#he does come often come off as a jerk in the trilogy so i kind of understand why he isn't the most respected character

[foxstens]

kevin day deserves more love

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #481

Top Ten Pixar Villains

Those rascals and rapscallions at Pixar are famous for twisting our emotions, aren’t they? Perverse masters at making us cry with sadness or joy, often at the same time (I’m looking at you, Inside Out, with your yellow and blue marbles). Oh yes, they’ll stick the knife in and give it a good old yank, like John Travolta teaches his daughter to do in Face/Off when he’s not really John Travolta and it’s a bit icky but then she stabs him at the end of the film so it’s alright really.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Pixar, renowned for turning grown men into blubbering messes, mostly because an adult character was convinced to part with old toys he no longer plays with. But I’d argue that one thing they’ve done less well than their parent studio (that’s Disney) is crafting iconic baddies. I mean, we all know the Disney Villains; they’re so iconic and successful as pop culture icons that there’s an entire trilogy of movies based on what would happen if a bunch of them had kids (apparently they’d sing a lot). Pixar baddies though? Hmmm, maybe not quite so iconic. I can’t see someone making a live action prequel movie about Chef Skinner.

But that’s not to say they’re not great; in fact, rather than going down the route of snarling, moustache-twirling villainy, Pixar actually does a great job in creating antagonists instead. Sometimes they’re misunderstood; sometimes they’re not the person you thought they were! Quite often some kind of redemption is offered, and the villains are very, very rarely dropped off something tall. A lot of them aren’t even defeated, so to speak! A good deal of nuance and shade goes into a Pixar villain, and if they haven’t made as many all-time-great iconic ne’er-do-wells, it does seem as if their approach is starting to rub off on Disney mothership (the likes of Frozen II and Moana either don’t have, or at least subvert, the notion of all-powerful bad guys).

So what do we have? Well, hopefully, we’ve got a list of really cool villains from Pixar movies. most of them are presented as the film’s “big bad”, although there are a couple of lesser baddies. And I think we do see the pattern emerging, of more mundane levels of villainy; the selfish and greedy and damaged. It makes for great characterisation and some beautiful storytelling; some complex and pitiable characters. And, yes, a few absolute bastards too. Let’s tut disapprovingly.

Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear (Ned Beatty, Toy Story 3, 2010): a superb performance from Beatty as a seemingly nice, jovial old bear who’s really a manipulative, power-hungry, gaslighting bully. Realistically portrayed as damaged and bitter, he has a tragic backstory that feels real, and a sense of pain and loss that feels earned in this universe. Questions the nature of everything the movies are about, and is a genuine threat in more ways than one. Plus he literally leaves them all to die in the furnace!

Syndrome (Jason Lee, The Incredibles, 2004): Buddy Pine’s backstory is one of belittlement and rejection, so his switch to villainy is as well explored as many a comic book bad guy. But he’s interesting partly in what his character says about Mr. Incredible – in a way justifying the criticisms of superheroes, as Mr. I does ignore the admittedly-annoying Buddy rather than mentoring or respecting him – but also because he prefigures notions of toxic masculinity about a decade or so before they became, well, a threat to global democracy.

Al (Wayne Knight, Toy Story 2, 1999): Like how Lots-o can be seen as a dark examination of toy life (all toys are replaceable, kids don’t really love you, etc), Al also shows us another dark facet of toy-dom: namely the life of a “collectable”. Toys, in this world, want to be played with, preferably by children, so a big ol’ man-child who stores them in boxes or puts them on display is not ideal. It’s an inversion of what a toy is for; an object of joy reduced to a commodity. Is it entertainment versus art? Who can say? Also, he’s really just a massive jerk and a huge slob, so we feel no pity for him once he gets his comeuppance at the end of the film.

Sid Phillips (Erik von Detten, Toy Story, 1995): man, they nailed the Toy Story villains, didn’t they? Maybe there’s even more to come! But right out of the gate, Sid was a classic. An utter sadist in a skull t-shirt, torturing toys for kicks; adults can see the traits of a genuine sociopath (some serial killers start by torturing animals, remember!), and he’s portrayed like a character in a horror movie. Seriously, in 1995, Sid’s room was legitimately disturbing. I’m not sure what moral lessons his actions teach us, but just as a pure article of terror, he’s supreme.

Hopper (Kevin Spacey, A Bug’s Life, 1998): it feels a bit weird, if I’m honest, to celebrate a Spacey performance. But as a character, Hopper is excellent, one of the best things about the generally-overlooked-but-still-a-bit-lesser-Pixar Bug’s Life. Riffing on biker gangs, Hopper’s locust swarm in, revving their wings. Hopper’s a classic tough guy thug, dominating through violence and threat; a creature with a small amount of power determined to hold onto it, and ultimately eaten by a terrifying bird. Just don’t look at the cast list.

Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt, Coco, 2017): after the horror of Sid and the thuggery of Hopper, de la Cruz is a different, more insidious villain. He’s a thief and a betrayer who exploited and murdered his best friend, condemning him not just to death but to a forgotten obsolescence in the afterlife. He’s a perfect example of the gaslighting, friendly-seeming bad guy, more in the mould of Lots-o, but with the world on his side and a sweet guitar. Genuinely hissable.

Stinky Pete (Kelsey Grammar, Toy Story 2, 1999): what, more Toy Story? Well, yeah. Don’t blame me, blame Pixar. And so Stinky Pete; a far more relatable and understandable villain, one driven to desperation through a lifetime of rejection and broken promises. Unlike the Machiavellian, power-hungry Lots-o, Pete just wants everyone to retire quietly together; he can’t accept the risks of freedom and only becomes sneaky and, indeed, violent after all else fails. But he does kinda get a happy ending, even if he doesn’t realise it; this is a villain who I feel could eventually be redeemed.

Randall Boggs (Steve Buscemi, Monsters, Inc., 2001): Waternoose is the real baddy in Monsters, Inc., of course; a conniving capitalist who’s prepared to sacrifice the world’s children to keep his monopoly. But it’s Randy who sticks in the mind; his selfish, vain lackey, a monster with a huge chip on his shoulder. His design – lizard-like, snake-ish, with a huge mouth and invisibility – is seriously disturbing. Hearing Buscemi’s voice come from that form – an aggravated teacher, a furious accountant – adds something special, something darkly hilarious.

Evelyn Deavor (Catherine Keener, Incredibles 2, 2018): visually and conceptually, The Screenslaver (great name) is pretty cool, but when it’s revealed that the Big Bad is really under-appreciated tech genius Evelyn, that’s a great twist. A smart woman propping up her schmoozing brother, her criticisms of the heroes – like Buddy Pine’s – have resonance, although she’s learning the wrong lessons from tragedy. Her relationship with Elastigirl, from friendship to enmity, is very well-written and performed, and her belligerence at the end is a nice touch, denying the heroes of any catharsis from her capture.

Shelby Forthright (Fred Willard, WALL-E, 2008): I was originally going to feature the autopilot, but then I figured, if you can get Fred Willard in your list… and really, who’s the big villain here? It’s us, right? We killed the Earth. But Willard’s smiling, happy CEO is there, encouraging his customers to buy, promising them safety and security, promising them a repaired world… but really he’s shovelling them off the planet, secretly commanding the computer to take humanity far away and never look back. It’s a devious, horrible plan, giving the people unending luxury, making them want for nothing, turning them into fab, soporific blobs, basically because that’s easier than the alternative. It’s a horrible indictment of humanity (also: he’s the CEO of a company, but also – it looks like – that makes him rule the world? Creepy). So, yeah, the autopilot might be a baddun, but it’s the man in charge who’s the real villain of the piece, even hundreds of years later.

Sadly no room for John Lasseter, who may not have tried to enslave humanity or torture children, but still managed to be a huge jerk and a phenomenal disappointment.

[heyyyharry]

Chapter 12: Closure

(from the My Girl Trilogy: Stay Mine)

…in which they’re the most happy they’ve ever been.

Warning: smut

Word count: 5.1k

AU: actor!Harry, older!Harry, younger!Y/N, (4-year age gap).

Wattpad link (Thea as Y/N)

There are three chapters left :)

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This felt like a dream. He’d awoken beside her so many times before but it wasn’t until this morning that it felt official. He lay on his side with an arm folded under his head, taking in her sleeping face. She looked so beautiful and serene, just staring at her alone gave him butterflies in his stomach. He thought he was too old to feel this way; butterflies sounded so juvenile, but he was way past feeling embarrassed about it.

As if she could read his mind, her mouth gave a subtle twitch, and he could tell she was awake.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

Her eyelids fluttered as she blinked lazily at him. “I love it when you pull an Edward Cullen.”

Her voice was hoarse from last night, the memories of which made his hard cock jerk slightly. He stroked her naked side and dragged her closer. She nuzzled his neck as he kissed her forehead.

“You’re so warm,” she said. “And hard.”

He let out a small gasp as her cold fingers closed around his cock. All it took was her touch and Harry was a goner. Sex had been added to their morning routine a long time ago, but the idea of them getting to do this more often now that she lived here made it all more exciting.

They made love, and she’d come twice before he carried her to the shower so she could wash up and wouldn’t be late for work.

“There’s no need to rush,” she reassured him while he was washing her hair. “I’m buying us some more time together. I’m sure Eddie doesn’t miss me, but I’ll surely miss you.”

The beam on her face made his heart leap. He grinned, massaging her scalp while holding her gaze. “Look at you. We’ve only lived together for one day and you’ve already become clingy.”

She nodded and spread the soap across his chest. “By next week, I’ll be crying and hugging your legs when you leave for work. Don’t say I haven’t warned ya.”

He laughed and playfully bumped his forehead against hers. “Come on, Princess. Let’s get you cleaned and I’ll drive you to work.”

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Eddie was over the moon to see Harry again. He literally pushed right past Y/N before she could say hello and tugged Harry into a hug. Harry hesitantly patted Eddie on the back, eyeing Y/N questioningly. She could only answer with a shrug while trying not to laugh at Eddie’s fangirling moment.

“Congratulations on your Oscar nomination!” Eddie pulled back, gripping Harry’s arms and grinning from ear to ear. “It’s just two weeks away! Are you excited? What are you gonna wear? Oooh, how are you gonna style your hair?”

“Jesus, let the man breathe, Ed.” Alice emerged from behind one of the shelves and ambled toward them, her burgundy lips arched at Harry. “I’m so sure you’re gonna win. You’re the best actor of our generation.”

“You’ve never watched any movie the other actors were in.” Eddie’s remark earned him a warning glare from Alice.

Harry laughed and waved her compliment away. “Don’t hype me up. It’ll just make me cry harder when I lose.”

“Don’t say that!” cried Alice.

Eddie turned to Y/N, his eyes gleaming. “Are you gonna attend the Oscars?”

“Of course!” She tousled Harry’s hair and smiled widely. “I cannot miss a chance to see Harry cry in public.”

“Jesus, be optimistic, you two!” Alice yelled, and Y/N responded with a shrug, pursing her lips.

“Lose or win, I’ll cry anyway,” Harry interjected.

“See?” Y/N pinched his chin and tiptoed to kiss his temple. “Only I get him the most.”

“Disgusting,” Alice jokingly coughed as she rolled her eyes and told them she’d have to finish sorting the new arrivals. Eddie seemed relieved that Alice was gone; he was desperate to have Harry’s attention again.

“So.” A smile crept up to his face. “Have you written your acceptance speech yet? Or do you have someone write it for you?”

Y/N snapped her head up to look at Harry with her eyes wide. “I haven’t heard you mentioned your speech.”

“Don’t need one.” He shrugged and draped an arm around her neck. “It’s not like I’m gonna win.”

“Are you joking?!”

“Y/N’s right!” Eddie looked overly distressed. “You can’t possibly think you’re not gonna win.”

Harry pursed his lips and let out a sigh. “This is my first nomination ever. And have you seen the people I’m up against? I’m just happy I got nominated, really.”

“Baby.”

“Yes, baby?”

Y/N furrowed her eyebrows as she crossed her arms. “No, I’m calling you a baby. I’m insulting you.” The way she scrunched up her face cracked him right up. “I’m not joking! You have to take this seriously. What does Jeff have to say about this?”

“Up to you.”

“What?”

“He said, ‘Up to you.’” Harry chuckled. “So I guess it’s up to me.”

She scowled at him. “We’re so having this conversation tonight.”

“Uh-oh, is this where I regret asking you to move in with me?”

“You two are living together?” Eddie brightened, but then Y/N pressed her whole palm to his face and gently pushed him aside. If Harry didn’t know them, he might think she was the owner of this shop and Eddie was working for her.

“Have a good day, Eddie,” Harry told the lad and pressed a kiss to Y/N’s pouty lips. “I’ll pick you up tonight?”

Her expression softened with a beam. “I’ll stop by my place to collect some stuff. Once I’m done, I’ll call you.”

“All right.”

“Harry?” He turned, both eyebrows raised as she walked up to him and grabbed his face with both hands. He bit his lips to stifle a laugh since she looked so ridiculously serious. “Write that goddamn speech.”

“I’ll think about it,” he gleefully told her and ruffled her hair before heading out.

As soon as he got back to his car, his phone buzzed aggressively inside his pocket and he didn’t even have to check to know who was calling.

Gemma.

He considered her name for a long moment until he felt someone watching and spotted a random girl standing across the street, pointing her phone at him. This was why he hated showing his face in public. He waved politely at her and watched her squeal and run back to her group of friends. Hurriedly, he got into his car and drove off, crossing another crossroads before pulling over to answer his phone.

Gemma seemed determined to talk to him. He heaved a sigh as his thumb lingered above the screen, his eyes rolled skyward. Last night, he’d promised Y/N that he would give Gemma and Isaac a chance to properly apologize and explain themselves; he couldn’t back away now.

He slid his thumb across the screen and answered. “Hello?”

“Can we talk, please?” Gemma asked, sounding nervous and uncertain. “All three of us. You, me, and Isaac.”

He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Okay. Where do we meet?”

“The coffee shop by your house?”

“All right. I’ll be there in fifteen.”

“Thank you.”

Harry only hummed as he didn’t know how to respond to that. He hoped he could manage to keep his composure when he saw the two of them together.

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Gemma couldn’t recall the days when her family, all four of them, were happy together. She couldn’t recall how her parents had grown to hate each other. She didn’t even know what had been their first serious fight from which everything had fallen to pieces. When she’d been a little girl, her parents would always send her to her room before they’d started a fight. She’d thought they hadn’t wanted her to be scared. Now that she was older, she knew they had sent her to her room so she wouldn’t overhear something that would ruin her childhood. Somehow she was thankful for that.

However, one night, she had sat in the shadow of the stairwell, peering through the bannisters and eavesdropping them arguing in the kitchen. She’d heard something about a woman named Aleigh, or Alex, or Ally, and had assumed it’d been someone her parents had known from work. That woman turned out to be Emilia’s mother. Even back then, when Gemma hadn’t known who that woman was, she could already tell that that woman had been the reason for her parents’ endless fights, and she had resented the woman she’d never met before. She guessed she’d been right after all. Twenty years had gone by and that woman was still the reason for Gemma’s and Harry’s misery.

When Gemma had told Harry that Emilia’s mother was still alive and Emilia and Winton had been using him all this time, he’d been so calm it’d frightened Gemma. After much thinking, it’d occurred to her that maybe he’d known all along, not really known, but he’d felt something wrong and decided to overlook it all so he could live in the fantasy where Winton was good and misunderstood.

“I’m going to see him.”

“What?” Harry almost spilt the drink in his hand as he flinched. “Why? Gemma, this is—”

“I’m just gonna say a few words and then leave.”

Harry’s gaze jumped to Isaac. “Did you know about this?”

“Yes,” Isaac said.

“And you also agree she should go see the man who’s fucked us both over.” It wasn’t a question and Harry sounded genuinely pissed as he ruffled his hair and exhaled sharply. “Look, you don’t have to do this for me, Gem,” he told her. “The things I gave them, just...let’s just think of those things as an act of kindness. Just cut them out of our lives and get on with it. They don’t deserve that much of our headspace—”

“I want closure, Harry,” she blurted. “It’s easy to just cut people off but they’ll never really leave you alone until you have the final words.”

“You already wrote him a letter.”

“How do I know he’s read it? Besides, that was before I knew about the shady things he did with his new daughter.” She tried not to sound bitter, but from the look Isaac and Harry were giving her, she guessed it hadn’t worked.

“Okay, then I’d go with you,” Harry said.

“No way,” she scoffed.

Beside her, Isaac straightened. “Harry’s got a point. I can’t let you go alone.”

She whipped her head to him. “Winton’s not gonna hit me.”

All three of them froze. Harry mirrored her reaction with his eyes bugging out and his mouth hanging open. She couldn’t believe she’d said that.

“Gem,” Harry ventured, and her heart was thumping so loud it almost drowned out all the other noises. “You weren’t in a car accident the other night, were you?” She didn’t answer, but her unconsciously touching the bandage on her forehead had confirmed his guess. “That son of a bitch!” he half-shouted, receiving questioning stares from a few people around them.

“Winton didn’t—”

“Asher did that to you,” Harry asserted and then grabbed his phone. “I’ll call my lawyer right now.”

Gemma hadn’t got a chance to stop him when Isaac interjected, “Or we can just go to his house and beat the shit out of him.”

Harry slammed his phone down. “Great idea.”

“Stop! Both of you!” Gemma cried out and flung an apologetic glance at the couple sitting across the aisle, who were just trying to enjoy their breakfast in peace. She then turned back to Harry and Isaac, her arms folded, her fists clenched. “Just...let me handle this. I’m gonna handle this myself. I know you care about me but I’m not afraid of Asher. I mean, I was...but not anymore.” She shook her head to make the memories of that night vanish. “He’s gonna pay for what he did, but I’m here to talk about Winton and you’re not going with me, Harry. I want to speak to him alone.”

Harry was quiet for a moment, but he didn’t seem too opposed to the idea anymore. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked at last, his forehead creased. “About Asher and about...you two.”

“It’s...it’s me.” Isaac cleared his throat, giving Gemma a sideways glance. “I didn’t want to let you know—”

She held up a hand to stop him. “Isaac, don’t. You don’t have to take the blame. It was me,” she told Harry. “I was too afraid that you’d judge me and–and you’d get mad at both of us.”

“I would’ve got mad anyway,” he breathed. “But I’m not gonna abandon you or think any worse of you. You’re my sister and I love you, Gem.”

“I cheated on my boyfriend—”

“Who abused you.”

It hurt to hear her brother say the word. If no one had addressed it, she could have just pretended it’d never happened. But it had. Her ex-boyfriend had abused her, and it was just another ugly reality she had to face.

“Still, I could’ve left,” she whispered, eyes on her half-empty cup of coffee.

Harry reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “Gem, he wasn’t allowed to lay a finger on you no matter what you did.” She looked up and met his soft look. “I promise I won’t interfere,” he went on, “but can you promise me you will fuck up his life?”

She exhaled a laugh and nodded. “Promise.”

Harry leaned back into his chair, crossed his arms and considered Isaac. “What are your intentions with my sister?”

Gemma face-palmed herself as she felt Isaac squirm in his seat, apparently unsure if Harry was being serious or simply joking.

“I just want to make her happy, H,” he said. “If you don’t trust me, you can ask Y/N—”

“Just as I was about to forgive you!” Harry gasped dramatically, and Isaac let out a laugh. He exchanged looks with Gemma. Both were relieved to know that Harry wasn’t against them. “I’m glad that you two are happy,” Harry continued. “This is a bit weird but...I’ll get used to it.” Then he pinned Isaac with his glare. “If you break her heart, I will kick your ass.” To Gemma, he said, “And if you break his heart, I will tell mum.”

“Classic.” She snorted and rolled her eyes. “By the way, congratulations. Heard you moved in with Y/N.”

Harry’s eyes went round. “Who told you?”

“Y/N told Alice who told Niall who told me,” Isaac said.

Gemma folded her arms on the table, leaning forward. “Alice and Niall, huh?”

Harry waved off her speculations. “Niall would’ve told us.” Then he jolted with a start. “Well shit, maybe he wouldn’t.”

“The next time I see him, I’ll make him talk,” Isaac asserted. He and Harry fist-bumped, and Gemma couldn’t stop the smile on her face.

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Y/N knew she’d run into him. He always got home early on Monday night, and still, she’d hoped she wouldn’t get unlucky. When had luck ever been in her favour twice a day?

She was locking the door with one arm carrying a box full of books when a voice came up from behind, “Do you need a hand?” And she felt her stomach clench and sweat trickle down her temple.

She looked over her shoulder, forcing a smile. “It’s fine, I got it. Thank you.”

Blake stood there with his laptop bag slung over his shoulder, waiting for her to finish, waiting for the conversation she’d been running from. Last night, she’d told Harry to talk to Gemma and Isaac and get his thoughts across, so she couldn’t possibly go against her own advice and avoid Blake until he moved back to the States. She might never see him again once he’d left, but she would never stop pondering over the things she could have said but didn’t.

She squeezed her eyes shut and slowly turned, curses springing up in her head. She hoped he couldn’t see past her tight smile, and if he did, it didn’t show.

Blake’s gaze fell to the box she was holding as he raised an eyebrow. “So you’re finally moving in with Harry.”

“Yes,” she answered then quickly added, “It has nothing to do with–”

“Me.”

Her mouth clamped shut.

She’d known this encounter would be awkward, just not this awkward. Her first instinct was to look around frantically as if seeking a place to run and hide. Blake seemed to notice her weird behaviours. He shifted from one foot to the other, staring at them like he normally would every time he got nervous. Whenever she saw him do something like this, she would see the sixteen-year-old boy she’d fallen in love with, then she would remember what he’d done to Laura, to her, and the picture of that sixteen-year-old boy would fade to black.

She heaved a sigh, held his gaze and nodded her head at the stairs going up to the next floor. He automatically followed. He put down his laptop bag beside his leg, and she hugged the box to her chest awkwardly. They sat on the bottom stair side by side. Something about the mood reminded her of their last afternoon together in Holmes Chapel. Their first goodbye. For all she knew, this could be their last.

“How did you meet Laura?” she broke the silence and watched Blake fidget uneasily. It was comforting to know that they felt the same about this situation.

“Her ex-husband was my professor,” he confessed.

“Well, shit.”

Her mindless response made him chuckle. “Yeah...Shit.”

“Were you in love?” This time, he cast her a questioning glance. “With Laura?” she ventured.

“No, I don’t think so,” he admitted. “I was really attracted to her. I’ve got a thing for smart and powerful women.”

She pursed her lips and released a long breath. “I mean, if I went to Yale, I would probably have a thing for smart and powerful women, too.”

He chuckled and waved off her comment. “Nah, it’s not Yale. I just always have.”

She blinked at him. When he caught her stare, she averted her eyes and tucked a strand behind her ear. He didn’t need to explain himself. She knew he’d meant her – she’d been the first ‘smart and powerful’ woman he’d fallen for, which should have made her feel flattered, but all she felt was sadness for Laura. Y/N knew what it was like to be wholeheartedly in love with someone who only loved one small part of you.

“Your book is still getting published, right?” Blake changed the subject, or maybe he really cared. Either way, she was relieved.

“Yes. Maybe I’ll send you a copy when it comes out?”

A hopeful grin lit up his face. “That’d be so cool. Can you sign it first?”

“Sure.”

Silence ensued.

“I’m not sure if you know this,” Blake trailed off. “But you smile the brightest when you talk about books...and him.”

Y/N was taken aback. She opened her mouth but didn’t know what to say. Blake smiled as if to tell her he wasn’t expecting a response, and it wasn’t until then that she noticed he also smiled the brightest when he was with her, even if they were talking about another man, the one she loved.

“I’m sorry for everything,” he spoke when she didn’t. “I was so selfish. I said I was doing it for you, but I guess I was doing it for me, too. I thought it could help me get you back, but it was never up to me to decide.”

“Thank you,” she mumbled. That sounded so out of place, but she didn’t know what else to say to him.

“Can we still talk sometimes?” he asked and bumped his shoulder against hers. “When I’m over you, of course.”

She was so relieved to hear his playful tone again. “And when will that be?”

He pursed his lips, his dark brows furrowed. “Let’s hope it won’t be too long.”

She said nothing, but she also wished that for him, and for them.

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Gemma’s hands were shaking as she held the shoebox to her chest and knocked on the door. A voice from inside the flat told her to wait just a moment. She shivered as it was the first time in twenty years or so that she’d heard that voice again.

The door was unlocked, and she was standing in front of the man whose face had become a blur in her memories. He was much older now, still, something about him made her feel like time had never passed, and it’d been yesterday when she’d chased after his car, crying and begging him not to leave her behind. The only difference was, he was in a wheelchair now, and she no longer wanted him back.

“Can I come in?” she asked in a neutral tone despite the emotions in his eyes. She knew it wasn’t because he was happy to see her again after that many years. Winton was just shocked and scared to see her after what he and Emilia had done.

He had no choice but to invite her in. She took a seat on the couch in front of him, the shoebox on her lap. The first thing she set eyes on was the massive picture of him, Emilia and her mother. Gemma’s heart sank as she bit her lip and looked away immediately.

Winton asked her if she’d like some tea, and she refused. “I suppose your daughter has told you everything.”

He seemed startled by how straightforward she was. What did he expect, though? ‘Hello, how are you, Dad’? Never in a million years.

“I-I feel awful–” he started, but she wasn’t interested in hearing the rest.

“Save it,” she cut him off. “I have questions and I demand answers.”

“Yes, yes...of...of course,” he stammered, unable to look her in the eyes. “You deserve that.”

She almost said he was in no position to tell her what she deserved, but then she contained her anger and went straight to the point. “Were you cheating on Mum?”

His eyes grew big. When he received a stern look from her, he lowered his head and whispered, “Yes.”

She calmly nodded. “Did you leave us because that woman was pregnant with Emilia?”

“Yes.”

“Was there anything real about the stories you told Harry?” she went on, fisting the hem of her dress. “The trainers. The day of his football match.”

“I was at the game,” Winton blurted, still not looking at her. “B-Because your mother asked me to come. But I could only watch you from afar. I was too afraid that you wouldn’t want to meet me.”

Coward.

She sat up straighter. “And the shoes?”

This time, he took more than a second to answer. “They were Emilia’s.”

Arsehole.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I swear I’m a better father now. Just ask Emilia–”

“You’re an arsehole,” she raised her voice, causing him to jump in shock. “I don’t care how well you treat your new family, but you don’t make people and abandon them. Harry was only five years old when you left us. I fucking chased after your goddamn car and you didn’t even stop to tell me why you had to leave. You’re...you’re a fucking coward!” She schooled her face, trying her best to keep her voice clear and calm. “You’re a shitty person and you don’t deserve our forgiveness. I’m just here to see for myself how pathetic you’ve become. And do you know what the worst thing is?” Tears stung her eyes as her voice dropped, “I cannot feel the slightest amount of joy to see you like this.”

He stared at her with a pained look on his face. She fought back her tears and slammed the shoebox on the coffee table. “Here are your daughter’s shoes.” And took out some bills from her purse, put it on top of the box. “Hospital bills,” she said before he could ask. “Harry told me to tell you you don’t have to pay him back. Not every act of kindness requires something in return. It was what Mum has taught us.”

“Gemma–”

She stood up quickly and straightened her dress. “If you or your daughter ever bother us again, our lawyers will contact you. Good luck, Winton. You’re gonna need it.”

The front door swung open, and Emilia froze when she saw Gemma. Gemma didn’t pay her a second glance as she made her way to the front door as brushed past Emilia into the hallway. She didn’t look back. It felt like a ton of rocks had been lifted from her chest.

Now she could finally breathe, and move on.

.

.

.

“What are those?”

Y/N descended the steps of the building and shoved the box into Harry’s arms, grinning. “Books. This is just a corner of my bookshelf, by the way.”

He laughed and put it into the car before turning back to wrap his arms around her. She buried her face into his chest as he kissed the top of her head. It felt nice to just be able to hold her like this after a long tiring day. He could do this on repeat for the rest of his life.

“Maybe I’ll build you your own library in my house,” he said as she pulled back. “Like in Beauty and the Beast.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “I never knew a Disney reference could turn me on so much.”

“It’s me actually. I turn you on.” He pinched her chin and pecked her on the lips. “By the way, I talked to Gemma and Isaac today.”

“I talked to Blake,” she said nonchalantly. “How did it go?”

“Good,” he said, brushing her hair out of her face as a wind blew right through them. She pressed her body against his own and he wrapped her in his coat, leaving only her head exposed. “Is it just me or is it really weird to see them together?”

“It’s not just you,” she giggled, arms tightened around his waist. “But Isaac’s a really great boyfriend so don’t you worry.”

“Shut up! I don’t need that reminder from you of all people.”

His reaction got her laughing. “I’m yours. I always have been.”

He already knew that, but hearing it from her made his heart flutter every time. “And I’m yours.” He kissed her nose. “I hope you told Blake that when you talked to him earlier.”

Her cheekbones lifted as the corners of her eyes crinkled. “Blake told me I only smiled the brightest when I talked about books and you. So I think he knows.”

“Good.” Harry shrugged. “Maybe he does deserve redemption.”

.

.

.

When they got home, she told him to take a shower first as she had some work she had to finish. He assumed it was just her Uni assignments so he didn’t ask.

As soon as he stepped out of the shower, he screamed and almost tripped when he saw her standing right in the bathroom, holding some papers. She looked extremely serious even though he was naked and dripping in front of her.

“Okay, I have a few options for you,” she said, handing him the pages with her scribbles all over them.

He wiped his hands with one of the towels on the rack and took the papers from her. “What are these?”

“Your potential acceptance speeches.” She clasped her hands behind her back, grinning from ear to ear. “I wrote them at work and polished them up while you were in the shower. I don’t know what mood you’d like to go for so…” She peered over his hands and pointed a finger to each page. “This one is ‘Men also cry’. This one...is ‘I’m better than all of you bitches.’ This one, my favourite, ‘I don’t deserve this but maybe I do but I don’t wanna sound like a conceited asshole’. And here–”

He didn’t let her finish and crashed his mouth against hers. Startled, she pushed him away with a hand on his chest. Her cheeks were flushed, and it wasn’t from the steam. “What did I say about kissing me while I’m talking?”

He shrugged, grabbed her by the hips and her first instinct was to wrap her legs around his waist as he pushed her against the tiled wall. She was kissing him back when she saw the speeches she’d written scattered on the wet floor, and she let out a gasp so loud and patted him frantically on the chest. “Wait, you haven’t read them!”

He refused to put her down, his kisses trailing along her throat. “I’m not gonna use them.”

“Why not?” She pouted but didn’t protest when he unbuttoned her dress and let it fall to his feet. She wasn’t wearing underwear underneath, and he wasted no time to suck a nipple into his mouth. She moaned softly, fingers dug into his shoulders.

“Because I’m gonna write my own speech,” he said into her neck, smirking when she grabbed a fistful of his hair and tugged his head back so he’d look at her.

“Really?”

He nodded and pressed a chaste kiss to her cupid bow. “It’ll be for the best if I write it on my own.”

Her expression softened at once. “I trust you,” she said, brushing her thumb across his cheek. “When will I get to read it?”

“At the Oscars if we’re lucky.” He nudged her head back with his nose at her jaw and left open-mouthed kisses down her throat. She’d slid her hand between them, stroking his cock before guiding it to her entrance. She was so hot and wet and ready for him. His eyes squeezed shut as he laughed lowly into her skin. “Maybe I’d take you on the stage with me...and propose to you in front of the whole world.”

She gasped and eased down on his cock with a hand on his shoulder. Her eyelids fluttered and her voice was strained as she joked, “Don’t make me break up with you on live television, baby.”

He kissed her mouth again and thrust all the way in, making her drop her head back against the wall, panting heavily. “What a little brat,” he said through gritted teeth. “Normal people would find it romantic.”

“Have we ever been a normal couple?” she asked and bit his lip. “Now stop talking and fuck me.”

[tessatechaitea]

Cerebus #16 (1980)

Cerebus is going up the stairs while Lord Julius is going down them. In the same direction.

Cerebus is often touted as the greatest independent comic book of all time (for various reasons) but I'd like to point out that Elfquest told an incredible story with beautiful art in just 20 issues as opposed to 300. Plus it had an elf orgy. Also, I know it continued on after the first 20 issue story arc but we can ignore the rest of the story because there was never another elf orgy and also the rest of the series concentrated too much on Skywise's fear of dying which was totally valid but was often used as a foil to make Cutter seem braver and more loyal to his wolf roots but really just showed he was stubborn and dumb and totally didn't fuck as many elf maidens as Skywise did. Cerebus does have some sex in his comic book but since the first sex he has is when he rapes Astoria, I don't think anybody was really clamoring for any more of that. I mean, sure, some people were! I didn't mean to erase the sickos and perverts out there. Sorry, jerks! I'm sure the "A Note from the Publisher" bit by Deni seemed like a good idea when starting out on a harrowing self-publishing journey like that of Cerebus. But it quickly became a space where Deni just says, "Self-publishing is fraught with hardships and also this is a really good issue! I won't spoil it! Goodbye!" I won't be sad to see the divorce happen! That's an okay thing to say because it already happened, right? It's not like my wishing for the end of their marriage in 2020 somehow brought about the end of their marriage in the early 80s. Is it? I never took a college course on cause and effect so who the fuck knows? Unless that Critical Literary Theory class was about that?! Oh my God! I think I understand it now! Dave's finale to the "Swords of Cerebus" essay that has been broken up over the last three issues describes how he was consciously drawing the Eye of the Pyramid cult leader's gigantic penis while drawing the snake. Sorry to report, though, that he's being sarcastic. Apparently Dave is above using phallic imagery to make a point about patriarchal themes. Only fucking hacks do shit like that! Take that, whoever wrote fucking Beowulf!

Even if Sim can't see the humor in everybody assuming he made a giant snake dick joke on purpose, he can still be extraordinarily funny with the least of materials.

This issue takes Cerebus to his first fancy dress party (that's a costume party for all of you people who aren't British (which is also me but only because I was born a citizen of the United States of America who didn't have a choice but knew it was a huge mistake as I was learning about Monty Python's Flying Circus and Dave Allen at Large in elementary school and The Young Ones in junior high and Red Dwarf in college)). Cerebus changes out of his vest and puts on his costume: a furry black jumper (that's sweater for all of you people who aren't British (which is also me but only because I was forced to watch mostly American popular entertainment until the advent of YouTube and now I mostly just watch Taskmaster over and over (by the way, is Taskmaster as good for people who don't know all of the "contestants" or do I enjoy it more because I recognize and like almost all of the people on the show?)). Lord Julius is dressed as an, um, a, uh, Estarcion matador? I have no context in which to guess what he is.

Certain people like Cerebus because he says what's on his mind. I purposefully used the passive voice here so you can't prove one of those people is me.

Lord Julius has a follow-up joke that leaves the reader thinking, "I guess all Pavrovians are fat?" That's Dave Sim continuing his work on Estarcion continuity! Remember how Pavrovians are the, um, you knows of Estarcion! You know the nationality I'm thinking of! The ones that are all the things people usually find insulting! Come on, you know who I'm talking about. The dumb fat arrogant stupid naive gullible ones! Yes, that's it! Americans! Try to remember Dave is Canadian. You have to think of Americans through Canadian eyes (which are the equivalent of smart, cynical Americans)! E'lass and Turg have gotten tickets to The Festival of Petunias so they can steal the Wyndmel Diamond. They're the duo composed of a giant muscular man and a little bitty shrimpy guy who last encountered (and were beaten by) Cerebus in Issue #6. E'lass is dressed like some kind of small dirt dwelling creature so I hope Cerebus gets offended by his costume and stabs him in the throat. There isn't enough random slaughter in this book about barbarians.

I haven't wanted to fuck a fish this badly since The Littler Mermaid.

I suppose I could have said "since Splash" in that last caption to seem more normal and less perverted but then you'd know I was lying. The assassins make a move on Lord Julius but Cerebus comes up with a plan to stop them that involves inducing the Palnu elite to throw herring-and-onion dip at them. Is that a parodied scene from Duck Soup or Conan the Barbarian? In the confusion, the lead assassin slips out through a secret door and E'lass, having just stolen the diamond and becoming increasingly paranoid that somebody saw him, slips through it as well. Cerebus and Lord Julius follow, having noticed the assassin but not E'lass. Most of the pursuit's tension comes from E'lass believing Cerebus remembers him and is now going to use the excuse of this new crime to murder him. It's more tense than I've even described because I really need Cerebus to murder somebody in this Swords & Sorcery book already. Reading this book waiting for a murder is like firing up a porn video on your laptop with your dick in your hands and realizing after five minutes that the video is almost over and was just a teaser for a pay porn site. Cerebus threatens to quit his job just before battling the assassin so he can negotiate a term of 8 bags of gold and a horse in exchange for killing the assassin as a pension before he goes. Julius agrees and Cerebus takes out the assassin with a rock to the head. I mean, I guess it's a murder so yay? But I was really hoping for some stabbing. Meanwhile E'lass lives through the cliché of the criminal whose paranoia gets the better of him and he tosses the diamond into a huge pit so he doesn't get caught only to discover that they never knew he took it anyway. Everything is wrapped up quickly and thoroughly with Cerebus given money and motivation to move on from Palnu. Dave complained about his heavy use of cliché in this Palnu trilogy and I have to say I agree with Dave. But I only agree with Dave on this point! Don't take that out of context and start raving on Twitter that Grunion Guy agrees with Dave's Issue #186 rant about girlfriends being illogical which is also secretly a rant about a guy who needs to get laid so badly he puts up with partners he probably wouldn't even be friends with and then finally just decides orgasms are evil and religion is super awesome but only if you smash all three People of The Book religions into one bland mash paste of ancient dogma. In the epilogue, Lord Julius receives a letter from his niece Jaka in which she expresses delight in possibly seeing Cerebus again. I guess Dave learned from Howard the Duck that comic book nerds really love for their anthropomorphic heroes to be fucking statuesque women. Perhaps every guy develops a fetish of being with a woman whose breasts are at head level due to being hugged constantly by their female relatives when they're ten years old. Deni's brother Michael's first installment of the "Aardvarkian Age" essays appears in this issue. It gives more details to the various nations of Estarcion and their inhabitants' culture, ruling styles, and brutality of their armies. I thought I'd be more interested in this than I actually wound up being. Maybe I thought it would be funnier? Instead, it's just a bunch of facts about made-up kingdoms to make them sound more believable by making them more like European countries in the Middle Ages. If this entire bit were just lifted from a history of Europe with the names of actual countries replaced by Estarcion countries, I wouldn't even notice. Mostly because I know nothing about European history. As I've always said, "Those who know about European history are doomed to repeat it, boring every single other person at the cocktail party." Dave apologizes for the quarter price increase of the comic book in the Aardvark Comments pages. Why, I hadn't even noticed! Probably because this is the Biweekly reprint issue and I purchased it as a collection off of eBay. Some people write in and discuss how Cerebus is a very fine and funny comic book. I nodded along in agreement as I read the letters. I only touched my private area twice while reading and neither time was for pleasure. The most surprising thing about "The Single Page" is that it clearly states who the comic was authored by: Kent Featherly. I don't know why so many of these single page comics aren't more clearly labeled. Isn't part of the reason for having them exposure for the artists drawing and writing them?! Not putting an effort to let a large audience know who you are and how they can read more of your work just sounds like something I would do. By the way, you should play this game I wrote, Starship Troopers: The Game. You can find it on the hard drive of my laptop. Cerebus #16 Rating: B. Look, it was funny and well drawn and all that. But even Dave said it relied too heavily on cliché plot devices. I've got to lower the grade when even the author points out some of the story's flaws! And I'd probably have come to the same conclusion without having been influenced by Dave Sim because I'm like the best Internet comic book critic who isn't a critic and isn't actually reviewing comic books. Also I almost forgot this evidence: I'm a Grandmaster Comic Book Reviewer! Nobody else can make that claim and if they do, they're plagiarizing me and I'd like you to point them out to me so I can send them a threatening email in which I pretend to be my own lawyer who is really good at suing dumb-dumbs.

[legobiwan]

Master and Apprentice: An Overview of Themes

Okay, so as many of you may have surmised, I adored this book. There’s so much to talk about in it and the ramifications of some of the themes play all the way up to the Sequel Trilogy. 

To be honest, I’m not even sure where to start with everything I want to talk about, but I’m going start here with this basic outline of things I noticed and will dissemble from there over the next few days, weeks, whatever. 

Lineage

“You inherit your parents' trauma but you will never fully understand it.”

So I will preface this part by saying that I am a huge fan of Bojack Horseman and this theme comes up again and again and again in this show. (As does the difficulty, but possibility, of breaking that cycle.)

This book is heavy on the behaviors and prejudices and patterns that get passed on through generations, or in this case, lineages. Dooku’s preoccupation with prophecy touches Rael, which touches Qui-gon, which touches Obi-wan, and of course, ultimately plays a huge role in Anakin’s life. Not only that, but Dooku’s restrained, demanding manner seems to have  rubbed off on Qui-gon, who seemed to be constantly measuring up Obi-wan to an impossible metric and thinking it in his presence, which meant Obi-wan likely felt all of this and presto changeo we have a talented young Jedi who feels he is unworthy. This book really illustrates how Masters are as much parents as teachers, and how whatever issues the parent is dealing with gets passed down and processed, whether it be through rebellion, imitation, or a host of other reactions. Hell, the book mentions Yoda’s master (albeit not by name). I am *dying* to know who they were and what happened there. 

Performance Art

Okay, so one of the initial main culprits is a group of performers who end up being branded as terrorists. First of all, this made musician-me CACKLE, period. But beyond that, there is a running theme of a performative aspect to government, to ceremony (Fanry perfects this), even to the Jedi themselves with their rituals, with their idealistic Code versus reality. Sidious was perhaps the best performance artist of the entire GFFA. And prophecy, to a certain degree, requires performance, requires actors to ingest a script and accept it as truth, and finally meet its demands of life’s stage. Is it foretold because the events must happen or because the actors choose to make them happen?

Prophecy

Which leads me into the thorniest topic of this book. Dooku was obsessed with prophecies. Qui-gon became obsessed with prophecy, to the point of breaking a thousand laws to get Anakin to Coruscant. And then Obi-wan was so devoted to Qui-gon, despite everything, that he told himself he had to believe in the prophecy, for Qui-gon’s sake (back to family issues there.)

How many of these prophecies ended up being self-fulfilling because of the actors involved? (Namely, Qui-gon.) Even when Qui-gon realizes his mistake is trying to control the future instead of accepting it, he goes ahead years later to manipulate circumstances so Anakin can be a Jedi. That’s not accepting the future, he cheated at dice to change the future, to control it. And that action set off an avalanche of consequences I doubt Qui-gon prepared for. In short, Qui-gon is a very fallible character here and shows a fair amount of egotism in terms of his relationship with prophecy. 

I mean, the Force showed Qui-gon that he was “meant to misinterpret” his vision? I don’t even know where to start with the sheer audacity of that statement. Qui-gon doesn’t report his vision to the Council, because he thinks they won’t understand, thinks they’ll get mired in some minutiae of governance and not do anything substantial. And yes, the Council does dither, even Obi-wan notices it, but those controls are there for a reason and Qui-gon just runs roughshod over them, because he thinks he alone has the answers, that he alone can change the future. 

And it kind of comes back to this whole Lineage issue where Dooku had this attitude that he alone knew the truth. I mean, he defects to the Sith partially to rid the Republic of corruption, and look at his Padawans - Rael and Qui-gon, both iconoclasts, both skirting the edge of...something, and it’s almost laughable that Qui-gon gets so upset with Rael’s disregard of certain parts of the Code (the killing of his Padawan part, of course, but also the celibacy part) because Qui-gon lies and cheats and pulls cons across the galaxy and disregards swaths of the Code at will. And you have to wonder, is this because Dooku was too independent, and if Dooku was that independent, how did Yoda’s training of Dooku play into that? 

Then again, while family and upbringing play a huge part in a person’s actions and personality, they are not the only thing, they do not dictate the future. Nor do prophecies. And Qui-gon clings so much to these prophecies, just as Dooku did (and Dooku’s prophecy of choice, he who learns to conquer death will through his greatest student live again is just...it explains a lot as to why Dooku was so devoted to teaching, was so exacting on his students ((although I will never let go of the headcanon that Dooku actually enjoys teaching, because I feel that a personality like his needs someone to impart knowledge to)). 

Prophecy, more often than not, becomes self-fulfilling prophecy, which is an interesting paradox. Prophecies are read, believed to be true, and are enacted by the actions of the very people (beings) who read them in the first place. 

And thus they become prophecy. 

I mean, no wonder Yoda wanted to burn the “sacred texts” by the time The Last Jedi rolls around. Prophecy becomes a way to abnegate responsibility for one’s actions, to deny, whether it’s Dooku seeking to avoid death, Qui-gon proclaiming he is a vessel for the will of the Force, or even Obi-wan claiming Luke as the Chosen One in Twin Suns. (Although, I wonder about that last one, as Obi-wan is naturally skeptical of prophecy. I mean, the Jedi do have the Force and are granted visions, but then again, they make decisions. They choose to turn to the Dark Side, choose to bend to the will of a hazy future which claims no specific actors...and I feel like Obi-wan’s references to prophecy are more an expression of familial love, of tribute to Qui-gon rather than a true belief that Anakin was "the” Chosen One. Obi-wan believed in Anakin himself above all else, even his better judgment.)

The Jinn-Kenobi Express

So...what is going on with these two?

In many ways, this is more of a Qui-gon book than an Obi-wan book, although we get plenty of insight to Obi-wan’s character. And one of the things I really appreciate about Claudia Gray is the fact that she seems aware of the Jedi Apprentice series, the kind of dynamic that created, and weaves this story in a way that does justice to those interactions and the limited time we see Qui-gon and Obi-wan together on screen. 

And the thing is, Qui-gon is kind of a jerk to Obi-wan. From page two of this book, his is questioning Obi-wan, wondering why he hasn’t reached a certain point in his abilities yet (all while deliberately holding him back in areas like lightsaber combat, which is an astounding illustration of Qui-gon’s complete obliviousness to his own actions and ramifications of his actions). And, let’s be honest, Obi-wan is an empath - he wouldn’t be such a talented negotiator and diplomat if he weren’t (because, before anything else, you need to be able to read people, to know and feel their emotions in order to succeed at deals, treaties, and diplomacy). Obi-wan knew Qui-gon was questioning him, could feel it and this harkens back to those JA books where Qui-gon is kiiiind of a total douche, at times. And Obi-wan - rebellious, independent, self-esteem-lacking, so wanting someone’s approval Obi-wan...just falls right into this. It’s kind of an unhealthy dynamic, which resolves itself after Pijal, only to relapse all over again when Qui-gon finds Anakin and pulls his BS on Tatooine. 

Here’s the thing. Qui-gon is not a bad person. I don’t hate Qui-gon, he has good motivations, he wants to make things better. He cares about Obi-wan, seeks advice from his old Master (not knowing Dooku has fallen, my god), tries to free all the slaves he encounters, wants to buck every piece of Jedi and Republic law in order to make the galaxy right. And, you know, I get it. I really do. But there’s idealism and then there’s trying to do the right thing within the systems (no matter how terrible) we have created and inching forward to change because to do otherwise would be to fight yourself in a paper bag. 

Qui-gon is the living embodiment of the phrase “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

And Obi-wan knows this, knows Qui-gon is fallible, knows that his devotion to idealism, to prophecy is dangerous and yet he goes along with it anyway because Obi-wan’s greatest failing is his attachment. Obi-wan (the empath) cares too much and he can’t let go - not of Qui-gon, not of Satine, and certainly not of Anakin. 

"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.“ I mean, I’m not a Kylo Ren-stan by any means, but he’s not wrong. At least, not in a broad sense, not in the way that might have allowed Obi-wan to make some clearer-headed decisions about everything from his relationship with Qui-gon to Anakin to the Council. 

In Conclusion

Dooku cared about his students but possibly feared death and thus possibly made his students his vessels to achieve the goal of immortality, despite enjoying teaching.

Qui-gon cared about Obi-wan as much as he did the betterment of the galaxy but was terrible at expressing it and put too much faith in himself, the Force, and prophecy. 

Obi-wan cared almost too much about everyone but himself, replacing self-esteem with rules and the Code, devoting himself to the memory of Qui-gon and his wishes in his guilt over his survival of the encounter at Theed.

And this writer cares waaaaaay too much about these characters and will most definitely be writing more about this book because, to quote Obi-wan flying a ship in the middle of a ship: AAAAAUUUUUUUUUGGGHHHH

[pooka-dragon]

Trials

Okay, this fanfic was on work and on drafts for months now. I was trying to write it all down the best I could and plot it all down and I think this will turn out amazing. And to let you all know, this is a trilogy chapter so there is gonna be three chapters for this (probably an extra one in case I feel in a good mood) This is a sequel to Taken from @shinyzango's 2D Bendy AU. To think it's all good and handy for Henry and Bendy, but more danger lurks up ahead that is far worse than they have encountered in Joey Drew's Studio. And what makes matters worse is that more of Henry and Bendy's close ones are in danger.

"Take it easy, Henry. Your arm is still hurt." Henry's mother said, trying to make her son be at ease. But Henry grew restless from a week in bed to heal up, helping his father lift up a large board for the new farm.

It has been weeks since Henry's capture from the bulk searcher that adapted outside of the studio. Henry refused to go back to bed and rest up. His arm did hurt a bit, but not enough to keep him from doing extra work around his home.

"Ma, I'm fine. I can barely feel it." He grunts as he helps his father make the board place up. Two large inky hands held the board in place, revealing Bendy in his monster form as he helps Henry and John with the work.  

His mother huffed in annoyance at his response. "I swear, I don't know if you have my stubborness or your father's." She grumbles, making Bendy, Henry and John look at Margret with a weird look. Bendy looks at Henry, letting out a confused whine in response. Henry could chuckle in response.

"Trust me, Bendy. If you lived here long enough, they bicker all the time like cats and dogs." Henry said as he grunts, managing to make his side of the large board on the barn they were rebuilding. Since the barn got burnt down a couple of months ago, they had to rebuild it. Most of it was complete, all there was left was the door.

But as soon as Henry mentioned that, he could feel his father giving him a rather annoyed look. "As if you and Bendy don't bicker at each other." He grunts as Bendy helps him place the other board in place.

"Not all of us bicker 24/7, dad. If there was an reward for most bickering people in the world, you and ma would be the top competitives." He chuckled, earning a playful smack from his mother. Bendy was also snickering at what Henry said.

"Don't side with him. You're my grandson." John grumbled, but he was smiling as he went to get the nails and hinges for the door. Bendy watched him and just shrugged in response, but then felt an emotion of pain in the back of his head and looks at Henry.

He had a grimaced look as he rubbed his left side, right where the old injury of the other Bendy gave him many months ago from the Studio. He lets out a whine and walked towards Henry, giving him a concern and worried look. "Henry, are you okay?" Bendy asked through their mental bond.

Henry glanced up at him before smiling, placing a hand on the top of Bendy's head. "I'm fine bud. It doesn't hurt as much as it use to. Probably twisted my leg wrong and it acted up." Henry said, rubbing his once injured leg. Bendy didn't seemed convinced of Henry's words, but doesn't question it and nods.

"Well, the barn is almost done. We can finish this up later after we eat some of my apple pie." Margret said, making Bendy perk his head up excitedly. He loved her apple pies so much because there was a hint of great sweetness that he couldn't describe. Of course, she wouldn't tell what she puts in the pie, but whatever it was, it tasted so good.

As they journey inside, Bendy suddenly had a funny feeling. He looks around, Bendy now in his normal size as he looks around, his eyes somewhat narrowed.

He can feel something watching him.

"Something wrong, bud?"

Bendy turned to see Henry glancing at him. Bendy looks back, finding the feeling of being watched fading away slowly before looking back at Henry. "I'm fine, Henry." He said before venturing back inside of the house.

In a far distance, there was a small forest, but in the darkness inside of a bush, there were deep growls, glowing yellow eyes staring at the house. It blinks slowly, the growls growing deeper as it watched the small toon go inside of the house.

A small squirell was unaware of the source as it tries to search for food, before it lets out a pained squeak when a larged clawed hand crashed down on it, black ooze driping on it. The squirell tries to break free, but then stopped moving when the clawed hand pushed down, a sickening snap being heard as the small animal went limp.

The hand draws back, slowly bringing the now dead squirell with it as a left a black marking on the ground, the grass slowly decaying as the black ooze bubbled up before it went silent.

00~00

The evening came as the barn was now complete. Margret and John smiled at their now complete barn, Bendy and Henry smiling at them as well. "I feel so happy, Henry. Not only that the barn is complete, but seeing grandma and grandpa happy too." Bendy said, making Henry smiled down at him.

"Yeah. That what happens after a long project like this does, it makes you feel good on the inside." Henry smiled. This made Bendy smile more--

The dreaded feeling came back. Bendy looks around, can feel angered eyes staring at the back of his head. He looks to see the forest that was away from the barn and house, but he can feel something off.

"Bendy, what's wrong?" Henry asked, seeing him look at the small forest as well.

"...I don't know....but I can feel something watching us....and it's not the friendly kind of being watched." Bendy whispered, still staring at the forest. It had a dark feeling over there now. He never gotten the feeling when he came over here a few times and now he has it.

"....is it like the studio?" Henry whispered, looking at him with concerns, then he starts to get that feeling as well. Angry eyes just staring at them both.

"...it is like that...and yet at the same time, it's not." Bendy said, before he clenched to one of Henry's hand for support.

Henry looks at the small forest, narrowing his eyes a bit to see if he could say anything. He could not see anything, but he could feel something watching them as well, and he could feel that they were full of anger, unfriendly eyes.

He could feel Bendy's hand clenching to his hand a little tighter before he knelt down in front of him, making sure that he was facing him instead of the forest that the feeling of angry eyes staring at them both.

"Bendy, look at me." Henry said softly, placing his hands on the toon's shoulder. Bendy took a deep breath before looking up at Henry. His expression was unreadable, but it was filled with determination and comfort at the same time.

"If it continues, we'll figure it out. We always do, right?" He asked, a small smile on his face. Bendy thinked for a moment before nodding at him. "Y-Yeah...but....what if it's....what if one of those large searchers are in there?"

"We took plenty of those things down before. We can surely do it again. And I wouldn't let anything happened to you. You know that, right?" He asked, giving his shoulders a gentle squeeze.

Bendy glanced up at him before taking calm and deep breaths to calm his nerves, the melting ink on his forehead starting to smooth out once more before nodding. "Y-Yeah. Yeah, you're right, Henry."

"....let's head inside. If it continues, we'll think of something. Okay?" Henry said. Bendy nods before hugging Henry tightly around his chest, making Henry grunt a bit when he caught the toon, but smiled and hugged Bendy back with one arm.

"Thanks, Henry." Bendy managed to say. Henry smiled and gives him a gentle squeeze. "For you, bud. Aynthing." Henry whispered before pulling away. Henry stood up, helping Bendy up to his feet.

"Alright, then. Let's get something to drink before the noon heat hits us." Henry said before leading Bendy inside of the house, making Bendy giggle. Bendy glanced back at the forest, no longer feeling the angry eyes staring at them. Henry was right, they would figure out if it does come to the worse.

As the sun starts to set slowly, they were having a calm moment in the living room, listening to a story on the radio. Bendy was nearly dozing off against Margret, who was rubbing his head right between his horns.

John looks up from his newspaper and smiled before looking back. "....huh. Says here there's been a spotting of deers around here, more than usual." He commented, Henry blinked as he looked up, who was reading an old book from his childhood.

"Really? Do you get a lot of deer?" He asked, Bendy blinking awake but he still seemed tired.

"Not all that often. A small group one in awhile, but not a whole lot. Probably looking for a new place to graze at if their old home is starting to become unflourish with plant life." John comment, looking at the next page.

Bendy could feel a strange feeling come from the barn, hearing one of the horses neighing loudly. "....hey, umm...I'm gonna check on Bendy jr. I haven't seen him since we've got here." He said, getting off the couch and stretch.

"Well...alright. Just don't stay in there too late." Margret said, smiling as Bendy went outside. He looks around, then at the forest. He couldn't feel the angry eyes glancing at him. This made him take his chance to go into the barn. He went inside, seeing some of the animals about to fall asleep.

He looks around before smiling as he see a familiar black colt in his stall. "Hey, buddy. I haven't seen ya since we've last visit." Bendy smiled as he walked up to the colt. Bendy jr. looks at him before letting out a neigh, scraping its hoof against the ground before walking up.

Bendy smiled as he pets the colt's head and mane the best he could--

There was a large creak against the wall. Bendy jerked a bit, pulling his hand away from the colt. He looks around before having that dread feeling once more, only this time, it had a sinking feeling.

Bendy walked outside and glanced around, stepping out of the barn. But as he did, he could not hear anything. No crickets, no toads or anything.

The silence scares him.

The ground starts to rumble, making Bendy jerk back as he backs away from a large hill starting to form underneath the ground. Bendy had that dark and dread feeling again, the angry eyes glaring at him once more--

A large black hand comes from the ground and pins Bendy. His screams were muffled as a large black creature came out from the ground, making a loud roar as it's body was snake like, one of the clawed hands pinning the toon to the ground, yellow eyes glaring down at him.

It was a large searcher.

An adapted large searcher that lived outside of the studio. It spreads out it's inky frills from the side of it's face, making a hissing sound as it lets out a roar, opening it's mouth to reveal razor sharp teeth. It looks down at Bendy, the inky air making Bendy gagged as it smelled ink gone bad from lack of use.

"....I've been waiting for this for a long time...this is for killing one of our allies..." It growled, it's grin evil as it starts to open it's mouth--

There was a loud bang, the searcher jerking when it felt something hit him against it's head. It turned around to see John holding a shotgun, reloading it as he aimed at it. "Get the hell away from my grandson, you damn snake!"

The searcher hissed, the frills expanding out before it lets out a hiss like roar, forgetting about Bendy as it aimed for John. Bendy coughed as he gasped for air before looking over at John. "G-Grandpa..." Bendy said, coughing from the foul odor from the large searcher.

Henry ran outside, dodging the claws that nearly came down on him and managed to grab Bendy, rolling out of the way as the searcher tries to slam it's claws down on them. Henry was gasping as he laid on his back, holding onto Bendy with one arm as the toon clinging to his shirt.

"I got ya, bud....I got you." He managed to say, then stilled when he saw the searcher turned to him. It lets out a roar before going after him. Henry cursed as he got to his feet and dodged when the searcher lurched forward to bite Henry, missing him by a few inches as it tore his sleeve of his shirt.

John could see that the bullets from his shotgun was not working as reloads. He then thought of an idea. "Henry, Bendy! Keep it distracted. I will be right back!" He shouted before going back inside.

Bendy and Henry look at each other and nodded. Bendy gets out of Henry's arms and focused, turning into his monster form. He lets out a threatening growl, the ink on his back starting to bubble up.

The searcher saw him and lets out a hiss, challenging Bendy to make the first move. Bendy made the first move as he made the first swing, smacking it right in the jaws, The searcher backs up, shaking it's head before jumping at Bendy, it's snake body coiling around Bendy to constrict him.

Bendy roars out, trying to get the searcher off of him, before punching it in it's throat, making the searcher roar out in pain before the coils loosen up, Bendy grabbing it before throwing it away from him.

Henry winced at the sudden anger he was feeling from Bendy due to their bond together. 'Bendy, you need to stay calm.' Henry tried to tell him with his thoughts. 'I-I'm trying, Henry. But this searcher....it's just making me feel nothing but anger!' Bendy said, being thrown back when the searcher grabbed him when his guard was down.

The searcher looked at Henry, growling loudly before he walked forward to him, stalking towards him. Henry backs up slowly, only having a large branch to defend himself with. The searcher lerched it's head back, roaring, about to strike him down.

There was sudden pain against the searcher, making it roar out in pain when a gunshot was heard. John came back, his shot gun in his hands as he fires another round, the bullets now stings so badly that the searcher was wiggling on the ground in pain, trying to get the bullets out.

"Like the taste of acetone,  you piece of garbage?!" John shouted, reloading his gun once more and fired at it, hitting the searcher straight in the eye, making it roar loudly in pain, scratching at it's own face to get the doused acetone bullets out of it's body.

It kept thrashing around in pain until the searcher's body shook less and less before it was just breathing deeply, scratching deeply against the ground. It glared at Henry, feeling it's life fading away from the acetone bullets. "....you may have taken me down....but you will never be safe...." It growls before the glowing yellow eyes started to fade.

The searcher lets out one last breath before it's body went limp, it's inky form now melting into nothing but a giant pile of ink, seeping into the grass with only the bullets left behind.

John kept an eye on the ground, aiming his shotgun at the source of the ink until he saw nothing. He relaxed before lowering his weapon, sighing deeply.

He walks over to Henry, helping him up to his feet. "You alright, son?" John asked, placing his gun down as Henry dusted himself off. Henry heard a whine and looks over at Bendy, seeing him slowly standing up.

"Bendy!" He ran over to the toon as Bendy placed a hand on his head, shaking the dizziness off before hearing Henry. "You okay, bud?" Henry asked, the toon glancing down at him. Bendy nods before lowering his head and nuzzled him.

"Yeah...I'm glad you're safe too, bud." Henry said, sighing with relief that the toon was okay. Henry watched his mother ran out to hug his father, which he embraced her tightly in return, hearing her sobbing against John's shoulder. "I'm okay, honey...." John said, kissing her on the top of her head as she tries to keep her calm.

Bendy smiled sadly at the scene--

Something hits him from behind, making Bendy fall over as he was zoning in and out of consciousness. He could hear Henry calling out to him vaguely, John and Margret looking around. He then could see something large and black grabbing Henry's parents, then Henry.

Before he went unconscious, he could see a larger figure standing over him, a large reptile like foot against the ground. He could hear the deep growls and instead of yellow eyes, there were a blood red, giving him an angered glare.

".....you'll know where to find us when you wake up....if you want to see your humans alive...." Bendy lets out a whine as the figure walked away, hearing Henry and his parents calling out to him.

He tries to reach out to them, but the pain in the back of his head was too much.

He was soon unconscious, Henry and his grandparents being taken away as he was left behind.

This is the first part of the three chapters. I will try to upload and write part two as soon as I can. In part two, you will get to see what has captured Henry and his parents, Bendy rushing to the rescue to save his only family, but will it be too much for him to handle? More fanfics to come. 

Until then, 

Pooka-Dragon

[chocobutt-trash]

Hiya! You write beautifully and you're probably sick of me saying that by now because I say it all the time and every comment I make on all your fics.. But there's many times when I'm engaging with your writing that I need to pause and just say "wow." So it got me thinking that you've probably read a lot of interesting books and I was wondering if you would share some of your favorite fiction titles. It's almost blasphemy to talk about non fanfiction on tumblr but I am quite curious. Thank u

*waves*Hey there - thanks so much for this ask, it’s something I relish being asked because there’s nothing I like more than talking about my favourite books ;)

First off I’m still super flattered you enjoy my writing so much! I have a long way to go before reaching the calibre of those I look up to, but with more practice, and wider reading, there’s always the chance, haha.

Blasphemy? Never!

So: books and authors I adore.

Right up at the top we have to have Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Mantel’s prose is absolutely exquisite, and she’s one of the most enjoyable authors around. Wolf Hall is the first in a fantastic trilogy covering the rise of Thomas Cromwell to power in Tudor England, but honestly, Mantel could write about de-greasing a kitchen sink and the prose would be so damn delightful I’d read it and weep. Here, we have a hefty tome that is, essentially, a history book, and the most stunning thing is that she’s reconstructed as much as possible of the events and scenery as was at the time of the Tudors. She really got inside Cromwell’s head to write this book, and he’s such an interesting character. We often hear of the Henry VIII story from either Henry’s point of view, or those of his wives (particularly Anne Boleyn). But this, now, this comes from the unexpected track. Born to commonfolk in a small London suburb, Cromwell was never meant to gain entry into the inner circles of the English Court, and yet he ended up influencing the political and religious direction of an entire nation. This is a fantastic character study of a shrewd, down-to-earth, ambitious man, who is at once a man of the people and yet so hard to fathom. Damn, just talking about it makes me want to read it again.

Filth, by Irvine Welsh, is a mainstay of mine. It’s written entirely in Scots dialect, so if you’ve not the background, you may need a translator. But Filth, like all Welsh’s novels, is amazing in its characterisation. It deals with an ordinary policeman in Edinburgh, Bruce Robertson, who, we slowly come to realise over the course of the novel, is completely morally corrupt. And it starts out with little things. Little, ‘oh, he’s probably being a bit of a jerk’ things. Little redeemable things. And since it’s all from his point of view, you’re along with him for the ride. Having a villain as the main character, first-person, and having the rabbit hole be such a subtle slip, does interesting things to your brain, to the point where, as a reader, you almost start waving away some of his actions, and part of it’s due to the sort of language Welsh employs. I love this fact, because you see how easy it is for people who do terrible things to get away with it. To make you want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Just in case they can be redeemed. There is also a hefty dose of psychological horror and existentialism, with a side order of magical realism as the tapeworm that lives in Bruce Robertson’s gut starts talking to him. The further he gets down the rabbit hole, the worse his mental health becomes. And, of course, this is Irvine Welsh we’re talking about, and I don’t think there’s even enough tags on AO3 to warn you of all the horrors this book contains within.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, has been one of the biggest influences on my writing style. McCarthy has an incredibly unique style. It’s bare-bones writing - he need not spell out anything for the reader, and this goes to the point where he doesn’t even use speech marks to delineate conversation. The structure of the writing alone is so flawless that you don’t even need it. It’s an exercise in creating a stark, vivid post-apocalyptic world with the bare minimum of ingredients. Word choice, sentence structure, emotion. His style really isn’t for everyone, but it is so clever and utterly delicious. I read the entire thing on the verge of tears, I was so worried for the kid in the story.

Amrita, by Banana Yoshimoto, is actually not Yoshimoto’s best work in terms of style (her short story collections Sleep and Kitchen are better), but it’s such a work of art that it stands as my favourite of hers. It’s about a young woman who wakes up after being in a coma, having lost certain parts of her memory. There’s a sister who died, a younger brother with problems of the parapsychological variety, and a healthy dose of magical realism. It’s all washed over with this serene sense of nostalgia and anticipation, and on every page I felt like I was on the brink of an entirely other world, that I could just look at the world slightly differently, and it would shift.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami, is an experimental masterpiece. I love the fact that I basically read the entire thing and it was so well-written I didn’t even question the fact that nobody in the novel has names. That’s right, nobody’s name is mentioned even once. And there’s at least a dozen characters. This is an outstanding book that influenced anime creator Yoshitoshi ABe (creator of Serial Experiments Lain, and Haibane Renmei), and it’s utterly fantastical and out there and thought-provoking, which is not what one might necessarily think for a novel that opens with a man musing at great length about what sort of sofa is best to sit upon.

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (no, not the comedian, the other one), is also experimental in nature, and is sublime in the way it packages up its stories. Mitchell has an immense amount of talent; there are multiple plotlines that spans centuries and he is somehow able to write convincingly well in each genre style, from nineteenth-century colonial memoirs to ‘70′s crime drama to futuristic post-apocalyptic fiction. I read a lot of ship logs from century-old expeditions, and the segment The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing is absolutely spot-on. There’s real beauty in this book, and please, for the love of god, read the book rather than watch the film, because beautiful as the film is, it does not come close to capturing that sense of wonder that the book does.

Dune, by Frank Herbert, has to be up here because not only is Dune a fantastic example of eco-fiction, but Herbert breaks the cardinal rule of not having more than one point of view in a paragraph and somehow I still love him. Conventionally, I prefer sticking to a single point of view in an entire scene, because otherwise the narrative is messy, and not in a fun way, more in a kind of sticks-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth-like-mashed-potato kind of way. Bleh. However, Herbert routinely switches perspective in the same scene, sometimes during the same paragraph, and occasionally during the same sentence. He’s pretty much the only writer I can stand who does this (barring Stephen King on the odd occasion) and it’s mainly because one of the principal themes in Dune is the use of Bene Gesserit magic, which is a glorified way of saying ‘using psychological warfare on others’. Words are a weapon, and it’s imperative to the plot of the story that the reader sees the effect of these words on the characters’ mental states. So yeah, it’s meant to be a sci-fi eco-warrior novel, but it ends up immensely psychological. And that is a very worthwhile read.

I think I’ve covered the main ones that tend to hover up near the top of my mind. Again, thank you so much for this ask, it was great fun to answer.

[petty-crush]

An open letter/retort to the “honest trailer” for “Alien Covenant”

Of course people can disagree and of course this is a sarcastic video. But since this contains a lot of knee jerk, being negative for views comments, (and because people may get fooled by just watching this video)I think this is a good place to dissect frogs.

My bias; I think “Covenant” is a truly great film. Spectacular in ideas, behaviors, visuals, and pure fun. I loved it. I am clearly willing to die on a hill for it

The main gap is that it’s really a different series, under the mask of the “Alien” series. It actually veers closer to the 1932 film “Island of lost Souls”. Ship of survivors representing normal veer into uncharted territory; a mad scientist bending the rules of biology encounters and clashes with them; the monsters he creates go to war with the ship. And in this film evil wins.

It also contains genuinely great performance(s) from Fassbender, grand sketches of gods wrecking the cosmos, humanity abandoning its children to go after unanswerable questions, and more that harken back to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” sandbox of sci fi.

To me, this film is all about David. The humans are cannon fodder for them. Which justifies their characterization. Also, he’s clearly a stand in for Ridley Scott and the work + wonder of being an artist, film director in particular.

I love this. I can see others liking it less, but is beautifully realized, staged, and executed.

So what are people looking for? Well…

[quotes around their words, mine by themselves]

“From Ridley Scott, one of the best directors… And one of the worst”

-first off, I think an artist is judged by their best work, not overall average

Scott can be quite varied. I personally favor going to cosmos than staying in your lane. Sometimes that make mistakes, but interesting ones.

Make no mistake though: “The Counselor” is a first rate film, acidic in the extreme, but so totally gonzo that it makes you breathe a different air. It’s the kissing cousin to “Covenant”, and both show a director willing to try new ideas and tones, and pulls it off spectacularly. Both have no interest in making the viewer feel good or flatter them, which definitely pushes some people away

“There are now more bad alien films than good ones”

-first off, where is “Prometheus”? Isn’t it an alien film? If not, and “covenant” is clearly a sequel to it, then maybe this film should be judged apart from the Ripley saga.

-I have wondered at times if calling it “Prometheus: Covenant” would have cut down on the confusion

-“Alien 3” is a spectacular film. It fully commits to the idea of Ripley having courage and purpose to her life as she knows she will die. It is completely different to “Aliens”(which may have been its problem concerning reception,as we will see) and “Alien”, it forms a perfect trilogy. Fincher may hate how fucked he got by the system, but it is a beautiful and wonderful film

“Alien resurrection” less so. But it is an odd, French splatter cartoon; certainly worth watching, not at all bad.

The “vs predator” films are largely minor, and I have no qualms with considering them less successful films.

-What makes the alien series great is that with each film the xenomorph changes to be what the film needs it to be. It’s flexibility storytelling wise is impressive. The problem comes when a audience only wants one type of story done

“When Ridley Scott wanted to talk about the meaning of life, he wanked for two hours”

-“Prometheus” has nothing to do with life, and everything to do with death. The characters in the film want to know about life (particularly Shaw since she can’t give birth) but they are punished at every turn, showing the universe to be uncaring.

Disagree with that statement or not, that is the rule that “Prometheus” and “Covenant” is abiding by.

Hell the first shot of “Prometheus” is an engineer killing himself. “Covenant” starts with life and realizing how the creator will die. There is consistency in this film universe.

And it also totally vibes with “Alien”.

“Save the philosophical stuff for ‘Blade Runner’, I want a short haired girl, in a tank top, fighting a xenomorph, who kills it by sucking it into the vacuum of space”

-and now we come to the real discussion/thorn in the side; this film isn’t a damn thing like “Aliens”

One thing that makes the alien series so fascinating is how it allowed two totally different filmmakers to make their masterpiece.

Also, it’s the rare series where the sequel brought in a bigger and wider audience.

I bet money that most people really only like “Aliens”. And that’s no shame, it’s a brilliant film. It’s strengths are the set pieces, the use of xenomorph as locusts, and characters that are simple but snappy and endearing.

In comparison to “Alien” which is cold, weird and slow moving (and brilliant) “Aliens” charm is more warm and dynamic. It doesn’t ask you to wait, it asks you to hold on. It gets kids in the door with Newt, it sets up a deep chord with Ripley giving her mother like affection , and it also makes Ripley more feminine and kick ass (she was wonderfully butch and joyfully selfish in “Alien”)

Cameron said it best in his critique of “Covenant”; “ I don’t like films where you invest in a character and they get destroyed at the end.”

Some people share that opinion. Ridley Scott does not. (Nether do I)His films generally have had the protagonist go through hell and often destroyed them. I admire that in him.

But that point of view explains why “Aliens” is so successful; it makes us love the characters and be sad when their friends die. Cameron is a genius, and is warm with his characters. Scott is also a genius, and picks their wings off like a cruel child.

Every alien film post “Aliens” has had to bear that cross, of creating such lovable stock characters. “Alien 3” didn’t give a shit, and made a impressive gathering of detached male prisoners. “Resurrection” came close with goofy space pirates, but were weird as shit.

In my opinion, if “Alien” came out after “Aliens” it would have not been as warmly received, because, got damn, is it cold and weird and hurts its people. It’s suppose to. The reaction to “Prometheus” and “Covenant” shows that all too clear.

Finally, Scott clearly does not give a shit about any alien film after his. I don’t think the Prometheus saga will show the queen alien because it came after Scott and he considers it invalid.

With this in mind, I can see how people are upset. Cold, hateful, sadistic are what “Covenant” are. And I love it for that.

I love mean films with a purpose and artistic flourish. And the Prometheus saga does it so well.

If you came to “Covenant” to root for its human characters, you are fucked (and kinda an idiot). Scott is making big budget sci fi epics about the mass murder of nature and survival of artists.

You can hate that, but call a spade a spade.

“In a franchise full of unforgettable characters”

(Shows only “Aliens” characters)

What about Dallas? Ash? Clemens? Golic? Call? Elgyn? Gediman?

There exists good characters other than the second film, guys

Once again, this love for “Aliens” blinds people to everything else

“Forget the humans”

Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

-but also, that slipping on blood part was (intentionally) hilarious

“Freshman philosophy class…two versions of same pretentious professor..flute”

-why do I get the feelings that the people who say stuff like this never study philosophy and just consider anything even slightest bit about talking about feelings and ideas just stoner shit, because they are the only people that talk about those subjects they let in their social circle?

I dunno, the idea about humanity killing its children for vague reasons, someone trying to better himself against cruelty and going mad himself, and finally having the courage to create something even when everyone else tells him to stand down sounds pretty universally relatable and human to me.

And even if it was pretentious, that is what art is, to subtract the distractions, and focus on what you want the world to be

-to me, David is sad Walter cannot create, like Scott is upset younger directors don’t get to make original universes and material. But David is also a fucking maniac who will stop at nothing, to whom other lives means nothing. That kind of grand vainness is perfectly at home in the world and its what art leisure to create out of whole cloth

But all of this gets in the way of watching strong men blow things away with guns, doesn’t it? (“aliens” did this to show how ineffective the marines were, not to worship them)

-the flute adds to the fantasy element, of the pied piper trying to lure others away, to their doom

Plus, it’s just fucking funny

“Snickers at 'I’ll take care of the fingering’”

See? This film is just so much fun

“I was not expecting this much flute playing”

I love it when films surprise me. I adore it when filmmakers follow their strange urges and give us scenes I never saw coming.

I love the scene of David tempting Walter with the flute.

I marveled at the scene where David drops his black plague on the engineers(who look totally different).

I looked around as David played the fucking theme to “Prometheus” on his flute. I starred at the other audience members, as if to ask “is this the real life?”

I laughed uproariously as just when you think it’s safe the xenomorph tracks the two pilots shower sexing, like it’s 1982 slasher time.

As soon as the humans delver us to David, I could see who this film was about. And really, the humans are just for showing his gentle and different Walter is.

Ridley Scott delivered a new horror classic, with a eye towards the 70’s and 30’s, but both feet in the present, with the score and design to make it work.

The first victim convulsing and back blood shooting. David acting as satan. Terror of trapped in the sick bay. The aforementioned shower scene. The cross bearing xenomorph rejects. The puppet master pulling the strings of the first post face hugger.

This is a brilliantly conceived, written, directed, and persevered treat for horror fans. I loved every second of it.

“Thrill of seeing the xenomorph move. In full daylight. Which just looks…wrong”

This is the best point of the video, though I disagree with the conclusion.

It is weird and against the vibe of the Ripley saga for the xenomorph to be a servant. But clearly these creatures are the hounds to mr burns. Satan. Evil mad dr Moreau.

It definitely gave the the film a totally new vibe. As did all the green life. But isn’t that what films are about, showing new images?

It just looks so damn different. I like different. Different and great-even better.

“Cgi Ripley?”

That would be pretty weird. But since I more or less wash my hands of any continuity, why not?

It’s probably just a spur of the moment statement. But also incredibly funny

“It asks [x] questions but leaves you wondering [y]”

Mac, the real question is, do you like to create? That’s all this film is about. The joy of creation. Of weaving something new out of something old.

Like, Ridley is literally exploiting his own creation. It’s surreal and the best.

“Compares terminator series to Alien series”

This is more apt, but in a different way.

For both series, The first film is a stand alone classic. A low key masterpiece. The second is an expansive blockbuster which really really skewed expectations for future films.

The comparison ends there though. Sigourney Weaver has way way more character to work with. Poor Schwarzenegger had so so directors to work with, while the Alien series put down the work of real filmmakers making challenging art.

I enjoy the terminator series, but it’s clear that it’s so much the work of one man (James Cameron) so no one else can make it work. But the fluidity of the xenomorph makes every single film worth watching and honestly essential.

The second film in both series cast a long shadow. But while the following films in the terminator series really don’t hold up if stand alone, the following xenomorph films all showcase a different side to hubris and death

Which is honestly the best way to approach this film. Something new, vibrant, and bizarrely personal

Respecting and knowing horror and monsters films for what they do helps too

“Me at the idea of six more alien films”

I love it. I usually get tuned out after a few films, but this Prometheus saga just works. The possibilities are endless.

Ridley Scott deserves the highest kudos for turning this series into greatness

In a certain way, “Alien” is “Halloween”, perfect in its execution and of its singularity.

Prometheus saga is Friday the 13th series. Messier, off to an odd start, but a snowball of its own delights that fosters an utterly nihilistic universe. Like Jason, David is too good for just one film, and we need those eight films of him. It may indeed prove to be the essentials space monster-mad scientist series, just like Jason is the essential slasher killer.

Is this pizza to a steak? Yes, but each have their own pure delights, and like a certain pie, it just gets better and beautifully blurrier with each dizzying bite

Long live Prometheus saga; may it rule in hell for an eternity. Just as “Covenant” does in my heart.

[brokenmusicboxwolfe]

I saw: 

Return of the Jedi- Not “Revenge” like the patch I got sent as a kid in my fan club renewal.

SPOILERS....because I don’t give a damn!

 Han gets rescued from Jabba with the help of the whole gang. Oddly when Luke gets captured he isn’t forced to wear a metal speedo and chains to be Jabba’s new dancing boy. Apparently only girls get lusted over and subjected to bondage by baddies, even if the baddies in question are a completely different and sexually incompatable species. Go figure. 

Then Luke pops in to see Yoda who claims he’s fully trained, though back in the day they would force little kids to leave their mamas in slavery while enduring many, many years of training. Maybe Yoda dies so he doesn’t have to deal with our wannabe jedi and the fall out from all the lies Luke’s been told. Sorry Ben, “A certain point of view” excuse doesn’t really apply here. You lied about Luke’s daddy and weren’t going to tell him who his sister was until he realized through the force. Or maybe it wasn’t the force but a wild guess based on saving face because the only girl he knows picked the cool guy in the hot rod over his whiny ass. Only know he has gone all Jedi, meaning he’s trying to act all cooler than though, emotionally detached and wearing back. His little act of “I’m a jedi now” is either adorably adolescent or creepy.

Anyway, the Empire has built themselves a new Death Star that is already nearly functional. Death Stars are just their thing now, though how you quickly bash together a new weapon the size of a moon with no one noticing the purchasing of material, transport of equipment, transfer of personal and the like I dunno. Maybe they were already starting a spare with the first one got broken. The team sent to a forest planet like moon to deactivate the equipment keeping the second Death Star from getting’s own race to go boom naturally is made up of Han, Leia, Luke, Chewie, C-3PO, R2D2 and some nameless extras.

On the moon things go a bit unexpectedly for them. Leia gets seperated and ends up with the teddy bear people. The fur balls must have mad sewing skills because by the time the boys get caught by the Ewoks she is wearing a dress fashioned to fit her  perfectly, despite the fact that she is a couple feet taller than them and they only wear hoods and little capelets. Of course it could be left over the last time they sacrificed some humanoid captives, like nearly happened to the boys until Threepio got over his aversion to claiming to be a god and Luke used the force to scare the little savages. Savages, right, the cliched primitives to help save the day thanks to the crappy lowest bidder gear the stormtroopers are kitted out with. 

Luke does take a moment to finally tell Leia that Vader is his father and she is his sister. The fact that this means Vader is HER father too, this guy that having killed the crew of the ship she traveled in subjected her personally to torture, then held her back while she watched her home world with most likely murdering the entire family she grew up with and possibly everyone she ever loved. You know, the guy that froze her boyfriend and tossed him to a bounty hunter. That guy. She should have some serious issues about this revelation! 

Look, Luke doesn’t have the same reason to know the evil of Vader personally. Vader did hack off Luke’s hand, but it was quicky in a fight and he got a nice cybernetic replacement. Luke doesn’t know his aunt and uncle were killed by Vader’s orders, but then he hardly mourned them. He seemed far more upset when Vader killed Ben, despite the fact that he barely knew Ben and Ben basically commited suicide deliberately letting kill him. Considering Ben has continued to pop in to have chats with him, I doubt he has too much of a rage at the dark one over it.

Does remind me though: We get proof the Leia is a really nice person because she comforts HIM on the Falcon when she’s the one that just watched the genocide of her people and might still be feeling the after effects of torture! I mean, geez Luke, why is all about YOU?

So yeah, it’s Luke that goes off on a crazy quest to save his daddy, claiming there is good in him. Considering I saw the lousy prequels I take issue with that! He might have had potential as a child, but by adulthood there wasn’t a damn thing likeable about the jerk! Now, of the two Skywalker kids he is the one that would be able to forgive Vader, what with being to ignorant and idealistic to face  reality. On the other hand, he has always been emotionally impulsive and proves an idiot because he lets the Emperor goad him into teetering on edge if giving into his dark side. I mean, the Emperor pretty much tells him “I’m trying to make you angry so you act stupidly and join our evil club. Because we are evil, in case you didn’t notice. Aw, come on, you know you wanna!” I really think Senator and Princess Leia, leader in the resistance before it even went public, might have been a lot less of a risk at giving into her dark side, even with her reason to hate Vader. Because she isn’t an idiot like Junior Jedi boy.

It all works out like you expect. Teddy bears smash imperial gear, so Lando, Wedge and company can turn Death Star II into a fireworks desplay that must have rained down debris on our little forested moon. Luke gets his daddy to finally have one moment of change of heart as his boy is tortured. So all is forgiven, all those horrible, cruel and impulsive deaths he inflicted don’t matter. Luke burns the armour, because armour is known for being so flammable, and Vader gets to be a ghost with a couple decades worth of face lift unlike the other force spirits hanging around who look about like they did when they died. Love triangle cured on account of suprise siblings, Leia and Han get to be a happy couple (well until the Force Awakens tells us it didn’t work our and they spawned an evil, temper tantrum throwing brat) There is rejoicing all around, including, in the SE version we are stuck with, the captial of the bloody Empire! Because we know they celebrated with fireworks  in Berlin and Japan at the end if WWII. “Yippie! We Lost!!” Whatever. It was all over, the good guys won and the trilogy mostly satisfactorily finished.

You know, back in the 90s a magazine called SciFi Universe had a cover story saying something like “50 Reasons we Hate Return of the Jedi...but love Star Wars” (I may not remember that right, it has been a LONG time!) It surprised me when I read it. I existed totally removed from fandoms and was oblivious to popular feelings. I had always considered this movie the weak link of the three, by a wide margin, but “hate”? Nah, I don’t hate it. In fact, I am kind of fond of the reviled  Ewoks. But yeah, I I do sort of shrug and fail to feel the slightest bit guilty mocking it. Still, even though I don’t rewatch it near as often as I do the two that precieded it, I do once in a while. That’s better than a certain other Star Wars triology! LOL 

[ailuronymy]

Guest Warriors-ify: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (original trilogy)

(There will be spoilers!!! These games have a billion characters so I narrowed it down to the most important ones. Sorry if someone you were hoping to see isn’t in here!) 

(I might come back for Dual Destinies…)        

Phoenix Wright: Dark blue mackerel tabby tom. Thick, medium-length fur that has a tendency to stick upright. Others make fun of him for this. Zealous with an overactive imagination. Clingy with his friends, becomes lethargic when ignored or abandoned. Never, ever gives up. Highly unpredictable. Direct and confrontational, even to the point of yelling in the face of much bigger cats who he knows are dangerous. Keeps managing to fake his way through tough situations in ways that make him look like a prodigy. Because of this, he’s been struggling to maintain this reputation - and keeps barely scraping by. (name: Dovestorm) 

Miles Edgeworth: Dark ginger classic tabby tom with a wavy white splash on his chest and on his tailtip. Sleek-furred shorthair. Resting grumpy face. Convinced that his father’s death was his own fault; lashes out his over this guilt by enforcing the warrior code a bit too fiercely. Apprentice-hood friends with Dovestorm; they grew apart when his father died. An actual prodigy who views Dovestorm’s brash rise to fame with contempt. After learning the truth about his father, he’ll go on a long journey to become a much nicer, calmer cat. (name: Sorrelheart) 

Dick Gumshoe: Big, stocky tom. Dark brown spotted tabby with a pale underside. Long, scruffy, unkept fur. Sorrelheart’s loyal  henchman  right-hand man. Far from intelligent but loyal and loving to a fault. Doesn’t have one single bad bone in his body - but has been known to do bad things when ordered to because he’s too naive to fully realize what he’s doing. Jumps to conclusions. Deeply affectionate. (name: Buzzardflower) 

Manfred Von Karma: Loud, intimidating blue-silver mackerel tabby tom. Long, elegant fur that’s grayed quite a bit with age. Vicious and egotistical. A bitter, abusive perfectionist with a nasty habit of attacking anyone who disagrees with him - verbally and physically. Has even been known to order the leader around (who, to be fair, is kind of a coward). Sorrelheart’s manipulative former mentor. Killed Sorrelheart’s father and, thanks to Dovestorm, will one day be banished for this. (name: Ashclaw) 

Franziska Von Karma: Equally loud, equally intimidating blue-silver mackerel tabby molly. Long, elegant fur that’s still young and beautiful. The spitting image of her father. Perfectionist to the point of intense self-critique. Lashes out violently in response to her insecurities. Does not yet realize that her father was abusive and is bitter over his banishment. Torn between respect for him and sisterly love for Sorrelheart. (name: Birchclaw) 

Mia Fey: Black smoke shorthair molly with a long tail. As she is smoke, her mackerel stripes show a bit on her chest and legs. Tall and beautiful. A remarkably just and outspoken warrior who is highly respected for her sense of duty. Murdered by a dangerous rogue she’d been tracking, much to the devastation of her former apprentice, Dovestorm. (name: Sootheart) 

Maya Fey: Smoke tortoiseshell shorthair. Has an adorable bushy tail. Supposed to be a medicine cat apprentice but she keeps slacking off. Mischievous molly who is cute enough to pass as innocent, which she uses to her advantage. However, heavily spiritual and mature when she needs to be. Teams up with Dovestorm after her sister, Sootheart, dies. They hunt down that rogue together and become friends in the process, having many more misadventures together afterward. (name: Duckpaw - later Ducktail.) 

Pearl: Classic lilac-silver tabby longhair. Very tiny. Much more durable than she appears, both physically and mentally/emotionally. Likes to play matchmaker with the grown-up cats. Another medicine cat apprentice, as it’s normal for this clan to have more than one. Very gifted in her connection to StarClan. (name: Mousepaw - later Mouseleaf.) 

Dahlia and Iris: Identical sisters, both lilac tortoiseshells of medium fur length. Both lithe and beautiful. Able to easily pass as each other. One is a violently toxic individual with dreams of revenge; the other is shy and helpless when faced with her sister’s manipulation. (names: Yewfur and Fallowpelt) 

Diego/Godot: Originally a handsome dark brown mackerel tabby longhair, poison killed most pigmentation in his body. His nerves (including vision) have been severely impacted as well. Now he’s white with unfocused red-pink eyes. Sootheart’s mate. Was unconscious for quite some time after being poisoned. Sootheart died while he was in this coma, which is a source of much rage and grief for him. Was once cool and collected, difficult to provoke. Now, he lashes out with petty revenge schemes, primarily against Dovestorm, who he blames for letting Sootheart die. Arrogant. Likes to think he’s mysterious but he’s actually just a jerk. (name: Tigercloud - changed to Whitefur) 

Larry Butz: Ginger ticked tom of medium fur length and white underbelly. Unpredictable. Has horrible luck; keeps getting in trouble with authority through little fault of his own. Always optimistic, always loud, always dumb. When something goes wrong, he’s usually at the center of it. Nobody likes him and yet he somehow keeps getting dates. (name: Honeystorm) 

The Judge: Once-chocolate longhair tom who’s almost completely grayed with age. Supposedly has a strong sense of justice…but easily swayed by threats and sob stories. Pushover. He’s technically the leader but he hardly leads. This guy’s been around forever. How many lives does he have left? Will he ever lose all of them? We just don’t know. (Batstar - once Batfur.)   

BONUS: Rise From The Ashes DLC! 

Damon Gant: Massive longhair ticked ginger tabby tom. Graying heavily with age but still young at heart. A selfish sociopath who passes as a fun-loving, generous senior warrior. Despises non-clan-cats with a passion. Soft spot for warriors who go above and beyond the call of duty. You are either terrified of him or he’s your best friend. Or both. Most likely both. (name: Lionwhisker) 

Lana Skye: Chocolate burmese molly. Shorthair. Deputy but forced into being Lionwhisker’s figurehead. Eternally stoic. Used to be much more gentle and friendly before Lionwhisker started blackmailing her over a murder that her sister was almost framed for. After that, she started to block people out of her life to protect them. (name: Ottercloud) 

Ema Skye: Chocolate burmese snowshoe molly with one white paw. Shorthair. Not even remotely stoic. Passionate, ambitious apprentice. Smart but a little too ahead of herself, often missing details and jumping to conclusions. Angry with Ottercloud for growing distant with her, however, is nevertheless determined to get her back as a sister. (Minkpaw - later Minknose.) 

Jake Marshall: Pale brown mackerel tabby tom. Long, thick fluff around his neck/chest but otherwise very smooth-furred. Acts laid-back but is actually bottling up his emotions. Useful in a crisis but not very good at long-term planning. Suspects fowl play in his brother’s murder, convinced that it wasn’t a rogue like everyone thinks. (name: Volestripe) 

Neil Marshall: Pale brown ticked tabby tom. White tux markings that skip his chin. Very short fur. Eager and hardworking. Former deputy, murdered by Lionwhisker. Minkpaw was originally framed for his murder; Ottercloud found his body, thought her sister had done it, and begged for Lionwhisker’s help to make it look like a rogue did it instead. Ottercloud became deputy in his place. (name: Deerclaw) 

Angel Starr: Gorgeous longhair calico with very little visible ginger. Soft, fluffy fur, especially on her tail and around her chest. Highly ambitious and intimidating warrior; however, she knows this and shows off a little too much, which sometimes makes her hard to take seriously. Volestripe’s mate, teamed up with him to investigate Deerclaw’s murder. Deeply despises Ottercloud. (name: Sheepfang) 

Bruce Goodman: Black-and-white van tom with medium fur length. Once a reluctant member of Volestripe and Sheepfang’s investigation trio. However, he made the mistake of politely asking Lionwhisker to help them, which got him killed in a fit of panic. (name: Swanpelt) 

Mike Meekins: Pale gray-brown shorthair tom. Long-bodied, long-legged, and lithe. Young cat who probably wasn’t ready for the promotion to warrior yet. His main duties include screaming at inappropriate times and annoying Sorrelheart. Looks up to Buzzardflower as a personal hero. (name: Snailfoot) 

[hisgirlinthewhitedress]

@thestateofardadreaming asked me to tell you all about 10 favorite characters, in 10 different fandoms.  

The first characters will be the ones I need to say more about. So here you:

Contessina De’Bardi (Medici:Masters of Florence)

I had started to watch the show for Richard Madden and I found myself to irreparably fall in love with Contessina. This woman is a force of nature, smart, resilient, loyal,bold, direct, self-reliant, brave, empathetic, loving. She’s a feminist of her time. I could hear her own version of Lemonade as she was going through years and years of marriage with a man who pretended to be a martyr and as she was giving lessons of Feminism™ to Lucrezia.

“there are more ways for a woman to be indispensable than just bearing children”

She got all the traits I want in a female character. 

Jack Shephard (Lost) 

He’s the main character of the show, he’s the leader, if it hadn’t been for him, some wouldn’t have survived a day on that island. He’s a hero, but not in a conventional way. He’s damaged, hurt, he lost so much in life, he fucked up very hard in his life and he doesn’t know how to fix his mistakes, his problems.

Jack’s character development is one of the greatest i’ve ever seen on any show, I lived his journey along with him, I was there with him in his path from man of science to man of faith. I felt it when he was crushed in the post-island period, I felt his pain, his suffering, his constant torment, it was real. Thank you Matthew Fox for the amazing acting.

“Jack, I wish you had believed me” John Locke

Obi Wan Kenobi (Star Wars)

Oh my Obi Wan! my burnt, heartbroken, damaged jedi 💔

tbh, if I talk about Obi Wan, I immediately talk about Anakin. I actually love them both on equal measure, but I choose Obi Wan, because I suffered for him.

I remember when I first watched the original trilogy and I really wanted to know what it was like Obi Wan and Anakin’s relationship. Then I watched the prequels, I ended up hurt, heartbroken, crushed because of these two.

They loved each other immensely. Obi Wan became not such a good jedi because he loved Anakin way more than a Master should care about his Padawan. He could have never killed Anakin because he loved him too much, his brother, his son, his life. Anakin’s betrayal destroyed him completely. He died on Mustafar along with Anakin, he was dead inside and kept living as Ben watching over Anakin’s son for 20 years. That’s commitment, that’s pure, selfless love. 

I swear, If I could have a scene in the next Star Wars movies with Anakin and Obi Wan reunited...it’d be...I mean, Obi Wan happy and in peace...too many feelings to handle.

Logan Huntzberger (Gilmore Girls)

yeah, yeah I know he’s not a main character and on a show that is based on the life of the Gilmore Girls...it’s a really questionable choice, but fuck it, I love Logan Huntzberger. I truly, deeply love him. He’s not perfect, he makes lots of mistakes, he lives a pretty privileged life with a 5 million dollar trust fund, he’s been a jerk at times? yes, sure and once out of jealousy to see his girlfriend with her own ex (WHO DOES THAT? *sarcasm*) 

But you know why I love Logan? Because he’s very well aware of his privilege, because he’s not fake, because he’s been honest with Rory since day 1, committed to her even though it scared him to be in a relationship, they both made mistakes along the way, but endured, loved, supported each other; the non commitment kind of guy became a great boyfriend Rory could count on, he became a better person for her.  Logan seems only just fun and LDB, but he’s always been more than that, I knew it since the first interaction with Rory: he stimulates her to confront each other’s point of view, he encourages her to speak her mind, he supports in any choice and doesn’t push her. He’s well-read, has a great education,  a quick, witted mind and high level of general knowledge. If I could have a spin-off with Logan and his family, because those dynamics were very interesting to watch. 

I looked beyond the facade and saw an incredible character. 

TVD!KLAUS 

This motherfucker was my favorite villain on tvd.

The Originals Klaus? Forget about him, that’s not Klaus. That’s a version that Carina McKenzie, Michael Narducci and Julie Plec dream of him and they got the damn possibility to show it on scree. Kevin Williamson I’m sure is disgusted by that. It’s not like he’s ever gonna say it, but we all know it.

Seriously, go back and watch S2/S3, but even S4 of TVD. That was Klaus Mikaelson, one of the most feared characters of that world, everyone literally lost their shit at the mention of Klaus’s name, he was everyone’s nightmare. He despised humans, got a badass family who hated the shit out of him, he had no moral, no ethic. Only Caroline Forbes was becoming his weakness, slowly, inadvertently she was becoming his only way to redemption

and you know what they did with him? he got a little werewolf pregnant (like what? seriously?), he’s threatened by everyone, no one gives a shit he’s Klaus Mikaelson, he’s got a daughter he named HOPE (that’s lame as fuck “you’re our only hope”...please...Obi Juan is our only hope) and his whole badass Original family has become the weakest, lamest thing I’ve ever seen on tv. 

SO basically, if you’re interested in watching Klaus Mikaleson, watch S2/3 of TVD. TO is shit.

Daenerys Targaryen (Game of Thrones)

(gif purposefully used for the haters)

Pay attention, I’m not talking of book!Daenerys, I think we’ve come to a point we need to divide the characters.

She’s so hated in the fandom, I read any kind of comments and everyone be like: “she’s boring, lame”, “she’s there only because of Tyrion”

Listen, I really don’t wanna impose my opinion, but I admire Daenerys for everything she’s done till now. She’s done plenty of mistakes and questionable choices and I have no idea if her destiny is to become like her father, the Mad King, but you gotta have some balls to be a woman in that period of time and get what she achieved. She’s a woman and she somehow handles to be respected and when she’s not, she earns the respect she deserves. 

Daenerys, as many other main female characters, can be decently treated because she has a name, a name she often uses and you know why? because for Daenerys, her name is her armor, her mean to get the respect of men, to get a voice in a room full of men who would probably like to rape her. She’s strong, fierce, determine and extremely flawed. I love her. 

I hate her now. Don’t even count the shit I wrote. What the fuck was I even thinking????

Frodo Baggins (LOTR)

idk, I just...I constantly want to protect him (and Sam), as I was watching the movies I was always like “protect Frodo!!”. I’ve never read the book, so I might change my mind, but in general I love many characters.

Pamela De Beaufort (True Blood)

True to herself till the very end. The writers didn’t spare not even Eric in that last, pathetic season.

I was so afraid, they would kill her off along with Eric, but they didn’t. She actually got her happy ending with Eric and that’s what I truly loved about the finale. 

Titus Andromedon (the unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt)

He’s just Titus. You all need to watch the show to understand 

Jessica Day (New Girl)

She’s a cinnamon roll in love with Nick Miller. She’s adorable, funny, quirky and supportive. I don’t understand why I read so many people saying that she’s annoying. I love her and Zooey Deschanel is amazing

I don’t wanna leave people behind as I tag, so if you wanna do it, do it!!

[thesnhuup]

Pop Picks – February 11, 2019

February 11, 2019

What I’m listening to:

Raphael Saadiq has been around for quite a while, as a musician, writer, and producer. He’s new to me and I love his old school R&B sound. Like Leon Bridges, he brings a contemporary freshness to the genre, sounding like a young Stevie Wonder (listen to “You’re The One That I Like”). Rock and Roll may be largely dead, but R&B persists – maybe because the former was derivative of the latter and never as good (and I say that as a Rock and Roll fan). I’m embarrassed to only have discovered Saadiq so late in his career, but it’s a delight to have done so.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home, part of her trilogy that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, Gilead, and the book after Home, Lila. Robinson is often described as a Christian writer, but not in a conventional sense. In this case, she gives us a modern version of the prodigal son and tells the story of what comes after he is welcomed back home. It’s not pretty. Robinson is a self-described Calvinist, thus character begets fate in Robinson’s world view and redemption is at best a question. There is something of Faulkner in her work (I am much taken with his famous “The past is never past” quote after a week in the deep South), her style is masterful, and like Faulkner, she builds with these three novels a whole universe in the small town of Gilead. Start with Gilead to better enjoy Home.

What I’m watching:

Sex Education was the most fun series we’ve seen in ages and we binged watched it on Netflix. A British homage to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, it feels like a mash up of American and British high schools. Focusing on the relationship of Maeve, the smart bad girl, and Otis, the virginal and awkward son of a sex therapist (played with brilliance by Gillian Anderson), it is laugh aloud funny and also evolves into more substance and depth (the abortion episode is genius). The sex scenes are somehow raunchy and charming and inoffensive at the same time and while ostensibly about teenagers (it feels like it is explaining contemporary teens to adults in many ways), the adults are compelling in their good and bad ways. It has been renewed for a second season, which is a gift.

Archive

January 3, 2019

What I’m listening to:

My listening choices usually refer to music, but this time I’m going with Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on genius and the song Hallelujah. It tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s much-covered song Hallelujah and uses it as a lens on kinds of genius and creativity. Along the way, he brings in Picasso and Cézanne, Elvis Costello, and more. Gladwell is a good storyteller and if you love pop music, as I do, and Hallelujah, as I do (and you should), you’ll enjoy this podcast. We tend to celebrate the genius who seems inspired in the moment, creating new work like lightning strikes, but this podcast has me appreciating incremental creativity in a new way. It’s compelling and fun at the same time.

What I’m reading:

Just read Clay Christensen’s new book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. This was an advance copy, so soon available. Clay is an old friend and a huge influence on how we have grown SNHU and our approach to innovation. This book is so compelling, because we know attempts at development have so often been a failure and it is often puzzling to understand why some countries with desperate poverty and huge challenges somehow come to thrive (think S. Korea, Singapore, 19th C. America), while others languish. Clay offers a fresh way of thinking about development through the lens of his research on innovation and it is compelling. I bet this book gets a lot of attention, as most of his work does. I also suspect that many in the development community will hate it, as it calls into question the approach and enormous investments we have made in an attempt to lift countries out of poverty. A provocative read and, as always, Clay is a good storyteller.

What I’m watching:

Just watched Leave No Trace and should have guessed that it was directed by Debra Granik. She did Winter’s Bone, the extraordinary movie that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. Similarly, this movie features an amazing young actor, Thomasin McKenzie, and visits lives lived on the margins. In this case, a veteran suffering PTSD, and his 13-year-old daughter. The movie is patient, is visually lush, and justly earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (I have a rule to never watch anything under 82%). Everything in this film is under control and beautifully understated (aside from the visuals) – confident acting, confident directing, and so humane. I love the lack of flashbacks, the lack of sensationalism – the movie trusts the viewer, rare in this age of bombast. A lovely film.

December 4, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spending a week in New Zealand, we had endless laughs listening to the Kiwi band, Flight of the Conchords. Lots of comedic bands are funny, but the music is only okay or worse. These guys are funny – hysterical really – and the music is great. They have an uncanny ability to parody almost any style. In both New Zealand and Australia, we found a wry sense of humor that was just delightful and no better captured than with this duo. You don’t have to be in New Zealand to enjoy them.

What I’m reading:

I don’t often reread. For two reasons: A) I have so many books on my “still to be read” pile that it seems daunting to also reread books I loved before, and B) it’s because I loved them once that I’m a little afraid to read them again. That said, I was recently asked to list my favorite book of all time and I answered Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But I don’t really know if that’s still true (and it’s an impossible question anyway – favorite book? On what day? In what mood?), so I’m rereading it and it feels like being with an old friend. It has one of my very favorite scenes ever: the card game between Levin and Kitty that leads to the proposal and his joyous walking the streets all night.

What I’m watching:

Blindspotting is billed as a buddy-comedy. Wow does that undersell it and the drama is often gripping. I loved Daveed Diggs in Hamilton, didn’t like his character in Black-ish, and think he is transcendent in this film he co-wrote with Rafael Casal, his co-star.  The film is a love song to Oakland in many ways, but also a gut-wrenching indictment of police brutality, systemic racism and bias, and gentrification. The film has the freshness and raw visceral impact of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. A great soundtrack, genre mixing, and energy make it one of my favorite movies of 2018.

October 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.

What I’m reading:

Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.

What I’m watching:

Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.

September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching.  And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia.  It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan.  Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news. 

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

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[thesnhuup]

Pop Picks – October 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.

What I’m reading:

Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.

What I’m watching:

Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.

  Archive

September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching.  And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

    June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia.  It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan.  Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news. 

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

  November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

  November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

  September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

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[thesnhuup]

Pop Picks – September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

  Archive

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching.  And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

    June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia.  It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan.  Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news. 

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

  November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

  November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

  September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

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