#incidentally i also saw near dark for the first time a couple weeks ago

[moveslikekeithrichards]

it took me this long to watch blade can u believe

[chibistarlyte]

this isn't really a headcanon but more of a pure prompt: since i just got home from work a hot minute ago-- bilbo and thorin modern!au see each other almost every single day on public transportation, who works up the courage to talk to the other first?

(i’m using the train as their mode of transport because i definitely prefer that over the bus. also, i mean they technically talk to each other when they say shit like “excuse me” but that doesn’t really count, right? sdhfksdhgfj)

The train was always so damn crowded by the time Thorin got on in the morning.

It was expected, though. His stop wasn’t until about six stops from the beginning of the line, and it was the middle of rush hour when everyone and their mother was commuting to work. So of course the train would be crowded.

Unfortunately for Thorin, he was a bit bulkier than most people and thus it was difficult to sandwich himself between other passengers and not disturb them by constantly bumping into them every time the train moved.

Today was his lucky day, he thought as he spotted a relatively open spot by one of the benches. He’d have to stand, of course, but that was no problem for him. He was used to it. He politely pushed his way through the aisle of people and came to stop right next to a curly-haired man with a book seated on the bench. Thorin held on tightly to the handle above his head as the train started to move once more, keeping his balance with ease.

The train ride itself was uneventful, as per usual. Thorin spent most of it just staring out the window and watching as the scenery slowly morphed from a mix of rural-suburban to a more urban setting the closer they traveled to downtown Erebor. He would have preferred to live in Erebor proper so that he wouldn’t have to commute for over an hour every day, but even for a jewelry designer such as himself, real estate in the city was just too expensive. At least the commute could be worse–had he decided to drive rather than take the train, he would have been stuck in standstill traffic for Mahal knows how long every morning and evening.

The train slowed to a stop at Erebor University, three stops away from his own. Thorin was busy admiring the artwork at the train station when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

“Pardon me, but this is my stop.”

Thorin looked down to see who had spoken to him and his blue eyes made contact with a pair of vivid green eyes. He was face-to-face with the man who had been seated next to him and wow, he had never seen someone so beautiful in all his life.

Oh. He should probably respond, somehow.

“Sorry,” Thorin said and tried to move out of the way of the curly-haired man. He received a nod in thanks and the man weaved his way through the remaining crowd. Thorin watched as he got off the train, watched as he properly shouldered his worn leather satchel and straightened his burgundy blazer, watched as the man headed out onto the campus and pulled a gold pocket watch–wait, a pocket watch??–out to check the time.

And that was the last glimpse Thorin had of this mysterious man as the train pulled away from the station.

.

The next day, Thorin saw the curly-haired man on the train again. This time, though, he was standing near one of the doors, one hand holding the handrail and the other hand holding a book that he seemed to be completely engrossed in.

Thorin could have sworn it was a different book from yesterday.

The man was wearing a navy blue blazer today. Thorin had thought the burgundy looked good on him, but the navy blue seemed to make his light brown hair stand out a bit more.

He tried to spend the rest of the train ride looking out the window like he usually did, but he found that his gaze kept shifting towards a certain passenger the entire time. At least, until said passenger once again got off at the university stop. Even then, Thorin watched him until the train went around the bend and the man was completely out of sight.

.

Day after day, week after week, Thorin saw the mysterious curly-haired man on his morning train commute. And from just observing from afar, Thorin learned these few things about him:

1. He definitely preferred wearing jewel tones. And blazers. Every single blazer Thorin had seen him in had been a deep, rich gemstone color of some kind. Being a jeweler, Thorin could appreciate that.

2. He seemed to be extremely well-read. He had a different book every day, and from the titles that Thorin had happened to catch on a few occasions, they weren’t exactly easy reads. There were even a couple he noticed were written in a different language, though he couldn’t discern what languages from a distance.

3. He was possibly a professor, judging by his attire, general demeanor, and where he got off the train every morning.

4. He was absolutely stunning.

Well, that last point was definitely more subjective than the first three, but.  Sometimes Thorin found himself distracted by the way the sunlight would fall on the man’s round face, illuminating his curls to an almost golden blond. Or the way his favored blazers would hug his shoulders just right. Or the way his gorgeous green eyes would squint every now and then on a particularly difficult passage in his book du jour and he would silently mouth the words he was reading.

Thorin had thought about kissing that mouth more often than he’d care to admit.

“Excuse me, please.”

Thorin mentally shook himself out of his daze and looked to the source of the voice. There was a small smile on the man’s face as he looked up at Thorin, green eyes shining with…something Thorin couldn’t discern. It was then that Thorin realized just how short this man was; he barely cleared Thorin’s shoulder.

“Oh, uh, my apologies,” Thorin said, ducking his head as he tried to move out of the way…but there wasn’t much room for him to move. He sucked in a breath and held it as the curly-haired man squeezed past him trying to reach the door. There was a small thump as the man descended the stairs, which drew Thorin’s eye.

A book was lying on the dirty floor of the train, still thankfully closed and bookmarked but the cover looked a little scuffed from its tumble.

Before the train started moving again, Thorin pushed his way towards the door and picked up the book. By the time he stood up again, the train had started moving and he damn near lost his footing before grabbing onto the nearest handrail he could. He held the book in his free hand and dusted the front and back covers off on his brown trousers. Once he felt it was clean enough, Thorin brought the book up to look at the cover.

His eyes widened when he saw the title of the book was in Khuzdul. Now that was a rare sight. There weren’t many books written in his mother tongue anymore, and this one looked like it had been published fairly recently.

Just who was this mysterious curly-haired man? Thorin needed to know.

.

Climbing the steps onto the train, Thorin immediately began looking around for the curly-haired man. He had to return his book to him, and also attempt to strike up a conversation somehow. He wanted to know why this man had not only been reading a book written in Khuzdul, but a book written in Khuzdul about jewels and metal crafting.

Too bad Thorin wasn’t great with social interactions.

And damn it, where was the man?! Of course it would be today of all days that he wouldn’t be on the train.

Finally, as the train began to move, Thorin spotted a familiar mop of light brown curls.

As politely as he could, Thorin weaved his way down the aisle filled with commuters until he reached the man, who happened to be standing this morning and holding onto the handrail with both hands. No book today.

Probably because he’d accidentally dropped the one he was currently working through, Thorin surmised.

“I think you dropped this yesterday,” Thorin said a little out of breath, his heart hammering in his chest and cutting off his oxygen supply. He held the book out to the man, who regarded it with wide green eyes that a few seconds later locked onto Thorin’s face.

“Oh, heavens, thank goodness you found it! I was searching everywhere for it yesterday…” the man sighed in relief, taking the book with a grateful smile.

Thorin’s heart leapt into his throat. “I-it’s no problem. I was hoping I’d see you today so I could return it to you.”

“Well, I thank you very much, Mister…?” the man trailed off.

“Thorin. Thorin Oakenshield.”

The man’s eyes widened again. “Thorin Oakenshield of Thror and Sons Jewelers?”

It was Thorin’s eyes’ turn to widen. “You know of us?”

The man nodded, his curls bouncing adorably around his cheekbones. “Oh, yes! Incidentally enough, I’ve read a bit about your company in this book…” A bit bashfully, the man held up his book, his eyes darting back and forth between it an Thorin a couple times.

Thorin cleared his throat, nervously averting his gaze to the window. His cheeks colored, though any blush he might have has was mostly covered by his dark facial hair. He tried to think of something, anything to say that wouldn’t make him sound like a socially inept idiot, but nothing came.

“So, uh, you seem to know who I am. But I have no idea who you are,” he said awkwardly, swallowing the lump in his throat.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I do believe I’ve forgotten my manners. My name is Bilbo Baggins. I’m a professor of Sindarin at Erebor University.”

Well, that confirmed Thorin’s assumptions that he must be a professor of some sort.

“So you’re a linguist?” Thorin asked. He idly wondered what other languages this man–Bilbo, what a nice name, it suited him somehow–spoke.

Bilbo laughed a little nervously. “Ah, I like to dabble, yes. Sindarin is the only other language I speak fluently, though.”

Well, Thorin could definitely help with that, being a native Khuzdul speaker.

“Oh, this is my stop!” Bilbo announced almost hurriedly, like the university stop had crept up on him without his knowledge. Thorin briefly looked out the window to confirm. Had time really gone that quickly?

“Um, thank you so much again for returning my book, Thorin! I don’t know what I would have done if I’d lost it for good!” Bilbo then laughed nervously again. “And it was very nice to finally meet you.”

Finally? What did Bilbo mean by that? Thorin didn’t have much time to wonder about it, though, because Bilbo was already squeezing past him for the door. “Nice to meet you too, Bilbo!” he called out. The professor waved to him as he exited the train.

The doors closed and Thorin looked out the window, blue eyes meeting green for the briefest of moments before the train continued on its way.

Thorin allowed a small smile to tug at his lips. He couldn’t wait to talk to Bilbo more tomorrow.

[lizziecq-blog]

i won’t let you go

the other day saw the release of an album that has likely flown under the radar of most people i know, but to me represents the culmination of something ancient and ambiguous, whose precise contours will likely take much more time to sound*.

If We Ever Live Forever by Longwave

historically, longwave are one of the least-remembered members of the so-called “class of 2001,” which was one of those vanishingly rare moments in music history where a bunch of bands in NYC got popular at the same time and thereby, for a time, held the rudder of popular rock music. this was the same moment that introduced us to interpol, les savy fav, and even the national, alongside a swath of much less memorable swoosh-gaze fluff like the exit, i love you but i’ve chosen darkness, etc. within a couple of years this moment had expanded and germinated into the “post-punk revival,” which in true punk fashion was capitalized on most enduringly by the brits, and blessed us with bands like the futureheads and field music while cursing us with boneheaded dross like franz ferdinand.

of course we’re ignoring the biggest driver of this wave: the strokes. is this it dropped that year (on rough trade, of course), and apparently it was so good that brandon flowers felt forced to rewrite what was to become the killers’ hot fuss from scratch. nice work boys! “mr. brightside” is still pretty good!

coming to the point: while longwave technically can’t be grouped in with the class of ‘01 (their debut had dropped the year before, and their major label “breakthru,” such as it was, had to wait until 2003), they had enough sonically in common with interpol and their derivatives to earn a spot on the dais; and at any rate, they were such good bros with the strokes that the latter invited them to open their first UK tour, which is what finally convinced the majors to give longwave a shot.

this is about where i come in. having joined my first band around the time is this it had hit - i’ve got my story about the first time i heard it just like everyone else** - i absolutely devoured it, along with the rest of the family. even at age 11 i was jaded enough not to credit the whole “saviours of rock ‘n’ roll” thing the critics had been trying to pin on them (also on the hives, and the vines, and the white stripes, and... man, rock ‘n’ roll is really just a gasping beached fish we’ve been spritzing with water every now and again for the last 40 years or so, huh?), but still it was hard to resist the lure of a bunch of drug-addled sex robots chugging straight eights into fake subway tunnels painted onto brick walls - like everyone else, i wanted dry, lazy, mechanistic beats, and i wanted them now. incidentally, this being the heyday of MTV2, this was the last time i can remember purposefully turning on the tv in the hopes that i might stumble onto the strokes playing something or other.

well, almost. because it was one of those times, maybe a year later, that i saw for the only time an ad for an album called the strangest things by a different new york band called longwave. 

the ad must have only been about 15 seconds, and i remember little of what it contained other than it was probably a bare sample of some of the band’s trademark atmospherics underneath the band’s name being repeated a few times. i couldn’t tell you what made me interested in it based on that, other than i was hungry for identity and i had access to kazaa, so now that i had heard of it there was no good reason not to give it a try. 

so i got on kazaa and the first thing i found was this:

not that it’s too surprising considering i was 12, but i hadn’t even considered anything beyond power chords by that point (my family had recently driven all the way to new york to see a reformed television play; i slept thru it) - and this was an entire song that didn’t use chords at all - i suppose it sounds a bit dated now, but this was an entire song that depended on textural variation rather than harmonic motion to define its structure, and how the hell were they even making those sounds to begin with? 

i bought the album: the strangest things. i still remember feeling my bedroom rock and scatter my bones when the first track hit:

i researched them on the allmusic guide; mackenzie wilson described one song as “just as charming as ride’s ‘vapour trail��” - who were ride? pitchfork was less enthusiastic, lamenting that producer dave fridmann, with such distinguished credits to his name as the flaming lips and mercury rev, would stoop to making something so bland - but who were they? 

this last piece was key as a matter of fact. there was no one i could get to muster as much enthusiasm for this sound as i could. my older brother, my only musical collaborator at that time, was positively venomous toward them, as he was with basically everything i liked that i had found on my own. but for my part i was done with power chords - i wanted to play this new thing i had found called “shoegaze.” and if my brother wouldn’t do it with me, well, i had just borrowed a cheap 4-track and orphaned delay pedal from my dad - it was time to strike out on my own. i picked up the guitar, started writing my own songs, and named my band day sleeper, peevishly dodging REM comparisons for about the next ten years:

and so: longwave, for all their virtues and shortcomings, were officially My First Indie Rock Band. i’ve extemporized at length about what i love so much about them elsewhere, but to paraphrase a good friend of mine who may have been my only convert across all this time, it’s not easy to be this simple and still be true. 

the real story i wanted to tell, however, is this one:

i grew up in the boston area, and the first time i got the chance to see longwave play live was when they played at tt the bear’s in cambridge (now sadly defunct, but i have a whole other trove of stories about being nurtured by this sweet little club). i was 14, and couldn’t get into the club by myself; thankfully my stepmom was able to convince my dad to get off his ass and take me down there, and even more thankfully, tt’s knew us both well enough to let me in the club (with X’s on my hands, obviously) as long as i stuck by my dad and didn’t try any funny business at the bar. i didn’t, but with my age i made a pretty strong impression on a very friendly (and very drunk) couple standing up front with me - i’m not sure how, but i’m certain they spread some kind of aura of protection around me that night, even if they mostly just gave the band a hard time for not playing any of their older songs***.

the show was stellar - they even made fun of the aforementioned i love you but i’ve chosen darkness, whom i had missed anyway - and fucking loud. and since this was tt’s, after the set the band stepped off the stage to talk to the audience. and my drunken friends introduced me, perhaps more loudly than the bar staff would have liked, as a 14-year-old.

and i talked to steve, their singer, and the first thing he asked me was if i played music.

i got to tell him all about how i had found his band, how it had inspired me to make music on my own, and without irony, tell him i had named my band after one of his songs. he spoke to me as an equal, promised to listen to my music, and actually fucking followed up. on myspace, no less! he even remembered my name, and spelled it right in his message!

point being, a new longwave record in 2019, long after the band’s commercial fortunes rather whimperingly flared out - this is, in fact, their second reunion album - is a big deal, at least for me. its very existence has implications that reach thru my ambitions straight into my identity, all of my ideas about what makes music important outside of the shitty capitalist structures it’s forced to accommodate, and inside them for that matter. all of my ideas about how music should be appreciated that often seem so opposed to how it is. not to mention how i feel about the standard metrics for success in our world, and how ultimately cynical and meaningless they are. 

because now, nearly 20 years on, the wider world has largely forgotten longwave, and is unlikely to be dented by them anew in 2019. but i like to think they they and i have been sustaining ourselves all this time on that same little trickle of meaning their music brought into the world all that time ago, and beyond that, neither of us need a reason to keep going now. everywhere you turn there’s always something there - that’s enough for us.

*the first song on longwave’s last album secrets are sinister was called “sirens in the deep sea.” get it? heh

**it was the video for “last nite” on MTV2, obviously. but the thing i remember striking me the most about it was that it was clearly an unsimulated live performance - the drummer knocks over one of his mics near the end, and you can hear the difference. fuck good charlotte - this is punk rock.

***a few weeks before, the band’s rhythm section had abruptly quit on them with no explanation offered. they had some new guys with them who messed up a fair bit - but this actually thrilled me at the time, because i got to feel like i knew the songs better than anyone by being able to identify the mistakes.

[wolfdenlin77-blog]

A Father's Day at the Field of Dreams

Music, Movies & Moods is a regular free-form column in which Matt Melis explores the cracks between where art and daily life meet. This time, a father and son go the distance to a ballpark in the cornfields of Dyersville, Iowa.

“You want to have a catch?”

It's a question my father and I have asked each other thousands of times. Many, many times when I was very young and less often as I left boyhood and quickly grew to be my father's height and taller. For a few years there, I'm sure it must have been one of the furthest questions from my mind, our ball gloves tucked away in the garage somewhere, dusty and out of sight. But leave it to life – and the little bits of wisdom we happen to grab hold of along the way – to send us back to the good, simple things. Out of college, in love, in debt, and trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life, I started asking that question again. As did my father. The best part about this particular question is that both of us know what the answer from the other will be: yes, always yes.

“You want to have a catch?” comes from Field of Dreams, of course, though fathers and sons have been saying it, or something similar, long before Kevin Costner ever started hearing voices, plowed over his corn crop, and turned the clearing into a ball field. Usually, when we ask this question, it means a trip out to the backyard or a local park. This time, though, it meant a trip to Dyersville, Iowa. That's about three and a half hours from my Milwaukee home. Add to my father's trip – at the wheel beside me – eight and a half hours from our family home in Pittsburgh. But that's him: have son, will travel.

The Kinsella Farmhouse - Photo by Matt Melis

Dad had asked the question this time. He's been a retired chemical engineer for a few years now and has started to figure out who he is without a full house and a daily commute. He chairs a local charitable foundation, jogs with a club twice a week, goes to movies, and give tours of PNC Park, where the Pittsburgh Pirates call home. (He can tell you things like where the park's reddish warning track dirt comes from. Incidentally, dyed volcanic rock from Utah.) When he visits me in Milwaukee, he's started taking extra time to travel along the coast of Lake Michigan, visiting decommissioned lighthouses. I bought him a certified U.S. Lighthouse Society membership – like a passport book – that can be stamped at each site he visits. “You're official now, sailor,” I told him. I'm a smart-ass.

The free time has also allowed Dad to add to his bucket list – some of which inevitably involves my mother, sister, or me. One evening last winter, we were on the phone together, and I could tell that he was nervous about something. Finally, he asked me if I'd go to the Field of Dreams with him, hedging against disappointment by saying it was only an idea and not a big deal. Clearly, he had forgotten that the answer to the “catch” question is always yes. I agreed immediately and teased him for being nervous. “I thought you were going to ask me to the prom,” I ribbed. Like I said, a smart-ass.

Ghost Player in the Kinsella Kitchen - Photo by Matt Melis

The night before we drove to Dyersville, we watched clips of Field of Dreams on YouTube. If you haven't seen the film, its lone intent, I'm convinced, is to make grown men cry. (I feel the score sneaking up on me as I type.) Costner's protagonist, Ray Kinsella - a cash-strapped rookie farmer with a hippy wife, tomboy daughter, and crippling regrets - receives a second chance to get things right with his deceased father. To make that happen, dead ballplayers walk, time unravels, and the universe, for once, connects all the dots. As, say, a 24-year-old, I scoffed at the solipsism and supernatural bent of the film. At 34, I know that more miraculous things happen each and every day for less meaningful reasons.

The road that leads to the Field of Dreams has been paved to accommodate “people coming.” The back road we took after making a wrong turn - a beaten path topped with crushed limestone that serpentines through cornfields and dairy country - somehow felt more appropriate. As I fumbled to hit play on the video on my phone queued up to say, “If you build it, he will come,” we saw the farm step out of the distance. The light poles, the cornstalks, the ball field, the lean right up to the Kinsella farmhouse that looks no different than it did nearly 30 years ago. To drive up to the ball field feels like stepping out of the corn in the film – to all of a sudden find yourself in a very different place, a place that feels magical if only for being so very out of place. It's the proverbial needle, the diamond, imbued with a wonder so strong that it makes you forget about the haystack or rough you've searched through and endured to find it.

Spotting Shoeless Joe - Photo by Matt Melis

My father and I toured the Kinsella farmhouse. A tour guide named Clarence, dressed as one of the “ghost players,” told us everything we'd ever want to know about the production and pointed out the care that had gone into preserving the location. I watched Harvey play on a small, black-and-white television in Ray and Annie's kitchen, learned that Ed Harris (Amy Madigan's husband) had been “The Voice,” and stared out the same window Ray did when he first saw Shoeless Joe Jackson standing in shadows on the dark ball field.

Ray Loves Annie - Photo by Matt Melis

All the while we were there, a couple dozen adults and children found seats in the bleachers or a position on the diamond. Dad and I found a patch out near the corn in left field and lobbed a few back and forth. I thought about his father, who died a few summers ago just a couple months short of 102 years old. He had come to this country illegally to escape starvation in Greece and become a citizen after serving in the military. He fell in love with baseball in 1960, the year Bill Mazeroski and the Pittsburgh Pirates shocked the Goliathan New York Yankees led by Mickey Mantle. Dad had taken him to Pirates spring training years ago and still tells the story of his 90-something father darting across an outfield to get a souvenir batting practice ball. For his 100th birthday, he had been the guest of honor at a Pirates game at PNC Park. Dad saw his father on the day he died, a couple hours before he passed away during a nap. As we tossed the baseball back and forth, I thought to myself, they got it right. And baseball had been a large part of that.

Playing catch in a cornfield takes your mind to places like that. Field of Dreams is about a father and son getting it right in the end; it's about second chances and the opportunities that can present themselves if someone will only take the first step. Watching fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, rotate across the field, take their swings, and pose like the ghosts emerging from the corn, I thought about how the same field that reunited Ray and John Kinsella onscreen was now allowing so many parents and children to get it right the first time around. Like my dad and his. Like my dad and me.

Field of Dreams Souvenir - Photo by Matt Melis

I thought about a lot between chatter as I took my turn driving home, leaving the Field of Dreams in our past. I'm now the age my father was when I first started sizing him up as a boy: using his leg as a yardstick to measure my growth, recognizing his daily arrival home by the crunch his pickup truck made as it climbed our gravel driveway, and learning what his large hand looked like clutching mine. It was also around that time I first overheard my father mention his holy triumvirate of successful travel: making good time, using correct change, and grabbing a bite to eat. We've joked about it for years, but not more than a week ago, I made a line of six or seven cars wait at least two minutes in a drive thru as I fumbled in a cupholder for seven pennies that turned out not to be there. The cashier rolled her eyes. Dad would've smiled – and kept looking for those pennies.

One thing I do struggle with is the decision I've made not to become a father. The thought that the game ends when Dad walks off into that cornfield, so to speak, saddens me sometimes. I feel like I have a great many innings left in this arm, far more than anyone can burn through merely as a son. But that falls on me then to find new fields, new games, and new ways to express love for others. That's what “a catch” is, after all. It's a way to say, “I love you,” even when the words struggle to come out – that is, when they need to come the most.

Grinning Ghosts - Photo by Matt Melis

The words were never a problem for Dad and me, though. No matter how trying life could be, there was never anything between us that a few words over a catch couldn't fix. I'm thankful we've gotten it right so far and continue to do so by doing things together like going to play catch in a ball field built in a cornfield in the middle of nowhere in Iowa. While the games of catch may be fewer and farther between these days and shortened in both distance and duration, I know that they still matter and what they will mean to me even when I'm my father's age.

I imagine myself as an old man out in a cornfield, a park, or maybe just my backyard and hearing that familiar question call out: “Want to have a catch?” If I turn quickly enough, maybe I'll just catch a glimpse of Shoeless Joe Jackson, my grandfather, or Dad or hear the sound of a ball popping a fresh-oiled mitt. To me, that'll be a bit like Heaven. A dragging arm but no regrets.