#this is the power i have when wielding photo reference and a whole lot of enthusiasm lmao

[yo-yo-yoshiko]

I want to carry this scene with me a little while...

[ladymochamagic]

Honestly, I really like to think from the looks of this banner to draw attention to the fact that looking at some of the key elements in this from the “gears” “cogs” “steam machinery” “railroad tracks” to the overall concept of a 1980’s architectural background theme that Espresso must’ve came from an underground steampunk city. Which could highly make sense for the fact that Espresso’s decor would kinda replicate the use of “old-age machinery” and “retro-futuristic” , quoting, “…the setting of the story and inventions that are fantastical and magical”. Even though we don’t get a lot of attention-to-detail on this particular banner— or background history when you unlock him from the gacha. I feel like I’m the only that may have pointed this out at a later time, but it still interests me that someone also from Twitter, whose captions were in Chinese was using reference photos and toggling visual elements of this particular image as well.

Which the image descriptively makes sense for its “machinery” and “underground industrial” world. Since Espresso would most likely teach science as his main subject to coffee work experiments through intense laboratory work to reading up historical events and fantasies, considering in the Steampunk realm, this would also include inventors and mad-scientists, much so like him self.

So far, with what I’ve kept up about Espresso and behind some (not), I mean ALOT of good controversies on Tumblr and through other social medias, I think in reality, I can’t really see him being majority of an antagonist— even if he is the “mad scientist” that he is for his desires of dark magic and claiming to be the the powerful coffee wielding pioneer— that he continues to be. I think he feels more comfortable, personally from where I think he came from, using his magic for his own use underneath the crimson faded light in his home city. Which the mood or vibe of an underground steampunk city would ideally fit for a character like Espresso and the fact that this may have been his origin of learning how he started to use different types of magic, especially experiments of grinding high quality coffee beans through his lab by using “powered-steamed machinery” and also generating through “high-speed railroad train engines” as well and to also supply fresh coffee beans originating from the other side of Earthbread where they are extracted from a coffee plant. It would make total sense, I believe!!!! To also add, he could be subjected as one of the leaders to his home, definitely not a monarchy system, but because he came from his own Republic, before grouping up with his original members until uniting with his current team to help run cookie alliances in the Magic City / Parfaedia Institute.

I guess coming to this conclusion that you could say that Espresso would definitely fit under the Steampunk aesthetic and not only the Dark Academia aesthetic. The whole science fiction and fantasy inspo definitely fits the description for a professor whose knowledge is quite incredible for magic use!

((I am completely going wild over how I quickly had to do some rushed research just for his banner thing. Because for someone who also enjoys the steampunk aesthetic as well, as far as clothing and the fantasy lore behind it. The idea just came to me. And yes, it’s 1am I desperately need sleep. Also fill free to head butt for me for this because I honestly could not get the right words out for explaining this headcanon of hell fire))

[thisselflovecamebacktome]

My personal connection with Taylor’s discography, part five: Marjorie

Basically this is just a series I’m doing where I write down my feelings on what each of the Taylor songs means to me personally on a line to line basis both for my own sake to have it somewhere and for anyone who wants to know anything further about me. So with that in mind, let’s get started.

Marjorie

This song is a little weird for me because as a whole, it’s about losing the almost romanticised view I had of my family. Like most of the people I think of when it comes to this song are still very much alive, but our relationship reached a point where I will never speak to them again. But despite our relationship being like that now, much like most kids, I grew up thinking these people were near perfect and those memories don’t go away just because I’m not on good terms with them now. Because of that, this song has been a very bittersweet song for me and one of the harder Taylor songs to listen to.

Never be so kind, you forget to be clever

When I was younger, I was one of those kids who never wanted to see anyone hurt and would give up if it meant someone else was happy. And that cost me a lot of opportunities. And a remember each time I’d do it, my mother and paternal grandparents would sit me down and remind me that I am a female and that the world is harsh and doesn’t give us as a gender many chances, so I shouldn’t be throwing away chances like that, especially to people who were more likely to achieve those goals through different means. I particularly remember having one of these talks in the third grade when I asked the teacher to allow my competitor in a maths competition to have a second try when he got an answer wrong only for him to quickly declare victory when I messed up a question later. Let it be known that I will never again forget that 7x8 is 56 and that even if I still have issues with it, I do not need to make things harder for myself by giving a leg up to people who would keep me down given the chance.

Never be so clever, you forget to be kind

As much as I tried to be nice as a kid, I definitely grew up with some privileges and a bit of a god complex when it came to my academic skill. Cringily, up until like 9th grade I was that kid that gloated about their grades and was like “well if you just tried harder, you’d get these grades too!”. I was particularly like this with my sister given my parents spent our childhood pinning us against each other and that was the only “win” I could take, especially in terms of my mother. Except it really wasn’t because my mother was also someone who hated school and didn’t do well through no fault of her own. As a result, “You’re smart Jessica, but there’s always going to be someone smarter and nobody is going to care how good you are if you can’t be nice” was a common phrase I heard as a kid. Whether or not it’s true is yet to be seen given some of the biggest names in the world are assholes, but I’ve definitely come to a place where kindness will always outclass cleverness in my life.

And if I didn't know better, I'd think you were talking to me now

When I have a hard decision to make or I feel like I’m making the wrong choice, I still imagine these idealised versions of my family were still in my life and talk myself into what I think is the next right move. Is talking to yourself still counted as being crazy? Perhaps, but it works and is weirdly comforting given everything that’s happened.

If I didn't know better, I'd think you were still around. What died didn't stay dead. You're alive, you're alive in my head, so alive

Despite everything that happened, my anger towards it, and the way I’ve tried to put it out of mine, I still look back fondly on these memories with these people before they showed who they actually were.

Never be so polite, you forget your power

Like I said, as a kid I hated inconveniencing anyone. This meant I ate a bunch of food I hated, did activities I didn’t want to and even went out while sick because I didn’t want to ruin the day for anyone else. In particular, I remember getting a big stomach ache while on holiday at my paternal grandparents’ house but still trying to get ready and go out to the beach for the day. When he immediately realised something was wrong was told that I hadn’t said anything because I didn’t want to ruin the day, he sat me down and reminded me that it was my holiday too and that was my body so I could and should take control of that and say no sometimes, even if it is just because I don’t want to do something.

Never wield such power, you forget to be polite

For all their flaws, my mother’s side of the family did teach one one thing. I came from nothing, and even if someday I broke the poverty cycle, I was not above anyone else. A lot of conversations with that side of the family was about how oftentimes it was “higher class” people who refused to tip or use manners and felt above it all. Also, when I was a smartass about my grades and jobs I wanted to get, I was reminded that even if I had the best paying job in the world, I would still need the “lesser” workers in order for my life to run smoothly. While the words “class struggle” never came into play, these conversations very much helped to form a lot of my beliefs and remind me to stay humble.

And if I didn't know better, I'd think you were listening to me now

When someone dies, a lot of people believe they send signs from beyond the grave. Sometimes these happen in the form of seeing associated animals on a bad day, sometimes it’s a random thing coming to you and pushing in a certain direction when needing to make a choice. And there are days when it feels the same with my family even though most of them are still alive. 

But most of all, I think about this line in reference to my uncle who passed when I was 12 who always had mine and my mother’s backs. I remember driving home from my partner’s place during a depressive episode a few years back thinking about how my grandparents live in the same suburb and considering dropping past even though I had cut them off years before to have not only roadworks happen to be happening in a way to make me go past their street, but also their light being off implying they weren’t there. And despite not being a spiritual/religious person anymore, something about that felt very much like my uncle had heard me and was making it clear that his parents were out living their lives and I was making the right choice by doing the same.

The autumn chill that wakes me up. You loved the amber skies so much. Long limbs and frozen swims. You'd always go past where our feet could touch

This line screams my sister to me. The best thing about my sister and the thing that I will spend forever missing is how she got so excited about the little things in life. Doing her makeup or wearing nice clothes was exciting, listening to music was exciting, getting up early on special days to open gifts was exciting, hell even going to a concert for an artist she hated was exciting for her. She was also the biggest risk taker of the family. And given her auburn hair, the autumn/amber visuals just caps the whole thing off.

And I complained the whole way there; the car ride back and up the stairs

I was a whiny and impatient kid (who somehow turned into a more impatient adult, yikes). Looking back, I spent so many occasions with my family whining about little things or asking how long it’s going to take instead of just enjoying the moment. And ultimately, I think that’s one of my biggest regrets in life so far.

I should've asked you questions. I should've asked you how to be, asked you to write it down for me

Like most people, I really underestimated how much time I was going to have with my family and I took for granted the notion that there was always going to be a time that they’d be around to help and get advice from. So I never asked. And now I’m here, 25 and feeling incredibly unequipped for handling the world around me like I should and wishing I had taken those opportunities to ask for more advice. Likewise, while people make jokes that white people have no culture, I genuinely really feel like I don’t (and as a result struggle with my place in the world) because I didn’t bother asking about our history or the family members I never met or any of that and don’t have anything in my possession to give me that information.

Should've kept every grocery store receipt 'cause every scrap of you would be taken from me

Kinda continuing from above, I hated taking photos and really didn’t keep much that my family gave me growing up. Like realistically when it comes to the extended family, I have a few really low quality photos, a piece of art my paternal grandfather gave me before moving to the UK because I loved it as a kid and my memories. And even with my sister and father, I have a single box of things my sister left behind and one Taylor Swift fan book and a necklace my father gave me. That’s it. 

I don’t have any family heirlooms, I don’t even think I have one picture of me with most the members of the family and I don’t even have the loving perception of them because that was taken from me in the fallout of the family. And despite everything that happened, that upsets me whenever I think about it.

Watched as you signed your name Marjorie. All your closets of backlogged dreams and how you left them all to me

To be honest, this line just reminds me of the women in my family and how much they sacrificed in order for me to get where I am today. Like both my grandmothers never finished school (with my maternal grandmother being unable to read) in order to get jobs to look after their families after both fathers abandoned them before marrying into abusive relationships. My mother quit her higher paying job to raise me and my siblings full time because my father had epilepsy and couldn’t. And my mother started working again in my teens in the form of cleaning the dirtiest of houses so I could go to Japan which was one of the happiest memories of my life. She also mentioned she wished I could have been a performer because she had always wanted to be. None of these women got to experience their dreams or even the lives they should have had all to make sure I had the best chance of living mine and again, no matter what happens, that will always be something I remember.

And if I didn't know better, I'd think you were singing to me now

Again, this line just screams my sister. Any time I hear one of her old favourite songs or a top ten hit I think she’d like, especially if it comes on shuffle or out in public, I think of her.

I know better, but I still feel you all around. I know better, but you're still around

Obviously I know these people are not talking to me. They’ve moved on with their lives and outside the moments where they feel the need to try PR the situation to keep me quiet, I imagine they don’t really think of me at all. Additionally, it’s hard to say that the idealistic versions of them I created in my head even existed to be around in the first place. And yet, I still feel their influence on me in my day to day life.

[catsafarithewriter]

Desperate Measures

A/N: Do you know how sometimes you get an idea that’s so stupid you immediately have to write it? Well, I saw THIS POST, and instantly latched on to the “The Fiance You Thought Was Lost at Sea” flavour and couldn’t resist. 

Human AU.

x

The date was going badly. 

Not covertly-ask-the-bartender-for-a-taxi bad, but definitely veering into climbing-out-the-bathroom-window territory. 

At least, it would have been if the windows were large enough. 

(They weren’t.)

(She’d tried.)

Haru hummed her way through another of her date’s monologues on the virtues of the different brands of modelling paint and subtly checked her phone. Still no reply from either of her housemates in the last thirty seconds. 

She wistfully looked over the pudding menu and tried to convince herself that the triple-fudge brownie was worth dragging the date out to a second course. 

She needed chocolate. Lots of it. 

She deserved it, really, she rationalised. As a prize for her patience. 

She made a noncommittal sound in the back of her throat as her date moved on to the various selections of glue and good god was she bored of toy planes.

She ate a little faster and dismissed the brownie. She’d come back for it another day. Even free pudding wasn’t worth this. 

“...and of course, there’s CA, which will bond between most dissimilar materials, including plastic to metal, but it can discolour some plastics...”

It wasn’t that she disliked model planes. Or tanks. Or trains. Or whatever her date made. (Truth be told, she’d forgotten within the span of dinner arriving.) It was more to the fact that it had been forty minutes and he hadn’t asked her for a single detail about her life. 

She had tried. But it turned out that derailing (all puns intended, she needed something to amuse her) a topic on scale model building was harder than it sounded. 

“...so personally I prefer an epoxy resin, even if it does take longer to dry. Of course, if you’re wielding plastic to plastic, then the obvious choice would be a solvent cement...”

Dear god, kill me now, Haru thought. 

And that was when Louise burst through the pub doors with a raucous bang and cried, “HARU, I’VE RETURNED!” at the top of her lungs. 

The bar went silent. Even Haru’s date trailed off on the merits of solvent cement. And it wasn’t just because of Louise’s dramatic entrance or her outburst, although either might have been enough. 

She was soaked.

Like, dumped-in-a-river soaked. 

Her usually perfect hair was plastered along the sides of her face, her clothes bedraggled, and what looked like a crab hung off her ear like a huge and ugly earring. 

“Haru?” Haru’s date asked. “Do you know that woman?”

“Uh,” Haru said. 

Louise cleared the pub in three easy steps - mostly because people swiftly got out of her way - and drew Haru into a bone-breaking hug. From this proximity, Haru could smell saltwater.

“Louise,” she wheezed. “What are you doing?”

“Saving you from your god-awful date,” Louise whispered, and released her. “Haru!” she boomed. “I know you’re in shock, but it’s me! I have returned! Your fiancée, lost at sea, but finally I have come back to you!”

Louise paused. 

It took Haru a moment longer to register that this was her cue. Luckily, everyone else seemed so perplexed by the turn of events that they didn’t notice her hesitation. She threw her arms around Louise and buried her head into her housemate’s shoulders to hide the hysterical laughter. 

“Louise!” she cried back, and she hoped people mistook her shaking voice for heartfelt emotion and not the physical restraint of hiccuping giggles. “It is you! I almost didn’t recognise you after all this time! How did you...? How did you survive the shipwreck?”

“Ah.” Louise leant back and Haru could see her mental gears frantically whirring. “It is a tale of drama and suspense and daring-do of epic proportions. It will live on in history as a tale through the ages. In song! In verse! Maybe in a little Broadway show.” She paused and reconsidered the rapt audience she had. “It is a story for another day!”

Haru’s date got uneasily to his feet, paler than Haru remembered him. “Uh, hi, should I be leaving or...?”

“Haru!” Louise bellowed. She was going to have no voice tomorrow at this rate. “Who is this man you’re with?”

“This is...” Good god, she’d forgotten his name. 

“Going,” he supplied. “Haru, it was... this was an experience, but I’m going to go now. It looks like you have a lot of catching up to do.” He paused. “I’ll pay on the way out.”

Haru was beginning to feel somewhat bad about her date, however boring he had been, but then Louise swept her off her feet in an overly dramatic lift and spun her through the air and Haru was too busy trying not to yelp/laugh to worry. 

As her feet touched back down, there was a shocked kind of applause from the onlookers. Again, Haru wasn’t given any time to process this before Louise grabbed her arm and hauled her out of the bar. She passed at least two bar patrons who were filming the whole incident. 

“Fiancée?” Haru managed to ask as they slipped back outside, as if that was the only question she had in her mind. 

“It sounded better than girlfriend. More dramatic.”

“You have a girlfriend,” Haru reminded her. 

“Yes, and she’s waiting for us in the car. There she is.” Louise gave a cheerful little wave at her mini, which currently contained her brother and her aforementioned girlfriend. 

Persephone was settled comfortably in the driver’s seat, while Louise’s brother and fellow housemate, Baron, was squashed into the back with his knees about his ears. 

Haru opened the passenger door and stared bemusedly at the occupants. “So what’s all this then?”

“What does it look like?” Persephone asked. “It’s a rescue mission. Now get inside before we attract any more attention. Louise, towel.”

Haru slid into the seat beside Baron while Louise ruefully dried herself off. “And who decided that posing as a fiancée lost at sea was the best way to get me out of a boring date?”

Persephone and Baron both pointed to Louise.

“Oh, come on. You can’t say that wasn’t fun,” Louise protested. 

“We did suggest alternatives,” Baron said. 

“Yes, but they were boring and no fun.” Louise twisted in her seat to look back at Haru. “We drew straws to see whose idea we’d go with.”

“And what were the other options?”

“Fire alarm,” Baron said.

“Isn’t that, like, illegal?”

“Only a little bit.”

“And only if you get caught,” Louise added. 

“Sephie?”

“Awkward third wheel,” Persephone said. 

“I’m not gonna lie, that’s kinda anticlimactic after the other two.”

“Never underestimate the power of an awkward third wheel. Cringey date stories, constant photos of my ninety cats, random facts on the mating rituals of bats, you name it. And even if it doesn’t end the date in thirty seconds, at least you’ll have an interesting conversation.”

“Your imagination never ceases to amaze me,” Louise said. 

“Oh, I do actually know about bat mating rituals. Blame late night nature documentaries.”

“I was referring to the cringey date stories.”

“Honey, I love you, but you once punched a guy on our anniversary.”

“He deserved it.”

“We nearly got arrested.”

“But we didn’t.”

“No. But we did get permanently banned from that bar.”

“The food wasn’t even that good there anyway.”

Haru leant over to Baron, although that didn’t take much in the confines of the mini. “Did you really suggest setting off the fire alarm to end my awkward date?”

“Toto proposed one of us pose as your child from the future and mutter about how you were late to meet your future spouse, if that puts my suggestion in a better light at all.”

“Toto was in on this too?”

“And Muta. He suggested posing as an FBI agent on the next table over.”

“Why?”

“I think his train of logic was that it would eventually freak your date out into leaving early--” 

“No, I mean why do either of them even know about this?”

“Ah. Yes, well we had to stop by their place to grab the final costume pieces. Toto still had a fake crab from the Little Mermaid school play he helped with.”

“Oh god. Is there anyone who doesn’t know about my terrible date?”

“I believe Hiromi is still ignorant to this.”

“Nope,” Louise said cheerfully. “I texted her for ideas and she’s the one who suggested the bucket of saltwater to add that extra briny effect.”

Haru cradled her head in her hands. “You’re all mad.”

“Hey,” Louise protested. “It got you out of the date, didn’t it?”

[old1ddude]

I'm looking forward to your take on things. (Take your time ofc, I don't mean to rush)

Hi anon!

I FINALLY have time to write about Harry’s RS cover story and photos!

On balance, I think it’s the best article we could have hoped for.  Sure we had the obligatory mentions of “C,” but H is still closeted (somewhat) after all.  I found it interesting that Kid Harpoon was left to do some of the lying for Harry.

I saw a good post by @dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram

https://old1ddude.tumblr.com/post/187311378342/im-a-little-curious-youve-said-in-the-past-if

It’s a short post and you should read the whole thing, but I’ll quote one sentence here, “Fundamentally I think Harry and Louis have different ways of communicating with the media. Harry is reluctant to lie, but hasn’t shown a particular desire to be understood.”

I think this is a very true statement and it’s very difficult (if not impossible) getting to know Harry by reading about him.  The best way to learn what makes Harry tick is to watch him.  While I believe Harry and Rob have good rapport, I wouldn’t imagine Rob knows Harry all that well.  I don’t think H is the type of person who let’s many people in, really.  What Rob gave us is a series of snapshots, or vignettes - time he spent with Harry.  There were some good insights and I never expected he would talk about his new music all that much.  Harry is like Mary Poppins - he never explains anything!  Rob is also NOT going to be the one that outs Harry.  He’s made some salient observations about Louis and Harry on stage at a 1D concert, but he knows where to draw the line.  I love how respectful Rob is of 1D, their music and fans.  This article is so far superior to Crowe’s, I can’t even articulate it!

This reminds me a lot of the Another Man spread, in many ways.  The lyrical and literary references gave us a “Rosetta Stone” by which to interpret the lyrics in HS1.  Harry never spoon feeds his audience, but there’s a wealth of information in his art - for those willing to invest some time and thought.  He even said in the article that he only talks about his “relationships” through his art!  The photos also remind me of AM, but this time he’s so much more confident!  I love the photography even more than the AM piece and Harry also looks a bit more muscular.  A solo career was brand new to him back then, but now he knows he can do it on his own.  It was also telling when he said how worried he was if he were to be arrested, etc. - what the label would do.  Harry embarked on his solo career with humility, fear, trepidation - fully aware of the power labels wield over artists.

His remarks about feminism were very good.  I’ve always been a bit incredulous that some in the fandom have sought to hold him to a standard of perfect woke-ness in all aspects of present day feminism.  (An impossible task, I’m sure.  The definition of said woke-ness will surely be different for every woke person you meet.)  He never tried to be an icon - just a guy who thinks everyone should be equal.

His words about Black Lives Matter, End Gun Violence and the rainbow were also perfect.  There was a concert where he gave a little speech acknowledging the whole variety of his fans which was similar.  Personally, I wish he only had the rainbow on his guitar, because that one is for him.  It’s VERY easy for celebrities to virtue signal and it can easily feel quite cheap and pandering (I think it usually is pandering, honestly.)  Also, there isn’t a guitar big enough for all the worthy causes which exist in our world.  That said, his framing of the issue - saying it’s about telling those fans he sees them makes me feel so much better about the whole thing.

I did think the stories about hallucinogenic mushrooms were a bit heavy handed and unnecessary.   I do understand him wanting to push back against the “pure Harry” idea circulating in some segments of his fandom, however.  

I’m very happy with Rob’s story on Harry.  It’s a series of vignettes, not a profile.  Good riddance to Cameron Crowe!

[uptightcitizensbrigade]

How St. Vincent's New Album Captures a Planet — and a Person — in Crisis

I'm seated with four other individuals in a room at the W Hotel. Before us, resplendent in an oversize gold jacket with matching gold boots, is Annie Clark, better known in the music world as St. Vincent. She's talking about her fifth studio album, Masseduction, as she plays a handful of tracks on a nearby laptop computer. "It's about sex and power and sadness," she says, swiveling in her chair. 

Clark, 35, first entered the music world as St. Vincent a full decade ago. Marry Me dropped in 2007, establishing the artist as a sweet-singing siren with a wild and electric sound to back her up. When I first listened to St. Vincent, I introduced her to my friends as a "punk rock Disney princess." In my own mind, I envisioned her beguiling all the creatures in a mystical forest . . . before setting it on fire.

"Are you feeling a jam?" she asks the room. We've collected in an intimate hospitality room next to the W Hollywood's sound suite, which houses an actual professional recording studio in the hotel. St. Vincent has just finished a photo shoot in the mini studio; we're set to go on a small tour after she takes off. For now, we get to have a small listening party where she'll play a few select songs from Masseduction and answer our questions.

She decides to lead with "Los Ageless," one of the singles that was released in September. It's only appropriate; we're literally in the heart of Tinseltown. When someone points out how very aptly St. Vincent seems to be channeling Los Angeles for the event, she kicks up her boots. "They scream LA, right? They look completely appropriate for this space."

While the rhythm and melody of "Los Ageless" is both intoxicating and electrifying, the lyrics are noticeably sad. "How can anybody have you and lose you and not lose their minds, too?" she asks. As the song winds down, she mumbles, "I try to tell you I love you, but it comes out all sick." It's this balance of highs and lows that really helps Masseduction shine. As the walls vibrate, surrendering to the rumbles of the huge hotel speakers, St. Vincent listens, swiveling slightly in her chair.

This sort of nauseating euphoria has been present in St. Vincent's entire musical catalog. On her second album, 2009's Actor, you'll find a perfect example. "Black Rainbow" starts sweet, with a light meandering flute sound driving most of the rhythm. As the song continues, the ominous, deep bass takes over until the final 90 seconds, when an intense electrical guitar slowly plunges the song into certain insanity. It's dazzling shows of artistry like that which have really carved out a musical space for her career.

When pressed about the dynamic between sex, power, and sadness in her work, the indie-pop songstress is quick to elaborate on the different levels featured in the album. "Sex and power, they can equal many things. They can equal surrender or they can equal intimacy," she tells us. "What, again, the culture is looking at now is the dark side of that, which is sadness, tragedy . . . there's a whole lot to kind of unpack culturally. We're at a moment that probably we should've exactly been at a number of years ago. But I do think that we're disassembling and reassembling what power is and who wields it. I really do feel that way."

After "Los Ageless," I ask if we can listen to one of my favorite songs on the album. "Happy Birthday, Johnny" is a classic combination: it's heartbreaking and beautiful. It's so specific, but it casts a wide net of emotional understanding. It also features Johnny, a figure who's appeared on and off throughout St. Vincent's entire musical career.

On her debut album Marry Me, she spends the title track begging a man, John, to marry her. "I'll be so good to you," she insists. "You won't realize I'm gone." On her 2014 self-titled album, she calls him "Prince Johnny." On Masseduction, Johnny seems to be at his lowest point yet. But who is he? Is he an amalgam of all the heartbreaks in St. Vincent's life? Is he metaphor for something bigger?

"I wish Johnny was a metaphor," she says, laughing. "No, the third of the Johnny trilogy . . . I think that some people are — like, tragedy is baked into them. But they also exist in this plane where they burn brighter than other people. So they also could burn out. And those are the kinds of people who break your heart time and time again, but you love them more at the same time. So that's about John again." 

With her admissions about Johnny, St. Vincent has shown her hand, if only in part. While it's true that Masseduction captures the bleak outlook that seems to be a part of 2017's zeitgeist, there's still a deeply personal aspect that seems to stem directly from the artist.

Though you'd be hard-pressed to identify the "Johnny" in her life, some of the singer's more recent romances have been a bit more public. St. Vincent began dating Cara Delevingne in 2015; the two were together until splitting in September 2016. (I'd suggest that "New York," the first single from Masseduction, is about Delevingne.) Though St. Vincent reportedly, briefly dated Kristen Stewart in October 2016, her romantic exploits have mostly managed to slip under the radar. Maybe it's because she's now in "deep nun mode," which she explained to The Guardian during a recent interview.

Romantic endeavors aside, St. Vincent doesn't necessarily cop to the idea that her new album is about her personal heartbreaks and sadness. Well, at least not overtly. "It's not a diary, because it's art or pop music or whatever, but it's very first-person. It's very much speaking to my own experience," she admits. "Which, sometimes, is to feel powerful. Or, you find yourself wielding power in ways that aren't particularly graceful. And then some of it would be definitely like being powerless. Powerless in the face of love or sex or drugs or whatever it is, kind of dealing with those forces that can swallow you whole if you're not keeping it together."

After the sorrow surrounding Johnny, St. Vincent next plays "Pills," another upbeat track that's almost delirious in its frantic pace. "Pills" is especially pertinent to the twisted yin and yang of being powerful and powerless. The manic guitar hearkens back to her previous albums.

In retrospect, it's easy to see how each of the musician's albums begets the next. The insane parts of Actor certainly bleed into the conflicting bitterness and sweetness on 2012's Strange Mercy. I mean, St. Vincent literally portrays a Gulliver-sized statue that shatters to dust in her "Cheerleader" music video. On 2014's self-titled St. Vincent, there are unmistakable references to the kind of dystopian vibes and global sadness she explores in Masseduction. I mean, just watch Digital Witness and tell me it's not a prologue for the "Los Ageless" video.

Once "Pills" ends, she opens up about where she was when she started writing the album. Her answer was entirely unexpected.

"The first song I wrote for it was 'Smoking Section,' which is the last song on the record, which is pretty bleak. I'm being really honest . . . It's one of those ones that my mom hears and asks me if I'm OK," she says with another laugh. "Yeah, it was on the Eastern Block, the former Soviet-occupied territory I was in. I was driving from the Czech Republic to Latvia and we had to skirt around Belarus . . . . long story short, it was a long bus ride."

While the song is admittedly dark, it's still her favorite song on the album. "I think that one . . . went through a lot of trying on different clothes to be recorded. I love that one."

With so much talk about the album's final song, it's only appropriate to end the event by playing it. Before she does, she returns to the previous notion about how the album is so personal and universal at the same time. "I have that emotional experience," she says, referring to the moments that inspired each song. "So it just seems like that's transposable. A friend of mine was telling me this great Kurt Vonnegut quote, the other day. 'Write just for one person, because if you write for the world, your idea will get pneumonia and die,' or something like that." She lets out another laugh. "You can look it up online, I just butchered it. But the idea, that if you can write truthfully about . . . your personal experience, that's going to be transposable to other people."

St. Vincent has been seated in front of us for the whole listening party, more or less. I think she got up to get a drink. But for this final song, the final song on the album — which seems to me like the very heart of the album, a track that synthesizes all of St. Vincent's pain — she opts not to stay. "I feel like I'll press play on this and then maybe I won't sit in front of you while you listen to it." She lets out one last laugh, starts the song, and leaves as the lyrics start. "Sometimes I sit in the smoking section . . . "

[automaticpostinfluencer]

The Mandalorian: Everything we know about Disney Plus Star Wars show

The Mandalorian is the first live action Star Wars show, and it’s getting a second season in fall in 2020.

Lucasfilm / Illustration by CNET

“Mandalorian, look outside, they’re waiting for you.” The wait is over — you can watch the all eight episodes of the first season of Jon Favreau‘s live-action Star Wars series The Mandalorian on Disney Plus right now. The show introduced us to the gift that is Baby Yoda (subject of many a fan theory and an onslaught of merch) and may bring a beloved Clone Wars character into live action for the first time in Season 2.

Disney Plus won’t be launching in the UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Germany until March 24. The first two episodes will be available that day, with the third coming on Friday, March 27. Subsequent episodes will be released weekly, and hit the service at 8 a.m. each Friday.

Now playing: Watch this: First look at the best Baby Yoda toys coming this year

3:49

What we know about season 2?

It’ll start in October 2020, Disney boss Bob Iger (who’s since stepped down) said in a Feb. 4 earnings call. He also mentioned the possibility that some of the show’s characters could go “in their own directions in terms of series” — hinting that we might see some Mandalorian spinoffs down the line.

Rosario Dawson will reportedly play Ahsoka Tano in the second season.

Rich Polk/Getty Images for Sony Pictures Entertainment

On March 20, Slashfilm reported that season 2 will see Ahsoka Tano, former Padawan of the late Anakin Skywalker, make her live action debut. She’ll apparently be played by Rosario Dawson, whom you might remember playing Claire Temple in Netflix’s Marvel shows.

Michael Biehn, who played Kyle Reese in The Terminator and and Corporal Hicks in Aliens, will join the cast as a bounty hunter, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Bill Burr will apparently also reprise his role as gunslinger Mayfield, and principal photography on the season was apparently completed before the coronavirusoutbreak, according to i09.

The day the season 1 finale aired, Favreau mentioned season 2 in a tweet featuring a Gamorrean — the porcine species that served as Jabba the Hutt’s guards in Return of the Jedi. So presumably that race will show up in the next batch of episodes.

CNET CULTURE NEWSLETTER

Movies to music, toys to technology, entertain your brain.

What happened in season 1?

You’re in luck! I wrote detailed recaps of each episode that you can use to catch up:

Chapter 1: The Mandalorian

Chapter 2: The Child

Chapter 3: The Sin

Chapter 4: Sanctuary

Chapter 5: The Gunslinger

Chapter 6: The Prisoner

Chapter 7: The Reckoning

Chapter 8: Redemption

Now playing: Watch this: Your guide to Star Wars lightsaber colors

2:16

Who’s in it?

Pedro Pascal (best known for playing Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones) is the bounty hunter behind the helmet: He’s a lone Mandalorian gunfighter operating in the outer reaches of the galaxy.

Pedro Pascal is the man behind the Mandalorian’s helmet.

Gabriel Maseda/NurPhoto via Getty Images

He’s joined by a star-studded cast, but a couple of these characters didn’t survive season 1:

I dunno about you, but the sight of happy Baby Yoda immediately calms me.

Disney

What’s the deal with Baby Yoda?

This little guy captured everyone’s hearts the moment he appeared in the season premiere, and we’ve got a whole separate guide for him. He’s officially known as The Child — we don’t know his real name, race or home planet, but he can use the Force pretty effectively and the Imperial Remnant wants him.

Oh, and the most detailed version of the puppet apparently cost around $5 million.

Mando walks away from his ship, the Razor Crest, in the show’s poster.

Disney/Lucasfilm

Why isn’t this about the usual Jedi and Sith conflict?

The Star Wars underworld is a very rich storytelling environment, according to executive producer Jon Favreau. He wanted to get back to the tone of the old Western and samurai films that inspired George Lucas, and said the show is Star Wars meets Mad Max. 

The Mandalorian is one of four shows set in a galaxy far, far away coming to the Disney Plus streaming service. 

The seventh season of The Clone Wars started in February, and the company announced a Rogue One prequel series focusing on rebel spy Cassian Andor in 2018. And Ewan McGregor will return as Obi-Wan Kenobi in a brand new show, set to start shooting in 2021.

Now playing: Watch this: We rode Disney’s new Star Wars ride

8:02

Who else is involved?

Directors for the first season:

Favreau, Filoni, Colin Wilson and Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy are the executive producers, with Karen Gilchrist as co-executive producer.

The Mandalorian is among the first projects for ILM TV, a division of Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic visual effects company. The show’s soundtrack is composed by Ludwig Göransson, who scored Black Panther, Venom and Creed II. Göransson’s Black Panther score won him a Grammy and an Oscar in 2019.

Is there a bounty of Mandalorian merch for us to hunt?

Merchandise hunting is a complicated hobby, but you know you want it. Three characters from the show are represented in the six-inch Black Series — The Mandalorian himself (along with a shiny carbonized variant), Cara Dune, IG-11, the Heavy Infantry Mandalorian (named Paz Vizla) and the Offworld Jawa. Baby Yoda will join them in spring 2020.

What’s a Mandalorian?

Mandalorians are humans from the Outer Rim world of Mandalore, its moon Concordia and the planet Kalevala, whose story was largely told in The Clone Wars and Rebels.

Sabine Wren (seen wielding the Darksaber) could appear in the show.

Lucasfilm

Their world went through major political upheaval during the Clone Wars and early days of the Galactic Empire’s rule, but many of the clans united under the rule of Bo-Katan Kryze after she took control of the Darksaber. The black-bladed weapon was created more than 1,000 years earlier by Tarre Vizsla (the first Mandalorian to join the Jedi Order) and became a symbol of leadership — it also showed up in The Mandalorian’s season 1 finale.

You probably associate bounty hunters Boba Fett and Jango Fett with the term because they wear the cool armor, but they aren’t true Mandalorians. Jango once claimed to be from Concord Dawn, a Mandalorian world, but the government considered him (and by extension, his cloned son Boba) to be pretenders.

Bounty hunter Boba Fett wears Mandalorian armor, but his status is disputed.

Lucasfilm

Could Boba Fett show up?

Fans have been clamoring for Boba’s return to the Star Wars galaxy despite his fall into the maw of a hungry sarlacc in Return of the Jedi, but there’s been no indication that will happen and he didn’t show up in season 1.

Fans of the Legends material (developed in novels, comics and games prior to 2014) will recall that Boba escaped the sarlacc in that continuity and went on to become the leader of Mandalore in a very different (and non-canon) post-Return of the Jedi galaxy. 

In canon, Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy of novels saw Mandalorian armor that’s heavily implied to be Boba’s being recovered from the pit and worn by former slave Cobb Vanth. Using the armor as a symbol of power, he becomes sheriff of Freetown (a settlement on Tatooine) and offers sanctuary to anyone willing to battle the world’s crime syndicates.

We also saw a mysterious person approach assassin Fennec Shand’s body on Tatooine in the final moments of season 1’s fifth episode, but the show hasn’t followed up on that tease yet.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian AT-ST Raider stands tall in Hasbro’s Vintage Collection

See all photos

What other stories could they draw from?

Star Wars 1313 was a video game that got shelved when Disney shut down all projects at LucasArts — Lucasfilm’s game development group — in 2013. We saw an impressive demo for Uncharted-style adventure before that, featuring actor Wilson Bethel (who recently hit the target in Daredevil season 3).

It would’ve seen players exploring the bowels of the city planet Coruscant — the title was a reference to its grimy underworld Level 1313 (which later appeared in The Clone Wars).

After it was canceled, we found out that Boba Fett was going to be the star and that Kennedy later agreed the concept art was “unbelievable.”

“So our attitude is, we don’t want to throw any of that stuff away. It’s gold,” she told Slashfilm in 2015. “And it’s something we’re spending a lot of time looking at, pouring through, discussing, and we may very well develop those things further. We definitely want to.”

In that same interview, Kennedy noted that Lucasfilm read through the material Lucas developed for the canceled TV show Star Wars: Underworld, which was announced in 2005 and canned in 2010 due to budget constraints. It was to be set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope and would have tied into 1313.

The Mandalorian invades Hasbro’s Star Wars: Black Series action figure line

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[chloealviaraet]

For the first YFMM I will be analyzing Lily Allen’s music video for her song “Lost My Mind” because I think it has great examples of line and shape throughout. 

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQi0ORxEyRA&feature=youtu.be

Analysis: 

Throughout this video line and shape are used to show both structure and uneasiness. The room itself is made up of a lot of rectilinear shapes, which is contrasting to the lyrics and idea of the song in a way that emphasizes the meaning of it. It all takes place in a single room that feels more like a box with its very lines making it up. The wood on the walls has a very linear grain and the floor pattern feels almost like it is moving in straight lines. The first photo from the video uses diagonal lines to showcase a feeling of being of balance. The camera is angled and Lily is angled in ways that combined are unnatural and unnerving. This second use of line is contrasting to the first, yet creates a completely different feel when you see it. It is a great representation of how she feels in the song and the feelings the lyrics are trying to evoke in the listener/viewer.  

Line Glossary: 

Lines  have both a direction and a length. A line is a mark, streak, stroke, slash, path, stripe, border, contour, striation, course, route, and track. Curved, bent, thick, wide, broken, vertical, horizontal, burred, or freehand, lines delineate shapes, forms, and spaces, volumes, edges, movement and patterns. Not only that -- lines create both 2D and 3D objects and figures. Lines 

are awesome and powerful.

Contour lines  indicate the edge around an object or the volume of an object. Contour lines dramatize changes of plane within the form. The curve of a belt around the waist is a contour line.

Diagonal Lines  are useful to draw the eye into a composition such as toward the vanishing points.  Three common types of diagonals are 1) actual diagonal lines 2) objects placed diagonally in a scene 3) a diagonal line created by the viewpoint such as the Dutch tilt.

Dutch Tilt - (known as a dutch angle, canted angle, or oblique angle) is a type of camera shot that has a noticeable tilt on the camera’s “x-axis.” The Dutch tilt camera technique was introduced by German Expressionists in the 1920s — so it's not actually Dutch. Directors often use a Dutch angle to signal to the viewer that something is wrong, disorienting, or unsettling.

Explicit lines - Explicit means clear, direct, and obvious. Is a drawing is easy to read? It may be that the lines are explicit, clean, with efficient use of variety.

Implied lines  are lines in a scene that is not physically there but are suggested by points in the art.  Implied lines suggest the edges of an object or planes within an object. An implied line is when a finger or gun is pointing to create an implied trajectory of intent. The implied line may be broken such as a dotted line, it may be defined by value, color, or texture, or it may not be 

visible at all. With implied lines, our brain interprets that a line exists.

Gesture Lines  capture movement usually in an action pose gesture drawings used in storyboards.

Line As Value has a long history. Before modern printing artist used line drawings to create value, or shading, to achieve volume. 

Line of action is an imaginary line that extends through the main action of the figure. When you draw an action figure you can capture the line of action on one layer then draw the figure drawing on another layer.  

Line weight  refers to the thickness or thinness of a line, or parts of the same line. 

Line quality - Line quality is the espressive essence of lines. Varying the line quality makes objects appear more 3-dimensional and exciting. Range in line quality heightens descriptive and suggestive potential. A single line can change in darkness and width, can vanish all together to mentally reconnect later on an edge.

Psychic lines are invisible. Psychic lines form between characters or between a gun and a target, or a hand pointing in a direction. There is no real line yet we feel a line. Eyes looking in a direction, especially characters looking at each other create a psychic line.

Shape Glossary: 

Shape is the external form or appearance characteristic of someone or something; the outline of an area or figure. As a verb, to shape is to give a particular form. As artists we shape our characters outward appearance by using shapes.

Abstract - means there are no recognizable objects. Abstraction can be used in backgrounds and textures.

Biomorphic - a free form pattern or design with a shape suggestive of a living organism, especially an amoeba or protozoan.

Curvilinear - s-curves inform Jessica Rabbit and a wander along a river into the distance

Distortion - is exaggeration, contortion, reform, slant, twist, or warp in ways that depart from reality.

Idealism asserts that the physical world is less important than the mind or the spirit which shapes and animates it. Idealists choose the soul, the mind, or the psyche over the body, the material, and the historical. When ideals (of appearance, or proportion for example) regulate the way an artist represents the world her work can be described as Idealist. The leading artists of the High Renaissance -- Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo -- are all associated with slightly different forms of Idealism. 

Realism, or naturalism, attempts to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality or exotic or supernatural elements. In the visual arts, illusionistic realism is the accurate depiction of lifeforms, perspective, and the details of light and colour. But realist or naturalist works of art may also be "realist" in their subject-matter, and emphasize the mundane, ugly, or sordid.

Positive and Negative - Positive space is the subject, focal point, or areas of high interest in any composition. Negative space is the area around the areas of interest. All compositions balance positive and negative space. Yes, stuff in the negative space can point to the focal point to make it most obvious. Positive and negative create a whole. Every composition is a combination of positive and negative space. Wield the positive and negative spaces with control and story-telling magic to become a design master.

Rectilinear - a boxy shape made with straight lines. For example, the screen you are looking at is a rectilinear shape filled with little square pixels, and pixels are also rectilinear. A storyboard is a series of  drawings in a linear set of rectilinear frames. 

Representational - means objects that players can name. The object represents something from the real world, or something that has the verisimilitude of realism. A cartoon bunny can represent a rabbit without being realistic. Representational is a sliding scale from realism to almost abstract. 2 dots and a curve can be arranged into an abstract pattern or they can be arranged into an emoji that represents a  smiley face.

Silhouette - a profile or shape that is easy to identify in dynamic environment

Squash/Stretch - shapes change profiles to emphasize motion. The stretched position shows the form in an extended condition. When you do a sit up your belly squashes and your back stretches.

[longforgottenunofficial]

The Pet Cemeteries

Yes, there are two.  Imagineer Kim Irvine (daughter of "Madame Leota" Leota Toombs) came up with the idea for the first one in the early 1980's.  Not a lot of time and effort went into the project.  Kim just purchased off-the-shelf yard statues of a dog, cat, skunk, and frog (complete with mouth hole for squirting water) and had Imagineer Chris Goosman compose some macabre epitaphs for the pedestals.  They were put in the vacant yard on the north side of the HM, alongside the wheelchair access path, reportedly to give them something to look at over there.

(pic by Monstersgoboo)

BIG JAKE Here lies my good dog Jake. Chasing a toad down a well was his one mistake. In memoriam MISS KITTY After losing eight lives you still had no fear. You caught a snake in your ninth and that's why you're here. R.I.P. BULLY You didn't drink, you didn't smoke. I just can't figure what made you croak. In loving memory of our pet STRIPEY You may be departed, But your presence will always linger on. Everyone seemed to like this little HM secret, so in 1993 they put another one in the front yard.

It has proven so popular that they subsequently added similar pet cemeteries to the WDW and Tokyo HMs. And so on. Those are the well-known facts, familiar to most Mansionites, if not to the general public.  Beyond that basic history, no one has bothered to say much.  But Long-Forgotten readers are a tough and discriminating audience.  They ask, nay, demand more.  Pry up those rocks and see what's crawling around underneath. A new addition came to the original pet cemetery in the summer of 2016. They needed to add another exhaust vent for the train tunnel going behind the HM and decided to make a virtue of necessity by disguising the vent as a crypt. So far so good, but the crypt is in the pet cemetery, and they made it up as a goofy, elephant grave. The crypt itself is tolerable, falling within the wide embrace of Victorian eccentricity (which, after all, gave us elephant foot umbrella stands), but that trunk looks absolutely awful. How can anyone over the age of eight, let alone Disney Imagineering, look at the exterior and landscaping of the Anaheim HM and conclude that it is an appropriate venue for this sort of zany kookiness? Barf. This looks like a refugee from the execrable queue in Orlando, disaffectionately known in these parts as PLQ:

Sometime around October a plaque appeared on the front:

More cutsie-wootsie stuff, ill-suited to the dignified exterior of the HM. And I hadn't noticed the mouse in previous photos, so I'll point to it now as part of the whole package. Anyway, bleahh. I'm only glad all of this is in a place generally unseen and easily ignored. I look forward to spending a lot of time forgetting it exists. As I said in the last post, I'm not a huge fan of the PC.  I think most purists and traditionalists see it as an unwelcome intrusion of sheer fantasy before the attraction even begins and would happily see it gone.  That's more or less been my position too, and yet I can't get worked up about it.  Something about the pet cemetery is okay, and it's time to figure out why.  Let's take a closer look. Much of the front yard version simply repeats the formula of the old one.  Once again you've got a lot of store-bought statuary sitting on pedestals with macabre epitaphs.  In fact, two of the statues (the frog and the skunk) are virtually identical to their back yard counterparts, although they have new names and texts.  The main difference out here is that some dates are attached.  The frog is "Old Flybait" ("He croaked, August 9 1869") and the skunk is "Beloved Lilac" ("Long on curiosity...Short on common scents, 1847").  There's also "Rosie" ("She was a poor little pig, but she bought the farm, 1849") and a dog named "Buddy" ("Our friend until the end"). The latter may be a long-overdue tribute to Buddy Baker, the musical genius behind the HM score.  The dating formula is obvious in the case of Old Flybait; it's exactly 100 years before the HM opening day, and this suggests that the other dates are really cryptic references to 1947 and 1949, probably the birth years of the Imagineers involved. There's nothing terribly out of place in any of these examples.  They are all of a piece.  We can easily imagine one or several family members in the mansion's long history being animal lovers and burying their pets out front, complete with whimsical epitaphs.  Even if the choice of animals is eccentric in some cases, there is nothing surreal involved, not even anything supernatural. In one case, however, these conventional statues are arranged in such a way as to suggest that the animals involved have business to conduct in the afterlife.

There is a clever thematic continuity between this cluster and some of the relationships you encounter inside the house.  Imagine the graveyard executioner, a man who in life wielded the power of death but who has now followed his victims into the grave.  It's called irony.  Better still, imagine the cat as Constance and the birds as her husbands, and you can feel the same chemistry at work.  No one forms a partnership with Death so powerful and so lasting as to avoid the same fate as Death's other victims.  It's a classic statement, made at least three times in the attraction, starting with this tableau.  I think the cat-and-bird set is perhaps the high water mark of the pet cemeteries. There is, however, a whole other set of grave markers.  These are original WDI designs, and they have a more fantastical flavor.  I suspect that it is these that rub some fans the wrong way.  There's Fi Fi the dog, with her cruciform tombstone made of crossed bones and her portrait with crossed-X eyes (like in the funnies).  This piece is significant for reasons that have nothing to do with the intentions of the designers.  It represents a change in the general culture between 1969 and 1993, but that will be the topic of another post.  For the moment, I'll simply note that it is the only cross-shaped headstone in the entire attraction, including all of the scale models and all of Marc Davis's concept art. The other weird monuments are for a snake, a bat, a rat, a fish, and a spider.  The pieces are nothing if not stylish.

It's a good deal harder to imagine these as simply the products of animal lovers in the Mansion's history.  The style of the monuments themselves is too bizarre.  Perhaps we are to imagine not merely animal lovers, but insane animal lovers, if we want to keep these within the imaginative realm of a real house with a history of real occupants—which is the starting point of the HM voyage. If imagining these pet monuments as items designed by crazy family members seems a stretch, then these freaky-deaky things simply don't belong here.  For me, there are enough tales of nutball Victorians to keep it all just barely within bounds. As if to illustrate exactly that point, Craig Conley sent me in November of 2016 the following clipping from a 1913 edition of Popular Mechanics,noting an 1855 grave marker for a fish.

Okay, even if we are not necessarily in the realm of fantasy, you still wonder what the original Imagineers were shooting for.  In one of the Long-Forgotten threads at Micechat, someone argued that pieces like Freddie the Bat were inspired by Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, which would eventually take over the whole Mansion every Fall and Winter, of course.  If you compare concept art for Freddie with typical NBC artwork, the similar look and feel is indeed striking.

But the dating is against it.  NBC was released the same year the pet cemetery was installed: 1993.  Better to look elsewhere for inspiration for this fantastic and surreal streak.  [Edit: But see new evidence below.]  As a matter of fact, the original HM Imagineers did kick around some lunatic pet ideas for the HM.  Ken Anderson toyed with having a man-eating octopus in a pit in the middle of a room in his 1957 Ghost House.  Which is pretty . . . out there.

Then there's this delightful but unused Marc Davis gag:

But if we're looking for justification for adding an element of the strange and fantastic to the Haunted Mansion, the obvious place to look is in Rolly Crump's unused "Museum of the Weird" designs.  Do I detect a whiff of the Museum in the pet cemetery? (Or *sniff* is that just a dead fish?)

Very, very few people know this, but Rolly actually designed some bizarre tombstones for the HM.  Where they would have been used, I can't imagine, but it must be admitted that Freddie the Bat has nothing on Velma Wingspan when it comes to eccentricity, and isn't the spidery lettering style used on the pet cemetery stones just a teeny weeny bit reminiscent of Rolly's "Museum" font?

"But even if Ken, Marc, and Rolly kicked these kinds of ideas around, they ultimately decided NOT to go in that direction, so even if the pet cemetery Imagineers were drawing inspiration from those guys, they also overrode their judgment by going ahead with this kind of thing." Yeah, I hear that, and it's a good point, but I still take some comfort in the idea that the newer Imagineers respected and revered the original masters and sought to draw inspiration from their work.  And anyway, since the pet cemetery, even at its most surreal, can be placed within the imaginative orbit of the Mansion, I've decided to call a truce on this one. New Evidence for Tim Burton's Influence One of our "Anonymous" commenters directs our attention to a short 1984 film by Tim Burton, Frankenweenie, produced by Walt Disney pictures.  Reportedly, Disney fired Burton after making it, claiming he had wasted company resources and had produced a film too dark for Disney to use.  It later had video and DVD releases. Well, SOMEONE at Disney liked the film.  There can be little doubt that it was a direct influence on the front yard pet cemetery.  The film is a parody/homage to Frankenstein, so there are important graveyard scenes—in a pet graveyard.  It appears also in the film's opening titles.

Fifi's tombstone at Disneyland is obviously taken almost directly from this movie.

There are several bone-cruciform tombstones in the Frankenweenie cemetery, but "Sparky" is the main animal character in the film. 

Even the shape of Fifi's head and the "X's" for her eyes may havebeen inspired by various other tombstones seen in the film.

Then there's "Earl."

There are also tombstones for a goldfish and a snake in the Burton graveyard.

This raises the distinct possibility that Imagineers (or at least Kim Irvine) were aware of Burton's work on Nightmare while it was in production and saw some of the models, and so possibly that artwork was an additional influence on the style of the 1993 HM pet cemetery. A big thanks goes to "Anonymous" for the tip.

Originally Posted: Monday, July 19, 2010 Original Link: [x]

[melodyoctave59-blog]

The Fix: Councilmanic Prerogative at its Worst

City Council is back in session for the fall, and with the primary elections coming up next year, some endangered members are looking to make a splash.

In the 8th District in Northwest Philly, Councilmember Cindy Bass already has a declared primary challenger, educator and activist Tonya Bah, and there are several other candidates rumored to be eyeing the seat who could make a race of it.

It’s hard to name many concrete Bass accomplishments on City Council, so heading into the 2019 election, it appears her strategy will be to introduce some “messaging” bills that either have no chance of passing, or are meant to signal to different groups that she’s on their side.

That’s the best lens from which to view Bass’s surprise decision last week to introduce a doomed bill completely ending the 10-year tax abatement on property improvements—with no prior political legwork to get her colleagues on board—and also for this latest “Eighth District Overlay” she introduced this week that straight-up prohibits daycares from opening in the entire 8th district, along with some other locally-unpopular land uses like auto repair and tire sales.

If it passes—which means enough other Council members going along with Bass’s proposal—this is an excellent illustration of Councilmanic Prerogative at its worst.

Councilmanic Prerogative refers to the near-absolute power each of the city’s 10 District council members wield over development projects in their respective districts. This longstanding tradition—not codified in any law or the Home Charter—gives them the power to green-light or stall all projects in his or her district, whether for good or ill. It’s as if a sitting Congressperson were to go to D.C. and pass laws for her own congressional district, not the country as a whole. It’s bad politics, and bad for the city.

Now, Councilmember Bass says nobody who lives outside the 8th District is allowed to have an opinion on this, but I know people all over the city, and I have to say that none of the parents I know, whether they live in Germantown or Mt. Airy or South Philly or the Riverwards—nobody with young kids that I know would agree with the notion that there are plentiful affordable childcare options around.

Everywhere you go there’s a space crunch and a waitlist. There’s a sense sometimes among some of the neighbors that because there are a lot of child care providers that this must mean there are enough childcare providers, but that’s obviously faulty logic. In most cases the providers all full, and where you see problem businesses enrolling more kids than they’re allowed to, that’s a symptom of too few daycare options, not too many. And in those cases, the better solution would be to appropriate funds to hire some more L+I inspectors to inspect daycare facilities. Leaning on zoning as the tool is like reaching for a sledgehammer when you need a scalpel.

The way it would work under this zoning overlay is that day cares—but not adult day cares, because why even pretend—would be a prohibited use, and then to open any daycare, you’d have to request a zoning variance. That would send the project through the much more political zoning variance process, where there’s a required meeting and a vote of the near neighbors, and a vote of the political hack-dominated Zoning Board of Adjustment on whether it gets approved. That adds time and money costs to the project, since the applicant typically has to hire an attorney, and it could always get bogged down in lengthy appeals—oftentimes for no good reason.

As multiple people brought up on social media, making it harder and more politicized to open above-board day care facilities—which already have to comply with lots of appropriately-stringent regulations even when opening by-right—will only work to the benefit of new illegal, unregulated daycares operating in the 8th District. People are still going to get childcare one way or the other.

In the course of doing this, they’ve created all kinds of other unintended problems, like an affordable childcare shortage and a ballooning black market for in-home daycares. This is an excellent illustration of Councilmanic Prerogative at its worst.

So this is an all-around terrible policy idea that’s going to make child care scarcer and more expensive in the 8th District, and limit convenient and affordable options for working families. It’s also potentially a violation of the city’s Fair Practices ordinance or the federal Fair Housing Act—an angle I hope some of our attorney friends will explore as this gets debated.

But the question of the effect this would have on working families being able to afford and access childcare is really beside the point of this bill, which is fundamentally about shoring up Cindy Bass’s voting base with older homeowners who don’t like children and don’t want to be around them.

Anti-children politics is disturbingly widespread everywhere, and the basic sentiment was best encapsulated in the recent Billy Penn piece on the Rittenhouse Square residents who tried to block a daycare because they hate the sound of children laughing.

“One person complained and said, are we going to have to listen to the sounds of kids laughing and yelling?” developer Jason Nusbaum told Billy Penn. “We could have worse problems.”

While zoning board members ultimately voted to welcome the childcare facility into the tony neighborhood, their unanimous decision did not come without a massive argument about noise, traffic and, of course, parking […]

Pleading to ZBA Chairman Frank DiCicco, Rittenhouse area residents insisted that a daycare center would only aggravate the neighborhood’s existing problems: traffic and noise.

“There is total gridlock in the neighborhood,” said Kristin Hayes, who said she’s raised two daughters from her home at 22nd and Pine. “Traffic is backed up through Graduate Hospital. It’s going to be a complete fiasco.”

While Bass staffers on Twitter tried to defend the bill as a check to ensure only high-quality child care options get approved, anybody who’s ever been to a zoning meeting knows this is absolutely not what’s going to drive the politics. Not even close!

This is an all-around terrible policy idea that’s going to make child care scarcer and more expensive in the 8th District, and limit convenient and affordable options for working families. It’s also potentially a violation of the city’s Fair Practices ordinance or the federal Fair Housing Act.

What’s going to happen whenever a new daycare is proposed is that near neighbors who don’t want to hear children laughing, or don’t want to deal with the extra traffic and activity during drop-off and pick-up times, are going to come out and complain and try to do politics to stop it. Every single time. And it’s not going to be about the quality of the school, but they’re going to say it’s about high-quality facilities and safety and all these other reasons when really it’s always about the same underlying things: children-related noise and transportation headaches during drop-off.

And just to be clear, there are some legitimate gripes about living near a daycare facility that nobody’s really figured out how to mitigate, as far as I can tell. Children will laugh. Lots of parents who drive their kids to the center will need to try and park all at once. It’s pretty bad. But because it’s universally bad, we need to acknowledge that every nearby homeowner is going to be tempted to NIMBY these places wherever they’re proposed, and if we think the most important value is that new daycares be allowed to continue to open, we’re better off just not inviting people to come out and complain in the first place.

Bass argues that flipping the default decision from Yes to No, and then running everything through the zoning variance process so that neighbors have a better shot at killing unwanted daycare facilities is going to weed out the bad projects and leave only the good projects, but this is pure fantasy. When you invite people to come out and complain about something, at least some people are going to take you up on it, always.

In the course of doing this, they’ve created all kinds of other unintended problems, like an affordable childcare shortage and a ballooning black market for in-home daycares. This is such an amazing and clear-cut abuse of zoning powers that perfectly illustrates why Councilmanic Prerogative is bad and needs to end.

Jon Geeting is the director of engagement at Philadelphia 3.0, a political action committee that supports efforts to reform and modernize City Hall. This is part of a series of articles running in both The Citizen and 3.0’s blog.

The Fix is made possible through a grant from the Thomas Skelton Harrison Foundation. The Harrison Foundation does not exercise editorial control or approval over the content of any material published by The Philadelphia Citizen.

Photo via City Council

Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/the-fix-councilmanic-prerogative-at-its-worst/

[micaramel]

On March 29, Rihanna's Fenty Beauty announced that it would be launching a red highlighter called "Geisha Chic."

After the brand shared photos of the new product on Instagram, customers called the highlighter's name "inappropriate," and accused the brand of being racist.

On Instagram, representatives for Fenty Beauty told customers that the highlighter has been pulled "until it can be renamed."

The same statement was reiterated to INSIDER by Fenty Beauty representatives.

Geishas have a rich history in Japan, and products inspired by them are often considered to be examples of cultural appropriation.

In the past, Rihanna's Fenty Beauty has been praised for offering cosmetics in diverse shades to suit multiple skin tones, but the makeup brand is now facing backlash from fans who say the name of its new highlighter "Geisha Chic" is offensive.

Photos of the highlighter, which Hypebae describes as a "metallic brick-red" color, emerged on social media in March alongside new Fenty Beauty products like the Sun Stalk'r Bronzer and Killawatt duo in "Afternoon Snack/Mo' Hunny." 

The product was met with criticism from Fenty Beauty followers on social media, who felt the product's name was "inappropriate" and accused the brand of being racist.

In response to one person's comment on Instagram, Fenty Beauty thanked fans for "educating" the brand, and said the product would be not be sold until it was given a new name.

In a statement sent to INSIDER, Fenty Beauty confirmed that the product has been pulled "until it can be renamed."

Trendmood, a verified makeup news account on Instagram, shared photos of the product on Friday.

After photos of the highlighter surfaced, customers began criticizing the brand

On Twitter, one customer called the product's name "inappropriate," while another accused the brand of being racist.

Rihanna was really about to bring out a blush called geisha chic 😐 thank god people noticed how gross that was and fenty delayed the launch to rename it. Really weird how the entire fenty beauty team didn't catch how inappropriate that name is from the start

— Sunny (@sun1796) April 1, 2019

. @fentybeauty has a new highlighter named “geisha chic...” ummmm? Rihanna... explain why Asian targeted racism gets glossed over, it feels even worse when it’s from another marginalized group 😓

— Jessica (@lyjessicat) March 30, 2019

“Geisha Chic Hunny” 🙄🙄🙄🙄 Really, Miss Fenty? REALLY?

— Jodie (@_J0die_) March 31, 2019

Really Fenty? This is supposed to be considered appropriate? pic.twitter.com/tyT3Df4xfw

— 🐝 Katie Bates 🐝 (@BeauteCoulisses) March 30, 2019

  However, some fans stood by the brand, and said they didn't have a problem with the product's name. 

As a Asian person, I don't see the problem in @fentybeauty naming one of their highlighter/blush 'Geisha Chic'.

— pizzaz (@Honeybuttergal) April 1, 2019

Exactly. Like I previously mentioned, the highlighter is called geisha chic (sans honey) and the color pays homage to traditional geisha and Meiko makeup. That’s why I’m finding this whole situation people getting worked up over nothing to be fake woke.

— Suffering™️ 😩👌🏽 (@Hibantina) March 30, 2019

@fentybeauty is about to make me so broke with their #TROPHYWIFE body lava & new #GEISHACHIC killawat foil!! Oh well. 🤷🏻‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/dT4OW0sWNg

— Taylor Harvey (@tayharve) March 29, 2019

  After facing backlash, Fenty Beauty announced that it would pull the highlighter 'until it can be renamed'

On Sunday, a member of the r/BeautyGuruChatter subreddit named elizabeth-bug shared a screenshot of a direct message she received from Fenty Beauty after leaving a comment on the brand's Instagram page.

"We hear you, we have pulled the product until it can be renamed. We wanted to personally apologize. Thank you so much for educating us," representatives for Fenty Beauty told the Reddit user on Instagram. 

Speaking to INSIDER, representatives for Fenty Beauty reiterated the same statement, and confirmed the message was sent to Instagram users. The representatives did not comment on when the product will be renamed and released.

On Reddit, many said they appreciated Fenty Beauty's statement, and applauded the brand for prioritizing customer comments over profits

"I like this reply: short, straightforward and with an actual apology," Reddit user PinkChampagne_ wrote.

"Good for them, not only apologizing but taking action, and giving no excuses," Redditor 321ss said.

"This is a good apology. It doesn't side step or make excuses. I'm super happy," Reddit user SwimmingCoyote said. "It's also a good sign that Fenty is willing to eat the cost of pulling an almost-launched product. Even if it's just renamed, that will require a lot of money to relabel. I appreciate that Fenty didn't just go forward with the launch while saying that they'd do better next time."

Products inspired by geishas are often considered to be examples of cultural appropriation

The term cultural appropriation is used to describe the adoption of elements in a minority culture — typically one that has been historically oppressed or discriminated against — by members of the dominant culture, by those who wield power in a society.

For example, many have spoken out against Halloween costumes that draw on exaggerated and insensitive cultural stereotypes, such as "geisha costumes."

Read more: Fashion Nova is selling a 'geisha' costume — and it shows how dressing up for Halloween can be problematic

Critics have argued that these costumes — no matter the intention behind them, sexualized or not — should not exist at all, as they allow those who belong in a privileged group to "try on" a culture without experiencing or understanding the history behind it. Meanwhile, when people within that culture wear the same garment, they are often mocked for doing so, or criticized for not assimilating into American society.

That's not to say that people can't appreciate cultures outside their own, or that cultural exchange is inherently wrong. The difference between appreciation and appropriation, critics argue, is that appropriation results from ignorance, from a failure or unwillingness to learn about a culture, or to listen to those within that culture.

Geishas have a rich history in Japan

According to Tokyo-based travel company, Toki, female geishas became prominent in Japan between 1750 and 1780. They originally worked as assistants to the oiran, elite and "very expensive Japanese courtesans."

At the time, according to San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, strict government regulations forbade geishas from forming personal relationships with, or even sitting close to, the courtesans' clients.

During Japan's Meiji period, which lasted from 1868 to 1912, geishas replaced the oiran as the main "providers of hospitality and entertainment at dinner events for large companies and government officials."

But in the early 1900s, according to Toki, US soldiers stationed in Japan following World War II incorrectly referred to a broad category of female Japanese workers — a group that included prostitutes and nightclub hostesses — as "geisha girls."

This American mistake contributed to a global misunderstanding of what geishas are — a warped perception that persists today.

Read more:

Ariana Grande fixed her Japanese tattoo after people accused her of disrespecting the language: 'RIP tiny charcoal grill'

Victoria's Secret says its 'runways have been culturally diverse for a long time,' but it has been accused of cultural appropriation over and over again

Zac Efron wore his hair in dreadlocks and he's being accused of cultural appropriation

Kim Kardashian defended wearing Fulani braids amidst cries of cultural appropriation

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Cleaning roofs is easier with this machine

from Design http://bit.ly/2I3SAtf

[jillmckenzie1]

The Secretary

“A story doesn’t have to be real to be true.” One of the opening lines of Kyle John Schmidt’s new play The Secretary could just as easily be flipped around to say, “A true story has many realities.” A dark and darkly funny new play at the Curious Theatre dives deep into the twisted and conflicting meanings of guns in America and how we all are related to the violence and power that they bestow upon us.

The scenario is this: a small town, probably in the South or Midwest, based on the characters’ accents, is slowly dying from economic starvation. The only real moneymaker in town is the local gun manufacturer, run by a widow named Ruby, as played by Kathleen M. Brady, a reasonable facsimile of Ann Richards. The town depends on her economic engine to stave off the post-industrial decline of the modern Heartland. When a shooting happens in the town, the residents trickle into Ruby’s office for various needs that only she can meet. Among those is Shirley (Leslie O’Carroll), the local high school secretary and the person who is the actual shooter, who is both arguably and dubiously guilty; Brandy (Karen Slack), the mother of the slain, in possession of tragic bereavement and practical necessity; April (Adeline Mann), the young woman who had escaped the town’s malaise, but has been driven back by the harsh hand of the larger world; Janelle (Devon James), the absent-minded office manager and half-sister to April; and Lorrie (Emma Messenger, the regional answer to Melissa McCarthy). It’s no accident that all the characters in this play are women. (The only named male characters are a shooting victim and a decrepit repairman, neither of which we ever see.) So often, “women” are given as the reason to own guns (“protect your family” rarely means “protect your 36-year-old son”), but women are rarely given voice to discuss the violence done to them and their children by those same guns. Playwright Schmidt has given us a story that opens that discussion.

There’s a lot to unpack (unload? har har!) in this play about the economics of guns. Guns are big business. Tax revenues have been so catastrophically gutted in some Midwestern states (I’m looking at you, Kansas) that basic amenities for civic institutions have to come from the tax-break-motivated “gifts” of capitalist “philanthropists.” Now, I’m sure some folks, of the type that Ruby seems to represent, genuinely want to give back to their communities. But there’s something here to say about needing school funding to rely on private donations rather than public coffers. When those private donations come from the fear and violence sold by gunmakers, how should we feel about their *tainted* lucre? Can good things come from bad things? The Sackler family gave us the opioid crisis, but they’ve also sponsored some nice art exhibits.

The economics of guns can’t be divorced from the idea of the power that a gun grants an individual. As money and jobs drain out of vast regions of the country, as racial demographics drift away from those who have been accustomed to power…guns can start to seem like the best way to rebalance the lives of those who feel bereft and confused. There’s an old, unattributed quote in the American vernacular: “God made all men; Sam Colt made them equal.” The Freudian and phallic symbolism of guns lands firmly on the idea of male power.

When women hold guns, they can wield the same physical threat to others than men’s larger and stronger bodies inherently possess. It’s a tantalizing temptation. When you no longer have the power of having money, you feel the need to seek out some other kind of power. Holding a gun gives you that. It’s intoxicating. Does it change you? Schmidt says “Yes.” The characters hold guns and do things that they would never do without them.

All the characters in this play are deeply intimate with each other. It’s a small town. They’ve known each other for decades. They know each other’s histories and hurts. There’s the strange intimacy of the relationship between the killer and the killed. Their lives become even more intertwined as they fall under the thrall of Ruby’s product—resulting in both tragedy and perhaps the prevention of more tragedy?

Here is the part where I offer unsolicited advice to the builders of this piece. The play itself is delightfully written and (tiny spoilers alert!) I am sure that the playwright is not unaware of the silent joke he has given us on the idea of “Chekov’s gun.” We see the guns, but never actually hear one fired. I found this to be hilarious. The scene changes are voiced over by gun advertisements, including a holster for use while sitting on the toilet, called the “Toilet Holster.” Why did Schmidt not cash in on the opportunity to call this, “The Magazine”?!

I loved the characters in this play. I found them totally relatable, very much in the vein the friends and family of my rural upbringing. The women working as secretaries in their fifties, with “disabled” husbands who maybe aren’t disabled but just can’t find work. The woman who leaves her office with both a loaded weapon and a purse full of mints and Kleenex. I particularly enjoyed Emma Messenger and Kathleen M. Brady’s performances and their chemistry together. The writing itself is also gorgeous: the names of the models of guns are both hilarious and totally believable. The lyrical and memorable quotes that come from the mouths of the characters are cringe-worthy in their truth (“A gun is a law that you hold in your hands.” “Use whatever story you want to sell whatever story you want.”) The dead boy is named Dustin or Dusty, depending on who is referring to him, an elegant bit of wordplay that reminds of me Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in Nightcrawler. The summary of the whole play is in the phrase “The gun did it.”

And that’s the story we all wrestle with, isn’t it? Did the gun do it? Is it the guns that kill people or is it the people who have the guns? Which story are we using to sell what? Whose story is the *real* one? That’s a question that can’t be answered in 90 minutes, but the perfect ending of this play leaves me it in the front of my mind.

I found this play wonderful and frightening. Don’t miss it. Tickets are on sale now.

Photo credits to Michael Ensminger.

from Blog https://ondenver.com/the-secretary/

[thisdaynews]

Google's onetime hired gun could now be its antitrust nightmare

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/googles-onetime-hired-gun-could-now-be-its-antitrust-nightmare/

Google's onetime hired gun could now be its antitrust nightmare

If Makan Delrahim goes after Google, he could align the Trump administration with progressive Democrats. | Cliff Owen/AP Photo

When Google needed government sign-off on a 2007 acquisition that would tighten its grip on the digital advertising market, the company turned to antitrust attorney and lobbyist Makan Delrahim to help get the job done.

Now, as the Justice Department’s top antitrust enforcer, Delrahim could be the one to undo it all.

Story Continued Below

As U.S. competition enforcers cast a more critical eye on the nation’s biggest technology companies, Delrahim would play the leading role in any DOJ lawsuit accusing Google of stifling markets and harming consumers. It’s a striking turn of events given the assistant attorney general’s past role in shepherding the company’s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick, a display advertising and ad tech firm that has played a central part in establishing Google’s market dominance.

“He worked on the key merger and, ironically, his job now is to undo the consequences,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington-based public interest group that opposed the Google-DoubleClick deal on the grounds that it would harm consumer privacy and depress competition.

Delrahim, a 49-year-old Iranian émigré with decades of antitrust experience and some light dabbling in Hollywood, has declined to discuss his plans with regard to Google. But the Justice Department began laying the groundwork weeks ago for a possible probe of the company, and Delrahim has already drawn a harder line than many antitrust observers had expected in opposing the accumulation of corporate power.

The prime example so far is the unsuccessful lawsuit his staff waged last year in an attempt to stop AT&T from gobbling up entertainment provider Time Warner, an $85 billion merger that gave control over a vast arsenal of film and television programming to a major internet, pay-TV and satellite provider.

If Delrahim goes after Google, he could align the Trump administration with progressive Democrats who also have major beefs with Silicon Valley — further demonstrating the growing political peril for the nation’s biggest tech companies.

Several Democratic candidates running for president, led by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have said antitrust officials should take a hard look at breaking up tech companies that wield too much influence over markets and people’s digital lives. Warren has specifically named Google’s purchase of DoubleClick as one previously approved merger the government should look at reversing — along with examples such as Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods and Facebook’s purchase of Instagram.

Delrahim himself has spoken more critically of the industry of late. He told an antitrust conference last month in Israel that “the current landscape suggests there are only one or two significant players in important digital spaces,” including internet search and social networking — a not-so-veiled reference to Google and Facebook.

He also suggested broadening the government’s typical standardfor judging whether a market lacks competition, saying it’s not enough to rely solely on price increases — especially when internet companies offer services free of charge, such as Google’s ad-supported search engine. Instead, he said, they also have to look for other harms to consumers, such as diminishing privacy or free speech.

Delrahim’s emerging critique contrasts with his past advocacy for Google.

In 2007, Google paid a team of five lobbyists from Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, one of Washington’s largest lobbying firms, roughly $100,000 to help usher the DoubleClick acquisition through Washington’s regulatory machine, lobbying disclosure records show. Delrahim was among them.

He had joined the firm two years before that following his first stint in the Justice Department’s antitrust division, where he was deputy assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush.

During Delrahim’s first tour at the DOJ, antitrust investigators ramped up scrutiny of radio giant Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia), which faced allegations it used its stations to hurt competitors of its concert promotion business. Clear Channel ultimately sold the concert business. Delrahim also worked on the Senate’s antitrust investigation into Microsoft in the late 1990s.

“Those two things, I think, reflect the fact that Makan has a real interest in conduct investigations, and that interest is relevant to the tech firms today,” said Allen Grunes, an antitrust attorney at Konkurrenz Group who worked with Delrahim at the DOJ. “It doesn’t tell you how he’s going to come out, but it does tell you that he’s got experience that’s relevant and he is interested in these issues.”

After leaving the DOJ, Delrahim spent more than a decade at Brownstein. In addition to Google, he also registered to lobby for other major tech corporations, namely Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm and Oracle.

Google needed the hired guns. The Silicon Valley behemoth had only recently opened a Washington office and lacked antitrust experts to help it deal with political opposition to the DoubleClick acquisition, said a person familiar with Google’s Washington engagement.

“At a time when Google didn’t have a lot of deep connections to conservatives on Capitol Hill, I think Makan was viewed as somebody who could bridge that gap and really understood antitrust,” the person said.

The acquisition of DoubleClick,which helps match advertisers to internet users, allowed Google to expand from text-based ads in search results to the visual display ads found on websites all across the internet. More importantly, the deal also gave Google ownership of behavioral advertising technology that would allow it to better target ads to users based on their online activity. In 2018, Google controlled 38 percent of the $109 billion U.S. digital advertising market, followed by Facebook at 22 percent and Amazon at just under 7 percent, according to research firm eMarketer.

Delrahim’s lobbying efforts focused largely on Capitol Hill, where he had worked for five years on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the person familiar with Google’s D.C. strategy said.

The panel’s antitrust subcommittee called a hearing on the acquisition in September 2007, where Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond defended the deal as a means to “help publishers and advertisers generate more revenue” and give consumers more “relevant and useful advertising.” Microsoft’s then-general counsel, Brad Smith, was among those warning about the deal’s impact, telling lawmakers it posed an “imminent risk of giving a single company the degree of market power that could foreclose competition.” Ultimately, however, Congress didn’t get in the way.

“In the end, there wasn’t a huge amount of pressure on the Hill, and the people who were working on that did a good job of tamping it down,” the person said.

The Federal Trade Commission cleared the DoubleClick deal in 2007, with one independent commissioner, Pamela Jones Harbour, dissenting from the decision. While Harbour warned about how the two firms could combine their troves of consumer data, the commission’s majority said that “the evidence did not support the theories of potential competitive harm” and that consumer privacy concerns were not unique to Google.

The deal also passed muster with the European Commission, which called it “unlikely to have harmful effects on consumers … or significantly impede competition.” Consumer privacy groups were dismayed at the ruling. The leader of one advocacy group, Privacy International, called the decision “this decade’s greatest threat to online privacy.”

The regulators’ logic looks naive in retrospect, Google’s critics say. It’s clear now that the DoubleClick deal helped the company consolidate power in the online ad business, said Sally Hubbard, director of enforcement strategy at Open Markets Institute, a liberal think tank that wants increased antitrust scrutiny of the big tech companies.

“The DoubleClick merger is one of those deals you look back on and say, ‘That was a mistake,'” she said.

“The majority opinion said this is a robustly competitive market, there’s going to be so much competition in the future. And you can see that’s not how it played out,” Hubbard said. “There’s very little competition. Google has really consolidated the ad tech market, and this merger was definitely an anti-competitive merger.”

Delrahim has occasionally weighed in on Google’s antitrust woes since then. In 2011, for instance, he told POLITICO that the FTC has more leeway than the DOJ to investigate the company for anti-competitive behavior. This, he said, stems from Section 5 of the FTC Act, which allows the agency to penalize unfair or deceptive competition practices, having “a much lower standard of proof” than the price-driven rationale the DOJ uses in competition probes.

Google declined to comment for this story. CEO Sundar Pichai told CNN in June that large companies expect to face scrutiny, but he argued that big is not necessarily bad, saying Google’s size allows it to innovate with emerging technologies. Google has also said it faces competition from Facebook and Amazon in the digital advertising market.

Warren has urged Delrahim to recuse himself from any antitrust review involving his former clients Google and Apple. But his work for them is more than a decade old, so it falls outside the scope of the government’s ethics rules. Delrahim returned to government as deputy White House counsel for President Donald Trump in January 2017, and moved over to Justice that September. He now heads the department’s antitrust division.

A DOJ official told POLITICO that agency staff “take potential conflicts very seriously, and work closely with their respective ethics officers to determine when recusal is appropriate or required.”

At his Senate confirmation hearing in May 2017, lawmakers pressed Delrahim on how he would handle potential conflicts of interest from his time in the private sector. He pledged then to consult career ethics officials about recusals. “l have three little children. I have no intention of going to jail,” he told the senators.

While Washington has been central to Delrahim’s career, he also spent years in between government gigs living in Los Angeles. There, he’s dabbled in the film industry, serving as an executive producer and investor in 2016’s “Trash Fire,” a horror-comedy film starring Adrian Grenier of “Entourage” fame. (The “nihilistic black comedy may leave a sour taste with some viewers,” the website Rotten Tomatoes advises.)

Hollywood remains an area of interest for Delrahim, who as antitrust chief sent the Oscars a warning letter after Steven Spielberg proposed blocking Netflix and other streaming services from being considered for awards. “[S]uch conduct may raise antitrust concerns,” Delrahim wrote.

Antitrust probes can take years to play out, and it’s unclear if Delrahim will remain at DOJ to see any antitrust investigation of Google through to its conclusion. He is already approaching two years in an administration where high-profile officials tend to have a short shelf life. Rachel Brand, who was the DOJ’s No. 3 official, left her post as associate attorney general in February 2018 after just nine months.

For now, opinion is split on how Delrahim’s links to Google could factor into a future antitrust probe.

Hubbard of Open Markets says Delrahim will have to make a “judgment call” if DOJ staff recommend legal action against the company, noting, “That’s where the politics and existing relationships and past experiences could really influence that in the wrong way.”

But the person familiar with Google’s Washington efforts said Delrahim’s knowledge of the company could also be an advantage in scrutinizing its operations.

“To be honest, I would be more nervous if I was Google. They now have an enforcer who is well informed about some aspect of their business, albeit from a decade ago,” the person said. “I think you have an enforcer who is more likely to call B.S. on them if he doesn’t think they’re accurate.”

Read More

[topicprinter]

As mentioned in previous posts, I’m an eCommerce consultant / digital strategist. I work with a lot of early stage companies to help them figure out strategies to help achieve exponential growth for their businesses. This is another blog post in progress but figured I’d share here first, so tuck in for a fairly long one.My advice below includes several assumptions. The first is that you’re a startup. The second is that you haven’t been through a major funding round, and are either bootstrapping or don’t have bottomless pools of disposable marketing dollars.Over the past couple of years almost every client I’ve worked with has the same innovative plan to become the next billion dollar eCommerce startup using influencer Marketing.They’ve done their research. Read the case studies about all the brands that made it big through influencer campaigns. They’ve crunched some numbers and are confident it’s the right approach for them.“InstaBro has 1 million Instagram followers and they’re all in my target demographic. Even if I pay him $10,000 and just 10% of his audience buys from me, that’s 100,000 sales. I’m making out like a bandit. I can find tons of people like that. Its win win.”Or“I’m smarter than those guys, I’m just going to go for the small fish influencers. They don’t cost much other than free product, What do I have to lose?”.Unfortunately, its not so easy anymore. Influencer marketing is no longer the guaranteed golden-goose secret weapon wielded by only the savviest millennial entrepreneurs. The secret is out, and the magic of the foolproof low-cost, mass-market revenue source is gone.The term “Influencer” is very broad. Technically its anybody who has the power to influence the actions of others. It could be an actor, a model, an industry expert…even the popular kid at school is an influencer.The Influencer I’m referring to is specifically anybody leveraging some level of “internet fame” to encourage followers to engage with a product or brand via online media channels. These people may have legitimate success within their areas of focus. Often they’re influencers simply because they’ve somehow managed to convince enough people that they’re influential. Welcome to 2018.Influencer marketing as an advertising channel has exploded over the last 3-5 years or so. Companies of all sizes shell out thousands of dollars for sponsored posts, Youtube videos, photos, podcasts…anything to get their name in front of that coveted Gen Z / Millennial demo. And every other teenager dreams of making it big, living easy blowing vape clouds and unboxing lip kits on Youtube or Instagram.In response, an entire sub sector within the digital marketing industry has grown to support this wave. “Influencer marketing agencies” and consultants are popping up left and right. They sign kids & mommy bloggers up by the dozen, convincing them they can make thousands per post if they hustle hard enough. At the same time, influence marketers woo unwitting companies to shell out thousands with the promise of big returns by flaunting big follower counts.The unfortunate reality is that my clients who come to me after already experimenting with influencer campaigns often have 0 idea about the actual the effectiveness of these campaigns. It doesn’t take a lot of complicated analysis before I have to break the bad news that the campaign was a failure. Sometimes the loss is nothing more than some free product and a few hours of the founders’ time, other cases its in the tune of many thousands of dollars.After analyzing countless influencer campaigns, the fact I’ve found is that traditional influencer marketing model is rarely is worth the time & money for your average startup.Estimating the effectiveness of an influencer campaign to a bootstrapping startup comes down to fairly simple math. The inputs are a mix of known numbers and educated guesses. How much will it cost? How many impressions will be generated? What percentage of those impressions are going to actively seek out your website or product? Of those visitors, how many of them will actually buy from you at some point in the future?Unfortunately the average entrepreneur might not be that savvy with marketing math, while many people along the road have motivations to inflate numbers. The influencer will try to impress you with big follower & subscriber counts. And your marketing guy will convince you they’re doing a good job with inflated result figures. The hungry entrepreneur may be quick to forget that 1 million followers does not equal 1 million impressions…and 1 million views definitely does not equal 1 million conversions.Maybe a single one of InstaBro’s posts is only seen by 10% of his 1 million followers. That’s just 100,000 impressions. Of those 100k impressions, if you’re lucky 5% of those will actually make it to your website. Now you’re at just 5,000 visits for your campaign (at $10k for the post, that’s almost $2 per click….a high amount to pay if this were a CPC campaign.) Influencer sourced visits are typically low converting. Generously maybe you’ll see a 1% conversion rate…or 50 purchases.So that’s the question, is 50 purchases worth $10,000 for you? Are non converting impressions worth anything to you at this stage?In reality, the actual percentages end up far lower than my example, with visit & conversion rates well under 1%. And more often than not, these campaigns don’t generate enough revenue to justify the time or expense.So why are Influencer marketing campaigns increasingly failing? Heres some of the big reasons:Reason #1: Theres a massive price bubble.In the beginning influencers didn’t know how much they’re worth. At the same times, companies new to the channel had no idea what to pay them. This was the time when you heard the magical tales of companies spending $5k on their entire influencer channels, going viral and raking in millions in revenue. But as Influencers caught on, naturally their worth became tied to their follower counts, and an arms race ensued for the best engagers. As those big guys become priced out of reach, companies flocked to the next tier down in search of a “bargain”…and so on. Well funded companies who didn’t want to miss out on the gold rush, and who don’t care about short term return….paid whatever these kids asked.All of this has lead to a steadily increasing price demanded by influencers at every quality tier. Since their cost per post are linked to their follower counts and not conversion rates, there is little correlation between the high prices demanded and the actual potential value of results for you.Put simply, the best influencers are often more expensive than they’re worth.Reason #2: There are a lot of terrible influencers out there, and identifying them isn’t always easy.Objectively gauging the true quality of an influencer pre-campaign has become extremely difficult.Once upon a time, followers or subscriber counts was in fact a good gauge of popularity…and thus, what a post or campaign by an influencer might be worth. Of course, it didn’t take long for people to start buying followers or using bots to boost numbers.Then marketers got smart and started looking at “engagement” instead as a metric of worth. But wannabe influencers gamed system again with “like for like” or “comment for comment” schemes, sometimes backed by sophisticated engagement-pumping botnets.But even if the person has tons of legitimate views, likes, & followers, its still almost impossible to answer “how receptive are this influencer’s followers to actually being influenced”? If they have a bunch of followers who like their posts but don’t really care about purchasing what they’re peddling, they don’t have real influence at all.Reason #3: Over saturation and no staying power.Many of these serial “influencers” are pushing products all day every day. If you’re hiring “the widget guy”, he might be promoting a new widget every day. This pretty much kills the whole “it works because his followers think you’re special” potential, and seriously limits potential efficacy. . There is such a thing as consumer marketing fatigue.At the same time, using mediums like Instagram, your post will become buried within 48 hours, and is undiscoverable via search engines. So if you don’t generate results in that time period, you post you spent $5k on is essentially dead in the water.Not too long ago I advised clients to use the strategy of “the big guys are overpriced…find the smaller ‘diamond in the rough’ influencers…don’t pay them much, or just give them free product. That’s how you’ll beat the system.” But over time I learned the time it takes to manage such campaigns is rarely worth the actual result. I’ve seen plenty of cases where an influencer with 50k-100k followers only manages to generate one or two sales from a post at the cost of $500-$100+.Of course, Influencer Campaigns can work…as proven by plenty of high profile examples. However, effective execution typically relies on serious money, and returns may not be immediate. Some effective strategies that probably pay off in the long run1. Major Celebrity endorsement.As mentioned one of the difficulties of successful influencer marketing is quantifying their true power of influence. 1 follower of the random guy with 1000 followers may not be equal to 1 follower of the next guy with 1000 followers. The power of influence on an individual is based on many highly subjective factors.Celebrity endorsements are a way around this problem. Well known celebs tend to have massive fanbases who don’t hesitate to buy whatever they’re selling…wearing…promoting. These campaigns can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars…but they’ve been proven effective pretty much since the dawn of modern advertising. Just look at what Kylie Jenner has done making a billion dollars essentially selling fancy lip gloss.2. Carpet bombing.This is my own term for the strategy which entails hiring every influencer you can possibly land, of all tiers & regardless of cost. The aim is to get your brand in front of as many potential customer eyes as possible. It’s a proven fact that people are more likely to buy a product they encounter over and over again. If somebody sees one influencer post about your brand, they’ll probably ignore it. If they start seeing their entire feeds fill up with posts about your brand…they’re going to take notice.However, this is a brand awareness strategy more than a conversion driver. Which means investing a lot of time & money now, for a return you might not make back for a long time. This puts it out of reach for many bootstrapping startups3. Review PostsPaying for legitimate reviews of your product is a great use of influencer marketing dollars. Online shoppers not only look for reviews before purchasing a product…many wont’ buy a product without them. Review posts are great because often they cost little more than some free product, and they’re search engine discoverable for a long time. But not just any review is a good one. They should be of high quality, posted on Youtube or a permanent blog, and SEO optimized. Reviews provide long lasting value through last-touch SEO impactOther than those instances and maybe a handful of others, Influencer Campaigns are rarely worth running for most businesses. And when you crunch the math, your bootstrapped marketing dollar is probably better spent on other digital channels.But I understand at this point some of you still reading probably think I’m full of crap, I must not have been doing it right, your friend Mike did it and it worked…if everyone is doing it, there must be something to it…you’re smart enough to make Influencer Marketing work for you.So when you ignore my advice t are some good rules to follow if you’re going to experiment with this channel.Influencer content should ideally be both permanent and high quality. A single Instagram post that’s buried in 2 days and not searchable on Google is worth a lot less than a video product review on Youtube that will stay at the top of the SERP indefinitely.Do the right math, and focus on the right numbers to analyze real value of an influencer before engaging them. Strong analytics is the cornerstone to any successful digital marketing push.Influencers try to throw the biggest numbers they can squeeze out. Often it becomes evident the numbers that matter don’t stack up. They may try to woo you with their 1 million followers…100,000 person email list….90% return rate of past clients. But whats their real engagement? How often do they post? Whats their real conversion rate? Do they even know these things? Even if all you give them is free stuff…your time is money. If you can’t do this yourself, it may be worth it to hire someone to do it for you.2b. Make sure you do the right math after the campaign to determine if it was actually effective at all. This sounds obvious, but too many marketers are looking at all the wrong benchmarks, and make bad decisions as a result.Influencer marketing works for some industries better than others. Take into consideration how your customers are actually buying. A fashion brand is much more likely to have success with this channel than say, selling some SAAS business.Of course its also imperative to learn how to spot the fakers. Influencers on every media channels use sophisticated techniques intended to make themselves look more popular than they really are. These techniques are constantly changing. You need to be smarter than they are.Be prepared to dedicate the manpower. An effective influencer strategy is time consuming. Recruiting new influencers, monitoring performance, keeping your brand ambassadors active is an ongoing effort. Often too much effort for a founding business operator to handle on their own during a time when they have bigger fish to fry. If you don’t have a marketing director on board…get an intern, or table this idea for later.Friends & family are still king. The best “influencer” for anyone isn’t some internet celebrity, but rather word of mouth from people they know. Referral campaigns are still one of the best ways to effectively generate sales without marginal spend. In summation, can Influencer Marketing work for you? Sure it could. But the real question you should be asking is if Influencer Marketing is the best way to put your precious dollars to work over other digital marketing channels.Anyway, I could go on all day about Influencer Marketing, and this post was certainly not exhaustive, but hopefully will give you some things to think about before adding it into your marketing mix. If you still have doubts, go ahead and experiment. Just be smart. At the end of the day, regardless of what I say…if its working for you, keep doing what you’re doing.

[ethanalter]

Rob Corddry previews the season finale of 'Ballers' and talks 'Twin Peaks'

Rob Corddry in Season 3 of ‘Ballers’ (Photo: Jeff Daly/HBO)

After overseeing his own show, Childrens Hospital, for seven seasons as a producer, director, writer, and star, Rob Corddry approaches his acting gig on the HBO series Ballers almost as a vacation. “Childrens Hospital was like swinging three bats in the batter’s box,” the actor tells Yahoo Entertainment. (The cult Adult Swim series wrapped up its run last year with a surprisingly dramatic series finale.) “Ballers is like stepping up to the plate with only one bat. It’s very light and fun!”

A big source of fun for Corddry is the opportunity to play sidekick to one of the world’s biggest stars, Dwayne Johnson, who headlines Ballers as football star-turned-financial manager Spencer Strasmore. On the show’s third season, which concludes Sept. 24, Spencer and his work buddy, Joe (Corddry), take their wheeling-and-dealing ways to a whole new level, trying to be the instigating forces behind a major league deal in the sports world. “What I liked about this season is that Joe wielded a lot of power and responsibility, and really enjoyed it,” Corddry says. “In the beginning, I thought, ‘How do I portray this guy who can drink all night and go to work without a hangover, yet make it clear that he’s very good at his job?’ Each season, you find him getting a little more responsible and taking the reins a little bit more.” We spoke with Corddry about this year’s big Ballers storylines, his love for (and theories about) Twin Peaks, and what to expect from his upcoming Childrens Hospital spin-off.

Ballers made news earlier this year when Elizabeth Warren revealed she was a super-fan. What was your reaction when you heard that news? I got emailed something by someone, and my first reaction was, “No. No she’s not.” And then I realized she actually did say this; it’s literally in the first page of her book! She didn’t wait until page two or chapter five. I still had some doubts, and thought that maybe it’s just for a certain voting demographic. But then Sam Bee invited me on to her show, because she was interviewing Elizabeth Warren and she was going to surprise her with me. And right up until the interview, Sam and I were a little worried. Like, what if she doesn’t actually care about Ballers and has to fake it?

But then I walked out and the Senator went, “Joe!” [Laughs] It was crazy. But now it makes sense to me that she likes the show; she’s the fiscal policies senator, so she’s always dealing with people that want more or maybe that have just gotten more for the first time. It all revolves around money, so I can see why she’d be very fascinated by the show. The show has a very diverse fan base; I am approached by the most unexpected of people, and she’s the best example of that. On Election Night, once she knew that Hillary was going to lose, she and her husband just binged Ballers as escapism. So that’s where this soft spot came from; it was a comfort to her during one of the worst times in her life.

The big storyline this season involved Spencer and Joe’s attempts to bring a football franchise to Las Vegas. Have you had personal experience being in a city that’s gained or lost a sports team? No, I’m from Boston and then lived in New York for a long time, so the sports teams are pretty entrenched there. But here in L.A., we just found ourselves with two football teams, neither of which I care about. [Laughs] That’s my very limited experience with it. Vegas, however, is a different beast altogether. I think what makes this show so good is that it gives people a peek behind the curtain. We have former football players on our writing staff, so it’s very authentic.

One of the big joys of this season is seeing Steve Guttenberg as a Vegas bigwig. I imagine you grew up watching him in movies — what was it like acting opposite him? Doing this show, I hardly ever get to the see the rest of the cast, but they make up for it in spades by putting me with people like Steven Guttenberg. This role is really antithetical to how we picture him, and he plays it in this really friendly, gleeful way, just on the edge of smarmy. But also so creepy! He almost reminds me of a David Lynch character. They say that you should never meet your idols, but Steve does not let you down. He’s one of those guys like Henry Winkler; a golden soul who I love to be around.

Corddry and Will Sasso on ‘Childrens Hosptial’ (Photo: Darren Michaels/SMPSP)

I’m surprised you never offered him a role on Childrens Hospital. He seems like a natural fit. I bet he was brought up! And I bet the Party Down connection pushed him back a little bit. We shared cast with Party Down, and we made Party Down references in one of our episodes. He had done that Party Down cameo and it was a very memorable one. So we probably felt that we’d be beating it on the head.

You mentioned that you don’t get to hang out with the rest of the cast very often. You also notably don’t have a love interest on the show. Are you pushing for that to happen? The writers actually told me they were considering it for this season, but ultimately killed it. And you know what? I totally agree. I don’t think we need to see that side of Joe. I mean, I would like to see more about his wife, who died mysteriously on a boat. That little Easter egg was dropped in Season 1, and he references it every once in a while. He referenced it this season, talking about how great it was when his wife died. So that’s a whole thing that might be worth thinking about. But no, a girlfriend [isn’t in the cards]. It’d probably be interesting because she’d be a lunatic, just like Joe. I can’t see him being like the settling-down type.

Did they share their idea for what a Joe-centric romantic storyline might have looked like with you before they killed it? They did, and it was one of those things that sounds good when it’s pitched in the writers’ room, then you think about it for a little bit longer, you realize nothing’s happening there. How does it serve the larger story of the whole show? Because my character is there to serve. He can be a good plot device, and he’s also there to serve at the pleasure of Spencer. If you want to do something, do something with that. Make people wonder if he’s gay. Or, gay for Spencer! Make that a storyline. That’d be interesting. Because he’s not gay, but he’s totally in love with him.

If they ever do get around to telling the story of Joe’s wife, who would you want to play her in flashbacks? Natalie Wood. [Laughs] No, Lizzy Caplan. She is someone that Joe might want to murder. And someone who I would love to hang out with for a day or so.

And it ties back into that whole Party Down/Childrens Hospital thing. There you go! We’ll get them all eventually.

Dwayne Johnson is known for having a crazy work schedule; it seemed like he was making several different movies while also filming Ballers this year. Does that ever impact your relationship onscreen at all? No, I admire the guy. He is nothing if not driven. Back in the first season, I was watching the Oscars one night and I had to turn it off at 9:00 because I had a 7 a.m. call the next day. And goddamn it if he didn’t show up presenting an Oscar! I was like, “You gotta be at work at 7 a.m. — what are you doing?” He just does that. He loves to work. So it hasn’t impacted my personal or professional relationship with him at all, except to say that I love seeing him when he’s tired.

Corddry and Dwayne Johnson in ‘Ballers’ (Photo: Jeff Daly/HBO)

What does a tired Dwayne Johnson look like? He just tells you he’s tired. We know each other pretty well by now, so I would ask him, “You tired today?” And he would just go, “Oh, dude.” He’s not a snapper. If anything, he’s nicer to people when he’s sleepy. And you know, he’s got a new kid, too. So I love just watching the monitors and going, “Okay, you’re human.”

Does this season end on a cliffhanger? There is a cliffhanger of sorts, but the Oakland Raiders-to-Vegas story is resolved in a very cool, creative way. You kind of don’t see it coming. They kept having to re-write the show as we got closer to the end, because there was movement to bring the Raiders to Vegas in real life! If that happened, they wanted to be able to have art imitate life.

The core cast of characters has been pretty stable throughout all three seasons. Is there a big death or departure looming? Well, if you’re playing Spencer’s girlfriend, don’t buy a helicopter! [Laughs] That’s what I’ve learned. Otherwise, no. If anything, it looks to me like people’s roles are growing. Like Reggie [played by London Brown], he had a cool storyline this year and I think there’s a bright future for his character. And you know who I’m really impressed with this season? Troy Garity, who plays Jason. He’s like me in that he serves other peoples’ stories, but I think he’s a really good actor and so well cast.

It’s almost like he has Jane Fonda for a mother. I know, right? I didn’t even know that until well into the first season, maybe even the second. It’s very funny.

Has she ever dropped by the set? Yeah, she stops by all the time, and is like, “Do it better you old poop.” [Laughs] Boy, I wish! That’d be fun.

What are your off-season plans now that Ballers is on hiatus and Childrens Hospital is wrapped? I have three shows in development. One is another Mr. Neighbor’s House special for Adult Swim, and another is a Childrens Hospital spinoff. I can tell you that it’s, of course, the same comedic tone and shares some of the same actors. But it’s completely different from Childrens Hospital in any other regard. It’s more like a global thriller/mystery told serially with cliffhangers every week. Where we shunned continuity before, we really have to adhere to it here. That’s really hard, man. I don’t know how these guys do it.

So now you have a sense of what Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse experienced on Lost! Oh my God! Never get yourself in a situation like that unless you’re David Lynch. Did you see Twin Peaks: The Return?

Kyle MacLachlan on ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ (Photo: Showtime)

Oh yes. It’s a masterclass in madness. It is! I’m still obsessed with it. I don’t want it to be over, and I loved the finale. I would love to do something like that. That’s probably what people said when they saw Twin Peaks the first time. Maybe someday I’ll figure out what my version of that is, because I just love the mythology.

What’s your personal take on what happens at the end of the finale? I don’t mind that there was no defined resolution. I think that freeze frame of Laura whispering into Cooper’s ear says it all. There’s a secret that we cannot know, and the viewer will never be privy to. So why not just be satisfied with this? Well, because we love the characters, and it’s hard to let go of something like that.

Ballers airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO.

[scoutshonor56]

YOU’RE FIRED!

Again with the clownishly long tie, pants pulled up past his navel, and open jacket – will someone please give Trump (I’m looking at you, Melania) a quick lesson in business/fashion etiquette?  Come to think of it, has this hangman’s noose ever been in style?  I think Donny owns the look.  

 Howdy campers, been a while.  I’ll be honest with you, after writing about Trump since last year’s primaries, well, I was burned out – Trump fatigue.  Besides, I pretty much came to the conclusion that what’s the point?  Every day is a comedy/horror show – depending on how you want to look at it – so yeah, I could write about him 24/7, but what’s the point?  It’s all in the papers and on your screen, every day – the guy writes his own material.  

 So what brought me out from behind my keyboard and compelled my itchy fingers to pick back up my verbal jousting lance?  The events unfolding over the last couple of days, and the firing of FBI chief James Comey in particular - but we’ll get to that in a minute.  As Popeye was famous for saying, “I’ve had all I can stanz, and I can’t stanz no more!”    

 So who are these two jovial politico’s yukking it up with our fearless commander-in-chief this past Tuesday at the White House?  Why that would be Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov on the left, and the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergei Kislyak on the right.  Hmmm, Kislyak… that name seems to ring a bell… Oh yeah, the guy who covertly discussed lifting sanctions on Russia with Trump’s now disgraced ex-national security adviser Mike Flynn – Trump’s second high level firing, following Attorney General Sally Yates.  Flynn is currently in the hot seat with the Senate Intelligence Committee, who also that Tuesday issued its first subpoena in the Russia investigation, ordering him to hand over records of any emails, phone calls, meetings and financial dealings with Russians.  Oops!

 *FYI, I got the above photo from the NY Times, who got it from the Russian foreign ministry/news agency Tass, as no American news organizations were allowed to take photos, nor were any reporters allowed in to ask questions (though they were ushered in minutes later for Mr. Trump’s session with Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state).

 Which brings us to FBI director Comey, who just hours before Trump’s meeting with the Russians became the third person to hear his boss’s favorite phrase, “You’re Fired!”  It seems Trump just can’t shake that famous tagline of his, wielded every week for years on his “reality” TV show.  It has such a good ring in his ears, the echo of power…  Poor Comey: at the time he was addressing a group of F.B.I. employees and potential recruits(!) in Los Angeles, when a television in the background flashed the news that he had been fired – DOH! I’m guessing that turned the whole affair a little awkward…

 So Comey – who Trump had previously shown the utmost confidence in, calling him “gutsy” when he was investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails – gets the Trump axe within days of him asking for additional resources for the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election – clearly signifying the investigation will not only continue, but will intensify – and the same day that he announces the issuing of a subpoena to Mike Flynn.  

 I’m no Columbo, but this whole thing stinks like an outhouse that is full and now leaking out and spreading it’s foulness into grandma’s backyard.  Three high level firings just this year: Attorney General Sally Yates, National Security Advisor Flynn, and now the head of the F.B.I. – each and every one of them directly linked to Trump’s team and their sleazy, back alley dealings with Russia.  You don’t have to be a genius to connect these dots.

 Well gee Bob, he is the president – I’m sure there is precedent; that it’s happened before… Yeah, once: back in 1973 when Richard Nixon fired the Justice Department’s chief Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, after Cox dismissed Nixon’s order to be content with the summaries of  recordings of Nixon and White House aides. Cox wanted the actual tapes.  Of course back then we actually had two parties that for the most part held integrity, the better interests of the country, governmental transparency and plain common sense above blind party unity – Nixon eventually was forced to resign. The spineless, lockstep yes-men of today’s GOP - or as I refer to them, the OWG (Old White Guy) party – unfortunately are the worst of enablers.  Trump will continue to hide behind his mounting wall of lies – the only wall he will ever see built – and for good measure will soon cook up something outrageous to once again direct America and the media’s attention elsewhere.  Might be time for another outrageous tweet in a totally different direction – “OBAMA PLANTED SECRET CAMERAS IN ALL THE WH BEDROOMS AND HAS FILM OF MELANIA AND I HAVING SEX!  SO SICK!!” Or worse, another random missile strike somewhere.

 What do I think?  I think this insecure, smarmy, and petulant little brat hiding in an old and fat man’s suit has sweat trickling down his soft and flabby back.  You can only put so many coats of paint on a cracking wall with a compromised foundation.  You can only put so many patches on this cheap re-tread, which has been leaking since day 1.  Granted I’m playing the optimist here, but this whole Russian thing isn’t going away; it’s too big and reaches to the heart of our democracy.  And Trump has made too many enemies, with the relentless press in particular, who smell blood like a shark or a hunting hound.  This just may be the desperately hidden and structurally flawed keystone holding this shaky castle together; the one that will bring it all tumbling down.  And in the end it will become clear that it was Donny’s hubris and stupidity that built this ill-gotten palace, with shoddy support beams, cheap craftsmanship, cut corners, and dirty dealings.

 By now it’s become clear to anyone with an 8th grade education and above that Donny isn’t half as smart as he thinks he is, and he certainly had absolutely no idea of the realities that came with his new job. This isn’t one of his real estate/development projects; his peers aren’t a group of easily duped investors, contractors, and boardroom sycophants; and his client isn’t a group he can impress with a trip down to Mar-a-Lago and a couple of free rounds of golf.  His client is the people of America, and regardless of his warped perspective, he serves at our pleasure, within a democratic political system of checks and balances.  To this day I honestly can’t fathom why he even wanted the job, other than self-delusional visions of power and grandeur.

 “What can be so hard!?  Hey, I’m the best dealmaker ever, I watch a lot of TV, and believe me, I could do it better!  So much better!”

 Unfortunately for the king with no cloths, even a growing number of GOP party members are pressing for an independent investigator to pick up where Comey left off.  They’re looking at 2018 – where all these useless seat polishers have to re-apply for their cushy and privileged jobs – and some are already slowly distancing themselves from this horribly deformed man-child they gave birth to.  Secretly making plans behind closed doors.  They may be team players, but they’re not stupid – and in politics, it’s all about survival.

 So my intelligent readers, with all this going on in the background, you would think even a freshman politician new to the game would forgo, or at the least, put off, a meeting with two high level Russian diplomats having a direct connection to this growing scandal – not Donny!  His self-assured arrogance and stupidity has no boundaries, no limits.  He has the intellectual depth of a coat of paint and the temperament of an immature 6th grader, and yet wears an assured sense of invincibility like a king’s robe and crown; a third world despot’s chest of fake medals and ribbons.  What a complete and utter asshole.  

 To quote our commander in chief from his little self-congratulatory speech at the victory party/suck-up fest in the Rose Garden recently to celebrate his “win” after the House pushed their hurried and revised TrumpCare ver.2 through the congressional birth canal like a premature baby coming out deformed and sideways (without even giving the Congressional Budget Office a chance to estimate its costs, its effects on coverage, or anything else), “Hey! I’m President! Can You Believe It?”

Ah, no I can’t – but hold that thought…