#he has some stuff with Ian I’d like to flesh out

[aotopmha]

I'm really starting to disagree with the reaction I see around Mikasa's indecisiveness.

At first I got it and I still get it a little bit - the phrasing is mostly used as a proxy for Mikasa getting little to do, but I also don't agree with the interpretations of her character that sometimes come out of those complaints.

Mikasa never was this super proactive Battle Goddess to me. She was always what you call a "reactive character".

Conflict came to her and she dealt with it, rather than jumping into everything herself.

Since she lost her first one, her purpose in life was to protect her family - people even now reduce it down to her just being protective of Eren, I and many others have always thought it's more complicated than that, but now I personally think there is even more to it than that.

At this point her not just being protective of Eren actually is also a pretty common perspective around, too.

I think it's about stuff past that - the specific way she cares and why.

The people around her are the ones who give her meaning and direction and thus she acts depending on how they do.

Where they go, she goes.

Her moment of proactivity in Trost was her way of releasing tension; a reaction to trauma, not her "taking action" and again and again I see this cited as some super cool moment.

She was actually falling apart on the inside and her ultimate resolve was still to go on living for those she loved - in that case, Eren's memory.

She is someone who unconditionally lives for others and to me the contradictions around the criticism of her character start here.

People want her to grow to be more independent, but because of the nature of her trauma, her journey to independence will inevitabily contain a period of indecisiveness.

That's just how this kind of trauma works.

Eren is a constant, her friends are a constant. Tearing her away from that safety will naturally lead to indecision and she will have to do work to find another reason to act that doesn't involve them.

If you are torn away from the people you live for, you are going to be indecisive.

People don't want the resolution to be that she just cuts herself away from her connections and kills Eren, either because that might come across as her story just being about suffering and going through pain over and over again.

But for her to grow more proactive and "learn to be more decisive" as Armin roughly puts it, she has to go through a separation.

She can't learn to be more proactive when she is in state of mind where her only purpose for living is living for others.

So it's a catch 22 situation, where the solution to both is separation, but separation will lead to indecisiveness.

Which is then called meekness and what people usually call "sexist writing" because it involves the female character growing passive, but these are actually two very different things.

Meekness is delibrate passiveness and not even wanting to do anything, indecision is confusion and not knowing what to do.

Mikasa wants to do something, she just doesn't know what to do.

"What should I do?" she asks.

"What could I have done to prevent this?" she asks.

Naturally, what is meant by meekness is also a lack of retorts. She doesn't go around disturbing or questioning the chain of command or escalating situations for the worse with her remarks post-timeskip anymore like she did with Rico and Ian during Trost, with Kitz Weilman (the "my speciality is slicing flesh" situation), Levi in the forest (she got his ankle sprained), the "I have no heart to spare" when chasing Eren or even standing against Levi in the serumbowl.

This kind of "meekness" is actually something basically everyone in this story is going through right now, but for some reason people just mostly keep pointing at Mikasa as if she's the only character that way, but I get it, cold and sharp-tongued Mikasa is probably better written for some because well, maybe it just has more personality for some.

Character development isn't good when it "takes away" stuff you like the character for in the first place and people like the sharp tongue of the single-minded teenage Mikasa.

I'm really happy this chapter actively made her indecision as part of her character, before I might've thought Isayama just didn't know what to do with her at points - I can definitely see that complaint for the Uprising arc, especially, but now it's clear her indecisiveness is the point and Mikasa has a new thing going that's not just about her relationship with Eren. She will have to find a purpose to act and goal to strive towards when everyone she personally cares about is gone and I think we might've just seen that purpose when she called out Eren for causing so much harm to others.

She would live so no child would have to suffer like she has and could live a happy life.

This chapter actually made me kind of tear up for her.

I'm not even sure I like Armin calling her out for not being The Independent Woman Who Needs No Man because everyone she cares about is being split apart from her and relationships with other people are everything to her. Taken in a certain way, it could be just read as "stop having feelings".

Sasha died and she was sitting by her grave, holding her head because of a headache, experiencing the same pain she did all over again as she did with her parents, Eren's parents, as with Eren back in Trost and Armin in Shiganshina.

But now that everyone she cares about is going their own direction, she is helpless.

So, as said, her arc is about her finding direction again and learning to stand on her own feet and I think she will.

That... or we'll go the negative character arc route and she'll go insane from loss and isolation, which I don't think feels like the direction the story is going.

Oh, but Levi is like her and he doesn't have such an extreme reaction!

Well yeah, but Levi's principles are different and his arc is different.

I'd even argue that Levi doesn't even have an arc - we just learn how his principles developed, which is prioritizing survival at all cost (which he learned to do in the underground city) and don't regret your decisions (which according to No Regrets is from Erwin). Maybe he softened up a little bit, but even then we saw he already had a "soft side" the moment he was introduced.

Levi could've developed a unhealthy relationship with Erwin given more time, but his childhood was never defined by trauma and living for other people. It was trying to stay alive. The youngest we saw him, he was malnourished and taken in by a serial killer. A different arc.

Here you could argue why Isayama just didn't make Levi the same character, in which case you could bring up the good old sexism word, but also that he wanted to write each character differently.

Mikasa is the only female or male character that values the relationships she has that much except for, well, at this point, Eren. Whose perspective is deeply ingrained in experiencing loss just like Mikasa's. He wants to genocide the whole world so his friends could live.

Mikasa's arc is specifically *about* the trauma of losing someone dear to you and what it can do to a person and why it does that.

Those she loves are Mikasa's safety blanket and now they're all basically gone.

Sasha is dead and Historia is isolated from this incident.

Armin is panicked and stuck in his mind between all the possibilities, so he runs off on his own to get something done in his mind - Connie, Annie. It's all swirling together in his mind, in panic, when Mikasa is looking for support.

Connie ran off on his own because of his own trauma.

Jean is probably the most grounded right now, but stuck with a lunatic extremist and paralysed into indecision himself.

Hange and Levi are also off somewhere else.

This is the first time Mikasa is truly standing on her own and isolated and it made me sad.

I guess you could call me sexist, but I feel like her not knowing what to do in this situation is pretty human and delibrately good writing.

It just makes sense to me and I don't see this apparent "meek" turn Mikasa's character has taken, when she has always been a reactive character.

The "no heart to spare" teenager Mikasa is the better character for some because her character gives the illusion of "agency" because of her assertive, sharp dialog, but she's never been to actively go and do something that doesn't involve what she cares about.

But it's kind of hard to do that when the people you actually say these things for either told you they hated you or are preoccupied with their own issues and scatter off on their own.

For who will you go on a suicidal rampage, use your "speciality to cut flesh" for and to which enemy will you "spare no heart" when you have nobody left to fight for?

Man, writing this made me sad. All Mikasa wants to do is to be with those she loves.

Once again my full chapter thoughts will be out once the CR version/other versions are out.

There was also some nice juicy Annie stuff, which I'm looking forward to digging into.

[fangirlinglikeabus]

every target novelisation....2!

planet of giants by terrance dicks ok so i think that the reason that this is...good, and an unearthly child was...not good, is because this was written 9 years later when like. other, non-terrance dicks people were also novelising stories and he wasn’t just grinding them out on an industrial level. planet of giants isn’t one of the greats of doctor who but this is a competent adaptation - it doesn’t add much but it does flesh out what’s already there, giving us some backstory elements and making the appearance of giant insects and bodies seem a bit more dramatic than they could manage in 1964. unfortunately it also alters my favourite line from the story (‘i don't know how you know, you're supposed to know!’) and the doctor is weirdly hostile at the beginning (he’s looking forward to ditching ian and barbara, he responds to barbara’s observation ‘drily’ like he’s being a bit sarcastic over her, um, *checks notes* noticing important details). also, dicks describes this in the opening as ‘the doctor’s most grotesque and terrifying adventure’ and i’m like...planet of giants? really??

doctor who and the dalek invasion of earth by terrance dicks ok this one legitimately doesn’t change much at all. it cuts down on some things (including the doctor’s end speech being shorter - i’m assuming that’s a space thing), fleshes out on pov bits as you can in prose, gets rid of the smacked bottom line. bizarrely there are a few times that susan calls her grandfather the doctor which...i’m pretty sure wasn’t there originally. aside from all those small details, yeah it’s basically the same, but it’s well adapted for prose (i genuinely think it stands as a novel in its own right), and depending on your reading speed it might actually be a nice, shorter alternative to the television version - it was around 45 minutes less time for me. some general things i wanted to comment on: the resistance is explicitly shown as kinda gender segregated (exclusively women are preparing food when we first see it) which irritated me; the description of parliament as a symbol of ‘human progress and tradition’ reminded me of blood harvest having the lords/commons system as the Ideal Form Of Government, in terms of how terrance dicks thinks (this may only interest me? idk i very probably spend too much time thinking about the political views of this particular dead dr who script editor); there’s a use of holocaust here that’s technically accurate to what the word literally means but it felt weird to me to use it.

the rescue by ian marter oh man i’ve been busy and this took me aages to read. it kinda...diverges increasingly from the original story as it goes on. we’ve got some scenes with the seeker crew (incidentally one of them says ‘ass’ and i was like???hello???you’re allowed to do that in a dr who book from 1987???), and then most of the expanded stuff is in the climax. dr who and bennett have a full on brawl! ian, barbara and vicki visit a destroyed didoi city on their way back to the tardis! mysterious silver figures! a giant worm encounter! incidentally, this does have way more of a downer ending than the original because it’s strongly implied that the last two of the didoi were killed by seeker crewmembers who fired in a panic, after which the report that forms the epilogue ends with “goodwill to all persons” to give us a taste of bitter irony. so that’s kinda grim. um...there’s actually a lot of little changes and minor expansions to this one as well so off the top of my head: we learn more about why vicki left earth (global warming :/), sandy is a lot more threatening-looking than on screen, the crashed ship gets its name changed to astra-nine, ian and barbara hold hands briefly, barbara’s fall really leaves her beaten up. i like the seeker crew comparing the tardis briefly passing them to various non-police box objects from the future (although the link to china is a bit eastern world=alien association for my tastes), dr who telling vicki ‘give that pretty face a wipe’ is clearly him attempting to cheer her up and it’s not meant to be weird but i found it weird. finally, i’ve gotta say i appreciate ian marter’s commitment to ‘mildly unsettling’ in his descriptions of tardis materialisations. this was the last novelisation he wrote before his death (the book’s dedicated to him) and mild criticisms aside, i do think he’s a good writer and he brings an interestingly different angle to the series. 

the romans by donald cotton oh my god. how do i even start this. i’m not even going to try cataloguing all the changes because this isn’t even close to a straight adaptation. it’s told in the form of various documents collected by tacitus - the doctor’s diary, ian’s journal that he keeps to prove to the headmaster at coal hill that he and barbara haven’t just eloped (i’m not joking, this is the textual reason for it), an assassin’s letters home to his mum, nero’s scribblings, and various other little details. vicki and barbara get less attention than on screen because we don’t see much from their perspective (vicki unfortunately doesn’t even get to chase the assassin out, she just screams in this), and the nero assassination plot is exclusively confined to being mentioned in the epilogue. it’s also a lot broader, or at least consistently broader, which means that ian’s side of things is treated a lot more lightly (which i was personally fine with) but also that we still get nero’s predatory behaviour being played for laughs. there’s also a few comments about women early on that i was unhappy with, and use of fat as an insult. generally, though, i thought this was great! there were a lot of things that i don’t have space or time to include here but i really liked. i guess i’d consider this as a companion piece to the tv version rather than a replacement, which some of these do basically serve as. they tell the same basic story, but they’re so different in a lot of ways that i think it’s worth looking at both. i just checked my notes and remembered this so content warning: poppea sabina’s first section references suicide.

doctor who and the zarbi by bill strutton ok so i think the web planet is boring. i don’t know completely why, i don’t think it’s any one thing, it has some interesting ideas, but it is! it’s fucking boring! anyway, we have a bit more casual sexism in the novel, we’re missing that fun convo about aspirin between vicki and barbara, but really i don’t think it adds or changes much - like even the chapters correspond pretty much exactly to the tv cliffhangers. i guess it’s competently written prose-wise, but i genuinely can’t get over my conviction that this story is boring. am i being unfair? maybe! i like some of the early atmosphere, though, and i appreciate a book which refers to ‘the ship tardis’ (lowercase) and ‘doctor who’ throughout the entire thing. oh yeah, and i encourage you all to look up the illustrations for this. i don’t know who that woman is but she’s definitely not vicki.

doctor who and the crusaders by david whitaker ah yes, the infamous ‘susan married david cameron’ novelisation. tbh i don’t like the crusades and this has the same problems - i don’t care about the english, el akir is every orientalist stereotype whitaker could possibly cram into one man, and That’s Not How A Harem Works. do i think it’s the most egregiously racist doctor who story of all time? probably not! it certainly has sympathetic arabic characters too. but i prefer most other historicals, at least. however, if that isn’t you, i’m sure you’ll get something out of this. there aren’t any particularly extreme changes to the plot structure, although it’s missing some later scenes at the english court, but it’s well written and probably if you like the original you’ll enjoy it more than i did. there’s some dated language surrounding black characters, though, i’m not a fan of the whole ‘we aren’t so different’ speech ian has (because it rests on ‘we all believe in a higher power’ which uh. i don’t. guess that means i’m not ‘civilised’. also generally i don’t like the argument that we should respect each other because of what we have in common - you should respect other people whatever!), and the prologue at the beginning where they muse on history and destiny assumes that the english invaders and the arabs are both equally right in their own ways (the doctor outright says this!)

the space museum by glyn jones so, i really like the space museum. mainly for vicki’s revolutionary fervour, but there are other reasons too. however, i don’t think that this really adds enough to be of interest - although we do get some information about the two alien species’ biology, and a bonus explanation of why everyone speaks english (the moroks briefly considered invading earth so programmed some earth languages into their translation system). there’s a bit more wandering around the museum, some minor tweaks and expansions in other areas, an underground tunnel scene where we learn a bit of the planet’s backstory...ian and the doctor are very snippy to each other in this, which i find funny. oh yeah, and there’s a bizarrely meta bit where ian comments on poor dialogue? basically, this is a book i enjoyed, but really it just makes me want to watch the space museum instead of reading it. just a heads up, there’s a character who briefly considers suicide to get out of his bosses being angry with him. 

the chase by john peel ok before i get started i need to establish that the cover for this one slaps. anyway, i don’t respect john peel at all but this was...alright? doesn’t expand much plotwise (although i suspect both the sand monsters at the beginning and the plants at the end have slightly more to do) but we get a fair bit of pov stuff. unfortunately lacking ian’s dad dancing and hi-fi the panda, the marie celeste bit is no longer played for comedy (barbara angsts over it) and even though the two paragraphs dragging morton dill are kinda funny i’m not sure how i feel about him being committed for claiming he saw daleks. ian and barbara’s departure plays out a little differently. steven is blond for some reason. we learn as well that daleks are charged by solar panels (at least they’re pro-green energy??)

the time meddler by nigel robinson pretty competent, straight down the middle novelisation, although that is tempered by inserting some weird sexist bits for steven and also lowkey being nostalgic for 11th century england at a few points? it’s also a bit more violent than we see on tv, and if anything the rape is more loudly implied, so heads up. other than that, there are a few minor embellishments (we’re explicitly told the dr and monk recognise each other, vicki tells steven that the tardis is important to her because it’s her home, a few differences between the monk’s tardis and the doctor’s are described, vicki views steven following her as a triumphant victory in their power struggle which i personally find funny), and there’s a prologue (recapping steven’s arrival in the tardis) and an epilogue (which delays the monk’s discovery of the broken tardis because he walks to hastings first to try and get involved there). i had fun, but it’s not a must read. 

[blog-sliverofjade]

Of Doms & Subs 6: At Least it Wasn’t Twilight

Pairing: Angus Hopper x OFC

Summary:  What's a submissive female to do when she fights her nature and goes on the run as a Lone wolf to avoid being assimilated into a pack?

Word count: 1411

Of Doms & Subs Master List

“Why are we watching An American Werewolf in Paris?” I asked, head tilted to one side that I distantly recognized as a faintly canine gesture.

“It’s sort of a tradition,” Alan answered.  “When someone’s newly Changed, we watch a werewolf movie just to talk all the way through it.”

“There’s no American Werewolf in Canada, but they got French Canadians, right?  Close enough,” Shane said.  Someone threw a kernel of popcorn at him, which he deftly caught in his mouth.

“Could be worse,” Mickayla said mournfully.  “They made me watch Teen Wolf.”

“I thought chicks were supposed to like that stuff!” Shane protested.

“Yeah, if you’re thirteen,” Mickayla and I said in unison.

“Do you have a teenage girl living with you, Shane?” Alan asked far too innocently.  “Because I could have sworn you had every season on DVD.”

The bickering that ensued masked the sounds of Angus entering the room, but not even the popcorn could hide his scent.  My heart beat faster when he passed behind the couch to settle in the recliner within reach of my left arm.  His de facto throne was the highest seat in the room and thus avoided any breach of protocol by anyone sitting higher than him.  I was so painfully aware of his presence that any one of the already crowded couches looked good in comparison to my seat.  Everyone who didn’t have other obligations had come.  I wasn’t sure whether it was courtesy, by design, or on accident that I ended up sitting next to the fearless leader.

The movie, surprisingly, was a good teaching tool.  They were quick to point out inaccuracies (take off your clothes, first, idiot!), many of which I already knew, as well as what laws both mundane and pack were broken.  No to mention cultural differences.  Such as: why don’t we get crappy underground raves?  It’s Seattle, why throw one when you can go find one?

Apparently they also had a cage in the basement for injured wolves and those who had temporarily lost control, like newbies.  When someone tried to suggest that it was for kinky purposes, Angus quickly shut them down.  No one even complained when Alan and I ranted about the medical inaccuracies for a good ten minutes.  (They’d all be so much raspberry jam on the sidewalk.  Did they use packing tape on that bandage?  What is it even for, anyway?  Broken nose?  Concussion?  Hiding his funny looks?)

“Reason number two: we can have a little ‘chat’ with your ex,” Mickayla said, continuing her randomly numbered list of reasons why packs are awesome, when the Big Bad Evil Guy/love interest’s ex was killed at the end.

“Uh, that’s really not necessary,” I stammered.  She looked at me skeptically.  The others quieted to listen, which made me stutter out an explanation.  “He wanted the perfect 1950’s lifestyle complete with a Suzy Homemaker waiting with dinner when he got home and a mistress on the side.  He didn’t try very hard to hide it because he thought I’d put up with it.”  There were several snorts of scornful laughter.  “He’d signed a pre-nup thinking I wouldn’t leave.  I’ll never forget the look on his face when I got everything, which was how I put myself through school.  Now he’s stuck with some nineteen-year-old he knocked up who can’t cook any more than I can.”

“I like her, can we keep her?” Alan asked of no one in particular, which elicited more good-natured jibes at his expense as well as general agreement.  Or matter that latter was just wishful thinking.  It was either that or their testosterone talking.  Probably the testosterone because the conversation turned to the various methods of disposing of bodies.

While the others debated the merits of burial at sea vs woodchippers and lye, Ellie caught my eyes with her own hazel ones before heading upstairs with several empty popcorn bowls.  I followed a moment later.

“I-if,” she stuttered, swallowed hard, then started again as she loaded the dishwasher.  Everyone else knew to leave the cleanup to Ian and Gordon as it was their turn, but she seemed to need something to do with her hands.  “What’s my timeline for making a decision?”

“The ceremony to bring a new member into a pack is done on the full moon, which is in eleven days.”  A look flickered across her face that suggested she was aware of the math, but refrained from interrupting as I gave a brief description of the ritual.  To her credit, she didn’t bat an eye at the thought of consuming my flesh.

I fell into a practiced relaxed pose in the hopes that it would put her more at ease as it often had with others in the past.  Even if she wasn’t adept at reading body language, or even consciously aware, her wolf would pick up on my cues.  I was glad that she had not yet learned to smell emotions and would have to believe what I allowed my face to reveal, which was currently wearing the mask of patient mentor.  What I felt, however, was worlds away from what showed.

“If I were to join a pack, what would be expected of me?”  I smiled at the conditionals, though they lacked the same determination as before.

“Monthly meetings.  A ten percent tithe once you find employment, which goes towards things like helping members get back on their feet, new wolves, and the like.  No one would ask you to fight, but any pack would benefit from your medical expertise.”  Her eyebrows quirked up in surprise.  “Fast healing can present its own issues, like bones that aren’t set properly.”  Soft, dusky pink lips pursed in thought as her sharp, sky-blue eyes with a touch of green and honey at the center flickered back and forth in contemplation of various scenarios.

“You already have Alan for that.”  That was not the conclusion I was expecting.

“As great as Alan is, he’s only one person, who has a full-time job,” I pointed out.  “What if, God forbid, he was hurt?  Or there were more injured than he could handle at once?”

“Does that happen often?”  Instead of appearing stricken at the prospect, or for not having considered those possibilities first, her eyes narrowed shrewdly as if she were already calculating assets and performing triage in her mind.

“Even once is too often.”  Ellie accepted that non-answer without digging further.

“Even though I have to give it up as a career?” she asked bitterly.  That was when realization hit like a hammer.  Nursing was more than a job to her.  She’d all but said that her ex forbade her to work.  Then she took his money to rebuild herself.

“Your wolf will see frightened patients as prey,” I said gently.  The dismay she tried to hide nearly broke my old, cynical heart.  “Even if the humans would let you once they figured out who you are.”

“Any specific duties for an unmated, submissive female?”  She had turned her back to me to wipe down the counters.  Her scent was a confusing mix of fear tinged with arousal.  Evidently she found her emotions bewildering as well because when she faced me again a rosy pink blossomed across her cheeks even as a furrow developed between her brows.

“Help out when and where you can as the situation calls.  As a submissive, your presence can have a calming effect on us sociopaths.”

“I think you mean ‘psychopath’,” she muttered.  A smile threatened to lift the corners of my mouth.  “And I seem to have the opposite effect on ya’ll.”

“How can you help this looney bin if you aren’t calm yourself?”  Small, white teeth worried at her bottom lip as she digested that.  I didn’t point out that the males were reacting to her like wolves in rut, which no amount of submissive energy would fix.  She was skittish enough as it was.

“I promise that I won’t touch you.”  Disappointment and relief flashed over her face like the shadow of a cloud.  To hide a small smile of satisfaction, I leaned until my nose nearly touched the soft flesh below her ear and breathed her in.  Her heart beat under her skin like a trapped butterfly.  Desire, both hers and mine, spiked sharply in the air.  “Not until you ask me first.”  I forced myself to walk away as casually as I could manage, her stare boring into my back.

[mermaidmafia-official]

{Part III: A COLLAR OF SPIKES}

tagging @bebemoon​, @ayzrules​, @interluxetumbra​, @bubblingbeautifully

the aftermath of march 18th, or: aaargh

‘So, you just kidnapped a werewolf.’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry, did my saving your furry little butt interrupt your dying-in-a-cellar-while-the-whole-island-burns-down party?’ He stumbled, and the vampire grunted under his weight. It was dark, and the air smelled musty and damp. ‘Alright’, he managed, between gritted teeth, ‘Why?’ ‘Why what?’ ‘Did you help me?’ There was a pause. He could sense the faintest traces of human presence, of booze and cocaine. A century old, at least. ‘I didn’t like what they did to you’, she said. ‘And I make very bad decisions.’ ‘Obviously.’ He grimaced. The pain he could take - that dull, reassuring ache - but he hated feeling this dizzy and limp. Ruddy vampires. They shouldn’t have known about the wolfsbane - no one had known for centuries. The wolves had made sure of it, ever since - ‘I’ve had worse’, he said, and she scoffed like someone who had never been tortured for information on the Borgia family in a Milanese dungeon. ‘Even so, shouldn’t you be healing by now?’ ‘Your friends had a little too much fun with me.’ ‘Not my friends.’ There was a thudding noise and he was doused in a cloud of dust. Coughing, he reached for something to hold on to and found rough brick. He could feel the darkness reaching for him, and fought. She was tugging him into a room filled with ghosts of scents - oak, perfume, whisky, and sweat… If I die here, he’ll never find me… Then, the darkness claimed him.

///////////

The smoke cleared slowly, retreating from broken city walls and leaving the corpses exposed. Raf licked the coppery taste of blood from his lips, and felt the adrenalin slowly drain out of his body. A dull pain raged in him, and he realised a deep cut in his shoulder had almost cleft his arm from his torso. He waited for the sharp sensation of flesh knitting itself back together, and came up empty. A wave of nausea washed over him. I have to find the others. Ten paces, with the world spinning around him, and then he was on his knees. I don’t understand. Someone calling his name. Ferrando, with black hair and blood-stained features, suddenly next to him, cursing and slapping his face. Raf growled. ‘Wolfsbane’, Ferrando explained, his face grimy with dust, as he pulled him to his feet, ‘laced on their blades. The one poison that may affect a werewolf. It dulls the senses and stops the healing.’ ‘How did they know?’ Ferrando shook his head. ‘That I don’t know, my friend, but you may be assured that I will find out - as soon as we get you out of here. You’ll heal as soon as the poison wears off.’ Raf grimaced as they stumbled across the battlefield, the scents of scarred flesh, smoke, and blood loud in his nostrils. ‘Cesare?’, he asked. ‘Spanked Sforza’s arrogant little arse. We’ve earned him a resounding victory, old boy, and the Borgia Pope will have no choice but to throw us one of his feasts!’ Raf grinned. That was good news indeed.

/////////////

Well, thought Nessa, watching a pale, amber-coloured whisky swirl around in her glass, as far as insanely stupid ideas are concerned, this one has to be my fucking masterpiece. I should get a trophy. She looked across the room to where the huge werewolf was curled up on one of the deep, plush sofas. In their best times, these sofas had easily carried six flappers and a dandy - now, the biggest one ached under just one wolf. She had draped one of the curtains from the Really Private Booths over him, feeling a little foolish. Did werewolves even feel cold? Nessa sipped her hundred-year-old whisky knowing it would do absolutely fuck-all, and remembered the sound of bones breaking, that night on the ice. He had healed in less than a minute then - so why not now? Well, if he dies on me, at least no one will ever know, and not just because I know how to dump a body. Her thoughts turned towards the coven. Had they all got out? If anyone took care of their own, it was certainly the Bloodmother… but there had been so much chaos. And all because one sleazy, pompous old fart without even one shred of substance or style - well- plenty substance, just not where it counted. Nessa knew a gang war when she saw one, and this one had just escalated. A sound interrupted her thoughts, and when she turned, the wolf was looking at her. ‘You’re still here’, he said, taking in the plush furniture, the old-fashioned chandelier, the curved ceiling, the bar. Nessa found herself wondering if he liked the place. ‘Don’t flatter yourself. It’s daylight out, which means I’m stuck here.’ He stared, annoyingly handsome even when dishevelled. Or especially then. Focus, Nessa. ‘Either you’re incredibly cocky’ he said slowly, ‘or you have the survival instincts of a dodo.’ Nessa huffed. ‘What do you know about dodos?’ His shrug turned into a wince. ‘Met them. Madagascar, 1694. They’re pretty dumb.’ ‘Well, I’m not… a dodo.’ How the fuck did we get here? ‘I’m just counting on your sense of fair play. And don’t tell me you don’t have one, I saw you race.’ He relented. ‘Won’t your coven miss you?’ Given they survived that mess. She shrugged. ‘Probably. They might just think I got lost, which isn’t that far from the truth - happens surprisingly often-’ ‘You don’t say.’ ‘-once, I landed in the middle of a rave in St Petersburg…’ Nessa squinted at him. Haha, funny werewolf. She was this close to poking her tongue at him. ‘Anyway, they’ll expect nothing less.’ Let’s hope that’s true. He leaned back on the sofa and crossed his arms. If he was still groggy, he didn’t show it. ‘So- what is this place?’ Nessa swivelled around on her barstool, trying to hide a fond pride under assumed casualness. ‘Used to be a speakeasy.’ He nodded, annoyingly unsurprised. ‘Run it yourself?’ ‘Oh you know, it was all the rage back then, every girl wanted one.’ ‘How come it looks like a time capsule?’ ‘You remember that crashing sound when we came through the door?’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘That was a wall.’ ‘Ah.’ ‘This used to be a railway tunnel, in the 1880s. I guess they just bricked it back up…I haven’t really been here since the fifties, but you should’ve seen the place in its heyday.’ He nodded. ‘Smells like it.’ Now he was just showing off. ‘No way you can smell that.’ Ah - wolfish smile. And a spark of mischief? Or the thrill of the chase? ‘Self-made moonshine, from the back. The very stuff you’re drinking right now, although I can’t say why… A smuggling tunnel to the harbour. Dancing and a band. Cocaine, quite a lot. And jazz.’ ‘Oh come on, even you can’t smell music!’ He grinned. ‘No, but the odds of guessing that one wrong were slim.’ ‘Granted.’ She leaned back on the bar. ‘By the way, do you want some? There’s nothing to eat down here and we’re all out of shirts, but if you’re thirsty, I got you covered.’ The wolf shook his head, apparently done with smalltalk. He got up slowly, grimaced, and started pacing to and fro. She didn’t object. ‘You go by Pixie, right?’ ‘With my human friends, mostly, but yeah. You can also call me Nessa.’ He tilted his head. ‘Since when do vampires have human friends?’ She crossed her arms. ‘Look here, wolf boy, I’d like to see your primary food source course through the veins of something that won’t shut up about cars and the economy and… fucking Game of Thrones. Of course, I would never drink Ian.’ ‘What the hell is an Ian?’ ‘Oh, he finds my food for me. You’d be surprised how many weirdos out there want to see their own blood in a wine glass. I think it’s a goth thing.’ Wolf boy looked confused. Luckily, she was used to getting that reaction from people. ‘Anyway, what do I call you?’, she asked, politely steering the conversation into more stranger-friendly territory. ‘Raf.’ There was a pause. ‘Oh, that’s it? That’s not your whole name, is it?’ ‘It’s enough.’ Only for Nessa, it wasn’t. ‘What’s it short for?’, she asked, and then, drawing a blank on names in general, suggested the only thing she could think of: ‘Rafaello?’ He stared at her, and said ‘no’ in that deadpan voice people sometimes assumed when dealing with her. She didn’t mind. Already, she was filing him away as Rafaello in her memory, even though he seemed to have little in common with a small, coconut-flavoured sweet. She took in his broad, bare shoulders, the movement written into every sinew and fibre of his body, and the keen green eyes that kept her in view. ‘You don’t seem the zealous type’, she concluded, finally. ‘I thought you werewolves were all about the blood war.’ He shrugged. Bruises shone in the half-light. ‘I’m a mercenary. Always have been.’ ‘Even in your first life?’ ‘Especially then.’ It wasn’t a joke or a brag, just a statement. Perhaps it was that this old speakeasy, with all its memories and the century-old shadows of party-goers, awakened her nostalgia, but Nessa felt something click into place. ‘Ah’ she said, with a little smile. ‘I always did have a soft spot for the stupid boys.’ Raf’s face darkened a little. ‘First off, I’m 550 years old, and second- you know nothing about me.’ She looked into her empty whisky glass. ‘True’, she agreed, ‘but you do kind of remind me of the ones I did know. Rakish and reckless, the lot of them.’ Cocky, and brave. ‘Nothing to lose and nowhere to go, and rage deep in their bones. Not like yours, of course, not the kind that comes out at full moon. It just… went into knuckle rings and switchblades and tommy guns.’ Rakish, and reckless, and needlessly dead before their time. ‘They wanted to run with the wolves, too - metaphorical ones, these ones, street gangs and rum runners and mobsters.’ She paused. ‘They tended to die badly.’ He stared and paced and said nothing. ‘And I know what you’re thinking, wolf, but I had nothing to do with that’ she went on. ‘I could never stand to watch all that spark- all that life- go to waste.’ She gestured vaguely at the empty space, which seemed for a moment to be filled with the spectres of long-dead dancers, and felt sad. ‘Even tried to turn some of them, back in the 1940s, when that seemed a very romantic thing to do. So much pain when they died, torn to shreds on the battlefields of France. Never tried it again, after that.’ In the ensuing silence, the dancers slowly faded back into darkness, and with it the faces of those young men that had come and gone for over a century. The wolf looked away when he said, ‘You still don’t know me.’ Her gaze wandered gently over his furrowed brows, the tired, yet defiant look in his eyes, the half-heeled cuts on his torso, and the hand clenching restlessly. ‘If you say so, Raffaello’, she said, with a shrug. And then he looked back at her, with just a flicker of a smile. She grinned. ‘Do you want that drink now?’

.

[feelieking]

Series 12

A somewhat belated post - I started typing up my thoughts about Series 12 shortly after it ended, but only found the energy for a sustained bout of typing while taking a few days off work.

Season 12 of Doctor Who is now over. Readers may recall that I felt season 11 was pretty lacklustre. Season 12… has been an improvement, but a lot of the issues remain. The cast are great – Jodie Whittaker is fantastic, and I honestly cannot understand the vocal subset of fandom who insist on saying she can’t act – but there are too many regular characters, which means that none of the three companions get a decent share of screen time or character development. There’s been an improvement in the number and development of the guest characters, but many episodes have really suffered from the problem of scooping up all of the NPCs into the TARDIS and carting them along. As a consequence, a lot of episodes really struggle to cultivate a sense of location, and having guest characters in the TARDIS becomes run of the mill.

It’s also very interesting to me that, after making his first series almost entirely continuity-free, Chibnall’s second series is probably the most fanwanky we’ve ever had. Spoilers for all of the episodes follow.

Spyfall is a strong start to the series. The aliens were far scarier and better realised than anything for the preceding series, and part one benefitted from a strong sense of style and place, a slow build of the plot, and a genuinely shocking and tense cliffhanger. Part two floundered a bit by comparison, choosing to rattle through both Ada Lovelace in Victorian England and Noor Inayat Khan in Nazi-occupied Paris. Either one of these pairs of characters and settings would have been strong enough for an episode on their own; smooshed together, neither was really given a chance to develop. Still, the Doctor/Master scene on the Eifel Tower was very well done.

Orphan 55 seemed to go down very badly with my friends when it was transmitted, but I rather enjoyed it. It was a very trad base under siege story with a proper cast of supporting characters and some genuinely tense and scary moments. The “twist” of it being Earth all along, however, fell very flat – it’s a bit of a cliché by now, added nothing to the story, and has been done better before by earlier Doctor Who stories! The Doctor’s moralising speech at the end also made me grind my teeth – as others have said, it’s not that I disagree at all with the moral, but that we were bright enough to work it out from the episode without needing to have the Doctor break the forth wall to address the audience directly. I also question the logic of the Doctor taking the entire supporting cast, including a frail elderly lady and a young child, with her on her monster hunt, rather than leaving a group behind at the more defensible holiday camp.

Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror was really good, and felt like the most Doctor Who-y story of the Chibnall era by some margin. Great cast, great monsters (despite the usually reliable Anjili Mohnidra hamming it up as the scorpion queen) – all three of the main human guest cast were proper, fleshed-out characters – and a strong sense of location. The thing that struck me afterwards, however, as I rhapsodised about how much I’d enjoyed this episode and that it was the best new Doctor Who story in ages, was that in a Davies or Maffatt season, this would have been a good middle of the road episode, and not the showstopper it was here.

What can I say about Fugitive of the Judoon? The whole episode is one big slight of hand, which is pulled off very well – but as a consequence, it’s difficult to think on the plot as a whole. The Judoon are back as a returning monster at least in part to distract from the surprise reappearance of Captain Jack, which I suspect in turn was at least in part to keep the audience’s mind off of who Ruth could really be. The pay-off to that, when it comes, is a satisfyingly shocking moment that raises a lot of intriguing questions.

Praxaeus, sadly, was a bit of a damp squib. It’s one of the worst offenders for the Chibnall-era trope of gathering all of the guest cast in the TARDIS and setting big chunks of the story there. The idea of the Doctor and her companions investigating a global crisis at different locations around the world had a lot of promise, but because the Doctor was able to just swoop in and scoop them all up in the TARDIS whenever needed, that idea never really came to fruition. Because the guest cast were all thrown onto the ship, a lot of them never really got the chance to shine – and it’s never explained exactly how captured astronaut Adam is able to text his location to grumpy policeman husband Jake – though at least kudos goes to the episode for a really down to earth portrayal of a same-sex marriage.

Can You Hear Me? was hugely frustrating – this could have been a gem of an episode, but as it is it sinks like a lead balloon. The problem is that the writer has thrown far too many ideas at the story in the hope of seeing what sticks. A mental hospital in Fourteenth Century Aleppo being terrorised by monsters from the nightmares of one of the patients would have been a really good episode. The Doctor’s companions and their friends being trapped in their dreams in modern day Sheffield would have been a really good episode. A ship full of experiments orbiting two colliding planets would have been a reasonably decent episode – but by trying to do all three at once in fifty minutes, nothing is given any chance to breathe and develop. Again, supporting characters are just thrown into the TARDIS and moved from arbitrary location to arbitrary location, and then the monster is defeated by… the dialogue saying that they’ve been defeated. It’s such a shame, because there’s so much good stuff here – Ian Gelder is superb as Zellin, and could have easily been a great recurring villain if they’d chosen to make more than one episode from these ideas – but sadly the whole thing is so much less than the sum of its parts.

The Haunting of Villa Diodati, by contrast, is superb – one location, really well developed and realised, a strong, well-drawn cast of supporting characters (and some very handsome gentlemen as well!) and no TARDIS scenes. The early parts of the episode are fantastically tense and creepy, with the horror of being trapped in a moebius strip of a house very effectively portrayed. Like any haunted house story, it loses some interest once the reason for the “haunting” is revealed, but the second half remains strong not least because Ashad the emotional Cyberman is superbly well portrayed.

Ascension of the Cybermen/The Timeless Children is very much a game of two halves. Part one is pretty effective – Ashad continues to be an excellent villain (his big virtual confrontation with the Doctor is superb) and the grim reality of the Cyber Wars is very well conveyed. Showing the potency of the Cybermen by having them effortlessly destroy all the Doctor’s clever gadgets and scatter her companions is an excellent touch, and Graham and Yaz’s fight for survival is compelling and convincing. The wheels very much come off in part two, however – I like Dhawan’s Master (more on him later) but the fact that he perfunctorily kills off the far more interesting Ashad is a mistake, as is halting the episode for what feels like half an hour of tedious Gallifreyan story time. The “Cyber Lords” are a bad fan fic idea, look derisible and do absolutely nothing before they’re dispatched. The actual Cybermen, terrifying in small numbers last week, are unable to hit a single human with dyspraxia running away from them in their dozens this week. The big questions of the episode – why is there a magic portal to Gallifrey? How did the Master destroy the entirety of his own race singlehandedly? – are never even asked, let alone answered. And as for the awful deus ex “death particle” suddenly jumping out of the plot with no set-up – eugh! Pretty much the only thing this episode has going for it are the excellent Graham/Yaz scenes.

The two things this series is likely to be remembered for are the new incarnation of the Master, and the revelations about the Doctor. Sacha Dhawan is great in the role – his Master feels genuinely unhinged and properly dangerous, with a real predatory cunning – but given how perfect Missy’s arc and final scenes were, I’m genuinely a little disappointed to see the character back, especially in full-on villain mode. However, I will concede that jealousy over discovering that the Doctor really is “special” is a very in-character motivation for him to renew his vendetta.

As for the shock revelations – the idea of a secret incarnation that the Doctor herself does not remember is intriguing, and Jo Martin really makes the role her own. There was a lot of speculation at the time that she’s the “Season 6B” Doctor, between Troughton and Pertwee, and that’s still the idea that I like, and seems ripe for development. If she’s pre-Hartnell, then why does she call herself the Doctor, and why is her TARDIS a police box?

The whole “Timeless Child” nonsense however – why on Earth did anyone think that a protracted subplot to explain away a moment from the Brain of Morbius (transmitted forty-four years previously!) was a good idea? How alienating must this have been for casual viewers? As an idea, I think it stinks, not out of a slavish insistence that the Hartnell incarnation must have been the first but for the fact that the Doctor only really became the Doctor – the hero – as the series was starting. Chibnall tries to have his cake and eat it by erasing the Doctor’s knowledge of her previous lives, and reminding us on screen that the interesting thing about the Doctor is not her origins, but who she is now – but as that’s the case, why are we supposed to care about her Timeless Child incarnations? What was the point of it? Even if you subscribe to the idea that “who is the Doctor?” is an interesting and worthwhile mystery, the Timeless Child isn’t a mystery answered, just a mystery deferred. If I had to sum up my feelings in one word, it would be “meh.”

[aboysbestfriendishismum]

Chapter 55 - Wine, puzzles and spoonmen (Part One)

In the previous chapter: Eddie and Angie woke up at her apartment. It's the third time in a row they sleep together but, although Eddie is constantly teasing her, they haven't had sex yet. Angie starts to get worried about this too and believes something's wrong. Eddie, Stone and Mike go to Roxy's on that same morning, right during Angie's shift at the diner. Eddie cheekily jokes, teases her, sends her subliminal love messages through juke box songs, then follows her in the back and kisses her; she thinks he's doing it on purpose so that their friends will find out about their relationship. The two of them have a brief argument but they soon make it up. Meg tells Angie about her new project: becoming a tattoo artist. She also understands Angie's worried about something and has her friend spill the beans. Angie confesses she has doubts about Eddie's physical attraction towards her. Meg tries to talk some sense into her and suggests her to set up a romantic night for Eddie and her at their apartment.

***

“Ian, can you come here a sec?” I call my coworker as I look through the sketchbook my roommate has just slipped on the counter top together with her purchases.

“What's up?” I hear him answer from afar.

“I need your help”

“Can't you do it by yourself? That guy who dropped the jarred Bolognese sauce made a mess!”

“Umph if that's Bolognese sauce, then I'm Julia Roberts!” I comment right when Hannigan comes back from the storage room, probably because of the commotion he heard.

“ANGIE?” he gives me a nasty look and I'd want to sink into the ground.

“Err I meant that it's a sauce produced in our beloved America! Healthy American food, tasty and nutritious... which gets inspiration from an Italian recipe to... to...” I try and make up for that as I address my audience, that is basically Meg, looking at me as if she could burst into laughing any minute, my boss and two perplexed customers, a young man and a fifty-something woman.

“To give a new interpretation of it?” the guy suggests from the snacks department.

“EXACTLY! A new interpretation. Different from the original”

“But as valid as the original” the boss adds.

“Very valid!” I say through my teeth.

“She's half Italian.” Meg explains to the customers “She'll be fucking fussing about everything but the sauce is good” the guy snickers and the lady shakes her head and walks towards the frozen foods.

“I'd have liked for you not to use the F word but you perfectly summed up my thinking” Hannigan's face relaxes and maybe I still have a job.

“Anyway it's all Ian's fault” I point out as soon as I see my colleague show up behind the back of the boss.

“What did I do?”

“I called you and you didn't came”

“Well, now I'm here, what's wrong?”

“Now Hannigan's here, I don't need you anymore”

“Can you please explain what the fuck's happening? I didn't understand a fucking thing!” the boss blurts out in the middle of our quarrel.

“I thought you couldn't say the F word here” Meg chimes in raising her hand as if she was at school.

“Not to custumers, but to employees...  yes”

“Meg needs to buy some wine” I point at my roommate and the bottle she's placed on the counter.

“So what? Your shift ends at 13:00, you still have 10 minutes” Ian gives me a glazed look and right now I'd stick my thumbs into his eyes.

“It's not for the timing, it's that I can't sell alcohol...”

“Oh right! Well, you'll take care of that, right?” he asks to our boss.

“Yeah, sure Ian! I'll take care of that, I'm already here! By the way why should I have my paid personnel work when I can do everything by myself, right?”

“Uhm... ok, I'll go and put some more sawdust on that stain” Ian walks away and Meg can't resist this time and explodes laughing.

“Haha he's so dumb! Anyway isn't it funny that you cannot sell me wine, considering you're the one who'll drink it?” my friend remarks while Hannigan's ringing her items: red wine bottle, sliced bread, salmon, cheese, butter, various snacks.

“You're kind of dumb too, you know” I hide my face behind my palms.

“You could avoid telling me, at least...” mutters the boss and shakes his head.

“Who? Telling you what? I didn't say a word! Oops, I forgot the dessert, wait a minute!” Meg realizes the shit she just did and plays dumb, walking away towards the sweets section.

“She was just kidding anyway hehe” I say and I hope he doesn't notice I'm sweating.

“Of course”

**

“They're great!”

“Thank you Meg for grocery shopping for me and bringing all the bags up for four floors for me... that's what you just said, right?” my friend is putting everything into the fridge as I keep looking through her sketchbook.

“Exactly”

“Anyway you don't have to tell me you like them only to make me happy, I want a honest opinion”

“I am honest! I must say I like the ones in black and white better”

“Right? I'm not confident with colors yet. I mean, it's not like I can't draw stuff in colors. It's just, whenever I draw something and color it and I think it'd be supposed to end on someone's skin, everything seems shit to me. I did very few drawings in color”

“The flowers series is perfect, also the one with the animals” she's really good at drawing, I've always known that.

“They're just doodles to get started, to try some themes and styles”

“They're not doodles... what about this?” I focus on something drawn on a separated sheet of paper, folded and stuck in the middle of the book, which falls down to the floor as I turn the pages.

“Which one?” Meg distractedly turns around then closes the fridge door shut and runs up to me, snatching the paper from my hand as soon as she sees what it is “Oh this? This is nothing, this... I did it last night at the salon, during downtime, it sucks”

It's a page made entirely of pieces of a puzzle, they're all different in shape and shade but don't create any image. They're all blank and fill the whole sheet of paper except for a small space, a missing piece. Instead of the missing piece, in the layer underneath, you can see something that looks like live flesh and muscle tissue, and it's the only colored part of the drawing.

“It's simple but of immediate effect. This could really become a tattoo”

“Do you think so?”

“Yeah, it also seems very realistic. It's disturbing but in a positive sense, I like it!”

“Oh, well, thank you”

“What does it mean?”

“That I thank you for your compliment?”

“Haha no, what does the tattoo mean?”

“Ah”

“There's always a meaning behind, right? What would such a tattoo mean?”

“Well but... but this is not a tattoo is just an excercise, there's no reason behind”

“No?”

“No! Ok, now that you make me think about it, it could represent, I don't know, a missing piece in someone's life? I mean, everybody has their own void inside, right? Nobody feels 100% complete, there's always a piece of the puzzle we can't find or that we lost in the way. And it can be very different things: a person, a passion, a goal in life. What do you think?”

“I think it'd be the perfect matching tattoo for a couple”

“A couple? Hahaha I didn't know you were so romantic!”

“Not necessarily a romantic couple. Also between two big friends. Or brothers. Think about it, one person can have the incomplete puzzle tattoed and the other one can have the missing piece, which fits in it perfectly”

“That's an idea. It should represent a strong bond. Between brothers... or a parent and a child”

“Sure, also” the latter not necessarily being a strong bond...

“A mother... a mother could get this one, with one or more missing pieces depending on how many children she's got.And the children will be the missing pieces” and what if the missing parts are the parents instead?

“And they you'll inject ink in those chubby baby arms of theirs!”

“Hahahah shut up! They can have it done when they're grown up. OR... you can draw the missing pieces in the same tattoo, a little further” Meg takes the sketchbook from my hands and starts drawing as she speaks, taken from sudden inspiration.

“You can also put the name in it. Or initials”

“Which name?”

“Of the child. Inside the puzzle piece”

“Sure, if I knew the name”

“What do you mean? Haha how can a mother not know the name?”

Meg gives me a weird look, then smiles: “I meant, if only you could give me a name to have a try”

“Try with Angie” I smirk.

“A random one”

“Totally random”

“Don't even try, I'm not gonna get matching tattoos with you, forget it” she shakes her head as she starts sketching a cursive A inside the drawing.

“SHUT UP! I'm scared of getting my earlobes pierced, do you think I'd get a tattoo?! You're crazy”

“Oh, I see, you wanna get one with Eddie?”

“Come on, hurry up, we need to go shopping”

“Hahaha this enthusiasm from you surprises me, abstinence can be powerful”

“MEG!”

**

“Do you really think we can find a slutty nightgown in a thrift shop?” Meg doesn't watch her tone as we stop in front of Rummage Hall.

“Shhhhhh! I don't wanna buy a slutty nightgown, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“You don't want to? We went out exactly for that”

“You said I should wear something nice but not too much. I don't wanna go too far or Eddie will understand...”

“Excuse me, isn't that the purpose of the whole thing? Make him understand?”

“Yes but...”

“Well, slutty it is, then!” Meg enters the shop and I tag along.

“Shhhhhhhhhhhh”

“Anyway we're not gonna find shit in here” my friend takes long strides towards the clothing section.

“Where did you want to go? Nancy Meyer? I've got no money for that stuff”

“No, but Fantasy Unlimited is a short walk away”

“BUT THAT- ehm... that is an adult shop” I raise my voice too without noticing, then shush myself up.

“And you're an adult, aren't you? Anyway they've got very cute things, I bought a lot of stuff there, that for the record I use also to go to clubs. Well, now only to go to clubs” she shrugs as she's examining a satin-like robe and then puts it back.

“You just need two triangles of fabric to be dressed and look nice, Meg, but for me it's slightly different”

“You just need triangles a little bigger, what's the problem?”

“The problem is there are no triangles big enough for me”

“Shut up!”

“And I don't know if Eddie would like that, I mean, I don't know his preferences” maybe he doesn't like this kind of seduction artifices, maybe he prefers a simpler style, a more natural approach. Why the fuck am I not naturally hot?

“He's a guy and he's heterosexual, what would his preferences ever be? The more skin he sees, the happier he is” it's Meg's very easy answer.

“My skin?”

“Yes, why?”

“There's too much skin in my case, maybe I'd better hide it” who am I kidding? You don't just put something cute on and turn into an attractive girl. You must be able to carry it around and feel confident in those clothes. I don't even feel comfortable now that I have a coat on. I'm never comfortable, except sometimes, with Eddie. Why ruin everything? I'll just show up like this, with a coat on. Or my fleece robe, I mean, he's used at my shitty outfits, this would be nothing new.

“Angie, what the fuck are you talking about?? He wants to see your skin because he likes you, I thought that had been already established by now”

“He likes me, altogether”

“No, fuck altogether, fuck mind, personality and all the other bullshit”

“Bullshit?”

“Angie, he likes your body, you turn him on, he wants you”

“He wants me so much than I gotta dress slutty to have him notice me?”

“The point is not having him notice you, that's what you got totally wrong. He already noticed you, you're with him basically! The point is letting him know you're ready for the next step. And stimulate him a little, warming up the atmosphere”

“If you say so” warming up, uh?

“Fuck, Angie, you're gonna give me a nervous breakdown sooner or later!” Meg pinches the bridge of her nose and I'm afraid she's really about to explode.

“Don't yell! There's people here” I complain looking around in embarrassment and hoping no one is listening to our conversation.

“Listen, when you're together... don't you ever notice anything in him?”

“What do you mean?”

“Whenever you kiss or hug... I mean, when you make out and stuff”

“Well, he looks... invested, focused on me and always gives me those looks that-”

“Ok ok, the look of love. But apart from that? Nothing else? Can't you feel anything?”

“What am I supposed to feel?”

“You know, since you also sleep together... and stuff”

“Stuff and stuff... Couldn't you be more clear?”

“Have you ever felt... something knocking?”

“Knocking?”

“Hasn't mini-Eddie ever popped up to say hi?”

“Mini... MEG WHAT THE FUCK??”

“Does he get hard? You must have noticed”

“DID YOU LOSE YOUR FUCKING MIND?!”

“Shhh stop yelling, there's people here” Meg chuckles and I'd kick her ass.

“You're to lock up” I grab her from the sleeve of her jacket and try to drag her out of the shop with me but she pushes me towards the books section.

“Jeez, you're such a prude”

“I'm not a prude, I'm just... discreet”

“Ok so have you ever discreetly checked if he gets a boner or not when he's with you?”

“Apart from the fact that it doesn't mean anything”

“Sure, now Eddie gets random boners with no reason, after all he's in his full pubescent phase”

“You're joking but it's true. Erections are not necessarily linked to sexual arousal only. Do you know men can get erections at the point of death too under certain circumstances?”

“Oh really? And how many times did Eddie die recently?” she smirks.

“Anyway, that said... it's none of your business” I turn the other way trying to look upset and as I look towards the clothing section, where we were until five minutes ago, I spot something I hadn't noticed before.

“I already know anyway!” Meg yells behind my back as I walk away towards the object of my interest, then she catches up with me “Come on, don't be mad. I'm sorry. I just wanted to prove my point! And tease you a little”

“What do you think about this?” I turn around showing the item I've just taken from the line.

“I think that... well, considering it's Eddie, we would never find something better to stimulate him, not ever at Fantasy Unlimited. Buy it!”

******************************************************************************************************************************************

I'm halfway between the first and the second floor when I realize I took the stairs instead of the elevator. I stop for a second, contemplating how stupid I am and trying to remember the moment I put autopilot on. I probably lost some lucidity once I parked outside Angie's condo. Was the doorway open? I think so, 'cause I don't remember buzzing and I'd remember if I had heard her voice, even through that shitty croaky buzzer. It looks like spending more time together hasn't changed the effect that the idea of seeing her has on me. I hope it'll never change. I shake my head and start walking up the stairs, two steps at a time, to arrive sooner. I didn't exactly run but when I get to the fourth floor I feel flushed. I take a deep breath, pull up my backpack and walk down the hallway to Angie's apartment. The first weird thing I notice is a sound: the sound of a saxophone, which becomes louder and louder as I get closer. The second weird thing shows up as soon as I turn down the corner and see something's wrong in Angie's door. As I come closer I realize the hallway lamp casts a narrow beam of light on the floor inside the apartment and from that I notice that the door is half-closed. As far as I know Angie double locks herself up even in her bathroom when she's home alone, she'd never let the apartment door open. I walk up slowly and in the meantime I open my backpack and stick my hand in it to find something I could use as a weapon. I don't really wanna waste some good wine crashing the bottle on the head of an elusive burglar. But I also doubt the videotape of Harold and Maude would have the same effect. I grab the bottle from the neck as I push the door open and cautiously enter the apartment. And I immediately notice two things. First of all I see there's something on the floor and at first they seem parts of a colorful object that broke into pieces. But as I lean down to see better, I take some of these fragments in my hand and figure out it's nothing but flowers, abandoned on the floor. I grope my way looking for water or glass pieces of a fallen and then shattered vase but I can't find anything. Now that I think about it, there was no vase of flowers here, at least not until this morning. Almost at the same time, I realize it's not really flowers but only petals and they seem to form a path towards the living room. In that moment I figure out I can follow the path of the blue and red petals on the floor with my eyes because the entrance is not lit only by the external hallway light but also by some burning candles placed on the phone table and on the shoe cabinet.

Oh.

I quickly stand up, feeling stupid for mistaking a romantic setting for a crime scene. I finally close the door behind me and follow the way led by the flowers, walking towards the living room and imagining the different scenes I could find, which have all the same main character. But she's the one missing when I get in the room, all that I find is more candles, the small table laden with delicious food and further away, between the two couches, a basket with a composition of blue and red flowers, just like the petals on the floor. Your love is king sings Sade in the background, that is not exactly background, since the volume is pretty loud. And I'm just standing here, wine still in my hand, waiting for Angie to magically show up, maybe with a little ambush behind my back, covering my eyes with her hands or in any other way she came up with. But that doesn't happen. Suddenly I think I hear a sound, more sounds, actually an almost regular sequence of sounds. I go and turn down the music a little and the series of dull thuds sounds clearer. Maybe a romantic setting doesn't exclude a crime scene... what the fuck is happening?

“Angie?” I call her and get no answer.

The noise comes from the kitchen and that's where I go, quickly but with caution. At first I slowly open the door to peep in, then I fling it open when I see Angie at the window, leaning outside, basically perched on the windowsill.

“Angie!” I call her again but she can't hear me. So I put the wine bottle on the table and reach out for her, shaking her by her shoulder “Angie what th-”

“AAH! Oh shit, Y'ALL WATCH OUT DOWN THERE!” Angie jumps and starts yelling outside the window, then I can hear a sharp noise, like something shattered into pieces and that's when I look out too to see what's happening.

What's happening is that there a small group of people on the pavement just outside the condo, standing in a sort of circle around a red expanding stain, while a guy curses and gives the middle finger in our direction.

“Angie... what did you do? What does it mean?” I ask as we both stuck our heads back inside the apartment.

“I've just lost a bottle of red wine and a boot” Angie sighs and replies as if it's the most normal thing, finally turning to face me.

And I finally focus for a moment and see what's in front of me: Angie, dressed in just a black The Who t-shirt that leaves her legs almost entirely uncovered, eye liner or whatever it is on her eyes, with those little wings on the sides pointing upwards that make her look more like a kitty, a glossy lipstick on her lips, vanilla scent. Maybe the burglar hit and killed me and this is heaven.

“Well, I can make up for the wine because I brought some too...” I walk backwards towards the table without taking my eyes off her, pointing at the place where I must have put the bottle “and I can go out and get back your shoe in no time. So, you see? Everything has a solution hehe, don't worry” why the fuck am I laughing? Do I think I'm funny? And why am I sweating?

“I'm sorry you have to go, you've just arrived” she replies with an irresistible pout, moving away from the window and breaking eye contact looking down.

“No problem, I'll be back in a minute.” I'm about to leave the kitchen, then I come back in “Oh wait, I can't”

“Oh ok... why? I mean, it doesn't matter Eddie, don't... don't worry” she starts stuttering and I smirk inside, trying to look cool.

“I forgot I have to do something first”

“What?” she asks puzzled before I get close and take her face between my hands to kiss her.

“This. I'll be right back, ok?” I whisper right after.

“Ok” she smiles and I kiss her again.

“And just so you know, when I'm back I got a bunch of questions about all this to ask you”

“Ok” her smiles widens and I kiss her once more.

“I'm telling you in advance so I won't catch you unprepared”

“Ok...” she repeats and I'm about to kiss her once again but she holds me back with her hands against my chest “Now go though”

“Uh is that so?” I try and get my kiss but she pushes me harder away.

“Hurry up”

“I'm going, I'm going. So bossy...” I let go of her and leave the kitchen, only to show up on the doorway a second later, only for a moment “I like it”

**

It takes me a while to find the boots, I mean, the boot, Angie's brown one, cause it rolled down the sidewalk under a parked car. When I find it, I instinctively look up, as if I'm expecting to see her still there, at the window, with her colorful hair fluttering in the night breeze. But she's not there and  I immediately go back inside. And during the whole way, this time using the elevator, I try and figure out the connection between wine and boot and the dynamics that brought them both out of the window. I walk up to the apartment and Sade is still singing.

“Thank you, Eddie. Do you want some?” I turn around the corner in the hallway and Angie's on the doorway with a bowl of chips in her hands and she holds it out to me as I get closer.

I want you I'd tell her but I just give her the boot and take the bowl and bury my hand in it.

“Anytime” I watch her quickly walking away into her room, quickly walking on her naked legs... GET IT TOGETHER MAN, YOU'RE SWEATING.

“Why are you standing there like that? Come in” Angie comes back and I'm still here at the door eating chips.

“I was waiting for you” I shrug and follow the flower path and her steps once again into the living room.

“So?” she asks when we're in front of the couch and I put the bowl of chips down on the small wooden table, since I believe we're about to sit down. Yet she keeps standing and smiles at me, with the tip of her canine popping up and diggin into her lower lip for a second as usual.

“So?” I repeat getting closer till my face is inches from hers, but without hugging her or kissing her, as if there's a game, a challenge between us, a challenge I'll surely fail.

“The bunch of questions... “ she looks down and, tugging the hem of her t-shirt down, she quickly takes a seat and I'm sure she's blushing even though she's not looking at me.

“Ok... Sade?” I point at the record player and sit down beside her, as I take off my jacket and throw it on the other couch.

“Hahaha of all this mess, the strangest thing to you is Sade's record?”

“No. But it's the first thing I thought of now”

“Don't you like it? It's... it's a good album” she turns towards me and subtly closes the distance between us on the couch at the same time.

“She's very good, it's just I didn't think you liked her. Can I ask the second question?”

“Sure”

“What the hell were you doing at the window with a bottle and a boot?” Angie's grin widens again.

“I was trying to open the wine bottle” she shrugs as if this is the most obvious explanation.

“By kicking it?”

“Hahaha more or less. My dad taught me”

“I sense a memorable anecdote is coming, I'm all ears”

Angie tells me about that time when she went on a camping trip with her parents to Lake Payette, her father's idea to celebrate his and his wife's birthdays, that I guess must be very close. On night one Ray pulled out a bottle of wine he had brought for the occasion but realized he forgot the corkscrew. He pounced on the cork with a knife but it seemed he couldn't open the bottle. Janis wanted to postpone the toast to the following evening, after going to the nearby shop and buying the bottle opener. There was no way to convince Ray though. So Angie's dad, as nothing happened, took off his boot in front of them, stuck the fuckin' bottle in it and, without saying a word, walked clumsily on a single boot up to the closest ponderosa pine and started slamming the bottle, protected by his shoe, against the trunk.

“You know, the pressure inside the bottle pushes the cork out, until you can grab it and take it off with your hands. My mom and I were doubled over in laughter” as she tells the story, Angie crosses her legs and moves on the couch and this makes her shirt go up little by little. I notice that and feel kind of an asshole.

“But it worked”

“And that was the first time I tasted wine: I was 11. It was good, although it had been shaken for 15 minutes”

“This means you got no corkscrew here at home?”

“Yeah... I mean, actually we had one, but I can't find it anymore. I guess someone took it at my birthday party or Matt or Chris borrowed it and haven't returned it yet. Sure it didn't seem wise to go there and ask them now, you know...” yes, I know, you didn't ask them because they'd have asked questions you don't wanna answer, at least by now.

“And you decided to use the Pacifico technique”

“And since I don't have any tree here, the only way to do it was beating the bottle against the wall. But I didn't want to risk getting the kitchen dirty so...”

“Hehe so you figured you'd do it out of the window?” I adore this woman.

“Yep. And it was working fine, until a certain someone scared me and made me drop everything. And I made a mess” she gives me a playful nasty look and scoots away from me.

“You're right, it's all my fault.” I scoot over on the couch to sit back close to her “But I know how to make you forgive me” ok, more than close basically glued to her.

“How?” she looks up at me amused, basically batting her eyelids against mine.

“Opening the other bottle” I stand up out of the blue and I leave her there, maybe a little disappointed? I go into the kitchen, take the bottle and open the window.

“With the Pacifico technique?” she asks as she shows up at the kitchen door.

“Nuh, with the Vedder one” I peer outside, remove the wrapper, pull out my lighter and start heating the end of the bottle neck with the flame.

“Isn't this dangerous?” I feel one arm circling my hip and for a minute there the red wine bottle was about to end the same way as Angie's one.

“No, I did it so many times” I answer as I rotate the bottle.

“Hey, it's coming out!” Angie exclaims behind my back while the cork starts moving.

At that point I tilt the bottle slightly as to prevent the cork from exploding like a bullet inside the apartment or into somebody else's window. Finally the corks pops out and falls into the street, where it looks like he doesn't hit anyone. Wine is safe too.

“See! Hot air expands inside the bottle and pushes the cork.” I close the window and triumphantly show the uncorked bottle to Angie, who arches her eyebrow at me ��What? I can do science too, you know”

“So you also know you could have caused an explosion and get hurt?” she rolls her eyes and by the way is still hugging me.

“Not if you know how to do it and and to be careful. So, am I forgiven?” I ask, raising the bottle at her as if it was a toast.

“Sure!” she chuckles and looks at me in silence for a while. And I'm expecting a kiss but instead, she lets go of me and exits the kitchen, but not before addressing me again “Let's go taste you boiled wine”

The wine is not boiled at all and it's not bad. Angie and I are at the second round and, as I'm stuffing my face with chips and sandwiches, I realize it's getting hot in here. I mean, I can't be this heated for two glasses of wine. And neither for the half nakedness of Angie. Even though... And this is the moment I figure out my usually chilly girlfriend is dressed only in a t-shirt and I can't hear her teeth chatter for the cold, so there must be something going on here.

“My bunch of questions aren't over anyway...” I say and Angie makes herself comfortable on the couch, half laid and leaning on the armrest.

“Shoot”

“It's fucking hot in here, isn't it?” I ask as I take off my flannel and she starts laughing uncomfortably and, as she tries to sit up, her feet get closer, touch my legs and push against me a little to leverage. But I don't move an inch.

“Hahaha yeah, you're right... as you can see, tonight's really the perfect night: just one disaster after another”

“Why? What happened?” I throw the shirt there were my jacket is.

“I don't know, it must... the heating system must be broken, and that's not unusual. The new thing is... this time, I don't know... they kind of broke the other way round and it's been heating non stop at full power since this afternoon”

“Do you want me to check your radiators?”

“No point trying, it's not just here, the whole building is burning basically”

“Do you want me to go down and check the boiler room?”

“NO!” Angie basically kicks me, then regains her composure “Err no, no worries. And then, I mean, the apartment manager is the one who's supposes to take care of this stuff and call technicians, that's what he's paid for! He'll do the work”

“Ok”

“And what if you can't solve the problem and maybe no one can and they blame you because you put your hand in there...”

“Alright”

“And by the way, at least it's not freezing, for a change”

“Well, yeah, still better than freezing but...”

“I know. Shitty building. Anyway, now you know the... ehm, you know why I'm dressed like... this” Angie goes on and pulls down her t-shirt again to cover her thighs.

“I wouldn't call it a disaster then” I smirk and rub the back of my hand softly against her leg, from her ankle to her knee. She stares at me in the eyes and for a moment I'm sure she's about to throw herself over me and kiss me, but I'm wrong again.

“So? Which movie do we watch first? Mine or yours?” she asks out of the blue.

“You decide” actually I even forgot about the movies, the heat, the wine, about where we are and maybe what year we are as well.

“No, come on, you tell me” my hand is still going up and down.

“It's the same for me, Angie”

“Same for me too”

“You're the host, you choose”

“You're my guest, so it's up to you” of course, as always: it's up to me.

“Uhm... alright! Let's watch yours first then”

“Ok! The tape is there under the tv, would you put it on? I'll get some water” in a fraction of a second Angie sneaks away into the kitchen and I find myself alone. I turn off the stereo then crawl in front of the tv to get the Goodfellas tape and as I do I think about one thing. Well, actually two. One worse than the other. The first thing is that I'd rather have gone to get the water instead of Angie, so I could come back here and see her on hands and knees as she fumbles with the videorecorder, and that it'd have made for a very nice view. My second thought is that the tv looked much better in Angie's room and it'd have been much more enjoyable to watch it with her from her bed.

Disgusting thoughts indeed.

“Did you find it?” Angie's question startles me as if I was caught red handed doing something illicit.

“Yep” I press Play, stand up and try to get back on the couch before her. I do and sit right in the middle of it. So she won't be able to sit far from me. I gloat for my smar idea.

“If you want to be more comfortable, just lay down. I'm gonna sit there. Hehe we have one couch each if we want to” is Angie even aware of her endless power? The power to leave me totally speechless with such statements?

“Actually... I don't want to”

“Are you sure?” well, I don't know... WHAT DO YOU THINK?

“Very sure, I don't want a whole couch for me, I wanna share it with you” I hold my arms out and grab her by her waist, pulling her gently towards me until I finally take her back on this couch. And I hold her and kiss her and touch her, pushing her delicately towards the armrest on her side. And at some point I feel her hand moving right under my body. I think I know what she's about to do and I feel euphoric all of a sudden. But Angie is able to surprise me again, because even if I don't see her doing it, I can clearly feel her gesture of grasping at the hem of her t-shirt and pulling it down for the umpteenth time. I internally laugh at my stupid X-rated delusions, although on the other hand I'm sorry Angie doesn't feel comfortable with me yet. I don't wanna hurry, really, I'd just like to know what the problem is. I give her one last peck on her lips and back away so we can both sit up properly.

“Ok. Let's fastforward all the commercials and advisories. Where's the remote? Oh there it is!” Angie, the one who was about to abandon me all by myself on this couch, the one who was coy and bashful during my approach like two minutes ago, it's the same girl that basically climbs on me to jump over on the opposite side and stretch out to take the remote on the other armrest. And then does the same thing backwards to get back to her place. And I'm not complaining at all.

**

We're almost at the end of my movie and this is the situation: we finished the wine I don't even remember when, as for food only a few snacks and two small chocolate cakes are left; I'm in my t-shirt and boxers because it's really hot, although we opened the window in the living room; Angie's smoking a cigarette, resting on the couch with her legs over mine and I've been genty stroking them for literal HOURS, something that contributes in heating the atmosphere even more. And I also feel kind of guilty, because Harold has just rushed to the hospital with Maude and I already know what's about to happen and the ending breaks my heart every time... and I'm here, basking in the softness and smoothness of Angie's skin under my fingers.

“It's so sad. But also beautiful at the same time” she remarks during the credits.

“Yeah. You really haven't seen it before?”

“Never. And now I see why you like it”

“Hehe right, Cat Stevens has something to do with it” I reply since I think she's referring to the soundtrack.

“Uhm yeah but that's not what I meant. What I wanted to say is that... well, this movie is like you” she takes one long last hit of smoke, then puts out her cigarette in the ashtray she placed on the floor. And she's amazing. Not because she's smoking but... I know it's not nice to say, and it's also unhealthy, a bad bad habit, but... there are times, particular times in which, maybe fuelled by excessive domestic heating and subsequent nudity, I see something extremely sexy in a woman who's smoking.

“Absurd?”

“Absurd, eccentric, thoughtful, bitter and sweet...” Angie slowly counts the adjectives on her fingertips and I can't say she didn't get them right. This means she knows there's something bitter, and dark inside me. Maybe that's why she doesn't trust me completely yet.

“Eccentric uh?” a devilish grin appears on my face.

“Oh well...”

“Said the girl who tried to open a bottle with a shoe outside the window”

“Ok this is gonna be another of those recurring jokes you're gonna use to take the piss out of me for the rest of my life, isn't it?”

“Yes... after all, I can't make fun of you for your nights out with Meg to pick up guys anymore, I have to find a substitute”

“Really? And why?” she adjust herself better on the couch to sit up and for a minute I'm afraid I'll lose touch with her legs, but she still keeps them over mine.

“Because you're not having those anymore” I hold her by the hips as she puts her hands on my shoulders.

“Are you sure?”

“You don't need to”

“So can I hang up my infallible pick up techniques now?”

“Sure, now that you picked me up”

“How I made it is still unknown...”

“With your infallible pick up techniques, of course”

“That are? Not doing absolutely anything?” as if she needed to do something to have me fall for her. I lay down on the couch and pull her with me.

“Being yourself and not doing absolutely anything, the best way”

“If you say so...” she mutters and she tries to sit back up but I hold her tight and prevent her from sneaking away. At this point, also not to slip and fall off the couch, she has to more or less straddle me.

“It worked with me, can't you see that?” I grab her as she tries to wriggle free, I hold her tighter and slip my hand under her t-shirt, to caress her back.

“Eddie! Come on, let me sit up...”

“Why?”

“Because I'm hurting you...”

“Shut up!”

“It's true and you know it”

“You can't crush me, I can feel you got all the weight on your knees and arms”

“Because I wanna spare you asphyxiation?”

“Cut.The.Crap.” I decide I'm gonna do this the hard way and my hand sneaks across her back towards her armpit so I can tickle her, but she gives up long before I get there. Mental note: Angie is very ticklish “Oh, that's better!”

“Hahaha stop it!”

“Much better” I repeat when we find ourselves basically nose to nose and then I stop torturing her, close my eyes and breathe in silence with her for five minutes, I think, waiting for something... that never comes. Angie removes her hands from my hair, where she had casually buried them in the heat of the moment. Then she holds on to the pillows, pulls herself up and backs away from me.

“I'll turn off the tv” Angie stretches out her hand to get the remote from the table where I put, then sits back down at my feet. I take a deep breath and sit up too.

“I'd better go” I'm about to stand up but Angie, with a quick move, grabs me by the arm and pulls me back down on the couch.

“WHERE ARE YOU GOING?”

“Home, so I'll let you sleep” I pinch her cheek and try to stand up again but Angie doesn't let me.

“But I don't wanna sleep! Well, I mean... you can sleep with me, you know, you can crash at my place”

“Even tonight?”

“Yes, why? Don't you want to?” Angie's torturing the hemline of her t-shirt again and if she tugs at it some more, it'll become a tunic.

“Sure I want to. I thought that it may be a problem”

“A problem about what?”

“I don't know, because of Meg?”

“Meg won't be here, she's sleeping over at her friend's”

“But she'll be back tomorrow morning, right? What if she sees me again? What will she think?” I'm saying it for her, not for me. If she sees me and does the math, I'll be nothing but happy.

“What will she think? Nothing. Anyway, I already told her”

“You told her?” I ask, suddenly interested and full of hope. Did she really tell someone we're a couple?

“Yeah, I told her you'd come over tonight. And that maybe you'd sleep here” hope destroyed in ten seconds. Maybe.

“And what did she say?”

“She said ok” Angie shrugs and takes the last two cakes left from the table, biting on one and handing me the other one.

“Ok? Only ok?” I take a bite too.

“Sure, what were you expecting?”

“Nothing. But... I think Meg knows then”

“Sure she knows, I've just told you! Why all these problems all of a sudden?”

“No, I mean she knows... about us...” a second bite and no more cake.

“NO! I... I didn't tell her anything”

“Angie... it's the 4th time we sleep together in a week, I don't think you need to tell her. If she's not stupid, she'll understand by herself.

“She knows we sleep together but she doesn't know... what... ehm... what we do” Angie eats the rest of her chocholate cake and pours herself half a glass of water to swallow it better.

“She can assume it, I guess” seriously, Meg's assumptions surely go well beyond what actually happens between Angie and I in reality.

“Meg has no trouble to say what she thinks: if she had suspects, she'd have openly told me”

“You should do it”

“What?”

“Openly tell her, about us”

“WHAT? WHY?” why the hell is she so scared?

“'Cause she's a friend to you and you have to start somewhere, don't you?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Listen, we already talked about it, do you wanna keep it secret? Ok, I'm in. But you could take things gradually, with no big collective announcements, just by telling it to one single person. And why not your best friend?”

“I don't know, maybe because she's totally incapable of keeping a secret?” Angie looks at me as if I was stupid and rolls her eyes.

“Well, that's so much better, isn't it. We only need to tell Meg, then she'll get the word out for us” I try and hug her and she slaps my chest in response.

“Fuck you, Eddie”

“Let's go to bed?”

“Mmm... ok”

[starwarshyperdrive]

what I ..would like to.. see in The Rise of Skywalker

I’ve seen a lot of people doing this lately and I was careful not to phrase it in a way that makes it sound like ‘there better be..’. WE as fans are not entitled to have it out way, so no ‘I want to see’ but more of a ‘would be cool, but I'm fine either way. 

1. No Reylo - Rey has quite literally closed the door on him. Whatever he might make of it or phantasize I don’t care, which leads me to..

2. No redemption for Kylo - unless it’s as a sacrifice. Ben can join Hayden as blue ghost. that’s ok, but there is no coming back after patricide. Period. If he wants to throw himself in front of Rey to save her, then I’m fine with theoreticially calling it redemption.

3. No Rey family retcon - that requires a super weird lengthy explanation why Rey is the daughter of XY and 3 tie-in novels. Keep it simple and straight forward. that means: 3a No Rey Kenobi and 3b No Rey Palpatine. Make her Qui Gonns revenge from the netherworld using dark side knowledge he somehow achieved to ‘create life’ as a mirror image to Anakin for all I care, that would make more sense and follow the narrative more than some clumsy Kenobi/Palpatine retcon.

4. No important information that requires knowledge of canon material such as books or comics. That would just confuse casual fans and be pretty bad writing. That doesn’t include some mild tie-in stuff like Rogue Ones Catalyst which wasn't required reading and acted as a nice introduction or some sort of extended prologue.

5. Don’t resurrect the emperor in flesh and blood. As much as we all would love to see the emperor again there would be some explaining to do. Especially after Ian McDiarmids appearance at SWCC and the laugh in the trailer I would expect it to be a red herring. I think there is a way to do it more elegantly. Who is to say that Sith couldn’t have developed the ability to be some sort of force ghost counterpart. Might not be referenced in the EU or new canon, but the doesn’t mean anything.

6. Don’t ignore Snoke - Please don’t leave Snoke a complete mystery that requires further reading and leaves the casual viewer wondering what this was all about. I can be just one throw away line from the emperor ghost about ‘this former advisor fool thought he can take my place after studying too many holocrons’ or something. I just rewatched Return of the Jedi and they have been mentioned in the Aftermath books. Palpatines purple advisor dudes were creepy enough to fit the bill. And they could still be very old. Who knows, they might have served Darth Plagueis before, like it would have been custom on a medieval court.

7. Use the sentence ‘from a certain point of view’ - Since The Last Jedi threw a wrench into the narrative laid out by JJ Abrams it looks a lot like JJ is trying to restore some bits of his initial idea, so it would be pretty neat if they’d incorporate ‘from a certain point of view’ into the movie as a tongue in cheek nod to the audience.

8. Surprise us with unexpected appearances - Appearances by characters like Obi Wan or Anakin will always be on top of the rumor list, but I’d really like to see some familiar faces in minor rolls, like they did in Rogue One. Wedge actor Denis Lawson repeatedly stated he has no interest (later claimed it was just a scheduling conflict and he would’ve like to be part), but his character appeared A LOT in recent canon material and he has been attending some conventions. Maybe that was to test the water to see how popular his character is. Maybe his nephew (Ewan McGregor) convinced him. So I’m calling it. Wedge cameo. Keep your eyes peeled. 

We’ve seen a lot of new alien species, but the at this stage the Resistance needs all the help they can get, so it would be really cool to see some Prune Faces or other familiar Rebel alliance members.

9. Saberstaff - I can’t believe I’m saying this. I was complaining about the new lightsaber design in every new installment from Darth Mauls double light saber to the light saber tonfa in The Force Unleashed, from Kylo Rens cross guard to the inquisitors helicopter lightsaber,.. but.. Rey is an excellent staff fighter. The fact that she kept her staff made me think that she might create a saber staff. And now I even think that would be pretty cool. It hasn’t been shown in the trailer, I know, but that doesn’t mean we could get a scene in the end when she starts training others and Luke might have even encouraged her to be herself and do what feels right for her, so that would seem like a natural evolution of the character. 

10. Give Lando an emotional Lando moment with the Millennium Falcon - Something fans of Solo can appreciate that isn’t too much in your face, just a quick ‘hey baby how have you been’ when he enters the ship or something. 

And that's it for now. We’ll surely get new material soon, so the list might change eventually but for now these are my personal Top 10 topics. 

[geezeralert]

A Beatles fan gets back to where he once belonged

(Some albums from my collection)

(First of three parts)

As a really big fan of the Beatles, I have always been somewhat in awe of those who are really HUGE fans of the famed singing group.

They just seemed to enjoy the music on a whole different level, with thorough knowledge and appreciation for what was produced by this unique musical foursome in their eight-plus years together.  

So, over the last four months, as a retired-geezer-bucket-list endeavor, I took a huge leap towards earning my “huge fan” badge.

I re-listened to, re-enjoyed and studied — consulting at least five books — each of the some 300 Beatles’ recordings, as contained on their 13 official albums/CDs along with many of their various related versions (on the three two-CD anthologies, various collections like “One” and the BBC live sessions).

I am blogging about it because, honestly, I’d just like to share my experience and put my basic impressions down in writing.  It was riveting and sinfully fun, spending too much money and too much time — including many breaks to just sit back, travel down memory lane and simply be entertained by these pop songs/albums that took me through the 1960s, from my pre-teen to college years — on what’s really a rather personal, trivial pursuit.  

But I’m also holding out hope that my findings could be interesting for other Beatles fans, of whatever level.

Quick bottom line: I am more impressed now than I was before with the output of this pop group and the incredible blending of the four multi-talented musicians Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.  I’ll write about why and list the highlights of what I learned in the second part.

First off, though, I should define “really big fans,” my current state and that of many millions of my contemporaries worldwide from the sixties.

This group is familiar with all the Beatles recordings (able to identify them when hearing just the opening notes), their background as a group and individuals (back to teenage years), their basic timeline as recording artists (who authored what compositions and when), their alternate recordings, their post-Beatles recordings, their relations (girlfriends, wives), and their basic life stories.

In other words, we just just paid attention all these years, watching the relevant movies and videos, buying their records and reading at least the most reliable major books about them — first by Hunter Davies and then by Bob Spitz — while also picking up more than a few of the annual money-grabbing “new” ones.

I’ve read two books by “first wives” Patti Boyd (“Wonderful Tonight”) and Cynthia Lennon (“John”) and Lennon’s sister, “My Brother.”

I also bought one of the first song-by-song compilation books, “Beatlesongs” (1989) by William J. Dowling. For decades, it was my go-to source for day-to-day inquires like “who played that great bass part on ‘Hey Bulldog’”?  

By being a big fan, my Christmas and birthday presents from family and friends often have been Beatles stuff (when they tired of stuff feeding my other passion, baseball) including three coffee table books, a box of “The BBC Archives” TV and radio broadcast material, and three other books going into each of the group’s songs.

From all that, I am left wondering if the Beatles ever had a private, unphotographed, unrecorded (in writing or audio) stretch long than five minutes.

It was the final gift last Christmas,  “Revolution in the Head” by Ian MacDonald, that propelled me to finally take on this long-planned intensive study of the Beatles’ music.

MacDonald’s definitive work, updated three times since published in 1994, is classified as a textbook by the Los Angeles Public Library. It goes into great detail on the musical and sociological aspects of each song so it was sometimes beyond my sphere of interest. But it was most useful to me by going song-by-song in chronological order, referencing all the alternative versions of the songs and telling where to find them.  

Along the way, I also found the fascinating (although partially disputed) book “Here, There and Everywhere” by Geoff Emerick, a teenage recording studio prodigy who helped engineer (record, mix) just about every Beatles song, either as an assistant in his teens or the primary engineer in his early 20s.

His first-person observations helped flesh out the more technical aspects or third-party accounts of the Beatles songs.

(Other books used for the song-by-song marathon: “The Beatles: A Hard Day’s Write. The Stories Behind Every Song” by Steve Turner and “All the Songs. The Story Behind Every Beatles Release,” a massive, picture-filled coffee table book by Jean-Michel Guesdon and Phillippe Margotin.)  

Meanwhile, there are a ton of other written works out there awaiting my attention once this project is done – exhaustive books by Mark Lewisohn; memoirs by the group’s producer (and Fifth Beatle early on) George Martin and original drummer Pete Best; “Shout: The Beatles in their Generation” by Philip Norman; and “Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now,” by Barry Miles — to name a few . . . in my price range (more on that in part three). There’s a seemingly never-ending flow of written material and reworked music.

And it’s fair to assume “really huge fans” have read them all. (I’ll delve more into what constitutes that fan level in parts two and three.)  

The original idea for trying this project came after advanced technology, resolved legal issues and a favorable marketplace brought about the production of the entire Beatles catalogue on CDs nine years ago.

I had tried keeping up with the Beatles’ output over the years on vinyl, eight-track tapes and cassettes but, for one reason or another, had some holes.

Nearly my entire Beatles collection of vinyl albums was stolen from my college dorm room in the early 1970s. I then rebought some of the biggest ones at that time but then sat back and waited for releases in the latest medium (eight-track, cassettes, CDs, digital) and lost track of what I had.

So, when the complete collection on CD (remastered to sound even better!) became available, I perked up. But the price tag ($150-200) gave me pause.

Then came an offer to buy the whole shebang at half price. I was ready to pounce.

But there remained another major issue.

The Beatles’ studio personnel, I learned, recorded each of their songs in both monaural (“mono”) and stereo. Each version had/has its strong backers, especially as the original tapes were revisited and reproduced with improved quality (both in stereo and mono) for the latest CD versions.

For the “true experience” of listing to the Beatles songs, did one really have to possess and listen to both stereo and mono versions? The inner Beatles fanatic and picky perfectionist told me “yes.” My practical and realistic self, though, said that’s crazy, unnecessary and an expense only the crazy wealthy fan would want to pay.

Luckily, many music critics recognized the dilemma this posed for the average fan. From reading a few of their comparisons and conclusions, I came up with a fairly consistent recommendation for which albums are best in mono and which are best in stereo:

Mono sounds best for “Please Please Me,” “With the Beatles,” “Hard Days Night,” “Beatles For Sale” and “Help.” Stereo is recommended for “Rubber Soul,” “Revolver,” “Magical Mystery Tour” “The Beatles (The White Album)” “Yellow Submarine” “Let It Be” and “Abbey Road.” (The latter two were only mixed in stereo anyway.)

Mono and stereo versions of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” both offer great listening experiences, and the 50th anniversary remix in 2017 added yet another aural mix.

The mono box set includes all the songs released as singles (45 rpm) and not on any of the basic albums (though some, those that rose to no. 1 on Billboard lists, are included in the “Beatles — 1” album/CD).  

Emerick actually recommended the mono mixes of  “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper,” which he engineered. He said much more care was given to the mono versions than the stereo ones, which were rushed at the conclusion of the project.

He wrote:

“True Beatles fans would do well to avail themselves of the mono versions of Sgt. Pepper and Revolver because far more time and effort went into those mixes than the stereo mixes. The stereo versions of those albums have an unnecessary surfeit of panning and effects like ADT (Automatic Double Tracking) and flanging. (Fellow engineer) Richard and I would sometimes get carried away with them because of their novelty value . . . especially if George Martin wasn’t there to rebuke us. Needless to say, it was John who especially loved that kind of overkill — we’d sometimes whack something on too severely just to see how it sounded, only to find him winking at us, saying, ‘More!’”

It should be noted that Emerick wrote his book in 2007, before all the remastering of the Beatles albums took place. So, perhaps the new stereo mixes enhance those versions to the point that they now are preferable.  

And then there’s the whole “Let It Be” controversy, when the original recordings were turned over to “wall of sound” maestro Phil Specter, reportedly by John Lennon, much to the chagrin of McCartney.

So, a stripped down version of those songs “Let It Be-Naked,” was produced.

For my listening project, I listened to that naked CD as well as a number of mono vs. stereo renditions of Beatles’ songs.  

Basically, I agreed with experts (they are so grateful, I’m sure!) that the early albums are best in mono.

This was a time when few people had quality stereo systems, if any stereo at all (I had a small portable one in my room), and thus much more time and care was given to the mono versions (says my books). Those tunes in stereo sound pretty tinny and awkward to listen to (says my ears), especially with headphones (e.g. the drums and base in one ear, the voices in another).  

Of course, musical preferences, like all reactions to art, are wholly subjective. When I posted a list of my personal choices for “five worst Beatles songs” (yes, they did produce some songs I cannot stand: “Rain,” “Paperback Writer,” “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” “I’m Down,” “Helter Skelter”) on a Facebook site, several respondents said the tunes were actually among their favorites. Some fans treat all of the group’s output as wonderful and any criticism as sacrilege.

In the books I consulted, Beatles tunes certified as “classic” by one author sometimes were depicted as “a disaster” by another. Even the Beatles disparaged as “garbage” some songs I (and others) enjoy.

Typical of most listeners, my reactions when sampling the stereo and mono recordings are probably based on how I first heard the songs. And for nearly all of them, that would be mono. Anything different sounds off kilter.

Some examples: The stereo “Taxman,” the lead song on side one of “Revolver,” has the bass and rhythm section on the left side while the lead guitar and percussion are on the right, with vocals in both. It sounds wrong to my ears, which first heard all the music coming out of both speakers (mono). Likewise, on the same album, “She Said She Said” (a favorite of mine) splits the instruments into separate channels and doesn’t sound quite right to me.

Still, the later works, as remastered, do have much greater depth and clarity in the stereo versions. Songs like “Martha, My Dear,” “Savoy Truffle” and “Glass Onion” sound terrific (I played them over and over). Likewise, most of Sgt. Pepper, which was remastered a second time for the 50th anniversary CD, is fine in stereo.

In several cases, like “Martha My Dear,” I enjoyed a song in the latest version far more than I did originally.

Which brings us to my general observations on what I heard and read. That would be part two, coming tomorrow.  

[nickrbockr]

Simon Vs Fan Fic: Chapter 6 - One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Ao3

Leah came with me to Walgreens to get items to put into Bram’s care package. Abby and Nick were still asleep and Ian decided to go on home and sober up for tonight’s partying. She went into the store to start on my list because I called Bram to apologize.

“Hi handsome,” Bram’s voice comes with a layer heart and warmth that drips into my ear.

“I don’t deserve that today,” I start as I shuffle in the passenger seat.

“Stop, Si.”

“If I made you feel bad in anyway, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, honest. What can I do to make you feel better?”

I scoff in guilt. “Here I am trying to apologize to you and you’re the one asking what you can do for me.”

“Simon,” Bram begins. “I know how hard this is, believe me. You have no idea how much Baltimore Nick has to listen to me talk things out. But what is important is how we communicate like we are now. When either of us is feeling something, we just need to let the other know. If I could hold you right now, I would tuck myself so close to your chest so I could hear my heart beat in your chest.”

“I miss you so much. I thought it would be easier, but I was wrong, it’s so much harder.”

“I made the same assumption too and it looks like I’ve been listening to Elliot Smith more and more. Which is counter-productive because the lyrics really are depressing. Remember this, Simon: you’re no longer alone in this, we’re in this together.”

“I’m glad you’re with my goofy butt, Bram. In spite of all my craziness.”

Bram exhaled and I swore I could feel his soft breath on my ear. “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you Simon. I see a man with perpetual sexy bedhead. I see your moon-grey eyes explore my face with beautiful awe. I see a man willing to do anything and everything for the sake of others at the expense of himself because that’s how much other people mean to him. I see a boy who I had eyes for since freshman year of high school. Look in the mirror, Si, through my eyes and you’ll understand.”

“I’ll work on that, B, I promise.”

“Simon Jacob Spier.”

“Abraham Louis Greenfeld.”

“I will see you soon.” He could feel Bram’s smile stretch across his phone as well as pang in his voice that was hungry for my flesh.

The ‘I love you’ chorus sang between us and I hung up. My screensaver of Bram popped up, a picture I screenshot from his Instagram. I barely kept any apps on my home screen so I could always stare at him when I needed him most. It’s such a strange gift, being able to affect another person’s mood only with the power of existing.

I left Leah’s car and walked into the Walgreens to find her reading a magazine on the floor.

“How’d it go?” Leah asked, not looking up from her issue of National Geographic.

“Exactly how you said.” I admitted, hand on the back of my neck.

“I swear to god it almost feels like I’m dating you guys too.” She replied, placing the magazine back on the shelf.

“How have you done it?” I ask her, looking for an honest answer.

“I don’t know, I’m not getting any out of it either,” she responds jokingly, standing up with my help.

“I’m serious. Leah.”

Leah rolls her eyes, “Do we have to do this in a Walgreens?” She starts to walk towards the food aisle, knowing the first item that will go into Bram’s care package. I catch her by her arm and stop her.

“We do…I just feel…ever since I knew I am going to propose, I’ve regressed into my high school self where I’m…an idiot and stumble over even small and easy things with you guys and Bram. You’re keeping me balanced, Leah, and I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Leah hugs me in the middle of the aisle as an older lady is looking at the greeting cards. She notices us and crosses her hands on her chest.

“You’re right, Simon,” Leah says, “you have regressed a little because you’re making me being a friend a big deal! Spier, are you going to regress to the point where you’re back in the closet?”

We laugh and walk towards the Oreos. Walgreens is a different store right when it opens. The employees still look like there is a sparkle of hope in their eyes. Leah and I discuss the pros and cons of double stuff verses regular Oreos when I finally tell her what I’ve been thinking since I knew I wanted to propose to Bram.

“Leah, you’re going to have to be my Best Person, you know that right?”

She shot me a confused look and smiled. “That’s how you’re asking me to be your Best Person? As a joking demand?”

“It actually seemed the most fitting way to do it to be honest,” I defend.

A large smile grew across her face. “You’re actually right for once in your life, Si.”

We checked out and I added the Double Stuff Oreos (I won that argument) to my care package that also had additional snacks, stereotypical college food, new CDs for him to listen to (yes we both still buy and own CDs), a pack of legal writing pads that he loves to use in his journalism classes, pencils and pens with his name embroidered on them, a framed picture of us from this summer, and a bottle of vodka, the only liquor that doesn’t make Bram too nauseated. We dropped it off at the post office and the worker seemed shocked to see two college-age kids in there at nine A.M.

“Sorry about last night.” I said on our way back to the apartment.

“You don’t really have anything to apologize for, you just got drunk and…Simony.”

“I know, but…I felt like we didn’t talk about how Abby and Nick felt really. Like I stole focus.”

“Well, you did,” Leah replied laughing, “but I think it was wanted. It didn’t seem like they wanted to discuss it.”

“I’ll make it up to them. I’ll cook breakfast.”

“I know none of us will say no to that.”

Once we’re home, Nick and Abby are awake and lounging in the living room. We all catch up while I’m cooking breakfast and they’re cleaning up remnants of the party from last night.

“So other than those major projects for school, I also have been commissioned to do a piece for another Off-Broadway show.” Abby finishes.

“Sounds like a good problem to have,” Leah says, throwing the solo cups into our recycling bin.

“Truer words have never been spoken.” Abby replies, sipping on water.

“So guys, breakfast is ready.” I turn around and have two plates ready to go for Nick and Abby and we sit at the former pong table. “View this as an official apology for last night.”

Both Abby and Nick tilt their heads in mild annoyance.

“Like we told you last night, nothing to apologize for. BUT!” Abby shouted, “We did gloss over the fact that you are marrying Bram!”

“Proposing to, yes, I am!” I shout back as I bring Leah and my plates. “Right now the plan is propose in Shady C over our break on our anniversary with rings provided by my Dad.”

“Ahhh! So we’ll all still be in the city!”

“I hope so, it’s at the end of January right before classes start, will that work for you guys?”

“For you and Bram? We’ll make it work,” Nick replies, stuffing egg and sausage into him mouth.”

“I also got his mom’s blessing when she visited last month and I’m still waiting to speak to his Dad but he is a hard man to talk to now that Ruth is in kindergarten.”

Abby stared at me with a dropped jaw as Nick reminded steadfast at eating.

“You’re asking his parents?! That is so cute!”

“I’m hoping to convince his Dad to come fishing to at least lure him up here.”

“Was that a pun?” Nick said, laughing.

“Not intentionally,” I reply.

The rest of our Saturday was stereotypical college student life: movies, booze, GrubHub order, some light marijuana use, more booze and then the bars that night. New Haven is a great New England town in the fall and the leaves crunched beneath our shoes as we walked to the second bar of the night.

“So I want to say this only once more and then I’ll leave it alone. You guys doing okay since the break up?”

Nick and Abby stared at each other.

“We really are,” Nick answered. “Bram was a huge help too, not to say that to make you upset, but-”

“No, no, I’m sorry guys,” I respond. “I shouldn’t have reacted like that and I have no right to. Bram is his own person and I shouldn’t be so…territorial.”

“You’re not territorial, Si,” Leah said between handing us our drinks.

“Yeah, I am. Or was. I don’t know. Last night took me back to the insecure Simon and I didn’t like that. I’m so, so happy Bram was able to help you guys, and I need to work on trust.”

“Si, we can’t really pretend to understand how it was like to be outed or come out in general,” Nick said with a sympathetic smile. “But if you actually have trust issues, they’re valid. It’s okay to feel feelings.” He finished, laughing. “That’s a weird sentence, but don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“I guess…I just…I think it all stems back from me thinking that…”

I haven’t ever really told anyone this ever, not Leah, not Bram, not Ian. I was weighing actually being honest as my friend’s concerned eyes stared at me as we walked to a table.

“I guess I have never felt like I’m good enough for Bram, like he will wake up one morning and realize he’s only been with some weird kid from his high school and discover that I’m not enough for him.”

There. It was out there. I finally said it. There was some relief in being honest about my feelings, especially something I’ve felt since Bram and I started dating. Bram has never made me feel this way, let me put that out there. It’s all my brain, all of my psychosis.

“Simon…” Abby pulled my hand to her, Leah placed hers on top, and even Nick put his hand on the pile.

It was already helpful to be able to say those things out loud and I think they understood that I need to get through those feelings myself, but their hands on my hand made me realize that I’m not alone, ever, no matter what. I know it’s cheesy but sometimes you need to hear the cheesy Hallmark card sentences.

“How could you think you’re not good enough?” Nick asked.

“You may be a weird kid from high school, but that doesn’t mean it makes Bram love you less.” Leah added.

“In fact, it probably helped you,” Abby finished as she flashed her Abby smile. “Simon, I know there’s nothing we can really say otherwise until you believe it yourself, but you’re a catch, Bram is lucky to have you just as much as you are lucky to have him.”

“Yeah, you need some self-esteem.” Nick said blatantly. After some stares from Abby and Leah, he continued. “I mean, you…naw, you need to work on your self-esteem. Cause if you don’t, the constant doubt and questioning will end up hurting you the most. And Bram may not want to stay around to watch you do that to yourself.”

“Easier said that done.” Leah said. “But he’s right, Si. As soon as you look at your relationship as a partnership instead of…however you look at it now, all of this doubt will go away.”

I know it wasn’t any business of mine, but I couldn’t help myself and asked.

“Was that why you two split up?” They looked at one another and now I felt like a dick. “Sorry, I’m just the worst person this weekend.”

“No, no it’s fine,” Abby said, sipping her beer. “We both had kinda the opposite problem. Too much pride.”

“Relationships are about give and take and I don’t think we ever found that rhythm. Both can’t give and not take.”

“It’s like if two tops tried to date.” I say, letting it slip out before stopping myself. Nick’s eyes bugged out as Abby started laughing until all of us were laughing at my dumb joke.

After that, the rest of the night was spent like we never left Shady Creek. Memories were talked about and conversation moved quickly and anytime a song came on that Abby liked we danced in the booth. Once the bar closed we swung by the late night pizza place and got some food while discussing the merits of Katy Perry’s latest album (I gave her an A for effort and Nick defended the album with the old ‘she’s hot’ argument).

The next day, I woke up to a text from Bram.

I was told today I can have that weekend off! I can’t wait to see you. :)

There’s no better way to start your day than having your boyfriend confirm a weekend together. Bram works part time at WBAL as their social media intern who they also make work most weekends. He gets to write the summary sentences of articles or links to the news stories on their website as well as respond to comments on their Facebook page postings. It wasn’t the most glamorous job, but it gave him experience and he liked that part.

I woke up Leah to sweet talk her into letting me borrow her car to drive to Baltimore and she said yes, but there was a price. I had to wake up to cook breakfast every morning until the weekend I needed it and I felt that was a fair trade off.

This morning, however, I didn’t cook breakfast and we all went to grab food together before Nick and Abby drove back to New York. When they visit, it never feels like we had enough time together.

“I wish we could stay longer,” Abby cutely pouted.

“I know I can’t convince you guys to stay in New Haven over New York, but I’ll never stop trying.” Leah responded as they hugged.

“So I’m assuming we’ll all see each other next during Thanksgiving?” I say.

“You know it.” Nick says as we hug too. “I love New York, but it’s nice to get out every once in a while, remember that there are smells other than garbage and smog.”

We laugh as I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket. It’s Bram’s Dad. I excused myself from the group.

“Simon, how are you?”

“Great,” I answer, a bit shocked. “How about you?”

“I’m also doing fine. So listen, I know you’ve been trying to get a hold of me and I thought I’d let you know that we’ll be in Boston visiting the wife’s family this coming weekend. If you were interested, we could try meet. I know you’ve been wanting to talk to me in person per your messages.”

I could hear a hint of annoyance in his voice, but as long as I annoyed him into at least seeing me, I can ask him. I didn’t want to ask either of Bram’s parents over the phone unless I absolutely had to, so I’m glad Bram’s step mom’s family lives in Boston.

“Yes, yes that sounds great! I was thinking, if you’re up for it, that we could meet in Provincetown and do some fishing?”

Did I sound as weird as I felt saying that sentence? I must have because all of my friend stopped talking and stared at me.

“I didn’t think you still had fishing in you, Simon. That sounds great, I will be sure to pack my poles.”

His tone was more relaxed after I mentioned fishing. Thank you Tracy Greenfeld.

“Super!” I jump and pump my arm at the audience of my friends. “Also, I know this will sound weird, but can you not tell Bram we’re doing this?”

There was a gut-wrenching pause on the line. I couldn’t say that sentence without sounding weird. Nick shook his head and smiled at me as I flipped him off.

“Okay,” he started. “Can I ask why?”

“Yes, but I won’t be able to tell you until we see each other.”

Another pause as I placed my free hand on the back of my neck. Abby had her fingers crossed and Leah leaned on the car waiting for the call to be over.

“Okay, I’m sure you have your reasons. I won’t tell him.”

Wonderful! I finally got him to spend some one on one time with me. Before I hung up, I gave Bram’s dad the information on where we’d meet to fish. Since speaking to Tracy, I had tried to find the best place in the area to fish and you couldn’t go wrong with Cape Cod.

“Fishing? You?” Leah said.

“Gotta make sure Elijah is in a good mood when I ask for his blessing. He loves fishing and we’ll be out in the ocean, so good views too? That’s important when you fish, right?”

“So you’re going on boat, alone, into the ocean with the father of your boyfriend of whom you’re going to tell him you’re planning on marrying his son?” Nick teased.

“Yeah.”

“If you disappear, I think we’ll start with Elijah.”

“Shut up and get back to New York.”

It was always hard to see my friends leave after they visited. Abby waved goodbye until they turned the corner to head back to New York.

"Can I borrow the car this weekend?" I ask hands folded in a begging manner?

"Duh," Leah said, rolling her eyes and following me back inside.

I couldn’t really concentrate the entire week, trying to figure out the best way to ask Bram’s father.

“Dude, just ask it,” Ian said to me. We were in our final acting class and in between scene studies of our classmates.

“I don’t think I can with Elijah.” I answer. “He’s…not scary, but he’s hard to read and that makes me nervous.”

“If he said no, would that prevent you from still proposing?”

I’ve been so focused on preparing what I’m going to do when I propose that I didn’t think of that part. Which is bad because I still don’t know where in Shady Creek I would take him or what I’d do. I need to figure that out soon, but first I need to get past this weekend.

“The thought of not marrying Bram is worse than Elijah saying no.” I answer. “I’d…probably still do it even if he didn’t say yes.”

Ian laughed, “Then why even ask him? Isn’t asking permission a dated step in marrying someone these days?”

“Yeah, but it seems right to do ask. When it comes to Bram, I want to make sure to do everything right so that the proposal is perfect and then we can plan the wedding together because as you’ve probably noticed, I’m not the best planner.”

“Dude, I think you’re doing well for winging it.” Ian said drinking some water. “Brammy is going to love whatever you do. Do you know how you’re going to ask yet?”

“Ugh…no.”

“He likes soccer, would you want to do it on a soccer field? Oh my god, you should! Then you can have Bram’s family and friends on Bram’s side of the field and your family on your side and you can have them stand as Forwards, Midfielders, and Defenders and oh! You and Brammy and both of your parents can be the Forwards!”

I stared at Ian with bugged eyes. He noticed and laughed.

“You’ve thought a lot about this huh, Ian. You sure you don’t want to marry Bram?”

“Don’t tempt me with a good time,” Ian joked back. “But Bram is missing something that I would never be ale to get past.”

“Boobs?”

Ian put his hand on my shoulder, “Boobs.”

Ian did me thinking the rest of the week. I really wish not everyone hated my high school idea because all of the significant places we were, we spent the most time in that damn high school. I can’t really propose in our either of our bedrooms because one there is not enough space if I invite people and two I’d probably get distracted and we’d just end up having sex and I’d forget to propose.

Would it be cheesy to do it in the parking lot when we had out first lunch and kiss as a couple?"

The more I thought about it, the more and more it did make sense. Bram still has his old car and maybe I could convince the manager to let us go into the store after hours.

“Hmmm…” Leah thought after I told her the idea. It was Thursday night and I we were waiting for our lasagna to finish cooking.

“You hate it.” I ask leaning back I my chair and headed back to square one.

“I don’t…hate it….but it also just doesn’t seem like the most romantic place to propose.”

You weren’t in the car with us when we ate Oreos and kissed while it rained.

“We really didn’t have a place outside of school. Our places ended up being in the lunch room or the fair or…”

That’s it. It was the place we built the foundation of our relationship. All of those moments happened at high school. And as weird or tacky others may feel it is, they didn’t have the relationship Bram and I had. They didn’t have the emails that both Bram and I pined over when we didn’t know who the other was. I have to ask him at Creekwood. It’s where Bram and I discovered each other.

“What is it, Si?” Leah asks as I have been staring into space.

“When I propose, it’s happening at Creekwood.”

“Si, I thought-”

“I know, everyone else thought it was a bad idea, but you told me to trust my gut about this proposal and my gut is screaming Creekwood. It’s the best place, it has our history. We were in the parking lot on a ferris wheel when he kissed me. How could it be anywhere else?”

Leah looked at me with loving eyes and let a smile grow on her face, very un-Leah like.

“What,” I started. “You’re scaring me.”

“I think you should do it.”

“Yeah?!”

“Yeah. You’re right, it all happened there and I know Bram would love it too.”

My stomach warmed and twilled and back flipped out of excitement. Finally got someone on my side with Creekwood and now I can even tell Bram’s Dad where I’m going to do it if he asks!

“Ah! I means a lot you are on board with this.”

Leah was quiet again and I even swear she was tearing up.

“Leah? You okay? Now you’re really scaring me.” I joke.

“I’m just so happy for you and Bram…Can you propose as soon as possible so we can all be happy together?!”

“I’m trying to make January come as fast as I can.”

I could hear both my Dad and Ian say ‘that’s what she said’ in my head.

Leah hugged me and made us watch a horror movie so she could, in her words, get out of this lovey-dovey mood.

I woke up on Friday and the feeling of happiness was soon overshadowed by my nerves of Bram’s dad. Luckily I woke up to a text from Bram.

I received your care package my amazing boyfriend. Thank you so much, I love it all <<33

                                                                            Hey cutie :)

. .. … Hey handsome :) How’s your Friday?

                                                                           Good. Kinda nervous

. .. … Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Do you have an audition coming up?

Ironically, he wasn’t entirely wrong, so I won’t be entirely lying.

                                Yeah, it’s a really good role and I want it so bad

. .. … Then you’ll get the part! Once you set your mind to something, you get it! It’s how you got me. <3

                                            You’re just saying that cause you love me.

. .. … True, but you’re also super talented. And super cute. You have me talking in fragments when I think about you too much

I’m always talking in fragments, you’ve been tripping me up since you were Blue. You’re already making me feel good about the audition.

. .. … Glad I can help. I love you, break a leg!

                                                                              <3 <3 <3

It helped me get through the rest of the day, but I was super distracted in my acting my theatre history class and couldn’t focus. I fantasized about proposing to Bram alone. Just him and me and the ring. Then I pictured kissing him and running my hands down his back onto the curve of his butt. Bram would pull me close to him and smile between a kiss, loving when my hands found their way back there. It was good I was sitting as it would be embarrassing to walk in my basketball shorts.

I calm myself down and run home to beat Leah so that I could…uh…take care of myself after class. It had been the longest two months away from Bram and his good heart and beautiful body wasn’t making it easier. Once I threw away the tissue, I began packing my suitcase. Bram would have already packed last week for this trip had he been going. I smile and pack the Elliot Smith shirt he got me. I’ll need him there in spirit more than ever.

Leah and Ian came home together as to follow the same path as last weekend. I turn down drinking because I have to be up early to get to Provincetown.

“Know what you’re going to say yet?” Ian asks, chugging a beer.

“No, I think I’ll try to bring it up casually in conversation. When we talk, it usually finds its way to Bram. It’s really the only thing we have in common.” I say laughing.

“Trust that gut, Si, you got this.” Ian answered, crushing the can and letting out a loud burp. I looked to Leah to catch her legendary eye roll. But she didn’t roll her eyes. She was laughing. Strange, but I suppose people evolve. But does Leah evolve like that? Last year she would have scoffed and left the room.

“You’ll be fine, Si. Go into it like you did with Tracy and you’ll be alright.”

With that, they left to meet some theatre kids at a bar so I could sleep.

I dreamt about Bram. I dreamt we were back on the ferris wheel and that we couldn’t stop kissing. It was a great gift from the universe to give me that subconscious boost of confidence. It was interrupted, however, by my alarm. I got up and grabbed the keys to Leah’s car. She left them on the kitchen counter next to luke warm waffles and a note.

‘Use the Belgian waffles as fuel to get your man! – Ian’ ‘Si, the waffles were from me, but Ian helped stir the batter. There’s an ice coffee in the fridge for you. - <3 Leah’

I opened the fridge to a large cup and grabbed it with a smile. The four hour drive went a lot faster than I expected. Bram recently got into making his own playlists for me of music he found himself listening too. I loved everything he sent me, but maybe it’s because I know he picked it and I love him.

The one thing he did pick up from me was listening more to older music than current pop or hip-hop. 90s R&B was his jam at the moment and he also mixed in 80’s stadium rock. It was quite the eclectic mix that helped keep me awake along with the ice coffee. Bram also snuck in some love songs and I swooned quietly on the road towards the Atlantic Ocean.

I arrived early enough to meet Elijah at a breakfast place. I walked in to ask for a table.

“Simon!”

Or so I thought. Bram’s father was in a booth and waving me over. I wave awkwardly because I can’t help myself and I go to the booth to sit.

“Coffee?” He asked.

“Yeah, love some.” That was a lie, I had to pee but I underestimated that Bram’s father would be so much like Bram. Elijah poured me a cup from the pot left on the table the singular cook who also was the waiter.

“So how is Ruth doing? I can’t believe she’s in kindergarten now.”

“You and me both, Simon. She’s good, though she doesn’t like to be called Ruth ever since she started. She wants to go by Ruby now.”

“Kids make fun of her already? She’s in kindergarten.”

Elijah picked up his cup and placed it too his lips while his eyebrows answered. “Yeah, I guess that’s the way the world is headed.” He licked the coffee droplets off his mustache with this tongue.

“So, I as able to rent a ship, just us two. Bluefish Tuna. He’ll be ready for us in about forty-five minutes.”

“Simon,” Elijah started. “You said you would tell me why I couldn’t tell my son you were meeting me. Are you ready to tell me?”

Is this how Dads treat all guys who try to date their children? Dad wasn’t like this to Bram, was he?

“Y-Yes,” I tripped over my words. “I wanted to talk to you while we were fishing, but I can talk now.”

The cook came back with a plate of eggs and with extremely buttery toast.

“Same thing for him,” Elijah ordered to and the cook complied, walking back to the grill. “If you want to wait, Simon, we can wait.”

Okay, am I looking into things or is this starting to feel like an interrogation? He starts digging in as I grasp my coffee mug and take a sip. It’s not that hot and it’s not that good, but it’s something to do while I’m pretending not worry about what he’s thinking.

“No, no I can tell you. I wanted let you know how happy your Bram has made me.”

“Abraham,” He said, a little defensive. “Call him Abraham.”

“Yes, of course, Abraham.”

“Well I’m glad to hear that. Is that it?” He said, staring at this plate and not into my eyes.

“No,” I say as my stomach is falling into a pit. “If that was it, I could have told you that on the phone.”

It was a risk to speak like that to him, but perhaps it will garner his respect. His eyes showed that it did as he looked at me up and down and shook his head. “I suppose you’re right.” He pushes the plate away and crosses his hands on the table. “So what is it that needed to be said to me in person?”

I touch the Elliot Smith shirt and I think of the way Bram gets lost in my eyes and then coyly smiles as he looks away. It’s weird that I can also see the parts of Bram in his father. I swallow as the cook bangs on the grill top.

“I love your son, very much. So much, in fact, that I’m going to ask him to marry me, and I know it would mean a lot to Bram if I was able to tell him I got your blessing to do so.”

Elijah’s face froze as soon as I said marry and didn’t move. It felt like time stood still and though it was only a few seconds, I was over analyzing every single micro expression on his face. I didn’t break eye contact with me and he didn’t break eye contact with me. The cook slid the plate in front of me, but we never took our eyes off each other.

Suddenly, Elijah’s face exploded into a big, Bram-like smile and he slammed the table with his palm. A boisterous laughter followed as confusion poured over my face, which actually caused him to laugh even more.

“I’m sor – I’m sorry, Simon. Oh my god!” He continued to laugh in the empty diner until he picked up his napkin and dabbed his eyes. I still sat in confusion as he calmed down. “I couldn’t resist. You believed it so much, did you really think I was that kind of father?” More laughs poured out of him as he pulled his plate back to him to continue eating.

“Simon, I apologize, but Tracy can’t help herself and she spilled the beans. So I knew about your intentions, and all I can say is that of course you have my blessing to marry my son.”

The biggest sigh of relief washed over me as the tough-Dad act fell.

“Thank you, Elijah, that’s, thank you for that.”

“Hey, you will only be able to call me Elijah for a little bit longer, soon you’ll get to call me Dad.”

The Bram-like smile returned to his face as he put eggs on his toast and took a bite.

“I will say though,” Elijah continued. “I was very happy with how you phrased the question.”

“Oh?” I say, now feeling comfortable to eat.

“You said ‘I’m going to ask’ instead of ‘I want to ask’ or ‘I intend to ask,’ implying the choice was made and that I could either like it or dislike it, but that you were going to do it. Since Bram came out, I had to re-structure what I wanted for him in his life. I had an idea when I thought he liked girls, but when he told me he liked men, I needed to go back to the drawing board. But it’s hard, thinking about the kind of man I wanted Bram to end up with and when he brought you to meet me the first time, I always liked you because I could always look over and see Bram confidently stand by your side. And his confidence was because of you. That is exactly the kind of man I want him to be with: confident.”

I fought the urge to let a tear come out of my eye. “To be honest with you, Elijah, it’s funny that you see confidence in me because it’s something I’ve been working on since high school.”

“You could have fooled me,” Elijah answered. “Simon, it takes a lot of courage to meet the father of your love because when you date someone’s child, you’re dating a part of the parent. You did it. You kept calling, you kept on it, and not in an annoying way, but in a responsible way. You made it happen because you have confidence. Simon, Bram has told me your fishing stories.” He said laughing. “You hate fishing. But you tried to meet me on my level to ask me a hard question. Working on confidence? Simon, you have confidence.”

“Thank you, sir. That really means a lot coming from you.”

“I don’t say things I don’t mean, Simon. Regardless of the genders of people in love, what you can’t fake is the longing looks you two share. To be honest, this moment wasn’t as much of a surprise to me, it was more of when it would happen.”

And that quickly, I have two Moms and two Dads. Elijah gave me an opportunity to bow out of fishing, but I respectfully declined. I had to show him I meant business. I paid the check, again trying to show him what kin of man I am, but he already covered the breakfast before I walked in the door.

“You know, I can see where Bram gets his strategic planning from.”

“And that’s why he needs you, the impulsive confidence.”

We left the diner and the sun had just began to paint the sky a thin red and gold on the horizon. Elijah taught me a lot about what it was to deep-sea fish and I honestly had a genuinely great time.

Until I became sea sick.

Elijah laughed at me while I puked the eggs back up over the side of the ship.

“Not a sailor, huh Simon?”

I spit the lingering taste out of my mouth.

“Not yet, but I’ll get there.”

[gotham-ruaidh]

Okay, Shifted prompt....what if Claire had to do something totally 20th Century to save Bree, and the rest of the Fraser's are like, woahhhhhh. Thanks for being the best writer on the block.

For the next few weeks I’ll be writing one-shots in the Shifted universe, filling in the blanks that we don’t see in the main story, before we resume the main action with Part 7 - The Visitor.

If there is a particular scene you’d like to see, send me an ask and I’ll see what I can do!

In Shifted, the premise is simple - what if Claire had gotten pregnant with Brianna a month or two earlier in the story, and she and Jamie had re-evaluated  their priorities and decided that the cause was lost, and they were able to slip away from the army and quietly return to Lallybroch?

Previous installments…

Interlude – The Surgery

Lallybroch, Winter1761

 “I’m worried about Young Jamie.”

 Jenny looked up from her knitting – a new scarf forMurtagh, to replace the one he’d mysteriously shredded during the last harvest.

 “His throat, ye mean? It’s no’ gotten any better in thepast week.”

 Claire nodded. “Yes – it’s still so swollen, and none ofmy treatments are working.”

 “Do ye ken why? It isna anything he’s eating – he grewout of that when he was a wee lad.” Jenny leaned over to fish a fresh skeinfrom her basket, whisking away the cat with the back of her hand. Adso fluffedhimself menacingly before slinking to the hearth and curling up in a sulky,furry pile.

 Claire set down the herbal she’d been consulting – one ofthe very old books Mother Hildegarde had recently unearthed and sent to herfrom Paris. She was doing well, Mother Hildegarde – or as well as Claire couldtell from the spidery writing. They hadn’t seen each other in more than fifteenyears, but remained in regular contact. Mother Hildegarde rejoiced at any newsof Brianna and William Fraser – said novenas in their honor – wished ferventlyto meet them one day.

 “I believe it’s his tonsils. They’re at the back of thethroat – his throat has been sore, yes?”

 “Aye. But ye must have something ye can give him to healit – ye canna cut the tonsils out to just remove the pain.”

 “I can do just that.”

 “What?” Ian piped up from the corner of the sitting room,placing a finger mid-page on his ledger. “What do ye mean, cut them out of him?”

 Claire spread her hands wide across her lap. “I know of away to do it, safely. It will be bloody, but quick – and he won’t feel anypain.”

 “But how is that possible?” Jenny raised a skepticaleyebrow, first to her sister-in-law, then to her brother – silent beside hiswife on the chaise across the sitting room.

 “I can put him into a deep, temporary sleep. I’d need tomake some ether – ”

 “Ether? Ye mean the substance Aristotle says the world ismade of?”

 Claire playfully shoved her husband. “No, idiot – it’salmost like a sleeping potion. Just as effective as laudanum, but with none ofthe side effects.”

 “Aye – that stuff tastes foul,” he agreed. “And it givesyou the nightmare.”

 Silently Claire’s hand shifted to Jamie’s – covering thefingers she had painstakingly healed in the aftermath of Wentworth – and at theabbey, when Jamie had spent a fair amount of time in a laudanum haze.

 No – now was not the time.

 “But I dinna understand, Claire,” Ian repeated patiently.“How can ye put him to sleep so quickly? And will he no’ wake up?”

 “I can, and he won’t,” she promised.

 Ian turned to his wife. “Will ye let Claire give it atry, J? Nothing else is working for him – none of her medicines have worked.And it’s eating away his strength – no lad should go through that.”

 Jenny pursed her lips, gazing into the fire.

 “It’s no’ that I dinna trust ye, Claire – only…weel. He’smy firstborn, aye?”

 Jamie rose, crossed the room, and knelt before hissister, resting a gentle hand on her knee.

 “Ye ken that Claire mended this hand for me, wi’ nolaudanum, aye?”

 “Yes, but – ”

 “If there’s anyone who can do it, and do it skillfully –it’s her. Ye ken that fine.”

 She sighed and nodded.

 “I’ll take good care of him, Jenny – you can be there.Every step of the way.”

 She swallowed, smiled quickly at her brother, and returnedto her knitting.

 “Well then. What do ye need us to do?”

 --

 It had taken four days to prepare.

 First, the raw whisky. Then the precious iodine. Andfinally the lye – the three basic ingredients for ether. All ready to go – for themixture had to be created and used almost simultaneously.

 It had taken nearly as long to convince nineteen-year-oldJames Murray that his aunt wanted to put him to sleep and cut something out ofhis throat – and that he’d emerge from the ordeal none the worse for wear.

 But the potent combination of Ian, Murtagh, and Jamie hadworn him down – and he had grudgingly agreed.

 Now he lay on the dining room table – stripped of linens,and scrubbed with raw whisky by eight-year-old William. Fourteen-year-oldBrianna stood beside her mother, ready to assist.

 Jenny stood beside her eldest child, a gently tremblinghand resting on his shoulder. Soothing.

 “It’s all right, Mam,” he said for the third time. “AuntieClaire kens what she’s about.”

 At the foot of the table, Murtagh gravely nodded. Ian satin a high-backed chair off to the side, together with Fergus, Maggie, Kitty,Janet, Michael, and wee Ian. And Mrs. Crook. And Rabbie MacNab.

 “Aye, she does,” Jamie agreed from his spot across thetable from Jenny. “Are ye ready, Claire?”

 Claire straightened up a bit and bent over the sideboard,where she had assembled the three crucial ingredients. “Yes. Quiet, please?This is quite delicate work.”

 Jenny whispered a decade of the rosary as the groupwatched Claire, Brianna, and William gently uncork the ingredients, carefullymix them in a bowl, and quickly capture the product in a separate covered bowl.

 Then William darted over to his cousin, and placed a linenrag over his nose and eyes.

 Young Jamie reached out his two hands – to be squeezed byhis mother and uncle.

 Gingerly, Brianna brought the covered bowl of ether to thedining table. Claire quickly doused her hands with whisky and sterilized herwee knives with the rest.

 “All right, Jamie?” Her voice was clear – strong – a toneshe rarely used, but which brooked no disagreement.

 “Aye. Just be quick about it, aye?”

 She smiled, and carefully poured the ether onto the rag.

 Within ten seconds he was out cold.

 “Lamp, please.”

 William materialized at her side, holding a lamp – safelycovered behind glass – up to Young Jamie’s face.

 “Keep the rag wet, Brianna. He can’t come up.”

 She nodded.

 And Claire gently pried Young Jamie’s jaw open, and begancutting.

 It was quick – and very, very bloody. Within two minutesshe had placed a sizeable chunk of flesh in the bowl beside Young Jaime’s head.

 “More, Brianna. He needs more.”

 Dutifully she followed Claire’s instructions – fingers trembling.

 Now Claire examined the rest of the throat – confirmed nomore inflammation – and began the sutures.

 In and out – in and out.

 Lallybroch had never been so silent.

 “That’s right – good. Almost done.”

 Brianna added more ether.

 William held the lamp a bit closer.

 Claire tied off the suture and cut the string.

 Then finally looked up at her audience.

 Jenny – eyes locked on her son, mesmerized.

 William – arms trembling with the weight of the lamp.

 Brianna – bright head bent to her work.

 The Murrays and Frasers and staff huddled against thewall, eyes wide with a mixture of fear and awe.

 And Jamie – smiling so brightly, so proud.

 “All right,” she swallowed, voice suddenly hoarse, bodysuddenly going lax as adrenaline flooded out of her system.

 “All right,” she repeated. “Let’s get this young man upto bed.”

 The room burst into enthusiastic applause and cheers.

 Young Jamie woke up and groaned in pain.

 --

 In bed that night, Jamie cradled Claire close.

 Young Jamie was healing under the watchful eyes of hismother and cousin William.

 Now it was Claire’s turn to heal.

 Jamie didn’t say anything, just pushed her face into herfavorite spot on his chest, and counted her breaths.

 “I didn’t think I could actually do it.”

 He tsked. “And why is that?”

 “I’ve never tried it before – it was risky. And I had tofind materials here. And I had only done it a few times before – in nurse’straining.”

 His thumb gently traced the bumps of her spine.

 “And when I learned, it was the oldest method – the WilliamsonMethod. Dating from the 1850s. Old-fashioned.”

 He snuffed.

 “Dinna look back. It worked, didn’t it?”

 She sighed. “It did. I’m so very thankful that it did.”

 He kissed her forehead.

 “It’s good to know I can do that. In case it has to beyou someday.”

 He kissed the corners of her tired eyes.

 “Hush. Dinna think of that now. Just think about ournephew, and how he will be well. Because of you.”

 She exhaled, and leaned up to kiss him. So grateful.

[giveamadeuschohisownmovie]

"Beauty and the Beast" review: Well, first off, I can safely say the movie has a reason to exist. It's difficult to say whether it's better or worse than the animated movie but it definitely does some things that improve on the original. Personally, I still like the animated movie better but I'd gladly see the remake again. First off, the superficial stuff. I liked the added backstory. There's an added subplot about Belle's mom that may seem out of place but it provides character development for Belle, Beast, and the dad. All the secondary characters are fleshed out more. Visuals are pretty (but dizzying at some parts). The songs are basically the originals but with new singers. Then there's the new songs, which are hit and miss. The songs are not bad, just passable. Also, maybe this is just me, but I'm glad the teacup didn't save Belle in this version. I liked that the dad was the one to do it since it made more sense in the narrative. Now the biggest change I liked was that the movie managed to make the romance feel more believable. There's more focus on Belle and Beast bonding over being outcasts in their own social circles, as well as their mutual love of knowledge and the arts. Also, Emma Watson's chemistry with Dan Stevens was surprisingly good, especially when you have to consider that Emma had to pretend he had a monster head. This is where I say Gaston is used in a much better way than the original. Because the remake emphasized Beast and Gaston's looks and levels of intelligence, the two men became mirror opposites of each other. This actually makes Belle choosing the Beast over Gaston more significant than the original since it's clear the Beast won her over with who he was on the inside. You get the same idea in the original, don't get me wrong, but it's much clearer, more thought out in the remake. What are some other goods? The whole cast was great. Emma Watson won me over as Belle and Luke Evans was scarily good as Gaston. Josh Gad was great as Lefou but there were times where it felt like he was just playing Olaf again. Speaking of Lefou, yes, he is gay in the remake but they don't say it outright. But there's LOTS of subtle hints that he is, not just a throwaway line that could be interpreted as him being gay. No, it's very clear that he is gay and honestly, I liked it. I'm not gonna criticize representation, no matter how small it is. Now, what did the movie do wrong? Well, the climax is way too silly for its own good. Like, really, REALLY silly. It killed the intense tone that the climax should've had. The movie, despite adding in scenes, still hits the same notes as the original. If you've seen the original, you basically know what's going to happen here. They do try to throw you off but it's still predictable. Also, the pacing in the first third of the movie was surprisingly off for some reason. Everything was moving too fast and the movie only slowed down once we reached the castle. It's like they were rushing the story to get to the Beast. Also, while the cast was great, a lot of them were underused. Casting Ewan McGregor, Sir Ian McKellen and Emma Thompson as the castle furniture characters may SOUND good on paper but really, they should've given the spotlight to a less famous actor. They aren't given a lot to do since this is Emma, Dan, and Luke's movie, so really, they were wasted here. And going back to the music, I want to emphasize that the soundtrack is hit or miss. There's no bad singing, it's just the songs aren't as memorable. To give you an idea, Beast gets his own song which was written for the remake and I can't remember how it goes. Seriously, he had a whole song and I can't even recall the tempo. So yeah, to summarize, the movie wasn't bad. It does some things better than the original and it does some things worse. But I'm definitely glad I saw the movie, it was worth the price.

[ellenzone]

Review: OK KO Let’s Play Heroes!

With hits like Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery and Critter Cruncher on their resume, and the mysterious Below continuously grabbing attention when it shows up at festivals, it’s clear that CAPY is at the forefront of the indie scene. It might come as a surprise, then, that their first game in four years is a licensed title.

OK KO Let’s Play Heroes isn’t the first time Cartoon Network works with an indie studio to bring their animated worlds to life. CN Games and Adult Swim Games have both attracted attention for working with renowned indie studios like Devolver Digital and releasing shockingly beloved licensed titles, like Pocket Mortys and the Steven Universe: Save the Light series. What’s curious about OK KO, then, is that it’s the first CAPY Games release since Super Time Force in 2014. With hits like Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery on their resume and the mysterious Below grabbing the spotlight whenever it shows up at a game festival, it’s certainly surprising to see CAPY working on a licensed game. Make no mistake, however, OK KO Let’s Play Heroes is as fun as anything CAPY’s worked on, and it’s imbued with a sense of childhood wonder that makes it unforgettable.

I’ve written about this game before – I was fortunate enough to get some hands-on time with it at Day of the Devs, and I’m glad to see the game hasn’t changed much sense then. For the unfamiliar, Let’s Play Heroes is based on the ongoing Cartoon Network show OK KO Let’s Be Heroes. The cartoon, from powerhouse creators Ian Jones-Quartey (Steven Universe) and Toby Jones (Regular Show), follows the journey of a young boy, KO, who dreams of being a high-level superhero like his mommy. To become the greatest hero he can be, KO works at Gar’s Bodega, a convenience store for superheroes run by the legendary Mr. Gar, and defends Lakewood Plaza Turbo from the machinations of Gar’s rival Lord Bossman. Heroes and villains are all assigned POW Cards, trading cards that track their individual levels, and KO dreams of having his own POW Card someday.

As KO, your work at Gar’s Bodega consists of accomplishing tasks for your coworkers and defending Lakewood Plaza Turbo. On any given day you get to choose which coworker to finish tasks for. The dialogue and adventuring and the mishmash of gameplay styles are deeply reminiscent of Night in the Woods, in the best way possible. Side plots flesh themselves out through the missions you accomplish, players get a chance to choose from various dialogue options to spice up the conversations, and along the way you can make other plaza denizens happy by helping them recover stolen items or finding hidden objects throughout the plaza. In all of these activities you learn more about the people you’re helping, and it’s hard not to become invested in KO’s mission to help as many people as possible.

In the midst of helping your friends and allies, KO is tasked with beating up Boxmore robots sent by Lord Bossman to attack the plaza. There’s a healthy mix of random battles and forced encounters. Players can choose to take on as many random battles as they’d like, with battle difficulty connoted by the color and size of the boxes they encounter, or they can for the most part avoid brawling until it’s absolutely necessary. That said, I absolutely wouldn’t recommend skipping out – for a studio that’s never built an arcade brawler, Let’s Play Heroes makes CAPY look like 90s Konami. It’s not super advanced - there’s only a punch button, there’s no light/heavy attack, there’s no kicking - but a combination of charged punches and dash attacks makes brawls into fluid and fun affairs. By the time you’ve leveled KO up in stats, you’re granted access to a swath of really fun-to-use attacks, and racking up high combos requires a significant amount of skill.

Certain brawls change things up by adding in platforms, drone villains, and other light touches, and the game doesn’t hold back on its difficulty. If you go in expecting a light-handed cartoon game, you’ll be surprised at how tough some of the bosses get, and high-level play requires. Random brawls do lean on being repetitive, as you’ll be fighting the same set of Darryls, Shannons, and Jethros throughout your days as a plaza employee; however, I never got bored in that repetition, thanks to a constantly evolving moveset and a seemingly endless selection of super moves, or Powie Zowies.

Those Powie Zowies are really what surprised me the most. When I got my hands on OK KO at Day of the Devs, I was only able to try a scant few. By the final boss fight in OK KO, provided you’ve done all the chores for the plaza’s denizens, there are some 20 specials that you can call on a whim. Aerial slams from Mr. Gar, a rainstorm of bullets from KO’s coworker Rad, and a fearsome ground combo from KO’s mommy Carol are some of the ones I relied on the most early on. As I continued to play, I unlocked fun new special moves like a burrito truck that drives through and knocks into all the enemies on the field, and Godzilla-like foot to stomp on enemies and deliver massive damage. Tougher battles require tapping into these specials and building strategies based on how long they’ll take to charge and what they’ll do.

Powie Zowies are unlocked by helping the denizens of the plaza. While unlocking these are mostly optional, the mystery of what each is going to do drove me to do whatever I could to unlock them quicker. I was pleased to see how well these systems flowed into each other in practice. I needed money, Techos, to buy an item for a townie to unlock their Powie Zowie; thankfully, I had unlocked a special ability where Teamster, the self-cloning construction hero, runs onto the field and throws all the Boxmore badniks into glitch mode. I used Teamster to glitch the robots, knocked out a rapid-fire combo to beat microchips out of them, and sold the microchips to KO’s hacker friend Dendy for quick cash so I could, for example, buy a snack for A Real Magical Skeleton from the bodega, or buy antenna gel for Rad from the rooftop barbershop.

That the various quests and brawls don’t feel like distinct halves but rather gel together as a full experience is the real magic that makes this game special. 100%’ing OK KO is something that comes naturally; unlocking the game’s various POW Cards and completing the story go hand-in-hand, and I left the story absolutely wanting more. Fortunately enough, the Lakewood Plaza arcade has a fight simulator, so I can return to the game’s brawls whenever I’d like.

Admittedly, I haven’t actually 100%’d the game yet. For the most part, Powie Zowies are unlocked after receiving a villager’s card from the POW Card vending machine and accomplishing tasks. However, there are four POW Cards that don’t show up in the vending machine packs, meaning there are Powie Zowies I don’t have. Also, there’s constant references to mystical “Zappy Wappies” that apparently make Powie Zowies stronger… but the game doesn’t *give* them to you. Curiously enough, there’s a code machine on the POW Card vendor that takes three-symbol inputs, and the only Zappy Wappy I was able to get came courtesy of a cute little promo goodie that CN Games sent me. I was absolutely stumped when it came to unlocking more Zappy Wappies and filling out my card binder… that is, until I watched the cartoon again and looked closely. I’m well on my way to completing the game, now, but in order to *finish* it I’ll need to watch the rest of the season and come back to the game when I find what I need. I’m trying to be vague about this because I want you to discover this on your own as I did, but ultimately, I’m really excited that the game’s given me a reason to come back, and being a fan of the cartoon anyway, having a reason to rewatch every episode isn’t exactly a bad thing.

There’s a charm and a structure here that makes me feel right at home. Being a hero is more than just fighting a bunch of robots. KO doesn’t earn levels on his POW Card by taking on baddies, he earns them by making his friends happy and helping them earn their levels back. A lot of the missions are ridiculous, and many of them feel like mini episodes of the cartoon. Enid wants the cool teens in the alley to notice her on social media, so KO asks Dendy to help him make a gif of himself getting hurt. Rad becomes embarrassed after not being able to beat his box lifting record, so his muscles ask you to gather goodies for a gift basket they’re going to give him as an apology. There’s an endearing sentimentality that runs through the show and CAPY has clearly worked to bake that same feeling into the game.

I credit CAPY with that sentimentality because all of this stuff was done in-house. The animation and art style mimics the show but is absolutely its own thing. CAPY wrote the scenarios and dialogue themselves, and thanks to the delivery from the show’s wonderful voice cast the cutscenes are really fun and quite funny. The flow of the overworld, where players move in and out of different static “scenes”, feels stylistically like a Paper Mario game, and though this can lead to minor confusion with regards to movement it’s honestly gorgeous to look at. Overall, it’s super unique, and it’s all clearly done from a place of love for both the OK KO series and cartoons in general.

Granted, the game’s not perfect. It’s a tad repetitive, moving about the overworld can be a chore at times, and there’s some audio mixing weirdness that makes the cutscenes louder than everything else. Also, it *might* bug you that completing the game means watching the entire series. I don’t know if that’s really all that negative, though – like the game it inspired, the cartoon is endearing, really cute, and super fun. Come for the solid arcade brawler, stay for the heartfelt story about a kid trying to do his best.

I’m glad to say that CN Games has genuinely succeeded in bringing another cartoon to life as a really fun game. Thanks to the hard work of studios like CAPY, animated worlds like Steven Universe and OK KO are getting the games they deserve. It’s been a long time since we’ve gotten our hands on a CAPY title, and I’m glad to say this one’s absolutely a knockout. 

Disclosure: I received a code for the PS4 version of OK KO Let’s Play Heroes from CN Games.

[dustedmagazine]

Listening Post: John Cale in Fragments

John Cale is in no way obscure. Over the last 50 years, his knack for hypnotic arrangements brought us the debuts of The Velvet Underground, Stooges, Patti Smith, and Nick Drake, and configured the Leonard Cohen cover that conquered the 21st century TV singing competition. Those marks on pop music have something in common: they took a dozen years or more for their full effect to percolate though the culture. While his time bombs have ticked, he’s worked with provocateurs that range from minimalist composer Terry Riley to maximalist fucks Jesus Lizard.

With his solo work, though, Cale remains the kind of artist even dedicated explorers can overlook. With a reputation that precedes him, delving into Cale’s personal work can be a surprise if one is expecting the confrontations of Lou Reed or the dread of Nico, or moods that live up to the album titles Fear, Guts or Vintage Violence. Indeed, his most recognized album, Paris 1919 is thoroughly pretty, ripe with orchestral accompaniment and literary reference. Dusted’s Justin Cober-Lake, Ben Donnelly, Jennifer Kelly, Ian Mathers and Bill Meyer use the expanded reissue of Fragments of a Rainy Season as a springboard to discuss Cale’s stature as singer-songwriter.

Ben Donnelly: Cale has been refreshing his back catalog, recently dusting off the 1992 European tour document Fragments of a Rainy Season and releasing it on Domino Records. Catching him mid-life, alone with a piano or a guitar for the whole set, it’s a portrait of the artist traveling light, pulling songs from across his career. For an artist with so many collaborations, it a good starting point for discussing him on his own.

What else is special about Cale, and this record?

Ian Mathers: One thing that I think is specifically special about this record is that, as Ben says, it is a good starting point for Cale’s work, and I can’t think of many other artists where that would be true. His full-band work is justly revered, but if someone was asking me about Cale and why I love his solo stuff I would absolutely hand them this album before anything else, and it really just is his voice and an instrument or two. But it doesn’t at all have the vague MTV Unplugged-type associations you might guess from the setup, and the more raucous songs fully come across that way. It does feel like a really nicely fleshed out career overview even though the arrangements are pretty tightly controlled.

And maybe mostly it’s just that we’re so totally in the presence of Cale’s voice, both literally and authorially. Yes, you’ve got his famous (and incredibly often copied) version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, but you’ve also got everything from the bloody-minded “Fear (Is a Man’s Best Friend)” to the wistful “Dying on the Vine”, you’ve got songs setting Dylan Thomas’s poetry to music and assembling unsettling narratives from basic learn-Spanish phrase books (“Cordoba”, which honestly might be my favorite song here). It takes a heck of an artist to have the same live album cover both “Thoughtless Kind” and “Guts”, let alone in similarly minimal settings, and have them register so strongly and yet so differently.

Ben’s absolutely right at how great Cale is as a collaborator and arranger, so maybe the reason I love Fragments of a Rainy Season so much is partly because it has such a tight focus on him as a songwriter and a performer. Are others here as knocked-out by these performances as I am? I’d take many of them over the recorded versions.

Bill Meyer: For me, the absence of a band allows me to avoid the lapses of judgment that make parts of Cale’s body of work hard for me to love. From John Cale Comes Alive (1984) forward he’s mixed great songs, sublime melodies, and wild man freak-outs with diffident performances and sketchy production that confused state of the art with flavor the week; the auto-tune stuff on his recent records is kind of embarrassing. But on Fragments you get him in good voice, decently recorded, with just his piano and guitar. You don’t get ill-considered reaching, you get his range as a singer and songwriter.

It’s worth noting that this is the second archival effort that Cale has offered recently. On M:FANS he revisited material from Music For A New Society and showed that he had no feel for it anymore. That may be good for him since he’s spent over 30 years of his life in much better shape than he was on that record, but it also felt like needless tampering. With this Fragments reissue he has added bonus material that risked undercutting the integrity of the original album because it isn’t solo (there’s a string section and a steel guitarist) and it repeats songs from the original album. But he pulls it off. The extra instrumentation compliments the songs without dating them.

Justin Cober-Lake: My thoughts fit in with what everyone else is saying. I’ve never liked Cale as much as I think I will, in part because he never sounds like I think he should. Vintage Violence and Paris 1919 are more pop and more accessible than you’d expect. In the context of his non-solo work (as musician or producer), it takes a minute to adjust to hearing that sort of sound. I actually listen to his ‘00s stuff as much as anything, largely because there’s more sandpaper to it.

But part of the fun of listening to Cale has been considering what mode he’s in. What is it that he’s doing on a new album? (And isn’t this sort of the fun of listening for his work within the Velvet Underground, too?) So Cale to me ends up being this figure that’s traceable by his shifts in style, and I’ve never paid enough attention to all of it to follow, to mark of periods or to, like Bill, date a shift to a given record. I put something on it and think about it as a discrete appearance of that mode of Cale.

Fragments, then, has this fun quality of removing all of that. A casual fan gets just to the songs. It’s probably a little reductive, but it feels like getting to the essential Cale; these songs– rather than particular performances– are at the heart of his work as an artist, rather than whether he’s chosen to do the orchestral thing or the autotune thing or whatever. That said, it’s not my favorite sound of Cale’s, but it is a wonderful way to listen to all this stuff.

Bill Meyer: I took the Cale plunge in 1981, not long after first spending some time with the Velvet Underground. So I got to him right at the end of a run of consistently strong records that ran from Paris 1919 through Honi Soit. He had great bands and wrote appealing melodies that contrasted impressively with his wild-man fits. Those are still the records I like the most, but Fragments dates from a time when I thought he might be hitting such a stride again. He made it around the same time as his reunion with Lou Reed and his collaboration with Eno, which sounded pretty good at the time. Subsequent efforts have never quite held together for me.

But I saw him last year, playing mostly songs from the last couple records, and he sounded great.

Ian Mathers: I agree with what you’re both saying here, and in a way I think some of that is what makes Cale both underrated and overrated, at the same time; on the one hand from the Velvet Underground onwards of course it’d be ridiculous to dismiss his work/influence (and honestly even if he’d just been in the VU and produced the first Stooges record that’d still make him pretty significant to me), but there’s a kind of restlessness to his stylistic/technical/aesthetic choices that can come across as a bit glib or uncaring, which means he doesn’t fit the frame of just being straightforwardly genius either. The range means that most music fans will be able to find something Cale’s done that they enjoy… and it’s equally likely they’ll be able to find something they don’t like at all.

And I think for many of us at least some of the production choices on Cale’s studio LPs fall into the latter category, which is one of the strengths of this album. Admittedly I heard the version here first, but at this point I kind of can’t tolerate the album version of “Dying on the Vine”. I don’t think that’s a laudable reaction, but it’s an honest one.

I agree with Bill that I think the bonus tracks largely work. Honestly, as much as we’ve talked about the stripped-down arrangements on Fragments of a Rainy Season are a big part of its success (and rightly so), I may wind up sequencing the string-assisted versions of “Fear (Is a Man’s Best Friend),” “Heartbreak Hotel,” and “Paris 1919” in place of the original album’s versions, they’re that good (and still feel very restrained compared to much of Cale’s studio work), especially the Elvis, which gets some ferocious distortion out of those strings. The extra outtake of “Fear (Is a Man’s Best Friend)” is an interestingly slowed-down take, but still feels kind of redundant (glad to have it, not sure how often I’ll play it), and it’s nice to have “Amsterdam” and “Broken Hearts” but those weren’t particular favorites of mine. I do wish this version of “Antarctica Starts Here” had made the original cut, strings and steel guitar and all, because it’s great.

Thinking that I might move those string versions into the 'main’ album when I play it in the future got me to notice something else, too; my old Fragments of a Rainy Season was just the standard CD issue, but the track listing of the original album seems to have been shuffled in this release (for example, “Dying on the Vine” used to be track 2, and now it’s track 13). Has anyone else noticed this, or knows why? I couldn’t find out if the new sequencing is intended to reflect more (or less) of the original set than the previous release, and so on.

There’s also the cover art, a favorite of mine, slightly updated only in that the background color has been changed from white to a dark blue-grey that I’m slightly nonplussed by. Like the actual songs, that cover is stripped down, looking more like a book cover than most albums, including Cale’s name, the title, and then a quote from MacBeth:

Banquo: It will be rain tonight.

First Murderer: Let it come down.

It’s one of my favorite moments in the play; as if one of the men MacBeth has sent to kill Banquo simply can’t resist the opening to say something that incredibly dramatic and foreboding, even though it’s probably what lets Banquo’s son get away. It seems oddly fitting for Cale, someone fond of the dark and the dramatic, but also sometimes capable of getting in his own way.

Ben Donnelly: This reissue puts the tracks in the running order of the original performance, which is a good idea. I hadn’t heard Fragments until this reissue, so I’m not wed to the old running order, though. I don’t think the extra tracks add much to the free-standing performance, but they do give context to Cale’s other approaches. Which also helps make this a good Young Person’s Guide to John Cale.

One of the advantages of this record is how the minimal arrangements push his voice to the fore, and what a voice it is. On a song like “Fear (Is a Man’s Best Friend)” it pushes him to make up for the dynamics of the missing backing band, moving the song from seventies art rock to something tighter less specific in style and era.

His voice lets small shifts of tone change the emotion of the song line by line– his longing ebbs and flows with frustration. Then there’s points where he breaks into sarcasm, spitting out a rolling-r with the word “prowl”. His playing barely moves off of three chords while he sings, until lets everything fall apart at the end, like a car crash. But it takes a full electric band to make a real car crash din, so you get this approximation of chaos with howls stretching into a yodel as the rhythm falters. He adapts the ideas behind the songs to make them fit the circumstance.

Cale is an understated singer with a naturally warm register, a complete contrast with Lou Reed and Nico, for whom force of personality made up for the deficiencies of their singing. That’s part of why his output confounds expectations. Born with quite a few musical gifts, he doesn’t fight against them. His voice is never clawing for attention. Yet it’s got it’s own strangeness, injecting calm when the music gets tense. We expect our provocateurs to be cool, but not necessarily calm. He is cool and calm. In this set, the points where he lets his deadpan crack add a dimension to the songs, almost like another instrument.

Most of these performances complement the studio takes, but a few take them to new heights. “Buffalo Ballet” surpasses the original– loosing a backing chorus scales it’s down to the right size.

I did see Cale do a set very much like this one in at the Paradise club in Boston in 1988. I wasn’t familiar with much of his catalog at the time. What surprises me is how much I can tie these performances to my memories of his Paradise set– I can still see him letting “Fear” fall apart with his yells, and I can see him getting up from the piano for the few songs with the guitar. I was impressed how “Ship of Fools” and “Leaving It Up to You” barely left two chords, yet were transfixing. The gig was a few years before Fragments. He’d been refining this stripped down style for a while.

Bill Meyer: I agree, Ben. His voice has held up really well over the years, but it was never better than in the early 90s. He had put his self-destructive lifestyle behind him (I remember reading a quote by Andy Warhol in the late 80s where he marveled that Cale had taken up squash and was looking great) so there was nothing pushing against the exercise of his gifts.

I saw him open for Pere Ubu circa 1990 by playing a set very much like the music on Fragments. The dignity of his demeanor contrasted strongly with the hostility he projected in the early and mid-1980s.

Jennifer Kelly: I’m having trouble with the piano arrangements, which just seem a little too happy and peppy for the material. Is anyone else getting a piano-bar-on-the-Carnival-Cruise-line vibe or have I completely lost it?

Normally I feel like sparer is better, but the bonus tracks with the string quartet (especially “Heartbreak Hotel”) are the ones that are making the most sense to me.

Bill Meyer: I think the pep is integral to his weird mix of interests and talents– dude has a bit of Paul McCartney in his wrists and he can’t keep it down.

Ben Donnelly: He is the guy who transformed a career-nadir Cohen number into middle America’s favorite B&D power ballad.

This conversation is making me realize parallels between Cale and a previous Listening Post pedestal-dweller: Lee Hazlewood. They have this sentimentality that too odd to be simple pop sentimentality, but still catchy and very approachable, if frequently colored by something completely left field.

In some sense, pop has moved towards Cale’s style of art song, just as it’s moved towards Hazlewood’s eccentric melodrama. The chattering piano and literary references shooting through fragmentary images reminds me of recent Joanna Newsom and PJ Harvey.

I like him best when he’s not trying to be too Manhattan or too Welsh country lad, but someone lost between the two.

For me, his inconsistencies get swept aside by his triumphs. I can’t think of a song I’ve listened to more than “Paris 1919” and I can’t believe I haven’t worn it out– it remains utterly enchanting to me, and I don’t think I’ve even taken much a break from it. The images sometimes seem to satirize between-the-wars naiveté, and sometimes seem to be about something personal he won’t reveal. I love that tension.

But I haven’t worn “Paris 1919” out because I’ve never binged on Cale either - too inconsistent!

Bill Meyer: Yeah, it’s never clear just how personal his music really is. He could be wearing his heart on his sleeve, or embroidering a picture of a heart on his sleeve, or making music that appears like someone’s heart on a sleeve. When he’s good, it’s good enough that that doesn’t really matter. That’s all something that he has in common with Hazlewood.

Ian Mathers: He’s a ghost, la la la la la la la la (like Ben I’ve so far found “Paris 1919” to be inexhaustible, along with several other Cale songs… and similarly, except for maybe Fragments itself, I’ve never really binged).

Jenny, I hear what you’re saying about the piano playing, but for me it just often enough sounds insistent or even nagging rather than just peppy that on balance I like it, but then you get something like the quasi-barrelhouse roll of “Darling I Need You” and it does feel a little naff (although knowing Cale, and I think the Hazlewood comparison is apt, maybe that’s the point!).

[slovenlyrecordings]

A ton of reviews just in courtesy of Terminal Boredom (they still hate 10" records):

ANMLS s/t LP Chilean street punko's who love to shout together - a lot and often. Reminiscent of 80's Spanish language boot-stompers Cicatriz, Eskorbuto and the like, but with added filth-blown guitars that are left tryna' cut through layers of amp cone dust and a seeping to the surface 70's rock cockpunch. The hardcore leanings and gang vocals calm a tad as the sides play on and I'm starting to hear echoes of John Reis riffage in the aptly titled "Instrumental" and the flip's opener, "V'amanos De La Ciudad". Thanks to "Pirata" they practically give you an Oi anthem at the end. Sort of a shock to see Slovenly head in this direction, as I'd expect the band to hook up with Lengua Armada, Sorry State or some other stateside stable of cellar dwellers. Is Ruleta Rusa still active? These cats should team up with them for a US stretch. Either way, I have no real knowledge of international hardcore (outside of Italy), so I'm gonna' shut up now and let you dig in on your own.(RSF)

The Cavemen "Nuke Earth" LP "Nuke Earth" is the third time these sleaze-Zealanders have been found rifling through the rubbage bins of garage shock past to toss a full platter. The best tracks within float to the surface - kinda' like pull tabs or smoke butts floating in the fetid water of a gas station squeegee bucket - and scramble about, attempting to create something along the line of a budget-punker's K-Tel collection. These cavemanish boys crank things off with "Lust For Evil" a tune that's got one boot planted firmly in the Oblivians camp and the other can be found kicking the 'Tards squarely in the gonads. Leather-jacketed riff warriors, hopped up on CPC (get it?!) and unleashing dueling leads and hostile vibes aplenty. "Janey" lightens things a tinge with some boozy balladry and organ rottens the rock during tunes like "Batshit Crazy" and "Concrete Town" in a way that could bring both Lost Sounds lovers, Spits fanatics and tattooed MCD car-show greasers lovingly together for a sock hop. Duster-huffers will rejoice to the dum-dum Dictator clunk of "Chernobyl Baby" and "Thug" which reeling in a meaty Gizmos/Penetrators spew. "Dont Wanna Hang" strips veneers in guitar frazzle and New Bomb Turk velocity. It's like having the Las Vegas Shakedown start up again, right there on your very own turntable! The parts may be aftermarket, but there's gonna' be some paunchy yet pleased turkeys around these forums real soon. (RSF)

ぐうたら狂 Gūtara KYŌ s/t 10” Damn, this here is a firecracker! What lies within these grooves are obliterated Teengener-ized riffs, and demented psycho-wails, all walloping upside the punk velocity of something akin to prime 80's Gauze. "Drive" got a lead that's reminiscent of a garage slop take of an old Soundgarden tune (I'm dead serious!) and it's pokin' out of a deteriorating Stalin bootleg. "Daydream" and "It's Gotta Be You" ride along hardcore gallops, rendered futile due to some of the gnarliest production filth since Tim Kerr was knob twisting. The shining light in all this scree would be the soulful belter "Romance" that kicks off the flip. This gold star doom rocker features strained crooning and a truly putrid solo that's - of course - blown all to snuff. It wouldn't feel outta' place on that 'Tokyo Flashback' sampler at all. Fo' real tho' - this platter could clear the sinuses of the most jaded of High Rise fan. Hell, Gutara Kyo is good enough to make me overlook the fact these songs are pressed up on the lamest of all formats (the dreaded 10") with a goddamn dumb 45 hole. Hey Pete, knock it off! All snark aside, I'd still tell folks to buy this, even if it was only available on floppy disc. Scum Stats: 100 copies pressed up on red and black splatterwax.(RSF)

Hand & Leg s/t LP Greek duo doing their best impersonation of that gluey/Krauty/fuzz-buzzy sound that the French has dominated for the past decade. This co-ed bass and drums act strips their music down to the bleached bone, leaving the sorta' repetitive weed-wacker chops and threadbare beats that Wire fans should froth over. Standout tracks like "Dogshit Country" lighten the low plod load a smidge, letting the high strings shine as if Godheadsilo was taking on a Volt tune. "Bloody Hole" closes us shop in a full two minutes of tone drone and irritated wail before the "song" proper takes flight within a spattered cacophony of pie-plate thwack and chanted vocals. Soothing to one's skull as This Heat. Dig yer feet in the sand, people. Scum Stats: 100 on clear vinyl.(RSF)

Häxxan "The Magnificent Planet Of Alien Vampiro II"" LP Nasally Israeli psych-boogie, for the moderne youth market. The press release mentions playing with Ty and them Fuzz comparisons are pretty on point in these here grooves. They also trot out bratty, childlike pop tantrums that should speak to the Burgerooligans that follow these updates as well. What you mostly get on this is quiet/loud dynamics pushing out a Black Angels/Frijid Pink hybrid. There's quite a bit of local flavor in their guitar pyrotechnics, so world-beat freaks and psych aficionados should perk up. Most of it makes for a fine fried background rock, but nothing is really sticking to my maw. A couple of tracks do stand out - "Circle Of Quantum" and "Snakes In My Hair" - both nearly seared my eyebrows off like the best moments of C.A. Quintet "Trip Thru Hell" with swirling, woozy leads and vocals lost in the arid desert wind. The whole ride is easy to digest and makes for decent afternoon accompaniment, but gotta' say I wanted more like those two aforementioned tracks. Better than the countless Ty & Dwyer clones we've had to weather so far. Better than the King Gizzard knock-offs to come. Let's just be happy today.(RSF)

Νόμος 751 (Nomos 751) s/t LP Electroshok-rockers that clatter along like a Grecian Metal Urbain. Drum machine robot riddims and twisted rockabilly riffs fighting against various space trash splatter and the occasional Spits-take on skate punk. There's a Grande Triple Alliance vibe rippling underneath that's hard to shake as well as more than a couple nods in the early Red Mass direction I use to enjoy (long before that act stank it up with Mac Demarco's hair-footed guest spots). I should ramble more about the tracks involved, but my janky-assed computer's 'bout to crash for yet another twenty minute interval - so I'm just gonna' go pogo about like some metaloid mutant instead. Give 'er a go!(RSF)

Proto Idiot "Leisure Opportunity" LP How the hell did the Hipshakes connection escape me?! Proto Idiot is way less Oblivian and way more Adverts than the 'shakes ever were. This here's a jagged pop-gone-puke to tunes like "Better Way Of Life" and "Angry Vision" - the sorta' stuff Jaytard did solo and that Useless Eater kid slung about. Comparisons to Devoto-era Buzzcocks seems apt, and there's a tad of 'Chairs Missing' up in here too. Honestly, either this is a love letter to the entire UK punker past catalog or I'm just an asshole who thinks so 'cuz of the English accent. Hey - it's the GG King Of The UK! Still, I'm perplexed that I never knew the Hipshakes were related. I'm bad at this game. I'd way rather party with this Proto Idiot than those stuffy shirted Protomartyr's out there. Good Fun. 'Nuff said. Scum Stats: 100 on green vinyl.(RSF)

Subsonics "Flesh Colored Paint" LP In this time of reunions around the corner for every wang-dang-doodle of a band that falls under the Budget Rock blanket, it shocks me to no end that Atlanta's Subsonics have never even given up. I've evidently been in the dark for nearly a decade (Sorry Slovenly/Sorry Subsonics.) as "Flesh Colored Paint" is their eighth full length. The band continues to do what they do best - muggy southern stomp filtered through Marc Bolan flutter and a Cramps-ian cha-cha heel strut. This sorta' glitter shimmer fits snugly nestled in the crotch region, somewhere between American Death Ray, Danny & The Darleans and so on. They've always been in my peripheral and I've witnessed them bring quite a solid live revue in my times, but they've never seemed tough enough to break me during my boozy-fueled heyday. NOW - on the other hand - being older, wiser and actually warming up to the voice of Brian Ferry - this stuff is pretty damn sharp! I'm fully locked down on the track "Begging Hands" here, which proves beyond any doubt that these swingers are as big of fans of Radley Metzger's 'Score' skinflick as I am. Elsewhere they beat on the traps like a Black Time light, less set on grate and more on the grind. "Die A Little", "Cold Cold World" and "In The Black Spot" ride in the Velvet's lil' Reed wagon, possibly playing at the wrong pitch. "I Must Be Poisoned" and "I'm The Most Popular Boy In Town" are cut from the same girl group worship and sequenced catsuit that Kid Congo stitches together with his Pink Monkey Birds. "Permanent Thaw" fires off that Black-Angels-Death violin scrape along its woozy train track clack and tunes like "Why Should Anybody Care At All" feature squirrelly, ragged soloing, as if front-mouth and string-slinger Clay Reed was dry humping his gee-tar on the studio floor (and chances are, he did). A good party platter for the red eyed sect. Now while we're at it, let's wax up them early WorryBird CDs!(RSF)

The Monsieurs "Deux” LP Knowing how much I loved Tunnel Of Love - one of the finest bombastic blowouts to cross my blurred vision in the early aughts - I feel like a lamestain for sleeping on this act for so long. Well, I fixed that over the past few months. Here I am, warming by the fire during this wintry bluster and ingesting another fine Andy MacBain release. Between this stuff and the Andy California EP, he's keeping Slovenly's Gladiators on the garbage rock radar (not that they ever really fell of it in the first place). The opener "Burning Flame" and "I Will Run" are straight up crash/bang shards of garage violence and if you said to me these were lost Tunnel Of Love tracks, I wouldn't argue it one bit. Things chill and take pop-ier turns within tunes like "Suburban Girls" and "At The Hop". Not saying cutesy levels of pop, but there's a definite whaff of catchy albeit retched perfection ala' Nobunny or Ramones girl group grabs. The femmes on deck keep Andy's cock-swingin' machismo at bay, adding great touches of Toody-esque back ups, forceful fuzzed power chords and abusive can bashing. "Get Right Get Ready" is rears a Karp riff and shoves it, clawing smack into the face of some delirious Dollrod slop. That's not a bad place to be - crawling around in a metallic Danny Kroha muck. Wrapping this fast lil' fucker up is "My War", which brings all the above elements to a broil, splattering about like a scorched Love cover turned beat-punk brat psych and going gloriously wrong. A wooly ride. Will ride again. Scum Stats: 100 copies on orange.(RSF)

[daemonvols]

Chapter Seven

An Evening with the Undead

 Years ago, Grandma Rose had told me, “These geists, they are not your friends. You should have human friends, flesh and blood and tears friends.”

She may have been right. At the time, however, like any child, I had not wanted to hear such talk. I was four years old and had just lost what I thought was my best friend.

    Greta Helgenmuth had the honor of being the first burial in the CPF in the fall of 1840. I have to infer from the records and newspaper articles that Greta was not well-loved by anybody, most particularly her four children. Her obituary listed her name, maiden name and family and the husband who “preceded her in death.” The mourning party consisted of my ancestor Jacob Baumann, caretaker, the Reverend Dieter Bruner, minister, and Jasper Lund, her attorney. No one knew where Greta had hidden or invested what the children believed to be a huge amount of money, so she was placed just on the edge of the Potter’s Field nearest the main cemetery.

    Reverend Bruner read the Lutheran burial service. The attorney shook his head and, according to Jacob’s journal/burial record, confided Greta’s final words: “I will haunt this place until the last descendent of those ungrateful little bastards has died. See if I don’t!” Since her children believed the idea that ghosts had to have some physical remnant to “come home” to when they haunted, they burned down the family house and sold it for cow pasture. Greta had to stay in the CPF.

    Jacob recorded conversing with “Die Hur” three times. His sons and grandsons wrote of her as well down the years. Grandpa Dov used the oral tradition to tell me of his conversations with the fading spirit and recorded her somewhat biased account of her illness and her ungrateful children.  In particular, he told me of one night, he relieved Grandma Rose from walking the floor with their colicky granddaughter by taking me out into the CPF for some air.

    “Your spawn, gravedigger?” he reported Greta saying.

    Grandpa Dov told me Greta touched my tight little belly and I shivered, then slept. He thought she might have found a soul mate, whatever that meant. She found something in me because until my fifth summer, if my grandparents looked into my bedroom on a summer’s night and found me gone, they could always find me sleeping beside Greta’s grave, my hand clutching the sod over her.

    Greta passed on before I turned five. Her last descendant, a timid librarian named Gabriel, died at his desk of heart failure that fall. He was a bachelor and “without issue.”  And thus Greta said nothing, did nothing and left no sign: she simply left.

    I did try to follow Grandma Rose’s advice when I’d stopped crying. I did try to find living friends. But the neighborhood children did not like inviting “the girl from the dead place” to play. One even told me I smelled like dead things. And so it went through my school years. Living in a cemetery might intrigue classmates at first. The ones who did not live along Mansfield Road in particular wanted stories, the gorier the better. But, with too much attention, comes the jealousy and the whole business of smelling like death and who did I have to bury to get that dress starts all over again. I thought my grandparents, my romance novels and our “residents” were family and friends enough for me.

    Until I saw Charlie.

    Once Lallie tired of her ceiling beam gymnastics and the food was prepared, I shooed them out to the front porch. Missy and Mischa still hovered there and the two youngsters could benefit from their ghostly experience. Unless, of course, the “ladies” chose that moment to “educate” the youngsters with their decades-old, and in Mischa’s case century-old, ideas on sex and relationships. If the ladies started that one, I’d be two “guests” shy of a party.

    I showered for the second time that day. Then, in my “foundation garments” (Missy’s terminology that always tickled me), I caught myself reaching into my closet for a good dress. I almost laughed at myself: who was I kidding? Charlie would come to meet Derek and Ian and the ghosts. I was like the bread to his curiosity sandwich, a delivery system for the good stuff. I made myself comfortable in clean jeans and one of my light blue business blouses.

    Nine-thirty came with a half-moon and starry sky. I had the driveway light on but turned towards the Potter’s Field away from the house and the porch lights dimmed. The aim was to appear inviting to the living and the dead, but to allow me to see them coming.  I could do nothing about the city street lights, but they were that obnoxious orange that frightened nobody. Not even the criminals that Mrs. Schnosburg believed lurked in every shadow on every block throughout every night.

    Missy and Mischa “sat” on the porch swing. I noted a tear in the cushion behind Missy, but said nothing or she’d tell me again how she was the best housekeeper a man could want, the best cook, the most understanding wife and so on. Any man coming up the front walk and hearing a see-through woman blathering on and on like that would probably turn around and run.

    Lallie and Rin sat off to the side of the front steps, coming as close to holding hands as they could. I admit I envied their closeness, even if it could never again be physical. I watched Lallie put her hands in and through Rin’s, then pull them out and try again and again and again; and I thought I understood what held her here. She still wanted the touching and cuddling and physical pleasures of their relationship. With the determination of her young years following her in death, she had to believe she could have it again, if only they kept trying.

    We heard Derek and Ian before we saw them. Ian was nervous and shouted his tics. Derek hissed at him to stop it, shut his mouth, and pull that tongue back in before he (Derek) bit it off.  That brought them into the reflected light of the driveway where the piles of colored gravel waited.

    OK, you have a question about the gravel. My reading told me, and my experience with some of Derek’s newbies is that, for reasons that supersede all understanding, new vampires cannot tolerate disorder. Those few who lived and were wiser in the old days left pots and pans, books and other items thrown around their houses by night. The messier, the better. If the vampire visited, s/he wasted the feeding time until daylight straightening out the mess and went to their coffins hungry.

    Ian was spell-bound by the mountain that rose up an inch or two over his head. He let a little gasp, first of impatience at the disorder, then of longing to organize it. I came down from the porch. “I need your help, Ian. Those crazy men at the garden center just dumped it all in one place.”

    “Fuckers,” he breathed. “Where do you want each color?”

    I had that planned. “Well, I wanted to put the yellow in the north bed under the bushes, the green in the south, and the blue and the pink on opposite sides of the driveway. What do you think?” His answer was to give me a smile that was almost sweet, if you can call a smile full of teeth that have ripped out throats ‘sweet.’ I left him to it and wonder if there was a bracha of thanks for the man or men who invented those colored faux rocks with their white crystal “icing.”

Derek settled himself in my grandfather’s favorite wicker chair with dark blue velveteen cushions. He had resumed his tailored suit and open-necked white silk shirt with gold cufflinks sporting the monogram “V”. I considered asking him if he’d brought a tie or if he wanted one of my grandfather’s, but I did not. Charlie was already fifteen minutes late – more if you started at nine o’clock. If I gave him the slightest opportunity, as some mishuggener in my family somewhere in the past when s/he had invited Derek into our house, he’d jump right in on how ignorant and desperate I must be to invite a grave robber to my house.

As opposed to inviting vampires and ghosts. I’m only saying.

The guests on the porch sat. Just sat, without a sound. As for the question that arises, yes, it’s awkward having a gathering like this on one’s porch when there is no conversation. I couldn’t offer them food and Derek would have some snide comments about what he would have to drink if I offered that. I sank hard into Grandma Rose’s matching wicker chair with the white wicker table holding the food between us. We listened to Ian giggling and cursing as he scuttled back and forth from the gravel piles in the driveway to the beds.

Grandpa Dov’s clock began to twitter when a shadow came along Bayberry towards the house. He paused to watch Ian dashing back and forth, then let three cars pass by before Charlie dodged Ian to come up the front walk. I shot out of my chair to meet him at the top step and keep him from stepping into Rin and Lallie.

“No parking on Mansfield after six,” he said.

“That’s true.” It would not do to gush about how glad I was that he came. But, in the dim with the soft orange and deflected white lights, he out-handsomed Shackleford.  “This is Rin and Lallie.” Charlie followed my open-hand gesture towards the young ghosts. He jumped back a step. “They’re pretty new to the CPF. No, they don’t shake hands. Come on up onto the porch.”

Missy and Mischa rose from the swing to meet him, which sent Charlie grabbing for one of the porch uprights. They circled him.

“Oh, Gracie, he’s a looker.”

“Good limbs. I imagine he’s a good worker, when he works.”

Charlie tried to watch them swirl around him, but he had the poked snapping turtle look on his face again. And I thought he would pass out altogether when Derek extended a cold, long-fingered hand.

“You have a taste for things that don’t belong to you,” Derek intoned. “I can respect that. Sit there.” He pointed to Grandma Rose’s chair. Charlie made a small, strangling sound and sat. “Grace Farmer, there is room for you with the ‘ladies.’”

Maintain the peace, I told myself before I snapped that this was my party and my porch. No family squabbles when a man comes courting, as my Grandma Rose would say. If he was courting. I sat between Mischa and Missy and wished for a sweater.

“There’s some veggies and crackers and dip,” I offered. “Right there on the table.”

“I-I-I’m fine,” he managed at last and shut his gaping mouth. “I had dinner.”

“As did I, so you may cease worrying that anyone here will ‘eat you up,’” Derek managed to sound bored. I saw his eyes flash with some interest. Perhaps he wasn’t quite sated, but he had promised not to feed on my company.

“Gracie tells us you’re a bookmaker,” Missy said. I envied her the ability to sink through a cushion.

Charlie blinked and looked at her. “Shipper. Well, packer. I take the order slips and pack the books for shipping.”

“How intellectually stimulating,” Derek said. Slapping an arrogant vampire goes against my contract and my experience, but the urge was strong.

“It isn’t,” Charlie agreed. “But it pays the bills. Or it did. I’m working for the Graveyard Workers full time now.”

“Bully for you. So we can expect to see you more often?”

Charlie looked at me, only at me. “That depends on Grace.”

Missy and Mischa tittered. If I hadn’t sat wedged between them, they would have executed the Solidarity or some other Girl Power move. I smiled as best I could and made took a visual measure of the distance between the swing and the porch steps.

“There are a lot of things that need fixing up around here,” I began, but the “ladies” went into full ghost-laughter mode. I felt sick.

Derek eyed me. He had shifted into full loco parentis gear. “Grace is not one of them.”

“That’s for me to say, Derek,” I said. “I’m over twenty-one.”

He frowned at me. “In my day, an unmarried woman’s age of consent was thirty-five.”

“In your day, women couldn’t vote.”

He grinned, full teeth and fangs. “And isn’t the world so much the better now they can?”

“It would be, if there were more women running things,” Charlie said. He looked at me again, with that smile that melted my innards. “Men don’t know everything.”

Missy and Mischa sighed with delighted smiles on their white faces. Me, I could have kissed him.

Derek looked ill.

The youngsters looked at this new human with something I would like to think was interest. But twenty-somethings’ interest is short these days. Video games and six-second scene changes and all. Lallie returned to the hand-holding (and missing) exercise. They made three or four more attempts, each time goring each other through the body or the thigh with their hands. She made a frustrated sound like an annoyed cat and lunged at Rin with her lips puckered. I don’t know which of them stopped the motion, but they became one in an exceedingly awkward way: Lallie’s face, complete closed eyes and with puckered lips, bulged from the back of Rin’s head. His samurai ponytail flopped over her short nose. Her bushy dark hair covered Rin’s face starting under his wire rim glasses. It occurred to me that the poked snapping turtle expression must be a male trait; Rin, too, had it mastered.

Missy and Mischa tsk’d and tutted.

Mischa: “Such behavior in public!”  

Missy, without conviction and with a bit of envy: “Aren’t you ashamed?”  

Mischa floated to an upright position. “I see we’ll have to have ‘that conversation’ and right now.”

Missy agreed and raised herself as well. “Come on, children, party’s over.”

Charlie and I watched them drift away past Ian, over the driveway and off into the darker corners of the cemetery. Then I noticed Derek’s close scrutiny of the new gravedigger. Charlie met his gaze only for a moment, then looked down towards his Nikes.

“Too bad,” he said. “I wanted to ask them what their unfinished business was.”

“Their what?” Derek demanded. He leaned forward towards Charlie. I pushed forward in the swing, but the vampire waved me off. He would keep his word. Charlie’s neck, and his blood, were safe.

“You know, they always say ghosts hang around the living because they have unfinished business.”

“And who is ‘they’?”

Charlie’s face darkened. “I don’t know who ‘they’ are! The people that study and write books about shit like that.”

“Oh, them.” Derek sat back, elbows on the chair’s arms and steepling his long fingers in front of his face. If he laughed, I knew I would have to slap him.

“It’s hard to say,” I jumped into the conversation. “Missy and Mischa are pretty scatter-brained, so I’m not sure they could tell you what their unfinished business is.” If they had any.

Some people write the silliest stuff!

“And what about you?” Charlie asked Derek.

“My business is ongoing and hardly a matter of choice.” The man could verbally snag silk.

“I see.”

Charlie looked at me for a long, and for me uncomfortable minute. “Well, I’d better be going, too.” He stood up, started to offer Derek his hand, then thought better of it. “Glad I could meet you, sir.”

If Derek did not appreciate Charlie’s manners, I did. I stood as well.

I walked with him down the steps and the front walk with my insides feeling like a plate of fruit gelatin that had just been knocked sideways. On the one hand, I wanted him to take my hand. On the other, I knew if he did, the gelatin would melt all over that sidewalk. He stopped where our front walk met the public sidewalk and turned towards me.

“Thanks, I, uh, it was a, that is, I learned a lot. Thanks.”

I lifted my face, hoping. He raised a hand and his fingers brushed my cheek. I waited, then closed my eyes. But he had gone, north, into the darkness.

  ��(.��5-�.GQ���V<��

[into-the-demimonde]

Game of Thrones Season 7, Episode 1: Dragonstone Review with my friend Alex

This season of Game of Thrones starts with a bang as Arya continues her quest for vengeance. Sam is still in Monk school, while Gilly and little Sam are still...there. Cersei is still crazy, Dany’s long voyage finally comes to an end, and Sansa butts heads with Jon.

Virginia: It goes without saying with a Game of Thrones season premiere, but nothing really happened this week. It was a lot of setup for conflicts to come.

Alex: Yeah, it was fine, but it felt like a lot of scenes that would be the opening scenes of other shows. I guess that’s part and parcel for a series with so many different characters and storylines, but it doesn’t make for the most interesting premieres.

V: Honestly, I’d be less bothered by it if this was going to be one 13-episode season, rather than two small seasons.

A: I agree. With only seven episodes I really don’t want to spend ten plus minutes watching Sam clean bedpans.

V: And they kept focusing on identical shots of him doing it. Glad I wasn’t eating at the time. Anyway, what was your favorite part of the episode?

A: The opening scene. I knew what was coming, but that didn't make it any less satisfying. It’s a great example of how not everything has to shock the audience; sometimes it’s better to let people wait for the shoe to drop.

V: It was so well done too. Everything from the verbage to not letting the girl have wine was perfect.

A: And I liked how Arya stayed in character as Frey when she told the girl not to drink. It’s a nice representation of Arya having to toe the line between good and evil to get things done.

V: I also thought the scene with the Lannister soldiers was a nice moment for her. You could see her knowing it would be the best thing to just kill them, while simultaneously being charmed by them.

S: Yeah, and it got her to see the grunts working for her targets as people rather than just enemies, which is a great followup to her slaughtering the Freys. People like the Freys and the Lannisters often force otherwise decent people into doing their dirty work. As always, good and evil are often murky concepts in Westeros.

V: Speaking of, what did you think of Sansa’s fight with Jon? I was with her personally. He wants to be merciful, but I agreed with Sansa that they should reward people who came to their aid.

A: This is gonna sound like a total copout, but I think they both make good points. She’s probably more right,  in that there have to be consequences for betraying them and rewards for helping them, but I understand Jon not wanting to punish families for the sins of their fathers (something he has some experience with). However, Jon did get the remaining family members to pledge loyalty to the Starks, so maybe his way was better. I enjoyed the larger argument this led to as well.

V: It’s true that both arguments have merit. I suppose that the preceding seasons have just left me with little belief that kindness works in this universe. Some people have speculated that this scene is foreshadowing a dark turn from Sansa, but I really hope not. She’s my favorite right now.

A: I think they might play with that as a theme; it would dovetail nicely with Arya struggling to see the humanity in enemy soldiers and Daenerys trying to curb her “Burn it all down” approach to conquest. Ultimately,  though, I don’t think Sansa will go too far into Cersei territory. She’s more ruthless now that she’s experienced so much evil firsthand, but I don’t see her becoming evil herself.

V: And I have to say, that would be the most disappointing thing the show could possibly do where I’m concerned, and they’ve disappointed me before many times. What do you think will become of Jorah Mormont?

A: I’m rooting for him, but I don’t see a happy ending in his future. I have a feeling he’ll manage to cure himself only to die some other way, maybe sacrificing himself for Daenerys.

V: That would certainly fit the mold with this show. By the way, that scene with Cersei, Jamie and the Ironborn was messed up.

A: I loved all the Lannister stuff. Euron is becoming a fun villain, so it makes sense he would align with the Lannisters. But I like that Cersei is listening to Jaime and not just trusting someone like him right out of the gate. Funnily enough, actually attaining power seems to be making her more careful instead of overly comfortable.

V: I guess seeing so many people who need to die in a room together makes me nervous. That being said, alliance or not, they’ll all be dead soon enough.

A: Damn skippy, because Daenerys Targaryen has finally arrived in Westeros! This was such a well done scene, and there was so much power in it I didn't even mind Tyrion not talking.

V: It was a smart move to end the episode on that. It was a great way to hype everyone for the rest of the season, and I thought it was funny how she asks “Shall we begin?” at the episode’s end.

A: So epic. I couldn't  help but think of Khan from Into Darkness.

V: I also thought the moments with the Hound, while simple, were really nice. Also relatively calm compared to all these women kicking ass.

A: That’s a great point; the women are the badasses in this episode while the men have the quieter moments. Sansa wanted to deal out punishment while Jon showed mercy; Arya smoked some fools while the Hound buried the victims of his coldness; Daenerys’ soldiers walk around in silence while she declares the beginning of her war. No shrinking violets, these.

V: The last thing I want to mention is the song the Lannister soldiers sing. Apparently there was some whining about this, specifically about Ed Sheeran having a cameo. Personally, I thought it was a pretty song and as we already said, it was a good scene.

A: I didn't mind either. Maybe if it was a completely extraneous scene that stopped the narrative short, but it was important and fleshed out Arya’s arc. To be fair, though, I had no idea who Ed Sheeran was before people lost their minds over his cameo. Jim Broadbent excited me much more.

V: He’s one of my favorites. Granted his part in this episode was pointless, but I assume we’ll see more of him.

A: I hope so. I don’t want them to pull another Ian McShane and get us all hyped up just to waste him.

V: Yes!! The only good thing that came out of that whole episode was the Hound. As I mentioned, they’ve disappointed me before. You  become paranoid with this show.