured large dog, but what struck him most was the eyes. They were still Lucy’s eyes. Slowly he crawled into the room and stretched his hand out towards her. The dog moved closer pushing it’s face into his hand.

“Hello Jeff.” It spoke, her voice deeper that it was normally.

“Hello Lucy” was all he could respond, because what else was there to say. He brought his other hand up and held both sides of her face, just as he had done earlier. His thumbs stroked the thick hair, his eyes never leaving hers. Then he drew his face to hers, his nose to her snout. “Oh Lucy” he muttered, before taking his hand and stroking the hair down her back. Lucy turned and pusher her body into his lap leaning her head on his shoulder so her eyes were still looking at his, tongue hanging out, just like a dog. Jeff laughed and started to stroke her vigorously, leading his leg to be pounded by her tail. He sat there a while, contented with being close to Lucy, finding comfort in stroking her hair.

“I’m hungry.” Lucy stated while getting up, leaving Jeff feeling cold without her warmth. He followed Lucy to the kitchen where he cooked them dinner. The rest of the evening was spent curled up on the couch, where he inevitable fell asleep with Lucy in his arms. Jeff woke up that morning to the sight of a naked Lucille sleeping against him. He smiled as he carefully extracted himself from beneath her, light hair coating is trousers. He grabbed a blanket and covered her up and leaving her to sleep.

***

The night of the full moon became their stay-in date night. To everyone else it was a cute time the couple reserved for each other. When it fell on the weekend they would go away together, somewhere secluded and alone. No matter where they were, the full moon was their time, and Jeff even went to one of the blood moon parties, where he was surrounded by an array of werewolves of different sizes and colours. Seeing them playing together made Jeff think of how misunderstood they really were, and he swore to himself to protect Lucy from anyone who thought they were evil. The small forms of the young werewolves were exceptionally dog-like and they would run about chasing balls and begging for attention. When one dropped a ball at his feet and sat wagging it’s tail expectantly, Jeff couldn’t help but think ahead to the future, where he might have a young pup like this. He picked up the ball and threw it for the brown-haired wolf, whom he later found out was called Austin. Seeing everyone for lunch the next day, all in human form, was the icing on the cake and a 5-year-old Austin sat between Lucy and him and pestered him about all things to do with the moon. He promised the boy to get him a moon rock next time he was on the moon base.

It was seven months later, after he returned from a four-month stay on the moon base, that the dangers of being a werewolf hit home. After reacquainting himself with his fiancé he showed her the small rock he’d brought back for Austin, only for Lucy to start crying. On the last full moon hunters had found the family and killed them all, leaving only Austin’s baby sister alive, who hadn’t inherited the gene. Jeff’s heart broke, the rock in his hand suddenly weighing twice as much. He wept with Lucy in joint grief, and they posted the rock to be buried with the boy. They took the risk and attended the funeral. Jeff and Lucy discussed their future in detail that night, coming up with ways to keep themselves and their future family as safe as they could, not wanting to acknowledge how little power they had.

[spaceorphan18]

Klaine Fic: Waiting For This Moment (3/12)

Title: Waiting For This Moment Rating: T Warnings: Shenanigans Word Count: 1234 Summary: Kurt Hummel thought he was going to be alone the rest of his life.  And then he met a guy who might end up being something more.  The possibilities are endless - now if only luck would continue to go his way…

Canon Compliant (as much as possible) starting with Never Been Kissed.  This chapter is A Very Glee Christmas. 

A/N: So, @ckerouac and I were inspired by THIS POST - the general idea being that I’d start a fic and then she’d write the next chapter, derailing my story into another genre, trope, etc, whatever she likes.   And then in the next chapter, I’d have to pull it back again.  

My chapters (the odd ones) are - or are going to try to be - the story of Kurt Hummel as he navigates the possible romance with Blaine Anderson between the episodes of Never Been Kissed and Original Song, trying to remain as canon compliant as I can possibly make it.  Meanwhile, RB’s chapters (the even ones) are going to be – well, I have no idea what she’s going to throw at me - and that’s the fun of it.  

So, sit back and enjoy the shenanigans we’re going to throw at you.  Have fun! Because we’ll sure be having it. ;)

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Kurt sat on the big, leather couch, resting against one arm, with his feet tucked under his feet.  It was late that night, and he just couldn’t sleep, so he had decided to come out to the common room to watch the fire and maybe read the new copies of Vogue that had finally arrived.  But that wasn’t happening.   Instead, he watched the soft flicker of the warm fire, and how it danced along the Christmas decorations lining the hearth.  Beside him, Pavarotti gives a few chirps, the bird happily keeping him company.  

“I wish I had your joy, Pavarotti,” Kurt whispered, reaching into the cage to stroke his head a few times.  

Christmas time had always been a hard time for Kurt.  Spending Christmas Eve so far away from his dad didn’t help.  He couldn’t help but wonder what everyone was doing back home - and as much as he loved Dalton, as much as he felt safe here - it didn’t quite feel like home.  

He heard footsteps from behind, and turned to see that Blaine, already in his pajamas, had come in to the room.  On his way to the couch, he flicked on the old boombox, finding a radio station that was playing some Christmas music.  A soft, instrumental version of Winter Wonderland filled the air.  

“I saw the light on, and wondered who was in here,” Blaine said, he grinned as he sat on the couch next to Kurt, not at the other end but right next to him. “What are you doing up so late?” 

“Couldn’t sleep,” Kurt said, pushed the magazine on his lap to the pile on the floor.  It wouldn’t be read tonight.  “Just thinking about things.”  

“Ah, things,” Blaine said with a nod.  He stared into the fire, and Kurt wondered if he wasn’t the only one who had things on his mind.  “Wanna talk about it?”  

Kurt gave a faint smile.  “You know, I’ve been having these weird dreams.  About… us,” he dared to admit.  

Blaine looked at him curiously, without concern.  

“Like, last night we were on the Starship Enterprise,” Kurt continued.  “We had dinner, and I simulated cheesecake, and Pavarotti was a Tribble that you brought on board, which I said we were definitely not keeping.  And, I don’t know, the rest is a bit fuzzy.”  

Blaine threw his head back with a laugh.  “Pavarotti would make a great Tribble!” he leaned over Kurt’s body to poke a finger into Pavarotti’s cage.  

Kurt closed his eyes - enjoying the moment of Blaine being so close.  He must have just showered because he smelled clean, like soap and raspberries and that Blaine smell that made him so dizzy.  

“Maybe you should make him a fuzzy little cap,” Blaine said, settling back in beside Kurt.  “He certainly squawks a little like a Tribble, don’t you think?” 

Kurt let out a chuckle.  “Blaine…” 

“So, Star Trek dreams, huh?” Blaine said, wiggling his eyebrows.  “Is this some kind of hidden fantasy or are the guys keeping you up with their bizarre retro marathons.”  

Kurt gave a little shrug.  “I have no idea… Maybe I’m still adjusting to this… new frontier.”  

The heaviness set in again.  The music had changed into something slower, a little sadder.  Why were there sad Christmas songs? Didn’t that just defeat the purpose?  

“Kurt, we can talk about it,” Blaine said, resting a comforting hand on Kurt’s shoulder.  “Whatever it is - you know you can come talk to me if you need someone, right?” 

Kurt leaned in, a little to Blaine’s touch.  Blaine always touched him; on the shoulder, his hand, the small of his back.  He was beginning to get greedy - he wanted more.  He always wanted more Blaine.  

Kurt let out a heavy sigh.  “Christmas is just… difficult.  I miss my dad.  We’re not huge holiday people, but you know, this is around the time mom died and - I mean, I’ll see him tomorrow of course, this is just… the first time I’ve been away from him for a holiday, you know?”  

“Oh, Kurt, I’m so sorry…”  

Kurt tried to shrug it off.  “It’ll be fine.  Dad says we’ll just do presents tomorrow night, and then have eggnog and cookies like we do every year.  And Finn and Carole and god, probably Rachel will be around, and it’ll be fine.  You know?”  

Blaine gave him a half smile.  “That sounds nice.  Much better than what I have to look forward to which is, well, nothing really.  I kind of wish I was staying here.  We don’t really do holiday traditions.”  

Kurt tilted his head.  “No traditions? Really?”  

Kurt wasn’t sure he had ever seen Blaine look sad before - but he kind of looked away before speaking again.  “Dad’s parents come over and we have an awkwardly cold and silent ham dinner for three hours.  I get some cash for a present and that’s about it.  That is until New Year’s when Mom and Dad host their annual party which consists of me trying to stay out of the way as mom gets trashed, and a million old straight people make out at midnight.”  

Kurt daringly reached out for Blaine’s hand - he could be the comforting one this time, and gave it a squeeze.  Blaine looked down at their clasped hands and smiled.  I could kiss you, Kurt couldn’t help but think - I could kiss you at midnight, and everything would be fine… 

“This year my brother is graciously giving us his presence,” Blaine said suddenly, with a bit of sarcasm in his voice.  “I can’t imagine what kind of drama he’s brought from L.A.”  

“You have a brother?” Kurt asked - Blaine had never mentioned that he had one.  He never talked about his family in general, and this felt like a big deal.  

“He’s… not worth talking about.  Everyone thinks he’s the most wonderful thing since sliced bread.”  

Kurt took the opportunity.  “I find it hard to believe that anyone would be more charming and wonderful as you.”  

Blaine grinned, looked down, and genuinely blushed.  “I, uh… thank you.”  

The music changed to a gentle saxophone playing Baby, It’s Cold Outside, and Kurt smiled fondly at the memory from a few days ago.  Their first duet ever - and they sounded amazing.  He called dibs on Blaine being his duet partner for life - he just hadn’t told Blaine that yet.  

He looked over to Blaine, who was staring intently at him, his eyes dark and golden in the firelight.  He wondered what Blaine was thinking - maybe that if they leaned in a little closer, they could brush their lips together.  Share that first kiss that seemed so tauntingly close.  

Kurt shifted, wanting to move in, but at the last second, leaned his head against Blaine’s shoulder instead.  Blaine seemed to be just fine with that, and clasped their hands tighter as he leaned his head against Kurt’s.  It felt right, having Blaine there next to him.  He wouldn’t be with his dad or his family for the holiday, but Blaine felt, already, like a bit of home was there with him.  

The clock began to chime - midnight.

“Merry Christmas, Blaine.”  

“Merry Christmas, Kurt.  I hope you get everything on your list this year.”  

The radio changed over to Mariah Carey, and Kurt smiled.  There was only one thing he wanted, and god, he hoped he would be able to get it soon. 

[x-wings-and-lightsabers]

There For You

This was from an idea that @x-wingwarriorbbpoe8 and I had when we were talking about Oscar’s character from “Triple Frontier”. I would have written it with him, but I don’t have Netflix and can’t watch it. *cries* So, here’s some Poe for you instead. This is my first time writing anything like this.

Pairing: Poe Dameron x Reader

Words: 1,622

Summary: Reader has had issues with assault in the past. It all changes when she meets Poe Dameron.

WARNING: A bit angsty. Mentions of physical/sexual assault. Reader is called a few gender slurs. Please don’t read or leave hateful comments just because of this. It’s a REAL-LIFE issue. Just scroll on by. 

Words could not explain the pain you felt. With each passing moment, the dark that cleared from your vision was replaced with a throbbing in your head. After a while, you were finally able to lift your head and look around. 

Your clothes. You were naked. Bruises littered your chest, abdomen, and thighs. You could feel you were bleeding from your head somewhere. Everywhere just...hurt. 

Your surroundings. You were behind some sort of building in a dark alleyway. Coruscant. That’s where you were. At least, where you thought you were. The sound of flying vehicles confirmed your suspicions. 

You sat up and curled in on yourself. You were alone, scared, confused. Feeling vulnerable even though it was dark. You couldn’t believe they’d taken advantage of you like that! You didn’t know what to do, so you did the only thing you could do.

You cried. You knew it wouldn’t help the situation, but you didn’t know what else to do. This happened all over the galaxy every day, to both guys and ladies. But you were lost. You cried for all the other victims of this, then cried for those lost to the same. Then, you cried because you made it out alive. 

You heard footsteps. They were coming back. You stopped your sobs and stayed still, trying to look dead. With all the pain you were going through, you could’ve sworn you were. 

A droid beeped and you cracked an eye open. You noticed an orange and white ball with a dome head. A man’s voice.

“Is she okay, BeeBee?” The world went black.

That was a few years ago. Now you were a member of the Resistance and had a small ring of friends. In those few years, you’d grown especially close to someone in particular. 

Poe Dameron was the man who’d saved your life in the alley that night. Had it been someone else, you wouldn’t be here, working on an A-Wing’s hyperdrive. It took you a while to tell him what happened, to build up that trust, but once you did, you’d become inseparable. He was really the only guy you felt comfortable around, but he was hardly here to hang out with. After all, he was a pilot, and you a mechanic.

However, there must always be an antagonist to every fairy tale. There was a new pilot, Talan, that always had his eyes trained on you in some way. A way that felt sexual, made you feel dirty and uncomfortable under his gaze. And today, it seemed your luck had run out.

Poe had a mission that morning, and he wouldn’t return until around midnight. That left you with your small group of friends, and they all went back to their rooms after they ate dinner to spend the rest of the evening in peace. With the pilots away, life on a Resistance base got boring, after all.

That left you vulnerable, and you didn’t like it. Not one bit. You were finishing up repairs on an old Y-Wing the higher-ups had managed to scrape up from Yavin 4. You’d put your tools away and walked a little ways back to your quarters with Rose Tico, chattering quietly about anything new. She eventually split off to go to her room, and you were alone again. 

You were coming up on your hallway when you heard footsteps suddenly come up behind you, a hand ferociously grabbing your H/L, H/C. Another covered your mouth. 

“Make one wrong move, and I’ll show you more stars than the galaxy can ever hope to hold.” Talan started to drag you back towards a supply closet when you heard a familiar voice.

“Hey, Cadet!” Poe walked up in his flight suit. You’ve never felt more relieved to see a man after the incident on Coruscant-until now.

“Oh, hello sir! You’re back early!” He tried to play innocent, but the damage had already been done.

“Let her go.” He didn’t comply.

“NOW! It’s an ORDER!” Talan tightened his grip on you, making you yelp, tears threatening to spill out of your eyes. 

“Shut it, bitch.” Poe walked forward with a calm face. You could see the fire burning in his eyes, even in the darkened section of the corridor.

“I said, let go of her.” His voice was calm with flickers of disgust.

“Why? Do you want her all to yourself, Commander?” The pilot sneered and you could feel the disgusting smirk against your neck. “Maybe you should take your turn.”

“What is wrong with you, Cadet? She’s a human being! Don’t you have any respect?” Talan scoffed.

“Why should I? She’s a whore!” Poe visibly stiffened but didn’t act.

“Do you think she had any control over what happened to her that night? Do you think you’re going to get your way with her because you think it’s right? Right to degrade her? To call her dirty? What if that was you? It can happen to ANYBODY! And there are people out there, past this system, all over the galaxy, that are silenced because of people like you. People that lack the decency to treat another human equally because of their past or their gender. So if you want to have any hopes of getting your wings, Cadet, I suggest you let her go.” 

Talan thought about it for a moment, then slowly let you go. You fell to the floor, sobs racking your body as you slumped to the floor. Poe walked up and sat down before he gently took you into his lap.

“And if you had even the SLIGHTEST bit of decency, you’d admit your mistakes and turn yourself in to your squad commander.” You looked up and saw the anger burning in Poe’s chocolate eyes before you heard footsteps running away. You turned in time to see Talan round a corner.

“Y/N? Are you okay? Did he hurt you?” You looked up at him and shook your head.

“No, I’m good.” He looked you in the eye, his eyes warm and all anger gone. A hint of concern tinted his expression. 

“Y/N/N.” You locked eyes with him. He only used your nickname if he was concerned. He was just so kind, always backing you up when he could be there, checking in on you when he wasn’t. He’d saved your life, and he was really the only man you’ve trusted in the past three years. You were overwhelmed by emotion, and it quickly caught up to you. 

You buried your face into his chest and started crying for what felt like the umpteenth time since the incident. He laid a hand on your head, stroking your hair as the other gently held your waist.

“I’m sorry, I’m just so...scared when you’re not around and-”

Lips on the top of your head. You started to panic again. Was the very man you trusted taking advantage of you now? But it didn’t feel like it. His lips were far too gentle.

“Don’t listen to anything they tell you. You’re more to me than what they think you are.” You gasped and took the time to lift your head up and kiss the underside of his jaw, thanking him. You both blushed at the move, but you didn’t say anything.

For the first time in a while, you let a guy hold you close. And for the first time in a while, it wasn’t because of a selfish want for your body.

A few days passed, and Poe found you working on Jess Pava’s ship. He told you Talan turned himself in and had been dishonorably discharged. At the look of excitement on your face, he wrapped you up in a “Poerito”, his strong arms wrapping around you and holding you close.

“Thanks, Poe.” He pulled away from you and let his hands rest on your shoulders with a warm smile.

“At least he had the decency to realize what he was doing was a mistake.” Tears pricked at your eyes again, but this time they were happy tears. You picked up on something in his eyes, an emotion you saw before but couldn’t place.

The small hangar suddenly wasn’t busy anymore. The crowd had dispersed to go to chow, and you were alone with another man. Poe brought a hand up to your cheek, gently laying it there. Your cheeks went hot at the sight of his eyes going to your lips.

“Poe, what are you doing?” He looked back at your eyes, his own filled with what he hoped to be a soft, caring warmth. You subconsciously moved closer to him, placing a hand on his shoulder.

“Returning your kiss.” His soft lips landed on your cheek, but you had different ideas. You brought your hand up to his cheek and re-directed his lips onto yours. His eyes widened, but he gave in and gently kissed back, your hand remaining on his cheek as your other went up to run through his dark curls. He let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding and carefully placed his hands on your hips. 

You pulled away, sighing when he placed his forehead against yours. He looked into your eyes with a look that said he would protect you from the galaxy itself if he had to.

“So, is that the seal of approval?” You laughed and kissed him again, him smiling into your lips.

“I take that as a yes?” You smiled at him.

“Yep.”

“Y/N?” 

“Yes, Poe?” He twirled a strand of your hair around his finger. 

“You wanna get dinner later?” You stepped up and hugged him, your head resting on his chest. You closed your eyes and listened to his heartbeat, taking in his scent.

“Sure.”

[soto-translates]

Pash Sept 2017 article: Saiyuki Reload Blast anime

Many thanks to @flowermiko​ for providing the scans!  Sorry it took me so long to get to it　 m（ー＿ー）m

Soto Note: text in (parenthesis) are part of the article. Text in [square brackets] are notes from me.

The ones holding the fate of the world are men with a dangerous connection!?

We corner the producer about his aim in the episodes taking place 500 years ago that delve deep into the relationships between the Sanzo Ikkou and Goku’s past.  Additionally, we also talk with the character designer who brought to life these high-quality images!

Saiyuki Reload Blast

Data ON AIR: AT-X = every Wednesday night 10:30-; Tokyo MX = every Thursday at midnight; Sun TV = every Friday night 11:30-; BS11 = every Sunday late night 1:30-; TV Aichi = every Monday late night 3:05-
HP: http://www.saiyuki-rb.jp/     TWITTER: @saiyuki_rb
© Minekura Kazuya・Ichijinsha / Saiyuki RB Project
STAFF: Original work - Minekura Kazuya (serialized in Ichijinsha “Gekkan Comic ZERO-SUM”); Director - Nakano Hideaki; Series Composition - Konuta Kenji; Character Design - Satou Youko; Sub Character Design - Kobayashi Toshimitsu; General Animation Directors - Kobayashi Toshimitsu, Satou Youko; Prop Design - Sugimura Tomokazu; Action Animation Director - Saiki Yasuhiro; Art Director - Mayuzumi Masaki; Color Setting - Yamagami Aiko; Director of Photography - Asakawa Shigeki; Editing - Kimura Kashiko; Music - Katou Tatsuya; Music Producer - Kawashima Mai; Music Production - Lantis; Sound Production - Jinnan Studio; Sound Director - Takakuwa Hajime; Opening Artist - GRANRODEO; Ending Artist - Luck Life; Animation Production - Platinum Vision
CAST: Genjo Sanzo / Konzen Douji - Seki Toshihiko; Son Goku / Goku - Hoshi Souichirou; Sha Gojyo / General Kenren - Hirata Hiroaki; Cho Hakkai / Field Marshal Tenpou - Ishida Akira; Kougaiji - Kusao Takeshi; Dokugakuji - Yamanoi Jin; Kanzeon Bosatsu - Igarashi Rei; Prince Nataku - Kouda Kaho; Taruchie - Saito Chiwa; Saitaisai - Suwabe Junichi, etc.

What connects these men who can’t turn back?    The Sanzo Ikkou swear at one another while brandishing a gun and rounding up youkai.  The stage suddenly turns from their story drawn in the early episodes to 500 years ago.    Sanzo and Goku, Gojyo and Hakkai are tightly bound by a chain that, while at first glance seems like nothing, is actually so strong no one else can get through.  The reason for that seems to lie in an incident that occurred in Heaven 500 years ago.  Precisely because the lives they risked for others were stolen from them, they are now determined to live their lives for themselves.  However, there is one more person they are connected to.  The War Prince, Prince Nataku.  How is he, vanished from Heaven, connected to the Sanzo Ikkou?

Original picture: Itou Mina  Direction: Kobayashi Toshimitsu   Color Setting/Check: Yamagami Aiko   Coloring: T.D.I.   Special: Asakawa Shigeki

Goku and Sanzo

In the early stages of this work, Goku and Sanzo haven’t had many scenes together.  Maybe this paradoxically displays their connection...?  Because for Konzen, somehow bored to death with his peaceful days in Heaven, 500 years ago, his meeting with the “gold-eyed creature” Goku was the catalyst that upended his life.

[over young Goku] Konzen, gimme a name!

[caption: young Goku, current Goku] Comparing Goku’s expressions from now and when he was in Heaven, both are child-like but 500 years ago he was more infant-like and uneasy.

Here’s a highlight! Comment by the producer It was decided that I’d be handling the latest “Saiyuki” work, which has long enjoyed popularity, and the pressure is immense (pained smile).  It has continued serialization for over 20 years, and I’ve been reading it since my school days too, after all.  That’s why I’ve dealt this project thinking about how the make the fans think that “Saiyuki” and the “Sanzo Ikkou” have returned.  In Saiyuki Reload Blast, the Sanzo Ikkou has travelled quite a ways from Chang’an, seen different cultures, and overcome various obstacles.  That’s why I wanted to show a slightly calmed-down Sanzo and Goku, Gojyo and Hakkai.
(Frontier Works Producer: Shiraishi Youko)

[under Konzen] Can you remain that little one’s sun?

[caption: Sanzo] Konzen becomes conscious of his own emotions when he meets the young Goku.  Is this painful experience the reason that the current Sanzo respects their personalities so refreshingly it borders on violence?

Nataku and Goku


Nataku has been used by his father’s ambition as the “War Prince”, valued only in battle.  For him, Goku is his one and only friend.  For Goku too, worried about his own existence, Nataku’s words are salvation, but the adults’ situation tears them apart.

[over cherry tree] My name’s Goku.  Nice t’ meetcha.

[caption: cherry tree] If only they could play like this someday.  Goku’s simple wish is crushed by the adults’ expectations.

[caption: Nataku torso] Nataku activates his power as war prince.  On his own he has overwhelming power equalling an entire army, but...

Here’s a highlight! Comment by the producer As someone who’s worked on this, I have an emotional attachment to Konzen.  He was raised in a hot house environment, wanting for nothing, but then he meets Goku and begins to mature by living with him.  The scene where he thinks he won’t let anything happen to Goku, despite Konzen’s being a man with no power aside from his authority and position, hits me hard.  The Gaiden episodes were presented in the OVA series, but that anime focussed on how Konzen, Kenren, and Tenpou died, and on the events leading to Goku’s exile in the Lower World.  In this anime, the first half of “Saiyuki Gaiden” makes a point of showing how Goku met Konzen, Kenren, and Tenpou, and of course Nataku.  I can’t go into detail because it will spoil later developments, but I hope you’ll understand why we included the Gaiden episodes in this anime if you watch until the end!

[caption: Goku crying, Nataku bleeding] Torn between the loyalty to his father that had been implanted in him and his friendship with Goku, Nataku turns his blade on himself.  Goku, shocked by witnessing his friend’s death, breaks his diadem and begins to rampage.

Here’s a highlight! Comment by the producer Compared to before, the “Sanzo Ikkou” in this anime have changed yet remained the same.  What’s changed is their position of “We aren’t heroes of justice”.  This is something I’ve inherited from the previous person in charge, but apparently the original creator Minekura Kazuya Sensei said so during production of the anime’s first episode.  For example, even if they’re told unilaterally to help, I think they won’t.  But, like with Tamuro in episode 1, if they see intent and faith in the side to be helped, they’ll at least lend a hand.  I’m always keeping this in mind.

Gojyo and Hakkai

Gojyo lives according to his animal instincts and Hakkai wordlessly backs him up even while tossing him sharp comments.  In a sense, their perfectly synchronized relationship is reminiscent of the trusting relationship between Kenren and Tenpou, 500 years ago in Heaven.

[caption: Gojyo] Gojyo appears to do only as he pleases, but in actuality cares about his companions.  Maybe the promise from 500 years ago lives on deep within his heart...

Here’s a highlight! Comment by the producer This is a highlight that comes up after this, but new characters like the last Sanzo Priest appear.  She doesn’t feel much like a priest, just like Genjo Sanzo, but during scenes when the two of them talk they act just like “highest ranking monks”.  And, the Sanzo Ikkou’s rivals show up.  I hope you watch to the end.

[caption: Hakkai] At first glance, Hakkai smiles guilelessly.  But behind that smile is a man who can see several moves ahead and acts accordingly.

[caption: Kenren & Goku] Straight-forward Kenren, who claimed Goku as his illegitimate son, is a good big brother figure.  The age difference is refreshing!

[caption: Gojyo & Hakkai, Tenpou & Kenren] Gojyo and Hakkai, Kenren and Tenpou show just about the same sense of distance now as 500 years ago.  You can feel the common roots in their love of tobacco and drink.

[under Tenpou & Kenren] This’s called a pinky promise.  It seals the deal.

Cornered the artist!  Special comment from the character designer Satou Youko

--- How did you feel when it was decided you’d be taking part in “Saiyuki”, which has received passionate fan support for 20 years?   I wondered if I was good enough (laughs).

--- What impression did you have of the original “Saiyuki” series when you read it?   I was very surprised by the drawings, which were more detailed and cleaner than I’d imagined.

--- “Saiyuki” has been adapted for anime many times before.  What parts did you focus on in designing the characters for this adaptation?   I was careful to create solid images even with thin lines, and keep them from becoming like today’s thin and bendy line drawings.

--- Were there points you paid attention to when translating the original manga characters into anime?   All the characters have distinctive details in their hair, so I took special care there.  I was especially careful with Sanzo’s sideburns, Goku’s expressions, Gojyo’s head volume, Hakkai’s eyes, and the like.

--- Konzen, Kenren, and Tenpou, who closely resemble Sanzo, Gojyo, and Hakkai, appear in this anime.  Were you conscious of how to draw their differences?   I designed the characters so you wouldn’t forget that they’re all different people; I thought about how their personalities lead to different expressions.

--- Similarly, for the young Goku from 500 years ago and the current Goku, were you thinking of how to show the difference in his expressions?   I concentrated on making Goku from 500 years ago have a cheerful, innocent child’s face.  Conversely, while the current Goku appears younger than the other three, he does bear several life experiences not shown in the manga.  That’s why I tried to give him an expression that was more than just a child’s, and couldn’t be called purely innocent.

--- What did you enjoy drawing, and what was difficult to draw?   I think those are both covered by the sheer amount of lines (laughs).

--- How did you feel when the main voice cast from the previous 20 years of “Saiyuki” was announced for this picture?   I was delighted.  It was like, “Aah, it’s become ‘Saiyuki’!”

--- Please give us a highlight from the “Saiyuki Reload Blast” to come.   We’ve made an effort to reproduce the original work as closely as possible.  After the 7th episode, familiar(?) and nostalgic characters will show up, so stay tuned!

[Soto Note: If anyone has anything they'd like to see me translate (eventually), drop me a note!]

[marjaystuff]

Kristin Hannah Interview by Elise Cooper

The Great Alone

Kristin Hannah

St. Martin’s Press

Feb 6th, 2018

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah is another winner from the author of the bestseller The Nightingale.  There are not enough adjectives in the English language to describe the greatness of this novel. It is an adventure story where readers feel they are put in the middle of the Alaskan frontier; it is a relationship story that also confronts abuse and obsession; and it is a love story between a mother/daughter, father/son, and two young adults as well as the land and those who live on it.

The plot begins with the Allbright family moving to Alaska after a Vietnam buddy willed them a cabin by the Kenai River.  The daughter Leni hopes that this new start will lead to a better future for her family since her father can never keep a job.  At first, Alaska seems to be the answer to their prayers. In a wild, remote corner of the state, they find a fiercely independent community of strong men and even stronger women. Ernt Allbright is a Vietnam POW who has returned home with PTSD, suffering sleepless nights, flashbacks, nightmares and a volatile behavior. His wife Cora is consumed by caring for their daughter.  Leni tries to understand her parents and is someone who must grow up way too fast, becoming her mother’s protector from her abusive father. She falls in love with Matthew Walker who wants to show her happiness, loyalty, and security.  His father Tom is someone who perceptively realizes that the Alaskan environment should be modernized and that his son should no longer be isolated and enclosed. He has a feud with Ernt and Mad Earl, who team up in their resentments of government, the military, and the Walker family.  Representing an Alaskan homesteader is Large Marge, a no-nonsense woman who tries to help the Allbright women see the light. But the setting of Alaska is also a character, a place of beauty and danger. A word of warning, read it with a tissue box nearby because this story is an emotional roller coaster ride.

Elise Cooper:  Why the Alaska setting?

Kristin Hannah:  My family has a long history there.  In the late 70’s my mom and dad went up and fell in love with Alaska.  They met a woman and her daughter who were homesteaders there.  Afterward, they decided to join in to build a fishing lodge on the Kenai River.  Flash forward three generations and we are still running it. Since I still go every few years I wanted to write about the Alaska I know.

EC:  Do you see Alaska as a character in your book?

KH:  Absolutely!  It is the genesis of the book.  I find it a remarkable place and have a love and fear for it.  I titled this novel The Great Alone because it is one of three nicknames for the state.  Besides this one it is also called ‘The Land of the Midnight Sun’ and ‘The Last Frontier.’ The nickname and my title came about from Alaska being such a wild landscape and the people who live there are rugged, fierce, and individualists. It is what the poet Robert Service called Alaska. The primal essence of the book is survival. The actual day-to-day survival in these incredibly harsh conditions depends on the individual who needs to be tough.  

EC:  Do you think readers will get a glimpse of what Alaska is really like?

KH:  I hope so. All the details in the book still exist today.  I put in the book about the forbearing winters, how the light in summers never ends, to survive people need to hunt.  The family in the book lives off the land by hunting, fishing, and gardening.  It is a remote geographical area from the Continental US.  80% of Alaska still has no roads at all.  In the winter rivers become the highways and in the summer, it is difficult to get around.  During the winter months, they must live in the dark for months and months at temperatures well below zero.  The Last Frontier nickname comes into play because there is the need for a fundamental spirit to be willing to fight nature all the time.  I put in the book the statistics that there are 1000 ways to die and 5/1000 go missing, never to be found.  Just running out of gas can kill you.  

EC:  In the novel you reference The Call Of The Wild by Jack London?

KH:  Yes, I had my main character, Leni, read it as a great introduction to where she was going to live.  Another book, Into The Wild, shows the dangers of Alaska.  It is about a college student who tries to live there during the winter in a school bus.  Unfortunately, he dies. Both books show how Alaska can be beautiful, seductive, and dangerous.  

EC:  Can you describe your characters, starting with Large Marge?

KH:  She is one of my favorites.  As Leni soon realizes, ‘Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.’ Large Marge is a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community. Everyone toed the line with her.  She tried to help the Allbright women during the really dark times, but she also understood the battle was Cora’s to fight and that she must save herself.

EC:  What about Mad Earl?

KH:  He has resentment against the government. But remember, almost everyone in his family did not go along with his attitude.  He was probably the worst person Ernt could have met. Just as throughout the US, in Alaska there are pockets of these ‘Survivalists.’ Through him I was able to show the 1970s was a time of political and social unrest including the Vietnam War that brought such division.  

EC:  You did a good job making Ernt a sympathetic figure in the beginning, but by the middle of the book he was a hateful character?

KH:  He is someone who suffered from PTSD and mental illness that went undiagnosed.  My personal take is that he was troubled before he went off to war and became trapped by his own demons.  He ultimately evolves into the villain.  In the remote isolated cabin, he becomes a threat to his daughter and wife.  At the end of the story when Leni finds his medals and the newspaper clip showing his ghostly features after returning home, I hope it is a reminder that there was a time he was not despised.

EC:  He was a Vietnam veteran?

KH:  Yes.  As a POW he was tortured for his country.  I came of age during the Vietnam War, actually I was the same age as Leni.  I wore one of those POW bracelets for years, supporting a Captain, my friend’s dad, who never came home.  I touched on it in the book, the shameful way people who served were treated when they came home, being called ‘baby killers.’  Then and now I do not think we offer enough services, care, jobs, and understanding to those who have come home after putting their lives on the line for us.  This is not the first book I wrote about PTSD.

EC: What is the other novel?

KH:  It is called Home Front and is about a female Black Hawk helicopter pilot who has PTSD and the effects the war had on her. There is a stigma to ask for help.  These people are trained to be warriors and then told to ask for help, but these are dynamically opposite.  I think it is very important in books, films, and the media to keep talking about the challenges that those serving and their families face after coming home.  I wanted to show in both books how someone who comes home emotionally damaged changes the family dynamics.

EC: Cora suffered from abuse and many of these women also have a hard time asking for help?

KH:  Sadly, in our society there are a lot of women who stay in abusive situations. I describe Cora as a victim and mother.  She would do anything for her daughter except leave her husband.  Ernt and Cora have a toxic and tragic love that is all consuming.  She describes the relationship as if he has cancer and is sick.  He describes it as similar to heroin.  Both are aware of the deep flaw in their love. They represent the dark side of love.  A love gone wrong that was probably more of an obsession.  She was dependent on him and he needed the control.  I put in a scene in the book between Cora and another character, Tom Walker, where she saw what her life could be if she had the strength to change it.  It was tragic she didn’t.  

EC:  Does Matthew and Leni’s relationship represent what love should be?

KH:  This is the dream, romantic, love at first sight where they are meant to be together.  A love that overcomes everything and lasts.  They both sacrificed for each other.

EC:  There is a feud between Ernt and Tom similar to ‘West Side Story’?

KH:  I thought of it as Romeo and Juliet.  The teenage love of Matthew and Leni that goes against their parents with increasing risk.  Even in the extraordinary world of Alaska they were able to find a way for their love.

EC:  How would you describe Leni’s and Cora’s relationship?

KH:  Leni reversed roles with her mother and was the one with common sense.  She knew she had to sacrifice her own feelings and desires for her mother.  She was the strong one who was wise beyond her years.  The moment she learned about the abuse everything in the book pivots.  This quote describes the book plot going forward, ‘Leni saw suddenly how hope could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst?’ Unlike Tom who put Matthew first and stood by his son, Cora could not put her daughter first.  Leni knew her mother was broken and as tragic as her father.  But through Tom Leni saw what a family could be, the family she wanted.

EC:  There is a strong love between Leni and Cora.  They refer to themselves as ‘two of a kind,’ and ‘two peas in a pond.’ Please explain.

KH: Both loved each other unconditionally.  I wrote in this quote by Cora, ‘Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl.’ And then Leni realizes that the love she felt for her mother was ‘a durable thing, as vast as this landscape, as immutable as the sea. Stronger than time itself.’ This is also true of my personal feelings as this book freed me to write how they loved, protected, and survived together. I lost my mother when I was young and didn’t realize for a number of years that I never wrote mother/daughter adult relationships.  Either they were difficult for me to imagine or so painful that my subconscious was protecting me.  I am really glad I wrote this and enjoyed writing it.

EC:  Another powerful quote, ‘Instinctively, she lifted her camera and minimized her view of the world. It was how she managed her memories, how she processed the world.  In pictures.  With a camera, she could crop and reframe her life.’ What was your thought process?

KH:  I was thinking how Leni came from a broken and dysfunctional family.  All of that is a way for her to say ‘I will choose which memories I will keep, and which I will shelve.’  

EC:  What do you want readers to get out of the book?

KH:  For me, the best books part a curtain and reveal a world that people do not know exists.  This is what I wanted The Great Alone to do for Alaska and its people. It is a complex look at love and survival that are competing forces in the novel.  I think most of my books are about a woman fighting incredible odds and coming into her own successfully.

THANK YOU!!

[queenkaramel]

Across Time :: Chapter Seven

@juliakaze this is my favorite aesthetic she created!!! 

Posted On: AO3 & FFN

MasterList

YEAR 1982

LOCATION: FLORIDA 

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

The clock behind the counter mocked Kara, as the quiet sounds of the contraption echoed in her ears. This wasn’t how she expected to spend her Friday evening, let alone Christmas Eve. Kara had become fond of this holiday, but staring at the pasty off-white wall wasn’t exactly the best way to spend it – there were a million other ways she could have celebrated the night but her stubbornness had resulted in her sitting in a dingy booth in a small diner.

Christmas was a religious holiday on this world, about the birth of the son of God. Friends and families gathered together to celebrate the anniversary of his birth, and spread cheer and joy, and give each other presents. Kara knew better though, having lived on this planet for more than two centuries, that the gifts, parties, and other unique attributes associated with Christmas nowadays was an afterthought, conjured up by people wanting to make money off the season of festivities. Kara occasionally took part in the holiday, though not for any religious reasons. Rather, she gave gifts to her co-workers, and friends she had made throughout the years, and sometimes even drank and partied like any other red-blooded American during the festive season.

Currently, she was on quest to re-start her life. She had lived in Seattle for almost twelve years and she couldn’t keep the charade of having an amazing skin regiment, or genetics to the fact that she never aged. It was once again the time to restart her life, and her new destination was Florida for more than one reason. But now she was discovering reason that she didn’t even know about.

Rao always has a plan, a voice echoed in her mind.

A plan? If this was Rao’s plan it must have been the most convoluted, messy, and disastrous plan he had ever concocted. Otherwise, why would she sitting in a diner – alone – with a cup of coffee that was turning cold by the second, listening to the infuriating sound of time passing as she watched Mon-El walk around and serve customers with a stupid fucking smile while he refused to give her a second look!

The entire diner was almost empty, but Mon-El still refused to talk to her, let alone look at her. He was happily serving the only other customer in the diner while skillfully avoiding her. He would walk past her booth occasionally to refill her cup of coffee, but wouldn’t say a goddamn word. And if he wasn’t going to say anything, she wasn’t going to either. Two can play at this game!

Kara had been sitting in this booth since noon, and it was almost nearing midnight. Other customers, and even some of the staff had given her questioning looks throughout the day, but once she saw Mon-El she had made up her mind that she wasn’t going to leave this establishment without giving him a piece of her mind. What she hadn’t been expecting was him being a stubborn fool and refusing to even interact with her. Kara was half tempted to leave, but she already committed to this task, and was going to see it through.

“You stupid bastard,” she murmured under her breath, and for the first time this entire day Mon-El actually looked at her. Annoyance and anger pulsed out of his eyes, and his glare intensified. Good. She was glad he heard her, “you know it’s true,” she whispered again while holding his gaze.

Mon-El composed his face again and started talking to the last customer in the diner.

“How was your meal Winn?” she picked up their conversation through her enhanced hearing.

“Wonderful as always Mike!” her eyebrows perked up. Was it Mike now? “Although I am still looking forward to those crepes you promised me!”

Mon-El laughed, and Kara began to seethe in her booth. He was happy without her, how dare he?

“When Megan lets me in the kitchen again, I will definitely make you those crepes.” He can cook now?

“Well, I best be heading home. Lena had to work the late shift tonight so she could get Christmas Day off. And we have to go to her house for Christmas morning. More snide comments from Lilian and Lex. And us working overtime doesn’t work well the family. They don’t see the beauty of the Challenger yet, they just expect another failed mission. You should be happy you don’t have in-laws yet.”

“Don’t worry Winn, they might not see it, but I definitely do. And so does the rest of the world.”

”Ya…ya Mike. I don’t need another Space the final frontier speech from you.”

“Well, you will keep getting it until you begin to believe you.”

“Trust me, Lena and I see it. It’s just the rest of Luthors that are a problem. See you tomorrow night?”

“Of course!”

“Make sure you bring some Christmas cheer! And tell Megan to not make the dipping sauce spicy again…only Jon can handle that spice.”

“No guarantees Winn. Good night…and Merry Christmas!”

“Merry Christmas.”

She saw Winn slam some money down on the counter, and pick up his coat and head off. He had friends, and he had life here in Florida. A life without her. Granted, she had a life without him in Seattle, and in Rio, and in New Zealand…. but seeing that he moved on as well hurt a lot more than she thought.

With no left in the diner besides Mon-El and one other server, he had to talk to her, even if it was ‘We are closing soon, you need to leave’.

But the minutes went by and nothing happened…. He swept the floors, bused the tables, wiped the counters all while whistling a tune that Kara had never heard of. Listening to the clock tick was bad – but this unknown tune was literally setting her ears on fire.

“Hey Mike!” another server came out the back room, “It’s pretty dead tonight, and it’s Christmas Eve, I don’t think the diner needs the both of us. I’ll finish up cleaning, and maybe even close early. Why don’t you head out?”

“Megan, it’s no trouble at all,” huh, so this was Megan, “I don’t mind staying…”

“Mike, I’m being serious. It’s literally dead. Just go home,” she playfully slapped a towel at him. And tried to shoo him away with her hands.

“Well in that case. Why don’t you go home, and spend Christmas Eve with Jon and the rug rats and I’ll close up shop,” his eyes snapped to Kara for a brief second, “and I’ll maybe shut down the place an hour early or so…?”

“Mike, I can’t –”

“You can, and you will!”

After some very good insistence on Mon-El’s part, Megan finally relented and gathered her stuff and left. But not without telling Mon-El how exactly too close up the diner: make sure the dishes are clean, the open sign is turned off, and the meat is placed out to defrost, and so on. It certainly gave off the impression that Megan was the owner of the diner, based off the way she fretted over it. Mon-El finally placated her, claiming he has closed the diner many times and she had no reason to worry. And now that Megan was gone, Kara was sure they were the only ones left in the entire establishment.

“Oh shit, I forgot to tell her about the dipping sauce,” Mon-El bemoaned, “Winn’s going to have a fit.”

“It’s not the only thing you forgot,” she hissed at him. Not even bothering to whisper, they were the only ones left, who cared?

“Do you have something to say?” he shot back.

“Me, have something to say?” she said incredulously, “What-ever made you think that I do? Was if me sitting in this diner for fucking twelve hours your first clue? If not, you Daxamites must be really daft!”

Mon-El crossed the room towards her in a rage, ready to give her a piece of her mind. He was pointing an accusatory finger at her and his body was visibly shaking, and Kara could practically feel the pure fury that he was emitting off of him. Finally, she thought. But no words were spoken again. His jaw clenched down, and he pushed his accusing finger back into his fist, “Not worth it,” he gritted and turned to walk away.

Now it was Kara’s turn to be irritated. Not worth it? What the hell was that supposed to mean? All of her pent up irritation finally came bursting out, and she chucked her completely filled coffee mug in his direction, missing him and hitting the counter in front of him.

“What. The. Hell. Is. Your. Problem!” Mon-El clenched his fists tighter, and Kara could his arm muscles ripple and strain due to the additional tension he was exerting.

“My. Problem. Is. You.” she responded in kind.

“Right. I’m the problem. Just doing my job, and I’m the problem. Whatever helps you sleep better at night, Kryptonian,” his words cut her deep, reminding her of the day they crashed landed. Whatever helps you sleep better at night, Kryptonian? It was like they were the old Kara and Mon-El back in 1754. Strangers. Enemies. Not the ones who had spent 150 years together building a strong friendship that Kara hoped would lead to more one day. Well, it was so close to leading to something more. That ‘something more’ was almost in her grasp, it was so close and she still let it slip away. And now? All the progress, all the memories they had created together were slowly disappearing in front of her.

Mon-El began cleaning the glass shards of her coffee cup from the counter and the floor, “Why are you even here?”

How was she supposed to answer that? She felt like the biggest idiot right now. Twelve hours she had spent in this diner and she hadn’t even thought about what she was going to say to him. So she did the only thing she could when people are losing an argument, “Why are you here?” she mocked him.

He chuckled. He actually chuckled. But it wasn’t the laughter she was used to hearing, laughter that was usually jovial, sweet, and warmed her heart. It was a cruel laughter, and she felt ridiculed by it, “Why am I at the place I fucking work at?” Her eyes bulged, in all her time of being with him she had never once heard him curse out loud, “Are being serious right now Kara?”

She was too stunned to say anything. Oh Rao, where did it go all wrong?

“But you? You come into this diner, you see me working here and you sit your pretty little ass down in a booth for twelve hours. So it seems to me you have something to say more than I do, so why don’t you spit it out already and leave?”

“I don’t take orders from you,” she sneered. How dare he speak to her that way? This wasn’t the Mon-El she knew, not the kind and gentle one that literally treated her like the apple of his eyes. But things change, right? And Mon-El definitely did.

“Well then, why don’t you sit down in that booth and let me finish my work if you have nothing to say?”

Kara huffed, she had cornered herself into a sticky situation. Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. Her stupid ego had gotten her into this mess, and now there was no way out. She picked her poison and sat down in the booth and watched him continue to clean and re-arrange the lobby by stacking the chairs on top of each other. All the while, Kara thought about her new game plan. The clock ringing in her ears once more.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

The more she thought about how she could attack him, the more befuddled by the situation she became. She hadn’t even given it a second thought as to why Mon-El was working in a diner. He was held two military positions before, was a sea captain, an ambassador, an engineer, and a stupid journalist…and now his new line of work was a bus boy server at a dingy diner? That made no sense. Kara wondered if she should shelve her anger for just a moment so she could ask him why? And how?

No. No, she couldn’t flatter. She came in here with a mission, and she was going to fulfil it. Maybe she could use his new found profession to rouse him, and maybe she will finally elicit the response she craved form him. Finally she could shout at him till her was heart was content. She didn’t want a one-sided argument where he could just take the insults she threw at him. No, she wanted him to try defend himself, she wanted him aggravated so when she delivered the final blow it would bring her satisfaction, and he would run away to lick his wounds while she could finally be free from what happened thirty years ago.

“So how is it working at this fine establishment?” her voice filled with malice, hoping he would respond and be caught in her trap and she could attack him like a rabid lioness, with accusations, and declarations and make him feel guilty about his actions.

“It pays the bills,” he responded simply, showing no hint of falling in her trap. Crap, she needed to find another way.

“And this is the line of work you picked? What happened to the brilliant mechanical engineering that was my one and only hope for getting off this planet?” she wanted to get under his skin, she wanted to provoke him. Just take the bait dammit!

But he kept continuing with his ministrations. He moved to turn off the neon red OPEN sign by the entrance, and then walked towards the cash register. Kara followed his movements with narrowed eyes, waiting for his response.

“Like I said, it plays the bills,” he said after a full two minutes. Mon-El was mulling over whether he should engage her or not. He picked the latter, and choose to repeat his previous answer.

Kara grumbled. But then she picked up on his murmuring – apparently he couldn’t hold his anger back either and the words flowed out his mouth and to Kara’s ear, “Thought she would be smart enough to know why…”

This was such a childish way to fight, words exchanged in hushed tones, each one trying to get the last word in, and trying to bait each other into a fight.

“Smart enough,” she stomped her away to the register. He would have known that she would pick up on whatever he said with her enhanced hearing so he clearly wanted her to respond, “What does that me?!”

“I think you know. Or at least the Kryptonian in you should know, right? Why don’t you sit down and give it another thought, huh? Maybe you might be able to figure out why I am working in the diner in the middle of Cape Canaveral Florida!?”

Fucking shit! The entire time she was trying to get him to take the bait, and here she was taking his bait. It had completely blown up in face and she hadn’t realized it until it was too late. But the argument had finally started, and at least that was a win.

“So why don’t you explain it to me huh? Since I am so dumb, stupid and too much of an idiot to understand,” her body was shaking with rage, and she was just waiting for the right moment to unleash it on him. But this wasn’t the right time, she needed to hold in a little while longer.

Mon-El slammed the cash register drawer shut, “Kara I know this isn’t what you want to talk about. So can you stop beating around the goddamn bush and get to the point, so I can get on with my life. You know, if that’s possible for you….”

“No! You started it, so why don’t you tell me what I don’t understand right now. Clearly I can’t understand it myself, so why don’t you help me?”

Kara knew that how immature this fight was getting. It reminded her of the arguments she and her cousin Kal would frequently get into, where they would shout anything and everything at each other until something finally stuck. And once something stuck, neither of them would move on until the argument got bigger and bigger and root of their problems was uncovered.

“Kara, I don’t have time for this,” he pinched the bridge of his nose.

Clearly, Mon-El was more evolved than Kara and her cousin were. Whereas they loved to egg on the fight, Mon-El was trying to diffuse it.

“You were the one to call me stupid, so don’t start something you can’t finish,” and then Kara murmured, “Although it seems to be a wonderful habit of yours.”

Again, with the words muttered under their breaths.

“Cape Canaveral, Florida, Kara? Where the goddamn Challenger is supposed to launch at the Kennedy Space Center. Ring any bells? This ‘brilliant mechanical engineering that was my one and only hope for getting off this planet’ is trying to keep his ears opens to learn how far these humans have progressed. And this ‘dingy diner’ is a lovely hangout for those scientists, and I even made friends with a couple of them. So now that you know why I lowered my standards and became a fucking server could you please leave? And the next time you see, I would appreciate it if you just walked in the other direction.”

Kara cowered away. She was an idiot. The reason she had picked Florida as her new location was because it was slowly becoming a hub for space exploration, and the second challenger was due for takeoff next month. That was the reason, well primary, reason why she had decided to settle in Florida. And if she hadn’t let her ego get in the way, she would have known that Mon-El was thinking the same. Her cheeks flushed red with embarrassed.

“Oh, and don’t worry. Once I get the right technology to fix our motherboards, I’ll find you. Cause unlike you, I like to keep my promises,” he remarked snidely.

All the embarrassment and humiliation she had felt a moment ago had vanished. His steel-gray eyes cut her like shards. The allegation that she wanted to make, the allegation that she was trying to build up to, he had said them. But what standing did he even have to say that? What promises did she even break? It was Mon-El who did the breaking, not her.

The rage built up in her again, “I don’t keep my promises? You’re the one to talk. You’re the one who broke his promise. Don’t try to make yourself the victim, when you really are the villain,” she seethed.

“Me? Me?” he asked shocked, “I kept my promise Kara. But you were too busy making money and getting fame to keep yours. Now I know what matters to you. Fame and fortune, so don’t worry, I’ll stay out of your path. ”

“What the hell does that mean!?” she yelled. Mon-El wasn’t even making sense. It was like he was trying to manipulate the entire conversation to his side, but she wasn’t going to allow that, “You’re the one you didn’t come back! You’re the one didn’t come back to me! You’re the one you didn’t keep your promise! I waited. For Rao’s sake, I waited for two years! Every day after the war ended I waited for you to come through those door. I waited to see again. I waited for your touch again. I WAITED! And you never came….for two years. I felt like an idiot, the most gullible naïve girl in the universe. You used me, and you never came back. And now, after all these years I can finally tell you how much you hurt me, how long it took for me to move on, and how there is this dulling pain in my heart, and you’re standing there saying was all my fault? How dare you!?”

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

“You really know how to paint yourself as a victim Kara. Bravo,” he clapped his hands, insulting her even further, “I never fulfilled my promise? The moment I got off that ship, the moment I came back to the States, I went to that small little club in the North Carolina port to see you. To hold you, to touch you, to kiss you again,” Kara’s breathe hitched, “To keep my promise. After months of not seeing you, after months of dreaming about you, I went back to the club to see that you weren’t even there Kara. You left. You were gone. So I thought, maybe you went to work somewhere else in town, maybe you found another job? Letters get lost in the war so many times, maybe I missed the one telling of your new profession. So like a fool I searched the entire city for you. I mean, how hard could it be to find a Kara Danvers. It was a unique enough name, right? For months I looked, and I came up empty handed. And then years later I heard of this beauty in New York City that was headlining for a popular club, and she had the most wonderful voice in the world, and her name was Kira Dixon. I didn’t even know that it was you until I saw your photo Kara! You had found money and fame and forgot me.”

Kira Dixon. She had forgotten that when was ‘discovered’ in the small club in North Carolina, they had told her to ditch Kara Danvers for a different, stage appropriate name, and Kira Dixon was born. But if that was Mon-El’s explanation of the events, then he had lied to her. And once again was trying to manipulate the events in his favor.

“Don’t lie to me, Mon-El,” he was adding insult to injury. Taking pride in rubbing salt in her open wounds, and he thought she wouldn’t notice, “If you had really gone to the club we wouldn’t have been in this position.”

“Kara. I’m telling you the truth. And if you can’t handle your mistakes, I’m not here to coddle you. I don’t even know why you are even here? You left me, so why do even care anymore?”

“NO YOU DIDN’T! I didn’t leave you, YOU LEFT ME! If you had do gone to the club, like you claim you did, you would have found me!?”

“YOU WEREN’T THERE KARA! HOW WOULD I HAVE FOUND YOU?”

“I LEFT YOU A LETTER!”

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

“I left you a letter,” she whispered as the burden of her feelings that she had been carrying over the last thirty years tipped over, “I knew letters got lost in the mail. Sometimes you would respond to every third letter I sent you. I would go months without hearing a response and I didn’t want to risk telling you about my new job for it to only get lost in midst of the war. So I told the owner that when a Michael Matthews stops by, to give you the letter telling you where I was so you could find me again. But you never did, Mon-El,” her heart was shattering, and the dulling pain began to pulse red hot over her skin, and it felt like pins and needles all over. It had taken her years to glue herself back together, and now it was taking just minutes for her too fall apart again, “but you never did.”

“I never got a letter….”

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Kara couldn’t breathe. I never got a letter. He never got a letter. He was lying again, he had to be lying again. No. No. No. His steel blue eyes looked softer now, his face less strained and his demeanor shifted to look like a defeated man: shoulder dropped, and head down. No. No. No. He was lying again. Lying. But his voice held such sincerity, and the change of his behavior told a different story. He wasn’t lying, he wasn’t the vile man she had painted him to be for thirty years. Her heart didn’t ache, she hadn’t felt so lost and broken because he had left her – no – it was because of lack of communicate. A small little mistake that had cost them both more than she could have imagined. It had cost them a life together.

All that hurt, rage, and pain that she had held onto for all these years, all of which fueled her to confront Mon-El, all of which gave her the courage to speak to him again, so she could finally lay it to rest felt so inconsequential, and disconcerting. She had nothing more to say. She had no more cards to play, no she didn’t even have a hand to begin with.

She had sat down in this diner holding onto something that wasn’t even real, and she lashed out at him. She had started it, she had accused him, she had ruined what they had. What was left now? At this moment, she wished the earth would open and swallow her whole because those soft steel blue eyes that help such contempt for were now melting, but she couldn’t face it. Not after humiliating herself like this. So she did the only she could think of, she turned to walk away.

She heard Mon-El shuffle behind her, “KARA WAIT,” his voice the most kind it had been all night. Definitely not pleasant, but there was no animosity, “don’t go.”

Kara gripped the handle of the door tightly, thinking whether she should stop and hash things out and fix what was broken. Oh Rao, she really wanted to fix everything.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

She opened the door and walked out, ignoring Mon-El calling after her.

Her heart was screaming at her to turn around and walk back through that door. It was tugging, pulling at her, but her mind wouldn’t listen. After that entire debacle it was ashamed, mortified and she didn’t have the courage to turn around and face him. The anger she had held onto for thirty years taunted her now. She had acted like a fool, duped by her own emotions. So she continued walking, and after she was clear of that one yellow car in the parking lot, the tears began to pool out of her eyes and she super sped away, without even looking back.

She tried to zone in her ears to listen into what Mon-El was saying – if he was saying anything — in the diner but all her ears could focus on was the rackety clock that was hung being the counter on the pasty off-white wall.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

She was too afraid to listen, she lacked the bravery, the valor to face the consequences. How do you move past a thirty year old grudge, one that she instigated?

Coward, her heart yelled. Yes, she was a coward.

Hope you guys like it! As always - please ignore mistakes and an edited on will be posted on Ao3 soon

ONE CHAPTER LEFT GUYS! 

[nickdelo]

Top 25 Films of the 21st Century

Nick’s List

1. Boyhood (Linklater, 2014) 2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004) 3. Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004) 4. In Bruges (McDonagh, 2008) 5. Children of Men (Cuaron, 2006) 6. There Will Be Blood (P.T. Anderson, 2007) 7. Inside Llewyn Davis (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, 2013) 8. Before Midnight (Linklater, 2013) 9. The Master (P.T. Anderson, 2012) 10. The Social Network (Fincher, 2010) 11. In the Mood for Love (Kar-wai, 2000) 12. Nightcrawler (Gilroy, 2014) 13. Ex Machina (Garland, 2015) 14. Hell or High Water (Mackenzie, 2016) 15. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) 16. Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin, 2012) 17. Catch Me If You Can (Spielberg, 2002) 18. The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2009) 19. The Departed (Scorses, 2006) 20. Short Term 12 (Cretton, 2013) 21. The Prestige (Nolan, 2006) 22. Mud (Nichols, 2013) 23. Y Tu Mama También (Cuaron, 2001) 24. Creed (Coogler, 2015) 25. Frances Ha (Baumbach, 2012)

John’s List 1. Gladiator (Scott, 2000) 2. Hot Fuzz (Wright, 2007) 3. Inside Llewyn Davis (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, 2013) 4. Anchorman (McKay, 2004) 5. No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, 2007) 6. Training Day (Fuqua, 2001) 7. Django Unchained (Tarantino, 2012) 8. There Will Be Blood (P.T. Anderson, 2007) 9. John Wick 2 (Stahelski, 2017) 10. Inside man (Lee, 2006) 11. Burn After Reading (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, 2008) 12. American Psycho (Harron, 2000) 13. Gone Girl (Fincher, 2014) 14. Zoolander (Stiller, 2001) 15. Best in Show (Guest, 2000) 16. Nice Guys (Black, 2016) 17. Adaptation (Jonze, 2002) 18. Birdman (Inarritu, 2014) 19. Bernie (Linklater, 2011) 20. Sicario (Villeneuve, 2015) 21. The Master (P.T. Anderson, 2012) 22. The LEGO Movie (Lord and Miller, 2014) 23. Doubt (Shanley, 2008) 24. The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, 2008) 25. Silence (Scorsese, 2016)

ND: We've had this discussion a few times before: is there a difference between "best" and "favorite?" My initial reaction is no. We like what we like, for whatever reason you come to or criteria you choose, that's the grading scale, pure and simple.

The one glaring instance where the "best" and "favorite" line begins to blur is with the work of Richard Linklater, whose films are so emotionally vulnerable that they have effectively changed the way I see the world. In another filmmaker's hands, Boyhood would have been a showy gimmick, but Linklater understood what this project needed to be before shooting the first scene, allowing the deeply human nature of the film to unfold beautifully and organically. It deserves a spot on this list for innovation alone. Explain yourself, John!

JI: With a fear of being blocked from continuing this project, I must admit, I haven't seen Boyhood yet. That's is the plain and simple reason why it is not included on my list. Wish I had some lame, pretentious reason for its exclusion. 

ND: I am happy to see you've somewhat made up for this oversight with the selection of other outstanding Linklater film, Bernie. It's a rare feat to so perfectly utilize two very specific actors (Jack Black and Matthew McConaughey). Walk me through your process a bit before we get into detail. JI: My process was pretty simple and I think you outlined it pretty well, I picked what I like. I could tell you why I picked each and every one of these movies individually but on the whole, you have to go with your gut and pick the movies you feel are the best to you. Also, as we have discussed previously, going into being best is staying power. There are a few movies I've only seen maybe once or twice but I still think of them to this day. Movies like Doubt and Silence are like that for me. I feel if a movie has that kind of power it is impossible to not include it on a "best" list. Please feel free to eviscerate me for not seeing Boyhood, I deserve it.  ND: You have shamed me, son. Boyhood is on Netflix so you're running out of excuses. Though I am not without sin, having not seen Doubt.

JI: Huge misstep on my part, for many reasons but especially since I really enjoy Ethan Hawke. ND: My girlfriend will be relieved to know I am not the only one.

Anyway, film-going experiences that resonate with me long after I leave the theater always score the highest on my lists, as the director's ability to utilize all aspects of the medium plays a huge part in landing an emotional impact or gathering more information upon repeat viewings. So it's no surprise the Coen Bros., Paul Thomas Anderson, Alfonso Cauron, and David Fincher are prominently featured throughout our lists as masters of blending the cerebral with a cinematic spectacle. I should address the lack of comedies on my list (though In Bruges, Eternal Sunshine, Llewyn Davis, and Frances Ha are all loosely comedic). Don't get me wrong, there are few things better than laughing your ass off in a theater, but when applying the "re-watch" test to some of my all-time favorite comedies (Walk Hard, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, 21 Jump Street), the jokes, once tread, aren't good enough to lift the film to the highest class, considering the low bar for cinematography, acting and, most importantly, narrative. I may be in the minority here, but these movies are largely fleeting experiences as I grow older. What are your insights into your comedic selections? I wouldn't classify Hot Fuzz as a strict comedy considering the high-wire act Edgar Wright always pulls off, nor Best in Show, a borderline Shakespearean experience with levels of complexity to the jokes. Anchorman is clearly a classic, and you obviously believe it has aged well. Zoolander, though, I'll need some convincing. JI: I think I largely agree with your take on comedies in regards to putting them on a best list but in terms of rewatchability I'm not sure I agree as much. Of course there are comedies that don't stand the test of time, Borat chief among them, but for the most part I feel great comedies stay funny no matter how many times you've heard the jokes. Addressing your second point about the two straight up comedies, Anchorman and Zoolander, there is a level of comfort and familiarity with those two. I'm not confident they actually do still hold up but since I saw them at the time I did I think they still hold that spot for me, if that makes any sense. A perfect example of being weary of their relevance now is the fact I haven't and never plan on seeing either sequel. On Zoolander specifically, I saw it in theaters and hated it but every subsequent viewing I've enjoyed it more and more and no matter how many times I've seen it there are still lines that crack me up. Not sure if that does anything to convince you but it just strikes a cord for me and I can't really explain it but seeing it when it came out in 2001 rather than today is a big part of that.

About the other two, I just think they're great movies that happen to be really funny. Hot Fuzz is the perfect send up of the types of movies Nick Frost's character loves. The performances are great, I particularly love Timothy Dalton's character, there are impressive action sequences and I really relish all the cameos in the beginning between Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan and Cate Blanchett.  Not sure if this is a hot take, but it is the best movie from the Frost, Pegg, Wright trio. Best in Show gives such a realistic feeling to such absurd characters in an equally absurd premise. It is funny throughout without seeming cartoonish despite the cartoonish nature of the characters, like Eugene Levy's character and his two left feet. I haven't seen all of your films but one that I'm curious about and especially its place on the list is The Social Network. I liked it but my thoughts don't really seem to align with many people's on the quality of the movie. What standout so much for you with that movie that it is in your top 10?

ND: The Social Network opens with one of the most captivating scenes in recent memory. There's nothing to it -- two college kids are in a bar chatting across from one another, and eventually the girl breaks up with the guy. It's been done a thousand times before, but the way it's staged and written and performed is nothing short of memorizing. In five minutes of shot/reserve-shot dialogue we learn everything we need to know about Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg -- how he's wired and what his motivations are. The scene is jammed with more character development that most movies can manage in their entire run-times, and when the fervently escalating discussion culminates in Rooney Mara's Becca telling Mark, "you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd, and I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole," it hits you like a freight train.

That scene sets the stage for the whole movie, a rudimentary premise turned thrilling through the artful design of David Fincher. There's a perfect cross-section of seedy Ivy League ritual and lure, the dangerous hubris of a brilliant, spiteful teenager, and the lustful excitement of an unknown frontier. Fincher made a movie about Facebook -- FACEBOOK! -- a pulse-pounding high-wire act, which is miraculous.

I'd like to hear more about your no. 1 selection, Gladiator. It's unlike any other movie on your list, both in terms of genre and style. What about it has made such a lasting impression? 

JI: Gladiator is definitely one that even I didn't expect to be number one when I started out doing this. The first thing that made such an impression is that my dad took my to see it in the theater, I was about two months away from turning eight, so seeing such a violent movie in the theater was a big deal. (Questionable parenting? The world may never know). Beyond that though it is insanely re-watchable for me. I watched it twice over memorial day weekend! In terms of the movie itself, the action scenes are incredible, the performances from Crowe and Phoenix are really solid. Crowe is a little one-note throughout but I think he fluctuates that one note just enough to create a sympathetic hero and somewhat rounded character and Phoenix is always great as the weirdo bad guy. Has he ever not been really good in anything? There are definitely flaws with the movie, so it isn't number one because it is a flawless piece of art, but I find it to be highly entertaining (yes, I was entertained Maximus) and something you can always watch. I feel like this hasn't be a very articulate breakdown as to why, but it is just kind of a gut call.

ND: Shame on you for spoiling my "Are you not entertained?" joke.

JI: Not including the comedies, is this the pick you have the biggest issue (if that's even the right word) with? Also, were there any movies for you that surprised you where you ended up slotting them, similar to my experience here with Gladiator?

ND: I don't want to be misunderstood. I don't have a problem with any of your picks; art is a very personal thing and who am I to judge how you or anyone else creates a criteria for greatness? I'm just trying to pick your brain a little bit. I will admit to having never seen Training Day. And I thought No Country for Old Men was underwhelming -- though I know I am in the vast minority and it might have been a case of the film being so hyped that I was predisposed to be disappointed.

JI: I wasn't trying to imply that you had a problem with any pick, that's why I hedged and said I don't think issue was the right word to use. No Country's ending falls a little flat but up until that point I find Javier Bardem too magnetic to be disappointed on the whole.

ND: In regards to the ordering, there were no surprises in the top 10. I'm sure on a different day Eternal Sunshine or Before Sunset or even In Bruges could have been no. 1, but I didn't overthink it with Boyhood (watched it again this weekend) and it's not worth splitting hairs over my best of the best.

I guess the biggest surprise is In the Mood for Love at no. 11, as I hadn't seen it until about a year ago. It's right up my ally in terms of a deeply melancholy romance story, chock full of utter beauty and heartbreak weaved together so seamlessly. It's a quiet film that speaks volumes in its slow, calculated moments. Recalling my The Social Network, Boyhood, et al picks, I am always impressed when filmmakers take a simple premise and do something inventive with it, and Wong Kar-wai brutally precise decisions are marvelous. 

Quick side bar: I learned about In the Mood for Love on CineFix, a YouTube channel that creates incredibly detailed and researched lists. It's a must-subscribe for any film buff.

The next biggest surprise is Catch Me If You Can. It's decidedly unlike all my other selections, and very Spielbergian (not always a good thing), but god damn, that movie is just so much fun. It's a perfect caper, plain and simple.

JI: I was curious about your inclusion of Catch Me if You Can, because as you said it is so unlike any other movie on your list. Spielberg has been a little hit or miss since the turn of the century, good thing he's producing Gremlins 3. ND: I didn't want us to devote any space for honorable mention selections in order to make the 25 mean something, but I'm changing my tune a little bit. Give me ONE movie that hurt the most to leave off. I really wanted to find a spot for Wall-E. That movie blows my mind. JI: My original number 25 was going to be the documentary Let the Fire Burn. Probably a way out there choice considering the rest of my list. It is about MOVE in Philadelphia and what ultimately transpired when Mayor Goode effectively bombed the house that MOVE was in. Not sure if you've seen it but I loved how they used all archival footage to tell the story. There is no narration and from I remember very little on-screen text. The documentary plays out telling the cohesive story of MOVE and then the aftermath and fallout following all the destruction. It also features councilman Ed Rendell, which might be a nice easter egg for some. It also does a great job of bringing to light a story that even in Philadelphia isn't really talked about or told anymore and gives full context to both the MOVE members and the city.

ND: I actually just watched Let the Fire Burn not too long ago. I took a deep dive into the MOVE bombing earlier this year, absorbing as much about it as I could, because you're right, it goes largely un-talked about considering what a bonkers story it was (though just this week the city commemorated the event and the lives lost with a monument). And I definitely appreciate a documentary that is driven by facts and not an agenda. I'm surprised to see we only have three overlapping selections -- The Master, Inside Llewyn Davis, and There Will Be Blood. The former two we talked about in depth during our last collaboration, but let's discuss TWBB for a second, especially now that Daniel Day-Lewis is "retired." Even for a career as illustrious as DDL's, his turn as Daniel Plainview by far his crowning achievement, and I'd put it toe-to-toe with any performance ever put on screen. He carries every frame with such menace, vigor, and even surprising vulnerability that makes the viewer sympathize with a terrible man. It's unlike anything I've ever seen.

JI: I haven't watched it all the way through in a while but I find myself often YouTubing scenes just to inject more DDL straight into my veins.  The only other character that has been so outright horrible, vindictive while retaining vulnerability and a likability to me was Gandolfini as Tony Soprano. However, that is comparing apples and oranges, with an 86 episode series compared to a single feature.

Back to DDL in TWBB. His Plainview is such a transformation that anytime I see the movie or see clips my brain doesn't even compute that DDL is Plainview. He truly takes on his characters and becomes them and it is incredible in the way he has been able to transform himself through his various roles. I can see why the say it takes him about three or so years to mentally prepare for a role. It is hard to imagine anyone ever topping his absolute mastery of the art.

Two questions about DDL I'd like to pose for you. 1) Do you think the retirement will stick? He has done this before where he took time off to be a cobble. Now he is supposedly retiring to become a dressmaker. I think he'll eventually make his way back to the screen. 2) This is more of a thought exercise than a black or white question but should we be grateful for the few performances he did produce and how outstanding those are or should we be disappointed we only got so little of him during his career? It is a little disappointing to me but the other side of the argument is that maybe his performances would have suffered if he took on more projects and didn't throw himself in fully as he did. ND: The answer to your first question is simple: no. Maybe at this very moment, DDL thinks that he's done all there is to do on screen, and considering he already-selective process, I bet this sabbatical lasts less than 7-8 years. But he will come back. DDL knows he's the best, and he will get that itch again once he reaches senior citizenry. And he's spent his entire adult life getting lost in other people that I'm not even sure he knows how to be himself. The more interesting question would be: what do you want his big comeback role to be? This is a hard question that I wasn't exactly prepared for, but we are so used to seeing him in these larger-than-life roles that I wouldn't his coming back in a simple, humanistic family drama. Mike Mills (Beginners, 20th Century Women) has the goods to write him a juicy role, but even more perfect would be Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester By the Sea). Holy shit, I want to see nothing more now. The second question is a bit more complex, because it was undoubtedly frustrating for DDL to take his good old time selecting only to leave us with Nine or The Ballad of Jake and Rose, but even in subpar movies (I didn't enjoy Lincoln, either), DDL always makes it worth watching, so his batting average, so to speak, is still remarkably high. If he were to have taken more roles along the way, could he have given us a few more classics? Probably, but more likely is he would have given us more disappointments. Look at De Niro and Pacino. The two have combined for dozens of duds in the past 20 years to only a handful of good roles. If the alternative to DDL's selectivity is Dirty Grandpa, Stand Up Guys, The Intern, Jack and Jill, etc., I'll take the former every time. JI: I think I'd like to see him comeback and do something totally unexpected. How fun would it be if he was in a comedy or a Tarantino movie? I'd love to see what he could do in something that is so very much outside his realm, without stepping into Jack and Jill territory like you mentioned previously. 

This is slightly (very) off topic, but since you mention De Niro and Pacino, you think they can turn their cold streaks around with Marty in The Irishman?

ND: I mean, if anyone's going to bring those two back from the dead, it's Scorsese. He has more than earned our trust at this point. I'd be lying if if wasn't a tiny bit worried about Marty going back to the gangster well -- and god forbid he ever cast a woman or a PoC -- but if it ain't broke, I guess.

Let’s leave it here since we’ve covered a lot. Though if you want to return with a deep dive on the John Wick 2 > John Wick decision, I’ll be here waiting.

[weekendwarriorblog]

WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEEKEND MARCH 8, 2019 – CAPTAIN MARVEL!!!

 This is a big weekend for Marvel Studios, as they release their first superhero movie with a female protagonist -- not counting Elektra (thanks for the laugh, Max Evry!) -- and the question is not whether it will make $100 million this weekend but how much MORE than $100 million it will be making this weekend. But that’s a question to be answered over at my gig at The Beat and it will be answered in about an hour...

CAPTAIN MARVEL (Marvel Studios/Disney)

Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson, Sugar, Mississippi Grind) Written by Boden, Fleck and Geneva Robertson-Dworet Cast: Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Jude Law, Ben Mendelsohn, Djimon Hounsou, Lee Pace, Annette Bening, Gemma Chan, McKenna Grace, Lashana Lynch, Clark Gregg MPAA Rating: PG-13

I’m not sure how much more I have to say about the latest Marvel movie after writing about it extensively for The Beat. (You are reading my Box Office Preview there for all the stuff you used to read in this column about the wide releases, right?)

I am greatly looking forward to seeing this on Thursday night for a number of reasons and none of them are due to “old white man hater” Brie Larson, who I used to have respect for until she decided to attack me and my livelihood and ability to get work.

That said, I’ve been waiting for directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck to break out and do a big studio movie for many years, as I’ve been a fan of theirs since Half Nelson and have spoken to them a number of times including one of my favorites of theirs, the road trip movie Mississippi Grind, starring Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn, who played a much nicer and more sympathetic role in that then he has portraying the villain in many studio movies since then.

I’m also looking forward to Captain Marvel since it introduces to the MCU the idea of the alien races, the Kree and the Skrulls, who have played such a large part in some of my favorite Marvel Comics storylines, including the “Kree-Skrull War” from The Avengers, which certainly could be something being set up in the MCU. I also loved the Skrulls as Fantastic Four villains, and here’s hoping that with the new Disney-Fox merger, we might actually see a GOOD Fantastic Four movie one of these days (or a crossover with Avengers even!)

Anyway, we’ll see whether I feel like writing a review for this on Friday after seeing it on Thursday night, but it’s really tough to be fair and impartial when the star of a movie has already gone out of her way to write you off, due to your gender, race and age.

More importantly, let’s get to some…

LIMITED RELEASES

One of the best movie out this weekend is Oscar-winning Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Lelio’s new movie GLORIA BELL (A24), starring Julianne Moore. A remake of his 2013 Spanish language film Gloria, the filmmaker behind A Fantastic Woman makes his English language debut with Moore playing the title character, a lonely older woman dealing with family issues who goes out dancing on Friday nights in hoping of meeting men. On one such night she meets John Turturro’s Arnold, and the two of them fall into a romance that runs into issues when he finally meets her kids and ex-husband (Brad Garrett).  Although I never did see Gloria, I was pretty blown away by how Lelio told this story, and Moore gives one of the best performances of her career – YES, MUCH better than her Oscar-winning turn in Still Alice. I know that A24 brought the movie to TIFF last year, but for whatever reason, they decided to hold it until March… just like Brie Larson’s Free Fire, ironically enough. Personally, I think Moore has a real chance at another Oscar nomination, but having a movie released so early in the year will make it tough, sadly. I was really able to relate to this movie more than I thought I would but mainly to Turturro’s character.

Another film worth seeking out is Vincent D’Onofrio’s second film as a director, the Western THE KID (Lionsgate), as in “Billy the Kid,” played by Dane DeHaan. The “kid” in the title is also teenager Rio, played by Jake Schur, who is on the run with his sister (Leila George) trying to get away from their abusive uncle (played by Chris Pratt!) Along the way, they meet Billy the Kid, as well as Sheriff Pat Garrett, who has been sent to capture and try Billy.  It’s opening in 250 theaters on Friday, so it won’t be too hard to find, and I’d love to say more wonderful things about it, but I’ve been embargoed. I hope to have an interview with D’Onofrio soon over on The Beat!

Another film worth seeking out is 3 FACES (Kino Lorber), the new film from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi (The Circle, Offside), who has been banned from making films in his home country but continues to find a way to make films anyway. This one received an award for Best Screenplay at Cannes last year and has played Toronto and New York Film Festivals before opening at the IFC Centeron Friday. Panahi also stars in this drama along with Iranian actor Behnaz Jafari, as they go on a road trip to help a girl whose family has forbidden her from attending a drama school in Tehran, encountering various people along the way. The film continues Panahi’s exploration of combining his personal life with dramatic storytelling in the real world, which I haven’t really enjoyed as much as his straight dramas.

Opening at Metrograph is Black Mother (Grasshopper Films), the new cinema verité doc from filmmaker and photographer Khalik Allah (Field Niggas), which combines portraits of denizens of Jamaica shot on 16mm and HD with audio recordings of them talking about life in Jamaica. It’s a really beautiful film, and this is from someone who generally doesn’t care for cinema verité docs, but this really is a compelling film that’s worth seeing.

Oscar winner J.K. Simmons stars in his wife Michelle Schumacher’s second film I’m Not Here (Gravitas Ventures) playing Steve, as a lonely man who is haunted by memories of his past locked into the objects and sounds around his house. The film also stars Sebastian Stan, Mandy Moore, Max Greenfield, David Koechner and Harold Perrineau, and it opens at New York’s Village East, Los Angele’s Laemmle Monica and in other select cities this Friday. (Simmons and Schumacher will be at the Laemmle for a QnA on Sunday evening.)

Opening at New York’s Quad Cinema Friday is Giacomo Durzi’s doc Ferrante Fever (Greenwich) about novelist Elena Ferrante, who has made waves both in Italy and in America, thanks to a few independent publishers.

Gabrielle Brady’s directorial debut Island of the Hungry Ghosts, winner of Best Documentary at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, will open at Astoria’s Museum of the Moving Image. It focuses on the residents of Christmas Island off the coast of Indonesia where asylum seekers are held in a high-security detention center and counseled by trauma therapist Poh Lin Lee.

Since I haven’t had a chance to see JC (All Is Lost, Margin Call) Chandor’s new movie Triple Frontier, starring Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund and Pedro Pascal (Narcos) as Special Forces operatives planning a South American heist, I don’t have much to say about it, although I’m sold based on the premise alone. It’s opening In New York and L.A. on Wednesday in single theaters in both places (Sorry, Steven Spielberg!) but it will stream on Netflix a week later on March 13. Maybe I’ll write more about it next week. Maybe not.

Opening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center is the late Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still (KimStim) which played at New Directors/New Films in 2018.  It involves a teenager who accidentally injures a bully and interacts with various people who are dealing with their own burdens. Actor Zhang Yu will be making appearances before and after screenings including a reception before the 6:30pm screening on Friday.

This week’s Bollywood offering is Sujoy Ghosh’s BADLA (Reliance Entertainment), starring Taapsee Pannu as a young entrepreneur who is locked in a hotel room with the body of her deadl lover, so she calls upon a prestigious lawyer (Bollywood vet Amitabh Bachchan) to figure out how she ended up in that predicament.

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

Ringo Lam X3 continues through the weekend, while Raul Peck X2continues with a screening of Murder in Pacot  (2014) on Saturday. This week’s Late Nites at Metrograph  is Fassbinder’s Love is Cooler than Death (1969), and the weekend’s Playtime: Family Matinees is 1982’s The Last Unicorn, an animated film from Rankin and Bass that was co-created by the Japanese anime studio Topcraft, who went on to form Studio Ghibli – you’ve probably heard of them. The voice cast includes Mia Farrow, Alan Arkin, Jeff Bridges, Angela Lansbury and Christopher Lee, and it’s probably a bit of a lost classic.

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

Weds and Thursday is the Billy Dee Williams cop double feature The Take  (1974) and Nighthawks (1981), and then on Friday and Saturday, the Bev double features One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest  (1975) and Arthur Hiller’s The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder (1974) (a movie I’ve never even heard of!). Sunday and Monday’s double feature is two Paul Wendkos films, The Case Against Brooklyn and Tarawa Beachhead, both from 1958. On Saturday and Sunday, the Kiddee Matinee is the Australian horse movie Phar Lap  (1983) while the midnight offerings this weekend are Kill Bill Vol. 2 on Friday and The Groove Tubeon Saturday. Grindhouse Tuesday is back with the “Bruce Li” double feature of Soul Brothers of Kung Fu  (1977) and The Image of Bruce Lee  (1978), movies made after Bruce Lee’s death.  (If I lived in L.A., this is where I would be on Tuesday night.) The high school comedy classic Clueless (1995) will screen on Tuesday, as well.

FILM FORUM (NYC):

Starting this weekend, the Greenwich Village theater presents a new 4k restoration of Jack Clayton’s 1959 film Room at the Top, which won Oscars for screenplay and actress Simone Signoret and was nominated for Picture, Director, Actor and Supporting Actress (for Hermione Baddeley’s 2.5 minute appearance in the film). It’s about a working-class guy who sets his sights on the daughter of the boss.The weekend’s Film Forum Jr. is Joe Dante’s 1993 film Matinee, starring John Goodman. Also, author David Thomson will present a screening of Joseph Losey’s 1963 film The Servant on Sunday.

MOMA (NYC):

New month, new Modern Matinees series and for the next two months, it’s a doozy with Modern Matinees: B is for Bacall, showcasing the fabulous filmography of Oscar-nominated actor Laure Bacall. This week, they’re screening the 1954 film Woman’s Worldon Wednesday, Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946) on Thursday and 1947’s Dark Passages on Friday. (Note that most of these movies will be rescreened later in the series in case you miss them this week.) Also this week is the series William Fox Presents More Restorations and Rediscoveries from the Fox Film Corporation, which features lots of movie from the ‘20s and ‘30s, many of them accompanied with live piano. Wednesday is Hangman’s House from 1928 and 1920’s Just Palsand Friday is 1929’s The Cock-Eyed World and Me and My Gal (1932), and there’s more on Saturday, Sunday and next week.  This is a busy time for MOMA as they’re also presenting Carte Blanche: Mariette Rissenbeek on German Women Cinematographers, which mostly features films from the last 15 years but many which never have received U.S. theatrical releases.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA)

Big weekend for Albert Finney fans as Albert Finney Remembered presents a few fantastic double features including Two for the Road  (1967) and Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon (1982) on Thursday, the Coens’ Miller’s Crossing  (1990) and John Huston’s Under the Volcano  (1984) on Friday and Tom Jones (1963) and Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003) on Sunday. The Egyptian’s big event for the weekend is the 7-movie day-long Boris Karloff-Bela Lugosi Movie Marathonon Saturday, which will include Frankenstein, Dracula but some lesser-seen classics like The Raven (1935) and more. If I lived in L.A., this is where I would be on Saturday.

AERO  (LA):

The AERO continues its Hitchcock, Truffaut and Jones series with double features Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much  (1956) and Truffaut’s 1968 film The Bride Wore Black (which I’ve actually seen fairly recently!) on Friday, and Rear Window  (1954)and Mississippi Mermaid (1969) on Saturday. The theater will also have an all-day screening of Sergey Bondarchuk’s 7-hour epic adaptation of War and Peace  (1967) in four parts with two brief intermissions.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

The Quad’s still a month away from its 2-year restoration anniversary, but they’re reshowing Bertrand Blier’s Going Places and Luis Bunuel’s Tristana this coming weekend. The former is also part of Amour or Less: A Blier Buffet, a retrospective of the French filmmaker who I’m not even remotely familiar with. (Sorry!) They’re showing eight of Blier’s films before the new 40thanniversary restoration of his 1978 film Get Out Your Hankerchiefs opens on Friday, March 15.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

While Weekend Classics: Early Godard  seems to be taking a weekend off, Waverly Midnights: The Feds  is screening the Wayan Brothers’ White Girls (2004) in a 35mm print! Late Night Favorites takes a break from showing Ridley Scott’s Alien (which celebrates its 40th anniversary this month!) to show David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977).

BAM CINEMATEK (NYC):

Premiering at BAM on Friday (as well as the Laemmle Glendale in L.A.) is the U.S. premiere of a restoration of Franco Rocco’s 1980 film Babylon, which was banned from the New York Film Festival and never released in the United States. Written by Martin Stellman (Quadrophenia), it stars Brinsley Forde from reggae group Aswad as a dancehall DJ who fights again racism and xenophobia in Thatcher-era London.

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

See It Big! Costumes by Edith Head concludes this weekend with screenings of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964).

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART  (LA):

The Nuart’s Friday midnight screening is George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road Black & Chrome Edition (2015).

STREAMING AND CABLE

Season 1 of Ricky Gervais’ new series After Life will debut on  Netflix starting Friday, but there are also a few new movies including Clark Johnson’s Juanita, starring Alfre Woodard as the mother of three who goes on a trip to Montana, plus there’s Conor Allyn’s Walk. Ride. Rodeo., an inspirational drama that tells the true story of Amberley Snyder, played by Spencer Locke from the Resident Evil series, a 19-year-old rodeo rider who barely survives a car crash that leaves her paralyzed from the waist down. So yeah, Netflix is even trying to sidetrack Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel rerelease with other female-led films just like they’re going to try to derail Warners’ Shazam! with Brie Larson’s directorial debut Unicorn Store next month. The struggle continues.

Now available for digital download is Joe Eddy’s Steve McQueen biopic Chasing Bullitt (Vertical), starring Andre Brooks as the legendary actor who in 1971 makes a deal with his agent to let him choose his next acting gig if he finds his Ford Mustang GT 390 from Bullitt. Also available digitally is Dallas King’s action-thriller Kiss Kiss (Cleopatra Entertainment) that follows four strippers who go to a wine tasting that turns into a female fight night. I didn’t make this movie up, but apparently, it’s counter-programming to Captain Marvel.

LOCAL FESTIVALS

On Thursday, the Museum of the Moving Image is presenting the 6thannual Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival with two programs of short films. Also on Thursday, the IFC Center will kick off Canada Now 2019 with Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky’s new doc Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, another globe-crossing from the duo behind Manufactured Landscapes. There will also be other Canadian films that have played in various film festivals north of the border.

Oh, yeah, also South by Southwest is happening in Austin, but I’m not going, so…

That’s it for this week. Next week, Captain Marvel will probably be #1 again, but there are a few other movies hoping at least for second place.

[networkingdefinition]

Cowboy Quotes

Official Website: Cowboy Quotes

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• A boxing match is like a cowboy movie. There’s got to be good guys and there’s got to be bad guys. And that’s what people pay for – to see the bad guys get beat. – Sonny Liston • A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow. – Edward Abbey • A cowboy, a lawyer, and a mechanic watched Queen of the Damned,” I murmured. Warren—who had once, a long time ago, been a cowboy—snickered and wiggled his bare feet. “It could be the beginning of either a bad joke or a horror story.” “No,” said Kyle, the lawyer, whose head was propped up on my thigh. “If you want a horror story, you have to start out with a werewolf, his gorgeous lover, and a walker. – Patricia Briggs • A lot of old guys in movies are like cowboys – they talk like cowboys and they dress like cowboys. – Val Kilmer • A lot of the issues of the Dallas Cowboys yesterday having pressure on Tony Romo, came from the outside pressure. – Emmitt Smith • A new cologne is coming out. It’s for cowboys, and it’s made from cow’s manure. That way the women will be on you like flies! – Bill Maher • A second floor window opened, and Kyle stuck his head and shoulders out so he could look down at us. “If you two are finished playing Cowboy and Indian out there, some of us would like to get their beauty sleep.” I looked at Warren. “You heard ‘um Kemo Sabe. Me go to my little wigwam and get ‘um shut-eye.” “How come you always get to play the Indian?” whined Warren, deadpan. “Cause she’s the Indian, white boy,” said Kyle. – Patricia Briggs • According to a British poll, you’ve only got a one in five chance of achieving your childhood career ambition. Which probably explains why you don’t run into that many cowboys, princesses, or space rangers. – Jay Leno • All field agents have some cowboy in them – even the ones from New York. – Tom Clancy • All I can hope to do is instill great morality in my son and trust him along the way. The music he listens to or how he chooses to wear his hair doesn’t define his moral compass, and if he wants to listen to country music and wear a cowboy hat too, that’s fine. – Mark Hoppus • All of you cowboys, fight for your land. – Woody Guthrie • Always have faith in God, Yourself and the Cowboys. – Eddie Sutton • American Graffiti was the first movie where the director let me have any input. It was the first time anyone ever listened to me. George thought my character should have a crew cut, but I wasn’t happy with that idea. I’d always had pretty long hair back then – in college, particularly – so I told George my character should wear a cowboy hat. George thought about it and he remembered a bunch of guys from Modesto, California, who cruised around, like my character, and wore cowboy hats, so it turned out that it actually fit the movie. – Harrison Ford • Americans don’t want cowboys to be gay. – Larry McMurtry • And than suddenly he was there, charging down the hallway like death in a cowboy duster. – Richelle Mead • And what do we have here? A scary monster, cowboy, and a fairy princess! Here’s a hit of ecstasy, run along now. – James St. James • Ang [Lee] gave us a lot of books about cowboys who had been gay or stories about it and all that stuff. And I just talked to a lot of my friends – who [was] their first, particularly same-sex, first situation. That was fascinating to me – trying to learn what that was in a certain period of time. Certain age. The secrecy involved in it. All those things. – Jake Gyllenhaal

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Cowboy', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_cowboy').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_cowboy img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • But the reason I became, why I wanted to be in the business was because there was Midnight Cowboy. – Jodie Foster • Call saw that everyone was looking at him, the hands and cowboys and townspeople alike. The anger had drained out of him, leaving him feeling tired. He didn’t remember the fight, particularly, but people were looking at him as if they were stunned. He felt he should make some explanation, though it seemed to him a simple situation. “I hate a man that talks rude,” he said. “I won’t tolerate it. – Larry McMurtry • Canada has become trouble recently … It’s always the worst Americans who go there … We could have taken them over so easy. But I only want the western part, with the ski areas, the cowboys, and the right wingers. They’re the only good parts of Canada. – Ann Coulter • Cheap liquor is a magic potion that can turn you into a puppet cowboy before it kills you. – Patton Oswalt • Cowards never lasted long enough to become real cowboys. – Charles Goodnight • Cowboy boots with a suit? You’re a rough, tough businessman. Chaps with a bow tie? You’re in the rough, tough man business. – Dana Gould

• Cowboys make better lovers: Ask any cow. – Edward Abbey • Cowboys, just like the word says. – John Wayne • Despite what people think of cowboys, they take pride in how they look, and that look is important to them. – Steve Kanaly • Did I ever tell you my pet peeve?’ No,’ I said. People who dress up their pets to look like Little Lord Fauntleroys or cowboys, clowns, ballerinas. As if it’s not enough just to be a dog or cat or turtle. – Jerry Spinelli • Don’t get me wrong, God Bless the farmers and cowboys. It just wasn’t the life I wanted. When writing stories of other lands, I can describe people and places from actual experience. And for someone with an imagination like me, I could see dinosaurs and lost civilizations in the jungle of Vietnam. – Tom Johnson • Edward Said talks about Orientalism in very negative terms because it reflects the prejudices of the west towards the exotic east. But I was also having fun thinking of Orientalism as a genre like Cowboys and Indians is a genre – they’re not an accurate representation of the American west, they’re like a fairy tale genre. – Craig Thompson • Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn’t. You can’t unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons’ sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That’s just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that’s what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons. – Naomi Klein • en you show up to work and put on your undergarments, throw on your suspenders and your cowboy boots, throw some dirt on you, and then get on your spurs, you start to walk a bit different. When you put on your gun belts, you change again. You go through this whole transformation process. All that stuff changes you. Riding a horse changes the way you walk and your demeanor. – James Badge Dale • Europeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case. – George Friedman • Every little kid wants to grow up to be a cowboy, and I did. – Lee Iacocca • For an actor to remain a child is rather important. It’s a childlike, dreamy thing, acting, if you think about it. It’s the sort of thing children fantasise about, playing cowboys and Indians in the street. I think that acting is just a highly refined development of that. – Michael Gambon • For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious–or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution. – Naomi Wolf • For most Northerners, Texas is the home of real men. The cowboys, the rednecks, the outspoken self-made right-wing millionaires strike us as either the best or worst examples of American manliness…. The ideal is not an illusion nor is it contemptible, no matter what damage it may have done. Many people who scorn it in conversation want to submit to it in bed. Those who believe machismo reeks of violence alone choose to forget it once stood for honor as well. – Edmund White • For some reason cowboy sounds better than cowman. – Demetri Martin • France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything. – Adam Michnik • Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east. – Rebecca Solnit • Hardy was every loose-limbed cowboy in warn denim, every pair of blue eyes, every battered pickup, every hot cloudless day.” -Liberty – Lisa Kleypas • He could wear hats. He could wear an assortment of hats of different shapes and styles. Boater hats, cowboy hats, bowler hats. The list went on. Pork-pie hats, bucket hats, trillbies and panamas. Top hats, straw hats, trapper hats. Wide brim narrow brim, stingy brim. He could wear a fez. Fezzes were cool. Hadn’t someone once said that fezzes were cool? He was pretty aur ether had. And they were. They were cool. – Derek Landy • He reclined on a delightfully cushioned lounge in the sprawling ranch Paris had rented. In Dallas, Texas, of all places. Promiscuity had decked himself out, too, wearing a Stetson (weird), no shirt (understandable), unfastened jeans (smart) and cowboy boots (weird again). Dude looked ready to rustle cattle or something. – Gena Showalter • Hey. Hands off.” “, ““Please. Please, please, soooo pretty. Lemme just have one little touch.” ““Peabody, isn’t it embarrassing enough you’re wearing pink cowboy boots, again, without standing here drooling on my coat?””, [J.D. Robb, Celebrity In Death] – Nora Roberts • How odd it is that sewing is thought to be ‘women’s work’ when surgeons, sailors, and cowboys sew too. Yet how many female thoracic surgeons are there? And if precision motor activities are thought to be performed better by women, why wouldn’t they make better surgeons too? – Gretel Ehrlich • I always wanted a guitar. I always wanted to be a cowboy singer because I also listened to Hank Williams, and he would always sing these neat romantic songs. – Dick Dale • I always wanted to be a cowboy, and Jedi Knights are basically cowboys in space, right? – Liam Neeson • I always wore cowboy boots and drove a truck, and talked like this. So everywhere I would go in comedy people would say, “Foxworthy, you ain’t nothing but a redneck from Georgia!” It kind of became a formula joke. – Jeff Foxworthy • I came from a very intellectual neighborhood. When we played cowboys and Indians as kids, I had to be Gandhi. – Robert Frost • I came in with my idea of what a cowboy would wear, but then I met some real cowboys and they said that I rode the horses well, shoed the horses, but no good cowboy would be wearing a pair of Levi’s. I had to get a good old pair of Wranglers. – Steve Kanaly • I came to New York for the first time with Peter Buck at age 19. We spent a week living out of a van on the street in front of a club in the West 60s called Hurrah. It’s where Pylon played. I saw Klaus Nomi play there. And Michael Gira’s band before he did Swans-they all wore cowboy boots and were so cool and had great hair. I was so jealous. – Michael Stipe • I can tell a good cowboy by the way he approaches a cow. – Henry Green • I couldn’t do country, with all due respect to all country music artists. My parents dressed me up with a cowboy hat and we’d go to the rodeo when I was younger and it traumatized me for life. – Chris Colfer • I didn’t always know, but I always wanted to. I always wanted to be the very best receiver the Cowboys ever had. That was my goal coming in as a rookie and my goal throughout my career: being the best they ever had, going up in the Ring of Honor. – Michael Irvin • I didn’t come to Nashville to put on a cowboy hat and pretend to be a country singer. My attraction to Nashville as Music City is the variety and flexibility: the fact that there’s so many musicians at your disposal, so many amazing studios and talented people that you can draw from. … I try to be myself, but at the same time I’m learning a lot, and I’m pulling from not only from the well of inspiration that I’m getting from Nashville, but I’m pulling from my roots. – John Oates • I didn’t want to play a rancher. I didn’t want to have a cowboy hat on; I wanted to get away from that in the things I do. But I read the script and fell in love with it. As hard as I tried to say no, I couldn’t. – Tim McGraw • I don’t care about going down in history as a great bull rider or bronc rider. I hope people will remember me as a great cowboy. – Ty Murray • I don’t walk around with a cowboy hat. I did get a tattoo that says ‘cowboy’ that’s a bit of an over-compensation, probably. – Ronnie Dunn • I feel like a real cowboy! Yippi Ki Yay! – Kurt Angle • I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, ‘Okay, you fall off the horse this time. – John Sayles • I found a treehouse. I found this weird tree, out in a field, and someone had put a piece of a fence, way up in a tree. I just went up there and went to sleep for a few hours, in full cowboy regalia. And someone did take a photo. I have a photo of it, somewhere. It brought me back to when I was 12 years old, sitting in a treehouse and imagining that I was in a Western somewhere. – James Badge Dale • I get to actually experience what it would be like to be a psycho, which is not a fun one, or to be a cowboy, or to be a weird character of some sort. For me, it suits me. It suits my personality. I’m an emotional kind of person anyway. – Josh Holloway • I grew up in Dallas, with cowboys. I was the only guy in sixth grade with long hair and an earring. Let’s just say I got a lot of, er, flak for being different. – Barry Watson • I grew up in southeastern Oklahoma on a working cattle ranch, and it was always very romantic to me: The West, the cowboy, the Western way of life. – Reba McEntire • I grew up in that, when I was a kid. My friends and I used to play cowboys and Indians. We were cowboys killing the Indians, following the Wild West stories. All of this combined into a very strange culture, which is frightened. – Noam Chomsky • I grew up with a lot of Hollywood films. Cozy farm houses, cowboys, nice flats in New York. Especially as a kid, those things have a huge impression on you. – Andrea Arnold • I had done my first picture and I didn’t have anything to do for awhile. I was asked to come back to New York and do Bus Stop in the role of the cowboy opposite Kim Stanley. – Dick York • I had read the Animal House script, and by hook and crook, I finally got an audition. It was a great one. John Landis followed me out into the hallway afterward and said, “I’ve never done this before, but you’ve got the job. Now don’t tell anyone!” I’ve never had a director do that. It was one of those Hollywood-dream-come-true stories. They saw me as a surfer or cowboy, not a preppie, but someone begged and borrowed me an audition, and I went in and got it. – Tim Matheson • I had the pleasure of listening to Rickie Lee Jones’ Flying Cowboys album on audio cassette, which had just come out at that time because I am an elderly man. – John Hodgman • I have played a boxer, a cowboy, a knight, a prince, an elf and a pirate. I am so glad to have done all of that already. – Orlando Bloom • I hope my music sets up the platform for me to be able to do lots of things – to have a cowboy-boot line, maybe, or do a perfume or makeup deal. – Miranda Lambert • I just fell in love with Thomas McGuane the minute I saw him. He was the handsomest guy I’d ever seen, and gorgeous and sexy, and he had long hair and cowboy boots and tight jeans. So it was truly an act of love, to say the least, and it ended up having a permanent impact on my life, obviously. – Margot Kidder • I knew even if I’m a cowboy, I’m going to be involved in jazz in some way. – Dave Brubeck • I know all the songs that the cowboys know’bout the big corral where the doggies go,’Cause I learned them all on the radio.Yippie yi yo kayah – Johnny Mercer • I laughed at the whole Cannes Film Festival thing because it didn’t feel real. I remember getting off the red-eye when I arrived in France. I had a cowboy had on and some zit medicine, and there were like 15 photographers who jumped over the luggage carousel to take pictures of me. – Liv Tyler • I like crazy shoes or unusual cowboy boots and I collect big belt buckles. – Patricia Cornwell • I like to go to the frat house and drink with my white friends, because anytime you go drinking at the frat house, white boys bring you a drink and hand it to you like it’s a top CIA secret. They’ll hand me my drink, and I’ll go, ‘Man, what the hell is in this?’ ‘Dude, don’t worry. Don’t ask, just drink it. I’ll see you in 20 minutes.’ Next thing you know, I’m buck naked, standing on a coffee table, with a cowboy hat. – Aries Spears • I met this cowboy with a brown paper hat, paper waistcoat and paper trousers. He was wanted for rustling. – Chic Murray • I never considered myself a cowboy, because I wasn`t. But I guess when I got into cowboy gear I looked enough like one to convince people that I was. – Clint Eastwood • I remember first seeing Barney Kessel, in the 1940s, standing on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, in his cowboy boots, sun glasses and hipster threads, holding his guitar case man, you just knew that cat could wail!’ – Anita O’Day • I remember my son wanted to go to bed with his cowboy boots on, and we had this fight for like an hour. Then I realized that the only good reason I had for him not to do it is because I didn’t want him to. There was really no other reason. And finally I said, “OK, fine.” It was a great victory for me, because I realized it doesn’t really matter. – Michael J. Fox • I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit. – John Hurt • I ride really well and I shoot a gun really well. I love the genre. Once I did Westerns, I was hooked. I love them, but there’s been very few of them made. I never wanted to play a guy who was acting like a cowboy. I wanted to play someone who had a real life, but was also trapped into situations. – Lance Henriksen • I sacrificed for the Dallas Cowboys when most quit. I put in overtime to try to help young players. – Charles Haley • I spent two months in Fredericksburg, Texas, when I was 8, while my father shot a movie, and I loved it. I just embraced the whole cowboy culture. I got myself a pair of awesome boots and a cowboy hat. – Alexander Skarsgard • I tend to get comfortable with the dialogue and find out who the person is in the script and try to hit that. People are sort of independent of their occupations and their pastimes. You don’t play a politician or a fireman or a cowboy – you just play a person. – Billy Campbell • I think every man should have a pair of boots. They’re really sexy. Leather boots, cowboy boots, it depends. – Kemp Muhl • I think the warning labels on alcoholic beverages are too bland. They should be more vivid. Here are a few I would suggest: “Alcohol will turn you into the same asshole your father was.”; “Drinking will significantly improve your chances of murdering a loved one.”; “If you drink long enough, at some point you will vomit up the lining of your stomach.”; “Use this product and you may wake up in Morocco wearing a cowboy suit and tongue-kissing a transmission salesman.” – George Carlin • I think you’re going to find out that westerns will be coming back. It’s Americana, it’s part of our history, the cowboy, the cattle drive, the sheriff, the fight for law, order and justice. Justice will always prevail as far as I’m concerned. – Clayton Moore • I thought about telling him the truth: ‘Oh, nothing. Just having my soul exorcised so I can roam around purgatory, looking for the ghost of the dead cowboy who used to live in my bedroom. – Meg Cabot • I thought of telling him that if it wasn’t for Oklahoman cowboys and Mexican whores having a bit of fun, there would’ve been no Texans, but that would be counterproductive. – Ilona Andrews • I was always drawn to performing, but I never thought I could. I have no idea what I wanted to do outside of the old cowboy-or-fireman. When I was in college, I got serious about acting. I started examining history and then everything related to the theater. History, art, all the other studies, if I could link them into the theater, then it became alive for me. It just opened up my eyes. – Billy Crystal • I was feeling real good and real manly. Until a real cowboy walked by and told me I had my hat on backwards. So much for my career as a cowboy. – Michael Biehn • I was freaking out when Brooks & Dunn were breaking up. I thought ‘We play a ton of rodeos, and I thought this was such a cowboy deal, and I don’t wear a hat. They might not think I’m a cowboy. That might sound ridiculous to a lot of people, but apparently, it meant something to me. I wound up with a cowboy tattoo from my elbow to my wrist. – Ronnie Dunn • I was going to move back to Dallas, and my goal was to work at Channel 8 and be a sportscaster and cover my Cowboys and live happily ever after. – Chris Harrison • I was playing cowboys and Indians in the trees, and then I started hitting the golf club with clubs father sawed off for me, and I began playing right here with my father. – Arnold Palmer • I was raised in farm and ranch communities, and my dad wanted me to be a cowboy like him, but I saw how he struggled in life and wanted more than that. – Tom Johnson • I was raised on technology. I grew up in Livermore, California, a town of physicists and cowboys. My parents worked at the government laboratories there. So technology was very normal for me. – Cynthia Breazeal • I was rather shaken by all the green trees. I always am. It gets me. I don’t want to be funny about it but I am. I loved seeing all the westerns, but I had asthma and couldn’t go anywhere, but I loved watching them in Technicolor and seeing the cowboys and the landscapes of Monument Valley and you’d see the forests of the Anthony Mann films and think, ‘wow, that’s fantastic’, but I could never go there! – Martin Scorsese • I went to Texas a few times for gigs and adopted the cowboy look. Every man, at some point in his life, goes through a cowboy stage – everyone! Well, at least everyone that I look up to! – Theophilus London • I went to West Texas and started writing a cycle of Americana poems after the space conjured images that, as a child, I only saw on television-John Wayne, cowboys, borderlines. But suddenly, I felt close to these once-foreign imageries and wondered how I’d changed. Each evening brought the darkest skies in the country, and I understood the expansiveness of our inner selves. Ultimately nothing divides us except the worlds and words we allow. – Nathalie Handal • I wore a lot of vintage clothing. I dressed like a reporter, with a little card in my hat. I had these fantasies of who I wanted to be, so I’d dress like an explorer, a cowboy. I dressed up like Elton John a lot too. That was another period. – Illeana Douglas • I wore hot pants and cowboy boots and I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ – Alek Wek • I would love for someone to offer me a serious part in something. I don’t know if I could even pull it off, but I would like to be the cowboy that rides off and someone shoots him off the horse in the middle of town. Just a serious role. It wouldn’t have to be a big one. – Jeff Foxworthy • I wouldn’t call it [“Wild Bill Hickok”] an urban legend, but I guess I’d call it a rural legend that the cowboy was always soft-spoken, mild-spoken, well-mannered. – Keith Carradine • I’d had my whole life to write my first album. I had my No. 1 and my third single out, and they go, ‘Hey, guess what? We need to start recording the next one.’ I’m like, ‘Uh oh, I got to write another album. Well, how am I gonna write ‘Should’ve Been a Cowboy’ and ‘Ain’t Worth Missing’ and all that again?’ It took me forever to write the first one. – Toby Keith • If anybody asks me what I attribute the longevity of my career to, then I say it’s because I was never satisfied with being a cowboy in the plains of Spain and later I was never satisfied with just playing a detective in San Francisco, and constantly just pushing the envelope. – Clint Eastwood • If I’m being forgiving of myself, I could say I’m somebody who was really hungry for experiences. The same thing that would make me go try to be a trail cook on a ranch was the same thing that would make me want to have sex with a couple cowboys while I was there. – Elizabeth Gilbert • If I’m playing country, I gotta have my country hat and my cowboy boots. I gotta have a voice, and the third thing, I gotta have I guess a little music to keep me in the right mind, a little pre-show something to get ya going. Lots of AC/DC, or I’ll sit on youtube and find all kinds of stuff before we take the stage to get pumped up. – Hank Williams III • If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn’t it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed? – Steven Wright • If the Cowboys and Titans ain’t playing, I’m not interested. – Tanya Tucker • I’ll never forget reading Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end – the scene where the patient says goodbye to the doctor and she puts a flower in her hair as a kind of thank you to him – and I felt like a cowboy shot from a canyon’s top. This is a different experience from reading a novel, I think. The emotional effect is cumulative. Let’s just hope market forces don’t send short fiction the way of the dinosaur, because their sales are paltry compared to the novel and this is truly unfortunate. – Adam Ross • I’m a cowboy who never saw a cow. – Johnny Mercer • I’m content where I am. I know I am going to be a Cowboy for life. – Terrell Owens • I’m just a big boy, I’m still just playing cowboys and Indians and astronaut and baseball player and all that stuff that I used to play as a kid. – Bryan Cranston • I’m not a great science fiction fan myself. I probably feel that way about Westerns. Like I used to play Cowboys and Indians, they can act out Will and the Robot. – Mark Goddard • I’m scared of snakebites – that’s the origin of cowboy boots, protection – but my toes need to breathe. – Gavin McInnes • I’m the oldest son of a crazy man, I’m in a cowboy band. – Bob Dylan • I’m thrilled, I’m grateful, I’m blessed. I played for the world’s greatest professional sports team in history. Once a Dallas Cowboy, always a Dallas Cowboy. – Bob Hayes • In a lot of places in the United States and certainly even more places around the world, the image of the cowboy has become, for some people, a negative one. The word ‘cowboy’ implies a strong, stubborn individual whose individualism depends on pulling down other people’s individualism. – Viggo Mortensen • In New Haven, Conn., when I was growing up, there were two sorts of Irish. There were the “drugstore cowboy” micks, who hung around the Elm Street poolroom over Longley’s Lunch. And there were the earnest young Irishmen who fought their way up from the Grand Avenue saloonkeeper backgrounds of their fathers, went through Yale Law School, and have now found high place by the preferment of local politics or in the teaching profession. – James T. Farrell • In the United States, you can put on a cowboy hat and join the country-western neighborhood. If you’re down below 14th Street in New York City, that’s bohemian; that’s left-wing. – David Lee Roth • It doesn’t matter the kind of music, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a cowboy hat or a yarmulke. I don’t care if it’s outer space or pop, the spirit is the same. – David Lee Roth • It is easier to get an actor to be a cowboy than to get a cowboy to be an actor. – John Ford • It’s a fact that kids watch TV. But if you think back, when you watched cowboy movies, you would go out and play cowboys. TV and movies motivate people. – Magnus • It’s almost comical that astronauts are stereotyped as daredevils and cowboys. As a rule, we’re highly methodical and detail-oriented. Our passion isn’t for thrills but for the grindstone, and pressing our noses to it. – Chris Hadfield • It’s funny, but when there are dominant teams, there are a number of people who rail about the fact that they’re always seeing the Dallas Cowboys or the San Francisco 49ers or the Green Bay either in the playoffs or in the Super Bowl. – Al Michaels • It’s like you said the other day,” said Adam. “You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin’ about for millions of years. ‘Snot worth growin’ up for, if you ask my opinion. – Neil Gaiman • I’ve always been interested in the Southwest. There isn’t a place in the world you can go where they don’t know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West. – Cormac McCarthy • I’ve always been really hot on westerns. All my life growing up, cowboy, cowboy, cowboy. – Morgan Freeman • I’ve always loved comic books. As a kid, I used to read cowboy stories and historical comics about other worlds, unknown places that would take me out of myself and which helped to develop my imagination. – James Herbert • Jessica Simpson attended boyfriend Tony Romo’s football game. The Cowboys quarterback had the worst game of his career. It’s a bad year for the name Simpson. Even O. J. is pissed – he feels like they’re making his name look bad. – Chelsea Handler • John Wayne never ever disappointed his fans, because he was a cowboy. – Vinnie Jones • Justin Salinger showed up one day with a pink cowboy hat on and everyone else got really annoyed because somehow he’d managed to get the pink cowboy hat. – Alex Cox • Kerouac was the cowboy that inspired the whole Beat Generation, and highlighted and put the spotlight on all of these minds that didn’t really know what they were doing at the time, but accomplished something much bigger than what they ever foresaw. – Garrett Hedlund • Last night I dreamed I went to hillbilly heaven and you know who greeted me at the gate? The ole cowboy-philosopher himself, Will Rogers. – Tex Ritter • Living in Dallas, I root for the Mavericks and the Stars and the Cowboys, but I’ve always pulled for the Chicago Cubs. I enjoy watching them play. – Lee Trevino • Monday is President’s Day and former President Bill Clinton is very excited. He is taking George Bush, Sr. to ‘Hooters’. … George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton have been spending more and more time together. Doesn’t that seem like an unusual couple to you, honestly? Earlier today they went to go see that gay cowboy movie. – David Letterman • My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky. – Alan Moore • My father’s a protector. My father’s old-school. He’s a cowboy. – Paul Walker • My favorite teams are the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Jets. – Bridget Hall • My friend Kathy is the only person who’ll be halfway honest with me. ‘Did you ever see a cowboy film, where someone has been caught by the Indians and tied between two wild stallions, each pulling in opposite directions?’ she asked.I nodded mutely.’That’s a bit what giving birth is like. – Marian Keyes • My grandpa was a cowboy. He roped cattle out in Texas and Arizona. Growing up, I’d see him maybe once a year and he’d always get me on a horse at some point. But each time I’d have to learn again. – Austin Butler • My uncle Claude was my favorite uncle he was also my godfather. He and I were really, really close. He used to take me to see cowboy movies all the time when I was a little boy because I loved cowboy movies. He got a cowboy name for me, which was Smokey Joe. So from the time I was three years old if people asked me what my name was I didn’t tell them my name was William, I told them my name was Smokey Joe. – Smokey Robinson • Neiman-Marcus is one thing, and the Dallas Cowboys are another. – Mercedes McCambridge • Never be possessive. If a female friend lets on that she is going out with another man, be kind and understanding. If she says she would like to go out with the Dallas Cowboys, including the coaching staff, the same rule applies. – Bruce Jay Friedman • Now look! That damned cowboy is president of the United States! – Mark Hanna • Now, I have to – in my defense, I have the say that general knowledge of the deadly nature of cigarettes was not primarily in my mind and nor was it on these poor cowboys, who – many of whom who’ve died of emphysema since we were shooting. – Haskell Wexler • One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game. No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush’s Iraq War. – Adam Hochschild • President Bush recently challenged Iraqi soldiers still fighting U.S. troops like so: … ‘My answer is bring ’em on.’ For those of you who may be criticizing Bush for acting like a movie cowboy, let me remind you. He’s actually acting more like a movie cheerleader. – Jon Stewart • Prior to being mugged I did not feel I had to carry a gun. However, I knew how to shoot a gun very proficiently. As a boy, I used to play cowboys and Indians all the time. – Bernhard Goetz • Renaissance cowboy/raconteur Pop Wagner …deadpan funny …his presence is like meeting Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers riding a single, many colored horse. Pop is a kind of ‘textile genius’ who is able to spin, at once, both yarn and rope. – Ron Miles • Simple. Pared down. Timeless. The ties were never too thick or too thin; the pants were never too flared or too skinny. In my life with Dad, he wore Western apparel because we went riding – jeans, cowboy boots, the turquoise belt buckle. But it was all very simple, and that classic look is very ‘Ralph Lauren.’ – Jennifer Grant • Some of these bulls are gonna’ spin those cowboys so fast, they’ll look like a frog in a blender. – Wayne White • Someone said DX over here? It was this dipshit with the cowboy hat over here. – Randy Orton • Sorry for the tune up between time, but what the hell, cowboys are the only ones who stay in tune, anyway. – Jimi Hendrix • Spending that many hours in the saddle gave a man plenty of time to think. That’s why so many cowboys fancied themselves Philosophers. – Charles Marion Russell • Spring comes with joyous laugh, and song, and sunshine, and the burnt sacrifice of the over-ripe boot and the hoary overshoe. The cowboy and the new milch cow carol their roundelay. So does the veteran hen. The common egg of commerce begins to come forth into the market at a price where it can be secured with a step-ladder, and all nature seems tickled. – Edgar Wilson Nye • Tell me again what we’re doing here,” I said, running a continuous scan of our surroundings. Fang popped some Cracker Jack into his mouth. “We’re here to watch manly men do manly things.” I followed Fang’s line of sight: He was watching the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who were not doing manly things, by any stretch of the imagination. – James Patterson • Thankfully dreams can change. If we’d all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses. So whatever your dream is right now, if you don’t achieve it, you haven’t failed and you’re not some loser-but just as importantly-if you do get your dream, you’re not a winner. – Stephen Colbert • That cowboy had heartbreak written all over him and she’d be damned if she knew why every time he blew into town she ended up naked before he ended up gone. Reed always ended up gone. – Cindy Gerard • That’s where I got my start and where I’ll continue to work, but I can’t tell you the number of films between Drugstore Cowboy and Curly Sue that I auditioned for and wanted that didn’t choose me. – Kelly Lynch • The chief contribution made by white men of the Americas to the folk songs of the world ——- the cowboy songs of Texas and the West ——- are rhythmed to the walk, the trot, and the gallop of horses. – J. Frank Dobie • The cowboy doesn’t need an iron horse, but covers his country on one that eats grass and wears hair. – Charles Marion Russell • The cowboy movies is not our go-to programmer anymore, here’s a horror film. – Robert Englund • The cowboy music twanged in the roadhouse and carried across the fields, all sadness. It was all right with me. I kissed my baby and we put out the lights. – Jack Kerouac • The Cowboy’s defense has more holes in it than Ronny Milsapp and Jose Feliciano after a game of lawn darts. – Dennis Miller • The fact that I got Drugstore Cowboy at all was a fluke. – Kelly Lynch • The first movie I appeared in was Carry On Cowboy, though not as an actor. I was just riding horses. – Richard O’Brien • The last three movies I’ve done, I played a cowboy, then I played a soldier, and now I play Han Solo. So the little kid in me is having a real joyride. – Alden Ehrenreich • The military offered the opportunity to see the world, and meet other people and learn new customs. Plus, the Army taught soldiers discipline. The life I experienced in the service was an education I could never have obtained as a cowboy. – Tom Johnson • The only negative thing is that I got into acting thinking, “One day I’ll be a cowboy, the next day I’ll be an astronaut. Maybe I’ll be a fireman.” It seems that I’m destined to play smart people in suits. I’d rather have that than no niche. – Joshua Malina • The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren – Sarah Vowell • The thing that bothers me the most is the recklessness and greed of the local ranchers, who run too many cattle back here, choking with waste the creek that runs through my property. There’s certain times of day that the cowboys like to send them turds down the river. Them f**kers piss me off. if you gotta mess up the ecology of the world in order to raise a bunch of cows, well eat somethin else. I’m not a fan of the cowboys. – Merle Haggard • The whites have always had the say in America. White people made Jesus white, angels white, the Last Supper white. If I threaten you, I’m blackmailing you. A black cat is bad luck. If you’re put out of a club, you’re blackballed. Angel’s-food cake is white; devil’s-food cake is black. Good guys in cowboy movies wear white hats. The bad guys always wore black hats. – Muhammad Ali • There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment. – Paul Theroux • There is about to be a big cowboy boot in your ass if you dont shut up. – Jim Ross • There was a photo of me with weird sunglasses on and a green sweatshirt, some striped thing, with tights and cowboy boots…I just saw that photo and thought, ‘God, I look crazy.’ – Mary-Kate Olsen • There was no excuse for Dallas Cowboys to lose to Washington. Rivalry or not, Redskins are a bad team. – Jemele Hill • They gave me the chaps and hat and everything. I looked like a real cowboy. I walked around the rodeo and thought, I am a real cowboy and thought everyone thought I was a real cowboy. – Michael Biehn • Though Geographic didn’t publish that photo in the story that it was done for, “The Life of Charlie Russell,” a cowboy artist in Montana. But later, maybe a year and a half ago, they named it one of the 50 greatest pictures ever made at National Geographic. – Sam Abell • To be an artist of my generation willing to be unhip -artists were supposed to be like cowboys. – Deborah Kass • To be honest I’m the only one really who’s a cowboy. Like an honest to goodness cowboy. – Tim Rozon • Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that. – Steve Earle • Trust me, Joe. You’re not a cowboy. The only cows you ever saw as a kid came under a plastic wrap in the grocery store or in a paper wrapped from McDonald’s. (Tee) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • Upon four-legged forest clouds the cowboy angel rides – Bob Dylan • We are continuing to look for ways that we can do something that’s good for both of us. Good for both of us being the Cowboys relative to relief as to our cap management and good for him that would maybe be some pluses for him on his contract. – Jerry Jones • We have a sense that we should be like the mythical cowboy… able to take on and conquer anything and live in the world without the need for other people. – Morrie Schwartz • We ride and never worry ’bout the fall. Guess that’s just the cowboy in us all. – Tim McGraw • We say it’s a modern American Western – two gunslingers who ride into town, fight the bad guys, kiss the girl and ride out into the sunset again. And we were always talking from the very beginning that if you’re going to have cowboys, they need a trusty horse. —Eric Kripke on the decision to add the Impala – Eric Kripke • We were a really crazy band. This was in ’73. I had my hair real short with a white stripe down the middle of my head. The guitarists had pink hair. We weren’t playing CBGB’s either, we were playing Statesborough, Georgia, for cowboys on penny beer night. We used to keep crowbars onstage when fights would break out. Those were really wild times. – Rex Smith • Well sir, I may not be a for-real cowboy… But I am one hell of a stud! – Jon Voight • Well, of course the general idea was dreamed up by the advertising agency and so my job was to realize that. And we down to Lubbock, Texas, usually and onto a ranch and we would pick cowboys who looked the part and photograph them under dramatic situations – rounding up wild horses or running through streams and then reaching in and taking a drag on a cigarette. – Haskell Wexler • Well, Tommy Lee Jones is a little bit more intimidating. He’s definitely a cowboy. He’s from Texas. – Christina Milian • Westerns was why I got into the business. I grew up on a small farm in California and all I ever wanted to do was to play gangsters and cowboys in movies. – Brion James • What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. – John le Carre • What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows – almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I’m basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that’s more au courant. – John Baldessari • When I was a kid, I was watching the movies my parents wanted to watch. I came from a working class family, not specifically educated, so we were watching popular movies. My dad liked cowboy movies, so we were watching cowboy movies. Some of them were amazing. It’s a genre of movie I like very much. – Olivier Martinez • When I was a kid, my step dad started this business and would go out and get lost cows and stuff. He was part-time truck driver, farmer and cowboy. He taught me how to ride from an early age. – Tim McGraw • When I was starting to get noticed as an actor in the 1970s for something other than the third cowboy on the right who ended up dying in every movie or episode, Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world. – Bruce Dern • When my friends and I played cowboys and Indians, I was always the Chinese railroad worker. – Robin Williams • With an animated show you can make a banana purple. You can put three hats on a cowboy. That would require several days of stitching, in live-action, that you wouldn’t be able to afford. I mean, you can just do tons and tons and tons. – Dan Harmon • Word of advice, kid. This may be the Wild West down here, but you ain’t a cowboy. You’re not even a boy in a cowboy suit. – Caitlin Kittredge • You can do anything that you wanna do, but uh-uh, don’t step on my cowboy boots. – Hank Williams, Jr. • You can’t fool me, comrade. You want to put on a cowboy hat and keep lawless bank robbers in line.” “No time. I have enough trouble keeping you in line. – Richelle Mead • You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today’s cowboys. As will you be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. The eddies, cataracts, arranged variations, fractious minutiae. You order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow, lead it where it’s needed … You deal in facts, gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry. – David Foster Wallace • You might be a redneck if a full-grown ostrich has fewer feathers than your cowboy hat. – Jeff Foxworthy • You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy. – Lyndon B. Johnson • You’d look out and there’d be little babies watching the show, and boys and girls. They loved the cowboys, and they loved Annie. There were young people seeing the show for the first time. I stayed for two years because I enjoyed it so much. – Bernadette Peters [clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

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[equitiesstocks]

Cowboy Quotes

Official Website: Cowboy Quotes

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• A boxing match is like a cowboy movie. There’s got to be good guys and there’s got to be bad guys. And that’s what people pay for – to see the bad guys get beat. – Sonny Liston • A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow. – Edward Abbey • A cowboy, a lawyer, and a mechanic watched Queen of the Damned,” I murmured. Warren—who had once, a long time ago, been a cowboy—snickered and wiggled his bare feet. “It could be the beginning of either a bad joke or a horror story.” “No,” said Kyle, the lawyer, whose head was propped up on my thigh. “If you want a horror story, you have to start out with a werewolf, his gorgeous lover, and a walker. – Patricia Briggs • A lot of old guys in movies are like cowboys – they talk like cowboys and they dress like cowboys. – Val Kilmer • A lot of the issues of the Dallas Cowboys yesterday having pressure on Tony Romo, came from the outside pressure. – Emmitt Smith • A new cologne is coming out. It’s for cowboys, and it’s made from cow’s manure. That way the women will be on you like flies! – Bill Maher • A second floor window opened, and Kyle stuck his head and shoulders out so he could look down at us. “If you two are finished playing Cowboy and Indian out there, some of us would like to get their beauty sleep.” I looked at Warren. “You heard ‘um Kemo Sabe. Me go to my little wigwam and get ‘um shut-eye.” “How come you always get to play the Indian?” whined Warren, deadpan. “Cause she’s the Indian, white boy,” said Kyle. – Patricia Briggs • According to a British poll, you’ve only got a one in five chance of achieving your childhood career ambition. Which probably explains why you don’t run into that many cowboys, princesses, or space rangers. – Jay Leno • All field agents have some cowboy in them – even the ones from New York. – Tom Clancy • All I can hope to do is instill great morality in my son and trust him along the way. The music he listens to or how he chooses to wear his hair doesn’t define his moral compass, and if he wants to listen to country music and wear a cowboy hat too, that’s fine. – Mark Hoppus • All of you cowboys, fight for your land. – Woody Guthrie • Always have faith in God, Yourself and the Cowboys. – Eddie Sutton • American Graffiti was the first movie where the director let me have any input. It was the first time anyone ever listened to me. George thought my character should have a crew cut, but I wasn’t happy with that idea. I’d always had pretty long hair back then – in college, particularly – so I told George my character should wear a cowboy hat. George thought about it and he remembered a bunch of guys from Modesto, California, who cruised around, like my character, and wore cowboy hats, so it turned out that it actually fit the movie. – Harrison Ford • Americans don’t want cowboys to be gay. – Larry McMurtry • And than suddenly he was there, charging down the hallway like death in a cowboy duster. – Richelle Mead • And what do we have here? A scary monster, cowboy, and a fairy princess! Here’s a hit of ecstasy, run along now. – James St. James • Ang [Lee] gave us a lot of books about cowboys who had been gay or stories about it and all that stuff. And I just talked to a lot of my friends – who [was] their first, particularly same-sex, first situation. That was fascinating to me – trying to learn what that was in a certain period of time. Certain age. The secrecy involved in it. All those things. – Jake Gyllenhaal

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Cowboy', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_cowboy').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_cowboy img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • But the reason I became, why I wanted to be in the business was because there was Midnight Cowboy. – Jodie Foster • Call saw that everyone was looking at him, the hands and cowboys and townspeople alike. The anger had drained out of him, leaving him feeling tired. He didn’t remember the fight, particularly, but people were looking at him as if they were stunned. He felt he should make some explanation, though it seemed to him a simple situation. “I hate a man that talks rude,” he said. “I won’t tolerate it. – Larry McMurtry • Canada has become trouble recently … It’s always the worst Americans who go there … We could have taken them over so easy. But I only want the western part, with the ski areas, the cowboys, and the right wingers. They’re the only good parts of Canada. – Ann Coulter • Cheap liquor is a magic potion that can turn you into a puppet cowboy before it kills you. – Patton Oswalt • Cowards never lasted long enough to become real cowboys. – Charles Goodnight • Cowboy boots with a suit? You’re a rough, tough businessman. Chaps with a bow tie? You’re in the rough, tough man business. – Dana Gould

• Cowboys make better lovers: Ask any cow. – Edward Abbey • Cowboys, just like the word says. – John Wayne • Despite what people think of cowboys, they take pride in how they look, and that look is important to them. – Steve Kanaly • Did I ever tell you my pet peeve?’ No,’ I said. People who dress up their pets to look like Little Lord Fauntleroys or cowboys, clowns, ballerinas. As if it’s not enough just to be a dog or cat or turtle. – Jerry Spinelli • Don’t get me wrong, God Bless the farmers and cowboys. It just wasn’t the life I wanted. When writing stories of other lands, I can describe people and places from actual experience. And for someone with an imagination like me, I could see dinosaurs and lost civilizations in the jungle of Vietnam. – Tom Johnson • Edward Said talks about Orientalism in very negative terms because it reflects the prejudices of the west towards the exotic east. But I was also having fun thinking of Orientalism as a genre like Cowboys and Indians is a genre – they’re not an accurate representation of the American west, they’re like a fairy tale genre. – Craig Thompson • Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn’t. You can’t unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons’ sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That’s just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that’s what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons. – Naomi Klein • en you show up to work and put on your undergarments, throw on your suspenders and your cowboy boots, throw some dirt on you, and then get on your spurs, you start to walk a bit different. When you put on your gun belts, you change again. You go through this whole transformation process. All that stuff changes you. Riding a horse changes the way you walk and your demeanor. – James Badge Dale • Europeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case. – George Friedman • Every little kid wants to grow up to be a cowboy, and I did. – Lee Iacocca • For an actor to remain a child is rather important. It’s a childlike, dreamy thing, acting, if you think about it. It’s the sort of thing children fantasise about, playing cowboys and Indians in the street. I think that acting is just a highly refined development of that. – Michael Gambon • For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious–or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution. – Naomi Wolf • For most Northerners, Texas is the home of real men. The cowboys, the rednecks, the outspoken self-made right-wing millionaires strike us as either the best or worst examples of American manliness…. The ideal is not an illusion nor is it contemptible, no matter what damage it may have done. Many people who scorn it in conversation want to submit to it in bed. Those who believe machismo reeks of violence alone choose to forget it once stood for honor as well. – Edmund White • For some reason cowboy sounds better than cowman. – Demetri Martin • France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything. – Adam Michnik • Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east. – Rebecca Solnit • Hardy was every loose-limbed cowboy in warn denim, every pair of blue eyes, every battered pickup, every hot cloudless day.” -Liberty – Lisa Kleypas • He could wear hats. He could wear an assortment of hats of different shapes and styles. Boater hats, cowboy hats, bowler hats. The list went on. Pork-pie hats, bucket hats, trillbies and panamas. Top hats, straw hats, trapper hats. Wide brim narrow brim, stingy brim. He could wear a fez. Fezzes were cool. Hadn’t someone once said that fezzes were cool? He was pretty aur ether had. And they were. They were cool. – Derek Landy • He reclined on a delightfully cushioned lounge in the sprawling ranch Paris had rented. In Dallas, Texas, of all places. Promiscuity had decked himself out, too, wearing a Stetson (weird), no shirt (understandable), unfastened jeans (smart) and cowboy boots (weird again). Dude looked ready to rustle cattle or something. – Gena Showalter • Hey. Hands off.” “, ““Please. Please, please, soooo pretty. Lemme just have one little touch.” ““Peabody, isn’t it embarrassing enough you’re wearing pink cowboy boots, again, without standing here drooling on my coat?””, [J.D. Robb, Celebrity In Death] – Nora Roberts • How odd it is that sewing is thought to be ‘women’s work’ when surgeons, sailors, and cowboys sew too. Yet how many female thoracic surgeons are there? And if precision motor activities are thought to be performed better by women, why wouldn’t they make better surgeons too? – Gretel Ehrlich • I always wanted a guitar. I always wanted to be a cowboy singer because I also listened to Hank Williams, and he would always sing these neat romantic songs. – Dick Dale • I always wanted to be a cowboy, and Jedi Knights are basically cowboys in space, right? – Liam Neeson • I always wore cowboy boots and drove a truck, and talked like this. So everywhere I would go in comedy people would say, “Foxworthy, you ain’t nothing but a redneck from Georgia!” It kind of became a formula joke. – Jeff Foxworthy • I came from a very intellectual neighborhood. When we played cowboys and Indians as kids, I had to be Gandhi. – Robert Frost • I came in with my idea of what a cowboy would wear, but then I met some real cowboys and they said that I rode the horses well, shoed the horses, but no good cowboy would be wearing a pair of Levi’s. I had to get a good old pair of Wranglers. – Steve Kanaly • I came to New York for the first time with Peter Buck at age 19. We spent a week living out of a van on the street in front of a club in the West 60s called Hurrah. It’s where Pylon played. I saw Klaus Nomi play there. And Michael Gira’s band before he did Swans-they all wore cowboy boots and were so cool and had great hair. I was so jealous. – Michael Stipe • I can tell a good cowboy by the way he approaches a cow. – Henry Green • I couldn’t do country, with all due respect to all country music artists. My parents dressed me up with a cowboy hat and we’d go to the rodeo when I was younger and it traumatized me for life. – Chris Colfer • I didn’t always know, but I always wanted to. I always wanted to be the very best receiver the Cowboys ever had. That was my goal coming in as a rookie and my goal throughout my career: being the best they ever had, going up in the Ring of Honor. – Michael Irvin • I didn’t come to Nashville to put on a cowboy hat and pretend to be a country singer. My attraction to Nashville as Music City is the variety and flexibility: the fact that there’s so many musicians at your disposal, so many amazing studios and talented people that you can draw from. … I try to be myself, but at the same time I’m learning a lot, and I’m pulling from not only from the well of inspiration that I’m getting from Nashville, but I’m pulling from my roots. – John Oates • I didn’t want to play a rancher. I didn’t want to have a cowboy hat on; I wanted to get away from that in the things I do. But I read the script and fell in love with it. As hard as I tried to say no, I couldn’t. – Tim McGraw • I don’t care about going down in history as a great bull rider or bronc rider. I hope people will remember me as a great cowboy. – Ty Murray • I don’t walk around with a cowboy hat. I did get a tattoo that says ‘cowboy’ that’s a bit of an over-compensation, probably. – Ronnie Dunn • I feel like a real cowboy! Yippi Ki Yay! – Kurt Angle • I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, ‘Okay, you fall off the horse this time. – John Sayles • I found a treehouse. I found this weird tree, out in a field, and someone had put a piece of a fence, way up in a tree. I just went up there and went to sleep for a few hours, in full cowboy regalia. And someone did take a photo. I have a photo of it, somewhere. It brought me back to when I was 12 years old, sitting in a treehouse and imagining that I was in a Western somewhere. – James Badge Dale • I get to actually experience what it would be like to be a psycho, which is not a fun one, or to be a cowboy, or to be a weird character of some sort. For me, it suits me. It suits my personality. I’m an emotional kind of person anyway. – Josh Holloway • I grew up in Dallas, with cowboys. I was the only guy in sixth grade with long hair and an earring. Let’s just say I got a lot of, er, flak for being different. – Barry Watson • I grew up in southeastern Oklahoma on a working cattle ranch, and it was always very romantic to me: The West, the cowboy, the Western way of life. – Reba McEntire • I grew up in that, when I was a kid. My friends and I used to play cowboys and Indians. We were cowboys killing the Indians, following the Wild West stories. All of this combined into a very strange culture, which is frightened. – Noam Chomsky • I grew up with a lot of Hollywood films. Cozy farm houses, cowboys, nice flats in New York. Especially as a kid, those things have a huge impression on you. – Andrea Arnold • I had done my first picture and I didn’t have anything to do for awhile. I was asked to come back to New York and do Bus Stop in the role of the cowboy opposite Kim Stanley. – Dick York • I had read the Animal House script, and by hook and crook, I finally got an audition. It was a great one. John Landis followed me out into the hallway afterward and said, “I’ve never done this before, but you’ve got the job. Now don’t tell anyone!” I’ve never had a director do that. It was one of those Hollywood-dream-come-true stories. They saw me as a surfer or cowboy, not a preppie, but someone begged and borrowed me an audition, and I went in and got it. – Tim Matheson • I had the pleasure of listening to Rickie Lee Jones’ Flying Cowboys album on audio cassette, which had just come out at that time because I am an elderly man. – John Hodgman • I have played a boxer, a cowboy, a knight, a prince, an elf and a pirate. I am so glad to have done all of that already. – Orlando Bloom • I hope my music sets up the platform for me to be able to do lots of things – to have a cowboy-boot line, maybe, or do a perfume or makeup deal. – Miranda Lambert • I just fell in love with Thomas McGuane the minute I saw him. He was the handsomest guy I’d ever seen, and gorgeous and sexy, and he had long hair and cowboy boots and tight jeans. So it was truly an act of love, to say the least, and it ended up having a permanent impact on my life, obviously. – Margot Kidder • I knew even if I’m a cowboy, I’m going to be involved in jazz in some way. – Dave Brubeck • I know all the songs that the cowboys know’bout the big corral where the doggies go,’Cause I learned them all on the radio.Yippie yi yo kayah – Johnny Mercer • I laughed at the whole Cannes Film Festival thing because it didn’t feel real. I remember getting off the red-eye when I arrived in France. I had a cowboy had on and some zit medicine, and there were like 15 photographers who jumped over the luggage carousel to take pictures of me. – Liv Tyler • I like crazy shoes or unusual cowboy boots and I collect big belt buckles. – Patricia Cornwell • I like to go to the frat house and drink with my white friends, because anytime you go drinking at the frat house, white boys bring you a drink and hand it to you like it’s a top CIA secret. They’ll hand me my drink, and I’ll go, ‘Man, what the hell is in this?’ ‘Dude, don’t worry. Don’t ask, just drink it. I’ll see you in 20 minutes.’ Next thing you know, I’m buck naked, standing on a coffee table, with a cowboy hat. – Aries Spears • I met this cowboy with a brown paper hat, paper waistcoat and paper trousers. He was wanted for rustling. – Chic Murray • I never considered myself a cowboy, because I wasn`t. But I guess when I got into cowboy gear I looked enough like one to convince people that I was. – Clint Eastwood • I remember first seeing Barney Kessel, in the 1940s, standing on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, in his cowboy boots, sun glasses and hipster threads, holding his guitar case man, you just knew that cat could wail!’ – Anita O’Day • I remember my son wanted to go to bed with his cowboy boots on, and we had this fight for like an hour. Then I realized that the only good reason I had for him not to do it is because I didn’t want him to. There was really no other reason. And finally I said, “OK, fine.” It was a great victory for me, because I realized it doesn’t really matter. – Michael J. Fox • I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit. – John Hurt • I ride really well and I shoot a gun really well. I love the genre. Once I did Westerns, I was hooked. I love them, but there’s been very few of them made. I never wanted to play a guy who was acting like a cowboy. I wanted to play someone who had a real life, but was also trapped into situations. – Lance Henriksen • I sacrificed for the Dallas Cowboys when most quit. I put in overtime to try to help young players. – Charles Haley • I spent two months in Fredericksburg, Texas, when I was 8, while my father shot a movie, and I loved it. I just embraced the whole cowboy culture. I got myself a pair of awesome boots and a cowboy hat. – Alexander Skarsgard • I tend to get comfortable with the dialogue and find out who the person is in the script and try to hit that. People are sort of independent of their occupations and their pastimes. You don’t play a politician or a fireman or a cowboy – you just play a person. – Billy Campbell • I think every man should have a pair of boots. They’re really sexy. Leather boots, cowboy boots, it depends. – Kemp Muhl • I think the warning labels on alcoholic beverages are too bland. They should be more vivid. Here are a few I would suggest: “Alcohol will turn you into the same asshole your father was.”; “Drinking will significantly improve your chances of murdering a loved one.”; “If you drink long enough, at some point you will vomit up the lining of your stomach.”; “Use this product and you may wake up in Morocco wearing a cowboy suit and tongue-kissing a transmission salesman.” – George Carlin • I think you’re going to find out that westerns will be coming back. It’s Americana, it’s part of our history, the cowboy, the cattle drive, the sheriff, the fight for law, order and justice. Justice will always prevail as far as I’m concerned. – Clayton Moore • I thought about telling him the truth: ‘Oh, nothing. Just having my soul exorcised so I can roam around purgatory, looking for the ghost of the dead cowboy who used to live in my bedroom. – Meg Cabot • I thought of telling him that if it wasn’t for Oklahoman cowboys and Mexican whores having a bit of fun, there would’ve been no Texans, but that would be counterproductive. – Ilona Andrews • I was always drawn to performing, but I never thought I could. I have no idea what I wanted to do outside of the old cowboy-or-fireman. When I was in college, I got serious about acting. I started examining history and then everything related to the theater. History, art, all the other studies, if I could link them into the theater, then it became alive for me. It just opened up my eyes. – Billy Crystal • I was feeling real good and real manly. Until a real cowboy walked by and told me I had my hat on backwards. So much for my career as a cowboy. – Michael Biehn • I was freaking out when Brooks & Dunn were breaking up. I thought ‘We play a ton of rodeos, and I thought this was such a cowboy deal, and I don’t wear a hat. They might not think I’m a cowboy. That might sound ridiculous to a lot of people, but apparently, it meant something to me. I wound up with a cowboy tattoo from my elbow to my wrist. – Ronnie Dunn • I was going to move back to Dallas, and my goal was to work at Channel 8 and be a sportscaster and cover my Cowboys and live happily ever after. – Chris Harrison • I was playing cowboys and Indians in the trees, and then I started hitting the golf club with clubs father sawed off for me, and I began playing right here with my father. – Arnold Palmer • I was raised in farm and ranch communities, and my dad wanted me to be a cowboy like him, but I saw how he struggled in life and wanted more than that. – Tom Johnson • I was raised on technology. I grew up in Livermore, California, a town of physicists and cowboys. My parents worked at the government laboratories there. So technology was very normal for me. – Cynthia Breazeal • I was rather shaken by all the green trees. I always am. It gets me. I don’t want to be funny about it but I am. I loved seeing all the westerns, but I had asthma and couldn’t go anywhere, but I loved watching them in Technicolor and seeing the cowboys and the landscapes of Monument Valley and you’d see the forests of the Anthony Mann films and think, ‘wow, that’s fantastic’, but I could never go there! – Martin Scorsese • I went to Texas a few times for gigs and adopted the cowboy look. Every man, at some point in his life, goes through a cowboy stage – everyone! Well, at least everyone that I look up to! – Theophilus London • I went to West Texas and started writing a cycle of Americana poems after the space conjured images that, as a child, I only saw on television-John Wayne, cowboys, borderlines. But suddenly, I felt close to these once-foreign imageries and wondered how I’d changed. Each evening brought the darkest skies in the country, and I understood the expansiveness of our inner selves. Ultimately nothing divides us except the worlds and words we allow. – Nathalie Handal • I wore a lot of vintage clothing. I dressed like a reporter, with a little card in my hat. I had these fantasies of who I wanted to be, so I’d dress like an explorer, a cowboy. I dressed up like Elton John a lot too. That was another period. – Illeana Douglas • I wore hot pants and cowboy boots and I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ – Alek Wek • I would love for someone to offer me a serious part in something. I don’t know if I could even pull it off, but I would like to be the cowboy that rides off and someone shoots him off the horse in the middle of town. Just a serious role. It wouldn’t have to be a big one. – Jeff Foxworthy • I wouldn’t call it [“Wild Bill Hickok”] an urban legend, but I guess I’d call it a rural legend that the cowboy was always soft-spoken, mild-spoken, well-mannered. – Keith Carradine • I’d had my whole life to write my first album. I had my No. 1 and my third single out, and they go, ‘Hey, guess what? We need to start recording the next one.’ I’m like, ‘Uh oh, I got to write another album. Well, how am I gonna write ‘Should’ve Been a Cowboy’ and ‘Ain’t Worth Missing’ and all that again?’ It took me forever to write the first one. – Toby Keith • If anybody asks me what I attribute the longevity of my career to, then I say it’s because I was never satisfied with being a cowboy in the plains of Spain and later I was never satisfied with just playing a detective in San Francisco, and constantly just pushing the envelope. – Clint Eastwood • If I’m being forgiving of myself, I could say I’m somebody who was really hungry for experiences. The same thing that would make me go try to be a trail cook on a ranch was the same thing that would make me want to have sex with a couple cowboys while I was there. – Elizabeth Gilbert • If I’m playing country, I gotta have my country hat and my cowboy boots. I gotta have a voice, and the third thing, I gotta have I guess a little music to keep me in the right mind, a little pre-show something to get ya going. Lots of AC/DC, or I’ll sit on youtube and find all kinds of stuff before we take the stage to get pumped up. – Hank Williams III • If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn’t it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed? – Steven Wright • If the Cowboys and Titans ain’t playing, I’m not interested. – Tanya Tucker • I’ll never forget reading Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end – the scene where the patient says goodbye to the doctor and she puts a flower in her hair as a kind of thank you to him – and I felt like a cowboy shot from a canyon’s top. This is a different experience from reading a novel, I think. The emotional effect is cumulative. Let’s just hope market forces don’t send short fiction the way of the dinosaur, because their sales are paltry compared to the novel and this is truly unfortunate. – Adam Ross • I’m a cowboy who never saw a cow. – Johnny Mercer • I’m content where I am. I know I am going to be a Cowboy for life. – Terrell Owens • I’m just a big boy, I’m still just playing cowboys and Indians and astronaut and baseball player and all that stuff that I used to play as a kid. – Bryan Cranston • I’m not a great science fiction fan myself. I probably feel that way about Westerns. Like I used to play Cowboys and Indians, they can act out Will and the Robot. – Mark Goddard • I’m scared of snakebites – that’s the origin of cowboy boots, protection – but my toes need to breathe. – Gavin McInnes • I’m the oldest son of a crazy man, I’m in a cowboy band. – Bob Dylan • I’m thrilled, I’m grateful, I’m blessed. I played for the world’s greatest professional sports team in history. Once a Dallas Cowboy, always a Dallas Cowboy. – Bob Hayes • In a lot of places in the United States and certainly even more places around the world, the image of the cowboy has become, for some people, a negative one. The word ‘cowboy’ implies a strong, stubborn individual whose individualism depends on pulling down other people’s individualism. – Viggo Mortensen • In New Haven, Conn., when I was growing up, there were two sorts of Irish. There were the “drugstore cowboy” micks, who hung around the Elm Street poolroom over Longley’s Lunch. And there were the earnest young Irishmen who fought their way up from the Grand Avenue saloonkeeper backgrounds of their fathers, went through Yale Law School, and have now found high place by the preferment of local politics or in the teaching profession. – James T. Farrell • In the United States, you can put on a cowboy hat and join the country-western neighborhood. If you’re down below 14th Street in New York City, that’s bohemian; that’s left-wing. – David Lee Roth • It doesn’t matter the kind of music, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a cowboy hat or a yarmulke. I don’t care if it’s outer space or pop, the spirit is the same. – David Lee Roth • It is easier to get an actor to be a cowboy than to get a cowboy to be an actor. – John Ford • It’s a fact that kids watch TV. But if you think back, when you watched cowboy movies, you would go out and play cowboys. TV and movies motivate people. – Magnus • It’s almost comical that astronauts are stereotyped as daredevils and cowboys. As a rule, we’re highly methodical and detail-oriented. Our passion isn’t for thrills but for the grindstone, and pressing our noses to it. – Chris Hadfield • It’s funny, but when there are dominant teams, there are a number of people who rail about the fact that they’re always seeing the Dallas Cowboys or the San Francisco 49ers or the Green Bay either in the playoffs or in the Super Bowl. – Al Michaels • It’s like you said the other day,” said Adam. “You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin’ about for millions of years. ‘Snot worth growin’ up for, if you ask my opinion. – Neil Gaiman • I’ve always been interested in the Southwest. There isn’t a place in the world you can go where they don’t know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West. – Cormac McCarthy • I’ve always been really hot on westerns. All my life growing up, cowboy, cowboy, cowboy. – Morgan Freeman • I’ve always loved comic books. As a kid, I used to read cowboy stories and historical comics about other worlds, unknown places that would take me out of myself and which helped to develop my imagination. – James Herbert • Jessica Simpson attended boyfriend Tony Romo’s football game. The Cowboys quarterback had the worst game of his career. It’s a bad year for the name Simpson. Even O. J. is pissed – he feels like they’re making his name look bad. – Chelsea Handler • John Wayne never ever disappointed his fans, because he was a cowboy. – Vinnie Jones • Justin Salinger showed up one day with a pink cowboy hat on and everyone else got really annoyed because somehow he’d managed to get the pink cowboy hat. – Alex Cox • Kerouac was the cowboy that inspired the whole Beat Generation, and highlighted and put the spotlight on all of these minds that didn’t really know what they were doing at the time, but accomplished something much bigger than what they ever foresaw. – Garrett Hedlund • Last night I dreamed I went to hillbilly heaven and you know who greeted me at the gate? The ole cowboy-philosopher himself, Will Rogers. – Tex Ritter • Living in Dallas, I root for the Mavericks and the Stars and the Cowboys, but I’ve always pulled for the Chicago Cubs. I enjoy watching them play. – Lee Trevino • Monday is President’s Day and former President Bill Clinton is very excited. He is taking George Bush, Sr. to ‘Hooters’. … George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton have been spending more and more time together. Doesn’t that seem like an unusual couple to you, honestly? Earlier today they went to go see that gay cowboy movie. – David Letterman • My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky. – Alan Moore • My father’s a protector. My father’s old-school. He’s a cowboy. – Paul Walker • My favorite teams are the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Jets. – Bridget Hall • My friend Kathy is the only person who’ll be halfway honest with me. ‘Did you ever see a cowboy film, where someone has been caught by the Indians and tied between two wild stallions, each pulling in opposite directions?’ she asked.I nodded mutely.’That’s a bit what giving birth is like. – Marian Keyes • My grandpa was a cowboy. He roped cattle out in Texas and Arizona. Growing up, I’d see him maybe once a year and he’d always get me on a horse at some point. But each time I’d have to learn again. – Austin Butler • My uncle Claude was my favorite uncle he was also my godfather. He and I were really, really close. He used to take me to see cowboy movies all the time when I was a little boy because I loved cowboy movies. He got a cowboy name for me, which was Smokey Joe. So from the time I was three years old if people asked me what my name was I didn’t tell them my name was William, I told them my name was Smokey Joe. – Smokey Robinson • Neiman-Marcus is one thing, and the Dallas Cowboys are another. – Mercedes McCambridge • Never be possessive. If a female friend lets on that she is going out with another man, be kind and understanding. If she says she would like to go out with the Dallas Cowboys, including the coaching staff, the same rule applies. – Bruce Jay Friedman • Now look! That damned cowboy is president of the United States! – Mark Hanna • Now, I have to – in my defense, I have the say that general knowledge of the deadly nature of cigarettes was not primarily in my mind and nor was it on these poor cowboys, who – many of whom who’ve died of emphysema since we were shooting. – Haskell Wexler • One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game. No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush’s Iraq War. – Adam Hochschild • President Bush recently challenged Iraqi soldiers still fighting U.S. troops like so: … ‘My answer is bring ’em on.’ For those of you who may be criticizing Bush for acting like a movie cowboy, let me remind you. He’s actually acting more like a movie cheerleader. – Jon Stewart • Prior to being mugged I did not feel I had to carry a gun. However, I knew how to shoot a gun very proficiently. As a boy, I used to play cowboys and Indians all the time. – Bernhard Goetz • Renaissance cowboy/raconteur Pop Wagner …deadpan funny …his presence is like meeting Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers riding a single, many colored horse. Pop is a kind of ‘textile genius’ who is able to spin, at once, both yarn and rope. – Ron Miles • Simple. Pared down. Timeless. The ties were never too thick or too thin; the pants were never too flared or too skinny. In my life with Dad, he wore Western apparel because we went riding – jeans, cowboy boots, the turquoise belt buckle. But it was all very simple, and that classic look is very ‘Ralph Lauren.’ – Jennifer Grant • Some of these bulls are gonna’ spin those cowboys so fast, they’ll look like a frog in a blender. – Wayne White • Someone said DX over here? It was this dipshit with the cowboy hat over here. – Randy Orton • Sorry for the tune up between time, but what the hell, cowboys are the only ones who stay in tune, anyway. – Jimi Hendrix • Spending that many hours in the saddle gave a man plenty of time to think. That’s why so many cowboys fancied themselves Philosophers. – Charles Marion Russell • Spring comes with joyous laugh, and song, and sunshine, and the burnt sacrifice of the over-ripe boot and the hoary overshoe. The cowboy and the new milch cow carol their roundelay. So does the veteran hen. The common egg of commerce begins to come forth into the market at a price where it can be secured with a step-ladder, and all nature seems tickled. – Edgar Wilson Nye • Tell me again what we’re doing here,” I said, running a continuous scan of our surroundings. Fang popped some Cracker Jack into his mouth. “We’re here to watch manly men do manly things.” I followed Fang’s line of sight: He was watching the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who were not doing manly things, by any stretch of the imagination. – James Patterson • Thankfully dreams can change. If we’d all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses. So whatever your dream is right now, if you don’t achieve it, you haven’t failed and you’re not some loser-but just as importantly-if you do get your dream, you’re not a winner. – Stephen Colbert • That cowboy had heartbreak written all over him and she’d be damned if she knew why every time he blew into town she ended up naked before he ended up gone. Reed always ended up gone. – Cindy Gerard • That’s where I got my start and where I’ll continue to work, but I can’t tell you the number of films between Drugstore Cowboy and Curly Sue that I auditioned for and wanted that didn’t choose me. – Kelly Lynch • The chief contribution made by white men of the Americas to the folk songs of the world ——- the cowboy songs of Texas and the West ——- are rhythmed to the walk, the trot, and the gallop of horses. – J. Frank Dobie • The cowboy doesn’t need an iron horse, but covers his country on one that eats grass and wears hair. – Charles Marion Russell • The cowboy movies is not our go-to programmer anymore, here’s a horror film. – Robert Englund • The cowboy music twanged in the roadhouse and carried across the fields, all sadness. It was all right with me. I kissed my baby and we put out the lights. – Jack Kerouac • The Cowboy’s defense has more holes in it than Ronny Milsapp and Jose Feliciano after a game of lawn darts. – Dennis Miller • The fact that I got Drugstore Cowboy at all was a fluke. – Kelly Lynch • The first movie I appeared in was Carry On Cowboy, though not as an actor. I was just riding horses. – Richard O’Brien • The last three movies I’ve done, I played a cowboy, then I played a soldier, and now I play Han Solo. So the little kid in me is having a real joyride. – Alden Ehrenreich • The military offered the opportunity to see the world, and meet other people and learn new customs. Plus, the Army taught soldiers discipline. The life I experienced in the service was an education I could never have obtained as a cowboy. – Tom Johnson • The only negative thing is that I got into acting thinking, “One day I’ll be a cowboy, the next day I’ll be an astronaut. Maybe I’ll be a fireman.” It seems that I’m destined to play smart people in suits. I’d rather have that than no niche. – Joshua Malina • The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren – Sarah Vowell • The thing that bothers me the most is the recklessness and greed of the local ranchers, who run too many cattle back here, choking with waste the creek that runs through my property. There’s certain times of day that the cowboys like to send them turds down the river. Them f**kers piss me off. if you gotta mess up the ecology of the world in order to raise a bunch of cows, well eat somethin else. I’m not a fan of the cowboys. – Merle Haggard • The whites have always had the say in America. White people made Jesus white, angels white, the Last Supper white. If I threaten you, I’m blackmailing you. A black cat is bad luck. If you’re put out of a club, you’re blackballed. Angel’s-food cake is white; devil’s-food cake is black. Good guys in cowboy movies wear white hats. The bad guys always wore black hats. – Muhammad Ali • There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment. – Paul Theroux • There is about to be a big cowboy boot in your ass if you dont shut up. – Jim Ross • There was a photo of me with weird sunglasses on and a green sweatshirt, some striped thing, with tights and cowboy boots…I just saw that photo and thought, ‘God, I look crazy.’ – Mary-Kate Olsen • There was no excuse for Dallas Cowboys to lose to Washington. Rivalry or not, Redskins are a bad team. – Jemele Hill • They gave me the chaps and hat and everything. I looked like a real cowboy. I walked around the rodeo and thought, I am a real cowboy and thought everyone thought I was a real cowboy. – Michael Biehn • Though Geographic didn’t publish that photo in the story that it was done for, “The Life of Charlie Russell,” a cowboy artist in Montana. But later, maybe a year and a half ago, they named it one of the 50 greatest pictures ever made at National Geographic. – Sam Abell • To be an artist of my generation willing to be unhip -artists were supposed to be like cowboys. – Deborah Kass • To be honest I’m the only one really who’s a cowboy. Like an honest to goodness cowboy. – Tim Rozon • Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that. – Steve Earle • Trust me, Joe. You’re not a cowboy. The only cows you ever saw as a kid came under a plastic wrap in the grocery store or in a paper wrapped from McDonald’s. (Tee) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • Upon four-legged forest clouds the cowboy angel rides – Bob Dylan • We are continuing to look for ways that we can do something that’s good for both of us. Good for both of us being the Cowboys relative to relief as to our cap management and good for him that would maybe be some pluses for him on his contract. – Jerry Jones • We have a sense that we should be like the mythical cowboy… able to take on and conquer anything and live in the world without the need for other people. – Morrie Schwartz • We ride and never worry ’bout the fall. Guess that’s just the cowboy in us all. – Tim McGraw • We say it’s a modern American Western – two gunslingers who ride into town, fight the bad guys, kiss the girl and ride out into the sunset again. And we were always talking from the very beginning that if you’re going to have cowboys, they need a trusty horse. —Eric Kripke on the decision to add the Impala – Eric Kripke • We were a really crazy band. This was in ’73. I had my hair real short with a white stripe down the middle of my head. The guitarists had pink hair. We weren’t playing CBGB’s either, we were playing Statesborough, Georgia, for cowboys on penny beer night. We used to keep crowbars onstage when fights would break out. Those were really wild times. – Rex Smith • Well sir, I may not be a for-real cowboy… But I am one hell of a stud! – Jon Voight • Well, of course the general idea was dreamed up by the advertising agency and so my job was to realize that. And we down to Lubbock, Texas, usually and onto a ranch and we would pick cowboys who looked the part and photograph them under dramatic situations – rounding up wild horses or running through streams and then reaching in and taking a drag on a cigarette. – Haskell Wexler • Well, Tommy Lee Jones is a little bit more intimidating. He’s definitely a cowboy. He’s from Texas. – Christina Milian • Westerns was why I got into the business. I grew up on a small farm in California and all I ever wanted to do was to play gangsters and cowboys in movies. – Brion James • What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. – John le Carre • What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows – almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I’m basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that’s more au courant. – John Baldessari • When I was a kid, I was watching the movies my parents wanted to watch. I came from a working class family, not specifically educated, so we were watching popular movies. My dad liked cowboy movies, so we were watching cowboy movies. Some of them were amazing. It’s a genre of movie I like very much. – Olivier Martinez • When I was a kid, my step dad started this business and would go out and get lost cows and stuff. He was part-time truck driver, farmer and cowboy. He taught me how to ride from an early age. – Tim McGraw • When I was starting to get noticed as an actor in the 1970s for something other than the third cowboy on the right who ended up dying in every movie or episode, Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world. – Bruce Dern • When my friends and I played cowboys and Indians, I was always the Chinese railroad worker. – Robin Williams • With an animated show you can make a banana purple. You can put three hats on a cowboy. That would require several days of stitching, in live-action, that you wouldn’t be able to afford. I mean, you can just do tons and tons and tons. – Dan Harmon • Word of advice, kid. This may be the Wild West down here, but you ain’t a cowboy. You’re not even a boy in a cowboy suit. – Caitlin Kittredge • You can do anything that you wanna do, but uh-uh, don’t step on my cowboy boots. – Hank Williams, Jr. • You can’t fool me, comrade. You want to put on a cowboy hat and keep lawless bank robbers in line.” “No time. I have enough trouble keeping you in line. – Richelle Mead • You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today’s cowboys. As will you be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. The eddies, cataracts, arranged variations, fractious minutiae. You order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow, lead it where it’s needed … You deal in facts, gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry. – David Foster Wallace • You might be a redneck if a full-grown ostrich has fewer feathers than your cowboy hat. – Jeff Foxworthy • You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy. – Lyndon B. Johnson • You’d look out and there’d be little babies watching the show, and boys and girls. They loved the cowboys, and they loved Annie. There were young people seeing the show for the first time. I stayed for two years because I enjoyed it so much. – Bernadette Peters [clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'a', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_a').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_a img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'e', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_e').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_e img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'i', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_i').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_i img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'o', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_o').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_o img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'u', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_u').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_u img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'y', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_y').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_y img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );