#sander sides chelsea

[simping-on-the-daily]

Roman: screams

Remus: screams

Virgil: screams

Chelsea: sprinting into the room What’s wrong, Virgil?! D:

Roman: WHY ARE YOU ONLY ASKING VIRGIL?! WE'RE ALL SCREAMING!

Chelsea: Because Virgil doesn't scream unless it’s an emergency! You two scream whenever you have the chance.

[shitpostblrbackup]

My name is chelsea whats your favorite blogs gettin’ got by tumbumbler.

[chaotic-bean-of-smolness]

YouTuber Recommendation Because I'm Bored:

1. Jacksfilms

- Does a few video series called Your Grammar Sucks (YGS), Yesterday I Asked You (YIAY), Jackask and other sketches.

- He's seriously hilarious, I watch his videos everyday.

- His wife is the best.

- Has 3 adorable doggos.

2 and 3. Jenna Marbles and Julien Solomita

- One of the cutest couples on YouTube

- Have 4 doggos.

- Have a podcast called the Jenna and Julien Podcast

- She just does whatever she wants and I love it.

4. Dead Meat (I couldn't find a better gif sorry)

- Have a series called The Kill Count, where they count the kills in your favorite horror movies. If you're scared of horror films then this series makes it easy to watch.

- Also have a Podcast called The Dead Meat Podcast.

- Run by James A. Janisse and his wonderful fiance Chelsea Rebecca.

- They do a lot of film reviews and horror related games. Also, thay go to a lot of conventions and interview some of your favorite horror actors.

5 and 6. Sarah Schauer and Brittany Broski

- Both are on Tik Tok

- Sarah started out on Vine

- Are roommates and have been making a lot of fire videos together.

- They bounce off each other so well it's unbelievable.

7. Lunch Club

- Made up of CallMeCarson(Carson), Slimecicle (Charlie), Ted Nivison, traves (Travis), Hugbox (Noah), jschlatt (Schlatt), and cscoop (Cooper).

- Pretty sure all of them stream on Twitch. Carson, Charlie, Schlatt, and Travis definitely do but I don't really watch Cooper, Ted or Noah much.

- Have a podcast called the Lunch Club Podcast

- Everything they do is just chaos.

8. Anthony Padilla (this was like the only gif I could find that didn't include Dan Howell lol)

- Formally of Smosh

- Is dating Mykie from Glam and Gore (as of June 2020)

- Does a lot of very important interviews that I reccomend everyone to watch. His videos are very informational.

- Is often compared to Daniel Howell because they look very similar.

9. Boyinaband

- Most famous for his rap song "Don't Stay in School"

- Does videos that could be considered boring but he makes them entertaining.

- Has done songs with iDubbbzTV, TheOdd1sOut, Jaiden Animtions, and Pewdiepie.

- Is very into heavy metal music.

10. Thomas Sanders

- Started out on Vine.

- Famous for his Sanders Sides videos where he talks through difficult situations with the different aspects of his personality (kinda like Inside Out). He makes them with the help of his friends Joan and Talyn. They are all on Tumblr too but I'm too shy to @ them uwu

- Massive theater kid.

- Has another channel called Thomas Sanders and Friends.

- Is the gayyyy~ 🌈

- Is such a sweetheart

- Sorry I'm rambling now

[bthenoise]

ICYMI: Here Are 12 Newsworthy Items You May Have Missed Over The Holidays

Hello everybody and happy new year! While getting back into the swing of things here at the office (aka our house), we noticed a handful of exciting things have been announced while we were off the grid safely celebrating the holidays.

So, instead of pumping out article after article for you to comb through and catch up on, we thought we’d compile all the things you may have missed into one, easy-to-read post.

Let us begin:

GOOD CHARLOTTE DEBUT SOMBER NEW SINGLE “LAST DECEMBER”

For the first time since 2018′s sensational LP Generation Rx, Good Charlotte has returned with brand new music. 

Written as a way to cope with the hard times as of late, guitarist Benji Madden says of the gloomy new single “Last December”: 

“2020 being the 20th anniversary of our self-titled debut album really made us feel like we wanted to release something for those fans who’ve gone on this journey with us. The holidays can be a rough time of year - thinking of the ones we’ve lost and longing for moments that have passed us by is definitely a part of the joy and melancholy. For us, this song speaks to both sides of those holiday feelings and we hope it brings some solace to anyone who needs it.”

To check out the new track, see the video below.

AFI DETAIL PLANS FOR BRAND NEW ALBUM 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by AFI (@afireinside)

Great news AFI fans! Looking to follow up 2018′s five-track EP The Missing Man, Davey Havok and Co. have shared news regarding when you might hear some new music.  

Taking to their socials, the band collectively shared: “With the end of a year that has been, at best, challenging for all, we have news that we hope may bring you some joy. Very soon, new songs shall be yours. Before the year’s end, our 11th album will follow. We could not be more happy with our latest work and hope you will feel the same. Thank you for joining us upon this next journey. We are thrilled to take it and honored to have you at our side.”

Anyone else excited for a new AFI album!?

††† (CROSSES) SURPRISE RELEASE CHILLING NEW COVER 

As if a brand new Deftones album and 20th anniversary version of White Pony wasn’t enough, Chino Moreno concluded his 2020 with a brand new release from his thought-to-be-dormant project ††† (Crosses).

The song, which is a cover of Cause & Effect’s 1990 track “The Beginning Of The End,” is Moreno and guitarist Shaun Lopez’s first offering since their 2014 self-titled record.

To check out the track, see below.  

FOO FIGHTERS DEBUT SECOND NEW SINGLE “NO SON OF MINE”

Continuing their promotional push for their forthcoming tenth studio album Medicine At Midnight, Foo Fighters have released their second new single. 

Titled “No Son Of Mine” (and no, not an Every Time I Die cover), the latest from the hard rock staples leans much more on the louder side than their previous single “Shame Shame.”

To check out the new tune, see below.

FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE GO “BLUE” FOR NEW EIFEL 65 COVER

It’s not everyday you hear an Italian symphonic death metal band cover an Italian techno group but here we are.

Ending their 2020 on a colorful note, noisemakers Fleshgod Apocalypse released a stirring rendition of the 1998 hit “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” -- yes, you read that correctly.   

Commenting on the mind-bending cover, frontman Francesco Paoli said, “After the amazing response over our latest single ‘No’ we wanted to release something that could make the end of this shitty 2020 a bit funnier for everyone. That’s why we took a popular dance track from the 90s and made it the heaviest, angriest, bloodiest party song ever.” 

“We’re ready to blast your ears again in 2021,” Paoli noted, “stay tuned!”

To hear the cover, see below.

AS IT IS DRUMMER AND FUTURE FIREMAN PATRICK FOLEY DEPARTS FROM THE BAND

Bummer news As It Is fans: Founding drummer Patrick Foley has decided to step away from the band to take on a new heroic role as a firefighter. 

The band took to their socials to share: “Our brother and friend Foley has decided to step back from As It Is, to pursue a brand new career as a fire fighter. We could not be more proud of him (and are keeping him on speed dial for when we next use pyro in a live show). All love, Patty, Ali, Ronnie x”

See the band’s emotional farewell video below. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by As It Is (@asitisofficial)

CANE HILL DEBUT DEVASTATING NEW SINGLE “KILL ME”

2021 is shaping up to be a busy year for Cane Hill. Continuing to churn out head-pounding singles, the New Orleans act recently released their blistering new track “Kill Me.”  

Vocalist Elijah Witt commented on the song saying: "I think if this year [2020] has taught me anything, it's that this dreadful voice of negativity in my head is loudest when my life is quiet. Just like everyone else, my mental health has taken a steep decline this year, and giving life to that horrific voice was the easiest way for me to try and combat it. ‘Kill Me’ is what I feel in the parts of me I can ignore when life is normal.” Witt adds, “‘Kill Me’ adds another chapter to ‘Krewe De La Mort’ that continues to bring Louisiana folklore to life. Building upon the visual intensity we established with ‘P.O.T.H.,’ we worked closely with Dreamseeker Productions in further exploring elements of witchcraft and the occult while staying true to these Cajun tales.”

To check out the new song and striking visual, see below.

ENTER SHIKARI SHARE BIZARRE NEW VIDEO FOR “T.I.N.A”

If you’ve ever wondered what Enter Shikari would look like as walking, talking (and dancing) human hands, you’re in luck. 

The band, in support of their latest LP Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible, have released a truly stunning clip for their track “T.I.N.A.”

To watch the video directed by Matthew Taylor, see below.  

CROWN THE EMPIRE RELEASE INTERACTIVE MUSIC VIDEO FOR “RED PILLS”

Will you take the red pill or the blue pill? This is the question you must ask yourself in Crown The Empire’s new interactive music video directed by Sam Shapiro. 

Set to their track aptly titled “Red Pills” off their 2019 release Sudden Sky, the band’s new clip leaves things in the viewers hands for once.   

Elaborating on the video, the band shared, “We created an interactive experience where you, the viewer, will be taken down a wormhole to decide your own ending. Choose your destiny wisely...”

Check out the video below.

MAYDAY PARADE DEBUT STRIPPED-DOWN VERSION OF “I’M WITH YOU”

Leave it to Mayday Parade to release something sad around the holidays. 

In collaboration with Decatur City Church in Decatur, Georgia, vocalist Derek Sanders and drummer Jake Bundrick have shared a new stripped-down version of their song “I’m With You.”

To check out the gloomy piano-led version, be sure to see below.

DARKO (EMMURE, CHELSEA GRIN) UNVEIL CHAOTIC NEW VIDEO FOR “PALE TONGUE”

While listeners patiently await the debut full-length release from Emmure drummer Josh Miller and Chelsea Grin vocalist Tom Barber, aka Darko, the duo have released a wild new music video.  

Set to their blistering track “Pale Tongue,” the band’s new clip provides insane visuals that will leave you feeling like you hallucinated it.

To check out the video, see below.  

WATCH ASKING ALEXANDRIA’S DANNY WARSNOP STAR IN NEW METALCORE COVER OF “YOU’RE A MEAN ONE, MR. GRINCH”

Who would have known a Dr. Seuss classic would go so well in the stylings of metalcore? 

Showing that the classic Christmas thief himself Mr. Grinch knows a thing or two about mosh pits and breakdowns, YouTuber/musician Jared Dines has teamed up with Asking Alexandria’s Danny Worsnop for a hard-hitting cover of “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”   

To check out the rippin’ rendition and accompanying music video, see below. 

[stainedglassgardens]

Favourite films watched in 2019

I arranged them into broad categories – other than that they’re in no particular order. 

Indie

Skate Kitchen (Crystal Moselle, 2018) 6 Balloons (Marja-Lewis Ryan, 2018) The Party’s Just Beginning (Karen Gillan, 2018) Thirteen (Catherine Hardwicke, 2003) Baise-moi (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000) Vazante (Daniela Thomas, 2017) Erasing Eden (Beth Dewey, 2016) The Seen and the Unseen (Sekala Niskala, Kamila Andini, 2017) Knock Down Ginger (Cleo Samoles-Little, 2016) The Garden (Sommerhaüser, Sonja Maria Kröner, 2017) Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (Marlina Si Pembunuh dalam Empat Babak, Mouly Surya, 2017) Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009) Soldiers. Story From Ferentari (Soldații. Poveste din Ferentari, Ivana Mladenović, 2017)

Comedy

Dick (Andrew Fleming, 1999) The Breaker Upperers (Madeleine Sami and Jackie Van Beek, 2018) It Stains the Sands Red (Colin Minihan, 2016) Satanic Panic (Chelsea Stardust, 2019)

Classics

Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970) House of Wax (Andre DeToth, 1953) Eve's Bayou (Kasi Lemmons, 1997) Germany Pale Mother (Deutschland bleiche Mutter, Helma Sanders-Brahms, 1980)

Horror

April and the Devil (Jake Hammond, 2018) Blackwood (Andrew Montague, 2019) The Crescent (Seth A Smith, 2017) Us (Jordan Peele, 2019) American Mary (Jen and Sylvia Soska, 2012) Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974) The Devil's Passenger (Dave Bundtzen, 2018)

Science fiction

Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, 1983) Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2015) In Full Bloom (Maegan Houang, 2019)

Action

Destroyer (Karyn Kusama, 2018) Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell, 2018) Snatch (Guy Ritchie, 2000) Holiday (Isabella Eklöf, 2018)

Documentary

Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005) Abducted in Plain Sight (Skye Borgman, 2017) Jane Fonda in Five Acts (Susan Lacy, 2018) Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012) The Decline of Western Civilization series (Penelope Spheeris, 1981, 1988 and 1998)

Full list of 273 films watched in 2018 under the cut!

January

Like Father  (Lauren Miller Rogen, 2018)

Upgrade  (Leigh Whannell, 2018)

Skate Kitchen (Crystal Moselle, 2018)

Never Been Kissed (Raja Gosnell, 1999)

Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, 2015)

Dick (Andrew Fleming, 1999)

The Black Balloon  (Elissa Down, 2008)

Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell, 2018)

6 Balloons (Marja-Lewis Ryan, 2018)

Rosy (Jess Bond, 2018)

The Party’s Just Beginning (Karen Gillan, 2018)

The Rider (Chloé Zhao, 2017)

Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013)

Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

Thirteen (Catherine Hardwicke, 2003)

Sadie (Megan Griffiths, 2018)

The Miseducation of Cameron Post  (Desiree Akhavan, 2018)

Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002)

Fyre: The Greatest Pary That Never Happened (Chris Smith, 2019)

Time Share (Tiempo Compartido, Sebastián Hofmann, 2018)

The Stranger (Orson Welles, 1946)

Abducted in Plain Sight (Skye Borgman, 2017)

King of Thieves (James Marsh, 2018)

Malevolent (Olaf de Fleur, 2018)

Serena (Susanne Bier, 2014)

Baise-moi (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000)

And Breathe Normally (Andið Eðlilega, Ísold Uggadóttir, 2018)

Catwalk: Tales from the Cat Show Circuit  (Aaron Hancox and Michael McNamara, 2018)

Santoalla (Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer, 2016)

Jane Fonda in Five Acts (Susan Lacy, 2018)

Mademoiselle Paradis (Licht, Barbara Albert, 2017)

The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography (Errol Morris, 2016)

February

Matangi/Maya/M.I.A (Steve Loveridge, 2018)

Pride & Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005)T

The Brain Hack (Joseph White, 2014)

Vazante (Daniela Thomas, 2017)

Tanglewood (Jordan Prosser, 2016)

Outfall (Suzi Ewing, 2018)

Pigskin (Jake Hammond, 2015)

The Funspot (Jake Hammond, 2015)

April and the Devil (Jake Hammond, 2018)

Smithereens (Susan Seidelman, 1982)

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Marielle Heller, 2018)

Bus Stop (Joshua Logan, 1956)

Pink Plastic Flamingos (Colin West, 2017)

The Breaker Upperers (Madeleine Sami and Jackie Van Beek, 2018)

Amanda Knox  (Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn, 2016)

Holy Hell (Will Allen, 2016)

Shoplifters (Manbiki Kazoku, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018)

Skin (Jordana Spiro, 2015)

A Night at the Garden (Marshall Curry, 2017)

Give Up the Ghost (Nathan Sam Long, 2018)

Last One Screaming (Matt Devino, 2017)

The Katy Universe (Patrick Muhlberger, 2018)

Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018)

Did You Hear About the Morgans? (Marc Lawrence, 2009)

End Game (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 2018)

Behind the Curve  (Daniel J. Clark, 2018)

Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005)

92MARS  (Ricardo Bernardini, 2018)

Construct (Kevin Margo, 2018)

Invaders (Daniel Prince, 2018)

March

Three Identical Strangers (Tim Wardle, 2018)

Dirty John: The Dirty Truth (Sara Mast, 2019)

Blackwood (Andrew Montague, 2019)

One (Luke Bradford, 2019)

God's Kingdom (Guy Soulsby, 2018)

Holiday (Isabella Eklöf, 2018)

Frigid (Joe Kicak, 2016)

Girl of the Sky (Ariel Martin, 2017)

Monitor (Matt Black and Ryan Polly, 2018)

Donoma (Evan Spencer Brace, 2018)

Perfect Blue (パーフェクトブル, Pāfekuto Burū, Satoshi Kon, 1997)

The Sermon (Dean Puckett, 2018)

Layer Cake (Matthew Vaughn, 2004)

Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010)

Generation Wealth (Lauren Greenfield, 2018)

The Rachel Divide (Laura Brownson, 2018)

The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance, 2012)

Burden (Timothy Marrinan and Richard Dewey, 2016)

What Will People Say (Hva vil folk si, Iram Haq, 2017)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (Kurt Kuenne, 2008)

Animal (Fabrice Le Nézet and Jules Janaud, 2017)

Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Karecki, 2003)

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (Errol Morris, 2003)

April

Erasing Eden (Beth Dewey, 2016)

Destroyer (Karyn Kusama, 2018)

Unicorn Store (Brie Larson, 2019)

May the Devil Take You (Sebelum iblis menjemput, Timo Tjahjanto, 2018)

People in Cars (Daniel Lundh, 2017)

Presentation (Danielle Kampf, 2017)

Ink (Jamin Winans, 2009)

Hedgehog (Lindsey Copeland, 2016)

Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982)

Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)

The Silence (John R. Leonetti, 2019)

24 Davids (Céline Baril, 2017)

The Frame (Jamin Winans, 2014)

The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999)

Baraka (Ron Fricke, 1992)

Wayne’s World (Penelope Spheeris, 1992)

Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)

Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, 1983)

Jesse’s Girl (M. Keegan Uhl, 2018)

I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)

Mary Goes Round (Molly McGlynn, 2017)

The Green Fog (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2017)

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Someone Great (Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, 2019)

May

Ekaj (Cati Gonzalez, 2015)

Capernaum (Nadine Labaki, 2018)

Porcupine Lake (Ingrid Veninger, 2017)

The Decline of Western Civilization (Penelope Spheeris, 1981)

The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (Penelope Spheeris, 1988)

The Decline of Western Civilization III (Penelope Spheeris, 1998)

Revolver (Guy Ritchie, 2005)

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu (Rob Letterman, 2019)

RocknRolla (Guy Ritchie, 2008)

Snatch (Guy Ritchie, 2000)

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie, 1998)

The Seen and the Unseen (Sekala Niskala, Kamila Andini, 2017)

Nkosi Coiffure (Frederike Migom, 2015)

Speak Your Truth (Kris Erickson, 2018)

Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2010)

A.I. Rising (Lazar Bodrosa, 2018)

The Crescent (Seth A Smith, 2017)

Ring (リング, Ringu, Hideo Nakata, 1998)

Absences (Carole Laganière, 2013)

The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944)

In Color (José Andrés Cardona, 2019)

Winners (Dan Bulla, 2018)

Jess (Daniel Hurwitz, 2018)

My First Time (Asaf Livni, 2018)

Murmur (Aurora Fearnley, 2018)

Pulsar (Aurora Fearnley, 2017)

Struck (Aurora Fearnley, 2017)

Samira (Lainey Richardson, 2018)

Despite Everything (A pesar de todo, Gabriela Tagliavini, 2019)

It Stains the Sands Red (Colin Minihan, 2016)

Satain Said Dance (Szatan kazał tańczyć, Katarzyna Rosłaniec, 2016)

Knock Down Ginger (Cleo Samoles-Little, 2016)

Gold (Cleo Samoles-Little, 2015)

Jane's Life (Cleo Samoles-Little, 2012)

4/4 (Kyle Sawyer, 2016)

Sugar Land (Lorenzo Lanzillotti, 2018)

The Idea of North (Albert Choi, 2018)

A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018)

Dark Water (仄暗い水の底から, Honogurai Mizu no soko kara, Hideo Nakata, 2002)

Sound of My Voice (Zal Batmanglij, 2011)

Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

The Perfection (Richard Shepard, 2018)

House of Wax (Andre DeToth, 1953)

June

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Stacie Passon, 2018)

Always Be My Maybe (Nahnatchka Khan, 2019)

Gente que viene y bah (Patricia Font, 2019)

Period. End of Sentence. (Rayka Zehtabchi, 2018)

American Mary (Jen and Sylvia Soska, 2012)

The Boss (Ben Falcone, 2016)

Extremis (Dan Krauss, 2016)

E il cibo va (Food on the Go, Mercedes Cordova, 2017)

Last Night (Massy Tadjedin, 2010)

Murder Mystery (Kyle Newacheck, 2019)

Bead Game (Ishu Patel, 1977)

The Ceiling (Katto, Teppo Airaksinen, 2017)

Elisa & Marcela (Elisa y Marcela, Isabel Coixet, 2019)

Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (Marlina Si Pembunuh dalam Empat Babak, Mouly Surya, 2017)

The Garden (Sommerhaüser, Sonja Maria Kröner, 2017)

Fast Color (Julia Hart, 2018)

The Tale of Iya (Iya Monogatari: Oku no Hito, Tetsuichiro Tsuta, 2013)

Chico and Rita (Chico y Rita, Tono Errando, Fernando Trueba and Javier

Mariscal, 2010)

Rafiki (Wanuri Kahiu, 2018)

Floating! (Das Floß!, Julia C. Kaiser, 2015)

The Quiet American (Phillip Noyce, 2002)

July

Keepers of the Magic (Vic Sarin, 2016)

Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2015)

Mr. Holmes (Bill Condon, 2015)

The Long Dumb Road (Hannah Fidell, 2018)

Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)

Life Overtakes Me (John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson, 2019)

The Milk System (Andreas Pilcher, 2017)

A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)

The Texture of Falling (Maria Allred, 2019)

Family (Laura Steinel, 2018)

Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952)

Identity Thief (Seth Gordon, 2013)

August

Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)

In Full Bloom (Maegan Houang, 2019)

Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990)

The Eagles are a Country Music Band (Cody Wagner, 2018)

The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997)

Hobbs & Shaw (David Leitch, 2019)

Coco (Lee Unkrich, 2017)

Bubba Ho-Tep (Don Coscarelli, 2002)

John Wick (Chad Stahelski, 2014)

Eve's Bayou (Kasi Lemmons, 1997)

I Don’t Protest, I Just Dance In My Shadow (Jessica Ashman, 2017)

My Cousin Rachel (Henry Koster, 1952)

Lifeline (Harry Jackson, 2018)

FOMI (Fear of Missing In) (Norbert Fodor, 2019)

Body at Brighton Rock (Roxanne Benjamin, 2019)

Koreatown (Grant Hyun, 2018)

A Report of Connected Events (Mischa Rozema, 2018)

Sundays (Mischa Rozema, 2015)

A King's Betrayal (David Bornstein, 2014)

Perception (Ilana Rein, 2018)

Germany Pale Mother (Deutschland bleiche Mutter, Helma Sanders-Brahms, 1980)

Men in Black International (F. Gary Gray, 2019)

Captive State (Rupert Wyatt, 2019)

Little Forest (리틀 포레스트, Liteul Poleseuteu, Yim Soon-rye, 2018)

September

What Keeps You Alive (Colin Minihan, 2018)

Grave Encounters (The Vicious Brothers, 2011)

Terrified (Aterrados, Demián Rugna, 2017)

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

Helen (Sandra Nettelbeck, 2009)

Colossal (Nacho Vigalondo, 2016)

Out of Blue (Carol Morley, 2018)

Taxi (تاکسی‎, Jafar Panahi, 2015)

Dear Ex (誰先愛上他的, Mag Hsu and Hsu Chih-yen, 2018)

Marguerite (Marianne Farley, 2019)

Birders (Otilia Portillo Padua, 2019)

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

Mansfield Park (Patricia Rozema, 1999)

Long Term Delivery (Jake Honig, 2018)

Game (Joy Webster, 2017)

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

Foxfire (Annette Haywood-Carter, 1996)

October

Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009)

Under the Shadow ( زیر سایه, Babak Anvari, 2015)

Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984)

Scream (Wes Craven, 1996)

Ghostbusters (Paul Feig, 2016)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Rabid (David Cronenberg, 1977)

Rabid (The Soska Sisters, 2019)

In the Shadow of the Moon (Jim Mickle, 2019)

Benny Loves Killing (Ben Woodiwiss, 2018)

The Golem (Yoav & Doron Paz, 2018)

Eli (Ciarán Foy, 2019)

The Adversary (L’Adversaire, Nicole Garcia, 2002)

Satanic Panic (Chelsea Stardust, 2019)

The Devil and Father Amorth (William Friedkin, 2017)

Wounds (Babak Anvari, 2019)

Silent Hill (Christophe Gans, 2006)

Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh, 2011)

Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974)

The Shift (Francesco Calabrese, 2014)

The Baby (Kamran Chahkar, Lei Jim, 2012)

Intrusion (Jack Michel, 2013)

The Devil's Passenger (Dave Bundtzen, 2018)

Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)

November

A Hijacking (Kapringen, Tobias Lindholm, 2012)

The Kitchen (Andrea Berloff, 2019)

The Hole in the Ground (Lee Cronin, 2019)

Assassination Nation (Sam Levinson, 2018)

Amy (Asif Kapadia, 2015)

Tell Me Who I Am (Ed Perkins, 2019)

Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947)

Terminally Happy (Adina Istrate, 2015)

The Glass Key (Stuart Heisler, 1942)

LuTo (Katina Medina Mora, 2015)

The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)

Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator (Eva Orner, 2019)

December

Soldiers. Story From Ferentari (Soldații. Poveste din Ferentari, Ivana Mladenović, 2017)

John and Michael (John et Michael, Shira Avni, 2004)

High Tension (Haute Tension, Alexandre Aja, 2003)

Little Joe (Jessica Hausner, 2019)

The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999)

Finders Keepers (Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel, 2015)

To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)

My Buddha is Punk (Andreas Hartmann, 2016)

Little Miss Sumo (Matt Kay, 2018)

[tkrr]

The Left isn’t as progressive as it thinks it is

So Taylor Swift is a fan of Kamala Harris, who, let’s hope, will be our next Vice President. I just wanted to acknowledge that, and it really does show that Taylor’s serious about her feminism, because Harris is an absolutely fantastic choice for VP. She was my favorite choice out of the gate for president, but she dropped out before primary season... but here we are. 

I didn’t come here to talk about Taylor though. 

One of the most disillusioning things in my life was working as director on a public access talk show where a bunch of old New Lefties from the 60s sat around and discussed issues of the day. I did this for a couple of years until the producer and I drifted apart, at which point the 2016 campaign was in full swing and I was getting sick and tired of the constant Hillary-bashing. (She was “ambitious”, you know.) They rarely discussed social issues, and when they did it was usually related to some kind of international relief operation (like the one in Haiti a few years back) or castigating Democrats for turning away from the labor vote. (I don’t think I ever heard the phrase “identity politics”, but...) When Obergefell v Hodges came down from the Supreme Court in 2015, their first show after it happened was yet another rehash of the Israel/Palestine issue. As I was in the early stages of planning my transition, this didn’t go over well with me, but I kept my mouth shut and put up with it for another year. They were of course very concerned with corporate influence, with a regular set decoration being an American flag with the stars replaced by corporate logos. This was not the left I thought I’d be working for.

See, I’d done a lot of work with another producer on a show covering issues relevant to the homeless in our area. That felt good. That was, and is, how I see progressivism -- my contribution might have bordered on slacktivism from the outside, but I was providing a link in a chain for people who actually needed help. Similarly, the producer of the show I was talking about before had used me as director on a show about local public school issues; progressivism to me involves listening to people at risk and helping them reduce that risk. That was what the Civil Rights Movement did, and what groups like the Black Panthers tried to do. Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, Amnesty international -- this is stuff that matters to people in their immediate, daily lives. I had kept the populist left -- call them Bernouts, fire baggers, the Green Tea Party, whatever -- at arm’s length, but I kind of assumed that these things were priorities for everybody claiming to be on the left. This... did not turn out to be the case. 

What I’ve learned, from that experience and from the last few election cycles, is that the populist left is not on the same page as the activists who are actually putting effort towards directly taking care of people. They talk about labor rights, which falls into that category, but they put other issues, especially civil rights issues, on the back burner. There’s a lot of emphasis on foreign policy, but usually in a very simplistic way that’s clearly still stuck in the Reagan era. (Which is jarring when you hear it from someone who was born after Reagan left office.) When Euromaidan happened in Ukraine in 2014, they bought the Russian government’s side of the story hook, line, and sinker, despite the people noting that the rhetoric came straight out of the USSR’s propaganda playbook. They treated Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden as gospel, but oddly enough I don’t remember them talking about Chelsea Manning much. (I wonder why. 🏳️‍🌈? Nah, can’t be...) The supposedly “progressive” populist left overall has this kind of tunnel vision, and I can’t help but notice they’ve been replaying the same scripts since the 1960s. The last time I looked at the Green Party USA’s platform, it was such a bizarre mix of things that actually make sense combined with things that were either wrong or outright insane that I realized I could probably never vote for a Green candidate. (That in and of itself is fodder for an article I do not have the time or the energy to write.) On top of all that, there’s the sheer self-destructiveness -- I can’t understand how someone can say that their conscience is clear for voting for third-party if the simple math means their vote made it harder to advance the agenda they say they want.

What it comes down to is that there are two “left”s, and they’re only just barely compatible. I wish I didn’t have to concede the word “progressive” to the populist side, because fundamentally, no matter to what extent they manage to diversify their own base, they wind up sidelining the concerns of marginalized people (particularly black and Jewish people; there’s a link at the bottom of the article written by a black writer for a Jewish audience that I found very enlightening) in favor of centering a “generic” narrative that ultimately comes down to “things white people worry about”. The scary part of this is that because they’re basically reactionary, they don’t realize that the economically-centered message they’re pointing out is not actually as helpful for all citizens as they think it is, and will never admit it. One particular point I’ve made occasionally -- the class narrative is irrelevant for most African Americans. Shows like “The Jeffersons”, “The C*sb* Show”, and “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” were all about wealthy, successful black families; there were working class black sitcoms as well (I wish “227″ had the same staying power as “Golden Girls”), but the ones we remember were all about black families that made it, and one of the stinger lines from the pilot of “The Jeffersons” was Marla Gibbs’ character Florence saying “How come we overcame and nobody told me?” Yes, I’m white. But this is stuff that other white people could find out if they bothered to look into it.

In the end, though, the worst aspect of all of this is the reductionism. It becomes an argument over who’s lefting better than all the other lefties, to the point where “liberal” has somehow become synonymous in some circles with “anyone right of Bernie Sanders”. (Which is really ironic given Kamala Harris’ voting record in Congress, running left of Bernie.) I don’t see too much of the crowd doing that going out and trying to do the things that make people’s lives better directly; it all amounts to telling people how much better things will be Come The Revolution™, but any efforts that fall short of total societal reform *right fucking now* are seen as worse than failure. Once in a great while, some will admit that they think that these are just bribes to the proletariat to stave off the revolution, but to be honest, I don’t think most of them have put that much thought into it. This isn’t the left I want to represent. If your plans don’t start with “first do no harm”, they’re going to have an opportunity cost far too high to be morally acceptable. And if standing on principle means giving up your opportunity to advance a progressive agenda, your “progressive” principles are worthless. 

(I had some other points to make involving cancel culture, but it’s 2:30 AM and this is already a rather long post. Maybe I’ll do a second one that includes it.)

The link I mentioned above: https://forward.com/opinion/435826/why-the-left-has-failed-with-black-voters/

[sanderssidesfanfiction]

We’ll Carry On - Chapter Thirty Seven

We’ll Carry On Tag

General Content Warnings: Sympathetic Deceit Sanders, Substance Abuse, Abandonment, Minor Character Death, Transphobia, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Dissociation, Bullying, Homophobia

Chapter-Specific Warnings: Hospitals, Talk of Assault

September 28th, 2019

“Come on, Logan! Just take a sip! You said Jack should be the designated driver just so you could try it!” one of the girls at the party, Chelsea, said.

Logan gave her a sideways glance and grabbed a beer that wasn’t opened yet, and took an experimental sip. It tasted awful, like there was a fire going down his throat, but he had to admit that it wasn’t as bad as he thought it was going to be. He’d just space out how long he took to drink it.

Chelsea laughed and hugged him, moving away to someone else who was hesitant to take a drink. Logan grimaced. It was the first party of the year, and he resolved that he didn’t want to have no excuse to drink beer ever throughout the rest of high school. He’d just be the designated driver every time, then. Maybe he’d get pressured into drinking less.

November 1st, 2019

When Logan woke up the next morning, he still had a pit of dread in his stomach. He checked his phone immediately to see if he had a text from Jack, but he had no such luck. He headed downstairs to find that only Dad and Ami were in the house, and his brothers and Vanellope were out in the backyard. Logan swallowed. “Did...did you hear from Jack’s parents? Is he okay?”

Dad and Ami shared a look. “Jack is still in the hospital,” Ami said. “They took his blood and found out that he was drugged with Rohypnol. Not by choice, judging by the levels they found.”

Logan felt all the air leave his lungs in a rush. If he had gone to the party with Jack, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe Logan could have gotten to him earlier, maybe he would have noticed who spiked Jack’s drink...

“Don’t blame yourself, Logan,” Dad said. “You’re the one who got in the van and drove over there to make sure he was okay. You saved his life.”

Logan still shook. It was hitting him that Jack could have died last night. Even if he had made it home safe somehow with the driver drunk, if he had been drugged and he didn’t tell his parents...he wouldn’t be okay.

“Ami and I are pretty sure what happened last night is a good lesson in why underage drinking is not okay, and why you shouldn’t do it,” Dad said. “But we still need to talk about it, so we’re clear on what to do if you find yourself in a situation like that again.”

“I definitely won’t drink until I’m twenty-one,” Logan promised.

“Good, but that’s not what we’re talking about,” Ami said. “Sit down, we’ll talk.”

Logan swallowed and sat down at the kitchen island across from Dad and Ami.

“If you find yourself in a situation where there’s alcohol and you’re not twenty-one, or there’s any sort of illicit drugs involved, Dad and I want you to leave. Make your excuses and get out,” Ami said. “Even if you don’t drink any alcohol, others getting drunk means that if you get drugged, someone could just claim you drank too much and others wouldn’t give you a second glance. And if there’s drugs being used openly, it’s the same story.”

“Logan, you’re smart. You know that Jack was in someone’s sights last night, and they saw fit to assault him. He was lucky to get out of there before he got caught. We don’t want that to happen again, to either of you. I know you guys want to socialize, but there’s ways to do that which don’t involve anything illegal. And on that point, what happens if the police get called? You can’t just run all the way home without getting some strange looks, at best, and get caught resisting arrest at worst. And if you’re arrested, you know what’s going to happen? Ami and I are going to get a call from the police, and we will not be pleased,” Dad said.

Logan swallowed again, nodding. This was easily the most terrifying lecture he had ever been given, mostly because it wasn’t filled with empty threats, but actual scenarios that could happen.

“You don’t have to call anyone’s parents or the police if you see someone bring out alcohol, all right? That’s not what we’re asking. We’re just asking that if you see someone bring it out, you leave. We don’t want you getting in trouble. And we won’t even ask you why you’re home early if you don’t want to talk about it,” Dad continued. “We’re concerned about your safety, first and foremost. So no alcohol for you or around you until your twenty-one, and no drugs period, all right?”

Logan nodded. He didn’t want to be in trouble with anyone, least of all Dad and Ami. He spoke, voice trembling and small as he asked, “Can we go visit Jack later, please? I want to see for myself that he’s all right.”

“We’ll call his parents and see if he’s up for it,” Dad said, grabbing Logan’s hand and squeezing it, silent reassurance. “He’s a little rattled since the doctors told him what he’d been given and what happened last night.”

“I bet that he wouldn’t want to see me anyway,” Logan sighed. “Because I’m the one who got him in trouble with his parents.”

“Logan, you saved his life,” Ami said. “If he’s angry with you for telling his parents he was drugged because he got drunk, that’s his problem. He wouldn’t be okay if it weren’t for you. I don’t understand why he wouldn’t want to see you, or why he’d be mad at you.”

“Between us, Logan, Jack’s parents were asking when you’d be able to come over because they wanted to personally thank you for helping him, and apparently Jack had been asking about you. He doesn’t hate you,” Dad said.

Logan could feel tears pricking at his eyes again. He hated crying this much, especially considering he was on testosterone and that made it much harder to cry, so he was doubly miserable. “Can...can we go see him soon?” he sniffled. “Please? I want to know my boyfriend’s going to be okay.”

“I’ll call Jack’s parents and see if they can find out when visiting hours are, and we can see him today,” Dad said. “Does that sound okay?”

Logan sniffled and nodded. Dad tutted and came over to hug him. Logan clung to him like a liferaft until he finally felt like he could breathe again. He was still crying, but he could at least talk. He turned to Ami. “Ami...I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you that I drank at parties before...I just...didn’t want you to be...disappointed in me...or mad...”

Ami sighed and shook his head, hugging Logan as well. “Logan, I’m not mad at you. I never was mad at you. And now that we have clear boundaries about what happens at parties, I can rest easy knowing that you’ll be responsible. You’re not in trouble.”

Logan nodded.

“I’ll call Jack’s parents,” Dad offered. “You guys can go outside with the others or let them know they can come in if they want.”

Logan took a shaky breath and let it out slowly. He was going to be okay. Jack was going to be okay. Everything had worked out last night.

The wait to see what Jack’s parents would say felt like an age to Logan, and the fact that visiting hours weren’t until three in the afternoon to start with made the waiting for that feel like an eon. But eventually, Ami drove Logan to the hospital where Jack was staying, and they got directed to Jack’s room, where Jack appeared to be resting.

Mister Harkness say them first and came over to Logan. “Logan, you’re here,” he said softly, hugging Logan tight. “Thank you for saving my boy. You have no idea how thankful we are.”

Logan hugged Mister Harkness back. “And he’s going to be okay?”

“They’re monitoring him until they’re sure he’s through with his withdrawal, which shouldn’t take later than tomorrow, and after that he can go home. He’s been asking about you.”

“Is he asleep?” Logan asked, pulling away from the hug and looking at Jack.

“No, he’s just dozing,” Mister Harkness said. “Not much for him to do at the moment, so he’s been sleeping off most of the effects. But he was alert less than fifteen minutes ago, so he shouldn’t be too grumpy, even if he is woken up.”

Logan nodded and Mister Harkness ushered him into the room. Logan stood at the foot of the bed, looking Jack over. He wasn’t hooked up to any machines, which was promising, and they didn’t even have an IV drip, only some half-drunk water by his bedside. He was jolted out of his thoughts when Jack murmured, “You know it’s creepy to watch people sleep, right?”

“I always thought it was romantic,” Logan said with a relieved laugh as Jack opened his eyes and grinned. “Hi, honey.”

“You look like crap,” Jack said.

“Hey, I’m not the one in a hospital bed,” Logan pointed out. “I’ve just been crying a lot. You nearly died, I’m allowed to be worried.”

Jack grew quiet. “Yeah, I know. They told me I had a bad reaction to the combination of alcohol and drugs, and that if I hadn’t been brought in, I would probably be much sicker, if I were here at all.”

Logan swallowed and moved to the side of Jack’s bed, grabbing one of his hands. “Let’s be glad that didn’t happen,” Logan said. “How was the hangover?”

“Ugh, it was massive,” Jack laughed. “I’m telling you, hangovers get ten times worse with withdrawals added into the mix.” He sobered as he asked, “Did your parents chew into you?”

“Not really,” Logan said. “They explained why I shouldn’t have had beer before and why I shouldn’t do it again, and what they expected of me if I ever go to these parties again, but that was about it. You?”

“I got a talking-to once it was clear I’d be alive for a while yet,” Jack chuckled. “I’ve never been so happy to be in trouble.”

Logan laughed and shook his head. “I love you, Jack. I love you so much.”

“If I weren’t stuck in this bed for a while yet I would kiss you,” Jack said with a dopey grin. “As is, I can barely push myself into a sitting position.”

Logan kissed Jack’s forehead and leaned against the side of the bed. “Better?” he asked.

“Little bit,” Jack said. “I might need more kisses to be one-hundred percent, though.”

Logan laughed. “You’re terrible!”

“Yeah,” Jack said with a grin. “But you love me anyway!”

“Yeah,” Logan sighed.

“Don’t sound so put out about it!” Jack exclaimed, laughing.

Logan pretended to consider Jack’s demand. “Nah,” he said. “This is funnier.”

Jack lightly whacked him with the back of his hand. “Seriously, I love you.”

“I love you too,” Logan said, smiling. “As we just discussed.”

Jack rolled his eyes before grimacing. “Ow. Rolling my eyes is not a good idea. My head just span like crazy.”

“You okay?” Logan asked, immediately concerned.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Jack groaned. “Just...need a minute.”

“Should I count for sixty seconds, or am I to take that figuratively?” Logan asked.

Jack pulled a face without opening his eyes. “You must be feeling better, if you’re being like this.”

“Yeah, well, knowing my boyfriend is alive and recovering well does wonders for my soul,” Logan said, laughing.

Jack opened his eyes, but only into a squint. “You know...I’m not feeling great, still. I might need to rest more.”

“Should I go and come back tomorrow? Or go to your house whenever you’re released?” Logan asked.

“No, I don’t want you to go yet, but if you could just...sit quietly without snarking too much, that’d be great,” Jack said.

“I can do that,” Logan said, grabbing one of the chairs in the room and pulling it over to Jack’s bedside, sitting down and holding Jack’s hand.

They sat there in companionable silence as their parents talked just outside the door. Logan could hear snatches of their conversation, of what Jack and Logan were both told and what they expected the consequences of their actions to be, if there were to be any at all. But most of all, he could hear the relief in Mister and Misses Harkness’ voices, and Ami’s reassuring tone. Everyone was just glad that Jack was alive. Logan couldn’t say he blamed them. He didn’t know what he would do if he didn’t have Jack by his side in some way, shape, or form.

...That was weird to think about, though. Because the way Logan was thinking about Jack was more than just infatuation, and more than just the honeymoon phase. He thought about Jack like he truly, deeply loved him.

[flexiblefish]

Source:[X]

by Gavanndra Hodge 12 JANUARY 2019

Gillian Anderson is hard to pin down. Is she American or English? (Her accent slips between the two, depending on who she is talking to.) Guarded or warm? (She can be either, based on her mood.) Tough or vulnerable? (Or both?)

'‘Because my parents were American and we lived here in the UK, there was always a sense of not quite fitting in. Because of that I’ve always felt a bit of an outsider. I have perpetuated that because that is what feels familiar to me, it is what feels comfortable,’ she explains. When we meet Anderson is English and warm, talking about the birthday parties she has to organise (she has three children, Piper, 24, Oscar, 12, and Felix, 10); and although she is very petite, wearing white patent stiletto boots and slender black trousers, she exudes the commanding charisma that makes her perfect for her imminent roles. Rumour has it that she will be playing Margaret Thatcher in an upcoming series of The Crown, the Netflix series created and co-written by her partner, Peter Morgan. No one is confirming this, but no one is denying it either. Meanwhile, this month she stars in a new Netflix series, Sex Education, in which she plays a sex therapist who lives with her teenage son (Asa Butterfield). And in February Anderson has another plum role: Margo Channing in Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove’s much-anticipated adaptation of All About Eve, also starring Lily James as Eve, with music by PJ Harvey. The play – a modern reinterpretation of the 1950 film, which starred Bette Davis as Channing, a blazing Broadway star who is gradually supplanted by a younger rival – is about ambition and betrayal, femininity and anger, stardom and personal sacrifice. Anderson’s is a bravura role, one that requires not just the cool intensity that we have come to expect from her, but also humour. Channing is deliciously droll, delivering endlessly quotable lines with comic precision (‘I’ll admit I may have seen better days, but I’m still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut’). ‘A couple of years ago my boyfriend Pete said to me, “You know what would be a great role for you? Margo Channing,”’ Anderson says. ‘So I rewatched the film and I thought, “Oh my God, how much fun would that be!”’ Anderson, not one to wait for opportunity, discovered that theatre producer Sonia Friedman had the rights to the script and was working on it with van Hove – Cate Blanchett was set to be Channing. ‘So I thought, “Ah OK, I’ll just slink into the background.” Then my agents got a call to say that she [Blanchett] had backed out due to scheduling conflicts, and there was interest, and was I interested? So I was like, “Yes! When’s the meeting? Now?”’ Van Hove, on the phone from New York, is equally excited to be working with Anderson. ‘Margo needs someone who understands what the theatre is all about, someone who can carry a play, who can occupy the whole stage, and Gillian can do that; she is a fabulous theatre actress. Although, of course, she became iconic for me in the 1990s when she was in The X-Files.’ There is something a little surprising about Ivo van Hove, an avant-garde director celebrated for his reinterpretations of plays and operas such as Hedda Gabler, Antigone and Lulu, professing fandom for a mid-’90s sci-fi series; but that is to forget the huge cultural impact of The X-Files, its quality and its ingenuity. The series was about two FBI agents, played by Anderson and David Duchovny, who attempt to unravel various natural and supernatural mysteries. No one expected it to become such a success, least of all Anderson, who was 24 when she was cast in the show. It was her first major role and it made her a star. She won multiple awards for her portrayal of the sceptical Dr Dana Scully, including an Emmy and a Golden Globe. But such stardom often involves sacrifice and Anderson was suffering. The production schedule for The X-Files was brutal, involving 16-hour days for nine months of the year. Furthermore, in 1994, aged 25, Anderson married Clyde Klotz, assistant art director on the series, and nine months later she gave birth to their daughter, Piper. After three years she and Klotz divorced. It was while she was pregnant that Anderson started having severe panic attacks. ‘I was having them daily,’ she explains, experiencing palpitations, numbness, ‘hallucinations, all of it’. Things didn’t get better once Piper was born. ‘I was a young mother, and shortly after that we were separating, and I was working these crazy hours. I remember periods of time when I was just crying, my make-up was being done over and over again and I was not able to stop crying.’ Anderson sought solace in meditation. ‘I went to somebody and there was a meditation we did together. We went to some quite dark places and I got to see that I could still survive those dark places, I was stronger than they were, and after that the panic attacks stopped.’ Anderson had been having panic attacks, on and off, ‘since high school’. As a teenager she was a daydreamer and a troublemaker who felt different from her peers in Michigan because of her childhood in Harringay, having left the ‘incy-bincy flat with a bathroom outside’ that she and her parents lived in when she was 11 years old, when her family moved back to the US. ‘I started falling in with groups and trying to fit in, until it got to the point when it was like, “I don’t f—ing want to fit in. I want to look completely different to all of you, and stop staring at me because I have a mohawk.” I’d shave the sides of my head with a razor blade and dye my hair different colours.’ Anderson’s parents, Rosemary and Ed, were living in Chicago and were both just 26 when she was born. Soon afterwards the family moved to London so Ed could attend film school, while Rosemary worked as a computer programmer. ‘My parents were working very hard and would often work late. I have lots of memories of playing by myself in the back garden and searching for friends in the neighbourhood because I didn’t have siblings.’ After moving back to America, Rosemary and Ed had two more children, a son and a daughter. Anderson admits that her adolescent waywardness might have been related to the arrival of two new babies in the house. ‘I made trouble and I got attention that way.’ Acting is another way to get attention, something Anderson learnt early on. ‘I remember being in a play when I was in primary school. I was meant to be a Chelsea fan. I started chewing gum on stage and blowing bubbles and got all the attention. I thought, “This is all right, everybody is watching me!”’ But when she reached 16 and started doing more professional productions in America, performing became fundamentally important to her. ‘I enjoyed the connection between performer and audience, the control. And I remember thinking, “I can do this. They are showing me I can do this.” 'It changed everything in my life, knowing I could do something. Prior to that there hadn’t been that moment yet when I found purpose and direction.’ Anderson decided that she wanted to pursue acting as a career and was accepted at The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago. ‘From the very start of school I didn’t go into the dorms, instead I found an apartment with a roommate in a funky neighbourhood. I was the only one who was living out of school. That is my pattern, carving my own thing. 'All through [theatre] school I dressed like I was a member of The Cure. That was how I was in the world, grungy, not considered, not mature. I was forthright and gutsy – I drove myself to Chicago in my dad’s VW van – but slightly falling apart.’ She always knew she would return to England. ‘My childhood here, the smell of north London, it has such a massive tug on me. I really felt, when we moved to the States, that I would eventually have a life back here.’ She and Piper moved to the city after The X-Files ended its original run, and she went on to have two more children, Oscar and Felix, with her now ex-boyfriend, businessman Mark Griffiths (there was also a marriage to British documentary maker Julian Ozanne, which lasted for two years, with the couple separating in 2006).

In the UK Anderson’s career developed in a way that might not have been expected for the golden girl of ’90s sci-fi. She took juicy roles in big-budget period dramas – Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations – and appeared on stage, at the Royal Court and the Donmar Warehouse. But it was her performance in the BBC detective drama The Fall, starting in 2013, that solidified her reputation as the go-to actor for female characters who are charismatic and powerful. Anderson, as DSI Stella Gibson, was imperious in her white silk shirts and high heels, unwavering in her pursuit of the serial killer played by Jamie Dornan. The screenwriter Allan Cubitt created the role of Gibson with Anderson in mind. ‘I wanted Gibson to be an enigmatic figure. Gillian is a riveting actress, but there is an aloofness to her as well. Also I was attempting to reclaim the idea of the powerful femme fatale, without the fatale; someone who is aware that her beauty can be used to help her ends. That she is unafraid of that was radical.’ Anderson was deeply involved in the creation of Gibson’s look, altering the way she thought about herself in the process. ‘What fascinated me about her, and I feel that we were able to find that in the costume design, was that the way she dressed never felt like it was for anyone else but her. I don’t think I have necessarily changed the way I dress since her, but I feel like I am certainly more conscious of what I wear and what it says.’ As a younger woman her style was ‘messy, like a discarded urchin’. She would wear oversized suits and ‘floppy dresses that I had probably stolen from the thrift store’. Whereas now her look is sleek, and she favours brands like Jil Sander, Prada and Dries Van Noten. The Fall was about gender, power and desire; and it was while filming it in Belfast that Anderson began thinking more about the struggles that women face in the 21st century. ‘I was reading all these statistics about young girls being suicidal and having such low self-esteem and I thought, “Surely, given everything that we know, and the fact we are all having these feelings, can we not start a conversation about whether we want this and how to deal with it?”’ This morphed into her writing a book, We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere, with her friend, the writer and activist Jennifer Nadel, in 2017. Alternating between pieces by Anderson and Nadel, it details their own personal struggles, and includes practical sections on how to deal with issues such as anxiety and low self-esteem using practices such as meditation, affirmations and gratitude lists. ‘We both know how it feels to be in emotional pain,’ says Nadel. ‘Both of us have felt lost, and found a spiritual way out. Both of us have experienced radical transformation as a result of the things that we wrote about in that book.’ Cubitt and Nadel each say that among the most impressive things about Anderson, as a collaborator, are her focus and drive. ‘I have never met anyone with Gillian’s ability to focus. And she has a certainty about things, she is not mired in indecision,’ says Nadel. What this means is not just an incredibly long CV, but numerous satellite projects. Anderson has a line of smart, grown-up clothes that she has developed with the brand Winser London (‘I didn’t realise I was so opinionated about buttons!’). She also works for numerous charities, focusing especially on women’s rights and environmental issues. ‘Because of my work ethic and also having had such high expectations, both of myself and other people’s of me, at such a young age, I think it became near to impossible for me to relax at all, to do anything that wasn’t work-related, so a lot of my later adult life has been trying to force myself to do that, and I struggle so hard, and sometimes I lose sight of it. So there is a part of me that wonders if I am slightly addicted [to work], I learnt it so young.’ The scant spare time that Anderson allows herself is spent ‘going to the cinema, to the theatre, watching documentaries’. Piper, who has just completed a degree in production and costume design, is now living in her mother’s basement, and the two of them recently went on a trip to Amsterdam to see van Hove’s four-hour stage adaptation of the Hanya Yanagihara novel A Little Life. That might not sound like everyone’s cup of tea, but Anderson loved it. And despite all the seriousness and the self-examination (or perhaps because of it), she is good company, thoughtful and witty. She has, she says, got happier as she has got older, less self-critical, more self-accepting. ‘I am constantly reminded of the fact that I am not normal. But fortunately I have enough abnormal people around me to help me feel that it is actually OK.’

[heresince93]

Full transcript of Gillian’s Telegraph interview

Gillian Anderson is hard to pin down. Is she American or English? (Her accent slips between the two, depending on who she is talking to.) Guarded or warm? (She can be either, based on her mood.) Tough or vulnerable? (Or both?)

'‘Because my parents were American and we lived here in the UK, there was always a sense of not quite fitting in. Because of that I’ve always felt a bit of an outsider. I have perpetuated that because that is what feels familiar to me, it is what feels comfortable,’ she explains.

When we meet Anderson is English and warm, talking about the birthday parties she has to organise (she has three children, Piper, 24, Oscar, 12, and Felix, 10); and although she is very petite, wearing white patent stiletto boots and slender black trousers, she exudes the commanding charisma that makes her perfect for her imminent roles.

Rumour has it that she will be playing Margaret Thatcher in an upcoming series of The Crown, the Netflix series created and co-written by her partner, Peter Morgan. No one is confirming this, but no one is denying it either. 

Meanwhile, this month she stars in a new Netflix series, Sex Education, in which she plays a sex therapist who lives with her teenage son (Asa Butterfield). And in February Anderson has another plum role: Margo Channing in Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove’s much-anticipated adaptation of All About Eve, also starring Lily James as Eve, with music by PJ Harvey.

The play – a modern reinterpretation of the 1950 film, which starred Bette Davis as Channing, a blazing Broadway star who is gradually supplanted by a younger rival – is about ambition and betrayal, femininity and anger, stardom and personal sacrifice.

Anderson’s is a bravura role, one that requires not just the cool intensity that we have come to expect from her, but also humour. Channing is deliciously droll, delivering endlessly quotable lines with comic precision (‘I’ll admit I may have seen better days, but I’m still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut’).

‘A couple of years ago my boyfriend Pete said to me, “You know what would be a great role for you? Margo Channing,”’ Anderson says. ‘So I rewatched the film and I thought, “Oh my God, how much fun would that be!”’

Anderson, not one to wait for opportunity, discovered that theatre producer Sonia Friedman had the rights to the script and was working on it with van Hove – Cate Blanchett was set to be Channing. ‘So I thought, “Ah OK, I’ll just slink into the background.” Then my agents got a call to say that she [Blanchett] had backed out due to scheduling conflicts, and there was interest, and was I interested? So I was like, “Yes! When’s the meeting? Now?”’

Van Hove, on the phone from New York, is equally excited to be working with Anderson. ‘Margo needs someone who understands what the theatre is all about, someone who can carry a play, who can occupy the whole stage, and Gillian can do that; she is a fabulous theatre actress. Although, of course, she became iconic for me in the 1990s when she was in The X-Files.’

There is something a little surprising about Ivo van Hove, an avant-garde director celebrated for his reinterpretations of plays and operas such as Hedda Gabler, Antigone and Lulu, professing fandom for a mid-’90s sci-fi series; but that is to forget the huge cultural impact of The X-Files, its quality and its ingenuity.

The series was about two FBI agents, played by Anderson and David Duchovny, who attempt to unravel various natural and supernatural mysteries. No one expected it to become such a success, least of all Anderson, who was 24 when she was cast in the show. It was her first major role and it made her a star.

She won multiple awards for her portrayal of the sceptical Dr Dana Scully, including an Emmy and a Golden Globe. But such stardom often involves sacrifice and Anderson was suffering.

The production schedule for The X-Files was brutal, involving 16-hour days for nine months of the year. Furthermore, in 1994, aged 25, Anderson married Clyde Klotz, assistant art director on the series, and nine months later she gave birth to their daughter, Piper. After three years she and Klotz divorced. It was while she was pregnant that Anderson started having severe panic attacks.

‘I was having them daily,’ she explains, experiencing palpitations, numbness, ‘hallucinations, all of it’. Things didn’t get better once Piper was born. ‘I was a young mother, and shortly after that we were separating, and I was working these crazy hours. I remember periods of time when I was just crying, my make-up was being done over and over again and I was not able to stop crying.’

Anderson sought solace in meditation. ‘I went to somebody and there was a meditation we did together. We went to some quite dark places and I got to see that I could still survive those dark places, I was stronger than they were, and after that the panic attacks stopped.’

Anderson had been having panic attacks, on and off, ‘since high school’. As a teenager she was a daydreamer and a troublemaker who felt different from her peers in Michigan because of her childhood in Harringay, having left the ‘incy-bincy flat with a bathroom outside’ that she and her parents lived in when she was 11 years old, when her family moved back to the US.

‘I started falling in with groups and trying to fit in, until it got to the point when it was like, “I don’t f—ing want to fit in. I want to look completely different to all of you, and stop staring at me because I have a mohawk.” I’d shave the sides of my head with a razor blade and dye my hair different colours.’

Anderson’s parents, Rosemary and Ed, were living in Chicago and were both just 26 when she was born. Soon afterwards the family moved to London so Ed could attend film school, while Rosemary worked as a computer programmer.

‘My parents were working very hard and would often work late. I have lots of memories of playing by myself in the back garden and searching for friends in the neighbourhood because I didn’t have siblings.’

After moving back to America, Rosemary and Ed had two more children, a son and a daughter. Anderson admits that her adolescent waywardness might have been related to the arrival of two new babies in the house. ‘I made trouble and I got attention that way.’

Acting is another way to get attention, something Anderson learnt early on. ‘I remember being in a play when I was in primary school. I was meant to be a Chelsea fan. I started chewing gum on stage and blowing bubbles and got all the attention. I thought, “This is all right, everybody is watching me!”’

But when she reached 16 and started doing more professional productions in America, performing became fundamentally important to her. ‘I enjoyed the connection between performer and audience, the control. And I remember thinking, “I can do this. They are showing me I can do this.”

'It changed everything in my life, knowing I could do something. Prior to that there hadn’t been that moment yet when I found purpose and direction.’

Anderson decided that she wanted to pursue acting as a career and was accepted at The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago. ‘From the very start of school I didn’t go into the dorms, instead I found an apartment with a roommate in a funky neighbourhood. I was the only one who was living out of school. That is my pattern, carving my own thing.

'All through [theatre] school I dressed like I was a member of The Cure. That was how I was in the world, grungy, not considered, not mature. I was forthright and gutsy – I drove myself to Chicago in my dad’s VW van – but slightly falling apart.’

She always knew she would return to England. ‘My childhood here, the smell of north London, it has such a massive tug on me. I really felt, when we moved to the States, that I would eventually have a life back here.’

She and Piper moved to the city after The X-Files ended its original run, and she went on to have two more children, Oscar and Felix, with her now ex-boyfriend, businessman Mark Griffiths (there was also a marriage to British documentary maker Julian Ozanne, which lasted for two years, with the couple separating in 2006).

In the UK Anderson’s career developed in a way that might not have been expected for the golden girl of ’90s sci-fi. She took juicy roles in big-budget period dramas – Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations – and appeared on stage, at the Royal Court and the Donmar Warehouse. But it was her performance in the BBC detective drama The Fall, starting in 2013, that solidified her reputation as the go-to actor for female characters who are charismatic and powerful.

Anderson, as DSI Stella Gibson, was imperious in her white silk shirts and high heels, unwavering in her pursuit of the serial killer played by Jamie Dornan. The screenwriter Allan Cubitt created the role of Gibson with Anderson in mind. ‘I wanted Gibson to be an enigmatic figure. Gillian is a riveting actress, but there is an aloofness to her as well. Also I was attempting to reclaim the idea of the powerful femme fatale, without the fatale; someone who is aware that her beauty can be used to help her ends. That she is unafraid of that was radical.’

Anderson was deeply involved in the creation of Gibson’s look, altering the way she thought about herself in the process. ‘What fascinated me about her, and I feel that we were able to find that in the costume design, was that the way she dressed never felt like it was for anyone else but her. I don’t think I have necessarily changed the way I dress since her, but I feel like I am certainly more conscious of what I wear and what it says.’

As a younger woman her style was ‘messy, like a discarded urchin’. She would wear oversized suits and ‘floppy dresses that I had probably stolen from the thrift store’. Whereas now her look is sleek, and she favours brands like Jil Sander, Prada and Dries Van Noten.

The Fall was about gender, power and desire; and it was while filming it in Belfast that Anderson began thinking more about the struggles that women face in the 21st century. ‘I was reading all these statistics about young girls being suicidal and having such low self-esteem and I thought, “Surely, given everything that we know, and the fact we are all having these feelings, can we not start a conversation about whether we want this and how to deal with it?”’

This morphed into her writing a book, We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere, with her friend, the writer and activist Jennifer Nadel, in 2017. Alternating between pieces by Anderson and Nadel, it details their own personal struggles, and includes practical sections on how to deal with issues such as anxiety and low self-esteem using practices such as meditation, affirmations and gratitude lists.

‘We both know how it feels to be in emotional pain,’ says Nadel. ‘Both of us have felt lost, and found a spiritual way out. Both of us have experienced radical transformation as a result of the things that we wrote about in that book.’ 

Cubitt and Nadel each say that among the most impressive things about Anderson, as a collaborator, are her focus and drive.

‘I have never met anyone with Gillian’s ability to focus. And she has a certainty about things, she is not mired in indecision,’ says Nadel. What this means is not just an incredibly long CV, but numerous satellite projects. Anderson has a line of smart, grown-up clothes that she has developed with the brand Winser London (‘I didn’t realise I was so opinionated about buttons!’).

She also works for numerous charities, focusing especially on women’s rights and environmental issues. ‘Because of my work ethic and also having had such high expectations, both of myself and other people’s of me, at such a young age, I think it became near to impossible for me to relax at all, to do anything that wasn’t work-related, so a lot of my later adult life has been trying to force myself to do that, and I struggle so hard, and sometimes I lose sight of it. So there is a part of me that wonders if I am slightly addicted [to work], I learnt it so young.’

The scant spare time that Anderson allows herself is spent ‘going to the cinema, to the theatre, watching documentaries’.

Piper, who has just completed a degree in production and costume design, is now living in her mother’s basement, and the two of them recently went on a trip to Amsterdam to see van Hove’s four-hour stage adaptation of the Hanya Yanagihara novel A Little Life. That might not sound like everyone’s cup of tea, but Anderson loved it.

And despite all the seriousness and the self-examination (or perhaps because of it), she is good company, thoughtful and witty. She has, she says, got happier as she has got older, less self-critical, more self-accepting.

‘I am constantly reminded of the fact that I am not normal. But fortunately I have enough abnormal people around me to help me feel that it is actually OK.’

All About Eve is running at the Noël Coward Theatre from 2 February to 11 May 2019

[simping-on-the-daily]

Oh look, a meme.

[berniesrevolution]

You will not be surprised to be told that Tucker Carlson’s new book, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, contains a series of attacks on diversity, immigration, feminism, and “identity politics.” You may, however, be surprised to be told that the book contains high praise for Ralph Nader, quotes from Studs Terkel, laments the disappearance of the anti-capitalist left, and presents Jeff Bezos as one of its central villains. Carlson has written a book that is as staunchly nationalist as one would expect. Yet it’s also a little bit socialist.

Carlson’s basic framework would commonly be described as “populism.” There are the people, and then there are the “ruling class” elites. The rich and powerful care only about themselves. They do not care about Middle America, and have presided over the opioid epidemic, the hollowing out of industrial towns, and exploding inequality. Meanwhile, ordinary workers suffer. At times, he almost sounds like Bernie Sanders. His analysis is persuasive, well-written, and often funny. It’s also terrifying, because elsewhere in the book, Carlson makes it clear: he wants a white-majority country, thinks immigrants are parasitic and destructive, misses traditional gender hierarchies, and dismisses the significance of climate change. Carlson’s political worldview is destructive and inhumane. Yet because it has a kernel of accuracy, it will easily tempt readers toward accepting an alarmingly xenophobic, white nationalist worldview. Carlson’s book shows us how a next generation fascist politics could co-opt left economic critiques in the service of a fundamentally anti-left agenda. It also shows us what we need to be able to effectively respond to.

First, let’s look at the parts that are most right, and perhaps most unexpected. In an analysis almost identical to that of leftists like Thomas Frank, Carlson says that Republicans and Democrats are now both beholden to corporate power. Sometime in the 1990s, Carlson says, he began wondering “why liberals weren’t complaining about big business anymore,” and had started celebrating “corporate chieftains” like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the Google guys. Ralph Nader should be a hero to all liberals, spending his days “greeting a parade of awestruck liberal pilgrims” from a retirement home. Instead, he is “reviled,” even though “every point Nader made was fair” and “some were indisputably true.” Suddenly “both sides were aligned on the virtues of unrestrained market capitalism… left and right were taking virtually indistinguishable positions on many economic issues, especially on wages.”

The “prolabor” Democrats, Carlson says, were “empathetic and humane” and “suspicious of power.” But today they have disappeared, and the party of the New Deal is now a party of Wall Street. Carlson points out that Hillary Clinton won wealthy enclaves like Aspen, Marin County, and Connecticut’s Fairfield County (the hedge fund capital of the country). “Employees of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon donated to Hillary over Trump by a margin of 60-to-1,” and while “Seven financial firms donated 47.6 million to Hillary,” they gave Trump “a total of $19,000, about the price of a used pickup.”

As a result, Carlson says, Democrats are now largely silent on labor issues: “When was the last time you heard a politician decry Apple’s treatment of workers, let alone introduce legislation intended to address it?” Corporations make vaguely “socially liberal” noises, like decrying gun violence and being pro-LGBT, and as a result escape criticism for mistreating their workers or contributing to economic inequality. Carlson cites Uber, which has prominent liberal Arianna Huffington on its board and has had to commit to reforming its “bro culture.” And yet it still treats its drivers like crap:

“[Uber is] running an enormously profitable business on the backs of exploited workers… An obedient business press [has] focused on the ‘flexibility’ Uber’s contractors supposedly enjoyed. … [But] Feudal lords took more responsibility for their serfs than Uber does for its drivers… Uber executives weren’t ashamed… They sold exploitation as opportunity, and virtually nobody called them on it.”

What happens, Carlson says, is that corporations “embrace a progressive agenda that from an accounting perspective costs them nothing.” They are, in effect, purchasing “indulgences from the church of cultural liberalism.” Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In and Mark Zuckerberg is floated as a possible Democratic presidential candidate, but Facebook is an evil corporation to its core. Sean Parker has admitted that Facebook was engineered to be addictive, that its designers thought: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?… We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once it a while.. To get you to contribute more content.” Carlson notes that the company commits “relentless invasions of the public’s privacy,” and that epidemiologists have linked the product “with declining psychological and even physical health.” Carlson writes:

“Evidence has mounted that Facebook is an addictive product that harms users, and that Zuckerberg knew that from the beginning but kept selling it to unknowing customers. Those facts would be enough to tarnish most reputations, if not spark congressional hearings. Yet Zuckerberg remains a celebrated national icon.”

We know Facebook is manipulating people’s emotions to sell advertising, and yet we still get headlines like “How To Raise The Next Mark Zuckerberg.” Or look at Amazon. Jeff Bezos supported Hillary Clinton for president, yet “no textile mill ever dehumanized its workers more thoroughly than an Amazon warehouse.” Carlson asks: “when was the last time you heard a liberal criticize working conditions at Amazon?… “Liberals and Jeff Bezos [are now] playing for the same team.” Successful businessmen “pose as political activists,” and pitch their products as woke. That way: “affluent consumers get to imagine they’re fighting the power by purchasing the products, even as they make a tiny group of people richer and more powerful. There’s never been a more brilliant marketing strategy.” He goes on:

“The marriage of market capitalism to progressive social values may be the most destructive combination in American economic history. Someone needs to protect workers from the terrifying power of market forces, which tend to accelerate change to intolerable levels and crush the weak. For generations, labor unions filled that role. That’s over. Left and right now agree that a corporation’s only real responsibility is to its shareholders. Corporations can openly mistreat their employees (or “contractors”), but for the price of installing transgender bathrooms they buy a pass. Shareholders win, workers lose. Bowing to the diversity agenda is a lot cheaper than raising wages.”

Carlson mocks the “socially liberal” Davos elite who hand-wring about inequality while reaping its fruits. He points to the example of Chelsea Clinton, who talked nobly about her values (“I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t… That wasn’t the metric of success that I wanted in my life”) before buying a $10 million, 5,000 square foot apartment in the Flatiron District that spanned an entire city block. Chelsea Clinton’s career, for Carlson, shows how contemporary believers in “meritocracy” benefit from an unjust and nepotistic system: Clinton was paid $600,000 a year as a “reporter” for NBC despite appearing on the network for a sum total of 58 minutes. The bubble of privilege that many elites inhabit was exemplified in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, which suggested that “Things in America are Fine.” (The slogan was actually “America Is Already Great.”) Carlson is not wrong here: Hillary Clinton herself was so out of touch that she is still saying things like “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product… So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

Carlson also says that there has been a troubling tendency for both sides to embrace the military-industrial complex. Key Democratic figures supported the Iraq War (e.g. Feinstein, Kerry, Clinton, Biden, Edwards, Reid, Schumer). It was New York Timesreporters who contributed to scaremongering about Saddam in the leadup to the war, the New York Times op-ed page where you can find contributions like “Bomb Syria, Even If It’s Illegal” or “Bomb North Korea, Before It’s Too Late,” and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman who said that Iraq War had been “unquestionably worth doing” because it told Middle Easterners to “suck on this.” Barack Obama (who was given the Nobel Peace Prize, Carlson says, for “not being George W. Bush”) killed thousands of people with drones, including American citizens, prosecuted whistleblowers, kept Guantanamo open, and failed to rein in the vast global surveillance apparatus. Hillary Clinton pushed aggressively for military action in Libya, which destabilized the country. There is a D.C. consensus, Carlson says, and it is pro-war. Some of the book’s most amusing passages come when Carlson flays neoconservative hacks like Max Boot and Bill Kristol, who have now become allies of the Democratic Party in paranoia about Russia. Boot’s career, he says, publishing articles like “The Case for American Empire” and advocating invasion after invasion, shows us how “the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, breaking things along the way.” The hawkish consensus is no joke, though, and Carlson says he misses the liberal peaceniks, who “were right” when they warned that “war is not the answer, it’s a means to an end, and a very costly one.”

To many on the left, everything Carlson says here will be familiar. The phenomenon he’s pointing to, by which Democrats and Republicans both became free market capitalists,  has a name: neoliberalism. Larry Summers was quite open about it when he said that “we are now all Friedmanites.” Carlson���s point about how corporations whitewash exploitative practices by appearing socially progressive is one leftists make frequently (see, for example, Yasmin Nair’s essay “Bourgeois Feminist Bullshit” and Nair and Eli Massey’s “Inclusion In The Atrocious“). The foreign policy stuff is a little off: it’s not that Democrats used to be pacifists, since the Vietnam tragedy was initiated by JFK and expanded by Lyndon Johnson. Empire has always been a bipartisan project, antiwar voices in the minority. Aside from the suggestion that this is new, it’s accurate to say that American elites have largely embraced the projection of American military power.

But Carlson is not going to be joining the Sanders 2020 campaign. His book has a dark side: a deep suspicion of cultural progressivism, inclusion, and diversity. Carlson believes that liberal immigration policies have been imposed because they serve elite interests (Democrats get votes and Republicans get cheap labor for Big Business). As a result, the fabric of the country is fraying. He writes:

Thanks to mass immigration, America has experienced greater demographic change in the last few decades than any other country in history has undergone during peacetime… If you grew up in America, suddenly nothing looks the same. Your neighbors are different. So is the landscape and the customs and very often the languages you hear on the street. You may not recognize your own hometown. Human beings aren’t wired for that. They can’t digest change at this pace… [W]e are told these changes are entirely good… Those who oppose it are bigots. We must celebrate the fact that a nation that was overwhelmingly European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language.

To some people, what Carlson writes here may not seem racist. And like many conservatives, he resents having what he sees as common sense treated as bigotry. I don’t think there’s any way around it, though: Carlson’s problem is that the United States looks different, that it’s not “European” any more and has no “ethnic majority.” He’s explicitly talking the language of ethnicity: it’s destabilizing that we’re not a white-majority country anymore. This isn’t simply about, say, the “Judeo-Christian ethic” or embracing the “American idea.” If that were the case, then it would be hard to make a case for why we shouldn’t let in the Catholic members of the migrant caravan, who love American culture and want to march across the border saying the Pledge of Allegiance. The problem is that they are not European, that they change the look of the place, that they disrupt the “ethnic majority.” Europeans are the real Americans, the ones that hold the fabric of the nation together, and minorities, people who are different, threaten to undo that fabric.

(Continue Reading)

[mandeebobandee]

So @introverted-happiness did a commission for me! They did one with Chelsea without a ponytail and one with one. The character on the left in both of these is Chelsea, who functions as both my Creativity in the verse I made with my own Sides and as a character in both versions of my Harry Potter Sanders Sides AU.

The character on the right in both of these is Andrea, who functions as both my Anxiety in the verse I made with my own Sides and, thus far, only a character in the version of my Harry Potter Sanders Sides AU where Virgil is sorted into Ravenclaw (or the ‘Virgilclaw AU’ as I have chosen to nickname it XD).

I would like to note that in the first version of my Hogwarts AU, Chelsea and Andrea are not a couple - though this is not because I am averse to them being a couple, but rather because Chelsea is already dating Era in that version (also Andrea has not even fully showed up in that version soooo kind of hard for them to be an item in a story Andrea hasn’t turned up in save for a very brief mention). As for the Virgilclaw AU...well, we’ll see how things go in that story. =) 

Thank you again, Vic! I absolutely love what you did. <3 

[tabloidtoc]

National Enquirer, May 6

Cover: Dying Angelina Jolie leaves $116M fortune to son Maddox and other kids don’t get a dime 

Page 2: Elton John collapses and needs wheelchair as lifetime of hard partying and wild sex catches up to him 

Page 3: Dolly Parton’s secret battle with mental illness 

Page 4: High-flying Tiger Woods shuns bedridden brother Kevin 

Page 5: Shrinks tell all about Tiger Woods comeback 

Page 6: American Idol ratings hit rock bottom and it will be cancelled, relapse fears for Paula Abdul after her dad’s death, Hoda Kotb’s Today show takeover plan exposed 

Page 7: Queen Elizabeth won’t let Meghan Markle touch the royal jewels, Prince Harry’s vain wife Meghan Markle plans post-baby body work 

Page 8: Lori Loughlin moves out on husband Mossimo Giannulli because she blames him for prison predicament, cheating college moms Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman have turned on each other 

Page 9: Wendy Williams single and ready to mingle, Tom Cruise may be facing the legal fight of his life with a bombshell case threatening to shake Scientology to the core 

Page 10: Hot Shots -- Kate Winslet on set of Ammonite, Busy Philipps and Michelle Monaghan and Whitney Cummings, Neil Patrick Harris and husband David Burtka 

Page 11: Mariah Carey puts back on 40 lbs, dippy Madonna drags kids to Kabbalah 

Page 12: Straight Shuter -- Chelsea Handler has yakked nonstop while promoting her latest book but her lips are sealed about former BFF Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon, Jennifer Lopez treated a fan meet-and-greet poorly, Queer Eye are expanding with a spinoff featuring gay guys throwing weddings in small towns 

Page 13: Pamela Anderson is terrified of another sex tape leak this time with Julian Assange, Julian Assange’s outrageous antics while in the Ecuadorian embassy in London 

Page 14: True Crime 

Page 17: Real Life 

Page 18: Cover Story -- Dying Angelina Jolie leaves $116 million to son Maddox, other kids lose out to teen who took her side against Brad 

Page 20: How to save more money this year 

Page 21: Katie Holmes dumpbed by Jamie Foxx again 

Page 22: Health Watch, Ask the Vet 

Page 25: Bette Midler caught out without makeup or a wig looking nothing like the Divine Miss M, Ryan O’Neal selling off a prized portrait of late partner Farrah Fawcett to ensure his drug-addict son Redmond never gets his hands on it 

Page 28: Goldie Hawn buys her own ring to make Kurt Russell say yes, pot keeps Maury Povich and Connie Chung’s 35-year marriage on a high, Hollywood Hookups -- DWTS pros Val Chmerkovskiy and Jenna Johnson married, Dina Lohan’s online boyfriend Jesse Nadler has dumped her over jealousy issues, Naomi Campbell has ditched boytoy Liam Payne because she got bored 

Page 30: Katy Pervy blow-up sex doll has Katy Perry on the warpath, Johnny Depp lying low as Amber Heard cried abuse 

Page 32: Brave Alex Trebek prepares for the end, aching Ozzy Osbourne backs out of tour, medical emergency sidelines Morrissey, Mick Jagger is worried about his health and will take his physician on the road when the Rolling Stones resume touring 

Page 42: Red Carpet Stars & Stumbles -- Sophie Turner, Priyanka Chopra, Brie Larson, Rita Wilson 

Page 45: Spot the Differences -- Ron Perlman, Sander Thomas and Oliver Hudson in Splitting Up Together 

[im-a-space-gay]

Is This A Thing?

Has anyone else watched Barbie: Video Game Hero before?

Here's an idea.

Barbie: Video Game Hero, Sanders Sides AU.

Like, picture it.

Barbie: Thomas

Chelsea: Remy

Teresa: Talyn

Renee: Joan

Cutie: Emile

Bella: Roman

Kris: Deceit

Crystal: Virgil

Gaia: Logan

Maia: Patton

Like,

Can anyone else see it?

[rapeculturerealities]

We know what McCain was good at and what he was praised for, but we’re not hearing about some of the darker sides of his political record. And there’s nothing wrong with bringing some light to the darker parts of a politician’s, a public figure’s record. This is not some sort of dancing on his grave. This is talking about what he did.

we’re being told for the last 48 hours that John McCain was the embodiment of civility in U.S. politics, he was a bastion of decency. Even Bernie Sanders used that phrase. And yet, even McCain himself probably wouldn’t recognize that description. He was a well-known cranky and rude and abusive figure. He called antiwar protesters “low-life scum.” He mocked Chelsea Clinton as ugly. He made jokes about rape and spousal abuse. He famously called his Vietnamese captors “go*ks” and said, “I won’t apologize for that.” He used the C-word against his wife in public. He has a long history of not behaving in a civil manner. He ran a presidential campaign in 2008, Amy, where at the rallies of McCain and Palin people shouted out “terrorist,” “traitor,” “off with his head,” “kill him,” in reference to Barack Obama. Today we condemn Donald Trump for holding rallies where they say “lock her up.” Where is the condemnation of those rallies in 2008 that John McCain presided over?

read more

[toptrending2]

Liverpool and Chelsea could make a move for Sander Berge in January

Liverpool and Chelsea could make a move for Sander Berge in January

Liverpool and Chelsea could make a move for Sheffield United midfielder Sander Berge during the January transfer window. Berge has been one of the best-performing midfielders in the Championship this season. The Norwegian international has played in the Premier League with Sheffield United in the past but stuck with the Yorkshire side after they got relegated to the Championship. There’s no doubt…