#morri would be still most of the time and then have little dance parties usually when simon was active (or trying to sleep)

[mushroomnoodles]

tw/cw for sfw and non kink mpreg

where morri was a pretty still baby, baby 2 is a little acrobat

[fortisfiliae]

Promised Part 8 - Tom Riddle x reader

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Masterpost | Masterlist

Summary: In this story, Tom didn’t grow up as an orphan, but with his grandfather and uncle. Reader’s sister got very sick and the Gaunts offer their help. But not without asking for something in return.

Disclaimer: Please be aware that I don’t condone any of this in real life. (GIF is not mine)

Warnings: Arranged marriage

Word count: 2.9k

Part 8 - Slughorn’s Party

Coming back to Hogwarts after the Christmas holidays was a lot easier this time. Now that you knew Elsie was definitely better, you could enjoy your stay and focus on your studying. Maybe you could also focus on Tom. Both things seemed equally important somehow. 

The fact that you could see your best friend Camille again added to the good things Hogwarts had to offer.

You were sitting on her bed in her dorm, telling her everything that had been going on during the last days. The Gaunts who had wanted to force you to do an unbreakable vow, their fight with Tom, that Tom had stayed for a bit, the book he had gifted you and everything in between. 

“I can’t believe you got him a snake,” Camille laughed. “What do you think his family said about that?”

“I couldn’t care less what they think of it,” you said jokingly. “Hopefully they’re mad at me.”

“Do you think Tom got in trouble for it?”

“I hope not. But I don’t think so. He knows how to stand his ground.”

“And the book he gave you?” she asked excitedly. “Do you think that it means something? It’s some sort of family heirloom after all.”

You lay down on your back next to her and thought about it. 

“I’m not sure. Do you think that was some kind of secret message from him?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll have to look into that.” You rolled over to face her. “And what have you done these days? Tell me all about your presents.”

“Well,” Camille said with a smile. “The presents weren’t the most exciting part of my holiday, to be honest.”

“What?” you asked. “Oh. Hang on, let me guess. You met someone! A guy?”

 The smile on her face widened. “I didn’t meet him. I just kept in contact via owl.”

“Oh, Merlin! Who is it? Someone from school?”

She nodded.

“Go on, tell me!”

Her expression suddenly changed. 

“You have to promise not to be mad.”

“Why would I be mad?”

“It’s someone you don’t exactly like,” she said, a thick tone of guilt in her voice.

Then you knew. 

“No. Don’t. It is Ben Hilt, isn’t it?”

She nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“Oh, Camille,” you sighed and needed a moment to sort out your thoughts. “Why?”

“He is a very charming boy.”

“He’s a year younger than you.”

“So?” she giggled.

“He wanted to tell on me to the Ministry, so that I wouldn’t be able to marry Tom. Sticks his nose in everybody’s business.”

“He just wanted to help. He thought you were forced to do it. And you have to admit he wasn’t exactly wrong about that.”

“Have you told him about the pact?” you asked and gave her a serious look.

“Of course not. I would never. I told him right from the start that if he’s only after me to get information about Riddle and you, he could piss off.”

“And?”

“He didn’t piss off,” she said happily. “He’s a really nice guy. We never talked about you and Tom after I had made it clear it was none of his business. He didn’t even bring it up, to begin with. I would never date someone who would want to harm you, I swear.”

“Ugh, I know,” you groaned. “You’re too good. For me and for Ben.”

“Shut up,” Camille answered as she nudged your shoulder.

“Hang on. Did you just say ‘date’ someone? Are you official?”

“No. I guess not. But maybe someday. Now, what are you going to wear to Slughorn’s party?”

Slughorn’s annually belated New Year’s party was one of the few exclusive gatherings happening in school. Students could only attend if they had gotten a personal invitation, from Slytherin’s headteacher Horace Slughorn, who would invite his favourite pupil, or rather, the ones he thought looked best in his trophy collection. 

Camille, Tom and you had all gotten Slughorn’s owl.  

You had not known how to bring up the topic in front of Tom for a while. Even though you were going to marry him, that didn’t mean he wanted to go to the party together. Together, as in, on a date. And yet you had felt too weird asking him about it, so you usually had danced around the subject, awkwardly trying to find out if you were on the same page. Until he had finally said what you had wanted to hear. He had asked when to pick you up from your dorm as if it had been crystal clear to him, that you were going together. 

Seven o’clock, as arranged. It had arrived so soon. You hastily fixed the small wrinkles on the hem of your dress with a spell when you heard him knock on the door. Tom looked very posh in his black suit, politely offering his arm. And off you went. Together.

The guests at the party were usually students of year six and seven, as well as some teachers, so you knew most people there. Camille, who had brought Ben with her, looked absurdly pretty in her golden dress. Ben couldn’t have been more proud. He talked to Camille non-stop and really seemed head over heels for her. Right next to them stood two of Ben’s friends, looking all out of character in suits.

Avery and Lestrange came without dates and seemed awfully nervous for some reason. They whispered to each other every time you looked their way.

And then there was Freda Morris. Hogwarts’ head girl, who had her eyes fixated on Tom from the moment you had entered the room. You wondered if she had even noticed you next to him and if she was aware Tom was off-limits. Everyone knew by now that you were engaged after all. Either she didn’t know, or she didn’t care. The expression she sent you, after carefully staring you up and down, told you though, that she was absolutely aware of your relationship. She looked like she wanted to throw you out the next window.

“What in Merlin’s beard?” you muttered quietly to yourself after she had finally turned away from you.

“Pardon?” Tom asked and came closer so he could hear you better.

“Nothing. I just thought Freda was looking at me weirdly.”

“Really?”

“Let’s go over to Camille and Ben, shall we?” you asked, quickly changing the subject.

Tom’s gaze fell right on the two. 

“Your friend came with Hilt?” he asked sternly and began to walk their way. 

“Um, yes. About that,” you said, pulling lightly on his arm to stop him. “They’re dating. Kind of. They’re not official yet, but, you know, it could lead somewhere.”

He looked like you had just given him the world’s most unnecessary information. 

“What are you trying to tell me?” 

“That we have to be nice,” you answered and gave him your best fake smile, demonstrating what you wanted him to do.

“Nice?” he asked, gawking so blankly at you, it was almost comical. “You want me to be nice to Benjamin Hilt? After what he’s done?”

“Well… Yes.”

“Why?” Tom asked, genuinely not understanding what you meant.

“Because Camille is my best friend. And she likes him.”

Tom sighed.

“Answer me this,” he said. “Camille knows a lot about you, yes?”

“Yes.”

“I assume she knows about us,” he started talking more quietly. “Our pact?”

“She does.”

He rolled his eyes. “That’s what I thought.”

“So?” you asked.

“Isn’t it clear? He’s sweet-talking her to get information.”

“That’s what I first thought too. But Camille swore she wouldn’t tell him a thing. And she said she had made that clear to him from the beginning.”

Tom was still eyeing Ben sharply. 

“Come on,” you said and pulled him their way. “I trust Camille. It’ll be fine.”

“It‘s not her I don’t trust,” Tom said under his breath but proceeded to walk towards them with you.

“Good evening,” you said to them.

Camille hugged you and gushed: “You look so beautiful! Oh, you both know Ben, I believe.”

You offered him your hand and Ben shook it, an honest smile on his face.

“Fresh start?” you asked.

Ben nodded and turned to shake Tom’s hand as well. Tom looked at him seriously for a moment, inspecting his hand as if it was covered in Dragon Pox, until you nudged his side with your elbow, urging him to accept, which he reluctantly did.

Slughorn called for dinner before you could talk more, so you all went to the big oval table at the other side of the room.

Ben sat down left to Camille, you to her right and Tom on your other side. The three courses were lavish, as were all feasts at Hogwarts. 

Slughorn talked openly across the table, asking his students about their holidays. Freda, obviously trying to impress, mentioned that she had been to France with her family, which didn’t have quite the effect on Slughorn that she had hoped it would.

“Pathetic,” you mumbled and Camille chuckled.

“Mean, aren’t we?” Tom whispered, a grin forming on his face.

“Me? Never.”

He exhaled a laugh through his nose and slowly grabbed your hand beneath the table, taking you by surprise. You looked over to him, your fingers wrapping around his hand, then you pulled it upwards and rested both his and your hand on the table. 

“Now you’re just cruel,” Tom jested when Freda looked over and saw the two of you.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” you answered, biting the inside of your cheek to prevent yourself from smiling. “I’m merely holding my fiance's hand. That’s not an act of violence, is it?”

“Fiancé?” Tom asked and cleared his throat.

“Aren’t you?”

“You’ve never called me that before.”

He was right. You had never called him that in person, or when you had talked about him to anyone else. 

“Well,” you swallowed, feeling a wave of heat on your cheeks. “It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

Tom grinned and held your hand a little tighter while glancing down onto the table. “Sure.”

After dinner, the guests spread around the room, chatting and drinking punch while they waited for the first dance of the evening. Slughorn had pulled Tom aside a while ago, asking him for his opinions on different things concerning Potions, politics and the news. He visibly hung to Tom’s every word, clearly awed by his favourite student, nodded and agreed to most of the things Tom said. 

You turned your back on them and faced Camille and Ben, still hearing the two chat behind you and thinking of how well-spoken Tom was. He knew how to lull in every teacher by heart.

Each word that left his mouth seemed carefully crafted for Slughorn’s ears only and made him react just as Tom wanted him to. Impressive. 

You had engaged in a conversation with Camille and Ben, still keeping an ear on Tom behind you, when Slughorn finally set him free and wished him a nice evening. You expected him to join you, even though he still didn’t like Ben, but suddenly heard an all too familiar voice talking to him.

“Hello Tom,” Freda Morris said, sickly sweet. “How are you? How were your holidays?”

You shot Camille a look, to which she automatically checked the people behind you, eyes wide in disbelief when she peered back at you. 

“What are you going to do?” she mouthed silently.

“No idea,” you mouthed back.

Ben stared back and forth between Camille and you, completely confused until he finally noticed what you were whispering about. 

“Oh,” Ben snorted. “Someone’s looking for trouble.”

Alright. Freda had not given up on Tom yet. There was a knot in your stomach, pulling bitterly and twisting your insides. You tried to ignore it, took a deep breath and decided to listen to them first. Maybe you were overreacting. You could always jinx her later.

“Oh yes, Paris was wonderful actually,” Freda enthused and had pronounced ‘Paris’ in a weird French accent. “It’s so cosy there around Christmas, you have to go someday.”

“Sounds nice,” Tom answered, rather casually. “Well, if you don’t mind, I-”

“Oh, Tom, actually,” she went on. “I wanted to ask you. Don’t you think we should open the first dance together, as head boy and girl? It’s a tradition, after all.”

Tradition? You had never heard of such a tradition before. Camille and Ben, now eavesdropping too, were as dumbfounded as you. Camille was sincerely shocked, while Ben’s mouth was open, half laughing, half speechless, like a fish on land gasping for air. It seemed that you had not been overreacting, so you turned around, now facing Tom and Freda’s backside.

“I don’t know if that’s actually a tradition, Freda,” Tom said, looking back at you briefly, one side of his mouth pulling upwards.

“Philip Elms and Eve Sterling opened the dance at last year’s party,” she huffed. “They were head girl and boy too.”

“Correct,” Tom agreed. “But they were dating at the time, weren’t they?”

Freda didn’t answer.

“And seeing as we are not dating, I have to politely decline,” he said, again looking at you. “Now excuse me, I have to talk to my fiancée.”

Tom left Freda standing there and the four of you watched her wandering off. No one said a word, you could have sworn Camille was holding her breath until Ben burst out laughing.

“Mate,” he chuckled. “That was… Deadly.”

Tom didn’t laugh, squinting at what Ben had just called him, but nodded appreciatively before he turned to you, offering his hand.

“What are you doing?” you asked.

“Opening the dance? The music has just started and Slughorn told me I should do it.”

You shook your head amusedly, took his hand and let him take you over to the dance floor.

“For someone who accused me of being cruel, you’re doing a very good job yourself, you know,” you said, keeping an eye out for Freda, in case she planned on hexing you. Better safe than sorry. 

“Ah, she’ll be fine,” Tom assured. “Or would you have preferred if I took her to dance?”

You didn’t answer but shot him a smile when you arrived on the dance floor, where you got in position. Tom placed his right hand on your waist and took your right one in his left hand, holding both of them upright below shoulder height. All the guests had gathered around the floor, waiting for you to start dancing. Luckily there wasn’t enough time to get too nervous. It had all happened in a matter of minutes.

“You know how to waltz, right?” Tom asked.

“It’s been a while, but-”

“Doesn’t matter, I’ll lead,” he said and took the first step, spinning in circles in three-four time.

Tom was a good dancer, which didn’t surprise you. He probably had taken courses some years ago, just like you, upon your parent’s request. You kept up with him quite well, only taking a wrong step every now and then.

“If I had known, I would’ve practised,” you mumbled.

“It’s alright, people will join in soon. You’re doing well,” he reassured you and lightly squeezed your waist.

That reminded you of the fact that you had never been so close to each other for more than a moment. Suddenly the spinning felt faster, all eyes focusing on you, burning holes right through you. The only thing steadying you was Tom and his hands.

You spotted Camille in the crowd, who was smiling at you, holding up her hand and giving you a thumbs up. That made you feel a bit more at ease, so you let Tom lead you round the floor, twirling away from people’s stares. Finally, halfway through the song, pairs of people joined in and filled up the dance floor, leaving not much room to be glared at.

Tom looked down at you, a proud smile adorning his face, his eyes softer than you had ever witnessed them before.

“What’s that I’m seeing there?” you asked. “A genuine smile? Certainly a rare sight.”

He swallowed, not changing the way he looked at you.

“Camille was right,” he said quietly.

“She usually is. But what do you mean?”

“Earlier, when we went up to them. She said you look beautiful. You do.”

People’s faces around you seemed to blur and you couldn’t hear them properly anymore. The only thing you saw was Tom’s face and how his eyes still stared down on you. It felt as if you weren’t dancing anymore, but rather floating above the ground, a swarm of butterflies emerging from your stomach. Your hand went from Tom’s shoulder behind his neck on its own and pulled him closer. Closer, just a tiny bit closer, so that you were able to view every single one of his eyelashes. His chest bumped against you and his cologne tickled your nose pleasantly. You let yourself sink into the smell of bergamot and lemon, feeling how his hand squeezed your waist a bit tighter by the second.

Closer, until you both shut your eyes and your lips met in the middle, kissing Tom right out there on the dance floor. You were the only people that had stopped spinning, even though it still felt like you spiralled around a hundred miles an hour. Butterflies turned into aeroplanes, rotating and crashing gently against each other, just like the two of you.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Masterpost | Masterlist

Please consider leaving a comment and tell me what you think so far :) They motivate me so much to keep writing! Let me know if you want to be tagged, or untagged. Thank you for reading!

Permanent tags: @geeksareunique @ren-ela @marauderskeeper @way-obsessed5 @oreofrappiewithblueberry @draqcnheartstrinq @dogfatherpads @obscurilicious @maralisa124 @theseuscmander @lumos-barnes @theboywhocriedlupin @igotmadskills @jamcspotters @thisismysecrethappyplace @vulpecula-minor @snarledblack @swellwriting @carolinesbookworld @fandomtravels @heartbeats-wildly @clockworkherondale @aikeia @i-padfootblack-things @emmamass24 @sleep-i-ness @miss-theya @gruffle1 @peachesandpinks

Promised tags: @superblyspeedydragon​ @angeli-fucking-cat​ @cyarikaaa​ @hp-slaps​ @prettylittlehiddles​ @katjusja​ @elderwilliams​ @-thatgirloverthere-​ @1950schick​ @kissing-violet-wings @accio-boys​ @mythicalamphitrite​ @aqswdefrgthzjukilop​ @always394patronus​ @nesseldee​ @peachyserenade @iliveforthefandom04​ @chr0nicbackpain​ @truly-insatiable​ @blushingpogue​ @scarlet-says-hi​ @staplerrrr​ @uglipotata72829​ @muralskins​ @noobmaster696969 @urbankite2 @prettysatan @april-showers-and-flowers​ @etherrxall​ @slytherclawmalfoy​ @thoseofgreatambition​ @officiallyunofficialperson​ @lettersfromtheocean​ @whyisallthecoolstufftaken​

If your tags don’t work, please check if your email is verified on tumblr!

[twilight-town-zombies]

For the ship thing. Sorikai or Akuroku. Dealers' choice on the faves.

Here’s akuroku (better late than never? 😅) 

1. How do much do I ship it?: Never heard of it/ Notp / Dislike / used to ship / maybe / ship it / aww / otp / IS IT CANON YET?

2. What non sexual activities do they like to do together?

Axel and Roxas are both daring and adventurous, and I love the idea of them traveling to new cities and worlds together. They befriend the locals, explore both major tourist destinations and obscure holes-in-the-wall, dare each other to try new activities, taste all the local delicacies and end every day together climbing as high in the city as they can, watching the sunset, and eating something sweet. I also think Axel and Roxas would really enjoy music. They would seek out performances and festivals, and figure out a way to get music from different worlds on their Gummi phones to share with friends and listen to at home. Roxas would be thrilled to have the chance to help Axel train with his keyblade, and of course, Axel would still have combat pointers for Roxas. With Axel’s fire power it would be cool if they learned to forge their own weapons, keyblades included. 

3. Who does chores around the house?

The Organization has military-like cleaning standards, so both of them are pretty tidy. Bigger tasks, they would put off until they reach catastrophic proportions and then have to tackle them together. For example, the sink has been leaking for weeks, Roxas has been mentioning it every now and then, and Axel has been saying, “yeah, yeah, we’ll get to it” but they don’t get to it until the bathroom floods, and then they are both soaking wet, wrenches in hand, switching off between trying to fit under the sink and make sense of the directions. 

4. Who’s the better cook?

Axel’s kind of a natural in the kitchen because he has such a good sense of temperature, but his taste is not for everyone, since he especially enjoys foods that are spicy, crispy, salty or ice cold. He tends to do more cooking than Roxas. Roxas is initially comically terrible in the kitchen, but he’s a quick study and gets pretty good practicing with Axel, Xion, and Sora. He especially likes making breakfast and desserts. 

 5. Who’s the funniest drunk?

Roxas. With his strong dose of good sense out the window, there is very little Roxas won’t do including dancing on the table and public karaoke. Axel is right there with him, but would generally participate in most of the activities sober, as well. Roxas is also an “I LOVE YOU, MAN” kind of drunk toward anyone and everyone, and has been known to hug even the likes of Riku. 

When Axel drinks too muc,h he spends the vast majority of his time hitting on Roxas and/or trying to get him home to their bed, (to be fair, he is usually successful), and the rest of the time being even more acerbic and catty than usual. 

6. Do they have kids?

I think considering both of their pasts, they would want to wait a while, but later on down the line they would be interested in taking in a kid or two that needed them. They would be sweet, if unconventional dads, and their kid would be a sweetheart but kind of a pistol.

7. Do they have any traditions?

One - Regularly revisiting a certain clocktower to eat ice cream or meet up with friends or have important conversations or just to get away from the stressors in their lives for a while. Two - Dreaming of the beach. They do actually go every so often, but they are -always- talking about making plans to go to the beach when they have a day off or wishing they were on the beach. 

8. What do they fight about?

I think both of them are insecure being part of Team Light. They don’t completely feel like they’re “good guys” after their pasts working for the Organization. Axel thinks Roxas has nothing to feel guilty about because he’s the one who’s always had the most conscience, and Roxas doesn’t think people are hard enough on him when he spent so long doing what the Org asked without question. Axel doesn’t think he’s good enough for Roxas, and Roxas has to regularly reassure him that yes he does want to be with him even though he’s done terrible things, and that he understands why Axel did them and that Axel has changed and believes he can be better. He loves Axel and sees all his best qualities and gets frustrated when Axel doubts that. Roxas also gets upset if Axel tries to keep anything from him, even when Axel is just trying to protect him, so Axel tries to be as open and honest as possible, though it doesn’t always come naturally. 

9. What would they do if they found their pairing tag on tumblr? (If they have one)

I think their initial reaction would be wild laughter. They would spend a ridiculous amount of time looking through it, debating its accuracy, and making plans for future activities based on ideas in the tag. Roxas would be a little embarrassed at first but get over it. Axel would be fascinated at first, but then a little impatient to get back to what they could be doing in reality. 

10. Who cried at the end of Marley and me?

(I’ve never seen Marley & Me, I’m just going to assume a very cute dog dies)

Roxas. Axel had to hold him, rub his back, and reassure him it was just a movie and real dogs don’t die, that would be cruel and horrible. Axel didn’t cry. Obviously. He just had something in his eye.

11. Who always wins at Mario kart?

It’s a pretty even competition if all parties are playing fair. Sometimes they cheat and distract each other with kisses and touches, and Axel tends to be the more distractible of the two, which Axel still considers a win-win situation for them both. 

12. One thing I like about this ship?

They have an actual relationship that I got to watch grow and evolve throughout the game. Axel was the only Org member remotely nice to Roxas when he didn’t have anything or anybody, and Roxas helped Axel from totally losing himself by reminding him what it was like to see the world through fresh eyes and to care about another person. They have fun banter, they spend time together, confide in each other, they miss each other when they’re gone, and they have a strong undying loyalty toward each other. I also love the clock tower moments in general, escaping the harshness of their reality to steal time together watching the sunset while romantic music played and comforting and confiding in each other. 

13. One thing I don’t like about the ship?

Retcon aging = Fandom Drama™ Like, please let me ship this ship I’ve been shipping since I was a kid in peace. 

14. The song I would say fits them?

So many, but recently: Hell and Back (Maren Morris) & Daylight (Taylor Swift)

15. Another headcanon about the pairing? (Free space)

I headcanon that after training with Roxas, (or trying to protect him) Axel would also be able to dual wield keyblades like he does his chakram. 

[dustedmagazine]

Dust, Volume 6, Number 10

The Slugs 

September seemed to be the month when all the records on endless delay finally got kicked out the door, COVID or no, ready or not here we come. We’re deluged with music, some recorded before the world changed, some clearly cooked up mid-pandemic. There are a lot of covers EPs, lots of solo material, lots of home-made lo-fi, lots of benefit comps, and who are we to complain? Better, instead, to reach for the headphones, load up the hard drive, pile on the LPs and do some listening. Here’s some of the stuff that caught our attention, as usual ranging all over the continuum, from traditional to edgy and experimental, from silly pop punk to enraged death metal to bookish electro-acoustic improvisation. Contributors this time out included Jonathan Shaw, Patrick Masterson, Jennifer Kelly, Bill Meyer, Derek Taylor, Ray Garraty, Tim Clarke and Andrew Forell. Happy fall.

Amputation — Slaughtered in the Arms of God (Nuclear War Now!)

Slaughtered in the Arms of God by Amputation

Given the degree of smugness that accompanies utterances of the phrase “Old School Death Metal,” it’s frequently instructive to listen to some. Right on time, the misanthropic bunch at Nuclear War Now! has delivered some seriously Old School sounds to our digital doorstep. This new compilation LP gathers both of the demos of Norwegian knuckle-draggers Amputation, along with a contemporaneous rehearsal recording. Likely the resulting record will be of principal interest to fans of Immortal, the long-running, on-again-off-again Norwegian black metal band that Amputation would morph into in 1991. The songs collected on Slaughtered in the Arms of God have some additional musicological significance, as they document the sounds of 1989 and 1990, transformational years in Norway’s metal scene. Mayhem and Darkthrone tend to get most of the attention, for reasons both good and bad; and like Darkthrone, Amputation made death metal before transitioning to blacker, more brittle sounds. The music on Slaughtered in the Arms of God is muddy, thudding and thick. Perhaps that’s the result of the primitive recording tech the band used, likely of necessity. But through the murk (and to some degree because of it), you can hear the influence of Stockholm’s fecund death metal scene, especially Dismember’s earliest stuff. Scandinavia’s metal currents run deep and dark. Whether that means that Old School Death Metal is intrinsically a good thing is a different matter.

Jonathan Shaw

 Anz — Loose in Twos (NRG) 12” (Hessle Audio)

Loos In Twos (NRG) by Anz

I love the idea of listening to DJ mixes of original or all-new material; it’s probably why I still value, say, Ricardo Villalobos’ Fabric 36 so much. Manchester’s Anna Marie-Odubote, aka Anz, has been doing just such a thing annually since 2015 and really went wild with spring/summer dubs 2020, which compiled 74 tracks into nearly an hour and a half of new music. That would’ve been more than enough amid all of this (imagine me gesturing around vaguely), but “Loos in Twos (NRG)” on the venerable Hessle Audio imprint is an equally formidable, decidedly tighter release I played a lot at the start of September. Three club-ready tracks here break down acid, jungle and footwork, and while all three are heady breaks, the looped vocals and bongo of “Stepper” make it the one for me. Get those feet moving digitally now so they’re comfortable once the vinyl arrives in early October.

Patrick Masterson

 Ashes and Afterglow — Everybody Wants a Revolution (Postlude Paradox)

Ashes and Afterglow drops pop punk melodies into deep buckets of fuzz, lets them bubble and bob to the surface before shoving them under again. The band is mainly the output of one Luke Daniel, who appears to have been in other band called Sea of Orchids, but neither outfit has left much of an internet trail. And sure, this is the kind of thing that could easily get shuffled under; it breaks no moulds. And yet shuffling “To Take a Look at the World,” has a heart-worn resonance, Daniel’s voice echoing in reverbed hollow-ness against surging tides of guitar noise. “My Yesterday Girl” churns a little harder, with a bright, pop-leaning sort of hopefulness hedged in by seething feedback. It’s not bad, but it never hits a melodic vein the way that similarly inclined artists like Ted Leo or Ovlov or Tony Molina do, and it never pushes the noise over the top, either. Neither pop nor punk but somewhere in middle.

Jennifer Kelly

 Ballister — Znachki Stilyag (Aerophonic)

Znachki Stilyag by Ballister

A cake is still a cake, whether you put chocolate frosting and strawberries or white icing and a fondant roses on top. And while they don’t all taste or look exactly the same, a Ballister album is still a Ballister album, and the first Ballister album in three years does not mess with the recipe. Dave Rempis (alto and tenor saxophones), Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello and electronics), and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums and percussion) still trade in a particularly hard-hitting form of total improvisation. The changes are ones of emphasis — Lonberg-Holm sounds like he’s using a wah-wah pedal and deploys some especially slashing feedback tones, there’s a bit more space in Nilssen-Love’s intricate beat configurations, and Rempis left his baritone sax at home — and of location. Znachki Stilyag was recorded during the fall of 2019 in Moscow, Russia, which may explain why the big horn stayed at home. But the ones you hear still cut and thrust with broadsword force and rapier precision. This is a cake you can trust.

Bill Meyer  

 Vincent Chancey — The Spell: The Vincent Chancey Trio Live, 1987 (No Business) 

Vincent Chancey likely isn’t alone amongst his peers in feeling exasperated by folks singling out his instrument as uncommon or unusual to jazz. It’s a form of damning through faint praise and one that feel

s even more lackadaisical with any time spent with his music. Chancey plays the French horn and he’s plied it in settings as diverse as Sun Ra Arkestra, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra as well as gigs supporting Aretha Franklin and Elvis Costello. It’s unclear whether the trio documented on The Spell was a working concern, but that hardly matters given how well bassist Wilbur Morris and percussionist Warren Smith gel with their convener. Spread across two sides of an LP, the concert recorded at a New York City art gallery covers four pieces, two by Morris bookending one apiece from Smith and the leader that stitch together very much like cohesive suite. An unadvertised surprise comes with Smith’s ample application of marimba alongside a regular drum kit. Recording quality isn’t optimal, but Chancey’s rich, rounded, phrases gain extra gravitas through the sometimes-grainy acoustics. Woefully underrepresented in the driver’s seat discographically, his acumen as both improviser and composer is easily vindicated by this limited edition (300 copies) release.

Derek Taylor 

 Che Chen — Tokyo 17.II.2012 (self-released)

Tokyo 17.II.2012 by Che Chen

Nowadays Che Chen has earned a measure renown as the guitar-playing half of 75 Dollar Bill, and all the praise is earned. But before that, he played a roomful of instruments in the True Primes, Heresy of the Free Spirit and duos with Robbie Lee, Tetuzi Akiyama and Chie Mukai. The through-lines to all these efforts is a willingness not to play things the way their supposed to be played, and a gift for supplying the right resonance in any setting. Since 75 Dollar Bill is a New York-based band made for social occasions, the COVID-19 lay-off has been especially hard — so there’s no better time to see what’s in those hard drives in the closet, right? Chen has released this solo concert from 2012 via Bandcamp. In Tokyo for a brief layover, he played amplified violin at a party held in the basement of someone’s apartment building. The amplified part is important; dips and swells of feedback count as much as in this 25-minute performance as the fiddle’s bright, plucked notes and rough, bowed tones. Chen moves purposefully from one mode to next, taking time along the way to savor the room’s lively acoustics.

Bill Meyer

 Jeff Cosgrove/ John Medeski/ Jeff Lederer — History Gets Ahead of the Story (Grizzley Music)

Odds are that even the estimable William Parker would be surprised by the prospect of a William Parker cover album. But that’s essentially what History Gets Ahead of the Story is as organized and realized by drummer Jeff Cosgrove. That the project is the province of an organ trio only adds to the potential consternation quotient. John Medeski officiates the Hammond B-3 console and saxophonist Jeff Lederer, doubling on flute, completes the combo convened by Cosgrove. The latter’s connections to Parker stem from a trio he was part of with the bassist/composer and pianist Matthew Shipp that disbanded in 2015 after fruitful collaboration. Parker’s personage and music left an indelible mark and the seeds for the present album were sown. Collective creative license doesn’t get in the way of soulful, energizing renderings of such staples as “O’Neal’s Porch,” “Corn Meal Dance” and “Wood Flute Songs,” but troika also cedes time for a triptych of strong originals that align aurally with their dedicatee’s inclusive tone world sensibilities.

Derek Taylor   

 Derelenismo Occulere — Inexorable Revelación (Le Legione Projets)

Inexorable Revelacion (FULL LENGHT 2020) by Derelenismo Occulere

This sounds like a rehearsal gone wrong. In the time of the COVID pandemic, Neo Apolion, a guy responsible for the music in this Ecuadorean duo, recorded a demo and sent it to the band’s vocalist Malduchryst with a message to do with it whatever he wants. Malduchryst took his band partner’s words all too literally. With complete disregard to the music he began vomiting a noisy, messy mass of screams to a microphone (has he never heard of a black metal with no vocals?). If it sounds totally batshit, you can rest assured that it is. This is what makes Inexorable Revelación actually great black metal. When a lot of metal bands these days are just Backstreet Boys with leather jackets on and with guitars, Derelenismo Occulere care about only fury and mayhem. Their Argentinean mix man Ignacio only adds more chaos to the album. The only flaw this tape has is that it is 15 minutes too long.

Ray Garraty  

 Whit Dickey — Morph (ESP-Disk)

Morph by Whit Dickey

Drummer Whit Dickey and pianist Matthew Shipp have been recurrent partners since the early 1990s, when they were both members of the David S. Ware Quartet. It’s fair to say that each man is a known quantity to the other, and that one of the things they know about each other is that they might still be surprised by the other’s playing. Dickey’s retreated from time to time in order to revise his approach, and while Shipp has often threatened to quit recording over the years, he has never stopped working or evolving. This double disc combines one duo CD and another that adds trumpeter Nate Wooley to the pair. Wooley’s done a number of dates with Shipp in recent times, but he and Dickey were musical strangers before they entered Park West Studios in March 2019. Without Wooley, Shipp and Dickey seem very free and trusting of each other, transitioning with dreamlike ease from abstracted gospel to sideways swing to restless co-rumination this the ease. The trio seems more considered. The trumpeter dips quite sparingly into his extended technique bag, favoring instead linear statements that instigate fleet perambulations from the pianist and more supportive, less overtly dialogic contributions from the drummer. Both sessions work, and their differences complement each other quite handily.

Bill Meyer

 Dropdead — S/T (Armageddon)

Dropdead 2020 by Dropdead

Yep, it’s that Dropdead, the Providence-based powerviolence band that hasn’t released a proper LP since 1998 and was on a long hiatus through much of the 21st century. Since 2011, Dropdead has put out a string of splits, with heavyweights like Converge and Brainoil. But a whole record? Maybe the unrelentingly shitty condition of our political and economic conjuncture motivated the four guys in the band (three of whom have been affiliated with Dropdead since 1991) to write the 23 burners, rants and breakdown-heavy hardcore tunes you’ll hear across Dropdead’s 25 minutes. It’s a welcome addition. Bob Otis’s voice doesn’t have the shredding quality of days of yore — but that ends up being useful. You can hear the lyrics, and they’re drenched in venom and righteousness. The rest of the band hasn’t lost a step. Pretty impressive for a bunch of guys with that much grey in their beards. That said, they don’t pull any intergenerational, “we’re-older-and-wiser” moves. This is still music that wants to collapse boundaries, between stage and mosh pit, between races and genders, between species, even. Not so much class positions: “Warfare State,” “United States of Corruption,” “Will You Fight?” Late capitalism’s depredations still bear the principal brunt of the band’s anger. Things have gotten worse, and Dropdead respond in kind. They may be a lot older, but they’re even more pissed off.

Jonathan Shaw

 Fake Laugh — Waltz (State 51 Conspiracy)

Earlier this year, Kamran Khan released his second Fake Laugh album, the charming, playful Dining Alone, which made its way into Dusted’s mid-year round-up of favorites released in the first half of 2020. Khan’s third album, Waltz, is a very different beast, featuring just piano, vocals and the odd keyboard texture, casting his songwriting in sharp relief. Undoubtedly created in this stripped-down way out of lockdown necessity, it’s hard to listen to these wistful, melancholic songs without imagining where Khan’s knack for colorful arrangements might take them, given the chance. (As a tease, closing song “Amhurst” offers up a shimmering electronic melody and some sighing synth chords.) There’s no doubting Khan’s way with a tune, and his naked vocal, though occasionally showing strain, suits the mood. It’s understated and undeniably lovely, yet Waltz feels like a minor release for this talented artist.

Tim Clarke

 David Grubbs / Taku Unami — Comet Meta (Blue Chopsticks)

Comet Meta by David Grubbs & Taku Unami

In the 23 years since Gastr Del Sol fell apart, David Grubbs has done many things that don’t sound much like his old band with Jim O’Rourke. And Taku Unami has worked in such varied settings and ways that the most persistent quality of his engagement with sound is its ability to induce question marks and ellipses in any train of thought intending to decode it. So, it’s both remarkable and delightful that this record, the duo’s second collaboration, sounds rather like parts of Gastr Del Sol’s Upgrade & Afterlife. The foundation rests upon the way two guys who can and do play intricate guitar duets make subtle use of other elements — creeping acoustic piano, humming synthesizer, urban field recordings — to make music that thickens atmosphere and accumulates mystery with such subtlety that you don’t notice it until you’re in it.

Bill Meyer  

 Guided by Voices — Mirrored Aztec (Guided by Voices Inc.)

I know, I know, it’s another Guided by Voices record, the fifth since 2019, but hear me out. Pollard is still tapped into the fuzzy, rackety, melodic sap of the rock and roll universe, and he has only to knock his hammer a few times against the gnarled tree of life to extract more of what sustains us. Shorter version: he can do this all day, every day, without any noticeable let-up in quality. So, let us celebrate another batch of Who-like power chords, of rumbling drums and monumental bass thuds, of melodies that curve out delicately like spring’s first vines, then thicken into thundering climaxes and triumphant refrains. Let us give thanks again for inscrutable lyrics that drift off into poetry then pull back in the most ordinary artifacts of the spoken word. “I Think I Had It. I Think I Have It,” crows Pollard in a voice that has been blasted by time but come out more or less intact, and yes, Bob, you still do.

Jennifer Kelly

  Edu Haubensak & Tomas Korber — Works for Guitar & Percussion (Ezz-thetics)

The celebrated Wandelweiser aesthetic serves as a loose overarching impetus for the four interpretations of compositions by Edu Haubensak and Tomas Korber that comprise Works for Guitar & Percussion. Classical guitarist Christian Buck and improvising percussionist Christian Wolfarth ply their instruments through pairing and isolation. Essayist Andy Hamilton describes context by delineating a distinction between music (based in the language of tones) and soundart (which is non-tonal) and placing the duo’s interpretations in the opaque border between these realms. Repetition and timbral disparity frame Haubensak’s “On” while Korber’s “Aufhebung” applies scrutiny to microtonal diversity and temporal impermanence. Wolfarth fields Korber’s “Weniger Weiss” from behind snare drum, trading recurring stick rolls with varying segments of silence that compel ears accustomed to Western musical structures to consciously fill in the blanks. Haubensak’s solo “Refugium” finds Buck bending two closely tuned strings in an extrapolation of an Arabic maqam that feels tenuously connected to the form, at best.

Derek Taylor 

 Inseclude — Inseclude (Inseclude)

Brad MacAllister of CTRL and Blue Images and Benjamin Londa of Exit have been working in the darkwave and chillwave scenes for several years and their first album as Inseclude is a long distance collaboration that mines the darker side of 1980s alternative and electronic rock. From Pennsylvania, MacAllister sent musical ideas to Londa in Texas who added guitars, lyrics and vocals to produce a set of songs that are well made and enjoyable if largely unmemorable. There are a number of contemporary bands doing similar things — Hamilton’s Capitol and Manchester’s Ist spring immediately to mind — taking the Cure, New Order, Sisters of Mercy template and why not? Unfortunately, the passage of time and the law of diminishing returns have led to overfamiliarity with this style of music that makes for easy and perhaps unfair comparisons. When they stretch themselves, Inseclude’s songs do hit. “Sondera” and “Failing To The Pulse” carry some real menace with the juxtaposition of wide-angle synths and paranoid vocals but elsewhere the pair seem held back by a restraint and lack of bottom end that diminish the impact of some pretty decent songs.

Andrew Forell

 Kvalia — Scholastic Dreams Of Forceful Machines (Old Boring Russia)

Схол��стические Грёзы Силовых Машин by Квалиа

Krasnoyarsk sits on the banks of the Yenisei river in southern Siberia and is known both for the natural beauty of its surrounding landscape and for its primacy as an aluminum producer. Local musicians Aleksander Maznichenko and Aleksey Danilenko reflect the latter on their new five track EP Scholastic Dreams Of Forceful Machines, an icy, metallic collection of post-industrial clang pitched somewhere between Einstürzende Neubauten and early Clock DVA. Their machines are forceful but cranky, rusted, near obsolete. Maznichenko keeps the thrum of turbines is steady but the drum machines lurch and thump, the keyboards whine and scream, the Russian vocals protest their obstreperous charges. Danilenko’s bass is post-punk elastic skipping amongst the raining sparks hinting at a will to dance with his mutant riffs. They sound like they mean it and the result is a terrific EP full of fire, fumes, steam and sweat.

Andrew Forell  

 Mezzanine Swimmers — Kneelin’ on a Knife (Already Dead)

Kneelin' on a Knife by Mezzanine Swimmers

These songs circle around noise-crusted, repetitive beats, the drumming stiff and mechanical, the riffs chopped to short bursts, the vocals woozy and distended. “Sexy Apology” reiterates a three-note keyboard lick ad infinitum, as main Swimmer Mike Smith drawls the title phrase, similarly on repeat. Yet within this unchanging structure, chaos erupts in detuned keyboards, miasmic feedback and corrosive noise. It’s hard to say whether these songs are too tightly organized or too loose, a bit of both really, and yet, get past the headachy thud and there’s an unhinged psychotropic transport. No one ever said that kneeling on knives would be comfortable.

Jennifer Kelly

 Mosca — The Optics (Rent)

Mosca · The Optics [RENT001]

Part of the initial wave of neon-infused dubstep hedonism surrounding the Night Slugs camp at the turn of the last decade, Mosca’s Tom Reid has since survived on the strength of a regular slot behind the decks at NTS and sparingly deployed releases on such renowned labels as Numbers, Rinse, Hypercolour and Livity Sound. “The Optics” debuts his new Rent imprint, conceived as a way to get out music that doesn’t fit in elsewhere. (Originally, this was to be an a-side for a coming AD93 release, but as he says, “There's only so long you can keep a track with a baby crying in it back from the masses.”) Supposedly inspired by the Under the Skin beach scene, the five-minute track immediately throws you off with a dub-heavy shuffle and metallic, alien sounds that zoom around the mix. The main thrust of the melody arrives around a minute in, and gradually the sounds close in on you. There’s bells, birds, a baby crying and then, just when you’re feeling completely stressed out, it all falls away; a driving jungle rhythm carries you the rest of the way. Deeply satisfying dance from a head who hasn’t lost his way.

Patrick Masterson  

 Prana Crafter/ragenap — No Ear to Hear (Centripetal Force Studio/Cardinal Fuzz)

No Ear to Hear by Prana Crafter / ragenap

When Robert Hunter, the poet who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star,” “Ripple,” “Truckin’,” “Terrapin Station” and many other songs, died in late 2019, long form psych musicians Prana Crafter (William Sol) and ragenap (Joel Berk) mourned separately but simultaneously. The night he died, both took solace in improvised music, which didn’t so much evoke or represent Hunter, but captured some of their feelings about his work and their loss. When they talked, soon after, they found that both had made lengthy open-ended meditations on the same person. Those two extended pieces make up No Ear to Hear. Prana Crafter’s entry, “Beggar’s Tomb,” is weighted and slow moving, building gradually from simmering drones into towering edifices of feedback and dissonance. Although performed largely on guitar, the sound is filtered through gleaming effects and layers into astral strangeness, a mystic’s trip through mental interiors. ragenap’s “Nightfall” also takes shape slowly out of looming sustained notes and black velvet quiet and sounds that scratch and vibrate at the edges. A solitary acoustic guitar takes up space at the forefront finally, carving a hesitant melody across the hum. The tune turns fuller and more agitated as it progresses, adding layers of feedback and distortion. Neither of these pieces sounds much like the Grateful Dead, and of course, neither has any sort of lyrics. I doubt that anyone, hearing this album for the first time would say, “Oh yeah, Robert Hunter.” And yet inspiration works in strange and, in this case, fruitful ways. You can enjoy this even if you don’t like the Dead.

Jennifer Kelly

 Raven Throne — Viartannie (Chroniki Źmiainaj Ciemry) (self-released)

Viartannie (Chroniki Źmiainaj Ciemry) /The Return (The Chronicles of the Serpent Darkness) by RAVEN THRONE

These Belorussian black metal veterans are true materialists. On their seventh album, they show that nature is a social construct, not something given. And boy, their nature is not a loving mother. Unlike many metal bands convey nature via field recordings, Raven Throne craft their ferocious sounds with guitars and drums. Aren’t these as natural instruments as stone and wooden sticks? The atmospheric black metal subgenre has been contaminated by pop and folksy metal so that it’s hard to maintain a truly evil sound, while still bringing the atmospheric elements into it. Raven Throne pull it off. This is how darkness should sound.

Ray Garraty  

 The Slugs — Don’t Touch Me I’m Too Slimy (2214099 Records DK)

Don't Touch Me, I'm Too Slimy by The Slugs

The Slugs are an exuberantly lo-fi punk pop duo out of London who bash and thump and shout short, acidic ditties about being female, in a band, under assault and under the weather. Liberty Hodes, who is also one half of the comedy duo A Comedy Night that Passes the Bechdel Test, plays a jangling, forceful electric guitar, while her Phoebe Dighton-Brown bangs away in brutal simplicity on the drums. Both sing, sometimes in unison, sometimes in rough harmonies, occasionally in slashing counterparts. (One chants “Feel sick/can’t be sick” while the other rolls out mellifluous “ah-ah-ah-ahs” in “Feel Sick.”) There is a charming, unstudied quality to their music, which is a bit too smart and biting to be primitive, but nonetheless eschews frills. It’s hard to pick favorites—the whole EP is over in five tracks and 11 minutes—but “Pest” is giddy fun, with its slouching, battering guitar-drum motif and slacker choruses. The shout along chorus of “Don’t touch me! I’m too slimy!” is the best thing on the record, hitting a rebellious, unwashed spot of resonance in the work-from-home era. Second best, the gleeful tirade about sleazy male promoters in “Girly Gang” (“Give you all the gigs if you touch my wang”), which builds in round-singing euphorias until it ends suddenly and a la Jane Austen in matrimony (“Married in a dress by Vera Wang”). People are comparing the Slugs to the Shaggs, but that’s just short-hand for banging away anyway without all the training. The Slugs are smarter, slyer and more autonomous, and if they sound a little rough, that’s exactly how they meant to sound.

Jennifer Kelly

Tobin Sprout — Empty Horses (Fire)

Empty Horses by Tobin Sprout

Blessed with one of the finest names in music (alongside dEUS’s Klaas Janzoons), Tobin Sprout is best known for being part of the Guided by Voices line-up that created classic albums such as Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes in the 1990s. Though Sprout’s subsequent solo output has been a steady stream compared to Robert Pollard’s deluge, Empty Horses is his eighth solo album. In it, the now-65-year-old ruminates faith, mortality and American history atop a spare, country-tinged backing. There’s a deep ache to many of these songs, the kind of emotional weight that manifests in pointedly low tempos, sparse drum parts that hang behind the beat and vocal performances that are almost uncomfortably intimate. Running to a succinct half-hour, with many of the songs clocking in at just a couple of minutes each, Empty Horses confronts demons seemingly too pernicious to overcome. Yet, when the music becomes more expansive — such as the graceful pedal steel of “Breaking Down,” the woozy modulation of “Antietam,” or the biting fuzztone of “All In My Sleep” — Sprout sounds like he may be on the verge of making a much-needed breakthrough.

Tim Clarke  

 Son Lux — Tomorrows I (City Slang)

Tomorrows I by Son Lux

Son Lux’s songs embed unsettling sounds in deep wells of silence, finding disturbing textures in string sounds, electronics, percussion and the fluttering soul falsetto of founder Ryan Lott. Tomorrows I, reportedly the first of three related albums, has a quietly dystopian vibe and a moist, echoing unease that might remind of you Burial’s classic Untrue. A brief, looped, keening violin motif punctures the opening cut, “Plans We Made” with all the threat of Bernhard Hermann’s shower music for the film Psycho, while Lott trills haunted phrases about being afraid to let go. “Undertow,” near the end, brings in a whole string quartet to swoon dissonantly, as a knocking beat (drummer Ian Chang) sounds like a body being dragged across the floor. “Just waiting for the undertow,” sings Lott in the dread empty spaces between, in arias of muted desolation. Minimalist and menacing and mesmerizing.

Jennifer Kelly

 Ulaan Janthina — Ulaan Janthina (Part 1) (Worstward)

Ulaan Janthina (Part I) by Ulaan Janthina

Steven R. Smith contains multitudes, and Ulaan Janthina is the latest manifestation of his mutating musical self. This release exemplifies three aspects of Smith’s practice. First, he likes to make beautiful things. Hard copies of this tape come in a custom-oriented box that contains tinted photos, shells and printed communications as well as the cassette. And he’s project-oriented. While other iterations have been devoted to an Eastern European vibe, or guitar noise or a virtual ensemble sound, Ulaan Janthina results from a decision to work primarily with the keyboards in his house. It’s a winning strategy, since his synthesizers, organ and harmonium all benefit from the grittiness of Smith’s recording methodology, and his spare playing style makes his melodies stand out quite starkly from the background atmosphere. Like the name says, this is part one of the Janthina (named for a genus of sea snail that makes its own floating platform — not a bad metaphor for the survival-oriented independent musician) venture; a second, similarly packaged cassette is pending from Smith’s Worstward imprint soon, and a future release is already planned by Soft Abuse records.

Bill Meyer

 Various Artists — Spr Blk: Liberation Jazz and Soul From the '70s and Beyond (Paxico)

Liberation Jazz and Soul by Marcus J. Moore

Author Marcus J. Moore (late of The Nation but also found everywhere from Pitchfork to WaPo) has a book on the way in October, The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America. In advance of its release via cassette devotees Paxico, Moore cobbled together “rare and somewhat familiar” Black music from his own crates. “These are the kinds of songs I play when walking through New York City or driving through Maryland,” he says in the release. What that means for you is a two-sided mix that burns slower on the A and gets more percussion-heavy on the B. Leading off with Doug Carn’s fittingly titled “Swell Like a Ghost” and featuring jams from Willie Dale, Milton Wright, Ronald Snijders and other lesser jazz, soul and funk lights, it’s a revealing mix that will no doubt pair well with that fall reading you’re about to get going on.

Patrick Masterson 

 Vatican Shadow — Persian Pillars of the Gasoline Era (20 Buck Spin)

Persian Pillars Of The Gasoline Era by Vatican Shadow

Dominick Fernow is hugely prolific, and most folks with ears tuned to the densely churning worlds of noise and industrial music will be familiar with his abrasive, unsettling output under the Prurient moniker. Fernow’s releases as Vatican Shadow are fewer in number, and more attuned to ambient, even melodic movements and textures. That’s sort of odd, given that the Vatican Shadow records thematize and explore Fernow’s obsession with the history of the Middle East, especially post-9/11 collisions of Western military force, Islamic traditions of resistance and the tactics of terror used by both sides. Relaxing stuff, that ain’t. Consistent with the larger project’s tendencies, Persian Pillars of the Gasoline Era claims an interest in the CIA-coordinated Iranian coup (MI6 helped out, too, those imperial scamps) that deposed Mohammed Mossadeq, installed the Shah Reza Pahlavi and inaugurated some of the principal tensions that have shaped the last half-century of world history. It’s unclear how Fernow’s pulsing, shimmering, sometimes juddering synth sounds are meant to represent or otherwise engage that history. For sure, record art and song titles summon all the right semiotics, sometimes with an interesting edge. But “Taxi Journey through the Teeming Slums of Tehran” sounds more like a malfunctioning MP3 player than a taxi or a “teeming slum” (can we all be done with that phrase now?), and “Moving Secret Money” is pleasantly trance-inducing, rather than insidiously evil. Musically, it’s quite good. The packaging seems to want strike other notes. Maybe that’s the point — too many folks are too busy consuming quietist pop to bother with the grind of the political. But is this the intervention we need?  

Jonathan Shaw

[auroraaboraaborealis]

There are few critics whose work can be read for style alone, and many of the best of those are essentially impressionists or appreciators, like Whitney Balliett and Henry James, idiosyncratic enthusiasts who wrote most often to explicate a new, if sometimes baffled, love. There is a still smaller number who, though passionately opinionated, and as often inclined to damn as praise, manage to turn opinion itself into a kind of art form, who bring to full maturity the moral qualities that hide in violent judgment—qualities of audacity, courage, conviction—and make them come so alive on the page that even if the particular object is seen in a fury, the object seems less interesting than the emotion it evoked, while some broader principle always seems defended by the indignation. Of that still rarer kind, those who come first to mind in English might be Tynan and Shaw on the theatre, Johnson and Jarrell on poetry—and to those names must be added that of Robert Hughes, the Australian (and, latterly, American) art critic, who died this week.

Hughes was many kinds of writers—his hugely popular account of Australia’s founding, “The Fatal Shore,” and his two marvellous books on the cities he loved, “Barcelona” and “Rome,” as well as his biography of Goya were all memorable in their kind—but his fame rightly rested on his thirty or so years of art criticism for Time, and (as he knew) above all on the series and book “The Shock of the New,” still much the best synoptic introduction to modern art ever written. “Nothing if Not Critical” was the title, taken from Iago, that, with mordant self-mockery, he used for a collection of his criticism. And he was a pure critic: both his memoirs and his essays on cities came most alive when he was laying into someone, or pouring praise on something, explaining why one fountain in Rome is more beautiful than another, or why someone he met in the course of life was not beautiful at all. The critics’ work was his work—not disclosing, but describing, fixing, defending, denouncing.

He was, first of all, an artist who just missed having a career as one—as a young man, a cartoonist, his line was said to be ridiculously, fluidly nimble. (There is a wonderful portrait of the young, inspired, angelic-looking Hughes in Clive James’s “Unreliable Memoirs”; indeed, a fine biography might be written of Hughes and James and of the conquest of Anglo-American opinion by Australian energy and unspoiled ambition.) He thought with his hands. When he was defending a notion of permanent value in his mid-nineties “culture war” polemic, “The Culture of Complaint,” it wasn’t with a sniffy reference to Plato or Dante, but through his direct experience as an amateur carpenter, of the practice of planing, sawing, varnishing, and getting it right. There were good tables and bad tables; master carpenters to make them well and miserable ones to make them badly. Craft attempted with passion—that was his critical touchstone. Though it was part of his achievement to help end for all time the notion that novelty in art is in itself a virtue, or that “radicalism” or progress was in any way a reasonable end for creativity, he did so without becoming a reactionary. He had only contempt for the cheap smug conservative taste that risked nothing and tried no new thing, and rooted its suspicions in bile and bad faith. He much preferred a rough-worn and unvarnished table made by passionate hands to a smooth one made to pattern.

His values rose not from some distant imagined past, but from the European modernism that still vibrated with excitement in the Australia of his youth, where no one yet knew it well enough to have grown tired of it. Shaped—some might say scarred—by a resolute Jesuit education, Hughes had as a teen-ager drunk in the images and ideas of that faraway modernism without the least touch of complacent familiarity. (Mechanical reproduction heightened, enhanced its value for him.) In the same way that his contemporary Barry Humphries relished the dandy-art of the eighteen-nineties in a way that few Brits could, or that Clive James kept faith in the power of the heroic couplet to communicate, Hughes believed in modern art with something close to innocence. Although “The Shock of the New” is in many ways an account of the tragedy of modernism—the tragedy of Utopias unachieved, historical triumphs made hollow, evasions of market values that ended by serving them—that tragedy is more than set off by the triumph of modern artists. The thesis of “The Shock of the New,” if such a work can be reduced to one, is that what art lost when it could no longer credibly be a mirror of nature it had gained as a transmitter of lived experience, so that, if the surface of the world had been ceded to the photographic image, the essentials of existence—desire in Picasso, physical ecstasy in Matisse, or the agonized alienation in Giacometti, or all of them at once in Van Gogh—could now be expressed with newfound urgency.

Hughes had an impressive line in indignation, but he was allergic to irony. If he seemed at times out of place in New York it wasn’t by virtue of unorthodox opinions; it was because of a kind of robust, unashamed absence of irony, or meta-awareness, in his work, an absence of sentences placed in inverted quotations or of any despair about the ability of plain speech to achieve plain ends. What he really detested was mannerism, in all its guises, whether the mannerism was the Italian kind that had to be cured by Caravaggio or of the postmodern kind that had yet to be cured at all. If this left him blind to the virtues that mannerism may contain—elliptical thought, the tangle of reference, stylishness—well, who would not want to be in a minority clamoring for truth and passion in a mannerist age?

A radical conservative, a skeptic about the avant-garde in authority who relished the trespasses and achievements of the avant-garde in opposition, he was like Swift, someone who had been driven into reaction only by the excesses of the reforming party in power. He could be rough and even brutal, and, like every critic, his hits and misses are, in retrospect, in about even balance. The odd thing was that, in conversation, he was immune to the habit of turning differences of taste into differences of value. If you explained to him why, say, Jeff Koons or Damian Hirst was not quite the monster he had imagined, he would listen patiently, and then sum up your wavering, hesitant hems and haws in a neat phrase: “Hmmmn…Well, Yes. You’re saying that Koons is to sex what Warhol was to soup cans?” A machine gun burst of laughter. “All right, then!” As with all first-rate writers, the bite, and even occasional bluster, was covering up something, and in Bob’s case this was an enormous vulnerability: to experience, to people, to art. The images that arrive from a quarter century of sporadically intense friendship are not of enemies excoriated but of gentle gestures attempted, of poetry recited and far-distant masterpieces evoked.

Advertisement

“Ah, yes!” was his usual start to a sentence, eyebrows raised in memory followed by the single name of whomever or whatever was about to be quoted or praised or described: “Ah, yes! Auden!” he would say, and then he would give you, from memory, the entire nativity section from “For the Time Being.” (I knew no contemporary writer of any kind who had so much poetry committed to memory; it was part of the rote-learning side of his Jesuit education.)

He was as touching a man as you could hope to meet: when our first son was born, Bob arrived at our loft with arms full of stuffed Australian animals for the newborn. “Now this, you see—this is … the Joey!” he said, showing him the baby kangaroo in its pouch, as though he were describing a work by David Smith. (When, a decade later, he called in the middle of the night, with the news that his only son, Danton, from whom he had long been estranged, but loved all the same, had taken his own life, it was with a desperate, apologetic grief that I have not, and hope never again, to hear equalled.) And, above all, he was a writer: I write this far from both from the Internet and from my own library and yet Hughes’s sentences and phrases stick in my head without either having to be consulted. For all the violence of his disdains, they are mostly phrases of enthusiasm: his insistence that Eric Fischl’s suburban vision “smells of unwashed dog, Bar-B-Q lighter fluid and sperm,” his evocation of the nineteenth-century American landscape artist as “God’s stenographer,” his description of a Morris Louis stain picture as “the watercolor that ate the art world,” or, more profoundly, his explanation of the rococo play of line and painterly weather in a Jackson Pollock and of how it belied his reputation as a mere paint-thrower.

He loved most of all art that danced on an edge between manifest accomplishment and audacity, where a painter managed to bring his or her sheer talent to bear upon the world—and then made the inadequacy of talent alone to bear adequate witness to the world manifest, too. The painters of the London School, which he did so much to raise in the world’s estimation, earned his trust because they echoed his virtues: a love of craft married to an allergy to mere elegance; a feeling for the life-giving qualities of healthy vulgarity and a love of life and the world as it really is, displayed without apology. The smears and howls and broken lines and awkward bodies, the will to truth evidenced in the open, blunt statements of Bacon and Auerbach and Kitaj and Freud—these artists were not so much his best subjects as his truest equivalents.

Criticism serves a lower end than art does, and has little effect on it, but by conveying value it serves a civilizing end. If Bob’s last years were in many ways sad, and at times agonized by the pain that his horrific 1999 automobile accident had left him, the work never stopped, and his affection for those round him never dimmed. Through it all, his mind would rise and a phone call would arrive, and one would race downtown to spend time with him; he would read page after page of whatever he was working on, reciting, in his gruff, warning voice, some masterly combo of verdict, examination, evocation, summary—and then, being Bob, look up, anxious as a schoolboy, and say, “But do you think it’s any good? Do you, really?” It was so much better than good that no good words came to mind. At the end of the evening he would dismiss you, as one raised Catholic and still surprised in the presence of the world, with a simple, “Bless you!” His writing will live as a repository of experience fixed in place by a consciousness tormented but never overthrown, and his memory will survive not as some hanging judge of the museums but as one of the indispensable mavericks of modern humanism.

Illustration by David Hughes, from Robert S. Boynton’s 1997 profile of Robert Hughes.

[darlingnisi]

Celebration Day 3 : VIP Edition

Part 2 Here!

Funk Soldiers Panel

Shelby J

Kat Dyson

Xavier Taplin

Joey Rayfield

Kip Blackshire

About Last Night... (The Prince on the Big Screen event)

A lot of reherasal

Kirk organized everyone, got the materials out

Biggest challenge was that there were a lot of performers who worked with P at different times so the arrangements of the songs were often different. Hard to sync up with the show or pick the right one to use at first

Shelby said it was hard not to turn and look at him on the screen

The fludidity of the performance came with experience because they knew what P expected of them musically

Kat said “having him in my ear floated me back to my time with him” The instructions he gave inside of the performance still applied

Joey noted that he better understood the difference between just playing and performance from his time with Prince

“I almost forgot he wasn’t there”

Kat Dyson Origin Story (Guitar)

Recommended by Sheila E. Kat and Rhonda Smith met Sheila while demoing gear at an industry show. Sheila asked for their music as she had an idea to do an all girl band at the time. She got sick and gave their info to P. P took them both on.

Their audition was a four hour jam session in 96. P asked Kat “How much of my material do you know...and how much did you buy?”

Her favorite P music are the soundtracks, especially Batman and her favorite songs are Joy of Repetition and Question of You.

She and Rhonda did an arrangement for Question of You for him.

Xavier Taplin Origin Story (Organ)

Played with and was reccomend by Gouche, another NPG member

Audition was P on Bass and Job Blackwell on Drums. They played 777-9311 and P had him solo for 60 bars. He fell back into the groove and P told him to keep going...fell back into the groove again...and P told him to keep going. P put his bass down, walks over to  Xavier, and stands “uncomfortably close for 15 seconds just looking at me” he then says “We’re going to have a lot of fun.”

Joey Rayfield (Trombone)

Gets a call from Adrian Crutcfield about an audition in Charolette North Carolina. Gets PDF of a chart for Xtraloveable and realizes it’s for Prince

They have a Skype audition.

Time passes and he randomly got an email with a Delta ticket to Minneapolis. He quit his job and left for Paisley.

At first played on Andy Allo’s Supeconductor sessions.

Story : during a rehearsal P slowly walks up to the stage and says “You and Ida go play ping pong and if you win, I’ll play you. Joey wins and plays Prince. Joey’s in his dress shoes though and is slipping and sliding everywhere. P stops the game, moves a rug to be under Joey and says “I ain’t got no insurance.”

Story from Kat : I played basketball with him. Nobody told me not to block his shot. The game was over after that.

Kip : I was playing with him in the Daisy Chain video.

Kip Blackshire Origin Story (Vocals)

Morris Hayes invited him to a Carlos Sananta show and Jam session at Paisley. Kip absently playing basketball. Hears a “clang” (P dropping his guitar). P comes over and squares up with Kip. Kip passes P the ball, and P checks him hard in the stomach with it. Kip says he isn’t dressed to play and P tells him to come back the next day to play for real. The next day they play a 2 on 2 game. Kirk/Prince vs. Morris/Kip.

Was cleaning up in the bathroom and absently singing. P overhears and invites him to sing with them in the studio. P asks him if he knows Little Red Corvette and Kip says “I wasn’t allowed to listen to you growing up.” Instead P played guitar and Kip answered his licks with his voice. He was invited to join the band and the first song he sang on was Undisputed from Rave.

Shelby J Origin Story (Vocals)

Audition for Larry G’s band. Got in and was at 3121 doing a rehearsal. Kept being told to re-sing Higher Ground. It was P asking.

Was singing I Can’t Stand the Rain during a show. Crowd goes wild and she thought she was “DOING IT!” turns out P had come on stage behind her and was plugging up his guitar to join them. He came up to her mic and sang cheek to cheek with her for that song.

Was in Walmart getting supplies at home when she got invited to sing at one of his shows NYE. From there she was asked to join the band and their next gig was the Superbowl.

Arrangement Panel with Michael B Nelson

Had done work with Micheal Bland. There was an idea for a warm up group early 90′s. Dave and Kathy Jenson with Michael B Nelson, Sonny, and Tommy B made up a 5 piece band. They recorded some tracks and sent it to P. P told them to go to a Carmen Electra rehearsal to be filmed. Time passes asked to come to the soundstage at Paisley...saw pedal boards set up P was there! NPG was very tight at this time so P just held up a signal and they started into Madhouse 4. The horns were shocked for a moment then fell in (this was their audition). They jammed for 6 hours then recorded for the first time that same day....Sexy MF? (This may be wrong...he mentioned that they recorded for the first time that day, then a moment later said the first thing they recorded was Sexy MF as part of a different story so...take that how you will)

Told to get their passports together. They joined him on the Diamonds and Pearls tour

There were 11 semi trucks and 110 people in the entourage for the D&P tour. Their first stop with him was Tokyo

Hornheads was formulated as a horns only group since they were on with P and couldn’t play with anyone else, they just made a mini group to keep their chops up during down time. Mike Nelson wrote the tunes and they have 3 albums.

“Even when he was giving you a hard time, he’s just pushing you”

Q: What was it like during the 90′s? Every office was filled. He gave you exactly what you needed to fufill a task. You didn’t ask for additional questions...you had to trust yourself and know that he trusted you to use your creativity wisely.

Prince preferred Duke Ellington’s style of horns

P would send Mike tapes of a lead line and melody and Mike would add horn parts.

Mike did Black Muse, new Xtraloveable, When She Comes, Groovy Potential, Morning Papers and more (He’s been around for about 25 years)

Percentage of things recorded to released of the work Mike did. 50%

He co-wrote Billy Jack Bitch. While they were working on something, Mike played P a song during tape change. P said “Who do I have to pay to use that” The instrumental part of Billy Jack Bitch was written by Mike.

Story : Working on something and Mike B was impressed with how it sounded. Forgot everything he said could be heard in the control room by P. Commented “man that is funky” P responds “yes it is.”

Story : Tenor sax was playing a solo while working on something and it didn’t go well. When it was done, from the control room P says “You guys see Waterworld?” Tenor sax guy “No who’s in it” Prince, “Your mama” Tenor sax guy, “Oh it’s good to know she’s getting work!” “Prince falls off his chair from laughing” (Waterworld has a reputation for being a very bad movie.)

Q: Why did you last? P told him “You and Clare Fischer really understand my music.” Was asked to be full time in 2012. He never had a falling out or harsh words with P and P never rejected any of his additions to his songs.

Got our pictures from our tour back. Framing mine for sure! It’s like my 5th picture in here and the only good one, lol...

Funk Soldiers Concert

Honesty we were all kind of weary about this as this seemed to be a remix of the NewPower Soul group to some degree...or at least that concept, but once again VERY happy to be completely checked about the assumption because they were PHENOMENAL and not just because of something that happened...! Set list : 

I’m Yours

I Feel For You

Party Man

Girls and Boys

Lady Cab Driver/Irresistible Bitch mashup (!)

1+1+1 is 3 (I LOST. MY. MIND. YA’LL KNOW THAT ONE NIGHT ALONE TIME PERIOD IS MY COMPLETE FAVORITE AND NOBODY DOES COVERS OF THOSE SONGS AND IT WAS SO GOOD!)

The Work Part 1 (I WAS ABSOLUTELY DELIRIOUS! AGAIN BECAUSE THIS IS MY ERA AND NOBODY DOES THIS! I was so into it singing, foot stomping and dancing, I got tapped by security and they asked if I want to go on stage! I 100% always say I’d never do it, but I thought I’d get to jam out to The Work since that goes on for a bit. I got back stage and they said I was to be part of a dance battle (WHAT?! I LEGIT AM THE MOST RESERVED PERSON USUALLY ABSOLUTELY NOT! (And also I guess for The Professor, lol) So me and Lenny Beason (from Purple Underground who thankfully I mostly know in real life so I was comfortable) were to battle to...

Black Sweat (Kip told me to go first so I tried to do every dance I could think of...The Housequake, The Get Off dance, Tried to remember the Purple Funk SF Funknroll dance but my mind blanked so I did some booty pops and stopped on the accents with a pose. Lenny went during the next chorus...then I had to go again. Shelby said I’m her funk sister now and we got T-shirts! My heart was beating so fast ya’ll! It pays to love The Rainbow Children! LOL!

Chelsea Rodgers

Xtraloveable (AGAIN A DREAM COME TRUE I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO HEAR THIS LIVE WITH THESE GUYS DOING THE HORNS!)

Big City

Welcome 2 the Dawn (SO glad they did this instead of Purple Rain! Amazing choice! A Great song!)

Paisley Park

All the Critics Love You in New York/Housequake Jumps

Alphabet Street (Sheila E came out and crowd surfed for a bit)

Very good job! They were very tight, funky, and kept everyone’s spirits WAY up, especially with the EXCELLENT choice of Welcome 2 the Dawn being the only slow song.

This day was the 21st and honestly it was a BLUR. Even if I hadn’t gotten chosen by Ghost Prince to go up, the experience the band gave us with their energy and love made it hard to be sad this day. For me, interestingly I had a harder time on the 20th seeing him up there at the Big Screen event and with all the news that came out on the previous Thursday...did stay in bed for a bit that day to be honest...but “the day” was so full of just AMAZING like he legit came down like “ya’ll don’t cry for me...look at all this that I left behind for you to enjoy!” This day was was distracting with so much information followed by such an explosive show! Everyone was on their feet dancing, singing, hands in the air, just the whole time!

I’m very glad the days for the arena event got switched because it honestly would have been too much for me if it fell on this day...

Last part here!

[redsoapbox]

MY TOP TEN ALBUMS LIST OF 1983

As someone who has always been an obsessive list-maker, I can’t quite comprehend how I’ve resisted the temptation, in the three years of redsoapbox, to blog to the world my thoughts on favourite films, books, records, etc. However, during some much-needed spring cleaning over the weekend, I stumbled upon a list of my favourite albums from 1983 and my defences collapsed on the spot. So I ’m putting it out there, regardless of the risk to my reputation (ha, ha). 

1.Swordfishtrombones - Tom Waits

The album, of course, that marked Waits’ change from jazzy, bohemian barfly to surrealist junkyard poet. I hadn’t had much to do with Waits up until this point but subsequently bought up his back catalogue on the strength of this masterpiece. Waits described the transition in style this way -  “I hatched out of the egg I was living in. I'd nailed one foot to the floor and kept going in circles, making the same record”. “In the Neighbourhood”, the alt.torch song “Frank’s Wild Years” and the little love poem “Johnsburg, Illinois” were the obvious standouts. Swordfishtrombones still remains on heavy rotation in the McGrath household today.

Selected track -  “In the Neighbourhood”

2. Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy - Billy Bragg

Sometime in 83/84, I showed up at the local Polytechnic to watch The Icicle Works and fell head over heels in love with unbilled support act, Billy Bragg. As a fully paid-up member of the Labour Party, I bought into Billy’s ‘socialism of the heart’ in a big way. I stood there open-mouthed as the ‘Bard of Barking’ cranked out “Milkman of Human Kindness”, “New England” and “To Have And Have Not”. The gig ended on an unbelievable high, with Billy joining Ian McNabb and co. on stage for an encore which included a medley of “Jailhouse Rock”, “L.A. Woman” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. I’ve seen Billy ‘one-man Clash’ Bragg play a dozen times since, and this fifteen-minute masterpiece remains high in my all-time top twenty albums list.

Selected track - “To Have And Have Not”

3. Hysterics - The Nightingales

In the sixties, you got to define yourself musically/culturally by choosing between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, for post-punks like me, though, it was a straight choice between The Fall and The Nightingales (of course, you could secretly worship both and I did!). I was always, deep down, a Robert Lloyd man - I once fired off an angry letter to *Mojo taking Morrissey to task for lumping the ‘gales in with The June Brides and The Jasmine Minks - and still regard the frontman as one of the best lyricists in pop music history. It was a real joy to witness The Nightingales come back from a 20-year hiatus (during which Lloyd worked as a Postman) with 2006′s Out Of True, an album which gives Hysterics a real run for its money. One of my top 5 all-time favourite gigs was The Nightingales/Happy Monday’s/Ted Chippington corker in the Poly of Wales in 1984/85.

Selected track  -  “This” 

The Nightingales have not been too well-served by the internet and there is next to nothing in terms of live footage before their reformation. They did, however, record 8 Sessions for John Peel, including the one below from the 5th of December 1983 which kicks off with “This”, the only song from Hysterics that I could track down for the purposes of this piece. 

* The letter was published in issue no 151.

4. Murmur - R.E.M.

Having disastrously passed up the chance to catch ‘some new American band’, who in fact turned out to be none other than R.E.M., at Rumney’s run-down New Ocean Club in November 1984, I had to wait a further five years to see the band play (in Newport and Birmingham) as part of their Green tour. By then, of course, the whole world had fallen in love with the college rockers turned conquering heroes. Albums such as Document and Green may have propelled Athens’ finest into the big leagues, but the Byrdsian mumble-fest that is Murmur remains their masterpiece. A belated thumbs-up to Big Al for turning me onto the band in the first place.

Selected track - “Talk About The Passion”.

5. Power Corruption and Lies - New Order

You can’t begin to discuss the strange and surreal story of New Order’s rise to world domination without first engaging with the personal tragedy of Ian Curtis and the dramatic fall of Joy Division. How the remaining members of Manchester miserabilists Joy Division - Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris - recovered from the suicide of their friend and frontman Curtis in May 1980 to remodel themselves as the unexpected pioneers of Indie dance (Blue Monday is the biggest selling 12 inch record of all time) is surely one of the tallest tales in the annals of popular music. 

Full disclosure here - there was a time in the mid-eighties, stretching to somewhere between 12 and 18 months, where I barely listened to anything other than Joy Division/New Order. Curtis had already died when I bumped into two old school friends, Tosh and Dai, huddled in the doorway of The Criterion pub at closing time one stormy Friday night in Pontypridd in the winter of 1983. In what was undoubtedly a drunken conversation, I heard the name Joy Division for the very first time. The next morning, with praise for JD still ringing in my head (unless that was the hangover), I headed straight for Hurleys Toy Shop (there was a record store in the back, staffed that morning by another friend from school, Huw, a mod who was clad in his usual Parka). I asked him to put on the first Joy Division record that I had caught sight of, which, try and stifle the laughter here folks, happened to be odds & sods compilation Still. The thrumming, glacial intro to “Exercise One” slowly unfurled and then, at 1.43 precisely, Curtis’ doomy, dislocated voice kicked in and my life would never be quite the same again. And I hadn’t even heard a track from Unknown Pleasures or Closer, let alone the classic singles “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, “Transmission” or “Atmosphere”.

New Order tried and failed to recapture that sound with their debut album Movement, but they were saved by the unlikeliest of transitions - the doom merchants became dance doyens, a shift signaled by the singles “Everything’s Gone Green” and “Temptation”.The members of New Order underwent personality transplants overnight and cemented their place in the pop pantheon.

Selected track - “Age of Consent”. The video below is the notorious live BBC concert, where everything in the lead-up to the gig has gone wrong. Bernard, visibly bursting at the seams with anger, isn’t best pleased, to begin with, and things are about to get worse!. I must have watched that twenty-minute broadcast a million times!

6. The Icicle Works - The Icicle Works

It’s been many a long year since I played this album and off the top of my head I can only name a couple of the tracks - “Birds Fly (Whisper To A Scream)” and the top twenty hit “Love Is A Wonderful Colour”. I was, though, a hardcore fan at the time, buying every album and a fair few of the Ian McNabb solo efforts that followed, including his majestic Head Like A Rock (1994), featuring members of Crazy Horse. Around the time of that album, he played a gig in Newport in front of a very paltry crowd. He took to the stage, looked around him and murmured ‘so this is Newport’. He never uttered another word during the set and looked well fed-up with life. He did, though, play the storming “Fire Inside My Soul”, which more than made up for his couldn’t care less attitude.

Selected track -  “Love Is A Wonderful Colour”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFUGLNz1YfY

7. Punch the Clock - Elvis Costello and the Attractions

Another album that needs a good dusting down! Aside from King of America (1986), I usually confine myself to the Greatest Hits compilations when I’m in the mood for a slice of EC these days. Funnily enough, this month’s issue of Uncut has a feature on the album's producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley in which they recall that ‘the premise of the record was Elvis needs a hit, and a hit in America. Keep that in mind”. Langer recalls Costello freaking out on the last night of recording, claiming the album sounded crap. There are great tracks here - “Shipbuilding”, “Everyday I Write the Book” and “Pills and Soap” but there won’t be too many Costello aficionados claiming it as his best work.

Selected track -  “Let Them All Talk”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjr9zAknhbI

8. Soul Mining - The The

Although we weren’t to know it at the time it was Matt Johnson’s follow-up to this fine record, 1986′s crusading, state of the nation classic Infected, that would truly stand the test of time. Soulmining shouldn’t be neglected, however, with fine tunes like “This is the Day” and “Uncertain Smile” to its credit.

Selected track - “This is the Day”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAue9jqLB74

9. Perverted by Language - The Fall

Probably The Fall record I played the most down the years (along with Live at the Witch Trials), mainly because I was obsessed with “Eat Y’ Self Fitter”. Any track beginning 

I’m in the furniture trade / Got a new job today / But stick the cretin / On the number-three lathe’, deserves our absolute devotion.

As with most Mark E. Smith compositions, I haven’t got a scooby’s as to what the substance of the song is actually about, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? when you can belt out  ‘Where’s the cursor? Where’s the eraser? until you’re fit to drop.

Selected track - “ Eat Y’Self Fitter” of course!

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFCOt6wbm80

10. Inarticulate Speech of the Heart - Van Morrison

The Belfast Cowboy’s streak of legendary albums, from 1968′s Astral Weeks through to 1974′s Veedon Fleece (discounting workmanlike efforts such as His Band and Street Choir in 1970 and 1973′s Hard Nose the Highway), was well and truly over and his mid-eighties slump entirely predictable by the time of this average undertaking. Still, anything that bears Morrison’s stamp upon it is bound to include a magical track here or there. In this case, it was the momentously odd “Rave On, John Donne” and the Morrison masterclass that is “The Street Only Knew Your Name”.

Selected track - “The Street Only Knew Your Name”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa8sdU6bxlA

Clearly, there are some glaring omissions here, but I was a 21-year-old slip of a lad at the time, and all in all, it’s a pretty fair list, I think. The top 4 are all still to be found in my top 30 albums list and I wouldn’t disown any of the others 35 years on. Those were great gig-going years - many thanks to Duncan, Huw and Stephen who accompanied me to some of the concerts mentioned above, and plenty of others besides in my indie heyday. I guess I still owe you petrol money, guys?

[myfinancialguideme-blog]

How Our Corrupt Campaign Finance System Enabled Trump -- And Kneecapped His Rivals

New Post has been published on https://financeguideto.com/must-see/how-our-corrupt-campaign-finance-system-enabled-trump-and-kneecapped-his-rivals/

How Our Corrupt Campaign Finance System Enabled Trump -- And Kneecapped His Rivals

As 2015 comes to a close, many people are still wondering how reality television mogul and rejected Guy Fieri appetizer Donald Trump continues to lead the race for the Republican presidential nomination — and why a nominally able coterie of experienced establishment politicians has proven unable to break his stride. 

So what’s holding the rest of the field back? Analysts have focused on Trump’s rhetoric — the way he loudly, freely enunciates an impolite version of the conservative id — and how well it’s resonating.

But there’s another way in which Trump has broken with the rest of the field: He’s not relying on the Citizens United-spawned campaign finance regime, with its welter of nonprofits and super PACs. In October, he told the nine super PACs that appeared to be supporting him to “stop using his name, likeness, and slogans and to return any donations they have already received,” The Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson reported at the time.

Rather than losing out as a result of this approach, Trump is thriving while his rivals stumble around inside the dark-money Tomorrowland their party continues to build. Even if the business mogul is no normal person’s idea of a standard-bearer for a better, more citizen-focused politics, his opponents have more than ably made the case that this massive injection of money into the political system has — at least at the presidential heights — “weirded” it out of proportion.

From elaborate and clunky apparatuses for skirting Federal Election Commission laws to a failure to recognize the need for retail politics, Trump’s rivals make it seem like it was smarter to simply reject the Citizens United era’s promise of unlimited campaign funds. Instead of innovation, there is confusion. Instead of freedom, there seems to be a dead weight around the necks of campaigns that might otherwise have been competent.

iCARLY: Fiorina’s Outsourced Army Is Doing Everything But Win

John Bazemore/AP

Over at Mother Jones, Timothy Murphy heralds this election cycle as the “Age of the Uncampaign,” and drops you deep within its plastic dystopia by introducing you to the campaign ex machina of Carly Fiorina, an organization known as Conservative, Authentic, Responsive Leadership for You and for America, which — when its final f’s and a’s are sanded off — goes by the slick new-age moniker “CARLY.”  

CARLY is supposed to be some sort of genius invention, a kind of insider outsourcing of campaign drudgery in which logistics are not coordinated by the campaign itself, but by a super PAC. What makes this arrangement so interesting is that according to the law, campaigns and super PACs are not permitted to coordinate. As you know, these laws are never enforced. The campaign regulatory regime is best described as the FEC asking only that every campaign honor an unspoken request: “Please don’t give us an obvious reason to sanction you and we promise to continue looking in the other direction.”

So, to that end, the campaign of Carly Fiorina and her brutal army of logistics-bots have an arrangement that ensures that everything gets sorted out. Per Murphy:

Federal law also prohibits super-PACs from coordinating with political campaigns. The way CARLY and Carly navigate this is a bit more complicated. Traditionally, campaigns pick and choose which towns they want to visit, select a venue, and book an event. Fiorina doesn’t usually do that. Instead, she accepts invitations from hosts, usually supportive chamber of commerce types, who’d like to hear her speak. She then posts the event on a Google calendar that’s publicly accessible to anyone who knows where to look. CARLY sees an event has been posted and coordinates with the host about running it. So Carly coordinates with the host, and the host coordinates with CARLY, but CARLY does not coordinate with Carly. Got it?

Fiorina’s super PAC arrived on the scene in February, and its evolution to a clever, troll-the-good-government-types acronym may be the only memorable thing her campaign has done, aside from reliably demonstrate a seething contempt for Hillary Clinton and a strange affection for rebuilding the 6th Fleet. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO, having clawed out from the depths of the one-percenters that still scuttle in front of the cameras for the “undercard” debates, has not managed to sustain any of the brief spikes of momentum into which she’s lucked, and nothing her campaign does seems to help. After hitting a peak of 8 percent in the polls (according to the HuffPost Pollster poll average), she’s fallen back to 2.9 percent, good for seventh place, some 33 points behind Trump. 

By all accounts, Fiorina’s super PAC is great at making sure campaign events happen without the campaign itself having to lift a finger. But while it’s a little nifty that CARLY has allowed Carly to outsource campaign jobs to Americans, it’s enough to make you wonder whether this new age of super-complicated dance moves between candidates and their super PAC logisticians really is superior to the bygone era of simply making decisions — which seems to be Trump’s way of doing business.

Innovating Yourself To Death With Jeb! Bush

Mary Schwalm/AP

Carly (or if you prefer, CARLY) isn’t the only electoral venture struggling to make the new mechanisms of campaign finance work effectively. Back in April, The Associated Press proclaimed that the “traditional campaign” was about to get a “makeover,” thanks to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. See, ol’ Jeb, he immediately saw the promise of a future of unlimited and unaccountable money, and he knew that the certain path to victory was to “disrupt” the old way of running a campaign, and be the first to innovate his way to the future. Only Jeb (d.b.a. “Jeb!”) could pull off the neat trick of blending his family’s traditional, high-powered donor base and political connections — critical assets in the “invisible primary” period — with the unending font of political venture capital promised by the age of Citizens United. 

What Jeb understood was that his super PAC could swallow up money in big heaping gulps, whereas his campaign, by law, was only allowed to digest his donors’ largesse in bite-sized morsels. So Jeb took what looked like a perfectly logical leap. Instead of keeping his campaign manager, Mike Murphy, lurking around campaign headquarters, he sent him off to run the Right To Rise PAC, giving Murphy the authority to use that organization to fulfill all the duties of the traditional campaign. Under ordinary circumstances, one might wonder if divorcing a campaign’s limbs from its brain in this way was a wise idea, but Jeb’s move was, at the time, treated as if he had invented some bold political life hack. Jeb was, after all, “the smart one.”

Per The Associated Press:

The concept, in development for months as the former Florida governor has raised tens of millions of dollars for his Right to Rise super PAC, would endow that organization not just with advertising on Bush’s behalf, but with many of the duties typically conducted by a campaign.

Should Bush move ahead as his team intends, it is possible that for the first time a super PAC created to support a single candidate would spend more than the candidate’s campaign itself — at least through the primaries. Some of Bush’s donors believe that to be more than likely.

Eight months later, The Smart One has successfully innovated himself to 5.6 percent in the most recent HuffPost Pollster poll average, and you have to wonder if he even remembers why he thought reinventing the presidential campaign was a good idea in the first place.

Scott Walker 2016: Way Too Much And Yet Not Nearly Enough

Morry Gash/AP

Scott Walker, of course, can only envy Jeb’s position at this point. If Bush has been naive about his ability to master this new way of doing campaign finance, Walker’s the candidate who got entirely mastered by it. The Wisconsin governor’s ruination was well underway by the time he hit a late-summer patch of messaging struggles, in which he was constantly following big policy declarations with even bigger policy walk-backs, some directly attributable to donor criticism.

But long before this period of near-daily humiliations, Walker was demonstrating that he lacked any real idea of how to run a campaign in this new era. He was great at getting donors to fund his “Unintimidated” super PAC. But even as Walker watched the money roll into the PAC, the funds he needed to pay campaign expenses were proving harder to come by.

Writing for The Atlantic, Yoni Applebaum highlighted the struggles of Walker (and Rick Perry) as a cautionary tale for the super PAC era. Walker, having lost sight of the fact that his campaign needed a healthy supply of “hard money” donations to keep the fires burning at his campaign office, was never able to exploit the generosity of his super PAC donors:

But it turns out that there are some things that Super PACs can’t do. Hard money can pay for the full gamut of campaign expenses, from hiring staff to purchasing printer toner to putting ads up on television. Super PACs can pay for television ads, but they can’t pay for campaign staff.

Perry and Walker were hoping to hang on for long enough to allow nominally independent Super PACs to flood the airwaves with supportive ads. But long before the first caucus, their hard dollars dried up, leaving them unable to make payroll.

So, Walker’s lowest moment as a presidential candidate was a strange thing to witness. As Mother Jones’ Russ Choma characterized it, the Wisconsin governor was caught between the demands of the donors who’d bought in with the biggest dollars, and the realities of a campaign that was too broke to act in any meaningful way to either meet those donors’ demands or get traction in the polls on its own merits. Walker’s subsequent exit from the race was the first indication that having a big pile of money around was maybe not all it was cracked up to be. (At least for an aspiring presidential candidate — the governor’s donors are going to extract a return on their investment even if Walker never makes it to the White House.)

Of course, in a way, a gigantic pile of money sings a siren song of its own utility, suggesting that the cash is an end in itself. And the lesson we’re learning at the dawn of this age of unlimited political money isn’t so much about how our politics gets destroyed as about how that money might exert a destructive pull on our politicians themselves, luring them onto dangerous shoals. The ships get sunk, but everyone gets paid.

What you see from the Bush, Fiorina and Walker campaigns is that money — specifically, the vagaries of campaign finance law that allow one to make a higher and deeper stack of ducats in some place other than a “campaign” — has warped their thinking. They’ve become convinced that these oddball arrangements, in which the bulk of the activities that constitute the overall task of “running for president” are placed in the hands of another organization, are somehow more “efficient.”

But what’s the evidence that this is true? And what are these campaigns doing to improve their standing? Because it looks a lot like their answer to the first question is “people have given us money” and the answer to the second is “we’ll get more people to give us money.”

If You Want Marco Rubio To Show Up, Bring Cash

Mary Schwalm/AP

If this new era of campaign finance led candidates like Bush, Fiorina and Walker to make ill-advised campaign makeovers, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s attempt to leverage the potential of limitless boodle has left his campaign looking like botched plastic surgery. 

Over at Gawker, Alex Pareene has offered a compellingly dim view of Rubio and his strange campaign, pointing out that what Rubio calls his “presidential campaign” doesn’t look at all like a traditional campaign — and people are starting to voice some real concerns about it. 

As Rubio demonstrated a modicum of staying power during this fall’s debate season, the Florida senator was greeted by the chattering classes as a candidate on the rise — the “establishment fave” who was about to take over the primary season any minute now, just you wait. He was serious, he was competent and he was going about the business of running for president in the right and traditional way.

But lately, people have started to peek beneath the surface, and they’re finding a candidate who’s not actually invested in traditional retail politics and early-state voter outreach. Much like his former mentor Bush, Rubio has decided to try his hand at innovating. And how’s that working out? Well, he may have taken it too far. Just ask National Review’s Tim Alberta and Eliana Johnson, whose Dec. 9 dispatch from Des Moines began, “Everyone here is mad at Marco Rubio.”

Yikes! Why?

On the campaign trail, Rubio is calling for a “new American century.” He’s also running a different type of campaign, one that eschews spending on policy staffers, field operations and other traditional aspects of a winning bid in favor of television advertising and digital outreach.

Rubio’s vision of “running for President” may be the GOP field’s most radical reinvention of the wheel — all digital politics, virtually no personal politics. It’s almost as if Rubio believes his presidential prospects rely so much on being “young” and “fresh” and “hip” that he can’t countenance a concept so antiquated as glad-handing his way across Iowa and New Hampshire. 

To Rubio, the only outreach worth doing is donor outreach. So while Trump leads the pack on a parade all over the early-state map, holding rallies, meeting voters and making nice with influential activists in the field, Rubio just sort of wanders around, looking for new rich pals to give him money. And when he meets someone with deep pockets, they get a lot more than the “digital presence” that the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire are getting from him. If you’ve ever talked with Rubio about what you can do for his campaign coffers, odds are that he’s proved himself to be a very conscientious and attentive darling.

As Pareene points out, however, Rubio’s practiced disdain for one-on-one contact with early-state voters is the exact wrong approach:

The superiority of field operations over “digital outreach” isn’t one of those hoary old campaign cliches beloved by out-of-touch old hacks: There is rigorous evidence supporting the (common-sense) idea that direct personal contact with potential voters is the single most consistently effective way to win campaigns. It’s commonplace (in the GOP, at least) to compare Marco Rubio, the young and charismatic one-term senator, with Barack Obama circa 2008, but Barack Obama’s revolutionary, Clinton-beating 2008 primary campaign was built around actual boots-on-the-ground organizing.

Why, if Rubio worked half has hard to win over the actual voters in the early primary states, he might be poised to finish in second place in one of them. But he’s not figured out that this is the way the game is played. “The problem [with Rubio’s campaign] is that it isn’t one,” writes Pareene. There’s that idea of an “Uncampaign” again.

The Reverse-Engineered, Super PAC-Enabled Long Con Of Ben Carson

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Which is maybe why the guy making out like a bandit in this new campaign finance regime is Ben Carson. He and his close affiliates have mastered and maximized the potential of this hell-with-the-lid-off era of money in politics. Their genius move was to construct a reverse-engineered “presidential campaign” that could exploit the space that election law and the media create for a presidential candidate —  for the purpose of minting money off of Carson’s name.

Carson barely pretends to be a candidate. When his book tour took him to places far from the early primary battlegrounds, Carson happily complied without evidence of concern. And as his electoral fortunes have ebbed and flowed, there’s no sign of worry or pressure, either. This is all in keeping with Carson’s campaign, which also barely pretends to be one. As MoJo’s Murphy notes:

Carson raised more money than any other Republican candidate in the summer of 2015, almost all of it through paid direct-mail programs. Because only a small fraction of direct-mail recipients donate, it costs a lot of money to make a lot of money—in Carson’s case, he paid $11 million to raise $20 million during the third quarter of 2015. That leaves him with plenty of cash, but it also means that when you donate to Carson, you’re mostly donating to his consultants.

The old saying is that every movement eventually becomes a racket. The innovation of Carson’s backers was simply to skip to the end.

The Quietly Retro Campaign Of Ted Cruz

Mark Zaleski/AP

But there is one candidate who’s made some headway cutting into Trump’s advantage, and that’s the guy who’s happily let Trump jump out and seize it — Ted Cruz. Of course, Cruz is up on the Citizens United game as well. He’s courting big donors, and he’s backed by super PACs. So how is he avoiding the rest of the field’s fate?

Well, in the first place, Cruz does retail politics. The Texas senator is not averse to the work of meeting early-state voters or influential activists, like Rubio, and he’s not trying to build a better mousetrap, like Bush. Cruz put in the time in Iowa, and with the backing of Hawkeye State evangelical firebrand Bob Vander Plaats, he earned his reward. The knock-on effect of Cruz’s workmanlike effort is that support for his candidacy is rippling ever outward.

And when it comes to fundraising, there’s just something more balanced about Cruz’s approach. As The Washington Post’s Katie Zezima and Matea Gold reported in October, Cruz “has hit on a fundraising formula that no other candidate has been able to match: raising millions from a robust base of grass-roots supporters while building a substantial network of rich backers.”

As for his super PACs? The advantage Cruz has there is that despite the fact that the groups had raised “eye-popping” amounts of money as of April, they’ve not been terribly effective: In early November, CNN reported that most of the plans of Cruz’s affiliated super PACs had either foundered or been put on hold.

At the time, this looked to be a “Cruz in disarray” story. But since then, if anything, his under-reliance on others to do his campaigning for him have allowed Cruz the chance to stride confidently into January. Cruz, running one of the only campaigns that genuinely resembles a traditional Republican electoral venture, is on track to potentially dislodge Trump in Iowa. It makes you wonder whether, if Jeb had been a little less thought-leadery in his approach to getting elected, he wouldn’t be faring better right now himself.

Obviously, it’s too early to tell if Cruz’s approach to beating Trump will be successful. But it’s not too soon to consider the possibility that he’s making the race tighter through a combination of fealty to old-school retail politics, a commitment to fundraising balance and, maybe, a little bit of luck, in that his super PAC holdings didn’t grow so big, or become so critical, that they became stumbling blocks.

Will Donald Trump Outlast The GOP’s Big-Dollar Donors?

ASSOCIATED PRESS

If only for the moment, Trump is succeeding without the piles of dark money, without a network of affiliated super PACs brimming with ad-buy strategists working early-state angles, and without logistics drones coordinating the day-to-day of his campaign. With no need to sell a limited number of billionaires on a zazzy new campaign strategy, he’s left Rubio to waste his time trying to dazzle the donor class. Instead, Trump is mounting a flesh-and-blood campaign in all the spaces Rubio’s declined to personally appear.

Of course, it’s an open question as to whether Trump really wants it that way — some reports have placed the candidate well within suck-up distance of major GOP donors like Sheldon Adelson, whose money Trump now assures us he abjures. And Trump has also claimed some unique privileges that may have rendered a huge campaign war chest unnecessary: His ability to convince cable news producers to just let him phone in to the anchor’s desk remains a benefit that’s not trickled down to the rest of the field. For that matter, there’s no other campaign whose rallies are treated as must-broadcast breaking news events by the cable outlets.

Nevertheless, one has to give Trump a little credit for keeping himself so removed from his rivals’ super PAC pitfalls. When he wants to stage a rally, there’s no need to coordinate it through the weird and complicated system by which Carly Fiorina activates her CARLY-bots. Unlike Cruz, he’s not leaving off-putting stock footage laying around for the ad-makers with whom he “can’t coordinate.” And while Trump may say a great many grotesque things, he’s not beholden to an army of donors who claim the right to final edit of the campaign message, as Walker was.

Trump’s got no strings attached to his person, no albatrosses around his neck. But for everyone else in the field, it looks like these burdens are all that this new era of unlimited campaign dollars actually has to offer.

Speaking of! Back in November, Bill Scher, sizing up a beleaguered and bitter Jeb! Bush campaign, took to Politico with some advice for the former Florida governor. “Jeb can still win,” Scher wrote, “but he needs to follow the comeback model of a Democrat.”

That Democrat? John Kerry, who at this point in the 2004 presidential election was every bit as wayward as Jeb is now. And Kerry’s example did offer Bush some hope. As Scher described, Bush — like Kerry — could win the “vetting” war with his untested opponents. He could stay above the fray and let the campaigns around him lose their heads in an acid rain of opposition research. He could continue to present himself as the reasonable and sensible man in a room of loons, trusting the voters to return to a reasonable and sensible perch.

But there was one really important thing Kerry did to right his ship that Scher forgot about — a surprising omission considering that it occurred almost exactly twelve years to the day before Scher’s piece was published. Namely, Kerry fired Jim Jordan, the man running his campaign, and replaced him with Mary Beth Cahill.

And that’s literally the one thing Jeb Bush cannot do: fire Mike Murphy. How could he? You can’t replace the guy running your campaign if your campaign — your reinvention of the traditional campaign — is run out of a super PAC, with which you are “not allowed to coordinate.”

When our corrupt campaign finance system prevents Jeb Bush from being able to fire the loser who’s running his presidential campaign into the ground … man, you can’t blame Donald Trump for having a laugh at that.

~~~~~

Jason Linkins edits “Eat The Press” for The Huffington Post and co-hosts the HuffPost politics podcast, “So, That Happened.” Subscribe here. Listen to the latest episode below.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

[financingideas-blog]

How Our Corrupt Campaign Finance System Enabled Trump -- And Kneecapped His Rivals

New Post has been published on https://financeqia.com/must-see/how-our-corrupt-campaign-finance-system-enabled-trump-and-kneecapped-his-rivals/

How Our Corrupt Campaign Finance System Enabled Trump -- And Kneecapped His Rivals

As 2015 comes to a close, many people are still wondering how reality television mogul and rejected Guy Fieri appetizer Donald Trump continues to lead the race for the Republican presidential nomination — and why a nominally able coterie of experienced establishment politicians has proven unable to break his stride. 

So what’s holding the rest of the field back? Analysts have focused on Trump’s rhetoric — the way he loudly, freely enunciates an impolite version of the conservative id — and how well it’s resonating.

But there’s another way in which Trump has broken with the rest of the field: He’s not relying on the Citizens United-spawned campaign finance regime, with its welter of nonprofits and super PACs. In October, he told the nine super PACs that appeared to be supporting him to “stop using his name, likeness, and slogans and to return any donations they have already received,” The Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson reported at the time.

Rather than losing out as a result of this approach, Trump is thriving while his rivals stumble around inside the dark-money Tomorrowland their party continues to build. Even if the business mogul is no normal person’s idea of a standard-bearer for a better, more citizen-focused politics, his opponents have more than ably made the case that this massive injection of money into the political system has — at least at the presidential heights — “weirded” it out of proportion.

From elaborate and clunky apparatuses for skirting Federal Election Commission laws to a failure to recognize the need for retail politics, Trump’s rivals make it seem like it was smarter to simply reject the Citizens United era’s promise of unlimited campaign funds. Instead of innovation, there is confusion. Instead of freedom, there seems to be a dead weight around the necks of campaigns that might otherwise have been competent.

iCARLY: Fiorina’s Outsourced Army Is Doing Everything But Win

John Bazemore/AP

Over at Mother Jones, Timothy Murphy heralds this election cycle as the “Age of the Uncampaign,” and drops you deep within its plastic dystopia by introducing you to the campaign ex machina of Carly Fiorina, an organization known as Conservative, Authentic, Responsive Leadership for You and for America, which — when its final f’s and a’s are sanded off — goes by the slick new-age moniker “CARLY.”  

CARLY is supposed to be some sort of genius invention, a kind of insider outsourcing of campaign drudgery in which logistics are not coordinated by the campaign itself, but by a super PAC. What makes this arrangement so interesting is that according to the law, campaigns and super PACs are not permitted to coordinate. As you know, these laws are never enforced. The campaign regulatory regime is best described as the FEC asking only that every campaign honor an unspoken request: “Please don’t give us an obvious reason to sanction you and we promise to continue looking in the other direction.”

So, to that end, the campaign of Carly Fiorina and her brutal army of logistics-bots have an arrangement that ensures that everything gets sorted out. Per Murphy:

Federal law also prohibits super-PACs from coordinating with political campaigns. The way CARLY and Carly navigate this is a bit more complicated. Traditionally, campaigns pick and choose which towns they want to visit, select a venue, and book an event. Fiorina doesn’t usually do that. Instead, she accepts invitations from hosts, usually supportive chamber of commerce types, who’d like to hear her speak. She then posts the event on a Google calendar that’s publicly accessible to anyone who knows where to look. CARLY sees an event has been posted and coordinates with the host about running it. So Carly coordinates with the host, and the host coordinates with CARLY, but CARLY does not coordinate with Carly. Got it?

Fiorina’s super PAC arrived on the scene in February, and its evolution to a clever, troll-the-good-government-types acronym may be the only memorable thing her campaign has done, aside from reliably demonstrate a seething contempt for Hillary Clinton and a strange affection for rebuilding the 6th Fleet. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO, having clawed out from the depths of the one-percenters that still scuttle in front of the cameras for the “undercard” debates, has not managed to sustain any of the brief spikes of momentum into which she’s lucked, and nothing her campaign does seems to help. After hitting a peak of 8 percent in the polls (according to the HuffPost Pollster poll average), she’s fallen back to 2.9 percent, good for seventh place, some 33 points behind Trump. 

By all accounts, Fiorina’s super PAC is great at making sure campaign events happen without the campaign itself having to lift a finger. But while it’s a little nifty that CARLY has allowed Carly to outsource campaign jobs to Americans, it’s enough to make you wonder whether this new age of super-complicated dance moves between candidates and their super PAC logisticians really is superior to the bygone era of simply making decisions — which seems to be Trump’s way of doing business.

Innovating Yourself To Death With Jeb! Bush

Mary Schwalm/AP

Carly (or if you prefer, CARLY) isn’t the only electoral venture struggling to make the new mechanisms of campaign finance work effectively. Back in April, The Associated Press proclaimed that the “traditional campaign” was about to get a “makeover,” thanks to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. See, ol’ Jeb, he immediately saw the promise of a future of unlimited and unaccountable money, and he knew that the certain path to victory was to “disrupt” the old way of running a campaign, and be the first to innovate his way to the future. Only Jeb (d.b.a. “Jeb!”) could pull off the neat trick of blending his family’s traditional, high-powered donor base and political connections — critical assets in the “invisible primary” period — with the unending font of political venture capital promised by the age of Citizens United. 

What Jeb understood was that his super PAC could swallow up money in big heaping gulps, whereas his campaign, by law, was only allowed to digest his donors’ largesse in bite-sized morsels. So Jeb took what looked like a perfectly logical leap. Instead of keeping his campaign manager, Mike Murphy, lurking around campaign headquarters, he sent him off to run the Right To Rise PAC, giving Murphy the authority to use that organization to fulfill all the duties of the traditional campaign. Under ordinary circumstances, one might wonder if divorcing a campaign’s limbs from its brain in this way was a wise idea, but Jeb’s move was, at the time, treated as if he had invented some bold political life hack. Jeb was, after all, “the smart one.”

Per The Associated Press:

The concept, in development for months as the former Florida governor has raised tens of millions of dollars for his Right to Rise super PAC, would endow that organization not just with advertising on Bush’s behalf, but with many of the duties typically conducted by a campaign.

Should Bush move ahead as his team intends, it is possible that for the first time a super PAC created to support a single candidate would spend more than the candidate’s campaign itself — at least through the primaries. Some of Bush’s donors believe that to be more than likely.

Eight months later, The Smart One has successfully innovated himself to 5.6 percent in the most recent HuffPost Pollster poll average, and you have to wonder if he even remembers why he thought reinventing the presidential campaign was a good idea in the first place.

Scott Walker 2016: Way Too Much And Yet Not Nearly Enough

Morry Gash/AP

Scott Walker, of course, can only envy Jeb’s position at this point. If Bush has been naive about his ability to master this new way of doing campaign finance, Walker’s the candidate who got entirely mastered by it. The Wisconsin governor’s ruination was well underway by the time he hit a late-summer patch of messaging struggles, in which he was constantly following big policy declarations with even bigger policy walk-backs, some directly attributable to donor criticism.

But long before this period of near-daily humiliations, Walker was demonstrating that he lacked any real idea of how to run a campaign in this new era. He was great at getting donors to fund his “Unintimidated” super PAC. But even as Walker watched the money roll into the PAC, the funds he needed to pay campaign expenses were proving harder to come by.

Writing for The Atlantic, Yoni Applebaum highlighted the struggles of Walker (and Rick Perry) as a cautionary tale for the super PAC era. Walker, having lost sight of the fact that his campaign needed a healthy supply of “hard money” donations to keep the fires burning at his campaign office, was never able to exploit the generosity of his super PAC donors:

But it turns out that there are some things that Super PACs can’t do. Hard money can pay for the full gamut of campaign expenses, from hiring staff to purchasing printer toner to putting ads up on television. Super PACs can pay for television ads, but they can’t pay for campaign staff.

Perry and Walker were hoping to hang on for long enough to allow nominally independent Super PACs to flood the airwaves with supportive ads. But long before the first caucus, their hard dollars dried up, leaving them unable to make payroll.

So, Walker’s lowest moment as a presidential candidate was a strange thing to witness. As Mother Jones’ Russ Choma characterized it, the Wisconsin governor was caught between the demands of the donors who’d bought in with the biggest dollars, and the realities of a campaign that was too broke to act in any meaningful way to either meet those donors’ demands or get traction in the polls on its own merits. Walker’s subsequent exit from the race was the first indication that having a big pile of money around was maybe not all it was cracked up to be. (At least for an aspiring presidential candidate — the governor’s donors are going to extract a return on their investment even if Walker never makes it to the White House.)

Of course, in a way, a gigantic pile of money sings a siren song of its own utility, suggesting that the cash is an end in itself. And the lesson we’re learning at the dawn of this age of unlimited political money isn’t so much about how our politics gets destroyed as about how that money might exert a destructive pull on our politicians themselves, luring them onto dangerous shoals. The ships get sunk, but everyone gets paid.

What you see from the Bush, Fiorina and Walker campaigns is that money — specifically, the vagaries of campaign finance law that allow one to make a higher and deeper stack of ducats in some place other than a “campaign” — has warped their thinking. They’ve become convinced that these oddball arrangements, in which the bulk of the activities that constitute the overall task of “running for president” are placed in the hands of another organization, are somehow more “efficient.”

But what’s the evidence that this is true? And what are these campaigns doing to improve their standing? Because it looks a lot like their answer to the first question is “people have given us money” and the answer to the second is “we’ll get more people to give us money.”

If You Want Marco Rubio To Show Up, Bring Cash

Mary Schwalm/AP

If this new era of campaign finance led candidates like Bush, Fiorina and Walker to make ill-advised campaign makeovers, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s attempt to leverage the potential of limitless boodle has left his campaign looking like botched plastic surgery. 

Over at Gawker, Alex Pareene has offered a compellingly dim view of Rubio and his strange campaign, pointing out that what Rubio calls his “presidential campaign” doesn’t look at all like a traditional campaign — and people are starting to voice some real concerns about it. 

As Rubio demonstrated a modicum of staying power during this fall’s debate season, the Florida senator was greeted by the chattering classes as a candidate on the rise — the “establishment fave” who was about to take over the primary season any minute now, just you wait. He was serious, he was competent and he was going about the business of running for president in the right and traditional way.

But lately, people have started to peek beneath the surface, and they’re finding a candidate who’s not actually invested in traditional retail politics and early-state voter outreach. Much like his former mentor Bush, Rubio has decided to try his hand at innovating. And how’s that working out? Well, he may have taken it too far. Just ask National Review’s Tim Alberta and Eliana Johnson, whose Dec. 9 dispatch from Des Moines began, “Everyone here is mad at Marco Rubio.”

Yikes! Why?

On the campaign trail, Rubio is calling for a “new American century.” He’s also running a different type of campaign, one that eschews spending on policy staffers, field operations and other traditional aspects of a winning bid in favor of television advertising and digital outreach.

Rubio’s vision of “running for President” may be the GOP field’s most radical reinvention of the wheel — all digital politics, virtually no personal politics. It’s almost as if Rubio believes his presidential prospects rely so much on being “young” and “fresh” and “hip” that he can’t countenance a concept so antiquated as glad-handing his way across Iowa and New Hampshire. 

To Rubio, the only outreach worth doing is donor outreach. So while Trump leads the pack on a parade all over the early-state map, holding rallies, meeting voters and making nice with influential activists in the field, Rubio just sort of wanders around, looking for new rich pals to give him money. And when he meets someone with deep pockets, they get a lot more than the “digital presence” that the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire are getting from him. If you’ve ever talked with Rubio about what you can do for his campaign coffers, odds are that he’s proved himself to be a very conscientious and attentive darling.

As Pareene points out, however, Rubio’s practiced disdain for one-on-one contact with early-state voters is the exact wrong approach:

The superiority of field operations over “digital outreach” isn’t one of those hoary old campaign cliches beloved by out-of-touch old hacks: There is rigorous evidence supporting the (common-sense) idea that direct personal contact with potential voters is the single most consistently effective way to win campaigns. It’s commonplace (in the GOP, at least) to compare Marco Rubio, the young and charismatic one-term senator, with Barack Obama circa 2008, but Barack Obama’s revolutionary, Clinton-beating 2008 primary campaign was built around actual boots-on-the-ground organizing.

Why, if Rubio worked half has hard to win over the actual voters in the early primary states, he might be poised to finish in second place in one of them. But he’s not figured out that this is the way the game is played. “The problem [with Rubio’s campaign] is that it isn’t one,” writes Pareene. There’s that idea of an “Uncampaign” again.

The Reverse-Engineered, Super PAC-Enabled Long Con Of Ben Carson

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Which is maybe why the guy making out like a bandit in this new campaign finance regime is Ben Carson. He and his close affiliates have mastered and maximized the potential of this hell-with-the-lid-off era of money in politics. Their genius move was to construct a reverse-engineered “presidential campaign” that could exploit the space that election law and the media create for a presidential candidate —  for the purpose of minting money off of Carson’s name.

Carson barely pretends to be a candidate. When his book tour took him to places far from the early primary battlegrounds, Carson happily complied without evidence of concern. And as his electoral fortunes have ebbed and flowed, there’s no sign of worry or pressure, either. This is all in keeping with Carson’s campaign, which also barely pretends to be one. As MoJo’s Murphy notes:

Carson raised more money than any other Republican candidate in the summer of 2015, almost all of it through paid direct-mail programs. Because only a small fraction of direct-mail recipients donate, it costs a lot of money to make a lot of money—in Carson’s case, he paid $11 million to raise $20 million during the third quarter of 2015. That leaves him with plenty of cash, but it also means that when you donate to Carson, you’re mostly donating to his consultants.

The old saying is that every movement eventually becomes a racket. The innovation of Carson’s backers was simply to skip to the end.

The Quietly Retro Campaign Of Ted Cruz

Mark Zaleski/AP

But there is one candidate who’s made some headway cutting into Trump’s advantage, and that’s the guy who’s happily let Trump jump out and seize it — Ted Cruz. Of course, Cruz is up on the Citizens United game as well. He’s courting big donors, and he’s backed by super PACs. So how is he avoiding the rest of the field’s fate?

Well, in the first place, Cruz does retail politics. The Texas senator is not averse to the work of meeting early-state voters or influential activists, like Rubio, and he’s not trying to build a better mousetrap, like Bush. Cruz put in the time in Iowa, and with the backing of Hawkeye State evangelical firebrand Bob Vander Plaats, he earned his reward. The knock-on effect of Cruz’s workmanlike effort is that support for his candidacy is rippling ever outward.

And when it comes to fundraising, there’s just something more balanced about Cruz’s approach. As The Washington Post’s Katie Zezima and Matea Gold reported in October, Cruz “has hit on a fundraising formula that no other candidate has been able to match: raising millions from a robust base of grass-roots supporters while building a substantial network of rich backers.”

As for his super PACs? The advantage Cruz has there is that despite the fact that the groups had raised “eye-popping” amounts of money as of April, they’ve not been terribly effective: In early November, CNN reported that most of the plans of Cruz’s affiliated super PACs had either foundered or been put on hold.

At the time, this looked to be a “Cruz in disarray” story. But since then, if anything, his under-reliance on others to do his campaigning for him have allowed Cruz the chance to stride confidently into January. Cruz, running one of the only campaigns that genuinely resembles a traditional Republican electoral venture, is on track to potentially dislodge Trump in Iowa. It makes you wonder whether, if Jeb had been a little less thought-leadery in his approach to getting elected, he wouldn’t be faring better right now himself.

Obviously, it’s too early to tell if Cruz’s approach to beating Trump will be successful. But it’s not too soon to consider the possibility that he’s making the race tighter through a combination of fealty to old-school retail politics, a commitment to fundraising balance and, maybe, a little bit of luck, in that his super PAC holdings didn’t grow so big, or become so critical, that they became stumbling blocks.

Will Donald Trump Outlast The GOP’s Big-Dollar Donors?

ASSOCIATED PRESS

If only for the moment, Trump is succeeding without the piles of dark money, without a network of affiliated super PACs brimming with ad-buy strategists working early-state angles, and without logistics drones coordinating the day-to-day of his campaign. With no need to sell a limited number of billionaires on a zazzy new campaign strategy, he’s left Rubio to waste his time trying to dazzle the donor class. Instead, Trump is mounting a flesh-and-blood campaign in all the spaces Rubio’s declined to personally appear.

Of course, it’s an open question as to whether Trump really wants it that way — some reports have placed the candidate well within suck-up distance of major GOP donors like Sheldon Adelson, whose money Trump now assures us he abjures. And Trump has also claimed some unique privileges that may have rendered a huge campaign war chest unnecessary: His ability to convince cable news producers to just let him phone in to the anchor’s desk remains a benefit that’s not trickled down to the rest of the field. For that matter, there’s no other campaign whose rallies are treated as must-broadcast breaking news events by the cable outlets.

Nevertheless, one has to give Trump a little credit for keeping himself so removed from his rivals’ super PAC pitfalls. When he wants to stage a rally, there’s no need to coordinate it through the weird and complicated system by which Carly Fiorina activates her CARLY-bots. Unlike Cruz, he’s not leaving off-putting stock footage laying around for the ad-makers with whom he “can’t coordinate.” And while Trump may say a great many grotesque things, he’s not beholden to an army of donors who claim the right to final edit of the campaign message, as Walker was.

Trump’s got no strings attached to his person, no albatrosses around his neck. But for everyone else in the field, it looks like these burdens are all that this new era of unlimited campaign dollars actually has to offer.

Speaking of! Back in November, Bill Scher, sizing up a beleaguered and bitter Jeb! Bush campaign, took to Politico with some advice for the former Florida governor. “Jeb can still win,” Scher wrote, “but he needs to follow the comeback model of a Democrat.”

That Democrat? John Kerry, who at this point in the 2004 presidential election was every bit as wayward as Jeb is now. And Kerry’s example did offer Bush some hope. As Scher described, Bush — like Kerry — could win the “vetting” war with his untested opponents. He could stay above the fray and let the campaigns around him lose their heads in an acid rain of opposition research. He could continue to present himself as the reasonable and sensible man in a room of loons, trusting the voters to return to a reasonable and sensible perch.

But there was one really important thing Kerry did to right his ship that Scher forgot about — a surprising omission considering that it occurred almost exactly twelve years to the day before Scher’s piece was published. Namely, Kerry fired Jim Jordan, the man running his campaign, and replaced him with Mary Beth Cahill.

And that’s literally the one thing Jeb Bush cannot do: fire Mike Murphy. How could he? You can’t replace the guy running your campaign if your campaign — your reinvention of the traditional campaign — is run out of a super PAC, with which you are “not allowed to coordinate.”

When our corrupt campaign finance system prevents Jeb Bush from being able to fire the loser who’s running his presidential campaign into the ground … man, you can’t blame Donald Trump for having a laugh at that.

~~~~~

Jason Linkins edits “Eat The Press” for The Huffington Post and co-hosts the HuffPost politics podcast, “So, That Happened.” Subscribe here. Listen to the latest episode below.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

[jordannamatlon]

By Jia Tolentino 

Last September, a very twenty-first-century type of story appeared on the company blog of the ride-sharing app Lyft. “Long-time Lyft driver and mentor, Mary, was nine months pregnant when she picked up a passenger the night of July 21st,” the post began. “About a week away from her due date, Mary decided to drive for a few hours after a day of mentoring.” You can guess what happened next.

Mary, who was driving in Chicago, picked up a few riders, and then started having contractions. “Since she was still a week away from her due date,” Lyft wrote, “she assumed they were simply a false alarm and continued driving.” As the contractions continued, Mary decided to drive to the hospital. “Since she didn’t believe she was going into labor yet,” Lyft went on, “she stayed in driver mode, and sure enough—ping!— she received a ride request en route to the hospital.”

“Luckily,” as Lyft put it, the passenger requested a short trip. After completing it, Mary went to the hospital, where she was informed that she was in labor. She gave birth to a daughter, whose picture appears in the post. (She’s wearing a “Little Miss Lyft” onesie.) The post concludes with a call for similar stories: “Do you have an exciting Lyft story you’d love to share? Tweet us your story at @lyft_CHI!”

Mary’s story looks different to different people. Within the ghoulishly cheerful Lyft public-relations machinery, Mary is an exemplar of hard work and dedication—the latter being, perhaps, hard to come by in a company that refuses to classify its drivers as employees. Mary’s entrepreneurial spirit—taking ride requests while she was in labor!—is an “exciting” example of how seamless and flexible app-based employment can be. Look at that hustle! You can make a quick buck with Lyft anytime, even when your cervix is dilating.

Lyft does not provide its drivers paid maternity leave or health insurance. (It offers to connect drivers with an insurance broker, and helpfully notes that “the Affordable Care Act offers many choices to make sure you’re covered.”) A third-party platform called SherpaShare, which some drivers use to track their earnings, found, in 2015, that Lyft drivers in Chicago net about eleven dollars per trip. Perhaps, as Lyft suggests, Mary kept accepting riders while experiencing contractions because “she was still a week away from her due date,” or “she didn’t believe she was going into labor yet.” Or maybe Mary kept accepting riders because the gig economy has further normalized the circumstances in which earning an extra eleven dollars can feel more important than seeking out the urgent medical care that these quasi-employers do not sponsor. In the other version of Mary’s story, she’s an unprotected worker in precarious circumstances. “I can’t pretend to know Mary’s economic situation,” Bryan Menegus at Gizmodo wrote, when the story first appeared. “Maybe she’s an heiress who happens to love the freedom of chauffeuring strangers from place to place on her own schedule. But that Lyft, for some reason, thought that this would reflect kindly on them is perhaps the most horrifying part.”

It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms. And yet this type of faux-inspirational tale has been appearing more lately, both in corporate advertising and in the news. Fiverr, an online freelance marketplace that promotes itself as being for “the lean entrepreneur”—as its name suggests, services advertised on Fiverr can be purchased for as low as five dollars—recently attracted ire for an ad campaign called “In Doers We Trust.” One ad, prominently displayed on some New York City subway cars, features a woman staring at the camera with a look of blank determination. “You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”

Fiverr, which had raised a hundred and ten million dollars in venture capital by November, 2015, has more about the “In Doers We Trust” campaign on its Web site. In one video, a peppy female voice-over urges “doers” to “always be available,” to think about beating “the trust-fund kids,” and to pitch themselves to everyone they see, including their dentist. A Fiverr press release about “In Doers We Trust” states, “The campaign positions Fiverr to seize today’s emerging zeitgeist of entrepreneurial flexibility, rapid experimentation, and doing more with less. It pushes against bureaucratic overthinking, analysis-paralysis, and excessive whiteboarding.” This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic. No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation—or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in the video. It’s a stretch to feel cheerful at all about the Fiverr marketplace, perusing the thousands of listings of people who will record any song, make any happy-birthday video, or design any book cover for five dollars. I’d guess that plenty of the people who advertise services on Fiverr would accept some “whiteboarding” in exchange for employer-sponsored health insurance.

At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear. Human-interest stories about the beauty of some person standing up to the punishments of late capitalism are regular features in the news, too. I’ve come to detest the local-news set piece about the man who walks ten or eleven or twelve miles to work—a story that’s been filed from Oxford, Alabama; from Detroit, Michigan; from Plano, Texas. The story is always written as a tearjerker, with praise for the person’s uncomplaining attitude; a car is usually donated to the subject in the end. Never mentioned or even implied is the shamefulness of a job that doesn’t permit a worker to afford his own commute.

There’s a painful distance between the chipper narratives surrounding labor and success in America and the lived experience of workers. A similar conflict drove Nathanael West, in 1934, to publish the novel “A Cool Million,” which satirized the Horatio Alger bootstrap fables that remained popular into the Great Depression. “Alger is to America what Homer was to the Greeks,” West once wrote. His protagonist in “A Cool Million,” Lemuel Pitkin, is an innocent, energetic striver, tasked with saving his mother’s house from foreclosure. A series of Alger-esque plot twists ensue. But Pitkin, rather than triumphing, ends up losing his teeth, his eye, his leg, his scalp, and finally his thumb. Morris Dickstein, in his book “Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression,” notes, “The novel ends with Lem as a vaudeville clown being beaten nightly until he simply falls apart.” A former President named Shagpoke Whipple gives a speech valorizing Pitkin’s fate, extolling “the right of every American boy to go into the world and . . . make his fortune by industry.” Whipple describes Pitkin’s dismemberment—“lovingly,” Dickstein adds—and tells his audience that, through Pitkin’s hard work and enthusiastic martyrdom, “America became again American.”