#going to print this and frame it on my wall as a Historical Moment and the 8th Wonder of the World

[robotsandramblings]

WET HAIR?? SALT N PEPPER GRACEFUL GREYING??? FULL BEARD???? PONYTAIL????? SMILING HAPPY HUNTER??????

i will never stfu about Hunter in the finale 🗣️‼️💖

[frommybookbook]

OK, @emi--rose and @epersonae, this has been bouncing around in my brain for nearly a month now and I spent the morning at the art museum with my partner today and accidentally rambled at him while standing in a tiny little corridor of mid-19th century French prints and drawings and then realized that I should have been recording it so I could finally write this post.

That said, here we go.

First off, I am an art lover and consider myself an artist. I have always loved art and art history but am largely self-taught. I don't have a degree in any of this and have taken very few formal classes. I just love the subject and read a lot.

OP of this post and the second reply make some really good points. Art museums originated from a fundamentally different mindset to the science/history museum. Those institutions, for the most part, were always meant to be places of educating and informing, where art museums grew out of the private salons and showcases of Owning Stuff. They were never meant to educate and while they have improved in the last century or so, they're still Not Great.

The biggest deficiency, imo, of most major art galleries today isn't that they're primarily focused on displaying The Collection or their Centerpiece Works, but that they lack context. Every single piece of work in an art museum, even the famous ones, takes on more meaning and more relevance when it's placed in context to not only the other works around it but the time in which it was created. Art has always been a part of the historical record and social commentary—always. What humans create and how they create it and why they create and who likes or dislikes it says as much about a society in a given moment as a daily newspaper from the time. (Sidenote: this is why I hate the term "modern art", all art is modern/contemporary to the time in which it was made, Rembrandt was modern in his day.)

Most museums do make some effort to provide this context and from what I've seen in the last decade or so, are improving. But these improvements take time and money.

Often times, special exhibits will be the best at doing this because of their transient nature. These exhibits bring many disparate pieces together from many different sources—The Collection, storage, private ownership, other institutions—to tell a cohesive story. The curators have the time and resources available to highlight that connective tissue, to provide the relevant historical and societal and technical context to really make the pieces sing. And they have the freedom to change the text on the walls and order new placards and have brochures printed. It's hard to go through the permanent collection and do these things. Think of your own home and think of the things you have on display. Are all of your photographs and houseplants and records organized perfectly? Do they all have the best frame or cutest pot or ideal placement? Or are they good enough, the best that you could do at the time, and as you have the time and resources when you bring in new things, you make those look nicer and more put together? In other words, the picture you've had of you and your college roommates for a decade is in a kinda cheap frame and a little crooked on the wall because it's been there for ages but now that you have a little more money because you have an adult job, you put new art behind properly sized mats with real glass and actually use a level to hang it.

For example, this morning I saw the new Mary Cassatt exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was an incredible experience and very well researched and displayed. The works were laid out in a logical, chronological order and surrounded with contextual information about Cassatt's upbringing and family life and financial background. Her subjects were placed in the historical context of life for women in the early 20th century and within the greater context of the Impressionist movement. There were placards on her methods and techniques and explanations of how modern advances in print making and pastel composition impacted her work and the work of her contemporaries. I saw artworks that I'd seen dozens of times, at this museum and others, in a whole new light because I saw them in a new context.

Going into the exhibit, I was already very familiar with Cassatt's work and her background as she's always been a favorite of mine (there are so few women represented in major museums, I've always been a fan of those that are but that's a different ramble for a different post). But even still I learned a lot of new things and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. And more importantly, my partner, who didn't have nearly the familiarity I did going into it, also enjoyed the exhibit and infinitely more so than he would have without the context he learned along the way. Anecdotally, I would say the same seemed to be true for other patrons, based on snippets of conversations I overheard along the way.

And yet as great and informative as the context around the Cassatt exhibit was, the rest of the museum is still severely lacking. As I've said before, this is largely due to the entropy of leaving well enough alone when it comes to long-term/permanent Collection displays, but even smaller, non-Special Exhibit, new displays suffer from a lack of context, presumably due to a lack of funds.

For example, just across the lobby from the Cassatt exhibit, in a small section of corridor between galleries—not even a proper gallery itself—I noticed a new display of prints and drawings (we're museum members so we're there pretty regularly and I notice most changes like this). There was a placard describing the works, and it did a decent job. It explained that they were all created in France in the late 1800s/early 1900s and largely born from the class dissent and social uprisings common of that time. It even pointed out that these works and their subject matter might be at odds with what people imagine when they think of the Impressionist art "synonymous" with that time and location—presuming the average museum-goer has enough context to know that the Impressionist movement originated in France at the turn of the 20th century. But what it didn't say is that the reason this small handful of prints were pulled out of storage and put on display was because they were created using the same techniques in print making that Mary Cassatt had been experimenting with at the same time in the same place and could be seen also on display just a few hundred feet away. The curators didn't have the time or the space or the money or the whatever to provide this additional bit of context that would have made this little passthrough bit of hallway more relevant to 90% of visitors who just came to the museum this day to see the Mary Cassatt exhibit.

This is the point of our visit where I got frustrated by the lack of context and essentially word vomited this post all over my partner. He enjoys art and had enjoyed the Cassatt exhibit but he hadn't paid much attention to the additional prints; they were just something different filling a couple walls on the way to the much larger room of the more famous van Goghs and Cezannes and Monets. After I told him of the connection, he went back and studied them more closely and appreciated them more. He commented unprompted on the differences between the subject matter and presentation of those pieces and the Cassatt works from the same time and place. By giving him the context, he was able to engage in his own critical thinking about the art and make connections that will make those pieces remain in his memories and thoughts.

tl;dr: context is key, especially when it comes to art. If we want people to be able to truly appreciate and engage with art, regardless of its time period or style, we need to give them the context to do so.

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!

[passionate-reply]

This week on Great Albums: a stupendously underrated classic of queer punk meets synth sophistication, and an album without which we wouldn’t have Dare by the Human League: Homosapien, the 1981 solo opus of Buzzcocks frontman Pete Shelley. Find out more by watching the video, or reading the transcript below!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Today, I’ll be talking about one of those albums that isn’t necessarily the most acclaimed or best remembered work of its period, but nonetheless played an important role in history, and remains unrivaled for its uniqueness: Pete Shelley’s Homosapien, first released in 1981.

Shelley has historically been chiefly remembered as the frontman of the punk act, Buzzcocks. But, despite punk’s reputation for simplicity to the point of obnoxiousness, Shelley was one of many musicians to come from the punk scene with a penchant for experimental or otherwise ground-breaking music. His very first solo release, 1980’s Sky Yen, features little more than a brash wall of oscillating electronic noise, not unlike the earliest provocations of industrial artists like Cabaret Voltaire.

Music: “Sky Yen (Part One)”

Subsequent generations of critics have gone great lengths to coin and define terminology, in the hopes of breaking this period down into constituent parts, but the more I study it, the more I’m inclined to view it as just a huge soup. There was, quite simply, a lot going on in Britain’s underground in the late 70s and early 80s, and in practice, the lines between punk, post-punk, industrial, synth, noise, and other avant-garde miscellany are frequently illegible. As an artifact of this era, Homosapien resonates with all of the contradictions this melting pot would imply, fusing emotional rawness and pristine production in a way that never quite settles down and feels comfortable.

Music: “I Don’t Know What It Is”

“I Don’t Know What It Is” served as the opening track of the album’s second side, as well as its lead single. With a bona fide guitar solo as well as a propulsive, and truly soaring, chorus, it somewhat resembles that most 1980s of art forms, the power ballad. It is, ostensibly, a love song, and is revealed to be one quickly enough, but its portrayal of love is far from kind. While a real power ballad might take the concept of love for granted, “I Don’t Know What It Is” seems to portray it as something mysterious, inscrutable, and dangerous. And I can’t forget to mention just how much Pete Shelley stands out as a vocalist--his high-pitched, perhaps even fried or shrill vocals add a great deal to the song’s sense of unease, and really sell the idea of someone who’s being overtaken by an uncontrollable and dominating force.

Of course, perhaps the most noteworthy thing about Homosapien’s sound is its fusion of the hard, driving acoustic guitar of punk with the electronic sensibilities of its producer, Martin Rushent. I wouldn’t say this combination is ever terribly cohesive in its sound, but I think that’s why I find this album so interesting: there’s a tension that permeates each track, a feeling that things don’t fit together. While Homosapien is a pioneering work of electronic-centered production, enough of the pieces are still in place that you can certainly hear the shape of music to come as you listen to it. It’s not just the synthesisers, but also the use of electronic percussion here--it’s difficult to overstate the impact that so-called “drum machines” had around this time. While reviled by many, both then and now, rhythm machines were undeniably “instrumental” in changing what popular music sounded like. Even synthesiser-based electronic acts like Gary Numan, OMD, and Kraftwerk often relied on traditional percussion, so this genuinely was pretty shocking at the time.

Perhaps the most important element of the legacy of Homosapien is the fact that Martin Rushent would go on to use the skills he honed here to produce one of the most influential albums of the 1980s, and perhaps of all time: The Human League’s Dare, which would go on to cast an enormous shadow on nearly all popular music to come, after playing an enormous role in instigating an era of popular dominance of synth-pop. In that sense at least, Homosapien is certainly a very historically important album, and for that reason alone, I think it deserves a fair bit more attention than it gets. Still, for as much as the electronics might be the most forward-looking element of this album, one also can’t deny that it remains full of aggressive and perfectly punk overtones, as on the crass or perhaps dismissive screed of “Guess I Must Have Been In Love With Myself.”

Music: “Guess I Must Have Been In Love With Myself”

While Homosapien has many moments of seemingly being too thorny to get a good grip on, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t also times in which it can feel like a bit more than the sum of its apparent parts, as on its most narrative-driven track, “Pusher Man.”

Music: “Pusher Man”

“Pusher Man” is one of, if not the, most synth-centered compositions to be had on Homosapien, but its insistent pacing and neurotic portrayal of the “low life” theme of buying illicit drugs mean you’ll never confuse it for run of the mill synth-pop. Moreso than anything else the album offers, this track reminds me of the sort of “synth-punk” that American acts like the Units and Crash Course In Science would put forward at around the same time. “Pusher Man” was, at the very least, a sufficiently experimental track to earn the honour of being cut from the US release of the album in order to make room for some non-album A-sides, as happened to many albums at the time. But hey, that’s enough beating around the bush. Let’s talk about the real crown jewel of this album.

Music: “Homosapien”

If you’ve heard anything from this album before, chances are, it was probably the title track, which proved to be quite the commercial success--despite being banned by the BBC on account of its homoerotic content. Given that this very same year, they also came after OMD’s “Enola Gay” for its obviously nonexistent reference to homosexuality, one might be forgiven for thinking that a tune called “Homosapien” was simply misinterpreted. The title track isn’t terribly explicit material, but its clever wordplay nonetheless deals quite deftly with issues of sexuality and personal identity. In the earlier verses, Shelley introduces us to typified roles of gay male sexuality--the “cruiser,” the “shy boy”--only to seemingly doff them with the tune’s defiant refrain, asserting that the only truly important identity a human being has is that of “Homosapien.” Far from being an unfortunate coincidence, the similarity of “Homosapien” to “homosexual” is being employed here completely deliberately, particularly with it being mashed into a single word and thus gaining a greater resemblance to the word “homosexual” in print. It not only allows Shelley to belt out a borderline dirty word, but also creates a sort of unconscious syllogism, suggesting, in a sense, that homosexuals are people too.

With elements of both unapologetic pride in one’s own queerness, as well as the uncompromising assertion that humanity is something much deeper than that, the title track of Homosapien is one of the most fascinating and inspiring queer anthems of its time. Its artsy slipperiness has prevented it from feeling more shallow with time, and its straightforward or raw quality, intensified by that constant acoustic guitar, has kept it sounding equally sharp. It genuinely does surprise me that this album isn’t at least a little bit better remembered than it is. Outside of the title track, most of this album is currently not available on services like Spotify and YouTube Music at the time of this writing, and I actually struggled to present musical examples here. That’s really a pretty high level of neglect in this day and age, and I hope it can be rectified in the relatively near future.

It would be no exaggeration for me to say that Homosapien features some of my very favourite cover art of any album. Homosapien’s sleeve design sees Shelley occupy some sort of sleek, but hollow hyper-modernist office. Geometric forms suggest the world of the artificial or ideal. An Egyptian statue beside Shelley is a reminder of history, and the idea that even the greatest empires must eventually fall. Likewise, the telescope and early computer positioned nearer to Shelley are evocative symbols of science and technology--but in context they seem more sinister, being juxtaposed against a phrenology bust, which evokes the ways in which our attempts at science have caused misunderstanding and great human misery in the past. The central scene is framed in with large areas of black, which make the space feel even more claustrophobic and uninviting, and Shelley appears to be pushed into the background, almost belittled by the inanimate objects. Overall, I think it’s sort of funny that this album’s cover is perhaps more iconally “New Wave” than the music itself ended up being, particularly with Shelley clad in this somewhat foppish white suit and bow tie--certainly a big change of attire for a former punk!

Given the experimental nature of the collaboration between Shelley and Rushent, you might be surprised to learn that Homosapien actually wasn’t a one-off. Just two years later, Shelley would release a follow-up LP, XL-1, which was also produced by Rushent and largely continues the same ideas. While Shelley would never see the success of “Homosapien” again, the XL-1 single “Telephone Operator” would also chart to a lesser degree.

Music: “Telephone Operator”

My favourite track on Homosapien is “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça,” which closes out the first side of the album. If you’re familiar with my other work, you probably already know that I’m coming at this as someone chiefly interested in the electronic side of things, and I think that of everything on this album, “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça” is the closest to being convincing as a synth-pop tune. With a bubbly, synth-dominant sound and lyrics that are more contemplative than aggressive, it’s much closer to the mould of what I usually listen to for fun than a lot of the other tracks are. That’s everything for today--thanks for listening!

Music: “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça”

[ms-maj]

In This Diary

(Day 3- A song that reminds you of summer. Un-beta’d so please excuse all the mistakes, I drank way too much coffee tonight)

Here in this diary,

I write you visions of my summer

It was the best I ever had

There were choruses and sing-alongs

And that unspoken feeling 

of knowing that right now is all that matters.

In This Diary-The Ataris

The summer before senior year is historically hectic. Between SAT and ACT prep, extracurriculars, community service, it’s a wonder that Betty Cooper even got a moment's rest. Of course, because she had every minute of her summer (including free time) mapped out, she would get notified that a position had become available at the prestigious writer’s retreat she was initially rejected from. 

Getting to it and out of all her other obligations was no small feat, but, with deft humility and what she likened to mental gymnastics, she got there. Eight weeks away from New York, from her narcissistic mother and apathetic father, and the friends who always seemed like they had more important things to do. Eight weeks with likeminded people, good books and herself. 

The campus was warm and inviting, not the monolithic buildings with their windowed walls she was used to in the city. Riverdale’s small university felt like some cliched, idyllic embodiment of what the countryside used to be. And she loved every second of it. From the perfectly manicured lawns to the stone facades of the lecture halls, she felt more and more at home with every day that passed.

Her single dorm had been clean, though surprisingly cold and sterile compared to how homey everything else had felt. She’d decorated modestly, a few framed pictures of her sister and friends from back home, and finally, sheets in a color other than pink. After the long days of instruction and group work, she was happy to come back to her small sanctuary and sink into the seafoam coziness.

It’s wrapped up in the soft fleece she feels comfortable enough to pull out her journal. She hadn’t been able to keep one recently. Her mother was overbearing on a good day and the last year, well, she took it to a whole new level. Not that she’d ever had much privacy, but she had thought her diary at least was off-limits. Everyone had boundaries, except Alice Cooper it turned out. Now, here, far out of her mother’s expertly manicured clutches, she can put the pen to the page and try to sort out her mind. 

She had expected rigorous lessons, these classes were supposed to emulate the college ones she’d be taking in just a year, but everyone in them seemed to be on a different level than her. Betty was a journalist at heart, she wrote well and with conviction, but her writing did follow patterns. Truth. She laid it out as best she could, doing the facts justice while trying to reach her audience, but this seminar was in creative writing. And creative wasn’t something that Betty found came naturally to her.

It was the second week of the eight when she was approached. Sitting in the library, her second favorite place, her overthinking was interrupted by a messenger bag loudly hitting the table in front of her.

Confused, and a little annoyed, she looked up only to be greeted with the most beautiful blue eyes. “Um,” she cleared her throat. “Can I help you?”

He smiled, pulling out the chair, turning it around and sitting. “I think that maybe we can help each other.”

She’d be a liar if she said she hadn’t noticed him. With dark wavy hair and eyes that seemed to look right through her, he was exactly the kind of trouble she wasn’t planning on getting into. It helped in dissuading her that he carried himself the way most disaffected youths do; cool and aloof, sat at the back of the class, injecting only to be argumentative. (Even if his arguments were always thoroughly thought out and actually raised questions that Betty would have never thought to ask.)

Which is why when he dropped his stuff on her table that day, instead of rebuking him, she raised a dainty eyebrow and asked him what he had in mind. 

He needed a critical eye; someone meticulous, methodical, detail-oriented, “With all your color-coded notes and penchant for detail, I figured who better.”  

“And in return?” He leaned in, chair on two legs as its back rested against the table's edge. She wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light, the way his eyes seemed to darken as he watched her, or maybe it was just what she wanted to see.

“Seems like you need help getting out of your head,” If he only knew. “Your writing that is, it’s great—don’t get me wrong—but it’s all very…”

“Clinical?” Betty offered. 

A smirk played on his lips. “That’s a good word for it. You write like you’re trying to convince everyone that there’s a story being untold, instead of letting it unfold organically. It’s your story, you set the tone, you set the tempo, there’s no one-size-fits-all option in creative writing. You have to start letting yourself show through.”

That’s how it started. A new notebook—blue—filled with hastily jotted observations in her perfect print and his semi-legible scrawl. He would always point out when she got too deep in her own thoughts and when her writing started to reflect it, and she helped him rein in his penchant for superfluous detail. They worked in beautiful tandem. One month into the program, two weeks after they’d met in the library, she not only noticed a change in her writing but in herself. 

She found her reflection smiling back at her more often than not. Jughead, his acerbic commentary, and general vitriol were usually traits that repelled Betty, but here, where she didn’t have crushing expectations she was free to feel. Melancholia had been no stranger to Betty, her life a predetermined series of points set out by her parents, a living, breathing, paint by numbers. Pretty, pastel, prosaic. 

But not in Riverdale. 

In Riverdale, she was simply Betty. In her most base, true form. She found people who encouraged her writing and growth, and in return, found she really enjoyed the editorial component of writing. Almost more so than the act itself. There was a kind of peace in restructuring other people's works. Hearing for their voice, helping them to define and refine it. The freedom afforded to her over the summer had started to wear at her Type A proclivities, editing gave her some of that control back. But she had learned to enjoy that freedom in equal measure. 

And she never would have gotten there without Jughead. The townie, she learned later, having lived in Riverdale his whole life and planning on attending this writing retreat since he could remember. Jughead who learned how she took her coffee in a matter of days. Jughead whose words struck chords within her as though he were a maestro, creating symphonies in prose.

Or maybe that’s just how she felt when she’d catch him looking at her.  Staccato heartbeat, blood pounding in her ears, fire burning just under the surface of her skin. The rampant thoughts that ran through her head when they were together only letting themselves out when she sat down with her diary at the end of the day.  What was once a detailed catalog of her day to day, from activities to feelings was now an abstract.

In her diary, she found her voice. She discovered poetry. More aptly she discovered how to use poetry. She found that, while she probably wouldn’t ever be a great writer of non-fiction, she could convey more with less in poetry. That her deliberate words carried more weight than the flowery supposition she thought she wanted. 

It was in there, privately pressed between the pages, she confessed. Her fears, her doubts, how her heart sped up while the time simultaneously slowed when his arm would brush against hers as they lounged on her bed. That she noticed he hadn’t tried to make any other friends here, keeping everyone else at arm's length while letting her—inviting her—encroach into his carefully curated bubble. That even though all signs pointed to yes, even this more confident, more comfortable Betty was terrified of rejection.

She’d never been a stranger to it; she was initially rejected from this intensive after all. Before, she was expected to plaster on a Cooper approved smile and bury whatever feelings that presented themselves. 

Now, she didn’t think she’d be able to do that. Jughead had helped her find so much more than just words. When she’d admitted she hadn’t had a cheeseburger in two years because her mother didn’t approve, he insisted on taking her to Pop’s.

“It’s not just a diner, Betty,” he said, slinging one leg over his motorcycle. He held his helmet up, urging that she take it. “It’s a Riverdale institution. You can’t be in this town for any amount of time without partaking in a milkshake and double cheeseburger.” 

She slid the helmet over her head, hair loose around her shoulders for the first time in her life. She watched as his tongue peeked between his lips as he took her in. “This is my first time on a bike though, so, go slow,” her voice was muffled by the helmet she knew, but he heard her. Straddling the bike, she loosely wrapped her arms around his waist, trying not to think about how soft the leather of his jacket would feel against the skin or how the hard planes of his stomach would feel under her hands. 

“I’m afraid going slow would be much worse. You’re just going to have to hold on much tighter than that.” She felt the air expel from his lungs as she tightened her grip. Maybe he was as affected by her presence as she was his. If he was though, he didn’t show it for the rest of the night. Aside from helping her off the bike, he didn’t initiate contact and made himself impossibly small looking in the booth, somehow physically shrinking into himself when he still seemed so emotionally open with her.

Even from the most mundane of topics the conversation flowed. He could make anything interesting, she loved watching his eyes light up when he got lost in the excitement of a good conspiracy theory or the thought of analyzing and dissecting pieces of popular culture. She could easily see herself like this with him: passionate, wild-eyed, thoroughly engrossed (or obsessed. It depended on who you asked, of course)   

When they’d departed for their separate dorms, she couldn’t help but feel dejected. Back in the safety of her room, she changed into pajamas to get the smell of grease and exhaust and brooding boy she had a desperate crush on, off of her. She pressed play on the saddest playlist she had curated and poured her heart onto the pages of her diary.

The last week of the program came far too quickly. The feeling in the lecture hall was different as well. The homesick were excited for the end to be near, but Betty wasn’t ready to be back in New York. She wasn’t sure this new, improved Betty would hold up under her mother’s increasing scrutiny. She didn’t know how much time she had before she broke completely.

“For your last assignment, I want you to do something that scares you. Obviously I don’t mean skydiving or anything, but something to do with your writing that scares you,” the professor said before dismissing them. “Write in a different tense or point of view; write a different style; share your work with a different audience. Just find the one thing you haven’t done yet here and just...let go.”

Betty snuck a look at Jughead from the corner of her eye. His brow was furrowed, jaw clenched tight, appearing deep in thought. She let out a shaky breath before going to smooth back the ponytail that wasn’t there. 

This is it, she thought. Her chance. To tell him how she felt, to bare her soul to him even more than she already had. She was up and out of her chair the second they were dismissed, talking herself into her decision with every step that led her back toward the dorms. 

“Hey,” his voice was soft, pensive as he opened the door. They hadn’t spoken much that day, just a text confirming he was in his room. 

Producing a hastily wrapped parcel from behind her back, Betty sighed. “If I don’t do this now, I won’t. The scariest thing for me, right now, is you reading what’s in there.”

“Betts,” he started, but she stopped him.

“There’s a lot of me in those pages that I could never share with anyone else. Whether they’d look at me differently or,” she shook her head stepping back, further into the hall. “Just read it...or don’t...either way, you’ll know where to find me.”

She didn’t stay to hear if he had anything to say, turning away from the boy holding the pieces of her heart, of herself, literally in his hands. Back in her room, she called her best friend Veronica and asked if she would watch some horribly cliched eighties teen comedy with her over facetime. She was asleep before “the guy” realized he was an idiot. 

Morning came quickly, as it usually did, but it seemed even faster knowing her days were dwindling. The light filtered through the blinds, dust floating lazily in the haze. She threw her head back into the pillows, hoping to be swallowed by slumber once again. But something niggled at the back of her mind. Something was keeping her firmly rooted in the waking plane.

The sound of a knock on her door.

She wasn’t sure if she was ready to face what she thought awaited her. When another knock came, and then another, more persistent knock, she willed herself out of bed and across the floor. Hugging tight the robe she threw on, she opened the door. 

Jughead didn’t look like he’d slept at all. His hair, normally secured under his beanie, was wildly sticking up in all directions. The eyebags that were everpresent on his face seemed deeper and more pronounced, and she was pretty sure he was still wearing the same thing he’d been wearing when she dropped the journal off to him.

The journal that was presently clutched between his hands.

“Did you mean it?”

Confused, she questioned back. “Mean what?”

“All of it? Any of it?” His voice seemed softer now, more unsure than she’d ever heard him. In their nearly six weeks of friendship he had seemed so confident. He was the one who approached her in the first place. But looking at him now, hands clenching at the notebook between them, maybe she wasn’t the only one who got more than just someone to look over their work.

Her eyes sought his, finding their usually blue hue stormy and grey. “Juggie, if I didn’t mean it, I wouldn’t have written it. And I certainly wouldn’t have shown you.”

He stepped closer, invading her space with his large body. “Betty,” he exhaled slowly. “There’s a reason nothing happened after we went to Pop’s and it wasn’t because I didn’t want it to.”

She watched his Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he swallowed. “Then why?” 

“Because I’m an all or nothing kind of guy, Betty. And I know this has an expiration date! It’s five days from now. You’re leaving Saturday, to go back to New York. Where you’re going to do amazing things. Because you’re amazing, and nothing you do could be anything less.”

“That’s not true, or objective, you know that right? We both only have a year of high school left and then what? You could come to New York—”

He shook his head sadly. “Betty, I’m not coming to New York. I’ll probably never end up leaving Riverdale.”

“Then I’ll come here! I like it here, Jug. I could come here, and we can…” His hand reached for her, finding golden locks and twisting them between his fingers.

“I could never ask that of you.”

“Why are you here then?” She asked cooly as his hand fell from her hair. 

Slowly he dragged the hand that had been playing with her hair through his own before huffing a laugh.  “I honestly don’t know. My plan was kissing you as soon as you opened the door and then my brain got involved.”

She felt the corner of her lip turn up. “Brains are dumb. They always get in the way.”

He smiled back at her, both of them moving even closer together. “Betty, I’m not one of those guys who does casual. I need to know that you're in this. Really, in this. That you want to be WITH me as much as I want to be with you because I can handle the distance if I knew you were all in.”

Brushing one of many unruly curls from his brow, Betty smiled. “Jughead Jones, haven’t you figured it out by now?” 

He raised an eyebrow to her question, his arm coming to snake around her waist.

“I don’t do anything in halves.” 

When their lips finally met she knew instantly that her life would be different. Maybe she didn’t know right then just how different, but she could tell you, with certainty that that summer changed her life. She had followed her heart and finally got it right.

[paperwayne]

snapshot.

50 Wordless Ways to Say “I Love You” ➡ 23. Taking a picture together to print and hang later.

Pairing: Dick Grayson x Reader

Word Count: 2,095 words

Warnings: Mild violence

“Nightwing! On your left!”

“Got it!” Dick shouts, twisting out of harm’s way. A split second later, he spins around and lands a blow on the screaming android.

Two more come your way. You leap onto the shoulders of one and slap an explosive onto its chest, jumping onto another android right before it goes off. Hot shrapnel cuts into your cape as acrid smoke fills your nose.

“I gotta say – hah! – this is not what I had in mind when you invited me to the mall,” you yell over the chaos.

Dick skids over to your side. His escrima sticks crackle with electricity – and in a moment, he stuffs them into an android’s eye sockets. “Trust me, this wasn’t on the agenda. I wanted to sh – oof! – show you the new photography studio. It’s Wild West-themed.”

“You don’t say?” You link elbows with Dick and he swings you into a robot feet-first. “That’s cool. You know I always want to party with you, cowboy.”

“Aw, you flatter me, Blackfinch.”

Pain shoots through your shoulder right before you can reply. Grunting in pain, you reach up and grab the android behind you, heaving it over you and into the ground. The white tile shatters.

“You okay?” Dick asks. You tear your attention away from the throbbing in your arm and see that he’s fighting the last android; it’s barely standing.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” you reply. “Gonna have a nasty bruise, though.”

“Hm –” Dick crouches low and knocks the android down with a sweep of his leg. A well-aimed stomp to its neck ends its rampage, and you watch intently as the neon green of its eyes fade into gray. Guarded relief washes over you the same time your adrenaline rush begins to die. 

After surveying the ransacked left wing of the mall, the two of you make your way over to each other.

“You didn’t break anything, right?” Dick asks, brow furrowing.

“Believe me, I would know if something was broken.” You pat his chest, gesturing with your chin at the blaring lights outside the exit. “Look like the police finally arrived.”

While he glances over at the police cars parked on the other side of the doors, you gingerly rub your shoulder and bend over to inspect one of the hunks of metal. “So – I’m guessing this is Glass’s work.”

Dick’s mildly concerned gaze quickly narrows when you show him the patterning on the interior. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

“Wanna bet how quickly we can track him down?”

You raise a brow underneath your cowl. Putting away his escrima sticks, Dick looks down at your outstretched hand and smirks.

“Nope,” he replies. “Not gonna risk it all this time, Blackfinch.”

—

“You know, there’s an old-time photography studio uptown. Not Wild West, but close enough.”

You catch a falling drop of melted ice cream, looking over Dick’s shoulder as he scrolls through his phone. It really is admirable, how determined he is to find a good studio, but you’re quickly distracted by the tangy creaminess of blackberry cheesecake. (You think this particular distraction is well-deserved, though – what was meant to be a one-hour skirmish ended up being a two-hour long battle against Glass’s toys, and by the time the two of you managed to turn him in, both you and Dick were pretty damn sore).

“You really want this photoshoot done, huh, Grayson?” You pause to bite into your ice cream, letting out a pleased hum as it coats your tongue; so expensive, but so worth it. “What’s with the sudden interest?”

He shrugs. “I just think it’d be fun. A ridiculous photoshoot’s a pretty good idea,” Dick reasons, showing you the route to Bearon’s Studio. “See? It’s only a few blocks away.”

“Okay. Let’s go, then.”

Your companion nods just as an explosion rocks the ground. Your ice cream scoop falls to the ground as you stumble and regain your footing, looking up to see smoke billowing from a nearby building.

“Seriously?” Dick groans.

As if on cue, a cloaked figure jumps out from a window and hits the ground running. There’s a maniacal cackle, and you sigh.

“Guess we’re going in a different direction, Dick.”

—

The runaway criminal ends up being a petty thief-turned-pyromaniac due to some street drug with a name too vulgar for public ears. You would have been glad that he wasn't a big-time villain with ulterior motives, if it wasn’t for the fact that it was an absolute pain in the ass to finally get him cornered and secured. To add to the picture, you now have teeth indentations on the same arm that got bruised in the first fight.

At least it's over now, though. Maybe if you and Dick hurry, the studio will still be –

“Closed?” Dick exclaims, hands gripping the door handles. The interior of the place is shrouded in darkness, and right near Dick's shoulder on the other side hangs a sign that reads “CLOSED” in dark, red print. “It’s not even close to six yet!”

“Guess they closed early.” You press your forehead into the glass and squint inside. Nothing happens. (You’re sort of relieved that nobody jumps out of the shadows at you and Dick.)

Dick’s hands drop down to his sides, and his head soon plonks against the door next to yours. “Man,” he sighs.

You turn to look at him. There are many expressions that look lovely on Dick’s face, some more than others, but disappointment is not one of them. It prompts you to think, and you tap on the door in thought, lips puckering.

Finally, you stand straight and snap your fingers. Dick raises an eyebrow.

“I’ve got it. Follow me.”

“Uh … okay.” Dick runs across the street after you, catching up in two quick strides. “Where are we going?”

You flash him a quick smile. “My grandpa’s house.”

Dick’s noise of surprise turns your smile into a smirk. The relationship between the two most important men in your life isn’t sour by any means, but your grandfather never really cared about social cues, and the most uncomfortable moments of your teenage life had resulted from his comments whenever you and Dick stood in the same room. You’ve gotten more used to his ways by now – which is nice – but still, you’re glad you don’t have to think about what he might say today.

“Don’t worry,” you assure Dick, running down the stairs toward the subway. “He’s out on business.”

Your childhood home was a penthouse suite. Fifteen years living the high-class life there, and not once had your grandfather renovated the place in any way, shape, or form; so after you and Dick finally reach the top floor and greet Miss Paula, it doesn’t take too long to find The Room.

“Okay,” you murmur to yourself, keeping ahold of Dick’s hand as you walk past your old bedroom, feeling your way down the hallway. Eventually, you reach a door with a keypad. “Aha.” Six digits, all in quick succession. “Behold.”

“… No way.” Dick walks over to the far corner as you flip on the light, gazing up at the array of hats hung onto the wall. Carefully, he takes one of them and examines the dark leather, lips curling into an incredulous grin. “How come I’ve never seen this place before?”

You take the hat from him and place it ceremoniously onto his head. “Grandpa’s way protective of his cowboy stuff. He only let me in here once I turned eighteen, and only responsible family and the closest of our friends can come in here.” Reaching around him, you grab a lasso off its hook and give it to Dick. “Here.”

The two of you spend the next few minutes trying on different combinations of hats and boots, modeling for each other and laughing your heads off like a pair of teenager. You tie a red handkerchief around Dick’s neck and fit him with a vest. He finds a giant wagon wheel hidden behind some crates and has you pose in front of it, expression deadly serious for historical accuracy. Finger guns complete the outfit.

“We don’t have a camera from the nineteenth century, but a filter’s the next best thing,” you state, rotating your camera around for a selfie. It takes a bit of stretching to include your enormous hats, but you manage. “Smile!”

Dick squishes his cheek against yours, and you can feel some stubble scraping against your skin as you take the shot. Your phone flashes and you bring it back down to check the result.

“Heh, you’re blinking.”

“You’re blurry.”

“It’s cute anyway,” Dick concludes, arm still wrapped around you as he favorites the picture.  “Text it to me, will ya?”

“I’ll do you one better and get it printed out at Walmart. This one should be framed and hung up,” you reply.

“You’re right.”

While Dick takes a moment to send one of the pictures to his siblings, you take off the two ten-gallon hats stuffed onto your head. The boots and spurs follow after a bit of difficulty. Your handkerchiefs go back into the drawers, the lasso back on its hook. It doesn’t take terribly long to put everything away, and when the two of you finish, the room looks exactly like it had before. (Who said that attention to detail was only applicable in the field?)

“Well, that was fun,” Dick laughs, hands on his hips as he surveys the hat collection one last time. “I’m actually glad we did this instead of the studio, to be honest.”

“I agree.”

Miss Paula is still, oddly enough, dusting the furniture when you and Dick come back to the foyer; she raises an eyebrow as the two of you walk to the elevator, all twin grins and muffled snorts.

“I hope you kids enjoyed yourselves,” she calls after you as the doors slide open, pointing her duster suspiciously in your direction. Her lips are pursed, but a twinkle shines in her eye.

You beam innocently. “We did. Send Grandpa our regards, please.”

“Mmhm.”

The doors close. Dick turns to you, eyes alight with mirth. “I hope your grandpa won’t be mad that we used his stuff for a photoshoot.”

“Nah, he’d have a heyday if he caught us. He’d probably want to hire a photographer and everything,” you snort, shaking your head.

He chuckles. “Really?”

“Yeah.” Glancing over at him, you will your next words to be light. “I mean – he always thought we looked cute together, remember?”

“He did.”

Dick’s reply is a mix between a question and a statement – you’re not sure which one it is, and when you try to read his face you don’t get much of an answer. His eyes flit to meet yours, and the slightest of smiles graces his lips for a moment before it’s replaced by a thoughtful look.

You instinctively turn your attention towards the steadily decreasing floor number above the buttons. There’s no elevator music, so now all you can hear is the sound of your breathing and Dick’s breathing, and god, the awkwardness is back again. Geez Louise. Why did you have to say that? That was years ago. Your grandpa probably only liked pairing you up with Dick because he thought it’d be funny.

“I think he was right.”

Your brain short-circuits. “… Huh?”

Dick leans back with his elbows against the rail, staring up at the floor number with you. Six, five, four. “We would be cute together. Hypothetically, you know.”

“Hypothetically.” You swallow, bracing yourself against the wall when the elevator suddenly stops at the ground floor. “Yeah, you’re right.”

Pause.

“Hey, remember when your grandpa made all of us ride on his Fourth of July float that one summer?”

His voice cuts through your fretting. You cling onto the new subject, and it’s thankfully easy to laugh once you refocus. “How could I forget that? God, he embarrassed me so much when I was in high school.”

“It was Wild West-themed, wasn’t it? I forgot that part until today.”

“It was. Damn, that actually makes it more embarrassing.”

“I need to look for pictures of that parade – oh, speaking of which, remember. To print out the photos.”

His expression’s solemn, and you roll your eyes and nudge him with your shoulder. “I’ll remember, Grayson. First thing after work tomorrow.”

“Alright,” he says. “I’m counting on you, partner.”

“And I’ve never let you down,” you respond.

Dick grins. He gives you a squeeze around your waist, looking down the street as you both walk towards the subway.

“Nope. Not once.”

__

[50 Wordless Ways to Say “I Love You” prompt list (requests using this prompt list are openCLOSED)]

[teatimewithlennon]

I Know The Way There [John Lennon] - Part 3

~~Lyds has a realization and decides to use her powers to go somewhere she’s never been~~

Part 1 l Part 2

Song For This Part

Word Count: 1396

{I hope you guys don’t think this is too slow. I don’t usually write fanfiction and I want to write this as if it’s a real story I’d write normally. Anyway, I hope you enjoy.}

We continue to dance freely around the cafe, spinning, and cleaning tables.

My father's singing always brings me joy. His pitch is always off, especially on the higher notes. I'd never tell him that because of the look he gets in those old eyes. In them I see myself. I have to same sad grey eyes but, just like him, when music enters my soul, they light up with the spirit of the music.

Watching my father dance brings back memories of watching him and my mother in the kitchen as a child. The way he and mom would sway together, her long skirts flowing and her hips moving. Because of them, I always knew what real love looks like.

Their love was all about soul. It was about the simple pleasures of life. It was about the music they both loved. The slow passionate dancing. The comfort of shared secrets. The appreciation of warm silence. The way their hands felt intertwined with each other.

My eyes light up, "I have an idea!" I shout, running to the back stairs up to the apartment.

"What are yo-" My dad calls out after me, but I'm already up the stairs.

As soon as I reach the top of the stairs I burst into the old apartment. The whole place smell of weed and incense. The living room is decked out with shag carpet. Bright furniture decorates the small space. There's a purple bead curtain leading to the hallway, and I rush through it; to the second door on the left, into my childhood bedroom.

Everything is exactly as it has been since I moved out. By this time the sun shines bright through the old sheer curtains. Outside the window are several potted plants. My old bed sits in the corner with a quilt my grandma made for me spread out. The metal frame swirls in a beautiful pattern and is covered in colorful ribbons. The brick wall behind it is decorated with paintings I had painted years ago. At the foot of the bed is my desk, a mess of notebooks and art supplies of all kinds.

Across from the bed is my mirrored closet, which I swing open. I keep most of my historical fashion here so my roommates don't ask too many questions. My hands run through the cloth, knowing exactly what I'm looking for. When I find it, I yank it out and throw it on the bed, pulling off my clothes.

About 40 minutes later I look in the mirrors and appreciate my work with an affirmative nod.

When I emerge from the back hallway, the cafe has filled out some. I quickly try to walk past my dad as he is serving some teens. I'm not quick enough, though. As he swiftly sets his tray down on another table and grabs my arm.

"What's going on?" He says, very concerned, "You ran off so quickly."

"I had a great idea for some inspiration." I pull my arm away from him, "Don't worry, I'll be back before you know it."

"Where are you going?" he asks.

But I'm already out the door

My feet move under me as if I have no control. I don't know where I'm running to, just away from everyone. The oxfords I'm wearing pad against the ground erratically, fueling my energy as I round a corner, running toward the water. I look around me, checking for any passerby. It's all clear. Wood creaks under me as I sprint down an old dock. When I reach the end, I jump.

The late morning sun disappears in an instant. All the sounds of the city vanish and I'm left in the void. The bone-crushing pressure builds around me. My heart beats so hard I feel it might explode. I panic when I feel as though it's been too long.

That's exactly when the weightlessness comes.

My ears pop when all the noises come flooding back. The pain replaces the nothingness but I still can't feel my legs under me so I grasp at anything, ending up leaning against a cold brick wall. My body craves the air that it was missing just seconds before. Cold air blows past me as a hand is placed on my shoulder, pulling me away from the pain in my body and back to the world around me.

"Are you alright?" says the man, voice cloaked in a heavy Liverpool accent.

I take a moment to gather my thoughts and look around before responding. It's very dark and reaks of sweat. There's graffiti all over the walls. Next to me is a heavy metal door with the word exit printed in red on it. I got lucky jumping right before this guy walked in.

"Yeah, It's just my asthma acting up." I manage a smile as I look up at him, my vision is hazy and I can't quite make out his features.

"One of my mates has got asthma, are you sure you'll be okay?"

I straighten up, "Of course," I say beginning to walk away, "thanks for the concern."

The dingy hallway smells of beer. I make my way through the dimly lit building, following the distant sounds of music. Hearing a crowd cheering, I round a corner into the main area of the club.

Looks like I made it right on time, as four familiar faces take the stage.

They begin their set while I work my way through the mass of bodies in front of the stage. I'm not trying to get near the front but rather I just want a drink. I think it's best for me to keep my distance from the boys, seeing as how I know how this all ends.

I manage to find an empty seat at the end of the bar, tucked partially away in a corner. With a drink in hand, I watch the movement of the crowd to songs I have heard thousands of times. I've never been here before, at least not here and now. I'd been to the Cavern Club once with dad on for my 18th birthday.

But being here, now, is like nothing else. I can feel their voices in the air. They have a resonance I have never seen before. I'm one of the luckiest people in the world, watching The Beatles play this early in their careers.

Something in the crowd is pulling me in. I could not tell you what it is, but the only thing in my mind was my body moving with the conglomeration of people. So, I let my body take me where it wanted to go. It's so hot. The air is thick with the smell of perspiration. And somehow I had managed to get myself to the front of the crowd.

I knew every word to what was being sung, and I sing it all out as loud as I can. I don't think much of it.

But on stage, one young man did take notice.

After watching the set, my heart is full. I can't believe what I just saw. There is a smile plastered on my face, and my face is beginning to ache from it. In fact, everything in my body aches, and for once it's not the crushing power of the universe. I make my way back to my dark corner of the bar and watch the rest of the night tick by; drinking and taking in the ambiance of the seedy club.

I watch everything move, time feels as if it has sped up just for me and soon enough the club's patrons had thinned out, and I've zoned out into the universe. My thoughts on the whole reason I came here, to find some inspiration.

My mom used to tell me she had believed that the only musicians to ever truly understand love, was The Beatles. I grew up listening to these songs, but I never felt like I really understood what she meant. And while I was star struck, I don't know if I really feel the love she was talking about.

A knock on the bar next to me pulls me out of my thoughts; it seems I've been stuck their pretty often lately.

"You know, for a bird with asthma, you have a pretty good set of lungs," the man says.

[alphawave-writes]

It only takes a (Christmas Eve) moment Sigma x Harold Winston

Synopsis: Siebren and Harold spend their first christmas eve as a couple together in Harold's apartment. For this pair of middle-aged men, that means ugly sweaters, movies, and a lot of kissing. 

This was done for @oldstupidtmplar, who wanted me to write a fluffy fic based on their Christmas art, which you can find here. I HIGHLY recommend checking them out. Their art is just beautiful, and has definitely inspired how I write these two.

Read it here, or find it on AO3. For more Sigma, check out my series 'The universe sings’. For more Sigma x Harold fluff, check out my other two fics here and here

-

If Siebren thought Horizon One’s Christmas decorations was excessive, Harold’s apartment was in a league of its own. A Christmas tree was adorned with the traditional ornaments and also various coloured paper chains—a remnant of Harold’s half-Chinese heritage. Wax candles had been lit and burnt away, leaving behind the lingering scent of gingerbread. If he peeked through the doorway, a basket of apples wrapped in colourful packaging paper lied in a tiny basket on Harold’s kitchen countertop, side by side with a variety of snacks and desserts. Fairy lights line the backwall of Harold’s living room, opposite a small couch and a TV.

On a table in the corner of the room, Siebren noticed a stack of books on zoology and animal biology. Next to them was a single framed photograph. Siebren remembered this picture. It was taken months ago back on Horizon One, less than a week before he and Harold were to head back to Earth. In the photo, Harold smiled toothily at the camera, two thumbs pointing up while Siebren himself smirked beside him, eyes scrunched up to give an expression that’s halfway between coy and smug.

Siebren only realized he had picked up the photograph when he heard footsteps behind him. He quickly replaced the photograph on the table as he turned around to face Harold. He was wearing what many university students called a ‘christmas dad’ outfit. His thick rimmed glasses matched horrendously well with his green Christmas sweater, where a caricature of a gorilla sat side by side of two snowmen.

Compared to his simple red sweater adorned with stars, Siebren looked almost fashionable. “I think you win the ugly sweater contest,” he smiled.

“Heaven forbid I look good on Christmas Eve,” Harold chuckled. His eyes glanced to the photograph, his laughter fading into a warm smile. “Like the picture?”

“The-the photo?” Siebren cleared his throat loudly, averting his gaze. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Siebren, I know you saw it.” Harold grabbed the photo and gazed upon it fondly. Siebren stood behind Harold, looking down on the photo from Harold's shoulder. “You looked good,” Harold said.

“I look smug,” Siebren muttered.

“You look handsome." He placed the photo back, turned around, and stole a kiss from Siebren’s cheek. “This one turned out quite nicely, actually. I'm thinking of taking it to the shop and framing it.”

Siebren blushed. “Really? I-I mean, that’s not necessary. I wouldn’t want to impose.” He rubbed the back of his head.

“It's a good photo. We look cute.” Harold waved Siebren to follow him to the kitchen. “Come on over. I managed to find a store that sells stroopwafels here in Hong Kong. Probably not as great as your homemade ones, but they’ll do in a pinch, right?”

Siebren stared at the photo, his cheeks still pink. He didn’t have the guts to ask Harold why he went through the effort of printing and framing that particular photo. Sure, they were dating, but for less than a year. He didn’t think he had that much impact on Harold’s life—not enough to warrant a framed photo of his face in Harold’s home, at least. A man’s home is a sacred, special place, after all. A single photo on a man’s living room, when there were no other photos in sight, that was something significant.

“Siebren, come on. You said you’d make me your boozy eggnog.”

“C-coming,” Siebren stuttered before heading for the kitchen. His lips pursed. “And it’s called advocaat.”

It was clear from the spotlessness of Harold’s kitchen that the man didn’t cook often. The fridge had few edible food items, the pantry mostly consisted of non-perishables, and the pots and pans were a bit too spotless. Still, Harold’s kitchen was as organized as his desk, so it didn’t take long for Siebren to get the ingredients he needed: egg yolks, salt, sugar, brandy and vanilla extract. Harold watched from the opposite side of the kitchen island, chewing on a gingerbread biscuit. Siebren knew better than to ask Harold for help in the kitchen. 

As he cooked the ingredients in a pot, his eyes couldn’t help but drift to the lone hallway, where two doors sat. One was the apartment’s sole bathroom, and the other was Harold’s bedroom. The very same bedroom he was expected to sleep in tonight, within the covers of the bed, next to Harold’s sleeping form. A new wave of heat crept up his cheeks and down his chest.

It wasn’t a new thing for the two of them to sleep together, but that was all that ever occurred, never anything more. It was different back on Horizon One because they were on a space station where professionalism and thin doors were the standard, where sleeping side by side on the same bed is tantamount to scandal. That was as far as they allowed themselves to bend the rules, if not out of fear of losing their jobs then to protect the tentative peace of the moon base. But now he was here in Harold’s apartment, in Harold’s domain. Horizon One’s rules didn’t matter here. They could be as intimate as they wanted to. Trouble was, Siebren didn’t want to be more intimate. All he wanted to do tonight was curl up by Harold’s side and dream pleasant dreams. He wasn’t sure if Harold felt the same way now that they were back on Earth.

He filled various mugs with the bright orange advocaat mixture, being careful not to spill anything on the pristine kitchen countertop. Harold helped him put them into the fridge where they will refrigerate. Afterwards, they made themselves comfortable on Harold’s couch. Harold turned on the TV to a web streaming service before passing the remote to Siebren.

His eyes lingered on Siebren’s feet. “You know, you can take off your socks if you want, Siebren.”

“Really? Finally.” Overeagerly, Siebren whipped the socks off his feet and stuffed them into his pant pocket. By his side, Harold stifled a laugh. Siebren frowned. “What?”

“Nothing, nothing. It’s just so cute how excited you got over it,” Harold giggled.

“Bare feet promote better circulation for the legs.” Harold gave him a withering smile. Siebren added, with a pout, “My feet get sweaty.”

“There it is,” Harold laughed. His arm wrapped around Siebren’s neck.

Siebren’s response was to wrap his arm around Harold’s waist as he flicked through the meager listings. He wasn’t completely surprised that Harold’s taste largely seemed to compromise of Asian historical dramas, not that Siebren was a fan of them. Documentaries and sci-fi shows were more his thing. He clicked on search. “Any preference?”

“Nothing really.” Harold rested his head on Siebren’s shoulder. “Something simple with a nice story. Doesn’t necessarily have to be Christmas related.”

“I believe what you just told me is a preference,” Siebren smirked.

Harold rolled his eyes, amused. “Just pick the movie, tiger.”

Siebren’s eyes narrowed a little as he clicked in and out of a few movies, none of them satisfying his tastes. After a while, he clicked on a bunch of boxes in various different filters. The counter of available movies on the top left hand corner ticked down.

“Siebren, you’re not searching for a research paper. This is just a movie,” Harold laughed.

“But how else are we going to optimize our movie watching? By highlighting key words, sorting by genre, rating, and ranking, we shall theoretically get the perfect movie that will satisfy both our tastes. Observe.”

Millions of movies came down to just one. In the genre listing it’s titled as ‘vintage’ and ‘animated’. A rusted, cubical robot waved happily against the backdrop of what appeared to be another planet, the Earth glowing an ethereal blue in the distance. An old Disney film called 'Wall-E'.

The two men paused, looked at each other, and shrugged. Siebren pressed play on the remote, and the two of them curled up into each other, pressed so close that they could feel each other’s body heat. Harold is comfortable and warm in his arms, a welcoming distraction from the mysteries of the universe. 

The movie turned out to be surprisingly good fun, although perhaps not for the reasons intended by its creators. Harold was overanalyzing the movie’s themes as it relates to the Adam and Eve myth, while Siebren makes a game out of pointing out all the scientific errors within the movie. Harold kept his mouth shut when the plant was introduced, but became very vocal once the spaceship shot up into space.

“Aren't there sensors for this? Did they not refuel the spaceship?”

“I know,” Siebren laughed, amused to see Harold get so passionate. “And this is supposed to be for a scouting mission for a single robot.”

“I’m one person, and I've been in spaceships 5 times smaller than that. Why don’t I get a gigantic missile like that when I go up to space?”

“Maybe if you become a robot, you’ll get special treatment.”

Harold slapped his own forehead, snickering. “Heavens, no. I rather like being human.” He turned to Siebren, eyes low, his voice dripped with innuendo. “Some things you just can’t do as a robot.”

Siebren gulped loudly, keeping his face forward to the TV. Harold let it slide, sniggering to himself, quieting as his attention was inevitably drawn back to the movie.

The rest of the movie passed by in relative silence, the two of them only piping up if they saw something worth discussing. Still, even the scientific improbability of a colony of humans traveling the stars for thousands of years could not distract them from the love story that was core to the movie. Though the two robots never said a word, their love was as clear as day. In a strange way, it reminded Siebren so much of his romance with Harold. So much of their love was expressed through actions and song, not words. 

In the final moments of the movie, the main character robot had reverted to factory settings, removing the personality and autonomy that made it human. Siebren reached for Harold’s hand, the contact leaving electric sparks. He sucked in a breath, his eyes darting to the side. Harold brushed his hand on his jaw, pulling his head to face him. The two robots shared a tender kiss, their love restored, the Earth panned away to reveal the dirt and debris that floated outside its atmosphere, but Siebren didn’t see any of this. All he could see was his own image, reflected in Harold’s wanting eyes. ‘It only takes a moment’ from Hello, Dolly! echoed throughout the room as Harold ran his thumb over Siebren’s chin.

And that is all, that love’s about

And we’ll recall, when times runs out

Siebren’s eyes closed as he felt the hot breath hit his cheeks, calculated the estimated time of impact when lips crashed against lips. Harold looped his arms past his waist, pressing pause on the remote. The movie had been paused, but the lyricists still kept singing their love song in Siebren’s head, their voices the only thing Siebren can hear aside from his own heavy breaths.

That it only took a moment

To be loved

A whole life long

Siebren barely registered the faint scent of apples before lips—then tongue—pressed against his mouth with the impact of a meteor. His hands felt for Harold’s shoulders, bracing from the shudders of the aftershock. The string lights illuminated Harold in prismatic colours, his tongue a solar flare that burned Siebren from the inside out. Siebren’s mouth eagerly opened, flicking his tongue, desperate to mimic the very actions that threatened to unravel the very molecules that made up his body. He was at Harold’s mercy, intoxicated on Harold’s taste, trapped underneath Harold’s love.

Harold shifted beside him, lifting one leg so he could straddle Siebren. His smile was small but indulgent. His eyes twinkled like the stars. His hands trailed down to Siebren’s stomach, hovering over Siebren’s thick thighs, fingers twitching in anticipation. Whispers of Harold's lust hovered in the air, choking the once-clear air.

It's all too much for Siebren. Too much, too soon.

His eyes flew open, a hand pushing Harold away slightly. The distance between them widened by two centimetres, but it was enough to make Harold stop and take pause. Harold stared at him dumbly; clarity had yet to filter into his body.

“Siebren?” He whispered breathily. “Do you want to take this to the bedroom?”

“I…n-no, I…” He didn’t know what he wanted. He wanted this, this moment, this kiss, but no more than that. He wasn’t ready for what came next. He wasn’t sure if he would ever be ready.

“Siebren?” Harold repeated.

“Mijn Schatje, I…” Siebren sighed. “I’m…I’m sorry. I’m not ready for…” he pouted. “M-maybe I should find a hotel for tonight instead.”

“W-what? Why?”

“I know what you want. What you want to do to me, o-or what you want me to do to you, but I’m not ready. If you ask me to sleep with you, I’ll just lead you on and…well...” Siebren coughed loudly into his fist, his cheeks crimson in shame.

“Siebren, did you…I didn’t mean to…” Harold’s eyebrows scrunched together. He gazed down to where he sat on Siebren’s lap and took the glasses off his face, placing them on the side table beside the sofa. He ran a nervous hand through his hair, fingertips disappearing into chocolate brown strands. "I didn't mean to push you."

Silence hung between their bodies, thick and impenetrable. All they could do was stare at each other, trying to interpret meaning and emotion behind shimmering eyes.

Siebren ran a soft hand over Harold’s stubble, tracing a pattern of his own creation. Harold leaned into Siebren’s touch, his eyes flutter closed. Their heartbeats slowed down to the beat of the metronome. The tension slowly evaporated from their shoulders.

“I should have mentioned this earlier,” Siebren whispered. “I’m sorry.”

Harold shook his head. “Don’t apologise. You’ve got your limits, I understand. That won’t stop me from loving you.”

“I still want to continue this,” Siebren said. “The kissing, the touching. What we usually do.” He looked away bashfully. “Nothing more than that, if that's okay with you.”

Harold smiled, relieved. “I understand perfectly, my x­­īn gān.”

Siebren had never heard Harold use that particular nickname before, but he thought it must be important when Harold’s hands pressed on his chest and kissed him delicately on the lips. He kissed back eagerly, pulling Harold so close he could hear his heartbeat thumping in his chest. Fingers glide over Siebren's shoulders, relaxing him. Siebren hummed in pleasure. Yes, this was what he wanted.

They caressed each other, give and take, tracing over cheeks and necks and shoulders and arms. Harold tilted his head to the side, silent permission for Siebren to leave his mark on his skin. And Siebren took it, sucking lightly, just enough for Harold to sigh deeply. 

“Are you OK with this?” Siebren breathed into Harold’s skin.

Harold’s eyes fluttered, a lazy smile growing. “I’ll be happy with anything as long as it’s from you,” he said. He meant every word , and Siebren knew it. He let out a quiet smile, glad and relieved that he had such a kind, wonderful man by his side.

Arms snaked around Siebren’s neck, pressing kisses on his jaw. “Harold,” he sighed.

“Stay,” he pleaded. “It’s cold outside.”

He couldn’t help but chuckle quietly. “It’s 18 degrees outside. I’m already sweating in this sweater,” he said.

“Then I’ll be cold without you.” His lips nibbled Siebren’s Adam’s apple. “Stay with me tonight. Please.”

Siebren responded with a kiss to the bridge of Harold’s nose and a smile. Siebren allowed himself to be led out of the living room, past the kitchen and the lone hallway to Harold’s quaint little bedroom. He had very little time to admire the plain bookshelf and the twinkling lights of the Hong Kong skyline before Harold pulled him to the bed. A laugh escaped Siebren’s throat as Harold wrapped his arms around his body, pressing the two of them so close he could feel the rise and fall of Harold’s chest. They didn't stop touching and kissing each other. 

It's hours when their kisses became less passionate and more lazy, their sighs and groans tinted with sleep. Harold traced his thumb over Siebren’s cheekbone, his eyes half-lidded and fond. “Nǐ de yǎn jing hěn měi,” Harold sighed.

Siebren smiled sleepily. “What does that mean?”

“You’ve got beautiful eyes,” Harold responded.

Siebren blushed. “And what about the other one you said earlier? Xin Gan, I think it was?” He probably butchered the pronounciation.

“A secret," Harold giggled.

Siebren hummed quietly to himself, enjoying the melody of Harold's soft laughter. This was what he wanted, to be in Harold’s arms like this, to hear the song of Harold's life thumping in his chest, constant and even. “May I say something in Dutch to you?” He asked quietly.

“Go for it.”

“Ik hou van jou,” he said. “Mijn favoriete plekje is samen met jou zijn.”

“What does that mean?”

“A secret,” Siebren smirked.

Harold huffed, eliciting another quiet chuckle from Siebren. “I’ll find out one day,” Harold declared, his voice laced with mirth and joy. “Just you wait, I will take Dutch lessons, and I will find out what you're saying.”

“It’s good things, don't you worry, mijn schatje," he said. “Wonderful, magnificent things.”

They fell asleep like this, their limbs wrapped around the other, content smiles strewn across their face. Though Siebren was in Harold’s apartment, sleeping in Harold’s bed, he couldn’t help but feel like he had finally found a place he could call home. 

His dreams were short, and he forgot what happened in them when the morning rose, but he remembered that they were blissfully peaceful and pleasant. They pressed light kisses on each other's cheeks as they woke up, drank the advocaat Siebren made the night before from the fridge, and unwrapped the presents beneath Harold’s Christmas tree. Siebren got Harold a stuffed gorilla with glasses that bared more than a passing resemblance to Specimen 28. Harold in turn got him hot pink bamboo socks.

Siebren gave Harold a withering look. "Seriously?" he said, upon which the latter laughed.

Harold brought out a second gift hidden behind the couch—"the real present", he claimed. Siebren was careful to not rip the wrapping paper, revealing a simple but large cardboard box. Inside the box, nestled beneath the stuffing, was a framed photo. It’s a photo of the two of them—the very same photo that sat in the corner of Harold’s living room, in fact, only enlarged. The frame was painted bronze and adorned with classical architecture motifs, making the photo within seem more intimate.

"It was such a good photo I thought I should frame it," Harold said. He gazed fondly at the photo. "You really do look handsome here."

Now Siebren could see what Harold saw. As he gazed at his own, younger face, he didn’t look smug or cocky, as he initially thought. He looked like a man who was absolutely in love.

If he could glance at his reflection, he figured the same expression on the photo was stricken across his face.

Harold pecked Siebren on the cheek. His smile was warm and welcoming like the sunrise. “Merry Christmas, Siebren.”

“Merry Christmas,” Siebren smiled. He bit back a sniffle. Tears began to well up.

“Are you…are you crying?” Harold chuckled.

“N-no! It’s the Styrofoam you put in this box.” He cleared his throat excessively loud, a diversion to distract Harold while he blinked away the tears. “P-perhaps I need another cup of advocaat.”

“Oh, tiger, if only I knew the photo would get you so emotional," Harold laughed, louder than before. "You look so cute when you’re flustered.”

“I am not cute, Harold,” Siebren pouted, which only seemed to convince Harold even more that he was cute. The rest of the Christmas morning was Siebren trying (and failing) to explain to Harold why a middle-aged man of his stature and appearance could not be cute.

[darkangeldesignstudio]

Dark Horse

So, I know I promised to post the first chapter of Dark Horse on July 13th and that is still coming, but I decided that, since I have a prologue already written and edited by the lovely @sexykitty96, I would post it today as a little treat for everyone.

Here she is in all of her glory, but I’m not that nice, so I will not be telling you who the Reader will be paired with until the first chapter goes up.

But, if you go over to my AO3 page and read the story info.....

Warnings: Angst, Violence, Death, Attempted Rape, Strong Language, Mentions of Animal Abuse, and Eventual Smut and Fluff

**There will be some chapters/scenes that occur in the “Deep South” and since this is set in the late 1800s, there would usually be some really racist and downright hateful things going on in those areas (there was still little respect for African Americans, Natives, and women during this time period) but I will be censoring many of these things because I find them despicable and I do not want to condone these happenings within my writing. So, even though there will be some scenes where our heroes will be fighting the KKK, there will not be any racial slurs used. African Americans will be referred to as colored folk, colored people, or blacks (nothing more or less). Native Americans will be referred to as Indians, Natives, or by the tribe that they are a part of (nothing more or less). If you have a problem with this fic being “Historically Inaccurate” because of this then you might as well mosey on down the road. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.**

Setting: Post Civil War era USA. Marvel Cowboy AU.

Preface: Your home is attacked by the Hydra gang and you are rescued by Steve, Bucky, and their group. The government agency, known as Shield, wants them captured and Hydra wants them dead. With nowhere else to go, you join their ragtag group and set out on the adventure of a lifetime. Helping those less fortunate along the way, your small group grows and so does your affection for these two rough and tumble outlaws. When the chips are down, will you all be able to escape unscathed? Or will the boot drop and leave you heartbroken and alone again?

Thanks again to @sexykitty96 for being the best beta and friend a girl could ask for. Without your encouragement and friendship, I never would have been brave enough to write something like this.

Next Chapter

Prologue: Peace and Happiness

“Y/N!”

Your brother’s angry call and stomping boots called your attention from the food stores in the pantry. You peered round the doorframe to see what he was on about and had to cover your mouth to stop the guffaws of laughter from escaping.

 John looked around the house, trying to pinpoint your location without moving too far from the doorway. When he turned his back to you, you noticed the reason for his ire. Covered head to toe in hay, he also had a faint hoof print on the seat of his pants. He didn’t have to search much longer as the sight made you snort loudly, unable to hold back your giggles.

“It’s not funny!” He scowled, face growing more red by the second. “That damned horse of yours is a menace.”

Getting yourself under control, you studied him seriously. “What did he do this time?”

“I thought the beast was sleeping, so I decided to feed him for you.” Knowing where this was going, you had to hide your smile with your hand again. “The bastard was faking, again! He waited until I was in the stall and kicked me into the hay trough.”

You smirked at your brother; he really was generous to a fault. No matter how often Bodaway tortured him with his pranks, John was always willing to help you out and tried his best to make friends with the naughty stallion.

“Thank you for trying to help.” You walked towards the door, donning your jacket to fend off the brisk evening air. As you passed, you placed your hand on his shoulder. “I’ll talk to him, but at this point, you are really just a glutton for punishment.”

His cheeks became flushed with embarrassment as you laughed your way out of the house and to the barn. You gave your brother a hard time, but it was all in good fun. John was the only family you had left after your father died. He took care of you and made no protests when you and Bodaway turned up on his farm with nowhere else to go.

The sun was just starting to descend, bathing you in golden light as you swung the door open. The interior of the barn was warm, keeping the horses and chickens safe for the impending winter weather.

You looked to the second stall down the way and spied the big black Arabian with his neck leaning over the stall door. His neighbor, a handsome bay Shire, was asleep in the back corner of his stall, tired from a day of cart pulling. You snuck past Duke’s stall with a commanding stride and a stern eye. If a horse could appear contrite, Boda was at least trying to fake it. His head hung low as he peeked up at you with mournful eyes.

“Don’t give me that look. I know you’re not sorry about what you did.” You crossed your arms when he pinned his ears at you, as if to say, “So, what if I’m not.”

“Why must you be so difficult?” You sighed, gripping the bridge of your nose and shaking your head at the mischievous brat in his stall. “At this point, its fortunate my brother won’t make me sell you. Not that anyone’s crazy enough to buy a menace like you, but still. Don’t. Push. Your. Luck.”

Boda snorted in derision, backing further into his stall. It was his way of inviting you inside to talk, but in reality he was just seeking a cuddle after being scolded. Even knowing all of this, you couldn’t resist going in to see your overgrown baby. Rolling your eyes, you stepped into the big black’s domain.

Looking up into the male’s dark eyes, you scowled at him. He held his head high above you, trying to seem intimidating, but you weren’t phased. The stallion wouldn‘t dare hurt you, no matter how dangerous he looked in that moment. There was only one thing in the world that he loved more than grain or treats, and that was you. Pointing at his muzzle, you narrowed your eyes at his haughty demeanor.

“Get down here.” When he rolled his eyes, you stomped your foot and growled. “Now, Bodaway.”

Pawing at the dirt floor of his stall, he lowered his head reluctantly, turning to look at the wall with a renewed interest in the wood grain there. You reached out, placing your palm between his black ears and gripping his long forelock. Pulling his face back towards you, you forced him to meet your eyes.

“You will stop this nonsense at once, Boda.” You scolded him like you would a child, pointing at him and waving your index finger in front of his face. “That means no more kicking, no more biting, and no more pranks. You will behave or no more sugar cubes for a month.”

His ears swiveled towards you, eyes widening with your threat, and he made a funny little nickering sound. Begging like a scolded dog.

You released his forelock, smoothing it back into place between his eyes. “Stop trying my patience and I won’t take away your treats. Deal?”

He nodded vigorously, snorting and grunting in affirmation. He would be a good boy, at least for a while. You grinned and gave his neck a rub. “That‘s my sweet boy. Now, get some sleep. We have work to do in the morning.”

With another swift pat, you exited the stall. Exiting the barn and closing the door behind you, you looked to the sky. A radiant, scarlet sky framed pastel colored clouds; it was breathtaking.

Looking back towards the house, you could see your brother through the windows, setting the table for supper. You smiled with happiness. John really does too much around here. Maybe tomorrow I could go out and hunt for a deer as thanks. Yeah, that would be perfect.

Entering the small house, you shed your coat and boots. Walking to the fireplace, you glanced back at the dinner table and your brother sitting in his chair. “Feels like a blizzard is coming in, so I locked up the barn.”

“Thanks, sis. How did the brat take his scolding?” You laughed as John grinned at you.

“About as well as he always does. I threatened to take away his sugar for a week, so he will behave for about that long.” You fed a few logs onto the fire and approached the table. Your brother’s laughter filled the small room.

“That’s better than nothing, I guess.” Pointing to your chair across from him, John urged you to sit and eat. “We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow, especially if it snows. Best eat and get to bed.”

“Sure.” Taking your seat, you began to dig into your bowl of stew with vigor and your home fell into a peaceful silence.

Unbeknownst to you, that quiet would soon be shattered and your lives would change forevermore.

[rainbow-neko-main]

Freedom in Different Places (Ch. 1)

An AU given to me by a good friend. Featureing some good fluffy Biker Chase x Librarian Henrik. ~♡♡♡ (if i like this enough i might make more parts ;D )

===========

"What do you mean you can't fix it?!" yelled a man wearing a black lether jacket with a red baseball cap, bright yellow and green strands messily stuck out of the hat. He seemed to be shouting at a teenager, decorated in body piercings with a red tatto across his neck, his hair unlike the other was died a dark green. He was holding a box of tools and coverd in oil. Chase never thought he'd see the day where Anti, their gangs mechanic, wouldn't be able to help him with his motorcycle. He was beginning to think there was not one thing the teen couldn't fix...

I guess he finally found one.

"Exactly what I mean Chase. You can't just bust up your motorcycle that bad and expect me to be able to fix all your mistakes. This is way out of my league!" Anti states back. He hated when Chase shouted at him. It's not his fault the man ran his ride into a wall trying to escape from one of their recent jobs.

"Settle down you two, no need to fight." Another man steps out of the shadows, his hair is normal brown and spiked up. The black leather he wore matched his two companions except he had a green eye printed onto the back with white text across it reading 'BOSS'.

"Chase you can't get upset at Anti for not being able to fix your bike. Anti you need to calm down. You know you can't blame him for what happened last night." Jack says accordingly. "We don't even know where you were on that heist..." Anti mummbled before continuing at his normal volume while ignoreing Jack's glares. "Chase if you want me to fix your bike, get a computer or a book or something for information." Chase seemed to pale at the mention of going somewhere and staying inside. But he knew just as well as them that they couldn't get it fixed anywhere else...

"Jack loan me your bike so I can go to the library..." Jack tossed Chase his helmet and made a gesture to take off his hat before riding. Chase returns it with a smile and heads out the door, missing the mutter of concern that escaped him

"How the fuck am I gonna do this..."

-One Quick Ride Later-

Chase stops and park his motorcycle out front of the large building, the dark black was in high contrast aginst the buildings nice tan walls. Any resonable person would have thought a biker walking into a library was the most ridiculous thing they've ever seen...at least thats what Chase thought. He walked into the building, noticing the little bell on the door. He breathed in and could smell the freshness of new books, hear the absolute silence of the small library. He sighs lightly and reminds himself to keep his volume down. "Lets get this over with..." he mutters.

Chase starts to roam the isles of books and shelves. He noticed fantasy and science fiction, he even found a couple historical texts. Yet not a single "how to" book or mechanics guide. How the hell does anyone navigate-

His thought was cut short when he accidently bumped into someone. He heard a few thumps followed by a pained voice curseing in what seemed to be...German? He looked over quickly to see who he had knocked over and felt his words get stuck in his throat.

There on the ground was a small man surrounded by fallen books, a small bandage rested across his freckled nose and soft floppy bright minty green hair rested on his head. He was wearing a white sweater over a collared light blue shirt and khaki pants. He was rubbing his head but when he looked up Chase could see his blue beautiful eyes were framed with an adorable pair of square glasses. He wore a nametag that read 'Henrik' which meant he worked here...and Chase had knocked him over.

"Oh! D-dude im s-o sorry! Let me help you!" Chase exclaimed as he finnaly returned to his senses, leaning down to help pick up the fallen books. The man, Henrik, responded quickly. "No no thats alright. I should have been looking where I was going." He says as he starts to also pick up the books. They were almost done untill the last one where they both reached for it and ended up with entwined hands on the book.

They looked up from the book at eachother and stared. It felt like this for an eternity when in reality it was only a few seconds. Henrik pulled away and stood up with Chase, brushing himself off lightly.

"Again, i'm so sorry dude. The names Brody, Chase Brody." Henrik smiles and Chase swore he felt his heart melt. "It's fine. Henrik Schneeplestein. I'm the librarian here." Librarian? Oh! Librarian of course! "You work here? Would you mind showing me where I could find some mechanic books?" Chase asked excitedly. Henrik blinked in surprise and nodded. "Of course. There right down this shelf and-" he gave Chase a small step by step instruction on where to find what he needed. Chase thanked him and turned on his heel, but not before shooting a smirk over his shoulder at Henrik. "Hope to see you around." With that, he turned the corner towards Henrik's instructions.

Little did they know that as soon as he turned that corner they both feel into a blushing hysterical mess. Henrik hid his face in a book and happily bounced from one foot to another, glad to have not made a fool of himself infront of someone that handsome. Chase on the other hand coughed inti his rolled up sleeves, trying to cover up his blushing face.

Chase quickly gatherd the books he needed and waved a small goodbye to Henrik at the counter. Listened as the bell on the door rang a little and closed behind him before he took off on Jacks motorcycle to their shared house.

In that moment both Henrik and Chase had a similar thought, like their souls entertwined and had a shared moment of hope...

"I hope hes there tommorrow..."

[50shadesofmittens]

So I went on vacation for a week

Meant I had minimal internet, but more time to write. I’m now happy to say that I’m at the point where unless something goes very wrong, I’m going to be editing the next chapter of Three Times They Don’t for only grammar, purple prose avoidance, and humor. Not at the same time, of course, but it means I’ve gotten more done. Yay!

It also means I have a bunch of stuff I cut from the chapter which I want to post here. So if you’re interested, just bear in mind some of this was cut for good reason:

He hadn’t spoken to me since that night at Ullanor, and I doubted he remembered me at all. And only a few millennia ago I learned that Magnus had been framed for a crime very personal to me.

Ten thousand years had passed for me as well, and I had far worse failures and far greater offenses behind me. I can honestly say I had no idea what to feel about him now beyond ‘potential major security breach.’

…/…/…/…/…/…|…\…\…\…\…\…

“So, you do know where to find it?”

“…Ehh… Iiii… It’s not quite…” The book may not have “I know where they are, but… I don’t keep those books in the library…” And frankly, I didn’t want the nerdy gene-father of the Bloody Magpies anywhere near my oh-so-irreplacible personal library that would be super easy for a bookworm kleptomaniac sorcerer to steal from. Or just steal.

“So where can I find them?”

“I… I keep them in the-” A brilliant realization struck me. ’The Screaming Angel’ was amongst those I did copy down and keep in the palace. The Black Library version had better printing, but there was another option.

“Keep them in?”

“Uh, sorry. I found a special hiding spot for some of the Who books back when their fate was being decided, just incase someone got too… trigger-happy and decided to burn them before a decision was made.” Stored alongside several other books with multiple copies. “C’mon, I’ll show you where they are.”

…/…/…/…/…/…|…\…\…\…\…\…

My standards must have been so low they were underground if mere possession of a wholesome moral code was all it took. Well, that and copious muscles. Admittedly fine muscles. And regularly wearing no sleeves, while still being non-threatening, or at least less threatening than every other pair of bare arms in the palace.

…/…/…/…/…/…|…\…\…\…\…\…

In the silence that followed Magnus’ smile fell, the mood started to creep from enchanting back to awkward, and I decided to break the ice and extend the magical moment. “Anyways, nasty revelations and temper tantrums aside, I’m glad we asked about his past.”

“That was a wide berth of fascinating information.”

“But there’s still so much more I want to know.”

“I’m curious about what it was like when he came into his powers- what sort of impression the various shamen left, if they had any messages or wisdom to impart, if there were any clues as to what he was before then.”

“I want to know what the various cultures of Earth were like, especially the contrasts between them. That’s such a huge range of history, there’s got to be civilizations that rose and fell under similar circumstances with huge, contrasting factors between them.”

“That’s an unusual thing to fixate on.”

“Yeah, but think of it this way- if we know what the differences were between cultures with some constants between them, we can analyze the differences and figure out which were the cause of massive societal differentiation, and which were the results. And with so many centuries, there’s got to be plenty of examples to look at. Like- it’s one thing to get an opinion from scholars who share biases from living in the same era, it’s another to get a first hand account.”

“There are original sources, you know.”

“Yeah, but if we’re going to do a second round of historical tales, it’d be a great time to learn more, well, history. Although, honestly I didn’t think it would be possible for us to get the whole tale of the Emperor’s life in one setting. After all that time, there must be thousands- no, millions of adventures he’s had throughout the eras!”

“Probably less than you think. It would not surprise me if he stayed too far from any local societies to pay much attention, only came out when he sensed a warp predator to vanquish.”

“You don’t think he did anything of interest in those years?” I said.

“Of course not, but you can’t honestly think he just blended in through multiple ages of human history. I can tell you from experience, people tend to notice. And when you have the sort of magnificent presence Father does, it gets even harder to hide.” Magnus said.

I knew then that Magnus would be amazed at how many places an advanced superhuman could hide. How many backwater planets and bustling hive cities we could disappear in. How many places a man could go to get fucked.

“Um.”

For an hour or a year, it didn’t matter to me back in the days when I had escaped from wonderland, but was still falling down the rabbit hole. I had nothing to drag me away. But that’s what happens when someone is betrayed by everyone they-

“Why is your aura all…” I blinked, realizing that Magnus was talking to me, “tense?”

“‘Tense?’” The word came out harsher than I intended, demonstrating his point. Carefully I relaxed my jaw, unclenched my fists, and let out a long breath. It had been a tiring day, and it was better not to let my mind go down a dark route.

“Your emotions are intense enough to…” Magnus trailed off, “Well, they were practically broadcasting themselves just now. But you seem to have calmed down rather quickly.”

It was an acquired skill. One I needed to keep myself from going postal through the palace. “Nothing too bad, I hope.”

“It is a bit disconcerting.” Magnus admitted, “In my experience, one cannot have such an ability without also possessing a warped view of reality.” I thought it a testament to Emperor’s skill with genetics that his son was rather pretty even when he was being petulant.

“Ah.”

“N-not that that’s a bad thing, of course.” Magnus said, quickly. “I just mean- well,” His voice dropped to a mumble, “Oh gods, I’m no good at this.” Raising his voice again, he said, “I mean, hey, why don’t we go, um, find something to distract- I mean, something engaging to do while we wait out Father’s temper tantrum?”

…/…/…/…/…/…|…\…\…\…\…\…

He glanced about at the books on the top shelves and the conspicuously empty bottom rows. “Well the basic principal at the heart of our system is keeping the irreplaceable stuff out of fortress-pillow fights.” I hadn’t meant to be so honest, but the words came out anyways. In my defense, I was not prepared to face Magnus today.

…/…/…/…/…/…|…\…\…\…\…\…

Magnus’ scowl dropped, and he looked at my helmet- not the face of it, but the entire symbol of the Custodes- with wide eyes. Not like he was reading my mind, but like he was reading into me.

…/…/…/…/…/…|…\…\…\…\…\…

Magnus looked away, face flushed slightly. I’d like to think an unspoken understanding passed between us. Magnus eventually turned back to me, but he looked so handsome in the aftermath of that moment of wisdom that I didn’t want to break the spell. Briefly, I wondered if he’d grant me a hug if I asked for one, if only so I could get those muscular arms wrapped around me.

…/…/…/…/…/…|…\…\…\…\…\…

There were more questions I wanted to ask. More things I knew the man I was pretending to be would say.

I wanted to kiss him, right then and there. Wanted it too much for it to be a rational thought. To this day, I’m not sure why you didn’t. Then again I still had my helmet on, and headbutts have never been terribly romantic.

“Erm.” With Magnus’ natural disposition it was hard to tell if he was blushing as hard as I was. “I’ll just… hey, do you want some popcorn?”

“Uh… … I-” He cut me off before I could finish.

“Why don’t I go make some snacks? It’s not like this garbage is going anywhere.”

“I can go get food. Menial tasks are usually my job.”

“No no, I don’t want you to think I can’t take care of myself. It’s fine, I’ll just… go.”

With that he teleported away. I remained for a moment, and my eyes drifted towards the Aquilla symbol on the walls. mind blank yet already certain of what I was going to do.

Six thousand years ago, I never wanted to leave the palace. One day a little under six thousand years ago, I ran away from the palace with no desire to ever return. That vow lasted until the Imperium fell apart, and nobody else was able to stand in the way of a tyrant. But even then, I barely returned to the palace.

I had to leave the palace and the planet before I could put those ghosts to rest.

I spent centuries running from the pain and betrayal in my past. But the ghosts of my brothers weren’t strong enough to keep me celibate for millennia, even if I’m finding old memories rising from the grave more and more these days. It always happens when I’m back in the palace, or when someone reminds me of all I lost.

It’s been a little under six thousand years since I slept with someone who was stronger, or as strong as I am. I’m not sure if it’s because I was never ready to be vulnerable or because it’s so hard to find someone who fits the bill. Now the palace had someone who was beautiful and sexy, someone who- I was sure- wanted me, but also wasn’t so crazy as to pursue any whim of desire. I thought that ‘Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to reclaim one more lost piece of myself.’

I knew that a psyker could easily make me feel things that weren’t my own. I knew this could be a trick for Magnus to manipulate me. I wasn’t underestimating or discounting the possibility. At the time, I just didn’t care.

Rule one: Always make sure you to full, uncoerced consent. The vast majority of Imperial Citizens don’t feel safe telling a superhuman ‘no,’ I had to make sure to avoid those.

          Well I certainly didn’t have to worry about that with a Primarch who could bench-press me

Rule two: Always make sure you want to give your full consent. Especially if you might not be able to back out later.

          That was a good point…

Rule three: Make sure you both go into it knowing exactly what to expect from the other. Don’t assume a once-off is the default, and don’t assume you’re promising monogamy.

          I could easily abide by rule three.

I reached the kitchens quickly. The nice gold ones that the serfs only entered to clean where Astartes lived out whims of being warrior chefs. I found Magnus with his back turned to me and a bowl hovering six feet in the air. Something clicked into place somewhere deep in my mind.

In the seconds before I spoke, I thought to myself, ‘For someone who’s spent a good deal of time avoiding physical contact with some very fine and eager men, I’m about to be rather forward with my affections.’

What came out of my mouth was, “You know, we never did finish our little… discussion.”

The room had seen enough destruction that parts were constantly being replaced, but throughout all the renovations the floor always had a checkered tile pattern.

           //More content here I never included

“Mmmyes, I think that’ll do nicely.” I said, lowering my voice to a purr, letting more of my weight fall against him and perusing his body further.

Magnus responded with jerk and a noise somewhat like an elephant trying to hit all the notes in “Amazing Grace” backwards on a trumpet within three seconds. The pan in his hand flew through the archway opposing me and hit a wall in the hallway with a loud clang.

The sound echoed while the two of us stared at each other.

“I’m sorry, what?” Magnus asked.

“Um-” I look at him. Surely he cannot be serious? Magnus has never-

All at once my world goes cold. Besides me the Magnus of the Tower says, “I mean- I’m not, not complaining exactly, I just want to make sure that you- you said- you were just joking, right?”

He sounded half-bold at first and the illusion of confidence faded away at the end, but I barely processed his babbling. Instead I studied the man in the kitchen. Would I still want him if I hadn’t loved another who shared his name? How much of my desire was genuinely for the person who’d served a Chaos God for ten thousand years and how much of it grew as an extension of what I once had with another Magnus.

Because I still didn’t know how much the different fragments of the Fifteenth Primarch shared together and how much was cultivated by the experiences and memories of each individual. But it only took a few tiny similarities to make the confusion- the way Magnus flicks their hair back when it falls in the pages of a book they’re engrossed in, the way they sway ever so slightly when a story has enraptured them, the way their face goes slack when they see a sight of true wonder.

None of those things had anything at all to do with a person’s humors, temperment, or maturity. I knew that, and yet such small details could easily blind me, make me see an enduring history or a fire-forged bond of trust where none existed.

But as Magnus shifted uncomfortably in the face of my silence, I realized that any proposition from me would be unfair to Magnus. Because I hadn’t finished my rules, and one of them was very important today.

Rule six: Don’t lie about who you are. If you can’t be honest to the people you know, then go find a stranger who’s looking for a stranger.

The rule was mostly an extension of rule one, but in this case the issue wasn’t whatI was so much as whoI was to Magnus.

Should the Crimson King return to Tzeentch, anything he learned would come to the direct attention of the gods. Or what if I told him the truth and he forced me to lead him to the other fragments of Primarch XV, devoured them and made himself whole.

…/…/…/…/…/…|…\…\…\…\…\…

And then a baneblade rode through a hallway just a few dozen meters away from where we were.

“…Well, I’d better get back to work. Please- if you want to take anything else from here, let me know before you do.”

“This should be enough.” Magnus said, levitating roughly three quarters of the books in the closet.

[differentkindapiratemovies-blog]

Photography - Process and Meaning

My initial instinct when it comes to photography is to go out with a camera and shoot black and white stills of the real world. I even played around with self portraits for the first time in my life. But relating my photography work, whatever it was going to be, to the theme of transformation got me thinking. I very much want to make movies, and so how does photography relate to that? I don’t know a lot about photography itself, no photographers really or famous photographs I particularly like but I do know and like how it relates to films, things such as cinematography, composition, you know, basically everything except the image is still. Movies are essentially photographs shown one after another TRANSFORMING not only what we are seeing but the media we are seeing it in. So, my first idea was to write a little film, shoot it frame by frame (most likely with a continuous shooting DLSR camera which i did use) related to theme of transformation and print out every single frame and display it in a gallery like setting. However, this was impractical. Not only would it take a ridiculous amount of time (and printing credits) that I didn’t have. So maybe cut down the idea? How so? Okay, have not a short but a few SHOTS instead. All right, still impractical, especially on my time limit. 

I really thought about transformation, from transformation of the self as in me then to the medium itself to maybe making something to do with werewolves. I often deal with blocks when i come to physically doing something in recent times so I decided one day just to take my camera out to Camden Town just to break that wall down a little. Every time I go i think about how much it’s changed, or maybe at least not how I remember it. When I was growing up I was told Camden was a cool place to be but every time I go with my rose tinted glasses thinking of the times I missed out when real punks roamed the streets. Camden is filled with tourists, wannabes, homeless people, street pedlars trying to cell you CD’s and drugs and rowdy drunk people. Its dirty, its busy, its like the rest of London. Like the heart has been taken from it, never letting me in my time see what London was like. Especially since it has physically changed since I made memories there as a kid; a large part of the market that was unique that I used to spend time in with my family and made memories there was, well, gone. it just wasn't there. Instead, a block of flats being build. How depressing, how modern. 

So i saw a perfect opportunity when I saw a run down shop window with a sign reading Camden market that had yellow tape across it. CAMDEN IS CLOSED, GO HOME is shouted at me, with reflections of visitors and shoppers in the window. Perfect I thought so I started snapping, handheld. Then I played around with it in an editing software. I stared experimenting and then blurring frames over each other and repeating them in a hypnotic montage that could be played on loop for hours in a big dark room as an installation perhaps although I’ve never had much interest in that medium. The short series of photographs, or film, shows that in a sense Camden is dead, suggesting a transformation and showing a transformation in the mediums with photographs sped up becoming moving image then slowing down and stopping becoming a photograph. With an important aspect fading in an out of what can separate the two - sound. 

The reflections, almost Pepper’s Ghost-esque, symbolise the people who once came to Camden and no longer do but could also suggest the hollowness of the people who go there today, or maybe once did. The tape suggests the place is almost long abandoned with only remnants of what was, such as the ghosts of those who were, a cut-off sign, and tape, to suggest the place is no longer looked after and long forgotten. The “ghosts” could also mean the memories that are now just that- memories, hence the jittery imagery being on loop, like a memory replaying in the brain. Then comes in some negative and distorted colors for a brief few moments, yet another transformation, that the place, or the memory of it, is somehow corrupted or not what it used to be. I think I took some inspiration from Malcome Le Grice’s Berlin Horse when I was playing around in the edit, which a few nights in the library playing around with the frames and ideas I had. Then of course the day of shooting which meant a trip up to Camden itself. 

Historically, one moment when still image became motion happened around the 1870s-1880′s when Eadweard Muybridge was asked to take photographs of horses galloping. He would set up a series of cameras and triggers to go off at certain points as the horse galloped through the shots. It was here, the photographer became scientist where he discovered the human eye could not pick up on the fact that all of the horses hooves at a moment were all off the ground. The question is though- did this photographer now scientist accidentally create film/moving image by experimenting with horses? I believe this correlation between photography and moving image relates to my work. 

(See Sketchbook pages for additional things)

Overall I am not that happy with my final piece, Ghosts Of Camden, (although I do quite like the short myself) as I joined late onto this project and did not give myself enough time to really fulfil a project up to my standards. Although i have interest in photography my main passion is film and also where most of my knowledge comes from and the direction I want to go. I am not particularly interested in photography or know much about other practitioners except for its obvious connection to film with cinematography which i do enjoy (Stanley Kubrick himself being a photographer before a film director which is often why his films are very photographic). I also have an interest in Gonzo style going out and being an opportunist. If I had to do anything differently i would, well, go back and do it all differently. I would probably make somethings else, like a werewolf film and print off the frames so I could call it photography, although the fact I did a werewolf movie already put me off this idea. It’s been hard because I’m not very passionate about it and didn't have the time. One hundred hours is a long time for something you can’t get that excited about although in a way it was a relief because I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself with my favoured subjects. I enjoy taking photos, but thats about it. I realise I could of done a lot better both after and during the project. Like all art mine is down to interpretation and eventually the artists intent becomes all but meaningless, presuming of course that anything you ever make will be seen and be taken in.

Transformation Experiment:

I went out and tried to break the ice with the camera, playing around with flowers and the transformations they go through. From growing, to being alive, then dying and being dead, no matter what way they die. The same process all living things and beings go through.

Transformation 1:

The moment a street peddler having a conversation then hugging a stranger. There isn’t a lot to say about this but I take an interest in capturing untouched real moments out in the world. 

Transformation 2: 

The moment a woman bending down to tie her shoe lace, the only person to be at the same height as the nearby homeless man who everybody walks by and pretends isn't there. For the single moment she’s on the same level as the homeless man before she gets up and becomes apart of the moving crowd again, not noticing the man. Also note the homeless man is sitting next to a store front with a “penny sale” sign.

Various Photographs:

A graffiti tag on an advert of woman with the words “I Saw It First”, obviously referring to her fashion however with the frame cut off and with the tag it implies that the tagger himself is saying this about the woman and perhaps the photo is a comment on sexism. 

A young black woman and an old white man walk smiling although looking in different directions, probably seeing different things in the world, though almost harmonise. 

Outside of a gay bar a group of men smile and look at some of the women-orientated sex ads in the phone box. Although one of my attempts at photographing the seedier side of London is in fact a comment on how masculinity could be masking as something else.

A person walks up the street on her smart phone as we see to the right of the frame old disused phone boxes, an image showing the changes of technology.

A homeless person sits has headless people decide not to take notice of him, being distracted by a diversion that we usually pretend to see when walking past homeless people although here is a physical sign. Perhaps something the media doesn’t want us to see? 

Tearing Through Time- Self portraits at different stages torn up and stuck together inconstantly. I don’t do too well with time, I can never seem to keep up with it. This was me expressing that.

Various self portraits trying to capture my own raw emotions going through different stages. I’m not a fan of self portraits, these are probably my first and last attempts. 

Last Transformation 

[apexart-journal]

A New York moment with Mr. Andi Owens.

Mr. Owen’s Harlem: the Civil Rights History walking tour in Harlem was canceled, but I didn’t know until I had arrived. What ensued was a fairly typical New York moment a meeting that was serendipitous and equally enriching as a history tour. I am often saddened to see and experience the physical and visual changes of Harlem a neighborhood that historically has a regal impact. IT just further signals the grip of unaffordability has on this city and how so many of us are so impacted. The historical Black neighborhood often considered the mecca, is no exception. The massive brownstones, the ornate pre-war buildings and large avenues with tree lined malls separating the sides. It is undeniable the impact gentrification has had resulting in a change both visually -with new glass and steel buildings and psychically with the emotional impact long time residents feel when their neighborhood is changed and become unsustainable. Harlem Heritage tours was created by a Harlemite to allow Harlem to be presented by locals who have first hand experience, knowledge, and history in the neighborhood the HH tours gives an authentic view of the rich neighborhood. Enter Mr. Owens - 

Andi Owens is a gem, a spry and energetic man who moved to Harlem in 1959 to attend Columbia University 

 I entered the storefront looking for my tour and once we realized it was canceled He started to tell me more about the organization. The storefront is filled with what turns out to be Mr. Owens personal collection of art and artifacts documents of American history - paintings, collages, photographs, and sculptures, Street signs, and piles of newly printed t-shirts and sweatshirts - a recent addition to the organization to help financially since Covid- has resulted with tremendous loss of tourism. Mr. Owens and I chopped it up for over an hour, going back and forth with a familiar rapport, sometimes it was a quiz and both of us deferring to my IPhone to settle the debate. 

We talked about NYC real estate about securing rent stabilized housing and how when I turn 65 I will be eligible for rent assistance from the city if I just hold on until then. We talked about Strivers Row and how those homes were being bought by out of towners for 10million dollars. We connected about coming to NYC as young artists to go to school and then never left. He shared his time at Columbia University where he founded the Queens Rebels, a classical theater group that he would direct for 3 years until he could enroll for his senior year because the University president had charge The Queens Rebels $3000 for the folding chairs used for the performance - a performance that nonetheless received rave reviews and featured Olympia Dukakis as the lead - he this charge prohibited him from returning to graduate but he went on to become a Rockefeller Fellow as well as a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institute.

We spoke art, he was friends with Romare Bearden describing how all the artists in Harlem would visit Romi downtown in his studio, we spoke about Jacob Lawrence and how in Mr. Owens opinion he didn’t get enough recognition because his wife moved them to Seattle. We spoke out the terrible debacle that was the Harlem on My Mind show at the Met in 1969. We shared our love for trash picking in NYC and how artists can find such treasures and I described the doors, windows, and screens I have found in addition to furniture. On the gallery tour of the two walls bursting with work he identified some of the High end frames he found on the sidewalk. We discussed the trial of Derek Chauvin and George Floyd’s murder - all taking place in his hometown of Minneapolis. 

We had quite a few laughs and he let me know that he was 92 and feeling fine. He told me to come back for my tour and left me with  Shirley Chisholm sweatshirt as a gift... 

All of these bright bits and spots of the conversation are just a glimpse into a Mr. Owen’s charm and importance. His voice is one that can lead and inform others He is witty and so happy to share. His love of Harlem and history is Palpable. He founded Genesis 2  a museum hat will open soon that he has donated his entire collection of document, ephemera, art, objects, and letters.. He said he can’t take it with him, but clarified he will be cremated and made the plans so no one has to worry, but we both laughed that although he can’t take it with him he can join his collection and his remains can be part of the collection he said Thank You !! haha 

We had a great afternoon sitting in the dimly lit storefront office/gallery/shop -with the spotlights lighting the artwork,  he gave me a tour without leaving the leather cushioned bench that was positioned directly below a painting of Harriet Tubman, a work we analyzed together and then discussed her statue not too far from where we were sitting. the more we looked at works the more we our conversation traveled time and space- we spoke of of Malcolm X and MLK Jr, we spoke about the FBI and the bourgeoisie  Every work had a story that led our conversation in a new direction always connecting to back to Harlem 

[howardlinkedin]

Debriefing (And Other Bad Jokes) Part 4

Part 3 here: x

Next, Part 5: http://howardlinkedin.tumblr.com/post/168953427738/debriefing-and-other-bad-jokes-part-5

Summary: Slightly less ridiculous chapter about museum heists, unless your name is Howard Link, in which everything is still ridiculous, while Allen asks the Important Questions.

There are only three people who know the entire story of how Yuu Kanda went from absolutely loathing Allen Walker to something like positive, relationship affirming emotions. (No one can  make Kanda admit things like “love” or “romance,” even if they threatened death. Honestly, even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to succeed, seeing as the man would break the idiot who dared make threats in the first place inches away from death’s door.)

First there was the Bookman- which should be obvious given his skill set. The redhead even bragged about knowing the two were bound to become...whatever they were long before they even knew it. This bragging usually got a sword uncomfortably close to his crotch.

Next was Lenalee, who was Allen’s best friend and confidant. She actually had a front row seat to the drama that was Kanda’s and Allen’s relationship coming to a head. This was something she often reminded Allen when he was being particularly annoying, due to the fact that she had recorded most of it on her phone, and she was not afraid to use it.

Last, and probably the most baffling, was Johnny Gill. Baffling, because the forensic examiner hardly even made an appearance at the Department, choosing to spend his time at the Crime Labs. Lenalee and Lavi often wondered how the smaller man fit into this equation, since he was never around when the officers in question usually interacted.

Argued.

Violently flirted.

Everyone else working in or associated with the Black Order Police Department were simply secondhand observers. Many got whiplash when word actually got out that Kanda and Walker were A Thing.

---

Whatever Thing the two decided to be, was the question of the century. Only Allen and Kanda knew what, exactly, they were to each other, but it was there and sometimes it was less violent and more on the sweet side.

If you squint.

---

Noise Marie was the Order’s top surveillance specialist. At every stakeout, he was there, hidden away in a van, abandon building or any other nondescript location to listen in on the goings on with the officers under his care to watch.

Or rather, not so much watch.

Noise, legally blind that he was, could only listen. Which made his name rather ironic, which he was very well aware of, thank you very much.

The lack of proper sight never stopped him from being the best at what he does, however. No one questioned how his unique skill set works, but altogether accepted at the Order regardless.

So when the tell-tale buzz of the speakers tickled in, he responded immediately.

“This is Marie.”

“Allen here-” (In the background, Noise could hear the new Detective Inspector chide. “Walker, don’t give your name out in the middle of a job!”  The chiding was moot considering Link just also have out the rest of the officer’s name.

“Okay fine, Eagle One-” “I’m Eagle One.” Kanda grunted over his own communication. “Darling, only when I let you.”)

“I’m listening.” Marie tried not to sound amused. It was hard, but he was a professional and this was a job.

A high stakes job.

---

Once again, Link was able to actually do his job, and this time it looked more promising to be solved than the current murder case.

He listened and traded notes with Inspector Galmar, who had, up until now, been the only detective assigned to the Phantom G case.

(At the debriefing, Allen had commented that it was a rather cute name for a thief. Allen also though Kanda was cute when on the verge of homicide, so Link decided the officer’s opinion of anything was to be mad ravings of a crazy man.)

“And you say that somehow, anyone arrested during this case has been framed?” Link flipped through the stack of prints of the literal dozen fingerprints uncovered from every scene of the crime.

Galmar sighed heavily. “Yes, the problem we don’t know how or have any evidence besides obvious intuition. Unfortunately, the law can’t let anyone free from arrest just on those grounds.”

Unfortunate indeed, considering that all who were arrested claimed to never have been near the areas where valuables have been stolen. But, as far as the law was concerned, fingerprints don’t lie.

“So.” Walker, who had been a silent observer, until now, leeched himself at Link’s side and stared at the images. “This kid is able to lift copies of multiple prints from several officer, who happen to always be on site during a stake out, plant them and then make off with the loot?”

Link’s brow ticked at the loss of his personal space and elbowed the officer away. “Walker, let me work.”

He paused, narrowing in on the other’s comment. “You said ‘kid.’”

Allen grinned like a cheshire. “I did.” “And why,” Link’s suspicion once again rising. “Do you believe the thief is a kid? Clearly this level of skill is not something a mere child could do.”

Shrugging, Allen had the gall to look innocent and doe eyed. “No reason.”

“Walker.”

“Howard.”

Howard Link decided then and there he needed to make a doctors appointment for the amount of migraines he continued to suffer.

---

“I thought you were supposed to casing the layout of the museum.”

“I did.” Allen chirped. The Detective Inspector pinched the bridge of his nose. “Walker, you literally have been standing behind me this entire time. What part of that is casing anything?” Phantom G, as the acclaimed thief signed their M.O as, was most often known by the many notices they leave announcing their future plans of theft. The most frustrating aspect of their taunts was that they always delivered them to the scene where they threaten to loot, and always naming said object they are wanting to steal.

No matter the security, the Phantom always, always got away with it. With false fingerprints left behind, the accused unconscious with the very same mask as the Phantom over their face.

It was a wonder the entire team working on the case thus far hadn’t quit out of frustration.

Especially considering how utterly ridiculous the masks were. What with the bright, flashy neon yellow.

This time, the threat was at the local museum, which happened to house a very expensive and very historical crown.

“I saw the glass case where the crown was.” Came Allen’s cheeky reply, as though that was all he needed to see.

And maybe it was? Because Link was beginning to believe that despite all of Walker’s oddities and nuances, they always worked.

---

Link took a glance around the open space of the museum. “Where is Officer Kanda?”

Allen waved a hand as if to portray ‘don’t worry!’

“He’s doing a better job than I am at canvasing the entire area.”

Because that’s what Kandas do, apparently. And Allens just pester and waste time around actual hard working investigators.

---

“Anyway,” Allen continued over the communication to Marie. “Quick question, and it’s very important that you answer.” “Yes?” Noise turned a dial at his soundstation, making the frequencies of the white noise in the area more clear.

“What are you getting me for my birthday?”

(“WALKER.”

The surveillance specialist could hear Kanda sigh over the detectives reprimand.)

“Because I’ve been thinking of a hat. A large fluffy warm hat. Maybe a matching scarf.”

(“Walker, we are WORKING now is not the time to-”

“Jesus Christ shut up, both of you.”)

This is when the museum alarms are set off.

---

Arrested was yet another framed officer, with the crown missing and Officer Allen Walker-

Well. He was engaging in an actual chase with the presumed true thief.

On the rooftops.

Link had to at least admit that the other man was dedicated to his job.

---

The thief- Phantom G, in all their neon glory, hopped, jumped and mauvered the rooftops with the skill only someone who understand the layout could accomplish.

“Hey, you know maybe bright colors weren’t the best idea in this situation.”

Unless your name is Allen Walker, in which case he somehow managed the ability to maneuver just as, if not more, fluid after the thief and the crown.

Said thief gasped, and nearly tripped when the officer swung from a railing and landed just in front of them. They made an attempt to dash to the right, but Allen, quick as he was, flashed the crown at the Phantom’s face.

Well, assumed face anyway. It was hard to tell, what with the huge mask and all.

“Sorry, but this is mine now.”

“WALKER! You can’t keep stolen property!” Link chose that moment to leap to the roof also.

Phantom G took the momentary distraction of the Detective to leap from the side of the building and slide down the emergency fire exit.

Allen put the crown on his head and followed suit, all smiles.

And Link? Well Link followed after because Walker You Can’t Put That on your Head It’s Valuable!

---

Once on ground, the thief shot their arm out and Allen yanked the Detective with him to slide down the ally and out of the way.

Inspector Howard Link did not squeak, he most certainly did not, no matter what Officer Allen Walker says. (Noise Marie caught it all on tape, and he is very sorry for the man’s dignity and pride.)

The wall where they had landed was sliced through with thin threads, almost invisible if not for the moonlight.

Allen’s smile dropped off his face.

“You know, a lot of people just had their lives ruined by you. Do you really want to add manslaughter to the list?” “Shut up!” Finally, the thief spoke. They sounded young, too young.

Link didn’t have time to analyze further, and took the moment to dash out and kick their legs from under them and slapped one wrist with handcuffs. They yelled in surprise.

“Link! Move!”

The detective barely had time to flinch away before the same threads as before shot from the Phantom’s free hand and into Link’s shoulder.

With a grunt, the blonde rolled away, holding the wound to stave the bleeding. The threads were very sharp indeed.

Suddenly, the threads were sliced through, and Kanda shot out like a bullet from seemingly nowhere at the thief. “If you want to play like an adult, then play with me.”

The other man had a grin what Link could only describe as maniacal.

The thief, no the kid, which was what they could only be, because they were too small and wiry to have been an adult, and their voice too, too young, let out a sudden screech in fear at the swordsman. They leapt up and clambered over window sills in an attempt to escape.

Their retreat was cut short when Kanda sliced the wall nearest their hand, impaling his sword clean through. “You really should rethink your actions right now.” The officer was as serious as they ever were, and the warning in their words were as sharp and dangerous as his sword.

The air was quiet for exactly two seconds before it was filled with sharp wailing. The Phantom Thief G slid down to the grown, heaving. The mask was becoming soaked with tears.

“Jesus Christ you’re loud.” Kanda complained, which was not really the time or place, but still altogether a very good observation.

The wailing and crying was indeed very loud and very shrill.

---

With the mask off, Phantom Thief G, as deduced by Allen earlier that day (and Link still demands to know how the officer figured that, much to his ever mounting frustration) a kid.

No more than nine years of age, identified by Marie as Timothy Hearst, was cuffed and placed into the awaiting police vehicle.

With Allen, who deemed it acceptable to coddle the criminal, and let himself be sobbed on in the back of the car.

“Walker, kid or not he’s still a-” “Shh Link, you’re scaring him.”

“NEED I REMIND YOU that he could have very well killed us, and managed to stab my arm.” The Detective hissed. His arm still hurt, mind. Miranda, who was also on standby, had wrapped it. The kid’s wailing only intensified. “I’m- I’M SORRY!!!” He bellowed.

“See, he’s sorry.” “Walker.”

Kanda ignored them all and snached the very expensive and valuable crown from his partner’s head and handed it over to Inspector Galmar. Allen ‘awed’ in disappointment.

Everything was too ridiculous anymore.

---

Timothy had cried himself to sleep in the Order’s jail cell. Wrapped in no less than three blankets and five downey pillows piled around him. 

No one commented on this.

In his office, Commissioner Lee read over Link’s report. “How could a child have this level of skill?” He inquired.

Allen, who commandeered the room’s only couch, piped up before the Inspector could respond, literally taking the words from his mouth. “He had help. No kid could ever pull this off without proper training.”

His silver eyes were far off, and Link didn’t like it. He also did not like how Walker obviously knew more than he let on.

Link was the detective, it was his job. Yet Officer Allen Walker was able to deduce just as fast and as much as he could.

“Training?” Still, he pressed on. Confrontations would happen later.

The white haired officer hummed, eyes flashing back to the present. “Yeah. Those needle threads aren’t something easily handled without being trained in them. No normal nine year old would ever have a working knowledge of them.”

“I see.” And Link did see. He also agreed. “I believe also that Hearst had help. To pre plan exactly who to frame and have them be an officer that would be stationed during each and every heist? There’s someone else working in the shadows.”

Commissioner Lee scowled at the thought of a kid having been wrapped up in this mess. It left a sour taste in his mouth. “Do we have any leads as to who, though, is the question.”

The Detective Inspector was at a loss there.

“Sheryl Kamelot.” Allen named, looking for all the world the most serious he has ever been. “This reeks of Noah, and Sheryl would be our best bet.”

Komui straighten at the names, and leaned on his elbows. “Explain Officer.” He demanded of his subordinate.

Allen also leaned forward, unconsciously flexing his scarred hand. “Sheryl’s pride in the Noah consists of finding kids who show talent, any talent really, and exploiting them in anyway.

Stealing, information gathering, murder - there’s no limit to what he’d train a child to do. My guess is that Timothy is rather new into the fold, which was why he was scared easily enough to surrender. Anyone worth their scuff in the Noah would have needed a lot more to put them into submission.”

Howard Link frowned, scowled, and tensed the longer Walker spoke. Because, how, how, how! How does the young officer know this? Where did he get this information? To have such an understanding of one of the Noah, was nothing short of terrifying.

Did he learn this during his arrest of Tyki Mikk? Or was it before during investigation? But, as far as Link knew, Walker was not assigned the Noah case first hand. That was General Cross Marian. Did Walker learn this from his mentor? Was Cross actually reporting directly to his adopted son, and both were keeping quiet?

Why wasn’t the Commissioner demanding these details?

There were too many questions surrounding Allen Walker, and Link despised the lack of answers.

---

Once away from the Commissioner’s office and steps down the hall, Link demanded his answers. “How? How do you have such knowledge?” His voice was thick with distrust and accusations that he hadn’t outright stated. The implication was still there, regardless. “And for that matter, how are you able to follow thieves across rooftops and spy those threads? You said it yourself it takes training. What are you hiding Allen Walker?”

They had both stopped their descent down the hall.

Contrary to their pause, Kanda was making his way to them, but by his movement he was in no hurry.

Allen only smiled that alarming and guileless smile of his that renders everyone around him defenseless but also paranoid at the same time. “Oh Link, you should have put the pieces together by now. You’ve read my file after all.”

If Link believed in in such things, he could have sworn the air turned chill and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

He couldn’t even deny it, not with Kanda now directly behind his partner, like the shadow he always was. Tucked at his arm was Walker’s file, which had been stolen from Link’s apartment nights before.

[lokischocolatefountain]

An Act of Political Sacrifice

Part: (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)

Fandom: Hamilton (Modern AU)

Pairing: Alex x Eliza

Rating: PG for swearing

Word count: 1.9k words

Warning: Historical inaccuracies for the sake of convenience, Philip is a baby, adultery, angst, inappropriate language, nightmares, arguments

Summary: Elizabeth Hamilton, with a wonderful career, loving husband, and a child, is satisfied in life. How does she handle it when her husband who could never be satisfied pulls the rug out from under her, destroying everything she held close to her heart?

Alexander Hamilton had all that he never dreamt of having, as an orphaned teenage boy who had no hope for his next meal. He had been the longest-serving Treasury Secretary and earned most people's love and respect for helping his country out of one of the biggest economic crisis they had seen. He made money. He made so much money, he didn't have to go without good food for a month to buy a book. Most of all, he had a family. His father only rarely replied to his texts, his brother hadn't spoken to him for over a decade, but he had his sweet Betsey who bore his ring around her finger, and his name in her heart. They had their baby who was the perfect product of their love. 

He had a home with them. It was small and humble in comparison to the mansion in which his wife was raised. Often, he felt guilty for pulling her out of a house whose bathroom was as big as their living room, but she was more than just content with their home. Eliza had decorated every part of it, with so much attention to every detail. 

Eliza chose the wooden flooring, the dark gray couch with the yellow pillows that all looked different, but somehow looked really pretty. There was the grey and white rug over which the coffee table rested. He chuckled lightly at the memory of him whining about how the living room looked too cheerful for his personality and persuaded her to let him choose the boring off-white curtains that matched the walls. She thought it looked ugly, but let him keep it anyway because it was the first time he involved himself in home decoration. 

Years later, he laid on the gray couch, clutching her pillow and tearing up at the memories of her because it was all he had, a week after he released the pamphlet. They had gone into a convenient routine very easily. She'd drop Philip at the daycare, he'd pick him up in the evening and drop him of the next morning for her to pick up that evening. He had messaged her and left several voicemails, drunk and sober. She hadn't responded to any of them, and rightfully so. 

It was only a week since he last kissed her goodbye. It was that morning, and he could recall kissing her seconds longer than usual before she got into her car to go to her practice. She was taking Philip because the daycare was closed, he didn't ask why. It was only a week, but it felt longer. He had become so used to her touch that the lack of it was excruciating. 

It wasn't the last time he saw her, though. Nate called him past midnight, panicking about a picture of his wife captured by some gossip magazine. The quality and angle of the picture were all bad, just like the condition of the photograph's subject. She looked so small, so defeated and so unlike his strong Eliza who stood tall despite her small physical frame. 

Alex easily got the magazine to refrain from printing the picture by threatening a lawsuit. He had hurt Eliza enough, she didn't need more public humiliation after what he had done. He hoped foolishly that she would understand why he did it, though. 

Alex always had several advisors who knew just the right thing to do in any particular situation, but he always consulted his wife's opinions and they were all similar, if not the same as his own. She refrained from political talk with others, but that boundary was absent in their relationship like several other boundaries. He'd ask and she'd readily say what she thought of an issue. This issue, he couldn't discuss with her. So, he just assumed that she would understand his decision. 

Peggy was pissed when he texted her about it. You're so fucking dense, Alex! You hurt her and your first thought is why didn't she support me? Oh god! Angelica, when she came to collect Eliza's clothes, sarcastically congratulated him on his invention of the purest form of stupidity. 

He visited the Schuyler mansion in hopes that he would get to meet her, but she declined to enter the premises until, and in her words, the cheating prick took his ass back to his apartment. So, he did. Even the security of the mansion seemed bummed about his presence. It was only then that he truly believed that she was gone from his life, entirely. 

So, when he woke up on his couch, sweating and screaming from his nightmare at 3:00 AM to Eliza, he believed he was still sleeping because she couldn't possible here, could she? She held him like she always did after his nightmares of his mother, poverty, and war and then he was sure that she was truly there because even with all the power of his incredible mind, he couldn't simulate what Eliza's touch felt like. Like a lost man in a desert dreaming of water would know the difference between the effect of imagined versus real water, he knew her touch when he got it. He cried her name into her chest too many times, and she probably cried a bit too, before he fell asleep in her arms. 

"We need to talk," was the first thing he had heard from her in really long and he was glad, even though it was the most dreaded sentence in any relationship.

 Eliza wore the white sundress with cherries on it, her hair was tied up in a pony and there no trace of make-up in her face. She sat on a small yellow stool in the nursery, and both their mood and their conversation were too grim for the colorful room. 

"I'm so sorry, Betsey," he said as he kneeled in front of her to get to her eye level. There was no response from her, and she wouldn't even look him in the eye. He tried to take her hands in his, but she flinched away from his as though she was afraid his touch would contaminate her. For what felt like hours, but only six minutes according to the elephant-shaped wall-clock, the only sound in the room was of their breathing. 

"Please say something," he begged and she still wouldn't look up. He got off the floor and stepped away from her. 

"Eliza," he said sternly. 

"I don't know what I was thinking. It was a stupid, stupid mistake, and I hate every bit of myself for what happened. But, we can't solve this if we don't talk about it. So, please, please cooperate with me!" He cried, and she sighed loudly.

 "How many times?" she asked, finally looking up at him. Her eyes were red and her nose was pink, and he knew she had been crying a lot. 

"What?" He furrowed his eyebrows in confusion. 

"How many times did you cheat on me?" She asked with a pointed look, as if daring him to answer. 

"I- I-," he stuttered. 

"You cheated on me too many times to keep a count count?" He knew exactly, the number of times he had sex with Maria Reynolds, but if he confessed, it would only hurt her more. 

It was his turn to remain silent. 

"You wanted to talk! Now, why don't you open that stupid mouth of yours and answer me, Hamilton?" She yelled as she got of the stool. 

"I don't recall." 

"Oh, well hello Jeff Sessions," she laughed mockingly, while she clapped. If he wasn't on the other end of her mockery, he would've praised her quick sense of humor. He only hoped for the ground to swallow him whole. 

"Describe her to me, then," she said. 

"What?" 

"Did I stutter?" she spat. 

"She's tall and slim. Curly hair, I guess," His world-renowned eloquence was dead by then. 

"Was she good?" she sounded desperate to know everything, and he felt like his head was about to burst. 

"No." 

"You liar! Why would you go behind my back and have sex with some girl for an entire year if you didn't like it?" She was suddenly up on her feet and leaving the nursery. He followed, trying to say anything that would get her to listen to his apologies. 

"Eliza-" She didn't even seem to be paying attention to his words because she continued. She stopped in her steps as though she suddenly realized something. 

"Unless. Oh my God! Were you in love with her?" She asked, turning to face him. Her eyes were brimming with tears, threatening to spill anytime. 

"What! No, no, no, no! You know I love only you," he insisted. How was he going to prove it to her? Fuck! 

"What do I know, Alexander? I knew you would never, ever hurt me this bad, but you did. I knew you would keep the promises you made to me on our wedding, but you didn't. I knew for sure that you would never sleep with another woman but you clealy did! I don't even know who you are!" She sobbed, and the terrible sound seeped into ever pore of his body and it hurt like a million sharp needles.

 "No, you know me. I love you-" He held her face in his palms, and for a second, she looked convinced but then she slapped his hands away. 

"Don't say that! You don't mean it!" Her voice was so sorrowful, it hurt. 

"No, I do! I love-" 

"You slept with another woman for a year, Alexander! I don't think that gesture screams love," she yelled. 

There was silence for too long for his liking. Alexander wanted desperately for the silence to be gone. He waited for her to say something as they sat together on their living room floor, far apart from each other. 

What she said next made him regret his longing for the uncomfortable silence to be over. Having to watch her cry from a distance and not being allowed to comfort her was terrible, but nothing close to the stab he felt in his chest when she said that. 

Hamilton knew he could lose his memory, but he would remember every detail of that moment. He had experienced the worst pain when his mother passed away too young, he knew the pain of not having enough meals to sustain life, he knew the pain of watching deaths repeately in a war, but not even the sum of them could compare to what he felt when she spoke those words. 

"Do you want a divorce?" 

He did not. He didn't have to write a fucking paper on the pros and cons of divorcing Eliza Hamilton to arrive at the conclusion that he didn't want to spend life without her as his wife. He knew that he needed her in his life to be able to breath normally. Just a week without her was suffocating enough and having her back in their home felt like the plastic bag tied to his head was finally pulled off. 

A lifetime of that was a death sentence. 

But, he had to think about her. He spent such a long time trying to satisfy his insatiable self that he went to the point of cheating on the woman he loved more than life itself and yet, he wasn't satisfied. 

What if she wanted a divorce? 

"Do you?" 

[positive-magazine]

Have you ever gone through an old photo album? While you leaf through those pages, protecting dear and beloved memories, it is impossible not to be touched by that bittersweet sense of nostalgia that goes along with old photos. Like Proust’s madeleine, those images will take you back to how things used to be… despite the fact that those memories might not even be yours: those recollections might belong to your parents, ancestors or even to strangers, yet sentimentality prevails, taking materiality through the yellowish and faded tone of old prints. It is a peculiarity of film, like an ancient spell.

Courtesy of The Rescued Film Project

Preserving that spell is the enormous task that the Rescued Film Project, a couple of years ago, decided to get involved with: in acquiring undeveloped rolls in every possible way, they try to keep strangers’ forgotten photographic memories alive. Film is a degradable material, if not held properly or developed, images lightly start to disappear from it.

[quote_box name=””]These moments never made it into photo albums, or framed neatly on walls.  We believe that these images deserve to be seen, so that the photographer’s personal experiences can be shared. Forever marking their existence in history.[/quote_box]

Like time travellers opening time capsules, like archaeologists revealing ancient secrets, the Rescued Film Project already had the chance to come across captivating stories, for example in 2015 they found 31 rolls of film taken from a WW2 soldier. In 2016 they discovered 1,200 rolls of film shot by one photographer in the 1950s, thanks to crowdfunding they managed to get enough money to developed them, saving Paul’s memory from oblivion.

Courtesy of The Rescued Film Project

Levi Bettweiser is the main man behind this beautiful idea, we had the chance to ask him a few questions:

P: Can you tell us how the project started? L: As a film photographer, I’m always on the hunt for cameras in thrift stores, antique shops, etc. About 5 years ago I started noticing that many of the cameras I was looking at still had film in them. Since I was processing my own film I decided, because I was curious, to start buying cameras, even ones I didn’t want, just to acquire the film inside. Once I had enough rolls, about 30, to justify the time and cost, I processed them. I was really surprised at how many images there were still on the film. I had assumed most of the cameras had been opened, ruining the film. I realized that if I could get several hundred images from the rolls just in my local area, that there must be thousands of rolls still out there from around the world. So I actively started searching for them and the result was The Rescued Film Project.

P: How do you get the rolls?  L: We get rolls from all over the world. They come to us as donations from Rescued Film supporters. But the majority of the rolls we acquire are purchased directly by us from stores, auctions, and other random places.

Courtesy of The Rescued Film Project

P: What are the problems you encounter when developing  old film – are light parameters written on the rolls you find? Which one was the oldest you found? L: We have the most trouble processing color film because there have been so many different times with their own unique chemical processes. Black and white film really hasn’t changed all that much in regards to how it is processed. We often are forced to process color film as black and white which can cause the images to be very dense or thin. Also with old film, exposure to moisture is very common which causes mold to fuse to the emulsion. Moisture and heat can also make film very brittle. We often have film just disintegrate in our hands when attempting to work with it.

P: Are you the only one taking care of the developing process? L: Yes The Rescued Film Project is pretty much a 1 man operation. This includes the film processing and scanning, but also social media, website, acquiring film, and notification of film status to anyone who has donated film.

P: Did you manage to find out more about the stories behind the rolls? And there is a story that’s particularly dear to you?  L: We rarely find out anything about a roll, its origin, or the images it contains. Every once in awhile we are able to identify a location within a roll or a famous person. But the vast majority of our 30,000 images have no supporting information.

Courtesy of The Rescued Film Project

P: I read you found 1200 rolls from the same photographer – Rescued Paul – or about those rolls belonging to a soldier who fought in WWII. Are they still “unknown”?  L: Yes the photographer is still unknown. But most of the locations in which the images were taken have been identified. For the “Paul” film we are in contact with his children and have started learning more about who he was.

P: While Vivian Maier has now become a globally known example – and a “blockbuster” exhibition – her story proves how much beauty can be hidden in privately held films yet, referring to the films you developed: what if those picture were never to be revealed? Is this something you thought about? L: This is the main driving force of the project. We believe that all images, however mundane, are important for a few reasons. 1. They were important to someone and had meaning to them. So we feel those images deserve to be revealed even though we may never understand the true context behind them. 2.  The images in the archive document a part of the human experience that we rarely see showcased.  Since most of the images in the archive are shot by amateur photographers of their personal lives, they document our collective personal experiences as human beings. When you got to museums, you primarily only see photos of moments that have large historical significance. But how we lived and what we did every day should also have relevance to future generations.

Courtesy of the Rescued Film Project

P: Considering the decline of film photography, has it become more expensive to get the chemicals you need for the developing process?  L: The expense of processing film is still pretty reasonable.  There has been a resurgence and increased interest in film shooting and processing over the last 5 or so years which i believe is still keeping the medium alive.

P: Did you submit these rolls to museums or galleries? Are they interested?  L: We initially reached out to a few places regarding the WWII images but wasn’t met with any interest.

P: What’s the goal of the project?  L: To create a vast online archive of rescued film images where people can go to view, research, and potentially help reconnect images with the people in them, or who shot them.

We hope for this project to meet as much support as possible, because to peak into these photographic moments, to imagine the smell of rain or the warmth of summer breeze, to think about the lost words behind these pictures is something to hold on to. If you want to submit films to the Rescued Film Project click here.

If you are interested in other articles on photography click here.

The Rescued Film Project Have you ever gone through an old photo album? While you leaf through those pages, protecting dear and beloved memories, it is impossible not to be touched by that bittersweet sense of nostalgia that goes along with old photos.

[robwilsonimages]

Reading Images

Rob Wilson

Blog Entry 2

28th October 2019

The previous article discussed the necessity of applying critical thought to your images as a photographer. In this entry, I shall apply ‘Critical thinking as a careful and sensitive reading of the text’ (Moore, 2013, p. 514) to two of Stephen Shore’s images from Uncommon Places (2015). ‘Uncommon Places’ is a critical resource for my own MA project. It serves as both an inspiration and a reference point. Therefore, an understanding and detailed analysis of the book is vital as I move forward with my own work.

 Reading Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places

Reading and interpreting a photograph is difficult. As Burgin (2003, p. 131) states:

‘The intelligibility of the photograph is no simple thing; photographs are texts inscribed in terms of what we may call ‘photographic discourse’, but this discourse, like any other, engages discourse beyond itself, the ‘photographic text’, like any other, is the site of a complex ‘intertextuality’, an overlapping series of previous texts taken for granted at a particular cultural and historical conjunction.’

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s most famous image illustrates the challenges of understanding this ‘intertextuality’ of meaning.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint Lazare, 1932

Cartier-Bresson’s own words illustrate his feelings and intentions about his work. It applies perfectly to this image.

‘Above all, I craved to see the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.’ (1952, in Scott (2007), p. 212)

This is photography’s decisive moment, yet it is viewed in multiple ways. For Time magazine (2015, pp. 190-191) the jumping man ‘evoke[s] the dancers in the poster behind him’, and the image was ‘a masterpiece of form and light’. For Clarke (1997, p. 208), ‘The image is full of humour, of irony, but also full of implied philosophical reflection on what the moment might mean and how it is to be read’. Philip Jones-Griffiths viewed the photograph very differently. For him, the photography was a harbinger of the doom that was to strike Europe. He noted the Jewish name on the wall, the wreckage in the water, and the man jumping ‘into the unknown’.

‘He (Bresson-Cartier) was Nostrodamus. He predicted what was going to happen to Europe in that one single image.’ (The Genius of Photography, 2007)

There is no single reading of any one image. Fortunately, the work of photographers, cultural theorists, and semioticians has provided us with means with which to analyse and interpret photographs. A particularly useful toolset was provided by Shore himself in The Nature of Photographs (2007), most particular the four factors used to consider images at a ‘depictive level’ (pp. 37-96). These are: flatness, frame, time, and focus. Additionally, Bate (2016, pp. 25-43) offers a guide to semiotic analysis, most usefully in his discussion of rhetoric in photography (pp. 35-43). It is these tools that will be used to ‘read’ two images from Uncommon Places (Shore, 2015).

 Placing Shore’s Work

Shore’s Uncommon Places is difficult to place in any particular photographic genre; it is neither conventional landscape photography as notably made by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, or Faye Godwin, nor is it documentary photography produced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Don McCullin, Raghubir Singh among countless others. Yet, it contains elements of both. It documents American towns, cities, parks, and life, but is formalised in the style of classic landscape photography as, like many of the most notable landscape photographers, Shore made the images using a large-format view camera which requires a notoriously slow and meticulous shooting process.

Soutter (2013, p. 34), when discussing Church Street and Second Street, Easton, Pennsylvania, 1974, states that:

‘The viewpoint of the image places us right on the street and makes us aware of the photographer’s physical presence.’

This is not just true of this image, but of all those in Uncommon Places. The viewer is there on the street next to Shore as he works. Equally, the German photographic artist, Hilla Becher, felt that Shore represented the places he photographed with warmth and fondness (Soutter, 2013, p. 34). His generosity towards the geography of American and attention to detail are present in every single image.

Stephen Shore, Horseshoe Bend Motel, Lovell, Wyoming, July 16, 1973 (2015, p. 23)

Like much of Shore’s work, many would consider it banal. The image, with its absence of people, feels deliberately static. Yet, analysis reveals a meticulously composed image.  When we first examine it, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the sign on the left for ‘Horseshoe Bend Motel’. Our eyes pause for a moment before moving to the vivid first rainbow and the larger hotel sign on the right. We then move forward in a shallow ‘C’ curve through the picture from the lorry and its trailers, to the old trucks, before we finally rest on the green car. It is only on a further viewing do we notice the second rainbow.

The physical photograph itself may be flat, but the image is full of depth and detail. The placement of the vehicles, at clock points, is remarkable. The lorry is at almost two o’clock, the aquamarine truck at three o’clock, the blue truck at five, and the green car at seven. The framing suggests a world continuing beyond. The roads heading out of the frame hint that a journey lies beyond what we see. We cannot see the front of the green car. Where does it point? What is in front of it?

The America of this picture is in 1973 and it is a dark time in its history. It was the year of the crimes of Watergate. US involvement in the Vietnam War was reaching an unsuccessful conclusion with the withdrawal of American troops and the initial release of POWs. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was, despite summits between the two, still at its height. From October, the global economy is rocked by the Oil Crisis introduced by OPEC as a response to the backing of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. 

Yet, in the image, time seems lost. The place appears slightly dated and forgotten even for its time; the blue and aquamarine trucks far predate the image hinting at a more innocent pre-Vietnam America. However, beyond some slightly overgrown grass, the scene is not shabby or broken. The hotel signage is well kept, but their dull browns emphasize the forgottenness further still. It is devoid of human life. The hotel sign begs us to return, but the viewer will only return to the picture and not to the place nor to the America before Vietnam. Yet, there is a hint of hope. The rainbows and clearing cloud encourage us to look to a brighter future and better things to come for the Horseshoe Bend Motel, and for America itself.

Stephen Shore, Church Street and Second Street, Easton, Pennsylvania, June 20, 1974 (p. 55)

This image, also of an everyday scene, offers us a single-point perspective on a street that recedes into the distance before it turns right and disappearing out of sight. Beyond the road is a wooded suburban area of trees and houses that intimate at further worlds beyond the frame. Above, the sky is bright, but overcast. Little shadow can be seen in the picture. Our consideration of the receding street and sky is interrupted by a large grey and green building. In front of the building sits a striking red VW Combi, the vehicle of choice for hippies in the 1960s and 1970s; it is a symbol of alternative exploration and travel.

Above the Combi, caught in time, is a boy sitting in the window. On the window, below the boy, something illegible is printed. It is only a very close examination that reveals the writing is the sign for a dentist’s office. This close examination reveals a final surprise: the boy has breathed onto the window and created a fog. Without the boy and his fog, the picture would be, as is consistent with Uncommon Places, beautifully composed. However, there would be little of further interest. He and his fog are, without a doubt, perfect exemplars of Barthes’s punctum (1980).

We, the viewers, consider who the boy is and why he is at the dentist. We also question what his relationship is with the VW Combi. Is the vehicle there to collect him? Is it his mode of escape? Most of all though, we wonder why he has blown a breath-fog over the window. Is it some small act of rebellion, is he keeping himself amused, or is it just boredom?

Shore himself, when discussing this image gives valuable insight.

‘I am relying on the descriptive power of the camera to make a complex picture that the viewer moves their attention through. So, what I am doing is creating a small world for the viewer to explore rather the impression of what its like to look through my eyes.’ (MOMA, 2015)

It is through that descriptive power that we are brought into the picture and our attention drawn, most particularly, into the boy’s world. He signifies the frustration that everyone who has lived in a dull suburbia has felt: a desperation to break the monotony and a desire to find something interesting to do. It is through his escape route, the hippy’s Combi, that his desperation and desire can possibly be fulfilled.

At a superficial level, the two images are similar. They feature scenes of everyday America that are initially unrelenting in their ordinariness. Yet, careful consideration reveals to the viewer universal truths about our suburban geographies: the hope and promise of brighter and more interesting futures among the banal. This leads us to a truth about all the images in Uncommon Places: there is always something more going on beneath the surface.

  References

Barthes, R. (1980). Camera Lucida. 2010 ed. New York: Hill and Wang.

Bate, D. (2016). Photography: The Key Concepts. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury.

Burgin, V. (2003). Looking at Photographs. In: L. Wells, ed. The Photography Reader. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 130-137.

Cartier-Bresson, H. (1952). The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Clarke, G. (1997). The Photograph. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

MOMA (2015). How to see the photographer with Stephen Shore. [Online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T029CTSO0IE [Accessed 30 October 2019].

Moore, T. (2013). Critical thinking: seven definitions in search of a concept. Studies in Higher Education, 38(4), pp. 506-522.

Scott, C. (2007). Street Photography: From Brassai to Cartier-Bresson. 1st ed. Lond: I.B. Tauris & Company Limited.

Shore, S. (2007). The Nature of Photographs. 2nd ed. London: Phaidon.

Shore, S. (2015). Uncommon Places. 2nd ed. New York: Apeture.

Soutter, L. (2013). Why Art Photography?. 1st ed. Abingdon: Routledge.

The Genius of Photography. (2007). [Television Series] Directed by Tim Kirby. United Kingdom: BBC.

Time (2015). 100 Photographs: the most influential images of all time. 1st ed. New York: Time Inc Books.

Wells, L. (2003). The Photography Reader. 1st ed. Abingdon: Routledge.