#i love the chorus but 'sorrow slow dancing around the edges around her eyes/the last one out to win a prize' is a VERY CLOSE SECOND

[daddy-long-legssss]

All My Own Stunts

Josh [Homme] comes and sings on this one. He’s very dominant, his voice. When you record his voice it just sort of leaps out, it’s great. What else can I tell you about that one? It’s got another reference to cowboy films. It just says, “I’ve been watching cowboy films on gloomy afternoons” which were something I were doing at the time. It’s also where we let ourselves have a bit of a wig-out.

[x]

[the-remainder]

Greetings weary traveler,

it’s time to conclude the Tale of the Fog Children. Enjoy and let us know what you think.

If you're not sure what I'm talking about, this is a bonus short story that takes place in the world of The Remainder, a dark fantasy visual novel, you can play Act 1 by clicking here.

Tale of the Fog Children

Part 1 Part 2

I looked to the west. A violeuth hue was bleeding into the sky, morning nears. I lied down on the pile of straw and made a pillow of my arm. Currents were strong this night, more so than an average night, I would need my endurance soon.

I slept lightly, so when the commotions came my eyes shot open of their own accord and I rose to my feet easily. As I strutted out of the patch of woods, the young couple were scampering toward me. I looked past them through the milky gloom of dawn and confirmed that the fogdune was gone, leaving the husk of a house behind.

On reaching me, Duma doubled over, panting, and managed between gasps. “It’s… it’s on the move… we barely...”

“Relax, friend. Did your neighbours get out as well? Fogdunes feed slowly, there’s still time to save their house. Did you bring the keepsake?”

He was gawking at me. “How did you know?”

“It’s my purpose to know, I sent your neighbour a messenger last eve and warned them to post a watch.”

Mouth hanging open, Duma kept staring a moment longer, then drooped his head. “I’m sorry, I was…”

“It’s alright, all dust in the wind now. But this isn’t the time, the keepsake.” I kept my voice soft and steady.

Duma’s face became sullen, creases mashing together painfully and lips quivering. He bit down on it. “Gone... we threw them away after—”

“Will this do?” Sestra stepped forward, unwrapping a cloth pouch that she took out from within her blouse, near her heart. It was a little whistle, carved to resemble a water fowl. “She’d had this since she was a babe, I made it for her.”

Duma was still in a daze when I said, with a smile and a subtle bow to Sestra, “more than enough, now come along.” I strode toward the Ashborn’s house.

“Play a tune she’d loved.” I said as we neared the fog and a weight began to press on my chest. The dune was flattened against one of the stone walls of the house and was trying to wrap around the sides and roof with difficulty. The insects were struggling.

Sestra began a simple, trilling tune. She smiled a little as she did so. The fogdune shivered, tiny undulations glided across its surface like ripples. It began to peel off from the house and ooze toward us, accompanied by a chorus of hushed gasps from village folk who looked on incredulously at a distance.

“Good, now keep playing and follow me.” I said as I walked briskly toward the shore, toward the nearest Seamouth, where the fogdune was born.

The Milborns followed without trouble at first, with Duma guiding Sestra as she played the tune. But packed dirt gave way to soggy mud, trees and bushes gave way to fungus and lichens. We were entering the marshes.

The going became strenuous. Our breaths were hot and heavy. Mud sucked at our feet and fog like bundles of sheets drifted, obscuring our view. But I could smell the acid and salt, the Seamouth was near. I looked back to see that Duma and Sestra were struggling, but with more hope and determination in their eyes than when I’d first met them. It should be enough, I thought, for them to make the right choice.

When the pool of bottomless black water came into sight, I lit the censor I’d filled with a herb that repelled spirits, and began circling around the couple while saying. “Move to the edge of the water. Don’t follow me any longer.” They did so with some trepidation, glancing around nervously. This was a place for mersial, I hoped they wouldn’t realize the meaning of it just yet.

I made a large enough circle so that the fogdune was not disturbed by the smoke until I’d blocked it off from all other sides but the shore side. It had nowhere to go now.

“You know what to do now, Sestra.” I said as I came back to the pair who were backing away from the encroaching fogdune, with little ground left under their feet.

A chill rain began to fall all around us.

“What now, mister? How do we get them out of there?” Duma said, holding my gaze for the first time, eyes trembling. Sorrow was washing over us like a torrent.

“I’m sorry for your loss, friend, truly.” I held his gaze softly, without condemnation.

“What? What are you saying? You said we could help them, right? You said…”

“We can. They had left the world of the living some time ago. Now only fragments of their heart remain, entangled with the insects of the fogdunes. The insects suffer, for being bent to the will of the children and forced out of their natural resting place. If we don’t allow them to return to the Seas, they will die slow, agonizing deaths. The children will share their pain.”

Sestra had stopped playing and clutched the whistle in her shaking hand. All the fight drained out of Duma. He swayed, collapsing into a sack with his face buried into his hands, and convulsed silently. Sestra gently cradled his head against her as her own tears fell. The corners of her mouth twitched up and down. Hope and despair, eternal enemies.

The fogdune slid away a smidgeon, only to be stopped by the ring of smoke, emitting a faint, shrill hiss. Then it tried a different direction with the same result. It was thoroughly trapped, the wall of smoke and the pummeling of rain had it bumbling aimlessly, like a lost child, I thought. A poor, lost child. Like me, just like me.

No, I shook my head and focused on my smile, on my task, so that the sorrow and guilt pouring over me and through me didn’t wash me away.

“Sestra.” I shouted over the downpour. “Do you not see? To keep them here is to condemn them to limbo. Throw the whistle into the Seas, the fogdune will follow and disperse. You can free it. You can free the children, what’s left of them.”

Sestra’s knuckles were bone white. She looked at the pitiable fogdune, searching with her eyes, searching with her heart.

“You can free yourself. It’s not too late. It’s never too late.” A numbness behind my eyes was spreading, I needed to leave soon, or I shall dive into the Seas myself to escape this drudgery.

And then I saw that Sestra smiled. A wide, joyful smile. Her lips curled up, eyes crinkled, dimples showing. She pressed the little wooden whistle to her lips, then to the centre of her chest, then threw it into the water.

In a blur of cold, moisture and… laughter, the fogdune momentarily enveloped all three of us as it rushed past and dove into the water after the whistle. A sheet of milky vapor spread across the surface, as a web of glowing, tearil flecks of light bloomed briefly within the dark water. We watched as the lights danced and flitted before fading away.

The end. Thank you so much for reading!

[littlefreya]

Under the Milky Way

*No permission is given for reposting my work, copying it or parts of the source material and claiming it as your own*

Summary: Henry has been in love with his friend for years. Just hearing her name makes his heart race but he doesn’t know if she feels the same and doesn’t know how to act when he really likes a girl. 

Pairing: Henry Cavill x OFC

Word count: 1K

Warnings: None. Fluffy and romantic.

A/N: I’m a good Dom and after (and before) giving you all that rough stuff I’m now treating you with some fluff, because boy you’re gonna need it with all that’s coming...  Thanks @agniavateira​ for doing the beta! Masterlist is here. This is roughly inspired by “Under the Milky Way” by The Church. 

Title: Under the Milky Way

He waited so long to finally see her again. Hoping this time he will receive a sign, some gesture, or a hint that will finally shake the earth and give him the assurance that maybe, just maybe she feels the same.

When he saw her tonight his throat went dry, suddenly the simplest words felt complicated and could not seem to form on his tongue. That navy blue maid of honour dress hugs her small form so adoringly as if the fabric itself worships her body. Her hair is half held back by a french braid which circles the back of her head like a small Elvish tiara. Thick, dark waves fall from it, curled at the edge of her lower back. 

He tries to avoid staring at her as she takes her place beside the bride. Not wanting to embarrass himself any more than he already did, but his sight is drawn as if by some magnetic force. In his mind, he wants to kneel before her and bow his head like some knight out of a fairytale, to plead to be in the service of this queen. 

She is looking at her best friend as they stand in the centre of the stage. She clutches a bouquet of white and pink roses against her chest while her eyes shine. She senses someone looking at her. When she glances at the crowd, her eyes fall on him right away. They share a mutual smile and she forces herself to look away.

They have always liked each other, he has always been kind to her.

Sometimes he would touch her as they sat with friends, a feverish stroke, innocent or by mistake, but that would be enough to make her heart flutter like a huge butterfly in the cage of her chest. 

To see him physically hurts sometimes. Especially on a night like this when she is supposed to be happy, yet her heart feels sorrowful.

The ceremony soon ends. The bride and the groom share a loving kiss and she claps her hands with a blissful smile. Their eyes meet again and she can’t help but feel that same chant in her lungs. 

Several drinks later they are on the dance floor, dancing with a group of their friends in a large circle. Henry is outrageous in his dance moves. He self-claims to be the worst dancer to ever walked this earth, which is why his moves consist of dramatic hand gestures meant to be parodic. He thinks it’s funny; he is mainly here to make people laugh.

But these are her type of dance moves and she follows him, doing the same. They perform the overly-dramatic gestures while singing along to the sounds of cheesy rock ballads from the 90s.

Friends begin to move away, looking at them as they’re doing their own little thing while shaking their heads and sighing. It’s been clear for the last 4 years, as obvious as a hit on the head. Yet the only people who seem to be clueless are Henry and her.

Another cheesy song ends and Henry laces his fingers in hers as she laughs drunkenly, throwing her head back as she can’t contain herself. The rhythm suddenly slows down and the soft guitar begins to play Under the Milky Way by The Church.

She calls out how much she loves the song. While still holding her hand, he boldly pulls her against him. She puts her head on his shoulder, her heartbeat accelerate, so much that she is certain he can feel the throb against his taut torso.  

Sometimes when this place gets kind of empty Sound of their breath fades with the light I think about the loveless fascination Under the Milky Way tonight

All eyes are on them as the beat picks up. The dramatic gestures have been reduced to a slow, rhythmic dance that doesn’t necessarily fit the beat of the music. Unaware of how they are supposed to dance or act, they allow themselves to flow naturally. They’re too drunk anyway, their bodies exhausted and running on steam. 

She is crushed against his warm chest, while the classical guitar of the chorus plays. It feels so cosy to be wrapped in the big man’s arms and listen to the music as it plays through his body. The music forces them to depart, or at least she tries, twirling away only to be caught by his hand around her wrist. His eyes are too foggy, his smirk whimsical as he pulls her against him once more.

“Under the milky way tonight…”

He hears her beautiful voice singing along with the words of the song which now just became his favourite song in the whole wide world. He presses his chin against her head, holding her in a moment he wants to have frozen in time. Just him and her, lost in a purple-pink haze of the illusion that he finally told her how he feels and she said she feels the same.

But as soon as the song ends their bodies part.  Embarrassing drunken smiles are exchanged, suddenly their eyes are unable to meet. It’s time to go home, each to drift away to their designated drivers. She kisses him goodbye on the cheek and walks away, holding herself from turning back and running to crush her lips against his.

~*~

Come morning he finds a message on his phone. A friend sends him a video. It’s from the night before, him and her dancing in each other’s arms all alone on the dance floor.

“You two are absolute idiots, everybody knows, just ask her out!”

Swallowing deeply, he looks at his large American Akita that peers at him with a bewildered face.

“What do you say, buddy? Take the chance?”

Kal tilts his head in a question and then barks.

She lies on the bed with the cat on her chest, holding back tears that've been threatening to run down her cheeks for hours. 

When her phone vibrates on the pillow next to her head she sniffles and picks it up to see who messaged her.

“Can I take you on a date tonight, little one?” 

[kentuckyanarchist]

There are few albums as bipolar as Boys and Girls in America—few that combine euphoria and aching nostalgic sadness in the same way, and fewer still that do it both masterfully and in absolute earnest. The Hold Steady’s third record greets you right from the start with a double motion: the album cover, all kids with hands in the air, hot pink with confetti flying (“up to yr neck in the sweat and wet confetti” as “Most People Are DJs,” from Almost Killed Me, had it), cuts against the very first line, where Craig Finn riffs on Jack Kerouac to affirm: “boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.” Kerouac evinced the same bipolarity in On the Road, and Hemingway too, Steinbeck too, not to mention Dylan, not to mention Springsteen—it’s part and parcel of a particular kind of American lyrical masculinity that likes to bellow and wail about its sensitive seriousness. Writers in this tradition—and Finn, whose first four Hold Steady albums approach flawlessness, is among the very best of them—plumb the unchartable depths of sorrow that provide everyday hedonism with its uneasy foundation. They give voice to a pain that can’t be outrun no matter how hard their characters try, one that catches them up in solitary moments and/or comes to suffuse whole segments of lives.

It was a feature, no doubt, of Almost Killed Me, the Hold Steady’s debut from 2004; it was unavoidably present in Separation Sunday (2005), their high-concept dramatisation of that line from “Thunder Road” about waiting “for a saviour to rise from these streets”. But on Boys and Girls songs like “Hot Soft Light” pummel you with it: the drunken reassurances and unsubtle heavy metal references of the verses cascade into the nightlife typology of the chorus, where all possible encounters are reducible to ideal types, “the guys / with the wild eyes when they ask to get you high” and “the girls / that’ll come to you with comfort in the night.” “Hot” and “soft”, such a simple pair of monosyllables, do all sorts of work here: they’re a mellow high before it becomes a problem (“it came on hot and soft / and then it tightened up its tentacles”); they’re a callback to the summing-up of human existence as just “hot soft spots on a hard rock planet” (“Most People Are DJs” again); and, when the title drops in the final line, they’re the body and the blood, Christ himself at the centre of the cross. In other hands counterposing religious ecstasy with drug-induced euphoria might seem pat, or at least like a failed attempt to shock; in Finn’s it seems entirely sincere.

Songs like “First Night” trade in a kind of nostalgia that’s not without its darkness and drama. More than almost any other Hold Steady song “First Night” runs off of Franz Nicolay’s keyboards, but there’s vastly more there too, in the strings and backing vocals especially. In the quadrumvirate of characters (not forgetting the narrator), Holly aka Hallelujah aka the central character of Separation Sunday is central, and she’s still in rough shape. The flashforward from that first night, when Holly “slept like she’d never been scared”, to last night, with Holly disconsolate and trembling, echoes in the shaking keyboards, over which the album title becomes a mantra in falsetto. At which point Finn, who from Lifter Puller days is well-acquainted with the art of the sneer and the snarl, intercedes: “don’t bother talking to the guys with their hot soft eyes”—those two adjectives for the last time—“you know they’re already taken.” All of which is not to forget that in the phrase “she was golden with barlight and beer”, “First Night” also coins the most beautiful ever way of saying “she looked hot when I was drunk.”

Songs like “Party Pit” take up the mantle of ceaseless mobility from Kerouac (the tradition Deleuze describes in which “everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside”) and run with it, juxtaposing a wayward narrator with an old friend who never escaped the vicissitudes of the teen scene. (As a 16-year-old I cycled home most nights across the Carter Bridge, over the railway just north of Cambridge railway station, and the line about crossing “that Grain Belt Bridge / into bright new Minneapolis” became wrapped up with that quotidian experience. I don’t know if “bright new Minneapolis” is a joke or just a conscious bit of mythmaking—I’ve never been to Minneapolis but I don’t see it as a city with lights so bright they can be seen glittering from above—but the image resonates nonetheless. And for the record: you’ll find lyrics sites saying the line’s “brand new Minneapolis,” but it’s not. Listen to this version.) Finn’s narrator’s been away to school and come back (“to start a band, of course”) but the heroine’s stayed put, “pinned down at the party pit,” stuck going round and round in circles, “gonna walk around, gonna walk around, gonna walk around and drink.” The party’s the site and source of sadness here and getting away’s jinxed too: coming home’s a bittersweet endeavour as much because of what’s stayed the same as what’s different.

And “Stuck Between Stations”, with its unpromising source material, its dated central metaphor, its shoehorning of a guilty-pleasure or problematic-fave author (as John Darnielle’s said—Darnielle being a man who knows his Berryman and knows his Hold Steady—the “sometimes in blackface” of Berryman’s Henry worries away at any too-friendly reading of that sad Minneapolis bard). It might not be the best Hold Steady song but it might be the one that most overtly strives for grandiosity in a Springsteenian mould, it might be the one that succeeds most evidently at making a bold statement that finds a way to hit home regardless of one’s circumstances. And the album’s clearest statement of ambivalence and bittersweetness is in the “buts” of its chorus: Berryman, at the time he took flight, we learn, “was drunk and exhausted but he was critically acclaimed and respected / he loved the Golden Gophers but he hated all the drawn out winters / he likes the warm feeling but he’s tired of all the dehydration / most nights were kind of fuzzy but that last night he had total retention.” Strung out but at least having made something of oneself—at home but not all year round—finding the booze sometimes a chore—and sometimes somehow glorious! It’s all there.

Lyrically, I wonder if this is achieved through a sort of wilful mythologisation. Berryman, after all, probably didn’t really love the Golden Gophers, but why not flesh out his story with the claim that he did? “How a Resurrection Really Feels,” from Separation Sunday, delves into its heroine’s despair but also zooms out to describe the graffiti tributes made to her by other unnamed characters—to show her story’s a legendary one in its own universe too. Once again Springsteen got there first, this time in “Highway Patrolman,” which invents a whole fictional town and county, and a slow dance for the characters to wax nostalgic about, all in order to build a world in the song and thereby make something somehow universal. Across all the Hold Steady albums the same characters recur in different (not always that different) predicaments, but their stories never totally cohere. They have the feel, at times, of characters in your peripheral vision or even on the edge of a dream, cohering to make certain points then splintering once more. The stuff of strange, half-true legends.

And then there’s the god question. Finn doesn’t just see love, or hope, or beauty, or tenacity “in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers” (in “Citrus”), he feels Jesus there—and in so doing captures a sort of lowdown American pantheism found from Emerson to the Beats, not to mention in the final scene of Bruce Almighty. The particular form that the mystical takes in “Chips Ahoy” is not the same form it took in most of Separation Sunday, but in the narrative of the girl with a sixth sense for winning racehorses it’s there nonetheless. Even the stuttering puh-puh-puh assonance of “pinned down at the party pit” conceals a deification metaphor, its martyress fastened tight to the scene—as Lifter Puller more bluntly put it, she’s “nailed to the nightlife like Christ on the cross.” (As a disbelieving teenager I had a disproportionate number of Christian friends, I guess I was drawn to people who believed in things. It’s possible I thought I had something similar in certain bands, certain songs.) God, in America today, is as fiercely contested signifier as everything else, but it’s clear that the omnipresent God of Boys and Girls is also a personal God, not to mention a lenient, ecumenical one.

Boys and Girls met me at a particular time in my life, a couple of years after it was released, in summer 2008, which is probably the biggest part of the reason it’s stuck with me (other texts are sepia-shaded for the same reason: Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, the first Conor Oberst solo album). The rest of the first four Hold Steady albums are probably just as good, but this one works in certain ways that set it apart. It’s less cynical than Almost Killed Me, less weary than Separation Sunday, less nostalgic than Stay Positive, and more holistic than all of them. It turns out that the holism and the bipolarity amount to the same thing.