#every new iteration brings out a new part of him I never pondered before | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

semischarmed · 4 years ago

Text

Mine

Many coaches have come and taught the many iterations of our university team. Over the years, these coaches, like players, come and go. Good ones are hard to come by. Great ones are once in a lifetime. That was our Coach James.

He had a fatherly quality to him. There was a warmth in his training, a brightness when he would teach us. When we succeeded, he helped bring us up further and when we failed he softened the blow with his wisdom. Coach was great like that. Strictly professional, of course, but with a layer of genuine friendliness and a desire to watch us all succeed. He really was the perfect coach and we were blessed to have him. Still, in my lust, in my pure selfishness, I knew I had to have him- all of him to me and me alone. One long summer day, I ask for some one-on-one training. Never one to turn down a teaching opportunity, he complies. Like I said, he was a great coach.

I decide this would be the day. I run, but not too well. I throw, but haphazardly. That’s all it took for him to lean in. That’s all it took to get him close. Of course, he came with pure intentions- I did not.

When he is right above me, when I feel the vibration in the air from his chest, when I feel his raw power and vitality. That is when I strike. I fuck up my throwing position a little more, and he guides it proper. Fuck yeah. Jesus, I could stay like this forever. I feel the resonance of his deep voice within my very soul. Beckoning to me. “Become me. You want this. You deserve this,” it taunts. He was still coaching me, sure, but my mind is preoccupied with dark intent.

These gentle breaths as he speaks- these steady hands guiding mine to a better position. These would be my truths now. A most intimate of trainings. Coach James would be training me-sure- he would be training me to use that bod. I stare at him with longing. He would never look at me that way. God, I wanted him so bad. We glisten with the sweat of the midday sun. I could melt just like this. And in fact, I do.

In that grasp, in that teaching moment, I decide to teach coach a couple tricks myself. I look up at his face. Earnest. Strong. Patient. I watch his lips- they’re still moving- he’s still guiding me. Good. He hasn’t noticed my body begin liquifying. He continues on, unfazed. Unconcerned. He always did have that humble strength about him.

I am drawn to those plump lips, to his perfect smile and the void behind them, to the force of his breath over me, and to the very vibration that created them. I am drawn to that body which I would make mine. I wrap his thick arms around me. Those goddamn arms. They pulse and tense in surprise. He finally catches on. “- Hey. What are you doing? What.. What is this?” I pay no mind. A breeze picks up and his scent fills me. I wrap myself in it. Old spice deodorant layered over the pungent, musk of a man. My man. My scent, soon enough. The air was ripe in pheromones. Testosterone. James. I inhale deeply, trying to catch as much of him as I could. His skin is nice, too. It’s a bit damp, a bit hot from the heat, but nice. I feel them stretch taught, struggling to contain the mass of muscle beneath. I draw his shocked embrace even closer, uncomfortably close. I feel him between concern over my melting form and a need to push me away. Works for me. I continue to liquify further. Faster. You will be mine, Coach.

The world stops for a moment- at least for me. Maybe adrenaline, maybe my imagination. I commit this scene to memory, the scene where I become something greater. The scene where the real Coach James is born.

I shoot up his nose and flood his mouth. His body is forced to gorge itself with my mass. With every breath he attempts to draw, he pulls the liquid me instead. He retches, attempting to vomit me out, but I just draw myself further in. Flooding and flooding, I saturate coach with myself. When all but the last of me is a dribbling of slime upon his cheek, I disperse inside him. I drill into his every crevice, swim through his bloodstream, bond with his ever piece. I settle deeper and deeper inside my coach. Until his body no longer recognizes my presence as foreign. Until I am coach. I incubate into him, my pieces dormant.

Coach James awakes in the grass to the odd sight of a star-filled sky and a cold night breeze. “What the fuck...” he ponders, rubbing his head in confusion. He aches all over, yet he isn’t hungry. He digs into his memory, attempting to piece together the past few hours. I just spent them digesting this afternoon so he would have no success.

Unclear on the past events, yet unfazed, he walks back to his car and heads home.

———

That first night was magical-for me. As for coach, I’m not quite sure. I am ever present in his dreams. Pleasure, I think, is how I’d describe what being inside James was like. In his dreams, in his deepest thoughts, I lay there to witness them. These were thoughts, these were ideas, these were emotions that only I would be sole witness to, along coach. Ecstasy. This was a piece of him we would share alone. I was like a part of him, and only I would know him fully to this extent.

In the next few days after the events of that afternoon, Coach appeared a little more vain, a little more irritable. To my teammates he just seemed off. They catch glimpses of him checking himself out. They hear the barely audible moans from his office as he delicately feels his every part.

“What the fuck was up with coach” They say. Little did they know the real question to ask was ‘what was up’ IN their coach. Little did they know it was the influence of their missing teammate, ingraining himself deeper and deeper into his beloved James.

Despite the changes, my coach resists me. The further I try to bond, the more his body rejects me. It is a 3 day affair. A push and pull. With every push, I gain momentary connection to that bod, only to have that fulfillment ripped from my now non-existent hands. He was a coach, after all. I should have known it would be a battle of wills. Still, there was someone I had that coach didn’t have-yet. My mind. I had a cleverness match-made for that hot bod. A cleverness he deserved. A cleverness that I would utilize to the fullest to make that match a reality. Coach was a happy, content man. I was not. He needed my ambition, my cleverness, my lust. That body deserved better.

I let up the assault on his mind. He feels himself winning, backing my parts into a corner. It’s here where I apologize profusely inside him. He accepts because, James was the kind of guy to pick someone up when they’re down. He accepts my apology foolishly as we decide upon the best way I may leave him. A chance. We decide to do so in the privacy of his home- for my sake, of course. Little did he know, I felt his resistance weakest there. He readies himself for my exit, relaxing so I may flow out of him. I ready myself for one final push. It was in that moment that I surround coach with my psyche, encapsulate his very soul.

Coach James wakes up making an odd face his body has never made. It was a lustful, sinful grin. It was my grin. I start chuckling. My voice is deep, booming. We moan together as my dormant parts stir. We moan as it starts convulsing. The shaking was harsh. I puppet this body still and eager to accept more of me. It takes some resistance but it finally yields. Nothing good comes easy, after all. I stick my parts take their rightful places. Those bulging, slick arms? Mine. Powerful, vascular legs? Also mine. That thick, veiny cock? Fucking. Mine. I feel them inside me- I alight as his energy becomes mine. We tickle. We feel great. At long last, this body was mine.

No. Further. I want everything he ever is, ever was. James was gonna give me that. I wanted permanence. No one would ever tear us apart. I decide on his soul. I decide on becoming that as well. I string his soul up, prisoner in its own body, unable to do much of anything until transformed by the poison of my very being. In the meantime, I pleasure my new self to grant him a taste of what we could have, what we could be, once he yielded. I use those thick python arms as my own. I gingerly trace my a newly muscular inner thigh. I shiver in delight. Fuck. We were sensitive. Who knew?

I stare at myself in the mirror. Oh god, oh god this was real, he was truly mine. “Here’s how to use this bod correctly” I mock in that gentle, instructive tone he had. I rush up to the mirror and start making out with myself. It’s cold. It warms up as I continue to lap at it with my tongue, as I continue to smear with these new plump lips of mine. “Fuck yeah, that’s the stuff, coach” I moan as him. The room is humid, dripping with pheromone, hot from the heat I am emanating in wearing my beloved coach. I touch my new dick for the first time, feeling his soul rile up. I feel his teaching sensibilities corrupt with my desire. As any good coach knows, never let them have a chance to fight back. Before he has a chance to react to my newfound control or my actions, I pump quickly, determinedly. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. Coach’s body was fucking hot. This was a fucking dream- Oh My god. “Oh. Oh. oh” Our moans ring like music to my new ears. And in that final resonance, I release with only one thought: “I’m Coach James”. His hand shakes in resistance. This was it. I force the hand still. Command it. It was my hand after-all. I scoop our cum in my hand. I give my hot new reflection a playful wink. “Bottoms up” I say to us both. Sweet Nectar. My Nectar. With every taste and of his own milk, he perverts own senses, dilutes his very self. He has obviously never tasted himself to this capacity- because I finally feel his soul reflexively bond to mine. He tries to pull back. Like I’d let him. I greedily keep us tethered together. Then, he relents. There’s my James.

When he finally yields I feel his memories, his feelings, hopes open up. I take them all. Distort them. I take all of him into me, meld them with myself until we were but one soul. They were me, now. My memories, sure. My senses. My feelings- fuck yeah, but inundated, saturated with my lust. Hopes- not a fucking chance. My hopes and dreams for this body are far greater. Coach James was greater that that. I was greater than that. I am the James the world deserves.

I am left panting by the end of it. Ecstasy reverberates. It’s all me in here, baby. My coach- I was reborn. Tears stream down my cheeks. “Call me James” I say with newfound truth and intent. That name came naturally to me. I was fully him, after all.

———

‘New James’ is fucking kinky. Dirty. Narcissistic. As much as I love bossing around the kids, I love playing with myself even more. I got some great parts. Look at this fucking bicep. Teaching? Fuck that. Fuck the team. New James is ripe with ambition and power. “James Harrison got better fucking things to do that teach some stupid fucking kids,” I spit in the mirror as caress myself. Yeah. This bod’s a fucking power trip. So much more New James can do with his time.

“New” might be a bit of a misnomer. I am James, in body mind and soul. I am James, in past-present and future. All he ever was? All he ever will be? Me. I am James, forever. And I aint no fucking coach.

-End-

Just a quick one.

#male possession

452 notes · View notes

brighteyes-darkhearts · 3 years ago

Text

I read the Iliad, the project of a sun-drenched, blood-soaked semester in Florence. I loathed Achilles. What a stupid, selfish, dishonorable man. Homer originally called the epic The Wrath of Achilles, which is a far more appropriate title, all things considered. Sixteen thousand lines of dectilic hexameter to which thousands of people have devoted countless hours of life and countless jars of ink reading, translating, pondering; a civilization destroyed, innumerable lives lost, children left father-less, all because of one terribly petty man. The most terrible part of all of it, though, is that he is right, and successful.

Achilles strove for immortality, and he achieved it.

He died over two thousand years ago and everyone in modern Western civilization still knows his name. I hated him most because I knew , I know, his name, too, and because I see myself in him and him in myself. We all want a legacy; we all want immortality. Not in the sense that we fear the deaths of our bodies, though some of us certainly do, but rather in the sense that we fear the deaths of our names. They say we all experience two deaths: the first when our bodies cease their function, the second when our name falls from someone's lips for the last time, never to be spoken again, the memory wisps of smoke, uncatchable even if someone wanted to.

People would rather go to war and fight and kill and die instead of fulfilling some kind of peaceful pastoral idealism if such happiness means they will be forgotten.

Have you ever really considered the implications of that?

Have I? Has anyone?

To have or leave or create, cultivate, curate, a legacy, one needs to have a name. Sounds obvious, no?

A name is something everyone has, the second gift we're ever given, one longer lasting than our first gift of life. Names can be terribly old fashioned and boring, staunchly traditional, wildly new age, or if one is the child of a celebrity, they can be bizarre and unfortunate.

I never thought too much about my own name until recently, except in comparison to that of my twin sister, against whose monumental combination of syllables most others pale significantly. However, as my young adult self nears the expectations of marriage and motherhood, which many my age have already fulfilled, the concept of names has been on my mind with increasing frequency. On a superficial level, this consists of thoughts like "Could I marry someone whose last name doesn't sound good with my first," or "since my children will be saddled with my husband's last name, I get to pick their first and middle." I have been informed by my mother, however , that that is, in fact, not how the partnership of marriage works.

Marital disputes aside, as I thought about having to change my name for my eventual husband's, something I had always planned on doing when I got married, and something I had never considered much of an option, I found myself developing quite a resistance to it.

Why am I the one required to upend my identity, and not my husband? As previously referenced, isn't marriage supposed to be the ultimate collaboration, a team endeavor? Sure, I can keep my name, but then I designate myself as an "outsider," an "other," concepts that shape the very foundations of the human behavioral matrix. This, in turn, led me to the whole "why" question.

Names function to provide order to society, categorizing people in a clearer way than "hey, you" for everyone we meet. They also delineate strict patrilineal origin and hierarchical status within said society, often emerging from one's trade. I am referring, of course, only to men, because up until astonishingly recently, and sometimes still today, women were considered the property of men. Women would not own property or function independently from the man to whom they belonged.

The names of women, like the names of fields and houses, denote ownership.

Even then-names are a privilege, because they provide an avenue through which one can form an identity, through which one can be remembered. Throughout history, not everyone was considered important enough to warrant remembering. Enslaved people on plantations in the American south were not given last names of their own; they had to create them themselves or take on those of their owners, and with it, a clear signifier of their forced place in society. Considering the last names of Jewish Europeans both unnecessarily difficult and too clear a sign of the identities they sought to erase, Nazi Germany renamed millions of the Jews they killed or enslaved with unconsidered combinations of nouns and adjectives- Rosenberg, pink mountain, or Gardenschwarz, black garden. The immigration operatives of Ellis and Angel islands did the same to thousands of newcomers whose names they did not want to attempt to spell, so here, you take “Smith,” and you get “Jones.” Your connection to family history and national culture? You won’t need those here. Welcome to America.

Our names are the greatest gifts our parents can give us, planting us firmly within family lineages or tying us to historical figures and concepts; again, another moment in which the memory of another is re-embodied to continue its arduous trek towards immortality. We become our names as we mature, growing into or out of them. There were several options for my own name floating around before I was born, all of which seem entirely inappropriate and unfitting now, though occasionally I feel nostalgic for the Gracen I could have been but never was, a multiplicity of personalities never given the chance to realize themselves. Friends of mine whose names were mercilessly anglicized have slowly begun to reclaim them in their original, intended forms, building back conversation by conversation, introduction by introduction, the bridges back to who they are, who their parents named them to be, the cultures and histories from which they come.

Perhaps, in contemporary society, none so acutely feel the pain that names can bring than members of the trans community. Claiming their true name as an act of courage and authentic life in the cool sunlight of every morning and having to defend it in every hour that follows, having to suffer, too often in silence, the sting of a deadname used by those with no empathy or understanding or common sense in their hearts. Sometimes, the names our parents give us are simply wrong, and reclaiming our true names, those given from the deepest depths of truth at the core of our hearts, is the greatest gift we can give ourselves, and the utmost respect we can give to others.

Identity is a smoky concept to pin down concretely, but names are the first iteration of this idea, translating conceptuality into physical manifestation. It should come as no surprise, then, that our names are the first to go whenever someone seeks to dehumanize. Ayn Rand bestows upon all her characters a litany of numbers, distinct but uninspired, parts of a machine, easily replaced, insignificant.

Names are dangerous, because they allow for and support the construction of an individualized consciousness. There is no greater threat to oppression than a fully realized, highly actualized, wildly individualized consciousness. We most certainly cannot be the masters of our fate or the captains of our souls if we don't even know who we are.

#identity #my writing #poets on tumblr #mortality #immortality #what’s in a name?#how to life #achilles #philosophy #personal essay #late night writing #writers on tumblr #excerpt from a story i'll never write #writers #nonfiction #writtenconsiderations

3 notes · View notes

heartau · 5 years ago

Note

yuta + vampire au?

hello hello! i’ll be writing this in bullet point form because ive got really bad writers block :( !!

warnings: smut, various mentions of explicit gore, mentions of death and one mention of suicidal tendencies (not romanticizing though bc thats gross!)

work title: flame

being alive for more than a century can take quite it’s toll on you, even more so if you’ve spent the last 300-something years mourning over the death of a partner who carried half of your heart’s soul within them.

the scene has been iterating constantly in nakamoto yuta’s mind ever since the scene had occurred in front of him, in the middle of a battlefield, the year 1784.

the first vampire war, just a few years after he was first turned into one of them; a monster.

it was mortifying to him, the lack of bloodshed that stained the fields juxtaposed the mountain of beheaded bodies that eclipsed disarrayed towers.

tableaus of his lover’s head being sliced from their neck with just the flick of a specific blade, the killer’s face, of whomst housed flames in her eyes laughing as if it were a victory, flash in his mind before he shakes his head to rid of the frightening memories, focused on balancing himself atop the rooftop of his apartment building.

it’s the year 2019 and he lets out a sigh into the cool march air as he watches the cars and people littering streets below him continue on about their evening.

even if he were to jump, he’d only survive - vampires are cursed with immortality, no matter what they were to do to achieve the afterlife, they’ll only wake up alive and their bodies regenerated, as if nothing ever happened to it.

they stay in the same form since the moment they were bit.

“greetings, your highness,” his roommate’s voice causes him to turn towards his direction. “i have acquired some devastating information to bear.”

“stop talking like that, taeyong,” yuta mutters, swinging his legs over the ledge. “it’s 2019, people are gonna think you’re a weirdo.”

when the vampire war of 1784 came to its conclusion, yuta was victor, having savaged the remaining humans after watching his lover’s beheading; thus, he was brought to reign.

and he’s been reigning ever since.

reigning over what, exactly? who knows.

taeyong, his royal messenger (now, technically, one of his roommates), is one of the only vampires that he knows of these days.

“your highness,” taeyong cocks his head to the side. “i’m afraid i do not comprehend what you mean.”

yuta lets out a sigh. “never mind,” he mutters. “what’s the news?”

“i’m sure you are familiar with the blade of bloodlust?” taeyong says, and a jolt of pain goes through yuta at the mention of the weapon that was used to kill his lover. “it’s been stolen.”

“what do you mean?” asks yuta, furrowing his brows.

“it’s been stolen.” taeyong repeats.

“yes, i heard you the first time,” yuta lets out another sigh. “what do you mean it’s been stolen? isn’t it under heavy guard at the historical archives?”

he recalls the two muscular vampires who stood guard at the iron doors that housed the blade - surely no one can get past them both, with their burly arms and tall statures.

“it was, yes,” taeyong lets out a sigh as he pushes up the thin-lensed glasses perched atop his nose. “but upon visiting with doyoung this morning for further inquiries, we had found the bodies of both jung jaehyun and suh johnny. both bodies beared no head.”

yuta stood up from the cement ledge with widened eyes - if his heart were still beating, it would be thumping at a million miles per second at hearing this.

“so what you’re telling me is…” yuta’s voice is shaking.

he had rid of all the humans capable of holding that blade in 1784 by tearing them apart limb to limb and painting the cobblestone streets with their velvet ichor, bent upon mutilating them to the best of his abilities after what they had done to his lover.

there’s no way that a vampire hunter would still exist in the year 2019.

taeyong nods once. “a vampire hunter has been reborn, your highness.”

later that night, after discussing more on the matter with taeyong and doyoung, his royal strategist, he couldn’t bare to keep himself within the walls of his apartment.

the blood bags that he kept in the dodgy refrigerator in the kitchen were all gone, thanks to the recently turned teenager named mark lee, whom doyoung had bitten out of spite after the teen successfully tripped him as a dare by his friends.

“maybe if you calmed down a bit, we wouldn’t be out of our only life source right now, doyoung.” yuta scolds his strategist, who only rolls his eyes in response.

once upon a time, the man used to heed yuta’s word; the title of king was still a blessing those days. nowadays, as they settle into modernized settings, it would be a rare morning to hear the words “king” slip from doyoung’s lips.

“yeah,” mark says from the corner of the run down apartment. “what he said.”

“do you want me to go get some more food or something? i’ll break into a farm if that’s what you want. animal blood is just the same.” doyoung says, crossing his arms over his chest.

“no,” yuta sighs, slamming the door of the refrigerator closed. “i want you and taeyong and mark to stay here. there’s a vampire hunter on the loose and the three of you could survive against one.”

“and what are you gonna do?” doyoung quirks an eyebrow. “kill a random person on the street? what if they’ve got a family to come back to?”

“which is why i’ll find a criminal or something,” yuta mutters. “stop talking to me like that, doyoung. i’m your king, remember that.”

“right,” doyoung says. “king of the last ten vampires roaming the earth.”

yuta rolls his eyes before slamming the door closed, pulling on his suede jacket as he walks down the halls of the apartment complex.

they reside in the dodgy part of the city, so finding a criminal to bring home as food will be an easy task.

yuta walks the cool streets with his hands buried in the pockets of his suede jacket, eyeing every person who passes him by.

a group of giggling women, obviously having just left the bar down the street - harmless. yuta continues to walk.

a man standing on the stairs leading into an apartment complex, holding flowers behind his back, probably picking up his date - also harmless. yuta continues to walk.

a group of highschool boys cackling as they dash down the cemented streets, probably up to no good - a bit questionable, but they were all just highschool boys, so harmless. yuta continues to walk.

yuta continues to walk until he reaches the edge of the town, the rich skyscrapers of the high end districts letting him heave a sigh before pivoting on his heel to go back to his apartment and to let doyoung break into a farm.

but before he’s able to give doyoung the greenlight, he hears whimpering deriving from deep within a dark alley way.

the sound causes him to perk up, effortlessly stealthy when he walks to where he hears the sound.

“please,” he hears a shaking voice. “if you wanna rob me then go for it, just, please, don’t take my necklace.”

he looks around the corner and sees a tall, burly man dressed in all black cornering a sobbing girl, you, holding your purse in front of your body. from the looks of your outfit, you must have also just left from the bar down the street - but as yuta sniffs that air, he smells no alcohol coming from you.

“crying’s not gonna do anything, lady,” the robber gruffs. “give me your fucking necklace or else i’ll take it off your neck after i blast your head off.”

that sentence lets another sob wreak through you as you fall to your knees, clutching your bag tightly. “please, this necklace is special to me.”

“and? i don’t give a shit.” the robbers mutters, digging for something in his back pocket. the lights coming from the entrance of the alleyway reveals the outline of a gun. “i don’t got time for this, bitch making me wa-”

his sentence is cut off by silence, you hear the dull engine of a car passing by just down the alley way. you open your eyes, expecting to look down the barrel of a gun, only to see a different man standing in front of you.

“are you okay?” the voice is gentle and velvet when you hear it, looking up to see a kind face peering down at you. his hand was outstretched, offering to help you up.

“where did he go?” you question him.

“who?” his voice sounds slightly dejected, but still remains kind.

you take his hand hesitantly as he helps you up to your feet, heels wobbly as you find your balance. you rack your mind for words to say, but you can’t seem to find the correct ones for your situation.

“you should get home,” the man gives you a therapeutic smile. “it’s a strange town, it’s unsafe this time of night.”

you stare at him for a few seconds more, truly unable to form words, and you nod tightly. “but wait.” a beat. you search his eyes, they seemed to be glowing with a red flame. “who are you?”

but before the sentence escapes your lips, the man is gone.

that night, you went home with shaking hands and the lingering memory of the man with the burning flame in his eyes.

“taeyong,” yuta asks as he take a swig of his blood-filled cup.

the four of them, yuta, doyoung, taeyong and mark, are seated on the floor of the rundown apartment, feasting on the blood of the criminal that yuta had taken down.

taeyong turns his head towards him, setting his own glass down on the coffee table. “can mates be reborn?”

taeyong cocks his head to the side. “what are you inquiring, your highness?”

“i met a woman tonight,” yuta toys with the edge of his glass cup. “when i looked into her eyes, they held… a familiar fire.”

taeyong grows silent for a second as if he were pondering.

“your highness, there is a first time for everything.”

the next time yuta encounters you, it is during his day job as a barista at a local cafe.

(someone has to pay the bills; taeyong would freak out customers with his medieval speak, doyoung would quit after one squabble with a customer, and mark is still too recently-born to control his bloodlust.)

“hey, you’re the-” “can i take your order, miss?”

your eyes make their way to his nametag: yuta.

“yes, yuta,” you say, sharpening your eyes at him. “i’d like one tall iced caramel macchiato, and i would also like to speak to you when your shift is over.”

when yuta’s shift ends, your cup is already empty, finding solace in the screen of your phone. “you wanted to talk?” yuta asks, pulling up a seat next to you.

you waste no time. “who are you?”

“huh?”

“who are you? how did you know i was in trouble last night? where did that man go? he seemed to disappear into thin air.”

yuta lets out a sigh as he leans onto his elbows on the wooden table in front of you. his eyes are searching into yours, a wry smile taking over his face. for a second, even you felt a little inferior underneath his gaze but you quickly snap back to your usual gait.

“are you going to answer me or are you just gonna smile at me like that?”

“actually,” yuta says. “go on a date with me, and then i’ll tell you what happened.”

you roll your eyes. “and how do i know you’re not planning to do whatever you did with that guy to me?”

a grin stretches on his face. “i’ll take you out someplace where a lot of people are,” he says before putting his hand on top of yours. an electric spark seemed to erupt from your touch which caused his smile to widen. “trust me.”

and he did just that.

you and yuta’s first date took place at an amusement park - at first it started off with you nagging for him to tell you what really happened during the incident but you soon forgot about the entire incident the moment you screamed at the top of your lungs when the rollercoaster dropped. you spent the rest of the date clinging onto him as he dragged you from ride to ride and winning you multiple toys.

after, he took you back home and you promised to let him take you out again.

you and yuta’s second date took place at a simple 80’s themed diner, in one of the better spots of your town. as the neon lights flicked onto yuta’s skin and seemed to set his eyes even more ablaze, you sipped on your strawberry milkshake as you listened to him ramble about the daily occurrences he has to face.

you quickly forgot the reason why you even began to let yuta take you out when he kissed you on your doorstep, that night.

“your highness,” taeyong knocks on yuta’s door, one night, a few months later. “doyoung and i would like to speak with you about something.”

yuta turns his gaze from the book he was reading to his royal servants, one of whom remained loyal to him all these years. “yeah, come in?”

taeyong walks in, standing opposite to taeyong while doyoung lazily sits on yuta’s bed, crossing his legs. they both stay quiet for a while, and yuta furrows his brows confusedly.

“what is it?”

“i’m sure that you’ve noticed that mark hasn’t been coming out of his room for the past few months,” doyoung says, raising an eyebrow. “any reason?”

yuta ponders for a moment and then shakes his head. “no?”

“your highness,” taeyong sighs. “you’ve been arriving home with the stench of human blood for the past months. it’s absolute torture for the young boy. he’s just turned recently, so his senses are heightened.”

yuta closes his book. “he was turned a year ago, he should be fine by now,” yuta mutters, already deciding to dislike the topic of conversation. “why, do you guys have a problem with it too?”

“if you’ve got a blood bank, share it with us,” doyoung says, matter-of-factly. “i know you’ve been going out to get your share of blood, and the scent is fucking delicious, and we need it.”

yuta scoffs. “i don’t have a blood bank, doyoung,” he says. “although i don’t know why you’re acting as if i’d share it with you. maybe if you continued to be loya-”

“there you go again with your loyal shit,” doyoung groans. “there are only a few more vampires left on this earth and you’ve barely done anything to track down the hunter that’s been on the loose for the past few months. last i heard, qian kun and his coven were wiped out in beijing just last week. why would i be loyal to you if you haven’t been loyal to us? arent you supposed to be our king?”

“doyoung,” taeyong sighs. “that’s enough.”

“doyoung,” yuta stands up, towering over doyoung. “i tore apart every single vampire hunter with my own two hands, to the point where their existence were wiped out for more than a century. if it wasnt for me, your corpse would be buried in the ground without a head.”

doyoung stands. “you tore them apart nearly a century ago,” his voice grows louder. “you tore them apart a century ago and thats the only thing you’ve got underneath your belt to remain king but guess what!? there’s a new hunter! and they haven’t been killed yet! and if they fucking find us, yuta, the existence of vampires will be gone.”

“maybe that’s what should be,” yuta mutters. “we’re monsters.”

“are you saying you’d rather be human scum than to be immortal?” doyoung widens his eyes. “that you’d let a fucking vampire hunter win over your own kind?”

“doyoung, that’s enough.” taeyong stands in front of doyoung before the jet-black haired man could say anything more. “your highness. whoever the person you’ve been meeting is, they’re not worthy of your admiration. i beg of you to end it now before our coven is in danger.”

when yuta shows up on your doorstep, the flame behind his irises seem to burn deeper than how they usually do.

“oh, hey babe,” you say, as you let him in. your apartment was in disarray, clothes strewn everywhere. “sorry for the mess, i was just unpacking my stuff from my trip to ch-”

“i need you.” yuta nearly growls, backing you into the wall. your jaw becomes slack as you widen your eyes when your back meets the wall, his lips coming into contact with yours in a flurry of desperation.

when he pulls away for air, he’s panting, pressing his forehead against yours.

“babe, what’s gotten into you?” you ask him, half amused, half turned on.

“i just miss you a lot,” he says, peppering your neck with kisses. “i was lonely here while you were having fun abroad.”

you let out a moan when you feel him nip at one specific spot in the crook of your neck, his tongue licking over the spot to lightly sooth the pain. “well, you’re not lonely now.”

sex with yuta is not only physically draining, but emotionally as well - each time you find yourself entangled in your bedsheets with him, he’d let out all the emotions that he’d been facing the past few days, as if he were yearning for a clean slate at the end of it.

and while he lets out those emotions, he ends up being needy, which makes him rough - even while he kisses you tenderly, you can’t help but scream every time his hips snap back into yours.

even now, while you hover above him, arching your back as you letting out screams of pleasure while he thrusts his cock inside of you again and again from underneath, watching your face contorted in bliss although you’re sure that your neighbours have grown sick of hearing the two of you at times like these.

he pulls you back down towards him, hands fumbling when he flips the two of you over as he continues to rut into your hips while he cups your face to kiss you in an effort to mute your moans, but even then, knowing how far you break just because of what he does to you fuels his ego.

“you gonna cum baby?” yuta growls, pinning your hands down to your side as he watches your eyes roll to the back of your head. “you gonna cum from my cock?”

“fuck, yes, yuta!” you mewl, voice broken and hoarse from screaming all night. “keep going, k-keep going.”

you feel his cock reaching deeper and deeper inside of you as if he were planning to leave a mark within you, your bed beginning to move with his hips as it squeaks with every thrust. a few more ruts and you feel the familiar knot appearing in the pit of your stomach, your walls tightening around him as you feel the burning need to scream his name form in your throat once more.

“yuta!” you scream, unable to grasp at anything for support due to his hands pinning your entire body down, the feeling inside of you grows more intense. “i’m gonna cum! i’m gonna fucking cum!”

“cum for me baby,” he mutters, hips snapping in and out of you. “cum for me and scream my name. tell your neighbours who owns this dirty little cunt. tell your neighbours who fucks you so good.”

and you do, back arching off your mattress as you cum, lewd words stringed with his name escaping past your lips. the sight alone is enough to push yuta over the edge as well, littering your stomach with white as he pumps himself onto you.

for the next few seconds, you lay in bed in order to recollect yourself as well as to let the numbness slow down between your legs. yuta, however, pulls the sheets over him before he drops his legs to the floor, now sitting on the edge of the bed.

“yuta,” you grab his hand. “come lay with me.”

he stays silent for a while, and you hear him gulp. “(y/n), i have to tell you something.”

you furrow your eyebrows as you wait for him to continue, pulling the sheets over your naked body.

“i,” he stammers. “i can’t keep lying to you.”

“what do you mean?”

“when we first met, that man who tried to attack you,” he whispers. “i… i did something to him.”

there is a beat in the air before he keeps talking.

“i heard you crying, and so i went there, and i saw you and… you just felt so familiar to me. and i had to save you, so i killed that man and,”

he puts his face in his hands.

“(y/n), i’m a monster. i’m a monster and you shouldn’t love me.”

“why, yuta?” you whisper as you sit up to move closer to him.

“because, that man… i killed him and drank his blood,” his whispers. “(y/n),”

“yes, yuta?” you get up off the bed.

“i’m a vampire.”

the air between the both of you is silent for only a second, yuta screwing his eyes shut as he braces the impact of you possibly not believing him and laughing in his face, or of you screaming in fear before begging him to leave your house and to never see him again.

he fears for the worst, hoping that whatever happens, the least hurtful comes to truth.

but while his eyes are screwed shut, he does not hear you at all - he does not smell you, he does not feel your presence.

he only opens his eyes when he feels the cool, sharp metal against the skin of his neck. he gasps when his eyes meet yours - the same flames burning in your irises, but now they burn clearer.

you never housed the eyes of his lover.

you housed the eyes of his lover’s killer.

you smile at him sweetly while you press the blade of bloodlust against his skin.

“your highness,” you whisper. “it’s nice to see you again.”

271 notes · View notes

justgotham · 6 years ago

Link

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details of tonight’s Gotham series finale.

“I just think the DC Universe is so incredibly deep and vivid, and I’m a big fan of it all,” says Gotham executive producer Danny Cannon of the world that spawned the inspiration for the Fox series that came to a Dark Knight conclusion tonight. “I don’t think there’s any limitations for what DC can do right now. I really don’t.”

In that vein, “The Beginning …” episode penned by showrunner John Stephens on Thursday brought the Bruno Heller-developed Batmanbackstory show to its logical end with a 10-year time jump from last week and bumping right up against the canon of the Caped Crusader.

Bruce Wayne is back in town, a collection of villains have broken out of the dreaded Arkham Asylum including a certain killer clown and Detective Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue) has been framed for murder in tonight’s almost stand-alone ender. Add Gotham Police Commissioner James Gordon (Ben McKenzie) pledging retirement as his family are under threat and you’ve got yourself an episode that either ends the Gotham tale or sets it up for a whole new run.

To that end, I spoke with Cannon and Stephens about the Rob Bailey-directed finale, how they got to this end after five seasons and whether it was part of the original plan. Currently working on another Batman story, the July 28-debuting Pennyworth for Epix, Cannon also revealed what reaching 100 episodes tonight with the Gotham finale means to him in the Peak TV era.

DEADLINE: So we’ve finally seen Batman in Gotham, literally and figuratively. Was how it all played out in the series finale how you envisioned it all those years ago?

CANNON: When we pitched the pilot, we very much pitched that the show will end when we see Batman, that’s it. We always knew this was the show in which Gotham the city was the star. Early on, we were talking about what would a city have to do to deserve a vigilante such as Batman? So when he arrived, we’ve told our story.

DEADLINE: Fox has been marketing the end of Gotham as a two-part finale, and yet coming off last week’s conclusion of the Bane story in “They Did What?” which felt like a season finale, this “The Beginning…” episode that you wrote John was something very different …

STEPHENS: Well, we had told all these stories, Bruce had left the city, so it actually felt in a good way, for a while we were like, “Oh boy, what have we done?” But then it really gives us the chance to almost like, not reboot the show but tell a whole different chapter in the life of the city. That gave us the freedom and the courage to jump forward 10 years in the finale. You’re right in that last week also feels like a finale — but to the season, not to the show, I’d say.

DEADLINE: Was the time jump of a decade in the series finale the only way to bring Batman to the screen for Gotham?

STEPHENS: I’ll say that we initially had talked about the last act of the show might be 10 years in the future. But I would also note what Danny said about why does this city need a vigilante?

DEADLINE: How so?

STEPHENS: That you cannot actually tell that whole story in four minutes at the end of the episode.

So the reason it’s a full 10-year time jump for the entire episode is so that we can actually see where the characters are and also why the city in this point in time needs Batman to arrive. Also, we wanted to fully touch base with all those characters that we’ve known for all this time. We’ve become attached to them; the audience, we know, has become attached to them, so we wanted to follow them through.

DEADLINE: Danny, you and I had spoken a number of times about Gotham’s trajectory, about the ideas that Bruno and yourself had, and the way you guys planned to carry it forward. So did this pan out the way you envisioned?

CANNON: Yes, but it took on a life of its own, and that was always due to the stellar cast we had.

We just kept writing for them because their talent was just exceptional. It kept stretching the writing, and we kept giving them more things to do.

So, I’d say, yes, things grew, for the better, but we always from the beginning of every year, had a plan. That plan was always fulfilled, I think, and always played out. I’m glad that you said that this last episode is a reboot, because it is. If you wanted to start a Batman series, you could do it right now.

DEADLINE: That something you’re thinking of doing?

CANNON: (laughs) I never do just one thing at a time, you know that. And there’s only 10 episodes of Pennyworth, for now. But no, I’m not saying there is going to be another Batman show. I think the movies have that market cornered, for him and the Joker, as they should. I just think the DC Universe is so incredibly deep and vivid, and I’m a big fan of it all. I don’t think there’s any limitations for what DC can do right now. I really don’t.

That said, I’m incredibly proud of the 100 episodes that we did. I mean 100 episodes of television — which, quite honestly, is some of the best-looking, cinematic television around, with some of the best actors and some of the best-written stuff I have ever been a part of. It’s been great.

DEADLINE: Certainly, the way you left it with Batman now in town, the Joker in the game and Ben McKenzie’s Jim Gordon staying on the job, there is more story hanging there …

CANNON: Perhaps, but I think Donal Logue put this best, when Fox picked us up for 22 episodes, when he said this may be one of the last aircraft carriers leaving the harbor. On network television and big dramas like this, I think we’re going to see less and less of them now.

DEADLINE: Really?

CANNON: Yes, I do believe we were on the end of the big network drama. If this were to go again, would it be a Netflix show, or an Amazon show, or a HBO show? I often wonder what we would have done differently or how the story telling would have unfolded differently. It’s a good question to ponder. However, we don’t get to really ponder that now, as we are both on to other things.

DEADLINE: John, you were the showrunner, and you wrote this final episode. Was there any part of the Batman story, the Batman canon, or even the greater DC canon, that you didn’t explore that you wished you had?

STEPHENS: You know, I’ll be honest with you, not really.

To me, if I had more time I would have liked to follow those characters more, to follow Donal’s Harvey Bullock or to follow Oswald and Laura on their journeys, to find out what they’re doing, when there’s times when we didn’t see them. I didn’t feel like there are any parts of the Batman story that we weren’t able to tell. To me the only parts that I missed overall are the stories that we weren’t able to tell with the characters that we did have, just because we didn’t have all the time in the world.

DEADLINE: You did spend a lot of time over the seasons with Cameron Monaghan and his Joker-ish Jerome Valeska character. In the series finale it looks like the Joker has come to town after a breakout at Arkham Asylum …

STEPHENS: (laughs) Well, I wouldn’t say that he’s the Joker, I still wouldn’t go on record saying that, even though he sure looks like the Joker, I have to admit (laughs again)

DEADLINE: Yes, he does.

STEPHENS: I think when we first started talking about it, and we wanted to do what we were calling the Proto-Jokers, the idea was if we can’t do the Joker, maybe there’s a character who existed before him. A character that seeded those ideas, like in the subconscious of Gotham.

So what we started to do was to parse out all of the qualities of the Joker, and just dole them out, one by one, through various iterations of Cameron’s character.

DEADLINE: Of which, there were, up until the finale, a number of iterations.

STEPHENS: Well, yes, because you want to give him the anarchy that the Joker sometimes had. Once he played that out, you want to give him the funhouse-like ringleader that he would sometimes be. Then you would want to make the character simply terrifying, the way the Joker is sometimes terrifying. So it was singling out various qualities, and then when he’s reborn, we take all those characteristics together. Cameron brings them forward. Also with his performance, which is really just transcendent — he took it and went to an entirely different level.

You know, with Valeska and with all of our characters, we were playing with the idea that a character can exist on a spectrum. That people can move along that spectrum to be good or bad, to be dark or light.

DEADLINE: So Danny, is this the end of Gotham you wanted?

CANNON: That’s an interesting question. I mean, I wanted to direct it like I did the pilot, but I didn’t get a chance. But Rob Bailey did a great job. But yes, there was disappointment in me that I couldn’t direct it. Beyond that, yes, this is the Gotham finale I wanted.

STEPHENS: It’s very bittersweet for me watching the show end. I’m incredibly proud of it. It is the best version for the ending of the show, but also, I’m always going to look at and go well that was it, that was the last one. So, yes, there’s that but I’m a little sad about it being over.

#Gotham

36 notes · View notes

metamodel · 6 years ago

Text

A Machine For Hammering the Soul, With Robotic Padres

It's a juicy weekend read for you, in defence of piety (!)…

📖📖📖

After taking an extended break from social design work “to get some perspective” (ahem), I find that Everything Now Looks Very Strange Indeed™. This is another one of my updates on restarting a creative practice, with added cultural and design commentary.

(If someone’s forwarded this thing to you in the hope you’ll find it interesting, you can subscribe here to secure my everlasting love.)

Today I want to write of vibrations of the soul, the experience of the divine and the habit of prayer. With robots. Yes.

I remain a staunch unbeliever, and yet I find that these apparently religious terms become more useful when I’m wrestling with certain practices: of creativity, of recovery, of becoming a better participant in my communities (local or cosmic). Each of these requires me to paradoxically affirm my own sense of agency by simultaneously curbing it.

For example, working on our addictions is never simply a matter of exerting our individual willpower (which is called “white-knuckling it” in recovery culture, and clearly unsustainable); we instead need to make the choice to surrender to the collective agency of community.

And the other week, my dear friend Janelle and I attended a writer’s meetup that involved everyone sitting down and just doing some fucking writing. As we sat in a zero-ambience pub bistro, beavering away, she passed me a note:

“THIS FEELS FORCED AND NOT RAD.”

Agreed, the venue was very much not rad, and we weren't a very inspiring sight, but to be fair to the rest of us, Janelle’s own writing is driven by uncommonly strong affective tides that would wreck a less glorious being. I’d argue that for most people, sustainable creativity needs in some way to be “forced”, and this isn’t a bad thing. My own creative endeavours need to be sustained by the scheduled habit of accessing an animating spirit that might reveal itself to the solidarity of a congregation. (It does need a better venue, though. Blech.)

Such appeals to the beyond have given me a new, practical appreciation of the rigours of piety. But lest I be accused by Slavoj Žižek of some lacklustre, postmodern, liberal-secular appropriation of spirituality, I need to leaven this stuff with a good dose of machines and robots to keep it interesting to me. 😉

Eternal return: burials, and when the earth rejects us

First, some follow-up.

Did you know that in this wonderful medium of email newslettering, you can simply reply to any of these missives from me, and that your reply will appear directly in my everyday, personal email inbox? It’s real email. No really, I love this, so replies are encouraged. Meanwhile, I’m really heartened by the generous messages I’ve received from you thus far. Also, I don’t know some of you, and this mixture of the known and unknown is tantalising.

Answering my call in the last issue for objects that deserve “burial rites/rights" with us, Andrew (who I know can light a fire with his bare hands) replies that “I would bring with me a wooden spoon for my cooking, a headlamp for reading late at night and camping, and a vr headset because I know I won’t be affording one in this lifetime”. That would just be a simulated, still life VR headset then, right?

And Deborah, who wants “to be buried with seeds inside me, so I could be compost” (and who also first pointed me in the direction of socially responsible design, many years ago 😘), also notes that the word “Pandæmonium”, which I used in my last missive to describe the experience of the classroom in the context of exploring All the Things, “was coined to describe the Place Of All The Demons” — the capital of Hell in Milton’s Paradise Lost. So oddly… appropriate.

Deborah also pointed me to “When the rocks turn their backs on us”, Ken Wark’s review of Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism:

[T]he Anthropocene is far from being some hubristic discourse about the powers and destinies of Man. It is rather a malignant, viral human presence in geological time. I think here one could read the Anthropocene through the figure of immunity rather than community. It is not the figure of Man becoming sovereign over the community of the biosphere within geological time. It is rather the biosphere immunising itself against forms of (non)life that it can’t endure.

While I think there’s every reason to despair, this feels a little too enthusiastically misanthropic. (Perhaps Wark is trying to make up for his embarrassing social democratic excesses of the ‘90s.) Not all community is naturalistic, hippy-dippy togetherness and accommodation, and the pain of recognising and negotiating it, against the predations of capital, might offer a bleak kind of hope. I shall ponder. I’ve naturally procured Povinelli’s book and will report back in a future issue.

⚒️🎵 The Hammer Song

[caption align="alignnone" width="980"]

Kandinsky’s "Winter Landscape", 1911[/caption]

The Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage show could so easily have drifted into Adult Contemporary Viewing territory, but it brought me this amazing quote from Kandinsky:

Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, and the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

The eyes are the hammers. Whoa. Despite its manifest spiritualism, this image builds a model of aesthetics that’s all about resonant, relational assemblages of awesome in which each actor plays a material part. My eyes and yours live together inside a big piano. Fucking yes. This is society and ecology, defined — via aesthetics. The exhibition leaves Sydney this weekend if you want to catch it.

🔪🥀 Nick Cave is a joyful robot monk. Wait, what?

[caption align="alignnone" width="980"]

Nick Cave in conversation. Photo filched from Daniel Boud.[/caption]

I was grateful to be at Conversations with Nick Cave the other week, not just to hear Cave’s voice and solo piano really rise to the occasion and fill a venue with their resonance, but to see the open Q&A format of the show return repeatedly to Cave’s creative process.

Fans who might’ve been clamouring for transcendent tales of sudden inspiration, or 19th Century Gothic influences (“I don’t have any”), were brought back to earth by the familiar refrain of the committed creative professional: Cave shows up to work, which requires lots of meticulous preparation and backbreaking iteration, and he makes it happen. “It’s a job,” he said, with finality. (I love the incongruity of this stuff coming from people like Nick Cave, or Bobbie Gillespie, who apparently keeps office hours for Primal Scream.)

But I’ve become a little sceptical of the total demystification of creativity that’s now common in our algorithmically inclined age of, uh, content-marketing savvy. With our era’s overly instrumentalist promotion of a well-adjusted creative-entrepreneurial mindset, it might be all too easy these days to reduce everything to using elbow grease to, you know, hit targets.

So I love that Cave is still in awe of sacred aesthetic magic when his rigour allows it to happen. He talked of putting in the work so that the divine can arrive. All his meticulous “going through the motions” (again, not a bad thing) produces something more than the sum of those motions. For him, it’s a way to experience God. And despite his Prince of Darkness reputation, Cave was at pains to describe how joyful that process can be. “There’s nothing dark about it.”

🤖🙏 Oh yeah, the bit about robots

When I was listening to Radiolab the other day (despite my long-running ambivalence about the show), I found that this recent episode’s focus on robots of antiquity resonated unexpectedly with my reading of Nick Cave’s creative process.

Hear me out.

In 1562 the crown prince of Spain, Don Carlos, falls down a flight of stairs and sustains a head injury that is by all accounts going to be fatal. According to Radiolab, his father King Philip II “kneels at his son’s deathbed and makes a pact with God: ‘If you help me, if you heal my son — if you do this miracle for me — I'll do a miracle for you.’”

Don Carlos miraculously survives, apparently thanks to the intervention of the spirit of Diego de Alcalá, a celebrated monk who died a century before. And so now Philip II needs to somehow perform his miracle:

[He] enlists a really renowned clockmaker named Juanelo Turriano — a huge ox of a man, described as always being filthy and blustery and not a lot of fun to be around — but a great, great clockmaker. So the king says, “Look, I want you to make a mechanical version of Diego de Alcalá, a mechanical version of this 100-year-dead holy priest. Yes, a mechanical monk — a robotic padre.”

[caption align="alignnone" width="980"]

The robotic padre[/caption]

Artist and historian Elizabeth King describes the result:

Driven by a key-wound spring, the monk walks in a square, striking his chest with his right arm, raising and lowering a small wooden cross and rosary in his left hand, turning and nodding his head, rolling his eyes, and mouthing silent obsequies. From time to time, he brings the cross to his lips and kisses it. After over 400 years, he remains in good working order.

A miracle of technology! (You can watch a very low quality video of the robot in action here.) “He walks a delicate line between church, theatre, magic, science,” King writes, pondering the significance of the mechanical monk. “Here is a machine that prays.”

What does it mean? According to King and Radiolab, in the context of Counter-Reformation Spain, the robot monk strikes to the heart of debates about how one gets close to God:

You have the Protestants, with Luther, who are saying, “it’s not about works … it's about whether you feel it.” And then you have the Catholic argument which is to say you do these rituals because these are the rituals, and this is the way you get close to God.

The robot monk teaches us how to do ritual. Controversial! Given the ridiculous degree of crufty observance and corruption in the Church at the time of the Reformation (and, um, other times), I obviously understand why the Protestant appeal to pure feels was compelling. But my own ingrained Catholic social justice calculus of “good works” aside (“don’t fucking tell me your account with God hinges on how you feel inside instead of your concrete actions in the world, you schismatic apostates!”), I can’t help but think that this debate, and the robot monk himself, is a metaphor for the observance of creative process.

As stated above, I’m suspicious of the reduction of creativity to a bunch of instrumental observances in the mechanised pursuit of… metrics. Hack-work content marketing success, paid in SEO indulgences to the Church of Google. But to respond to this by abandoning the rigours of creative process for the inspiration of pure feeling would be a mistake. Unless you're a tidal wave like my friend Janelle, feelings are fickle. Protestant churches tend to trade the horrific institutionalised power of the Catholic Church (about which we need no reminders) for another kind of tyranny: exploitative emotional economies in which the faithful tend to be at the mercy of charisma. And to trade in pure charisma is to produce strongmen. As our current times remind us, charismatic populism offers release for the anxious but also destroys the processes that ultimately help us flourish as communities. Creative populism that relies on emotional catharsis tends to destroy the basis for a consistent creative practice. Just as the Reformation ended up eliding the point of what “good works” might potentially be about (i.e. acting rigorously to enable the arrival of goodness), we also need to remember what creative rituals are for (i.e. exactly the same thing as good works).

Thus it is with Nick Cave, who for me is the amazing robot monk. He mightn’t be your cup of tea, or you might even find his work occasionally objectionable, but I think most of us can agree that his creative practice really hums. (Don’t let his obsession with Southern Baptists or his own Anglican heritage distract. In terms of process, he is an exemplary Catholic robot.) He prepares, meticulously. He shows up to work. He performs the motions regularly, not worrying about inspiration, and through these observances somehow accesses what he feels to be a divine and joyous experience of creativity.

I’m convinced that if Nick Cave relied on pure feeling, or murderous inspiration, or spontaneous gothic possession, or any of the other assumptions people make about his artistic persona, so many great moments of his oeuvre wouldn’t exist. Nick Cave walks the square and kisses the cross and talks to God. For he is a joyous robot monk.

🎼 Coda

For those of you who remain unconvinced by my yoking together of monks and murder ballads: the final line of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, an historical murder mystery set in a monastery, is “Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus”, or “The rose of old remains only in its name; we have only naked names”.

Meanwhile, I was never really a fan of the chorus of “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” Cave’s duet with Kylie Minogue:

They call me The Wild Rose

But my name was Elisa Day

Why they call me it, I do not know

For my name was Elisa Day

Oooh. The name of the rose. Anyway, to me, Minogue’s delivery always reeked of passive fatalism. But the other day, I realised that it wasn’t fatalistic all — it was full of spooky reproach. Elisa Day remains known to us by her Wild Rose name of legend, but her ghost insists on remembering her own name. She’s crossing t’s and dotting i’s from beyond the grave.

Following Kylie, we would do well to pay proper respect to the names of those who are in the beyond. The way we relate to them constitutes its own assemblage, its own machine of observances. In this I’m reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 short story, “The Nine Billion Names of God”, in which Tibetan monks manage to automate the process of transcribing all the permutations that God’s name can take, using a supercomputer (naturally). Observing the names is the universe’s purpose, you see. And when the final name is encoded… Whoa.

How's that for a crazy constellation? (I know I'm just reaching. But it's fun!)

A sustainable portion of all my love,

Ben

0 notes

madpicks · 8 years ago

Photo

New Post has been published on https://www.madpicks.com/sports/nfl/5-nfl-teams-that-cant-seem-to-find-a-franchise-quarterback/

5 NFL teams that can’t seem to find a franchise quarterback

Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, and Matt Ryan. All three are model franchise quarterbacks, bringing stability, consistency, and a high level of play to their respective teams. Ryan Fitzpatrick, Brock Osweiler, and Blaine Gabbert … well, they don’t really fit into that same category.

Cleveland Browns coach Hue Jackson — who is helming a team that definitely belongs on this list — recognizes the difficulty involved with finding that type of player.

“There’s not Peyton Manning and Tom Brady walking around all the time,” Jackson said, via Joe Reedy of the Associated Press. “I think every quarterback has to be coached and put in an environment so that he can be successful and be good. There are a lot of guys — you just look at the history in the National Football League — that some things didn’t go right, whatever those things are.”

A franchise quarterback is a luxury that not all NFL teams possess, and when things don’t go right, it can impede a team’s success for years and years.

There are a few teams that stand out as having the absolute worst quarterback situations in the NFL, and we’re here to rank them for you.

5 – Los Angeles Rams

Look, maybe Jared Goff is the franchise quarterback of the future in Los Angeles, and the Rams certainly hope so, considering what they gave up to select him first overall in last year’s draft. But he sure didn’t inspire confidence in 2016, riding the bench until Week 11 despite Case Keenum throwing nine touchdown passes against 11 interceptions up to that point.

But the Rams haven’t had one quarterback start an entire season since Sam Bradford was healthy enough to do so in 2012. Since then, the Rams have featured dynamos such as Kellen Clemens, Austin Davis and Shaun Hill behind center.

And let’s not forget the failed Nick Foles experiment. Foles was traded from the Eagles to the then-St. Louis Rams in exchange for Bradford with the expectation that Foles would stabilize the offense. Instead, he got benched for Case Keenum in Week 11. Foles got the starting job back briefly while Keenum recovered from a concussion, but lost it again as soon as Keenum was healthy. Then Foles asked the Rams to release him, and they obliged.

The Rams come in at No. 5 on the list because there’s reason to hope Goff can live up to his draft status and develop into a franchise quarterback (although he’d be the first-ever Air Raid quarterback to find sustained success in the NFL).

Still, the recent quarterback history is so bleak that we cannot in good conscience exclude them.

Last franchise quarterback: Marc Bulger, who played well enough to become the highest-paid player in team history in 2007 and then completely and promptly fell apart.

4 – San Francisco 49ers

Remember when Colin Kaepernick led the Niners to a Super Bowl back in 2012, and then back to the NFC Championship in 2013? Those days are long gone.

Last season was an amalgam of bad quarterback play from both Kaepernick and Blaine Gabbert. The 49ers finished the season dead last in the league for passing offense, averaging just 181.9 yards per game. San Francisco ended up with two wins all season to show for it.

The 49ers haven’t had the benefit of quality quarterback play for a while, and they’re about to have no quarterbacks on the roster. Kaepernick is expected to opt out of his deal with the Niners and become a free agent in March. Gabbert is set to become an unrestricted free agent with the start of the new league year, also. The Niners have Christian Ponder and Thad Lewis, an undrafted free agent out of Duke, on the roster right now, too. They’re both set to hit free agency.

New head coach Kyle Shanahan has his work cut out for him, and priority one has to be finding a capable franchise quarterback.

Last franchise quarterback: Jeff Garcia was a consistent starter over his five seasons in San Francisco, but I would go a bit farther back in Niners history based on the team’s 35-36 record with Garcia. Steve Young, who last played for the Niners in 1998, is the most recent guy.

3 – Houston Texans

This is the saddest entry on this list, because the Texans paid a pretty penny for Brock Osweiler last offseason in hopes that he would become the franchise quarterback this team so desperately needs.

The Texans have a dominant defense, and that’s how Houston has managed to make the playoffs in each of the past two seasons with a carousel of ineptitude at quarterback. In 2015, Houston won its division by virtue of the division being the AFC South, despite the fact that they had to work with Brian Hoyer, T.J. Yates, Brandon Weeden, and even B.J. Daniels behind center for a couple of snaps.

Last season, the Texans thought they’d addressed the problem, bringing in Osweiler on a four-year, $72 million contract with $37 million guaranteed. Unfortunately, Osweiler didn’t play like a franchise quarterback and ended up being benched late in the season for Tom Savage. Now the Texans have a decision to make on Osweiler’s future, but cutting him carries $25 million in dead money. It’s a sticky situation.

Last franchise quarterback: Because the Texans are such a young franchise, there are really only three quarterback eras in team history — David Carr, Matt Schaub, and then this mess that started with Ryan Fitzpatrick. Schaub was actually pretty consistent and pretty good for the most part, when he was healthy, from 2007 through 2013.

2 – New York Jets

Speaking of Fitzpatrick, that era is over in New York, and now that it’s behind us, we can look back and affirm that he was never really a franchise quarterback. But the Jets’ struggles to secure a quality quarterback go way back at least to 2009, when they selected Mark Sanchez with the fifth overall pick in the draft.

The first couple of seasons with Sanchez resulted in AFC Championship bids, but largely due to a stellar offensive line and the strength of the defense. His decline began in 2011, and he brought us delightful moments like the Buttfumble in 2012, and the Jets really haven’t recovered.

Since the Jets moved on from Sanchez, they’ve had their own little quarterback carousel. From Geno Smith to Michael Vick, and then on to Ryan Fitzpatrick, then back to Smith, and then to Bryce Petty, there’s no consistency at the position, and it’s something New York will try to remedy this offseason.

Last franchise quarterback: You know who it wasn’t? Brett Favre, who landed with the Jets for just one season after his initial retirement from the Green Bay Packers back in 2008. Rotator cuff injuries kept Chad Pennington from ever being better than lackluster. Since the Joe Namath days, Vinny Testaverde has been the best quarterback in New York, and he last played for the Jets in 2005.

1 – Cleveland Browns

Look, there are teams with uncertainty at the quarterback position, and then there are the Cleveland Browns, a team that has started 28 different quarterbacks since drafting Tim Couch first overall in 1999.

Ah, 1999 — those heady days when the Browns were a brand new team in Cleveland, replacing the franchise that had departed a few years earlier for Baltimore. The optimism that must have accompanied that pick, which didn’t work out for Cleveland long-term, thanks primarily to injuries for Couch.

Since then, it’s been a revolving door at quarterback, with the Browns averaging 1.65 starting quarterbacks per year since the 1999 season. Cleveland has spent first-round picks on Couch, Brady Quinn, Brandon Weeden and — oh, dear — Johnny Manziel.

Needless to say, none of those options, nor any of the other 24 quarterbacks who have started games for the Browns over the past 17 seasons, have developed into franchise quarterbacks. Better luck this year, Browns.

Last franchise quarterback: With this iteration of the Browns, there legitimately hasn’t been one. You have to go back to the days before Art Modell moved the franchise to Baltimore to become the Ravens, to find a franchise quarterback. Cleveland had a pretty good stretch from 1986 to 1995 between Bernie Kosar and Vinny Testaverde, and then, of course, the team moved to Baltimore. Classic Browns.

The good news for the Browns or any other team looking for help at the position is that there are some reasonably decent options likely to be available in free agency. None of them measure up to “franchise” status, but some of them are at least better than Ryan Fitzpatrick.

0 notes

junker-town · 8 years ago

Text

5 NFL teams that can’t seem to find a franchise quarterback

Maybe this will be the year these teams finally figure it out at quarterback.

Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Matt Ryan, all three are model franchise quarterbacks, bringing stability, consistency and a high level of play to their respective teams. Ryan Fitzpatrick, Brock Osweiler and Blaine Gabbert ... well, they don’t really fit into that same category.

Cleveland Browns coach Hue Jackson — who is helming a team that definitely belongs on this list — recognizes the difficulty involved with finding that type of player.

“There's not Peyton Manning and Tom Brady walking around all the time,” Jackson said, via Joe Reedy of the Associated Press. “I think every quarterback has to be coached and put in an environment so that he can be successful and be good. There are a lot of guys -- you just look at the history in the National Football League -- that some things didn't go right, whatever those things are.”

A franchise quarterback is a luxury that not all NFL teams possess, and when things don’t go right, it can impede a team’s success for years and years.

There are a few teams that stand out as having the absolute worst quarterback situations in the NFL, and we’re here to rank them for you.

5 - Los Angeles Rams

The Rams come in at No. 5 on the list because there’s reason to hope Goff can live up to his draft status and develop into a franchise quarterback (although he’d be the first ever Air Raid quarterback to find sustained success in the NFL).

Still, the recent quarterback history is so bleak that we cannot in good conscience exclude them.

Last franchise quarterback: Marc Bulger, who played well enough to become the highest-paid player in team history in 2007 and then completely and promptly fell apart.

4 - San Francisco 49ers

Remember when Colin Kaepernick led the Niners to a Super Bowl back in 2012, and then back to the NFC Championship Game in 2013? Those days are long gone.

New head coach Kyle Shanahan has his work cut out for him, and priority one has to be finding a capable franchise quarterback.

3 - Houston Texans

The Texans have a dominant defense, and that’s how Houston has managed to make the playoffs in each of the past two seasons with a carousel of ineptitude at quarterback. In 2015, Houston won its division by virtue of the division being the AFC South, despite the fact that they had to work with Brian Hoyer, T.J. Yates, Brandon Weeden and even B.J. Daniels behind center for a couple of snaps.

2 - New York Jets

1 - Cleveland Browns

0 notes