#blade in his mid forties era

[saintbarou]

FUCKING PLUVI LMFAO I FUCKING KNOW

[jadewing-realms]

“Try harder, next time.”

This Villain calls himself ‘Pain’.

Talk about melodramatic. He stands on the edge of a crane at the top of a skyscraper still under construction, looming over the street below, where a dozen totaled cars billow noxious smoke, chunks of asphalt seem to have uprooted themselves and then crashed back down to uproot yet more asphalt, trees dangle snapped in two, and Ochako could count on one hand the number of windows remaining unbroken in the area. Shards littered the scene like dozens of glittering stars reflecting the deepening sunlight.

Since the battle began forty-five minutes ago, he hasn’t moved from that spot. His comrades in arms, five other members of his gang, once again spread throughout the district, wreaking havoc, causing panic and destruction, damages worth millions, just as they have done relentlessly over the past two months. At every interval, he takes the time to preach forth his cause.

“This society has forgotten pain,” he says, even now, atop his tower, violet eyes half-lidded, dead-looking. “It has forgotten loss. And suffering. In doing so, it willfully ignores the plight of the less-fortunate. The downtrodden, the weak. The strong are raised with unmatched privilege while the rest are left to their own devices, and ultimately, to the misfortune of the fate in which their circumstances deposit them. You Heroes are no Heroes at all. Stain was right to judge you, but even he allowed his personal ideals to blind him to the truth: this entire Hero society must be made to know pain, and only then can true change be ignited.”

Ochako gulps down a stab of indignation. Every time he opens his mouth, she wants to punch him in his triple-studded nose. He speaks like he has every right to proclaim these ‘truths’ and more so to act on them, like he’s allowed to cause so much destruction because his beliefs deem it necessary. Beliefs that he and his entire gang hold, calling themselves Akatsuki—the Dawn. And every syllable bleeds a near-inhuman amount of condescension that would make obvious just how little regard he has for the common man, if his placement far overhead didn’t already do that.

He acts like he’s some kind of deity. A god of judgment.

“Bulls***,” she murmurs as she creeps up along the corner of the building, just out of his sight behind his position and to his right. He’s busy surveying the damage he’s done, watching his operatives battle it out with the Heroes below amidst sacrificial fires razed to tear innocents away from the land of the living.

A merciless god.

He’s gathered quite the posse, though, she knows. Strong Quirks, unusual Quirks, and with all of them watching out for each other, it’s been hard to even take a single one out. One shapes glass into monsters, another transforms his limbs into long-range weapons, one drains energy from your body just by touching you. She doesn’t know the Quirks of the other two; she’s barely glimpsed them since the fight started. And then, there’s this one…

The leader, she’d venture to guess. He’s the one who’s remained distant, an eye in the sky, now and then pressing a hand to his ear, probably communicating intel to his fellows on the ground. And he has some kind of remote manipulation Quirk that allows him to push and pull objects at will.

Ochako’s quite familiar with anti-gravity, and when he pulls something or someone, it looks startlingly similar to when she robs an object of gravity’s comforting hold and lets it fly. Only he adds force behind it, rips his target off the ground and then slams them back down with enough force to split concrete.

But perhaps, if it truly is gravity-related, she has a shot against him. After all, in theory… he can’t manipulate the gravity of something that has none, right?

When she at last crests over the ledge onto the incomplete floor that marks the construction’s halted progress, Ochako squints into the setting sun, which throws beams of searing orange light between the other nearby buildings, sends it glancing off thousands of glass panes and it all seems to be glaring down at her. She averts her eyes toward the crane, on her right, which is only a number of paces away now—the man called Pain stands at a mere twenty meters off.

Success of this mission will depend on the element of surprise.

So she slips in close to his perch, takes a deep breath and then opens her mouth.

“HEY A**HOLE!”

With an announcement like that, he can’t help but take notice. Ochako supposes her boyfriend’s abrasive habits are good for something on a practical level. Psychological warfare.

His purple eyes dart for her presence before zeroing in on her and narrowing dangerously. She gives him a cute wave, before she presses her fingers against crane’s body and activates her Quirk, setting it to floating. She gives it a shove… right off the edge of the building.

Those purple eyes widen. He starts sprinting up the crane’s neck, trying to reach the body before it gets too far from the edge. Ochako’s waiting for him.

When he raises a hand, she’s ready for it and activates her Quirk as quickly as she can. She starts to float. If he’s still able to pull her despite her lack of gravity… then perhaps his Quirk isn’t related to gravitational force at all.

At first, nothing happens. Then, as he comes to the edge of the crane, which has floated much too far for him to jump to safety, his glare intensifies and she feels a sudden jolt across her body—like weight. Except it’s going the wrong direction… like gravity has not only been switched back on again, despite her activated Quirk, but it’s going horizontal instead of vertical. Her feet pull away from the ground.

She’s no stranger to flight, but usually, she is the orchestrator and the conductor, directing herself as she wills. But this is not her Quirk. She has no control here. This brings a whole new sort of nausea to her gut. The air rushes rapidly around her as her speed increases and she’s whipping through the air, straight toward him. Toward Pain.

He keeps his gaze fixated on her. Which means he can’t see the other person who is, no doubt, just waiting for his chance.

Ochako hardens her scowl, deactivates her Quirk on herself, and feels her speed skyrocket with added weight. Now she has momentum. She braces herself mid-flight, ready to come in hot and kicking.

Pain draws a simple blade.

She’s pretty sure she can handle that.

Just before she reaches him, she reapplies her Quirk and rids herself of gravity once more. When he stabs, she kicks out, trying to catch him in the inside of his forearm. He withdraws the hand, her other foot comes up for a landing square in the center of his chest, since she hasn’t stopped moving yet. Is his Quirk still active? Or is it just her momentum dragging her forward now?

Her kick doesn’t connect. He sidesteps and wraps his left arm snug around her calf. His right brings up the knife once more. He wields it like a sword, plunging it toward her ribcage.

It’s easy enough to block with her hand, after which she wraps all five fingers tightly around his wrist. When she lashes out with her free leg this time, both his arms are occupied, and without gravity on his side, he wrenches away not unlike a cannonball leaving the barrel. He takes her right booster with him though, and drops it as he scrambles for a hand-hold along the crane’s neck, something to stop his perpetual motion; the boot begins the long plummet toward the ruined street below.

Ochako huffs and sets herself down atop the crane’s body. The entirety of the vehicle bobs with a terrifying creak at the sudden weight, but she keeps a conscious hold of it in the grip of her Quirk. Her stomach isn’t churning yet.

“Who gave you the right to pronounce judgment on people like this?” she spits, allowing a bit of her anger to seep out in this brief moment of interlude. “None of those people down there did anything to you!”

Fingers latched around a rung along the top of the metal neck, he levels her nerve with a cold, calculating glare. He seems so… empty. “You are right. They did nothing.”

He lurches forward, pulling himself one wrung toward her. “They did nothing when a few ragged urchins begged them for spare change so they could have a decent meal.”

Again, he moves ahead with great care, climbing the crane like it’s a giant ladder. “They did nothing when they saw mere children sleeping huddled under a single windbreaker in the crook of a bolted garage door.”

He grabbed hold of the next rung. “As long as children suffer needlessly in this world, who are any of you to call yourselves Heroes? I will bring a just end to this kingdom of lies, and in the ashes, raise the dawn of a new and better era of true peace and prosperity.”

“You’re a lunatic,” she shakes her head, regarding him in disbelief. He truly sounds like he believes every word he said, and now she’s close enough to see the unwavering resolve in his face.

“If you cannot see the truth in my philosophy, then you are part of the problem.” He raises one hand, palm out, fingers splayed. Ochako frowns; her Quirk is active, but he’d moved her toward him before. Is it not gravity? Should she release or remain?

This time, when his eyes narrow, she moves backward. Her speed is just as breakneck, and she knows that just behind her, the unfinished building awaits to welcome her with cold concrete. She braces herself for a rough impact.

An explosion flashes light over her shoulders, warms the air at her back, and a pair of muscular arms wrap themselves around her as a force contrary and equal to the one pushing her brings her to a hasty and almost complete stop. They drift listlessly off kilter, moving from the shadow of the crane into the golden light of the distant sunset, but her focused inertia has been traded for simple aimlessness. Slowly, her body unwinds. With all this sudden starting and stopping, now her stomach’s beginning to complain.

She breathes a staying sigh against Katsuki’s chest. He braces a hand against her neck, thumb feathering her jaw. Then suddenly, he’s gone, blasting away from her to arc over her head. She squints at the explosions, cranes her neck to watch him go.

“HEY A**HOLE,” he snarls, cresting amidst the rays of sunlight streaming over the crane, “dontcha know that every sun that rises,” he halts his drift with a small palmful of sparks, and then aims both hands at the criminal several meters beneath him, “has to go down!?”

His toothy grin is positively wicked, just before he lets loose a volley of force on par with what he once used to repel a meteor shower of Ochako’s own making. Raging fire, billowing ash envelopes the crane in a hellish cloud of concussive chaos. Ochako can feel the searing heat from it wash over her in waves, she squints against the shockwave, grimaces at the mournful groan the crane releases in protest.

At the distance he’d chosen, Katsuki can’t have killed Pain. But surely he’s disarmed and disabled him. There’s no way someone would be able to withstand that kind of raw force unscathed. Not even the man who claims to be a god.

When the smoke clears… there he is. Still holding tightly to the crane’s neck as the vehicle descends and rotates idly mid-air, and his dead eyes are trained on Katsuki’s place above him with something akin to disgust. He raises a hand again and, by his previous pattern, he’s preparing to draw Katsuki in to close quarters, knocking him across the crane’s mutilated body, littered with sharp edges of broken metal, in the process. Not even Katsuki’s explosions would protect him from that. And since they have no way of knowing what else Pain has up his sleeve, much less how he was able to withstand that devastating blast…

There’s only one thing left to do.

Ochako knew what was likely to come when she suggested this plan before they left the ground. But still, she hates to think it’s even necessary.

The road is broken already, vacant, waiting. She presses her fingertips together… and releases the crane. And the god.

With another groan of pain, the metal behemoth drops at an alarming rate, straight toward the fires below. For a brief moment, as he falls, Ochako’s almost sure she sees a hint of surprise on Pain’s stony face. Again, those purple eyes dart and find her amidst the rush of smoke around him. He stares…

Is he afraid?

She can’t tell.

Then her body lurches after him. He’s pulling her down with him.

Her mind panics. She can’t release her Quirk, that will do nothing, but leaving it does nothing as well—either way, she has no way to avoid the coming impact she herself orchestrated to end the fight for good. It’ll do just that… perhaps for both of them.

Katsuki..!

Something snatches her from the sky.

They careen off to one side, down the block made hazy with smoke, ash, and flying debris, and stagger to a landing just as the crane itself smashes into the street. Katsuki turns his back, shielding her from the sickening calamity of twisting metal and shattering glass, breaking asphalt, that goes on for several seconds until the whole of its weight has met the pavement. The displaced air whips over them, tugging her hair into her face even under her visor.

Gravity is merciless.

Slowly, Katsuki’s arms loosen around her, and they both turn to survey the damage of her final, endgame move. The crane is burning now, a mangled heap of wreckage barely resembling what it once was, a centerpiece to the banquet of destruction surrounding it. The air is thick and spiced with burning, rubber and gasoline. This recklessness will cost more in damages, no doubt, but Ochako is confident it was a necessary measure. This threat could not be dealt with by normal means.

“Hey Ochako,” Katsuki blurts quietly, pointedly. She glances at him questioningly. His eyes—so different from Pain’s, so much more alive and blazing with pure will—meet hers narrowed and filled with red-hot accusation. “You almost let him get you, dumba**.”

She scoffs. “I was trying my best, all right? He’s not exactly an easy one to handle.”

“Try harder, next time.”

“Hopefully,” she huffs, interrupted by a sigh—of exasperation or relief, she isn’t sure, “there won’t be a next time.”

Carefully, they approach what’s left of the crane, stalking amidst the smoke and keeping their eyes peeled for a body. Unconscious, hopefully, but possibly… otherwise. Ochako swallows the burn of bile. She doesn’t want to think about that yet… prepared as she thought she was. With the sun sinking lower, red light illuminating the surplus of damage, it doesn’t take long to make an unsettling deduction…

Pain is gone. Just… vanished. Katsuki shoots her a fiery look of growing confusion from his place opposite the jagged remains of the crane’s neck, which she returns with a simple shake of her head.

The god has escaped. The sun will set, and there’s no way they’ll be able to launch a search so soon, not with this disaster area to deal with. Tomorrow… the dawn will come again.

Now it’s her turn to scowl. D*** these Villains with their deeply philosophical monikers.

[kylegoodmanuca-blog]

Punk is more than a sound

Punk is more than just a sound, it’s a whole way of being, and rock’s new rebels preferred lived-in T-shirts and Levi’s.

Loud, fast, and simple, punk rescued rock‘n’roll from suffocating on its own excesses, giving the genre a razor-blade edge it hadn’t had since its earliest days. The rebellious spirit and willingness to question traditional conventions—like the idea that you had to know how to play an instrument before you could start a band—would find their way into nearly every meaningful musical revolution that followed, from hip-hop to indie rock to techno.

Music’s only ever been just one facet of punk’s identity, though. It’s more than just a sound, it’s a whole way of being—a philosophy, an attitude, and, crucially, a look.

Punk’s sonic foundations were laid down in New York City by the same people who established the beginnings of punk style: artists like Lou Reed, the Ramones, Suicide, and the New York Dolls who wanted to strip away the bloat rock had accumulated in the psychedelic era and return it to something purer. While Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones matched their arena-filling ambitions with equally elaborate costumes of velvet and sequins, rock’s new rebels preferred lived-in T-shirts and Levi’s.

“We came out of the glam scene,” says photographer Paul Zone, author of Playground: Growing Up in the New York Underground. “So by the time ’74 came around and glam was winding down, probably 50 percent of the people in that scene were involved in what would come to be known as the punk scene. It was just that our flamboyance got a little more played down.”

“There was still fashion going on,” Zone adds. “They’d go to the thrift shops, where you could find vintage clothes. Black Levi’s jeans became a staple for everyone who was there. When it comes to Levi’s and jeans, they were being used in a lot of different ways. In the glam days, the Dolls were wearing little boys’ Levi’s jackets that where so small that they could hardly get their arms in them.”

In the mid-1970s, the new New York sound and style came into focus through the Ramones (who created a uniform of shredded Levi’s 505 jeans and black leather jackets), Television(whose guitarist Richard Hell was one of the first performers to rock spiked hair and torn T-shirts held together by safety pins), and Blondie (fronted by Debbie Harry, who pioneered high-low mixes of Levi’s and designer pieces), and other groups that orbited divey clubs like CBGB. “They had no money,” photographer Jenny Lens recalls. “The holes in Joey’s knees were from wear and tear. They were not fashion. I have photos of Dee Dee Ramone wearing a leather jacket, and around the wrists it’s really frayed. It was shameful back then to run around with holes in your jeans, and the Ramones said f—k that, that’s who we are!”

Blondie, 1977; Photo by Suzan Carson/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

By the time people started calling it punk, the revolution had already started to spread around the globe. Malcolm McLaren managed the New York Dolls before returning to London where he and partner Vivienne Westwood operated a boutique called Sex. Inspired by what he saw in New York, he combined the Dolls’ over-the-top outrageousness with Richard Hell’s deconstructed style to create a quintessentially British spin on punk fashion and tapped his new clients, the Sex Pistols, to promote it.

“McLaren went back to England and emulated the look and gave it a little more pizzazz with hair colour and putting more fashion into it,” Zone explains. At the same time, other London punks like X-Ray Spex—fronted by Poly Styrene—seized upon the movement’s DIY philosophy and started using staple items like jeans and leather jackets as blank canvases to decorate with pins, paint, and spikes.

At nearly the same time as it crossed the ocean to the UK, punk spread to L.A., where fans of the Ramones and Blondie adapted their distinctive looks to fit the city’s unique identity. “What we were doing in L.A. had to do with a lot of factors,” Lens says. “One was the weather. We could have a lot of thrift stores and a lot of yard sales, church bazaars. We don't have the rain and snow and cold that you have in London or New York. We were very into that DIY thing. You could repurpose [clothes], you could cut them up and do things with them. We’d rarely wear the same thing twice.”

L.A.’s bands were diverse, from pop-friendly acts like the Go-Go’s to the defiantly anti-commercial approach of the Germs, to bands like the legendary X who sat somewhere in between, but they were united by the bonds of their tight-knit community. “The fashion was very organic,” Lens says. “There were no paid stylists. We were stylists for each other. Everybody was going to thrift stores together, going to bazaars together, sharing each other’s clothes. It really came out of dressing up every day and expressing yourself and being an artist. You could be an artist who expressed themselves visually from head to toe and also on stage. Or not—you could be a photographer or a graphic artist or a fan or whatever.”

The L.A. style comes through in one of Lens’s favourite photos of the time, where X singer Exene Cervenka and scenester Pleasant Gehman pose in a shower at a loft where the pioneering fanzine Slash was throwing a party for Devo. “Pleasant had bleached her jeans and written ‘Slash’ for Slash magazine,” she explains. “Nobody had bleached jeans then. We did a lot of things that other people weren’t doing.”

Forty years after punk started, the music continues to reverberate, not only in the punk scenes that have popped up in cities and small towns around the world, but in the indie and alternative movements that punk inspired. In fashion, its influence has spread even further. You can see some of X’s rootsy simplicity in the indie rock uniform of jeans and T-shirts, and the continuing influence of McLaren and Westwood’s vision in the complexly customised jackets that have become de rigueur for rap stars. Punk style’s most enduring legacy can’t be boiled down to a particular item of clothing, or even the popularity of distressed jeans and dyed hair. It’s more about the idea of being authentic, that if you do your own thing and dress your own way, you can make the world change around you. “We would take what we would see in fashion and make it our own, where other people would take what’s in fashion and just run with it,” Lens says. “We influenced fashion more than the other way around.”

[fatboistudios35-blog]

Bizarre Days. A Critical Thinking Production. By Franky Santiago.

The Sacred Filter

Undisclosed location Argentina forest June 2048 the cold evening air and frost on the trees. Global warming at it’s finest as a stone trader sits in his fortress. Jimmy Rochelle legendary trader and mercenary. Feared in many parts of the world and a legend in Mantleville. Sitting there surrounded by Obsidian stone and fortune.

Tall lean figure, slick back greasy hair and a 21 Savage tattoo portrait on his neck. Wearing an all white suit with blue shirt. Tigers eye ring and a watch with hematite in it. Mid forties.

When humankind first discovered that Obision when used properly could cut through atoms and heal the people. Only the rich and powerful wanted it for dark purposes and for the money making it a very precious stone. Now just a resource that almost exists in legend. The world slowly deteriorates as the rich take the money and humans almost develop devices to transfer consciousness to computers.

Jimmy in a glass house in the middle of the forest surrounded by trained assassins. As a helicopter approaches he prepares to welcome his guest. The Truth and his men arrive on the roof. As the chopper makes the wind blow.

The Truth mid sixties long grey hair braided and built like a silverback gorilla. Aged and with battle scars from years of what he has been doing. Black cargo pants, steel toed boots and grey sweatshirt. Pistol at his side. Tucked inside a long six inch blade.

“Gentlemen. Welcome welcome. Please no guns.” Jimmy says.

The Truth nods handing over his pistol. They enter the elevator and go down to the business room. Three guards stand there in suits with face paint.

A room from the future flat screen TVs and a fireplace. Portraits of Jimmy in stone and Obsion stones everywhere. Glass windows showcasing the forest. In the wall a fishtank of tropical fish. Below through the floor there is a swimming pool and hot tub. Like an exercise room.

“Don’t worry my men are here for protection.” Jimmy says. “Please sit. So you come for the Obsidian yes? Powerful tool from the gods.”

“Yes. Powerful medicine.” The Truth says as he sits down. “I hear you have it.”

“Oh yes were on a mine of it as we speak. Tell me what do you desire it for?” Jimmy asks. Lighting a cigar.

“Medicine for my people.” The Truth says.

“Medicine? What? You waste my time with that nonsense. This is precious stone used for making weapons. Powerful tools my friend the money. Used for great destruction that we can use for the money.” Jimmy smiles. “So tell me. A man with your talent wants it for what a community? Are they billionaires or what?”

“People need medicine on the reservation. I will pay any cost. Just help us.” The Truth says softly.

“Oh that’s what I like to hear.” Jimmy snaps as his goon approaches with an eleven inch stone of Obsidian. “This right here my guy. Six million dollars.” Placing it on the table.

Black stripes dark blue and glossy emitting a powerful aura and its sharp edges transparent. Solid obsidian stone for great value. Used for filtering negative energy and used for weaponry. Filtering the darkened subconscious and cleaning the spirit.

“Really beautiful and sacred. What do you do with this medicine?” The Truth asks.

“Medicine? You poor lost soul this is fortune. It cured cancer, cut atoms! Fought even the hardest wars for mankind. This is power. You see my men are highly trained to kill. Who do you think pays for all this? This stone. I started off in West Mantleville selling guns now look at me! I have it made. What the real question is how did I make this happen?”

“I don’t like your disrespect.” The Truth says.

“Oh my disrespect?” Jimmy asks in confusion exhaling smoke.

“You dishonor our ancestors and give this to bad people. Every night you make families work and slave labor and kill them. Yet here you are dining an feasting with near unlimited power. Before the era of man and their thirst for knowledge this was very sacred and you desecrate it to make your money. For material objects. To give into the darkness.” The Truth snaps.

“Oh yeah.” Jimmy pulls out a pistol. “I could blow your brains all over my glass floor and no one would ever think to question me. Tell me is that not worth the money? Or are you to broke to understand?” Jimmy asks.

The Truths stares. “You were supposed to kill me.” The Truth grabs the gun pistol whips Jimmy out cold. Then shoots the three goons. Then walks over and yanks up Jimmy.

Machine guns fire on the outside as men scream. Then a large explosion rattles the structure as the glass cracks. Then six militiamen on ropes swing in and aim guns at Jimmy.

“Please! NO NO NO!” Jimmy begs on the ground with a knot on his cheek. Crying in his own tears.

The Truth yanks up Jimmy and gets him in a headlock and slams him to the floor. Then grabs Jimmy and locks his jaw twisting.

Jimmy screams in agony. As The Truth twists his Jimmies head and squeezes his jaw.

“What do we do?” A militia member asks.

“Raid the structure. Take the medicine.” The Truth says as he pauses to squeeze Jimmy's head. “Then kill any remaining men of his and when we load up the stone blow this place back down to the ancestors.”

Jimmy yells in agony as The Truth squeezes his skull. Jimmy screams now directed at the militia members who raid the fortress.

The Truth drops Jimmy to the floor. “I give you one time. Fight me with honor or die like coward.”

Jimmy jumps up and tries to run as The Truth grabs him by the collar and drops him to the glass floor. Jimmy's head makes a thud like a hammer to wall.

“Now you die like coward.” The Truth says as he picks up Jimmy like a barbell.

Jimmy screaming hysterically. As he kicks and screams crying hysterically.

“PUT ME DOWN! NOW! I KNOW POWERFUL MEN!” Jimmy yells.

The Truth throwing Jimmy in the air like he's a basketball as Jimmy's brain splatter on the tree on impact and he ricochets like a bouncy ball off two trees and lands in the dirt. Splattering on on the dirt on impact.

The militia members fill the helicopter and The Truth jumps out the window and climbs the rope back to the roof.

“Truth. Explosives planted no hostiles and all woman and children are not insight.” The Militia member says.

“Good. Give this place back to the ancestors.” The Truth demands as he climbs the ladder into the chopper.

The chopper flies off into the air enabling stealth mode. In the distance a silent explosion sends a shockwave as the glass structure crumbles echoing for miles.

“One less colonizer to worry about.” The Truth says calmly as he stares into the distance.

In the news a small explosion nothing more nothing less. But in the criminal underworld and the wealthy know something big went down. Just another day.

[xtruss]

Before Slim Malik Turned Shady

He could bat a bit too, you know?

— Osman Samiuddin Senior editor | ESPNcricinfo | April 2, 2020

In our series Come to Think of It, we bring new perspectives to bear on received cricket wisdom. In this instalment, a reassessment of Saleem Malik, who might be remembered as a fixer but was so much more

You're not going to like this, not one bit. To many of you it won't matter because what you're about to read happened too long ago. But the world is in a rare pose of reflection - really its first ever. If not now then when to think deeper about, and beyond, accepted wisdoms and established truths: that is the central thrust of this series.

Which is how comes the opportunity to remember that before Saleem Malik the fixer there was Saleem Malik the batsman; and that he wasn't any batsman, he was one, more emphatically than is now recalled, capable of genius.

See, you don't like it. Why remember Malik as anything other than a fixer? Australian players called him the Rat and no one ever outraged much. Such is the stain he left that remembering him as we do is the perfect punishment, more robust than Justice Qayyum's life ban.

And sure. That will stick forever, unlike the ban, now overturned.

But forever needs stories to fill it, so here we are telling the one about when Malik first came to notice, way back when the '80s began, as the next big thing in Pakistani batting. These days, when we can finally say that fast bowlers come and go but a Babar Azam is forever, we can truly appreciate and understand how big a deal Malik's arrival must have been.

It happened just as one of Pakistan's most celebrated batting orders was breaking up. Sadiq and Mushtaq Mohammad and Asif Iqbal had gone, Majid Khan was done, and Zaheer Abbas hadn't long left. Javed Miandad, flourishing, needed company.

So landed Malik, a prodigy, with a first-class hundred in his second game, and a star and captain of Pakistan's Under-19 set-up. A hundred on Test debut - in a makeshift side ripped apart by a rebellion against Miandad's captaincy - set the seal on this potential.

England was a happy hunting ground for Malik. He made close to 1000 Test runs there at over 20 points higher than his overall career batting average.

Looking back now he was very much a sportsman of his era. He cut a shapeless figure, ungainly in a very middle-aged, subcontinental-male way. Not avuncular, exactly, but we all know an uncle like him: a little paunchy, a little curvy, a little bottom-heavy.

That doesn't mean he was a liability. On the contrary, he was an outstanding boundary fielder - not in the same way Jonny Bairstow is, but his throws were the work of a sniper, sleek, efficient and lethal. What, after all, do we remember of his contribution to the entire 1992 World Cup other than the throw from deep midwicket to run out Phil DeFreitas? Closer in, check out this catch - it's 1984; it could be 2024.

Bat in hand, waiting for action, the uncle didn't vanish. But once in play, here was a handsome batsman. The easy drives, the light feet, the rubbery whip of the blade whenever he went square either side, even as small an action as the shuffle to the off when he set up to drive had a pleasurable quality to it.

In toto, it could culminate in a range that matched Miandad's, only it played out on vastly different pitches. Miandad had Sharjah but Malik had Eden Gardens. Imran Khan promoted Abdul Qadir and Manzoor Elahi above Malik in the chase, so frustration and a teensy bit of anger, maybe, drove Malik. Rage could have helped a chase of 78 at over ten an over. But Malik was ice-cold, which, as a response, was much more calculating and complex and compelling than dumb old anger. He went hard at an injured Maninder Singh's SLA and dealt with the very mediumy pace of Madan Lal and Kapil Dev with the abruptness and lack of decorum that only a 23-year-old can conjure. Plus, a late chop through point off a Kapil yorker wide of off stump, having moved outside of leg stump to create the room, was the future.

Once he got ahead of the rate, he made sure to retain strike over the last couple of overs, picking up doubles and singles. He wasn't going to waste this. Here was Miandad's nous in killing the chase, but something altogether more formidable in setting it up.

Just as good was another, lesser-recalled gem, the 41-ball 66 in the Nehru Cup semi-final against England. Not just by numbers, in nature both innings were more aughts than '80s.

At another end stand three of the finest, most underappreciated Pakistani Test innings of the era: 99, 82 not out, 84 not out. All three came at Headingley across two Tests when swinging Headingley was a mean little hell for batting. The three innings showcased patience and technique, of course, but also sharp judgement and game awareness, especially the first of them: ground out over a day, alternating between steadying the batting and forging ahead, eventually setting up a famous innings win.

In that time only Queen's Park Oval was tougher to bat at. And Malik's only Test there? Sixty-six and 30, and the half-century was the only one from either team in the first innings. Khan once implied that Malik was a flat-track bully but Khan was sometimes off on his player assessments, just that we only remember the ones he got right. Malik was anything but.

The sweet smell of Sharjah success: Saleem Malik, Imran Khan, Wasim Akram and Javed Miandad celebrate with the Austral-Asia Cup trophy in 1990.

Khan's ambivalence towards him was curious. Khan loved good body language, that most deceitful quality, which explains a little: Malik was no lion in the field. But Khan also loved men who stood up in crisis, and enough of Malik's best innings came in those moments, right under Khan's nose.

And somehow Khan rarely factored for one of Malik's most remarkable innings, when he batted one-handed, his left arm in plaster, against the toughest opponents of them all, West Indies. Forty-one minutes, 32 team runs, and enabling Wasim Akram's first Test fifty. A reminder not only for Imran but for us that humans are not binary creatures: one can be corruptible but also brave, selfless and committed when situations demand.

What Malik did seem to lack was the raw hunger of more driven, consistent players. He could and did go missing, as during the 1992 World Cup, or for the two and a half years and 19 Tests with just three fifties in the mid-'80s. He also ended with a single fifty in his last 13 Test innings.

The mood had to strike him, that much is true, and only he controlled when it did. When he became captain, for instance, and was afforded the respect he felt he deserved, he couldn't stop scoring. Early in his leadership he reaffirmed the depth of his quality, swatting away early-peak Shane Warne (Warne would dismiss him just once in five Tests, across which Malik averaged 71). Less remembered but a true-blue classic was his other 99, as captain, at the Wanderers - another tough venue, against a spiteful pace attack.

Captaincy suited him to the extent that it forms one of Pakistan's great what-ifs - how good might he have been? He took over a team, remember, much like the one he had debuted in, torn apart by factions and rebellions. He inherited one of the game's spikiest ego clashes, between the two Ws, and massaged it to a degree that both took nearabouts six wickets per Test each under him. Akram - who gravitated to Malik's charisma, not Miandad, after Khan's exit - had a better average under no other captain; Waqar Younis averaged better only under Miandad (among captains who led him in more than two Tests). And to think that initially not only were they not talking to each other, they weren't talking to Malik either because he had assumed the post they most wanted.

Captaincy, sadly, was the undoing; all that power and success merely grease for the ride down. And it's entirely plausible that even if Malik hadn't succumbed as he did, he might have ended up squeezed out between the two great pairings that overlapped and overshadowed his career: Khan-Miandad and Akram-Younis.

That he ensured he'll never be forgotten is, let's wager, no consolation.

[dumbestpersoniknow-blog]

The Path to Avengers: Endgame. Part 7 of 21--Iron Man 3

Observations and opinions. Feel free to disagree. I ain’t trying to convince you of nothing.

Pepper is now CEO of Stark Industries. Tony was a jerk in his younger days. The mistakes of one’s youth makes the super-villains of one’s present. This particular villain discovered a cure for dismemberment. Tony has been having portal-induced panic attacks since introducing a portal to a nuclear warhead.

This begins Phase 2 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Why does Phase 2 start here?  What does this change of phases mean for the average fan? What is a Phase? Let me answer all of those question by saying: This is the beginning of Phase 2.

Now that I think about it, what’s different in Phase 2 is that we have entered the “superheroes do not need to inconvienience their superhero friends when mayhem ensues” era of the MCU. At one point, Happy tells Tony that he wants things to be how they used to be before Tony started hanging out with the superfriends.  Tony could have been helped by hanging out with the superfriends during this movie. Does he not want to bother them? Are they busy? The U.S. president gets kidnapped. Captain America would probably be willing to clear his schedule. Maybe he's too busy catching up on The Twilight Zone and Seinfeld.

Is Iron Man 3 is a Christmas movie? It has Christmas trees and Christmas lights and it has a Christmas music soundtrack. The reasons for this story-wise are nonexistent. But Director Shane Black likes Christmas movie. So there you go. Tony thinks a kid wanting his autograph looks like Ralphie. We learned in the first movie that Peter Billingsley works for Stark Industries. That’s almost interesting.

Speaking of almost interesting things, Jon Favreau, who directed the first two Iron Man movies, did not direct the third. But he did returned to play Happy Hogan. And speaking of Christmas movies and Peter Billingsley, he is in Elf, which is also directed by Jon Favreau. Favreau was hired to direct Iron Man based on the success of Elf. He was seen as a bankable director. The whole Marvel Cinematic Universe is born out of Elf. That sentence may be a stretch, but it’s typed now, so what can you do?

Uh oh. I feel a long paragraph coming on filled with petty complaints. In an attempt to add brevity, I’m going to type this paragraph all in one breath and stop there, no more. [big inhale]  A couple things that drive me crazy about this movie regard the Iron Man suits themselves. Tony implants implants into his arm so the suits know how to align when he summons them to fly onto his body. But he just basically points at Pepper to make the suits fly onto her. How does that work? And Tony, Rhodey, Pepper, President Ellis and that bad guy all wear iron suits at some point. Are these suits one-size-fits-all? I’d like to see all of these people in a lineup. There doesn’t appear to be much elastic around the mid-section of the Mach 42. Also, in the other movies, the big technological breakthrough was not the suits. It was the power source. In this movie, his suits break apart into a bunch of pieces and fly all over everywhere disconnected from their power source which is in Tony’s chest. And for a long stretch of the movie, Tony doesn’t have a suit because it needs to be charged up. Why does it need to be charged when he has the power source imbedded in his body? I hate to go getting all finicky, but the rules of this technology in have been set. They must follow the rules or [gasps for air] My fingers are strong. My lungs are weak. Moving on.

Now, a more substantive complaint:  The villainous scheme. I like judging villains by their evil plans. Forty years later, for me, the gold standard of villainous schemes is still Lex Luther buying up worthless desert out west and programing a nuclear missile to hit the San Andreas Fault. He does this in order to drop California into the sea which will give him a whole coastline of prime oceanfront real estate. That’s a clever idea. Stopping that is a job worthy of Superman.

In Iron Man 3, the villains need Tony’s help to—wait, no— thy need to kill Tony because—wait, no—they need to kidnap Pepper to force Tony to—wait, no—they need to kill Tony because— ummm, I can’t keep up with their motives. Another part of their big plan is to kill the president so they can become the vice president’s healthcare provider. Do I have that right? To be fair, their plan is to own both sides of The War on Terror. But the story is told in a muddled way.

Even though the overall narrative of this movie is messy and unfocused, it’s filled with fun scene after fun scene, funny moments and witty dialogue. The forrest is frightful. The trees are delightful.

Tony goes for a long stretch of the movie without one of his iron suits. He must rely on his MacGyveresque wits and creativity to take on the superpowered baddies. Good stuff. When his suit finally returns to him, it comes in stages. He fights a group of bad guys in their lair with only his right glove and left boot. Every time he takes someone out, he sets himself careening out of control. That’s scene is a hoot. I am fond.

Many fans of Iron Man from the comics became irate with this movie. It was billed as the introduction of The Mandarin. The Mandarin is Iron Man’s archenemy and looked to be played by Ben Kingsley, but !!!SPOILER ALERT!!! The Mandarin turned out not to be The Mandarin. He turned out to be a drunk actor named Trevor who was hired by the main villain to scare people. The main villain is rather run-of-the-mill and boring. Imagine months of hype about The Joker being in a Batman movie only to realize while watching the movie that The Joker was just some drunkard Carmine Falcone paid to act crazy. People were none too happy. But as someone who isn’t a fan of Iron Man from the comics, I thought it was a bold and inventive twist.

So Ben Kingsley was the Mandarin—until he wasn’t. Then Guy Pearce said he was the real Mandarin. But in the All Hail the King one-shot someone tries to break Ben Kingsley out of prison because the real Mandarin wants to see him. This would make Guy Pearce a fake Mandarin also. So there is the possibility that the Mandarin could be a future villain in another movie. This does seem unlikely to happen anytime soon. The Mandarin wears ten rings. Each ring gives him a different power. Even if Robert Downey Jr. continues on as Iron Man (or if he leaves and Iron Man is recast), the quota of superpowered hand jewelry has been used up by Thanos.

Tony Stark narrates this movie, which is new. I’m not a fan of narration. After William Holden explained how he got to be a corpse in Sunset Boulevard, narration has gone downhill. Well, I guess it works for Apocalypse Now. Frank Drebin did some good voice over work. Jacob Tremblay did some good narration for Room. Jacob Tremblay did some good narration for Wonder. Harrison Ford did some nearly tolerable narration for Blade Runner. However, the narration was even better in the Director’s Cut after it was removed.

Stan Lee Cameo— A happy judge at a beauty pageant.

Post Credits scene— Oh, the narration isn't narration. Stark has been talking to Bruce Banner for the whole movie as if Banner is his therapist—or as if someone is trying to say that this iteration of Bruce Banner is going to be around for more than one movie. Mark Ruffalo is the first actor to do so.

Returning Characters— Iron Man, Potts, Happy Hogan, Bruce Banner, Rhodey, JARVIS

[timothyivison]

B(L.A.)DErunner, 1980-2020

Expanded to Immersive City

Joe Day

Tim Ivison

SCI-Arc, spring 2018 seminar

TUESDAYS

10am-1pm

ROOM 226

ABSTRACT:

In the last two decades of the 20th century and the first two of the 21st, space has taken some unlikely turns. The millennial window of 1980-2020 saw a profusion of spatial paradigms, realized in new architecture, art, film, literature and theory. Many of these were first tested in Los Angeles, a city that had long been a template for US auto-driven urban expansion, but now often stands in for everywhere. We will clarify, question and debate LA’s role as urban role model, and document the new spatial regimes pioneered here between 1980-2020, since Fredric Jameson’s nodal celebration of the Bonaventure Hotel.

In retrospect, the preceding forty years, 1940-1980, appear a relatively coherent late-Modern whole: as WWII concluded, the Korean War kept the southland’s military industrial complex humming and the Cold War guaranteed its continuation into the foreseeable future. The 1950s launched both the Space Race and the era of mass suburbanization, with the valleys of Los Angeles coming to represent its sprawling apotheosis. In the early 1960s, Rand Corp. pursued “game theory” in Santa Monica, Warhol inaugurated Pop Art at Ferus in West Hollywood, and Capitol Records inaugurated Beattlemania at Hollywood and Vine. Meanwhile, the Watts Uprising brought the civil rights movement to the LAPD’s doorstep. By the end of the decade, the psychedelic bliss of the Summer of Love was followed by the bad trip of Altamont …followed by Nixon’s War on Drugs. To all of these advances and upheavals, the 1970s were both the after-party and its hangover.

The 1980s by contrast are an ironic “Morning in America,” one of extreme and less commensurable polarities: Ronald Reagan and Black Flag, the Crystal Cathedral and the AIDS crisis. After almost a half century, the Cold War “ends” in less than two weeks with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Financial globalization and the dot-com bubble of the 1990s promised to usher in Fukuyama’s “End of History”, strangely echoed in the prayers of evangelical Christians, eager to hasten the apocalypse. The turn of the Millennium promised this and more, but the truly epochal shift came in the following year on 9/11 – the late arrival of the 21st century. The Great Recession of 2008 and the slow ascent of the Obama years set the stage for the backlash of Trump, with all his echoes of Reagan. For architecture, this has been a forty-year period of compound “isms,” as Postmodernism splintered into Historicism and “Deconstructivism,” only to be supplanted by a proliferation of neo-Minimalisms and Blobisms. Many finally opted for the generic “Contemporary” — a loaded term in its own right. This seminar will explore and document the new spatial formations engendered in this millennial period, especially as they were imagined from and for Los Angeles: a map and a territory marked up with concrete islands, concrete pools, gang graffiti, area codes, gated communities, fragmented horizontal grids, and stacked hierarchies of satellite, cell towers, and fiber optic cables. The original Blade Runner, released in 1982 and set in an imaginary 2019, will serve as a bracketing device for our studies. Readings will include foundational essays on Los Angeles and the millennial turn. Authors will include Reyner Banham, Joan Didion, Mike Davis, Bret Easton Ellis, Ed Soja, Steve Erickson, James Ellroy, and others.

REQUIREMENTS:

Regular attendance and participation in discussion are paramount. Each student will be responsible for one discussion

presentation related to a reading. In addition, there will be two analytical exercises:

1. The first of these - two annual entries for the cultural production matrix on the next page - will be due at mid-term. Each student

will identify and document 5 major cultural events/formations in two years, one between 1980 and 2000, the other 2000-2020.

2. The second, final project will be a spatial extropolation that bridges - geographically, thematically, in some way spatially -

between the two years’ findings at the midterm. This will include a 1000-2000 word synopsis, a 2-3 minute clip and two difinitive

images, and will be due the final week.