#this has been in the works since i posted about the mick and john being 2 sides of the same coin thing lol

[robinsnest2111]

Mick and John 5, paswg style!

[gorogues]

1. What’s the most accurate/canon depiction of The Rogues relationship with each other for both pre-New 52 and post-New 52 comics? (eg what Mark is to Lisa and vice versa, what Digger is to Sam and vice versa, Len and Mick, etc until you’re done listing how everyone’s relationship with everyone else is like)

You can add others (Owen, Axel, Evan, etc) if you want, but this question is mostly aimed at the main Rogues.

2. I swear I saw a post from someone on this platform, I don’t know if it was you or somebody else, but they basically said something along the lines of: “You’d think that it would be out of character for Barry to leave his villains in Iron Heights, knowing how unethical the prison is and all. But the more I thought about it, the more I agreed that no, it isn’t actually that out of character for Barry.”

That thought has been stuck in my head ever since, and as someone who doesn’t really know Barry’s characterisation all that much (a crying shame, I know), I just wanted your opinion.

Is this statement true? I’d like to hear your reasoning for if you agree or disagree.

I didn’t know if I should keep these two questions on separate asks or not, so I just combined them both onto one. Hope you don’t mind all that much. I know it will probably take awhile to answer my questions, if you decide you want to that is. If you do then no pressure, take as much time as you want. If you decide you won’t answer, that’s also completely fine with me. Either way, hope your happy and safe wherever you are and have a good day/night.

Buckle up, because this is a long ride. To start, I'm leaving out stuff like when a Rogue was mind-controlled into doing something, or when they weren't in control of their actions due to being puppeted by Neron or Nekron (although the Black Lanterns were speaking from their victims' memories and thus may have had relevant things to say. It wasn't that person committing evil acts, however). That stuff wasn't voluntary, though of course the people harmed by them during those periods might not see it that way.

--Pre-Flashpoint--

Lisa and Len: Their relationship has varied depending on the era. In the Bronze Age they were often indifferent and sometimes hostile to each other (she didn't seem upset about Len's purported death), but occasionally got along well. After Crisis they frequently worked together and were generally friendly, but tensions built and things turned bad -- originally, Lisa was intended to have murdered her brother for his cold gun, but that was nixed in favour of her just stealing it. By the Johns era she was dead and Len was overtly mourning her, and we'd see in retconned flashbacks that they were very close due to their shared traumatic upbringing. One flashback showed her saying she'd become a criminal to be like her big brother, although Bronze Age comics were quite clear that she did it to avenge her dead boyfriend.

Lisa and Mark: They didn't interact much (just a few issues), but she poisoned him in one story to get him to do her bidding. It doesn't seem like they were close.

Lisa and Digger: Again, they didn't interact much, but she poisoned him in one story to get him to do her bidding. After she died, the tabloids claimed that she and Digger had a secret love-child -- which wasn't true -- but maybe they had more interactions that we never saw. Or maybe the tabloids just assumed Lisa was the mother because she was the only female Rogue in those days.

Lisa and Sam: They never interacted with each other back in the day, but in a later retcon Lisa wanted to be introduced to him because he was "cute".

Lisa and Roscoe: They were dating, and were very close. Eventually death separated them several times and they didn't get back together for unknown reasons.

Lisa and Mick: She and Len once tried to kill Mick in the Bronze Age, but he doesn't seem to have held a grudge; the three of them got along fine after Crisis, and they worked and socialized together. In the Johns era we saw an early flashback of Mick being exceptionally rude to Len about Lisa, so maybe their early relations weren't always great.

Lisa and Hartley: They only appeared in a few stories together, and in one (Blue Devil #30) they didn't interact much but seemed friendly. In DC Retro-Active: The Flash: 1980s they got along quite well, and seemed to get along when the heroes were rescuing Wally from the Turtle Man. Overall they were civil and friendly with each other.

Lisa and James: They co-existed well enough at Len's party, but she later poisoned him to get him to do her bidding. And the relationship between James and the Rogues (including her) was rather sour in Blue Devil. They seemed terse with each other at best.

Len and Mark: Len's been kind and supportive to Mark over the years, especially since taking over the team's dad role, but interestingly he didn't list Mark amongst the Rogues he liked. (There was also a panel in which Len listed Mark amongst three Rogues who were his "real family", but that was right after saying he was glad Lisa was dead -- it was from Johns' first arc and he quickly retconned his own work). Mark seems to like him, and trusted him enough to confess to Clyde's killing. The two had a good relationship of mutual support in Rogues' Revenge, which was probably the best they've ever had and the closest they've been.

Len and Digger: In Len's spotlight issue, he claimed Digger was one of the few Rogues he liked. They did get along well, including working together outside of the Rogues/Central City, though Len didn't treat Digger very kindly near the end of his life. Len was also cool-to-hostile to him after he returned from the dead and wanted to rejoin the Rogues, and actually beat the shit out of him (admittedly Digger had just done something stupid). That said, Len wistfully said "what are friends for, eh, Digger?" when Digger was dead and told Owen that Digger "was one of…my friends", so it seems Len always did retain a soft spot for him even despite his growling. He was probably taking a tough-love approach, even if he was a jerk about it.

Len and Sam: They got along fine before Sam was killed, and even liked each other enough to work together outside of the Rogues/Central City. They didn't seem close or anything, but Sam was one of the few Rogues Len said he liked in his spotlight issue.

Len and Roscoe: They seemed to get along okay or were mostly indifferent to each other before Roscoe died, but after his death Len made it very clear he didn't miss him (although interestingly, Len seemed sad at his funeral). This may be because Roscoe had recently tried to kill the other Rogues if they messed with his plan after he'd died (which they did), but the fact that Roscoe dated Len's sister surely didn't help. By the Johns era the two of them hated each other, and Len opted not to treat Roscoe like he did most Rogues -- leaving him to languish in prison and not helping him when he clearly needed it. Things eventually devolved to Roscoe threatening to mind-control the other Rogues to make them fall in line, and Len killed him. Afterwards, we learned that at some point in earlier history Len had turned the other Rogues against Roscoe to become the group's leader, but unfortunately we don't know the details of what happened.

Len and Mick: A very complicated relationship, which goes from friendly to openly hostile and back again…sometimes within the same issue. Mick said he got along with all the Rogues but Len, which is basically true, and Len was a major reason Mick spent long periods estranged from the Rogues. In the Bronze Age, Len (and Lisa) tried to kill Mick, and previously Len had tried to traumatize Mick by manipulating him into killing an innocent person. Len's been openly insulting to Mick at times, who'd then retaliate in kind, but Len has also been supportive and helpful with Mick's many psychological issues. Sometimes Len watched out for his well-being in ways nobody else did. The end result is a complicated and not very healthy frenemy relationship between them, though they generally work well together with their complementary tech.

Len and Hartley: They seemed to get along okay until Hartley reformed (though there was a flashback to Len being callous to him in the early days), but Len's been low-key hostile to him ever since. There must be an underlying reason for it, because Len didn't really treat other reformed Rogues that way (even if he wasn't always thrilled with them) and I think he just doesn't like Hartley.

Len and James: In Len's spotlight issue, he said James was one of the few Rogues he liked. Which is interesting because I've never seen a particular bond between the two of them, but Len did accept James back quite readily after a long period of reform (which even involved fighting against the Rogues as part of the FBI). James doesn't seem to have much fondness for Len though, and has cheerfully tricked and pranked him a few times.

Mark and Sam: They seem to have gotten along okay, though they didn't interact much.

Mark and Digger: They were generally quite friendly to each other, though Mark didn't have the nicest things to say about Digger after he'd died. The Rogues can be like that with each other, however, so it might not really mean anything.

Mark and Mick: They didn't interact much but got along well when they were on the same side. However, the two of them have frequently been on opposing sides (or at least one was reformed and one wasn't), so there may have been ongoing tension between them from the time of Mick's first stint with reform. But things were fine between them when Mick rejoined the Rogues after that, so it seems like there was no lingering grudge.

Mark and Roscoe: They didn't interact much but seemed to get along okay. In Blackest Night, Roscoe's zombie (which wasn't actually him, but had his memories) spoke flatteringly to Mark and reminded him that at some unspecified point they'd once planned to take out Len and run the Rogues together, which was a bombshell never addressed again. They probably would have turned on each other if the plan ever came to fruition, but there was either mutual respect or some intended backstabbing going on there.

Mark and Hartley: They seemed to get along reasonably well back in the day, though many Rogues were frosty to Hartley after he reformed and Mark was probably no different. Hartley didn't seem as though he had fond feelings for Mark after reforming, as he was pretty apathetic when he saw Mark distressed in Iron Heights and potentially exposed to a lethal virus, and Hartley was as cold to the Rogues when he 'returned' undercover as they were to him. It's not clear whether Hartley knew Mark was part of the Rogues who'd killed his parents and framed him for it, or if he'd even blame Mark for that since Mark wasn't directly involved in the scheme. But it's fair to say that they didn't get along well from at least the Johns era until Flashpoint.

Mark and James: They got along well before Crisis, and socialized in a friendly manner up into the Waid era. But things had probably changed by the time James joined the FBI, in which he was working to take down the Rogues (including Mark). James rejoined the Rogues in the aftermath of Rogue War and interacted civilly with them, though he was openly contemptuous of their behaviour in Countdown and we later learned that he was there undercover. I think it's likely James didn't have particularly warm feelings for Mark or most of the others, and perhaps there was just too much bad blood before James was killed and the universe soon rebooted.

Roscoe and Mick: They didn't interact much but seemed to get along okay; they looked cheery when chatting during a flashback in Mick's spotlight issue. However, Mick's narration stated that he got along with Roscoe even though Roscoe talked over everyone's heads, so it seems probable that Mick tolerated him more than liked him.

Roscoe and Digger: They got along well before Crisis, but haven't been shown interacting since. Both have done personality 180s since Crisis, and I can't imagine either of their newer personalities would like or even tolerate the other, so they probably wouldn't get along and likely avoided each other. Roscoe did attend Digger's funeral, though.

Roscoe and James: In the Silver/Bronze Ages they never actually interacted with each other on panel, though they must have met behind the scenes because James was at Roscoe's funeral and complained about his sense of humour. (We've also seen a flashback of them together from a comic published later.) And James spoke dismissively of him after his death, calling him the least of the Rogues. It's difficult to say what their relationship was, though James clearly wasn't impressed by him, and probably wasn't thrilled with Roscoe when his mind-whammy was undone…and Roscoe died soon after, so they never spoke again before the universe was rebooted. It doesn't seem to have been a good relationship, but we've seen so little of their interactions.

Roscoe and Hartley: They seemed to get along okay before Roscoe died, but things took an ugly turn after he'd returned and Hartley had reformed. Roscoe tried to goad Hartley into killing a presidential candidate and then tried to frame him for it, and did so by being a homophobic asshole to him and Hartley understandably thought he was a monster. My opinion, based on what Roscoe said in the issue, is that he was trying to seriously rile up Hartley to accomplish his plan and might not have actually believed the stuff he said…but it doesn't change that he said and did it, and was in fact acting like a monster. What's interesting is that later (in the Johns era) Hartley was lamenting having no living family left, and Roscoe told him "You still have family. Me for one." Which was probably cold comfort and Hartley wouldn't agree, but it's still very interesting that Roscoe would say that.

Roscoe and Sam: Roscoe was generally quite friendly to Sam, but Sam tricked him into losing a million dollar bet and left him to die in a booby-trapped prison, so Roscoe resentfully helped Barry ruin Sam's plan. Roscoe secretly swore to get payback, but never seems to have acted on it and Sam screwed him over again by later stealing his loot. For whatever reason, Sam was the Rogue that Roscoe chose to inform of his death, though he also had a scheme to blow up the Rogues if they messed with his revenge plan (which they did). They had a weird relationship, but I think Roscoe liked Sam more than the other Rogues.

Sam and Digger: They were generally great pals, despite some hiccups here and there -- Digger was a dick to Sam in Gotham and then tried to hypnotize him into doing his dirty work. Sam was pissed enough that he tried to get a cop to shoot Digger dead. But otherwise they got along quite well and worked/socialized together even outside the Rogues and Central City, and after Sam died his costume and tech ended up in Digger's hands and he used them to commit incognito crimes. The other Rogues were furious (not knowing who was doing it), but Digger thought Sam would appreciate the joke, and he was probably right.

Sam and James: They mostly got along okay, although Sam robbed James of his loot once, and all the Rogues of the late Bronze Age tended to snarl at each other for some reason.

Sam and Hartley: Their relationship didn't seem particularly notable until Hartley was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and then Sam and Digger went in disguise to free him. Both were somewhat dismissive of Hartley, claiming he wasn't a great pal or anything, but the Rogues sometimes do that to downplay their feelings (perhaps to seem like tough guys?) and they went to a fair bit of effort to spring someone they didn't really care about. They obviously cared.

Sam and Mick: They seemed to get along well before Mick had a traumatic experience and left the Rogues. We don't know what Sam thought about Mick's reform.

Digger and James: They generally got along in a friendly jocular manner before Crisis, though one time Digger disapproved of James trying to unmask an apparently-deceased Flash and kicked him for it…they ended up squabbling and yelling at each other. After Crisis, Digger turned his back and suggested that the Rogues should let James fall to his death. Later, after Digger had been away from the Rogues a long time and James had reformed, Digger repeatedly begged him for money and James completely cut him off, calling him a "mooch". So perhaps relations soured after their time apart.

Digger and Hartley: As noted above, Digger and Sam went to some trouble to free Hartley from lock-up. That aside, they didn't have a good relationship; Digger criticized Hartley's battle tactics and Hartley thought poorly of Digger's intelligence even before Crisis, and we know that Digger made a lot of shitty comments/jokes about Hartley's sexuality. And Digger was openly hostile when he saw Hartley at Linda Park's funeral. Post-Crisis' Digger's personality is obnoxious enough that he'd definitely get on Hartley's nerves (and vice versa, to be honest), so it's no surprise they don't get along.

Digger and Mick: They seemed to get along well, though as noted above Mick could get along with almost everyone. Digger may not have appreciated Mick's stints of reform, but he still accepted the situation when Mick sometimes returned to hang out with the guys, so maybe it didn't even bother him. And Mick was willing to lend him money (likely knowing he wouldn't get it back) after James cut him off, with a bit of gentle chiding about getting his shit together. They appear to have had a good relationship.

James and Hartley: Best friends, at least when they're being written properly; we'll leave Countdown out of this because we all know how OOC it was. James was friendly with Hartley when they were both Rogues (it's not known whether he knew Hartley's sexuality then, but he might have), and he accepted Hartley once Hart had reformed and become a pariah to the Rogues and was openly gay. Later Hartley was accused of murdering his parents and James refused to help him when he was on the lam, but it's very possible that was due to the general mind control James was under, so it's debatable whether that was really his fault. Ditto for James basically press-ganging Hartley and Mick into the FBI. Either way, all those shenanigans aside, they're very good friends who like, accept, and trust each other. James also left his will and data for taking down the Rogues to Hartley, and told him that the information was hidden from everyone else by invisible ink.

James and Mick: They've never seemed particularly close, but later in life developed the commonality of reform or semi-reform and both are quite easy to get along with. As stated above, James drafted Mick and Hartley into the FBI and that may not have been their choice, but James was supportive of Mick's mental health and ensured he received plenty of psychological support…which was definitely necessary. He also encouraged Mick to train and remain physically healthy, so overall he was very considerate of his needs and well-being. They weren't close after the two of them went back to the Rogues, but that may have been because Mick sincerely wanted to return and James was (apparently) undercover. Overall they had a friendly and supportive relationship, despite some occasional bumps.

Hartley and Mick: Their relationship before Crisis wasn't particularly notable one way or another, but in the Johns era they were firm friends and allies during a time when most of the Rogues neither liked nor accepted Hartley. Hartley was a fugitive at the time, and Mick was the only person willing to help him with no questions asked. They later worked well together at the FBI, but weren't close when Mick rejoined the Rogues.

--Post-Flashpoint--

Digger and all other Rogues: Only Digger and Len have had significant interactions, and that story inexplicably depicted them as not knowing each other. However, a later issue showed Len offering Digger a place with the Rogues via text message.

Roscoe and all other Rogues: He's only interacted with them in passing, although Len tried to kill him again so it seems their relationship hasn't improved :>

James and all the other Rogues: He's only interacted with them in passing (aside from Axel), and he mind-controlled them into doing his bidding so there's probably no love between them and him. A past version of him also worked on the Legion of Zoom with the Snarts, but they were cool towards each other.

Lisa and Len: For a while she blamed and hated him for giving the Rogues metahuman powers, which left her seriously injured/ill and her boyfriend trapped in the Mirrorverse, but those problems are over now and the two are fairly close despite occasional differences. She opposed his regime during "Year of the Villain", but still cared about his safety and his conscience, and she broke him out of custody after his defeat. For his part, Len made a lot of mistakes during the New 52 and was selfish at times, but he went to great lengths to keep her safe and healthy during her illness.

Lisa and Sam: They almost got married and were very close through many struggles, but eventually broke up and she's been cool towards him since. He reacted by becoming a sullen hedonist, and their breakup is probably a big part of why he's not been with the Rogues for a while.

Lisa and Marco: He admired and respected her and wanted her to be team leader before seemingly falling back towards Len's leadership. They treat each other with mutual respect, though he put her life at risk in Rogues Rebellion when he'd had enough of the ongoing shenanigans. He later returned to do the right thing and help her and the others.

Lisa and Mick: He's frequently been surly towards her as he is with everyone else, but clearly cares about her and treats her with about as much respect as he has for anyone.

Lisa and Hartley: The first time they interacted on panel, Lisa got revenge on him for being a "traitor", but later that was forgotten and he went to a fair bit of trouble to keep her safe from danger. His narration stated that she'd supported him and helped him come out to the other Rogues before the New 52 began, indicating that they'd been good friends, so I don't know if they ever reconciled the 'traitor' thing or he simply let it go.

Len and Sam: They had/have something of an uneasy relationship because Sam was dating Len's sister, and Len was responsible for tearing them apart and nearly getting her killed…and after getting through all that, Lisa and Sam broke up and left Len somewhat in the middle. But Len has much better relations with Sam than he had with Roscoe before Flashpoint, and they mostly treat each other with friendliness and respect. But there's obviously anger and tension at times too.

Len and Mick: An extremely hostile relationship throughout most of the New 52, though Mick calmed down somewhat in Rebirth. All the meta Rogues were angry at Len, but Mick took it to another level of resentment and bitter violence. That's mostly behind them now, but Mick's still somewhat surly and it's probably a legacy of what happened to him. Len, on the other hand, didn't really take much responsibility for what he did to the other Rogues who weren't Lisa, and it's not surprising his relationship with Mick wasn't good. However, when the Sage Force was sorting out Mick's trauma it (or his mind) conjured up 'Len' to talk sense to him and calm him down, and by "Year of the Villain" Mick proclaimed that Len was his best friend, so obviously the situation significantly improved over time.

Len and Marco: They formerly had a terse relationship due to resentment about metahuman powers, though they seem to be on good terms now that it's behind them. Marco can be moody though, so that's probably a challenge at times.

Len and Hartley: They haven't interacted much, though Hartley saved Len from dying in an accident and Len seemed happy to see him -- but he also wanted Hartley to let him go, so maybe he was just buttering him up. Hartley was working as a hero at the time, so he wouldn't budge even for old times' sake.

Marco and Sam: Their relations have ranged from friendly to antagonistic during times of stress, but overall they treat each other with respect and have a brotherly relationship. They seem like actual friends.

Marco and Mick: Mick's intense anger issues and Marco's brooding moodiness was kind of a match made in hell and probably why they've never been close. They seem to get along okay now that Mick has mellowed a lot.

Marco and Hartley: They haven't interacted much.

Mick and Hartley: They haven't interacted much.

Mick and Sam: Mick was surly to everyone for most of the New 52, though his relationship with Sam in Rogues Rebellion was surprisingly positive and friendly. Sam tried to talk sense and the brotherhood of Rogues to Mick, who mostly dismissed him but still sacrificed himself to save the others, showing that Sam had gotten through to him. Mick later turned up alive, and was afterwards restored psychologically and physically by the Sage Force, which calmed him down significantly. But Sam turned into a jerk after he broke up with Lisa, and Mick yelled at him for it and finally got through to him somewhat, indicating that both of them listen to the other and are the better for it. Their relationship has never been warm and fuzzy, but it seems like there's enough respect to get the other guy to be better, and for both to accept advice.

Sam and Hartley: They were friendly during their interactions, which makes sense because Hartley was helping to save Lisa.

Question 2: I swear I saw a post from someone on this platform, I don’t know if it was you or somebody else, but they basically said something along the lines of: “You’d think that it would be out of character for Barry to leave his villains in Iron Heights, knowing how unethical the prison is and all. But the more I thought about it, the more I agreed that no, it isn’t actually that out of character for Barry.” That thought has been stuck in my head ever since, and as someone who doesn’t really know Barry’s characterisation all that much (a crying shame, I know), I just wanted your opinion. Is this statement true? I’d like to hear your reasoning for if you agree or disagree.

This is a bit of a tricky question, because Iron Heights was introduced and got most of its panel time when Barry was dead, so he wasn't around for the 'heyday' of its development when Ashley Zolomon and Wally West grappled with what was going on inside. We don't know what his position would have been before Flashpoint, though I don't think he would have liked it. Classic Barry was very much a law and order type (a cop, obviously), but that was in the days when prison brutality generally wasn't addressed in comics. We do know he was horrified by what was done to Clive Yorkin, which was an experimental and arguably cruel treatment of a prisoner.

But there's no question that Iron Heights has been around since Barry came back, that there's been abuse shown on-panel since then, and he hasn't really done anything about it. He was shocked by what happened to Axel in solitary and seemed like he was going to rescue him, but that just kind of petered out and it was Kristen Kramer and David Singh who did the work to stop Wolfe. I do think that's out of character….to a point. There's no question he's a cop and someone who follows the rules more often than, say, Wally. But that can also work both ways, and overt cruelty and harsh punishment isn't following the rule of law either. I think Barry wouldn't lose sleep if Wolfe took away prisoners' material comforts and privileges, even if we think that's wrong, but IMO he should find a beaten prisoner or a prisoner with his prosthetic arm removed unacceptable and take action. He's a person who has shown mercy towards reformed and even completely unrepentant villains before, and he's not perfect, but nobody is.

TL;DR I don't agree with how Barry's Iron Heights plot was handled.

[longitudinalwaveme]

Writing a Better Version of the "Two-Rogues-Handcuffed-Together" Storyline in Countdown

@gorogues recently posted a piece about the relationship Evan and Axel had with the other Rogues, including the very hostile relationship between the Pied Piper and Evan.

Reading through the post made me realize that the animosity between Hartley and Evan was probably the most in-character aspect of any of the Rogues during Flash: the Fastest Man Alive, Salvation Run, and Countdown (with the possible exception of James' hand puppets and Hartley blowing up Apokolips with Queen music).

Nothing else makes any sense.

Mick, James, and Piper were all part of the FBI team that was trying to bring down the criminal Rogues. So why does Mick get accepted into the group basically immediately while Pied Piper and the Trickster are forced to prove their loyalty? Captain Cold seemed equally willing to accept both Mick and James back at the end of Rogue War. What changed? Granted, it would later be established that both James and Piper were undercover for the FBI, but the Rogues didn't know that---and even if they maybe suspected, by all accounts it seems like they should have suspected Mick, too. He reformed even before Hartley did!

Why/how did Inertia go from being furious at the people who had made him a living weapon against Impulse, and desperate for the love and affection he'd never had, to a complete sociopath who was basically Eobard 2.0?

Why are the Rogues, undercover for the FBI or not, all so stupid? James and Captain Cold are the worst examples, since James comes across as a complete moron for almost all of Countdown, and Captain Cold should absolutely not be dumb enough to just follow the leadership of an obviously untrustworthy teenaged speedster without any real question, especially since he doesn't really like or trust anyone with super speed. And he should absolutely be able to tell what when a speedster has lost their speed; slowing down the Flash is basically his stock-in-trade. How did he not notice that Bart was no longer moving at super speed? In fact, how did NONE of the Rogues notice that? Also, why did neither the Trickster nor Pied Piper, nor any of the non-undercover Rogues except Kadabra, think to question Inertia's device at any point? You'd think Piper and Trickster, at least, would have wanted to try to see if they could maybe shut down the device when no one was looking or something.

In speaking of Kadabra, why was he with the Rogues? He'd never been a part of the group before, and is definitely not the type who would want to share the limelight. More importantly, why did he stay with them after they were all banished to that alien planet during Salvation Run? It's not like he isn't powerful enough to deal with things by himself. In fact, he's such a powerful reality warper that I honestly don't know why he couldn't have either a) immediately teleported himself back to Earth or b) transformed the planet so it was no longer a danger for him.

Why did both Pied Piper and the Trickster apparently forget that they were reformed? Pied Piper is particularly egregious, since Geoff Johns made it very clear that he was still on Team Good Guy, but even after (I think) Countdown retconned things so that he and James were both working undercover, that story still treated them like they were only just now reforming half the time, rather than having been reformed for years.

If James and Piper were undercover for the FBI, why couldn't James have just...y'know...called the FBI and asked them to tell everybody about him and Piper being undercover after Bart died? It seems like that would have saved both James and Piper a lot of grief (and also kept James from getting shot in the head). Did no one else know about that mission?

Why was James suddenly so horrible to Piper out of nowhere? There was no build-up at all prior to Countdown to suggest that they were mad at each other or anything, and they had been portrayed as good friends before that.

I could go on like this forever.

But that initial point about how Evan and Piper really really hate each other, and how that's one of the few things that F: TFMA and Countdown gets right, gave me an idea for a better version of Countdown.

The most immediately obvious choice to fix Countdown is to keep James and Piper as the two Rogues featured, but don't have James spontaneously lose like 80 IQ points, forget his own character development, and suddenly be uniquely horrible to Hartley for no reason. It would also be good to have Piper consistently remember his character development, and it would be nice if James didn't die.

The next most immediately obvious choice is to keep Pied Piper and Trickster chained together, but have Axel be the Trickster instead of James. Unlike James, Axel hadn't been established as Piper's friend, so it wouldn't seem weird for him to be a huge jerk to him, and, also unlike James, Axel really can be an idiot.

A lot of the promotional material makes it seem like the writers may have been thinking about Axel as the Trickster rather than James, like this Countdown teaser that has what looks to be James in Axel's clothes.

Or this image, with the "yo" gloves that are pretty Axel-exclusive:

Between these two images, I'm half-convinced that the original plan was to have Piper handcuffed to Axel instead of James (though it's also entirely possible that someone at DC just didn't do the research, and this is a very early instance of "Jaxel", where James and Axel have their visual designs sort of merged together regardless of which character it is.)

But I think the most interesting idea for Countdown would have been to have the Pied Piper handcuffed to McCulloch. They really, really hate each other, as underlined by Countdown itself, so it would make sense for them to be hostile to one another and for McCulloch to fill the role James does in the final comic. It would be fascinating to see them be forced to deal with each other for a long period of time, and it might give us some actual closure to their dynamic, which otherwise basically went nowhere before the universe rebooted. That being said, you would have to get rid of most of McCulloch's tech somehow, because otherwise it would just be begging the question of why he doesn't just teleport away.

And apparently great minds must think alike, because I was looking through some old posts by @gorogues and apparently we interpedently hit on the same idea for the best way to fix Countdown.

[pinktinselmonstrosity]

every book i read in september!

this has been a very weird and depressing month for me, but at least i got a lot of reading done 🙃 a few v long books and some others i raced through, let's get into it!

The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman

I had just started The Silk Roads (more on that later) at the end of last month when I got covid, and decided to switch to something a bit easier. Luckily I had this on hand, and it was absolutely perfect. I love this series so much, and I think this may have been the best one yet. Very good!

The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan

My first foray into reading history for fun, one year post-history degree, and boy was this a bad place to start. I don't have a problem with the book overall, I just don't think it was right for me. I'm used to very focused studies of one particular historical period, so I found the broad-ness of this quite disappointing; it covers essentially all of human history in around 600 pages, so naturally can't go into great detail about any part of it. I found myself slightly bored and not learning anything new about periods I was already knowledgeable about, and being left wanting to learn much more about periods I wasn't already knowledgeable about. Again, this is definitely a problem with me rather than with the book - when I dip my toes into history again, I'm for sure going to go for something very specialised rather than something broad.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

My parents love this series and we've been watching the tv show together since it started, and the book does not disappoint! It's about a group of, essentially, reject spies, who accidentally find themselves at the centre of a terrorist plot. I did find myself imagining the characters only in the way they're portrayed in the show, but that didn't impact my enjoyment (also I could not remember the plot at all, which helped).

Penance by Eliza Clark

This book has been sitting on my shelf for over a year, and I finally got around to it. It was good but, for me, didn't live up to the huge amount of hype. It's a faux-true crime story, using the conventions of true crime writing to tell a fictional story and criticise the genre. As someone who enjoys true crime but also thinks critically about it, I've read a few of these kinds of novels, and to be honest this one is not the best (I would recommend Devil House by John Darnielle or The Curious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett, for anyone who's interested).

I was actually really enjoying it until the ending, which seemed tacked-on and didn't really make sense with the rest of the book. It kind of felt like a random plot twist just added to make the book seem more edgy, without actually saying anything more than ''sometimes journalists twist the truth''. It also didn't feel like it mattered very much, since the reader knows the entire story is made up. Kinda disappointed, especially since I know people who really love this book.

Complicity by Iain Banks

This was fantastic! It follows a journalist who is investigating a series of grisly murders and unexpectedly becomes the prime suspect. Much more gruesome than I expected, and even though I figured out who the killer was fairly early on, it still kept me hooked. I loved the use of flashbacks and multiple perspectives, both of which made it much more tense and exciting. Would highly recommend!

The Examiner by Janice Hallett

Hallett is one of those authors whose books I will literally take a detour and immediately buy if I see a new one in shop windows. All of her novels are stand-alone crime novels with quite different subjects, but they're all told through documents, like emails, text messages, call logs, etc. They're basically the book equivalent of found footage, and it works SO well. This one is set in a university, focusing on a small class of postgrads and the mystery surrounding their final project. In addition to things like text messages and emails, the book includes sections of the students' essays and marking feedback to tell the story. It has one fantastic twist, and it definitely one of my favourite of her books yet!

The Castle by Franz Kafka

I really wanted to love this, but it turned out to be one of the most difficult books I've ever read. The prose is impenetrable; trying to read this book feels like wading through quicksand. Every few minutes I would be flicking through to see how many pages I had left, which is very uncommon for me. I feel the need to clarify that I'm a very strong reader, and usually enjoy difficult novels, but this one didn't feel rewarding enough to make up for the complexity. The narrative is unsatisfying and feels completely pointless; I understand that that basically is the point, but I didn't feel compelled by it. Unfortunately this was not for me at all.

Currently Reading + On My Radar

I am currently reading The Night Manager by John le Carré; it's very good so far, and the perfect antidote to a slow-moving, plot-less book hangover. Since next month is October, I'm planning to read some spooky things. I have some horror novels on my tbr, like Sheep's Clothing by Celia Dale and Rouge by Mona Awad, as well as Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, which I'm reliably informed is horrifying. Looking forward to it!

[avasharpe]

Only For Her

Chapter: 1/1

Words: 777

Summary: Ava and Sara text each other using emojis.

Fandom: DC’s Legends of Tomorrow

Relationships: Sara Lance/Ava Sharpe. 

Characters: Ava Sharpe, Sara Lance, and Mick Rory.

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences.

Additional Tags: Emojis, implied sexual content, Beer, Friendship.

Read at AO3

Read at FFN

AN: Look at me posting for Avalance again. I decided to clear out my WIP folder so while these are short and simple. I'll be posting a few more things in the future.

………………………………………………………………

Sara smiled down at her phone as those three little dots disappeared to reveal Ava’s new text.

“I know how much you love desert, 🍩🍰🧁.”

“Not as much as you do 😜,” Sara typed back with a smile.

“I don’t know. You seems to enjoy that whipped cream and chocolate last week🍫.”

“You know I can have Gideon fabricate anything I want 😉.”

“Is that a challenge, my love? 🤨” 

The more Sara thought about it, the more her mouth watered as she longed for her lips to touch Ava. Something stirred deep inside her, a gentle ach that she knew and loved. It had been a week since they had been able to see each other in person as Ava was busy with the Time Bureau being audited by the government and the nonstop time aberrations appearances. Sara was so worked up that even the idea of licking her girlfriend’s fingers was enough to work her up.

“Your kitchen. Tonight. The one who looks the most delicious wins. 🥵🌶️”.

Just as she hit send someone knocked on her door.

“Sara,” Ray wined, as he knocked again. “John refuses to do any of his chores or clean up after himself. It’s becoming a real problem. The dust build up in the Gym is reaching allergen levels.”

“I’ll be there in a minute Ray,” Sara yelled, flopping onto her bed.

Her phone dinged and she quickly checked her text.

“You're on! 😠🍑” 

Sara smiled and placed her phone on her nightstand before going to moderate Ray and John’s . argument. Some day she wished her team was more independent and willing to deal with their own shit without running to her at the first sign of conflict. She often felt like a school teacher with a bunch of ill-equipped children.

………………………………………………………………

“Mick!” Sara shouted, as she entered the parlor, she walked up to him and held out her hand making a grabbing motion.

“Something, I can help you with Captain?” Mick asked with a smirk.

“Just hand it over Mick.” 

However, he only shrugged and as he casually sipped on his beer.

“Now!” Sara said using the harsh voice she only used for desperate times.

“Alright, alright, no need to get your panties in a twist or did you decide on a thong for the Mrs. tonight,” Mick said as he teased her while fishing her phone out from the lining of the recliner.

“What have I told you about going through my phone,” she said, when he handed the phone to her she waved it at him like a scolding teacher.

“How the hell am I supposed to resist when you just keep it lying around like that?”.

“It was in my room behind a locked door!”

“Yeah well, isn’t that secure of a door, I thought you of all people would know better. You should at least hide it in a safe or smoothing. I mean I expect this kinda thing from Haircut or Pretty…”

“My room is supposed to be secure!” Sara said, stomping her foot. It was in that moment as she realized how childish she was being, but he had already made his bed she might as well make him lay in it.

“I can’t allow you to continue to go through everyone’s phone. It’s a gross invasion of privacy. If you continue to do this I’ll have no choice but to prohibit you from lighting any fires.”

He shrugged, clearly not taking her threat seriously.

“I mean it Mick. No trash fires, no lighters, no nothing, and if it means John has to stop smoking, then so be it. It’d be good for him,” Sara said, crossing her arms as Mick eyed her, but they both knew she would make good on her threats. 

“Fine,” Mick growled, as glared at her.

“Thank you,” Sara said, her voice returning to its sweet sound. “Now, hand over Ray’s too. And Nate’s.”

Mick reluctantly handed over the phone and mumbled under his breath in worlds she chose not to hear.

“Thank you,” she said. When she finally had everyone’s phone, she turned to walk out of the parlor.

“How come, Ava only texts you, Emojis,” Mick asked, catching her attention as she turned back to him. “She doesn't text them to anyone else.”

“I guess I’m just special,” Sara said, with a smile she felt a pink tint to her cheeks that she didn’t bother hiding from him.

“You got a good one, their boss,” Mick said, giving her a nod of approval, something Sara knew meant he thought very highly of their relationship.

Sara smiled, as she thought of how true his words were. “I know.”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jesse Duquette, The Daily Don   ::  [Scott Horton]

* * * *

How Murdoch steamrolled Tucker

LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV ::  APR 25, 2023

Rupert Murdoch is 92 years old, and everyone just finished making fun of his brief engagement to conservative radio host Lesley Ann Smith, the ex-wife of California railroad heir John B. Huntington.  The engagement lasted just two weeks.  Murdoch has been married four times, the last time to Jerry Hall, model and ex-wife of Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger.  That marriage lasted six years.  Murdoch reportedly told Hall he was divorcing her in an email.

Murdoch’s marital history is particularly interesting when you consider his recent divorce from Fox host Tucker Carlson.  That’s the way I think of Carlson’s departure from his seven-year career at Fox.  When Rupert decides it’s over, it’s over.  Here’s an excerpt from his email to his former wife: “Jerry, sadly I’ve decided to call an end to our marriage,” The Guardian reported. “We have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do.”

You get that?  It was good while it lasted, six years with those cameras flashing at the world’s wealthiest media-mogul with his supermodel on his arm, but now he was finished.  Moving on.  Busy man.

You don’t want to get on the bad side of Rupert Murdoch.  You don’t even want to be on his good side, because as his marriages and latest engagement prove, once he decides it’s time to pull the ripcord, you’re in the wind.

It’s been the same with his business empire.  It’s easy to forget that Murdoch was once just an Australian newspaper owner with big eyes to get off that gigantic island-continent and make his way in the wider world.  His first big move, way back in the 60’s, was to expand into Great Britain, buying the News of the World and the Sun.  Next was New York City, where he established a beachhead in 1976 by buying New York Magazine and the Village Voice in a hostile takeover.  I wrote about that battle for the late-lamented New Times magazine, and I have to say that I watched slack jawed as Murdoch steamrolled Clay Felker, the magazine genius who had created New York Magazine and then combined it with the downtown alternative paper I had worked for, the Voice.  Murdoch charmed, threatened, and walked over or past the board of New York Magazine, getting one after another of them on his side until he was able to, in a single sweep of paperwork and investment banking magic, make Felker’s mini-empire his.  The New York Post was next, followed by his purchase of the prestigious London broadsheet, The Times.

He became an American citizen in 1985 and set out on another buying spree, this time buying Twentieth Century Fox.  He used the Fox brand to buy up a small television network, Metromedia, which he transformed into the Fox channel.  In the early 90’s, the Fox channel began carrying original programing.  Then he formed the British broadcasting company, BSkyB.  In 1996, Murdoch started Fox News on cable, and in 2007, his holding company, News Corporation, bought the Wall Street Journal, which he had coveted since the days when he took over New York Magazine.

If you owned anything that published in print, made movies for the big screen, or broadcast shows on network or cable television, you were a target.  Murdoch hit more than he missed.  By last year, he was worth $21.7 billion and was the world’s 31st wealthiest man.  

Fox News became a cash cow for the Murdoch empire, taking in about $12 billion a year in recent years.  It’s money Murdoch earned by feeding a ravenous horde of conservative viewers a steady diet of right-wing red meat around the clock.  Fox News long ago ceased being a real news network and simply went into the business of raw propaganda with its wink-and-a-nod motto, “Fair and Balanced.”

Tucker Carlson became one of the channel’s biggest revenue generators with his nightly spew of conspiracy theories, racist garbage like “the great replacement theory,” paeons to authoritarianism with his worship of Hungary’s Victor Orban – Carlson even took his show there for an entire week in 2021, and produced a rabidly antisemitic documentary on the country last year called “Hungary vs. Soros: Fight for Civilization.”

All of this was fine and dandy for Rupert Murdoch as long as Tucker kept the bucks coming.  Carlson warmly embraced Trump’s Big Lie, beginning when Trump lost the election in 2020.  The Big Lie was a feature of his show almost nightly for the next two-plus years.  Carlson’s show featured many of the right-wing loons who made the allegations against Dominion Voting Systems that were defamatory – Rudolph Giuliani, Sidney Powell and many others.  Tucker sat there and listened to them spew their lies night after night, nodding and giving his patented look of puzzled curiosity.  But asking questions and looking puzzled wasn’t a defense when Dominion sued for defamation.  That lawsuit ended up costing Murdoch a whole lot of money, $787.5 million to be exact, when Fox News settled the suit without a court fight last week.

There has been a ton of speculation about why Carlson was fired yesterday morning, much of it settling on emails written by Carlson that were revealed by the Dominion suit.  Many of his emails were embarrassing to the network, and thus to Murdoch, as Carlson wrote repeatedly that he didn’t believe a word of the garbage he was putting out on his show about the Big Lie that Trump won the election.

The L.A. Times reported yesterday that sources inside Fox say that Murdoch himself was upset by some of Carlson’s emails that were not released by the Dominion lawsuit because they didn’t bear on its defamation claim.  These emails instead gave an insight into what Carlson thought about Fox management, according to the L.A. Times.

“Fox management” is one man:  Rupert Murdoch.  Carlson is said to have written some nasty stuff about lesser Fox figures such as CEO Suzanne Scott.  Murdoch doesn’t care about Suzanne Scott.  He doesn’t care if Tucker Carlson thinks Scott is incompetent or unlikable.  What Rupert Murdoch cares about is being considered a Big Man Media Mogul and making money.

The Dominion lawsuit, much of it caused by the statements made on Carlson’s nightly show, brought Murdoch low in the eyes of his Big Man Media Mogul contemporaries, the guys – and they’re almost all guys – who show up every year at Herbert Allen’s Sun Valley Conference of media Big Men.  It’s a kind of summer camp in the mountains of Idaho for media moguls, among whom Murdoch was arguably the biggest.  Herbert Allen is the CEO of the investment bank, Allen & Company.  Murdoch goes way back with Herbert Allen and his investment bank.  He and his company handled Murdoch’s takeover of New York Magazine way back in 1976.  Murdoch doesn’t like it when you do something that lowers him in the eyes of “Herbie” Allen, as he is called, or any of the other media Big Men.

And he especially doesn’t like it when he can put a name on a loss of $787.5 million.  That name is Tucker Carlson, who thought that he was a Big Man because of the adoring hordes who watched his show every night and the millions he was paid for attracting them.  But he wasn’t a Big Man.  He was a worker bee in the sprawling Murdoch media empire, and now he’s a worker bee who got squashed by the Murdoch steamroller, as so many have been squashed before him.

Murdoch still owns the Fox empire.  Tucker Carlson owns his trust fund check as an heir to Swanson Frozen Foods, however much he managed to put away when he was riding high in the 8 o’clock slot on Fox News, and whatever he can squeeze out of Fox in his so-called exit package.  And he owns the stack of bills that are piling up from lawyers representing him in the sexual harassment lawsuit filed by former Fox producer Abby Grossman, because there is no doubt that in firing him, Rupert Murdoch severed Fox from Carlson in the Grossman lawsuit and is no longer paying his legal bills.

I often see businessmen like Murdoch referred to in the press as killers.  But Murdoch isn’t a killer.  He’s a taker.  He sees something he thinks he wants, like a magazine or a newspaper or a studio or a network, and he takes it and then he takes all the money it brings in.

Murdoch paid the legal fees for his four ex-wives, but he wasn’t married to Tucker Carlson.  Murdoch was once his employer, and he was happy to take the money Tucker earned for him, but he’s a busy man, and he moved on.

[Lucian Truscott Newsletter]

[soundsof71]

So, considering you are a passionate fan of music released in 1971, I feel justifiably obligated to ask you what you think of Buffy Sainte-Marie's 'She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina' album. 😂 (Also, it would make me beyond happy if you could post more about Buffy, my friend! Thank you! ❣)

Buffy Sainte-Marie + Crazy Horse - what’s not to love? LOL I confess that it was the Crazy Horse connection that caught my attention first. I had a general idea who Buffy was, had seen her on TV a few times, but I was a big Crazy Horse fan. News that they were her backing band for this album was easily enough for me to scoop it up.

They weren’t doing anything much with Neil Young in 1971 (other than this album, on which Neil also appeared!), but they had released a tasty solo album in February 71, produced by Jack Nitzsche (who also produced this, and would later marry Buffy), and featuring Ry Cooder (also featured here, although did not marry Buffy). 

(btw, the first place that Buffy, Ry, and Jack worked together was on the Nic Roeg film Performance, starring Mick Jagger. People obviously remember Mick in that, but musically, Buffy was the best part!) 

She Used To Wanna... also features Jesse Ed Davis, a Native American guitarist and singer who was a frequent “usual suspect” at these sort of “sure, invite everyone!” jam albums of the era, and played a prominent role at 1971′s biggest concert (at least in the US), The Concert for Bangladesh on August 1.

(I know you know  RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked The World, the documentary about indigenous music’s influence on rock and roll, which has chapters on both Buffy and Jesse Ed. I just watched it again recently, and love it! A reminder of Buffy’s pivotal role in classic rock history. Not mentioned in the film: she relentlessly championed the work of her fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, helping them get their first record deals.)

I haven’t listened to She Used To Wanna Be A Ballerina for a while, so I definitely need to do that, along with posting more pictures of Buffy.  (I can’t believe I’ve only posted two!) 

But I’ll tell you what still stands out to me about that record years later. “Smack Water Jack” is an underrated track from Carole King’s Tapestry that got a ton of airplay at the time. Quincy Jones did an instrumental cover as the title track for his terrific 1971 album, too, but it has somehow faded to obscurity since then. Buffy takes a playful trifle, and turns it into a powerful fable of men of color who explode into violence in response to the violence visited upon them, and self-satisfaction of whites in authority who answer their demands for better living conditions by killing them on the spot. 

No need for a trial when you can murder them in the streets, right? “You can't talk to a man when he don't wanna understand / And he don't wanna understand” hits different when Buffy sings it, and in 2020 for that matter. 

It’s also just a terrific performance whose combination of soul and rock and roll and driving piano in a sort of Old West-sounding context would have made this sound right at home on a record like Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection  or something by The Band. I’m limited to five video embeds per post so I can’t embed it here, so I'm linking instead: anyone who hasn’t heard this definitely needs to.

Her cover of Neil’s CSNY track “Helpless” has things I like even better than Neil’s original, including Merry Clayton standing in for CSN. Buffy’s version is more muscular (thanks again to Crazy Horse), and taps even more deeply into the isolation of the song that the star power of CSNY somewhat obscured. 

Buffy’s version also made a brief but memorable appearance in the 2018 film Hotel Artemis, starring Jodie Foster. A weird little movie that I loved maybe more than it deserved LOL but I recommend nonetheless:

I know that this album gets attention because of the unusual number of covers, including one by Leonard Cohen, and a cover of a cover that Leonard had made famous on top of that, called "Song of the French Partisan” (hers is the far superior version imo, a song of French resistance to Nazi occupation from the perspective of a woman hiding a resister), but there are a couple of standout originals too. 

I love the title of this record, and the title track is a delightful little stomper that playfully cautions against equating the intentions of grown women with the childhood fantasies they’ve grown out of. More Merry Clayton goodness here on backing vocals too. 

“Soldier Blue” is a powerful song first written for the 1970 film of the same name, billed at the time as “The most savage film in history” -- and maybe it was. It used the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre as a metaphor for Vietnam, and it's still shockingly brutal. It was the third-highest grossing movie in the UK in 1971, though, and the single became a top-10 hit for Buffy there. 

It didn’t do as well here, either the song or the movie. Perhaps not shockingly in retrospect, Soldier Blue was pulled from American theaters after a few days, the Vietnam metaphor not at all lost on the Nixon administration. 

As horrifying as it was, this is about when I was reading Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (first published in 1970), and Soldier Blue resonated with me in a whole lot of ways. Here’s the song in the opening credits of the movie.

I was also really struck by “Moratorium”, which is the story of “Universal Soldier” (from her 1963 debut, but a bigger hit for Donovan in 1965), coming from the opposite direction. In the earlier song, she blamed war on the soldiers who think that fighting is honorable, but here, she has empathizes with the young men, boys really in many cases, who’ve been lied to by their countries, their parents, and even their friends. They’re not vainglorious. They’ve been duped by people they trusted. 

(I don't think she takes enough into account how many men sign up to fight because they want to embrace and celebrate their worst, most violent impulses, which was of course an undercurrent of “Universal Soldier”, but I appreciate her empathy here. More than one thing is true at a time.)

Buffy goes even farther, though, calling on soldiers to support and validate demands for peace as explicitly supporting them, summed up in the unforgettable cry, "Fuck the war and bring our brothers home!" 

1971 was the peak of antiwar demonstrations in the US, with the biggest crowds ever seen in this country until the 2017 Women’s March. The May 1971 demonstrations pretty much shut down Washington, culminating with Vietnam Veterans Against The War throwing back their medals on the steps of the US Capitol, incredibly powerful stuff to see on TV in my formative years, and Buffy was right there in it. Anti-war songs were a cottage industry for sure, but nobody was writing with the nuance and empathy that Buffy was.

Here’s a 1972 performance of “Moratorium”, Buffy and a piano, and more emotionally bare than that:

There’s obviously lots more to say about Buffy, far outside the realm of protest music that was actually just a small part of her musical palette -- her pioneering experiments with electronic music, her educational philanthropy starting in her 20s, Sesame Street, you name it. Her commercial peak was still in front of her, and while I can’t say that this is my favorite of her records, it does have some of my favorite songs of hers, and 1971 and She Used to Wanna Be A Ballerina is definitely where I went from knowing who Buffy Sainte-Marie was to being a fan. 

I'll also note as I do now and again that while this blog started as an offshoot of a book on 1971 that I’d started but abandoned, I mostly listen to music released now. That’s always been my policy, including in 1971. When 1972 rolled up, I was mostly listening to music from 1972, music from ‘80 in ‘80, ‘91 in ‘91, 2018 in 2018, etc., to name just a few other favorites. (Plus The Beatles, okay? LOL I still listen to The Beatles every day. No apologies.) Honestly? It took me until 2011, in my fifties, when a whole bunch of 40th anniversary editions of 1971 albums got released all at once that made me think, “Wait a minute, this was maybe THE pivotal year in classic rock history!” 

So yeah, the historian in me dug into 1971, but even though I happened to be alive and enthralled by music in that year, what I’m doing here has nothing to do with nostalgia, or any idea that that was the *best* year in music, even if for the narrow slice of music that is classic rock, yeah, it absolutely is. For soul/R&B too, and for the explosion of women artists outside the even narrower confines of pop as well. This is not subject to debate. No year like it, before or since. It's just that classic rock is a such a narrow slice, and I like my slices wide. LOL Which is also why my blog has less and less 1971 content as I go along. 

While my general policy is that my favorite year for music is THIS year, this particular year hasn’t left me as much energy as usual for listening to music. Some of it is These Trying Times���, some of it is my bipolarity and schizophrenia getting the better of me in waves, as is the way with these, uhm, things. (Keep taking those meds, kids!) I listen to music and post about the people making it as a creative act, not a passive or reflexive one, and I just haven’t felt as creative as usual.

(This is also has everything to do with why so many Asks have been piling up unanswered. I apologize if you’re one of the many kind and indulgent souls who’s gotten in touch, but I swear I’m gonna get to ‘em all!)

To get an idea of what I’m ACTUALLY passionate about right now, my “to be edited later” running list of 2020 favorites randomly added to a playlist as I encounter them, to be properly curated later, is at Spotify, cleverly entitled “2020″ -- 94% women, which is about right. LOL 

But since I do in fact listen to old stuff (by which I mean 2019 LOL), I made a list of mostly 2020 bangers from women rockers with some tasty treats from 2019 that I haven’t been able to let go of just yet, inspired by a post I saw at tumblr saying that punk music by women is just plain better (also beyond debate), called “Women Bangers: A Tumblr New Classics Jam”. I’ll be posting an essay with a YouTube playlist soon, because god forbid that I only talk briefly about anything LOL and most of these women need to be heard AND seen.

Like Buffy Sainte-Marie, whom you'll both see and hear more often on my blog soon. Thanks for the reminder! Always a pleasure to hear from you and be challenged by you. :-)

Peace, Tim 

[cyber-flight]

Notes from the AHWM Explanation Livestream

This will be long, so fair warning! If you're on computer, you can press the spacebar to skip this post if you want!

There was CG smoke for the bomb

The last shot was running after the bomb goes off, filmed during the day

Many cursed images

(0:56 - Guns Blazing) November 5th = gunpowder treason & plot (a reference)

Ethan is the one yelling during the run

Helicopter/Car was filmed in a place formerly known as Spiderwoods (spiders, snakes, and bugs everywhere)

Mark's patented method to get rid of snakes is to tell them to fuck off

There was big black snake near the library

Chica snore-grumbles

Most of the choices were pretty evenly split in the video data

The guy who owned the field in Helicopter/Car also owned the helicopter

It was hard to get the cameraman to know that the camera is an interacting character

They filmed up to 10 pages a day

Prison was the first 2 days of shooting, as well as the part with the most characters/extras (12 people)

Mick gets typecasted in roles of authority

The Prison location is a functioning mental hospital

John was a Prisoner, first mate, and is a realtor IRL

There is no "why" to recording this to keep a broad audience and have fun after Mark was in a depression and made WKM

The Gregory Brothers / Schmoyoho made 2 renditions of I Don't Wanna Be Free (which is on Apple/iTunes/Spotify)

The musical was a production/recording nightmare on the 2nd day

They had 20 minutes max. to learn each segment; they had a choreographer helping them learn the dances

The original vocals didn't have the accent

Mark had to do the vocals, acting, blocking, etc. in 30 mins

Mick was supposed to cross frame during the top-hats-part, but they had already recorded it; the producers weren't comfortable telling Mark "no" yet, so they had Amy do it

The smashed bricks were styrofoam; Mark was typed to a rope that was pulled

The director of photography was Phillip J Roy; he took a pay cut to work on this project

Yancy's sleeve tattoo is the whole map again

Yancy's tattoos are Tiny Box Tim and Mark/Dark across his knuckles; those were Makeup's ideas

The Musical was only 1/4 of a recording day

There was 3 work weeks of shooting (15 days)

Day By Dave made a remix

Yancy was named "Prison Mark" until the fight scene started to be made in post-production, where he needed a name; Mark liked Yancy and Amy was very against it originally

Yancy killed both of his parents; Mark knew people were gonna fall in love with him anyway

"Yancy stans, go, march on"

Yancy has an emoji bandaid

Heapass (canonically) makes an appearance in Thanks and also Yes Please; he had "Heapass" on a cast, but it was on the wrong side from the camera

Holt Boggs (the cell guard) is an amazing man; he was overqualified ("soft hands")

The cell was in a green-screen soundstage, so there was more improve

Yancy was supposed to be hidden in the ceiling or beside the bed, but under the bed turned out better; he's hidden under the bed the whole scene

The Red Gemini was the camera that they used for this project

Mark just runs off frame in Thanks and also Yes Please

The audio-only part was very convenient for filming and fitting for a 1st-person perspective

Yancy's talk at the gate was Mark real-acting & the late shot of the 1st day of filming, which made all of them realize that the project could actually work

Yancy WANTS to be in prison; he knows all the ways out - he'd leave if he wanted to

The items in the box are more representational achievements

Mark needs our help to promote AHWM, through liking the video(s), commenting good things, and spreading the project; the performance of this dictates the ability to make another similar project

Mark worked for FREE for 5 months, taking no cut of the budget for himself

"Yancy is just Prison Mark with amnesia" "There could be a time-skip there; it could work"

Robert Rex, "a god walking amongst mere morals;" has always wearing the same thing; Mark didn't know that he was going to do different accents

Amy is the hand with the feather-duster

The Warden's desk moves into the hallway after a smash-cut

Mick's line had to be rewritten so it can be ambiguous; you can only tell if you were looking

The Warden embodies "big strong hands," something Mark writes into dialogue a lot (along with "trust you me"); everytime he touches something it cracks (his desk, Yancy's shoulder)

Pulling stuff from behind Mark's back was on-the-spot

The dirt joke was a prop-person and Mark throwing buckets

Mark helped Holt Boggs make a short video

HOLT BOGGS

The truck in Prison was a one-take-wonder; they actually bashed the truck through the wall in a such a cartoony, perfect way

The Bob/Wade skit was a reference to Prop Hunt

Mark comparing the disappointment of people not liking the video to a cup of dirt under the Christmas tree

The lid to the sewer says "a heist with markiplier"

The sewer was in an actual sewer treatment plant, which took about a week of filming; some parts were flooded so they couldn't film there; this place was scheduled to be torn down

Mark forces us to choose the Light Tunnel first

Cranbersher, GrittySugar, and Lixian collaborated for the Light Tunnel; it was originally going to be live action with a green-screen and a pre-made raft; Cranberser offered when he had a 3-month break from other projects

Amy notes that Mark did a lot of "falling"

Mark had to carry a 200 pound man and a heavy camera rig to carry Y/N

There was poison ivy, snakes, spiders, etc. on the island

The Game Grumps voiced the aliens; Erin originally was meant to play the Warden & Danny was meant to play one of the guards

Many roles fluctuated due to scheduling

Getting abducted is a reference to ADWM ("not again!")

Mark loves MatPat's scenes and acting (Build a Shelter)

There were so many mosquitos near the Cave and the actors couldn't put on bug spray because they had to preserve their makeups

There was a giant hole in the Cave from which grasshoppers rained down

They were a mile into the cave; they weren't able to staff them for 3 days, so they recorded for 2 days and had fo cut some shots

The Cave freeze-frame was unscripted; the camera director didn't tell cut and it was too funny

The Hermit was originally supposed to be Jacksepticeye but scheduling errors were in the way

Mick was originally supposed to be Crazy Ed

When the sound-guy didnt have a sound effect, one of them riffed something at the mic and it was modulated to fit as best as possible

Mark's camera loses signal/battery power

Mark has done the hot-wire-while-moving in Car before (van videos)

The blue flash during Car is you from the future/another timeline

Mark was actually driving the car; someone flashed the blue light so it was a bit dangerous

Tyler and Ethan make appearances as Zombies

Tyler actually let Mark hit him with a rock

There was a dead beaver in the shed during the Zombie Apocalypse

The Zombie Apocalypse shots were in VERY hot weather

The barricaded front door but very open back door was intentional humour

Ethan's zombie handshake was thought up on the spot

Moe was the man screaming from the fire and zombie attack, making everyone behind the camera laugh

Rosanna Pansino sings opera & speaks Chinese

The Scientist had to be broken up (the cuts are in the gunshots)

243 is a chemical identification symbol in an actual laboratory, nothing meaningful to the plot

The code leads to the AHWM website

What's truly inside the box is the real timeline, which is the team making the project

The room where the monitor was in (Amy, script manager, etc.) was locked out and no one could see what was going on, only hear it through headsets

Mark threw 2 dummies (main video, Absolutely Not!)

Chica likes to climb through the cords underneath Mark's desk

The true/canon ending is For The Greater Good, which leads to ADWM

SodaPopIn hasn't really done this before, but he went with it because he was told Mark was nice; he continued even during harsh weather, many planes, and a long take/monologue

The sandwiches are a callback to ADWM

The montage endings were inspired by the ones Amy made for ADWM

There was never any time set aside to get photos for the montages, so they had to continuously get pictures

Catherine makes an appearance in the Warfstache bit

Warfstache is just a meta joke > you respond by writing in the comments as a survey, producer Catherine is more powerful than the video-editing, ringing the bell for notifications

They rented the same place for the Warfstache bit that they used to film all the other previous Warfstache bits

Dark inserts himself wherever he feels like being

There is charity (#TeamTrees) merch for each of the egos/Mark characters in this project (including the new ones)

Edge of Sleep's last episode aired yesterday (as of the stream - 6/11/19)

A "reverse" charity livestream is happening soon

The next project(s) are already in the works

SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT HEIST

Amy originally wasn't going to work on this project until they went to Texas; she became Creative Producer once Mark put himself into too many places

Iba originally auditioned for the man in the burning truck, but his voice was so good he became the seer/guide

The project has been "cooking" since May

The next project would be a completely different project, not a continuation

SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT HEIST

Regular uploads start again tomorrow (7/11/19)

[xrockpaperscissorsx]

Jeremy Saffer/ Chris Motionless Calendar

For even more info, go to Jeremy’s tumblr. tmblr.co/Zx4D7yD27EsO

Let’s take a few steps back, about 6 years ago.  We were just getting going as a band, had a whole different lineup and were playing local shows as often as possible. We were writing our first batch of demo songs and most importantly, were looking for a new name since at that time we were hideously named “When Breathing Stops”. I popped in the Hellfest  2001 DVD that I had just bought and immediately skipped to watch Eighteen Visions’ performance section and as soon as I heard James Hart say “This song is called Motionless and White” I knew that would be the most badass band name for us. I repeated it in my mind 1000 times and started envisioning saying it out loud at shows as our band name and it just felt.. perfect.

When we first started we were heavily influenced by a lot of different bands but for me personally, I was borderline OBSESSED with bands like Eighteen Visions, Bleeding Through, AFI, It Dies Today and Himsa. I literally wanted to BE Mick Morris from 18V and because they were such a huge influence on our band that’s why we decided to go with MIW as our name. I should be ashamed of myself for admitting some of this stuff but oh well hahaha. I used to sit online for hours and just lurk pictures of Davey Havok, Mickdeth from 18V, Brandon from BT, John Pettibone from Himsa and Nick Brooks from IDT because, like i said, I wanted to BE all of them. I gathered up tons of photos of them that I still have saved on my desktop computer hahaha NO SHAME, you KNOW you’ve done it too hahaha.

Anyway… to finally get to my point of this whole thing, one day in my endless creeping of the internet I came across a Myspace profile of a guy named Jeremy Saffer, who literally took rad photos of almost every one of those guys/bands I previously listed. I was extremely happy because I was so pumped to find his work, and of course as my never ending-goal stacking-self did, i  aspired to one day hopefully get to work with him. I desperately wanted to be a part of the same things my favorite bands were. I would’ve given anything to be in their shoes and to work with people that they were working with and playing the shows they were playing etc. About a year went by after initially finding Jeremy’s photos and lurking them every week to see anything new was posted and then I saw the MickDeth 2007 calendar that Jeremy was putting out. I flipped and would’ve bought it immediately but because I didn’t have a debit card or anything, I was shit out of luck.

After several years more of relentlessly keeping a close eye on Jeremy’s photos and hoping one day to cross paths with him as we were growing as a band a touring a lot, we ended up doing a tour with Drop Dead Gorgeous in early 2010 and my time had finally come to take a shot a contacting him. I knew we would be in his home area so even though I was SO FUCKING NERVOUS, I tweeted at him to see if he would write back. I honestly thought he would HATE us, so i was afraid to get something like “fuck your shitty emo band” back or something to that extent. To my surprise, our booking agent at the time saw the tweet and immediately put me in touch with Jeremy. As if my nerves weren’t shot enough, I called him and spoke to him on the phone to work out a time and place where we could meet and take some photos. The next day we got together and he was one of the nicest dudes i’ve ever met. The shoot was completely unplanned but he still knew EXACTLY what to do with us and what we were going for. It was such an extremely surreal experience for me to after all these years be finally standing where some of my biggest influences in music had stood and to meet the man responsible for taking the photo’s that filled my computers hard drive up hahahaha.

At this point i’d love to say.. the rest is history, but i can’t just leave it at that. It’s been almost 2 years since that first time and in just 2 short years Jeremy has become not only my favorite photographer to work with, but one of my best friends in the world. When I look back from the beginning I often think that my life isn’t real. I’m in a position now that I only could’ve ever dreamed of being when we started. With that being said… you can imagine how huge of a personal accomplishment it is for me to announce that now all these years later, I am the one with my own Jeremy Saffer Calendar. It’s not that I have my own Calendar thats a big deal to me. It’s that if you ever told me that some day this would happen, that I would be doing the same thing that MickDeth had done, I would’ve laughed at how crazy it sounded. I know i’ve said it like 10 times already, but it’s just crazy to know i used to be obsessed with things that i’m now actually living. Calendar and photo’s aside, I just want to say Thank You so much to Jeremy for having me be a part of what he does and for being an amazing friend to me. The world is full of some of the most horrible people and I can vouch that he is one of the best dudes on it. We make an excellent team and I look forward to MANY more years of that continuing.

Hope you guys enjoy the Calendar if you pick it up. Thank you for helping me accomplish things I never thought possible.

Buy it here!

http://jeremysaffer.bigcartel.com/product/chris-motionles-2012-calendar

[olivarryprompts]

Fanfic Friday #5

Welcome to Fanfic Friday! Each Friday I will post a new fanfic here and on A03. Enjoy x

Read/Save it on AO3 at https://archiveofourown.org/works/32197966

{crossover}

Ship: olivarry

Warnings: small amount of angst, swearing

Status: dating

Wc: 2,413

Once again, there were some sort of god-like presents threatening Central and Star city, hence it was up to everyone’s favorite superheroes, and their teams, to defeat the crisis and save the world.

I am said superhero, the fast one specifically. Oliver and I have been dating from around since I awoke from my coma. How did we get together? That’s a story for a different time. Oliver and I, throughout all of this, have been able to keep our relationship a secret. I know, huge shocker.

“Oliver, Cisco and Ray have made the tech, but it needs to be tested.”

“So,” he said, with his Oliver look, “Test it.”

“How are we supposed to test tech that should defeat Aliens without actual Aliens?”

“Kara.”

“Ollie! We can’t shoot at Kara.”

“You're so cute,” Oliver said, under his breath, “Sometimes I just want to cuddle you like a teddy bear, however out of character.”

I blushed deeply, “Stop it. We need to save the world.”

He leaned it, laying a careful kiss on my forehead, “And we will.”

“You’ve really helped on the ideas front,” I said, sarcastically.

“Let’s get the teams together and discuss what we know so far. We can think up our next moves.”

“Okay, yeah. I’ll get everyone to the hub.”

“Barry Allen do not speed m-”

I sped him to the hanger.

“I hate you,” he commented with an underlying smirk.

“I love you, too.”

I quickly sped everyone into the room before returning to Ollie’s side.

“Yes Barry?” Sara Lance, captain of the Waverider, said.

“Well, I-i,” I looked over at Oliver for help.

He whispered, “Thought as though we should call a team meeting.”

“Right, I thought we should call a team meeting to, to discuss, uh, um-”

He continued in a subdued voice, “what we know, our plan, and our next steps.”

“To discuss what we know about our big bad, what our plan is, and our next steps to ya know, save the world.”

“Are we meant to pretend we aren’t hearing the brooding man?” John Constantine, local warlock, said.

“I give up. Ollie, lead the team. You know what to do.”

“You tried,” he smiled, a little over fondly, “Right so, Nate, Iris what have we got on her?”

“Well, she seems to have no record of life until she popped up in our time and attacked Central city,” Nate explained.

“We wondered if there was a chance of her being from another Earth, and Cisco tracked her residual frequency from the attack, and the frequency matched one from this Earth.”

“So that leaves us nowhere, loves,” Constantine said, lighting a cigarette, which Sara promptly knocked out of his hand and stamped on.

“Well, not necessarily. We know that she just appeared which narrows down the search to anyone without a record, which is very few people,” Cisco explained.

“If we can just get a strand of her DNA, I could take a look into how to gain her powers and where they come from.”

“To get the ladies NDA we need to find her,” Mick grumbled.

“Thank you Mick,” Oliver said, rolling his eyes, “Dig, did Lyla get anything.”

“Argus satellites haven’t picked up anything. She said she’d call and let us know.”

Felicity entered, and Oliver raised an eyebrow at me.

“She told me to put her back,” I said lowly to Oliver.

“I-i told you not to PUT me.”

“She’s scary,” I defended further.

“Sorry I was not present, I mean I wasn’t here because I was well-that’s the point. I was hacking, obviously, that’s what I do, I hack, but you guys know that-��

“Felicity,” Ollie said, “The point.”

“Right. There was something on her arm, almost underneath her skin. I looked further into it and it seemed to be of a technological origin. I came back and instantly drew the “thing.” I think it might be some sort of microchip. After consulting Ray, I did some digging, and I came back with some interesting results,” she projected the images from her tablet, “This was a theoretical experiment planned in-you guessed it, Star City. it was, well, awful. It was talking about mutation and how technology had the power to change any and all humans for the better. It was called Project Mutant.

“Oh yes Felicity, I bring you, Mutant, our big bad.”

“Not your best work,” Caitlin commented.

“Offended,” Cisco replied with a grin. Oliver was clearly getting annoyed, so I touched his arm subtly. His demeanor began to soften.

“Right,” he cleared his throat, “Can we track this chip?”

“Well, yes and no. The chip is on a completely different server to any domain I’ve come across. I don’t even know what it is. It’s essentially in a different world. I’d need to get track of her personal server to begin the hack, which-”

“You obviously can’t do,” Ray said, “Can I see the server?”

Ray, Cisco, and Caitlin all looked at the server Felicity pulled up on her tablet.

“Does that look like a wave function to anyone else?” Cisco said.

“A what?” I said.

“Somehow, her DNA, it’s acting like a particle on the quantum level,” Caitlin further explained.

“So we need to treat her, in essence, as a quantum particle.”

“So that’s why everytime I try to hack into the database it moves. Why it acts like a domain I’ve never seen before.” Felicity said in some sort of revelation.

“So how do you track a particle?” Ray said, “You can’t, wave function collapses.”

“So we can’t track her in any way.”

“No, no we can. The art of quantum mechanics is tracking particles, that's the whole point.”

“So you “solve” quantum mechanics before this looney destroys a city. Hell no.”

“Right, moving on from the science, which I am sure you guys will figure out, let’s say we can track her and find her. If she’s like a particle then can’t she just pop in and out of anywhere at any time, ya know wave particle duality and all. Light goes so fast that it theoretically travels through time. “

“Oliver, are you in there? When did you learn quantum physics?” I said, shocked.

“Y-you pick up things here and there. That’s relevant anyway. How do we stop her.”

“Simple, what stops a particle?”

“Cold.” Caitlin said.

“So, we need to track her, build a weapon to slow her down on the sub-molecular level, and keep her in that state. Easy,” Ray summarized, looking defeated.

“Hold up, she came back to this time for a reason. She clearly has motive. If we know her motive, we can predict where she will attack next. She can’t just pop out of existence if she has a goal she needs to complete. She can go back to this time for a reason, out of all the times she could have existed,” Sara said, “She came back now. This timing, this place, it has to mean something to her. That could hold the key to stopping her.”

“You’re right,” Iris said, “She has a reason.”

“We could run some samples of history through Gideon to look for significance,” Nate suggested.

“There’s an idea,” Sara said.

“Right, looks like everyoens got work to do, let’s get this rolling.

I brought Oliver into flash time. He was stressed and uptight.

“Ollie?”

“Barry, what-what are you doing? They can all..”

“Flashtime, remember.”

“Why did you-”

“Sometimes you just need the world to stop for a moment. You know that better than anyone.”

He just wrapped his arms around me and kept me close.

“We’re going to win this. We’re going to be fine,” I told him.

He just hummed.

He leaned in for a kiss, which we both needed.

“Let’s do this,” Oliver said.

“Let’s.” I pulled away from him and smiled.

The fight was intense and it was Oliver and I left with the task of finishing her.

“Ollie, go, go please. I can do this, I’ll be able to.”

“It’s my bow that has the tech, no way in hell I leave you here.”

“Think Oliver! I am the only one fast enough to stop her.”

“Barry, don't. Don’t grab my bow and speed off. Please,” he was begging. Before I could think much more about what was on the line, I kissed Ollie, grabbed the arrow, and sped off towards her. With her caught off guard, I was able to plunge the arrow into her forearm. When I pulled the bow out, I saw that the world around me had changed.

Oliver’s POV

Just like that he vanished. First from my touch and then from this time. My bear, bazza, barry, just, gone. I ran at the spot where he’d disappeared from yelling, “BARRY! BARRY!”

“Oliver,” A voice said.

“H-he can’t be gone. I-i can’t do this, any of this, without him. Please I need him. GET HIM BACK!.”

I found myself slumped against a wall. I threw my bow across the room and chucked some arrows wherever I pleased. I waited a few moments before collecting my bow and getting on my motorbike. Tears threatened to fall. How could I lose the one person in the world that matters the most to me?

Once I arrived back at the hanger, I immediately went into the storage room. I grabbed my phone and unlocked it. My back screen was a picture of Barry cuddled into my chest. If anyone questioned it, I’d tell them I lost a dare to Barry and this was my forfeit. Obviously it was a huge lie as it was one of my favorite pictures of the two of us. His cute smirk is on show as well as his clingy nature. I missed his reassuring touches already. Angry, I threw some boxes around the place.

I instantly drew an arrow back at the tapping of someone's feet. Closer, closer, here. It was just Felicity.

“Hey,” She said in her sweet voice.

“Hey,” I said, monotone.

“We’re going to find Barry, wherever he is.”

“Don’t tell me that! Don’t tell me that when he could be anytime and anywhere,” I sneered through gritted teeth.

“Okay,” Felicity said in her felicity voice, “What is going on? Not keeping a level head is not helping Barry.”

“Felicity you don’t understand.”

“Then make me understand, Oliver.”

“It’s HARD TO KEEP A LEVEL HEAD WHEN IT'S THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE!”

“Love of your life?” she questioned.

“Yes, love of my fucking life.”

“You and-”

“Me and Barry.”

“How long?”

“Long. Year and a half.”

“W-who knows?”

“No one does.”

“Oliver, look at me. We will find Barry, okay? We have all the best minds working in here, and we will get him. You have got to stay calm, though. We need you Oliver, okay? Do it for Barry.”

“Alright,” I said, sucking in a deep breath.

We entered the main portion of the hangar again, “Anyone got any ideas?”

“Ray thinks he can hack her biochip now that she is no longer in quantum flux,” Caitlin reported.

“Would that tell us the time or just the place?” Iris, equally as worried, inquired.

“Just a locational ping.”

I racked my brain, “When was she experimented on?”

“Around May 2012 they started.”

“Where?” I questioned again.

“Floy Woods Hospital, Central City. It had closed down by then but-”

Cisco took over from Cait, “It looks like their electricity was still on around that time.”

“Ollie, mind catching the rest of us up to speed?” Sara asked.

“Whenever I’m in a stressful or panicking situation, my mind always rolls onto Lian Yu. If she was in a similar state, surely she was thinking about where her trauma began. Or, if not that, a place that made her feel safe, her apartment, family home, ect. I’m hoping it's the former because the latter means she could be there at any point in time.”

“Right.”

“I’ll take Oliver and whoever needs to come on the waverider to check out his hunch. Hopefully we will find him then.”

“Let’s go! He hasn’t got time to waste,” I yelled.

“The rest of us will stay here and keep looking for clues,” Kara said.

I shot my way through the security detail in the building before carefully scouting out the rest. Heat signature saw three people in a singular room, one atypically warm. Barry. I bust my way through the door, easily taking out the two other people. I quickly cut off the restraints and picked off the metahuman dampeners.

“Ollie,’” Barry said, weak.

“Come on Bazza, let’s get you home,’ glad to have him back in my arms.

“What about her?”

“Sara should have taken care of her by now. She’ll be on the waverider, in cuffs.”

“G-good.”

“What did she do to you?”

“S-s-some s-s-s-”

Barry collapsed into Oliver, and Oliver cradled him in his arms. He carefully made it up to the roof where the waverider awaited. Barry needed treatment quickly.

They told the team to meet them back at star labs asap. Barry could be treated best there. I stepped off the waverider and quickly ran through star labs, trying to get to the cortex where the medbay was. Caitlin was already there, waiting to treat Barry.

I walked out of the lab, unable to see Barry like that. He’s going to be fine, I told myself. I went into the speed lab. I found some balls, and I began throwing them up and pinning them against the back wall with arrows.

Barry’s POV

My eyes fluttered open. I felt outstandingly weak.

“O-oliver? Where’s Oliver?”

“I’ll go get him,” Caitlin said.

“Gave us a real scare there Bear,” Joe said, concerned, “How are you feeling?”

“Weak, but I-i’ll be alright.”

“We got her by the way,” Cisco chimed in, “Locked away in iron heights.”

“Nice.”

“Barry,” Ollie said, making his entrance known.

“O-ollie?”

“Right here,” he said in his low, sugary voice.

“Thought you left,” I whispered lowly.

“Never, darling,” he said, equally as quietly.

“I’ll give you two a minute,” Joe said, leaving. Cisco and Caitlin followed.

Oliver wrapped his arms around me, “You idiot. My idiot.”

“I’m here, right? Nothing happened.”

“But it could have.”

“Hey, look at me. I’m fine, Ollie. We’re fine.” I leaned in for a kiss. He happily obliged.

“I just thought I lost you.”

“I thought I lost you, too.”

“Love you,” he smiled.

“Love you more.”

He let it slide. Just this once.

[leverage-ot3]

notable moments from The Nigerian Job

(PART ONE)

leverage 1.01

note: there are A LOT of scenes in this one, but they are all important in one way or another in terms of notability, character-building, etc

Dubenich: I’m sorry Mr. Ford, sorry, I know who you are I’ve, uh, excuse me. I’ve read all about you. I know for example that-that when you found that stolen Monet painting in Florence you probably saved your Insurance Company what 20-25 million dollars. Then there was that identity theft thing and you saved your insurance company I don’t even know how many millions of dollars but I just know that when you needed them… What happened to your family is the kind of thing--

Nate (slams glass down): You know that part of the conversation where I punch you in the neck nine or ten times? We’re coming up on that pretty quick.

- - - - -

Dubenich: I’m serious. Look, look at the people I’ve already hired. Do you recognize any of these names?

Nate (going through file): Uh, yeah, I’ve chased all of them at one time or anoth-- Parker? You have Parker?

Dubenich: Is there somebody better?

Nate: No, but Parker is insane.

Dubenich: Which is why I need you.

Nate (laughs): No. I’m not a thief. (closes file)

Dubenich: Thieves I got. What I need is one honest man to watch them.

- - - - -

Hardison: I’ve been doing this since high school, bro, I’m Captain Discipline.

[Flashback]

(New York City Hotel, Five Years Ago)

Manager: They came straight from the airport and up to their room.

Security: So you never actually saw any of them then.

Manager: No, but the credit card numbers checked out.

Security: Break it down!

(Doors open to reveal Hardison sitting on a couch drinking orange soda while three beautiful women dressed as Princess Leia fight with lightsabers)

Security: Does that look like Mick Jagger to you?

Hardison: This is not the room you’re looking for.

what a fucking GEEK oh my god

like, his flashback is so tame compared to the others???

like, his version of criminality is hanging out with cosplaying pretty girls and watching them fight with lightsabers, all under the guise of pretending to be mick jagger

- - - - -

Hardison (holding up an earpiece): It’s a bone-conduction earpiece mic, works off the vibrations in your jaw.

(Hardison tosses it to Eliot who holds it to his ear)

Hardison (whispering): You can hear everything.

Eliot: You’re not as useless as you look.

eliot being subtly impressed with hardison is my religion

- - - - -

Hardison: I don’t even know what you do.

[Flashback]

(3 Years Ago Eliot, wearing glasses and drinking from a mug of tea, enters a room full of men in Belgrade, Serbia)

Eliot: I’m here to collect the merchandise.

(Most of the men pull guns. Eliot takes a long sip of his drink. Outside, the windows flash with gunfire. Moans and the sound of a body falling fill the air. Inside, Eliot calmly takes another drink. One man sits at a table surrounded by bodies that litter the ground. He places a baseball card on the table. Eliot smiles)

am I the only one that wants to know the context of this???

- - - - -

(Parker drops down between Eliot and Hardison, hanging upside down from scaffolding)

Parker: Can I have one?

Hardison: You can have the whole box.

(Hardison holds the box of comms up for her. She takes one and pulls herself back up)

Eliot: What are you going to do when she finds out you live with your mom?

Hardison: Age of the geek, baby. We run the world.

Eliot: You keep telling yourself that.

(Parker puts the comm in her ear, smiling)

ot3 moments from day one baby

also eliot goes from ‘baby’ to ‘oh god, I’m baby’ in 0.0000005 seconds

- - - - -

[Flashback]

(19 Years Ago in Kansas City, a ten year old Parker stands in her living room watching her foster parents fight. The foster father turns to Parker, holding a stuffed bunny while the foster mother stands in the background, crying)

Bill: You thought I wouldn’t find this? You don’t get bunny until you do what I say. So be a good girl or, I don’t know, a better thief. (walks out of room)

Foster Mother: Bill!

(Parker walks outside and down the walk. Behind her, the house explodes. She hugs her bunny and smiles)

for the LONGEST time I thought she blew up the house with her foster parents until I saw that john rogers confirmed they weren’t home at the time

also this gives HEAVY insight as to how even the smallest part of Parker’s childhood was

abusive, emotionally manipulative, etc

- - - - -

(Parker adjusts her repelling gear, caressing it as if it were a lover)

Parker: Last time I used this rig, Paris, 2003

Nate: You talking about the Caravaggio? You stole that?

- - - - -

Eliot (examining earpiece): Is this thing safe?

Hardison: Yeah, it’s completely safe, it’s just, you know, you might experience nausea, weakness in your right side, stroke, strokiness.

Eliot (puts earpiece in): You’re precisely why I work alone.

shut up eliot you’re about to be so far gone for them it will be amazing

- - - - -

(Parker dives off the roof)

Parker: Yeehaaaa!!

(Eliot and Hardison run to the edge and watch her fall)

Eliot: That’s twenty pounds of crazy in a five pound bag.

what’s the opposite of foreshadowing? because I’m thinking about the long goodbye job and it’s reference to this (also the SIGNIFICANCE in that episode in how both hardison AND eliot repeat this line, finishing one another. because they both are on the same wavelength by that point, so in tune with one another and in constant awe of parker.)

- - - - -

parker just ??? drops the fucking glass ??? onto the sidewalk below ??? like ??? what if it hits someone ???

- - - - -

Nate: Okay, you got any chatter on their frequencies?

[Electrical Room]

Parker: No. Why?

[Unfinished Office]

(Nate checks records)

Nate: There’s eight listed on the duty roster, there’s only four at the guard post.

[Electrical Room]

Parker: I can’t even tell how many guys are in the room. How can you tell who’s who?

[Unfinished Office]

Nate: Haircuts Parker. Count the haircuts.

[Electrical Room]

Parker: I would have missed that.

[Unfinished Office]

Nate: What?

[Electrical Room]

Parker: Nothing.

mastermind father and daughter in episode ONE

- - - - -

we love to see eliot beat up four guys in the time it takes hardison’s bag to fall to the ground

- - - - -

Eliot (empties gun and smiles): That’s what I do.

(Hardison looks impressed. Behind him, the door clicks open. He and Eliot smile and enter the server room together)

the FLIRTING ENERGY in this scene

- - - - -

Eliot: Did you give them a virus?

Hardison: (chuckles) Dude, I gave them more than one virus.

hardison doesn’t half-ass, pass it on

- - - - -

Parker: Problem. Those guards you ganked?

[Electrical Room]

Parker (looking at monitor): They reset all the alarms on the roof and all the floors above us. We can’t go up.

[Hallway]

Eliot: Every man for himself then. (starts to move away)

Hardison: Go ahead I’m the one with the merchandise.

[Electrical Room]

Parker: Yeah, well I’m the one with an exit.

[Unfinished Office]

Nate: And I’m the one with a plan. Now I know you children don���t play well with others but I need you to hold it together for exactly seven more minutes. Now get to the elevator and head down. We’re going to the burn scam.

[Elevator]

(Eliot and Hardison enter an elevator and begin changing their clothes)

Hardison: Going to Plan B.

[Unfinished Office]

Nate (packing his things): Technically that would be Plan G.

[Elevator]

(elevator doors open and Parker runs in. She begins changing while the men look away)

Hardison: How many plans do we have? Is there like a Plan M?

[Unfinished Office]

Nate: Yeah, Hardison dies in Plan M.

[Elevator]

Eliot: I like Plan M.

there are SO MANY things about this scene I want to discuss but here are the top ones:

1- nate calling them out as children? amazing

2- eliot and hardison canonically changed in the elevator together BEFORE parker dropped in, but they weren’t necessarily looking away in a backs-turned way when she came in (when they were still getting finished getting dressed)

3- parker being completely nonchalant changing with two men in the elevator? she must not really care about being naked in front of other people (as seen later in what I think is the morning after job (?), for example)

4- the boys look away to be polite but there is definitely interest in BOTH of their faces

5- so this is what the burn scam entails

- - - - -

parker takes shotgun while the two boys are in the back. I need to see the scene of them awkwardly sitting together in the back. possibly bickering.

- - - - -

Nate: All right, all right. The money will be in all your accounts later today.

Hardison: Anybody else notice how hard we rocked last night?

Eliot: Yeah, well, one show only, no encores.

Parker: I already forgot your names.

Hardison: It was kind of cool, being on the same side.

Nate: No, we are not on the same side. I am not a thief.

Parker: You are now. Come on Nathan, tell the truth. Didn’t you have a little bit of fun playing the Black King instead of the White Knight, just this once?

(they all walk away in different directions)

smh you’re all 0.000005 seconds away from becoming a family

“no encores” my ass

+ I love how hardison is the FIRST one to (immediately) bring up how awesome they worked as a team

- - - - -

(Nate walks slowly down a toward a large room where voices are coming from)

Hardison (holding gun): You mind telling me what happened to the designs?

Eliot: What makes you think I know what happened? Stupid.

Hardison: Look, forget you man. You did it when we were coming down from the elevator.

Eliot: Yeah, that makes sense doesn’t it? You had the file every second.

Hardison: Hold up Kujo, I did my part, I transferred the files.

Eliot: You better get that gun out of my face...

Hardison: What did you do?

Eliot: …or else I’m gonna feed it to you.

Nate: Hey!

(the men turn, Hardison pointing the gun at Nate)

Eliot: Did you do it? You’re the only one that’s ever played both sides.

Nate: Yeah, you seem pretty relaxed for a guy with a gun pointed at him.

Eliot (looks at Hardison): Safety’s on.

Hardison: Like I’m gonna fall for that.

Nate: No, no, actually he’s right, the safety is on.

(Hardison looks at the gun and Nate grabs it)

Nate (to Eliot): You armed?

Eliot (shakes head): I don’t like guns.

(Eliot looks pointedly past Nate’s shoulder. Nate turns, pointing the gun at Parker who is holding a gun on him)

Parker: My money’s not in my account.

(She walks around Hardison, raising her gun as Nate lowers his)

Parker: That makes me cry inside in my special, angry place.

Nate: Okay, Parker. (slowly reaches out to lower Parker’s gun) Now did you come here to get paid?

Hardison: Hell no. Transfer of funds man. Global economy.

Eliot: It’s supposed to be a walk away. I’m never supposed to see you again.

eliot could have IMMEDIATELY taken the gun away but it made hardison feel safe so he was humoring him

and how easily nate took the gun away? interesting, for a former insurance agent

“you armed?” “no, I don’t like guns” eliot sweetie I love you

also parker’s entrance tho

- - - - -

Nate: Then the only reason you guys are here is because you didn’t get paid. And you’re pissed off. (laughs) As a matter of fact the only way to get us all in the same place at the same time is to tell us that we’re not. Getting. Paid.

(a look of realization goes through the group and they all start to run. Nate opens a garage door and directs them out. Hardison trips on the stairs and Eliot pulls him to his feet)

Nate: Come on, come on, get up. Let’s go, hustle. Go.

(the others exit and Nate looks back to see a ball of fire headed toward him)

eliot: I hate you all, I work alone, I don’t care about any of you

eliot 0.000005 seconds later: hauling hardison off the ground so he doesn’t die in an exploding building because ‘I guess he’s by boyfriend now’

- - - - -

Nate: Have we been processed?

(Eliot waves ink covered finger tips at him)

Eliot: They faxed our prints to the State Police.

[Hospital Room B]

Hardison: Yo, if the staties run us man, we’re screwed.

Parker: How long?

Hardison: Thirty, thirty-five minutes depending on the software

- - - - -

Nate: Parker! Get me a phone. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to get out of here together.

Eliot: This was a onetime deal.

Nate: Look guys, here’s your problem. You all know what you can do, I know what all you can do, so that gives me the edge, gives me the plan.

[Hospital Room B]

Parker: I don’t trust these guys.

[Hospital Room A]

Nate: Do you trust me?

Eliot: Of course. You’re an honest man.

Nate: Parker, Phone.

[Hospital Room B]

Parker: This is gonna suck.

(she sticks her fingers down her throat and bends over)

Hardison: Oh. Hell no

the amount of times eliot brings up that it was supposed to be a one-time thing is HILARIOUS considering just how fast he imprints on them lmfao

also how they all immediately trust him, I’m soft

- - - - -

(Parker nods compliantly. The doctor and nurse leave the room. Officer checks her handcuffs then leaves. Parker and Hardison hold up the phones they stole. After a quick glance, they switch phones. Parker holds up the keys she stole and tosses them to Hardison before standing up and talking to the vent into the next room)

domestic pardison

- - - - -

(Hardison leads Eliot to a police cruiser that Nate and Parker are already inside of. As Hardison guides Eliot into the backseat he hits Eliot head on the top of the door frame. Eliot turns and growls at Hardison)

Hardison: Walk it off. Walk… get inside. Get inside.

(Eliot gets in the car)

I love chaotic (pre)boyfriends

- - - - -

Eliot: I’m gonna beat Dubenich so bad that even the people who look like him are gonna bleed.

Parker: You won’t get within 100 yards. He knows your face. He knows all our faces.

Eliot: He tried to kill us.

Parker: More importantly he didn’t pay us.

Eliot: How is that more important?

Parker: I take that personally.

Eliot: There’s something wrong with you.

okay to be fair eliot at least is open to and listens to parker’s reasoning before concluding she’s crazy

- - - - -

Eliot: What’s in it for me?

Nate: Payback, and if it goes right a lot of money.

Parker: What’s in it for me?

Nate: A lot of money, and if it goes right, payback. Hardison?

Hardison: I was just gonna send a thousand porno magazines to his office, but, hell yeah man, let’s kick him up.

these characterizations are so on point

- - - - -

SOPHIE’S INTRO LMFAO

+ how everyone else is horrified but nate just looks entranced

- - - - -

[Flashback]

(In Paris seven years ago, Sophie is cutting a painting out of a frame with several empty frames nearby. The door burst open and Nate enters with a gun in hand)

Nate: Freeze.

(Sophie grabs her gun and shoots Nate in the shoulder. He responds by shooting her in the back. They both clench at their wounds)

Sophie: You wanker!

so are we, as a fandom, EVER going to talk about this scene ???

- - - - -

(so apparently there’s a 250 text block limit for posts on tumblr so I guess I have to make more than one post for this now. the following part will be reblogged on this post immediately after. reblog that version instead please lol)

[drneilfox]

Scarlet's Swords: Music Films Book Blog 10 (July 2021)

A rollercoaster of a month emotionally with ‘the book’. So many moments of insecurity and anxiety washed away by a series of related and tangential moments and experiences. I went on annual leave finally, to await the arrival of our new baby and to spend a few weeks as a family with little to no responsibility or expectation beyond that. It was freeing to put on my out of office at work and simultaneously put a quasi-OOO on the book for the foreseeable. It might have been foolish given how far behind where I wanted to be I am currently, but it was liberating.

It caused me to rethink my approach, or at least know I need to (I haven’t done it yet because I’m stepping back a tad). In the downtime away from writing I have been tinkering and moving forward at a snail’s pace. One thing I did was to map out all the films I still need to see or see again, or at least have told myself I need to see or see again. It’s up near the 300. Obviously I can’t watch that many and write and read and edit and submit my first draft in February 2022. So I stopped worrying that I had to. I have been prioritising viewing and making peace with the fact that I can’t see everything. It’s weird how pervasive that sense is when writing about cinema and how hard it is to escape. The feeling that I am writing about something I love and want to share with people is subsumed beneath the fear of being ‘tested’ on my knowledge and the facts of it all (even though I’m not presenting fact) and what ‘gaps’ might tell people about me. This is sometimes stronger than the feeling that I am just a terrible writer writing a book no one has any interest in ever reading. I wonder if that’s my age, or the social media age, the fact that it’s taken me so long to get to this point or some wretched combination of all three.

The writing of the list certainly helped put the next few months into focus and my sketch of a new plan, once I am back in earnest at the desk, looks ok. I’m excited to work through the final films and get the book into even better shape. Other events in July certainly helped. One was finishing a draft of the fifth chapter on my list, on films about making music. It was a slog time wise, because of so many interruptions, but I got there on the final day of ‘work’ before annual leave. So it felt momentous and a good way to sign off for a bit.

There was also the arrival of some films from the U.S. I took advantage of the Barnes and Noble 50% off Criterion Collection sale and the fact that I have a dear, dear friend in New York (thank you JC!) to post stuff to me that would mean avoiding import tax, to get my hands on some classic films. I mainly wanted them for the extras but also because I love them. I picked up A Hard Day’s Night, Gimme Shelter (a July rewatch), Transes and one I’ve never seen, Murray Lerner’s Festival. I also picked up maybe my favourite ever music doc, Les Blank’s A Poem Is A Naked Person, and a box set of Blank’s work which includes a ton of music, music-centric, or music related works that I can’t wait to get stuck into. Blank is fast becoming one of my favourite filmmakers.

July’s watchlist was heavy hitters galore as I was watching and rewatching for my Milestones chapter so films and filmmakers included The Last Waltz and other Scorsese works (is Rolling Thunder Revue his best music film maybe?), Jonathan Demme, Julien Temple and films about the Beatles, Stones and Bob Dylan. Big. One such film was Demme’s beautiful concert film Heart of Gold, focusing on Neil Young not long after surgery for a brain aneurysm. It’s a warm and soulful film and one I saw on DVD, in New York, on a lazy afternoon before heading home, while staying with my friend John Carlin (the JC who sent posted me some DVDs this month). I was tired, I was all New York-ed out, and John put it on and we loved it. It meant a lot, maybe more, than it would normally had because a couple of years earlier I had written a play called How It Plays Out, that John travelled to Luton to perform in as the lead, and in the play he performed a Neil Young song, Only Love Can Break Your Heart. John Carlin is a brilliant songwriter in his own right. Check out his work here and buy Songs From The Black House, it’s one of the best records ever made, Fact. I love him.

I also read the first book that will feature in my book since I started writing back last year (nearly 12 months ago!), Thomas F. Cohen’s Playing to the Camera: Musicians and Musical Performance in Documentary Cinema. It was invigorating. Not only is it a great book, but it reminded me why I am working on mine. I want to be in dialogue with these other works that exist, reach out to and pull from them and survey the land of ideas that is music documentary and the writing on it. I loved Cohen’s style and confidence too. It gave me strength to be more confident about my own writing. It was also nice to see so much time dedicated to Shirley Clarke’s Ornette: Made in America, a truly magnificent doc I loved writing about.

So over the next few months I shall be reading more and more for the book. I am excited. That trip to the BFI library (where I learned of Cohen’s book), really galvanised me, in ways I’m becoming more aware of as I think more and write less.

Don’t forget, you can track what I’m watching (and maybe try and work out which films I’m referring to above and in the note fragments below) via my Letterboxd list, here.

Don’t forget you can listen in to my book themed playlist here.

Here’s what I was listening to while writing in July:

Finally, a bit of fun. Here are my favourite notes from this month’s viewing sessions:

Demme knows

“I just wanna play well and share the stage with my friends”

“He had a lot of ukeleles in the trunk”

Imagine booing one of the greatest live shows ever by one of, if not the, greatest rock n roll backing bands of all time.

Joan Baez’s Dylan impression is bang on.

“I don’t even wanna get in tune”

People lying around everywhere.

Need a shower after watching this.

Babies, planes and Nick Cave

Bob Marley tats and flags

Coke in the nose

Clapton - boring

Bob looks amazing!

“you booed!”

Keroauc’s grave

“I don’t want this shit to work. I hate it”

Bawdy

Ludicrous outfit Mick

Chilly at the heliport

[longitudinalwaveme]

Len Snart’s Creepy/Pathetic Proposals, Part 3

For this post, we will be looking at Flash #140, “The Heat is On--For Captain Cold. It was published in November 1963, and was written by John Broome and drawn by the inimitable Carmine Infantino.

In addition to being another story where Captain Cold creeps on pretty women, this story also features the first appearance of his fellow Rogue Heat Wave, alias Mick Rory. 

The comic opens with Barry and Iris at the latter’s apartment, watching TV. Iris, being Silver Age Iris, suddenly turns off the television. “I didn’t like the way you were staring at that girl, Barry Allen!” (The program he was watching featured a celebrity named Dream Girl). 

Barry proceeds to lodge his foot firmly in his mouth. “I wasn’t staring! I was just waiting for Dream Girl to turn around!” He then has to quickly explain that the Flash “told” him that the Willens and Kohl Law Firm asked the Flash if he could find the heir of Mr. Varner, a wealthy mining magnate whose only child was believed lost in a shipwreck. 

The child in question had a diamond-shaped birthmark on the back of her neck. If she can be found, she gets a two million dollar trust fund (roughly $16 million in today’s money) and an additional $10,000,000 (roughly $80 million) will go to charity. If she can’t be found before the end of the next day, all the money will go to a couple of “ne’er-do-well” relatives of Mr. Varner’s. Why he didn��t just arrange for all the money to go to charity if she wasn’t found is anyone’s guess. But regardless, that’s why Barry wanted to see Dream Girl’s back. 

Iris, surprisingly, immediately accepts this explanation like a reasonable person and even turns on the TV again...but instead of Dream Girl’s program, they see an important news broadcast that reveals that Cold has broken out of prison (again). This time, he escaped by using “one of his fantastic cold guns, which he manufactured out of spare freezer parts in the prison workshop!” WHY WAS NO ONE SUPERVISING HIM TO MAKE SURE THIS DIDN’T HAPPEN? 

Barry leaves Iris and promptly changes into the Flash to go on the hunt for Captain Cold. 

We then cut to Captain Cold’s hideout in a cave. It’s decorated by a humongous picture of Dream Girl’s head and neck (seriously, it’s like as large as he is.) 

“There! It’s the largest picture of Dream Girl I could find! Of course, she’s everybody’s dream girl now, but soon things will be different...and she will be mine alone! I admit that at various times in the past I’ve--ah--thought myself attracted to other girls! But the feeling I had for them pales into insignificance compared to what I feel for Dream Girl!” 

Len Snart reads women’s magazines in prison. Make of this what you will. He also broke out of prison solely to woo her away from the Flash, who is currently her dream man. So, how is he going to do this? He’s going to commit crimes and fight the Flash, that’s how! 

“Why, I’ll make a sap out of the Flash! I’ll pull off crimes right under his nose! I’ll show him up for the stumblebum he is--compared to Captain Cold! And by doing that, I’ll prove to Dream Girl that I’m really the man she thought Flash was! I’ll become her dream man--and nobody else!” Len, that’s insane. 

Cold decides to get her attention by robbing the exiled government of Guanador (one of DC’s many fake countries), who are “arriving here in Central City with all the bank notes they could steal-I mean all they could carry away with them-from the Gauanadorian Treasury!” 

The next day at 8 AM, Cold strikes. “No criminal in his right mind would dare try anything here today--against all these forces of law and order. But as it so happens--I’m not in my right mind--I’m in love! Ha ha!” Unfortunately for him, the Flash pops up. “At last! My long night’s vigil has paid off! I’ve come across Captain Cold!” In other words, Barry ran across the city all night for almost no reason. Cold didn’t do anything until 8 AM the next day!

Before Flash can defeat his rival, however, he is shot in the back with a blast of intense heat. Heat Wave is on the scene!

“How about that hot reception, Flash? Allow me to introduce myself, the one enemy you will never conquer! Heat Wave--at your service!” Mick is perhaps a bit overconfident here. 

For some reason, instead of jumping into action, Flash stands around long enough for Heat Wave to blast him again, knocking him unconscious. (“That sizzling blast! Hitting me with the force of a pile-driver--uh!”) Cold and Heat Wave then team up and escape the scene of the crime. 

The two go to Captain Cold’s cave hideout, where Heat Wave explains that he used to be a fire-eater in the circus, but that he “lost his taste for the work”. 

“I created my own uniform--and my weapon--a heat gun!” Yes, this is all the explanation the comic is going to give you for this. Note that his gun isn’t technically a flamethrower at this point, either, so you can’t really handwave it away that way. 

And then the never-ending puns begin. “It sure is hot stuff, Heat Wave! You know, we should make a good team...and since you have no hideout of your own yet, you’re welcome to share mine!” The Flash Rogues have always been oddly chummy in this way; I’d believe that basically any of them would have made the same offer. 

Of course, things basically fall apart immediately thereafter when Heat Wave reveals that he’s also in love with Dream Girl. “She’s the reason I gave up fire-eating! I was determined to win her love! And I knew the only way to do it was to show up Flash--her dream man!” Heat Wave and Captain Cold are so similar they even share the same nonsensical logic...but man, at least Cold was already a crook. Heat Wave gave up an established career for this insanity!

The two shoot at each other (to basically no effect, since their blasts cancel each other out).

Cold: You!? You’re just a big nothin’! Dream Girl will be mine--and nobody else’s!” 

Heat Wave:  And you-you’re just a cold-hearted Romeo!

I think Cold won this round of insult-slinging, Heat Wave. Your insult didn’t even make sense.

However, instead of continuing to fight, the two instead decide that whoever commits the most spectacular crimes will win the girl. “As far as I’m concerned, Heat Wave, that bet is ice-cold!” The puns….the puns! Make them stop! 

Flash runs around looking for the pair of criminals, who have apparently been causing enormous damage to the city because of their confrontation. Note that the art completely fails to convey this. 

When the Flash shows up, the two crooks promptly call off their rivalry in the face of a bigger threat, planning to take it up again as soon as Flash is defeated. Each hits Flash from one side, creating the awesome-looking image from the cover. 

However, Flash isn’t down long, as he uses his control over all his molecules to conduct the cold to the side of his body being blasted by the heat gun and vice-versa. Sure, that makes sense. SCIENCE! 

Flash then creates a suction vacuum that knocks the two crooks together. Flash takes them back to prison, where both men explain their insane motivations for the crime spree that did a bunch of damage that we didn’t see. 

Flash then goes to meet with Dream Girl, who...shock! Surprise!...is actually Mr. Varner’s long-lost daughter. She has a picture of herself with the birthmark and had it removed only recently. Dream Girl also grew up in an orphanage and has a fear of water, which could be explained by the boat crash she survived. Dream Girl-real name Priscilla Varner-inherits the trust fund, charity gets a lot of money, and the day is saved. 

The issue ends with Barry and Iris on a moonlight drive, where Mean Silver Age Iris tears down her boyfriend. “Tell me, Barry, don’t you feel ashamed sometimes to be so slow-moving and lazy when the Flash--” Barry cuts her off here: “Gosh, Iris! We can’t all be the Flash!” WHY. ARE. THESE TWO. DATING?

Stay tuned for part 4! 

[rushingheadlong]

A review of Queen: The Early Years

Well I have finally finished reading Queen: The Early Years, and now that I have read all 198 pages of this book I feel very confident in saying:

Yall I don’t think this is a good book. Like I really, really do not think this is a good book.

I’ve talked about some of this once or twice before, but I wanted to get all my thoughts about this in one place so, here we go. Brace yourselves, this is going to get wordy (as all my posts invariably do).

The Sources (or lack thereof)

The author wrote this book based on interviews with “over 60 friends and colleagues” of the band. Contrary to an earlier post of mine, he does provide a full list of the people he spoke with, however a lot of these connections are... dubious at best.

He does interview former band members of the groups they were each with before Queen, which might be the only good bits of this book. But a lot of the people he talked to fall under “friends of friends” or “casual acquaintances” or “knew them for a few months decades ago” and not really people who had deep insights into Queen as people, which is fine but he’s presenting their information as if they did.

He also doesn’t give any qualifiers for the information presented - and unless it’s a direct quote from someone, he doesn’t even tell you where he’s getting 90% of the “facts” in his book from. There are no in-text citations, apart from those sporadic quotes, and no bibliography list anywhere in this book.

Instead, he just presents everything he’s writing as the absolute truth with next to nothing to back up what he’s saying, apart from cherry-picked quotes from people who have their own biases in these conversations to begin with. He writes about how many of these people fell out of touch with Queen for 30+ years, and there are several moments during reading where I was wondering whether these stories that were being quoted were true or if it’s the sort of thing that these people made up for the purpose of getting their name in print (especially stories about Freddie).

In the interest of fairness, he does admit in the two-page epilogue that he knows the people he talks to will have their own slant to their stories but he claims that all biographies are “a random assembly of thoughts and recollections” as if to absolve himself of the work of verifying anything being told to him, or at least putting in the effort to let the reader know that things cannot be verified rather than simply presenting everything as pure objective fact.

Authorial Bias and Band Portrayal

The author very much comes across as writing about the band to fit his preconceived ideas of who they are. There are definitely points in the book where he presents images of the band that almost seem like caricatures - Freddie made out to be the deeply self-loathing gay who everyone knew wasn’t actually straight, Brian to be the aloof controlling perfectionist - with little to no nuance given to their actions or stories.

But there are also a lot of moments when it seems like the author doesn’t like the band at all and that he’s writing this book in an attempt to tarnish their image?

Like I wrote in one of my earlier posts, he literally says that Freddie and Brian had the power in the band and that Roger and John had “token” roles. He also implies that Queen only started attributing songwriting credit to the band as a whole beginning with The Miracle to prevent singles royalties from going to Freddie’s estate when he died. The author also often feels the need to put the blame for failed friendships solely on the band, and on several occasions implies that they “betrayed” the people who helped them out in their early career.

Because of this, and because he conveniently doesn’t provide sources for anything he says, it makes me call into question basically everything he writes in this book. Are these stories and facts all accurate, or is he spinning the truth to fit the story he wants to tell?

It’s worth noting also that he apparently asked Brian, Roger, and John for their input, and they and all their official representatives declined. It’s always a red flag for me when someone writes about Queen without the band’s involvement, but the author presents this situation as if he had been deeply wronged by this and implies that any bias in the book was because he didn’t have “their” side of the story - and not because he simply failed to do any work to validate what 60+ strangers were telling him.

I also want to give a warning that how he writes about Freddie’s sexuality is painful in a lot of places. It’s a combination of ideas that don’t hold up well in the 25 years since publication (for example, he says in one place that since Freddie went to an all-boys boarding school it was obvious that he would end up being queer) as well as loose anecdotes shared by people who didn’t know him well, but all felt that they had to give input about his sexuality.

It feels like every time this author interviewed someone about Freddie, he felt obligated to include their “opinion” on whether it was obvious that Freddie was gay in the early 70s or not. It’s a heavy and strange focus that gets really uncomfortable to read about after a while, and one that I don’t think is really appropriate to have been included to the degree that it was.

Misinformation

The author flat-out puts wrong information into this book. I will admit that most of what I picked up on during my read is trivial, but it’s the sort of trivial that makes me question his authority to write anything accurately and also (I believe) has led to misinformation being spread in other Queen writings.

He says that Brian’s parents could have afforded to buy him a guitar, and that the building of the Red Special was essentially an act of ego. This is directly contrary to everything that Brian has ever said on the topic, which is that his family was too poor to afford to buy him a guitar and that the Red Special was built out of an act of necessity. (This also ties into the author’s biased writing of Brian as a controlling perfectionist.)

He gives incorrect dates for concerts and tour information, as can be proven by other first-hand sources like ticket stubs and tour posters. (For example, he says that Queen played six shows in New York’s Uris Theatre in 1974, when we know they only played five.) Again, this is a minor thing but if he’s getting details like this wrong why should I trust his broader stories or conclusions that have no other verifying sources to be correct?

I also think his book is the origination for the story about Brian getting gangrene due to a dirty vaccine needle in 1974. I have a problem with this claim in that I don’t think it’s actually true, but this book is now the earliest source of the story that I’ve seen by over a decade. However since the author doesn’t cite anything in this book, I have no idea how he found this information (or whether he made it up himself).

I also suspect that this is the book that Mick Rock copied information from when compiling the timeline in his book Classic Queen, which was published 12 years later in 2007. Mick Rock not only copies the gangrene story (again, with no further information or citations given) but also includes a very specific reference to Brian complaining about not feeling well while on tour on April 21st, 1974 - a date which is also specifically referenced in The Early Years, again without any citation for where this information came from.

No one takes Mick Rock seriously as a good source for Queen information (beyond info about the photo sessions themselves, which is about the only thing within his scope of expertise). Now it seems like he might have copied those “facts” from this book, which means we might very well have a situation of one questionable book being copied by another until misinformation and lies get assumed to be true just because they’re in more than one place now, never mind that none of this is getting backed up by anything concrete.

Tiny details because I’m big mad about this book just in general

Maybe this is just my copy (which is a physical book, not a digital copy) but there are a lot of typos in this book. Mike Grose becomes Mike Crouse from one paragraph to the next. Words are misspelled, punctuation is missing... It’s a little jarring to see in a book that was actually physically printed up, and makes me wonder if this went through any sort of editing process whatsoever.

Conclusions, or something of the sort?

I need to admit here that I am very angry about this book, because particularly in the later chapters I think the author starts speculating about band dynamics and things from later in their career in a way that is entirely wrong and inappropriate.

However, for the most part, I did enjoy the first part of this book. Roger’s and John’s early chapters seemed to be fine (and from what I’ve been told, the information in Roger’s chapters is backed up in other, better researched, sources). The book started falling apart for me around Brian’s and Freddie’s chapters, though, and as it progressed it just kept going off the rails.

I’m actually really frustrated and disappointed by this, because there’s a lot in this book that reads like it could be true. There’s a lot here that sounds very believable, that seems to align with what others have said about the band, and that I didn’t blink twice at until the cracks started showing up and everything got called into question.

There’s nothing exactly wrong with writing a “biography” based solely on loose anecdotes, especially given that this was written in 1995 shortly after Freddie’s death and before a lot of the more contemporary sources had come out (like Brian’s books and the things him and Roger have said in more recent years).

But I do think that the author has a responsibility for doing some vetting of these stories, either by trying to verify what’s been said or making it apparent to the reader that some of the information is hearsay or has to be taken with a grain of salt. The Early Years doesn’t do that, though. This book is presenting itself as a labor of love from a tired, dedicated author who has toiled over tracking down these stories while being rebuffed by the band itself, and at no point does anything come with a caveat about what’s being said.

The author wants you read this book and assume everything in it is true. The author wants you to feel sorry for him that he couldn’t interview Queen directly, and frankly it seems like he wants you to side-eye the official Queen story (or at least question their morals and motives) in favor of agreeing with the narrative that he presents.

And that’s the big issue that I have with this book. Most of the information in here could very well be true - but as a reader, you aren’t given the tools you need to judge that for yourself and instead are encouraged to sympathize with the author and his work, and to take what he says as objective fact and not look at any of it too deeply.

And because of that, the entire book falls apart for me. If I know that the author is printing small details of misinformation, and I don’t have any way of verifying what is being printed here, and the author starts presenting conclusions and narratives that run counter to everything else that has been said about Queen... how can I trust that anything in this book is accurate on it’s own?

[caribbean-ace]

Another week and another episode review! SPOILER ALERT!

Our immortal legends try to find their way back but they manage to find all kinds of trouble while doing so.

Zombies, not my favorite thing in the world but it was interesting the whole ‘the world is actually ending and we are stuck here’

Co-captains for life, that’s it, i have nothing else to say.

Well i kinda do, but that probably would be another post.

John and Zari is an interesting pair, i like their team work when trying to find the rings but i don’t really see them as a couple, but that’s just me. I was freaking scared when she didn’t wake up at first.

Ava getting shot actually got me, but then i remembered that she is immortal, for a day.

Sara not being honest with Ava had me torn, again i will elaborate more in a separate post.

Legends sticking together although they were about to die it made me smile. This has probably been the time where they had it worst by far in the whole show (if they had a similar scenario with slim chances i don’t remember)

Ava watching Sara die it was painful, although we know Sara has died before and she had faced worst than pretty much anybody on the team it wasn’t easy, because of course she died in front of the love of her life.

Poor Gary trying to save the day, he’s just a poor baby, but he did great, i really hope he doesn’t stay dead

Bonus: the avalance pinky swear, ‘my girl’, Mick throwing the bus driver since they had no money to pay lol, also Mick promising Lita he would stay out of prision, freaking Gideon!Human is back.

This is not particularly my favorite episode, it was entertaining, not gonna lie but i didn’t expected to see so many charachers getting killed. Let’s hope that this disaster gets fixed as soon as possible, of course not all episodes can be with a happy ending

[thecoleopterawithana]

Hey there, anon.

First, let me start by saying that I truly appreciate exchanging ideas and debating topics; I believe that’s one of the best ways to reach a deeper understanding, having a lot of different perspectives brought into it. But I’ll only do it if we keep it respectful. And if there’s interest in discussing this issue (and I’m assuming there is because you did send me this ask) we’ll need to first examine our own emotional reactions to it and see if we’re ready to be clear-minded about it. It is only possible to discuss ideas if we’re open to different ones in the first place.

Second, I want to make clear that I won’t try to convince you of anything nor, frankly, is that the point. All that I can do is present the information that we have and then offer my personal reading of it. What your takeaway is, concerns only you. But it is also wise to examine our own motives approaching this exchange; mine is to reach a deeper understanding of these people. If it was only a battle of wills, or each trying to “win” the argument by conquering the other with their strong pre-conceived notions, I’m afraid it wouldn’t be half as enlightening. I’ll proceed in the good faith that we’re all here seeking a greater awareness of other human beings’ inner lives.

And lastly, if we do want to get a look at those inner worlds and emotional landscapes, we have to actually look inside. This means we can’t take every word at face value and realise that every intervenient is dealing with their own complicated feelings, motives and biases; that means the initial subject, the surrounding associates, and finally, even ourselves. The best we can do is develop the critical sense and emotional intelligence necessary to be aware of all these different factors.

So, all preparations done with and guidelines established, let’s actually address your points.

I’ll start providing an excerpt of the Yoko Ono interview you’re referring to:

I ask if she has ever had sex with a woman, or been attracted to them.

“Well, that’s another thing. John and I had a big talk about it, saying, basically, all of us must be bisexual. And we were sort of in a situation of thinking that we’re not [bisexual] because of society. So we are hiding the other side of ourselves, which is less acceptable. But I don’t have a strong sexual desire towards another woman.”

Have you ever? “Not really, not sexually.”

One online satire imagined an affair between Ono and Hillary Clinton.

“It’s great,” Ono laughs. “I mean, both John and I thought it was good that people think we were bisexual, or homosexual.” She laughs again.

What about that old rumor that Lennon had sex with Beatles manager Brian Epstein (which was also the subject of the 1991 film, The Hours and The Times)?

Lennon himself said: “Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship.” Later, Lennon’s friend Pete Shotton said Lennon had told him that he had allowed Epstein to “toss [wank] him off.”

“Uh, well, the story I was told was a very explicit story, and from that I think they didn’t have it [sex],” Ono tells me. “But they went to Spain, and when they came back, tons of reporters were asking, ‘Did you do it, did you do it?’ So he said, ‘I did it.’ Isn’t that amazing? But of course he would say that. I’m sure Brian Epstein made a move, yeah.”

And Lennon said no to Epstein?

“He just didn’t want to do it, I think.”

Did Lennon have sex with other men?

“I think he had a desire to, but I think he was too inhibited,” says Ono.

“No, not inhibited. He said, ‘I don’t mind if there’s an incredibly attractive guy.’ It’s very difficult: They would have to be not just physically attractive, but mentally very advanced too. And you can’t find people like that.”

So did Lennon ever have sex with men?

“No, I don’t think so,” says Ono. “The beginning of the year he was killed, he said to me, ‘I could have done it, but I can’t because I just never found somebody that was that attractive.’ Both John and I were into attractiveness—you know—beauty.”

I ask what she makes of the people outside the building, the crowds still at Strawberry Fields.

Ono misunderstands, or mishears (or is simply focused on the last strand of our conversation), and continues to talk about sex.

“I don’t make anything out of it. When you’re not really interested in that sort of sex, you don’t think about it. Both John and I surprisingly were very passive people. Unless somebody made a thing out of it, if they made a move, I wouldn’t even think about it.”

— in Yoko Ono: I Still Fear John’s Killer by Tim Teeman for the Daily Beast (13 October 2015).

You may not believe Yoko. But it is also important to understand if it’s because of her unreliableness as a witness (Yoko is excellent at PR and marketing, and John Lennon is the brand she’s built her life upon) or because of what she’s saying (John Lennon being interested in men). If it’s the first, that’s a reasonable worry, but like I said, you just have to possess the critical sense to be aware that that’s a motivation that is there and examine what she says with that in mind. If it’s the second, there’s a lot more testimony available from people other than Yoko that may help illuminate the matter. One of my favourite sources is John himself. But more on that in a minute.

But let’s go with the first one, for a second. That Yoko is someone with personal feelings, biases and motivations, one of them being that her livelihood depends on the maintenance of her continued association with the John Lennon brand and the fairytale JohnandYoko narrative she’s been promoting since 1968. Why then would she be one of the main voices claiming John’s bisexuality? And she gives us the answer in this interview: “both John and I thought it was good that people think we were bisexual, or homosexual.”

Consider that their image was that of the avant-garde, anti-establishment, bohemian couple. Like Yoko said, it not only generated press but was also very in-brand for people to think they were bisexual. John himself put it on similar terms when he asks himself, on November 1974, “It is trendy to be bisexual and you’re usually ‘keeping up with the Jones’, haven’t you ever… there was talk about you and PAUL…”.

As singer Chuckie Starr told Christopher Andersen [author of Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger]: “[1973] was the glitter era, and everybody wanted to be part of the bisexual revolution.” It’s relevant then to remember that the rock world was full of stars coming out as bisexual during this period: Elton John, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, etc. All four ended up somewhat retracting their statements: Elton John officially came out as gay in 1992, and the other three simply renounced their bisexuality in the 1980s, in the wake of an increasingly conservative culture and public panic over the AIDS crisis.

Now, this is an entirely too complex a matter for me to get into in this post: trying to figure out what was the “truth”, to separate one’s genuine interests from the context of the times. Did the “bisexual chic” being a fad during the 1970s and good publicity for those involved make the experimentations undertaken any less true? Were they faking it for the press or liberated enough to try? Are the take-backs fruit of them having decided that just wasn’t it for them or are they a reflection of what was socially acceptable at each moment? Is it like John and Yoko decided that “all of us must be bisexual. And we were sort of in a situation of thinking that we’re not because of society” or was that just the free-love idealism of the times?

I feel like Yoko’s statements come from that perspective that it’s all about experimentation. Bringing up the famous Norman quote, “From chance remarks [John] had made, [Yoko] gathered there had even been a moment when—on the principle that bohemians should try everything—he had contemplated an affair with Paul, but had been deterred by Paul’s immovable heterosexuality.”

I don’t know if the bohemian ideology was offered by John as a justification, but I suspect these were Yoko’s own rationalizations coming into play, perhaps in an attempt to create an emotional distance in John’s interest in Paul, claiming it was all about the experience and the physicality.

(It also remains frustratingly unclear if the “[John] had been deterred by Paul’s immovable heterosexuality” was part of Norman’s readings, Yoko’s gatherings or of John’s chance remarks.)

Another informative bit is this: “I think [John] had a desire to [have sex with other men], but I think he was too inhibited. No, not inhibited. He said, ‘I don’t mind if there’s an incredibly attractive guy.’ It’s very difficult: They would have to be not just physically attractive, but mentally very advanced too. And you can’t find people like that.”

First, I’d like to point out that while in this interview Yoko says that John never found anyone both physically attractive and emotionally advanced enough to consider having sex with, she did tell Norman that he’d considered having an affair with Paul. So John did find someone like that.

Secondly, I find it extremely revealing of John’s view of sex that he doesn’t consider it enough to be physically attractive, but he’s also seeking mental compatibility and stimulation. This tells me that John wasn’t interested in it merely as bohemian experimentation or just the physical release of a one-off thing. He was actually searching for the qualities necessary to maintain a longer relationship.

I personally think that for John, ideal sex was personal, and an epitomization of intimacy and closeness. (He always was a romantic.)

In interview with Sandra Shevey (June 1972):

JOHN: It’s a plus, it’s not a minus. The plus is that your best friend, also, can hold you without… I mean, I’m not a homosexual, or we could have had a homosexual relationship and maybe that would have satisfied it, with working with other male artists. [faltering] An artist – it’s more – it’s much better to be working with another artist of the same energy, and that’s why there’s always been Beatles or Marx Brothers or men, together. Because it’s alright for them to work together or whatever it is. It’s the same except that we sleep together, you know? I mean, not counting love and all the things on the side, just as a working relationship with her, it has all the benefits of working with another male artist and all the joint inspiration, and then we can hold hands too, right?

SHEVEY: But Yoko is a very independent person. Isn’t it— [inaudible]

JOHN: Sure, and so were the men I worked with. The only difference is she’s female.

SHEVEY: But you didn’t find it difficult to make that transition?

JOHN: Oh yeah. I mean, it took me four years. I’m still not – I’m still only coming through it, you know.

See how for John sex is just an extension of all the other ways to show physical affection, that he had craved while “working with other male artists”? “The plus is that your best friend, also, can hold you without…”; “it has all the benefits of working with another male artist and all the joint inspiration, and then we can hold hands too, right?”

And I don’t know of many outright negations of John being homosexual or having interest in men, but this one, “I’m not a homosexual, or we could have had a homosexual relationship and maybe that would have satisfied it, with working with other male artists” sounds more like an admission to me. Of course he had to throw that “disclaimer” in there after saying “The plus is that your best friend, also, can hold you without…” Without what, prosecution? Because you’re both men? John had to save face; he would have been practically both coming out and declaring his longing for his recently divorced male best friend.

“We could have had a homosexual relationship and maybe that would have satisfied it…” Satisfied what? Satisfied whom? Paul was satisfied. The declaredly unsatisfied one was John.

As for your point that John couldn’t be open to the subject because he was a homophobe, there is the likelihood of internalized homophobia.

Defined by Meyer and Dean in 1998 as “the gay person’s direction of negative social attitudes toward the self, leading to a devaluation of the self and resultant internal conflicts and poor self-regard” and by Locke in that same year as “the self-hatred that occurs as a result of being a socially stigmatized person”, internalized homophobia can make a queer person both hateful of themselves and other LGBQ people.

John himself realised and admitted that his violent conduct when accused of being gay as a young man, was born out of his insecurities about his own sexuality: “And obviously, I must have been un– uh, f– frightened of the fag in me to get so angry at that. You know, when you’re twenty-one, you want to be a man, and all that.”; “I must have had a fear that maybe I was homosexual to attack [Bob Wooler] like that and it’s very complicated reasoning.”

And it soon became apparent that his instances of homophobia, like the rest of his outwards aggressive demeanour, were only posturing.

If you’d like to read more about the topic of John dealing with his sexuality, I’ve recently answered two more asks about it: on the Bob Wooler incident and on the Tony Manero story. For more examples and anecdotes you can always consult the tag.

There are really too numerous examples of John expressing his openness and sympathy with the LGBQ struggle, sometimes including himself in that pain. Some examples are more subtle than others, but it’s there if we ourselves are open to that possibility.

Now, let’s focus on your last point: the people in his life that defended his heterosexuality. We’ll have to afford them the same depth and critical eye, in examining their statements that we’ve been giving Yoko and John.

For Cynthia, I apologize, but I couldn’t find any statement on John being straight, but if one is provided I’d be happy to comment.

As for John’s half-sister, Julia Baird, I do have a quote:

“Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, was a known homosexual. Epstein was always polite and charming. It has been insinuated that John was drawn to Epstein. I believe there was no such relationship between them. John was macho. But if John was a homosexual, it would have made no difference to me. I’ve asked Paul McCartney, who laughed and said: ‘Why not me? I’m handsome.’ Then he said: ‘I was holed up with John in hotel rooms everywhere. There was never a suggestion of anything like that.’ I believe him.”

— Julia Baird, in Boston Globe: Lennon’s half-sister remembers… (2 October 1988).

Again, we have to put ourselves in her perspective. This is a person who contacted with John for some years as a young girl and he obviously made an impression on her; the teddy boy, her cool big brother. It is understandable that she would not want her memory of him threatened. People often cling quite strongly to the idealised image they have of someone.

But her statement that John was macho (and therefore couldn’t be attracted to men), shows how far her understanding goes both of homosexuality and John himself.

So if her image of John reflects only his surface-level projections of a macho tough guy, is fixed on the teenager she knew as a child, and doesn’t go deep enough to realise how soft and insecure he really was, then what can we expect from her assessments on his sexuality (especially considering her view that homosexuality seems to threaten the masculinity of a man?)

And finally, we have Paul.

Paul’s relationship with the subject of John’s sexuality almost deserves a post of its own. [And I had in fact written quite a lot about it in this post before it suddenly closed without saving.] But the multitudes of emotional dynamics and levels of perception going on in there are so numerous that I think a new post really is better suited. I hope to get to it soon. 

But let me just say here that there are a myriad of reasons why Paul would state that to his knowledge John was never gay, and none of them invalidates John actually being attracted to men. If he was or wasn’t is completely up to him, and from his own statements about it and his behaviour that was certainly something that he seemed to be exploring about himself.

Or at least, this is my reading of it. I only can guarantee you that I’ve certainly made the effort to examine all the possible motivations present, including my own. But what you take from here anon is, similarly to John’s sexuality, up to you entirely. 

-

[Note: I’ve answered this ask despite feeling a certain defensiveness from the sender, that I feel translated in a kind of hostility in the language. Maybe this wasn’t the original intention but it was what it felt like to me. Hence the introductory disclaimer that it only makes sense to send an ask if one wants to discuss ideas and hear my opinion on a subject. If there is no openness to have this discussion in the first place, I’ll reserve the right not to respond either. Thank you, and please keep the exchanges ongoing but respectful.]