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drifting-pieces-blog-blog · 1 year ago

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Breaking down the comics: Familiar Ghosts (Issue 31)

Moon Knight, Issue #31: A Box of Music for Savage Studs

Written by Doug Moench and art done by Kevin Kowlan and Terry Austin. This is our first official change up without Bill.

The end of the story also has a short:

"Fly the Friendly Skies" Written by Steve Ringgenberg and art done by Michael Hernandez and Kevin Dzuban.

We open in Brooklyn as the sun sets.

A group of tough looking punks gathers in a back alley.

On the other side, we see a pair of old hands opening up a music box.

"War council all present an' 'counted for, Shank."

"Right. Now listen studs. Time to creep-time to slide through the shadows like two-ply smoke, soft and silent and slippery. Right?"

There's lots of punk language being used here. We’re talking gang rule and street territory.

Minor history lesson: In the 1970s and 1980s young gangs made a major uprising. It became easier to get around, and weapons became easier to get a hold of.

Fights became deadlier, and with drive by shootings now accessable to them, casualties started to grow. By the early 1980s, crack cocaine had hit the streets in a big way and any youth gangs turned to drug dealing and movement.

Especially in New York, the violence escalated heavily in the early to mid 80s and by late 80s, it was considered an epidemic.

Next up we see Moon Knight, gliding across Brooklyn.

"This part of Brooklyn's a bad scene, all right -- A war zone, and worse than I remembered... Even the wind here seems dirty and hopelesss. Still no sign of any trouble tonight...Simmering or otherwise. Maybe Gena's kids were wrong.

No...Even if everything IS quiet, it's not like Ricky and Ray to cry wolf on something like this--they're too streetwise."

He decides to make one last round before heading back to Manhattan.

The gang moves to a street called 'dough row'.

"Closing time on Dough Row--A concentrated block of grimy shops teetering on brinks of bankruptcy.

Merchants scowl as leftover goods are carted inside, tattered awnings rolled back, iron gates locked, sparse tills counted...And as unwelcome shadows appear, Like jackals after the pickings."

The thugs pass by the shops, the protection money has already been collected.

Except for one shop. A pawn shop where the owner stands his ground.

"That's right, pawnbroker--and if you wanna keep runnin' yer hock business, you gotta pay the rent! Right, Studs?"

"Yeah, Pawnbroker--You Jews always got plenty of money--You can afford it!"

They heckle him. A common anti-semetic stereotype.

One of the Studs steps forward, clad in a nice black leather jacket.

"Don't make it hard, Lewis--Just pay up, huh?"

"Lenny...? You too, Lenny?

Still running with this pack of hooligans? With these---These beasts? I thought you were going to quit the gang--Get yourself a job. Your mother is a good woman, Lenny. You'll break her heart if--"

Shank, the leader, steps in and starts a fuss. He grabs the pawnbroker with threats of violence.

Moon Knight passes by in time to watch them smack the Broker around. He isn't going to stand for that.

He’s never really got along well with punks.

While Moon Knight fights the main punk, the leader calls out to Lenny for help.

"Help me, Lenny! You're my war chief, man--Help me!"

The pawn broker begs Lenny not to listen.

While Moon Knight interrogates the main guy on what his game is, Lenny jumps on his back.

This gives the main punk time to run off.

And earns Lenny a good old fashioned Moon Knight back-hand.

"A spatter of blood stains the window filled with hocked dreams... Merchandise originally displayed, brand-new and tantalizing in all the other shops along Dough Row. Just as all roads lead to rome---All dreams die with the Pawn Broker."

The broker steps in and stops Moon Knight. "No! Don't hurt him! He's a good boy!"

As Moon Knight hesitates, Lenny makes a run for it.

Moon assures the broker that he won't hurt Lenny then take off after him.

"I've sent quite a few punks to the slammer, Lenny--Some for life. A lot of them started out just like you."

"Yeah? Well, at least those guys are eatin' regular--And what do you know about it anyway? A star with your picture inthe papers--Probably rich--What do you know about doin' something for money? Somethin' wrong."

"Maybe I know more about it than you can dream, Lenny. At one time or another, we've all been mercenary."

Moon Knight recalls his merc days.

"Yeah? You think we like doin' what we have to do? Look around you, Man! This is what they're willin' to give us--Garbage and back alleys! But the minute we try steppin' out into the street where the money is, they start screamin' about undesirable elements!"

Lenny is worked up. He yells about how the powers that be don't want them. Want only to keep them down. How it's a war and they have to reclaim the streets.

Moon Knight is deep in thought.

It must remind him of someone else... Someone a long time ago yelling the same thing at their father.

He asks Lenny if he is a good boy. The Pawn Broker spoke up for him, after all.

Lenny pauses to think about how things were a long time ago, but the moment passes. He storms off, leaving Moon Knight alone in the alley.

Moon Knight lets him go.

Moon Knight returns to the pawn shop to make sure the owner is alright.

"I have, you know, faced far tougher men than those young hoodlums..."

Mr. Lewis is fine, but he tells Moon Knight that he has business.

Right on time, the other shop owners show up with bats, pipes, and axes.

The neighborhood is going to fight back.

Moon Knight pleads with them to not do this.

"You are the ones who showed us it is possible to fight back. Besides, if I survived the Nazis, I can certainly stand up to a bunch of young hoodlums!"

Moon Knight tries to reason with them, tell them that the police tend to not appreciate vigilantes.

Is Moon Knight not a vigilante? Why should they remain victims?

"That's different--I...uh...I know what I'm doing..."

Do you, Moon Buddy?

"Then you leave me no choice... And you'll just have to go through me to do it."

The men don't exactly want to fight Moon Knight.

Moon Knight asks them to talk to the gang. To offer them jobs and a means to support themselves.

But the shop keeps can't afford to give them jobs. The economy is too far gone and barely support themselves.

"...But we can be nice to them... Nice but firm. We must all agree never to pay them again --But we must also agree together, to talk to them, try to explain things..."

The men all agree and depart. Moon Knight watches them leave.

"I think it's time I became Lockley for a while...To dig deeper into this mess."

Out under the docks, the gang talks about their next plans.

Apparently they need the money for 'The Dance". Another gang has spread the word that they don't have it in them but there's a dance where they can prove themselves.

The leader declares that they need to send a message and trash the pawnshop tonight.

Lenny protests.

"If there's too much trouble on Dough row, people'll stop going' there and the shopkeepers won't have any money to give us. Besides, the cops'll shut us down."

He has a point.

"I'll get the money from Lewis, but I'll do it quietly." Lenny promises.

He's given till tomorrow night.

Lenny returns home where his mother is waiting.

She notices his bloody nose and fussess, but he tells her not to worry.

"I've told you a thousand times... The Savage studs is a social club."

She shows him a music box she found in the closet while cleaning.

"Your father gave it to me when we learned we were going to have you."

She falls asleep listening to the music.

"The mother sleeps. The son looks at her, studies her, for the first time in years. And rough hands grasp a delicate box of music. A door clicks. Silence is complete."

He takes the music box.

Back in Manhattan!

Jake is back in his cab and he pulls up at a Basket ball court to find Gena's boys.

Gotta say, I love seeing Lockley hanigng with the people.

He asks how the boys are doing before getting to business then asks for more information on the Save Studs gang.

They tell him to check out the 'club house' under the wharves.

Jake thanks them and tells them to head home to help their mother close up the diner.

They tell him about a film they made for school that got an A and he promises to check it out later.

A man of the people!

Brooklyn, the next day.

Lenny returns to the pawn shop.

Lewis instantly suspects trouble, but Lenny tells him he's there for something else.

"I wanna hock somethin'... I... I need some bucks. How much'll you gimme for it?"

He pulls out the music box.

"Oh, Lenny... No, Lenny No... Where did you get such a thing? I cannot accept merchandise which has been stolen."

"It ain't stolen! It's mine! From when I was a kid!"

"Lenny, I'm a merchant of dreams, and sometimes, many times, I am sick with myself for trading in such things."

This is the life of a pawn broker. Things once loved and cherished by someone holds many dreams that have died and been sold for cheap collars.

"Once a dream has been lost, Lenny, you cannot buy it back... Not with all the cheap dollars in the world..."

Lenny is angry. He's doing it for Lewis.

"Either you fork over some bucks for the lousy thing, or I gotta force you to pay me protection--But one way or another I gotta show some green to Shank and the other Studs."

Lewis refuses. He won't buy another dream.

"Listen, Old man! You mighta been my old man-And you won't even do this for me?! You won't even help me when I'm only trying to help you!?"

Now theres a turn. His mother said his father ran out on them.

Lewis agrees and pays him. Lenny promises to come back and buy it back in two weeks. Lewis tells him no one ever comes back to redeem their dreams.

Back at home, Lenny's mother is distraught that someone stole her music box.

"I...I kow who took it. And I'll get it back..."

"Can you, Lenny? Can you do that for me? Will you?"

"I promise, Ma--I swear it!"

NEXT ISSUE: WHEN THE MUSIC STOPS!

What’s interesting about this issue is Moon Knight’s hesitation. You can see him wanting to help Lenny the second Lenny gives him the argument about it being a war and how he needs to stand up for himself.

It’s a very familiar argument that Marc Spector makes against his own father and what took him down the path he took.

There is pain there and the need to not let him go the way he did, but also still agreeing with him. Why shouldn’t he fight for his right to exist and live a happy and healthy life?

Then, let’s not forget the other side, the Jewish Pawn Shop keep that wants to stand up for himself, but also wants to protect Lenny.

Moon Knight is unsure of how to help, but he wants to help. This is territory that he will walk in time and time again. A common theme in early Moon Knight years by the OG. Perhaps, it’s the Jewish culture. To exist despite all those who wish them not to exist. To fight back or not to fight back? To have faith or to survive despite faith?

This story also reminds me of a MUCH later comic. Where Moon Knight fights against ghost punks.

In the mean time, let's check out the mini story:

"FLY THE FRIENDLY SKIES"

This happens open with Jake and I'm here for it.

"On this sullen summer evening, heat lies like a shroud on lower manhattan.

The sidewalks seem to whisper secrets of madness and death. In a sleazy bar--"

Frankly, I love that Crawley drinks tea everywhere he goes. With reused tea bags because he’s broke. I also love that Jake is sitting there so RELAXED in his red sweater jacket thing and green shirt and matching hat. The man just has style that says comfort. And you know he’s drinking shit coffee too. (has anyone actually cosplayed Comic Jake Lockley yet? This is a tragedy and it needs to be remedied.)

So Crawley has dire news for Jake.

You know this was NOT written by Moench because Crawley is understandable without reaching for a dictionary.

Crawley goes on to tell Jake that someone has hired five exotic hitmen, each specializing in their own brand of weaponry. Their target? The Brenner Airship works 'The Ark II', which is like a sort of blimp.

"These killers were hired to either steal the ship or destroy it. And one very odd thing, Jake--The killers are all women! Beautiful women!"

Jake takes a moment. It would seem that Steven Grant helped to finance the Ark II.

LOOK AT THAT JAW LINE. I love when people try to make sense out of Jake’s face. He’s such a manly looking regular guy. He’s like that laid back uncle that shows up late to all the family gatherings, is loud and makes obnoxious jokes, hands out folded bills as gifts to the kids, gets yelled at by all the other adults, then says he’s gotta job to get to and ducks out early. A legend.

ANYWAYS. I’m getting distracted. It’s nice that Jake takes a moment to worry about Steven getting upset if things go badly for his blimp. But also shows that Moon Knight has his place and they all respect it.

"But when Moon Knight arrives at the Brenner Airship works, he finds it deserted and...eerily watchful."

Okay, so the blimp is a 'flying environmental lab'.

Moon Knight wonders why someone would want to steal it.

He moves in to investigate and finds some sort of vapor leaking. Something is being pumped into the big balloon!

The gas being pumped into the balloon? Zyklon B!

Yeah... you know the one...

Moon Knight moves in to shut off the gas but inhales a bit, making him dizzy.

As he tries to turn it off, someone sneaks up behind him and knocks him out.

Moon Knight wakes up some itme later, unable to see (an 'aftereffect of the gas. The blindness wears off in a few hours') and in the clutches of five assassin women and some dude.

(side note, the women are in various states of skimpy outfits and one appears to be totally naked??? Art choices of 1982 people.)

Moon Knight tells the weird guy that he heard someone was out to hijack the ship.

""The rumor is true. It was I who hired the ladies to dispose of the guards. I have a board of directors to answer to and I fear they would not approve of my plans--particularly my plans for the gas!"

With Moon Knight being blind, the guy decides that Moon Knight is harmless and decides to take him on a tour.

Moon Knight may be without sight, but Steven Grant recognizes that voice (him being on the board of directors).

"Brenner. You ARE Douglas Brenner, aren't you? The environmentalist? The brains behind Ark II?"

Also, Moon Knight is sassy as fuck and I love it.

"Indeed. I am flattered you recognize me. Come."

"I'm BLIND--remember?"

"Then follow the sound of my voice--Unless you prefer to be led like a cripple."

They start with the computer room where the computers not only fly the Art, but they also keep tabs on weather satellites up in space.

Seems Brenner has gone eco-terrorist and now wishes to use the satellites to eliminate the source of pollution - "Man himself!"

Yeah, he's gone full Poison Ivy.

"In one hour when we reach the proper altitude, the computers will automatically release the gas, New York City will die! And after New York--Boston! Chicago! Detroit!--All the rest!"

Moon Knight starts to inch closer but...

"Blast... My vision's still too blurry. Can't gauge the distance properly to jump him."

Moon Knight DOES manage to find the light switch just as the women prepare to kill him.

Everyone in the dark, he manages to track voices enough to take out three of the women before the fourth sneaks up on him and knocks him out again.

And here we have Moon Knight doing what he does best: GROUND.

Weird dude starts monologuing and Moon Knight uses the moment to sock him one good.

"You...can see?"

"The gas wore off."

Moon Knight tells him he can't kill the world.

Not exactly what creepy guy wanted to hear. He snaps and charges.

Moon Knight takes him out easily.

"He was crazy...But he wasn't very tough. No wonder he needed those muscular ladies. Funny... They seem to have abandoned him. Probably somewhere else in the balloon... Hiding in an airtight compartment in case any of the gas reaches the upper atmosphere. But there won't be any gas."

Moon Knight manages to reset the computers to prevent them from letting out the gas.

He then finds a card for "Iron Rose Inc". The organization that Brenner found the assassins from.

"They've just gotten high on my list of people and places to smash."

Moon Knight gives from the balloon with his glider cape and calls up Frenchie. He gives instructions to get the air force in to gently bring down the balloon.

And that concludes the little short.

This one was odd. Really really odd. When the shorts happen that aren’t written my Moench and by some guest artist trying to get a grasp on what to do with Moon Knight, you either get a fantastic one or one that just kinda staggers. This one staggered.

But I did appreciate the acknowledgement of Moon Knight’s quips and humor. Especially that they remembered to include Jake and the discussion that Steven would have a thought or two about the mission. That was nice. We don’t get enough Steven.

The next one (sequel to the music box one) is ALSO a double feature. I wonder if this happens because they feel the main story isn’t as spectacular or if they realize they are short and need a quick filler to pad out the issue.

Join me next time and we’ll find out together!

#Moon Knight #Moon Knight comics #Analyzing the comics #Marc Spector #Jake Lockley #Steven Grant #Did you know that Tumblr only lets you paste in 10 images as a limit?#This means that any additional images have to be uploaded #I try to pick my images carefully #Sorry if I get a little descriptive sometimes I'm just being picky about the images

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necromaniackat · 1 year ago

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Cruel Summer

Chapter 13: Night Crawlers

CW/TW: drug use/possession

Above images are of Evelyn’s mum and the outfit she put on

Word Count: 2.6k

“What made you join the army?” You asked lazily, tracing circles and figure eights on Felix’s bare back. The morning sunshine beamed through the windows carelessly; warming and brightening the grim rooms of the house as it peeked over the horizon. The coolness of the night still hung in the warming air – the need for blankets wasn’t existent.The duvet was strewn across the floor and the sheets were ruffled as you and Felix lay on top of them.

Little did you know, Brahms was still passed out cold behind the wall after having an orgasm so strong he fainted.

You and Felix lay in bed, completely naked – Felix was laying on his front, face buried in the pillows as he tried to squeeze as much sleep in as possible. You were on your side, facing him. You both have been awake for a while now, but you were enjoying the peaceful silence.

“It’s family tradition; the men become soldiers.” Felix’s groggy voice was muffled by the pillow as he answered your question.

Your brows furrowed as questions circled your brain.

“So you’re only a solider because your dad was?” You questioned curiously, still tracing imaginary symbols on his skin. You both leisurely sprawled across the bed; sheets were ruffled and the duvet was thrown to the floor. Both of your bare bodies basking in the morning light.

“And his dad, and his dad, and his dad,” Felix lulled in a sleepy voice. The creases between your brows deepened as you examined his peaceful face – his eyes closed and hair strewn around his face. He looked so beautiful.

“Was it really your choice to join the military?” You inquired nosily. Felix’s brownie coloured eyes opened, he was looking directly at you.

“It’s my dad’s dream for me to be a solider and fight in a war,” he replied with a croaky voice – much different than the sleepy voice he was using a moment ago. You frowned at him.

“You don’t have to do things just because your dad wants you to,” you told him honestly. Felix couldn’t help the massive grin from forming across his face as he bit back laughter unsuccessfully.

“You’re one to talk,” he comment. You pursed your lips and shook your head.

“My dad didn’t want this for me,” you uttered truthfully. Felix’s chocolate brown eyes found your gaze. He didn’t say a word, but the question was asked with a look.

“Growing up I was always told I was born in the wrong generation; that I belonged to the 1970’s. I’m still very much a hippie at heart, ethically sourced everything. I make my own lotions, body wash, shampoo and conditioner; I wanted to open a shop to sell them at an affordable price. Y’know, clean living without breaking the bank,” you explained, still tracing shapes on Felix’s skin.

“Why didn’t you?” Felix asked softly. Your eyes moved from your facing fingertips to meet his gaze.

“My dad died when I was twelve; he always wanted to turn this place into a bed and breakfast but he never got the chance to so I stepped up to the plate to do it for him,” you told him honestly. “–I made the choice, but did you?” You studied his face closely; looking for a negative emotion but all you saw was adoration in his eyes.

“I did,” Felix murmured softly; eyes drifting from yours. He didn’t appear to be happy with that choice. You wanted so badly to tell him that if he’s unhappy he can choose something else. You wanted to comfort him. But you didn’t want to come across as emotionally invested – at least not too soon. Or at all. Your friends have had these types of relationships where they’re not in a relationship with someone but they still have sex and hang out once in a while. If that’s what this is, it’s your first time having this kind of relationship.

Before you could say anything else, the sound of a car pulling up the drive filled the quiet. You sat up with a puzzled expression on your face; in the six days you’ve been here there hasn’t been a car to drive up to the manor that didn’t intend on being there. Besides, it’s got to be at least five in the morning, who was here at that time?

You crawled out of bed, hobbling over to the window with Felix in tow. The blood in your veins ran icy cold when your eyes were laid upon the silver Audi pulled up to the mansion.

“Shit, it’s my mum,” you declared as you tore yourself away from the window. You went over to your suitcase and started pulling out clothes to frantically put on. You settled on your denim bell bottoms with an orange and white abstract pattern blouse that you tied up instead of buttoning up. The long flowing sleeves frilled out at the bottoms.

“You didn’t tell me your mum was coming,” Felix claimed as he scrambled to gather his clothes, which were thrown haphazardly around the room.

“I didn’t know she was coming until now,” you shot back as you tied a bandana around your head to keep your hair from your face.

Felix didn’t even get the chance to say something in return when the doorbell rang through the house. You and Felix froze, looking at each other as if the other knew what to do in this situation.

“You stay here, I’ll go handle her,” you instructed your half assed plan. Your mum already knew someone was here; Felix’s car is parked out front. Felix nodded in agreement before you scrambled out of the bedroom, still trying to dress yourself and make yourself presentable. All while you were trying to figure out why your mum thought it’d be okay to show up here without telling you first. Especially at whatever-the-fuck o’clock in the morning.

“Evelyn?” Your mum’s voice softly rang through the house as you bounced down the stairs. You saw your mum standing in the foyer in her paint strained blue coveralls with her hair tied in pigtail braids. Her shamrock green eyes found you as you joined her in the foyer.

“Mum? What are you doing here?” You asked curiously. Your mum’s usual confident demeanor was contrasted by her awkward and shy body language; she kept her gaze away from you as she tried to come up with an answer. You got the feeling something happened at home and she needed some time to think.

“Who’s here?” She questioned, turning the attention back to you. You paused as warmth filled your cheeks. It was your turn to awkwardly try to grapple for answers. Your mum’s eyes moved from you to something behind you. You knew it was Felix who was standing behind you – hopefully he’s clothed.

Mindfully, you turned around to meet the sight of the large man crowding the landing. Your breath hitched when you saw he was back in uniform, minus the jacket. His broad shoulders making the fit of his olive green tee shirt stretch across his shoulders and chest. The tee shirt fit baggily around his middle; his frame narrowing at his waist. The utility belt clicked into place around his hips. His baggy camo trousers made his lower half look wide as well. Felix was the perfect definition of the male hourglass figure.

You couldn’t help but stare at him; you found yourself craving him again. You were sore and tired but you’d jump his bone at any given opportunity if you could.

“Evelyn….” Your mum drew out your name. You blinked a few times then turned to face her. Your mum looked stunned; she never knew you to be the kind of girl to bring a guy home. She always thought you were a bit too prudish for your own good. But you were one month out from a rough breakup, maybe you’ve moved on already. Or maybe you’re spiraling and this is a cry for help.

“Who’s your friend?” Your mum asked after a moment of contemplation. You felt blush heat up your cheeks brightly. Your mum basically caught you with your pants down. You tried to respond but you stuttered and stammered over your words.

“This….. uhh, this is my, uhh, friend.”

“Felix,” Felix chimed in.

“Felix!” You exclaimed in agreement. Felix shared a grin and friendly wave. Your mum looked at you in awe; she was still speechless. Only a soft “oh” passed through her lips. Your gut told you she was making assumptions.

After a very awkwardly silent moment while you tried to gather yourself. Your brows furrowed as you came down the last couple steps, moving toward your mum. You loosely crossed your arms over your chest as you looked her up and down.

“What are you doing here mum?” You asked keenly. It was your mum’s turn to stammer and stall, trying to find the answers. Although, you had a feeling you already knew.

“I came to help you with your project and to keep you company.” Your mum’s gaze moved from you to Felix behind you. “–But I see you already have that covered,” she added in a fake cheery, soft spoken way. You sighed to yourself, knowing she meant well but she still pissed you off. This is you moving out all over again. When you moved out your mum went a little nutty. She’d invite herself over to your flat whenever she pleased; all because you gave her a spare key for emergencies.

Your mum doesn’t do well with distance, especially after your dad died. You were rarely allowed to play in the woods with your friends or roam the neighborhood, she kept you strictly on your street and on your street only. But everybody knows why she keeps you so close…..–you’re the last piece of your dad she has. He was her first love and you liked to believe she was his.

“Mum, I told you I have everything handled,” you reminded her sternly. Adam told you that you need to set and reinforce clear boundaries; otherwise your mum is going to do whatever she pleases. You started that journey by taking the spare key to your flat away from her and giving it to Adam.

Clearly you need to have that conversation again.

“I know you did. I’m sorry I made you feel like I’m not respecting your boundaries but I’ve been trying to get ahold of you all night and I thought something happened to you too,” your mum explained, trying to keep her cool.

“What do you mean “me too”?” You quizzed with concern in your voice. “–What’s going on?” Your mum frowned; it was obvious she hadn’t slept last night. This only worried you more. Your mum is subscribed to getting a full night’s rest, even when you were a baby she always got enough sleep. So for her to stay up all night, it means something really bad happened.

Your stomach twisted and tied into tight knots as your heart began to race in your chest. Anxiety cramped in your lower abdomen.

“Bex got arrested in Amsterdam,” your mum announced after a moment of realization. You wore an expression that read stunned as you looked your mum over, trying to see if she was joking. You knew Bex wanted to go to Amsterdam to meet up with a boy but you didn’t actually think she’d go. And get arrested nonetheless. She’s sixteen!

“For what?!” You exclaimed in disbelief.

“She got caught with MDMA,” she replied in a less than amused tone.

“Ecstasy?” Your reiterated. Your mum nodded her head and sighed heavily.

“Apparently it wasn’t one or two pills either, there was enough in there to make them think she was trafficking them back to the UK,” she further explained as she put her hands on her hips; her lanyard full of keys jingled with movement. You let go of the breath you didn’t realize you were holding.

“How much will it cost to bail her?” You asked as you shifted your weight anxiously. Your mum blew raspberries as she tried to think.

“Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t even know how long she’s been gone because she told her grandmother she was with us and she told us she was with her nan.” Your mum sounded so defeated.

“I last heard from her on Tuesday but besides that, radio silence.” You added a piece of the puzzle. You watched as your mum stood in your foyer, now biting nails, in complete defeat.

“Adam’s going there to bail her out once it’s posted,” your mum told you honestly. You felt a twinge of angry and potty jolt through you. Bex has always been the wild child which is funny because you were the family hippie. But over the last six years she’s gotten more and more reckless; this isn’t Bex’s first run in with the law. Your mum and Adam are at their wit’s end. She’s not a malicious person either, none of her crimes are violent. She just does stupid things.

You’re not going to heckle her because of drugs – you occasionally partake in smoking a joint or doing shrooms. You’ve even done ecstasy; so you’re not going to hound on her for doing drugs. But she broke the golden rule of being in possession of illegal drugs. Don’t draw attention to yourself. You can say that as a straight white cis woman but that rule doesn’t apply to everyone.

You frowned as you observed your nerve wrecked mum.

“C’m in mum. I’ll make us some coffee and breakfast,” you told her as you laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. Your mum’s tired eyes found yours. She gave you a gentle smile and nod before walking back towards the kitchen.

As soon as she entered the kitchen your gaze moved towards Felix as he came down the steps. He acted as if he didn’t just witness my mum have a nervous breakdown in my foyer. He towered over you as you shifted your weight, your arms tightly tied over your chest.

“I’m sorry you had to witness that,” you apologized as you two stood mere feet apart. Felix shrugged casually.

“Little sisters are gonna little sister,” he commented with a grin. You snorted a laugh and nodded in agreement. He appeared to be so amused by your reaction; his eyes crinkled in the corners as they stayed on you.

The pair of you stood awkwardly in the foyer, not saying anything to each other. You felt your body cringing from the awkwardness of the situation. Although Felix didn’t seem to get the memo since he stood confidently, smiling down at you.

You felt blush rush to your cheeks under his adoring gaze. One hand was rubbing the nape of your neck while the other had a nervous hold of the opposite arm. You couldn’t meet his gaze but you knew his eyes were so luscious in the morning light that flooded in through the windows.

“Anyways–” you were cut off when a hand found the side of your face and a pair of lips were firmly pressed against yours in a sweet but passionate kiss. You involuntarily closed your eyes with both hands raised in surprise. You were suddenly lost in that sea of greedy want. You wanted his lips on every inch of your skin. You wanted to be covered in his adoration.

He pulled away ever so slightly, resting his forehead against yours.

“I’ll see you tonight,” Felix said confidently. Breathlessly, you nodded in agreement. Felix pulled away from you; leaving the house. You stayed completely still, still mesmerized by what just happened. You weren’t expecting that. You expected he’d run for the hills, that this was just friends with benefits; maybe it is and he’s just comfortable around crazy. Either way, you were delighted that he was coming back tonight.

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thislovintime · 2 years ago

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Peter Tork in Montreal, May 26, 1982; photographed for The Gazette.

“‘There are two kinds of pain,’ [Tork] was saying yesterday, as he dipped down into the sometimes-murky well of his own experience. ‘One is the pain of growing up. The other is the pain of refusing to do so. ‘To my mind, the first is better because although it’s infinitely more difficult to deal with, at least it changes. It,’ and he paused for the longest of moments, ‘somehow gets better.' […] [H]is somehow has meant cleaning up his act, giving up the old standbys of drinking and drugging. For another, it has also meant learning to overcome the fear that life straight would somehow turn him into a pallid clone, his days marked by the slow tick of agonizing sameness. Which took not a little amount of courage and a lot of will. ‘Looking back now, I realize I was compulsive,’ he says. ‘And that comes from the lie that you have to do everything yourself. Making it. And you can’t make it without the support system of other people. I think this whole business we’re into now about glorifying the individual is a temporary historical aberration. That you can’t ask for help, that there is no sense of community. ‘Anyway, at the end of the long road, the chemistry backfired,’ he recalled. ‘It was like being totally aphasic. Conversations which, when I started with drugs, seemed intelligent, articular and enlightening, at the end became disjointed. ‘On the road, I would reward myself for not getting blitzed before a performance by getting blitzed after it. I’d make promises to myself at home and then the minute I got back on the road, the controls came off and I was right back where I started from. When you’re in that condition, issues of will become very fuzzy.’ The solution slowly became less so. ‘I realized I had a choice,’ he said. ‘Either a dull life or no life at all. Amazingly, life straight and sober has turned out to be a delight. Now I’m blitzed on natch.’ [...] ‘Part of me was in the middle of the Monkee thing,’ Tork recalls, ‘and part of me was outside it, isolated from it. The Monkees’ records were for teenyboppers and the instrumentations were deliberately non-threatening. Everybody said the Monkees were a plastic pop group, I guess because we became known through television. But nobody said anything about the creation that was the Mary Tyler Moore or I Love Lucy shows. No TV shows were judged by that standard.’ When it was all over, he went out on his own and, during the 1970s, tried a variety of things which never seemed to work out. Television didn’t want him, publishers were indifferent about a book on the Monkees and he was battling the alcohol and the drugs. Today, that war is over and Tork is hoping to devote all his energies once again to his music. ‘I guess I look for things with a little bounce,’ he says. ‘A lot of what passes for pop music today has no grace. Yes, that’s the word. Like sledge-hammer rock. Or heavy metal music. My ears are softer and I guess I look for tone quality much more. But high-energy jump-rock I do like.’ The future, for what it’s worth, seems to have its own special promise and Tork is beginning to believe much is still possible. This time on the track, at least, he intends on being master of his own controls. ‘I used to ask myself, “Why me?” before,’ he says. ‘Now I’m saying, “What the hell, why not?”’” - article by John Fitzgerald, The Gazette, May 27, 1982 (x)

#Peter Tork #Tork quotes #80s Tork #60s Tork #70s Tork #long read #The Monkees #Monkees #Release #The Peter Tork Project #The New Monks #Peter Tork and the New Monks #1982 #<3 #(sorry about the photocopy quality of the photo)#The Montreal Gazette #can you queue it

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alys-gay-parade · 1 year ago

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Concept Reveal: NatsuChiru

For the last few months, I've been doing a lot of concept work for an original project that I'm extremely passionate about. Taking place in 1970's Tokyo, it's about a mixed-race Tlingit girl connecting to the heritage she was raised outside of while also discovering the deeper truth of the one she's lived in her whole life.

Trigger warning for mentions of police brutality, suicide, loss, grief, war, cancer, past child abuse, and the atomic bombings in the character descriptions under the readmore.

Primary Cast:

Natsuko (her father chose that name because it reminds him of Natsilane, a figure from the Tlingit story of Blackfish, the first orca) is one of the 2 titual characters. Born in Japan, she's never known life in her father's homeland. She's incredibly optimistic despite not really finding community in either the other local kids or the other military brats at the naval base. Even though she doesn't have any friends her own age, she's got the best family in the world to make up for it. She aspires to live the dreams of a career in music that her father and his cousins never got to and inherited her mother's affinity for animals, leading her to become an idol that performs with our other titular character.

Yáxwch (yax-witch), aka Yax (or Yakuza-kun by only his wife), is a young Tlingit singer/songwriter from Sitka, Alaska; he's also Natsuko's father. After the death of a very close friend (crush, but he'll never say that) to a drug related shooting by the police in his teenage years, he and his cousins vowed to get out of town by any means necessary. This eventually leads to them all joining the navy together as engineers, using his father's connections to ensure they're deployed to a relatively safe base under the watch of a family friend. It's here where he meets his future wife and mother of his only child.

Ashika, Natsuko's mother, is a soft-spoken young woman until you really set her off. She volunteers at a local wildlife center, which has led to her developing close bonds with several rescues she has fostered and released. Not much about her past is known to her husband and daughter, primarily due to her having a 3 year gap in her memory from a traumatic childhood event surrounding her family's Yakuza ties, which she intends to keep secret from them for their own protection.

Chilkat, stage name Chiru, is the other titual character and a 6 year old orca that was kidnapped from her pod off the Alaskan coast 2 years prior to the story's events. Being trained to perform, she desperately craves interaction and bonds with Natsuko almost immediately upon them meeting, as if their souls were drawn to one another. Through the bond they share, Natsuko can tell she wishes to return to her mother.

Antagonists:

Ryosuke is Ashika's older brother, and now head of their family's Yakuza branch, which was supposed to be passed to her. Although he loves his little sister, he knows what triggered her memory block and is deeply ashamed of himself for it. The lifetime of lies and secrets to keep himself out of hot water have jaded him to the principle their family was meant to uphold: harm only those that deserve it and use our power to help the disenfranchised to build up the community. He can't see this, however, and thinks he is doing everything he is supposed to be. He helps fund one of his client's marine park, where Chiru performs, and acts as a talent agent to find a captivating group of young performers.

Elizabeth is 1 of a pair of twins, the daughters of Yax's captain at the naval base. She deeply resents Natsuko for her seemingly perfect family and life after her and her sister suffered horrific abuse at the hands of their mother back in the states, only to be shipped to an entirely new country to live on the naval base with their now single father who barely has time for them. Having acted as her sister's protector their entire childhood and now losing her to Natsuko, she's become aggressive and standoffish to an alarming degree, and the adults in her life all fear that she may be too far gone.

Supporting cast:

Jimmy, one of Yax's cousins, is afro-indigenous, his mom being a black woman from New Orleans. He was very much raised to be overly polite and kind, which makes him very sweet, but also a bit gullible and a bit of a pushover in most situations. He isn't naive, however, and very much understands how people can and do sometimes take advantage of his big heart.

Eagle is Jimmy's partner since they were in middle school and cousin to the late member of their group. He's a Tlingit/Haida trans man who is incredibly open and honest about who and what he is, which sometimes gets him into trouble in the climate of the 1970s. He takes it all in stride, however, as he took martial arts in his childhood to defend himself (at his very supportive parents' request so they could be a little less anxious). Fiercly protective of his friends and family, he will not hesitate to call out bullshit where he sees it and give a dose of reality to those that cross him.

Javier, the youngest of the squad, is Yax's other cousin. His father is a Latino immigrant who ended up working at the cannery thanks to a Tlingit woman being willing to translate for him since she took Spanish in school growing up. Javi acts as the glue that holds the group together, being able to mediate arguments thanks to his unrelentingly calm demeanor and general positivity.

Kenji is Eagle's cousin and Ryosuke's partner, being his and Ashika's childhood friend. He was born in Anchorage, but his parents divorced when he and his brother were just kids, leading to their father taking them back to Japan. He ended up getting a law degree back in the States and served 6 years as a defense attourney. He eventually became disillusioned with the justice system in both the US and Japan, prompting him to join the police force in an attempt to force change from the inside out. His policy is to only make an arrest if he can't diffuse a situation civilly, as he sees himself as a civil servant to the community. This led to his conviction rate percentage to be pretty high since he only arrested people he felt would cause problems and allowed him to eventually be promoted to lead detective. His brother was a very stressed and depressed salaryman who ended up taking his own life, sending the entire friend group into a deep depression over a second hard loss that they're only just starting to shake off.

Captain Mortimer Smith was stationed with Yax's father during the bombings and made a promise to him that he would do whatever he could to help the people whose lives were destroyed in those moments. The horrors he saw during restoration deeply saddened him, and he vowed never to become the disgusting types of people he worked alongside. With his youth occupied by humanitarian efforts, he was late to the fatherhood game, having his twins at 40. When he learned how badly his ex-wife failed as a parent in his absence, he took it on himself to give his daughters the best possible life he could despite the circumstances. He was entrusted by Yax's father to keep an eye on the boys so they don't get themselves killed or arrested, and he does so willingly. Although, sometimes, he regrets taking on that burden.

Yuki is Natsuko's older cousin, the adopted daughter of Ryosuke. Her birth parents were clients of his, and both ended up dying young due to radiation induced cancer. Ryosuke and Kenji took her under their wings without question. She's very attuned to life as a Yakuza child and often inserts herself into Ryo's world without his or Kenji's blessing. Due to her turbulent upbringing, she often gets into trouble at school and hangs with questionable crowds, which eventually led to her being expelled from her catholic private school and being put in the same school as Natsuko and the twins. In an attempt to keep her out of trouble, Ryo insisted that she be a member of the idol group he's trying to build to perform with Chiru.

Olivia, though she just prefers Ollie, is the younger of Captain Smith's twins. She's a ball of anxiety but tries her best to stay thinking positive. Her sister sheilded her from the worst of the abuse their mother put them through, and she watches and worries about Elizabeth every step of the way into their new normal. Although she starts off joining her sister in the bullying and torment of Natsuko, Ollie finds that she actually really likes the girl and grows to feel romantic interest for the first time in her life. She joins the idol group and attempts to get her sister in it as well to help her warm up to the others, but unfortunately, Elizabeth wants nothing to do with that.

Other important figures that will be discussed and even spoken to on the phone, but might not be shown in anything other than flashbacks:

Elvira: Yax's indigenous mother, she and her siblings grew up in a residential home. She bonded with a pod of orca that visits every year and likes to swim with them into her older age despite a worsening heart condition. She never names them, though, as she respects them too much to treat them like pets. She opted to give her son a Lingit name, meaning sea otter, as a nod to the culture she was torn from and had to rediscover.

Montgomery: Yax's father, he's legally blind from watching the nukes but is otherwise healthy and makes a living as a financial advisor. Bad at parenting, but he loves his son.

Ai: The name Natsuko gives to Chiru's mother, who is Elvira's favorite of the pod. She misses her baby and is still in a state of grief over losing her.

Shinji: Kenji's younger brother who committed suicide 8 years prior to the events of the story. He developed a crush on Yax but didn't want to overstep and ruin his friendship with Ashika, so he kept it silent and took it to the grave.

Jin: The group's late friend from back in Sitka. His mother is a refugee from North Korea, and the community protects her without question or hesitation. Yáxwch was present to witness the brutal overkill that took him, leading to lifelong trauma and nightmares.

Cheif Natsilane: He has watched over his direct bloodline in the thousands of years since his death. While the stories of him are much grander than the reality, he feels a sense of paternal connection to those who connect with his likeness and ideals. He's been very interested in Natsuko since her birth and has been carefully guiding her from the sidelines.

Blackfish: Natsilane's spirit guide in the afterlife. She's a bit sassy and is fiercely protective. The symbolic form she takes often unintentionally frightens those she meets for the first time.

Sakura: A woman samurai from feudal Japan. Her village had been targeted in an ongoing war, and she was instructed by her mother to take all the children deep into the forest to hide. When they emerged, their home was devoid of life. As the oldest, she took up her father's sword and armor to defend this community of orphans, her children. She watches over her descendants as well, having adopted every child she happened to come across, with a special focus on the branch that has Yakuza ties. She met Natsilane during the bombings, as he had noticed her and instinctively went to comfort her.

Pastor Brown's family: literally an excuse to sprinkle in tidbits of my family history in the gang's discussions of the goings on back home, as my father would have been 16 in 1978 when the story takes place. He's got a lot of really insane stories about his rebellious youth. Anybody who knew our family back then knows exactly who I'm talking about.

I'm super excited to set out on this journey, and I hope the experiences I'll have will be extraordinary. Feel free to ask me any questions about the project, as I'm eager to share and discuss! Stay healthy and happy, everybody!

#original works #original characters #tlingit heritage #tapping into the anime nerd within me #tlingit #passion project

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ledenews · 8 months ago

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Santorine: Generation to Generation, Ideals Are Handed Down

When I’m around my contemporaries, there are conversations I work to avoid. Doctors, drugs, hospitals, and insurance are high on that list. I also don’t like to wax poetic about the past. Today is as good as it gets, and when tomorrow starts it’s going to be better. I do like to observe how things were different. An innocuous discussion about how back in the late 1970s if you were close to the legal intoxication limit, the police seemed to have a lot more latitude in how you were treated. History shows this to be completely accurate. Of course, this was before those brave, mad mothers helped us realize a real issue, but if you were foolish about it back then, you would lose your license. Recently, while sitting at the bar in my daughter’s restaurant, I was talking about exactly this topic with a retired banker who I did a bit of business with some years back. We both agreed that back then we were more worried about our fathers than about what the police could do to us if we got caught driving under the influence. The retired banker’s father was a Marine in the Second World War. Mine, a Drill Instructor. They were part of a community of veterans who were highly concerned with appearances and reputation. While they didn’t know each other, there was a commonality of experience. A special depth of understanding. They had fought through about the worst that humans could do to each other, and they knew what tied us together, and a critical part of any lasting success was reputation. No police officer, no judge, no one could or would rattle us like our Dad’s could. It was a combination of their expectation that they fought for the freedoms and the privileges that we enjoy, and how dare their offspring screw it up for themselves or others. Top of our list in any situation was to make these demanding men, our fathers, proud. Their community was cohesive. The highest accolade any of them had was the fact that they served their country with honor and could therefore be depended upon. Reputation. WWII and Korean Conflict veterans knew it was everything, and they were going to make certain their children understood this essential message, and I think we did. I was born near the very end of the “Baby Boom.” The men who were my teachers and my bosses were all WWII veterans. They were leaders and team players. They knew that together there was little they could not accomplish. They had an incredible influence on the Baby Boom Generation. They grew up being influenced by men from the previous generation who were involved in “the war to end all wars,” and that wording carries special meaning when describing events that change everything. I knew few of them. All honorable men, but they never had the camaraderie and the esprit de corps of their World War II children. I was close with my first and second-grade teacher, Mrs. Davidson. She retired at the end of my second-grade year, and contrary to popular belief, I didn’t drive her out of teaching, but I was a handful. Being close to Myrtle Davidson meant you also knew her stepfather, “Dad” Gannon. He passed away in the late 1970s at the age of 105 years. He had an amazing quality of life right up to the end. I remember being called to hurry to Mrs. Davidson’s house, as she was worried that “Dad Gannon” would hurt himself. He had hired some men to shingle a shed and was not happy with the work that they were doing, so he dismissed them and decided to do it himself. He had to be every bit of 103 years old at the time. I spotted him on that project. I was probably 16 years old, and I filled the “fetch” role, but I also learned to wear a carpenter’s apron, and I was taught to nail the shingles just so. We talked – I was excited about attending American Legion Boy’s State to learn about how our republic functions and he was committed to continuing to lead bird-watching sessions at the local nature center. It’s something he’s been doing since the early 1960s. He mentioned how fortunate I was to have the men in the community who had served and also gave back with important projects like Boy’s State. He said the men in his early life fought in a much different conflict, and when they returned to civilian life they had to pressure the government to do the right thing and provide them with benefits and consideration for their service. That was during his early life. He was born about 1871. Of course, he was talking about the war between the states. As many will quip, there was nothing civil about it. So here I am, in my mid-60s, realizing that some very basic truths and beliefs were passed down to me and that I was gifted the opportunity to touch truths from so long ago. I don’t believe subsequent generations let those soldiers in blue and grey uniforms down in any way. I do believe we are at our best when we strive to live up to their expectations, do the right things, and continue to build our individual reputations. At the end of the day, that is all there is for each of us. I think we should work to honor those who came before, and provided us with such and amazing starting point. Building our individual reputations, and living up to our parents’, and their parents’ expectations is so very critical to each of us because when I look in the mirror, I see my Dad over one shoulder and all the men and women who made a difference to me over the other shoulder. I won’t let any of you down. Promise. Read the full article

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kylesvariouslistsandstuff · 11 months ago

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The thing American animated movies of a particular time period and albums/singles by The Beach Boys - an American band - have in common...

Europe coming to the rescue and making them big hits somewhere...

Particularly the Disney animated features. The films released from 1970 to 1981 were not financial flops or underperformers in any sense of the word in North America, but they certainly weren't the blockbuster events Walt's movies sometimes were. The posthumously-released THE JUNGLE BOOK was a Top 10 success at the domestic box office in the calendar year of its release, and no Disney animated film would achieve such great numbers on American soil until... Hybrid WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT in 1988, some 21 years later. For an all-animated example, THE LITTLE MERMAID in 1989. (MERMAID didn't make 1989's Top 10, but it was still a big movie nonetheless.) These post-JUNGLE BOOK movies, staggered in release throughout the '70s, seemingly just played to the families, they didn't seem to have the kick, zest if you will, that got others interested. Even the kids of the 1970s were possibly past this kind of corny thing, as the world was ever-changing. (Though the funny thing is, the relatively chill and plot-light "characters exist" stories like THE ARISTOCATS and ROBIN HOOD seem rather quirky and against-the-grain when putting them next to the majority of today's ruthlessly on-the-move mainstream animated movies.)

Whereas in Europe... Different story. I already went over that on another post, but in territories like France and West Germany, these films were *blockbusters*. ARISTOCATS, ROBIN HOOD, THE RESCUERS, you name it. Different cultures, wholly different worlds, audiences over there embraced these films and others from different distributors. Europe had always, in some way or another, been Disney's bread-and-butter. When World War II raged across the Atlantic, Disney lost so much income and this was a big reason why PINOCCHIO and BAMBI initially flopped at the box office. In the '70s, when it seemed like American audiences wanted something new and different, Europeans seemed to welcome the films with open arms.

The Beach Boys are perhaps the quintessential American band, with a long, rich, and often confounding and complicated history, besmirched with pain, tragedy, and tumult... and yet, some of the most - to my estimation - beautiful music to have ever come out of any band, thanks in part to the genius of Brian Wilson. And there are plenty of parallels between Brian's work and Walt Disney's vision that are another post for another day... And often times, they are EXPLICIT. Brian once did a solo album of Disney song covers, in addition to making plenty of music that resembled the score of a classic Disney film.

In late 1966, around the same time Walt Disney passed away, Brian Wilson was suffering from waxing mental health problems and exacerbating drug use, whilst obsessively creating what would've been his masterpiece... An ambitious, often boggling album called SMiLE. Brian collapsed, and the project collapsed with him, there were other factors at play, only small pieces and individual songs being repurposed or released elsewhere in the coming years. Following this debacle, The Beach Boys' output suffered commercially... It had seemed that Americans, in the words of historian David Leaf, deemed a once chart-topping group on the cutting edge of musical innovation a bunch of "surfing Doris Days". Outdated, irrelevant, not up to speed with the ever-changing (and HOW!) musical scene and zeitgeist of 1967 and beyond.

Some critics bemoaned that Brian and his group fell far from what SMiLE could've been, kind of in the same way it's often stated that Disney's feature animation output went down in quality following Walt's death. In reality, The Beach Boys didn't fall back on anything nor give up. Brian's leadership role was diminished, but his brothers Dennis and Carl began to step up, alongside the other members of the group. The Beach Boys recorded and released some truly cool music from the middle of 1967 - the release of the 'Heroes and Villains' single - up until the release of the album SUNFLOWER in the summer of 1970...

And the majority of this output flopped commercially in the U.S., or at best, did decently enough. A few singles - such as 'Darlin'', 'Do It Again', and 'I Can Hear Music' - managed to get into the Top 40. Not the Top 10, or Top 5, they used to easily chip... But most bands would kill for that. Other singles, such as 'Cottonfields', went almost unnoticed. Albums like FRIENDS and SUNFLOWER didn't even crack the Top 100, despite their quality and even approval from some of the big music publications at the time of release. (Shockingly, Rolling Stone critics spoke positively of some of these albums.) Americans didn't wanna hear it... The Beach Boys, whose name did not help one bit, were the squarest of squares and that was that about that.

In Europe, however... The UK, particularly... The Brits loved the California sound of The Beach Boys, likely unlike anything they had ever heard over there. In 1966, The Beach Boys had edged out The Beatles or at the very least came very close to doing so in terms of popularity. One advantage the group had was that they toured frequently, often without Brian, but still toured nonetheless. The Beatles, of course, gave up touring in mid-1966 following a series of controversies and being generally overwhelmed by Beatlemania in order to focus on honing in their more adventurous sides.

The Beach Boys' seminal record, PET SOUNDS, did okay at best in North America upon its spring 1966 release. Like, it was not a massive flop or anything, but #10 was certainly not the position an LP of theirs normally landed at home. In the UK, it was a #2 smash, and lauded by virtually all of the British music press and several renowned musicians. Here in America, it was kinda met with polarization, which is absurd to think nowadays, considering that the album handily tops almost every Top 100,000 Albums Ever list. "I guess I just wasn't made for these tiiiimes..."

So yeah, The Beach Boys were huge in the UK circa 1967-1970 and did quite well throughout most of Europe, and were struggling to get attention in their home country.

For reference...

THE ARISTOCATS - Moderate hit in the U.S. Absolute blockbuster in France, West Germany, and the UK.

ROBIN HOOD - Same as above.

THE RESCUERS - Same as above.

THE FOX AND THE HOUND - Mostly same as above, it didn't do well in the UK for some reason. Or at least it appears to have missed the UK's Top 20 in its release year. Still, massive in France and West Germany.

THE BLACK CAULDRON - Underperformed domestically, but in the Top 5 of the year in France.

'Heroes and Villains' single - #12 U.S., #8 UK, #10 Netherlands, #7 Sweden

SMILEY SMILE - #41 U.S., #9 UK

WILD HONEY - #24 U.S., #7 UK, #20 Germany

FRIENDS - #126 U.S., #13 UK

'Do It Again' single - #20 US, #1 UK & Australia, #10 Canada, #3 Netherlands, #5 Norway & Sweden, #4 Germany, #4 Japan, #7 South Africa, #7 Switzerl- HOLY SHIT this one single was a BEAST

20/20 - #68 U.S., #3 UK, #41 Canada, #23 Germany, #20 Netherlands

'Break Away' single - #63 U.S., #6 UK, #10 Netherlands, #29 Germany, #20 New Zealand, #38 Canada

'Cottonfields' single - #103 U.S., #5 UK & Rhodesia, #1 Australia & Norway, #2 South Africa & Sweden & Denmark, #12 Netherlands, #13 New Zealand, #21 Finland, #29 Germany- 'nother fuckin' *monster* single right here.

SUNFLOWER - #151 U.S., #29 UK, #10 Netherlands, #79 Canada

Sometimes, Americans' tastes... Or unwillingness to try something... Just plain ol' suck, lol.

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chernobog13 · 3 years ago

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NEAL ADAMS R.I.P.

I was shocked and saddened to learn today that legendary comic book artist Neal Adams had passed away at the age of 80.

Adams had been working in the comic book industry since the 1960s. His realistic, commercial art-style of drawing was a breathe of fresh air, and his work was immediately identifiable. As someone described it so well, Adams could make the fantastic look real.

During the 1960s he worked for both DC and Marvel, drawing a multitude of characters. But seemed to me that the bulk of his work during this time was at DC.

A lot of his work at DC was on covers, which was a great marketing idea because his art just grabbed you. I can’t tell you how many times I bought a comic because it had a Neal Adams cover, only to be disappointed that someone else did the interior art. (Most places back in those day did not allow you to browse the comics at the stands. “Hey, kid! This ain’t no library!”)

That isn’t to say Adams wasn’t given interior art assignments. At Marvel he worked for a short stint on X-Men before it was cancelled; drew the bulk of the Kree-Skull War story in Avengers.

At DC he took over the Deadman strip and made it his own, and drew several issues of World’s Finest and The Brave and the Bold (these are just off the top of my head; I’m sure he did more). It was in one of those B & B issues that Adfams redesigned Green Arrow’s costume and gave him the mustache and goatee.

But it wasn’t until the late 1960s/early 1970s when he teamed up with writer Denny O’Neil that Adams really hit his stride. The two of them took over Green Lantern, added Green Arrow (and Black Canary most of the time, although she never got cover credit) and produced classic stories that were more relevant, dealing with real world issues such as racism, drug abuse, and pollution.

As if that weren’t enough, the duo then turned their attention to Batman. The character was in dire straits at that time, the victim of the campiness of the Batman television show. In short, he had become a joke, but no one was laughing anymore.

O’Neill and Adams saved the character by stripping away all the silliness of the Silver Age and bringing him back to his roots. He was the dark knight detective again. He was THE Batman.

That move saved the character and reinvigorated the franchise. If it hadn’t been for O’Neill and Adams, Batman would not be the flagship character he is today.

Adams was also one of the first, and most vocal, proponents of creator rights. When Superman the Movie was about the be released he brought to the public’s attention that Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were essentially destitute and abandoned by DC.

It was because of the efforts of Neal Adams and others that Siegel and Shuster got a “created by” credit in the film, why that same credit began appearing in every issue of Superman and Action Comics, and why DC started paying Siegel and Shuster an annual stipend.

Adams work wasn’t limited to DC and Marvel. When Ballantine Books released new paperback editions of the Tarzan novels they were adorned with Neal Adams covers.

He also established his own company, Continuity Associates, and began producing comics for new, independent published like Pacific Comics, before dipping his toes into the self publishing world for awhile, with characters like Toyboy, Samuree, and Megalith.

In the past few years he has done projects for both DC and Marvel, as well as provided numerous covers, which were usually bonus alternates.

The last project Adams did at the Big Two that I’m aware of was the Fantastic Four: Antithesis mini-series with writer Mark Waid.

Quite frankly, I do not have enough time or space here to do justice to Neal Adams’ incredible body of work, and the contributions he made to comic books.

Neal Adams. rest in peace, sir. You will be sorely missed.

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thekillerblogofkillers · 3 years ago

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Herbert Mullin (1947-?)

Herbert William Mullin is an American serial killer, responsible for the murders of 13 people in California in the 1970s. When Mullin was 18 years old, his best friend Dean Richardson died and he built a shrine to him in his bedroom. He later confessed that he was scared that he may be gay, despite having a long-term girlfriend. At the age of 21, Mullin’s family, with his permission, committed him to a mental hospital. He would extinguish cigarettes on his skin, attempted to enter the priesthood and would pound on walls and floors, shouting at people who were not there. He would often discharge himself after just a few days. Later, FBI profiler Robert K. Ressler said Mullin was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, possibly accelerated by using LSD or marijuana. By 1972, 25-year-old Mullin had moved back home with his parents in Felton, California, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. By this time he was hearing voices that told him an earthquake was coming, and that only human sacrifice could help him save California; Mullin’s birthday, April 18, happened to be the anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which he thought was significant. Mullin believed that the Vietnam War had produced enough death to hold back the earthquakes, but with the war winding down he would need to start killing people in order to keep the earthquake away. On October 13, 1972, Mullin claimed his first victim when he beat Lawrence White to death with a baseball bat. White, a homeless 55-year-old man, was hitchhiking and Mullin hit him after tricking him into looking at the car engine. Mullin later stated that the victim was in fact Jonah from the Bible, and that he sent Mullin a telepathic message saying, “Pick me up and throw me over the boat. Kill me so that others will be saved.” His body was discovered the following day. 11 days later, 24-year-old Mary Guilfoyle, a college student, was running late and decided to hitchhike. Mullin picked her up and stabbed her through the chest and back. He dissected her body, scattering her remains along a road.

On November 2, 1972, Mullin confessed his sins at church. In his paranoid schizophrenic state, he believed Father Henri Tomei wanted to volunteer as his next sacrifice to prevent the earthquakes. He beat, stabbed and kicked the priest, who bled to death in the confessional while a parishioner looked on and ran away. The witness described a tall, young man in dark clothing and black boots, but this did not help police, who speculated that Tomei possibly startled a robber. Following this incident, Mullin attempted to join the U.S. Marines, but failed the drug test. This rejection fuelled Mullin’s delusions of conspiracies and groups of “hippies” out to get him. He stopped taking drugs, believing they were causing his problems in life. In December 1972, Mullin bought a .22-calibre revolver and decided to kill Jim Gianera, a high school friend who had sold him marijuana, blaming him for his rejection from the Marines. However, when he arrived at Gianera’s house, he discovered his old friend had moved. The cabin was now occupied by Kathy Francis, who gave Mullin Gianera’s new address. There, Mullin killed Gianera and his wife before returning to the Francis home, where he shot and killed her and her 2 sons (aged 4 and 9). As Francis’ husband, who wasn’t there at the time, was a known drug dealer, this was thought to be the motive for the triple homicide. Prosecutors later used the murder of Kathy Francis to dispute Mullin’s claims of insanity, as he killed her to remove a witness who could link him to the murder of Jim Gianera. Around a month later, in February 1973, Mullin was wandering around Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, when he encountered 4 teenage boys camping illegally. He walked over to them, and claimed to be a park ranger. He ordered them to leave as they were “polluting” the forest, but they refused. Mullin killed all 4 boys and abandoned their bodies, which were found a week later.

The final murder took place on February 13, 1973. Mullin was driving through Santa Cruz when he passed Fred Perez, a retired fisherman, who was weeding his lawn. For no apparent reason, Mullin doubled back and used his rifle to kill the man with a single shot to the heart. He then got back into the car and drove away. This incident occurred in broad daylight and there were several witnesses, one of whom got Mullin’s license plate number. He was captured a few minutes later and a “docile” Mullin was arrested without incident. During interrogation, Mullin admitted to his crimes, telling police that voices in his head told him to kill people in order to prevent an earthquake. He claimed that the only reason there had not been an earthquake recently was due to his handiwork. As Mullin admitted his crimes, the focus of the trial was whether he was sane and culpable for his actions. The fact that he showed evidence of covering his tracks and premeditation was highlighted by the prosecution, while the defence argued that Mullin had a history of mental illness and had paranoid schizophrenia. On August 19, 1973, Mullin was declared guilty of first-degree murder (premeditated) in the cases of Jim Gianera and Kathy Francis), while for the other 8 murders Mullin was found guilty of second-degree murder. He also pled guilty to second-degree murder in the case of Father Henry Tomei. Mullin has been denied parole 8 times since 1980. He is known to have interacted with Edmund Kemper during his incarceration, sharing a cell once. Kemper recalled: “Well, [Mullin] had a habit of singing and bothering people when somebody tried to watch TV. So I threw water on him to shut him up. Then, when he was a good boy, I’d give him some peanuts. Herbie liked peanuts. That was effective because pretty soon he asked permission to sing. That’s called behaviour modification treatment.”

#textpost #text post #true crime #murder #serial killer #herbert mullin #earthquake #california #edmund kemper #paranoid schizophrenia #priest #lsd #marijuana #drugs

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somethinginrocknroll · 3 years ago

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He's not my favorite in a normal sense. His crazy fucking lifestyle and death are. He knew Elvis, The Rolling Stones, and many others too. Here's a mini bio on him:

Ingram Cecil Connor III better known professionally as Gram Parsons. He was a musician and frontman. Parsons worked with The Byrds in 1968, before quitting and joining his own band, The Flying Burrito Brothers from 1969 through 1970.

Gram was born in Winter Haven, Florida on November 5th, 1945 to Ingram Cecil Connor Parsons II and Avis Snively Connor. Avis returned to her hometown to give birth to her son. She was the daughter of citrus fruit magnate John A. Snively, who held extensive properties in Winter Haven and in Waycross. Gram's father, Ingram Connor II was a famous World War II flying ace, decorated with the Air Medal, who was present at the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

In 1956 when he was only nine-years-old, Gram saw Elvis Presley in concert and fell in love with music. That’s where his love of music came in. Two years later his father who went by “Coon Dog” took his own life two days before Christmas, Gram was only 11/12. Both him and his sister Avis (Jr) were both shattered after their father’s death.

Avis Sr remarried to Robert Parsons and the children took his name and were adopted by him once he married their mother.

Gram Parsons did briefly attend the prestigious Bolles School in Jacksonville, Florida. That was before transferring to the public Winter Haven High School. Which he did after failing his junior year. Gram returned to Bolles which had converted from a military to a liberal arts curriculum amid the incipient Vietnam War.

For a time, the family found a stability of sorts. They were torn apart in early 1965, when Robert had an extramarital affair and Avis' heavy drinking led to her death from cirrhosis on June 5, 1965, the day of Gram's graduation from Bolles.

Barely in his teens, he played in rock and roll cover bands such as the Pacers and the Legends, headlining in clubs owned by his stepfather in the Winter Haven/Polk County area. By the age of 16, he graduated to folk music, and in 1963 he teamed up with his first professional outfit, the Shilohs, in Greenville, South Carolina.

Gram was heavily influenced by The Kingston Trio and The Journeymen. The band played hootenannies, coffee houses and high school auditoriums. Parsons was still enrolled in prep school, he only performed with the group in select engagements. Forays into New York City (where Parsons briefly lived with a female folk singer in a loft on Houston Street)included a performance at Florida's exhibition in the 1964 New York World's Fair and regular appearances at the Café Rafio on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village in the summer of 1964.

Although John Phillips who is an acquaintance of Shiloh George Wrigley arranged an exploratory meeting with Albert Grossman, the impresario balked at booking the group for a Christmas engagement at The Bitter End when he discovered that the Shilohs were still high school students. Following a recording session at the radio station of Bob Jones University, the group reached a creative impasse amid the emergence of folk rock and dissolved in the spring of 1965 around the time of Gram’s mother’s passing.

Shockingly despite being poor in school and having bad test grades, Gram went to Harvard University in 1966 with the help of a strong essay he wrote. He only did one semester and that’s where he became more serious about country music. He heard Merle Haggard for the first time.

In 1966, he and other musicians from the Boston folk scene formed a group called the “International Submarine Band”. After briefly residing in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, they relocated to Los Angeles the following year. Following several lineup changes, the band signed to Lee Hazlewood's LHI Records, where they spent late 1967 recording Safe at Home. The album contains one of Parsons' best-known songs, "Luxury Liner", and an early version of "Do You Know How It Feels", which he revised later in his career. Safe at Home would remain unreleased until mid-1968, by which time the International Submarine Band had broken up.

In that same year Gram got the attention of The Byrds’ guitarist Chris Hillman thanks to business manager Larry Spector as a possible replacement member since David Crosby and Micheal Clarke left in late 1967. Parsons had already met Hillman at a bank in 1967. Gram had his only child, Polly, with Nancy Ross the girlfriend of David Crosby.

Gram passed the audition in February 1968. He was at first a jazz pianist but was switched to rhyme guitar and vocals. Gram left the band when asked why Gram responded with,

"Being with The Byrds confused me a little. I couldn't find my place. I didn't have enough say-so. I really wasn't one of The Byrds. I was originally hired because they wanted a keyboard player. But I had experience being a frontman and that came out immediately. And [Roger McGuinn] being a very perceptive fellow saw that it would help the act, and he started sticking me out front."

He was also friends with The Rolling Stones members Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. And they stayed close to each other until a fall out in the 70s. Before Parsons' departure from The Byrds, he had accompanied the two Rolling Stones to Stonehenge along with McGuinn and Hillman in the English county of Wiltshire.

Immediately after leaving the band, Parsons stayed at Richards' house and the pair developed a close friendship over the next few years, with Parsons reintroducing the guitarist to country music. According to Stones' confidant and close friend of Parsons, Phil Kaufman, the two would sit around for hours playing obscure country records and trading off on various songs with their guitars.

Returning to Los Angeles in 1969, Parsons sought out Hillman, and the two formed The Flying Burrito Brothers with bassist Chris Ethridge and pedal steel player “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow. They did every genre of music possible from hard rock all the way to country and jazz gospel. Around this time of The Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram started dabbling more and more into drugs.

Then Gram started a solo career in 1970 and toured with Emmylou Harris for a bit ; he may have been romantically involved with her as well. He then accompanied the Rolling Stones on their 1971 U.K. tour in the hope of being signed to the newly formed Rolling Stones Records.

Parsons and Keith Richards had mulled the possibility of recording a duo album. Moving into Villa Nellcôte with the guitarist during the sessions for Exile on Main Street that commenced thereafter, Parsons remained in a consistently incapacitated state and frequently quarreled with his girlfriend, aspiring actress Gretchen Burrell who later become his wife.

Eventually, Parsons was asked to leave by Anita Pallenberg, Richards' longtime domestic partner. Decades later, Richards suggested in his memoir that Jagger may have been the impetus for Parsons' departure because Richards was spending so much time playing music with Parsons. Rumors have persisted that he appears somewhere on the legendary album, and while Richards concedes that it is very likely he is among the chorus of singers on "Sweet Virginia", this has never been substantiated. Parsons attempted to rekindle his relationship with the band on their 1972 American tour to no avail.

After leaving the Stones' camp, Parsons married Burrell in 1971 at his stepfather's New Orleans estate. Allegedly, the relationship was far from stable, with Burrell cutting a needy and jealous figure while Parsons quashed her burgeoning film career. Many of the singer's closest associates and friends claim that Parsons was preparing to commence divorce proceedings at the time of his death; the couple had already separated by this point.

In the summer of 1973, Parsons' Topanga Canyon home burned to the ground, the result of a stray cigarette. Nearly all of his possessions were destroyed with the exception of a guitar and a prized Jaguar automobile. The fire proved to be the last straw in the relationship between Burrell and Parsons, who moved into a spare room in Kaufman's house. While not recording, he frequently hung out and jammed with members of New Jersey–based country rockers Quacky Duck and His Barnyard Friends and the proto-punk Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, who were represented by former Byrds manager Eddie Tickner.

Before formally breaking up with Burrell, Parsons already had a woman waiting in the wings. While recording, he saw a photo of a beautiful woman at a friend's home and was instantly smitten. The woman turned out to be Margaret Fisher, a high school sweetheart of the singer from his Waycross, Georgia, days. Like Parsons, Fisher had drifted west and became established in the Bay Area rock scene. A meeting was arranged and the two instantly rekindled their relationship, with Fisher dividing her weeks between Los Angeles and San Francisco at Parsons' expense.

Gram loved to visit Joshua Tree National Park. He would visit it often. Gram would frequently do psychedelic drugs and try to spot UFOs there. He told Phil Kauffman that he wanted his ashes spread there in Joshua National Tree Park since he loved that place and practically lived there when not in LA.

So he, Dale, Micheal, Phil, Gram's girlfriend Margaret, and Dale's unnamed girlfriend all went to stay at JNTP Inn. Where Gram got morphine from an unknown woman.

He injected himself and OD. Margaret shoved ice cubes up his ass and put him in a cold shower which worked. He was up and talking. Dale was left in charge to watch over Gram and then Gram stopped breathing. Dale tried CPR but failed. Margaret and Dale both watched Gram die. Finally they call a fucking ambulance and he's pronounced dead on arrival.

Now Gram’s stepfather is a POS okay. He wanted Gram buried in Louisiana so he could take Gram's little wealth and the family estate which didn't belong to the stepfather since he wasn't blood.

Phil and Micheal couldn't allow this. Gram wanted to be cremated and his ashes spread. So with a shit ton of booze to make an elephant drunk they take a loaned hearse, because you know everyone has a hearse on loan. They were dressed as cowboys. For as suits were “too itchy” to wear. The duo take his body back from the airport where he's meant to fly back to Louisiana back to Joshua National Tree Park.

So the duo crash in JNTP and they pour five gallons of gasoline on Gram and his coffin. Causing a fireball. But cremation and gasoline are different. So instead of having Gram's ashes they had a cooked charred Gram instead. Police were of course called. The duo was fined $750 each and made to do community service.Gram was sadly buried in Louisiana against his wishes but his stepfather didn't get anything.

Gram's wealth and estate were split between his wife, girlfriend, sister, and his daughter. And the family denied the whole illegal cremation happening and won't talk about it.

The end.

Omg that is a really good summary, very sad life tho and how he died but wow

#anon #I’m amazed #his life sounded depressing ngl

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thejudgingtrash · 4 years ago

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hello mel i Love You

HELLO DIL I LOVE YOU EVEN MORE!!!

You had me SCREAMING! Criminal genius/Detective Annabeth is my new hyper fixation, I fucking swear T_T

My brain went OVERBOARD with this! It’s super long! Please enjoy!!

(I’ve withheld this story due to the current political climate and I still feel sorta a way. But if reading about the p*lice triggers you or makes you feel uncomfortable, I wholeheartedly understand if you want to skip this one. Also... the story has some... a little bit of heat in it. Not much, it’s SFW. But it’s there <.<)

And: law enforcement, medical and science side of the pjo fandom, I doubt that this will make any sense :D

Also thanks again Torie @percyheartsannabeth for being an amazing beta!!

The Golden Age (WC: 9,5k)

“Absolutely not,” Detective Annabeth Chase crossed her arms and shook violently her head. The blonde curls nearly escaped her bun. Her partner Detective Luke Castellan was surprised. He had never seen Annabeth reject a direct command.

“We need his statement, Chase,” said Sergeant Charles Beckendorf. “It’s his M.O. The drugs, the paintings. Either he’s operating from prison again or someone’s copying him. We need to put a stop to this nonsense once and for all!”

“Even so, we’re busy with the robberies in Chelsea.” Annabeth didn’t want to pick this case up again. The case that made her famous, the case that changed her life forever. For the worse.

“Stoll will take over that with his younger brother. Chase, you don’t have a choice. You will talk to Perseus Jackson. That’s an order,” Captain Dougenis commanded. He had the final say. Luke nodded, Annabeth did nothing.

“Don’t you think we haven’t tried to get him to cooperate earlier? He said he only wants to talk to you. The person that put him behind bars,” Beckendorf explained.

Fuck Annabeth thought. She did not want to face Perseus Jackson again. She wanted to forget him and move on. The looks from her two superiors said that they would deny her wish. Jackson was a cunning manipulator. She knew how he worked and what he was. A criminal. A thief. A criminal.

“When will I speak with him?” she sighed. A battle that was lost quickly.

“In two days. Should give you enough time to study the case files,” Dougenis said.

Off to a great start. The sound of footsteps echoing in the hallway muffled as the prisoner was placed into the interview room two days later. He sat down and the cuffs fell from his hands. He rubbed his wrists. A little bit of freedom regained. Orange was a hideous color, but he actually managed to make it look good on him.

He and Annabeth were separated by the thin layer of the one-way-mirror. His sea green eyes scanned the plain fake wall in front of him. They tried to find her as he knew he was being watched. The piercing stare actually caught her eye directly. Annabeth sighed. He couldn’t hear her, but a smirk found its way onto his lips regardless. He knew her.

“You’ll be fine in there?” asked Luke who would stay outside of the interview room. He had been a part in arresting that monster. The condition that Jackson gave them was that he wanted to speak with Annabeth – alone. Annabeth nodded. Then she stepped into the small room. Tension laid in the air.

Four years had passed since he had been locked up. Perseus looked good. His hair was grayer, the beard had been trimmed recently. He looked like he exercised on a regular basis. Annabeth’s eyes spent two seconds engraving the picture of his brown biceps into her memory.

“Perseus Jackson, 38, born in New York City, arrested due to art theft and extortion. Twelve years. You’ve managed roughly a third so far.” Despite her marvelous work, they never were able to charge him for drug trafficking directly. The witnesses had remained silent. Annabeth took a seat in front of him.

“Annabeth, you know me,” Perseus pouted. A contrast to his deep voice. “Call me Percy,” he winked.

Her neck felt hot. “It’s Detective Chase for you!” she hissed. Amusement sparked through his eyes.

“Okay, Detective Chase.” How was he able to make her name sound so… dirty? So profligate?

“The woman that I have to thank for my new cozy home needs my help now all of a sudden. The tables have turned. I like that.” And Annabeth did not like one bit how his mocking tone sent shivers down her spine. The way his tongue flicked. The urge of standing up and fleeing the room was prominent, but she was a professional and had a job to do:

Make Perseus Jackson sing.

“I need information.” Annabeth’s mouth was pressed to a thin line.

“Straight to the point, Detective, huh?” The attractive man leaned forward. “And what information do I supposedly have?”

“Your family never stopped your business,” Annabeth spat. Perseus shrugged and his fingers tapped on the desk. An annoying habit.

“Someone is operating with the same methods as you. Art gets stolen and drugs follow the leads. Either you’re behind it or someone else has been recruited to fill your place. We need to find that someone.” She opened the case files and showed him pictures of missing paintings and locations as well as new collecting points for drugs on a map.

“Oh?” Jackson made and tilted his head. He faked interest and glanced lazily over the pictures.

“I’m pretty sure that I don’t have the time in my precious little cell to run all of the things that you’ve been accusing me of. Everything comes at a price, Detective,” he then smiled.

Sea green met light gray. Annabeth swallowed. Memories came back.

ii.

Two years. Annabeth had spent two years on that fucking case and barely made any progress. The smuggling of paintings to cover up or be used as payment for drug operations just didn’t make any sense. Her partner Luke got undercover into the business as a small middle man, but the rules were different for women. Sexism ruled yet once again. Detective work had narrowed the window down and came to one person: Perseus Jackson. He was invisible. He was a phantom. He had been swallowed by mother earth, never to be seen again.

He was part of the Greek syndicate that ruled with an iron fist over the East Coast. Not even the Italians, Chinese, Egyptians or Russians had that much power. Chrýseon Genos. The Golden Age. A fitting name for a bunch of pieces of shit that found joy in ruining people’s lives and making New York unsafe each and every single day. Everything was coded and followed the basic principles of Greek mythology. After Konstantinos Olympianidikis, otherwise known as Kronos, died in the 1970s due to a raging war with his own brothers, his three sons split the legacy and entire empire into three sections:

Adrian Olympianidikis. Hades. Racketeering and money laundering.

Petros Olympianidikis. Poseidon. Theft and drug trafficking.

Zacharias Olympianidikis. Zeus. Prostitution and human trafficking.

All these crimes were tied to the Golden Age and the police forces couldn’t do anything. Witnesses vanished or remained silent. The little evidence they had left was either compromised or disappeared. Everyone in the Golden Age had their little specialty. Everyone passed missions and power onto the next family member in the hierarchy. So did Petros aka Poseidon do the same thing with his sons. One of those sons was Paris. His youngest. The only pieces of information that Annabeth had of him were a 17-year-old picture that showed Paris shoplifting with some of his cousins and a diploma that showed that he had studied art history. A picture of him as a boy and proof that he had a college degree. Wow. Compelling evidence.

Annabeth took one final look of the teenage boy. The picture had been taken in the year 2000 hence the quality of the security camera of Macy’s being complete shit. Despite seeing a long mop on his head and awfully baggy clothes there was next to nothing that was useful for Annabeth in the year 2017. Hell. Who knew what Jackson looked like now as a grown man? The probability of him running around like in the early 2000s was next to none.

“And?” Annabeth asked Luke as he returned from a meeting in the syndicate.

“Poseidon is willing to speak to you,” her blond colleague nodded. The scar under his eye had proved his loyalty. A near fight for life and death. The other person had remained in the hospital for a while but was fine and dandy by now according to Luke.

“Okay.”

“Only you. Not anyone else. I’ll drive you.” Annabeth nodded.

The townhouse in the Meatpacking District did not look much like most of the houses in the area. The real luxury laid within. The house was filled with two kinds of people: security guards and young models. Annabeth felt uncomfortable and underdressed as she was following a young girl’s lead. Barely a woman. Not only did Poseidon enjoy his life at the fullest, no, he was also rich as fuck. Young women served drinks and cooked in the kitchen. Bikinis, shorts and cocktail dresses so short that they nearly gave Annabeth whiplash. A young thing named Lacy brought Annabeth to the garden where a mini pool party was going on at its fullest.

Despite being in his 80s, Poseidon looked good. He looked young and was full of life. He looked like he was in his solid early 50s. The hair and the bushy beard were so white that it seemed to have been dyed. The tanned skin was healthy. A friendly face. The only indication of his age were the neck and his hands. Had Annabeth been into older men, she had to admit that she wouldn’t have said no to Poseidon from the visuals alone.

Poseidon enjoyed his book and the giggling girls in the background as Lacy caught his attention with the new arrival. “Ah!” he said, and his eyes twinkled as he put the sunglasses away. Girls were swimming in the pool or playing volleyball, music was blasting, and food was served.

“Detective Chase!” Poseidon stood up and shook her hand. A firm grip. He spoke with a soft Greek accent.

“What can I do for you?” he asked friendly.

“More like how can you help me speak to one of your sons?” Annabeth smiled.

Poseidon laughed. “Which one? I have many.”

Yes, you do you horny bastard the blonde thought. Poseidon had twelve sons in total. Or twelve sons that he publicly claimed. All by different mothers of course. All of them had joined the family business and most have paid the price with their lives.

Proteus. Triton. Khrysomallos. Pegasus. Arion. Polyphemus. Bellerophon. Theseus. Orion. Sciron. Chrysaor. Paris. More than half of them were dead, less than half of them were alive. Tryfon aka Triton, the son Poseidon had when he was 19, had been killed by his cousin Iraklis also known as Hercules in 1974. Orion had been twelve when he had been shot in the street by Antonios and Phoebe aka the twins Apollon and Artemis in 1986. Assassinated by his own cousins. The trend of getting killed by your own family members was fairly present in the Golden Age.

“The youngest,” Annabeth answered which made Poseidon laugh.

“Ah, my boy Paris. What did he do?” Curiosity swung in the words of the old man that referred to his son in his codename.

“Sorry, confidential,” Annabeth deflected and pouted.

“Of course, of course. Ah the police. Friend and helper. As you can see-” Poseidon pointed to the precious gardens. “My son isn’t here.”

Annabeth nodded. “Well, if you happen to see him, tell him to give me a call.”

She gave him her card. Poseidon studied it. “Of course, I will Miss Chase.” Another friendly smile.

The blonde nodded and then left. The smile of the old man vanished for a split second only to appear as one of his young helpers gave him one of the many burner phones of the house.

“Thank you, Drew!” he said before pressing a number into the small device.

“Yes?” asked the tired voice of a man on the other side.

“Can you explain to me why a certain Detective Chase from the NYPD came to my home to talk about you?” The old man sounded cold and amused at the same time.

“What?” Now he was wide awake.

“I thought the woman would introduce herself as your fiancé! Something that would actually make me proud,” complained the old man and nodded to another young thing that handed him a drink.

“I will take care of it.”

“Yes, you will.”

The line was dead.

And Annabeth continued to work for another two weeks without any other results. Her shift came to an end but at least the desk was clean. She didn’t drown in mountains of paperwork like Castellan did.

“See you tomorrow!” said Connor Stoll as she crossed ways with him in the hallway.

“See you!” Her mood had reached its lowest so far. It was time to visit her best friend since childhood and his bar The Grove. As soon as Annabeth stepped out of the police department, it started to rain.

“Great.” Her steps got faster.

Fortunately for her, The Grove was within walking distance. The pouring sky distracted Annabeth so much that she didn’t realize neither a black Lexus parking around the corner nor the footsteps that had been following her. The leather jacket and the blonde curls were wet but nothing that would worry bartender and owner Grover Underwood all too much. He had seen her in fairly worse states.

“What can I do for you, Annabeth? An Old Fashioned like usual?” His friend nodded.

“Have you eaten something?” The dark-skinned man knew Annabeth and her habits. Overworking herself and forgetting to eat lunch were her favorite deadly combinations.

“Well, I wouldn’t mind something to snack on,” she confessed.

Grover only shook his head but gave her a glass full of pretzel sticks. A delicious Old Fashioned stood on the counter a few moments later. The door behind her opened and closed.

“What can I do for you, sir?” asked Grover and looked to the door.

“Whiskey. Double.” A rich baritone. Pleasant to the ears.

Annabeth heard the squeaking of the barstool next to her. She turned her head to the right and nearly fell to the ground. A man sat next to her that was a younger copy of Poseidon. Paris Olympianikidis also known as Perseus Jackson, son of Poseidon. The man she had been searching for since forever randomly decided to appear. Her talk with Poseidon must have sparked something and Annabeth hated the stupid rule about women not being in the family business unless they had been born into it even more. Precious time that could have been used for undercover operations had been wasted.

Perseus looked… good. Good didn’t even describe it. His salt and pepper hair had the same streaks in the beard. He had a chiseled face with a straight nose. Wrinkles around the eyes showed that he loved to laugh and smile. He seemed to enjoy his regular exercise; the way his shirt shifted whenever he moved a muscle made it seem like it was about to tear apart. His skin was of a rich brown, and his lips were curled into a devilish smirk. The sea green eyes were a direct copy of his father’s. He had won the genetic lottery. He had nothing in common with the shoplifting boy from the year 2000.

“A little bird told me you were looking for me,” he winked.

Why did her chest feel so heavy? Why weren’t her lungs functioning normally?

Percy had to admit. His father had been right. Annabeth Chase was his type. Her body had a beautiful shape from what he had observed in the past few days. A firm ass that did Pilates on a regular basis in a class not far from her shithole of an apartment. A heart shaped face and a slight tooth gap that made her look only more adorable. Blonde princess curls that seemed to be fairly taken care of with expensive products. But her eyes… an interesting gray that told him one thing: she had a flaming spirit that was blessed with intelligence. Or was it cursed by its burden?

“Your father,” she commented.

The whiskey was served, and Percy took a swig. He was pleased.

“Do you mind?” the handsome man asked as he grabbed a smoke. Annabeth turned to Grover who ignored the antics of the new customer. The bartender placed an ashtray in front of him instead. What in the fuck is going on?

“I usually don’t smoke,” he confessed and lit the cigarette regardless. Annabeth pulled a face. Where was the logic in that?

“And you do now because…?” The interest was honest.

“I only smoke when I’m having a good drink-” He raised the glass to Grover who nodded and appreciated the compliment. “And am sitting next to a beautiful woman,” Perseus winked.

Annabeth didn’t know whether she wanted to blush or strangle him. She was 29 and acted like an insecure school girl for fucks sake! She nearly laughed.

“So, I have the honor of finally meeting you, Annabeth.” The way he said her name. So smoky and dark. He belonged in prison for that.

“It’s Detective Chase for you!” she hissed. The criminal next to her only raised an eyebrow.

“Bossy. Kinky. I like it,” he smirked and enjoyed the redness of her face as he pulled from the cigarette and blew the smoke.

Grover in the corner tried to hide his laughter with a cough. Annabeth turned to her best friend with a murderous rage. “Annabeth and kinky. Yeah right.”

“Grover, shut up!” she commanded. Jackson next to her was more than just amused.

“Now I’m interested.” He tapped some of the ashes off.

“You really want to know the details of her love life?” Grover asked.

“Oh, I definitely bite,” Percy smiled. Yes please. Annabeth wanted to smack herself.

“Could we come to the more pressing matters?” the woman groaned.

“Sure,” Jackson shrugged.

He lifted his drink, she lifted hers. They met in the middle and both felt a spark immediately.

“I need information.” Chase cutting the chase.

Percy smiled. “Everything comes at a price.”

The fact that Annabeth had spent another hour next to him and had let him pay for all of her drinks made her stomach churn in hindsight. He even insisted on paying for the Uber that picked her up.

As Annabeth returned to her apartment, she started searching through it high and low in her semi drunken state. The stupid Greek syndicate had to have bugged her. Her already chaotic apartment was even more disheveled. At least she would be forced to properly clean up once the weekend hit. The worst part was that she found absolutely nothing.

What’s worse? Being wrong or being crazy?

iii.

“I’m pretty sure you got the wrong person,” Percy said and grabbed the glass of water in front of him. The interview room looked sad. “I know nothing.”

“I’m pretty sure we’ve got the right person,” Annabeth retorted and leaned forward. Her hand grabbed the edge table so tightly that the vessels nearly popped. He had to give her something.

“You’re the key. You were the blueprint and now someone’s running off with your legacy. And you’re more than okay with that?!”

“Mmhh,” Percy made. As if he had seen the most delicious thing in his life. The fact that he didn’t lick his lips was a wonder. Annabeth’s eyes followed his gaze right into her cleavage. Two buttons of her blouse that had been left open. Boys will be boys.

“Are you fucking serious, Jackson?” she spat.

The prisoner leaned backwards into his chair with a grin that quickly vanished. “It stinks in here,” he sighed.

Annabeth halted her movement. Her eyes widened in shock.

“No,” she whispered.

His beautiful sea green eyes told her one thing. Yes.

iv.

“Is this really necessary?” Annabeth questioned Beckendorf’s decision behind his back.

A visit to an art gallery. Perseus Jackson decided to become visible to the public eye all of a sudden and started to work as an art collector and conservator. He had meetings with clients, he had visitors in his studio and seemed to actually use his degree for something. Whether it was for the good or not was a matter of perspective. The criminal went to the gym daily; he even bought his own fucking groceries. Observing him had been nerve wrecking. Especially since probably he knew that he was being watched and therefore enjoyed every second of Annabeth’s annoyance. The detective felt like a true voyeur. He hadn’t done anything suspicious unless being a little piece of shit counted. Jackson didn’t separate his waste for an instance. Prick.

When Luke told her that Jackson had planned the opening of a gallery and proposed that they should go, the blonde almost laughed. A public event where no invitation was needed. A ballsy move. It seemed like Jackson really gave no fucks. Unfortunately, Beckendorf caught wind of it and now she was forced to go.

“I’m afraid so,” Luke said as he rubbed his temples. He really wasn’t in the mood for a fight with Annabeth. She was an opponent that just maimed you with arguments.

“What’s going on, Annabeth?” her colleague asked. “You wanted to find Jackson the entire time. You’ve worked for years on this and now you’re basically backpedaling. This is so not you.”

For better or for worse, Annabeth didn’t talk about Luke with her meeting with Jackson at The Grove. Something told her that she should hold onto the information.

“I don’t know. Just a bad feeling I guess,” she confessed. Annabeth didn’t know what would happen once Jackson was aware of her presence. And he would definitely see her.

“You’re not alone.” Luke patted her shoulder. “Grace, Beauregard and hell even that di Angelo informant guy said they would be present. Jackson must have pulled a big gig if even the Italians are interested in his shitty joint. Nothing will happen to you.”

I’m not so sure about that, Annabeth thought, but the only thing she did was nod.

A month had passed, and the day of the gallery opening was finally there. Annabeth stood in front of the building where soft string music could be heard from the outside and guests flooded in. Annabeth saw how undercover cop Jason Grace entered. He quickly glanced in her direction but turned around. Annabeth understood; he was a valuable asset who could not let his cover get blown over.

The blue dress that she wore hugged her curves tightly and the high heels that she chose made the detective regret every life decision that led up to that exact moment. Her soles would be burning the next day and it wasn’t like in the movies. An attempt to run in those things would be a one-way ticket to the ER. The wire in the dress didn’t make the discomfort any better.

“Chase, everything's fine?” asked Beckendorf in her ear. Of course, she had been bugged.

“Yes, everything is good. I’m moving,” she said.

Annabeth mingled with the crowd and entered. The blonde actually stood in awe and registered all the modern pieces. Pop art, minimal art, abstract expressionism, all sorts of different post-modern works that fought for space but harmonized wonderfully together in the rooms. How the fuck was that criminal scum be able to display works from Andy Warhol, Helen Frankenthaler or Jackson Pollock?

They had to be either stolen, bought for a large sum, rented, which was not the style of the Greek syndicate or, something that was Jackson’s supposed specialty, be forged. A waiter offered her champagne which she politely declined. As much as Annabeth would love to cloud her mind, she could not afford it on that evening. She had to look out for Jackson. The blonde made her first round at a slow speed.

“Can you see him yet?”

“No, not yet. Oh, there he is! With Chiara Benvenuti!” A known mafia bride. Chiara was surrounded by her bodyguards like always as she pointed towards a picture.

“Good,” Beckendorf breathed into her ear. “Perhaps we can finally raid this place.”

The painting was an abstract piece with lots of red elements. Blood that was spilled on the dance floor. Something fitting for a coldhearted villain.

“Of course, painting it was a task, but I thoroughly enjoyed it,” Annabeth heard Jackson say. The way Benvenuti laughed made her rage. Jackson joining her, didn’t make it any better. The fact that Benvenuti stared at his tanned chest as he had left some of the buttons of his shirt open, pissed the detective even more off.

Jackson’s sea green eyes shifted to the right and caught her staring at him. A pleased expression rested on his face and the smile could almost be considered to be honest. Embarrassed, Annabeth turned around and immediately left the corner. Fuck that mission. Fuck everything. Fuck that man in particular and the uneasy feeling that rested inside her heart. She saw Luke mingling with two people in black suits, they looked like they would fit the description of some of the Golden Age’s lackeys. Luke was irritated but there was no time for explanation. Annabeth needed alcohol, she needed it badly.

“Chase, what’s going on dammit?” hissed Beckendorf as he heard her frantic steps. She was glad he was unable to see her in that pathetic state.

“Nothing,” Annabeth lied. “Don’t want to blow cover.”

Fortunately, another waitress was making her rounds and Annabeth grabbed a glass which she nearly inhaled. She was wandering through the gallery and tried to figure out her next steps. Too little, too late.

“You left me waiting. Good evening, Detective.”

Annabeth almost let the glass fall as she heard his deep voice behind her and felt his large hand around her waist. A scent of musk and fresh sea breeze crawled into her nose. The grip wasn’t extremely tight, but it was clear that Perseus Jackson had no intention of letting her go.

“Fuck!” hissed Beckendorf into her ear. It was too early to storm the place. They had nothing in their hands against Jackson.

“You have quite the collection,” Annabeth complimented him.

“Thank you, love.” She punished him with a sour look that made his grin only widen.

“Interested in buying?”

“If it’s real perhaps.”

“Oh, my dear Annabeth, everything is real.” The warmth of his hand spread throughout her entire body. Her glass was empty, and he gave it to one of the lackeys.

“Mister Olympianidikis,” the boy nodded and ran off with it immediately. Oh, the power of someone in the higher hierarchical position of a crime syndicate.

Jackson accompanied her through the gallery and showed her his favorite pieces.

Annabeth could picture Beckendorf walking up and down in the small van, nearly losing his shit at the man babbling about oil colors or frameworks that he or other painters used. Jackson was hindering them on purpose. Something was going on.

“There’s something I want to show you. Follow me.” He took her hand and walked to a hidden niche. Jason Grace who stood in the corner and spoke to a woman eyed them with suspicion.

A white door was there with the words Emergency Exit engraved on it. A cold and naked hallway was in front of them. Lights were off and the moon was the only orb that illuminated the place. They were alone.

“And what are you supposed to show-” Jackson cut her off. With a brutal kiss.

A spark that set the entire place in flames. Annabeth did the one thing she was not supposed to: not use her intelligence. Her arms automatically wrapped themselves around his neck as she fiercely kissed him back. Their lips fought a battle against their lungs, and they dived into each other again and again. Taste. That was all they thought.

Percy pulled away from Annabeth. She was beautiful. Her citric smell was divine. The delicate updo was no more. The lipstick was smeared. Her lips trembled and there was something else written in her eyes. Lust. She wanted him as much as he wanted her. A wild look was on his face. He kissed her again. He held her close to his body and pressed her against the wall.

Annabeth felt how one of his hands slid underneath the dress. Did Annabeth exchange the boy shorts for a thong in the last minute? Yes, she did. Did she regret that decision? No, she did not. But his hands had a different goal in mind. The yanking made her shriek into his mouth. A solid welcome for his tongue. The wire underneath her dress was no more. Only then did he place his tight grip on her ass.

Oh, two can play this game Annabeth thought and grabbed the wire that stuck out of his collar.

“Guess that no one’s listening in on us anymore,” Percy commentated.

“It seems like it,” Annabeth agreed. A calm before the storm. A storm that broke loose as they kissed each other again. Percy’s lips wandered.

“Who told you to waltz in this place with this fucking dress?” He claimed her neck with kisses. His beard tickled her. “You look perfect!”

Annabeth wished she could retaliate the compliment. Percy looked fairly handsome in the beige suit, but her brain was short circuiting and only focused on not moaning too loudly and enjoying the feeling of being pressed against him. The probability of her colleagues rushing in that compromising situation was way too high.

Percy broke the kiss off for good. He made a move towards the staircase. A foot was set to the lower step. “Come with me!” His hands reached out for her.

Annabeth was panting. Heart or sanity who would win? Annabeth made one decision that would seal her fate forever. She took his hand and the unlikely pair fled out of the building.

As soon as they opened the backdoor, Annabeth heard a frantic scream for her name. There was no turning back now. A black car was waiting for them in the hidden alley. It looked like Castellan didn’t do his homework properly and had received the wrong plans of the building to study.

Percy held the door open for her and she slipped into the limousine. Percy followed. “Leo!” he barked. The vehicle moved with screeching tires and drove through a garage which led to a tunnel that Annabeth had never seen. She stopped paying attention to it as Percy claimed her lips yet again.

The car ride was a blurry memory. They entered another garage which was when the car stopped. “We’ve arrived,” announced the chauffeur.

Percy nodded to the front and then exited the car. He reached out for Annabeth and helped her out of the car. “Where are we?” she asked as they entered an elevator.

Percy pressed a key card against the board. “My home.”

There was no time left for sightseeing. They immediately entered the bedroom. His jacket was tossed aside, her dress slid to the floor. Both of them fell to the bed. Both of them never wanted to leave the bed.

Annabeth woke up to the wonderful smell of coffee. Her eyes fluttered and the memories hit her. The wonderful night she had shared with a wanted criminal. Her naked body was wrapped in satin sheets. The blonde sat up. Her pale body was sore and ached but in the best way. She didn’t remember the last time she had sex with anyone; work had been way too busy. She didn’t want to remember. What Perseus Jackson did to her would be fairly impossible to top.

Said Perseus Jackson entered the bedroom in nothing but sweatpants and two mugs. Oh yes, he did enjoy his daily workouts. “Morning,” he smiled.

“Morning,” she replied and thanked him for the cup. A delicious aroma took over the room. Annabeth took a sip.

“Mmhh,” she delightfully sighed. Two pumps of hazelnut and heavy cream, just the way she liked it.

“Yes, I did do my homework,” he laughed and drank his tea. “You aren’t the only people that study others. Was seeing me work out at least fun?”

“Shut up, Jackson,” Annabeth blushed. He laughed.

The cop finished her cup and Percy put it on a nightstand. “And what do you want to do now?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Something’s coming to my mind.” His light eyes darkened, and he cupped her face. Annabeth pushed the blanket aside, revealing her perfect self.

“That insatiable?” she laughed but didn’t receive an answer as she felt his lips on hers again. Her hand went on to grasp his black curls.

“Very,” he said as his hands roamed over her very naked body.

Putting the blue dress on again felt wrong. Percy wouldn’t have minded for Annabeth to stay the entire day at his apartment, but he knew she had a point when she said that her colleagues would searchthe entire city for her. Turning brick by brick if they must.

“I honestly can’t come up with a good excuse for my boss. You didn’t think this through.” Annabeth wandered through the modern apartment. It was bathed in light and had window fronts that showed her the entirety of Manhattan and the green of the Central Park. A dream apartment. The Golden Age had money, no doubt in that.

“Well… I actually have an idea,” Percy started. Annabeth turned to him with one cocked eyebrow and her hands on her hips.

“That sounds like I won’t like it,” she predicted.

He opened a cabinet and showed her the bottle.

“Are you fucking serious?!”

“Well as you’ve said. I didn’t think it through,” he shrugged with a goofy grin. It made him look adorable. Stop Annabeth. No time for that. Percy grabbed a cloth as well.

“Let’s just say that I never had the honor of being treated that way,” Annabeth muttered. But she agreed with him. It would make the lies that were about to come out of her mouth easier.

Percy kissed Annabeth one last time and brushed a lock out of her beautiful face. “Sweet dreams, Annabeth,” he wished her.

Then he pressed the drenched cloth over her nose and mouth. Her eyes rolled back, and she was embraced by darkness. Annabeth slumped down but Percy caught her.

Four hours later, Luke Castellan and Jason Grace made their way to Annabeth’s apartment, looking for possible clues. Both of them were fucking pissed. At Jackson, at Annabeth, at the entire fucking operation. The police force was frantically looking for her. They got Paris Olympianidikis for kidnapping at least. If they would catch him.

Luke had a key to Annabeth’s apartment because they were close friends. Annabeth had actually defied orders, nearly ruined a mission and drove him to the hospital as his wife gave birth three years ago. He had to find her. Not to make it even, but to know that his friend was safe.

“Look for anything useful,” Luke commanded. Jason nodded.

Luke entered the living room and Jason worked through the bathroom which was followed by the bedroom. He nearly slipped to the floor.

And there she was, sleeping like a princess.

“Annabeth?! Annabeth! Luke, she’s here!”

The next thing Annabeth remembered was waking up in the hospital. She knew that everyone was pissed at her. But Castellan had defended her for the stupid act of following a criminal to nowhere. Jason had seen where they left, and Annabeth thought the Sergeant could hear important information. Who would have guessed that the wiring would be cut off?

Examinations. DNA samples were taken to get a hold of Jackson. Questions. So many questions. A knock. Yet another person that wanted to annoy her. “Yes?” Annabeth sighed.

“Annabeth,” Beckendorf entered the hospital room. Annabeth felt patronized but of course her hands were tied. She refused to speak with her boss about a certain criminal. She covered up the truth and enjoyed living her life in lies. The young detective had no family who anyone could call. That made Beckendorf extremely worried about her.

The tall man took a seat next to her bed. “I’m not here to tear you apart, pretty sure Captain Dougenis had the pleasure.” Yes, he had. “I want to hear from you what happened.”

The blonde retold her vision of events. “I don’t know,” she sighed. “It was a trap. I can’t remember how I ended up in my apartment.” Annabeth spoke a little truth in her web of lies.

“The way our connection cut off as soon as you left the exhibition… I thought it was static. Then you were gone.” Oh no, he heard us making out Annabeth thought. She tried to suppress the panic that was bubbling up in her and was glad that Percy had discarded the wires. The technicians at the police department would have immediately figured out that there had been no static. She remembered almost everything. The staircases. The car. The apartment. The way he felt between her legs. The way she straddled him. The way he grabbed her throat. The pleasures and the cries.

Beckendorf looked deeply into her eyes. He knew that she had something to hide but was wise enough not to ask. The old man was one of the few people that blindly trusted her instincts in the department.

“Okay,” was all that he said. “I’m trusting your judgement.” She nodded. He was a kind soul.

“Take the next week off. You need the rest.” Beckendorf stood up.

Percy saw how her delicate fingers grabbed the folder and closed it. The shiny object fell into his vision.

“I like your ring.” His sea green eyes shot up to her face. He saw a slight blush on her cheeks.

“Thank you,” she nearly whispered and played with the small white band.

“Someone very important gave it to me a long time ago. Someone dear to my heart.”

He blinked twice. She blinked twice.

A devilish smirk rested on his face.

vi.

Their affair lasted an entire year. The fact that it came to an end was saddening. But it was predictable. Star-crossed lovers from two entirely different universes that weren’t meant to be. Otherwise the balance of both of their worlds would crash, burn, and fall.

Annabeth had insight into the police work and Percy had insight into the Golden Age. That was the sole reason they barely saw each other in a work related context. They actually managed to live a fairly happy life outside of the working hours. They went on secret dates, they visited museums after they had been closed and reopened only for the powerful son of Poseidon, they watched movies together, they even flew out to visit his Hawaiian mother Sally who adored Annabeth. And the sex was amazing. A welcoming bonus. Both felt happiness for the very first time. Both felt love for the very first time.

The secret studio in his art gallery was one of the few places where they could be free.

“And here’s the Mona Lisa,” Percy grabbed the painting out of the box. He showed Annabeth some of his latest pieces that were part of his collection or creations. Real paintings and forged ones.

“Wow, that looks so real. An incredible copy.” Annabeth had visited France in her college days.

“The thing that’s hanging in the Louvre?” he winked.

“Tell me you’re joking.” The corners of his lips pointing up was all she got.

Annabeth laid next to him a week later. They were inside of her shitty apartment. Percy had surprised her because of course he could cook as well. To the question “Is there something you can’t do?” Percy only answered, “Change a tire and board planes because I hate heights.”

He might have been joking, he might have been serious. Annabeth did not care. She had returned from yet another demanding shift. This time her task force had hunted down one of Zeus’ kids. Aristidis also known as Ares. Despite being in his late 40s he was an annoying little piece of shit. The fat fuck tried to sell child slaves on the dark web and barely managed to escape them.

As Annabeth had entered her apartment, she was greeted by the delicious smell of parmesan that melted over fresh pasta. Seeing houseman Percy cook was not only a picture for the gods but something she could get used to. Annabeth placed her bag on the sofa and ran to the kitchen to greet Percy with a kiss. A passionate kiss.

“Aren’t-” kiss. “You-” kiss. “Hungry?” he asked between their kisses.

“Well, I think we can eat later.”

“Grover is right, you’re a terrible liar when it comes to food,” he joked. The Grove was another spot for them together. Once the customers left, the three would sit together and joke. Mostly at Annabeth’s expense.

Annabeth pouted and then kissed him again. The only thing that broke her silence was her stomach grumbling.

Percy broke off from her with a roaring laughter. “Eat first. Then we can come to the more fun activities.”

Annabeth pouted but Percy unfortunately had a point.

Now she was fighting against falling asleep as she laid on his chest and he played with her hair. He inhaled her smell. Raindrops were racing on the window as gravity pulled them down. The shower on the outside calmed them. “There’s a good reason why you never found me. Why no one found me,” Percy started.

Her tiredness was gone. Curiosity won. “The fact that my father uses me as his master forger is abundantly clear, right?”

Annabeth nodded. They didn’t talk much about his business ventures in the Golden Age, but she had pieced large chunks of the puzzle together.

“I want to leave my family,” he confessed.

“What?” That came as a surprise to Annabeth. Percy seemed fairly content with his life in the family business. He joked about it and enjoyed the high standards of life that came with the fruits. Then again, Annabeth had seen the dark shadows that followed the Golden Age everywhere they went. Blood, bodies, chaos, destruction.

“A rule that my father engraved into my brain was to be invisible. Live like there’s no tomorrow, but don’t forget to clean the remains of yesterday. The day me and my cousin Ethan were caught shoplifting seventeen years ago changed me. It changed us all. We were so naive, and felt so invincible. For normal parents that would have been a tirade and grounding. Our parents think differently. For Ethan, whose idea it was to begin with, it cost him his eye.”

Annabeth’s eyes widened. The cruelty of parents. The fact that the Golden Age had no problem with hunting their own down was still sickening to her.

“It didn’t matter. Four months in and he had been shot by the Russians, the Bratva. Nearly started an entire fucking war,” he sighed.

“Percy, that’s horrible.” Annabeth tried to see if there was any emotion left in his eyes. There was none. His eyes were dull from the wars he had seen. Percy was blind and used to the cruelty of the survival of the fittest.

“Annabeth, I’ve witnessed my first murder as a thirteen-year-old. At least I haven’t pulled the trigger myself yet. Not in a deadly way.” He stared at the white ceiling.

Her heart broke for the boy that lost his honest smile. “That doesn’t make it any better.”

“No, it doesn’t. It really doesn’t.” Percy hugged her tightly. “I want to be free. Die as a free man. Live in the sunlight and not in the shadows. Not in fear of getting gunned down by a crazy family member. My father spoke with my uncles. They gave me an impossible task. Once I solve it, I’m a free man.”

“Who are you? John Wick?” she joked. She wasn’t in the mood for cracking stupid jokes, but she had to uplift the situation or else the mental image of Percy losing his innocence as a child would forever haunt her.

“That guy is amazing; I’m not going to lie.” Percy managed to crack a crooked smile.

“And the task?”

Percy sighed. He wouldn’t have minded a smoke. “It stinks in here, the three of them had said. ”He turned to Annabeth. “There’s a rat.”

A rat? she thought. “Someone that betrays my family. They mix up our business and create chaos from within as if they want us to implode. I have to find and either obtain or eliminate them.”

Someone that betrayed the Golden Age? Whoever they were, they were crazy and suicidal.

“And what do you want to do once you’re free?”

“Move to Hawaii. Be reunited with my mother again. Find a woman,” he looked at her and grinned. “Marry her, pop out a kid or three. Be an artist.”

Silence. Annabeth was speechless. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that and being a part of that,” she whispered.

Percy only kissed her.

Another month later. The fact that Percy disappeared around her birthday upset her, but that was life. He had been in Los Angeles for a gig. Which gig exactly she did not ask. Was it a legal gig? Highly debatable. It had something to do with the rat. That was all that he told her.

A small package got sent to her and she was curious to see what it was. No sender. Carefully she opened it. A small ring box was in there. Tiffany’s & Co.

A card was attached to the box. Happy Birthday, Princess – P.

“Oh no…” Annabeth opened the little box. The ring had a small silver band that was covered in small diamonds. Her jaw dropped. The ring was beautiful. And it was meant to be for her?

Annabeth put it on. It sat perfectly on her ring finger. Annabeth looked at the box again. It had a code on it. The detective grabbed her phone and searched for the ring.

“WHAT THE-”

Perseus had spent fifteen thousand dollars for that little piece of jewelry.

“No…” she cried. How could he have spent so much money on her?

Annabeth ran into her bathroom and shoved a loose tile aside. She used that little space to hide something. That something was the burner phone that Percy had given her so that they could always stay in contact. Annabeth called him.

“And?” he asked.

“PERSEUS JACKSON!” she yelled.

“HAVE YOU LOST YOUR FUCKING MIND?!”

“Why? Don’t you like the ring?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I love it. We have to talk about the price.” Her left hand already played with the beautiful ring.

“Why? Do you want a more expensive one? Let me know which one, I’ll buy it,” he stated.

“What?! No! You’ve spent way too much on that ring! I can’t accept this!”

Percy laughed. “You can and you will. It is my gift for you. Happy birthday, Annabeth.”

Annabeth wanted to scream. Denying his gift felt so wrong, but it was the right choice she made.

“Once you’re here we’re going to have a talk. We have to return this!”

Annabeth could practically hear how he shook his head. “You’re going to like the ring and you’re going to keep it.”

“Fine,” she huffed. Annabeth accepted her fate and waited until the days of solitude would be over. Until she was reunited with her Percy again.

The year had passed. Then it happened. The day Paris Olympianidikis would fall.

vii.

“Cooperate with me, Jackson,” Annabeth sounded soft. He merely raised an eyebrow.

“Cooperate and we can make a deal. Better conditions in prison, a reduced sentence perhaps and-”

“I want out,” he boldly stated.

Annabeth stared at him blankly. “Pardon me?”

“You said cooperate and we can make a deal. That’s my end of the line.” Jackson leaned back into his chair again.

Annabeth was speechless. He had beaten her with her own game. She closed her eyes for a second before focusing on him again. Don’t let him get the best out of you.

“I’ll see what I can do.” He smirked as he loved to hear that answer. Then she remembered what he had said.

“You said it stinks in here?” she repeated. Annabeth eyed him suspiciously.

“Yes, Detective,” he truthfully answered.

“What does it smell like?”

“Colors, Detective.”

“Why?”

“You should be able to see it for yourself.” He scratched his temples.

viii.

They got him. They didn’t get him with drugs or anything else that would give him a long sentence. But they got him with one of his forges. The good old Al Capone method. If you don’t get him with the big guns, try to stick to the petty crimes. Criminals get sloppy. Especially criminals that do way too much in too many places. The meeting was over, and everyone cheered. Everyone but Annabeth.

“Shouldn’t you be happy? Hell, Annabeth. You’ve spent more than three years on this case.” asked Travis Stoll.

“It’s just…unbelievable. The fact that everything comes to an end. Goal completed and all,” she smiled sadly.

Annabeth dreaded her seeing Percy again. He was waiting in her apartment and probably preparing food for them. The sight of her apartment complex made her heart sink. Where once was joy, ruled depression.

“Annabeth, what happened?” Percy ran to the door as he saw her in her desolate state. The door closed and she told him what would happen in the next sixteen hours.

“I’m so sorry,” she cried. Percy just held her and hugged her tightly as the tears blinded her. He fought his own tears that threatened to rise. Their future, destroyed.

“It was bound to end like this,” he said. Sadness rested in his voice. But also, tranquility.

“No.” Annabeth shook her head and buried her face into his strong chest.

“Whatever happens. I’ll be fine. Most of the prisons and the judges are smeared.” He kissed her head.

“Of course, they are,” she laughed darkly. Knowing that he wouldn’t be subjected to fights in prison didn’t do much to calm her down. She’d rather have him next to her.

“Annabeth. I want you to arrest me.”

“No. Never.” She violently shook her head again and slapped his shoulder.

“I mean I’m already used to your cuffs, now’s the chance to make it official,” he grinned.

“Percy! Now is not the time to joke about our sex life.” They shared a laugh anyway.

“I have another wish. Move on, Annabeth. Live life to the fullest,” he whispered.

“Everything but that.” She refused to move on. How could she?

“Find an idiot, marry him, have kids and live happily with him. Do that for me. Please,” he continued.

“I want you to be that idiot,” she pressed and looked deep into his eyes. “I don’t care how long it’ll take. I’ll wait for you.”

He kissed her. Don’t do this Annabeth. Don’t give me hope he thought.

The unlikely couple hugged each other tightly as they went to bed. One last time. It didn’t come to Annabeth as a surprise to find his side of the bed cold and empty. His side. His side was no more, it was only her side.

Perseus spent the night and morning hours in the art gallery. He had one final piece to finish. He drank and smoked and cursed. The bottle of cheap whiskey nearly fell to the ground, but he managed to catch it.

The oil painting was a self-portrait. An anchor to the last few moments of his life as a free man that hid in the shadows.

The task force broke into his gallery. He had a cigarette in his mouth and put the paintbrush down as his lover approached him. He had a sarcastic smile on his lips which vanished as he registered the pain in her eyes.

“Perseus Jackson, you are under arrest,” spoke Annabeth with a commanding tone.

She put him into cuffs and read him his rights. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in court... A glance at the painting he had been working on ever since he left the apartment.

Annabeth knew immediately that it was them. Percy in the painting hugged her but their faces had been cut off. She saw the birthmarks on her back and the accuracy of how he portrayed his hands on her hip. Percy’s final act of love to her for all of them to see. Unfortunately, all of them were blind to it. All of them but Annabeth.

The moment she was at home she ran to the bathroom and emptied her stomach. Gush after gush came out of her. Her mouth felt sour and dry, the teeth hurt and had an ugly yellow color, the tears that blinded her ran towards her nose. “What have I done?” she cried and looked at her pathetic self in the bathroom mirror.

Judgement day came eight painful months later. The judge slammed the hammer and sealed his fate.

Twelve years. Twelve years was the sentence. Perseus lost his coolness for one second. Annabeth’s heart broke in two. Poseidon who sat on the other side of the room looked like he wanted to shoot the judge right then and here and Annabeth would have gladly joined him.

They were robbed of twelve years together. Percy was put into handcuffs. His sea green eyes searched through the ranks until they found her gray ones. He blinked twice. I love you. She blinked twice. I love you too. The police officers around her almost cheered.

They complimented her for the worst decision of her life. An act that had destroyed her life. Her lover was gone. And a free rat was still out there.

The trail of memories stopped. Annabeth knew that Luke was restless behind the one-way-mirror. The talk had stretched into eternity and gave little information to the hidden detective, but so much to Annabeth. Percy had been right. He was roaming freely in prison. He was able to talk with his family day in and day out. And most importantly. He knew of operations. And he knew of his own operations the best.

Finally. There was movement in the gallery. Whoever was decided to continue the work of Percy Jackson was stupid enough to revisit the place where it all began. The rat would be caught in a trap.

“NYPD PUT YOUR - no.” Annabeth had the gun pointed at him. But she couldn’t believe it. The rat. The rat that had cost her four years of their life.

“I’m sorry, Annabeth,” he sadly smiled. Then he pointed his gun at her.

A shot.

Annabeth had closed her eyes. The bullet didn’t hit her. It had hit him as Luke Castellan had fired a warning shot into the abdomen. The detectives moved to him.

“Call an ambulance!” yelled Annabeth to the cops that flooded the place. He laughed on the floor as he bled.

Jason Grace. Secret son of Zacharias Olympianidikis also known as Zeus. He not only wanted to act in revenge as Percy’s brother Sciron had killed his older sister Thalia. He wanted to spite him and take over his businesses as well. The money and the gold. The cars and fame. In his twisted mind he was able to run the syndicate and destroy it at the same time. It was over.

Annabeth saw as the ambulance drove off. Percy scratching his temples as an indication for the glasses and his talk about colors to point to the gallery would be his ticket to freedom. Hopefully.

ix.

It was the first time that Percy had seen the sun as a free man again. He left prison with the clothes he entered. The deal with the district attorney went smoothly although the old man would have rather wrung the half-Greek’s neck.

A black car drove up to the prison. Two people exited the car.

“Mom? Dad?”

Sally and Poseidon hugged their free son tightly.

“You are stupid!” cried Sally. “Both of you!”

Father and son winced. That was Sally Jackson for them.

Quitting her job had been freeing. She had made the decision about half a year ago. Annabeth wanted to see something new. Experience something new. She was on the way to the small airport. The day was sunny and warm. A new day to start a new chapter in her life.

Annabeth arrived. “You can stop hiding, we aren’t being followed,” she laughed.

Percy yawned in the backseat. “I was sleeping,” he excused himself.

“Of course, you were.” She rolled her eyes and smiled into his reflection in the rearview mirror.

Her colleagues were upset, especially Luke, but it had to be. She had to quit for her own sanity. Beckendorf would check up on her and then see who she was with and connect the dots. But he would be wise enough not to contact her, not to rat her out. He would be happy about the fact that she had found love.

They would live with Sally and her little family for a while before they would buy their own house. The private jet that Zeus had given them would bring them to Hawaii undetected. A small sorry as the son of Zeus had caused a lot of trouble in the family. At least Jason was still alive.

Annabeth stopped the car and turned to Percy.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too,” she grinned. A delicate kiss was shared.

A golden age was truly upon them.

The End

Ummm... I... I think this might be a poppin feature fic? I have still many ideas and many things could be fleshed out...? Help?

BUT THANK YOU AGAIN FOR THE SUGGESTION DIL OMFG ILY!

All Cookout Fics

Cute/Cursed Cookout Writing Prompts

#pjo #Percy Jackson #annabeth chase #mel's little cookout #percabeth #percabeth fanfiction #pjo fanfic #percy jackson fanfiction #percy jackson and the olympians #tw: police #tw: violence #mel writes #the golden age

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buzzdixonwriter · 4 years ago

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Tears In The Rain

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe…All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

-- Blade Runner (David Peebles & Rutger Hauer)

The radar screen manufacturers -- RCA, GE, and others -- started jonesin’ for cash when the end of WWII dried up all that sweat & easy military materiel money.

Commercial consumer television existed before WWII in England, the UK, and Germany but it was a super-expensive technology confined to a few very wealthy homes in a few select markets or in Germany’s case, public venues such as beer halls.

Radar screens and TV tubes were basically different applications of the same thing, so the radar tube manufacturers shifted their production to TV sets pitched to post-war consumers as the must-have status symbol.

Problem: Said TV sets needed something to show and while there was live national network and local programing, most early stations filled their air time with old movies / cartoons / serials / comedy shorts.

That was the cultural gestalt I and other boomers grew up in during the 1950s, an era when much of the on air media dated back to the 1930s.

I’ve always been more culturally observant and curious than others in my generational cohort, and while they blandly / blindly watched Bugs Bunny and Popeye and Betty Boop and Our Gang, I was asking my parents and grandmother and aunt about the odd details I saw in old media (it didn’t hurt that we had a beautiful art deco edition of Collier’s Encyclopedia that my grandparents acquired in the 1920s in the house as well).

As a result I knew far more about the Depression and Prohibition and war rationing and other major cultural events and touchstones prior to our generation than did most other boomers.

When our history and social studies textbooks finally introduced these topics in junior high and high school, I was already intimately familiar with them.

As a result, I fell in love with the Marx Brothers and continue to love them to this day.

And while I watched and re-watched The Three Stooges, once I discovered Laurel and Hardy I left Larry, Moe, Curly, Shemp, Joe, and Curly Joe behind.

But the thing is, to fully understand and appreciate and know and love the Marx Brothers, you have to understand the pop culture of their era.

The same applies -- to a lesser degree -- to Laurel and Hardy.

The key difference is that The Three Stooges are pure physical mayhem: There is nothing to understand.

They are imbeciles who inflict pain on themselves and one another, and while far, far inferior to Groucho / Harpo / Chico or Stan & Ollie, they will outlast them.

Anybody from any era or any culture can access The Three Stooges, but if you don’t understand a “gat” (short for gatling gun) is 1930s slang for an automatic pistol, then Groucho’s line upon seeing a automatic in a drawer with a pair of derringers -- “This gat’s had gittens” -- is absolute gibberish.

Likewise Laurel and hardy require some understanding of how American cultural values functioned in the 1920s and 30s; if you don’t get that, a lot of their humor is lost.

Our Gang / Little Rascals ages better because kids are kids and much of what they do is universal.

But even there much of their references have to do with the Depression or WWII rationing and scrap drives and if you don’t grasp that then those jokes zoom past you.

The situation isn’t confined to pre-WWII media, either.

The Marx Brothers and Laurel & Hardy might possibly be recognized by the current generation as something their parents and grandparents watched, but the Ritz Brothers are forgotten by all except those who specialize in comedy / pop culture history. Wheeler & Woolsey are even more obscure, and Olsen & Johnson obscurer still, and if you’ve ever heard of Lum & Abner my hat’s off to you.

And holy shamolley, those are just the comedians we’re talking about. There’s a whole universe of pop culture lost as fans of old B-Westerns die off, not to mention minor pop stars of music and small movies in the 1930s / 40s / 50s.

Silent movies have virtually disappeared from pop culture today; they are things of the past, historical artefacts.

Thanks to the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg and Comic Book + and Digital Comics Museum and other sites, literally tens of thousands of hours of old radio shows and countless pulp magazines and comic books and other media are available, but who accesses them today except the truly die-hard genre fans or the pop culture historians?

Why morn their passing?

As Theodore Sturgeon famously observed, isn’t 90% of everything crap?

Yes, it is.

But that doesn’t make it any less of the cultural gestalt, the zeitgeist of the era than the few timeless gems that shine through.

. . .

As pop culture historian Jaime Weinman points out, the boomer generation -- the late 1940s to early 1960s -- offered a particularly fallow time for pop culture.

We enjoyed access to previous generations of pop culture, brought to us in curated form. Even if those curators were costumed local cartoon show and horror movie hosts, we got at least some understanding of what led up to our own generation.

Weinman observes that because of technical broadcast reasons, only a few avenues fell open to new programming -- and that new programming could be rerun again and again to fill in gaps in local stations’ air time.

It created a generation with remarkably deep pop culture roots, even if relative few members of that generation were aware of them.

We were, to some degree or another, aware of a vast library of older pop culture media and icons and idioms.

Ironically, this began changing in the late 1960s, slowly at first, but coming full flower in the mid-1970s as music cassette recordings allowed us to create our own playlists off radio shows and record players, and cable TV stopped being something for the hinterlands and started penetrating urban markets, thus literally uniting the country with first dozens then hundreds and a virtually infinite number of channels and streaming options.

But the real nail in the golden age of pop culture’s coffin was the introduction of home TV recordings and time shifting, meaning we no longer needed to wait for curated programing but could watch what we wanted when we wanted.

Despite a wider range of options, older material became less and less popular, and the lack of curation is a big part of that.

With nobody to supply some sort of context -- even goofy horror host context -- older examples of pop culture became less accessible.

The newer generations look less to the past, more to the future.

. . .

As I’ve written before, endings fascinate me.

Right now I’m seeing a generational shift with the boomer generation’s pop culture rapidly fading to be replaced by Generation Z and the generations to follow them.

I look at the boomer era and wonder how much will survive.

Very little, I’m afraid.

And that includes losing some of the best our era had to offer.

For example, how many people today know of The Firesign Theatre?

In the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, they performed absolutely brilliant satirical comedy on radio and recordings. Their album Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers received a Hugo nomination for best sci-fi drama presentation of 1970.

I still laugh when I hear their recordings -- but I laugh because I lived in that era.

Their humor relies heavily on topical subjects and the counter culture of the late 1960s-70s. They were very much a Southern California phenomenon…and thanks to radio and TV and movies of that era, that culture permeated the entire country.

But that era is gone, and now when I listen to them I laugh, but to use a specific example I laugh because I know who Ralph Williams was and what he meant to Southern California pop culture in that time.

You don’t get that, you don’t get the joke, and the brilliance of The Firesign Theatre’s humor is lost.

Like tears in the rain.

. . .

Cheech y Chong will survive, because like The Three Stooges, their appeal lies in their basic stupidity.

True, many of their routines make contemporary pop culture references, but material like “Dave’s Not Here” is timeless.

You don’t even have to get the drug references to find it hilarious.

Conversely, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers will fade.

As characters, they are of a particular time and place: Hippie dippie San Francisco.

They can’t survive transplantation, as was demonstrated in their last few stories.

Now there’s an animated series that brings them from the swinging 60s to to Trump 20s and it just doesn’t work.

The creators Don’t Get The Joke.

I don’t blame them for failing to get the joke, but updating the Freak Bros. would be like updating the Marx Brothers.

It can be done, but only badly.

. . .

Music will always have musicians and buffs who will track every obscure item they can find, but a lot of the best and most innovative work will be forgotten by mainstream culture.

This is because in many case, the best musicians are way ahead of the rest of their field, and their innovations are only made palatable by others who take them up and reinterpret them in a way to make them accessible to contemporary audiences.

Frank Zappa, as much as I personally love him as a cultural icon, will fade fast after the last boomer dies.

Basically, he didn’t make singable music.

There are a lot of brilliant innovations in his work, but his lyrics are so idiosyncratic as to be impossible to cover.

That, and a lot of his lyrics and subject matter would not be comfortably acceptable today.

Yeah, when he did it he was trying to make a satirical point, but when modern audiences hear it, they don’t hear the sharp commentary on the culture of his time, they hear songs that seem to glorify sexual violence and racial bigotry.

Most of the people who decry so-called “cancel culture” today are hypocrites trying to justify their own offenses, but there will be creators and components of pop culture who simply aren’t going to make the cut.

I can show you on paper why radio’s Amos And Andy was a brilliantly written show.

You’re not going to get modern audiences to accept white actors doing blackface…or black voice.

Zappa is acceptable today because there are still enough people who get the joke.

When we’re gone, so are most of his songs (his instrumentals hopefully will live on).

. . .

Quentin Tarantino’s star is already starting to set.

His copious dropping of the n-bomb seemed daring and edgy in the early to mid-90s now seems boorish and tiresome.

People don’t want to listen to that, and how can you make them watch what they don’t want to watch?

The Hateful Eight might endure since it gives a sorta context for its racial animosity, ditto Django Unchained, but even they will be problematic due to Tarantino’s Red Apple universe -- a world similar enough to ours to be mistaken for it at first glance but ultimately completely different.

Inglorious Basterds will ultimately fail the history smell test by audiences who will perceive it as wildly inaccurate.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood probably has the least problematic elements in it, but it too is so firmly set in a specific time and place that only those who lived it can truly appreciate it.

When we’re gone, who can follow the pop culture breadcrumbs that lead us through the movie?

Tarantino is a brilliant writer / director, and film students in the know will study his movies to see how he pulled them off…

…but they’re going to move far past him.

(He may enjoy a revival 50 years from now, the way certain film makers get rediscovered a half century after their deaths. If so, it will be by people able to see past the pop culture references to the real story beneath.)

. . .

Roger Corman and other exploitation film makers aren’t going to as welcomed once the boomer generation departs.

Boomers see them as transgressive artists, tweaking the nose of so-called respectable society.

New generations will see they as creeps who exploited violence and sexism.

(And we shouldn’t mourn its loss; most of it is soft-core pornography. But there were a few shining moments that shine only if you know the context, and that is fading fast.)

. . .

Superheroes probably won’t die out just as Westerns never completely died out, but like Westerns their audience is rooted in a very particular time and place.

I mentioned B-Westerns earlier; once upon a time there were literally dozens of B-Western stars, each with their own face base and merchandising and movies…

…and now there are no more B-Westerns.

We remember Roy Rogers because he’s culturally referenced elsewhere (and Gene Autry because he left a great big museum in his name).

B-Westerns’ success was based on fulfilling audience expectations, essentially giving the same thing they’d seen before, only slightly different.

Superheroes have degenerated into that.

In their current form, they’re deconstructions based on what a previous generation’s pop culture produced.

The superhero market has been supersaturated in the past and collapsed before.

This time when it collapses it will take along countless near-identical characters and storylines.

What emerges from it will be as different from the current iteration of superheroes as The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly was from My Pal Trigger.

. . .

Likewise, if James Bond is to survive, there will be a drastic retooling of the property.

It is possible; Sherlock Holmes has been retooled often.

The original Connery Bonds, the ones we consider to be “iconic” will eventually be viewed as an embarrassment.

The world and its attitudes are changing, and while there will always be room for heroes, audiences will be a bit more discerning about which heroes they want.

The attitudes of the original Bonds will not fly with future generations.

. . .

Finally, one prospect that will make it into the future, though not necessarily on its own strengths, no matter how significant they are.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 has skewered pop culture via bad movies since 1988.

Supported by a legion of fans, there are several books and websites that annotate all the references found in the various MST3K series.

Scholars 500 years in the future will thank these fans and researchers for their efforts.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 and its various annotated spinoffs will be the Rosetta stone of 20th century pop culture.

It will provide a context to make the jokes understandable, but more importantly than that, it will open a window into what people were thinking and feeling in the last decade of the 20th century.

It and the films it spoofed will be studied with near Talmudic intensity (you think I jest; I do not). They’ll provide insight that will help future generations and cultures understand this one.

#Once Upon A Time In Hollywood #Wheeler and Woolsey #Lum And Abner #The Ritz Brothers #The Firesign Theatre #The Marx Brothers #Laurel And Hardy #Frank Zappa #Olsen And Johnson #Our Gang #Little Rascals #The Three Stooges #Groucho Marx #Harpo Marx #Chico Marx #Stan Laurel #Oliver Hardy

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