#if they wanted me not to style George in the womens fit they should have taken pics of him in the men’s | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

chernayawidow · 2 years ago

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HOW DID I MISS THIS AHHHH!! Currently banging my head against the wall for missing this notification 😓 BUT I’M HERE NOW AND THATS WHAT MATTERS!!! LETS DO THIS BABY!

“You’d been getting ready for this dinner with your family for four hours. How long did it take you to slap on some makeup and throw on a dress?” — tsk tsk Ben, he’ll learn eventually that makeup and hair are an art you can’t rush… I leave an hour for each stage of getting ready. An hour for hair, an hour for makeup, an hour for picking an outfit, plus an extra hour in case I run behind in any category 🤣

“You had a black suede clutch tucked in your other hand, but Ben was drawn to the bright red of your dress. The color alone appealed to him. It called back a memory of a musty club, rich whiskey, and the dulcet tones of your voice.” — I love the nostalgia of her wearing a red dress, and the call back to when he first saw her in one that night in the club 🫶

“But now, this dress was shorter. It also hugged your every curve and stopped just a few inches above the knee. He noticed a tantalizing little slit in the back, at the hem, leading his eyes down your sheer pantyhose and down to the tall, black heels.” — This sounds like such a crisp fit! I can literally always count on you for some amazing outfits, and the description of this makes it so easy to picture!

“They raked back up your body, taking in the short sleeves, the slight plunge of the neckline, the red lipstick as bright as your dress, the soft sweep of eyeliner and dark lashes—and you hoped he noticed the way you��d painstakingly done your hair into soft, ‘40s style waves.” — HELL YEAH!! Plunge necklines for the win!! And the hair?? I love love LOVE that detail, and I’m sure Ben would too heheh! 😮‍💨

“Gotta match my girl,” said Ben. Though he fingered the ends of your softly curled hair with a more genuine glint to his smile. “Though you’ve gone a bit vintage.” — THEY’RE SO CUTE OMGGG!!! Him modernising for her, and Pookie dipping her toe into the vintage era for him 🥹

“I gotta assume you want me to fuck you in your mom’s house.” — Benjamin, that would entail messing up the hair and makeup that took ages to perfect 🖐️

“Now that was an image. Soldier Boy: browsing through a magazine of women’s jewelry. You smiled brightly at him.” — Ben was probably giggling and kicking his feet as he imagined his Pookie wearing the things in the catalogue 😂

“Ben hesitated, but when he glanced over at you, he reached over and thumbed at your chin, under those ruby red lips. It made you smile.” — They’re so damn cute 😭💖

“When the two of you arrived at your mother’s house, she opened the door to her home and greeted your boyfriend like a long-lost son.” — this line is really funny when you remember that he’s probably old enough to be her grandfather, if not her great grandfather 🤣

““What should we call you? Ben, or Soldier Boy?” she asked dryly.” — Louisa naurrrrr, be nice to the radioactive Supe! 💀

“You remained in the kitchen to help out, while Ben migrated to the living room with your grandfather.” — Oh my goodness, of course he did 🤣

“Ben blinked at the casual mention of oxycodone, but he wouldn’t mind a few of what Sylvia was having. Oxy gave him such a nice buzz.” — Ben this is why we can’t have nice things!

“You’d told him about Alexa and Siri and all those techno bitches out there now, controlling people’s houses. He didn’t trust it.” — Omg this is such a funny concept to me, Ben learning about all of this shit would be hilarious 🤣 and it’s even funnier that he doesn’t trust it LMAOO!!

“Mets versus the Cubs, three to one.” — When I see ‘Mets’ it reminds me of a club we have in Brisbane called ‘The Met’.

““You like baseball?” George asked as he turned on the TV. Ben nodded, and the other man put on a game.” — He’s getting to hangout with someone closer to his own age for once, good ol’ grandpa bonding💀

“George raised a brow. “Did he? Well, we all need a glass every now and then.”” — This interaction is making me WHEEZE! 😂

“She didn’t want to take any chances with your dad, who’d been more than unstable at the time in his drinking.” — Stan grandma for clear skin. At least Ben can’t hit on her with her being dead…

“Ben didn’t often pray. But he drank then with a silent toast, that good ole’ Jon was getting hot coals up the ass right about now. In hell.” — Cheers to that, fuck Jon!

“George gave him a wry look. “The fate that all men fear. Ass cancer.”” — I LOVE GRANDPA GEORGE!!! His sense of humour is 🤌

“Ben actually smiled. Now he knew you were related to this man.” — This is so adorable, I love that he gets to have a positive interaction like this. I think I know who he’s gonna gravitate too for family gatherings…

“Shit. There was more than one reason you hadn’t told the rest of your family yet, and this was partly it. How the hell were you supposed to explain this?” — Oh it’s easy, just say that one of his dipshit employees at the time kidnapped you for no good reason, and so Soldier Boy nobly… uhh… kept you on house arrest, and eventually killed aforementioned dipshit.

““So was your father. And you still worked with him for years,” she remarked, even off-handedly as she went back to stirring.” — Trina I swear to god I’ll king hit you if this is how it’s gonna be. That’s an extremely low blow you bitch, leave my Pookie alone. Her boyfriend is literally radioactive! 😒

“Your aunt shrugged. “It’s the truth, isn’t it?”” — Does this mean that EVERYONE can spit the truth? Because Trina I’ve gotta say, you’re a big mouthed slag who nobody likes because you give thoughts that nobody even asked for 🤙

“I’m really happy for you, sweetheart. You’ve got a superhero! Who knew you’d pull that one off, huh?” — TRINA YOU SLUTBAG THAT WAS SO OUTTA POCKET!

“But your hips, hun. I mean, I enjoy a snack. A bon bon. A chocolate eclair. The occasional croissant, but the weight don’t come off easier as you get older, does it?” — OH I HOPE WE GET TO THROW HANDS WITH THIS BITCH!! Trina nobody likes a person who constantly says unsolicited and personal bitchy things, and yet you just can’t help but open your mouth 🙄

“And have you talked about kids yet? That’ll be some serious weight gain.” — Trina why the fuck are you so obsessed with weight?? Who HURT you?

“I’m just sayin’!” she said. “He might have forever, but you certainly don’t.” — PLEASEEEEE TELL ME WE GET TO BEAT THIS BITCH UP! She may be family, but if that doesn’t matter to her, then surely we get a pass too!

“Okay, you know what?” Louisa finally stepped in and grabbed your arm. “I need your help. Let’s find the red tablecloth so we can set the table.” — NO LOUISA FUCK OFF! TRINA NEEDS HER ASS BEAT AND HUMBLED THE FUCK UP! 😒

“There you found Ben immersed in a baseball game with Grandpa George. Both men only looked up at you when you stood near the couch with crossed arms.” — This is priceless 😂

“George chuckled and patted you warmly on the back. “Why do you think I’m out here?”” — Grandpa is a wise and very smart man for that!

“I need you,” you whispered in his ear. “Now.” — Ben’s getting his wish… 😮‍💨 although she’s game to risk ruining her hair and makeup, I will say that.

Ben’s intro to her family was less chaotic then I thought, he funnily enough just got to chill with the oldies. Poor Pookie was the one copping the heat 😓 man fuck Trina! I’m lucky enough not to have an aunt Trina, and if I did, I would get into soooo many arguments with her! No fucks given! It was fun to see Ben and George interact though, I was curious to see how he might react to his granddaughter dating a man as old as he is and I love that it wasn’t even brought up. Stan George for clear skin! I’m so glad I don’t have to wait for the next chapter 😮‍💨 keen as to read that one!!!

Love Actually - Part 2

Paring: Soldier Boy/Ben x Reader

Summary: You and Ben steel yourselves in order to meet your crazy family for Christmas dinner.

AN: Here’s the requested Part 2! It got too long, so I had to break it up lol. There will be a Part 3 after this (final part). I also tried really hard to find an image/gif that would match this chapter better, but alas, there are only so many pictures of this scruffy guy. (And none in a real suit. 😂)

Read Part 1

Remember, this story is set in the same world as “Break Me Down,” and set before “Checkerboard.” But this can be read as a stand-alone! Hope you enjoy…

Word Count: 4,800 Tags/Warnings: Tense situations, bit of angst, lots of sexy fluff

Part 2: "Season’s Greetings"

Ben checked his watched again.

He’d lost count of how many times, how many minutes, how long he’d been waiting for you to come down the goddamn stairs so he could get this night over with.

You’d been getting ready for this dinner with your family for four hours. How long did it take you to slap on some makeup and throw on a dress?

Finally, he heaved a sigh and got up from the couch, adjusting the watch on his wrist. He stayed by the foot of the stairs and called up to you.

“Hey. What’s taking so damn long?” he asked. His brows were furrowed, mouth set in an aggravated frown. “I already told you. I’m not planning on being at this thing all night. So if you don’t come down here in the next ten minutes, I swear to fucking Christ—”

Ben stopped short, as he heard your footsteps at the top of the stairs. When he looked up with expectant, pursed lips, his face subtly froze.

“What? What’re you gonna do?” you teased. Tucking a strand of hair behind your ear, you grasped the guardrail and carefully made your way down the stairs. These heels were no joke.

You had a black suede clutch tucked in your other hand, but Ben was drawn to the bright red of your dress. The color alone appealed to him. It called back a memory of a musty club, rich whiskey, and the dulcet tones of your voice.

But now, this dress was shorter. It also hugged your every curve and stopped just a few inches above the knee. He noticed a tantalizing little slit in the back, at the hem, leading his eyes down your sheer pantyhose and down to the tall, black heels.

His lips formed a teasing smile. “You sure you can walk in those?”

But you could see the truth in his eyes; he liked what he saw. They raked back up your body, taking in the short sleeves, the slight plunge of the neckline, the red lipstick as bright as your dress, the soft sweep of eyeliner and dark lashes—and you hoped he noticed the way you’d painstakingly done your hair into soft, ‘40s style waves.

“Do I look shaky to you?” you countered.

Ben tilted his head slightly as he stared up at you. “Not one bit.”

He reached out for you on the last step of the stairs. You took his hand and gave him a grateful look, but your hand didn’t stop there. It grazed up the sleeve of his suit jacket as you took him in with a smile.

Not often one to don a simple black suit, Ben went with a charcoal gray against a crisp black undershirt. No tie though, leaving the first couple of buttons casually open.

“Look at my man, all sharp and modern and sexy as hell,” you purred. He accepted the praise with a pleased quirk of his lips.

Normally you wouldn’t try to feed his peacock-level pride too much. He knew he was a damn fine-looking man. However, you also knew he wasn’t totally into meeting the rest of your family tonight. You knew you needed to give him a (well earned) ego boost.

“Gotta match my girl,” said Ben. Though he fingered the ends of your softly curled hair with a more genuine glint to his smile. “Though you’ve gone a bit vintage.”

“Compromise.” You grinned, and you leaned up for a soft kiss.

He met you there, even pressing his luck when his tongue begged entrance against your lips. You held his cheek and brushed your thumb there tenderly, but you soon broke away.

“We’ve got somewhere to be,” you reminded him. Ben sighed through his nose, though his hands molded to your waist.

“I didn’t realize you were that kinky,” he said. His voice was deep and suggestive. Your face started to heat up, even as your brows knitted with confusion.

“What?” you asked.

“I know you’re not gonna make me wait all night to get a taste of this,” he said. And he leaned down to begin plying you with his heavy hands and his lips along your neck. “I gotta assume you want me to fuck you in your mom’s house.”

You uttered a shocked laugh. You batted his shoulder, even though it didn’t even make him blink. His lips curved as they grazed your neck. He inhaled under your ear, making a pleasant shudder run down your spine. He hummed in approval.

“Is that the perfume I got you?” he asked.

“Mhmm,” you nodded. “I like it a lot. Makes me feel all warm and spicy.”

Ben chuckled into your neck. He did pull back eventually to thumb around the edge of one of your earrings—the second part of his Christmas gift to you. The white stone and silver filigree shone in the light.

“They look good,” he remarked, giving you a charming smile. “Better on you than the catalogue girl.”

Now that was an image. Soldier Boy: browsing through a magazine of women’s jewelry. You smiled brightly at him.

“Thank you, baby,” you replied. “They really are beautiful.”

Then you glanced down to find your gift to him on his wrist: a new silver Rolex. You turned his hand over to make sure that it fit him right.

“Not too tight, right? Not too loose.” you asked.

He shook his head. “Nah, it’s good.”

“Just good? Does it still need adjusting? We can go back to the store and have them fix it—”

“It’s perfect, sweetheart. Stop fussing,” he said. Your lips pursed as you looked up at him from the watch.

“I just want to make sure you’re happy with it, that’s all,” you said.

“I am,” he replied. But his smile, the hidden glint of something in his eyes, made you blush. Inside, you were warm and pleased.

“All right, let’s go then,” you said. “I’ve got the rum cake, and the actual rum ready to go in the kitchen. And the presents are lined up by the door. Can you load those up in the car for me while I get the food?”

Ben obliged you, though he soon balked at the army of presents waiting for him by the door. When did you have time to get all of these? He didn’t remember you buying all this shit.

Though he realized, this must’ve been how you filled your time after work, while he was gone for the past two weeks on that mission.

As he loaded the gifts into the car, Ben reluctantly remembered that it had been…strange, to be away from you. For the past few months, you two had fallen into a rhythm. Waking up to each other, busy morning routines before work, sharing your evenings afterwards.

You had also been making it your mission to find new things to do together. Like paintballing, of all things. Or comedy shows, new movies and restaurants, concerts, club nights with your friends. Though it was weird for him, sometimes, to go to a show without all the celebrity fanfare he used to get as Soldier Boy.

Well, he was still Soldier Boy. He just wasn’t getting paid anywhere near the same as he used to. (But let’s face it, he didn’t need the damn money. He’d earned plenty in 40 years of fame and family inheritance.)

People still knew his name, still worshiped him at times, but it wasn’t the same. He wasn’t part of Vought’s machine anymore. No one really told him what to do, but if he wanted this life—here, in upstate New York—he was forced to make efforts to color within the lines of the law (mostly). Hell, he actually worked for a living. Even if it was for the government.

The point was, he was part of something. And it wasn’t totally shit, even if he was surrounded by morons on a daily basis…

By the time you opened the passenger side door to interrupt his musings, Ben remembered to actually start the car.

“You okay?” you asked as you clicked in your seatbelt. You were keeping a close eye on him tonight, trying to gauge his shifting moods.

Ben hesitated, but when he glanced over at you, he reached over and thumbed at your chin, under those ruby red lips. It made you smile.

“Yeah,” he replied. Though he let out a subtle breath as he faced the road and took the wheel of the car. Ever perceptive though, you sent him an assessing look.

“You’re not nervous, are you?” you asked. His brows furrowed slightly.

“Why would I be?” he asked, his voice a bit sharp. Defensive, you interpreted.

Instead of answering, you leaned over and laid a hand on his thigh.

“Look, my mom already likes you. Louisa’s going to come around,” you said. Your mouth edged into a smile, of sorts. “I just need you to stop me from killing my aunt with a ladle.”

Ben snorted in response. “All right.”

When the two of you arrived at your mother’s house, she opened the door to her home and greeted your boyfriend like a long-lost son.

“Oh, Ben! Come in, please,” she beckoned, grabbing his arm and guiding him inside. “You look so handsome, my goodness!”

Ben couldn’t help offering a smile. It was infused with his usual charm.

“Marie,” he greeted with a nod. You shook your head, despite your own smile. Ben liked attention—along with a bit of praise and fanfare went without saying. And you knew your mom wouldn’t be the only one to play into that tonight.

“Hi, Mom,” you said pointedly, with a hand on your hip. Marie turned to you with a bright smile.

“Oh! Honey, there you are. Merry Christmas!” She brought you in and hugged you tight. She then fairly gushed as she took in your dress and touched your hair. “Oh, you look so beautiful. I wish you’d come earlier though. I need you to help me and Trina. Come on.”

Marie glanced up at Ben again. “Oh, you too, hun! We can introduce you to everyone.”

Ben nodded. He followed your lead behind your mother, and you inwardly steeled yourself on the way to the kitchen. The familiar smells awaiting you brought you back to the better parts of your childhood. Ones that were filled with music, laughs, and good food.

And if there was one redeeming quality about your Aunt Trina, it was that she could cook her ass off. Since your mom had always been more of the “boxed meal” variety cook, Trina always took over at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and just about every other family gathering.

She was putting the ham in the oven while your sister sat at the kitchen table with your Grandpa George, peeling potatoes. The bigger table in the dining room was currently set up with appetizers and wine.

But the sounds of chatter and pots and pans and cabinets closing—it all stopped when you and Ben entered the kitchen. You felt his hand at the small of your back, and whether he meant it to or not, that familiar touch stabilized you.

Even Trina stopped giving Louisa directions on how to correctly peel and cut the potatoes for boiling. Her mouth opened when she took in the sight of Ben, from head to toe.

“Good evening,” he said, if only to break the silence.

But you knew the rest was up to you. You curled a hand around his solid arm and gave him a smile, before looking to your family.

“Hey, guys. Merry Christmas!�� you greeted. “This is my boyfriend, Ben.”

Trina squealed in excitement. She came over (with a wooden spoon in hand) to give you an enthusiastic hug and kiss. She held your arms and looked between you and Ben.

“Your mom said you were dating a superhero, but I had no idea…” she twittered. “I mean…it’s Soldier Boy. He’s in my kitchen!”

“It’s Mom’s kitchen, actually,” you muttered. Trina’s excitement dimmed slightly as she rolled her eyes at you.

“Ever the smart mouth,” she said, playfully whacking you in the ass with her spoon.

Ben smirked. He certainly agreed with your aunt’s assessment. He turned to her to offer something in greeting, but before he could, Louisa’s voice cut in from across the room.

“What should we call you? Ben, or Soldier Boy?” she asked dryly.

You frowned, gave your sister a look. Meanwhile, Ben didn’t quite make it to a smile, but he was civil when he answered her.

“Ben’s fine.”

You remained in the kitchen to help out, while Ben migrated to the living room with your grandfather. Ben grabbed a large glass of wine on his way there, along with a few mini quiche to tide him over until dinner.

He then noticed an old woman sleeping on the leather recliner.

“Who’s that?” he asked George.

“Oh, that’s Great Aunt Sylvia,” George said. “She just took an oxy for her hip. She’ll be passed out ‘til dinner.”

Ben blinked at the casual mention of oxycodone, but he wouldn’t mind a few of what Sylvia was having. Oxy gave him such a nice buzz.

But instead, he and George sat on opposite ends of the couch while Sylvia snored away.

For a moment, it was quiet, save for the soft crooning of Nat King Cole playing (and Sylvia). The music came from a small round speaker on the coffee table, Ben noticed. You’d told him about Alexa and Siri and all those techno bitches out there now, controlling people’s houses. He didn’t trust it.

“You like baseball?” George asked as he turned on the TV. Ben nodded, and the other man put on a game. Mets versus the Cubs, three to one. The men were silent for a while as they watched the game.

Unfortunately for Ben, that peace couldn’t last.

“So,” George started. “You’re a supe, huh?”

Ben inclined his head, sipping at his wine. This was what he fucking hated. Small talk.

“I remember you,” George said. “My wife and I liked that movie you made…King of Kings. With Charlton Heston. What a classic that guy was.”

Ben smiled. “He was a good time. Drank like a fucking fish.”

George raised a brow. “Did he? Well, we all need a glass every now and then.”

Ben nodded, taking a pointed sip of his wine.

“Heston. One of the few celebrities I gave a shit about when he died,” George said with a shake of his head. “Wasn’t long before my wife’s passing.”

You’d told Ben a lot about your grandmother. When your parents got divorced, she’d insisted that you, your mom, and your sister live with her and George. She didn’t want to take any chances with your dad, who’d been more than unstable at the time in his drinking.

Ben didn’t often pray. But he drank then with a silent toast, that good ole’ Jon was getting hot coals up the ass right about now. In hell.

Ben then considered your grandfather’s musings, realizing he hadn’t thought about his old pal Heston in a long time.

“How’d he die?” Ben asked. George glanced over at him.

“Well, official case was pneumonia. But it wasn’t all that clear,” he said. “However, I think he had a flare up.”

“Of what?” Ben asked.

George gave him a wry look. “The fate that all men fear. Ass cancer.”

Ben raised a brow, his mouth twitching. He had a feeling he knew where your sense of humor came from.

“You probably don’t have to worry about that,” George waved a dismissive hand. “You’re still young. Well, sort of…I mean, being superhuman and all that. I’m sure that comes in handy with the normal stuff, like the sniffles and whatnot…and hey! At least you won’t have to worry about your asshole fallin’ out.”

Ben actually smiled. Now he knew you were related to this man.

In the kitchen, you were trying and failing to dodge a game of “Twenty Questions” with your aunt, while you and your sister finished cutting potatoes. All of the questions were predictably centered around Ben. Luckily, you had a plate of mini quiche, cheese, and salami between you and Louisa to keep you pacified.

“Well, you’ve done well for yourself, I’ll give you that,” Trina said. “But why on God’s green Earth didn’t you tell us you were dating Soldier Boy? How the hell did you even meet him?”

Shit. There was more than one reason you hadn’t told the rest of your family yet, and this was partly it. How the hell were you supposed to explain this?

Louisa shot you a knowing look, along with a raised brow.

“Well, I was actually assigned to find him after he…went missing last year,” you said, keeping things purposefully vague. “We met and…things just kind of took off from there.”

Your mom and your sister didn’t even know all the details, but they knew this much. After Soldier Boy used his nuclear power to end Homelander, he’d escaped in the aftermath.

You’d been working a year in Surveillance at Supe Affairs, but you’d been a private investigator by trade, previously working at your father’s firm. You’d even worked at Vought for a few years, before joining the S.A.

You were then recruited by Grace Mallory to track down Soldier Boy, along with Butcher and his team.

…And that’s where things got complicated.

“But isn’t Soldier Boy the one who killed Homelander?” Trina asked. She stopped in her stirring of the cranberry sauce to look back at you. And you met her stare directly.

“Yes. He was partnered with the CIA on that.” Sort of. You added, “Homelander wasn’t the hero you all thought you knew, remember? He was a raging psychopath.”

Trina huffed at that.

“So was your father. And you still worked with him for years,” she remarked, even off-handedly as she went back to stirring.

Your entire body stilled. Inside, your temper was a lit fuse, preparing to ignite. You stuffed a mini quiche into your mouth to stop you from exploding.

And your mom and your sister recognized the danger. Louisa frowned tightly and touched your arm.

She had been too young to form a true relationship with your father by the time your parents were divorced, and your grandparents (and later you) hadn’t allowed Jon to interfere too much with Louisa's life. So Jon’s death, a mere seven months ago, hadn’t truly affected her as deeply as it had you.

And that in itself was complicated.

Marie paused in preparing the sweet potato casserole to give her sister a warning look.

“Trina, that’s not fair,” said Marie.

Your aunt shrugged. “It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

Slowly, you stood. You grabbed a hand towel and brushed the velvety remains of potato skin from your hands. You also took the plate of cheese cubes and salami with you.

“Honey, she just means—”

“I know what she meant, Mom,” you said. Your mother wasn’t confrontational. She would never tell her sister to shut the fuck up when she was being out of pocket.

But you had no problem doing so. You walked over to Trina, who saw the look in your eye and actually relented, realizing that there was, in fact, a line, and she had crossed it.

“Look, I’d like us to continue having a nice evening,” you told her. “Mention my father again, and it won’t be.”

After a moment, Trina nodded.

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that. Don’t mind me,” she said. But then, she smiled. “I’m really happy for you, sweetheart. You’ve got a superhero! Who knew you’d pull that one off, huh?”

Your flat smile remained. “Oh, yeah? How do you mean?”

Trina faltered. Apparently, she hadn’t expected that.

“Oh. Well, you know…”

“No. I really don’t. Can you clarify for me?” you asked, using the same even tone you employed with testy co-workers on the Surveillance team.

Trina sighed. “Oh, honey. You’re a beautiful girl, but…”

“What?” you challenged. “Just say it.”

Behind Trina’s coil of dark hair piled on her head, Marie looked worried. Louisa was also on tenterhooks, gripping the kitchen table. She slowly got to her feet though, in case she needed to intervene.

“Well, I wasn’t gonna say anything,” Trina said. She gestured to you, after grabbing a cheese cube off your plate. “But your hips, hun. I mean, I enjoy a snack. A bon bon. A chocolate eclair. The occasional croissant, but the weight don’t come off easier as you get older, does it?”

You were officially burning like a tea kettle.

“And with a man like that…” Trina fanned herself with the discarded, empty bag of cranberries. “Mother of God. He’s gotta be beating ‘em off with a fucking stick.”

Your mom pursed her lips at the salty language, giving Trina a sharp glance (for multiple reasons).

Trina noticed, but she only popped another piece of salami into her mouth. “Sorry, hun.”

But then she turned back to you.

“And have you talked about kids yet? That’ll be some serious weight gain.”

You let out a sharp breath and raised your gaze heavenward, pleading for mercy.

“Jesus Christ,” you muttered.

“I’m just sayin’!” she said. “He might have forever, but you certainly don’t.”

Now that one struck a nerve. Perhaps not the one she intended, but it cut deeply into you all the same. You and Ben had agreed to pin that conversation for now, but the fact was, he would continue to age much slower than you.

At your steely glare, Trina again raised her hands. This time in placating defense. “I’m trying to help you, is all I’m saying.”

You gripped the edge of the kitchen counter so tight you thought a manicured nail might break off. You’d reached the end of your tether.

“I’ve been here for all of five minutes—”

“Okay, you know what?” Louisa finally stepped in and grabbed your arm. “I need your help. Let’s find the red tablecloth so we can set the table.”

She led you out of the kitchen and into the hall, but you stopped short so fast that you skidded a bit in your heels. You took deep breaths and braced a hand against the wall.

You turned to your sister. “Why doesn’t she attack you like that?”

“Oh, believe me,” Louisa said, rolling her eyes. “I had my turn before you got here. I’ve been locked in with these clucking hens all morning.”

A grin twitched at the corner of your lips.

“My condolences,” you said. But then, you look at your sister a bit harder. “And you. What’s your problem, huh? How long are you going to give Ben a hard time?”

It took her a moment, but Louisa eventually sighed.

“I mean, Aunt Trina’s an asshole, but she kind of said it. He’s literally a century-years-old,” she said. “How do you not have a problem with that?”

You crossed your arms, though you knew you didn’t have a good answer for that one.

“Age is…relative.” You struggled against a wince.

“He lived through the damn Dust Bowl,” Louisa deadpanned. “He’s fucking ancient.”

You glared back at her. “Okay, enough. What’s your real problem, huh? I mean really.”

Louisa let out another sigh. Her hands went to her hips. You hadn’t had a chance to tell her, but she looked pretty tonight too in her black dress. It flared at the waist and reached her knees, and she’d paired it with some chunky red heels. She was a little taller than you normally, but not by much. As the older sister, you enjoyed finally being taller than her for once in your higher heels.

Still, you were annoyed with her right now. You sensed she had something deeper against Ben, and it wasn’t all about his age. When she eventually answered, it just confirmed your suspicions.

“He’s dangerous,” she said at last. “He’s so fucking dangerous.”

That disheartened you. Your lips pressed, and you held onto your own arms a bit tighter.

“Not to me,” you replied. Louisa’s frown deepened as her brows knitted together.

“Especially to you,” she said. “He kidnapped you.”

You gave a wan smile. “Not technically.”

That had been one of his subordinates, who’d taken you outside of Ben’s orders…

It was a long and complicated story, but basically, it had worked out for both of you in the end.

Louisa gave you a more incredulous look. “He’s got an atomic bomb in his chest.”

“He’s working on controlling it,” you insisted. “He’s gotten a lot better!”

Louisa threw her hands upward in exasperation and turned to leave you in the hall. You stopped her with a hand on her arm.

“Look, I get it,” you said, meeting her gaze directly. “You’re worried about me. But here’s the thing…you don’t have to do that. I’m the one who looks out for you, remember?”

Once again, she frowned at you. “Why, just because you’re older?”

You gave her a teasing smile.

“Well, yeah.” Still, you grasped both of her arms, now crossed in front of her chest. “Lou, haven’t I always taken care of you?”

“Okay, yeah,” she said. “But who takes care of you? Who makes sure you’re all right?”

You gave her a patient, if knowing look.

She grimaced. “Oh, don’t you say it.”

“Honestly, Lou. He does take care of me…he makes me feel safe.” You bit your lip, and your eyes began to well up with the sting of tears, emotion rising in your throat. “I’ve never had that. Ever.”

Your sister released a heavy sigh. “I know.”

“Then can you actually try to get to know him? Please?” You rubbed her arms, pleading with your eyes. You wanted your family to like your boyfriend, but it was so much more than that. You didn’t want to have separate worlds. Everyone in this house was part of your family, and that now included Ben.

The longer she looked into your imploring eyes, Louisa’s grimace lightened, just a touch. “I’ll think about it.”

You smiled then, warmly as you hugged your sister. You then kissed her on the cheek, leaving the bright red imprint of your lipstick.

When you went back into the kitchen, your better mood was ruined pretty quickly by watching your aunt run your mother around the kitchen with demands and instructions. You decided to jump into the fray, taking a large serving bowl out of Marie’s hands before it tipped over.

“How’s the ham doing?” you asked.

“About half an hour or so, I think,” Trina said. “Maybe forty-five.”

“Okay, and what’s left?”

“Let’s get the desserts ready.”

While your help sorely relieved your mother, it was actually a terrible idea for your mental health. When you could take no more of Trina’s irritating, commanding voice in your ear, you had to take a breath (as well as down a full glass of wine).

You wordlessly asked Louisa to tag in for you before you traveled into the living room.

There you found Ben immersed in a baseball game with Grandpa George. Both men only looked up at you when you stood near the couch with crossed arms. Your nerves were on edge, your blood still just short of boiling, but you took pains to look pleasant.

“Who’s winning?” you asked.

Ben quirked a smile at the sight of you, while George gave his more freely.

“5 to 3. It’s close on the Mets,” he said. You realized then that you hadn’t even hugged your grandfather yet.

“Oh my God, Grandpa! I’m so sorry,” you said with a frown. You went over to hug him. “Trina has me all out of whack.”

George chuckled and patted you warmly on the back. “Why do you think I’m out here?”

You sighed with a wry smile. You then turned to Great Aunt Sylvia, who was still passed out in the recliner.

“Aunt Sylvia?” you tried. You went over to her and touched her arm.

“Leave her be, hun,” George told you. “Only the smell of food’ll rouse that woman.”

Your smile deepened. Then you turned to Ben, who’d been watching you with reserved interest. He’d never seen you with the rest of your family before.

You went to him on his side of the couch and asked, in a tone deceptively light, “How about a tour of the house? You haven’t even seen it all.”

He could admit, it was a fairly big house for just your mother, but he was more interested in the game.

“I’m watching this,” he said, gesturing at the screen. However, when he saw the tight press of your lips, he knew something wasn’t right with you. You were trying to tell him something with your eyes, he just didn’t know what.

You leaned down, subtly grabbing his thigh.

“I need you,” you whispered in his ear. “Now.”

The tone of your voice set his blood alight with new interest.

Ben’s resulting smirk was subtle, but edged.

“A tour it is.”

AN: Just when you thought you'd seen the last of my BMD cliffhangers. 😏

How'd you like Ben's introduction to his girlfriend's family? I also sincerely hope you don't have an "Aunt Trina" in your life. 🙄

Next Time:

He grabbed your arms and meant to kiss you, but you stopped him with your fingers against his lips.

“Two rules: this lipstick doesn’t come off. And no. Ripping. The dress.”

Soldier Boy Masterlist

Main Masterlist

Tag List:

@deans-spinster-witch @this-is-me19 @waynes-multiverse @mrsjenniferwinchester @samanddeaninatrenchcoat @spalady26

@spnwoman @syrma-sensei @wirdbeimaufhebengebunden @muhahaha303 @123passwort

@xoxovienna @katherineann814 @lollag0w0 @globetrotter28 @nancymcl @ashbatz @secretdreamlandmentality @kristophalis @wonderland2022 @emily-winchester @shelh93 @sl33pylilbunny @spoonmynoodle @chernayawidow

@buckybarnes-1917 @asgardprincess97 @sometimes-i-sing @itsyellow @karnellius @kimberleymjw @is-this-a-febreze-commercial @iamsapphine @sanscas @se-fucking-hun @lassie-bird @jessjad @yepimthatperson @fromcaintodean @stoneyggirl2

@spnfamily-j2 @im-a-slut-for-fluff @lacilou @venicesem @mimaria420 @vanillawhiskeyflavoredkisses @tearsfortheyouth @agalliasi @chriszgirl92

#love actually #part 2 #soldier boy #soldier boy x reader

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theleftovertaco · 4 years ago

Text

The Boys in Heels

I decided to go ahead with this hc. I have so many opinions about the boys in heels.

in our lineup today is Fred, George, Draco, Neville, Ron, Harry, and Cedric and Oliver have been added!

Fred

Fred saw you walking around in heels during a school ball and he loved them

Like loved them

Baby boy was simping over you in these pretty sandal shoes, he liked how your legs looked in them

Fred is already a very tall boi, but he still wanted to wear heels

So you dug out that same pair of blue heels and enlarged them slightly to fit his feet

Boy also wanted to paint his toenails to match so why not

He stood up and immediately fell over and then you nearly did laughing

“HELP ME UP!” “AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

He grabbed onto your arm and slowly stood up and then taught himself to walk in heels

He looked at himself in your mirror and just started beaming

Spent about ten minutes just looking at his legs

He started strutting around the common room in the heels

After this you got him his own pair in red

George

Georgie was going on a date with you

You walked down from the girls dorms in a pair of pastel yellow heels

George is a softie by nature so he swooned

And he was way into it

“Love you’re so much taller! How do you walk in them?”

He asks if he can wear a pair of yours a couple weeks later.

So you find an older pair of pink heels and enlarge them

He tries them on and immediately does that dinosaur walk that people do when they first wear heels

His legs are all bent and he looks like a baby giraffe trying to walk for the first time so you narrate it like the old BBC documentary you and him watched together

“The baby giraffe stumbles and falters before-” “SHUT UP YOU”RE MEAN- OH SHIT I THINK IT GOT IT!” “The baby giraffe is successful.” “Must you taunt me?”

You two start dancing around the common room to old music and after he decides he wants to start wearing them often

Eventually when he and his brother open WWW he wears heels on the first day to boost his confidence

The first pair you get him is a set of pastel pink heels and he wears them so much the heel just snaps off at some point

Draco

He saw you in heels before he even really knew you

You had that whole badass aesthetic and wore those high knee style heels

He admired how badass you looked

So he actually went and just bought a similar pair himself a few months after you were together

He surprised you a couple weeks later

“What do you think, love?” “You look fantastic!”

Maybe it’s the whole rich pureblood thing, where they teach him to act and talk but he actually already knows how to walk and act in heels

It was actually Narcissa, he observed how his mother walked and started to model it

Draco doesn’t wear them super often, he just pulls them out when he doesn’t feel as confident

Probably pulls out a skirt as well

But not too often since he finds heels to painful

“Wimp.” “Hey, I’m delicate.”

Over time, he buys other heels, mostly in black and green

But he always comes back to those first ones

Neville

Neville was always a little intimidated by you

You wore these dark combat boot style heels

And you were always so confident

You just put out that vibe of “Do not fuck with me”

Whereas his vibe was like “Hey, you could probably pour soup in my lap and I’d apologize to you”

So even after he’d gotten to know you it took a long time

You brought it up because he was always staring at yours

He was very sheepish, but eventually agreed

Now, contrary to popular belief, Neville is actually pretty tall, so he didn’t want anything that would make him stand out too much

So you found a tiny little kitten heel style thing

He was insecure about the noise the heels made, so you placed a spell so that the heels wouldn’t make the little click clacking sound when he walked

First day he wore them, he looked insecure, so you convinced a couple other girls to walk around with the two of you and all of you shower him with compliments

He’s bright red the whole day but the smile never leaves his face

After, he gets more confident and starts buying more heels

Harry

Harry saw a pair of red pumps in Hogsmeade by himself and bought a pair saying they were for his girlfriend

“You’re girlfriend has big feet” “You’ve got something to say about my girlfriend?” “No, mate, sorry.”

He kept them at the bottom of his trunk, he never thought you would find it

You were helping him reorganize his trunk and he completely forgot it was there

You pulled them out and he snatched them back almost immediately

“What are these?” “NOTHING! They’re nothing!” “They look like a pair of heels.”

He just stuttered for about a minute before confessing

“I thought you would have a problem.” “Why the hell would I have a problem?”

By the time you found out he’d learned to walk in them and eventually you convinced him to wear them in front of you

So far it’s more of a you and him thing but he’ll get out there eventually

Ron

Ron’s height is similar to the twins so he already towered over most people

But he was just slightly shorter than his brothers

And it bothered him

They always poked fun at him for it “how’s the weather down there” “I’m only a little shorter than you two!” “Couldn’t hear you from up here, sorry Ronniekins!”

So you offered the idea that he should wear heels

Initially he does it as a joke

Staggers into the Great Hall wearing six inch black heels and makes a comment about the twins height

But soon he finds that he kind of likes the heels, likes how confident they make him feel

“I see why women wear them. They’re painful as hell but I feel powerful.”

Over time he starts wearing them more

He rolled his ankle once though in an incident and stayed away from them for about a month

But when he got back into them he was as active as ever

But he’s never running in them again

Never. Again.

Cedric

Cedrics a pretty boy

We been knew

But he initially did it on a dare, you and your housemates dared him to wear them for a day since he had never known the pain of walking around for 8+ hours in heels

So he shows up to the first school dance of the year in 5 inch black stilettos and a suit

Big mistake on his part

He twisted an ankle 5 seconds in

You had to half carry him to Madame Pomphrey and you both spent the first 20 minutes of the dance in the hospital wing while his ankle healed

But after that he started wearing them a little more often

He was always getting dared to do stuff so he started trying stunts in his heels

It began with just running but he tried to jump and that was successful and now he cartwheels around the castle in heels sometimes and you are very worried he’ll end up with broken legs

You find him a pair of comfortable heels (those two words are antonyms) and he now prefers those

You still worry he will hurt himself

“Are you about to jump off that tree and land in heels again?” “No?” And then the fucker jumps

But sometimes he just wears them for fun because he likes them

Oliver

Oliver is a very athletic boy

He never really things about the idea of feeling pretty

But he saw you wearing those like sneaker heels that don’t really look like sneakers

Or rather he just noticed that you were taller

So he asked if he could wear a similar pair cause he’s always been a little insecure about his height

He’s not even short (not that it matters) but still

So you let him borrow them

And we walks into the common room with so much goddamn confidence

After that he wears a pair of heeled boots and feels 10 times better

He wears them to a quidditch game once and when he kicks a quaffle away from the highest hoop he punches a hole it the ball

So because of him heels are now banned during quidditch

But other than that he’s doing great with the heels

Wears them around an to class, the noise the louder ones make draws attention to him that he really likes

You can hear him coming before you see him

Although Madame Pince did not seem to appreciate that

Oh well, you win some you lose some

Besides, Ollies happy, and he looks beautiful, so what else could you ask for?

I’m gonna try to get the makeup one done during the weekend, let me know what else you want me to do! Send me an ask, I fully accept requests!

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quentineliot · 4 years ago

Text

Country music. Everybody's favorite. Right? ;P

I grew up in the Southern US. "The South" people from the area would more affectionately call it. I've moved, and done a lot to separate myself from not only the so called culture there, but also it's music.

And I LOVE music. Sang in the car to every song that came on the radio from the age I could make sound, to 21. My mom always tells this story about how I would cry as a baby unless Vince Gill was playing on cassette.

It's been around 7 years since I've turned on a country radio station. But because I grew up on the music (and classic rock like zztop) occasionally a country ear worm will stop by. And being a fully realized transman, it makes sense looking back at the lyrics of many of these songs, why I didn't notice sooner. And why telling my parents was incredibly terrifying.

Not EVERY song uses the "sweet girl with an overprotective dad that just a good ol boy wants to marry and raise a family with" formula. But it's a Lot of them. And if it's not a song about a guy just wanted to settle down with a pretty girl who can cook a good meal, it's about jealousy. And how (typically) women act in these songs is sung at the top of your lungs, about how she'll fuck up his car, steal his dog, or murder him and his mistress.

Miranda Lambert has a song about burning everything down and lighting it on fire. Which, is honestly a mood. But having been In The South, people don't think it's hyperbolic. There are a LOT of people that, if they were willing to bring Dixie Chicks back into their hearts, would be doing some Goodbye Earl's of their own. (Though, this song is a better example of justice taken, and of all the references so far, I think I'm most comfortable with this one.)

Take a look at these lyrics from Shania Twain's "Any Man of Mine"

"Any man of mine better be proud of me

Even when I'm ugly, he still better love me

And I can be late for a date that's fine

But he better be on time"

Okay so I'm with you on the first two lines. Great start. But you're saying you don't want your man to be late but You* can be late. Double standard and not okay. This was music I absorbed as like, idk, a 6 years old? I'd need math and Google and I don't feel like it. Moving on.

"Any man of mine'll say it fits just right

When last year's dress is just a little too tight

And anything I do or say better be okay

When I have a bad hair day"

First two lines, personal preference I suppose. I'd rather be told if I don't look good and change my clothes. Not everyone is me, a lot of people would much rather get "yes baby you look amazing!" always. Top two lines, good.

But ANYTHING YOU DO OR SAY BETTER BE OKAY WHEN YOU HAVE A BAD HAIR DAY?!!! Excuse me???!!! Absolutely not.

-------

I mentioned Carrie Underwood's Before He Cheats earlier. All you really need is the chorus. I don't need Google for this one.

And I dug my key in to the side of his pretty little suped up four wheel drive

Carved my name into his leather seats

I took a Louisville slugger to both headlights

Slashed a hole in all four tires

Maybe next time he'll think before he cheats

TLDR: he cheated on me so I destroyed his car. And while this song was a fucking Anthem when it came out, any woman who exhibited even slightly agressive behavior was Shut the fuck Down. Make it make sense. The song is about criminal activity so, clearly, anyone who does this should be charged. So why wouldn't people let women and girls show anger in a productive way?

Trisha Yearwoods "She's in Love with the Boy"

Is literally just romanticizing getting married at 16 or 18 or to your first love.

Faith Hill's "This Kiss" gets a pass but only because of "Cinderella said to Snow White, how does love get so off course?" And I thought they were in love with each other 😂

I can't even begin to unpack Fancy by Reba McEntire. And Reba is legendary, she's been making music since before I was born and I love her. It's just, that song.. Eugh. Yikes.

I've been trying to find other songs that absolutely put "go find a nice boy and have babies" into my brain at an early age, and I stumbled on George Strait and I know a few of his songs by heart. Oceanfront Property. All my exes live in Texas. Check yes or no. Amarillo by morning. I can't find anything wrong with any of his music. So it CAN be done.

I'm just salty about the amount of redneck inspiration porn I was made to sing as a child. (my mother made me sing at parties. I preferred singing alone) No other genre of music does this. Rock music isn't over here all "look pretty, shut up, and find a good husband" 🤨

I feel I should mention that there have been recent songs that defy this formula. ",This ain't my momma's broken heart" by Miranda Lambert. Taylor Swift has a unique writing style so I'm sure she's written SOMEthing that's not just trucks beer women muddin or whatever else today country is about? There's a couple about whiskey I think. It's always whiskey or beer..

Country music is like all about family, or something sad and mourning that loss. Heaven, angels, wings, gods watching over you, memaw is watching over you, you're not alone I'm there with you even tho I'm on a truck 100 miles away, think of me when you hear the wind blow kiddo🙃

Finally, to be clear, I don't hate any of the songs Ive referenced or pulled lyrics from. They were my entire childhood. Lonestar was my shit, I choreographed a dance to Shania Twain's "Man I feel like a woman" and did it in front of an auditorium of people, I still know every word of Suds in the bucket by Sara Evans and anything Martina McBride I've sung hundreds of times. It's beautiful music. But dang does country music and the south know how to brainwash people. It's scary.

#idk what im actually typing #there's a point jn here somewhere #country music #thoughts

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georgecunt · 1 year ago

Note

Some fun extras woo! (yes I'm somehow adding more into this)

I know George's suit is already beautiful but, having the fit from this satoko dress!! (i was resisting on using women costumes for the main post but here its okay).

Like, THINK Chopin baby blue to white top, beautiful rhinestones, black pants, and this serve of a slit, people would die (im still not sure if both front or back or just back tho but, u see my vision).

Sapnap!! I found my absolute favourite costume for him after making the post. Ifl this would go when he goes for a more modern style (his fave when he was in junior but he wasn't good enough to pull them off YET, now he is)

The jewelry, the turtle neck under it, it's flowy it's modern it's fashionable. He'd love it (also he could choose not to use the turtleneck if he wanted)

(funny enough, this is similar for what George had in mind originally for his exhibition costume before it changed)

Also if you wonder what sapnap would wear for galas:

1st from his junior era (he thought it looked better than it did my sapogie), 2nd one from the most recent (#ibelieve pls let me <- he could also have a tanktop under i guess)

Some dream shirts that we would've worn when starting his competitive career (my baby he's a beautiful and so potent skater but he's NOT known for slaying outfits until literally his comeback).

Also, on a REALLY GOOD ONE. The 3rd image is one of my faves for men and I think Dream would wear it really well in black but i couldn't find a way to fit it inside the story (would be for the next season short)

Finally, just so you know my pain, these are some male costumes I've had to look through to make this: (Nathan chen is here twice because he was FAVOURITE AT WORLDS he should not be dressing like a bowling alley!)

for when u wake up. What kind of outfits would dnf have in the skate thingie

oh god u don't understand how cool this was to think about but also! how difficult!!

Men costumes are usually either 1.plain shirt 2. tight black long sleeve 3. the ugliest thing you've seen in your life (with some VERY SPARSE outliers), so this was hard but here's my try at it.

So, I think Sapnap and Dream would have a kind-of similar style not because they do irl, but because of the music choices.

Sapnap's best programs are on (not urban) spanish/latin music with a lot of classic guitar. This means he literally has the option of going, off-white shirt or black top with very little shinies if at all. Red accents are allowed. He's the one i have more vague in my mind but fl Sapnap would go more on the black with golden accents, cleavage + golden jewelry. He's the most likely to wear a full black costume in competition. Examples: (i hate suspenders to death but u get the gist)

Now, Dream. Why are him and Sapnap similar? -> shirt as costumes. I don't think Dream would go for full body tight, but also I think that his outfits really progress during the years. Dream is a kind of a modern pop/ballad skater so I think he'd wear lighter colours and costumes that "look like clothes".

Examples (the burgundy would probs be dark green but u get it, also little cleavage because he's a coward):

For his comeback season though (after his injury and George coming to Canada for him), he does his short in a black tight costume with blue accents and his free in a off-white blouse that's more open and soft AND HE SLAYS (i love that shirt think of dream in that, his comeback, making a new record again my baby).

George now!! So, if he could he would wear full black loose tops and that's it, because 1. he doesn't like the feel of tight clothes 2. shirts are awful and he hates them. Problem for him -> his trainer/coreographer is Stpehane Lambiel who's a drama queen and would not let him. So, because his programs are very classic, ice-prince type of coreo, he wears loose mesh outfits (give the illusion of see through but aren't really), with light blues and turqouises.

Examples (the last one my absolute fave for him, ots such a famous one but,, look at it):

Now, for their exhibition. They dance together a modern song (think virtue/moire stay) which is more on Dream's repertoire that what George's would be, but they´ve been just playing around with that song so long in the rests from training and when it was only just them that is so personal. I think Dream wears a shirt very similar to this but with a slightly different fit (tucked in bottom, similar to George's light blue/white costume from before). Also, the back as it is but would change the front so it doesn't look like a fake jacket but as a unified one piece gradient.

For George tho, i think originally he was thinking on a loose full black with golden rhinestones (and that's what Dream thinks his costume is) but then Lambiel convinces him to change it so they match better. Makes sense with the lore okay. He changes it to something similar to note stellata (again, a classic) but with blue as the contrast color. The cut being diagonal down to his pants instead of tucked in gives it a more "dress" look than the tucked-in shirts he usually wears and the contrast works with dream's. The flowy bits give contrast from the tightness of the rest of the shirt and the silhouette!!

This one would've been designed to work with Dream's so the match would be better okay, it's hard to find men's costumes that already match for pairs

#fs.dnf

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tahitianmangoes · 4 years ago

Text

When George Met Clementine

Pic by @vanderlindeee 💕 Clementine met George only a few months ago. It had been a mistake, a stupid mistake on Clementine’s part. ‘You shouldn’t drink the night before a job’, Black Belle had taught her that. So why was she in a saloon, too many whiskeys deep the night before she planned on robbing a banking stagecoach?

Maybe it was nerves. She’d never done a job this big on her own before. Sure, she’d held up many a stage but this was different: six riders, the driver and a gunner beside him and however many men would be inside the stage - perhaps four. That was twelve men. Clem knew she could do it. She was strong, agile and smart. Not to mention she was a quick draw and a sharpshooter should it come to it. She was sure it would, these things usually did…

The whiskey made the doubts and the worries a little quieter in her head and maybe would help her sleep better.

The stagecoach came through the pass every Sunday, Clementine had been watching it for almost a month now. She knew the route, knew the riders - the same men every week, knew how long it would take-

“You drinkin’ alone?”

The voice ripped Clementine out of her thoughts. She’d been staring at the bottom on her glass, rerunning her plan through her head for at least the ten thousandth time.

A man stood beside her at the bar. Clementine took her time in looking him up and down; he was big- brawny - his chest and shoulders broad, at least double the width of her. He was youthful looking, his face was adorned with freckles and boyishly handsome. He wore fine clothes, a crisp white shirt unbuttoned to reveal the swell of his large chest just a little, form fitting dark patterned pants that were held up by matching suspenders. His light eyes met hers. He seemed to be enjoying the way she studied him, a careless smirk across his lips.

“I was.” Clementine answered, not returning his smile. This didn’t seem to faze the stranger at all.

“You weren’t thinking of leaving, were you?” He asked.

“And what if I was?” Clementine shot back.

The man’s smirk stretched wide as he said, “I’ve been thinkin’ about how to speak to someone as pretty as you all evening. It’d be a shame for you to leave now.”

“I’m sure that’s what you say to every girl.” Clementine said to him, turning back to her drink and sipping coyly now.

She felt her lips curl into the smallest of smiles. She never saw herself as someone outwardly attractive - not like some other women. She didn’t wear fine clothes, style her hair or use make up. She had no need for those things. So it was nice to get attention, even if it was from a stranger in a saloon who was most probably going to try his luck with every woman in there - like fishing and just waiting to hook something.

“Only the prettiest girls.” Came the stranger’s smooth reply.

“Maybe you should have come over here sooner and you might not have missed your chance.” Clementine said to him. She felt the heat rise in her cheeks a little as she spoke, not used to flirting, if that indeed was what she was doing.

The man laughed softly, he moved his head closer to Clementine’s, “so you admit I did have a chance?”

She could feel the heat coming from him. It was a hot evening regardless and that was only amplified by the man standing so close to her, his head next to hers so that all she had to do was lean into his lips… But that wasn’t Clementine. She shied away from him. She had already allowed herself to get distracted with the whiskey and now the handsome stranger.

His smile was unrelenting, even as Clementine moved away from him.

“What’s your name?” Clementine asked him.

“George,” came his swift reply.

“George what?”

George smirked, “just George.”

Clementine didn’t want to admit that she wouldn’t mind seeing what Just George had to offer but she couldn’t. Not tonight.

“Well, Just George. I have to go but it was nice to meet you.”

George sighed theatrically, clutching at his chest as if he had been shot in the heart, “would you really do this to me?” He asked her, “I don’t even know your name!”

Clementine stifled a laugh. “Wouldn’t you like to know, big boy George?”

With that, she downed the rest of her drink and she moved past him, out of the saloon.

She regretted it as she mounted Thaddeus, her sorrel Breton, and started her way back to her camp. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been intimate with anyone. Even if it was just one night with the handsome stranger, it was better than nothing...

She tossed and turned as she tried to sleep through the nerves of the upcoming morning, the heat of the night and what could have been with Just George.

****

Clementine woke up as the sun rose. Her guns were cleaned and ready - two semi-automatic pistols that she would hide under her dress. She didn’t usually wear a dress but it was necessary for today.

She had decided that the best way to do this was to perhaps fake being a damsel in distress who had twisted her ankle after her horse bolted. It was brazen but she knew she could do it. The safer option was to take cover on higher ground then pick the riders off but there was too many things that could go wrong - the stagecoach would be able to make a getaway while she sniped the riders and she only had the time it took for the stagecoach to go through the pass where there was enough cover to shield them from prying eyes…

Clementine made it out to the trail in good time. She shooed Thaddeus and tried to make herself look meek and weak, sitting on the ground and holding her leg as if it hurt.

She felt like she was waiting for hours but probably not. Her palms were slick with sweat and she could see herself shaking with anticipation as she heard the stagecoach rumbling towards her.

Sure enough and right on time it appeared in the centre of the pass where she was sitting, cradling a “sprained” ankle.

"Oh! Excuse me, could you help me?" She called up to the driver as the stage approached her and came to a halt. A couple of the riders came around front to look at her. She felt them eyeing her suspiciously and saw one of them scan the hills above the pass - that's where any sane person would have their backup hidden but Clem realised in this moment, that she was far from sane.

“What you want miss?” The gunner who sat beside the driver asked warily.

“Oh… Sir, please…” Clementine said, trying to sound soft unlike her usual blunt self, “my horse bolted and I’ve gone and hurt my ankle… You don’t think you could help me, could you? Just take me to the next town?”

One of the riders peered out at her from beneath the brim of his hat. “This ain’t no passenger coach, missy. We are on official business.” He put unnatural stress on the first syllable of the word ‘official.’

“Come on now, Clinton. She’s jus’ a girl. A pretty girl stuck out here on her own.” The driver said, greedy eyes not leaving her as he spoke.

There was a moment while the driver, the gunner and a couple of the riders all conferred before agreeing that Clementine could get up onto the coach with them.

“Can you help me up please, sir?” Clementine asked the closest rider. “My ankle’s twisted real bad.”

The rider dismounted his horse and went to help Clementine up. She moved as quick as a fox, grabbing the rider and twisting his arm up and around his back to disarm him. The other rides opened fire and Clementine used his body as a shield while she removed her guns from garters under her dress.

It all happened in a flurry, gunshots rang out clearer than a bell and the horses began to buck and tried to bolt.

Clementine made short work of the driver and gunner beside him - headshots were the most efficient. The riders were trickier and soon she had to let go of the body and take cover by the rock she had been leaning against a little earlier. As she reloaded her dual pistols, she heard commotion inside the stagecoach: “what’s going on out there?!” “It’s an ambush!” One of the riders was shouting.

Clementine popped her head over the rock when there was a gap between gunfire for her to shoot back. Two more riders down. She hunkered down though the following gunfire. They’d have to reload soon and then she could make her next move.

That was when there was a shout from down the other side of the pass. Clementine looked back to see a man approaching fast on foot. She was about to cock her gun at him, thinking he was part of the stagecoach but she soon recognised him to be the stranger, Just George, from last night.

“Don’t worry!” He called to her, “I got you!”

It happened in slow motion to Clementine. George barrelled towards the riders, shooting wildly with his repeater - Clementine wasn’t even sure if he was aiming because none of his shots landed. He shot the side of the stage coach and two of the horses threw their riders and bolted past George who ended up losing his balance and face planted heavily in the dust of the trail.

Clementine swore under her breath and she darted out, grabbing George by the shirt collars and dragged him back to the rock where they continued to take cover. Clem whistled for Thaddeus.

“What the hell are you doing?!” She snapped at George.

“Im savin’ you, ma’am!” Came George’s earnest reply, his light eyes confused as they met Clementine’s.

Clementine clenched her jaw and popped her head back over the rock again to shoot at the men left guarding the coach before she popped a bullet in George instead.

The large brown Breton was galloping into sight now. “Get up and get on the damn horse!” Clem growled at George who must have realised that it was in his best interest for him to do what he was told.

George hopped onto the back of the horse, holding onto Clementine as she kicked the sides of Thaddeus and they sped away.

Clementine didn’t stop until they reached her camp.

Never had she done a job that had gone so wrong so quickly before. She slid down from the saddle and stormed away from George angrily.

“Aren’t you going to thank me?” He asked as he got down from the horse.

Clementine rounded on him, her eyes ablaze with fury. “Thank you?!” She repeated loudly, her voice echoing off of the surrounding cliffs, “what the hell for?!”

“F-for saving you..?” George offered but Clementine could tell by the look on his face that he knew this was the wrong answer.

“You owe me big time, George.” Clementine hissed. “That was a bank stage and I was doin’ just fine robbin’ it on my own. I don’t need no knight in shining armour - especially if they’re as incompetent as you!”

“How much..?” George stammered, his cheeks burning red now.

“Four thousand dollars.” Clementine replied, emphasising each word.

Clementine held George’s gaze, glaring at him before turning on her heel and marching into her camp.

George hesitated before following her sheepishly. “I can make it up to you!”

“Oh yeah?” Clementine scoffed.

“Yeah. I-I’ll work for you… For free of course! Anything I make will go to you.”

Clementine sat down heavily on a small canvas chair outside of her tent. She looked up at George again today much like she had the night before only she didn’t have the benefit of the whiskey to skew her judgement. Aside from being so very handsome, he was muscular. Now, Clementine was strong but she definitely could do with someone else to do all the heavy lifting and manual labour… He seemed fit, too. There was no doubt that he would be able to work.

But Clementine had been alone for so long, just her and her horse camping all over the country… The thought of another person being with her made her nervous but it was also oddly exciting.

“Ok.” Clementine said finally. “You work for me now.”

“I won’t let you down, ma’am, I swear!” George said enthusiastically.

“Hmm, we’ll see about that.”

#rdr2 #my oc #clementine quinn #big boy george #rdo #rdr oc #red dead redemption 2 #rdr2 fanfic #writing

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goblinconceivable · 3 years ago

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oh ffs, i have feels but also head exploded

So basically someone liked a story I wrote a million years ago and mostly forgotten about, and when that happens I often reread the thing. (I can’t be the only one who does that...) Can’t say I’ve thought about Alex/Izzie since I wrote it, couldn’t even tell you when I stopped watching the show, though I think it was before her cancer.

Anyway I infected myself with feels for them again. And I dig the style I was using, 1+1 started a third chapter for funsies and should have stopped there. Because I did some reading and watched some clips and it’s all too much and when that happens I meta.

Usual mishmash, structure desired but no work put into achieving it. Classic brain dump.

Okay, fundamentals first. I am for now ignoring how Izzie/KH left the show. Because they had to exit her somehow and I’m sure Shonda was pissed at her, (or was leaving the door open for her return but I doubt it.) Haven’t seen it, if I needed to I could work it into my conception of their whole arc, but since I’m more critically hung up before that point, not worrying about it.

What’s got me messed up is that RIGHT AFTER Izzie promised to not go crazy, she... went crazy. Like, WTF was that about? I get that GA is all about the soapy drama, that is why I stopped watching. First couple seasons: brilliant. Downhill from there. But two things:

1) We never get to see these two happily together. One hot second and bam.*** Every. Time. Shonda allowed it for Meredith and Derek, but in my brain other couples got it for periods of time at the least. But these two, nope. And know what? THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN FASCINATING TO WATCH. I could delve into this and might swing back around but trying to hit highlights.

2) It set them on two different storylines instead of one. And Izzie got the short stick. Yes I can see how it works on paper, but not on screen. There are limits to the visual medium and limits to how much screen time they were given, which pretty much destroy the ability to nuance something this complex.

a) Izzie’s in her own world dealing with a ghost and is basically in two relationships at once (mental note to look for parallels with Alex’s exit and Jo v Izzie.) Except one’s a dream and the other is a reality that is still developing, yet she can’t give attention to. She has to fight every time to be there for Alex in the real world, and we don’t really get to explore her struggle. It often just looks like distraction and distance and him being second right after she firmly laid out that she cares about him.

b) Alex is in a relationship and is super happy and excited and wants the perfection he’s dreamed about to be real so much he’s overlooking everything that’s off. In his own little dream world I guess, but like, the whole thing skews into this being the story of Alex while Izzie is wandering in circles somewhere over in that direction, all serving the purpose of advancing exploration and development of Alex’s character. When did KH ask to be let out? If it was after this point, Shonda svcks. I mean, it is cool to watch him really blossom, but since he’s doing it under his own steam I’m left with a bad taste in my mouth. Because he’s not really in a real relationship. I want to see him get that, I want to see it for real.

***What IS interesting, I’ll admit, is that when they’re not together, they’re beautiful. Which is most of the time, so they gave me that. I’m a massive fan of the bittersweet, the star crossed, the never-quite-on-the-same-page, the nuance, the “it’s a deeper connection, a deeper love than just romance.” Thank gosh, it is time for excited thoughts. Because there is a strong friendship and mutual reliance and helping each other grow, pushing and giving hard truths and encouragement, and yes romance is woven through this but not the genesis and used more in terms of nudging everything along the path.

I love that Alex basically imprints on Izzie. I love that he loves her the whole time. But he’s willing to step back. He may get jealous and resentful and petty and scared and mean. But those are natural human emotions, Izzie gets them too, and they’re fundamental to his character and through those things he learns and grows. Izzie doesn’t make him. She entices him. Yeah, often directs him, especially at first. But at some point he’s growing on his own, in fits and starts, in reaction to his own emotions.

For example, when Izzie tells him she slept with George, he gets pissed, but also admits why pretty readily. And he tells her the truth, remarkably straightforwards. He reaches out to her a lot. And she turns him aside a lot. And he keeps loving. Even if romance is off the table. He runs after her a lot. Sits next to her when she’s upset a lot. Is understanding a lot. He’s different with her, and look I’m a fangirl, it’s a trope, I swallow bait line and hook. Which should be bait hook and line if my vague understanding of fishing is correct. I fished once, with safety implements, and still cried even as they removed the fish and popped it back into the water. (Okay I just reread to sort out where I’d gotten too and it’s hook line and sinker. Statistically someone will probably read this someday, you have my full permission to laugh at me. Anyway...)

The quintessential moment, the revved to 100, of course being when Izzie is clinging to a dead Denny. They’re all standing around. No one even looks surprised with jilted Alex talks to her. In a really caring way. And this is still fairly early on, wasn’t watching anything but their scenes but this had to be rare sight eh? (Mebbe?) And then he picks her up and sits down holding her and she clings and cries and like symbolism and could essay that but not going to right now because the broad relevant stroke is that Alex loves Izzie selflessly. And this is the pinpoint core of why I can buy his ending, because he can’t NOT love Izzie. I don’t think he even wants to stop. Though he can set it down in his heart and let her go and doesn’t pine. But he never stops loving her and it’s so many kinds of love imperfectly yet perfecly forged.

Forged. But also born. Stars uncrossed. I have emotions without words and if I try I’ll never get out of it to move on, so moving on.

(Oh, George telling Alex to talk to Izzie because she won’t talk to him about whatever it was. Isn’t is crazy that Izzie’s emotional squishy bestie goes to the emotionally stunted bad boy to help her because... it’s an understanding of the two-way Izzie/Alex bond, but also this crazy trust that Alex will show up.)

I love that Izzie isn’t blind to his faults, truly doesn’t like his faults, but has eternal faith for who he is and can be. She always saw him as someone with walls, once she stumbled on a lose stone and got a glimpse inside. She knows. She doesn’t always understand, but she knows.

Slight divergence from that line of thought, but its a great moment when they get together and he’s fairly transparently trying to make sure they’re in a committed relationship by dangling other women in front of her, and she’s a little ticked that he seems to be taking it rudely casually. Probably a bit of insecurity, but I’d say more that she has a long history of not reading him from the perspective of him loving her. Ie, 100% not recognizing that telling him about sleeping with George would hurt him. And doesn’t get it until he comes in and he’s dropped the swagger and it’s a “I know I’m doing something wrong and I don’t know how to do it right so help me” thing.

(Random memories of Sloan/Don from The Newsroom when she’s crying on the floor and Don comes in a sits next to her. I wuvs them too.)

I love that she openly leans on him, when he offers support she takes it. She doesn’t ask why, she accepts it and leans into it and is open to it because she trusts him because she knows him. The bits where she hates him tend to fall out of romantic issues, but when that’s removed from the equation they’re in sync. And the thing is, just as caring is fundamental to Alex’s nature, trust is fundamental to Izzie’s. And those two things weave into each other. Kinda like rats and the food button. When Alex reaches out Izzie she honestly accepts it, a “reward.” So he’s comfortable doing it again, and again. And when she does rebuff him he’s seen rewards come out enough that he doesn’t just scatter. And when Izzie trusts him, he rewards her with gentleness and care. She has the rougher time of it overall, because Alex is more screwed up emotionally, and breaks her trust more often than she rebuffs him, but that’s where Alex’s constant love comes in. But I cannot recall enough critical moments to have a cohesive proof, so I could be a little off base.

In my head Alex has always loved Izzie more than Izzie loves him, but I think my memory was unfair. There is a real constancy to Izzie’s affection, though I don’t think she imprinted on Alex as he did on her. She’s a different person, loves differently, has different issues. But my longstanding impression is mostly because of Denny. Who she truly did love, though the qualities of that love deserve exploration which I will not at this time attempt. And Denny loved her. The whole “side loves along the way” being a trope. Though usually “it ended in death/deathlike state” is given to the man and so THANK YOU SHONDA. Thinking of classics like Jane Eyre and Rebecca though I think both were actually crazypants first wives. And I do think female character’s side guys have a habit of dying, but it tends to feel more like a plot point to shut the door on continued love, whereas Denny remains a part of Izzie’s life.

At any rate, despite superficial similarities, Alex doesn’t hit the trope because his crazypants relationship wasn’t ever really about the woman: yep Alex got Rebecca, and Rebecca was crazypants, and it was a plot point to get him to the crying. Rebecca wasn’t love. It was never love. BUT

She DID, in every way, highlight what needed to be highlighted. 1) That he desperately wants a family. 2) that caring for someone, not just about them, is fundamental to him, (and ties neatly into him caring for Izzie all those sitting on the floor conversations.) and c) it’s not entirely healthy. Which is ALSO why thrusting his new happy relationship with Izzie into caregiver role is insensitive and undermines the relationship because it only makes sense if we got to see them both happy in the relationship first. And then we can see the quality of his caregiving change. But we didn’t. So bugger it.

I do LOVE how they let almost the whole next season play out he fallout of all that. Something taken slowly! We got to explore it. Did feel a bit drawn out tbh. But it just emphasizes the weight of it, I guess. Especially as it was a subplot amongst 100 others. This was their development for the season. Which was mostly Alex. But Izzie’s reactions revealed some things about her as well. Majorly dancing around laying it out for a close look and I don’t know why.

Favourite moment? Maybe Izzie putting her hand on Alex’s chest when he’s freaking out and telling him to stop, he doesn’t need to say any more. Because he’s trying to convince her of something, and she understands. And the trying to convince is shredding him, and she knows that. It’s a very loving and accepting “stop.” She’d already taken charge of the situation, for the good of the patient. She’d already taken charge because she knew Alex couldn’t handle it, he was too deep in something to see clearly. And she’s still in charge. She doesn’t break down and cry for him, or try to comfort him, he’s been thrown back into childhood and PTSD might literally be at play and what he needs, and she understands, is someone he can trust, who’s calm and gentle but strong and solid, to say it’s okay. It’s going to be okay. You don’t have to carry this on your own. We have it now. Because when we’re little and in over our heads what we want and what we need is an adult to take the burden. And still the physical contact is comforting, her tone of voice reassuring. She creates a space where he can feel safe and heard.

Ugh, rewatching, and we’re watching him literally devolve. Stages of grief ya’ll. He’s using every tactic to try and get what he thinks he needs: being able to take care of Rebecca. He’s in denial that anything is wrong. He gets angry when Izzie grabs him, to the point of threatening to hit her (though it’s fighting words and not real threat, and Izzie totally knows that.) He dives into bargaining. She’ll be okay if he can take care of her. He can do it. He tries to convince her it’s true.

By the time he gets home it’s depression. Not just Rebecca, but about his mom. And Izzie approaches him differently. In the hospital it was immediate and she was “in charge,” and needed to be in all facets, but at home, with the situation taken care of, she’s a friend. An equal. Which is what he needs right now. His sticking point later is the crying, so I kinda wonder how he’d react just to having told her about taking care of his mom as a kid. Right at the start he told that kid about his dad, (dad beating up his mom and him beating up his dad) while Izzie was within listening distance and didn’t seem fussed. But it’s ultimately a story about him being manly and protecting his mom physically. Which would be why it’s several seasons in before this crops up - waaay more intimate information. Probably all lumped into one, with the crying as shorthand. And mostly that his past is a fact, it’s his emotions he wants to keep private and deny.

He clearly did try to drown his emotions with sex. I’m not sure it would have worked with a random girl because he’s way too close to crying to do much of anything. And obviously doesn’t work with Izzie because sex is apparently emotional intimacy and I guess comfort for men moreso than women, but it plays out as a desperate attempt to get comfort in a safer way. Bargaining again, I suppose. “Have sex and will be fine tomorrow.” But, as noted, he doesn’t get that far because it’s too heavy and he rather quickly is just sobbing.

Which is a lovely parallel to holding Izzie while she cried on him after Denny died. Though Izzie had no qualms and no massive emotional recoil because emotions and vulnerability are normalized for females Izzie is a particularly emotional person. And an inverse of all the times Izzie is an emotional wreck and Alex sits down besides her and offers her support and understanding.

Could also argue that Izzie just saying “I’m sorry... About Rebecca. And your mom” - it’s an emotionally intimate moment. Of understanding. She’s acknowledging the two situations, and isn’t trying to do anything about them, explain or push or anything else. Just make him feel understood and not alone and sex is the way he can respond to that. How to process that in a way that feels manly to him? Also notably Izzie does seem to be going with it, and it’s aborted because he starts sobbing. And is still saying “Please” which is amazing, because he totally was never asking Izzie to just sleep with him. He wants to make it stop - the pain, emotions, probably reliving memories. But also... stages of grief. He needs to feel it, so he can accept it. He really just needs to cry, and grieve, and not be alone.

And it’s like... this is where their love story feels epic because it would look so different if they didn’t have all the levels and layers of love. Take out the romantic/sexual aspect. Take out the friendship. The trust. The family. Take out anything and this can’t play out.

Who didn’t love moments like Alex explaining to Bernedette Peters that men sometimes need to protect their manliness in the eyes of the woman they love. And they’ll do shit things to protect that manliness, but it’s because they care. Which is obviously idiotic and while romantic on screen is very much not so in real life, but this is fiction so hey ho. It’s such a wonderful foil. Because the situation here was not that Alex took his pain elsewhere to protect Izzie’s opinion, but that Alex completely and for a long time shut Izzie out to protect his manliness, which is entirely counterproductive but the only option he could see. He minimizes his experience as a “bad night.” (I mean, if you remove all the adjectives, he’s not wrong.) He’s protecting his own sense of manliness to himself. He doesn’t like feeling that vulnerable. He let Izzie get too close. He’s afraid. It’s all a tangle. And it pays off when they come back together and he’s willing to be more vulnerable, almost, and then enthusiastically, happy to be.

*But it does reference when he slept with Olivia when he failed his boards. So yeah, he’s done it literally too.

Backing up a step to revisit season 5. And actually they start out close. They’re all out in the cold waiting to greet patients and Alex grabs a blanket for her. He’s not irritated that Izzie keeps asking how he’s doing, just obviously in a bit of personal denial. And they’re totally messing around and lighthearted and look at each other with their heads really close and it begs some questions about the interim, though I guess they just haven’t talked about it deeper than “are you okay.” And per the Izzie/Meredith convo I guess they didn’t continue having sex (probably didn’t have sex that night either). Though the way Izzie looks at him as he leaves, she’s totally concerned that he’s not dealing with it.

Ah yes, forgot - so they just kept his breakdown unremarked upon, the superficial checking in is situational because Rebecca is a fact. They don’t talk about it, it’s fine. Pretending it did not happen. But it’s as soon as Alex thinks Izzie told Meredith about it that it goes pear shaped. It’s funny that his issue is the crying and he’s the one that told Meredith, but thematically Izzie saying “he’s opening up to me” is sorta the same. Also awww that even as she labels them friends, there’s this little glow inside her that they got closer. Emotional intimacy, what’s life without it eh?

So also 100% it’s high on Alex’s mind. That he did it, and so too that Izzie could betray him and tell others. Their relationship is so beautifully fragile in that short interim. It’s this little bubble where he’s okay that he was vulnerable with Izzie because she accepted it and isn’t making a big deal about it. And he does feel super close to her. But he can’t take anyone else seeing him in a non-manly light. For himself, and it works in terms of Izzie too if it’s an inside/outside situation. I’m a bit stuck and going in circles. If Izzie tells, then Izzie isn’t taking it seriously? Doesn’t understand him? I don’t think he’s even angry at her, if he looks weak to others then she’ll come to see him as weak? Halp, stuck.

Also so, I’ve seen it remarked upon that Izzie tends to forgive Alex when she maybe shouldn’t. But part of forgiveness can come from understanding the other person. Doesn’t have to be, especially for little stuff. But for big stuff?

Oh, and so weird but kinda cool that right after that rather self-aware conversation with Peters, he specifically lets Izzy see him with another woman. Were those scenes meant to be inverted? Or is he going into this eyes wide open? Trying to prove something? He’s hurting her though, is it intentional? Because cheating, by nature, is secretive, your person doesn’t know so you’re not hurting them directly, though of course when they find out it blows up. But the intention to wound is not there, it’s an escape. Proving that he’s really fine and back to his old self? They are not sleeping together so this isn’t cheating.

And even after that Izzy just shrugged it off. Popped in to tell him they maybe are getting kicked out, tries to get an apartment with him. She’s holding on to their closeness and friendship, despite him being prickly. And then... he smacks her or whatever they were doing which is back to flirty, and not meaningful but notably guides her out of the elevator before him. Though her barb about STD did hit him. Maybe he was trying to figure out how to stop being rude at her, and her continued friendliness was bufffer space until he could? He does say hello at the end, but who was she talking to about having no one?

It does bring up an interesting insight. It is true bout not something I thought about, that Izzie could be lonely, and actually does get as much out of their relationship as Alex ever did. They are incredibly close. And I think George might be married at this point, and thus no longer her “person”?

And then into the cryptic speak about them, while the father/son organ musical chair thing was happening. He’s looking over his shoulder at her, glances up, unspoken words yadda yadda. Follows her out into the hall when she leaves. The freeze out is shorter than I remember, but look, they kinda always keep communicating because freeze outs do not feel right. And I’ve moved to a blow by blow but Alex is trying to talk profession, and Izzie doublespeaks the “emotionally stunted” and he physically recoils and stutters like “yeah but no, that’s not what we’re talking about” and yet is now there and talking about them too. “Okay, ... I”m trying to be- I am, but this” WHAT is he trying to be/is??? Trying to not be emotionally stunted. Is emotionally stunted (or doubling down on trying?)

This is just such a beautiful conversation. Because Izzie IS emotional and caring but she has a mean backhand. Pettiness, ultimatum, she can smack back as hard as anyone smacks her. And she’s coming from a totally reasonable place, because he’s going hot and cold on her. And you can see that it affects him, and that falls out from that same pattern where he’s trying to tell her somehing and she’s not putting in a ton of effort to figure out what he’s saying, but is focused on her own needs and thoughts. ‘Cuz she’s hearing something like “give it up, you’re not going to get what you want out of me.” And he’s trying to say “I’m afraid I can’t be what you need, because I svck, please don’t make me try and fail.”

And they’re convo through parallels continues, Izzie calls Alex broken and is like “okay I do it your way my caring for you is pointless and it’s all fine.” Dad calls for son while kinda dying. I know they claimed different thought process but didn’t Alex call for Izzie when he was shot? And the payout from the series of exchanges: Alex is yelling at his standin to just step up and show he cares. With a hefty does of potential regret. It’s a 180, hoping that the kid does love his day, as well as getting emotionally invested. His relationship with his father isn’t mentioned, not sure if it’s meant to play into this, because he has previously acknowledged that he regrets losing his father completely.

(But then 10 seconds later she’s going to go crazy and by avoiding treatment it’s kinda like trying to kill herself and just... poor taste writers, poor taste.)

Cue a moment where Izzie knows what he’s trying to say and rewards it.

Enter Izzie being a little obtuse, I know I covered this but ending my personal cannon with them getting together - Alex literally says “are we going steady.” He’s literally saying “you tell me yes or no, and I will do that.” Of course he’s trying to say “I don’t know if you’re serious and I want to be please clarify and reassure” but one of those literal ones should have been enough. But then Izzie does always push him, not always intentionally, to be a little more direct, a little more vulnerable, trust her a little more. And the result is sooooo adorable!

And brings to mind when Izzie was trying to ask him out for the first time. And it went a tiny bit screwy and Alex flips it and asks her out.

There’s just so much awesome. *sobs* And there’s probably awesome in the cancer storyline too but I do not feel I can trust it and also it’s going to run full into Izzie being lame and leaving and all character development out the window? And I DO NOT want to see her trying to come back and Alex saying No. Because what will I see in the middle that gets them there? They always say yes. Eventually. And season 16 when JC is leaving the show is a bit on the long side, even if I ignore the details of the intervening years.

Throwing everything at the wall and maybe I’ll be done with dumping or can at least refine things. It’s the little speech I’ve only read and don’t want to hear bcause not sure how he did his line-read, but when he describes how he imagines Izzie’s life. In how much detail, how much he wants for her, what he knows she’s capable of building. He’s saying it to Jo and I’m uncomfortable with the idea he loves her, even if the letter to her does leak a “love you, in love with Izzie,” and I’m fine with Izzie loving Denny and don’t find it a problem Jo is still alive because I don’t see Alex going back but the thing where if he looks her in the eye he won’t return to Izzie and the kids is upsetting. And it’s just the kids and insta-family which is enticing. I mean, he’s not going to tell wife he’s leaving that he’s always loved his ex in a different way or anything. But he’s also not lying. He does mention to Meredith that he can’t go back to Seattle. He’d stay with Jo then out of... ? Halp. The best I got is he’s currently in a dream and if he goes back to his life, where he was happy, then he’ll lose the dream and it will disappear on him?

Slightly nicer is the elsewhere expressed (Meredith) idea that he’d set Izzie as unreachable. Thus, in line with what he told Jo, he didn’t want to contact her because he didn’t want to make it worse for himself, and his happiness comparison was completely excluding himself from the possibility of being part of Izzie’s life. It’s all happiness of them individually, not together. But yes, he always wanted to reach out, wanted to hear her voice and he never had an excuse? No excuse but curiousity, and that wasn’t enough to take a chance, but this was an excuse and he took it.

And the idea that he knows the right thing is to stay in Seattle, and being with Izzie and the kids is crazy, but it’s what makes him happiest, where he belongs. Meredith’s letter read first, so in that light, he’s overexplaining to Jo. Also exposition. References that conversation about his mental picture of Izzie, which I think was in the context of Jo questioning his feelings for Izzie. It scared him because... ? He focuses on the kids. It’s a little at odds with doing this for him, and a little suddenly ignoring the fact that he’s In Love with Izzie and I guess his mental image for Izzie was also his dream life and he gave it to her. Though where he thought her kids came from is possibly an oversight. Adoption?

Because it makes it sound like he’s torn between new and old love but the old love has is kids and wins. It’s a free pass to perfection. But he imagined a “whole life” for her, which is a massive investment opf time and emotional energy on someone he hasn’t seen in forever. I mean thinking well for an ex is al well and good but this sounds a bit beyond that, where she’s not a part of his life but a part of HIS life, believing she’s okay makes everything okay.

I am also willing to take up arms and claim that “I can’t look you in the eye because I wouldt be able to walk away...” doesn’t mean walk away from Jo, but walk away from Izzie. But that’s kinda tenuous. It just... it sounds like if he sees Jo he won’t be able to leave her, which puts her above Izzie (and even the kids, though he can still be in their lives) and that contradicts other statements, or at least their implications .

Though fair point that there’s a metric of who you’ll give up everything for. Izzie would for Denny. In a sense, I hear Meredith got her back in the Seattle hospital and she declined out of respect for Alex’s feelings. So in a way she gave up her life for Alex. And never reached out to him but did respond when he did. She picked up the phone. Maybe not knowing who it was, or they all kept their own phones. And Alex gave it all up for Izzie+kids. I want to know he’d give it all up for Izzie alone, and the life they could have had.

Or is it that he wouldn’t be able to leave Jo because, as noted to Meredith, it’s the right thing to stay in Seattle. And he’s become a man who does the right thing. And sometimes the right thing isn’t what we truly want, and to get that we have to be selfish. He one perfect thing is in Kansas. And it’s the family. It’s a family with Izzie. And his kids. It’s the whole package. If it wasn’t Izzie, the kids wouldn’t be enough? Also indicates that even with Jo was not exactly where he should be.

I’m also going with “some clues in various directions to satisfy various viewers but really offending most of them because this is all 10 years ago and people are newer viewers or forgot or hated Izzie when she left etc.” But preponderance of evidence leans in favour of this choosing what makes him happiest over what makes him happy.

ETA: he has a life for Izzie in his head because if she’s not happy, he can’t leave her where she is. He sees her as an optimist, the opposite of him and good things happen when you lean in that direction. He imagines her somewhere woody because that’s where they lived when they were married.

ETA2: Izzie didn’t notice Alex wanted to be exclusive. Because Izzie sees the good in him, but she doesn’t try to justify or explain things. She takes him at face value (mostly, she knows superficial crabbiness is just an unpleasant personality trait.) Until/unless she has very good evidence to he contrary. And THAT is why he has to take an active role and go to her. He does have to work for the relationship.

(Briefly skipped to a scene in season 6 (avoiding that season) and he actually says “I can’t be your nurse” which is so much character growth. Because I was afraid he’d gone full out into caregiver mode, which is not healthy for either of them. He’s protecting himself, but also pushing her to face up.)

CODAS

Watched Alex calling for/hallucinating Izzie when shot. Maybe it’s a Miranda thing? After freaking out right after she died, about how he can’t live without her, his breakup speech was essentially about how he realized he could survive without her. He doesn’t need her like that. And he was really hurt by the really shitty thing she did, leaving him. Thus valid conclusion that they should part ways and he’s not caught in the love/hate. But at some point after that, per hallucination conversation, he really wants her to... come back for him. To love him enough to not be able to stay away and come back for him it’s funny because the best way for her to love him was the respect his wishes and not come back. I mean she doesn’t even say anything after he asks that.

Interesting point “we married...” It’s a promise. He starts with “I’m sorry.” His breakup speech to her - rehearsed? He’s speaking from love and hate all blended and I think he’s a lot more honest and self aware, and he’s almost always been honest with Izzie. So his dying speech was also fear based? He’s scared, he’s in shock, like, physical shock. To when is his mind taking him? It’s natural to have regrets after a painful but necessary breakup. It’s been months but that’s still recent enough. So on the whole, inconclusive except yeah, he isn’t over her, but he admits during their breakup that he loves her “so much.”

Also love his “frozen together in time... and now we’re not.” They’ve both grown and changed, and so has their relationship, but there connection hasn’t. That hasn’t changed.

So back to his Izzie speech, which is meaningful intentionally as in 300th episode, where years later he was wondering still about her, enough to create a good life for her. A happy, rich and full life. He imagines it clearly and deeply enough to add smell to it. Smell is heavily linked to memory and emotion.

As happy as he is with Jo. Maybe it’s contentment? Something missing for each of them but not something he consciously knows? Meh. Back to frozen. He has an image, a full rich image of her and her life. It’s immersive but static, a snapshot. And the him who looks at that snapshot is the same him over time.

Letter to Meredith. “It’s about me.” Which is sorta back to breakup speech. It was about him, ending the relationship. He didn’t deserve to be left. And this is about him, not leaving Izzie+kids. There’s movement and beauty in this.

Meredith/Alex talking true love. So I’m torn. Jo refused his proposal, and the question is if you only get one true love. Did he think Jo was a true love, and if she refuses him it’s not? Or is he hoping that true love happens after they’re married? Given the constancy of his love for Izzie, from fairly early on, even if he didn’t call it that at the time I’m pretty sure it’s indisputedly much earlier than marriage, and she turned him down all the time, which would forestall true love worse, right? Can’t say as I’m not watching any Jo/Alex, cannot will not no need don’t gotta.

#alex x izzie #grey's anatomy #brain dump #meta #why couldn't i just leave well enough alone #and mess around with a vignette for funsies and a writing exercise #and not actually look at canon #because now i have feels #and am confused #and there are barriers to my feels #but it's okay i will live in my own little AU #and remember and know more than i did #given it was many many many years ago #i mean over 13 #right after season 4 started #izzex

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thekillerssluts · 4 years ago

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Nostalgic For A Different Future: Arcade Fire's Will Butler On How His New Solo Album Finds Healing In Community

When Arcade Fire released their very first single, it came with a B-side that hit very close to home to brothers Win and Will Butler: a recording of a song called "My Buddy," credited to their grandfather, Alvino Rey. In fact, several generations of musicians line their family tree. While those historic echoes provide joy and solace for younger brother Will, the world tipping into pandemic and protests over racial injustice reinforced life’s darker cycles. On Butler’s second solo album, Generations (due Sept. 25 via Merge), he explores the ways in which we come together in community both because of and in spite of those ripples.

The video for early single "Surrender" represents that duality perfectly. The clip opens with studio footage of Butler’s band recording the jangly anthem, complete with call-and-response vocals and gospel falsetto. But much like 2020, things devolve quickly, with closed captioning-style subtitles mourning the deaths of Black men and women killed by police, calling for sweeping political change, and insisting on prison reform. Though written long ago, the album holds a special ability to tap into something boundless and timeless while simultaneously feeling entrenched in the tragic pain of the present.

Butler spoke with GRAMMY.com about the album’s similarities to Fyodor Dostoevsky, the ways in which songs take on new meaning over time, how Generations fits in with an upcoming Arcade Fire album and the healing power of community.

Did you have any hesitation about releasing the album in the midst of the pandemic?

I'm sad to not tour it. If I could wait four weeks and then tour the record... but that's not going to happen. It's actually kind of a good time to put out music. It feels morally good! People want music, so let's put out music. I've experienced that, where people put things out and it feels generous.

It truly does. You've compared this album to a novel and your debut before this to a collection of short stories. Is there a particular novelist that you feel would be in tune with your work? Do you take inspiration from fiction in that way?

It's not Dostoevsky. [Laughs.] But it is weirdly more inspired by Dostoevsky than it ought to be. It's the tumult of the 19th century, the next stage of the industrial revolution and the gearing up of socialism and anarchism. It feels related to the pre-revolutionary thing happening in Russia. [Laughs.] It's not a one-to-one comparison by any means, but it’s just the deeply human things happening in a context of the whirlwind.

Was there an experience that led you to the feeling that it was the right time to deliver such a politically driven album?

Partly, I went to grad school for public policy. I explicitly went as an artist wanting to know what's happening and why it's happening. I started the fall of 2016, which was a very bizarre time to be at a policy school. But I had a course with a professor named Leah Wright Rigueur, a young-ish professor, a Black woman, a historian. The course was essentially about race and riot in America. And since it was a policy school, the second-to-last week on the syllabus was talking about Hillary Clinton and the last week was talking about Donald Trump. It was a history class, but in an applied technical school, so it's like, "What are we doing with this history?"

We read the post-riot reports of Chicago in 1919 and the post-riot reports of the '60s, the Kerner Commission and after the Watts riots, and we read the DOJ reports after Ferguson and after Baltimore and Freddie Gray. And then Donald Trump got elected at the end of the semester. This course really trained my eyes at this moment of time, just being in that state of thinking about what's going on and why it's happening.

Right, and the album's title feels like it encapsulates not only the history that you were learning at the time but also your personal and familial ancestry.

Yes, very much so. My mom's a musician, and her parents were musicians. My grandmother grew up in a family band driving across the American West with her parents before there were even roads in the desert. Her dad got arrested a bunch of times for vagrancy or for not paying off loans. There's something very beautiful about being in the tradition of generations of musicians. That's a positive thing in this world. It's no coincidence that I'm a musician. There are, however, many more poisonous things that are also not coincidental that are rooted in both personal and political history. All of political history in America has been geared towards making each generation of my family's life better insofar as they're white men. It's been very good to my family, but that is as much of an undeniable generational heritage as music, which is this beautiful and faultless and glorious thing.

Do you see that musical tradition in your family as storytelling?

It's never been explicitly storytelling, though that is part of it. It's more about building community or building a society through entertainment. Entertainment is almost too light a word. My grandfather and grandmother did all these broadcasts during World War II, and some of it's jingoistic, some of it's incredibly moving, some of it's just dance music for people who don't want to think about the war for a minute. It's all these emotions, but still with this aim of trying to get us all in it together–which in a war context is fraught. But there's that element of always trying to make a family, make a community, learning how to bind us all together.

That reminds me of the call and response vocals you've got throughout the record. It has an especially gospel-y feeling on "Close My Eyes," which is such a clever way to paint a song about surrendering to something bigger than yourself, that communal feeling. What was the impetus for that narrative voice?

Part of it is just rooted in Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. [Laughs.] Years ago, someone mailed us the complete Motown singles on CD, just every single starting from day one. Even though there’s some garbage mixed in there, it just feels so human with those gang vocals and great singers that sometimes they just pulled off the street. You get the sense of humanity. Having backing vocals be so integral instead of just having my voice layered feels like having a community and feels very natural. It's hard for me to not just rely on that every third or fourth song. [Laughs.] It just feels like that's how it should be.

Those multi-part harmonies must be especially potent live in a room. Do you write in a way where you’re already picturing these songs live?

We played almost every one of these songs live before we recorded them. My solo band played "Surrender" live on the Policy tour for years. But even before we went into the studio last summer, I booked a weekend of shows. We did the Merge 30th Anniversary festival just to have us feel it live and have that communication. And then we went down to the basement to try to iron it out.

Speaking of "Surrender," that song took on an entire new life in the video. It starts out with videos of your band in the studio, but then quickly and powerfully gets replaced with messages mourning the deaths of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor and emphasizing the need for prison reform. You never know what life a song will have when you’re writing it.

That song is very nostalgic in a certain way. It’s looking towards the past, but not wishing to be in the past. It's wishing that we were in a different present because we had already chosen a different past. So when I was editing the video, I started it as a "making of" video. But the footage is from January of this year—five, six months old. There's this feeling of nostalgia, but also 2019 was not good enough to look back at. [Laughs.] 2019 was also horrible.

It's not like I want to go back to 2019. I want to play music with people. I want to be having fun with my friends. I want to be making a record. But I don't want it to be 2019. I'm nostalgic for a different future. And as I'm editing the video, there have been six weeks of protests of people trying to build something, and it just felt crazy to not acknowledge that. It was what people were focused on, at least the people around me.

Do you feel like you'll be infusing more overt social and political commentary into your music going ahead?

I think so. It's important that it's organic. It's part of the world I live in, part of my family and my friendships. Before the coronavirus hit, I was very much looking forward to touring and had vague plans to do town hall meetings and discussions. It felt like a rich time to do that around America, and around the world. I'm sad to not get to do that, but I think it will happen someday.

You produced the album yourself in your basement, so were you writing with the production choices already in mind or were you writing while in the studio?

I had the band come down and record for a week. And at the end of that first week, we had seven or eight songs that could be real. Some of them were clear. Some of them are simpler, like "Surrender." Others were trying to figure out where they would go. "I Don't Know What I Don’t Know" was more trial and error, trying something crazy. We'd turn everything off for two days and then come back to it and try something else. You try to be surprised by it.

I love revision. Well, I don't love it. I hate it. [Laughs.] I love the process of editing, of making a version of something and then finding something that's either better or worse. It's fun when you work with an editor that you trust, but when you're just doing it yourself, you drive yourself batty after some time. But I still love versioning it until it makes sense.

It feels like you're not too precious. You just want to service the song at the end of the day.

Yeah. I try to not be precious. I feel like the songs mostly came out with a fresh spirit. I didn't massage any of them too much. I'm very conversational in how I think of the world. Nothing is the final statement. You say something and then someone says something else and then you say something. And you have to finish what you're saying in order to hear what the other person says. So if that means putting it out into the world without rounding everything off, to me that feels right.

The record begins and ends on the same burning synth tone, like history ready to go around the loop again. What does that synth tone represent for you?

Not to get too mystical, but there's something about the bass that is so embodied. There's something about a really powerful bass that is fundamental, something that just gets to the core. I wanted that core to feel a little uneasy. It's not like the hit at the end of "A Day in the Life" where it’s this clear conclusion. It's a little bit gnarly. It's a little bit not in the right key for the song. It’s something disturbing at the very core of everything.

What has writing and producing this record taught you about yourself?

I found that while I still prize quickness and thoughtfulness and conversational life, this record took longer and took more effort than Policy. It was way less casual. It was not casual in a very good way. I realized this shouldn't be a casual undertaking—even though it can have lightness and humor and breezy elements. Even then, the whole undertaking can still be serious and grounded. It can even be quick without being casual. In the past, I've fallen into thinking, "Just do something first before you think about it too hard." But this was a reminder that you can do something more thoroughly.

Were you writing these songs while working on the next Arcade Fire album? Speaking about intention, how do you compartmentalize those two sides of your creativity?

Yeah, Arcade Fire is always very cyclical. We record for a year and a half, we tour for a year and a half, and then we're off for a year and a half. I was very conscious to do this in a moment when I wasn't distracted by something else. I wanted to focus on this.

I'm still figuring it all out. Right now I'm making a video for the song "Close My Eyes." I have children, two-year-old twins and an eight-year-old, so the spring was just complete family time—net positive, but total chaos. [Laughs.]

https://www.grammy.com/grammys/news/nostalgic-different-future-arcade-fires-will-butler-how-his-new-solo-album-finds

#Arcade Fire #will butler #interview #generations

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dachi-chan25 · 4 years ago

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Are there any fairly obscure books, movies, plays, historical events etc. that haven’t been made into musicals yet that you would love to see made into musicals?

Well idk if they are obscure but I have TONS of things I would like to see as musicals. Honestly this question is so exciting.

First off I was gonna include "Como agua para chocolate" de Laura Esquivel but I found out throughPlaybill that is gonna happen so I am super excited to see how that turns out.

So yeah here is my list:

BOOKS:

"Mas rápido que el deseo" by Laura Esquivel. (This is a beautiful love story told from a dying father to her only daughter, and the way sound is used in the book always made me think how beautiful it would be to see it as a musical)

"Aura" by Carlos Fuentes (this one made me think how few "thriller" musicals we have and Aura would be incredibly easy to produce cuz there are very few characters and you wouldn't need a big production. It tells the story of a young man who comes to leave with a Window and her niece with whom he falls in love only to discover a reeaaaally creepy secret)

"Amor en tiempos de cólera" by Gabriel Garcia Marqués (This one is an epic and long love story, I think it has the potential to be as legendary as Le Mis or Phantom)

"Leonora" by Elena Poniatowska (this is the novelization of Leonora Carrington's life, she has a lot of contact with diverse artist of her time such as Miró, and deals w her struggles w mental illness)

"Duerme" by Carmen Boullosa (this one is about a young woman during Colonial era in México, she dresses as a man is quite unconventional . It's historical background is also super intresting )

"Northanger Abbey" by Jane Austen (according to Google there has been a musical adaptation but I would like it if this was given more of a SIX or &Juliet approach, I mean c'mon Catherine is pretty young and has these wild fantasies cuz she is such a bookworm they would be so funny to see on stage)

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden (this would be kinda hard to adapt but I just think it would be visually gorgeous)

"Middlemarch" by George Elliot (I think it has so much potential to be an amazing musical i just imagine the selfrighteous Dorothea singing about how she wants a pious and intelligent men who guides her and opposes her ideas at the beginning of the musical and then a reprise trying to pretend she has got her way in marrying Casaubon. Kind of like a "Thank Goodness" moment.)

"Foul is fair" by Hannah Capin (this one is quite a recent book, it's a retelling of Macbeth and it blew me away. It would be more of an edgy musical like Heathers, but the message is more about rape culture )

"Like a Love Story" by Abdi Nazemian (this one tells the story of 3 teens meeting on 1989 and bending through Madonna while fighting for LGTBQ+ rights. Ofc this would have to be a jukbox musical and honestly I can't think of a better way to make a musical w Madonna songs)

"The Queen of the Night" by Alexander Chee (maybe a bit too on the nose, cuz it already has a musical element, but honestly the story is just amazing and pretty dynamic)

"Space Opera" by Catherynne M. Valente (again quite a recent book but it draws so heavily from the Eurovision song contest, and it's fun and campy. Also why aren't there more Sci-fi musicals???)

MOVIES

"Ladyhawke" (I used to love this movie when i was younger and would love to see it as a musical)

"10 things I hate about you" (why isn't this a musical already??? The movie is iconic, it's a fun Shakespeare retelling, would have such fun songs)

"The lost boys" (ok so I know vampire musicals haven't fared well, but I think that's cuz the approach is waaay to serious, honestly this would make for a campy fun musical with some amazing costumes)

"Rocketman" (C'mon this writes itself. Like it would work perfectly for a stage adaptation)

"The corpse bride" (it already has a couple of songs and honestly it would be so cool visually)

"Twilight " (HEAR ME OUT!!! This one should only be made by Starkid cuz it shouldn't be taken seriously it should be a fun parody of the YA literature at the time with lots of selfawareness, and sarcástic humor. I put this one on the movie category cuz let's be honest the movies had some killer soundtrack)

"My Best friend's wedding" (I mean the Pretty woman musical was ok i guess but this one already has an iconic music scene, and I think the story work better for a musical)

"Dirty Dancing" (again c'mon why isn't this a musical but Ratatouille got so much hype on tiktok???? Like this would have gorgeous dance numbers, humor, heartbreaking scenes)

"Dangerous Liaisons" (I know there is a musical based on the modern adaptation "Cruel Intentions" but this movie was amazing! Like i think this version would work better for the stage)

PLAYS

"A Streetcar named desire" by Tennessee Williams (so there is an opera and that hillarious Simpson's episode but I really would love to see this one as a musical )

"El burlador de Sevilla" by Tirso de Molina (I am a fan of Don Juan Tenorio, but I think El burlador would work better for a musical, the ending works better and it's female characters are waaaaay more intresting and fleshed out)

"La casa de Bernarda Alba" (I think this would be amazing, I picture Bernarda as an alto the story is super character driven and there is a lot of internal monologues that could translate perfectly into songs)

"Turandot" (so this is an opera but I think this one would be an amazing option for a musical, the main themes of the show are love an revenge , ofc it would have to be re worked as much of the names and settings reek of Orientalism , like idk what Puccini was doing giving characters names like Ping, Pang, Pong but yeah it has the potential)

"Machinal" by Sophie Treadwell (this is one of my favorite plays, it's set on the 20's and I think it would make a great musical with a tragic ending we all see coming)

"Uncommon women and others" by Wendy Wesserstein (this is about a bunch of woman who reconect at a lunch and they start talking about their time as college students during the second-wave feminism and how they discovered themselves through it )

"Awake and Sing!" By Clifford Odetts (first off the title rocks so fitting for a musical, then we have the story of Jewish immigrants on the Bronx pursuing the American Dream)

HISTORICAL EVENTS

- I would love to see a musical about the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, like most productions back then were musicals and it would reintroduce to the world iconic mexican actors such as Pedro Infante, Silvia Pinal, Jorge Negrete, Dolores del Río, etc etc.

-A musical about the artists of the Italian renaissance. I would do this in the style/tone of Something Rotten!

-A musical about Leona Vicario .

-A musical about real pirates like Madame Cheng

-I know it's a Biblical story so maybe not true but I think it'd be cool to see a musical about King Ahasuerus, Vashti and Esther .

And that’s all I can think of the top off my head.

#stuff i would like to see as musicals #i took ages to respond to this #but i just kept going back and forth #dachi rambles

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tiesandtea · 5 years ago

Text

The London Suede Come To America (1995)

"Some days I wake up and I feel absolutely bullet proof," says Suede mainman Brett Anderson. "When I wrote 'So Young' I wanted a song that was like that... pure raging excitement."

By Michael Goldberg, Addicted To Noise (ATN), San Francisco. Archived here.

ATN was founded by Goldberg, who previously worked as an associate editor and senior writer for Rolling Stone, in 1994. It was one of the first online music magazine that offered audio samples and video interview clips with its editorial content. The first issue came out in December 1994. (x, x)

In the midst of a February/March club tour of America, ATN caught up with Anderson in Detroit for a frank chat about naked men in dog collars, the New British Invasion, the Sex Pistols, and his drug(s) of choice.

Suede leader Brett Anderson is a wisp of a man, who claims not to court controversy despite provocative album cover art and such lyrics as "I want the style of a woman, the kiss of a man." Yet he's caused plenty of controvery. Consider his comment to Details that he's "a bisexual man who's never had a homosexual experience." Sexual ambiguity sells, as has been clear since Elvis appeared on the scene some 40-plus years ago.

Suede bring Bowie's Ziggy Stardust sound (and androgyny) into the '90s. These Brits know how to make hits. "So Young," "The Drowners," "Metal Mickey," and "Animal Nitrate" were brash, infectious pop confections that begged to blast from car radios. They flew up the charts in Britain upon release.

Dog Man Star, the group's second album, is a song suite, an hour of metallic bang-a-gong rockers and ethereal ballads. Anderson can sing as trashy as the late Marc Bolan, but he can also hold his own crooning with the likes of George Michael or, going back some decades, Bing Crosby. And he's not afraid to go against conventionin fact, he seems to relish it freely admitting that he liked Kriss Kross records and just can't understand the popularity of grunge rockers Pearl Jam and neo-punks Green Day and the Offspring.

Anderson and bassist Mat Osman grew up in Haywards Heath, a bland suburb located 40 miles south of London ("Quite a horrible little place," Anderson told one reporter). His father took odd jobs; in recent years he's driven a taxi. His mother died of cancer in 1989. His father was a fan of Liszt, going so far as to name Anderson's sister Blandine, after the composer's daughter. He first heard both the Beatles and the Sex Pistols playing on his sister's phonograph.

Anderson felt like an outsider from as early as he can remember. And he always wanted to be a rock star. In fact, he says he assumed everyone wanted to be rock stars, and was flabbergasted the first time he met someone who didn't.

Away from the raucous punk and post punk scene of the late '70s and early '80s (he was 7 years old in 1977, the year of the Sex Pistols), Anderson romanticised being in a band, and dreamed. Ask him his influences and he doesn't hesitate: the Beatles, the Stones, Bowie, the Sex Pistols, the Smiths, "and punk bands like Crass."

In 1985, at age 15, Anderson strummed an acoustic guitar and sang on the street for spare change. He says he played in "hundreds" of bands [clearly an overstatement] but eventually landed in London with Osman. They placed an ad in the New Musical Express which brought them guitarist/songwriter Bernard Butler, and some time later replaced their drum machine with Simon Gilbert.

By April of 1992, before they'd even had a record released, Melody Maker put them on the cover, declaring, "The Best New Band In Britain." Funny thing is, they lived up to the hype.

And they've managed to survive their 15 minutes of fame. Anderson expects the group to record another album following spring and summer tours of Asia and Europe, then return to tour America in the winter. The album won't be released until next year.

Addicted To Noise: I found it interesting that "So Young," off your first album, was about that feeling of invincibilty experienced when one is "so young," a sentiment more recently expressed in the Oasis' hit "Live Forever."

Brett Anderson: "So Young" came from our first flush of success and the desire of everyone around you to kind of settle you down. The desire of people to almost build a rock star career, and to actually take all the joy out of it, the pure joy you get out of being in a band that people love. It was one of those songs that I wrote with an audience in mind. There's certain songs that you have to hear sung back at you. One of the things that I loved about "The Drowners" [their first UK hit], it was written as a quite personal thing but the way the song works best is when you've got 2000 people singing, "You're taking me over." I did have in my head the vision of 5000 people singing back to me with "So Young." I love that. It was supposed to be quite anthemic, it was supposed to be quite stupid. I didn't want to be turned into some kind of intelligent, literate pop star, you know what I mean?

ATN: Why not?

Anderson: I don't think there's any place for intelligence in music. I can't see the point. Music's instinctive and it's natural and it's dumb. It's real dumb.

ATN: What were you trying to communicate in that song?

Anderson: There's just a feeling of absolute invincibility that you get sometimes, especially if you've been in bands a long time and it's taking you a while to actually convince people. Some days I wake up and I feel absolutely bullet proof. I wanted a song that was like that. That was actually almost pure raging excitement.

ATN: The cover of your latest album, Dog Man Star, depicts a young man lying naked on a bed. Who is that?

Anderson: The picture is from a book of photographs I've had for a long time. It's actually the husband of the photographer who took it and it was taken the day after they split up. It's a beautiful picture. It's something I've had for a long time and we've never made a record that really fit it, and then we did. It was one of those things where I took it into the band and everyone went "Ah, that's the one."

ATN: Both album covers are controversial in their own way.

Anderson: They're not meant to be in the slightest. You should see the original of the Suede album. The picture we used is actually cropped. The original full picture, the woman on the right is naked in a wheelchair and the other one is kneeling to kiss her. It's a beautiful picture. And we got the right to use it. But one of the things we did was to phone up the two models in the picture to check if they were all right with it because it's an image that's going to be seen all over the world and one of them didn't want it used. Which is fair enough. It's a twenty year old picture, or whatever. But I just liked the mood of it so we cropped it. But it wasn't intended to be controversial. I mean one of the things people always say is it's so androgynous. Which is really weird, cause in the original you can tell it's two women. But anyone who is shocked by two women kissing in 1995 is a fucking half-wit.

"If we wanted to be controversial we'd have called the album I fucked dogs," says Anderson. "It's fucking easy to be controversial and difficult to be good."

ATN: Yeah, but that's what's so interesting particularly about America. I've lived in San Francisco all my life and in San Francisco, as you know, is a very sexually liberated city. But you go to Kansas, or some of these places you go through when you tour, and it's like the Stone Age.

Anderson: I know. America is definitely like three or four different countries. No, there was no intention to be controversial. I'm not really interested in being controversial. If we wanted to be controversial we'd have called the album I fucked dogs. It's fucking easy to be controversial and difficult to be good.

ATN: In putting two women kissing on the cover of that album, what did you want to say?

Anderson: Nothing. It's a beautiful image. I don't give a fuck about things like that, what people will think. One of the funny things about that is you had all these people phoning me up going, "Yeah, we think we're offended by your album cover but we're not sure. Cause we don't know what it is." Oh, well it's a man kissing a woman. "Oh." Only kidding, it's two women. "Oh, we're offended then." No, no I was joking. It's actually a man and a woman. "Oh we're not offended then." It's the same fucking picture. It's not for me to think about. I'm not going to think about it.

ATN: But you got that kind of reaction to the first one and then you put out Dog Man Star. You're saying you weren't courting controversy with that cover?

Anderson: Not in the slightest. It's because we come from Britain where no one gives a shit. Really. And to think that a semi-naked man is in any way controversial is one of the great horrors of this century. You should have seen the original fucking cover for Dog Man Star, man.

ATN: What was that like?

Anderson: It's from One Hundred and Twenty Days In Sodom . You know that film? Passolini?

ATN: I haven't seen that.

Anderson: It's fantastic. It was the naked man in a dog collar snarling at the camera. That was a fucking brilliant picture but we couldn't get the rights to that. So perhaps we should have gone with that and then I could be discussing controversy with you. I don't think it's a big deal. There are people who are professionally outraged nowadays . That's their job. But no one's actually outraged. They just think they ought to be.

ATN: It's a position they take.

Anderson: Right. It's my job to be outraged by a naked man. And it's the woman over there whose job it is to be outraged by a naked woman.

ATN: Do you think there's a New British Invasion really going on right now? Can it be compared to what happened with the original "British Invasion" in the '60s? And do you think that that's what's going to happen?

Anderson: No I don't think so. It's all very well for a bunch of people in the media to get excited about it, but a British invasion is when British bands start selling a lot of records in the States, and at the moment British bands aren't selling any records.

ATN: It seems to me that some of the bands haven't been getting the kind of shot that they should get over here.

Anderson: We've certainly felt like that. It's always been quite strange for us 'cause the records have kind of leapt out everywhere else, all over Europe and Japan. The records just sell more and more each time. But we've found that American radio is pretty hard going. And radio and MTV are pretty much what make you over here.

ATN: You're over here, you're touring. Are you feeling like there's any kind of change yet in the reception?

Anderson: Absolutely. It's probably different for us because we've got pretty much a hardcore cult following over here. So we've never had a problem in the US. It's always been very comfortable for us. We've always had a very good time here. Whether or not that translates into anything kind of mainstream, we'll have to see. There's definitely a different musical climate in England and a different musical climate in America. I don't think the bands have ever been less connected. And I think that's a real shame. I think all the great music in the world has been universal music. I'm not really interested in flying the flag for Britain. I don't give a shit, really. I'd like to make records that turn the world on. That everyone wanted. I think the whole thing is a bit of a red herring.

ATN: What are you saying?

Anderson: The whole idea of British Invasions and American renaissances. It does away with the concept of people just making good records.

ATN: There are some really great English bands right now. Suede, Oasis, Bush, Elastica...

Anderson: I think definitely the British music scene has fucking woken up a little bit and realized that you can't just sit around and make cool records for your mates. But I think there's a long ways to go. And things are still pretty divided between Britain and the US. There's no way you could hear a record and say, "I'm not sure which country that comes from." That's quite a shame, I think.

ATN: One problem is that people in America aren't really getting exposed to the new British rock & roll.

Anderson: That's the frustrating thing. I don't mind being hated. There's loads of places we go where people have heard us and they despise us. Yeah, it's really frustrating to know that people just haven't heard of you. And the real divisions in American radio. For a while I spent 24 hours a day listening to alternative radio. I think it's horrifying [the way bands are pigeonholed]. I think it's completely un-American. And I think it's a real problem for a lot of British bands, 'cause a lot of British bands fall between the genres. I mean I don't think of us as an alternative band and we'd sound pretty exotic on alternative radio. But then if you try to get us on Top 40 radio, they say we're too alternative. The problem is if you don't immediately fit into something quite comfortable. American radio has become more and more compartmentalized, which is a shame because it's a totally un-American attitude. One of the things that Americans have always been respected for is the breadth of what they're into. America has been the place where people like Black Sabbath and they like Portishead. I think it's quite sad that it's actually being carved up, kind of like demographic radio.

ATN: Dog Man Star seems more introspective, with a lot more ballads and slower material than the first album.

Anderson: A lot of changes between this album and the first one are just to do with having the time and the money to make the record that we always wanted to make. The first record is filled up with live tracks and things we've been playing for a couple of years. And when you're starting out you write big storming rockers that actually grab people's attention. You're desperate to be heard. Whereas this one we knew people were actually going to listen to it. It's a bit more subtle. We wanted to do something that you could really just lose yourself in, that you could dive into. And we wanted to actually make an album rather than a collection of singles. We sat and wrote it as an album. You know, we wrote the songs in one batch and all of the songs are like little cousins of each other. And it's supposed to be a whole album that you can actually live in and from the minute it turns on you just get swept away by it. There are a lot of changes of mood in it and a lot of changes of pace. Like one long song with an introduction, verses and choruses and even an outro.

Anderson: But I don't think it's more introspective. I think it's less introspective.

ATN: Really?

Anderson: Yeah, I think it takes on the world a bit more. I think the record takes the world on, whereas the first one was probably what was happening in our heads. This one lives in the real world.

ATN: Give me an example of that.

Anderson: Something like "We Are the Pigs" or "The Asphalt World." They're not about just what's going on in my head. They're about the people around me and the world about me and the city around me and the country around me.

ATN: Did you go somewhere to write the album?

Anderson: I did. I was living in a place called Highgate. It's a very strange place. It's a beautiful little bit of London. It's like the 14th century or something. It's got like a village green and people have rabbit hutches in their gardens and it's between two of the fucking roughest bits of London. I basically just shut myself in a bare white room for about three months and I didn't do anything but just sit and write. It's quite an inspiring place because it's very quiet and very calm but you're seconds away from real degradation and squalor. I find it quite inspiring. I need a bit of calm to write. I don't need calm in any other part of my life. But to write, I like to just sit back and let it wash over me.

ATN: Talk a bit about the lyrics on this album, and the songs.

Anderson: I think a lot of it is very blank. A lot blanker than the first one. For the first one, I used to sit down and actually slave over them and change words and did like 50 drafts. But a song like "The Asphalt World" is really simply written and it's written about kind of what I did during the day. I wanted to write something that was quite simple, that was just about me and the people around me. Things like that and "The 2 of Us" are almost like reflections on the day before. Whereas something like "Daddy's Speeding," that pretty much came to me in a dream. I had a dream that I was sent back in time to save James Dean from the car crash. We ended up getting loaded together and I didn't bother. I could have saved him.

"Still Life" came from living in that kind of place, being surrounded by housewives and incredibly bored people. It's one of the strange things that people think our lifestyle is always quite frenetic but it's actually pretty much like a housewife's a lot of the time. You know, 23 hours a day it's pure boredom. And I was trying to write a song that was about me and about them. I pottered down to the shops in the middle of the day and would see these incredibly bored people actually become almost completely disconnected from life.

Kind of like fading alcoholic housewives. And "We Are The Pigs" is probably about the division between those people and fucking two minutes down the road, people living in Archways and the way there's no connection between the two.

ATN: I want to get your opinion on some of the other English bands. What do you think of Oasis?

Anderson: I think they're all right. Yeah. I don't know their music very well but I think they're quite exciting, which is good for a English band. I think they sound pretty natural.

ATN: You've heard "Live Forever"?

Anderson: Yeah, I think it's all right. A lot of the bands that people always ask me about I'm not particularly interested in.

ATN: What do you listen to?

Anderson: I like Beatles and the Stones. I like a lot of modern stuff, dance music, soul, rap. I like people who can actually sing. That turns me on. I like Prince. I like a lot of rappers because they've got kind of a hypnotic quality to them. There's too many people who are kind of singing essay writers. I'm quite turned on by people who have the power in their voice, whether I agree with what they say or not. Perhaps Jim Morrison or Nick Cave, who have a bit of authority, who have a bit of power to them. It doesn't matter what they say, it's the way they say it that's quite important to me.

ATN: Any particular rappers.

Anderson: Oh, Snoop Doggy Dogg.

ATN: Yeah, he's great.

Anderson: The thing is I don't agree with anything he says but you have to listen to him. I like Kris Kross as well. And people like Coolio. And who does that "Regulate"?

ATN: Warren G.

Anderson: I like a really smooth sound, I like people who can really sing, you know? That's almost disappeared. A lot of modern singing, a lot of rock singing and soul singing, it's all technique, all showing off. It's wailing and howling and hitting the high notes. I like people who can whisper in your ear instead of shouting at you.

ATN: Initially there was a lot of talk about Suede in terms of sort of reviving the glam thing and the Bowie thing? What did you think about that?

Anderson: I never, never understood it. I have no idea what was going on. I've always hated glam rock. I thought it was appalling. I'm not really interested in fake music and it was very fake music. I was a bit horrified by it all.

ATN: Did the Bowie references make sense?

Anderson: Oh yeah. I'm a massive fan. It frustrates me when people go over the top about it, but I think he's great.

ATN: What music influenced you when you were young?

Anderson: I suppose the punk stuff. If we're talking about what turned me on to music, what made me pick up a guitar. It was kind of like Crass and people like that. I like Sex Pistols and stuff, but I come a bit late to it.

"Anyone who is shocked by two women kissing in 1995 is a fucking half-wit," says Anderson.

ATN: And who else?

Anderson: A lot of tough punk. Real annoying your parents music, mixed with that, stuff my sister listened to: Beatles and Stones and Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd. And then after that, I suppose when I was old enough to buy records, it was the music of the day: The Jam and the Specials and Japan and people like that, just stuff you heard on the radio, basically. My musical education is not a list of cool, cult artists I spent years trudging around record shops to find. It's stuff you hear on the radio when you're having a tea on a Sunday night. That's where my love of music comes from, big pop music.

ATN: When things first broke for Suede, how old were you?

Anderson: About 23.

ATN: How did you handle it?

Anderson: It was easy, it wasn't that much of a problem. It really isn't. You can imagine what it's like being incredibly famous. [laughs] You can! It's like any other life, but you get recognized more often. You just have to wash your hair a bit more often, you can't buy as much pornography.

ATN: Look at the Kurt Cobain situation.

Anderson: That's a very different thing. He was a lot more famous than I was, and to his credit, one of the things that really saddens me about that is he spent a lot of time saying he was deeply unhappy with success. And everyone thought it was an image. That's one of the things that's sad about fakes in music. They actually ruin it for anyone who is telling the truth. Because if it wasn't for the fact that here's generations of people who have thought it's cool to be tortured, perhaps people would have taken him a bit more seriously when he said he hated himself and that he hated what he was doing. I look at like Sinead O'Connor now. I read something she said and I feel horrified for her, really sorry for her, because she's saying that she can't handle it and she's having a terrible time. And everyone thinks it's a joke, everyone thinks it's her image. And that really saddens me and that's why I've always tried to be blatantly honest in interviews.

ATN: Why did you call this album Dog Man Star?

Anderson: Its just three of my favorite words, really. It's just something that a lot of the songs are about. Almost like the three stages of man, the three things you can be. I feel very dog-like at the moment.

ATN: Sort of like the animal state to whatever state we are in at the moment to a spiritually enlightened state?

Anderson: Perhaps not a spiritually enlightened state, but I've always been attracted to people who actually think of themselves as stars, people who actually treat life like a film or a book. I don't mean in the sense of people who are actually in the public eye. There's a lot of people who have sold 60 million records who you see 50 times a day who don't have the faintest star quality to them, and then there's a lot of people working gas stations, they just have that aura around them? They just make things happen out of everyday life.

ATN: In the first song on the album, you make reference to Winterland, you make reference to introducing the band, which I took you to be talking about the Band, you know, Robbie Robertson's The Band.

Anderson: [Laughs] No.

ATN: That's where they played when they played their first performance.

Anderson: I was thinking the Sex Pistols' final gig.

ATN: But that's pretty wild. I was at that show at Winterland, actually.

Anderson: You're kidding.

ATN: It was probably the greatest show that I ever saw.

Anderson: I was watching it just recently. I've got bits of it on video. It's something I've seen about a million times. That bit at the end. [Starts to deliver lyrics in a monotonal Johnny Rotten voice] "This is no fun/ No fun/ At all."

ATN: People were throwing money and all kinds of stuff onto the stage. Rotten was just picking the stuff up. And the audience was just the most bizarre audience. It was a mixture of people that were totally into the band and people who had come to see the freak show.

Anderson: Yeah totally. I've always been fascinated by them and by that gig and just the way they managed to compress everything into a year. Or in the case of that show, anything you could ever ask for a gig in three-quarters of an hour. I just love the idea of a final moment. Of a band just being in the present.

ATN: The thing was, though, when you were there, the music sounded so great and so powerful. Some people tended to say, oh, the Sex Pistols couldn't play that good...

Anderson: Oh they fucking rule! We were listening to the album last night on the bus. If you listen to it now, it just sounds like the greatest rock album in the world.

ATN: Never Mind the Bollocks . . .

Anderson: Yeah. It's so completely almost like year zero it's ridiculous. It's like listening to Chuck Berry.

ATN: Exactly.

Anderson: Or the Rolling Stones. It's just a fucking absolutely great melodic rock album. All the things that people say about them are absolutely untrue. There's only one criteria for musicianship, as far as I'm concerned, and that's whether you can get across what you're saying with your instrument and with your voice. I'm not interested in any kind of technique or anything like that. To me, a great musician is someone that you understand what they feel when they pick up a guitar and there's people who can do that with three chords and there's people who can play entire symphonies and have never moved a human soul.

ATN: All these guitar players who can play scales up the wazzoo, but so what?

Anderson: The real problem is, you've got someone like Sex Pistols, they come along and people mistake it. People think that the way they played was what was important, people actually think that if they can replicate the sound as raw or amateurish as that, that they'll somehow be as great as them. And it has nothing to do with that, it has nothing to do with the level of musicianship. It has to do with the fact that they actually send an electric shock through you. And there's people who do that with incredibly complicated music and there's people who do that with incredibly simple music.

ATN: How old were you when you were exposed to "God Save the Queen" and "Anarchy . . . ?"

Anderson: That's the strange thing. I was just really too young. It was '76 when that happened, which is 20 years ago now. I was about 9 or 10, so I wasn't a punk. I couldn't get to any punk gigs or anything. So we just got these ripples in the suburbs, this incredibly frustrating feeling 'cause you knew you were getting everything like second or third hand and you knew you were missing out. Luckily they were one of the few bands where the records were so fucking powerful that it didn't make any difference, you could actually plug into it. Half of my life I've kind of lived the pop dream, wanting to be in a band, and it comes from that, it comes from being cut off from it and just having these little bits of vinyl which were my only connection to it. It's not like nowadays where any kind of fucking two-bit thing makes it, you see it everywhere. It was in the news. I can remember for a few weeks where that was the news. You know what I mean, the Sex Pistols.

ATN: Was it the Sex Pistols or what was it that actually made you make the decision, OK, I want to do this?

Anderson: It's one of those things that's always seemed completely natural to me. It's almost the other way around. I can remember the first time I met someone who didn't want to be in a band. And I can remember thinking it was the most bizarre thing. I thought they were making it up. I just assumed that everyone wanted to be in a band and a lot of people settled for something else.

I guess that punk was really important just because the first time you pick up a guitar, you're not going to be able to play "Brown Sugar," but you are going to be able to play stuff like "Bodies" and "Submission." I used to be in a punk band called The Pigs. We played these kind of like bastardized Sex Pistols and Fall songs about the countryside. I mean they actually connected you to music.

One of the big problems of coming from the kind of place I come from is there's no history, there's no music, you can't imagine yourself as a pop star. You couldn't say, "I want to be in a band." There weren't any bands. There wasn't a local scene or anything. The nearest big town is Brighton and that's never produced anything. One of the things about the Smiths I loved when I was growing up was just the kind of obvious ordinariness of them and the fact that they were making beautiful, important music and they were just obviously kind of like the square kid in the back of the class.

ATN: Haywards Heath is where you grew up, right?

Anderson: Yes.

ATN: But that's 40 miles from London. That doesn't seem that far to me, but it sounds like it felt like it was a million miles away from anything cool.

Anderson: Oh yeah, completely. It's near enough, I used to go up to London when I was 15, 16, but kind of as a complete tourist. I used to wander around the streets with my mouth open. I didn't get to do anything. I just went to wander around and soak it all in. I think that's quite important to be cut off from it, because you keep your romantic view of it intact.

ATN: You romanticize it.

Anderson: People actually from London, they're a bunch of fucking, cynical old farts, they really are. They've all seen it all before, they've all been backstage. They've already seen the downside of it and we never really had that. We still kind of actually believed in the band. And I think a lot of big city people just don't. They don't believe in the power of music.

ATN: About how old were you when you had The Pigs?

Anderson: The Pigs. I guess I must have been about 15.

ATN: Was that your first band?

Anderson: I've had hundreds. Bedroom bands. I was in a band called Suave and the Elegant. They did kind of Beatles covers. None of us could play. Just farting around. And then, when I met Mat [Osman], it was the same thing, we couldn't play. We had a drum machine in the bedroom and we'd do these dreadful fucking songs.

ATN: How come you parted ways with guitarist/songwriter Bernard Butler?

Anderson: He just didn't really enjoy being in the band anymore. There was just no point having anyone in the band who doesn't think it's the greatest thing on earth, you know what I mean?

ATN: So basically he got bored with it or frustrated with it?

Anderson: I think he wanted to do everything himself. He's very musical and he just wanted to sit and play guitar and write songs. And if you want to be in a big band, you actually have to work at it. You have to be singer and musician and businessman and politician and interviewee and all these things at the same time.

ATN: Do you worry at all that not having his musical input is going to affect things like coming up with material?

Anderson: Not in the slightest. We're working a lot faster that we ever have done.

ATN: And you like the material as much?

Anderson: Yeah, certainly. I'm really excited about it. The thing is, I'm writing stuff on my own and I'm writing stuff with [new guitarist] Richard Oakes and I'm writing stuff with the band. Richard is vomiting stuff out.

ATN: What makes you mad?

Anderson: I guess absolute waste. Just the realms of crappy fucking records. Piles of dogshit. You could get rid of 95% of the records that were ever released and no one would be any the worse off. I'd like to see MTV close down for an hour and go, I'm sorry there's nothing good to put on. Or a music magazine saying, we're not coming next week because nothing happened.

ATN: It seems like there's always been this classic tension between the creative sidesomeone trying to make great rock & rolland the record company's side, where it's a business trying to make money. And it's like they don't care whether it's the Sex Pistols or whether it's Journey.

Anderson: At the same time, it's very easy to just be purely musical and just sit at home all day and make beautiful records that no one hears. I can't get away from the fact that if we make a record now, because of record companies, 90% of the world's population can get a hold of it in a week and that's a fucking fantastic thing. That's technology being used in an incredible way. You can't knock it. If you're going to make a record to communicate to people, then you should make sure people fucking hear it. I think that's really important. I don't want to just sit home and say, we just write music for ourselves and if anyone else likes it, it's a bonus.

ATN: One of the reasons that there's so many crappy records is because the record companies don't know. They're trying to find something...

Anderson: They're doing a job. I'm very aware of that. Every single person you meet in the entire fucking rock-and-roll industry is doing their job and they're looking out for number one. It is a fucking industry and you've just to be completely aware of that. That's why you have to be quite a tight unit as a band because it's the four of you against the rest of the world. However much there's people around us who have our best interests at heart, at the end of the day we're the band and we know what's best. We have pretty much absolute control over Suede. We have more control than pretty much any band out there today.

ATN: Do you make the business decisions?

Anderson: Yeah. Everything follows from the records. Basically, when it comes to selling, we leave the record company to it. That's what they're there for. They're the salesmen. But we're one of the few bands where no one hears our record until we've finished it. And then we come out with a finished record, finished artwork. And we hand it over, we say these are going to be the singles, and we let them to the bits that I have no fucking interest in. Like marketing it.

ATN: When you handed a record over to them, have they ever come back to you and said, "Oh, we think you should do this or we think you should get that song remixed?"

Anderson: [laughs] They wouldn't fucking dare. I mean we listen to them. Every now and then the American record company will say, "I think this would make a great single in America." And we have listened to them in the past. But pretty much anything we actually care about, we do ourselves. No, no one's ever suggested that to us. No one's ever suggested remixing or anything like that. I think they know that it would be a terrible, terrible mistake.

ATN: You've toured America now, this is the third time?

Anderson: Yeah.

ATN: What do you think about this place, given that you've been here enough times that you have some sense of it?

Anderson: I love the place. I do love the place. There's a real openness to it that you don't get in lot in other countries.

ATN: What are some of the specific things that you like?

Anderson: I've had some of the best nights of my life kind of lost in strange American cities. Just being swept along. People are completely receptive to, I don't know, letting loose. Getting loaded and getting loose. Just because there's a kind of dumbness to the place. There is! Which I really like. Let's just see what happens, that kind of thing. England can be a very claustrophobic place, especially if you're vaguely well-known and I don't get that in America at all. I find the opportunities for getting yourself in trouble are vast here.

ATN: Can you be more specific?

Anderson: Not without perjuring myself at a later date. [laughs] I like the people here. I like the fact that people will actually try anything. And I like the way it's very fast moving. It really suits a band on tour. In Britain and Europe it takes kind of six months to get to know people so there's no point in meeting people. Whereas in America you meet people and they're like, "Hi, I'm Cindy, I was abused as a child and I'm a Gemini." And you're off, you know what I mean?

ATN: What's your goal for Suede?

Anderson: Just to make a string of absolutely great records. That was my goal for Suede when I was 12 years old. Doesn't change. One of the only things that doesn't change. To make just an absolute realm of fantastic records that people love.

ATN: Do you have aspirations of having the biggest band in the world?

Anderson: No. I want to be the best band in the world.

ATN: How did you come up with the name?

Anderson: It's just a beautiful, sensual word. It sounds really nice and looks really good. It's a sensual thing rather than intellectual. I've probably gone on many times about how Suede is the animal skin around a human body. But that all came later, when I was getting fucking [laughs] pretentious in interviews. It was just a sensuous, sensual word.

ATN: How did you feel about having to be the London Suede?

Anderson: It stank. I think it's shit.

ATN: What do you think of some of the American bands that have made it in recent years ranging from Pearl Jam to more recently, the Offspring and Green Day?

Anderson: I don't get it. I wish I did. I wish I could at least have understood it but didn't like it. But I just don't get it at all. I'm completely amused by it.

ATN: Are there any American bands that you do like?

Anderson: I like that Sheryl Crow record a lot. I like Perry Farrell, I think he's pretty cool. I like R.E.M.

ATN: You do?

Anderson: Yeah, I do like R.E.M. a lot.

ATN: What do you think of Monster?

Anderson: I think they got away with fucking murder.

ATN: Oh really?

Anderson: I understand it, though. I really understand it. It would be really easy to make another record like the last one and it's quite brave to make a record that you know is going to sell less. I don't think it's a particularly great album at all. I'd love to have been in the business long enough where people actually give you the benefit of the doubt whereas we're in the situation where people always assume the worst. We're always fighting for people to like our records. Whereas I think there are a few fucking statesmen in the world, like Paul fucking Weller in Britain, just because he's been around so long, if he makes a quarter of the way decent record, it's kind of like the second coming. Back to R.E.M., I just like the way they can be that big and that simple. I can't think of another band who've got that big and have actually used it to get simpler and more direct instead of turning into something enormous.

ATN: Speaking of the second coming, do you have anything to say about the Stone Roses' return after so many years of fucking 'round or whatever they were doing?

Anderson: Musically, it's great. They're probably some of the best musicians in Britain and they can actually fucking play. But one of the reasons I really liked the first album is I thought they actually had some songs. And I don't think they have on this one. But that's my personal taste. I like songs. And I don't think this is a very songy album.

ATN: How do drugs affect what you do?

Anderson: Apart from making me get up late for interviews, not very much. It's just something I do. It's not kind of a building brick in Suede, it's something I do personally.

ATN: Do you find it creatively stimulating?

Anderson: Very, very rarely. Not normally. When I wrote this album, I wasn't even drinking. I just locked myself in a white room for 14 hours a day. Pepped myself up with ginseng. Very occasionally I feel inspired by drugs, but not very often. And when we play live, it's funny, when we play live, none of us even have a beer before we go on. We played before 70,000 last year at a festival and we were the only people straight there.

ATN: So is it more a way of getting outside of yourself?

Anderson: I do it for exactly the same reasons that everyone else does. It's a good laugh. It makes me feel in different ways but that's no different from the reasons why millions of people who take drugs. I'd like to say it's some kind of creative elixir but to be honest, most drugs are incredibly uncreative. Cocaine is the least creative drug I can think of. Dope is fucking pointless. It's not a musical thing at all.

ATN: What's your drug of choice?

Anderson: What's the drug of choice? [laughs] I'll take anything, man. I don't really like slow drugs. I don't like drugs that slow you down. I don't like downers. I don't like anything that makes you fucking buzz off to a dream world. I like things that heighten....

ATN: In other words you don't like heroin.

Anderson: No, not particularly. I'm not really interested in dream drugs. I like things that light up your life, pep you up. Ginseng is my drug of choice. And Guinness. [laughs] Any drug that begins with "g," basically.

ATN: At certain points, do you sit back and say, this is amazing that I've been able to achieve what we have achieved?

Anderson: Regularly. Regularly I look in the mirror and say, I'm the luckiest man alive. Yeah, it hasn't lost its wonder for me at all. You can get worn away sometimes, but there's always the moment when you listen back to a track or the moment you play a great gig where you feel like Superman, actually feel like 500 feet tall.

ATN: In terms of the state of rock & roll right now, what's going on from your point of view?

Anderson: I think it's quite inspiring. I think it's quite inspiring in Britain and I think Americans seem quite inspired about the whole thing. I think Britain's producing some halfway decent records for once and I think people are actually astounded that Britain has risen and is beginning to get off its fucking ass. I think the American scene has totally been shook up by cheap bands and the fact that record companies are running around like headless chickens because money doesn't equal success anymore. I think that's great.

What I don't like at the moment is the kind of cult, alternative elements of it, the way everyone is playing to these tiny little demographic audiences and there's no kind of connection across any kind of cultures or even across a fucking big lake like the Atlantic.

ATN: When Elvis Presley died, Lester Banks wrote about Elvis and he said that Elvis was the last rock star that connected everybody.

Anderson: The really big problem is every band in the entire world is living in the shadows of the Beatles and there ain't going to be no more Beatles unfortunately because everyone knows too much and everyone has more access. So people can have music that completely fits them, and you end up with these bizarre musical sub-cultures that are just aimed at one percent of the population. And you never can have another Beatles and I find that incredibly sad. Because that is the blueprint, I think, for every band, for every decent band, to try and make records that turn the whole world on, records that anyone can connect with.

ATN: You really believe in the positive effect that a great rock-and-roll record can have on people.

Anderson: Certainly. Even if it's the most stupid record and it does nothing more for you than brighten up your day for four minutes when it comes on the car radio, it's still more powerful than the other art forms.

ATN: At its best, what do you think it can do?

Anderson: At its absolute best, I think it can totally empower people and totally make people feel like they're wearing a suit of armor and strengthen people and make people feel above the shit of the world. Even at its worst, it can be fucking great. I think a dumb-assed pop song, the dumbest of the dumb-assed pop song is probably more important than any fucking painting done since the war or any sculpture or anything like that.

ATN: Why do you feel that way?

Anderson: It affects people in a way that those things don't. It affects people in a totally natural, physical, emotional way. Not in an intellectual way. It's democratic. It's the only fucking democratic art form left. You can get it anywhere. One of the great things about music is it does belong to everyone and that great songs just come to live in the air. That's why I like the radio so much. That was my first introduction to music. Every now and then I turn it on and think, what a fantastic thing it is. Just that you can have these things all the time. You don't have to go to a fucking gallery, you don't have to pay anything. There just isn't any equivalent for any other art form and it's fucking cheap, music. It must be said. You can get yourself an original Suede for what, about $15?

ATN: Now, it seems like, in terms of a CD, it lasts for quite a long time.

Anderson: Oh, that's a typical fucking American attitude. They always want to know how long it lasts. It is. It's the only place I've ever been in the world where they come first and ask you at a gig, how long are you going to play? Who gives you a shit, you know what I mean?

ATN: I know what you mean. Like a shitty band could play for 3 hours, who cares and like 10 minutes of greatness....

Anderson: I saw The Jesus and Mary Chain when they played for 20 minutes and they were fucking incredible!

ATN: The first time they came to America they played at a little club called the I-Beam in San Francisco and it was amazing.

Anderson: I can just imagine in America someone going, "That was incredible, why don't you play longer?" People always want a fucking encore.

#brett anderson #suede #this is long AF but genuinely interesting!#the london suede #atn #addicted to noise

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