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words-after-midnight · 2 years ago

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Writeblr Introduction (finally): N. Roy / words-after-midnight

Because I've been here since December and still haven't posted one of these.

[Updated 22-07-2023]

About me:

I'm Nico (he/him), a 32-year-old chemist moonlighting as an author of dark adult contemporary crime fiction and horror. I'm based in Tio'tia:ke, colonially known as Montreal, where I live with my 10-year-old cat Saturday and most of my chosen family and friends. I plan to publish under a pen name similar to the one on my blog (ie. not my real name - I like to keep my different "lives" separate). You can read more about me here. I love tag games and ask games and interacting with folks on here! I especially love the Find the Word and Last Line/Heads Up Seven Up games, so please never feel like you're annoying me by tagging me in those. I also love any and all music tags!

What I write:

My novel-length projects - 95% what I talk about on this blog in terms of my writing - are predominantly (though not exclusively) in the realm of adult contemporary crime fiction, usually in combination with horror, thriller, docufiction, and/or psychological fiction. All of my novel-length works take place in the same universe, and are all - either directly or indirectly - connected to each other.

My short fiction is typically either contemporary litfic, slice-of-life, crime/procedural, or experimental horror. Most of my existing short fiction is currently being submitted for publication (or in the process) to various literary periodicals.

I write and submit freestyle poetry on occasion.

My forte is writing well-developed, messy, typically queer characters who exist on a continuum between morally gray to morally bankrupt, as well as complex, intense, and/or dark relationship dynamics. Other things I love writing and featuring in my stories include:

Small casts (I typically focus on 1-3 central characters)

Symbolism, motifs, and foreshadowing

Found/chosen families and homes

Exploration of dark real-world themes, including themes involving mental illness, trauma, and recovery

Intense and/or introspective narration

Faster-paced narratives

Trope subversion

Social commentary

Experimental narrative styles

Unconventional formatting

Genre-blending

Complicated endings

What I read (with some exceptions here and there):

Crime thrillers/dramas

Psychological thrillers/dramas

Contemporary horror (not into supernatural or fantasy horror unless the premise and/or themes are very intriguing)

Litfic with darker plots/character relationships

Mysteries (especially murder mysteries)

Dystopian and/or realistic speculative science fiction

My projects:

I currently have three active WIPs, which you can read more about under the cut. You can also find general information about all my projects here.

Active WIPs:

🌙 Life in Black and White | Adult contemporary | Psychological thriller | The love of my life | Querying as of Fall 2023

Draft start date: June 7, 2008 Draft completion date: February 12, 2011

Status: Line edit + prepping query package

Comps: THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS (Nemerever) x GIRL ON THE TRAIN x CATCHER IN THE RYE

Summary: At the dawn of early adulthood and fresh from a childhood fraught with instability and loss, Gabriel's life revolves around outpatient psychiatric treatment, his own rigid routines, and trying to find purpose. But when his best friend moves in with the alluring Jeff, a former fellow patient, and Gabriel reluctantly befriends him, everything changes. After a fateful choice permanently estranges them, Gabriel is left to pick up the pieces of his life and identity, while all the while, a growing obsession lurks beneath the surface... Major themes: Control, choice, obsession, mental illness and recovery, stigma/social perceptions of mental illness, inevitability, grief, trauma, the butterfly effect.

WIP intro post Story playlist Pinterest (cw: violence, gore, some disturbing and/or suggestive imagery)

Tags: #libaw, #call it midnight (for inspo reblogs)

💀 The Dotted Line | Adult contemporary | Experimental horror/Dark comedy/Crime | Camp NaNoWriMo project - July 2023

Banner image source

Draft start date: July 1, 2013 Draft completion date: TBD

Status: Drafting

Comps: THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION x A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Summary: A young, emotionally challenged inmate nicknamed after an Al Pacino movie navigates the bizarre and dangerous world of a medium security American state prison while plotting his escape.

Major themes: Survival, reinvention of self, abolitionism/overt anti-carceral messaging, institutional abuses and corruption, trauma, the darkest recesses of humanity.

WIP intro post M&S Camp NaNoWriMo Directory post Story playlist Pinterest (cw: violence, gore, some suggestive imagery)

Tags: #tdl, #the jungle (for inspo reblogs)

🔵 Supernova | Adult science fiction | Dystopian/Speculative/Science fiction | Introduced as part of Moon & Seraph Pitch Week in March 2023

Draft start date: TBD Draft completion date: TBD

Status: Pre-production (zero drafting/outlining)

Comps: FRANKENSTEIN x BREAKING BAD

Summary: What if you held the key to the Earth's salvation... and its potential destruction?

An eccentric Montreal chemistry professor is rumored to have isolated a dangerous theoretical compound with powerful implications for the energy sector. Despite her many warnings, her new PhD students, seeing strong potential for a solution to the advanced climate crisis threatening life on Earth within a few decades at most, decide to investigate the claims. By doing so, they ignite the spark to an unstoppable chain reaction of passion and pride, power and corruption, and unintended consequences they never could have anticipated.

Major themes: Scientific responsibility and ethics, unintended consequences, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, advanced climate crisis, discrimination and social inequalities.

WIP intro post Moon & Seraph Pitch Week post Inspo playlist

Tags: #sn, #hexa (for inspo reblogs)

#writeblr intro #feel free to reblog i appreciate it!#crime fiction #horror #writeblr #writing #writers on tumblr

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commander-minkowski · 2 years ago

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this may sound a little harsh but honestly I have disdain for anyone who seriously compares/conflates the magnus archives and welcome to night vale beyond a surface level. like ... sure ... they're both speculative audio drama, set in a world that slightly deviates from ours in ways that can be unsettling, have a work-related framing device, are about a queer guy with a strong personality.

but. tma is straight up horror. whether you personally think it's scary or not, its purpose is to be a collection of spooky stories that will creep you out and/or make you think about the nature of fear and why and how certain things scare people, and how both the emotion of fear itself and the ways people capitalizing on other people's fears affect both the characters and the listener. (yes, it has an overarching plot, but even at the end when the plot is at its most important -- during season 5 -- the core of the regular episodes is a self-contained scary story).

welcome to night vale is a very different story. the "horror" elements are always grounded in either comedy or social commentary. tma dips into social commentary occasionally (eg with the lonely symbolizing depression), but, I'd argue, not with a ton of intentionality. and it's absolutely not a comedy. wtnv, regardless of whether you personally think it's funny, is. the comedy comes either from pure absurdity or from the juxtaposition between tone and subject matter (the way cecil almost always delivers dire news in a chipper tone, versus the way he talks about seemingly ordinary things and events, like librarians or valentine's day, in a grim, foreboding way).

wtnv is also chock-full of incisive satire. follow the arc of desert bluffs, as an example -- while it starts out in absurdism ("kill your double"), it then turns to anti-corporate/anti-fascist commentary (the year 2 arc), then pivots to be about xenophobia, specifically the way minority religious and ethnic communities are demonized by the majority for atrocities perpetuated by an elite few at the top (years 3-4 iirc), and eventually ends up in a hopeful place of peaceful coexistence. there's also a ton of other stuff -- the ineffectual, monolithic city council, the sheriff's secret police, the vague yet menacing government agency, angels as people who "don't exist" legally and the implications of that, night vale's hostility toward "interlopers," etc, etc. and, hell, wtnv even has its own poignant exploration of depression ("being stuck in the mud," I wanna say year 4 or 5). sure, it's occasionally creepy or scary, but the main thrust of the series is not to scare you or to explore the nature of fear. it's to explore various social issues through a lens that is absurd -- either in a funny way, or in an unsettling way, or in a way that walks a fine line between.

finally, a slightly tangential point that might also piss people off, but fuck it, I'm including it anyway -- I get annoyed when people compare tma and wtnv in terms of representation/imply that tma is somehow more progressive than wtnv just because it's newer/that wtnv is somehow outdated in its representation. objectively, wtnv has a very strong track record when it comes to being thoughtful about diversity and inclusion, especially in matters of race. for instance, very early in the show's run, when fink and cranor decided to make carlos a much bigger character, they recast his va to be dylan marron, a latino man (it was previously a bit part taken by cranor iirc). they even made up an in-universe explanation for why his voice had changed. since then, they've cast multiple vas of color to play characters of color (tamika, dana, josie, kevin, basimah, michelle, etc) which is far from standard practice both in podcasts and in animation. few other widely loved/well funded podcasts take the care to do this (a few smaller ones, like caravan and desperado, actually do, proving it's not a matter of money/resources but rather one of care and intention). I'm not saying wtnv is perfect in its handling of race and other sensitive topics, nor am I saying that tma is horrible at it (though I have seen some criticism leveled at it that I agree with). I'm just saying that to compare wtnv unfavorably to tma in terms of its handling of sensitive topics is just laughable and smacks of the fallacy that just because a show started airing in 2012, it has to be less progressive than shows coming out later.

anyway. thanks for indulging me if you read this far. stop lumping these two shows together </3

#my ramblings #tma #the magnus archives #wtnv #welcome to night vale

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o-w-quinlan · 3 years ago

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Digimon Ghost Game: Thoughts and Speculation

These last few days we’ve gotten enough information about the new Digimon anime that I feel comfortable going in-depth about my thoughts on it. Of course, since we’re still missing a description, or a trailer, or really anything beyond the name, the poster and the character design, all of this may end up wrong, but hey, the hype is its own enjoyment.

Thoughts

First thing noticeable about the trailer is that there’s only 3 main characters (plus their Digimon) this time around. Considering the ongoing problems of the Digimon Adventure 2020 writer team to give more than crumbs to their gigantic cast, going back to the trio teams of Tamers or Savers sounds like the right choice.

We also… don’t really see anything in the background. From most Digimon posters we can more or less guess if it’ll happen primarily on the Digital World or the Human one, but here it could be anything. The poses of the main characters are also different from what’s typical for a Digimon series. Often the posters have the characters ready to leap into action, or otherwise in awe of their fantastical surroundings. These three children… aren’t doing either. If anything, the main character (Hiro, apparently) looks slightly confused. The other two, Ruri and Seijiro, do look like they know what they’re doing (a return to Tamers and Savers with the protagonist being less experienced than his companions?), with Ruri sort of ignoring her surroundings to look at her phone and Seijiro in a very confident pose. The three Digimon behind them, on the other hand, are leaping into action. The way they are shadowed (when other promotional material has already revealed their appearances), as well as the “Ghosts? Holograms?” text in the poster, adds to their mysterious nature, which goes along well with the confusion on Hiro’s face.

Design-wise… I’m not a big fan. The Digimon themselves look a bit better in the promotional material than they did in the anime art we had of them, but Angoramon still looks bland, Gammamon looks sort of like V-mon in body shape and Hackmon in color scheme, and I understand both of those Digimon have a lot of fans but I’m not one of them. I really only like Jellymon, though she’s weirdly detailed for a Child Digimon. That said, I do like the diversity in designs these trio of Digimon have going for them. Gammamon is confirmed to be a Virus Digimon, so that’s the first protagonist Digimon to be a virus since Guilmon (further adding to the Tamers comparison).

The children though… I don’t think I’ve ever seen a group of Digimon protagonists that look this bland? Hiro is the worst of the three, with almost absolutely nothing memorable going for him except of course red and blue clothes mean he’s the protagonist. The sole unique feature he has is the small scar on his left ear, which hopefully means there’s some backstory behind it. The other two, while better, still don’t make much of an impression. Ruri is fine, but she looks more like a Juri than a Ruki, if you catch my drift. Side character design rather than main character design. I do like that she seems to be taking the “smart one” role in the cast, if her focusing on her phone (looking up information?) is any indication. As for Seijiro… I’ll always like characters that are confident in themselves, but he looks like a mix between Kiriha from Xros Wars and Knight from Appli Monsters with a lot less personality than either of those two.

I do like that we’re breaking tradition by having a male tamer be paired with a female-looking Digimon. The opposite has happened quite a few times before (and it’s happening again in this show with Ruri and Angoramon), but Seijiro and Jellymon are the first time this has happened in a Digimon anime, I think (at least outside of Xros Wars having its protagonists be partnered to literal armies of Digimon).

So, overall, I like the mystery vibe this poster has, but don’t really like most of the designs. From a wider perspective of the franchise, though, I do love that we’re getting non-Adventure animated material (seems like the commercial success of Adventure 2020 was used for Good), and that the new digivice toy, the Digivice V, is just a new edition of the Vital Bracelet, bodes very well for the increased synergy between products the franchise currently has.

Speculation

The whole mystery vibe here leads me to believe that at least the beginning parts of the series will have Hiro constantly question the nature of Digimon. I suspect we’ll see some light horror tropes used for his first few interactions with Digimon, like in Tamers where Takato’s first meeting with Guilmon had the young boy terrified. Ruri and Seijiro do look like they know what they’re doing, though, and given that the mystery would be over pretty soon if they explained things to Hiro, perhaps we’ll see a more delayed introduction to them, like in Appli Monsters.

As for the plot of the series, the name “Ghost Game” as well as how the G’s in the title vaguely look like pins on a map make me believe the series will have something like a treasure hunt, or perhaps that the children will be investigating “mysterious” events in search of something. I mean, Cyber Sleuth is one of the most popular Digimon games, and it wouldn’t be strange for the anime to take some inspiration from it (Appli Monsters already referenced it in its Agumon episode). With that said, I believe this series will spend at least its first arc (if not most of the series) in the human world.

The emphasis on ghosts here makes me believe it will lean into that “Digimon may or may not be the same as mythological creatures from the past” idea that Digimon Adventure 02 introduced, and that Digimon Survive will use (if it ever actually releases). The various links between mythology and Digimon that Cyber Sleuth used and the ambiguity of how related they actually were (or if it was all one giant coincidence) was one of my favorite parts of it, so here’s hoping something similar is done here.

The fact that the main Digivice of the series is a Vital Bracelet and that each protagonist Digimon has a DIM card dedicated to them makes me think we’ll see this series lean into branched evolutions. Adventure 2020 was already emphasizing this to a further extent than anything before it, so perhaps Ghost Games will take this even further beyond.

Conclusion

Despite having some problems with the designs of the characters, I’m very excited for this series. It’s literally the first time since the 1999-2002 heyday that we’re getting anime series back-to-back, and if that isn’t proof of how much success Digimon has gotten in the past few years, I don’t know what is. The increased synergy here with the virtual pets department, as well as the updates and changes in the Reference Book website that there’s been in the past year which only hardcore fans of the lore could possibly care about but for which all of us hardcore fans are very grateful, make me hope they’ve learnt from their mistake back in the early 2000’s where it seemed nothing in the franchise had anything to do with anything else. Here’s hoping the series has more emphasis on characterization than the current Adventure 2020, too, considering they can no longer rely on their audience knowing these characters from previous works.

Eagerly waiting for a trailer or an update of its website for further news.

#digimon #Digimon Ghost Game

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ty-talks-comics · 5 years ago

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Best of DC: Week of November 20th, 2019

Best of this Week: The Question: The Deaths of Vic Sage #1 - Jeff Lemire, Denys Cowan, Bill Sienkiewicz, Chris Sotomayor and Willie Schubert

The Question is one of the best Objectivist heroes.

By extension, that also includes Rorschach since he’s a pastiche of good old Vic Sage himself and it’s easy to see why people gravitate towards them so much. The idea of Objectivism is… iffy to say the least, but being rational, utilizing one's free will and choosing to act in one’s own self interest can be seen as good qualities, especially in the ways that Vic and Rorschach operate. They have good, unwavering moral compasses and do their best to persuade others to their reality.

But their strengths are also their greatest weaknesses.

When Steve Ditko created The Question back in the 60s, he was all into Ayn Rand’s philosophy and that carried over heavily into Vic Sage’s characterization which saw him use almost any means necessary to keep Hub City’s chaos at bay, even going so far as to let criminals live or die on their own merits if Sage left them in precarious situations (Once leaving a man in a sewer drain and calling the cops to either find him or his body.). He was not a good person, but he was what the city needed to survive, much like Rorschach who chose to die rather than live in Ozymandias’ world built on a lie.

This book continues to build off of that characterization while mixing in elements from Dennis O’Neil and Denys Cowan’s 1980s run with the character and brings in his cast of characters and modernizes Hub City’s issues, hopefully to the delight of those wanting to see a return of everyone’s favorite conspiracy theorist/detective/agent of justice. Honestly, it’s a damn good job.

The book begins with The Question savagely breaking up a prostitution ring operating out of the city. He smashes faces into walls, elbows a big guy in the face and when he runs out of people to hit, he turns to the Councilman of Hub City who just so happens to be one of the patrons of the seedy motel. In fear, the Councilman pleads with The Question to not kill him and he responds by pulling out a phone and recording as much as he can, he then elbows the Councilman in the head and steals his ring, hoping that it might help him with other cases. One of the prostitutes thanks The Question for his help, but he rebuffs her and essentially says that she has no future, but the innocent little girl does.

In just one scene we learn everything we need to know about this iteration of Vic Sage; while he’s not a murderer, it is implied that he may have killed before, but he also knows that getting evidence and ruining someone's life with their evil deed is just as effective as a bullet. Though he saved the lives of the prostitute and the child with her, he insults her by calling her a whore, but insists that the little girl be given to the soon to arrive police. It’s another Randian idea that he doesn’t feel sorry for those that have “ruined” their lives in his eyes and he even notes this when he speaks about how Hub City itself is rotten and dying.

Soon after the bust, Vic Sage appears on his news channel and grills Myra Fermin, a character from the O’Neil and Cowan run, on the activities of her brother - incumbent Mayor Wesley Fermin. This is a bit of a change from the O’Neil run as Wesley was Myra’s husband in that series, but Lemire seems to be doing this in an effort to showcase some kind of family loyalty between the two. Sage accuses Wesley of being the man behind Hub City’s wave of crime, linking him to video evidence from an “anonymous source” of the Councilman in the brothel and this catches Myra off guard.

He then continues by saying that the Councilman’s arrest wasn’t mentioned in the police report, obviously showing that they’re corrupt as all hell and when the cameras are cut off, she lambasts him for ambushing her with his accusations and he says that she lacks spine and that the longer she chooses to ignore things, the more complicit she becomes. When the family lawyer comes to take her away from Sage’s “slanderous accusations” and threatens a lawsuit. Vic asks Myra what happened to her that she has to hide behind a lawyer and she replies by saying she grew up, labeling Vic’s objectivism as childish.

In some ways it’s easy to agree with her that the world isn’t necessarily black and white, but at the same time, it’s because of that that Vic’s able to operate in the way that he does. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that either of them are right as Hub City is still suffering and neither of their actions seem to have changed much in that regard. It’s a sad reality that only Vic is able to see since it’s so plain in his face, but when his only solutions are to beat people up and occasionally have evidence that can easily be dismissed by bought off judges, it’s clear that cynicism would win out in the end.

Denys Cowan really does remind me of why the early Question series was so memorable as his style his only improved from the old days. His signature style of hatch shading, Sienkiewicz’s inks and Sotomayor’s colors really set the noir tone of the story. Though it takes place in the modern day, it looks like a 90s book set back in the 50s or 60s and I love that about this. Cowan manages to pull so much emotion out of a character whose most distinct feature is the fact that his mask has none. Vic Sage is angry, he’s tired of this shit and has been for a little while.

Sotomayor does an amazing job contrasting Sage’s double identities with The Question wearing his normal dark blue suit and orange undershirt and Vic Sage wearing a bright brown suit. This symbolizes the dual natures of the man himself, with one operating in the dark and other in the light. This is brought up when Vic goes to speak to his former Chemistry teacher, Tot. Tot is one of the few people that knows Vic is The Question and as they discuss Hub City’s need for Vic Sage more than The Question right now.

Cowan’s art is absolutely beautiful in these scenes. As I will continually state, everything feels very noir-inspired, grimy and dak. Chris Sotomayor is able to beautifully use all of his colors to illustrate the gravity of the situation and show how easily Vic is able to move between his two personas. Using the compound that affixes the featureless mask to his face, a puff of smoke is created and that allows for Sotomayor to transition the blue into brown and vice versa through the scene. It’s amazing to look at when combined with Sienkiewicz dark inks. What’s even better is that the smoke almost forms a question mark in some thematic fun.

Vic says that The Question can do things that Vic Sage can’t and it’s debatable as to whether or not that’s always going to be a good thing. Throughout this scene they also discuss the ring that Vic took from the Councilman and how he seems to have some sort of odd memory or attraction to the symbol on it. While we’re left in the dark initially, I have some speculation as to what it could possibly be and how it may tie in to another incarnation of The Question or if it’s just something completely new and interesting. Sage is convinced that Fermin is involved with it somehow and the conspiracy begins as he notes that Fermin’s lawyer had a similar ring.

When Vic gets back to his office, he starts obsessively drawing the symbol almost from memory and then he questions how he can Google search it...then he does just that, commenting on how the internet has taken the fun out of detective work. It’s a funny crack, especially as he finds information that he absolutely needed and starts building a board for every piece he has, focusing on an old society that used to call Hub City home.

One of the best bits of the book have to be The Questions inner monologue throughout each page. He details, moment by moment, his actions and the actions of two other occurrences at the same time. It feels very Ditko-esque with just a little bit of Rorschach omnipresence thrown in there for good measure, though Sage mentions how he was actually oblivious to the other two events. Likely meaning that he’s writing a journal of the important things shortly after everything’s gone down.

As he enters the former home of the Hub City Elder Society, Myra accidentally walks in on her brother in the middle of putting the screws to the Councilman and in another part of the city a white police officer shoots an unarmed black man. We don’t get to see much more of the other events as the book then mostly spirals into a nightmare for Vic.

Cowan’s art takes a dark turn as The Question walks through the dark tunnel, discovering the symbol on the wall and starting to see horrific visions. Eventually, he stumbles upon the bodies of the Elder Society and a dark hole in the middle of the cave. Cowan and Sienkiewicz turn this into a horror show as the skeletons are strewn across the cave and The Questions visibly hit with fear, wondering if he should let his identity slip away and let the darkness tell him his real name.

Sienkiewicz earns his money through his dark inks in these pages and the few panels he’s given to illustrate nightmares on the level that he did with The New Mutants. The lines are scratchy, dark, sometimes incomprehensible and I absolutely loved them. At one point we get a close up on The Question’s blank face as done by Coan and the following panel is one of those nightmares - a jagged, green face begging “Charlie Victor Szasz” for help. The panel that follows sees The Question jolt back, his body language being the only thing that betrays his blank face as we can clearly see how afraid he is.

He runs out of the tunnel monologuing about how fear pushes one away from the truth and how he only knew fear, especially after having found a blank face mask similar to his own in the cave, only… it was far older than he. Tot calls him soon after and tells him that he’s been trying to reach him for three hours, much to Vic’s surprise. The city is in chaos after the shooting death of David Fuller, the black man mentioned earlier, and there are riots in the streets. Vic’s talk show would have been airing during the time The Question was in the tunnel and the City NEEDED his commentary, but whatever’s going on with the Elder Society and the mask demanded his attention more.

It’s astounding just how bad Hub City was able to get in a few short hours as Cowan portrays the riot as deafening and violent with Vic standing on one side of the street with no violence and the other side being a madhouse with car windows being smashed, bricks being thrown and molotovs flying in the background. At the same time, Myra wasn’t supposed to see what her brother was doing and unfortunately, she picked the wrong time to attain a moral high ground to things. Wesley has her detained in the room to decide which side she’s on, especially knowing that she’s turned a blind eye to his activities in the past.

Vic goes to visit his friend Richard Dragon, the man who taught him how to fight. While he drives, he listens to Wesley Fermin’s statement on the shooting and Fermin tries to deflect any blame from the Officer in question even though there is clear video evidence, he calls it “supposed video evidence.” He comments on the Officer’s history on the HCPD and says it’s too early to lay blame on anyone, claiming that the officer had just cause to “defend” himself. The riots only get more heated.

Vic and Dragon’s prior history is acknowledged, even Vic’s time as a man of Zen is brought up before we learn that he dismissed the “new-age bullshit” in favor of just hitting people. Dragon pours him a cup of tea and Vic tries to seek answers about things he’s seeing, calling them more than visions - memories maybe. Vic notes that all of this has an occult “mumbo-jumbo” feel to it and says he doesn’t believe in superstitious nonsense to which Dragon replies that he must feel the same way about metempsychosis. Before Sage is able to question him about what that means, he feels the effects of whatever drug Dragon put in his drink and he’s sent into a colorful rainbow of a dreamscape, waking up in the past without his face.

I love the fact that Denys Cowan returned to a character that he really helped popularize back when he was first being showcased at DC Comics and Bill Sienkiewicz does an amazing job with the inks in this issue, really helping set the grimy tone. Chris Sotomayor knocked it out of the park with his coloring to give this book life. Of course, the book wouldn’t have been nearly as good if not for Willie Schubert’s expert lettering as well.

This book was an amazingly fun and dark read that really returned The Question back to… at least his 80s roots while still acknowledging the characters past and potentially some of the unexplored parts of his New 52 self. Jeff Lemire does a good job of reintroducing Vic Sage as a nightly news host as well as his supporting cast from Tot to Myra and Richard Dragon. He’s still a good detective and conspiracy theorist, only this time, he’s going to have to go to places that he normally wouldn’t.

As it tends to happen, I’m sure that Book Two will be the absolute best issue of the series and will give us some insight over the many times The Question has lived or died and that’s a mystery that I’m sure Vic Sage would love to solve and find a rational answer for. I honestly also hope that we get some clarity on the other reboots and retcons that he’s endured over time as that seems to be one of the main themes of the book. Vic Sage isn’t enough, so the Question is the other half, but if the Question is no one, then who is he?

#the question #vic sage #charles victor szasz #dc comics #dc black label #jeff lemire #denys cowan #bill sienkiewicz #chris sotomayor #comics #objectivism #steve ditko

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itsclydebitches · 5 years ago

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It Chapter Two: Aged-Up Protagonists and the Umbridge Effect

Writing reviews, metas, and the like is a lot about timing. If you don’t craft your writing in the immediate aftermath of your source’s release, someone else will beat you to it and, chances are, your audience will be less enthused about reading the same arguments weeks later. (Admittedly, that’s up for debate. I for one am happy to read about the same shit for years on end.) Thus, when I didn’t have the time or the mental energy to write about It: Chapter Two immediately after seeing it in theaters, I knew within a few days that I’d lost a lot of ground. Fans and critics alike have already spoken about the film’s major draws, namely the update on Richie’s sexuality and the canonizing of a beloved, thirty-year-old ship. We’ve also covered the issues that arose out of those positives. In 2019, is it necessary to show a hate crime in such violent detail? By giving us queer characters, have Muschietti and King unintentionally fallen into the trap of treating them badly? One is dead and the other mourns while the straight couple passionately kiss beneath the lake. Faithful adaptation vs. modern activism is a tricky balance to strike. I could rehash all those arguments here, but why bother? They’ve been articulated better by others already. Besides, falling behind means that I now have the space to discuss something just as important to me.

The Losers’ ages.

Now, I’m not sure if you all have noticed, but fantasy adventures aren’t really geared towards adults. That is to say, stories often contain adult content, but that’s not the same thing as putting adults at the center of the narrative. I’ve experienced a niggling sense of displeasure that’s grown stronger with each passing year and it took until my mid-twenties to figure out what it was: I am no longer the hero of many of my favorite stories. Because I’ve grown up. Harry Potter is concerned primarily with the trials and tribulations of characters between the ages of eleven and eighteen. If we return to that world---such as through a certain cursed play---the focus must shift to the new, shiny generation. Anyone who falls through a wardrobe is bound to be a child and if they dare grow up? They’re no longer allowed access to such a fantastic place. Kids are the ones who find the Hundred Acre Woods, or fall down rabbit holes, get daemons, battle Other Mothers when the world gets flipped, or head off onto all sorts of elementary and high school adventures. Sometimes, even those who are adults mistakenly get caught up in this trend. Frodo might be in his fifties, but as a small, kindly hobbit he comes across as younger than the rest of the Fellowship. Since the release of Jackson’s trilogy I’ve corrected more than one new fan who assumed (somewhat logically) that he is in his early twenties, max. It’s an easy mistake to make when we’ve grown accustomed to children and young adults taking center stage in so many fantastic, high-profile adventures.

Of course, there are plenty of counters to this feeling. Just look at Game of Thrones. Though we see much of the story through younger perspectives---such as the Stark siblings---the vast majority of the cast is made up of adults, playing just as pivotal a role as the up-and-comers. Fantasy, Science Fiction, and other speculative story-lines are by no means solely in the hands of minors, yet I think it’s also worth acknowledging that a good majority of those stories do shape our media landscape. Or, if they’re not strictly minors, they’re characters who embody a sort of static young adulthood, the Winchesters and the Shadowhunters and all the television superheroes who might gesture towards markers of adulthood---we have long term relationships, hold down jobs, can impersonate FBI agents without anyone batting an eye---yet are still able to maintain a nebulous form of youth. They all (try to) look and act as if they’re right out of college. The standards of film and television demand that actors appear twenty-years-old even when they’re pushing forty, and the standards of much literature insists that twenty is simply too old for an adventure, period. I can still clearly recall two moments of shock (later agreed upon by my friends) when I encountered unexpectedly older protagonists in genre fiction: the realization that Sophie actually spends the majority of Howl’s Moving Castle as a very old woman and that The Magicians takes place in graduate school. “Wow,” I remember thinking. “When’s the last time that happened?”

What does all this have to do with It: Chapter Two? I don’t have any big twist for you here. It was just really refreshing to see such a fantastical story where our cast is all forty or older. Seriously, can we take a moment to appreciate exactly how much King undermined expectations there? The first half of the novel is structured precisely how we assume it ‘should’ be. There’s a mysterious threat, there are children caught up in the middle of it, and ultimately only they are capable of saving the day. We know this story. We even have the characterization of the town itself to reinforce this structure, a place so warped by evil that only the very young with their open-mindedness and imagination are capable of seeing Derry for what it truly is, illustrated beautifully in the film by Mr. Marsh straight up not noticing a whole room full of blood.

Though they’re It’s prey, children are also the only ones who have any potential power over him. You have to be able to acknowledge a problem in order to fix it and King could have easily ended his story at the first chapter alone, with the group somehow managing to defeat Pennywise for good the first time they set foot in the sewers. A part of me is still shocked he didn’t, if only because the young savior as an archetype was embedded within Western culture far earlier than It’s 1986 publication. From Carrie to The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Pet Sematary to Firestarter, King is no stranger to putting children at the center of fantastic tales. Yet he’s also given us numerous adult protagonists, managing to find an enjoyable balance between the two, both within individual novels and his entire corpus. It represents that balance, not just imagining a story where seven (yes, I’m counting Stan) middle-age adults manage to finally save their town, but actually setting up a twenty-seven year jump to allow for that. It's the best of both worlds, exploring the difficulties inherent in both childhood and adulthood, arguing that we need each---that imagination and that experience---if we hope to come out alive.

While watching It: Chapter Two I took note of how many people laughed throughout the film, and not just at the moments set up to be funny (looking at you, Richie). Rather, the film that two years ago had scared the pants off of movie-goers now entertained them in a much more relaxed manner. No one was hiding behind their popcorn; there were no shrieks of fright. I’ve seen more than one reviewer express displeasure at this change. What the hell happened? Isn’t an It film supposed to be scary? Well, yes and no. I think what a lot of people miss is how providing us with an adult cast inherently changes the way fear manifests, both literally in the case of Pennywise’s illusions and thematically in regards to the film itself. This sloppy bitch, as established, preys on children. His tricks have the illogical, fantastical veneer that reflect how children see the world: you’re scared of women with horrifically elongated faces, zombie-like lepers, and hungry mummies. They’re literal monsters emerging out from under the bed. Of course, as adults watching the story we’re easily able to see how these monsters represent much deeper, intangible fears: growing up and disappointing your father, falling ill like your mother always claims you will (to say nothing of contracting AIDS in connection with a budding queer identity), and the danger that comes with being alone and ostracized. Sometimes It: Chapter One gestures more firmly towards those underlying fears---such as the burnt hands reaching for Mike when we know his family died in a fire---but only once does it make the real horror overt, when Pennywise takes Mr. Marsh’s face and asks Bev if she's still his little girl.

Outside of pedophilia and sexual abuse, Chapter One’s real horror is mostly coded, symbolic, left up to (admittedly rather obvious at times) interpretation. It’s just under the surface and we’re meant to be distracted by the fact that, allegorical or not, there’s still a very creepy thing hunting our protagonists from the shadows. For two hours we take on a child’s perspective, biting our nails at all the things we once imagined hid inside our closets. We’re scared because they’re scared.

That mindset irrevocably changes once your group grows up. Forty-year-olds simply don’t freak out in the same way a bunch of thirteen-year-olds would, especially now that they know precisely what’s happening and have the mental fortitude to combat it. At least to an extent. Chapter Two isn’t as traditionally scary for the simple reason that the film now acknowledges what all adults eventually must: there’s nothing in the closet, there’s nothing hiding under your bed. Or if there is, it’s something tangible that can be handled with a calm(ish) demeanor and a well-placed ax. An adult might scream when something jumps out at them, but they’re not as inclined to cower. Adults might still be scared, but they’re better able to push that fear aside in order to take action. The group first reached that point in the sewers--- “Welcome to the Losers’ club, asshole!”---and now fully embodies that mindset with nearly three decades of growth and experience to draw on. This is why Ben investigating the library as a teen reads as teeth-chatteringly scary, but Ben and Bill as adults investigating the skateboard produces only a comment about how they're getting used to this nonsense. They know, and we as the audience know, what the real threat is and whether or not we need to shield our eyes when something starts clunking its way down the stairs.

All of which isn’t to say that Chapter Two isn’t scary. It’s simply scary in a much more realistic manner, killer clowns and Native American rituals aside. The fears have been aged-up along with the cast, stripping away the child-like fantasies that made us wet our pants in Chapter One. What’s the scariest moment outside of the jump scares? When two men and a kid beat a gay man and then chuck him in the river to drown. You’ll note that, unlike in the first film, Pennywise doesn’t actually have to do much work here. Seasoning people up with fear? The rest of the world is doing that for him. That first scene detailing a truly horrific hate crime (which, by the way, is based off of true events) results in a meal delivered straight to Pennywise’s arms. It’s people who targeted that couple, beat one of them within an inch of his life, and then tossed him over a bridge, bleeding and shrieking for help. All Pennywise had to do was scoop him from the water and take that first bite. He’s incidental to the film’s most cringe-worthy scene. We can argue all we want about how it’s Pennywise’s influence that “makes” the town this way, but any queer viewer knows that's simply not the case. In 2019 we're still living this horror, no Pennywise required.

Likewise, the two children we see murdered are much more overtly grappling with fears that have nothing to do with fantastical monsters. Dean, the little boy Bill tries to save in lieu of Georgie, is rightly petrified because a seemingly crazy adult is now stalking him. We as the audience know that Bill is just trying to help----that he’s not the real danger here----but that’s not the perspective this kid has, nor is it the issue the film is grappling with. We first see him approaching an idol of his, Richie, and instead of an enjoyable experience he winds up getting yelled at. The It films are only tangentially interested in the status of fans and their relationship with celebrities, but we know it’s a common theme for King’s work overall. Look at Misery and look at this cameo: a disenchanted fan of the 21st century, criticizing a writer’s novel and leveraging him for money. “You can afford it,” he tells Bill, swindling him simply because he can. The context of this little boy as a fan and Richie as the older, bigger, larger-than-life comedian adds another layer to the interaction. It’s not just an adult verbally attacking a child, it’s an adult this kid worshiped enough to recognize and quote his material from memory. Who easily walks away from that?

This little boy then finds Bill shrieking at a sewer opening, is manhandled by him, and told in the scariest way possible, born of Bill’s own fear, that he has to get out of dodge, fast. There are scary things out there, Dean freely admits that he’s heard kids’ voices coming from the tub drain, but right now the scariest thing is how badly the adults in his life are failing him: parents (from what little we can gather) are distant, his comedic idol is mean, and now this stranger is traumatizing him in the middle of the street. Once again, it’s easy to see how Pennywise isn’t needed to sow fear or even enact cruelty; he’s not a requirement for horrible things in the world, he’s merely their reflection. We see the same setup with the little girl under the bleachers. That scene demonstrates precisely how not scary Pennywise is. Here’s this child putting aside her discomfort over his looks and agreeing to be his friend. What’s worse than a clown with a creepy expression? The knowledge that all the other kids have already rejected you because of a birthmark on your face. Bullying is the far greater threat and one��we’re 100% more likely to deal with in our lives than a killer clown, so the second film re-frames Pennywise to better acknowledge this. He’s scary because things like bullying and neglect exist to give him an easy in. He’s even scary because in this moment, hiding under the bleachers, manipulating this little girl, he’s fully embodying a child predator. Chapter One was a primal, “There’s a monster hiding in the shadows” kind of fear. Chapter Two is a, “We’re all going to die from climate change” kind of fear. Logical and largely inescapable. Characters like Richie don't need Pennywise to take some fantastic form to scare him. Homophobia has already done all the work.

Ultimately, I think of this as the Umbridge Effect. Who’s the most hated character in the Harry Potter franchise? I’ll give you a hint, it’s not the Dark Lord responsible for two wars, attempted genocide, and the death of our title character.

We despise Umbridge because she’s real. She’s relatable. She’s grounded in a way that Voldemort could never hope to be. We have no fear that an all-powerful sorcerer is suddenly going to come out of the woodwork and attempt to enslave and/or eradicate everyone without magic. That’s just not on our list of things to worry about. A corrupt politician, however? An instructor who uses her power to emotionally and physically torture students, getting away with it because of a cutesy, hyper-feminine persona? We’ve seen stuff like that. We’ve lived it. Umbridge represents all the real wrongs in the world when it comes to bigotry and privilege. Therefore we hate her---we fear her---in a way we could never hate or fear Voldemort. Now, in It: Chapter Two, Pennywise is the new Voldemort. Is an alien clown with an unhinged jaw and three rows of teeth technically scary? Sure, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the real problems that plague the cast: abuse, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, the fear that someone will hurt or outright kill you over some part of your identity. These are things we continue to fear long after the credits roll and the lights come up, and they’re now barely coded in the story:

It occurred to me halfway through my viewing that the people laughing at the characters’ new plights were the same ones who didn’t flinch when a gay man’s head cracked into the pavement. I had both hands over my mouth during that scene and I wasn’t snickering whenever Eddie had a panic attack, or Ben’s self-confidence took a hit. Because those moments, like our opening, hit pretty close to home for me; I didn’t find them embarrassingly humorous in the way much of my theater did. So many reviews in the last two months have insisted that Chapter Two isn't scary, but I think that depends entirely on whether or not you're struggling with these now explicit threats. We're not dealing with mummies and creepy portraits anymore. Instead, tell me how you feel about holding your partner's hand in public. Do certain memories make you vomit? Or freeze? Consider heading upstairs to the bath? The horror is dependent on how the audience views Bill's stutter coming back, or the bruises on Bev's arms.

The cast grew up. It’s a fantastic twist. It also means that the horror needed to grow up with them, resulting in a film that could no longer function as a simple, scary clown movie. Our ending reminds us of that. When did people laugh the loudest? When the Losers’ club was bullying Pennywise into something vulnerable. And yeah, I get it. It’s a cheesy moment that we feel the need to laugh at because it’s just so unexpected. Awkward, even. Since when are badass horror monsters defeated with a bit of backyard peer pressure straight out of middle school? If this were any other story, Pennywise would have been defeated by Eddie’s poker. The most scared member of the group finally finds his courage! He has faith that this simple object can kill monsters! He throws it in a perfect arc, splitting the deadlights in two! That’s a heroic ending. Something epic and fantastical, relying on the idea that the Good Guys will win simply because they believe in themselves... but that’s not how the real world works. That ending is a child’s fantasy. Sometimes you do the heroic thing and end up dying anyway. Which isn’t to say that the heroic thing is useless. It saves Richie’s life. It’s just that a single act can’t cure all our ills in the way that storybooks often claim they can.

How then does an adult deal with huge, intangible problems like bigotry and mental illness---the things Pennywise now fully represents? By saying “Fuck you” to those things again and again with all the support you can possibly wrangle up at your side. You refuse to let those issues control you; you drag those child-like representations into the light and remind yourself just how small they really are. We don’t get to beat something like depression by spearing it with a fire poker in some overblown finale. If we did, we’d all be having a much better time. All you can do is band together with friends and scream that you’re not going to let your fears define you anymore. Pennywise is a symptom of all the true horrors in the world. Sadly, you can’t beat those with a baseball bat. But you can acknowledge the heart of the issue, literally in the case of five friends squeezing until that one symptom, at least, is gone.

Image Credit

#1:https://www.screengeek.net/2018/07/10/it-chapter-2-character-mashups/

#2:https://earlybirdbooks.com/the-re-read-the-lion-the-witch-and-the-wardrobe

#3:https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/7/4/19413771/stranger-things-season-3-review-recap-hopper-elevenrussians

#4:https://comicbook.com/movies/2019/08/08/harry-potter-movies-review-10-years-late-snape-dumbledore-franchise/

#5:https://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/netflix/277257/give-the-dragon-prince-a-chance

#6:https://www.forbes.com/sites/lindamaleh/2019/04/23/she-ra-and-the-princesses-of-power-season-2-review/#ec7022c42953

#7:https://www.commonsensemedia.org/tv-reviews/avatar-the-last-airbender

#8:https://www.newsweek.com/buffy-vampire-slayer-turns-20-charisma-carpenter-shows-enduring-legacy-and-566123

#9:http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2009/alice-in-wonderland-the-movie/

#10:https://www.hindustantimes.com/tv/game-of-thrones-this-edited-out-scene-between-bran-and-sansa-reveals-so-much-about-finale/story-qFDHflH2dO6Kcki1wgsEyM.html

#11:https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Why-Ender-Game-Best-Possible-Adaptation-Book-40110.html

#12:https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/supernatural-end-season-15-cw-1196579

#13:https://www.slashfilm.com/it-chapter-two-scene/

#14:https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/9/12/16286316/it-cleaning-up-blood-scene-feminism

#15:http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-208633/photos/detail/?cmediafile=21647122

#16:https://stanleyyuris.tumblr.com/post/188300897715/chaotic-losers

#17:https://whatculture.com/film/it-chapter-2-every-character-ranked-worst-to-best?page=3

#18:https://www.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/comments/7uhrkz/the_most_hated_character/

#19:https://9gag.com/gag/am2X2Z4?ref=pn.mw

#20:https://screenrant.com/harry-potter-hated-characters-unpopular-worst-ranked/quickview/17

GIFs1-5:https://the-pretty-poisons.tumblr.com/post/188344826978/why-is-everyone-looking-at-me-\like-this

#It #It Chapter 2 #It Chapter Two #It Chapter Two Spoilers #reddie #mymetas

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theouterdark · 5 years ago

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Hello! In the light of Storyteller Saturday writeblr event, I'm sending some questions around & since I love your work, I wanted to ask you something too even if you don't participate. :P Sooo, you haven't told us much about Topiary Black. How is it going, first of all, and what are some of your plans for it at the moment. How is Coldwater Sound's 2nd draft going, you had mentioned you were thinking of two different versions of it. No pressure, this is only if you wish to talk about them. ^^

I’m somewhat restrained when it comes to revealing details about my WIPs while I’m drafting, and what I do share is only after deliberate consideration. That said, I’d love to answer your questions, but I want to touch on my reservations as well because I don’t think I’ve ever talked about it here.

Oversharing cripples my process and my work because:

A) My creative well empties

If I receive validation or catharsis from revealing information or excerpts before the work is truly done, my brain will trick me into thinking I’ve accomplished something, thereby:

B) I become unproductive

Which inherently is my natural state, which gives me unintended distance from the narrative, thereby:

C) The story wanders from my active memory

That’s mostly why I err toward ambiguity. But. Since I’m not actively working on these for a few more weeks, let’s jump in.

Status: Outlining

Topiary Black is progressing, if somewhat leisurely. I know most of the major beats, and some of the minor ones, but I’ve been indecisive on matters of setting and character. The main cast needs to be pruned, for starters (one of my weaknesses is adding far more characters than necessary in the initial draft, so I’m trying to save myself oodles of time by shedding some of the extra weight now).

I’m also having antagonist problems that I was cognizant of early-on but chose to ignore because problems like that are for Future Dylan. I think I’m zeroing in on something interesting though.

Occasionally, I’ll pen a scene when I can’t contain it anymore. But for the most part, there is too much on my plate with this project to begin writing in earnest.

As far as a timeline, my goal is to complete draft one by mid-late summer 2020. I think it’s doable, but I may postpone work until I get more of the worldbuilding firmed up.

I know that’s not much in the way of actual interesting information so here are some nuggets:

The bulk will be recounted in the first person by the member of The Aviary known as “Loon”

Also planning on using a frame story for her “present” timeline

It will tackle sexuality and identity far more than any of my previous works

Inspirations for Topiary Black include “The Library of Babel,” the Akashic records, Rabbits, Mr. Robot, and the art of Simon Stålenhag

It takes place in an alternate 1980s

I’m currently planning it to be one of three semi-connected projects, the other two being “The God Machine” and Deerfield Run, that will form a loosely-connected speculative fiction trilogy, but each will read as a standalone work

I think that’s about all I can reveal at the moment, let’s get on to the next WIP.

Status: Drafting

Oh boy, what a mess.

In short, draft two isn’t going. I touched on this in an earlier update post, but my current struggle with Coldwater Sound is not a fun one. I have two entirely different conceptions of how the novel should go, and in my heart, I know which one is gonna win.

And it’s the one that requires me to re-write the entire thing.

At its heart, it will remain the same. The characters and their relationships won’t differ wholly from the first draft, but the bulk, as it is, is far too convoluted. I’ll be trimming the core cast, cutting locations, and refocusing the plot on Blake the mystery of Penny’s disappearance.

That means losing a lot of stuff I like about the original, sadly. Such is the way of things. I may reconsider this by holding another reading of draft one.

Honestly, I’m far more focused on a different project that you didn’t ask about, but I’ll tell you about it anyway:

Status: Seeking Alpha Readers/Drafting

I haven’t done an official ask/announcement, but I’ve gained enough distance from The Devil from the Outer Dark to begin the Alpha Read. I know some of the changes I want to make, but I’d still like some reactions to build from. I want to keep it small, likely 3-5 readers, if anyone out there is interested.

It is technically a sequel to Coldwater Sound, but the first is not required reading. Just like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd isn’t required reading for Murder on the Orient Express. Blake is still the main character, there’s still a mystery for her to solve, and horror lurks around many a corner, but spoilers for Coldwater Sound are mild at best.

If you want to help me out or learn more about the project, shoot me a message here on my blog.

Tagging: @writingmyassoff, @erin-writes-stuff, @midnightstreetwanderings, @byjillianmaria, @bethwrotethis, @doux-ciel, @hilunawrites, @ghost-possum, @zmlorenz, @doubleviewfinder, @veronicadent, @els-writes, @dantedevereaux, @tlbodine, @hypotheticalwriterquestions, @hazeywrites, @reeseweston, @dor-rose-love, and @katabasiss. (Let me know if you’d like to be added or removed from future tags for any of these projects).

#storyteller saturday #on sunday (sorry)#writeblr #writeblr community #topiary black #coldwater sound #the devil from the outer dark #p:tb #p:cws:d2 #p:tdftod #update #get to know me #get to know the writer #Dylan speaks #seeking alpha readers #seeking readers

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grimes-claireboucher · 6 years ago

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GRIMES | WHO KNEW WORLD-BUILDING WOULD BE SO DIFFICULT?

BY SID FEDDEMA

APRIL 23, 2019

You can hear it, can’t you? The pulsing, panning synth bass, ingenious and instantly memorable. A gossamer coo, almost a sigh. And then a voice in an unusually high register singing  lyrics full of menace, at odds with a calculated syrupy-sweet, faux-naive intonation: I never walk about after dark / It’s my point of view / If someone could break your neck / Coming up behind you always coming and you’d never have a clue.

Seven years later, its power remains unmitigated. “Oblivion” turned horror into art, and, while drawn from a personal, particular experience, it spoke to a universal pain, a sense of predation and vulnerability all too familiar for women. Most importantly, it is a defiant act of resistance, a steadfast insistence on Grimes’ ownership of her own experience, and a refusal to be silenced. Pitchfork named it the best song of the decade so far. NPR named it one of the “greatest songs by 21st Century women.” Grimes was suddenly a cultural touchstone, a feminist symbol, a cherished member of the resistance. Everyone was watching.

They still are. Look at the Twitter fusillades, the talmudic readings of even the most flippant utterance, the team-joining. Feuds! With contemporaries, the media, her label. Gossip! A storm of it, following her spacetime-warping appearance with Elon Musk on the Met Gala red-carpet. And to hear Grimes tell it, being caught up in all this has been excruciating. She’s said that 2018 was one of the hardest years she’s endured.

When we speak, Grimes is in flux—emotionally, artistically, career-wise. But that’s nothing new. If I was to describe her with one word, I think it would be '“mercurial.” Or “protean.” She never stands still, never settles. She feels less like one person than like a collection of occasionally-combative creative spirits inhabiting one body. Hence the wide cast of characters in her albums, the fashion experiments, the accretion disk of material spanning mediums and genres. As I was writing this article we got word that she has changed her name—to c [lowercase italic], rather than Claire Boucher, and that the Grimes identity she’s built up over the course of her career could be next to go. For a journalist, she’s a tough subject: not only is she encyclopedic in conversation, but by the time you finish your draft, half of what you’ve written may no longer be true. While this capriciousness is a powerful creative resource, it can also make things difficult. She is a hell of a lot of fun to talk to, though—a whirlwind of ideas, opinions, wisecracks, and puckish self-deprecation.

I was given four tracks from the new album to prepare. But when I bring up the first, the disarmingly raw, strange, and lovely “Shall I Compare Thee,” she laughs. “I hate all these songs now. I might even replace them all. I’m supposed to be finishing the album this month or whatever, but I’ve been making a shit ton of new music instead. Which is a really bad idea.” She sighs, thinks for a moment. “But I’ll probably put out the songs that I said I’ll put out.” I tell her that her fans would surely appreciate seeing what she’s been working on. “Maybe, maybe not,” she replies, grinning. “I think the fans want me to stop making metal, nu-metal. Which I will! I have, I have stopped making metal!” Meanwhile, she’s dropping demos for an augmented reality side project under the moniker “Dark,” scribbling away on a novel, and thinking about a suite of “hymns, like glossolalia vocal music,” but which she “probably won’t release as ‘Grimes,’” as she explains it. She has changed her artistic approach, and is intent on unshackling her creative impulses. “I read a book on speed painting, about how you just lay it down and become satisfied with it. So I’m trying to do a bunch of stuff like that right now. It does feel better, because it just contains more life,” she explains. “Shall I Compare Thee” embodies this speed-painting creative methodology: DIY production, recorded in “like, two hours.” But the other single from the album, “We Appreciate Power,” is the opposite. It’s polished to a shine, conceptual, accompanied by a well-produced video. “‘Power’ is sort of the end of the old music I was making,” she says. “This era of super-produced and perfected sound—it’s sort of a thesis on that, a bookend.”

She’s eager to explain the concept of the new album. However she feels about the songs at any given moment, she’s clearly excited about the story that they’re telling. “Miss Anthropocene” is a character, essentially an anthropomorphization of the concept of climate change. The name is a witty pun on “misanthropy” and “anthropocene”—the geological era defined by humanity’s irrevocable impacts on the planet. “All the media about climate change is like one big guilt trip. It’s super depressing, like, here are some facts that make you wanna go home and kill yourself. It sucks and it sucks to look at, so people just kind of look away from it,” she says. “I want to change that. In ancient Greek culture you have these gods that represent abstract, terrifying concepts. Like a God of Death. So I wanted to make Miss Anthropocene this idea of, like, the God of Climate Change. She wants the world to end and she wants to bring about the end of humanity, but she’s fun. She’s fucking fun and evil!” Grimes laughs. “Also, climate change is beautiful, even if it’s terrifying. It’s so nice to look at. The sunsets are brighter and more beautiful. Volcanoes, oil rainbows, hurricanes... destruction is gorgeous—people are drawn to it.”

Miss Anthropocene marks the end of an era for Grimes. When it’s released she’ll be finished with her obligations to her label, and she’s excited about the prospect of working without contractual restrictions. “I’ll never sign with another label. I’ll never have to put out another album... If I didn’t have this whole requirement to release an ‘album,’ I would have just dropped a bunch of music ages ago.” The album format, she says, feels increasingly ill-suited for her shape-shifting, experimental style. “Albums are trash unless you sit down and make a really good album. I’m not really that consistent. I feel like I would work better in like EP-ish formats.”

It’s not the only departure from musical tradition that she’s considering. Touring, she tells me, has increasingly become a stressful obligation. “I wanna retire from touring. I wanna do a hologram tour. Why do we keep doing them for dead artists instead of living ones who have stage fright?” Does she still get stage fright, this far into her career? “Oh my god, yes. It’s nightmarish. Apocalyptic. Terrifying, horrible. I can’t hear clapping or cheers—I just hear an echo chamber of death. I black out. Dissociation—I can’t tell what’s happening. After a show I’m always thinking, What happened? And people are like ‘It’s ok!’ I know people like the authenticity of live performance, and I do too. But I’m not a good performer. I’m a director who accidentally fell into this position, and now it’s too late to change. So I need to Gorillaz it—I need to find a way to not have to do the Beyoncé thing as much.”

The sense is that Grimes is finished with facades, done pretending, done jumping through hoops to meet our expectations for what a ‘pop-star’ should be. Coming to terms with all this has been a messy and difficult process, but she’s finally feeling like herself again. She’s optimistic, if wary. And she’s ready to let it all out. Her forthcoming album, to hear her tell it, is Grimes unleashed. “I feel like at times there is an extreme rage that I haven’t been able to lay down,” she says. “A rawness that I have withheld from the public, because people always told me to make it more accessible. I’ve given that up for this, and it’s been freeing.”

She’s confronting her past as well. Miss Anthropocene was written during a period of intense self-reflection, and in the midst of personal tragedy. After losing others to addiction and overdoses, yet another close friend had passed. She hints obliquely at her own struggles with substances. It’s hard for her to talk about, but she has confronted it head-on while making this album, and is ready to be honest with the public. “I had early disturbing experiences with kids coming up to me and admiring things that were self-destructive. I was like, fuck, people think it’s cool to cut yourself or vomit or do crack. That’s not good! But then it became this stifling thing,” she says. “I don’t know. I’ve lived this hard, fucked-up life. I can’t pretend I didn’t. It started feeling like I couldn’t express myself properly, because I was so worried about being a good role model. It scares me to be hyper-honest, but we never see women getting to be that way. There should be someone out there that’s messy and fucked up—for some people this is how it is. It scares me because I don’t want little kids to romanticize certain things that are not cool. But I also don’t want to lie about the reality of my existence. I can’t make super honest or super emotional art if I’m always pretending to be cool and chill all the time.”

Grimes’ fans, who love her rabidly, have expressed worry at times in the last few years. If it seems she’s been self-sabotaging, whether online or in her relationships with collaborators and partners, it’s because she really has struggled. But unlike most of us, every step of her journey has been seized upon by a fascinated public and a cynical press hungry for headlines and clicks. And her reticence to tell us what she was really going through left all the more room for speculation. “Two of my best friends died before I was 18, and I lost like five friends to opiate-related deaths. Really close friends. I had one die when I was on a shoot, and found out while filming the second day. All this stuff, fucked up stuff, is happening. Before I would just not mention any of it. I feel like I’ve been through war when I think that all these people around me are dead. In 2016, my good friend died. They were a friend of 15 years, and I felt nothing. Just nothing. And it was so weird. But, you know, there you go. So you start removing yourself from everybody because you don’t want to face it. Life becomes too shockingly fragile, you know?”

It hasn’t been easy for Grimes to engage with her past, but talking about it—in her art, in interviews like this one—is helping. “I’ve gotten better. I was really fucked up in 2016 when I wrote this album, but now I’m doing much better. When I was going through the Art Angels cycle, I was having severe PTSD, and everyone was like, ‘Don’t let the public know!’ I know there are people who think I’ve fucked up the last year, and I do need to be more organized and reasonable and thoughtful at times, for sure. But I feel my art is better.”

Grimes’ favorite part of her job comes before she records a single note. “Dreaming it up feels so easy. The making and releasing can be horrible, but the dreaming is always fun,” she sighs. And that’s why she’s such an interesting figure, right? She’s a prodigious dreamer. We may love the music—I still blast “Oblivion” on an almost monthly basis, revisit the strange and compelling world of Art Angels—but it does sometimes feel almost beside the point. Grimes is building a universe, and she’s shedding the strictures that get in the way of that grand vision—the album format, her label, even her own carefully-crafted identity. “Part of what I’m doing is setting up the world-building. Reverse Harry Potter it. Soundtrack comes first, then the fashion, then everything, everything, everything. Then the book, right before I die,” she says, not really joking. Reaching this point of liberation hasn’t been a smooth process. Grimes is unfailingly honest with herself, her own worst critic. But she feels free, she’s happy with what she’s creating, and her ambitions have only grown. We just need to get out of the way and let her dream.

#grimes #claire boucher #actuallygrimes #interview 2019 #flaunt magazine #sid feddema #2019 #zoey grossman

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cosmicflowchart · 6 years ago

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Floating - Colin Ritman/Reader

Summary: Colin comforts you after a nightmare. Warnings: nightmares, drowning, underwater danger, being grabbed, darkness, swearing, mentions of work-related stress Word Count: 1858

When you opened your eyes, your mind clouded with sleep. You felt weightless, floating in space, and you couldn’t feel anything around you--no bed, no chair, no walls…

Water.

You blinked hard, and the discovery of where you were made your eyes sting. There was no pain, just surprise. The water rushed in and you blinked to clear your vision, but what you found when you did made matters worse. Dimly lit, dark teal water encased you on all sides. A cloud of black nothingness swirled far below you. You looked up to see how close you were to the surface, but you saw nothing: no shafts of light, no boats, nothing. You flailed around, at a loss for anything else. You tried to force your unmoving jaw open with your shaking hands, but you couldn’t even feel your hands on your face. In your periphery you knew you’ve failed.

You tried to breathe in. You seemed to lose air when you did, so you held your breath. Your hands few out, trying desperately to find something, anything, that could save you. You gasped and you could breathe air again, but you hyperventilated as you wondered how long it’d be before you passed out. Your arms pulled you upward hopelessly, dragging water downward, your legs kicking with all the strength you had left in you.

Something slimy grabbed your shoulder. You glanced over in horror to discover a dark, partially transparent, arm-like...thing gripping you. With just a slight twitch of your eyes, you noticed it came from the dark below. You couldn’t scream but your mouth fell open and you gurgled as loudly as you could. Your opposite hand grabbed at it, but you couldn’t touch it. It’s almost like a mist grabbed you.

Moments later, the arm pulled you towards the swirling darkness, the meager light from above disappearing to nothing as you watched it fade. You gave one last soundless scream in hopes that someone would hear you.

“(y/n)!”

Your eyes shot open and your entire body went rigid. You took in a gasp that feels much bigger than it sounded as the bright colors and lights around you faded to clarity.

“Earth to (y/n),” joked a familiar voice, but even a half-asleep you could tell it was tinged with worry. You matched the voice to the face you saw instantly. No glasses, but you’d know that hair anywhere. And you knew that face, and God were you glad to see it. Your muscles relaxed again.

“Colin?” you were out of breath as you spoke, propping yourself up on your elbows, your head up off the pillow.

“It’s me,” he had his hand on your upper arm, and he was sitting on the other side of the bed, leaning partly over you. “You’re awake now. Least, I think you are. Let’s pretend we are. It’s a bit early for levels of reality.”

Your eyes darted around the room. Nothing was teal or dark--the sun streamed through a window on the other end of the room, just hitting the bottom of your bed.

“What the fuck,” you whispered, not to him, just in general. “I’m not…”

“I can pinch you if you don’t believe me.”

“No, no, I believe you. I just...fucking hell, I had a terrible nightmare. It felt way too real.”

“Yeah, figured as much,” he said quietly. He climbed off your tiny bed and sat beside it, balancing his chin on his folded arms as he told you what he saw. “Found you with your whole face just, buried in your pillow, and I thought, ‘that’s not gonna help.’ So I flipped you over, but then you started stirring and whimpering, like something was scaring you, so I shook you a little. Then you woke up.”

He watched you, still worried, as you sat up and stretched. “I think my brain worked you into my dream? I, I was floating in this dark water, and I couldn’t find any way out, no matter where I turned. This hand thing pulled me into this dark cloud below, I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened when you tried to shake me. It does make sense that you’d pull me down, though, if that was supposed to be you. We like to get into the darker parts of the human psyche for fun.”

“Sorry about all that, love. Stepped out for a fag, came back to you having an awful time. I know messing with you while you’re asleep or drunk or whatever isn’t appropriate, but I wouldn’t have woken you if I didn’t think you needed it. I thought you needed a hand. Sorry.”

You’d never heard him apologize for something so minor, much less multiple times in the same thought. His face tried to affect nothing resembling emotion. But his eyes betrayed his attempt. “What are you sorry for?”

“For not being here.”

You couldn’t help but chuckle, “I’ve had nightmares without you here before, Col. Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate it. I’m really glad you care. It’s nice to have someone who does. But I’m a grown-up. I don’t need you to watch me all the time.” You gave him a cheeky grin as you added, “Someone in the government’s got their eye on me all the time anyway.”

“Too early,” he shook his head but you both laughed. You watched him for a moment as he thought of what to say. “I’m sorry if I seem clingy, and I know...this,” he pointed quickly between the two of you, “is still new, but I worry about you.”

“Same to you,” you blinked slowly, still sleepy. You wrapped a hand around one of his arms. “Did I wake you up?”

“I woke when the sun came up. Bastard won’t let us sleep in,” he droned, casting a rueful glance at the window.

“When was that?”

“A few hours ago. You didn’t wake up then, I don’t think, but I woke next to you. We were properly tangled up together,” he smiled. “I felt bad leaving you here even for a second. Should’ve listened to my instincts.”

“Well, you did. You came back in and woke me. I’d say that counts. Besides, it’s not your fault my brain keeps conjuring up nightmares.”

He fell silent, his eyes moving down to the sheets. You squeezed his arm and he met your gaze, his eyebrows arching as if to ask what was up.

“Come up here,” you requested softly, scooping a hand underneath one of his elbows, and he complied climbing back onto the bed and sitting behind you. He spread his legs out so he could sit with you in his arms. He wrapped his around your waist and you leaned back so he could rest his chin on your shoulder.

You could feel beneath you that he was just wearing boxer-briefs, and he had just his button-up shirt on from the day before, sitting open, and you were pressed against his chest. The one time he forgot to bring a change of clothes was the time he passed out while comforting you, in your bed, in your apartment. You elected not to mock him for this. He was being kind to you, you weren’t going to ruin that by being an asshole. You both needed this.

Just sitting there in his arms, you felt like you were floating again, but everything shone softly, the sunlight catching your clutter. You were floating with a life ring around your waist. A life ring with as much, if not more, damage than you, but if it worked, it worked.

“(y/n)?” Colin finally spoke again, his voice rumbling through your chest. “Mind if I speculate a little?”

“Go for it,” you murmured. You leaned your head back onto his shoulder. “What does the master of conspiracies think of my dream?”

He laughed at this, hugging you a little tighter for a second. “That’s exactly what I was going to talk about. I’m not going to get too into this, I know your eyes glaze over if I preface it too much and we’re not, well, you know,” he gestured with one hand to imply altered states.

“Yeah. You’ve thought more about it than I have,” you digressed. “But what about the dream? The whole drowning and darkness thing. Any idea what it means?”

“Drowning isn’t an uncommon motif in dreams,” he informed you, coming to life as he got to show off his cleverness. “It means you’re drowning in real life, too, either because of stress or work, or sometimes you’re in money troubles and you feel you can’t get out of it. It’s all about helplessness. It’s your body trying to tell you to swim out of it, if you can. Your brain’s at least cognizant enough to know what’s going on with you. That’s more than I can say for a lot of people. That’s my take on it, anyway. Not sure what the darkness is. I’d need a few more days to figure that out.”

“I don’t know if I can get out,” you frowned and turned over your shoulder into his chest. He responded by adjusting his arms, holding you to him. A few moments later, he leaned back so the two of you could lay down, and you draped an arm over his stomach, his button-up falling half-open with the gesture. “I can’t up and quit my job. I don’t hate it, I thought it’d be a dream come true, but it’s just, it’s so much. I have so much fucking work to do. I do feel like I’m drowning a lot of the time. Just didn’t think it’d get to this point, that my boyfriend would have to wake me up from my dumb brain being stupid.”

“Your boyfriend doesn’t mind,” he looked over at you, your noses almost touching. “The human brain’s an unreliable, imperfect mess. You can’t fault yourself for having nightmares, love.” His pretentious vibe hadn’t fully left but he sounded so open, so relaxed around you, that you smiled at him. “It means your brain wants to protect you, and that you want to protect you.”

“Of course I do. If I die of stress, who’s gonna take care of you?”

“Oh, I can take care of myself,” he scoffed. “Like you said, we did exist before we met each other.”

“No, I know, I know. But you know what? You make existence less terrible.”

Colin laughed softly. “I’ve thought the same since the moment we became friends.” He gazed at you with so much adoration, you almost melted into the bed right then and there.

You moved closer and kissed him. He moved a hand to the back of your head, deepening the kiss, your movement slow and passionate. The two of you stayed in your bed, sheets wrinkled and strewn everywhere as if something more intimate had happened. Neither of you had anywhere to go that day. Even if you did, you would’ve called in sick. You wanted to float with Colin for as long as you possibly could.

A/N: Well, this ended up as hurt/comfort instead of fluff, but I’m glad I wrote something with a happy ending to share with you folks. This is my first Colin-centric fic but it won’t be the last. Thank you for reading this! Give this a like (or even a reblog) if you enjoyed it, or if you’re interested in reading more, feel free to browse my writing tag: https://cosmicflowchart.tumblr.com/tagged/cosmic-writes. And you’re more than welcome to follow this blog for more Bandersnatch Trash.

#colin ritman x reader #colin/reader #colin x reader #colin ritman/reader #fluff #hurt comfort #hurt #comfort #black mirror: bandersnatch #bandersnatch #colin ritman #colin #cosmic writes

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dingoes8myrp · 7 years ago

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That Pesky L-Word: Willow’s Label

I wrote a post about Willow and Oz’s relationship, focusing on the problems within the relationship itself and whether or not they could have been resolved. I came up with “Yeah, if Oz wasn’t so scared of being a werewolf to actually be a functional werewolf” with a sidenote of “But, there is the topic of Willow’s sexuality to discuss.” Here is that topic!

Short and sweet

There is no wrong answer. Willow loves who she loves when she loves them. But, I understand how important the gay label was at the time the show aired (and still is).

The nitty gritty

I have a gripe about how Willow’s sexuality was portrayed on the show. Joss Whedon has said that he’d intentionally tried to write both Willow and Xander so they could maybe turn out to be gay if he felt like it in the future. But, in the early seasons of the show, neither of them was written as questioning their sexuality in a way I consider legitimate. Part of this could have been because that kind of thing just wasn’t written well in TV at the time, and it was usually played for laughs or in a way that was uncomfortably stereotypical (even for shows that were trying to be progressive about it). Disclaimer aside, Willow’s early stage “questioning” was throwaway at best and played for laughs at worst. In Doppelgangland, we had Vamp!Willow - an evil doppelgangar from another dimension - who was very affectionate with Vamp!Xander, and then hit on… well, herself, presumably to make regular Willow uncomfortable. Willow made a comment: “That’s me as a vampire? I’m so evil, and skanky… and I think I’m kinda gay.”

Okay, here’s my gripe with this. Vampire Willow is evil and Willow doesn’t sound thrilled at the idea of herself being evil, skanky, AND GAY!!! Oh, the horror! Now, had this been an intentional foreshadowy breadcrumb we know the writer team is great at planting (see the Dawn plotline), they could have played this as a metaphor for Willow quietly beginning to question her sexuality and finding it scary. But, that’s not what they did. Vamp!Willow groped regular Willow and licked her face, and Willow made a throwaway quip played for laughs. Then it was all evil and gross to think about.

I cannot remember any other example pre-season four of Willow genuinely appearing to question her sexuality. I could make an argument that Willow had some attraction to Buffy here and there, but that would be purely speculative based on the chemistry of Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alyson Hannigan. I don’t think it would hold a lot of weight, if I’m honest (though if anyone wants to recommend some Buffy/Willow fanfiction or meta while we’re here I’d love to read it). If you have examples, please share! I don’t have the show handy to rewatch at the moment.

From seasons one through three, Willow is very attracted to Xander, Oz, and even Angel to a degree. That is demonstrated very clearly throughout. We never see her legitimately attracted to a female character without having to dig through dialogue and body language and what have you. If Willow was always meant to be gay, it was not addressed well in early seasons, in my opinion.

If we look at Xander, however, we have a bit more to work with. He has that confusing exchange with Larry in Phases in which he appears to be commiserating with being closeted. This is an entire sub-plot within the episode, so it’s more than a throwaway line, but it’s also highly played for laughs as well. He demonstrates what I would consider boy crushes. The first that comes to mind is Jack in The Zeppo, but that one’s a little lacking in evidence, just my interpretation of their interaction. Others include Riley, Spike, and Dracula (though, to be fair, he was mind-warped by Dracula). I genuinely believe Xander has displayed clear attraction to men throughout the show (mostly played for laughs).

If we compare the way Xander was written with the way Willow was written, there’s far less questioning happening on Willow’s side. This leads me to believe Joss may have originally planned for Xander to be gay when Seth Green left the show and it paved the way for Willow instead. Then the chemistry between Alyson Hannigan and Amber Benson was excellent, so how could you not do something with that?

My other issue was how quickly Tara was written in as Willow’s love interest after Oz left. I forgive this because Seth Green leaving forced them to hurriedly rewrite their story. But, to me, at the time, it felt like an abrupt and out of character change for Willow, seeing how “straight” they’d written her the first three seasons (particularly when you compare her to Xander or even Faith and Buffy).

So, this is where the label becomes a problem for me as a writer of Willow fanfiction and an RP’er of Willow, Oz, and Tara (I’ve written each of them on different RP message boards). I understand that once Willow was with Tara she identified as gay and after Tara she continued to identify as gay. I think, as a character, Willow saw Tara as her endgame, and therefore identified as gay because, well, yeah, if she was going to be with Tara for the rest of eternity, then duh. That was always how I saw her taking that label. I never thought it was the same as her sort of swearing off all men forever. The way she was written throughout the whole run, if you look at the early and late seasons all together, I think it makes more sense that she’s bisexual, pansexual, or to just chuck the label altogether. She loves who she loves and during certain phases of her life, some people are better fits for her than others.

I understand, though, that this opinion offends people. Willow being labeled gay at the time the show aired was a big deal. It was the first time I saw a same-sex couple kiss on screen in a way that wasn’t comical. I believe Willow was one of the first main cast members to come out as gay in a primetime TV show. I genuinely believe that portrayal paved the way for a lot of other shows, particularly in the supernatural and fantasy genres. I also love Willow and Tara once they get going. It was a rocky start that could’ve been done better, but they’re one of the healthiest relationships on the show, in my opinion. I’m not trying to negate that. All I’m saying is, they could have written the lead up to it better.

Switching gears a bit, I’m going to talk about Kennedy.

Kennedy was badly written. There. I said it.

What I mean by that is we didn’t get a lot of background or development for her before she became Willow’s girlfriend right on the heels of Tara. We got time with Tara before she started dating Willow, and we got time with Tara and Willow before Tara became a part of the gang. The same goes for Anya when she started dating Xander, Angel when he started dating Buffy, Oz, Spike, Scott Hope. They cut corners with Kennedy, then they plunked her into a big set of Tara shoes to fill and she clunked around awkwardly in them. I’ve said before I believe Kennedy fell victim to the all-over-the-place that was season seven. There simply wasn’t a lot of room for her to get the amount of story she should have.

Taking what we know of Kennedy, I don’t buy her as a legitimate relationship for Willow. A short-term “let’s try this out” thing, maybe. But, Kennedy is abrasive, spoiled, and selfish. She reminds me a lot of early Cordelia and season three Faith (neither of whom meshed well with Willow). So, I’m still baffled that these two became an item.

In a post-Tara story line, I struggle with what to do with Willow. Because, with Tara out of the picture, to me it’s not out of the question that Willow could fall in love with a man (particularly either Xander or Oz, since they have pre-existing history and wrong-place-wrong-time kind of break-up scenarios). I honestly think she could fall for whoever she wanted and it would be totally in character for her.

My conclusion is, ultimately, I don’t think there’s a wrong answer here. She loves who she loves. If you’d rather label her, cool. You do you. But I’m not gonna.

#buffy the vampire slayer #willow rosenberg #dingometa #tillow

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paralleljulieverse · 7 years ago

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In Blake Edwards’ 1982 film Victor/Victoria, there is a bittersweet moment when Victoria Grant (Julie Andrews), the down-on-her-luck English protagonist stranded in Depression-era Paris, drops her hitherto plucky facade and dissolves into weepy distress. Having been caught in a wintry downpour with newfound gay friend, Toddy (Robert Preston), Victoria retreats to Toddy’s apartment to dry off and enjoy a cognac-fuelled heart-to-heart. When she subsequently tries to slip back into her now dried clothes, Victoria discovers to her horror that they have shrunk to tattered rags.

“My best dress,” she wails in shock at the waifish reflection in the dressing mirror. “I can’t go out like this…What am I going to do?!” “Sell matches!” retorts Toddy in a vain attempt to jolly the situation. Victoria manages a wan chuckle before collapsing in tears into Toddy’s comforting embrace.

The reference in this scene to Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Matchgirl” is clear enough but Toddy’s gentle quip harbours another, potentially more pointed, intertextual allusion.* Star Julie Andrews actually played the Little Matchgirl in a 1959 tele-musical adaptation of the classic Andersen fairy tale made for BBC TV.

Titled The Gentle Flame, the programme was something of a landmark event in British broadcast history. One of the most ambitious TV musical projects undertaken to that date by the BBC, The Gentle Flame was developed as a tailored showcase for Julie Andrews, with a specially commissioned script by writer-director Francis Essex (Essex, 40), and a suite of new songs from Ronald Cass and Peter Myers, the composer-lyricist team who would later go on to write a string of hit film musicals for Cliff Richard (Donnelly, 144-46). Airing in peak time on Christmas Eve, The Gentle Flame was promoted as a major holiday entertainment and it attracted a substantial national audience (Cowan, 5).

To put The Gentle Flame in historical context, the 1950s was a period of profound transformation for British broadcasting. In 1954, the nation’s booming television market was opened to commercial competition with the creation of the ITA (Independent Television Authority) and the BBC suddenly lost its privileged monopoly as the sole TV network (Briggs, vol. V, 3ff; Holmes, 2ff). Confronted with a new landscape of competition and changing popular tastes, the iconic UK broadcaster moved to improve its marketability with an expanded range of audience-friendly fare.

Earlier in the decade, the BBC had appointed Ronald Waldman as Head of its TV Light Entertainment Division and he was influential in overhauling the network’s programme offerings (Briggs, vol. V, 24). A seasoned industry veteran with many years experience as a successful radio producer, Waldman believed that the key to attracting a mass audience was the strategic use of “star power”. In a 1956 memo discussing the results of an internal audience research bulletin, Waldman noted with alarm how “two out of three viewers declares [sic] the ITA was better than the BBC in the matter of Variety…and stars” and that the broadcaster “must try and get some personalities” (cited in Bennett, 56).

One of the “personalities” high on Waldman’s wish list was Julie Andrews. Years previously, Waldman had played an instrumental role in Julie’s early career when he introduced her as a ‘child prodigy’ to the airwaves of Britain on his popular radio show, “Tonight at 8″ in 1947. It was a longstanding professional association shared by other members of senior management at BBC-TV. When Waldman was promoted to Executive Business Manager of Programming in 1958, his former role of Light Entertainment Head was taken over by Eric Maschwitz who, as it happens, had also worked with Julie in her child star years on the production team of Starlight Roof (Briggs, vol. V, 196). It’s possibly not surprising, then, that “the Beeb” should have been keen to secure Julie for its expanding roster of television ‘names’ in the late-50s.

Not that Julie was exactly a stranger to the small screens of Britain. She had made her television debut as far back as 1948 appearing on Rooftop Rendezvous alongside parents, Ted and Barbara Andrews (”Rooftop”, 27). She then popped up with some regularity across the early 1950s as a guest on assorted TV musical variety revues and quiz shows. She even made a high profile appearance on the “commercial competition,” performing in 1955 on ATV’s hugely popular Sunday Night at the London Palladium, produced by another old-time associate, Val Parnell (Gray, 12). By the time Julie returned to the UK in 1958 as the triumphant star of My Fair Lady, her celebrity was at an all-time high and conditions were ripe for promotion to TV leading lady in her own right.

In what was claimed to be “one of the biggest fees ever paid to a British star”, Julie was signed by the BBC in May 1959 to an exclusive deal for “four hour-long TV spectaculars” (”Julie Signs,” 3). Originally scheduled as monthly broadcasts to start in June, the series was subsequently postponed until after Julie had finished her London run in My Fair Lady in the autumn (”Julie’s TV Show Postponed”, 3). Meanwhile, the BBC built up public anticipation by featuring Julie in a special pre-filmed appearance on Harry Secombe’s popular variety show, Secombe at Large (30 May 1959, BBC). It also secured rights to Julie’s appearance on The Jack Benny Show from CBS in the US which it broadcast in September (Noble, 6).

Finally, on November 12, the first of Julie’s four specials for the BBC bowed amidst much fanfare (“Highlights,” 9). Simply called The Julie Andrews Show, the 45-minute specials (slightly shorter than the originally announced one hour format) were broadcast fortnightly on a Thursday evening at 7:30pm. The first three entries followed a standard TV variety format with Julie hosting, singing, performing and chatting with a roster of changing guest stars. The fourth and final entry took a different approach, devoting the timeslot to the premiere production of a new Christmastime musical, The Gentle Flame (”Gentle,” 7).

A loose adaptation of Andersen’s “Little Matchgirl,” The Gentle Flame starred Julie as Trissa, the nineteenth-century beggar girl who uses her last box of matches to keep warm on a bitterly cold snowbound night. One by one she lights the matches and:

“as she does so she is transported into a world of music, beautiful gowns and dancing. She meets a young man and falls in love but when she discovers that the room in which she met him had been boarded up a long time ago, she finds herself poor and back in the street again” (Taylor, 8).

Appearing alongside Julie in the programme was a supporting cast of seasoned character actors including John Fraser as Charles the fantasy suitor, Jay Denyer as the Shopkeeper, and Pauline Loring as the haughty Rich Woman. Special musical support was provided by members of the Brompton Oratory Boys Choir (”Gentle,” 19).

In many ways, The Gentle Flame was not unlike a smaller-scale British Cinderella, the celebrated 1956 TV musical created by Rodgers and Hammerstein for Julie. Yet, despite its considerable cultural and historical significance, The Gentle Flame has largely fallen into obscurity. As far as can be ascertained, it hasn’t ever been seen since its initial broadcast almost sixty years ago and it is overlooked in all but the most exhaustive historical commentaries. Even Julie herself gives the programme short shrift. In her memoirs, she dispenses with the BBC series in a few short paragraphs, concluding with the matter-of-fact summation: “We ended up with four fairly good shows, the final episode airing on Christmas Eve” (268).

So what happened to The Gentle Flame and why isn’t it a bigger deal today? For a start, there is a question mark over whether or not a copy of the programme exists or, for that matter, ever did. Sadly, both the BBC and the BFI (British Film Institute) report that they don’t hold The Gentle Flame in their libraries and that there are no known records of it in any other archival repository (BBC Archives, personal communication, 11 November 2017).

Up until the 1960s, most British television content was produced via live transmission and wasn’t typically recorded (Holmes, 9-10). Some select programmes were filmed in advance and others of special note were captured for subsequent rebroadcast and/or preservation using telecine cameras (in much the same way that Cinderella was recorded as a kinescope by CBS), but the lion’s share of TV content was live and unrecorded. Industry practice started to change in the late 1950s with the advent of videotape technology but, because it was prohibitively expensive, its incorporation was patchy. As late as 1963, less than a third of BBC programming was routinely recorded (Turnock, 95-96).

In the case of The Gentle Flame, it is difficult to determine the exact technical status of its production. Not only is there no known copy of the original broadcast but, even more disconcertingly, BBC Written Archives have “not retained any production files for The Gentle Flame or other Julie Andrews Specials” (BBC Archives, personal communication, 11 November 2017). All that exists in “official holdings” is a microfilm copy of the script, an audience research report, and a handful of production stills. In the absence of concrete documentary evidence and/or a labour-intensive detective hunt through papers and collections that may still be in existence from people involved in the production, all we can ultimately do is speculate about how The Gentle Flame was produced and if a recorded copy was ever made.

Technical credits for the programme list an entry for “film sequences” by A. Arthur Englander and editing by Pamela Bosworth (“Gentle,” 19). This would suggest that at least some of the programme’s material was pre-filmed. The most likely scenario is that it was produced as a mix of live broadcast and pre-filmed sequences. This hybrid style was fairly common practice for BBC programmes of the era where pre-filmed sequences would be inserted into an otherwise live broadcast, typically to add exteriors or special effects shots that were impossible to do in a studio or to offer a “breathing space” for costume and scenery changes (Turnock, 87).

There is certainly evidence that this practice of mixing live and pre-filmed sequences was used in earlier episodes of The Julie Andrews Show. Newspaper reviews make mention of the fact that, among other things, a comic sketch between Julie and Kenneth Williams in Episode 1 and an animated sequence and appearance by Stanley Holloway in Episode 3 were all pre-recorded inserts (Erni, 23 Dec., 38; Sear 26; Taylor 16). In the case of The Gentle Flame, it is most likely that the fantasy sequences with Julie and John Fraser at the ball would have been pre-filmed. Publicity photos reveal dramatic costume and hairstyle changes in these scenes that would have been difficult to negotiate in an exclusively live format. So, at a minimum, some of the material elements from The Gentle Flame must have existed in a recorded format.

Furthermore, given the unprecedented expense and prestige of these Julie Andrews specials, it beggars belief that the BBC wouldn’t have recorded them in some form or other –– if not for posterity, at least with an eye to possible rebroadcast and/or extended distribution. Historian Rob Turnock (2006) notes that, as early as 1952, the BBC was recording select live performances and staged programmes and even “established a transcription unit to distribute telerecordings and purpose made BBC films abroad” (90). Moreover, much of the reason the BBC commissioned their own staff writers to develop new programmes––as they did with The Gentle Flame––was to “generate material that it owned and could record by itself” without having to negotiate permission and clearance from external rights holders (ibid.).**

However, even if the BBC did record The Gentle Flame, it is no guarantee that the recording would still be in existence today. Because TV was widely viewed in the era as a transient medium of live communication –– in much the same way as radio or theatre –– there was little sense that TV programmes had lasting value or should be conserved beyond the period of their immediate use. It wasn’t till 1978 that the BBC initiated an archival policy but, by this stage, it was estimated that over 90% of all previous programming had been destroyed, whether through outright disposal or through wiping over for re-use (Fiddy, 3). When the BBC made the move to colour transmission in 1967, for example, it undertook a wholesale junking of old monochromatic programmes in the misguided belief that they no longer had appreciable value or purpose (Fiddy, 8). Hours of content from even hugely popular BBC series such as Doctor Who, Steptoe and Son, and Dad’s Army were lost in this way.

So if The Gentle Flame were indeed recorded, any copies would really need to have defied the odds to have survived to the present day. But, who knows? Events like the BFI’s annual “Missing, Believed Wiped” public appeal have had great success in turning up many BBC programmes previously presumed lost forever. So maybe a copy of The Gentle Flame is lurking in some dusty, out-of-the-way storage facility somewhere just waiting to be rediscovered. If you’re reading this, Dame Julie, Check the attic!

Finally, the question remains: was The Gentle Flame any good? Well, critical reception of the programme was, it must be said, mixed. Maurice Wiggin of the Sunday Times called it “charming Christmastime fare” that displayed “cunning visual talent at full stretch,” though added as a slightly acerbic aside that writer-director Francis Essex “should stick to directing and leave writing to writers” (20). Guy Taylor, resident critic for The Stage, was positively rhapsodic in his review:

“My Christmas viewing started with Julie Andrews, and what better viewing can you find than that? She appeared with John Fraser in a delightful forty-five minute programme called The Gentle Flame, written and produced by Francis Essex…Everything about this show was right, the photography was delicate, the sets were imaginative and beautifully lit and the special music and lyrics by Peter Myers and Ronald Cass were charming…Essex’s script was excellent blending fairy-tale with the naturalistic and how nice it was to hear English spoken so clearly by Miss Andrews. Essex must have had this in mind when he wrote it.” (31 Dec, 8)

Others were not quite so enchanted. Irving Wardle of The Listener wrote that The Gentle Flame was:

“a really bad example of old-style musical comedy, eliciting push-button responses to such things as a waif in the snow, a ballroom and a Byronic bachelor with pots of money. The legendary association between romance and wealth is unobjectionable, but one does object to the dreadful dialogue (’This is my first ball’) Mr. Essex inflicted on Julie Andrews, and to the fact that he destroyed the sad poetry of the original by making the real world as fanciful as the one the girl imagined” (Wardle, 31 Dec, 11).

So, who knows? The Gentle Flame could be a lost mini-musical treasure or a hamfisted failure. Either way, to see and hear the young Julie Andrews perform a role written just for her during her prime Broadway years would have to be as close as imaginable to the perfect Christmas treat.

Notes:

* Whether or not the reference to the Little Matchgirl in Victor/Victoria is an intentional nod to The Gentle Flame is hard to know. Blake Edwards was certainly a master of satirical allusionism and, like most of the films he made with his wife and longtime collaborator, Victor/Victoria features more than the odd snook at the “Julie Andrews image” including, in this case, quips about nuns, exploding umbrellas, and even recycled jokes from Thoroughly Modern Millie. However, The Gentle Flame isn’t exactly a high profile entry in the Julie Andrews canon, so any intertextual reference would be pretty left-of-field. Interestingly, the joke about the Little Matchgirl in Victor/Victoria was inserted during production. The original shooting script has a different line in this scene:

Victoria: What am I going to do? Toddy: Well, you could open a boutique for midgets! (Edwards, 34)

** Clutching at straws, Julie does state in her memoirs apropos her BBC TV series that “we would tape one show a week” (279). Of course, the verb “tape” here could be being used symbolically rather than literally, but hope springs eternal.

Sources:

Andrews, Julie. Home: A Memoir of My Early Years. New York: Hyperion, 2008.

Bennett, James. Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen. London: Routledge, 2011.

Black, Peter. “Peter Black’s Teleview.” Daily Mail. 13 November 1959: 18.

Briggs, Asa. The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Vols I-V. London : Oxford University Press, 1995.

Cottrell, John. Julie Andrews: The Story of a Star. London: Arthur Barker, 1968.

Cowan, Margaret. “TV a Comedown? No, Says Julie.” Picturegoer. 12 December 1959: 5.

Donnelly, K.J. British Film Music and Film Musicals. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.

Edwards, Blake. Victor/Victoria. Unpublished screenplay (Final revised version: 23 Feb 1981), Culver City, CA: Blake Edwards Company, 1981.

Erni. “Foreign Television Reviews: ‘The Julie Andrews Show’.” Weekly Variety. 18 November 1959: 34

_______. “Foreign TV Followup: ‘The Julie Andrews Show’.” Weekly Variety. 23 December 1959: 38

Essex, Francis. “Some Passing Memories.” Television: The Journal for the Royal Television Society. Vol. 16. No. 1, 1976: 36-41.

Fiddy, Dick. Missing Believed Wiped: Searching for the Lost Treasures of British Television. London: British Film Institute, 2001.

Forster, Peter. “Television: Instead of Lunch.” The Spectator. 11 December 1959: 878.

“The Gentle Flame.” Radio Times. 20-26 December 1959: 7, 19.

Gray, Andrew. “Julie Andrews is Booked for Sunday Palladium.” The Stage. 6 October 1955: 12.

“Highlight s of the Week: Julie Andrews.” Radio Times. 8-14 November 1959: 9.

Holmes, Su. Entertaining Television: The BBC and Popular Television Culture in the 1950s. Manchester University Press, 2008.

“Julie Signs Up for TV.” Daily Mail. 12 May 1959: 3.

“Julie’s TV Show Postponed.” Daily Mail. 13 June: 3.

Noble, Peter, ed. British Film and Television Yearbook, 1960. London: BA Publications, 1960.

“Rooftop Rendezvous.” Programme Listing. Radio Times. 21-27 November, 1948: 21.

Sear, Richard. “Last Night’s View: The Unspoiled Fair Lady.” Daily Mirror. 13 November 1959: 26.

Taylor, Guy. “In Vision: Julie Andrews Makes Her BBC-TV Debut.” The Stage and Television Today. 19 November 1959: 16.

_______“In Vision: All Those Faithful Viewers.” The Stage and Television Today. 31 December 1959: 8.

Turnock, Rob. Television and Consumer Culture: Britain and the Transformation of Modernity. London: I.B.Tauris, 2006.

Wardle, Irving. Critic on the Hearth: Bitter Rice.” The Listener. 19 November 1959: 8.

__________. “Critic on the Hearth: A Blow Out.” The Listener. 31 December 1959: 11.

Wiggin, Maurice. “Television: Low Tide, High Noon”. The Sunday Times. 27 December 1959: 20.

Wright, Adrian. A Tanner’s Worth of Tune: Rediscovering the Post-War British Musical. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010.

#julie andrews #television #musical #christmas #bbc #1959 #Hans Christian Andersen #the little match girl #the gentle flame #francis essex #ronald cass #peter myers #british musical

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jamesginortonblog · 7 years ago

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Twenty years from now, you might find yourself sitting by the fire, telling tall tales to young ’uns about the madness and the mayhem of this century’s teenage years, and you might find yourself thinking — if only there was some kind of, I don’t know, TV drama that accurately encapsulated almost everything that was going on in the world in 2017, one that also felt like James Bond meets The Godfather. My friend, the drama you would be looking for is McMafia.

The series is the BBC’s big-budget new-year crime drama. Starring James Norton, Juliet Rylance and David Strathairn, alongside a host of Russian, Israeli, Brazilian and Serbian stars playing mob bosses from their home territory, it blends the stylish globetrotting of The Night Manager and The Sopranos’ take on family values, with a dark underpinning in reality.

McMafia’s script began life as a 2008 book of the same name, an epic study of organised crime by the investigative journalist Misha Glenny; it was then wrestled into a drama by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Hossein Amini, best known for the Ryan Gosling thriller Drive. At first sight, this looks like another of those impossible-to-film tomes with which British TV is currently besotted. (The City & the City? The Patrick Melrose novels? Are you all insane?) Glenny’s tome details the rise of criminal empires from the dust of eastern Europe’s communist states and the globalisation of crime across continents, using free-market tropes. The term “McMafia”, for instance, is a reference to the Chechen gangs who franchise out the feared Chechen name to thugs across Europe, like a gun-toting Ronald McDonald.

Amini was hauled into the project by James Watkins, the director of Black Mirror and The Woman in Black, who had been trying to squeeze Glenny’s sprawling book into a feature film. “We sat in a little garden at the V&A — which, ironically, ended up in the series — and decided it could only be a TV series,” Watkins recalls as we squat on some antique furniture during a break in the filming of a violent chase in a country house. “It’s got whorls and tone, but no actual characters.”

Over the book’s fragmented vignettes, Amini lays an action thriller-cum-family-drama structure at whose heart is Alex Godman (Norton), the son of a Russian oligarch who was educated at an English boarding school, runs a successful hedge fund and is preparing to marry his ethical activist girlfriend, Rebecca, played by Rylance. When his dodgy uncle starts meddling in Moscow, Alex’s perfect life falls apart and he is thrown into the family business with increasing vigour.

“There are elements of Alex that are based on me,” Amini explains as he joins us. “I came to the UK from Iran in 1977. I was bullied at school for being foreign and found it hard to adjust. My parents can’t go back to Iran, although I could… All of this I put into Alex. So that notion of what it’s like to be Russian, but sometimes be ashamed of being Russian, and trying to work out if you’re British or Russian or something else — that’s very personal.”

Amini writes — or at least rewrites — roles once the lead actor has been cast. Drive’s sparse, moody script was as inspired by Gosling as by James Sallis’s original book. With Norton, he has done much the same thing, sculpting Alex to fit Norton’s natural sense of cool detachment as he boots up his inner Michael Corleone, against the backdrop of a violent global black economy that snakes its tentacles through everything from politics to the illegal deals smartphone makers rely on for their raw materials.

“We saw James playing the Russian aristocratic gentleman in War & Peace, a cultivated Englishman in Grantchester. Then there was Happy Valley, where he’s got this quiet, damaged fury — and it was obvious he would be perfect for a Russian bear inside a bowler hat,” Amini says.

“The thing about Alex is, he’s not a villain and he’s not a hero,” Norton tells me a few months later, as we sit by the Adriatic on Croatia’s Istria peninsula — which is doubling as the south of France and Tel Aviv. “He’s trying to do the right thing, but he’s being screwed up and twisted and turned, and he gets into this sort of spiralling, chaotic mess. They tell me they didn’t see anyone else for the role — I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. What did they see in me?”

Norton’s performance here will do nothing to dampen rumours that he’s the next Bond after Daniel Craig hangs up his Walther PPK. From the moment he steps out of a black cab in a tux onto the steps of the V&A — through spectacular assassination attempts, scenes of brutally trafficked young women, oblique references to the criminal machinations of the Russian government, high-speed chases through luxury mansions and dubious deals in pulsing Tel Aviv nightclubs, with some flashy high finance thrown in — his role has pretty much every ingredient necessary for 007, including the occasional raised eyebrow.

“To be honest, it’s mad, this crazy speculation,” Norton says with a quick laugh. “I think Daniel Craig’s going to do another two. I’m aware that James and Hoss putting me in a tux at the V&A couldn’t be more incendiary. I did say to them, ‘Are you just baiting me and stoking the fire?’”

Either way, he’s aware that this is a potentially career-changing role — not that he’s done badly so far. His elegantly foppish performances in Death Comes to Pemberley and Life in Squares led, unexpectedly, to Sally Wainwright picking him to play Royce, the dark, psychopathic nemesis to Sarah Lancashire’s troubled Catherine Cawood in two series of Happy Valley. The crime-solving vicar Sidney Chambers in Grantchester came shortly after, and he’s been in War & Peace, Flatliners and Black Mirror since then. As Alex, though, he has finally earned leading-man status.

“It’s terrifying in a way, because there’s nowhere to hide, really,” he says, giving a small smile. “Before, my agent was saying I should maybe move to a bit of theatre or a bit of film. Now he’s saying I need to decide how this is going to affect me and where I go next... It’s an AMC and BBC show, the budget is huge, we have Hoss, David Farr and James Watkins on the script, the supporting cast are all A-listers. Being the thread through all those people, I just hope I’m not the one to cock it up.”

The A-list cast, it’s fair to say, is not only impressive, but requires a little explanation. Every television drama project these days has to scream a little louder than the last just to get attention. In 2016, roughly 1,200 brand-new scripted shows were launched in the world’s main television markets, according to the industry number-cruncher the Wit — and estimates for 2017 suggest there will have been considerably more, as Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat launched scripted streaming services and Netflix alone produced 90 shows just in Europe.

McMafia is effectively the BBC’s answer to this internationalisation of talent. The Leviathan star Aleksey Serebryakov and Mariya Shukshina, a Russian TV stalwart, play Alex’s dubious oligarch parents; the Georgian actor Merab Ninidze proves oddly charming as the Kremlin-connected mobster Vadim; the Czech actor and regular Hollywood heavy Karel Roden delivers a weary ex-cop turned crime lord; and the Bollywood star Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays a corrupt Mumbai importer, Dilly Mahmood.

Russians, in other words, play Russians, Indians play Indians and Brazilians play Brazilians. When nationalities speak among themselves, they do so in their own tongue, rather than in the heavily accented pidgin English beloved of earlier shows. Sometimes there are subtitles, sometimes not. It’s a mark of how cosmopolitan the British viewer has become that a primetime drama on a mainstream channel can now drift seamlessly between languages.

“People in the UK don’t really know who these people are, but in their own world, they’re enormous superstar figures and have this immense skill set,” Watkins says. “Some of the Russian actors do so much with so little. Whenever anyone comes in to act with the Russians for the first time, we have to take them aside and say, ‘Look, this isn’t about you or your work, which we love — but before you act with them, watch what they’re doing and make sure you can match it, because they’re setting the tone for the whole piece.’”

Watkins is keen to stress that the tone is gritty, rather than glamorous. Each location is shot with different filters, and the dark, unsettling horror underpinning the action tends to be in the bleached-out bright sunlight of the Middle East. This is grimly true of the second episode, in which a young Russian beautician, Ludmilla, arrives in Egypt for a hotel job. She is picked up by a couple of cheerful locals, who drive her out of Cairo to a concrete shed where she’s beaten, tied up and shoved into the back of a van before being sold on to an armed gang — the first stop in a brutal series of events that leave Ludmilla in Israel, sold on yet again to a haughty brothel keeper.

It’s a shocking subplot, coming so soon after an exotic party at the Palace of Versailles thrown by Vadim — the Russian gangster with Kremlin links — and all the more so because it is the one story lifted directly from Glenny’s book, and is thus, effectively, a dramatised documentary. Indeed, all of the darkest elements in the series are echoes of real life — Amini based one early killing on the 1991 assassination of the former Iranian prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar. And Dimitri Godman’s drunken decline echoes the last grim years of Boris Berezovsky’s life. “We’ve tried not to chase events, because real life is always going to move faster,” Watkins says. “But every fresh headline almost seems to confirm the thesis that the corporate is becoming criminal and the criminal is becoming corporate — the intersection between criminality, intelligence agencies, banking and government.”

“Like most people, I thought the mafia was compelling and exciting,” Norton adds. “There’s money and fast cars and yachts and beautiful women. I hope people see that while we tell that story, we also tell the story of the cost — from human trafficking to drug-dealing and poverty-stricken junkies in Mumbai whose habits pay for someone’s superyacht.” He pauses. “Though I’m now aware that there are things in this phone that are unethically sourced, and I’m still using it every single day. So this probably won’t make a significant difference.”

Which is part of the final trick that Watkins and Amini play — constantly taking us back to London parties and ethical business launches by semi-legal tycoons, making clear our complicity in all the sordid crime and violent murders the show depicts. The most chilling paragraph in Glenny’s book does exactly the same.

“Organised crime is such a rewarding industry,” he writes, “because ordinary Western Europeans spend an ever-burgeoning amount of their spare time and money sleeping with prostitutes; smoking untaxed cigarettes; sticking €50 notes up their noses; employing illegal untaxed immigrant labour on subsistence wages; admiring ivory and sitting on teak; or purchasing the liver and kidneys of the desperately poor in the developing world.”

So, if you do end up in 20 years’ time using McMafia as a document of our fractured era — from Russian political meddling to dubious oil deals to corrupt hedge funds and ruined human lives — you might want to prepare yourself for the obvious question from your loving offspring: what did you do to try to stop it?

#james norton #McMafia #Hossein Amini #article #The Times

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teenagetragedymentality · 4 years ago

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Just The Beginning

To my readers:

I hope as you read chapter after chapter of monumental moments, milestones, horrible tragedies, and road blocks that have come with my “normal life”, you gain knowledge, strength, willpower, and maybe even the idea that there are so many like you and I. If we only would open our mouths. Things will evenutaully change, nothing lasts forever!!

From experience and wishing there was a person to relate to, I hope you feel some kind of hope. A silver lining, if you will. I will inform you early on in this book I’m a quote lover and one of the hundreds that I personally really relate to is,

“Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll start having positive results” ~Willie Nelson

I write with a “goal” to prove to those who doubt themselves, even after all the bad you may have encountered through the journey of your life, you can make the life you want! Make sure you make it way better than before. Not only “making it out the other end” but making it out the other end smiling with a whole new outlook on your new life you made!

You can usually always turn a negative into a positive, (I didn’t state it was easy) it all depends on what and how the situation is viewed. As life has carried on, I even gained some more brains to “graduate” onto the different levels of adulthood knowng that if you view everything badly your life is going to end up more than likely bad. Like the old saying when riding horses, look at where you want to go. If you look down you more than likely are going to end up down on the ground. If you look straight ahead you will go ahead so on and so forth as I'm sure you understand the concept.

If you always live negitive and think negitive, life is pretty negative. You have to break out of the cycle. Which is hard, everything I write about wasn’t easy. A lot of self work and realizing that some times its not the problem but the reaction to the problem. If you want to change it and make your life worth living. Who wants to live miserable? I dont, so I wrote a book. All the demons, all the stories, all the speculation out onto paper for others to level with.

The current level I feel I am at is, this is my time to tell my story. Along my journey there has been quite a few others that have also encouraged me to speak up, write a book. Tell my story because this story is a story that needs to be told.

Sadly, I firmly believe there are parts of my story that happen all over the world all the time to women and men. People have to stand up and make a change, I cant say it enough. We all have voices let’s make them heard.

~I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples. Mother Teresa

Honestly, my last reason is because I want to tell my story for me! I don’t want to carry all of the baggage around for years and never deal with it. Getting the weight off my shoulders and the hurt out of my heart is the best way I can think of for me personally to heal.

I can write a book, I am here. I will be heard! I will speak for those who can’t. Statistically speaking, what I have been through most people don’t have the ability to tell their story on the other end of the horror nor have the strength or the endurance to always keep on keeping on.

I go back and forth, this book will teach you I am very indisive. I can say it’s about you (the readers) as much as it is about me really. Most importantly above all else though, if I help one person from hurting themselves or someone else during a “low point”, “crisis time”, (whatever you want to call it) of their life, that means the unimaginable to me. No matter what you're going through you will get through it if you put your mind to it. My book feels as if it's my “purpose” and to finally heal. Maybe make a difference in the process!

~You must be the change you wish to see in the world~ Mahatma Gandhi

I want to dedicate this book for anyone going through a hard time. Just know a bad day doesn’t mean a bad life. As you read I do make puns and try to make light of a bad situation with humor. Hell, you might even get a laugh outta this one!

I know I am a fighter, strong woman (in various ways) and I have a powerful message that needs to be spoken about more openly among human beings. As you embark into my journey no matter how uncomfortable it may become, I am letting the world read all of the nitty gritty with the hope I make a difference to someone somewhere!

With nothing but peace and love

~M.J~

P.s: Before you do anything drastic read the whole book before you make a permanent decision on temporary feelings! Please!

#writers on tumblr #my writing #life goals #book inspiration #going to write a book #my story #want to share #depression #mental disorder #ptsd #letting my thoughts out #bucketlist

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thecinephale · 7 years ago

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Best Movies of 2017

I’m so excited that many of the great films this year did so well at the box office and are such a big part of the awards conversation. I’m grateful that every year brings great works of cinema, but it’s even better when a bunch of people actually get to see them.

This is the first year I’m not counting miniseries. The lines are becoming too blurred between TV and film and also nobody needs me to say again how much I love Jane Campion and Top of the Lake: China Girl.

Still need to see: All the Money in the World, Berlin Syndrome, Graduation, Happy End, In the Fade, Loveless, Lovesong, Prevenge, Princess Cyd, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, A Quiet Passion, Slack Bay, Staying Vertical, Thelma, Woodshock

If your favorite movie isn’t on this list maybe I didn’t see it because a sexual predator was involved or maybe it was just a really crowded year with a lot of really good movies!

Honorable Mentions: -Battle of the Sexes (dir. Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton) -The Beguiled (dir. Sofia Coppola) -Call Me By Your Name (dir. Luca Guadagnino) -Colossal (dir. Nacho Vigalondo) -Columbus (dir. Kogonada) -A Fantastic Woman (dir. Sebastian Lelio) -Good Time (dir. Josh and Benny Safdie) -Landline (dir. Gillian Robespierre) -Lemon (dir. Janicza Bravo) -Logan Lucky (dir. Steven Soderbergh) -Parisienne (dir. Danielle Arbid) -Phantom Thread (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson) -Wonder Woman (dir. Patty Jenkins)

15. Planetarium (dir. Rebecca Zlotowski)

The first two movies on this list got fairly bad reviews so take my opinions as you will. And I get why many struggled with this film. Not only is it dealing with a wide swath of issues, but it’s also doing so with a variety of different tools. It dabbles in the occult, but it’s not a horror movie. It’s a period piece, but feels of the present. It suggests romance, suggests betrayal, suggests familial tension, yet… But here’s what’s great. It’s gorgeous. With some of the best cinematography of the year (Georges Lechaptois), some of the best production design of the year (Katia Wyszkop), and easily the best costumes of the year (Anaïs Romand) it’s compulsively watchable. Combine that with Natalie Portman’s incredibly grounding performance and I was more than willing to go along with Zlotowski as she explored the history of images, the power of images, and the danger of images without committing to a conventional structure.

14. It’s Only the End of the World (dir. Xavier Dolan)

I don’t know how anyone could love Dolan’s other films and dislike this one. It’s such a perfect embodiment of Dolan’s career thus far. Dolan’s films are operatic because he understands that for individuals their problems are operatic. Pretty much every family has conflict, disagreements, scars, but that can’t be dismissed so easily when they are OUR conflicts, OUR disagreements, OUR scars. I love how much respect Dolan always has for that truth. The cast is filled with French cinema royalty and they fully live up to the material’s grounded melodrama.

13. The Lure (dir. Agnieszka Smoczynska)

There’s one key reason this vampiric Polish horror-musical retelling of The Little Mermaid works in a way that other adaptations fall short. Sure, the sheer audacity of that genre mashup makes for a fascinating and unique viewing experience. But what ultimately makes it work emotionally and thematically is that it’s about two mermaids. This was always intended as the initial concept was a horror-less, mermaid-less musical about the Wrońska Sisters (who wrote all the songs in this). But still Smoczynska and her screenwriter Robert Bolesto really manage to keep all that’s wonderful about the source material while contextualizing its complexity. I’ve softened on the Disney version over the years, but it still can be painful watching Ariel change herself for a man (especially when one of those changes is not speaking). Here the presence of her sister, sometimes judging, always worried, creates a circumstance that allows this film’s “little mermaid” to make the realistic mistakes of a teen girl in love with a boy and in hate with herself, without the filming giving its seal of approval. There’s no judgment one way or the other. It’s just real. All that aside this is a vampiric Polish horror-musical retelling of The Little Mermaid. Like, come on. Go buy the Criterion edition!!

12. The Rehearsal (dir. Alison Maclean)

This is the only film on this list that isn’t available to watch. I was lucky enough to see it at the New York Film Festival two years ago, then it had a one week run at Metrograph, then nothing. The real shame is that this isn’t some avant-garde headscratcher to be watched in university classrooms and backroom Brooklyn bars. This is a deeply humanistic, very accessible movie that almost demands wide conversation. And given its setting at an acting conservatory I especially wish all the actors in my life could watch it. Well, hopefully it pops up on some streaming site someday. But until then check out this early Alison Maclean short film that’s equally wonderful albeit wildly different in tone (this one is more like feminist Eraserhead): Kitchen Sink (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt58gDgxy9Q&t=1s).

11. Novitiate (dir. Margaret Betts)

The history of cinema is a history of queer subtext. But it’s 2017 and while it may be fun to speculate whether Poe Dameron is gay and I’d be the first to say “Let It Go” is a perfect coming out anthem, it’s no coincidence that the best queer allegories of the year ALSO had explicitly queer characters. This film in particular is so special because it’s both the story of a young woman’s repressed sexuality and a story about how faith of all things is comparable to said sexuality. Sister Cathleen’s mother does not understand her affinity for Jesus the way many parents do not understand their children’s sexuality or gender. While coming out stories are a staple of very special sitcom episodes, I’ve never seen one that captures the pained misunderstanding the way this film does. Part of this is due to wonderful performances by Julianne Nicholson and Margaret Qualley and part of it is that religion is oddly the perfect stand-in for queerness… even as it represses queerness within this world. The movie begins with a series of flashbacks that feel stilted and conventional in a way that’s totally incongruous with the rest of the movie. It’s unfortunate because otherwise this would’ve been even higher on my list. But this is Betts’ first film and the majority of it is really special. And while I do think she’ll make even better films in what will hopefully be a long career, this one is still really worth checking out. I mean, I haven’t even brought up Melissa Leo’s frightening and absurd (yet somehow grounded?) performance that makes Meryl Streep in Doubt look like Amy Adams in Doubt.

10. The Florida Project (dir. Sean Baker)

As marketing extraordinaire A24 has managed to spread this film to a wider audience, they’ve made a lot of fuss about this film’s political depiction of Florida’s “hidden homeless,” Baker’s approach of mixing professional and non-professional actors (shout-out to Bria Vinaite who deserves as much awards attention as Willem Dafoe), and how the film “feels like a documentary.” And while I’m glad this strategy has worked, I tend to balk at the tendency of marketers and critics alike to call any movie with characters who aren’t all rich and/or white “like a documentary.” But regardless of its realism which I feel in no position to comment on, it’s certainly a great film about childhood and fantasy and how sometimes it’s easier to be a parent to everyone except your own kids. And not to build it up too much if you haven’t already seen it, but the ending is truly one of the best endings in recent years, not only in and of itself, but how it contextualizes and deepens everything that came before.

9. Whose Streets? (dir. Sabaah Folayan)

This is an exceptionally well-constructed film. I feel like most documentaries in this style have great moments but show a lack of restraint in the editing room and/or struggle to find a clear narrative. But this film moves along at an exceptional pace while still feeling comprehensive. Every sequence feels essential even when the scope expands beyond the two central individuals. This can be credited in part to the editing, but the succinctness wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the footage captured. The intimate moments we’re able to watch are stunning and enhance the already high stakes of the surrounding film, the ongoing narrative of the country. This is an essential reminder of the humanity behind activism, the sacrifice behind news stories, and that for many people political engagement is not something to do with an open Sunday afternoon but a necessary part of survival.

8. Their Finest (dir. Lone Scherfig)

Easily the best Dunkirk-related film of the year, this is the rare movie about movies that doesn’t feel self-satisfied, but instead truly captures the joy of cinema and storytelling. It’s odd to me that romantic melodrama, a genre so celebrated when it comes to classic film, is often written off as fluff in contemporary cinema. Yes, this movie is romantic. Yes, this movie is wildly entertaining. But it’s also painful, it’s also telling a story of women screenwriters we haven’t heard before, it’s also showing how powerful art can be as an escape and a mirror in difficult times. If you’re interested in filmmaking and/or British people, check this out on Hulu. Gemma Arterton is really wonderful and Sam Claflin is good eye candy if you’re into that sort of thing.

7. Starless Dreams (dir. Mehrdad Oskouei)

This documentary about a group of teenage girls living in an Iranian “Correctional and Rehabilitation Center” is proof that sometimes the best approach to the medium is simplicity. Oskouei pretty much just lets the girls talk. But it’s truly a testament to his abilities as a filmmaker (and person) and the girls’ vulnerability and storytelling prowess that the movie remains compelling throughout. As the girls tell their stories it becomes clear that the center isn’t simply a prison, but also almost a utopic escape from the daily horrors they faced outside. Both options are so completely insufficient when compared to the lives these young women deserve this realization is enraging. And while the film takes place in Iran it doesn’t require a lot of effort to realize young women have similar stories and circumstances all over the world. This movie is on iTunes and I really, really recommend checking it out. The subject matter is heavy, but because the girls are allowed to determine the narrative it never feels maudlin or unbearable and at times is even quite funny and joyous.

6. Raw (dir. Julia Ducournau)

I really appreciated how Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl captured the all-consuming lust of teenagehood. So, um, think that movie, except cannibalism. A lot of cannibalism. I feel torn between being honest about how truly gross this movie can be and pretending otherwise because I really don’t want to scare anyone away. I’ll put it this way. It’s really, really worth it to watch this through your fingers if you even maybe think you could handle it. Because it’s just a really great movie about being a teenage girl, discovering sexuality, being away from home for the first time, having a sister, having a first crush, a first sexual experience, feeling completely out of control of your desires and needs. Hey, even Ducournau insists this isn’t a horror movie. So don’t eat anything beforehand, but definitely check this out.

5. Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele)

I hardly need to add any analysis to what has easily been the most talked about and written about movie of the year. But I just need to say that it makes me so happy that a socially aware horror movie (the best subset of my favorite genre) not only made a huge amount of money but is also considered an awards frontrunner. That is so wonderfully baffling to me and a testament to the greatness of this movie. Many great horror movies capitalize on people’s fear of otherness, but those who are othered in our society are much more likely to be victims than villains. That Peele managed to show this without ever feeling like he was exploiting real pain is truly an accomplishment. The tonal balance this film achieves is certainly something I’ll study when I make a horror movie writing back to Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, Sleepaway Camp, etc.

4. Faces Places (dir. Agnès Varda, JR)

Agnès Varda has spent her entire career blending fact and fiction, opening up her own life for her art. But there’s something different about this film which is likely to be her last. While so much of her work places her vivacious spirit front and center this film feels almost like a cry of humanity. Oddly enough I’d compare it to Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky in that it seems to say, “Don’t fetishize my happiness, don’t mock my joy, don’t infantilize me, just because you can’t enjoy life like I can.” I look to Varda as the kind of artist (and person) I want to be in how open she always seems to be. But what this film made me realize is that part of that openness is how sad she can be, how angry she can be. Varda is often called “the grandmother of the French New Wave.” I guess this is the only way the film community knows how to contextualize a woman being the one to start arguably the most influential film movement. Varda is the same age as all those guys! She’s not the grandmother! She just happened to make a bold, experimental film about five years ahead of the rest of them. By ending with Godard, and pairing up with JR who is basically an incarnation of Godard and friends as young men, Varda is really exploring her place in film history and the world, and how difficult it is to be to be a pioneer. No country has more contemporary films directed by women than France and this is in a large part due to Varda. But being the one to create that path is exhausting. I realize I’m making what’s easily the most life-affirming, humanist film of the year sound like an angry, self-eulogy, but I think this aspect of the film and Varda’s career should not be ignored. If you’ve never seen anything by Varda, this film will read very differently, but still be wonderful (and honestly more joyous). I recommend seeing it, watching 20 of her other films, and then seeing it again.

3. The Shape of Water (dir. Guillermo del Toro)

The trailer for this film shows the main character, Elisa played by the always wonderful Sally Hawkins, doing her daily routine. Alarm, shining shoes, being late to work, etc. But even the redband trailer leaves out one of her daily activities: masturbating. Maybe it’s odd to associate masturbation with ambition, but the choice to show that early on and then repeatedly seems like a perfect microcosm of why this film is so great. It’s not afraid. Guillermo del Toro has made a wonderful career out of celebrating “the other” through monster movie pastiches, but this to me is his very best film because of how willing it is to be both clear and complicated. This movie is many things, but one of those things is a queer love story. And even though human woman/amphibian man sex is maybe even more taboo to show on screen than say eating a semen filled peach, this movie just goes for it. I’m not sure if this movie succeeds in everything it tries to do but I so deeply admire how much it tries. Not only is one of Elisa’s best friends gay, but we spend a significant amount of time getting to know that character and see that maybe his obsolete career hurts him even more. Not only is Elisa’s other best friend black, but we see how being a black woman affects her specifically in what is expected of her versus her husband. Fantasy and sci-fi often use real people’s struggles as source material for privileged protagonists, and while this film certainly does that, it works because the real people are still shown on screen. Also del Toro is a master of cinematic craft so this is really a pleasure to watch.

2. Lady Bird (dir. Greta Gerwig)

Before diving into this specific film it’s worth noting that this is one of six debut features on this list. It’s so exciting that we’re hopefully going to get full and illustrious careers from all of these people. But when it comes to Gerwig it feels like we already have. She has been proof that if the film community is going to insist on holding onto the auteur theory, they at least need to acknowledge that actors and writers can be auteurs. Gerwig is known for being quirky, but this really sells her talent short. She is clearly someone who has a deep understanding of cinema and, more importantly, a deep understanding of people. Part of being a great director is casting great actors and then trusting them and it’s so clear that’s what happened on this film (let me just list off some names: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Lucas Hedges, Tracy Letts, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Lois Smith, I mean come on). They really make her wonderful script come alive. This is a great movie about female friendship and a great movie about mother-daughter relationships, but more than anything it’s a great movie about loving and hating a hometown. Even though I’ve only seen the film twice I think back on moments in the film like I do my own adolescent memories. They feel familiar even when I don’t directly relate to them. This movie feels big in a way only a small movie can.

1. Mudbound (dir. Dee Rees)

This is when my penchant for hyperbole really comes back to bite me in the ass. I use the word masterpiece way too much. But when I say Mudbound is a masterpiece I don’t just mean it’s a great movie I really loved that I recommend everyone see. I mean, it’s The Godfather. It’s Citizen Kane. It’s the rare movie that has a perfect script, perfect cinematography, perfect performances, is completely of its time, and will stand the test of time. If we ever get to a place where art by black women is justly celebrated it will be in the 2070 AFI top 10. It’s that good. Part of what sets the movie apart is its almost absurd ambition. It breaks so many movie rules (not only does it have heavy narration, but it has heavy narration from multiple characters), and yet it always works. I love small movies, I love weird and flawed movies, but there is something so spectacular about watching something like Dee Rees’ third feature. I’m so excited to watch this movie again, to study it, to spend a lifetime with it. I feel like it really got lost in the shuffle by being released on Netflix, but that also means right now it’s on Netflix and you, yes YOU, almost certainly have or have access to Netflix. So you could watch it. Right now. Watch it. Stop reading. Turn the lights off. Find the biggest TV or computer screen you have so you can really appreciate Rachel Morrison’s cinematography and watch it. It is perfection wrapped in a bow of perfection and I really must insist you watch it.

Television!

Still Need to Catch Up On: The Girlfriend Experience (S2), Queen Sugar (S2)

Honorable Mentions: -Big Little Lies -Broad City (S3) -Girls (S6) -Insecure (S2) -Master of None (S2) -One Mississippi (S2) -Orange is the New Black (S5) -Search Party (S2) -Shots Fired

10. Twin Peaks: The Return 9. Jane the Virgin (S3/4) 8. Transparent (S4) 7. Better Things (S2) 6. I Love Dick 5. The Good Place (S1/2) 4. Sense8 (S2) 3. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (S2/3) 2. Top of the Lake: China Girl 1. The Leftovers (S3)

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trevorbailey61 · 8 years ago

Text

Black Sabbath

Genting Arena, Birmingham

Thursday 2nd February 2017

And in the end...... They left home to take on the world, they have fought and conquered and their language has been absorbed and translated by a host of inferior imitators. For the warriors one last victory procession before the end, a finality that as they reach where it all started now seems very real. Of course the final tour doesn't always mean the final tour. The thought that there is just this one remaining opportunity means final tours are often highly lucrative leading to them going on for years. The Who have been on a never ending one for about three years, including another two visits to Birmingham since I wrote some drivel about the end of an era. When the end does come, it can be sudden and unexpected, we decided against paying the vastly inflated ticket price asked for Prince's “Hit and Run” tour fully expecting there would be another chance to see him. At nearly 80, it was always likely that we would regret not taking a last chance to see Leonard Cohen but then, about a year later we were to see Burt Bacharach still tinkling the ivories at 86. The grand statement, therefore, allows some sense of control in the face of the unpredictability of fate, one day you will be right. The feeling is, however, that for Sabbath, this really is the end. They are already one member down, Bill Ward embroiled in some contractual dispute with the others that also acts as a cover for his failing health. Tony Iommi looks lean and fit but has had his battles with cancer whilst Geezer Butler, who of the four appears the most unscathed, no longer posses the girth to carry off the leggings his younger self was known to wear. Then there is Ozzy, the charismatic front man who whilst in what appeared to be a permanent state of confusion, practically invented reality TV. It is tempting to see that his battles with drink, drugs and his dysfunctional family have left him a shell bit here, in front of a fiercely partisan crowd in his home town, he is in his element. His figure may be hunched and dressed entirely in black he may have forsaken the flamboyance of his glory days but his sheer presence is as magnetic as ever. Black hair, dark black eyes, white skin showing the lines brought about by age and those binges and the demonic stare that fills the giant screen combine to show that on this final tour, he has a look that complements the bleak intensity of the music. The proficiency and technique of those around him create the brooding atmosphere but it is on Osbourne's shoulders that the show rests and despite his demons he delivers.

In their thousands they came, an army in black swarming through the concourses and empty halls of the NEC. Their influence is such that this was so much more than a wake for those mourning the passing of an old friend, eager young faces mixed with craggy old ones and, for a band who always seemed very blokey, there were a surprising number of XX chromosomes present. The diversity only extended so far, however, and, as it always has done, Sabbath’s particular brand of hard rock appeals to a mostly white audience. T-shirts are proudly worn displaying the tours on which many had seen them before, the oldest of these, tightly stretched over the middle age spread of its wearer, was faded to grey and listed a series of dates in the early 70s. Like the band themselves, time has not been kind to many of their followers and some moved tentatively, stick in their hand to give them support and confidence but infirmity was never going to keep them away. Waiting just outside the station, a family walk past, different generations drawn to the dark lords but each expressing how they have personalised their connection with the music. Grandparents, dressed in denim and leather, grandad with a goatee and shaven head, grandma with bleached white hair and overdone make up, were 70s heavy metal veterans from when Sabbath first burst onto the scene, possibly a little surprised that both they and the band have survived this long. White faces, long black hair and huge boots, mum and dad were 80s goths, Sabbath temporarily absent in their youth meaning these darker paths were opened through some of those they had influenced. The confidence, and a figure that has yet to show the ravages of time, mean that the children can take the look of their parents to its striking and extravagant conclusion, tight ripped jeans and t-shirts, spiked hair and the same huge boots. A love shared by the family but each with their own version.

A toiling bell announces the princes of darkness, the solemn signature of the “Black Sabbath” song, Iommi’s tritones forming the devil’s interval to create the unsettling setting for the doom laden lyrics. Osbourne’s straight and impassioned delivery gives them the substance they would otherwise lack and the prog rock twists and jazzy rhythms immediately show the subtleties and variations that made them so much more than just a heavy metal band. “Let’s go crazy”, shouts Osbourne igniting a ferocious Iommi riff to release the built up tension into a frenzy. It was the song that started it all and the tone and structure of much guitar based music that followed, the cartoon new metal sound of acts like Iron Maiden, the dense goth of The Cult or the slacker grunge of Nirvana, can all be found in the legacy that Sabbath left, particularly over the course of four stunning albums released in the early 70s.

Bringing it all back home, the set is dominated by these four albums, a celebration of their power and influence. Some choices are obvious, “War Pigs” shows that whilst their lyrics often lacked subtlety, the breadth of the themes they tackled was much broader than they were often given credit for. A reflection on peace that comes straight from Woodstock, they were almost hippies, it’s anti war message is all the more forceful through being stated so plainly and at such volume. Wailing sirens, Iommi’s power chords and Butler’s fluid bass lines create the tone for the apocalyptic lyrics; “Evil minds that plot destruction; Sorcerers of death's construction”, some things don’t change. “NIB” is introduced by a surprisingly funky Butler bass line and leads to an instrumental section where Iommi gives the teasing signature of songs that had failed to make the set, This concludes with one of those rituals of the early 70s - the drum solo. There was certainly no doubting the technique but with over a dozen false endings it is a relief when the rest of the band reappear. When they do it is with the thumping beat and the instantly recognisable motif of “Iron Man”, fittingly about a man returning from the future to warn of an impending apocalypse, perhaps now this is the future.

“NIB” casts Osbourne as the devil, something that feeds speculation on the bands interest in the occult, particularly in their early days. Sabbaths devils, however, are more Hammer Horror than Aleister Crowley, not to be taken too seriously and a bit camp. The humour was mostly lost on their more obsessed followers and, as is the case with “NIB”, the satanic themes were often used to illustrate more worldly concerns. “NIB” shows how easy it is to give into temptation, something explored more directly in “Snowblind”. In introducing the song Osbourne briefly reflects on his own addictions, saying it is something he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy, and the lyrics are some of their most incisive. These were written by Butler and show terror, pain and a frightening descent into dependency; “Winds of ice that soon will spread; Down to freeze my very soul”; a path the person singing them was already taking. “After Forever” shows that, despite their reputation as purveyors of the black arts, their background and religious views were Catholic and rather than a celebration of the occult, is an attack on atheism, “Is your mind so small that you have to fall; In with the pack wherever they run”. Through “Fairies Wear Boots”, “Under the Sun/Every Day Comes and Goes”, “Into the Void”, the pace and density of the sound never lets up and each is built around Iommi’s glorious signature guitar. His playing is possibly at its most fluid on “Dirty Woman”, but appearing on “Technical Ecstasy” it is the one time they step away from the first four albums and lacks the urgency of their best work. “This is the last one” Osbourne tells us before “Children of the Grave”, unless of course we earn another one but with the ferocity of the playing that was never in doubt and as balloons fall from the roof engulfing the stage the party is almost complete. All that was needed was, of course, “Paranoid”, a short burst of self doubt that displays both individually and collectively the strengths of this formidable band. Purple confetti, each piece having “Black Sabbath” printed on it, flutters down across the hall, a group hug, a wave and they were gone, one more performance and that is it - the end of their dark era.

In 1968 an oddly worded ad appeared in a music shop in Birmingham, “Ozzy Zig Needs Gig”, Intrigued and having just seen their jazzy blues rock band Mythology fold, Toni Iommi and Bill Ward replied and thus found themselves alongside two other survivors from a failed band, a psychedelic outfit called Rare Breed. Having tried different names without success, they found themselves rehearsing above a cinema that specialised in the horror and sci-fi b movies that were to give them so much inspiration. After one such evening, Butler had a dream, "I was asleep and I felt something in the room, like this weird presence, I woke up in a dream world, and there was this black thing at the bottom of the bed, staring at me. It was just this apparition. It just lasted a second. But it just freaked me out.” Osbourne captured Butler’s description of his dream in the ominous lyrics, Iommi added the guitar motif and the title was lifted from a Boris Karloff movie. The band had a song and an identity. On a chilly night, the song that the dream inspired will be performed by its creators for the last time, or will it. No sooner had the last piece of confetti softly landed, than Iommi announces that the band may work together again, perhaps another never ending final tour is just beginning.

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