#this has been my weekend of jeff and I’m thriving

[daisychain-unchained]

I finally found a copy of Grace in a record store, and the place was called Magnolia Thunderpussy. I feel like Jeff would be so proud

[sorrytodistract]

About Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ending

I wrote a little something for the series finale last week and published it on both IG and Twitter but I realised that tumblr has been a huge factor as to how I fell so much in love with the show. Therefore I decided to share my little experience as an AoS fan over there too. Enjoy!

How do I begin to explain what Agents of SHIELD means to me ?

I stumbled upon it when I just started to get interested in Marvel and especially the MCU. I remember hearing about it first when they announced the show, probably an article about how the #CoulsonLives campaign made it happen in the summer of 2013. From then, I kept it in a corner of my mind, telling myself how I wanted to watch it once it came out. Flash forward to the very beginning of October, I was scrolling through tumblr when I saw a gifset picturing two scientists bickering. I saw from my friend's feed that it was from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. And I realised I forgot it started airing the week before. I had a feeling I was going to love these first two characters I saw. I just had no idea how much. I managed to binge the first two episodes and then I was waiting impatiently for the third. I was longing to find out more about all these characters and follow them as they solve supernatural mysteries... By FZZT, I was totally hooked and had already read and watched all the cast's and EP's interviews. In April of the next year, I was so excited about the season finale that I watched it live, in the middle of the night while I had Uni in the morning. And then I couldn't wait until the next season, with a million questions and impatient to find the character's I've fallen in love with once more. I was studying languages and watching the show in its original version and without subtitles most of the time because I couldn't wait, really allowed me to become fully bilingual. 

Through the years, I grew up as a young woman as I tried to find my professional path. It had its ups and downs but I could always count on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. every week to cheer me up and for a good time. I was enjoying watching them go to the end of the world for their missions. I've always loved travelling and so decided on a job related to tourism. Meanwhile, Fitz's struggles with changes helped me deal with my own stress and anxiety issues. Some episodes were harder than others because they sometimes hit too close for comfort but I still couldn't let go of the show. The kindness and benevolence I could feel from the entire cast and crew through social media made me feel at home when I was watching the show and the behind-the-scenes content. They were a part of my life, as well as the other fans I was talking to on tumblr or Twitter with on the daily. We developped special bonds through our love of the show. 

Another flash forward to... March, 2017. I was now working as an apprentice for an airline as well as getting my degree in tourism. I was at school when I saw C2E2 anouncing they were having Iain De Caestecker as a guest, one of my favorite actors from the show. Elizabeth Henstridge had already been announced and it promised to be such an exciting convention with my two favorites. I don't know why but then I checked my calendar and saw that I was off work and school that weekend... An insane idea was forming in my mind : one of my friends from the fandom lived in Chicago, I was off work and had great opportunites for plane tickets... I took the plunge and got them that same day. I have never travelled to the United States before but everything was decided within a few days. My craziest idea yet.

About 10 days before the departure, anxiety kicked it fully and I came very close to cancelling my trip because I was so nervous something would go wrong. I made it though. To one of the best weekends of my life. Elizabeth and Iain were the nicest and really made the jetlag and anxiety worth it. I was able to meet so many fans of the show for the first time, some I already kind of knew from social media and it was so fun to put faces on names and hang out with everyone during the weekend. This convention made me realise how I wish to meet every cast member from the show to thank them for what the show meant to me. And so everytime I was able to, I would participate in one and meet other cast members and other fans and I would have SUCH a blast. Every cast member I've met were so kind and funny and I always felt comfortable with them, even when I was rambling incoherently because of nerves or loss of words.

In a perfect world, I would also want to meet every crew member to thank them personally because without them, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. wouldn't have been the same. They were all essential in making my absolute favorite show.

I remember how every year we would campaign on social media to make sure we have one more season of our favorite tv show because we loved it so much and they deserved a good run. I was so fond of every character, they felt like family to me and I was always eager to find out more about them and see their new adventures. Jemma's resilience helped me through grief, Daisy's optimism boosted my own to always move forward whatever the obstacles, May's resistance encouraged me to develop my own, Yo-yo's faith reminded me that I should always thrive to be better. Seeing so many multi-faceted and powerful women on screen was rejuvenating.

This show reminded me every week of the importance of family and its values and how we don't necessary have to be blood-related to become one.

I don't think I've ever loved a series more than Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. As it's more than a tv show, it's family. It accompanied me during most of my adulthood and I'm going to miss it. But more than that, I'm grateful that it exists and will forever be in my life. Through the episodes I can rewatch. Through all the friends I've made thanks to the show. Through all the memories.

Thank you Maurissa, Jed and Jeff for creating the little show that could. Thank you to all the writers for fleshing out all these perfectly flawed characters. Thank you to the entire cast for portraying them with so much talent. Thank you to every crew member for doing an outstanding job and sharing your memories with us fans. Thank you all for 7 amazing years ! All the best to each and every one of you.

And last but not least thank you to every AoS fan I’ve interacted with over the years for the best experience. I am lucky to be able to call quite a few of you my friends. 

[funface2]

Best Dick Jokes Through History – Why Sexual Comedy About Men Is Important – Esquire

Blake Griffin landed a dick joke about Caitlyn Jenner at the Comedy Central Roast of Alex Baldwin, which aired last weekend. “Caitlyn completed her gender reassignment in 2017, finally confirming that no one in that family wants a white dick,” he said to roars of laughter. Was the joke offensive? Racist? Hilarious? All of the above? For her part, Jenner took the dick joke in stride. “Caitlyn was down for it,” one of the writers of the roast said. “She was like, ‘Well, you know, I’m gonna hit hard. I want them to hit me hard.’ And so we did.”

Dick jokes have existed throughout history in nearly every culture known to man, from the greatest literature of all time—Shakespeare and James Joyce—to ancient graffiti. “Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!” some anonymous guy scrawled on the wall of a bar in the Roman city of Pompeii around 2,000 years ago. They have been staples of comedy for millennia for a reason: They’re nearly universally appealing.

“Whether you’re rich or poor or black or white, everyone laughs at a dick joke,” says comedian Aaron Berg, who hosts a recurring show at The Stand in New York City. (Berg also hosted a somewhat controversial, entirely satirical show called White Guys Matter that addressed some aspects of white male inadequacy.)

One comedian has elevated dick jokes to poetry, launching them into the realm of high art: Jacqueline Novak, whose one-woman off-Broadway show about blow jobs, Get on Your Knees, manages to make the dick joke both hilarious and high brow. She’s not the first woman to tell a dick joke, nor will she be the last, but she is perhaps the only one to devote a show almost entirely to the penis (with a few minutes sidetracking to ghosts) and be feted by The New York Times for doing so.

Novak, who has been called a “deeply philosophical urologist,” may represent a tipping point in dick jokes, because her show is finally allowing people to see the wisdom (yes, wisdom) in penis humor.

“I don’t even think of myself as like, interested in telling penis jokes. I certainly wouldn’t sit down and go, I’d love to do a show about penises,” Novak says. “I think it’s more like an investigation of my heterosexuality. Does [being heterosexual] mean I love the penis? I’m interested in the language that I’ve been expected to use or accept as legitimate about the penis. Here’s all the reasons that that’s ridiculous.”

Novak’s show is replete with riffs on our “ridiculous” penis language, from the fact that we say the penis is “rock hard”—”No geologist would ever say, this quartz is penis hard“—to the idea that the penis penetrates a woman—”You penetrate me? Fine, but I ate you, motherfucker! I chewed you up! Spit you out, and you loved every goddamn second of it.” In some ways, Novak is the perfect teller of the 21st century dick joke, not only because she is chronicling our hangups about the penis, but also because without a penis of her own, perhaps she is able to see the dick more clearly for what it is, in all its ridiculousness and beauty.

“You penetrate me? Fine, but I ate you, motherfucker! I chewed you up!”

But for the most part, phallic culture remains incoherent. Men are pilloried for exposing their dicks, while Euphoria is celebrated for its 30-penis episode; dick pics are critiqued like Picassos or seen as a public menace; judging a man by the size of his penis is perfectly acceptable or grossly objectifying; porn covers every inch of the internet, yet Facebook won’t accept ads for dildos. Dick jokes are still looked down on as cheap—to be fair, some of them are blatantly bad—but some comics say that isn’t always fair.

“Dick jokes, if you craft something amazing out of them, could be the funniest thing someone’s ever heard. And funny in a way that like, opens your mind up even,” says comedian Sean Patton. “That’s the most important kind of comedy, where you laugh at something to the point where you’re now a little more accepting of it. And that can range from anything to other people’s sexual orientation to accepting your own mental illness.” Patton’s own extended dick joke, “Cumin” on Comedy Central’s This Is Not Happening, has been viewed over 2 million times on YouTube.

Jacqueline Novak performs at the 2019 Clusterfest in June.

Jeff KravitzGetty Images

Novak uses the blow job to critique cultural expectations of masculinity and the pressure women feel to become skilled at sexually pleasing men. “The teeth shaming starts early, of course,” she says in her show. “If you have your full set of teeth…don’t go into a room where a penis is. It’s not safe for him. Why would you put him at risk?”

Patton likens the dick joke to a “Trojan horse” of comedy. “You make them laugh hard at dick jokes, now they’re listening,” he says. “Then you can throw in something a little more meaningful, and they’re on board.”

Not that all dick jokes need to be intellectual to be taken seriously. The song “D*** in a Box” by The Lonely Island, featuring Justin Timberlake, won an Emmy. It turns out the concept wasn’t exactly new. “Decades before The Lonely Island, B.S. Pully was doing that in the ’40s and ’50s,” comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff says. “Pully would be holding a cigar box at his groin, walking down the aisle. [He would] start a show saying, ‘Cigar, would you like a cigar?’ Then he would lift up the lid, and there was a hole cut in there, and his dick was hanging out. The audience would go crazy.”

Dick jokes continue to thrive off audience reactions, according to several comedians I talked to. Bonnie McFarlane, who is best known for her appearance on Last Comic Standing and her Netflix documentary Women Aren’t Funny, began telling dick jokes when she started out in 1995. “You tell dick jokes because it’s a very male audience, so that’s what they want to hear about,” she says. “It’s been a thing since comedy started. People can really kill if they’re just doing dick jokes.” But there is a double standard, she says, when female comics are made fun of “for talking about their vaginas too much.”

That Novak, a female comic, is revolutionizing the dick joke makes sense, considering that historically, “the vanguard for so-called dick jokes and sexual material comes first and foremost from women rather than men,” Nesteroff says. He points to female comics Rusty Warren, Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and LaWanda Page as “probably the four quote-unquote ‘dirtiest’ comedians of the ’50s and ’60s, more so than Lenny Bruce, more so than Redd Foxx.”

LaWanda Page performs for The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast in 1978.

NBCGetty Images

He also says African Americans pushed dick jokes further than any other ethnicity. African-American comedian Page’s albums from the 1970s were rich with dick jokes, referencing “the size of the man, the endurance of the man,” Nesteroff says. As Page recites in her 1973 comedy album Pipe Layin’ Dan: “Husband, dear husband, now don’t be a fool/you’ve worked on the night shift ’til you’ve ruined your tool/you’d better go hungry the rest of your life/than to bring home a pecker so soft to your wife.”

“LaWanda [told] dick jokes for the same reasons a lot of black comics do, because they had to come up in the chitlin circuit, which is basically comedy clubs or bars or places where only black audiences mainly go,” says comedian Harris Stanton, who has toured with Tracy Morgan. “When I started comedy [in 1999] I started in the chitlin circuit,” he continues. “Urban comedy became this big explosion in the United States. A lot of the young black comics couldn’t get into a lot of mainstream clubs, so they would have to perform wherever they could, and dick jokes were welcome to those places.”

African Americans were pioneers of the dick joke, but they definitely weren’t the only ethnic group telling them. Three of the other female sex-joke pioneers Nesteroff mentioned were Jewish. Pearl Williams was known for roasting overweight men when they entered the comedy club by asking, “How long has it been since you’ve seen your dick?” Lenny Bruce, one of the most famous Jewish comedians, was arrested for saying schmuck on stage in 1962. Seven years later, another famous American Jew, Philip Roth, published Portnoy’s Complaint, which is essentially a 274-page dick joke, or so some claim.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen your dick?”

“I probably owe a debt to Philip Roth that I’m not even fully aware of,” says Novak, who is Jewish. She references him directly in her show, joking, “I went off to college feeling good. It’s a Catholic-ish college. Lots of virgin boys scurrying around, scrambling for sexual experience at parties. Not me. I’m a Jew and I did the coursework in high school, so I felt like a Philip Roth figure. A Jewish pervert ready to teach.”

Jewish male comics may be drawn to dick jokes, according to Berg, who is Jewish, because, “the fact that our penises were intruded upon at a very young age probably gives us a fixation on it and makes us want to talk about it more.”

Dr. Jeremy Dauber, the Atran professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Columbia University and author of Jewish Comedy, traces Jewish dick jokes all the way back to the Bible. The earliest case of laughter in Jewish tradition is Sarah’s laughter when she’s told that her 100-year-old husband Abraham will give her a child. It is “a laughter about male impotence,” Dauber says.

But comedians aren’t just laughing at penises anymore. Novak is going in the opposite direction. “I’m trying to restore [the penis] to true dignity.” Will her intellectual blow job jokes allow the dick joke to be taken more seriously? Will future comedians have to deal with the flack that Patton still gets in his reviews?

“Even like positive reviews, sometimes they’ll still point out there’s also a lot of cock, cock cock,” he says. “Why do you have to make sure everyone knows that you thought some of the subject matter was lowbrow?” He thinks reviewers roll their eyes at his dick talk because “everyone constantly is terrified that those around them don’t think that they’re that smart.”

Comedy is one of the only art forms that allows us to talk about male genitalia so openly and democratically. Whatever form the dick joke takes, from idiotic to intellectual, from poetry to prop comedy, as long as it gets a laugh, it should be celebrated. And there’s no better way to diffuse the angst surrounding the modern-day penis than a well-crafted dick joke. The more we laugh about penises (and not just at them), the happier the world might be.

Hallie Lieberman Hallie Lieberman is a sex historian and journalist, and the author of “Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy.”  

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Bài viết Best Dick Jokes Through History – Why Sexual Comedy About Men Is Important – Esquire đã xuất hiện đầu tiên vào ngày Funface.

from Funface https://funface.net/best-jokes/best-dick-jokes-through-history-why-sexual-comedy-about-men-is-important-esquire/

[karlieklosssource]

Supermodel Karlie Kloss turns coding passion into a summer coding camps for girls

It's about 7 a.m. on an early autumn day in New York City and supermodel Karlie Kloss is quickly becoming a morning person.

“I don’t know when or how this happened, I don’t think I’ve slept past the sunrise any day this week,” Kloss told ABC News’ Chief Business, Technology and Economics Correspondent Rebecca Jarvis in an interview for “Nightline.”

On this particular morning, Kloss is coming off of a 16-hour day filming Project Runway and is getting ready for an event with Adidas, one of her many brand ambassadorships.

Despite the long days and early mornings Kloss embraces it all.

“That’s kind of my life but the good thing is I really love what I do,” said Kloss.

The 40-time Vogue cover girl got her start at just 13-years-old when she was discovered at a mall in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. She was approached by two modeling scouts, Jeff and Mary Clarke, the husband and wife duo behind Mother Model Management, who also famously discovered Ashton Kutcher at The Airliner Bar in Iowa City.

In Kloss’ case, they were recruiting for a charity fashion show.

“I was just at the mall with my friend and I was wearing Birkenstocks and just living my life at 13 years old…And at that time I literally had no interest in that [modeling] or really idea of like what the fashion industry was. It just wasn't in my world.”

Kloss said she realized quickly “it really was something I really enjoyed” and it didn’t take long for her career to take off. The modeling scouts introduced her to agents and by the time she was 15-years-old she was walking in her first major runway show.

“That fall when I started my freshman year of high school I got an opportunity to walk in New York Fashion Week for Calvin Klein and I was 15 years old. Like literally had started high school two days before and it just put me on the map.”

Kloss became a breakout star in the industry, walking in 31 shows her first New York Fashion Week season. Over the course of the next few months Kloss got an apartment in New York City and was traveling around the globe with her first major fashion campaigns for Bvlgari and Dolce & Gabbana.

But while she was living the life of a glamorous and worldly model, back home in St. Louis, pre-social media, she was just an average teenager.

“I was 15 years old, I was tall and lanky, no boys were paying any attention to me. I felt totally out of place in St. Louis, just like every teenager does. And it kind of was like this secret alter ego that I got to live out and build a career. And no one really knew about it back home.”

(MORE: Karlie Kloss goes back to school)

Over the next 11 years Kloss would become one of the most recognizable faces on the planet, gracing the runways of major designers like Oscar de la Renta, Christian Dior, Versace and Diane von Furstenberg.

She also served as global brand ambassador for Estee Lauder and starred in several major international campaigns for brands like adidas, Versace, Dior, Carolina Herrera and Swarovski

“I was going back and forth between, like, sitting in my chemistry class, getting on a plane that night right after school going to Paris, walking Dior Couture opening the show…and then going back home and like needing to like still turn in my five paragraph essay,” said Kloss. “But it was really amazing dual world and life that I lived and still live, I guess.”

Today that “dual world” includes another passion -- coding. On the surface it’s one that might seem unexpected, as the couture-clad super beauty doesn’t necessarily fit the stereotype of a hoodie-wearing coder, but Kloss has had a love of math and science from the beginning.

(MORE: Karlie Kloss goes back to school)

As the daughter of an emergency room physician, she looked up to her father, fascinated by his ability to problem solve and help people using science.

“I definitely thought being a doctor would be my kind of career path. I always was really fascinated by science, by math and I loved the idea of being able to help people with a skill set,” she said.

Kloss discovered her own love of coding by taking classes at The Flatiron School in Lower Manhattan. Her instructor and dean of the school, Avi Flombaum, said that she was a natural.

“I met Karlie, I was doing a class for two of my friends and they asked if she could join...She showed up on day one, really took to it and outperformed my two friends,” Flombaum told ABC News’ Rebecca Jarvis.

(MORE: How to get your girls involved in coding)

After that first lesson in 2014, Kloss was hooked.

“That whole week, and more and more, she started emailing me if we could spend time on the weekends coding and that sort of snowballed,” Flombaum said.

But eventually, Kloss wanted to do more than just learn herself. She wanted to figure out a way to give other women the skill that she found so valuable. With the help of Flombaum, she started a scholarship giving 21 teenage women across the U.S. the opportunity to take the Flatiron School’s two-week pre-college program coding class, the same one that Kloss took when she fell in love with coding.

“I have this audience of young women across the country around the world, and I really care about the message that I'm sending them both through my words and my actions. And I thought, you know what, I would love to offer them something more meaningful than just a picture backstage at a runway show.”

Just one year after starting her own coding journey, Kode With Klossy was born.

Today the free two-week summer coding camp has grown to 50 camps across 25 cities across the U.S. girls ages 13 to 18 can apply to attend through the company’s website and be placed in classes of 20 where they learn to code real-life apps.

It’s not abnormal for Kloss to pop into one of the camps, and she’s become a mentor for many of the young women who have been with the program since the start. “Nightline” joined her for one of those visits at a camp in New York, where level 3 campers are learning Swift, the coding language used by Apple developers.

“It’s really amazing because I feel like I really have seen them grow so much, beyond just learning code...They’ve been able to grow as humans. I think it’s such an intense moment in life being in your teen years and high school and you’re kind of figuring out so many things and I see these girls kind of come into their own power, come into their own confidence, and they realize all that could be possible in their lives, in their careers, and it’s just so fun and amazing to watch. I get goose bumps, I really do. They’re my little sisters.”

In the beginning, the young coders first learn the basics of the new language and then collaborate to design and build a new app. They were in the final stages of creating applications targeted at real world problems when “Nightline” stopped by. But it’s not just the curriculum that these young coders love, it’s the relationships they are building with other young women in technology.

Many of the coders we spoke to said that the camps provide a supportive place to grow and thrive. Valeria Torres-Olivares, 18, began learning to code in her sophomore year of high school. But she said the past two summers she has spent at Kode With Klossy have “been a rejuvenating experience having amazing girls to work with and talk about code with.”

“You don’t feel comfortable asking your peers questions because most of the time they are male and most of the time, whether they are mean to you or not, they do make you feel like you are less than them,” Torres-Olivares told ABC News’ Rebecca Jarvis.

Many of the female coders “Nightline” met say they are outnumbered by their male counterparts at school.

“It’s just like three girls in the front row and then the rest of it is all guys. Basically feels like a guy’s club. So being here feels like a safe space,” 16-year-old camper Ivana said.

Sofia Ongele, 18, who started learning to code at the Kode With Klossy camp in 2016, added that one of her favorite things about the program is the network of women she can connect with to talk about coding. “I could just hit up my girlfriends any time that I wanted to and be like, ‘hey, help me out here.’ So that was really great.”

When creating the camps it was important to Kloss to focus on women. Today, while women make up more than half of college-educated workers, they only make up 25 percent of those in STEM fields, according to the U.S. Department of State.

“There are multiple problems too, I think, why more girls don't get excited about tech or see themselves in that industry. A -- barrier to entry of not having opportunities, not having a class to even take to learn the skills. And B -- what society tells us or the image that we see and I think we need more visibility around women in the industry and they exist.”

With over 16 million followers across her social media platforms, Kloss is helping to increase the visibility around women in technology, showing that the stereotype surrounding STEM aren’t real.

“Everybody expected me to be one thing, to be on the catwalks or in magazines...And so I definitely think a lot of people noticed when I started coming out and talking about my love of science and math and more nerdy passions,” said Kloss. “I think that me standing up and kind of identifying my nerdy passions has ignited that for so many other girls and that impact is something that really drives me to want to keep being true to who I am, and supporting other young women.”

Watch more from Karlie Kloss on "Nightline" tonight at 12:35 a.m. ET and hear more of her interview on the ABC News podcast, “No Limits with Rebecca Jarvis."

[dancingwithdylan21]

Thirsty - College AU

Summary: The reader tries to convince Stiles to go out drinking and they both get more than they bargained for.

Pairing: Stiles x Reader 

Word Count: 1,739

~

“Come on, Stilessss.” You whine dramatically, latching on to his firm bicep as if that will influence your life long best friend.

“Y/N, I can’t!” He huffs snatching his arm back.

“Dude...what kind of college kid are you?!”

“The kind that’s failing metaphysics class.” He groans. “If I don’t get at least a B on the test tomorrow then I’m screwed."

"Meta what?” You say confused.

“Exactly!” Stiles throws his hands up in the air. “Some stupid philosophy bullshit.”

“What…why? You’re a criminology major.”

“I forgot which day we had to sign up for classes. By the time I remembered, there was nothing good left. So I got stuck with a shitty three hour class every Friday.”

“Oh, Stiles. I don’t know how you get through life.” You tease him, only getting a dirty glare in response.

“You know I can’t sit still for that long, Y/N.” Stiles complains, dragging his hand through his dishelved brown hair.

“There’s this annoying girl who wears a ton of dark eye makeup. She looks like a fucking raccoon! And she legit follows me around. I sit in a different spot each class and she always fucking sits near me!”

“Well, it’s hard to resist all this charm.” You gesture towards him and move to settle down onto a futon, you know Stiles isn’t done rambling. Once he gets frustrated about something - forget it. He needs to rant.

“Hooking up with her would be a risky move.” Stiles spits out. “There’s no fucking way any sane guy would touch her without at least two condoms on."

"This is why we’re best friends, Stiles. Because you’re such a people person.” You snicker loudly.

“Oh, shut it.” He barely mumbles.

Talk about opposites attract. You’re the upbeat, easy going chick who’s always smiling. Stiles’ the grumpy, impatient dude with a heart of gold. But for some reason the dynamic works, you both definitely balance each other out.

“I have to start getting ready. I’ll be at The Emerald if you change your mind, ok?”

“What the hell is The Emerald?” Stiles scrunches up his handsome face.

“I already told you about it, man.” You roll your eyes. “It’s a new club. Everything is emerald green and silver. It’s a cool looking place!”

“Sounds…interesting.” Stiles raises an eyebrow.

“Whatever, buddy.” You laugh as you start walking out of his dorm room.

“Y/N, wait!” He jumps up in a panic. “How are you getting home because I know you’ll be too drunk to drive…”

“Lydia’s boyfriend is driving us. I’ll just find a ride with them or über if I have to.” You shrug in his direction.

“An uber?” Stiles feels almost offended. “No. If you need a ride, I’ll come get you.”

“No, Stiles! You need to study and rest up for tomorrow. Plus I’m going to my parents house and not coming back until Monday.”

“Um, were you gonna tell me that? Or just disappear for three days and see if I notice?” He snaps without thinking.

“You’re so needy, Stilinski.”

“Am not!”

“Are you sure you’re not hiding a vagina under those sweatpants?” You smirk while he plops back down at his desk.

“Oh honey, you couldn’t handle what’s under these sweatpants.”

“Really.” You deadpan taking a step closer.

“Really.” Stiles challenges leaning back in his computer chair with a smug smile.

“Oh well, I’ve gotta see this then. Drop em.”

“…What?”

“Show off your glorious cock, Stiles. Don’t be shy.” It makes your friend slightly blush and you can’t hold back a giggle.

“I don’t have time for this nonsense, Y/N. Stop distracting me with your dirty mind.” He pretends to be annoyed.

“Whatever you say, you big stud.” You crack up. Stiles rolls his eyes but he has a huge smile on his face. He crumbles up a piece of paper and throws it at you, hitting you right on the forehead.

“Score!” Stiles exclaims throwing up his arms.

“You’re twenty going on twelve, kiddo.” You shake your head at him.

“I’m freaking adorable.” Stiles sticks his tongue out at you. “What time should I pick you up?”

“Stiles..”

“No, Y/N. I’ve made up my mind.”

“But…”

“I know your parents live like 30 minutes away. It’s fine. My test isn’t until noon tomorrow. If your parents don’t mind, I can crash there and then leave early in the morning.”

Sigh. You know you’re not gonna win this.

“Fine. But if you fail the test, don’t you dare blame me! And my parents will be away this weekend so you can obviously stay over.”

“Sounds like a plan, sweetheart.” Stiles grabs a can of Pepsi from his mini fridge.

“Make sure you eat something too.”

“Yes, mom.” He says with a crooked smile.

“Shit.” You mutter at the clock. “I need to get ready. Have fun studying.”

“Yeah, I will.” Stiles pouts while he watches you leave his dorm room.

You’ve only been gone for thirty minutes and Stiles already feels left out. He wills himself to focus but he keeps wondering if you’ve left yet. Hearing a light knock, his head snaps up to see you peeking in through the half open door.

“Hey you.” Not waiting for him to answer, you stroll on in and it makes Stiles’ heart practically stop.

You look amazing. He’s so distracted that he doesn’t hear you talking to him. His mind wanders as he pictures you dancing at the club. You’ll be looking sexy as hell under those green lights and Stiles is pissed that he’s gonna miss it.

“Hello?” You snap your fingers in front of him. He shakes his thoughts away and gives you a sheepish smile.

“Here. Eat this, you weirdo.” You hand over a medium pepperoni pizza from his favorite pizza joint that’s near the campus. Thank god they deliver.

“Woah, Y/N.” Stiles grins wide pulling you in for a tight hug. “You’re the fucking best!"

Your phone starts vibrating and you see a text from Jeff flash on the screen. He’s one of those on again, off again guys who literally drives you fucking mad. It’s like he thrives on playing games and messing with your head.

"Who’s that?” Stiles asks even though he has an idea based on your reaction.

“Jeff. He said he’ll be stopping by tonight to say hi.”

Stiles’ jaw immediately tightens and he definitely wants to go with you now. He hates Jeff. The bastard is no good for you and he is always breaking your heart. Then Stiles’ the lucky one who has to pick up the pieces.

“How about you skip the club? We can eat pizza and watch a movie.” Your best friend suggests with his brown eyes boring into you.

“You have your test, dude! What’s wrong with you?”

“Me? Nothing’s wrong with me. Jeff’s just a piece of shit.” Stiles growls unable to control it. With a roll of your eyes, you ignore him and start reading a text from Lydia. You glance up and notice that he’s eyeing you with a weird look on his face.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Stiles shrugs with an attitude as he continues watching you.

“What? Tell me!” You cast your eyes down. "Does my outfit look bad?“

”…Don’t you have a longer skirt that you can wear? And a top that isn’t so tight.“ Stiles wonders staring at you.

"Seriously?” You scoff as he continues looking you up and down with a puss on his face.

“I know it’s on the slutty side but whatever. Hopefully I’ll get hit on by a hot guy cause I’m horny.” You finally answer grabbing a piece of pizza.

“Uh…”

“And then you won’t have to waste your time picking me up.” You add completely oblivious that Stiles is internally freaking out. He mutters under his breathe but you’re unable to make it out.

“What’d you say?”

“Don’t worry about it.” He spits out at you, now shooting daggers at his laptop.

“Stop pmsing, Stilinski. It’s unbecoming.” You snort at him. Stiles spins around on his computer chair, studying you with his arms crossed.

“Stop being grumpy. I bought you pizza.” Instead of replying, your best friend races over to his closet and then begins searching for something on his iPhone.

“What’s happening here? Should I be concerned?” You ask sarcastically.

“I’m googling to see if the stupid emerald place has a dress code.” Stiles answers over his shoulder so he misses it when your mouth drops open.

“Mieczyslaw Stilinski! Sit your ass back down and fucking study!” You demand with your hands on your hips.

“Oh, yeah. You’re real intimidating, Y/N.” He laughs. “Your hot pink top makes you extra scary.”

Before you get a chance to respond, Stiles rips off his shirt and starts changing in front of you. Damn it. You become distracted by his hotness but snap yourself out of it and stalk over to him and shove him in the chest.

“You were fine until I mentioned Jeff. I already told you I’m done with him for good. So relax, ok?” You try to get through to the stubborn man but he just starts whistling.

“I’m almost ready.”

“Stick with the original plan. You’re not going.” You state firmly watching him fix his messy hair.

“If you’re a bird, I’m a bird.” Stiles lazily shrugs.

“Did you just quote The Notebook?!” You gasp. “Who the fuck are you?"

Stiles chuckles and walks back to his closet to get his boots,"I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He deadpans.

“That doesn’t even have anything to do with this.” You roll your eyes.

“Yes it does. It means if you’re going then I’m going.”

“No. It means…that he’ll do whatever she’s doing because it’s what she wants…or something.” You add now confused.

“You just proved that I’m right. Like always.” Stiles flashes a cocky smile.

“This isn’t what I want! I want you to go back to being Responsible Stiles. He was just here. Like friggin thirty minutes ago!”

“Responsible Stiles has left the building.” He wiggles his eyebrows at you.

“You can’t take your test hungover, dear.”

“I’ll only have a couple of beers since I’ll be driving. Besides someone needs to be the voice of reason when Jeffrey fucking shows up.”

“Whatever.” You groan knowing that he won’t change his mind.

“Let’s get this shit show on the road!” Stiles announces, slapping your ass on the way out of his dorm.

~

Masterlist 

[tkmedia]

The Heavyweight Waiting Game

Around this time in 2021 we were due to find out who was the top man in the heavyweight division. We were told Tyson Fury against Anthony Joshua was incoming and there would not just be not just one fight but a rematch, too, and all the belts would be unified. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. It was. That huge contest was carved in half by a judge at arbitration and we were due to get Fury in a trilogy bout with Deontay Wilder and Joshua then had to face his mandatory Oleksandr Usyk. The journey to undisputed suddenly featured two semi-finals instead of one straight shootout. Fury-Wilder III was due to take place today , Joshua-Usyk – announced this week – will take place at Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium on September 25. However, after a Covid outbreak in the Fury camp the third fight with Wilder was shunted back to October 9 in Las Vegas. Provided Joshua-Uysk and Fury-Wilder both take place, and then negotiations can get Fury and Joshua in the ring in 2022, the wait for unification might not be too long. That’s if Fury and Joshua both win, but that will be of no consolation to the likes of Dillian Whyte and Joe Joyce – who fights Carlos Takam and starts as a strong favourite today. Their wait is long and will only get longer, particularly if Fury-Joshua happens and there’s a rematch. That would realistically wipe out 2022 for the belts, so Whyte, who has already famously waited years for a chance would have to wait much longer. And the upcoming heavyweights, like Filip Hrgovic, Charles Martin, Andy Ruiz and just about anyone else near the top of the ratings must decide whether they want competitive outings or coast through several months of meaningless bouts or even remain inactive as they look to preserve their high ratings. It’s one of the first times in modern history when there haven’t been enough belts to go round, but make no mistake, this is not a plea for more titles. Usyk gets his shot at Joshua by virtue of being the first mandatory in the queue for AJ’s belts. The WBO have him No. 1 in their ratings and should he lose and Joyce wins, Joyce would like assume that position but then the 35-year-old could surely expect a long wait. Of course, we are talking about eventual scenarios but either way the true picture at heavyweight will not be resolved for months and months and some fighters may miss out on some prime years while they wait.  Still, there are fights to be sold and Joshua said this week of his date with Usyk: “We are two Olympic gold medallists who have fought our way to the top and never avoided challenges. The venue is exceptional, the atmosphere will be electric, I'm honoured to be the first person to fight in such an awe-inspiring venue. The stage is set and I am ready to handle business.” Meanwhile, Fury and Wilder have had to playing a waiting game themselves. First arbitration, now Covid. They had been due to have a third fight last summer but that vanished into the ether with people questioning whether Fury needed it and if Wilder wanted it. There rematch was 18 months ago and now they must wait another 11 weeks. “I couldn't have been more ready for next Saturday,” Fury told the Daily Mail’s Jeff Powell this week, suspecting that he caught Covid from a sparring partner outside his Las Vegas bubble. “After that I'd have been just as ready to knock out Anthony Joshua in December,” he added. He is clearly keen that there will be no further delays. Fury knows the sport well and knows he has thrived when he’s been active. He didn’t want this delay and he hadn’t wanted to wait this long. There had been moves to get him out last Christmas but they came to nothing. He doesn’t want to wait any longer. “We will strictly control the access for sparring partners and increase testing,” he told Powell of the lead up to the new October 9 date. “No masseur. No fitness coach. No dietician. Even my two brothers will have to wait to join me until fight week here in Vegas. I've suffered enough frustration on this roller-coaster. I don't need more, any more than I would have risked anyone else's health by coming early out of quarantine.” Joyce might have a long wait, too, although he said he’s not looking beyond the Frenchman he meets this weekend. “I've got a big test in Takam so I won't look too far ahead because this is a tough fight,” stated Joyce. “I need to beat Takam up to make a statement so I can go on to win a world title. Takam gives it his all and he's a hard fight. It might take a few rounds, it might take all the rounds, but I will get the job done then cruise on to a world title.” Perhaps there will be a world title in the “Juggernaut’s” future but he might have to be prepared for a long cruise because the heavyweight queue is backing up, seemingly with no chance to jump it.  Read the full article

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior 9/11/20 – I AM WOMAN, BROKEN HEARTS GALLERY, RENT-A-PAL, UNPREGNANT AND MORE!

Thankfully, we’re getting a slower week this week after the past few weeks of absolute insanity with so many new releases. This week, we also get a nice string of movies about women that are mostly made by women directors, so hopefully these won’t get lost in the shuffle of theaters reopening.

To be perfectly honest, I went into Unjoo Moon’s I AM WOMAN (Quiver Distribution) – this week’s “Featured Flick” -- thinking it was a doc about ‘70s pop sensation Helen Reddy. Imagine my surprise to discover that it actually was a narrative film with Tilda Cobham-Hervey playing the Australian singer who moved to New York in 1966 after winning a contest, expecting a record deal but only winding up with disappointment.  Once there, she’d meet journalist Lilian Roxon (Danielle Macdonald, being able to use her real Australian accent for once) and Jeff Weld (Evan Peters), the man who would become her manager and then husband. Once the couple move to L.A. with Helen’s daughter Traci (from her previous marriage), things began to pick up at the same time as Reddy starts dealing with issues in her marriage and friendship with Roxon.

Listen, I get it. To some (or maybe all) younger people, including film critics, Helen Reddy represents the cheesier side of ‘70s music. I only know her music, since I was a young kid who listened to AM Top 40 radio for much of the ‘70s, but by the end of the decade, I had already switched to metal, punk and noisier rock. As you can tell from watching I Am Woman, Reddy is a particularly interesting music personality, particularly once you realize how hard she struggled to get into the business with a husband who only feigned to support her after dragging her to L.A. for “her career.”

There were many takeaways from watching Moon’s film, but one of the bigger ones is how amazing Cobham-Hervey is at portraying a woman that few of us may have actually seen perform even on television. I’m not sure if Cobham-Hervey did any of her own singing or is lip-syncing the whole time, but it doesn’t matter because she instills so much joy into the performances, especially the two times she sings the highly-inspirational title song live.

Although there isn’t a ton of major drama in Reddy’s life, most that does exist revolves around her relationship with Wald, who is depicted by Peters as an out-of-control coke-sniffing monster. Those in Hollywood may have dealt with Wald as a movie producer or during his stint as Sylvester Stallone’s manager, and only they will know how exaggerated this performance is. Far more interesting is Helen’s friendship with Macdonald’s Roxon which would inspire her to perform the song “You and Me Against the World.”  (Seriously, if you want a good cry, throw that song on after watching I Am Woman.)

Moon does a great job with the material, whether it’s recreating New York in the ‘60s – often using music to set the tone of the period -- or by framing Reddy’s story with Phyllis Schlaffly’s fight against the ERA, as depicted in FX’s mini-series Mrs. America.  Still, it never loses track of Reddy’s journey and her role as a mother to Traci and slightly less to Wald’s son, Jordan. The movie ends with a wonderful and tearful epilogue, and I will not lie that I was tearing up more than once while watching this movie.

I Am Woman may be relatively uncomplicated, but it’s still a compelling relaying of Reddy's amazing story bolstered by an incredible knock-em-dead performance by Tilda Cobham-Hervey. It’s also one of the most female-empowering film I’ve seen since the Ruth Bader Ginsburg movie On the Basis of Sex, starring Felicity Jones.

This week’s primary theatrical release is Natalie Krinsky’s THE BROKEN HEARTS GALLERY (Stage 6/Sony), starring Geraldine Viswanathan as Lucy, a young woman who works at a gallery who is still obsessed with her ex-coworker/boyfriend Max. On the night of her  disastrous break-up, Lucy meets-cute Nick (Dacre Montgomery from Stranger Things), who later inspires her to rid of her hoarding issues by creating the “Broken Hearts Gallery.” This is a place where people who have broken up can bring the remnants of said relationship by donating the mementos they’ve maintained from their partners as sentimental value.

I’m a big fan of Viswanathan from her appearance in Blockers and TBS’ “Miracle Workers” series, as she’s clearly very talented as a comic actress, but I couldn’t help but go into this with more than a little cynicism, because it does follow a very well-worn rom-com formula that can be traced right back to When Harry Met Sally. Yup, another one.  Much of this movie comes across like a bigger budget version of a movie that might play Tribeca Film Festival, and I wish I could say that was a compliment because I’ve seen a lot of good movies at Tribeca. But also just as many bad ones.

The problem is that The Broken Hearts Gallery isn’t very original, and its roots are especially obvious when it starts interspersing the recently-heartbroken giving testimonials. It’s also a little pretentious, because rather than the real New York City that would be recognizable to anyone who lives there, it’s more of a Millennial woke fantasy where everyone is a 20-something LGBTQ+ of color.  Even so, the main trio of Lucy, Nick and Nick’s business partner Marcos (Arturo Castro from Broad City) do keep things fun even when things are getting predictable.

To be honest, I’ll be perfectly happy to see Viswanathan become the next Meg Ryan, because part of the reason why I warmed up to the movie is because I thought she was quite great in it. (I hate to say it but she’ll definitely need a simple name to remember to make that happen. I’d like to suggest G-Vis… as in G-Vis, she’s awesome!) There’s no question she’s the best part of the movie, but it also thrives from some of the other women cast around her, including Molly Gordon, Phillipa Soo and (surprise, surprise!) Bernadette Peters. (At times, I was worried Lucy’s friends would get particularly annoying, but you’ll warm up to them as well.)

Krinsky’s movie is cute, and while it certainly gets a little overly sentimental at times, there are also moments that are quite heartfelt, so basically, it’s a tolerable addition to the rom-com genre. The fact that the characters are so likeable kept me from outright hating the movie, especially once it gets to its corny and somewhat predictable ending. Another thing I like about Broken Hearts Gallery is that at least it’s making an effort to have some sort of theatrical presence, including drive-in theaters.

Next up is Jon Stevenson’s RENT-A-PAL (IFC Midnight), a rather strange and very dark horror-comedy. It stars Brian Landis Folkins as David, a lonely 40-year-old living with his elderly mother suffering from dementia, who has been using the services of a dating service called Video Rendezvous. This is the ‘80s after all, so it involves getting VHS testimonials from various women. One day, David finds a tape labelled “Rent a Pal” and he decides to check it out. It turns out to be a video of a guy named Andy (Wil Wheaton aka Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation) who David begins having conversations with, but once David gets his chance to have a real relationship with a nice woman named Lisa (Amy Rutledge), he’s been dragged too far down the rabbit hole with Andy’s evil urgings.

This was recommended to me by my own personal rent-a-pal, Erick Weber of Awards Ace, who saw it weeks ago. I totally could understand why he would have liked it, because it’s pretty good in terms of coming up with an original idea using elements that at least us older guys can relate to (especially the living with your Mom part which I had to do a few years ago).  I wasn’t sure but I generally thought I knew where it was going, because David’s trajectory always seemed to be heading towards My Friend Dahmer or Maniac territory. What I liked about Folkins’ performance is that you generally feel for him right up until he gets to that point. I also really liked his innocent relationship with Lisa and was hoping things that wouldn’t get as dark as where they eventually end up. I also have to draw attention to Wheaton’s performance, because as one might expect if you only know him from the “Star Trek” show he did as a kid, this is a very different role for him similar to Seann Michael Scott in last year’s Bloodline.

Either way, Stevenson is a decent writer and director who really pushes the boundaries with where Andy takes his new friend, and it’s especially great for its synth-heavy soundtrack that reminds me of some of John Carpenter’s best scores, as we watch David’s inevitable descent into madness. You’ll frequently wonder where it’s going, but for me, it just got too dark, so I only really could enjoy it up to a point.

A little cheerier is UNPREGNANT (HBO Max), the new film from Rachel Lee Goldberg, who directed the recent Valley Girl remake, although this time she’s adapting a book written by Jenni Hendricks. It stars Haley Lu Richardson (from Split and Support the Girls) as 17-year-old Veronica who discovers that her dopey boyfriend Kevin has gotten her pregnant. Since women under 18 can’t get an abortion in Missouri without a parents’ consent, she goes on a road trip with her estranged childhood friend Bailey (Barbie Ferreira) to New Mexico to get the job done.

It’s more than  little weird seeing this movie come out in the same year as a much more serious version of the same movie in Elyza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometime Always. That aside, Goldberg and her cast do their best to make this something more in the vein of last year’s Book Smart, although that’s also a fairly high watermark for any movie.

Because this is a road trip comedy, it tends to follow a fairly similar path as other movies where they meet a lot of strange characters along the way, as they try to get a ride after being busted cause Bailey stole her mother’s boyfriend’s car for the trip. For instance, they meet a friendly couple who tend to be pro-lifers who want to change Veronica’s mind, and the best side character is Giancarlo Esposito as a conspiracy theorist named Bob.

I guess my biggest problem with the movie is that it just isn’t that funny and feels fairly standard, but at least it has a decent ending to make up for the predictability of the rest of the movie.

Now streaming on Netflix is Maimouna Doucouré’s French coming-of-age film Mignonnes aka CUTIES, a film that premiered at Sundance and then stirred up quite a bit of controversy last month due to its marketing campaign, but is actually not the pervy male gaze movie which it may have been sold as. It’s about an 11-year-old Sengalese girl named Amy Diop (Fathia Youssouf) who wants to join the school’s “cool girl” dance group, known as the “Cuties,” even though it goes against her family’s Muslim beliefs.  Amy learns to dance so she can be part of the dance team and take part in a dance competition, but you know that this decision will led to trouble.s

Cuties got a lot of backlash from for the trailer and Netflix’s decision to release Doucouré’s movie, which is about a young girl discovering her sexuality, although it isn’t really something lurid or gross but actually a very strong coming-of-age film. I haven’t seen the trailer, but I can only imagine what scene it focused on that got people so riled up, since there are dance scenes that felt a little creepy to me. Other than that aspect of the film, Cuties is as innocent as a Judy Blume book. I mean, how else do you expect kids to learn about real life than movies like this? (Unfortunately, the movie is TV-MA so young teens won’t be able to watch it.)

The big problem with the Cuties is that they’re actually kind of bratty and bullies, almost like a younger “Mean Girls” girl gang, so it’s very hard to like any of them. They’re also trying to act way older than they really are, and you can only imagine what dark places that might led, as you worry about Amy getting dragged down with them, just because she wants to have friends and feel popular.

Despite my issues with Cuties, Maimouna Doucouré is a fantastic filmmaker, and this is a pretty amazing debut, especially notable for how she’s able to work with the young cast but also make a movie that looks amazing. That said, Cuties is a decent coming-of-age film, although I feel like I’ve seen better versions of this movie in films like Mustang and The Fits.

Also from France comes Justine Triet’s SYBIL (Music Box Films), starring Virgine Efira (who appeared in Triet’s earlier film, In Bed with Victoria) as the title character, a jaded psychotherapist who decides to return to her passion of writing, getting her inspiration from an actress patient named Margot (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who she becomes obsessed with. I don’t have a lot to say about this movie other than it wasn’t really for me. As far as French films go, a movie really has to stand out from the usual talkie drama filled with exposition, and though I thought the performances by the two women were great, I didn’t really care for the script or the pacing on this one. After playing at last year’s Cannes, Toronto and the New York Film Festival, Sybil will be available via Virtual Cinema through Film at Lincoln Center and the Laemmle in L.A. as well as other cities. You can watch the trailer and find out how to watch it through your local arthouse at the official site.

Now seems like as good a time as any to get into some docs…

 Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortés’ doc ALL-IN: THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY (Amazon) follows Stacey Abrams through her run for Atlanta Governor in 2018, but it also deals with the laws that had been put in place to try to keep black voters from taking part in their right as Americans to be able to vote. I’m not sure what’s going on with me right now, but I generally just don’t have much interest in political docs right now, maybe because there’s so much politics on TV and in the news. I also have very little interest in Abrams or even having the racist history of the American South drilled into my head by another movie. I was born in 1965, my family didn’t even live in this country until 1960, and I’ve spent my life trying to treat everyone equally, so watching a movie like this and being preached to about how awful African-Americans have been treated in parts of the South for hundreds of years, I’m just not really sure what I’m supposed to do about it here in New York. I guess my biggest problem with All-In, which is a perfectly fine and well-made doc – as would be expected from Garbus – is that it lacks focus, and it seems to be all over the place in terms of what it’s trying to say… and I’m not even sure what it is trying to say, nor did I have the patience to find out. I thought Slay the Dragon handled the issues with gerrymandering far better, and I think I would have preferred a movie that ONLY focused on Abrams and her life and political career than trying to make a bigger statement. All-In will open at a few drive-ins (tonight!) and then will be on Amazon Prime on September 18.

I was similarly mixed on Jeff Orlwosky’s doc, THE SOCIAL DILEMMA, which debuted on Netflix this week. This one looks at the addiction people have for social media apps like Facebook and Twitter, and how the information of what people watch and click on is collected into a database that’s sold to the highest bidder. Basically, it’s your worst fears about social media come to life, but my issue with this one is that the filmmaker decided to hire actors to dramatize parts of the movie, showing one family dealing with social media and phone addiction, which seemed like an odd but probably necessary decision other than the fact that the topic is so nerdy and so over my head that maybe it was necessary to illustrate what’s being explained by programmers. Again, not a terrible doc, just not something I had very little interest in even if it is an important subject (and I’m probably spending too much on social media and essentially more of the problem than the solution).

I saw S. Leo Chiang and Yang Sun’s doc OUR TIME MACHINE at Tribeca last year, and I quite liked it. It follows influential Chinese artist Ma Liang (Maleonn) who collaborates with his Peking Opera director father Ma Ke, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, on an elaborate and ambitious project called “Papa’s Time Machine” using life-sized mechanical puppets. I don’t have a ton to say about the movie but it’s a nice look into the Chinese culture and traditions and how the country and art itself has changed between two generations.

One doc I missed last week but will be available digitally this week is Michael Paszt’s Nail in the Coffin: The Fall and Rise of Vampiro about semi-retired professional wrestler Ian Hodgkinson aka Vampiro, who is a Lucha Libre legend.

There’s a lot of other stuff on Netflix this week, including THE BABYSITTER: KILLER QUEEN, the sequel to the Samara Weaving-starring horror-thriller, again co-written and directed by McG (Charlies Angels: Full Throttle). This one stars Bella Thorne, Leslie Bibb and Ken Marino, as it follows Judah Lewis’ Cole after surviving the satanic blood cult from the first movie.

I don’t know nearly as much about the British comedy series The Duchess, other than it stars comedian Katherine Ryan as a single mother juggling a bunch of things. Julie and the Phantoms is Netflix’s latest attempt to be the Disney channel with a movie about a young girl named Julie (Madison Reyes) who decides to start a band with a group of ghosts (hence the title). It’s even from Kenny Laguna, who is best known for the Disney Channel’s biggest hits High School Musical and The Descendants.

Other stuff to look out for this week include Kevin Del Principe’s thriller Up on the Glass (Gravitas Ventures), which is now available On Demand, digital and Blu-Ray; the Russian dogs doc Space Dogs (Icarus Films) – available via Alamo on Demand; Phil Wall’s doc The Standard  (Gravitas Ventures), and Andrei Bowden-Schwartz, Gina O’Brien’s tennis comedy All-In (on Amazon Prime and VOD/Digital) and Sam B. Jones’ Red White and Wasted (Dark Star Pictures).

Next week, more movies not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

[accio-ambition]

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for the wonderful and encouraging words in response to the first chapter! Honestly, the amount of messages and tag screaming I received made me so happy. I cannot express how much I appreciated every single comment. I can only hope that I do the story and you guys justice. :) I forgot to mention last time that I’ll be updating this every Tuesday and Friday well into sweater weather season. And also we don’t meet Killian for a little while yet, whoops, did, please don’t kill me. Another huge thank you to @sotheylived for beta-ing and @shipsxahoy and @queen-icicle-fandom for the lovely accompanying art. You guys are the best! Go give shipsxahoy’s original post of the cover and queen-icicle-fandom’s snapshots from the first chapter, as well as the other @captainswanbigbang stories, some love. I’m working my way through them right now and they’re all SO GOOD.

Summary: Bouncing around with her son for the majority of her life, Emma Swan has told herself she’s happy in the city. It’s where the most camera operating jobs are, and that’s how she makes her money. But when an old friend calls her and asks for her help on a new project in small town Maine, Emma finds herself in a place she’s never been with people she doesn’t know filming a profession she knows nothing about. But when the captain of the ship she’s filming begins taking a keen interest in her and her life, she finds herself wondering whether she might just catch something other than fish. Deadliest Catch AU Rating: T Content warning: Character death, some violent situations

FFnet/AO3

Chapter Two

With the weekend behind them, Emma at least has work to keep her mind off of the impending future: Jefferson’s offer, David’s advice, the possibility of moving. This series she’s working on, it’s alright. The cast is sweet – especially Anna, who’s too bubbly for her own good and exactly what casting was looking for in their main character. But it’s minimal work for her. They’re filming on a fucking camcorder approximately four years past ancient.

But it’s a gig. For such a shitty set up, it’s not all that shitty. The pay is good, the food is better, and she gets the weekends off to hang out with her son.

Her traitorous mind thinks of the possibilities. Maybe it would be good to sort of…settle. Good for Henry – he could make better friends if they have to stay in town for a set amount of months instead of moving wherever they’re filming. He could focus better in school, maybe join a sports team.

And her. It could be good for her. She knows Mary Margaret and David and Jefferson, so she wouldn’t have to worry about making friends or having people to watch Henry if something urgent comes up. She’d have a job already set up that has the potential to go on for years. And it’d be an adventure: she’s never so much as been on a boat, let alone know how it works.

“Doesn’t seem like a good idea, actually,” she mumbles to herself as she fixes the camera minutely, trying to adjust for Anna’s subtle shift in positioning.

“What was that?” the director asks her. “Is something wrong?”

“Nope,” Emma quickly answers, standing up and backing away. “Everything’s fine, just talking to myself.”

She can’t come to a decision by the end of the week, something particularly unusual. Even since Henry was born, Emma’s been more of a shoot first, ask questions later sort of person. It’s how she survived and sort of thrived growing up in the foster system. But something about this opportunity – the time, the people involved, everything – gives her pause.

Unsurprisingly, it’s her son that makes her decision for her. Saturday morning is rainy and ugly. The perfect kind of day for catching up on the movies they both managed to miss in theaters.

Instead of connecting her laptop to the TV, Henry sits down next to her with the laptop in hand.

“I’ve got so many questions,” she says sarcastically. “One, what are you doing with my laptop and, two, why aren’t Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones on my TV right now?”

“Ghostbusters can wait, mom,” Henry huffs. “This is more important.” He presses a couple of keys on the laptop and shifts around on the couch so that the computer screen is completely hidden from her. For a moment, Henry sits there and looks at her, as if he’s gauging her reaction to news she hasn’t heard yet.

Then he inhales deeply. “I found us a house.”

She’s flabbergasted. “What?”

He turns the laptop so she can see the screen properly. “A house,” he repeats himself. “In Storybrooke. For when we go there.”

Taking a look at what the kid’s pulled up on the screen, Emma’s jaw drops even further. “Kid, I haven’t even accepted the job yet.”

The screen shrinks from her view as Henry sets the computer back on his lap and scoots away. “Why not?” he asks.

“Partially because you hadn’t said anything.”

Henry shrugs, his focus turning to the house on the screen before him. “It’ll be an adventure.”

“But won’t you miss your friends here?” Emma inquires.

“Mom, I’ll make new friends,” he reasons, flopping onto the couch cushion behind him. “I think it would be really good for us. Plus I could finally see snow.”

That makes her chuckle, reaching forward to pinch his knee so it jerks. “Is that what this is all about?” she asks him. When he doesn’t immediately answer and she spots his bashful look, Emma sighs. “Henry, all you had to do was ask and we could’ve driven up to Denver or something and gone skiing.”

Henry mumbles something unintelligible, wiggling away from her so that she doesn’t pinch his knee again. When he’s got his back to the opposite end of the couch, he shoots her with a withering look.

“Take the job, mom. Stop looking for a reason to run from it.”

It’s moments like these where Emma can’t help but grin. If she had any doubt as to who’s child this was, it’s accusations and truths as he’s just said that remind her Henry is hers. He knows her so well because, beneath it all, that is exactly why she hasn’t answered Jefferson’s offer yet.

(And she did have concerns about the kid, that wasn’t a lie. She is a mother, at the end of the day.)

“Then look at the house,” Henry continues. “It’s got a fireplace and an upstairs and it’s pretty close to the water.”

“Really?” she asks. Following her son’s finger, Emma spots the little map. It’s got a green pop-up that represents the house and, just as Henry said, three streets over is water. “I bet you can see the ocean from the top floor.”

“Dibs!” he shouts in her ear.

“What are you dibs-ing?”

“I call dibs on a bedroom with a view of the ocean.”

“Um, I’m the parent here, I get first dibs on everything.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Yes it is, you’ll understand when you’re older.” Emma exhales noisily, letting out a little moan along with it. She lets her head loll back on the couch and stares at the ceiling in contemplation. “So we’re really doing this?”

Henry grabs the phone and hands it to her. “Operation Pirate is a go.”

With a resigned sigh, she dials Jefferson. “Can’t you come up with a different name?” she asks as she searches for Jefferson’s number. “You know I’m not going to be following Jack Sparrow or Long John Silver or anything like that.”

Henry shrugs. “Operation Go Fish doesn’t have as nice a ring to it.”

Mimicking his shrug, Emma mumbles, “Fair” before the phone connection goes through and she’s greeted with, “Hello, Emma Swan” from the other side.

“Hello Jefferson.” She winces a little because her voice sounds stern even to her own ears. “Um, I’m calling to-”

“Now wait,” Jefferson interrupts her swiftly. “Should I be sitting down? Do I need a box of Kleenex? Grace!” he yells. “Can you find your papa some Kleenex?”

“What are you talking about, Jeff?”

“I’m assuming you’re calling to let me down gently,” he says matter-of-factly.

Emma chuckles. “No, I was calling to accept.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” she repeats herself. “I mean, unless you want someone else.”

“No, Em, this is going to be delightful!” Hearing how happy her old friend is on the other end of the line makes her smile. Jefferson’s always been a bit eccentric - a little crazy more often than not - and thus is always at one extreme end of the reaction spectrum. At least this time around, it’s the positive side. “So do you think you can get up here by the last week of June? Little prep time, get to know the ship, et cetera, et cetera.”

Emma gives Henry a thumbs up. “I think I can manage that.”

“Amaaazing,” Jefferson sings. “We’ve already got a place up there we’re moving to in three weeks, so we’ll be on site if you’ve got any concerns. We can look for places for you two.”

Sending a sly eye across the couch to her son, she says, “Actually, Henry’s already on that mission.”

Jefferson chuckles. “What a forward-thinking son you’ve got there,” he says. “Wonderful. You know how to reach me if something comes up. I’m working with the network on contracts and salaries and such, but we can figure out the nitty-gritty in person.”

“Yeah, that’s totally fine. So long as I’m getting paid.”

“Of course. I’m working for something in the almost exorbitant range.”

“As long as I can keep my kid alive, I’m fine with whatever.”

“Great.” There’s a bit of a lull in the conversation before Jefferson, a tad more serious than she’s used to hearing him, assures her. “This is going to be great, Em. Don’t have any doubts.”

“I don’t have any yet.” Henry starts waving erratically at her, causing her to roll her eyes. “The kid’s having a stroke or something trying to get my attention, so I’ll call you if I have any trouble.”

“Awesome. Goodbye, Emma Swan.”

“Bye Jeff.”

“Bye Jefferson, bye Grace!” Henry shouts before Emma hangs up with a sigh.

Rolling her shoulders back, Emma prepares herself for her son’s enthusiasm. Where he got so much of it, she’ll never know. “Alright, kid, so what have you got for me?”

“You’re gonna love it,” he says, flicking through the pictures.

Her first thought is, “It’s a house,” which she shares aloud.

She hasn’t lived in a house in years. They’re too expensive for her paycheck, too big for just her and Henry, and too permanent for her lifestyle and history. Since he’s been born, it’s been apartment after apartment with an occasional loft thrown in to change things up a little. And it’s worked well.

But, Emma supposes, now that Henry’s growing up and getting older, it makes sense for him to experience that white picket fence life.

“That’s what I said,” he sassily responds. At her raised brow, Henry exhales and gestures toward the computer screen. “I looked for apartments. They don’t really have anything good for us, but they’ve got a bunch of houses.” He clicks through a couple of the pictures and Emma gets a general idea of what the place looks like. Henry stops at one picture in particular that shows what looks like a living room. “Look, a fireplace.”

All Emma can see is the enormous number to buy - not even rent, buy, you’ve got to buy the place - the place. It’s got too many high numbers for her liking. “It’s a bit too expensive, Henry,” she tells him gently. “But we can call the realtor and see if they’ve got something else like this place.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see her son’s shoulders fall a little. “Okay,” he mumbles dejectedly. And then he’s clicking around on the laptop again, another picture of another house popping up on the screen. “But what about this one?” he asks, excitement in his voice once more.

Ghostbusters forgotten, they spend the rest of the morning and a majority of the afternoon looking at houses, finding them on Google Maps, and casually creeping on the town Emma hopes might provide a little bit of home. David wasn’t lying when he said the town was small: Storybrooke had to be less than an eighth the size of Phoenix. One hotel, a diner, an ice cream place, a handful of shops. Two bars, so that counts for something in Emma’s book, not that she would have much time between Henry and filming.

It looks very quaint. Very small town America. And, frankly, she’s kind of afraid. It’s been a decade since she lived somewhere where she knew her neighbors and could chat with whoever she ran into at the grocery store. Smiles on the street and a sense of belonging and community instead of anonymity. That’s what she needed when she had Henry: a way to blend into the crowd to shield herself and her son from any sort of judgment.

“What do you think, Mom?”

“I think it’s gonna be interesting,” she says softly. “Different.”

“Different in a good way or not?”

She shrugs. “Guess we’ll have to see when we get there, right?”

She thinks that’s the end of the conversation – that they’re both sort of jumping into the deep end without much thought – until she’s vacuuming Henry’s room on one of her odd days off and finds a countdown on his bedside table. The number is in the mid-30s on that day and when she flips to the final day, she finds more colors and what looks like balloons. In her son’s script, Emma reads Moving to Storybrooke tomorrow!

The thought of confronting Henry crosses her mind, but the kid’s really excited about this. Surprisingly so. And sensing his enthusiasm makes Emma herself a little more excited about their upcoming adventure. They’ll road trip cross-country to Maine and settle into something a little different than they’re both used to these days.

The whole ordeal of packing is both stressful and calming. Once she settles into the process – taping boxes, filling boxes, labeling boxes, stacking the boxes away – Emma’s brain goes blank. She’s done this so many times before, it’s old hat. When Henry was younger, she’d wrap him in a scarf she’d found and cradle him against her chest, or sit him down with a toy train.

Now, though, they make a game of it, or at least try to. He’s only ten, so his attention span isn’t all too long, but when he does help her out, they shoot objects into the box like a basketball hoop.

(Emma doesn’t bother to fight the fact that she goes through afterwards, once Henry’s lost interest or gone off to do his homework, and reorganizes every box. Over the years, they’ve accumulated much more than she’d ever thought, but she’s still wary and tries to pack it all into as few boxes as humanly possible.)

They still don’t have a place to put all their belongings once they get to Storybrooke. Despite a call to the two realtors in town, Emma’s yet to find a place that Henry likes within her price range. She appreciates that her son has a specific idea of what he wants in his life, but a camerawoman’s salary just does not cover a stone fireplace, a wraparound porch, and a view of the harbor, even if Jefferson’s promised raise turns out. It just doesn’t.

But she’s doing her best, fielding Skype tours early in the morning and spending time after dinner perusing the web. She even calls on Mary Margaret to visit the final contenders in person, just so she can get a feel for it from someone she trusts.

(That leads to late night phone calls catching up and she really, really has missed her closest friend. She didn’t realize how much until the second time it happened, when Mary Margaret brought up an old joke from college that Emma had forgotten about.

It’s been a long time since she laughed so hard she cried.)

The boxes are piling up in a corner of their apartment. Emma’s already locked into a promise to sign a contract with a television network: they’re moving to Maine. They just don’t have a place to live for the time being, despite their hard efforts.

That is, until one afternoon, while she’s packing away temporarily useless kitchen utensils and Henry’s checking what books are available at the library today.

“Mom, this is the house,” Henry tells her. “This is it.”

Her brows furrow as she sets the potato masher on the counter to come sit next to him, getting a perfect view of the screen. Instead of the local library’s portal, he’s on a real estate site. The house he’s talking about is the first house he showed her a couple weeks ago, the one with the fireplace by the water. With a sigh, Emma tries to be gentle with her reminder. “We already looked at that house, kid, and I told you-”

“That it was expensive, I know,” he interrupts her. “But look at it now.”

At first, she glances at the computer screen just to appease her son. But, on second look, Emma sees what he’s referring to: the price has gone down significantly, to just within their price range.

“W-what?” she stutters. “How?”

Henry’s got this shy smile he’s trying to hide, the expression he always wears when he’s about to tell her something he’s done but knows he shouldn’t have. “I called the realtor of that house to talk to her and she told me that David and Mary Margaret live in the house next door,” he explains. “So she called them up and talked to them and realized she knew Mary Margaret and brought the price down.”

“What?”

Henry shrugs. She supposes that could make some semblance of sense - Henry relating their financial situation to the realtor, and then the realtor called the Nolans as a reference check. It’s possible Mary Margaret posed as another potential buyer. It could be possible. Improbable, but possible.

Mary Margaret would say it was a sign. You’re supposed to be in this house at this point in life, something like that. And Emma can’t say she wouldn’t agree. The cards seemed to be falling in just the right way.

“I really like this place, Mom,” Henry says, interrupting her thoughts. Gesturing toward the screen again, he adds, “And at this rate, it would be rude not to live there, after what Ms. Shoemaker did.”

Loathe though she is to admit it, the kid’s got a point. The realtor, Ms. Shoemaker, obviously wants this house off her hands if she’s willing to lower the price that much just for them to live there. And, Emma reasons, she would feel a little bad for putting the woman through all that trouble just to decide no.

And the house is really nice. A house.

Emma glares at her son, scolding him with a stern finger to his nose. “You’re manipulative, you know that, right?”

Henry whoops in excitement, jumping off his chair and throwing his arms up in celebration. “Fireplaces and snowmen!” he shouts. Returning to her side, he hugs her tightly as she laughs. “And when Christmas comes, we can get a real tree!”

Gently pushing him away, Emma goes back to her task of sorting the utensils. “All right, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ve still got to pack all this stuff up.”

“But Moooom,” her son complains loudly. “A house. We’ve only lived in apartments.” Henry tugs at the hem of her shirt. “C’mon, Mom, let’s celebrate a little bit. We can pack some more tomorrow.”

(It is a really big thing, he’s got a point. Buying a house is a really adult thing.)

(The voice of reason in the back of her head reminds her that she’s only decided to buy a house. She’s still got to call up Ms. Shoemaker to accept her offer. Well, she should probably check her bank account first, and then she’ll probably have to apply for some sort of loan or something.)

(But she’s going to buy a house. White picket fence and all.)

Setting down the slotted spoon in her hand with a reluctant sigh, Emma turns to Henry. “How about some ice cream?” she suggests.

Her son’s bright smile in response reminds her why Emma does anything in the first place.

[thepropertylovers]

Feature Friday with Jeff Pillar & Giang Le

Happy Friday the 13th everyone! What do you have planned this weekend? We are going to be deep cleaning the house and editing some videos and we are looking forward to the down time. It's been a hectic week, but it's been a lot of fun. We posted our coming out story as well as the story of how we met, and you guys have left the most heartfelt and sincere comments. Also, we've been getting a bunch of messages from you guys about your coming out stories and we are in the process of responding to them, so thank you for your patience!

This week's Feature Friday is a beautiful one. Jeff and Giang gave us all the feels when they describe what they love most about each other. You can feel the love coming through the words and we think you guys will fall for their words, too. See what we mean below...

Where are you from?  Jeff: New Jersey, Giang: Connecticut

Where do you live?  Philadelphia, PA

What’s your Instagram handle?  Jeff: jsp483, Giang: giang315

How long have y’all been together and how did you two meet? Who asked out who?  Jeff: We celebrated 8 years together in July.  We met online in 2009, when I lived in Philadelphia and Giang lived in NYC.  I suggested Giang come down one weekend to visit me and go to the beach.  That was two weeks after we first started talking. (My favorite picture is posted here from that day at the beach).

Choose a song for the story of your relationship:  “Opposites Attract” by Paula Abdul.  So many lines are spot on! “You like the movies, and I like TV.  I take things serious and you take ‘em light.  [You] go to bed early and I party all night…[]he makes the bed, and []he steals the covers.  []he likes it neat, and he makes a mess. I take it easy, baby I get obsessed.”

What is your favorite thing about each other? Jeff: My favorite thing about Giang is how uncontaminated he is by drama.  Many people thrive on drama.  Others have a way of finding themselves caught up in drama.  Giang is impervious to drama.  This is one of the main reasons we almost never fight, since there is never drama that is straining or stressing our relationship.  Giang: Physically, my favorite thing about Jeff is when we cuddle and he squeezes me in a bear hug so hard that I can't breathe for two seconds. He does this to me several times a day. Personally, my favorite thing about Jeff is his authenticity. He doesn't hide the fact that he isn't hip and cool, and up to date with all the social flavors of the day. It gives me a lot of ammunition for teasing him. I remember when Adele became big. We were in the car, and he asked me who "A Deli" was. He wasn't kidding. He likes his old school music, music he grew up listening to with his parents. He prides himself on being a contrarian and an iconoclast, sometimes to my frustration, but it's a character trait that I deeply admire. He doesn't try to hide the fact that he's a nerd, and a history buff. He doesn't like being out of his comfort zone and he does little to hide it. We recently came back from a two week family vacation to southeast Asia, and his comfort zone was certainly tested...food, culture, weather, everything. While I laughed and teased him about it, he made no effort to change the way he is. If Jeff likes you, you'll know it. If he doesn't like you, you'll know it. There is no fake smile with Jeff. I say all this to try and convey how authentic he is. He is who he is and does not hide any of it. He embraces the way he is almost as much as he would a gallon of ice cream. Oh that's the other thing I love about him, his love for ice cream. He can go through two gallons of ice cream in one sitting.

How would you describe your home décor style? Giang: Modern and minimalist.  I am an architect, and take the lead when it comes to furnishings and décor.  Jeff happens to have very similar tastes, so it’s a good match.  We both like glass, white, and clean lines. 

Any big plans for the future? Where do you see yourselves in 10 years?  Around 10 years from now we will probably sell our home in South Philly (which we just bought 11 months ago).  With 10 years of homeownership experience (and with our student loans finally paid off!), we hope to work on our own projects.  Jeff is happy in his career as the COO of a consulting company, and Giang has his own budding career as an architect.  We hope to combine our expertise and turn it into a new career, or at least an expansive hobby.  Just as long as we do it together! 

What is your favorite memory together?  Our favorite memory together was the day we rode bikes through San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge, in September 2014.  It was the most perfect day, weather-wise, and it was just the two of us, all day.  We had lobster rolls for lunch, a delicious chocolate chip cookie in Sausalito, and Italian for dinner after taking the ferry back past Alcatraz.  Close runner up would be Jeff’s 33rd birthday in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

What is one thing still left on your bucket list?  We both want to be self-employed.  Achieving this will give us the freedom to fulfill all of the other bucket list items (Australia, Mykonos, finishing the Internet).

How old were you when you came out and what was your experience like?  Jeff: I was 23, in between college and law school.  I told my best friend first.  Next, I told my mom, one day while driving to the store together.  She had realized it years ago, and reacted by noting that patio furniture was on sale at Home Depot.  I would be hard-pressed to think of a truly bad experience.  My parents, siblings, friends and extended family did not care that I was gay.  It should be this way for every person coming out.  Giang: I came out when I was 24, after I was done with college and grad school. My coming out experience was one filled with lots of love and support. I came out first to my sister, then all my close friends, and then finally my parents. I struggled to speak when I came out to my sister, making her think that I was trying to tell her I had a terminal illness and was going to die. When I finally got the words out, she continued to cry but as a result of happiness and relief that it wasn't "bad news." All of my close friends were completely supportive, so I could not have asked for anything more. I told my mom before I told my dad. My mom cried for a few days, but my dad told me that I'm his son and that I needed to be me and do whatever made me happy. In hindsight, my only regret about coming out was not doing it sooner.

Have you faced any backlash or hardships as a couple?  Jeff: We really haven’t.  During our time together, we’ve lived in Philadelphia and NYC, so not exactly the Bible Belt.  Giang: The only hardships we really face are self-inflicted, as a result of our differing personalities. Jeff's a homebody, while I like to be out and about. Jeff doesn't consume alcohol, while I enjoy spending time with friends having a drink or two. Jeff likes the beach, while I like the city. We make it work. Or perhaps, that's WHY our relationship works.

What is one piece of advice you would give to others on how to make a relationship last?  Jeff: Avoid fights, as there is rarely a good reason to have one, and no one ever feels good about it afterward.  Oh, and our super-duper secret to success: we do not judge what each other eats. Giang: I think the key is to always make sure our own identities shine. Once one person tries to change another person into something they're not or something they don't want to be, that's when the relationship fails. Also, buy him lots of ice cream. Also, agree that Giang is always right. Humor is extremely important. Make sure you make each othother laugh every day. 

[shuttaapp]

Skate to create: Neal Boyd

Neal Boyd, a.k.a Grimcity, has spent more than 30 years surfing on the concrete. Although he does it mainly for fun, he has accidentally compiled an enormous experience in this field.

In this interview, we talk with Neal Boyd about skateboarding, how we got his start, his Youtube channel, the pro skaters who influenced him most, and his thoughts about the skateboarding scene.

1. Where are you originally from?

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, raised in Jackson, Louisiana, and have lived in Hamond, Louisiana since 1995. I claim Hammond as my home. We're between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, so it's a perfect spot to be in.

2. What's your favorite quality in a person?

Honesty, ethics, and a really good sense of humor.

3. How and when did you discover skateboarding?

When I was 10 years old, I lived in a really small, rural neighborhood. One of my my neighbors had bought a skateboard for his kid, but it never got used. We lived on top of a hill, and as I played with it I eventually was given permission to use it whenever I wanted to. It was basically given to me. The year was 1985.

4. Where does your online name “grimcity” come from?

When I was in college, I self-published a comic book for a little over a year… It was violent, but also very, very comedic. The name of the city where all the action took place in was “Grim City.” I'd also created a comic strip character that I'd used for comic strips (and the comic book) named “Grim,” so in the relatively early days of the internet I just used “grimcity” as my online persona.

Some of my friends call me Grim in real life, though I'm completely the opposite of a grim person… I'm actually very geeky and goofy and I have a lot of love for everything. My nature is very positive, so the nickname “Grim” and “grimcity” is kind've a joke in and of itself.

5. What was your first board and your first memory of skateboarding?

The first board I can claim was the one my neighbor (Mr. Tom) basically gave to me… It was a Variflex he'd bought for his own kid, but he let me ride it as much as I wanted to. I feel in love with it more than his little one did, so I really owe him a lot... He literally exposed me to skateboarding.

After that I had a Nash from a a department store (due to not having any money), but my first pro board was a Jeff Grosso from Santa Cruz. He's a living legend, and I've been fortunate enough to hang out with him. Really love that guy.

My first memory of skating was really just being a little 10 year old kid going really fast down the hills surrounding where I lived. We were a small town, and this was pre-internet, so I didn't even know how big skating was back then.

6. You created a Youtube channel which already has more than 4.000 subscribers and a 100 videos. Tell us a little bit about it. What is the main purpose of the channel?

The channel has actually been around for a while now… A little over 10 years I think? When I first started it it was simply to store videos because my hard drives were running out of space. After that, I got into doing really in-depth skate product reviews, and though I've slacked on that a bit, my focus lately has been making self-filmed skate videos with a focus on composition, color, and framing. If you look at my later videos with the eyes of a photographer, rather than a videographer or even a skateboarder for that matter, it makes more sense.

7. Who has been your biggest influence on your skateboarding?

When I was a kid, everyone was an influence… I wanted to ollie as high as Natas Kaupas, become an all terrain guy like The Gonz, skate fast like Tommy Guerro, float in the air like Hosoi, be as funny as Grosso, and skate as raw as all of the Sick Boys, who were a group of guys from San Francisco (some already mentioned) that included Jim Thiebaud, Julien Stranger, Ron Allen, Mickey Reyes, Archimedes, and a huge list of other people.

These days I'm a lot older, but I'm still influenced by a lot of people. Jim Thiebaud and I wound up becoming really good friends several years back, as well as my man Mickey Reyes. They run my favorite skateboard company (Deluxe) and even if I'd never met them, I'd be riding everything they make, including Real Skateboards, Thunder trucks, and Spitfire wheels. They have a huge influence on me because the company uses skateboarding to help people in need, from helping hurricane victims to providing money to facilities that help kids beat cancer.

I'm also heavily influence by the younger skaters that I roll with here in my city. I've seen them develop from wobbly-legged beginners to absolute skate machines over the years. I thrive on that. Many of these kids have tricks that I will never, ever be able to land, but that's part of passing the torch. I love my Hammond locals, and they push me as hard as I push them to progress in our own respective ways.

8. What's your favorite trick and who do you think does a perfect version of that trick?

I have two: the first one is the Ollie Impossible, and the perfect ones were done by Dylan Rieder who sadly passed away in 2016. Secondly, I love doing simple little kickflips, and to see them done perfectly, I stare in awe whenever Dennis Busenitz does them (or any variation of them).

9. Are Pro skaters role models?

Pro skaters are just like everybody else. If they are role models, I don't think they mean to be. Having said, they're definitely influential. I think kids try to emulate the tricks and styles they see from pros, but as with everyone, we have our good and bad sides. If I were to direct a kid towards someone who might be a role model both in the act of skateboarding as well as just being a good person, I'd list them as follows:

1. Daewon Song: He's the embodiment of progression, and he's a genuinely good person. He's about as old as I am, and like me, he's still a kid at heart that just wants to skate.

2. John Cardiel: His energy, positivity, and drive are the embodiment of what skateboarding is. He's a legend, and if you were to ask most pro skaters who their favorite pro was, they'd say Cardiel. He suffered a catastrophic injury which was supposed to make him unable to walk again, but he defeated it. When you watch any of his old footage, it compels you to get up, grab your board, and go for it.

3. Rodney Mullen: He invented most of the street tricks we do today, but more importantly to me, he's always continuing his education in other areas, including higher maths and architecture. It's one thing to simply become a better skateboarder, but it's also important to expand your knowledge base with other subjects, from the arts to astrophysics. Knowledge is easy to access today, and if you're not skating, I recommend reading a good non-fiction book or at least listening to an academic lecture on any given topic on You Tube. Lots of universities post lectures online, so there's no reason not to get a better understanding of the world. I watch or listen to at least one lecture a day, and on weekends I try to get at least two.

10. What's your go-to spot?

I live right around the corner from the concrete park I shoot video at in my YouTube and Instagram videos, but one of my favorite places (which I've documented a lot online, including Shutta) is a yellow parking curb next to a fountain. It's simply a curb in a secluded location where I can go and clear my head.

11. Who do you usually skate with?

Our local park is a family… The Dreamland squad. We have a couple of crews inside that family, namely the Therapy crew and the False Teeth crew. I also skate with a ton of friends from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette.

12. Have you ever joined a competition?

I have, but I'm not really a competitive skater. Most of the contests I've entered have been here in Louisiana, so for us it's not so much about winning as it is an opportunity to see everyone you know and have a really good time. Our contests are more like family reunions.

13. As one of the best skaters in the app and winner of one #ShuttaMission, explain to us how has your experience been when taking photos with Shutta.

I'd hate being known as one of the best skaters using the app! I prefer thinking I'm the best at having fun at skating, which is hopefully a sentiment shared by every skater!

I sincerely love the app, and am working on a video about it to get some more skaters involved with it. I started using Shutta before the user interface was redesigned, and still use it when I'm out recording. It's better at getting precise screen captures from videos than taking stills directly from the iPhone, the wheel tool that allows you to scrub through the timeline is brilliant. A lot of skateboard tricks are less than a second long (like jumping over something), and the “peak” part of that trick is probably down into the milliseconds… So being able to easily get to the exact moment you want to capture is just the best. I also like that I get an image saved to my camera's library, and simultaneously get to share it with an international community of people that get hyped when they see something new.

I'm also very appreciative that Shutta picked me as a winner for the “Freeze” contest. I'm a geek by nature, and the Tomtom Bandit camera is really well made. I've been using it a ton! I still can't believe I believe I won something like this by just going out in my town and skating like I always do. There are aspects of it that I prefer over my GoPro and my iPhone, so it's with me everywhere I go, even if I'm not skateboarding.

14. Any views on the skateboarding scene?

On a local level, I'm extremely happy that skaters today have it easier than my generation did. Skateboarding in the states wasn't looked at positively by a large swath of society for a long time, it was all underground, and growing up, I got into a ton of fights with people who would literally walk up to aggressively and instigate violence. We were punk rock/hip hop street kids that skated and ate concrete for fun, so we always had to handle confrontations as best we could. These days, there's been a mainstreaming of skateboarding that has allowed it to progress in ways I never thought it would, but I'm a bit conflicted, if not hypocritical of it. On one hand, I love that there are skateparks popping up everywhere, but on the other I hate seeing the media portray skateboarding as a sport, and I don't like the idea of it being in the Olympics. I'm glad that there's a boost of revenue for the pro skaters and skate companies that benefit from all of this exposure, but the old sentimental side of me still kind've misses the anti-establishment nature that skating had when I got into it.

15. What do you have planned for the near future?

My plans today are the same as they always have been… I want to push myself in whatever direction skateboarding takes me, and I want to do what I can at being a better person in general. I just want to be a good global neighbor, be the best at what I do professionally (computer geekery), and hopefully help the up and coming skaters in my area know more about the roots of skateboarding. The main goal is to ensure that the kids I skate with now become really old skaters like me.

Go follow Neal Boyd on Shutta and subscribe to his Youtube channel to see more!

All pics by Neal Boyd.

[denise8691]

WWE star Sheamus can't wait to have a blast in Belfast

The SSE Arena is the venue for another huge night of wrestling and the Irish star of the show is looking forward to having the craic The SSE Arena is Raw this Saturday night as the WWE juggernaut storms in to Belfast with a Superstar stacked card of mammoth proportions. Post-WrestleMania, the flagship Monday night show's roster may have lost grapplers such as Charlotte, The New Day, Chris Jericho and Rusev in the Superstar Shake-Up, but it has gained a host of huge names and bodies that will grace the Odyssey this weekend, with arguably the best line-up Belfast has seen in some years which includes Roman Reigns, Seth Rollins The Miz and Alexa Bliss. One man who has stayed firmly on the red brand is Dublin's own Sheamus, and speaking to Belfast Live from Rome before heading home for the weekend, the Celtic Warrior is revelling in his current spot on the card with tag team partner, and former foe, Cesaro. "Last year, Cesaro and me, we had the best-of-seven series against each other and we didn't know where that was going to go," said the former WWE and World Heavyweight Champion. "We had a lot of stuff to prove, I'd come off the back of this League of Nations thing that had died on it's arse a bit and he was coming back from injury and felt he was going to be pushed but wasn't going anywhere. They put us in the series to give us the opportunity to go in there and steal the show and we did. "The last match, everyone was in to it, there was a slow build and it told a great story and then we ended up tag partners, where at the beginning we didn't get on, we didn't like each other but we made it work and we eventually won the tag team titles off The New Day to end their longest tag team run. "It's been a lot of fun. We've been really lucky with and we're having a lot of fun with it. We don't know where it's going or how long it will last but I like to live in the moment, you never know what's around the corner so enjoy what you have when you have it." The pair have entered in to a feud with the legendary Hardy Boys, Matt and Jeff, who returned to the WWE at WrestleMania last month in Orlando, Florida, and so far their bouts have been as hard hitting as they come. "Honestly, when the Hardys made their entrance at WrestleMania, it was like an Undertaker return, their music hit, I got goosebumps all over my body, their were 80,000 odd fans going bananas. Standing in the middle of that, it's hard to describe, it was incredible. "To me, it helped make it one of the best matches on 'Mania, especially with the ladders and the spectacle of it. I'm pretty sure we stole the show." Sheamus was involved in one of the biggest 'Mania moments of this year's event, being the victim of one of Jeff Hardy's infamous Swanton Bomb's from the top of a twenty foot ladder, which as you would expect, wasn't a move without its risks. "When he landed on me, I took his heel to the side of my head. I went home looking like a panda bear, with two black eyes, but that's what it's about. I thrive on pretty much being the toughest Superstar in the WWE, no one comes close. I'm not afraid to take a licking and give one back. "I'll tell you who else is tough, Jeff Hardy is tough as nails. I kicked his tooth out (at Sunday night's Payback event) and he still kept going. It is what it is, it's very physical entertainment, people don't understand it, but when get in there with someone like me or Cesaro, you realise just how physical it is." The UK loops of the WWE tours are among their most popular and with a rise in popularity in the wrestling in the UK and Ireland, not just with the American juggernaut but with local companies like PWU, OTT and ICW as well as the return to television of World Of Sport, it's peak time for wrestling and wrestlers over here. Sheamus is in no doubt that the WWE has played a huge part in that growth. "I think it shows just how great the Irish are and how well the WWE has done being shown over here in the last few decades, because these are guys, myself included, who have grown up watching WWE and gone to live shows as fans, so you can see now that it's been a huge influence. "It's really resonating now. People think that the product now isn't anywhere near the Attitude Era. Now, I loved the Attitude Era but this era we are in now is better. I said this in a lot of articles around WrestleMania and lots of people said "Oh, Sheamus, that's not right" but the Attitude Era was great, it was marketed to teenagers and it had swearing and a lot more use of profanity and stuff. "Now we're a PG product, were in the world of family entertainment and I think right now, we're in a great era that people are going to look back on. I've a lot of time for the Attitude Era, it was great for what it was but it doesn't compare to anything we have today. It doesn't come near, I don't care what anyone says. "Everyone's motivated, everyone is pushing hard and the amount of shows we're doing, the number of countries we're doing - the company is doing better than it ever has." And in Belfast on Saturday night, Sheamus will be looking to send the fans home happy, whether they cheer or boo him (more likely the latter) as he normally does when he performs at The Odyssey. "I have great craic in Belfast. Last year I remember singing Molly Malone in the ring, it was great craic. I'm looking forward to it on Saturday night, we'll have a blast and maybe I'll belt out another tune, I don't know yet. "Either way, it's going to be a lot fun, our roster is stacked with a lot of top guys, so it means it's going to be great craic." Link: http://www.belfastlive.co.uk/sport/other-sport/wwe-star-sheamus-cant-wait-12988023#ICID=sharebar_twitter

[gretagerwigarchive]

Greta Gerwig & Joe Swanberg: The Penny-Pinching Future of Indie Cinema

By Steve Dollar  |  March 2, 2009 

source: https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2009/03/greta-gerwig-joe-swanberg-the-penny-pinching-futur.html

There’s low-budget guerrilla filmmaking and then there’s low-budget guerrilla filmmaking. Greta Gerwig, the 25-year-old star of indie-cinema micro-faves such as Hannah Takes the Stairs, Nights and Weekends and Baghead, recalls an inspiring moment during a visit home to her native California. Making an overnight stop at a motel in Santa Barbara, she flipped through the TV channels until she was stopped cold by something on the local public-access station. There, she discovered a very curious action flick called The Pharaoh Project.

“It was beyond amazing,” Gerwig says, her cadence by turns hesitant and headlong, as she recalls the insane saga about an elite squad of legendary warriors (Genghis Khan! Alexander the Great!) reincarnated to wreak havoc on the modern world. Really, it was like the director and his beefiest bouncer buddies were trying to create a Steven Seagal sci-fi/action epic on a PBR budget. “The most official-looking car they could get their hands on was a cream-colored Toyota 4Runner, but they played it like it was an FBI armored vehicle.

     Gerwig, a Barnard-schooled playwright, screenwriter and director, has won glowing reviews for her comedic acting skills, mostly channeled into fetchingly flaky characters as romantically befuddled as befuddling. But even if the Los Angeles Times calls her “an ingénue for the text-message set,” and even if she’s about to start shooting John C. Reilly in her next feature, she still shares a nothing-fancy Williamsburg pad with a roommate. Make fun of The Pharaoh Project all you want. Gerwig won’t. “I just kept watching because there was so much there to admire,” she says. “It isn’t that far removed from the kind of movies I’ve made. The ‘let’s just go do it’ attitude. We’re interested in different things. I’m interested in the million tiny deaths that occur in everyday human interactions, and they’re interested in sweet-ass roundhouse kicks. But the motivation to make something is similar.”

Along with her friend and sometime collaborator Joe Swanberg, 27, Gerwig is one of the most prolific characters in a new wave of young filmmakers lighting up the indie landscape. The past few years have seen the arrival of a slew of talented, original directors who have thrived despite—and sometimes because of—miniscule budgets and improvised means: The list includes the Duplass brothers (Baghead), Aaron Katz (Dance Party, USA; Quiet City), Todd Rohal (The Guatemalan Handshake), Ron Bronstein (Frownland), Mary Bronstein (Yeast), Craig Zobel (Great World of Sound), Ry Russo-Young (Orphans, You Won’t Miss Me), Frank V. Ross (Hohokam, Present Company), Kentucker Audley (Team Picture), Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) and Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation).

Early on, Bujalski’s sound mixer, Eric Masunaga jokingly referred to one of the films as “mumblecore,” and the label stuck for a while. It was catchy, and spoke to the indie-rock flavor of efforts like Swanberg’s LOL, in which urban post-grads stumble in and out of relationships, bands and poorly furnished apartments, endlessly discussing feelings they can’t always articulate. The use of consumer-grade handheld digital-video cameras, spontaneous dialogue and casts comprised mostly of other budding directors are also common tendencies, although by no means exclusively so. Katz gives his actors scripts. Bronstein, who co-starred with his wife Mary in the Swanberg-shot Web series Butterknife, works in 16mm. So does Zobel. Not everyone digs Final Cut software. In other words, these filmmakers are hardly clones—but they have more in common with one another than they do with everyone else.

This movement, as such, has branched out as Swanberg and his peers have begun to mature after years of film festivals such as Austin’s annual SXSW, which became a flourishing seedbed for the movement around 2005.

“The technology changed in the mid-to-late ’90s,” Swanberg says, giving his socio-cultural analysis as he takes a chair next to Gerwig in a photographer’s studio near the Manhattan Port Authority. It’s a brittle winter evening after a day of hiking around bleak locales in upstate New York, where the pair posed as Depression-era vagabonds—even as all-too-real panhandlers proliferate on the streets outside. “The resolution got better, and the Internet allowed social networking to happen like it hadn’t before. The threat of the actors strike in 2001 that paved the way for a lot of reality TV to hit the mainstream made a huge impact on the way mass audiences perceived handheld video. Because they got used to watching it, all in one year, with Survivor and every other show that came along shot in a run-and-gun style on a small camera.”

It wasn’t long before young filmmakers hit the festival circuit with their own low-budget projects, though, as Swanberg notes, “A bunch of celebrities had to make movies on [digital video] to legitimize it. Ethan Hawke had to make one, and Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming made The Anniversary Party, and everyone said it was cool, and even then it took a lot longer.”

Swanberg began shooting so-called “webisodes” in 2005 with Young American Bodies, a series for the erotically minded Nerve.com, which reflected the diaristic—OK, blog-like—intimacy of his features. “This whole idea of exposing very personal inner thoughts to a general public whether they wanted it or not seemed really crazy five years ago,” he says. “But it was around the same time that these smaller movies started to do something similar: I’ll tell my story and my friend’s story. If it plays festivals and people see it, great, and if it doesn’t, it still exists. I made my first two movies for less than 3,000 bucks.”

That vow of insularity can’t stick forever, though. Swanberg’s new film, Alexander the Last premieres March 14 at SXSW and, on the same day, becomes available by demand on IFC, as part of its Festival Direct series. The idea, Swanberg explains, is to make the film broadly accessible while it’s still playing festivals, and not wait for interest to fade. “The way people are watching stuff is changing,” he says. “If I don’t start putting these movies out very quickly they will start backing up on each other. Theatrical distribution doesn’t make sense anymore.”

Benten Films, a DVD outfit run by two film critics—Andrew Grant of FilmBrain.com and Aaron Hillis of GreenCine.com—has done an impressive job of packaging and promoting work by Swanberg and fellow indie upstarts like Audley, Rohal and Katz. But it’s not easy. “There aren’t enough distributors to go around,” Hillis says. “If you’re an independent filmmaker there are not a lot of options out there. There’s no more middle class. It’s just a matter of time before it becomes either The Dark Knight or mumblecore, with nothing in between.”

If that’s the case, Swanberg’s work doesn’t suffer from a smaller screen. Alexander—a slender (72 minutes) but quietly observant drama that says as much with silence as with its improvised dialogue—is lucky to have an irresistible center of gravity in Jess Weixler (Teeth), a rising star whose face is a delicate map of feeling. About nothing if not process, the film charts the keenly attenuated emotional swings of Alex, a young actress drawn to her handsome co-star Jamie (Barlow Jacobs) while her rock-musician husband is on the road. To further complicate matters, she has introduced the fresh-from-Kentucky Jamie to her older sister Hellen (Amy Seimetz), who actually engages in the fling Alex and Jamie pretend to have onstage. The milieu may not be too far away from the tempest-in-a-beer-can angst of The Real World, but the spirit is much closer to the bedroom intimacies of the French New Wave. Yet, even if Swanberg’s actors are at home with casual nudity and candid couplings, their journeys of self-discovery are not linked to a larger political or philosophical agenda. They prefer singing their own songs and tinkering on thriftshop keyboards to dropping postmodern allusions to art and cinema. Their point is not to be clever, but to be honest. The film also broadens Swanberg’s professional circle. Jane Adams (Happiness) takes a small but key role, and Brooklyn filmmaker Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), for whom Swanberg has been working as a cameraman and assistant director, helped produce when another project failed to jell. Likewise, the Duplass brothers, whose ambitions skew more mainstream, have cast John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill for their next comedy. And Reilly also takes the lead in Gerwig and collaborator Alison Bagnall’s Funny Bunny.

“There’s an audience now, and I’m wanting things I didn’t want before,” Swanberg says. “I want to shoot in other cities now, and I want to shoot in HD. I want to rent apartments, and I want sailboats and all these other elements. But before, I was content with a few people in a room.”

Gerwig—who spent the past year racking up performances in neo-grindhouse genre flicks like Ti West’s House of the Devil and a non-mumblecore indie in which Iggy Pop plays her dad—has a good laugh about her efforts to go Hollywood. “I’ve made a bunch of audition tapes,” she says. “I start cracking up because I can’t get through the scenes. Some of them, I have to cry and say things in Southern accents.” She drifts into her best Scarlett O’Hara: “Johnny did not kill that bay-buh! I killed it! Because I hated it!” Nonetheless, the actress confesses, sure, “I’d love to be the girl in the dinosaur movie.” Well, OK, maybe a movie with little plastic dinosaurs.

Gerwig says she was astonished to learn that the guys who made Cloverfield are fans. “The woman who casts Gossip Girl loves Aaron Katz. What!? But maybe I’m not supposed to say that. The number of people who are around watching you out of the corner of their eye is amazing.”

Swanberg—whose output has increased since he brought on Anish Savjani (Wendy and Lucy) as a producer—won’t likely be taking on any Cloverfield sequels, even with his handheld-video skills. If his films don’t make money, he’ll still shoot. “It’s a compulsion for me,” says Swanberg, who also finds time to continue acting in his friends’ movies, shooting Web projects and helping his wife, Kris Williams, with both her filmmaking and burgeoning gourmet-ice-cream business. “It’s not like I started doing it because I was good at it. Nor is it that I continue to do it because I’m good at it. I do it because I can’t help it, and I don’t know what else to do. I already know there will be a period when I will make 10 of them that nobody sees or likes or writes about. But the reason why I will continue through that period that nobody cares is not because they will care again but because I can’t help it. It’s selfish. I’m making these things for me.”

[lodelss]

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,564 words)

Lynn Shelton was the kind of artist no one asked for, but the only one you really wanted. The kind of person who was so good — so empathetic, so altruistic, so honorable — her work couldn’t help but be good in all the same ways. But in the face of what film became — a monstrous inequitable monopoly — she played too kind, too female, too independent, too old. When Shelton died suddenly on May 15 at only 54, from a blood disorder no one knew she had, artists more famous than her surfaced one after the other to remember her flawless reputation, critic after critic to fawn over her career. It was so familiar, all those people so quick to praise in private but almost never in public, until, you know, it kind of doesn’t matter anymore. The reality was that Shelton had made eight films, directed countless television series, and still had to audition for jobs even when she knew the people giving them. The reality was that she had to work in TV to pay for the work she really wanted to do. The reality was that people in the industry knew her name, but no one outside of it did. “The main reason women make inroads in independent film is that no one has to say, ‘I pick you,’” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2014. “I’m not pounding on anybody’s door. I’m just making my own way.” 

As existence increasingly became exhibitionism, Shelton made being a private success — being a good person making good work — more valuable than being a public one. Which is why I loved her more than any other artist around. Because it wasn’t just about loving her films, it was about loving her as a filmmaker, as a woman. Because, somehow, over two decades, she was always pure independence — fervent, uncompromising, relentless and humble, humble, humble — despite the constant pressure to be otherwise. To me, she was the only kind of artist to be.

* * *

If I met Lynn Shelton, I don’t remember it. I probably saw her and would have undoubtedly come across her name more than a decade ago, in the summer of 2009, when I interviewed actor Joshua Leonard about her third film, Humpday. It irritates me that I can’t remember. She was at the very least on the fringes of mumblecore, a no-budget indie film movement which really got going in 2005 with The Puffy Chair, Mark and Jay Duplass’ $15,000 parent-funded road trip movie. These films were hipster-style verité, with mix-and-match personnel and, according to Film Journal International, a “highly naturalistic feel, a fascination with male/female relationships and low-fi production values.” Originated by writer-director Andrew Bujalski (Support the Girls), the movement also established the Duplasses, triple-threat bros with their fingers in every indie pie — from Jeff, Who Lives at Home to Amazon’s panegyrized series Transparent — and Joe Swanberg, the guy behind Netflix’s Easy. It was less of a vehicle for women. Even the It Girl.

In 2008, about a decade before she became GRETA GERWIG, I profiled Greta Gerwig for a now-defunct magazine called Geek Monthly. She and Swanberg had co-everything’ed the long-distance relationship drama Nights and Weekends. (As it happens, Shelton, who started out as an actor before it began to feel like “an exercise in narcissism,” appears briefly on screen though I don’t mention her in the interview.) I somehow addressed mumblecore’s gender divide while missing Shelton’s two features, We Go Way Back (2006) and My Effortless Brilliance (2008). “It can really feel like boys[’] town,” Gerwig confirmed at the time. She mentioned being broke, despite her omnipresence on the mumblecore scene: “There have been nights where I sit and stare at the wall and say, ‘What am I doing? What’s going to become of me?’” She was 24. 

Shelton was 43. Maybe that’s why I missed her, along with the rest of the world. Even the oldest mumblers, the Duplasses, were several years younger than her. Shelton had taken a while to get into film, the same way it took me a while to get into writing. She started acting in theatre, then studied photography before moving into experimental film, editing, and documentary. “I just did not have the confidence to do it,” she told The New York Times in 2009. “And then I had to find a backdoor way in.” Shelton was intimidated, just like I would be intimidated, but the pull landed her there anyway, as it did for me. She joked that her version of film school took two decades. It sounded familiar, that long way around. The way she finally gave herself permission also sounded familiar — through a female artist, Claire Denis, who was almost two decades older than her (I was more promiscuous about my idols). “I thought: ‘Oh, my God. She was 40 when she made her first film,” Shelton told the Times in 2012. “I thought it was too late for me, so in my head was, ‘Oh, I still have three more years.’” I’ve had this exact thought about writing: that it took me too long to get here, that I’m past the point of it being worth it. You may find that many artists — many women artists, who, if they weren’t actively discouraged from pursuing art, weren’t actively encouraged, either — have had this exact thought.

Shelton beat Denis by a year. Her first movie, We Go Way Back, is probably her most autobiographical, perhaps because she had just come from the world of documentary. It follows a 23-year-old woman (Amber Hubert) as she floats through life, acting in a theatre production she doesn’t really feel and doing men she doesn’t either, until she unearths a series of letters to her disconnected adult self from her confident 13-year-old self (Maggie Brown). This specter, her own past, helps her find her way back (so to speak). Shelton has said she herself had a similar trajectory, a trajectory familiar to so many women, where she started out with all this bravado and, slowly, bit by bit — as she became a woman, as her body changed, as society encroached — she lost it. It reminds me of all those typewriters I got as a child, all the writing I knew I would do, until I suddenly felt not good enough to write, not smart enough, not allowed enough. When Shelton got some semblance of her confidence back, she was already 39. And it showed. Though she was skirting the edge of mumblecore, her films just felt more baked than the others on every level, from screenplay to soundtrack: more considered, less flip (less male?). They weren’t sentimental romances; the relationships were more complicated, the dialogue funnier. Her films weren’t self-serious, they were mature. They were about people making messes and then cleaning them up.

It makes sense that in an industry that prefers men, Shelton’s third film, Humpday, about “two straight dudes, straight balling,” would be the one to get attention — it won the Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Independence at Sundance in 2009. As she herself says exasperatedly in the film, in which she plays a polyamorous boho den mother-type, “Boys. Fucking boys.” By that point, three years into the career she took so long to get to, Shelton had already settled on the formula that served her best, one that reflected the realism of life through the realism of her characters. She molded the movies to her muses, most of them men, from Mark Duplass (Humpday) to Josh Pais (Touchy Feely) to Jay Duplass (Outside, In). She limited the set to a small crew, cut down the takes, and shot with many of the same people (including musicians — do yourself a favor and listen to Tomo Nakayama’s “Horses” from Touchy Feely) in her drizzly home state of Washington, before sculpting it all in the editing suite. 

That she worked so organically, so modestly, from the place she grew up — not New York, not L.A., not some soundstage — was part of the whole thing. It wasn’t about careerism (repulsive), it was about her doing her best work. As for the money, if Shelton wasn’t funding her films through her own television work (she has said she only really felt professional after she directed Mad Men in 2010, while being named executive producer on Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere last year was a whole new level of arrival) it was through grants and fundraisers, with the crew paid through a profit-sharing system. When no one was getting money, at the very least they were getting warm meals. As Shelton told Anthem magazine two years ago: “I want to create this emotionally safe environment as much as possible for [the actors] to take the risk of opening up their hearts and their faces and their eyes.” 

This is the opposite of how art is made now, where everything is about money — huge studios, huge budgets, huge concepts, huge stars. Mid-budget films, which thrived in the indie boom times of the nineties, the most formative films for me and for the last Gen-Xers, the ones that started to sputter in the aughts when Shelton came around, have virtually vanished. What passes for mid-budget now has no less than $10 million behind it and a marquee name slumming it for cred. The few earnest indie directors left, like The Rider’s Chloé  Zhao, are snapped up for superhero content — even Shelton was in early talks around Black Widow. I can’t imagine a Marvel movie by Shelton and I’m not sure I want to, but I would still see it. I would see it because she made it.

Shelton’s plots were not high concept; they were barely plots at all. Which is just how I like it. I like my movies with nothing going on: just people living their lives. Maybe it’s my processing speed — even the simplest plot can be hard for me to follow — or maybe it’s being the kid of psychiatrists. Shelton always said she wasn’t the smartest person in the world, but she was fairly sure she had pretty high emotional intelligence. She was the daughter of a psychologist. Her interest was in tangled relationships, often with multiple family members involved, and the discomfort that emerges from within them. “I’ve always been that close observer of human behavior,” she told Slant last year. “I feel like the thing that makes humans human are their flaws.” 

The scene that touched me most in a marathon re-watch of Shelton’s eight films was in Touchy Feely — neither my favorite of her films nor the one featuring an actor I particularly like, which proves how skilled she was with performers. Ellen Page, playing Jenny, a sheltered, existentially morose twenty-something, sits on on a couch opposite her aunt’s oblivious boyfriend (played by handsome indie regular Scoot McNairy), staring at his lips, laughing tightly, nervously, her eyes bigger than the whole room. With no music, and just the two of them, side by side, quietly talking late at night in a dingy apartment, Jenny’s lust is so powerful it’s practically a third character and her words, as though overflowing from her loins, come out almost despite her: “Have you ever wanted to kiss someone so badly that it hurts your skin?” Yes. Right now. This isn’t cinema, it’s a conduit for intimacy. Which maybe says more about me than I want it to. But I have a feeling this approach — slow, humane, in no way prescriptive or showy —  is what led so many critics to dismiss Shelton. That scene, and Shelton’s movies as whole, remind me of a quote from Before Sunrise, a movie made by a man, but as collaborative in spirit: “I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between.”

My favorite Lynn Shelton movie is Laggies. I’ve probably seen it ten times. It’s the story that gets me. Which is the same reason Shelton made it, the only movie she did not have a hand in writing (Andrea Seigel is the screenwriter). It’s about a 28-year-old woman (Keira Knightley) having a quarter-life crisis, a woman who in the end describes herself as a snake carrying around her dead skin — old life, old relationship, old friends. Until she can shed all of this (will she?) she is in “this weird in-between place,” eventually befriending a teenager (Chloë Grace Moretz) and falling for the kid’s dad (Sam Rockwell), who is not unlike her. “You know, I never anticipated still having to find a place where I fit in by the time I was an adult, either,” he says. “I thought you automatically got one once you had a job and a family. But it’s just you, alone.” God, yeah. You don’t see much of this on screen, the female midlife crisis, though you do see a lot of the male version. And that sucks. Shelton refers to it as floating, but to me, when I have experienced it, it feels more menacing — like you have no tether, like you’re one of those astronauts who becomes detached from that shuttle cord and disappears into the black. Shelton questioned whether she was selling out by making a movie someone else wrote, a glossier movie than usual, starring real life celebrities. But she couldn’t resist the story in the end, a story that essentially defined her. “She doesn’t know what she wants to do but she knows what she doesn’t want to do, which is to fall in lockstep with this conventional timeline of what quote-unquote adults are supposed to do and that all of her friends around her are doing,” Shelton told The Georgia Straight in 2014. “I’ve tried to do things on my own terms and it took me 20 years to get to doing what I’m doing so I really relate to that prolonged journey of self-discovery.”

* * *

“I’m sorry,” one of my best friends said when I told him Lynn Shelton had died. I’ve never had someone I know respond that way when someone I don’t has died. “I wouldn’t normally say that,” he explained, “but I know how you feel about Lynn Shelton.” It’s true that I didn’t know her, but I knew her films, and the two were inextricable. Just like her and Marc Maron, her creative partner and her partner in life. Maron was Shelton’s last muse. She made Sword of Trust for him, a film in which he plays Mel, a pawn shop dealer, who is brought a sword by a couple that supposedly proves the south won the Civil War, which they collectively sell to a pair of loony right-wing conspiracy theorists. Shelton appears as Mel’s ex, a woman with whom he fell into drug addiction and whom it is clear he still loves but can’t trust. But it’s Maron you can’t take your eyes off, maybe because it’s him Shelton can’t take her eyes off.  As he said on his podcast, “I was better in Lynn Shelton’s gaze.” Everything was. When Shelton was walking around, it meant that, despite how bad it was, the world was still a place where a woman could be an artist, a woman could be a woman, on her own terms. What Denis did for Shelton, she continued to do for me. I don’t want to think of what her death means for film, but I know for me, as a woman, as an artist, it makes the world a whole lot harder to bear.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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15 Underrated Cities and Hidden Gems for your Great US Road Trip

When it comes time to plan any US road trip, there are cities and landmarks that immediately leap out as ‘must see’ inclusions.

The likes of New York City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Washington DC, and Philadelphia automatically earn their place on your itinerary just as surely as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite claim a day or three.

While these cities and landmarks are sure to be highlights of any US road trip, there is a host of other cities that are just begging to be explored and experienced.

From hipster-friendly craft beer heavens to hiker’s paradises to charming New England escapes, there is far more to any US road trip than the obvious. Below, you’ll find fifteen underrated cities worthy of a day, a weekend, or even a week on your itinerary.

15 Underrated Cities for Your US Road Trip

There’s never a dull moment on a road trip.

Some of the most memorable experiences on my 2016 Great US Road Trip occurred in towns I never even thought about in planning the trip.

From getting the death stare in a West Texas burger joint to visiting the Roswell Museum to boozy wine tour days in southern California, even the shortest pit stop made for an unforgettable memory.

Looking for a hidden gem to add to your US road trip? Here, you’ll find fifteen cities that don’t get the credit they deserve.

Image courtesy of James Willamor.

#15 – Greenville, South Carolina

The Carolinas don’t tend to get a lot of love when it comes time to plan a US road trip. Without the world-famous landmarks or bustling cities to draw people’s attention, both North and South Carolina are often missed, and it’s a crying shame.

Take Greenville, for example. A dynamic foodie city with small town charm in spades, Greenville well and truly lives up to its name with an abundance of nearby hiking trails and the famous Swamp Rabbit Trail – a former stretch of rail that has been converted into a stunning cycling route.

But it’s as a food destination that Greenville has earned its plaudits, and every ‘reasons to visit Greenville’ article you’re likely to find will rattle off so many restaurants that you’ll want to devote a week to this charming corner of the States.

Read more…

While I haven’t made it to Greenville myself, Feast and West has a great piece on why you’ll love Greenville.

Image courtesy of m01229

#14 – Annapolis, Maryland

Maryland is often overlooked in favour of its more prestigious neighbours such as Pennsylvania, Washington DC, and New York.

The allure of a day in the Big Apple, the City of Brotherly Love, or the US Capitol is obvious, and I would never suggest something as crazy as cutting one of the East Coast Three to make room for Maryland.

While many might favour Baltimore, I found myself just a little bit in love with Maryland’s capital, Annapolis.

Why Annapolis?

Located on the shores of the mighty Chesapeake Bay, Annapolis is a city that well and truly embraces its proud naval tradition.

Whether you’re out on the water sailing, paying a visit to the US Naval Academy, feasting on blue crab at Cantler’s, or just soaking in the capital’s rich history, Annapolis is a cute little city that is a great break from the bigger and busier cities you’ll doubtless visit while on the East Coast.

The city might not be awash with landmarks you’ve daydreamed about since your youth, but it’s possessed of a quiet charm that is hard not to love.

I spent two sunny weeks in 2012 exploring Annapolis with a local; soaking in the sun on the waterfront, eating my fill of Maryland’s signature blue crab (with lots of Old Bay), and enjoying its laid back nightlife.

Read more…

While I never wrote about my experience in Annapolis, it’s also a short drive from the East Coast’s popular seaside playground, Ocean City.

Bixby Bridge has got to be right up there with the Golden Gate and Sydney Harbour as one of the most visually stunning bridges on earth.

#13 – Monterey, California

The drive down California’s Pacific Coast Highway is one of the most breathtaking stretches of road you’re likely to ever encounter.

Stretch from San Francisco all the way down the windswept, craggy coast, Route 1 has featured on two of my previous US road trips and stands out as one of the absolute highlights.

Located not too far from San Francisco, quaint Monterey is a seaside town with a lot of charm.

From the world-famous Monterey Aquarium to saltwater taffy and fresh seafood on the waterfront to gorgeous Carmel-by-the-Sea to its proximity to picturesque Bixby Bridge, Monterey is a stop every Pacific Coast road trip should include.

Read more…

Interested in Monterey? You can read more about how to spend two days in Monterey.

Image courtesy of Nicholas A Tonelll

#12 – Flagstaff, Arizona

Flagstaff doubtless makes it on to a lot of US Road Trip itineraries due to its proximity to the Grand Canyon.

A popular base from which to explore the iconic Grand Canyon, Flagstaff is a charming city of its own. It has a great hipster mountain town vibe to it that is hard not to love, and it would be criminal to leave Arizona without having given a little time to Flagstaff.

More than just the Grand Canyon

Many picture Arizona as dry desert, but Flagstaff’s location in the mountains means it gets downright chilly in the winter. The cool mountain air makes for world-class stargazing, and the Lowell Observatory is a must for anyone with a love of the night sky.

The town itself is awash with brew pubs and brunch joints (my personal favourites are Beaver Street Brewery and the Toasted Owl Cafe, and it’s perfectly located to visit a number of national parks and landscapes such as Petrified Forest National Park, Meteor Crater, and Walnut Creek Canyon.

Read more…

Everybody has been to the Grand Canyon, but have you ever explored the Indian cave dwellings at Walnut Creek Canyon? I have, and it was fascinating.

Image courtesy of Larry and Linda

#11 – Albuquerque, New Mexico

ABQ might be best known for its role as the backdrop to Walter White’s crystal meth empire on Breaking Bad, but there’s a lot more to the New Mexico city than the often oppressive way it was portrayed in the AMC hit.

While my own US road trip featured Sante Fe instead of ABQ, there are plenty of reasons to visit Albuquerque including their world-famous Hot Air Balloon Festival.

Located along iconic Route 66 and home to some of a unique melting pot of Hispanic, Native American, Latino, and Anglo culture, this is truly the US Southwest epitomised.

Whether you’re hiking the surrounding desert, visiting Native American desert dwellings, eating your fill of delicious chili, or just taking a spin out on America’s most famous stretch of road, Albuquerque is more than just a quick stop for gas.

Read more…

Lonely Planet has plenty of ideas when it comes to things to do in ABQ.

Image courtesy of Karah Levely-Rinaldi

#10 – Moab, Utah

The name might not immediately leap to mind when you’re thinking of dream US destinations, but take a look at Moab’s location on a map and you’ll see why it’s a must have in my eyes.

Located at the crossroads between Canyonlands National Park and Arches National Park, Moab is the perfect launching point from which to explore these two stunning national parks. For those with a love of the great outdoors, there are few places better suited.

For adrenaline junkies, you’ve got white water rafting, rock climbing, skydiving, ATVing, and mountain biking to keep you occupied. For the more sedate, simply hiking these iconic parks is a once in a lifetime experience.

Read more…

Utah was a last-minute cut from my most recent US road trip, but Hike Bike Travel has a fantastic Moab itinerary that ought to inspire.

Image courtesy of Jeff Gunn

#9 – Asheville, North Carolina

It’s probably not a well-kept secret anymore, but Asheville in North Carolina is the one city I was most disappointed I missed in my most recent road trip. Named as Lonely Planet’s #1 destination in the US in 2017, Asheville is a city on the rise.

A foodie and beer lover’s heaven, Asheville has captured the hearts of most anybody who has had the wherewithal to add it to their itinerary.

With a thriving arts scene and access to the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains for hiking and day trips, Asheville is a city I am determined to get to and thoroughly explore just as soon as I can.

Read more…

You can read a little bit more about Asheville and seven other cities I was sad to miss in my article 8 Places I’m Sorry I Missed on my US Road Trip.

Image courtesy of Roger Goun

#8 – Portland, Maine

I’ve had an enduring fascination with the New England ever since I got my hands on my first Stephen King book. The seminal horror writer has based a great many of his novels in his home state of Maine, and Portland perhaps best exemplifies the New England aesthetic.

Cobblestone streets, salty breezes, a lonely lighthouse, clam chowder, ice cold beers, and that unmistakable New Englander personality all blend together to make Portland the quintessential coastal New England town.

You half expect a haunted mist or time-eating Langoliers to come looming up out of the morning fog…

Read more…

The New England continues to elude me, but Travel and Leisure has a great three day Portland itinerary to get you inspired.

Image courtesy of Predl

#7 – Savannah, Georgia

My own US road trip featured the underwhelming city of Atlanta, so I’m a little disappointed when I read more and more about why Savannah is the best place to go to experience true Southern comfort and hospitality.

Shaded by gorgeous oak trees, the classic Colonial architecture of this fading Southern Belle speaks of a different time in American history. With amazing food, oodles of history, and that all-important southern hospitality, Savannah is a city I am dying to visit and you should be too.

Read more…

While I was busy being disappointed by Atlanta, Adventurous Kate was falling in love with Savannah. You can read her reasons to love Savannah here.

Image courtesy of Petr Melssner

#6 – Page, Arizona

On the shores of gorgeous Lake Powell and set amid some of the most stunning scenery the American west has to offer, Page is your gateway to unforgettable sights such as Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend – two of the most photographed landscapes in all of America.

Whether you choose to take in this remarkable scenery on foot, on a Colorado River cruise, or from a kayak – it’s a corner of the US that should be on any respectable cross-country road trip.

With a huge variety of Page hotels to choose from, visitors can do the backpacker thing or live in the lap of luxury as they explore the canyons, cliffs, and windswept desert at their own pace.

Read more…

Page was another last-minute cut from my Great US Road Trip, but you can read plenty of reasons to visit Page, AZ over at Miss HappyFeet.

Image courtesy of Greg Knapp

#5 – Buffalo, New York

New York State inevitably ends up on every US road trip, but more often than not, it’s just New York City that gets a few days assigned to it.

The American gateway to Niagara Falls, Buffalo is more than just a place to base yourself ahead of a ride on the Maiden of the Mists. Like the other underrated US cities on this list, it’s a thriving foodie scene that has plenty to keep your taste buds occupied for a weekend or more.

Travel and Leisure named Buffalo as America’s third most underrated city in 2016, citing the city’s thriving craft beer scene, it’s perfect pizza, vibrant arts scene, and jam-packed festival calendar as reasons why the city warrants a visit.

Read more…

The Crazy Tourist has fifteen reasons to visit Buffalo that might get your imagination in overdrive.

Image courtesy of Russell Harrison

#4 – Raleigh, North Carolina

You’ve got to be a pretty remarkable city to capture the hearts of Caz & Craig from yTravel, but that’s exactly what Raleigh, North Carolina has done. The jet-setting family of four have singled out Raleigh as their favourite spot in the US and even have a fantastic guide on how to move to Raleigh.

Why do they love it so? It’s a cruisy, green, modern, hip city with stunning natural beauty to pair with its thriving food, beer, and arts scene – the kind of place whose charm is apparent from the moment you enter its city limits.

To me, Raleigh’s food and beer scene is one of its biggest appeals, and it might be best for my waistline that I wasn’t able to make it in my 2009, 2012, or 2016 road trips…

A city with small town charm, there are plenty of cheap Raleigh hotels to make it a good stop on your trip north (or south), but why not spend a few days between Raleigh and Asheville to really see what North Carolina has to offer?

Read more…

Rebel Heart Travel has come up with fifteen things to do in Raleigh that ought to inspire. Go check them out!

Image courtesy of spablab

#3 – Nashville, Tennessee

Music City is a must-see for country music lovers, but the Tennessee city is an often overlooked gem when it comes to US road trips.

While it may not have the same drawcard appeal as New Orleans or Florida, there’s plenty of reasons why Nashville should feature in your exploration of the US South.

Country music may not be your cup of tea, but you haven’t partied until you’ve spent a night sipping Bud Lite and bouncing from honky tonky to honky tonk in Nashville. With live music in every bar and people singing along to their old favourites, it’s hard not to get swept up in the atmosphere.

Just steer clear of those cheap Fireball shots…

Read more…

I recently discussed whether Nashville or Memphis is the more deserving road trip destination.

Image courtesy of Twelvizm

#2 – Portland, Oregon

The premier hipster haven in North America, Portland is a city that well and truly embraces its weirdness.

One of the only places I’ve made a point of visiting on multiple occasions, Portland’s craft beer scene, food scene, and overall atmosphere of general weirdness makes it the kind of city I’d love to call home someday.

Why Portland?

Beer lovers will be spoiled for choice by the city’s dizzying array of craft beers, and the opportunity to design your own Portland brewery tour is a fun way to get out and explore.

Add in the presence of the nearby Colombia River Gorge and the gorgeous Pacific Northwest coastal towns such as Astoria and Tillamook, and you’ve got a recipe for a city that well and truly surpasses all expectations.

Read more…

I’ve waxed lyrical about Portland on many occasions, most recently when I compared it to Seattle and Austin in my Hipster City Showdown.

My friend, Kait takes the wheel during a SLO wine tour. I’m really stoked with how this photo turned out.

#1 – San Luis Obispo, California

I’d never even heard of San Luis Obispo (henceforth known as SLO) until my friend, Kait suggested I swing by on my way from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

I certainly never would have guessed that SLO would go down as one of my favourite stops on the entire road trip.

Wine tasting, bar crawling, and delicious food devouring were all on the agenda in this sunny, youthful college town.

If you’re looking to fully embrace Southern Californian life in a hidden gem that hasn’t been ruined by tourists yet, you could do a lot worse than SLO.

Read more…

I’ve written before about the many reasons to visit SLO.

What are your favourite underrated cities in the United States?

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[spydre]

Tuck Everlasting - BLT

This month I decided it was time to take the first steps in reconnecting with the theater community.  I renewed my membership in the Theatre Arts Guild, and attended TAG night for Bellevue Little Theatre's "Tuck Everlasting - The Musical."  My emotional state seems better when I spend time with friends and family, and I need those connections. What I didn't take into account was that I was headed out to see a show that centers primarily around the theme of what it means to be mortal.  What struck me first as I entered the auditorium, even before I laid eyes upon the beautiful set, was the size of the audience - respectable for a TAG preview - and how I recognized nobody.  I've been away from theater for far too long, ever since I started working second shift.  I expect that to change, hopefully sooner than later.  I'm very pleased to see the community thriving, in spite of the rumors of plague circulating, and I look forward to making new friends in the near future. Speaking of the set, I'm impressed with the minimalist design.  Patrick Ulrich has chosen not to hide the orchestra, nor shunt them off to the side.  Rather, they are seated at the rear, highlighted in cameo, with only a token separation from the foreground.  A couple of elevated platforms frame them, while also granting an extra level to serve as bridges, tree branches, and attics.  Ensemble cast carry extra set pieces in, away, and even change position during scenes, incorporating the movements well.  Speaking of the ensemble, props to choreographer Kelsey Schwenker.  They looked like they were enjoying themselves, something that I often forget to do when I have to dance.  During one particular number ("My Most Beautiful Day"), it looked as if one woman was missing a partner, but she didn't look at all awkward, which had me questioning whether it was done that way on purpose.  My reaction to the actors is the hardest for me to analyze, because here's where I find it difficult to separate what I'm feeling inside from what I'm seeing onstage.  I kept wanting to see more from everyone, and I'm not sure that's fair.  Or maybe it is fair, and they were doing their parts so well that it pulled such strong feelings from me, because I've been all those people. I've been Winnie Foster, feeling fenced in at every turn and just wanting to taste some freedom.  I could hear it in Eva Cohen's voice during "Good Girl Winnie Foster."  I watched Eva reacting to everyone around her, watched Winnie's character learn and grow.  Pay attention to this girl. I've been Winnie's mother, and her grandmother, simultaneously scared and overprotective, and rebellious of authority, wanting the kids to have some fun (my late wife would tell you that I was always more of the latter).  Both these behaviors are borne of intense love.  Sara Mattix and Rose Glock gave me that sense, it fed what I was feeling, and the fire wanted more.  I wasn't disappointed. The hardest character to identify with, and the most fun to watch, had to be The Man in the Yellow Suit, yet I've been him too.  Patrick Wolfe showed us someone who has allowed his dreams of wealth and power to overshadow his connection with humanity.  And honestly, isn't this what we do when we spend so much of our time and energy pursuing a career that we ignore our families?  When we allow ourselves to believe that striking it rich would solve all of our problems?  Okay, sure, it would solve a lot of them, but not all. The interplay between Constable Joe and Hugo (Jeff Klemme and Jake Parker) is deliberately light, and I think the show needs that, but in my eyes it didn't properly set up the relationship to follow, to view Hugo as comic relief.  That seems like a script problem, not the fault of anyone here. And the Tuck family.  These people, being immortal, might seem to be the hardest to understand.  But their problems are not so very much removed from ours, because we often behave as if we will live forever.  I know I have.  Angus Tuck (Chris Ebke) spends his time lazing about, ignoring his wife.  Oh, I've been you, Angus, believing that there will always be tomorrow.  It's a tragedy of mortality that we're wrong.  Can you imagine the tragedy of being right about that?   I wanted to beat some sense into Angus.  Winnie was far gentler. Miles (Travis Manley) has suffered loss, and never recovered.  I'm you, right now, Miles.  It's hard.  Travis made me feel that pain anew, with his anger, and I wanted to comfort him. Jesse (Elliot Kerkhofs) is forever frozen in adolescence, for all of his years.  I'm not proud to say that this describes much of my own life.  Many of us take far too long to grow up.  By the final scene, brief as it was, he did seem to have matured a bit.  Maybe it was that very curt goodbye that did it. The only character that I have never been, is Mae Tuck.  Jennifer Gilg portrayed a woman who looks back on a long life that has contained multitudes of sadness, and still smiles, and still sees hope.  She remembers the best days, the good times.  I aspire to this, but cannot claim it. I won't go into detail on the final dance number.  It recaps the entire moral of the story, without words, and it utterly destroyed me.  I should have stood for the curtain call.  The cast and crew deserved it.  But I was busy blowing my nose. Tuck Everlasting - The Musical runs weekends until March 29, at the Bellevue Little Theatre, 203 W Mission Ave, Bellevue, Nebraska.  (402) 291-1554.  Performances start at 7:30 pm on Friday and Saturday evenings and 2:00 pm on Sundays.  Admission Prices are Adults: $20.00 Seniors: $18.00 Students: $10.00

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Best Dick Jokes Through History – Why Sexual Comedy About Men Is Important – Esquire.com

Blake Griffin landed a dick joke about Caitlyn Jenner at the Comedy Central Roast of Alex Baldwin, which aired last weekend. “Caitlyn completed her gender reassignment in 2017, finally confirming that no one in that family wants a white dick,” he said to roars of laughter. Was the joke offensive? Racist? Hilarious? All of the above? For her part, Jenner took the dick joke in stride. “Caitlyn was down for it,” one of the writers of the roast said. “She was like, ‘Well, you know, I’m gonna hit hard. I want them to hit me hard.’ And so we did.”

Dick jokes have existed throughout history in nearly every culture known to man, from the greatest literature of all time—Shakespeare and James Joyce—to ancient graffiti. “Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!” some anonymous guy scrawled on the wall of a bar in the Roman city of Pompeii around 2,000 years ago. They have been staples of comedy for millennia for a reason: They’re nearly universally appealing.

“Whether you’re rich or poor or black or white, everyone laughs at a dick joke,” says comedian Aaron Berg, who hosts a recurring show at The Stand in New York City. (Berg also hosted a somewhat controversial, entirely satirical show called White Guys Matter that addressed some aspects of white male inadequacy.)

One comedian has elevated dick jokes to poetry, launching them into the realm of high art: Jacqueline Novak, whose one-woman off-Broadway show about blow jobs, Get on Your Knees, manages to make the dick joke both hilarious and high brow. She’s not the first woman to tell a dick joke, nor will she be the last, but she is perhaps the only one to devote a show almost entirely to the penis (with a few minutes sidetracking to ghosts) and be feted by The New York Times for doing so.

Novak, who has been called a “deeply philosophical urologist,” may represent a tipping point in dick jokes, because her show is finally allowing people to see the wisdom (yes, wisdom) in penis humor.

“I don’t even think of myself as like, interested in telling penis jokes. I certainly wouldn’t sit down and go, I’d love to do a show about penises,” Novak says. “I think it’s more like an investigation of my heterosexuality. Does [being heterosexual] mean I love the penis? I’m interested in the language that I’ve been expected to use or accept as legitimate about the penis. Here’s all the reasons that that’s ridiculous.”

Novak’s show is replete with riffs on our “ridiculous” penis language, from the fact that we say the penis is “rock hard”—”No geologist would ever say, this quartz is penis hard“—to the idea that the penis penetrates a woman—”You penetrate me? Fine, but I ate you, motherfucker! I chewed you up! Spit you out, and you loved every goddamn second of it.” In some ways, Novak is the perfect teller of the 21st century dick joke, not only because she is chronicling our hangups about the penis, but also because without a penis of her own, perhaps she is able to see the dick more clearly for what it is, in all its ridiculousness and beauty.

“You penetrate me? Fine, but I ate you, motherfucker! I chewed you up!”

But for the most part, phallic culture remains incoherent. Men are pilloried for exposing their dicks, while Euphoria is celebrated for its 30-penis episode; dick pics are critiqued like Picassos or seen as a public menace; judging a man by the size of his penis is perfectly acceptable or grossly objectifying; porn covers every inch of the internet, yet Facebook won’t accept ads for dildos. Dick jokes are still looked down on as cheap—to be fair, some of them are blatantly bad—but some comics say that isn’t always fair.

“Dick jokes, if you craft something amazing out of them, could be the funniest thing someone’s ever heard. And funny in a way that like, opens your mind up even,” says comedian Sean Patton. “That’s the most important kind of comedy, where you laugh at something to the point where you’re now a little more accepting of it. And that can range from anything to other people’s sexual orientation to accepting your own mental illness.” Patton’s own extended dick joke, “Cumin” on Comedy Central’s This Is Not Happening, has been viewed over 2 million times on YouTube.

Jacqueline Novak performs at the 2019 Clusterfest in June.

Jeff KravitzGetty Images

Novak uses the blow job to critique cultural expectations of masculinity and the pressure women feel to become skilled at sexually pleasing men. “The teeth shaming starts early, of course,” she says in her show. “If you have your full set of teeth…don’t go into a room where a penis is. It’s not safe for him. Why would you put him at risk?”

Patton likens the dick joke to a “Trojan horse” of comedy. “You make them laugh hard at dick jokes, now they’re listening,” he says. “Then you can throw in something a little more meaningful, and they’re on board.”

Not that all dick jokes need to be intellectual to be taken seriously. The song “D*** in a Box” by The Lonely Island, featuring Justin Timberlake, won an Emmy. It turns out the concept wasn’t exactly new. “Decades before The Lonely Island, B.S. Pully was doing that in the ’40s and ’50s,” comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff says. “Pully would be holding a cigar box at his groin, walking down the aisle. [He would] start a show saying, ‘Cigar, would you like a cigar?’ Then he would lift up the lid, and there was a hole cut in there, and his dick was hanging out. The audience would go crazy.”

Dick jokes continue to thrive off audience reactions, according to several comedians I talked to. Bonnie McFarlane, who is best known for her appearance on Last Comic Standing and her Netflix documentary Women Aren’t Funny, began telling dick jokes when she started out in 1995. “You tell dick jokes because it’s a very male audience, so that’s what they want to hear about,” she says. “It’s been a thing since comedy started. People can really kill if they’re just doing dick jokes.” But there is a double standard, she says, when female comics are made fun of “for talking about their vaginas too much.”

That Novak, a female comic, is revolutionizing the dick joke makes sense, considering that historically, “the vanguard for so-called dick jokes and sexual material comes first and foremost from women rather than men,” Nesteroff says. He points to female comics Rusty Warren, Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and LaWanda Page as “probably the four quote-unquote ‘dirtiest’ comedians of the ’50s and ’60s, more so than Lenny Bruce, more so than Redd Foxx.”

LaWanda Page performs for The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast in 1978.

NBCGetty Images

He also says African Americans pushed dick jokes further than any other ethnicity. African-American comedian Page’s albums from the 1970s were rich with dick jokes, referencing “the size of the man, the endurance of the man,” Nesteroff says. As Page recites in her 1973 comedy album Pipe Layin’ Dan: “Husband, dear husband, now don’t be a fool/you’ve worked on the night shift ’til you’ve ruined your tool/you’d better go hungry the rest of your life/than to bring home a pecker so soft to your wife.”

“LaWanda [told] dick jokes for the same reasons a lot of black comics do, because they had to come up in the chitlin circuit, which is basically comedy clubs or bars or places where only black audiences mainly go,” says comedian Harris Stanton, who has toured with Tracy Morgan. “When I started comedy [in 1999] I started in the chitlin circuit,” he continues. “Urban comedy became this big explosion in the United States. A lot of the young black comics couldn’t get into a lot of mainstream clubs, so they would have to perform wherever they could, and dick jokes were welcome to those places.”

African Americans were pioneers of the dick joke, but they definitely weren’t the only ethnic group telling them. Three of the other female sex-joke pioneers Nesteroff mentioned were Jewish. Pearl Williams was known for roasting overweight men when they entered the comedy club by asking, “How long has it been since you’ve seen your dick?” Lenny Bruce, one of the most famous Jewish comedians, was arrested for saying schmuck on stage in 1962. Seven years later, another famous American Jew, Philip Roth, published Portnoy’s Complaint, which is essentially a 274-page dick joke, or so some claim.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen your dick?”

“I probably owe a debt to Philip Roth that I’m not even fully aware of,” says Novak, who is Jewish. She references him directly in her show, joking, “I went off to college feeling good. It’s a Catholic-ish college. Lots of virgin boys scurrying around, scrambling for sexual experience at parties. Not me. I’m a Jew and I did the coursework in high school, so I felt like a Philip Roth figure. A Jewish pervert ready to teach.”

Jewish male comics may be drawn to dick jokes, according to Berg, who is Jewish, because, “the fact that our penises were intruded upon at a very young age probably gives us a fixation on it and makes us want to talk about it more.”

Dr. Jeremy Dauber, the Atran professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Columbia University and author of Jewish Comedy, traces Jewish dick jokes all the way back to the Bible. The earliest case of laughter in Jewish tradition is Sarah’s laughter when she’s told that her 100-year-old husband Abraham will give her a child. It is “a laughter about male impotence,” Dauber says.

But comedians aren’t just laughing at penises anymore. Novak is going in the opposite direction. “I’m trying to restore [the penis] to true dignity.” Will her intellectual blow job jokes allow the dick joke to be taken more seriously? Will future comedians have to deal with the flack that Patton still gets in his reviews?

“Even like positive reviews, sometimes they’ll still point out there’s also a lot of cock, cock cock,” he says. “Why do you have to make sure everyone knows that you thought some of the subject matter was lowbrow?” He thinks reviewers roll their eyes at his dick talk because “everyone constantly is terrified that those around them don’t think that they’re that smart.”

Comedy is one of the only art forms that allows us to talk about male genitalia so openly and democratically. Whatever form the dick joke takes, from idiotic to intellectual, from poetry to prop comedy, as long as it gets a laugh, it should be celebrated. And there’s no better way to diffuse the angst surrounding the modern-day penis than a well-crafted dick joke. The more we laugh about penises (and not just at them), the happier the world might be.

Hallie Lieberman Hallie Lieberman is a sex historian and journalist, and the author of “Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy.”  

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