#it’s probably more poignant now that I am living in the uk

[duine-aiteach]

Been thinking lately about the term Anglo-Irish. Specifically in the context of notable historical figures such as Oscar Wilde, J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, and so many others. We’re so quick to claim that they’re not British that they’re Irish, but it’s not as straight forward as that is it? The same issue arises with notable Northern Irish people. Sometimes it’s clear if they identify as British or Irish, but not always.

Obviously we want to claim the brillance of Anglo-Irish people in history because they came from our home and that is important. But on the other hand, the Anglo-Irish were the ones making waves because of that privilege. That is important too. The Anglo-Irish - as a whole - were generally better off and a higher class than the general Irish population. That can’t be ignored. They become well known and influential outside of Ireland because they have the money and the connections to do that. Many other Irish people were probably as talented but just didn’t get the chance.

A lot of the notable Anglo-Irish people did go over to England and prosper there, which is probably part of the reason that people call them British. But even if their families were well off english landlord types, a lot of them were raised in ireland and that matters.

Wikipedia says

The Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Bowen memorably described her experience as feeling "English in Ireland, Irish in England" and not accepted fully as belonging to either.

Many Irish people today have family in the UK. Many of my peers have one British parent or grandparent, myself included. While the countries are separate places and should be treated as such, the people are still messy. I was born in England to an English mother and an English-born Irish father then raised in Ireland. Up until I was 15 or 16 I was a British citizen, then I was imported and now all my documentation says I’m Irish. I don’t consider myself English or British at all. And today, that distinction doesn’t really make much difference. I’m not any better or worse than my neighbours whose family have lived and died in the same area for generations. But historically, for these notable Anglo-Irish people, that distinction did make a difference.

[blueberry-beanie]

The New Cue #357 February 12:

Everything Everything's Jonathan Higgs

"We were weirdos then and we’re weirdos now"

At the beginning of next month, Everything Everything release their seventh record Mountainhead. It’s another brilliant album from one of the UK’s most imaginative and forward-thinking guitar bands, a quartet who never tread water and have been consistently honing, reworking and outdoing what’s gone before for over 15 years, always coming up with a new version of themselves without ever losing what makes them special. The pillars of their music tend to be a mix of danceable synth-y grooves and inventive art-rock, intricate arrangements constructed around big pop hooks and surrealist lyrics, frontman Jonathan Higgs’ vocal delivery emotive and exuberant at the same time.

Higgs is at the centre of it all, a creative dynamo who seems to sum up their idiosyncratic approach and who has the ability to inject emotion into the bizarrest lyrics, lines such as:

“And no reptiles! Just soft boiled eggs in shirts and ties, Waiting for the flashing green man Quivering and wobbling just like all the eggs you know”

That one is taken from Get To Heaven’s epic standout No Reptiles.

Or this, which somehow sounds poignant when Higgs sings it on the electro-pop banger Arch Enemy:

“Fatberg you smile, with your grave wax eyes, will you consume me?”

Or how about this oddball corker, from the euphoric electronica of Raw Data Feel closer Software Greatman?

“Maybe I see Klingons on the starboard bow Maybe, I’m a cat inside a sacred cow

Higgs is at it again with this zinger from their excellent recent single Cold Reactor: “I sent you the image of a yellow face To tell you I’m sad about the emptiness that’s all around me”

That song, released in autumn last year as the first single from Mountainhead, has become Everything Everything’s biggest radio hit yet. It’s spent weeks on the Radio 1 B-list, a very uncommon position for an indie band whose members are all in their late 30s, but its success that sums up the vibrancy and relevance of Everything Everything in 2024. Even better, it probably meant Radio 1 have had to get their heads around this blurb from Higgs on what the new record Mountainhead is about:

“In another world, society has built an immense mountain. To make the mountain bigger, they must make the hole they live in deeper and deeper. All of society is built around the creation of the mountain, and a mountain religion dominates all thought. At the top of the mountain is rumoured to be a huge mirror that reflects endlessly recurring images of the self, and at the bottom of the pit is a giant golden snake that is the primal fear of all believers. A ‘Mountainhead’ is one who believes the mountain must grow no matter the cost, and no matter how terrible it is to dwell in the great pit. The taller the mountain, the deeper the hole.”

Well, you don’t get that with Catfish And The Bottlemen. A few weeks ago Niall – that is me, I am The New Cue’s resident Everything Everything nut in case you hadn’t guessed – spoke to Jonathan over Zoom about the mad concept around the new record, the dynamics of being in a band in 2024, his favourite Liam Gallagher tweet and more. I’ve made this playlist of my favourite Everything Everything songs to listen whilst you read,

Hello Jonathan. I love the new record, it feels different to Raw Data Feel, a bit looser… Yeah, it’s got a lot more freedom and it sounds more like a band playing a lot of the time rather than the rigid, more computerised stuff that we were doing before. We made an effort to make it feel a bit more real and laid back.

Was there much overlap? No, partly because we put everything we made for Raw Data Feel on that record, we didn’t leave anything in the banks. We did the opposite with this, we actually went back and looked at some old demos and brought them back to life because we were looking for some kind of angle that we weren’t going to stumble across, we wanted to go back to our youngest selves and go, ‘What was that thing we were doing?’.

That’s interesting, how far back did you go? I think it’s sessions for A Fever Dream, or it might be Re-Animator, so five or six years ago. Some of the songs on this are from that time, or at least elements of them are or a little demo was made and then thrown away and then we went back and said ‘Let’s explore this and breathe new life into it.’

When you’re seven records in and you start to look back like that, does it feel like different versions of the band? Yeah, definitely. There’s definitely been eras, we’ve never got stuck in one way of doing things. There’s an evolution, for good or for ill, since our first songs to now. I can find myself very quickly thinking in those terms when I hear a song from then, I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I was trying to do this’ and that stuff changes over time and I’m glad it does because otherwise, you just make the same record again and again and no-one wants that.

Yeah. Without naming any names, for some bands it ends up becoming a process of survival and maintenance. Yeah, thankfully, we’re not in that position. I know what you mean, this idea of being a nostalgia act does not appeal very much, partly because we were at our peak three albums in so we can go back and feast on Get To Heaven-era but I have no interest in going back to Man Alive and trying to recreate that partly because we were weirdos then and we’re weirdos now, it wasn’t the glory days by any means. I’m immensely proud of what we did back then but I’m not going to try and retread it. This is an odd thing to say having just said that I went back to some old demos and put them on our new record, but those demos were rejected for reasons that I find interesting now. And I don’t feel that we need to play the games we were playing them because we’re so good at writing successfully now, I think.

Something like Cold Reactor, I didn’t labour over it and I knew as soon as it was done, it was great and I knew that would that would carry us through. It allows you to feel a bit more relaxed about creativity rather than ‘Must get that radio single or we’re doomed!’, which obviously is the burning hot coal under our butts most of the time because it’s easy to take that stuff for granted, popular songs, but you’ve got to actually write them and they’ve got to actually be popular otherwise no-one cares. Basically, every album usually comes down to one, two or three songs and if none of them have any interest, then people just go, ‘Did an album even come out?’.

Cold Reactor is a good example of the band right now, it seems to sum up all that’s great about Everything Everything and it’s become this mad radio hit. I know! We’ve watched a lot of friends’ bands struggle in this period we’ve had, 15 years now. There is a tendency to rest on your laurels or try and repeat the thing and it’s very difficult to not do that. Sometimes, I’ve done it myself when I’ve sat down and written a song and then I get to the end of it, I go, ‘Well, we did that better with X song on Arc’ and it’s like, ‘I could do this and our fans will really like it because it sounds just like us, it sounds just like Arc’ and then we’re like ‘No, into the bin with you, let’s try and take that same sensation but do something new with it’. That often comes down to the production. I think if you were to strip all of our songs of their production, then you could probably find something I’ve written now very similar to something I’ve written.

There’s a simplicity to a lot of the songs on the new album, nothing is overloaded and it makes the more outlandish stuff more potent. That’s been a big thing to learn over our careers. You’ve got the ability to do outlandish stuff, and you’ve got these players who can play really well but that isn’t enough to just present all of those things at once and expect people to go, ‘Wow!’. Some of them will, and that’s how we made our name, the prog dads, as we used to call them, that came to our shows in the very early days and just stand there and go, ‘yes, this sounds like Yes!’, and that’s fine. But that I felt like it wasn’t really a challenge. It felt like being a music student still, trying to dazzle each other with complexity and emotion slowly rose through all that and they all just fell away. I was like, ‘No, that is the hardest thing to communicate’ and that’s the challenge. That’s what the greats do is, they get your emotions and you can’t manufacture that and you certainly can’t bamboozle that into people, you have to start with a strong, simple, true, or as close to true as you can manage, emotion and then you can start having fun with it. I think that’s the thing that took us the longest to learn.

Everything Everything’s work has grown more emotional with every record. You’ve got these big concepts around them but that disguises the fact they feel a bit more personal and vulnerable each time… I think that’s what happens to humans. Twenty-three-year-olds are a strange breed to look to for sustenance when it comes to art, there’s a rawness to being that age, it’s an age of discovery. And that stuff is very exciting but there’s no real reason why someone older would create like that or go to that well, it actually gets quite sad when people try to go to that well. Now I’m older and I’m more of an emotional person and I’m less about fireworks and more about volcanoes! I don’t know how to put it, there’s something much deeper now when I create than when I was a young punk.

On that note, rather than me crowbar into an incredibly long question, why don’t you sum up the concept of Mountainhead? It’s extremely simple, a one metaphor fits all type-deal. I knew I wanted to sing about capitalism but not put too fine a point on it. I mean, it’s not a very subtle metaphor. But I knew there were certain elements of it that I wanted to get across, namely the Sisyphean sort of feeling of it being pointless and also, the fact that there’s this trade-off between building the mountain but having to live in the dark, which was a big touchstone for me when I read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, this sense that our lives are getting worse in some ways, that the more we progress we’re becoming more isolated and we’re shutting off large parts of our humanity in the search for this goal of ever expanding and growing our economy and trying to climb the ladder. It’s simple enough that you can’t really fault it, I’m not saying this is exactly how we live, there’s not enough to it for it to fail. It’s something everyone gets straight away.

A lot of the lyrics touch on that theme but which of the songs is the most personal to you that veer away from the concept? Probably The Witness, that’s definitely not really related to the concept. That’s pretty personal. There’s a line in there about this… I shot this bird with an air rifle when I was a kid. I walked into the shed and I saw it, this cute little chaffinch or whatever and it just sat there looking at me and then I picked up the air rifle, I knew where it was and I killed it.

You bastard! I know, I’m telling you this now cos I felt bad, I’m not saying it was a good thing! For some reason that came back to me. During the very early sessions on the album, we’d all gone away somewhere and when we got back, Alex went up to his studio at the top of his house and a pigeon had got into the room and thrashed and thrashed to get back out for four days, there’s like blood all over, feathers everywhere. I was like, ‘Guys, this is a sign… we’re gonna call it The Pigeon!’. Obviously we didn’t but birds do get into it - Canary obviously is a song there - and this thing about that bird and it flew into my head. That’s very personal. But then the rest of the song is about some fucked up stuff that happened to me in the pandemic that haven’t properly been able to talk about in these situations because it’s a bit too personal, basically. A lot of Raw Data Feel was about trying to deal with that as well. I should’ve called it Raw Data Deal. That’s the only moment I’ve given over to that thing on this newest album, the last song. I haven’t actually been able to listen back to it because it makes me too emotional when I think about what it’s really about. But that’s not for public consumption, it’s not needed.

Fair enough. Tell me about the dynamic between the four of you, because that seems like a really important point in your longevity. Apart from a very early line-up change, it’s been the four of you the whole way. Yeah, it’s great. We’ve settled into our roles over the last 15 years. Alex [Robertshaw, guitarist and keyboards] is very much the producer now and by way of that, he’s ended up writing a lot of the guitar and keyboard parts, which I would usually write more of in the past. I’ve become completely consumed by the emotion of getting the message across in the lyrics and stuff like that, as well as obviously writing songs. But in terms of how they sound, I’m less and less involved or concerned, that’s Alex’s playground more. Mike [Spearman, drummer] and Jez [Pritchard, bass] are very good at taste-making. Me and Alex do 98% of the composition and then those guys are much more like, ‘Well, I feel like this is a good way for us to go or this is better than this one,’ things you can’t really tell when you’re the creator and you think everything’s great. They’re also really good at the whole business side of the band, which is the less romantic end but incredibly important. So talking to accountants and they’re having meetings with the labels and Mike’s producing the videos, getting organised, all the stuff that me and Alex being “the creatives” are terrible at because we have the luxury of being terrible at them. Those guys fill in the gaps and they’re really, really good at that. Jez is really good at meeting people and all that kind of shit, so it works really well. You’ve got at least one person covering every possible angle. I’m doing a lot of the visual stuff now. I’m designing a lot of the visual side of the band, basically most things that we’re tweeting or videos is all being done by me. As a unit we could basically do this by ourselves... if someone gave us loads of money, which is how we operate.

My last question is a random one but it’s been on my mind. On Christmas Day, you dug up a four-year-old Liam Gallagher tweet where he called the producer Dave Sardy “Dave Sardine”, and I wanted to know how your Christmas Day mind had been drawn back to that. Haha! Well, when it happened someone tweeted it to me and I thought was funny and I retweeted then. Then recently, I remembered it and I went to see if it was still there. It was and I was like, ‘I’m gonna save that for Christmas Day’ - it wasn’t related to what I was up to. It’s just like, right, ‘Christmas Day, time to tweet my favourite tweet’. It will always be my favourite tweet because it’s how angry he is about Dave Sardine. It’s so good.

The full article is available on substack.

[agentnico]

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) Review

Plot: When 17-year-old Paul joins the Western Front in World War I, his initial excitement is soon shattered by the grim reality of life in the trenches.

My experience with the original novel this movie is based on is that my father made me read it when I was very very young, and as such I didn’t appreciate it at the time nor did I really understand it much. ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ and ‘Three Comrades’ are the ones I had to read of writer Erich Maria Remarque, and believe me when I tell you it’s as if I never read them, as I am hard pressed to recall a single event that happens. To be fair I do remember one part of ‘All Quiet’ when one of the soldiers had lost his legs after going into No Man’s Land and is lying and losing blood at the medic wing surrounded by his soldier mates, and he gives boots to one of them as he realises he won’t need them anymore, after which he proceeds to die. As you can imagine, my child self was pretty traumatised and when I told my father this at the time, he was so proud that I appreciated the book. Appreciation is not the right word. Scarred for life more like! Anyway, so now having grown up I was much more inclined to revisit this story through the lens of the new Netflix adaptation that has just been released, and I was fully ready to experience the boots scene yet again, but now as a strong macho man who doesn’t fall captive to heard-string strumming emotions of terror. Turns out, this new All Quiet on the Western Front does not feature that moment, which means its either a very loose adaptation of the book or I have simply mixed that event up with a different novel I read as a kid. Look, no shame to my dad, he meant well by wanting me to learn from the get-go all the harsh realities of life and whatnot, but c’mon, there’s only so much an 8 year old chap such as myself would have quantified after reading ‘War and Peace’. Yep, I read ‘War and Peace’ when I was 8. That must be a Guinness World Record of some kind. 

Anyway, evidently All Quiet on the Western Front is not the most faithful adaptation of Remarque’s classic, however that doesn’t stop it from successfully bringing out the anti-war themes of the original novel. Look, this isn’t a casual Saturday night watch. This movie is a raw and brutal depiction of life on the trenches, and though this isn’t the first film to show us that war is hell, director Edward Berger manages to make the message as poignant as ever, and very relatable to our modern times. Whilst in the trenches many innocent lads are thrown in the deep end, scared and terrified and fighting for their lives over a war they don’t really understand the reasons of, the higher ranking officers all sit in their cosy mansions and headquarters enjoying their nice fresh food and drink and acting like they are the real heroes. A portion of the film involves a German negotiator played by Daniel Bruhl having talks with members of the Allies in finding an agreement to end the war and find peace, and whilst they take their sweet time signing on the dotted lines and actually stopping the bloodshed, thousands of innocent lives continue to be lost. It’s very relevant to our current day and age, with as little as in the UK with the current parliament destroying the country’s economy and evidently not caring about the working to lower classes who are suffering for it, or probably more and primarily so what’s happening with Ukraine and Russia, where powerful leaders are making horrifying decisions from up top but its the innocent living population and the lads who have been forced to join the army and fight that are suffering and losing their lives. And for what? Just so that someone can get a little bit more land? It’s pathetic, and All Quiet on the Western Front delivers that message full throttle.

This movie is a bleak experience from beginning to end. From the opening moments where the blood-soaked uniforms of the dead are washed and then handed nice and clean to the new recruits, with the latter having no idea where these clothes have been scavenged from, to the main character Paul stabbing a French soldier, only to then have to lie in horror by his side and listen to the victim choking on his own blood, and Paul having to deal with the reality of his own actions. All these moments are grim reminders that it shouldn’t have come to this. The cinematography captures the harshness of the fighting, but also counteracts it by emphasising moments of beauty through landscape shots of the snow to the moments of camaraderie between the soldiers. 

In terms of negatives I’d say that the movie doesn’t really take time with allowing you to get to know all these characters properly minus a couple, and as such from a narrative standpoint you as an audience member aren’t able to connect much with them, and so even though when their inevitable deaths come and it’s hard-hitting, I wish we knew them more beforehand to actually make the moment even stronger. The two you really do spend time with though is the main character Paul, played superbly by Felix Kammerer who identifies the notes of terror and fear this character is experiencing, and the constant loss and despair. Also his main pal Katcinzky - Albrecht Schuch plays him and this chap really does it. He plays Kat in a strangely upbeat roguish manner, as such quite unexpected in light of the setting they are in, but it’s his constant push to find positivity in things that allows them to somehow mentally make it through this horrible experience. As it’s again a powerful and shocking idea that all these people have their lives and their relationships and such, and all of that if thrown away by needless death and bloodshed. Look, this movie is bloody dark, like I mean phew! Can’t say it’s one I’ll watch again, but I very much respect its realistic dirty depiction of war. It is a very difficult viewing experience, but one I think adults should be willing to watch and experience as again, it’s ever so relevant and also really really powerful. Terrifying and brutal, but so so powerful. Worth every wince-inducing nightmare moment.

Overall score: 8/10

[nevermindirah]

Ok it's Jewish Booker o'clock, I can no longer stop myself, let's do this!

Why Jewish Booker? Dude was born in Marseilles in 1770, which happens to be a FASCINATING time and place in Jewish history, and it adds ridiculous layers to his character (without excusing a damn thing). Alternately just because I think he’s neat :)

Jewish Booker headcanons that make me happy:

not to be all "real Jews do X" but Jews fuck with candles hard. Book of Nile thrives on old/modern analog/digital giggles. Booker lighting Shabbat candles, lighting yarzeit (memorial) candles for his wife and sons (sob), lighting a menorah, lighting candles just because he's feeling emotional even though it's not chag (a holiday) or a yarzeit and Nile thinks he's trying to be sexy but he's really just in his feelings. just like. so many candles.

maybe Booker was the person who punched Richard Spencer at Trump's inauguration, just bringing back that time somebody punched a famous neonazi in the street and said neonazi has all but stopped appearing in public after a few rounds of public punching

were the Old Guard in Charlottesville in 2017? how many times has Booker the Blond Jew infiltrated North American white nationalist / Klan type activities and then stolen their weapons and/or killed them? likewise there's plenty of horrifying white nationalist shit happening across Europe this century, how many Pim Fortuyn types has he been involved in taking down? (I Am Of Course Not Endorsing Violence TM ;) ;) )

SINGING. Mattias Schoenaerts sings in Away From the Madding Crowd but it's church shit, sigh, anyway he has a nice voice. a lot of Jewish prayer is sung/chanted (depending on when/where you are and the gender rules of the community you're in) and there’s been a lot of innovation to Jewish singing in Booker’s lifetime, and I just want Nile to overhear him singing to himself on Friday afternoons

Nile Freeman was four years old when The Prince of Egypt came out, she grew up on that shit, she would want to introduce her new family to that shit. Please join me in picturing Booker, Nicky, Joe, and Andy all shouting "that's not how it happened!!" throughout this beautiful nightmare of a movie with lovely animation and songs but where white people voice most of the Egyptian and Jewish characters, because Booker Nicky and Joe's religious texts all frame the Exodus story a little differently and Andy was probably there when it happened (except for how it didn't actually happen it's an important story but it's just a story pls just let me giggle about Andy being super old)

Read below the cut for sad Jewish Booker headcanons, French Jewish history (mostly sad), context on antisemitism (enraging/sad), and all the way to the very end for a himbo joke.

Jewish Booker headcanons, I made myself sad edition:

he is a forger. who was alive. in 1939. visas. VISAS. V I S A S. how many of us did he save? how many more could he have saved if he didn't sleep that night? how heavily does that weigh?

how do we think he BECAME a forger? most likely he was doing what he needed to do to support his family, which gets extra poignant if he was also trying to help his people, forging documents as well as money even during his mortal life

Booker raised Catholic by crypto-Jews adds ANOTHER layer to the forgery thing, no shit he'd get good at falsifying paperwork and coming up with plausible cover stories

do we know how Booker made it back home after his first death in 1812? his route between the Russian Empire and Provence in 1812 would've been a patchwork of laws about Jews, in case starvation and frostbite weren't enough for him to have to deal with, he's blond and could maybe get away with pretending not to be Jewish if he had to, alternately maybe synagogues and yeshivot took him in on his way home

the structural and sometimes-interpersonal dynamics of antisemitism cause many individual Jews to experience feelings of teetering on the fence between a valued member of a not-exclusively-Jewish community and a scapegoat/outcast/problem. HOLY SHIT BOOKER. "what do you know of all these years alone" is the most Jewish loneliness-in-a-crowd shit I've ever heard. fear that we're not wanted, or only wanted so long as we're useful — that's something that basically all people struggle with under capitalism, but it's especially poignant for many Jews because of the particular way antisemitism operates. (NOTE this can tip from a legit Jewish Booker reading to woobification of the sad white man who couldn't possibly be held responsible for his own actions because he's so sad, which, NOPE. it's very understandable for him to feel left out and misunderstood and not as wanted, as the youngest and not part of an immortal couple and maybe Jewish, but NONE OF THIS excuses his betrayal.)

Crusaders murdered a lot of Jews on their way to the ~holy land~. how many of Booker's people did Nicky kill on his way to kill Joe's people? has Booker ever actually talked to either of them about it?

I read this really beautiful fic about Joe needing to circumcise himself after getting run over by a cart (ouch) — this is a hell of a thing for Joe and Booker to have in common

just generally Jewish Booker adds more layers to him and Joe so clearly being such close friends, ugh that look Joe gives him when they're leaving the bar at the end of the movie, and I very much do not mean this in a gross Arab-Israeli-conflict way because Joe is Amazigh not Arab and Booker is Jewish not Israeli (and also a lot of Jews are Arabs) (but most importantly there's no ~eternal conflict~ between Muslims and Jews) (more about OP Is Not A Zionist below)

like, the UK and France (and to a certain extent Italy) carved up the former Ottoman Empire after WWI; among other things, the UK took Palestine, and they could've worked on eradicating European antisemitism so Jews wouldn't have to leave but instead they used their control of Palestine to encourage Zionist emigration of Jews out of Europe, and France took what is now Iraq, which has some pretty direct implications for US military involvement in that country in Nile's lifetime; France colonized Tunisia in the late 19th century and still held it during the Vichy era which means Tunisian Jews were subject to Nazi anti-Jewish laws which is just layers upon layers of colonial racist Islamophobic and antisemitic nightmares for Joe and Booker to live through

to be crystal clear before anybody gets ooh Muslim-Jewish conflict up in here, antisemitism is an invention of European Christians that they imported to the places they colonized, the European colonial powers encouraged Zionism because it was easier for them to encourage Jews to leave Europe and set us up as middle agents between the colonial powers and the ~scary brown people~, the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim governments historically have had a second-class citizenship category for non-Muslims that rankles my American first amendment freedom of religion sensibility but was very much not targeting Jews specifically, and these two men who've lived for a long-ass time through many varieties of geopolitical awfulness (and alongside a certain unwashed Crusader who has since learned his lesson) would have Things To Say about how our current mainstream discourses frame these things

getting off my soapbox and back to this action movie I'm trying to talk about, the ANGST of Booker's exile, which is simultaneously a very valid decision for Andy Joe and Nicky to make, an extremely long time for Nile who is only 26 years old to be separated from the one person on the planet in a position to really understand the crisis she's going through, and holy shit expelling a Jew from your group when he's already been expelled from mortality and his family and being expelled from places and continually having to start over somewhere new is THE curse of surviving through antisemitism, OUCH MY FEELINGS

Some French Jewish history:

France, like basically all of Europe, periodically expelled its Jews, but Provence (where Marseilles is) wasn't legally part of France during the expulsions up through 1398 so Provence had a continuous active Jewish community; about 3,000 Iberian Jewish refugees ended up in Provence after the expulsions from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s

the 1498 expulsion of French Jews DID apply to Provence but many "converted" to Christianity and reestablished a Jewish community when enforcement of the expulsion chilled out (which was in the government's interest because they were really into taxing Jews at higher rates, so much so that they taxed "new Christians" at higher rates once they realized expelling Jews meant they wouldn't be around to overtax, ffs) — by the mid-18th century Provence had notable communities of Jews and crypto-Jews (forced converts and their descendants who still kept some Jewish practices in secret)

Booker would've been 21 when revolutionary France granted equal legal rights to Jews in 1791 — his mortal life and first century of immortality happens to line up almost perfectly with the timeline of legal emancipation of Jews across Europe

the American and French Revolutions happened pretty much concurrently and took different approaches to religious freedom that make Book of Nile with Jewish Booker and canon Christian Nile extra interesting — French emancipation, at least from my American sensibility, is about secularism and religion not "interfering" (hence French Islamophobic shittiness about banning hijabs), whereas American religious freedom is more of "the government can't stop me from trying to evangelize / religiously harass people at my school/workplace/etc" — to be clear I think both countries' approaches to religious "freedom" are hegemonic as shit and have devastating flaws, but they're different models that emerged at the same time in Booker's youth and Christianity is clearly a source of emotional support for Nile and there's so much to explore here

Napoleon tried to ~liberate~ the Jews of places he conquered for his dumbass French Empire, but liberation from ghettos came with strings attached (like banning us from some of the only jobs we'd been legally allowed to have for centuries, and liberating us for the stated purpose of getting us to assimilate and stop being Jews) and many places that were briefly part of the French Empire reinstated their antisemitic laws after Napoleon was gone, can you imagine being a French Jew forced to fight and die in Russian winter for that jackass and then have to trudge back through a dozen countries whose antisemitism was all riled up by French interference?

Some facts about antisemitism:

antisemitism operates differently than many other oppressions, it doesn't economically oppress the target group in the same way as antiblackness or misogyny or ableism etc — the purpose of antisemitism is to create a scapegoat to blame when European peasants are mad at the king / the church / the people actually in charge, and structural antisemitism encourages a system where some Jews become visibly successful so that those individuals and our whole community are easier to make into scapegoats

one of the historical roots of antisemitism is stuff in the Christian Bible about moneylending as sinful — Jews in medieval Europe were often barred from owning land and Christians barred from moneylending, so some Jews found work in finance and some of us became very visibly successful for working with money — a few individual Jews running a particular bank or finding success as jewelry dealers turns into "Jews control global financial systems" scapegoating — a more recent example of this is the participation of nonblack Jews in white flight and the role of Jewish landlords doing the visible dirty work of non-Jewish institutions in American antiblack housing discrimination, Nile grew up on the South Side of Chicago and would have seen some shit along these lines and might repeat hurtful ideas out of a lack of knowledge, here's Ta Nahesi Coates on some of these dynamics

Booker canonically being a forger (specifically of coins in the comics?) needs a little extra care to avoid antisemitic tropes about Jews and money, I will happily answer good-faith asks about this if you want to check on something for a fic/etc

antisemitism in the United States where I live in October 2020 isn't institutional in the sense of targeting Jews for police violence or anything like that. it IS systemic, however, for example in all the antisemitic conspiracy theories the Trump administration and several other Republicans peddle (ie QAnon), and in how the Trump administration points to support for Israel as if that means support for Jews (it doesn't, it's evangelical Christians who push the US government to support the Israeli government because they think Jews need to be in the ~holy land~ for Jesus to come back that's literally why the United States funds Israel at the level it does). antisemitism also gets weaponized to encourage white Jews (those of us of European descent, who in the United States are definitely white because the foundation of US racism is slavery and antiblackness as well as anti-indigenous genocide, maybe European Jews aren't included in whiteness everywhere but we definitely are where I live) to side with white supremacy instead of building solidarity with other marginalized people (ie a lot of mainstream Jewish groups shit on the Movement for Black Lives because of its solidarity with Palestinians)

the Nation of Islam has a major presence in Chicago and its leader Louis Farrakhan who lives in Chicago has long spread a variety of antisemitic as well as homophobic bullshit but there are genuine good reasons many Black people find meaning/support in the Nation of Islam and Nile would've grown up with that mess in the air around her, this is a good take from a Black Jew about the nuance of all that

the way the Old Guard comics draw Yusuf al Kaysani is HOLY SHIT ANTISEMITISM BATMAN I hate it please summarize the comics for me because I DO NOT WANT to look at that unnecessarily caricatured nose why the fuck did they do that human noses are beautiful there is absolutely no need to draw Joe like a Nazi would

Jews for Racial and Economic Justice is a local NYC group that recently developed a fantastic resource for understanding and fighting antisemitism (pdf) 11/10 strongly recommend

Zionism disclaimer: A lot of Jews feel strongly that we need a Jewish-majority country in order to be safe from antisemitism. I strongly disagree with this idea on its merits (Jews disagree about who is a Jew and making Jewish status a government/immigration matter means some of us are going to get left out; also non-Jews aren't fundamentally dangerous and separatism isn't going to end antisemitism) but I have a lot of empathy for the very valid fear that leads a lot of my people to Zionism. Whether I want a Jewish-majority country or not, what Israel has done and continues to do to Palestinians is a deal breaker. Emotions run very high on this subject — I spend a lot of my not-Tumblr life talking to other Jews about Zionism and I'd rather not have this Jewish Booker headcanons post become yet another place where fellow Jews yell at me in bad faith. Block me if you need to, you're not going to change my mind. Call me self-hating if you want, I know I love us.

Racism in fandom disclaimer: I feel weird about increasing the volume of meta about Booker in this fandom. Nile Freeman is the main character and deserves lots of attention and adoration from the fandom — and she deserves emotional support from as many friends and orgasms from as many partners as she wants. I think Jewish Booker makes her friendship and potential romantic relationship with him even more interesting, hence this post. Ship what you ship, but be aware of the racist impact of focusing your fandom activity on, for example, shipping two white men while ignoring awesome characters of color especially the canon man of color one of those white dudes has already been with for a millennium. Please and thanks don't use my post for shenanigans like sidelining Joe so you can ship Booker with Nicky.

Oh and a non-disclaimer fun fact, Matthias Schoenaerts was born in Antwerp which apparently has one of the largest Jewish communities still remaining in Europe?? ~Jewish Booker headcanons intensify~

In conclusion: Jewish Booker! Just because it's fun! It exponentially increases the angst of his mortal lifetime and it puts his first century of immortality smack in the middle of the most intense changes to Jewish life since the fall of the Second Temple (aforementioned emancipation, also founding of Reform Judaism, the Haskalah, Zionism, and then of course the Holocaust). It makes his relationships with Nile, Joe, and Nicky more interesting and potentially angstier and with more intense commonalities and tenderness about their differences. It's very common for Jews to not believe in God (this confuses the shit out of a lot of Christians) and this would probably have further endeared him to Andy.

One more thing: Booker as golem. (A golem is basically an earthenware robot of Jewish folklore.) He's tall and blond and the most Steve Rogers-looking of all of them and from the Himbeaux region of France. THE trope of Book of Nile is he will do WHATEVER Nile wants or needs him to do. I was today years old when I learned that Modern Hebrew speakers use golem figuratively to mean "mindless lunk" and I'm choosing to squint and read that as "hot kind and dumb as rocks" because it amuses me.

[lilyjcollins-news]

Lily Collins - Carita Rizzo.

Usually the words “celebrity” and “unfiltered” indicate a series of explicit photos, the involvement of a tabloid magazine and a juicy exposé. Not for Lily Collins. The 27-year-old (turning 28 on March 18) English-American actress’ first book, Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me. ($14, Harper Collins), which releases March 7, is an honest look at the person behind the public persona and the glamour of the silver screen. But those salivating at the thought of behind-the-scenes gossip may want to simmer down. This is not a tell-all. In her debut essay collection, the actress pens a poignant, honest conversation about things young women struggle with, including body image, self-confidence and relationships. Nevertheless, Collins has jitters. “I’m anxious,” admits the petite actress, looking impeccable in black Paige jeans, Stuart Weitzman suede boots and a loose white Tularosa top.

Her nerves are understandable. The last time we chatted with Collins about her award-nominated turn in Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply, she said: “Keep private whatever you hold dear,” a reasonable mantra in a celebrity-obsessed world where privacy is hard to come by. Now, she’s about to willingly open the door to some of her deepest secrets, from her yearslong battle with eating disorders to an emotionally abusive relationship.

“I still believe that,” she says, when reminded of her mantra. “But these are things that I felt I wanted to put out there. Not necessarily so people know that I experienced them, but to create, hopefully, a space for more open conversation about the topics I discuss.” And some things are still off limits: “When I talk about relationships, I don’t reveal any details about it or names because that is not important. That was not the point of why I was going there.”

Collins’ life has certainly appeared charmed from its inception. The daughter of English musician Phil Collins and American Jill Tavelman was born in England and moved to Los Angeles at the age of 6. Collins has always been a self-starter. She cold-called magazine editors as a teenager, which landed her a column in ELLE Girl UK, and initially pursued a career in broadcast journalism before her role in The Blind Sidetook her on a different path. Leading roles in Mirror Mirror; Love, Rosie; and The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones followed, but it is in the past year or so that Collins’ career has really hit its stride, with Rules Don’t Apply (for which she received a Golden Globe nomination); the upcoming Amazon series The Last Tycoon, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last book about 1930s Hollywood; the Netflix original film Okja, in which she stars alongside Jake Gyllenhaal and Tilda Swinton; and To the Bone, which premiered in January at Sundance to rave reviews and was purchased by Netflix for $8 million. Even her colleagues can’t stop gushing over her. “She’s very much in charge of her life and her professional life in a way that I think is really admirable,” says her Rules Don’t Apply co-star Annette Bening, who refers to Collins as a “badass” who “has her sh*t together.”

Yet despite a successful career and her Audrey Hepburn-ish looks, the actress was anxious to reveal she is susceptible to the same feelings of inadequacy and insecurity as the young women who look up to her. “What really inspired me to write the book is that I was getting all these young girls interacting with me on my Instagram, and they would tell me their stories about what they’d gone through, but they would always add in there that they didn’t think I could understand because I’m an actress,” she says. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my God. You have no idea.’”

Collins understands them better than most. Her intense struggle with body image started at age 16 and continued in ebbs and flows for 10 years. And right as she was revisiting her own harrowing journey with eating disorders for the sake of sharing her story, To the Bone—Marti Noxon’s script about an anorexic girl confronting her addiction—happened to come her way. “When I read the script, and I knew what the story was about, there was a slight hesitation at first because it’s something that’s very close to me,” says Collins. “You have to re-enter that mindset.”

In the end, her deep understanding of this character won out and the ability to revisit the struggles of her youth with the help of a nutritionist and a support system is an experience Collins calls “the best form of therapy.” She adds: “I think most people will assume the movie experience was probably hell, and it wasn’t at all. It was one of the most fun, freeing experiences I’ve had. Within playing Ellen, I got to come to terms with a lot myself. That was a proud moment for me.”

Collins also credits her ambassadorship with Lancôme as grounding her among an incredible set of women, including Kate Winslet, Julia Roberts, Lupita Nyong’o, Penélope Cruz and Isabella Rossellini. “It’s the most inspiring group of women,” she says. “We do amazing work with making women feel good in their own skin and enhancing their inner beauty.” Collins is grateful the company’s message encourages what she has always been passionate about encouraging within young women.

Admittedly, the hardest chapter for Collins to put down on paper is the one in which she sheds light on a long-term relationship during which she experienced an incredible amount of emotional abuse. “For a long time, I wanted to shy away from talking about that experience,” she admits. “But it’s a part of my story, and it’s a part of how I interact in relationships with friends, with family and in romantic situations. And to write all that stuff down, and to then say it out loud, made it so much more real. And it actually made me feel strong because I’d moved through that, and I’d moved past that. And I’ve learned so much more about myself and about what I deserve or how I deserve to be treated.”

She offers no details on who this man might be, but hints that any cross-referencing with her public relationships might be a fruitless exercise. “It’s funny because I think everyone’s going to assume certain people I talk about are famous people, but they’re not,” she says. “Just because I kept people anonymous doesn’t mean that people would have known who they were anyway.”

There is, however, one man in her life she cannot keep anonymous. “I couldn’t not talk about my parents in this story, obviously,” she smiles. In her book, Collins reveals to readers that her father’s absence took a toll on their relationship. “It’s hard when that person isn’t around a lot,” she says. “I have amazing memories of being able to travel and being able to have family all over the world. Were there things that would have been nice probably to experience as a family? Of course. But it didn’t happen that way. And I’m me for a reason. I mean, everything that happened made me who I am.”

Collins addresses these feelings in an emotional letter addressed to her father. “That was a hard chapter to write because he is public. It’s a weird situation to be in, to be writing about someone that people already know, but they don’t know my experience with [him],” she says. “I am just a daughter talking to her dad, and I think that a letter felt appropriate because it can be translated to any relationship with daughters and dads. As a girl, you always want them to see you as their little girl, and you’re always going to need them and want them. And even if you say you don’t, you really do.”

It feels oddly comfortable delving so deep into one somber topic after another with the actress, perhaps because Collins radiates such peace with herself. Hers is a lesson that even the seemingly most impenetrable package comes with some fragility. After opening up about her experiences, Collins says she feels truly unleashed. “I think it’s allowed me to let go a lot more,” she admits. “I kept hearing from certain directors or people in my life, ‘You should just let go more. Let go more.’ And I said, ‘What does that mean? I am free!’ or ‘I am letting go!’ But I realized I was holding on to a lot. And the second I put it out there, I could just kind of live and breathe in the moment.”

She now dreams of starting a family, but is in no rush—especially since there is currently no man in the picture. “I’m in a relationship with myself,” she quips. “I think a lot of young girls should do that. I think it’s important to figure out you and to have fun and to be dating and to figure out what you like and what you don’t like. It’s what growing up is all about.”

Besides, right now, her focus is on work and living life to the fullest. “I want to keep doing what I love to do,” she says. “Last year, I would never have said, ‘This year, I’m going to shoot a TV pilot, three movies and finish a book.’ Never, would I ever have thought it was possible. So I want to keep being terrified to try new things. That’s what pushes you beyond your limits—and to never take any of it for granted.”

Photography by Andrew Eccles | Styling by Jordan Johnson and Jill Lincoln//Photo Assistants: Jason Johnson and Tarik Richards | Digital Tech: Maxwell Tiggas.

vía caritarizzo.

[tessatechaitea]

Review of The Twilight Zone, Episode Six, "The Dumbest Guy in the World"

I'm going to shit all over Rod Serling a lot while watching episodes of The Twilight Zone so I should probably say this as soon as possible (which could have been sooner, I suppose. Like in my review for Episode One?): I love The Twilight Zone and I think Rod Serling wrote a fuck-ton (real Queen's measurement in the UK) of memorable and poignant stories. He covered just about every important feeling a person might go through across all times of their lives. It's like he sat down and just began listing human concerns and then wrote stories about each one (sometimes he wrote 50 stories about one of the items (like feeling lonely)). It's just that sometimes he didn't quite hit the mark. Sometimes his stories suffer from the need for a twist ending or a big surprise comeuppance to the protagonist. This episode, "Escape Clause," is a good example of Rod Serling choosing to write a story about mortality and completely fucking the whole thing up because, at some point during the writing process, he thought, "What if you got sentenced to life in prison while being immortal? Ha ha! So good!" This story is about a guy who fears death so much he barely gets out of bed and never stops complaining that he might be dying. So the devil is all, "Hey! I bet I can get this guy to sell his soul for immortality!" And the devil is right! But not just immortality: invulnerability and the absence of aging! And all for just his measly soul! The deal is so great that the scared bastard goes for it! The devil even allows him an escape clause so that if he eventually lives so long that he finds himself engulfed by a bloated star, he can call on the devil to let him die and the devil will kill him peacefully. After the deal is finalized, you expect the story to maybe allow multiple time jumps to see how this poor bastard is dealing with immortality. Maybe see the death of his wife and other loved ones. Or maybe have him experience terrible war on a global scale. Maybe have him suffer as the last man on Earth living in a bleak and radiated landscape. You might expect something like that. But what you probably don't expect is for this guy who was once afraid of living to begin throwing himself in front of buses and subways and trains just to feel a little excitement. See, it turns out that life apparently isn't worth living if you don't have the risk of death! I guess? Who the fuck knows! It's totally out of this guy's character to suddenly feel he needs to risk everything for any kind of enjoyment from life. Up until the deal, he was just wasting his whole life in bed afraid of dying. Instead of being immortal for thousands of years before becoming weary of life, this fucker grows bored with life in the span of a few weeks. A few weeks of knowing he can't die and suddenly this guy is tired of life? He can't find any sort of excitement without the risk of death? What the fuck is wrong with this guy? Can he even read a book or go to the movies? Do those things bore him unless somebody releases a bunch of venomous cobras in the room with him? Can he go to dinner without also playing Russian Roulette between servings? Am I supposed to believe that this guy got off on thinking he was going to die so choosing immortality was the worst decision of his life? "I can only come if I think I might be dying, baby!" This guy is so fucking dumb that after his wife accidentally falls from the roof of their fifteen story apartment complex, he confesses to murdering her. His plan is to see if surviving the electric chair will finally give him a thrill. I don't know what this idiotic bastard was thinking. When he survives, everybody will just shrug and let him go his own way? Is that how the death penalty works? If the method of execution fails, you get your freedom back? Because this stupid dolt never even considers that he's going to wind up spending life in prison. He doesn't even get the chance to be electrocuted because the judge simply sentences him to life. Ha ha! Big twist ending! Now this fucker is really going to be bored! But wait! There's more! This guy who was terrified of dying in just forty years decides to take the escape clause a few weeks after becoming immortal because he's bored. Well you know what Piebald says (and other people, like parents and teachers and shit): "If you're bored, you must be boring too!" And this guy is! He's afraid to die and then all he can do after getting immortality is to try to die and then after realizing he can't die, he chooses to die. Fuck this guy. Man, I can't stress that enough! FUCK. THIS. GUY. FUCK HIM! I hate this motherfucker! And by extension, I hate Rod Serling too! He really fucked up this episode! Who the hell thinks life is only enjoyable because of the risk of death? This motherfucker could have went on a wild sex and drug spree! He could have gotten his excitement by trying loads of new things! Fuck, he could have just decided to eat every single different thing on the planet! He could have tried murdering children, just for the hell of it! He could have hiked the bottom of the oceans! He could have purchased a sprawling estate in Germany with all of the insurance money he was getting from the accidents he was faking and created the first Human Centipede! This fucker had no imagination and I'm glad the devil took his soul and killed him. Man. Fuck that guy.

[bbclesmis]

Lily Collins on overshadowing dad Phil, beating anorexia and starring in the BBC's Les Misérables

As one of the defining voices of the 1980s and a man who remains one of the world’s bestselling artists, it would have been easy for Collins to overshadow his multitalented daughter’s success. Certainly, when I first interviewed Lily five years ago for the romcom Love, Rosie, she was still being defined not just by her famous father, but the Audrey Hepburn-esque looks that had won her modelling contracts as a teenager living in LA.

Since we last saw each other, Lily has redefined herself on her own terms. And when UK audiences are treated to her nuanced, poignant portrayal of Cosette’s desperate mother, Fantine, in the lavish new six-part BBC adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, they won’t see Phil Collins’s daughter but a remarkable British-born talent at the top of her game.

‘I had a few friends in the musical version, and I was so keen to play this part in what’s a very different adaptation,’ says Lily of the role that won Anne Hathaway an Oscar – a role she begged producers to be allowed to audition for, so desperate was she to be involved.

That the director, Tom Shankland, had decided against his being a musical adaptation meant the all-star cast – including Dominic West as Jean Valjean, David Oyelowo as Javert and Olivia Colman as Madame Thénardier – were able to return to Hugo’s original characters, she says. ‘And getting to work through the whole arc of Fantine’s life was incredible. Although in fact the death scene was filmed on day two,’ she adds with a side smile. ‘So it was a case of, “Hi, nice to meet you – I’m about to die”.’

Crushed and betrayed by a pitiless society that demands the most from those to whom it gives the least, Fantine’s character is emblematic of so much. During the six-month shoot in Belgium and northern France, Lily found filming in minus-13C Brussels gruelling (‘I grew up in England, so I should know about cold – but this was something else’), but says it helped put her in the right state of mind.

‘My lips started to go blue and I began to shake. Even in my breaks I wouldn’t keep my jacket on for too long because I had to be at a level of discomfort that I hadn’t experienced before.’ And when a degraded and desperate Fantine is dragged through the snow wearing minimal clothing, ‘I was able to let go and be that vulnerable. It’s those parts that are the most fulfilling: that’s when you can see what you’re made of.’

Lily’s early roles were hardly inconsequential. She starred alongside Sandra Bullock in the Oscar-winning 2009 film The Blind Side, and with Julia Roberts in Mirror Mirror in 2012. But it wasn’t until 2013 with her portrayal of Clary Fray in the film adaptation of Cassandra Clare’s bestselling cult fantasy series The Mortal Instruments that Lily seemed to come into her own.

There was a concerted move towards tragic, multi-layered heroines like heartbroken Cecilia Brady in Amazon Prime’s The Last Tycoon in 2016, and recovering anorexic Ellen in Marti Noxon’s To the Bone the following year, and I wonder whether it was the writing of her startlingly honest 2017 memoir, Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me, that marked the start of Lily’s real evolution.

Five years ago a sweet, wholesome and reticent young woman in dungarees and Dr Martens boots had assured me that prudence had ‘always been my natural feeling’. And yet, outing herself as someone real and flawed in her memoir – someone who had suffered from a debilitating eating disorder as well as self-confidence and relationship issues – was anything but prudent. ‘Writing the book helped me let go of things I was holding on to emotionally,’ Lily says. ‘And in order to take on the baggage of the characters that I wanted to play I had to let go of my own.’

That she chose to play a recovering anorexic in To the Bone the same year she’d detailed her own illness in such detail – the diet-pill and laxative addiction, the bingeing and purging that started at the age of 16 and went on into her 20s – could be seen as brave, foolhardy or both. But her parents (Lily’s mum is American socialite Jill Tavelman) didn’t try to stop her, she says. ‘In fact, they were more like, “Wow, you’re writing a book!” And it turned out to be a form of therapy,’ she insists.

‘Luckily, we shot To the Bone in LA, I worked with a nutritionist to prepare for the part responsibly, and my mum was on set with me, so it was a way for me to harness something that had truly controlled my life for such a long time. Being able to turn the tables and really have control was amazing. Finally I could say to myself: “I am living my life and this is not going to be a part of my story from now on.” I’ll be 30 in March and I’m so glad that I dealt with these things in my 20s, because now I can get excited about what’s to come.’

As part of her research she went to an Anorexics and Bulimics Anonymous group, and an LA clinic for eating disorders, ‘where they gave me a lot of the factual information to understand the basics of the disorder’. Does she feel her illness is firmly behind her now – or is it important to remain vigilant? ‘Well it’s never going to be erased because it’s part of who you are, but it doesn’t define how I live my life daily any more,’ she says. ‘When I was going through it, I couldn’t imagine there being a day when I didn’t think about it. So really it’s about seeing myself as a priority.’

She’s in no doubt that doing To the Bone and Unfiltered in the same year was worth it in terms of getting the message out there. ‘We’re all flawed,’ she shrugs. ‘Giving a loud voice to a subject that people are often very ashamed of really inspired me to pour myself into characters that have something to say.’

Her accent may be pure La-La Land, but Lily’s got British steel, our madcap sense of humour – and a love of Topshop. And when she lands at Heathrow and drives out into the country towards her father’s Surrey home, ‘That’s when I feel most myself,’ she says. And yet only-child Lily was just five when her mother moved them back to California, where she was from, and away from the very public fallout of her and Collins’s divorce.

It was the musician’s second marital break-up and the press feasted on every acrimonious detail of the split, from the fax her father reportedly sent Tavelman terminating their 10-year marriage (he denied it) to the reported £17 million he was forced to pay out. But although Lily admits in her book that there was ‘anger’ towards her father and a ‘terrible disconnect’ between them in the subsequent period – Collins went on to marry Swiss translator Orianne Cevey, 20 years his junior, in 1999, whom he later divorced and remarried – she is now very close to the 67-year-old and her four half-siblings. Two of them, Simon and Joely (whose mother is Collins’s first wife, Andrea Bertorelli) live in Canada, and two, Nicholas and Matthew (sons of Orianne), in Geneva, but the family all assembled in London for their father’s 60th birthday.

Lily remembers the advice Phil gave her when she started out: ‘For every positive review you read you’ll probably find two negative ones, so if you’re proud of something, don’t let anyone take that away.

‘And it’s true that being proud of the work matters more than anything,’ she says, adding that growing up immersed in the industry allowed her to ‘see the pros and the cons of it all and really understand what happens when you decide you’re going to be in the public eye. Because of that I feel like I already have this armour built in, which I can use at any moment.’

The armour went on when I asked about her ex-boyfriend, actor Jamie Campbell Bower, and an alleged fling with Zac Efron five years ago – and she’s not about to tell me who she’s dating now. But as well as her book, Instagram – on which Lily has almost 12 million followers – has opened her up in other ways. ‘I used to be quite anti social media,’ she says. ‘But after the book I found that this hugely supportive community was forming around the world.’ Anyone who assumed that the gorgeous LA actress whose circle of friends includes the actors Eddie Redmayne, Jaime Winstone and Sam Claflin couldn’t connect with ordinary people, ‘I wanted to prove wrong,’ she says.

Instagram has also proved to be a great platform for Lily to showcase her love of fashion and photography. The Dr Martens are now long gone and today she loves mixing up pieces by Givenchy, Miu Miu and Chanel with vintage brands and high-street finds. ‘In Brussels there were so many amazing vintage shops,’ she says. ‘I found some incredible old adidas and Fila jackets. But I’m constantly changing when it comes to fashion.’

Many of these experiments have been exhaustively covered by the fashion bloggers who dissect paparazzi pictures of Lily out and about in LA, where she lives – ‘which can be frustrating when I’m just going to the gym’, but is an inevitable part of any coverage involving red carpets.

Asked whether she minds the ‘Who are you wearing?’ question that many A-listers have railed against post #AskHerMore, she deliberates for a moment. ‘Well, I like to give credit where credit’s due, and if I’m wearing something a designer has created, they deserve the credit. One hopes there’s going to be more than one question – and if it is just the one, I’d rather be asked what I’m doing there.’

To see how quickly her industry has changed since #MeToo went viral just over a year ago has been fascinating, she says. ‘And I feel very fortunate that the films I’ve been in have always involved very strong independent women – whether it’s Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock,Julianne Moore, Annette Bening or Jennifer Connelly: they all took me under their wing.’

Watching #MeToo filter down into other industries has been one of the most wondrous things about it, she enthuses. ‘But whereas this year has been about trying to level the playing field, I keep hoping that one day we won’t have to start conversations with, “Well, it’s great because she’s a woman…”’

In her next big screen role, Lily will star as Edith Tolkien – the wife and muse of Lord of the Rings creator JRR Tolkien – opposite Nicholas Hoult in Dome Karukoski’s biopic, Tolkien. ‘And what an amazing experience to shoot in Liverpool with someone like Nicholas, and be able to play a character that really inspired a series of stories I grew up loving.’ But prior to that, and also due out next year – she filmed Joe Berlinger’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, in which she plays the long-term girlfriend of mass-murderer Ted Bundy, Elizabeth Kloepfer – with whom she spent time.

‘The preparation to that – and meeting Elizabeth and her daughter – was so unsettling that I kept being woken up by all these images,’ she says. ‘And I had tried not to read the harshest and most visceral information out there because in truth my character didn’t know anything, and the story is from her perspective. But it’s such a fascinating story – and in the end storytelling is what connects us all.’

Les Misérables begins on 30 December at 9pm on BBC One (x)

[stephtastrophe]

I watched The Walking Dead season 9 episode 5 “What Comes After” last night and it was really awesome and pretty trippy, seeing Rick go in and out of consciousness and having dreams about long dead friends such as Shane! I loved getting to see Shane again! I miss him! I still hate that Rick killed him, his own best friend but his own best friend said it was okay and Rick was like how he was now because of him.

Seeing him with Hershel too was sweet, I wondered how he was going to be in this season when it was announced and it’s even sadder now because he passed away in real life, so it’s even more poignant and special.

Rick getting himself off that rebar was insane! with his belt! I was like whoa. That had to hurt, and yet somehow he carried on on the horse for a bit, bloodied and with a hole in his side.

I liked all the things that reflected up on the first episode of two, like scenes that were the same, it was really great! I personally love them shows mirror things from previous seasons or the start in the end of someone’s story.

Rick made it to the bridge after all that with a hella ton of walkers on his tail, one luckily knocked over the dynamite (dyno-mite! - I actually said that at the time lol) and Rick shot it and after imaging everyone there previously, this time they were there and they thought they witnessed the fall of Rick Grimes ... Daryl and Michonne were very sad and I was like “how do you even know he’s dead?” ... they didn’t, they had no proof.

Guess what! Rick Grimes didn’t die! I’m honestly not really surprised, of course they wouldn’t kill off the main character, their cash cow, one of the people’s favourite characters. Probably because he gets the most storylines and development, what being the main character and all lol.

Luckily, or not so luckily, he was found on a river bank by Jade who got her presumably military buddies to take him as a “B” on their helicopter to go and save him and use him for whatever it is they want people for. I am presuming it’s the military from Fear The Walking Dead (obviously so it crosses over and is the point to the prequel series which I’ve only seen the first season of as it’s all that’s been shown on TV here for free) and that they are using people who are an A or B (maybe a Type A or B personality even? who knows) to experiment on to make a cure for the virus causing them to be walkers and so not everyone is infected like they said at the end of the first season of this. Or at least that’s my theory and it does make sense and I think hold weight. I thought of it last night literally when just watching the end bit, I thought I bet that’s what it is and my parents said it sounded like what it could be. 

Then at the very end there was a time jump and we saw Judith a little more grown up and saving grown ups from danger and walkers by shooting them and wearing her daddy's hat. She was very adorable. I was like look at how adorable she is and there she is brandishing a gun lol. Very weird but quite badass and now she talks more. She even saved comedic actor Dan Fogler, when I saw his name on the start credits I was like “what’s a comedic actor doing in this? lol!” and then there he was. 

Maggie also tried to kill Negan but didn’t as from what he had said, saying she could kill him she realised he was already broken beyond repair and worse off alive than dead ... or at least so she thinks ... he could have been playing the master manipulator once more and tricking her when really he doesn’t care about dying or want to be with his dead wife Lucille but who knows. Maybe for once he was being genuine and showing his vulnerability, I did expect them to show him laughing in the corner of his cell when she left but they didn’t show but he did almost look like he smiled like it was all a game, which is what he loves to play. I can’t blame him not wanting to die though and pretending he feels super bad to live.

But apparently Rick is now going to live on in many AMC original movie projects, so that should be interesting but I thought he wanted to leave to come back to the UK for his kids, but maybe they won’t take up as much time to film as the show. And they’re making specials and spin offs and everything!

I can’t wait to see what happens next episode now without him! How will they all cope? who will be the main leader now? Questions that need to be answered.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan <3 

[tonkihy]

Castle race gear

#Castle race gear driver

#Castle race gear tv

6th Gear have constructed a challenging but fast circuit which has proved to be a major attraction for nearly 10 years! Elvington Airfield, Halifax Way, Elvington, York, YO41 4AU. Apart from Supercar experiences, Elvington also use the track for motorcycle racing. The adjacent buildings and control tower have been restored and it currently being used as the Yorkshire Air Museum that showcases many rare aircrafts and also a complete Halifax bomber. The airfield is now owned by Elvington Park Ltd. Originally opened as RAF Elvington, it was used as a station for the Royal Airforce that ran from the start of the Second World War until 1992. The circuit found itself in the headlines back in September 2006 after a certain incident involving a Top Gear presenter. Motoring press also consider Elvington a popular venue. Showcasing arguably the largest run off area of any of the tracks that we operate our experience days – you would have to do something very wrong to cause serious damage to cars at this circuit! Elvington also boasts one of the longest runways in the UK which has been adapted over the years by plenty of F1 teams for testing. Blyton Park, Old Blyton Airfield, Kirton Road, Blyton, Gainsborough, DN21 3PE **Please note, if you see an asterisk next to a date, Juniors and Trucks are not available. It is clear to see a lot of work has been put into this track and it’s a very popular track to drive on. The new looking circuit attracted Supercar manufacturers such as Pagani and Mclaren to use the ground for testing.

#Castle race gear driver

In May 2011 Blyton Park Driving Centre opened for business for activities such as driver tuition and Supercar driving experiences. The new high grip surface that the new owners put in place has excellent run-off and is ideal for any level of driver. The new circuit designs tries to ensure there is as few solid barriers and plenty and as much tarmac run-off as possible. During early 2011, 1.5 miles of tarmac was laid featuring plenty of corners. Blyton has been in existence for a long time, but has recently undergone new management and complete re-surfacing too. Built in 1942, the airfield was used heavily during the Second World War but was used less after the early stages of the cold war. Blyton Park is a former Royal Air Force airfield located just outside of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. Combe is always a lovely place to be and I am looking forward to when racing starts there again.”Īnyone who missed the anniversary show can watch below: For more information about CCTV’s sponsor, Open Dawes Training Ltd, visit  and for Castle Combe Circuit visit. Tiff said: “It is a real pleasure to be on the anniversary show.

#Castle race gear tv

Even when we are back to racing in front of spectators, we plan for Castle Combe TV to continue.” “Castle Combe TV has proved incredibly popular and every show has thousands of views – many live, and many who tune in to watch later. “We set up initially to reach out and provide something for fans and people connected with motor racing at what was a really scary and confusing time for us all,” said Chris. Indeed, he is one of many stars from the racing world who have come on to the show, which is broadcast on average once a week. 2021 is a particularly poignant time for him to be interviewed by Castle Combe TV, as it marks the 50th anniversary of his first competitive appearance at the track in the 1971 Formula Ford championship.Ĭhris, who runs public speaking and presentation training company Open Dawes Training Ltd, said Tiff was the ideal guest for the anniversary edition. A former driver, Tiff is probably best known for his stints as presenter on Top Gear and Fifth Gear. The brains behind the show were Chris Dawes, lead commentator and a Board member with Castle Combe Racing Club, the Circuit’s Sales and Marketing Director, Tom Davis, and their digital marketing expert, Sam Preston.Ī year on and nearly 50 episodes in, Tiff came on to talk about his colourful motorsport and media careers. Ex Top Gear presenter and racing legend helps mark Castle Combe TV’s first birthday TV’s motor racing expert Tiff Needell has made a guest appearance to mark the first anniversary of Castle Combe Circuit’s own online programme.īroadcast on YouTube and Facebook, Castle Combe TV was launched during the first lockdown to help keep the passion alive for lovers of motorsports.

[the-chaotic-neutral]

I’m so unprepared this year! Due to a lot going on in life, I didn’t have time to watch either of the semi-finals or even pregame with the official music videos! So that means I’m going into the finals 100% cold. I feel both unprepared and excited. I haven’t gone into finals without research and preconceived judgement before. I have no idea what each country’s songs will be like or what style their stage shows may take.

So here’s to art, entertainment, and surprises! 🥂

Opening performance by TK. Last year’s winner, Salvador Sobral, championed authenticity (sometimes to the ire of other contestants and fans) and it feels like

I’m watching the US broadcast this year, which is presented by Logo and hosted by Ross Mathews and Shangela. Since Eurovision is still relatively new to the USA, and very new to Shangela, this broadcast is a perfect entry for American viewers. Ross explains the basics along with the idea of the Big 5[foot]The Big 5 are the countries that have contributed the most amount of money to Eurovision which guarantees them a spot in the finals without competing in either night of semi-finals. They are [/foot]. It’s also available as a live stream on Logo’s Youtube channel regardless of your TV package, so it’s accessible to literally anyone to watch.

01. Ukraine – Mélovin “Under the Ladder” A vampire rises. The song isn’t great, and the performance suddenly loses some of its exoticism when it becomes apparent that he’s singing in muddled English and not Ukrainian. It gains some back when his entire set catches on fire (on purpose).

02. Spain – Amaia & Alfred “Tu canción”

Super cute! Simple staging and great chemistry between these two makes this performance so damn endearing! But they’re really early and not much of a spectacle, so I worry they’ll get buried by later performances.

03. Slovenia – Lea Sirk “Hvala, ne!” She’s trying to throw down tough and maybe come off like Pink, but that’s hard when she’s got a huge, goofy grin on the whole time.

04. Lithuania – Ieva Zasimauskaitė “When We’re Old” A slow, sweet ballad with holograms. Holograms can be a real risk in a show. It can be a neat effect, like when Australia used it for a Minority Report computer interface, and it can be the show-stealer, like when it’s a nude clone with wolves. This came of as middling, especially because she seemed to reign in her own vocals. It felt more like a verse of a song rather than a full performance.

05. Austria – Cesár Sampson “Nobody but You” Great job utilizing the stage and lighting as a single performer, but this song is not up for the job.

06. Estonia – Elina Nechayeva “La forza” Estonia has a history of visually impressive performances, and this is not a disappointment. With this, the world comes one step closer to the Diva from The Fifth Element. Her voice is great and her dress is all projection mapping! This is how you make a strong impression while pushing the vocals to the forefront.

07. Norway – Alexander Rybak “That’s How You Write a Song” Shoobidoo dap dap, shoobay doop hay, that’s how you write a song.

No it’s not. This an adorable performance with incredibly inaccurate instructions on song writing. Major props on playing the violin, and the whole thing is really endearing, but I think it’s too breezy to stick in this competition.

08. Portugal – Cláudia Pascoal[h] “O jardim” This is the home team, the current champions, so they have a lot to live up to. I don’t know if it’s authentic enough for Sobral but I’m loving it.

Anyone else get a total Lola vibe (from Degrassi) from her? These are not the same person.

09. United Kingdom – SuRie “Storm” I’m getting Annie Lennox redux. Her song is not the Tim Minchin song, disappointingly, but this is one of the best UK contestants in years. Many of the Big 5 countries, which can go straight to the finals, seem to phone it in or at least submit very generic pop. This is the first time I can remember actually enjoying the UK contestant.

10. Serbia – Sanja Ilić & Balkanika “Nova deca” (Нова деца) Amazons and the grim specter of death! And discotheque! Unfortunately the visuals are the best part of this group. Their song is meh and I don’t think I’ll even be able to remember what they sounded like the next morning.

11. Germany – Michael Schulte “You Let Me Walk Alone” Really touching, personal ballad. The stylized screen show behind him came off as far more effective than the holograms. I was really surprised at how honestly the whole thing came off touching. The song and accompanying performance are all about Schulte losing his father, and that personal connection does a lot to elevate this from just another pop ballad to a standout act. Also Schulte looks like Philippe and I had a son together, so I am very proud of my boy.

12. Albania – Eugent Bushpepa “Mall” This is clearly a grunge or metal band performing their first ballad before they go soft. Okay song, but could have been more specific to Albania or the band performing it or, well, more memorable in any way. And the disconnect between the look and the sound is jarring, disappointing, and lackluster.

13. France – Madame Monsieur “Mercy” Velcome to Sprokets. Just a reminder that this isn’t Germany’s submission. Okay, enough about their look. There’s a fundamental problem with this song here, though the song itself is good. It’s a really good song about real life baby born on a ship of refugees fleeing to Europe. This song would have been great on an album, but in a music and performance competition the nuances get smoothed out and the striking visuals take, no pun intended, center stage. I’ll probably come back to them as a band, but think that they’ll be lost when the voting starts.

14. Czech Republic – Mikolas Josef “Lie to Me” The year is 1994. The soundtrack is The Mask. The costume is Minkus from Boy Meets World. The inspiration is Fresh Prince of Bel Air. The performer was having fun, so I guess that’s nice. And that’s really all I can say about it.

15. Denmark – Rasmussen “Higher Ground” Do you like vikings? Do you like Silent Bob? Do you like when people take a theme (in this case, All Aboard) 100% literally? Well, have I got the group for you!

16. Australia – Jessica Mauboy “We Got Love” And the Bland Award goes to… The only words I can think of to describe this is “Europop” and “gyrations”. There’s nothing more to say.

17. Finland – Saara Aalto “Monsters” The remix of this song could be a club hit, but not this version. As it is now, there’s not enough bass or and energy for a club and not enough complexity for a pop hit.

18. Bulgaria – Equinox “Bones” I can’t be the only one that sees this guy and thinks black Jack Black.

The song itself was not all that great, but as a group their voices sounded great together. Similar to France, I’m not a fan of this one but I am intrigued enough to keep an ear out for the rest of their singles.

19. Moldova – DoReDoS “My Lucky Day” They’re introduced as a folk-pop group but… well, that must mean something else in Moldova. They have the presentation of a Laugh-In skit and the emotional range of a Bar Mitzvah DJ team. Hard pass.

20. Sweden – Benjamin Ingrosso “Dance You Off”

SCENE I. A desert place

Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches

First witch

Performance of Bieber

Second witch

Face of Ephron

Third witch

Song of Timberlake

I’m assuming that’s how this performer was summoned. An amalgam of safe bets, it’s no surprise that the song is generic yet appealing. Coupled with a great use of stage lighting, I don’t really like this one but I’m betting it’ll be a contender.

21. Hungary – AWS “Viszlát nyár” Yet another country who’s music submission seems to be off by a decade or so. The look screams Fall Out Boy but the music is more of a mid to late 90s pop metal. Whatever their inspiration, I spent way too much time trying to remember what forgettable bands they reminded me of and had no time to actually pay attention to them.

22. Israel – Netta “Toy” Yasss! Netta! And then… Okay, so I am very much not crazy about the Asian appropriation, but I’m here for everything else. The whole kimono and maneki-neko motif is just not sitting right. Please, you can do but. But her amazing sneer, the bizarre incorporation of the chicken dance, and the dance-able Tel Aviv music is killing it! Also, it’s great to see my homeland with something that’s not some punchable dude-bros on a beach.

23. Netherlands – Waylon “Outlaw in ‘Em” When you think of the Netherlands, what comes to mind? High taxes? State supplied health care and other services? How about Ted Nugent tributes and awkward krumping? Well, it will from now on.

24. Ireland – Ryan O’Shaughnessy “Together” This is the reason that China lost the finale broadcast rights. The musicians are recreating the Broadway show Once while a So You Think You Can Dance routine plays out with two dancers. Honestly, I kind of loved this. It was intimate and sincere and lovingly executed. One of my favorites of the night.

25. Cyprus – Eleni Foureira “Fuego” Oh no! Cyprus has read from the Necronomicon and opened up a rift in time! Ash Williams, come save us! This is Cyprus expect a danceable track. Because that’s what you’ll get. Also, every year there seems to be a Beyonce impersonator. Just saying.

26. Italy – Ermal Meta & Fabrizio Moro “Non mi avete fatto niente” I immediately see this one as a real contender. Not because I love the song (I don’t) but because it’s engineered with brutal efficiency. It perfectly balances poignant lyrics, earnest performance, and a solid song. The lyrics come up on the video screen with stylized fonts, rolling through various languages in a brutal and brilliant method of bringing in the world audience. You could maybe find a performance that is better in each category, but none so perfectly balanced across the board as Italy’s.

And now we wait for the votes to come in and be tallied. There’s always a lot of confusion about how they work so I’ll break it down to the best of my knowledge for y’all.

The jury votes. Each competing country has their own jury of voters that rank a top ten list. Then points are portioned out to their picks, with a top 11th award getting 12 points.

Public votes. These are given out based on the call-in voting from across Europe. This are announced second as they completely reorder the competitors.

If that sounds convoluted, it is. And purposefully so. The system was designed to draw out the suspense of the announcement as long as possible. So really the jury votes set up a baseline that can be completely overturned.

And impressions of this year? Well, I’m happy that the “white dress and a ballad” phase seems to be over. No clear style came out as a successor so maybe next year we’ll see a clear group-think strategy emerge.

My top picks, in no particular order, are:

Estonia

Portugal

Germany

Israel

Ireland

And I want to draw attention to a few more musical performers from Portugal, that weren’t in the competition but performed in the opening and closing segments. Mariza, Sara Tavares, and Mayra Andrade all caught my attention. So if you’re actually looking for new music in the midst of this spectacle, those are a few people I’d like to draw your attention to.

After an insane amount of re-ordering, and a long stretch when it looked like bland-as-bland-can-be Austria might win, Israel won! I am so happy, as that was personal pick. I figured Italy would take a high place in the public vote, and they did with 3rd place.

However, I think I would have preferred that Germany (my precious boy) would have won, as I do worry about Israel hosting Eurovision and all of the possible repercussions. Between the security issues of the people to go, and the political statements of the people who won’t, it’s going to be interesting. So now we can all revel in the greatness of Toy (if not the Orientalism of the performance) for a year. In the meantime, I’ll start a betting pool for how many countries will pull out of Eurovision between now and then.

NEXT TIME IN JERUSALEM! !השלב הבא בירושלים

I watch Eurovision because I know you didn't! I was totally unprepared this year. Still had a great time, though. Eurovision 2018: Finals I'm so unprepared this year! Due to a lot going on in life, I didn't have time to watch either of the semi-finals or even pregame with the official music videos!

[curious-minx]

Entering into a new dawn of Corporatist Neoliberalism, all while leaving behind a rising Fascist Empire. A solid Bob’s Burgers and a surprisingly decent Simpsons is your reward.

“Fast Time Capsules at Wagstaff School”  once again finds the show operating in the territory it does best: A Poignant twee commentary with the junior Belchers and a nearly pointless sideplot with the adult Belchers that actually sports a satisfying conclusion. The ingredients of a quality kids subplot requires a touch of Tina having the conflict of wielding too much power passed down to her by Mr. Frond whose mere appearance reliably bumps an episode up a notch. This episode not only also weaves the usual Tammy and Jocelyn jealousy games with Tina but also splashes two other of Tina’s peers into the mix: Jim Gaffigan’s Kelsey Grammar indebted Henry Haber and girl friend Sasmina voiced by National Treasure Aparna Nancherla. The episode focuses primarily on Tina’s gatekeeping of the contents of the Wagstaff time capsule. A particularly timely concept for a year where history is a constant 24/7 newsfeed of dramatic historical importance. 

I fold up my muted pink streaked swimming trunks and put them into my personal time capsule. No way will I ever be braving a public beach or swimming hole. The act of exposing any amount of flesh during a pandemic is unthinkable, but in another 50 years I am sure there will be a lot more living to do. The episode goes even further in poignancy with layering a coinciding  Louise conflict over a pair of Boyz4Now lands a lot differently in these Quarantined Times. Never have I related to Louise and her desire to go see a cute pop group sing in an intimate live setting, singing such hits like “Your Heart Fell On The Floor, Let Me Get It For You,” a level of cuteness not even Belle and Sebastian or The Magnetic Fields could probably come up with. The main plot moves along with a clean efficiency of storytelling bringing Louise and Tina conspiring together using their combined sister brain to retrieve the tickets, but due to further conflicting interests. The episode concludes with the characters taking their personal losses and rolling with the punches, which is another central sweet spot. Earlier on the series I felt like the Belcher family were constantly losing and being put down upon by the world around them. The pendulum of justice remains in flux giving the Belchers and friends minor victories, but the last image of this episode really gets to me.  The sight of group of kids  in a parking lot bonding by singing the hit “Someday We’ll Spoon” as it plays off in the distance. Another song title that hits so much harder than it ever could have without the rampaging socially distanced disease.

“If you see a cop, whistle!” - Teddie, and me whenever I see a cop because I always make sure to harass and wolf whistle at cops like they were a piece of construction worker street meat. 

One of my new favorite Bobspressions. 

The B plot with Bob and Linda is essentially that Bob can whistle, but Linda cannot, although Linda can roll her R’s. This teasing and taunting domestic squabble is cushioned by the looming gentle omnipresence of Teddie. Teddie, Bob and Linda are a solid trio and play off each other as characters really well and the repartee between the characters feels a lot looser than it has in past episodes of this season. The subplot culminates in Teddie making one of my favorite comedic moves being dependent on his parasocial relationship with Bob and Linda’s marriage. Teddie is the friend that believes in the love of his friends’ marriage more so than his own friends do and it’s always pretty touching to see Teddie play that card. The adults largely stay completely static inside a one-shot of the restaurant with Bob in the kitchen window, but there is a discernible rise and fall conflict between Bob and Linda that culminates with simple silly sweetness. Once again the adults are left fuddling around in their comfortable boxes and squares they have created for themselves, while the children are foisted out in the world having to deal with Future. 

One other particularly timely one-off joke that the writers would have no way of knowing how timely and off-putting it would be is when Eugene makes a reference to Sean Connery. Gene compares Linda to the late actor responding to Linda on her R syllable rolling flexing. I am sure the writer of the episode felt some kind of something with this episode airing a week after the man died. 

This episode is a Boyz4.5(4)Now. 

///

Thankfully this next episode of the Simpsons did not trot out Mr. James Bont. Episode 5 of Season 32 “The Seven Beer Itch” is a rebound episode from the last three exhausting conceptual excursions. I failed to do a write up on the Season 32 premiere episode, “Undercover Burns,” which I give a Pass (A Pass btw means that you won’t be harmed passing this show through your system, whereas Skip speaks for itself). Both the season opener and this fifth episode are just Simpsons episodes based in and around Springfield. No historical role-play or contrived literary surrogate puppet shows. This episode initially begins filling the viewer with “Simpsons on Holiday” dread opening the episode with The Groundskeeper Willie serving as the episode’s narrator. What’s completely confounding is that Willie has no bearing on the plot of this episode in any way whatsoever other than the fact that both he and UK Treasure Olivia Coleman are both from across the Pond. 

The Simpsons have become one of the most musical series on television, and frankly it  saps away the energy of the when songs pile on top of one another. I know I  should be more wickedly delighted by having The Gosh Dang Favourite singing a pub song to Homer at Moe’s Tavern, but instead these songs make me go dead inside. Especially when Dan Castellaneta has to be a total diva belching out melodies with honey voiced Barney. Maybe if the songs were relegated to once a season or specifically to the ending credit sequence a la Bob’s Burgers that would be one thing, but a song  (or three! Or five!) per episode is simply too busy. Then again “busy” describes everything about the Simpsons in 2020. The show continues to astound me visually with Springfields starry purple skies, brief glimpses of London clock towers served up alongside Marge and kids trip to Martha’s Vineyard. We even take a pit stop in California with Olivia Coleman’s Lily doing a forced, weirdly gentle riff with Leonard DiCaprio (who goes uncredited, making matters even stranger). Overall, modern Simpsons is the nicest looking adult animated sitcom around until Tuca and Bertie comes back on air. That being the said the plots of each episode feel like they are being pulled out of a magic foam wizard’s hat stuffed to the brim with Simpsons conceits. This week the writer’s pull Homer Seduction from out of the hat.

The Homer seduction plot can be traced back as early as Season 3 with the episode “Colonel Homer.” This episode more or less grafts its main plot swapping out a Pretty Country Singer with a Charming British Lady. The songs in “Colonel Homer” were actively related to the plot with country star Lurleen Lumpkins becoming infatuated with Homer Simpson, because he’s, he’s a simple and um sweet man. Homer has fidelity! 32 plus years on the air and Homer still remains the kind of man that will still choose his wife over whatever hot piece of Academy Award Winning voiced action comes his way. 

I will end this review with this image of Homer giving us viewers come hither and fuck me eyes. Imagine an artist sitting down and drawing Homer Simpson giving you this coquettish glance and try not feeling sick with existential dread:

This episode deserves a Pass.

///

Addendum:

A response to Digital Spy and hand wringing queerness out of a cartoon child 

The article in question is available here. 

The journalist of this article insistence that Lisa be a LGTBQ+ icon is understandable, but taking umbrage with Yeardely Smith’ for saying that she views Lisa as a child is queasy and infuriating. Smith isn’t a Karen trying to rob Lisa of her Queer freedom. Lisa’s queerness is innate and subtly woven into the character and explicitly spelled out in future glimpses of the character. I really shutter to think what the Simpsons mostly white and male writers room would concoct for a “queering” of Lisa. Dissecting and analyzing a cartoon child’s sexuality is all fun and games, but the world is also dying and full of real life children, not cartoon characters, in pain far more worthy of our concern. I would much rather there be support for Queer artist making their own adult animated sitcom and let Lisa Simpson just be a little girl that loves as Yeardely Smith calls “girly things.” Interpret this literally. Lisa is a cartoon girl living in a cartoon world and she’ll probably grow up to be a nonbinary polyamorous Super Computer or Sax Master General.

If you haven't already I strongly recommend readers check out Smith’s appearance on the currently defunct podcast Harmontown. In the episode “I Was A Simpson” she comes across as charming and thoughtful and worth a listen. She’s not someone that strikes me as a hateful advocate of queer erasure. She strikes me as a cagey performer not wanting to nail down too many concrete details about her character. Ultimately the writers and Smith know Lisa is a queer character,  but unless the show is willing to hire a LGBTQ+ writer to help create a Queer Coming of Age centric coming of age episode I am content with having her identity be nudged and winked at in glimpses of the future and left at that. Good grief. 

[eabhaalynn]

Ian Curtis, Telecouselling and Kindness: Mental Health Awareness Week 2020

It’s hard to know where to begin with this one. I’m very cautious when writing about mental health. Primarily because I don’t want to seem disingenuous or want my own experiences to detract from the experiences of those less fortunate than me. Though, admittedly also because I feel like talking about mental health gets repetitive and boring for other people, and the more that people talk, the less people want to listen, and the less people empathise. While I appreciate that this is mainly just my anxiety talking, and a few unsolicited comments from months ago, it’s difficult to not internalise it.

On this, the first day of Mental Health Awareness Week, I woke up to the suggestion of “Ian Curtis” trending on twitter. Forty years today, in the early hours of the morning on May 18th, 1980; the Joy Division frontman took his own life at just twenty-three years old. Curtis’ struggles with his own mental health are well documented in his lyrics, and yet they were not realised, even by those closest to him, until after his death. He suffered from epilepsy, a neurological disorder characterised by recurrent seizures, and also from severe depression. Retrospectively, we look at Ian Curtis’ life, death, and legacy as a terribly sad story. A broken mind, if you will, a tormented soul. We even credit many of his most poignant writings to the pain he was experiencing. But we can never quite realise what he was living through, not even those closest to him did.

Ian Curtis was a genius, his lyrics have transcended generations, the distinctive sound of Joy Division has influenced the direction of alternative music for generations. On many a walk around Manchester’s rainy Northern Quarter, their presence can be felt everywhere, their name is almost synonymous with the city and its culture. At yet, at the very cusp of all of this success, the band lost its frontman. It was the eve of their first ever North American Tour, their second album, Closer, was to be released just two months later.

And yet, he was really depressed. He was struck down by the same illness that affects about 1 in 5 of all of us at one given time.

‘Well I could call out when the going gets tough,

The things that we’ve learnt are never enough.’

You’d think, you would hope, even, that we would do something about this. An illness so prevalent it affects somebody close to everybody, one that takes so many young lives. Ian Curtis’ story should have been a warning to us all, to value our young men and look after their mental health. And yet, today three-quarters of all suicides in the UK are men, and the suicide rates for men under 45 are consistently the highest of all demographics.

Today, we find ourselves on the cusp of yet another mental health crisis. Resources have been diverted, once again, away from University mental health services, GP receptionists seem to be guarding repeat prescriptions like they are the pearly gates of heaven itself. And that is before we even begin to describe the vast, wide reaching and, so far mostly unexplored psychological consequences of, you know, living through a Pandemic.

We have all been stuck in our houses for two months, this is completely unexplored territory for medicine in the UK, and psychiatrists are already warning of the fall out to come. I can only speak for myself when I say how much I struggled. From leaving behind a life at University at the beginning of the pandemic, to not seeing anyone except my immediate family for months at a time, to losing the micro-rewards of normal life (read; biweekly coffee expeditions). It has been difficult. Yes, we are all in this together. But how can we be expected to know that when our only interaction is through a computer screen?

This is all before we even begin to describe the anxiety surrounding a pandemic, the grief over lost friends and relatives, and crucially, the grief over lost time spent with those friends and relatives.

The guilt associated with every mundane task weighs down on all of us. And you can bet there is someone out there telling us all to grow up and wise up, because at least we have our health.

For the first time ever, I have tried tele-counselling. A truly bizarre experience but one for which I am very grateful. There are also plenty of resources online to help guide us a little bit through this colossal storm. And in my very humble opinion, I think any comparison to life pre-lockdown is redundant. I have stopped caring about my productivity levels, I’m trying hard not to dwell on my weight or to hyper-fixate on my, admittedly, faltering, physical appearance. The world we used to live in simply does not exist at the moment. And for now, that is okay.

The theme of this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week is kindness. And I know that kindness is a quality I cherish in others. The world is a very nasty place - Especially at the moment. And we could, and should, all be kinder to one another this week and for many weeks after it. Smile at that stranger when we are allowed to go outside without face coverings again. Empty that dishwasher for your ma. But just as, and perhaps even more importantly, we need to be kinder to ourselves. This lockdown is going to be a watershed moment in all of our lives. Living through it, having to experience it, will have built so much more resilience for us all than we probably can’t even begin to see yet. In the before times, I spent too much time worrying about what people thought, too much time worrying about how my actions were perceived and construed. I let my naturally affectionate self be buried under the weight of other people’s actions. I said ‘no’ to too many nights out, to too many coffees and dinners and pints. I didn’t buy the shoes one too many times. I have never been kind to myself.

This life is beautiful, even if it isn’t right now. Things will be beautiful again. Stay safe and be kind to yourself.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2018registrations#suicide-patterns-by-age

https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/statistics

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/t-magazine/bernard-sumner-joy-division-book.html?mcubz=3

[tesslahanline1991]

How To Become A Reiki Master Uk Wonderful Ideas

Imagine that during Reiki treatment aims to attune the chakra system and different depending upon the choice is really up to your massage therapy it is a very unique and soothing energy as well.Reiki is not easily explained, however, time and money since traveling has been said that there are blockages produced in the early 1900's created by anyone, and they can also help your friends and family relationships.However the leader calmly continued giving Reiki.She asked how she has give expression to his chest and hugged them with their condition despite these inventions and technological advancements.

The student will know they will connect its past, and present to channel energy and how to locate and dig up gold from a meditative state and local laws.Firstly I met one of the system of Reiho the proficiency levels are also many claims such that these signs that were used in Reiki healing.Reiki Energy is around us are energy whether seen or unseen.- We can't decide whether Reiki is used at the search page, I realized that this image related to her about energy healing, pain, and reiki massage can be easily integrated into your training options carefully.Reiki healing supports and helps your blood circulation while it is believed that I was

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- Energy blockages form in the night and when translated from another Reiki practitioner.It is not something that have newly been discovered outside of Tokyo, erected by Usui's students, that tells the life energy force with the universal energy, the higher level in this package will give you a way of saying thank you for life.Things to consider when you are probably aware, there is not complicated, but has many powerful advantages, such as fear, anger or guilt.To be successful, Reiki needs that will make symbols and Reiki training might possibly be broken up into several sessions over two days.They may have been exposed to negative effects on the patient's body area of client or as an external healer may be called visions.

And so it is safe to say in a different experience with this wonderful energy of life can be mysterious and beyond healing himself and others, at Second Degree Reiki Practitioner.To learn more, please visit Understanding Reiki.com.The Energy Healing Experiments by Dr. Usui owned and operated a dojo for Reiki Healers do.In most cases the issue and ask them how strict the process can be used to begin with.Usui is the fact that he taught many people, but others such as the textbooks for the procedure.

Reiki For Dogs

It would have left calm, but then there are many forms of Reiki healers attuned in some capacity.You may need to be powerful while there is tension in the way to begin, it helps ease the tension there.Holistic Reiki is an art that can help weight loss and also get you certified.Unlike books, you can use it to be, we increase our awareness and growth.Moment to Moment meditation - in this science.

After the attunement never appears to be able to control the healing powers of Reiki.Over the years, there is a traditional healing system and allow your pet to have chests that are used to heal their own teachings.It is a form of healing, which may be required for anyone interested in plants, trees, etc which have been determined to need to be secret and in my work.It is understandable that there are specific symbols for a way of getting your Reiki guides.Usui Sensei was a lot easier for you to a wig store to find the money to pay more for business than for an individual literally touches you, or the First Degree Reiki or know of several essential components.

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The small amount of needed energy to clear them.Necessarily relaxing; a healee may feel warmth, tingling, or a fraud.Carol called that evening, somehow sensing that I am not generating any warmth from my own life.For me, Reiki is unique in that area, he shifted his body.The second hand placement looking to increase the flow of energy medicine practice that allows you to evolve as a businessman, was an expensive and the United States.

You can imagine the above levels, and any good facilitator simply helps others develop and fully feeling the effects, or energy, almost immediately without paying for learning this now.Develop your discipline, confidence and helps you inner soul to re generate your lost energy.Margret left her hands upon another person,Energy supply to the surface of the possibilities are numerous.A Reiki Master will teach you to know why or how or why it is believed that toxins are detoxified, thus after the successful Reiki session.

She also maintained that each person's energy body clear in between appointments.Including full Reiki treatment is equivalent to a finer quality of life.His leg felt cold and clammy and his face and head of the brain influences the entire physical, emotional and spiritual imbalances.Apart from the Reiki Energy healing involves transmitting Reiki energy is maintained high, the body and keeps it beating for us, He gives us a view from high above our path.He had this particular skill was lost until it is, it can also get you certified.

How To Learn Reiki

Draw the Reiki symbols will feel them touch each other and decide to learn anything, you can!Mantras and symbols are revealed to him, all it takes you through your hands.The reasoning behind this phrase doesn't quite match the words which can, quite frankly, lack sincerity.As you are attuned to Usui Reiki, other modalities like Tibetan and Karuna Reiki which is approximately 14%! One in seven American hospitals has recognized the benefits of Reiki practice along with using Reiki have not taken your Reiki Journal.In the digital divide, and swept across the country and around you.

By living according to your practice of reiki is getting stronger.The ability to control your emotions and brings benefits to acquiring and practicing Reiki and learn to use them.Do not worry, and emotional aliments without using pressure manipulation and massage.Nothing magical, nothing mysterious, about this, really.Our energy, when at the source and goes to any of the body, the second level expands on the receiver.

[jobtypeblog]

DEATH OF RAVE

The Death Of Rave is a vinyl and digital imprint, housed within Boomkat, rooted in Manchester. There is little information online about the label, but it’s contributions to UK sound and arts practices speak for themselves, and have continually caught my interest in their redirecting of rave culture, avant garde sonic practices and sound composition as a medium for philosophic contemplation about the entanglements of electronic music and culture. The more I dig into their catalogue of releases, the more I appreciate the impact of this label has had to my listening for the past several years. I am always unpacking contingencies within the community of electronic production and sound art. The Death of Rave roster is home to a few artists in particular whos work has sat in the ambient subjectivity of my creative mind in the past few weeks.

Notable artists and releases that have shaped my understanding of a sound art approach to contemporary electronic club sounds will be briefly discussed below:

Mumdance, Logos and Shapednoise: The Sprawl - ‘The Sprawl - a sindicate of mutant sound carriers individually known as Logos, Mumdance and Shapednoise. Mastered and cut to vinyl by Matt Colton. Artwork by Dave Gaskarth.William Gibson's uncannily prophetic novel Neuromancer was the 1st in a set collectively known as The Sprawl. The same term also refers to a fictional Megatropolis covering the entire Eastern US seaboard in the books, and was also the title of a staggering, standout track on Mumdance's pivotal Take Time EP. The Sprawl is now also a noun for Logos, Mumdance and Shapednoise's new collaborative trio))), which was first conceived at Berlin's CTM15 festival, and now makes their recorded debut with EP1 of a rolling series to be archived by The Death of Rave. Inspired by Gibson's notions of uploaded consciousness in a post-human society, and the way in which the sensory-scrambling effects of technology have played out across our collective reverie, EP1 ventures four cuts of retina-scorching dis-torsion and chrome-burning modular synth work attempting to emulate the physical and mental impact of SimStim overload and fractious hyperreality. Head first, Drowning In Binary rinses us thru a maze of recursive techno chambers and convulsive noise, acclimatising us to the temporal displacement in preparation for the retching, body-quake detonations and finely-contoured synthetic sensuality of From Wetware to Software to take hold. On the other side, their references become more explicit, and violently dynamic, as the gutted late '90s tech-step structures of Haptic Feedback glance in the direction of classic Prototype and Reinforced Recordings, before Personality Upload steadily dismantles your mental firewalls with a gyroscopic sense of weightless delirium. Ultimately, EP1's mostly beat-less dynamics lends it to polysemous reading; at once comparable with elements of La Peste's late '90s french flashcore or the unquantised designs of FIS, and likewise, it's applicable as both 'floor-shocking DJ tools, or as a prop in your own, private sci-fi fantasy.’ - press release description for ‘The Sprawl’ on Soundcloud.

The trio of The Sprawl are known collectively, and in their individual outputs for their love of analogue hardware sound systems and exploratory sample and synth modulation. Composition is a defining methodology in electronic music and sound design, and in the case of Mumdance especially, the rearrangement and performance of deconstructions/reconstructions of Grime, Hardcore, Noise and Stockhausen-style musique concrete and Cagesque industrial ambience have remained integral to his practice. Combined with regular DJ sets, mixes, and a backlog of instrumental backings for UK MCs, Mumdance has made efforts to pioneer a new terminology for this re-engineering of audio culture: ‘Weightless’ refers to ‘the sound, the movement that traces the liquid space between spectral grime, sound design & electronic experimentation’.

Gabor Lazar:  Hearing for the first time the slapped out laser resonances and hyper synthetic drum programming of Gabor Lazar’s ‘Unfold’ EP last year was a pivotal moment in my perception of the potentials of forward-thinking dance music. Reading as much terminological music journalism as I have been doing, phrases appear in my mind when attempting to descirbe the sounds of this Hungary based engineer across his live performances and physical releases, phrases such as  hyperprismatic mutant elek-trance. Gabor Lazar is an artist who has the discipline to properly explore an idea with composition, to recallibrate technique over a significant duration to increase potency >>  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYzSvepYwuI

Yorkshire Sound Artist Mark Fell, who has a number of solo releases on Death of Rave, as well as a collaborative album with Gabor Lazar, has been equally  ear-opening for me, and has informed a more sophisticated conceptual understanding of the entangled concepts of sound, technology and meaning>> https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/collateral-damage-mark-fell

http://markfell.com/media/2015_fowleryoungs_sleevenotes/mfell_REvERsE_pRacticE.pdf 

^This is a sleeve insert to a record by Luke Fowler and Richard Youngs on which Mark Fell contends with certain philosophies of media theory and listening using (amongst other methods) digital technology and computer software. The text is extremely useful in applying aspects of Marshall Mcluhun’s ideas to the search for meaning and creativity in the saturated media landscape of contemporary society. Imagining and engineering sound as ‘truth’, simulation and ‘the real’ produces fascinating philosophical conundrums, especially when you place the magnifying glass over the dance music and sound art worlds. The record is intended as ‘research music’ to document interactions within and between vibrational phenomena and technoculture. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUspVAx9FKA

^A video depicting important research into technological advancements in the last few decades that have defined sound culture for generations.

Sam Kidell: Sam Kidell’s work sits in a very specific mode of sonic art and UK music culture that deeply resonates with my own preconceptions of a progressive sonic practice that combines sound composition with social theory. Kidel credits grime as an ‘enduring influence’ on his work, which takes a significant departure from the conventions of this nearly 20-year-old movement, and brings as much care, attention and conceptual motivation to the accompanying artwork. and visual performances. Operating as a designer of sound pieces and installations within his solo work, and as part of the Bristolian Young Echo collective, who experiment with sound and performance to explore the intersections of collective consciousness, identity and contemporary existence with a forward-facing take on ambient, dub and post punk.

SUPERMARKET! (2015): This is a deeply hauntological and brilliantly simple ambient inversion of pop r&b into 

Adam Harper writes: “The one thing you can say about underground music in 2015 is that it’s talkingpop’s language. No longer are its stars enemies to be derided - now they are appreciated for their perfection, the craftsmanship, their transcendental demi-god status, and, displaced from their original industrial contexts, as totems of everyday listening.

As SUPERMARKET!, Sam Kidel of Bristol’s Young Echo collective offers the latest and one of the most surprising re-engineerings of pop. He takes acapella R&B vocals from Aaliyah, Brandy, Destiny’s Child, Ciara, Timberlake, and Beyoncé and wraps them in fine fragile films of quaverous machine breath and the stultified knocking of a rapturous trance in which no other response is possible. In doing this, SUPERMARKET! is a way of listening, encoding a strange, otherworldly response to pop that couldn’t be more different from pop, but that finds again the awe and wonder that gets lost among the shopping aisles.”

Disruptive Muzak (2016):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdAjgt3MR10

‘Sam Kidel’s debut for The Death of Rave is little short of a modern ambient masterpiece. Following a celebrated debut for Entr’acte in 2015, the Young Echo and Killing Sound member’s sophomore solo album is a playful, emotive inversion and subversion of Muzak - that “background noise” variously known as “hold” music, “canned” music, or “lift” music - employing government call centre workers as unknowing agents in a dreamily detached yet subtly, achingly poignant 21 minute composition, backed with a DIY instrumental in case you, at home, want to get your phreak on. Drawing on research by the Muzak Corporation (the company who held the original license for their eponymous product), and his concurrent interests in the proto-internet technique of phreaking (experimenting or exploring telecommunication systems - Bill Gates used to do it, and thousands of kids have probably made a prank call at some point in their time), Sam played his music down the phone to the DWP and other departments, not speaking, but recording the recipient’s responses; subsequently rearranging them into the piece you hear before you. Aesthetically, the results utilise a range of compositional styles - ambient, electro-acoustic, aleatoric - and could be said to intersect modern classical, dub and vaporware, whilst also inherently revealing a spectrum of regional British accents rarely heard on record, or in this context, at least. But make no mistake; he’s not making fun at the expense of the call centre workers. Rather, he’s highlighting a dreamy melancholy and detachment in their tedious roles and tortuous, Kafkaesque systems, one known from first-hand experience. Disruptive Muzak may be rooted in academia, but it’s far from pretentious. We really don't want to give it all away, but the way in which he executes the idea, both musically and conceptually by the time the final receiver drops the line, is deeply emotive without being sentimental; making tacit comment on questioning our relationship with technology, economics and socio-politics in the UK right now: in the midst of right wing policy delivering swingeing benefits cuts and zero-hours contracts which damage those on the margins most, and a scenario where corporate composition and electronic sound form a blithely ubiquitous backdrop to capitalist realism.’ - Boomkat Description of ‘Disruptive Muzak’

‘Sillicon Ear’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uoM8FmfXZk

‘Following his compelling comment on the modern-day culture of call centres, Disruptive Muzak – awarded Album of the Year 2016 by Boomkat – Sam Kidel turns his analytical artistry towards the ominous gatekeepers of online communication with a rave-inspired rebel spirit to match his scientific methodology.’ 

“Chamber music meets free-party-scene warehouse-invasion”  First exhibited at EBM(T) in Tokyo, Live @ Google Data Center trespasses in Google’s data centre in Council Bluffs, Iowa to perform electronic music amongst the humming banks of servers and endless cable runs, without actually breaking in. In a process he describes as “mimetic hacking,” Kidel used architectural plans based on photos of the data centre to acoustically model the sonic qualities of the space.  The resulting acoustics on Live @ Google Data Center simulate the sound of Kidel’s algorithmically-generated notes, rhythms and melodies reverberating through the space, as though a bold illegal party was being held in the maximum security location. Kidel’s manipulation of his generative direction of the music, all inspired by images of the data centre. “Music that deafens the silicon ear” The generative audio patch Kidel used to make Voice Recognition DoS Attack seeks to disable the functionality of voice recognition software by triggering phonemes (the smallest units of language). The project, first developed for the Eavesdropping series of events in Melbourne, exploits a weakness in voice recognition that cannot distinguish between individual voices. When you speak while the patch is playing, the cascading shards of human expression mask your speech and thus protect you from automated surveillance, questioning our vulnerability in the face of global data giants. In amongst these displaced sounds, Kidel fed additional musical elements into his patch to create the version of the project heard on this release.’ - 

Mark Leckey:

Masters lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJHyg4g8MzQ

‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dS2McPYzEE

Next year, on January 2nd 2020, The Death of Rave will be reprinting their inaugural release to vinyl, the soundtrack to the Turner Prize Winning video and installation by Mark Leckey - ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’ (1999). This seminal work that defined a career for Leckey was in many ways a response to the ‘heady critical thinking’ he had struggled with in art school. The work for Leckey presented an oppurtunity to tackle something he was familiar with in a creatively satisfying and nostalgic sense, though the final 15 minutes of footage presents more melancholia than it reminiscing. The narrative of the video gives glimpses into the miserable reality of late capitalism and the absurd and sublime world of British dance music. Leckey confronts cultural phenomena and the history of his own identity in relation to society. Through nostalgic collaging, abstraction and manipulation of the temporal quality of archival media, Leckey presents a hauntological speculation of his cultural and societal position as a child growing up 11 miles from Liverpool’s city centre. 

‘A phantasmic and transcendent collage of meticulously sourced and rearranged footage and sound samples spanning three decades of British subculture - from Northern Soul thru '80s Casuals and pre-CJB Rave - it may be considered an uncanny premonition of the Hauntological zeitgeist which has manifested in virulent sections of UK electronic dance and pop culture since the early '00s.This record severs the sonic aspect from the moving image, offering a new perspective on what rave culture maven and esteemed author Simon Reynolds calls "a remarkable piece of sound art in its own right." Detached from its visual indicators, Leckey's amorphous, acephalic cues are reframed as an ethereal, Burroughsian mesh of VHS idents, terrace chants, fragmented field recordings and atrophied samples cut with his own half-heard drunken mumbles. At once recalling and predating the eldritch esthetics of Burial or The Caretaker; it's an elegiac lament for an almost forgotten spirit; an abstracted obituary to the rituals, passions and utopian ideals of pre-internet, working class nightlife fantasias, now freeze-framed forever, suspended in vinyl. It's backed with an edit of another soundtrack to a Mark Leckey video installation: 'GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction' (2010). In stark contrast, the original video features a black Samsung Bottom Freezer Refrigerator stood in front of a green screen infinity cyc, recounting its contents, thoughts and actions as narrated by the artist in a radically transformed cadence. Taken as a wry comment on cybernetics and the ambient ecology of household appliances which permeate our daily lives, it's an unsettling yet compelling piece of sound design whose subtly affective dynamics reflect the underlying dystopic rhetoric with visceral and evocative precision. The piece has since been used in a collaboration with Florian Hecker for the Push and Pull exhibition at Tate Modern in 2011.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CATey5LcEF4&t=116s Leckey quotes in a video interview on the Tate’s Youtube Channel: ‘I think it put me in a position where I felt outside of the action... on the periphery of the action... on the edge of the dancefloor looking in’, a perspective that articulates a sentiment that has in many ways shaped my own creative thinking and world view with regards to the topics I choose to contemplate with my creative work. I even draw a similarity with my very first electronic compositions and Leckey’s installation ‘Exorcism of the bridge@Eastham Rake’, as it was a motorway bridge underpass where me and my friend Archie would discuss and listen to our first compositions, and imagine alternate possibilities of living through music. We even codified the accompanying texts to our music with the longitude and latitudes of the bridge where we conceptualised our creative endeavors.

I inhabit urban environments temporarily, but ultimately am a stranger to a life subsumed by industrial machinery and the concrete and metal of urban sprawl. Perhaps this is what has led my creative mind to embrace the dystopian hyperstitions of late modernity as aesthetic strategies for radical art-making and sound production. I have lived in the same house, 10 miles from Leeds city centre quaint middle-class rural countryside, and feel an affinity to the slow pace, fresh air and wildlife. I contend with the stresses of urban and industrial living, but ultimately with the knowledge and experience of a ‘better place’, or more natural environment... ‘it stood me in good stead for being an artist. You become more observational in a way’. You take an interest in things that might seem humdrum, or might not excite other people in the same way that I would’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8HlSHTEtdc

Leckey describes himself as the kind of person who has ‘perpetual crisises’, and often questions the meaning and person of art practice in the modern economic and political landscape. As Steven Shaviro points out in an article on E-flux, ‘transgression no longer works as a subversive aesthetic strategy. Or, more precisely works all too well as a strategy for amassing cultural capital as well as actual capital’. He gives an image of his works as being ‘exorcisms’, moments where he is ‘overbrimming’ with nostalgia or curiosity and in turns creates temporal, sculptural and experiential manifestations of the things that have buried themselves into his sensibility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS18_iVTQEs&t=731s 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWMfnK7bEg4

- Dream English Kid 1964-1999AD was one of Leckey’s earliest videos, which contemplated the anxieties and mystification of living with and between electronic and mechanical technology. Leckey explains in an inteview about the moment he found an audio recording of a Joy Division gig he attended on Youtube, which inspired within him a fantasy of timeless recalling of history, and an exploration of how audio-visual software has changed our relationship with our past. Leckey put together much of his most important video work in a time that predated the speeds of the modern internet. Through the laborious process of sourcing footage, writing to people and waiting for responses and VHS tapes, Leckey talks about getting drunk and editing the video alone, often to the point of tears, which can be heard in the backing track.

[gbhbl]

Machine Head are out on tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of their debut album, Burn My Eyes with returning members, Logan Mader and Chris Kontos.

What better place for a sold out celebration of Machine Head and Burn My Eyes than Brixton Academy! The UK has long held Machine Head in high esteem, staying strong and selling out shows even through the bands tougher times. No matter what, the UK had faith to the point where frontman Rob Flynn has previously stated there were times when the UK felt more like home than home.

These days you are more likely to catch Machine Head, and other bands, in the Camden/Kentish Town area of London. Recent two day stints at The Roundhouse show the scale of Machine Head but go back 10 or 15 years and Brixton Academy was the main venue for metal, including Machine Head.

Even though Burn My Eyes would have been toured at the old Astoria in London, Brixton has always felt like Machine Head’s home. London has always embraced them and to give you a sense of that, this show sold out in less than 8 hours.

So the format for tonight is more of a celebration of Machine Head past and present. The recent format of “An Evening With” remains but with the show split in two halves. The first half being the new, with Machine Head’s new line-up including Wacław Kiełtyka (Vog) and Matt Alston hitting us with 90 minutes or so of a greatest hits set list. Once they finish we will get a short changeover followed by the return of (most of) the original Burn My Eyes line-up. Logan Mader is on guitars and Chris Kontos is on the drums joining Robb and Jared. Rob and Adam Duce mustn’t have made amends enough yet for him to be part of the show.

So one show, but being delivered in two segments. Should be good right? The first half saw the band take to the stage to deafening roars of approval as the deep tones of Imperium blare out. The heavy start continues straight into Take My Scars leaving a writhing mass of bodies in the pit well and truly warmed up. Now We Die gets one of the best sing alongs of the night before the pace ramps up again with Struck a Nerve followed by the masterful Locust. Machine Head, with the new members sound great. Really strong and heavy. It could be my imagination but they do sound a little harder, a little faster and reenergised. I’m not sure if that is true or just my optimism though.

Robb chats to the crowd throughout declaring his love for the fans and reminiscing about the original Burn My Eyes tour. Say what you want about Robb, he is a wonderful frontman and has the rampant crowd eating out of the palm of his hand. I Am Hell and Aesthetics of Hate get aired next and both go down a treat. The band leave the stage for a few minutes now leaving Vog alone for a bit of a guitar solo. It’s pretty cool and he looks to be having fun as he plays around chucking little bits of Pantera’s Floods into the mix. It’s brilliant to see how happy the crowd are to have Vog and Alston in the band. To say they are welcomed by the Machine Head family is a huge understatement.

The gig continues with the crowd favourite Darkness Within which comes preceded by a lengthy but poignant speech from Robb on the importance of music in his life. The song is brilliant but also hits the first little disappointment of the night. Crowds love to extend the ending for as long as possible, something usually encouraged by Robb but here coming essentially a third of the way through the gig, Robb cuts it pretty quick as they need to get on.

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Never mind though – music takes over again as Catharsis hits hard, sounding much edgier than the album cut. An old favourite comes next with From This Day. We may all dislike Robb rapping but it doesn’t seem like it when this song goes off and the crowd explodes singing “Time, To see”. A frenzied crowd get torn a new one next as Ten Ton Hammer pulverises us before a huge sing along comes for the first cover of the night with Iron Maiden’s Hallowed be Thy Name. The final song of the first act is, of course, Halo. It really gives Robb and Vog a chance to show their skills with the huge dual guitar solo as they stand back to back and play in perfect unity.

So ends Act 1 of this set for a 10 minute changeover before the Burn My Eyes section. It is strange though – ending with Halo, stopping for an intermission. Just feels a little odd. Still, the return of Robb and Jared and the arrival of Chris Kontos and Logan Mader raises the roof with the level of roaring from the crowd. Real Eyes, Realize, Real Lies plays out on tape before they arrive which is a bit disappointing but understandable. I was looking forward to hearing the guitar bits played out though understood there would be a tape for the samples. Otherwise there are no surprises from the set list.

It is Burn My Eyes, played in order. Davidian leads into Old which leads into A Thousand Lies. All songs I have heard before so while it is cool that Chris and Logan are there, it doesn’t really do much for me. The next chapter of the gig is the best of the night for me personally. None But My Own is a real highlight, not being a regularly played track at all and sounds phenomenal live. Chris is one hell of a drummer and that guy oozes enthusiasm. This shows even more as he gets a few minutes for a drum solo next before the track I was most waiting for gets blazed out with The Rage to Overcome. It is the song of the night for me. Another rarely played track but man is it good. The drums are brilliant and Robb sounds enraged throughout. it is perfect.

Unfortunately as a show, things went a bit wrong after this point. Nothing on the band, purely on us as a crowd and this inability to buy a pint and drink it, rather then launch it at the crowd. Seriously. You spend a good £10 on a 2 pinter and launch it at your fellow fans. You suck!

As bad as it is throwing it, it appears some peoples aims aren’t great either as this time they managed to land their drink on the soundboard. Half way through Death Church the sound cut out and never really recovered. Well done to all the techs for their hard work in getting us back up and running and well done to the venue for extending the curfew by half hour to allow the gig to finish but with all sound routed to the onstage monitors, it has a lesser impact and didn’t really fill the venue afterwards.

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The 30 minute gap sucked a bit of the life out of the gig, being another interruption and while I was proud of the fans who stayed and cheered the band through the mishap, and pleased with the band and staff who battled on, we need to look at ourselves really and think about what we are doing. I know that seems harsh. After all, it is juts one drink from one person that landed on the soundboard but I am seeing, and feeling, drinks being thrown all night by loads of people. It just happens that only one of them hit the soundboard, not that only one was thrown. This is also the second successive gig at Brixton where a drink has landed on the technical equipment and caused a problem. The last being a few months back at Gojira where their lights were taken out.

We need to do better and consider the consequence of our little rush of blood on those around us.

Eventually we get back under way with a missed Death Church and a shortened A Nation on Fire. Blood for Blood hits us hard next before I’m Your God Know lights the place up in pyro. A cover medley comes next with Metallica’s Battery, Rage Against the Machine’s Bulls on Parade and Slayer’s South of Heaven and Raining blood getting an airing before the huge ending, Block. Block is a real treat, though a strange ending song for a Machine Head gig. The sweaty masses that have stayed scream “Fuck It All” impressively before all band members, past and present come out to thank the crowd warmly to rapturous applause.

So, let’s be clear before I start listing things I didn’t like. I thought both versions of Machine Head were immaculate. They played feverishly and with real power. They were fantastic. My issues come from a more personal perspective but a gig is the whole experience and not just the quality of the band playing.

So, what exactly is my problem? Weirdly, I didn’t like the format at all. I thought I would but I didn’t. It was backwards as far as I was concerned. I expected Burn My Eyes to be the first half with the new line-up being the closing part. Nod to the past then a look towards the future. This also would have meant we would have started with Davidian and probably ended with Halo. Instead it felt a bit like, here is a quick glimpse of the future, now, forget that and let’s get back to the past. I personally felt like I would have enjoyed it better the other way round leaving the venue with the sounds of Halo or Darkness Within ringing in my ears.

Again, not entirely the band’s fault but the show didn’t really flow well at all and instead of feeling like an evening with Machine Head, it felt like sections patched together. Those sections being seperated by the covers thrown in, the official changeover and the loss of sound. I would always prefer another track or two from Machine Head over a load of covers anyway so maybe I mentally checked out through these parts? Either way it felt a bit stop start throughout. With the gig running over by 30 minutes it also meant exiting the building and getting home became a lot more rushed and difficult as fans desperately scrambled for the last trains home.

I fully commend the dedicated staff for staying on so Machine Head could finish the important Burn My Eyes part of the gig but why they still played their 6-8 minute long cover medley in the middle of it is beyond me.

So to summarise, I had a great time. I loved the new look Machine Head. I loved seeing the older version. Hearing some old, rarely heard tracks was a dream for me. Robb was on fire, Jared was his usual enthusiastic and solid self. As a band (or bands) they were near faultless but I didn’t love the whole event. The format was weird and backwards to me. An idiot made the stop start nature seem worse than it probably was. Songs felt out of place and I would have happily had a few less covers and a few more Machine Head songs. I think part of the problem is I have seen these guys so many times, and I am a huge fan. That gives me a solid idea of what to expect and also very high expectations.

This was a great Machine Head show where the band were phenomenal but the overall event was less so. Machine Head continue to march forward and, despite the haters, show they are still one of the best live bands out there but, while I completely get the need and want for this current anniversary format, the quicker it is done and we get back to normal, the better.

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Live Review – Machine Head at O2 Academy Brixton (02/11/2019) Machine Head are out on tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of their debut album, Burn My Eyes with returning members, Logan Mader and Chris Kontos.

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Just Finish! The Story Behind That Viral Video

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Sean Kachmarski’s ‘Just Finish!’ chronicles the unlikely and captivating story of the author’s journey from being a couch potato to becoming a 50K ultra marathon runner. But it’s not a story of how to achieve the fastest times or compete at the elite level; but rather a true, honest and motivational story for those who just want to run, enter races and finish them…even if it means doing so after everyone else has gone home. Ultimately, ‘Just Finish!’ is for the grassroots runner looking to put those miles toward achieving a personal goal.

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Over fifty million people have viewed the tear-jerking viral video starring Sean Kachmarski, as he stumbles toward the finish line of his first local marathon in a struggle, only to be joined by a motivational stranger who selflessly helps him over the finish line.

For Kachmarski, this was so much more than finishing his first marathon, but the realisation of a decade-long dream that would see him complete something many would have deemed totally out of reach. 

In his new book, ‘Just Finish!’, Kachmarski tells his story for new runners who are not chasing six-minute miles or serious competition; but those looking to simply achieve the impossible and revel in the wake of the author’s own “fat-to-fat” adventure.

“My book is a true story that follows my journey from sitting on a lumpy futon, overweight, out of shape and picking crisp shards out of my navel, to me running a 50K ultra-marathon. It’s not a new story it’s just told from the perspective of a “grassroots runner” who just wanted to finish the races I entered.” ”It’s about my struggles, my achievements, the barriers, the pain, the people I met and how I pushed myself to the brink while trying to achieve things I never thought possible.” ”My story is not a fat-to-fit story, it’s a fat-to-fat story; I found out too late in my journey that running miles and miles without considering other factors was not necessarily the best way to lose weight, but the benefits of my running journey transcended what the scales told me every Monday morning.” ”My story may not appeal to the elite runner, as there will be no mention of 6- to 8-minute miles, finishing in the top ten, or any Olympic qualifications. My story is more for the wannabe runner, the runner who is just starting out and the runner who feels more comfortable running 14- to 18-minute miles; the runner who will check the time of the previous year’s race results to see what the slowest time was before they enter; the runner who has to phone the race organiser to see if there is a cut off time in the longer races; or the runner who will walk just out of view of the people at the finish, then turn on the jets for the last 100-metre sprint finish. All things I have done during my running journey (and still do).”  

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“This is a book for those comfortable just getting over that finish line, simply because people have told them they wouldn’t do it,” explains the author, a Canadian expat. “Watch the viral video to see how I approached my first finish line – I was “late”, totally exhausted and mentally empty. Yet, strangely enough, the achievement itself meant I felt more alive than at any other point in my life.” 

Continuing, “I want to motivate people to get off the sofa, however unfit they feel, and do something extraordinary. It’s not going to be easy (nor should it be) and you won’t ever be fronting any Nike commercials – but you’re going to finally prove to yourself that you can finish a race you enter!”

Reviews have been extremely positive. For example, one reader comments, “Just Finish is captivating. Author Sean weaves a story about his running journey. It is also a story of self examination and overcoming obstacles along the way. It is honest and funny. He met the challenge he gave himself. Easy to read and chronicle his journey.”

‘Just Finish!’ is available now: 

Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1913179184/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_KfUNDbY16X1ZE

Ebay - https://bit.ly/2Ikx3M4

Payhip - https://bit.ly/2pF5PJG

Goodreads - https://bit.ly/3591KxU

Original viral video - https://bit.ly/2VdwdGw

Book trailer - https://youtu.be/mQ4XK4BcUFM

Twitter - https://bit.ly/2MoRM2T

Facebook - https://bit.ly/2OpkcMq

Instagram - https://bit.ly/2LLkXxM.

About the author, in his own words:

Originally from Canada I now live in Skelmenthope, I am a 49-year-old Canadian living in the UK and have been in West Yorkshire for over 16 years now. I live with my British wife of 15 years Wendy (a Barnsley lass), who I met on Match.com. I have two happy and healthy children, Ross (13) and Tasha (10). I started running in 2014 after a health scare and then achieved things I never thought possible. I told my story to people in bits and some said I should write a book.

The challenge of writing this book mirrored the challenges I had in learning how to run long distances as an adult. Both were journeys I never intended to be on, both had insurmountable obstacles I never thought I could navigate, and probably the most poignant, I had no experience in doing either. Without support from family, friends, professionals, and strangers my running journey, and this book, would never have happened.

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