#because I can change things willy nilly when its just me playing dolls

[ahollowgrave]

18. Has your OC ever had a prophecy made about them? Was it a big deal or did they ignore it? Was it straightforward or cryptic? Did it ever come to pass or did they circumvent it?

Scuffs my boot

Hiiiiiiiii friend

She kind of sort of does! The prophecy is generic enough that any nun could fill it. But… she’s the youngest and most likely to succeed so the weight of it falls upon her shoulders. It certainly feels like a big deal, to her, as it is the thing that started her on the path of a paladin. Something to do with lost saints, missing holy weapons, you know! God stuff!

It’s a prophecy from Menphina ‘herself’ so there is zero chance of Odette trying to ignore it or circumvent it. She would do anything for her Holy Lover’s affection.

It is pretty straightforward in the end goal, but vague in the… how to get there. She’s struggling through this part, now. But she has some time! She’s gotta get good with a sword and shield before she can wield the holy relics that are her’s to claim.

My end goal is to, eventually, do a mini-arc with Odette and her friends helping her find and retrieve the items! She can’t do this alone, she’s just a nun, but she is lucky enough to be friends with some very cool people!

Thank you for the ask, my friend!!! > Get to know my OC <

[rachelbethhines]

Tangled Salt Marathon - King Pascal

This is, in my opinion, the worst episode of season two and I’ll get into why under the cut. 

Summary:  The group is stranded on an island after a storm. The tiny islanders, the Lorbs, mistake Pascal for their mystical ruler; the chameleon loves the adulation, until he’s expected to protect his people from a vicious monster.

Since When Did You Learn How to Sail, Rapunzel? 

So they hit the storm and Rapunzel starts doling out orders like she always does, but like, she logically shouldn’t know what to do here. She’s only been out of the tower for a little over a year and sailing takes time to learn. There’s been nothing to establish beforehand that she’s learned this stuff. If anything Eugene and Lance should be the one giving the orders here as their backgrounds could feasibly included sailing as they’re world travelers. 

Here lies part of the problem with Rapunzel’s characterization, and I’ve already touched upon it back in The Alchemist Returns, but Rapunzel can’t and shouldn’t be magically good at everything. She can be incredibly skilled in some areas, like acrobatics and the arts, but she also should have lapses in knowellage just due to a lack of experience and expertise. 

A female character isn’t ‘weak’ just because they have to sometimes rely on other characters. They shouldn’t be written to be magically better than the male characters just because they got boobs. That’s not empowering; that’s condescending. Women are people, and real people have varied skill sets and weaknesses that match their interests and backgrounds. 

So Why Is the Island Tropical? 

According to what few maps we see in the show (and yes, they are inconsistent, but bare with me), Corona is somewhere in Northern Europe near an ocean or sea. According to dialogue at the end Forest of No Return, they’ve been traveling east, and according to the map in Rapunzel’s Return, the Dark Kingdom is north east of Corona specifically. Meaning that they must be somewhere in the northern Baltic Sea right now, which is not tropical at all.  

This is part of the problem with Tangled’s ‘throw it all into a blender’ style of approach to worldbuilding. If traveling the world is going to be a major plot point for a season then we kind of need to know where things are in relation to each other. Climate should help determine such things, but if you’re all willy nilly about culture, which climate affects, than nothing is going to make sense. 

My only guess is that the island is suppose to be magical so it has a different climate to the surrounding environment, but that’s just a headcanon and not actually stated by anything in the show itself. I shouldn’t have to be doing the work of the writers for them. 

So Why are We Separating the Guys Again? 

Back in Freebird the writers needed to get Cass and Raps alone in order for them to have their bonding time and a heart to heart, but here, it’s just lazy writing. This is a Pascal focus episode and it requires that Rapunzel interact with lots of other characters, so splitting the group up doesn’t benefit the story in any way. 

The writers just didn’t want to fool with writing for eight characters at one time (I’m not counting Fidella or Owl, though logically they should be considered characters in their own right and not just props for the story, but oh well); which begs the question of why they wrote in so many characters to begin with. 

It’s also an excuse to make the girls seem more competent than the boys, which, as I explained above, is not real ‘girl power’; just bad writing.  

Let’s Talk About the Outfit Changes and How Marketing Affects the Story 

The entire point of this episode and indeed this whole island arc, is just because of marketing stipulations. Every season is required to have one Pascal focused episode and one Max focused episode, because Disney marketing wanted to sell cute animal toys. Another requirement of the story was outfit changes for the mains so that once again marketing could sell dolls and variants and such. It’s why Rapunzel, Cass, and Eugene get so many alternate costumes, while Lance doesn’t despite being with them on this journey too. 

Which is understandable to a point. American television animation has always been about selling toys and merchandise. It’s how these shows make most of their money back. If there’s a show that you enjoy and you want to support it being on the air, you need to buy the toys. Priating doesn’t do jack to the bottom line, it does not affect ratings as most people don't own a nielsen rating box. (an increasingly outdated method to calculate popularity anyways) But whether or not the toys sell is the make it or break it point of every show. 

However, there are better ways to implement these stipulations then how Tangled goes about it. You want to give Max and Pascal focus? Then actually give them focus that relates to the overall plot and not just meaningless filler. You want to the characters switch up outfits and have that tie into the story? Then make sure it fits all of the characters and don’t drag it out more than it needs to be, because this island arc it too damn long. 

And you want to know what the biggest kick in the teeth is? There’s barely any merchandise for this outfit. There’s like one paper doll set and that’s it. The toys for Tangled the Series did not sell and they stopped merchandising the show after season one. Now add in the rating plummet during seasons two and three, and we’re incredibly lucky the show didn’t get canceled outright because it’s by all accounts a financial flop. 

I suspect there was an upfront contract that guaranteed them three seasons no matter what, and that’s the only reason it managed to escape the chopping block and why Chris and Ben weren’t let go sooner from the project. Because Chris at least no longer works for Disney. He left as soon as production ended on the show. 

The False God Trope is Over Played 

I can find examples of this trope dating all the way back to the early 60s, and arguably even sooner than that. However around the 80s, after Return of the Jedi hit theaters, the trope was inescapable in children's media. Every cartoon since has had this same plot shoved in somewhere. It also became paired with the ‘liar revealed’ trope (the bane of my existence) more often. 

And that’s what this is; an incredibly stale take on an incredibly by the numbers story. I kept waiting all episode for the other shoe to drop, for some sort of twist on the usual cliche, but it never came. 

This episode is boring, aggravatingly so. It’s the main reason why it’s in my bottom five. Because while you could argue that really little kids wouldn’t be as over exposed to the trope like an adult such as myself, the writers themselves desperately tried to distance themselves from that targeted audience. They’re the ones that yell ‘it’s not a kid show’, while feeding us crap like this, and I just have to roll my eyes. 

Tangled doesn’t know who it’s audience is. It should be pre-teen girls, but the creators want shoot for an older audience, teens, while marketing wants this to be a preschool show. So the series careens wildly all over the place in terms of tone and winds up satisfying no one. Older audiences are frustrated by childish filler such as this, while younger audiences are exposed to themes and messages that they probably shouldn’t be. I know several parents who have stopped their kids from watching the series because they don’t approve of the toxic values the show prometes in its incompetence. 

It bungles so many of its attempts to be mature because it won’t actually explore the complexities of the plot. Either cause it’s wasting too much time on filler, it can’t explore it’s more disturbing elements to their natural conclusions due to the audience, or it just mistakes ‘shocking’ as deep. 

King Pascal isn’t mature or deep. It’s pointless guff that adds nothing while actively taking away from more interesting storylines. I say skip this dreck and go watch Doctor Who’s The Aztecs instead if you want to see this trope done right with maturity while still being all audience friendly. 

It’s also has the added bonus of featuring two well developed strong female characters who hold their own with the equally capable guys while actually developing all of those characters simultaneously, and was co-produced by an actual woman. If they could pull that off in the early sixties than Disney and Chris have no excuse today. 

This Is the Same ‘Lesson’ As Pascal’s Story

In addition to being boring and unoriginal, this episode is also redundant. Rapunzel already learned to show appreciation to Pascal back in season one. Why are we having her relearn this lesson instead of giving Pascal a new arc? 

It’s not even consistent as Rapunzel only acts this way towards him in his focus episodes. It’s also not a lesson in behaving condescendingly in general because Rapunzel goes on to be condensing to everyone anyways. 

So Did We Really Need This Episode Just to Introduce the Island and the Firefly? 

Yes both of these things come into play later, but not in any significant way. We’re here on this island for four whole episodes and it only comes back for one in season three, and only to further a side character’s story; not the main plot. Also the Firefly will help resolve the plot in five episodes time, but it’s just given a reintroduction there anyways. Why couldn’t this information have been condensed down and repackaged into another episode entirely? 

That’s what I mean by poor pacing. Tangled is not efficient in its storytelling. It drags things out only to give us rushed endings or no resolutions at all. Stop drop feeding info in the backgrounds of filler episodes where it’s not relevant and actually give us stories that focus on the plot, dang it. 

Once Again, Rapunzel is a Hypocrite 

Just like in Pascal’s Story during season one, Rapunzel is quick to show consideration for her oldest friend but can’t be bothered to admit fault to a teenager that she abused. One that she knows is currently facing horrendous and inhumane treatment inside of a jail cell right now and still does not give a damn. 

You can’t claim Rapunzel is a kind and compassionate person so long as Varian and his story exists.You just can’t. Because no matter how you slice it, being a minor means that there is a power imbalance in how adults and the government treats them. A power imbalance that is constantly being exploited by the mains. 

Conclusion

You won’t miss anything other than the shipwreck itself if you skipped the episode. Which is aggravating because it means it’s technically necessary to the on going story without actually adding anything substantial to it. It’s like the series opener all over again, only made worse by how boring and redundant it all is. Worst episode of season two; and now I just want to go watch Doctor Who instead. 

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S2 Ep 43: Things Get a Lot Less Vague, But it’s Still Pretty Vague

I’m taking full advantage of the laziest time of the year and I’m watching even more Yugioh. I even gave myself a buffer. Sort of. I kinda lost a day playing Octopath Traveler and I don’t even remember that happening.

Now this episode doesn’t have anyone getting struck by lightning, but if that happened, it would have fit right in. A lot happened in this episode. So, to start off, Mai decided to play one of the three cards we were given explicit instructions to never ever play and it has immediately screwed her over via orb.

Everyone else watching the orb has become completely enamored by it. Especially Kaiba, who is pretty positive he can turn this sphere into a dragon. I don’t know why anyone would ever come to this conclusion, but welcome to Yugioh, it’s well into S2 and I’m just still jaw agape and saying “HOW?” at my screen.

Like y’all I don’t know how to play this game, which should be hella apparent from reading any of my posts, but like there is one thing that everyone knows--even I knew--about Yugioh the game. Let me just, once sec

Ah, there we go.

Like sometimes it shows that your game is originally in a language that doesn’t require spaces between words. And like this is coming from me. You know how verbose I am, I freakin love words. But maybe that’s too many words for a card.

(read more under the cut)

And while this is pretty much the worlds most BS card already, what’s even better is that none of this jargon appeared until after Mai played the card. Like basically the card pretends to be completely normal and then is like “Boom, gotcha. I’ll just be a cool Ikea orb lamp instead!”

At this point, while everyone is scrambling around trying to fathom what to do about this huge ass fake sun blinding everyone down in Domino, Marik decides to deposit some more bizarre lore.

I kind of assumed Yugi and Kaiba were born with the correct soul formula to become the reincarnation of these people from 3000 B.C.E. without any actual blood relations but apparently, somehow, you got people from Ancient Egypt migrating to Ancient Japan. Sure, I mean if you did enough trading routes it could happen. It just seems like it would be a difficult transition?

And we could get real head canon and talk about their parentage since there’s a lot we don’t know. Mokuba and Kaiba could have different fathers, since they are quite different looking, which may be how Mokuba is exempt from all this lore while it still applies to Seto (Cuz Mokuba has been staring at that card for like quite a while and he cannot read it). But like, I don’t know if the show will even bother to cover that.

I don’t know if we’ll find out when in their bloodlines Kaiba and Yugi’s Egyptian cursed lines arrived in Japan. Was this during like the Edo period? Was this to set up a really bizarre Shogun Yugioh spinoff?

Wait, is that a thing? I don’t actually know, Yugioh seems to have like 8 spinoffs that all look a lot of the same to me. It may just be 1 spinoff that Netflix keeps changing the preview image of to trick me into thinking there’s 8 of them.

Or, did Kaiba have a relative that showed up in the 80′s and had a crazy weekend and a one night stand? Would Kaiba even know who his real Dad is?

Whatever, I’m sure there’s plenty of fanfic made over the last 20 years to cover this so I don’t have to. Moving on.

And then this kid’s show decided to tie up Mai to a wall or something? Man, Marik and chaining people up, this is the fourth person he’s chained up today! At least this time she doesn’t have a box over her head.

Still pretty kinky though.

Yo did Mokuba just...casually walk out of Marik’s Shadow Realm just now?

Again, do they cancel the game at this point because the equipment is...clearly malfunctioning? Like, this is the part that Kaiba is supposed to have full control of because he made all the equipment they’re using and he’s just...glossing over this? Like, this is the one thing that Kaiba would be like “OK wait, wait, we can’t ship it like this, my company is actually ruined if the game can do this, one sec, cancel everything.”

Nah. They just kinda watch.

And now, Marik decides to say the bird chant so we can hear what was actually written on the card and it was...a...

...it was the definition of what a poem is all right...

This is the lyrics to the Ra poem, just so you can see how bad it is. My search engine history will never be the same, but I just want y’all to glory on how kid’s show this poem is, compared to everything else going on in this kid’s show at this moment.

"Great beast of the sky, please hear my cry./

Transform thyself from orb of light and bring me victory in this fight/

Envelop the desert with your glow and cast your rage upon my foe./

Unlock your powers deep within so that together we may win./

Appear in this Shadow Game as I call your name,/

Winged Dragon of Ra"

Bravo, writers. Bravo. This corny as hell poem with its very awkward meter was voiced over alllllll the other nuts stuff going on in this show and guys, it’s a juxtaposition.

Now at this point, Kaiba has his poem he needs to make the card works--so he no longer needs to translate it--so he can just cancel. He’s got everything he wants now. Time to just cancel. Throw the cursed boy in whatever prison you got on this ship. In fact, just toss him off the ship entirely. You no longer need him. He doesn’t even have the card anymore. Mai has it.

I honestly think Kaiba just spaced the hell out at this point.

Also then Marik follows it up by saying this:

Joey gets wind that this is pretty bad and we’re going to get a very dead Mai--I mean Joey was the one who just recently got struck by lightning so it’d make sense that he’d be the one to say "I know for a real true fact none of you are going to do a damn thing about this unless I do this myself.” So he runs directly over to Kaiba but then I think the show decided to edit out him talking to Kaiba because it just jump cuts to Joey talking to Roland instead.

Like it really felt like Joey went the long way around to get on this platform but I dunno, maybe he tried to punch Kaiba in the Japanese version and that’s why they edited it out? I dunno.

Also, how many times will Joey get DQ’d before he actually gets DQ’d? Will anyone ever in fact get DQ’d in this entire tourney?

As Ra starts warming up his engines to start spewing fire all over the field, Joey decides to take a moment to try and talk to Mai. To tell her that yes, he did have a dream about her, but didn’t want to tell her earlier, because no teenage boy in their right mind would tell an adult woman that they had a dream about them during a near-death experience.

Which honestly most of it was lost on the fact that Mai can only hear him as a sort of ghostly spooky echo.

So then, through the power of...the show only calls if friendship, but it’s very vague, y’all...they break the curse that Marik put on Mai, and she remembers Joey. Also because Joey is touching her face. Like literally touching her. This would have been way spookier if she could not see him at this point.

So Ra is getting ready to fry these two up and I thought “wow, we’re gonna get two bodies at the end of this episode. What a treat!” but there’s a twist.

What? Lol what?

Within like 3 milliseconds, Yugi goes “dammit what are these assholes doing?” and leaps up to the platform and then takes yet another direct fireball hit in order to save Joey Wheeler. No one even asked Yugi to do this--he’s not even competing in this game, but he certainly got up there and took it.

This episode must have been a right up shipping frenzy when y’all were 12.

Marik is so pleased that he got to eff up Yugi more in this duel than the one that he actually tried to kill Yugi Muto in. If I remember correctly he did mention that this all was very convenient--I mean he got 3 in one go and he wasn’t even trying. So, Because Yugi is passed out and because Kaiba will never actually step in and stop anyone in this show unless Mokuba orders him to, Marik walks straight up to Joey and Mai and makes some more nonsense right in front of everyone on this show.

This is right in front of most of the entire cast.

Maybe it’s the color scheme but I got strong Stinky Cheese Man vibes from this magic effect.

I thought of pulling more caps from this point but there was waaaay too much shirtless Yugi in it. In my mind, all cartoon characters, when they take their shirt off, have another shirt on underneath. And if they take off that shirt, it’s yet another shirt. It’s shirts and boots leggings on all the way down to infinity like a russian nesting doll, and the image of shirtless Yugi really puts a kibosh to my world view and I didn’t like it.

No kinkshame, of course, if that’s your thing, well, you got a 18x18 pixel shirtless Yugi right there for you to enjoy. Enjoy.

Now that Mai has been trapped here in this hourglass resort, she will lose her memories of her friends for the rest of time, obsessively watching everyone else's vacations that are full of friends having way more fun than she is having.

This is just Instagram basically. Y’all, this is just Instagram.

And some of y’alls Instagram has shirtless Yugis in it, I just know it.

And not to get too real but like, last episode we went through how Marik basically gave Mai depression--and it says a lot that his way of doing this was illustrated in a show written like 20 years ago in a lot of the same way social media works today. Just throwing that out there. 

Overall, I feel like the theme of the Mai ark is “Marik just sped up what they were already doing and it was super effective.” Mai trapped herself in her own false and negative insecurities. Kaiba failed to moderate anything. Joey waited way too late to say the right thing. Yugi sacrificed himself again to such a degree that he couldn’t save Mai later when Marik was just strutting around cursing people willy nilly.

And I’m not going to lie, Marik’s cargo pants/cape strut was hilarious.

It was probably supposed to be menacing, but this long cut of this ridiculous cast just watching this weird boy go was great.

Up until now Seto has been a very patient impatient person, but now it’s finally his duel, and he’s so excited to duel Ishizu--but y’all it’s just Seto up against a phsycic again. I imagine it’s gonna go real great.

Other than that one guy in town, will this boy ever duel a normal person?

Also...been debating on whether Mai is dead or alive, and her soul still seems attached to her body--like she’s still salvageable? So I’ll say alive for now. Seems more like a dream than like she literally got transported elsewhere.

Dude. It is S2 and I just realized that Mai Valentine is a pun.

Damn.

If you just got here, this is the end of S2 and things are rapidly losing their mind. Click here if you want to read from ep 1

[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

YOU PROBABLY HAVEN’T HEARD of Duncan Hannah, a New York–based painter and illustrator, though there’s a somewhat famous, mid-’70s photo of him lounging in a rattan chair next to a bathing-suit-clad Debbie Harry. The image comes from an obscure 1976 art film called Unmade Beds, an amateurish, charming New York time capsule directed by Amos Poe (neither Hannah nor Harry could act).

Hannah will now be known as a diarist. As he notes in his new book Twentieth-Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies: “This is not a memoir. These are journals, begun in 1970 at the age of seventeen, written as it happened, filled with youthful indiscretions.”

Arriving in New York City from Minnesota, thin and wispy young Duncan is already well read and culturally hip — and not lockstep hip either, but rather a precocious contrarian. In art, he likes comic books, illustrators, and, most of all, David Hockney. To his credit, he tells his knee-jerk-avant art teachers at Bard College that he likes the Pre-Raphaelites. (“They shook their heads…” Well, of course they did. Of course they did.) He paints portraits of his offbeat literary heroes (e.g., Wyndham Lewis, Colin Wilson), which itself is kind of odd, and exhibits them in a group show, “in spite of not fitting in with the show’s agenda.”

Most of this book recounts our young rake meeting almost everyone important in his two worlds of art and music: Hockney, Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, Larry Rivers, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry. A precocious dialectician, he can spar with the best — and worst — of them:

Danny shouts, “Louis, Louis, come join us!” looking at the entrance to the back room. I crane my neck to see who he is talking to. Gulp. Standing there in an alcoholic stupor, looking into my eyes, is the avatar of decadence and perversion, the legendary Lou Reed!

Creepy Reed lopes over to their table and whispers a truly stomach-turning proposition to our young diarist, which I won’t describe here. Appalled, Hannah becomes an ex-fan: “My hero worship is immediately over. Ick. […] He downs the rest of his tequila and leaves me alone in the booth to ponder my missed scatological opportunity.” It’s telling that Hannah, who lets the reader know that he has excised much from these journals, decided to leave this story in. Later on, he spots Reed at Max’s Kansas City, looking “like a skinny chimpanzee.”

Our narrator’s musings reach a peak of quotability whenever he’s witnessing the sorry truth about his heroes:

Fran Lebowitz sits with us and complains about her latest trick. [New York] Dolls drummer Jerry Nolan comes in with a gaudy chick in leopard skin, zippers, and frosted hair. Real skanky. Fran slips off …

Hannah also displays a shrewd ear for good music versus trash:

Bryan Ferry never disappoints […] Hawkwind […] weren’t to my taste. Queen […] I don’t like. […] Television is sounding better and better. Lenny Kaye called them “the golden apple at the top of the tree.”

[D]rove to Edgar Winter’s house on Sands Point, Long Island. This is Fitzgerald country, the fictional East Egg […] Gatsby! Yet inside this mansion was a rock band, dressed in their glitter sneakers and spandex, playing pinball machines and watching crap TV. Oblivious […] Pearls before swine, I thought to myself. We listened to a rough mix of their new album, which sounded lame […] Just loud, boring product for dullard youths. Rock ‘n roll can be incredibly stupid.

At what must have been the greatest New York rock-star party that ever happened, at the Academy of Music in June 1974, he sidles up to both Bryan Ferry, who’s distant and distracted, and David Bowie, who’s friendly, engaging, and witty:

He graced me with a glance, and I asked him if he was collecting material for a new song at this very minute. He sneered his canines at me and said, “Yah, why, do you wanna be in my song?”

I sneered back, “Yah, what about it?” We kept up our grimaces like a couple of thugs, necks outstretched, until he broke out laughing.

Meanwhile, in the art scene, minimalism is in full swing, but Duncan is (appropriately) unmoved. His stubborn conservatism, though, seems possibly to have cost him a more high-profile art career in such a ripe time and place. Hockney himself pays a visit and critiques his work (“Your drawing is a bit heavy-handed in the American fashion”), but progress remains slow, and he resists painting “something conceptual […] [s]omething that had quotes around it.” Regardless, Hannah’s days in New York were clearly tilted more in favor of “the life” (sex, drugs, and parties).

You might assume that our young-and-waify hero proceeded to screw his way willy-nilly through the gender-bending, glammy ’70s, this being the comparatively carefree, pre-AIDS era. But though his wolf-baiting good looks and friendliness are a constant magnet to a parade of lecherous males, he remains, steadfastly, straight as a razor.

The budding sociologist in Hannah (all of 22 here) is sharp-eyed when recalling a party at “the old Factory”:

This is the place where trigger-happy Valerie Solanas shot Andy. Creepy. They used to shoot laser beams from up here across the park into Max’s. I feel the party’s force fields, currents of strength, currents of weakness. “The love that dare not speak its name” just won’t shut up these days. Gayness has lost its underground status in NYC and is busy becoming the dominant sensibility. Lots of affectation. Sad when things turn to parody.

A short detour through London in August 1972 (“We sit at the dark basement bar and eyeball a couple of likely-looking English lasses, in their ‘frock coats and bipperty-bopperty hats’”) contains yet another best-possible-time-and-place music pilgrimage I can’t help but envy:

Robert Wyatt’s new group, Matching Mole, play. I love them. Then it’s Roy Wood’s Wizzard, who look ridiculous but sound great.

At intermission, we drank vodka […] and wound up talking to a forward young girl named Mary. […] Mary said she liked effeminate boys and I nudged her over to the doorway […] and kissed her and felt up her tits.

Bingo, glam-rock-era success! (This episode aside, the book is disappointingly scant on pornographic details, despite the number of conquests it chronicles.) Our thin white duke’s 20th birthday is summarily ruined, however, when his androgynous looks and excessive drinking in a London gay bar lead to what he calls a “near-rape experience,” the one truly frightening episode in the book.

While the party girls and the art-student girls keep on “flying low” for our handsome young buck, the picaresque life is starting to wear him down:

I smell like booze all the time now, but it’s expensive booze for a change. Perpetual hangover. […] I’m living faster than I can write. Not that I actually have something to write about. There’s no time to do it.

Everything turns sour. “The next chapter of this blackout finds me alone…” Hannah realizes he’s an alcoholic. A “real” girlfriend in his life (a rarity) turns out to be nuts:

Terry was hearing voices in her head, and she stabbed me in the chest with a small penknife she keeps in her bag. The little blade bounced off a bone. Ouch! This because the voices were teasing her about my so-called “harem.” “Terry, there is no harem!” But the voices insisted.

There is much tottering down smelly New York alleyways in platform shoes during many a besotted dawn. It’s a pungent, Scorsese’d-out New York that wafts up from these pages: “It’s hard to unravel people’s origins in New York. They act cagey. Suspicious”; neurosis in the air “mistaken for energy […] the new pissiness”; “[p]eople fall apart all the time.” 

As a final flourish, our now jaded dandy is disappointed when he visits grumpy Ned Rorem, who doesn’t come on to him at all but is actually a rather unfriendly old fuck. But Dunc is unfazed. To quote from an old blues song: “His disposition takes him through this world.”

Twentieth-Century Boy is a breezy, demotically precise portrait of Bowie-and-Warhol New York, splayed like a passed-out wino on every page. Hannah, who has no regrets and still looks young, now lives in New York and Connecticut.

¤

Anthony Mostrom is a journalist living in Los Angeles. He was formerly an LA Times columnist and a book reviewer and travel writer for the LA Weekly.

The post The Thin White Dunc: A Jaded Dandy in 1970s New York appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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