#its the alt and blue hair which i have had blue hair for a decade everyone else moved into my house asdfghjk i've been here the whole time

[fabdante]

Use this picrew and post the last song you listened to on Spotify

tagged by the lovely @robinainthood (thank u ily)

im listing two songs because my phone and my laptop differ

last spotify song listened to on my phone: a pirates life for me by we cut corners

last spotify song listened to on my laptop: sleep patterns by merchant ships (look i was having my biweekly 'i need to listen to sleep patterns on repeat Right Now moment no one question me)

no pressure tags for: @thevampireauthoress @destroyyaa @pvmpkin-gvts @cainite-bite @bigsister-watches !

thank you again for the tag!!

[nirikeehan]

Happy Friday! You have a bad things happen bingo and I am here for it! How about "Faux-Affectionate Villain" for Dorian? (Yes I am predictable, gotta pick on my favorite mages)

wkfjnkjgrn this was incredible, thank you. I am combining this with your previous prompt from a non-bingo list: "Black and Blue: Write about a time you’ve been physically hurt." This was my first time writing for Dorian and I had a blast. Enjoy this as of yet untitled whumpfest!

For @dadrunkwriting and @badthingshappenbingo

Series: Dragon Age: Inquisition

Characters: Dorian Pavus, Raleigh Samson, aaaand... Corypheus. Yeah, I really wanted to write Dorian snarking at Corypheus for 2000 words. 🤷‍♀️

Also, sorry in advance to any Samson stans – he is Not Nice in this one.

---

By all accounts, the dungeon was dreadful.

Dorian had never been one for dungeons, especially not the sort people built in the south. Too drafty, too dim, too… stoney and full of chains. On the whole. He was certainly not biased on the subject, being manacled to the wall at present.

“And not even in the fun way,” he lamented, with a tragic sigh.

The sigh proved to be too much: it turned into a cough, which blossomed into a spasm of pain that left him gasping. Well, that wouldn’t do at all. It was a shame Corypheus’s forces hadn’t seen fit to send him a healer, because the torso of his hand-crafted mage robes were stained with a worrying bit of blood. And now breathing was becoming a chore.

This might be the end, you know, said an annoying voice inside his head. It bothered him from time to time, and Dorian hated it because it sounded an awful lot like him. When he wasn’t tempering it with wine, acerbic wit, or outright lies, sometimes it scared him. To his bones.

“Nonsense,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “It’s only a matter of time before the heroic rescue arrives.”

The voice ran through a vast number of practical reasons why a heroic rescue was unlikely: he had been grabbed alone; the enemy had surprised the Inquisition and vastly outnumbered them in this region; the shattering blow from the Red Templar had been the last he saw of his colleagues before he blacked out. It was entirely possible the Inquisition already believed him to be dead. And even if they didn’t, what was the loss of one Tevinter? Wasn’t he barely an improvement over Corypheus and his Venatori to the likes of them?

“Oh, do shut up,” Dorian said cheerfully; it was the only way to deal with self-doubt, he’d learned.

It might be true that the majority of the Inquisition thought him an arrogant worm, representative of the Imperium and all of its slovenly decadence, but he was confident he had the Inquisitor in his corner. He and Thalia often wiled away long nights huddled over thick tomes in Skyhold’s library whilst discussing Tevinter culture, ancient magics, and what a society ruled by mages might look like in the south. Unfortunately, although she was the Inquisitor, Dorian couldn’t be sure whether her insistence alone would cause a rescue to materialize. That much he conceded to the fretting voice in his head.

The door to his cell swung open on creaking hinges. In stepped two guards — the frightful red lyrium sort, with crimson eyes and large crystals sticking out of their shoulders — and between them, a man with dark hair, fancy armor, and a swagger meant to broadcast that he was in charge.

“Ah,” Dorian said brightly, “so nice to finally be greeted by an envoy befitting my importance.” He grinned at the guards and the man they flanked. “It’s you, isn’t it? The other one — the Cullen, but for Corypheus. Stanley, or some such?”

Something dangerous flashed in the man’s eyes; evidently, he took offense to being compared to the Inquisition’s commander. “That’ll be General Samson to you.”

Dorian had heard about Samson — mostly from Cullen over chess games. Cullen’s disdain for his former colleague betrayed some serious bad blood, the cause of which Dorian had not yet been able to wheedle out of the Commander. Although he was certain the tale was a juicy one, he had difficulty squaring the version Cullen vowed to obliterate with the one standing before him.

“I have to say, I’m not impressed.” Dorian cocked his head. “As army generals go, the Inquisition’s is much better looking. The receding hairline does you no favors, Stanley. Might I suggest a full shave of the skull? And perhaps some facial hair? I hear a bald head plus goatee is all the rage amongst nefarious villains this season.”

Samson stepped forward and gave him a swift kick in the ribs, which provided Dorian all the information he needed, and perhaps some internal bleeding as well. Capricious and arbitrarily cruel, this Samson. Perhaps Cullen was right after all.

“Heard he had a mouth on him,” Samson said. “That ought to shut him up for awhile. Let’s go, boys.”

Much to Dorian’s surprise, interrogation and torture were not on the roster. Instead, while he struggled to see past the writhing pain, Samson’s men hauled him up, unchained him from the wall, and shackled his wrists together behind his back. Then they marched him from the cell — well, they marched. Dorian stumbled along, every step agony.

By the time they got him up the steep tower steps, Dorian was certain that if his ribs hadn’t been broken before, they were now. After he had fallen the second time, one of Samson’s thugs had to hold his elbow to keep him upright. Which was probably for the best, because afterward they took him right into Corypheus’s throne room.

It was, in a word, hideous. More damp stonework, laden with blood red tapestries, lyrium deposits jutting out hither and thither. Dorian wanted to blame the terrible decor on primitive southron sensibilities, but Corypheus was Tevinter, for Maker’s sake! Were tastes truly that abysmal a thousand years ago, whenever Corypheus had been mortal?

The throne itself was gold, which clashed with its surroundings, but Dorian was forced to respect the symbolism of it. The golden city, killing gods, golden thrones — he understood the motif. That didn’t mean he had to like it.

He wondered, briefly, if he had gone delirious from the wound. He must have, surely? Because there was Corypheus himself, lounging on the high seat, looking less like a man and more like a thing — a mummified corpse with stunted wings, perpetual scowl, and glowing rocks fused to his face. Yet Dorian’s fear felt quite far away, as if it were happening to someone down the hall. Not him, not as he staggered toward this monstrous creature, bound and helpless.

Corypheus met his gaze, and did something truly horrifying.

He smiled.

“Dorian Pavus,” he said, with a voice like shifting tectonic plates. “We finally meet. Alexius told me so much about you.”

Oh, Dorian thought. This is where I either vomit or faint. How unbecoming. Horror shot through his entire body, down to his toes. Corypheus spoke with the approving tone of a Circle professor — not that Dorian had heard it directed at him overmuch. The thought that Corypheus had spoken to anyone about him personally, let alone Gereon Alexius, was enough to make him wish he’d never been born.

He burst out laughing. Immediately, he was hit with pain so intense he doubled over. The Red Templars kept him aloft with firm grips. Samson stood between him and Corypheus, growing markedly less patient the longer Dorian giggled, which was, to be fair, quite a few minutes.

“He’s gone mad, Your Grace,” Samson growled. He reached for the sword at his side. “Let me put him out of his misery.”

“Stay your hand,” Corypheus commanded, and the room went deathly still. Corypheus’s voice had a sort of booming quality to it that reverberated off the walls and into one’s very soul. “General, take your men and leave us.”

Samson sneered. “But — Your Worship, he could—”

“And remove his shackles before you go,” Corypheus added.

Samson stood for a long moment, clenching his jaw. Dorian thought that perhaps he was regretting his choice of employers. Finally, he nodded to his soldiers. They grabbed Dorian roughly by the arms. After some jostling and twisting, his hands fell free. Dorian braced himself against a stone pillar, rubbing his wrists were the metal had bitten them, and watched the Red Templars file from the throne room.

As the door slammed, he turned back to the man who would be God. “So. This is — shall I say? Unexpected.”

“Is it?” Corypheus held up one skeletal claw-like hand, as if in a gesture of helplessness. “What is so unexpected about one Tevinter wishing to speak to another?”

“As if you were any normal Tevinter,” Dorian spat. “Not the one who destroyed the very heavens.”

“You sound bitter. How narrow-minded, when you could be the one sitting beside me once I usher in a new world order.”

Dorian wanted to blame the pain that pulsed through him with every ragged breath — this must be a hallucination — but Corypheus sat placidly, his tumescent face awaiting a response.

Dorian cleared his throat. “Pretty sure Stanley thinks he’s got that seat reserved.”

“Samson shall fulfill his purpose in due time, as will all my minions. But no, he shall not be entering the Black City at my side.”

“Too bad for him,” Dorian mumbled. Staying upright was becoming difficult. Soon he would slide right down this pillar, and wouldn’t that look pathetic. He shifted his weight, breath catching from a sharp stab somewhere near his kidney. “And why exactly would you want me instead?”

“I spoke at length with Alexius about you, as I mentioned.” Did Dorian detect a fondness in his voice? It was difficult to tell, as it sounded distorted, artificially low — as if he were using some sort of spell to make it more formidable. Wouldn’t that be a scandal? But no, it was probably just the result of being killed and reborn that many times. “From the sound of it, you are every inch the ideal Tevinter man. Pure of blood, sound of mind, fit of body.”

Dorian nearly choked to prevent another laughing fit. Apparently Alexius had never mentioned certain details if Corypheus thought Dorian to be the ideal Tevinter man — but the last thing he wanted to consider right now was how socially progressive this deranged half-zombie might be. “Oh, Corypheus, I am terribly afraid that Alexius did oversell me.”

“Not from what I have observed.” Corypheus paused. “Are you in pain?”

“However did you deduce that?” Dorian asked, who had slipped into more of a crouch than a stand.

Corypheus stood, which was a terrifying experience in itself, as he was at least eight feet tall. He sauntered closer, until Dorian was entirely enveloped in his shadow. Against his will, he shivered.

The towering monster reached out and waved a hand in front of Dorian’s body. The pain melted away, like frost in the morning sun. Dorian inhaled sharply — nothing seemed wrong, no pesky cracked ribs or seeping wounds. He had never seen such powerful healing magic before, not in all his years of study.

He straightened, craning his neck to see up into Corypheus’s atrocious face. “I suppose you’re expecting me to thank you.”

“It would be polite.”

“Well,” Dorian huffed, “you’re about to learn that I am, in fact, an insufferable cad.”

Corypheus’s eyes bore into him. Dorian’s hands flexed at his sides. He estimated he could throw a fire spell or two before he was disintegrated on the spot. “All that nonsense the Venatori believe, about Tevinter supremacy. That comes from you then, does it?”

“Of course not. They simply share my beliefs. They so happen to be the correct ones.”

“Beliefs that declare Tevinter bloodlines superior to all else,” Dorian said breezily.

Corypheus nodded. “Indeed.”

“And you want me for my ‘supreme Tevinter blood.’” Dorian felt a little ill just saying it.

“Of a sort. It is a necessary requirement, but your accomplishments speak for themselves. You are wasted in the pathetic rebellion that calls itself the Inquisition. If you were to cast aside that weak little girl you consider your savior—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t underestimate that ‘weak little girl’ if I were you.” Dorian looked away. These words might be his last, and he didn’t want to squander his final moments looking at the abomination that was the once-Magister’s visage. “This is the part where you try to get me to betray the Inquisition, isn’t it? Well, you can save your breath. If you do still breathe and are not powered entirely by dread necromancy.”

It seemed Corypheus would have cocked an eyebrow, had he possessed one. “You do not even want to banter back and forth about it?”

“Why bother? The answer is ‘no.’ No a hundred thousand times over. I would die before serving you tea, you withered old husk, never mind turning my cloak for you. Not a chance.” Dorian grinned. “So you might as well kill me now and get it over with.”

Corypheus stood silently. Dorian looked beyond him, at the gaudy throne, and waited. He hoped Varric would write an epic chapter about his noble sacrifice and tragic, untimely demise. He damn well better convey how handsome I was, Dorian thought, annoyed that he had never sat the wordsmith down and hammered out the specifics. I want boys and girls swooning over me from the Kocari Wilds to the bloody Anderfels…

The death stroke never arrived. At last Dorian looked up, against his better judgment, because it meant taking in Corypheus’s ruined face again. The undead Magister was staring at him with either a scowl or a neutral expression — it was difficult to tell.

“Very well,” Corypheus said, and sounded almost tired — but surely that was Dorian’s imagination. “It was worth the attempt. Back to the dungeons, then. You are too valuable to kill, my dear Dorian.”

As he was being dragged back downstairs in chains, he smiled. Alive was far preferable to dead. Now he just had to hold out for that rescue, the one that had to be in the works. Positive thinking was half the battle — and at that, Dorian Pavus was a master.

[path-of-my-childhood]

Taylor Swift: ‘I was literally about to break’

By: Laura Snapes for The Guardian Date: August 24th 2019

Taylor Swift’s Nashville apartment is an Etsy fever dream, a 365-days-a-year Christmas shop, pure teenage girl id. You enter through a vestibule clad in blue velvet and covered in gilt frames bursting with fake flowers. The ceiling is painted like the night sky. Above a koi pond in the living area, a narrow staircase spirals six feet up towards a giant, pillow-lagged birdcage that probably has the best view in the city. Later, Swift will tell me she needs metaphors “to understand anything that happens to me”, and the birdcage defies you not to interpret it as a pointed comment on the contradictions of stardom.

Swift, wearing pale jeans and dip-dyed shirt, her sandy hair tied in a blue scrunchie, leads the way up the staircase to show me the view. The decor hasn’t changed since she bought this place in 2009, when she was 19. “All of these high rises are new since then,” she says, gesturing at the squat glass structures and cranes. Meanwhile her oven is still covered in stickers, more teenage diary than adult appliance.

Now 29, she has spent much of the past three years living quietly in London with her boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, making the penthouse a kind of time capsule, a monument to youthful naivety given an unlimited budget – the years when she sang about Romeo and Juliet and wore ballgowns to awards shows; before she moved to New York and honed her slick, self-mythologising pop.

It is mid-August. This is Swift’s first UK interview in more than three years, and she seems nervous: neither presidential nor goofy (her usual defaults), but quick with a tongue-out “ugh” of regret or frustration as she picks at her glittery purple nails. We climb down from the birdcage to sit by the pond, and when the conversation turns to 2016, the year the wheels came off for her, Swift stiffens as if driving over a mile of speed bumps. After a series of bruising public spats (with Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj) in 2015, there was a high-profile standoff with Kanye West. The news that she was in a relationship with actor Tom Hiddleston, which leaked soon after, was widely dismissed as a diversionary tactic. Meanwhile, Swift went to court to prosecute a sexual assault claim, and faced a furious backlash when she failed to endorse a candidate in the 2016 presidential election, allowing the alt-right to adopt her as their “Aryan princess”.

Her critics assumed she cared only about the bottom line. The reality, Swift says, is that she was totally broken. “Every domino fell,” she says bitterly. “It became really terrifying for anyone to even know where I was. And I felt completely incapable of doing or saying anything publicly, at all. Even about my music. I always said I wouldn’t talk about what was happening personally, because that was a personal time.” She won’t get into specifics. “I just need some things that are mine,” she despairs. “Just some things.”

A year later, in 2017, Swift released her album Reputation, half high-camp heel turn, drawing on hip-hop and vaudeville (the brilliantly hammy Look What You Made Me Do), half stunned appreciation that her nascent relationship with Alwyn had weathered the storm (the soft, sensual pop of songs Delicate and Dress).

Her new album, Lover, her seventh, was released yesterday. It’s much lighter than Reputation: Swift likens writing it to feeling like “I could take a full deep breath again”. Much of it is about Alwyn: the Galway Girl-ish track London Boy lists their favourite city haunts and her newfound appreciation of watching rugby in the pub with his uni mates; on the ruminative Afterglow, she asks him to forgive her anxious tendency to assume the worst.

While she has always written about relationships, they were either teenage fantasy or a postmortem on a high-profile breakup, with exes such as Jake Gyllenhaal and Harry Styles. But she and Alwyn have seldom been pictured together, and their relationship is the only other thing she won’t talk about. “I’ve learned that if I do, people think it’s up for discussion, and our relationship isn’t up for discussion,” she says, laughing after I attempt a stealthy angle. “If you and I were having a glass of wine right now, we’d be talking about it – but it’s just that it goes out into the world. That’s where the boundary is, and that’s where my life has become manageable. I really want to keep it feeling manageable.”

Instead, she has swapped personal disclosure for activism. Last August, Swift broke her political silence to endorse Democratic Tennessee candidate Phil Bredesen in the November 2018 senate race. Vote.org reported an unprecedented spike in voting registration after Swift’s Instagram post, while Donald Trump responded that he liked her music “about 25% less now”.

Meanwhile, her recent single You Need To Calm Down admonished homophobes and namechecked US LGBTQ rights organisation Glaad (which then saw increased donations). Swift filled her video with cameos from queer stars such as Ellen DeGeneres and Queen singer Adam Lambert, and capped it with a call to sign her petition in support of the Equality Act, which if passed would prohibit gender- and sexuality-based discrimination in the US. A video of Polish LGBTQ fans miming the track in defiance of their government’s homophobic agenda went viral. But Swift was accused of “queerbaiting” and bandwagon-jumping. You can see how she might find it hard to work out what, exactly, people want from her.

***

It was girlhood that made Swift a multimillionaire. When country music’s gatekeepers swore that housewives were the only women interested in the genre, she proved them wrong. Her self-titled debut marked the longest stay on the Billboard 200 by any album released in the decade. A potentially cloying image – corkscrew curls, lyrics thick on “daddy” and down-home values – were undercut by the fact she was evidently, endearingly, a bit of a freak, an unusual combination of intensity and artlessness. Also, she was really, really good at what she did, and not just for a teenager: her entirely self-written third album, 2010’s Speak Now, is unmatched in its devastatingly withering dismissals of awful men.

As a teenager, Swift was obsessed with VH1’s Behind The Music, the series devoted to the rise and fall of great musicians. She would forensically rewatch episodes, trying to pinpoint the moment a career went wrong. I ask her to imagine she’s watching the episode about herself and do the same thing: where was her misstep? “Oh my God,” she says, drawing a deep breath and letting her lips vibrate as she exhales. “I mean, that’s so depressing!” She thinks back and tries to deflect. “What I remember is that [the show] was always like, ‘Then we started fighting in the tour bus and then the drummer quit and the guitarist was like, “You’re not paying me enough.”’’’

But that’s not what she used to say. In interviews into her early 20s, Swift often observed that an artist fails when they lose their self-awareness, as if repeating the fact would work like an insurance against succumbing to the same fate. But did she make that mistake herself? She squeezes her nose and blows to clear a ringing in her ears before answering. “I definitely think that sometimes you don’t realise how you’re being perceived,” she says. “Pop music can feel like it’s The Hunger Games, and like we’re gladiators. And you can really lose focus of the fact that that’s how it feels because that’s how a lot of stan [fan] Twitter and tabloids and blogs make it seem – the overanalysing of everything makes it feel really intense.”

She describes the way she burned bridges in 2016 as a kind of obliviousness. “I didn’t realise it was like a classic overthrow of someone in power – where you didn’t realise the whispers behind your back, you didn’t realise the chain reaction of events that was going to make everything fall apart at the exact, perfect time for it to fall apart.”

Here’s that chain reaction in full. With her 2014 album 1989 (the year she was born), Swift transcended country stardom, becoming as ubiquitous as Beyoncé. For the first time she vocally embraced feminism, something she had rejected in her teens; but, after a while, it seemed to amount to not much more than a lot of pictures of her hanging out with her “squad”, a bevy of supermodels, musicians and Lena Dunham. The squad very much did not include her former friend Katy Perry, whom Swift targeted in her song Bad Blood, as part of what seemed like a painfully overblown dispute about some backing dancers. Then, when Nicki Minaj tweeted that MTV’s 2015 Video Music awards had rewarded white women at the expense of women of colour, multiple-nominee Swift took it personally, responding: “Maybe one of the men took your slot.” For someone prone to talking about the haters, she quickly became her own worst enemy.

Her old adversary Kanye West resurfaced in February 2016. In 2009, West had invaded Swift’s stage at the MTV VMAs to protest against her victory over Beyoncé in the female video of the year category. It remains the peak of interest in Swift on Google Trends, and the conflict between them has become such a cornerstone of celebrity journalism that it’s hard to remember it lay dormant for nearly seven years – until West released his song Famous. “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex,” he rapped. “Why? I made that bitch famous.” The video depicted a Swift mannequin naked in bed with men including Trump.

Swift loudly condemned both; although she had discussed the track with West, she said she had never agreed to the “bitch” lyric or the video. West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, released a heavily edited clip that showed Swift at least agreeing to the “sex” line on the phone with West, if not the “bitch” part. Swift pleaded the technicality, but it made no difference: when Kardashian went on Twitter to describe her as a snake, the comparison stuck and the singer found herself very publicly “cancelled” – the incident taken as “proof” of Swift’s insincerity. So she went away.

Swift says she stopped trying to explain herself, even though she “definitely” could have. As she worked on Reputation, she was also writing “a think-piece a day that I knew I would never publish: the stuff I would say, and the different facets of the situation that nobody knew”. If she could exonerate herself, why didn’t she? She leans forward. “Here’s why,” she says conspiratorially. “Because when people are in a hate frenzy and they find something to mutually hate together, it bonds them. And anything you say is in an echo chamber of mockery.”

She compares that year to being hit by a tidal wave. “You can either stand there and let the wave crash into you, and you can try as hard as you can to fight something that’s more powerful and bigger than you,” she says. “Or you can dive under the water, hold your breath, wait for it to pass and while you’re down there, try to learn something. Why was I in that part of the ocean? There were clearly signs that said: Rip tide! Undertow! Don’t swim! There are no lifeguards!” She’s on a roll. “Why was I there? Why was I trusting people I trusted? Why was I letting people into my life the way I was letting them in? What was I doing that caused this?”

After the incident with Minaj, her critics started pointing out a narrative of “white victimhood” in Swift’s career. Speaking slowly and carefully, she says she came to understand “a lot about how my privilege allowed me to not have to learn about white privilege. I didn’t know about it as a kid, and that is privilege itself, you know? And that’s something that I’m still trying to educate myself on every day. How can I see where people are coming from, and understand the pain that comes with the history of our world?”

She also accepts some responsibility for her overexposure, and for some of the tabloid drama. If she didn’t wish a friend happy birthday on Instagram, there would be reports about severed friendships, even if they had celebrated together. “Because we didn’t post about it, it didn’t happen – and I realised I had done that,” she says. “I created an expectation that everything in my life that happened, people would see.”

But she also says she couldn’t win. “I’m kinda used to being gaslit by now,” she drawls wearily. “And I think it happens to women so often that, as we get older and see how the world works, we’re able to see through what is gaslighting. So I’m able to look at 1989 and go – KITTIES!” She breaks off as an assistant walks in with Swift’s three beloved cats, stars of her Instagram feed, back from the vet before they fly to England this week. Benjamin, Olivia and Meredith haughtily circle our feet (they are scared of the koi) as Swift resumes her train of thought, back to the release of 1989 and the subsequent fallout. “Oh my God, they were mad at me for smiling a lot and quote-unquote acting fake. And then they were mad at me that I was upset and bitter and kicking back.” The rules kept changing.

***

Swift’s new album comes with printed excerpts from her diaries. On 29 August 2016, she wrote in her girlish, bubble writing: “This summer is the apocalypse.” As the incident with West and Kardashian unfolded, she was preparing for her court case against radio DJ David Mueller, who was fired in 2013 after Swift reported him for putting his hand up her dress at a meet-and–greet event. He sued her for defamation; she countersued for sexual assault.

“Having dealt with a few of them, narcissists basically subscribe to a belief system that they should be able to do and say whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want to,” Swift says now, talking at full pelt. “And if we – as anyone else in the world, but specifically women – react to that, well, we’re not allowed to. We’re not allowed to have a reaction to their actions.”

In summer 2016 she was in legal depositions, practising her testimony. “You’re supposed to be really polite to everyone,” she says. But by the time she got to court in August 2017, “something snapped, I think”. She laughs. Her testimony was sharp and uncompromising. She refused to allow Mueller’s lawyers to blame her or her security guards; when asked if she could see the incident, Swift said no, because “my ass is in the back of my body”. It was a brilliant, rude defence.

“You’re supposed to behave yourself in court and say ‘rear end’,” she says with mock politesse. “The other lawyer was saying, ‘When did he touch your backside?’ And I was like, ‘ASS! Call it what it is!’” She claps between each word. But despite the acclaim for her testimony and eventual victory (she asked for one symbolic dollar), she still felt belittled. It was two months prior to the beginning of the #MeToo movement. “Even this case was literally twisted so hard that people were calling it the ‘butt-grab case’. They were saying I sued him because there’s this narrative that I want to sue everyone. That was one of the reasons why the summer was the apocalypse.”

She never wanted the assault to be made public. Have there been other instances she has dealt with privately? “Actually, no,” she says soberly. “I’m really lucky that it hadn’t happened to me before. But that was one of the reasons it was so traumatising. I just didn’t know that could happen. It was really brazen, in front of seven people.” She has since had security cameras installed at every meet-and-greet she does, deliberately pointed at her lower half. “If something happens again, we can prove it with video footage from every angle,” she says.

The allegations about Harvey Weinstein came out soon after she won her case. The film producer had asked her to write a song for the romantic comedy One Chance, which earned her second Golden Globe nomination. Weinstein also got her a supporting role in the 2014 sci-fi movie The Giver, and attended the launch party for 1989. But she says they were never alone together.

“He’d call my management and be like, ‘Does she have a song for this film?’ And I’d be like, ‘Here it is,’” she says dispassionately. “And then I’d be at the Golden Globes. I absolutely never hung out. And I would get a vibe – I would never vouch for him. I believe women who come forward, I believe victims who come forward, I believe men who come forward.” Swift inhales, flustered. She says Weinstein never propositioned her. “If you listen to the stories, he picked people who were vulnerable, in his opinion. It seemed like it was a power thing. So, to me, that doesn’t say anything – that I wasn’t in that situation.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was more than nine months into his presidency, and still Swift had not taken a position. But the idea that a pop star could ever have impeded his path to the White House seemed increasingly naive. In hindsight, the demand that Swift speak up looks less about politics and more about her identity (white, rich, powerful) and a moralistic need for her to redeem herself – as if nobody else had ever acted on a vindictive instinct, or blundered publicly.

But she resisted what might have been an easy return to public favour. Although Reputation contained softer love songs, it was better known for its brittle, vengeful side (see This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things). She describes that side of the album now as a “bit of a persona”, and its hip-hop-influenced production as “a complete defence mechanism”. Personally, I thought she had never been more relatable, trashing the contract of pious relatability that traps young women in the public eye.

***

It was the assault trial, and watching the rights of LGBTQ friends be eroded, that finally politicised her, Swift says. “The things that happen to you in your life are what develop your political opinions. I was living in this Obama eight-year paradise of, you go, you cast your vote, the person you vote for wins, everyone’s happy!” she says. “This whole thing, the last three, four years, it completely blindsided a lot of us, me included.”

She recently said she was “dismayed” when a friend pointed out that her position on gay rights wasn’t obvious (what if she had a gay son, he asked), hence this summer’s course correction with the single You Need To Calm Down (“You’re comin’ at my friends like a missile/Why are you mad?/When you could be GLAAD?”). Didn’t she feel equally dismayed that her politics weren’t clear? “I did,” she insists, “and I hate to admit this, but I felt that I wasn’t educated enough on it. Because I hadn’t actively tried to learn about politics in a way that I felt was necessary for me, making statements that go out to hundreds of millions of people.”

She explains her inner conflict. “I come from country music. The number one thing they absolutely drill into you as a country artist, and you can ask any other country artist this, is ‘Don’t be like the Dixie Chicks!’” In 2003, the Texan country trio denounced the Iraq war, saying they were “ashamed” to share a home state with George W Bush. There was a boycott, and an event where a bulldozer crushed their CDs. “I watched country music snuff that candle out. The most amazing group we had, just because they talked about politics. And they were getting death threats. They were made such an example that basically every country artist that came after that, every label tells you, ‘Just do not get involved, no matter what.’

“And then, you know, if there was a time for me to get involved…” Swift pauses. “The worst part of the timing of what happened in 2016 was I felt completely voiceless. I just felt like, oh God, who would want me? Honestly.” She would otherwise have endorsed Hillary Clinton? “Of course,” she says sincerely. “I just felt completely, ugh, just useless. And maybe even like a hindrance.”

I suggest that, thinking selfishly, her coming out for Clinton might have made people like her. “I wasn’t thinking like that,” she stresses. “I was just trying to protect my mental health – not read the news very much, go cast my vote, tell people to vote. I just knew what I could handle and I knew what I couldn’t. I was literally about to break. For a while.” Did she seek therapy? “That stuff I just really wanna keep personal, if that’s OK,” she says.

She resists blaming anyone else for her political silence. Her emergence as a Democrat came after she left Big Machine, the label she signed to at 15. (They are now at loggerheads after label head Scott Borchetta sold the company, and the rights to Swift’s first six albums, to Kanye West’s manager, Scooter Braun.) Had Borchetta ever advised her against speaking out? She exhales. “It was just me and my life, and also doing a lot of self-reflection about how I did feel really remorseful for not saying anything. I wanted to try and help in any way that I could, the next time I got a chance. I didn’t help, I didn’t feel capable of it – and as soon as I can, I’m going to.”

Swift was once known for throwing extravagant 4 July parties at her Rhode Island mansion. The Instagram posts from these star-studded events – at which guests wore matching stars-and-stripes bikinis and onesies – probably supported a significant chunk of the celebrity news industry GDP. But in 2017, they stopped. “The horror!” wrote Cosmopolitan, citing “reasons that remain a mystery” for their disappearance. It wasn’t “squad” strife or the unavailability of matching cozzies that brought the parties to an end, but Swift’s disillusionment with her country, she says.

There is a smart song about this on the new album – the track that should have been the first single, instead of the cartoonish ME!. Miss Americana And The Heartbreak Prince is a forlorn, gothic ballad in the vein of Lana Del Rey that uses high-school imagery to dismantle American nationalism: “The whole school is rolling fake dice/You play stupid games/You win stupid prizes,” she sings with disdain. “Boys will be boys then/Where are the wise men?”

As an ambitious 11-year-old, she worked out that singing the national anthem at sports games was the quickest way to get in front of a large audience. When did she start feeling conflicted about what America stands for? She gives another emphatic ugh. “It was the fact that all the dirtiest tricks in the book were used and it worked,” she says. “The thing I can’t get over right now is gaslighting the American public into being like” – she adopts a sanctimonious tone – “‘If you hate the president, you hate America.’ We’re a democracy – at least, we’re supposed to be – where you’re allowed to disagree, dissent, debate.” She doesn’t use Trump’s name. “I really think that he thinks this is an autocracy.”

As we speak, Tennessee lawmakers are trying to impose a near-total ban on abortion. Swift has staunchly defended her “Tennessee values” in recent months. What’s her position? “I mean, obviously, I’m pro-choice, and I just can’t believe this is happening,” she says. She looks close to tears. “I can’t believe we’re here. It’s really shocking and awful. And I just wanna do everything I can for 2020. I wanna figure out exactly how I can help, what are the most effective ways to help. ’Cause this is just…” She sighs again. “This is not it.”

***

It is easy to forget that the point of all this is that a teenage Taylor Swiftwanted to write love songs. Nemeses and negativity are now so entrenched in her public persona that it’s hard to know how she can get back to that, though she seems to want to. At the end of Daylight, the new album’s dreamy final song, there’s a spoken-word section: “I want to be defined by the things that I love,” she says as the music fades. “Not the things that I hate, not the things I’m afraid of, the things that haunt me in the middle of the night.” As well as the songs written for Alwyn, there is one for her mother, who recently experienced a cancer relapse: “You make the best of a bad deal/I just pretend it isn’t real,” Swift sings, backed by the Dixie Chicks.

How does writing about her personal life work if she’s setting clearer boundaries? “It actually made me feel more free,” she says. “I’ve always had this habit of never really going into detail about exactly what situation inspired what thing, but even more so now.” This is only half true: in the past, Swift wasn’t shy of a level of detail that invited fans to figure out specific truths about her relationships. And when I tell her that Lover feels a more emotionally guarded album, she bristles. “I know the difference between making art and living your life like a reality star,” she says. “And then even if it’s hard for other people to grasp, my definition is really clear.”

Even so, Swift begins Lover by addressing an adversary, opening with a song called I Forgot That You Existed (“it isn’t love, it isn’t hate, it’s just indifference”), presumably aimed at Kanye West, a track that slightly defeats its premise by existing. But it sweeps aside old dramas to confront Swift’s real nemesis, herself. “I never grew up/It’s getting so old,” she laments on The Archer.

She has had to learn not to pre-empt disaster, nor to run from it. Her life has been defined by relationships, friendships and business relationships that started and ended very publicly (though she and Perry are friends again). At the same time, the rules around celebrity engagement have evolved beyond recognition in her 15 years of fame. Rather than trying to adapt to them, she’s now asking herself: “How do you learn to maintain? How do you learn not to have these phantom disasters in your head that you play out, and how do you stop yourself from sabotage – because the panic mechanism in your brain is telling you that something must go wrong.” For her, this is what growing up is. “You can’t just make cut-and-dry decisions in life. A lot of things are a negotiation and a grey area and a dance of how to figure it out.”

And so this time, Swift is sticking around. In December she will turn 30, marking the point after which more than half her life will have been lived in public. She’ll start her new decade with a stronger self-preservationist streak, and a looser grip (as well as a cameo in Cats). “You can’t micromanage life, it turns out,” she says, drily.

When Swift finally answered my question about the moment she would choose in the VH1 Behind The Music episode about herself, the one where her career turned, she said she hoped it wouldn’t focus on her “apocalypse” summer of 2016. “Maybe this is wishful thinking,” she said, “but I’d like to think it would be in a couple of years.” It’s funny to hear her hope that the worst is still to come while sitting in her fairytale living room, the cats pacing: a pragmatist at odds with her romantic monument to teenage dreams. But it sounds something like perspective.

[because-its-important]

transitions & transformations

i. the rest of my batch at RC

I spent the first six weeks of my batch at Recurse Center in an out-and-out sprint. I learned Python, built and released projects, and wrote blog posts every week. I wasn’t sure where my limits were, but I was determined to find out - preferably by overshooting them, then adjusting after the fact.

A curious thing happened. I kept finding that I was more than capable of starting and finishing projects, especially when I had a firm mental image of the end goal. There were at least as many unexpected good-turns as there were setbacks, and I certainly didn’t come up against any inscrutable barriers. Mostly the challenge was in overcoming the distance between a thing that doesn’t exist and a thing that does, which I was able to sort out pretty handily through a consistent application of effort across time.

Who’d have thought?

A selfie taken on my birthday, which also happened in the last few months and was really great!

The second half of my batch was not so visibly productive - with the exception of The Question Game. The Question Game is a simple game designed to help groups of people get to know each other better IRL. I designed it with my friend Brittany a few years ago as an icebreaker when we found ourselves in a group of folks who knew us but didn’t really know each other. The game only really needs a method of generating random numbers for a small but arbitrary group size, but building it out as a toy webapp was a good excuse to get practice working with a JS-only stack. I learned React, got a lil more familiar with node, and even went as far as to attach an otherwise completely unnecessary PG database and Sequelize ORM. You can see the code for it here. Outside of this project, however, I didn’t publish any code. I didn’t publish any writing, either.

So I’d like to take a moment and shine a bit of light on the work that I did during the rest of my batch.

🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘

First, I made the decision to leave community.lawyer, the social impact startup I co-founded in 2016 following the Blue Ridge Labs Fellowship.

I’m happy to report that I left on the come up, which seems a rare and privileged thing for a founder to be able to say. Gaining traction in a hyper-specialized industry like legal tech takes a gargantuan amount of sustained forward momentum, and I departed just as we began to reap the fruits of our labor. In the last few months community.lawyer has reached final approval on partnerships a year in the making, won federal grants we’d submitted to in 2016, and every day our software is being used to help connect people who have legal needs with credible lawyers. Our first two partners were exactly the types of legal organizations at the heart of our mission: the Justice Entrepreneurs Project and the DC Reduced Fee Lawyer & Mediator Referral Service.1 Based in Chicago and Washington DC respectively, these orgs are specifically chartered to deliver quality services at rates that more Americans can afford. I am so proud. ⚖️

Second, I started my first ever job hunt as a software engineer. Wowee, this was scary! I knew that I had to prepare for interviewing, which meant a) getting my career change narrative straight, b) studying Data Structures & Algorithms 101, and c) learning how to perform my handle on both of these in a live, semi-adversarial environment.

At one point during my batch my laptop broke. I read through this wonderful illustrated book during the two days it was being fixed.

In order to direct my search I also had to craft a set of selection criteria of my own. Foremost: “What good will my work do for the world?”2 Additionally, “What degree of access will I have to supportive mentors?”

Getting started with interview prep was a challenge, at least partly because I had so many options for where to start. But I did get started! I read Cracking the Coding Interview, I did the free trial and weekly free problems on Interview Cake. I attended a few group mock interviews at Recurse Center and signed up for a 1-1 mock interview with an RC alum. Her name is Leah, and she’s amazing - the superbly friendly and encouraging Comp Sci TA I wish I’d had years ago. 💚Brittany also set up mock technical screens for me with her pals, Leaf and Ian. They were the vanguard against my outsized anxiety about programming for an audience and they each took the time to give me solid feedback.

Third, I extended my batch at Recurse Center by another 6 weeks. I had decided early on I wouldn’t extend (for no real reason) and stuck with this decision up until two days before my batch ending. A small group of folks - Lily, Connor, Alicja and I - went to NYX in Union Square to try out lipsticks. We played with different colors and finishes (satin! matte! shimmer!) for half an hour or so. There came a point when I looked up, glanced across the narrow makeup store at my beautiful friends’ beautiful faces and thought, “You know, you don’t have to leave yet, right? What’s the rush?” I’d already accomplished my primary goal, to forcibly rework my identity as an engineer, but it sure seemed that I could stand to reach for a second one. That night I decided to extend my batch, with the intention of sampling a more open method of self-directed learning, i.e. with a little more chill and a lot less panic. Specifically, I wanted to practice connecting meaningfully with my limited supply of social energy.

In my bonus six weeks, I: gave three talks (2 planned, 1 impromptu) under encouragement from Ayla and Lily, learned to juggle thanks to instruction from a fellow RCer, Edward, who also loaned me a book about learning, made it into weekly Feelings Check-in (read as: opt-in support group) fairly regularly, picked my first ever lock, saw a live-coding show and then later attended two live-coding workshops (one on TidalCycles, another on Super Collider), sat in a dark room and played howling wolf clips while Microsoft Sam read grimoires aloud, got my hair braided for the first time in a decade, made dumplings and DJ’d for a dinner party, connected with folks about queer-poly relationships, gave fiery advice, and received compliments so earnest and rational and persistent that it was difficult to refute them.

Zine fair plus Lightning Bolt concert inside a movie theater in Times Square??

I also put my interview prep to use and interviewed with a handful of Recurse Center partner companies. Job searching meant squaring off against impostor syndrome and a ton of related anxieties in rapid succession. I successfully choked most of that down when it mattered, though, and it was only a couple short weeks before I received my first offer.

To that end, I’m super happy to say that I’ll be joining Blink Health as a Fullstack Product Engineer! Blink Health is a healthcare startup in SoHo. They make it easier for people to afford prescription drugs, especially for those with limited insurance plans or none at all. These savings aren’t trivial either: an extra $50 can spare someone from choosing between groceries or medicine that week, and for some folks Blink saves many times that. I’ll be starting at the end of this month. ✌️🤓

The last two years have been a wild ride: participating in a social impact fellowship and accelerator, busting my product chops and learning web dev to get a public benefit company off the ground, then diving into four months of self-directed learning at Recurse Center. I’m really looking forward to having some externally imposed structure again. Real health insurance, too.

ii. some hard truths

I made a few radical life changes in 2016, like getting involved in activist spaces, dating more, biking everywhere, building strong friendships, going capital-B Boogying, programming full-time. As I carried those changes forward through 2017, I began to notice a lot of mental and emotional reconfiguration happening to me.

Did you know that along its way to becoming a butterfly, a caterpillar nearly completely liquifies inside its cocoon?

Psychological growth is confusing, full of false starts, and generally painful. You’ve got the static pain of stretching beyond your limits, the pleasure-pain of feeling an old knot finally release, the frustrating pain of stubbing your toe because some helpful asshole has been rearranging your psychic furniture when you weren’t looking. There’s the more dramatic knife-in-the-gut pain of realizing that just because you’re growing doesn’t mean the people closest to you are, and that now in certain cases what you previoulsy regarded as friendship actually looks a whole lot like run-of-the-mill exploitation or even emotional abuse, if you're being honest, and it's a realization that only hurts more because it’s so irredeemably cliche and boring. And despite all that pain you gotta go ahead and grow anyway, claw your way out of the relative comfort of ignorance. Transcendence may not be the only show in town but afaik it’s the one most worth watching.

Prior to attending Recurse Center I’d spent lots of time exploring my surroundings and cataloguing people and places worth coming back to. My view of myself did change (and positively!) as a consequence. But sooner or later, ya get tired of the taste of low-hanging fruit.

So, armed with the bookshelf of a philosophy grad and a burgeoning psychoanalytic vocabulary begging to be let off leash, I decided to use my time at RC to try confronting a few of my Hard To See truths in addition to becoming a better programmer.

Here’s what I’ve found so far.

Truth #1: People like me a lot. This causes me problems.

I’ve been metabolizing this one for some time. I remember having a conversation with Brittany in January of 2016. I don’t remember what social anxiety I’d been vocalizing, but I must have been worrying that someone “hated me.” Brittany cut me off, exasperated in the way that only a friend can be in the face of utter delusion: “No one hates you Nicole! You’re always worried that people don’t like you and it’s never true!”

I carried that admonishment with me through two years of voracious friendship-building. On the whole, seeing that people do in fact enjoy and seek out my company has curbed the most egregious overreaches of my social anxiety. But reckoning with my anxiety honestly has also meant acknowledging that my compulsive instinct to withdraw from social situations is also a protective (if suboptimal) response to a few very real dangers.

Most acutely: being friendly, generous, and intensely empathetic makes me a ready target for users. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt for as long as I can, which makes me proportionally susceptible to being taken advantage of and then gaslighted about it. A lifetime of socialization as a petite woman don’t help, neither. This leads to a pattern where, semi-regularly, I look up and take stock of how someone has been treating me and realize that the answer is Very Badly, For Quite A While. This in turn leads to rough periods of cutting ties and moving on. Ideally I’d like to be be able to filter bad actors out sooner, but I also want to stay open, giving, and hopeful beyond reason. Those desires are fundamentally at odds with each other - raising vs. lowering one’s defenses - but it’s clear that I need to come up with a strategy that balances both.

More broadly, though, I operate under an ever-present dread of inevitably disappointing everyone who knows me. Whether people project onto me because they already like me or like me more because they project positively onto me, I am extremely sensitive to the fact that when people meet me the conception they form has waaay more to do with what they want to find than what’s actually there. My body is a surface readily projected upon: young, female-shaped, ethnically ambiguous, small, smiling. These well-intended projections cause me the most trouble when people see me interacting socially; they’ll witness fifteen minutes of seemingly effortless extroversion on my part and extrapolate out massively. As far as they’re concerned I’ve got plenty of social energy to spare, and if I don’t spend it hanging out with them, it must be because either my friendliness is fake or I don’t like them.

Pretty much none of this is conducted consciously, of course, but it still creates a lot of unnecessary pressure that I can’t pretend not to feel and resent. I know there are people who dream about attaining this kind of “popularity” - to be assumed Cooler than one truly is - but getting buffeted around by folks’ totally unexamined, unarticulated psychological desires mostly sucks.

Truth #2: I’m non-binary.

I’ve also spent a very long time resisting this one. Two decades on the rack, easy. As such, the story of getting here is long. Perhaps one day I’ll tell it. 😛

The short of it, though, is this: I’m probably at least as much of a boy3 as I am a girl. Outside of where my life has been mutated by the chronic background radiation of sexism, “benevolent” and otherwise, I don’t strongly identify as a woman. Furthermore, I find the two-gender system to be infinitely more alienating than comforting. Gender is a social construction designed to impose order on the natural messiness of sexual experience, and as far as I’m cool with that, I am decidedly Not Cool with the “normal” state of affairs, i.e. aggressively shoving whole human beings into an absurdly reductive false dichotomy.

Between its either-or-ism and its forced assignment, the traditional approach to gender reveals itself to be obviously bullshit to anyone who spends more than a few minutes thinking about it. Its boundaries are arbitrary, inconsistent, and generally ill-fitting at the level of individual experience, which why they require such an outrageous amount of coercion and bodily violence to enforce. As much as other folks want to participate in a system of ritualized violence I guess they are free to? Personally, I’d prefer to see it actively dismantled.

If gender is to be saved it’ll be by subverting it, taking it apart, remaking it into something life-affirming. Not the dehumanizing garbage we’ve got now.

As of yet I don’t have any plans to change my presentation because I don’t fuckin’ gotta!

I do have a preference towards They / Them pronouns, but She / Her is still fine. For most of my friends this isn’t going to be at all surprising nor will it in any way negatively impact our relationship. Anyone who needs me to just-be-a-girl, however, can expect turbulence.

Truth #3: My righteous anger is justified and I am good at using it to help others.

I have felt conflicted about my anger for a long time. Since a very vocal childhood I have been regularly frustrated by prejudices and injustices, and I was frequently the first voice of dissent against them, whether that meant challenging adults or my peers. Unsurprisingly, I became well acquainted with the standard strokes of the backlash.

When you are confronting bigotry in a mixed environment, the voice of the status quo will generally manifest in one of two ways:

Gaslighting, e.g. “you are wrong to have said this at all, obviously I am a Good Person, you are just imagining that what I said sounded like XYZ, honestly how could you even think this, as a matter of fact it is I who is offended!”

Tone policing, e.g. “you’re too upset about this! after all, I, the person who did Fucked Up Thing, am perfectly calm about Fucked Up Thing, so any amount of anger makes you irrational by contrast, and I get a raincheck on whatever this is about!”

I know these responses are repulsive. I know they are merely the signs of a weak and imperiled ego acting out of fear. And yet I still spend an inordinate amount of time second-guessing my own anger. Gaslighting and tone policing are a favored weapon of the status quo because they work, and they work in direct proportion to how agreeable their target wants to be.

content warning: the following segment talks about sexual harassment and assault

About couple weeks ago I had the misfortune of being sexually harassed at a club in Bushwick. After numerous rejections and explicitly telling a creep bothering me, my friends, and other women in the club to get lost, I finally went to get a bouncer to eject him. The bouncer got the creep to leave. When I went to thank him, the bouncer told me a whole story about how the creep was “a harmless guy.” Then he reached down and grabbed my ass. Presumably he felt entitled to do this after helping me get rid of a person I asked him to remove... for unwanted touching.

It Really Sucked.

At every turn during the whole ordeal (and its aftermath) I had to hold onto my anger, convince myself that I wasn’t overreacting, remind myself that anyone who thought this was acceptable to do to me is almost certainly doing worse to more vulnerable people. I kept picturing myself the way this guy, this man in a position of power, must have seen me in order to feel okay doing what he did. That I was young, small, female, too friendly to say No, already indebted anyway; that he was one of the Good Guys, that his behavior was also “harmless” because he had decided it was. I conjured up as much anger as I could, pushed down the nausea of envisioning my own degradation from an attacker’s POV, and got to work. I reached out to the club and was quickly put in contact with the owner. The venue now has a publicly posted zero tolerance sexual harassment policy. The entire staff is going through training with a local org dedicated to creating safer nightlife spaces. And that motherfucker has been fired.

I demonstrably made the world better. I wasn’t alone, but all that happened because of my actions. Me and my anger, we did that.

I wish more people were this fucking angry. 💢

~ end of content warning ~

iii. an opinion

My Saturn return is upon me, y’all. As Frank Ocean serenades, we’ll never be those kids again. I have lived a few of these here nine lives and it seems only prudent to be moving forward with some sort of opinion on the matter.

My opinion is this: us folks with financial and physical security should be spending more time fixing shit around here. Figuring out what needs fixing and how you might help are the first steps.

If you’re operating on a similar scale of privilege as I am, maybe that means changing jobs to do more mission-oriented work. If you can’t swing a change of that magnitude, maybe it means showing up to community events and engaging with, caring for, supporting people you otherwise wouldn’t talk to. Churches, libraries, volunteering, supporting local artists, participating in local politics - this all counts. If you’re already doing this sorta thing, that is awesome! Maybe you also have a friend worth inviting who you sense is just itching for a chance to exercise compassion?

I’m using “fixing” pretty loosely here, too. Fixing, to my mind, means making the world brighter, safer, and sweeter for your fellows, human and otherwise. We’ve all got different ideas about what that looks like, and there are definitely folks - myopic or malevolent or both - who will swear up and down that their fear- and hate-driven behaviors will bring about better world. Ultimately, though, I believe that many hands reaching towards their personal vision of Better will in fact make things Better, especially when that vision is informed by meaningful interaction with the real world and its real sorrows and its real triumphs.

But ya gotta reach. Ya gotta try.

I am so tired of hearing my well-fed, well-homed friends piss and moan about late capitalism4 without lifting a damn finger in service of the communities bearing the brunt of material hardship. Unfettered capitalism sure does have a marked tendency to wreak havoc on organic life! But capitalism is not a monolith, and lamenting the abuses perpetuated by its principle benefactors as unchanging or inevitable only normalizes them. Any investigation into the history of capitalism (or the broader phenomena of how a Few come to subjugate the Many) will very quickly disabuse you of the notion that this shit is going to stop without a great deal of active resistance.5

So unless you are personally doing work to put our current strand of democracy-withering corporatism six-feet-under, seriously, just STFU instead. Your nihilism is boring! You don’t sound woke! Save it for your local DSA working group!

Which isn’t to say that I’m not convinced of the wickedness6 of the problems we’re facing: skyrocketing wealth disparity with no relief in sight; the destruction of most of Earth’s biodiversity via mass extinction; a pernicious climate of racism and xenophobia that scapegoats black and brown folks and then visits misery upon them; the weight of an aging population bearing down on the shittiest healthcare system of any nation in its class; a widely disenfranchised electorate further fragmented and fatigued by hyper-polarization; the gendered terrorism that is inflicted daily on women, trans and non-binary folks, and queer people at large; a rising wave of depressive anxiety as people become more aware of these problems and how thoroughly they’ve been disempowered from changing things for the better.

So yeah, I get it. These are hard problems. I just don’t see any better option than trying anyway. I want to spend my time fixing things around here and encouraging others to try their hand too. You already know the bad news: real change is hard and it can take a very long time. You might work your whole life sowing seeds whose fruit you never get to taste.

The good news, however, is that you can get started whenever and wherever you are. The good news is that a sense of purpose is its own reward.

iv. how to get started

When you’ve got hard work ahead of you, your best bet is to use your beautiful human brain and create some leverage. Ask Archimedes about it.7

Lever systems got two parts:

The lever, which is the tool you use to amplify your effort. The longer your lever is, the easier your job will be.

The fulcrum, which is the wedge the lever rests on. The nearer your fulcrum is to the thing you want to move, the easier your job will be.

If you’re starting from zero - “I want to do more for the world but I don’t know how!” - my advice is to forget about the lever arm for now. A lever ain’t shit without a fulcrum, anyway. Your time is better spent exploring the world, keeping an eye out for problems you’d like to solve, and identifying nearby points of leverage. If you want to get into activism, a fulcrum might be volunteering to fold pamphlets for an organization with a mission you believe in. If want to see more self-expression in the world, it might be might be inviting your friends to a zine-making class or hosting your own arts and craft night.

The best fulcrum is one that makes you Feel Good when you apply any amount of effort against it. Too many people get caught up in a self-defeating belief that if they can’t give 110% of their creative energy to something they might as well not try. I can confidently say that trying is itself a virtue. Every time you try even a little bit you make it easier for yourself to try again later, and more importantly, you make trying easier for others. A bunch of people altering their behavior a smidge in the same direction doesn’t add up to nothing; on the contrary, it’s a sea change.

If you’ve got a decent idea of the types of problems you want to solve, though, and you’ve tested your fulcrums, and you are thinking, “Okay, but is this all I’m capable of giving?” then it’s probably time to work on your lever. Given your own interests and inclinations, what skills can you develop that will increase the good you’re doing 10x, 100x over? This is the long game, but it scales a whole lot better than “keep doing what I’m already doing, but more.”

For me right now this means deepening my technical knowledge, building a resilient support network, and sharing what I’m learning. Helping others has been a powerful motivator for self-improvement, not the least of which because it’s a convenient shortcut through the snarl of self-confidence issues.

I am so grateful that Recurse Center was a stop on lengthening my lever! What a concentrated cluster of helpful, considerate beings.

I’ve spent the last two years wandering around New York City in wide-eyed wonder, asking myself the most ambitious question I could think of: how do you save the world?

Getting older comes with a lot of downsides, but asking yourself big questions and living your life as the answer is the primary pleasure of adulthood. It took a ton of courage to get started and I am still frequently awed to find myself moving in the right direction. I’m humbled by the grace and fortitude of the folks who’ve been at this for way longer.

I’m also a hell of a lot happier. This summer’s gonna be rad. ☀️

There are lots of extraordinarily sexy company names like this in the legal world. ↩︎

Having the choice to direct my energies in this way is a privilege. Working in tech gives me this freedom of motion and I have been drawn to software engineering in part because it is the freest of the free (if you still gotta labor for your living). ↩︎

😱😫😖😬😬😬... 😏 ↩︎

Substitute with whatever modifier is en vogue. As a point of fact, “late capitalism” is a term that’s been floating around for literally over a hundred years. ↩︎

Thankfully, history also clearly demonstrates that the tide can be turned. ↩︎

“The use of the term ‘wicked’ here has come to denote resistance to resolution.” Wikipedia page. ↩︎

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” etc etc. ↩︎

[thisaintascenereviews]

Album Review by Bradley Christensen Survivor – Eye Of The Tiger Record Label: Scotti Bros Records Release Date: February 1982

The idea of the “one-hit-wonder” is always fascinating to me, and I’m sure I’ve talked about this same thing before, but I wanted to talk about it again, since I’m doing that thing where I get into a ton of bands that are known for one big song, ultimately seeing if the album these songs are on are, well, any good. I did that a lot when I got into 80s new wave last summer, and that’s what I’m doing now, but it makes sense, though. Personally, I feel as though music was its peak during the 1980s, but that’s not because the quality of the music is so much better (at least compared to today). A lot of wonderful, amazing, and influential albums came out, of course, but I’m talking about that more so in the sense that music was in a very fruitful and fertile state. Music was going into many different directions, ideas, and sounds. Experimentation was happening everywhere. Pop music was starting to be defined, but it was in its new wave and synthpop days (way before what we’d define pop music as now). Heavy metal was going into a bunch of different directions, ultimately dropping the blues influences of the late 70s. Speed metal, thrash metal, NWOBHM (new wave of British heavy metal), and early hints of black metal and death metal were creeping up in the first half of the decade, while those two styles would rear their heads by the last few years of it. Hard-rock was taking elements of pop and new wave into its sound, especially with something like Van Halen’s 1984 being a perfect example of rock and pop mixing together. That, in part, lead to the popularity of glam-metal (or hair-metal, depending on what you want to call it), because of how accessible these bands were. Don’t even get me started on punk, pop-punk, hardcore, post-punk, industrial, and tons more stuff, because those other styles got their starts in the 1980s (well, punk and pop-punk started in the 1970s, but the 80s took it even further).

Music was just a great melting pot during the 1980s, even though a lot of people just think it’s only composed of 80s pop and new wave. They’re not totally wrong, since 80s music is defined by new wave, but a lot of other stuff came out. Another interesting part of the 80s is that the amount of one-hit-wonders, and like I said right in the first sentence, I find the idea of these bands / songs to be incredibly interesting. While I think the 1990s wins in terms of having the most random songs chart highly, and that decade, too, was very diverse, interesting, and fertile, especially during the first few years, because new wave on its way out and grunge / alt-rock / college-rock hadn’t taken hold yet, 1980s had the most one-hit-wonders. These are bands and artists that you only remember for one song, and most of the time, you don’t even know who they are. You’ve heard their big hit, but you’re always like, “Who does that?” Or, if you’re like me, you’re like, “Oh, that band does that? I had no idea!” There are tons of iconic songs that you’ve listened to, but you’d have no idea who did them, and that’s kind of understandable. Because music was so fertile during that time frame, so much stuff came out, and people just got bombarded with stuff. It’s not like today, where you can find anything you want on Amazon, iTunes, Bandcamp, or Spotify, because people didn’t have the luxury of the Internet. A lot of stuff got thrown to the wayside, and the reason I find these songs / bands interesting is that a lot of them are quite good, sometimes even amazing, but they’re very underrated and not all that well-known. It was amazing to go through bunches of 80s new wave / synth-pop bands, and hearing how wonderfully underrated these bands are, because people passed on the whole album. If they didn’t pass on the album, the album surprisingly did well, but people forgot about it over time.

A good example of an album that people forgot about is Men Without Hats’ 1982 LP, Rhythm Of Youth. These guys brought us “The Safety Dance,” a silly little tune that was supposedly written in response to people “moshing” at their show, but that’s all that people know them for. I mean, I love the song, and it’s an 80s classic, but the whole album is great. It’s catchy, fun, energetic, and weird synth-pop / new wave that sounds both dated and timeless at the same time. I love the album, and it’s such an underrated record, but people will always remember them for The Safety Dance. That’s a good case of where a one-hit-wonder deserved a lot better, but for every case of a band that deserved a lot better treatment than they got, there’s another one that doesn’t deserve better. I always hate talking about these types of bands, because they released one really great song, but the rest of the album just doesn’t measure. That’s where hard-rock / pop-rock band Survivor comes into play. You might know this band for “Eye Of The Tiger,” which is the Rocky III theme song (that’s how most people heard of this song, anyway), but it became a generic staple of sports movies and shows. It’s a damn great song, honestly, and it’s one of the best of the 1980s. It’s very energetic, anthemic, and inspiring. This is where Fall Out Boy were most likely influenced by a couple of their biggest hits, “Champion” and “Centuries.” This song, like those, has that “we can do anything” feeling to it, and it’s a great song. I absolutely love it. It’s one of those songs that most people seem to love, and you can get pumped to, because it’s got that feeling to it. Most people also have no idea who does it, or have heard another song from these guys, but I’d be lying if I said that’s a bad thing.

I picked up their 1982 LP, Eye Of The Tiger, and I don’t care for it much. You’d think this album would fare better with the album being the same name as the title track, but not really. There’s a big problem with a lot of bands, and albums, that fall into the one-hit-wonder spectrum, and this album really has that – the best song is the first one. That makes sense, though, since that’s what record labels and bands want to capitalize on. The biggest single is usually first, so people can start the album with a song they recognize, but that’s a problem when the rest of the album just doesn’t measure up. It really doesn’t here. That’s for two reasons, and one of them isn’t their fault, necessarily. The first reason, and the main reason why this album doesn’t do much for me, is that it’s just boring and generic. “Eye Of The Tiger” is fairly formulaic, simplistic, and nothing groundbreaking, either, but it’s fun, energetic, and intense. The rest of the album just doesn’t do anything that great, or that fun, and that leads me to the second thing that bothers me, and it’s that nothing really measures up to that song. I wouldn’t have minded if nothing on the album measured up to “Eye Of The Tiger” if the songs themselves were still interesting, unique, or worthwhile, but they really aren’t. Even on the albums from a lot of one-hit-wonders that I’ve heard, the rest of the songs are still pretty good, and you can understand why people latched onto the song, versus the whole album. This album has one great song, and a lot of “meh” songs.” I mean, nothing sounds bad on here, inherently speaking. Everything sounds fine, but the rest of the album is very generic, bland, and just forgettable. This is a good example of a band that’s rightfully a one-hit-wonder, since “Eye Of The Tiger” is a great song, but the rest of the album doesn’t deliver whatsoever, unfortunately. It’s not horrible whatsoever, but sometimes an album being so milquetoast is worse than being actively bad.

[pigeonacademic]

The Welcome Home characters: The Protagonist: Dr. Jeremy: A really sweet therapist who has worked with the protagonist for a while, and moves away, so the protagonist gets a new therapist. Danielle: The person the protagonist communicates with via paper airplanes and messages in a bottle who climbs into the window to greet her friend. Dr. James: The seemingly kind, but creepy therapist and twin brother of Jeremy. Murders children and certain people he deems fit for it

@ufolotus @diaroon my writings  

Paperwork with tiny print was a strain on the eyes, and Emeritus didn’t exactly have eagle-vision. His nose bumped against the paper so many times that he didn’t notice he had a black smudge on the tip until Adrian pointed it out to him during break.

“Do they let the ink dry before they send the papers out?” The brunette chuckled, watching his mentor angrily wipe at the smudge. Emeritus gave him a dry look, reaching for a napkin and wetting it with some coffee. “Sometimes they don’t wait long enough for it to dry; these papers used to be hand-written when there were fewer members on the team, but now they’ve been using the printer, and a shitty one at that.” The blond dabbed his nose, checking to see if the ink was coming off. He handed the younger man the napkin. Adrian took it gratefully to clean his own fingeres, glancing at the other letters they had to read. “Perhaps we should leave them here until they dry?” It wasn’t a bad idea, Emeritus had to give the man that. He went over to the window, opening it.  

"Briney waves crash around your body and you pretend to be powerful. Stardust falls upon your shoulders and you pretend to be ethereal. there’s a spark in your eyes and you pretend to be untalented. The fires of the factory speak to you, and you pretend to be at peace."

A decade could be cruel, especially behind the barbed wire fences and looming prison, which, while looking soulessly dull on the outside, gave an omnious feeling with its tall dark windows, and flashes of orange as prisoners were herded to their cells from the mess hall, and in some cases, to the last room they'll ever be in. Hobble had picked up a few scars along the way, and a serious smoking habit. As she stood at the pickup-spot, she shielded her lighter with her hand to keep the chill autumn wind from blowing the fire away, the flame lighting up her aged features. She long accepted she wasn't young anymore, and the added stress of that place didn't help. BEEP BEEP! The pickup-bus had arrived-the woman had to blink several times to make sure she was seeing a bus, they had become nearly extinct after the war- and stared at the driver as he pulled up alongside her, opening the door. Hobble quietly got on and sat a few seats behind the driver, pulling her tattered, faded hat snugly down over her head. God, she was glad it still fit after all these years. "First day out, hm?" The driver asked, adjusting the mirror to look at her. She had noticed he was a stocky man who had a shadow of a beard, as if he had skipped a day shaving, and a periwinkle blue uniform, with a matching cap in which she presumed most of his long curly hair had been tucked under, judging by the few strands peeking out.

She nods from her seat; she didn't really want to make small-chat with anyone at the moment. He started to drive away, the prison getting smaller and smaller the further they went into the countryside, where the dead trees and yellow grass were slowly intergrating into lush greens and the golden, rustic colors of fall. "So, where do you want to go?"

Hobble thought for a moment; where would she go? If her parents were still alive, they would have most certainly moved, and she doubted that rickety house would be standing. As for that place, Hobble was sure a bunch of vagrants made it their own hideaway spot. She might visit it sometime in the future, but now was too soon.

"Anywhere." She looks up at him in the mirror. "Anywhere but here."

The bus sped on, and Hobble found herself looking out the window, the scenery becoming more wild and beautiful with each passing moment; she almost felt at peace. A flash of red startled the woman as it stuck to the window, but on closer inspection, it wasn't an autumn leaf like she thought. It was a red butterfly, clinging to the glass as it enjoyed it's free ride, beautiful red wings fluttering in the breeze. Seeing that butterfly reminded her of Emeritus, and his last words to her; how he spoke so fondly of that particular type of butterfly. She had thought it more than odd, but now she could see what he meant, now she was seeing it for the first time. But thinking about him or what happened doesn't matter now, Hobble thought, softly smiling at the butterfly as it spread it's wings and took off into the clear blue skies, fading off into a tiny red dot. What matters most of all, is the present.

Piper's Papers.

- Do I remember Breedwell Road?

I remember it quite well; how could I forget the place where my life was the happiest, and where my life also ended?

"(Player1) shares a hug with (Player2) before stabbing them in the back with a dagger."

(Player1) and (Player2) share a kiss.

(Player1) kisses (Player2) before stabbing (him/her2)

(Player1) sits in a tree and flicks acorns at (Player2) (Player1) holds (Player2) as (he/she2) dies

(Player1) steals (Player2) 's food and blames it on (Player3)

(Player1) flirts with (Player2) . (Player2) slaps (him/her1) and walks away.

(Player1) flirts with (Player2) who is a giggly, blushing mess. (Player1) kisses (Player2) sweetly. A heartbroken and enraged (Player3) murders (Player1)

(Player1) tries to convince (Player2) to hook up with (Player3). It does not succeed and (Player2) feels dejected.

(Player1) tries to convince (Player2) to hook up with (Player3). It succeeds, and (Player2) and (Player3) spend the day together.

Its hard for me to put into words what I want to say. I'm not the best wordsmith; most of the time whenever I start to write,  I can't really find a way to express want I want to say.  I really miss you, but I'm glad you're safe at home, away from this.   It's been very cold here; these creatures have the home advantage on their planet, being used to temperatures that would rival even the coldness of Yellow Diamond's heart, and are used to scurrying across the rocky land. Where we plod, they gallop. They've picked off several others already. They're smart too; they already figured out that shattering us won't allow us to regenerate, and make off with what pieces they can to assure we can't bring them home. I can see their eyes glowing beyond the floodlights; they're waiting for us to let our guard down. Their ghostly howling is enough to scare the most hardened among us, and we can hear them clawing at the sides of the ship, and in the morning we find deep scratches along the fuel tanks. Our commander has been given orders to retreat, but there have been delays. None of us may make it home.

Introductions: Show off your gemsona! Weapon Summon: What’s their weapon? How do they summon it? Background: What’s their story? Crystal Idol: Your gemsona magically gets to hang out with the canon Gem they most admire! What happens? Purple P and Tiger M: Jump into the ring! What’s your gemsona’s wrestling nickname and costume? (Could they take on Purple Puma?) Special Talents: Is there an element or aspect of nature your Gemsona can control? Or: What’s something only they can do? The Homeworld: What’s their relationship to the Gem Homeworld? Distance Model: Draw your gemsona’s distance model! (x) Cracked Gem: Uh oh! Their gem’s got a crack in it! Change of Heart: A villain’s turned hero and a hero’s turned villain! Or: Your gemsona now has the opposite personality! Dream Team: Show off your other gemsonas! Or: If they’re a loner, introduce your gemsona’s friends! Alt Outfit: Design their space suit, beachwear, or ‘pilot’ outfit! A Day in the Life of: What’s an average day look like for your gemsona? Challenger Approaching!: Your gemsona’s caught in a fight! Is their opponent a monster? Another gem? Or something else? Regeneration: Whoops! What’s their new outfit? Hanging with Humans: Imagine your gemsona hanging out with some of the humans from Beach City! Does your gemsona get along with humans? Fusion Frenzy: Quick! Fuse with someone! Shapeshift: What kind of shapeshifting do they do? Can they shapeshift into objects? Animals? Can they only transform a part of their body? Steven Style: Draw your gemsona in the style of Steven Universe! Or: Have your gem play ‘Steven Tag’! Loyalty: Your gemsona was loyal to the Homeworld at some point… What was their role there? Or: If your gemsona’s never been to Homeworld, who are they loyal to? Monster Gem: What’s their corrupted form? Rebellion!: Where was your gemsona during the Gem Rebellion? Same Gem? Same Gem!: There’s sure to be at least one other gemsona with the same gemstone as yours. Draw them together! Outfit Exchange: Snag another gemsona’s or a canon character’s outfit! Historic Site: Your gemsona visits an old gem site… With the Gems: Imagine your gemsona as a Crystal Gem! Stars In Your Eyes: Show off your gem with Steven’s trademark ‘starry-eyed’ look! ٩ ( ✪͈̀ ᗜ ✪͈́) ۶ Guess Who?: Come up with a fake Steven Universe episode introducing your gemsona! Or: draw your gemsona on a screenshot from the show. Favorites: Draw some of your favorite Gemsonas!

Concept

Shifty catches Apatite and Topaz dancing, then fusing, and took photos. Later on threatens Apatite about exposing the two, and considering Topaz is a lower-class gem and a Off Color, he'll be shattered. He holds this over Apatite's head and uses it to get him to do things for him, all in the hopes of framing him and getting him off the group.

"Oh..now normally, fusion between two different gems don't bother me, but you know how everyone else is." He holds up the photographs, smirking. "It would be a shame if these got out, blowing around the gempire, hm? Oh, no worries, you're safe, its your signifigant other who will be in danger; may I say, he would be shattered for this kind of behavior." Apatite looks horrified; the other notes this with pleasure. "You'd do anything to keep him safe, right? How much do you love him?"

Fur Elise: Showcases Apatite and Emerald's bond, especially over music. Emerald is more lively and spry, while Apatite is the softer and gentler melody.

Hitman Mission: Topaz and Red Coral are on their infilteration mission on another planet. They must avoid being seen by the other creatures there, and have been given orders to kill if needed. They should not alert anyone else to their prescence.

This Is Where I Belong: The gems are either going to Earth, or they are returning to Homeworld. Both places could be home. Homeworld would obviously hold stronger ties, for they lived there for so long. But hey, I've moved more than fourteen times, what do I know what a home is, and what one feels like? I have no idea, but they'd find a home someplace, whatever a home feels like.

Santa Monica Dream: Emerald is lying on a bed, staring at the wall. It's a late-summer, early autumn day, with golden sunlight filtering through the window. He is thinking, hugging the pillow.

Mary Shaw theme: Emerald is exploring a creepy house with Angel Aura; they see movement which prompts them both to get the fuck out of Dodge. They get lost and they have to try and find their way out. Unbeknownst to them, it's only Red Coral being Major Dickhead.

Dirty Little Secret: Each of their gems have their secrets; the sequence shows what they are. Emerald is almost caught doing his, and so is Red Coral.

Mr. Saxobeat: Red Coral is dancing to this song, and he tries to get the others to join him. Emerald is dragged into it, but he sneaks away while Red Coral is trying to land a difficult move. Apatite just shakes his head and leaves with Angel Aura. Topaz stays because he feels bad for Red Coral.

Lone Digger: The gems go out on a Friday night on Earth. They see some....interesting sights.

Circle Backwards: Apatite is in his office, looking out the window and down at the rest of what remains of his old squadron, still active with training. He misses spending time with them, and is writing letter after letter to try and reconnect. Only one or two reply.

Roll The Dice: Emerald is dragged along on an outing with the others, and they try to get him to let loose. It takes a while, but he starts having fun. They go sight-seeing before going to a dance club. He practically kills it on the dance floor-or makes a fool of himself, but still has a epic time anyways with his friends.

Mohombi Maraca: Red Coral crashes a pool party. He may or may not start a dance-off with someone, before Topaz picks him up and carries him away.

Party Rock: Emerald has no patients for the day, so he's just being bored around the office before deciding to why not dance?

Room of Angels: {REDACTED} {REDACTED} It has to do with Yellow Diamond and Pink Diamond. (Hint: The song sort of explains)

Durmstrang: Topaz is training with the other Topazes. Their session is intense, and Angel Aura is a little intimidated watching them, and hides out on the roof of another building.

Cleopatra: We see a different form of Apatite from a few thousand years ago.

Good Time:  Gems getting ready for their day, breezing through their work day before waiting for night to fall so they can go do together whatever gems do when they want to have fun. Maybe there's a gem-rodeo with creatures from another planet, maybe they attend that, and Red Coral double-dares Angel Aura to participate.

To All Of You: The Gems are on Earth, and Emerald takes the day with Topaz to explore the town together.     (Still debating on whether they should go to Beach City or in Alabama, because I feel pretty strongly for both)

Stamp On The Ground: Gem dance-competition. Apatite is surprisingly good at this one, and even sheds his usual attire to make it easier for him. (Relax, he's wearing something under that.)

Run Boy Run Instrumental: Basically, I like to think that gems like Topaz were most likely shattered for being malformed. (Backed up by what we just saw in the recent episodes) Since its before the rebellion, gems like him are sent off to be shattered. He gets scared and escapes, while those gem bots are after him. Soon he finds a gem who helps him hide. Then it cuts to the rebellion, where any remaining gems that were strong enough, no matter how 'off-color' they are, are recruited, and he's one of them. Cue a military training montage.

Candyman Theme: It's autumn on Earth, and Emerald is enjoying it.

Die Young: The gems accidentally crash a school dance, but nobody cares. (I might also make an appearance in this one!)

Faceoff SYFY Theme: The gems each show off their weapons in dramatic reveals. May even do a little show with them.

You're So True: Topaz and Emerald adventures, both on Homeworld and on Earth.

Boats and Birds: More of the relationship between Emerald and White Diamond.

Yeah, Red Coral's a little surprised at that one .

"He's..drowning me?"

"It's just a dream, it doesn't mean anything."

"but look at how happy he is! that's the biggest i've ever seen him smile!"

"IT'S JUST A DREAM, RED CORAL."

Weston school antics: Gregory draws other students a lot, and yes, nudes included. Cheslock snuck a look through his art book once and was scarred. Greenhill is an animal lover and will cross the street to pet a dog. Redmond is embarassed of his uncle and hates his coddling. Joanne has a pet turtle named Bronte. Maurice once tried to humilate him in front of other students in the lunch room. "What's the difference between you and Bronte? At least Bronte comes out of her shell!" Cheslock was PISSED He grabbed Maurice by his collar and shook him. "WHAT DID YOU SAY YOU LITTLE SHIT!?"

Maurice screamed like a T Rex to get a reacher's attention Cheslock got detention, Maurice got a stern-talking to.

Lawrence studies with the door shut and he hisses at anyone who tries to interrupt Clayton drinks a lot of coffee before studying

I got some ideas with White Zirconia and Pearl. Basically, you said he gaslights, right? Master manipulator. So let's say Pearl screws up, and she's punished for it, and the whole time he's berating her on how its her fault and if she didn't mess up all the time he wouldn't have to punish her, because he 'hates' doing that. Then he probably brings up all the privileges she might have as his Pearl that other Pearls don't get the luxury of having, like intermingling with other gems in her free time instead of constantly being at his side?

Yeye! A sort of "I treat you so well, yet you're never happy. You're such an awful Pearl; you never even laugh or smile". So basically, you got it 100% right! Also, the Distortionist isn't my headcanon voice, it's just a song that fits WZ really :'D I already told you this, but Tim Curry is my headcanon White Zirconia voice. I don't know why, I just think it fits '-';

I imagine Pearl was at least acquaintances with the other Zirconia's Pearls, who I should probably draw sometime-- maybe even the Diamond's Pearls, too, since Zirconias are so close to the Diamonds. I also like the idea of "Pearl Parties" where a bunch of Pearls belonging to high-ranking Gems can get together and enjoy themselves (while some of the Gems still monitor them, of course). I think that in order to appear normal, WZ probably let her go to at least one.

Also, adding onto that, I have a headcanon about Yellow Diamond's Pearl. During the rebellion, our Pearl wasn't the only Pearl to revolt-- lots of others did. Most were shattered, but some became CGs or simply hid in the colonies. In paranoia and distrust, YD had her original Pearl shattered and had a replacement made, which is why our Pearl didn't recognize her.

pearl parties typically involve live music (i think angelite would serve as the main "musician race" because angels play harps, but if you have suggestions for other musician gems, i'd love to hear!), movie showings (any gem can be an actor, but typically they use obedient gems from a very abundant race or high ranking gems who basically pay for their roles), as well as friendly chitchat and possibly jade massages? yeah.

as for how the pearls act, it really depends on their owner. however, since CG pearl was WZ's, the others would probably treat her really well because they know of the power her owner holds. pearl, i think, would be a little flustered and embarrassed by attention, but it's good to be able to dance and show artwork without having to worry about being blatantly insulted

"You took away everything I had!" Apatite felt his throat tighten, feeling himself tremble. "What more do you want from me!? My position, my friends, Topaz-whatever you want, you already have it! You knew I never stood a chance against you for any of this-"

"That's the sad part." Shifty interjected, leaning over to stare into the other's eyes. "You did once." "It was your decision to let the chips fall where they may. It's your own fault you lost everything."

{Topaz Comic} "THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING ELSE WE CAN DO FOR HIM!" "He will still suffer! Even if there was a way to make him docile in this state, he'll still be in agony. Putting him down is the only humane thing we can do for him right now."

"BUT HE'D BE AL-"

"You can't get hung up over that! I know he's your best friend, but its cruel to let him suffer!"

Comics: hmmm... topaz with a cracked gem undergoing some severe deformations? given his size, there's plenty to work with :Uc and if you dont mind more suggestions, you could do like a small sidecomic where red coral has to stall apatite outside the infirmary/emerald's room/wherever topaz and emerald are and apatite is getting increasingly frustrated "why won't you let me see him!?"

bumblebee agate, dragon's vein agate, fire agate, olive fire agate, montana agate, moss agate, cotton candy agate,

and the bonus panel(s) are" Everyone comes out of their trance-IT WAS ALL RED DIAMOND'S DOING!! Everyone just tackle-hugs Topaz, he had no idea what made them so upset FLASHBACK ON WHY SHE DID IT:

-Apatite disturbed RD to deliver a message and didn't apologize enough -Red Coral beat one of her Red Corals in a tournament and got catty about his victory -Angel Aura crashed into Red Zirconia while flying, helped them up and flew off, no apologies. Got lost in thought, didn't realize. -Emerald: UFOLOTUS: maybe he was fixing up one of the Gems in RD's Court, and he came off as rude to them, so the Gem tattled even if Emerald wasn't actually being rude, when you're a patient undergoing surgery, anything the doctor says can be taken the wrong way

Story/comic/blog/misc Titles

From the Moon With Envy

Lost Hope (in?) Bunnies

a Boy With Perfect Stars

Hope against Oceans

Stories of Caring Days

Meet my Zombie Beauty

Songs and Scenarios for Blights: Stamp on the Ground: Blights dancing! River Flows In You: Blights relaxing with each other, maybe one looking out into the distance and thinking about someone. Futari no Harmony: Blight Duet To All of You: Blights on a trip You're Going Down: Blight turf war Low: Clubbing Blights Here I am: Baby Blight and his Mama Circle Backwards: Ostracized Blight Your Heart Will Lead You Home: Sad Blight remembering all his friends I need some sleep- Blight is an insomniac Davy Jones: Blight remembering a tradegy My Heart Will Go On: Blights on the beach Got Well Soon: Nightclub Blights Tubthumping: BLIGHT BAR BRAWL Nigram Clavem: Blights in a spooky church Lone Digger: Basically the video but with Blights Every Time We Touch: BLIGHT FLASH MOB MEME Mountains: Blight autumn trip Santa Monica Dream: Sad homesick Blight Boats and Birds: Mama Blight and her babies Turkish Pop: Dancing Blights Die Young: PARTY BLIGHTS Come Wayward Souls: Blights getting scared by the Beast Party Rock: Teen Blights Adam's Song: Lonely Blight

notes on next gen 

Sebastian descendent:  Jasper: Red eyes, Dark brown hair. He's more or less a shy kid who's interested in the occult, and thinks that summoning a demon is a fun idea.

Abigail': Margeret: Red eyes, dark brown hair, freckles Like her grandmama she's cold.

CIel's:  Caleb: Brown hair, blue eyes, glasses, mole on chin

Claude:  Webber: Redhead, yellow eyes, spider fangs Is a nerdy-ass kid who could talk to spiders, and hella hates his pun name when he realizes he's part spider demon. Life sucks for Webber.

Undertaker: Alexander Monica: Redhead, blue eyes, birthmark on arm, unusual Alexander is a descendant from Undertaker's first family, so he's got nothing special about him in regards to species. His great grandpapa also visits quite often. He finds him strange.

Gregory:  Tripp,  brown (dyed platinum blond) purple eyes, streak (hidden by hair dye) More into the punk aesthetic, Tripp inherited his great-grandpa's poliosis, something he doesn't like and tries to hide it with hair dye.

Edgar:  Brittany, blond hair hot pink tips, fashionable clothing, red eyes, The Pop Princess, latest styles are her thing. Call her a girly stereotype, but she's high-class.

Greenhill: Alice, blond, green eyes, toned She's into sports, though she hasn't considered cricket.

Bluewer:  Josh, dark hair, brown eyes, missing tooth Is a heavy slacker, and a great disappointment to his great grandfather.

Druitt: carbon copy of druitt

Lau: Poppy, brown eyes, dark brown hair, wavy hair Finds it funny she was named after a drug-plant, enjoys conversing with her great grandfather's spirit.

Bard: Brandon, hazel eyes, dirty blond hair, pyromaniac-science exploder Seriously don't ever hand this boy anything that can be set on fire because he will find a way to do it.

Mey Rin: Chu hua,  Red hair, hazel, nearsighted with glasses Sweet thing, likes to dance

Finny: Merriweather, green eyes, brown curly hair, daisy birthmark arm Likes to garden too

Tanaka:   Chika, teacher, forty, dark hair, brown eyes,  fighter, That sweet old lady that helps in the after school study programs? She can kick your ass

Hannah: Henry, Hannah lookalike, dress code breaker All the guy-lovers want him.

Alois:  Annie, black hair, blue eyes, very mature curvy

Timber:  All Girls Thompson: All Girls Canterbury: All Girls Triplet Cousin Catastrophe.

Ash:  Olivia, platinum blond hair, pinkish eyes, wing nubs, She's self concious about her wing nubs and doesn't wear anything backless.

Nervous

Twitch Flutter Ripple Fold tightly Fidget Flap Angry

Flare Bristle Fluff up Ripple Beat Raise up Snap open Happy

Flutter Curl up Ripple Wave Flap During Battle Bludgeon Smack Bat Clout Whack Kick someone’s legs out from under them Snap someones neck (only for muscular wings like bat and bird wings) Problems that may come with having wings Poke out from under blankets and let all of the cold air in Stepped on Get pins and needles from being folded for too long Squashed on chairs/ in beds/ in crowded hallways Vulnerable in battle Molting (for bird wings)

I got all I could, and I know there will be some I forgot and will regret not posting.

[weflossindaily]

Supreme skaters Javier Nunez and Tyshawn Lyons, model Paloma Elsesser, Jen Brill, skater Tyshawn Jones, Chloë Sevigny, skaters Sean Pablo Murphy and Mark Gonzales, all wearing a mix of Supreme and their own clothing.

James Jebbia, the man who, in 1994, founded and to this day runs the SoHo-based company that has been making clothing and skateboards and a lot of other things that the people who love it absolutely have to have, doesn’t think of Supreme the way most people in fashion might—as a brand that started out in a small store on Lafayette Street and has since inched its way to legendary global status. He thinks of Supreme more as a space. When Jebbia was a teenager in Crawley, West Sussex, in the eighties, working at a Duracell factory, listening to T. Rex and Bowie on breaks and spending his spare cash on trips to London to buy clothes, it was always in a certain elusive kind of store—one that became the model for Supreme.

“The cool, cool shop,” says Jebbia, who is 54 and dressed in jeans and a plain dark-blue T-shirt, label-free and low-key, with closely cropped hair and deep blue eyes. “The shop that carries the cool stuff that everybody was wearing—no big brands or anything.”

His office a few blocks west of the Supreme store is adorned with a skateboard designed by Raymond Pettibon; some drawings by Jebbia’s kids, age 8 and 10; and a larger-than-life-size portrait of James Brown—whom Jebbia, crucially, sees as not just the hardest-working man in showbiz but as a guy who never played down to his audience. Jebbia is, likewise, ever-mindful of his customer, who is generally aged eighteen to 25 and wants simply to buy cool stuff—and who will pay for it, assuming it’s worth it.

Of course, what began as a generally male-focused enterprise has, with more and more frequency, been co-opted by women—mirroring both the rise of girl skaters and youth culture’s impressively genderless approach to dressing and living. (The recent surfeit of off-duty models posting Instagrams of themselves lounging, living, and partying in Supreme has only added fuel to the fire.)

“My thing has always been that the clothing we make is kind of like music,” Jebbia says. “There are always critics that don’t understand that young people can be into Bob Dylan but also into the Wu-Tang Clan and Coltrane and Social Distortion. Young people—and skaters—are very, very open-minded . . . to music, to art, to many things, and that allowed us to make things with an open mind.”

Recently the fashion world has been waking up to Supreme. In the past decade, the company has opened stores in Tokyo, London, and Paris, while the passionate devotion of their customers has brought it into the conversation with both teenagers at skateboard parks and the front rows of high fashion—with Paris in particular swooning over Supreme’s collaboration this fall with Louis Vuitton. Jebbia loved working with Kim Jones, Vuitton’s menswear designer, to make skateboard trunks and backpacks, bandannas and gloves, shirts and jackets. The feeling was mutual.

“When you see the lines for Supreme in New York or London,” says Jones, “you see so many different types of people, and they are people you can relate to—they understand high-low, they’re smart, they’re intelligent, and they’re humorous. They know what they want, and they are very loyal—and a customer who is loyal is a real aspiration for anybody with a brand.”

The Vuitton collaboration was also, for many in fashion, their first glimpse into the secretive world of Supreme, which has become a kind of shorthand for authenticity, immediacy, speed, and deftness in its way of doing business. More than just selling sweats and tees and hats, the brand brings out a new collection two times a year, like any fashion company—generally, an online look-book, followed by a few pieces dropped every Thursday, each item available both online and in the stores. A Supreme drop, for those who haven’t experienced it, is an event. “We can have a leather jacket for $1,500, and if it’s a good value, young people will understand that,” Jebbia says. “But we also want to have the feeling that this won’t be here in a month. When I grew up, I think everybody felt that way. It’s like, If I love this, it may not be here, so I should buy it.”

If Jebbia was anxious to get press when he started, now he worries about overexposure. Supreme keeps advertising to a minimum and works with people like Sage Elsesser, the pro skater, who models for its look-book. Elsesser is the kind of person marketers think of as an influential outsider but whom customers see as just a cool skater. “Supreme is family-oriented, and that matters most to me,” says Elsesser. Supremeheads understand the nuances of marketing nonsense; their nose, both for corporations pretending to be human and for brands trying to throw themselves at potential customers, is highly refined, a reason Supreme uses social media primarily as an exhibit space. “We’re not trying to overconnect ourselves,” Jebbia says. “We’re just trying to show people things that we do—no different from what a magazine did 20 years ago.” (They published six issues of their own magazine before developing their website around 2006.)

Founder James Jebbia at the Supreme office in SoHo. Photographed by Anton Corbijn, Vogue, September 2017

Nothing about Supreme was planned in advance, its success a coincidence of place, time, and hard work. By the time he was nineteen, Jebbia had left England and was a sales assistant at a SoHo store called Parachute. From there, he worked a table at the nearby flea market, then founded a store, Union, on Spring Street that sold British goods and streetwear. Union did well enough until it began to sell clothing designed by Shawn Stüssy, the skateboarder and surfer, at which point it did great. Next, Jebbia helped run a shop with Stüssy until Stüssy decided to retire. “Now what the hell am I going to do?” he recalls asking himself.

“I always really liked what was coming out of the skate world,” Jebbia says. “It was less commercial—it had more edge and more fuck-you type stuff.” So he decided to open his own skate shop on Lafayette Street. Lafayette was then a relatively quiet strip of antiques stores, a firehouse, and a machinist, but also a Keith Haring shop—a downtown art-scene connection that, in hindsight, was key. Jebbia built a spare space (the very notions of spare and clean soon becoming Supreme trademarks), then brought in good skateboards, cranked the music, and played videos constantly—wildly disparate things like Muhammad Ali fight videos and Taxi Driver—to draw onlookers.

The kids he employed, often skateboarders themselves, were cool, opinionated—and, yes, often scowling at the uncool—but allowed outsiders a view into their clique. The very first employees were extras in Larry Clark’s film Kids, written by Harmony Korine, who lived in the neighborhood and recalls Supreme as less of a store, more of a hang—though within a year, designers from uptown as well as Europe and Japan were paying attention. “They were easy adapters to a kind of dissonance, where you have several things at different points on the cultural spectrum that are all connected by a kind of aesthetic or vibe,” says Korine. Supreme started a magazine featuring the faces of the young downtown scene—Chloë Sevigny, Ryan McGinley, Mark Gonzales—a mix of models, artists, skaters. “James tapped into a secret sauce,” Korine continues, “and they’ve kept strong because youth propels the culture, and they are always on the side of the youth. You can’t fake that.”

Initially, Supreme made only a few T-shirts. Then their customers arrived wearing Carhartt matched with Vuitton, Gucci with Levi’s. Soon Supreme tried a cotton hoodie, realizing that if it was simply made a little better than what was out there, skaters would be willing to pay a little more for it. According to Jebbia, this sort of thinking isn’t unique to skate culture. “Gucci is saying, ‘Hey—just because you’re young doesn’t mean you won’t love this $800 sweatshirt,’” he says. Jebbia can’t say enough about designers who respect young buyers rather than simply use them to attract press. The genius of Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s creative director, as he sees it, is that he doesn’t just show young people wearing pieces on the runway; he hopes they’ll actually wear them as they go about their lives. “He’s creating exciting products for right now—today,” Jebbia says.

The hoodies worked, as did the fitted caps they tried next. Collaborations came early on, with artists making work for skateboard decks, as well as for T-shirts and other clothing. The painter Lucien Smith credits Supreme’s intimacy. “A lot of people don’t understand that this is a supersmall group of people who are just working on that original idea—that it is a skate shop,” he says.

The list of artists who have worked with Supreme over the last two decades could fill a gallery space: Christopher Wool, Jeff Koons, Mark Flood, Nate Lowman, John Baldessari, Damien Hirst—even Neil Young. But the collaboration that changed everything was the line of tees, shoes, and shirts produced with Comme des Garçons, in 2012. “I think that opened a lot of doors, a lot of eyes,” Jebbia says. “I have never met anyone with such a strong, single-minded vision who has always stayed close to his sense of values,” says Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garçons and Rei Kawakubo’s husband. “That’s why our collaboration was so meaningful—and why the growth of Supreme has in a way mirrored our own.”

Spend some time with Jebbia and you get to know his own favorite brands, which include well-known names like Patagonia along with a few you are not likely to have heard of, like Antihero, a skateboard company. “They’re very below the radar,” he says, “but they are very pure in what they do—I hold them in as much esteem as I do Chanel or Vuitton.”

I think a lot of brands reach a point where they say, We kind of have a formula—we’ve got it made,” he says. “Our formula is there’s no formula.” He mentions his wife, Bianca, who grew up in Elm­hurst, Queens, in a Chilean family and raises their children at their apartment in Lower Manhattan. “She’ll shop at Prada, she’ll shop at Chanel—and then she’ll shop at Uniqlo and she’ll wear something from Supreme,” Jebbia says. “And it’s not ‘Look at me dumbing this stuff down.’ She’s just wearing what she likes, and I think that people are more like that now.”

On one recent morning in his office, Jebbia stepped up from his desk and went out for coffee, passing through the studio from which the new Supreme motorized street bike was about to drop, the latest in the seemingly infinite collaborations—this one with Coleman. The space is big and open and white-walled and has the feeling of a workshop. The office staff—an industrious, no-frills team of about 40—is dressed elegantly but practically as they prepare to release their new Comme des Garçons Nike Air Force 1s, the long lines on Lafayette Street still a day or two from forming.

Out on the street, he offered a tour through his own history. “Parachute was there,” he says, “and Comme des Garçons had a store there. . . .” He pointed up. “I love that Alex Katz lives up there,” he says. “People can talk shit about the neighborhood, but I really think it’s one of the most vibrant places in the world.”

Jebbia doesn’t have a title. “My wife keeps saying I should just call myself founder, but I don’t know,” he says. “ ‘Just tell em I run a skate shop’ is how I usually put it. But I guess I kind of direct things.” He likes to stay out of categories, to be free of market demands. Growth, for instance, is something he is focused on, but at the Supreme pace: slow, but quick enough to satisfy customer demand. “We don’t want people to think we are a tricky, hard-to-get brand,” he says. “We can only do so many things,” he says. “The hat factory we use can only make so many hats.” Jebbia is also wary of anything that will raise his overhead or put his ability to take risks at risk. “We’re making stuff we’re proud of,” he says, “not doing stuff to stay alive. I don’t think enough people take risks, and when you do, people respond—in music, in art, in fashion.”

As we walk, Jebbia is greeted by people from the neighborhood, and when at last we sit he seems to almost relax for a minute talking about his weekends—which are, he stresses, decidedly unglamorous. “The kids have a lot of homework,” he says, “and I actually like not having any plans.” As with his stores, he likes to keep life clean and simple—dinner with his wife and kids, and maybe a weekend visit to MoMA. “I don’t have this lavish lifestyle,” he says, “so I don’t have this massive overhead.”

And with that, he’s back to being wary. “I’ve seen brands get comfortable,” he says, “but I’ve never felt comfortable. I’ve always felt every season could be our last.”

In this story:

Sittings Editor: Sara Moonves. Hair: Tamara McNaughton; Makeup: Romy Soleimani. Production: Patrick Van Maanen for Moxie Productions.

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Source:

vogue

Supreme, From Cult Skate Shop to Fashion Superpower

James Jebbia, the man who, in 1994, founded and to this day runs the SoHo-based company that has been making clothing and skateboards and a lot of other things that the people who love it absolutely have to have, doesn’t think of Supreme the way most people in fashion might—as a brand that started out in a small store on Lafayette Street and has since inched its way to legendary global status.

Supreme, From Cult Skate Shop to Fashion Superpower James Jebbia, the man who, in 1994, founded and to this day runs the SoHo-based company that has been making clothing and skateboards and a lot of other things that the people who love it absolutely have to have, doesn’t think of Supreme the way most people in fashion might—as a brand that started out in a small store on Lafayette Street and has since inched its way to legendary global status.

[gyrlversion]

Inside Backpage.com’s Vicious Battle With the Feds

In Michael Lacey’s younger and more vulnerable years, his father gave him this advice: “Whenever someone pokes a finger in your chest, you grab that finger and you break it off at the knuckle.” Lacey grew up in the 1950s as a bright, bookish boy. His father, a sailor turned enforcer for a New York construction union, had little use for his son’s intellectual gifts. If Lacey lost a fight at school, he says, his dad “came home and beat me again.” But the boy toughened up, and he carried the lessons he’d learned into adulthood. He became a newspaper editor and earned a reputation as a down-and-dirty First Amendment brawler. Early on in his career, he struck up a partnership with James Larkin, a publisher whose sensibilities matched his own. Together, they built the nation’s largest chain of alternative newsweeklies.

Lacey and Larkin were heroes to many—micks from the sticks who made a fortune thumbing their shanty-Irish snouts at authority. Their papers went after mayors and police chiefs, governors and senators, Walmart and the Church of Scientology. They provoked outrage with their business practices too, by setting up Backpage.com, a kind of red-light district for the internet. As attorney Don Moon, the pair’s longtime adviser, puts it: “Their brand was always ‘Fuck you. We don’t have friends. We have lawyers.’ ” That approach served them well for 45 years, right up until the morning Michael Lacey found himself staring into the barrel of a Glock.

A few minutes before 9 am on April 6, 2018, a fleet of unmarked vehicles with government plates rolled up in front of Lacey’s multimillion-dollar compound in Paradise Valley, a few miles outside of Phoenix. These weren’t the guests he’d been expecting. The 69-year-old divorced father of two had recently gotten remarried, and he was preparing to host a lavish party to celebrate his vows. Tents were pitched on his lawn; retired journalists and overworked lawyers were winging their way into town. FBI agents informed the groom that he was being arrested on charges of money laundering and facilitating prostitution. They cuffed him, then subdued the home’s other occupants, including Lacey’s 76-year-old mother-in-law, whom they ordered out of the shower at gunpoint.

For the next six hours, the lawmen tossed the compound looking for, among other things, “evidence of wealth.” They seized art, cash, computers, even the bride’s wedding ring. Meanwhile, at the Phoenix airport, federal marshals awaited a 747 inbound from London. When it touched down, the flight crew made an announcement: Police would be boarding, so passengers must stay put. “I wondered who they were there for,” recalls Larkin, then 68, who was seated beside his son in business class. “I quickly figured out it was me.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment on the arrests.)

Partygoers soon received a cryptic text message. Owing to “unforeseen circumstances,” it said, the wedding celebration had been “postponed.” A notice went up on Backpage, explaining that the website had been seized “as part of an enforcement action.” More than a few guests completed the journey to Phoenix anyway; reporters can’t resist a story, and Lacey had already paid for a block of rooms at the Hotel Camby. They gathered at various local watering holes, offering what one attendee describes as “toasts to the accused,” and pieced together a gripping narrative—a tale of free-speech crusaders crossed over to the dark side, dedicated news­hounds become digital pimps.

Backpage, the domain that brought the federal government down on Lacey and Larkin’s heads, wasn’t much to look at—a bare-bones interface wrapped in Facebooky blue, similar to Craigslist in both form and function. Its name alluded to the old days of print publishing, when classified ads, especially ads for topless bars, escort services, and other sexually oriented businesses filled the final pages of alt­-weeklies and provided much of their revenue. Visitors to the site were greeted with several columns of links, which directed them to listings for various metropolitan areas around the country. From there, they could reply to ads or write their own.

Many of the ads—for auto parts, part-time gigs, vacation rentals, and so on—were free to publish. But the lewd stuff, listed under the adult section, cost money. For as little as $2 a day, users could post in such categories as “body rubs” and “dom & fetish.” The site’s terms of use prohibited any content that could be considered “unlawful,” “harmful,” or “obscene.” To gain access to the adult section, all users had to do was click a link confirming they were 18 or older. Once inside, they saw an endless scroll of titles, some laden with innuendo (“Cum lay your hotdog on my bun for memorial day”), others more explicit (“Three holes anything goes $90”).

As in the print days, these adult ads reigned supreme. In 2011 they accounted for 15 percent of Backpage’s listings but generated more than 90 percent of its revenue. By the time the Feds pulled the plug on the site, it was operating in 97 countries and was valued at more than half a billion dollars. People called it the Google of commercial sex ads, a platform that dominated its market as thoroughly as Facebook dominated social networking or Amazon did online retail.

The government indictment that triggered Lacey and Larkin’s arrests, United States v. Lacey, et al., includes 17 “victim summaries”—stories of women who say they were sexually exploited through Backpage. Victim 5 first appeared in an ad on the platform when she was 14; her “customers” made her “perform sexual acts at gunpoint, choked her to the point of having seizures, and gang-raped her.” Victim 6 was stabbed to death. Victim 8’s uncle and his friends advertised her as “fetish friendly.” The indictment accuses Backpage of catering to sexual predators, of essentially helping pimps better reach their target audiences.

In the years before their arrest, Lacey and Larkin had successfully beat back charges like these in court. They took refuge not only in the First Amendment but also in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Congress’ great gift to the internet. Passed in 1996, Section 230 largely immunized online platforms from liability for the user-­generated content they hosted. They were free to police offending material as they saw fit, without undue fear of prosecution by state or local authorities—as long as they didn’t create it themselves. America’s tech behemoths, from Twitter to Facebook, have often invoked Section 230 in court. The internet we have today wouldn’t exist without it. After all, you can’t build or sustain a giant network if you’re getting sued every time a user says or does something objectionable.

For a while, Lacey and Larkin’s strategy had worked: They’d won case after case, with the support of Big Tech and civil libertarians alike. But by the time the Feds descended on Paradise Valley that morning in the spring of 2018, the tide had turned. Many of their friends and allies had fled, spooked in part by too much bad press. The tech industry, which faced withering scrutiny over its role in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, had thrown them under the bus. Their top lieutenant had flipped. And Congress had used them as an excuse to finally accomplish what it had been trying to do for more than 20 years—tear a hole in Section 230.

Maybe they should have seen it coming: The betrayals. The asset seizures. The changing zeitgeist. They were, to be sure, brazenly cashing in on the sex trade. But here’s the thing: Silicon Valley had better hope they win. United States v. Lacey is a dangerous case, with potential consequences far beyond the freedom of two aging antiauthoritarians.

A view from Paradise Valley, looking out onto Camelback Mountain.

Jesse Rieser

It’s a mid-November afternoon in 2018, and Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin are seated on either side of the 20-foot-long glass table that dominates Lacey’s living room. They’re clad in jeans, polos, and ankle monitors. A black charging cord snakes from a wall outlet to Lacey’s left foot, which emits an occasional beep.

Both men are out on million-dollar bonds, secured by real estate the government eventually hopes to own. The bulk of the charges against them fall under the Travel Act, a law designed by Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department to target organized crime. According to the indictment, Lacey, Larkin, and their underlings not only turned a blind eye to prostitution and child sexual abuse but, driven by greed, actively worked to abet it. Their case is set for January 2020. “El Chapo got to trial quicker,” Lacey quips.

I’ve worked for both sides in this showdown. In the late 1990s, I was a staff writer for the Dallas Observer, a weekly owned by Lacey and Larkin. Then, in 2001, I went to work for the Department of Justice as an assistant US attorney in Plano, Texas.

The two men have lived large, and it shows. Larkin is a burly former football player, 6 ’ 2 ” and easily 250 pounds, with cornflower eyes, chubby cheeks, and a ruddy complexion. Lacey’s mug reveals decades of sun and single-malt Scotch—the hooded lids, the sagging chin, the lines running like canyons down his face and into his neck. His spiky hair has thinned and grayed, but he still has the prominent schnoz, the ice-blue eyes, and the knuckles famously tattooed with “HOLD FAST.” (His father, who served in the Navy during World War II, had the same slogan inked across his fists.)

Their situation looks bleak. The government has seized all of Lacey’s financial accounts and most or all of Larkin’s. Prosecutors have already produced more than 10 million documents and have promised, or threatened, more to come. It will cost the defendants several million dollars just to buy the software they need to search the government’s files. For the time being, though, they’re still drinking well. When I arrive, Larkin has uncorked a bottle of Jack Quinn, a cabernet produced at his 3-acre vineyard in Napa. (Although Larkin has owned the place since before Backpage existed, the government has given notice that it intends to seize the vineyard, alleging that he used Backpage-derived funds for its maintenance.) Lacey, meanwhile, is still knocking back Macallan 21—although nowadays he stops to ask the price. At the Blue Hound bar in Phoenix, where we repaired for a later interview, it’s $120 per shot.

Lacey got his start in journalism in 1970, in the wake of the Kent State shootings, when he and a group of antiwar comrades at Arizona State University founded what would become the Phoenix New Times. In the beginning, he claims, he sold his blood to pay the bills. He met Larkin two years later—not long after Lacey’s father, the union enforcer, and his mother, an opera singer and registered nurse, were found frozen to death in a rented trailer in Oswego, New York. (“It was a murder-­suicide,” Lacey says. “They were drunk, and she turned on the gas.”)

The men connected immediately. Both were college dropouts, and both had suffered through difficult childhoods. Larkin’s mother died when he was 2, and he spent most of his youth in what he describes as a “Catholic ghetto.” In high school, he cofounded a student newspaper, The Big Press, then promptly got himself suspended for criticizing administrators. “I wanted to be in that business,” he says. Lacey brought him on as publisher.

In 1977, Lacey and Larkin staged a putsch. They wrested control of the New Times from Lacey’s cofounders and set about turning the fledgling broadsheet into an empire. Larkin worked out a lucrative revenue model, emphasizing classifieds and personals. (While a page of big retail ads might net $1,000, a page of classifieds, 100 ads at $25 a pop, could bring in $2,500.) Six years later, they began to expand. They bought up struggling weeklies in cities across the country—Denver, Houston, Miami—and transformed them into serious news organizations, hiring experienced, high-profile reporters and giving them resources to do the job.

“I didn’t get into this racket to be told what to publish,” Lacey growls. “By anybody.”

They believed there was an audience for in-depth, long-form investigative reporting. A month after 9/11, for instance, The New Times Broward-Palm Beach published an exposé on how lapses in federal immigration policy had allowed the hijackers to enter the country. In 2003, Westword got the scoop on a sexual assault scandal at the US Air Force Academy. In 2013, The Miami New Times ran a story on the steroid scandal in Major League Baseball, which ultimately resulted in the suspension of 14 players. Lacey once told an interviewer, “As a journalist, if you don’t get up in the morning and say ‘Fuck you’ to someone, why even do it?”

They tangled with shareholders, authorities, competitors, printers, and municipalities that tried to restrict their distribution. Lacey, who wrote numerous stories himself, was known to clock reporters and pummel press aides, usually when spirits were involved. (He estimates that he’s been arrested “10 or 11 times,” but “only three for writing.” The one criminal conviction on his record is for a misdemeanor DUI.) When violence didn’t settle things, Lacey and Larkin often moved matters to the courtroom. Litigation was their idea of fun, the continuation of hell-raising by other means. “I didn’t get into this racket to be told what to publish,” Lacey growls. “By anybody. If you don’t like it, don’t read it.”

Steve Suskin, their former in-house counsel, says they and their companies were sued 56 times between 1997 and 2012 alone. “We won them all,” Suskin recalls. They were successful in part because they recognized that litigation is a war of attrition, and they were willing to go the distance. Says Lacey: “You want to sue us, bring your lunch pail, ’cause we gonna be awhile.” In their most famous legal set-to, they successfully sued Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County’s notoriously anti-­immigrant sheriff, for false arrest, winning a $3.75 million settlement. In a final flip of the bird to Arpaio, they used the money to set up a nonprofit to defend the rights of undocumented immigrants and Latinx Americans.

Through it all, Larkin kept the money coming in, embracing each new fad in classified advertising. In 1989, for example, the New Times group launched its first adult section, appropriately dubbed Wildside. (The ads were moderated by sales staff to ensure no blatant sex-for-money propositions made it into print.) Racy ads fueled the company’s explosive growth; by 2001, Lacey and Larkin owned 11 papers, which raked in more than $100 million a year. But the good times didn’t last. Craigslist had begun expanding into cities outside the Bay Area, offering free ads in all categories except jobs and erotic services. Classified revenue tanked.

In 2003, Larkin was approached by Carl Ferrer, an ad salesman he’d hired away from a small paper in Louisiana and installed as classified ad director at the Dallas Observer. Ferrer, a short, slight man with a goatee and a perpetually worried look, proposed that they create an in-house version of Craigslist. Larkin put him in charge of building and running the website, which launched in 2004.

The following year, Lacey and Larkin won the prize they’d chased for years—The Village Voice, the grande dame of alt-­weeklies. When the New Times group merged with Village Voice Media, the two companies formed a 17-paper megachain valued at about $400 million, with an estimated $180 million in annual revenue. Lacey and Larkin’s timing could not have been worse. Between 2006 and 2012, according to the Pew Research Center, American news­papers lost half their advertising revenue. Backpage, however, grew steadily, even if it wasn’t nearly enough to offset the papers’ declining receipts.

Lacey and Larkin say they were advised by counsel that what Backpage was doing was 100 percent legal. They saw no distinction between advertising and editorial; it was all protected speech, all mission-critical. In 2008, they were honored by the Arizona chapter of the ACLU as Civil Libertarians of the Year. In his acceptance speech, Lacey decried “the gentrified instincts of soccer moms,” which led demagogues like Joe Arpaio to crack down on press freedom. He vowed that both he and Larkin would continue to oppose the “forces of offended decency” wherever they found them.

Today, they remain defiant. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Lacey declares. “I didn’t do what they say. And if they think they’re gonna punk me, they got the wrong fucking guy.”

One of the great ironies of internet history is that the Communications Decency Act—a law conceived, as its name suggests, to rid the web of vice—actually ended up doing the opposite. It was proposed in 1995 by Senator J. James Exon, a Nebraska Democrat who’d watched with increasing alarm as “the worst, most vile, most perverse pornography” spread online. He was particularly concerned about what all this obscenity might do to the minds of America’s children, and went so far as to compile a “blue book” packed with X-rated screenshots. “This is a sample of what is available today free of charge,” he told his colleagues on the Senate floor when the CDA came up for debate. “Click, click, click on the computer, on the information superhighway.”

Although Exon repeatedly described the legislation as “narrow” and “streamlined,” the Department of Justice warned that its indecency provisions were unconstitutionally broad. Within a year and a half of the CDA’s passage, the Supreme Court agreed and struck those provisions down. Section 230, however, survived, offering a safe harbor to some of the same sites that Exon had hoped to bring down. The information superhighway began to look more perilous than ever.

In 2001 two academics at the University of Pennsylvania published a widely cited study in which they estimated that some 326,000 children were “at risk of commercial sexual exploitation.” Although the authors didn’t formally address what role the internet played, they asserted that “online sexual victimization of American children appears to have reached epidemic proportions.” By 2008, a new coalition of would-be regulators had emerged, led by the National Association of Attorneys General and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit partly funded by the US government. Together, both behind the scenes and in the press, the two groups began pushing some of the internet’s major players to strengthen their safety protocols.

In response, Myspace, the web’s largest social media platform at the time, gave the boot to some 90,000 convicted sex offenders. Facebook, meanwhile, took steps to prevent underage users from sharing personal information with strangers. Craigslist started requiring that anyone who posted an ad in its Erotic Services section provide a verified phone number and pay a fee by credit card. It also hired attorneys to moderate ads.

For some officials, though, these changes weren’t enough. In early 2009, Thomas Dart, the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, sued Craigslist for facilitating prostitution. “Missing children, runaways, abused women, and women trafficked in from foreign countries are routinely forced to have sex with strangers because they’re being pimped on Craigslist,” he said. “I could make arrests off Craigslist 24 hours a day, but to what end? I’m trying to go up the ladder.” That same spring, tabloids across the country were awash in headlines about the “Craigslist killer,” a young man in Boston who’d responded to a massage ad on the site, then murdered the woman who posted it.

A federal judge in Chicago quickly tossed Dart’s case, citing Section 230. But Craigslist eventually surrendered anyway. On the night of September 3, 2010, it quietly covered its Adult Services section with the word censored. Two weeks later, in testimony before Congress, Craigslist execs explained that they’d done their best to address their critics’ complaints; now, it seemed, they just wanted out of the headlines. They also warned that law enforcement was losing a valuable partner in the fight against trafficking. Yet Ernie Allen, the lanky Kentuckian who ran the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, saw this as a necessary step. “Some of this problem will migrate to other areas,” he said, “but frankly that’s progress.”

Allen’s prediction was right. In the wake of Craigslist’s capitulation, the sex trade did indeed shift to other sites. There were many to choose from—myRedBook, Naughty Reviews, Cityvibe, Rentboy—but Backpage was the chief beneficiary. Larkin sent around an email advising his employees to expect “a deluge” of adult ads and reminding them that, “like it or not,” such ads “are in our DNA.” Lacey says he remained focused, as always, on the editorial side—though he had “no problem” seeing the ads “take off like they did.” Ferrer, meanwhile, seemed only too happy to inherit Craigslist’s share of the adult market, even if that meant assuming its place in the crosshairs. “It is an opportunity for us,” he wrote in an email. “Also a time when we need to make sure our content is not illegal.”

Backpage was already getting into hot water. A girl in Missouri had sued the site in mid-September, alleging that she’d been pimped out at the age of 14 and that Backpage had willfully “failed to investigate for fear of what it would learn.” She claimed, without clear evidence, that the site’s operators “had a strong suspicion” she was underage. Ultimately, a federal magistrate dismissed her case. The situation was tragic, he said, but Backpage was protected under Section 230. The girl needed to sue her pimp.

On October 18, Backpage announced on its blog that it had retained Hemanshu Nigam, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in sex crimes and child abuse, to develop a “holistic” safety program. Nigam sat on the board of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and had done similar work for Myspace. In the months that followed, Nigam and his new clients met repeatedly with representatives from anti-trafficking organizations. They discussed changes to Backpage’s site architecture, moderation practices, and content policies. The organizations suggested, for instance, that users should be prevented from employing search terms such as “incest” or “Lolita,” since these might “indicate illegal activity.” Backpage moderators, meanwhile, should be on the lookout for “ads written from masculine perspective,” particularly if they employed the euphemism “new in town,” which “is often used by pimps who shuttle children to locations where they do not know anyone and cannot get help.”

“You want to sue us, bring your lunch pail, ’cause we gonna be awhile.”

By late January 2011, Backpage had implemented many of the recommendations: It had banned photographs with nudity, drawn up a list of “inappropriate terms,” beefed up its vetting process, and begun referring “ads containing possible minors” directly to Allen’s staff. Ferrer also worked closely with the authorities. According to a Justice Department memo from 2012, “unlike virtually every other website that is used for prostitution and sex trafficking, Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations.” A later memo noted that “even Ernie Allen believed that Backpage was genuinely trying to rid its site of juvenile sex trafficking.”

Lacey and Larkin say they were more than willing to help crack down on child abuse. But the demands being made of them seemed increasingly unreasonable. Sex trafficking, defined as commercial sex involving coerced adults or anyone under 18, was one thing. Consensual sex work was quite another—and it wasn’t even illegal under federal law.

In March 2011, Lacey and Larkin flew to Virginia to meet with Allen. “To say that the meeting did not go well is an understatement,” Allen wrote later that day. After a full hour, he and Lacey “were still screaming at each other.” Allen demanded that Backpage do more to combat prostitution. Larkin said the site would enforce a “news­paper standard,” but Lacey added, “We are not Craigslist, and we aren’t going to succumb to pressure.” A Justice Department memo continues the story: “Allen responded that ‘At least you know what business you are in.’ ”

Lacey’s memories are no rosier. “Allen pulls out this shoddy U. Penn report”—the one from 2001—and “thumps the table with it,” he recalls. The report sent Lacey into orbit. “They love to inflate the numbers by talking about children ‘at risk’ of exploitation,” he says. Owing to the shadowy nature of sex trafficking, such numbers are notoriously hard to pin down: Experts at the Crimes Against Children Research Center have noted that “scientifically credible estimates do not exist,” and one of the Penn report’s authors told The Washington Post in 2015, “Clearly, a new, more current study is needed.”

Lacey thought he knew what business Allen was in too—fearmongering in the interest of fund-raising. He took the meeting as a finger in the chest. Within a few weeks, The Village Voice began to run articles examining the fishy data on child sex trafficking.

In April, Nigam suggested that, as a gesture of goodwill, Backpage should join the Demi and Ashton Foundation, a nonprofit created by actors Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. The foundation had recently run a series of PSAs under the slogan “Real men don’t buy girls,” featuring various Hollywood bigwigs. Lacey ignored Nigam’s suggestion. Instead, he instructed The Village Voice to publish an article titled “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight.”

Larkin, for his part, tried to make nice with the authorities—at least until he and Lacey could cash out. Backpage was causing too many headaches, and the papers were growing deader by the day. “Selling print sooner than later was the winning move,” Larkin explains. “The longer you waited, the dumber you were.” Initially it seemed that Backpage would be the easier business to unload. By September 2011, a private-equity firm focused on “out-of-favor industries” had agreed to buy it for $150 million. But the deal fell apart after the National Association of Attorneys General announced an investigation of Backpage. Larkin and Lacey were incensed. Section 230 provided that websites could be prosecuted only under federal criminal law, so they considered a state-level investigation extralegal. From that point on, both men were ready to go to the mattresses.

The following fall, Lacey and Larkin sold their beloved alt-weeklies to a group of their own editors for just over $32 million, about 8 percent of what the chain had been valued at in 2005. (Even this amount was later negotiated down, after the buyers defaulted.) In a farewell letter, Lacey wrote that they were leaving to carry on their jihad “over the First Amendment, free speech on the internet and Backpage.” Cynics pointed to the money; by 2011, Backpage was raking in more than $50 million a year, nearly as much as the newspapers that spawned it.

Whatever their mix of motives, Lacey and Larkin moved their cause to the courtroom. With Section 230 as their weapon, they won a series of civil suits and successfully challenged anti-Backpage laws in New Jersey, Tennessee, and Washington state. Many of the court opinions noted the First Amendment problems inherent in regulating internet content. “When freedom of speech hangs in the balance,” wrote the Tennessee judge, “the state may not use a butcher knife on a problem that requires a scalpel to fix.”

By this point, the nation’s attorneys general had had enough. As they saw it, Backpage and other internet platforms were using Section 230 as an excuse to duck their responsibilities to users. In July 2013, 49 of them signed a letter to Congress saying that the law needed an overhaul.

Lacey shows off his ankle monitor and knuckle tattoos.

Jesse Rieser

State attorneys general weren’t the only prosecutors itching to get in on the action. The Feds were too, but they had a problem: They couldn’t identify a viable crime. Prostitution wasn’t a federal offense, and they didn’t seem to think they could make sex-trafficking charges stick. Back in 2011, the Justice Department had quietly opened a grand jury investigation into Backpage in Washington state; according to an internal memo, prosecutors interviewed more than a dozen witnesses and subpoenaed more than 100,000 documents but ultimately decided that “a successful criminal prosecution of Backpage is unlikely.” They thought about trying to make a case under the Travel Act but, as they noted, that theory “had never been litigated in a similar context.” So they formulated another potential plan of attack. “Moving forward,” they wrote, the Justice Department should “take a hard look at bringing this case as a civil forfeiture case,” with its “lower standard of proof.” In this scenario, the government would seize a website operator’s assets and property, then force them to prove they weren’t implicated in criminal activity.

In June 2014 the Justice Department put this plan into action. It seized myRedBook and demanded that the site’s owner, Eric “Red” Omuro, forfeit $5 million in cash and property. The following summer, the Department of Homeland Security launched a similar raid against “the nation’s largest online male-escort service,” Rentboy, and its owner, Jeffrey Hurant. Both men pleaded guilty to violations of the Travel Act in exchange for lighter sentences and lesser fines. The forfeiture approach seemed to be working.

Meanwhile, Backpage opponents were finding sympathetic ears on Capitol Hill. In April 2015, Senator Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio and the chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, fired off the following tweet: “backpage essentially sells human beings. It’s horrible, and I’m going after them.”

That same month, Lacey and Larkin finally located a serious buyer for Backpage: Carl Ferrer. He agreed to pay just under $603 million for the platform—four times what they’d been offered in 2011.

Portman’s subcommittee soon issued a series of subpoenas, seeking internal documents that would reveal Backpage’s moderation practices. The site fought back, but in September 2016 the US Supreme Court ruled that it had to fork over more than 1 million internal emails and other records. Every dubious decision, every bit of chatter and commentary, every lame joke between Backpage employees and managers, was about to come spilling out.

On January 8, 2017, the Senate subcommittee released its final report, titled “Backpage.com’s Knowing Facilitation of Online Sex Trafficking.” It pushed the theory that Lacey, Larkin, Ferrer, and their employees had invalidated their liability protections under Section 230: Rather than removing illegal and obscene content, the Senate said, Backpage had helped develop it, using clever moderation practices to “sanitize the content” and conceal it from the eyes of the law—all in the name of earning a few extra dollars. This, the subcommittee implied, put Backpage in the position of a content creator, not a mere content host.

Most courts had been rejecting the same argument for six years, but now Portman and his colleagues had what they considered incontrovertible evidence. Much of it was contained in the report’s 840-page appendix, which included highlights from the emails and other documents that the site had been ordered to produce.

The report outlined three major steps in Backpage’s road to perdition. In the early days of the site, most ads for commercial sex were deleted outright. By early 2009, however, Ferrer had begun to instruct his employees to manually remove any obscene photos and “forbidden words,” then post the ad anyway. In an email, he wrote that he considered this the more “consumer friendly” approach, because it would avoid “pissing off a lot of users who will migrate elsewhere.” But the true goal, according to the Senate, was to give those ads “a veneer of lawfulness.” One former Backpage moderator, identified in the report as Employee C, testified that she saw her role as “putting lipstick on a pig, because when it came down to it, it was what the business was about.”

By late 2010, Backpage had developed an automated filter called Strip Term From Ad. It was tuned to remove problematic words (“lolita,” “rape,” “fresh,” “little girl”) before any human moderator had seen the ad. Because the original language wasn’t saved on Backpage’s servers, the Senate complained, there would be no real record of the offending content—nothing to send to law enforcement. “Of course,” the subcommittee wrote, “the Strip Term From Ad filter changed nothing about the real age of the person being sold for sex or the real nature of the advertised transaction.”

Perhaps that’s why, in mid-2012, Backpage instituted a kind of hybrid process, automatically editing some ads while automatically banning others, depending on the terms used. But the Senate saw chicanery here, too. Ferrer complained that the auto-bans were causing confusion among users; if they submitted an ad that contained a banned term, they had no way of knowing why it had been rejected. And so Backpage rolled out an alert feature, which informed users which specific term was to blame. In the Senate’s eyes, it was “coaching its customers on how to post ‘clean’ ads for illegal transactions.”

The appendix was full of what appeared to be smoking guns. In late 2010, for instance, Backpage’s operations manager, Andrew Padilla, castigated one of his employees for putting a note on a user’s account suggesting she was a prostitute. “Leaving notes on our site that imply that we’re aware of prostitution, or in any position to define it, is enough to lose your job over,” Padilla wrote. “If you need a definition of ‘prostitution,’ get a dictionary.” The following summer, four months after the ill-fated meeting with Ernie Allen, Larkin cautioned Ferrer against publicizing Backpage’s moderation practices. “We need to stay away from the very idea of ‘editing’ the posts, as you know,” he wrote in an email.

On the night the Senate report was released, Backpage finally shut down its adult section. It was, of course, far too late to stave off what was coming. The next morning, Lacey, Larkin, Ferrer, and two other Backpage executives appeared in Room 342 of the Senate’s Dirksen Building for a grilling by Portman and his colleagues. It was a carefully choreographed bit of political theater. The Backpage witnesses took the Fifth, as senators knew they must; thanks to a pending case in California, they had no choice. Portman denounced them for refusing to “come clean.”

Within six months of the hearing, at least eight new civil lawsuits were filed against Backpage. The Section 230 defense now worked only intermittently, as courts increasingly read in exceptions. The site’s operators began preparing for a rumble with the Feds. Backpage handed out fat legal retainers, as key employees lawyered up. Lacey and Larkin started segregating cash; funds from the sale of Backpage went into one set of accounts, while proceeds from the newspaper sale went into another. Ferrer bought a brand-new Texas McMansion, put it in his wife’s name, and poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into renovations.

Still, Lacey and Larkin largely shrugged off the Senate’s report. “We didn’t go out and try to disprove it,” recalls an attorney who worked on the matter. “It’s not like there isn’t plenty to say. But to try to rebut 50 pages of allegations in the press? That’s fighting a losing battle.” The lawyer added: “It was a hit piece. It was intended to be a hit piece. What are you going to do?”

In August 2017, Portman launched another attack against Backpage. With a bipartisan group of 20 senators, including Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, he introduced the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or Sesta. Later, in an op-ed for WIRED, Portman laid out the bill’s key features: It would remove Section 230’s “unintended liability protections for websites that knowingly facilitate online sex trafficking” and “allow state and local law enforcement to prosecute” those sites. Just as J. James Exon, the sponsor of the Communications Decency Act, had done two decades earlier, the senators deflected concerns about constitutional overreach. Portman described Sesta as “narrowly crafted”; Blumenthal called it “narrowly tailored.”

Silicon Valley disagreed. On the day Sesta was introduced, the Internet Association—an industry consortium that represents Airbnb, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and more than three dozen other tech companies—released a statement calling the bill “overly broad.” While it was important to pursue “rogue operators like Backpage.com,” the association said, Sesta was more butcher knife than scalpel; it would create “a new wave of frivolous and unpredictable actions against legitimate companies.” In a letter to the Senate, a coalition of human rights and civil liberties organizations warned that the result of all this litigation would be “increased censorship across the web.” Platforms that had once sought to encourage free speech through light moderation would now take an iron-fisted approach. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the chilling effect would be particularly damaging to sites like Wikipedia, which “don’t have the massive budgets to defend themselves that Facebook and Twitter do.”

But Big Tech and its allies were no longer really in a position to complain. On Halloween, Congress hauled in executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Legislators wanted to know why the platforms had failed to stem the tide of fake news and misinformation in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, why they’d sold political ad space to Russian nationals, why they were supposedly muzzling conservative voices. Pundits opined that the web was all grown up now; many questioned why platforms still needed Section 230’s protection.

Several days after the Capitol Hill perp walk, the Internet Association suddenly reversed course. It came out in favor of a lightly modified version of Sesta, which by now had been combined with an equally clumsily named House bill, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or Fosta. It was hard not to see the association’s move as a cynical act of political pandering. As Winston Churchill once said, “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”

The Fosta-Sesta law is already panning out as its detractors feared. Once Trump signed it into law, platforms rushed to self-censor; nobody wanted to be Backpaged.

By the spring of 2018, things had gotten even worse for Big Tech. That March, news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, seeming to confirm the public’s worst suspicions. Four days later, Congress passed Fosta-Sesta. The law amends Section 230 to allow states and civil plaintiffs to go after websites that “promote and facilitate prostitution” or “knowingly benefit from participation in a venture that engages in sex trafficking.” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, one of the original authors of Section 230 and a longtime tech industry ally, warned that further measures could be in the offing if “technology companies do not wake up to their responsibilities … to better protect the public.”

In spite of the protests of free speech advocates, more than 100 organizations had come out in favor of the law—Truckers Against Trafficking, Girls With Grit, the Christian Action League of Minnesota. Seth Meyers and Ivanka Trump touted it too. But sex workers and their allies were bitterly opposed. The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists noted that Fosta-Sesta contained “a sweeping and unproductive conflation of sex trafficking and consensual sex work.” The association further argued—just as Craigslist had when it shuttered its adult section in 2010—that, in forcing sites like Backpage to remove or censor their content, the law would merely drive predators into even darker corners of the internet. Their crimes would be harder to spot and investigate, and many sex workers would be forced “to pursue far riskier and more exploitative forms of labor” on the streets.

Two weeks after Fosta-Sesta passed, Carl Ferrer appeared in a closed federal courtroom in Phoenix. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to facilitate prostitution and launder money, surrendered Backpage and its assets, and promised to cooperate with federal authorities. (Ferrer’s plea forbids him to talk to the press. “I’m not trying to avoid you,” he told me at a recent court appearance. “I just have to say no comment.”) A day later, the Feds nailed Lacey and Larkin in Phoenix, charging them and five other Backpagers under long-­existing criminal statutes. As many legal experts pointed out, the move suggested that the government never needed Fosta-Sesta to prosecute the pair; President Donald Trump had yet to even sign it into law. Lacey and Larkin never seemed to seriously consider that Ferrer might flip. Other insiders certainly did. “I think he just chickened out,” offers an attorney who worked with Ferrer for almost 20 years and spoke to me on condition of anonymity. The lawyer points out that Ferrer never shared Lacey’s and Larkin’s disdain for cops. “That’s an awful lot of pressure to put on a skinny white guy,” he continues. “And Jim was never all that nice to him.”

Though it is still relatively early, the broad outlines of each side’s strategy are clear. If this case reaches a jury, the government will likely argue that the end justifies the means—that sex trafficking and prostitution generally are so abhorrent that the government had to do away with Backpage, protected speech and all. They will employ what trial lawyers call “reptile theory,” tapping into the jury’s primitive instincts, arguing that Backpage constituted a public danger and that convicting the defendants will make the community safer. They will tell the grisly tales set forth in the indictment’s 17 victim summaries. They will depict Lacey and Larkin as calculating profiteers, outlaws who refused to honor the reasonable requests of law enforcement because they might make a few mil less. They will hope the defendants’ seeming indifference to the plight of trafficking victims inspires the jury to overlook holes in the prosecution’s case.

The defense strategy is equally clear. Lacey and Larkin will offer high-minded arguments in defense of what the public regards as low-value speech. They will challenge government experts who claim they can look at a sample of Backpage ads and know beyond doubt that they proposed illegal transactions. It’s unclear how effective a witness Ferrer will be; over the past decade, he has given numerous sworn statements in Backpage litigation that contradict assertions in his plea. To the extent that Ferrer has anything damaging to offer, the defense will likely argue he was acting on his own. “We had lawyers telling us how to do this,” Lacey says. “The only way this was going to blow up was if Carl was doing something he shouldn’t have.”

Backpage cofounder James Larkin.

Jesse Rieser

Backpage cofounder Michael Lacey.

Jesse Rieser

Fosta-Sesta is already panning out as its detractors feared. Once Trump signed it into law, platforms rushed to self-censor; nobody wanted to be Backpaged. Cityvibe shut down altogether. Reddit banned numerous communities, including r/escorts and r/SugarDaddy. Google reportedly began purging its users’ cloud accounts of sexually explicit material. Cloudflare, one of the largest cybersecurity and website performance companies in the world, terminated service to Switter, a social media platform on which sex workers connected with each other and vetted their clients. Cloudflare is known for its commitment to free speech, but it was compelled to enforce what its general counsel called, in an interview with Vice, “a very bad law and a very dangerous precedent.”

The endless game of whack-a-mole continues. A month after Fosta-Sesta passed, ads for commercial sex had plummeted 82 percent, according to TellFinder, a data analytics tool originally built by the Defense Department. Within another four months, though, the numbers had rebounded to 75 percent of their previous daily volume. New sites popped up, seeking to fill the void left by Backpage, just as Backpage had done with Craigslist. One of them was called Bedpage.

Still, the Justice Department remains committed to taking the Backpage defendants down. Its plan seems to be to force them to plead, à la Rentboy and myRedBook. Since March 2018, federal prosecutors have seized more than $100 million in cash, real estate, and other assets from Lacey and Larkin. The strategy is simple: No money? No lawyers. QED.

The asset freezes raise all kinds of thorny constitutional questions. Generally speaking, federal prosecutors are permitted to freeze a defendant’s assets based on probable cause alone, even before the defendant has a chance to challenge the government’s case in court. But regular forfeiture rules do not apply in cases involving forums for speech—newspapers, films, books, magazines, websites. The US Supreme Court has decreed that when the government seizes these expressive materials, or the proceeds derived from them, it must immediately hold an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the seizure is valid.

But the Backpage defendants have a problem: So far, they can’t get a court to hear their claims. Since last summer, the Justice Department appears to have been playing a clever shell game. They’ve brought cases against the Backpage defendants in two federal districts—civil seizures in Los Angeles, criminal matters in Phoenix—and they’re making the defendants spend what money they have left chasing Uncle Sam from place to place. So far, judges in both districts have agreed with the government’s suggestion that they should defer to each other, effectively denying the defendants a forum to challenge the asset freezes. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments in the case in July.

“The abuse on these platforms does not stop at sex trafficking,” the association of Attorneys General wrote.

Paul Watler, a media law specialist at Jackson Walker LLP in Dallas, is troubled by the seizure tactic. “It’s an end run around the First Amendment,” he says. The big question remaining, according to Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, is whether federal prosecutors will use this strategy to crack down on other platforms in the future. “Is this the leading edge or a one-off?” he asks. “I still don’t know the answer to that. But they’re coming for us, one way or another.” Even if Fosta-Sesta is one day ruled unconstitutional, as many legal scholars expect, government officials have shown that they’re willing to subvert Section 230 in other ways. If Lacey and Larkin lose—if the asset seizures stand and the Travel Act charges stick—prosecutors will have a valuable new weapon to wield against Silicon Valley. Personal wealth will be no deterrent.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Attorneys General is on the warpath once again. On May 23, 2019, the group sent a letter to a handful of congressional leaders urging further cutbacks to Section 230. “The abuse on these platforms does not stop at sex trafficking,” they wrote. “Stories of online black market opioid sales, ID theft, deep fakes, election meddling, and foreign intrusion are now ubiquitous.” They recommended that Section 230 be amended to allow a wide variety of state-level criminal prosecutions.

Lacey and Larkin remain convinced that the furor over sex ads is a moral panic, irrational and hysterical, cynically stoked by politicians and law enforcement. And they’re not about to surrender. They know they’re not the world’s most sympathetic defendants—rich (or formerly rich) white men accused of, at the very least, morally questionable business decisions, fighting for their right to hire the best lawyers money can buy.

Yet they can still seem oddly tone-deaf, even a touch naive. In April, a federal judge shot down Lacey’s request to have his ankle monitor removed in order to swim during a Hawaiian vacation. (In pleadings, Lacey’s lawyers explained he had use-’em-or-lose-’em flyer miles.) Prosecutors called Lacey a flight risk, and the resulting headlines were predictably brutal. Lacey responds with incredulity: “The idea that I would run—are you kidding? I’m taking the first flight to confront you.”

Christine Biederman is a lawyer and investigative reporter based in Dallas. She is working on a book about Backpage.com.

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[torentialtribute]

ANDREA PIRLO EXCLUSIVE: Football’s coolest man on Chelsea and Cristiano Ronaldo

Andrea Pirlo is a few weeks away from the age of 40 when I asked him how he would like to be remembered on his milestone birthday

& # 39; Good player, good person. Class.

Describe yourself as & # 39; class & # 39; can be seen as a sign of arrogance for most former players, but not for Pirlo. It just seems to fit.

Andrea Pirlo holds the Champions

Andrea Pirlo holds the Champions League trophy during a visit to Yankee Stadium in New York Competition trophy during a visit to Yankee Stadium in New York "

Andrea Pirlo holds the Champions League trophy during a visit to Yankee Stadium in New York

Pirlo made his name at AC Milan for a trophy-laden spell in the colors of Juventus"

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Despite being one of the most decorated players of the modern era, it is like an exponent of the beautiful game for which he can best be remembered.

He sauntered his way to six Series A titles with AC Milan and Juventus, helped one of the major Rossoneri games win two Champions League crowns and pulled the strings in Italy as they raised the World Cup 2006.

But it was his vision, the ease of possession and the flawless technique that set him apart from the rest. Well, that and the beard.

Pirlo sports the same rough facial hair as he sits down to chat with Sportsmail in New York, the city where he ended his trophy-laden career just over 18 months ago.

His sense of style always expanded from the field and that has clearly not changed since he held his boots after two seasons in Major League Soccer with New York City FC

His white shirt, navy blue blazer, green chinese and black canvas shoes may not sound like anything out of the ordinary, but he still manages to stay cool while settling on an office desk on the corner of the bright lights of Times Square

Pirlochats with Sportsmail & Joe Strange during Heineken & # 39; s Champions League Trophy Tour League Trophy Tour

<img id = "i-4ce9a4ca595d1a72" src = "https://dailym.ai/2Igld6w newpix / 2019/05/26/11 / 0D6DA33200000514-7064089-image-a-3_1558867931919.jpg "height =" 446 "width =" 634 "alt =" <im g id = "i-4ce9a4ca595d1a72" src = "https://dailym.ai/2JMZ5T6" height = " 446 "width =" 634 "alt =" <img id = "i-4ce9a4ca595d1a72" src = "https://dailym.ai/2QyAge9 image-a-3_1558867931919.jpg "height =" 446 "width =" 634 "alt =" <img id = "i-4ce9a4ca595d1a72" src = "https://dailym.ai/2v6coo3 /05/26/11/0D6DA33200000514-7064089-image-a-3_1558867931919.jpg "height =" 446 "width =" 634 "alt =" The Italian kisses the World Championship by helping Italy win France in the 2006 final " class = "blkBorder img-share"

The Italian kisses the world championship after helping Italy win the victory over France in the 2006 final

With the same light frame and wavy locks of his playing days, Pirlo cer

But after calling in his time for his 22- career, he claims that – unlike so many newly retired players – he doesn't have to miss sliding around midfield or the camaraderie of the dressing room.

& # 39; No, I am good & # 39 ;, he says when asked if he has missed football, apparently recognizing that others in his position may have survived the transition well

& # 39; When I decided to stop playing, it was the perfect time. I was tired and in pain, so it was the right time. I don't miss the game right now. I'm well at home

& # 39; Now I am working on TV (as an expert), with the Series A and the Champions League. time for that. I like to stay with family, with friends. & # 39;

Pirlo is a family man. His Instagram account is dotted with photos and videos of his four children Niccolo, Angela, Leonardo and Tommaso, and girlfriend Valentina.

It is that – in combination with his relaxed attitude – which makes his next words come as somewhat of a surprise.

Pirlo, who recently turned 40, has a reputation for being stylish both on and off the pitch "Pirlo, who has recently turned 40, has a reputation to be stylish "

Pirlo, who has recently turned 40, has the reputation of being stylish both on and off the pitch

<img id = "i-23cf3a983fbb0298" src = "https://dailym.ai/2QwfSKo" height = "636" width = " 634 "alt =" The former Juve star poses with young sounds Leonardo and Tommaso and girlfriend Valentina "class =" blkBorder img-

The former Juve star poses with young sounds Leonardo and Tommaso and girlfriend Valentina "young sons Leonardo and Tommaso, and girlfriend Valentina

" I have to become a coach, "he reveals.

If Pirlo continues a career in management, the work of two Chelsea bosses – one of the last licenses in September and beyond, it might be good for me to become a coach.

He admits to be a great admirer of fellow countryman Maurizio Sarri and counts Antonio Tell his favorite manager after working with him for both club and country

However, he is not a fan of the Premier League deal with those responsible.

& # 39; It's not easy for him (Sarri), & # 39; he says. ]

& # 39; He needs time to adapt the players to the new system. For me he is a very good coach.

Pirlo was able to follow in the footsteps of the former Juventus and Italy manager, Antonio Conte "

Pirlo could follow in the footsteps of former Juventus and Italy manager, Antonio Conte

Pirlo could follow in the footsteps of former Juventus and Italy manager , Antonio Conte

He believes that Maurizio Sarri (center) deserves more time to leave his mark on Chelsea Maurizio Sarri (center) deserves more time to make his mark on Chelsea "

He believes that Maurizio Sarri (middle) deserves more time to make his mark on Chelsea

& # 39; With Chelsea he did well work – he won the Premier League and the FA Cup, maybe he had a probl Take your own eh and now he's free.

& # 39; If you see the history of the club in the last 10 years, they have changed too many coaches. The problem is not the coach, maybe it's the club. "

Pirlo also seems astonished at the way Chelsea operates his transfer company. Carlo Ancelotti wanted to take him to Stamford Bridge in 2009, but the club's rules for signing older players were overwhelmed.

He emphasizes, however, that he does not regret playing in the Premier League, because he also (19459002)

& # 39; I had the opportunity (with the Premier League) to come up with (Carlo) Ancelotti to Chelsea and to Manchester City when I went to Juventus & he said.

& # 39; Chelsea said I was very old – 30 years old!

& # 39; It would certainly have been a fantastic experience, but I am glad I decided to stay in Italy. & # 39;

Pirlo, pictured in action against Chelsea in 2009, was sought by then-manager Carlo Ancelotti "

Chelsea in 2009, was sought after by then-manager Carlo Ancelotti "

Pirlo, pictured in action against Chelsea in 2009, was wanted by then-manager Carlo Ancelotti

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<img id = "i-d1a6b1c45667b1ff" src = "https: //i.dailymail. co.uk/1s/2019/05/29/00/13888876-7064089-image-m-9_1559084668672.jpg "height =" 433 "width =" 634 "alt =" <img id = "i-d1a6b1c45667b1ff" src = "https://dailym.ai/2JPt1xB" height = "433" width = "634" alt = "<img id = "i-d1a6b1c45667b1ff" src = "https://dailym.ai/2QxsXmQ 72.jpg "height =" 433 "width =" 634 "alt =" <img id = "i-d1a6b1c45667b1ff" src = "https://dailym.ai/2JLlOyN /13888876-7064089-image-m-9_1559084668672.jpg "height =" 433 "width =" 634 "alt =" <img id = "i-d1a6b1c45667b1ff" src = "https://dailym.ai/2uS4u1n 1s / 2019/05/29/00 / 13888876-7064089-image-m-9_1559084668672.jpg "height =" 433 "width =" 634 "alt =" <img id = "i-d1a6b1c45667b1ff" src = "https: / /i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/05/29/00/13888876-7064089-image-m-9_1559084668672.jpg "height =" 433 "width =" 634 "alt ="

While Pirlo opted to spend two decades in his own country, Cristiano Ronaldo made a shock to Series A last summer,

The Italian hopes the arrival – and subsequent impact – of one of & # 39 ; the world's largest superstars can re-ignite the division and help bring back the glory days of the 1990s

& # 39; I was surprised because it is very difficult to get Ronaldo to Juventus but it is important for Serie A. I have improved the competition, I have improved the other teams.

& # 39; We hope that Ronaldo is a trendsetter and that more big names will follow him. & # 39;

And could a transfer to the pond next to the former man of Manchester United be?

& # 39; I don't know & # 39 ;, admits Pirlo, who is back in the States for Heineken & # 39; s Champions League Trophy Tour visit to the Big Apple

& # 39; He has been contracting with Juventus for two or three years and then it is possible that he will come to the US or to another country.

Cristiano Ronaldo impressed Juventus in his debut season when she won the Series A title "class =" blkBorder img-share "/>

Cristiano Ronaldo impressed in his debut season with Juventus when they received the title of Series A

In his debut season, Cristiano Ronaldo impressed Juventus when they received the Series A title

Pirlo stands next to Ronaldo for a charity match at the Allianz Stadium earlier this week "

Pirlo stands next to Ronaldo for a benefit match at the Allianz Stadium earlier this week

& # 39; I was very happy to play here. It was an important experience for me, for my family. I have often been to the city to go to restaurants with friends. "

When he brought the trophy to New York, he added: & # 39; It is important because the Champions League is the most prestigious club trophy. People outside of Europe understand how much it means.

& # 39; When I was playing in the US, a lot of people are watching the games, and seeing the trophy this time in the US and New York is fun, they understand how important it is. & # 39;

Pirlo, who certainly had dinner at his favorite spot in the city's trendy meat processing district, counts the vineyard as one of his business interests: & # 39; I don't work every day

He is a keen watcher of football, especially the Champions League, where a young player caught his attention more than any other during the incredible run of Ajax to the semi-finals.

& # 39 ; At present Frenkie de Jong is the best for me & # 39 ;, he says professionally. & # 39; He has the per personality, the technique, everything to play in this position. & # 39;

Pirlo believes that Ajax midfielder Frenkie de Jong the game in a similar style plays as he himself

& # 39; Pirlo believes that the Barcelona-bound midfielder reminds him of himself. It's the vision, & he adds, & # 39; knows the field and the movement of the other players. He is a very good player.

Perhaps De Jong will one day graduate to become a class like Pirlo.

To UEFA Champions League trophy tour to follow, presented by Heineken® on social, visit @Heinek and and use #Unmissable and #UCLTrophyTour.

<img id = "i-11075cb187d85b0 "src =" https://dailym.ai/2QBESAg "height =" 423 "width =" 634 "alt = "<img id =" i-11075cb187d85b0 "src =" https://dailym.ai/2QBESAg "height =" 423 "width =" 634 "alt =" <img id = "i-11075cb187d85b0" src = "https://dailym.ai/2JNGdTY a-16_1557449949682.jpg "height =" 423 "width =" 634 "alt =" <img id = "i-11075cb187d85b0" src = "https://dailym.ai/2vQn0ba /01/13319050-7013119-image-a-16_1557449949682.jpg "height =" 423 "width =" 634 "alt =" The Brooklyn Bridge can be seen on the back of the Brooklyn Bridge,

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[popofventi]

Ventipop #229 :: A Glimmer, The Study of Dreams & Windex Tears

THESE ARE THE MOST INTERESTING, HUMOROUS AND INSPIRING THINGS I FOUND ON THE NET THIS WEEK. IF YOU ENJOY, PLEASE SHARE WITH A FRIEND.

Laugh. Think. Feel.

2 Patrons…and Counting

You may have noticed, I removed all ads from Ventipop when I rebooted the site last month. So…the only revenue I receive is from “Buy Me A Coffee” link on the homepage and the “Become A Patron” link on the top of every page of Venti. Last week, I received a coffee and gained my 2nd Patron which is a monthly contribution. (Thanks Lisa!) I don’t expect it, but it sure is appreciated and good people affirming when it happens. If you can click one of those links and give even a little, it helps offset the costs associated with the site.

"Working in a mirror factory is something I can totally see myself doing."  -- Anonymous

Ask For Rick Astley…and Ye Shall Receive

Recommendations

"Charlesgate Confidential is terrific."  -- Stephen King

Book Recommendation - Charlesgate Confidential by Scott Von Doviak

A breathtakingly clever, twist-filled narrative that moves from 1946 to 1988 to 2014 and back again. Charlesgate Confidential is a tremendous modern-day pulp story that combines fact, fiction, legend, and baseball. It reads like an unassisted triple play and is so fun.

I’m not usually attracted to this genre, but even the Wall Street Journal gave it a good review so I decided to check it out. Read it in almost one sitting. Von Doviak does a fantastic job of creating setting, tone, dialogue and characters for each distinctive decade. From the 40’s rat-a-tat-tat rapid fire made-guy dialogue to the 1980’s record shop, big hair-trying to get laid in college narrative to the present day detective looking for treasure storyline, Charlesgate Confidential is a throwback and a flashforward joy of a read all-in-one.

Album Recommendation - There’s Always Glimmer by Gia Margaret - Official Site, Featured Song “Groceries”

…The Best Tradition of All

Giving the Gift of Gift Guides

I used to put out a Ventipop Gift Guide, but then I decided my gift to the world would be to stop putting out another gift guide into the world. There’s already way too many of them. But here are my favorite go-to Gift Guides:

Ventipop’s Favorite Things

I had to buy one of these for my son from the Kikkerland Gift Guide

Books, Books, Books Gift Guide by Penguin Random House

Finnish Design Shop offers a list of “Pieces of Nordic Happiness”

Canopy curates Amazon into a single hub for easy gift giving

The Best Gifts for men who have everything gift guide by The Manual

Tom’s Guide offers gifts for the techies in our lives

The Kottke.org Gift Guide

Travel & Leisure share their best gifts ideas for travelers

Refinery29 offers up a very unique index of alt Gift Guides

The Guardian offers a nice Culture Gift Guide

Daily Nous offers a unique Philosopher’s Gift Guide

And a few more: Buzzfeed, Engadget and A Cup of Jo

Tom Cruise & Christopher McQuarrie Explain The Proper Way To Watch Action Movies On Your TV

Movie Trailer of the Week

Inappropriate Non-PC Comment of the Week

This little gem ran through my brain as I was attending my daughter’s choir concert tonight: “I'd like to start a choir that stars only kids with speech impediments.”

Sway bells wing, aw you wistenin’?

In da wayne, snowis gwistenin’…

Pause-vertising

Pause-vertising is the latest attempt by advertisers to get tv viewer’s eyeballs and ears on their commercials. Ads that only run when you pause a tv show while streaming. "Imagine an ad for soda or beer that comes on the screen just as you decide to stop the action during a run of an episode of Black-ish on Hulu to go to the kitchen for a snack, or a pitch for toilet paper that begins to move in the moments before you choose to halt the video stream for a bathroom break," reports Brian Steinberg. "And yet, there’s no guarantee viewers will welcome 'pause-vertising' any more than they do the current crop of 30-second pitches." Read more about Pause-vertising…here.

Snaps & Buckles & Japanese Things…

It’s the most busiest time of the year, so if your’e in need of some nature-based relaxation, check out these live 24/7 nature streams.

Fashion Policia - If you don’t want to support “fast fashion” and cheap, exploitive clothing labor, read 14 Expert Ways To Tell If Clothes Are Well-Made Or Super Cheap.

Blue lights in Japanese train stations have played a huge role in suicide rate reduction since 1984. This interesting tidbit is explained along with a ton of other really interesting things in Tom Whitwell’s infatuating article “52 Things I Learned in 2018”.

More Japan, please. For my brother, Top 10 Books About Japan.

And one more for Japan. The Michelin Guide recognizes fine dining, was started by a tire company and is now awarding a used car dealership in Totttori Japan…for its Ramen noodles. Makes perfect sense.

Science, Bitch!

Gross: Man coughs up a giant blood clot. Grosser: Man coughs up a giant blood clot in the shape of his lung.

Luxembourg will be the world’s first country to make all public transportation free.

Japan’s Planned Space Robotics Lab Looks Like an Asteroid Suspended Over a Crater

Every single time anyone on the news or in the movies fires a gun up in the air, I know the next words coming out of my wife’s mouth, “Those bullets are gonna come down and kill someone.” Turns out, she’s been right about this the whole time:

A new study says, “There’s no right thing to say to someone in need.”

The science of studying dreams in a lab.

The best table tennis shot of 2018:

Interview of the Week

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel started season two this week. Here’s an interview with the starring actress Rachel Brosnahan. “[Frances McDormand] said something to me that I will never forget, that there seem to be 27,000 new products a day out there to alter your face… but that your face is a road map to your life and to everything that has made you who you are up until that point. And why would you ever want to erase any part of that? That every line on her face is every smile she’s ever smiled and every tear she’s ever cried and frown she’s ever frowned. And she wears them with pride.”

Fall Asleep In Two Minutes

This military secret formula for falling asleep in two minutes is said to work for 96 per cent of people after six weeks of practice.

Here’s how to do it:

Relax the muscles in your face, including tongue, jaw and the muscles around the eyes

Drop your shoulders as far down as they’ll go, followed by your upper and lower arm, one side at a time

Breathe out, relaxing your chest followed by your legs, starting from the thighs and working down

You should then spend 10 seconds trying to clear your mind before thinking about one of the three following images:

You’re lying in a canoe on a calm lake with nothing but a clear blue sky above you

You’re lying in a black velvet hammock in a pitch-black room

You say “don’t think, don’t think, don’t think” to yourself over and over for about 10 seconds.

A Beautiful Thing

Can a Windex ad move you to tears?

Nah.

Um.

Maybe.

"In a world that has decided that it's going to lose its mind, be more kind my friend. Try to be more kind."  -- Frank Turner

-xxx-

[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/maysoon-zayid-interview-i-want-to-be-the-image-of-the-american-you-dont-think-is-american/

Maysoon Zayid interview: 'I want to be the image of the American you don't think is American'

US standup comedian Maysoon Zayid likes to joke that if there were a competition called the Oppression Olympics, she would win gold.

“I’m Palestinian, Muslim, I’m a woman of colour, I’m disabled,” Zayid, who has cerebral palsy, tells audiences, before pausing a beat to hang her head, her long dark hair curtaining her face, “and I live in New Jersey”.

The joke lands laughs whether Zayid tells it in red states or blue, and puts people exactly where Zayid wants them: disarmed, charmed and eager for more. She told it near the beginning of her 2014 TED Talk, which drew nearly 15 million views, became the most-watched TED Talk that year and changed Zayid’s life. She now has a development deal with ABC to create a semi-autobiographical sitcom called Can-Can, starring her.

Read more

The show faces daunting odds; only a handful of the dozens of scripts networks order each autumn make it to air. But if Can-Can makes it all the way – Zayid told studio executives that she would end up in an internment camp if it didn’t – it may push two populations, one widely ignored, the other demonised, from the country’s margins into the mainstream.

People with disabilities make up nearly 20 per cent of the population yet account for about 2 per cent of onscreen characters, some 95 per cent of which are played by able-bodied stars. And it is hard to imagine a group more vilified in the United States than Muslims or Middle Easterners, whom, as Zayid’s television writing partner, Joanna Quraishi, said, “Americans see as either terrorists or Kardashians.”

The executive producers of Can-Can include Todd Milliner and Sean Hayes, who plays Jack on Will & Grace, itself a groundbreaking show credited with helping make gay characters mainstream. Milliner and Hayes are well aware of the envelope-pushing potential of Can-Can, but said that was not what sold them on Zayid.

Her energy filled the room, and she was self-aware, super smart, and madly funny. Crucially, she had a singular story. “The whole business is moving even more toward authentic stories that aren’t on TV right now,” Milliner said.

Zayid is a vociferous part of a small, dedicated movement calling attention to disability rights in entertainment, which are consistently overlooked in the quote-unquote diversity conversation.

Jay Ruderman, president of the Ruderman Family Foundation, a philanthropic and advocacy organisation for disability rights (it also works to strengthen ties between American Jews and Israel), said Zayid’s show could crush enduring stigmas disabled people face. “Progress is being made very slowly, but shows can be transformational,” he said.

Read more

The Can-Can character will be much like Zayid, a woman who happens to be disabled and Muslim and who grew up in New Jersey with big hair and Metallica T-shirts, navigating love and friendships and the world. “I want to get out there and be the image of the American you don’t think is American, and the Muslim you don’t think of when you think of a Muslim,” she said.

Zayid lives in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, that she shares with her husband and their cat. She likes to keep her husband’s name under wraps, and publicly refers to him as Chefugee, for he is indeed both a refugee – they met while she was working with refugees in the Palestinian territories – and a chef.

Zayid’s parents, who are from a village outside Ramallah, also raised their family here. Zayid is the youngest of four daughters, and had an idyllic childhood despite a traumatic birth. The doctor botched her mother’s C-section, she said, smothering Zayid. Cerebral palsy is not genetic; it’s often caused by brain trauma before or during birth, and manifests differently in people. Zayid shakes all the time, though yoga has lessened the severity, and can walk but cannot stand for very long (she calls herself a sit-down standup comedian).

Her parents treated her no differently from her siblings. Her father, a gregarious salesman, taught her to walk by having her stand on his feet. She was sent to dance and piano lessons because the family could not afford physical or occupational therapy, and she became a popular high achiever. “I lived in a bubble,” she told me, “and that is very much related to who I am now”.

At college, her bubble burst. She went to Arizona State University on an academic scholarship, and on her first day in an English literature class, her professor stunned her by asking, “Can you read?” She majored in theatre – her lifelong dream has been to appear on General Hospital – yet despite wowing teachers she was never cast in school productions. Even when the theatre department mounted a play about a girl with cerebral palsy, a non-disabled student was chosen over Zayid for the part.

“It was devastating, because I knew I was good,” Zayid said. “The girl who got it was a great actress. But why would anyone want to see her fake cerebral palsy, when I’m sitting right here?”

It was a light-bulb moment, and she realised that the movies she loved with disabled characters, like Born on the Fourth of July, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and Rain Man, all had visibly non-disabled stars. She pursed acting after graduation, until a forthright acting coach told her she would never get cast, and ought to do a one-woman show.

leftCreated with Sketch. rightCreated with Sketch.

1/25 Bojack Horseman

A cartoon about a talking horse, starring the goofy older brother from Arrested Development… on paper little about BoJack Horseman screams “must watch”. Yet the series almost immediately transcended its format to deliver a moving and very funny rumination on depression and middle-age malaise. Will Arnett plays BoJack – one time star of Nineties hit sitcom Horsin’ Around – as a lost soul whose turbo-charged narcissism prevents him getting his life together. Almost as good are a support cast including Alison Brie (Glow, Mad Men), Aaron Paul, of Breaking Bad, and Amy Sedaris as a pampered Persian cat who is also BoJack’s agent. Season five touches the live rail of harassment in the movie industry, offering one of the most astute commentaries yet on the #MeToo movement with an episode based centred around an awards ceremony called “The Forgivies”.

Netflix

2/25 Stranger Things

A valentine to the Spielberg school of Eighties blockbuster, with Winona Ryder as a small town mom whose son is abducted by a transdimensional monster. ET, Goonies, Close Encounters, Alien and everything Stephen King wrote between 1975 and 1990 are all tossed into the blender by Millennial writer-creators the Duffer brothers. It was clear Stranger Things was going to be a mega-smash when Barb – the “best friend” character eaten in the second episode – went viral the weekend it dropped.

Netflix

3/25 Daredevil

Netflix’s Marvel shows tend towards the overlong and turgid. An exception is the high-kicking Daredevil, with Charlie Cox’s blind lawyer/crimefighter banishing all memory of Ben Affleck’s turn donning the red jumpsuit in 2003. With New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood as backdrop, Daredevil is caked in street-level grit and features a searing series one performance by Vincent D’Onofrio as the villainous Kingpin. The perfect antidote to the deafening bombast of the big screen Marvel movies.

Netflix

4/25 The Staircase

Did he do it? Does it matter considering the lengths the Durham, North Carolina police seemingly went in order to stitch him up? Sitting through this twisting, turning documenting about the trial of Michael Peterson – charged with the murder in 2003 of his wife – the viewer may find themselves alternately empathising with and recoiling from the accused. It’s a feat of bravura factual filmmaking from French documentarian Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, which comes to Netflix with a recently shot three-part coda catching up with the (very weird) Peterson clan a decade on.

Netflix

5/25 Dark

Stranger Things: the Euro-Gloom years. Netflix’s first German-language production is a pulp romp that thinks it’s a Wagner opera. In a remote town surrounded by a creepy forest locals fear the disappearance of a teenager may be linked to other missing persons cases from decades earlier. The timelines get twisted and it’s obvious that something wicked is emanating from a tunnel leading to a nearby nuclear power plant. Yet if the story sometimes trips itself up the Goonies-meets-Götterdämmerung ambiance keeps you hooked.

Netflix

6/25 A Series of Unfortunate Events

The wry and bleak Lemony Snickett children novels finally get the ghastly adaptation they deserve (let’s all pretend the dreadful 2004 Jim Carrey movie never happened). Neil Patrick Harris gobbles up the scenery as the vain and wicked Count Olaf, desperate to separate the Baudelaire orphans from their considerable inheritance. The look is Tim Burton by way of Wes Anderson, and the dark wit of the books is replicated perfectly (Snickett, aka Daniel Handler, is co-producer).

Netflix

7/25 Maniac

If you’re curious as to how Cary Fukunaga will handle the Bond franchise, his limited series, starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, drops some delicious hints. It’s a mind-bending sci-fi story set in an alternative United States where computers still look like Commodore 64s and in which you pay for goods by having a “travel buddy” sit down and read you adverts. Stone and Hill are star-crossed outcasts participating in a drugs trial that catapults them into a series of trippy genre excursions – including an occult adventure and a Lord of the Rings-style fantasy. It is here that Fukunaga demonstrates his versatility, handling potentially hokey material smartly and respectfully. 007 fans can sleep easy.

Netflix

8/25 Better Call Saul

The Breaking Bad prequel is starting to outgrow the show that spawned it. Where Breaking Bad delivered a master-class in scorched earth storytelling Saul is gentler and more humane. Years before the rise of Walter White, the future meth overlord’s sleazy lawyer, Saul Goodman, is still plain old Jimmy McGill, a striving every-dude trying to catch a break. But how far will he go to make his name and escape the shadow of his superstar attorney brother Chuck (Michael McKean)?

AMC Studios/Netflix

9/25 Black Mirror

Don’t tell Channel 4 but Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology series has arguably got even better since making the jump from British terrestrial TV to the realm of megabucks American streaming. Bigger budgets have given creators Brooker and Annabel Jones license to let their imaginations off the leash – yielding unsurpassable episodes such as virtual reality love story “San Junipero” and Star Trek parody “USS Callister”, which has bagged a bunch of Emmys.

Netflix

10/25 Mindhunter

David Fincher produces this serial killer drama based on the writings of a real-life FBI psychological profiler. It’s the post-Watergate Seventies and two maverick G-Men (Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany) are going out on a limb by utilising the latest psychological research to get inside the heads of a motley assembly of real-life sociopathic murders – including the notorious “Co-Ed” butcher Ed Kemper, brought chillingly to live in an Emmy-nominated performance by Cameron Britton.

Netflix

11/25 The Crown

A right royal blockbuster from dramatist Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost / Nixon). Tracing the reign of Elizabeth II from her days as a wide-eyed young woman propelled to the throne after the surprise early death of her father, The Crown humanises the royals even as it paints their private lives as a bodice-ripping soap. Matt Smith is charmingly roguish as Prince Philip and Vanessa Kirby has ascended the Hollywood ranks on the back of her turn as the flawed yet sympathetic Princess Margaret. Most impressive of all, arguably, is Claire Foy, who plays the Queen as a shy woman thrust unwillingly into the spotlight. Foy and the rest of the principal cast have now departed, with a crew of older actors – headed by Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies – taking over as the middle-aged Windsors for season three.

Netflix

12/25 Narcos

This drug trafficking caper spells out exactly what kind of series it is with an early scene in which two gangsters zip around a multi-level carpark on a motorbike firing a machine gun. Narcos, in other words, is for people who consider Pacino’s Scarface a touch too understated. Series one and two feature a mesmerising performance by Wagner Moura as Columbian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar, while season three focuses on the notorious Cali cartel. Reported to be one of Netflix’s biggest hits – the company doesn’t release audience figures – the fourth season turns its attention to Mexico’s interminable drugs wars.

Juan Pablo Gutierrez/Netflix

13/25 Master Of None

A cloud hangs over Aziz Ansari’s future after he was embroiled in the #MeToo scandal. But whatever happens, he has left us with a humane and riveting sitcom about an Ansari-proximate character looking for love and trying to establish himself professionally in contemporary New York.

K.C. Bailey / Netflix

14/25 Bloodline

One of Netflix’s early blockbusters, the sprawling soap opera updates Dallas to modern day southern Florida. Against the edge-of-civilisation backdrop of the Florida Keys, Kyle Chandler plays the local detective and favourite son of a well-to-do family. Their idyllic lives are thrown into chaos with the return of the clan’s black sheep (an unnervingly intense Ben Mendelsohn). The story is spectacularly hokey but searing performances by Chandler and Mendelsohn, and by Sissy Spacek and the late Sam Shepard as their imperious parents, make Bloodline compelling – a guilty pleasure that, actually, you shouldn’t feel all that guilty about.

Rod Millington/Netflix

15/25 The Alienist

You can almost smell the shoddy sanitation and horse-manure in this lavish murder-mystery set in 19th New York. We’re firmly in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York territory, with a serial killer bumping off boy prostitutes across Manhattan. Enter pioneering criminal psychologist Dr Laszlo Kreisler (Daniel Brühl), aided by newspaper man John Moore (Luke Evans) and feisty lady detective Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning).

Kurt Iswarienko

16/25 Love

Judd Apatow bring his signature gross-out comedy to the small screen. Love, which Apatow produced, is a masterclass in restraint compared to 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up etc. Paul Rust is Gus, a nerdish movie set tutor, whose develops a crush on Gillian Jacobs’s too-cool-for-school radio producer Mickey. Romance, of a sort, blossoms – but Love’s triumph is to acknowledge the complications of real life and to disabuse its characters of the idea that there’s such a thing as a straightforward happy ending. Hipster LA provides the bustling setting.

Netflix

17/25 Queer Eye

Who says reality TV has to be nasty and manipulative? This updating of the early 2000s hit Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has five stereotype-challenging gay men sharing lifestyle tips and fashion advice with an engaging cast of All American schlubs (the first two seasons are shot mostly in the state of Georgia). There are laughs – but serious moment too, such as when one of the crew refuses to enter a church because of the still unhealed scars of his strict Christian upbringing.

Netflix

18/25 Chef’s Table

A high-gloss revamping of the traditional TV food show. Each episode profiles a high wattage international chef; across its three seasons, the series has featured gastronomic superstars from the US, Argentina, India and Korea.

Charles Panian/Netflix

19/25 Arrested Development

A disastrous group interview in which actor Jason Bateman “mansplained” away the bullying co-star Jessica Walter had suffered at the hands of fellow cast-member Jeffrey Tambor meant season five of Arrested Development was fatally compromised before it even landed. Yet Netflix’s return to the dysfunctional world of the Bluth family stands on its merits and is a worthy addition to the surreal humour of seasons one through three (series four, which had to work around the busy schedules of the cast, is disposable by comparison).

Netflix

20/25 Altered Carbon

Netflix does Bladerunner with this sumptuous adaptation of the cult Richard Morgan novel. The setting is a neon-splashed cyberpunk future in which the super-wealthy live forever by uploading the consciousness into new “skins”. Enter rebel-turned-detective Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman), hired to find out who killed a (since resurrected) zillionaire industrialist while dealing with fallout from his own troubled past. Rumoured to be one of Netflix’s most expensive projects yet, for its second run, Anthony Mackie (aka Marvel’s Falcon) replaced Kinnaman as the shape-shifting Kovacs.

Netflix

21/25 Rick and Morty

Dan Harmon, creator of cult sitcom Community (also on Netflix), finds the perfect outlet for zany fanboy imagination with this crazed animated comedy about a Marty McFly/Doc Brown-esque duo of time travellers. Every genre imaginable is parodied with the manic energy and zinging dialogue we have come to expect from Harmon.

Netflix/Adult Swim

22/25 GLOW

Mad Men’s Alison Brie is our entry point into this comedy-drama inspired by a real life all-female wrestling league in the Eighties. Ruth Wilder (Brie) is a down-on-her luck actor who, out of desperation, signs up a wrestling competition willed into being by Sam Sylvia (podcast king Marc Maron). Britrock singer Kate Nash is one of her her fellow troupe members: the larger than life Rhonda “Britannica” Richardson.

Netflix

23/25 Archer

Deadpan animated satire about an idiot super spy with shaken and stirred mother issues. One of the most ambitious modern comedies, animated or otherwise, Archer tries on different varieties of humour for size and even occasionally tugs at the heart strings.

24/25 Ozark

Breaking Bad for those with short attention spans. The saga of Walter White took years to track the iconic anti-hero’s rise from mild mannered everyman to dead-eyed criminal. Ozark gets there in the first half hour as nebbish Chicago accountant Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) agrees to serve as lieutenant for the Mexican mob in the hillbilly heartlands of Ozark, Missouri (in return they thoughtfully spare his life). Bateman, usually seen in comedy roles, is a revelation as is Laura Linney as his nasty wife Wendy. There is also a break-out performance by Julia Garner playing the scion of a local redneck crime family.

Netflix

25/25 The Good Place

A heavenly comedy with a twist. Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) is a cynical schlub waved through the Pearly Gates by mistake after dying in a bizarre supermarket accident. There she must remain above the suspicions of seemingly well-meaning but disorganised angel Michael (Ted Danson) whilst also negotiating fractious relationships with do-gooder Chidi (William Jackson Harper), spoiled princess Tahani (former T4 presenter Jameela Jamil) and ex-drug dealer Jason (Manny Jacinto).

Netflix

1/25 Bojack Horseman

A cartoon about a talking horse, starring the goofy older brother from Arrested Development… on paper little about BoJack Horseman screams “must watch”. Yet the series almost immediately transcended its format to deliver a moving and very funny rumination on depression and middle-age malaise. Will Arnett plays BoJack – one time star of Nineties hit sitcom Horsin’ Around – as a lost soul whose turbo-charged narcissism prevents him getting his life together. Almost as good are a support cast including Alison Brie (Glow, Mad Men), Aaron Paul, of Breaking Bad, and Amy Sedaris as a pampered Persian cat who is also BoJack’s agent. Season five touches the live rail of harassment in the movie industry, offering one of the most astute commentaries yet on the #MeToo movement with an episode based centred around an awards ceremony called “The Forgivies”.

Netflix

2/25 Stranger Things

A valentine to the Spielberg school of Eighties blockbuster, with Winona Ryder as a small town mom whose son is abducted by a transdimensional monster. ET, Goonies, Close Encounters, Alien and everything Stephen King wrote between 1975 and 1990 are all tossed into the blender by Millennial writer-creators the Duffer brothers. It was clear Stranger Things was going to be a mega-smash when Barb – the “best friend” character eaten in the second episode – went viral the weekend it dropped.

Netflix

3/25 Daredevil

Netflix’s Marvel shows tend towards the overlong and turgid. An exception is the high-kicking Daredevil, with Charlie Cox’s blind lawyer/crimefighter banishing all memory of Ben Affleck’s turn donning the red jumpsuit in 2003. With New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood as backdrop, Daredevil is caked in street-level grit and features a searing series one performance by Vincent D’Onofrio as the villainous Kingpin. The perfect antidote to the deafening bombast of the big screen Marvel movies.

Netflix

4/25 The Staircase

Did he do it? Does it matter considering the lengths the Durham, North Carolina police seemingly went in order to stitch him up? Sitting through this twisting, turning documenting about the trial of Michael Peterson – charged with the murder in 2003 of his wife – the viewer may find themselves alternately empathising with and recoiling from the accused. It’s a feat of bravura factual filmmaking from French documentarian Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, which comes to Netflix with a recently shot three-part coda catching up with the (very weird) Peterson clan a decade on.

Netflix

5/25 Dark

Stranger Things: the Euro-Gloom years. Netflix’s first German-language production is a pulp romp that thinks it’s a Wagner opera. In a remote town surrounded by a creepy forest locals fear the disappearance of a teenager may be linked to other missing persons cases from decades earlier. The timelines get twisted and it’s obvious that something wicked is emanating from a tunnel leading to a nearby nuclear power plant. Yet if the story sometimes trips itself up the Goonies-meets-Götterdämmerung ambiance keeps you hooked.

Netflix

6/25 A Series of Unfortunate Events

The wry and bleak Lemony Snickett children novels finally get the ghastly adaptation they deserve (let’s all pretend the dreadful 2004 Jim Carrey movie never happened). Neil Patrick Harris gobbles up the scenery as the vain and wicked Count Olaf, desperate to separate the Baudelaire orphans from their considerable inheritance. The look is Tim Burton by way of Wes Anderson, and the dark wit of the books is replicated perfectly (Snickett, aka Daniel Handler, is co-producer).

Netflix

7/25 Maniac

If you’re curious as to how Cary Fukunaga will handle the Bond franchise, his limited series, starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, drops some delicious hints. It’s a mind-bending sci-fi story set in an alternative United States where computers still look like Commodore 64s and in which you pay for goods by having a “travel buddy” sit down and read you adverts. Stone and Hill are star-crossed outcasts participating in a drugs trial that catapults them into a series of trippy genre excursions – including an occult adventure and a Lord of the Rings-style fantasy. It is here that Fukunaga demonstrates his versatility, handling potentially hokey material smartly and respectfully. 007 fans can sleep easy.

Netflix

8/25 Better Call Saul

The Breaking Bad prequel is starting to outgrow the show that spawned it. Where Breaking Bad delivered a master-class in scorched earth storytelling Saul is gentler and more humane. Years before the rise of Walter White, the future meth overlord’s sleazy lawyer, Saul Goodman, is still plain old Jimmy McGill, a striving every-dude trying to catch a break. But how far will he go to make his name and escape the shadow of his superstar attorney brother Chuck (Michael McKean)?

AMC Studios/Netflix

9/25 Black Mirror

Don’t tell Channel 4 but Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology series has arguably got even better since making the jump from British terrestrial TV to the realm of megabucks American streaming. Bigger budgets have given creators Brooker and Annabel Jones license to let their imaginations off the leash – yielding unsurpassable episodes such as virtual reality love story “San Junipero” and Star Trek parody “USS Callister”, which has bagged a bunch of Emmys.

Netflix

10/25 Mindhunter

David Fincher produces this serial killer drama based on the writings of a real-life FBI psychological profiler. It’s the post-Watergate Seventies and two maverick G-Men (Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany) are going out on a limb by utilising the latest psychological research to get inside the heads of a motley assembly of real-life sociopathic murders – including the notorious “Co-Ed” butcher Ed Kemper, brought chillingly to live in an Emmy-nominated performance by Cameron Britton.

Netflix

11/25 The Crown

A right royal blockbuster from dramatist Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost / Nixon). Tracing the reign of Elizabeth II from her days as a wide-eyed young woman propelled to the throne after the surprise early death of her father, The Crown humanises the royals even as it paints their private lives as a bodice-ripping soap. Matt Smith is charmingly roguish as Prince Philip and Vanessa Kirby has ascended the Hollywood ranks on the back of her turn as the flawed yet sympathetic Princess Margaret. Most impressive of all, arguably, is Claire Foy, who plays the Queen as a shy woman thrust unwillingly into the spotlight. Foy and the rest of the principal cast have now departed, with a crew of older actors – headed by Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies – taking over as the middle-aged Windsors for season three.

Netflix

12/25 Narcos

This drug trafficking caper spells out exactly what kind of series it is with an early scene in which two gangsters zip around a multi-level carpark on a motorbike firing a machine gun. Narcos, in other words, is for people who consider Pacino’s Scarface a touch too understated. Series one and two feature a mesmerising performance by Wagner Moura as Columbian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar, while season three focuses on the notorious Cali cartel. Reported to be one of Netflix’s biggest hits – the company doesn’t release audience figures – the fourth season turns its attention to Mexico’s interminable drugs wars.

Juan Pablo Gutierrez/Netflix

13/25 Master Of None

A cloud hangs over Aziz Ansari’s future after he was embroiled in the #MeToo scandal. But whatever happens, he has left us with a humane and riveting sitcom about an Ansari-proximate character looking for love and trying to establish himself professionally in contemporary New York.

K.C. Bailey / Netflix

14/25 Bloodline

One of Netflix’s early blockbusters, the sprawling soap opera updates Dallas to modern day southern Florida. Against the edge-of-civilisation backdrop of the Florida Keys, Kyle Chandler plays the local detective and favourite son of a well-to-do family. Their idyllic lives are thrown into chaos with the return of the clan’s black sheep (an unnervingly intense Ben Mendelsohn). The story is spectacularly hokey but searing performances by Chandler and Mendelsohn, and by Sissy Spacek and the late Sam Shepard as their imperious parents, make Bloodline compelling – a guilty pleasure that, actually, you shouldn’t feel all that guilty about.

Rod Millington/Netflix

15/25 The Alienist

You can almost smell the shoddy sanitation and horse-manure in this lavish murder-mystery set in 19th New York. We’re firmly in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York territory, with a serial killer bumping off boy prostitutes across Manhattan. Enter pioneering criminal psychologist Dr Laszlo Kreisler (Daniel Brühl), aided by newspaper man John Moore (Luke Evans) and feisty lady detective Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning).

Kurt Iswarienko

16/25 Love

Judd Apatow bring his signature gross-out comedy to the small screen. Love, which Apatow produced, is a masterclass in restraint compared to 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up etc. Paul Rust is Gus, a nerdish movie set tutor, whose develops a crush on Gillian Jacobs’s too-cool-for-school radio producer Mickey. Romance, of a sort, blossoms – but Love’s triumph is to acknowledge the complications of real life and to disabuse its characters of the idea that there’s such a thing as a straightforward happy ending. Hipster LA provides the bustling setting.

Netflix

17/25 Queer Eye

Who says reality TV has to be nasty and manipulative? This updating of the early 2000s hit Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has five stereotype-challenging gay men sharing lifestyle tips and fashion advice with an engaging cast of All American schlubs (the first two seasons are shot mostly in the state of Georgia). There are laughs – but serious moment too, such as when one of the crew refuses to enter a church because of the still unhealed scars of his strict Christian upbringing.

Netflix

18/25 Chef’s Table

A high-gloss revamping of the traditional TV food show. Each episode profiles a high wattage international chef; across its three seasons, the series has featured gastronomic superstars from the US, Argentina, India and Korea.

Charles Panian/Netflix

19/25 Arrested Development

A disastrous group interview in which actor Jason Bateman “mansplained” away the bullying co-star Jessica Walter had suffered at the hands of fellow cast-member Jeffrey Tambor meant season five of Arrested Development was fatally compromised before it even landed. Yet Netflix’s return to the dysfunctional world of the Bluth family stands on its merits and is a worthy addition to the surreal humour of seasons one through three (series four, which had to work around the busy schedules of the cast, is disposable by comparison).

Netflix

20/25 Altered Carbon

Netflix does Bladerunner with this sumptuous adaptation of the cult Richard Morgan novel. The setting is a neon-splashed cyberpunk future in which the super-wealthy live forever by uploading the consciousness into new “skins”. Enter rebel-turned-detective Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman), hired to find out who killed a (since resurrected) zillionaire industrialist while dealing with fallout from his own troubled past. Rumoured to be one of Netflix’s most expensive projects yet, for its second run, Anthony Mackie (aka Marvel’s Falcon) replaced Kinnaman as the shape-shifting Kovacs.

Netflix

21/25 Rick and Morty

Dan Harmon, creator of cult sitcom Community (also on Netflix), finds the perfect outlet for zany fanboy imagination with this crazed animated comedy about a Marty McFly/Doc Brown-esque duo of time travellers. Every genre imaginable is parodied with the manic energy and zinging dialogue we have come to expect from Harmon.

Netflix/Adult Swim

22/25 GLOW

Mad Men’s Alison Brie is our entry point into this comedy-drama inspired by a real life all-female wrestling league in the Eighties. Ruth Wilder (Brie) is a down-on-her luck actor who, out of desperation, signs up a wrestling competition willed into being by Sam Sylvia (podcast king Marc Maron). Britrock singer Kate Nash is one of her her fellow troupe members: the larger than life Rhonda “Britannica” Richardson.

Netflix

23/25 Archer

Deadpan animated satire about an idiot super spy with shaken and stirred mother issues. One of the most ambitious modern comedies, animated or otherwise, Archer tries on different varieties of humour for size and even occasionally tugs at the heart strings.

24/25 Ozark

Breaking Bad for those with short attention spans. The saga of Walter White took years to track the iconic anti-hero’s rise from mild mannered everyman to dead-eyed criminal. Ozark gets there in the first half hour as nebbish Chicago accountant Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) agrees to serve as lieutenant for the Mexican mob in the hillbilly heartlands of Ozark, Missouri (in return they thoughtfully spare his life). Bateman, usually seen in comedy roles, is a revelation as is Laura Linney as his nasty wife Wendy. There is also a break-out performance by Julia Garner playing the scion of a local redneck crime family.

Netflix

25/25 The Good Place

A heavenly comedy with a twist. Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) is a cynical schlub waved through the Pearly Gates by mistake after dying in a bizarre supermarket accident. There she must remain above the suspicions of seemingly well-meaning but disorganised angel Michael (Ted Danson) whilst also negotiating fractious relationships with do-gooder Chidi (William Jackson Harper), spoiled princess Tahani (former T4 presenter Jameela Jamil) and ex-drug dealer Jason (Manny Jacinto).

Netflix

Zayid took comedy classes instead, began to get gigs, and after 11 September started the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival with Dean Obeidallah. “The simplest way for me to describe Maysoon is fearless,” Obeidallah said.

She also toured with the standup comedy show Arabs Gone Wild, landed a part in Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, and became a political commentator on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, which proved a revelation.

Zayid had long understood that some non-disabled people recoiled at disabilities out of fear. “They’re one popped blood vessel or car accident away from being this way,” she said. But her Olbermann appearances drew hateful online comments calling her, she said, “a Gumby-mouth terrorist” and “an honour killing gone wrong”. It was the first time Zayid had been mocked for being disabled, and made her suddenly aware of the abuse that disabled people routinely faced.

After Zayid’s TED Talk went viral, she became one of the most booked speakers at the huge talent agency WME, and used her bigger platform to push questions forward: Where were the visibly disabled news anchors and talk-show hosts? Why, outside a handful of shows – among them Switched at Birth, Breaking Bad, American Horror Story and Speechless – were visibly disabled actors largely absent from television? Why was it OK for non-disabled stars to play disabled characters – a practice nicknamed “CripFace” – and win big awards?

While performances by, say, Joaquin Phoenix as a wheelchair-using cartoonist or Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking largely go unquestioned, and even lauded, by non-disabled people, Zayid said that for many people with disabilities, their acting looks cartoonish, exaggerated, offensive and inauthentic.

“You can put on makeup to look Asian or Latino or black, but black, Asian and Latino people know you’re not,” she said. “And disabled people watching their disabilities being poorly portrayed know it’s not them either.” Or, as she says onstage, if a person in a wheelchair can’t play Beyoncé, Beyoncé can’t play a person in a wheelchair.

Zayid will find out in January whether her show is to be made into a pilot. In the meantime, she is zipping around the world. In recent years, her gigs have included performing at the Team Beachbody Coach Summit – it’s for workout fiends – in Nashville, Tennessee; opening for rapper Pitbull in Las Vegas; and doing comedy, in both Arabic and English, in the United Arab Emirates (“They loved me,” she said).

At every turn, she slaps down people for using a particularly dreaded word. “If you think I’m inspirational because I go and do sit-down standup comedy uncovered and uncensored in the middle of the Arab world, I’ll take it,” she said.

“If you think I’m inspirational because I wake up in the morning and don’t weep about the fact that I’m disabled, that’s not inspirational,” she continued. “That’s like I make you feel better about yourself because you’re not me. I want to make you feel better about yourself because I made you laugh.”

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Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/features/maysoon-zayid-interview-comedian-standup-disability-activist-ted-talk-can-can-show-a8626201.html

[tube-thoughts-blog]

Vol. 14

zero stars - terrible, 1/2 a star - dull, 1 star - folly, 1 1/2 stars - lacking, 2 stars - fair, 2 1/2 stars - decent, 3 stars - terrific

--- MTV's 120 Minutes w/ Alan Hunter:

*Alan has to be pulled out of his dressing room listening to George Jones (Sure, George is way too manly for Alan)

*The pinnacle of man towered over by skyscrapers in a very 20th century modern art ad for athletic 80s yuppies who drink milk. Yuppies listen to Phil Collins on evening MTV, not late night 120 minutes alternative bands.

*Wrigley's gum w/ nutrasweet for sweater wearing 80s families to chew on long bike rides.

*Awesomely 80s retro ad for a Casio keyboard drum that has a dorky guy walking around the type of alley Michael Jackson would dance in until he meets a sexy looking keyboard player who would fit right in with Prince's band at the time.

*TSOL "Colors": Another edgy new wave The Cult-esque sounding music video featuring cowboys. What was up with these bands & cowboys? Depeche Mode did it too. Decent.

*Walk in the West "Lonely Boy": Another edgy cowboy themed video? This time with the alt version of Cougar Mellon? This is more bluesy & has some of those awesome 80s video editing techniques with the band superimposed over shots of driving through rural America. Decent.

*The Descendents "Kids On Coffee": Very 80s punk/hardcore aesthetics featuring mugs of coffee & pictures of Molly Ringwald for some reason. Decent.

*Some new alternative records for the week are gone over by Alan. A few hip hop show up. Not sure if these were quirky hip hop acts or if hip hop was still considered a niche.

*Nickelodeon tips from Dennis. Nick still aired the Menace at this point. Now the black & white, non-trying-to-be-a-Teeny-Bopper-Pop-Star-themed show would give tween brats a seizure.

*Hey, "hoppin' & bobbin'" 80s family, sign up for HBO & cable. You'll get a free phone alarm clock too. Huh? Phone alarm clock? Whose dumb idea was that invention? People will never sleep beside their phones & use them for alarms *wink*

*Vomitous preview for a Joan London talk show about being a great mom & Mother's day on the Lifetime Network. Now, Joan stars in a commercial about putting her dear old mom in a nursing home to get rid of her. Ha!

*A generic new wave pop band "The Hooters" in an MTV bumper & performing & bowing, in front of a concert crowd, as a god awful song by them with the lyrics "Day by day" plays.

*Another cartoon graphics bumper for MTV featuring a jackpot machine scroll. More imagination went in to all these old bumpers than has gone into actual MTV programmingin the last almost two decades since the early 2000s.

*Joe Piscopo in a Miller Lite beer ad playing an over the top 80s wrestler, named Python Piscopo, taking over a seedy dive bar

*"Captain EO" a strangely forgotten Disney theme park music video / movie attraction produced by George Lucas & starring Michel Jackson. Looks good if you like MJ's 80s videos & Star Wars.

*James "So Many Ways": An Aussie sounding new wave singer is dancing, around a field of amber grains, like a spastic. Something new wave singers were known for doing. Dancing like a spastic. Nice, soaring, Bono-esque vocals. More than decent via video cliches.

*The Housemartins "Happy Hour": Quirky U.K. band in a pub partying themed video w/ California Raisins style animation. Terrific.

*Get a KODAK Supralife battery & be able to play air guitar longer beside your giant 80s ghetto blaster boombox. Awesome.

*"Did You know?" ad w/ 1-800 number for ordering a Yugo compact car. Pretty cheap too for a new car under 4,000. Not sure how much a new car cost in the 80s, but it would be hard to get a used car w/out 100,000 plus miles on the motor for anywhere near that amount today.

*Pringles Sour Cream & Onion dip chips has the Royal Family going goofy for the flavor.

*The low fi "do it yourself" aesthetics of videos by bands like Gene Loves Jezebel are something corporate produced videos can't re-capture.

*Gene Loves Jezebel "Heartache": Okay, I might have spoke too soon. The band had signed with Geffen records by the point of this video & the earlier clip doesn't apply. This video is slick w/ better camerawork, but the band's music still manages to shine thru. ---- Decent.

*The Bolshoi "A Way": This Brit band takes over some nice mum's quaint home to film aspooky little number for I.R.S. records 80s R.E.M.'s label

*"The Long Ryders" a hopeful "band" (not sure if real), in a Miller Beer ad, perform theircorny bar band rock & roll in a bar in Hollywood near Tower Records.

*Another stereotypical 80s dorky teen (the kind in every 80s teen movie) plays a CASIO keyboard in his totally 80s bedroom for his bored out of its mind hound-dog w/ big ears

*A 50s via the 80s "Leave it to Beaver" type nerd talks in the mirror about Cracker Jacks & then shares them with his sweetheart.

*Wrap up Hollywood hit movies like "The Karate Kid" & "The Al Jolson Story" (complete w/ him in facepalmingly funny black face) for only $29.95

*Soft & Dri ladies deodorant helps a cute black chick get ready for her tv news debut

*MTV's "Make My Video" contest for a chance to make a video for Madonna. Wow! 80s Madonna was iconic, I'll have to admit. Right up there with all the other 80s icons. Pretty to boot. Also included, in winning, is a surplus of Twix candy bars & a Levis wardrobe. I'd like to see some of the terrible entries from the contest.

*Bang "Summertime" an MTV Basement tapes winner: This NYC street video featuring a garage band that looks like KISS minus makeup feels like it would belong more on regular MTV or Headbangers Ball.  --- Fair.

*Cactus World News "The Bridge": A big, soaring U2 sounding band plays for a concert festival. --- Decent.

*Alan insults Cactus World News & blames it on a music article. I admire the bite that MTV wouldn't show today in insulting an artist on their network. They'd be considered a product that would be above criticism today, if they still had vj's or music videos. Still, Alan is the wrong person to be hosting this show, as MTV would soon figure out.

*The Go-Betweens "Head Full Of Steam": Video w/ a band that has a prissy looking leadsinger & Cure video style aesthetics. Nice crooning. -- Decent.

*80s mallrat teens tired of waiting forever for zits to go away get Clearasil & then beat it on their mopad or skateboard to the local foodcourt to gawk at each other while screwing up their skin even more with chocolate milkshakes & greasy pizza slices. The winner: corporate America. The loser: hormonal teens & their scraping to get by parents.

*Toni volumizer makes any 80s chick look like a high fashion sex kitten.

*"Heartbeat of America is today's Chevrolet"... This was a time when picturesque Americana actually might have meant something before global trade sent automotive jobs overseas.These quirky Americans & American made autos have vanished. Replaced by crumbling urban landscapes (Detroit), jobless & depressed people, along with foreign made products & autos.

*Sammy Hagar era Halen takes over MTV for a week. Would have been more fun w/ Diamond Dave. Can't imagine any band taking over MTV anymore much less one like Van Halen.

*The Wind "Good News, Bad News": A funny semi-acoustic duo music act performs for their neighbors in block party black & white video. Close to decent.

*A Brit rock (nobody that I recognize) ex-junkie for a "No Drugs & Alcohol" sober music making experience 1 - 800 recovery number. Being sober is probably why his music career is so forgettable.

*James Brown for MTV. James Brown popular in the 60s & here still recognized on MTV in the late 80s. Current MTV doesn't recognize music much less music legends.

*Cryin' Out Loud "Live It Up": "I ain't no Marxist" a lyrical band w/ "a message." Fair.

*Awesome post-apocalyptic arena combat ad for a "Lazer Tag" toy. "Stadium not included ."Ha. Someone must have complained that their backyard wasn't as fantasy like as this ad.

*"VCR Theater," every night at 2am on The Movie Channel, helps rock lovin' chicks, who sleep with their electric guitar, record a flick. Why the rock & roll theme was included, in the ad, must have been because the ad was MTV specific. Otherwise, it makes no sense.

*Penn & Teller have "blood & fire" as they guest host MTV. "Born to be wild" badasses.

*A rock & roll hotel in "Playin' For Keeps" rated PG13. 80s PG, which GoodBadFlicks.com would tell you might equal a little R rated sex & nudity & language w/ the comedy. I had forgotten this 80s movie. Might be a forgotten gem, might be well a forgotten dud.

*Christy Brinkley for taking a shower & using Prell shampoo. I, like Chevy Chase, am all for getting a little wet w/ the very sexy 80s model Christy Brinkley.

*More bad jokes & bad silver jackets from Alan.

*Timbuk 3 "Future's So Bright, Gotta Wear Shades": A minor classic. terrific.

*Christmas "Big Plans": Clever points for the band name. Clever & quirky video featuring mailroom drudgery. The band escapes into a fantasy world filled with cliche 80s cheesy & weird video editing techniques. Close to terrific.

*Alan's head is now a talking head in an 80s tv set. Silver 80s tv sets w/ either a rabbit's ears antenna or a dial cable box are more art & make me feel more happy than a 60 inch flat screen wall hanging home movie theater experience to watch crappy 20 tens era reality shows on. Those old tvs played awesome UHF local tv stations & awesome at the time cable channels.

*Every day Joes drink Miller beer after they get off work from their blue collar jobs. It's the "American Way" of getting liver disease & addiction & emotional / relationship problems when you're "Born & raised in the U.S.& A."

*"Top Gun, the number one soundtrack" w/ music from Kenny Loggins, Berlyn, & Loverboy. Coming to a yuppie moron's car stereo near you! (unfortunately)

*"Dippity Do" hair styling gel for futuristic 80s weirdos.

*MTV was hip in the 80s, I might not say this enough, & for clarity on how "cool" it actually was... it had guys sticking their fists up chicken butts & wiggling said fist, while their bald heads were covered in whip or shaving cream. Why? Why not?

*The Rainmakers "Let My People Go-Go": Funky, bluesy, quirky, top hat wearing band rocks the house (literallY) while their horn section blows it up out in some rural decay while walking around w/ the bulldog from Little Rascals. Decent.

*Billy Chinmock "Somewhere in the Night": tape cut out, so who knows, didn't look like it was gonna be great for an alt video what w/ its aesthetics of a high style 80s babe walking down a foggy back alley. zero.

I think at this point in 1980's 120 minute alt rock history, they had mistaken alot of the popular bluesy rock of the time for alt rock & mixed it in w/ the Brit new wave. It didn't mesh together well. I guess none of the music on 120 minutes history ever truly did through the changing time periods & trends. At least it existed for a while & was something a bit different.

*Limited Warranty "Hit You": 120 Minutes has definitely gone off, at this point, but the tape has another video for me. It's a new wave pretty boy group. In the style of A-Ha "Take on Me." It's nothing terrible for what it is. Pretty catchy like most of that kind of music was. Decent, I guess.

close to 2 for Alan,  close to 3 for MTV, 2 1/2 for videos, 2 1/2 for ads

--------------------------------------

Geraldo Rivera: Exposing Satan's Underground *"This is a horror that will give children bad dreams." We're not talking about Satan,no, it's Geraldo's mustache. Jokes & utter stupidity aside... Seriously, after all his 80s & 90s tabloid garbage "news" hysteria, it's unbelievable that Geraldo still has a career in journalism.* zero stars

Penn & Teller Bullshit!: Ouija Boards & Near Death Experiences *The mind can be deceived through cheap games & brain power-outs.* close to 3 stars

--- DinosaurDracula.com presents Creepy Commercials Countdown:

*Sunkist Spooky Fruit (1989): Eat enough gummy fruit flavored snacks & wake up, from a candy coma, in a cemetery filled w/ animated trees, lounge about skeletons, & purple people eaters from the stars.* 2 stars

*Easter Seals Halloween Coupons w/ Vincent Price (1990): "Halloween doesn't have to be spooky." It's blasphemy for a lame organization to get one of the most symbolically spooky actors of all time to say this. "It should be warm & friendly." Even if it's meant to be ironic & Vincent Price sure reads it that way, it sucks. I want Halloween to be like Halloween 3, and end horribly. Well, at least in my imagination. Candy & fright. Not "safe" coupons.* 1 star

*Coors Light Beer w/ Elvira (1991): If I were an Addams family style disembodied hand & I met Elvira, I would do more than try to hand her a beer. I would crawl down the front of her very open black dress & never come out. Also, I wouldn't mind being at a Halloween party stuck behind Elvira in one of those two person horse costumes.* 3 stars

*Spooky Goop Halloween Make-Up (1988): Be the coolest & weirdest kid on the block going from cheap ghoul face paint to full on Fulci's Zombi grotesque skin.* 3 stars

*The People's Court Frankenstein Promo (1988): Village idiots will kill over daytime trash tv. Dr. Frankenstein & his monster (son?) would have been great guests on Jerry Springer.* close to 3 stars

----------------------------

Public Access: "My Name Is John Daker" *A mumbling piano lady, of some Methodist church according to her, & a mumbling male singer who couldn't be more stiff. They attempt a song about "The Lord" only for it to devolve into jaunty number about the moon hitting one's eye like a big-ah pizza pie.* either 1 star or 3 stars terrible becoming terrific

--- Red Letter Media presents Best of the Worst: Shakma, Python II, and Beaks the Movie

*Shakma: A crazy baboon on the loose while its victims live action role play in a college animal testing lab.* either 1 star or close to 2 1/2 (for primate slasher premise cuteness)

*Python II: One of those crappy CGI snake genre flicks. A genre that would be further made worse by SYFY & Asylum later on in the 2000s. The python looks startling, in its scenes, but I do not know if that's just all the taco soup, that I ate earlier, talking or what.* 1 1/2 stars

*Beaks the Movie: The VHS box cover says "unintentionally funny." See, hipsters, our VHS ancestors were self aware too. So, this is pretty much an Italian exploitation version of Hitchcock's "The Birds" complete w/ that Eye-Talian auteur creative cliche of animal cruelty. Such a dumb premise taken to its heights of ridiculousness, but M. Night would try it with "The Happening" & there's the "wants to be so bad so bad it's good" but isn't "Birdemic 1 & 2." Not really all that fun, except to Red Letter's Rich.* 1 star

According to Red Letter Media, Beaks is best (by default) Shakma is divisive & Python 2 was supposed to get destroyed by beach birds but they don't like birdseed covered VHS tapes

-------------------------------

Classic Comedy Central: Buddy Scott trio in the elevator *An office worker ant is trapped in his coffin falling a hundred plus floors to hell. He cheers up when a lounge act sing to him the message that he's "heading to the top." Penn Jillette (then voice of Comedy Central) says to "Think positive."* 2 1/2 stars

--- Everything Is Terrible:

*You Gotta Be Kidding Me: The customer is always a pain in the rear of the golf shorts.* 1 star

*They're Coming For Your Kids!: "For the cost of two Cokes," & one soul, they'll become manipulative salespeople of religious literature on their school campuses.* 1 or 3 stars

*The Net: "From astrology to gardening & punk rock."* close to 3 stars

*Telephone Song!: Be correct when you dial collect. Tween girls discover the power of the telephone. They all do.* 2 1/2 stars

*Rock Music & the Occult: "God isn't interested in impressing teenagers." Hence the reason that Satan's rock music is so successful.* 3 stars

----------------------------

"B Videos 101 Vol. 1" *"Perfect, no one suspects" that Andy Griffith is a bar brawling deviant, that Redd Foxx is from a galaxy far far away, or that Papa Smurf likes to have his salad tossed.* 2 1/2 stars & zero stars for the doo doo Jackson Pollock porno finale

--- Phone Losers:

*Security Cam Pranks - The Kitchen Couple: An outrageous & short lived invasion of boring breakfast table privacy.* either zero or close to 2 1/2 stars

*Home Security Prank Call - Peace of Mind: Every hour on the hour reassurance is bothersome & as comforting as forced prayer.* close to 2 1/2 stars

*Rich Neighborhood Prank Calls: We've been going through your trash, & we don't like what we find.* 2 1/2 stars

*Tenants from Hell - Archaeological Dig Site: Before you hear it on the news, we want to let you know about the giant skeletons & the buried alien technology that we found.* close to 3 stars

-----------------------

Beavis & Butthead: It's So Cold in the D *"This is hard to dance to." Detroit has fallen on such hard times, the very danceable to hip hop sounds more like a funeral song.*

2 1/2 stars w/ riffing

1 star w/out

5 Dollar Wrestling: Death Match Dance Party *"Blood in the roller-rink."* 2 stars

--- Found Footage Fest:

*How To Have Cybersex on the Internet: "those who have mastered the art of one handed typing."* close to 3 stars

*It Only Takes A Second: "to be safe" or die in a hilariously horrible accident.*

3 stars

*Mr. Nasty - Insult VHS Tape: Mr. Nasty is such a bad insult comedian, he makes Andrew Dice Clay look like Jeffry Ross who looks like Nazi propaganda of a Jew on marijuana.* 1 star

*What Does God Say About Worldliness: "It's better to go to a funeral than to go to a party." Maybe so, but it's not as much fun. So this failed comedian, turned touring for money evangelist, says one can have a fine stable of horses, cars, or women... but HaHa, it's a one way ticket to H-E-L-L. The evangelical sort of brags about having a stable of finely bred horses, by the way. His audience looked like they were at a funeral. No smiles, no laughs, no horses, just misery. I thought they called it the gospel (good news).* 1 star

*Something's Happening: Watching the mucus sizzle. The "stuff that's killing the world" (mucus) of a old man / mucus conspiracy theorist. (What did I just watch?!)* Uh? stars?

------------------------------

--- Monstervision w/ Joe Bob Briggs: Coma

*Joe Bob has on his gloriously un-politically correct rebel flag western shirt (Joe Bob is just too un-PC for current tv) & he does a funny editorial on the world's obsession with wrapping the everyday garbage products we produce & consume up with so much other wrapping that there's no real garbage anymore just the plastic we used to hold all the crap we consumed.

*TNT had such a hard on for E.R. coming to TNT, Joe Bob says that's the reason the first flick is E.R. creator Michael Crichton's "Coma"

*Drive In totals:  77 dead bodies... 8 breasts 2 living 6 dead (censored)... Brain slicing kidney weighing.. vegetable handling.. organ donating.. plastic covered peni (Devious look on Joe Bob's face as he says this).. death by electrocution...  gratuitous New England antiquing... fire extinguisher fu.. cadaver fu..

*Huggies ad w/ a baby parachuting out of a plane thru fluffy clouds. Don't diapers sell themselves? Babies are cute, sure, but is this to convince new parents of that fact & to make the awful reality of changing shitty diapers not have them wanting to put their brat up for adoption?

*Dennis Miller for dollar collect calls & being a smug asshole. Only good thing that he ever did was Weekend Update on SNL, & Norm was better at it. Fallon & Tina not my choice...Colin Quinn pretty okay...

*Fisher Price Rescue Mission toddler action figures ad... Huh? This isn't Saturday morning cartoon commercial breaks? This is after 11pm TNT. Why the ads for kids & their parents?

*A dog dreams about bacon in the classic "Beggin Strips" commercial. I think this would not be politically correct now either. Dogs can't eat bacon because their owners have to feed them liberal nazi approved gluten free & non-processed healthy meat dog food. Surely no bacon, a little chicken (no hormones) & they'd just love to take meat away from dogs & make them vegans. They don't go that far yet, but PETA probably does with their pets.

*Leann Rimes (sp?) croons the classic country song "Blue" while images of picturesque Maine play in a Red Lobster commercial. Nice combo.

*An ad about the type of toothbrush (Oral B) a dentist uses, & so should you. Dentists also have free access to all the high tech dental cleaning & surgery tools in their office, so why does it matter that they use a certain toothbrush at home? It doesn't.

*WCW's "The Giant" has nostrils so big that he could inhale most normal size people. Check him out on TNT's WCW Monday Nitro.

*Ikea turns a subway train into a kitschy living space for the daily grind passengers. Ikea furniture also is the decor of one of the sub levels of Hell.

*Joe Bob reads from the "trashy" novel version of Coma while he sips from his Budweiser covered in a TNT logo coozy.

*Another of the countless "never need another" "get back to your outdoor life" allergy rx ads. I wonder if evolved alien civilizations, out there in the stars, still deal w/ allergy problems on their planets filled w/ lush plant life...

*Firestone helps a young college age guy & his dog get back out on the road of life in his beat up convertible.  "Saved money too." Sure, mechanics aren't rip off artists.

*Visit the TNT website for NBA news, a Babylon 5 chatroom (you were a legit nerd if you were on a chat site like this in the 90s, not a hipster nerd), even a Monstervision page

*$1.99 Disney toys in Happy Meals has a future out of the closet broadway kid putting on a living room show, along w/ his sister, for his parents who are too cheap to buy real toys or cook an actual healthy dinner for their kids. Harsh, but whatever.

*Kevin Nealon, another Weekend Update SNL alumni, sells out to a collect call ad.

*Antz, one of the early CGI Pixar style movies. Has some of the charm, if I'm remembering correctly, of those CGI cartoon movies for kids, not as obnoxious as most, but the animation hasn't aged well (imo).

*Monks avoid breaking their vow of silence by chewing "Beano" before eating gassy salads at dinner. First semi clever & funny & not despisable ad of the night.

*Digitally restored, & w/ dvd style extras, episodes of Star Trek coming to 1990s Sci Fi channel hosted by Shatner.

*Joe Bob has an I.V. drip ran into his beer to keep with the medical theme.

*Joe Bob makes a joke about Dustin Hoffman being a midget who has to wear platform pimp shoes. ha

*Two patronizing ads to talk about. One w/ a less manly man who needs to get a mid sized Sonoma pick up truck like a "real man." Another about a old maid going to Tru Value to pick up (not truck) a can of paint to match her cat's furball.

*Eggo's new microwave pancakes (I'm sure they're edible?) make a dad believe he's a short order breakfast cook at a greasy spoon diner. One where truckers show up in a family's kitchen in the morning. If truckers are showing up in your kitchen, uninvited, it's not for griddle cakes. It's cause you're gettin' raped.

*Wanna check out what whitebread 90s peoples looked like, view this "So easy to use, no wonder it's #1" America Online 1 800 number commercial

*"Come see the softer side of SEARS" Short story, every time I used to go to the mall ,I somehow ended up entering thru the SEARS appliance section. So, first I was greeted by refrigerators, washers, dryers, color tvs (Dire Straits, wink). The softer side, the SEARS clothing section, was way off in another part of the mall. Some tucked away corner. By the time that I was there, mall anxiety was really getting to me. I wanted to Tom Savini "Dawn of the Dead" special fx kill a few mall motherfuckers. Not really. I'm more timid & just wanted to run back out the way I came thru all the appliances.

*Joe Bob talks about Rip Torn being a good ole Texas boy & having starred in an episode of I Love Lucy. Joe Bob doesn't really like Lucy (me either) but feels like he's seen every episode (me too for some reason).

*Joe Bob blames Nick at Nite for classic tv osmosis, & says we're better off watching "hick at nite." I definitely digged TNT's Monstervision & 100 % Weird, but there were a few late nite Nick at Nite shows worth watching like F-Troop & Dobie Gillis among others

*"Get back to the groovy 60s" w/ flower power & free love? No. McDonald's Big-Macs & fries instead. The secret sauce is almost as good as sex & for 49 cents, the same price a burger was in 1969, I'm in. Don't take the brown acid or Grimace will really freak you out, mannnn!

*Kinkos guido competitors think it's better to have comedy than color printing. Not a bad ad going off one viewing & not having it ran into the ground like tv ads' fate goes.

*"Smile you got French's Smile you got fun." French's mustard. Smile you got heartburn. Smile you got a nasty yellow stain on your white t-shirt. Points for the dog, in the ad, w/ a whole hotdog held sideways in his mouth w/out swallowing. That had to have lasted all of 2 seconds. Dogs swallow everything whole in seconds.

*Cute commercial w/ live bears dressed up like a mama bear & her school aged children little bears. She dresses them up in backpacks & sends them off into the woods to go to school. She packs a lunch of rice krispie treats in wrappers. Bears & people food don't mix. The bears probably destroyed the set to eat all the sticky candy & mauled a few school children once they got to school.

*Motorola phones & pagers give NYC hipster yuppies "wings." It's a fashion model / actress who attended suit & gown parties while also keeping it real w/ her across town jeans & t-shirt boyfriend. Not sure how many regular folks had a cell phone at this point. Pagers were pretty popular yet ghetto.

*Campbells tries to give moms the delusion that their teenage sons will leave the bedroom & the Playstation long enough to have a family meal in the kitchen.

*Hip Hop tapdance meets RiverDance meets the Salsa dance in a TOPS appliance ad. Why they needed to spice up an appliance store grand opening is just a sign of the popularity of River Dance crap at this point in the 90s.

*TimeWarner cable, it's like a bagel penetrated by the Empire State building. No, really, that's the image they put on the screen. Not sexual subliminal at all, wink wink. Either that or they're saying, "Fuck you, New York, pay your overpriced TimeWarner cable bill, 'cause we got our figurative giant dick up your ass!"

*Joe Bob claims to have been kicked out of a convent of nuns. Fox in the hen-house.

*I think it's important to view these old (not too old) ads, because the sinister hand appears, & is more visible given the historical context. It shows that sinister hand has always been around trying to make the world outside the hamster wheel seem prettier than it really is.

*Wear Target clothes & look like a model photographed in stunning black & white photography Yep.

*Tony Danza is the boss of fifty percent off collect calls. These collect calls ads were the pathetic celebrity precursor to things like Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice & Dancing w/ the Stars.

*Preview for James Garner in a TNT original movie along with Kathleen Turner. Ted Turner had a real hard on for old actors like Garner.

*A Geico car insurance fairy ad. Geico were already torturing people at this point? Hmmm.

*Another Geico ad w/ a business guy bumming a ride on the back of a chicken truck w/ feathers flying in his mouth & all over the place. Quirky, but still Geico, & they've worn out their welcome long ago.

*Joe Bob & Reno the Mail Girl discuss Bill Clinton lowering the standards of America's women w/ his flawed Southern charm & looks.

*"Words instead of letters" to the tune of "Sweet nuthins" on Motorola Wings pagers. The era of text messages has begun. Interesting ad for historical purposes.

*A pretty lady leans out of the darkness, turns on a light, & says "Do you see the tar stains on my teeth or smell the tobacco on my breath?" Well, no I don't have smell-o-vision & whatever happened to Targon mouthwash? Smokers just don't give a shit anymore. The rising price of smoking (health, money, & legally) has worn smokers down.

*Clairol hair color. Coloring one's hair can make that person feel like a "natural wo-man."

*Joe Bob thinks that the TNT censors are out to blur comatose boobs because they mistakenly think the sight of them will make people wanna screw nekkid corpses.

*Joe Bob ridicules the plot holes & foolishness involving bumbling security guards & a heroine who is clued in but clueless.

*Coma: A sleuthing surgeon almost sinks trying to stop a corrupt hospital conspiracy of organ harvesting for profit & having a social climbing coworker boyfriend (Michael Douglas) who doesn't, til almost her end, believe her conspiracy.*

running from 2 to 2 1/2 stars for Coma, 3 for Joe Bob, & 1 1/2 for the ads

--------------------------------

The Young Turks: Fox News's War On... Sharks *Clear the waters, sharks, people are number 1.* 2 stars (edit years later: I used to occasionally get news from the turds at Turks. how dumb.)

Public Access: "Live TV Prank Calls To Pro-911 Communist Public Access Host" (youtube) *Bluff & guff.* either 1/2 or 1 star

James Randi & Psychic Crime Solving *Police don't officially use psychics but often rely on their illogical detective work.* either 1/2 (what'd you expect? other than sensational lies by the psychic. which this time didn't happen. therefore dull reading.) or 3 stars

==== The Comfort Zone w/ Ray Comfort:

"Ray Comfort's New Homosexuality Movie" ("Audacity" ha...)

*"People were begging" this Aussie sounding evangelical, Kirk Cameron's buddy, the guy who debated, along with Kirk, atheists.

They were begging him to make a movie about gay ole homosexuality in the non-happy sin sense.

He's also infamous for a video where he talks about evolution & creation using a banana as an example.*

runs from 1 to close to 2 stars

(He's rather polite & there's not a lot of hate towards gays as usual w/ these things.)

(edit, years later:

when you're a shitlib supporter of gay rights, you put them up on a pedestal.

not realizing how truly degenerate they are.

this is way before I saw pics of what really goes on at pride parades.

where oral & anal sex takes place on the street along w/ half naked men in leather & clown outfits performing spankings & bondage acts.

many times, other non-gay themselves equal rights, for queers, supporters (like i was) would bring their families (including children) there to support these pride marches. that's a folly that should open more eyes. not sure it does when one is that blinded w/ the mindset of "don't judge" & "love is love"... ugh... smh in disgust & shame

here I was poking fun at a dumb evangelical (man of faith in a faithless world. an easy target.) & his banana folly

while thinking anyone else was intolerant or ignorant for holding onto tradition in the face of such odd & socially dysfunctional behavior.

forgive me.)

================================================================================

Conan on TBS: James Bobo Fay Got His Hands On Sasquatch Semen *Bobo is willing to "take one for the team" of bigfoot hunters. In the name of pseudo-science & love.* 2 1/2 stars

Kenny vs. Spenny: Who Is Cooler? *Kenny overdosing on black tar heroin or Spenny, Kenny's caring nurse, dressed up like a "Greek rapist" (Johnny Depp)? The obvious loser gets locked in a cold meat locker.* close to 3 stars

"Fan Made Dominos Pizza Commercial featuring a fake The Undertaker" *Okay, so it's the Summer of 1992? It's a few months before the World Wrestling Federation pay per view wrestling show "Summerslam." Beware though The Undertaker has been missing for months. That's not the strange part, no, the strange part is that The Naked Gun's Leslie Nielsen had been out searching for him in vignettes. Dominos pizza was the sponsor. Here, some real nerds borrow a vhs camcorder, their Dominos delivery gremlin of a car, & a nighttime cemetery to film one of their friends dressed up like their hero, The Under-taker, lurking behind a tree while, in said graveyard, ordering pizza through the power of the darkside? Not exactly sure, but he got them to deliver w/out paying for the pizza & only leaving an autographed picture of himself as a tip.* 3 stars for absurd effort

Look Around You: Food *Vegetable orchestra for the Feast of Saint Frankenstein. Featuring a piping hot casserole made out of recycled & dehydrated food that pushes the fat right out of the skin. Or you could stay home & celebrate your birthday with a delivery medicinal-pizza.* close to 3

"New Orleans Airwaves - The Mystery Morgus Episode" *Serialized & shot on grainy film, circa 1960s, mad science lab hijinks w/ all the gloriously ghoulish trappings.* more than 2 1/2 stars

--- Everything Is Terrible:

*Christian Star Wars: It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for an Imperial lazer beam to penetrate the soul of a believer.* 3 stars

*Anybody Can Make Chili Dogs: Knock on a stranger's door & share the message of love topped w/ a variety of condiments to mask the bland taste of grinded pig's anus packaged in a tube form.* close to 2 1/2 stars

*Machine Gun Magic: "They're not for everyone." Just those who can't get enough of that tat-a-tat-tat action.* 1 star

*Police Scanner: The suspect appears to be an obese house-cat.*

either 1/2 a star or fair

*Why Wait For Heaven: The babyboom generation were really susceptible to cult thought & behavior.*

either 1 or 2 1/2 stars (eye opener, I'm now a mindless believer)

-------------------------------------

Manimal: Night of the Beast *Simple bear necessities of wildnerness life trying to be corrupted & turned into a casino resort for the mafia. Robert Englund (not quite Freddy just yet) vs. Manimal. There's a destructive claw, in the movie, but it's not Freddy's. It's Manimal in a ridiculous looking bear suit.* 2 1/2 stars

Men Without Hats - Safety Dance (Literal Version) *"Whack a midget's ass."* 2 1/2 stars for literal 3 stars for original

Angry Video Game Nerd: Seaman for Dreamcast *It has Leonard Nimoy. It eats time & knowledge. It says / does "fuck." It's not logical... or is it? (Cue creepy sci fi music)* 3 stars

The Young Turks: Man Breaks Leg Attempting To Rape Horse *Sadly "it wasn't his first "rodeo"..."* 1 star

Hannibal: Fromage *Lures & lutes. Hannibal gets into a kung fu showdown w/ a fellow serial killer.*

3 stars

Penn & Teller Bullshit!: PETA & Eat This! *Ethical? No. Infact, insanely evil. Emaciated? Yes. ------ Stop expecting results. Start exacting change. Avoid batshit crazy activists at all cost. They'd starve us all.* 3 stars

---- Memory Hole:

*I'm Obese Song: Just tryna tell you people that I'm messed up.* 3 stars

*Meatsack Worshipers: It puts the cow tongue on its skin or else it won't ever get Fritos again.* close to 3 stars

*Salad Tossers: Hidden Valley's behind closed doors food fetishes.* 2 1/2 stars

*Satan's Dinner Prayer: Dig in, hooves first.* close to 2 1/2 stars

*Dance Til U Puke: Achy Breaky Rappers never die. They cry "unbutton my fly."* 3 stars

---------------------

"Munchies" (1987) *Roger Corman produced Gremlins ripoff starring Harvey Korman as a polyester sleazeball bumbling villain. Exists in a quirky America similar to Tim Burton's "Mars Attacks."* running from 2 down to 1 1/2 stars

---- Reel Wild Cinema w/ Sandra Bernhard : Supernatural Sirens

*Creepy Mexican 1940s Universal Horror looking horror short called "Curse of the Crying Woman." Pretty darn creppy, and much more depraved than Universal Horror.

*Sandra wants to slap a bitch (The Crying Woman) & then go get a massage (ha)

*Sandra says not to mess with the hearts of Texas witches or sell your soul to Hollywood

*"The Naked Witch" a story about Bruce Campbell's hipster twenty something year old uncle riding the backroads of Texas, in the 1960s, accidentally bringing back to life buried & vengeful femme fatales. while all the time narrating to himself about it.

*Sandra drops some info about the director of "Naked Witch" filming another flick called "Naughty Dallas" in a strip club owned by Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin Jack Ruby

*Comedian Dana Gould joins Sandra to talk about capes, masks, & restraining orders.

*Sandra gives a hilarious history lesson on Mexican imports including pain killers, ponchos, various other things from Tijuana, & most of all El Santo horror/sci fi movies

*"Samson vs. The Vampire Women"... Watch as El Santo gets "monkey flipped," then puts a werewolf in a "camel clutch" wrestling submission hold. I love typing that sentence.

*1950s retro ad where a woman shows off her Playtex magic plastic bra as she turns completely invisible, except for her underwear, in a grocery store of all places.

*Dana talks w/ Sandra about his friendship w/ Ed Wood's starlet Vampira (sp?). Great story about how she met a rollerskating Bela Lugosi on Hollywood Boulevard. Ha. awesome.

*"The Girl in the Cage"... a 1960s kooky nudie short minus the nudity. We can watch the kitschy siren paw at her bamboo prison, but no nudity. 'Cause even though we're all adults & this is late night, the Puritans who wouldn't ever watch this, & the kids, whose parents ought to have them in bed by late night tv time, might get offended. Nice jungle girl strip tease, none the less.

*Buy a Viva Santo t-shirt from this 1 800 number ad. Do it before Hot Topic puts it up at their store & makes it not cool to wear anymore. Shortly after, they did.

*Grindhouse coming attractions commercials for "The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman"... "Devil Woman" a cobra charming she bitch flick from Asia.... "Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico" a Frankenstein sexploitation feature....

*No surprise to find out, via the credits, that the show's "Film Doctor" is none other than the director of "Basket Case" & "Frankenhooker"

3 stars for the shorts & 3 stars for Sandra

----------------------------------

--- Crematia's Horrorscopes (old school tv horror host):

*Aries "A man w/ a glass eye will try to catch yours as his rolls under a table"... Not a bad way to meet. "Meet cutes" make me wanna puke. Glass eyes usually make me want to puke, too, This however I like.

*Taurus "A gardener will ask you to propagate. Don't do it. Ask him to fix the latch." If you have to be told not to screw your gardener, you need more than your horrorscope read. Gardeners don't look the way sexless middle aged women imagine them to be. No six-pack & tan. Only a mustache w/ bread crumbs in it. "Fix the latch." He's not a gynecology expert, either, I'm sure. If you can afford a gardener, you can afford a trip to the vagina doctor. We're already asking enough work, at slave wages, from our illegal help.

*Gemini "Cockroaches will stage a counter-revolution in your kitchen." Wouldn't that make the cockroaches already the oppressive regime in one's house if that were so?... No hiding when the lights come on. It's the humans crawling around in the dark trying to throw molotov cocktails in order to get access to the cereal cabinet or the fridge. Are they gonna booby trap cans of roach spray so that it will explode in the human's hands? That sounds more revolutionary than counter-revolutionary.

*Cancer "You'll be given a gift that requires batteries." This had to be tame in order to be on basic tv. But is a sex toy joke being worked in here? Not funny & probably not.

*Leo "A poultry farmer will ask you to do foul things, but you'll chicken out." Okay, maybe I was wrong about the last one not being about a sex toy. This is getting pretty grotesque. "Chickening out" hints at being interested in the first place. I don't know too many women or men who'd have to turn over in their heads the notion of doing foul things w/ a guy who more than likely smells of chicken feces even after bathing. Someone might be in to that. Someone w/out a gag reflex (I don't mean that in an oral sex sense).

*Virgo "A woman will view your clothing w/ disdain & offer you club soda." Bad joke.

*Libra "You'll attend a party that reminds you of a bowl of cereal full of fruits, nuts, & dates." First, you need some fruits & nuts to spice up a party. Aren't dates dried up fruit? Who'd want a dried up date? Not the fruit but an actual romantic interest... Who'd be at a party thinking about cereal? besides a really high stoner who couldn't wait to get back to their apt & watch cartoons....

*Scorpio "You'll be invited to the neighbors for a matzo ball but you won't know what to wear." If you're that culturally ignorant, then wear some of your Nazi memorabilia attire.

*Sagittarius "A grammarian will make rude comments about your dangling participle" that's pretty clever, I guess. unless your sexual partner is the grammarian.

*Capricorn "A fisherman will invite you to dinner. Go just for the halibut." Stay to look at his small dinghy. Surprised that she didn't say that too.

*Aquarius "A foreigner will misinterpret your body language & take you up on an offer." What's w/ all the references to stumbling into a bad sexual situation? People who follow the nonsense of the zodiac must be really paranoid about rape.

*Pisces "A phrenologist will ask to look at your wife's bumps." He's a doctor of small bumps. He's not a plastic surgeon wanting to give your wife bigger boobs.

Crematia has a dirty mind.

2 1/2 stars

---------------------------

GoodBadFlicks.com : "Bad Channels" *Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" radio airwaves alien panic meets early 1990s rock & roll cheese plus Full Moon Horror productions animatronics special fx work. Starring quirky & energetic MTV vj Martha Quinn.* close to 3 stars for the review

Idiot Box starring Alex Winter: Episode 1 *Raw animal urges & accounting.* more than 2 1/2 stars

Clerks TV Show Pilot (Disney) 1995 *So sanitized, Silent Bob would have Tourettes trying to sit through it. Jim Breuer would fit in pretty well w/ Jason Mewes.* close to 2 stars

The Daily Show w/ Craig Kilborn: 1996 Bill Clinton & Bob Dole Presidential Debate Coverage *Kilborn struggles to connect w/ the studio audience (I believe there was one & it wasn't just the crew laughing. Or maybe it was. Often quiet.. only minimal laughing noise). The correspondents of the Daily Show invade their first of many major political events. You could tell that the major news journalists didn't really know how to react to it. Nothing interesting to report from the snoozer debate. News of Sammy Hagar fired from Van Halen. A funny bit called "Tesh History" that I forgot about & remember liking back in the day. Craig interviews old school entertainers Joe Balogna & his wife Renee Taylor.* 2 stars

Nickelodeon Arcade (featuring the stars of Nick's Salute Your Shorts) *Donkey Lips & Buttlick (the redheaded scumbag pal of Edward Furlong in Terminator 2) go to a gameshow arcade ran by a quirky black dude in a colorfully loud shirt. The type of arcade that moms imagine. Ones w/ a green screen like on the weather channel & where kids wear bike helmets plus elbow & knee pads just to be safe.* 2 1/2 stars (fond childhood memory)

Reading Rainbow: The Salamander Room (1994) *LeVar visits a NYC zoo rainforest enclosure. Much love to Lynne Thigpen who was the voice of reading the story. An unsung hero of the show. Also, there's a reason the theme song is stuck in many an adult's head years & years after never hearing the song again. Good reason that is.* 3 stars

James Randi debunks an aura reader (youtube) *The aura reader had to pick out the auras or actually sillhouettes of strangers behind a thin white sheet. 2 out of 5 ain't bad, given it's all a game of chance & aura reading is bullshit. But, if I were the aura reader, I would claim that the 1920s style barbershop quartet top hats threw off their chakras.* 2 stars

---- TV Carnage:

*Seamless: On Dr. Phil, today a murder confession, tomorrow the tale of a clutterbug.* 3 stars

*The Bottom Line Is Nice Hair! No Matter How You Get It!: "There's a new you waiting" & he has teased bangs but no bald spot.* close to 2 1/2 stars

*Your Inner Piece: If you are wise, you won't let a white guy wanna be yoga master (yogi) put you into all kinds of awkward stretching positions that resemble sex positions.* close to 2 1/2 stars

*Women Look Amazing When They Fight: Noogies & short shorts. I miss America's Roman gladiatorial days of sexist lady athletics.* 2 1/2 stars

*Sylvia Dogs Do Rule Heaven: Saint Peter has a St. Bernard.* 2 stars

----------------------

Beavis & Butthead: Don't Call Me Dude - Scatterbrain *If you don't know the dude, it's rude.* 2 stars w/ riffing close to 2 stars w/out

Uncharted Zone: Gemma Cretella - Thesis Antithesis Synthesis *Pretentiously wordy hipster techno music white rapper.* 1 1/2 stars

Robocop: Zone Five *This series continues to borrow heavy from Batman & Frank Miller. There's a drug hitting the streets of Old Detroit that's similar to The Joker's laughing gas. The bureaucrats have turned a section of the most crime ridden part of the city over to vigilantes who secretly are the criminals supplying the drug. There's a psychiatrist agreeing w/ the criminals & he's a lot like Dr. Crane in Batman Begins. Robocop's son almost gets corrupted by the vigilantes, similar to a lot of Robin stories.* more than 2 1/2 stars

Rifftrax versus 70's Commercials from CBS's presentation of the Star Wars Holiday Special *"Always look for the union label" & the "extreme melodrama."* 3 stars w/ riffing 2 1/2 stars w/out

Occult Demon Cassette presents "Never Be A Victim" (1990s Stranger Danger) *Be alert, aware, & filled w/ awful anxiety. Has friendly Irish-Canadian police officer Jim scared the shit out of you, w/ his helpful hints about the horrific, yet or not?*  either 1 or 2 stars

"Madman" (1982) w/ commentary from cast & crew *Trends don't always have to be a bad thing. Following in the footsteps of Friday the 13th & Halloween, some young, determined filmmakers scrounge together enough resources to take a camp legend & turn it into another great entry into the early days of the 80s slasher genre.* 3 plus stars w/ commentary 3 stars w/out

American Gothic: Inhumanitas *To living we owe respect. To the dead we owe the truth. To the devil, Lucas Buck, a crooked lawyer owes money & also a corrupted preacher owes his soul.* close to 3 stars or 1 1/2 stars for the horrible CGI / unintentionally funny scene of a poor, old, black man's head on the body of the angel sister pretending to be a waitress.

"Warlock Moon" w/ audio commentary from Joe Bob Briggs *According to Joe Bob, San Francisco & Austin indie filmmakers may have traded ideas about turning the classic children's fable "Hansel & Gretel" into a horror flick. He suspects much marijuana was smoked in the process (ha). San Francisco produced this one, Warlock Moon, which Joe Bob says should have went by its other, much better title "Blood Spa." The Austin connection makes it very similar to & almost a sister film of "Saw" (Texas Chain, that is).*

3 stars w/ commentary & 2 stars w/out

The Higgins Boys & Gruber: Skinny Wizard *Tired of spending your weekend either jamming out to metal in your kitchen/den/living room combo or going to the mall w/ your devil worshiping friend Thad? Straighten up, thanks to The Parents Coalition for Good Tunes.* 2 1/2 stars

Jerry Springer: "I'm In Love With A Gay Vampire" *You'd think that it'd be a drain, but they're great emotional & spiritual support in a relationship or affair.* 1 star

Duran Duran: Rio (Literal Video Version) *"Sweet air saxophone dude, dude, dude, dude..."*

running from 2 to close to 2 1/2 starsw/ literal & close to 2 1/2 stars for actual

"Dirty Shary" ---xxx--- (1985) *She's got a 44. No, not a handgun. A 44 double d breast size & she's using it to somehow help take down a white slavery sex ring.* more than 2 1/2 stars

Cheaters: Anesthesiologist Finds Cougar Wife Cheating *Menopause shouldn't mean a skanky girls nite out addict should pause gettin' some from douchebag hunks just 'cause her hubbie specializes in dulling sensitivity.* zero stars

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Mitchell *"Leaves behind the "great" smell of brute." Joel also leaves behind a great legacy, fleeing in an escape pod after this awful movie. This movie is more anti-drug idiotic than Reefer Madness. Joe Don runs around being a supposed to be loveable drunk, but isn't, always chugging a six pack & shooting first or causing someone else's violent demise, even at one point an innocent helicopter cop partner. However, he's on his moral high horse in forced comedic interactions w/ his high class escort girlfriend who he's always shoving around & hauling off to jail for a small amount of marijuana. Hypocritical. That's on top of the rest shit movie smeared in 70s era country western trucker lowlife swagger Americana b.s. (not just in the also awful soundtrack & not in any cool way).*

more than 2 stars w/ Joel's last MST3K riff & 1 star w/out

5 Dollar Wresling: Storm Maverick, Your Next 5 Dollar Wrestling Superstar *He body slams his pillow, even though it's also his amigo, on his grandma's living room floor.* close to 3 stars

--- TBS Commercials May 12, 1988 (Part 3 on Youtube) ran during the Superstation Movie Presentation of "The Savage Bees":

*The announcer lady talks about how Thursday at 8:00pm prime time, TBS will be showing The Dirty Dozen w/ Lee Marvin & Ernest Borgnine. That shows the huge difference in old school TBS & modern "Very Funny" TBS. The Dirty Dozen is very manly whereas TBS's modern primetime lineup of "Big Bang Theory" is very unmanly.

*Preview for Frank Sinatra as a guest on Larry King Live on sister network CNN.

*80s mallrat tween girls dance about because Lee 'Press On Nails' have just been made for smaller hands.

*Partly animated Murine earwax removal system commercial. My grandparents were of the Depression/WW2 generation. By the late 80s, they were already retired & living comfortably. Products & ads like this remind me so much of their medicine cabinet. TBS reminds me of them, as well. Old war movies, westerns, & Americana sitcoms / dramas.

*A New York Giants linebacker, in full gear, in his locker room spraying athletes foot cure spray on his toes. The brand is NP-27, & the can couldn't have a more generic yellow & red color scheme design or bland logo. Probably why the product didn't last...

*Sleepinal to help 80s adults fall asleep fast. The milquetoast ad man for Sleepinal puts me to sleep just looking at & hearing speak.

*Quirky promo for prehistoric time travel feature "The Land that Time Forgot" on Grandpa Munster's Super Scary Saturday on the Superstation.

*Remember those old Time Life music compilation commercials? The ones where some forgotten entertainer would stand alone in a studio & sing a few lines from each of their hit songs? Well, here's one for "Get the Very Best of Ray Stevens" & Ray is at his best (worst?) as he sings his tunes while dressed up in costumes fitting each silly song. Whitetrash variety

*"Munster, Go Home" promo coming on Saturday afternoon on the Superstation.

Ah, I so miss old school TBS Superstation

A very biased for nostalgia reasons 3 stars

------------------------------------------------------

Extended Play on Tech TV 10/12/2001? *Extended Play was such a better name than X Play. X for xtreme, I guess, sounds like something a group of smarmy ad people sat around & did focus groups to come up with a "cool" title. Adam Sessler a thick head of spiky Billy Idol hair too. There's also no nerd sex object Morgan Webb to lust over. Talk with a visionary computer gaming studio ,Xulu, who wanted to have a realistic space travel simulator. Sad news that the already dead, at the time, Sega Dreamcast wouldn't be getting Shenmue 2, & instead X Box would. Preview for the classic, cute, & addictive "Super Monkey Ball."* 2 stars

Cracked.com : Why 28 Days Later is Secretly About Sex *Everything in this running zombies(? infected?) flick is a metaphor over frustration about humans' urges surrounding fucking.* either 1 star or 3

Brass Eye: Science *Some people say that heavy electricity isn't real. Those people aren't idiots or celebrities looking to be cool standing up for a cause they pretend to understand.* more than 2 1/2 stars

Forbidden Transmission 2: Cultural Fallout *Let's all smoke pot, dat damn fried chicken, do fag stuff. Shucky ducky, quack quack. Grab a slut & pee in her butt* 3 stars

Max Headroom: Baby Grobags *Planned Parenthood presents Baby Grobags from the makers of Hot Pockets. These bundles of joy are smarter than a 5th grader & an adult.* 2 1/2 stars

--- Cinema Insomnia w/ Mr. Lobo: Bigfoot, Mysterious Monster

*Retro 1970s ad for Mattel's Creepy Crawlers 'Thingmaker 2' from an era when little girls wore granny sized eye glasses. Awesome.

*Some 1960s era Go-Go dancing w/ upskirt shots of nice legs in pantyhose & white jungle babes.

*Mr. Lobo wants the viewer to suspend disbelief for the "Godfather of Grunge" Bigfoot

*1950s sci fi film star Peter Graves comes on camera, very grim, to tell the viewers of the film about its earnestness in documenting the truth about Bigfoot (snicker) & to warn them of the horror (let the exploitation begin).

*Vintage trailer for King Kong vs. Godzilla. In it, an American scientist talks about how King Kong's brain is bigger. Go America, boo Japan! Our monster is smarter. But did we not kidnap Kong from Skull Island in the Pacific? Shhh! He's a Yankee, now!

*Lobo & Graves both talk about the Loch Ness monster. Of course, Lobo does it more tongue in cheek. Loch Ness vs. Bigfoot... about as close as we could actually come to King Kong vs. Godzilla. That is if all the crazies are right & reality isn't.

*Parody of those old soft rock romance cd ads that would play on t.v. This one is for cult sci fi character Krankor. For only 9 payments of $9.99 own Candles, Krankor, & You. It will make you want to hug your significant other on a sunset beach while the waves gently break on your feet. Ah... romantic.

*Nice bumpers for Cinema Insomnia using old cartoons. One has a giant, angry motor oil can chasing a cute something or other...

*Lobo is keeping up w/ the latest crypto weirdo through UFO magazines & such.

*Graves tries to pass off modern lizards' ties to ancient times, including the funny little running on two legs lizard complete w/ wacky sound effects, to prove the possibility of Sasquatch... He's no Darwin.

*1950s ad for Gravy Train dog food "Makes it's own gravy" & "looks like beef stew" if you believe Johnny, the hound's owner. Go ahead, Johnny, take a bite. You know you wanna.

*"This could be your terror!" "This could be your city!" so it says in a vintage trailerf or Rodan. The early days of the atomic age had people actually wondering if that were true or not. Or at least shelling out a nickel or dime to see monster carnage.

*American history lesson on Sasquatch. He ("they") migrated from Asia. Oh, no, don't tell Donald Trump. Also, a Brit team, in the 1800s, possibly captured a young one & named it "Jacko." Hmm... a young, repressed weird boylike creature named "Jacko"... Why am I reminded of a chimp named "Bubbles" & a pursuit of The Elephant Man's bones...

*Lobo is having stomach problems out in a park restroom on his hunt for Bigfoot. He'll find another big, hairy manlike creature instead. The North American Gay Bear fetishist.

*Gigantis, the Fire Monster trailer. Bigfoot as an excuse for all the kaiju krazy

*Graves tries to argue the importance of oral statements on Bigfoot to a scientist. The scientist doesn't buy it. He wants hard scientific evidence. Graves brings up the fact that the courts relied on such testimony. Thank science for physical scientific evidence coming into play more now in the courts. It's not 100 percent perfect, yet, but it's far better than a jury believing the same person, in a real trial of importance, who had earlier given a sworn report on their encounter w/ a mythical creature.

*An adult Bigfoot believer recounts his time out camping w/ his Boy Scout troop when Bigfoot was caught sniffing their underwear late one night. This caused the boys to squeal like a Girl Scout. This only proves that Bigfoot belongs not in the list of known species but instead on that of sex offenders.

*Chilly Dilly "The Personality Pickle" a cartoon pickle spokesperson who looks like Jimminy Cricket. A portable pickle snack. Snacks have come a long long way. Picklemania ran wild.

*Lobo visits w/ the director of "Bloodthirst, the Legend of the Chupacabra." American woodsmen are afraid of Bigfoot & Mexican desertmen(?) fear "Goat Sucker."

*Trailer for the above mentioned flick. Looks very low budget & shot on video. Also like a vampire flick instead of a monster flick. The director explained that he believed the Chupacabra was actually another Mexican/South American legend called the Mocha or something Vampire. He admits fans & critics hated his Chupacabra re-imagining & I can easily see why. It sucks.

*Chocolate Toddy dairy bar snack in a can. It's 1950s white people approved. Mooooooo! The poor dairy bar worker guy. What a lame uniform.

*Suburban Sportsman is odd & I don't know what to make of it. A sort of travelogue of Area 51 conspiracy theorist visiting the base, looking at dead sheep corpses, & then going out on the salt desert to use their high powered pistols to shoot lizards for lunch.

*Again, Cinema Insomnia makes good use of stock footage for their bumpers. Comforting midnight jazz & a moon filmed for some long ago tropical flick now shown in timelapse sliding across the night's horizon. Doing late night tv, right.

*Escape from the Planet of the Apes trailer. When the apes arrived here via space ship to the astonishment of the U.S. army. The Ancient Aliens tv show guy w/ the crazy hair... He looks like a Tim Burton concept sketch for his Apes failure of a movie.

*Graves visits a psychic detective w/ a Bigfoot plaster cast hidden in a suitcase. The quack guesses correctly. If it weren't obvious that Graves was fucking w/ the viewer, before, it should be now.

*Lobo tries to hypnotize a waitress into revealing whether or not she served Bigfoot a cup of Joe as one of her countless customers over the years.

*Trailer for the awesome looking stop motion 50s giant monster flick "The Black Scorpion."

*Lame & long winded joke interview w/ a 5th grade teacher about Bigfoot being his former student. Only gets funny w/ a short part about Bigfoot hitting puberty & being smelly.

*1940s looking safety film clip about numbskulls taking risks & turning into grotesque looking figures wearing scary as shit masks from that time period. I think the masks were supposed to make them look like comical fools, but to the modern eye it's ole timey uncanny valley horrifying.

*Lobo sits on a nice pier interviewing Bigfoot's awkward prom date who seems to never have gotten over that night. She claims Bigfoot had a tiny penis.

*Lobo talks w/ Bigfoot's former roommate in college. The hipster playing the part makes sure the shot is framed w/ a Buffy cast photo magazine, a Doctor Who laser disc or vinyl album, & his Superfriends cartoon t-shirt.

*A bunch of hippy investigators went out in the woods w/ tranquilizer guns & cameras to find evidence to force the scientific community to "take a more active role in the hunt for Bigfoot" according to Graves. Also according to Graves, they only came back w/ a handful of fecal matter & hair. Sounds about right. Hippies + or - Bigfoot = Hair + Shit.

either fair or folly for Peter Graves pseudo documentary, 3 stars for Cinema Insomnia's ads & bumpers, more than 2 1/2 stars Lobo, close to fair for the guests

-------------------------------------------------------

Chiller Theater Presents: Doctor Moreau's Happy Pills (youtube) *If only they'd invent a solution to everyday ills.* close to 2 1/2 stars

"Marc Maron Predicts the Future" (youtube) *Doomed, bored, & further restricted. Marc nailed it.* close to 3 stars

Rich Hall: Supermarket Sniglets --1983-- (youtube) *Made up words that should be in the dictionary. An early urban dictionary, but more cleverly absurd & stomachable & not awful slang related.* close to 3 stars

Bill Maher's "Religulous" *Take it on faith & do it because you've always done it, dammit.*

more than 2 1/2 stars

[vileart]

Dr Carnesky's incredible bleeding Dramaturgy: Marisa Carnesky @ Edfringe 2017

Its time to reverse the curse! Because the revolution will be menstrual!

1970s horror meets 2020 feminist activism as Dr Carnesky's Incredible Bleeding Woman paints Edinburgh red

Putting the magic back into menstruation, showwoman and artist Marisa Carnesky reinvents menstrual rituals for a new era drawing on the hidden power of a forgotten matriarchal past. She is joined by amazingly skilled stars of the UK's alt cabaret scene - an eclectic group of women performers aka The Menstronauts who combine activism, art, humour and stagecraft. Delivered with a tongue in cheek reverence, the show mutates from a curious ladylike lecture into a glam 1970s magic show and finally into a spectacular 2020 feminist activist ritual.

Referencing representations of women and blood from ancient mythological deities and traditional human cultures to classic horror movies, here menstruation takes centre stage in a profound exploration into what it means to be ‘female’. Issues around fertility, body shame, taboo and lost ancient herstories are scrutinised, politicised & reclaimed.

With a potent brew of horror and parody The Menstronauts perform mind blowing menstrual rituals utilising all manner of skills, tricks and props from hair hanging, a sawing in half illusion, sword swallowing, gushes of strawberry jelly, floods of theatrical blood, spurts of red lipstick and an unstoppable flow of sheer heart and soul. Starring Marisa Carnesky, Fancy Chance, Rhyannon Styles, MisSa Blue, H Plewis, Sula Marjorie Plewis Robin and Nao Nagai.

What was the inspiration for this performance? 

It stemmed from my (Marisa Carnesky) research into menstrual rituals for my PhD at Middlesex University. I gathered some amazing women performers from the cabaret scene I knew together and asked them to reinvent menstrual rituals and create some menstrual activism with me. The show is the result.

As a group of women we were all going through different challenges to do with our bodies, from  miscarriage, infertility, childhood body shame, transitioning gender and childbirth. We wanted to explore new ways to mark and represent these experiences through performance and ritual.

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas? 

We have found it to be really important and effective to bring a live show that really connects and touches people with issues that we face around our bodies. Because we are live people experience the show communally together and the shared energy in the audiences reactions can create poignant and cathartic group reactions, as well as all the fun of being at a spectacular circus show.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?

I had been working with these artists in a number of projects through the east London alternative cabaret and live art scenes. We have worked together on a number of projects including our Ghost Train ride show that was in Blackpool and a rollerskating spectacle for the Cultural Olympiad based on the tarot.

How did you become interested in making performance?

I trained as a ballet dancer and then discovered the avant garde, punk rock and magic! I love creating performance, devising it, teaching it, performing it! I live and breathe it now for over 25 years and yet this is the first time I have brought one of my own productions the Edinburgh so I am excited to see how it is recieved!

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

We did an amazing experiment in this project where we only created the acts on the dark of the moon on the beach every month for three months on special performance retreats at the Metal artists residency house in Southend….its witchy stuff indeed! 

Then we got together for one week at the National Theatre Studios and pulled the material together. We further developed it by continuing to meet every dark moon and creating activist performance events and connecting with womens marches and campaigns.

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

None of my productions are usual…they are all unique investigations into ritual, gender, politics, spectacle and what makes us human…. From an arthouse Ghost Train in Blackpool about immigration and disappearance to a rollerskating psychedelic spectacle about the tarot and collective change we try to meld performance forms, popular and high culture, political issues and visions of the conscious and unconscious experience.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

We hope they will think about menstruation in a new light, be informed by the real research, entertained by our spectacle, showwomanship and humour and moved by our personal journeys.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience? 

We think its important to address the shame long associated with the female bodilly cycle but we want to do that and make work that is both entertaining, current, knowing enough for contemporary audiences and speaks to a diverse mixture of people from different walks of life and experience. 

The material is both fun and popular in style but also serious and arty. We are activists and we are here to act and use everything we have in our box of tricks to create experiences that speak to people and move them.  

Collectively the group devised the ritual performances by meeting every dark moon at Metal in Southend over the course of three months. Through a process of performance making, spell casting, dream diaries and cathartic sharing, the cabaret performance came together embodying the diverse lived experiences of menstruation in the group; from physical pain, fertility, , miscarriage, transgender identity, menopause and religious ritual.

Described as the High Priestess of Cabaret, Marisa Carnesky is the Creative Director of Carnesky Productions, a theatre company responsible for highly original large and small scale interactive performance works. Previous projects include Carnesky’s Ghost Train (2004-2014) and alternative stage school Carnesky’s Finishing School, which just completed a residency in the old Foyles building in Soho (August 2016 - January 2017). Carnesky Productions is interested in the use of spectacle, magic illusions and grand ritual as a means of creating highly accessible provocative work rooted in popular culture to promote cultural and political discourse.

Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman is the end result of Marisa Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman research project which she has completed as part of her PhD at Middlesex University.

Listings information:

Dr Carnesky's Incredible Bleeding Woman (16+)

Venue: Pleasance

Dates & Times: 14.00 2 – 28 August (not 9, 21)  

Tickets: Previews 2, 3, 4: £7.30,

5, 6,9,10,16,17, 23, 24: £10.80 (£9.80 conc)

7,11,12,13,18,19, 20, 25, 26: £13.80 (£12.80 conc) 7 & 8 are on 2for1 offer

Box Office: 0131 556 6550 or 0131 226 0026 online at: pleasance.co.uk  or tickets.edfringe.com

Connect with Carnesky Productions on Twitter: @CarneskyProds #Bleedingwoman Facebook: The Menstronauts, and online at: carnesky.com

Become a menstrual activist. The Menstronauts are a menstrually identified activist group inspired by Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman and The Radical Anthroplogy Group. They aim to raise awareness of the importance of the cycle and global issues relating to women’s bodies and their menstrual rights. You too can take part and reclaim the importance of your menstrual cycle through the power of ritual activism! Find The Menstronauts on Facebook.

Cast and Creative Credts:

THE MENSTRUANTS Veronica Thompson aka Fancy Chance performs regularly in the cabaret, variety, burlesque, live-art and circus communities. She was crowned Alternative Miss World in 2009 and London's Top Tranny in 2010. She will be performing her solo show 'Flights of Fancy' at the Soho Theatre in April 2017. She is also one of the few active hair hangers in the UK. Rhyannon Styles has been a Carnesky company member since 2008 performing in Carnesky’s Ghost Train and Carnesky’s Tarot Drome. Styles is a journalist and is currently Elle Magazine’s first trans columnist and her memoir ‘The New Girl’ will be published in July 2017. H Plewis has worked as a performer and choreographer with Carnesky Productions since 2008. She is also associated with Duckie, collaborating with the collective for over a decade, currently on The Posh Club and PC/DC. An all round live artist specialising in dance, H has worked across many contexts, most recently motherhood. Sula Majorie Plewis Robin is the

youngest Menstruant. An early arrival weighing less than a bag of sugar, she is now almost standing on her two chunky legs. She likes the milk of human kindness and Notorious B.I.G. Nao Nagai is a London based Japanese artist who immigrated to the UK at the age of 15. She has worked with postmodern pop performance pranksters Frank Chickens (winner of Foster’s Comedy God Awards 2010) and has devised and performed in shows by Hey Ho Ha. She trained as a Lighting Designer and has worked in diverse genres from cabaret - Copyright Christmas (Duckie) to Opera - Madama Butterfly (Grimebourne), touring nationally and Internationally. MisSa Blue is a renowned international performer who has been working on the circus/ sideshow and burlesque circuits since 2011. MisSa thrills audiences with dangerous stunts; a femme fatale who blurs the lines between high end entertainment and performance art. She performs at many international burlesque festivals and regularly headlines gigs all around the world. THE TEAM Assistant Director Florence Peak is a London-based artist who has been making work since 1995. With an extensive training in dance and a background in painting, Florence Peake's performance practice uses drawing, painting and sculpture materials combined with found and fabricated objects placed in relationship to the moving body. Site and audience, live and recorded text, wit and humour are key to her work. Dramaturg Kira O’Reilly is an artist currently leading a new MA pilot in Ecology and Contemporary Art in Helsinki. Her practice, both wilfully interdisciplinary and entirely undisciplined, stems from a visual art background; it employs performance, biotechnical practices and writing with which to consider speculative reconfigurations around The Body. Lighting Designer Marty Langthorne is a Lighting Designer for theatre Live art and Dance. He studied at The National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) graduating in 2000. From 2001-2005 he was Production Manager for Performing Lines which took him outside Australia for the first time. Touring internationally with William Yang brought him to London and in 2005 he decided to move there. Always interested in experimental work, he became involved in the London live art community. He was a member of Pacitti Company and Production managed their SPILL Festival. Costume Designer Claire Ashley is a London based costume designer who runs a studio offering bespoke costumes and clothing, from metamorphic and vintage inspired costumes to bridal and tailoring. Magic Consultant Tom Cassani is a graduate of Carnesky’s Finishing School where Marisa Carnesky runs one week crash courses in solo performance. Trained in sleight of hand, misdirection and prestidigitation, Tom now uses these skills of deceit as an artistic framework to explore truth, honesty, manipulation and fabrication through performance art.

Carnesky Productions – A brief herstory

2000-2002 Jewess Tattooess national and international tour including BAC, Arnolfini, Los Angeles International Festival

2002-2004 The Girl From Nowhere national and International tour including Riverside Studios and Anti festival Finland

2004-2014 Carneskys Ghost Train London, national touring including Glastonbury, European tour in Belgium, residency for 5 years on Blackpools Golden Mile

2007 Magic War , Soho Thetare and touring nationally and internationally including City of Women Slovenia, Les Halles Brussels and Red Cat In Los Angeles

2012 -2014 Carneskys Tarot Drome for the Cultural Olympiad, Old Vic Tunnels and touring to festivals nationally and in Europe including Latitude and Cirque De Jules Vernes France.

2009 ongoing Carnesky’s Finishing School at various locations including 2 year residency at The Roundhouse, touring summer festivals and residency at old Foyles building Soho, October 2016 –January 2017

2015 premiere of work in progress National Theatre Studios and Duckie Dr Carneskys Incredible Bleeding Woman (DCIBW)

2016 DCIBW at UCL for International Women’s Day and Soho Theatre

from the vileblog http://ift.tt/2sHz7In

[hollywoodrefugee]

Commence Reality Check

Now that we have social networks and personalized news which reinforce our tastes and inclinations in an endless feedback loop, the concept of reality bubbles has been bantered about quite a bit; people suddenly realizing that we all do not live in the same subjective world. It’s like that twitter ‘controversy’ about the picture of the dress. Was it blue and black or white and gold? Individual perception is highly variable, and that en masse party conversation was a good illustration of this truth. And yet we continue to run the world under the premise that there is one objective reality. The lessons we learn are often so wrong-headed. Take what happened in Germany during World War II, the atrocities and mass extermination. Psychological studies like Milgram’s electrocution simulations and Zimbardo’s prison study show that, under the color of authority, most individuals will comply with heinous commands, even if they believe their actions may cause harm or death to another. Moreover, we know that genocide is not a phenomenon isolated to a particular period of time or culture. So why is it such a commonly expressed belief, to proclaim that you would never do such a thing, to wag one’s finger and exclaim, “Shame!” Or how people tend to vilify their previous stage of development. Once they’ve ascended to the next level, they’ll look down on those still stuck in that phase – as if they had never been there themselves. We keep playing this simplistic, dichotomous game of us versus them, relegating our own progress to a mere re-drawing of the line in the sand between “good” and “bad.” When will we realize the game is rigged?

With the inauguration of Trump imminent, I am reminded of the reality bubble of my youth. It was the ‘80s, the Reagan years. Preppy fashion was all the rage, with clean lines, simple prints and a highly tailored and homogenous overall look. I remember looking at pictures from the ‘70s. Pointy-collared leather trench coats, indigenous-inspired textiles, a hodgepodge of textures and patterns. And curiously, more brown people prominent. To my young eyes steeped in the ether of a more conservative era, these images disturbed me. “Why does everyone look so greasy?” I wondered to myself. The dissonance from one decade to another was sharp. In hindsight, I can see that this was because the latter period emerged in direct opposition to the former. Maybe this is a necessary part of transition, since when we are in the midst of a reality bubble, whatever fits into the current paradigm is assimilated, whereas information that doesn’t jibe is ignored or otherwise discarded. Under such a mechanism, the only way to move into a different model of reality is to disqualify the foundations of the previous era.

Is it a coincidence then, that the decade that is currently being rehashed in pop culture is the ‘80s and that we are now about to enter another period of authoritarian-leaning, “strong father” rule? During the ‘80s, we waxed nostalgic for another conservative era, the ‘50s, with movies like Back To The Future and Peggy Sue Got Married. I remember coveting a poodle skirt as the coolest costume. Whereas in the liberal ‘90s, we rediscovered the funky ‘70s, with its endless diversity and anarchic fashion rules. It speaks to me that this latest political shift has much more behind it than we are able to fathom, that the forces of this transition are part of the waves of change that are as inevitable as the turning of the seasons. I look at the Trump scions in all their Nazi-esque perfection and see the writing on the wall, how children growing up today may inhabit this new reality bubble, seeing the world from the perspective of golden thrones and coiffed hair. Whatever world we land into, at first we do not question its assumptions, for it is like the air we breathe. Leave that to the elders, who know better because they have lived through different times. But for the young, there will be no context for comparison.

I had two experiences with millennial Lyft drivers that have stayed with me. In the first ride, I was sharing with the young man my impression that society no longer feels a need to imbue creative content with values, and that by taking a valueless stance, we are not only wasting an opportunity to illustrate important life lessons, but also going down a slippery slope from amorality to nihilistic decline.

“I don’t know. What you’re talking about, that’s religion. We can’t have that in, like, movies, you know?” the young man said to me.

He has been programmed, like many in the progressive half of American society, to see any discussion of values and the need to represent ethical behavior in our fictions as a stance of the religious right. This has been the attitude of Hollywood for so long. Any time someone tries to bring up the entertainment industry’s responsibility in this regard, they typically have been dismissed as fundamentalist freaks. This has created a dead end in place of where there should be a vital debate. Hence, my driver with his thought-stopping having been triggered, surmised that the topic was outside the realm of valid discussion.

Before the election, I rode with another millennial driver. The presidential campaign seemed to be on everyone’s mind, so we got to talking about it.

“They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter. I don’t even think I’ll vote,” he said.

“Well, that’s one way of looking at it,” I said, nonplussed by this bizarre but common refrain.

“You know who I think must have been the greatest leader? Reagan," he said.  "Really. Why do you say that?" I asked, trying to keep my shock in check.  "I mean, the ‘80s were such a cool decade. He must have had a hand in that,” he said. I believe he was being serious.

The young man looked progressive, like the majority of people one runs into in San Francisco. And here he was talking about the Reagan, a man who removed the solar panels Carter had previously installed in the white house. A man who crushed unions, demoralizing worker solidarity and pushing the everyman into even greater economic insecurity. A man who cut funding for social services, flooding the streets with  homeless. A man who escalated the war on drugs, to the disproportionate devastation of ethnic communities. A man who was in office during the emergence of the AIDS crisis, but who never once uttered the word “AIDS” or acknowledged the epidemic’s tragic impact on the gay community.

I wish I had had the mental dexterity and swiftness to relate all this to my young driver. Alas, I stayed silent. The conservatives had done such a good job at holding onto this shiny picture of Reagan, made easier by the fact that the former actor was always photogenic and striking a pose of singular authority. So now even those who undoubtedly would disagree with his most basic policies are taken in by the revisionist history. Something feels like it’s missing from the equation right now. And here we find ourselves, on the cusp of a huge reality check.

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[sensitivefern]

MOUNTAIN-ASH: (Sorbus) Its dense clusters of showy white blooms in spring and its bright red berries make mountain-ash a favorite tree for the home grounds. It is quite hardy and many beautiful specimens are seen in New England. These are mostly the European mountain-ash, or rowan tree, Sorbus aucuparia, which reaches a height of 50 feet. It was brought here in colonial days. The American species, Sorbus americana, grows 30 feet tall and is seen commonly growing wild in the woods. [...] Mountain-ash is easily grown even in dry soils. It is propagated by seeds and layering. The berries, incidentally, can be made into preserves.

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Glandularia pulchella is a species of flowering plant in the verbena family known by the common name South American mock vervain. It is native to Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and it is present elsewhere as an introduced species and roadside weed. It is an annual or perennial herb producing one or more stems growing decumbent to erect in form and hairy to hairless in texture. The rough-haired leaves are divided deeply into lobes. The inflorescence is a dense, headlike spike of many flowers up to 1.5 centimeters wide. Each flower corolla is up to 1.4 centimeters wide and white to purple in color.

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Iris As far as ‘I’m’ concerned, only 3 species of Iris have ‘earned their chops’ as being worthy of growing in your containers:

Iris ensata ‘Variegata’ – looks like a ‘4th of July fireworks grand finale just before the shells explode’... native of Japan...

Iris pallida ‘Variegata’ – the flowers emit a ‘pleasant grapey scent’; the rhizomes are turned into the famous orris root...

‘If I could grow only one iris it would be the elusively turquoise “Katharine Hodgkin”, but I’d be almost as happy with the super-reliable rich blue “Harmony” or deep purple “George”’ – all of these are derived from *Iris reticulata’...

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BALTIMORE, MARCH 12, 1948. August and I returned last Saturday morning from our two weeks in St. Petersburg, Florida. We had a pleasant time of it, and the visit was a considerable success. We left Baltimore in a sleet storm, but during all our time at St. Petersburg the weather was perfect. Since our return the weather has been cold, but we have borne the change very well. [...] At the end of the first week the St. Louis baseball brethren turned up in St. Petersburg for their Spring practice. The stadium where they operated was only a few blocks from out hotel. We went twice a day, and enjoyed the practice immensely. The feats of the brethren, indeed, were more spectacular than one could ever hope to see in an actual game. [...] We found a really good restaurant in St. Petersburg, and another in Tampa, which is only forty-five minutes away. A third, somewhat inferior to the other two, is in Bradenton, across Tampa Bay. This is a trip of 2 1/2 hours. We made it in a converted yacht and enjoyed it very much. The weather was fair, and there was just enough wind blowing to give the yacht a gentle roll.

[H.L. Mencken]

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❚Joseph Hergesheimer (February 15, 1880 – April 25, 1954) was a prominent American writer of the early 20th century known for his naturalistic novels of decadent life amongst the very wealthy.

Michael Moore THANK YOU President Obama for commuting the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning!!! She will be released in May - instead of in 2045!! THANK U

Blac Youngsta From Wi...

The indomitable Betty White turns 95 today.

People All Over the World, Join Hands, Start a... 'POTUS Shield'? A group of my very favorite Christian con artists and self-declared “prophets of God” are descending on Washington, DC this week to pray and sing and mumble incoherently in order to form a “POTUS Shield” over the city to protect Trump against spiritual heebie jeebies. Or something.

In Philip K. Dick’s 1962 alternative-history novel “The Man in the High Castle,” a single, terrifyingly plausible shift in history has produced a profoundly transformed world. In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is assassinated at a rally in Florida, setting off a chain of disastrous events: after Republicans take power and reverse the New Deal, the U.S. neither recovers from the Great Depression nor enters the Second World War. Decades later, the world is ruled by fascist powers. What had been the United States is now...

The Trump bump – when a diss from Donald is good for business The president-elect’s abusive tweets about everyone from Vanity Fair to civil rights leaders can unwittingly have a positive impact. SAD!

[torentialtribute]

Stewards, fans and authorities combine to leave football in the gutter

The attack on Jack Grealish shocked the football world on Sunday. Premier League now admit it: football got so packed in its own glossy self-publicity that it was complacently convinced that the police were hardly needed on the ground.

Director of Premier League policy Bill Bush has Sportsmail that there is something iconic and symbolically important about the police uniform in the ground, although the worst problems lie outside his class, where the pinching is much greater

Clubs now only pay for officers stationed in a narrowly defined area within the & # 39; footprint & # 39; of grounds. Manchester United is typical of many – paying only for officers patrolling the forecourt of the stadium, but not for the Sir Matt Busby Way, which runs next door.

Ipswich Town went all the way to the Supreme Court to fight Suffolk Police demands for £ 500,000,

Dave Whelan, owner of Wigan, also won a lawsuit for a large payout to the Greater Manchester Police.

London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, said some of the country's richest clubs alone

Khan said that the Metropolitan Police spent nearly £ 7 million a year checking football matches in the capital, yet less than £ 350,000 from the

The sight of Grealish that became stock photography was still struck of a gray-haired Birmingham steward in a hi-fi

While the player tries to celebrate the goal of Villa, the steward Grealish pushes and Villa's Irish midfielder, Conor Hourihane, pushes up an advertisement ng. The police officer from West Midlands needs all her strength to prevent Hourihane from repaying. Police drivers.

Clubs are so determined to reduce the costs of supervision that stewards of any description are involved in crowd control. The majority of a good and responsible job, some for less than the living wage of £ 7.83.

The source describes clubs working in a desperate pursuit of staff as stewards, some of whom work for up to 5 hours & # 39; have worked at night in a nightclub door. There is a rapid staff turnover.

& # 39; They will not know how to handle incidents & # 39 ;, said the source. & # 39; They are briefed by one of the supervisors who attended the stewards briefing 90 minutes before the kick-off.

& # 39; Very basic details are told – start time, risk level, how the fans are. Many are fine, but the number is not the clearest. There is this assumption that you can trade the police for stewards.

It is usually a minority of course, but Birmingham City & # 39; s reputation for antisocial and misconduct behavior in games is known. In November, the club was at the top of the list for the most arrests of all clubs in the top five in England – for the third consecutive year.

The reasons are complicated – generalizations are risky if there is an idiot – but the visceral Villa for the European Cup and first division title in a two-year period in the early 1980s. Villa does everything to Birmingham to remind the fact.

The area around St Andrew & # 39; s has more than its share in social deprivation. Mitchell is from the Sheldon district, while he is a despicable supporter who has dug Grealish from Chelmsley Wood about the death of his brother – both rugged, blues-supporting areas.

Birmingham has registered 591 arrests in 2017-18, 22 percent of 2016-17. The entire Premier League only had 374 arrests. The club points to schemes that are designed to tackle bad behavior. A campaign was launched in May 2016 calling for responsible drinking.

The club emphasized that the police and stewarding were adequate against Villa.

Chief Financial Officer Roger Lloyd, Financial Controller Gary Moore, Club Secretary Julia Shelton and Chief Coordinating Officer

It is impossible to make legislation for every invasion. However, many officers and stewards patrol the perimeter, there is always potential for Mitchell to run on. When Birmingham entertained Villa last season, there were 457 police officers present – 53 per spectator.

But British top-level police officer Mark Roberts believes that some people in the game are smug about security.

[EFFdirectorShaunHarvey'swenstheoldprohibitionsupporterswhodrinkalcoholonthestandontheprosecution'utternonsense'mindset

Those who argue for a more liberal government on the grounds in the past decade and then arrested 2017-18 decreased by six percent compared to the previous season

The FA suggested that there was cause for concern when they called on Monday to top with the prospect of increasing penalties for these incidents like this

Society

Wider reasons were offered Monday for an attack of this kind to be carried out. Dr. Martha Newson, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, described an increased aggression caused by the use of cocaine by some fans. Dr.

Newson told the BBC that perpetrators of violence conformed to & # 39; group identities & # 39; as part of a tribal & # 39; attack and defend & # 39; psychology. She has studied hooliganism in Brazil, where the presence of & # 39; security mothers & # 39; – mothers positioned between fans and the field – scares the violence. & # 39; They are a low-threat group, rather than men who face other angry men & # 39 ;, she said.

Senior police officers believe that part of the problem is a receding collective reminder of days when football was synonymous with hooliganism.

& # 39; Older fans don't want to go back there & # 39 ;, says a high-ranking police officer. & # 39; Younger people never knew. & # 39;

But none of those theories explain the presence of those who, isolated by the anonymity of a football audience, go to games to unleash a barrage of abuse.

Some in this number seem to have abused the sole purpose of their afternoon. Handing out the jump between an hour and so and crossing the border to enter the field doesn't seem that great. Mitchell & # 39; s lawyers said on Monday that he & # 39; cannot explain what happened to him & # 39 ;.

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