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butter-egg-toast · 4 years ago

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YouTuber Girlfriend ▶️

I got a bunch of requests for this one. . 👍

Requested by @dragonwolfs

Long post be prepared.

I'm so sorry I couldn't think of Albert, Kadea, and Aii

Enjoy 🤗

Haru: 🎨

🌙You're a mix media ArtYouTuber.

🌙You do various art forms like painting sculpture, Ink art, ceramics, etc.

🌙You're usually not on Camara, most of your videos are focused on your art work.

🌙On some occasions Haru would draws something for you

🎨" Look (y/n), it's a Mackerel sculpture"-Haru

🌙 Haru gives art tips on the channel for beginners.

🎨"Art and swimming are similar...just go with the flow"-Haru

🌙He goes shopping with you for art supplies.

🎨" We literally only bought 4 items and it came to 40 dollars?!-Haru

🌙You and Haru did a couple of drawing challenges like:

Draw with left hand challenge,

Draw each other challenge

Draw with your eyes closed challenge

🌙At the end of the day Haru secretly enjoy making art with you.

🌙You have a simple following of 50k

Channel name: HoneycombArts.

Matoko: 🐱

🌙You're an animal YouTuber

🌙You work at a pet adoption center. So you encounter different types animals like:

Cats, dog, rabbits, birds, and many more

🌙You invited Matoko to help you with the feral kittens and cats; immediately after hissing at you and the other employees they warm up to Matoko.

🐱"Wow.. they really love me!"-Matoko

😸" Woah Her fur is so fuffy and pretty"-Matoko

🌙You give tips about properly taking care of animals.

🌙Matoko usually not on Camara that much (he's kinda shy)

🌙But when he is on Camara, The videos with the most views are usually with Matoko washing kittens.

🐱"You want to make sure the kitty is calm and not scared of you. Make sure you talk to them to calm them."-Makoto

🐱"Its okay little guy, you're gonna be a nice and clean kitty"-Makoto

🌙 You have a simple following 80k

Channel name: PreciousPets

Nagisa: 🎬

🌙You're a movie/TV show commentator. Comedy skits, you comment on badly movie reviews or simple commentary.

🌙You and Nagisa something reenact scenes from movies and TV shows.

🎬" Oi!!! Look at me when I'm talking to you *bad acting*" -Nagisa

🌙Nagisa cant get his lines right and he always laugh. That's what makes it charming.

🎬" Dont go...I..ummm... *laugh* I forgot (y/n) chan.. what's the line again?"-Nagisa.

🌙Sometimes there are cheesy skits you do together for fun.

🌙 there are some occasions were both of you and Nagisa forgot your lines and you both had to improv.

🎬" Noooooo... how.. could you betray me? Nagisa fell to his knees. "Well...you shouldn't have took my... taco.." trying your best to hold in your laughter. Nagisa confused at your choice of words. "Eh?..."-Nagisa

🌙He Loves being on Camara most of the time

You have a simple following 50k to 80k

Channel name: Tomatometer

Rei: 📘

🌙You're a History YouTuber. Educational videos, learning , science, and technology

🌙 You go over the latest new technology and you have sponsors that send you laptops and phones

🌙You have a mini segment were Rei goes over interesting fun science facts

📘"The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue"-Rei

📘" People who speak two languages may unconsciously shift their personalities when they switch from one language to another.

🌙 You and Rei do a myth busting, where you answer questions from viewers.

🌙There was even a time were you both performed a chemistry experiment that failed.

📘" *cough * see this is why its important to have safety precautions"-Rei

You have a simple following of 50k to 60k

Channel name: Learn Something Today

Rin: 🛠

🌙You're a DIY YouTuber, building and create easy life hacks

🌙You build random projects you find on Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest or viewers suggestion

🛠" (y/n)? That a cool sculpture"-Rin

🌙Rin is never in your videos. The only time he showed his face is when you both did a challenge together.

🛠" Woah!! This looks complicated. But nothing's too complicated for me. What do we need ,(y/n)?"-Rin

🌙Rin sometimes goes shopping with you to find your supplies.

🛠 "Huh?! This is a lot of wood (y/n), what are you making today?"-Rin

🛠" what type of wood you need?"-Rin

🌙You sometimes give away or sell your projects depending on the occasion.

🌙Rin helps with your projects on his day off, because he's curious how the project will turn out.

You have a simple following of 80k

Channel name: Fix it Make it

Souskue: 🥙

🌙You're a cooking Youtuber

🌙Sousuke something does voice overs talking about cooking traditional Japanese food and giving cooking tips.

🥙" Okonomiyaki is a simple pancake that is cook with cabbage."-Souskue

🌙People always send you emails asking to show your boyfriends face because they love his voice so much.

🥙" They really like me? I dont think my sounds like honey"-Souskue

🌙You sometimes do food challenge and completions with your friends and Souskue. (Souskue always win)

🌙You make a variety foods all over the world

🥙"Can you cook pork cutlets?"-Souskue

🌙The meals you and Souskue cook, you both give to homeless shelters and orphanages.

🌙Every special occasion you bake a themed caked.

🥙"Is that a shark?! How did you make this?!"-Sousuke

You have a simple following of 70k

Channel name: Cookie dough gummies

Momo: 🎮

🌙You're a Gaming YouTuber

🌙You play a wide variety of games like horror, dating Sims, action,Platformers, 3D, and many more

🌙Multiplayer with all your friends (Among us)

🌙Momo definitely loves playing adventures and scifi games with you

🌙Momo likes to bring Puyysuke with him to the gaming sessions.

🎮"Puyysuke is good luck!!"-Momo

🎮"Puyysuke is just as excited as I am with this game. "-Momo

🌙You and momo sometimes compete with each other in fighting and racing games.

🎮"Awwww no fair (y/n) that's cheating !!"-Momo

🎮" Ahhh how you keep winning"-Momo

You have a simple following of 60k

Channel name: Beetle juice

Seijour: 💪

🌙You're a health and fitness Youtuber

🌙Health and fitness tips from professionals and Seijour.

💪"Having a perfect form is the most important and effective way of succeeding"-Seijour

🌙Breaking down the human body to benefit different bodies types.

💪" This exercise plan I used on the samzuka swim team. I guaranteed you will bulk up👍"-Seijour

💪No pain no gain. Keep pushing YOUR ALMOST THERE!!! You can do it!!"-Seijour

🌙 You and Seijour do couples yoga on sundays.

💪"Dont worry (y/n) I got you. Just relax your muscles"-Seijour

You have a simple following 80k

Channel name: You're lifestyle

Kisumi: 💄

🌙You're a beauty YouTuber.

🌙Hes pretty much on your channel 24/7. Everyone loves the both of you.

🌙You do make up challenges, skin care tips, and themed make up looks.

💄"Niacinamide and hyaluronic acid are the best together on your skin"-Kisumi

🌙 You and kisumi have challenges where you do each other's makeup.

💄" Eh? I used the wrong color?! Haha sorry "-Kisumi

💄"I hope I'm not too rough with your face. Let me know."-Kisumi

🌙Kisumi did a voice over on one of your tutorials twice.

💄" Now shes applying blush on...oohhwow that's a cute shade on her..its really cute (y/n)"-Kisumi

💄" wow that makes (y/n) eyes pop!"-Kisumi

🌙Kisumi loves to do seasonal makeup tutorials with you.

🌙He even let you do some makeup on him.

💄" Woah I look like a kpop male idol! How did you did that??!"-Kisumi

You have a simple following of 90k

Channel name: Velvet lips

Asahi: 🔎

🌙You're a Horror theme YouTuber

🌙Discuss Mysteries and Paranormal activity all over the world, Unsolved crimes. Mysteries death and conspiracies theories

🔎"That's interesting.. has the crime been solved?"-Asahi.

🌙Asahi is not into the paranormal because he doesn't believe in it. However, because you like, he's curious about the stuff you talk about.

🔎"wow that monster is 8 foot tall!! And it was seen in Japan??!!"-Asahi

🔎" mmmhh.. that picture is kinda convincing"-Asahi

🌙There was a time where you, Asahi, Hiyori And kisumi went to explore an abandoned house on the countryside that is known for huntings

🔎"oh... (y/n) do you want me to hold your hand if your scared?"-Asahi

🔎"huh? That noise? It may have been a rat"-Asahi

You have a simple following of 70k

Channel name: Mystery XE

Ikuya:💻

🌙You're a Anmaition Youtuber, sometime you animate your story times and do little funny Anmaition, and music video Anmaition.

*The time I accidentally pranked my teacher story time*

*Middle school experience * story time

*Worst family vacation ever* story time

*Creey encounter at work ft Ikuya* story time

*How I met my boyfriend ft Ikuya* story time

🌙Ikuya something gives you ideas for a Anmaition.

💻"How about do a little mermaid Anmaition?"-Ikuya

💻"This is cute a Anmaition, you think you can teach me how to do it?-Ikuya

🌙 You created a Anmaition for Ikuyas birthday with one of his favorite songs.

💻" I love ever bit of this. You really know what I like"-Ikuya

You have a simple following 60k

Channel name: Ms.Honbuns

Natsuya: 🗺

🌙You're a travel YouTuber/Vlogger

🌙 natsuya is on your channel 24/7

🌙You and natsuya traveled to various locations while site seeing, eating food, meeting local people, learning the language, learning the history, and having fun.

🌙You do 360 VR videos of each country, or city you visit.

🌙Sometimes you both camp and go on hikes.

🗺" ah Its so calming out here in the wild"-Natsuya

🌙Natsuya has his own little segment were you taste different types of beers and wines all over the world

🗺".. woah (y/n) you have to try this. The favor is out of this wolrd!!"-Natsuya

🗺"Where do you want to go for the spring? I was thinking 🇬🇧The UK or 🇲🇽 Italy."-Natsuya

You have a simple following 90k to 1M

Channel name: Lake side view

Nao: 🍀

🌙You're a Garden YouTuber

🌙you give gardening tips

🌙on the weekends nao helps with your garden and maintaining it.

☘"Wow!! (Y/n) your vegetables looks great "-Nao

🌙You harvest and Nao cooks the Vegetables.

🍀"Wow the vegetables this harvest is delicious"-Nao

☘"Next harvest, can we plant watermelons?"-Nao

🌙Time lapse videos of Fruits and vegetables growing and decomposing.

You have a simple following of 50k

Channel name: Growful love

Hiyori: 🛍

🌙You're a Fashion YouTuber

🌙 Discuss the newest trends and unboxing new clothes, shoes and accessories .

🌙Haul videos with Hiyori (sometimes)

🛍" These sweater feels amazing"-Hiyori

🌙You and Hiyori sometimes try on matching clothes.

🛍" Wow! We're definitely a cute couple!-Hiyori

🛍"This is something I'll definitely wear every day "-Hiyori

🌙 Most of your clothes are your choice of style. And Hiyori's is more like dark academia.

🌙 Sewing clothes for you and Hiyori.

🛍"woah!! You made this for me?! Thank you so much"-Hiyori

🌙 And some occasions you guys will go thrift shopping.

You have a simple following of 60k

Channel name: Exclusive Z

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peacefulmode · 5 years ago

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omg nooo thanks for posting such a long response!! 😭 i love your hcs so much... damian jason start a farm when. post the timelines and bdays i wanna know :O (i can ask you on your sideblog if you don’t want to clutter this blog lol!)

hehe thats good to hear!! i dont mind you asking on my main, the sideblog is more of a personal archive for me anyway. omg if ur interested in jay, dami, and country life i HIGHLY rec Out Here Hope Remains by audreycritter. it’s part of a larger series (Cor Et Cerebrum, its an AMAZING storyline about bruce discovering he has a brain tumor), but this particular one is about jason and damian staying at the Kents’ for a couple weeks. i really loved the dynamic it explored. id totally draw scenes from it if i had any drawing skill

OK now for the timeline. also under the cut.

i think everyone except damian and steph has canonical birth dates. some, like bruce and dick, have multiple. but no one’s birth year is official (for obvious reasons). so im circling everything around this one date: August 16, 1994 — jason’s birthday!

feb 19, 1971 - bruce’s birthday - the date is the most commonly referenced. year calculated bc imo bruce is 17 years older than dick

march 20, 1988 - dick’s bday - because dick being a millennial is so perfect lol. he has many birth dates but the one with him beign on the first day of spring is most fitting

jan 26, 1994 - cass’s bday - she’s canonically about half a year older than jason. jan 26 is the official date

aug 16, 1994 - jason’s bday - the date is official, the year i saw in a fic and i thought it was really fitting

1995 - steph is born - i dont think she’s ever had an official birthday. i think she’s a fire sign—aries maybe? so around march

in 1996 batman debuts. i hc that dropped out of princeton freshman year, trained around the world for 6 years, and came back to gotham to build the batcave. thus he’s around 25 in batman year one

july 19, 1996 - tim’s bday - the date is official, and he’s usually about 2 years younger than jason

bruce was batman for about 1 year when dick’s parents fell. dick trained for 1 year before becoming robin, and debuted in 1998

2004 - damian is born - he was grown in an artificial incubator .. so idk if he has a real birthday. to me he seems like a scorpio baby, but i also love him being born in the spring like dick was

in 2004 lil tiny tim starts taking pics of the dynamic duo

when dick graduated high school he was fired, aka spring 2006. canonically, bruce met jason on june 26th (on the anniversary of his parents’ death) that year. which is sort of hilarious because bruce was only partnerless for about 1 month until he was like I CANT TAKE THIS ANYMORE I NEED A NEW BLACK HAIRED BLUE EYED BOY TO TRAIN IN CRIME FIGHTING.

in 2009 jason was killed :’( the next spring tim became robin III

2010-2011 was the year after the earthquake (No Man’s Land storyline), cass came to gotham, and also jason was resurrected and then taken by talia, steph became robin and then had a fake death, ALSO BATMAN: HUSH STORY, DAMN WHAT A CRAZY YEAR FOR THE BATFAM

in 2013 jason becomes red hood and the iconic Under the Hood arc happens

in 2014 damian meets his dad, bruce “dies”, dick becomes batman, fires tim from robin and gives it to damian, wow what another wild year

the rest is pretty easy to piece together. dami is 13 in the comics rn so .

#dc #i just love timelines man #long post #Anonymous #1

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tumblunni · 6 years ago

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Misc headcanons for Directator's assistant director yokai sidekicks!

* I think the Nosirs are actually brothers but for these guys i think theyre just a bunch of unrelated employees who share a uniform. Maybe draw them with variations in height and weight and stuff to tell them apart? And they probably have different hair under the hats.

* this yokai species is a water element fishman thing possibly based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Cos ive been doing a lot of thinking on why the heck they have those weird face markings and with the bulgy eyes they kinda do match the description of the early stage Deep Ones in that story. Either that or theyre kappas who hide their weak spot under caps. (Cappas?)

* their only power as yokai is super strength. They probably surprise people a lot by being so powerful, cos they never really bother to fight unless their boss is in trouble. Its mostly just an 'ultimate assistant' power that helps them carry lots of stuff for maximum efficiency.

* theres probably variants of this yokai for every type of minor job ever. I feel like its just the thing you turn into when youre a very normal dude who just wants to continue your normal job in the underworld. This trio are 100% content working for Directator and their idea of a peaceful afterlife is just the same as their regular life! No aspirations for bigger superpowers or anything, just gimme that magic ability to be even better at the job i love~

* not sure about names for the trio yet except one of them should be jerome cos thats a nice name. Their origin story is just that theyre unrelated employees who worked under Directator when he was human, and sorta bonded together into The Directator Protection Club. They were his most loyal assistants who stayed with him even as the studio made flop after flop, and even followed him into hell in the end. (Died trying to save him from a studio fire) They were all kind of aimless young adults for one reason or another, who didnt have much good in their life aside from this job and didnt have any positive familial figures except this strange little family they found together. So theyre not blood related but they treat each other like siblings and see Directator as a cool uncle figure that they all look up to. And theyre all roommates together now in the yokai world so basically yeah they got adopted in all senses except the Actually Saying It Out Loud sense

* Aside from their general shared personality of Being Cute And Enthusiastic And Supporting Their Boss i feel like maybe there are some small differences you notice after a while? From the titanic episode it seemed like one of them was kinda dopey innocently hero worshipping the boss and one of them was a sassy trickster who loved a chance to mess with the heroes, just based on the different way they animated them obeying the order to toss the heroes off the bungee jump. And one of them was shown dressing as a lady waitress in one of the scenes in the first episode, so im gonna grab that opportunity and say she's a trans girl. They all dress very similar while on the job just cos its practical clothing for work, but you can tell her apart by a small ponytail at the back of their identical hairstyles. (Probably the cute flame ponytail style like ghoulfather!) Off duty she likes to dress a bit more femme, but her bros still support her as a woman no matter how she dresses. The only way to get these perpetually smiling doofuses to start a fight is to mix them up and misgender her! (Well, that or be mean to the boss also. Theyre just very ride or die for each other!)

* There actually are more of these yokai aside from the main three, Directator has picked up a few more employees over the years since he died. He can probably summon infinate hordes of them like ghoulfather can do with his mafia goons! Its just that these three have the main emotional bond with him so he trusts them to do all the most important jobs.

* they have an ultimate transformation that is just them on each other's shoulders in a trenchcoat. Their acting skill is so good that everyone universally believes this is a new form and they even gain boosted stats!

* in battle maybe their ability would be some sort of adaptability thing to reflect how theyre such multitalented helpers? Like 'all attacks are treated as non elemental' or 'changes elements to match the last hit taken'?

* also probably in battle theyd have combo abilities with directator, like he's able to revive them automatically whenever he gets a critical hit or something. I feel like them having low hp and frequently knocking themselves out in the process of protecting him is very in character

* directator remembers all their birthdays and throws a super theatrical big ol party~! They also celebrate the day each of them got hired and the day they made their first successful film in the yokai world, and then every time they have a new success too. Basically they love excuses to show how much they care for each other! Best buddies cinema club 4ever!!!

* Even though Directator can now poof up illusions of any set and costumes using his powers, he still prefers to let the assistants make all the most important critical stuff for each movie. He just feels sad that his newfound powers would be taking away a fun bonding experience that they used to have. But also obviously working your ass off to make everything on a short deadline ruins the fun of making arts and crafts together, so he's grateful he can take some of the work off their shoulders.

* the shape of directator's powers as a yokai came from not from his egotism but from his dying wish being to ease the burden on his employees who were always so loyal to him. He also likes to use his illusions to help them out with stuff even when theyre not working, though he still has to say lights camera action and etc so its a lil funny. Like 'oh no assistant number 3 is going out on a date and her dress is ruined!' then he runs in with one of those clapboard things and is like CUT! TAKE TWO! *poofs up an illusion dress with a star wipe transition* Keeps pausing the scene and telling her boyfriend to show more emotion, lol. Like overprotective dad cliche but its more 'are you hammy enough to be worthy of my niece?? Show me your best death scene!' Also has an entire orchestra follow them around and do a soundtrack to their date. 'Darling it'll be a sensation! Directator's secret masterpiece: the film only you get to see! Cmon boys this is our most important production yet!' Very well intentioned but predictably he ends up ruining the date by trying so hard to make it perfect for her, and she's like 'aww dont worry boss, if that guy cant handle my family then he's not the right dude for me anyway' *hugs and end of episode* *but also yknow..he still learns his lesson and interferes less in his friends's lives next time*

* maybe two of the trio have the same names? Like "here's my supreme team: Ashley A, Ashley B and Jerome!"

* give them a special attack where they just three hit combo Directator with a big ol wholesome hug of admiration and all his stats go up. 'Boss you really brightened up our lives!' 'And our afterlife!'

#directator #mr movien

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kosmicdream · 7 years ago

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Temp. FFAK Official Timeline

This is a very rough, temp timeline for FFAK. It mostly covers events that have already happened or at least have been mentioned. I dont really cover anything that is happening in the present day timeline lol. I might make edits to this in case i fucked up in places or maybe ill just do a totally new one at some point! you dont even know how messy my actual one is like my god its an ever worse horrible clusterfuck of text. (Also remember, the ffak story has no time travel so dont be worried about that sort of mindfuckery!) enjoy

Years before 1414: Whenever was 600 million years ago i dont want to do the exact math: Evil Mother is born but shes not called that at all cuz she adopts that name later in life but just know she is here and readt to party Lots of stuff happens. like idk. evolution and life. 600 mil years is a long time ok -LALALA -HUMANS AT SOME POINT COME TO BEING.and form civilization and.. all that -modern human society exist! ppl have tvs and such. -Mandragora Worms have gone ‘extinct’!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ooooo -??????????? a ton of other stuff. isnt history cool?? kicks legs, yells -mysterious worm break outs all over dmtia. bombs fall. wars. despair! -Grant Lumberman gets a doggy at some point and loves it but then it dies and so does his family and friends and his whole city he is relocated to the Auseklis moon colony (on Dmtia’s moon!) along w/ other Vena Cavian kiddos !!!! (in yr 1414)

YEAR 1415 [Scene From Ch. 11: Pages 3161-3196, 3400-3401] Characters: Randall Aiguille - Age 20 Mr. Rotten (Which was named “Aeschylus” at the time, created by Randall) Crosshatch Unit (sort of) Rembrandt Aiguille - Age 22 Grant Lumberman (Aka, ‘Good Leadman’) - Age 14 Octavian “Otto" Silverberg - Age 15 (I was gonna type up every referenced scene like this then i was like fuck it thats too hard! lol)

Years 1416-1425 ?????????????? (most events likely will be mostly covered in a prequel series.) YEAR 1420: Crosshatch Unit first programmed/built by Randall/Rembrandt Aiguille leadman and evil mother fall in lurv at some point

YEAR 1426 Miracle Baby Crimson is Born (From Good Leadman/Evil Mother worm fuck action yeehaw)

YEAR 1427 -Crimson’s 2 eyes are removed + Evil Mother Believes they are dead and leaves Leadman to work with Tricend -Canary is Born (From Evil Mother, and a King Worm) -Hekatons are made (From The King worm that made Canary, concept of Hekatons is from Evil Mother) -July 8th: Perkons Hatches and will not let anyone near the other 4 eggs!! stay away

YEAR 1428 - Good Leadman (Age 27) and Perkons (6 months old) Meet (Happens in Jan) (Multiple scenes in ch10, continued in Ch11) Perkons turns 1 in July. -Perkons gets a hold of 1 of Crimson’s eyes at some point, turns it into a Knife.

YEAR 1429 - Perkons turns 2 in july and is a fully matured adult. Rest of the 4 hekatons eggs hatch sometime after in that year. -Dievas assumes protective guardian role for his siblings. -Dievas meets Aeschylus. (ch11) YEAR 1430 Perkons turns 3. The rest of the first hekatons are one. During this year they mature to an adult. YEAR 1431 Lauma meets Velns, who is imprisoned. Then shortly after, Perkons confronts Lauma, she is 2, he is 4. So It took place after July 1431. He transforms the 2nd crimson eye into a Spoon in front of her.

Years 1431-1448 (specific dates not all disclosed sry): -Velns/Lauma, Dievas/Laima begin making children. baby baby baby! YEAR 1438 - Crimson (Age 11) is eaten by a Hydragora Queen worm - loosing her human body in the process but gaining a worm one instead. -Crimson runs around in a destroyed city, holding a corpse. Meets Velns who taunts them. -Lauma and Dievas make up, and have their first nest together- a Batch of A/B hybrid eggs. -Lauma is killed by Perkons -Velns is killed by Perkons (Which was also on Dmtia’s Moon, so the moon is destroyed.) -Laima is “killed” by Perkons. (Actually survived, as part of Dievas’ plan.) -Perkons confronts Dievas with the Crosshatch Unit and mention they fight for Peace and under the “Thumb” alliance. Perkons kills Dievas. (scene in ch11) -Laima escapes with A/B Eggs, as well as other hekaton eggs. (and will later form the Ghost Kingdom, which she rules as queen.) ????? many other things happen????? these were some busy years folks

YEAR 1449 -Crimson meets a Helper, Galore the Hekaton, and a Bunny worm (who will later grow up to be agent Paper) in the forests of DMTIA (Ch9) -Galore “meets" her first parents, Lauma and Velns, in some mysterious coma dream thing from listening to crims sexy magical heartbeat (also Ch9) ??????????more events happen??????????? -Galore “Dies” by exploding. Crimson witnesses it. -Bunny wormed named Cirrus “Dies” and is buried in a grave. However, she was only injured she later climbs out only to witness Crimson and Celadon leave in Crimson’s truck and it was the saddest thing ive had to draw ok. i am crying even remembering it ??????????more secret events this was yet another busy and traumatizing year for crimson????????????? -Months later, Crimson (age 23) has a conversation with her third mandragora heart, and ends up having a period sex masterbate-y fantasy that made many readers scream in terror when they read it.(Ch11)

Years 1450-1904 god so much stuff happens during this time, lays on the ground. i mean just fucking look at how much time that is. thats over 450 years lol nbd right

YEAR 1905 -Agent Knife is sent on a remote mission (back to Planet Dmtia) to hunt down one of thumbs most wanted criminals, a man named “SIMON MCGOLD” -After months of searching/failed attempts at locating him, Knife confronts and is stung by Simon’s close personal bodyguard, a queen worm named Nail who is famous for killing over 50,000 Hekatons. (Gaining him the nickname “Hekaton Hunter.” (CH12) -?????????? more stuff happens like you dont even know????????

Years 1906-1924 ??????????? lots of stuff??????? lets laugh at some spoon stuff together tho -Spoon thinks Knife is stupid but weirdly interesting i guess -Spoon tries to pretend hes not in love w/ knife cuz thats like??? g...ay??? -Spoon realizes he’s totally hot for Knife and decides hes gonna totally seduce him -Spoon realizes flirting isnt going well with knife and is actually rly deeply hurt by rejection and so he tries to sleep around w/ other ppl to pretend hes fine cuz w/e!! who cares -Spoon realizes hes totally in love w/ Knife and is devastated by Deeply Gay emotions -Spoon moves in w/ Knife and spoon tries to pretend he is fine w/ just being Knife’s obsessively devotedly loyal but not romantic/sexual partner. just ttly... platonic.. best dude pals..!!! who murder together -Spoon realizes he cannot handle just being friends and attempts to move out cuz he just is having a meltdown -Knifes like chill we’re already dating and Spoon is like “wtf we are?” and knife’s like “why else would i let you move in w/ me” and spoon just stares at a wall for like 12 hrs in shock -They start to officially for real date™ after spoon regains contact with reality -???????stuff??????? -Spoon dresses up as AGENT BEE!!!!!!!!!!!! THE MOST IMPORTANT EVENT IN ALL OF HISTORY HANDS DOWN MARK UR CALENDARS

YEAR 1925 July 8th - Simon (now Agent Spoon) has been in a relationship with Knife for 20 years. He meets Celadon #1. Location is the forests on the moon THUMB HQ. who is rightfully pissed as fuck at him. kick his ass, girl (she does btw) (ch11)

YEAR 1926 -Knife Adopts a tiny perfect adorable fluffball c-type and names him Kurt. -Spoon hates it like more than anything ever -Spoon and Knife end up having to live separately, causing a huge strain in their relationship.

Years 1927-1936 -feeling neglected, Spoon starts to sleep around, including the Crosshatch unit and becomes p close friends w/ them! its actually a positive thing for once. wtf (ch11) -Kurt becomes Agent Fork and works alongside Agent Knife on missions and its adorable and great but knife’s depression is also growing bc he misses spoon

YEAR 1937 Cash Leadman is born! :D

YEAR 1938 Rome Aiguille is born! he doesnt even hate worms at this point! Years 1939-1955 more stuff. ect.

YEAR 1956 -Locket confronts Knife. Knife is so traumatized from meeting a surprise biological child that he has a meltdown and vanishes. he is then believed to have died. -Spoon Explodes from sadness of the news, but does not die. Half of him leaves to Cash Leadman’s house, who convinces him to keep living. He becomes “Scissor”, using her former crosshatch robot body. (ch11) -The other half meets Locket and has his Spoon stolen from him. very sads. Also cant wear thongs anymore (ch11)

YEAR 1957 -At some point during this year, Spoon kills Agent Rock’s dad and also prevents Fork from being able to enter Wibbleworld (his dream). (Scene in ch8) -Fork goes back to prison (guess what, it wasnt his first time goin’ there!)

YEAR 1958-present -the death of rock’s hot dad springs a chain reaction of all his sons trying to kill spoon and getting revenge. Spoon successfully kills them all though lmfao. dont fuck with the leg. -fork breaks up with dollop and she starts stalking him

YEAR 1961 -Dylan and Agent Knife meet in Wibbleworld moon, on July 8th (his birthday) He reveals secrets to her. (ch11) -Dylan/Celadon and Antony believe they are successful at killing Agent Knife on this same day.

YEAR 1962 -Feb 2 - Aeschylus wakes up in LEVEL K of the Crosshatch Colony (The Aiguille Moon) and is escorted by Antony Aiguille (Age 21) and Celadon #1, #2 and #3. Dylan and Barfy show up. (Ch 11) -Dylan tries to convince Antony not to get eaten (and fails) (ch12) -March - A mysterious earthquake and worm outbreak kills 20,000 residents in the Crosshatch Colony. O_O -July 7th - Fork meets Dylan for the first time. :3 (Another serving episode one!) -July 8th: This is where the present timeline begins! Canary wakes up on a platform. Hooray! we made it. i dont feel like typing out the events u can just read the comic i guess lol. farts!

YEAR 1963: Hasnt actually happened yet, but the final feast is said to occur this year!!!!!!! O_O ooo EDIT: one of the events were out of order, but this has been fixed (8/19/2017)

#ffak #feast for a king #ffak timeline #ffak faq

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fuckyeahexofics · 8 years ago

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fic search #139

1. it won't be long until i come home by hidden_onigiri

Hi! Hoping any of you could help me find this XiuHan fic I've been wanting to re-read. I'm pretty sure I found it in livejournal but my memory of it is a bit vague. If I recall correctly, Luhan certainly likes Minseok but Minseok is a bit afraid(?) about their relationship progressing to 'more-than-friends' territory. He enlists in the army so he could properly sort out his feelings and be away from Luhan for a while. Jongdae goes with him and has been a really nice friend who gives him support.

2. and we'll be running by baeksthighs or

try hard by a_pu_nk

hey! im looking for this sekai fic where i think they're in a party? and one of them blows smoke from a joint to the other's mouth, im not sure who is who but its something like that. i think they might be bestfriends or friends with benefits. Thanks a lot!!!

3. House of Cards by keiteullin

Can you please help me find this fic where kai is an escort and D.o. somehow got in contact with kai and they promise to meet at a hotel. But after d.o talked to kai he said kai wasn't what he was looking for so he left. ! Kai was nvr rejected b4 so he wanted d.o bad and the next they kai got d.o at the hotel room and they had sex and stuff like that. Thank you!

Hi Team, First of all let me telly ou that I absolutely love your fic recs. I read a fic long time back and lost the link to it... It had Jongin as sehun's dad, and sehun is kinda uni mate to/and has one sided crush for kyungsoo...Jongin and Kyungsoo meet at a party and Kyungsoo keeps company to a bored Jongin, and eventually Jongin seeks his company. Kyungsoo might also be working for Luhan part time here. If you can find the fic name, I'll be eternally grateful. Love you guys. ❤

Hi, so there is this Chen/Luhan fic that I have vague memories of reading on LJ. I don't remember that many details, but I know it ended with Chenlu in a car having a sweet moment. I read it back in 2012 or 2013 but I can't for the life of me remember. I know this is super vague, but maybe someone knows what I'm talking about?

6. The Truth Will Set you Free by fanforyeol

Hello wonderful admins, can you help me to find this fic? It's krisyeol and I vaguely remember it's on aff but I'm not sure. I don't really remember the fic but I think it's an arranged marriage au and I remember this scene when it's chanyeol's birthday and he accidentally met kris in 24hour store, and when they got out from that store kris give a plastic bag full of sweet treats for chanyeol as birthday present. I remember I enjoyed this fic but forgot to bookmark it :(

7. heaven can't help you now by seawitch (Dubcon, religious themes, character death, please proceed with extreme caution)

hi guys so i've been trying to find this possession au fic where jongin is a pastor to this new church and one day he finds baekhyun and kyungsoo in a room together and claims to tell junmyeon the main pastor so baekhyun gets mad and decides to trick jongin to try to sleep with him and jongin gets really turned on because of some potion baekhyun gave him?

part 2. sounds familiar can't remember the title either but I can provide more information. I think kai caught D.o & Taeyeon making out. Kai told suho. D.o got punished and took revenge. Kai drank the potion and it made him crave sex. His 'inner devil' tried to take over his body. The devil promised him to get rid of kyungsoo so he doesn't have to crave for sex anymore. Devil kai drew a pentagram under d.o's bed. The other pastors found the drawing & labeled d.o as the devil so he was executed

8. A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes (When You Fall Asleep) by cosmicruler

hi admins! i've gone thru the HP!Au tage but i cant find this :( please help... its chanbaek where they use to be best friends before Hogwarts but Baek was housed in Slytherin and everyone in Slytherin gets bullied, so Chanyeol started bullying Baekhyun too.. There's a part where Baekhyun was trying to stop Chanyeol from hexing a boom for a Quidditch match.. Thank you so much!

Hello, I was wondering if u know the fic in which luhan has a look like that's name I think is luxun or something like that, anyways luhan is a celebrity that's dating jongin(they both r) but he's cheating on jongin with his look alike, I forgot the name and can't seem to find it, thank you!

10.

Hi can you help me find this fic please? It was a mama!au (chaptered), and it was sort of adventure-ish? There is this scene I can remember tough. I think it was Xiumin and another member. They were supposed to find the other members for some reason. They went aboard a battle ship or something and found Baekhyun locked in a cell. And he had his mama mark somewhere on his back (shoulder I think). That is how Xiumin and the other member knew he (Baekhyun) was one of them. Thank you!

11.

I was wondering if you could help me find a sesoo fic where ksoo and sehun where in a park and it started to rain so they had to run to sehuns car. I dont remember much but ksoo had to put on one of sehuns shirt and they made out while ksoo was on sehuns lap. Ksoo was also kinda insecure in the fic and sehun was really patient and understanding w him. Im sorry this is rlly vague but i can't seem to find the fic anymore.

thank you @princesschanhan, @dollceto @thetas @mariatokiha and anons for your help!

#fic search

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yespoetry · 5 years ago

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An Interview with Joshua Byron & Chariot Birthday Wish on Queerness and Art

By Joshua Byron & Chariot Birthday Wish

Editor’s Note: grammar and punctuation aesthetic have been largely preserved for authenticity and tone.

Joshua: We are chatting and checking in with each other on the 4th of July, a honeysuckled day of nostalgia, dogmatism, and fear. I recently began releasing a webseries Trans Monogamist with Alfredo Franco and Artless Media and Chariot Birthday Wish recently released his new book of poetry, hot pearl.

J: How is the weather in Philadelphia- if that's where you are now; it's so hot here in New York. I was invited to a million things but part of me just wants to try and drink some iced coffee and lay down and watch a Derek Jarman movie or something. Perform that kind of tired queerness.

I wanted to talk about your poetry, and your latest work, and also how your work maybe functions as haiku. I was reading Barthes on haiku recently who idolized haiku as a sort of perfect form. The perfect image, something that collapses time inward. And that makes me think of your work- a collapsed inward image. But also like, fun and bubbly. Effervescent.

C: It’s hot in, sticky in philadelphia, i am currently home now. were in the humid thunderstorm loop here but i dont think a storm is going to break for another few days. im going to go smoke weed on mikayla’s roof later today, other then that i've been playing katamari and drinking ice water while drawing all day.

people mention haiku to me a lot, because i write small, few word poems, with a focus on natural imagery. I honestly don’t read much haiku, and wouldn’t site it as a direct source of inspiration, or say that ive studied the form. i do think my work resonates with a similar drive and spirit of haiku though, and i hold a dear reverence for the form.

i love that quote “the perfect image” and “something that collapses time inward” my intent of form for writing poems is absolutely trying to expand a space, a moment, an emotion, memory, as wide and deep as possible with as few words as i possibly can. i really focus a lot on creating complete and whole worlds inside my poems, but its subtle because they are such small poems. my work has a lot of play in it, i think my tone of voice always has an air of play to it.

J: I think for me I think of the succinctness of your work, more so than scale. Sometimes your work even if it isn't about apocalypse, feels very tied to that, the event, the feeling, the fear, the expression of it and often I think your work has mechanical feelings in it, these references to the Matrix or like using human concepts in regards to natural things. I think a lot of some of your work that lists desires and those desires bend to human concepts, not natural ones.

I think that the bubbling of your work feels like it could go on forever, like how do you decide to end a poem or even a collection? In hot pearl or hell ship or i love you, here's a gigantic worm?

C: yes ! i think most of my work, comes from a place of constant consideration of apocalypse. And consideration of technology ! ive always been really inspired by and into sci-fi, cyberpunk ie: the matrix. i love to reference technology for sure. interweaving technology into nature and natural images, one function of that for me is about desire. desire for connection, for access. i think about texting my friends from the middle of the woods, and the simultaneous understanding of the link to earth + self, emotionally and also physically! But I also do think that technology and mechanics are a part of nature, and “the natural world.”

humans are a part of nature and we created these things. there’s this Bjork quote where she says that “You can use pro tools and still be pagan”. I’m really into the idea of using technology as tools of divination and holy connection with nature. I imagine a scene; being in moss, it’s absolute bliss, and then the connection of texting, sharing an image of moss with a friend, sharing that moment through cellular towers, and then that sneaking sense of apocalypse like earth Is going to melt.

and knowing that those moments of sharing and experiencing the absolute magic and heavenly nature of is not going to be possible anymore because humans are melting earth. I’m trying to hold all of these goods things weighted with that, the frantic fear of losing something so special. Its very cyberpunk to me. and then yeah !!!! its driven by desire! if i think of it now, a have a lot of poems that say “i want”i want so much...

with books, I usually decide on a number of pages first its very straight forward. im like okay this book is going to be 20 pages or 100 pages. with poems, if i read it and i have my emotions and vision echoed back to me, then its done ! I try to make myself cry, and I am always trying to write what I think is the perfect poem. i do try to spend a collective hour editing each poem, but usually i just know when its done. Not to be obtuse.

J: How do you think desire plays a role in the work that you do?

Your work has such striking images - things I think are (I hate this word) but striking and original. I'm thinking of even the word "hell ship" for instance or "hot pearl," the fag poem, "superintendent of the golf course," "my flowering boyhouse," and the specificity of the "i want.”

The images feel free from societal cliches and expectations, like a weaving of a fantasy world. I don't know if I have a question, I mostly just wanted to say that. It seems just very sprung from your mind, very specific. It's not that there aren't poetic traditions that predate or intertwine with yours, but I think in some ways it feels very Greek (Sappho, perhaps?) in its directness, in its wink, in its boldness.

I also wanted to hear you speak on the fag poem, it feels so essential and tears me apart.

C: i love to meditate on the feeling of desire, and feel desire. i also think that the reason i make art comes from a similar part in my emotional body as my desire. its an expression of that desire, as well as a manifestation of desire, i really long to create art and i love to make art about desire. its such a full and intricate emotion.

Recently I read a definition of “eros” as the opposite of “death wish” the antithesis of the call of the void, that eros is an absolute will to live and desire to experience. That’s the well of desire I channel my creativity through. which i think relates a lot to your mention of sappho. i read a lot of sappho, her voice and her form (specifically too how we just have fragments of her poems, and what that does to the form of her work) has something that i draw a lot of inspiration from. absolutely the way she, and other translations of greek text (ive been reading the iliad for 2 years).

i do also 100% imagine all of my poetry to take place in a specific and complete realm, in a fantasy world. that idea, of creating a whole separate place, lexicon, and memeplex was one of my first visions and drives as a poet.

the fag poem: i also started it with wanting to write "a fag anthem" which is not usually how i write poems, with a specific thesis for the poem. its an ode to faggots, a faggot declaration, but one from a place of reclamation driven by pain.

J: How do phones play a role in your life or your poetry? Your poems do include references to downloading pics of horses, or texting in the woods, or just texting or staring even. but i also wonder about the idea of writing on phones and what that means poetically and structurally.

What is your relationship to social media and Instagram? it mystifies me! you have a following and i wonder how that feels and how that is tied up in art-making, glo worm, distribution, and if it matters to you or if you have any feelings of community or fracture over how the internet works? In regards to the above, what are your thoughts on looks, or pulling looks? The politics, the aesthetics, the joys of looks? Are you pro look? Anti-look?

C: its a little trick of mine to add a reference to a phone in a poem. i think that phones are so intimate. i have an intimate relationship to my phone, and theyre magically little devices. i try to capture that magic when referencing "downloading pictures of horses" or looking at pictures of birds on your phone. thats also tied to apocalypse though, sometimes im writing from a space of thinking about animal extinction, when certain animals are gone and but we still have access to photos of them on the archive of the internet. our phones being a connection to that archive.

i love social media. i love connection ! im def in the camp of holding closer to the positives of social media, outside of my paranoia about facebook and the surveillance state and like, influencers, etc. i just want to share my art with people and reach people. it feels good to be connected with people who like my art and to be an artist. i can unpack that for hours though.

There are times when being seen, and watched by a following is overwhelming. I think there can be a tendency for people to view you just as the single dimension of what they see online. I def have an online persona, and have built an image, altho thats also complicated and confusing because that image and persona is not a lie, just a crystallization of parts of myself. but I don’t really concern myself too much with that anymore. People can see me how they want. I am highly protective of parts of myself and my life

i love looks. i got into art as a kid because i wanted to be a fashion designer. as a transsexual gay faggot virgo born the week of beauty, aesthetics are very important to me ! in that, the play and fantasy of looks are important to me. i do believe that aesthetics are empty. especially in this year of 2019. and i think holding that in mind can create buoyancy for the play of looks, of pulling a look. its about fantasy and expression. i also find power in it. recently to combat my social anxiety, ill wear elf ears to non-costume events, as it subverts my paranoia of being stared at for being a fag freak. i like giving people a reason to stare at me, a fag freak.

J: Tell me about your influences. Who gives you visions? Tell me about the knife? tell me about Keanu Reeves, the Matrix, and your celebrity icons?

C: Techno music gives me visions, the ocean gives me visions, the forest, the planets give me visions. Bjork gives me visions, Bruce Springsteen, Gregg Araki, Wong Kar Wei, Anohni, Greek mythology, Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions, Kazuko Shiraishi, the color red, the color blue, Cocteau Twins, dream pop, pop music, Brokeback Mountain.

to me, the knife, is a perfect vision of pop +freakdom + communism + mysticism. Its apocalyptic gay communist dance music, deeply mystic lyrics. it's everything I search for in art in one project, I cannot believe the knife.

the Matrix, simply to me, is about following your destiny. to me it's about actualizing the godly calling, your godly calling, your vision for yourself. it's so virgo, bringing together the celestial and the earth.

Keanu is just so beautiful; i think it's a trans guy thing. me and him have very similar birth charts. i love my playful relationship with celebrity icons. i feel tepid to "stan" people and celebrities. Icons are false, kill your idols, blah blah blah. but its a gay thing also to have icons, and its a part of that fantasy.

J: Talk more about elf ears and giving people a reason to look at you?

C: id just rather give people something truly freaky to look out, rather than just the spectacle of my visibly trans body. its a transsexual thing for me for sure, or like informed by my medicalized trans body, modifying my body, fantasy cyborg, morphing my tool (my body)!

J: Are there any other body mods that really seem exciting?

Did you have a spiritual upbringing or have any spiritual practices now?

What does healing the earth look like to you?

What does healing self and community look like to you?

C: i love getting pierced recently..also obviously tattoos, as a tattoo artist and someone who gets tattoos. if they knew how to dick surgery good i would do that. maybe someday theyll get it. im getting top surgery this year.

i was loosely raised catholic. i do candle magic and ritualistic intention setting.

full ! communist ! revolution now ! fully paid reparations ! returning stolen land back to its people ! and high tech cleaning of the oceans, permaculture, rebuilding of the rainforests. returning Nikola Tesla’s ideas and designs back to the people.

community looks like responsibility. I’ve been thinking recently about how self healing happens with community healing, and when you put your time and heart into community, it heals your heart. I think we’re deep in a culture of individualistic healing, and it’s alienating. Workers of the world unite.

Chariot: what is your relationship to fantasy ? idle cosmopolitan, your first mini series, is full of ghosts, tarot readings, an alternate world. it felt like it was brushing against a suggestion of magic, also the way time + space is expressed in the series, it has a morphing quality. trans monogamist doesn't really carry those themes through, besides the astral projection class ( a little hint at the magic” is there still fantasy in this second work ?

J: I think for me I don't see Idle Cosmopolitan as that fantastical; how hard is it to believe a world with spirits of some kind? Even if they aren't expressed the way they are expressed in fantasy novels or TV. The everydayness of magic. For me, fantasy is similar to queerness in that it means possibility. Hope. Optimism through pain. Most fantasy is born through quests and pain, the classic Arthurian tale.

I think for me, that's the root of it. I read so much fantasy when I was kid. I was obsessed with Arthurian lore, castles, Pokemon, Digimon, the Green Knight, all of it. I think that Trans Monogamist is fantastical in some ways, I've heard Broad City described as a fantastical NYC, as has SATC and almost any show about people in NYC. So in that sense, yeah. Where every corner has people to date. And of course, while I do exist as a NB Carrie Bradshaw in real life, that concept is a sort of fantasy of its own.

C: What’s your relationship to technology and that aspect of film-making?

J: Technology worries me. I read Carceral Capitalism last summer and felt worried, as always, by the rise of surveillance and predictive policing. I think I understand why some people chose paths of craft over content, but I also don't think it's always a strict binary.

But to be fair, at a certain point you can often only know so much about one or the other. You can focus on learning more and more about craft and technology and lenses or you can focus on plot, characters, drama... Or you can do both! I just don't know that many people who end up able to do both. It's a lot of effort and time and money just to do that learning. I do think there are cracks for the light in technology to come forth. It's how we met! But I find myself often pessimistic about it. But I don't want to come across as a technology grump either. I can be modern occasionally.

C: do you think you are expressing a part your self through the main characters of your work? you act as both of them, i wonder what your relationship to self portrait is? if the self insert is significant or, how is that self insert significant to you? is it that no one else could properly portrays these characters?

J: I definitely think of my work as self-portraiture. I think part of it just that I'm making work about things that I go through, I'm making work DIY, and it can be easier (and harder) to self direct. It's also, of course, cheaper, than trying to find someone else and guide them to a place you feel deeply. I think for a while I felt uncomfortable about appearing in my own work but now I"m pretty numb to it. It just sort of feels like the kind of work that I'm making now. I think it felt required. If we're thinking of the path, we're thinking of flow, it just felt like the next step in making art.

Also, for me, it's important to make work specific and not too broad. I want to talk about what my queerness, what my life is like, and I don't want to speak for someone else at all.

C: what is your process like for writing, and editing your video work? you're a workaholic right? can you talk about that process ? your relationship to that?

J: I am such a workaholic. I mean we are doing writing work on the 4th of July!! I have three projects in different stages right now. Video work is usually much more collaborative. There's a free fall element to not having all the control. It's scary and it's also how I push myself to not be a total control freak and to push myself to be a better artist. I do believe in community and collaboration I just also have an intense drive to sort of speed through things and make and create and there's certainly an element of capitalism that has infused me with needing to DO things. It's not my best quality!

But it also is a strength. I like to create! And sometimes that urge is so strong that sometimes I do need to do things alone. I think it's important to balance collaborative work with solo work, you need outlets! So sometimes I write alone, sometimes I don't. My video work often involves at least 16 people in the cast. And Trans Monogamist was all about co writing and co starring with Alfredo Franco and having Artless Media being such a big guiding and production force.

C: What’s your relationship to tropes and pop?

J: I think I love tropes, astrology, SATC quizzes, all of those kinds of things. I think the boxes we fit in or don't fit in both do and don't speak about our personhood. Sometimes we put too much stock into them, sometimes too little.

Queer tropes of course are such a fundamental part of online queer culture and also can be so toxic but also very healing! I think the way queer culture fractures and floats online definitely influences my work, but I try to engage playfully. There are things in queer online culture I feel serious about- in terms of supporting funds that support black trans woman or fundraisers for surgeries. But in terms of other queer iconographies and categories I try to just absorb and play. I think little of my online presence has to do with replicating those memes or ideas.

If anything it's about crafting my own identity that picks apart at random things like Carrie, an occasional look. Trans Monogamist definitely skates around and jokes a lot about types of gays while also recognizing that RIver is their own type of gay and while River jokes about hating gay graphic designers or art gays, River is an art gay. It's just that claiming identity feels scary to River, so they sort of dash over or around it and try and just be a person. Someone described TM as a show that tries hard to categorize people.

I don't know how I fit. I'm an art gay I guess. Nonbinary sometimes seems to be ascribed its own internet aesthetic but I don't know how i fit in that or don't. If anything I think there are certain binaries of queerness that I do identify on.

C: What trope am I?

J: You're definitely an alt-art gay as well, but on a different side of things? There's def a type of gay that does tattoos, is trans, loves communism, and cowboy imagery.

C: right, what you said also got me thinking about tropes as language, theyre identifying words, and that shapes our understandings of ourselves and our experiences. and there is so much play i think, in queer culture between collective experience and personal experience.

J: I think I worry a bit about the ways we seem to gravitate towards locks and keys as ways of conceptualizing identity. And yet, I do that! So who am I to say that? I think it's best to let everyone feel their identity the way they feel it, even if that's not how I feel it. Right? What does that hurt/what does it heal? It certainly heals someone else and probably doesn't hurt me, excluding hatred, of course. Plus, sometimes someone's experience or a collective's experience help us- we say that's me! or that's definitely not me!

C: can you say more about territory? how does pop, or mass culture, bring us into territory?

J: What's the difference between populist and popular? Is there one? Can something that's populist be destructive, can it be healing? Is liking what the people like somehow revolutionary or is it bad? Are we as a people healing bending towards justice or not? It's a tricky counter situation. Plenty of things we probably think are good are considered bad, and vice versa. so sometimes seems revolutionary and sometimes doesn't.

But it does remind me of the way Bergman is against symbolism-reading in his work, Susan Sontag's against interpretation, Patti Smith's writing about not trying to read a message into literature. I'm not sure i wholly agree, but the idea of the sign as uninterpretable or as a mirror is interesting. Of course these are also mostly people with a romantic idea of art and plenty of people believe in interpreting art and for good reason. Works can be about race, class, gender, etc., and also have images that can't be broken down. It can be both.

Joshua Byron is a nonbinary storyteller based in Brooklyn. Their work includes the webseries Trans Monogamist co-created with Alfredo Franco and Artless Media, Idle Cosmopolitan with Glo Worm Press, as well as the zine Sincere Hate. Previously they have written dating columns and lyrical essays for Bushwick Daily, the Body Is Not An Apology, Yes Poetry, and more. Their films have been screened at Sarah Lawrence College, the Indianapolis LGBT Film Festival, Secret Project Robot, and more. They love Ursula K LeGuin, rose soap, and lots of coffee.

chariot wish is an artist and angel living in philadelphia. theyve seen the matrix 28 times in 2 years and love horses.

#Joshua Byron #interview #chariot wish

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trendingnewsb · 7 years ago

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Artie Lange Is Not Ready to Die: F*ck Em All

Its hard being friends with the notoriously demon-plagued comedian Artie Langewhich, full disclosure, I am. This is in no way objective. I truly want the guy to live.

I first interviewed Lange in 2006 as part of the New York Posts coverage of the annual New York Comedy Festival. He had just sold out Carnegie Hall in a few hours and was on top of the world. Over the next few years, we met at comedy clubs from time to time. I mentioned how healthy he looked in a May 2009 Page Six item about his visiting Colin Quinns one-man show (which he mentioned in his book Crash and Burn). When I interviewed him again on Oct. 30, 2009, it was a longer talk this time, with a few insights that surprised me. He talked about the game comics play of initially sabotaging a set with the audience, then seeing if you can dig yourself out of that hole. I asked if he had ever thought that he might be playing the same game with his own life. You should be a shrink, he said.

Sixty-nine days later, I heard the news, like anyone else who follows Lange: that he was near death after stabbing himself in the stomach nine times with a 13-inch kitchen knife.

Then on Sept. 27, 2010, I got a call from comedian Dan Naturman, who told me all about Arties triumphant return at the Comedy Cellar, which led to an incredibly feel-good lead item in Page Six called: Artie Lange Thrills Audiences Again.

I interviewed him several more times over the years, and when my husband Pat Dixon, who is also a comedian, started his own show in 2015 at Compound Media, run by controversial radio legend Anthony Cumia, I told Artie that he ought to consider joining the network. To my surpriseand unrelated to me telling him that, as the pairing of two Sirius refugees is a no-brainer for anyone who follows shock-jock radioin August 2017, he started a new show with Cumia called The AA Show. Now, not only did Lange have a regular broadcasting outlet, but the HBO series Judd Apatow and Pete Holmes enlisted him in called Crashing, where he played himself, was a bona fide hit. His third book, Wanna Bet?, was inked, his standup was doing well, and so if you were doing any kind of predictive sequence, what happened next was no surprise.

Oct. 16, 2017: Artie Lange rushed to hospital, cancels weekend show. Dec. 13, 2017: Artie Lange Arrested After Missing Court Date for Drug Charges. Dec. 15, 2017: Artie Lange Headed to Rehab on Private Jet After Drug Charge.

Less than a month later, on Jan. 12, Lange returned home to New York and tweeted out to his 364,000 followers: Im back guys. Clean & Sober 32 days.

On Jan. 18, after celebrating Dave Attells birthday (Artie just turned 50 himself), Lange met me in between sets at New York Citys Olive Tree Cafe. To avoid the requests for photos from fans and occasional paparazzi, we sat in his SUV and drove around the city for an hour and a half before returning to the comedy club. With one hand on the steering wheel and one on an unlit Marlboro Red, Lange talked about everything from Harvey Weinstein to Donald Trump to Louis C.K. to Aziz Ansari to the fundamental question at hand:

Artie Lange doesnt want to die… right?

The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mandy: So I guess Im wondering at what point all of this is enough to get you to stop. Like, for instance, I have a friend who if he did cocaine one more time, the doctors told him his nose would collapse

Artie: Well half of my nose is gone. My nose has no septum. I mean Ive been snorting coke and heroin

Mandy: When was the last time you did coke or heroin?

Artie: Well I just pissed clean at Hazelden so thats 38 days. But heres the thing: 31 of them were in lockdown. So nows the real work. And Im not going to lie to you, its a struggle lying there every night.

Mandy: Whats the longest youve ever been clean?

Artie: Since I was 15, 11 months. And two weeks in my twenties.

Mandy: Do you take, what is it, methadone?

Artie: No, no. I was on methadone years ago. There was a methadone clinic on Eighth and 35th, and I would go there before Howard. They would give it out to me, like special, at 5:30 a.m. I had to stop doing heroin because I was losing my job. They gave me the methadone. Its fucking heroin, basically. I left during interviews to throw up. And I said, Well this is worse than fucking heroin, so why dont I stay on that. I take Suboxone now. Suboxone works well for me, and its accepted by society. It looks like a pill you take for blood pressure every morning, so thats how Ive got to look at it. It lets you not go cold turkey.

Aziz Im sorry is a better name. I dont have any respect for Aziz Ansari. Im glad nobody got raped.

Artie Lange

Mandy: You detoxed cold turkey in jail this last time?

Artie: Ive been in jail like eight times, and this past time, I detoxed. I kicked heroin, like lying on the floor. When I got arraigned, you always want to be very respectful in front of the judge. She was like, What are you doing? And Im thinking to myself, Well, your honor, Im dead. And you know, Im trying to stand up. Withdrawal, the physical stuff, people would see the first or the second day of withdrawals, girlfriends would say, Well, that was really bad. And Im like, You saw the opening act. That was The Clash. That was David Johansen. The Who is about to take the stage. The third or fourth day of heroin withdrawal, if youre a big user like I became, if youre not physically stopped from getting dope, youll get it. With heroin, I became an addict on the road. I always had money. Ive never had to steal. I dont judge those people. Like people say to me, Have you ever blown a guy for heroin? I say, No. But then again, no ones ever asked.

Mandy: If you do fall off the wagon again, are you scared of fentanyl at all?

Artie: No. A real heroin addict is not scared of fentanyl. Id do it in a heartbeat. I want strong shit.

Mandy: Have you seen the tiny amount it takes to kill you?

Artie: I dont know what it is, but draw it back one inch. I would accept fentanyl in a heartbeat. I had a fentanyl patch on in a mental home. It was unbelievable. Ive never ODed. Ive had dealers say, Jesus Christ. What the fuck. But the nose is bad now. I could get a brain infection. If I did it, anything would go right to the brain. But again, I heard that six months ago, and I went and used an hour after.

Mandy: So I mean… you must want to die.

Artie: No, I dont want to die. I want to be high.

Mandy: But that will eventually kill you.

Artie: Im 50. If you would have told me in 1995, if you tried to bring up 2018, it would be like The Jetsons. Id be like, What are you talking about?

Mandy: So youre having fun on borrowed time.

Artie: Im playing with the houses money. As far as Im concerned, Im an overachiever. A lot of money changed hands on the internet when I turned 50. I was so happy. Fuck em all.

Mandy: But I mean… your mom and your sister. Theyre the main people who keep you from wanting to to be reckless with the houses money, right?

Artie: Yes thats the… thats the worst.

Mandy: I called your mom when you were practically in a coma these last few weeks, and her voice was just so heartbroken. I dont think she thought you were going to make it.

Artie: Yeah, you know, my father left us with nothing. I love my dad. He was my best friend. But my father was a criminal. My dad was an impulsive guy, and thats what killed him. Just like my father, with me, there are real high highs and real low lows. Like my mother saw me at Carnegie Hall, when my book went to No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and I think [Barack] Obamas was like No. 7. She has that framed. But then shes also seen me withdrawing in jail.

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Mandy: Your mom discovered you when you tried to kill yourself in 2010, right?

Artie: That was not a suicide attempt. I was in such bad withdrawals. Believe me, I leave a note. The one other time, I left a note. But shrinks go, Youve never tried to kill yourself. Because there was always a mountain of drugs involved. I was in such bad withdrawals, I wanted to feel something different. I was by myself. I wanted to lose enough blood to pass out. When I woke up, I dont know, I figured Id put on a red shirt and go out. I didnt know my mother was coming over. They had an intervention planned that I didnt even know about. I go, Ma, you never planned a surprise party.

Mandy: Does your mom talk to you every day?

Artie: Yeah, my mother knows me better than anybody, but I dont tell her when I slip. You know, when Dr. Drew offered me 250 grand to do Celebrity Rehab, I thought to myself, Do I just want to kill my mother now? Like its going to be me and Dennis Rodman throwing up in the same bucket. I love Dr. Drew, but I knew that show was going to go off the air because the recovery rate is like zero. If Pablo Escobar were alive today, hed be running a rehab. Its such a corrupt industry.

Mandy: You seem to still get offered drugs a lot. I think about that scene in Crashing where its the super hot woman from Showgirls who has coke and wants to do it with you.

Artie: Gina Gershon? Yeah, you know, that episode is based on one of my stories. And if the woman who inspired the episode figures it out, shed be very happy with the casting.

Mandy: Do you think it was a good idea to leave rehab early?

Artie: I have to do this intense outpatient thing which is five days a week. I go in there in the morning, and I get piss tests there. Screen Actors Guild doesnt let you do that to people. Like its almost an NFL union. You cant pee-test people. Not that Im complaining about it, but I dont get fired from shows because ultimately its a forgiving business for stuff like that. People always say its a forgiving business. And, its true. Robert Downey Jr. came back, and hes like the best actor ever. But for every one of him, theres like two thousand Jeff Conaways from Taxi living at a right angle and nobody cares and they die alone.

Mandy: Youre just working so much right now.

Artie: The one genre where I have some juice is the radio business, and you know Anthony Cumia, I love Anthony so much now. I never really met him before. Were both sort of outlaws. Without this podcasting technology you know we both would be out of a job now, probably. Its such a weird existence I have right now. Over on one side, Im doing this crazy podcast with Anthony on Compound Media that I love, and then Im on Crashing which is an HBO-produced show I love, but which could not be more the other way. Judd Apatow is another famous guy who saved my life. Like, what a great person. Ive got books and stand-up, and Im still making a lot of money doing it. If thats not going to go away, theres not much of an incentive to stay in rehab.

Mandy: And Im guessing, from what you said, you dont want to leave your mom with nothing. So what about a gig like the one with Anthony Cumia. Is that enabling or is that helping you stay clean?

Artie: Let me tell you something: I love doing it. Its almost like therapy. A lot of people dont understand a comics mind. People are like, Youre going to jump right into stand-up? Yeah, thats what I have to do. I cant stop doing it. And Anthonys show is like from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Its the most fun Ive ever had in my life. Even more fun than Howard. Because I was never uncensored on Howard. Its his show. Its Howard. So what was happening near the end when his life changed, he would meet somebody in the Hamptons, and we wouldnt know about it. Like me and Fred [Norris, the longest tenured Howard Stern staff member] wouldnt know about it. And then hed be friends with them, like somebody we bashed for 10 years. So Id say something about Richard Gere, and hed go, You got a problem with him? Id go, Havent we always had a problem with him? No, I had dinner with him. Well, can I get the memo? I dont give a shit. Ill put him on the fucking list. But I wouldnt not be able to make fun of Orlando Bloom. The show, I couldnt be on now. And he knew that.

Mandy: Anthony probably does a better Howard impression than Howard at this point.

Artie: Well the thing about Anthony is that hes the same guy off-air. But its not true for Howard. Howards a very fascinating guy. He must have an IQ north of 180. But the example I always use is that Hunter S. Thompson was a guy who destroyed like the wealthy and corporate America, and he walked the walk until the end of his life. He was a crazy maniac in Colorado and shot himself in the head. And Howard was like that for a while. He was making fun of all these people, and when he got a chancelike no one else has become an A-list person through the radiobut when he got a chance to be with those people, fans thought hes going to be like Hunter S. Thompson. Like you see them through the window eating, and hes going to bust through the window or moon them or something. And when he got the chance, like Jennifer Anistons wedding, he starts making out with Orlando Bloom.

Mandy: Metaphorically.

Artie: Right. And to me as a fan, its like, what the fuck have we been laughing at all this time? Me and my first girlfriend at the time Dana [Sironi], she was close with Beth [Ostrosky Stern]. And Beth is a sweetheart. I dont want to make it sound like Im bitter. I still love Howard.

Mandy: Who are the people from the Stern show you keep in touch with?

Artie: Well, theyre not allowed to call me. I swear to God, Ive had people tell me from the show they were worried they were talking to me. Look, Im a person whos impulsive, and I get very angry and I say things I shouldnt say. Its hurt me my whole life, and Im a junkie.

Mandy: You tweeted a few days ago, Look out Marci. Im talking to Howard without your permission, referring to his high-profile handler Marci Turk. Did you actually talk to Howard Stern?

Artie: No, I dont talk to Howard. We hate each others guts. He cant stand me for some reason, and Ive learned to hate him.

Mandy: Whats your reaction to Louis C.K.? And now everyones talking about the story that was written about Aziz Ansari.

Artie: Aziz Im sorry is a better name. I dont have any respect for Aziz Ansari. Im glad nobody got raped. But you know, I agree with Samantha Bee when she says it doesnt have to be rape to ruin somebodys life. Thats true. And what Louis did is despicable. That was a rumor for a long time. But if youre a couple of women at the Aspen Comedy Festival, youve got a lot going on, probably. And theres this comedian, who back then he wasnt famous, but hes always been respected, and they certainly knew him. And hes promising them shit supposedly, and its just because he wants to jerk off in front of them. Its just the creepiest thing ever. Louis was always overrated to me. He has like five jokes hes written that I like. But you know Ill go along with it, if it gets me spots. I just think hes overrated. To me, it was like the emperors new clothes came off. In the hotel room.

Mandy: Have you had any women approach you with any kind of Me Too moment, something they wanted to confront you about?

Artie: A girl? No. I mean, some people think Im a misogynist because of stuff on the Stern show. You know Ive never told anybody this, but this is how my family feels about sex predators: After I told my father about a high-school teacher hurting a girl I knew, the way my dad dealt with it was by waiting outside the teachers house, putting a bag over the guys head, and leaving him in a car for two days. My dad came back, disguised his voice, and he said, Stop fucking touching little girls. Im not condoning how he handled it, but thats just the truth. My father thought that was justified. You know, there are people who think Goodfellas is horrible. We think its a comedy. My momshe is the strongest woman in my lifeand she and my sister are my heroes. Any woman whos ever dated me will tell you, Im like, Are you sure? Can we get this in writing and an email from you? I think in Hollywood, its a case of these nerdy guys who dont know what to do with a woman, and they get a chance to do it, and they do something inappropriate. Like Ive never been a Casanova but Ive always been able to get a date. I think the more time you stay asexual in your adult life, you get creepier.

Mandy: Ive had several comics over the years tell me about their personal dislike for Aziz based on his standoffish behavior. Do you think theres any schadenfreude right now as he is coming under fire?

Artie: Im probably one of those guys. I thought he could follow me on Bitter. I dont like bashing of comedians in general. I hated the Dane Cook-bashing thing. And Dane goes on to make all that money, and that bitterness comes out. Then his brother steals millions of dollars from him. I wish Dane well. And you know, I think Aziz gets a lot of that bitterness, too. You know, his timing is perfect for comedy. But what he does at the Comedy Cellar is not going to endear him to anybody. What he does there, he sits in the corner like a young Dylan writing jokes, and he can do that at home. We get it. Youre a hard worker. But I guess were going to have to get over that, because a new generation of people is coming.

I think he was trying to figure out a way to get rid of me. I did the job for him, but I dont think he was rooting for it.

Artie Lange on Howard Stern

Mandy: Do you think that Crashing captures the changing culture in comedy at all?

Artie: Judd is so great at what he does, and so is Pete [Holmes]. The way Judd lets you improvise, and the money… see Ive never been involved in something that you might call a hit. Except the Stern show, but that was very different. Judd is so successful. The money HBO is spending. They shot it like a playyou dont have to do over-the-shoulder stuff. And the way that I talk and work, it was way better for me. Judd knew that. Like the scene in the pizzeria, Judd read my book, which was flattering, and he said, Just tell me stories about your life, about what can happen off-stage, so like the ghost of Christmas future. Comedy future. I think its great, because Judd lets us talk.

Mandy: I was relistening today to your very first Howard Stern appearance. And Stern is joking, saying, You need coke. Youre a lot better on it. He also says, Go out and get into more trouble, and well have you back on.

Artie: I know. But you cant blame anyone else for any of this. Howards genius is seeing which way the wind is blowing in society and acting accordingly. I think he noticed after the Janet Jackson thing, we started getting fined for stupid shit. Were getting $500,000 fines for jokes Im making about farting. The guy is a genius at marketing and comedymore so in marketing. I think he saw over time the way the show was going, and that it would not be conducive to have me on it. But he also knew that I was popular. I think he was trying to figure out a way to get rid of me. I did the job for him, but I dont think he was rooting for it. I think he conquered that era of radio with me. I wouldnt fit in now at all. I cant stand Gwyneth Paltrow. The contrast between the old shows is crazy. Like if you listen to shows we did of us talking about Jennifer Aniston or Ellen DeGeneres dancing in the 2000s. He said Aniston was a cunt. Even I was like, Jesus, it must be personal. Now he goes to her wedding.

Mandy: So whats going on with your health? The diabetes has gotten really bad? Have you had to amputate anything?

Artie: God no. The rumors have gotten really bad, havent they? No, the diabetes is under control every time I go to the hospital. But the thing is, its a confusing disease. One day a Twinkie could save your life, and another day it could kill you. Im not a good preparer so thats why I was bad in school. I was like, Lets get the fuck out of here and get to life. Which comedy lets you do. But yeah, with diabetes, youre supposed to measure your blood sugar every time before you eat. Im like, What the fuck, are you kidding me? Im going to take my blood sugar in the parking lot of McDonalds? Its bad, but when I go to the hospital they get me under control. So now its under control. Its fine, actually. But you know, give me two months out of the hospital and my blood sugar is higher than my credit score. Thats the signifier of a loser. They also put me on the liver list. I needed a new liver. But I went to a medical clinic someone recommended, and they gave me this special shit they put in the saline, it cost like $80,000, and my liver enzymes were like 900, which is like Mickey Mantle at the end of his life. And it went to normal, completely normal. My kidneys, my liver are all fine. The doctor said, Youve got the bloodwork, despite the diabetes, of an Olympic athlete.

Mandy: Have you thought about going down to Hippocrates Health Institute, where a lot of entertainment industry people have gone?

Artie: I did that once. Yeah, my sister found out about it. You need a prescription for an apple. I ran away from that in 2008. Howard said, go away for as long as you need to. Eight days in with these two other guys who were Stern fans who would have done anything for me, we just escaped in the one guys car. I got a $3,500 room at the Setai in South Beach, and I got a hooker and a bunch of pancakes. And I called into the show and said I have whiskey and pancakes with this Ecuadorian hooker, and he put me on the air. So I left early from that, and I was out of control. And Howard didnt think I was going to die or anything. You know, Chris Rock came in once and said, Howard, I think youve got to fire Artie. I love him. But he needs consequences.

Mandy: I guess my take is, from observing you from afar, youve said, Im clean so many times, and that youre always somebody who is going to use.

Artie: People think that I want to be someone who uses. I dont. I mean, I remember in Little League when I didnt use anything, I was very happy. When I am emphatic about it, in my personal life, I dont lie to friends of mine. But I can think of a lot of reasons why you dont tell your boss youre doing heroin, and why I lied to Howard Stern. Theres also a misconception I hate that Howard didnt care about me. He tried to get me help. Several times he said to me, Take as long as you want, and when you come back you have a job.

Mandy: So do you think some of the drug abuse comes from massive, massive self-hatred? That was the case for me, I know, and many addicts.

Artie: Thats interesting. Listen, Bernie Brillstein was talking to Norm Macdonald and me once. Hes the legendary manager who managed [John] Belushi, and he managed Chris Farley. And he supposedly said to Belushi and Farleyits funny he had guilt that he said this to Belushi, and 20 years later he said it again to mehe said, Well, whatd you get into show business for? Not to fuck hookers and do drugs? I was brought up on Sam Kinison and Richard Pryor. With Richard Pryor, I wanted to do almost everything he did, short of burning himself. And thats a terrible thing to think, but I got the opportunity, and I made every mistake you could make. I was like, Why not? The first time we went to Las Vegas with Howard, I fucked 11 strippers in four days. We were like the Rolling Stones going in there. Two years on MadTV aint exactly the Rolling Stones. The stuff Ive done with Norm Im so proud of because it was Norm, but it was never like a big hit. Like Dirty Work has become a little bit of a cult thing, which Im proud of. But with the Stern show, this was like rock-star shit. We flew into Vegas on a private jet, and theres a line around the block, and its all for us. Howard is married. Fred is married. Everyones married, and then theres me. The strippers going down her list, and she says, I guess Ill fuck him.

Mandy: Do you still talk to Norm Macdonald?

Artie: We communicate with text, like everybody else. He put a very nice thing in his book about me. He called me the last time, and he said, you gotta stop doing this. He was worried about me. I love Norm. Norm saved my whole career. Out of nowhere. I was about to start driving a cab again. I got the call for Dirty Work, and that led to everything else. Norm. Howard. Quincy Jones, who gave me MadTV. And Judd now. These are famous guys. [Bruce] Springsteen called me. And Apatow said to me, he said, You must be a really bad addict going back to this shit after all these people, your heroes, saved you. Hes right. I mean, Quincy Jones saved my fucking life. He also got me these insane privileges in L.A. County. Like my own shower. And I asked Quincy, How do you have so much sway in prison? He said, I made Thriller.

Mandy: So why do you go back to the drugs after you get clean each time? Is it the boredom?

Artie: Its the anger. Ill give you an example. Its a story I kind of keep on the down-low, but there was this girl that I dated in San Diego. She worked at an agency as an assistant. She was 23. I was 28, and I was on MadTV. And she was pregnantshe got pregnant, found out it was a boy. I was all excited, and she was scared to death because of how I had been living. Me at that age makes this look like Mr. Rogers. So the first place we made out was Zuma Beach, and she said, Lets go to that place. I want to tell you something. Shes crying, and she says, I had an abortion. I was mad, and I said, Why? And she said, You know, Artie, youre going to make your mark in this business, but I hope you do it before you die. And I cant deal with that.

Mandy: So anger is often the cause of relapses for you? Anger at the world?

Artie: It is a strange world. Its like rereading the Unabomber Manifesto its kind of like, I get it now. I dont agree with how he went about it, but he was clearly on the money about technology. Or look at the movie Network. That one scene, he lays everything out about what is to come.

Mandy: When do you find out if youre going to jail?

Artie: Feb. 23. You know, if they want to send me away for being a junkie, thats fine. The judge was very fair. Very smart. I dont know if she was a big fan of mine, but thats all right.

Mandy: When do you think you were happiest in your life?

Artie: You know, its funny. When I was broke, when I left the port as a longshoreman, and I decided to drive into New York City one night, I was 19 years old. When I started doing well, I was driving a cab, I was broke, trying to help my mother out. We were about to lose the house. And I told her I could go back to the port. She said I could keep doing it. But you know, I was happier during the struggle because of hope. I was 23, broke, driving a cab, parking a cab in front of The Comic Strip, which was the first place I passed. I would have [Joe] Matarese or [Dave] Attell watch the car. I was happier then, I swear to God.

Mandy: Hollywood can be fairly crushing. So many transactional relationships and people who dont care if you live or die and want to use you.

Artie: At the Stern show, I saw how toxic that entire environment was. You have some people who are without talent who just leached onto Howard. Talentless guys whose entire life is based on pleasing that one person. I saw people who werent comedians who thought they could sit in that chair and do what I did. When I went down with the heroin thing, they were clearly making statements about it. Like if I died, they would have been almost happy about it, I guarantee it. I saw the sharks swimming like Ive never seen before. I thought I knew a lot about people in a non-naive way coming into that job, but man, the way people wanted what I did for a living. What pissed me off is that they thought they could do it. And you know, theres a reason that chair stayed empty. Im done being humble with some things. That chair isnt empty completely because Howard felt like it; that chair is empty because he knows no one can do what I did. There are people who are funnier than me, but theres no one who would have been as honest, and no one who knows that show better. I left a lot of blood on that fucking floor, man. I told stories that cost me relationships with some people, and I didnt realize it. I almost got arrested. The DEA came to the fucking show because of something I said on the air, in their fucking windbreakers, to grill me about Heath Ledger because they thought we had the same heroin dealer. Im like, Why the fuck do you think that? I guess theres reasons they could. There was a security guy who worked the door, and he saw the whole thing, and he said, Artie, you are one entertaining fuckup.

Mandy: What do you think of Donald Trump, who used to do the Howard Stern Show quite a bit?

Artie: I love Trump. Ive had like four times when I interacted with him. I roasted him. Trump said I was the best of the night, but then Howard is so smart, he told me to tell the joke that was making fun of him in business. I do, and then Trump goes, Artie was the worst of the roast. He bombed. I had a CNN guy call me about it, and I said, Im not doing it. Because Im fucking rooting for him. And I golfed with him and Eli Manning once at his club. I did nothing but laugh along with him. Then I saw him at Howards wedding. Howard had bought out Le Cirque. But it was still small. I had played Carnegie Hall at this point, but it was so nerve-wracking. Billy Joel and his wife were there, two feet from me. Howard. Trump and Melania. Barbara Walters, Joan Rivers, Chevy Chase. It was a tough room, you know. And I killed. The first joke was how much Beth looks like Christie Brinkley, so I made a Billy Joel joke. And thank God he laughed at it. But Howard was drunk, and doing that great Howard laugh. I loved making Howard laugh. But Trump came up to me afterward, because other people spoke and kind of bombed, and he shook my hand, and he said, That was a very hard thing to do, and you were amazing. He respected that even though I look like a slob he could tell I worked hard. Because, yeah, you think I walked into Stern because I won a lottery? So I always respected the guy.

Whether youre for him or not, what he represents is that this country can vote out politicians and elect a game show host because theyre pissed off about stuff. You know, there are two guys on that Billy Bush tape. One guy apologized. The other guy didnt. One guys working at a gift shop in Kennebunkport. The other guys president. The fucking country likes alpha males. The Midwest does, I know that. And the stuff with the Mexicans. He didnt say he hates all Mexicans. He told the truth about the drug problem. How do you think I get dope? Trump just doesnt give a shit. You know, Louis C.K. wrote an op-ed piece, while he was, jerking off next to women, calling Trump Hitler? And its like, Calm the fuck down. It washes down what Hitler did. A guy who let the Mob take away garbage because you have to? The naivete of these people. If you build a building in New York, you have to deal with the Mob. Trump knows that. Ted Cruz lost so many votes during the primaries when he attacked him on that.

Mandy: What do you think of the porn star Stormy Daniels and Trump? I guess he asked her to spank him with a copy of Forbes.

Artie: Well, I think Ive done worse. Comparing him to Harvey Weinstein? Thats a fetish. Listen, if Trump has raped someone, of course I hate his guts.

Mandy: So for you, what has the reaction been to your latest near-death experience? From everything that Ive read on Twitter and Reddit and YouTube, I feel like half the fans are saying, I dont want to watch him kill himself anymore, and like, Ive stopped believing him.

Artie: The fact that I havent got it yet is hard to understand. I think theyre disappointed in me. It was an easier sell at 30 than it was at 50.

Mandy: Whats the best sobriety advice youve received, do you think?

Artie: To not make my Higher Power my career or another human being because it can disappoint you.

Mandy: Do you believe in God? Do you pray?

Artie: You know, Ill give you something Ive never told anybody. So my father was obsessed with Houdini the magician, and Houdini was obsessed with the occult. Houdini always tried to contact the other side, like dead relatives. So Houdini said, If I die, lets have a word. If the psychic tells you the word, you know, we talk. So my father said, when he was lying in bed, he had the plan to kill himself, but I didnt know that. He said, Lets do that. I go, OK. His father, who I never knew, died when he was 11. He got shot in front of him. His father worked at a factory. The Otis Elevator Company in Newark. It was a bookie, I guess. But he said, Lets make it Otis.

So Im in rehab this latest time, several weeks ago. And Im in the van, which the hilarious security guards call The Druggie Buggie. Or The Loser Cruiser, thats what they call it in jail. So Ive just come out of the shit, with the withdrawal part, and I looked better, I guess. It was a beautiful day. Where I went in Connecticut, it was like a Christmas card, it was unbelievably beautiful. And I said, I feel better this time. I felt really good. The sky was clear. I was with people I like, and they both said out of nowhere, I think youre going to make it this time. And I said, I guess I gotta think like that. And I stretched over, and there was a car that said Otis on it. The elevator at the rehab that never broke, they said, when I told them the story, the Otis Elevator Company was repairing the elevator. Listen, I dont believe in any of that shit, but that is the most spiritual thing thats ever happened to me. I tell my mother that, and clearly shes religious, and she goes, Dads talking to you. Im telling you, that was fucking freaky. So you know, just at that moment, when I had hope and I looked up and it was a clear sky and it says Otis, I was just like, Jesus Christ.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/artie-lange-is-not-ready-to-die-fck-em-all

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Beyond the blade: the truth about knife crime in Britain

Teenage knife crime is a tabloid obsession, blamed on feral youth running riot in our cities. But the reality is much more complex and we cannot save lives if we do not understand it

On Monday 23 January, shortly after 3pm, the regular din of children turning out of the Capital Academy secondary school in north-west London was interrupted by a sudden hush. All the kids were running around like usual, said one neighbour. But then it just went quiet. I got up to draw the curtains and saw kids running away, screaming.

Quamari Barnes, a 15-year-old student, had been stabbed several times. He fell just yards from the school gate. A woman cradled him in her arms as paramedics rushed to the scene before whisking Quamari away to hospital.

By most accounts, Quamari danced to the beat of his own drum. As a precocious child, he held court in conversations with adults from an early age; by his teens, he could cook a full Sunday roast on his own. When he was younger, he had no problem being the only boy in his dance class; as a teenager, while his friends were into grime and rap, he went old-school Bob Marley, Dennis Brown and Aswad.

After the attack, his family had been confident that Quamari would pull through. He had been talking to his mother in the ambulance, and the school sent out an email alerting parents to the tragedy, which said that he was expected to survive. But he didnt make it. One tribute from a fellow pupil, left at the school gate along with flowers, balloons, candles and a Jamaican flag, said: I can see you laughing at my art and craft skills. It was only yesterday you told me how proud you were that I chose drama. You made me think I was beautiful and confident You stood up for me when no one else did.

A 15-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has been charged with Quamaris murder.

One day later, at the Old Bailey, another 15-year-old boy was sentenced to 13 years in prison for fatally stabbing Folajimi Orebiyi, 17, in the neck and the back near Portobello Road in west London last July. Fola, as he was known, ran into a group of boys one of whom had been involved in a longstanding feud with one of Folas friends. Invited to a spot off the main road to settle the dispute, Fola assumed he was heading for a fist fight. But the presence of a knife took this incident to a whole different league of trouble, the prosecutor told the jury. It turned out that this wasnt so much a fight as an ambush. Within seconds, Fola was singled out and stabbed to death.

Explainer

Folas mother, Yinka Bankole, described her son as a vibrant and intelligent young man who planned to go to university to study maths and accounting. I was in labour for 23 hours with him, yet it took less than four minutes to stab him to death, she said. What are the government doing about this knife crime that seems to have taken over the streets of London? How many more of our children have to die before the government act?

Its a good question. Sadly, despite the nations episodic fixation with the issue, it is unlikely to receive a satisfactory answer.

A week before Quamari was killed and Folas killer was sentenced, the governments quarterly crime-statistics bulletin reported that knife crime in England and Wales had increased 11% on the previous year, while National Health Service data showed a 13% rise in hospital admissions for knife wounds. The report concludes that this increase reflects both an improvement in record-keeping and an actual rise in knife crime. The warning lights are flashing, said the previous Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe.

A Metropolitan police report released last month indicated that between 2014 and 2016 the number of children carrying knives in London schools rose by almost 50%, while the number of knife offences in London schools rose by 26%. The Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron, called it a wake-up call.

Scotland appears to have bucked this trend. In 2014/15, recorded crimes of handling an offensive weapon (which includes knives) fell to their lowest in 31 years, while the number of young people under the age of 19 convicted of carrying an offensive weapon fell 82% between 2006/7 and 2014/15.

In October, the Sentencing Council published draft guidelines for stiffer sentences for people carrying knives. Chief Constable Alf Hitchcock, who leads the National Police Chiefs Council taskforce on knife crime, told the London Evening Standard in early March that the peak age for carrying knives is getting younger, and is currently between 13 and 17. Youve got a group of people probably being influenced by their siblings, by their peer group, and carrying, which is not a good trend, he said. In Manchester, parents of a 14-year-old were ordered to pay 1,000 to a boy their son stabbed several times outside school. During a month-long amnesty in Surrey, police collected 237 knives, which will be used, along with knives collected by police across the country, in a 27ft sculpture called Knife Angel, which may yet adorn the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

When politicians and officials seek to pre-empt public indignation by making statements about wake-up calls and warning lights, it is a sign that something unacceptable is unfolding, which they lack either the will or the ability to address.

The answer to Folas mothers question How many more of our children have to die before the government act? is both damning and complex. Many more children will die from knife-related violence; indeed, four more have been stabbed to death since she posed it. But it is not because the government and related agencies are not acting. Pretty much every week, somewhere in the country, there is some kind of initiative to tackle knife crime an amnesty, a new charity in the name of the fallen, an appeal from police, a mayoral statement.

The trouble is that these efforts seem to have little effect. That might be because efforts to make a positive intervention are dwarfed by all the things the government is doing that are making the situation worse. These deaths occur at a moment when the country has made a conscious decision to defund and under-resource its young. When you slash youth services, underfund child mental health services and make swingeing cuts to education and policing, there will be an effect. The most vulnerable will suffer. Austerity didnt invent knife crime, but it is certainly contributing to the conditions in which it can thrive.

Quamari was the fifth young person to be killed by a knife this year. The third, Leonne Weeks, 16, died a week earlier. Her body was found on a muddy piece of wasteland in Dinnington, South Yorkshire. Dinnington is a short drive from Rotherham, Sheffield and Worksop, and a series of irregular buses connect this former mining town with the wider world, but it has no train station of its own. The pit used to look after everyone, says James McIver, 77, a former assistant pit supervisor, including the sick, the lame and the lazy. When it shut in 1992, everybody suffered. With more than half the children in the town now living in poverty, Dinnington serves as a commuter base for the surrounding towns.

A trainee beautician, Leonne posted dozens of selfies on her Facebook page, mostly with friends, and all with the same lip-smacking pout. Her body was found between two fly-tipping grounds in the centre of town. An abundance of floral tributes, balloons and hand-drawn pictures of Leonne were surrounded by broken refrigerators, remnants of old televisions and discarded soft furnishings.

Leonnes death attracted considerable attention: in the print editions of national newspapers, 27 stories appeared about her killing. Quamaris death was on the front page of the London Evening Standard, but there were only three stories in national newspapers. Coverage of the knife deaths of children and teens in the national press varies widely. There were 68 stories in national newspapers about Katie Rough, a seven-year-old girl who was stabbed in York this January; at the other end of the spectrum, one fatality has not been reported at all.

Katie Roughs parents, Paul and Alison. The couple were joined by hundreds of people in Westfield Park in York in January 2017 to release balloons on what would have been Katies eighth birthday. Photograph: Rex Features

The medias response to the murder of young people is inconsistent, says Patrick Green, the manager of the Ben Kinsella Trust in London, which is named after a 16-year-old boy who was stabbed to death in Islington in 2008 after a night out celebrating the end of his GCSEs. Some of these tragic deaths get little or no coverage. These stories are often lost because its a busy news day or because they consider the young person to be an unworthy victim. The media are more likely to report on the murder when a bright, educated young person from a privileged background is killed, and we all think: How did this happen to them? But we dont hear about or ask the same questions about the murders of young people from more vulnerable backgrounds.

Ben Kinsella, for example, was the brother of Brooke Kinsella, who played Kelly Taylor in EastEnders, which made his death high-profile. The attack was also caught on CCTV, which kept it in the public eye. Media interest in knife crime goes in cycles, explains Green. We go through phases when suddenly theyll be all over it, and Ill get lots of calls from media outlets asking me to comment on a recent murder, and it is front-page news. And just when I think we are making headway, getting the message out there that this is a big and growing problem, there will be another couple of murders and Ill hear nothing or see nothing in the papers or TV. Absolutely nothing or if I do, the victim wont get more than a couple of lines.

Over time, these inconsistencies have become glaring. Crimes committed with knives are nothing new Shakespeares plays are full of them. Knife crime as a phenomenon, however, is relatively recent. A survey of the national press and the London Evening Standard in 2000 revealed just one mention of the term; three years later, it was up to 24. Coverage peaked in 2008 with 2,602 mentions that year before trending precipitously downwards. What is significant about these statistics is that they bear only the vaguest correlation to the frequency of knife crime which peaked in 2011, by which time the media had begun to lose interest. Last year, even as the number of such crimes rose, the number of mentions of them fell.

The media did not invent knife crime either. But, with considerable help from the politicians, it has certainly shaped or rather distorted our understanding of it.

These distortions are, in no small part, made possible by the paucity of accessible facts. National data on the number of children and teens killed by knives in any given year is not publicly available. Contact the Home Office and it will tell you that individual police forces collect that information; for the best available data, it suggests that you try the Office for National Statistics. Contact the ONS and it informs you that all the deaths in England and Wales are collated in the Homicide Index, which is maintained by the Home Office. Send a freedom of information request to the Home Office and it refuses on the grounds that it would be likely to prejudice the prevention or detection of crime or the apprehension or prosecution of offenders. It also notes that the release of the names of victims could endanger the safety, or physical or mental health of their families.

So, while knife crime, particularly as it affects young people, has been the subject of national debate for a decade, our awareness of its true scale is limited, our grasp of its trajectory is only approximate, and coverage of it is erratic. In short, as a nation we are conscious that there is something out there known as knife crime, but as yet we lack any coherent or enduring national response.

Without accessible official data, or well-informed discussion, our understanding of the problem is cobbled together from a mixture of personal assumptions, media representation and political projection. Our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe, wrote Walter Lippmann in his landmark book Public Opinion. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported. But what others report when it comes to knife crime is neither neutral nor consistent.

The absence of information is just one of the reasons that the Guardian is launching a new project, Beyond the Blade, which will track the death of every child or teen killed by a knife this year. For the rest of the year, whenever access and legal restrictions permit, we also plan to give each of these victims as full a profile as we can. Wherever possible, and only when welcome, we will go to their funerals, vigils and fundraisers and learn about them from those who knew them best parents, family, teachers and friends. And via a series of freedom of information requests, we also plan to gather as much data as we possibly can in order to better understand the phenomenon.

Interactive

We know how these young people died. But we would like to know how they lived: who they were, what they wanted to be, what made them laugh. All too often, young fatalities are given little more than cameo parts in a morality play of someone elses creation. Those who die are endowed with ambition and gentle character; those who kill have in the past been described as savages and feral. In humanising rather than caricaturing those involved, we hope to gain a more honest, possibly more complex, picture of what is happening. Trawl the internet for hours and you will find little about Fola Orebiyi beyond that he was a lovely boy who wanted to study accounting, and that maths was his favourite subject. Im sure thats true; Im also sure there was much more to him than that.

Since we began tracking at the beginning of this year, nine children or young people, aged 19 and under, have been killed by knives. They fell everywhere from rural idylls to city centres, and were found in places ranging from a kitchen bin to an alleyway. They dont even remotely conform to the stereotype of what constitutes knife crime. The youngest, a baby girl named only as Infant Tunstill, was just a few days old when she died of multiple stab wounds in Burnley in January. Rachel Tunstill, 26, her mother, has been charged with murder.

In his 2010 book Knife Crime: The Law of the Blade, the former Mirror associate editor John McShane compiles a sensationalist catalogue of the most high-profile knife murders in recent British history. Describing the 1995 murder of Philip Lawrence, a headmaster who was stabbed outside his school in west London, McShane declares that it marked the dawn of an age when the response to a confrontation was no longer verbal or even rough physicality. Instead it was the quick, uncaring thrust of a blade from a feral youth lacking compassion or morality, thinking only of himself and nothing of the havoc caused to those in his way or their loved ones.

Knife crime is a construct. It does not simply mean, as one might reasonably expect, crimes committed with knives. It denotes a certain type of crime committed by a certain type of criminal in a certain kind of context, all of which are illustrated by McShanes descriptions.

As it relates to young people, this construct comprises several elements. It is a crime committed by evil kids not kids who do evil things, but kids who are quite simply evil. Elsewhere in the book McShane describes perpetrators as naturally violent, monsters and teenage thugs who populate a section of society that is feral, callous and bloodthirsty. The idea of knife crime also carries heavy racial connotations. In 2007, then prime minister Tony Blair told an audience in Cardiff: The black community the vast majority of whom in these communities are decent, law-abiding people horrified at what is happening need to be mobilised in denunciation of this gang culture that is killing innocent young black kids. But we wont stop this by pretending it isnt young black kids doing it.

A year earlier, David Cameron, then the opposition leader, suggested in a speech that hip-hop was partly responsible for youth violence. I would say to Radio 1, do you realise that some of the stuff you play on Saturday nights encourages people to carry guns and knives? he said.

This assumption isnt limited to politicians making speeches. Every time a young person is killed by a knife, look on social media, and you will see how the response is shaped by the race of the victim alone.

When white kids are killed, people opine about the state of youth today, the demise of the town in which they died, or the world in general. When black kids are killed, usually the assumption is that their race had something to do with it.

A few days after Quamari was killed, one person posted a story about his death with a comment directed at Sadiq Khan referring to a police practice that disproportionately targets young black men: What do you get if you curtail Stop and Search Mayor of London @mayoroflondon? Just a few days before Quamari died, Djodjo Nsaka, 19, was fatally stabbed just three miles away from Quamaris school in the shadow of Wembley Stadium. According to his friends, Djodjo, a business-studies student at Middlesex University, planned to open his own business selling baseball caps with his own designs, and dreamed of one day becoming a millionaire.

He worked two jobs (JD Sports during the week and Tesco at weekends) in order to support his family, including his two-year-old daughter, and to pay his tuition fees. Just a month before, he had bought Christmas dinner for his mother, father and five sisters.

And yet a few days after his death, a Conservative councillor in Dover, Bob Frost, posted a news story about Djodjos murder on Twitter with the message #BlackKnivesMatter. The carnage continues into 2017. Any protest from the community? Thought not.

Knife crime is also understood to be primarily urban, the product of deprived, inner-city areas, particularly in London. Indeed, this is one issue for which the accusation of London bias does not conform to the notion that the capital is a cocoon for metropolitan privilege. Finally, its gendered. As Jill Leovy writes in Ghettoside, an in-depth account of one murder investigation in Los Angeles, which works as well for knife violence in Britain as it does for gun violence in the US, the killings typically arise from arguments. A large share of them can be described in two words: men fighting.

Some of these preconceptions bear some relationship to reality it really is primarily young men who are involved. According to the 2005 Offending, Crime and Justice Survey, Men aged 10 to 25 are almost twice as likely to have been the victim of an assault without injury than females of the same age A quarter of all murders are of men aged between 17 and 32. A males chance of being murdered doubles between the age of 10 and 14, doubles again between 14 and 15, 15 and 16, 16 and 19, and then does not halve until the age of 46. Stabbings are also more likely to occur in urban areas, with London by far the most lethal, followed by Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and West Yorkshire. The three police-force areas where knife crime is least likely to occur are Surrey, Norfolk and Dyfed-Powys.

Other preconceptions are very misleading. A study titled Young People and Street Crime, commissioned by the Youth Justice Board across 32 London boroughs, illustrated that when other relevant social and economic factors were taken into account, race and ethnicity had no significance at all. Crime is more prevalent in poor areas, and since black people are disproportionately poor, they are disproportionately affected as perpetrators and victims. Its class not race or culture that is the defining issue. When we took everything else into account, ethnicity dropped out of the model altogether, says Marian Fitzgerald, a visiting professor of criminology at the University of Kent.

Similarly, the claim that young people are becoming more feral is a slur on a generation that fails to square with the reality. According to the Centre for Public Safety, it is true that in the capital, the number of victims of youth violence and knife crime injuries have been on a steady if fairly gradual upward trend, and are now back to where they were five years ago. But it is also true, according to the Ministry of Justice, that the number of young people entering the criminal justice system for the first time nationwide is at the lowest rate for a decade. The proportion of children who say they have tried drugs halved between 2001 and 2014, and those between the age of 11 and 15 who had tried alcohol is now at its lowest since the National Health Service started asking in 1988. The Metropolitan police last year revealed that the overwhelming majority of children and young people who carry knives are not gang members. Many are just scared and carry them for protection.

Take the construct as a whole and you have the ingredients for a tabloid-induced moral panic, in which young black men, who reside outside our basic moral norms, roam crime-infested, hostile cities in pursuit of hapless victims. Understood as the product of a collapse in values perpetrated by evil youth, each death is experienced as its own senseless pathology, which can only be reined in by tougher policing, longer sentences and better parenting. In the absence of a cure (you cant fix evil), there is no hope; only fear. Those unknown footsteps heard approaching from behind, McShane writes, might be innocent, or they might be something more deadly.

But when you look at the reality of this years cases, it becomes clear how misinformed the construct is. Of the nine young people who have died this year, just two were in London, while three were in Yorkshire; three died in small towns or villages of 10,000 people or less; five are white, two black and one Asian (we dont know the race of Infant Tunstill); three were aged seven or under; three are female.

The only stories in which the term knife crime was used in the national press, including in this newspaper, were related to Quamari and Djodjo the only two black men, and the only two Londoners.

Police search for the body of seven-year-old Katie Rough. Photograph: Rex Features

It is still early in the year, and we are still early in our reporting. But it could be that one of the reasons Britain is having such a hard time finding a solution to knife crime is that we have such a narrow and distorted understanding of the problem.

In a chilly basement at Kings College Londons medical school, Gareth Davies, the medical director for Londons Air Ambulance, is teaching students how to slice a cadaver halfway down the ribcage, cut through the bone and then prise the ribs open like a clamshell.

You have to access the patients heart within about a minute, a minute-and-a-half, says Davies, a pioneer of the lifesaving technique. These patients have technically died in many ways, so youve got a very small window of opportunity to reanimate them. So being accurate, but also being quick, is really important.

Surgeons are getting increasingly adept at saving the lives of people who have been stabbed particularly in London, where a trauma network formed by four major hospitals in 2010 offers a round-the-clock service. Duncan Bew, the clinical lead for trauma and emergency surgery at Kings, wonders whether these advances have the effect of downplaying just how bad knife crime in the capital has become.

My team sees more people with stab wounds than it does people with appendicitis 25% of trauma wounds that come through are stabbings, he says. But the fatality is the catalyst for it getting into the news. We see injuries all the time that never get in the news, you never hear about it, and they are happening all the time.

To get a comprehensive understanding of the impact of violent crime involving knives, one would have to look at more than knife deaths. Fatalities might represent the most tragic and sensational aspect of the phenomenon, but most people who are stabbed dont die and, thanks to the kind of advances in surgery mentioned above, some who might previously have died can now be saved. The fact that many of these trauma centres are based in London might account for why relatively fewer deaths have occurred in the capital this year compared to elsewhere in the country.

Our project, with its focus on young people killed by knives, will necessarily be more narrow in its scope. It provides a very particular albeit macabre lens through which to view Britains youngsters. But while these deaths provide a starting point, it is by no means the end point. By finding out who these young people are, how we are failing to protect them and what we might do to prevent more tragedies of this nature, we hope to emerge with a vivid picture of British youth that goes beyond the horror of their deaths and the sensationalist headlines or silence that follows them.

A few weeks after Quamaris death, I went to the Avenues Youth Project in north-west London. It is a modern building at the end of a block of neat, Victorian terraced houses in the borough of Westminster, where Quamari went to use the centres impressive array of DJing and mixing equipment the Thursday before he died. He took part in their Live cotch programme, in which young people interview each other about their musical influences. Quamari, a quieter, more playful less braggadocious presence than his peers, was a selector he played music at parties and compered from the mic was looking forward to a soundclash with another DJ the week before he was killed.

Weve seen a number of our kids die, the executive director, Fabian Sharp, told me. In one case, in the arms of our youth worker not here; she lives locally. Last year, a 17-year-old who been stabbed in the neck and had a severed artery stumbled in here while we were delivering a youth session, with blood spurting out of his neck. Our youth workers saved his life. Those are sort of grim flashes in among what is otherwise, for us, a really joyful and wonderful experience of being able to offer kids an alternative.

Sharp says that witnessing such violence, and even just being in the proximity of such tragedy, takes a huge toll on how young people see their place in the world. They dont go around talking about it all the time, but it is there. And that could be expressed through a memorial service for somebody who passed away and is a victim. And weve had, in the past, to organise events for young people to come and offload their anxieties around the loss of a friend. I dont think you can witness some of the things that these kids have witnessed and not carry around some of this baggage.

But theyre not coming in here and crying and demanding mental-health services, if you know what I mean. Theyre kids. They come here, they want to play. Or have fun. But you notice it in a kind of swagger. Theres a kind of facade being put on. The knife thing is a symptom of something much deeper. Kids are scared and they dont necessarily feel there is anyone out there to protect them.

At the gates of the Capital Academy the day after Quamari died, children trooped out in twos and threes to pay their respects, leave flowers and tributes. Girls in hijab lay their heads on the uncovered shoulders of their classmates and wept while boys stood in silence and shock. This shit is fucked up, man, said one.

The Avenues Youth Project is just about to see all its local council funding disappear, leaving the organisation reliant on a range of disparate grants while it seeks out other revenue streams. Were fortunate that we have a building that we can probably exploit better than we did in the past, in terms of rental income and so on, Sharp told me. But all of that energy takes away from the work that we need to do with the young people, which is urgent. A lot of clubs are closing. They simply cannot make ends meet.

These young deaths do not take place in a vacuum. We live in a moment when inequality is rising, while cuts are biting in a range of sectors that disproportionately affect young people.

According to a recent Unison report, between 2010 and 2016 387m was slashed from youth services; between 2012 and 2016 a total of 603 youth clubs were closed. A recent report by Sian Berry, a Green member of the London Assembly, revealed that in the last five years 28m has been slashed from council youth service budgets in the capital, resulting in the closure of 36 youth centres and a 48% cut in council youth service employment. Its really hard to prove a direct link between youth crime and youth services, Berry told me. But there has to be a link between young people having nowhere to go and young people being left to hang out in unsafe spaces and interract with each other in ways that are not constructive and also feel alienated from society.

In January, Theresa May pledged to make mental health provision for young people a priority. But research by Young Minds, a charity advocating for mental health services for young people, revealed that in 2016/17 roughly half the clinical commissioning groups in England, which allocate funds for mental health services, will spend the extra money earmarked for child and adolescent mental health to plug shortfalls elsewhere. Last year, research by the thinktank CentreForum revealed that these mental health services turn away, on average, 23% of the children referred to them for treatment by GPs, teachers and others.

The funeral of 16-year-old Leonne Weeks at St Leonard church in Dinnington. Photograph: Rex Features

In Dinnington, where Leonne Weeks was killed, an online petition calling to reopen the local police station has more than 700 signatories. Its like an insurance policy for the community, Tim Wells, who set up the petition, told the Rotherham Advertiser. Hopefully people wont have to use the police, but I think it gives the public confidence and reassurance that the police are there if they need them.

During a vigil for Quamari outside his school a little more than a week after he was killed, several speakers mentioned a collapse of the kind of community cohesion that allows everyone to look out for each other, and elders to tell children where they are going wrong. Parents need to know where their children are, who their friends are, and not leave them to be raised by computers and phones, said one.

Cheryl Phoenix, who grew up with Quamaris mother in Wembley, north-west London, started a voluntary youth club of her own in the borough of Brent, after seeing services for her sons disappear. She believes parents definitely have a role to play, but that there is a limit to what they can provide. We all know children are lovely, we all love them, she told me, but we also know that they drive you bloody potty. So we need a break, and at the same time, they also need an outlet: a break away from the home, away from your parents, somewhere to just let loose and burn off some steam and energy. But right now, children are confined to the home, or their friends come and knock for them, and parents dont want them all in the house, so theyre outside, theyre just standing around congregating So if theres no facilities there, like youth clubs or anything going on, then how are we surprised by the increase in violence on our streets?

This brings us back once again to Folas mother who, like many parents bereaved or not, wants to know what the government is doing about knife crime. But the question remains: what would they have the government do?

Unlike guns in the US a product designed to kill, which serves no other real purpose apart from hunting knives are everyday objects. Every house has at least one. There have been knife amnesties and guidelines issued about who shops should sell them to. But, given the widespread access everyone has to sharp implements, there are clearly limits to what knife control can achieve by itself.

Earlier this month, Chief Constable Alf Hitchcock told the Evening Standard that he plans to focus on a list of the top 50 people who are habitual knife-carriers in London, which accounted for 15% of the national increase in the year ending September 2016. Using what he termed the Al Capone approach named after the notorious Chicago gangster who was eventually put away for tax evasion he gave a green light for the police to target this group and find any plausible reason to take them off the streets.

Whatever one thinks of the ethics of that, there are doubts about how effective a more punitive approach could be. Most criminologists argue that education and a public-health approach will make the greatest impact. Homicide, like most other violent crime and predatory property crime, is strongly associated with poverty and social inequality, concluded a report commissioned by the Home Office in 2003. This suggests that preventive strategies focused upon particular offences should be complemented by, and complementary to, broader long-term initiatives against poverty and social exclusion.

Six weeks after Quamari was killed, there was standing room only at the Sacred Heart Church in Camden, where his funeral was held. Many latecomers had to gather outside. Quamaris jet-black coffin was carried in to a round of applause, followed by Bob Marleys Dont Worry. On top of the coffin, mourners placed, among other things, the flags of Uganda and Jamaica the home countries of his mother and fathers families a framed poster of Bob Marley, sunglasses, dominoes and three airline tickets from a family holiday to Jamaica, home of his fathers ancestors, where he visited Marleys mausoleum.

Its not true to say he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, said Father Terry Murray, who presided over the funeral service. He was doing what every pupil every day should do. Waiting at a bus stop after school, when dark events happened.

As the service, which overran by more than an hour, concluded, Father Terry Murray had a special message for the young people in the pews. Please dont allow anyone to bring us back to a place like this again under these circumstances, he pleaded as the assembled clapped.

The next morning, several hundred people arrived at the Gospel Tabernacle Assembly church in Tulse Hill, south London, for Djodjos funeral. Women wearing green wraps around their waists, one wailing, accompanied his plain wooden coffin to the altar, where a chant went up in Congolese. Owing to a weak microphoneand frequent teary interludes, the testimony from family members was difficult to decipher. As mourners trooped past the closed casket, women waved tissues and wept. Many wore T-shirts with Djodjos face on the front and Father, Son, Brother, Friend on the back. As a brass band complete with two sousaphones played, mourners accompanied the coffin outside, waving flags with his face on them.

That evening in the small village of Rettendon, near Chelmsford in Essex, a woman heard screams of distress shortly before midnight. The next morning the neighbour woke up to discover that Denis Petkov, a 19-year-old Bulgarian, who had been in the country just a couple of months, had been stabbed to death in the flat where he lived after a night out with his friends. This is the first time his name has appeared in a national newspaper.

Additional reporting by Damien Gayle and Caelainn Barr

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This piece was amended on 28 March. Monday 24 January has been changed to the correct date, Monday 23 January.