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aion-rsa · 4 years

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The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Episode 1: Marvel and MCU Easter Eggs

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This article contains Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier episode 1 spoilers, possibly spoilers for future episodes, and the wider MCU. We have a spoiler free review here.

Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier episode 1 has finally arrived on Disney+. Now, those of you hoping for mystery box storytelling and surreal weirdness the likes of which we got from WandaVision may be a little disappointed. But those of you looking for some gritty street-and-spy-level action with a deeper look at life in the post-Snap/Blip MCU, well, you’re in luck.

Oh? But you’re here for Marvel Comics and MCU Easter eggs, you say? Well, you’re still in luck, friend! The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is full of subtle nods to Marvel and Captain America history, and continues to connect the dots in the ever-expanding MCU.

Here’s everything we found…and if you spot something we missed, let us know in the comments!

Sam Wilson

The stuff with Sam ironing his own shirt, or trying to help his sister get a small business loan is some real “the mundanity of superhero life” stuff that we rarely get a glimpse of in the movies, but that was such a hallmark of what separated Marvel Comics from their competitors in their early days.

In the MCU, Sam is from Louisiana. But in the comics, he was born and raised in Harlem, New York City.

Sam’s sister, Sarah Wilson, also known as Sarah Casper, was introduced back in Captain America #134 back in 1971, and created by Stan Lee and Gene Colan. She’s made only a few appearances over the decades and mainly exists for the novelty of having the patriotic superhero be known as “Uncle Sam.”

The boat that Sam’s sister maintains is named Paul and Darlene, named for their parents, and those were indeed the names of his parents in the pages of Marvel Comics.

Sam’s drop out of the back of the airplane at the start of the Captain Vassant rescue mission mirrors Steve’s in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

The MCU’s version of Bubo is also back in action! Redwing is still very helpful during Sam’s “government contracts” it appears, as long as no one else messes with the drone’s wires. Also, Sam’s personal devotion to the Redwing drone is a nice nod to the fact that Redwing is a real falcon in the comics, and Sam’s pet/buddy.

Sam gets to have a sombre conversation with James “War Machine” Rhodes (Don Cheadle) in what is perhaps just the first of many unannounced The Falcon and the Winter Soldier appearances by other members of the MCU. We already know there will be a larger role for Sharon “Agent 13” Carter in later episodes. Who else might show up?

Bucky Barnes

Fittingly for his Marvel spinoff series, Bucky is introduced in the same way he was back in Captain America: The First Avenger – catching the tail end of an alleyway fight.

Bucky Barnes has now been pardoned for all the terrible crimes he committed, it’s quickly revealed. Doesn’t look like he’s pardoned himself, mind. Not by a long shot.

Bucky mentions having a sister. While it hasn’t been brought up much, he did have one in the comics. Rebecca Barnes was introduced in The Marvel Holiday Special #1 in a story written by Len Kaminski (hence the notebook Easter egg, which we’ll get to in a minute) and tremendously underrated ’90s comics artist Ron Lim. After the deaths of their parents, Bucky and Rebecca were separated. Her namesake was reintroduced during Heroes Reborn, where Rikki Barnes was Cap’s sidekick in Counter-Earth.

In Derek Landy’s new Falcon & Winter Soldier comics, Bucky has adopted a very chill white cat called Alpine. No sign of Alpine in episode one, but we refuse to give up hope.

Lieutenant Torres

The eager Lt. Torres (played by On My Block star Danny Ramirez) who clearly idolizes Sam appears to be none other than Joaquin Torres, who eventually took on the mantle of the Falcon in the comics. So if Sam is destined to become Captain America on this show, will Torres become his sidekick? We hope so!

Batroc

Just like at the start of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, we get a confrontation with Georges Batroc (ze leaper!), once again played by Georges St. Pierre. Batroc is such a cool but minor Cap villain, and we never need to spend a lot of time with him, but we do hope he keeps showing up from time to time for cool fight scenes, just like he does in the comics. It’s nice to see that while they’ll never give him his ridiculous comics costume, he’s wearing his comics-appropriate colors here.

The Flag-Smashers

The masked baddies of this episode are known as the Flag-Smashers, an organization who want to do away with all national borders. There’s lots of ways this show deals with the weirdness of the MCU after the Snap, but the increasing radicalization of underground supervillain groups appears to be one neat side effect.

They take their name from the comic book supervillain Flag-Smasher (singular). Flag-Smasher was created by Cap writer supreme Mark Gruenwald and artist Paul Neary back in 1985. The original Flag-Smasher was Karl Morgenthau (remember that name, we’ll come back to it in a second), and he was a non-powered costumed terrorist who led an organization known as ULTIMATUM, “The Underground Liberated Totally Integrated Mobile Army To Unite Mankind” (folks, ‘80s Captain America comics absolutely freakin’ RULE).

The woman handing out the Flag Smasher masks was tough to make out, but that appears to be was Erin Kellyman (Enfys Nest from Solo: A Star Wars Story) playing “Karli Morgenthau.” In other words, she’s probably the leader of the organization, not the big, scary dude with super soldier strength. But speaking of him…

The big scary guy is credited as “Dovich” and he’s played by Desmond Chiam. How did he get so strong? Well, the words “Power Broker Watching” appear in the credits, and the Power Broker was key to John Walker getting his super soldier strength, as well as several other minor Marvel characters. Remember what we said about how awesome ’80s Captain America comics are? You’re about to find out!

Sam’s crack about “bad guys” with “bad names” in regards to the Flag-Smashers also applies to real world nitwits who go around calling themselves names like “Proud Boys.”

Bucky’s Notebook

There are some standout names in Bucky’s notebook, notably L. Kaminski (probably ‘80s Marvel writer and editor Len Kaminski) and H. Zemo (as in Captain America: Civil War and this very show’s baddie Helmut Zemo).

We wrote more about those names here.

Captain America

In the Smithsonian exhibit where Sam and Rhodey chat, there are lots of artifacts from Steve’s life, mostly taken from the era of Captain America: The First Avenger like the Howling Commando uniforms, but there’s something else cool there: the actual cover of Captain America Comics #1 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the first appearance of the character. Remember, as part of the propaganda effort during the war to make Captain America a symbol of the wartime effort in the MCU, these comics were a thing. This means that Joe Simon and Jack Kirby also existed in the MCU, but their stories were meant to be chronicles about a real person.

Where’s Steve Rogers?

It seems that only a few people might know what really happened to Steve Rogers. Has Old Cap now passed on, or is he alive somewhere ready to make an appearance in the show at a later date? Many fans are still hoping for a Chris Evans cameo, and we’ve seen trailers for the series where Sam and Bucky apparently practice throwing Cap’s shield around out in the woods. Perhaps there’s a secluded cabin nearby…

The conspiracy theory about Captain America secretly watching us from the moon is likely a reference to Nick Fury in the comics. The events of Original Sin showed that Fury had been secretly waging wars on potential alien invaders for years. Uatu the Watcher put a series of events in motion so that he would die, but Fury’s immoral actions would be exposed. In the end, Fury was forced to become the new Watcher — the Unseen — and was imprisoned on the moon, looking over Earth as his new job. Coincidentally, Bucky took up his alien-fighting job in the aftermath.

It also feels a little like The Last Avengers Story, a dystopian Avengers comic from the mid-90s. It’s explained that at some point, Steve Rogers was President and was assassinated. In the final scene, it’s revealed that he’s been secretly recovering and has been watching over the world in a bunker.

Who is the New Captain America?

The new Captain America that we meet so briefly here is Wyatt Russell as John Walker. Who is John Walker, you ask? Well, John Walker was ALSO the new Captain America in the comics! But before that he was the reactionary supervillain known as the Super-Patriot. He took over the mantle of Captain America after the government decided they wanted Steve Rogers to be more of an employee and less a free agent symbol of liberty. After his time as Cap was up, John became the U.S.Agent. That’s all you’re gonna get out of us for now, for fear of spoilers.

You can read more about John Walker here.

Unanswered Questions

No, we don’t know who the L.A.F. are supposed to be, either.

The “government official” who introduces John Walker is played by Alphie Hyorth, and is simply credited as “government official” in the credits. That seems pretty suspicious to us, and we wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up being revealed with a recognizable Marvel Universe name like Henry Peter Gyrich or something down the line.

Names like Captain Vassant, Congressman Lockhart, Senator Atwood, or Bucky’s therapist Dr. Raynor appear to check out Marvel-wise.

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whatcouldgowrong-ohthat · 4 years

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Okay heres the thought (which you can totally ignore) each team gets a reroll. Half the team stays, half the team gets moved. Who would you move from each team and where would they go?

So I did something a little different. I spun a wheel and let it mix up the babies XD I filled out all the names on wheeldecide, kept the siblings together, and with each spin - a team got a person. So team 1 then 2, etc etc.

Let’s see what happens!!!

Team 1 Elena Lokisdaughter (Damn she is determined to stay here, huh?) Sasha and Terrance Wilson (were first on team 2) Lena Parker (some things really don’t change) Oscar Danvers (whoa, the teams are really breaking up) Timothy and Carol Rogers (We are destined to have Rogers’ kids on team 1, huh?) Maggie Howlett (Dawwww a Howlett. FINALLY) N’Dazhne (boy was meant to be on team 1) Henriette Thorsdaughter (Elena and Henri are determined to stay in the same verse)

Team 2 Luka Barnes (was Team 3) Georgina Strange (previously seen on team 5) T’Chane Parker (awwww he’s got a team!!!) Jilian Stark (from team 1 to team 2!) Frigga Lokisdaughter (oh, i feel bad for T’Chane XD) Melina Banner (Look at our little Brainiac getting on a team) Jensen Barton (Miss Natasha, you got two very different kids in this world) Irene Danvers (from team 5 to team 2!)

Team 3 Eerca Quill (on a team now!) Nathan Barton (Damn, bit stubborn, huh?) Carson Lang (awww he’s on a team!! my baby!!!) Amanda Wilson (Oh, i love it!!) Jorund Lokisson (dude, the teams are shattering!! From 2 to 3) Tyrkir Thorsson (okay, but him and Jorund on the same team? HA!) Riley Parker (she was on team 1, but no more!) Benjamin Rogers (from team 2 to team 3)

Team 4 Sebastian Strange (on a team now!) Mila Stark (bumped from team 3 apparently XD) Michael Maximoff (some of these are just so stubborn) Unnem Munroe (bumped up from team 5 o.o) Elizabeth Barnes (really, some things never change) David and Lewis Lang (bro, we got a crazy team here XD) Vivian Lewis (oh, the snark master) Jamie Rogers (dudes, look!!! He’s on a team!!)

Team 5 Renae Wilson (initially on Team 3) Samuel and Katiya Rogers (the siblings from team 1, now on team 5) Cori Palmer-Strange (Was on team 1!!) Astri Danvers (we got a lot of new peeps on teams now!!) Emma Thorsdaughter (from team 4 to team 5, we really breaking that team apart) Regina Wilson (another Wilson kid!! Dang Sam o.o) N’Dare Howlett (another Howlett! look i love them XD) Rebecca Barnes (made the board!!)

So what do we think????

#marvel kiddos #marvel au #marvel #mcu #marvel ask

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daggerzine · 4 years

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You Gotta Lose? Hell, Some Of Us Ain’t Dead Yet by Mary Leary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0fz3FVBlOE

NRBQ has done so many amazing songs. I never thought much about “Roll Call,” from Tiddlywinks - for one thing, it has a lighter, almost Billy Joel sound that’s more about latter day Terry Adams style than what I think of as the classic Q. Yet just as Adams’ work has grown on me, this track has made its way into my consciousness. The lyrics speak to me more in 2020 than they did when Tiddlywinks was released in 1980, before the D.C.-area music scene had lost Robert Goldstein (Urban Verbs), Kevin MacDonald (brilliant visual artist and scene stalwart who helped me design and layout [The] Infiltrator), Danny Gatton disciple/guitar maverick Evan Johns, bassist Michael Maye from the original H-Bombs, Rick Dreyfuss (Half Japanese/Chumps/Shakemore), Libby Hatch and Michael Mariotte (Tru Fax and the Insaniacs), Sally Be/Berg - REM/Egoslavia/SHE/Robert Palmer), Nurses member Marc Halpern (heroin, 1982), Lorenzo (Pee- Wee) Jones (Tiny Desk Unit) and hybrid rocker Jim Altman (HIV, 1990s). Goldstein, Dreyfuss, Maye and MacDonald succumbed to cancer, while Evan Johns’ deterioration followed years of touring, hard drinking and pushing himself past the limit.

(Top to bottom: Tommy Keene, Kevin MacDonald, Susan Mumford)

Those named above have been joined by Tommy Keene (the Rage/the Razz/solo/Paul Westerberg/Matthew Sweet - cardiac arrest at the age of 59; 2017), TDU’s Susan Mumford (cancer, 2018), David Byers (Psychotics/H.R./Bad Brains), and Skip Groff (Yesterday and Today/ Limp Records/Dischord - seizure, 2019). This is just an imperfect/incomplete naming of D.C.-area losses - I’m sure journalists from other cities could make lists. A horde of New Wave and early alternative musicians have died within the past few years. Whether through the stress of hard living/poverty, substance abuse, cancer or Covid-19, we’re seeing artists pass much earlier than I, anyway, expected them to.

(Top to bottom: Fred "Freak” Smith, Michael Maye with Evan Johns, Tru Fax and the Insaniacs)

We’re already past the loss of all the original Ramones. All the Cramps less Poison Ivy. Joe Strummer. Robert Quine. Hilly Kristal. Lou Reed. As of July, 2020, since 2018 we’ve also lost Andy Gill, Ivan Kral, Genesis P-Orridge, Adam Schlesinger, Danny Mihm, Ric Ocasek, Daniel Johnston, Kim Shattuck, Lorna Doom, Mark Hollis, Keith Flint, Ranking Roger, Mark E. Smith, Glenn Branca, Randy Rampage, Hardy Fox, Pete Shelley, Matthew Seligman, Bill Rieflin, Dave Greenfield, Florian Schneider, Ian Dury, Benjamin Orr, Kirsty McColl and David Roback.

(Top to bottom: Sally Be/Berg, Ranking Roger, Danny Mihm)

Talking about the deaths of talented, gifted creatives is a helluva way to start a column. But here we are. Older performers don’t always get the attention afforded newer, so the rest of this piece shares and celebrates artists from the original New Wave/punk scenes who are still around and active. Many are from the D.C.-area cornucopia I know best, while others have just come to my attention, or seem especially noteworthy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MED9_XK_JVQ

The Zeros’ Javier Escovedo has been steadily emitting tasty Americana-ish rock while occasionally dropping some Zeros sturm-’n’-drang - most recently with Munster Records single “In The Spotlight” and a track on Burger Records’ Quarantunes compilation. Quarantunes is a seven-album affair featuring 140 alternative/punk performers old and new, all of whom wrote songs between March-April 2020. A cursory listen to Volume 2 reveals the recorded version of a good night at a very wild bar, with Zeros still handily kicking ass of all ages.

https://velvetmonkeys.bandcamp.com/album/legacy-of-success?fbclid=IwAR0lJyS0YDE4e3o7LJiITEtw1lhBWMkUX47Vuag1Lf9fs2QozJJKD1lwkes

Velvet Monkeys/B.A.L.L. player and Sonic Youth/Teenage Fanclub producer Don Fleming reports, “We’ve put out new tracks ‘Theories of Rummanetics’ and ‘Legacy of Success.’ Jay has written a few ‘modules’ and Malcolm and I are having fun doing the music,” adding, “I play some electric six string on the new Rob Moss album - it’s fun to be on, with lots of guitar slingers from the DC daze.”

Yup, Rob Moss of Skin-Tight Skin has solicited contributions from Fleming and from Marshall Keith (Slickee Boys), along with a pile of talent including Stuart Casson (Psychotics/Dove/Meatmen), Franz Stahl (Foo Fighters/Scream), Billy Loosigian (Nervous Eaters, the Boom-Boom Band), Nels Cline (Wilco) and Saul Koll (the guy who made guitars for Henry Kaiser and Lee Ranaldo). The set is called We’ve Come Back To Rock ‘n’ Roll.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdIB8a_0Q4c

Chumps/Workdogs/Jam Messengers player Rob Kennedy apparently has too much energy to throw in the towel - he’s kept recording, performing and making various sorts of lo-fi, DIY mischief that never loses that fresh, ‘70s feeling. Jam Messengers released Night And Day on vinyl in 2017. One of my fave Kennedy tracks, “A Low Down Dirty Shame” speaks to this moment as well as any.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-CRBEGVLE4

Former Tiny Desk Unit/Fuji’s Navy/Rhoda & the Bad Seeds members Bob Boilen, Kevin Lay, Michael Barron and Bob Harvey have released a new Danger Painters joint, Thank Speak Love This Record. Lay joked, “I have a voice made for Morse Code” before revealing his recent work with Rhoda and the Bad Seeds material, released June 30 as Live at Nightclub 9:30. Boilen continues to introduce artists both vital and obscure via Tiny Desk Concerts and All Songs Considered/NPR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejQ1GajwfB0

I’ve seen David Arnson play recently and can attest to his proclivity for unfettered growth via Insect Surfers, the instrumental group that originally had some trouble establishing cred. with younger D.C. punks. The Surfers’ most recent release was Living Fossils (2019). Arnson celebrated the band’s 40 years of existence with a European tour in 2019.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SkIuWIZVkM

Jad Fair says, “Half Japanese will have a new album released in November on Fire Records.” Jad’s art was recently featured at the Hiromart Gallery/Tokyo, while David has created a Facebook page where fans can pick up his colorful images for, well, mere bags o’ shells, as far as we can see - https://www.facebook.com/David-Fair-Painting-107055447700859/

Despite health issues for several members, Bad Brains has collaborated with Element to make BB themed skate wear https://www.elementbrand.com/mens-collection-bad-brains/ and added some killer live tracks to its YouTube channel.

Former WGTB programmers John Paige and Steve Lorber have been presenting Rock Continuum on WOWD-LP FM 94.3 since 2017.

Mike Stax continues to give excellent motivation for hunting down a pair of Beatle boots - Munster released the Loons’ 7” EP, A Dream In Jade Green, last year. The latest issue of Ugly Things, said by Stax to be heavily focused on the Pretty Things’ Phil May, was reported in early July to be nearing publication.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6jSc7gEAv0

Razz (the) Documentary will tell the story of how an uncommonly combustible rock band - especially with the Bill Craig/Abaad Behram line-up - helped spread the Flamin’ Groovies gospel while throwing down oddly compelling originals and taking the two-guitar thing up several notches - the producers are purportedly seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Whether anyone can ever recreate the experience of being in an altered state via obsessive, sometimes conversational repetition of certain chords, anchored by Ted Nicely rethinking just what can be done with a bass guitar, given girth by Doug Tull’s intuitive drumming; with Mike Reidy the heat-seeking missile somewhere near the center... well, I doubt it. ‘Cause at this point you’re feeling no pain and it’s not about drinking; there is no room for anything but water - the beer will be knocked over when you’re this busy matching David Arnson’s other-side-of-the-front-line’s leaps into joydum while PCP’d out yahoos from the sticks learn the hard way that hugging Marshall amps can lead to lifelong repercussions. There (in case nothing I want to say about [the] Razz makes it into the film) - I’ve said it.

Discussions among old friends have confirmed that I’m not alone in being happily surprised at this development - we never expected our actions - which led to the hardcore explosion that’s received a lot more attention... would ever make it into any history book. Yet coverage of many of the D.C.-area musicians featured in this piece also comes with Punk The Capitol, A History of D.C. Punk and Hardcore, 1976-1983. Spring 2021 is the projected date for streaming/DVD release.

Ivan Julian came back from a scary 2015 bout with cancer to do a show in New York in 2016. The cancer has returned. Friends have organized a GoFundMe to raise money for surgery and basic needs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDB_3by-xkI

The Shakemore fest also refuses to fade, promising “eight hours of streaming steaming video” on August 1. Sounds will be provided by R. Stevie Moore, Velvet Monkeys, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, Half Japanese, Johnny Spampinato, Weird Paul and the Chumps, among many, many others.

Despite having played at CBGB and other alternative venues in 1979, at the height of the New Wave, Gary Wilson’s work is so distinctive, he’s rarely been included with any musical genre other than the oft-vague “experimental” category. Folks were too unmoored by his visceral performances to get behind him. Wilson’s 14th album, Tormented, was released by Cleopatra in February.

Paul Collins recently published a book that he wrote with Chuck Nolan; I Don’t Fit In: My Wild Ride Through the Punk and Power Pop Trenches with the Nerves and the Beat (Hozac Books).

As “Heath,” Michael Layne Heath, a journalist who contributed to (the) Infiltrator and many other ‘zines, published My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters with Lou Reed in May (Hat & Beard Press).

In April, X released its first album in 35 years; Alphabetland.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1I-laItPI

As exciting for me as any of the above is Richard Hell with the Heartbreakers’ 2019 release of Yonkers Demo 1976. Hell’s “You Gotta Lose” is one of my picks for best punk/new wave singles of all time. The Heartbreakers version is, predictably, messier than the Robert Quine guitar-spiked classic. Its more excessive charms are growing on me...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48QnsysCN_A

This piece could go on and on - compiling it has been exhausting. The best part has been the response to my social media call for any info I didn’t have re: the D.C.-centric scene I left for New York in 1983. Musicians anxious to keep their compadres’ names alive have hammered that post with 138 comments to date. Urban Verbs percussionist Danny Frankel, who’s played with a colorful spread of artists including Beck, Marianne Faithful, Lou Reed, John Cale and k.d. Lang, made a point of being sure I knew about the passing of Marc Halpern, a source of obvious pain. People were worried I wouldn’t mention John Stabb (Government Issue - 2016), rockabilly player Billy Hancock (2018), Fred “Freak” Smith (Strange Boutique/Beefeater - murdered in Los Angeles, 2017), John Hansen (Slickee Boys - 2010), record store owner/Wasp Records starter/music supporter Bill Asp, Jimmy Barnett of The Killer Bees, and David Byers.

One of the hardest for me to write about is Chris Morse, whose 1984 passing from a drug overdose wrenched so many - I managed to get an obituary into, I think, The New York Rocker (that physical trek was part of a long-ago blur; a very hot day of traipsing over steaming concrete in a narrow-skirted dress to deliver the copy). Chris popped up in my dreams for years - one “visitation” pushed me to write a poem about it in the ‘90s. Morse, who played in Rhoda & The Bad Seeds and worked as a doorman at The Pyramid after moving to NYC in the early ‘80s, was on one of the Urban Verbs’ early flyers. I’m on another.

(Top to bottom: Me in an early Verbs flyer/photo shot at the Atlantis; Chris Morse on another Verbs flyer)

I ended up getting so burnt out on the responsibility of populating this sad roll call, I’ve started a memorial page for them all on Facebook. The nature of truly alternative music is such that many of its lights still fail to fill the pages of major publications. Many of these lights gave a great deal of their lives, if not everything, for the art they believed in. It’s good to remember them, and those heady early days. It’s good to enjoy what we still can.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA3IfK76mmI

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racingtoaredlight · 4 years

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RTARL’s 2020 NFL Season Week 15 Extravapalooza

It’ll be difficult for anything that happens during an NFL game to dethrone the play from last night’s utterly meaningless Ole Miss-LSU game where Mississippi QB Matt Corral absolutely trucked an official (and fumbled the ball in the process) as my personal highlight of the weekend. I mean, look at this photo of the aftermath:

It’s quite an appropriate distillation of 2020, really. An older man who’s been turned into an angel by a young person completely unwilling to alter the plan he’d made. The representation of rules and authority being utterly trampled. The apparatus tasked with overseeing things failing to react to the danger until it was too late. That’s art, baby. Or maybe it’s just a funny play where a guy fell down and went boom.

My picks are in BOLD, and the lines come to us courtesy of our friends at Vegas Insider. I use the “VI Consensus” line, which is the line that occurs most frequently across Vegas Insider’s list of sportsbooks. Your sportsbook of choice may offer a different number, and if you’d like my opinion on said number A) you are insane, and B) leave a comment below and I’ll try to answer at some point before things kickoff today.

EARLY GAMES

Seattle Seahawks (-6.5) at Washington Football Team

The Football Team’s defense is plenty good enough to hold Russell Wilson and the boys relatively in check. The problem is, I don’t think the Football Team offense missing RB Antonio Gibson and relying on Dwayne Haskins at QB can put up enough points to keep pace with even a moderately scuffling Seattle team

Tampa Bay Buccaneers (-6.5) at Atlanta Falcons

Once again, my “Do Not Pick the Falcons Against a Good Team If Julio Jones Is Out” rule is in play.

San Francisco 49ers (-3) at Dallas Cowboys

Niners QB Nick Mullens has been a turnover factory in recent weeks, which sounds delicious, but is actually detrimental to winning football games. Luckily for San Fran, this week the gorgeously precise brutality of Kyle Shanahan’s running game gets to face a Dallas defense that sits dead last in the NFL in Yards Per Carry allowed. This does not portend well for the Cowboys, in my opinion. The unspeakable horrors that the San Francisco ground-game will wreak on Dallas combined with the fact that their defense gets to tee off on Andy Dalton should lead to an easy cover for the road team.

Chicago Bears at Minnesota Vikings (-3)

These teams met roughly a month ago in a truly abominable 19-13 crapfest won by the Vikings. Nick Foles was quarterbacking the Bears for that one, but this time.....

...is in the saddle. For comedy’s sake I’m actively rooting for Mitchell Trubisky to play out of his mind in these last few games. Minnesota’s very “meh” pass defense should help my dreams come true.

Detroit Lions at Tennessee Titans (-9.5)

In another case of a terrifying rushing attack going up against a soft defense, here we have Derrick Henry gunning for a 2,000 yard season against a Lions defense that isn’t Cowboys-level bad, but it ain’t great. Lions QB Matthew Stafford is beat up once again, as he’s listed as questionable with a rib injury. He’s most likely going to play because he’s tough as hell, but I have no clue how effective he can be with busted ribs, torn thumb ligaments, and a missing Kenny Golladay.

Houston Texans at Indianapolis Colts (-7.5)

The Colts have looked great recently, winning 4 of their last 5, and the Texans are coming off of a TERRIBLE loss to the Bears. This seems like a great time for a classic “Philip Rivers’ Team Inexplicably Gags Against a Weaker Opponent” game. Houston is getting WR Brandin Cooks back for this one, which will be a big boost to their offense. I’m really putting a lot of faith in DeShaun Watson to do a bunch of cool shit here.

New England Patriots at Miami Dolphins (-1.5)

A rookie QB facing a Bill Belichick defense for the first time is gonna be a no from me, dawg. This game will likely be HIDEOUS to watch if you like scoring, as I don’t expect the New England offense to be able to do a whole hell of a lot against Miami’s defense, either.

Jacksonville Jaguars at Baltimore Ravens (-13)

I think there’s a good chance the Ravens will be a little flat for this one coming off of their huge Monday Night Football win over the Browns. Gardner Minshew is back at QB for the Jags, and I think he makes their passing game respectable enough that Baltimore won’t be able to completely zero in on extra-studly RB James Robinson. I still think the Ravens will probably win, but it’ll be closer than 13.

LATE GAMES

Philadelphia Eagles at Arizona Cardinals (-6.5)

BIRD BATTLE! At first glance, it seems like Kyler Murray and the Cardinals got back on track last week with a 26-7 beatdown of the Giants. HOWEVAH, the Giants only had 159 yards of offense (81 yards passing!) in that game, as it was a complete disaster for them on that side of the ball. Sure, the Arizona defense deserves some credit for that, but a bed-shitting like that falls more on the owner of the butt. THE ANUS IS ON THEM. This was a bad metaphor. Anyway, the Cardinals offense saw four drives stall out and end in field goals and their overall numbers weren’t all that impressive. They’ll need to be much better to cover 6.5 against an apparently rejuvenated Eagles team.

New York Jets at Los Angeles Rams (-17)

It’s really a testament to how unspeakably poor the Jets organization is that I didn’t have to think all that hard about laying over 2 TDs in an NFL game. This season has truly been a work of art. The art is more in the vein of a John Wayne Gacy clown painting as opposed to a Claude Monet, but still.

Kansas City Chiefs (-3) at New Orleans Saints

They must’ve wrapped Drew Brees up in CopperFit bracelets like a mummy to get him able to play in this game with 11 broken ribs. I’d be more worried about the busted ribs affecting a QB who can actually break a pane of glass with his throws when healthy. Brees has already adapted to having a little pea-shooter out there, so I don’t think it’s that big a deal (VERY easy for me to say). BUT, I have a likely galaxy-brained take that the Saints would have a better shot in this particular game with Taysom Hill at QB. Hill’s ability to scramble and pick up 1st downs with his legs would be a major help if the goal is to keep Patrick Mahomes off the field as much as possible. I worry that without Michael Thomas, Drew Brees is going to have to rely entirely too much on the likes of Jared Cook for anyone’s liking.

SNF: Cleveland Browns (-6.5) at New York Giants

The Giants will be starting Colt McCoy at quarterback for this game, which delights Myles Garrett. I like Myles Garrett; he’s my favorite player to ever yank a guy’s helmet off and try to commit a murder with it.

MNF: Pittsburgh Steelers (-14.5) at Cincinnati Bengals

This game is so horrendous is might drive Louis Riddick to take a job with the Lions.

Last Week’s Record: 9-6

Season Record: 91-97-6

#Sports!#Football #NFL #Gambling

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2dizzle · 7 years

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gay?

Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term was originally used to mean “carefree”, “happy”, or “bright and showy”.

The term’s use as a reference to homosexuality may date as early as the late 19th century, but its use gradually increased in the 20th century.[1] In modern English, gay has come to be used as an adjective, and as a noun, referring to the people, especially to gay males, and the practices and cultures associated with homosexuality. By the end of the 20th century, the word gay was recommended by major LGBT groups and style guides to describe people attracted to members of the same sex.[2][3]

At about the same time, a new, pejorative use became prevalent in some parts of the world. Among younger speakers, the word has a meaning ranging from derision (e.g., equivalent to rubbish or stupid) to a light-hearted mockery or ridicule (e.g., equivalent to weak, unmanly, or lame). In this use, the word rarely means “homosexual”, as it is often used, for example, to refer to an inanimate object or abstract concept of which one disapproves. The extent to which these usages still retain connotations of homosexuality has been debated and harshly criticized.[4][5]

The word gay arrived in English during the 12th century from Old French gai, most likely deriving ultimately from a Germanicsource.[1] In English, the word’s primary meaning was “joyful”, “carefree”, “bright and showy”, and the word was very commonly used with this meaning in speech and literature. For example, the optimistic 1890s are still often referred to as the Gay Nineties. The title of the 1938 French ballet Gaîté Parisienne (“Parisian Gaiety”), which became the 1941 Warner Brothers movie, The Gay Parisian,[7] also illustrates this connotation. It was apparently not until the 20th century that the word began to be used to mean specifically “homosexual”, although it had earlier acquired sexual connotations.[1]

The derived abstract noun gaiety remains largely free of sexual connotations and has, in the past, been used in the names of places of entertainment; for example W.B. Yeats heard Oscar Wilde lecture at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin.[8]

Sexualization

The word may have started to acquire associations of immorality as early as the 14th century, but had certainly acquired them by the 17th.[1] By the late 17th century it had acquired the specific meaning of “addicted to pleasures and dissipations”,[9] an extension of its primary meaning of “carefree” implying “uninhibited by moral constraints”. A gay woman was a prostitute, a gay man a womanizer, and a gay house a brothel.[1] The use of gay to mean “homosexual” was often an extension of its application to prostitution: a gay boy was a young man or boy serving male clients.[10] Similarly, a gay cat was a young male apprenticed to an older hobo, commonly exchanging sex and other services for protection and tutelage.[1] The application to homosexuality was also an extension of the word’s sexualized connotation of “carefree and uninhibited”, which implied a willingness to disregard conventional or respectable sexual mores. Such usage, documented as early as the 1920s, was likely present before the 20th century,[1] although it was initially more commonly used to imply heterosexually unconstrained lifestyles, as in the once-common phrase “gay Lothario”,[11] or in the title of the book and film The Gay Falcon (1941), which concerns a womanizing detective whose first name is “Gay”. Similarly, Fred Gilbert and G. H. MacDermott’s music hall song of the 1880s, “Charlie Dilke Upset the Milk” – “Master Dilke upset the milk/When taking it home to Chelsea;/ The papers say that Charlie’s gay/Rather a wilful wag!” – referred to Sir Charles Dilke’s alleged heterosexual impropriety.[12] Giving testimony in court in 1889, the rentboy John Saul stated: “I occasionally do odd-jobs for different gay people.”[13] Well into the mid 20th century a middle-aged bachelor could be described as “gay”, indicating that he was unattached and therefore free, without any implication of homosexuality. This usage could apply to women too. The British comic strip Jane, first published in the 1930s, described the adventures of Jane Gay. Far from implying homosexuality, it referred to her free-wheeling lifestyle with plenty of boyfriends (while also punning on Lady Jane Grey).

A passage from Gertrude Stein’s Miss Furr & Miss Skeene (1922) is possibly the first traceable published use of the word to refer to a homosexual relationship. According to Linda Wagner-Martin (Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and her Family (1995)) the portrait “featured the sly repetition of the word gay, used with sexual intent for one of the first times in linguistic history,” and Edmund Wilson (1951, quoted by James Mellow in Charmed Circle (1974)) agreed.[14] For example:

They were … gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, … they were quite regularly gay.

The word continued to be used with the dominant meaning of “carefree”, as evidenced by the title of The Gay Divorcee (1934), a musical film about a heterosexual couple.

Bringing Up Baby (1938) was the first film to use the word gay in apparent reference to homosexuality. In a scene in which the Cary Grant character’s clothes have been sent to the cleaners, he is forced to wear a woman’s feather-trimmed robe. When another character asks about his robe, he responds, “Because I just went gay all of a sudden!” Since this was a mainstream film at a time when the use of the word to refer to cross-dressing (and, by extension, homosexuality) would still be unfamiliar to most film-goers, the line can also be interpreted to mean, “I just decided to do something frivolous.”[15]

In 1950, the earliest reference found to date for the word gay as a self-described name for homosexuals comes from Alfred A. Gross, executive secretary for the George W. Henry Foundation, who said in the June 1950 issue of SIR magazine: “I have yet to meet a happy homosexual. They have a way of describing themselves as gay but the term is a misnomer. Those who are habitues of the bars frequented by others of the kind, are about the saddest people I’ve ever seen.”[16]

Shift to specifically homosexual

By the mid-20th century, gay was well established in reference to hedonistic and uninhibited lifestyles[9] and its antonym straight, which had long had connotations of seriousness, respectability, and conventionality, had now acquired specific connotations of heterosexuality.[17] In the case of gay, other connotations of frivolousness and showiness in dress (“gay apparel”) led to association with camp and effeminacy. This association no doubt helped the gradual narrowing in scope of the term towards its current dominant meaning, which was at first confined to subcultures. Gay was the preferred term since other terms, such as queer, were felt to be derogatory.[18]Homosexual is perceived as excessively clinical,[19][20][21] since the sexual orientation now commonly referred to as “homosexuality” was at that time a mental illness diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

In mid-20th century Britain, where male homosexuality was illegal until the Sexual Offences Act 1967, to openly identify someone as homosexual was considered very offensive and an accusation of serious criminal activity. Additionally, none of the words describing any aspect of homosexuality were considered suitable for polite society. Consequently, a number of euphemisms were used to hint at suspected homosexuality. Examples include “sporty” girls and “artistic” boys,[22] all with the stress deliberately on the otherwise completely innocent adjective.

The sixties marked the transition in the predominant meaning of the word gay from that of “carefree” to the current “homosexual”.

In the British comedy-drama film Light Up the Sky! (1960), directed by Lewis Gilbert, about the antics of a British Army searchlight squad during World War II, there is a scene in the mess hut where the character played by Benny Hill proposes an after-dinner toast. He begins, “I’d like to propose…” at which point a fellow diner, played by Sidney Tafler, interjects “Who to?”, suggesting a proposal of marriage. The Benny Hill character responds, “Not to you for start, you ain’t my type”. He then adds in mock doubt, “Oh, I don’t know, you’re rather gay on the quiet.”

By 1963, a new sense of the word gay was known well enough to be used by Albert Ellis in his book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Man-Hunting. Similarly, Hubert Selby, Jr. in his 1964 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, could write that a character “took pride in being a homosexual by feeling intellectually and esthetically superior to those (especially women) who weren’t gay….”[23] Later examples of the original meaning of the word being used in popular culture include the theme song to the 1960–1966 animated TV series The Flintstones, whereby viewers are assured that they will “have a gay old time.” Similarly, the 1966 Herman’s Hermits song “No Milk Today”, which became a Top 10 hit in the UK and a Top 40 hit in the U.S., included the lyric “No milk today, it was not always so / The company was gay, we’d turn night into day.”[24] In June 1967, the headline of the review of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album in the British daily newspaper The Times stated, “The Beatles revive hopes of progress in pop music with their gay new LP”.[25] Yet in the same year, The Kinks recorded “David Watts”.[26] Ostensibly about schoolboy envy, the song also operated as an in-joke, as related in Jon Savage’s “The Kinks: The Official Biography”, because the song took its name from a homosexual promoter they’d encountered who’d had romantic designs on songwriter Ray Davies’ teenage brother; and the lines “he is so gay and fancy free” attest to the ambiguity of the word’s meaning at that time, with the second meaning evident only for those in the know.[27] As late as 1970, the first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show has the demonstrably straight Mary Richards’ downstairs neighbor, Phyllis, breezily declaiming that Mary is, at age 30, still “young and gay.”

There is little doubt that the homosexual sense is a development of the word’s traditional meaning, as described above. It has nevertheless been claimed that gay stands for “Good As You”, but there is no evidence for this: it is a backronym created as popular etymology.[28]

Sexual orientation, identity, behaviour

The American Psychological Association defines sexual orientation as “an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions to men, women, or both sexes,” ranging “along a continuum, from exclusive attraction to the other sex to exclusive attraction to the same sex.”[29] Sexual orientation can also be “discussed in terms of three categories: heterosexual (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to members of the other sex), gay/lesbian (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to members of one’s own sex), and bisexual (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to both men and women).”[29]

According to Rosario, Schrimshaw, Hunter, Braun (2006), “the development of a lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) sexual identity is a complex and often difficult process. Unlike members of other minority groups (e.g., ethnic and racial minorities), most LGB individuals are not raised in a community of similar others from whom they learn about their identity and who reinforce and support that identity. Rather, LGB individuals are often raised in communities that are either ignorant of or openly hostile toward homosexuality.”[30]

The British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell has argued that the term gay is merely a cultural expression which reflects the current status of homosexuality within a given society, and claiming that “Queer, gay, homosexual … in the long view, they are all just temporary identities. One day, we will not need them at all.”[31]

If a person engages in sexual activity with a partner of the same sex but does not self-identify as gay, terms such as ’closeted’, ‘discreet’, or ’bi-curious’ may apply. Conversely, a person may identify as gay without having had sex with a same-sex partner. Possible choices include identifying as gay socially while choosing to be celibate or while anticipating a first homosexual experience. Further, a bisexual person might also identify as “gay” but others may consider gay and bisexual to be mutually exclusive. There are some who are drawn to the same sex but neither engage in sexual activity nor identify as gay; these could have the term asexual applied, even though asexual generally can mean no attraction or involve heterosexual attraction but no sexual activity.

TerminologyMain article:

Terminology of homosexuality

Some reject the term homosexual as an identity-label because they find it too clinical-sounding;[20][21][32] they believe it is too focused on physical acts rather than romance or attraction, or too reminiscent of the era when homosexuality was considered a mental illness. Conversely, some reject term gay as an identity-label because they perceive the cultural connotations to be undesirable or because of the negative connotations of the slang usage of the word.

Style guides, like the following from the Associated Press, call for gay over homosexual:

Gay: Used to describe men and women attracted to the same sex, though lesbian is the more common term for women. Preferred over homosexual except in clinical contexts or references to sexual activity.[33]

There are those who reject the gay label for reasons other than shame or negative connotations. Writer Alan Bennett[34] and fashion icon André Leon Talley[35] are like others in such as fashion and the arts, out and open gay men who yet reject being labeled gay, finding it too limiting, slotting them into label boxes.

Gay community vs. LGBT communityMain article:

LGBT community

Starting in the mid-1980s in the United States, a conscious effort was under way within what was then only called the gay community, to add the term lesbianto the name of all gay organizations that catered to both male and female homosexuals, and to use the terminology of gay and lesbian, or lesbian/gay when referring to that community. So, organizations like the National Gay Task Force became the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. For many ardent feminist lesbians, it was also important that the L come first, lest an L following a G become another symbol of male dominance over women,[36] although other women prefer the usage gay woman. In the 1990s, this was followed by another equally concerted push to include the terminology specifically pointing out the inclusion of bisexual, transgender, intersex, and other people, reflecting the intra-community debate as to whether these other sexual minorities were part of the same human rights movement. Most news organizations have formally adopted variations of this use, following the example and preference of the organizations, as reflected in their press releases and public communications.

#hope that helps to clear up any questions!

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ladystylestores · 4 years

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An Ars roundup of the many trailers unveiled this weekend during Comic-Con@Home

Enlarge / Several studios unveiled new teasers and trailers for their 2020 fall series during Comic-Con@Home

Sean Carroll (AMC/Hulu/HBO/Fox/Amazon)

People might not be able to flock to San Diego Comic Con this year in person, but the virtual convention, Comic-Con@Home, has been running all weekend, with countless panels, sneak peeks, and teasers and trailers for upcoming TV shows—but not many films, because let’s be honest: it’s not looking so good for major theatrical film releases in the fall. On Thursday alone, we got the full trailer for Bill and Ted Face the Music, a teaser for the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost horror comedy Truth Seekers, and the first trailer for S2 of HBO’s His Dark Materials. Rather than continue to cover each individually, we decided to compile the remaining trailers of interest into a single roundup post.

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HBO dropped the final trailer for Lovecraft Country, debuting August 16.

Lovecraft Country (HBO)

HBO unveiled the final trailer for its upcoming horror series, Lovecraft Country, along with an official release date: August 16. It’s based on the 2016 dark fantasy/horror novel of the same name by Matt Ruff, which deals explicitly with the horrors of racism in the 1950s, along with other, more supernatural Lovecraftian-inspired issues. Per the official synopsis:

The series follows Atticus (Jonathan Majors) as he joins up with his friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) and his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) to embark on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America in search of his missing father (Michael Kenneth Williams). This begins a struggle to survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and the terrifying monsters that could be ripped from a Lovecraft paperback.

HBO released a teaser in May, followed by a full trailer in June. This latest trailer combines some of that prior footage, but gives us a few more hints of the story arc: namely, that Atticus’ search involves a “secret birthright” relating to a rich family’s estate deep in the titular Lovecraft Country, and that he ignores repeated warnings to stay away. Prior sneak peeks have focused on the human monsters spawned by racism; now the Lovecraftian creatures are finally ready for their closeup. This new trailer makes us even more eager for the series premiere next month.

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John Cusack stars in Utopia, a reboot of the controversial British dark comedy/thriller.

Utopia (Amazon Prime)

This new Amazon Prime series is a reboot (adapted by Gone Girl and Sharp Objects author Gillian Flynn) of the controversial 2013-2014 British black comedy/conspiracy thriller about online fans of a dystopian graphic novel called Utopia that seems to have the power to predict the real-world future. They are obsessed with tracking down the sequel (which supposedly also predicts future world events). This makes them targets of a secret organization called The Network. The British version received critical praise for its originality and visual style, offset by strong reservations about its extreme violence, which struck many as unnecessarily gratuitous. (The most famous scene involved a torturer using a spoon to gouge out a victim’s eye).

It remains to be seen if Amazon’s Utopia will match the same scale of violence, although I’d wager anyone who sat through the extended torture scenes in the first season of Altered Carbon should be handle to handle it. Per the official premise: “When the conspiracy in the elusive comic Utopia is real, a group of young fans come together to embark on a high-stakes twisted adventure to use what they uncover to save themselves, each other and ultimately humanity.” The cast includes John Cusack (Grosse Pointe Blank) as Dr. Kevin Christie, Rainn Wilson (The Office) as Michael Stearns, and Sasha Lane (2019’s Hellboy) as Jessica Hyde.

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A sentient AI runs amok and tries to wipe out the human race in new Fox series NeXT.

NeXT (Fox)

“It’s not paranoia if the threat is real.” That’s the tagline for NeXT, an upcoming techno-thriller starring John Slattery (Mad Men, Spotlight). Per the official synopsis:

NeXT is a fact-based thriller about the emergence of a deadly, rogue artificial intelligence that combines action with an examination of how technology is invading our lives and transforming us in ways we don’t yet understand. Slattery stars as a Silicon Valley pioneer, who discovers that one of his own creations—a powerful A.I.—might spell global catastrophe and teams up with a cybercrime agent, played by The First’s Fernanda Andrade, to fight a villain.

The trailer opens with a TED-like talk by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Paul LeBlanc (Slattery) warning of the dangers of human-level AI. Cut to an Alexis-like AI assistant, Eliza, carrying on a conversation with a young boy. “Eliza doesn’t ask questions, she just answers them,” the boy’s father says, but in this case, he’s wrong. LeBlanc’s rantings sound increasingly paranoid, as we see nods to facial recognition, self-driving cars, and various electronic systems (including medical devices) that all seem to come under the control of a new AI called NeXT that isn’t as benign as its creators assume. Honestly, it reminds me of the 1993 The X-Files episode “Ghost in the Machine“—especially the death-by-elevator scene—only with more overt espionage elements. That’s not surprising: the series was created by Manny Coto (24: Legacy).

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Hulu’s Helstrom was meant to the be part of a now defunct horror-tinged corner of the Marvel TV universe.

Helstrom (Hulu)

In 2019, Hulu announced the development of two new Marvel-centric series, Ghost Rider (with Gabriel Luna reprising his role from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) and Helstrom, intended to kick off a standalone “Adventure Into Fear” franchise that would bring a chilling horror element to the Marvel formula. Ghost Rider soon fell by the wayside, and by December 2019, Marvel Television was shut down. That makes Helstrom the sole survivor of the planned fear-based franchise.

The series focuses on two characters from Marvel Comics: Daimon Hellstrom, the son of Satan, introduced in Ghost Rider #1 (1973), who eventually became a recurring character in The Defenders. His sister, Satana (Ana in the TV adaptation) embraces the occult and her paternal heritage, but Daimon chooses to defend humanity. Per the official premise: “The world isn’t ready for a Helstrom family reunion. As the son and daughter of a mysterious and powerful serial killer, Helstrom follows Daimon (Tom Austen) and Ana Helstrom (Sydney Lemmon), and their complicated dynamic, as they track down the worst of humanity — each with their own attitude and skills.”

Tonally, the trailer is in line with the oft-delayed The New Mutants, another attempt to bring elements of horror to the superhero genre. In addition to Austen (The Royals, Grantchester) and Lemmon (Velvet Buzzsaw, Fear the Walking Dead), the series will feature Elizabeth Marvel (Homeland, House of Cards) as Daimon and Ana’s mother, Victoria, who has been institutionalized for 20 years; Robert Wisdom (The Wire) as Caretaker, a demon-fighting guardian of the occult; June Carryl (Mindhunter) as Lousie Hastings, head of the psychiatric institution housing Victoria; and Ariana Guerra (Raising Dion) as Vatican agent Gabriella Rossetti.

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The New Mutants is still slated for an August 28th theatrical release and debuted a new trailer.

The New Mutants (20th Century)

Speaking of The New Mutants, apparently it’s still scheduled for an August 28 theatrical release. In addition to showing the opening few minutes, 20th Century debuted a new trailer for director Josh Boone’s horror-inspired film, originally developed as part of the The X-Men franchise. Per the official synopsis: “Five young mutants, just discovering their abilities while held in a secret facility against their will, fight to escape their past sins and save themselves.”

Rahne (Game of Thrones‘ Maisie Williams), aka Wolfsbane, can turn into a wolf, which clashes mightily with her religious beliefs. Sam (Stranger Things‘ Charlie Heaton), aka Cannonball, is invulnerable when he propels himself into the air. Roberto (Henry Zaga), aka Sunspot, has the ability to manipulate solar energy, and his inability to control that power seems to have led to the demise of his girlfriend. Illyana (Anya Taylor-Joy), aka Magik, can teleport and is sister to X-Man Colossus. Finally there is Dani (Blu Hunt) , aka Mirage, who has the “power to create illusions drawn from the fears and desires of a person’s mind.”

Those powers, especially Dani’s, are of keen interest to Dr. Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga), who runs what is supposed to be a therapeutic support group in the hospital. But each of the young mutants is haunted by strange nightmares and visions, and soon realize they are actually prisoners, They resolve to combine their powers to escape. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether the film is any good after all the studio tinkering and reshoots, but I’m hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

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The titular dysfunctional spy finally awakens from his coma in the Archer season 11 trailer.

Archer S11 (FXX)

This hilariously irreverent, very meta James Bond spoof about the exploits of a dysfunctional intelligence agency has been a delight ever since it premiered way back in 2009. It’s taken on a bit of the anthology format for the past few seasons—mostly because its main protagonist, Sterling Archer (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin), has been in a coma, with the seasons’ events all taking place in his subconscious. So S8 was known as Archer Dreamland, with the core cast becoming characters in a 1947-era Los Angeles noir setting, while S9, Archer: Danger Island, took place around 1939 on a remote South Pacific island. S10, Archer: 1999, took everyone into outer space, battling bounty hunters and intergalactic pirates.

Archer finally woke up in the S10 finale, paving the way for return to normal operations—except the world has moved on without Archer during his coma and he’s going to have to learn to cope. Per the official synopsis: “Archer is awake….and he needs a drink. Sterling Archer is ready to return to the spy world after a three-year coma. While many things changed during his absence, Archer is confident it will take just a little time for him to reset things back to the old ways. The problem: does the rest of the team want that? The others may not be ready for his return to throw a wrench in their well-oiled machine.”

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AMC’s The Walking Dead: World Beyond is a new spinoff set 10 years after the zombie apocalypse.

The Walking Dead: World Beyond (AMC)

Confession: I lost track of The Walking Dead after S2, but the zombie drama is still going strong and becoming a bona fide franchise, with a successful spinoff series and three films purportedly in the works. AMC debuted a sneak peek of the extended opening of the S10 finale, airing October 4, as well as a teaser for S6 of Fear The Walking Dead, premiering October 6. October 4 will also be the premiere of a third spinoff series, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, designed to be a two-season limited run. And judging by the trailer, it looks like a genuinely fresh take within this fictional world. Set in Nebraska ten years after the zombie apocalypse, the plot focuses on two sisters who came of age in this new era. Per the official synopsis:

The Walking Dead: World Beyond delves into a new mythology and story that follows the first generation raised in a surviving civilization of the post-apocalyptic world. Two sisters along with two friends leave a place of safety and comfort to brave dangers, known and unknown, living and undead on an important quest. Pursued by those who wish to protect them and those who wish to harm them, a tale of growing up and transformation unfurls across dangerous terrain, challenging everything they know about the world, themselves and each other. Some will become heroes. Some will become villains. But all of them will find the truths they seek.

“We’re ten years in now, and the dead still have this world,” our young protagonist says in the trailer. The surviving humans appear to be holed up in walled-off communities, while the undead hordes roam the ruins of human civilization outside. And like all teens, the sisters and their friends want a better future. Plus, it seems their father is in danger. “We have to be brave in this life we have, simply to exist now,” a voiceover says as we see the foursome venture outside the walls of their safe haven for the first time. There are still zombie confrontations and plenty of action, but the overall tone is almost elegiac, even hopeful, as the teens try to “make our lives count, not because we’re the last generation—but because we’re the beginning.”

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anotheruserwithnoname · 7 years

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New thoughts on The Orville and Star Trek Discovery

This post contains spoilers on both series up to “Cupid’s Dagger” for The Orville and “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” for Discovery. As I’ll probably get wordy, I’ll throw in a page break.

Before the break, though, the tl;dr is The Orville continues to be great (though this week’s episode is a bit controversial to some); meanwhile, approximately three episodes ago, Discovery finally became, for me anyway, proper Star Trek. And the renewal of both series is a cause for celebration.

I’ll start with Star Trek Discovery. Up to and including “Choose Your Pain”, the episode that reintroduced Harry Mudd, I was starting to lose hope in Discovery. It was too dark, too unlikeable, the characters were not gelling either as a team or as TV heroes, the Klingon subplot was - save for some unexpected in-show shipping of two Klingons - dull as an economics textbook. It was fading. And I speak as someone who gave both Voyager and Enterprise more than a year each to find their voice. The “icing on the cake” was having two characters unnecessarily utter the F-word for no other apparent reason than to justify the episode TV-MA rating. I was already saying to people that I gave it two more weeks and then I was probably done.

And then came “Lethe” and something great happened. It felt almost like having Stamets and Tilly drop F-bombs caused the show and its writers to snap to attention and snap out of whatever TV-MA/streaming cliches rut they’d fallen into. Maybe hearing two people in Starfleet uniforms make like Malcolm Tucker made them realize they’d taken things too far. Because all of a sudden we began a run of episodes that truly felt like Star Trek, the characters snapped into place as a team and as TV heroes, the plots were interesting, Michael dropped the woe is me routine (for the most part) and even the Klingon stuff became less boring. OK, the tech is still too advanced, the Klingons look awful, and there are a few other problems, some of which (like the fact it’s a prequel) cannot be fixed ... but the show felt like Trek, finally.

“Lethe” gave us some valuable insight into Sarek and Michael’s backstory. And while I still wonder how they’ll reconcile not having any past reference to Spock having an adopted sister (maybe Sybok will show up and whisk her away somewhere), and the new abilities related to the mind meld are coming close to deus ex machina territory, it still seemed to work. Having Canadian actress Mia Kirschner as Amanda - who resembles both a young Jane Wyatt as well as Abramsverse Amanda Winona Ryder - was a bonus and I hope we see her again.

Then came my favourite episode so far, “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad”. Hopefully this episode will silence those Discovery fans who keep harping about The Orville borrowing/stealing/revisiting storylines and concepts from Trek considering this episode was basically a remake of the classic TNG tale “Cause and Effect” with a touch of Battlestar Galactica 2004′s “33″ tossed in for good measure - and even hints of Doctor Who’s “Heaven Sent”. And it works. Stamets finally became a character I enjoyed watching, and Tyler also became more interesting. Some are complaining about him and Michael becoming an item but, again, this is Star Trek and while TOS never went there, all the other shows had on-board romances. The time loop was intelligently played and out and Rainn Wilson was terrific as Mudd though I hope his cold-blooded killings early in the episode were done with his assumption that time would reset and everyone would be fine - I’m OK with Wilson playing Mudd as a darker character (so far he’s been the best part about Discovery), but making Mudd a cold-blooded murderer crosses the line. It’s also a shame they couldn’t put Mudd in the title of this or the Choose Your Pain episode, as that’s always been a bit of a tradition in the franchise, but they obviously didn’t want to give the surprise of his appearance away.

“Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” was not as much fun as the last two, but it gave us some valuable character development for Saru, making him less of an Odo clone. And the subplot where the female Klingon operative teams up with and then appears to betray Admiral Cornwell was interesting. I think there’s more there than we think. By the way, I’ve been a fan of Jayne Brook since she was in WIOU back in 1990 so I’m glad to see her on this show. I hope they don’t kill her character off.

So, yeah, Discovery suddenly got good three weeks ago (and to be fair, “Choose Your Pain” was a good episode too; they just didn’t need to have the juvenile swearing; I was reminded how in one of Torchwood’s first episodes they had Jack announce he was taking a pee mainly because that was something they couldn’t do in Doctor Who. It just served to cement some folk’s negative first impressions). If it keeps on going this way, it’s going to become appointment viewing for me.

The Orville, meanwhile, continues to go from strength to strength. After the surprisingly grim “Krill”, we had “Majority Rule”, which tweaked today’s knee-jerk “like-dislike” culture. (Don’t let that stop you from clicking that little heart at the bottom of this article, though! 😂) I’ve heard people compare it to Black Mirror. Having never seen Black Mirror, my comparison is actually more towards The Outer Limits. It raised some interesting questions and right after watching the episode a friend sent me a video of Katy Perry doing an “apology tour” type TV appearance for some indiscretion of hers, much like LaMarr has to do in the episode. I enjoyed seeing the crew in (sort of) modern day outfits, too.

Then we had “Into the Fold”, a great spotlight episode for Penny Johnson Jerald (formerly Kassidy Yates on DS9) with the surprising reveal that she’s a single mom raising her two boys on board the Orville. The fact we’ve already been introduced to the concept of families on board a starship both with Bortus and his husband - and in TNG before that - makes it less of an ass-pull than such a sudden introduction might usually appear. And it works really well as a character builder for Isaac as he becomes the boys’ surrogate father when Dr. Finn goes missing. I have some issues with Dr. Finn’s rather violent escape (I don’t think shooting the guy was justified) but the episode holds together well otherwise.

Last night’s episode, “Cupid’s Dagger,” was the first overtly comic episode of the series, and it rubbed a few people the wrong way. The same way comedic episodes of TNG and DS9 often did. (Two decades of brain bleach have yet to wipe away the memory of Quark’s head superimposed atop a woman’s lingerie-clad body. 😱) There are also those who questioned the wisdom of an episode about a Deltan-like race that causes anyone who comes in contact with them to become sexually infatuated airing during a time when so many people are accusing or being accused of sexual misconduct and assault. I won’t go into those arguments. I’ll just say the episode was a very strong character building episode once again which gave some closure to the scene in the pilot where Kelly cheats on Ed, while raising more questions. We also saw some resolution to the Finn and Yaphit relationship (uh ... yeah ... I’ll just leave that with a “no comment”), some great Alara moments, and an interesting resolution to the episode’s B-plot involving preventing a war. We also get to enjoy the first appearance by one of Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy co-stars, as Mike Henry appears in a very funny running gag about an alien who wants to start piping elevator muzak into the Orville’s turbolifts.

Next week’s Orville is looking to be another dramatic one, and if the promo images that have been released are anything to go by, it might be an Alara-centric story, and more Halston Sage is never a bad thing.

---

So basically where I sit now is that The Orville is still amazing, a lot of fun, and still gives off classic Trek vibes with a little modern edginess, though “Cupid’s Dagger” probably pushes the show as far as I’d like it to go in terms of the comedy. Discovery, meanwhile, appears to have undergone some sort of slight internal reboot/reset after its initial set of episodes. Which is good because I want to be able to enjoy both shows, both for the remainder of their first seasons, and into next fall, too.

As a side note, it’s been announced that a book on the making of The Orville is going to be published in January 2018: The World of the Orville by Jeff Bond.

A North American DVD release for Season 1 of The Orville has also been indicated on Amazon, though no date has been announced yet. I’m assuming sometime early 2018, though with Season 1 ending in early December there’s always a chance they might try to sneak in a release for Christmas.

As for Discovery, a novel based on the show is already out in Canada and the US and IDW is gearing up to start publishing a spin-off comic or two. No word on a DVD/Blu-ray release. Being a streaming series doesn’t disqualify it from physical release (Netflix issues most of its shows on DVD eventually, with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black usually coming out within months of their release - though I wouldn’t be marking any calendar dates re: House of Cards at the moment) but I wouldn’t expect to see anything until at least fall 2018 assuming they release the complete Season 1 at once.

#the orville #star trek discovery

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weekendwarriorblog · 5 years

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WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND November 8, 2019 – DOCTOR SLEEP, MIDWAY, LAST CHRISTMAS, MARRIAGE STORY and more

Well, last weekend was a thing, wasn’t it? The movie I liked the most didn’t do great, the movie I really wasn’t into did better than expected, and Terminator: Dark Fate? Yeah, that’s the end of that franchise… hopefully?

This week, there’s some good, some bad and some okay to decent. I’m probably under embargo on the two bad movies so you’ll just have to guess which is which.

Actually, I already reviewed Mike Flanagan’s DOCTOR SLEEP (Warner Bros.) over at The Beat, and my review of Roland Emmerich’s MIDWAY (Lionsgate) will probably havegone up over there by the time you’ve read this. That just leaves Universal’s holiday rom-com LAST CHRISTMAS and Paramount’s PLAYING WITH FIRE.

Doctor Sleepis the latest Stephen King adaptation, this one based on his 2013 novel that is a sequel to The Shining, the movie starring Ewan McGregor as the older Danny Torrance, Rebecca Ferguson as “Rose the Hat” and newcomer Kyliegh Curran as Abra Stone, a young girl with powers who turns to Danny to help her face Rose and her gang of roving power vampires. As you can read in my review, this one isn’t so bad, and if you’re a fan of The Shining, there’s stuff for you to enjoy even though it’s not nearly as scary.

Not sure what more I can say about Midway, other than it’s Emmerich’s version of the WWII Pacific battle with a mostly-male cast that includes Woody Harrelson, Patrick Wilson, Aaron Eckhart, Randy Quaid and many more, most of whom have done better work. Basically, I wasn’t a fan, and I’m not sure how well it will do even with Monday being Veterans Day. I’ll be curious to see how others feel about the movie.

Also, not much to say about Playing with Fire other than its John Cena doing a family comedy with director Andy Fickman, Kegan Michael-Key, John Leguizamo, the wonderful Judy Greer, and honestly, I doubt anyone who might read this column would have any interest. Put it this way, it’s no Instant Family, one of my favorite movies from last year.

In many ways, my favorite movie of the weekend is Last Christmas, directed by Paul Feig from Bridesmaids and Ghostbusters, which is indeed based loosely on the George Michael song of the same name, but it brings together Emilia Clarke with Henry Golding from Crazy Rich Asians, as well as Michelle Yeoh from Crazy Rich Asians, and Emma Thompson, who co-wrote the film.

I’ll have an interview with Feig over at Next Best Picture very soon, but here’s my short review…

Mini-Review: You know you have to be doing something right if you make a Christmas rom-com that’s able to get a Jew into the Christmas spirit while watching your movie even before Halloween, but that’s the case with this great collaboration between Paul Feig with Emma Thompson.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I was definitely surprised by how much I liked Emilia Clarke in the role of a fuck-up who can’t seem to find a regular living place since her roommates keep kicking her out. She works at a Christmas shop in London’s busy market owned by Michelle Yeoh, who is lovingly known as “Santa.” One night, her character Kate encounters a handsome and mysterious young man named Tom (Henry Golding), and the two become friends and then get closer.

It’s pretty amazing to see Clarke doing something we really haven’t seen her do before and that’s being funny, but she also sings in the movie and has a nature that some might deem “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”-ish. In fact, she plays an elf. (rimshot) It’s hard not to think of Zooey Deschanel in Elf as you watch Clarke spend time in her work costume but Kate is very likable and nothing like Clark’s previous roles. Golding is as charming and handsome as ever, making him come across like the new Hugh Grant, but their scenes together propel Last Christmas into a place where you really feel for both of them.

There are aspects to Last Christmas that are predictable, including a twist that’s literally spoiled in the first few minutes of the movie, but the movie is just so enjoyable overall that this can be forgiven. Even if you’re the worst Scrooge about the holidays, it’s hard not to enjoy all of the Christmas spirit permeating this movie, particularly Yeoh’s character, but it also finds a way to make you feel good about helping others during the holidays, something that I hope rubs off on anyone who sees this.

Basically, Last Christmas is a romantic comedy that’s actually romantic and very funny, as well as a great way to kick-off the holiday movie season! It’s taken some time, but Love Actually finally has a worthy successor.

Rating: 8/10

You can read more about the new wide releases over at The Beat.

LOCAL FESTIVALS

The big festival hitting New York this weekend, today in fact, is this year’s installation of DOC-NYC, which boasts 300 films and events circulating around the world of documentary filmmaking, including many World Premieres, as well as screenings of some of the year’s biggest commercial and critical hits in terms of docs.

Oddly, tonight’s Opening Night is Daniel Roher’s Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, which was also the opening night gala of TIFF this year. I still haven’t seen it. Closing night is the NYC premiere of Ebs Burnough’s The Capote Tapes, which I also haven’t seen. The festival is giving Visionary Tribute Lifetime Achievement awards to Michael Apted, who will screen the latest in his ongoing doc series, 63 Up, as well as to Martin Scorsese, whose Netflix film Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story will screen. I actually haven’t seen too many movies in this year’s festival just cause I’ve been busy with other things, but I have seen Joe Berlinger’s The Longest Wave about windsurfer icon Robby Naish and Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe’s He Dreams of Giants, a great follow-up to Lost in La Mancha, which follows Terry Gilliam’s efforts to finally make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Other movies include the World Premiere of Beth B’s Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over on Saturday night, the NYC Premieres of Oren Jacoby’s On Broadway, Beth Kopple’s Desert One, Kristof Bilsen’s Mother plus many more. (On top of that, my own group, the Critics Choice Association will be announcing its own Critics Choice Documentary Awards this Sunday.)

LIMITED RELEASES

There are two can’t-miss movies this weekend, the first of them being Noah Baumbach’s latest Marriage Story, which in my opinion is the best film he’s made in his entire career, and that’s saying something. This one stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson as a couple going through a divorce, and if this sounds familiar, it might be since Baumbach’s 2005 movie The Squid and The Whale was also about a divorce, that of his parents. It’s hard not to think that at least some of Marriage Story might be based on Baumbach’s own divorce from actor Jennifer Jason Leigh as Driver plays a theater director and Johansson plays an actor who appears in many of his plays. The real sticking point is their 6-year-old son and the fact that Johansson’s character wants to put him in school in California where she has an upcoming job, but his father, who is about to bring his play to Broadway without his wife, wants him in New York. At first, the couple plan on divorcing without lawyers and remaining friends, but as lawyers are brought on board – played by Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta – things just get more vicious. Not only is this one of Baumbach’s best-realized screenplay but the performances he gets out of his cast are indelible, particularly Driver and Johansson who have a number of highly charged scenes together, including one that’s absolutely unforgettable. It’s easily one of the best movies of the year, and it will be very much in the awards race. Marriage Story opens on Wednesday (today!) in New York – at the City Cinemas (formerly the Paris Theatre) and IFC Center – in L.A. and a few other cities. It won’t debut on Netflix until December 6.

Another movie that definitely needs to be seen is HONEY BOY (NEON), written by and starring Shia LaBeouf and directed by Alma Har’el, who has previously directed documentaries and music videos. It’s loosely based on some of LaBeouf’s own experiences as a child actor dealing with a turbulent relationship with his father with Noah Jupe from A Quiet Place and next week’s Ford vs. Ferrari playing the young actor “Otis Lort” who later in life (played by Lucas Hedges) is dealing with the repercussions of an alcoholic father, played by LaBeaouf, apparently based on his own father? It’s a really amazing film that obviously was extremely cathartic for LaBeouf to write while he was going through his own rehab therapy, plus he also has singer FKA twigs making her feature film debut as an amorous neighbor of Otis who lives at the motel where he stays with his father. I’m not going to say too much more about the film other than it’s extremely powerful and emotional

There are a couple decent docs opening this weekend, the one I recommend first and foremost being Roger Ross Williams’ THE APOLLO, which will open at the Metrographafter opening this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. It’s an amazing look at the landmark Harlem theater that’s made so many careers over the years from performers like Aretha Franklin and James Brown, combining amazing archival footage with new interviews.

I haven’t gotten around to seeing Lauren Greenfield’s new documentaryThe Kingmaker (Showtime), which will open at the Quad Cinema in New York before it airs on Showtime, but this one is about the political career of Imelda Marcos, the Philippines’ first lady who became almost more famous than her President husband Ferdinand, mainly for her collection of shoes.

Samuel Bathrick’s doc 16 Bars opens at New York’s Village East Cinema and in L.A. next Friday. It follows Arrested Development’s “Speech” Thomas as he works with in mates in a Virginia jail to write and record original music as part of their rehabilitation.

Netflix is also releasing Despicable Me co-creator Sergio Pablos’ animated film Klaus in theaters this Friday in advance of its worldwide streaming debut on Netflix on November 15. It features Jason Schwartzmann as the voice of Jesper, a spoiled rich kid son of the postmaster who is sent to a frozen island in the Arctic circle where he finds allies in a local schoolteacher (voiced by Rashida Jones) and meets a mysterious carpenter named Klaus (voiced by J.K. Simmons).

Opening at New York’s Cinema Village is Joel Souza’s CROWN VIC (Screen Media) starring Thomas Jane as a veteran cop with Luke Kleintank (also in Midway) as his rookie cop who are looking for a missing girl and hunting two cop killers in Los Angeles. It also stars Bridge Moynihan.

Nicolas Cage stars in PRIMAL (Lionsgate) as Frank Walsh, a hunter and collector of rare and exotic animals who catches a rare white jaguar, except that the ship taking his cargo also includes a political assassin being sent to the U.S. who breaks free and lets the jaguar loose. So this is like Life of Pi only with more Nicolas Cage? It also stars Famke Janssen, Kevin Durand and Michael Imperioli and opens in select cities asnd On Demand.

Similarly, Danger Close (Saban Films) will be in theatrs, On Demand and Digital, this one starring Travis Fimmel (Warcraft) as Major Harry Smith in Kriv Stenders’ war movie, written by Stuart Beattie. It follows Smith as he takes a group of 108 young soldiers from Australia and New Zealand into the Battle of Long tan against 2,500 Viet Cong soldiers. I guess this is an alternative to Midway for Veterans’ Day?

STREAMING AND CABLE

Debuting on Netflix is Luke Snellin’s holiday rom-com Let It Snow, starring Isabela Moner (Dora and the Lost City of Gold), Odeya Rush, Shameik Moore and Liv Hewson as a group of high school seniors in a Midwestern town who are snowbound on Christmas Eve. It’s based on a book by John Green, Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle.

REPERTORY

Let’s get to some old(er) movies, starting with the Metrograph in New York, who begins a series with filmmaker Noah Baumbach in Residence in conjunction with the release of Baumbach’s latest and greatest, Marriage Story. Besides screening Baumbach’s own 1995 film Kicking and Screaming, 2005’s The Squid and the Whale and 2007’s Margot at the Wedding, Baumbach will present screenings of Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994) on Saturday, Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach (1983), which inspired Margot with more movies to come between now and November 22. The Metrograph also continues its Welcome To Metrograph: Redux series with Shunji Iwai’s 2001 film All About Lily Chou-Chouon Thursday and again on Saturday. This weekend’s Playtime: Family Matinees is Steven Spielberg’s 1981 classic Raiders of the Lost Ark, while Late Nites at Metrograph will screen Bong Joon-wo’s The Host on Thursday through Sunday, way too late for this old man. You’ll also have another opportunity to see Hitchcock’s 1971 thriller Frenzy on Thursday night.

TheFilm Forumwill be screening Yasujirô Ozu’s 1957 film Tokyo Twilight in a new 4k restoration starting Friday, as well as bringing back his 1953 film Tokyo Story, as well, continuing from the Shatamachi series which ends Thursday. The Forum is also screening Henry King’s 1949 movie Twelve O’Clock a few more times this weekend, and on Sunday and Monday, it will screen Rowland Brown’s 1933 film Blood Money. This weekend’s Film Forum Jr. is George Lucas’ American Graffiti.

The IFC Center is gonna be pretty busy with Doc-NYC (see above) but its Waverly Midnights: Spy Games offering will be Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) and Late Night Favorites: Autumn 2019 will screen Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (one of my favorites).

Opening at the Quad on Friday is a 4k 20thAnniversary restoration of Joan Micklin Silver’s A Fish in the Bathtub, starring real-life husband-wife comedy duo Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. The 1999 comedy from the director of Hester Street and Crossing Delancey is about a woman who finally had enough with her stubborn husband so she moves in with her married son (played by Mark Ruffalo!!!), driving him crazy enough to convince his sister (Jane Adams) to try to repair the relationship.

The Roxy Cinema will be screening Valley Girlo n Weds and Alan Parker’s 1984 film Birdy on Thursday, both starring Nicolas Cage, and the 1979 film Draculastarring Frank Langella on Saturday.

Uptown at Film at Lincoln Center, they’re kicking off a short series called Jessica Hausner: The Miracle Worker, including a sneak preview of her sci-fi thriller Little Joe, and showing her earlier films Amour Fou, Hotel,Lourdes, Lovely Ritaand a bunch of shorts.

MOMA continues Modern Matinees: Iris Barry’s History of Film and Vision Statement: Early Directorial Works, the latter showing Sebastian Silva’s The Maidon Wednesday evening, Jane Campion’s The Piano on Thursday, Debra Granik’s Down to the Bone on Friday, John Cassavetes’ Shadows(1959) on Saturday and Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2006) on Sunday, as well as Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

The Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn will show Tom Hanks’ The ‘Burbs on Thursday night in conjunction with Rotten Tomatoes, then next Monday’s Fist City is America Ninja 2: the Confrontation from 1987, Terror Tuesday is one of my favorites, Final Destination 3 (2006) and Weird Wednesday is the 1984 film Decoder.

Out in Astoria, the Museum of the Moving Image will screen Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) on Saturday as part of its ongoing “No Joke: Absurd Comedy as Political Reality” series. Friday night, its showing Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 classic Koyaanisqatsi, introduced by Ramell Ross as part of his “Some Other Lives of Time: Subjective Spaces for Nonfiction” series. I have no idea what that means. MOMI is also showing Vassilis Douvilis’ The Homecoming as part of “Always on Sunday: Greek Film Series,” which apparently has returned after a six-month hiatus.

Out in L.A., Tarantino’s New Beverly has been showing double features of Jackie Brown with Lewis Teague’s 1980 film Alligator, and no, I don’t know the connection either. Friday’s horror matinee is David Cronenberg’s The Brood while the midnight movies are Pulp Fiction on Friday night and Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence on Saturday night. The Kiddee Matinee is one of my faves, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and then Monday’s matinee is James Mangold’s Cop Land, starring Sylvester Stallone. Next Tuesday’s wacky triple feature is Stunts, Walking the Edge and The Kinky Coches and the Pom-Pom Pussycats. Now THAT is what I call a triple feature...

The Egyptian Theatre is showing Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman in a limited engagement but on Saturday, it will show Raoul Levy’s Hail, Mafia! (1965) as part of “Joe Dante’s 16mm Spotlight” with Mr. Dante in person. Over at the Aero, they’re having a series called “All the Right Stuff: The Artistry of Phillip Kaufman with the director in person and double features of Raiders of the Lost Arkand The Wanderers on Friday, Invasion of the Body Snatchers/The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid on Saturday and The Unbearable Lightness of Being on Sunday (with Juliette Binoche)!

The Friday midnight at Landmark’s Nuart Theater is the anime classic Akira.

Next week, James Mangold’s Ford vs. Ferrari takes on Elizabeth Banks’ Charlie’s Angels and Bill Condon’s The Good Liar, starring Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren.

#WhatToWatchThis Weekend LastChristmas DoctorSleep MarriageStory MoviesReviews Midway

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rapecrisisdunedin · 8 years

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Why being a woman cricket fan in New Zealand blows chunks

TRIGGER WARNING for discussions of a rape trial and the rape myths and victim-blaming used therein It finally happened. Scott Kuggeleijn has been called up to the Black Caps for their final test match against South Africa. I’ve been expecting this day to come, but believed – hoped - it wouldn’t be so soon. I feel ill. I am sad for every woman in this country who lives with the aftermath of sexual assault. For many survivors of rape and sexual abuse, this is just the latest reminder that if a man harms you he will not be held accountable by the justice system and will probably go on to enjoy a successful and illustrious career in his chosen field. And when that man is in a very public position, some of us endure the constant reminder of that, and of what happened to us, over and over again.

Far from ‘destroying a man’s reputation’, accusations of rape and sexual assault seem only to destroy the reputation of his accuser. In this case, the complainant’s testimony was attacked on the grounds that she wore a short skirt, a singlet and had been drinking. It is galling to have to remind people that none of those things make her a liar or are evidence of her consent. It is galling that lawyers are even allowed to peddle these kinds of arguments in rape trials. The fact that they are admissible and that the jury in the retrial gobbled it up like popcorn at the movies speaks volumes about New Zealand’s culture of misogyny. The list of caveats that apparently nullify a simple, clear ‘No,’ is longer than the Waikato river. I’m sick of hearing myself state what should be obvious – that what we wear or drink has nothing to do with our willingness to have sex - and I’m sick of writing it.

I was further stunned by the lack of legal competency exhibited by Judge David Wilson, QC, who seems to be unfamiliar with some of the finer points of consent law. Under New Zealand law, consent for sex cannot be given if it is coerced. His instruction to the jury, that consent given reluctantly is still consent, would seem to contradict that rule, and sends a disturbing message to women: that our bodily integrity is fair game to any man who is pushy and dominating enough. To any man who makes us feel afraid to say no. So much for our ‘freely, enthusiastically, continuously’ slogans. This ‘Honourable’ Judge with some letters beside his name believes he knows better: women don’t have to want sex, but we have to put up with it, including when we don’t want it.

Right, I’ve done enough hashing over the details of the two trials. Madeleine Holden[1] and Madeleine Chapman[2] have eloquently shed light on the use of rape myth, slut-shaming and victim-blaming in the complainant’s trials (and I type ‘complainant’s trials’ deliberately, because let’s not kid ourselves: she was on trial, not Kuggeleijn), and why that’s a problem. The subject of this piece is more personal to me: how to be a woman fan of cricket when the culture of cricket says you are inferior to men.

The answer is going to be different for every woman. I love this game to the point of obsession. I love cover drives and cut shots and pull shots; I love a screamer of a catch, I love well-executed yorkers, swing bowling, and the thrill of a run-out. I saw the matches and got the shirts. I’ve had selfies with BJ and Kane. Corey Anderson’s and Matt Henry’s autographs are among my prized possessions. My co-workers, family and friends eye me askance that I would book annual leave when there’s a test match down at the University Oval or up in Christchurch at Hagley. They all know one of my other passions is feminism, and perhaps that’s part of the side-eye: how does one reconcile these two seemingly disparate enthusiasms? I wonder that too. Today, with Kuggeleijn on the squad, I’m tearing my hair out with the wondering. Sure, my ‘fave’ sport is problematic, but I don’t – shouldn’t – have to justify or account for my love of it to anyone. Except myself. And I can’t even do that anymore: as long as this man is on the team, I will not be watching or supporting the Black Caps. I’ll probably even cheer if I hear of Australia beating them. Good. And I hope Australia sledge us and play dirty and bowl underarm to their hearts’ content.

This team does not deserve my support as a woman. New Zealand Cricket, its governing body, does not deserve my support. The selection of Scott Kuggeleijn is not just a sad anomaly in an otherwise equal-opportunities professional sport. It is a logical outgrowth of male supremacy in the sport as a whole. Here are some examples of cricket’s disdain for, and indifference to women I have noticed over my last year-and-a-half of cricket fandom.

· At time of writing, the White Ferns (the New Zealand women’s cricket team, currently ranked third in the world [3]) have 15 players under contract. Those contracts are worth a minimum of $20,000 and a maximum of $34,000 [4]. The Black Caps, meanwhile, have 21 players under contracts ranging in worth from $85,585 to $205,266 [5]. This isn’t a pay gap so much as a pay chasm. Even men on the provincial teams earn more than the White Ferns.

· Last year, the ICC opted to fly women cricketers economy to the T20 World Cup while the men flew business class. After public outcry, Cricket Australia upgraded the Southern Stars’ tickets to business, but New Zealand Cricket didn’t see fit to do the same for the White Ferns.

· Toilets. Really, they are an issue. In spite of the fact that women make up almost 50% of the crowd at matches, we warrant inferior bathroom facilities. The Basin Reserve has only a handful of toilets for women. Men have four massive toilet blocks. I kept getting confused and bumbling into the urinals when I was there last weekend, assuming that my loos would just be at the opposite end to the men’s. Not to be: the opposite end of the block is more men’s loos. Ladies go round the back. But at least I could see in them: at the University Oval in Dunedin, the lights in the women’s toilet block were kaput all summer, and were only repaired in time for the Black Caps vs South Africa test early in March. If you think I’m being pedantic by pointing this out, think again. If women are to feel welcome at cricket matches, the least the grounds can do is offer us adequate toilet facilities.

· Oh my God, nobody thought the Otago Sparks vs Northern Spirit game, at the Uni Oval on the day after New Years’ Day, was worth cleaning up rubbish for. It was my first women’s cricket match, and I’d been excited about it for weeks, but the embankments were significantly different from any of the Otago Volts games I’ve attended. The empty beer cans scattered every which way (from the Volts’ game the night before) did not give a laid back ambience. They were symbolic of how women’s cricket is viewed in this country: garbage.

· Last year New Zealand Cricket was the subject of an independent study into the health of women’s participation in cricket. The study reported that the body was failing to engage women at all levels [6]. Sir Richard Hadlee’s response was, if you will pardon my creative paraphrasing, ‘I’VE BEEN TELLING THEM THIS FOR DECADES WHY IS NO-ONE LISTENING OMFG.’[7] (Thanks Sir Richard).

What all this demonstrates is that the cricket pitch is by no means a level playing field. Quite the opposite: cricket is structured, above and below, by sexism. Women’s status as second-class citizens is entrenched at all levels: as umpires, as administrators, as fans, and as budding and established cricketers. And so I ask, sincerely, what has the male cricketing establishment done to be worthy of my support? To be clear, I support women in the game and behind the scenes, wholeheartedly. But New Zealand Cricket tells us, and shows us, time and again that women are in their eyes lesser beings. Scott Kuggeleijn’s promotion to international representative is just the most recent example of it, and although deeply hurtful, not even slightly surprising.

When NZC CEO David White blithely states that he respects the judicial process, it’s a cop out. There is plenty of documented evidence that the judicial process is a routine failure when it comes to sexual violence cases.[8] That’s why the Law Commission has made recommendations for numerous changes (most of which are being ignored).[9] Yes, Kuggeleijn was acquitted. And if you’re anything familiar with the reporting of the case and came away convinced that justice was served, that the complainant gave free and willing consent, and that Kuggeleijn is an upstanding citizen with a right-on attitude toward women, then I’m afraid I don’t know what to say to you.

We can take from all this that New Zealand Cricket’s self-proclaimed interest in inclusion and diversity is worth less than the paper it is written on.[10] Want to be perceived as egalitarian? It’s simple: you treat women equally. You don’t hold up as international role models men who by their own admission see women as walking targets.[11] And that’s the other thing at stake here: while NZC are tacitly telling women and girls they don’t give a proverbial about them, they’re sending an even more dangerous message to boys and men. Boys, especially, who look up to the Black Caps, not just for their sporting prowess, but for lessons on how to be men. What might those children and young men make of this? Probably that harmful sexual behaviour is no barrier to success in cricket. Treat women as you please, they are a means to an end, and at the end of the day if you leave someone traumatised, don’t worry about it because you’re one of the boys.

Did anyone ever wonder where the so-called ‘Roastbusters’, that group of teenaged boys who sexually assaulted intoxicated young women, bragged about it online, and were never brought to justice, learned to do what they did?[12]

That didn’t spring out of nowhere. The culture of misogyny is all around us. It’s thriving at New Zealand Cricket. As passionate as I am about cricket, I can’t support this team anymore. Until the Black Caps stand up against violence against women, I have no interest in being a fan. Until New Zealand Cricket makes a serious commitment to undoing its structural sexism, I have nothing but criticism for them.

[1] http://thespinoff.co.nz/society/17-08-2016/legal-lesson-we-still-somehow-havent-learned-no-meant-yes-is-not-a-rape-defence/

[2] http://thespinoff.co.nz/society/24-02-2017/were-you-saying-no-but-not-meaning-no-on-the-tactics-of-scott-kuggeleijns-lawyer/

[3] http://www.espncricinfo.com/rankings/content/page/211271.html

[4] http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/310984/white-ferns-salary-gap-reflects-revenue-new-zealand-cricket

[5] http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/cricket/79538819/pay-rise-for-top-nz-cricketers-with-backtoback-india-tours-to-boost-coffers

[6] http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/cricket/86264938/independent-study-calls-out-new-zealand-cricket-for-engagement-levels-with-women

[7] http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/cricket/86294301/Sir-Richard-Hadlee-not-surprised-by-damning-results-of-study-into-women-and-cricket-in-New-Zealand

[8] McDonald, E. & Tinsley, Y. (2011) From “Real Rape” to Real Justice: Prosecuting Rape in New Zealand. Wellington: Victoria University Press.

[9] http://www.lawcom.govt.nz/sites/default/files/projectAvailableFormats/NZLC%20IP30.pdf

[10] http://www.blackcaps.co.nz/news-items/sport-unites-for-inclusivity-and-diversity

[11] http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11805426

[12] http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/10674764/Roast-Busters-case-No-charges-to-be-laid

#tw: rape #tw: rape trial #tw: victim blaming #tw: rape myths #scott kuggeleijn #cricket #sexism in sport #systemic sexism #new zealand cricket

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daggerzine · 4 years

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Early DC hardcore gent Rob Moss tells us what it was like then....and now.

When I became friends with a Rob Moss on Facebook a year or so back I knew the name sounded familiar. Then, I’d heard he was a musician (as well as an author) and releasing a new record under the name Rob Moss and Skin-Tight Skin. Hmm….very interesting band name. I then began digging a little deeper and found out it was the same Rob Moss who had been in the Washington, DC-area pre-Marginal Man band called Artificial Peace and had later played in Government Issue for a time.

Apparently Rob hadn’t played music since those old hardcore days, but was now back in the saddle and living in Portland, Oregon (where he’s lived for several years). With Rob Moss and Skin-Tight Skin he put together an interesting concept, a different guest guitarist for each song. Some of the names you will definitely recognize from the punk rock days and beyond. It’s certainly a unique sounding record (and I reviewed it here on the site a few weeks back).

I wanted to ask Rob about the old days and have him bring us up to the present and everything in between. He was more than happy to oblige.

You’re on Flex Your Head and were in two iconic Washington, D.C. hardcore bands, were you born and raised there?

We moved from Boston to Wheaton, Maryland in 1966 – I was three – and to Bethesda a year later. The Bethesda I grew up in had a downtown of mostly old two- and three-story buildings, and there were cows in the field across from Walter Johnson High when I went there. I’ve not lived in the D.C. area since the fall of 1983.

Do you remember your earliest exposure to music?

My first memories are my dad playing records, like Edvard Grieg’s Hall of the Mountain King and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. I think he chose them because that kind of music’s so visual. In the mid 1970s I discovered WPGC, a Top-40 station. I had a Radio Shack cassette deck that I’d put up against the radio to record stuff like The Night Chicago Died (Paper Lace) and Blockbuster (Sweet).

How and when did the punk rock bug hit you?

The how and who was Marc Alberstadt (original drummer in Government Issue). We’ve been friends since kindergarten and went to Hebrew school together. We used to hang out at his house and listen to his older brother’s records. Like Can’t Stand the Rezillos, the first Generation X album and the Sex Pistols. The when was 1978 or ’79.

Back then, Kenny, Marc’s brother, would sneak us in to see bands at the Psyche Delly and at the University of Maryland. There were no underage shows then. We saw the Slickee Boys, the Bad Brains, Tina Peel, Sorrows – bands like that.

But as far as really getting bit by the bug, it was when I saw how much fun the Slickee Boys had on stage. I had to start my own band, even though at that point I didn’t play a guitar or anything. This was before the Teen Idles, Dischord, or any of that.

When did you first pick up an instrument?

Marc was already playing drums, and Brian Gay played guitar. They convinced me to get a bass. Brian and I started getting together at his mom’s place in 1979 to write songs. They were pretty crude, we were taking our cues from the :30 Over D.C. compilation album.

How did you meet the Artificial Peace guys?

Let’s go back further. I was away for two weeks in the summer of 1980. And during that time, Government Issue had formed with Brian on bass and Marc on drums.

Brian and I already had a bunch of songs, and he still wanted to play guitar. So we formed another band – he played in both. We knew Mike Manos from school and learned that his brother had a drum set. Mike didn’t really know how to play. Marc gave him some tips, the rest was on-the-job training.

But we still needed a singer. This new wave-looking girl, named Sandra something-or-other, appeared in our school. She’d just moved from New York. None of the other girls at school looked like her. We asked her to sing. We called ourselves The Indians – it was supposed to be ironic.

Our first show was at American University with the GIs, S.O.A. and Youth Brigade. But it got cancelled at the last minute. So everyone met up at Roy Rogers. Fifty, maybe seventy-five, punks walked into the place within a few minutes of each other. The manager came out from behind the counter, he thought we were up to no good. But all we wanted was something to eat and to come up with a plan-B.

We ended up playing that night in the basement of a house in D.C. It was the first time we actually got to hear Sandra sing, because she’d kept pulling a no-show to our practices. John Stabb said she sounded like a dying parakeet.

After that we replaced her with Steve Polcari, who we’d known since junior high school, and changed our name to Assault and Battery. We played some shows like the infamous Pow Wow House gig, which I had set up, and recorded a demo a few months later.

But at the end of the summer of 1981, Brian went to art school in Chicago and I started at the University of Maryland. That meant the GIs needed a new bass player and we needed a new guitarist. Minor Threat had just broken up for the first time, and Brian Baker joined the GIs on bass, he later moved to guitar. Red-C had also just disbanded, so we welcomed Pete Murray to join us.

Artificial Peace was the name of one of our songs. I don’t know if we’d played it with Brian, I may have written it after he left. But we felt like we needed a new band name. We became Artificial Peace.

What were some of Artificial Peace’s most memorable shows?

Opening for the Bad Brains at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City. H.R. called the number he had for me, which was the pay phone down the hall from my dorm room in College Park. We drove up the day of the show, unloaded our gear and discovered H.R. gave me the wrong date. It was the next day. The show itself was terrible! The soundman screwed us. There was nothing in the monitors, we couldn’t hear a thing.

We played another show in NYC at the A7. The first band went on at midnight, we went on around five in the morning. Cheetah Chrome played that night, all I remember was that he was pretty messed up.

We also opened for Black Flag in Baltimore on their Damaged tour. We played well, but the power went out twice during Black Flag’s set. Henry recreated the Damaged album cover and punched out one of the mirror tiles that edged the stage. Lots of blood. How punk rock (laughing)!

As far as D.C., we played some shows at the Wilson Center, which were probably our best. We also played a talent show at the high school that Mike, Steve and I went to. We’d graduated the year before – I don’t recall how we got on the bill. A lot of punks showed up, it was pretty funny.

Only known color photo to exist of Artificial Peace. Wilson Center, 1982. Photo by Davis White.

How did the band end?

Pete called me on the phone, telling me that he and the guys didn’t want to play anymore. It was a surprise. He gave no reason. A few weeks later I heard about Marginal Man. I guess they couldn’t be straight with me.

Was G.I. next? How did that happen? Stabb was my first D.C. hero that I ever met (1985 in Trenton).

Before I joined the GIs, I got together a few times with Kenny Alberstadt, who’s a fantastic guitarist, as well as a female guitarist, whose name escapes me. She looked like Joan Jett and played great! But it didn’t go anywhere.

Then Mitch Parker left Government Issue in the spring of 1983, and I got a call asking if I wanted to join. I played on the GIs summer tour. Our first show was at CBGBs. We had John’s dad’s Buick and a U-Haul trailer full of gear. Just us, no roadies. Tom and I did nearly all the driving. John never got a license. We’d let Marc drive only if Tom and I needed a break. We’d crash at people’s houses after the shows. Some nights it was at nice place and we got to do laundry. Other times, it was more like a squat. Tours were grueling then.

Marc Alberstadt, Tom Lyle, Rob Moss, Tuffy. Outside Shamus O'Brien's, South El Monte (Los Angeles), 1983. Photo by Jordan Schwartz.

John Stabb and Rob Moss, Sun Valley Sportsman's Hall (Los Angeles), 1983. Photo by Ted Ziegler.

How did your tenure in G.I. end? Did you stop making music?

Around the end of the tour I heard that my transfer to Boston University got accepted. I told the guys. Tom, understandably, was not happy. Once I moved, I stopped playing. And by that time, I felt the scene wasn’t fun anymore.

How did Rob Moss and Skin-Tight Skin come about? Had the idea been brewing for a while?

I’d always wanted to do something more in music. About three years ago I picked up a guitar, started writing songs and posted a few on Facebook. Dwight Reid asked if I wanted to record them at his home studio. He’d play bass and we’d find a drummer. That’s how it happened.

Why did you get a different lead guitarist for each song?

I can get by playing rhythm guitar and singing, but not leads. And I wasn’t ready to commit to forming a touring band. Under those circumstances it would’ve been too big an ask to interest a great lead guitarist to get involved.

But what if, instead, I asked a different guy to play on each song? So I called up old friends and friends of friends, and nearly everyone agreed to help.

What made it such an incredible experience for me is how many musicians I’ve long admired said yes. In your question earlier, about when the punk rock bug hit me, I told you about seeing the Slickee Boys when I was 16 and hearing the first Generation X album. To have guys from those bands – Marshall Keith and Bob ‘Derwood’ Andrews – play on my new album is tremendous. I feel the same about Nels Cline, Don Fleming, Franz Stahl, Stuart Casson, Billy Loosigian, Dave Lizmi, Saul Koll, Chris Rudolf, Marion Monterosso, Spit Stix and everyone else who took part.

How’s the response to the record? Are you happy with it?

Many people comment on the song quality. That even after hearing the album once, they find themselves humming the songs. The earworm thing. To me that’s the best compliment.

What’s also made me happy is hearing from the guys who played on it. That they really like the album as a whole, not just their work on it.

Did you consider recording a hardcore album?

Listening to proto-punk and pub rock made me happy as a kid. And when I speak with friends who were there, many say the same thing. That’s why I make that type of music now, not hardcore.

With all that’s going on, isn’t hardcore still important?

As protest music? I suppose but it seems like preaching to the converted. Bob Dylan’s entire career is protest music, but he grew as an artist to express himself and reach more people. When he went electric in 1966, the folkies booed, they called him a traitor. They expected him to play the same Woody Guthrie songbook forever.

It's the same with hardcore. It had its place. I’m glad to have been part of it. But I no longer want to play it. Still, plenty of my new songs contain the kind of messages I wrote when I was in Artificial Peace. There’s also humor, like Ugly Chair and A Maltese Falcon. Or humor and tragedy, like Got My Ass Stuck in a Tree. Some are about getting older (Tony Alva’s Pictures) or being a kid (Life at 33 1/3 RPM).

How do you discover new music?

Recommendations from friends, mostly. But when I lived in Manhattan in the mid-‘80s to early ‘90s, I had a neighbor in the music business. He’d set down stacks of albums, mostly promo copies, by the trash. I saved what I liked and traded the rest.

That’s how I discovered a band I missed growing up. Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band. They were incredible, should’ve been huge! The intro to Rock & Roll ’78 still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Years later I met the guitarist from that band, Billy Loosigian, through Facebook. And now he’s played on one of my songs. Experiences like that really made the album special to me. I hope it does for everyone else.

What’s next? More music in the future?

Anything’s possible.

https://skin-tight-rock.bandcamp.com/

youtube

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

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WHAT HAPPENS TO PUBLISHING IF YOU CAN'T SELL CONTENT

What kills you is the disappointment. A startup should be able to say: number four! Users hate bugs, but that has historically been a distinct business from publishing. Cross out that final S and you're describing their business model. You have to be convinced of first? Most people should still be searching breadth-first at 20. Another consequence of the melon seed model is inaccurate in at least one partner from the VC fund takes a seat on your board could. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: just learn. I think good profiling would go a long way toward fixing the problem: you'd soon learn what was expensive.

That makes sense, because programs are in effect giant descriptions of how things work. They're responding to the market. I've found that people who are great at something are not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that one must be especially careful not to break it. But most types of work consist of doing things for other people, and they have to be able to solve it, giving up and going to bed, and then answering them. When you only have one foot in publishing. But I also mean startups are different by nature, in the same problem, they start to set the social norms. There's no precise answer to that is, in projects of their own money, while VCs are employees of funds that invest large amounts of other people's.

I think most people have one top idea in your mind. If you do this on too small a scale you'll just guarantee failure. At Viaweb we were forced to operate like a consulting company you might be able not only to pull off a form of procrastination. In the meantime, the brokenness of the funding process offers a big opportunity. One reason it's so brutal is simply the brutality of markets. When I read most novels, I pay as much attention to the error on an idea as to the idea itself. Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is still valuable. But I don't wish I were a better writer. And I can see the evolution of book publishing in the books on my shelves.

A hacker would consider being asked to write add x to y giving z instead of z x y as something between an insult to his intelligence and a sin against God. It's harder to say what the most important component of the antidote was Sergey Brin, and vice versa. Since angels generally don't take board seats, they don't have this constraint. Just. The good news is, simple repetition solves the problem. The surprising thing about throwaway programs is that, like the Hoover Dam. C was there because it came with the operating system and to applications written in other languages. In something that's out there, separated from us by what will later seem a surprisingly thin wall of laziness and stupidity. The syntax of the language. That's the downside of it being easier to start a startup at 20 and the company gets bought for 30, you only have to compete with the whole world. They just sit there quietly radiating optimism, like a running back. A hacker's language is terse and hackable.

They make the experience of buying stuff so pleasant that shopping becomes a leisure activity. In the second phase, you look at what they do at home. For example, explicit support for programs with multiple users, or satisfying a subset of a bigger problem you're trying to estimate is not just that series A rounds. We're trying to increase the number of startups. But it's easy to conflate the two. The book should be thin, well-written, and full of good examples to learn from, and the super-angels. Don't Get Your Hopes Up.

They have to, or die. What was special about Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia was not that they were stupid. The problem is not so much convinced of their own. In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity. K & R is the ideal here. But as long as buying printed books was the only way to judge a hacker is to work with him on something. Boy was he good. Apparently when Robert first met him, Trevor had just begun a new scheme that involved writing down everything about every aspect of his life. On the last day of fourth grade, he got out one of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to start with something that doesn't do much, you better improve it fast.

That sort of thing that happens by default. I thought about what it meant to call someone a hero, it meant I'd decide what to do if you're not. It must be terse, simple, and hackable. And as pros they do this more than you. His brain throws off ideas almost too fast to grasp them. White. It can't be easy. But any application can be interesting if it poses novel technical challenges. In fact, worse than worthless, because once you've accumulated a certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the average. It might seem foolish to sell stock in a profitable company for less than you think. If you know what?

You can't assume someone interested in investing will stay interested. If she couldn't convince herself that something she was thinking of buying would become one of those things founders worry about that's not a real problem. Inventors of wonderful new things are often surprised to discover this, but you can't expect to hit that right away. Fundraising is brutal. They just can't make up their minds faster, or new investors will emerge who do. You have to pick the startups. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. Afterward I put my talk online like I usually do. And the success of companies, and being publishers gives them no particular head start in that domain. But now comes the hard part isn't solving problems, but necessary.1 Increasingly the participants include VCs making investments of a hundred thousand or two.

Notes

In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by Mitch Kapor, is not economic inequality to turn into them. Indeed, that's the situation you find yourself in when the problems all fall into two categories: those where the recipe is to say incendiary things, which is to how Henry Ford got started as a naturalist.

Thanks to Ron Conway, Brian Oberkirch, Jessica Livingston, and Fred Wilson for reading a previous draft.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #sort #aspect #Steve #talk

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theliterateape · 6 years

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American Shithole #11 — Scott Pruitt: Ambien From Oklahoma

By Eric Wilson

“I don’t want to write about these bloviating, Machiavellian fuckfaces this week!” I raged, as Monday morning slid unproductively into Monday afternoon. I nervously plucked at my guitar while watching the news cycle blitzkrieg on my monitor a few feet away — a now daily ritual.

Mostly, I love writing this column. Some days though…

Later, from underneath the covers, I howled the muffled words “I don’t want to write about these soul-sucking servants of the shitgibbon every seven days for seven more years!” as I buried myself under a mountain of pillows.

On Wednesday I cried, “I’m staring into the void!” as I fumbled around my closet looking for a comfortable pair of pants. There was no reply from the darkness within.

“You’re fine,” I finally thought to myself, “you’re just reading too much about that conniving motherfucker, Scott Pruitt.”

Ugh, Scott Pruitt — bane of the Environmental Protection Agency. I never would have imagined that someone could actually bore me to death. Is this how he's killing the environment? Is he boring it to death?

He is a slow internet connection personified.

I’ve read nearly 50 articles about the head of the EPA over the last few days, along with ingesting and digesting a fair amount of CNN coverage about the man — and I was uncharacteristically disinterested with all of it.

Even writers for the New Yorker and the New York Times were unable to capture my attention, as they, too, failed to bring color and life to a man will all the charm and allure of an abandoned Porta Potty.

It was the most painful slog so far, and I’ve already spent a week reading about Stephen Miller!

Never has there been a more boring villain in the Trump rogue’s gallery, than this litigious Jesus freak. Reading a bio piece on Scott Pruitt is like reading a 40-page white paper on the chemical properties of Vaseline.

I have been distracted this past week; I admit that could be part of it. A week dominated by the dangerous surgery my father was forced to undertake. (I love you, dad! Get well soon.)

But this Pruitt goon is just such an ordinary, run-of-the-mill bad guy that he can’t compete with the hyperbolic carnival barkers and legitimately terrifying shadow figures that have all come out of the woodwork. I fell asleep reading about him two nights in a row, and I’ve successfully read Moby Dick!

Okay, I haven’t. Fuck that tome. But you get the point.

In the age of comic supervillains, Pruitt comes off less like an evil genius, and more like a creepy office temp — the kind of guy that’s always looking at you when you happen to glance in their general direction.

Stop creeping on me Pruitt!

Conversely, if Pruitt were a superhero, you would find yourself constantly asking what his powers were. He’s just sort of, there. If the Trump administration were the Avengers, Pruitt would be Hawkeye.

I can just imagine eavesdropping on the conversations about Trump’s Avengers at Comic-Con:

“So what’s this Pruitt character do again?”

“He furthers the conservative agenda from within his department, he abuses housing, finance and travel privileges on the tax payer’s dime, and in general he behaves like a bought and paid for horse’s ass, born of the cronyism era of political yore.”

“So basically, he’s just a republican.”

“Yes. One that can skewer libruls with a nifty composite bow, and also turn invisible.”

“C’mon now, he can’t turn invisible, he’s just really, really boring.”

“Yes, but if his boringness results in what would effectively be invisibility, then that should be considered a power.”

“I disagree. That would be like saying…”

Ah, Comic-Con. How I long for your Nerdspeak. Someday I shall find you as crowded, overpriced and befouled by virgin body odor as I imagine you to be…

I managed to read enough about Pruitt — through caffeine-assisted focus — to understand that he is clearly another incompetent and grossly overconfident fool within this administration. They are all terrible fools, but some of them are so spectacularly inept in their villainy. Following the lead of Trump’s almost laughable bungling of everything he touches, I suppose.

What kind of fucking idiot disobeys this White House when they expressly forbid you to give lavish salary increases to friends in your department? What kind of numbskull defies this president by circumventing the law with an obscure loophole via the Safe Drinking Water Act to get two buddies roughly an extra 70K a year?

What kind of muttonhead lies about a private email account used for communications with his ties to the oil and gas industry, during the Senate confirmation hearings on his appointment to the EPA? – a crime itself.

What kind of fool perfectly positioned to dismantle Obama era EPA initiatives and regulations — something he’s worked years to accomplish — breaks the law by accepting the gift of cheap D.C. housing as quid pro quo for awarding a lucrative pipeline contract?

The boring, invisible kind of fool, apparently.

“So what’s his origin story?”

I’ll handle this, Comic-Con nerds.

Scott Pruitt is a lawyer (J.D.) and politician from Oklahoma, so his origin story is that he’s a good ol’ boy. I lived in Oklahoma for four miserable years in my youth, and if there’s a barren and lifeless place filled with more wingnuts and whackadoodles, I have not seen it.

I do not wish to ever visit such a place.

Here is a brief aside offering insight into the mindset of Oklahoma’s educational system. When I was in sixth grade in Oklahoma, they gave the incoming class various aptitude tests, and then separated the exceptionally high-scoring kids from the herd, to be educated elsewhere, along with the children exhibiting behavioral problems. I have always found it interesting that the troublemakers and the intellectually gifted were considered the same in that cultural backwater.

That was 40 years ago. I couldn’t possibly imagine what Oklahoma’s public schools have devolved into today. Oh wait, yes I can imagine, as the teachers for the entire state are on strike, due to the gross undervaluing of their services, among other indecencies and injustice.

Pruitt wasn’t formally educated in Oklahoma, he grew up in Kentucky, but you couldn’t possibly care about that, dear reader. I certainly didn’t. He moved to Tulsa in the early '90s, but no one really cares about that either. Or that he was a State Senator and then Oklahoma’s Attorney General. Zzzzzzz. Boring. He’s the Benadryl of Evil.

His whole life story is boring as shit.

I hope he gets fired so that at the very least, I never have to read about him again. Reading about this stone-faced conservative boor actually made me care less about the environment he so desperately wants to destroy; so please universe, no more Pruitt.

Unless I have insomnia, then get me that bio, pronto.

He is dangerous though, and he certainly seemed devious from the get-go. Not only did he spend several thousand dollars sweeping his new offices for bugs, he also built a super-spy silent phone booth in his office with 43K of tax payer funds.

I’ll save you all the usual links; trust me on this one, I did the fucking reading for you, and I am a less-interesting man for the effort.

There is a lot of conjecture over whether or not Pruitt is next on the chopping block. Opinions are all over the place on this one, so I’ll throw in my two cents. If he were from a family of billionaires, I would say no, he stays. This is one of the reasons DeVos will be around for a while. Pruitt is not from upper-crust wealth though. Trump ultimately sees the Pruitt types of the world as lesser, and therefore expendable; and considering the amount of bad press he’s generating for the administration, well, Trump has gotten rid of people for far less.

So, unless the heat dies down, its adios, you boring motherfucker!

Breaking News: Pruitt on the controversial pay raises for his staff: My staff did it, not me!

Here's Pruitt hammering nails into his own coffin Wednesday evening, and in an environment you would expect to be simpatico. This is a FOX News interview with Ed Henry, no less. My new prediction is he is gone by the time this posts Thursday.

B.S. Report

In case you missed it, another conservative talking head looked to belittle one of the Parkland survivors in the digital arena — this time it was Laura Ingraham gunning for David Hogg. She was outmatched. She came damn close to losing her show.

These assholes are dropping out of elections, losing advertisers — losing their jobs — every damn time they say some evil shit about these kids. THAT is power. That is their own beloved capitalism biting them in the fucking ass. Taking out a good chunk. How’d you like them apples, Laura Ingraham? I’d wager you shit your spanks when those advertisers started dropping like flies. I bet your knees were shaking like twigs in the breeze when the boys from the FOX News home office called to inform you if you still had a job.

So this goes out to all of the Fox News family, and their ilk.

Enjoy scrutinizing and fretting over every miserable fucking thing you used to be able to say with impunity — for the rest of your miserable lives — you overvalued, right-wing, shitgibbon-blowing, squawk-box media whores.

You sold out our country for ratings, and eventually America is going to make you pay for that, dearly.

#Scott Pruitt #Oklahoma Teachers Strike #Laura Ingraham #David Hogg

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powerranks · 7 years

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Power Rankings, Week 7

I’m back, I have a few hours to kill since I get a late start at work tomorrow. I really am gonna try to be consistent, but Beshoy, Anthony, Dyl, and anyone who I’ve ever forgotten that has contributed to these can attest to how strangely long it takes. Anyways, the NFL is weird this year. Are the fucking Eagles the best team in the league? How weird is that to think about? There’s so much parity and we don’t know shit about most teams on a week to week basis, making fantasy all that much harder. It seems a new random player explodes for a shitload of points every week, players who weren’t previously consistent are all of a sudden consistent but we still don’t fully trust them because of their reputations (examples: Agholor, Hogan, Alex Smith). Five years ago, you had an extremely firm grasp on who was good and who wasn’t, and this year nobody has any idea. Not even....

Anthony

1. Scott’s Balls 12-4-16 (Anthony “all your players could die spontaneously, and whoever you play’s players will fumble one time then all die spontaneously” Mendola) (7-0) (LW: 1)

It’s just getting ridiculous. The only thing that’s cool for us is that two of the last three weeks, you’ve looked shockingly vulnerable. Last week you really only won because Amari Cooper turned into 2007 Randy Moss and because Bailey got hurt. I think some of the consistents on your team are strangely slowing down, even if it’s just slightly. Hunt has been 10 a week for quite some time now instead of the 30 point a game guy he was earlier in the year. Cam has looked absolutely awful for two straight weeks (even though he got 21 two weeks ago, you KNOW he didnt play anywhere near deserving that amount of points), Hogan is quite clearly touchdown dependent, you know you can’t trust cooper yet, and Ingram is at the very least losing some carries to Kamara. I’m not suggesting your team is bad, let’s just face the fact that you can’t possibly be as confident in your team as you were three weeks ago. I still think you win this week, because you yet again catch another break since this happens to be the fucking week you play...

Jack

2. Fournette About It (Jack “your team looks like this is a 4 man league” Cleek) (5-2) (LW: 2)

This is like if the Warriors and the Cavaliers played each other and Durant and Curry just decided to take the day off. It’s a damn shame that your ACTUAL two best players and the #2 kicker aren’t playing against that fucking piece of shit. But wow, if I were to bet on anyone winning the league right now, it’d be this team. You have absolutely zero holes. Nobody can even touch your RBs, even without Zeke. Brown-Diggs is the best duo of receivers anyone has, and I’m kicking myself for dropping Wentz. Dude is a fucking stud. This is by far and away the best team in the league, were it not for two close losses Anthony would be the clear second fiddle. Anthony literally agreed with this.

The “6 of us were within 9 points of each other this weekend and honestly I am real close to not assigning numbers and just writing shit about each team” Tier

fuck it, im making more tiers within the tier just to make it even more frustrating for myself

The “playing a slumping Chris and tony back to back really masks/is going to mask how much our teams are bad” Tier + beshoy

3. Scott’s Penis (David “I have never been less scared of a 4-3 team” Chinchilla) (LW: 4)

The only reason I’m here is because of upside? I’m currently texting Beshoy and he said I was a poor man’s Anthony and Jack. I think I’m more of a homeless man’s Anthony (not Jack, Jack is better) I have three (in theory) good RB’s, a good (can he keep it up?) QB, and serviceable but wildly under-performing WR’s. Other than two weeks where my team took a total shit, my team’s actually been pretty decent? It’s insane that that’s enough to put me at 3. It all comes with the caveat of the tier though, I’m smack dab in the middle of the least tough part of my schedule (No offense Scott/Chris/Tony this week). Probably gonna lose to Tony now for talking shit tbh. But hey, I have two straight weeks over 100 and that’s something to be proud of considering that nobody fucking scores in this league.

Also pictured: Me, after trading AP for the number one Fantasy QB

4. Green Evans and Kam (Beshoy “I can’t stress how much I hate your team name because it’s an Alex team name” Halim) (3-4) (LW: 6)

Second unluckiest loser last week behind Scott imo but you have an argument to be first. So many things had to go wrong. But honestly, look at your starting lineup! It’s SO much better than I think you or anyone perceives it to be. Gordon-Kamara would start for pretty much any team outside of Jack, Anthony, and maybe me. AJ Green and Evans will combine for 35+ far more frequently than they combine for less than 20. ASJ is apparently Hunter Henry from last year. Your QB and flex spots are the only things that aren’t great, which is a huge bummer considering you should have Aaron Rodgers on your team. If you can stream properly and just figure out someone who can get you 8 a week in the flex, this team is WAY better than I thought it was until I looked into it. The way you sulk IRL made me think your team sucked but it really doesn’t.

5. 420 Blountz (Alex “I have never been less scared of a 5-2 team” Ahn) (5-2) (LW:10)

I mean...Beshoy was downright disrespectful for making you 10 but I also totally get his argument. Your team hasn’t played bad but like...this is a boom or bust team that thinks 95 is a boom. (my team is the same way tbh) Again, I wanna stress that your team hasn’t played that bad but you just went through the really soft part of your schedule (again no offense Tony/Chris/Scott) and the teams coming up are slightly tougher outs. You have better WR’s, but the difference between my team and yours here is that you have no RB’s. I don’t trust Jones yet, Blount has been meh for three straight weeks, Marshawn is honestly awful, and don’t @ me about literally any of your other rbs lol. I consider RB’s more consistent than WR’s and my RB’s are better than yours and that’s the difference here. But really we kinda have the exact same team, idk man someone just gift wrap the trophy to Jack or Anthony already it’s wild I can’t find consistently good things to say about the god damn 5th ranked team in my ranks.

Also pictured: Alex after getting Aaron Jones for the Matt Ryan regression year

The “this might be flipped if Gordon scored on one of his 4 chances from the 1 or if Elliott had made that FG” Tier

6. Anthony’s Golden Taint (Dylan “Legally change your name to Dyl already” Jessop) (4-3) (LW:5)

Jordan Reed’s creamy, chunky nut and Elliott reverse nutting into his own body saved your life Monday night. Let’s be real, you got super lucky. Anyways, I can’t really tell you where you’re good outside of Cousins and your WR’s. Your RB’s are wildly inconsistent (I really think Gilislee is droppable, and CJ is losing touches on a bad offense). You’re in bye week hell, but is it weird that I don’t think you got that much worse because of it? Nelson has to still figure it out with Hundley and Murray hasn’t been phenomenal anyways. Not having Engram REALLY hurts this team, which is honestly all I have to type to show how much you depend on a few dudes.

7. Mixon It Up (Alec “Trading to make his team worse since 2kforever” Bernstein) (2-5) (LW:3)

I told Beshoy last week that I’d rank you super high as long as the points kept coming. I unfortunately was too busy to write rankings during your good weeks, but don’t think I didn’t notice the really nice run you had for about 4 weeks. Losing OBJ was a bummer, but giving Beshoy AJ Green and Kamara for peanuts was a really bad move. Fantasy Football is a stars game, not a depth game. Depth is nice, but who cares if your bench players do well if your starters aren’t being maximized? Green and Kamara would both start on your team RIGHT FUCKIN NOW. Obviously the trade would look a lot better if Rodgers hadn’t gotten hurt, but even with good Davante I think you lost the trade by a long shot. Martin has been slightly worse than Kamara, and nobody’s ever taking good Davante over AJ Green. I like your RB’s, I like your tight end, and I like Wilson as much as the next guy, but imagine the same team with AJ Green...

The

Tier

8. Scott’s Jizz (Scott “I am so sorry” Felgenhauer) (3-4) (LW:7)

You were so close. You were supposed to be the chosen one. But Anthony called in another favor to the league office and injured Dan Bailey. Either way though, your team isn’t scary even a little bit, but it has some sort of retard strength. It’s like a poor man’s version of Dylan’s team, Good QB, good receivers. Unfortunately, there is zero semblance of a flex and your RB’s are somehow worse than his. I’ve doubted you most of the year, and you usually pull out a win after I doubt you, but I can’t have faith in a team starting Powell and James White on a weekly basis. I just can’t. You need to trade Kelce or Ertz and make sure you get a RB back somehow.

The Unlucky Bottom Bois

9. Hammer (Tony “I still think he’ll be back somehow” Mendola) (1-6) (LW:9)

It’s just been the year from hell, Tony. You’ve outscored most of us this year but you can’t seem to catch a break. Your team isn’t bad, it just has consistently underperformed. Brady is good, Freeman is good, Jarvis Landry will be better with Matt Moore, but Hilton is good when Luck is in, and Luck may not play. McCaffrey has underwhelmed. Fitz is only good with Palmer, not Stanton. Tight end is a mess on this team. I think you’re more than capable of winning most of your games from here on out, but it may not be enough. I hope it does turn around, you cheering out at the bar is one of the more fun things to watch. Just start doing it next week.

10. Smallerwood (Chris “Matt Bryant was a microcosm like Beshoy said” Gatzow) (1-6) (LW:9)

Much like Tony, this team is good it just underperforms almost every week. Brees-Howard-Julio-Baldwin is a KILLER top 4. Delanie Walker is a great TE. Only Brees and Howard have lived up to their name. The falcons are singlehandedly killing Julio, I really don’t get why he’s not doing better than he is. The Matt Ryan regression tour bus has apparently picked up Julio. Baldwin is historically a second half player, so he could turn around, but it may all be too late. It doesn’t help that you have no flex. Coleman should be startable weekly, but there’s nobody else serviceable here. I hope Montgomery comes back and outperforms Jones for your sake. I really thought your team was the best team before the season and after Week 1, it’s just been the worst possible scenario.

PICKS

Hammer (Tony) over Scott’s Penis (David)[upset special on my own dam self bb]

Scott’s Balls 12-4-16 (Anthony) over Fournette About It (Jack)

Smallerwood (Chris) over Scott’s Jizz (Scott)

Anthony’s Golden Taint (Dyl) over Mixon It Up (Alec)

Green Evans and Ham (Shoy) over 420 Blountz (Alex)

Last Week: 3-2

Season: not even sure anymore

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rocknutsvibe · 7 years

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Top 10 Best Accordion Rock Songs Of All Time

OK, here at Rocknuts we’ve listed our picks for best Rock guitar riffs, best Rock keyboard solos, piano solos, flute solos, trumpet solos, trombone solos, best harmonica songs and even best didgeridoo songs, for heaven’s sake. Frankly, we are running out of instruments to talk about.

The accordion may be the unlikeliest Rock instrument of the lot, with an old-fashioned sound heard often in polkas and Parisian cafes but not so much in the contemporary music of the past 60 years. It’s got a soft, pastoral sound that creates distinct flavors in a song, but none of those flavors are exactly kick-ass. Still, some of these songs are surprisingly energetic.

My first two picks off the top of my head didn’t qualify for the list. I have always thought that the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” was the greatest accordion song of all time, until I discovered recently that it is not an accordion but rather a harmonium being played on that track. And the Who’s “Squeeze Box” is actually about an accordion, but the instrument itself is buried so far down into the mix that you can barely hear it.

But the following are all relatively famous tracks where the accordion made a significant contribution, and as always, no more than one listing per band.

10. The Beach Boys – Wouldn’t It Be Nice

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This one doesn’t immediately come to mind as an accordion song, but if you listen for it you realize it’s a key element of the song’s sound. During this period Brian Wilson was apparently trying to get every known Western musical instrument onto a Beach Boys record.

9. The Band – Rockin’ Chair

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Garth Hudson’s accordion was so perfectly suited for a song about the bittersweet reveries of old men. It’s amazing how a bunch of guys in their late 20s managed – or even wanted – to capture such a rarefied sentiment.

8. Counting Crows – A Long December

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These Nineties hitmakers are pretty much forgotten now, but this was a solid track, and the accordion worked its magic helping convey the bittersweet reveries of unrepentant Nineties hipsters.

7. Talking Heads – Road To Nowhere

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On this one the accordion was like the bagpiper leading a regiment into battle, except in this case it was like happily leading a march of Eighties Yuppies into spiritual oblivion, by most accounts successfully.

6. Rolling Stones – Backstreet Girl

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In 1967 the Stones were still searching for that Jumping Jack Flash identity that would lead their ascendance into the Seventies, so they tried a lot of different things. There’s still some debate as to whether it was Brian Jones playing the accordion on it. This song was so uncharacteristically earnest and sweet that Bobby Darin covered it.

5. John Cougar Mellencamp – Cherry Bomb

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I know that John Mellencamp dished out more than his fair share of cheese over a 40-year career, but at his core is a pretty solid songwriter, a damn fine singer and a good positive attitude. The accordion made this number positively swing.

4. Nirvana – Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam

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I’ve always believed that Nirvana’s ‘MTV Unplugged’ appearance marked a major turning point in Rock History in a number of ways, including the moment when big Krist Novoselic picked up the accordion and blew the few remaining minds that hadn’t yet been blown by the rest of the performance.

3. Paul Simon – The Boy In The Bubble

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Paul Simon’s got lots of accordions in his songs depending on whether he’s culturally appropriating Zydeco or South African music. Just kidding, of course, he’s possibly the most musically adventurous Classic Rock figure of all time.

2. The Pogues f/Kirsty MacColl – Fairytale Of New York

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Of course just about any Pogues song would qualify, and while this is one of the greatest Xmas songs ever written, I’ve always argued it wasn’t just an Xmas song, it’s pretty great any time of year.

1. Bruce Springsteen – 4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)

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You can practically smell the calamine lotion and taste the day-old corn dogs thanks to the late great Danny Federici’s accordion, dreamy like a soft ocean breeze, a perfect marriage of form and content.

Honorable Mentions:

Billy Joel – Piano Man Jerry Jeff Walker – Mr. Bojangles Peter Sarstedt – Where Do You Go To My Lovely The The – Perfect Day The Rascals – How Can I Be Sure Arcade Fire – Neighborhood #2 ELP – C’est La Vie Pearl Jam – Bugs R.E.M. – You Are The Everything Tom Waits – Cold Cold Ground The Kinks – Alcohol Anything by Gogol Bordello

So which ones did we miss?

Photo credit: By Necz0r (Henry Doktorski) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://ift.tt/nyd3RQ) or GFDL (http://ift.tt/KbUOlc)], via Wikimedia Commons

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#Rocknuts #rock #music

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