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hethrewmyheartinthecut · 6 years ago

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Ten Things • Alfie x Reader

This is the part where you’re supposed to blush for the stain on your dress, the teacake at four in the afternoon, the state of your hair, eavesdropping, or looking at him. Or all of the above. But your mind has ascended to such a state of fucklessness that you merely cock an eyebrow at him.

He breaks out into a crooked smile of surprise. It’s not so bad to look at, and it reminds you that you are, in fact, a creature with particular interests, even if work lately has restricted those interests to your imagination and your own two hands.

@alfiesolcmons said:

What up my names Vanessa, and I never fuckin learned how to read. lol jk. ok I'm 5'3" , relatively curvy, i like books and eating to much food (bread is delicious, just carbs ok). Kinda quiet most of thw time unless the subject which ppl are talking about is something I'm interested in, in that case I'm screaming from the rooftops. I'm Alfie trash and I like beards.

So I took those qualities, added my own innate bitchiness, and voila! Here she is, all 8762 words of her.

Warning: this thing is a mess start to finish, but at least parts of it are fun?

I. Exhaustion Teacake It’s been a long, long day, and your students have been particularly heinous; Jimmy Westin kept trying to take a cookie from little Maisie Fletcher during lunch, and when you stopped him, he chucked a chunk of ham at you. Now you’re walking home, lugging a bag full of schoolwork to grade, with a brownish stain on your cardigan that looks quite a lot like dried blood.

Fuck it. Fuck it, you’ll take the shortcut.

You’ve been told by more than one person not to venture through the heart of Camden Town, but frankly you can’t tell how much of that is real and how much of that is just people hating Jews. And also, you’re tired as fuck. Even if you do get mugged, it might be nice. Being hit over the head would be the perfect excuse to just lie quietly on the sidewalk for an hour or so.

It is when you’re almost out of Camden Town, sweating slightly and at your absolute weakest, when the smell hits you. Intense, almost sweet, it’s unmistakably the smell of fresh bread wafting out the propped-open door of a bakery. You squint up at it; from the striped green-and-white awning to the gold lettering on the windows, it seems almost a little too good to be true, like someone wandered into your heart’s desires and plopped this shop down in front of you for the express purpose of making you miserable.

Dinner’s in three or four hours. And you’ve been saving up for a new dress, because your favorite red one has been slowly turning pink after being washed so many times. But, fucking hell. You inhale deeply.

You go in. The boy at the front notices the stain on your blouse, but says nothing. You, in turn, eye a long loaf with a crust that looks like it’d give you a proper crunch. There’s also another one, darker and faintly shiny, that looks like it’s been braided. Ultimately, you settle on a beautifully iced teacake and pay up.

There’s no tables or chairs anywhere, just a long counter, but you think of the distance remaining to your flat, you breathe in that sweet air, and fuck it. Standing in one corner of the shop, bag on your arm, you tear off a piece and begin to eat, mentally daring the boy to make any kind of eye contact with you. He does not.

Through the door in the back, muffled voices become clearer, as if from men ascending or descending stairs. They’re speaking a language you don’t know (Yiddish? probably?), and arguing, one defensive, one very, very aggressive. Mind half-fogged with pure bready bliss, half-curious, you peek into the open door that leads into the back of the bakery and see two men, one unspeakably enormous, dark-haired one, and one bearlike man made half of beard and half of rage. Halfway through barking something that sounds like an order, the bearlike one glances out at the shop beyond and makes direct eye contact with you.

Then the bearlike man barks an order, and the boy at the front hurries to close the door between the back rooms of the bakery and the front of the shop. You shrug. Almost done with the teacake anyway.

II. Trouble-

Once a week is reasonable, right? It seems reasonable. At any rate, the two people most often manning the front, the curly-haired boy from before and his extremely talkative mother, soon learn your name, and you theirs (Ezra and Judith, respectively), and there’s a pleasant if mildly embarrassing familiarity in that. You come to anticipate the divine, doughy smell and your little corner in the bakery with great pleasure, knowing that it’s the one moment in your day that will likely be silent, free from students or flatmates; even the chatty Judith seems to understand, and lets you stand and eat in peace.

The man’s there too, though rarely. Maybe once every three weeks. You watch him, and sometimes he catches you at it, but he doesn’t seem to mind. You catch Judith talking to him animatedly one day, and venture to ask his name. There can’t be much harm in a name. Castles in the air are for yourself and yourself only, right? Anyway, his name is Alfie, which doesn’t appear to suit his usual growling demeanor much, but pairs decently enough with his guffaws. He gives you something to think about that isn’t the news, or your family, or your flatmates, or your students, and though he’s rarely speaking English, his animated ways give you plenty of entertainment. He’s like a walking, talking dime novel with that swagger. And he’s free, or at least comes free with the pastries and bread.

And the beard’s not bad.

This goes on for a few months, and he still doesn’t know your name but that probably doesn’t matter. There’s a golden moment that more than makes up for it, when you look up from your bread and he’s perfectly framed in the doorway, vest unbuttoned, white shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow, kneading the dough. You decide the heat’s not so bad if it’s making him sweat. You decide this is almost certainly a trap set by some kind of fiend. (Gods you don’t believe in, but little assholes with the power and will to fuck with you seem pretty reasonable.) You decide you’re not going to look away.

He looks up at you, and you don’t move. He looks back down, and gets on with it. But for the next ten minutes or so, he stays in full view, and you don’t stop looking, and poor Ezra keeps his own eyes glued to the newspaper at hand.

As soon as you get home that night, you start to make inquiries. Out of the five girls that you have crammed into one flat, you get lucky with Letty, whose mother is Jewish.

“Do you know an Alfie?”

“Alfie what?”

“I don’t know. He works at this bakery in Camden Town, built like a barrel.”

“Jesus Christ, Vanessa.”

“What?”

“I knew you’d get after a man eventually. Tessa told me it’s been two years since the last, but him?”

Only two weeks ago, your principal threatened to fire you for not being able to handle the workload, even though your workload has doubled since Ms. Spinelli suddenly quit. So yeah, you went behind the school and drowned the very last fuck you had to give in the river. Her reaction only has you amused. “What’s the problem? He’s not married. Did he kill his wife?”

“Not quite.”

“He’s got the clap? He votes Tory?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“I wouldn’t call him a gangster,” she concedes, “but he runs around with that type. He’s killed a man. And everyone knows the bakery’s not really a bakery.”

“Isn’t it? The bread there tastes a lot like bread.”

“It’s a front for something.”

“Mm.” Alright, so now he really is straight out of a dime novel, and you’ve got more fodder with which to entertain yourself. What could one do in a fake bakery? Forge money?

“Oi. Vane.”

“What?” You look over. “Oh, you thought that was going to scare me off him?”

“Doesn’t look like I succeeded.”

“Nah.”

You can feel her reassessing you, and obligingly pull a lazy smile.

“Quiet girls have the most surprises, huh,” she says after a second.

You shrug. “You know where I come from?”

“Orphanage, same as the rest of us.”

“Yeah, but when I turned fifteen, they sent me to the Stoker place. You know what they say about Stoker’s?”

“I’ve heard it’s got a reputation.”

“Stoker’s was for the troublemakers and the troublefuckers.”

“Am I supposed to guess which one you were?”

You smile.

III. Cocktail (The Wrong Kind)

They hire a new teacher. Ms. Solokov, and as you walk home that day, you feel a sense of relief mixed with trepidation.

Truth is, you love your students, the grimy, shouty little assholes, because they give you so much trouble. You wouldn’t know what the fuck to do with a simple, quiet life; you feed off the chaos, on trying to control it, most of the time, wrangling all of them into learning whether they like it or not.

You’re tired of looking and feeling like a wreck, of course, but with things much tamer, you’re starting to worry about the boredom. Your off days have gotten significantly less entertaining since Tessa got married; she no longer drags you to hip spots around town, and you try (and fail) to not resent Craig for that. Anyways. It’s looking like a boring weekend.

This particular Friday, you have a simple roll, not even toasted, not even with butter. You tear tiny pieces off it and savor the taste as it melts on your tongue. Alfie’s in the back, but you only caught a glimpse of him once, so he’s probably down in the basement, so you turn your imagination to the people outside, making up increasingly ridiculous or tragic stories to explain the baby in that pram (dead mother! Horrible rich father! Will certainly become a bratty heiress!) or that newspaper-throwing boy (destined to become a great writer! Cut down too soon in a foreign war!) or that tall, angry-looking fellow in the long coat (secretly a terrible husband! Soon to be brought down by his crafty wife!) until the tall fellow stops and pulls a bottle out of his coat.

And that’s not too out of the ordinary (a man? Drinking? gasp.) but then you see he’s stuffing something in the bottle, and then out come a lighter and oh shit, that’s a rag about to be lit.

“Oi!” you bellow, because there’s no time to do anything, and Judith ducks down behind the counter as you huddle in your corner, wishing you had something more solid than a dinner roll to chuck back. Fuck there’s a lot of wood in here.

Then it gets worse. The man takes out a revolver and shoots twice, shattering the large windows in a spray of glass, then cocks back his arm, the Molotov cocktail ready to go. Then a third shot blasts through the air, and red blossoms through his gray coat, and he crumples to the ground. The bottle shatters on impact, splashing oil all over him. The rag catches him on fire, and he spends his last minute on earth very noisily.

You’re distracted from the blackening corpse by a yelp. It’s Judith, dismayed, darting into the backroom past Alfie, who’s standing there gun in hand. You know you’re supposed to be scared, but it’s not a bad image, white shirt open at the throat and all. He looks at you. You take a bite and chew slowly. You don’t look away.

You’d be happy to stand there forever, but unfortunately that was your last bite, and. Well.

“Guess I ought to go before the police arrive?” you say.

“Aw, the police don’t care about Camden Town.”

“You seem to manage well enough without them.”

There’s a flash of that crooked grin again. Then he comes around the back of the counter towards you, walking carefully, big boots crunching over the glass. He offers you his hand, the same hand, you can’t help but notice, that held the gun. You take it.

This whole delicate-damsel thing would work a lot better if you had worn some fucking heels, but your walk to work is considerably too long for that nonsense, so instead it’s the crunch crunch of flats over glass. You use him for support even though you don’t need to. His hands are rough and you’d like to know where the calluses come from. You wouldn’t mind feeling them a bit more.

He walks you over the glass, to the door. A few gawkers have begun to cluster in the windows of the dress shop opposite. There’s no more glass, so you relinquish his hand.

If this is a dime novel, you’ll play the cowboy if you want to. And you want to, even if you haven’t got a gun. You know the right lines for the damsel--gratitude, mostly--and they’re fucking boring.

“Till next week, Alfie,” you say, and you leave before he can answer.

You don’t know if he’s watching you go. You hope he is, but you’re feeling pretty pleased either way.

IV. Style/Busy

Now that your workload has lessened, you’ve got the time to spare to, oh, not just dunk yourself in a tub of water and scrub like mad before you pass out on your bed atop still-wet hair. No, you’ve got time to use those curlers. Time to slip a tube of lipstick in your purse. Time to take your savings and get that new dress for yourself, a sensible choice, blue printed with tiny flowers, fake pearl buttons for a touch of, oh, don’t call it class, but maybe style. (You know it flatters the curve of your ass, too. There’s that.)

The shoes. The shoes are a mistake, and you know it even when you’re putting them on, but damn if those delicate heels don’t make your legs look good. You know they make your legs look good.

By the time you make it to the shop that Friday, your toes are pinched all to hell, but you lean into the pain and order yourself an iced bun, telling yourself that the sugar will make up for it. You eat it slow, so slow, and he doesn’t show up; there’s not the slightest flicker of movement in the backroom, and it’s fucking disappointing. You take to eating about a bite a minute. Tiny, tiny bites. You won’t buy anything else to eat; there’s no dignity in that. But if you can just make this one stretch out for--

A car screeches to a halt in the street outside, and you press yourself into the corner as Judith runs into the backroom. Not again. But no, it’s him, jumping out the driver’s side door and walking fast to the door, his white shirt crimsoned by a gash in his shoulder. He barges through the door and pulls up short at the sight of you. Maybe, maybe it was an offense that he forgot about you for a moment, but the look on his face more than makes up for it. Yeah, there’s a considerable distance between your limp-haired, shit-dressed look and your red-lipped, heel-sporting look. You know you look a proper fashion plate. You know he’d like a look underneath the blue.

You raise an eyebrow.

He starts, remembers there are other things he needs. Fumbles for the words.

“I take it you’re busy?” you prompt.

“You could say that.”

He’s dripping blood on the floor, and there’s a pleasure in the fact you don’t have to give a damn about it. He’s no child that needs to be told to sit down and get bandaged up. He’s a man, and if he’s going to run round wounded, that’s his goddamn choice.

“Go on, then,” you say.

He disappears into the backroom, thunders down the stairs, and emerges minutes later carrying a long black box rather like a violin case, except rectangular and far, far too long to be for a violin.

You watch the car careen away, and then you call to Judith, “It’s fine!” Shoving the rest of the bun in your mouth, you chew with gusto and begin your walk home.

Next week, you wear a softer lipstick and ditch the heels, but the hair’s the same and so is the dress. A little effort’s fine. The blackberry scone is sublime. And then, no matter how slow you eat, he doesn’t fucking show.

“He is alive, isn’t he?” you say to Judith.

“Yes, dear.” Bless her, she doesn’t judge you a whit, just says it and gets back to the paperwork she likes to do during slow hours.

“Thanks, Judith.”

V. Good People

The next time you go, you wear what you want: the cute dress, the aggressive lipstick, flat shoes. The newspaper was interesting that morning so you didn’t bother with the hair. You’ve got no expectations, and things are a little lighter that way, albeit a little less exciting.

Due to an extended all-school meeting, you’re dreadfully late and the place is jam-packed, but that doesn’t matter. The shop turns up a delightful surprise for you: a man named Moshe, just a year younger than you, who was trained as a teacher at the exact same time. Who incidentally you couldn’t marry for the same reason you’ve never been able to marry, namely that you’ve never wanted to. But it’s still good to see him again.

All through the line, you talk about your respective schools, and end up hotly debating pedagogical methods, the relative psychological merits of penalties and rewards. Somehow that slips into the relatively modern history of English schools and the influx of lascars and freedmen and loops right back around to the balance of power between the teacher and the parent and then you get a beautiful spot where you’re the only one that can talk because Moshe’s busy ordering two loaves and then you’re so invigorated that you get a small loaf that’s still larger than both your fists put together and far too large for one sitting. And then the two of you huddle in the corner and dip into the ethics of bodily autonomy and you know you’re gabbling like an idiot but fuck it’s been a long time and you’ve missed all this arguing--

“Y’know, me,” rumbles a voice behind you, “I vouch for a smack upside the ‘ead. Is that not an option on the table? Because it should be.”

Alfie slides into the conversation, much too close, and on the wrong side. That is, he leans into Moshe’s personal space, and the poor man blanches.

“Mr. Solomons!” He fumbles with his bags in order to get his right hand free, then offers it. “We so appreciated your, ah, your actions regarding the school redistricting. Truly. A disaster averted.”

Alfie shakes his hand too hard and for too long and you’re on the verge of rolling his eyes.

“He’s just getting a couple loaves for his family,” you say. “Wife and three children. We trained together.”

“Oh, do you know Vanessa?” says Moshe, smiling anxiously, shaking out his hand by his side.

“Vanessa? No.”

“Oh.”

But the both of you are looking at each other, you in faint exasperation and Alfie in an irritating mask of benevolence, so Moshe adds, “I should get home, there’s a list of groceries as long as my arm that I still have to pick up. Good seeing you again, Vanessa, very good seeing you, Mr. Solomons.” Then he slips out the door.

Behind you, the rush of the day has petered out to just a couple customers and Judith. It’s few enough for you to talk properly.

“He was nice,” you say. “And he’s a good man, which is rarer. You shouldn’t scare off good people.” Even if they’re good people that you have indeed fucked, thank you very much.

He gives you one of those shit-eating grins. “If they’re good people, they’ve got no reason to be scared of me, innit”

“We both know that’s not true.”

“Mmh.” There goes one of those undefinable sounds whose meaning is lost in his beard. You choose to take it as a grunt of concession. Then: “Do you always talk that much?”

You shrug. Judith, without looking up from the change she’s counting out, says, “No, she doesn’t.”

You have to stifle a smirk at that. So much for the appearance of a private conversation. If Judith knows, the whole neighborhood knows, but it’s not your neighborhood and you can’t bring yourself to care.

“Do you bake?” he says abruptly.

“Would I be here if I did?”

“Would you like to learn?” he says, sardonic and a little slow.

“What would it cost me?”

“Oh, whatever you can spare.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

VI. Fast/Slow

The sun has just set as you make your way to the shop. There’s not many people around; most are finishing up dinner with their families. The shop has been closed for about an hour now, but the backroom is lit and when you try the door, you find it unlocked. You lock it after you.

The backroom much larger than you previously thought, a cavernous space complete with what seems like miles of countertop. Alfie’s in a chair in the back, heels up on a table, reading the finance section of the newspaper and smoking a cigarette. When you come in, he chucks the cigarette in the ashtray and gets to his feet.

“Vanessa!” he cries. Then he stops short. “Did you bring a gun?”

“No.” You hand over your purse to prove it. “Are you disappointed?”

“Very fuckin’ disappointed.”

“Then get me one yourself. I don’t have new-gun money.” You reach over, pick up the cigarette, and have a puff. It’s an old vice of yours, not one you indulge often. But tonight’s a night for vice, clearly.

“You have teacake money.”

“I have my priorities in order.”

Up close and in private, you’ve got the ability to try and figure out whether his eyes are green or blue. So you do. Green, you decide, and then you sweep your eyes over the rest of him.

“Go on and bake,” you say. “I’ll watch.”

“What ‘appened to student participation?”

“I imagine that’ll come later on.”

You perch on one long countertop, smoking and swinging your heels, as he begins measuring and mixing the dry ingredients. Well. You say measuring, but he’s mostly eyeballing it.

“So you’re a teacher, eh?” he says.

“Yes. Do you want to be taught?”

“Tell me about the Italians.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything in the last twenty years. Politics, culture, London immigration history.”

It is flattering that he thinks you know all that. And you do know all that, having taken particular interest in modern immigration, but there’s just one thing.

“Are people going to die?” you say.

Halfway through cracking an egg, he looks up. “People die every day, Vanessa.”

“Are Italians going to die?”

“Italians are people, stands to fuckin’ reason.”

“Three of my students are Italian.”

“Any kid young enough to be your student probably has at least another thirty years on ‘em.”

You consider this. “All right, I think you’ll be most interested in the Sicilians…”

And you’re off to the races. You talk through the ingredients mixing, you talk through the dough getting kneaded (your favorite part), and then he puts it in a bowl and you’re still talking and--

“Doesn’t that lot go in the oven?” you interrupt yourself.

“I thought you were fucking with me when you said you didn’t know how to bake.”

“Well, surprise.”

“It needs to rise.”

“Needs to what now?”

“It’s going to grow until it’s twice the size it is now.”

“Shit, I didn’t know baking was interesting.”

“Yeah?” He scratches his jaw with a couple beringed fingers. “You’ve seemed pretty interested.”

“Come here,” you say, and he does. “How long does it take to rise, do you think?”

“Half an hour, forty-five minutes.”

“I can think of some ways to pass the time.” You spread your legs a few inches.

He grins, and settles himself between them, the fabric of his work trousers rough against the insides of your thighs, the metal of his rings cold on your knees, his right thumb tracing tiny circles on your left leg, warm. “You’re a fast little thing, aren’t you?”

“Little, maybe. A thing, no. And Alfie?”

“Mmh?”

Hooking your thumbs in his belt loops, you grasp his hips and pull him forward till he’s flush against you, your heels tucking him in closer. “Nothing about this has been fast. I’ve been wanting you inside me for four months now, and you’ve wanted the same for nearly as long. Four months of thinking about it, and nothing stopping you, four months of wondering what you’re going to taste like, four months of only my own fingers and a--”

He kisses you hard and you smile your victory into it till the smile melts under heat, his hands rucking up your skirt, yours frantic at his belt buckle, hips rolling and words vanishing till his rings clatter off onto the countertop, he slips a hand into your panties, and the kiss suddenly ends.

The expression on his face, the surprise there, followed by gratification? Delicious. He brings his fingers up to his mouth to taste, and that’s a sight, isn’t it? He must know it is, because you catch a glimpse of pink tongue, and that was entirely unnecessary for the purpose.

“You did that,” you admit to him. “Don’t get--” Your fingers dig into his shoulders when you feel him pressing into you. “--fucking arrogant about it.”

“Too late,” he murmurs, and then his mouth is on your throat and his fingers stretch slow and perhaps there’s a rebuttal to that but you can’t be bothered to think of it when you can run your hands through his hair instead.

He fucks you like you expected, hard and fast, the edge of the counter cutting into your thighs, the stretch in your cunt more than worth it, and his mouth travelling everywhere, an unexpected bonus. It’s good and then it’s too good to be true, because despite your best attempts at clinging, he pulls away.

Now it’s his turn to enjoy the expression on your face, but then, there are options here. You have options.

“I’ll do it myself,” you say, and sure enough one finger slides in easy, then two, and you know yourself, know just how to crook your fingers and find the right spot and he’s drinking in the sight like a man in a desert but before you can hit a proper rhythm, his hand closes over your wrist.

You make a desperate sound down low in a part of your throat you didn’t even know was capable of making noise. “There are easier ways to make me fight you.” Your voice is ragged to your own ears.

“If nothing about this has been fast, with half an hour left, why start now? I can take care of you. Are you going to let me?”

You rest your head against the wall, taking in the sweat-soaked sight of him. You’re tempted to just pull him in, knowing you could persuade him in two seconds to fuck you again. He’s good at bluffing, but his cock’s more than enough evidence of impatience.

Curiosity has always been your weakness, though, and he’s not specified how he wants to take care of you.

“Yes,” you say.

He kneels.

The insides of your thighs are red. You’re going to have beard burn there for a couple days. It’s worth it.

VII. Lend Me Your Rear

He shows up at your front door, which is a mistake. Not one he could’ve known, because you haven’t talked to him about your flatmates yet, but still a mistake.

You don’t bother asking how he got your address.

“What can I do for you?” you say.

A wolfish smile spreads across his face. “I was thinking--”

You open the door much wider, revealing your roommates, four other women, listening in unabashedly. Letty waves.

He waves back.

“I, ah, got you a book,” he says.

“Really.”

But he has. It’s packaged in brown paper, but you can feel that it’s a thick hardback.

“The Bible? That’s very sweet of you,” you say.

“Right.” He reaches to take it back, but you’re too quick.

“I’ll open it later.”

“When?”

“When you drive me to your flat, in about two minutes. Let me get my purse.”

He doesn’t look particularly happy with that, but he can’t object, can he? Not when he’s already butted into your place.

His flat is odd, clearly not meant for visitors, small and very full, with two bookshelves and a massive bin holding a ridiculous number of unwashed clothes, plus six apples on the kitchen table for no apparent reason.

You gesture at the shelves. “What’s all this?”

He shrugs. “Got a taste for it in prison. Quakers used to donate old shit, and I was bored.”

“Are you still bored?”

“Sometimes.”

You move a pile of paperwork from a chair to the floor, then sit down and start tearing at the brown paper packaging.

“Volumes one and two of Gibbons’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” You look up. “Not quite what I was expecting.”

“What were you expecting?”

“The Kama Sutra?”

He laughs. “I have that around here somewhere.”

“Save it for a rainy day.” You trace the edge of the cover with one finger, then flip it open to a random page and begin to read. “The troops fought like men interested in the decision of the quarrel; and as military spirit and party zeal were strongly diffused throughout the whole community, a vanquished chief was immediately supplied with new adherents, eager to shed their blood in the same cause.” You look up and grin.

“Wot?”

“The Italian information wasn’t just because Italians are going to die. You get off on this, don’t you.”

“Is it so unusual to want someone with a full head?”

“As opposed to an empty one? No, not unusual. But gratifying.”

“How gratifying?”

“Come over and find out.”

It’s nice to finally fuck on a bed for once. Afterwards, you drape yourself across his back, tracing the scars there.

“You’re Shakespeare, you know that?” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Though she be but little--”

You bite his shoulder.

“It was a compliment!” he protests.

“She is fierce? I know.” You press your lips to the bitten skin. “It was a thank-you. I’m fond of Beatrice.”

He checks it over. Sure enough, you didn’t break skin, but there are marks on him now. He makes a face.

“If I knew you were so delicate…”

You both laugh.

“You remind me of Shakespeare too,” you say.

“Yeah?”

“You want to guess?”

“I am a Jew.”

“I’m aware, Alfie.”

He grunts; you grin. “I take it that The Merchant of Venice was one of the old things donated?”

He nods.

“Go on, then.”

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” At first, he starts lightly, trying to inject irony in his voice, distance, but it doesn’t work; the rhythm of the words carries him along. “Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?” You can see, now, why Moshe called him Mr. Solomons and not Alfie; why he seems able to command the entire neighborhood. You see where the ability to ignore his own spilled blood comes from.

The rest of the speech is one long exercise in seeing how low his voice can go, and at the very last line, he strokes your cheek, tender like he’s never been, a menace in it that makes your mouth go dry.

“The villainy you teach me I will execute,” he murmurs, “And it shall go hard, but I will better the instruction.”

You didn’t think that you could be surprised by wanting him in any kind of way again, but here you are, thighs still sticky from the last time and you want him, you want him, you want him. And you take him, giving what you received, bruising but also, also. Taking note when he trembles.

Later, when you’re so worn-out you won’t even lift your head to talk, you say, “You didn’t guess right.”

The truth is, you were thinking about the time a teacher asked for an analysis of Marc Antony’s famous speech and you ended up wanting to fuck him. The ambition, the skill, the bloodlust underneath it all, the wrenching sobs in front of a crowd, flash of white teeth grinning victory in private--yeah, you could ride that ancient motherfucker. Alfie’s not at that level of duplicity, but he’s got the same charisma, the same savagery underneath.

“What was it, then?” he says.

His ego is healthy enough already; it doesn’t need feeding.

“Exeunt, pursued by a bear.”

VIII. A Problem

“You know what? There should be a problem by now,” he declares.

“Mm?” You lean back in your chair. He likes to monologue and you don’t mind listening.

“The honeymoon’s fucking over, innit.”

“I wasn’t aware we were married.”

“We’re not, but it’s been three months. Three months means we should’ve found a fucking problem. You give any two people three months together, and they should be able to find a dozen problems and go their separate ways, right?”

You eye him suspiciously, but he doesn’t seem to be gearing himself up for a separation; on the contrary, he just looks like he’s pontificating as per usual. You relax. “A problem like what?”

“Like the danger isn’t very fucking sexy anymore now that you’re close enough to get shot if a man comes through that door. Like you’re tired of staying inside and you want to be walking on my arm, like you haven’t seen a share of the profits, like you realize you’ll never get any further in, like you want kids, like you’re fuckin’...worried about saving my soul or some such shit.” Alright, maybe this is not a usual speech. He does look mildly worried.

“That’s a pretty big ego you have there, Alfie,” you say. “You do see that none of it fits, right?”

“I see that, and it’s very fucking concerning, because I’m wondering what brand new three month problem you’re going to come up with. You and that imagination.”

“A finger up the ass is not innovation, Alfie, it’s a pretty common cure for temporary boredom.”

“And the fucking marathon last Friday?”

“That I’ll proudly claim as a personal invention.”

He smiles, and it’s a little terrifying, that. Yeah, maybe he is a little fond of you, maybe you’re a little fond of him, but it’s still two people getting what they want, at the core. That’s what it is.

“Listen,” you say, “If you want a problem, you’ll have to make it up yourself, because I have none. And for the record, there’s a three-month mark for women, too, and it’s wildly different.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You get up out of your chair and got to sit in his lap, tilting his chin up, beard itchy in your palm. “At three months, he’ll start to think he owns you. You can see this because he’ll start to try to make you marry him, start to get bored and see other women, start to try in bed less and less, start to push you around.”

“You think I’d do that?”

“I think if we’re going to talk about changes at three months, we should talk about how completely unwedded I am to you, in every sense of the word. How I know that the good shit--the nearly unbelievable shit, the way you try to read ahead of me in Gibbons, the loaves you give me when I go, the way you get off on getting me off--how I know that good shit sometimes doesn’t last. How I abandon wells that have gone dry, how I’ve got too much fucking experience for that.” Your grip on his jaw tightens. “Don’t you fucking dare. Don’t pity me, it wasn’t me. It was my sister, and a girl I trained with, and probably half the other women out there. It’s only common sense, nothing personal.”

“You don’t trust me, eh?”

“I don’t see the need. And don’t think I haven’t noticed you have an entire room you keep locked every time I come over.”

He looks guilty, and that’s not at all what you wanted, not what you expected. To have a locked room is not beyond the bounds of what you’re here for, after all.

“Don’t get hurt feelings,” you say. “It’s not my fault a woman can’t be both safe and sentimental at the same time.”

“She could try.”

“She doesn’t want to. You kill people, Alfie.”

“...Yeah.”

“Then there we are.” There’s something in his eyes you can’t read, and that’s a problem, that right, there, but if you can’t figure it out, you can’t fix it. You kiss him by way of a panacea, and then you get up and wander over to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

“Is it that simple?” he calls after you.

“It is.”

IX. Rum Is For Pirates

And it seems that way for another very good two weeks. You still stop by the bakery every now and again, but it’s rarer; mostly he picks you up at eight and returns you before midnight, and that’s a little less sleep for you but a lot more fun. Problems, despite his prediction, do not arise.

Until rum night. After much wild guessing, you’ve finally hit upon the distillery in the bakery basement, and he’s agreed to fill you with about as many samples of the product as you can bear, it being a Saturday night and neither of you heading to church Sunday.

“It’s shit, innit,” he says, pulling a face after his first drink.

“Then why are you having another?”

He shrugs, and grins, and you’re halfway to kissing that off his face when the phone rings.

He mutters his replies, again in Yiddish, and you’re idly contemplating the possibility of licking something off his shoulder blades. Not rum, whiskey maybe. But his voice rises in concern and lowers back into something steadier than usual, which you read as reassurance, and by the time he hangs up, you’ve got your shoes on.

“I can walk from here,” you say. It’s not a great time of night, but nobody’s going to touch you.

“No, I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with me,” he says.

“I’m not doing a thing for your business.”

“It’s closer to your business than mine.”

Which is how you end up knocking on the door of a crowded flat with a five year old girl jumping up and down shouting on the sofa and a twelve year old boy, face grave, answering the door.

“Hi,” you say. “I’m Vanessa.” You stick out your hand, which he shakes like he’s a fortysomething banker. It would be charming if the backdrop wasn’t so sad.

“I’m Joshua. Did Mr. Solomons send you?” he says.

“Yes, he just drove to get you some groceries.”

“The stores are all closed.”

“He’ll find a way.” Thankfully, this seems to satisfy the little man, and you don’t have to elaborate on what’s undoubtedly going to be a fair bit of theft. He steps aside and lets you in.

“How long has it been just you two?” you say.

“Two days.”

“What’s her name?”

“Tabitha. Tabby for short.”

“Alright.” You lock the door behind you, then squat in front of him. “Joshua, you’ve done a good job. We’re going to take care of this. Can you do something for me?”

“Maybe.”

God, the kid’s smart. Your chest aches. “Can you get some water for you and your sister?”

“Why?”

“Because dehydration always comes first.” You straighten.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to have a look in the bedroom.”

“Don’t.”

“Love, someone’s going to have to do it. Or it’s going to make the whole flat smell very bad. It’s not going to go away.”

His face crumples. You squat down again and give him a hug, and presently the little girl has climbed down off the sofa to join in. She smells like piss but that’s understandable. Your dress was going to be a wreck after tonight anyway.

When they’re both done crying, you sit them down at the kitchen table for some water each, and then you venture into the bedroom. You were expecting a mother, but this is clearly more of a grandmother, hair gray, and not beginning to smell too much, yet. Eyes closed, thank God. You’ve not dealt with many bodies in your time, but it’s always twice as bad when the eyes are open.

Likely there’s some sort of culturally polite way to deal with this, but there are children waiting on you to get it over with, so you untuck the edges of the sheet from under the mattress and tie her up in the sheets, bundling pretty tightly.

Joshua doesn’t seem to like the silence much, so you end up talking loudly through the crack in the door, even as you start in on the bathroom with soap and a rag.

“Miss?”

“Yes, Joshua.”

“Who are you?”

“Vanessa.”

“Are you Mr. Solomon’s wife?”

“No, I’m a teacher.”

“I’ve never seen you at school.”

“There are other schools.”

He absorbs this.

“Miss?”

“Yes, Joshua.”

“Who is Mr. Solomons?”

You want to laugh. “I’m not sure, sometimes. I suppose he’s a baker. He likes rum. Maybe he’s a pirate.”

“Pirates need ships.”

“A pirate on land, then. He has the beard for it, right?”

“I guess.”

“How do you know him, Joshua?”

“He was there when Dad went to jail. Dad’s a murderer,” he says, like murderer is the same as florist or milkman.

You find yourself saying, “Oh,” politely, like you do to old friends declaring marriages you don’t approve of.

“Yeah, and he gave us a card with his phone number on it. It had a flower on it. It was pretty fancy.”

Just then, the door opens, and Alfie storms in in a flurry of jovial Yiddish and a mass of bags. By the time you emerge into the kitchen, the kids are stuffing their faces with makeshift sandwiches of bread and cheese. You wait until you’re quite close to him, then you lift onto your tiptoes and murmur in his ear: “Do you know where you’re taking her?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you should do it now.”

You cover Tabby’s eyes with one hand, but Joshua’s such a little man, he won’t let you, and you don’t have the heart to force him to look away. Anyways, when Alfie carries her out, all wrapped up in the sheets, she just looks like a bundle. You tied those knots tight.

The miracle is that Tabby actually likes taking baths, so that’s not so difficult, and then the food hits her and Joshua at about the same time.

“You didn’t have to touch the body,” he says, as you both watch them, curled up, asleep on the sofa.

“It was the work at hand.”

“I can have Ollie walk you home, if you want.”

“Ollie?”

“Tall, dark hair. You could bump into him while robbing his house and he’d apologize to you for it.”

“Oh, that one. No, it’s fine. There’s still laundry to do, and I know you’re shit at laundry.”

“I’ve done my own laundry for decades now, mate.”

“It’s a little sad that you’re so proud of it, Alfie.”

“I can handle this myself.”

“I know. But I’m here now, so I might as well.”

It’s several hours of work, but not without its peculiar rewards. While packing up the grandmother’s clothes, you even catch Alfie shining Joshua’s little shoes.

“Wot?” he says, as if you’ve accused him of something.

You just shake your head and get back to folding blouses.

After what feels like a month but is probably more like several hours, Judith shows up, and the house is clean and as childproofed as can be, you and Alfie both dozing in separate chairs.

You don’t even bother to explain, just lurch up out of the chair.

“Wait,” says a little voice. It’s Joshua, blinking sleepily up at the three of you. “Where are you going?”

You start forward, but Alfie’s closer, and he holds up a hand, so you let him take it. You watch as he kneels next to the sofa and starts talking, softly. You don’t understand the words, but you don’t have to. Joshua’s little face is earnest and rapt beneath the sleepiness.

“Hello,” Judith says to you, brightly.

“Hello.” You offer her a smile. You know this is all ridiculous, or maybe again that’s the sleep deprivation.

She reaches into her purse and produces a muffin.

“You’re a queen among women, Judith. An absolute queen.”

The muffin doesn’t last you nearly long enough; soon you find yourself sitting next to Alfie in the car, and nothing to do with your mouth. You think you might be supposed to say something, but you don’t know what it is. You’re not quite sure how to act. Because now you’re not just the foulmouthed teacher that doesn’t know when to stop, and he’s not just the violent baker that amasses power via killing and stealing in his spare time. You’re still all of that, but other things too, enough to make you people.

“Have we found a problem?” he says.

You shake your head. “It’s just different.”

Maybe it is a bit of a problem, because now that he’s more than a cock with various attractive qualities attached, he’s a man, and you’ve never known what to do with a man before, never having seriously tried.

He’s watching you. “You still want a drink?”

You look out the car window. The sky is beginning to lighten in the east, and all your body wants to do is sleep, but leaving him now feels like leaving something unfinished. “Why not?”

X. High Sun

You wake up to a lick on your face. “No.” You push away, but your hand meets fur, not skin, and--”Alfie!”

“Wot?” He ambles in from the kitchen, looking like he’s not even hungover, the bastard, already dressed, apple in hand.

“You had a dog this whole time and didn’t tell me?”

“Yeah.” He clucks at the little brown spaniel, which leaps off the bed and circles his feet, panting excitedly. “Want an apple?”

“No.” You sit up, swiping your hair out of your face. The first time you’ve slept in his bed, and you didn’t even fuck first. You’re not sure how to feel about that. “Is that what you kept all locked up in the room?”

“I have guns and papers and illegal shit in there. My neighbor takes the dog when you come over. But he had to go to work this morning.”

“Right.” You make it to the bathroom in time to throw up in the toilet, which helps, oddly enough. You wash yourself up, bath and all, and emerge in one of his shirts, partly because your dress is spoilt but partly because you’ve always wanted to. He demonstrates his appreciation for the sight first by handing over toast spread thick with butter, then by watching you eat with particularly avid eyes. You lick your fingers clean when you’re done.

“Alfie?”

“Mm?”

“You’re going to have to lock the dog in the bathroom for this part.”

He does.

You take your time unbuttoning the shirt while he rushes to get off the vest, the shirt, the trousers, the socks, it’s funny and then suddenly he’s crawling up the bed, sliding a hand up your thigh, and you forget what’s funny with his head between your legs, taking his time. He licks into you and palms your breasts and you’re not used to this, the odd, luxurious feeling of hardly moving at all, flexing a little under him, taking everything and giving nothing. But it’s on offer, so you take it.

He doesn’t make it easy on you, though. He usually knows when you’re close, because your nails leave crescents on his shoulders, or his hair gets a sharp tug, but this time he backs off even before that, slows down the pace, lapping at you in a way that’s nowhere close to satisfying. He reaches up and palms your breasts, but that’s not much use, either. You bite your lip and wait. Clearly, the man has a plan, and you’ll indulge him.

The plan turns out to be him touching you in every possible way that’s unsatisfactory: one finger slipping in, shallowly, a slight prickle of teeth dragging down your neck, two fingers in while he mouths at your nipples and that’s--oh that’s alright, that’s better, but the rhythm’s barely there and you’re this close to just shoving him off and taking care of yourself (as you’ve done twice now, on occasions when the frustration became too much), but then he ducks back down, starts sucking at your clit properly, and and you sigh a yeah, like that.

When he finally lets you come, you’re whimpering for it, hands clutching at the sheets, words lost to the pleasure, sight almost too. You look down, afterwards, and he’s got his head resting on your thigh, watching you with a pride that doesn’t annoy you as much as it used to. Doesn’t annoy you at all, actually.

“Come here,” you say.

He crawls up obligingly for the kiss, moans his encouragements when you feel him through his trousers. He breaks away entirely when you unbutton them and guide him into you. So much, so soon after your last orgasm, you can feel yourself twitching like mad, squirming into him, away from him, but you hold yourself to it because you want to see. And when you look up, yeah, there it is: the slightest of hesitation, buried under ten layers of his cock thinking for him, enough that he moves far too slowly to be giving anything to himself. There it is. You were right.

You push him off, clumsy still but determined, push him till you’ve got him on his back, where you want him, and you can mount him again, biting down on a fuck at how much it all is, oversensitive yes but determined more than anything else. You roll against him once, give a shit-eating grin at his groan, and then start to ride him in earnest. “Come on,” you pant, when you’ve got your voice back enough to manage two syllables. You’re five strokes behind coming apart, but you’re holding on, you want to take him with you. “Fuck me,” and he looks up at you, trembling above him, with something like awe, and obeys.

When a wet washcloth has done its work and you’re side by side in the bed (another first) and the record player sings out some sweet contralto, he discovers that he likes to play with your hair, and you don’t see any point in stopping him.

“We could do this again,” he says.

“I was planning on it.”

“No, all of this. Breakfast, and the dog.”

“And scrubbing down floors at 3am?”

“I’ll try to keep the dead bodies out of it, love, but I can’t promise it’ll be all be sunshine if you stick around for more than three hours a week.”

Yeah, that’s fair. You should say no to the whole thing. But there’s worse things than a dog, some toast, an midday fuck. There’s worse things than sweet and savage, fingers sure on your thighs, on a trigger, on the handle of a broom. Where else are you gonna find a man that can play tenderness straight to a little boy, gentle and right, and then turn around and play tenderness twisted up to a threat too, rasping in a way that makes you wet? You would’ve been just fine with the cock alone, but there’s other things to consider, you see that now. You decide to let yourself consider them.

“I’ll think about it.”

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#God I'm such an asshole #Alfie x OC #Alfie x Reader #Peaky Blinders imagine #Peaky Blinders #Peaky Blinders fanfiction #Peaky Blinders fanfic #Alfie Solomons #alfiesolcmons #mine

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 314

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Click on the video above to watch Episode 314 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Welcome to Hump Day hangouts where I plug in my headphones to make them work. No start coughing man who’s going downhill quickly. Chris, take over.

Man Down. Google got them. Yeah. All right, I’m back. I just had to toss that real quick before. I totally lost it there and started blowing people’s eardrums out, man. All right, well welcome everybody to the bumpiest Hump Day hangout start in a while. This is Episode 314. Today is the 18th of November 2020. And this is the one to where Hernan screams at us to let him in. So hopefully he’ll be joining us. before too long. We do have some announcements to get into, before we start answering questions, and I am just pulling up the page looks like we have got a lot of questions today. So try to keep this short and get into a bar real quick and say hi to everybody. And then answer the questions after the announcement. So Marco, you’re wearing a different shirt man, you’re looking You’re looking good today, what’s what’s going on,

I have to break up my vintage shirts once in a while man, you got to keep them guessing gotta keep them guessing I’m in the tropics, I’m going to tropical moment. Here we are, you know, it’s still my Fortress of Solitude I am as I always say where I choose to be not where I have to be. And I do what I want to do not what I have to do. So it’s a really good place to be and wake up every morning understanding what where my portfolio is. And how I’m going to get to being able to break it down so that it’s a it’s also a process where the process guys, right. And we build processes and systems as opposed to the my mind as I start explaining. And as I start expanding, since the inception of the powerful idea, it’s now a process of getting to the point where you want to be whatever that is. I don’t let me define it for you. Like I’m gonna call CT Fletcher fucking possible. Don’t let somebody define your impossible. You decide what it is you’re going to do you break it down so that you can get there if it’s a huge job, okay, I want I want a billion dollars. I’ll give you an example. Well, the only way to make a billion dollars is $1 at a time, if you start out, I’m going to make a billion dollars that nobody in this world is going to pay you a billion dollars. Unless you come up with the ultimate, another Amazon, right? Another way to create that. Nobody’s going to give that to you. But you start building on it you make 100 bucks, you make 1000 you make 100,000 however it is that you’re going to get it. But if you start out with that goal of a billion it’s not a goal. It’s an idea. It’s a dream. It’s a wish it’s young. Maybe someday I could put a you’ll never do shit. Because it’s too big. But if you break it down and start working, and you do the do people don’t take that the right way. Don’t do Oh, that’s funny, and it rhymes and and Mountain Dew and all that crap, right? retro and all that shit. No. Fucking mindset. When you wake up every morning you do not hear here it is you do what you have to do. Because that’s what you want to do. you twist it. Okay, I have to do but I enjoy it. Because it’s part of what I want to do. Yeah, I got to do I have to get up in the morning. We all have to get up. But choose to stay in bed. I can say but I’ll have to get up. I got kids. You know how that goes, man. People. It’s a lot of it is common sense. But like, Gordon Ramsay said, I can’t teach that. That’s common sense. It’s one of his gifts, right? I can’t teach that. Common Sense. Guys, a lot of this is just common sense. You can’t make a billion until you make that first dollar. I’ll leave it at that.

Fair enough. Yeah. Don’t be an idiot sandwich. One step at a time. $1 at a time. Oh, man.

Well, Bradley, how you doing? Man?

We got you on video. So I guess the technical hurdles are over with.

Yeah, what a mess that is every week.

I like it adds a little bit of spice to the start. never know what’s gonna happen.

Yeah, I’m good. Happy. Happy to be here. I’ve been super busy this week. And I plan on being super busy for the next several weeks.

So fair enough. And I’ve been working with a small group right from the mat and not just the mastermind, but some people from hopefully live right doing some real estate stuff.

Yeah, in our mastermind. You know, we have little mini mastermind groups. They’re like accountability groups, and I’ve formed one. Just recently we just had our first meeting on Monday, where we just get together for now. Six or seven of us and talk about it’s for anybody that’s real, it’s marketing in or for real estate, whether for their own business or for client work, whatever doesn’t matter. And, yeah, it’s pretty good because, as we’ve talked about many times, you know, that’s how we got together and Semantic Mastery, my partners and I, from basically a weekly accountability group that we that I informed way back in, I think, 2012, or something like that. And that’s how we all came together. And so I know there’s always opportunity, things like that can happen in little in mastermind groups. And so there’s the value of joining a larger mastermind like what the semantic mastery mastermind is, but then it’s also benefits to get in the smaller mini masterminds because it’s a much more intimate setting where a lot of ideas can exchange and ideas can flourish. You know what I mean? And so that’s, I think, I think there’s, there’s always opportunity in those small mastermind groups like that, so I’m hoping that something will come of ours as well.

Nice. All right. Hernan didn’t want to join us, but I guess he decided to show up. So what’s up, man?

Good, man. I mean, it was cold outside. So thank you guys for letting me and I appreciate that. You know, it’s raining was boring. So it wasn’t the door like, open now. Yeah. Now it’s good, man. It’s good to be here. I’m really excited for what’s happening, you know, the future of Semantic Mastery. We have some good stuff cooking. So I’m really excited for for what’s coming up for Semantic Mastery for mgib. So stay tuned. We’re supposed to have a guest today. That’s gonna be next week as well. So that’s gonna be pretty awesome. And you know, I’m excited. Overall. Thank you guys for joining.

Yeah, Chris. How you doing, man? Doing good here.

You can put up my Christmas tree already here.

It’s awesome. I like it. That’s your scene that speaks to my heart. That’s the right size, the right amount of cleanup involved.

That’s, like, straight out of the box, man. Like perfect. No work.

Good deal. Yeah, adolescent that’s doing good development. So in full progress. So like exciting times are coming.

Nice. Let’s see. And I just want to share. So I posted I know Bradley saw it. We talked about video all the time, we talked about you know, using video onboarding, we have an entire course Bradley put together on that if you haven’t seen it, just go look up video Legion system. But I shared something because I had to log into bondora, which I used to send people after they contact me and they hit my calendar booking form. And it was just great to see that it’s just another confirmation. So this is before we’ve talked face to face. And over the last 90 days, I had an 89% open rate 100% watch the video and 42% replied, and I’m not even asking for a reply. I’m just saying if you have anything else you want to share with me. You know, it’s just such a great tool in any way, shape, or form. You can automate it using bondora. You can use loom you can use templates. But I think that I put it in the post there. But I interviewed the founder of Bon Jovi. And what he said was automate the process, not the relationship. And I love that because everything about this I do is automated except that one part and all I have to do is press button, I get to record a personalized video that I actually enjoy. I kind of have fun, I’ll like walk around the kitchen and stuff and like say hi to people. And then I press another button and I’m done. And then you know, build that trust, and it shows people your real person, you actually care enough to send them the video. And it doesn’t matter to them that it took 20 seconds. Right, it’s that you took the time to do it. So yeah, really cool tool. And, you know, like I said, if you don’t want to pay for it, just use loom, something like that. It’s just a real game changer for you, especially if you get in that habit of staying behind the computer screen. And you’re not, you know, showing your face you’re not used to talking to people face to face, make sure you know you’re putting yourself out there and kind of starting to build that trust. Yeah, man. All right. Also, real quick, I wanted to talk about it just because it’s near and dear to me, I’ve been looking into a lot more AI stuff as things move forward. And so with the mastermind members, the ones who are interested, I think we have 10 or 12 people signed up already, I’m going to be talking to them about some tools that are incorporating some AI or not. So we’ll be diving into that and sharing with them kind of what I’m seeing for things like content briefs for copy contemporaries for blog post, getting rough drafts, written automatically. And then things like PPC and copy headlines, being able to generate that stuff really quick. So we’re gonna be talking about that on Friday in the mastermind. And then like Bradley was talking about his group and with the real estate so we do all this smaller stuff within the larger mastermind. If you want to find out more about that you can head over to mastermind dot semantic mastery.com. And if you’re new to Semantic Mastery, first of all, thanks for being here today. If you’re wondering about some of the stuff we’re talking about the mastermind or you know you hear us talking about the SEO shield or syndication networks, head over to the SEOshield.com that’s the word de Seo shield.com. Grab that that’ll explain a lot of it. Beyond that if you want to have kind of a bigger approach and kind of a more Building Block lists for a bunch of different areas that you’d like to follow for step by step processes for SEO head over to battleplan.semanticmastery.com we’ve got our battle plan right there. I already talked about the mastermind, you’ll know if you’re ready to join that but if you’re ready to grow your digital marketing or physical business and you want to join an experience community at the mastermind.semanticmastery.com that’s where you want to go. And then mgyb.co, done for you services, we use them, you should use them and to story. So beyond that, guys, I know we got a lot of questions. Is there anything else we need to let people know about before we get into it? Not Alright, that’s it. Let’s do it. Oh, shoot.

I saw something that I’m going to cover for Justin Hess in just a minute.

Word Agents

Yeah, well, we’re gonna give something away today, I think. All right. First of all, let me get the grab screen. I was also looking at something else. Because you mentioned AI Adam. So I’ve got something to share that I just came across was just sent to me via email today. So let me grab the screen. You guys should be seeing my screen. Correct. Got it? Well, yeah, concerning AI. Alright, I’ve talked about this before, I’ve been using this company called wordagents.com recently for website content, like page content for local business stuff. And they’re, they do a really good job of writing content. You know, I’ve talked about this on Hump Day hangouts a lot recently. But I like to use long form content. Instead of creating complex silo structures, I like to use simple silo structure, and have long form content from my top of landing page, you know, my landing page, essentially on top of silo, but it covers a lot of what I would have used as supporting articles or sub categories in a complex silo structure, I just add that into long form content as as section headers. And in that way, I can keep the silo structure simple on the on the site, it’s much easier to manage, it tends to work really well. And so I’ve been using two different companies for that kind of content. One is called crowd content. The other one’s called Word agents, word agents is cheaper if you’re buying in bulk, right. And so that’s, that’s what I’ve been doing more recently is buying, you know, like 10,000 words at a time cost 800 bucks. So it’s eight cents per word. But if I was to buy those types of articles from like, crowd content and hire four star writers, which is, you know, the top of the line writers, it’s 12 cents per word, and there’s no discount for more words. So essentially, it’s a it’s a significant discount, what 25% discount, or 30% 33% discount if I go with word agents. So anyway, I just got this email today from them talking about SEO, content optimization add on. And what’s really cool is, you know, Adam was just mentioning AI. Well, I started using phrase.io, I don’t know a couple of months ago now, to optimize content. So existing content that I already have on sites, analyzing it with the phrase IO app, and then adding more to it, right. So rewarding things, squeezing additional keywords in that phrase.io is determined or deemed are relevant. You know, and it does it. It’s just, it’s a really cool tool. And phrase.io is one of several apps that have similar functionality like surfer Seo marketmuse, which have not seen or clear scope, but there’s more coming soon. And my point is that with word agency.com, this is not an affiliate link, guys, I’m just sharing it with you, because he Adam mentioned AI stuff. And they will actually now use the tools that they have available or that they’ll you know, that they say that they can optimize your content with as part of their writing process. So what’s really cool is I like in just the past couple of months, since I’ve started using phrase, I’ve purchased long form content from word agents. And then once I get it back, I haven’t even trained to VA to use phrase yet because I was learning it myself. So I would go in and actually spend, you know, an hour optimizing a piece of content that was sent to me or delivered from word agents. So what’s really cool is now instead of me having to do that, I can actually just now uses like, 50% credit. So for example, for a 2000 word article, you would have to use 3000 words of your word, you know, your word bank, so to speak, in order to to have them apply one of these apps to the content writing. But you know, hey, that’s, that’s a lot of time that it will save me from having to do it or even having to train a VA how to use the phrase app, that would take a lot of time. Right. So my point is, it’s just just going to make it a lot easier on me since I was already using Word agents for them for me to just spend a little bit more and have them optimize the content with the phrase.io app. And again, there’s more tools coming soon. So I wanted to point that out, guys at I’m quite happy with the the work that I’ve gotten from word agents. And I think I’m gonna like it even better now that I don’t have to go in and you know, finish optimizing it once I get the delivery from them, it’s really nice I might have to include that are all at least mentioned at Bradley on mine. Because I know with market muse, something they’re doing is offering. They’ve already done it with people where they you could like, tie it to your website to get the content recommendations, blah, blah, blah. But then they would create a brief for you instead of like waiting phrase where you have to go in and kind of manually do it. And so now they’re kind of using their own algorithms to do that based on your own writing. So you could basically order it and then have it that brief and then have the brief compiled for you and then have it written there. So really starting to solidify or streamline this process.

Very cool. All right. So now we can get into questions. And then there’s something that I might have to wait until Marco’s answering one of these questions for me to pause the screen and whip something up to give to Justin here in a minute. And the rest of you on the webinar today will will appreciate this as well. We’ve got new applets available that you guys can use to import into your free accounts. So I just have to put it in a clean format. But that’s it’s it’s it’s great because it’s going to make the the ability to use free IFTTT accounts for syndication networks, so much easier. So I’ll share that with you guys here in a few minutes if I can get it situated before at some point during this today’s webinar.

Is There Any Update On buffersites.com By Abbas Ravji?

So Alright, first question up is Joel. He says, Is there any update for the auto blog content CMS thing that was mentioned in a previous webinar? If not, is there an alternative? There’s no update just yet, because it’s still in beta. In fact, I even have that open in my browser in my browser right now. Because I was going through some of the training videos, and I’m trying to get set up and start testing with it with myself. I’ve got a project is perfect for it. But no, it’s still in beta. We we can’t really do anything now. Mark. Adam, didn’t we have a landing page somewhere that we could send people to to get on the waiting list for condis?

That’s a good question. Let me take a look. It’s just just been long enough. Now I can’t recall. But let me take a link you did. I think you whipped it up like during a hump day hangouts a few weeks ago. That makes

sense. Let me take a look.

Yeah. So that’s for the the syndicating like, it’s called condis. But it’s, it’s really awesome. You know, and again, it’s still in beta guys. So now it’s not available yet. And we’ll let you know as soon as it is. Plus, you can get on the waiting list when Adam drops the opt in page for that. Okay. It’s a Marco, you got any comments on that? Because I know you’ve started playing with it a little bit.

Yeah, I’ve got a couple of sites up looks pretty good. But it’s in beta. I can’t really say anything until Jeremy’s ready to go.

Where Can We Place The Buzzboost Embed Code Other Than The Gsite And ID Page?

Okay, cool. Also, when it comes to co citation feeds, where else can we embed the buzz boost embed code other than the G site and the ID page? Thanks. You guys are legends. Thanks, Joe. Um, I haven’t used it anywhere other than that. I mean, I’m any you know, you could you could, you could embed the buzzboost embed code using our embed gigs and mgyb, for example. You know that that would help because then you’re again, you’re you’re embedding your RSS co citation feed in relevant content on hundreds or thousands or 10s of thousands of sites. Right. So, you know, that’s something I’ve not even tried that I’ve not even tested that. But it’s really interesting, because not all of my idx pages have that built into them, where we build a, you know, a co citation, super feed with ranked feeder, which is Lisa Allen’s product. But on the sites that I do, it’s really interesting. I’ve got several lead gen assets that are strictly lead gen assets, they don’t really have a bigger brand associated with them or anything else and every one of those that I have that buzz boost, and I just noticed this this week, which is why this is a timely question. I’ve noticed that every one of those even ones that I haven’t touched, because they were really for like development purposes. Like I’d set up some GMBs for testing and things like that. They’re all ranking and generating leads and some of them aren’t even monetized like in other words, I don’t even have a lead buyer for some of them and I just was noticing that every one of them that I was looking at this week had that so I’m thinking about creating a process and then having one of my VA is go through and actually do that for all of my lead gen assets. Again, I don’t I can’t swear that that was why those other local locations are still ranking but some of these are like two years old never fucking touched them never done any work. Nope, no press releases, no nothing. And yet they’re still in the three pack, like two years later with no additional work being done other than, you know, the the idx pages continually updating from the buzzboost that’s in there. So anyways, I don’t know of anywhere else that you would embed that maybe Marco has some idea But using the embed gigs and mgib might be something worth testing

anyway, where you can answer the code, actually access the code, you got access to the code, you can insert an iframe, that’s literally anywhere where you can access the code and get a, an iframe. Again, you just said it, hired through mgyb.co, for an embed one plus link building, plus indexing, and you’re good to go. I mean, that’s literally all you need. Because you’re going to get iframes wherever you Wherever data can get an iframe. And you’re going to get links into it and do that indexing gig and it’s all relevant. And that dude, right now, iframes are magic. They’ve always been, they’ve always been really good. But for some reason, every time Google comes in hard, and then they start rolling back, the update, for some reason old school shit, like this kind of stays, and it powers up even more. It’s really interesting. So you guys got to, don’t worry so much about Google updates. But look at the result. After the update, look at the data and see what what’s actually working. You’ll see that old school shit is really getting power right now.

Yeah, it’s cyclical, right? I mean, it seems like there’s always certain fundamental strategies that work better sometimes than others. But then they come back and they come back stronger. So it’s kind of like cyclical. And I’ve noticed that over the, over the years as well, so

Do You Still Build Out Automated Sites For Your Money Site?

Okay, the next question says, saw a video on another SEO podcast where someone mentioned building out satellite sites for an e commerce site, according to network Empire. Do you guys still build out automated sites around the money site? If so, what are the benefits of the approach? Well, yes, and no, I mean, that the syndication network is they’re all automated sites, right? So I mean, think about that the syndication network, our automated sites, we publish content to the blog, the money site, and then it Reese, you know, repost or publishes out to all of our syndication network properties. So that’s kind of automated content. It’s all branded content from the original source, which would be our blog or a money site. So yes, in that respect, we do. Also, as we were just mentioning, earlier today, we were you know, we’re working on testing an app for creating like, essentially auto blog sites and networks of auto blog sites that we have extreme amount of control over. And they they, that’s what that new app that we’re beta testing right now. called contests. Again, Adam might be dropping a sign up or an opt in link for that, so that you can be on the notification list when it’s available. But yeah, so I mean, we’re testing with that, too. But outside of that, I, I know, you can still do it and still produce results. That way. There’s, you know, a number of people out there that teach that method. Again, besides the syndication network in the G site, I’m not really doing impressive advantage, because I’m, you know, publishing a ton of content through press advantage for each project. Outside of that, now, I’m not doing it, but will it still work? Yeah, that’s a method that can absolutely work. Marco, do you want to comment on that?

No, because I don’t use satellite, I use the G site, I power up the G site and drive stack, adding the extension. That’s what our MGYB.co extension gig is for, I like to power that up and transfer the power directly to the money site, RYS, I think that we get a whole lot more power. When we do it that way, then building out these, these satellite websites. Plus, if it’s if it’s a G site and drive stack, all bets are off, right? Because when, like, the way that the algorithm is applied, the way that penalties and everything else, if you’re on a TLD, it’s applied differently. We’ve seen it time and again, where Google simply won’t penalize itself. We’ve seen it all that’s why we’re in there. Whereas if you’re going to do this on a mini site and or building satellites, kind of like a an old school, private blog network private meaning that it’s yours, and a blog network, because you’re going to publish content to them and add a link to your website and meaning that you’re not going to go and then sell links to your PBN, cuz then it’s no longer private, then it’s public, right? So if you’re going to go through all that trouble, I’d rather just power up my G sites and drive stacks and if I need to build the G site and drive stacks satellite, that’s how I that’s how I do it. Now. You’re welcome to try it. Either way. I think my way works perfectly well.

There you go. Um, I’ve got the screen pause briefly while I try to format something but we can move on to the next one. And I’ll come back to standby one minute, guys.

Okay, I’ll come back to it. All right.

What Do You Recommend For Keeping The GMB Page Fresh If The Client Has Low Budget For Content?

So the next question is from Randy. He says, Howdy folks, when dealing with clients that have a low budget for content, what would you recommend for keeping the money site GMB fresh with updated content. Worried about panda if I import RSS feeds directly into blog posts, yeah, I would. I don’t like doing that either, because then you’re auto populating content on your money site with other people’s content. And I don’t like to do that. We talked about using curated content, Randy all the time, because that is a very inexpensive way to produce content, highly relevant content and also create co citation. using other people’s content, it’s very efficient, very inexpensive. Again, you can train vas, with our method, it’s called content kingpin, if you want to go check it out. That’s the same method that I’ve been using. And I trained, you know, bloggers to for all my content needs for my clients and GMB posts and everything else, using curated content. And again, content kingpin teaches that method, it was designed specifically to teach somebody how to do that. So for example, you could hire a VA in the Philippines. You can pay him three or $4 an hour or whatever you want to pay on a per post basis, which is what I prefer to do. That’s very inexpensive, because they can very quickly create relevant content by curating other people’s content. And that’s different than just because again, you’re still, you’re still pulling in other people’s content that you’re going to cite the source. So you need to link back to the source of the content that’s been curated. So for, let’s say, use three different pieces of content in a curated post, right. So that would be like, you might cite two different articles, and a YouTube video or a slide deck or an audio file, you know, or something like that, or just three different pieces of you know, Article content. And then any, for each one of the snippets that you curate into that post, you would link back to the original source, right, because you want to give credit, you want to give attribution or cite the original source, which is fine, because I typically nofollow those links anyways. But it’s that way, you have control over what is being posted on this on your money site, as well as you create unique content, even if it’s curated snippets of other people’s already published content, because you inject commentary, and at the top right, there’s an opening paragraph, then there’s usually a little bit of content commentary added between each piece of curated content. And then there’s a conclusion paragraph, which could just be a couple of sentences. And typically, that’s where a call to action would go anyways. So it’s very efficient and quick way to develop highly relevant content, create co citation because you’re outbound linking to relevant content. And a very, very quick way to do it. That said, outside of doing curated content for for money site posts, which can then be repurposed as GMB posts, right. So again, you’re getting a whole lot of traction from one piece of content. The other way that you could do it is like if you don’t have a really big budget, or your client doesn’t have a big budget for content even enough, which you should for curated content, because it’s very inexpensive, if it’s done correctly. But the other thing would be just to focus on the GMB posts, right, make sure that you have on page on the on the website that the money site done well. And then you could focus on just doing GMB posts because those are very inexpensive as well. They’re much shorter form type content, right is 1500 characters max and the GMB posts. So again, I would recommend that you you try to work out curated content for the money site, which can then be repurposed the GMB post as well, it’s going to populate your syndication network all of that. But if you don’t even have a budget for that, first of all, get higher playing paying clients. But second of all, you can always focus in on GMB posts. If it’s for local stuff and get some significant traction that way, and that’s rather inexpensive as well marketing want to come on in that.

I’m going to second get get better paying clients who can handle the content budget also want to get such fantastic results for your clients that you can charge them more so that you can show that you can start producing better content, so that you can then charge them more make that attended then on you, I am going to get your results when I give me not give them the pitch that I give, I’m gonna it’s going to take me about 90 days to get your results, you’re going to see the results At the end of those 90 days, 90 days, we’re going to discuss what the new budget will be what it’s going to cost to keep me producing these results. And nine out of 10 it’s going to work. Nine out of 10 the guy’s got a shirt 90 days. And after those 90 days when they see the results that you can get for them, you better be able to get results, a nine out of 10 they’re going to they’re going to close and they’re going to say yes, please, let’s go on the monthly, how much is it and then are going to blink when you hit him. I hit him hard man. I hit him hard. But then the results that I’m giving them justifies them saying yes, that’s the whole point when you make it attendant on you, rather than on what the client is giving you, then you can pretty much start setting your own prices. That’s how you get better clients because like people know each other Jordan is really good about this, the doctors that he works with, they know one another. And they talk to one another. And since they’re in different geographical areas, like, they’re all talking, I got this guy. And then when you get that good, the word of mouth runs along. And now, if you’re niching, down, like Bradley recommends, or if you don’t, like I do, because if you got enough money to pay me to get your results, I’m going to figure out how to get get your results. The niche is irrelevant, because again, I’m going to call Jordan, I know Google AdSense, I know Google, I know how I’m going to get this person results, regardless of where we’re going. So there’s many different ways that you can do this focusing on this is the number one thing on the results that you can get so that you can then charge more, because now you’re you understand what it is that you’re worth. And then you’re not going to take these low budget people who don’t even have money for it. How is it? We’re iftt, we’re syndication. And we’re into strengthening your tier one branded through all of it, how in the world that you’re going to be able to do this, if you don’t have a content budget, or if it’s miniscule, so that maybe you blog once a month. Or you know, maybe you do a post every other week, which is not going to do anything for you.

Right on. All right, next question. See if I can find it. Damn, we got a lot of questions today. I’ve scrolled too far. That’s why. How do I get back to where we were?

We’re at the tag silo structure. There we go. Question. There we go.

Do You Index Or DeIndex Tag/Category Landing Page When Using A Tag Silo Structure?

Okay, Kook. Okay, when using a tag silo structure? Do you index or deindex the tag or category landing pages? Or do you worry about those tag or category landing pages ranking for your target keywords? All? It depends. I mean, it really is. It’s going to depend it um, you know, there’s a lot of things that you can do. First of all, with a with a typical silo structure for like local business type stuff, especially, I usually redirect the category URLs to the top level landing page. So remember, when you creating a silo, right, you create cat, your landing pages, and then you create corresponding categories for your landing pages. Four simple silo structure, that’s it, right? You’ve got top level categories, and then you’ve got your pages, and then everything else is going to be posts, right? Because posts are how you add depth to a simple silo structure. If you were doing complex silo structure, then you would have categories top level categories, and then subcategories, and they would have corresponding pages and child pages. That make sense. And then posts would go, you know, in but again, I always try to use simple silo structure at almost all, you know, almost always now. So when so for category URLs, the category itself, I like to redirect the category URL to the top level landing page, its corresponding landing page. Does that make sense? And that’s only because typically, you know, for like local business services and stuff, people aren’t going to be looking for posts in a particular category, because they’re not there to consume content. They’re there to contact the local business to provide them a product or service. Right. So again, it’s not like a content based website, we use content to help it to rank, but people aren’t usually on a local business website to read through, you know, articles in a particular category. So that’s why I don’t care about having a category index page, like a blogroll page for that category. It’s not necessary, right? So why not allow that taxonomy structure in WordPress to kind of flow the page rank up to that top level landing page by redirecting that category URL to the landing page. So that covers categories, when it comes to tags, it depends, once again, on what it is that you’re doing. I usually leave them to index the tag pages to index. But you can also think about this and I can’t get too deep into this guy’s again, this is a free forums where we talk about in like heavy hitter club or the mastermind, but you can canonicalize tag pages, I usually leave an end index anyways. But then you can canonicalize tag pages to their corresponding, you know, landing pages if you have them. Or what I like to do is again, my, what I do is create the land, you know, the silo landing pages and top level categories. That’s all topically. The categories are topic, topic based, right? And then I do tag silos for location silos or geographic silos. And so what I do is I have my my VA who does my blogger, she she writes blog posts that are optimized for a particular keyword plus a city. Right and so that blog post becomes a landing page itself. And then what we do is we canonicalize the tag the corresponding tag to that particular page, so that we have essentially two link building targets, right, we have the tag page. And then we have the the landing page, which in this case would be a blog post, both of those could become link building targets. But what I like about using tags specifically is because of the stuff that we can do on the G sites, right, we talked about theme mirroring, and all that kind of stuff all the time. And with the GS with tag pages, you can do some really cool things by embedding the tag page into g sites, you know, create a page on the G site optimize for the term that you’re you’re trying to rank for, and then you embed a tag page into there. And that becomes a link building target as well, that can funnel or pass juice to all of the posts that have that that are that share that tag. That makes sense. So it really depends. I mean, again, it really depends on what it is that you’re doing. I can’t give you a solid answer, because it’s going to depend on the project. I typically will leave my tag pages to index but then I use canonical is very strategically. Does that make sense? Anybody want to comment on that?

on the web, right? It’s it’s always, depending on what it is that you’re trying to accomplish. Yeah, this is this isn’t an easy question to answer, because this does variables on how you’re using your tags and you categories.

I agree. Yeah, I totally agree with that. So it is it’s one of those kind of like standard SEO answers, which is it depends, you know, because it really depends on what it is that you’re trying to do. There’s just so many things that you can do when you’re using like a dual silo structure on a site. What I mean by that is using the traditional silo with categories. And then there’s the tag silo, which I use specifically for location based silos now. So I consider that like to two types of silos on the site, right? You have topical silos, which are the traditional silo structure. Then I use tag silos, which are for location silos essentially. But it’s really cool because you can do a lot of cool things with it. It’s a good question, though.

IFTTT Pro Concern

Justin says, Hey, guys, hoping you have been able to hear back from someone at IFTTT about the wonkiness has been going on since the pro upgrade my pro accounts are not showing any of the applets I create so I can’t share them to my other pro accounts. And today, I noticed the various accounts of yours. And some others I was using applets from have changed to this user hasn’t created applets too, so I don’t know what to do anymore. Okay, as we as we’ve you know, answered this question a bunch of times, Justin, even with a free account, and you can you can enable applets you just have to find them, right? But so you go to the Explore tab you can search you know, like the the standard applet titles or names that we’ve used over the years, you can locate there’s a handful of them that I know to be ours, you can tell by the applet creator the username essentially, Stephen R. Reynolds is one of them Vernon e DUNS and other one I’ve got a bunch of how to SEO as another one, there’s a bunch of them that we’ve created over the years that are in the kind of library applet library under the Explore tab that you can locate and turn them on, if you have IFTTT accounts where you had created the applets. But you let it go. You know, as you never subscribed, you never subscribed as a pro subscriber. Let’s say you had 15, applets and an account and you allowed it to go to the free plan beyond the date where you could subscribe as a pro account, then it automatically turns off or archives all but three applets. Right. So but if you just used somebody else’s applet and turned it on, then it will allow you to turn them all on. Does that make sense? But it will, it will only allow you to keep three that you’ve created in an account. So what I’m saying is if you had an account that you set up, and it’s now on the free tier instead of a pro tier and you had created all 15 applets in this example, then it will only allow you to keep three of them on the other 12 are going to be archived, then it won’t allow you to turn them on you can go to the Explore tab and find the other applets that somebody else created that were in the library of applets and then turn them back on enable them and then swap out obviously, you know add your own RSS feed or whatever. However, I’m gonna share this with you guys now and I think it’s still on my clipboard. Well I already posted it to at you Justin, but I’m just going to post it here as well. I, we have a pro account and by the way just to share this with you guys on how to create applets in a pro account so that you can share them between other accounts you do that. If you go in IFTTT, you click your profile icon in the top right corner, you’ll see a drop down says platform or there’s an item in the drop down called platform. Click through to that, then you have to set your user account up as a service. So and I can’t I’m not going to show you guys how to do all that I had to learn it myself in the last two weeks. But there’s help files and everything else but you got it. You’ve got your username for that IFTTT The T account, it has to be a pro account. But if you have a pro account, you can create your username as a service or add it as a service. And then from there, you create applets. These are the applets right here that I’ve created with the pro account. You guys have access to this now it’s in the comments. But for example, if I were I don’t know if I can click through, probably logged into one of my accounts, but let’s just see. Yeah, I am. So if you can see, these are now saying by Semantic Mastery, and this is a blog RSS repost to blogger. And look, even if I’m not logged in, if I go over here to refresh Firefox installation, I can now see these applets. Whereas before you couldn’t write.

there was no way to share applets anymore. But now because I’ve created all of these applets, under our pro account, you have to do it in platform.ifttt.com. And you have to again, you have to set your pro account up as a service, and then you can start creating applets. And that’s what I’ve done here. And so these applets are now the new updated applets that will allow you guys to import them directly from this sheet into your account, all you got to do is copy the URL paste and go in your address bar when you’re logged into your account. And now you can enable these applets and these have all been coded up to today’s standards. And by the way, attribution has been coded into the blog syndication applets now, so that you don’t need to have a attribution inserter plugin in your RSS feed. So in other words, for those of you don’t want to talk about to, you know, we used to just use the code inserter from Yoast, or from our own RSS plugin that we developed to create that attribution link, like this post was first published on you know, whatever, that would automatically insert that like line of that attribution link at the bottom of every post in the RSS feed. But because Yoast is such a piece of shit, and we’re not in the plugin game or the plugin development business, and so it’s it’s we don’t even really want to continue supporting the one that we created. I just recreated all the applets with attribution already built in. So you don’t need that you don’t need that anymore. By the way, I also found out that all in one SEO pack plugin does also have an attribution module built into it. And I think Jeffrey Smith and the IRS has an RSS module built into it as well. That’s the SEO ultimate Pro, which is what we recommend for SEO plugin. But what I’m saying is you don’t need any of that anymore, because they’re built directly into here. Okay, now, some of these may change or be edited slightly, because I haven’t completed testing all of the YouTube applets yet, these have all been tested. So these may change but the URL is not going to change. So even if I update the athletes guys, they’re not going to change, the URL should not change. Okay. So we’re in the process of updating a syndication Academy, we’re going to be relaunching that as version three updated for 2021, essentially, because we probably won’t watch it before beginning of next year. But just know that we have got a lot of stuff cooking for the new syndication Academy guys, and right here are the applets that I just created within the last week and a half or so. Okay, and again, you guys have access to this now. The URL is semanticmastery.com/new-IFTTT, that will take you to this page here. Do not ask to edit this page, go to File, and then go to make a copy and copy that into your Drive account. And then or download it as a CSV or whatever you want. But if you ask to edit this, I’m going to deny it. Okay. So don’t don’t ask. Anybody want to comment on that?

Oh, perfect. Beautiful.

Should You Use An SEO Shield Or A Syndication Network For A Client With Several Web Properties?

Okay, ideas. 111 says I purchased your SEO Power Shield and have some questions as to the best structure my client has several web properties that would be best if they would be branded as one entity using her name. The business recently changed structure with the new business name being her name. So this works well. Several of these sites are old and need to be replaced with better siloed sites. Is it effective to build the SEO power shield and include these old properties siloing the information in the shield and then add information from the new site as it is completed?

Uh, I don’t know, this is a almost needed diagram for this. I’m trying to visualize what you’re telling me in your head but or I’m trying to visualize in my head what you’re telling me and I’m having difficulty. Also, I need to promote one of their new sites immediately as they are opening several other locations just for IV therapy and nutrition. Would this get a separate SEO shield? Or just a separate syndication network? Thank you, Marco. This seems like a bit of a complicated question. And without all the details, I don’t know if I could give a proper answer or were you able to interpret. It’s not something that I’m that would be answered here. This is requiring just a lot of what I would consider a consultation time. It’s not something that we do on Hump Day. We don’t answer anything this intricate, because this requires this a whole lot of different things. And then we have to go look at it and see what which one would be the best way to answer it. Right? Yeah. How would we approach this? Okay. It’s not something that I can answer cold.

Yeah, yeah, it’s difficult. I mean, just from rereading it while you were talking, I mean, if just on a very high level, if there’s multiple websites that should be brought under one brand, then I would almost say why not create one website under that, you know, parent or master brand, and then set up silos on that website. And then, you know, basically, import the content from the existing individual sites into the new site, and then do redirects from the old sites that, to me, it makes a mess, if you’ve got a bunch of different websites out there that were separate websites, but now you want to bring them all under one entity, if they’re related. And it makes sense, then absolutely, you can. But what I would suggest is housing them all under one domain, right, and you could, you could just you repurpose the old content, just so you set up proper silo structure on the new branded domain, even if it’s her name, or whatever, it doesn’t matter. And then you would set up silos, which would have been each of the individual sites, you bring that content, and it can be literally copy paste to bring that content in. And then you would set up redirects from the old domains, to the new sex, you know, the corresponding pages on the site, that kind of stuff so that you’re pushing all of that relevancy to that one domain, that one entity. But then there’s a lot of schema stuff that could be done there that would really need to be done to combine all that into one entity. Also, the the SEO or excuse me, the SEO shield, that could all be mirrored once that original website, the main entity, main branded entity website would be built out correctly and formatted correctly, like all of that could be duplicated or mirrored in the SEO show. But again, without knowing like all the different pieces and stuff, like does it make sense to mix them all under one entity or not? And only you can answer that? So I agree with Marco, that this is one of those questions that more context is needed, and probably going to need more, you know, more consultation from somebody. So that would be like a great question for the semantic mastery mastermind. And I don’t know if you guys and how heavy hitter are doing like audits and stuff, but that would be a really good question for the mastermind. So sorry, I couldn’t give you a better answer for that.

Now, this is some I mean, we’ve done it we did it for for Pete Hogg. And in my ask Marco, anything, webinars. I’ll even I’ll even go into that. Right, but but not here, because this requires me actually going and looking at everything. And seeing how I would put it together for the questions that he’s asking. Is that something that you can just fly off off the cuff on and say, yeah, yeah, I do this and this and this? Yeah. Because if I change like that, like the main change, and so now, what do we do? What do we do with the old property? I have to look at them? How much value is there in there? And how much change? There’s just so much? I can’t answer it.

Yeah, I agree. That’s, it’s, it’s a complicated question with very little information, which I know it’d be hard to. Honestly, if you posted a great big wall of text trying to explain all this stuff. We wouldn’t even cover it anyways. So again, that’s more of one of our paid groups. We try I tried I tried to give you some somewhat of an answer, but I know that probably didn’t suffice and for that, I’m sorry.

What MGYB SEO Products Do You Recommend For An eCommerce Site And Events Planning Site?

Next question. Hello, guys. I got my battle plan two weeks ago and close to new clients here in the UK to build an e commerce website for each of them with monthly SEO look at that guy’s got his battle plan two weeks ago and close to clients in two weeks. That’s strong. So congratulations. So I plan to purchase your keyword research is the first step for each Can you tell me what are the other products I need to purchase from your arsenal services and in what order? Am I to purchase them? One of the ecom websites is in the fashion that specifically children’s custom clothing and the other is in selling hair products, mostly targeting women’s hair. Both are located here in London, England. Yeah, well, if you’ve got the SEO battle plan, that’s like, you know, basically the roadmap. The other the other thing I would say is, as Adam mentioned at the beginning of today’s Hump Day hangout is go to the SEO shield.com. That’s the seoshield.com. and sign up for that free training. And that will take you through the SEO shield training. I think it’s on a four day schedule. So you get another lesson every day. That kind of walks you through the different components of the SEO shield. And that that’s really what we would suggest is get the keyword research first and once you have that, then go order an SEO power shield for each client. right because that includes all the have our you know, our proprietary methods, our building blocks our foundation of, you know, the foundational stuff that we do which is the syndication network, the RYS Drive stack plus g site, the idx page, and press it manage organization page, all of that combined. So it’s it’s basically that’s why we we’ve recreated the SEO show to begin with was because instead of ordering individual components, you get it all in one bundle, it’s a little bit less expensive, and it’s also less work on your end to place the orders in separate pieces or, you know, at separate times. So in plus we get it a little bit faster that way too. You get it delivered a little bit faster. So again, go through the battle plan, if you haven’t already sounds like you have go to SEO.com opt in for that, it’s free, you’ll go through that training. And then what I would suggest is after the keyword research has been delivered, then you order the SEO, power shield for each client comments on that SEO power shield and link building, get that initial link building for the brand, solidify the brand, then you start looking at what your targets are, you need the data, that’s what the initial run is for.

That’s right. That’s right. Not only that, but when you order the SEO power shield, on the thank you page, there’s an opportunity to get link building for that power shield at a discounted rate. It’s like the Oto for link building. So that’s a really good opportunity to purchase the links for that too. So once it’s built, it’ll immediately go to link building team to have links built to it. So that helps to solidify all of that as Marco said. Okay, so I have another client from the British Virgin Islands who I closed yesterday to build an events planning site for her in the British Virgin Islands, there is not much competition in that niche. So I would need to purchase all of your service, there is not much competition that niche so what I need to purchase all of your services, and if not, what would you recommend? Well, I don’t recommend ever doing anything less than the SEO power shield for for a project period. Like, in my opinion, that’s the bare minimum, it covers all of our, if it’s not very competitive, when you order an S, once you have an SEO power shield in place, that means that it will probably require very little off page work in order to get it you know, like off page, essentially link building and embed gigs, that type of stuff for you to be able to get results. I can’t say it won’t take you any because I don’t know. But it will probably take very little. So but again, I wouldn’t recommend shortcutting again, as I mentioned before, guys, that’s like our foundational stuff the SEO showed is the foundation of everything that we do, it used to just be syndication networks, but over the years it’s grown into all of what we can all of the components that our makeup the SEO power shield. So I would recommend that being like your, your floor right your basement like that’s that you build that first and then from there, you only do the off page as needed or content marketing and off page SEO as needed. Once you get your desired results, you can kind of slow it down a little bit. So that’s what I would recommend. Anybody else?

Moving on.

What Do You Recommend To Get The SMS PIN Verification In Creating Gmail Accounts?

Robert says thank you SM team and best part of Wednesday’s Hump Day Hangouts. Thank you. I’m limited on creating additional Gmail accounts and their verification process what options are safe to get the SMS pin verification completed? I don’t know because I don’t go through that process anymore. Um, I have somebody that I buy accounts from now when I need them. I don’t know if he’s got a landing page or not. But I pause for a minute if you guys have any ideas because I don’t create my own accounts anymore at all. Does anybody do that here?

Negative.

All right, standby. I’m gonna pause the screen just for a moment while I look up the email I don’t think he’s got a landing page for this but you can email this gentleman and tell him standby I’m looking just to see I might have an email. No, I have an email but I’m sorry. I was looking for a landing page.

Alright, um, his name is miles Chad. I’m grabbing the email now and I’m going on pause the screen just a moment guys. Okay, so I’m going to add Robert contact miles, Chad for purchasing accounts. And he does like a bunch of web 2.0 stuff, Twitter accounts, Gmail accounts. He does aged accounts, new accounts, phone verified stuff. He gives you the phone number for verify that he verified them with these accounts are really good accounts. Guys. I’ve used account providers over the years and this guy’s miles Chad. He’s really really good about replying via email, like communications really good. He’s prompt. The accounts are good. I’ve never had any problems with the accounts. He’ll replace them. If there is a problem like I don’t I don’t you have to ask him about what the time limit is that He will replace them. But I know like if I get a new fresh batch of accounts from him, and during the process of, you know, binding them to my IP or to, you know, a proxy or whatever it is that I’m doing, if I have any trouble, and I get locked out of the account, he’ll replace them. I’m not talking about months down the road, but when I first get them he does. So again, contact him, tell him I sent you. I just actually purchased some Twitter accounts. I don’t use Twitter much, but I purchased some Twitter accounts from him a few weeks ago, like literally about three weeks ago. So I know he’s still selling accounts. I would I would contact him tell him I referred you. Okay. Let’s see Chris, move the camera down unless you’re naked. Yeah, Chris does that pantsless he’s not here to defend themselves by

What Do You Mean By The Importance Of Press Release With Keyword Anchor Text To Improve Website Entity?

pavlo Hey, guys, question press release with keyword anchor text will be helpful to improve website entity. I’m confused regarding this topic. That’s why I decided to ask you without guessing. Thanks a lot. I don’t you can use I mean, look that okay, the short answer. And that’s the only I’m only going to be able to give you the short answer. No, don’t use keyword anchor text. You can use branded anchor text to link back to your website through a press release. That that’s okay. I prefer naked URLs or brand anchors when linking directly back to the money site. Does that make sense? I try not, unless I’ve got like a particular page on my site that has a really robust link profile. And I can afford or I can, you know, use keyword anchors at that point, then that’s okay. But only if you know what you’re doing. I don’t recommend it. If you don’t know what you’re doing just use naked URLs or brand anchors, if you’re going to link directly to your money site from a press release. So yeah, that’s that’s the simple short answer. Anybody else want to comment on that?

Yeah, because, I mean, Jeremy has been so good about giving us access, or allowing us to power up our entity. And we already do a really good job of that, yes, it will improve. If you’re going entity for entity, I mean your main entity and and you really need to know it, you really need to know what you’re doing. If you’re doing this, you really need to know and it’s not something that you can just go Okay, let me take a text anchor, and and send it you know, however many links that is, because then I mean, you can get into a whole lot of trouble with all of those links coming to your to your website, right? through one like a one word, one, one keyword anchor text. That’s trouble, man, that’s if you don’t have everything set up, right? To receive that anchor text link, you’re in trouble. So rather than that, the schema, the iframe, everything that you can do on that press release will help you overall, especially with that ad ID page and adding the press advantage media page, it just everything that we do with that Id agreed.

How To Set Google Folders Public To The Web And Be Indexable?

Okay, so, uh, I think we’re probably only get two to the last two year old off and then bb. And then I think we got to wrap it up, guys, because we’re almost at the five o'clock hour. So Olaf says hello there. How can I make Google folders public to the web and indexable, we can’t share that here. You can still do it, there’s absolutely and in fact, Syndication Academy update, when that comes out, which again, will probably be in the early first part of next year. So 2021, there will likely be something available there that will show you how to do it or give you a resource that will give will make a folder like give you the ability to make folders public. And also we may be able to provide that and MGYB very, very soon, like in a couple of weeks, maybe we’re gonna have a meeting about it next week. So there’s a very good chance that we can provide that as a service inside of MGYB. can’t share it with you here because that was a something that we shared Marcus shared in the paid setting. So it wouldn’t be right for me to share that here.

But yes, we’ve been using that we’ve been using that method and MGYB. And then that’s something that I’m that I’m going to give away, right? Because when Google took that away, I had to go and spend time on that, to figure out how to do it. So did Rob. I mean, we immediately got on that and figured out how to make them public. Again, it plus, we had already been doing it in the drive section and G sites. I mean, we can still do it to this day, the best way to make one public is to go and get a drive second g site from MGYB. We’ll do it for you save all that time and effort.

Yeah, and like I said, you can absolutely still do it. There’s no question. And that’s probably going to be something that we have as a service inside of MGYB to make files and or folders public. But we’re going to we’re going to talk about that next week. So we come back with that question. Again. I’m sorry, I couldn’t share with the method here guys. But there are some things that just have to be behind closed doors. This is a free public forum. So it’s certain things we can’t share. And hopefully you understand that. You can come join one of our paid groups though and find out All off.

How To Show An Image Schema In Mobile SERPs?

So Bibi says, Hey guys, I thought it was Thursday today Time flies. Yes, it does. For the questions, I have a post. Okay, I’m going to share I read this previously. So I’m kind of prepared for this. We’ll try to get through this rather quickly. But he says I have a post that has graph schema with and he talks about the different types generated by the Yoast plugin. So the first thing I’m going to tell you to do is throw that fucking plugin out. Like, Yoast is a piece of shit, don’t use the Yoast plugin. For schema stuff, like I said, use SEO ultimate Pro, it’s a paid plugin, but it’s totally worth it. It has all the different schema types built into it, it’s got schema builders directly in the plugin. So like on the post or page editors inside of WordPress in the SEO ultimate Pro Plugin widget underneath where the text editor is there, you can literally develop any type of schema you want there. And what’s great about it is not only can you develop the schema specific to that page or post, but you can always go back and edit or append the schema using the SEO ultimate pro plugin, and it will automatically format it correctly. Because if you try to use two different schema types on a page or a post, and you don’t have them connected properly, called connected schema or connected data or nested schema is another term for it, then it can ambiguous ate the main entity of the page because you’ve got two separate schemas on the page, you have to have it connected properly. And so again, like the SEO ultimate pro plugin will do that for you automatically. If you’re using the schema creator and editor that’s on the page or post level. Does that make sense? So it will automatically append additional schema for like marking up different items like video object, image object, whatever reviews schema, FAQ schema, all of that. So highly recommend that the Yoast plugin add so much bloat so much shitty code, I just highly recommend that you stop using that crappy plugin. Okay, Marco will will verify that as well. Also, if you want to create schema without purchasing a plug in, I would recommend a free version is technical SEO calm. It’s the go to technical SEO. com Click on Tools and find the schema markup generator. And here you can find all different types of schema that you can mark up. This is what I was using before I started using the schema creator and Jeffrey’s plugin or the SEO ultimate pro plugin. And lastly, another option would be but it comes with a monthly subscription fee. But I am using this myself, I like it because you can get some really significant, like really complex connected data item type schema with schema app.com. This has an it has a little bit of a learning curve with this and it has a monthly expense. But if you’re going to be doing a lot of structured data stuff, I recommend using this I know my partners might not use it. But I like this because it automates a lot of stuff for me. I don’t have the patience that some of my like Rob does to do all this shit in spreadsheets, so I use schema. So those are the three things I would suggest this for individual, like items that you want to mark up this if you want to do significant like connected data items, which is really what you should be doing now anyways, or the SEO ultimate pro plugin, which doesn’t have a monthly expense and that’s a again, it’s a great plugin. It’s way better than Yoast. Mark, do you want to comment on that?

No, we’ve run over time. Yeah.

Okay, so no comments. Alright guys, thanks for being

Source: Semantic Mastery Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 314 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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localwebmgmt · 4 years ago

Text

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 314

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 314 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Welcome to Hump Day hangouts where I plug in my headphones to make them work. No start coughing man who’s going downhill quickly. Chris, take over.

Fair enough. Yeah. Don’t be an idiot sandwich. One step at a time. $1 at a time. Oh, man.

Well, Bradley, how you doing? Man?

We got you on video. So I guess the technical hurdles are over with.

Yeah, what a mess that is every week.

I like it adds a little bit of spice to the start. never know what’s gonna happen.

Yeah, I’m good. Happy. Happy to be here. I’ve been super busy this week. And I plan on being super busy for the next several weeks.

So fair enough. And I’ve been working with a small group right from the mat and not just the mastermind, but some people from hopefully live right doing some real estate stuff.

Nice. All right. Hernan didn’t want to join us, but I guess he decided to show up. So what’s up, man?

Yeah, Chris. How you doing, man? Doing good here.

You can put up my Christmas tree already here.

It’s awesome. I like it. That’s your scene that speaks to my heart. That’s the right size, the right amount of cleanup involved.

That’s, like, straight out of the box, man. Like perfect. No work.

Good deal. Yeah, adolescent that’s doing good development. So in full progress. So like exciting times are coming.

I saw something that I’m going to cover for Justin Hess in just a minute.

Word Agents

Is There Any Update On buffersites.com By Abbas Ravji?

sense. Let me take a look.

Yeah, I’ve got a couple of sites up looks pretty good. But it’s in beta. I can’t really say anything until Jeremy’s ready to go.

Where Can We Place The Buzzboost Embed Code Other Than The Gsite And ID Page?

Do You Still Build Out Automated Sites For Your Money Site?

There you go. Um, I’ve got the screen pause briefly while I try to format something but we can move on to the next one. And I’ll come back to standby one minute, guys.

Okay, I’ll come back to it. All right.

What Do You Recommend For Keeping The GMB Page Fresh If The Client Has Low Budget For Content?

Right on. All right, next question. See if I can find it. Damn, we got a lot of questions today. I’ve scrolled too far. That’s why. How do I get back to where we were?

We’re at the tag silo structure. There we go. Question. There we go.

Do You Index Or DeIndex Tag/Category Landing Page When Using A Tag Silo Structure?

I agree. Yeah, I totally agree with that. So it is it’s one of those kind of like standard SEO answers, which is it depends, you know, because it really depends on what it is that you’re trying to do. There’s just so many things that you can do when you’re using like a dual silo structure on a site. What I mean by that is using the traditional silo with categories. And then there��s the tag silo, which I use specifically for location based silos now. So I consider that like to two types of silos on the site, right? You have topical silos, which are the traditional silo structure. Then I use tag silos, which are for location silos essentially. But it’s really cool because you can do a lot of cool things with it. It’s a good question, though.

IFTTT Pro Concern

Oh, perfect. Beautiful.

Should You Use An SEO Shield Or A Syndication Network For A Client With Several Web Properties?

What MGYB SEO Products Do You Recommend For An eCommerce Site And Events Planning Site?

Moving on.

What Do You Recommend To Get The SMS PIN Verification In Creating Gmail Accounts?

Negative.

What Do You Mean By The Importance Of Press Release With Keyword Anchor Text To Improve Website Entity?

How To Set Google Folders Public To The Web And Be Indexable?

How To Show An Image Schema In Mobile SERPs?

No, we’ve run over time. Yeah.

Okay, so no comments. Alright guys, thanks for being

Source: Semantic Mastery Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 314 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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savetopnow · 7 years ago

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2018-03-11 10 MUSIC now

MUSIC

Brooklyn Vegan

Soul Glo pulled over on tour, member in custody, raising money for bail

33 artists we're excited to see at SXSW 2018

What's going on Saturday?

tours announced: Soccer Mommy, Ravyn Lenae, Wet, The Slackers, more

Neil Innes (Bonzo Dog Band, Rutles) at Beatles 'The Fest,' playing NYC-area shows

Consquence of Sound

Pearl Jam unleash surprise new single “Can’t Deny Me”: Stream

SXSW Film Review: Eighth Grade Empathizes With the Confused Priorities of Middle School

The Big Lebowski Perfected the Art of the Stoner Noir

SXSW Film Review: Unfriended 2: Dark Web Proves the Internet is Omniscient with a Bleak Punch to the Gut

SXSW Film Review: A Quiet Place is Scary and Resonant, Even If It Betrays Its Own Premise

Fact Magazine

Ableton Live 10’s most useful hidden feature is its themed sound packs

Watch a short film exploring Shibuya’s dance music history

Regis releases Play Neutral mixtape on Hospital Productions

Trippie Redd – Confessions

Grouper announces new album Grid Of Points

Fluxblog

Hopes Or Holidays

An Emotional Sexual Bender

Straight To Your Face

The Last Year Has Been Kinda Rough

Radion Beams Casting Vibrant Views

Idolator

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ratherhavetheblues · 8 years ago

Text

DAMIEN CHAZELLE’S WHIPLASH “You’ve got plenty of options…”

The young but extremely formidable filmmaker, Damien Chazelle, merits, I believe, special attention for his bringing to the fore in virtuoso style the question of art production in contemporary life. He does so, not from the perspective of pedantic ideology, but from the carnal immediacy of figures pursuing objectives intuitively shallow and vile. The weight of history, appearing to condone and promote such virulent heroics, comes to bear in such a way that it is our protagonists’ injuries which hold us in thrall and, as such, link to an extensive cinematic endeavor (now central to these studies) of a lone wolf in mortal combat with a large pack.

Impressively enriching this imbroglio of tradition, in our film today, is the factor that both jazz-drum student, Andrew Neiman, and jazz-band teacher, Terrence Fletcher, have, variously, assimilated in their sensuous careers—formal and informal—that the world needs shaking up and jazz music is the air force to do the job. This is no over-done, Bach-first avowal like the one cemented to an antiquated French idiom, in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Les Enfants Terribles; but nevertheless, that air force experiences acute engine trouble.

Let’s begin to approach this turbulence by getting a bead on the startling Marine boot-camp Fletcher has been allowed, for many years, to maintain within a prestigious New York City music school (the Shaffer Conservatory). In the course of the expert’s discharging his role of Department Head of the Jazz Faculty, he recruits the precocious freshman, Andrew, to the Senior Big Band. His mentoring includes an instance of expressing reproof toward the youngest hopeful, in this way: “Is that the fastest you can play? You worthless Hymie fuck! No wonder Mommy ran out on [writer/ schoolteacher] Daddy when she figured out he wasn’t Eugene O’Neil…If you deliberately sabotage my band I will fuck you like a pig! You are a worthless faggot little piece of shit!” The Department Head, in this and many other indiscretions, sends us reeling from his sense of entitlement to, on one hand, demolish in youngsters their candid musical endeavor and its mystery. In addition, during many instances of rehearsing that elite squad designed to shock and awe the best which other such ensembles can field, his leadership amounts to honing, for the sake of metronomic, sonic bullets, diamond-sharp tempo and tone. In that methodology, we soon discover the overarching priority upon exposing and punishing his galley slaves as lacking the fibre to be one of those musical icons abandoned and thereby imperiled while at the same time a presumed killing rejoinder to a dominant world history he has come to loathe. The actor, J.K. Simmons, depicting the Head, resembles a grim, ascetic priest channelling a principal of the Spanish Inquisition. There is an episode in one of the nocturnal, management-absent rehearsals when Fletcher’s claw-like hand-gesture demands a halt and he claims to hear that someone is off-key. He decrees that the culprit confess within 10 seconds. No one comes forward. The hunter confronts several players in a solo passage and nothing seems amiss. He derides the assembly with the axiom that not realising one is off-key is even worse than simply slipping. Then he makes his way into the face of a trombone-player he refers to as “Elmer Fudd.” The whip claims to know that Fudd is the travesty. The shy and terrified boy looks down to his feet during this confrontation and says nothing. That earns him being noisily and insultingly thrown out of the band in not maintaining he was faultless—after his departure, the leader telling the slaves (as if an increase in his supposed fascinating unpredictableness) he knew the ex was not to blame (pinpointing a far more handsome kid as in error and going unpunished because the lack of a killer instinct was the crime he chose to punish that day).

Unsurprisingly, that martinet, so preoccupied with his version of the right stuff, proves to be a bathetic cornball, his sharp Big-Apple bluster notwithstanding. He commences one rehearsal by playing a CD of an alumnus who had made it into the Wynton Marsalis Lincoln Centre Big Band and had died the day before. Teary and self-serving as it was, his treacly homage neglects (what we learn later) that the young pro had committed suicide along a trajectory of stress and depression stemming from the days of the highly-rated Shaffer band. (In a prelude to another college festival win, leaving the personnel far more depressed than delighted, we see the alarming educator chatting with a young man and his little daughter. Fletcher is amazingly cordial, and no wonder—the spectator being no doubt the titular and rarely seen overseer of the musical aspect of the Shaffer family’s wide menu of philanthropic activities.) Perceiving an error in Andrew’s playing (an event whereby the freshman is sadistically pitted against two other hopefuls) Fletcher throws a chair at him. This gesture—no doubt a staple through the tense years—has a connection to another of the tyrant’s nostalgic preferences, namely, the maturation of sax legend, Charlie Parker, as launched by an irate drummer, Joe Jones, flinging a cymbal at his head for dereliction of duty, whereby the slouch transforms himself into a marvel, by dint of a year of hard, solitary work. The producer of thoroughbreds takes as an article of dogmatic piety that three hundred years from now the name Charlie Parker won’t be as meaningless as the name Joe Blow.

But, in that latter indulgence, Fletcher, for once, is on the same page as Andrew and the rest of the so-called elites. Galvanized by certainty that he can show the way to a Holy Grail of being noticed by those who put careers in place and confirm a sort of immortality, the young players allow themselves to be savaged by not merely a psychopath but a leader who knows and cares nothing about jazz and music per se. The few chances the toilers get to present to us a sustained passage of instrumentation reveal tight-ass precision on the order of a marching band. (There is a wicked little moment when they sound like being at half-time on Friday night.) It is massively perverse to conduct jazz study exclusively in the form of large ensembles, which tends to display the most antiquated instances of the genre. The crest of jazz disclosure comprises small groups—trios, quartets and the like—whereby bass and drums propulsion would maintain a flow of uncanny ripple from out of which piano or sax or trumpet or other soloists could improvise melodic variants circulating outward and at the same time being pulled back into the rhythm section, from which to flourish forward again (often harmonically, in the company of another soloist) to a sense of innovation meeting the viewer’s (and the player’s) need for discovery. Early on, Andrew meets up with his father, a public-school teacher, at a movie theatre on variegated 8th Street and nearby—the drummer’s walk there being a brief play of contrasting optical and cool jazz motifs. They have a big tub of popcorn, and Andrew adds a bag of raisins to it. His father reminds him not to forget the sweeter factors having been poured at the middle of the container. “I just eat around them,” is the musician’s rejoinder. “I don’t understand you,” is the basic trainer’s position. Just digging into a larger void is precisely the main role of a jazz drummer (as supplemented by an occasional solo both emphasizing the rhythmic powers and priming further improvisation from the “sweets”). Although his dad misses the point of Andrew’s instinctive musicality, now being permanently squelched, he does pick up a lack of satisfying enthusiasm, and wants him to realize, “You’ve got plenty of options…” “Options?” the boy asks in a whisper, now being overwhelmed by a one-tracked careerism which blights the feast of options at the heart of jazz. “Just… just life…” his father had tried to get across as the real creative field.

But at a family dinner, probably during the Thanksgiving break, we see how compelling the martial atmosphere (far from thanksgiving) has become to him, despite a training experience where he is slapped repeatedly for “rushing” and then “dragging;” and then, with the advent of a tear of incredulity that his aspiration could become so nightmarish, becoming subjected (in front of the whole band) with, “Are you one of those single tear people…Do I look like a double fucking rainbow?” Andrew has two brothers—one an MVP college football wiz; the other participating in a model UN event. They are embraced by the elders with, severally, “Tom Brady!” and “… soon to be Rhodes Scholar!” No such directed fluency is meted out to Andrew, and he feels slighted as a result. (“So, how’s the drumming going, Andy?” Also feted is Jim, his father, for being “Teacher of the Year.”) Feeling compelled to blow his own horn, Andrew becomes strident and far from convincing (not even to himself) that he is on top of the world (being quite a different thing than diminishing others). “It’s going really, really well. I’m part of the Shaffer jazz orchestra, which means the best in the country.” The MVP suggests that that distinction is based on “subjective perceptions;” and our protagonist bristles with a sharp, “No.” (Coinciding with the ways of the bottom-line Patriots being a dubious approach to the primordial logic of music; however, I would not be quick to discount musical magic in one of their games I saw recently.) An uncle, far less discreet and tolerant than Jim, poses the obvious problem, “Does the studio get you a job?” On Andrew’s admitting how contingent his situation is, the skeptic (and in fact deadly enemy, who helps us see part of what’s behind Fletcher’s nocturnal scorched-earth campaign) sneers, “I’m so glad you’ve figured it out. It’s a nasty business, I’m sure…” [if effectively pressed, this loved one would aver that reflection is a “nasty business”]. The spotlight swings back to the MVP, and Andrew, losing what little equilibrium he has, says, “It’s Division Three.” From there, the soon-to-be-very-distant-uncle asks, “Got any friends, Andrew?” The latter fires back, “I never really saw the point…” The other students are quick to cite the friendship of Lennon and McCartney, which, fuel to the fire, elicits from the jazzman, “Charley Parker didn’t know anybody…” The blitzing linebacker, having done some gratifying homework, listens to the boy’s indiscretion, “I think being the greatest musician of the 20th century is anybody’s idea of success,” and goes for blood with, “Dying broke, drunk and full of heroin at the age of 34 is not exactly my idea of success.” Overt hatred now raging, Andrew sneers, “I’d rather die broke, drunk and full of heroin at the age of 34 than hear people at the dinner table talk about living to be rich at 90 and no one remembers them…” The uncle posts the dig that his two normal nephews have plenty of friends. Andrew counters with the faint praise, “I’m sure they’ll make great school board presidents” [Fletcher, on first encountering Andrew and seemingly asking the benign question of what his father does and finding he’s a teacher, asks as a matter of course, “What college does he teach at?”]. The college body-contact specialist, dipping into Fletcher’s territory, taunts, “Think you’re better than us? Come play in one of our practices…” Before leaving any such dinner forever, Andrew replies, “You’ll never hear from the NFL!”

Andrew does, in fact, hear from his version of the NFL. He had bulked up enough of Fletcher’s venom to one day assault him, participate incognito in the dishonorable discharge of the Marine Drill Sergeant (relating to that suicide), and then, after a stint in a fast-food restaurant, reunite with the now free-lance ranger amidst the still-numerous jazz clubs in Manhattan which could give the impression that career glories are there for the taking. The two adversaries seeing eye-to-eye on producing an incandescent moment being a ticket to the so-called Big Leagues, hit the stage at the JVC Jazz Festival and Andrew—after being sabotaged by the same old terrorist in the first number and staggering off the stage; comforted by Jim; and then going back to the drum kit—reels off a long, showy and technically brilliant solo, becoming an overnight sensation. Which means?

Which means the running on near empty has come to a pass where Jim’s, “You’ve got plenty of options,’ assembles itself in such a way that the Division Three fixations are put in their place for the sake of a Big League at the heart of musical dynamics. The fervid concern for a sonic absolute almost obliterates the reality that we are in the hands of a filmmaker (albeit a filmmaker who has logged many hours in music classes). As such we are confronted with a cinematic option (on the order of that rare resort to the popcorn tub and its two dimensions) beyond the many drum-kits. Producing the popcorn is a young girl, Nicole, whom Andrew—having frequented the place as also Jim’s way of keeping tabs on his son’s dangerous journey about which he perhaps has a better sense of its pitfalls—asks for a date. “I’ve seen you many times… You’re very pretty…Would you wanna go out with me? Ever?” In a narrative almost entirely devoted to words becoming blades, this juncture represents an astronomical departure. Nicole, clearly far more at home with romance than he, pulls out of the air the perfunctory demand, “Go away!” But immediately more clarification is provided. Andrew, solemn and flustered, says, “Oh, my God, I’m sorry!” And then she laughs, the only laughing matter in the film. She tells him, “I’m just messing with you…” and though he politely retorts, “It’s actually pretty mean,” a date for pizza is quickly arranged. This flow of cinematic charm has been expertly grafted to the moment when Lola, the taxi-dancer (who has a long-term absentee lover and father of her child and accommodates many surrogates with a mixture of pleasure and melancholy), in Jacques Demy’s film, Lola (1960), begins an ambivalent and brief attachment to Roland, a passionate admirer lacking confidence and direction. Thereby, the deadly momentum of Whiplash has been infiltrated by a subtle, a gentle and a humorous creativity. In marked contrast to Andrew’s situation, Lola rehearses a song about herself, for the sake of freshening up her marketing at the club, which does not involve worrying about imperfections; and with this we have music continuous with her wider actions—tentative, delightful and bringing to bear a creative cogency.

Chazelle gives us several scenes pertaining to the plentiful options so desperately needed. The film we hear buzzing in the background while Andrew chooses the fibre over the sweet is Jules Dassin’s Rififi(1955), about an intense, meticulous theft of jewels, their hard-edge literalness and sociopathic concomitants coinciding with our death march here. The hard-edge drumming by Andrew which opens the film has been framed from along a corridor of windows, resembling a very early shopping mall, and resembling, in fact, the ancient shopping mall in Nantes where Nicole-like Lola meets Andrew-like Roland Cassard and a dinner date is planned. In a reversal of the unreliable figure elicited by Nicole’s jest (Lola’s dream lover, named Michel, seen in Lola in a white Stetson and white Cadillac and being on the horizon) who leads to Roland’s dream of leading a life with the dancer being shattered by the single mom almost relenting but gently dumping him when the man in white shows up, it is Andrew (dumping Nicole, and not gently but insultingly, as an albatross) dedicating all his time to fulfilling his dreams of Something Big (Michel being a parody of private-eye, Mike Hammer in the 1955 noir, Kiss Me Deadly, whose keyword is “Something Big”). Roland goes on to a career of diamond smuggling—the headquarters being a hair salon in that old mall—and then (as seen in Demy’s, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg [1963]) rising to diamond dealer with a trophy wife and no musical topspin, no range of interplay.

The incursion of Nicole has introduced to the diamond-hard, diamond-cold drama a warm pliability with which to countenance the train-wreck of Andrew’s failure to engage the magic of musical sensibility. The uniqueness of Lola’s world poses something far from idyllic. But its instinctive playfulness, its mastery of the baseline holding its statements to an embrace of restraint, carries with it a tensile strength which Fletcher and Andrew have shied away from.

The closing juggernaut scene at Carnegie Hall should, but seldom will be taken to heart as proof against the hard-headed confusion being melodramatically fabulous—a “triumph” of industrial-strength ruthlessness in the workplace being the phenomenon that gets thing done and makes the world go round. Fletcher, being the rabid and very clever opportunist he so obviously is, on that chance reuniting with Andrew turns on the charm-valve previously seen with the source of funding. The flattering invitation to sit in on the gig does not fail. Nor does the first number’s shot of a never-heard premiere/ nightmare, capped off with the ex-teacher getting in the ex-student’s face and shooting off the surprise, “I knew it was you” [leading to the dismissal]. On returning to the stage, loudly interrupting by means of a machine-gun cadence and taking over the show, commanding the other players to give their all to his selection(being “Caravan”—the wild and the wonderful presumably understood), he soon gets down to entirely hogging the spotlight with a protracted, technically and emotively risky solo. At first Fletcher is unsure of what his next move should be; but, seized by Andrew’s golden production, he concludes that a Charlie-Parker-like epiphany was at hand and, being a religionist of such moments, he becomes both a parishioner and a rattlesnake ready to mine the career power-surge filling an august site of artistry more in common with Nicole (who, on being dismissed, Fletcher-style, asks, “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”) and with Jim (who, seeing his son making a grotesque spectacle of himself, sees a death in the family). As the big/little drive winds down, Fletcher and Andrew enjoy eye-contact and the promise of cutting each other up in the course of (perhaps) profitable years to come. Fletcher had, in his Cassard-like (a Cassard being a presenter of legal cases) successful seducing of naïve and vain Andrew at the club where the latter bumped into him, used the rhetorical bon-bon, “a good job,” as the lowest sinking to infamy. But there they are onstage, and pissing their pants at the prospect of good jobs. In Lola, there is a wide range of aspirations to good jobs. There is also, amongst the various casts of characters, craftsmanship of the gut which comprises that creative dynamic which could be called music,

#damien chazelle

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