#somehow going back in time to the 1930s as Audrey

[my-little-random-world]

ANNA MADELEY 𝒂𝒔 KATE KENDRICK 𝒂𝒏𝒅 DAVID TENNANT 𝒂𝒔 TOM KENDRICK | Deadwater Fell (2020) S01E01

[blind-rats]

But Veronica Mars is very much the child of many pop culture influences, especially on television. Creator Rob Thomas combined elements of several different series to create something unique and wonderful. If you’re diving into the world of Veronica Mars for the first time, or are a returning fan, here are four series that contributed to its creation that you might want to check out before the new season drops.

Twin Peaks

The influence of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks on almost every single “prestige television” series over the past thirty years is immeasurable. But the show’s fingerprints are especially all over Veronica Mars. The 1990-91 cult classic was centered on the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer, a character we never see in the series except via flashbacks and in the ephemeral “red room.” Her girlfriends from school, Donna Hayward and Audrey Horne, become teenage detectives obsessed with finding her killer. This all leads to a mystery that covered the show’s full first season and part of its second, and which became a national obsession.

Veronica Mars takes a similar approach. When we first meet the titular character, she’s mourning the death of her best friend Lily Kane. Much like Laura Palmer, she was a popular and well-liked student who hid a much wilder side. One that ultimately got her killed. The mystery of both girls’ murder was at the core of both series. Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas cites the show as an influence but said in an interview  “they didn’t solve anything. When you realized they were jerking you around, that’s when it fell off.” However, Thomas might be misremembering. Peaks’ central mystery was solved 14 episodes in… and it took a full 22 chapters for the Lily Kane murder to be solved!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Veronica Mars premiered exactly one year after Buffy went off the air, but many Buffy fans felt the influence of on this new show from the get-go. Both shows centered on small, affluent towns in California that are the focal points for much strange goings-on. In the case of Neptune, CA on Veronica Mars, those goings-on are not supernatural. But that’s really the main difference. The rest of the similarities are numerous. Like Buffy Summers, Veronica is a plucky and sarcastic high school girl, who despite everything is a social outcast. Yet the other students all know to come to both girls when they need the kind of help only they know how to give because of their special skills.

Veronica’s supporting cast is also very much from the Buffy template. Computer genius Mac is her analog for Willow Rosenberg, while her platonic male bestie Wallace Fennel is a stand-in for Xander Harris in many ways. Veronica has a very similar relationship to her dad that Buffy does to her surrogate dad, Rupert Giles. And her volatile relationship with boyfriend Logan Echolls is reminiscent in some ways of Buffy’s love affair with the vampiric Angel. Even in its day, the show was well aware of the similarities and played upon them. Buffy alum like Alyson Hannigan, Charisma Carpenter and even Buffy creator Joss Whedon appeared on the show. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, clearly everyone involved with Buffy was very flattered indeed.

Freaks and Geeks

It might not seem so upon first glance, but the cult “one season wonder” series Freaks and Geeks was also a huge inspiration for Veronica Mars. The 1999 Paul Feig/Judd Apatow produced a show about high schoolers in the early ’80s was a very real presentation at how kids interact with each other and the social constructs of high school life. Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas loved the series, as did many critics at the time. But it found a hard time finding a “hook” for the audience by just being a nostalgic slice-of-life drama. It was sadly canceled after one season.

So Thomas decided to use the teenage dynamics of Freaks and Geeks for inspiration on how his kids interacted, but surround it all with a noir-mystery story to get audiences sucked in. In an interview with Vulture back in 2014, Thomas said, “If you’re going to try to get a teen show on television, give them something high-concept, something that they can market. So I tried approaching my teen character piece through a high-concept idea.” He then added, “I can get a teen show on the air if I sell it as a teenage private eye, and then I can still somehow get some of these small-story show ideas in there.” It might have been another cult show in the end as well, but it lasted two seasons longer than Freaks and Geeks did!

Nancy Drew

If you say the words “teenage girl detective,” chances are the first thing anyone says in response is “Nancy Drew.” Even if the person saying it has never seen or read a single thing involving the character! That’s how deeply synonymous the concept of Nancy Drew is with “teenage girl detectives.” The character first appeared in 1930 and has since gone on to dozens of novels, movies, and a pair of television series. Soon there will be a third one on the way via the CW.

The character has undergone many revisions since being created nearly a century ago, but she has always remained a plucky teenage sleuth who lives with her single dad, much like Veronica Mars does. But the main inspiration Nancy Drew gave Rob Thomas was to create another young female detective in the popular culture who wasn’t Nancy. Veronica was created to finally eclipse her as America’s #1 teen detective. In an interview with NPR, Thomas once said “Nancy Drew…like, I feel like she had her run.” Still, it’s impossible to deny that without Nancy, there’s no Veronica.

[aphrodite-l-writes]

Suffered Enough

Pair: Bucky Barnes x OC

Warnings: Self-deprecating thoughts, some language maybe?

A/N: Hi Y'all! I will be writing reader-inserts in the future so please send in requests! I know many people aren’t huge fans of OC characters but I just wanted to give everyone a little promo of how I like to write? Please send in some feedback as this is the first thing I have published and I hope it is okay! Love xx

(Part 2)

*

I don't know you

But I want you

All the more for that

My morning coffee run was interrupted by the most attractive man I had ever seen, everything about him radiating beauty. His hair was pulled away from his face, highlighting his strong facial features. The way his skin glowed in the light was almost godly. He chimed a quiet thank you to the barista who smiled at him in return as he sat close to the window. He pulled a slightly-used copy of ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ from his small backpack, opening it to what appeared to be the last chapter. He pulled a pencil from his bun, his hair tumbling onto his shoulders as he scribbled a short note in the margin of the novel.

I was so engrossed in the behaviours of the man that I missed the same barista calling my own name. I scrambled to grab my large cup, smiling at him before dropping a tip in the jar. Every piece of me wanted to know him more. He seemed so far away from this world, yet somehow so close to the earth.

Words fall through me

And always fool me

And I can't react

And games that never amount

To more than they're meant

Will play themselves out

Once again, I found myself admiring the man in the coffee shop. He had finished Williams’ play and had moved on to ‘Lord of the Flies,’ one of my personal least favourite classics. I caressed my cup and pretending to be typing as I watched him stand, making his way towards me. His piercing eyes bore into mine as he stopped softly in front of me.

“I know the arm is weird but can you stop staring at it, please.” He huffed, exhausted.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Which I really didn’t. I had yet to notice the fact that one of his hands were metal.

“Oh, um, you weren’t staring at my arm?” He blushed, the soft pink making his features stand out further as he reached his arm to the back of his neck, rubbing it out of embarrassment.

“No, I hadn’t noticed your arm until now. I like literature. You have been reading some classics and I was just curious to see how you reacted.”

My well-formulated excuse seemed to be convincing as he relaxed his shoulders. “I am so sorry for accusing you like that.”

“You don’t need to apologise, I’m sure it would’ve been weird. I’m really sorry!”

He stood awkwardly in front of me for a while, clearly thinking, confused about what to say. “How are you liking Lord of the Flies?” I asked with a small smile.

“May I?” He gestured towards the chair and I nodded, probably too enthusiastically. “I like it, but it moves slowly. It’s a great concept but the execution is strange. How do you feel about it?”

“Personally, I absolutely hate it.” I laughed at my remark and he smiled softly. “On the other hand, I think it’s an interesting concept but the pacing is odd.”

“I agree. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was much better.”

I smiled in agreement before catching a glimpse of his wristwatch. 12:37. I had been so occupied by the man that I completely lost track of the time. “Fuck, I’m sorry but I have to go. I have a class to teach in 20 minutes! It was lovely to finally talk to you…”

“James. James Barnes.” His grin made my stomach feel as if it was going to explode, his eyes glistening and his teeth perfectly white.

“Until we meet again James Barnes.” I smiled in return before collecting my things and beginning to leave.

“Wait, I never got your name!”

“Oh, sorry. It’s Audrey.”

“Just Audrey?

I nodded over my shoulder with a grin before rushing out of the cafe and to the high school, giddy from excitement over the perfect man in the cafe. James.

Falling slowly, eyes that know me

And I can't go back

Moods that take me and erase me

And I'm painted black

Bucky smiled over at me as we sat atop his car, overlooking the city, his blue eyes glistening in the moonlight. The cool breeze all but bothered me as he had placed his jacket over my shoulders, holding it onto my body by bringing me closer to his side. After only knowing the man for a month, I felt surprisingly comfortable with him. His friend Steve was worried that the two of us were moving too fast, but he grew to like me, at least it seemed that way.

I felt his lips on my cheek and snuggled my face further into his neck. “Am I finally going to know that elusive last name of yours?” He teased.

“Oh Barnes, only since you asked so nicely. My full name is Audrey Margaret Martinelli.”

“Martinelli?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I knew a girl with that last name once.”

“Really? Maybe it was one of my cousins?”

“I doubt it. It was a long time ago anyway.”

His sudden dismissive behaviour was curious and I sat up, holding his face between my two small hands. I stared into his eyes which studied my face intently, soon filling with realisation. He pushed himself away from me, my hands falling from his face.

“James? What’s wrong?”

“Please, Audrey, drop it. It’s nothing. Get in the car, I’ll take you home.”

“Buck, please…”

“It’s nothing, please… Can we just go home?”

You have suffered enough

And warred with yourself

It's time that you won

The incessant ringing of my phone woke me and I groaned as I saw an unknown number. I contemplated just not answering but decided against it, picking up the phone. The phone on the other line was definitely not a friend of mine.

“Audrey?”

“Yes, that’s me?”

“This is Steve Rogers. Bucky’s friend.”

My body jolted upright at the mention of James. After a week of having ignored texts and mixed calls, it was just what I needed. “Oh my God, Hi Steve. Is he okay?”

“He is okay, but he hasn’t left his apartment. I was wondering if you could meet me here. I’m guessing he would probably want to talk to you about it too.”

“Thank you, Steve. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I ran from the small apartment I lived in, to my bike, pedalling as if my body could power it forever. I couldn’t feel the burn in my thighs at all as I sped through the busy New York streets, dodging pedestrians with skill. Before I knew it, I was out the front of the quaint building, leaving my bike attached to a post outside and sprinting as fast as I could up the stairs.

My hand was raised, ready to knock on the chipping door, but Steve beat me to it. He flung the door open, ushering me in with a smile of sympathy. I saw Bucky sitting at the table, his head in his hands, elbows firmly placed. It was possibly the saddest sight I had come to see. Someone so kind, so strong yet so very broken.

“James…” I spoke as softly as I could as I stepped towards the fragile man. He flinched at the mention of his first name.

“Bucky...please.” It was as if he was begging me.

“I’m sorry Bucky, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“No, it’s my fault. It’s all my fault.” He began to sob and my heart felt as if it was shattering. “I shouldn’t even be here, alive.”

“Bucky, please don’t say that!”

“Steve, why did you bring her here? Huh, to rub it in? The fact that I can never be happy?” He spat, fire filling his wet eyes.

“Buck, I think you need to tell her. I mean, we’re all connected. She is her granddaughter.” Steve was almost as cautious as I was.

“Wait, how would you two know my grandmother? Angie is dead, she has been for a while.”

“I know Audrey. I don’t think I properly introduced myself. I’m Steve Rogers, Captain America.”

My heart rose to my throat. The man standing in front of me had been through hell, yes, but he knew my grandmother. He knew her friend Peggy well. He must know more than I do about her, about their relationship, about Angie’s life.

“Yes, and I would love to hear you talk more about my grandmother, but what has that got to do with Bucky?”

“Buck, do you want to tell her?” Steve’s question was answered with a small nod.

“Auds, doll, come sit.”

I sat directly in front of the man I had come to know so well, grasping his hands in mine. He was quick to tell me when he met Steve, in the 1930s. Everything in me was telling me to run at that exact moment but something made me stay. Whether it was that I had grown to almost love the man, but he was good and kind. He deserved love as much as everyone else.

Soon, he had told me about how Hydra forced him into becoming the Winter Soldier but how his reform led to him becoming somewhat an asset to the Avengers, mostly, Steve’s cause. His eyes were filled with so much pain over what he had done to people, or what he was brainwashed to do.

“I know it’s all a bit much. You can leave, please, I can’t bear to have you tell me how disgusting I am.” He pulled his hands from my own.

“Bucky, I don’t think you are anything less than the kindest, most wonderful man I have met.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Yes, I do. You are extraordinary Bucky Barnes. You are human and you are beautiful and I don’t know why you had to suffer so much, but you deserve to be happy now. You have felt so much pain and now you are free to be happy.” I smiled up at him, standing to meet him and bringing my hand up to his face, wiping a fallen tear from his cheek.

He pulled me into his chest, pressing a kiss to my forehead. I stayed in his large arms, cherishing the affection while it lasted. “Thank you for telling me Bucky.”

“You deserved to know.”

There was a minuscule silence that Steve soon broke. “You look very similar to your grandmother. Almost the exact same. It’s fascinating.”

“That’s quite the compliment, Mr Rogers.” I grinned and Bucky let out a breathy laugh. “Ooooh, tell me what she got up to as a teenager!”

Steve and Bucky began telling me stories about her, myself in Buck’s lap as the three of us laughed hysterically. The two don’t particularly scream ‘fun’ when you look at their exteriors but the two were a perfect pair, chiming in each other's stories. The three of us were happy. Bucky finally seemed genuinely happy.

Falling slowly sing your melody

I'll sing it loud

The tall ceilings of the hall amazed me, the crystal chandeliers hanging so beautifully, the light coming in from the windows hitting the shards and reflecting onto the skin if those standing near it. I thought I was alone admiring the venue until Bucky appeared next to me, holding his arm out for me grab ahold of. I took it gladly and he escorted me towards the large group of people, all dressed beautifully.

“You look beautiful doll.” He whispered, pressing a small kiss on my cheek. “They’ll love you, I promise.”

[warholiana]

‘Warhol’ Review: Nothing Like the Real Thing

‘I want to be as famous as the Queen of England,’ Andy Warhol once said.

By Dominic Green April 17, 2020 11:16 am

WARHOL By Blake Gopnik Ecco, 961 pages, $45

‘As genuine as a fingerprint,” said the caption to Andy Warhol’s photo in his high school yearbook. The style of a Warhol screen print is as unique as a fingerprint, but a genuine Warhol was so easily faked that Warhol had assistants do the work for him. Mass production and media smarts made Warhol the most famous of all American artists—not bad going for an artist who, as Blake Gopnik admits in his detailed, enthusiastic and absorbing biography, “never had the innate talent for realistic drawing that even many minor artists have.”

Fame is the right measure of his achievement, but fame was not his only spur. There was money, too, and plenty of drugs, not forgetting elaborate choreographies of gay sex that Warhol, with factory-like efficiency, combined with his photographic hobbies. Today Warhol stands proud in the public’s estimation. The art world revels in its elitism, but a Warhol, as the English put it, does exactly what it says on the tin. Campbell’s Soup, Elizabeth Taylor, Chairman Mao and Marilyn Monroe all look genuinely like themselves, and the fingerprint of Andy Warhol seems, somehow, to be on them all.

“I like to watch,” says Chance the Gardener in the film “Being There,” Hal Ashby’s meditation on the credulity of the rich and powerful. Warhol played the fool as only an intelligent observer can. His early 1960s transformation from intellectual graphic designer to gum-chewing Pop star was the most successful case of dumbing up since Marcel Duchamp’s realization of the secondary value of bathroom fittings.

Warhol’s triumph was a belated commercial victory for the pre-1939 European avant-garde: Critics called early American Pop Art “neo-Dada.” We live in Andy Warhol’s world of endless lurid images, each framed in irony. This is Jeff Koons’s good fortune, if not always ours.

He was born Andrew Warhola in 1928 in what Mr. Gopnik calls a “grim little flat” in Pittsburgh’s Soho neighborhood. His parents Andrej, a laborer, and Julia, a cleaner, had immigrated from what was then called Ruthenia and is now eastern Slovakia; Uniates, Slavic Catholics following the Greek rite, they were a minority within Pittsburgh’s “Slav” minority. Andrej was absent for long periods and died from complications of tuberculosis when Warhol was 13. Julia cooked Ruthenian food—in the 1930s, tinned soup was still a luxury—and encouraged Andy and his two older brothers to draw by copying from magazine illustrations.

How did the artist whose “notable achievements,” according to Mr. Gopnik, include rejecting a “signature touch” acquire his monumental blankness? Mr. Gopnik, an art critic (formerly for the Washington Post), wonders if Warhol’s Ruthenian background made his family “hyphenated Americans” with “nothing to put before their hyphen.” Did the Warholian recipe of low emotional affect and highcamp impact emerge as his shield and sword against a homophobic society? Or was it a childhood bout of Sydenham’s chorea, the disease then known as St. Vitus’s Dance? The illness’ immediate effect was that the 11-year-old Warhol watched Disney shorts over and over on a projector in a sickroom whose walls were adorned with shots of movie stars. Longer-term effects included blotchy skin, shaky hands and, Mr. Gopnik suggests, the repetitions of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Mr. Gopnik expertly traces Warhol’s technical and intellectual roots to his studies in painting and illustration at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology: the paintings of Stuart Davis, whose deceptively bland depiction of consumer products made him Warhol’s “one true avatar” in American art; the “hot new art of silk-screen printing”; and the Bauhaus notion that the studio should be a factory and art an “indictment of materialistic forces.”

The beatnik “André” made a virtue of his “comically awkward” sketching technique by turning his lack of traditional “hand” into an impersonal “efficiency,” as adaptable to commercial design as to the avant-garde gallery. In 1949 he took an overnight Greyhound to New York City and launched his “secret weapon,” the “blotted line” lifted from his hero Ben Shahn. A hardworking “bashful elf” with a “cold, calculating heart,” Warhol quickly built a reputation as “a cheaper Ben Shahn,” without Shahn’s “taint of far-left politics.” He drew for Condé Nast’s Glamour magazine and the Girl Scouts’ American Girl, and produced covers for highbrow LPs and books published by the literary imprint New Directions.

By 1960 Warhol had gotten ahead in advertising. He owned a house on the Upper East Side, and his mother was living in the garden apartment. He had repaired his appearance with skin creams, a nose job and a wig. He had worked and networked, and befriended Truman Capote. He had exhibited in small galleries too, but, Mr. Gopnik writes, his work remained known only to “the tiniest circle of uptown gays” and his income as a designer was declining as magazines turned to color photographs. His projects at the time included designing a bookplate for Audrey Hepburn and drawing the feet of minor celebrities.

The Abstract Expressionists had shown there was money in avant-garde art. Contemporaries like Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg were already reworking American icons. Warhol had an adman’s eye for the empty vessels of commercial imagery. “I want to be as famous as the Queen of England,” he told the uptown photographer and socialite Frederick Eberstadt. For the second act of his life, Warhol exchanged Brooks Brothers suits and season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera for jeans and pop radio. He experimented with urinating on his canvases, but inspiration lay closer at hand, in the designer���s world of mass-produced images.

“You’ve got to find something that’s recognizable to almost everybody,” the dealer and decorator Muriel Latow advised. “Something like a can of Campbell’s Soup.” Warhol described the soup-can sequence of 1961 as a “synthesis of nothingness,” but the power of his early images derives from their synthesis of depths and shallows. Isolated and enlarged, their colors inflamed, the commonplaces of commerce assume the scale and resonance of cult icons.

Warhol’s tins, Brillo Boxes and famous faces were, Mr. Gopnik suggests, not just a camp “Dada reply” to the machismo and existential angst of the Abstract Expressionists. Warhol fed the directness of commercial photography through the techniques of tradition, “meticulously hand-painting” his cans. He pretended to “cut all ties to craft and tradition,” but was the latest in the “craft obsessed” line of trompe l’oeil painters, curators of uncanny American reality like John Haberle.

By 1965 his Soup Cans, Marilyns, dollar bills and Jackie Kennedys had won Warhol an entry in Who’s Who—he claimed to descend from the von Warhols of Cleveland—and the keys to the Silver Factory on 47th Street, where he produced art, films and the early shows of Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground. Warhol, who fantasized that he was the “keeper of a male brothel,” ran a dark kingdom of “heavy drug use, sexual madness and violence.” Applying the theory of the “found object” to the “found person,” he collected “oddballs and freaks,” dubbed them “superstars,” exploited them in tediously obscene films, then ditched them into addiction and early death. In 1968 a thwarted hanger-on, Valerie Solanas, shot him. His life was saved by a doctor who opened his chest and manually massaged his heart.

The reborn Warhol dumped his old accomplices and devoted himself to “Business Art.” In the 1970s, instead of observing and reflecting the surfaces of consumption and celebrity as an outsider, he came to resemble his earlier image of Elizabeth Taylor, the famous person as “perfectly fungible commodity.” His last two decades are a catalog of vacuous screen-printing and joyless corruption, with Warhol proliferating inferior copies of his now-haggard trademarks: Interview magazine, which he founded and which foundered amid celebrity back-rubs; portraits of Chairman Mao and Mick Jagger; groveling to Imelda Marcos and the Shah of Iran; changing his style for “people portraits” of the merely rich; and daubing bodily fluids onto the canvas in a succession of ever-sillier wigs.

“You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, and you’re even a killer of laughter,” Willem de Kooning raged at Warhol at a party in the 1960s. Warhol did make several killings. Mr. Gopnik calls them “true, important achievements,” but they now look more important than true. In the early ’60s, Warhol briefly balanced commerce and the avant-garde, photography and paint. Fame turned him into the real thing, a genuine fake. Business Art “reduced all of Warhol’s works to their lowest common denominator as merchandise,” Mr. Gopnik admits. Warhol descended with them, as the court pornographer of celebrity culture. In 1987 he died rich and lonely, at 58, from a heart attack after gall bladder surgery.

Mr. Gopnik compares Warhol’s hunt for lucrative “pet portraits in Kuwait” to Goya’s pursuit of commissions from Bourbon aristocrats, and likens Warhol to Gainsborough, who complained of “the People with their damn’d Faces” and wished he could paint landscapes. But Warhol’s idea of a “landscape,” as Mr. Gopnik indicates with laudable if not impressive detail, was “crotch shots of a porn star.” Placing Warhol with Picasso on “the top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses” perhaps overrates an artist who couldn’t draw. Warhol’s real peers were the movie stars he loved: larger than life in image, but better at expressing other people’s ideas than contriving their own.

—Mr. Green is the Life & Arts editor of The Spectator (U.S.).

See this review online (behind a paywall) at https://www.wsj.com/articles/warhol-review-nothing-like-the-real-thing-11587136581