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d-criss-news · 4 years ago

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Three months after launch, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman’s short-form service Quibi is entering its first awards season.

As the nascent platform, which is still finding its feet with subscribers, kicks off its debut FYC campaign, Deadline has assembled a virtual roundtable of creators and stars to explore how it lured Hollywood A-listers to the second screen, what they really thought of it when they first heard about it, the creative process, the importance of owning their own rights and how they see things going forward.

Joining us were Darren Criss, co-creator, songwriter and star of musical comedy Royalties, Nicole Richie, creator and star of irreverent comedy Nikki Fre$h, Cody Heller, creator of Anna Kendrick sex doll comedy Dummy, Veena Sud, creator of dark thriller The Stranger and Nick Santora, creator of Liam Hemsworth action drama Most Dangerous Game.

DEADLINE: What did you think of Quibi when you first heard about it?

Nicole Richie: I went in there and I had a general with them, not really knowing what I was going to make. Separately, I was kind of preparing to do this comedy album without the show around it and I sat with [Jeffrey Katzenberg] and talked to him about the platform and the idea that it was for these in between moments, and that it’s quick bites, it’s ten minutes or less, and it was something that, I found it very smart and pretty exciting. I’ve done short-form before so I definitely felt like I could do it. There’s a lot of young creative people there and I was very excited to work with them.

Darren Criss: Just like everybody else in the industry I’d heard about Quibi. Obviously, anything that you know, Jeffrey Katzenberg attaches himself, my ears kind of perk up. So, I’d been aware of the concept. I think the specific idea of short form was never something that I thought ‘I have to make short form, nor was it, oh my God, that’s the worst thing ever’. For me, what excited me about Quibi, much like Nicole said, was the fact that it was this new thing. I always gravitate towards the renegade kind of out-of-box thinkers and I always think it’s an exciting opportunity to try something.

In many respects, it is the Wild West. So, when you’re shooting stuff you go, man is this going to fly, do we do it in this aspect ratio, how do we edit this, what is the precedent here, and in the lack of precedent I think for a lot of people that is actually kind of a scary thing where you say ‘We don’t know what works and what doesn’t work’, but for me I actually look at it as a really cool thing because you’re like, ‘Wow, fuck it, shoot it, ask questions later’. We get to decide what the thing is or not. I really was excited by that, it’s a really kind of fresh kind of community of people that are with the company that just got me excited about doing something in a new way.

Cody Heller: I had a weird evolution of Dummy (left) becoming a real thing, it was kind of a twisty journey. I had just written it as a script to get me staffed on other shows years ago and then I had a general meeting with Colin Davis who used to work at TBS and I actually had it set up to be a short form show at TBS, when they were attempting something like 15-minute late night programming thing with edgy stuff. So, I had written seven 15 minute episodes and then the whole block at TBS died. I was devastated but I was already working on this other show on Showtime, so that’s the way it is and I moved on.

Then like a year later you know, I kept in touch with Colin because he’s just a cool dude, and he gave me a call and he said ‘I left TBS, I’m at this new place, you never heard of it before because it doesn’t exist yet. It’s called Quibi. I hope you don’t mind, I gave all your scripts to Jeffrey Katzenberg and he loves them and he wants to meet with you next week’. It was just like the most surreal experience, like I went in and met with Jeffrey and he was quoting lines from these insane, very raunchy scripts, and he just got the show. It was so exciting and cool to have this older Jewish gentleman totally grasp and get what I was going for. That was just so exciting.

Veena Sud: I felt when I met with Jeffrey that what he was talking about was nothing short of potentially revolutionary in how we look at content, from the vertical screen obviously, but also how people would look at our storytelling, and what device they would watch it on. I thought about how radically different our relationship is with these things we walk around with in our hands than it is with the screens that we watched you know, in our homes or in the theaters. The device itself allowed for potentially a very different experience in content, which was really, really interesting to me.

Nick Santora: Well, my initial reaction was ’What the hell is this?’ I went to meet with Jeffrey, like it seems everyone else on the call did and he’s a very impressive guy, and he’s full of energy, and full of enthusiasm. It was coming off this Most Dangerous Game being a pilot for NBC that didn’t go, and he said, ‘Listen, can you basically add a hundred pages to this and blow it up?’ When he was talking about the ten minute segments I just had a feeling what I wanted to write would work really well for that because you just needed a cliffhanger or a twist or a turn about every nine or ten minutes. I worked on Prison Break and that show was bananas, and every commercial break was a massive cliffhanger and every episode out was an even bigger cliffhanger so I said, ‘I’m going to have to do this 15 times and I thought I could I don’t know if it would have worked better anywhere else. I think it really worked well in the Quibi format because, I call it Pringles entertainment, you just pop one in your mouth every nine minutes.

DEADLINE: How was the actual process of writing, producing and editing in this way?

Nick Santora: The writing for me was the same, I just needed to make sure that organically that every nine to ten pages there was an oh shit moment that would make people want to watch the next episode. The prep was very different because I had to work very closely with my director to make sure that in addition to filming it the way we would normally film something for network television or any television that didn’t have a turnstyle device, we had to have three cameras rolling at all time and we had to make sure and prep for the shot based on the location, based on the actors, based on what was going on in the scene, that the vertical and the horizontal would both have something very interesting to fill the frame. We always had a third camera running to catch the vertical, especially when you’re doing action and we have guys you know, jumping off of boats onto bridges and stupid shit or crazy shit like that, you want to make sure you’re getting it in the frame if people are turning their phones in either direction.

That was challenging and really fun though, and then editing was effectively the same if I’m being honest, it’s just that you had to do a vertical pass and edit the entire thing for you know, for a vertical turnstyle watch. But that wasn’t that big of a deal because it all comes down to making sure you’re editing it in a way that’s visually interesting and tells a good story. The prep was where it was most different for me, where we had to basically say, this is going to basically be two different movies, one vertical and one horizontal.

Veena Sud: What was so fascinating for me with The Stranger, directing it as well, was having to think really radically in terms of not thinking about vertical and horizontal as separate entities. I really wanted to have one monitor. Looking at two monitors or three monitors is really just kind of out of my wheelhouse. I like to look at one thing when I’m directing and focus on performance mostly. So, I had to have something baked in that would allow me to have that freedom to be looking at the actors versus, ‘Are we getting the shot?’. One thing we talked about extensively in prep, which was radically different because of this is, how do you service this story and allow the audience to feel what they would feel on a bigger screen and not feel less? What I mean by this is, if you hold a phone vertically you’re automatically losing east and west, right?

We looked at other shows that had tried to do vertical framing and very quickly started to think this is going to be a disaster unless we come up with a whole other aesthetic approach to this. So, really quickly, instead of thinking east and west in terms of the screen, think of north and south, and think of A to Z. Think of infinities, think of the depth of what you’re looking at. Think of going as deep into the screen as you possibly can in a way that maybe traditionally you wouldn’t think of when you have a landscape you know, when you have that aspect ratio. So, that’s why we had people moving, that’s why we’re always leading and following for the most part, that’s why all the environments were constantly changing, and we were looking for infinity lines constantly when we’re shooting and prepping. So, pushing the aisles of a grocery store closer together so that as the actor moves through them you would see left and right in a way that you know, traditionally you would not see if you were shooting that type of aspect ratio.

Darren Criss: Obviously for the three comedy weirdos here, the medium services our genres in very, very different ways than to Nick and Veena. I was really impressed with the way that they utilized what might seem a limitation in storytelling. I noticed it consciously. I wondered how they were going to fill all of the big action stuff in here. Yes, there is this aspect ratio thing, there’s the short form, you’re still applying the same rules that you would apply to if Katzenberg told all of us ‘I want a three-hour movie’ but if it was just that, if your idea is good enough, if you’re dexterous enough as a storyteller, you can kind of kneed the dough to fill in the space that you’re given. People have thought of really cool ways to maximize their narrative within this very specific box and that variety of nuance is such an exciting thing and the fact that that’s possible in such a fresh way is like something not to be ignored.

Cody Heller: We’re all just so fucking talented [laughs]. With [The Stranger and Most Dangerous Game], I did find myself wanting to experience both versions, so I want to rewatch in the vertical just to see the difference and experience it both ways. That is different than my experience because for me I really did just kind of center frame everything, like I shot everything in one big square and then just had demarcations on the video village screen. Because I had this show where literally it’s mostly one character and then a sex doll, most of the time they’re close enough together that it’s not really an issue, but the only times I would really notice it would be establishing shots. It was such a fun challenge to rise to and I loved the experience.

DEADLINE: Do you think these shows could be made anywhere else and if not, were you aware of that while you were making them?

Cody Heller: I don’t think I could have made this show anywhere else. I think my show, in particular, blends itself so well to ten minutes because I think if you made it a half hour you’d have to really go into [B] stories, which I think for my show it just works better as a smaller piece about Cody and Barbara. Quibi was so supportive and gave me so much artistic freedom that I just cannot speak highly enough of their whole team. They give really good notes that makes it so much better.

I really loved the challenge of taking on something new and the turnstyle thing was exciting. One thing that was super cool that I didn’t think of while I was shooting but noticed during the editing process, was because Quibi has to be ten minutes, it can’t be more than ten minutes but it can be less than ten minutes, and the episodes don’t have to be uniform in length, that was very liberating in the edit stage because then I was able to say this scene that I thought was so funny on the page, it didn’t really play as I thought and it’s not necessary to the story, let’s just cut the whole scene.

Nicole Richie: Cody mentioned having the A story and the B story on a television show and just having it be the A story, it does feel very intimate. I do feel like a B story on your phone doesn’t really work because when you are watching on a phone, you really do want to be locked in to that story, and from a comedy perspective, I love the jokes, but I’m very conscious of the breath after the joke, letting people digest that. With a show like Nikki Fre$h you know, only focusing on two people and then the music video, I was able to shoot that and give the jokes a moment. I can’t see this show living anywhere else.

Darren Criss: I think ideally anything that you make is so good in that particular mode of communication that you simply cannot imagine it anywhere else because the meal has been cooked so well. But I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot if somebody would like to make a five-movie franchise deal with Royalties [laughs].

I don’t think this could have existed anywhere else in any other format simply because I don’t think anybody else would have taken a chance on what we were doing. That is one of the valuable parts that I kind of glazed over about Quibi is that they’re really creator forward and really empowering a lot of the creators. It sounds like we all had a date with the Great Oz [Jeffrey Katzenberg]. I’d like to think it could exist in other places because I’d like to think our idea is malleable enough to fit in other places, but it comes down to the belief system and the support from someone in Jeffrey Katzenberg’s shoes.

DEADLINE: Have you had any feedback in terms of whether people watched in one go or in short bursts?

Veena Sud: It’s been anecdotal and it’s been both. Some waited for the whole thing to drop so they could watch it all in one go, because that’s the muscle that we’re used to as Americans now, with all the streaming devices. The most fascinating feedback were people who watched it day by day and feeling their growing anxiety and their growing desperation for the next hit. That was fascinating because while I was cutting and shooting simultaneously, you could feel that growing kind of addictive nature of something that’s less than ten minutes long and that does have cliffhangers built into it. It’s pretty fascinating to see how the need for the next, and the next, and then next grows over time.

Cody Heller: I binged The Stranger and I think if I had to wait each day I’d probably would have had many panic attacks every day. It would have been such a different experience, and now I am curious and kind of wish that I had experienced it that way because that’s so fascinating.

Can I just circle back to one thing that we were talking about before… Nicole, you made a really smart interesting point about the phone and it being this personal thing. For me I was one of the early ones to shoot and I didn’t know at the time that it was only for your phone. I thought that you were going to be able to also watch it on your TV, so I wasn’t really aware of that and then when I found out later during post-production I was kind of bummed since I thought that especially for comedy and especially during corona, like people love to laugh together. I was happy when they decided to add the possibility to your TV feature because I love nothing more than going to the theater and laughing with people. You can’t do that during Corona but at least you can be with family members or whoever we’re quarantined with and watch something together.

Also, I just want to say one other thing, Nicole Richie, you seriously, like could be in a Christopher Guest movie.

DEADLINE: Quibi’s rights position is that you can retain the IP and after two years repackage these shows into long form versions if you want to. How important was that for you and have you thought about that since you made these shows?

Nick Santora: I’m in the process of dealing with that right now. We have a potential buyer very interested in doing Most Dangerous Game as a feature film, and it was a big selling point to me because I just intuitively thought I could take those ten-minute segments and work with the composer to smooth out some of the musical cues, get the establishing shots that we would need to act as bridges and in just a matter of weeks with some minimal effort, turn it into a nice hour and fifty-minute movie that would play really well. There’s a fair amount of interest and I think we’re going to be successful in selling it. It was a selling point to me because you know, you want as many people to see your work as possible, and I think it’s great that Quibi gives you the opportunity to just turn it into another platform and see if it can be successful there. I’m interested to see how it plays out.

Darren Criss: I think for everybody it’s sort of a no-brainer deal. If anything, it’s sort of a brilliant way to incentivize the creator to deliver the best shit humanly possible because it’s a money back guarantee. Having this deal, I kept asking what’s the catch here, like this simply cannot be the case. I was so grateful frankly for the set up that was given behind our deal that, aside from just personally wanting to make something great, I was incentivized to make this really as kickass as humanly possible for the hand the fed me.

Veena Sud: What I found so fascinating about the idea of retaining the rights to what I create, even in its modified form, is this discussion has not been around since the 70s and United Artists. It’s the radical idea that we, as creators, get to own the thing that we create, which is revolutionary and beautiful. Katzenberg introducing it into the ecosystem of our industry is something that needs to be talked about and will be resisted being talked about certainly, but let’s talk about it. Let’s use this wonderful incentive that he provided us as artists to come and play in a sandbox that hasn’t been tested as a way for we, as artists, to start talking about that we should own the rights to what we create.

Darren Criss: One of the things that Jeffrey said on the first rollout of introducing Quibi, like maybe two years ago, was saying up top that this is the single handedly most disruptive time in the entertainment industry’s history, and so structures like Veena’s talking about are being kind of thrown out the window and everyone’s kind going, wait a second, things don’t need to be like this.

I mean, right now people are considering this with the very nature of how Coronavirus is making cooperate structures reconsider their rent on buildings. We are reconsidering a lot of old things that we say, ‘Wait a second, this was maybe not the best thing’. I think we all know what I’m talking about on a much more social scale. There are a lot of things that are happening where, I think the renegades again are stepping forward and saying ‘This is fucked, why don’t we think of a different way that can empower us in a way that can really service the things we’re making in a more fruitful way.

The very question of you asking ‘Was it a good thing that you get your thing back in two years?’, that’s crazy that that gets to be a causal question. It’s an amazing thing and of all the things I think are really great about Quibi I would hope that it starts this conversation and this precedent for fueling creative in this way, and not just for the selfish sort of economic notions that I get out of it, but empowering creators can only be a good thing. I’m very careful with that because I don’t want to sound like a maniacal egotist, but there’s so many things that really incentivize positive things about content when it’s done in this structure.

Cody Heller: I mean I just can’t wait to own it again so that I can sell it to Disney+ [laughs].

—

DEADLINE: Darren, you were making Royalties at the same time as Hollywood. Would you want to do more Royalties?

Darren Criss: Yeah [but] hopefully I don’t have to do them all at the same time. I certainly echo what Cody was saying and I feel like anybody in a creative position is definitely hypercognitive of following those same principals. Having an opportunity to look at systems in different ways, in a way that can benefit so many people, is an exciting thing. It’s not, ‘Oh crap, how am I going to pull this off?. It’s like, okay, cool, let’s get all the people involved that we can to make this something really special and more beneficial for everybody involved. I mean look, we’re a whacky, zany comedy about writers that write goofy songs. That is sort of an ever-green game. There is a big pile of funny little puppies in the pen that I really want to give a home. That if there is a second season it’s giving them a place to go because we had to earn those ideas.

The hardest thing about a first season is establishing an audience’s trust, knowing your way around your actors and how the things going to look. It’s not until the second go that you kind of get to roll up your sleeves and go, alright, so here’s what we can really do, now I know what I’m working with. I really look forward in getting to do anything in a second season simply because now I’ve watched other people’s shows, I’ve seen how my show functions on this thing, I’ve seen how people react to my character’s and my jokes, and the songs, I now want to see if I can make those things that I threw out the first go, but hey, that is not up to me, that’s up to Katzenberg.

#darren criss #deadline hollywood #nicole richie #cody heller #veena sud #nick santora #royalties #royalties press #deadline roundtable #press #july 2020

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fane-oh1 · 4 years ago

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Hello! I’m Brittany. I love a good sci-fi setting, and I’ve been enjoying my Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough (albeit very slowly because I get distracted by everything). I’m a full time student right now, so I’m probably going to be slower than I’d like to be on replies, but I’ll do my absolute best!

Anyway! This here is my child, Fane. He’s a piece of shit. And I have a love-hate relationship with him. If you want to plot with this idiot, either dm me on Discord or hit me up on Tumblr!

…// (Seoirse O’Fannaín the Seventh, Male) has entered Night City. He is 28 years old and looks a lot like Sebastian Stan. You can usually find him working as a Solo somewhere in the (Northside Industrial District). Some would describe him as (Loyal and Creative) as well as (Clueless and an Extreme-Altruist).His aesthetic is often described as (Crisp and professional, dutiful sentinel, and deadly when provoked) and he’s known as Fane. \…

TW: Death of Parents (accident), Military Service

BASICS//

Full Name: Seoirse Rían O'Fannaín the Seventh Preferred Name: Fane O'Fannaín Age: 28 Birthday: September 1, 2049 Sexual Orientation: Panromantic demisexual Relationship Status: Single Occupation: Former Militech Special Operations, Solo Nationality: American [first generation Irish-American]

CYBERWARE//

Cyberlimb Left Arm [Illegal Militech Prototype]

Gorilla Arm (Cyberlimb Function)

Rocket-Launcher Arm (Cyberlimb Function)

Mantis Blades (Cyberlimb Function and Human Arm)

Smart Link (Cyberlimb Function)

Militech Berserk Mk. 5

Kiroshi Optics Mk. 3*

Bioplastic Blood Vessels*

Cataresist

Detoxifier

Kerenzikov

Subdermal Armour*

Synaptic Signal Optimiser*

Lynx Paws*

Fortified Ankles

Limbic System Enhancement

Visual Cortex Support

Bionic Joints

Bionic Lungs

Dense Marrow

Microrotors

Titanium Bones

BACKGROUND//

Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York Hometown: Brooklyn, New York Current Residence: Night City, California Health Issues: Hypermetabolism, Missing Left Arm Traumas: Losing his parents at eighteen, Losing his arm in service to Militech

PHYSICAL//

Face Claim: Sebastian Stan Eye Colour: Blue Hair Colour: Dark Brown Height: 6'0" Weight: 172 lbs [192 lbs. including Cyberlimb] Tattoos, Birthmarks, Scars, etc.: Scarring all down his left side from the synthetic musculature he needs to stay upright under the weight of his Cyberlimb.

RELATIVES//

Father’s Full Name: Seoirse Conor O'Fannaín the Sixth Father’s Status: Deceased Father’s Cause of Death: Automobile accident Mother’s Full Name: Darina Nollaig O'Fannaín Mother’s Status: Deceased Mother's Cause of Death: Automobile accident Siblings: Eibhlín Sibéal O’Fannaίn [Alive], Sutton Bonavitz [Found Family, Alive]

RELATIONSHIPS//

Ex-Significant Other(s): None of Note Current Significant Other: N/A

MISC//

Hobbies and Talents: Fane is a musician, through and through. He loves writing music, he loves playing music, and he loves listening to music. Fane can play nearly any instrument, and any instrument he doesn't know, give him twenty minutes, and he'll be proficient with it. He has a particular affinity for the piano and the guitar though. Fane is also a talented vocalist (Voice Claim: William Beckett).

Fane is a former special operations sniper. He’s a near-perfect shot, and even more so with his enhancements. He’s quiet on his feet and tactical when the situation calls for it.

TRIVIA//

Fane speaks English and Gaelic fluently

He keeps a collection of notebooks and various sticky notes to keep things that he thinks he ought to remember safe.

Fane absolutely loves food in any form. He's not terribly picky and eats just about everything.

Despite loving food, Fane cannot cook. He's an absolute disaster in the kitchen and should not be trusted alone in one.

Fane’s Cyberlimb causes him daily pain, but the fact that it’s an illegal prototype makes it hard to have it looked at.

More facts to come as I think of them!

BIO//

TW: Death of Parents, Military Service, Non-Graphic Dismemberment

Born to Irish immigrants in Brooklyn, New York, Fane thought he’d always live in New York City. He didn’t care that it was an old city, with new technology being built on old structures. He loved it. Brooklyn was, and always has been , his favourite place in the world. He grew up as the diligent older brother to a sister that was eight years younger than he was, and he had dreams of becoming a school teacher.

But when he was eighteen, the worst possible thing happened. His parents were killed in an automobile accident, hit and run. They never found the person or persons responsible. At that time, Fane was enlisted in the Militech army, looking to save some money before going away to college, so his sister was taken to a cousin that lived in Night City until Fane ended his tour and could meet them there to live.

That was not meant to be, unfortunately. For, Fane was injured whilst serving, had his left arm almost completely severed. He expected the army to fix his arm, maybe install some cybernetics to make it go, but he did not expect them to completely remove his arm and replace it with an experimental prototype. The prototype is heavy, and in order to support the weight, his entire left side has been rebuilt out of cyberware plating and metal.

But Militech didn’t stop there. They had the perfect subject to turn a human into a living weapon, so they did. Nearly every organic part of Fane’s body was replaced without his consent. Only a few pieces of his cyberware were things he chose*. Now, his body houses an unsafe amount of cyberware, and he’s often in danger of succumbing to cyberpsychosis.

After becoming Militech’s experiment, however, Fane used their new upgrades to run away. He deserted the army and ran straight for Night City and disappeared beneath the crowds. He tries to keep a lower profile, keeping to himself when the situation calls for it. He earns a living a solo, choosing to act as a bodyguard somewhat off books. If the price is right and he’s desperate enough, he may take other jobs. But he would rather use his illegal cyberware to protect people instead of hurt them.

*See above List, they are starred

Wanted Connections//

Possible Relationship (Fane can be difficult to ship with. He's 100% demisexual, and his panromantic side does tend towards males or male-presenting individuals but not exclusively)

Friendships (Fane loves making friends, he's just, not the greatest at keeping them sometimes)

Enemies (While Fane himself is not prone to making enemies, he is a former Militech soldier, which can be a sticking point for some people)

Got other ideas? Let me know! I'm open to a lot of things!

#cyber.intro #Fane's Intro #If you wanna plot hmu

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theliterateape · 4 years ago

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Hell in a Handbasket

By David Himmel

SHE TAKES ONE LAST LONG DRAG FROM HER CIGARETTE. She pushes the smoke past her gleaming teeth and full lips and crushes the thing beneath her boot. Her black coffee has finally cooled to a barely drinkable temperature. She takes a sip as she enters the radio station. Another fucking morning show. This one in San Francisco. It’s still dark out and, between the cigarette and the coffee and all of the whiskey she drank last night, she has the worst morning breath in recorded human history.

She didn’t have time to brush her teeth. She overslept and was rushed out of her hotel room by Gavin the tour manager. The clothes she had worn at last night’s show were strewn across the floor. Gavin threw the jeans and Superman t-shirt at her as she struggled to get her naked body out of bed. She didn’t have to fuss with makeup or her hair; she looks the same at five in the morning in the grips of a hangover as she does at eleven at night when she’s in the grips of stage lights and adoring fans.

Way back before she was famous and had dreams of being interviewed by radio deejays, it didn’t matter what you looked like as much. The listeners couldn’t see you and the deejays looked just barely put together themselves. But today, everything is visual, and if this show is anything like all of the others, they’ll be recording the interview for the radio station’s YouTube page. She hates the beautification and objectification of women in the entertainment industry. However, she sees nothing wrong with not wanting to look like hammered rat shit, which is exactly how she feels. This morning, as she has been most mornings this past year, she’s self-aware enough to be thankful for her easy-to-manage looks.

Gavin makes the introductions in the studio. She smiles her big, brilliant smile—the one that makes men and women fall in love with her—and begins to charm the three morning show hosts.

“Good morning. I’m really happy to be here,” she says into the microphone. Her mouth is dry and it tastes like a circus floor. She reaches for the bottle of water one of the hosts handed her when she walked in. She thinks she should have had a piece of gum instead of that cigarette.

“You’re wearing a Superman t-shirt,” the fatter of the hosts says. “Are you a fan of the comics?”

“This isn’t a Superman t-shirt,” she says. “It’s a Supergirl t-shirt.”

“Hear, hear, sister!” says the woman host.

“And yes, I’m a fan of the comics.”

“For those of you just tuning in, we’ve got Jane Hadley in the studio with us this morning,” the thin host says in a well-rehearsed broadcaster’s voice. “If you’re not familiar with Jane Hadley then you’ve likely been in a coma trapped in a mine shaft for the past year. Her debut album, Hell in a Handbasket, is this year’s runaway hit and iTunes’ most downloaded album ever. Right now, Jane Hadley is a bigger deal than Taylor, Adele and Beyoncé.”

“Combined,” Fat Host says.

“And she’s performing a sold-out show at Decker Hall tonight,” Thin Host continues.

“But don’t worry,” Lady Host says, “if you didn’t get tickets for the show, we’ll be giving a pair away a little later on this morning. And I think—Jane, correct me if I’m wrong—that these tickets also include a backstage meet and greet.”

“They do,” Jane says. “I’ve even got my Selfie-Stick for photos.”

“Did you bring that Selfie-Stick with you this morning?” Fat Host asks. “I’d love to get a photo with you. You have to be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen this early in the morning.”

Jane smiles and laughs a hearty laugh that not even the most high-tech lie detector test could determine its authenticity one way or the other. “I didn’t bring it but I’m sure we’ll find a way to take a photo without it.”

“And you’re going to play a few songs for us this morning, too, right?” Lady Host asks.

“I brought my guitar and will even take requests.”

The three hosts celebrate over this surprise. Thin Host says, “You hear that, K–POP listeners? The beautiful and talented, Goddess of Rock Jane Hadley will be taking your requests for a live, in-studio acoustic session! Don’t go anywhere. You’re listening to the Manic Morning Show on 97.1, K–POP.”

Thin Hosts glances at Fat Host who taps a series of buttons on the control board and clicks a wireless mouse linked to the monitors. A station bump plays followed by a commercial break beginning with an ad for a local diamond dealer. The hosts take their headphones off.

“Do people actually listen this early?” Jane asks as she also removes her headphones.

“Not anymore,” Thin Host says.

“We’ll replay everything with you in the eight o’clock hour,” Lady Host says.

This is not how Jane saw her life. For one thing, she never thought she’d be a smoker. But divorce can promote bad habits as diversions from the heartache. And for another thing, she never thought she’d be divorced at thirty-seven years old, though she was only thirty-five when it all happened, which only makes it worse. She is too young to be divorced and too old to only now find herself at rockstar status. Unfortunately, without the divorce, the fame and fortune—and morning radio show interviews—would have continued to elude her.

Before she was Jane Hadley, the rock ’n’ roll singer/songwriter—the Goddess of Rock, bigger than Taylor, Adele, and Beyoncé combined, she was Jane Hadley, the folk ’n’ roll singer/songwriter who never sold more than a thousand albums and a few hundred t-shirts. Before she had a #1 album flying off the shelves and being downloaded to the Cloud by millions, and an entire merchandising department, she was just a girl who played in a few bands: the Stargazers, Rosie’s Dream Catcher, Jane and the Jaded Cowboys.

None of these were good band names and she knew it. But she liked the music they made. Sweet, folky, only as loud as the all-acoustic gear would allow. All her bands looked the same. Jane played rhythm guitar and sang lead. The lead guitar, keyboard, upright bass and percussion were played by men. This wasn’t intentional, it’s just how things played out. They sounded similar, too, although each incarnation sounded more practiced than the last, a byproduct of age and gig experience.

The Stargazers was her high school band. It lasted long enough to play mostly Simon & Garfunkel covers at a few garage shows and the school’s Battle of the Bands. She formed Rosie’s Dream Catcher in college with her then boyfriend, keyboardist Matt. They recorded one CD of ten original songs. They sold all one hundred copies for two bucks a piece by the time the band, and Jane and Matt, split three years later.

She wonders why they are waxing intellectual about Kurt Cobain and the meaning of “Smells Like Teen Spirit?” She just wants to plug tonight’s show, play a few songs, maybe answer a call and give vague, recycled answers about what inspired her to write the album. Instead, she’s bemoaning about the trappings of fame and denying any intention of making an album that will last the test of time. How Gen X of her. How Fiona Apple of her. How awful of her.

Jane always figured that if success in the music business was ever going to come to her it would have been with Jane and the Jaded Cowboys. It took her a little while to become comfortable with her name being segregated from the band name. She didn’t want to be a Diana Ross or Gloria Estefan but Adam, the guitarist, thought they should capitalize on the gender difference and put their radiant leader out front while her boys backed her up. Adam was a marketing major in college and while he was a gifted guitarist, his real talent was in hype.

Jane and the Jaded Cowboys were prolific. Their songwriting was a science. Jane would come to practice with lyrics ripped from her many tattered Moleskin journals and a tune she thought worked with the words. From there, all five would flesh the thing out until they had a nice little folky pop song. They were a good team and their musical tastes and abilities complemented each other well.

With the freedom provided by quarter-life adulthood, they toured a lot in the sixteen years they were together. They earned fans but none who would bleed for them, really. They played the festivals and a few of the storied concert halls spread throughout the country. They headlined some shows and shared the bill with acts that would go on to the kind of fame and success that Jane and the Jaded Cowboys were chasing but never caught up to.

Because being in the band didn’t pay a livable wage, everyone had real jobs. Jane tended bar at Queen Lizzie, a hipster hotspot in Chicago where the drinks are overpriced and the customers happily overpay. She hated the place and the customers but the money was too good to walk away from. She was able to afford the necessities: instruments, rent, food, clothes, tour van, gas money for the tour van and Moleskin journals. She even managed to save a fair amount and really hack away at her student loans. Not that her degree in art history was worth more than the paper the degree was printed on.

The songs she wrote reflected her life. They featured themes of loneliness, desire, road trips and regret. The songs weren’t bad. But they weren’t great either. Their most popular song among their few loyal fans is called “Photographic Art History.” It’s about wasting time and energy. One critic, writing for an online publication about the lineup of a summer festival in Chicago, described Jane and the Jaded Cowboys as, “a band that makes perfect background music for the perfect lazy day of napping.” On the band’s Facebook page, Adam spun the opinion by posting the review and writing, “IndieRock.com says ‘Jane and the Jaded Cowboys makes perfect music for the perfect day!’”

Jane hated the hype. But it was the best her band ever got.

And speaking of hype…

“Rolling Stone called you the voice of women of this generation,” Thin Host says. They are back from commercial break. “That seems like it could come with a lot of responsibility. Do you feel responsible to speak for your generation?”

Since Hell in a Handbasket dropped, many critics had echoed Rolling Stone’s claim. Jane used to see herself as a Joni Mitchell type, or Carole King or Carly Simon. Women from a very different generation. And one that isn’t hers. She isn’t even sure which generation the critics are talking about. At thirty-seven years old, she’s no longer part of the youth culture but she’s too young, still, and new to fame, to be a music veteran. And in the entertainment industry, the young and the old were the major markets. Everyone in the middle is white noise. Jane feels that if she’s the voice of any generation right now, it’s the White Noise Generation. But she can’t say that.

“First of all, it’s an insanely flattering thing to say about someone,” Jane answers. “But it’s also an insanely broad generalization and a little presumptuous. I didn’t make this record to be a statement about women or for all women or anything like that. And if we look at music history, we don’t ever really know how representative a musician was or wasn’t to her generation—or his—until the music has had time to mature and that generation, or whatever, has adapted from it in some way.”

“Well, take Kurt Cobain. In a way, your situation is similar to Cobain’s,” Thin Host says. “He was considered the voice of Generation X right out of the gate. And he was dead before his music and his generation really even had a chance to—what did you call it?—mature. But everyone was right. Kurt Cobain was, and still is considered to be, the voice of his generation.”

“So if you don’t already have a heroin addiction, you better get on that,” Fat Host says.

“No, then she’d just be compared to Courtney Love. And no woman wants to be compared to Courtney Love,” Lady Host says.

“Yikes. God no. That’s even worse than being compared to Yoko Ono,” Jane says.

“There are so many awful women in rock ’n’ roll,” Fat Host says.

“You named two,” Jane says. “The awful men in rock ’n’ roll still outweigh us twenty-to-one.”

“And that’s why she wears that t-shirt,” Lady Host says.

They all have a laugh as Jane glances at the clock on the studio wall. She’s booked for an hour. It’s only been eleven minutes. She wants to go back to sleep. The coffee isn’t working. She considers what it would be like if she did start using heroin. It’s cheaper than booze, cigarettes and even coffee. And on the road, it’s often easier to get.

“Okay, I understand that you’re reluctant to accept your influential role in today’s culture,” Thin Host says.

“It’s not a reluctance,” she says.

“A rejection then,” he says.

“No. I mean, they’re just songs.”

“But don’t you want your songs to mean something? Isn’t that what every artist wants?”

“Sure. In a way. This album means what it means to me. I can’t control what it means to anyone else. It’s nice that it’s been so well received. I’m touched that people are finding their own meanings in the songs.”

“So you’re saying that the song, the first single, ‘Onward,’ isn’t symbolic of the woman’s place in today’s society.”

“I think Hemingway said something about the foolishness of trying to include symbols in your work on purpose,” Jane says.

“So no.”

“‘Onward’ is a song about my ex-husband moving out of our apartment and me, a woman, having to make sense of what he, a man, had left behind. If that is perceived as anything other than that—”

“I understood it as a break-up song,” Lady Host says.

“But things can be perceived by any number of people in any number of ways. That’s the great thing about art. Let me ask you guys a question. Since you brought him up, what does ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ mean to you? What’s that song about?”

“Making trouble,” Thin Host says.

“Cheerleaders,” Fat Host says.

“Disaffected youth,” Lady Host says.

“All I ever think about when I hear that song is deodorant. That song is a deodorant jingle to me. Because when that song came out, I was eleven years old and Teen Spirit was the brand of deodorant I used.”

“Commerce,” Fat Host says. “Cobain is rolling over in his grave.”

“Nah,” Jane says. “He knew damn well what he was doing when he titled that song. He was being funny—Oh crap, can I say the ‘D’ word?”

The hosts laugh. “Yes, ‘damn’ is allowed. ‘Crap,’ is not,” Thin Host says. They laugh some more then he presses on. “Symbols or not, this album is incredible.”

“Thank you.”

“I doubt that you’d call it a concept album.”

“Not in the traditional meaning of concept album, no. I mean, it’s not The Wall. But it was conceived by specific events. There’s a theme.”

“It’s a break up album,” Lady Host says.

“It is indeed a break up album. A break up and all of the, um, crap, that comes with it.”

She knows she sounds like a pedantic blowhard. They are baiting her into it and she is too strung out on exhaustion and weak coffee to resist. She wonders why they are waxing intellectual about Kurt Cobain and the meaning of “Smells Like Teen Spirit?” She just wants to plug tonight’s show, play a few songs, maybe answer a call and give vague, recycled answers about what inspired her to write the album. Instead, she’s bemoaning about the trappings of fame and denying any intention of making an album that will last the test of time. How Gen X of her. How Fiona Apple of her. How awful of her.

But after two weeks of horrendous heartbreak, isolation, and alcoholism, Jane had come to one conclusion: right or not, fuck Keith.

She is saved from falling deeper into these asinine rock critic musings when the hosts go to break again. They’ve cued listeners to call in with questions and requests. The first three callers request “Onward,” to no one’s surprise. Jane pulls her guitar from its case and gives it a gentle tuning. She gets the familiar sinking knot in her stomach as she does.

Her departure from acoustic folk to electric rock was the best way for her to get through the pain of her divorce. It allowed her to turn the deafening sadness into rollicking anger. And every time she plays these songs with an electric guitar and her banging, thrumming, clanging tour band alongside her, she becomes more and more removed from the origin of the source material. She’s healed each night. And in quieter moments in between cities on the bus, when she finds herself descending toward that sadness and regret, she can listen to the album at top volume through her headphones and relive the anger and gravitate toward getting over the goddamn thing.

But there’s no escaping the raw bones of truth when she plays the songs acoustically on radio shows like this. She wanted to bring the band with her and at least have a bigger sound so the songs weren’t so stripped down and she didn’t feel so naked. But her management vetoed it. The fans wanted Jane Hadley naked. And that’s what they were getting. And every time she tunes the guitar to play “Onward,” she is rocketed into a wretched reverie of when she first tuned the guitar to write the song.

Keith had just closed the door of the apartment with his last box of stuff under his arm. It had been the first time they’d seen each other since he asked for a divorce two weeks before and fled to wherever he had been staying. Jane spent those two weeks crying, substituting alcohol and cigarettes for meals, sleeping on the living room floor because she couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping alone in their bed and didn’t feel that she deserved the comfort of the couch. She was emotionally destroyed and she thought it best to destroy herself physically, too.

He said some pretty nasty things when he left. There were accusations of infidelity because she played songs that weren’t about him. He blamed her for his inability to secure a steady and well-paying gig because she was not supportive enough. He called her a manipulator and a user and chastised her for having more friends than he had.

None of these accusations were true and he was clearly taking his own self-loathing out on her. How could someone’s likability make her unlikable? Keith had found a way. The two therapists they had seen every week since getting married eight months before, called it projecting. Keith denied it and Jane believed everything he said.

But after two weeks of horrendous heartbreak, isolation, and alcoholism, Jane had come to one conclusion: right or not, fuck Keith. Watching him leave with a box of his mother’s old stained Tupperware was enough to pull her off of the floor and begin writing music again. “Onward” became Jane’s life’s statement of purpose. And as the first single and the album’s first track, it became the album’s statement of purpose, too. And thus, it became a generation of women’s statement of purpose.

She didn’t even have to write the lyrics down and work them out in her notebook like usual. She just played and sang and it all came together. She scribbled it down once she was done and the song, at first, resembled every other song she had written. Soft, slow, melancholy. She didn’t want that. She wanted something different. Because the same old song hadn’t done her much good for her career or her internal struggle. She didn’t feel soft, slow or melancholy. She felt hard, fast and fucking pissed. She dusted off her electric Gibson and amp and played the song faster and louder. She felt alive again. She felt angry. She felt inspired.

She lit a cigarette and played it again. She recorded it and upon listening back, she heard a voice she didn’t recognize but loved. The chorus made her smile, even though it felt strange on her face.

You took my love And let it burn Scorched and ashen I move onward

✶

SHE MET KEITH LESTINGHOUSE AT A SHOW IN PEORIA, ILLINOIS. He was a videographer and had been hired to document the headlining band, the Dandelions, who a year later would win the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. Keith’s art direction in the documentary was lauded for its grit, the way it “captured the essence of budding rock ’n’ roll success,” according to some well-respected blogger somewhere online.

She found Keith smart and funny, and thought his patchy beard and thin, lanky body made him handsome. He seemed to genuinely like Jane’s music and her band. And he seemed to like her. By the end of their first date, they realized that they had been a match on each other’s online dating profiles.

“Why didn’t you ever send me a message?” she asked him.

“Why didn’t you ever send me one?” he replied.

He was a feminist and she liked that about him, too.

Six months in, they were engaged. Two months after that, they were married. It was a small ceremony held in her parents’ barn at their farm in Dowagiac, Michigan. She wore cowboy boots with her consignment wedding dress, he wore black Chuck Taylor sneakers with his new suit from an online custom clothier. An hour before the wedding, Jane cried all of her makeup away when Keith requested that her father not walk her down the aisle. Well, he didn’t have any family at the wedding, therefore, her father’s obvious presence was her way of rubbing it in that he was an estranged son. Jane conceded. Then Keith decided that it was okay for her dad to walk her down the aisle after all. This was the first crack in the façade of perfection Jane had placed Keith behind. Then, at the reception, Jane and the Jaded Cowboys played a song she wrote just for Keith, just for their wedding. Drunk, he mistook it for a song about some other guy and stormed off into the Dowagiac fields. Jane—the consummate professional—finished the song then ran into the fields after her husband. When she found him, he continued accusing her of infidelity until she managed to convince him otherwise and they screwed right there in rows of soybeans.

He moved into her place. His video equipment crowded and nearly ousted her music equipment. Space in the small Chicago apartment was the crux of their Cold War—Keith acting like Reagan with his finger constantly on he Button and Jane acting as Gorbachev, desperate for some kind of peaceful and reasonable resolution.

Two weeks later, they were in therapy. The only discussion they could have without Keith’s demanding a therapist’s intervention was about what they’d have for dinner. It helped that Keith’s veganism limited their dining options. Keith was a volunteer for Greenpeace and convinced Jane to sell her 1967 Pontiac GTO. It was left to her in her grandfather’s will. It was her grandfather who taught her to play guitar and encouraged her to pursue a career in music. He was a sound tech for bands like the Byrds, Leslie Gore, the Lovin’ Spoonful and even the Beatles once. Anywhere she had to be, Keith told her, she could ride a bike, walk, run or use public transportation, if she must. And that inspired the second song on the album, “Red Meat Wishes and Gasoline Car Dreams.”

You’re sidewalk stalking Good people on God’s green earth I honk and rev my motor And slide back a Quarter Pounder

Still, Jane loved him. But what Jane loved more than Keith was love itself. Though she was never far from her friends or family and had an incredible bond and unwavering trust with her bandmates, Jane feared being alone. Alone in that romantic sense. It was that fear that empowered her to stay with Keith, which left her otherwise powerless. And that’s where “Distracted by Loneliness,” the album’s third song, came from.

Covered in hearts Well wishes from friends and family Their undying love can’t compare to the misery you give to me I’d rather be lonely with you than never alone again

✶

WHEN THEY RETURN FROM THE BREAK, JANE PLAYS “ONWARD.” Fat Host cues up another recorded caller and the conversation they had with her during the break.

“Hi, Jane. I’m Claire. I think you are so talented.”

“Hi, Claire. Thank you.”

“I just broke up with my boyfriend of three years.”

“This ought to be good,” Fat Host says.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Claire,” Jane says.

“No, please, it’s for the best. I was miserable. We both were. Your album inspired me to leave him. Funny thing was, it was his record. He bought the album.”

“Men love her, too,” Thin Host says. “Is there a song you’d like Jane Hadley to play?”

“I’d love to hear ‘Two Week’s Notice,’” says Claire. “I quit my job last week, too. This song inspired me to do that.”

“This song isn’t about quitting a job,” Jane says. “It’s about the abortion I had.” The studio goes quiet—never a good thing in radio. Jane recognizes the silence and quickly readjusts her response. “But, uh, sure thing, Claire. Let me know if you need a reference or anything.”

The recording ends and Lady Host throws her finger at Jane like a stage manager would on the set of a live news show. Jane plays the first chord and sings “Two Week’s Notice.”

It’s not something I am ready for I’m sure neither are you I’ve already got a child I can’t raise two It makes no sense to drag this out It’s the right thing to do I’ve already got a child That child is you

“I’m not really sure how that song would inspire someone to quit their job,” Thin Host says when Jane is done playing. “I bet you get a lot of that. You know, people mistaking the intentions of your songs for something else.”

“Like we were saying earlier, that’s what happens with music and art,” Jane says. “People listen to music in different ways. Claire, I guess, doesn’t listen to the lyrics all that closely. And that’s fine. I just hope she find a new job soon and lands on her feet.”

“Guess you can’t judge a song by its title,” Fat Host says.

“We’re going to take another quick break and we’ll be right back with more music by request from our in-studio guest Jane Hadley, who is performing at Decker Hall tonight and we’ll be giving away that pair of tickets to see her. You’re listening to the Manic Morning Show on 97.1 K–WOW.”

There it is, the missing piece to Jane and Keith’s old fight, his calm condescension. Finding herself in familiar territory, she habitually lights a cigarette in her mouth.

They never take calls live on-air. It’s a recipe for disaster. You could get a Baba Booey or a suicide or someone who just wants to yell “Fuck” on the radio. Answering calls off-air lets the hosts screen and edit the calls for the best possible radio. Fat Host takes the next caller.

“Hi, Jane. Since you’re single, maybe we can hook up after your show tonight. I’m hung.”

Fat Host immediately hangs up on the caller.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Jane says. “Maybe he was cute.”

She’s joking but only a little bit. Among the whiskey and cigarettes, her after-show parties have been filled with men. Lots of men. At least one every night. The show in L.A. had two, the one in Salt Lake had three.

Two more calls, both women, both requesting “Onward.” The third call is a man.

“97.1, Manic Morning Show,” Lady Host says.

“Jane?” the caller asks like he was calling Jane directly and not a San Francisco morning radio show.

“Hi, do you have a request for Jane Hadley?” Lady Host tries again.

“Jane. Are you there?”

“Okay, weirdo, goodbye,” Lady Host says as she signals Fat Host to drop the call.

“Wait,” Jane says. Lady Host looks at Thin Host who nods as a sign to let Jane play this one out. “Keith?”

The three hosts look at each other with confusion before Thin Host chimes in, “Jane, you’ve got a friend here in San Francisco. And a K-WOW listener to boot!”

“Keith is my ex-husband.” The three hosts drop their jaws and sit back in their chairs like they’re ready to watch the unbelievable, certain shit show commence. “Keith, what are you doing?”

“I was listening to the radio and heard you.”

“What are you doing in San Francisco?”

“I’m living with my brother.”

“You have a brother?”

“I have three brothers.”

“Three!? Why didn’t you ever say anything? Why weren’t they at the wedding?”

“My family is complicated.”

Jane is stunned. She, too, is now sitting with her mouth agape in disbelief. “So you’re living here now?”

“For the moment. There was a job, so…”

“What’s the job?”

“It’s a documentary about San Francisco suicides that don’t take place on the Golden Gate. There’s a large population of suicidals that is overlooked because of the attention that the Bridge gets. It’s tragic. And these people aren’t even polluting the bay when they kill themselves. It’s an important topic.”

Thin Host jumps in again. “So, Keith—Keith, right?—would you like to hear a song by Jane Hadley?” Jane shoots Thin Host a look that says, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Let’s hear that one about abortion again.”

Jane cringes. She is no longer stunned, now she’s pissed. Of course she never told him about the pregnancy. By their third date, it was clear that he had baby fever. Because Keith had such a foul and complicated relationship with his own family, he was desperate to build a new one. And though Jane wasn’t opposed to being a parent someday, she was in no immediate rush, but also knew, deep in her gut, that Keith would make a terrible father. That having a child would provide him with another person to manipulate and break down until nothing was left but a desiccated husk of a human. He would do to his child what his parents did to him and what he had nearly done to Jane.

Jane and the hosts are frozen but the digital phone recorder rolls along.

“Can I hear it? Can I hear the song about you killing my child?”

“Whoa!” Thin Host says as Fat Host laughs in shock.

“She didn’t kill your child,” Lady Host says. “She’s the mother and she has the right to make any decision she wants related to her body.”

“I agree,” Keith says. “But in the interest of true sexual and gender fairness and whatever, doesn’t the father have a right to know and at least be part of the discussion? When were you pregnant, Jane? Were we married? Because if so, then you absolutely owed me that.”

Lady Host defends her. “She doesn’t owe you anything.”

“No, he’s right,” Jane says. “I probably should have said something. I agonized over telling you about it for two weeks before.”

“Oh, you agonized, did you? That was my child.”

She can hear his special brand of angry panic in his voice. She knows she should have the deejays hang up. But that anger and panic of his was always delicious bait to her. She can’t help herself from engaging. “It wasn’t a child, Keith. And if it had been, it would have been ours. And that, that right there is why I didn’t tell you. I mean, I knew I couldn’t keep it because of your selfishness and controlling impulses. I would have had the abortion twenty minutes after I peed on the stick but I held off, debating if you should be there with me. But I knew that you’d never agree to it and that the idea of it would only lead to this.”

“And what’s this?”

“You accusing me of killing your child.”

Thin Host speaks up. “So Keith, what do you think about the rest of the album?”

“I didn’t know she could play electric guitar.”

There it is, the missing piece to Jane and Keith’s old fight, his calm condescension. Finding herself in familiar territory, she habitually lights a cigarette in her mouth.

“Uh, Jane, you can’t smoke that in here,” Fat Host says.

She exhales a large cloud of smoke emphasizing it with two small rings at the end. “I’ll make you a deal,” she says, “you promise not to air this and I’ll put it out.”

“It’s just that, well, it’s a federal regulation that you can’t smoke inside of buildings. It’s nothing personal. Hell, we all smoke,” Fat Host says.

“Promise me.”

Fat Host looks at Lady Host and Thin Host. Thin Host nods and fat Host says, “Promise.” Jane snuffs the cigarette out on the bottom of her boot. She walks to the small trashcan across the studio, drops the cigarette in and pours a few ounces of coffee on it for safety. She returns back to her microphone and puts her headphones back on.

“What do you want, Keith?” she asks.

Silence.

“Keith? Are you still with us, Keith?” Thin Host asks.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“What is it you want, Keith?” Thin Host asks again as if Jane’s voice was the problem the first time.

“I want you back,” Keith says.

Jane bursts out in laughter. “Are you fucking kidding me!?” The hosts are shocked. “Sorry,” she says to them.

“It’s okay, we’re not live,” Lady Host says. She leans over to Fat Host and whispers, “Bleep it out.”

“Duh,” Fat Host whispers back.

“I’ve missed you and I have a new therapist out here who says that I’m ready to be in a relationship with you again.”

“Then sue your therapist for malpractice,” Jane says, “because he’s a fucking quack.”

Fat Host holds up his arm to grab attention and says, “We are coming out of break.” He turns on his microphone, does a quick station I.D. and lets the audience know that Jane Hadley is in the studio and that they’ll be back with more from her, then plays music. As he finishes and the red ON-AIR light outside of the studio door turns off, Gavin, Jane’s tour manager storms in.

“I think we’re done here,” he says. Everyone ignores him. This is something he’s used to so he shrinks back out of the studio.

“Jane, I—”

“Shut up, Keith. It’s not happening. But I’ll put your name on the will call list at the door tonight if you want to come see the show.” She looks at Fat Host. “Hang up on him.”

Fat Host again looks around at his co-hosts for a confirmation. They both deny her request. Jane sees this and as Keith begins pleading to her in a breathy panic, she stands up, throws her headphones on the console, walks around to the control board where Fat Host is sitting and rummages around with her eyes for the phone. “Hang up. Where is it? Hang up on him. There’s nothing more to say.” Fat Host uses his bulk to keep her away. “Okay then, I guess you don’t want those backstage tickets to my sold out show tonight for your listeners. I guess you’d rather fuck with me than keep a promise to your listeners. Fine then.”

She walks back around to her guitar and coffee, puts the guitar in its case, throws the nearly empty coffee cup into the trashcan. She lights another cigarette before storming out of the studio, the station, and into the parking lot where Gavin is waiting.

“I need a drink,” she says.

It’s barely past six-thirty in the morning so Gavin suggests hotel room service. Jane agrees. She admits that after a few mini bottles of Dewar’s and Tanqueray she’ll be ready for a nap.

✶

IN THE HOTEL ROOM, GAVIN SLEEPS IN THE DESK CHAIR WITH HIS FEET PROPPED UP ON THE DESK, a small bottle of gin delicately rests in his curved fingers of his dangling arm. It’s eight-thirty and Jane lays drunk in bed. She’s tuned the nightstand clock radio to 97.1 FM, K–WOW. The idiots are playing the phone call with Keith. They’ve bleeped out her cursing. They’ve edited it to make her seem more erratic than she thought she had been. She’s pissed about it but she knows that this is only going to help her reputation and lead to more album and concert ticket sales.

She fumbles for her phone and calls Keith. After recording Hell in a Handbasket, Jane set out to remove any traces of him from her life. She built a fire in the alley behind her apartment next to the dumpster burning anything associated with their time together. Photos, a pair of his socks she loved to sleep in, the Dandelions t-shirt she bought at the show the night they met, that stupid crystal duck he gave to her on their first Christmas together. She never understood the significance of it. He was so excited to give it to her, so proud of himself that she never bothered to ask him why he thought she might like it. Of course, the crystal duck didn’t burn, so Jane smashed it to pieces with a hammer. The one thing she didn’t do during her Keith purge was delete his contact information from her phone. He answered her call before the first ring finished.

“Come to the show tonight,” she says to him.

“Do you want to get back together?”

“No. But I want to see you. Actually, if you can, come to my hotel right now. I’ll text you the address.”

She hangs up before he can respond and sends the text. She knows she has made a destructive decision and that there is no way any of this will end well. But that’s not what Jane wants. Keith has reopened her wounds as easily as if they’d never healed at all. Jane wants to bask in the familiarity of the disrespect and jealousy and anger that defined their relationship. One more chug of the poison, she tells herself, then she’ll be done. She’ll even delete him from her phone.

Keith texts back that he’s on his way. Jane wakes Gavin up and kicks him out of her room.

“You called Keith, didn’t you?” Gavin asks.

“I’ll see you later,” she says, closing the door in his face.

She picks up her guitar and writes a new song. It comes to her as easily as “Onward” did. Maybe even easier. She realizes that Keith is her muse. The thought of that is a good reason to open another mini bottle of whiskey. Maybe she won’t delete him from her phone. Just in case her creativity ever runs dry.

This is not the type of musician or person she thought she’d be but it’s the one the music industry needs, the one her generation needs—whatever generation that is. And certainly, it is the one she needs to be in order to remain being anything at all.

#Chicago Fiction #David Himmel Fiction #Rock Music Fiction

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jmeddows2 · 5 years ago

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You (Roger Taylor x fem!Reader)

This is my Halloqueen gift for @mezzomercury Happy belated Halloween! I’m so sorry I couldn’t make it on time,but here it is. I’m really nervous about it ARGHH @dtfrogertaylor Summary: Reader is an opera singer, with a chaotic manager with just the right contacts in the industry Warnings: only a bit of swearing, else we have Fred and Reader become best friends, fluff Word count: 2k+ Notes: sorry for mistakes, english is not my first language Roger is single and childless in this story! The Duck House really exists and Queen used to stay there quite frequently when recording in Montreux :)

You were supposed to get a real job with a purpose, regarding the field you were actually educated in, but Steve, your manager had quite the reputation. Especially in terms of missing dates and mixing things up, making him the chaotic mess of a man that he naturally was. As an opera singer, that’s just started out, you struggled with auditions. Steve’s lack of time management was rather poor, that sometimes he wouldn’t tell you about the most important auditions in time, or miss most of them, because they just weren’t on his radar. If it wasn’t for all the contacts in the industry Steve apparently had, you would have run for the hills ages ago. One day, when Steve waltzed into the office to your meeting, which of course he was again late to, he was restless, jumping from one foot to the other. "I have it. This is going to be IT for you.” He explained it as a project. To 'expand’ your horizon, to fill your CV with something, that would make your future opportunities skyrocket from 0 to 100. .....to stand in for the band Queen as a background singer (in case of use)...... living, food and drinks provided.... is what the contract read ...should not be opposed to beer and fun. Must be flexible and be available to fly out during the time period of recording from June 1981 - March 1982. Place: Montreux, Switzerland. The few black letters on white seemed to get even more ridiculous throughout the over 100 page contract. But also funny. Mainly ridiculous though. Being crammed up in a recording studio in Montreux, Switzerland as an "option of use” wasn’t exactly your idea of a job. Or at least not what you were aiming for at the moment. The numbers with a 5 digit payment that crested the contracts last page, made you rethink the whole deal though, much to Steve’s joy. So you agreed. Your first encounter with Freddie, Brian, John and Roger was weird. Well, not with Freddie, Brian and John. They were all kind and excited to get to know you better. Roger was another thing. He didn’t even look at you or recognize you when you all gathered in one of the temporary Queen offices, to go over all the details. He was too distracted reading through the schedule for the upcoming months. It felt more like he pretended to be interested in the schedule on his lap, while absentmindedly toying with the pen between his fingers. You later found out, that he was dealing with the aftermaths of a really ugly breakup. Montreux, Switzerland You arrived at Geneva airport on a cold January morning, approximately 7 months after your first encounter with the band. Your personal driver was already awaiting you with a sign that read your name in capital letters. He had a wide grin plastered on his face. The exclusivity didn‘t stop there though. The one hour ride from the airport straight to the recording studio in the black limousine felt more like 10 minutes. A bottle of champagne, a few snacks and the heated leather seats in the car that made you feel oh so comfortable, may have been the reason why time passed so quickly. The nervous feeling crept back into your mind, as soon as the driver dropped you off in front of the casino, in which the recording studio was located. The recording studio was situated in the basement. As you pushed the door open, there was only a friendly security guard in the foyer, checking your ID. "Hi love, are you lost?“ It was Roger. His hair was a bit shorter than the last time you‘d seen him. "Oh hi, no actually, I‘m supposed to be here. As a background singer“ The uncertain tone in your voice made it sound more like a question. "uhh, I received a call to come out here. We had a meeting a few months ago“ Roger looked confused, but not bothered by your presence at all. "Well, be my guest then“ he awkwardly shook your hand and gestured for you to make you feel comfortable. "Where are you from uhm?“ "Micaela. Born and raised in New York City“ “A NYC girl? pretty sure you’ve got some stories to tell” he teased. “I’m sure not nearly as many as you” You got right back at him. That was something Roger highly valued. The wit, someone who’s not afraid to speak up. He smiled to himself and soon after Fred, Brian and John entered the studio as well. They each greeted you warmly. Freddie was very excited to have you on board. When he wasn’t busy recording, as a fellow opera enthusiast, him and you always found something to talk about. Or it was rather having Freddie listen to all the stories you had in store, even if it was just a few. It almost felt like telling bed time stories to a child, seeing his dark, beautiful eyes light up, even at the slightest mention of words like ‘stage’, ‘orchestra’, ‘costumes’ or ‘opera’ in general. "I’m going to be honest with you, darling” Freddie said, as he took a seat beside you on the couch, while Roger was banging his drums frustratingly to the already finished guitar and bass backing track of ‘Las Parablas de Amor’ in the recording booth. "We don’t actually need your beautiful vocals here” Freddie patted your thigh gently. "You’re kidding, right? Why am I here then?” "I thought you may enjoy a little holiday out here. You know, there’s great spa resorts around town. And you could do some small assistant work, nothing hard or bad, I promise! No, I promise on Montserrat Caballé, so you really know I’m not joking” he swore. Well, you couldn’t say no now.

Out of nowhere there was a loud crash. You turned around to see Roger tossing his drum sticks across the room, nearly hitting John in the head. Roger continued to throw casette tapes around, that were properly lined up on the shelf nearby. “I’m done with this. It sounds like a cheap piece of crap.” he stormed out of the room. The boys only looked at each other, as if they were communicating through their minds on who’s turn it was now to go after Roger. "I’ll go” you volunteered, seeing as no one else made a move and what could you possibly have to lose? Except for a huge amount of payment. Ok, maybe it wasn’t the best idea, but the other boys looked quite relieved when you got up from your seat. You prepared for the worst, grabbing your coat from the hanger on the door on the way out. It was really cold outside. Roger wasn’t hard to find. He was just outside the building, a cigarette hanging from his lips and rubbing his hands up and down his arms. He certainly wasn’t clever enough to bring a jacket with him, after his dramatic, oscar worthy departure. "Hey” how exactly do you approach an angry person you don’t know, but find really attractive? "Did they send you out here?” a chuckled groan left his lips. “No, I came out here on my own. Want to talk about it?” you suggested. He offered you a cigarette, but you declined.

"Talk about what? about the crap we’ve been recording lately? It’s disco.” he grimaced a pained face. “It sounds like the music they play in gay clubs. I mean don’t get me wrong, I support everyone’s sexuallity, but not everyone’s taste in music! I’m just not made for Disco music. It’s a load of bollocks. God, now I’m just venting” he threw the cigarette on the ground, putting it out with his boots. "I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m actually an opera singer. Not really Rock 'N Roll, is it? Yet I’m here in a recording studio with one of the biggest rock bands.” "Ok you have a point. Why did you agree to do this anyway?” he was shivering, while lighting another cigarette. "Sometimes you make sacrifices for the sake of others, but only as long as you’re feeling comfortable in your own skin ” "God,I hate that you’re right.” he sighed, unable to hold the pout anymore, that was was replaced by a smile forming on his lips. "Now let’s better get back inside before you freeze to death” you gestured for the door. "Just a minute” he grabbed you gently by the arm. "Thank you” Roger hugged you tightly, nuzzling his face into your neck. The feeling of his cold cheeks in contact with your warm skin made you jump a bit. “ Now let’s go and make some disco music” he laughed, grabbing your hand. Expecting another fight and argument by Roger, Brian, Freddie and John were surprised to experiece as calm as he ever was. Stil, you decided to put the recording on hold for the day and locate back to the house, in which you all stayed. "Welcome to Duckingham Palace” when entering the house, you quickly noticed why Roger called it like that. There were hundreds of wooden duck statues situated all around the house. They were evrywhere, quite creepy, but as time passed, they became pretty much invisble to you. Believe it or not.

You all had gathered around the living room with a hot drink in hand, when John lit the fireplace, creating a cosy atmosphere. It felt like you’d known Freddie, Brian, John and Roger since forever, as you seemed to pretty much share the same or at least similiar interests and humor. "Ok now Micaela. Tell me. What’s your favorite Queen album?” John asked curiously while pouring a generous amount of rum into his hot chocolate. "Easy” Freddie answered for you. “Has to be A Day At The Races” you nodded in response. "See? we’re besties already, you guys better step your game up” Freddie threw his arm around your shoulders. Roger couldn’t stop giving you little looks while having a conversation with Brian, who as expected also wasn’t a fan of the new direction in music they were headed at. “ how did you tame the lion, darling?” Freddie chuckled into your ear. " you know..How did you get Roger to calm down so fast? I know how he can get when he’s in a mood” "The cold outside did the job actually” you tried to sound nonchalantly.

"Of course yeah, that’s also why he’s been eyeing you up, ever since we left the studio. Did something happen?” Freddie kept pressing, but in a playful way. "He never gives in so easily. Usually not even to pretty girls like you when he’s mad” Your only answer was a light blush of cheeks. At 2 am, John was the last one to go to sleep. Roger and you literally had to drag him up to his room. He was so plastered, that he didn’t even recognize his own song on the radio. Roger and you decided to sip on one last ‘good night drink’ to reward yourselves for all the hard work of tucking John into bed like a little baby. There was a silence upon you, but it wasn’t awkward at all, just relaxing. "Thank you again for today” Roger broke the silence. "Nothing worth thanking me for” "It is actually. Y'know I’m glad you’re here. You’re going to make this much more bearable for me" you snorted out with laughter, not realizing how serious he was about the words he said. "I’m being honest, love! I really fancy you and I want to get to know you better.” he was so close to you now, you could feel his warmth. "the seaside promenade is really beautiful, almost as beautiful as you.” Roger brought his hand to your hair, to brush a few strands behind your ear. "So, it’s a date then” you nervously drew a circles with your fingertips on the surface of the wooden kitchen counter, while looking into his ocean eyes. "Yeah it’s a date” he smiled at you. You both took your last swigs of your drinks. "Good night Roger” you hugged him tightly and gave him little peck on the cheek, before wandering off to bed, thinking of all the beautiful scenarios the following day would have to offer. Roger followed closely behind, entering his own bedroom. The feeling of your kiss on Roger’s cheek lingered with him, until he fell asleep, thinking of his newly found happiness. You.

#roger taylor #brian may #john deacon #freddie mercury #Queen #queen + Adam Lambert #roger taylor fanfic #roger taylor x reader #roger taylor fluff #happy halloqueenevent #happy halloqueen #fluff

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thesparkjournal · 4 years ago

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THE CONTRADICTIONS OF CAPITALISM AND TECHNOCRATIC UTOPIAN FUTUROLOGY

A CRITIQUE OF FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY COMMUNISM Review by Roger Perkins

[Author Aaron Bastani, formerly known as Aaron Peters, one-time contributor to the UCL Conservative Society newspaper and researcher for the Blairite thinktank Demos]

There is no single contradiction or combination of contradictions that will make capitalism miraculously dissolve away into a communist nirvana. Capitalism in severe crisis does not collapse or fade away. Capitalism always fights back, searching for out-of-the-box configurations that give it new life. Therefore, capitalism must be consciously brought down and replaced with a new consciously-built socialist society. This imperative, the most important in human history, must begin, if not yesterday, then certainly today.

Contemporary capitalism is split by serious contradictions and seismic fault cleavages under increasing stress. The basic contradiction of capitalism is the contradiction between the social character of production and the private capitalist form of appropriation. In Anti-Dühring, Engels stated:

The contradiction between socialised production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie. (Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 25, page 256)

The resulting class struggle together with numerous economic crises and cycles have proven in the short and medium term to be features of a more or less “stable” capitalism and do not by themselves threaten the immediate collapse of capitalism.

However from time to time Marxists, non-Marxists, and even a few capitalists have sought out the fatal contradiction of capitalism. For example, it was postulated that the “Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall” would cause capitalism to grind to a halt. Investment would end if profit was no longer likely. But a tendency for the rate of profit to fall is not the same as an iron-clad law mandating the rate of profit to always fall. Counter tendencies, in theory and observed in practice, can bring about a rise. This was the view of Marx. Although Marx asserted that the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall was “the most important law of modern political economy” and “the most essential one for comprehending the most complex relationships ….” (Collected Works, Volume 29, page 133; Penguin Grundrisse, page 748) he nevertheless also stated that this law “operates only as a tendency. And it is only under certain circumstances and only after long periods that its effects become strikingly pronounced”. (Capital, Volume III, Collected Works, Volume 37, page 237; Penguin translation of Capital, Volume III, page 346) Only until capitalism is finally declared dead on a world-wide basis and the inevitable socialist forensic autopsy is performed will one be able to determine the extent a “falling rate of profit” played in its demise.

A more recent attempt to single out a possible fatal contradiction of capitalism occurred in conjunction with the so-called “greening of Marxism”. James O’Connor, founding editor of the eco-socialist journal Capitalism, Socialism, Nature, put forth the view that the “contradiction between the forces and relations of production” resulting in overproduction, crises, etc. is now in the process of being overshadowed by a Great Second Contradiction of Capitalism. Expandor-die capitalism is incapable of greening itself or reversing its expansion imperative to become a stable, steady-state capitalism. The dynamic logic of capitalism forces it to foul its own nest with run-away civilization imperiling climate change, environment destroying pollution and depletion of necessary resources. In addition to O’Connor’s “forces of production and relations of production” the conditions of production have now allegedly risen to prominence and will severely, even fatally, log-jam capitalism to a halt. Capitalist think-tanks are busy in search of ways to overcome this Great Second Contradiction of Capitalism while staying within the boundaries of a still recognizable capitalism and not straying over the border into obvious socialist solutions. So far they have not been anywhere near successful.

While O’Connor’s Great Second Contradiction of Capitalism is said to be located in production (conditions of production), the contradictions engendered by ever-increasing automation are observed in the sphere of consumption. At first automation was said to create as many new jobs as it displaced. But as the twentieth century progressed it became clear that the new jobs were mostly low-paid, precarious jobs for those who were able to obtain them and long-term, debilitating unemployment for those who did not. The working class, to an even greater extent than before, no longer had the purchasing power to buy what it produced – thus an under-consumption crisis.

This can be illustrated by the famous legendary encounter between Walter Reuther, head of the United Autoworkers of America (UAW) and a Ford Motor Company executive who had invited Reuther to tour the just-opened automated Ford plant in Cleveland. Reuther was confronted with acres of automated machines and robots. The usual assembly line of workers was nowhere to be seen. Instead a few thinly-dispersed technicians stood before a panel of green and yellow flashing lights making occasional adjustments to the production process. The Ford executive, with a gloating and gleeful grin turned to Reuther and confidently declared, “These robots, of course, receive no wages, zero pensions, never go on strike and they don’t pay any union dues to you!” Reuther immediately replied: “And neither do they buy any of your cars.”

The natural tendency of capitalism to cause a crisis of overproduction with the resulting temporary layoff of workers is said to have been morphed into the permanent massive disappearance of jobs accompanied by massive underconsuption.

In addition to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the destruction of the conditions of production and everincreasing automation there are many other contradictions of capitalism. For those who want to explore further, the following books may be of use:

Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism, David Harvey, 2014

Breakdown of Capitalism: History of the Idea in Western Marxism 1883-1983, F. R. Hansen 1985, reprinted 2017

Capitalism’s Contradictions: Studies of Economic Thought Before and After Marx, Henryk Grossman, reprinted 2017

Contemporary Capitalism: New Developments and Contradictions, N. Inozemtsev, Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1974

The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Contradictions of Capitalism, N. Inozemtsev, Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1982

With the arrival of the twenty-first century, Aaron Bastani, the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto, believes a new third qualitative leap in human history is about to take place. The first qualitative leap was the invention of agriculture, which was vastly superior to hunting and gathering. The second was the Industrial Revolution, particularly the invention of the steam engine which accelerated capitalism and sped it down the tracks to eventual world dominance. And three, the epoch we are now entering, one of boundless abundance made possible by hyper-fast quantum computers exhibiting high levels of artificial intelligence (AI).

In Bastani’s mind automation itself will undergo a capitalism-ending giant qualitative leap which, while ironically solving most of the existing contradictions of capitalism, will nevertheless become the fatal contradiction of capitalism. This new artificial intelligence (AI) society will result in the vanishing of the working class because living labour power will no longer be hired. The working class has been digitized into computer zeros and ones. Variable capital has now become constant capital – or so Bastani claims.

The author states that all of our material needs will be produced very, very cheaply �� almost for free – by gigantic computer-commanded 3-D printers. Bastani operates under the slogan “Information Wants to be Free” and gives the example of music now being free (but perhaps illegal) on the internet after having been digitized. This AI/knowledge society will be incompatible with a capitalist market economy, thus negating capitalism as well. But, according to the logic of Bastani, capitalists without a market would find themselves disoriented and confused. Under the infinite weight of AI technology they would not resist their inevitable demise. Therefore there would be no need to consciously overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. Capitalism just becomes irrelevant and sublimates away like dry ice. Such a view has more in common with 1950s social democracy than Marxism – an extreme version of “peaceful transition”.

And all of this will happen, not in some indefinite distant future when lowerstage socialism has evolved into communism, but only a few short decades away from now– maybe as little as only two decades away (around the 2040s). If only these fantastic predictions of Bastani were true! Communism is only twenty years or so hence and no revolution or socialist transition period necessary!

[Bourgeois futurologist pulp dates gracelessly in capitalist society: the above book chokes up the dollar bins of the English-speaking world]

Unfortunately, the author has combined some of the worst features of early utopian socialism with the speculative endeavors of modern bourgeois futurologists. Marx was hesitant to describe the future in more than a sketchy outline and certainly not in the fleshed-out and extensive details of the utopian socialists. Bastani on the other hand has no such hesitation. Meat would be grown in vats of nutrient fluid. There would be no need to cut down the oxygen-generating Amazon rain forest to create grazing land for methane-emitting cattle which would then get slaughtered for McDonald’s burgers. Declining scarce resources on Earth? Just get them from the moon or other planets – or, better yet, lasso a mineral-rich asteroid and tow it into a near-earth orbit. The author fails to mention any breakthrough regarding nuclear fusion on Earth, but why bother, we already have the sun. The new AI society will tap this free energy. No need to burn fossil fuels and Voila!, the climate change crisis solved.

The author provides technological solutions to most of the problems facing capitalism today, including health care (genetic modification and AI designed super drugs) and growing poverty (food, clothing and shelter – almost free due to AI mass production).

But the predictions of futurologists have often proven quite wrong. For instance, sixty years ago it was believed that by the year 2000 we would all be driving flying cars. It didn’t happen. This is most fortunate because automobiles raining down from the sky after an aerial freeway pile-up would be a very dangerous hazard indeed. A new category of statistical information would be necessary – death by falling vehicle.

Bastani doesn’t seriously consider that predictions are just that – predictions. He projects observed trends into the future as certainties, even having them manifest themselves almost within the same decade – a very unlikely occurrence. Even if one trend came true as predicted, he ignores the fact that a collectivity of many and different, interacting trends complicates accurate forecasting to an extreme degree. His thinking is mechanical, linear and not dialectical. He does not comprehend that all trends are subject to various contingencies, unintended consequences and even collateral damage to other trends, thereby altering the development path projected. Nevertheless Bastani plunges into the future with a fully elaborated utopian scheme – Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC). The author utilizes cherry-picked quotes from Marx throughout his book but is, in reality, much more a utopian technocratic futurologist than a clear-headed Marxist.

Who then is Aaron Bastani?

Bastani, UK-born and with a Ph.D. in political communication from the University of London, started his political journey with a family-inherited Tory outlook. He later opted for the Green Party, read Marx, continued his journey to the left and has now parked himself in the Labour Party recently led by Jeremy Corbyn. Along the way he co-founded Novara Media – a British left-leaning alternative media platform. However, Bastani’s media appearances are not confined to Novara and other fringe outlets. He is often invited as a guest on establishment media as well – BBC, Sky News, etc., where he sometimes dons a black T-shirt emblazoned with the message: “I am a Communist”. But is Bastani , his subjective beliefs notwithstanding, really a communist? Only by expanding the meaning of the word to its outermost fuzzy boundary, can Bastani be hesitantly identified as some sort of technocratic utopian “communist”. His views are not at all compatible with those of Marx, Lenin or historical materialists of today. The author’s political journey has definitely not arrived at the place called “Marxism”.

For Marxists, class is of the essence. For Bastani, class forces play little role. It is the forces of AI technology that have taken over. The working class (a prominent feature of Marxism) seems to have “died and gone to heaven”. It has been replaced by zeroes and ones and can no longer be exploited by capital because it has been absorbed into capital itself. As for the bourgeoisie, its class power has been sucked into the black hole of ever- increasing artificial intelligence. There is, however, a technocratic, vanguard-elite stratum of the population in his vision of society, but nowhere does the author state outright that it has become a new ruling class. What we are left with is some sort of amorphous multitude where class concepts are no longer applicable.

The political expression of this multitudinous blob of humanity Bastani calls “luxury populism”. Because Bastani believes the soon-to-arrive FALC is so overwhelming and inevitable, he doesn’t envision much political self-activity from the declassed and depoliticized masses. Although the author believes “the party form … makes increasingly little sense”(p.194), he flip-flops and advocates a FALC-led electoral party not too dissimilar from the Labour Party of 2019 – one of the very few instances where he recommends any sort of political action whatsoever. This party is necessary because the not-to-be trusted masses of Luxury Populism could go astray if not guided by the wisdom of committed FALC-ites. This party of “communist” technocracy would organize perfunctory “demonstration elections” because “people do not care about politics" and “it is only around elections” that the multitude is “open to new possibilities.”(p.195).The author is oblivious to other events that cause people to “care about politics” and become “open to new possibilities” – e.g. general strikes, wars, revolutionary situations, etc.

Apparently humankind’s path from capitalism to communism doesn’t include general strikes or revolutionary situations.

As for the possibility of war – imperialist nuclear war that could kill billions and set humanity back many thousands of years – Bastani obviously sees little danger because he fails to discuss this horrible possibility. If so, he is walking towards his “inevitable” utopian future with his eyes closed.

Though ignoring the working class in general the author does issue advice to present-day trade unions. To resist austerity is okay, but traditional trade union demands against capital should be shunted aside. Instead, unions should reorient themselves and attack the necessity of work itself. They should force corporations to introduce AI as soon as possible and as deeply as possible!

There is an anti-communist white thread running throughout the book. The only type of communism Bastani approves of is the “communism” of his own concoction –FALC. The author claims FALC differs from traditional communism in that it “recognizes the centrality of human rights, most importantly the right of personal happiness”(page 193). He gives no examples whatsoever to support this slanderous assertion. In answer to this anti-communist slop, let it be stated that communists are, of course, strongly in support of personal happiness and hold that it is achieved not in individual isolation but in the practice of a collective /individual dialectic. Human rights must be viewed not in the abstract in a form devoid of class content. They must be viewed concretely and the following question asked: “human rights” for whom and for what purpose? A capitalist whose bank has been nationalized would surely claim that the human right of ownership has been violated. That capitalist would also probably claim that the right to a job, healthcare and education are not human rights. And then there is “human rights imperialism”. Let us hope that Bastani has not fallen victim to such lying hypocrisy. But his “new communism” must, by any means necessary, be strongly marked off from the “old” communism.

Although Bastani does not extensively attack Lenin and the Russian Revolution, he does make his views known. He identifies with the Mensheviks who claimed that Russia was too technologically backward to even consider setting out on the path towards socialism/communism. The fact that he often quotes Marx but not Lenin is telling in itself (Marx good; Lenin bad). He describes the Bolshevik Revolution as an “anti-liberal coup” (p. 193). He condemns Leninism by falsely claiming that it “views production, and by extension working class subjectivity, as critical while ignoring a world whose ideas and technologies are hugely changed” (p. 196). But it is Bastani himself who views technological AI production as critical while failing to grasp that workingclass subjectivity (consciousness) is indeed one of the most important necessities in the defeat of capitalism.

Bastani instinctively knows that Communists would be highly critical of his smooth and speedy road to Fully Automated Luxury Communism – therefore Marxism Leninism must be run-over and left behind as road-kill.

The Scottish poet Robert Burns famously said that the best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry. No doubt reality itself will cause Bastani’s grandiose FALC to crash to earth. Will the author then concoct another and different utopian blueprint or will he become a disillusioned and cynical Labourite and maybe concentrate more on his business ventures? Or will he continue his political hopscotch and jump to the left and finally become a clear-headed Marxist (and Leninist)? It’s unlikely, but let us hope so. Or will he instead jump to the right and follow in the footsteps of former Labour Member of Parliament Sir Oswald Mosley, who had been considered a potential Labour Prime Minister? Mosley, however, defected from the Labour Party and founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932. Mosley’s mentor, Benito Mussolini, was also once a “socialist”. This reviewer will make no speculative predictions concerning the exact arrangement of Bastani’s future political kaleidoscope. It is his present political orientation as expressed in FALC that should cause concern.

The 1989 Hollywood hit movie Field of Dreams gave us the classic dialogue quote: “If you build it they will come.” In contrast Bastani’s 2019 science- fiction Field of Dreams tells us: Don’t build it and communism will come.

By relying on the almost infinite power of a qualitatively new artificial intelligence the author ignores the revolutionary practice of oppressed classes. No need to build any foundational construction that prepares for a revolutionary situation. Technological determinism has run amok. Just let the fatal contradiction of capitalism do its thing. The author leaves us with the impression that even if all anti-capitalists, revolutionaries and militant workers were to be placed in the deep sleep of suspended animation until after 2040 they would wake-up to Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Revolutionary cadres and a revolutionary organization not needed. This book is worse than seriously flawed; it is even dangerous, because it leaves us with the impression that passivity is a viable option.

Communists are not Luddite opponents of automation and AI. Many of the predictions of FALC will eventually become true although on a varied and much-altered time scale and under very different conditions than those envisioned by the author. But, however embodied or personified AI becomes, it cannot by itself function as avatar or proxy agent for qualitative change from one socioeconomic system (capitalism) to another (socialism/ communism). That role still belongs to a new and always changing working class. For Bastani the working class is not an agent of social change – only flotsam in the AI tsunami. For revolutionaries the working class, its party and allies must be recognized as the decisive core of the coming revolutionary process. The publishing of Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism will not get him rewarded with rapture to AI heaven. Instead, without decisive working-class action he will find himself engulfed in the flames of a capitalist hell-on-earth.

In conclusion: The declassed technological delusions and utopian visions of Aaron Bastani are dangerously wrong. The publisher, Verso Books, has given us a lemon, the lemonade of which is useful only to those who undertake grand “thought experiments” or seek truth via the maze of error.

Furthermore, speculations about the fatal contradiction of capitalism must be subordinated to the organization of a consciously socialist working class whose party is ready for and knowledgeable regarding what Lenin called a “revolutionary situation”. There is no single contradiction or combination of contradictions that will make capitalism miraculously dissolve away into a communist nirvana. Capitalism in severe crisis does not collapse or fade away. Capitalism always fights back, searching for out-of-the-box configurations that give it new life. Therefore, capitalism must be consciously brought down and replaced with a new consciously-built socialist society. This imperative, the most important in human history, must begin, if not yesterday, then certainly today.

#Communist Party of Canada #Aaron Bastani #Reformism #Marxism Leninism

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leonvld · 5 years ago

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habits .

task 2.

title from day6 4am’s debut album

what: jiwon performs 4am’s new discography in front of people who aren’t 4am/staff for the first time, and it’s for his parents.

warnings: n/a.

word count: 800+

it’s a line from a song he had written on the day he had been selected for 4am’s lineup, three years ago—

love is falling asleep on the train / trusting it’ll take you home

—and this is where we find our hero, cheek pressed against the cold window and the falling of his newly-bleached hair curtaining him from the rest of the world. the dream is something he’ll forget in the muted minutes after coming to full wake, despite trying with the palms of his mind to grasp and hold it tight. he fades from one world to the next softly, the gentle encouragement of a voice and a light tap on his shoulder breaking the last illusions of sleep.

he stirs awake at the touch, and then almost falls forward into the lap of the woman sitting in front of him as the train lurches to the stop. jiwon apologizes profusely, his voice still weighted with sleep, anchored at the ankles. the stranger’s daughter snickers at him, likely laughing at the tuft of dandelion fluff still sticking up on one side of his head and the pink mark on his cheek from where it kissed the window for the past hour.

“don’t worry about it, sir,” the woman says kindly. the tired, warm look in her eyes reminds him of that of his own mother, and he has to swallow around a lump in his throat. he feels like an idiot—missing someone he knows he’ll see in the next hour. “you looked like you needed the sleep.”

the light is on in the kitchen when he enters the apartment, and he gently leans the gig bag containing his acoustic guitar against the wall as he toes off his shoes by the entryway.

his mother exits the kitchen, a cup of tea in her hands, a blue apron tied tightly around her waist. her hair's rumpled and loose around her shoulders; she looks younger than her half-century, almost girlish. she looks up at him, taking in his clothes and general state of disarray.

“ hi, eomma. ”

" this is a surprise, " she says quietly. he lets her touch his cheek and study his face, her thumb smoothing across his skin. she grazes her fingers through his hair. “ the hair — is also a surprise. ”

“ good, it was supposed to be a surprise. ” he reaches a hand out, and she takes it. “ is appa home ? ” he asks, hitching his gig bag onto one shoulder.

her thumb traces small circles across the back of his hand. " he's grading papers; you know how he gets. he probably hasn't even noticed that someone's entered the house. " she pulls her son closer, into an embrace. " i can get him, just give me a minute. "

" i can get him, " jiwon murmurs. he presses his face into his mother's shoulder, lets her arms go around him. he closes his eyes. " eomma… "

" is something wrong ? " she asks immediately. he hates how she expects the worst, but they both remember how much he cried the day he had to come home after everest’s disbandment — neither of them are under any illusion about how temperamental the music industry can be. not anymore.

" no, everything's fine. i just missed you. " he kisses her temple, then steps away. " i'm going to get appa, hold on. i want you both to be here for this. "

they’re silent as jiwon rummages through his bag, waiting patiently while he tunes the guitar and places his capo on the first fret, hands shaking. but with the first strum of the strings his eyes close, and he lets his voice fill their small living room. he goes through the tracklist. freely, out of my mind, congratulations, habits. his voice gains strength as he begins each new song, and starts to trust again that his fingers knows exactly where to go without him needing to force them.

his eyes splash open when he hears an unmistakable sound, that warm smile of his wavering when he says: “ appa, are you crying ? ”

there’s a pull to his father’s shoulders, drawing them back and his spine up — it’s growth, a flower picking itself up once more after being trampled. jiwon can see from where he’s sitting across from them how tightly his father’s squeezing his mother’s hand. his eyes trail up her arm to see his mother’s face, also wet with tears.

“ ah, please don’t cry — ” he tries to joke: this is supposed to be an upbeat song. there are synths and everything. but his throat closes up and only the first few words manage to escape into the open air. he lets go of the neck of the guitar to press his knuckles to his mouth, blinks back wetness. he's so tired of holding it back.

he takes in a slow, uneven breath.

“ jiwon-ah, come over here. ”

the tears spill over and he wipes at his face, nods, clears his throat, laughs — hapless, impossibly happy and sad all at once.

“ okay. ”

#vldtask2 #lol it's sad boy hours

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nerds4life · 6 years ago

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The Essence of Evil: Sex with Children Has Become Big Business in America

By John W. Whitehead for Global Research, April 24, 2019

“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

Children, young girls—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex in America. The average age for a young woman being sold for sex is now 13 years old.

This is America’s dirty little secret.

Sex trafficking—especially when it comes to the buying and selling of young girls—has become big business in America, the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.

As investigative journalist Amy Fine Collins notes,

“It’s become more lucrative and much safer to sell malleable teens than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed once, but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day—and a ‘righteous’ pimp confiscates 100 percent of her earnings.”

Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.

According to USA Today, adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

Who buys a child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life.

“They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.

On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period of servitude.

It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.

“Human trafficking—the commercial sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the worst crimes in the U.S.,” said prosecutor Krishna Patel.

This is an industry that revolves around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men each day for $25 apiece, while their handlers make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.

This is not a problem found only in big cities.

It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.

As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out,

“The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”

Don’t fool yourselves into believing that this is merely a concern for lower income communities or immigrants.

It’s not.

It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged child sex workers in the U.S. These girls aren’t volunteering to be sex slaves. They’re being lured—forced—trafficked into it. In most cases, they have no choice.

In order to avoid detection (in some cases aided and abetted by the police) and cater to male buyers’ demand for sex with different women, pimps and the gangs and crime syndicates they work for have turned sex trafficking into a highly mobile enterprise, with trafficked girls, boys and women constantly being moved from city to city, state to state, and country to country.

For instance, the Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade.

No doubt about it: this is a highly profitable, highly organized and highly sophisticated sex trafficking business that operates in towns large and small, raking in upwards of $9.5 billion a year in the U.S. alone by abducting and selling young girls for sex.

Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger.

The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out,

“Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.“

“For every 10 women rescued, there are 50 to 100 more women who are brought in by the traffickers. Unfortunately, they’re not 18- or 20-year-olds anymore,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking. “They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked. They’re little girls.”

Where did this appetite for young girls come from?

Look around you.

Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children.

“All it takes is one look at MySpace photos of teens to see examples—if they aren’t imitating porn they’ve actually seen, they’re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they’ve absorbed elsewhere,” writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek. “Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school.”

This is what Bennett refers to as the “pornification of a generation.”

“In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives,” concludes Bennett. “Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.”

In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators. And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?

Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported,

“Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.”

Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.

Rarely do these girls enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.

Debbie, a straight-A student who belonged to a close-knit Air Force family living in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of this trading of flesh. Debbie was 15 when she was snatched from her driveway by an acquaintance-friend. Forced into a car, Debbie was bound and taken to an unknown location, held at gunpoint and raped by multiple men. She was then crammed into a small dog kennel and forced to eat dog biscuits. Debbie’s captors advertised her services on Craigslist. Those who responded were often married with children, and the money that Debbie “earned” for sex was given to her kidnappers. The gang raping continued. After searching the apartment where Debbie was held captive, police finally found Debbie stuffed in a drawer under a bed. Her harrowing ordeal lasted for 40 days.

While Debbie was fortunate enough to be rescued, others are not so lucky. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).

With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.

For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.

Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.

Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next Door”:

Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners–toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens–as well as what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.”

What Andrea described next shows just how depraved some portions of American society have become.

“They’d get you hungry then to train you” to have oral sex. “They put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older, I’d teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn’t hurt.”

Immigration and customs enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., report that when it comes to sex, the appetites of many Americans have now changed. What was once considered abnormal is now the norm. These agents are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. As one agent noted,

“We’ve become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit.”

This trend is reflected by the treatment many of the girls receive at the hands of the drug traffickers and the men who purchase them. Peter Landesman interviewed Rosario, a Mexican woman who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years. She said:

“In America, we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.”

A common thread woven through most survivors’ experiences is being forced to go without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men. One woman recounts how her trafficker made her lie face down on the floor when she was pregnant and then literally jumped on her back, forcing her to miscarry.

Holly Austin Smith (image on the right) was abducted when she was 14 years old, raped, and then forced to prostitute herself. Her pimp, when brought to trial, was only made to serve a year in prison.

Barbara Amaya was repeatedly sold between traffickers, abused, shot, stabbed, raped, kidnapped, trafficked, beaten, and jailed all before she was 18 years old.

“I had a quota that I was supposed to fill every night. And if I didn’t have that amount of money, I would get beat, thrown down the stairs. He beat me once with wire coat hangers, the kind you hang up clothes, he straightened it out and my whole back was bleeding.”

As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune:

“In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”

One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.

This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.

Trafficked women and children are advertised on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.

Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government’s war on sex trafficking—much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime—has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public, while doing little to make our communities safer.

So what can you do?

Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our communities.

Stop feeding the monster: Sex trafficking is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from homelessness, poverty, and self-esteem issues to sexualized television, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture—what is often referred to as the pornification of America—and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc.

This epidemic is largely one of our own making, especially in a corporate age where the value placed on human life takes a backseat to profit. It is estimated that the porn industry brings in more money than Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.

Call on your city councils, elected officials and police departments to make the battle against sex trafficking a top priority, more so even than the so-called war on terror and drugs and the militarization of law enforcement.

Stop prosecuting adults for victimless “crimes” such as growing lettuce in their front yard and focus on putting away the pimps and buyers who victimize these young women.

Finally, the police need to do a better job of training, identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of traffickers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms and cover for their dirty deeds.

That so many women and children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.

But the truth is that we are all guilty of contributing to this human suffering. The traffickers are guilty. The consumers are guilty. The corrupt law enforcement officials are guilty. The women’s groups who do nothing are guilty. The foreign peacekeepers and aid workers who contribute to the demand for sex slaves are guilty. Most of all, every individual who does not raise a hue and cry over the atrocities being committed against women and children in almost every nation around the globe—including the United States—is guilty.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

#spread this #make sure people know #get educated #be aware #save some lives #i worry many of you are prime targets for this #I can see the insecurity and desire for attention #rape culture #human trafficking #mine #this is a problem throughout the world

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elliesrandomessays-blog · 6 years ago

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Clickbait Title: How Todd in the Shadows killed Pop Music.

Non-Clickbait title: How the change in the social preconceptions of Pop music as a genre resulted in Pop Music making itself irrelevant.

For around a year now critics of American Pop Music have been lamenting the near complete overtaking of Pop music as the predominant music of choice by Hiphop. It's an unique time to be a fan of Chart Music. If you go on the Billboard Hot 100, the literal definition of what is popular in the USA at any one time you'll find a list that is primarily Rap music, not Pop. The top 20 at the time of writing currently has 13 rap songs amongst its ranks, and it doesn't peter off as you scroll down through the 70's and 80's. It gets worse if you're slightly sharper on your definition of Pop because pure Pop music only has at best 3 songs in the top 20. Hiphop is seeing a dominance of mainstream culture right now and has managed to almost entirely remove Pop music from the cultural zeitgeist and many critics want to know why. Why is Pop music no longer Pop music.

This could be the legit hot 100 or the Hiphop hot 100 and there’d be no difference.

I will quickly acknowledge the unfortunate duality of the term 'pop music'. It functions both as shorthand for music that is popular, regardless of genre or origin; and as an explicit label for the genre of pop music. Much the same way that indie can both mean independent, and the genre of indie. This is unhelpful bit of lexical crossover that's contributing to the general frustration so I'll spell the leading question out explicitly: why is capital-P Pop music no longer pop(ular) music.

There are many small factors that contribute to this such as the changes in the way music is consumed; Hiphop as a genre has been a lot quicker to adapt its method of distribution to the age of streaming than Pop being the big one that most people point to as the root cause, but I think there's a much more substantial change to the way the general media approaches Pop as a genre that has split it's audience down the middle. Essentially dividing and conquering.

I would put the main issue being with the form of Pop music criticism that began to spring up around 2010. The wave of Poptimism that I'm referring to technically began as far back as 2004 with the rabbit hole of Rockism and the philosophical rejection of the idea that disposable is an inherent negative but it picked up the majority of it's momentum around the time the Club Boom began to reach its third act (think: when Ke$ha became a thing). It's hard to ascertain exactly why it happened but the consequences of this change aren't hard to see, with the most tangibly visible effect being the sudden rise of Todd In The Shadows. While I wouldn't call him directly responsible for this shift - Todd moving from a novelty who applied the standard YouTube-Media-Criticism to Chart Music up to one of the largest influencers of the post-TWGTG style ('post-' being used in the same context as 'post-'modern) was largely driven by the sudden proliferation of Poptimism, and he in general serves as good synecdoche for much of the change in attitude that occurred around the time. So while this shift has nothing literally to do with Todd and his content, he's a good symbol of it, on top of him being a large feature of the surface-level of the change. For ease of reference from this point I'm going to refer to this new attitude as Toddian.

After Toddian-Poptimism rose there was a new critical eye being applied to Chart music and it felt like the charts had entered a golden age - unparalleled since the 80's. Pop music from Adele, Jason DeRulo, Carly Rae Jepsen, fun., Meghan Trainor, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake and many more managed to be in a position where they were both massively commercially successful and given the respect (and occasionally even acclaim) they deserved from critics for being well constructed, enjoyable music that had impact on people. In spite of the assumption that you're old enough to get in to a Club, the Club Boom was seen as a very immature time for music and you could read this Toddian era as being representative of a maturation of Pop Music, and the world responded. Serious, snobby, oldschool music critics weren't afraid anymore to include a Taylor Swift song on their year-end lists when none would've been caught dead doing the same with Flo Rida. And a whole Youtube subgenre of Chart critics grew in the garden Todd had planted. The musical artists of this time were respected for being good Pop Music, not respected for being good in spite of being Pop music: this era spelled the death of the Guilty Pleasure.

So, Question: why did it all stop? The Answer: the devil is in the details of what this new wave of Poptimism was actually doing to Chart Music. If you look at the general trend of what Toddian criticism liked and disliked there's one running theme that even at the time I was skeptical of and has since proven destructive to their own intended goal: Retro.

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Remember the time we let a 30 year regression become nearly the most popular song of all time?

The overwhelming trend with Toddian criticism is heaping a majority of the praise on genre-throwbacks and a reporting with a general air of unease newer genres that lack history. Synthpop, R&B, Funk, and Indie-Rock are regular appearances on 'Best songs of X year' lists. House, EDM, and Traprap are regular appearances on the opposite. In retrospect looking at these lists the general impression is not that Toddian criticism exist in order to promote Pop music as a place where legitimate artistic statements can be made and forward movement is being made, but rather to quash any potential movements away from the genres that the vague umbrella of nostalgia is comfortable with. Bar the odd breakthrough from Hiphop, Singer-Songwriter and memeworthy dance songs the charts of this era and especially the hit songs that were regarded as worthwhile can near universally be pinned to a specific retro era they were appealing to. Right across from 60's doo-wop to 90's synth-funk and every possible step inbetween, the critical process turned into "They seem to be going for a [decade]-era [artist] vibe on this new track" with lists ranking them on how much that critic enjoys each of the eras relative to one another.

Even within the context of individual artists careers you can see this. Justin Timberlake in 2014 releases 'Can't Stop the Feeling!', a piece of retro summertime-funk and it becomes one of the most well regarded pieces of popular music of the decade. In 2018 JT releases 'Filthy' a piece of modern Pop music that interpolates elements of modern dance and electronic and he's career is immediately killed. Calvin Harris spends decades regarded as the lowest Chart Music gets. In 2017 he released Funk Wav Bounces and suddenly 'Slide' is a critical darling. The next year he releases the equally quality House song 'One Kiss' and no one cares. Taylor Swift. 80's pop album 1989 is adored. Modern pop Reputation is hailed as an artistic bomb. The Weeknd. Moody PBR&B was rejected. Peppy 'Can't Feel My Face' is a "modern classic". David Guetta, Zedd, Martin Garrix and similar EDM producers are all seemingly ignored when they briefly entered the spotlight with only Avicii and Clean bandit getting acknowledgements because they spliced Electronica with Folk and Classical respectively. Imagine Dragons, one of the few rock bands unironically trying to push forward into modern Pop styles of production and aesthetic when pure Indie were adored yet are now regarded as "worse than Nickleback". Which is a phrase so incredibly toploaded with subtext that I could double the length of this essay just digging into those three words. I could go on longer with these but I'll leave the rest as names for you to think about yourself: Pharrell Williams, Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande, Fall Out Boy, Jason DeRulo, Bruno Mars, Katy Perry, Charli XCX, Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars.

Over the course of half-a-decade, the Pop music industry went from rewarded greatly, to heavily disincentivized to promote modern Pop music. Some would seep through the cracks such as Tove Lo and Julia Michaels but the lukewarm and actively hostile responses they respectively got were just further perpetuating the problem. Why would any rational record label want to invest time and money into artists trying to sound modern when all the Toddian eye is going to do is reject them in favour of someone who's tearing ideas directly out of Billy Joel's playbook. This lead to the inevitable crowding out of newer acts who were experimenting in modern genres. The last truly modern act to break in to the upper echelons of popular culture were probably The Chainsmokers. With Roses, Don't let Me Down and Closer all being incredibly popular with no retro era to support themselves only. And they also served as the Toddian eye's most brutal target. Literally being regarded as the worst album of the year.

(I'm aware that Todd himself actually liked The Chainsmokers. So this a good time for a reminder this isn't about his opinions specifically).

The obvious immediate rebuttal to this was posed to be within minutes when I posted the initial thesis for this essay on Twitter: if modern-Pop was killed by an overpraise of retro-Pop. Why isn't retro-Pop dominating the charts instead then?

The problem there is one that many fans of retro-Pop don't want to hear, retro-Pop was a fad, and that fad has now died. Or rather, retro-Pop was a rare occurrence of a meta-fad. It had a significantly longer lifespan than the 2004 indie-rock fad that gave us Mr.Brightside and the 2017 Spanish fad that gave us Despacito because rather than being one specific gimmick that popular culture was enamored with, it was composed of dozens of smaller fads that when placed one-after-another produce the illusion of a trend. If you actually look at the nitty-gritty no particular subfad of retro survived more than one or two artists releasing an album each. Doo-Wop was only popular long enough to give us Meghan Trainor and Charlie Puth while Michael Jackson was only popular long enough to give us The Weeknd and Jason Derulo. ect. ect. So the reason that Run Away With Me by Carly Rae Jepsen and Bills by LunchMoney Lewis weren't commercial successes in spite of seemingly being exactly the kind of retro hit that was at-the-time popular was because neither song were released when that specific era's fad was the in thing. Sure they were retro, but we already had Taylor Swift snap up dreamy 80's pop and DNCE had already filled the quota of glistening-pop-Funk so why would they need another?

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There was no way that this essay was going to exist without a nod to E• MO•TION at some point.

By early 2017 we had already essentially run out of genres to co-opt without going into music that's so old it's nearly measured in centuries. So that put the music industry into a Catch-22. They can't invest their promotional time and money into retro-Pop anymore because the fad is well and truly dead (you can't make another Uptown Funk because Uptown Funk already exists) and the general public is going to reject it as a late-to-the-party grasp of desperation. But they can't invest into modern-Pop because Toddian critics are going to reject it outright because it doesn't appeal to the core aesthetics that they like and are going to heap tepid reviews on it which will seriously damage any attempts to market the thing, you can't advertise a 3-star review. The retro-Pop well dried up, and now in the final quarter of 2018 everyone regrets cementing up the old well. Eventually all fads die.

Now it's time to bring Justin Beiber in, who I imagine so far has been the biggest ? lying under this whole argument. Beiber was huge around the same time of the final years of the retro-Pop fad and wasn't making anything remotely retro. He was making incredibly forward-pushing, futuristic sounding dance-pop that had yet to really have an era before now. But he's the final piece of this puzzle: the fad that overtook retro. Justin Beiber was riding the next wave: Tropical. Major Lazer started it, Beiber rode it to the top, Sia and Ed Sheeran followed behind him. That fad had the lifespan of a normal fad - around 14 months. Then that naturally morphed into Spanish music. Then that fad died and nothing came in to replace it so Pop music was left with a hole and nothing to fill it. Once again that left the pop music industry with the more general formulation of the Catch-22. Fad has died so can't promote that without looking desperate, can't promote new Pop music because no one wants to swim in a lukewarm pool where the lifeguard secretly wishes you were someone else.

Hiphop itself is pretty much irrelevant to the story. There's nothing special about Rap as a genre apart from the fact it just happened to be the 2nd place racer when 1st place's tires blew-out. That's not to say that Rap wasn't doing some legitimately incredible things and isn't worthy of success. But all I'm saying is Post Malone, Cardi B, and Kendrick Lamar would've been top-40-popular anyway and there was simply no one else in the way to stop them *not* going to number 1.

This has all had the consequence of turning Pop music, in both forms, into niche genres. Now that the general public isn't consuming Pop because it's what the miasma of popular culture tells them to like Pop has to start appealing to people who're actual Popheads, and when your audience becomes niche-sized they're small enough to make the critical decisions themselves. No one wants to listen to retro-Pop stars that the big labels are offering anymore because their audience now is so small that the audience is cutting out the middlemen and just listening to old music (it's no surprise this has all been at the same time as Africa by Toto's sudden rebirth) while on the other end no one wants to listen to the modern-Pop that labels offer anymore because their audience is making active decisions and is instead listening to Alison Wonderland and Virtual Self. Some like myself have even defected as far as Bill Wurtz.

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Seriously, if you’re a person who considers yourself ‘in to’ music and only think of Bill Wurtz as that weird guy who made the history videos then you’re missing out.

I'm not even going to pretend that there's a solution to this problem. Even if I had one I'm an insignificant enough cog in the machine that I couldn't enact it. But I can give my perspective on where the future of the Charts lie.

The main thing to keep in mind is that this is all cyclical. Eventually the general consuming public will get sick of Hiphop and whomever is in 2nd place when that happens is going to capitalize on the exact same sort of collapse that got us in the current situation. Arguably this will happen a lot faster since Toddian was a relatively large shift in critical style compared to 2009 but Hiphop has always had a higher degree of scrutiny applied to it for both fair and unfair reasons. And Pop music isn't totally dead either, arguably the nadir has passed and it’s on the way up not down at the current moment. As much as I dislike it, Weezer's cover of Africa shows there's at least a way back in to mainstream consciousness for Pop music if it decides to go down that route. And acts such as LSD, Bazzi and Halsey are still managing to claw their way into high listen counts through sheer force of quality.

So for now, I'd say enjoy the ride. And enjoy the brief time that Toddian Criticism has put us in where the radio not giving you Pop to listen to puts you in a place where you hear Tessa Violet for the first time instead

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#Pop Music #Pop #Hot 100 #Poptimism #Popheads #Charts

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organicblog421 · 3 years ago

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Aria Guitars Serial Numbers

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Aria Guitars Serial Numbers For Sale

In the mid 70's, serial numbers began to be used. At least for Aria guitars, made by Matsumoku, the serial number contains the year of manufacture in the first 2 digits, thus a guitar from 1979 would have a serial number, such as 79####. The manufacturing of Aria guitars were subcontracted out to Matsumoku from 1964 to 1986. If you are a middle-aged woman looking to have a good time dating woman half your age, this advertisement is for you. 1982, serial number 2080692 Aria Pro II PE60 Black n Gold. Face swap app.

The neck block is a part that was already made in Japan, so this is not the correct serial number for the guitar. Yamaha serial numbers are recycled every ten years, 29 formats are supported here based on research available on the yamaha website. Production YMMI (Yamaha Music Manufacturing Indonesia), Indonesia In the period of 1990-1996 an eight-digit serial number was used in this factory. If you want to know the production year of your Squier guitar,you can decipher it with the serial number decoder, or find it in explanation about the dating system below. Little black lines that grow on the guitar, and under the finish, little parts will fall off. The Korean Fender Squiers were produced from 1988, but there were no serial numbers until mid-1993 The 5 digit numbers are the same as the 8 digit numbers but donât have the 3 unit numbers on the end. All Black label Taiwan models have the headstock logo with the 3 tuning forks inside a circle with âYAMAHAâ¦ Yamaha occupies a surprisingly unusual niche in the guitar industry. The first step is to find the serial numberâa combination of letters and/or numbersâ and the 'Made in..' label (Japan, Taiwan, or Indonesia) on the guitar. G-50A label â note no Nippon Gakki on the label â from 1970-1972. RSS. YouTube. Simply enter your Yamaha piano serial number to find out when and where the Yamaha piano was made or look at the full listings of piano serial numbers. Your guitar's serial number is found inside the sound hole and up sharply towards the neck block (see example on the right). May 13, 2017 - The most common Yamaha serial numbers follow a system that uses 2 letters, followed by 5 numbers. 'MADE IN INDIA' on the headstock. My concern..the guitar is made in China. Facebook. Yamaha Piano Serial Numbers (how old / what age is your Yamaha piano) The majority of Japanese Yamaha pianos currently in the UK have a 7 digit (sometimes only 6) serial number which can be found to the top right area of the iron frame (youâll need to lift the top lid of the piano to see it). Images Custom instruments and wiring diagram courtesy of Ben van Dyk Jan 2015. Korean made guitars (just like American or any other country) depend on who, what when and why they where produced. The first two digits represent the week of the year it was made. The information contained in this guide was culled from our archives of Fender price lists and catalogs, beginning with 1968. You should be Aria guitars manufactured in the 1970s typically feature a serial number â¦ First generation 03 Series serial numbers may also be ink stamped on a white label. documented. The Squier IIs made in India seem to follow the numbering scheme in the USA. Note serial numbers recycle every 10 years. Solid top guitar. However, despite this huge stride forward in the companyâs history, these guitars would continue to be available for a Japanese audience only throughout the 1950s and much of the 1960s. It was during this era of Yamahaâs acoustic guitar history that the company proceeded with founding a factory in Hamamatsu, Japan. The plant are so dirty rats can't can't live there. It covers any Yamaha piano made between 1917 and 2012 in all 6 factories. That 'Made in China' sticker is always going to â¦ Although the tables below are as accurate as possible, serial numbers of these acoustic guitars have never been archived and are of no assistance when attempting to date these instruments. SoundCloud. If you get unexpected results please double check that any letters at the start of the piano's serial number aren't actually the end of the Yamaha model number or relate to characteristics of the piano such as scale or finish. I believe it to be mid 60âs. I would appreciate any information on possible year of manufacture. See another guide âYamaha FG Serial Numbers, Interior Markings, and Labelsâ for more info. Almost all white oval labels are made in Taiwan. According to YamahaAustralia all G-50A were made in Japan. These run new around $1200 and I've seen them cheaper in some places. The signature bass of the singular Billy Sheehan, the Attitude was one of the first production instruments developed by YGD. For instance, a '12' means it was made in the twelfth week of the year. Where to find the serial number Yamaha's guitars serial numbers repeat every 10 years, so additional research may be needed to find the exact year your guitar was made. A great example of the fantastic build quality of the Yamaha Taiwan factories in the late 70âies and early 80âies. Guitars since 1966.eval(ez_write_tag(((300,250),'jedistar_com-box-3','ezslot_0',116,'0','0'))); Serial numbers for acoustic and classical guitars, Serial numbers for electric and bass guitars. Serial Number Chart for Acoustic and Classical Guitars In the following charts, you can determine the year of manufacture for a Yamaha acoustic or classical guitar. Items made in China are bad. The serial number is generally stamped on the front or back of the headstock,or in some cases on the neck plate. Hangzhou, China; Taoyuan, Taiwan; As a result, there are six different serial number ranges for Yamaha pianos. I have a Yamaha Nippon Gakki Co.Ltd vintage electric guitar seriel No 12320. cream in color. Twitter. First two numbers in the sequence will tell you when your guitar was produced, while the following numbers represent the serial number of the instrument itself. Some more recent Squiers, including the Vintage Modified series (the serial numbers start here with SH), were in Introduced in 2007. The serial number registration of these countries also leaves sometimes to be desired. The company, which is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its presence on the American market and export to other countries beyond Japan, has consistently produced guitars that have sold in impressive numbers and attracted a notable following of celebrity players and esteemed pros. Guitar made in China are in the worst place you could make a guitar. Example: A serial number starting with W17 indicates the guitar was built in Korea, in 2017. The serial number is on a sticker on the back of the neck, close to the attachment point with the body. Your guitar was made onOctober 24th, 1987, 1997or 2007Production Number: 338 Yamaha â¦ The letters H to Q each represent the number that the year the guitar was built in ends in. In a three-digit serial â¦ GAX70; GRG170DX; GRG270; GSA60; SA120; GRX40; GRG121DX; AS73; All items (668) Based on the serial number, your Dean was built in 2000 (the first two numbers are the year manufactured). If your grand piano is a GH1G, GH1FP, GC1G, or GC1FP, your piano was manufactured in Thomaston, Georgia. Once located, the serial number offers clues as to when the guitar was manufactured, and the first few digits are especially important, as the numbers changed over a few decades. 2020 marks two related anniversaries for Yamaha Guitars: the 30th anniversary of Yamaha Guitar Development - our Los Angeles custom shop - and the 30th anniversary of the Attitude series. China Yamaha Guitar wholesale - Select 2020 high quality Yamaha Guitar products in best price from certified Chinese Guitar manufacturers, Custom Guitar suppliers, wholesalers and factory on Made-in-Chinaâ¦ From about 1971 Yamaha also had a special line of handbuild FGâs of outstanding quality. Instagram. The Yamaha Corporation has grown to become the worldâs largest manufacturer of a full line of musical instruments. YouTube. The first letter indicates the location where the instrument was made, and subsequent digits indicate the year the instrument was made. If the serial number begins with a 'T', the piano was manufactured in Thomaston, Georgia. China Guitar wholesale - Select 2020 high quality Guitar products in best price from certified Chinese Musical Instruments manufacturers, Electric Guitar suppliers, wholesalers and factory on Made-in-Chinaâ¦ Most serial numbers on Danelectro guitars have either three or four digits. Facebook. I believe it to be mid 60âs. (Source: Nigel Barker, Sydney Feb 2015, Hi. For example, if the guitar's serial number starts 'Z0411,' then you know that the guitar was made in China, in 2004 and the month code '11' refers to November. This website possesses NO DATABASE of guitars made by manufactures, instead simple serial code patterns that are available on this site and in the wider guitar community are used. See below for location initials. This place leads to later problems,The China Flu! I would appreciate any information on possible year of manufacture. SoundCloud. L Series High end line of Yamaha acoustic guitars which features the traditional vibe and superb acoustic sound by A.R.E. This orange label says made in Japan. The letter 'H' is â¦ Acoustic catalogs 70,72,78 and more t-shiga.com/sub7-5-1.htm, 2006 Acoustic, Electric and Bass guitar catalog | 2006 Guitar and Bass, 2012 Guitar catalog | 2012 Acoustic guitar catalog | 2012 Classical guitar catalog. Look for the two-digit codes to determine the month in which your guitar was made. The first letter represents the year that the guitar was built. The models included in this category were/are produced in China. Decode your serial number. Yamaha serial number 71024338 can you tell me when this guitar was made? This is because it doesnât have the popularity of a Gibson or Fender nor the resale value. H = 1 I = 2 J = 3 K = 4 L = 5 M = 6 N = 7 O = 8 P = 9 Q = 0 But it gives no clue as to the decade so for each letter it could represent the following years. Twitter. Other low-budget countries followed, like China, Indonesia and India. The Yamaha Guitar Archive data says these models started in 1974 but so far Iâve found Tan label serial numbers as late as August 1975, and I havenât found a Black label earlier than June 1975. Details. CSF series guitars combine the portability of a travel guitar with the focused tone and easy playability of a parlor guitar, while producing a surprisingly full and resonant sound. Generally a Yamaha isnât a guitar that is often faked like a Gibson or Fender. technology. Thank you, Copyright 2007-19 P Carroll Jedistar | All Rights Reserved | GAS: Guitar Acquisition Syndrome, 2006 Acoustic, Electric and Bass guitar catalog. Instagram. If your serial number has 2 lines of numbers please enter only the bottom row to the lookup form below. These had a leather label including signature: If the guitar has a nine-digit code, the two numbers following the year code identify the month. From 1982 Fender Squiers are also produced outside the USA, in that year the production startedin Japan. RSS. If the serial number begins with a 'U', the piano was manufactured in South Haven, Michigan. Trending pages. Look at the first letter of the serial number, which indicates which year the instrument was made. Serial Number Chart for Electric, Archtop, and Bass Guitars In the following charts, you can determine the year of manufacture for a Yamaha electric, archtop, or bass guitar. Some rare white oval labels are Nippon Gakki made in Japan: Thereâs one big exception concerning early FGâs. https://organicblog421.tumblr.com/post/657479049456844801/black-keys-el-camino-rar. CJ 838S, 1980, serial 00827125, made in Taiwan. I have a Yamaha Nippon Gakki Co.Ltd vintage electric guitar seriel No 12320. cream in color. Every Dean guitar made in United States comes with a seven digit serial number that is printed on the back of the headstock. I was a jumbo guitar and the sweetness of solid rosewood back and sides has always appealed to me. Let's look at an example of what this might look like - MM12022. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Fender was faced with competition from cheaper Japanese guitars. From this we can tell that this is the 22nd guitar built on June 12 of either 1966, 1976, 1986, 1996 or 2006. If the serial number begins with a 'T', the piano was manufactured in Thomaston, Georgia. Very cold and very hot. First Letter Years H 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001 I 1962, 1972, 1982, 1992, 2002 J 1963, 1973, 1983, 1993, 2003 K 1964, 1974, 1984, 1994, â¦ As a result, there are four different serial number ranges for Yamaha pianos. In 1975 most of the existing models numbers had -1 added to them, on a black rectangular label. Typically, yes. In 1887, Yamaha (then Nippon Gakki Co., Ltd.) began producing reed organs in Japan. I junked one and traded two.

If you are a middle-aged woman looking to have a good time dating woman half your age, this advertisement is for you. 1982, serial number 2080692 Aria Pro II PE60 Black n Gold.

First recorded serial numbers for guitars and bass by year: YEAR / GUITAR / BASS 1980 G000530 B0 G003122 B0 G009886 B0 G011654 B0 G013273 B0 G014690 B0 G017325 B0 G020241 B0 G023725 B0 G006 1990 G026344 B0 G027163 B0 G029962 B024288.

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Aria Guitars Serial Numbers For Sale

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1wngdngl · 3 years ago

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Game Review - Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back

I finally beat Crash Bandicoot 2 100%. For the first time ever! Okay, I had to look a couple things up, but I did give it my best effort first, and I’m satisfied with my experience.

So now, that there’s nothing left to uncover, here’s the review I promised.

(Cut for Spoilers)

First off, this is the only Crash Bandicoot game I remember owning as a kid. (I do think I remember playing Crash 1, but I think that must have been a rental or at a relative’s house.) While Crash 2 wasn’t a game I played all that many times – even with the bonus content it’s still a pretty short game, and I had loads of other games to keep me occupied – I do remember liking it. What did I like about it, back then? Well, it had good music, and some interesting level design, Crash was pretty endearing with his funny facial expressions, and it was just an easy game to pick up and play for a bit – at least until you were down to the really frustrating stuff at the end. The last few levels are tough, and I remember as a kid it took me forever to figure out what I was supposed to do during the Cortex boss fight, but I did beat the game once or twice.

Never got 100% though, at least not that I can recall. But now I have! thanks to patience and the power of looking things up ;) If you’re curious, the two things I had to look up at the end were the location of the last two secret warp exits. (Turns out, they were in the levels Diggin’ It and Unbearable.) As a result, this was the first time I’ve ever played the secret level Totally Bear, and as it turns out, a bear ride in the dark is quite a tricky combination.

So now that I’ve officially seen all there is to this game (keep in mind I’m talking about the original, not the N-Sane Trilogy version), here’s a few more general thoughts:

There’s something about the way Crash 2’s progression works that gives it a lonely, almost claustrophobic feeling. Think about it – at the start of the game, Crash is going about his daily life, hanging out with his sister and doing errands for her, then BOOM! He’s kidnapped by his old enemy, and trapped in a small tower and asked to do his bidding. Like, Crash might think he’s saving the world, but the player knows from the start he’s being duped. But even if Crash wanted to leave, he can’t. There’s no way he can escape the tower, from these small hub rooms with barely enough space to walk around. He can go into the levels, sure, and they can be pretty big, but at the end of the day they’re still corridors funneling him to the end. And while some of them are pretty, they’re filled with traps, pits, and enemies out for Crash’s blood. There’s no friendly faces for Crash here, no NPCs, Aku Aku isn’t really even a character yet. It’s just Crash versus these dangerous, sometimes mazelike death-routes. Then, when he gets to the end, he steps into the portal and he’s back at the hub room again. There’s no way out of this, and no choice but to do what Cortex wants. And considering how hard the game is, it could potentially take the player weeks to finish, months even, if they don’t play often. Imagine Crash just sitting on the floor in the warp room, waiting for the player to come back, hoping that Coco might find a way to contact him again soon…

Anyway, enough of that brooding stuff! Here’s some more thoughts I had while playing this:

One awesome thing about this game is that, for as short as it is, it still incorporates quite a variety of different level types. You’ve got the jungle/forest areas, the jungle rivers, a few snow levels, sewers, ancient ruins, etc. Near the end you also get some futuristic levels inside a factory/space station. Each level type has a distinct aesthetic, music, and enemies.

Layered on top of the level types are different playstyles, for when normal platforming might be getting dull. The jet ski bits, for example, while making it a bit hard to control yourself, are quite fun, especially when you’re racing against the clock for the hidden gem. There’s the parts where you ride a baby polar bear, and those play out like a fast autoscroller or racing game – the speed means you die a lot, but then you’re right back at it and ready to do better. The levels where you’re being chased by something are also intense – as a kid, I remember my anxiety spiking whenever I entered a level and realized it was a chase scene. The big polar bear with its huge teeth was super scary, especially with how it runs straight at the camera! Trying to run with Crash when you can barely see where you’re going can be a little annoying, but the paths of crates and wumpa fruit do help if you pay attention. The night levels are another type of auto-scrolling level where you can barely see where you’re going, and they make backtracking fun when you’re trying to collect all the crates. Probably the one mechanic that gave me the most hang-ups was figuring out the jetpack – the controls just aren’t very intuitive, and it takes a while to build up the muscle memory to fly around with any kind of grace. (That’s part of why the final boss is so frustrating to me >.> )

Another thing I guess I should talk about is the enemy design. The basic enemies are…okay, I guess. Not as distinctive as the ones in a Mario or Zelda game, but they work. Actually, that’s something that used to confuse me as a kid – so as Crash goes through the levels trying to find crystals for Cortex, all these things are attacking him, right? And some of them seem like they’re just wild animals that happen to live in those environments, so they don’t need any further explanation. But what about the enemies that have like, metal spikes and buzzsaws added to them? And what about the lab assistant characters you encounter near the end? In retrospect, the cyborg animals were probably created by N. Gin, but then why would they be attacking Crash? Does Cortex want to kill Crash, or does he want Crash to gather crystals? Or are we to believe that all the artificial enemies in the levels are actually sent by N. Brio instead?

The bosses are pretty good. I wish that the boss characters had more build-up so you would know more about who you’re up against (like, why is this blue kangaroo fighting me in his library?), but the fights with them are pretty fun and a nice change of pace. They take place in unique environments with some good music, and I remember the Tiny fight in particular always scared me as a kid. It’s this wolf-looking creature that comes leaping at you, on platforms floating over an abyss, and then the platforms start falling as sirens blare…o.o Again, the Cortex final boss is probably my least favourite just due to how it controls.

Like I mentioned before, the music in this game is pretty good, and there’s a surprising amount of it. Not only does each level theme get its own music, but there are different variations of it depending on where you are in the level. If you enter a bonus area the music becomes slower and more playful, while in the Death route it becomes more frantic. Each boss gets their own theme music too. I think my favorite music is the ones for the more industrial environments, like the sewers, factory, and zero-gravity levels. (The primary composer seems to be Josh Mancell, but the credits also list Mark Mothersbaugh, who did the soundtrack for the Sims 2, The Lego Movie, and Thor: Ragnarok; so maybe he helped with the more futuristic/electronic sounds?)

There’s a big difference between getting to the end of a level, and finishing a level. Each of the main levels has a crystal as well as a crate gem, but there’s often way more to them than that. Death routes, bonus routes, split paths, routes you can only access by finding a hidden gem in another unrelated level, secret spots that will bring you to the hidden warp room, where you can find alternate entrances into several levels, and even access a few totally separate bonus levels…It all means that you’ll be visiting each level several times. For some levels, getting everything requires a lot of backtracking – Piston It Away and Cold Hard Crash are the worst for this.

Okay, that about wraps it up. I’m planning to start a playthrough of Crash 3: Warped soon, so there’ll probably be a review of that…eventually ;D

#video games #reviews #crash bandicoot #crash bandicoot 2 #crash bandicoot 2: cortex strikes back

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earwaxinggibbous · 7 years ago

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“Congratulations” VS. “Started From The Bottom”

Started as a bottom, now my whole team’s fuckin’ rears.

Self-aggrandizing rap and hip-hop anthems have existed since the genre was invented. It’s just a really nice, friendly way of saying, “hey! I’m better than you.” Generally speaking, whoever is on the track should have the power and clout behind them to make all of the bragging seem warranted. A great example is Eminem’s Rap God, which has a chorus that literally has Eminem saying he’s beginning to feel like a rap god. And we buy it, because hell, Eminem basically IS a rap god. Regardless of how you feel about him, especially as a person, there’s no arguing that his flows and style require an insane amount of skill. (Or at least, they used to.)

The other big rule, once again using Rap God as an example, as that the song should actually be good. Because if you’re bragging about being the coolest rapper with the most chains and bitches while rapping like complete shit, your point is pretty much moot. When Eminem speed-raps in Rap God, it’s essentially the proof that he is in fact the man named in the title.

There’s only one real problem with these songs when it comes to audience reception: They’re not relatable to anybody except other rich rappers and musicians. Which can be kind of a problem since that’s not really who the music industry is aiming to please. So in somewhat recent times we’ve been getting a different flavor of self-aggrandizing rap. Songs that, instead of saying “I’m super great”, they say, “Hey, I started from humble beginnings and worked my way to the top, and now I’m super great”. Which gives us viewers the idea of this sort of achievable dream that is nearly within arm’s reach.

Enter two very, very different hip-hop artists, at two very different times.

Drake and Post Malone, in my opinion, are both pretty good, in my opinion.

Let’s start with Drake. Drake feels at least a little more like a “real rapper” than Post does. Maybe because he was on Young Money, or because he doesn’t have that sing-songy flow that Post does, but he just feels more like somebody I’d describe as a rapper. If I had any reason, I’d say it’s because Post Malone’s music, even his ego-boosting shit, tends to sound stoned or morose the bulk of the time. Drake’s voice isn’t much fun either, but at least I can believe his ego based on his vocal tones alone. Post has a tendency to sound really, really sad, or just super high.

Now one might say, “Panda, you can’t compare these two songs. Started from the Bottom precedes Congratulations by four years.” But the reason I’m making this comparison is that, despite Drake being considered the superior artist by nearly everyone, Congratulations is basically the better version of its predecessor.

Let’s discuss this.

Now for one thing, I fucking hate the music video of Started from the Bottom. Not because it’s that bad, though depicting “working at a drug store” as “the bottom” is pretty fucking stupid, the video itself does a pretty good basic job at getting across what it wants. I just hate the skit.

I remember pulling up the song on YouTube and thinking, Jesus, this song is 5 fucking minutes long? Half the lyrics are just the title. Relax, past Panda, one minute of that video is a stupid skit that shows up randomly before the second chorus. A full fucking minute of two of Drake’s coworkers, not even Drake himself, but two of his coworkers at Duane Reade or something ogling some woman who’s checking out of the store. It’s not funny, it doesn’t really add anything, and the two guys can’t act. Drake’s body language is awkward and goofy in the music video, I doubt he’d be a great actor either, but that’s fine, he’s just the guy who made the song. Most of what he needs to do is lipsync along to the track and wave his hands around anyway. But the two guys are in a skit, an acted skit that requires acting to happen, and they suck.

It doesn’t help that it’s interrupting what is already one of the most monotonous songs that the lord hath graciously dumped on top of our collective consciousness like a weighty cow turd. The video actually tries to help the song by making it look like Drake really did work a crappy job with a bunch of assholes and was raised in a shitheap. But this isn’t true.

And I hate bringing the lives of artists into their music more than anything. Because ever since really getting into Eminem’s works, I’ve been seeing every musician’s persona as a character. Now some musicians characters, like say, Mary Lambert, are very close to their real-world self, or even identical. Others, like David Bowie or the aforementioned Eminem, are essentially entirely different people offstage. Then there’s incredibly creative people like ThatPoppy who sort of blur the difference between a musical persona and the person behind it. And honestly I find that way more interesting than ripping into an artist personally. (Unless it’s Taylor Swift.)

But Started from the Bottom is an argument against critics who don’t believe Drake ever really suffered or understands the lower class. And I’ve read about him, so I can say that he should. He wasn’t living in a complete shithole, generally Canadian shitholes are better than American ones, but he still dealt with a parental divorce, bullying due to his race and Jewish upbringing, and having to see his father arrested. But there’s two issues once we reach this point.

One. This song never mentions any of that. And two. After dropping out of school he got a TV job to act as a main character on Degrassi. And since this song isn’t about his childhood, I can only assume it’s looking back on his days as a working-class young adult.

NO, Drake. BAD hip-hop artist.

Being an actor on a TV sitcom is not the bottom. Not to mention that even when he left to start making music, he essentially had his career set. Once you’re an actor on television, if people watched your shit, you can almost definitely get a job in music afterwards. It worked for Miley, Demi, Ariana, and Selena, there’s no reason it wouldn’t have worked for Drake. Not to mention that he got picked up by Young Money, which is essentially a free win for anyone who’s better and more interesting than sentient iguana man Li’l Wayne. (Which was surprisingly rare, apparently. Where the fuck is Gudda Gudda’s next single, Wayne?!)

Yes, Drake, we know you weren’t rich. That doesn’t mean you were at the bottom. I live in a comfortable apartment in Midtown and my mom works a law firm, and we don’t even call ourselves rich. “Not being rich” is different from “the bottom”. “The bottom” is only owning hand-me-down underwear, living in a downturned umbrella and eating dirt for nutrients.

But lyrically this song doesn’t tell you anything. All the stuff I know about this guy is just from Lyric Genius and Wikipedia.

Wow, you only argue with your mom once a month?

Lucky bastard.

Also, really quickly I wanna comment on the uncle line for a second. “The keys” are specifically to his drop top Lexus that young Drake was borrowing. I don’t think you need me to say that people who are on “the bottom” don’t tend to own convertibles.

And, like, rich people work at night and get in traffic too. Just because you’re in a limousine doesn’t mean there’s no traffic. It’s just slightly more enjoyable traffic.

And then Drake just spends the rest of the song essentially sucking his own dick without expanding on his hardships, which was supposed to be the point of this track from the beginning. And I don’t get the whole “no new friends” thing he always says, this isn’t the only song he’s said it in. Drake, unless you’re gonna tell me that the entirety of Young Money and several other well-known rappers went to high school with you like some kind of wacky rap music-based sitcom, I’m pretty sure you’ve made some new friends. Either that or your obvious baby crush on Nicki Minaj is painfully laced by inconceivable amounts of mistrust.

So you’re either a paranoid asshole who just admitted to not trusting the people that got him into the game in the first place, or you’re a liar. Good to know!

Honestly this song makes me just kind of not like Drake as a person. Which is probably one of the worst things you can do as an artist. If you’re trying to make a song that allows people to sympathize with your plights or revel in your success, being this illegally unlikable while doing it isn’t helping your case in the slightest.

But honestly the worst part isn’t even the douchey lyrics, it’s just the song itself. It just feels like it goes on forever.

(Pictured: A hook, apparently.)

The chorus itself is so repetitive I’d rather listen to fucking Come and Get It, Drake has a really bad habit of sounding literally bored to death, and the beat just sounds like a Future song jacked off on GarageBand. Lame snares and lame backing tunes. One whole piano key. Wow, Drake, you’re almost as good at playing physical instruments as your mentor.

(Even he hates it.)

Sad to say the beat and production is probably the best part? Drake’s voice wrecks what was already a weak beat. Whenever he wants to be self-aggrandizing he just sounds fucking bored. Like the most self-aggrandizing thing about it is the fact that he doesn’t think he needs to actually try. In fact, The Motto (YOLO) had the exact same problem. I actually prefer that song. The beat still isn’t high art, but it’s got a little more snap to it. Kind of reminds me of Sage the Gemini’s Gas Pedal, which falls into the category of songs that aren’t that great but can be danced to if put on the setlist.

But this? It’s no fun. A hard 1 out of 5, and that’s only because its attempted premise was almost salvageable. But all I really got out of this song was that Drake is an asshole, he went to school with Lil Wayne apparently, his mom is really really nice since they only argue once a month, and he should just go back to desperately wishing his girlfriend would call him on his cell phone. You’re way better at being sad than--

Fucking... goddamnit.

Now Post Malone is kind of... different. In many ways. One time he said he doesn’t write rap music, and while normally I’d attribute that to him being a pussy who’s too afraid to contribute to what is and has always been a predominantly black genre and racism and he secretly doesn’t wanna be associated with them or whatever. But honestly I’m inclined to give Post Malone some leeway because really, he’s a singer. He makes notes. He’s singing with a hip-hop flow and occasionally has actual rap guests who... honestly end up doing a similar thing on his tracks. (In this case, it’s Quavo! Hurray!)

Oddly enough I actually went through a few songs to compare this to before settling on Drake. I considered Cheap Thrills, as they both sort of follow a similar concept of ‘today’s a good day, let’s go clubbing with only three bucks in our collective pockets’. Decided not to because really Cheap Thrills could be more accurately compared to a myriad of other songs. Considered White Iverson, his first single, but decided they didn’t really have enough in common to use it. I had options.

Really the only reason I went with this is because Congratulations succeeds in every place that Started From The Bottom fails.

Rather than attempting to detail Post Malone’s past suffering, it moreso discusses the actual rise to fame. And alllll the people who said he couldn’t do it.

Beatwise this one outclasses Drake’s already. I remember reading critics describing Started’s beat as “haunting”, which was apparently a good thing. I don’t get it. Congratulations, on the other hand, is carried by a sort of stoned, laidback tempo. Really speaks to the whole idea of “hey, we worked really hard, our album dropped, and now we can take a break and have some fun!”

Honestly if Post Malone wrote more songs like this and less straight-up luxury porn/self-aggrandizing rap like White Iverson or rockstar. (I feel like I’m a minority in not really minding either one of those songs.) Also I must say that Post Malone seems to be really good at picking guest artists. On rockstar he has 21 Savage, whose big thing is that he’s gangsta and shoots people and don’t fuck with him, which at least fits into the attempted tone. (Honestly Sav fits better on that song than Post does.) And in Congrats, we get Quavo.

Not only do Quavo and Post sound really good together on this, as their vocal range seems somewhat similar implying some kind of bro-type unity shit. Honestly this song gives me more band vibes than rockstar does, albeit a very different kind.

You know, you just started your band, you’re waiting to hit it big, you’ve put in all this effort with barely any money, you’re living in a shitbag apartment with 4 other sweaty dudes and you all have to sleep together and Quavo keeps rolling over and shoving his nuts in your face. It’s completely garbage and your drummer has to whore himself out for money, you accidentally get paid for a gig in beer tickets like in that one episode of Metalocalypse, and then finally, FINALLY, you drop a tape that hits big. You get on TV, you meet a record exec, and you’re calling your mom during the afterparty and you’re all celebrating because it’s been so LONG since you could just have a BREAK and now everybody’s SAUCIN’.

EXACTLY.

The lyrics work perfectly for this, but not only that, it’s to show all of the naysayers who insisted they couldn’t do it. All the haters who are now suddenly super gung-ho about how they used to be friends with Post Malone even though they actually shoved him in a locker literally every day. This somehow manages to be super-laidback and super-hype at the same time, which seems to be Post’s general style. Candy Paint has sort of a similar feel. That’s also a fucking great song. I love Post Malone. There. I said it.

But the biggest difference between these two songs is that I somehow get some feeling that Post Malone started somewhere. When I hear Congratulations, I feel like he actually had to put in some effort to get where he is. His first big hit only even got released because somebody leaked it. Nobody was ever expecting it to be as big as it is. Stoney in general is an insanely personal album, and it all feels surprisingly honest for the genre despite the drops of luxury porn and self-aggrandizing.

Basically, TL;DR: Drake cares more about the destination than the journey. Post gives us both the conflict and they payoff. Drake’s beat lacks texture or purpose, whereas Post manages to meld his melodic voice with a smooth backing track. Also, Post occasionally bothers with wordplay! Lyricism in a melodic rap song? Who would’ve thought?

Hell, it even manages to fix the “no new friends” idea displayed by Drake by sort of re-interpreting it as “no fake friends”.

And fuck, I almost forgot to mention Quavo.

Oh Quavo. Your verse may be short, severely lacking in punchlines and technically mediocre, but you just... you sound good. You sound good with Post. Somehow Post fucking Malone manages to totally outclass one of the Migos on this track. But Quavo does pretty well. I kinda like the “Huncho Houdini” line and a few of the football puns. In the end his verse is a little too short to really judge as anything more than decent.

(Also, the music video is great.)

But yeah, who would’ve thought this white stoner with braided sideburns would manage to completely slam Drake, the god of the late 2010′s? I’m honestly tempted to give this thing a 5 out of 5, but due to a few not-rhymes that nearly slip past due to Post’s mild drunken slur, I’d have to drop it into a 4.5/5. Still, I love this song. I love this song, I love Post Malone, fuck it. Judge me if you want. I have yet to hear a Post Malone song I don’t like.

Which I guess doesn’t mean much since he only has an album and an LP out, but...

It’s more than can be said for Drake at this point.

#song vs song #post malone #drake #song review #panda posts #music criticism

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spacebookettes · 4 years ago

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The real CHAPTER 1

The Trillionaires Handbook

A mansion, a playground. Once discovered, fun. Food always available, drink... cocktails. Room’s you could sleep in, if you needed to. And labyrinthine. Surprising at every turn. What started as a typical mansion turned into extensions, new buildings, glass houses and a ring of workaday stone cottages, connected that formed one hotel like building. Perched on the edge of a cliff of a disused quarry, with sapphire blue water curving off into the distance.

Security kept the worst of the drunks in check and waiters served the drinks. The food was buffet style or fridges full of delights in small kitchens randomly discovered. Some of the bedroom windows opened out on to a great glass house filled with ferns and moss. A waterfall lines between the windows on moss filled curving up walls. Some of the windows had balconies. Some of the balconies had stairs leading upwards among the moss and fern covered dome like walls. Leading to a light forest of delicate white barked tree trunks and mist. A hut half hidden in the mist, with tools and wood to make sculptures. Bizarre little sculptures dotted around the white forest.

Word of mouth brought the people. A rumour, a secret party land if you knew where to find it. People from all over the world were there. Leaving after a few days or months. Some had never left. The security were trained in first aid, occasionally needed. Only occasionally as the people were generally well behaved. You could make friends there. New people. Some made life long friends.

In the ring of stone cottages, no windows on the cliff side, so most were unaware of the quarry and water. The cottages were set up like small homes, all with furniture, old fashioned and each with an old dialler type telephone on a small table. Each cottage had its own secret patio that led onto a great garden in the middle of the ring. People chilled here in the garden, it’s winding pathways leading to more little patios and in the centre of the chilled maze a pool with life guards. No bar here though. A small hut with a simple kitchen and delights in a giant fridge; That somehow was frequently refilled, though no one was seen. The pool was warm even in steamy winter.

On a quiet sunny day, occasionally a hidden door would open in one of the cliff side connected cottages and a small group or couple would discover it, walk down a stairwell that descended the rooms built down to the bottom of the cliff. All the time hearing the clanging’s, tinkering’s and machinations of the workings of a great house. All the time with views through little windows of the sapphire water. At the bottom a door. Opened onto a stone platform with wellington boots. The stone platform with stairs leading down to the blue, very shallow, water. The people walked through the water curving through the quarry walls until they reached a small flat island that had not been visible from the cottages. There sat under a vast rainbow parasol was a young woman who was occasionally on the news. The young billionaire.

The people sat with her and laughed. So, you are the owner of Party Land they discussed. The daft rumours that the young billionaire was an alien, brought up. No comment. The young woman got up and pressed a secret button on the pendant she wore. A hiss from the cliff above them drew everyone's attention. A large disk came partially into view at the top of the cliff. The woman gone. The people got up to get a better view of the craft. The young billionaire now at the top of the cliff, waved. A door opened and she entered the disk just big enough for a single person. Another hiss and the disk rose high then moved horizontally out of view. Unbeknownst to the people below a giant hidden mechanical arm had lifted the partially in view disk into the air and away, but not far.

Jewel 2

An unneeded huge tunnel boring machine with a new purpose. Dark Town.

The people smiled as their car started the descending part of the road. To the descending tunnel with pretty neon lighting the way. They reached the underground carpark. Walking toward the cyber lanes with the guiding neon signage on the ceiling. A black ceiling heightened, not cavernous but roomy. A black floor, black walls of the black buildings that lined the lanes, lit with neon. Neon outlined much of Dark Town. Always night but bright with fluorescence and flicker.

The usual commerce, though more curious. Strange gadgets. Daft little machines and digital collectables. Dark Town was a market town where anything cyber could happen. The neon dimmed, the signal for the light parade. A troupe of glowing people and ‘robots' with medieval cyber music. Blinking outlines of large fish heads. An amorphous holographic cloud above them, reflected in an artificial mist. Progressing through dim lanes and sparkling courtyards. Vast caverns of pitch blackness, an occasional blinking drone floating in the distance.

Food from everywhere, street food at high prices of course, but from the best: sought out around the world and made offers they’d be daft to refuse. On rotation, only employed for small amounts of time so as not to get homesick, unless they chose.

NO CYBER CLOWNS. Cute ‘robots'. cyber animals. And locals.

People actually lived in Dark Town. Some were paid to live in Dark Town; to just go about their eccentric selves. The slightly dimmer neon back streets with more adventure. Is where the locals lived, paid to be themselves. Florescent painting classes. Robot building. Programming lessons.

Dark Town was just outside an old city. At the furthest end of Dark Town was a glittering but dimly lit station. Every half an hour a super high speed train could take you to another old city.

Jewel 3

The young billionaire invested in a production company. Old unneeded warehouses and industrial sites were bought to expand the production. No one then famous could act in the films made there and no one famous could direct. All with an idea were given the opportunity to create. Strange little tales. Daft conundrums. Old stories from around the world. And sci-fi. All given creative little nudges by the Young Woman.

The production company divided and mutated finding new footing in other countries. In each collection of unneeded spaces, it was rumoured the Young Woman had a hidden office. Murmurings of slightly fantastical quiet places for the young billionaire to think.

From time to time the billionaire would appear to catch up and perhaps nudge when needed. A personal assistant familiar to everyone ran things.

Someone talented with gleaming ideas was working on something with humour. The assistant asked if they could spare some time. They walked through some passageway to a dusty out of the way part of an unneeded group of buildings and through a small unnoticed grey door. Inside was a dark space, little helpings of trash. Dusty. Cold. They could hear their footsteps as they walked toward a giant structure as though from an abandoned theme park. A decrepit cyber boot, enlarged as though missing from some giant fiberglass cyber creature. They climbed the toes and in between the giant dusty turquoise laces was a gap. Inside a desk and comfortable chairs. Here the temperature was warm, a little micro environment. The Young billionaire seated with a welcoming smile.

#bizarre story #surreal fiction #writers #new writer #experimental writing #oddity #uk writer #artist #world building #mansion #warehouse #dark story #neon lights

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deniscollins · 4 years ago

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Goldman Sachs Malaysia Arm Pleads Guilty in 1MDB Fraud

What would you do if you were a Goldman Sachs executive and an employee introduced you to a wealthy Malaysian businessman with extensive government connections known for being a flamboyant businessman wanting you to raise billions of dollars in bonds, but it was unclear how the businessman obtained his wealth: (1) make the deal and earn huge fees, (2) refuse to make the deal? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Goldman Sachs played a starring role in the dubious financial engineering that helped spark a global financial crisis last decade, and its 151-year history is dotted with scandals that ended in fines or governmental scoldings. But never before had it had to go before a U.S. judge and admit it was guilty of a crime.

The bank, one of Wall Street’s most powerful firms, admitted criminal wrongdoing by its Malaysian subsidiary on Thursday in a Brooklyn federal courtroom, bringing to a close a globe-spanning foreign bribery case that is the worst black eye in Goldman’s long history.

Goldman employees, the bank said, took part in a scheme to pay $1 billion in bribes to foreign officials. The bank, in turn, arranged the sale of bonds to raise $6.5 billion that was intended to benefit the people of Malaysia but was instead looted by the country’s leaders and their associates.

In the end, the scandal, which netted the bank a relatively paltry $600 million in fees, will cost Goldman and its current and former executives dearly. The bank itself will pay more than $5 billion in penalties to regulators around the world, more than it had to pay for peddling bonds backed by risky mortgages a decade ago. And it has moved to recoup or withhold more than $100 million in executive compensation, a rare move for a Wall Street bank.

In a statement, Goldman’s chief executive, David Solomon, said the former employees who had broken the law had concealed their actions. But he acknowledged that the bank had fallen short, and that employee subterfuge relieved neither he nor anyone else of responsibility.

“When a colleague knowingly violates a firm policy or, much worse, the law, we — as a firm — have to accept responsibility and recognize the broader failure that individual behavior represents for our firm,” he said.

Mr. Solomon and other current and former executives — including the bank’s former chief executive Lloyd Blankfein — will lose a total of $174 million over the leadership failures that took place in connection with the 1Malaysia Development Berhad fund, known as 1MDB.

“It goes with the responsibility of leadership to accept some consequences for things that go wrong on your watch,” Mr. Blankfein, who retired in 2018, said Thursday.

More than $2.7 billion was looted from the fund by powerful figures in Malaysia, including the family of the country’s prime minister at the time, Najib Razak, and Jho Low, a financier with expensive tastes who was the heist’s mastermind and remains an international fugitive.

The money taken from 1MDB funded lavish lifestyles for powerful Malaysians, including friends and family of Mr. Najib. The money bought paintings by van Gogh and Monet, a mega-yacht docked in Bali, a grand piano made of clear acrylic that was given to a supermodel as a gift, and a king’s ransom in jewelry. Pilfered money also financed a boutique hotel in Beverly Hills, a share of the EMI music publishing portfolio and the Hollywood movie “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

Karen Seymour, the bank’s general counsel, officially entered the guilty plea for Goldman’s Malaysian subsidiary, which admitted it had “knowingly and willingly” conspired to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The parent company of the bank itself entered into a three-year deferred prosecution agreement on a similar charge, which will be dismissed if Goldman complies with the deal.

While Goldman earned a reputation for ruthlessness during 2008 — its “great vampire squid” nickname still echoes in the public consciousness — it has long been a darling of authorities, and has offered something of a revolving door into public service. Hence its other nickname: “Government Sachs.”

There was little real drama associated with the 1MDB investigation’s resolution: Goldman and prosecutors spent nearly two years working out the terms, and the bank had long ago set aside money for penalties it knew were coming. Three law firms worked on the matter for the bank, and this year Goldman lobbied top officials with the Justice Department for a degree of leniency.

Dennis M. Kelleher, chief executive of Better Markets, a Wall Street watchdog, was underwhelmed by the settlement, calling it “highly favorable” to Goldman. The $2.3 billion fine, he said, is “virtually meaningless,” and he did not expect the Justice Department to show much interest in enforcing the deferred prosecution agreement.

A more serious penalty would have involved the appointment of an independent monitor to oversee the bank’s compliance procedures and a guilty plea by the bank itself, not a subsidiary.

“Goldman’s involvement with 1MDB was no ordinary crime in terms of scale, scope, consequence and egregiousness,” Mr. Kelleher said.

All told, Goldman will have to shell out billions in penalties and returned money in Malaysia, the United States and Hong Kong. The scandal also brought down Mr. Najib, the former prime minister, who is appealing his conviction in a corruption trial in Malaysia.

As part of the plea deal, Goldman has agreed to a statement of facts compiled by federal authorities that it will not be able to dispute. That document outlines a number of internal control failings at Goldman that authorities said should have detected the wrongdoing by its former employees, as well as Mr. Low’s involvement.

Mr. Low, a flamboyant businessman who had befriended many Hollywood celebrities and was known for staging wild and extravagant parties in Las Vegas, was introduced to a Goldman banker, Tim Leissner, in 2009. Mr. Leissner, the husband of the fashion designer and model Kimora Lee Simmons, began talking to Mr. Low about finding ways for Goldman to increase its business activities in Malaysia, but encountered obstacles when some at Goldman objected to Mr. Low’s becoming a client of the bank because it was unclear how he had amassed his wealth.

In early 2011, some in Goldman’s compliance division pushed back on the idea of the bank’s doing business with two of Mr. Low’s companies. Prosecutors wrote that one person at Goldman in March 2011 went so far as to say, “To be clear, we have pretty much zero appetite for a relationship with this individual.”

Even so, Mr. Leissner and Mr. Low remained connected, and Goldman earned the fund’s business. By December 2012, just a few weeks before the bank arranged a third bond deal for 1MDB, Mr. Low met with Mr. Blankfein at Goldman’s offices in New York. — just one of several meetings that top executives at the bank had with him between 2009 and 2014. One meeting, prosecutors wrote, took place on a yacht in southern France.

“Personnel at the bank allowed this scheme to proceed by overlooking or ignoring a number of clear red flags,” Brian C. Rabbitt, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s criminal division, said during a news conference.

Federal prosecutors had already brought charges against Mr. Leissner and another Goldman banker as well as Mr. Low, who is believed to be living in China. Mr. Leissner has pleaded guilty and agreed to forfeit up to $43.7 million.

Prosecutors acknowledge that Mr. Leissner was deceptive and frequently misled or lied to others at Goldman about whether he was dealing with Mr. Low. But authorities faulted Goldman for accepting those denials at “face value.”

Malaysian prosecutors also brought criminal charges against Goldman and more than a dozen executives, but the bank agreed in July to pay $2.5 billion to resolve that investigation. Goldman also pledged to cover any shortfall from the sale of $1.4 billion in assets that have been seized by prosecutors in the United States and Malaysia.

Much of the property seized belonged to Mr. Low, who has never appeared in court to face charges in the case. He has denied wrongdoing through representatives in the United States, but agreed last year to give up all claims to assets already seized by the government. Those assets, including apartments and a jet, are worth as much as $900 million. His exact whereabouts remains a mystery.

The bank’s Malaysian subsidiary is scheduled to be formally sentenced in December, allowing enough time for Goldman to secure waivers from regulatory agencies so it can operate as normal afterward, such as a fiduciary for employee pension and retirement plans.

While the legal saga is essentially over for Goldman, it will continue for some of the people involved: Mr. Leissner awaits sentencing, and the other banker charged in the United States, Roger Ng, has pleaded not guilty and awaits trial. Another former Goldman executive, Andrea Vella, has been barred from the financial industry by the Federal Reserve.

Goldman’s board said it was taking steps to recoup tens of millions of dollars in compensation from those three as well.

#Goldman Sachs #Fraud #Malaysia

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dontbreakstride · 7 years ago

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An Adventure at Annecy

Tumblr extended edition

A few years ago, I had discovered the existence of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 2015 when some of my online friends had attended it. When they shared their experience on Facebook, I knew I had to go some day.

In finishing the second year of my animation course, I felt this would be the best time for me to visit, so I planned my journey, got advice on what to see and how to get around and made my way.

Annecy is a really nice city. The main building that the Festival was hosted at Théâtre Bonlieu is just across the road from the huge open air screening, the lake and a view across to the mountain range. I was stunned by how the mountains loomed in the distance everywhere I went and everyone just went about their business. Since Norwich doesn’t have a mountain range, I was just in awe of them everywhere I went. There are also a lot of colourful buildings with grand architecture, large comfy cinema theatres and startlingly blue water.

Having never been before, and being unaware of Annecy Festival traditions, I was surprised by the amount of paper planes being thrown while the cinemas filled up. It was a completely different experience to going to the cinema any other day, and was a hard time adjusting to when I returned to England and no one was throwing paper planes and the like.

The experience at Annecy was very informative, and helped develop my ideas on my practice, which is extremely useful as I enter into third year.

WHAT I LEARNT

NEW CREATIVE CONTEXTS: A shared talk with Jean-Baptiste Spieser of Teamto and Tom Box of Blue-Zoo about current and upcoming things in the industry. The Teamto talk was about the production pipeline and how it can change radically depending on productions. The Blue Zoo talk was also quite interesting as it explained how they built and overhauled their render farm, as well as how they collaborate creatively within their studio.

The Art of Visual Storytelling with WALT DISNEY ANIMATION STUDIOS: The two speakers were Nathan Engelhardt, an animation supervisor, and story artist Lissa Treiman (who had, coincidentally, illustrated the first few issues that got me hooked to the comic GIANT DAYS). This was a massively helpful talk, very much worth the wait. The two speakers talked about how to make good shots great, through the positioning of cameras to the two cores of 'greatness' in animation – truth and entertainment.

Triggerfish's MAKING REVOLTING RHYMES: Mike Buckland and Sarah Scrimgeour of Triggerfish discussed the creative process of collaborating on the production of the short film Revolting Rhymes, including compositing and rendering.

The Art and Science of RENDERMAN: Dylan Sisson of Pixar held a talk showing the developments and potential for their Renderman renderer. It opened my eyes to the scope of things that Renderman takes into consideration, such as a recent shot in a Pixar film that had over ten thousand individually rendered lights.

VIRTUAL REALITY is the future: Google Spotlight Stories had a VR station set up with new videos daily. I managed to catch the session on Thursday which presented a preview of SON OF JAGUAR (dir. Jorge Gutierrez) and ARDEN'S WAKE: PROLOGUE (dir. Eugene Chung, Jimmy Maidens). I had never understood the true potential of VR in animation until after watching these, so much so that after I'd watched them I wandered around Annecy in a daze. Arden's Wake was especially mind blowing, as you could actually walk into the setting and see it from all angles. This has made me want to experiment with VR in my own practice.

WHAT I WATCHED

THE PEANUTS MOVIE outdoor screening: Having seen this movie before in English, I was surprised at how easy to understand it was in French. The broad animation style of the movie definitely helped.

A SILENT VOICE: A rather touching story about communication, repentance and forgiveness. Quite interestingly featured sign language in animation, which to me feels like a perfect match of two things, visual language and visual storytelling.

DESPICABLE ME 3: This is the first world premiere I have ever been to, and the atmosphere was wonderful. This was without a doubt one of the most active audiences I have ever been in. Whenever a joke hit, there would be a wave of laughter and applause, when one of the characters did something cute, there was a collective 'awww', even the applause at the end of the film ended up slipping into the same beat as the music of the credits. It was wonderful.

CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS: I never read that many Captain Underpants books when I was younger, so I was pleasantly surprised with how funny this was. Much like The Peanuts Movie, it managed to capture the style of its source really well, whilst still giving it their own flair.

ZOMBILLENIUM: An adaptation of a French graphic novel. Before the film began, the crew were on stage and threw production caps into the audience. The film was very stylish, with bold colours and shapes for the characters and making the CG look 2D.

SHORTS: I caught several showings of graduation shorts and shorts in competition. I was amazed by the diversity of shorts on display, showing the talents from animators of all walk-cycles of life. Shorts that stood out to me were the following:

Wednesday with Goddard (dir. Nicolas Menard, Canadian/UK) – a humorous and existential journey as a man tries to find answers to whether or not God exists.

vimeo

When Time Moves Faster (dir. Anna Vasof, Austria) – stop motion using objects like plates and curtains to animate sequences, showing each frame being set up in real time, then speeding up the footage to bring the sequence to life.

Double King (dir. Felix Colgrave, Australia) – there is something in seeing this on a big screen that makes it all that more fun.

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Nachthexen (dir. Julie Herdichek Baltzer, Denmark) – documentary short about the Nachthexen of WW2, animated in the style of Soviet posters

vimeo

The Burden (dir. Niki Lindroth Von Bahr, Sweden) – a musical stop motion based around anthropomorphic animals who are stuck in an anxious and existential space in their lives. Won this year's Cristal for a Short Film award

vimeo

Aenigma (dir. Antonios Doussias and Aris Fatouros, Greek) – a surreal trip through a painter's landscape mind-bendingly presented in 3D

Tuhi rumm (dir. Ulo Pikkov, Estonia) – stop motion of a doll in a doll house-like setting, has a mix of a nostalgic and haunting feeling

Casino (dir. Steven Woloshen, Canada) – a musical, energetic drawn-on-film animation capturing the frenetic energy of a casino

vimeo

After All – Michael Cusack (Australia) – a very poignant stop motion film about a man going through his recently-deceased mother's belongings and reliving memories he had, very heart-rendering but with the occasional splash of humour

TIPS FROM MY EXPERIENCE

Take care of yourself: In the height of summer in the south-east of France, Annecy is hot. But when you are standing, walking, waiting and surrounded by other people who are also hot, the heat becomes unbearable (so much so that my watch had condensation on it at several points). Drink lots of water, try to keep in the shade when waiting outside, remember to eat.

Learn key phrases in France: This is something I'm going to try and pick up should I go again. I used to know quite a bit of French, but having forgot most of it, struggled at points of my visit. A lot of the hosts are bilingual should you have any questions, but knowing the sound of general phrases and what they mean is helpful in a pinch.

Beat the crowd: The Festival's 'first come first seated' events will fill up fast, and the queues for the screening events might result in you not getting in if you don't book a place during ticketing. The 'first come first serve' events that I missed were with popular big names, such as a talk with Guillermo del Toro and another with the creators of The Amazing World of Gumball and Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, which I am still kicking myself over, so be sure to arrive early for those.

Patience is a virtue: The queueing process at Annecy is quite arduous, but the wait is always worth it. I got into the talk with Walt Disney Animation Studios by waiting two hours earlier. It pays off very much.

Be tactical: Annecy is a big festival in a big city. Events conflict and travel times might be longer than you expect if you are travelling by foot or if you need to retrace your steps. When it comes down to seeing a mainstream film or a studio focus talk, choose which one would be a more informative experience. This links in well with taking care of yourself too. If you haven't eaten or drank anything for a while and you are thinking of joining a queue for something that needs you to wait for an hour and a half in the sun, it's better to take care of yourself first and foremost.

If you can, go in a group: Not only will this be a 'strength in numbers' type deal, where you can book into the same events and wait together in the queue and tap out should you need to get food, but this experience is one to share if you are enthusiastic about animation and the like.

Don't be afraid to try: I hate plane travel. I knew very limited French. I have the worst sense of direction in the world at times. But I went to Annecy regardless of these things and actually had a brilliant time.

#my writing #annecy

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