#studio one eighty nine

[autobots-one-half]

the Nerima Wrecker Crews' Guide to Ranma Fandom for Newcomers

With the release this month of a brand new anime adaptation of the eighties manga Ranma ½, a lot of new fans are joining an older fandom that may leave them...confused about some details.

See, when the Ranma manga began in 1987, series creator Rumiko Takahashi was already solidly-established from her success with the runaway hit Urusei Yatsura. It only took two years for an anime adaptation to begin airing....for a mere eighteen episodes, before being canceled. If you go back to the '89 anime, you will almost certainly notice some drastic shifts in art style and tone from the first eighteen episodes to the remainder, and that's because only a single season was produced by Studio DEEN before production shifted to a new directorial crew, who dubbed the following season Ranma ½ Nettōhen (Fierce/Hot Battle Chapter).

The thing is, between the original eighteen episodes being made while the manga was still relatively early in its nine-year run, attempts to draw in better ratings by heavily promoting fan-favorite characters, a need for filler episodes to let the manga catch up to the pace of the anime's releases, and even the biases and friendships of the respective directors and writers...some things wound up being different.

And as a result, the Ranma ½ of the Eighties and Nineties is very different from what we're going to get with the 2024 anime. The 2024 series is based on a manga that had been finished for decades, and between the official releases so far and some unfortunate early leaks, it shows plenty of signs of being far more faithful to the original manga.

So, we of the Nerima Wreckers' Crew are here to introduce you to a few of the things you might run into as a new Ranma ½ fan exploring the existing fan content that has accrued over the past few decades!

Be aware: you're about to read spoilers for a four decades old manga. Questions about something that we don't cover in this post? Leave a comment asking for more, after the jump!

Something to get out of the way first: we're the NWC as an in-joke: as both Transformers and Ranma fans (and in some cases, fictive introjects), we wanted to combine the 'Wreckers' group name from Transformers with the English-language Ranma ½ fandom's nickname for the group of martial artists, students, teachers, monsters, and other characters who populate the series:

The Nerima Wrecking Crew.

The principal setting of Ranma ½ is Nerima, a ward of the metropolis of Tokyo. There are 23 special wards, and Nerima is a real-life one that is found in the northwest of Tokyo—in fact, it was the 23rd and final ward! In English-language communications, the local government identifies the ward as Nerima City, so that's how we'll speak of it here.

Nerima is a large city that still retains a very suburban, even exurban character stretching back to its history of farming. There are even still farms within the city limits, including at least one dairy farm last we checked! It's part of Tokyo, but it has a kid of old-fashioned peaceful character...that makes it the perfect place for anime characters to disrupt. That kind of disruption led the English-speaking fandom to dub our favorite crew of violent martial artists the "Wrecking Crew", presumably after their propensity to bust down walls and buildings.

A lot of anime and manga take place in Nerima. Takahashi's previous hit series Urusei Yatsura, the cat-robot classic All-Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku-Nuku, the anime adaptation of Stop!! Hibari-Kun, even Tokyo Ghoul...okay, some of these are not quite the same genre as the others.

This is often attributed to the large number of anime studios based in the city, but Ranma's adventures in Nerima have a special bond with the environment that seems to go beyond, stretching back to the original manga. Ranma is often seen walking along (or falling from) fencetops above canals just like the above image from Wikimedia, and scenes set in nearby parks map fairly well to specific ones in Nerima City, so we can generally assume that the neighborhood where the Tendō Dojo is found is roughly in the Ōizumi area along the Shirako River seen above.

More specifically, it's in an imaginary neighborhood somewhere nebulously within those boundaries, a neighborhood that parts of the older fandom know as Furinkan-chō, AKA "Furinkan Town", after the Furinkan High School that Ranma and Akane attend—drawing a connection to the more official identification of the cast of Urusei Yatsura as living in Tomobiki-chō and attending Tomobiki High School.

A sober, dignified edifice to education...populated by a bunch of martial arts lunatics.

Some of whom are probably going to be pretty different in the new anime!

Meet the principal of Furinkan High School. Yes, this is a native Japanese man. Yes, he has problems.

Principal, Headmaster, or in Japanese Kunō-kōchō (no given name provided) is, unfortunately, the unfortunate father of the equally unfortunate series mainstay Tatewaki Kunō. The Principal here visited the USA for a while in order to learn from our education methods and came back an even worse problem than he'd left, becoming obsessed with the trappings of Hawai'ian tourism and the English language. In the original Japanese, his dialogue is heavily peppered with random English words and phrases (and an obnoxious Woody Woodpecker-style laugh).

The thing is, it's hard to translate a character randomly speaking English...into English. So, the official English translations of the original manga and anime had the Principal badly pepper his speech with Hawai'ian Pidgin phrases. It's going to be a little while before he shows up in the new anime, so it's hard to say for sure how he'll be translated...but it probably won't be that. So, new fans: you're probably going to encounter a few fanworks where there's a random fake-Hawai'ian man threatening teenagers with bad haircuts.

Teenagers like Hikaru Gosunkugi.

This is Gosunkugi. You'll probably see him next season, because we're going to perform acts of supervillainy if they don't make a second season. He shows up pretty early on in the manga, and has an important role to play in a major storyline...but he didn't show up in the original anime for 94 episodes after he was supposed to appear.

What we got instead was Sasuke Sarugakure. There's some debate about exactly why the anime-only character Sasuke was added: a diminutive ninja with thick eyebrows, prominent whiskers, buck teeth, and a miserable lot in life as the Kunō family servant. Seemingly...the only servant. Sasuke's role in the original anime seemed to have been not only to fill in for Gosunkugi in an early storyline, but to act as a comedic foil to the overblown antics of the Kunō family—especially absurd since the anime took the already comical wealth of the Kunōs from the manga, and exaggerated it to an absurd degree that seems all the more ridiculous when you learn that Sasuke sleeps in the crawlspace and gets by on fewer than three meals a day.

Oddly, this characterization as a comically impoverished ninja is a recurring bit in Takahashi's stories: Urusei Yatsura featured the job-hunting missing-nin Kaede, and the last few volumes of the Ranma ½ manga introduced the threadbare kunoichi Konatsu.

Get used to this image. It's probably all you're going to see of Konatsu for a good few seasons...because the original anime never got to that part of the manga.

Konatsu is a thorny topic in the fandom due to matters of gender that aren't helped by the original anime never getting to those stories, and the original manga chapters taking forever to be available in English. What can definitely be said is that Konatsu A: identifies as a kunoichi, specifically a title for female ninja, and B: is AMAB.

But this is a series that's all about playing with gender.

For example...

The Girl. An anime-only episode of Nettōhen presented a story of Ranma taking a blow to the head, waking up not long after and insisting on actually being a girl—identifying her life as a boy as being something akin to a bad dream. This version of Ranma knows she was assigned male and turns back into a male body when splashed with hot water, but she demonstrates a visceral dysphoria about it that is painfully relatable. The episode's plot is concluded and the status quo is restored when the pacifistic girl is struck once more in the head at the end, restoring the Ranma who is a confident martial artist and self-identified man among men...but an increasing number of highly-rated fanworks reference this single-episode anime-only story.

This isn't the only time an anime-only episode touches on the idea of Ranma who is solely identified as a girl:

Ranma and the Evil Within starts off with Ranma joking about staying a girl forever, only for it to be taken seriously by the recurring problematic antagonist Happōsai (seriously, he's just the worst, and for some reason the original anime production team decided to make lots of anime-only episodes featuring him). A magic incense is brought into play, splitting off all the femnine 'yin' from Ranma's masculine 'yang'.

This split-off half is characterized as unbalanced, magically powerful, and a threat to Ranma's life. So of course, she looks sick as fuck. But just like The Girl, she's a one-off character. Don't worry: if the anime runs long enough to cover all the manga storylines, we'll still get a story about a female-only duplicate of Ranma. But it's going to be a little while.

Speaking of girls in Ranma ½, let's touch on Akane's female friends!

Mostly going unnamed in the manga, Akane has several female classmates and friends who received more prominent roles in the old anime.

(gif by @roseillith)

The two most notable of these are Yuka (lighter brown hair), and Sayuri (darker brown, often in a ponytail). These names do get called out in the old version of the anime, though they don't seem to have much personality beyond "girls who are friends with each other and Akane".

This role is sometimes filled by others in the old anime. It's much harder to find episodes where any other girls in the class are named, but due to two of them recurring, fanworks often bring them up as Akane's other friends:

Meet Asami (wavy shoulder-length hair) and Hiroko (short hair and freckles)...or is that Makoto and Shikako? Sources vary on these names, and English language websites disagree on which are the 'official' names. If anyone can track down an episode where either one is named on-screen, we'd appreciate it!

Akane isn't the only one with school friends: Ranma's got a few recurring acquaintances among the male students, as well.

In the old anime, these two are specifically named as Hiroshi (lighter colored hair and wider eyes) and Daisuke (dark hair and narrow eyes). They're often treated by both the source material and fanworks as Ranma's sole "normal" guy friends, and in general behave like stereotypical high school boys...including openly lusting after Ranma's girl form, even after they learn that she and the male Ranma are one and the same.

Hiroshi and Daisuke show up more consistently as a pair than Akane's friends in both the manga and the original anime, and fanworks often pair them romantically with Yuka and Sayuri. But even with how common Hiroshi, Daisuke, Yuka, and Sayuri are (down to their incredibly average names), they deserve mentioning for new fans...

...Because the new anime renamed them all! "Hiroshi" is now "Shingo" (しんご), "Daisuke" is now "Kiichi" (きいち), "Yuka" is now "Noriko" (のりこ), and "Sayuri" is now "Tomoyo" (ともよ).

That's it for now, because there's a brand new episode out that we haven't had a chance to watch while we wrap up this post on our lunch break. Until next time, this is the Nerima Wrecker Crew, signing off!

[noonaishere]

Music of the Heart [Jeong Yunho] - Masterlist

By: noonaishere (main blog: symphonyofmars)

Fic type: social media au / traditional

Pairing: Yunho x fem!reader

Genre: music industry setting, musician/producer, enemies to lovers, mutual pining, running from the past

Warnings: overbearing parents, verbal abuse, sexual harassment

Status: Currently updating

Updates: Thursdays and Fridays at 12pm EST

Synchronously posted with Online/Offline (any asterisked (*) chapters means they’re shared between both fics)

[intro post explaining y/n and t/n]

SYNOPSIS:

T/n has always loved music, though her experience of it wasn’t always the greatest. Forced by her parents to learn the violin - almost purely to climb the socio-economic ladder - she’s since forged her own path. She auditions at Wonderland Entertainment and becomes one of their studio musicians, but how will she deal with seeing her ex-best friend who also happens to be contracted under the company?

Also, how does t/n’s existence connect to y/n, someone she’s never met?

🎵 main cast

Chapters:

🎵 Prologue | a long time ago… in a town far, far away…

🎵 one | “local celebrity”

🎵 two | mahler

🎵 three | emperor nero

🎵 four | come meet the kids

🎵 five | duck and cover

🎵 six | his feefees were a little hurt

🎵 seven | homework

🎵 eight | give her my number

🎵 nine | canard et couverture parte deux

🎵 ten | a date?

🎵 eleven | the fight scene at the end of the count of monte cristo

🎵 twelve | we never talk

🎵 thirteen | youtube recommendations

🎵 fourteen | calendar man

🎵 fifteen | a ✨godsend✨

🎵 sixteen | no ducking nor covering

🎵 seventeen | he’s got pipes

🎵 eighteen | thinking about hats

🎵 nineteen | it is still apples

🎵 twenty | i know exactly who you are

🎵 twenty-one | busking

🎵 twenty-two | he got an audition or something

🎵 twenty-three | best friend

🎵 twenty-four | garage band

🎵 twenty-five | it’ll be worth it

🎵 twenty-six | more like “drone strike parenting”

🎵 twenty-seven | interrogation

🎵 twenty-eight | it’s over

🎵 twenty-nine | more like constipated

🎵 thirty | maybe

🎵 thirty-one | JUPiTER

🎵 thirty-two | no horses in space

🎵 thirty-three | Crom3r

🎵 thirty-four | punk rock

🎵 thirty-five | what a feeling

🎵 thirty-six | do we need a hot air balloon?

🎵 thirty-seven | gotta let the fans know

🎵 thirty-eight | i’ll bring the wine

🎵 thirty-nine | girl’s night

🎵 forty | that’s a no on the hot air balloon

🎵 forty-one | new kids

🎵 forty-two | splash fight

🎵 forty-three | a recluse and a traitor

🎵 forty-four | merch drop

🎵 forty-five | lol i’m screencapping

🎵 forty-six | do you know how to do cubes?

🎵 forty-seven | surprise modu girip baksu

🎵 forty-eight | sometimes the kickball inspires music

🎵 forty-nine | but what can you do

🎵 fifty | no need for sunglasses

🎵 fifty-one | need for sunglasses

🎵 fifty-two | D-Day

🎵 fifty-three | best friends forever

🎵 fifty-four | mission update

🎵 fifty-five | miss me?

🎵 fifty-six | that was really weird and I hated it

🎵 fifty-seven | good point

🎵 fifty-eight | the great outdoors

🎵 fifty-nine | please don’t use memes of yourself

🎵 sixty | ballad mashup with choi jongho!

🎵 sixty-one | scandal??

🎵 sixty-two | two giants

🎵 sixty-three | you really *are* a capitalist

🎵 sixty-four | benevolence and beef

🎵 sixty-five | lyrical content

🎵 sixty-six | principles

🎵 sixty-seven | well?

🎵 sixty-eight | can’t sleep

🎵 sixty-nine | what’d you say?

🎵 seventy | looking for an Ans:wer

🎵 seventy-one | whirlwind

🎵 seventy-two | she’s a me

🎵 seventy-three | solving problems

🎵 seventy-four | the great (less confined) indoors

🎵 seventy-five | pedagogy

🎵 seventy-six | going for a walk

🎵 seventy-seven* | WHAT?

🎵 seventy-eight | misc

🎵 seventy-nine | where the hell are you

🎵 eighty | chauffeur

🎵 eighty-one | public breakup

🎵 eighty-two | somewhere nice

🎵 eighty-three | the start of an apology

🎵 eighty-four | meeting ONiiX

🎵 eighty-five | sting operation

🎵 eighty-six | hack behavior

🎵 eighty-seven | doubleho7 reporting in

🎵 eighty-eight | being kind is punk

🎵 eighty-nine | listening to it for the background noise

🎵 ninety | Devious Deviants Devianting Deviously

🎵 ninety-one | it’s not gossiping, it’s ✨helping✨

🎵 ninety-two | lessons and small dogs

🎵 ninety-three | *distressed memeing*

🎵 ninety-four | fifteen minutes late with no starbucks

🎵 ninety-five | Game Day!

🎵 ninety-six | it’s a metaphor

🎵 ninety-seven* | suspicious group chat

🎵 ninety-eight* | more boba, less ice

🎵 ninety-nine* | ensemble transition (1/3)

🎵 ninety-nine* | ensemble transition (2/3)

🎵 ninety-nine* | ensemble transition (3/3)

🎵 one hundred* | an even more suspicious group chat

🎵 one hundred and one* | we’re both here now

🎵 one hundred and two | time off

🎵 one hundred and three | what’s it like having normal parents?

🎵 one hundred and four | kiddo

🎵 one hundred and five | cake and conversation

🎵 one hundred and six | confessions

🎵 one hundred and seven | the biggest idiot

🎵 one hundred and eight | ego death

🎵 one hundred and nine | what are you feeling?

🎵 one hundred and ten | take your time/get your shit together

🎵 one hundred and eleven* | pocket square

🎵 one hundred and twelve* | +2000% to self-respect

🎵 one hundred and thirteen |

🎵 one hundred and fourteen* |

🎵 one hundred and fifteen* |

🎵 one hundred and sixteen |

🎵 one hundred and seventeen* |

Epilogue 1

Epilogue 2

Epilogue 3

Epilogue 4

Epilogue 5

Epilogue 6

Epilogue 7

Send an ask or leave a comment if you want to be added to the tag list! 🎵

🎵🎵   [MAIN MASTERLIST]  🎵🎵

[singemall-stayallnight]

Positive Encounters With Jimmy Page & Robert Plant

"When I lived in Brighton, in the late seventies and early eighties, I met Jimmy Page and Philip Hale at a private musical event in Hassocks where I played piano for a small invited gathering. I chatted to Jimmy and briefly to Philip. I was invited to Jimmy's home at Plumpton shortly afterwards where an engineer was mixing Robert Plant's vocals on the album "In Through The Out Door". It was lovely, atmospheric; a truly beautiful place. There were guitars everywhere, even nine in the tiny WC. It was a charming place and Jimmy was a gentle, compassionate host. I recognised Philip Hale's photo in a local paper a short while later and recognised him immediately. It was so sad to read of his passing." Reply

Anonymous25 May 2017 at 13:15

A shot of Jimmy Page at his home, Plumpton Place. | Source: Pinterest

Jimmy Page with his Stratocaster at Plumpton Place. | Source: Pinterest

https://www.datalounge.com/thread/29920183-who-are-the-nicest-rock-stars-classic-rock-edition#29920857

"Jimmy Page was nice when I met him."

by Anonymous reply 6 December 19, 2021 4:05 AM

https://www.datalounge.com/thread/34120072-have-you-ever-embarrassed-yourself-in-front-of-a-celebrity-

"Yes, and I worked in Burbank (Hampton’s) which was an industry restaurant so met many, many celebrities and never acted a fool.

But when I met Jimmy Page in London ten years ago, I mumbled some gibberish, rolled my eyes at myself, then we stood staring at each other for what felt like an entire minute then I said, “anyway, I’m a really huge fan” and he yelled, 'awww!' And gave me a big, tight hug.

He was actually so sweet and I’m sure he got that idiotic behavior all the time but I was just the biggest dork."

by Anonymous reply 7 March 14, 2024 12:09 PM

"Wow R7! That's so cool. I probably would have reacted the same way. Who goes to work expecting to meet Jimmy Page!"

by Anonymous reply 8 March 14, 2024 12:37 PM

"R8

Oh, sorry. I didn’t write that properly - was still waking up, I think.

I didn’t meet Jimmy at Hampton’s in Burbank but in London where I was on vacation. I saw him walking with another guy and introduced myself."

by Anonymous reply 17 March 14, 2024 7:44 PM

This quotation by Pamela Des Barres about Jimmy is (partly) positive. Jimmy was a player. While we're on the subject, Robert was a player too.*

https://www.loudersound.com/features/pamela-des-barres-my-stories-of-alice-cooper-robert-plant-jim-morrison-and-more

"Jimmy Page

'My other true love that I thought I was really, really in love with. And he sure led you to believe it, man. I found out later from three other girls that he said the same things to all of us. But the best lover, the best talker, the best line giver, the best everything. He was it. He was the supreme catch if you were a groupie because he took you on the road, he bought you things, he whispered sweet nothings all the time. He led you to believe you were the one. And it really felt good.

He was the epitome of British royalty. I haven’t seen Jimmy in years. Although, you know what I hear now, he’s let his hair go grey and he’s sober for years. I think he’s a completely changed guy.'"

Here are a few threads with nice stories about coming across/interacting with Robert.

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/i-met-robert-plant-last-week.709197/

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/robert-plant-30-years-ago-1988-now-and-zen-album-poll.747966/

"I'll post since may be interesting for some of you guys who like this album.

I was assistant engineer on the recording. I was just 18 years old at the time. It was recorded at the 3rd Studio I worked at, Marcus Music, Kensington Gardens Square, which got demolished to make way for the rebuilding of Whiteleys :(. That was a great studio. I also assisted on ABC's Alphabet City there.

I loved working on this album. I volunteered because I had grown up with Led Zep. My best friend's uncle was Led Zep's roady and then did some live sound for them, IIRC. Led Zep IV was my fav album when I was 14. So, I volunteered for the Robert Plant session when I knew he was coming in. I hit it off with him straight away because of the indirect connection. Such a great guy. I got to sleep at normal times since he started at 10am and finished at 8pm, which is unheard of. He would buy us all curry EVERY lunchtime. I got to record some of his vocals in the upstair studio, which was a real privilege as a trainee engineer.

He would mercilessly tease Tim Palmer who was the producer/main engineer. Tim had done work with Texas. We took days getting a drum sound and RP was really digging TP that they recorded Led Zep IV in a week, or whatever it was, and the drum sound then was way better than he was getting now!

I remember Doug Boyle, quite a young guitarist, buying this supposedly super-duper guitar amp from the States. Trouble was it just sounded **** in the studio. Plant really gave him good teasing on that as well. Of course the great guitar amps are Marshalls and Vox AC30's.

The real icing on the cake was when Jimmy Page came and did some guitar over dubs. I was, and still am, such a fan. He used Vox AC30 amp and Les Paul. The sound was just amazing, and the way he played just had that great sound. When he bent just a single note that guitar just sang.

So, working on that album was one of the BIG highlights of my career. RP gave me £200 at the end too!! That's unusual. Assistant engineers/Tape Ops got a pittance, so it was well appreciated. RP's knowledge of music was amazing. He was playing REM, who I hadn't heard of at the time."

-Timbo21, Sep 2, 2018

Robert Plant performing on his Now And Zen tour in 1988. | Left photo: © Sheryl Chapman | Right photo: © Timm Chapman

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/1271389-to-be-wondering-a-lot-what-Robert-Plants-first-date-with-Liz-Jones-would-be-like susiedotcom · 02/08/2011 13:26

"I'd never heard of Liz Jones before now, but I do see Robert Plant out quite frequently in Worcester (well, DH does now that I never go out after dark…) He's the loveliest, coolest, friendliest guy ever and I can't believe he'd go out with the woman I've just been reading about. I'm quite pleased (and a bit surprised) to see so many RP fans on here though."

There seems to be a good amount of positive and negative experiences posted online when it comes to Robert. Here's a few of the negative ones:

This one in particular is from a Q&A thread hosted by men who work in the Nashville music business.

https://www.datalounge.com/thread/16819213-country-music-gossip-ii

"NG1 here. I know the engineer who has worked on many of Allison Krauss' records. I love how natural and unforced her voice sounds. He said that is partly because she barely whispers when she sings, and they have the volume tuned up high to catch her voice. Her voice is beautiful."

by Anonymous reply 319 June 12, 2016 5:05 AM

"R 319 take a listen to Alison's first couple of records -- she was singing in her "real" voice then. Her current whispery, throaty, style, while lovely, isn't natural and has lead to a few bouts of vocal rest and forced time off the road. And while she can be charming, she can also be, shall we say, difficult. That second album with Robert Plant will never see the light of day, she drove him nuts in the studio."

by Anonymous reply 326 June 16, 2016 4:40 AM

Alison Krauss and Robert Plant performing in 2008. Credit: Getty Images

"NG1 here.

Patty Griffin is not a Nashville artist. She's from Maine, and started in the folk scene in Boston. She moved to Nashville for a very brief time, where she recorded her first two albums, them moved to Austin, where , I believe she still lives. I see her around some, but I don't think she spends that much time here. She and Robert Plant live together -- or at least used to, I don't know if they still do -- which seems like the strangest couples. I've met Plant many many times, and he is the world's biggest ass."

by Anonymous reply 344 June 18, 2016 4:04 AM

"To NG1

Thank you for mentioning to us about Robert Plant. I always thought he was an ass. He thought his crap didn't stink. I wouldn't be surprised if Patty Griffin kicked him to the curb.

Like you have said on here before is Country music is where any artist can be forgotten or be pushed to the side at any time. Dang, that sucks."

by Anonymous reply 345 June 18, 2016 10:02 AM

"Oh, and Patty and Robert split up more than a year ago." by Anonymous reply 347 June 19, 2016 6:37 AM

Robert Plant and Patty Griffin with Robert Plant and the Band of Joy at Bonnaroo. | © David Oppenheimer

https://forums.ledzeppelin.com/topic/15152-robert-plant-band-of-joy-tour-2011/

Posted February 16, 2011

"The Show Must Go On?

Locals comment on the Band of Joy turmoil in Tennessee:

dropshadow 8:50 AM on February 14, 2011

'Try waiting on him sometime, and you'd never buy another ticket to one of his shows. He's a complete ass.'

There was also a thread on Datalounge that had a comment about how wait staff members working in various restaurants in Austin "hated" Robert, but I can't find the thread, nor do I remember the title. I'm pretty sure the thread was from the time he lived there with Patty or shortly after he'd moved back to England.

Here's more DL threads on LZ, for anyone interested:

https://www.datalounge.com/thread/14519026-led-zeppelin

https://www.datalounge.com/thread/25295397-let-s-talk-about-lez-zeppelin! (Lez is just a typo, it's not a reference to the cover band.)

There's other mentions of Jimmy and Robert in non-LZ threads on DL. You can use the search feature on the site, but theirs is not the best. Another option is to type a name and site:datalounge.com into a search engine. There have been other LZ threads & threads that contained LZ stories on DL, such as the one below, but they've expired.

https://www.datalounge.com/thread/8208701-rock-roll-royalty-70s-style!

Random Robert stories:

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/robert-plant-solo-recommendations.953836/

"Dreamland 2002: would get my vote. Saw him on that tour. Small venue of less than 2000 people. I was standing about 4 deep as there were no seating except the balcony. He kept smiling at this hot girl off to my right. As the show drew to a close, security came out and escorted her backstage. Guess a good time was had by all."

-JFSebastion, Dec 14, 2021

Robert Plant in 2002.

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/robert-plant-solo-recommendations.953836/

"Jimmy (Page) had an upward curve until LZ IV,followed by a downward spiral from there on. This point of view was confirmed to me by none else than Robert Plant at Copredy in 1995 when discussing LZ! Twenty years later I still hold to this opinion."

-joachim50, Mar 4, 2016

"I actually did not like to be misunderstood and misquoted:

Please note that there is a difference betweeen curve and spiral.I will not elaborate on either. I described "the upward curve until LZ IV,and the downward spiral as a "point of view that was confirmed (to me)by Robert Plant at Copredy in 1995 when discussing LZ.

So this was MY opinion at the time which I put across to Robert Plant,and he agreed to MY opinion.So I label it as his confirmation.

The background is that I got into talking with him at the bar at Copredy when I was chatting with Dave Pegg and Simon Nicol and was introduced to Robert Plant.During the course of our chat he(RP) asked me for my opinion about the albums of LZ to which I replied,that I regarded the" First Four" as monuments having an upward curve especially as Jimmy Page's contributions were concerned,and that afterwards an increasing number of cracks were to be noticed until ---in my opinion---the whole thing collapsed with Presence.

Robert Plant looked at me and told me that he agreed,and gave as reasons "too much money,too many birds,too many hard drugs,and too many personality clashes."

He also said that during the last 5 years of LZ his heart had not been in it anymore,and that he had been coerced by management to continue.He also said,that he regretted not having stopped working with LZ since especially the qualities of Jimmy Page and John Bonham had vaporized more and more dramatically due to their complete immersion into the Rock'n Roll lifestyle."

-joachim50, Mar 4, 2016

Led Zeppelin in 1971. | © Chris Dreja, Courtesy of Proud Galleries

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/robert-plant-the-early-solo-career-1982-1993.1194809/

"I really enjoy all the albums up to and including Fate Of Nations, with the exception of Manic Nirvana, which is okay, but not much more. I have to be in a 1980s mood for Shaken ‘N’ Stirred, but when I am, it’s a real blast. I saw RP on the tour for his second album and I remember a girl shouting out, 'I love you Robert', to which he replied 'You wouldn’t like the real thing at home.' That gig was a lot of fun."

-The Bishop, Feb 8, 2024

Robert Plant sings on stage during his ‘Principle of Moments’ tour on September 3, 1983 in Detroit, Michigan. | © Ross Marino/Getty Images

There are a lot of Zep threads on the Steve Hoffman Forum, as well as specific ones on Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham.

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Does anyone know which interview this poster is referencing?

This is a comment from a thread on the Steve Hoffman Forum but I can't remember which thread. I copied the comment but forgot to copy the link:

"Occam's Razor - Okay, thanks. I get it now. To tell you the truth from my perspective, I think Robert thought Alison was more capable in a wider genre of music and could adapt to more of his style. I knew the first time I heard/saw the "Please Read the Letter" video it wasn't exactly right. He was restaining his voice to match her style and adapting to her style. I knew it would only be a matter of time. When I read, remember this, that he wanted her to "moan" on a particular song, and she responded with "I'm not black", she just blew it. That statement was wrong on many levels even if she couldn't "moan" as he wanted. Totally "ignorant" thing to say in my opinion. Anyway, I DO love his current project very much and think Patty is just perfect. I think Robert finally found it. Also, LOVE the fact that he's doing more of a SOLO project rather than "duet" style. I do think though that Patty's voice and ability to adapt to Robert's style enhances his singing in a very positive way. His voice is sounding amazing.

BTW when you are a talent like Robert, yeah, four days is enough time to KNOW just where the thing is going or not going. I totally agree with him on that."

That response from Alison was indeed wrong. I'm curious to know who told this story. If it wasn't Robert, it was probably T Bone Burnett. If anyone can link to the interview that mentions this, or remembers anything about it, please let me know. I'd appreciate it.

*Just to give one example of this, from Lisa Robinson's Vanity Fair piece on Led Zeppelin, "Robert's tour amours were girls he managed to convince that he was, at any given moment, about to leave his wife, Maureen, the mother of his two young children."

[spiritundaunted]

King George VI, photographed by Walter Stoneman for NPG in 1921 as Duke of York and in 1938 as King. source

In 1917, in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, photographer Walter Stoneman launched a project to build a National Photographic Record (NPR) of all prominent members of British society. Over the next 41 years Stoneman took and printed postcard-sized pictures of some 7,000 individuals in his studio, between 100 and 200 a year, and provided them to NPG.

The project focussed on political and military figures, and sitters included five monarchs, nine prime ministers, twelve lord chancellors, eighty admirals and one hundred generals. Sitters did not pay for the privilege of being photographed by Stoneman, but were photographed free at the studios of J. Russell & Sons at Baker Street, and so Stoneman was not directly remunerated for producing the photographs.

Up until his death Stoneman had been the sole official photographer for the NPR. After his death, the NPR project continued with Walter Bird as photographer until 1967, when he was succeeded by Godfrey Argent who continued the project until it was stopped in 1970. By then, the collections counted more than 10,000 photographs.

wikipeda

[because-she-goes]

nineteen hundred eighty five

warnings: masochism/sh, couch scene, eating raw meat, Nora and Matty as intellectuals, a dash of sub!matty w/ dom!nora, swearing. Enjoy!

They were six months out from the album being released. Of course Nora had heard what they were working on so far and loved the live, organic energy. Her voice even hidden deep under layers of guitars and bass in some tracks. Matty had promised her no one would be able to know which song or hear her, so she agreed. What she didn't plan on, was him asking for her creative input on an interlude he was planning that would separate the “Being Funny” and “Greatest Hits” section of the concert. When he had first brought it up to her they were sipping their morning teas in their cozy California home. A much larger space than their New York and London apartments, especially with their studio spaces. The home wreaked of “art couple”, pictures plastered everywhere, flowers in unique vases sporadically placed on tables and counters, massive his and hers studios next door to each other that they had used two bedrooms for, a sitting room complete with library and sketch pads with markers for jotting down quick ideas for lyrics or paintings, a media room filled with DVDs of movies and vinyls they love, large open kitchen with windows everywhere for beautiful natural light and lastly a cozy yet romantic dining room with candles and fairy lights everywhere. Truly like someone had taken their brains and turned them into interiors. Greenery everywhere, ivy crawling up the white brick cottage’s walls, picket fence, the whole nine yards of a quaint american-english home. Nora was the main planner/buyer of the operation what with Matty being in New York and London every week working in the album with Jack or Jamie, but she made it a point to ensure the home felt warm and lived in - a place where he could come home, dump his shit at the door and relax. Not have to think about work or the band, just be himself, not Truman or Matty. Obviously, she didn't dare touch the home recording studio, all of that being left up to him and George to decide what he’d need. She also let him pick stuff for their bedroom and bathroom since she wanted him to still feel a part of the whole ordeal. This was their forever home so why shouldn’t he have input. He opted for a jade-green tile shower with twin wooden sinks and a block bathtub. For their sleeping situation, he wanted a big platform bed with blackout curtains covering their floor to ceiling windows (“Nike, my jetlag will be terrible coming home from traveling, they’d be so helpful!” He explained one evening over the phone) and two wood bedside tables with artwork. Keeping the space calm, zen and relaxing.

Getting back to the interlude, he had told her that the general idea of it - and tentative title - would be A Depiction of Masculine Romanticism. They had started planning and researching almost immediately, checking out books from their local library that afternoon about performance art and certain ideas Matty had already had: using Bukoswki interviews, The Virgin Suicides and Buffalo ‘66 clips to be playing in the TV sets behind him, discussing how people fake certain aspects of themselves or hypersexualize themselves to appeal to potential partners, as well as the whole ridiculous idea of Matty being a sex symbol in today’s world. Hearing all of this, it made Nora think of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece where she sat full dressed in front of an audience and on a PA system granted them permission to cut her clothes and take the piece with them - some approached her shyly and cut small pieces out of the hem of her skirt or top while others were bold and began cutting the center of her blouse or chunks of her bra straps. Ono herself describing it as a “give and take��� between the participants and her - much like a romantic relationship. There was also the instruction given in her book Grapefruit, Nora remembered, where she instructed a group of individuals to simply touch each other and it was up to each participant how far to go with said message. She brought this up to Matty that evening while in bed, showing him the book and exact message. Glasses slipping down his nose, wild curls in every direction, stubble dotting his jawline as he carefully flipped through it and read each passage.

“This is wonderful stuff, I was already contemplating taking my own shirt off and playing into the whole machismo thing with my tattoos and stuff. Thanks, baby!” He pecked her cheek, continuing to read on.

“Handsome, would you pass me that stack of Bukowski books? I want to highlight some stuff you could post across the TV.” She asks saccharine sweet, and he hands them across the bed sheet.

“Find something you love, let it kill you… I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of…A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.” She mumbles to herself, orange marker inking the pages.

“Nike love, remember that movie Buffalo ‘66 we watched one night, and how the guy is telling the girl to fake being in love with him? To sell the idea of them being married or something? I think that could work right like that bit?” He asks, brown eyes facing hers.

“Yeah, that would be really good! Plus, it would play into the clown character you do in the videos sometimes when you have a love interest like the Change of Heart couple.” She adds, thinking back to hearing him mention the other day on the phone to Jamie how he wanted to reprise the role for a new song off their album. “Plus, if you wanted to use The Virgin Suicides like you mentioned, practically the whole movie is about men exploiting young girls for their bodies and playing with their emotions so that would definitely work.”

“Have I mentioned how much I love you and your brain, Nora Downey?” He sweetly prompts, taking her cheek in his hand and rubbing the apple of it with his thumb.

CONTENT WARNING START: SH, MASOCHISM

“Only a few thousand times, Handsome… and I love you and yours too.” She melts, moving closer to him and tucking herself under his arm, now reading his book about Gina Pane and the use of her body as the vessel for artistic expression - st times even using the act of masochism and how people react to it as the art itself.

“In Unanesthetized Climb (1971) she climbed, barefoot, a ladder with rungs studded with metal protrusions, stopping when she could no longer endure the pain. For the installation series Action Notation she mixed photographs of her previous wounds with objects, such as toys, glass, etc., from her previous actions…” Matty’s hair falls in his face as he speaks, a hand rakes through it combing it back out of his eyes. “The process was controversial since it almost always involved an element of masochism: cutting her tongue or her ear, sticking nails into her forearm, smashing through a glass door, ingesting food to the point of nausea.” An idea sparks, he’ll come back to it later. He yawns. Nora’s eyes trained on his mouth like a hunter waiting for just the right moment to attack. God, how were his lips so pink? “Pane no longer based her approach on direct bodily experience, although the body remained pivotal and retained its symbolic significance through figures (cross, rectangle, circle) and materials (burnt or rusty metal, glass or copper).” Matty continues, breath shaky. He knew this was good, but he himself was not a masochist of this caliber yet, however Truman Black could be. Nora noticed the gears in Matty’s brain start to turn once he stopped reading. Despite the graphic content, she was fascinated with Pane’s work. She could see the clear connections between this physical mutilation and the emotional trauma women endure. One of Pane’s performances making this exact argument, it involved her laying on a mental frame with candles underneath, her body unmoving and unyielding to the slow burn - physically representing the pain some women experienced in their own bedrooms, with a partner or simply during sexual relations. Nora grimaces at the thought, bitterness suddenly soaking her tongue.

CONTENT WARNING END: SH, MASOCHISM

“…Okay! Think that’s enough of that for the night.” Matty swiftly states, ends of the book clapping together. “Do you want some tea or anything before bed, Darling?” He asks, getting up and making his way to the door. Her mind turns. Why has he been making the tea every night? Where did all her sweets go?

“Oh very smart, Matthew! I knew you’d been sneaking the chocolates at night while making the tea!” She gets up, chasing after him as he giggles over his shoulder - face bright red like a thief caught in the act.

“But they’re so good!!” He exclaims, running down the hall.

The following week, Matty is sat up in bed reading. Nora asleep in a heap next to him, snoozing away calmly. Bags under his eyes darker than normal and stubble more pronounced. Unbeknownst to Nora, Matty had spent every night for the past week reading about different performance artists, in an attempt to keep up with Nora during their meetings with Jamie and Patricia every few days. He was tired, but he liked the quiet evenings of studying - missing out on it during the ages where he would normally be at college or uni, as his brother now called it. He’d bring whatever book he was reading with him to the studio with the guys and read while George made the backing tracks.

“Mate, a tour isn’t a thesis essay. We can just have 10 minutes of us talking and the fans would be happy.” The giant points out in his deep voice.

“I am just reading so I don’t seem like a wanker when talking about this stuff to Nora, Mate.”

“Oh her? You’ll never outdo her. She’s got a brain the size of The Shard!” Ross cracks back at him.

“Yeah, Matt. She is like an oxford scholar or something with all the stuff in her head!” Adam chirps.

Matty grumbles something about his friends talking about her head as his nose goes back to his book.

Some months later, Matty has his interlude finalized. Nora hasn’t seen anything about it since those first few weeks, but here she was on opening night of At Their Very Best. Her black outfit matching his all black suit perfectly. The patent leather gleaming in the concert lights. Her brunette hair is worn down, gently caressing the small of her back.

The first half is going great, the fan’s screaming every lyric as if they themselves wrote it. Nora now hears the music she had suggested to Matty for the performance - “Nothin In The World Can Stop Me Worryin Me Bout That Girl” by The Kinks. It was a song from a movie she loved as a kid and it talks about a girl being unfaithful and her partner still loving her despite the pain. Matty, now up on the stage before her does as he told her moons ago, takes off his black button down to the cheers of the crowd. Nora’s stomach sank when he started doing the following action, something they certainly never discussed or something she never got a warning about. He saunters over to a crinkly leather couch, takes some puffs of a cigarette, hollowed cheeks accentuating his lips perfectly. He puts an oxygen mask to his face and continues to do things only Nora has seen when Matty is needy, pleading for her and aching to be touched. He feels his thighs, his own hands drifting everywhere hers wouldnt on those nights where she teases. His breathing goes erratic, chest starts to heave. Nora’s thighs begin to burn and at the apex of them she feels like a flame is being held to her skin. Her leather skirt suddenly feeling too restrictive. She is frozen, mouth agape, eyes unblinking. He simulates things only she has seen while on FaceTime while he toured and missed her. Her mouth drools. She looks at him like someone who has been starved for 6 years and suddenly sees a feast in front of them. Ravenous.

It is then that her Matthew bucks into his hand, head thrown back, jawline sharp enough to cut through glass. Cheers and screams of lust fill the room, it is deafening. She can’t hold it together anymore, sprinting to the side entrance to the stage, flashing her lanyard to security. She halts only when the edge of the spotlight is just about to hit her boots. Surrounded by the guys, Patricia, Sam, Jamie and the band, she is in shock.

He gets up off the couch, takes one final drag of a cigarette and as if he knows she’s there like a radar is in his brain, he fucking looks over his shoulder and winks at her with a devilish grin. Now the music shifts: an instrumental of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones. He kneels like a disciple in front of the TVs as they flash on. Bukowski’s words flashing across them with the footage of Buffalo ‘66 and The Virgin Suicides. Matty lays his head down in a sort of down-ward dog yoga pose, lanky arms outstretched - his shoulder blades jutting out like a fallen angel’s wings. Music taking over him as his chest heaves even more. He shifts a bit and moves to do push ups. Nora is now like a rabid dog at the side stage. Practically foaming at the mouth. He has her right where he wants her. George has to physically hold her back to keep the girl from running out onto the stage. Her brain analyzing each inch of his marble skin as it squeezes and contracts into the exercise to hold his weight suspended.

He comes to a stop and pivots on his knees. The music crescendos. Mick Jagger’s screaming now being played with the choir and guitars. Piano plays manically. Choir builds. A tomahawk steak is brought out to him, he takes a glance to the audience and to Nora, another wink. The audience goes to a level 10 wild. He devours the raw steak, holding the bone and gnawing down on the flesh. Picking some out his teeth and sucking his fingers clean.

Nora is baffled. All lust and the fact that she is married to the guy aside, it is some of the best performance art she has ever seen. Artistically, she is stunned at the fact that the toxic masculinity radiating off of him was not only being encouraged, but adored by the crowd. He has every single person in the building in the palm of his hand. Wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist, he crawls to the largest TV. Pushing the screen open, he plummets like Alice going down a rabbit hole. The crowd thunders. Nora is out of herself, brain alight. Amazed by his creativity and his ability to make at least 20,000 people feel every emotion he wanted them to, to have all of them at his whim. She is in awe, she knew he was a great performer and someone beloved, but she never knew he had this in him. That her Matty had this power at his disposal to use whenever, that he could switch that power on and off.

He, now out of character, steps to the group and wipes his face with a towel - out of the audience’s view. The sound of the sea of people cheering still consuming the building. She takes one look at him.

“I love you, Healy.” She mouths.

“Love you too, Downey.” He smirks as he gets pulled away to get dressed. All Nora can think is that no-one on the planet will ever come close to him for her, he’s it for her. Her mom always told her he was the one, but she didn’t actually think she’d be alive to see the day Matty fucking Healy was hopelessly in love with her. More than anything though, one thing was true. He was the best thing going for her in her life, and she would always be thankful to whatever angel sent him to her.

Thankful for her Matty. Her husband.

[buffyandwillow]

i walk into an art gallery for an exhibition opening wearing khakis and a parka and a face mask and holding in my hand a grocery bag with a ham inside. two tables inside the door are brimming with cheese and crackers and glasses of wine and bottles of perrier. i ignore them, not wanting to remove my mask, nor to linger to long.

some people are looking at the art. most are grouped in the center of the room, talking and catching up and eating their cheese and drinking their wine and perrier. i move quietly around the perimeter on my own, wanting only to absorb each of the artworks into my brain before leaving again.

a man approaches me when i'm halfway through my mission. i had made eye contact with him a few minutes earlier, just for a split-second.

i realize quickly that i had reached the wall where his artworks were being shown. "ah," i say. "i know your name. i've seen some of your articles about these techniques." i hadn't read them, but that didn't matter. he asks my name, and i tell him. i tell him five times, each time a little louder, because he can't hear me. "i'm lydia." "livia?" "lydia." "hmm?" "el-why-dee-eye-eh." "libia?" "LYDIA," i nearly shout across the gallery. but no one else looks our way.

he asks to see my face. i acquiesce because it's the easiest thing to, moving my mask to the side for just a moment, still gripping the bag with the ham in my other hand. "it's a shame to cover that up," he says when i do, and i want to leave but i want to see the rest of the artwork.

he points out three diagonal lines in one of his pieces, which doesn't interest me in the slightest. "why do you think i did that?" he asks. "you tell me," i say, three times, because he still can't hear me.

he talks more at length about his art, stopping mid-thought here and there. "where are you from?" he asks. i tell him toronto. more art talk, then: "are you single, married, engaged...?" "committed," i reply briskly. "how old are you?" "twenty-nine." he tells me he just turned eighty. that his daughter is thirty-one and just got married. i remain trapped in this conversation for what feels like hours.

finally he decides to go and i am free, except he comes back a minute later, having remembered that he didn't ask if i have work in the exhibition, too. i do. i should have said i don't.

standing there in front my work, once again trapped, leads to an exit: he introduces me to another artist whose name i am familiar with. she is kind, and welcoming, and for a few minutes we stand together and look quietly at the work on the wall before moving slowly away to continue our own journeys - i am travelling clockwise around the room, she counterclockwise. once i have finally, finally seen it all, i find her again. it was nice to meet you, i'm hope our paths will cross again, i hope you have a wonderful night, come visit my studio sometime. it's almost nice enough to mute the previous conversation which is still echoing uncomfortably in my mind.

the tables at the front door are nearly empty as i leave, save for a few crackers. i put on my hat and mitts and head home with my ham.

[calypso-finale]

Eighty Nine.

I have actually been so busy with these damn kids, I am back and forth with the boys and then Imani, Imani at night in the studio and the boys afterschool shit, why do they have so much shit, but I am giving Amerie the reigns in that now because I can’t be doing it like they want. The boys love that I come but I can’t be dealing with it all, I am tired. And I realised this was Robyn’ idea, I think it was her idea to make me busy because what the fuck. Herbo is a demon, like this guy knows how to get his way “you ain’t stupid are you?” I pointed “what!?” he spat “this is my niece first album, I am supporting her” I laughed “nah, you know this is something big because of all the people we got on it, you seeing the numbers in your head. But it’s good, I am joking with you” I chuckled “you better be, I am supporting niece. That my niece bro” rolling my eyes “dad are you ever going to sing?” I frowned “what you mean by that?” that is random “you just not doing your part of the song!?” she spat “oh you right, but I have been here just delegating everything that is all, I am being good, and I got you all these artists and trust me. They don’t know what is coming, you my daughter. This is going to be the biggest album ever. Since when does Rihanna sing anymore? See baby, you got this. Don’t worry about, I will get on the mic” placing my arm around her “exactly, you got me. Big Herb, you know that shit about to do numbers” he is a clown “cut it off the album though, that needs to go. Who wants some nasty rapper big Herbert” he kissed his teeth “nigga I will cut you” I chuckled moving back “but you good, don’t worry about it. You working so damn hard that I am proud of you” pressing a kiss to the top of her head, she worries too much. I just find it amazing that she got her mom in the studio, Rihanna was actually here on the mic. She swore she wouldn’t make new music, but she did it for Imani, so will I but it’s just I have been busy but that will be on my to do list “people are just going to judge me as some rich girl getting her people, like the album isn’t mine” she has a point, make two. Do the original, like it’s you but then make a remix one, nobody can complain then, you are good enough to do well, so stop it” nobody going to judge her.

I be coming home when Robyn is waking up for the kids, I am going to not go tonight because I am actually very tired, this whole routine. I think I won’t do anything tomorrow “morning” Robyn said “mhmm, I am knackered” Robyn pulled a face “just whipping off your boxers like that” I chuckled “I just want to get into bed, I am tired. I am too old for this shit” jumping into bed “you haven’t had any days off Chris, that is what happens. I told you that you just need to relax, and you do more” she has a point, placing my phone on the side table “I know, well I am going to do nothing tomorrow” I am so glad to be in bed “good, your eldest daughter messaged me. She has just landed, she said she will be over” I groaned out loudly “not Rylee” Robyn chuckled “she is too bougie for us, like honestly. Why?” I don’t get why she is here, isn’t she in Bali living the Kardashian life, she is stupid “I don’t know, I just woke up now to get the kids ready for school, she text me like three hours ago. Clearly she was on the jet with Saint and came here, she put. Hi mom I will be over to the house today, I have just landed” she brings her own drama “ok, but you know what I am going to say. That is your daughter, we don’t want to know. She has told us that, her life, she rules it so go for it. She only runs here when she is in the wrong” turning onto my side “that is kids, they never stop” I can’t be dealing with her shit “you’re still sore with her because of the relationship with Oakley and you breaking down” I shrugged not saying anything, I just want to sleep.

I didn’t want to get out of bed really, knowing Rylee is downstairs too, I did not want to move but I am here, I am awake and going downstairs. Robyn text me hours ago that she was here but I have just seen it now. I wonder if she is here or gone now, maybe she has gone. I don’t hate Rylee, but she comes with drama that girl. Robyn and I stay away from it and she knows that, we have been quiet with her because generally we don’t agree with it all so we just stayed back but I ain’t spoken to Oakley since and it does make me sad because we were close but things like this happen so what can I say “morning” Rylee said “hey, you making my food please” I said to Robyn “you just come down” she said “yeah but I am hungry so yeah, what you doing here? This ain’t Rylee, you living it up in Bali, being Rylee Kardashian, mother in law Kim” sitting down “shut up dad ok” why is she mad “I am just saying, what’s up? Fast life living and now you remember mom and dad? Or is it because you have a problem, where is Saint? Because if he posts another picture of you half naked I am going to beat his motherfucking ass, and you have some damn class” Rylee gawked at me “mom has done it before? She did lingerie” she defended “least she is doing lingerie, you’re posing for a random nigga? So you tell me, I will bust his ass. Have some shame, Robyn please don’t look at me like that. He is disrespectful, eating ass? I will fuck him up” Robyn got up “ok, now stop” Rylee put her head down “yes I know you was too high to even notice, you my daughter. And I don’t like it, either they are using you or you’re using them for clout? And since when did you need fucking clout? You acting off heartbreak, one you haven’t been through before and I get it but you a motherfucking mother so act like one! Kim is a clown and whore at that so don’t ever fucking think she is classy” I spat; I have been after Rylee to say these very words to her.

I have ate, had a smoke, I am calm now “sorry if I upset you” I said, Robyn also text me saying I am being a dick so I should apologise “it’s ok” she mumbled “where Is Aziel? He is not here, it just hit me now” sitting down “he is at the house, well my house. He didn’t want to come, weird enough. Grace mentioned it to him, and he said no” letting out an oh “also I didn’t want him to come because yeah I have come here with a problem” I am not shocked “I am leaving Aziel with you both” squinting my eyes “why?” that is random “because I am mentally in no fit state to be his mother, he is suffering because I am suffering, and I am inflicting it on him, I can’t be his mother” her voice broke “you can, get rid of the shit you’re doing” is she crazy “when you gave birth you become a mother for the rest of your life! You cannot put him down because you are going through this bitterness, and you want to run around with North and Saint! No!” I spat “he is suffering with me, he is better without me” I frowned “then his father is in London” I spat “he has a new child, he ain’t having him” looking at Robyn “Rylee, why are you doing this?” she shrugged “if you don’t take him then he will have to just be there with me, I can’t love him” my mouth fell open, Robyn glared at me to shut up “why can’t you love him, stop it Rylee. You do love him” she shook her head “I feel empty, I just see him and it’s nothing there but I know I am ruining him, so I am asking for you both to take him” Robyn looked at with pleading eyes to not say anything “you do love him but right now you just feeling hurt and pain, you haven’t stopped once to just think” she shook her head “I can’t be a mom to him” she looked at Robyn, and Robyn of course moved over to her to hug her, this is crazy to hear from her but I do need to back off.

I am really angry at Rylee, but Robyn doesn’t want me to say anything “I’m not good for him” she said “his dad is in London, go and give him the chance. Let him be a dad just because you don’t want to be a parent” Rylee looked at me “no it’s still fuck him” she pointed “you love him that’s why you’re so hurt about it, you want him to chase you and want you but when you laid hands on him and told him he was shit, he wasn’t going to be all forgiving. Just like a woman can be scorned so can a man, I am staying out of your shit, but I don’t agree with it. Now you’re here telling us you can’t be another!? Aziel is four!” I shouted, “why should we have him?” She coming to us for what “Chris, just please stop it. Listen to me Rylee, you can’t just drop him because you don’t feel like you’re a good mother. Once you held your child you’re a mother forever, it doesn’t stop ever” she wiped her tears “but right now I’m not good for him, and all dad is doing is shouting! He won’t let me fucking talk, I just right now not good for him. I’ve been too stuck in my ways that Aziel has been suffering, I’ve been a shit mother” she sobbed out “Chris please don’t shout ok, she is still young. She needs us, she came to us so stop it” shaking my head “what bought it on baby, talk to me. You was so determined to be with Kim and them, why are you upset now” Robyn asked “you create this drama and now you’re hard done by” Robyn shushed me “you do not do that, stop it” I clenched my jaw “look, I’m sorry. I’m just upset with you Rylee. I think we need you to and seek some therapy” Rylee sobbed out “I don’t need it; I just want to be me ok. I am a shit mother and I’m asking you both to help me” when is she not asking us for help “my son hasn’t been eating, he’s changed, he’s angry, he’s upset. And with me! He doesn’t want me” crossing my arms across my chest “why doesn’t he want you? Because he’s seeing mom with another man, flaunting it in his face. I told this to Robyn when she left me, I said you bring another man into y’all faces, I would fucking light shit up. You are stupid and me! I’m going, I can’t be nice. I just can’t be nice because she is upset because she can’t have shit her way” I can’t stand there and be fake, she did that shit herself and now she is coming to us; I cannot and I will not sit there and hear it, she fucking up her own son life because she is heartbroken.

Locking my car door and making my way to the house, I thought I would come and see Aziel myself and let Robyn deal with Rylee, I am right not too angry to be even dealing with it. Pressing the buzzer and waiting, when I saw Aziel I knew something was off, he really wasn’t himself at all. The door opened “Hi Mr Brown” Grace said, “call me Chris but how are you?” entering the house “I am well thank you, is Rylee here?” She asked “no, just me. Is Aziel here?” She pointed to right in front of me “he was going to go for a nap, but this is how he does it” seeing Oakley on the screen “watching Oakley” looking at Aziel sucking his thumb “yeah we put an interview on this time” closing the door behind me “hi Aziel” I waved at him, he just stared at me “he’s missing his dad” she said, smiling at him lightly “I can see, how has he been?” I asked “sad, he’s just gradually becoming more and more sad, I think the more the days went by that his dad didn’t come he realised he wasn’t around. Rylee doesn’t speak to him about it and it’s been hard on him, but then watching this makes him happy” walking over to him “Aziel” I said to him, he looked at Grace “it’s papa” Grace said and pointed at me “I come to see you son, I missed you big A” sitting down next to him “is that dad? Come, I have videos of dad too” he isn’t saying no but he’s just looking, getting my phone out “I have videos too baby” scrolling through my phone videos “oh here, look this is dad” playing the video “daddy” he took his thumb out of his mouth “yeah your dad” Aziel smiling at my phone “nah I can’t dance like you so why? You recording me” Oakley was trying to dance like me that one time and I missed it “miss you” he’s getting my teary eyed “he misses you too” the videos stopped “I have it” he asked “sure” passing him my phone, that is so sad.

I bought Aziel and Grace to the house, I mean he is ok with me now, but he is still quiet and with me there he wasn’t going to have a nap “Aziel is here” Raihan said as he came down “yes, you want to play with uncle?” I said to him “go with uncle and play” I said placing him down, but he went to Grace, of course he did “make yourself at home, I will be with you. Robyn” she waved at Aziel “hey baby, we need to talk now” I groaned out “what is it now? Rylee still here” she nodded her head “but I need to speak to you” nodding my head walking behind her “oh this is dramatic, we going upstairs. I know the drama ridden things are upstairs, office is drama, but the hardcore drama is upstairs “just please be quiet for a moment” clearing my throat “well I hope you spoke some sense into her” walking behind her “well yes but I had to break her down, like really get down to the issue, pushing her to speak” walking into our bedroom “Jesus Chris, why are the kids so hard work. Rylee is going to therapy she has no choice, she isn’t thinking right and really she is dropping herself in shit, so she revealed something to me that she told me to not tell but she knows I will tell you, but you cannot fucking say a thing. She is suffering in her own way too; she is dumb I get it but stop. I am serious. She told me that she fell pregnant again with Saint, nobody knows this because she got rid of it as soon as she found out. She said she didn’t think and did it because it’s not what she wanted and she doesn’t want to be in that family, so I said but you pushed yourself into there, now you got our grandchild in there lost. I am so mad with her, I think I can get Aziel out of the season, but she is stuck on there, she signed some shit. Well anyways, that happened” rubbing my head “it hurts my head to know she is that dumb” I mumbled “she is hurting everyone else while trying to hurt him, she is a mess and not thinking, and now she is back here. I won’t say shit, but I am pissed, she is an adult but if you can help her then do it” I shrugged “Saint and her are using each other for shit, and it's going to end nasty, I know it” Robyn said “she said that Saint doesn’t really want Aziel around, so I said that is why my grandchild is in this state, because you are stupid. Look I have had it out with her a lot, hurt people do hurt shit, what can I say” she is so dumb, like Rylee is loathing herself that she rather not mourn it and do dumb shit.

I didn’t bother to say anything to Rylee but hi, I mean Robyn has threatened me to not say a thing and I won’t “shocked you broke away from Saint” Imani said, she has just come home “yeah” Rylee just said, “hey dad, I am still thinking about what you said, also Willow and I are going to Miami” nodding my head “go for it, have fun” Imani sat next to me “so how come you’re here?” Imani asked Rylee “because I am” she just said, “the fast life always catches up on you” I said, “you should know” she retorted “I do, but I didn’t do what you did with the kids” Raihan walked into the room, Aziel is behind him which is nice “you playing nice with him” I asked “yes, but he is a baby. He sucks his thumb” side eying Raihan “he is a baby” maybe he will like Raihan “go and get some toys, bring them down for the room” Raihan sighed out “fine” waving Aziel over “also change the channel, who is ever watching news” looking over at my phone “I am going to ignore that for you, come here” Aziel made his way over to me “there we go” placing him on my lap “I have missed you Aziel, where have you been?” Imani asked him “I heard you are TT baby” Imani tickled him, and he smiled, looking over at my phone again “popular man” it’s just Skepz, I only link with him in London “daddy!” looking away from my phone, Aziel clapped “dad” looking up at the TV “we have some breaking news, UK rap sensation Central Cee, dated Rihanna and Chris Brown daughter. He has been taken into hospital from a drug overdose, that is all we have currently. We will bring you updated information as we get it, and if you have just tuned in, UK rapper Central Cee has been taken into hospital from a drug overdose” staring at the TV like that shit is untrue, Aziel is saying dad like it’s anything good “fuck, Skepz” he is calling me again “I just heard, I am calling you! Streets are saying on scene” my heart sank “bro, don’t say that shit. Streets don’t know shit” waving at Grace “Take him” I said “well I just heard like half hour ago, no news bro. Like streets are saying it was done” he talking shit “listen I ain’t-” I paused looking at Rylee, I know this girl isn’t wailing “what happened?” Robyn rushed in “call you back” disconnecting the call, let me try and call Wadz “oh my god” Robyn said in disbelief “dad say it isn’t true” Imani asked me, and I am trying, placing my phone against my ear, Wadz isn’t going to answer so I will do YB, he will answer “I don’t know, just hold on. Rylee fucking relax” she is scaring Aziel “fam” I knew he would answer “tell me, just please” I asked “I know as much as you, I am going to the hospital now, if I get anything I will call you. I am just in shock myself. Nobody answering me shit” my heart is in my mouth right now “fuck” I breathed out “I got to go now” he disconnected the call “Skepz said it was on scene” I just said, “what does that even mean?” Imani asked “no don’t say that!? Don’t’ say that!” Rylee screamed out “I am going London, fuck this shit” getting up, I am going there right now.

[mr-divabetic]

Divabetic's Luther Vandross Tribute podcast guests include Lisa Fischer, Jason Miles, Jeff James, Patricia Addie-Gentle RN, CDCES, and Chuck Flowers

[drivenbywords]

𝘌𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨.

Forty-six days. It had been forty-six days since I graduated from art school and finally got my degree. It was still surreal to think about, even during the car ride to my new art studio. My hands were fixated on the wheel as my mind disappeared from reality for the moment. That was what usually happened when I was behind the wheel; I would zone out until I reached my destination, unaware of how I got there in the first place. None of it felt real as if I was still chugging my way to graduation, having late nights of sitting in front of an easel and painting the next project for class. Although it was all official and life continued to progress on with my passion for art, I had moments of being a little girl again, locking myself away in my room and tracing the paint brush along the canvas to distract myself from reality. Art had a big part of my life ever since I was little. When my parents got divorced, I was a confused nine-year-old, just needing an escape from what was happening around me. When the long days of yelling and fighting took over the family home, I consumed myself with music and the easel I purchased after saving up in my money box. That began the days of putting on headphones and creating landscapes of what my desired reality would be like. Countless flowers around me in a meadow with a waterfall decorating the horizon, hearing birds chirping away in trees with a low sunset enhancing the sky. Then when it was the next day, it was a different fantasy of where I wanted to go. One time, I remembered painting the little details of the sand, imagining what they felt like under my bare feet with the waves of water kissing my skin. The ocean was slow and mellow, letting the sunlight place what seemed like crystals along the blue waters. I had always dreamt of being as beautiful as the ocean so I always took my time portraying it on my canvas, as well as the gorgeous sky above. I never thought of having clouds nearby; no sign of a disturbance from Mother Nature. Just a peaceful, unhurried time by the waves.  I had never thought in a million years that I would make painting a way of life, if it wasn’t for my step-father. He had walked into my room one time and noticed my paintings along the walls, letting my room finally be a sanctuary from all the change outside my little realm. At first, it seemed as though he was in awe, not finding the right words to spew out to me. Then he finally said how beautiful every one of them looked; he had no clue what was taking up so much of my time but he had never questioned it. My step-dad was a quiet man, only speaking out when he needed to. So when he shared how he enjoyed every piece I created, I took that to heart. He had always been a big supporter of my art and when I told him and my mother about going to school for it, they were ecstatic. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the dark and broodiness that was my birth father. He never cared to see what I needed emotionally, only tolerated little bits of me as much as he could. It was a complete one-eighty when my step-dad came into the picture, holding a hand out for me to take so I could finally find my way in this chaotic world.

Sliding the key in the door lock, I turned it before opening and walking inside. The studio had some plants and an easel from the previous owner of the place; my former roommate in college. She was moving away from New York to live abroad, briefly mentioning how she needed to let go of her studio and it immediately caught my attention. It wasn’t the biggest one in the world, but I didn’t complain for a second. I was just excited to own a little room for myself. If it wasn’t for my decision to go to NYU, I don’t think I would ever come this far in life. Even though people have always assumed it was because of my family. Did we have a significant amount of money? Yes. But did they pay my way through school and other accomplishments in my life? Absolutely not. I refused to let that be my story; I had to work hard for everything I received, but I saw this art studio as a graduation present. Throughout the years, rumors were spread around about me and my family, only getting through life with paying money and not getting consequences. The amount of times I had to defend my name and my family, it was exhausting to say the least. But one day, I decided to not waste anymore of my time and put all of that effort towards my own goals and achievements. I didn’t buy my way through school as everyone back home still assumed, but no one dared to give me the time of day and listen to me. But finally, I just felt like it was time to let my success do all of the talking.

I walked over to a nearby table, setting down a pot with a small sunflower that I had been holding under one arm, which made a peak of sunlight hit the flower in a subtle way. But it was also gorgeous to witness, making the yellow pop as if it was made to wear the natural light like an article of clothing. In a way, I saw this moment as a new start. It was the beginning of where life would take me after graduating, buying this art studio, and the beginning of what else was to come.

[ultraheydudemestuff]

Homestead Theatre Block (The Phantasy Entertainment Complex)                       

11794-11816 Detroit Ave.

Lakewood, OH

The Homestead Theater in Lakewood, OH, first opened in 1918. John De Frasia purchased the complex in 1965 when he opened a restaurant inside called Piccadilly Square. After seeing the 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty, De Frasia built a pirate ship inside the restaurant, which was converted to a music club in 1973.  One side of the ship is used as a DJ booth, while the second half is a sound stage. The walls of the complex contain early new wave posters and stickers from most bands that have appeared at the complex since its opening.  The theater played movies until 1979 and at one point was referred to as the Detroit Theater. Between the years 1976 and 1977 it was called The Last Picture Show. In the eighties, the theater was renamed the Phantasy, with a focus on alternative, goth and industrial rock groups.

     The Phantasy Entertainment Complex, consisting of the Phantasy Nite Club, The Chamber, Symposium, and Phantasy Theater,  has been a staple in the Cleveland music scene since the early 1980s. The Phantasy helped launch nationally recognized bands Anne E. DeChant, Devo, Exotic Birds, Filter, Lucky Pierre, the Adults, The Pagans, Stabbing Westward, and was the debut location for Nine Inch Nails. It was also a stopover for other major acts like Iggy Pop, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Pogues, The Psychedelic Furs, the Ramones, and Psychic TV and has hosted reunion shows for bands including Lestat, among others.

     Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett performed at the Phantasy Theater in 1987 a day before their film premiere of Light of Day.  Within the same complex The Chamber dance club began in 1996 under the joint management of D.J. Cable and Michele De Frasia and has since been the local haven for Alternative, Goth and Industrial subcultures. Notable artists that frequented The Chamber and are from the area included Andy Kubiszewski, Marilyn Manson, Kevin McMahon, Lorin Morgan-Richards, Larry Szyms and Textbeak.

     In 2009, the complex was investigated by paranormal researchers who claimed to have captured audio of spirits.  In 2010, a fire swept through the complex.  In 2015, the De Frasia family announced that the Phantasy Nite Club complex was for sale.  A deal to sell the venue fell through at the last minute in 2018.  As of June 2020, plans for the Phantasy to become a community hub and entertainment complex were nearing completion. On July 8, 2020, ownership was transferred to the West 117 Development- Phantasy LLC as part of the Studio West 117 complex. The complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places as the Homestead Theater Block on June 18, 2021.

[lenbryant]

(LONG POST) Being a piece from the New Yorker, this essay takes several paragraphs before it finally gets around to the main point. #refrigeratormagnet

David Zaslav, Hollywood Antihero

The C.E.O. of a conglomerate that includes Warner Bros. studios, CNN, and HBO takes on an entertainment business in turmoil.

By Clare Malone, August 23, 2023

In 1941, a couple from New York bought an undeveloped parcel of land in Beverly Hills for fourteen thousand dollars from the writer Dorothy Parker, the most fearsome wit at the Algonquin Round Table. James Pendleton, an interior designer and art dealer of Regency and Baroque pieces, and his wife, Mary Frances, who went by Dodo, craved a particular vision of California living. They imagined a landscape of eucalyptus trees and rose gardens, with a pool house suitable for high-life entertaining—a Xanadu escape from their place in Manhattan. The Pendletons enlisted the architect John Elgin Woolf, who designed homes for Cary Grant, Lillian Gish, Barbara Stanwyck, and Errol Flynn, to create a one-level house—Dodo had a bad hip—in a coolly sumptuous style that would come to be known as Hollywood Regency.

In 1967, Pendleton sold the house to Robert Evans, who, as the head of Paramount Pictures, went on to oversee a string of era-defining films: “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Love Story,” “The Godfather,” “Serpico,” “Chinatown.” Evans led a life worthy of a film auteur’s attention—glamorous, accomplished, and more than a little sleazy. When he bought the house, which he called Woodland, he had been married twice; he would marry five more times. He became almost as well known as a host as he had been as a producer, throwing bacchanalian parties and entertaining such stars as Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Roman Polanski. In the nineteen-eighties, an addiction to cocaine and an association with a tawdry murder case helped bring his career, and the parties, to an end.

Evans died in 2019, at the age of eighty-nine. Three months later, a media executive named David Zaslav bought Woodland for sixteen million dollars. Though Zaslav was one of a select group of people who could afford this Hollywood palace, he was not part of the town’s aristocracy. Zaslav was then the C.E.O. of Discovery, Inc., the cable corporation whose channels included HGTV, TLC, Animal Planet, Food Network, and the Oprah Winfrey Network. At the time, his greatest claim to fame was the size of his paycheck. In 2014, he was the country’s most highly paid executive, with compensation of a hundred and fifty-six million dollars, mostly in stocks and options. Zaslav, whose teeth gleam a startling white and whose wardrobe skews toward Wall Street leisurewear—logoed golf shirts and zip vests—had a reputation as a shrewd dealmaker, adept at brokering acquisitions. Discovery was something of an entertainment-industry backwater, known for a portfolio of low-cost, lowbrow, highly profitable programs, of the kind you don’t tell co-workers you watch: “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” “Wives with Knives,” “Naked and Afraid.” Zaslav, a lifelong New Yorker, had never been involved in managing a Hollywood studio, but he seemed to like the idea of the town. “David has always been on the outside looking in on the content world,” a former Discovery executive told me. “He’s always wanted to be a player in Hollywood.”

In May, 2021, a year and a half after Zaslav purchased Woodland, he was announced as the C.E.O. of a new media company, Warner Bros. Discovery—a vast conglomerate that melded Discovery’s holdings with those of WarnerMedia, which encompassed HBO, Warner Bros.’s film and television studios, CNN, and a suite of cable channels including TNT, TBS, and Turner Classic Movies. Zaslav, the sixty-one-year-old head of a middle-market cable company, had suddenly achieved a cultural reach beyond what the likes of Robert Evans could ever have imagined. “Whoa—the minnow swallows the whale,” the former Discovery executive recalled thinking.

Under Zaslav, W.B.D. adopted a new slogan, “the stuff that dreams are made of”—an evocation of Hollywood glory borrowed from “The Maltese Falcon,” a hit for Warner Bros. in 1941. But Zaslav joined the movie business at a bracingly inglorious moment. The advent of streaming video has demolished old business models. The unions that represent the industry’s actors and writers are carrying out a bitter and prolonged strike. And the company that Zaslav has ended up leading is an ungainly entity, stuck with colossal debts.

Zaslav has said that he is focussed on the long term—a sensible position, since he’s made a pretty rough first impression. As soon as he took over W.B.D., he began slashing costs and laying off hundreds of workers. Last August, he scrapped a Scooby-Doo movie and a ninety-million-dollar Batgirl project, both nearly complete, and wrote them off for tax purposes. (W.B.D. justified the decision as “a strategic shift.”) On the picket line, actors and writers point not just at his compensation package—valued at two hundred and forty-six million dollars in 2021, the year he brokered the W.B.D. deal and extended his contract—but also at his seeming interest in playing mogul while the entertainment business implodes.

For many, Zaslav is something of an antihero, at the center of the town’s story for all the wrong reasons. Those in what one insider half-jokingly calls “the Hollywood deep state” seem unsure that he is up to the task of building a new entertainment-industry power under difficult circumstances. Even Zaslav’s supporters describe him as an outsider feeling his way along. “Notwithstanding David’s long and distinguished media career, he is a relative newcomer to the motion-picture environment,” said Alan Horn, a former president and C.O.O. of Warner Bros. and chairman of Walt Disney Studios, who has been hired as an adviser to Zaslav. “That generated a lot of scrutiny, and it can take a while to be accepted.”

The deal that created W.B.D. was, like many mergers, a marriage of convenience. A.T. & T. had bought Time Warner in 2018, as part of an attempt to expand into the entertainment industry. This was a radical departure from A.T. & T.’s traditional business, but the company was eager enough to open new markets that it was willing to pursue an eighty-five-billion-dollar acquisition and to fight off an antitrust suit from the Department of Justice. Three years later, it was equally eager to get out.

John Malone, Zaslav’s longtime patron, is widely considered a principal architect of the deal. A former cable magnate who was a powerful owner of Discovery, Malone is eighty-two years old, worth around nine billion dollars, and seen as one of the most formidable minds in business. The W.B.D. transaction, a Reverse Morris Trust, is a hallmark of his dealmaking: a complex maneuver in which a company spins off a subsidiary to its shareholders, then immediately sells it to another company, which forms a new entity in which the shareholders have majority control. A.T. & T. shareholders retained seventy-one per cent of the stock in W.B.D.; this exchange, executed by high-priced bankers and lawyers, prevented them from incurring capital-gains tax. Malone owns less than one per cent of the stock, but sits on the board and remains enormously influential. (Advance, the parent company of Condé Nast and The New Yorker, is one of the largest shareholders in W.B.D., with around eight per cent of the stock.)

Discovery didn’t really have the money to make the acquisition outright. A former media executive characterized it as a leveraged debt buyout, which is “unusual in the media business, because the media business is so volatile.” But the deal left the new company with substantial handicaps: Discovery, which was already carrying fifteen billion dollars of debt, went further in debt as it made a huge payment to A.T. & T. Thus, W.B.D. was born more than fifty-six billion dollars in the red. In order to keep his company intact, Zaslav would have to use its cash flow to pay down that debt. The former media executive told me, “The key is, in the next two to three years, can David pay off enough debt that he emerges with a viable business?”

The media industry is a seascape of big fish prowling for slightly smaller fish to eat. W.B.D.’s creation was Discovery’s bid to “scale up,” combining assets to compete with such streaming entities as Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video, which have spent a decade enticing customers to cancel their cable subscriptions. The truism is that only the largest firms will survive in the post-cable world of streaming, which demands endless content. Traditional media companies have launched their own streaming services, but it’s been difficult for them to make scores of new movies and series while their once-reliable cash flows dwindle. Expensive cable subscriptions are quickly becoming obsolete. Advertising, too, has been lost to Big Tech, as Facebook and Google Ads have come to dominate the market.

Zaslav likes to tout W.B.D.’s vast library: “Harry Potter,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Superman,” “Batman,” “Friends,” “Game of Thrones.” (He tends not to dwell on “Dr. Pimple Popper,” a reality series about a celebrity dermatologist.) His company, he boasts, is purely focussed on content, not distracted by selling phones or cloud storage or bulk toilet paper. But anyone who runs an enterprise like CNN or HBO knows that the days of easy money from cable fees have ended. CNN made a billion dollars in profit in 2016, and is expecting to make more than eight hundred million dollars this year—a good business, but a shrinking one. The future of entertainment might have been aptly described by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, in 2016. “When we win a Golden Globe,” he said, “it helps us sell more shoes.”

Someone who has worked with Zaslav for years described his career as a series of cannily seized opportunities. Born in Brooklyn, he spent most of his childhood in suburban Rockland County, where his father was an attorney and his mother taught at a Jewish day school. Zaslav was a talented tennis player; Althea Gibson, the first Black athlete to win a Grand Slam, was his private coach. After graduating from Binghamton University and Boston University School of Law, he went to work for the New York firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby & MacRae, where he endeared himself to partners by joining them for matches. “I wasn’t a good lawyer,” he later told Time. “But I was a good tennis player.” (Zaslav declined to speak on the record for this story.)

In 1986, the firm hired Richard Berman, a former general counsel of Warner Cable, who brought along MTV and Discovery as clients. Zaslav was quickly drawn to the work. “It wasn’t the law that I was passionate about,” he later said. “It was the cable business and the idea of building a business.” A few years later, Zaslav recalled in an interview in 2017, he happened upon a story in the trade publication Multichannel News, which said that Bob Wright, the C.E.O. of NBC, wanted to get into cable. Zaslav wrote Wright a letter saying that he wanted to be part of the project. Soon after, he was hired as a junior lawyer for what would become CNBC.

Zaslav has told the story of the letter many times, though recently it got a bit of a punch-up. In the version he delivered in a speech this spring, the article appeared not in Multichannel News but in the Hollywood Reporter, and the letter went not to Wright but to Jack Welch—the C.E.O. of NBC’s parent company and perhaps the greatest corporate celebrity of his time.

When Zaslav started at CNBC, “there were a few layers between him and Jack Welch,” a person who worked there at the time told me. The startup network operated out of Fort Lee, New Jersey, far from NBC’s Art Deco headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Eventually, Zaslav began overseeing the negotiations with regional cable companies over how much each would pay to carry CNBC. “David was a transactional guy,” the former NBC co-worker told me. “He went from deal to deal.” But Zaslav was ambitious. His deals often seemed timed to close on the night before a big meeting, and he would show up bedraggled but radiating victory.

“David always attached himself to a higher-up boss,” a colleague from his NBC years told me. A former NBC insider said, “He was very good at managing up. He knows how to get somebody to buy into him.” Many cable-company executives of the era didn’t see themselves as media moguls; they were engineers and scrappy businessmen who had built the infrastructure to bring cable TV into millions of households. Among the most powerful of them was Malone, who ran Tele-Communications Inc., based in Colorado, which at the time was the country’s largest cable company. Malone—a soft-spoken, snowy-haired man with a permanently amused smile—is the controlling shareholder of Formula 1’s parent company and one of the largest private landowners in the United States. “I have earned so much money that money doesn’t interest me,” he told Der Spiegel, in 2001. “Now it is only the love of the game that drives me.”

In a 2017 interview, Zaslav told a story of staying at the office late one night to wait for a call from Malone. When Bob Wright arrived the next morning and found him still there, Zaslav explained why he hadn’t left his post: “You said I should wait for John Malone to call, so I did.” Wright, he said, “got Jack [Welch] on the phone and goes, ‘This guy stayed all night. Can you believe this guy?’ Years later, Bob said to me, ‘That was it. We said, you’re our guy.’ ”

Zaslav considers Welch and Malone his fundamental influences. Welch was known for ferocious cost-cutting and constant attention to the bottom line—which often came with mass layoffs. Malone has a near-fetish for tax avoidance and is a master of strategizing complex transactions. “Jack was analytics and costs and ‘figure out how to manage people out and get the best people in,’ ” Zaslav said on a podcast last year. Malone “is really about long-term strategic thinking and driving toward free cash flow,” he went on. “Somehow, I think the conflation of those two is my brain.”

Welch encouraged a hard-driving corporate culture, which Zaslav strove to embody. Compact and thrumming with energy, Zaslav has a distinct New York accent, and speaks in long narratives that always resolve in a salesman-like pitch. His two primary interests, people who know him well say, are business and his family. Zaslav met his wife, Pam, in high school, and they worked together as lifeguards at a summer camp. They now have three adult children, one of whom is a producer at CNN. Zaslav’s Instagram is filled with pictures of him golfing with his sons and eating at an Italian joint with his mother, who is ninety and lives in New Jersey. “What we love most about David is how he loves his wife Pam and their beautiful family,” Chip and Joanna Gaines, the stars of HGTV’s “Fixer Upper,” wrote not long ago.

Zaslav’s gift for cultivating allies helped him advance, but it also forced him to take sides in a messy corporate conflict. In 1993, Roger Ailes, a Republican political consultant with roots in television production, came to CNBC to help boost ratings. He promoted Zaslav, who was then thirty-three, to head the affiliates division, negotiating deals with various cable companies. But Ailes was in a bitter power struggle with Tom Rogers, the head of the cable division, and he saw Zaslav as loyal to Rogers. According to Gabriel Sherman’s 2014 book, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” he enlisted comrades to keep an eye on Zaslav and exhorted them, “Let’s kill the S.O.B.” In a meeting, Ailes allegedly called Zaslav “a little fucking Jew prick.”

The conflict took a toll on Zaslav. Sherman writes that an executive saw him “almost visibly shaking in an empty office.” In a memo from the time, Zaslav described a pervasive sense of fear: “I view Ailes as a very, very dangerous man. I take his threats to do physical harm to me very, very seriously. . . . I feel endangered both at work and at home.” Ailes was investigated and ultimately left CNBC, in 1996.

Zaslav and Rogers had outlasted their rival, but the episode had unexpected consequences. Ailes’s separation agreement stipulated that he could not work for such competitors as CNN and Bloomberg, but it said nothing about Rupert Murdoch’s company, News Corporation. Just weeks after leaving CNBC, Ailes held a press conference with Murdoch to announce that he would be the new leader of Fox News.

By 2004, Zaslav was the head of cable distribution and syndication for NBC Universal, a role that was distant from any programming decisions. He had attached himself to yet another boss, an executive named Randy Falco, who ran the business side of the division and was a candidate to take over the company. But Jeff Zucker, the former executive producer of the “Today” show, prevailed, and, according to the former NBC colleague, it was clear to Zaslav that he would never make C.E.O. of NBC. Though he and Zucker maintained a decades-long friendship, people who know them say that it was always tinged with competitive tension. “David kind of always coveted what Jeff was doing,” a person with knowledge of their relationship said. “He became C.E.O. of the company, and he was in charge of all the content and all the movies.”

Zaslav seemed determined to find his way into a similar position. In 2005, he joined the board of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, whose members included John Hendricks, the founder and chairman of Discovery, and Robert Miron, the chairman and C.E.O. of Advance/Newhouse Communications, which, like Malone, was an owner of Discovery. “Suddenly he got in the room with the guys who built the industry from the ground up,” one person who knew Zaslav at NBC said. “They were long-term thinkers and planners, and serious businesspeople.” Zaslav was eager to develop relationships with them. “He wasn’t particularly strong in terms of assessing and analyzing financial information,” a former cable executive said, of Zaslav. But he was “extremely good at creating bonds with key deal decision-makers.”

One well-informed industry source told me that Malone came to appreciate Zaslav’s energy and skill as an operator—someone who could execute complicated strategies on the ground. The media executive Barry Diller, who has known Malone for decades, told me, “John Malone has had a great facility for finding people that he thought were competent and giving them an enormous opportunity that would not have been available, almost at first blush.” In the summer of 2006, Zaslav began talks to take over Discovery. He was officially installed early the next year, with approval from Hendricks and Malone.

As C.E.O., Zaslav had a difficult remit: take the channel public, shake up its culture, and grow internationally. “At NBC, he was on an easy street with good compensation, not having to work very hard—he could delegate—and, all of a sudden, he had to work his ass off to turn around a group of channels that were underperforming,” the former cable executive said.

Zaslav laid off many of the company’s executives and a quarter of its staff. “There were some real turkey businesses there,” Malone said at the time. “David had to take them out behind the barn and shoot them.” Zaslav needed underlings who would help change the company. “People were coming in at nine, nine-thirty, heading out at six,” he told Time. He wanted those people gone. While some of his top executives are women, Zaslav is “swayed easily by a certain kind of person who talks a certain kind of way, and they all tend to be white men,” one former Discovery employee told me. “Very confident, big swagger. Having a bad reputation can actually be a good thing in his eyes, because it means you’re tough.” Being too nice could earn you a reproach.

Discovery had become known for earnest, carefully made educational and nature programming: Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man” documentary, the “Globe Trekker” travel series. Zaslav was more interested in taking advantage of the ongoing boom in reality TV. In 2007, “Jon & Kate Plus 8” premièred on TLC, opening a fruitful niche for Discovery, which then launched “17 Kids and Counting.” Zaslav showed demotic taste, and an instinct for gimmicks and provocations; in 2010, he green-lighted Sarah Palin’s reality show. “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” about a child-beauty-pageant contestant from Georgia, was followed by “Wives with Knives,” “Sex Sent Me to the E.R.,” “Naked and Afraid,” and “My Big Fat Fabulous Life.” In what seemed like a bid for more respectable life-style content, Zaslav courted Oprah Winfrey, and together they launched OWN in 2011. Television was then in what became known as its second golden age: “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Mad Men.” Zaslav made a point of not competing in that realm. “It’s like a kids’ soccer game—everyone saw something that worked and started chasing the ball,” he told Time. “It’s way too expensive.” Much of his programming was economical, lucrative, and relatively uncomplicated to produce. “Discovery’s model was completely different than the Hollywood content model,” the former Discovery executive told me. “It was very low-cost content that was made completely on a nonunion basis, owned one hundred per cent by Discovery.”

Malone based Zaslav’s pay mainly on the company’s performance, supplying much of it in the form of equity and stock options that vested over time. Discovery went public in 2008, and S.E.C. filings show that the following year Zaslav’s compensation was $11.7 million. A year later, it had jumped to $42.6 million. In 2014, Zaslav’s pay package was valued at $156.1 million, even as the stock fell by a quarter. “David is clearly a genius,” the former colleague from NBC said. “He’s taken probably about a billion dollars of stockholder money off the table since he started working for Malone personally.” (It’s closer to seven hundred and fifty million dollars. Still, a lot.)

Media-C.E.O. salaries have continued to grow, as the transformation of the industry requires more mergers and acquisitions, and riskier bets on unpredictable markets. But Zaslav was an outlier; even though Discovery’s stock value increased substantially in his time there, he was still the head of a mid-tier media company who in some years made more than Disney’s Bob Iger. In 2022, a firm advising institutional investors recommended that the company’s shareholders decline to reëlect three board members because of their “poor stewardship” around compensation.

For years, Zaslav lived in a tony village in Westchester County. Then, in 2010, he bought Conan O’Brien’s duplex apartment in the Majestic, an Art Deco co-op on Central Park West, for twenty-five million dollars. One person who has known Zaslav for years described the purchase as an act of self-assertion: “There’s a new player in town.” Still, a former Discovery insider who visited the Manhattan apartment said that the décor was almost shockingly modest. There were posters on the walls, and TVs playing programs from Discovery and CNBC—effectively an extension of his office.

Two years later, Zaslav spent another twenty-five million dollars on an oceanfront mansion in East Hampton, where he began hosting a “Shark Week”-themed Labor Day party. His guest lists started to appear on Page Six: Les Moonves, Harvey Weinstein, Donna Karan, Martha Stewart, Jamie Dimon, Ryan Seacrest, Colin Powell. Even Roger Ailes was spotted at a Winter Wonderland party in 2014. These days, Zaslav goes to Taylor Swift shows with Kevin Costner and John McEnroe, and sits courtside at Lakers games with Michael B. Jordan and Bill Maher. Joy Behar, a co-host of “The View,” recently accompanied him to a Bruce Springsteen concert. “He’s very social,” she said. “He’s very alpha—he has a big personality.”

Zaslav enjoys this kind of socializing but sees it as an extension of his work, the media executive Kenneth Lerer, who is a close friend of his, said. Lerer thinks that, without a high-profile job, Zaslav’s natural milieu would be a back-yard barbecue. Zaslav is often seen out in New York—at Barney Greengrass for breakfast, at Le Bilboquet or Porter House for lunch, and at the Polo Bar for drinks. But he tends not to linger. “He would have one course, a glass of wine, no dessert—because, by nine o’clock, David’s out,” the former Discovery insider said.

Zaslav rises at 4:45 A.M. to read the news, and then, when he’s in New York, walks a few miles through the city while making calls. One person sent me a photograph taken of Zaslav hustling up Madison Avenue, in jeans, a sports coat over a zip vest, and dark glasses, talking animatedly on his phone. Zaslav can call underlings as early as 6 A.M., New York time; the conversations often last no more than a minute or two, and sometimes end so abruptly that he doesn’t bother saying goodbye. “Everyone wakes up and they got e-mails from me,” Zaslav once told CNBC. “Part of my job is to push everybody forward.” He can be similarly bluff in meetings. One associate told me that he tends to deliver long monologues and ask questions without seeming intent on hearing the answer. Another associate read the phenomenon differently: “He can be multitasking and you think he’s not paying attention, but he is.”

Some colleagues called Zaslav a short-term thinker, who moves restlessly from idea to idea. His proponents see it differently. “Of all the C.E.O.s I’ve worked with over forty years, he’s probably the most hands-on,” Lerer said. “He gets an idea and he just forces it until there’s a decision.” In that process, others note, he doesn’t always keep his temper in check. “He could be very warm and very nurturing, and then turn on a dime,” the Discovery insider said. “I saw him lash out when people bullshitted, pretending to know what they didn’t know.” An incident in 2008 became a subject of company gossip. When Leonardo DiCaprio, who was an executive producer on a Discovery series, didn’t show up to a première, Zaslav and one of the other producers had what an attendee called a “spirited conversation”—a screaming match. One of Zaslav’s sayings, according to a former employee, was “It’s not show friends. It’s show business.”

During Zaslav’s tenure at Discovery, the industry was undergoing a radical transformation. In 2013, Netflix had launched its first major original streaming series, “House of Cards,” and since then it had poured billions into original movies and TV series. Netflix didn’t much concern itself with profits; its strategy was to dominate the streaming sector first, in the hope that it would eventually generate huge gains. This made some media observers nervous. “One day soon, the finance gods, they’re gonna wake up and say to everybody, ‘Where’s the money?’ ” one former executive told me. Another industry insider said that “an irrational stock market” gave Netflix the incentive to overspend. “And that tipped the scales in the market and caused peak TV and then too much TV,” they said. But Wall Street valued Netflix more as a tech firm than as a media company, and its stock price continued to rise.

Though traditional media companies knew that they needed to adapt for an all-streaming future, their investors weren’t ready to take too many resources away from cable, which was still a reliable, if dwindling, source of cash. “We couldn’t turn ourselves into Netflix because the lion’s share of our network and even studio revenues came from the cable bundle,” the former Time Warner C.E.O. Jeff Bewkes told James Andrew Miller for his 2021 book, “Tinderbox.” Like many others in the industry, John Malone thought that the only way to compete with Netflix was to join forces against it. “You have to aggregate either through coöperation or consolidation,” he said. In 2018, Discovery made its first major effort at that sort of expansion, purchasing Scripps, which owned HGTV, Food Network, and Travel Channel.

A.T. & T. saw the acquisition of Time Warner as a way to expand into a new but complementary field; the idea was that customers could stream A.T. & T.-owned content over A.T. & T. networks on an A.T. & T. platform. That deal is now viewed as a disastrous culture clash, between the Dallas-based telecom giant and the “creatives” who made up the teams at HBO, CNN, and elsewhere. The Times reported that in one early meeting, John Stankey, the C.E.O. of WarnerMedia, outlined for his new executives the protocols for communicating with him: no calls on Saturday, no PowerPoints, and as few meetings as possible. (A spokesperson for A.T. & T. disputed this characterization.)

In February, 2021, as A.T. & T. grappled with the media industry’s rapid changes, Zaslav sent a message to Stankey. “I have an idea,” he wrote, adding a couple of golfer emojis and a smiley face with sunglasses.

The two men talked for a couple of hours, and later met at a Greenwich Village town house to discuss a potential transaction. Finally, they brought in advisers and bankers to settle the details of what Zaslav’s team took to calling Project Home Run. The deal officially closed on April 8, 2022. Two weeks later, in what is now referred to as the Great Netflix Correction, the company reported a drop in subscribers for the first time since 2011; it lost roughly fifty billion dollars in value virtually overnight, and Wall Street abruptly abandoned its enthusiasm for companies that spend huge sums on content. Malone and Zaslav had closed their deal just in time.

As the merger took shape, Zaslav went on a Hollywood listening tour. Bryan Lourd and Ari Emanuel, the co-chair of the talent agency C.A.A. and the C.E.O. of the sports-and-entertainment firm Endeavor, respectively, hosted dinners with writers, actors, and executives. The deep state—the managers and agents who make the industry function—remained relatively receptive to him, hoping that he could undo the damage of A.T. & T.’s ownership. Zaslav was solicitous of the old guard. “We talked a lot about the eighties, nineties, and two-thousands, about how the business started to really change geometrically,” Michael Ovitz, the co-founder of C.A.A., told me. “He wanted a foundation, he wanted roots.” Ovitz offered Zaslav some advice: move to L.A. “When people try to run these creative businesses from the East Coast, it was very difficult to do,” he said. “You don’t get the intrinsic feeling.” Zaslav moved to L.A.

He settled into a new office, in a leafy corner of the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank—a recessed space where he works at Jack Warner’s old desk. A curving conservatory window opens on trees and a manicured garden. By the window is a sitting area where Zaslav receives guests. There, directly behind his chair, is a picture of him with Malone.

In Hollywood, Zaslav quickly adopted local habits. His Woodland house was under renovation, so he took an apartment at the Beverly Hills Hotel and spent a lot of time at its Polo Lounge. But he did not necessarily acquire the “intrinsic feeling” that Ovitz hoped he would. A well-informed source told me that Zaslav’s team fumbled through easy interactions; at one meeting, they asked painfully basic questions about residuals—long-term payments for reruns, DVD sales, and other repeat airings. Before the merger had even closed, Vanity Fair ran a lengthy piece on Zaslav, and Variety declared him “Hollywood’s New Tycoon.” The presumption that an out-of-towner was going to swoop in and fix everything rankled. There were snobbish dissections of his wardrobe and enthusiastic manner—though people were happy to attend parties in his honor and to take his money.

At the time, Jeff Zucker, Zaslav’s former boss at NBC, was running CNN. Zucker was popular with on-air talent, and the network had secured high ratings with aggressive coverage of Donald Trump’s Administration. Much of Hollywood was similarly resistant to his Presidency. But Malone, a libertarian who had contributed two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Trump’s Inauguration, chafed at CNN’s critical tone. During an interview in November, 2021, Malone said, “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists—which would be unique and refreshing.” Zaslav, too, began to talk about the need for CNN to tack to the center. Two months before the deal was finalized, Zucker was forced to resign, for having an undisclosed relationship with another executive.

Zaslav did not interview any internal candidates for the new C.E.O. Instead, he quickly appointed Chris Licht, a longtime producer who had launched “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and run Stephen Colbert’s late-night show. In June, a long profile in The Atlantic portrayed Licht as a feckless and distant leader, whose ham-fisted decision-making led to such embarrassments as a televised town hall with Trump, in which the host struggled to manage the former President’s ad-hominem attacks as a sympathetic crowd cheered him on. Zaslav was portrayed as an intrusive micromanager, trying to move the network toward an ill-defined political center. According to The Atlantic, CNN employees thought that “Licht was playing for an audience of one. It didn’t matter what they thought, or what other journalists thought, or even what viewers thought. What mattered was what David Zaslav thought.” Zaslav fired Licht days after the article’s publication. He is still searching for a replacement.

A CNN insider described the network’s prospects as the merger went through: the cable business was dying, but CNN had a devoted enough following that, with time and investment, it might be able to reinvent itself. Staffers saw CNN+ as their best hope; even though its programming was somewhat limited, it might help accustom viewers to streaming news from CNN. But Zaslav killed CNN+ after just a month. Now the future of CNN itself is uncertain. Though W.B.D. vehemently denies that it is for sale, many in the newsroom speculate that it would be a prime asset to sell if Zaslav’s debt-payment plan doesn’t go as quickly as Wall Street demands. Guessing at potential CNN buyers has become a media parlor game. Comcast, the corporate parent of NBC News, is seen as a likely potential partner for W.B.D., but CNN might not survive such a deal intact. If W.B.D. and Comcast merged, they might want to offload one of their news networks. “David Zaslav will be remembered as the guy who squandered the opportunity to take the world’s best-known news brand and transition it into a digital future,” the CNN insider said. “Instead, he took the massive yearly profits that CNN has, and used it to pay down debt for this bizarre, complex, convoluted, debt-driven merger.”

But CNN is only a small part of W.B.D.’s business, and of Zaslav’s mandate. “Whenever I talk to David, the first word out of my mouth is, ‘Manage your cash,’ ” Malone said on CNBC last November. Cash generation, he added, “will ultimately be the metric that David’s success or failure will be judged on.” In fact, bonuses for W.B.D.’s top executives this year are officially tied to the company’s cash flow, along with debt reduction. “If you’re an investor, you love David Zaslav,” the former Discovery insider said. “He is a great businessman. If you put a number out, he’s going to make that number.” But, the insider added, “he’s a tractor who will run you down to get to that.”

This spring, Zaslav gave a commencement address at Boston University, where he attended law school. Wearing a red academic robe and sunglasses, he spoke dutifully of the five things he’d learned along the way. “Some people will be looking for a fight,” he warned graduates. “But don’t be the one they find it with.” Outside, the Writers Guild had assembled a picket line. A small plane circled overhead, trailing a banner that read “David Zaslav—Pay Your Writers.”

On Twitter, a writer named Annie Stamell poked at the new C.E.O.: “All we want is 2 Zaslav salaries for 11,500 WGA members, is that really so much to ask?” Two days later, Zaslav and the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter hosted a party together at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, near Cannes, to celebrate a century of Warner films. The two were photographed in near-identical blue button-down shirts and cream-colored jackets, amid bottles of Dom Pérignon. Zaslav told a reporter for New York magazine that the party was for “our best friends, and our real friends, you know, no assholes.”

Zaslav was not alone in failing to project empathy. This July, as executives gathered for the annual media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, Bob Iger spoke in an interview about Disney’s initiative to control costs by “spending less on what we make, and making less.” This was a terrifying prospect for the creative class, but Iger dismissed the striking writers and actors: “There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic, and they are adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing that is quite frankly very disruptive and dangerous.” Disney had recently renewed Iger’s contract through 2026, at a rate of thirty-one million dollars per year. Fran Drescher, the sharp-tongued president of SAG-AFTRA, likened him and his fellow-C.E.O.s to “land barons of a medieval time.”

For writers and actors, streaming has meant a steep drop in residual payments, which once sustained them during career dry spells or made them rich if they created a hit. SAG-AFTRA has said that it wants its members to receive two per cent of the revenue that shows generate from streaming platforms, and wage increases to keep pace with inflation. The studios had put forth a proposal they claimed would offer the union a billion dollars in increased wages and residuals. But, as the Hollywood labor writer Jonathan Handel noted, that works out “to just $30 million per year per company”—roughly a single year’s pay for Iger or Zaslav.

Twenty months after Zaslav was declared “Hollywood’s New Tycoon,” it feels as if the town has turned against him. “He’s feeling the backlash,” as the former media executive put it. He has no choice about servicing his company’s debt. But, the executive went on, “human nature would say the other objective is to prove that you are the mogul. Five years from now, you want to be remembered as someone who helped rebuild the movie business.”

Warner Bros. studios are struggling, despite the billion-dollar success of “Barbie.” Zaslav likes to declare that the company has thirty-five to forty per cent of the world’s most valuable intellectual property—it just needs to take advantage of it. For more than a decade, Marvel’s superhero franchises have dominated the industry, while Warner’s equivalent, DC Studios, has struggled to keep up. Zaslav and his team hope to recruit the director Christopher Nolan, who made a string of successful movies before leaving Warner during A.T. & T.’s ownership. But some in the industry fear that Zaslav’s involvement in the movie business is distracting. Kenneth Lerer conceded that the hands-on instinct he sees as one of Zaslav’s strengths “does have some negatives with the Hollywood establishment, because you go to him, complain to him—he always jumps in. If David would jump in less, I think that’d be helpful to him.” A recent Variety feature on Warner Bros.’s new co-chairs, Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, noted that Zaslav showed up at the interview and snapped a “photo of his film chiefs being interviewed, like a doting dad at an amusement park.”

The studio and the strikes are only one problem Zaslav and other executives must solve. Media C.E.O.s know that the loss of cable earnings can’t be replaced by the streaming model that Netflix and Amazon helped establish. Seventy per cent of W.B.D.’s revenue is tied up in its cable channels, while its television and movie studios account for roughly thirty per cent. Even as Zaslav works to establish himself in Hollywood, the vast majority of his cable assets are based in New York and Atlanta. He needs to squeeze them for cash while managing their demise. (A spokesperson for W.B.D. said that Zaslav wanted to devote time to his Hollywood businesses during the first year but now lives between New York and L.A.)

One of his biggest looming deals has to do with renewing TNT’s right to carry N.B.A. games. Live sports are a primary reason that consumers keep their expensive cable subscriptions, and so networks risk losing customers if they lose the contract. “It’s like heroin,” Malone once said. “You’ve gotta keep buying and buying it.” Disney and W.B.D. currently own the N.B.A. rights, but it’s likely that a streamer that wants in on the sports market will join the bidding, driving up the price. “David’s not going to want to say he lost the N.B.A.,” one close observer of the deal said. “He’s paying $1.2 billion per year right now. He will pay more than $1.2 billion to keep the N.B.A., with possibly fewer games.”

Zaslav and his team have blamed some of their difficulties on the condition of WarnerMedia. At an investor conference, Zaslav complained that some of the company’s assets had turned out to be “unexpectedly worse than we thought” before the deal closed. The former Discovery employee told me, “We knew the debt would be bad. When the number came out, we were stunned and scared.” W.B.D. went so far as to investigate whether A.T. & T. inflated the projections that underpinned WarnerMedia's value. Last summer, A.T. & T. paid W.B.D. $1.2 billion. (The spokesperson for the company said that this payment reflects a standard post-close adjustment.)

Whatever the cause, W.B.D.’s first year was rocky. Zaslav’s plan to cut costs began almost immediately and brought a stream of bitter reactions. Among other things, the company started removing little-watched shows from HBO Max, including the cult hit “Westworld.” “We don’t think anybody is subscribing because of this,” Zaslav said, of the removed programming, in November, 2022. “We can sell it nonexclusively to somebody else.” Writers, showrunners, and actors complained of a disorganized process of informing them about the future of their shows. “People who you would normally talk to have been fired, moved, or quit, so no one has any idea how to get the information they need right now,” the showrunner and animator Owen Dennis wrote on Substack. “Never cheer for a corporate merger, they help about 100 people and hurt thousands.”

Though jobs were slashed across the company, one of the biggest controversies came from Zaslav’s decision to cut the budget at Turner Classic Movies, laying off several senior executives in the process. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Bryan Lourd and Steven Spielberg warned ahead of time that the cuts would attract outrage; the film industry cherishes its own history, and particularly the history of its greatest hits. Zaslav apparently complained that outsiders were telling him how to run his business.

After the cuts were announced, Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson joined a Zoom meeting with Zaslav to plead the network’s case. Zaslav offered a concession, moving the oversight of TCM from the cable division to Warner Bros., run by the Hollywood veterans De Luca and Abdy. One TCM executive got his job back, too. The directors, seemingly pacified, released a statement: “We have each spent time talking to David, separately and together, and it’s clear that TCM and classic cinema are very important to him.”

Some saw the incident as a demonstration of Zaslav’s impetuous decision-making. Others argued that, even though Zaslav craved acceptance in Hollywood, he knew that his mandate was to save money. On the ledger, W.B.D. seems to be making progress. This year, it launched a new streaming service, Max, which mixes premium HBO content with some of Discovery’s more down-market shows. Max allows subscribers to pay less in exchange for agreeing to view ads—a model that Netflix adopted last year—and increased streaming ad revenue by a quarter in its first few months, even as subscribership dipped. W.B.D.’s latest quarterly report says that it lost three million dollars on streaming, compared with a loss of five hundred and fifty-eight million dollars in the same period last year. Though Hollywood is in crisis, W.B.D. has found a benefit to the strikes: you spend less money when you aren’t making anything. Gunnar Wiedenfels, the C.F.O., announced in August, “Should the strikes run through the end of the year, I would expect several hundred million dollars of upside to our free cash flow.” Since W.B.D. was formed, Zaslav has paid down nearly nine billion dollars in debt. Some $47.8 billion remains.

Those sympathetic to Zaslav’s project of “rationalizing” the economics of streaming think that the anger at him is unfair. “We are all little boats navigating uncharted waters,” Alan Horn, the former Warner Bros. C.O.O., said. “The issues we’re having right now in the middle of a strike are exacerbated by the fact that no one quite knows exactly how to get to a ‘new normal.’ ” By this argument, Zaslav is being blamed for an agonizing but inevitable period of adjustment. “He said, ‘Look, this company needs restructuring so that it may be as healthy as possible in the long term. That requires some short-term actions that are painful,’ ” Horn said.

Barry Diller, who spent “a great deal of the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties” at Robert Evans’s Woodland estate as the C.E.O. of Paramount Pictures, has known Zaslav since his NBC years. He’s optimistic about Zaslav’s project, if not entirely clear on what the future holds. “W.B.D. will make it through. I do believe that,” Diller said. “What comes out on the other end is, frankly, up to the gods.”

The actors and writers on the picket line are less sanguine. Even as they protest, they need Zaslav and his peers to help Hollywood make sense again: to calibrate a streaming system so they can make both art and money, if in a more modest way than they used to. But Zaslav has enough to do solving the problems of his own company.

Collage illustration of David Zaslav

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; Source photograph by Steve Mack / Everett / Alamy

[nxmuzluv]

“ there’s something in the water, babe. i know you’re addicted ”

SOMETHING IN THE WATER is the SIXTH studio album by PARK AH-REUM, released by JH ENTERTAINMENT. released on october 20th, 2023, the album features TWENTY-TWO tracks, including the title track “DARKSIDE.” selling over four million copies within its first week, it became the MOST SUCCESSFUL album for a female soloist that year. with the title track winning SIXTEEN music show wins, the album has gone on to be lauded as one of ah-reum’s best works.

— TRACKLIST

INTRO: SOMETHING IN THE WATER

DARKSIDE (TITLE)

LUNA (B-SIDE #1)

PUSH ‘N PULL

MOONSHINE (PRE-RELEASE TRACK)

NOIR (FEAT. BIBI)

WOMAN OF THE SEA

ALLURE (B-SIDE #2)

INTERLUDE: CALL OUT MY NAME

REWIND (FEAT. YEJIN OF ND2ND)

TOUCH

WILL YOU TAKE ME AWAY?

PEARLESCENT

BY THE MOON

WARNING

BREATHE HEAVY

MY ONE AND ONLY (FEAT. SUGA)

FIRE AND ICE (STING)

SAY YES, SAY NO (DANGEROUS)

MIRROR MIRROR

FOREVER

OUTRO: WE’LL MEET AGAIN

— STYLING

oh the styling this era was something else !

lots of sheer, flowing fabrics, distressed elements, lace, armbands, lots of dresses, lots of two pieces, and lots (and lots) of couture (mugler, vivienne westwood corsets, dior, ludovic de saint sernin,, treasure chest of a wardrobe mhm)

bc the way hwayoung had ah-reum in archive mugler for one of her stages,, like insane that woman works magic every time !

the styling was very free and almost simple, featuring a lot of matching pieces. it was also very “sirencore” and clearly took inspiration from the ocean and its aesthetics, as well as from classical art ! ah-reum even said that a lot of inspiration came from sandro botticelli’s birth of venus painting, as well as from ancient greek mythology such as nymphs and the nine muses !

shoes were rare to see this era sjwjejjs ah-reum mainly performed barefoot, and if she did wear shoes, they were either lace up heels, over the knee stiletto boots, or doc martens

and omg the hair and makeup ! the makeup this era saw a lot of light shades such as pink, white, lilac, and occasionally black and red, and there were also a lot of pearls & glitter used ! the hairstyles were very loose and wavy, and we got to see ah-reum with a “wetlook” hairstyle a few times !

lots of extensions were used, and a lot of ribbons and pearls were used in her hair ! hwayoung also painted bows on her face once shwusjjsjk

overall, the styling was phenomenal and we got to see ah-reum in an aesthetic she’s never done before !

— ERA HIGHLIGHTS

after 2 years the it girl is finally back y’all !

the way this album was so anticipated like ah-reum released façade in 2021, broke records, and suddenly vanished (well, not entirely skweijdsj) from the music industry,, and then in the meantime she gets married and has kids like woah !

she did some collabs here n there, but goodness gracious the people were hungry !

so when that pre-release dropped ? oh lord !

“moonshine” came completely out of nowhere, too like,, ah-reum tweeted “something’s in the water” mere hours before the release in august, and all of a sudden there was a new track out

and it was a hit ! garnered over EIGHTY MILLION views in its first 24 hours, topped every major korean music chart, and found itself at no. 1 on the billboard hot 100 !

critics adored it too,, everyone was calling “moonshine” her best track since “façade”

before the album’s release, ah-reum promoted “moonshine” on music shows, was on two variety shows (one in korea, one in japan !), and attended the mtv vmas and she performed !

it was literally ranked as one of the best performances of the night like iktr !!

however, despite the limited amount of promo, the track did win THREE music show awards !

,,and then, the album dropped

this cb was thee cb of 2023,, “darkside” saw over A HUNDRED MILLION views within its first 24 hours, and debuted at no. 1 on the billboard hot 100 (and stayed there for nearly 4 months !), selling nearly 300,000 units. the album also debuted atop the billboard 200 and the billboard world albums charts !

the b-sides “luna” and “allure” fared really well, too ! the former debuted at no. 2 on the hot 100, while “allure” debuted at no. 8

seeing the b-sides on k-charts was so. interesting,, bc at first “luna” was at no. 2, but it was later knocked down to no. 3 and replaced by “allure” wijsjwiwj also yes ah-reum did take up the top 3 spots all on her own !

ah-reum had a lot of creative control when it came to this cb, ofc. she wrote most of the lyrics, produced a couple of tracks, and had a hand in the styling

she was everywhere this era, too. like immediately after having kids she threw herself into work

like do you see how many tracks are on this album ? girlie was working !

in addition to performing on music shows, ah-reum was also a guest mc on m countdown and music bank for about 2 weeks ! she also had american interviews & performances, had variety show appearances (she was a cast member on running man again !), and had a cameo role in a k-drama after ages !

on knowing bros they literally had this woman in a high school uniform at 27 and she’s literally married with 2 kids but she was having the time of her life so !

and she was on with le sserafim, too <33

ah-reum even won 2 grammy awards,, like she won grammys already but still, big deal for a k-artist !

the tiktok challenge collabs at music shows were on beauties’ minds for weeks,, like we hadn’t got one since april of 2021 like those were cherished

speaking of tt challenges, ah-reum’s for “luna” was notoriously kinda hard 😭 its difficulty became a meme and she eventually had to post a literal tutorial sjiwjsjsjk but at the end of the day that was more publicity for the album so !

ah-reum posted a lot on her yt, weverse, and insta this era, as well ! there were a lot of daily updates and behind the scenes,, it was very cute mhm

towards the end of the era, jh posted this “album quiz” to ah-reum’s website, and my goodness msjwjsk

it was essentially a quiz to test the fans’ knowledge on the album’s storyline, but the way most of it was complicated lore wjshisks like beauties on twitter were confused ! it was truly the great bts test of 2022 all over again

ah-reum ended up getting pregnant again at the end of november, but she still performed at melon and mama !

her performances received such rave reviews too,, literally turned both award shows into her own concert like iktr

also girlie literally dyed her hair 3 times this cb

her hair at the start was a deep purple with lilac tips, before jh dyed it completely lilac. and then towards the end of the era, it was literally dyed blonde

getting blonde ah-reum twice this year feels like winning the lottery but please free her scalp !

overall, this era was too good ! like 2 years of inactivity really paid off bc everyone was all over this cb ! so many people called it one of the best cbs of 2023, ah-reum was having the time of her life, and it was just a really great era <3

[beautyintheblackness]

Going Somewhere? #VacaDress

JADE JADA OFF THE SHOULDER PENCIL DRESS $1,995.00 (Cushnie)

JADE MARTINA OFF THE SHOULDER SLIP DRESS $1,695.00 (Cushnie)

OSHUN CAFTAN (COLLECTIBLE) $ 1,495.00 USD (Fe Noel)

LIZ TAIL BLOUSE $ 398.00 USD || LIGHT RUST SHEER PANTS $ 278.00 USD (Fe Noel)

Blue Palm Leaf Hand-Batik Cotton Evening Gown $775.00 (Studio One Eighty Nine)

Blue Diamond Espanada *Inquire for price*  (info@datariaustinlondon.com) | phone: (713) 296 - 0140 (Datarius Austin London)

ASOS DESIGN structured ruffle one shoulder pep hem bodycon dress $87.00 (ASOS)

YVONNE SLINKY DRESS- MELON  $220.00 (William Okpo)

[africafashionguide]

How one Tweet connected me to a Hollywood Actress

How one Tweet connected me to a Hollywood Actress

Did I ever tell you the story of how Actress Rosario Dawson and her business partner spoke at one of my Fashion Africa Conferences I host annually in London? We initially connected on twitter – a platform where i have over 14000 followers She had liked commented on my tweet I responded back and sent a DM I requested to interview her regarding her relatively new business Studio One Eighty Nine…

[nappynewz]

20 Black designers to support instead of Gucci and Prada

20 Black designers to support instead of Gucci and Prada

Carly Cushnie (Photo via Instagram @carlycushnie)

When you flip through your closet, how many items can you say were designed by someone of color? Instead of supporting the Gucci and Prada brands that insult the Black consumer, we are here to encourage you to circulate the Black dollar among designers in our community. Below are 20 Black-owned fashionbrands that you should support instead of…

[the-last-dillpickle]

DS9 trivia from IMDB - Part 2

- After production ended, and the sets were dismantled, the Defiant bridge set was declared "fold and hold" and placed in storage. It was re-dressed and used as the bridge of an alien cargo ship and a Klingon battlecruiser on Star Trek: Voyager (1995) and the bridge of the ECS Fortunate on Star Trek: Enterprise

- When the Nielsen ratings started to go down during the broadcasting of the third season, the studio pressed for radical ideas for the fourth season to increase the show's popularity again. Some of their suggestions included blowing up planet Bajor, or taking the action away from the station. They finally decided that the show needed a popular character from an earlier Star Trek series. Initially, the producers weren't too pleased, because they had set up a subplot within the Dominion War storyline where the Federation would be facing off against the Klingons, and were already having difficulties making it work. However, the studio decision turned out to be a blessing in disguise when someone suggested to introduce The Next Generation's Worf (Michael Dorn) to the cast as an intermediate between the Federation and the Klingons, which conveniently solved most of the script problems.    

- The name "Deep Space Nine" originated from an early working title, and pre-dated the decision to set the series on a space station. Producers intended on coming up with a new title after the show was fully developed, but stayed with the name, feeling it had an intriguing quality to it.    

- Malcolm McDowell, who had been in Star Trek: Generations (1994), once said he'd like to appear on this show, but only if his nephew, Alexander Siddig (Dr. Bashir), would direct the episode. Such a chance was offered in season five, episode eighteen, "Business as Usual", but never materialized due to scheduling conflicts.    

- When Nana Visitor became pregnant, her condition was explained away in the show by having Kira become an emergency surrogate for Keiko O'Brien's baby. Astonishingly, Visitor was only absent for one episode (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Let He Who Is without Sin... (1996)) due to the birth of her son. She actually cut her maternity leave short, out of fear that a prolonged absence would cause the writers to significantly reduce her role in the rest of the series.  

- Marc Alaimo was nicknamed "The Neck" on-set for his naturally long neck, which inspired the look of the Cardassian neck ridges.    

- Despite being credited as a regular, Cirroc Lofton appeared in only eighty-five of the show's one hundred seventy-three episodes. Morn (Mark Allen Shepherd), the most frequent recurring character, appeared in ninety-two episodes. Curiously, Sheppard isn't credited with this total on DS9's cast listing.    

- Jadzia Dax was originally supposed to have a forehead appliance as the Trill were first shown in Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Host (1991), but after a test, most people thought that Terry Farrell's face was much too beautiful to be partially covered by or with prostheses. Instead, she got to have spots on the side. They were drawn on personally by Michael Westmore each day, a process which initially took over an hour, but over time, this eventually was reduced to close to forty minutes. Westmore actually "signed" his work by adding two spots in the shape of an M and a W. From then on, all Trills were shown to be like this, rather than the version shown on Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987).        

- Amongst the actors to read for the role of Captain Sisko were Carl Weathers and Eriq La Salle. James Earl Jones and Tony Todd were offered the role but declined. Todd (who appeared as Worf's brother Kurn on Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987)) made two appearances on this show; first as an elderly Jake Sisko in season four, episode three, "The Visitor", then as Kurn in season four, episode fifteen, "Sons of Mogh". He appeared in Star Trek: Voyager (1995) season four, episode sixteen, "Prey".    

- Alexander Siddig originally auditioned to play the part of Sisko. Rick Berman thought that Siddig was too young for the part, and felt him to be a better fit to play Bashir instead.